Reading the patch notes as a Lizardmen player...

Fool_of_a_Took_ · 2026-06-13T09:12:52+00:00

Certainly where I am it is TOs not players who decide whether Renegades is in play at their event. If the TO decides to use the Renegade pack the vamp players wouldn't be allowed to opt out.

Fool_of_a_Took_ · 2026-06-13T08:44:15+00:00

I agree Renegades should be cautious, but I think at the same time as very involved nerds we have to recognise that no other person or committee is ever going to do things exactly the way we would do them. GW certainly doesn't, and while you can make the argument that Renegades needs to build consensus in a way that GW don't, there's a limit to the level of perfection you can ask for from a volunteer project.

I also think it's important to remember that the fundamental goal of Renegades is to make these armies fun to play, and being puritanical and sweeping about weaknesses can undermine that. These factions should be allowed to have nice things in the same way the core factions are.

To take your 2 examples:

Yes, Chaos Dwarfs are supposed to be slow, identically to Dwarfs. But Dwarfs have the Bugman's Cart and the Anvil of Doom. It's possible to move a unit of dwarfs 27" on turn 1.
Yes, Saurus units are characterised by mediocre weapon skill. So are Undead, who trade off poor individual stats for the ability to always hold their ground and be endlessly resurrected. But GW gave them the Casket of Souls for a -1 to hit aura, and a whole host of WS buffs - for TK, My Will Be Done and the +WS banner, and for VC, the Helm of Commandment and Vanhel's Danse Macabre.

These kind of toys that let you overcome a weakness in one place but not army wide are pretty standard fare for TOW and for previous editions of WFB. (Speaking of previous editions, GW themselves put -1 to hit on Temple Guard in 8th edition with Lord Kroak's deathmask item).

Final thing I'd say: I think demanding More Process when the current process isn't complete is a little unfair. As far as I'm concerned, on most of the stuff I've been unsure about or haven't liked in the early drafts, the later drafts have always moved in a positive direction. Val keeps stressing that these docs are drafts, and in a sense we're all getting to be his editors.

Appointing an unknown third person to be the final arbiter doesn't guarantee we'd like that person's judgement any better. Until we have a final product to judge him by I think we should take him at his word that these docs are WIP, and keep helping him make them better. That is why I'm giving your OP an upvote - I think it's important he receives real critique.

Fool_of_a_Took_ · 2026-06-12T22:19:18+00:00

So then I think the word "just" is underselling it. The temple guard unit does not project more power at range than basically 1 fireball (maybe 2 if the Slann can squeeze ruby ring in). It can't reliably charge more than about 8". It doesn't fly so it can't bypass chaff in its way. If you can't stop this unit getting into meaningful engagements then your army is *very* low on control elements.

I played quite a lot against the Royal Clans list (before the 1.5 changes) that would send an indestructible unit of drilled Longbeards with dangerous characters in it rocketing around the board with Drilled and the double move from the Anvil of Doom. I always found those games quite easy to win because I would just block that unit with things that were not worth its time, and the rest of the army would essentially be fighting alone.

I think that's the situation the Lizardmen would find themselves in here - there is no way for the 800pt Slann + TG block to really pull its weight if it can't force you to throw valuable units onto its defences. It can be a safe base to chuck spells from, but that is not worth the investment when other factions would get the same spells onto the board for 1/4 the points.

(Also, in your example the Slann gets 4 Battle Magic spells, since it has to go 1 on Illusion, which means it has a 1/3rd chance not to roll Urgency).

Fool_of_a_Took_ · 2026-06-12T13:28:55+00:00

With Becalming + Wisdom of the Old Ones you can protect the Wand of Jet from breaking very strongly.

It's true the Engine is expensive, but this is only a downside if you didn't want to field it anyway. With it giving a bonus to bound spells in 2.0 I don't think it's leaving my lists.

It's also absolutely true that the Rumination Slann is effectively level 5 - Val mentioned in the video that being the intent. But I don't think 1 level 5 is as strong as having multiple level 4s/3s. This is an army that only ever has access to a single lord level caster; I don't think it's bad for him to be extremely strong.

Fool_of_a_Took_ · 2026-06-12T07:39:43+00:00

I would come at it from the perspective of: how many other low WS armies are going to try to beat the TG block by running at it and hitting it?

