WIP Dwarves and 4th Edition Theme Lists

Back during Covid in 2020, once we stopped washing down groceries and the mail, I rediscovered ebay, and bought a lot of minis while working from home. Some even got painted up. One of the many reasons for the splurges was me wanting to get a bunch of intro armies established, as I hoped to pick the game back up and do a bunch of demo games once the pandemic waned. I had hoped a variety of armies could provide sensible jumping-off points for anyone interested in playing. 

It was a neat idea, but ridiculous in retrospect. Most bundles have since been given away, others are in still boxes of shame and yet to be spoken of (or accounted for) in great or any detail, but one bundle has since been broken wide open over the last few months: roughly a gazillion (mostly)-Mantic Dwarfs!

Dwarfs! Many of them primed and heading to the hobby table soon!

I picked up a used Mantic bundle online for very cheap during the pandemic, and then forgot about it, and picked up a second one about a year ago. Together, they seem to have been several army bundles, and all told, it's probably aclose to 200+ plastic Mantic Dwarf infantry minis for about $120. Not bad! I made a few other purchases over the years, and started organizing them all in late 2024, with the intent on building up a Free Dwarf army in 2025 to help fully embrace the next escalation league for the club. I had only tepidly embraced the first one but was ready for a new challenge, though the Free Dwarfs never actually manifested in 2025 due to lack of hobby time. So we’re gearing up for a 4th Edition run with them… in some form.

4th Edition is coming very soon, but has a lot of big changes known already. Ignoring all the stats and rules changes entirely here, armies are changing and consolidating. Rumors and spoilers are still trickling out, let alone compiled or comprehended from the drip drip drip of dissemination through podcasts, but overall, it is clear that list offerings are being culled and tightened up, and most of the old Theme armies look to be rolling back up into the old Master Armies, and then “unlocked” using specific heroes, allowing different combinations of units to be fielded. This consolidation impacts the majority of my armies, since apparently I play a lot of themed armies.

Herd is being rolled up into Nature, am I a smidgen apprehensive about their long-term viability, though they've suffered greatly from a lack of variable playstyles, and having access to more elementals and such could be really cool. Kingdoms of Men is rumored to be rolled up into League of Rhordia, for a mix of humans supplemented by Mantic Halflings. Varangur is rumored to be rolled up into Northern Alliance for now, but then broken out again at a future date. And my potential future Free Dwarfs here are rumored to be rolled up into Imperial Dwarfs to start, with Berserker Heroes able to change the army comp, and the Free Dwarfs are also rumored to be broken out into a distinct army again at some nebulous future date.

Writing this up in late October (it's taken a while to get around to post) I haven’t had a ton of time to keep up with spoilers, but my quick assumption (probably not a hot take) is that heroes and monsters will be more infrequent, but that the former will be much more impactful on the battlefield. I think a lot of my armies will have drastically different playstyle and list building approaches in 4th. The Kingdoms of Men/League of Rhordia, for example, probably won’t be able to have triple Giants, or triple flying Generals, or even triple war machines, just due to the restrictions we’ve seen spoiled elsewhere. I think the maximum of any monster or titan or hero or war machine is probably going to be two, either enforced by hard, bracketed list-building restrictions in the army list, or by softer practical restrictions, like difficulty of getting unlocks, and restrictions on the number of warlords and such it is practial to field. We shall see. Much more info is yet to be released.

Despite all of the uncertainty surrounding 4th, most generic units seemed safe, and as long as I’m not tripling down on hero hobbying, most hobbying efforts felt like they should probably be ok. So I recommitted to the Dwarf project in September, doing a lot of snipping and filing and priming. We'll take a proper new inventory once I get some more details on 4th, and hopefully I'll get some good hobbying done over the winter!