GW released a bombshell of new FAQs last Friday, covering errata for the core book and lengthy FAQs for each faction. And as always, we’ve got you covered with the rundown of what’s changed and what it means for your games. In this series of Hot Take articles, we’ll be covering the changes and our initial reactions to them but for more detailed analysis, check back over the next two weeks as we dive deeper into how these changes affect the game and its factions.
The four Broken Realms tomes were given Errata for the new edition. In this article we’ll break down the four together. As a reminder, the 4 tomes discussed here are Broken Realms Morathi, Teclis, Be’lakor and Kragnos. These tomes contain more than just their titular hero’s faction, making these FAQs a bit of a mixed bag of topics to talk about. This is, as an immediate hot take, Kind of Annoying, as you need to juggle PDFs, but we will make do.
The Good
- Kragnos got a status update. Kragnos now has the trait of Warmaster, meaning he counts as a general even if he is not your general. Rather than allied in Destruction he’s now considered part of the army (even if he doesn’t gain the keywords). Whether this change makes him viable at his cost (probably not), it does make him a little more interesting and causes him to clash less with Destruction allegiance abilities.
- Coalition Units are clarified. The Broken Realms FAQs make a lot of updates and clarifications to Coalition Units, particularly in Morathi and Teclis. This is a pretty interesting new wrinkle (as they are explicitly NOT Allies, but something else). Whether that matters in competitive play, who knows, but it does allow for more flavorful armies and, for Cities of Sigmar, seems like a nice boon to giving access to more toys.
- Be’lakor’s Legion is clarified. Be’lakor’s Legion of the First Prince can now take Daemon units from any Chaos tome that do not have the Everchosen keyword. These units gain the Legion of the First Prince keyword, and you gain access to allegiance abilities that replace Legion of Chaos Ascendant/Legion of the First Prince from Wrath of the Everchosen.
The Bad
- Be’lakor’s book is basically 1 change. So, you can either read that as “we did a great job on this book”, or “this didn’t fix anything”, your pick.
- Kragnos is probably still too expensive. With no other changes or updates in his tome, Kragnos is probably still just too expensive to take, even if he no longer clashes with individual factions.
The Ugly
- Large chunks of these books straight up were invalidated. Since Warscroll battalions are no longer valid in matched play that means huge chunks of these books are useless for players who bought them; a pretty brutal position to be put in.
The FAQs here generally don’t shake the world, and in some cases that’s maybe worse than anything. A lot of the fallout of the Broken Realms books is that Morathi and LRL made out like champs, while other factions got neat toys that aren’t entirely feasible or worth using. Slaanesh gets really nothing out of this FAQ, which, paired with their actual FAQ, just seems to continue GW’s weird vendetta against their own product.
At the very least, this means that Broken Realms books are similar to Psychic Awakening books in 40k before the 9th ed change. Some people may have to tote around 2 or 3 books now, others only their tome, but the bottom line is that if you were using these books before, you mostly got out of this with good changes and clarified rules.
That’s all the FAQs! Whew! Thanks for joining us on this journey, but we’re not done. Over the next few weeks we will have “faction focuses”, think of them as smaller, more bite size start competings and what it means for your army in third edition. If you have any questions or comments please post them below or email us at contact@goonhammer.com.
