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.

I played my first game of Warhammer: The Old World this week and had the thought: what if there was a partworks magazine like Stormbringer for that game? I then riposted my own idea with the notion that no tween would ever buy into something with the word “Old” in its title. Age of Sigmar it is!

The Narrative Materials

We open with a short story: Soul Raid. In this brief tale, a citizen militia defends their fishing village from an Idoneth Deepkin raiding party. It goes very, very poorly for the home team, as the wettest elves around absolutely clown on them. In the aftermath, the few survivors find their comrades either dead or with the souls sucked from their bodies, bodies which can no longer sustain themselves so wither and die of starvation in the following weeks. Overcome with grief, the narrator swears to fight with something sharper than a stick next time. The writing style is pretty basic, but I prefer this perspective to the more superheroic clashes between larger than life characters we often see.

Speaking of, one of the largest of those characters is Nagash, and we get to learn a bit about his domain in A Grave History. This brief run through Shyish is somewhat redundant with articles we’ve gotten before. At the center of Nagash is Nagashizzar, and unlike typical realms, the magic concentrates there instead of at the edges of the realm. Nagash chills up there in his inverted Black Pyramid, and when his attempt to exterminate all life from it was screwed up by Skaven interference, it unleashed the Necroquake. There’s also a brief mention of the War of Bones where Archaon sent Nagash to the bone zone during the Battle of Black Skies, and it took a few centuries for Nagash to pull himself back together.

The Hobby Materials

It’s a paint issue this week, and the included paints are both lighter toned layer paints, great for highlighting. Teclis Blue is one of GW’s excellent recent blues, which means it’s fairly saturated and with good coverage. I use it often on my Battletech models and any blue gemstones or lenses of my GW stuff. Slaanesh Grey is the other paint, a pink-toned grey perfect for highlighting purples. There are thorough guides for using both across our collections, with special focus on capes and other fabric folds. This is because this section also has a great tutorial on relayering, the process where you wash a color with a shade or Contrast paint, then layer it back up, leaving the darker color in the recesses. They show how multiple thin layers can get a gradual, smooth blend between these two colors, and it honestly looks great. I’d recommend a wet palette though, as doing this out of the pot kind of sucks – I’ve got enough experience doing just that.

The Gaming Materials

Faction rules for Stormcast and Kruleboyz open up the gaming section, but since those are out of date, I’m not gonna spend much time on them. More importantly, this week’s issue includes a new playmat for us to expand our existing play areas, which doesn’t look wholly distinct from the previously released Realmscape Expansion: Ghurish Expanse. The print quality is solid, and the double sided mat looks good with its rocks and pits of skulls. It’s basically a folded poster, but it’s alright. It’s a good surface to push models on in this week’s mission, Shoot the Messenger. After a diplomatic meeting of Kharadron and Stormcast, the duardin diplomat’s ship has been shot down by Grot archers and the wreckage must be recovered. To represent the volatile wreckage, the objective markers you fight over occasionally cause some mortal wounds. It’s not one of the better justifications for why objectives would be volatile, as ideally you wouldn’t be trying to handle burning blimp bits. Still, seems like a fun enough mission.

Final Verdict

It’s a paint issue, which is always a pretty rough value prospect. $9.10 worth of paint for $13.99 isn’t a great deal, and there isn’t much in the way of lore if you’re here for that. That said, the painting information in there is genuinely great, and could be what helps level up a painter beyond just the “slather on some wash” stage. It’s not one of the stronger overall packages we’ve gotten over the last year, but they can’t all be bangers.

See you next issue, warhams.

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