Warhammer The Old World – Tomb Kings of Khemri Unboxing

The second core set for Warhammer The Old World covers the Tomb Kings of Khemri, and is set for pre-order on Saturday January 6th, with a two-week pre-run for delivery on January 20th. This boxed set is a bit more expensive than the Kingdom of Bretonnia edition, with a RRP of 230 EUR / 175 GBP.

This core set will be available in English, German and French and cover a total of 93 miniatures.

Just like the other core set, this is a big box with thick walls and glossy prints all around. The back picture gives you an overview of the content and on the sides are two units painted up, the Chariots and the regular Skeleton Warriors with Spears.

The first thing you see once taking off the lid is a grey wall of plastic with the templates and rulers on top. After you removed these stacks of sprues, you reach the blue separator with the Old World Logo on it, to protect the printed part of the content. Once you take that off, you will get access to the hard cover rulebook with 352 pages, the bases and dice.

The gaming aids are templates casted in transparent orange plastic and the fearsome flexible measure sticks (often called whip sticks and caused mayhem among less disciplined players back in the day) from softer plastic in red. These designs are with us since Middlehammer era in the 90s, as you can see on the production stamps of 1995 (rulers) and 1998 (templates). Same thing with the bases, as some sizes date back to 2001.

Please note, there is still a production issue with the red measurement sticks, that are still 1/4th of an inch short. So, either both of you or none of you should use these for measurement, to not create any (dis)advantages. Interesting side note, the dice pack with 20 regular D6 and a larger scatter dice says Age of Darkness on it, as it is the same pack they use with the Horus Heresy starter set.

In addition to the hard cover rulebook, you get a reference sheet for a quick overview on some stats and a combined assembly sheet with the army list for 1.250 points in the back.

The hard cover book is made with a lot of love to detail. It is full coloured and starts and ends with  double page spread of the map of the Old World (from ~2300 IC). The first pages give you a brief introduction of the game system and a quick overview on the various races and timeline of the Old World. Lots of illustrations and artwork is used along the way, to frame the information delivered.

The layout of the rules is very similar to the latest Warhammer Fantasy Battles book. Clear diagrams with top views of regiments show various situations and how to handle them, especially with moving or multiple close combat situations, this is helpful. Among the illustrations and drawings, they used in this book, they picked up a neat detail from older publications. Small battle scenes or sketches of individual units, partially coloured (middle picture). And here and there you get an idea of how the armies will look on the new bases. The 20mm bases were completely dropped for Infantry and everything is on at least 25mm squares, which for example with the High Elves Spearmen looks more like a marching column than the shield wall of the past.

After that we see images of the whole armies and individual units of the 9 armies included in the initial release. The rules and army lists for these are not part of the core rulebook, but covered in the supplements Forces of Fantasy and Ravening Hordes. In detail these are:

• Empire of Man
• Dwarfen Mountain Holds
• Kingdom of Bretonnia
• Wood Elf Realms
• High Elf Realms
• Orc & Goblin Tribes
• Warriors of Chaos
• Beastmen Brayherds (not shown)
  
• Tomb Kings of Khemri

As you will notice, not all of the factions are listed above. These will receive free legacy rules, that will be published on Warhammer Community for download. Those will cover rules for Dark Elves, Skaven, Vampire Counts, Daemons of Chaos, Ogre Kingdoms, Lizardmen and the Chaos Dwarfs.

Towards the end we move on to the more elaborate rules of the system, including the set-up of scenarios and gaming tables. These pictures really catch the feel of old Warhammer. Among the tables you see a lot of terrain from the 90s and 00s, and I have my fingers crossed that we will see some of these return to the range. The rules of the core rulebook even cover a campaign system and a very practical overview in the back.

Among the releases you will find various card decks for pre-order. Some of them are generic for all armies to be used, others are faction specific. There are the Lores of Magic and Common Magic Items. These will only be available in English and not translated in German or French. These don't provide additional information, but give you the information in a compact format, so you have rules of the spell or magic item at hand and don't need to look them up in the book during playing. In addition, there are faction specific card decks for Tomb Kings (and Bretonnians) as well, covering their special rules, items and such in a deck of its own. Please note, these products had often the problem of being rather quickly out of stock in the past and then were just available through second hand market (usually at a hefty mark-up). So, if you intend to use them, take the chance if you see them at a regular price.

Both boxes come with huge stacks of grey plastic. With the exception of the Necrolith Bone Dragon, these are re-releases from older miniatures. The skeleton horses date back to 1993, and the Skeleton Warriors even back to 1998, but seem to had a re-tooling, as the Tomb Kings were released with a big wave in December 2002, but the sprues say 2005.

Each of the units in this box will have an additional review for their own, this is just the unboxing overview, to give you an idea of the content of these boxes. The skeletons were among the first multi-part plastic kits Games Workshop released in the late 90s (along with Soldier Regiment for the Empire, Skaven Clanrats and Chaos Warriors) and received upgrades with the release of Khemri as a White Dwarf list in November of 1998 and the later full release in December of 2002. This means the kits are meant to be used with each other and you can swap bits and pieces across the range. We will go into detail on this in the review.

The new model for this release is the Necrolith Bone Dragon, which is spread out on two sprues. It was previewed on the Warhammer Tournament event in 2023, and gives you the option to build either a Tomb King or a High Priest on Necrolith Bone Dragon, each with their own palanquin, and a hero on foot.

The core of the army are the skeleton warriors, of which there are 18 sprues in this boxed set. These are the generic undead warriors from 1998 multi-part kit and provide you with hand weapons, that you won't need as the Khemri used spears on their infantry. The bows for the Skeleton archers are part of the upgrade sprue.

The mounted skeleton warriors / skeleton horsemen sprue is included 4x times, and are armed with spears. The parts for the mounted skeleton archers are included, just like for the infantry, with the upgrade sprue. Of the horses, there are 22 in total (16 for the Horsemen and 6 for the chariots).

You get a total of 6 of the Tomb Kings of Khemri upgrade sprues, which will provide you with bows, shields and various bits for the command section of your units.

And last but not least, the Tomb King Chariot, of which there are 3 sprues.  This was designed specifically for the Tomb Kings and is not from the generic Undead range further upgraded,

Just like with the Bretonnians, we don't have the prices on the new units yet, so the price break down has to be taken with a bit of salt. We do know that the rulebook is 55 EUR on its own. The Skeletons were 20 miniatures per boxed set, we have 72 of them in here that gives us 3.8 boxes at ~40 EURs, the chariots were three to a box and if we count this at 55 EUR towards the bill. The only thing missing are the Bonedragon, which has the same size and number of sprues as the Mortarchs at 67,50 EUR but could easily be priced as high as the Black Coach at 110 EUR, so for this we're going with an assumption of ~80 EUR, and the two boxes of Skeleton Horsemen, which we will take in with 40 EURs each again. That's a rough - estimated ! - RRP of (55  + 3.8 * 40 + 55 + 80 + 80 EUR) of 422 EUR. Compared to 235 EUR, that is quite the saving!

The miniatures are quite dated and you will see that in comparison with some of the releases available along with the pre-order. The proportions have changed over the about 30 years, and you will see that especially if you put these miniatures next to the Tomb Guard of the 8th edition (which are incredibly well done). Due to the hordes of undead, I can see this box being worth bought a second time and then added to it with special units, as you get a load of skeleton warriors with this start-up. But beyond that, the range gives you a lot of options, with ranged and close combat units, regular infantry, monstrous units and various cavalry.

Warhammer The Old World is a brand by Games Workshop.

The reviewed product item was provided by the manufacturer.