Bengt

Wasn't there a webpage or twitterbot or something that generated strat & schemes? Is that still around and updated for M3E? You can also decide to play a story encounter in advance.

I think M2E was a bit of a mess towards the end. A lot of abilities and mechanics was different for the sake of being different as if the only way to differentiate a new model was to come up with something really wonky. I have not had the opportunity to play M3E as Malifaux is pretty dead around here but I like the way it reads.

The rules manuals page 43 introduces the concept of titles, are there currently any models that have them?

Oh. I must say that I prefer the M2E Snowstorm. The new one looks kind of silly, so I guess it goes well with the M2E Blessed though 😐. This?

Do you mean this?

Watcher. It's sculpted in perspective, it boggles the mind how this got accepted. Blessed of December. The body structure and pose looks really silly IMO. Johan. Extreme caricature (each foot is about twice the size of his head), which would have been acceptable if every human was sculpted to that aesthetic (while it wouldn't have been a game I would have gotten into, I could have appreciated the effort). Hannah. The retail model is just plain ugly, and doesn't look nearly as functional as the original. The fact that the original limited model is quite nice also rubs it in our faces. Steam Arachnid. When someone laid out the sprue for these, one of the legs was copy pasted twice and another was left out. So not really a re-sculpt so much as a re-cut, but I'm guessing one wont happen without the other.

On the frontpage, in the news section, there is a link to the old broken feed. So that should be updated to the squarespace one.

I'd add Ironsides and any other masters who now have out of keyword models in their boxes. I wouldn't be surprised if the long term plan is to replace all, but obviously some are pretty low priority because they are fine as is.

Lord Chompy Bits looks incredibly derpy. The other models look ok, but the cool thing, IMO, about Dreamer was that he had a quite different look from most of Malifaux models. This edgelord version looks like everyone else.

It becomes important which order cards are placed in the discard pile after an action with this crew. In M2E you get to chose the order when moving multiple cards, I wonder if it will be the same in M3E. Also, I think "...placed on the bottom..." sounds weird, "...placed at the bottom..." would be better IMO.

Soulstone miners being Mah Tucket is pretty bizarre, but at least they are also versatile Arcanists. Raptors just plain defected... Really don't like adding double names to all and sundry, took me a while to figure out who "Willie Brant, Foundry" might be.

Well we know what Walk and Disengage looked like at GenCon:

The Other Side was announced at GenCon 2015 as "Coming soon" and seems be coming out this month. Sure, a new game is a larger undertaking than a new edition, but I expect M3E is at the very minimum a year out.

All the 1st Ed and half or so of the 2nd Ed books so far have been serialised in pod format, the Breachside Broadcast. There's a new episode every two weeks.

Hmm, that's nice and vague. I guess I miss remembered that bit.

Leveticus started out as mercenary as well, there is a chronicles story where he is hired as a body guard for Ramos. Also doesn't the name of his place of business imply mercenary work? Can't remember what it is right now. Force of nature is a good description for Jack Daw. This aspect also makes him, IMO, a very boring character since he totally lacks agency in any stories I've read, he is just drawn to areas and tries to kill everyone there.

New Master I'm Most Excited For (Including New Dual Factions): Mildly interested in Hoffman I guess, they'd have to make a new set for him though, there is now way I'll spend money on the insult that is the lopsided Watcher... Lost Master I'm Most Disappointed In (Including Masters Who Lost Dual Faction): Ramos, I like the thought of spider hordes even though I didn't play them very often. I own Nico as well but hadn't gotten around to painting him, and now I'm feeling less motivated than ever so maybe I'm more disappointed about that? Master That Should Have Been: Mouse as a Guild master (instead of Dashell) so Ironsides could have gotten a proper totem... Existing Master Change I'm Most Excited In: I live in hope for Kaeris and the new burning mechanic.

There is a "keyword" for unthemed models (was it versatile?), emissaries and effigies are confirmed to have it, the riders also seems like good candidates.

Ravenguard is by a large margin the least painful army I've painted, the black main colour is just so easy to apply with spray and a bit of touch up. And if you mess up a little when doing details it's easy to fix since black covers so well. Iyanden on the other hand... In general I enjoy the results of painting, rarely the painting itself. Malifaux is not so bad since mostly you paint relatively few models of each type (I did paint an awful lot of spiders for Ramos), painting 20 Iyanden guardians yellow is a terrible chore, or a bunch of large vehicles yellow. When I'm god-emperor of the galaxy, yellow will be banned. And yes, I'm too stubborn to just switch to a different paint scheme now.

I'm happy there's a new edition coming, I think M2E is in need of a shakeup. There will no doubt be some rules changes that I think are for the worse (and some for the better) but so it goes. I think the dead man's hand solution is unfortunate, such things always comes with a certain stigma of not being quite really 100% official (I mean there are those who reject Forgeworld models for similar reasons). I don't see why they can't just be part of the regular rules with a note in the fluff that s/he is dead/imprisoned at the current point in the story line. I like the idea of themed hiring, and I hope no one in the new edition has ridiculously generous keywords like Leveticus and Marcus has in M2E. I like that having less conditions. But in M2E there are other persistent effects that are not conditions that you have to keep track of (e.g. Howard's Steam Cloud), if those aren't also removed it will all be for nought. The "Token" mechanic doesn't seem to bad as from the descriptions it was limited to one effect per Master. Pass tokens seems like you can keep by your soulstone pool so I don't mind those. Speaking of Pass tokens, I hope this is an actual mechanic for controlling activation disparity (like for instance Confrontation 3e had) and not just something you can buy or get a set amount of. Annoyed that the cards wont be standard magic size since any other sleeves/binders can be quite hard/expensive to get a hold of even if they do exist.

Bengt is my given name. I stopped using nicknames on forums many years ago for reasons I can't recall. 😛 The avatar picture is of my left eye.

I've said it before but I think Malifaux is Gotcha the Game. Don't get me wrong, it's still fun for the most part, but I'm not that fond of the design philosophy of making units unique by adding wordier and wordier unique rules as times goes by. I consider a game like Epic Armageddon, which had a list of unit and weapon abilities in the main rules and built all the units from those (and varying scores of course), much more elegant.

I think Amphibious Assault, Brotherhood of the Rat, and Creative Taxidermy are totally cool. They are not only single faction, the included models are summoning each other, so they are very closely tied together. If I played any of those factions (or crew in the rat case) they would be on my list. But even if you look at only the Arcanist models of Backdraft, all they seem to have in common is that they make some use of the burning mechanic and that is not a very strong tie in a faction with many options for burning. But yeah, I'm also a filthy casual so I'm not going to chase or overspend on models for that extra oomph in some clever combo.

I detest the practice of bundling models from several factions in one box. So even if the Fire Golem end up being the perfect "fix" for Kaeris I wouldn't buy Backdraft as gremlins are useless to me and it's way too much work flogging them on the side. Not super happy about models before rules either. This is not so bad as it will solve itself in time, but it sure stops me from picking up a product on release.

In the art I like the expression of the Vik with the full suit, it doesn't come across in the render though, so meh.