While the initial list of pre-orders seems quite big for the next week, when you break it down, it's actually just a lot of bundles of a few sets of terrain. But man, some of those bundles are expensive; do you have $1,120 to spend on AoS terrain? Have we go the bundle for you!
White Dwarf/Hobby Books
White Dwarf 82: Unsurprisingly, this is yet another AoS focused White Dwarf. The blurb mostly focuses on the Chaos Dreadhold range of terrain pieces being released, as they are also the obvious focus of this week. There is some mention on discussing the Grand Alliances as well.
Battletome: Chaos Dreadhold: This is new, and quite odd. Until I get my hands on this, I'm not sure really what this is. From what I can tell, this is a smaller version of the Big Books they've released so far. Like the large books, this will have warscrolls, ficiton, and scenarios, but won't be moving the storyline forward. This mostly focuses on using the Dreadhold terrain kits, obviously, and will put them in the Realms in the fiction. 80-pages at $33 isn't horrible and it seems to feature the same stunning artwork we've seen so far.
Fiction
The Realmgate Wars: Ghal Maraz: The pattern GW seems to be going for is to release a Big Book/Scenario Book that gives you the background and scenarios for the ongoing fiction and then release actual fiction that features those scenarios. The Gates of Azyr detailed the scenarios in the Starter Set, War Storm covers the battles in the first Big Book and now we have Ghal Maraz. I'm going to assume that this fiction covers the scenarios and battles from The Search for Ghal Maraz Big Book.
Khorne Bloodbound
Blood Warriors: The only units up for pre-order this week, the Blood Warriors are the heavy infantry for Khorne. For $62 dollars you get enough parts to make 10 Blood Warriors with a variety of options, including a Champion and Icon Bearer. Not a bad deal compared to the price of some of the heavy Eternal infantry.
Terrain
The Terrain is a tricky thing, looking at GW's page, there are no less than 13 different variations of the Chaos Deadhold terrain kits, with prices ranging from $25 to $1,120! Once you sift through it all, you find that most of these are bundles, various parts the can be combined into the look shown. There are only 4 actual pieces that are different.
Chaos Dreadhold: Fortress Wall: The smallest piece available at $25, this is just a basic wall section. It's not much on it's own, and you'd need several pieces to make a wall that's actually big enough to go around something or block of a chunk of battlefield. Still, this means you can buy exactly the number of walls you want to make your piece or atleast have several in small sections to rearrange depending on how you wish to set up your playing field for that scenario.
Chaos Dreadhold: Skull Keep: This is a basic tower, full of skulls and spikes like the rest of the Dreadhold pieces. The tower seems to be about 3-4 standard models tall with a small balcony on the second floor and room up top to put a few units. $75 seems a bit pricey for it's size, the Ophidian Gateway was a little more than half and was a very large piece, granted it was a mostly flat wall compared to whole tower.
Chaos Dreadhold: Malefic Gate: This $100 terrain piece might actually be the best value of the 4 different kits. You are essentially getting two Fortress Walls (already $50) attached to a gate piece (that opens and closes on two swinging hinges). It has places to join it to other Dreadhold kits and would look fairly impressive with two Skull Keeps on the ends.
Chaos Dreadhold: Overlord Bastion: Finally, the Overlord Bastion is a jacked up Skull Keep. $130 gets you a Skull Keep with an additional floor, a wall piece, and a set of stairs leading up the wall. It looks rather nice and you're basically paying $30 for an additional level of keep and stairs, which is about right in GW pricing.
The Terrain is an interesting feature and I would be much more excited for it if I hadn't already gotten earlier terrain pieces. The ones I've had so far are not that good, made of inferior plastic and suffering from poor joining edges (gaps and the like), which I'll discuss when I go to review it. For now, I'll be seeing what other reivews pop up about this terrain and if it's of similar quality before I invest too hard into, despite the over-the-top skull-and-spike-laden silliness that is Khorne architecture.
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