Small update
Work on "the ninth age" (suggestions for better name?) is ongoing as we speak. Basically it will be an updated version of 8th warhammer. Pretty much like how 7th edition was an updated version of 6th.
Personally I believe the best chance of saving the type warhammer we love is community driven rulebook and armybooks. If done right, such project could give us precisely what we have always wished for GW to be (writing competitive game, balance updates, writers that are in touch with the community etc).
It such project is to have any chance of success, we need a large player base, thus we want to maximise the number of people transiting to this. We therefore strive to create a version of warhammer that is close enough to 8th for people to still see it as warhammer and be able to pick it up and try it out without too much rules reading beforehand. But we still want to add some new stuff, both to create something to get people exited about trying it out, but also for improving the game.
So,
1. Rewriting rules for broken parts of the game, keeping the parts that works and changing the parts that do not
2. Small updates to rules with minor issues
3. New lores (keep some spells, around 30-40% new spells for each lore, updates to attributes, casting values etc where needed)
4. New magic items (both common and race specific, again keep some, add some new stuff)
5. New points costs for very strong/weak units (maybe rules changes in a few cases)
6. Possibly add new unit entries to match new models released for AoS.
Eventually we want to have an international committee, with representation from various communities, for deciding on all updates, rules changes, maybe even create new armybooks. Creating such committee would take time however (especially with most community representatives preparing for ETC at the moment), and releasing this soon seem important if we are to not lose to many players. On top of this, larger groups tend to work slower, so again creating a committee at this time is not optimal. We therefore intend to get the ball rolling and ASAP publish an alpha-version including points 1-5 (probably only points changes to the most imbalanced units in this version). Goal is to get this out before ETC (beginning of August), with a few sneak-peak pre-releases of some stuff during the next few weeks to get some hype going and show that works being done. If alpha-version is received well, we can then start to gather a committee and with this create a beta version based on feedback on the alpha version.
/Erik
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