by Peter Atkinson and Calvin Rarie

We’ve already gone to town on the Warscroll reveals, and got more excited than we ever expected about a unit hitting on 4s with a 5+ armour save; well now Men have Read Books, we’ve seen the full picture on the Armies of Renown and it’s time to get down to business.

The full details are out in the wild, and while we wait to have Wahapedia updated the book in our hands, I’ve included a couple of error-free assets here that other people have compiled from the Reads Book videos to assist the review.

Today’s focus will be:

• Clarifying how these things work.
• Analysing the AORs and what they offer: are they any good, and when would you use them over the regular Battletomes?
• Identifying some cool tech and tricks that you need to know about.

We’ll be following up with separate articles for each faction after this, with a deeper look at the specifics and some competitive lists, but today is all about an overall verdict for each Army of Renown.

Understanding AORs

I’m still seeing loads of questions about how these things work, so let’s just take a minute to lay it out.

The biggest question is “What do I keep / lose from the Battletome?” I’ve seen a couple of bullet points lists floating around, and none of them are comprehensive.

The best way to think about it is that you lose everything. It wipes the slate clean, so all tech from your book is gone. All you’re left with is the Warscrolls, plus whatever tech these new AORs give you. What has thrown people is that in a couple of cases, the AOR does give you back a key Battle Trait (the Bad Moon + Loonshrine or a rebadged Mightier Makes Rightier). So it looks and feels like the core army tech is intact, minus certain things – where it’s actually the other way around, a complete reset to Ground Zero with rules then added back on top.

So for the avoidance of doubt, you lose all of the following from the AOR’s original battletome (but Core Rules and GHB selections are still fine):

• Battle Traits
• Artefacts
• Command Traits
• Subfactions
• Heroic Actions
• Monstrous Rampages
• Spell Lores (although these AORs couldn’t make us of them anyway)
• Prayer Scriptures
• Mount Traits
• Battle Tactics
• Grand Strategies
• Core Battalions

The AORs give you their own versions of many of these – and we’ll be identifying today whether we think that’s a good trade – but to be absolutely clear, you will lose things like the Wade and Smash Heroic Action for Troggoths, which is a big deal but is easy to skip over in a review if you don’t play the army.

And that’s the thing – we play these armies, we take them to tournaments, and hopefully that gives us a good foundation to review them. Today’s article will deliver our thoughts on each AOR, and we’ll be following up next week with a deeper dive on each of them including detailed tricks, combos and army lists.

We’re not into regurgitating rules, so we’ve just dropped a couple of assets in here that were doing the rounds on socials for Trugg and KO. We’ll update the article when something similar is out there for Ironjawz and Sons, but at time of writing the best way to get the verbatim rules for the other subfactions is via people reading them directly from the page, so I’d suggest taking a look right here for WHW’s customary excellent coverage:

So this book is called Reign of the Brute; it’s taking place in Ghur; there are a bunch of great new Destruction models; and three of the four Armies of Renown are Destruction. The other one is an Order gunline, so which one do you think is gonna get the strongest rules?

Place your bets*, and let’s find out.

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Trugg’s Troggherd

by Peter Atkinson

One thing to clarify right up front is that Trugg can take your new CTs, but not Artefacts:

Credit: rules by GW, helpful graphix via Zo from the Gitz Discord

What you gain

The chef’s signature dish is most certainly the army-wide Leystone buffs. Being suckers optimists we do of course leap to assuming that 4 dice is plenty to get the buff you want, but it doesn’t quite work out that way. Theo has crunched the numbers in a Patreon article, and it sits somewhere between rolling a 3+ and a 4+ that you get the 5++ ward or shooting switchey offery that you built your whole strat around. Hmmm. But unless you crap out a whole bunch of ones, you will always get something solid out of it at least.

