This month is bringing a massive host of updates to Age of Sigmar as the setting transitions to Ghyran, the realm of life. Each army is getting two whole pages of additional rules and optional alternative warscrolls for you to use in your games and we are very excited about all of it! Before we get stuck in, a thank you to Games Workshop for providing us with these rules as an early release to review.
Babe wake up, new Soulblight Gravelords content just dropped. Soulblight have been pretty mediocre to bad for most of Age of Sigmar fourth edition, with the occasional player pushing a skew list to success. We’ve also literally just had a battletome and I get that there are huge delays between doing the work and making the printed book but it still feels a little funny as the end consumer to be getting this now. At least they left it to the end!
Battle Formations
Cryptmasters
In your hero phase you can pick a Cursed Sepulchre and it gets a 4+ ward. Absolutely baffling option, and honestly kind of a sign of how wonky the faction terrain rules have become. You wanna spend a battle formation on this? Huh?
Skinshifters
Once per turn (army) you can pick an infantry vampire hero and they get to make a 12″ flying move in your hero phase. No stipulation against moving again, so feel free to do that afterwards. Your basic Vampire Lord has no real need for this as they teleport, so the keyword soup leaves us largely with a selection of Vyrkos heroes. Am I going to blow a battle formation on Ivya Volga or Lady Annika? Probably not. If Radukar the Beast didn’t have the monster keyword I’d be quite hype on him becoming really fast. As it stands? This isn’t doing much for me.
Heroic Traits
Frightening Vitality
Some of the most fascinatingly bad rules writing I’ve ever seen. What I assume this was supposed to do was make it so whenever the hero healed it was always to a minimum of 3 Health. However, what it says is, “Each time an ability that heals at least 1 of this unit’s damage points is resolved, if the total number of damage points healed by that ability was less than 3, Heal (X) this unit where X is 3 minus that number.” This ability is passive and you might notice that it’s also an ability that always heals you for a number that is less than 3. So your Frightening Vitality hero receiving any healing at all will set off a chain reaction that fully heals them via this.
This is deeply stupid and clearly unintended. The good news is that with the Vampire Lord on Zombie Dragon being taken out back and Glocked in the head, there aren’t any big heroes in Soulblight that can both take a heroic trait and are actually worth having themselves (here’s looking at you, Coven Throne). Hopefully GW caught this before going to final print with the PDF!
Immortal Ego
Each phase you get to re-roll a hit roll, a wound roll and a save roll. I remember this from Sylvaneth! Less good here than it was for the trees, as the army lacks anything that both can take it and is as multi-phase or heavy hitting as a Durthu. Gives you something to take on a Vampire Lord on Nightmare Steed given they don’t need to spend a heroic trait on re-rolling charges.
A Wastrel and a Vagabond
The best name for an ability in Age of Sigmar? It’s up there. Zombies and Skeletons wholly within 12″ get +2 to move and +3″ to the distance they can pile in. Skellies and Zombies have a host of issues other than speed, but if you’re the kind of person who gets a kick out of that horde playstyle this is actually a really solid choice.
Warscrolls
I love that we’ve just had the battletome and they already knew two of the warscrolls were worthless.
Sekhar, Fang of Nulahmia
A cool model that kind of arrived and then immediately disappeared due to being rubbish. This version keeps Sekhar’s pretty bad stats in place, which is a shame, but reworks her abilities. Allow Me to Remind You is a once per turn reaction to your opponent issuing a command within 18″ and lets you block it & cause the CP to get spent on a 5+. Lest You Forget… is a once per battle round reaction to an enemy unit declaring a spell or charge roll within 18″ and it lets you pick one of the dice from their cast/charge roll and forces them to re-roll it. Irresistible Demand is a spell that casts on a 6 and picks an enemy hero within 18″, you then do d3 mortal damage to each other enemy unit within 3″ of that hero.
This version of Sekhar is, in fact, much more fragile than the previous version as you lose out on her defensive abilities. What you get in trade is a pretty wonky spell but otherwise some decent backline control abilities. This is honestly a decent trade, Sekhar is a wizard (2) that costs 220 points, you don’t want them in combat anyway and the control here is much better than the other version. I really want to like Sekhar because the model is so cool, but I’m unconvinced that this gets her over the line. Maybe if you’re doing a horde style build and going for battlefield control.
Corpse Cart
The good old Corpse Cart gets a melee profile compression down to one line, it’s always nice to not have to go through multiple rounds of rolling really bad attacks. Other than that, it’s been refocused to only buffing Zombies, which does make a good amount of sense thematically. Two abilities here: Unholy Lodestone picks a Zombie unit in combat range in your hero phase and makes their mortals-on-death ability activate on a 5+ instead of a 6. Necromantic Goad is once per turn (army) and lets you pick some Zombies wholly within 12″ at the end of the turn to make a 3″ move, and the move can get them into combat.
You know what? Two actually pretty good abilities here, especially combined with the heroic trait from earlier. I know a lot of you players out there own a lot of zombies; I had to play against you lovely people last edition. At just 80 points I could even see players that are intent on spamming zombies taking multiple of these, even if one ability only gets to work once – the boost from Unholy Lodestone is just a big uptick in damage.
Final Resting Thoughts
Games Workshop really have saved the worst for last with Scourge of Ghyran. Some of these rules are badly written, some of them are just bad, and some of them buff zombies. To be fair, hordes of shambling zombies is a classic Undead/Vampire Counts/Death/Legions of Nagash/Soulblight Gravelords build that has been terrible this edition, so an attempt to boost it up helps. The rest of what’s on offer here really seems to suffer from Soulblight now being an army that is so top heavy on named characters you can struggle to find something worth upgrading.
Have any questions or feedback? Drop us a note in the comments below or email us at contact@goonhammer.com. Want articles like this linked in your inbox every Monday morning? Sign up for our newsletter. And don’t forget that you can support us on Patreon for backer rewards like early video content, Administratum access, an ad-free experience on our website and more.
