Welcome to the embodiment of Bovine intervention.
It’s been five years since Games Workshop made the (at the time highly controversial) decision to completely reboot its beloved tabletop miniature game Warhammer Fantasy Battles into what is now Warhammer Age of Sigmar. Completely changing not just the ruleset of the game but literally blowing its entire world up, the model making company have spent the past five years slowly but surely introducing new spins on beloved factions of Warhammer into Age of Sigmar and its heightened, fantastical new world. Sorry, your Dwarves are now Duardin who are either perpetually angry, literally-gold-tattooed barbarians, or steampunk cyborg sky pirates. Your Wood Elves? Tree people. Your Orks? Well…now they’re Orruks. OK, maybe some of the changes were more about being able to get a copyright on a non-generic term.
Elves — or Aelves, blessed be that copyright — are probably some of the most radically transformed races in the setting. There’s currently five-ish factions of them. There’s the aforementioned tree people, the Sylvaneth. The wandering City Aelves made up of survivors of the old world. For the more sinisterly-flavored side of elvishness, there’s blind sea-dwelling soulsuckers called the Idoneth Deepkin, and shadowy dark assassins called the Daughters of Kaine. And now there’s the most recently introduced, the Lumineth Realm-Lords. Those last ones, essentially a new spin on the old Warhammer High Elves, have been teased as a new faction for much of 2020, but given the state of, uh, the world, their models have only just started coming out. Today, the Warhammer Community website gave us a closer look at one of those new kits, the Spirit of the Mountain.
I cannot stress this enough: this is a giant cow made out of mountain and mountain spirits. It is a battle cattle. A bovine deity. A holy cow. It looks ridiculous. It looks incredible. It’s probably going to be quite expensive — it’s about five times as tall as a typical Warhammer infantry miniature — and despite the fact that I’m terrible at painting models, I want one just to gawp at it. It’s just exactly the sort of dumb-good you want out of a setting as often ludicrous as Warhammer and its futuristic sibling.
So what is the Spirit of the Mountain, I hear you ask? Long story short: The Lumineth, much like the High Elf ancestors, are a bunch of extra-arse magic loving nerds. So extra they were, their process of acquiring more magical knowledge once almost tore their entire advanced society apart in an event called the Spirefall. It took doom for these dramatic pointy-ears to release they were being jerks, so they went on a spiritual retreat and refound themselves, bonding with the elemental spirits of their land of light, Hysh and learning new ways to empower themselves without going bonkers again. There are four elemental schools particularly dominant in the Luminth’s current society: water, air, light (dubbed ‘zenith’), and stone.
That’s where these bovine wargods come stomping in. They’re literally giant avatars the Lumineth have forged out of magical stones as a host for the natural spirits of the mountains to then embody. They even make little mountain replicas on them (well, little is not quite the right word), complete with forests to make said spirits feel at home in their giant bovine stone-mecha. And then those spirits march out alongside the Lumineth and bash things to death with giant hammers.
Because. Y’know. Warhammer.
Anyway, head on over to the link to see more of what you can do with the Spirit of the Mountain kit, which is set to go up for pre-order from Games Workshop on September 13.