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.

Another week, a storm with which to bring! We’re still in steampunk dwarftown, but there’s fortunately some textural variety this week in the flavor of aelves, Chaos, and, well, really just those two.

The Narrative Materials

We begin once more in Hysh, once more talking about the aelven gods Tyrion and Teclis, and their place in the first Pantheon of Order. As happy as Tyrion was to see his girlfriend Alarielle, Teclis was far less pleased to see Nagash again. Tyrion and Teclis ripped the souls out of Slaanesh to create their new Lumineth Realm-Lords, then dipped from the greater Pantheon as it weakened. Problem was, said Lumineth started to hear about who their soul essence came from, and Slaanesh’s words found their way to the Lumineth’s pointed ears. This led to civil war and the scarring of Hysh. While the newly minted Lumineth Realm-Lords survived this, dark days were ahead, as Nagash unleashed his Ossiarch Bonereapers and taking ground from the Hyshian aelves. I like the mix of myth and history here, from boots on the ground campaigns to the Greek pantheon-esque relationships between the gods of the setting.

It’s time for more Sigmarite propaganda in the “Perils” series, the somewhat mean-spirited in-universe articles going over all the bad stuff that Chaos can do. The runner is that most of what Sigmarite folks do to protect themselves is just as bad, or maybe just distinctly inhumane. It opens with a sermon about how no matter how much a Chaos worshipper delights or despairs in the harm they cause, they all share the same fate of eternal damnation. Well, except the willing servants of darkness, who get double damned. Burn everyone and everything – if they’re corrupted by Chaos it’s the only thing that can purify them, and if they’re innocent, you’ve saved them from the fate of living in a world with Chaos in it. Given Age of Sigmar’s more hopeful angle on fantasy, this feels somewhat at odds, like a page ripped from a Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay book, but it’s all DNA in the same beast. It comes and goes.

A Battle Record this week brings us up to speed on Grundstock Thunderers. “Grund” is far too close to “grundle” for my taste, but maybe that’s just a dwarf thing. These armored gunners protect Kharadron fleets from whatever threats they may face, and carry a variety of firearms for every occasion.

Ebba Bjorksen flipped his aethershot rifle’s grip, holding it by the barrel like a club. “Ho, Contractors!” he shouted to his comrades. They leapt from the deck of their gunhauler into the grots below, their aethermatic suits protecting them from impact. His training as an Arkanaut gave him a taste for the muck and mayhem of close combat, and with the grots cowering under the fire of the gunhauler, they’d be easy picking.

The Hobby Materials

This week we get a quintet of Grundstock Thunderers. The directions point us towards equipping each with a distinct weapon, though should we not want to equip a tiny beardo with a portable ribauldequin or glorified bug spray pump, we could use the standard Aethershot rifles. The models go together simply for the most part, with the only wrinkles being a few gun doodads and how well you can line up the pipes on their backpacks with their weapons. You can also swap the heads around however much you’d like, but posing option isn’t really there given how stunty these guys are. The details are well defined and the Kharadron aesthetic is here in full force. Most important is the Drillbill, a little mechanical owl with a drill for a beak. Age of Sigmar is pretty primo for Little Guys, and it’s only appropriate that the littlest guys would have their own commensurate Little Guys. It’s a nice little worldbuilding detail as well.

A set of painting instructions takes these Dwarfs from grey plastic to a genuinely high standard, as Stormbringer has been so generous to give us a hearty stock of paints by now. The challenge for a painter is still differentiating one metal texture from another though, and I feel these models are of an aesthetic that newer painters will struggle with.

The Gaming Materials

We naturally have a Warscroll for our Grundstock Thunderers, with the grim reminder that this unit can potentially five different weapons and five different shooting profiles. Since then that’s been flattened to three, which is still an awful lot for five models in an army-scale wargame.

In a continuation from last week, we are Running the Gauntlet. The scattered debris of the Kharadron ship that was constantly exploding last week continues to explode, with a slight variation on last week’s exploding objectives. This time, instead of simply causing D3 Mortal Wounds every turn, it’s the controlling player’s choice who takes that damage. This longer represents simple volatility, but now a lack of decorum in your own troops as they hurl exploding debris at the enemy. What’s more interesting is the asymmetrical deployment, where the forces of Order drive a central wedge between two smaller flanking Destruction deployment zones.

Final Verdict:

Grundstock Thunderers are $58 for five, so this set being only $13.95 is a nearly 75% savings. I’ll be honest- given their general stature I figured you’d be getting twice as many dudes for that price, but you don’t need me to tell you that the tiny plastic artifacts we call “Warhammer” run on the expensive side. If you have any interest in this flavor of dwarf it’s pretty hard to pass this up, but the rest of the magazine is enjoyable this week, with good painting guides and some well written lore. They may not be the flavor I savor, but as far as Kharadron Khontent goes, this was a good one.

See you next issue, warhams.

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