Embedded Files
WARHAMMER AGE OF SIGMAR
Venue:
Warhammer World (UK)
Format:
Path to Glory
(5 Game, Variable Points)
60 Player (Split into 4 Factions)
Narrative Location::
The Drench
Realm of Beasts
Rating:
Excellent
OVERVIEW
The Warhammer World: Savage Lands event for Warhammer Age of Sigmar represents the first official GW run Path to Glory event in the new format, an exciting new opportunity to forge your armies narrative alongside likeminded players amonst beautiful gaming tables at the home of Warhammer.
6o tickets for the event were on offer split into the 4 grand alliance specific tickets (so 15 for each grand alliance) representing a balanced foray into factions coming into the event. Tickets sold fast (except for death sorry) as excitement for the event was high, however due to some last minute real life events coming up there were some cancellations leaving approximately 13 players per grand alliance.
Each faction had a prenominated narrative lead, figures from the community who personify Narrarive Wargaming and could inspire their players to really get into the story on offer. Some drawn from the Age of Sigmar or Events teams, others from the wider community of the former RAW team and the Warhammer Witney crew.
PREAMBLE
This is my favourite event I have attended to date, the team having done an excellent job of adapting Path to Glory, a system designed for solo narrative progression, to an event and team format with minimal hiccups along the way and tying in a great narrative tale to it. The team mechanics, army growth and glory accumulation were executed gracefully and the factional leads ands events team kept everyone gripped together throughout the weekend without (to my observation) anyone ledt by the wayside.
For me this is the sort of event where I find Age of Sigmar to be at its best, players tied together in common story and narrative joy.
The event team explained that as this was the first Path to Glory event they were hosting they'd thrown everything at it, and there would be some learning as to what works and what needs refining. But you could tell they'd gone all out in making sure it was the best event it could be.
THE STORY
The Drench is a mostly unexplored wilderness in the northernmost part of Thondia. Even by Ghurish standards this area is dangerous, and laying the foundations for new explorations and conquests is profoundly perilous, for the Realm of Beasts viciously opposes all that resembles civilisation. For some brave (or foolhardy commanders) hidden riches can be obtained here, and glimmerling prophecies have started to spread that something in the Drench could have far reaching consequences. However it isn’t just the forces of Sigmar that have obtained these rumours. Forces of the Dark Gods have started massing on the coast, whilst spies have reported the gates of the Gutfort have started to open. There have even been sightings of the undead, although these have been dismissed as scaremongering.
Coming into the event players received the Event Pack (a sleek A5 ringbinder) featuring an introduction to The Drench, the region in which they would be doing battle for riches and renown throughout the weekend. As the narrative would unfold into the weekend the initial overview was brief introducing the region we would be fighting in and the background to our Grand Alliance figureheads whose will we would be exacting over the weekend. With our loyalties suitably loose there was plenty of scope to introduce your own narrative, with the initial team meetings giving time to each player to introduce themselves, their faction and reason for fighting in the Drench so we could all add a touch to the story.
As each mission was fought new mission sheets and lore sheets were added to our Event Pack, never knowing the mission more than one ahead allowed us to grow into the story and enjoy its twists and turns, and the physical copies of the lore meant we could read them at our own leisure, The team also instituted narrative music and soundbites for the pre-amble to the games where narrators would update us on the grander story at play over the weekend.
My best advice coming into this event is to know why your forces are there, but keep your goals suitably flexible to fit in with a team play environment where decisions are made as a group. For example the primary Quest for the weekend focused on Realmstone mining, an action a single battleline unit could do each battleround where on a 4+ you were rewarded with a Realmstone card that provided a unique boost and was vital to the final artefact of the weekend. As a player who had only a single battleline this was probably my worst part of the weekend as I couldnt take part in such a cool mechanic and simply watched others gain the cool cards. Its a learning experience going forward but might of been work mentioning on the event pack as it would of coloured my list formation.
THE ARMIES
The weekend used a slightly altered Path to Glory mechanic, specifically that you would not generate your own territories and would upgrade your Strongholds as a team. This meant unique territories for those factions with a PTG section were not in play and couldnt colour how the weekend progressed for the sake of balance across the factions without.
For the weekend all players were asked to write Orders of Battle at the following points limits:
600 Points - Optional Friday Night (3 games)
1000 Points - Saturday Games 1 and 2
1500 Points - Saturday Game 3, Sunday Game 1
2000 Points - Sunday Game 2
With the caveat that renown, glory and quest progress from the Friday night would not carry over into the weekend and was done as more of a meet and greet with models.
Units could be reinforced, or added in the next points brackets but never removed or retired. This meant if you played the friday night you would be using those same units all weekend and so on
I think the army growth aspect worked really well here, knowing how your force would expand throughout the weekend and able to play for each of the stages meant you brought only the models that you needed and could put all your attention into those.
THE WARLORDS
The other unique element was the requirement your PTG Warlord had to progress through the weekend, for those battletomes with Heroic Upgrades for Path to Glory this was the option, alternatively players could choose to use the Thondia: Anvil of Apotheosis to design and upgrade a hero throughout the weekend at the following levels:
600 Points - 10DP
1000 Points - 20DP
1500 Points - 30DP
2000 Points - 40DP
What you gain from the Anvil is the flex to design (within its very limited purview) something unique, however often you'll find the units are dramatically worse than those following a PTG upgrade track from their battletome as it carries a hefty custom tax (unless making a gargantuan monster, which feels undercosted at points).
Alot of the custom missions for the weekend, those generating "Spoils of War" for the map (see below) focused on keeping your GENERAL alive, for many of us this was the custom Warlord and thus survivability on the hero was paramount to supporting your Grand Alliance, for anvil heroes this is a touch more challenging as low wound counts and next to no Ward save on many of them made them easy bait for incoming fire.
