Age of Magic faction review: The Otherworld

The archetype

The Otherworld is quite an interesting archetype, meant to represent angels, demons (or daemons) and other flying ethereal creatures come to pester humanity.

Options

Like Jomsvikings in the original SAGA game, the Otherworld have no levy options. No weaklings in this army! What you do get is the option to make all your warriors winged. Presumably you must shout “surrender Dorothy” before the game starts, and “fly, my pretties” each time you move them. Or maybe that’s just me.

If flying warriors doesn’t suit you, you can take half your warrior units as Hunters, a warrior type unique to the Otherworld list. Hunters have lower armour, but move faster and fight like hearthguard whenever they charge into combat.

The Otherworld list can also take the full range of creatures and monsters. The lieutenant for the Otherworld is a Conjuror, who can sacrifice friendly models to generate SAGA dice.

The Battle Board

Your Battle Board lets you mess with your opponent’s plans. Portal lets you teleport a unit across the table (with some restrictions) while Doppelgangers replaces all your opponent’s attack dice with defence dice. Abyssal Breath lets one of your units launch a surprise shooting attack. There’s plenty to explore on this board and it can swing the game at key moments.

Models

The Otherworld was the list i had the most problems constructing from my own available models. If you’re a Warhammer Daemon army owner you’ll be happy enough with this list. Likewise a Lord of the Rings Mordor army would do fine here. Other model ranges are possible, but arguably have a better home in the other lists so far covered.

You could also go in a different direction and take some eldritch creation of beasts from the Cthulu mythos, who would fit quite nicely in this list.

After putting together a rather eclectic list for the sample army, I had some further ideas and will develop an Otherworld list from models yet to be painted.

Sample army

SAGA Age of Magic, the Otherworld, 8 point army

I won’t lie; this was the most difficult list for me to put together, based on my collection. This entire army can have flying, but those aren’t the kind of models I have.

My concept here is based around the angel going around with his army of judgement. It’s slightly to the side of the central angel/demon army concept, but I think it works.

Next to the angel is a large figure that I’m using as a wizard. The old harpies on the right are 6 Hearthguard. Behind them the eagles are 3 flying creatures. With creatures you pay 1 point per two or else remove 2 Hearthguard, 4 Warriors, or 6 Levy to add a single creature. That’s why this list has 6 Hearthguard and 3 creatures.

The cloud giant and flame elemental are our Behemoths, while this dragon is our flying scourge. To finish off the list I added 8 kobolds as hunters, a unique warrior type only available to Otherworld lists. They are weaker than other warriors but have 2 attacks if they charge into combat.

At 22 models this list is small but powerful with the right level of coordination.

Update: after writing this list I realised it’s not legal as only half your warriors can be changed to hunters. I’ll have to replace some of those kobolds with… something else.

Second update: here’s the newly painted army!

Other faction reviews

Undead Legions

Masters of the Underearth

Lords of the Wild

The Horde

The Great Kingdoms