You can make Dankholds Battleline as some neat fan service (which also means you can run a double-reinforced unit of three); I’ll let you read the Enhancements yourself, but the one you’ll always take is the CT to boost your healing. There’s no standout artefact but none of them are awful, and worth emphasising is that the Battle Tactics are actually really good.

What you lose

A lot. One thing that I haven’t seen other coverage really talking about much – presumably because in most cases they don’t play Troggs themselves – is how big a deal it is to lose your Heroic Action. This thing is amazing.

Wandering Trogg is one of the signature tools in the book. It’s quite a big deal, and especially when you remember that Trugg has the keywords to do this one himself in Gloomspite (and on that bigger base too), so in the AOR you’re losing it on him as well as the Dankboss.

You lose the normal – and strong – Gloomspite Battle Tactics, but the new ‘uns are great too so you could call it a wash. The Grand Strat is probably weaker than the go-to option for a tooled-out Alpha Trogboss though.

I’ll let you decide which Enhancements you prefer, but Glowy Howzit is definitely a big miss; and because you’re not in Megamob, you lose the double healing. Again, Trugg himself is directly missing out from going in his own AOR: healing every time you fight is even better with his enhanced Regeneration popping back D3+3 wounds every time, right on his warscroll.

Perhaps the biggest issue, though, is that you are limited to the tiny, tiny Troggoth range – and not even all of that. You can’t take classic Troggoth-keyworded Allies like the Mirebrute (who was already squeezed out of most lists) or the extremely popular Dobby, because they’re not Gloomspite keyworded. And within Gloomspite, you’re missing out on screens (Grots and Spider Riders), bodies on objectives (Grots), tech (Snufflers, Sporesplattas) and wizards (Grot heroes and the Gobbapalooza). That’s quite the package of useful shit you can’t use.

Once you start writing lists, you’ll see how clunky it is to make your points fit when every unit is 170, 190 or 210 points**. Worst of all, it fucks you pretty hard for even the most basic of Battalions: you literally don’t have two small heroes to fit into a Warlord or Battle Regiment. With no access to Wizards outside of Arcane Tome, you’ll get a piece of Nullstone, but Trugg can’t take the 4+ Magic ignore that he desperately needs, because he can only take CTs and not Artefacts. Listbuiding quality of life is kinda shit to be honest.

Why would you run them?

There are two scenarios where I’d consider Truggherd right now:

• A local one-dayer where you want to kick back and have some fun with a cool themed army. Take the lid off something cold and fizzy, and let the Leystone land were it wants.
• A teams event where you freak out shooting armies in the pairings process and try to get on all the Three Down Main Street map types.

There’s nothing “fun” about taking a shit army and getting smashed every game, but this AOR is good enough to be genuinely fun. It’s got its frustrations competitively, but there’s enough gas in the tank to give it a crack outside of the crucible of top-tables tournament play. And that’s honestly a fine place for an AOR to sit,

And ya know what? I think Trugg is good in classic Megamob, and that’s where I’d be more inclined to run him. There’s a school of thought that he can get punked early on without his ward up and you lose your centrepiece model, and that’s true; but I’d also argue that the lack of a native ward is priced in, and losing a 320-point mini won’t leave a smoking hole in the middle of your army like, say, Kragnos going down early.

If the same thing happens Trugg’s Troggherd you’re absolutely stuffed, because that’s your main Battle Trait and reason for running the army (univeral Leystone) gone for good, maybe taking your command trait down for good measure. It’s hard to go low drop with the units you can take so I’m gonna say that while army-wide Leystone makes Troggherd intriguing for casual and Teams play, competitively I’d either run him in Megamob or leave him on the shelf.

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King Brodd’s Stomp

by Peter Atkinson

We’ll update this article when there’s a good visual asset doing the rounds, but at the moment the only really accurate coverage is WHW linked above.

