Following the first ever online Warhammer Preview two weeks ago, Games Workshop and the Warhammer Community Team put on a second online preview this past Saturday, featuring more of the reveals they had planned for Adepticon and other conventions.

If you missed the preview and want to catch up on the reveals, you can check them out on Warhammer Community here.

Participating Authors

Robert “TheChirurgeon” Jones

Alice “RagnarokAngel” Lirette

Tyler “Coda” Moore

Jack Hunter

James “Wings” Grover

Liam “Corrode” Royle

Raf “captainraffi” Cordero

The Revised Structure

TheChirurgeon: The shortened time really worked. It kept things moving, and it felt like a brisk presentation that never stopped too long between reveals. Exactly the change they needed.

Jack: I’m really glad they shortened this compared to last weekend. Last felt like we were spending nearly as much time on pauses as they did on reveals, while this week was all content all the time.

RagnarokAngel: Huge improvement, no complaints here. They definitely got it together and kept things moving. I’m with everyone else, I got no complaints.

Coda: The coolest thing about this is that it shows they are learning and refining on the go. This is a good thing for the long term and needs to be encouraged.

Wings: Yup, huge improvement overall, and glad to see them act on the community feedback and implement some good changes. Everything felt much tighter, and I think their new strategy of re-playing some of the trailers to cover the in-between time was good. Hopefully it wasn’t too much of a nightmare to work from their side, and this is the model we’ll see in the future.

Liam: We got pretty much everything I wanted in terms of changes to the structure. As far as I’m concerned we’re personally responsible.

The Reveals

TheChirurgeon: Surprisingly, my favorite reveals were the ones they didn’t talk about, the Word Bearers Praetors. Those models look fantastic, and will immediately slot into the 40k Word Bearers army I’m building, similar to the Gal Vorbak I bought. They just look really good. The Hafling Treeman is also great. I don’t care for the elf one, though. It’s too hard to read what’s going on with its face.

Jack: I’m at a toss-up between the contents of the Lumineth box and the Word Bearer Praetors. The Lumineth box looks like a great beginning of an army, is taking cues from the Sisters box last year in having everything you need in the box, and GW figured out how to make custom dice that are readable and only have one symbol. These dice don’t suck. The Praetors ooze character and will fit right into any Chaos army, 30k or 40k.

RagnarokAngel: Lumineth box, I got giddy with excitement. It’s been my next planned army the moment they announced them and the box is an auto-buy for me when this is all over and we can preorder stuff. I’m also excited to see where giants go, it’s been rumored in the wings for a while and it looks like it’s what people assumed it’d be, an army of giant monsters. I’ll be excited to see more in the future.

As for what I didn’t like, Harlequins and Deathwatch getting a White Dwarf release is so very odd and I feel like there’s something going on there. They’ve kept niche factions involved by bundling them with more popular factions and then just decide to drop it at the finish line for these 2? Absolute bizarre choice and relegating it to an issue of White Dwarf tells me they just do not care. I’ll be happy to be proven wrong though.

Coda: The most important thing from the reveals is that the Lumineth box, which I will be buying the shit out of, doesn’t have any fucking hammers in it. Crisis averted. Also Stern owns, that model is doing a “Goku” in the best possible way. You can almost see her powering up to fight frieza chaos. If the artwork is her in that pose, with a battle aura and four other characters reacting to how much she owns, then I promise I’ll buy myself and Mckee one.

Wings: I will say that the content here felt a little bit light, but the Lumineth army box looks amazing and definitely ups the chances that I will finally fall down the AoS rabbit hole. I did also like the Stern preview a lot – that felt like the right sort of surprise to drop in one of these and was a definite “wow” moment. I would still like to see a bit more in the way of rules included in these though – they moved in the right direction with showing off the Lumineth army ability, but for some of us watching the excitement of new stuff is heavily tied to what things do on the tabletop, and the models themselves only go so far.

Liam: The Lumineth box is interesting to me because it’s suggestive to me that a) the Sisters box was a huge success, which I doubt is an insight that will surprise anyone and b) we’re going to see more releases done that way. Hopefully it won’t be such a long gap between army box and full release as Sisters had. I agree with James that dropping in Stern and the Harlequin the way they did was hugely exciting and made for a real reveal rather than a confirmation of something we already basically knew – whereas e.g. Bile last week was hinted at heavily before showing up, and the Lumineth army box was tying in to something they’ve already been promoting heavily. The Sons of Behemat, meanwhile, are on the wrong side of that particular divide – I feel like anyone who’s sufficiently plugged in knew the name and has been hearing the rumblings on it already, so not going any further than that was a bit whatever.