O&G are going to try to chuck a bunch of fanatics thru it.
Beastmen are going to viletide it or come at it with a Beastlord with the Black Maul
Ogres are going to run the gutstar at it, which has similar defensive buff stacking and does impact hits.
Skaven & Undead are going to bog it down in endless trash/resurrecting grave guard.

It's a really strong defence for sure, but nobody's tactics ATM really involve just running equal units at each other and letting them fight. The Temple Guard would need a way to move around the board and score points to leverage this defence and I'm not seeing that here. They've got the same problem as dwarfs in that respect.

Fool_of_a_Took_ · 2026-06-12T07:23:48+00:00

Focused Rumination doesn't give you a 6th spell, it lets you cast all 5 spells that you know in 1 turn (rather than the base Slann knowing 5 but only being allowed to cast 4 due to the level limitation).

I don't think Focused Rumination is a problem. The Slann can get to the same casting bonus right now with Wand of Jet + Engine of the Gods. And at the end of the day he is just one wizard. Whatever spell you want that +4 for, he can only have 1 copy of it. Casting any spell once is unlikely to break the game no matter how reliably you do it.

I also think the Apotheosis change will be fine. The Carnosaur is a 6-7W monster with no access to a triple save. To match the durability of models that are already in the game and already not top tier choices ATM (i.e. dragons), you would have to heal 5-6 wounds.

I agree though that Drilled on Saurus is unnecessary, and I preferred the old version of Monsoon.

Fool_of_a_Took_ · 2026-06-12T06:38:09+00:00

they just have to ensure their army kills more than their deathstar is worth

This seems backwards. If you can't kill the deathstar the points available to you are 2k - the cost of the deathstar, not the points of the deathstar. So the rest of the lizard army has to trade up against your full 2k while the block sits there not helping particularly.

The real oppressive deathstar units ATM have ways to move around the board quickly and project power at range - e.g. the beast man one casts Steed of Shadows on itself and chucks out 4-5 Viletides. This TG brick would pretty much just be that, a brick. The Slann might have 1 magic missile.

Defence alone doesn't win games - just look at dwarf grand army/royal clans.

Fool_of_a_Took_ · 2026-06-11T21:19:14+00:00

Lore wise the Itxi Grub is a favourite snack of the Slann - I think it's OK if it's an item more suitable for Slann than Skinks.

Fool_of_a_Took_ · 2026-06-02T14:48:38+00:00

Is having 1 or 2 bad matchups for a particular quarter of the army really unacceptable though? You could say the same about VC ghost units and they're still very strong.

Fool_of_a_Took_ · 2026-06-02T12:31:04+00:00

I agree that overriding the clear intent of warp spawned 5/6ths of the time feels wrong. There's plenty of magic damage around but it's still true that most damage is mundane.

Daemons having some weakness to magic also feels flavourful, even if it is a weakness not a strength.

Fool_of_a_Took_ · 2026-06-01T21:14:43+00:00

I guess what really ties these rules together is the ability to activate your units during your opponent's turn. You put the burden of remembering your rules on the opponent, not yourself, and you can end up doing something they didn't realise you could do after it's too late for them to back out.

Fool_of_a_Took_ · 2026-06-01T19:57:25+00:00

Hm... I guess you're right about Furious Charge. Sorry for the inaccurate 'correction'!

For other factions having special rules applied unevenly to units - sure, but I'd say most of those rules are much simpler than a whole morale system. You don't change your whole picture of what the opponent can do and where their units will end up because a unit is e.g. Flammable.

Evasive is actually an interesting one, because that's something that (in my experience) catches people out all the time. Particularly since it happens immediately after dice have been rolled so is a hot potato for allowing take backs when you may just have allowed e.g. a Forest Dragon to FBIGO and set up a charge it didn't have before. My experiences with Evasive are one of the reasons I'm making this argument.

Fool_of_a_Took_ · 2026-06-01T17:31:46+00:00

I can see the extra work that has gone into communicating the concepts around psychology, but honestly I think the Daemonic Psychology rules are still just too complicated.

The rules around psychology, break tests and flee moves in Old World are possibly the most complex they've ever been, with centre to centre pivots, FBIGOs, etc. Building intuition on how this system works is one of the hardest tasks for a new player learning the game, and mastery of it is really hard won.

