Gaming in the Age of Sigmar

Since I haven't finished basing any Stormcasts since the last post, lets have a chat about how our campaign is going to work. Get yourself a brew, and lets have a look at the rules.

AoS has changed a bit since the Realmgate Wars campaign books have come out. Mostly just tweaks, here and there, incorporation of things that came in via matched play into the main rules, that kind of thing. But it is worth having a think about this, and how it might affect the scenarios we're going to be playing.

Now, we could play the books with AoS v1, as it was when these books first came out. There's a copy of the rules in pretty much every early AoS book, nice and conveniently. But we're not going to do that. We're going to play using the newer core rules, as found in the new main rulebook, supplied online or in starter sets and so on.

There's a couple of reasons for this. The first is that it's easier for us to play using the newer rules - it's what we're more familiar with now, in any case, and most of the games we've played in the last few years have been under matched play anyway, so even under v1, that's coming close to this. The second reason is the warscrolls have changed. It also means we don't get too confused if we do end up playing someone else once the lockdown is lifted.

Now, while we've probably got copies of a lot of the older warscrolls, it's ultimately easier for us to use the most recent version, rather than trying to hunt back through for something. Overall, we don't think this is an issue, though it is sometimes amusing to put a model on the field, assume it still works in the same way, then crack the book open and find out it has completely changed since you last used a unit! 

A lot of the other changes shouldn't really affect the games too much - using bases, rules of one and so on won't have a huge effect (though gone are the days of spamming multiple mystic shields I guess). Measuring to bases is actually how I used to play previously anyway, and effects changing to unmodified roles again won't cause any further issues with how the battles play out.

I suppose the one big difference is how summoning works - when AoS came out, you could summon pretty much any daemons you wanted, for example, and could even have an army chain summoning a large amount of other units, as the summoning was written into the warscrolls themselves. This meant that if a wizard summoned a wizard, it could summon another wizard, and so on. This has changed over time, and now many armies have their own, bespoke, summon system, earning points from various different effects (Tzeentch earning points from spells being cast, for example). It will be interesting to see how how this works going forwards.

We've actually played three games already - we decided to skip the original AoS starter box scenarios, as we'd definitely played them when it was first released, and I'm not sure how much we'd have got out of them anyway. The battleplans we've played were Hold or Die, The Watchtower and The Ritual, all from the first hardback book - these are all in Aqshy, the realm of Fire. I'll post a summary soon, so the rest of the things that happen here make sense - but in general, things haven't been going well for Khorne.

For these games, and to remind ourselves of the rules, we've actually just been using the unit Warscrolls, the Battleplans themselves, and the Time of War rules for the Brimstone Peninsula in Aqshy (published with the scenarios) - we will probably add more things in as we continue.

I think I'll leave it there for today - lets see if I can get some basing done.