Barnes on Games: WH40k: Battle for Vedros Editorial Part 3

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This kind of reminds me of when the ASL Starter Kits were launched. They were initially conceived as a teaser to encourage gamers to buy into full bore Advanced Squad Leader, never to be a standalone system. But over time , they've heard and seen enough to realize it can exist separately, and have pushed out more content ( albeit still dwarfed by ASL ) . The latest is that they are working on a Pacific theater module, which I saw them playtesting at WBC.

So it sounds like GW needs to ask themselves, is this a starter / bridge into full W40K, or will it become its own entity ?

How many Marines come in this $50 starter box? I'm excited about the prospect of a AoS edition of 40K and though this may not be it...I can get a core of space marines from this to use next year with the (hopefully) AoS new rules.

The hope at The White House is for the kids and friends to each have a handful of space marines to hold the line against dad's tyranids. Maybe some of these boxes are a somewhat cheap way to build a foundation towards that.

This is double weird because they' ve just come out with Kill Teams, a stand alone small unit skirmish set.

Battle for Vedros really feels like an initiative that really lost its steam at the corporate level. I've never seen it anywhere, it's impossible to find on the website. Barnes is probably the only person on the internet talking about it. The rumors I've heard is the next edition of 40k will be like Age of Sigmar. In fact GW has been teasing this Eldar End Times thing for a while, about an upcoming battle against Slaanesh. Could this be similar to the WFB End Times event prior to AoS?

When we say give 40K the AoS treatment, I don't mean that they'll blow the universe up, but change to the cleaner rules.

Well, I can see them doing a big 40K event, but it won't nearly be the jarring change that the Old World to Age of Sigmar is.

Speaking of AoS...are there like nations, towns and such or is it all a demiplanes sort of situation. I don't feel like sever see any art with real buildings an such in the backgrounds. It seems to be either ruins or vegetation with some chaos warp colors in the background. Has anyone figured out what the deal is on the setting?

It might not blow up the entire 40k universe but it seems like GW is pretty set on cleaning up the Slaaneshy boobies and such. in Age of Sigmar the High Elves and Dark Elves teamed up to defeat Slaanesh and trap and hide it away somewhere where it can't be found. I'm no expert on the Old World fluff, but I never saw Slaanesh having as much to do with the Elves they way they do with the Eldar in 40k.

In 40k, the Eldar were the cause of the birth of Slaanesh due to their decadence, debauchery and hard partying ways. As a result Slaanesh was boring into the universe, destroying the Eldar gods, homeworld and sucking up millions of Eldar souls. As a result the souls of dead Eldar go to Slaanesh, which is why they invented the soul gem system of preserving the souls of the Eldar in these nifty little gems they wear all over the place. The Dark Eldar also split off at this time and they hide in the dark corners of the Eldar webway and torture and sacrifice souls of other living creatures instead of their own, somehow.

Well technically 2-3 Eldar gods survived. The god of war Khaine split into shards inside all the avatars on all the different craftworld ships and exo planets. The trickster god survived to and there's also some sort of god of the dead. Anyways, GW was teasing all this stuff last month about the Eldar rising up and creating a new god of the dead or something and taking the fight to Slaanesh. Maybe it won't blow up the 40K universe the same way Age of Sigmar will, but still might be a big deal in the fluff.

I think there's going to be a 40k comic in the Oct WD. I wonder if it'll be a comic in the newsstand/kid-friendly sense or a written by adults for adults story.

Probably the latter.

I'm pretty sure there is a new Eisenhorn: Xenos comic coming out/recently released and I was assuming it would be an excerpt from it.

I've been dealing with GW recently about some feature material for another site and, to be honest, I am no longer remotely surprised by the level of PR own goals they've committed over the years. They appear to be totally clueless at dealing with the press or even basic marketing outside their own hobby bubble. It's an astonishing level of ignorance for a major publicly-owned company.

There is a Vedros display at one of our LGS. It's mostly empty now though, so must have been picked over.

This whole line seems sort of DoA. I've yet to see it anywhere in person.

I too was hoping that this would be the start of GW making AoS start changes to the 40k ruleset. It somehow seems even simpler though, and with no way to expand it to other factions that kills it for me.

I picked up the "War of Sigmar" $30 mini expansion last week when i was grabbing the new White Dwarf. It sort of resolves some of your issues with Vedros by having 4 scenarios in the box, being just a scaled down version of the bigger starter, giving newbies a logical next step, and of course, the free rules for every other faction allows me to expand in any way I see fit. Doesn't hurt that War of Sigmar is in FLGSs either, so that people can actually buy it. Will be interesting to see if they will try to expand it to their non traditional customers like barnes and nobles/.

www.belloflostsouls.net/2016/06/breaking...t-40ks-new-face.html

It's almost identical to Aethersteel, but that game also uses cardplay, which makes it more interesting.

Chortle. Toy stores across America, huh?

Weirdly enough, the FFG main store in Minnesota has a Vedros display setup (they also sell a lot of GW miniatures). Sure sold out fast, though...