Hello everybody, if it's Wednesday, it's Warhammer and that must mean it's time for another episode of Warhammer Weekly. Joining me, as always, is my co-host Tom. What's up, buddy? Hello, friends.  The same great frigate at economical prices. That's what Tom's delivering. And always overburdened. Absolutely, always overburdened. That is true. You got a lot of, you got a lot of little wins hitching on there, Tom. Also joining us this week, we're so glad to have him back on the show. It's Eric, Mr. Stonemonk. How you doing, buddy? Doing great. Hello, everybody. Glad to be here. Yeah, your hair is looking delightfully short. I had a crisis of hair. It just was getting too long and I couldn't brave it out at, you know, a hairstyle, so I just took a shaver to it. I haven't done that since I was like 21 years old. Half my life ago. Aren't you lucky? I've cut my own hair about three times since this all started. It's pretty easy.   It's got it covered by these stylish headphones. That's what it is. You can't tell. Where does my hair stop? You don't know. It's a mystery. Is it stopped right here? Who knows? Who knows? At any rate, we're gonna talk about the narrative section of the GHB tonight and a couple other GHB related things. I just wanna make a couple other small points about it. But of course, we'll start with the news. Tom, what are you doing? There's a rumor engine. There is. It's not up on the screen as everybody knows. By the way, thank you to Goobertown saying I look sharp. I appreciate that. Another person whose hair I am very jealous of. So that's all right. That's most everybody in the world though, to be fair. But there you go. I don't have the rumor engine up because it is a ornate 40K Pew Pew gun that clearly looks like it belongs on a rogue trader or something similar. Somebody like a rogue trader or a very ornate inquisitorial type gun. Cool. I love the rogue trader figs that have come out. I hope there are many more cool rogue trader for figs that come out. That cowboy bebop rogue trader trailer, and yes, it was cowboy bebop.  It absolutely was. Was awesome. And I loved it. And it was like my favorite thing ever. So cool beans, but it has nothing to do with AOS. So there we go. It's true. But we did have some other stuff dropped this week. We did. We did. I see some images of some armies that got up points updates. You did. You do. Yes. So. The FAQ dropped the thing we've been waiting on. All the points changes and rules changes. I'm gonna put rules changes in big quotation fingers there because there wasn't really much in the way of that. Well, like really? Are you saying like of like FAQ or Rada stuff? Because I mean, what did drop? Like what did drop was pretty significant, wouldn't you say? Yeah. You mean like in the size of the crater is impact that hit Petrifex elite? Is that what you're, the extinction level event? Or even the Gaunt Summoner adjustment on how many horrors they get. Those were both good things. My point is there should have been a lot more. That's, that was, I mean. Okay. Yes, we got two very, very, very low hanging fruits. Like they're so low hanging that as you're walking through the apple orchard, they smack you in the face. So I'm glad somebody picked that. Vince, don't be negative. It's okay. Those things needed to be adjusted. I agree. No disagreeing. So let's talk about the actual adjustments. Well, adjustments needed to be made. Now, whether they needed to like swing the hammer as hard as they did, that's another discussion. Well, let's talk about these two things because you brought it up. Yeah. And Eric, have you seen all the points changes and all the rules changes? Have you seen all the FAQs? I'm here to talk narrative.  Gotcha. Fair enough. All right. So obviously the Gaunt now summons five pinkies which gets rid of the standard. The standard bearer. And it cuts the wounds in half. It does. It's 25 wounds instead of 50. 25 wounds instead of 50.  No issue there. I was good with that change. There were several ways they could have changed it. You've pointed out some other ways like they could have jumped him straight to summoning blues. They could have jumped it to where you always can only replace models as you've mentioned of the lowest type in the unit. So that way you can never restore pinks once Apink is dead, basically. Yep. You know, like there are lots of options that they could have pursued. They took this one. I think it's a fine change. Like, okay. I was, I had no problem with it. It seems like it accomplishes the right thing. That combined with the points adjustments on Zinch, I was like, yeah, all right. But it's fine. Seems like it corrected the problems. I'm really, like I'm really mixed on where Zinch lands now. Like I'm really, like it makes me sad that like some of their other stuff didn't come down. Like Arcanites and Zangor and stuff like that. And so I just, like, but this is a cycle. Like things that are too high, that are overtuned have to be brought down before we can actually start like giving them like. Often that's the case though, not always. Yeah. Yeah, it's true. Like I wish that they would have made some aggressive points changes on things like Arcanites on things like Zangor. But that's just me. Yeah, sure. So, I mean, I don't want to dive too deep into this, but we'll discuss a little of it.  I'm not like, I know just behind you. Let's all, let's all notice that just behind Eric's shoulder back there, he does have a big custom ironclad he's working on. So, you know, bring this over here. There you go. I know you two are one of the custom ironclad boys like myself. Yeah. I've got two separate custom ironclads for two separate, not indoor farmings. That's right, exactly. They're not for door farmings, obviously. No. No. So yeah, I mean, let's just quickly spin through this. I think the Petrifex Elite change was a bit mystifying. Obviously it's a fairly useless ability as written. It doesn't work on more tech at all for the most part and it doesn't do anything if Nagash is in the army. And you know, sure, like occasion on your ponies or other people, it'll do some stuff. So it's not like it does nothing. It's just certainly minimally impactful at most. Just truly redundant. Yeah, it's very frequently redundant. They could have, they could have done a lighter touch maybe with like ignore rent of one or decrease all rent by one. Sure. Or kill the, or since Petrifex is supposed to be the super defensive force. Right. Get rid of the rent and do something else. Yeah, exactly. Right. Yeah, I mean, they could have, they could have cut that part of the ability since like the narrative of Petrifex is that they're all dinosaur bones or whatever, something like that, you know. Right. They're fought for. Yeah. And so the idea being that, you know, they could have cut the offense part instead of the defense part. I'm not sure. I agree. But either way, okay. It certainly solved the Petrifex problem. Like we can all agree it solved the problem. Right. Whether it was like actually the right change I think is a very different subject. Yeah. I mean, it's a conversation. Like I feel for those players, that's what I'll say, the 10% of the player, the 10% of the meta that had OBR. Sure. It doesn't matter. They'll switch to more Secretarians and life will go on. And now Catacross will be on the table instead of Nagash and like, that's fine. Sure. The army's still fine. Yep. I don't disagree with that. Sure. Well, I'm just gonna quick clarify my glib answer to your question and that narrative players do care about balance and they do care about that sort of stuff. Because I think at the end of the day you want that core to be balanced enough that when you add stuff on top of it it doesn't break it further. Yeah. Obviously. I just don't want anybody who isn't, who's new to a narrative conversation. I don't need to propagate these stereotypes. Yeah. Indeed. All the Mortal Realms guys, we have them on here. You're all propagating those narrative stereotypes. It's so funny. I do wanna like, obviously, you know it's gonna be the ironclad in the room. Like, KO got massive cuts. Massive cuts. Too big. Enjoy, let me say this. Enjoy your six months of those cuts. Because those are not sticking. Maybe. Not all of them. Maybe. Well, the reason why I say maybe is we may not have events to actually. Doesn't matter. People, we didn't have a lot of events for, you know, this whole six months. The book, the book is getting locked or not the book, sorry. The PDF point changes will get locked in like, September, maybe? Sure. Sure. Yeah. And that'll be like two months before they do the points for the next general's handbook, which is a problem. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, what I would say is this, like I think a 10% cut largely across the board for everything that wasn't like infantry is significant. Like a number of the heroes. And so what I would say is like, I think some of the points were warranted. I suspect that, I talked to Gary Percival and he agrees with me in this, like we suspect that it's probably too far. Like truly it's too far. Sure. In a number of the areas. Like the, for example, nowhere in my wildest dreams would I have imagined that the Endred Master on Dirigible would have come down, right? Sure. Sure. I don't think that I would have imagined that the gun hauler would have come down. No, it seemed fine. I agree with the Fricket Cut. That felt right. Yeah. The Fricket Cut feels right, even though like a lot of people are like seven Frickets. You know, like, but Frickets actually have like a baked in restriction that a lot of people don't understand about like carrying troops. Because if there are any heroes you can't actually have a 10-man unit. Yeah. Yeah. They're one of the harder, they're actually one of the harder boats to manipulate for various reasons. So, no, I don't mind that. I could have seen it at 230, like same thing with the Ironclad, 480, 490 wouldn't have made a difference to me. Like, I don't, but like again, Ironclad, like I didn't see the points coming down on that. Like that surprised me. Admiral, like I've been a long proponent that the Admiral needs to come down. And I think 120 is his points. Like I think that that's probably accurate. Sure. Especially because he only has like two melee attacks or whatever. And so maybe S3. I mean, regardless, he's not... He's decent. He's decent. He's fine with it for 120. 120, I think he's fine. But, yeah, just like, and then on top of all that warplighting vortex coming down to 80. That's that, I mean, we mentioned, I don't, like I don't know if that was talked about or not if we actually mentioned it outright, but that is, again, that spell should be unmade from the game. It should have gone up to 200 points. Okay. And just like forgotten about. You should have seen the chat and the KO chat when those pages first leaked. Everybody was like, 80! 80! I mean, and you literally bought, you got enough points drops in almost any KO army you build to include that now for free. Yes. Yes. Yeah, sure. And so I'm real mixed on it, actually, the KO points drops. I will say this. This whole, the PDFs that just got released and then even the other book were very good for Dwarden. Sure, it's Dwarf time. If you're a fan of the Stunties, it is, it's your time. It is your time to shine, boys. It is your time to just go hog wild. That's right.  