I'm back, with a second review of the Flesh-Eater Courts Battletome, but the new one. That's right, even though I never post pictures of Flesh-Eater Courts minis, that's one of the armies I play! Anyhow, I'm not actually going to apply number scores to anything, you're just going to have to read it to find out what I think.
The Art
They have added a fair bit of new art to the book, mostly in two areas: Illustrations depicting the Abhorrant Arch-regent, and marginalia. Both types of new additions are nice. There are several very cool illustrations incorporating the Arch-regent and the Charnel Throne. The marginalia definitely brings up the level of quality a bit. This book is chock full of little "doodles" of spooky bats, winged skulls, spinal columns, angry ghoul faces, and so forth. The spread with little fluff snippets (that they include in basically every AoS book) has some really cool frames with creepy faces. Also, the cover is just great. I like it a lot because of how striking the colors are.
I have one complaint about the art in this book and that is that it feels somewhat diffuse. It somehow feels like they did less with more. There are fewer full art spreads, fewer full page art pieces, and more walls of text. The marginalia helps to break that up a little bit, but once you hit the rules, art is basically done because they've packed everything so tight.
The Fluff
So I've got to be honest... I haven't read much of the fluff yet, but I'm still reviewing it for one reason: THERE IS SO MUCH OF IT! When I got the book I opened it up and discovered that it is filled with page after page of small print fluff describing Nagash knows what. I read the first battletome cover to cover and loved it, but this one just feels like a novel.
I can definitely tell that there is a lot of new fluff because a lot of it involves the Abhorrant Arch-regent, and events of Soul Wars. The fluff in some sections is organized similarly to the 2.0 rulebook breaking up the timeline into "Age of Myth", "Age of Chaos", and "Age of Sigmar" stories.
There is also a fair bit of new fluff dedicated to the Grand Courts. What I've read of this is pretty cool and also very creative. For example, the Blisterskin Courts live in Aqshy and worship the sun (hence the blisters), while Hollowmourne Courts are the ideological descendants of a band of crusading knights.
The Battleplan
There's only one battleplan. It's an updated version of one of the battleplans from the original FEC book (Stirring the Nest). I'm honestly pretty disappointed by this. I've been really sad to see them only including 1 battleplan in the more recent battletomes. In the old FEC battletome, there were three battleplans each of which was accompanied by a short story describing the battle it was modeled after. The battleplan in this book is just a single spread with a bit of fluff and the rules.
The Rules
Oh boy, FEC got some rules. The warscrolls stayed pretty much the same. The Allegiance Abilities have spiralled wildly out of control. FEC now has two sets of Command Traits and Artefacts (one for Courtiers and another for Abhorrants), a Lore of Magic, and Mount Traits for their Terrorgheists and Dragons. Also, Feeding Frenzy is amazing now and is a command ability that just lets a unit just fight again in combat immediately after fighting the first time.
They've also added Grand Courts (same deal as the Kharadron Skyports) that give you even more Allegiance Abilities. You can take a Grand Court instead of your Delusion, which I don't find especially tempting, but I'm sure you've heard about the crazy battleline shenanigans they let you pull by this point.
Overall
All told, I'm a little disappointed in the lack of maps and the walls of text that are the fluff. I think that AoS 2.0 has dove hard into the old style of army books where there is lots of fluff and lots of rules. Their narrative content seems to have shifted from active content like battleplans to passive content like written fluff. A lot more focus has fallen on the matched play content by the addition of lots and lots of artefacts, command traits, mount breeds, and Grand Courts. It's still a very pretty book, and the rules certainly needed a bit of an update, but I think I preferred the overall feel of the first one.
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