The usual thank you to Games Workshop for sending us an advanced copy for review. Continuing along with our coverage of new Age of Sigmar rules releases, after a bit of a quiet period between Battletomes, we have the new Blighted Wilds Path to Glory book to look at. Is it Nurgle-themed as the cover and name implies? Keep reading to find out! It sort of is but rules-wise it works across all factions pretty well.

To start this off I want to give a sort-of preface that I'm not really a "narrative gamer". But what is "narrative gaming" anyways? It's an oft-had and never-agreed topic in our, and probably your, community of gamers. In the context of Age of Sigmar in 2025 it refers to Path to Glory games instead of Matched Play games, the topic that we most often write about here. However, in my greying age my gaming is becoming less-frequent and much-less tournament focused in general and this, actually, looked very interesting to me.

So strap in and let's have a look at what all is in this book and what it means for your narrative games of Age of Sigmar, should you so choose to partake!

Helsmiths of Hashut Dominator Engine. Credit: Rich Nutter

What's in the Book

A whole new Path to Glory campaign. You don't need either of the existing sets of Path to Glory rules, however you are allowed to have your heroes and units embark on paths from either of them; really you'll be playing this with a dedicated group of friends so just decide amongst yourselves how far you want to take that. Similar to Ravaged Coast you don't need to own the Core Rulebook for Age of Sigmar to play this, the free PDF download of the core rules will suffice!

In the book you get rules for:

Twelve Battleplans for your games during the campaign
Four Paths for heroes and units to embark on
New Universal Enhancements and Spell/Prayer Lores
Custom Landmarks of Ghyran to make your own faction terrain piece
Custom Regiments of Ghyran to make your own regiments of renown

Being able to just make your own faction terrain piece is just wild to me but getting to make your own custom regiment makes some sense going along with the Path to Glory theme. One of the best selling points of Path to Glory is the Anvil of Apotheosis getting to make your own special Hero and getting to do the same thing for a Regiment is just the next step along the path.

Battleplans

The battleplans you'll be playing follows a sort of tree and the one you play is determined by the player with the General of the lowest rank. There are two battleplans unlocked to all players from the beginning and after the first battles are fought and won you'll move on to choosing battleplans that both players have unlocked. The branches of this tree of Battleplans are connected by either Thyrian Paths or Concealed Trails; the former path unlocks battleplans by simply playing the game and the latter is only usable if both players have won on that battleplan.

Similar to Ravaged Coast if one player is down on points (by a fair margin of 200+) then the player with a larger army won't deploy every unit at the start of the game with some arriving later on. It's a nice way to deal with the lopsided nature of Path to Glory games and glad to see it here.

This whole campaign revolves around the spread of contagions and remedying diseased lands and is a core part of each battleplan. After picking the battleplan and figuring out deployment zones each player chooses a piece of terrain to be contaminated and then each other terrain piece that wasn't chosen is contaminated on a 4+ roll. Your units will be hurt and hindered by venturing near these pieces of terrain but can also attempt to remediate them on a dice roll making them safe for your own units but not for enemy units! Remediating terrain pieces grants the unit that did two renown points as well, so it's certainly something you want to be doing as quickly as possible! I really like that this means you'll be running around with otherwise very deadly units to go and fix terrain pieces mid-game instead of only trying to kill your opponent's units from the get go, and if you do that anyway you'll be running into a lot of contaminated terrain yourself. Remediated terrain pieces even grant units further buffs instead, so it's definitely something you want to be doing early-game and not saving it for the end.

One thing I really like in this battlepack is a new rule for when your opponent takes the double turn: When your opponent chooses to take the double, if you haven't done so yourself already, then you roll a dice for each command point your opponent has and on a 5+ steal one of them for yourself. Basically the Halfling Chef in Age of Sigmar. I love it. The game developers have taken step after step to make the choice of taking the double more and more difficult and I like this implementation a lot. You can basically count on having one less command point if you do, and possibly even less! That's huge!

Winning each Battleplan comes with its own reward other than just simple unadulterated victory and bragging rights. The winner chooses either an Ability reward or Miscellaneous reward, the former gives an extra ability to use in your next game that's usually quite powerful and the latter will give you a permanent increase in enhancements, spells, prayers, or just giving a bunch of glory points! After the winner chooses then the loser gets the other reward, so you'll always be walking away with something and what the winner chooses might be as important in denying your opponent something they really wanted as much as taking something that you did.

