Stormbringer is a weekly hobby magazine from Hachette Partworks introducing players to Warhammer: Age of Sigmar. In this 80-week series, our intrepid magazine-receiver will be reviewing each individual issue, its included models, and gaming materials. A Premium US subscription was provided to Goonhammer for review purposes. If you want to follow along at home, US Customers can check out Stormbringer here.

If you read this article the day it drops, then understand that I am soon to be bodied in the High Desert Hammerfall AoS GT. Will I have played a single game of AoS4 before the event? I hope so! Is that likely? Doesn’t seem to be!

The Narrative Materials

This week we begin in Chamon, the realm of metal. I feel like this place doesn’t get quite as much exploration as the other realms, or at least hasn’t thus far – either in or out of Stormbringer. This is likely for good reason, as a realm of magnetically levitating sky islands, rivers made of mercury, and ever-changing labyrinths of rusted metal are a smidge harder to model than “some rocks and tufts” or “the battle for Hole 9 at Sigmar’s Blessing Country Club.” Food is understandably scarce here, with rare harvests of coppergrass transported from settlement to settlement by armored convoys. Duardin of all flavors tend to thrive here, with the floating sky-islands (skylands?) and their associated ports being home to the Kharadron Overlords. Tzeentch is also pretty prevalent in this realm, as it’s constantly in flux, transmuting alchemically between once substance and another.

A following foldout details the armies of Chamon – illustrative, but by no means comprehensive. First and foremost are the Kharadron Overlords, forced from their mountain holds and into floating fortress cities in the sky. Their society runs on aether-gold, the gaseous remains of Grungni’s power floating in the skies of Chamon. I don’t know exactly how they extract this power from Grungni’s golden fart clouds, but that’s fine – it’s an inventive and neat little twist on steampunk airships and the like. They’re nominally on the side of Order and Sigmar, but they’re still mercenaries, so you could always say they’re fighting your good guys because a goblin offered them a Goodyear blimp full of aether-gold or whatever. Tzeentch is the next most prevalent power, but nothing about his plans here are anything new – his cultists lurk in cities plotting, Tzaangor Twistfrays gather around sites of power in the wilds; that sort of thing. The Celestial Vindicators Stormhost defend the city of Vindicarum, carrying out regular purges of its populace to root out Chaos. There’s that classic Warhammer grimdarkness for you, lurking in the periphery. The Iron Golem warband are also from here, forging Chamon’s natural resources into weapons and armor for the legions of Chaos. They hope to be Archaon’s personal smiths, but given their coming expulsion to Legends, I don’t think that’s going particularly well. Last are the Gloomspite Gitz, who lurk in just as many caves and pits there as anywhere else. There’s also a map of the Spiral Crux in this realm, and a bunch of the cities and battles around there. At its center is the Griffon’s Eyrie, where the Lode-Griffon, a powerfully magnetic godbeast, now lies dead. It’s one of the more fantastical realms, and one of the hardest to relate to as a result. Still cool though, real Yes album cover shit.

The Hobby Materials

We get back to our Spirit of Durthu this week, and helpfully also learn how to drybrush in the process. It’s such a simple technique and likely one of the first a painter will learn after putting down clean basecoats (or before learning how to do clean basecoats, in my case, RIP) but the most important piece here is about brushcare. It shows how to clean out your brush with soap to get paint out of the bristles, and the importance of reshaping it while still wet. There’s not altogether too many steps where we use drybrushing in the tutorial on how to paint the Spirit of Durthu, but it lets us knock out the bark, which is proportionally an awful lot of the model. The color choices are somewhat incoherent to me, with natural tones meeting cold blue-greys, fleshy oranges, and warm bone colors. They don’t quite work in my opinion.

The Gaming Materials

This week we get our first battlepack, which is a series of linked battles that form a narrative campaign. Realm Scout is the name of this particular battlepack, which is the culmination of our previous battles in Ghur and Ulgu, now leading to Chamon. This contains some super limited army construction rules, where you get to pick one unit from each list, plus two from a generic list. It’s kind of confusingly laid out and I’d rather just have points values, but I get the idea. Basically, players will get to pick 4 units from their collection, but when the choice is between a Knight-Arcanum and a Spirit of Durthu for one of your slots, I think I’d rather take the giant expensive monster.

Our first mission is Through the Gate, where a Destruction invading force is ambushed by an Order scouting party. This is represented by the Destruction player setting up first and the Order player getting to choose who has first turn. Scoring is standard hold one, hold two, hold more, and the twist here is the realmgate running between the two halves of the board. Any models standing on the line where the realmgate between Ulgu and Chamon meet die at the end of the turn. It’s a neat little twist, and it’ll take some planning to avoid the worst of it.

Final Verdict:

If you bought the last issue, you’ve gotta get this one to complete your Treelord model. That’s fine, as that’s still a combined $27.98 for a $79 kit. The rest of this issue is pretty good – the lore sections are light, but the section on how to drybrush and take care of your brushes is genuinely pretty great.

See you next issue, warhams.

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