I’ll come right out with it: I’ve never liked Kings of War models as much as my beloved Tomb Kings for Warhammer The Old World, or my Age of Sigmar armies. I wasn’t a member of the disenchanted Fantasy Battle tribe that Mantic’s game so ably embraced in the 2010s, and its releases since have rarely stolen my attention from Warhammer projects. A surprise, then, that the newly revealed miniatures for its Fracture expansion suddenly have my heart in the palm of their scaly hands.
Fully revealed and opened to pre-orders on Tuesday, Mantic says Kings of War‘s Fracture expansion book “represents an important update for the game, combining new narrative content, fresh army lists, gameplay options and balance adjustments informed by player feedback and tournament data”.
Which is going to be exciting, I’m sure, for keen players. They’ll get new Command Orders and list building options to play with, alongside what sounds like a pretty wide-ranging re-tune and re-up of rules options across many factions. What’s got me excited, though, is the range of new minis that comes with this book.
The main event is an entirely new army range for the Forces of Nature, the Herd: a variety of human-animal hybrids that sit somewhere between Warhammer’s Beastmen and the DnD Druid class, all ram horns, hide armor, and bestial aggression. It’s a massive expansion to a previously pretty limited faction, that Mantic says has been in the works since it first described the Herd in lore text over ten years ago.
All the ‘fantasy nature magic’ gang are here! We’ve got a lady who’s a tree; ranged and melee centaurs; tribal chieftains; spellcasting druids; massive, hairy not-quite-minotaurs; some very weird tree elementals; and a core, beast-person species, the Ferauns, whose horned faces somehow manage to blend sheep, goat, deer, cat, and fox into something distinct from any of them.
It’s a big drop, but if it were just those leafy lads, I wouldn’t be writing this little opinion piece. The game changers, instead, are the new centerpiece minis Fracture adds to two other armies: a High Paladin on Dragon for Basilea (an empire of shiny, Gondor coded humans) and Teynne the Usurper, for red-skinned, fork-tongued devils the Forces of the Abyss.
Ronnie Renton, Mantic Games’ boyishly charming, relentlessly ebullient CEO, may shed a tear to read it but, like most KoW minis, they both look inexpressibly old fashioned to me. They’re less detailed than the models GW would create to fill similar product roles; less cinematic; more robust and uncomplicated in their design and personality. But also, I absolutely freaking love them.
And I now realize it’s because they have one quality in spades, that 98% of Warhammer models have lacked for a decade or more. They have camp. Their proportions, poses, and expression are shamelessly exaggerated to fill out a tried and true fantasy archetype, instead of meticulously sculpting every half-millimeter for maximum fantastical realism.
The Dragon is deliberately lumpen and muscular, with up-reared, batty wings, like Blake’s Great Red Dragon. Its side-on, roaring head could have come off the front of a 1970s swords-and-sandals pulp novel. Teynne resembles nothing so much as Tim Curry’s sexy devil in the bizarre 1985 Ridley Scott movie Legend – which in my mind is high praise.
I have no doubt that I’m very late to the party on this, but these two miniatures have rather opened my eyes to what Mantic’s fantasy ranges can accomplish that GW’s don’t seem to want to anymore. I can’t say I’ll rush to get into the game – my pattern is very much full – but I really might pre-order these two characters alone, just to own them. It helps that they’re a bunch cheaper than Warhams, too.
If you’re already a dyed-in-the-wool KoW fan, come join the free Wargamer Discord community to let me know exactly what I’ve been missing, and maybe recommend me a couple other standout models to look at. Fellow enjoyers of the 1985 movie Legend are especially welcome.
Source: Wargamer
