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.
My state is currently on fire, which means we’re officially in the summertime, baby! Hope you all have a good… AoSummer? Summer of Sigmar? Age of Sugmar? Whatever, you get the idea.
The Narrative Materials
The narrative section is light this week, concluding a short story I’d completely forgotten – Nature’s Gambit. If memory (i.e. Google) serves, the first two parts of this were in issues 46 and 48, and we haven’t heard hide nor hair flowing aelven hair of Myilanae and her treefolk since. I wasn’t wild about either of the previous parts, which involved her warband being used as bait to draw out the forces of Destruction, then leading some nameless Stormcast out of the woods. She and her Sylvaneth pals gossip about the Stormcast in their midst, criticizing their lumbering steps and garish armor like the meanest of high school girls. They then slink back into the woods and let the Orruks and Grots charge into the Stormcast line before eventually deigning to help out and save their wayward allies. Inspecting the Orruk corpses, they figure out they’re coming from Ghur, so follow the trail back to the realmgate they emerged from. On the other side, Myilanae and her gossiping jerkwad pals find another grove of Sylvaneth who also found their way here, and by their powers combined, these Arbor Avengers will get their revenge on the Orruks. I didn’t like any of the parts of this series very much, I’ll be honest. The characters don’t grow or even really interact with each other, and even for stories mostly concerned with this week’s toys doing a Murder Death Kill, the action isn’t satisfying.
The Hobby Materials
We finally get the last pieces of our Stormdrake Guard, and can build them using the instructions from issue 76. With the instructions out of the way, this issue can focus on painting these beasties and their Stormcast riders. After covering up a few areas with sticky tac (the author avoids the word “grundle” when advising where to stick it under our Stormcast riders) we get to painting proper. The Draconiths are painted almost exclusively with shades and drybrushing, saving any layer paints for edge highlights on their more pronounced armor and scales. It’s a nicely naturalistic painting technique, and one that makes a large, intimidating model like this one more approachable. The rider is nothing we haven’t seen before; a standard Stormcast scheme that serves as a shiny cherry on top of this particular sundae. The only thing in this tutorial that doesn’t work for me is using crackle texture paint over the flight stand, which really needs some denser basing material to blend it in and make for something convincing – see the image above. In this case, it just looks like a cookie on top of a second, larger cookie, with a clear plastic stick jutting out of it. Whenever I get around to painting these myself it’ll undoubtedly be a process that involves a dozen hours of layering up progressively lighter skintones to get a more painterly look before creating a lush diorama on their bases, but I don’t need to bore you with details of my masochistic tendencies.
The Gaming Materials
There’s naturally a Warscroll for our newly completed duo of dragon riders, but it’s naturally for the obsolete third edition of the game. I only bring this up because when these guys dropped in 3rd, they were a problem. This was a unit that could do significant damage in every single phase, was tough to kill, relatively inexpensive, and projected a threat over the entire table. Even when they died they’d cause a bunch of mortal wounds, since Stormcast had the very lame army ability where Sigmar’s lightning bolt caused them to become mortal wound bombs when they died. They’ve since been toned down, but whole armies of nothing but Stormdrake Guard were pretty common for a minute there.
They might be too much for this week’s mission, Poisoning the Well. The unnamed City of Sigmar our campaign is centered around is under siege, with supplies running low. A small band of Order are riding out to get water from a magical well to relieve the city, while a force of Destruction would rather, well, you can read the mission name. This is a small battle, only two heroes and two troops selections per side, with three objectives to fight over. The central objective represents the well, and the life-giving water within can heal D3 wounds on any contesting unit on a 5+ at the end of their turn. It makes fighting over this central objective all the more important, and ties into the narrative of the mission appropriately. Hell, there’s even a fountain piece of terrain from issue 25 that would work well for this central objective.
Final Verdict
Once more, I get to remind you all that issues 76-78 of Stormbringer will only set you back $41.97, while a standard box of Stormdrake Guard is $127.50. I’m no mathemagician, but any value-seeking Stormcast enthusiast can tell one of those numbers is much lower than the other. The narrative didn’t do it for me, but the mission tied into the greater campaign narrative while offering something distinct, and the painting tutorial was genuinely good and would make for some good looking lizards.
See you next issue, warhams.
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.
