Path to Glory: Ravaged Coast, up for pre order today, is the first Narrative Supplement for Warhammer Age of Sigmar 4th Edition. With the Vermindoom ripping the Realm of Fire asunder, Path to Glory: Ravaged Coast takes players to Aqshy to hunt for Emberstone in the aftermath of the Skaven invasion.

In this review we’ll be checking out the new book, seeing what is included to enhance your narrative games of Path to Glory and sharing how it stacks up against the previous narrative book Thondia.

Massive thanks to Games Workshop for sending us a free early review copy to check out on the site, if you would like to support the site then why not order your Age of Sigmar goodies through our affiliate Element Games and save yourself some money too?

We also have a full review of the Orruk Warclans Battletome up today, along with an unboxing of the new Orruk kits which you can see just below or over on YouTube

So without further ado let’s send our warbands towards the Ravaged Coast as we check out the latest Path to Glory suppliment for Warhammer Age of Sigmar

Path to Glory: Ravaged Coast Review

Back in 2022 Season of War: Thondia was released, my favourite supplement to Warhammer Age of Sigmar so far. This book was dedicated to Thondia and contained a vast amount of lore and background information along with both narrative and matched play content for AOS.

Fast forward a couple of years and we have the spiritual successor in Path to Glory: Ravaged Coast. As you can guess from the title, this one is solely based on Narrative Play games with Path to Glory being the main focus of the book. At the launch of 4th Edition we had Matched Play content in both the Skaventide box and the General’s Handbook, so it’s nice to see Path to Glory also get some love within the first 6 months of the new edition.

Here at Sprues and Brews we’re massive fans of both the new edition of AOS and Path to Glory, and while there’s been some ace content for Path to Glory in the battletomes that have been released so far over the edition (Including some brilliant Anvil of Apotheosis stuff) I’ve been looking forward to the chance for armies without a Battletome to be able to get on board with Path to Glory without feeling like they are missing out on too much.

This is what Path to Glory: Ravaged Coast does, offering a full Path to Glory Battlepack with is packed full of new features and mechanics along with a whole host of Battleplans, Paths and Enhancements.

Needless to say, I was rather excited when the book arrived in my inbox, and dived straight into it to devour the new content within!

Before we jump into the new game rules however, let’s first take a look at the lore in the book.

The Lore

The first 24 pages in the book are dedicated to lore and the background of the Ravaged Coast. This is around half of the narrative content of the Thondia book, which is a shame – but we get some fun stuff here! Much like Thondia the first part of this book serves as scene setting for your Path to Glory campaigns. We learn of the area of the Ravaged Coast and what happened across the Great Parch after the Vermindoom, and the treasures that have been unearthed during the realm altering rataclysm. Emberstone, the realm stone of Aqshy has been brought up out of the earth across the realm, and the various races of the Mortal Realms are now braving the nightmare of Hel Crown and the surrounding areas in order to gather the precious material. I really enjoyed reading through this, but what it did bring to mind was thoughts of what may happen next in Warcry. With Emberstone being scattered across the realm and various warbands trying to gather this substance it really did make me think of Mordhiem, and how a blend of Mordiem and Warcry would be perfect as a setting for a new edition of the game. This might be me barking up the wrong Wyldwood, but I feel this book sets the scene for that really well.

During the first part of the book we get introduced to four new characters from the Darkoath, Stormcast, Flesh-Eaters and Kruelboyz. While these characters have no profiles, I feel this is a nice way of framing the tales you can tell with your own heroes and the narratives they can weave themselves. We get a nice mixture of background, stories and “in universe” things such as diary entries to tell each of their narratives, and I hope this is something we see continued if we get further Path to Glory suppliments (For 3rd Edition we only got the one book, so fingers crossed we get more love for narrative this edition)

As ever, the presentation is gorgeous with both artwork and miniatures shots used in conjunction with each other, and some nice touches such as the fold out sections we’ve seen in all the battletomes so far.

Path to Glory: Ravaged Coast – The Rules

So on to the bit that most people will be eager to learn about, the rules themselves! There’s a lot of content here to get through, and it’s broken down into 5 main sections – The core Path to Glory rules and Battlepack, Unique Paths to upgrade heroes and units, Universal Enhancements and Lores to customise your heroes, The Emberstone Forge allowing you to enchant weapons and some new Regiments of Renown allowing each Grand Alliance to take a new hero! Let’s dive in starting with the Path to Glory Rules…

Path to Glory Rules

While the core 4th edition Age of Sigmar rulebook offers the basic rules for Matched Play and Narrative Play, the modular approach to the rules means that these can be expanded further in other supplements. For Matched play we got the General’s Handbook at launch, which took the core concepts and expanded them into a system that is better suited for balanced tournament games.