I loved expanding my Warlord throughout the weekend, and though she died in near enough every game that was more a result of my list design being ill suited for the game in general (Treelords are full of sad feelings these days and they made up most of my list). Going into the next I'd definately plump for a more aggressive Warlord design to focus on getting those cinematic duels in whilst having a chance of surviving them, but thats a learning from a new event type.
THE MAP
The Primary focus of the weekend was the fight to control the Drench and access a hidden vault at its heart, this was done through two mechanics:
Crack the code for the Artefact
Control tiles on the Campaign Map
We'll get onto the Artefact mechanic later as its really cool but first lets focus on that campaign map. It was an excellently crafted 3d tiled map design created by the events team to symbolise Ghur, with each faction starting in their own quarter of the map to notate where they were arriving from. The Map element was a fantastic flourish for the weekend in helping us to visualise what we were fighting over and make tactical decisions, where after every game players would split Spoils of War (earnt 1 for winning your game, 1 for keeping your general alive) between tiles they wanted to take.
Starting from the grand alliance who earnt the least Spoils of War in that game each faction nominated a cartographer to chart their journey. Theyt had to place all of their spoils of war, and count take any tiles adjacent to one they already owned. Each tile had a default value, between 3 and 5 marking how many spoils of war were required to secure it. If the tile had an outpost, that number was increased (I think by 10, but you'll see later why that became irrelevant). If a rival faction already controlled a tile you could take it so long as you put more Spoils of War onto that tile than they had there.
As you can see on the map however Spoils of War became plentiful toward the end of the weekend, with fistfuls dropped onto tiles just to try and hold them for more than one turn, as the worst performing Grand Alliance had to place first, the tiles they took were often immediately overridden by the better performing Grand Alliances, who not only could see what had already been taken but had more spoils of war so could simply overwrite every tile taken by the worse performing Grand Alliances. This resulted in a two fold snow ball effect, if you did badly you both had to go first, and knew whatever you took you'd lose before the map stage was done.
This is the one area of the event I think could do with reviewing going into the next one, perhaps with each player getting to move their own little army token if they won and secure more territories alternating one player from each grand alliance at a time, this way making the cartographer role broader for everyone to get involved but also to stop the fistful of tokens approach to overwriting others.
Toward the end of the weekend Death reigned supreme, holding the majority of the bottom half of the map and able to dominate control, this early success and them really pulling some fantastic wins out of the bag meant in the final map stage they had done enough to secure access to the vault and relied only on their artefact being correct to win the weekend.
THE ARTEFACT
The artefact, and realmstone comprising it may be my favourite part of the weekend (except the players) its a nice touch in which each Grand Alliance faction recieved a blank artefact going into the Saturday morning, something their narrative leads had dug up from the dirt of the Drench and recognised as being a vital treasure if only they could unlock it.
As mentioned above players could elect to do a Realmstone Mining quest in place of others throughout the weekend, if successful they would recieve a random realmstone card from the event team in the aftermath (I believe 9 in total, 7 for the realms plus Warpstone and Varanite). These would then be placed upon the artefact and handed to the events team each round to see if you had cracked the combination.
From game 3 (I think) there was the potential to determine what the coloured dots on your artefact meant when returned by the events team, so long as you kept your messenger alive. Unfortunately for Order ours all died so we worked blind all weekend (and yet succeeded in cracking the artefact). Any Realmstone you didnt want to use in the artefact could be used by a player for a single use in game effect before being returned to the events team to be mined again later.
At the end of the weekend the faction with the most territories would be the first to test their artefact against the vault to see if it was correct, if they were wrong then second most would try and so on.
Fortunately for Grand Alliance death not only did they hold the most territories but they also cracked the artefact taking the victory and amberbone prized from the Vault.
THE PLAYERS
I know for new event attendees potentially one of the most worrisome part is playing against a room of strangers over a couple of days who might be immensely punishing in playstyle, or simply struggling to integrate into the team parts.
I am not a social person, I struggle with people and yet i LOVED this weekend, every player was instantly friendly, engaging and open to telling you about their models, lore, games so far and providing light hearted chat that set people at ease. The Team stage was fantastic as we all schemed together to try and take the weekend, though none could compete with the Chaos chant to the glory of Warpenstein every time we got pulled away for a team chat (destruction tried with their Waaaghs, but chaos had a catchy tune).
This was without a doubt my favourite event from a social perspective, pulling together as a team, having friendly rivalries and you could feel the passion each player had put into their armies (which made the painting competition such a tight race when voting for the best army of the weekend)
THINGS OF NOTE
- Lunch was immense, if you've been to a WHW event before imagine that but with double the options and fully stacked plates, if you havent been to WHW events before you dine in a seperate canteen to bugmans but the choices on offer were amazing,
- Gaming tables were beautiful
- Event team were organised, efficient, passionate as easy to talk to
The AFTERMATH
After Death won the campaign weekend began to wrap up, each player recieving their final closing narrative card to complete our A5 binders from the weekend and some unique, event specific Artefacts of Power reflecting the Amberbone found throughout the weekend to use in Path to Glory games going forward., This was an especially nice flourish as it meant carrying your narrative forward from the event and spreading word of how it went.
I'm definately going to be keeping an eye out for the next one, and will seek to dial up my armies narrative event more!
PAINTING NOMINATION PHOTOS
Here are the dozen armies from the Painting Nominations for the weeend, all fantastically high quality and yet more really cool ones who werent featured (trimming it down to 12 cannot of been an easy task)
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