But we'll see. I thought they were a pretty good deal. You get so many of those dudes now, so cheap on a three up save. It's true, but there's not a lot of, like in here's the flip side, like there's not like Dwarden don't have a strong presence in the meta right now. And so it'll be interesting to see if that changes or not. I don't know. Just seeing the list discussion, there's gonna be some Dwarfs flooding some tables. It didn't arm those near you real soon. A lot of round one, two up save, tempest eye, Ironbreakers. I suspect, like I don't know this for fact, this is me speculating. I suspect that we saw the across the board vote changes in KO because they want to incentivize KO armies that look like that they are boat heavy. Sure, they have a lot of boats. They like they want to, like, I think they recognize that they want the KO ships to be the hallmark of that army. And when they, when you look at the table, they want the profile of that army to be boats. Which is cool. Which I get. And so I don't have a problem.  And I like the all boat army and I like it better now because then I have enough to have some additional like units. So we'll see. My tempest eye list got significantly cheaper between all the changes. So I was stoked. I mean, what I'll say is this. I'm interested to see what happens moving forward. I do think that some of the KO changes were probably too much. And I'm not gonna be surprised to see some of that stuff like dialed back when we like the, I could see the iron clad and the gun hauler changes. Like I can see both of them shooting back up. I could even see the frigate maybe going up 10 points. I could see the Andrew master jumping back up. Yeah. Yeah, we'll see. We'll see. Sure. Cool. Eric, any other thoughts? No, I mean, I agree. I mean, the things that I've been focused on is boats and flying things.  I mean, the KO chat was wild when that came out. It was probably the only WhatsApp chat that I followed because I was in the midst of trying to build stuff. And yeah, I mean, I think getting more boats on the table, like it's the imagination of what this army is. It's what inspires people. Again, I've said it before, I think KO is probably one of this single most inspiring armies that GW has put out for AOS. And to muffle the...  Yeah, I completely agree. Look, I didn't build this freaking aircraft carrier for nothing. Okay, like that's there for a reason, all right? Indeed. So yeah, there you go. So lots of point changes. There were some surprising omissions. Yeah, Lord Croak not being in the list is a crime against humanity. Like that is, get out of here. Get out of here. And anybody in the comments who is about to launch some kind of no, he's really more expensive because you've got to buy this other stuff, defense. You can take a long walk off a short pier.  He is under-costed in the worst way. Like he is scaven, original scaven, levels of under-costed. And I, even then with them, an army, I love my first army. I've read that initial, you can go back and watch that first scaven review and I watched it and I was like, this stuff is too cheap. Like we got to bump some points here. This guy's not going to last at this point's value. I called for it then, I'm calling for it now. I am consistent. Yeah. And that's not just because they ate my God. Yeah, like partially, but not completely. Is you, Vince, you would say that you'd be okay if you had a 50% point bump. Right? Sure. Yeah? Yeah, like putting it at 4A? Sure. And what up to 480? Yes, I think that's probably too much, but he certainly should be, he's certainly a 400 something point hero. Right. Find the two numbers that come after the four where you think it fits, but that's the correct number. The first, you know the price is right game, where you're like trying to guess the cost of the car and you got to like fill in the numbers slowly. Like that's what it is. Like the first number is four. The gentlemen have spoken. Okay, we can argue over the last two. That's fine. I mean, I guess the third one's a zero. Because you don't do fires. Somebody made a comment about Knight Haunt not getting points love. You know, knock and knock or what I would say is that Knight Haunt have a more fundamental problem that they're dealing with. And at the end of the day, points aren't going to fix their problem. Because the things, yeah, like it's just there's issues there with the War Scroll design, the keyword stuff, the ability, synergy, the all of the everything. And I like the points changes that Knight Haunt made. Like it actually like for my army, it let me add a unit. You know, the points changes that did happen, but not everybody is running a death writers condemned duelist. Right? Like, so all of the everything that I did in Knight Haunt came down in points, right? Like almost everything on my list came down.  Sure. That are KO, KO. And so like I, like what I'll say is this, I think Knight Haunt are fine.  I think that a good general can do well with them. But I would also say that I wish, I think that there's some more fundamental development changes that need to be made. Yeah, overall fun stuff. Did Sally's go up enough? Somebody asked? No, probably not, but that's fine. We'll find out. Yeah, I mean, it's a better situation than where they were, so I'm cool with it. I mean, the Marauder change is laughable. The KS Warrior change is laughable. Those are both the wrong changes. Those are both war scroll changes. Not points changes. Trying to like, trying to fix that with points is like slapping a band-aid over an arterial cut. Like it's not doing the work there. We need some stronger treatments. Yeah. So, but yeah, I mean, overall I was like, fine enough. Most of these were good. They addressed croak aside. They addressed most of the issues I thought that really needed addressed. So as far as like kicking things that needed kicked, there wasn't quite enough dropping things I thought needed dropped among some of the forces, but that's okay. Like on the whole, yeah, I mean, good. Could have been better, but good. I give it like a solid six out of 10 for the efficacy of the points changes overall. Yeah. There you go. That's my rating. Six out of 10. But just like we talk about how much like a box of models costs and how many hours of enjoyment we get out of it, like any points change brings hours and hours talking about it. It's true. So it's just a gift that keeps on giving. It really is true. It is a wonderful, wonderful gift whenever we're given these changes because the hay that gets made for content creators, yes.  There you go. Okay. So, cool. Other interesting pieces of news beyond the FAQ, which we're not gonna like, there have been plenty of shows that have dove deep into every single point and I'll point you, we can point towards them in our pick of the week, but the other big news is we did get confirmation that the rest of the Lumeneth will drop in September today because that was sort of an interesting writer on an article they put out of people's studio armies. Has anybody called that out as a bunch of bull? You're saying that they're lying. You're saying it's all shenanigans. It's a ruse. No, I'm punning. Oh, okay. Because they're bulls. Now I get it. Now I get it. Cheers. Indeed, indeed. No, I don't think anybody has, although that is great, that is great. It is definitely sad that we have to wait a little more than a month for people to get their hands on those sweet, sweet cow-related elves. All the elves people are playing with now have no cows. There's no cow action. It's a problem. I love it. I am anti-hatchet. Sure, sure. But to me, the best model is yet to come, which is obviously the giant cow mountain guy. One of the better models they've made. That dude is awesome. That's an elf figure I can get behind. So at any rate, yeah, we know they're coming in September, which leaves the question of sort of what else we're getting when, right? Like, is the Sons of Emma gonna sneak out there somewhere, right? Because that's clearly just the book and one new kit. I could sneak it out on a weekend. I think those are September. Yeah, I mean, probably. Let me live in a bit of hope, Tom, where I can say, there's a chance. We know that the Underworlds Warbands are coming in August because they did confirm that in the Underworlds article that we're getting the daughters and the other iron jaws one in August. So we know those are gonna sneak in on some 40K weekends. And I'm glad that's happening. I mean, for those of us who are, or for everybody who's collectors, like, I think that's good. There's part of me that wants that stuff to wait and like the Warcry stuff when it comes up to wait until we can get back into playing games again because that stuff drives like real community participation and gets people back out to the stores and that sort of stuff. So it feels a little bit wasted on that end to have it coming out when we can't get together and play. But I mean, I know that a majority of this is of our community is hobby. So, and they need to make money. I just, yeah. It's one of those where I'm like, oh, I wish it was, we weren't able to get out to the store and it was driving people. You're gonna get these sweet newer bands and they don't take that long to get painted up and then you're not gonna be able to get them painted. And it's a shame. We also got the confirmation that we're gonna get season four in December, basically. And they showed like the silent ones. That's the image for the new season, the face of the silent ones in December. So, and I agree. Somebody said the new Brutes models are incredible. I completely agree. They are really, really great. I talked about, we obviously covered them when they initially spoiled the models, but yes, I do super agree. I mean, every Brute model ever is amazing. Brutes are like, just, they are the best orcs. They are the best orcs by far. So they just look super cool. I don't disagree with that. Yeah, I mean, I was happy to see, I think those points finally got to the right place, just to swap back to that, because like Brutes came down 10, our boys went up 10. Feels like exactly the right change to me. That was actually a points conundrum. They feel like they're in exactly the right place right now, where we'll see a nice little mix of those. I'm good with it. So I was happy about that. Cool. I mean, clearly what we're gonna be mostly seeing over the next couple of weeks is indomitable stuff, right? Obviously that it launches this weekend. You're already seeing people getting, being able to pick them up in certain ways in certain places and it's gonna be all the stuff, because actually after Indomitus, they have to release all the other things, all the other picks. So we gotta get that silent king, that sweet silent king model and that cool big satan shard of the Void Dragon. I think that's what he is. Did I remember all those words correctly? Probably not. I think I did. I gotta say, the new Necron stuff has gone like away from the humanoid. And I kind of had hoped that OBR had gone less humanoid. Like their elite three model unit is way cooler than the OBR elite three model unit.  Yeah, yeah. So I really like the design choices they made for that army. Yeah, it's a cool. How many people are going to use Necrons to play as OBR? Oh my God, no, I gotta, no, I gotta. I mean, it just feels like a slam dunk, right? Like the silent king is clearly just a catacroast stand in. He's a big diorama base.  That's easy to do. You can even replace the terrain piece with the monolith, with the new monolith and put that like, because it can stand up tall. So it's fine, you know? So I mean like this, it really does feel like some slam dunks there. And obviously just regular Necron, people can be your, your more tech card. So again, easy, easy. Use the big war of the world's walkers as your goth is our harvesters, with their long light and big, long tendrils coming out. Yeah, there's so many heroes.  