I am losing interest...

[chipset35]

First off, let me point out that I purchased the Age of Sigmar starter set to great excitement at getting in at the bottom floor of something new.
I purchased all the novels as I am a lore junkie.
Unfortunately, I have stopped buying both...here is why.

1) The novels and Storm Hosts are uninspiring, they are the same old thing in each, i.e. Storm Host is being overrun, another Host comes to their rescue, victory is now in their grasp, then a big bad guy shows up and they are on the brink of disaster again, then somehow the Storm Host pulls out a victory usually due to divine intervention. None of these novels can hold a candle to ANY Warhammer 40K or Warhammer Fantasy Novel. Not because the writers are not good, but because the writers have nothing to work with. Uninspiring Heroes and in the case of the Storm Hosts, they lack the variety of both Warhammer and WH40K.
The bad guys do have better variety, but the Storm Hosts remind me of NFL football teams all with the same uniforms and slightly different color schemes. They do not compare to even Space marine chapters.

2) The setting is bland....and confusing.
Are they in the old world a different world, in the iron core of the old world? Who knows?
You would think that the current setting would be interesting, but its not.
It would have been better if GW had placed AoS in the ruins of the old world with recognizable features or ruins that we used to find interesting. Instead, we have a bland and bleak boring landscape that despite its variety pales in comparison to the old world.

3) I want to love AoS, it was my first and only chance to get in at the ground floor of Warhammer/40K, but the more I read, the more I see the less excited i get. Maybe Dan Abnett can inject some life into it by writing an Epic Novel for it?

[Psychosplodge]

Don't distract Dan Abnett, he's got Gaunt's ghosts books, the next Eisornhorn/Ravennor book, and whatever else they want for the heresy from him to do.

[Charon]

Don't distract Dan Abnett, he's got Gaunt's ghosts books, the next Eisornhorn/Ravennor book, and whatever else they want for the heresy from him to do.

Benqin!

[Psychosplodge]

That's what I said

[40kGamer]

First off, let me point out that I purchased the Age of Sigmar starter set to great excitement at getting in at the bottom floor of something new.
I purchased all the novels as I am a lore junkie. Unfortunately, I have stopped buying both...here is why.

Right there with you. Although the lack of any balancing mechanism also contributed to my plunging interest as well. Guess those Stormcast Eternals are going to be the basis of some Truescale Blood Angels for me now.

[nsc]

1) I disagree, I find the individual personalities of each Stormcast to be very endearing, they're all very different and vibrant. They all behave slightly differently, with many being recklessly zealous for their own reasons. I find the reforging very interesting and I like how the stormcasts react to the creeping realization of what exactly it means to be a portion of sigmar's will. I find them infinitely more interesting than the standard loyalist marines and I've only read one short story which left a bad taste in my mouth (mandrake, imo the writing is absolutely abysmal).

2) How are you confused if you've read all these materials? The mortal realms are clearly separate from the old world which hangs in Azyr as a metal lump. The old world in its entirety (well what survived) is that metal lump. All of these mortal realms are pocket dimensions made real by sigmar and other gods. They are new and separate from everything previous, they are joined by realmgates and other celestial constructs.

Within these realms there are many thousands of years (possibly 2, possibly more) of history which are slowly being teased to us. Heroes and Heroines are cast about as desecrated statues which the stories from the blacklibrary and the campaign books, and I don't know about you, but I want to know more. I want to learn more about Celemnis and her Celemnite swords, I want to hear of her tragedy and rage which binds her soul to molten silver.

This is a type of world building which in design is known as "top down" and it is very popular. Now, if you don't like it, it's fine for you to say that you don't like it, but it's not fine for you to say that this is bland, sloppy, or bad. They've done a very good job of top down world design, providing a great deal of detail for the mortal planes within gorgeous maps, and very well placed and teased top-down lore design. MaRo very famously talked about the first edition of magic, where things like Shivian Dragons excited many people into wonder, "Where is shiv? Why does it have dragons?"

If this type of curiosity doesn't appeal to you then I'm sorry, it appeals to me and it's wonderful. With every page turn there's more to discover within this age and it's very exciting for me.