What you gain

You get to keep a rebadged Mightier Makes Rightier, but there’s also a couple of real headlines here that are worth focusing on. First up King Brodd himself gets a 5++ ward when he’s within 3″ of a friendly unit. That’s really easy to achieve while holding objectives. Let’s look at a classic “Three Down Main Street” for illustration:

See how close those pie plates are? If the objectives themselves are 15″ apart, there’s only a 3″ gap between them. They both extend 6″ in each direction so they cover 12″ of that 15″ gap themselves, and then it’s really easy to contest both while staying within 3″ of each other:

You can even have both models toeing onto both objectives and nominate one model to contest each, or both on one, depending on where your opponent’s models are and which objectives you already control:

Experienced Gargant players will know that they already want to stick together on the table, to counterpunch when inevitably attacked, so it’s not just easy to keep them within 3″ – it’s often beneficial.

But objectives aren’t always that close together

They don’t need to be. Megas come on a 130mm base which is a smidge over 5.1″

That means you can stay within 3″ of Brodd, and contest one objective each, when the objectives are up to 25″ apart:

6″ radius + 6″ radius + 5″ base + 5″ base + 3″ gap

You can cover that distance with a couple of mms to spare, to be “within” on all sides. See? Piece of piss.

There’s a really cheeky power pair here that we’ll come back to when we do the lists, but for today’s purposes, let’s just say that this is awesome. We’ve got the Amulet back, baby!

Next up is a ground-breaking and revolutionary idea that has been around in MCP for years: you can pick up terrain and throw it at your opponents, doing damage and completely removing it from the board. It feels weird because it’s new, but we’ve been doing it in Marvel for a long time now and it’s a really cool idea that feels awesome on the table. So hats off to AMG for coming up with it.

The damage comes from a dicey-as-hell shooting profile with a huge impact if it spikes. If you roll well, you’ve basically got a battery of free Ironblasters to toss around every shooting phase. Glorious.

I think at this point it’s worth laying out exactly how it works, because it’s easy to skim over the nuance here:

• In your shooting phase, one Mega-Gargant can choose a terrain feature within 1″ to Sunder.
• Note: This is not a Monstrous Rampage, it just kind of feels like one! It’s an extra thing you get to do.
• On a 2+, you Sunder the terrain
• Then you roll another dice for each unit on or garrisoned in the terrain: on a 2+ they take D3 MWs.
• Then all models on or garrisoned in the terrain need to be set up wholly within 6″ of the terrain and outside of 3″ from enemy models.
• If they cannot be set up in this way, they are slain

Have you spotted the A-Grade bullshit you can pull with this? You can toe the terrain yourself, Sunder it, then set yourself up on the other side for some free movement. It’s also a way that you can potentially nope out of combat when you’re bogged down, choose a better target for your free missile attack and charge away into something more favourable. Fucking BAM!

Another thing to mention here is that you physically remove the terrain from the table, which is exponentially better than Smash to Rubble from the core rules. You can clear yourself charge lanes, but more than that, you can completely remove all tech and keywords from Faction Terrain by hooking it off the board.

There’s a surprising amount of tech with Faction Terrain that is immune to Smash to Rubble: that Rampage specifically and solely removes warscroll rules from the Terrain.  But a lot of what they do is buried in Battle Traits, which are unaffected by the Rampage.

A few examples are:

• Seraphon using their pyramid as a node for summoning.
• Sylvaneth zipping around between Wyldwoods.
• Skaven teleporting to (but not from) a smashed Gnawhole.

You get the idea, but there are more.  Physically picking up the terrain piece and chucking it across the room is a whole level above Smashing it to Rubble: for the shooting attack, for the free movement bullshit, for opening charging lanes and for the rules it removes from play.  It’s amazing, and we’ll walk you through some real-game examples in the SOB follow-up article.

The CTs are good – I need to point out here that the one that gives you extra attacks for being within 3″ of other Megas only applies to Death Grip, not every melee profile as I’ve seen reported elsewhere. With CTs you don’t need a strong bullpen, you only need one of them to be the standout and we have that right here: Big Eater is the one you’ll always take, letting you double down on the DPS test angle. 