Inquisitor, Sazrak or whatever, I think. I think that's his name. He's special, yes. Yep, anyway, I don't know how to pronounce any of their names. I'm sure I'm butchering all of them. But yeah, I think those, I think those guys would be pretty good stand-ins. Yeah, they're like, the big forearm dudes from OBR could just be Scorpic Destroyers or whatever, like you mentioned, like that's pretty straight. So I, it's going to happen. Like somebody just one-to-ones it. Yeah, which I'm okay with. Like, I could see like, again, somebody people have said that they think that KO may have been testing the water for squats. And I agree with that. And so it wouldn't surprise me if we see something along that line as well. There you go. Illuminor Cesarus, that's what he is. That's what his name is. I was close, I was close. I was like, I had the right, I had similar syllables. I was in a Xenos frame of mind when I said it. Yeah, I was pretty, I was in the neighborhood. I was off a couple blocks, but I was pretty close to the address. Right number of apostrophes. There you go, that's right. Okay. And so, and I think that's basically all of our news. Yeah. Right on. All right, let's talk about some pick of the week. Eric, what would you like to share with everybody? I've got, I've got a couple, if I may. The first one is, if anybody is interested in, it's hard to play some games right now, but being hosted by on Twitter, I don't know how to say this, I can't use words right now. Animosity Campaign is kicking off today, I believe. And Animosity Campaign is an online narrative campaign hosted by Nuno M on Twitter and Aaron Boston, part of the Neo Network. And they're just, what they're doing a little bit differently is that you can participate similar to like Seasons of War, if you remember that from a few years ago, you can game, you can hobby, you can write short stories, you can do storytelling, you can do arts and crafts, you could probably create video content and post it up. And you participate with them, I believe on their Discord server and kind of connect with some people around narrative play.  And then in hopefully a couple of weeks, the Mortal Realms crew is going to be putting on our very own a soulbound actual play stream. We're going to figure this out. We're going to bungle it up real good. We're going to have a lot of fun doing it. And we're calling it Rollbound. And the first arc is eight episodes and it's called Realm Gate Hunters. So we're just going to see if we can tell a story in eight parts and have some fun. That's a lot of parts. You can certainly tell a story. Whether that's a good one, that remains to be seen. Oh, exactly. But I have all faith in you. It will be. Well, thanks. Thanks. It's a new space. We've been doing podcasting and relying on our vocal cords for all this time now. Our faces have to do some of the work. And it's not looking good for us. Nice. Tom, what about yourself? I've yielded my time to Eric. You have no pick. Is that what you're saying? That's what I'd say. All right. Well, I'll do two for you then. All right. Pick the first. If you want to get more detail on the points changes and those kinds of things, I recommend our good friend, AOS Coach, who put up a really nice video going army by army that you can see up on the screen right now and talking about all the points changes and the implications and the changes there. Coach is and as always a pillar of the community and a great dude. So I'll link that down in the show below. Take a drink. Okay. And secondly, I want to direct everybody to a personal thing. There's a survey. It will show up in the show notes. I apologize. I didn't get it included before that. I will. I'll actually probably drop it while we're sitting here talking. So it'll be in the description, but it'll certainly be in the description post when the show is uploaded. And it is a survey about balance. And I would ask everybody who's watching this or is watching this in the future, please go fill out the survey. It will be very helpful. We are going to be covering it next week on the show. The more responses we get, the better conclusions we can draw or at least the better correlations we can draw. And so I am very interested in this one. It's not, I think it's very much focusing on what I hope is things people care about. It has to do with the latest GHB, how people feel about the changes. And most importantly, question number one is you have to pick one and only one of your main army you play. The question that has caused people much consternation. No end of that consternation. Yes. But yes, you must, and there's a purpose for that. I have a design on that why I'm forcing you to first state what your main army is. There is a reason.  Tristan said my army wasn't listed. That is funny. Didn't put Tomb Kings on the list. I don't know what to tell you. I guess pick OBR, Tristan. That's the answer. We'll know what you mean. That judge, wake, wake. I did include all current non-legends forces, but I should have thought of that, so. But there we go. And I know a lot of people say, but I play lots of armies. Sure you do, but you have one favorite. Gun to your head, you can pick one. So, there you go. It'll be in the description, Randall. I will, like I said, I meant to drop it in before the show and it will be in the description after the show goes live. So, there you go. Tristan's response is great. He said he picked cities, get bed. And I'm like, yes, that's a great response and perfectly fair, Tristan. I don't know what to tell you, man.  So, at any rate, please do fill out that survey. No, it will be very helpful and it will, the more information we get, the more people to fill it out. I think there's a lot of interesting things about how we need, what I wanna talk about next week is how we need to think about balance and push for and agitate for change as a community. Given what's going on right now, GW is being very responsive. They are trying and doing a largely good job of making the game good and fixing problems where they come up. But I do think there is a better way we can redress this and I think if we as a community, and I know how I would personally do it, but I honestly don't just wanna sit around and yell myself my own personal opinions. It means a lot more if all of you fill out the survey and we have raw data and go, look, here's all the people who are saying this is also what we need because then all of your voices join mine. And if it turns out that you want something different than what I think the right answer is, that's great, then I can adjust my priors accordingly and stop agitating for change that what people don't want, which is so all in all, it's a positive thing. So like I said, I'll make sure to get linked up there. Okay, great. Let's talk about some hobby time. So Mr. Stonemonk, I know you've been super busy but you got that big boat. You wanna bring that back up here and just kinda show everybody because I'm not sure everybody gotta see it. I'm gonna lock onto you here. This is a truly beautiful thing you've been working on. Well, this was, I know that I think you had put out your first kind of whirlwind boat using the second Mechanicus terrain when I was kind of picking this stuff out. So you slipped in there, but it was validation. I always see when somebody else does something like first, I always feel like it's a gateway for everyone else. And so yeah, I just, I put together kind of half section of some of the Sector of Mechanicus. I don't know, whatever they're called. I didn't bother to learn all their names. Sure. And my big, I guess, Man Eater Slash, what are the ogres with the flame ogres? Gosh darn it. Firebellies. Firebellies. You know, runs this thing. And it was some narrative that came out of my other KO army and brought this guy and said, hey, he's got to have his own stuff. And so I've been working on, had been working on that a lot at the beginning of the year before, actually kind of in the first month of kind of quarantine. And then in the last, last month, after the new, what should we call it? Mechanicus stuff came out and the wings off of that flyer came out. Yes, yes. Was able to kind of complete this thing. I'd taken a, and made a cog griffin and tried to keep it in the pose of the regular. It was beautiful. Thank you.  And I was able to complete this and a few other pieces. I don't quite have a hundred points of it completed or a thousand points of it completed, but met some hobby goals. And then other than that, when, obviously over the past few months when the Soulbound came out, it's been a lot of kind of melding my love or transferring or melding my love of D&D and my love of the AOS, the Mortal Realms, lore and space, et cetera. And it's been really fun kind of being in community with other people around the lore even more so than when we're just reading the books and we're talking about the books and doing kind of informal book clubs with people who follow our show. This feels like a chance to just, I guess even more so get into the narrative. And so Soulbound and the reception of that has been really positive. And I was glad to hear watching your guys' stream with Mephisto as the GM has been fantastic. And I know that obviously you guys are big role players and have been role playing for a long time. So it was great seeing how much you guys were enjoying it. And so yeah, I mean, it's kind of just one more thing that as a community we get to learn about the lore of this place. And that's something I just really enjoy. And it creates a lot of tools for playing our games on the tabletop as well. Yeah, I agree.  We'll be back to the game this week. I apologize everybody. We've had a couple of weeks off through basically scheduling conflicts. We'll be back. Tom might not be this week, but we will be back. I'm sorry folks. We don't need the dwarf anyways. It's true. Well, I absolutely love that, we'll be talking about the Envolo Apotheosis here in a second. But I absolutely love that each of you picked kind of the model or the army that most exemplifies you and what you play and made characters for them. Absolutely. It's the power. It's what it allows you to do. So that's really cool. No, it's great how many of us made and picked characters that we can't, both Tom and I made characters that we can't make in the Envolo Apotheosis, which is exciting. True, that's true. So that's nice. We got that going for us. Well, here's the thing though. It's in the narrative section. So there is no can't. Oh, that's true. You can always break the rules. You can always break the rules. The rules tell us we can't, but we don't have to listen to those. I do agree. Okay, Tom, what have you been working on? You get any hobby in? I know.  