Storm of Magic and Wrath

The past few weeks have seen a couple of new books have been released for two of the more popular wargames which just happen to be the two wargames I play.

Storm of Magic

First, Games Workshop released Storm of Magic.  I've read about this expansion in White Dwarf, heard about it on various podcasts and have actually taken a look at the book.  The book itself is very nice.  There are lots of colour illustrations and the physical construction of the book is very clever.  The cover opens up just to the right of the spine in order to show off the nifty spinner on the inside cover.

From what I've read the rules for Storm of Magic sound interesting enough.  Lots of monsters and crazy amounts of magic brought to bear in order to capture and keep arcane fulcrums.  But, here's my problem.  The book is just shy of $60.  It's not a very big book and the rules only take up maybe 20-30 pages.  The rest of the book is filled with "scrolls of binding".  So, essentially the book beyond the first quarter of pages is a giant bestiary.  $60 is a lot of my hobby money to spend on some fancy pictures of monsters and their stat lines.

My second problem with SoM is the fact that the game is centred around massive monsters.  While this may seem great, I am relatively new to the hobby and to play this game would necessitate purchasing several relatively expensive monster models that I would only use to play SoM.  What happens (as I expect it will) when after the initial buzz wears off, people don't really want to play SoM very much anymore?  I am left with a bunch of monsters sitting on my shelf.  Frankly, I'm not that impressed with the monsters so far and can't see myself buying them just for the pleasure of painting them.

At this point, I think I'll be giving SoM a pass.  The think is, I don't play Warhammer enough to need a different variant.  I play a maximum of once a week and regular Warhammer is fine to fill that few hours.  I wish they would just get back to publishing army books in a timely manner.

 Wrath

 Wrath is the supplement/expansion for Warmachine.  I'll be honest when I say that I'm not sure how this thing works.  I am very new to Warmachine and I'm not sure what the point of the new book is.  I've been told that Wrath doesn't contain any new rules, but merely new fiction and models and their stats.  I've explained in an earlier post that fluff doesn't really float my boat.  So, I wonder if I need to spend the $31.50 for a bunch of stories that I may or may not read.  That's three ebooks that in my opinion are almost guaranteed to have better writing and stories than a game manual.  It would be great to be able to check out the stats of the new models for my faction and the other factions as well.  But, that's a lot of money for that peek.


In short, I'm undecided on Wrath.  Unfortunately, I was not able to have a look at it at my "local" hobby shop that stocks Privateer Press ("local" is two hours away).  Hopefully, a local player that has more money to spend on hobby than I do will pick it up and I can get a good look at it before I make my decision.