by Peter Atkinson

It’s a scene played out in Primary schools around the world: first thing on a Monday morning, a teacher still shaking the remnants of Saturday night’s hangover takes the easy option and gets the kids to write a few laborious sentences about “What I did on the weekend”.  In our classroom in Gateshead back in 1989, we were all scribbling away industriously until my mate Alan puts up his hand and says “Miss!  How do you spell diarrhea?”¹

Quite the weekend, then. Alan was my best friend and the person who got me into Warhammer in the 1990s: I collected Undead, he collected Dwarves but we were both too young and clueless to play the game properly – we did spend entire summers smashing out Hero Quest, though.  Alan passed away a few years ago, taken from us far too young and far too early, and I’ve always said I’d do a Dwarven army in his memory at some point.

So when today’s article looks at the armies I’d love to see added to Age of Sigmar, I’ll be picking one realistic option and one longshot, but also making sure that one of them is the Dwarf army that could finally stir me into action. We’ve all got ideas about AOS armies we’d love to see on the tabletop, and here are mine.

The One I Think We’ll See

Maybe Chaos Dwarves will be the army to make me branch out from Destro?  Back in the day, people used to read those old White Dwarf issues from cover to cover, again and again – with hindsight, it was the legendary Fat Bloke Era of the magazine – and I remember being kind of scared of the Dawi Zharr when I saw them in a batrep at the time.  Plus, the Lamassu was just the weirdest and therefore coolest thing ever.

I also happen to be interested in Sumerian culture – for anyone not aware, the Lamassu was originally a mythical beast from Mesopotamia.²  The strong link between Chorfs and Bulls comes directly from the classic Lamassu, so that’s another thing drawing me into the army.

Chaos Dwarves have been a cult faction, right on the fringes of being a fully-supported army since almost the earliest days of Warhammer. Can you imagine how cool this army would be in plastic minis, and how the community would lose its collective shit? The pop would be unsurpassed.

Credit to timmytime007

I do love a combined-arms force, which Chaos Dwarves fulfil by their nature as mighty smiths and builders of great warmachines. I also happen to have a foothold into the army already, assuming Hobgrots turn up in their eventual book. I don’t buy a lot of GW minis these days, but there’s no way I could pass up on plastic Chaos Dwarves. They’d just be too cool.

Chaos Dwarves might be the non-Destro army that pulls me in the most.  I’ve always said I’d pick up an army from outside of Team Green one day, and despite a couple of near-misses I’ve never jumped – nearly 10 years into AOS now, and every single game I’ve played has been with Destro.  It’s high time I followed through on my commitment to do a Dwarf army of some kind, and Chaos Dwarves would be the one.

The Longshot

GW being GW, it’ll probably be “More Bloody Aelves” because that’s their answer to everything.  Umbraneth have been trailed, much to the excitement of assorted filth-chasers, because Aelves and broken rules goes together like GW and repackaging Sumerian culture as an original IP.  Light Aelves, Dark Aelves, 80s Rock Chick Aelves, Fish Aelves, Aelves who live on mountains with cows.  Enough with the damn Aelves already.

Image credit: Sprues and Brews. $1.01 that the bastards are S Tier at release

So this should be an easy exercise, because “Not More Aelves” is automatically enough to qualify whatever I propose here as a Longshot.  We’ve had a few breadcrumbs over the years for truly unique AOS races, but the one I want is the Agloraxi.

These guys first came to light in the Firestorm campaign³, and have been fleshed out further since – you can read all about them here. The Agloraxi were a great civilization lead by Mages, who formed a ruling caste over their society known as the Arch-Domini. As their Empire expanded and grew tremendously powerful (largely on the back of slave labour), the Arch-Domini invested their energies into the pursuit of ever-greater arcane knowledge.

Their crowning achievements were:

• The Colossi, gigantic humanoid constructs built at their Titanworks. These behemoths were suitable both for heavy construction work of their own, and crushing Battlefield dominance.
• The Prismatikon, a gigantic weapon that spanned a whole continent and could target anywhere in the mortal Realms with precision. This super-weapon harnessed and concentrated the heat and light of Aqshy itself into a devastating beam that could annihilate entire armies.

This latter would prove to be the undoing of the Agloraxi, as the complete obliteration of an entire army of Khorne Daemons at the hand of the Prismatikon caught the attention of Big Red himself – who personally punched the Arch-Domini’s flying castle-city out of the sky.

Despite this brutal end, there’s no shortage of hooks for getting the Agloraxi back into modern AOS. It’s already well established that they had underground bolt-holes to hide from any catastrophe, and we could easily find that one or more of these hidden cells has emerged blinking into the daylight. Similarly there are cultists in the Cities who’ve sought the hidden knowledge and treasure of the Agloraxi for generations – those treasures were a big part of the actual Firestorm campaign – and at any point in time, we’re just one rediscovered magic book away from rebuilding the Titanworks and kicking off a self-annointed successor civilisation, in the spirit of the Holy Roman Empire.

The Agloraxi are just brimming with potential, in every possible way:

In terms of design and gameplay, we’ve got a lot of angles to explore. You’ve got spindly, dome-headed wizards running the show, backed up by Colossi for grunt, with all the tension and design space that implies around directing operations with your hyper-fragile but immensely powerful leaders. Their background is already pretty deep, and just to give you one example, it’s been said that the Sceptres of Flame (weapons wielded by the Arch-Domini) were able to destroy souls, so you could have a rule that they prevent recursion on units they’ve targeted.

In terms of the model range, a spread of units is natively built in and ready to go. The Archi-Domini are the leader caste, backed up by 1-wound troops with magnifying-glass laser rifles and various underclass conscripted grunts. You can have weapons teams operating sun-laser artillery. The Colossi are hulking centrepiece bruisers. The aesthetic would be uniquely AOS, with maybe some nods to historical cultures. This isn’t just a bit of fluff – this is an army.

And in terms of their place in the setting, the Agloraxi have immense potential. GW likes to wrap up an Edition with a series of campaign books that advance the storyline, and you could wrap up 4th with the Mic drop moment that the Agloraxi are back. After that, they’re a whole new antagonist in the Mortal Realms, pushing their own agenda – one example is that you could have a future storyline where they race to reconstruct the Prismatikon, while others seek to prevent it. The sky’s the limit.

From top to bottom, from minis to gameplay to narrative, this is a really cool corner of the Mortal Realms that deserves to be explored more.

Or….. they could just release more bloody Aelves. Place ya bets!

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1. Yup, I still had to Google the spelling ↩︎
2. Fun fact: Nergal was the Sumerian God of Plagues ↩︎
3. Shoutout to BaronnKlatz for the memory-jog ↩︎

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