You need to get some hobby back on, Tom. You're done. You're done with Yemen. You ran a great game. It was fantastic. It was a wonderful marathon. We all had a great time. We were excited about the unexpected part four in our increasingly inaccurate trilogy of stories. And now it's time to get back to that hobby table. Get them books off of there. Too many books back on that table. We gotta get ready. I know. I know. It's a whole work thing. Get the hobby stuff back on the shelf. That's what we need. Okay. All right, for myself, obviously I did finish this thing. This thing up. It's behind me now. I'm gonna turn the chair the wrong way. There you go. That it's all back there. My display board and that thing. Where exactly it's gonna go. I have no clue. I don't know where I'm gonna store that thing. But I'm hoping I get to use it sometime this year. You have been officially replaced as my partner for Holy Habit, Tom. So now I just gotta get a... Who's your partner? Well, I'll figure. I'm not just gonna say at this point in time. I wanna make sure all the T's across and I's have dotted. I have my suspicions. Do you now? I bet if I gave you five guesses, you wouldn't get it. But that's all right. Okay, maybe I wouldn't. So. That's all right. We've a new challenger has entered the field and I'm excited about it. Now I just gotta figure out how to work. Perhaps one of the eight armies that's up on the screen right now into my army for our combined team. Dun, dun, dun. There you go. At any rate, the, but I, so I finished that up and then I decided I wanted to work on something that wasn't that because that project was ridiculous. So I got two very different projects. One, I was sent this very nice figure by someone which is like this sort of, it's this sort of woman sitting in repose. It's this very like classical art piece. Looks like it came out of an old master's painting. And so she was a fun chance to work on really interesting flesh tones and oils and stuff like that. And so I'm just refining her, but she's fun. Just a nice little, very different completely for the love of the art piece. And then I'm also doing this guy, another space marine. So this is another Crimson Fist, my new favorite thing to paint. All marines I paint have to be fist related, only fisting here on this channel. That's all we're gonna do. Do I pull? And so Imperial Fists and Crimson Fists only. So this guy and I am recording him because people had asked about it. I'll tell you right now, I use oil paints for this as well because there is, I cannot imagine doing a space marine not in oil paints anymore. These like big monochromatic figures like this where they're all basically in one color and you're trying to do like high reflection near NMM type stuff.  And doing all of that work was like getting to that point, like maybe an hour, that's it. It's like, it's so ridiculously fast. I just, I cannot imagine doing an acrylic. So we'll do acrylics for the detail, but I'm painting how I'm gonna paint. And there you go. All right.  I need to record the rest of it, but I think I'll probably finish the girl first because she's fun. And I needed something that wasn't a gaming piece as a sorbet to clear the palette as it were. Okay, so gentlemen, let's talk narrative, shall we? Let's do it. K.O.Spawn said, Ed speaking of oils, any plans to interview James Wapple? K.O.Spawn, you need to go look at that playlist again, buddy. I did interview him about two months ago and yes, he was great and it was awesome. James is a good dude. So it has already happened. So the narrative section. Now obviously, the narrative section of this book is very specific this time. I wanna talk, just real quick, I wanna make a mention on the open play section. Have you, Eric, looked through the Skies of Slaughter campaign stuff at all? I have not. Okay, so it's pretty cool. Let me just say, we're not gonna dive into it in a big way because obviously I didn't prep everybody to talk about this, but two things I'll say about it. One, it's pretty neat. It's kind of a cool set of rules around how you do this aerial combat. It does feel a little more like planes fighting each other basically is I think how I would describe it. Yeah. But it's pretty cool.  Yeah, yeah, it's that kind of stuff, which is cool. And different monsters have different abilities to do all of those things. Like some are more maneuverable than others and tougher than others and recover better than others and so on and so forth. So it's cool stuff. The reason I mention it though is because what this section showed me is like, we talk about like the need to change war scrolls and there seems to be like a resistance to that. And yet here in this section is like 50 war scrolls of flying monsters completely rewritten from the ground up, okay? For all of these flying monsters. And as I was looking through this, I was like, this is an incredible amount of work. And I know Jervis worked on this first part.  Like he went to the foundation and built back up everything in the war scroll. They're very different. If we could do that, we can get better marauders. I'm gonna leave that here. Okay. Sure. So, cool, cool. The narrative section itself largely breaks down into two main sections, which is the team battles, special rules and the associated campaign and then the anvil of apotheosis. And then of course there's like the appropriate multiplayer battle plans. So I thought we'd kind of tackle that as is. And I will say a couple of things I wanna lead in with too is that by definition, narrative adds complexity to this game. Yeah, sure. Absolutely, absolutely correct. It's, which can be a barrier of entry for some people. It certainly, it's one of those things where I think most people that are developing narrative events or adding narrative, you're trying to add the right amount or just enough to make it feel different, to make it like, to make actions or the models themselves feel like they are in your imagination and that the story comes out more out of it. But it's always gonna be a little bit more complex. And the second thing I'll say is I think they should have led this chapter with the Anvil of Apotheosis. I agree with that. Because when I jumped into this very first section, I was like, what, I'm doing what now? Right, yeah, yeah, you're not wrong. I'm writing notes now. And on its head, you take that out as being like the first thing you read again, even narrative, I'm pretty open-minded when it comes to narrative, because I'm like, all right, what can I chew on? What's the mechanic that's gonna help me kind of imagine better? So I'm open to this, but as the opener for the chapter, it felt a little bit of a miss. Yeah, you can see that. But yes, top of the order though, team, playing in teams is a great thing to start with. And there's some pretty cool stuff in this chapter overall. Obviously the big thing that people are talking about is the Anvil. Sure, yeah, so I mean, we can cover this. I do wanna give it its time. I think it's actually really cool because you're right, like you're absolutely like, I hadn't thought about that honestly, Eric, but you nailed it. Because when you jump into this chapter and the first thing you read is the fog of war rules for the lines of communication. Wherein you're like, before the battle begins, players are given 10 minutes in which they can freely discuss strategy and tactics. Once the battle begins, players in a coalition can only discuss strategy and tactics if the generals of each of their armies are within three inches of each other. Otherwise, they have to use handwritten letters to communicate and they have to declare whether they're sending them by land or by air. And then there's like different results of when you can open the letter and is the letter lost? And I'm like, whoa, I am in the deep end here, I'm like right away. Because I read that and I was like, really? That's pretty crazy. Yeah, it's one of those things like where when you're doing narrative, so the other thing I'll say is what I like about this is I'm gonna say, and I'm trying to remember the past general's handbook, but this feels like the first narrative section of a general's handbook where they are kind of going for it in terms of adding some additional meat, mechanics, kind of pieces of the game, side games maybe to this. So I never want to stop the experimentation or say this was a bad idea to shoot for and I've not played it, right? I've not done it, so I can't say. So this, but this is one of those things where like, what is, so the problem they said is like, okay, we want it to feel like it's not, it's so easy being with other armies or even having a partner army, a team member, how do you make it so it feels like that fog of war? Well, you stop people from talking, right? And the question is, can you work through this step by step, write a letter? Who's it for? And I think in a little bit, they talked about having a game master. It's not clunky, like I just, like I was trying to imagine writing those letters and going through all the hoops and I was like, yeah. It's tough, like even the declaring charges portion. I think one of the things that might have made people more comfortable if they wanted to keep this in here was they could have said, here's a whole list of potential special rules to introduce into your narrative team games, right? And then here's kind of the features and benefits of doing that, right? Which I do like, they have some designer notes but they're not really selling you on why. And I think when, that's one of the things they're missing in this, like they have designer notes that are like, if players accidentally talk about tactics you should penalize them and I'm like, oh geez, that's harsh. You know, like, I think when you're like narrative, you're right, it does add more weight. And if you're trying to sell somebody on more stuff, you've got to connect the features and the benefits, right? Anybody who's ever sold a product knows that that's what you've got to do. And it needs to, one, you got to agree on the premise, hey, we want there to be a father war. And then second, the mechanic has to be just right, you know? And because you're still playing an entire game on top of that, it can't put too much on the players or the group to think more. Now, as you mentioned, I do like, so there's aspects of this I like. So like having pieces of paper is not necessarily something that I like because it's, I don't know, it's not mechanical. It's hard to know what the rules are or you write something in and of itself could be convoluted. Like I wrote something to my team member and I got through all my roles but they still didn't understand what I meant. But like declaring charges, like I like the idea of my partner not knowing who I'm going to charge and we accidentally charged the same unit and waste. I agree, that was what I was going to talk about. That's like actually a cool part of this I liked because I read the first one and I was like, wow, that is weighty. But then the second part I actually really liked where it was like, you don't get to talk about who you're going to charge instead at the start of the charge phase, you note down like this unit's charging that unit and you have to actually say who your target of the charge is, not just who's actually charging. And everybody in the coalition does that. And then you all kind of flip it once and roll, right? And I was like, oh, that's kind of actually a cool kind of the fog of battle. Things are moving too quickly for the lines to communicate. We don't have perfect control of the forces thing. And that's not, that one felt like, okay, I could see doing that kind of thing. That seems pretty reasonable, right? Do you remember when we played our Siege game and I believe it was last year's GHB where you basically do kind of a rock, paper, scissors where I make a decision, you make a decision and we see how they match up. Yeah, we'll see what the benefit or penalty is. I think something like that again, where you're kind of assigning a bonus or if you have a partner and you're like, okay, I think we're gonna go, you know, like we're both gonna, almost symbolically, let's play, are we gonna be playing the same way? So we both pick one of three things. And if we pick right, we both pick the same thing then we both gain that benefit or something like that where it becomes very mechanical, right? And can happen really quickly. That might have been an easier one to kind of, again, to swallow and digest. Not to say, again, I might try the Fargo War or the note or it's something that I think could have been adapted. So I think, you know, having it here at least opens the door to what that could be. But some of the more, something more concrete, I think is sometimes easier to get people into. