Plans for upcoming Skaven book

While I originally planned to finish version 1.0 first and then makes changes based on feedback as necessary, I figured it might be better to get the community's input right away and save the trouble of having to go back and redo a lot of things later. After all, I'm not trying to be like GW here, so what's the point of keeping the community in the dark really?
I have tried to not go overboard with changes since most of the Skaven book is pretty solid, and as such I will for the most part just streamline some of the rules to follow the basic BRB and rebalance points cost, as well as fixing those damn slaves!

Planned changes:

• Scurry Away! uses Swiftstride rules.
• Slave units are limited to the number of Clanrat units (mainstay rule).
• Slaves rolls 3D6 for all Psychology tests and Break tests, and discards the lowest result.
• Slaves no longer "explode", but causes hits on units they flee through only.
• Units that have their own movement and shooting rules will for the most part use rules from BRB, like Doomwheel, Abomination, Weapon Teams etc.
• Ratling Gun fires 3D6 shots, rather than rolling individually.
• Warplightning Cannon roll one artillery dice x 4 to determine range and strength, fires like a laser rather than bounce (6th ed rules).
• Doomwhell rolls one artillery dice to determine range (x2) and strength.
• Abomination goes berserk on the roll of a double, not a triple.
• Reworked Dogde mechanic for Eshin units (re-roll to hit instead of ward saves, no special ones for champions).
• Plague Monks are a Core choice (thus allowing for pure Pestilens lists).
• Night Runners are skirmishers (thus making them actually useful).
• Weapon Teams and Jezzails have 2W.
• Weapon Team ward save replaced with Look Out Sir.
• Warlock Engineers will be wizards by default, does not buy extra equipment (less special rules to keep track of).
• Snare nets removed.
• Lore of Ruin and Lore of Plague are separate lores. Lore attribute for both is rolling 13 for casting results in IF. Grey Seers can still use spells from both at the same time. Curse of the Horned Rat is the 6th spell from Lore of Ruin. Warpstorm and Weeping World Sores added.
• Wolf Rats added.
• Master Mutator added.
• Eshin Sorcerer added. Buys spells rather than rolling.
• Master Assassin added.
• Warlock Master added.
• Plaguelord added.
• Nurglitch added.
• Brood Horror added.
• Lore of Stealth added.
• Snikch is a Lord choice.
• Rat Ogres 35 pts.
• Jezzails ignore long range, champion has Sniper rule.
• Globadiers 9 pts, no longer wear heavy armour. Removed volley from the back and life is cheap.
• Weapons team no armour, 5 pts cheaper.
• Censer bearers 1A, 13 pts.
• Cheaper Special characters.
• The following magic items will stay (not including those that are on SC's): Fellblade, Blade of Corruption,  Rust Armour, Warpstone Amulet, Warpscroll, Skavenbrew, Skalm, Brass Orb, Sacred Standard of the Horned Rat, Storm Banner. Essentially the most iconic and classic Skaven items that has been part of their rules since 4th ed.
• Lots of new art and background material will be added.
• Fine, Stormfiends will be included. I still don't like them, and they will be severely nerfed (but useable).

What other changes do you feel should be included or altered?

Regarding the 9th Age Project

One of the bigger Warhammer community projects right now seems to be the so-called 9th Age. I've been keeping my eye on it from time to time since they started, and they have finally released their Ravening Hordes list in an alpha stage. While I like quite a few of the changes to the main game that they have done, I'm less impressed with the army lists themselves (and that seems to be a pretty common reaction from what I can gather from the Warhammer Forum). Though they are still an early draft, if their current direction is something to go by, then I don't see them as much of an improvement to the game at all, for the following reasons:

• Oversimplified rules. Most of the units' unique rules are gone, with nothing to replace them. I'm all for streamlining, but there's a limit to that too.
• Changed unit names. While I understand that they want to avoid copyright issues (something I still haven't had a problem with from GW even after 5 years), they have changed so many of the names you don't even know what units they are supposed to be without looking at the stats and rules. Most of the name replacements are rather poor too, like "Elves of Nature" replacing Wood Elves, or "Monstrous Rats" replacing Rat Ogres and so on. They have said they want input from the community to improve this though, but they are going a bit over the top in their effort to not provoke GW's lawyers by changing already generic names into even more generic names.
• Whole units missing from the army lists. Not sure if this is just an oversight, or if they really intend to leave them out completely.
• Weird internal balance and points costs for many units, that does not really solve any of the previous problems they had.
• Very basic layout and formatting. I know it's an alpha version, but I would at least liked to see something akin to GW's RH-lists in terms of graphical quality. Right now, it's a strain on the eyes to read the unit entries.
• The time-span they are planned to be used. According to the 9th Age, they are a temporary solution until the complete army books are finished. It took me 3 years to put out my army books, and then I had nearly full creative control, did not have to make up all background or art from scratch, and I had a ton of free time as a student. So even if the 9th Age guys would be able to release one whole army book every 2 months (which is unlikely, coming from the DoW project which took over a year), it would still take them almost 3 years to just finish the official armies.