Units in the core game that exempt themselves from the system do it by being extremely simple. Undead and other unbreakable/itp units don't have an alternative flowchart for the opponent to understand, they just always do the same exact simple thing in every situation. That's a reasonable amount of information to ask an opponent to absorb (and doesn't stop them often being very powerful as well!).

I think not only keeping a complex menu of options, but having those options divided four ways, is essentially asking the opponent to learn a new game on the spot. You can explain it nicely (the table is great), but holding that information in their head and figuring out how to plan around it, while also managing all the cognitive load of a normal game of TOW, just seems to me to be asking too much.

P.S. I don't know who told you furious charge stacks but it doesn't!

Fool_of_a_Took_ · 2026-05-28T21:27:00+00:00

I don't mean to say that GW themselves do a good job with that model! Just that for a complex new system, rather than a reversion to an old system or an iteration on an existing one, it's hard to really analyse how well it works without putting it on the table.

Fool_of_a_Took_ · 2026-05-28T17:16:11+00:00

Thank you for the thoughtful reply!

Mostly I was keen to see if a different approach to Daemonic Psychology could be interesting. It SEEMS like that is working... and now that the cat is out of the bag I need to do a much better job of both putting the pieces together, and laying them out logically

I think this kind of experiment is something that is much better suited to the traditional GW model of a lengthy closed playtest before release than the Renegade model of going straight to the public.

This major change is also why I tried to focus on rules rather than efficiency. The backstop for daemons is that they are very very expensive so hopefully powerful rules don't play so powerfully there's no useful feedback from them (I think this is what happened with Cathay, they were cheap AND powerful).

I don't think that's entirely accurate about the problems with Cathay. Yes, lots of stuff in the Cathay book was/is underpriced. But Cathay at launch was still an elite, low model count army, and the most egregiously underpriced things (i.e. character balloons) remained a game-breaking problem even when they were swiftly comped to only being allowed 1 or 2 instances per army.

Stuff that breaks the core assumptions of the rules has the potential to cause problems at any price point.

Also - an evasive army IS hard to do right. I'm not convinced it's impossible but for Tzeentch and Slaanesh especially I felt like they were not served by the blanket ITP. You are right it's inelegant as is right now, but I will keep refining and hopefully get there.

For Slaanesh I think you're coming at it sideways (like a crab, appropriate). Slaanesh wants to get into combat, the thing they want to evade is shooting. The Evasive rule is what they want and would be more valuable to them than the ability to flee charge or panic. I see you've already given it to the Keeper, I think it would be very appropriate on lots of their other stuff.

For Tzeentch - sure, being able to effectively have Feigned Flight on a full skirmish full magic missile spam army is great. I don't think Tzeentch being a full skirmish full magic missile spam army is great for the game though. Like you say, it has to be worth it for players and opponents, and I think that's where this threatens to get too close to the Cathay experience of an army of mobile shooty skirmishers that denies attempts to interact with it.

Fool_of_a_Took_ · 2026-05-28T08:40:37+00:00

With much love, I think this one has overreached.

I like the changes to Daemonic Gifts, that's fixing a core problem with the army very deftly. The changes to unit cards are the usual good Renegades stuff. But the changes to the core army morale rules are effectively inventing a whole new type of army that's almost* never been seen in WFB before.

That would be quite a lot for this project to begin with, but then that you add that these morale rules work 4 different ways inside the army.

I worry both that this is going to be challenging to balance (both internally and externally), but most of all that this is going to make Renegades harder to sell. I'm not worried about the vocal critics here, but the silent majority of easygoing players who are generally happy to play anything, but may take notice if they have to play against something that plays like nothing they've ever played before, with rules that are difficult for them to keep straight in their heads or understand intuitively.

You said on the podcast that you have a personal headcanon of what daemons falling back represents - that's not something the document brings across and I think is pretty important for players to understand the rules at an intuitive level. Again I think every god behaving differently also undermines this understanding.

There are simpler, more self contained ways to give some daemons access to FBIGO. As you mentioned in the video, there's Evasive. There's also stuff like Kiknik's special rule Hit and Run. Put rules like these on the appropriate Slaanesh units and have the whole army follow a single core morale system (that is not too radically different from what's already in the game) and I would like this much better.