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I mean, and then obviously you get the rules, all the rules around alliance and betrayal, those are all fine, I had no problem with that. Like the alliance thing about losing your command point made sense, like if you're splitting a bunch of your grand alliances, okay, cool. So there is some scenarios where betrayal, one of the things that I'm remiss is that the open play didn't have a refined, even more refined version of triumphant treachery in it. Right, right. You know, it's one of those, it's like this holy grail of getting that one right, which has a great like betrayal mechanic. The thing is with that is that it can flip flop. Like you betrayal, but that, you know, hurts you for one round. If you're playing two versus two and one person decides they just wanna give up or whatever, seems like, I don't know what the climax is there. I don't want the payoff is on a single game. Again, we'll get to the campaign in a little bit. Yeah, yeah. And maybe it makes more sense there, but as a one-off.  Sure, I could see it. But you're right, like in a normal two-on-two game or something, somebody decides to betray, well, I guess that other person just loses then. I mean, literally that's my monopoly experience growing. Right. And there were fights, right? Like, I don't think that's as appropriate for a group of friends around the table. Right. I did love that they talked about introducing the GM, which is sort of the next section, introducing a Game Master. I think that's actually something that's largely, it's underexplored. Obviously, the big narrative tournaments do this. So Paul, who was on here recently talked about it with the G-Bring Dome and obviously, Erin, you mentioned earlier who runs the narrative event at Nova. Those are GM'd narrative events. I know Raw also is a GM'd event, right? I think this is something people just largely don't think about and probably don't have as much exposure to if they don't come from a tabletop role-playing D&D-esque background where they're used to having an arbiter of some kind. But I like how actually that then affects the lines of communication where letters can get lost or handed to the enemy warlord, where you can attempt to assassinate people, right? Which I think is awesome. I love the assassination rules and how that all works. I actually thought that was super cool. And I love the bought favors actually, which can occur in either GM'd or non-GM'd, where you can slip command points to other people to curry favor, which I thought was super cool. Yeah, so one, I love adding the Game Master to the vocabulary of narrative play. In Age of Sigmar, it makes it less foreign, more people know about it. They're gonna be more inclined when they see a narrative event and the idea of a Game Master that's gonna be more familiar. And then yeah, all these little, I love small compact modular add-ons that can be fit in different places in a narrative event. Even just there's one phase or one part of the day where you're like, all right, there's an assassination table in play. Right, right. It doesn't have to be heavy and weigh things down, being light and flavorful. You get a lot of bang for the buck. And obviously as somebody who loves playing their Skaven, I love a good assassination table. And they even put the rats on the page, which was very apropos, so. Yeah, absolutely. And then all of this rolls into the Whisper Engine, which is a coalition campaign. Yeah.  Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, Tom, what did you think about the Whisper Engine campaign overall? I mean, like I like what it's doing. I would like a system that allows for both, like individual, like two player games and then multiplayer games. Sure. Like the Whisper Engine is specifically seemingly designed for multiplayer. I mean, that's always. Outwardly stated that like this is for four to seven people and we're assuming that you're getting coalitions together for most games, right? Right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, that being said, I don't know that you couldn't adapt it to just be an all-insrom, but sure. And that's where I'm at, where I think that like its strength is in, is in those type of flexible games. Yeah. The thing that it's doing really well are some problems that it's solving is that you can work with an odd number of people. Yep. Yep.  Yeah, the bidding process is the next thing I read that I was like, whoa. Yeah. I mean, you got to prepare to read it twice. It works, but you just got to really like, yeah. Yep. And then there's that complexity of what you don't spend in the bidding process to get who you want on which side. You use that to build, that's the size of army you can build. Is it interesting? I like choices like that, risk reward. But what's nice though is again, you bid, you build your team, the coalition's different every round. And so for a, it can feel a little open play in that like your allegiances are flip to flopping every turn, but it does make it so that everyone can be on a different team and you're less like stuck. Yeah, so it's more just like, okay, it's always these three people against these three people. That's what it's breaking down. Just so everybody's clear about what we're saying. Because the nature of the bidding mechanic, you end up having different, like you end up having different coalitions each week that you get together for the campaign. That's what's happening because you're bidding out this week where this is going to be the coalition. It's, you know, if you've got six players, it's one, four and five this week, but next week it might be one, two and five or then the next week it might be one, five and six or so or, you know, whatever, right? Right. Which is cool. I agree. That does help break that up. And it's interesting that like as people dominate, there would be natural incarnations to pull them to a team, but then it gets much more expensive to win them over. And then you end up having a smaller army to actually field. And so that, you know, that's, I think you're right. There is a natural cost there that comes out in the bidding process. And I think as you were saying before, like as is, I think it's an open play, it's an open play mechanic. What the struggle will be is like, why? Why are, what's the narrative reason for flopping back and forth or different people joining like one coalition and then the next and then the next? Is it political? Is it year after year? Is it something like that? So this doesn't give us that, but, you know, GMs are creative, so we can figure that out. Sure. I like the map that they give you. It's a very simple map from Shimon, which has some nice, you know, little special things you can take over and give you some cool bonuses. I'd honestly, I mean, I'll tell you right now, I don't know if you remember the original, original General's Handbook, the one that came out in 2006, let's say. That sounds right off the top of my head, which had a huge layer of campaign focus in it. Okay, of like different sample maps you can use. I would love if they just had some kind of a white dwarf article or put it up on the website. Like I know Phil Kelly and other people on the team really love to make maps. Give us just like five, six, 10 different cool campaign maps like this, just different things we could go and play and like one for each realm or something like that, full of neat locations for that realm. This feels probably about the right amount of space or size. Maybe it could be a little bigger, but cause like I feel like armies are gonna be kind of bumpy, bumpy and each other pretty fast, which that's fine. I mean, I don't know if that's a bad thing or a good thing, but I would love to see that kind of article expansion. Right? I mean, that just seems like a slam dunk. Yep. It does seem like there's a really cool process for taking over territories of people who've lost a battle in that round. And then if you get all your territories taken, if there's space on the board, you can start again, like you've slunk away and you're gonna restart. And I think you could adjust that kind of how long people can last on the map by increasing the number of spaces, right? You know, everyone's gonna get at least one redo, right? Yeah, sure. You know, in this particular map. So yeah. I agree. It's a good foundation. It's actually nice that it's kind of hard to white people out. Yeah. This is one of the things that happened in a campaign we ran back in like 2007, 2008, somewhere around there. I remember we did a campaign and I was playing my Skaven at the time and there was a Bretonian player and I was like, just don't attack me. Because at that time, Bretonians had like the worst matchup to Skaven. Like we were there absolute foil. That was a 90-10 matchup for Skaven's favor. And I was like, listen, Bretonian player, I'm cool with you, just don't mess with me and I won't come after you. Like there's plenty of other territory. I got other games I wanna play. I had played that player already like many times in the past couple months. I wasn't keen to play them again. And so then sure enough, the Bretonian player marches into my territory and I was like, that's it. I just turned around and wiped him off the map. I just conquered like boom, boom, boom. I picked him like three weeks in a row and just eradicated him from the map. And I was like, that's what you get. You're out of this game now. Don't pick me. I said, don't do it.  Thanks, Mike. Yeah. Absolutely. Way to ruin everybody's fun, Vince. Hey, I gave him the option. He crossed the line. You get one chance. You get one. That's it. No mercy. At any rate, no, it was just cool because like in this kind of system, that isn't what would have happened. Right. Right. Because the loser can still pick new territories. Even when you lose the game, you still get to expand. You might have some of your territory taken, you could still gain back. So you're kind of like lose one, gain one, compared to everybody else, just gain them one. And even if he'd gotten routed, he could have come back on the board, right? And so just that kind of stuff is cool as the remnants of his armies fled and set up shop somewhere else. Yeah. And I mean, it could be interesting when you're choosing where you would reset up, do you make deals with other players? Yeah. Do you figure out how to position, to help somebody close a gap or block a route or something like that? I don't know. Yep. Yep. No, I love this. I love campaigns. It's been a long time since I've gotten a full-size campaign on. Like in the interim years, most of the campaigns I ran were Mordheim or something like that, small scale stuff, Cry and Mordheim, the smaller skirmish games. I really would love to get a full-fledged, like army-sized campaign going again. It's just, I think that this, like looking at this, it made me think it'd probably be a good way to do it. Since one, we often play team games almost every week and two, recently we've had an influx of some additional people who've come and joined us for like our games. So we have the chance to actually expand it. Cause like we went from having like three sometimes four to having like five sometimes six. So that actually puts us in a position where we'd more often have a good-size coalitions. So we'll see. Just real quick for people who are, you know, are just craving that, what's that ultimate map experience? Obviously there's the, was it lost empires or what was the empire tiles? Oh yeah, yeah. Mighty Empires, is that what it was? Mighty Empire tiles. You can find tons of those like at Thingiverse and like other places that kind of print that sort of stuff out. Obviously you can get, you know, a big map and pull it out that has come forth with any of the Firestorm or whatever. You can also take a big like cork board and use a magic marker and just draw a bunch of stuff like this and then you can like, at the end of eighth, we