My thoughts on General's Handbook 2017

[wayniac]

So having skimmed through GH2017, here are some of my thoughts on it:

First, while not technically part of GH2017 they are mentioned, and the Open War cards seem great. I plan to make great use of them as my go-to for AOS games. Draw a deployment zone, draw an objective, possibly a twist, possibly give each player a ruse, and let that drive the narrative. Amazing idea.

I really like the changes to Coalition of Death and Triumph and Treachery to make them more interesting, although I doubt you'll see many people bother with the optional rules for limiting communication (too much of a hassle for most people to do). Triumph & Treachery in particular seems really good with the concept of "neutral" armies that you can't interact with unless they are your chosen enemy, and the "Treachery Points" mechanic seems really fun.  The Siege rules I'll be honest I skipped as I'm not really interested in that, but from a quick glance they seem fairly solid.  Not for me though, so I can't really comment more on them.

The Realmgate Wars battleplans seem pretty good for when you don't want an asymmetrical approach using the Pitched Battles, but as I said above I think Open War will be my go-to for most games. Speaking of the Pitched Battles, they definitely seem to be an improvement over the IMHO rather bland ones from the previous General's Handbook and should provide a lot of tactical flexibility and depth during the game.

The points and abilities changes have been discussed elsewhere so I won't get into them, but I will say that some I like, some I think weren't enough (especially for Death) but overall they are better than getting nothing.

The Time of War rules I found to be a bit disappointing however, I had expected more generic rules simply for playing in a particular realm, rather than a specific segment of said realm. Some of the abilities are cool, some can be over the top and make them unsuitable for even a rough balance approach (the beast one where you each get a free MONSTER, or the Metal one where you might have to roll a save for each model in a unit that's not in cover, and if they fail the save the unit takes a mortal wound, the Death one that can instantly slay models on a 6 while providing bonuses for DEATH units). These are still unsuitable IMHO without extra work to strip out the crazy effects but leave some of the more thematic ones in place. The bonus wizard spells are very cool and at the least I could see those being in play to provide a "feel" to each realm, but most of the special things can be too unbalanced to make them worth using, which is a shame as I was really looking forward to being able to make use of different realms in games to give the game a different feel.

Overall, despite my disliking some of the points and abilities changes, this is a solid book.  Everything really seems improved from before, and with the Open War cards there's a lot of variety that can be done in Warhammer: Age of Sigmar games.