How it works is that Megas wholly within 12” of this General heal D3 wounds every time they fight (both combat phases) – holy shit!  You’ve basically got Glogg’s Megamob near your General.  This is amazing.  The others are fine but this is the one you need to know about.

The Artefacts are all pretty good but I won’t be using them.  You’re being steered towards tripling down on durability by what the rest of this army’s rules want you to do.  There’s one for a 5++ ward against mortals only – pretty good, but I think I’d still take the Amulet of Destiny for a 6++ ward against everything.  The others are a conditional Fights First (roll 8+ to charge) and conditional artefact removal (roll a 5+ in melee).  They’re fine, but I’m taking Amulet.

Last but not least, the wrestling moves are all gone, but you get the Stonehorn Monstrous Rampage instead. Tap dance all over their army and get into the backfield with arguably the best Rampage in the game.

What you lose

Surprisingly little: the whole Gargants range (such as it is) remains open to you – this is as it should be, but at least you’re not limited to Brodd and all Kraken-Eaters on a fishing trip or something similarly annoying.  As noted above, you lose the fan-favourite wrestling move monstrous actions, but the one you get back is just as good as any of those (and probably better).

You’ll also lose the excellent Core Battalions, including the new improved Bosses of the Stomp – so no one-drop with an extra artefact.  At time of writing you do at least get a piece of Nullstone (assuming no Arcane Tome) and Brodd (who you’ll definitely want to take) is a named character anyway, so you’ve got a reasonable amount of tech; but you’ll be minimum four drops and perhaps take a knock when Nullstone goes away.

Your BTs and GS are gone if you take the AOR, but this is probably an upgrade overall.  The BTs were a weakness of the army but now flip the script into becoming a strength, and while the AOR Grand Strat is not functioning currently, you can take a punt on Kill All Wizards and still probably finish ahead on the deal for secondaries.

The book CTs and artefacts will be missed: the 40 wound CT is a personal favourite and without Club of the First Oak, the Warstomper probably takes a back seat.  Also I know our guy Nathan loves his Rocket Boots build for run + charge 3D6, which gets you stories in every game, and that’s gone too.  Your favourite loadouts are all locked out but that’s ok, because we have new ones now – it’s just different. 

Why would you run them?

How do Gargants win games?  Mostly by getting onto the objectives, dying as slowly as possible and running up a lead on primaries, while scraping out secondary points by their fingernails.  Everything in this book helps you get there.  You get a big ward on King Ding-A-Ling to keep him going; and you get access to rhythm healing in both players’ turns with the CT that you’ll always take.  Two big steps in the right direction there, which should often keep you alive and therefore dominating primaries for the 3+ turns you need.

This is backed up by a powerful suite of Battle Tactics that turbo charges your secondary scoring power.  The Grand Strat is a worry, but with the tools you have here you can craft yourself a win condition and for that reason, I think these guys are every bit as competitive as the Sons of Behemat Battletome armies. There’s a 4-1 list in here that will feel unique and amazing to play.

It’ll feel like no other games you’ve played and it’ll be a great pallet cleanser – but one that’s competitive enough to take to a GT. Big fan of this one.

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The Grunta Stampede

by Calvin Rarie

Do you ever look longingly at the shelf-stable microwaveable bacon and think that’ll hit the spot? Then this AOR is just for you because both of those things are awful.

What you gain

All non-hero pig units become battleline. You only have one Pig hero in this army, which you would take anyway to give Maw-Grunta Gougers battleline. Gore-Gruntas are also battleline too, which is good I guess.

You get a special pig-oriented Waaagh that your General can declare which lets BIG PIGS do d3 Mortal Wounds on a 3+ after they charge to each enemy unit within 1″ of the pig. Jury’s still out on whether or not GW intends for BIG PIGS to be able to make multiple charges in the charge phase, so at best you’re getting extra chances at d3 Mortal Wounds per pig, and at worst you’re doing the same mortal wound output as a fucking Doomwheel. ONCE PER GAME.