Apart from that, they seem overly ambitious. They have stated that they plan to release complete army books for all factions, and then even expand into uncharted territory, just like WAP (that is, this website) have done. However, based on previous community projects, there's only 4 books besides the ones made by me that I would hold up to a good enough standard as far as army books are concerned, and those were made by 4 different people each focusing on a single book for the course of at least a year.
The 9th Age consists of 6 top members who plan to make least 16 army books, without using any of the official background, any official art or any official names. In my experience, these projects tend to run out of steam in the first 1-2 months and then finally die down altogether.
They have said that they want the community to get together and want to assign 5 people or so working on each book, which they will then supervise. Call me a Negative Nancy if you like, but unless they have a member of each team being reasonably skilled at graphic design/editing/writing etc, I think we are in for a very inconsistent stream of not-Warhammer books.


With that in mind, I believe I will probably need to step in. So after I am finished with Skaven and Beastmen, I will probably try to go back to the official 8th ed books and give each of them updates to fix internal and external balance, as well as adding new units and background. And in the case of the Elf books, fix the awful additions to their fluff by Mat Ward. Yeesh.

Updated: Nippon, Hobgoblins, Bretonnia, Cult of Ulric

Changelog:

Hobgoblins:

• Cowardly Despoilers give the Hobgoblins +1 To Hit when charging the flank/rear, and -1 combat res. if charged themselves, rather than the other way around.
• Khans and Chieftains can use lances.
• Scorpion Riders have a 5+ scaly skin, for a total of 2+, 55 pts.
• Sneaky Gitz may skirmish.

Nippon:

• Borne on the Wind is limited to a 12" fly move.

Bretonnia:

• Streamlined Lance Formation to use rules for Monstrous Ranks for rank bonus etc.
• Added Lance Formation and Blessing of the Lady to each unit's entry for consistency.

Cult of Ulric:

• Added barding to the Grandmasters in the army list (bug fix).

Halflings:

• Halfling Militia 3 pts.
• Vigilante guard 5 pts, LA is an upgrade.

Also some news about the Skaven; working on them little by little everyday, and is currently up to 198 pages. There is a ton of editing that needs to be done though, so it will be substantially shorter when finished, probably around 120 pages or so. I plan to get a lot of work done on it during my vacation next week, but I don't have any release date as of yet.

Also preparing to add more to the miniatures gallery. Will be mostly sneak peeks of eventually-to-be-painted models from each of my armies to give you guys some ideas and inspiration (because I don't expect them to be finished any time soon). As soon as I get my new tripod, I'll take some pictures and post them on the blog.

New Chaos Dwarfs update out now!

The last version of the book was pretty much an extension of the Legion of Azgorh list, using most of the original rules from it with new ones added. However, going through the book, I noticed that a lot of the rules were needlessly complicated and redundant. With that in mind, the update contains the following changes:

• Clarified War Machine types and changed Iron Daemon and Siege Tower to work as chariots.
• Streamlined Iron Daemon, Magma Cannon and Deathshrieker.
• Merged Dagger of Malice with Obsidian Blade.
• Updated Resolute and Relentless to be on par with Dwarfs.
• Removed Bale Taurus, Great Taurus still present.
• Streamlined contempt.
• Removed Blood of Hashut, Naptha Bombs and Darkforged weapons since they are only used by Sorcerers as optional upgrades.
• Tenderizers and Whirlwinds may be taken in units.
• Tenderizers does not ignore armour, 100 pts.
• Blunderbusses are quick to fire, move or fire.
• Granite Armour gives 3+ save rather than 2+.
• Sorcerer-Prophet 220 pts, no longer have Darkforged weapon.
• Infernal Guard are no longer upgraded to Ironsworn, does not have ensorcelled hand weapons.
• Warriors do not have shields as default equipment, 8 pts basic.
• Devastators 13 pts.
• Immortals 14 pts.
• Berzerkers 13 pts.
• Iron Daemon S7, 250 pts.
• Kollossus 230 pts.
• Siege Giant 225 pts.
• Juggernaut T6, W10, 275 pts.
• Spelling errors and bugs fixed.