Dawn of the Storm Dragon is the second Arcane Journal dedicated to the Grand Army of Cathay, the newest army introduced for Warhammer The Old World. While it doesnt contain any new profiles, it does contain a lot of narrative content, new ways of playing and an Army of Infamy allowing you to field Empire units alongside your Cathay army.

In this review we’ll be checking out Dawn of the Storm Dragon, seeing what content it offers to not just Cathay players, but Old World players in general and having a think about what this means for future Arcane Journals.

Massive thanks to Games Workshop for sending us over an early review copy to check out on the site. If you would like to support the site then why not pick up your copy (or maybe even Miao Ying herself) through our affiliate Element Games and save yourself some money too!

Without further ado, let’s dive into the latest Arcane Journal and see what goodies it holds!

Dawn of the Storm Dragon Review

This is a very different Arcane Journal, as it is the first one not to have any new unit profiles in it. Grand Cathay are a different beast to the other armies we’ve had so far, as their first Arcane Journal was pretty much the way of distributing their army list. With that in mind, Dawn of the Storm Dragon feels like volume 2 of that Journal, but with a focus on narrative play and recreating the story of Miao Ying and her Jade Fleet defending the peoples of the Empire from the forces of Chaos.

Like with the previous Arcane Journals, the first half of the book is dedicated to lore, and in this we learn about how Yuan Bo, the Jade Dragon has concerns about the current invasion of Chaos and so chooses to dispatch a fleet led by Miao Ying to Marienburg to help the humans against the Hordes of Chaos.

There’s some interesting things here such as detail about the Great Trade routes and the interactions between the peoples of the Old World and the Cathayans. We see the Dragons having an interest in helping the Humans of the west even when the Elves of Ulthan choose not to, and I wonder if this will spark some unease between those races, with the Celestial Dragon seeing the Elves as arrogant.

The rest of the narrative details the war between the forces of Chaos and the allied army of Cathay and The Empire – holding back the tide only for another war to be brewing on the horizon…

War in Westerland

Next up in the book we get a nice 6 page section that expands the impact of terrain in games of Warhammer The Old World. We get a couple of charts of random terrain generators, plus rules to put them into use in games. Essentially you work out how many terrain pieces you want – use the generator to generate the elements you want – one player places all the terrain and then the other player will scatter D3 pieces to move their positioning. This leads to some more balanced terrain setups and eliminates some of the unconscious bias you might have when setting up terrain. I know some people like symmetrical layouts for matched play, but personally I’d rather do something like this and then have the roll to decide table edge actually matter. In many battles the terrain was a big factor, so it makes sense to me to make the choice of edge as important as getting to go first or second.

There’s also expanded rules here for things such as roads, rivers and bridges – so for example if you move along a road you get +d3 to your marching. Likewise, building rules are also expanded bringing back things such as being able to occupy buildings, and assault units that are garrisoned within them.

We also get a page covering any of the rules quirks of having multiplayer doubles games. I really hope a future book brings us something like Triumph and Treachery for 3/4 player games, as back in the Warhammer Fantasy days these were the most fun games I’d ever had! Would be great to see it return, and honestly you’d only need a few tweaks over the original ruleset.

Storm in the Wasteland

We also get a full 3 scenario narrative campaign that follows the events of the book. A 2500 Warriors of Chaos or Wolves of the Sea army takes on a combined force consisting of 1000 points of Empire allied with 1500 of Cathay in the initial battle, with the Cathay force coming to the defense of the Empire army. These missions quickly grow in scale though, with the second being 3000 points, and the final battle 3500. What’s cool about these scenarios is that the winner of the battle will unlock some additional things in the next battle – This might be the ability to give units in your army Vanguard or Stubborn, or even the ability to have some additional points added to your army.

I hope that we see more supplements like this, as there’s great scope for some fun games playing through the storyline and seeing how your campaign branches out compared to the established lore.

Grand Cathay Jade Fleet

The big new addition to the Grand Cathay army in Dawn of the Storm Dragon is a new Army of Infamy to represent the Jade Fleet – this is the fleet that sailed to the Old World and found itself allied alongside the Empire. To represent this, 33% of the army can be drawn from the Empire army list – but there are restrictions on what you can take. You can take a single Captain, Master Mage or Priest per 1000 points, A unit of Pistoliers or Outriders per 1000 points and unrestricted numbers of State Troops, State Missile Troops, Militia and Archers.

The Cathayan forces have given the Empire forces their blackpowder, which means all blackpowder weapons have a longer range. Guns are better too, as once per game your State Missile Troops can fire in an extra rank too!

To represent the Cathayans fighting to defend the Human allies, Jade Warriors and Lancers get to reroll hits of 1 when within 3″ of an Empire unit. Making Sky Lanterns even better, they also get access to an upgrade to give them Ambushers too, with the ability to reroll the dice to see when it arrives!

There’s no new units added here, but this seems a fun list, especially if you want to have lines of handgunners supporting your Cathay force. I feel they will get their own at some point in the future, but this makes a nice compromise until they get another wave in the future.

Magic Items

Rounding out the book we also get three pages of magic items. Some of them seem particularly powerful – The Sword of Reason is a S+2 AP2 two handed sword that causes Killing Blow on a wound of 5+, which is crazy good even for the high cost. Likewise The Wrath of Xen Yang turns off Regeneration Saves, and the Brazen Blade turns off Ward saves and Regen if you would on a 6. These seem particularly good at taking out some of the tooled out characters we see these days.

The Jade Armour of Beichai is a nice suit of Plate Armour that grants a 5+ ward and Magic Resistance 2, while the Jade Banner gives a unit +2 Combat Result, opening up some scope for stacking other combat res enhancing banners.

Ring of Jet is a nice item that allows you to cast Unquiet Spirits as a Bound Spell, and there’s some really nice utility items for wizards – the Clockwork Compass can be used to not only automatically unbind a spell, but also remove all remains in play spells on the battlefield. This one is expensive, but fell this is pretty powerful. The Seal of Xing Po is also really good, allowing you to discard two generated spells and replace them with two picked from the Lore of Yin or the Lore of Yang

I also quite like the Vermillion Quills – these are a single use item that allows you to reroll all hit and wound rolls during a combat!

Summary

So as I said at the start of the review, Dawn of the Storm Dragon is a very different Arcane Journal, and in some ways feels like a “part 2” of the Cathay book, containing a lot or more, a new alternate army list and some more items. Some will be disappointed about the lack of new units, but honestly with the Cathay release being so recent I feel it’ll be a little while before we see any other new models for them.

The gaming content in here is good too, I really like the new terrain rules and I feel the narrative campaign is great fun too – I really hope we see more like this in the future.

I suppose the big question is what Arcane Journals will look like from here on out. We’ve already seen teases of the next book with a focus on Khemri, and I suspect this is how future books will play out – containing content for another pass over all the armies while also containing some fun bits that any player can use. I suspect the Arcane Journals have been good sellers as a low cost alternative to the hard back books we’ve seen in 2nd edition heresy and Necromunda, and it really feels we’ll be getting a lot more books, but with a focus on players being able to pick and choose which ones they want to add to the collection.

If you’re a Cathay player this one is certainly worth adding to your collection – though I do feel that the Army of infamy gets a lot of bonuses with not many downsides compared to some!

It feels that Warhammer The Old World is going from strength to strength though, and I reckon there’s a lot more surprises to come this year…

Dawn of the Storm Dragon is up for pre order today and is released Saturday 6th September

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