Your Momentum points (which each BIG PIG gets from running and/or charging) doesn’t degrade Round 1, which is fine.

You get two unique monstrous rampages, one of which isn’t unique at all and the other is a toned down version of Wade and Smash for Troggbosses in the Gitz book. The first–Greedy Gobble–lets a pig potentially eat a model if you roll a dice and you roll double the wounds characteristic. The other–Charge Down–can only be used with single model units, so your reinforced Gougers are out of luck. Basically, after charging this monstrous action lets a 1 model BIG PIG unit make a d6″ move and gain 1 momentum point, which makes the difference between D3 and D3+1 damage on the Tusk attacks! God forbid the Gouger units get any kind of damage buff, like fighting twice in the same phase on a 4+ right?

You get one command trait and one artefact, and they both suck. Don’t take them. The Grand Strategies and Battle Tactics are also just weaker versions of what’s in the IJ book, and there’s a compelling argument that you’re likely going to just ignore these entirely and just use the GHB tactics and GS, because they might just be easier to accomplish, which is stunning given historical precedent for book tactics.

You get three mount traits, which are BY AND FAR the most interesting thing about this Army of Renown since you can give them to ANY BIG PIG UNIT, and the traits apply even if the unit is reinforced like the Maw-Grunta Gougers:

• Propa Wild gives a unit a counter charge ability that triggers at the end of the opponent’s before monstrous actions happen provided the BIG PIG unit in question is outside of 3″ and within 12″ of enemy units–roll a dice and on a 3+ you get to charge.
  • I’m convinced GW just forgot Ironsunz existed.
• Propa Nasty gives +1 to hit/wound to the mount attacks if the unit in question takes any damage the same phase. So if you charge with this unit by itself, and you fight first, you get nothing!
• Propa ‘Ard changes rend -1 attacks to rend 0 attacks against it. Pretty good for a Tuskboss, and probably the single biggest and most impactful thing in the AOR.

What you lose

Do you know what makes Ironjawz competitive after all these years? Being able to minutely and expertly manipulate the battlefield through powerful and subtle movement phase and hero phase abilities backed up by immense damage output provided through buff layering by Warchanters. Rarely does an IJ army win via full send at the top of 1 into your opponent’s army–which usually ends up in you getting the shit kicked out of you, to be honest.

Well this AOR literally prevents you from taking all those things. No Warchanters, no Fast ‘Un, no Mighty Destroyers, no Smashing and Bashing, no 3d6 Charges, no IJ Waaagh. None of that. It’s like GW fundamentally misunderstands the identity of its own army rules in favor of a brain-dead, knuckle-dragging take on the army derived from reading 40k Ork memes on 4chan.

Why would you run them?

I wouldn’t run this Army of Renown, and I cannot recommend a single reason to do so. You lose WAY too much for the most mediocre pile of rules since Kruleboyz first released. Everything in this Army of Renown is tied to dice rolls that cause mild benefits that don’t compile into anything remotely impactful, which would be fine if this was a narrative-only kind of thing but clearly this and the other AORs were designed with competitive AoS in mind. It feels like the rules designers had a deadline that they forgot about and wrote these rules in an afternoon. It’s a big, big, big letdown for such a hyped set of models that it blows my mind that any of this was decided to be acceptable.

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Grundstok Expeditionary Force

by Calvin Rarie

Speaking of unacceptable rules, let’s talk about the four-foot tall elephant in the room.

What You Gain:

Do you like rallying 3+ save models on a 4+? Did you think the Nullsidian Icon in Fyreslayers is great, but you didn’t want to play Fyreslayers because you can’t tell them apart, but wanted to play other equally blendable dwarves? Did you give up on 40k because your Wraithknights got nerfed, and now you’re looking for your next bullshit-rules oriented high?

