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’re following along with the meta-narrative of this series (and who isn’t? It’s like an ARG, just without the budget, expertise, public interest, or planned conclusion) you may remember I mentioned going to an AoS GT in issue 41. I’m happy to report that I had a good time and didn’t get absolutely massacred! I haven’t done a writeup of the event (lord knows I do enough of those) but I talk about it a bunch on the Badcast in episode 156. Will that be out by the time you read this? I hope so!

The Narrative Materials

We’re in Sylvanethtown these days, and this first article reflects that. Here we learn about the Sylvaneth mindset, and a bit of their history. They see all eras as seasons, each of which will pass and serve its purpose before setting up the next. This might mean something like the Age of Chaos, for all its apocalyptic brutality, is seen the same way you or I may see an especially cold winter or summer of wildfires. Of course said Age of Chaos was particularly bad, with Alarielle hiding away in Athelwyrd, clearly the successor to the Athel-Loren of the Old World. When she burst from her soul-pod as a mondo mommy on a big bug, things turned around for the Sylvaneth and they’ve since been seeding new groves around the Mortal Realms. As a literal and figurative force of nature, they’re at odds with the typical rogues’ gallery of orruks, Chaos, and so on, but also occasionally with the forces of Order who might cut down trees for firewood or to settle a new town. It’s as good an excuse as any for a battle between two nominally “good guy” factions to happen, and you kinda need those for a wargame to work. It helps that it makes sense in-universe without being too contrived.

Next is an article about the perfidious nature of Chaos, replete with some great old Warhammer Fantasy artwork, some of which I recognize as the work of Dave Gallagher. The most frightening part of Chaos outlined here is that nobody is truly safe. Rich, poor, virtuous, decadent, healthy, or sick, if the hordes of Chaos don’t come knocking, their corruption will. This paranoia is encouraged in-universe by suspecting your neighbors, and always being watchful with an “ends justify the means” mindset. This is more something we see in 40k or even Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, but it still lives on the fringes here in Age of Sigmar. Speaking of Warhammer Fantasy, there is some apocryphal historical text about the Empire of old (of which I am a huge fan) and how Sigmar himself returned to fight a horseman of the apocalypse. This is some End Times stuff, when Sigmar essentially possessed Karl Franz in the final battle against Archaon. It got a bit comic book-y at the end there, but for this game’s creation myth, it works.

Last we have a battle record for Tree-Revenants, the teeming infantry ranks of the Sylvaneth. Some of the flavor text here outlines the last bits of Celtic-coded stuff remaining from the Wood Elves of old, namely that Sylvaneth armies are broken into households and clans. As Mr. Scottish McIrish I clearly like this stuff and wish there was more of it. How these particular Revenants work into our Sylvaneth collection is but for the dice to decide:

Koranth Beechbark’s Warclan stood amongst the trees at the edges of Garagevale. This small Sigmarite town had stood in general harmony with nature, its people giving as much as they took from the woods around them. Even though the metallic bark of the Tree-Revenants clearly marked them as chamonite, they still found common cause with the Sylvaneth of this lush Ghyran realm. For that reason, they would stand watch over the little burg with their poison-sap-soaked blades, protecting this sapling town as it continued to grow.

The Hobby Materials

This week’s models are a group of five Tree-Revenants, the rank-and-file half-tree/half-elf-ghost troops that typically make up the Sylvaneth battleline. I actually haven’t seen many of these on the table through the editions of the game, which is a shame as they’re inspired, weird models. They’re a spindly, fragile unit, challenging to remove from their sprues without some sort of breakage. Make sure you’re using a fresh blade as you get this branch bunch off their sprues. Fragility aside, they’re not altogether too involved models, and we’re given a few options for how to build them. They are also a dual kit with the Spite-Revenants, which are a bald and weaponless variant that I don’t think looks as good. The painting instructions for these are still a bit lacking, making for some flat and muddy paintjobs. If you were to go off-script and paint them your own way, you’d find that they’re actually pretty simple – wood, ghost skin, metal and leaves are really it for the textures present, and you could keep that simple while preserving contrast.

The Gaming Materials

Our battle pack continues with a new mission, clearly leading us towards eventually getting some Kharadron models down the line. Duardin Mechanisms is a pretty typical hammer-and-anvil style deployment with a pair of objectives in the middle of the table. These objectives represent a pair of, well, Duardin mechanisms, and they keep scuttling away. The forces of Order want to follow these and find Duardin survivors, while the Orruks simply want to krump em. Each turn, after scoring points, your opponent can move any objectives you control 6″ in any direction of their choosing. I think this is very funny.

Final Verdict:

Tree-Revenants are sitting at an uncomfortable price point of $58 for a pack of five of these leafy Liberator equivalents. Fortunately, this issue’s $13.95 cover price is a much more reasonable rate to build up your own grove of these guys. The lore section this week isn’t mind-blowing but is certainly enjoyable, and the mission has an interesting twist that could easily be fun or frustrating. Despite my frequent misgivings regarding all flavors of elf/aelf/eldar/aeldar, I’ll have to admit this is a decent issue, for Sylvaneth army builders or otherwise.

See you next issue, warhams.

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