Path to Glory: Ravaged Coast does much the same for Narrative Play. It takes the framework that is given in the core book and expands it out into a fully fledged Battlepack designed for fun narrative games with both your heroes and units “leveling up” and getting new abilities and your forces slowly expanding and getting access to new spells and enhancements across the course of the campaign

The armies start off at just 1000 points and can later be expanded over the course of the campaign by spending Emberstone, and there’s a balancing mechanic for if you face an army that is larger than yours. Essentially there a chance that some of the units in the bigger army are delayed and can potentially turn up later in the battle. This is nice as it still allows the other player to use their full list, it just means that in those critical early turns you’re not so outnumbered – which can be a big help when you’re trying to hunt down precious Emberstone!

One big thing that is different for Path to Glory is that while you still select a core faction (Your general and your initial regiment has to be from this faction) you are allowed to pick up to 4 additional regiments and each of those regiments can be from different factions of the same Grand Alliance if you so wish! So for example if you took Stormcast as your faction you could have a Sylvaneth regiment and a Kharadron regiment as part of your army if you so wished! You can of course take all your regiments as Stormcast, but this is a nice way of adding some variety and different units to your Path to Glory force.

You are also allowed to take a Regiment of Renown for each regiment that allows one – so for example if we use the above army with Stormcast, Sylvaneth and Kharadrons you could take a regiments of renown that are allowed to be taken for any of those armies.

One thing to keep in mind is that at the start of the campaign you don’t start with any Faction Terrain and Enhancements, and you only start with a couple of spells. Terrain and Enhancements you earn by spending Emberstone as the campaign progresses, but spells work a little differently. You have a “spell book” that can contain 6 spells/prayers/manifestations, you start the game with an Unlimited spell and any spell available to your faction the first time a wizard is added, and then over the course of the campaign you unlock additional spells either from lores available to your army or from the universal ones in this book. Over the course of the campaign this then gives you a custom spell lore that all your wizards have access to. This is a really fun way of doing things and also gives you some variety in magic and prayers compared to Matched Play games.

Battles are a little different to Matched Play games too – there’s no battle tactics here, with each mission having it’s own objective, but also D3 +1 emberstone clusters that are deployed on the battlefield. Emberstone is the main currency in the campaign and is done for everything from buying new units, to advancing units down paths and crafting magic items – so this is something you’re going to want to get hold of asap!

There’s 4 tiers of different battleplans that you play through, with players having to earn a certain number of emberstone to get to the later ones, and then win games in those later missions to get to the more cinematic ones. This basically represents your forces advancing through the lands to get to the locations were the Emberstone is richest, which is a nice way of making the battles as varied as possible while also having the currency ramp up as armies get to the end!

There’s 12 different battleplans, and while the first few are pretty straight forward, they get a lot more interesting as the campaign continues with some interesting deployments and victory conditions (Such as units trying to stay alive and carry burning Emberstone shards that slowly cause damage to the carrier!)

Emberstone is a bit of a double edged sword as it is possible for it to explode in your face, but it’s all worth taking the effort to collect as much as you can. You do always earn some after each battle, but tokens you collect is guaranteed income so worth picking up!

With this being a narrative campaign, there’s a lot that can be done in the post game in order to manage your army and enhance your troops (or even see what their fate is after injury!) If you’ve played any other GW narrative campaigns before then a lot of this will be familiar, but essentially the Emberstone you collect can be spent to add new units to your army, to buy enhancements and spells, to send units on a new path or to increase their rank in one, to get a faction terrain piece, make emberstone weapons or even add some unique Ravaged Coast regiments of renown. There’s lots here to do, and tying this to Emberstone chunks rather than experience is a nice way of making sure that no matter how you are doing during the campaign there is always going to be something you can do post game. Obviously, if you are winning more games then you’re going to be able to spend more Emberstone, but even the person who has lost every game will be able to take part and make meaningful changes to their army as things progress.

As units gain get destroyed in battles they accrue battle wounds that can result in Battle Scars – As a unit gains more Battle Wounds they will go through various tiers of Battle Scars, these are tables that the unit rolls on that gives the unit some negative penalties, until finally the unit succumbs to its injuries and dies. You can spend Emberstone to try and heal these wounds (though its not guaranteed to work!) giving you another element you need to manage with your resources.

