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.

Before we get into this week’s typical arrangement of war, hammers, storms, and the bringing thereof, Hachette’s running a little contest/giveaway thing for folks in the US. You can hop on over to the giveaway page to learn more, but they’re giving away an Ogor Tyrant and some other cool stuff to a few lucky winners.

The Narrative Materials

Our first article today concerns Ulgu, the Realm of Shadow, or as it’s also known: Crime Realm. Shrouded in endless gloom, this realm is largely occupied by Malerion and Morathi-worshipping Aelves, dwelling in dark cities and foggy forests. Sigmar turns a blind eye to all the murder, piracy, and other criminal activity of these aelves because at the end of the day, they’re still allies in the war against Chaos, and Sigmarites dwell amongst them. The shifting shadows of Ulgu occasionally devour entire armies or parties of prospectors, and traversing Ulgu essentially sounds like being stuck in the Lost Woods in Ocarina of Time forever.

Following this is a brief article about dying, which is cool as hell. In the Age of Myth, the souls of the dead traveled to Shyish, where they would experience the afterlives of their respective cultures. I feel that not enough interrogation is done of this, because it essentially means every faith is at least kind of right. These days, souls are a natural resource, with Sigmar picking the most heroic for his Stormcast, the Chaos gods eating as many as they can, and Nagash turning the rest into fodder for his armies of Death. As for Orruks, nobody really knows – least of all the Orruks and Grots doing the dying. Do they fade into the masses of souls in Shyish? Do their souls conquer and crush the others in their afterlives? We’re yet to see Orruk undead (outside of the ancient Cursed Company models) or Stormboy Eternulz, so this will remain a mystery for now.

The narrative section concludes with origin tables to roll on for your Stormcast and Kruleboyz units. These matrices of options let you roll up the backstories for creatures and heroes, plus kunnin plans for your various units. I’ll keep these close to my chest for now, with the hope that sometime soon we can roll up a few. For reference though, I randomly rolled up a Weedy Gitz Plan where grots would cover themselves in mud, not just because they like it, but to better hide from their enemies. If nothing else, these random tables are a consistent delight in Stormbringer.

The Hobby Materials

This week we get a pair of paints – the Base yellow Averland Sunset, as well as Gryph-Charger Grey, our first Contrast paint. Averland is the closest thing to a yellow with good coverage I’ve ever used, and is the base for almost all my yellows across all of my hobby projects. Gryph-Charger Grey is a blueish grey that works as a cool shade for whites and light greys. I’d probably want to thin it with Contrast Medium first, but that’s likely outside the scope of this magazine.

Accompanying these paints are ample tutorials to not only use them across your collection, but also general information about the differences between Shade and Contrast paints and their uses. Shades are for shading and lightly tinting areas, while more pigmented Contrast paints are for staining and changing colors of whole areas, splitting the difference between Shades and regular Layer or Base paints. Instructions are given for Focused Shading, where you just shade one part of a model, Recess Shading, where you just hit the deeper recesses of a model or area, and All Over Shading, which is exactly what it says on the tin. Personally, Recess Shading is the technique I use the most, as it gets the cleanest and most intentional looking results for me. Some cleanup instructions are given too, teaching us how to clean up Shade Pooling by absorbing excess shade with our brush, and tidying up Tide Marks where washes leave unsightly marks. Lastly, some tips are given for shading one part of a model at a time (namely for big stuff like terrain) and protecting your desk or dining table with paper towels. I wish I had half of this information available to me when the Citadel Washes (RIP Devlan Mud and Badab Black) dropped in the late 2000s, as it would have leveled up my burgeoning paint skills by a lot.

The Gaming Materials

We get another chunk of the core rules this week; a smattering of the early pages of the rules without any presentation or context. For those keeping up at home, we’re up to 3.1 out of 28.2 sections, so it’ll be a minute before we’ve got the whole picture. The 4-page seed of 1st edition’s rules have since sprouted and bloomed with detail and depth, most of which I find intuitive and logical. Following this is an odd mission: Vital Intelligence. A Stormcast force of a Lord-Imperatant, Knight-Arcanum, and Stormstrike Chariot are trying to map out a cave network, while a Killaboss, Swampcalla Shaman, and 3 Man-skewer Boltboyz are trying to find a nice place down there to settle down. Each player picks their General, and the game ends when one General dies. The twist is that the ceilings of this cave are collapsing, so every turn both players roll a die for each of their own units. If they roll the turn number or lower, that unit takes a mortal wound. I do not understand the logic behind these forces at all, but I like the thematic rules adding a smidge of flavor to an otherwise straightforward mission.

Final Verdict:

These two paints together are $12.35, a few bucks under the $13.99 MSRP of this issue. I feel that even if you don’t care about the mission or the lore, the painting instructions are hugely valuable, especially to a less experienced painter.

See you next issue, warhams.

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