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.

While normally I’d be more critical of such a slight issue of Stormbringer, given my current predicament of posting this from my box fort during a break from packing, I’ll take the easy issue.

The Narrative Materials

We get all of one page of narrative content this week, and it’s about Orruk Warchanters. These Ironjawz musicians whip their mobs into a frenzy, beating the literal rhythms of war with their gorkstikks and morkstikks. Let’s see what we can roll up for ours with this week’s Battle Record:

Bazbad Horsemangla looked over the Orruks assembled in the evening before him. Even the massive Ironjawz were uneasy around Bazbad; his soul was borne of Shyish, and even in the twilight gloom, his comrades only saw death in his eyes.

“Boss Bazbad, why do we gotta wait til it’s dark before we go krumpin? I can’t see a fing out here” whined one Orruk. Bazbad quickly thumped him with his morkstikk, flooring the armored brute, and continued to wail on him until a consistent beat came from it. “Because dis is da rhythm – the rhythm of da night!” And so his Orruks marched onward.

The Hobby Materials

The assembly guide for the Warchanter is straightforward; he doesn’t have any options to him, and the instructions even nudge us towards decorating his base with sundry bits from our collection. It’s a pretty barebones model by modern GW standards, though I don’t care for the “flight controller” pose. I also would have liked it if he actually had some kind of drum. It’s a decent model, but definitely my least favorite in the Ironjawz range. Most of the magazine is then devoted to painting him, but it seems redundant with the painting guide from our recent Ardboyz acquisition. I think it would be better to just say “refer to issue 73 for an Ironjawz painting guide” or something instead of basically repeating the same information. More guides show us how to finish our terrain pieces, with the sweet little note that we’ve completed our terrain collection. I think that’s more in line with what I’d expect in this sort of magazine, and is more consistent with earlier issues – one issue gets the models to a certain point, and another has instructions for finishing them. Now all this is not to criticize the quality or content of these tutorials – they produce genuinely good results – they’re just somewhat repetitive, much like my complaints.

The Gaming Materials

This week we search for A Glimmer of Hope, and boy do I need one of those. The titular glimmer is actually a shard of Mallus, the iron core of the World-That-Was. These shards provide glimpses of the future, and are understandably sought after. The forces of Order want these for strategic purposes, while the forces of Destruction just want to spoil Order’s fun. It plays out in a pretty standard deployment of two lines of dudes running at a couple central objectives, but at the start of each player’s turn, they generate a command point on 4+. It’s a minor twist, but I think factoring in a possible extra two command points each battle round is significant enough to have a real effect on your game.

Final Verdict:

I’m gonna be real with you – this is maybe the slightest issue in the entire run of Stormbringer, which is odd since so many recent issues have been pretty packed. Warchanters run $35 a pop, so getting one for $13.99 here is a good deal, but the magazine has precious little else holding it up. You’ve likely already read a nearly identical painting guide on your Ironjawz if you’ve been keeping up, and the terrain painting info really isn’t anything you couldn’t have figured out yourself at this point. I believe in you.

See you next issue, warhams.

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