We’d like to thank Games Workshop for providing us with a preview copy of Warhammer Underworlds: Wyrdhollow for review purposes.

While I was not able to chime in on our Adepticon reveal discussion as I was too busy slamming hams and beers at Adepticon, it was still exciting to see some new Stormcast wizards. When Fowler and I were looking at the reveals on our phones at the Renaissance Schaumburg bar, I enthusiastically called dibs on all the Stormcast models. Cut to one month later and they were at my doorstep, ready to be built and sent into battle.

Assembly

As is typical of Underworlds warbands, you can build this trio without glue. The thought of that gives me agida and I crave the fumes of plastic cement, so I went ahead and glued them together anyway. While the pegs that let these models snap together are better than they used to be, it’s still a good habit to trim these down a smidge to stamp out any potential gaps along the joins. There are 24 bits in total here, and the mold lines are about as tight as you’d expect on a modern kit. The assembly doesn’t do much to hide them and there’s one that frustratingly goes down the middle of Sarpon’s unhelmeted face, which is one of my least favorite places for a moldline to be. He is otherwise simple to assemble, and has one big seam where the two halves of his robe join that will need thicker plastic glue, sprue goo, or other gap filler to completely hide. I also recommend the goblin-esque move of slathering on some slightly thick paint after the fact to help fill the gaps.

The main wiz biz boi, Domitan, (who I keep misremembering as “Dalton”) has a little divot on his base for the bottom of his staff to sit in, which gives the model more stability and will hopefully keep said staff from breaking. He’s got more intricately layered robes that too will require some deft glue work to seamlessly connect, but despite looking more complex, he goes together fairly easily.

Unsurprisingly, the floating lady, Leona Stratosi, is the trickiest model here to assemble. I accidentally missed her hip plate and it was a real challenge to get that back in place and line up all of her flowing robes. Some of these started to slide around after the fact, and it took some elbow grease to get them back to where they should be. She also has the smallest contact point attaching her to her base, appearing to float over her sculpted scenery, and that was a little fiddly to peg in. As the most visually impressive of the three models, I was understandably a little unhappy that I had run into some issues building her, but they were largely user error. The whole group took somewhere around 45 minutes to an hour, with the second half of that time solely being devoted to our floating friend here.

Painting

I’ve gone ahead and painted these models in the Spartan-inspired scheme my Stormcast army shares. If you’re interested in doing so yourself, here’s a tutorial so you can follow along at home. The textures here should be familiar to any Stormcast player, being mostly metal, leather, and cloth, with a smidge of exposed skin on the one unhelmeted fella. There are a few scrolls and a bauble on Domitan’s belt and a spellbook on Leona, but nothing too unusual.

There are a few wrinkles here that might trip painters up, which should be familiar to Stormcast collectors. First, their bases are rather detailed, and while it’s all pretty easy to wash and drybrush away, it would behoove a painter to either paint the miniatures separately from their bases or tackle the messy business of drybrushing beforehand. Personally, I just jammed a bunch of foliage on there to cover up any boring bits or messy overbrushing. There are also a few tough to reach spots on the legs of the models as they are often hidden by cloaks from certain angles, and it will require some careful brushwork to get inside and hit those details. Lastly, some attention needs to be paid to the arms and legs of these models, as they aren’t quite as armored as many Stormcast. If you’ve painted Vigilors before you’ll more or less know the story here, but you don’t want to paint cloth like it’s platemail or vice versa.

The amount of details on each of these models is equivalent to a character for your army, so be prepared to spend some time working through each of them. They’re also Knights-Arcanum, so if you wanted an alternate sculpt from the Dominion miniature or wanted to run multiple, this would be a great set to diversify your musclewizard portfolio.

Final Thoughts, Parting Shots, and What Have You

The most interesting thing about these models for me is what they’ll mean for the future of the Stormcast range. As Age of Sigmar’s posterchildren, it’s safe to assume we’ll get new Stormcast models in the future. Since the Dominion box, GW has been essentially updating each of the Stormcast chambers with the sleeker Thunderstrike armor designs, and it wouldn’t shock me if the Sacrosanct chamber from 2nd edition was next to get this treatment. This trio is from the nominally distinct Valedictor temple, but we’ll see what that means from a fluff and aesthetic standpoint in the future. The sleeker, less chunky look is far more appealing than the giant golden babymen from AoS’ launch, and I for one would be happy to see the rest of the range updated accordingly. A quick glance at the photo I added above should show you just how far this range has come in 6 short yet interminable years, and I’m excited to see where things go next.

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