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.

Just for funsies, let’s see how much of this article I can write in the time it takes Premiere to render an as-of-now undisclosed big video which you should be watching over on our YouTube channel not too long after this goes up.

The Narrative Materials

Our first article this week is the inaugural entry in “Terrors”, a series of in-universe articles explaining the sundry threats and, well, terrors of the Mortal Realms. This particular one concerns Orruks, particularly the classic variety and not the gangly, pubescent proportions of the Kruleboyz. Orruks here are compared to maggots; first there’s one, then there’s a million, and they seem to thrive everywhere, with new bands sprouting up seemingly from nowhere. Notes are made that Orruks don’t really seem suited for much of anything, with big clumsy fists, short legs, and jutting tusks, yet they’re surprisingly dextrous, fast, and eat any and every varietal of meat without issue. The Sigmarite Scholar Hermann Splott penned this particular piece, and it’s all very Xenology if you’re a 40k fan of sufficient age to recall that book.

The remainder of the narrative section are a pair of tables to roll on concerning the goals of your Waaagh! and Sigmarite Crusades. We’ve had similar ones before, but now the art reflects the more modern Orruk and Sigmarite models that have been released since the beginning of this magazine series. These largely concern their various mortal enemies, but it does let you roll up the name “Soggy Gitz” for your Ork Waaagh!, which has some Wet Bandits energy to it. Personally, my favorite part of these two mirrored articles is their maps. The Sigmarite maps are well-marked, with specific locations for mountains, allied armies, enemy warbands, and the central city of Sigmar itself. The Orruk map, meanwhile, is just some X’s scrawled in the dirt and a few rocks that say “ERE” by them. It’s very cute.

The Hobby Materials

This week we get a pair of paints, and a number of instructions on how to use them. First is White Scar, a pure white that I’ll be honest – I’m not wild about. It’s pretty chalky, clumps up quickly, and doesn’t get great coverage. I’ll still use it for color mixing or the odd dot highlight, but I prefer Monument Hobbies’ Pro Acryl Titanium White. The second color I’m actually more interested in, but alas have not had time to test in time for this review. That color is Sybarite Green, a light and somewhat desaturated surf green. My first apartment in college had walls pretty much the same color. It’s a color that is fittingly applied as a highlight to Dark Eldar models in some of the GW studio schemes.

The guides here focus almost entirely on detail work, which is what these colors would frankly be best for. My pro tip, right here, buried five hundred words into the sixty-second article in this series about a magazine teaching tweens how to play an out of date version of a tabletop wargame: When painting white, don’t start with a pure white. There’s nowhere to go brighter from there, so you can’t highlight it or otherwise draw attention to lighter parts of the miniature. Start with an off-white or light grey like Grey Seer and/or Ulthuan Grey, then go up to that pure white for highlights. That’s even what Stormbringer does, giving us Grey Seer some time ago and only giving us the white to highlight it now. It also teaches us the difference between using the tip and side of your brush for highlights. The side is great for running along long lines and hard edges, provided you don’t push too hard and cause it to bend or lose control. The tip instead is better for shallower details, faces, and edges where you can’t get the flat of the brush in adequately. I definitely tried to just use the tip of my brush far too often in my initial highlighting experiments, so having the differences outlined here is welcome for a budding hobbyist. There’s a couple dozen specific use cases for these paints across our collections, and a guide points out everything from the robes on our Kruleboyz to the emblems on our Stormcast shoulders. It’s by no means exhaustive, but it should give someone following along a good starting point.

And for those keeping track at home, my export finished. It got stuck on an encoding error but it’s fine.

The Gaming Materials

There are some tactics articles for Sneaky Snufflers and Squig Herds, which despite being from the now-obsolete third edition, aren’t all too different from how you’d use them now. Squigs still are hard to control but highly dangerous, and Sneaky Snufflers are still a great support unit. If so desired, you could take both in this week’s mission, Ashes to Ashes. Still battling in Aqshy, the forces of Order marched onward to the realmgate from last week, making as much noise as possible. The point was to lure out the forces of Destruction into a pitched battle, which they absolutely did. By gathering that many Orruks and Grots together though, the collected Waaagh! energy caused one of their shamans to hurl a fireball into the ground, kicking up a rain of ash. The end result is a pretty standard mission with a bunch of objectives in the middle, and a restriction on ranged attacks – they can only shoot out to 12″ in this mission. I’m not a huge fan of that sort of hard restriction since it more or less disables entire units and phases of the game, especially if there’s no way to lift it or change the limitation over the course of the battle.

Final Verdict

It’s a paint issue, so the value prospect is always going to be pretty stiff when held up against all the more exciting packages with models and hobby tools. It’s $9.10 of paint for a $13.99 cover price which is pretty rough, though the highlighting guide is genuinely good. The lore section is a little scant, though the tables to roll up are also pretty fun. The mission caps an issue that’s fairly weak overall, even if I can offer some mealy-mouthed compliments to the hobby section. If nothing else, it gave me something to do while Premiere tried to melt my GPU.

See you next issue, warhams.

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