Love the High Elf outpost additions!
Horse cavalry is a given for legacy reasons, but we can probably expect something fantastic for elite units similar to demigryph knights, beside the already existing pegasus knights.
Demigryphs for Empire was one of the best additions, background-wise, in all of 8th edition, by the way. After all, when places like Cathay would receive stone dog cavalry, martial arts monks and similar exotic wild stuff had they received an army book, then places like the Empire (and Bretonnia) should receive likewise exotic and wild stuff fit for their themes. It’s valuable to design places with an outsider’s view of the strange and the weird in mind, leaning into the exotic and strange (such as fantasy creatures like demigryphs and fanatics like flagellants) even for cultures which seem more mundane because they are closer to home.
Chaos Dwarfs have always been designed as weird and exotic, and we’ve benefited immensely from the sheer strangeness which the GW/FW studio folk have approached us with.
Bretonnia is in most need of fantastical additions to their range out of all WFB armies. They were originally in the 1980s historical medieval Citadel miniatures used for Warhammer fantasy, and it still shows in how Bretonnia was designed through the editions, strangely enough. The beauty of army lists is that you can still build a very low-fantasy, quasi-historical army by not including the more fantastical elements, if you so want. So the more the merrier.
That is also one reason why more grounded, familiar stuff like knights on horses certainly won’t go away. GW have long known the virtue of making stuff that people will recognize at a sight. Demons, orcs, dwarves, elves, vampires, undead ancient egyptians, knights, landsknechts, winged hussars, dragons, treemen and so on. It’s a historically based fantasy smörgåsbord that gets creative with already well known concepts, rather than trying to come up with entirely new stuff just for the sake of it. Instead of removing any of the more grounded down-to-earth bits plucked from real human history, Warhammer usually works by adding fantastical elements on top of the mundane, not by replacing it.
And since the current GW studio still clearly gets what their 40k setting is all about, they’ll probably stay rather true to the spirit in which Warhammer Fantasy was designed while obviously also building upon it and explore new stuff like they’ve always done. So my prediction is to expect grounded down-to-earth stuff to remain even as elite units in particular get all the more fantastical.
As to IP mania, expect redesigns of stuff like armour, dress and horse gear, beside more fantastical additions. Fingers crossed it will look good. :01:
Cheers
- that way GW can trademark them? Thats just a shot in the dark though honestly.
