Games Workshop has dropped an FAQ for the Lumineth Realm-Lords Battletome and Broken Realms: Teclis. What changed? Is it for good or for ill? Let’s take a look.

Broken Realms: Teclis

Broken Realms: Teclis got a notes but basically everything ties into the Lumineth Realm-Lords. Not terribly shocking because that is the vast majority of the book. Since much of the material for Lumineth Realm-Lords in Teclis much of the material overlaps. There’s only 2 changes here, both are typos that didn’t happen in the Battletome proper. The first is that the Starshard Battery battalion cut off “Ballista” from “Vanari Starshard Ballista” and the Scinari Calligrave warscroll does not state that the wounds dealt by Erasure are mortal wounds. These were both already in the 2021 Battletome and therefore are just correcting typos. Every other change is also a change to Battletome: Lumineth Realm-Lords so we’ll just cover all that over there.

Battletome: Lumineth Realm-Lords

The updates here are for both versions of the battletome. Since Games Workshop promised that the old Lumineth Realm-Lords tome would remain valid in conjunction with Broken Realms: Teclis it necessitates that rules are updated to keep up. The only real change here for the 2020 version is that the Lore of Hysh is now usable by Vanari and Scinari wizards, in addition to Teclis which matches the current Battletome.

Moving onto the new battletome we start to see the real changes and some are rather interesting. The Aelven twins Ellania and Ellathor were previously part of Ymetrica but have now been relocated to Illiatha. The reason is hinted at in the developer’s note which states their fighting style is more in line with Illiatha. Ymetrica is the poster child faction on all of the boxes but it did nothing for them, it is intended for use by Alarith units and so by relocating them to Iliatha they can benefit from the other Vanari units, working in tandem with them.

Severith and his generic counter-parts the Hurakan Spirits of the Wind see some changes. Into the gale, which reduces pile-ins by 2″ was slightly clarified to state “Any units with this ability”. In a practical sense this means that you cannot stack the ability. In most situations this won’t matter, but may have niche cases for units who get to pile-in 6″ instead. Severith also loses his Ymetrica keyword which is a pure win for him, as he can now benefit from Nation Abilities beyond Ymetrica which, again, did nothing for him. In the developer’s commentary we also get clarification that you can use the Spirit of the Wind ability at the end of your opponent’s shooing phase as well. This was not clear before but that makes their ability to jump around the field even more terrifying!

Past those changes we get a mess of Developer’s Commentary covering various different rule clarifications. The Vanari Shining Company ability will continue to function if you place a restored model back into the unit in base to base cohesion with 2 models, which is good for them as RAW it could be interpreted as breaking it.

The Battalion Hurakan Temple has an ability called Whirling Tornados, which allows a unit within 12″ of a Hero to count as having charged that turn. Some clarifications around it:

•  A unit counts charged even in the enemy phase.
• A unit can pile-in 3″ even if they are not within 3″ of an enemy unit (Since they did charge this turn)

This makes the battalion even better as it grants a lot of flexibility, with extra 3″ of movement and Spirits of the Wind will keep dealing 1 wound and -1 to hit during both combat phases, helping mitigate the hits of a dangerous foe.

Next up, a Scanari Loreseeker cannot deep strike in as Alumnia and then move, preventing them from working around the “within 9″ of the enemy” rule.

Sanctum of Amyntok is confirmed to allow the caster to move with the spell cast, and since the model and the endless spell are counted as one, they can travel together. Pretty cool.

A clarification on an unusual mechanic in Lumineth Realm-lords is that many command abilities do not require a Hero within range to use them. In this case, the developers confirmed any unit can use them, but must use it on themselves (Functionally this just means anyone can use them whenever).

Some confusing around the terrain piece, the Shrine Luminor. Since there is a gap in the model, thanks to its floating design, there were questions if an enemy unit can pass through it. The answer is yes, as long as there is no garrison. Otherwise it becomes solid and you treat it as area terrain. Simple.

Finally, the two questions that have picked my brain the most were about the Scinari Loreseeker being a Unique character. Generally “Unique” and “Named Character” are synonyms, but with such a generic name people were not sure if it was meant to be treated as such. The answer is yes, so it cannot receive command traits or artefacts. Brutal. The most disappointing FAQ answer to many will likely be that Vanari Bladelords do not gain the sunmetal weapon trait (mortal wounds on 6s) which depreciates and already weakened unit. Ah well.

Conclusion

And that’s it. Honestly despite there seemingly being a lot here there isn’t that much as the majority of it is the same between both books. There’s a lot of rules clarifications but nothing that really drastically changes the army, except for moving the twins to another nation and (more importantly) Sevireth a man fox without a country can give him a slight boost to an already powerful unit. Overall its a small net gain for Lumineth, but most of the changes here are just clarifying things that didn’t make sense or weren’t clear before. 3.0 is on the horizon so at this point Games Workshop may just be focused on making the books as functional as possible until then.

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