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 have a heart, soul, or a trace of empathy in your body, you’re probably having a rough week. I likely don’t know you and we’ll probably never meet, but we’re gonna ride this out together. If you, right now, are reading this preamble to an article series that by and large doesn’t matter very much, then things could be worse. They could probably be better, but you’re safe enough that reading a review of a toy soldier magazine for children is available to you. Let’s take that positivity-adjacent thought and carry it for as long as it serves us, and if that’s just until the end of this thousand word scribble about dwarves, goblins, and magic doodads, then that’s good enough for now.

The Narrative Materials

It’s a brief narrative section this week, focused entirely on the goings-on in Chamon, the Realm of Metal. Grungni was real happy here for a while, smithing cities and islands from the living metal of the land. His breath became the aether-gold filling the skies, one of the rare cases of CO₂ emissions being used for good. Said magical breath is the key to all of the Kharadron Overlords’ technology, and now I can only imagine that army smells like halitosis. Tzeentch spilled into Chamon during the Age of Chaos, reshaping the realm and displacing its inhabitants, but never fully conquering it. Now, Sigmar’s armies fight on the ground while the Kharadron Overlords take to the air, forming combined arms Aetherstrike Forces to drive back the forces of Chaos. Age of Sigmar isn’t usually this prescriptive with alliances in its written materials, but I don’t hate it.

The Hobby Materials

This is a paint issue, but a good one. We’ve got Dawnstone, a light grey I use often for the final stage of edge highlights or drybrushing. It covers well and is such a ubiquitous color that I can imagine any painter will find use for it. There’s also a pot of Agrellan Earth, a light brown texture paint made for getting a cracked texture on bases. It’s not what I use on my own models (I prefer Stirland Mud) but does achieve a believable parched earth look. Also included is a Citadel Texture Spreader, a slightly springy plastic tool for spreading texture paints out on bases. Let me quote myself from Imperium 38, where I first reviewed this tool:

“It feels a bit flimsy, as a soft and rubbery piece of plastic with an obvious seam running down the side – but by gum does it spread texture paints well. Ever since I started using texture paints, I have used either old brushes or metal sculpting tools to spread them, but these presented challenges. Both were rigid, and couldn’t generally hold that much texture paint at a time. This tool is instead flexible enough to work around a model’s feet or the bottom of a pot of texture paint, while having broad enough heads on either side of the tool to effectively spread texture with a good amount of control. I have already begun using it in my own projects, and I will be using it every time I slap some texture paint on a future model’s base.”

I stayed true to that promise, and have used it on nearly every miniature I’ve painted since. It’s a hugely helpful little tool, even if it isn’t the absolute most necessary piece of plastic I own. The fat end is also a nice little scoop to shovel snow flock onto models; it really is a gift that keeps on giving.

The bulk of this issue’s hobby section concerns getting more out of your bases. Slapping that texture paint down is a great start, but you can go as hard with basing as you can with anything else. There’s a helpful little guide for what bits are good for basing, as they aren’t all created equal. Discarded equipment like weapons and shields are great, fungi and spare branches from Gloomspite Git and Sylvaneth models are useful for naturalistic environments, and helmets can be made to work too. It makes a great point that bodies are tough since they’re usually sculpted in dynamic poses instead of dead ones, and faces usually have expressions that fall firmly on the “alive” side of things. I was guilty of at least a few overeager bases as a teenager where a normal-ass guy was just sideways on a base because I didn’t put in the work to make them look dead. The guide is genuinely great, showing how to make custom rocks by carving up sprues, striking the balance of basing detail for the size of the model you’re working with, and running through a bunch of very specific bits we’ve accumulated in our time with Stormbringer. We’re shown how to paint a whole load of these random doodads, and I appreciate the room for creativity this section affords. Honestly, I could have used this as a younger hobbyist, as I was often too afraid to base my models in case I did something wrong. This is genuinely one of the strongest – if not the strongest – articles in Stormbringer to date.

The Gaming Materials

A bit of fiction introduces this week’s mission, Fury of the Forest, which has a grot setting a tripwire on a tree only for it to come to life and attack. It’s kinda funny even if the punchline is obvious a mile away. The mission has a Destruction force holding a Sylvaneth soulpod grove, while a Sylvaneth force surrounds them and comes in to take it back. As this is Sylvaneth home turf, the Order player heals a wound on every Sylvaneth unit wholly within 9″ of any terrain features every turn. It’s otherwise a simple mission with a novel deployment. The Destruction player gets an advantage on objective proximity, so the question is if the Order player’s healing and deployment can make up for that.

Final Verdict:

If you couldn’t tell from my glowing review of the hobby section, I think this issue rocks. The hobby materials rack up to a $22.85 shopping cart on their own, so I’d say we’re also having the rare paint-centric issue that represents a savings. The mission is pretty good, and the lore section is meatier than expected for how short it is. I’m happy they made the space for the basing article though, as it was really something special, and a great use for all the random bits and bobs we’ve accumulated over the last year.

See you next issue, warhams.

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