Throw your minds back to AdeptiCon, and you’ll remember that baleful vortex of arcane Ghurish energy known as the Krondspine Incarnate.
These primal entities are manifestations of the magical energy of the Realm of Beasts, and now it’s time to look at how they’ll change your games of Warhammer Age of Sigmar when Season of War – Thondia arrives for pre-order this weekend.
These raw Ghurish vibe-monsters aren’t just grumpy, they're positively raging, a tempest of fangs and claws with a statline to bellow about.
Those attacks sport a hefty amount of Rend and Damage, and they’re exceptionally reliable, hitting on a 3+ and wounding on 3+ or 2+. The number of attacks the Krondspine Incarnate can make will change according to how powerful it is – but right off the bat, it starts each game with a fearsome 11 attacks.
Yes, incarnates wax and wane in power throughout the game according to how suffused they are with arcane power. The better they’re doing, the more lethal they become – and the harder they are to kill.
Incarnates don’t even have a Wounds characteristic – it’s kind of tricky to injure a howling mass of realm-energy tethered to an assortment of bones and realmstone. Instead, their power is marked by a series of states running from Empowered to Abolished.
The incarnate starts at Primal, and will shift up as it devours endless spells and slays MONSTERS, or down if it suffers damage.
Yep, that’s right. These vortexes of thaumaturgical energy can even turn endless spells into phantasmal prey. If an incarnate ends up within charge distance of one such wandering spell, it may choose to charge and perform a special Monstrous Rampage to chow down and increase its level. If it fails, however, its level falls as it weakens from the clash of energies.
So how in the world does an army cope with such elemental savagery? A HERO with enough willpower can bond with one of these creations, corralling their bestial intelligence and pointing them at enemy lines. Every faction may wrangle these spectres to do their bidding, but there’s a cost.
If the HERO the incarnate is bonded to dies, it reverts to its wild form. In this state, it is yet more savage, and in its mindless aggression, it treats all forces, be they friend or foe – or endless spell! – as targets to sate its bloodlust.
Their unpredictable nature makes the incarnates a serious risk – but one with a mighty reward. A general who seeks to bend one of these savage entities to their will must protect the champion who undertook the task, or pay the price.
That’s not all the Krondspine Incarnate can bring to the table. Besides vicious attacks, magic-munching, and unpredictable behaviour, this living maelstrom also exudes an aura that can turn even sage warriors savage. These energy waves are so powerful that they even flooded Yndrasta with violent* emotion and transformed her Stormcast Eternal allies into barely conscious feral brutes.
This is all explained in full in Season of War – Thondia, an upcoming supplement for Warhammer Age of Sigmar, which covers everything you need to know about Krondspone Incarnates and plenty more besides for all three ways to play.
Then there’s the Thondian Strongpoint, which features a range of Ghurish terrain, including a titanic skeleton, under-construction Dawnbringer Crusade fortifications, and a Krondspine Incarnate ready and waiting to tear them – and any warriors foolish enough to traipse through its domain – to pieces.
These are all available to pre-order this weekend, ready to transform your battles in the Mortal Realms into titanic clashes between Behemoths and primal incarnates.
* More violent than usual, even for the Celestial Spear.