While everyone is interested in Slaanesh
releases or painting the last havoc, the Fyreslayers battletome release was
almost unnoticed. Well, it’s definitely not the most popular faction in the Age of
Sigmar. Today we’ll tell you about 5, the most interesting features of this new
book.
Now it’s a normal army. Their first edition was
released at the very beginning of AoS, and, practically was just a bunch of
warscrolls under one cover. They only had several battalions except for the
unit rules. Now, there’s a huge menu – warlord traits, artifacts, prayers, and
everything, a normal faction should have in modern AoS. Probably, now these
guys will finally start to attract players.
Runes. Here’s the army special rule. At the
beginning of each your turn you activate one of six runes at your choice. The
point is that you can use each of them only once. So, you have to think about
your goals for this turn in advance. The list of effects is pretty standard but useful – rerolls, fearless, mortal wounds, wound roll buffs, and so on. Now
it’s hard to say, whether they will affect the game strongly, but definitely,
it’s a nice help. By the way, if you roll 6, you get an enhanced effect.
Different loge tactics. Now before the battle, you can choose to which loge your army belongs to, just like with any other
battletome It definitely makes the roster building more interesting. No matter
that there are only 4 of them here. The most interesting one is the last,
focused on magmadroths using. You’ve always wanted a whole army of blazing
monsters, did you?
Live magic and terrain. Fyreslayers follow the
trends and get their own terrain and endless spells, which are called here
magmic invocations, and are not practically spells, just like in the case with
Blades of Khorne. However, they do pretty much the same. Well, adding spells
everywhere is an issue for a separate discussion. First, the idea seemed cool,
but now these spells look quite boring since there’re no unusual effects on
them. Sure, they are useful, but experienced players can easily deal without
them. So, is it worth to copy-paste standard effects from one book to another?
And, the last point this battletome impressed
us with is a kind of negative. It is laziness. Which, was, honestly, expected, if
we are talking about such factions as Fyreslayers and Ghouls. Sure, they are
explained in the lore, but practically these factions were torn out of the
bigger ones in Fantasy Battles, and have extremely poor model and playstyle
range. In the first edition of such battletomes, the lack of it could be easily
explained – the new factions urgently needed some rules. But now, when nobody prevents
GW gamedesigners from creating a diverse and unique army, they are still happily making battletomes using the same standard rules, and adding the same standard
things. Here, we still have only 4(!) battalions, and no new units at all.
We really wouldn’t like it to become a tradition.
Still, there are 2 such books, along with some really interesting ones, like
Skaven and looming Slaanesh. So, let’s hope, the last type will prevail.