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.

While I’m running out the timer on Stormbringer, I thought I’d share a little love to one of my local Age of Sigmar evangelists. My buddy Ethan is running the Squig City Casino Royale later this month in Pendleton, OR, and the Age of Sigmar narrative looks like it’s gonna be an absolute blast. He’s been sending me pictures of his in-progress boards and boats for AoS boarding actions, and I’m jealous as hell. The 40k GT is gonna be great, but there’s yet to be a GW Matched Play layout that involves a big dang boat. Maybe in 2026.

The Narrative Materials

We’re still going hard with the Realm of Life theming from last week, with some history around how Nurgle went and brought his version of life to this particularly verdant realm. At first it was pretty chill – Alarielle, all alone in the Age of Myth, took up the hobby of planting the soulpods that gave birth to the first Sylvaneth. They formed their own glades, humans and aelves moved in, and things went pretty well until these varied cultures and subcultures had the disagreements all such groups do. As they warred on, Alarielle dipped, withering further when Nurgle invaded. She withdrew to a soulpod, then emerged in the Age of Sigmar in the form you’d recognize from her model, leading the charge against the forces of Chaos and taking back parts of the Realm of Life. Better a late Everqueen than a Neverqueen, I guess.

Next is a Battle Record about our new unit of Stormcast Vanquishers. They have big (magic) swords and blow loud (magic) horns to broadcast their orders (magically, of course). There’s not much to them aside from “Stormcast with sword” and frankly, that’s good enough for me. Now let’s roll some dice and see what narrative we can forge from the results:

Silvius Bladeborn swung her Celestial Greatsword in a wide arc, gutting a pair of Kruleboyz and narrowly missing a third. Every scratch, nick, and stain on her blade was committed to memory, and many new ones would be made to today. “Drive them back, Devoted!” Silvius shouted to her comrades. Nefeli Puresoul echoed this order a hundredbold, blowing her horn to signal the advance. A stab-grot ducked underneath Silvius notice, its shiv aimed straight for Nefeli’s gut. Before the diminutive assassin could complete their work, the hornblower reversed her grip on the trumpet and crushed the grot’s skull in a single blow. The Freeguild soldiery watched in awe, hoping to emulate these quick-thinking heroes.

The Hobby Materials

Included this week is a unit of five Stormcast Eternals Vanquishers. These greatsword-wielding weedwhackers of Sigmar are a genuinely lovely kit, and one of many that sold me on the faction and their Thunderstrike redesign. While you typically get ten in a kit, that’s just a duplicate sprue. This half-kit still has all the lovely command options, different sword poses, and separate heads you’d hope for. It’s kind of an unpretentious kit – here’s some dudes in platemail with big fuckoff swords, get after it. They build pretty easily, and the instructions walk you through one possible way to assemble your guys. Note that you can use different arms with different bodies than instructed, so long as you make sure to use the beefier arms on the masculine torsos, as they’re a little wider. The only thing I’d watch out for is the cloaks on these models sometimes have some pretty noticeable seams, as is often the case with long, flowing robes.  The painting instructions are also thorough, and we have such a glut of paints from this magazine that painting complete models with bases, shades, and highlights is well within reach.

The Gaming Materials

Our mission this week is Flaming Forest, but more importantly, we have a recipe for Buzlok’s Squig Steak, which I will reproduce in its entirety:

“Take one squig. Beat until flat. Clamp to metal plate. Leave on hot coals or embers. If squig still trying to bite, keep beatin’. Remove once juices run clear.”

It’s not quite the old Fallout manual’s level of recipe, but I very much enjoyed it. This accompanies the background for our mission, where the forces of Order start on the backfoot. Running low on troops and resources, they turn to the Sylvaneth for help. The forces of Destruction grow wise to this and start burning huge swathes of forest, poisoning wells, destroying crops, and cutting off the supply lines for the ol’ Sigmarites. When they try to chase the forces of Order into the remaining woods though, their grot scouts get massacred and the forces of Order counterattack. This isn’t represented particularly well – it’s a completely standard mission where ranged attacks do +1 damage. I’d have rather seen some sort of narrative list restriction (more Sylvaneth for Order, no grots to represent the destroyed scouting parties for Destruction) or some kind of burning terrain rules, as I think that it’s a pretty good setup for a mission.

Final Verdict

Vanquishers are $65 for a unit of ten, so figure $32.50 for half a squad. You’re getting that at less than half price with this issue’s $13.95 cover price, and they’re lovely models to boot. Our lore section is a bit thin and the mission doesn’t match its setup, but the hobby section is genuinely very good, if repetitive. Honestly, once you’ve got a start to finish tutorial for any Stormcast infantry unit it can kind of apply to them all, but if you somehow stumbled on this as your first issue, it’d absolutely get you there. That lands us with a pretty middling issue, buoyed by a great value on a useful and beautiful model kit.

See you next issue, warhams.

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