Boy do we have the Army of Renown for you!

There’s really two massive things to talk about with this AOR, given that all of it focuses on Thunderers and Grundstok Gunhaulers and the usual footheroes in a KO list:

1) When your Grundstok Gunhaulers move, you can pick one friendly unit with a wounds Characteristic of 6 or less that’s within 3″ of a Gunhauler, pick the unit up and set it back down wholly within 3″ of the Gunhauler, but the unit that got set up this way can’t charge. NOTE: that’s wounds characteristics, not total wounds, so a single Gunhauler can carry 15 thunderers at once, giving Thunderers upwards of 20″ of movement and up to 42″ of threat range. Hooray.

2) The whole fucking army gets an ability that lets them shoot or fight again after they’ve shot/fought in ANY phase on a 4+. This includes Unleash Hells.

The astonishing lack of creativity here in favor of “Well this is clearly the shooting army and they have gunboats, let’s give em uhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh shoot again on a dice roll?” is astounding–. In my opinion, if you’re going to release something like an Army of Renown it should open up new or different ways to play with the army as is. The Grunta Stampede at least TRIED to do something different, the Trugg army has a unique schtick to it focused on a centerpiece model, and Brodd’s stomp opens up new and powerful lines of play.

This is like a movie producer in the 80’s seeing how well their movie did and greenlighting a sequel that’s just the old shit again, but this time with MORE. There is zero application here that is interesting beyond you can live out your favorite Apocalypse Now scene but with dirigibles instead of helicopters.

This, of course, is all compounded by a ludicrously easy Grand Strategy and equally easy Battle Tactics. The Grand Strategy boils down to “Have at least 1 Thunderers Unit and 1 Gunhaulers unit alive at the end of the game.” So, outside of some specific scenarios, you basically have to avoid being tabled to not score this. Yes, Gunhaulers aren’t super tough, but when you can score your GS by literally parking a Gunhauler in a corner and using your 4+ rally on your 3+ save infantry it’s going to be tough NOT to score it.

What You Lose:

Artycles, footnotes and amendments are all gone. But don’t worry, the super powerful shit is now just battle traits and command traits.

Endrinworks are gone, but giving one to a Gunhauler was already a waste.

Fly High, Combat Disembark, and Disengage are all gone, but Fly High has been replaced with an even more potent version.

No big boats means no Ironclads or Frigates–which doesn’t matter a whole lot when you can just take more Thunderers and Gunhaulers.

No Balloon boys either, so no Endrinriggers or Skywardens. You know, the interesting infantry in the army?

No Arkanaut Company, so no cheap objective holders, but the entire army moves wherever it wants at will, so who cares.

A Note on This Army of Renown and Fun

I’m going to level with you–you’re running this because you feel that Age of Sigmar is too interactive for you, and that you want your games to end as fast as humanly possible. You’re trying to speedrun your way to victory, and you have zero intention of actually playing a game.

This is a non-interactive, hyper-tuned pile of rules. It is not unbeatable, but there are quite a few armies out there that basically get absolutely dumpstered by this because you got lucky and rolled all 4+s and essentially got 10 shooting phases instead of 5.

Don’t run this. You’ll hate doing it unless your goal is to reduce your games to exercises in statistics, which is NOT what makes Age of Sigmar a great game.

Why Would You Run Them?

You’re an Order Wanker.

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The Grid

I know what you’re all thinking: words are great, but can we simple Destro players please have a picture? Well here you go.

So this is when we’d feel happy to run each AOR:

• Sons of Behemat at a competitive GT
• Troggherd at a local one-dayer or maybe a teams event
• Grundstok KO when I hate all my friends and want to get rid of them
• Grunta Stampede when hell freezes over

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* Hey, you guessed right. You must be psychic, hey. Meanwhile, Order Wankers can get their t-shirts here.

** “What about Mollog?” Nope.

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