did something like this where I drew a map on a cork board and we glued like shields onto thumbtacks. Yeah, sure. You know, you could move those around and claim your territories. And they, you know, they have these cool icons here that just, yeah. So they give you a ton of that fun stuff to get interacted with. Yeah, absolutely. They give you three new coalition battle plans which are good. One thing I was very sad about with this, I actually like all three of these battle plans. I think they're all good and they're actually really cool. But they, so I always get the limited edition for the GHB because I'm a sucker for that kind of thing. And to be honest, I just like the cards because you get like all the little cards for the, you get the scenario cards, which are great. Which by the way, in this one, they have the realm cards in this one. I have people who didn't get it. So they have that whole, you know, the back of the book where you have the rules for the realm, those come on little cards in the card pack, which was great. They have like the triumphs and the un-little cards and the secondary objectives, whatever they're called, auxiliaries, or whatever they're called now, auxiliaries I think. Those are all in little cards. But the three coalition plans aren't on the scenario cards. You only get the match play scenarios. And previously they've always included the narrative and the other, like in the, in the 2017, for example, you have like the full tram of a tree and the full coalition of death ones. So I was really sad to see that because like I really use those all the time. So come on, GW, you couldn't give me my three narrative cards. What the heck, man? Was it that much of a cost increase to this overpriced freaking general's handbook? You couldn't give me my three narrative card scenarios? Nice, yeah. There's a minor complaint, but I opened them up and I was like, ah, yay, my scenario cards. I looked through them and I was like, where's the narrative ones?  Yeah. So anyway, anyhoo. So yeah, highly recommend it. It's something I think I want to get trying. Like I said, I've really been itching for like a campaign for a while. And this felt like, okay, cool. This is what I needed to do a team campaign, which is kind of what I'd been thinking about how can we do it? So this is the perfect time. So this was a, this was an absolute win for me. I agree with you. Some of the things are a little tricky and like we'll take some getting used to. Namely the bidding and the fog of war, right notes, I'll tell you right now, my guess is we do the bidding, but we wouldn't do the fog of war thing. Or we would just subtract, we'd get rid of the bidding and break up the clicks by rolling dice to determine teams. Yeah. So there you go. Yup. Or yeah, pulling from a hat or something. I wonder if, yeah, I mean, I want to, I was just looking in the chat and, you know, we've got Corey McQness says that they were able to play with the fog of war rules and after they just, you know, once they figured it out, it went pretty quick and was a lot of fun.  Totally. I wonder if you could do it with like texts. I bet you could use text messaging. Sure. Sure. I mean, why not? Yeah. Why not? All right. So that then brings us to the anvil of apotheosis The part that everybody's been waiting for. Yeah. Eric, why don't you start us off on the anvil? Overall, what's your overall thoughts on the anvil of apotheosis? Well, what's even better about this approach to giving us narrative mechanics is that it breaks it down into such small pieces that a GM can easily tweak, change, add, manipulate to bring even more possibility into this, right? There is literally, it's like one of those things where sometimes you think you're giving the narrative players like a closed system, here you go. And the reason it's not in match plays because we are going to play with this thing. And it just breaks down all of the things that you already would expect.  Like this is the same stuff, right? You're piecemealing the different aspects of a hero, you're adding a few restrictions, which some of them make sense that prayers go with priests, right? But some of them not so much where you have to, you can't have a warrior priest, or not a warrior priest, but like, I don't know. There's some things where you're like, okay, give me a way to bridge the gap here. And so, yeah, it's a bunch of little pieces that I can make tiny tweaks to without breaking the whole system and feel pretty confident that, you know, even more customization can come out of it. I agree. Tom, what's your thoughts on AOA? Beachfront Avenue. Yeah, I like it. It's acceptable. Okay. It's a reasonable thing. I mean, like what I would say is that I, at the end of the day, like I actually really like it. Yeah. I think that there's a lot of potential here. I think that it's doing everything that I've wanted it to do, right? Yep. With a very few exceptions, which I'll talk about, but yes, I agree. Right. And so, I just, I don't know what else I would want out of it. Like obviously there may be balance concerns or whatever. That's fine. But for narrative games, allowing me to construct my heroes, I'm in. You know? Yep. It's doing it. So that's where I'm at. I agree. Like I'm just gonna rip these sort of, I'm gonna rip these sort of band-aids off right at the top so we can just get rid of them, okay? And not have to deal with these later on. Okay. There are a couple, overall I love this system. I love it. I think it's great. But there are challenges. It feels like version one, right? Yep. There are some things that need to be corrected. I'm just going to rapid fire through them real quick so that honestly you and your group could just agree to correct them when you're using these people in your own games, be they narrative match player, anything in between, right? And that will, that way you can, I think spot the negative potential. So here we go. Things that don't sit perfectly right with me, okay? And changes that I think need to be made to this. I think for the most part, the archetypes are like the ancestries that is to say are fine. Like I didn't see a huge amount of issues with any of them. For the most part, they let you choose the kind of stuff you'd want to choose. They let you do the kind of things you'd want to do, okay? Great stuff. They do not allow you anywhere in here. And I actually saw Sam mentioned that he's gonna think about this for the GHB FAQ. So we might actually have something like this coming soon where he makes a reference to how you could handle it. But like the addition of specific sub keywords is lacking. So for example, I can make my guy an auric, like an iron jaw auric, I can do that, right?  So like by sheer fluke of him lacking that keyword, he can't access a lot of the different command abilities because they're keyed to mega boss. He can't access any magic items in the book because they're keyed to mega boss, right? Or to the shamans, which he is neither of those things, right? So, you know, like that, and there's other examples of this, like you mentioned Tom Marine and Skyfarer, right? So like there's no way to get that keyword so you could like hitch on a boat or board a boat or something like that.  He's just stuck. And there's, and some armies don't deal with this at all, by the way, that's what, the only reason it bothers me is because it's iniquitously distributed, right? Because like if you're a Skaven hero, for example, which go rats, you do get to pick like Masterclan, Pestilins, Verminus, Skyar, Mulder or Eschen, which means that you can pick from the many times like the command traits or the magic items of those particular clans. However, you can't be a, so like, you do get the magic items and command traits there, but you can't be like a claw lord, which then has other implications, right? Even though you might be built like a claw lord, you might be using the claw lord model, you might be a commander and acting for all intents and purposes like a claw lord, which can't be a claw lord. So like even how much of that matters is very not the same amongst all the armies, right? You look at a lot of the chaos armies and they're just like, well, any slanesh demon can take these items or these command traits and activate these abilities. Okay, great, I can be that, right? I can fill out that stuff, but I can't be a heed knight, right? Or whatever, which matters a lot in some armies or not at all in others, right? So my point is just watch the keyword bingo, maybe Sam will address it. My main point is just, I think my personal rule would be let people pick one of those sub keywords but just one for their heroes as long as it aligns with everything else, right?  It's pretty easy fix. On the commander arc types, they need to limit the command abilities to only be activatable once per, like to not be stackable. That's just gonna be a bad experience for people if they don't. Like I know it's narrative and I know they don't always put that stuff in there because that's more of a match play convention. I think in general, they should put that on there because like just ramping a unit up to like plus 50 million to hit just doesn't feel very fun in any kind of game. Right.  So, you know, ha ha, right? Like that's kind of not a fun experience. Yeah, well, that was, I liked that a lot. And that was another one of my critiques was, I think there should be three levels. Champion, captain and or something in a conqueror. Right. I think choosing between like a dragon or like 15 additional skill ability type things. It seems, I haven't built a ton of stuff in here, but it feels like you could build a lot of gotrics. Sure, oh, you absolutely can, yeah. Sure, sure.  Sure. You can build like little crazy chopper dudes on foot who run in with like an exorbitant number of extreme high damage attacks. Yeah.  They melt instantly to mortal wounds or whatever. Sure. But somewhere in between and part of that too is like progression, you know, starting as a champion, moving, you know, give me some room to move a little bit higher and then to the final form later on.  Yeah, sure. Sure. So just quick, let me, let me rapid fire these ovens because I've been taking too long to do it through this. And I said I was gonna get the negatives out of the way quickly. I don't love a lot of the restrictions on things like acolyte commander and mage. So for example, like I mentioned, I can't build skig in here because you can't take priest. You can't take acolyte as a skaven unless you're pestilence. Skig is most definitely not pestilence, right? He is a, you know, I'm a priest. And like I could build a version of him is if I could just take it. Again, you can ignore these restrictions. Just if somebody has a cool character in mind, do it.  