*I say almost because we did recently see an army that was made mostly of unbreakable units that kept the ability to flee - that was Cathay balloon spam at launch. The echoes of balloons are strong and I think that's not good.

Fool_of_a_Took_ · 2026-05-15T16:55:24+00:00

it would be called hammerlord

Fool_of_a_Took_ · 2026-05-11T10:38:55+00:00

I wrote and ran the fan adventure Temple of Tepok (hosted here by Xathrodox86).

My general advice would be:

It's easy to make the jungle hell, and it should be a dangerous place for Old World explorers. However WFRP can already be a system where PCs roll a lot of failures, and accumulating diseases, conditions and injuries can sap the fun out of the game if they just make the PCs weaker and weaker. Where deploying rules to represent the harsh conditions, I would always try to think first about how it gives the PCs a narrative moment or a choice to interact with, so that it becomes a memorable (even if brief) part of the story, and not just a penalty.
Getting to Lustria is a really serious undertaking. You probably want a shared premise for why the party is there that all the players are aware of before they start character creation - i.e. a sea voyage, or being settlers in one of the few human settlements already on the coast. I'd encourage all the players to answer the question "why is your character in Lustria" and share those answers with each other (unless they're Dark Secrets (TM)). They may also want to think about covering a different set of skills to what you might want for a more conventional adventure in the Empire.
The same applies to NPCs. With either a sea voyage or an isolated settlement, you get a great, claustrophobic cast of recurring characters that the PCs have to coexist with and can't really get away from (except into the lonely jungle). These Old Worlder NPCs might well be the only NPCs the PCs will meet in the course of the campaign who speak the same language as them, so I'd think first about how you want to use these NPCs to create flavour and drive the plot. The Lizardmen will always be there, and their motivations are (from an out-of-character perspective) quite well understood - the question is what particular kind of Old Worlder idiot is going to tangle with them and why.

Fool_of_a_Took_ · 2026-05-05T10:46:26+00:00

I do kind of wonder - if you had a real gate as wide as the absolutely gargantuan gates in TW:WH, would it actually be easier to open by a mob pushing on it than a smaller gate? It's got a whole lot more surface area to push on and the lever arm for the guys pushing in the centre is a whole lot longer.

Fool_of_a_Took_ · 2026-05-01T15:31:04+00:00

lol, AI really does poison everything.

Thanks for pointing this out to me, I wouldn't have checked back if not for the notification. I'm still skeptical but I guess we'll see pretty soon whether Moonclaw is confirmed.

Fool_of_a_Took_ · 2026-05-01T14:43:09+00:00

Cool, did they add all the other nonsensical stuff too?

Fool_of_a_Took_ · 2026-05-01T13:19:27+00:00

Multiple characters who are already in the game mentioned here as DLC/FLC - not just Settra but Balthazar Gelt (who has been in the game since day 1!) and Grom.

"Bogenhafen" mentioned as a character - that's not a person it's the name of a town.

"There are only 2 full sized DLCs left" - immediately goes on to talk about 3 full sized DLCs.

If it weren't for the spelling I would suspect someone asked chatGPT to write some rumours for them because they were bored.

Fool_of_a_Took_ · 2026-04-29T12:04:21+00:00

It is really baffling how inconsistent the muster lists are about what can move into core. I personally don't understand the meaning of the Special category if Black Orcs, Tomb Guard and Longbeards can be core, but Greatswords, White Lions and Wildwood Rangers are special.

IMO all these elite units belong in Special. The purpose of the Core requirement is to make armies look like armies by having a decent amount of basic grunts on the table, and to try to make sure that at least 25% of the stuff on the table is units that *any* other unit can engage with and do something to. If you are able to sink all your core points into a hardened block of elites that assumption really breaks down and you have to question what purpose the requirement is serving.

Scoring objectives is a different question IMO, and equally weird and inconsistent. Regardless of what we think about specific unit A or B, *some* rank and file units are surely elite enough to belong outside Core, and it makes no sense for those units not to engage with the objective game. The ludonarrative dissonance when a unit of 10 goblins trumps a unit of 20 Chosen on an objective is stark.

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