Path to Glory: Ravaged Coast – Paths

A big part of Path to Glory in 4th Edition are Paths – these are progression trees that heroes and units can advance through in order to gain different abilities

In Path to Glory: Ravaged Coast we get 16 new ones – 10 for heroes of various types, and 6 for non hero units. These can be used alongside the ones in the core book and any in battletomes to give you a massive list of different paths your units can follow. There’s a nice blend here including ones for different unit types. War Machines for example gain the Path of the Artillerist allowing upgrades such as extra attacks, ignoring Guarded Hero and even allowing the machine to fire twice in a turn once per battle! While Path of the Behemoth gives your monsters a boost with things such as ignoring Battle Damaged, getting +1 to hit when the enemy does All out Attack or gaining a 6+ ward save.

All of these Paths can be followed by using Emberstone – First Emberstone is used to set a unit along a path, and then increasing amounts of Emberstone can be used to move your unit along the path. At each level the unit gets to select one of two upgrades that then persist for the rest of the campaign, giving your units a lot of customisation options and a lot of variety in your games.

Universal Enhancements and Lores

As mentioned earlier, Enhancements and Lores work a little differently in Path to Glory, so to facilitate that the book contains 6 new Heroic traits, 6 Artifacts, 6 Spells and 6 Prayers that can be taken by any army to fill slots in their Path to Glory armies. There’s a nice blend of different things on offer here that can fill things that arent covered in battletomes – for example “Live on the Edge” is a nice trait to solo characters who want to jump around the board such as Vampires as it gives them a 4+ ward against shooting. While Magmic Key is a nice pick for slow armies as it allows them to leave the battlefield and be set up outside of 9 of enemy units.

The Spell Lore in particular has some nice Aqshy themed spells that bring back memories of the World that Was such as Fulminating Flame Cage causing damage to any unit using reaction abilities or Cascading Fire Cloak giving the caster a ward save.

The Emberstone Forge

One of the most exciting editions to Path to Glory: Ravaged Coast is the Emberstone Forge. This is a cool new way of crafting custom magic items that have the potential to be more powerful than the standard weapons heroes have. You pick if you want a ranged or melee weapon (which have decent but random stats) and then you roll on a matrix to increase the stats further – you can spend multiple Emberstone in order to gain multiple enhancements to them, but there’s a chance that the weapon enhancement fails to take hold and you don’t get any additional benefit. Some of the results on the chart will also cause some of your stats to worsen, so you have a fun game of risk here where you try and tease out the best weapon you can make without pushing your luck.

I hope that we see more different items that we can make with this system in the future such as shields or suits of armour – and this would be easily adapted for anyone who wanted to create something similar for their own campaigns.

Path to Glory: Ravaged Coast Regiments of Renown

The final section of the book details 4 new Regiments of Renown, one for each Grand Alliance. Unlike other Regiments of Renown however, each of these is just a single character who tends to interact with Emberstone Forged weapons – so for example the order one can make nearby Emberstone weapons get +1 to hit, while the Chaos one has a change of doing damage to someone wielding an Emberstone weapon (or even destroying it completly)

What’s cool here is that like with the Anvil of Apotheosis you simply get a statline that can be represented by any model you want as long as they are on a 32mm – 50mm base. While you can simply use a model from your existing collection, this gives you the opportunity to convert up your very own model to represent the profile.

Anvil of Apotheosis is one of my favourite parts of AOS, so having more reasons to make new characters is a big win in my books, especially when it encourages conversions and being creative.

Summary

So what do I think of Path to Glory: Ravaged Coast? It’s been a longer wait than I thought it would be for the first Path to Glory supplement for the 4th edition of Warhammer Age of Sigmar, but I’m very happy with what we have within the pages of this book! For the first 6 months of the new edition its felt that just those players with Battletomes have been able to fully take part in Path to Glory games, with Faction pack lists missing out on some of the love, but with Ravaged Coast there’s enough here for every player to feel like they are getting something meaningful and worthwhile! From the expanded battlepack, to the huge array of Path options and then the flavour of the battle plans, there’s lots here to keep both casual Path to Glory players and groups of narrative veterans entertained. I really hope this book does well, as I’d love to see more Path to Glory content in future that builds on what is in this book, but even if this is the only Path to Glory book for 4th edition, this gives players a much different way of playing that Matched Play and will fuel the imagination of gaming groups for the rest of the edition!

Path to Glory: Ravaged Coast is up for pre order today and is released Saturday 18th January

Games Workshop provided Sprues & Brews with a free copy for review purposes.