Cities of Sigmar Freeguild Fusiliers. Credit: SRM

Paths

As above you are allowed to use any Paths from any Path to Glory rules, I think really you should just stick with your own army's in your battletome and the set of Paths in this book if you're running a Blighted Wilds campaign to keep it simpler.

There are four new paths to embark on, two for your heroes and two for your units, giving them extra abilities as they rank up across the campaign. Your General starts out at the Aspiring rank giving them one ability right from the start.

Your hero can go down the Path of the Thyrian Druid or Path of the Sacrifice Master. Going off of name alone it's pretty clear what sort of abilities you can expect from either tree. Thyrian Druid gives your Hero healing, allows them to ignore terrain when moving, and shields friendly nearby units cloaking them in shadow and making them hard to see from range. On the other end, being a Sacrifice Master, makes them better at either hitting or wounding isolated enemy units in combat, giving a 3" move in the combat phase if they didn't charge, and turning one of their weapons into a Sacrificial Weapon that's truly terrifying.

Units, that are not heroes, instead are either Weald-Born or go down the Path of the Foresters. My favourite ability from the former is way of modifying an enemy charge each turn as your units perform a war dance to shake the earth. Foresters instead can make 6" pile ins and ignore all modifiers to saves at the highest rank, incredibly powerful abilities for placement and staying alive.

Universal Enhancements

Path to Glory is the perfect place to throw in some extra choices that are simply available to everyone. I really like seeing a couple tables of campaign-unique additions and none of these feel inherently broken that I'm able to think off; I'm sure there are some ways these could be used in some exploitative way, just none spring to mind for armies I play with or frequently against. You get six each of Heroic Traits, Artefacts of Power, Spells, and Prayers to add into your roster and spell book.

In the Heroic Traits slot you have a very amusing one called Blessed By the Old Magics where Once per Battle while casting a spell from the Lore of the Overgrown Wilds (below) you can change the roll to an unmodifiable result of 9. Great for getting an important spell out at the right time, even as limiting as it is to the unique spell lore in this campaign. The best part though, really, is that if the spell is unbound then the unit that did the unbinding suffers D6 mortal damage! That's already not a very easy roll to unbind to start with and, for most wizards, a pretty heft price to pay even if you do roll it.

Probably my favourite Artefact of Power here is the Arcane Seedpod because it pairs so nicely with the campaign's theme of needing to rectify pieces of terrain! During your movement phase you pick a terrain feature within 9" of the hero wielding the seedpods, until the start of your next turn all enemies within 3" of it halve their move, cannot Fly, and subtract 1 from any casting or chanting rolls they might make. It's only once per game but that's a huge sweep of debuffs to lay down in the turn that matters most!

Spells and Prayers work a bit differently in this campaign, you keep an Arcane Tome of the spells, prayers, and manifestations that your army's wizards and priests know with a maximum of nine in any combination at any given time. These can be in any combination from any lores available to your army as well starting with just three. The Lore of the Overgrown Wilds has six you can choose to include and Awaken the Carnivores stands out by casting on a difficult 7+ targeting a piece of terrain and forcing a -1 save for all units within 3" of it until your next turn; yes that means it will affect your own units too! Cast this and charge in headlong to be able to remove the enemy before getting hit back. On the other end is Prayers of the Jade Soul for your more priestly heroes with options like making enemy units Strike-Last or even returning slain models to units!

Soulblight Gravelords Barrow Guard. Credit - @badusernametag

Landmarks of Ghyran

Custom. Faction. Terrain. It seems like every army is getting a piece of faction terrain these days anyways and in the Blighted Wilds you can simple invent your own! This opens up a lot of very cool modelling potential for your army and I'd really love to see what some people do with this. Just like setting up a hero in the Anvil of Apotheosis you have a lot of choices.

First you choose what size the piece will be:

Imposing Monument - 100mm round, 105x75mm oval
Spectacular Edifice - 130mm round, 120x92mm or 150x95mm oval
Breathtaking Monolith - 160mm round, 170x105mm oval

You get a set number of destiny points to spend then and an appropriate points cost, none of these are free! Imposing Monuments are a cheap 20 points while Breathtaking Monoliths boast twice the Destiny Point Limit but will cost you 120 points to field. All of them start out with 8 Health and a 5+ save with nothing else, nice and simple. You can then spend Destiny Points on various abilities including, but not limited to:

Increasing its health and save characteristics
Giving it a movement value
Adding 1 to wards for friendly nearby manifestations
Flaws to increase its Destiny Point Limit like damaging itself at the end of each of your turns
Choosing whether or not you want it to have a Curator adding more upgrade options
Giving it melee and/or shooting attacks
Auto-killing a model in a unit that charged it on the roll of a 1 including things like Archaon or Nagash - poof

There's a lot of choice here and you can really make something rather unique that will aid your army if you so wish. Some Faction Terrain pieces are more essential than others (looking at you, Stormcast Eternals) so being able to make up your own instead that will actually be useful is pretty cool.