You can't actually be a wizard as a doerden, which is just like, I know that's how it is in the world, but like, okay, whatever. That's the rules for the general armies for your individual heroes. Seems like you'd be more fun. So again, just allow people to break those rules. Those restrictions don't actually need to be there. There's nothing that gets outwardly broken. By the way, a corn demon or like a corn demon priest or a slanash demon priest sounds totally awesome. It shouldn't be restricted. There's no reason they could be priests. Like why not? They should be supplicated to their gods. Like I understand the greater lore reason, but who cares? The bestial companions, the minor beast and mounted beast are dramatically over-costed. Like they are way too expensive for what you get out of them. They skyrocket your dude instantly into like a huge points category for very, very minimal benefit. There's the average damage added is about one. Like you literally add about one damage against a four up save by taking either of those things. And you know, you're paying eight DP for like two wounds and a move characteristic of eight, which isn't always even that big of a change. Like skinks already move eight. Ogres already move eight when they're hungry. You know, like lots of things already move at either at or near that speed. Like so it's often not that big of a movement change. Movement itself is over-costed on like two points for a single point of move is too high. Especially when you're already capped at three. So like a five inch, you know, person walking, going up to eight is not the end of the world. Ethereal needs some kind of change so you don't just automatically make everybody ethereal. It's fine in a narrative thing, just kind of be responsible. There's no reason that every single hero you ever make is ethereal. The second this is ported to match play, there's just no reason to not be ethereal. It's so cheap comparatively. The fact that I can be ethereal, cheaper than I can just have some dumb dog following me around, that gives me like an average of one damage and one wound is like exactly, that right there is all that sums the problem up in the simplest way I can. Being a ghost should not be cheaper than getting a dog from the pound. Okay. Sure. So like that's fine. And finally like heroes should probably have a min cost of like a hundred points or something like that just because otherwise you really are incentivized to just like take the base ancestry, give them improvised weapons so you spend nothing on that and then just like take acolyte or mage and basically get a free wizard for like 30 or 40 points, just outrageously cheaper than what you would normally pay for that guy. And statistically it's actually about the same as the wizard you're normally paying 120 points for, 100 points for. So like characters just probably be a minimum of a hundred points. Are the destiny points, do they equate two points in the game? They do like in here, it has like a little match play thing again. I'm just, I'm sort of sneaking in a little match play thing. At the very end it says, take the number of points you spend on destiny, multiply it by 10 and that becomes the match play cost. Okay, right. And so again, that last part is only a concern if you're trying to like stick these guys into match play, which I think a lot of people will for their home games whether I think you'll put a tournament. I think even a narrative, like narrative we still use points a lot because it's just a good, it's again, it's a language that's easy to understand. And so if you wanted to say, hey, you can bring a 200 point or you can bring two, you can, you have 400 points of heroes if you want to bring one or if you want to make three or four, you know, do something like that. It's just, again, it's gives you tools to make it easy for people to get into it. Yeah. So those are the changes I would recommend, like do something with ethereal. I would say honestly, you could just double the cost of ethereal and that would probably be more realistic or you could just say ethereal, like either rewrite the rules for ethereal to say like this monster gains ethereal and has a four plus eight and that's it. Like until up to like five points or something like that from the four it is right now. And so you can't be like three plus ethereal, whatever, whatever. For the most part though, other than that, I know that sounds like I mentioned a lot of things but they're actually pretty minor things. Like being on a big monster is cool, vast majority of the upgrades feel cool. The armory feels about right as to what it does, your ability to upgrade feels about right. Like the ancestries themselves all feel about right. So it's, you know, like all of that stuff is actually on point is just those minor things around the edges that I think need to be tweaked. Like I could rewrite, I could solve most of the problems here with a one page FAQ. Yeah. And I think things like restrictions, you should be able to buy your way past them. Yeah, sure. Because here, if I can make everything ethereal, not just mordant or not just, what is it? Oh, the malignant. Malignant, right. If I can make everything ethereal, why can't I make a scaven priest from Squire? I mean, I have elf, what's the keyword for getting on a ship? Oh, no, for catching on a ship is skyfarer, for boating is mariner. Yeah, I have elves that are going to have the skyfarer keyword on them. Yeah.  I agree, totally agree. Because like your point is so well taken. If I can take a scaven, make him an ultimate commander swinging for like five damage and put him on a giant dragon, which is certainly something I can do, which is nowhere in the scaven book, right? Like that's not anywhere in the lore that I checked out, right? But I can certainly build that, which by the way is awesome. That's not a negative, that's a positive and a big one. Then certainly I should be able to also just have one that's a priest. Like where are we drawing these lines? You know, just they feel kind of arbitrary. I mean, and the point is to buy a whole bunch of GW kits and mash them together anyway. Sure. So yeah, why are we restricting my, whether I call it a priest? Yeah, I will say that by the way, when I was talking about the monsters, it's only the little have a dog with you or be on a minor mounted beast that are broken. Because they're, they cost way too much for what you get. Being on a gargantuan beast, like a dragon or a mall crusher or whatever you can imagine, that's actually perfectly in the right place. Like that feels dead on how it should be. If you actually total up what you get, like if you went over and spent on your enhancements, what you get out of minor beast and mounted beast, they're correct. You understand what I'm saying? Like they actually cost six points and eight points for the most part. The minor beast is actually a little over-costed, but it's actually only like four. But the gargantuan beast is like crazy savings. Yeah, they are passing out dragons. We have got a dragon overstock and everything has to go. I am Bob from Bob's Crazy Dragon Emporium. Are you looking for dragons? I've got dragons. I will sell you all the dragons. You need a bargain, basement prices. So yeah, it's a good deal. Cool. Is there any big monsters that stat better in the apotheon anvil than they do on their own cards? Yes, yes, almost all of them. By like, almost all of them because of two things. One, your damage starts higher on this than it does for most other monsters. Like you have a base damage attack that starts at four. Okay. And like there are plenty of monsters out there that don't have a four damage attack. This is a big complaint of mine. Monsters should never, this monster does not have a one damage attack. This is correct design. I do not, please stop printing monsters. Right. Monsters that have one damage attacks. This should have never been a thing. It should not be a thing right now. If I was made king for a day, the number one thing I would do is I would go through all the monster scrolls and fix them and I would erase every one damage attack from monsters and they would all become multi-damage. Period end of story. A monster should never have an attack that hits as hard as a rat with a rusty spear. Those should not be equivalent in any world or any shape or form. The dude walking around the size of an Atlas mech. Okay. Should not be hitting like a rando with a club. Just bottom line. I would also point out that because you add eight to your hero's wounds characteristic, you will often end up with more wounds than the actual monsters in the base races that have often been set to 12. Right, because you're often starting at like a five wound hero and adding eight on top, you go to 13 base. You kind of already start up a little higher. Not always. Like obviously the people like the griffin or 13 wounds or whatever. So it's not one to one, but yeah. Yes, absolutely. You can be like, you can make the lord on, let's just say you find the lord on griffin pretty underwhelming, which fair, right? For his 320 points. You can make somewhere between 320 and 400 point version of that lord on griffin that like, oh, that griffin's going to do some work, son. Like he's read, he's read to go, read to go.   I think it's actually where this shines in between like three and 400 points. I'm just going to put it like that or between 30 and 40 destiny, whatever you want to say is actually where I think you get to make just the coolest stuff. Like you make things I've dreamed about making in this game. My only complaint is that I wish they had two different bodies for the monster profiles because they don't have any like ranged monster. I was just thinking of the same thing in that like getting to the monster, you've got a one size fits all to some extent, right? Every monster that's going to show up is going to have the same profile. Same club. And so I would say the same way though, I mean, like we see that difference in the battle tomes where you can give your monsters some extra upgrades or whatever. Like there should just be a, could additionally be a chart of characteristic enhancements for monsters to make them unique, right? They don't all have to fly. They don't all have to be melee. They can have like you said, a shooting attack instead of a melee or something like that. Yep, exactly. Like the BCL companion chart is actually a really good deal, like a shockingly good deal. You can enhance your big monster cheaper than you can enhance the guy on top. Like you can give that, you can give the monster like plus one to hit and plus one to wound with really good attacks and plus one attack by the way, even very, very cheaply. So you can actually make the monster into a monster. But the problem is you're always still talking about a melee monster, right? So yeah, you can give them like a breath attack. You can make it fly. You can give it things like impact hits and stompy stomps and that's all cool. Like I like making stompy, stompy monsters. I think this, the existing stuff here is actually really good at. So if your conception is like a traditional stompy, stompy monster, you can make a good version of that. But if you wanted to make like a Saigur, a steam tank, a KO boat, right? Something like that where it's more of a ranged monster. Yep. You can't really do that. Or like the, you know, that new Sphinx, right? That has a Saigur or an area of effect ability or like, and it seems like to me it just needs to be an expansion of this BCL companion and which I just brain farted on that being here but just make it where you're swapping some things out. Exactly. Yes. It should have a swap table. Swap. You're exactly right. I think the swap table is what needs to, is what's missing, right? Where you could take exactly where you can say like remove the claws attack and instead add this like, you know, eyes of fire laser beam attack or you know, whatever, right? So you could build, again, it's not like these things are rare, the Lumineth, the Huracanum, the steam tank, the KO boat, add, insert any, right? The Saigur, like there are lots of versions of those kind of ranged creatures. And the breath attack is not a good thing that fills in. Like it's a, the breath attack itself is actually one of the worst upgrades. It's drastically over-costed for what it does. And it's just like, it's cool. It's fine-ish if you like a breath attack doing maybe one or two mortal wounds on average, maybe like on a decent roll. But like, I want to make a cool range to monster, you know, and again, you could swap it and make them less effective. I'm all right with that, you know? But I want to design my own KO boat. Yeah. Yeah. Right? I love what they did. And I love, like, I would love if this was the alpha, right? Sure. Like this is the first pass, and we get a more refined version that like, and I think that we could even get to a point where like point scale, I don't know, like I love creating my own stuff. And I love, like this is right in my wheelhouse. And so, I don't know, like I just, I'm all like stars and googly eyes about the amulavatheosis. Yep. The version two, guaranteed, is gonna be called CogWorks. Yes. Where you're building your own forts, you're building your own machines. Yes. How amazing would that be? Amazing.  