Stormbringer is a weekly hobby magazine from Hachette Partworks introducing players to Warhammer: Age of Sigmar. In this 80-week series, our intrepid magazine-receiver will be reviewing each individual issue, its included models, and gaming materials. A Premium US subscription was provided to Goonhammer for review purposes. If you want to follow along at home, US Customers can check out Stormbringer here.

Welcome to the first Stormbringer of the new year! I’d say “new year, new me” but we all know I’m going to be Here on My Bullshit for at least another 70 weeks.

The Narrative Materials

Narrative is scant this week, as painting and measuring guides will take up the majority of the issue. We have a map of the 8 Mortal Realms, where they all meet at the Eightpoints, and a slight blow up of Aqshy. A point is made that these realms aren’t all just one thing. Unlike your typical mono-biome planet in something like Star Wars, each landscape here is diverse in climate and culture. If Aqshy was just Planet Hell, nobody would be able to live there, after all.

The Hobby Materials

As this week doesn’t have a model to review, I thought I’d review the semi-exclusive Gutrippa Boss included in this shipment. He was initially sold as Gutrippa Boss Haggok, a store birthday model in 2022. People who got in on Stormbringer early should be getting this guy, as I mentioned in the first installment of this series. He went together intuitively, which is good as he didn’t ship with instructions. Trimming him off the sprue was the challenging part, as thin fabric strips and a spindly spear (which arrived broken) don’t lend themselves well to shaving moldlines and sprue connections. There was some flashing around the wings of his vulture, which was a little tricky to trim. Mold lines were practically nonexistent, and most seams were well hidden by stitching on his clothes. His shield was easy to leave off to paint separately; good as it otherwise occludes the bottom half of the model. He’s a mini with really only one good viewing angle; flat in a way that is odd for modern GW but charming in its own way. This was my first Kruleboy and while the range has grown on me an awful lot, I don’t love painting them. The overlapping fabric looks great but is tricky to paint around, and it’s easy to miss the inwards-facing parts. Similarly, his face and skin are hard to get to with all the draped fabric and metal over them. Still, the combination of green skin, colored fabric, and rusty metal can make for a fun experience, and if you want maximum textures per model, the Kruleboyz range will probably sing to you. Personally, I’ve always been more on the “goblins” side of “Orcs and Goblins” so I’m looking forward to the Gloomspite models to come later in Stormbringer.

As for the actual content of this issue, it contains two paints: Corax White and Catachan Flesh. Catachan Flesh is as good a paint as Corax White isn’t. While Corax White is a chalky, clumpy paint with poor coverage, Catachan Flesh is a great dark brown that I use as the base for most of my dark skintones. We are instructed to use Catachan Flesh on all the leather straps and molded bases across our collections, while using Corax White on the Stormcast icons and occasional modeled brickwork. I wish they included Grey Seer instead, as it’s a nice off-white/light grey that’s easy to highlight up to white, and also covers better. The included guides are thorough in the intended application of these two colors, helpfully instructing painters to take the shield arms off their Stormcast for ease of painting.

The Gaming Materials

This issue contains a 12″ ruler, the same clear thin plastic ones you get in most Age of Sigmar starter boxes. It’s got a cute little Sigmarite design on it. It gets put through its paces this week as we move from the boardgame-esque spaces on the play mat to a typical inch-based movement system. Said spaces are still used for deployment, but moving and charging are handled more or less how they work in the full game now. Moving, shooting, and charging are all covered here, with helpful diagrams and definitions for each. This week’s mission, the punny Divide and Rule, pits the Knight-Arcanum and 5 Vindictors against 10 Gutrippaz and the Killaboss and Stab-Grot. The Stormcast want to kill the Gutrippaz, and the Kruleboyz want to kill the Knight-Arcanum. It’s up to the players whether to prioritize their primary targets or the more deadly non-mission-critical units. I like the asymmetry of it, but we’re still in pretty basic territory here.

Final Verdict:

This issue was a fairly weak one for me. For a newcomer who needs measurement explained to them, replete with a definition of inches for all the metric system enjoyers out there, it might be more valuable. Corax White and Catachan Flesh are $4.55 each (or they were, Catachan Flesh now leads to a 404 on GW’s website) totaling to $9.10 versus this magazine’s $13.99 cover price. I hardly think that ruler is worth the $4.89 difference, especially when my Stanley Levelock 12′ tape measure cost maybe 8 bucks in 2008 and still gets used every game. Hell, GW’s own tape measures only cost $10. The paint guides here might be worth it for thoroughness’ sake and the guide to using inches for everything might be useful to some, but this issue didn’t sing to me.

See you next issue, warhams.

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