Regiments of Ghyran

Again working very similarly to the Anvil of Apotheosis but now for a whole regiment instead of just-some-guy. You can take up to 1 Regiment of Renown as part of your roster and it can be a Regiment of Ghyran if you so wish. A Regiment of Ghyran is at least two and at most four units and can include a Hero but does not need to! It will also cost you a set number of points depending on what kind of Regiment it is and how large its Destiny Point Limit you choose for it to be; that ranges from being as little as 150 points up to 500, half your starting roster!

First you choose up to one Origin like making its charge rolls a minimum of 4 regardless of your roll and up to one Flaw stopping them from using Retreat abilities at any point; there's four of each option here so you can tailor it a bit of course. Any origin or flaw that you do choose affects all units in the regiment, so don't think about just one unit when choosing!

If you do choose to take a Hero then they're not going to be as powerful as an Anvil of Apotheosis one but roughly follows a very similar build. They start off with a Move of 5, save of 5+, Control of 2, and Health of 5 all of which can be improved at the cost of Destiny Points. You can make Gigantic or Gargantuan heroes changing them to Monsters and drastically increasing both move and health characteristics or mount them on a creature of some various sizes, so you're not just stuck with an infantry shmuck. Then pick any number of the fifteen different upgrades, being mindful that you're still yet to buy a unit and need to buy at least one! You can't just have a hero!

For your Units you are not wanting for choice. The Destiny Point cost of these units is per model so they can get pricey quick. There are eight different base warscrolls to build them off of including:

Ghyranite Warriors - cheap, weak, melee unit
Ghyranite Guardians - slightly better melee unit
Ghyranite Elite Warriors - the best base melee unit
Ghyranite Beasts - faster than warriors but max control of 1, standard for Beasts
Ghyranite Monster - a unit of up to three monsters with 8 Health each
Ghyranite Gargant - basically a Gargant profile, can also be up to three models
Ghyranite Chariot - also up to three models in the unit
Ghyranite Bombard - a nice artillery piece, as a treat

You can then further upgrade these units by giving them mounts, making their chariot steeds some sort of fiendish monsters, or making them truly monstrous with Companion attacks that join the unit, or are in some way riding on the Companion, or something. There is a lot of leeway here in how you create these physically so run wild with it!

There are of course then a series of upgrades to make them even better and more unique across ranged weapons, making their attacks hit/wound better, increasing rend, adding Champions, Standards, Musicians, increasing Control or Save characteristics, and even adding on more Health and giving their attacks Crit (Mortal) on one weapon profile!

Lastly are three pages of twenty idiosyncrasies that are purchased abilities to be used by any/all units in your Regiment. These range from simply adding 1 to Charge rolls all the way up to teleport themselves and also an enemy unit at the end of one of your turns massively disrupting your opponent's flow of the game and any plans they might have had. There are some really nasty and really fun options throughout here.

Ironjawz Gore-Gruntas. Credit: Rich Nutter

Remedying the Paths

This is a hefty tome and I'm actually pretty excited to give this a try. Am I going to make a Regiment of Ghyran immediately? Probably not, it's pretty daunting. Are there almost certainly some absurdly broken combinations between custom regiments, terrain pieces, and heroes? Yes absolutely. If that's how you, and importantly your local gaming crew, want to go about it then by all means do!

I like the implementation here of making terrain an important part of each game and unlocking the pathways to battleplans down a tree, it all feels incredibly on theme. While creating custom terrain pieces, heroes, and even a whole regiment isn't really my thing right now it's very cool to have a way to create some unique units full of conversion that can actually have a use on the tabletop, too.

Is this for you? I don't know, you read this far into a review of it so that means you probably have at least some interest. Seriously, if Path to Glory and "narrative" gaming is how you approach Age of Sigmar then you'll probably enjoy this quite a lot. If you're a Matched Play sicko that just wants to play 2,000 point standard games there's nothing wrong with that and this probably isn't for you, and that's fine.

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