I knew every frame, I knew every cost, every weight, every tonnage, every amount of spots it took on the, you know, on the frame, everything. And that was like my favorite part playing Battle Tech was just building mechs. Actually playing the game, I was like, oh, okay, I'll do this part. That's fine. But like, being able to, I could like, having a version two of this that includes a, exactly what you just said, right? Like the CogWorks or something where you could actually design your own ships or tanks or religious, you know, sort of, carts fly or, you know, moving around would just be incredible. Like it would make my freaking year. I think this version is really good if you largely wanna build either some very simple buffing heroes, right? So like a dude on foot who makes everybody like bravery 11, you can just like have a, you could be, you know, this is actually something Tom that I thought was actually super cool for alves, right? So you can take like the basic alf model, which is like a three point thing and starts at bravery seven, right? You can make it Daughters of Cain. You could turn it into an acolyte because they can be acolytes if you, you know, cause they might not, right? Or you could make it a commander. It doesn't matter. You could go either way. And then you could give it the totem and the inspiring thing. And then up their bravery, right? So you can up their bravery to 10. And then you can make it so everybody, wholly within 12, within 18 of this model because they'd have the totem keyword uses their bravery. And then if you've got the statue around, you've suddenly got bravery 11, which alves by default. And suddenly like mind razor gets real scary buddy. Just chopping them down. Even the skeletons are getting two damaged attacks from that. You're speaking my love language. And that's by the way, an actual pretty cheap hero by the by, right? That is a, that's one of those heroes I'm talking about. Like you could build that as a 50 point hero. Easily, easily. That's where they probably need to be minimum 100 cause that kind of doesn't feel right. Yeah. I mean, like, I think the simple move to make it all minimum 200, 400, I think solve, solve it. Sure.  Like you have 20 points to spend and minimum of 200 points. Right. If I was going to do that, I'd actually do it as probably 100, 200, 400, I think would be my idea. Like champion, hero, Lord, or something like that kind of a breakdown. Yep. But sure. Yes. Where you just say like, that's the flat thing. You get, you're good at these 20 points. You spend whatever you spend, it's going to cost that flat amount.  Yep. Right. Yeah. And I think that like, I think it's more balanced in that world than rather than being able to piecemeal it. Yeah. And that's why this is in the narrative space because narrative is like, it's like the padded room for rules. Sure. You can't hurt yourself in narrative or it's maybe less likely to hurt yourself with stuff like this because we work around it or we give everybody knives. And so, and maybe they'll figure it out for match play later too. So. Yeah. Well, it does feel like, it does feel like there's so many good ideas here. And I think naturally the idea of this in your group, which is how it's probably going to be implemented. Cause like we said, it's probably won't be, you know, hitting many tournaments without some kind of FAQ or change, but that doesn't matter. That doesn't, that doesn't mean it can't be a function in your group. And I think that once you all agree, it's sort of a non-aggression pact, right? Like we're all going to agree not to just like be horrible people, right? Cause we're all friends and we're all going to work collaboratively to not be terrible people. And that seems like pretty good.  And so by removing the need for everything to be the best it can be or the hideous it can be, that gives us free, you know, gives people freedom to make, you know, less optimized versions of this. And you can simply say, well, this is the guy I had in my head or the girl I had envisioned. And that's just what it is. And this allows, you know, those who have these special characters they've built to just put them on the table and that's extremely satisfying.  So the fact that it has restrictions on it's, again, another weird thing, but it also just doesn't need to be as refined to start off with.  Yeah, I want to shout out your boy Paul who's in the comments and had who dropped something that I love, love the idea of, okay? So he said, let me pitch an idea. Every future battle tone comes with additional abilities to add to your anvil build. Yes, yes, because that's what we're lacking, right? Are those like race specific things where you can make the guy really feel like it's more part of your force, right? I'll go one farther by the by. I would just love to see a big white dwarf completely dedicated to this and just like one page per. No, this is the easiest app to build. Absolutely, appify this. And it could be a web browser app that you just click, click, click, click and you've got a worst roll. And you print that out and, you know, take a picture. Like it... Where is the builder on this? I want the builder on this added to, you know, you know, when you go to the community site and it's like, you know, lists and building tools and you can build those. I want that anvil of apotheosis web builder in there, like tomorrow. And the sound file while you're clicking through is just tink, tink, tink, tink. Oh, that'd be amazing. Somebody fire up a GeoCities page. We can get this going. Okay.  It just feels like it'd be the easiest thing to codify, really, right? Cool. Is there anything else we want to say about the anvil? I mean, I think it's all good. I don't feel like there's, I don't know. The spells are really good. I actually like the base spells and the base prayers I think are both fine. I think they make cool wizards and cool acolytes. And obviously oftentimes you'll be getting additional spells or prayers from your specific book if you already have those things. So that's cool. They slot right in there. No issue there. Right. Yeah.  So if there's, if, you know, I don't know if there's anything missing, but yeah, like I said, it's modular and you can easily add something to fit whatever you're doing with the campaign. Yeah. I think for the most part it feels like they covered sort of all the, this, like I said, this feels like a really solid 1.0. I can think of so many ways I would love to expand this, right? Yep. Yep. This is so rich for what could be done here. I really hope, and I know this was like, I know this was Sam worked on the narrative section. I think he knocked this out of the park, you know, within this section. I agree with you. I think he was taking bigger swings.  Sure. So I really hope that everybody's, you know, shouting out Sam on Twitter or whatever, telling him how much they love this and that he, and that this sticks around, like that they continue to expand this to build on this because I do think this could be so rich, right? So yeah, anything else you'd want to see added to this in the future, we mentioned, we've mentioned many race, you know, species specific ones or army specific, build out, load out options. We mentioned the cog works. Anything else you think would be cool to fit on here, to fit in here? We also mentioned the ranged frame as the base frame for like the monster. Yeah. I'll give you one. I would love to see the ability to be treasonous built in here or a heretic and outcast, whatever you want to say. So this is me obviously speaking from Skig's perspective, but to allow a different race entry species archetype, whatever they're called, ancestry, sorry, into the, into a different army, right? So it's, you know, like you could restrict that in some way or not, you could have it cost more if it's really crazy, lots of ways to do it, but like the idea of having somebody with a crazy keyword or a crazy set of things, like have a scaven running around in your storm cast army, right? Do you think, would it make sense to, like instead of charging DPs or whatever, like did it cost command points to bring something like this in? Sure. I mean, you could have that as an additional cost in certain conditions, right? Like you could see it being the case that like sort of hiring this hero cost you your first command point, almost like mercenaries. Yeah. Right. That could be part of a resource, sure. Yeah. Anyway. But yeah, I agree with you. Like I, we have blown past single ancestry armies. Yes. Right, right. Yep. Paul just shot it out in another gem, a mutation builder for like all the different armies that play in a mutation space. You know, all the demons, scaven, right? Like there's a lot of armies where mutations are somewhat prevalent and that would be a cool thing to generate. Terrain or your army terrain artifact thing. Oh, building your actual terrain piece. Yeah, that'd be neat. Build your own terrain piece for your army. That's a cool way to expand it. Yeah. Yeah.  And then just build what we want. It's true. Somebody said, woo, a use for the OBR command point. It's a good point. You're coming back OBR. We're getting, we're trying to get you back in here. Yeah. And coach your welcome. Absolutely. Any other, any other thoughts we want to give on Anvil of Apotheosis? I mean, a big victory, right? I mean, that's, that's what we agree. Yeah. I mean, it's just the continuation.  And we're seeing more, you know, out of the box, mutated armies all over Twitter. People just aren't afraid anymore. Right. And this is just an evolution of GW say, hey, let us just, we're just going to put out plastic things. Like they're going to go to just like putting out bits. Like it's going to be a bit company. And we're just going to build whatever comes to mind. Sure. Sure. All right. With that, that brings the narrative section to a close. I will say also, I do love the pictures of the converted heroes in here. Actually, the converted vampire lord on zombie Archeon Dragon. Truly singularly amazing, which was Thomas Elliott. So yes, that is a gorgeous conversion, like a plus work. You know, I love converting Archeon. And so that was a big win. All right. Well, Eric, thank you very much for joining us, buddy. Great time. We're glad to have you back on. Always. Thanks for having me guys. Absolutely. For all of you out there who are watching, thank you so much. Don't forget the best way you can share your support is just give us a like, just move your mouse from like here over to here. Click that like button. It's so easy. It's so fun. Look at how much better you'll feel about yourself just after you do it. It's wonderful. So do give it a like. Don't forget about the survey. It is now down in the description. You may need to refresh your browser or something to make it appear, but I did add it while the show was going on. So please do fill out the survey. It takes less than one minute. It is 10 questions. It is so easy. I know this week is full of homework. You have to hit the like button and do a survey. Geez. So much crazy stuff. But as always, I want to thank you very much for watching. We appreciate it very much. And we'll see you next Wednesday.