Warhammer Fest 2023 Recap and Comments – Part 3

And the third and final part of our Warhammer Fest 2023 recap and comments, focussing on the Monday reveals. With them being only labelled as Kill Team and the rather "light" content of the Fantasy skirmishes from Saturday, I didn't expect that much. But was happily surprised.

There will be a narrative campaign for Kill Team called Ashes of Faith. It is not part of the current season Gallowdark, but an extension of its own, I assume a bit like Rogue Trader back in 2018. It covers no terrain, and a repack of the chaos cultists sets from the 40k Chaos range (Dark Commune, Cultists and Accursed Cultists), as well as a few Sisters of Silence and Scions to support the new Inquisitorial Agents, who are a new plastic kit, that will give you the option to build 7 different miniatures (a few variants shown here).

These are a nod to the Inquisitor 54mm miniature roleplaying game by Games Workshop in the 2000s, among them most noticeably Sergeant Stone, who had his 54mm miniature and even a rumour engine teaser a while back on Warhammer Community. The new model really catches the artwork by John Blanche and Adrian Smith.

This is a great easter egg and from what I understand with the character progression, a nice sidestep towards Inq28 and maybe missing link towards Necromunda.

After that, within the Kill Team slot the next Warhammer Heroes was announced. This a blind-packaged Space Marine range of which we already had various sets, with Firstborn Space Marine (Ultramarines and Blood Angels), Terminators and Death Guard. They usually were first sold in Japan and later in Europe / Rest of the World, with from what I understood some miniatures being rarer than others within the sets. This is not product for me, I don't like this trading card / blind buy model, but it is something that works quite well in certain markets and is used to gain market share in other areas like Asia.

What makes this series of Warhammer Heroes special, is that it receives its own rules for Kill Team as Strike Force Justian. No, the older heroes sets won't receive their own Kill Team rules. Honestly, we already had tones of various Primaris Marines, with limited editions, easy-to-build poses etc., I don't really see the need for these, especially as the captain is just another Primaris Captain.

And the final teaser of Warhammer Fest is the next season of Kill Team, what comes after Gallowdark. The new season starts in Autumn, probably called Vermillion from the short 20 second teaser and there will be Aeldari involved. Not much more on that.

Beyond these teasers, we covered here, Warhammer Fest hosted a few tournaments, a Golden Demon painting competition, which flew below the radar of many. I think that's sad, because I saw tons and tons of reposts of the Warhammer Community pictures, with no additional info. No comments, just like "yeah" to gather a few clicks and likes on Social Media and no content from the event as such. Of the few content creators that went there, I mostly saw again selfies with others and not really much coverage of the show itself (we do this differently, a parking lot picture and then it's all about the show in our event coverage).

I hope that we get proper, high-res coverage of the painting challenge and some of the gaming tables, because that's what it is all about. At least when I went to Games Day back in the day. Have to see if I can touch up some of my older Games Day visits in Germany for the blog (the last one was in 2013, so picture quality etc. might be an issue).

As for Warhammer Fest 2023, tickets were 20 GBP for a single day, 40 GBP for the whole weekend with two upgrades for Premium (140 GBP incl. a goodie bag) and VIP for 1.080 GBP (yes, that's right that's more than a grand). For European visitors, Manchester has an airport that is connected to various cities (Amsterdam, Basel, Oslo, Frankfurt, Munich, Milan, Prague etc.) and it is only a 20 minute car ride from the airport to the exhibition centre (Which is quite central in the city, if you want to combine it with other activities).

Will I try to go for the 2024 Warhammer Fest? Probably not. Not unless there is one in Germany. The panels are nice, but I can view them in the comfort of my house via twitch. As for me covering the event, most people are interested in the novelties and there's no reason to go there and post pictures of items that Games Workshop already showed you in High Res on their own page. I could just go there as a visitor and enjoy myself, but to be honest, I am a wargamer and my hobby is tabletop wargaming, not just Warhammer and so I prefer planning trips like BOYL, Salute etc. and maybe someday things like GenCon.