3) I cannot excite you friend, but if you don't like the design style of the setting then I suppose there's nothing to be done.

[Auticus]

Pick a balancing mechanism thats out there, there are a ton to choose from now.

[40kGamer]

Pick a balancing mechanism thats out there, there are a ton to choose from now.

The only thing I've tried has been the one the miniwargaming folks put forward. However getting others to buy into a system is the biggest hurdle since everyone has their own idea of what to do! Trying to play this game feels too much like work at this point.

[Caitsidhe]

1)Now, if you don't like it, it's fine for you to say that you don't like it, but it's not fine for you to say that this is bland, sloppy, or bad.

Why not? If it is fine for you to give your opinion stating you like it and in a manner that reads as if it comes from a brochure, it should be fine for him to state that he doesn't like it and why. I am still reading some of the literature so I won't give my thoughts on it until I'm done. However, I see no reason you should feel empowered to tell people that it isn't acceptable to give negative reviews.

[Erik Setzer]

Actually, I think the "realms" are supposed to be chunks of the old world that blew off and were saved and had winds of magic bound to them by the Old Ones. (My pet theory is that the Old Ones plan to reassemble the old world as some sort of anti-Chaos weapon.) The confusion comes in how they're referred to through the fluff, with "realms" suggest different planes of existence, or how in one of the novels the Stormcasts refer to them as "worlds" and talk about driving the scourge of Chaos out of the "universe," which seems like a bigger scope than we're really dealing with.

I'm trying to read the novels, but the Stormcast Eternals so far are, by far, the most boring characters. Other characters aren't bad, they seem to have an interesting story to them. But the Eternals are just... they're like someone made an army of Mary Sues with a touch of deus ex machina thrown in. All the talk of them being "immortal warriors without fear and without equal" just makes them sound even more boring.

But that's just compounding the biggest problem, which is that there's no stakes in the story. They rammed the plot line ahead a few thousand years, and this is what we get:

A bunch of people are found, no idea how they got there, but by now any civilizations that existed have been crushed. Sigmar fought Chaos, Chaos won, but Chaos couldn't win entirely, and thus we've established that if you lose to Chaos, you can play a waiting game and know they won't destroy everything (which is peculiar, as that's exactly what they did in End Times). Now Sigmar's driving back to beat Chaos out of the realms. The war's already been fought, and even a "loss" wasn't really much of a loss, except that any people we might have cared about fighting for were wiped out, leaving us no one to care about and knowing Chaos can't win. Pile onto that the situation with Ghal Maraz, where Sigmar flung his hammer because he was afraid Archaon would beat him, a god, in combat, and Tzeentch stole it. They make a big deal of him getting it back because it's that important, and then he immediately hands it off to a guy who'd get wrecked by a Greater Daemon and would probably snap in half at the sight of Archaon (given that Archaon's supposedly so powerful he can beat Sigmar). If the hammer is that important, why the heck would Sigmar not keep that thing in his own hands, especially if a lot of his power is tied to it being in his possession? It's like Thor fighting hard to get his hammer back, then handing it to someone else to use.

And speaking of Archaon, there's one more thing that tells us there's no stakes in this world. We see the world blown up, Archaon wiped out, all the guys other than Sigmar wiped out, etc. But suddenly Archaon is back, all the Elves are back (though Malekith seems to have realized his name was shared with a Marvel character and can't be copyrighted), and even Kairos is back despite being killed by Archaon to summon a Bloodthirster. All these meaningful deaths in End Times are suddenly reversed, making them meaningless in End Times. It doesn't just establish that there's no real stakes in AoS (or ability to make interesting new characters), it also says that End Times had a lot of story that didn't matter, and End Times makes no sense now because Chaos suddenly can't blow up a world any more and all these people wiped from ever existing are back and healthy and whole.

They wanted so hard to make the Stormcast Eternals *the* army that they wrote a story that only exists to glorify the one faction, with no chance at the good guys losing.

I get that people might not like minutes-to-midnight scenarios, but they're nowhere near as boring as knowing the good guys are just going to win all the rounds from here on out, and any setbacks are just minor nuisances.