Also on the disappointing side, as Alice said, is them quietly slipping in that Deathwatch and Harlequins are going to end up in White Dwarf rather than an actual book. That makes us 3/3 for really disappointing Eldar content in PA (4/4 if you include Ynnari, and yes I know that some of the PA rules for Eldar are strong – that isn’t what I’m focused on here). Once again I raise the question of why GW decided that a good use of space in this new series of books was to reprint a bunch of Space Marine stratagems and datasheets 3 or 4 times in a row – and presumably the Deathwatch rules will include some of that again. There’s been some great stuff out of Psychic Awakening, but also a lot of wasted potential.

I’ll also stick my neck out and say that I liked the Angels of Death stuff we saw. The visual style is probably on the wrong side of cliched in a post-Sin City world, but whatever, it’s a look that’s always worked for me.

TheChirurgeon: Yeah, I thought the Angels of Death stuff looked pretty cool. The Tyranid ships were probably my favorite part because it’s something we just don’t see very often represented visually in the 40k universe. So even though I have no real interest in the Tyrands vs. Blood Angels conflict, it had me exited to see the finished product.

I’m with you on Deathwatch – as a Deathwatch player I’m not real excited about White Dwarf rules. I mean, I don’t think that they can’t do a Deathwatch update in White Dwarf and have it be the same amount of new rules as a Psychic Awakening book – after all, the Chaos Legions got what, 3 pages of rules each and a name generator? – but it doesn’t make me feel like the army is seeing the same amount of love as the others.

On the other hand if, at the start of all this, you told me that Psychic Awakening was going to be a monthly series in White Dwarf adding rules for every faction like a modern Index Astartes, I’d have absolutely been on board for it. Almost certainly would have been less profitable, though.

Raf: GARGANTS.

What’s Next

TheChirurgeon: These felt kind of light given how big it was promised to be, so it was interested to see that another one is already on the books for two weeks from now. Looking forward to seeing what else they show, and it feels like we should have gotten more around specialist games — there was nothing for Necromunda or Titanicus.

Jack: It was interesting that they called this out as only being half of what they had planned to reveal at Adepticon. While both this week and last week are maybe a little light on content when they were hyping Adepticon as the biggest preview ever, it makes a lot of sense if you consider stuff being spread over at least three, and more likely four reveals. I’m hoping we get a bit more for the specialist games, especially Titanicus and Aeronautica.

RagnarokAngel: Was surprised to find out more stuff is coming, seems weird to keep teasing this out though. I also feel like there hasn’t been a real wow release announced yet. Which of course, there may just not be one. What we’ve gotten so far just doesn’t feel proportion to the level of hype they built up for it. We also haven’t seen what models people were supposed to get at Adepticon, which if it’s just Lieutenant Amulius would be rather underwhelming.

Coda: Engine War preview? Titanicus and Aeronautica? I dunno. I don’t think we are going to see something as big as an edition dropping online, that said I wouldn’t mind being wrong.

TheChirurgeon: I definitely wonder if we’ve seen things that would have been previewed get pushed back, to accommodate the fact that release schedules will be off now.

Wings: I am pleased to hear that they’re planning more of these over the lockdown period – I really like having stuff to look forward to in my hobby calendar, so even if a preview isn’t as cool as a tournament putting something there is good. As to what’s in that, some more specialist game stuff would be cool – along with the Lumineth the other nebulous possible release on the horizon that might suck me into another game would be Eldar stuff in Aeronautica. I want tiny Crimson Hunters GW. Give tiny Crimson Hunters.

Liam: The prospect of another preview is very welcome, because it did seem like they’d oversold “the biggest preview ever!” at Adepticon if this was as much as was going to be in it. I do wish they’d set that out from the start though – a bit of expectations management wouldn’t have gone amiss. In terms of things I’m hoping to see, more specialist games stuff would be great; we’ve had a Warcry warband and the Blood Bowl Treeman/squirrel with hero tree base, but surprisingly little for Aeronautica/Titanicus/Necromunda. A lot of the best and most exciting models they’re making right now are for those ranges, so it would be nice to get a look at them. And yes, I’m with Wings, I want Eldar in AI very much.

Wrap-up

That wraps things up for this Roundtable. Join us in a couple of weeks when we do this all over again for the next set of reveals. And as always, if you have any questions or feedback, drop us a note in the Comments below or email us at contact@goonhammer.com.