News on Pause – Hiatus

For four years, on the dot in fact, the Azyr Weekly has been publishing the news once a week, every week. We are 47,000 words in, and with 231 articles published. As a person who is chronically prone to leaving projects half-completed this has been a noteworthy achievement! However as time has gone on things have started to slip. Articles have started being published later and later in the week, and over the past month I have even done the unthinkable and skipped a week or two!

The Azyr Weekly is a lot of things to me. It’s a creative outlet, a passion project, and a proof of concept – a monument built by the ego of a man convinced that he is funny but needs to know if others think the same. It is a lot of fun. However, as my strategic studies supervisor passed on to me in exchange for a cool NZ$10,000; “Everything is very simple in war, but the simplest thing is difficult”. War in this case being an analogy for satirical journalism centered around a miniature wargame. What started as quick little diversion each Tuesday has become a chore eked every Wednesday evening, asking friends to photoshop up a cover image since I was already in bed or messaging mates to check “What’s funny at the moment?”. I have not lost my dedication to the Weekly, but I have lost my spark. And that’s no fun for anyone.

Instead of slinking off, I thought I should do the mature thing and leave this notice. The news is on pause, but it is not over. The Editor is just taking a break, a step-back to recuperate. I cannot promise that I’ll be back and better than ever – I will most likely be back the same as before! But hopefully I’ll be back with my passion 100% returned and raring to go.

If you run a site or blog and need some humorous articles, Age of Sigmar or not, please feel free to reach out to @AzyrWeekly (or even my personal Twitter @DistractdSatrap if you’re feeling cheeky). You can also email me. And if you know James Workshop; please tell him that I’m sorry about all those emails I sent at 1am during 2021 and that I’d love it if he took me off his spam list.

Until we meet again!

Yours in news,

the Editor

Orruks not green, just envious

Shock in the Mortal Realms this week as researchers in Azyr make an earth-shaking discovery – orruks are not naturally green, but are instead made that way due to their fundamentally envious nature.

The finding was made after an orruk was given the loudest firearm available from the Ironweld Arsenal, the fastest mount to be found in Hysh, and a pair of stilts which made him as tall as a mega-gargant. Upon receiving these goods the orruk’s skin immediately faded to a gentle lavender, and the orruk adopted a pleasant demeanour.

The implications are tremendous but application on the field has proven troubling, since only a single orruk can possibly be pacified this way at a single time. Efforts have instead pivoted to encouraging orruks to compare themselves against internal goals, rather than against their peers. However, just like their human counterparts, orruks have struggled to adopt this mindset and have instead taken to trying to prove their mindfulness through ritual bouts of ‘meditation’. That these often devolve into headbutting contests to prove who has the ‘strongest head’ has not filled Azyrite scholars with hope.

Flesh-eater Courts misread memo, attempt rank-and-flank

Recent rumours of an Old World revival have taken the Mortal Realms by storm. Chivalrous knights in particular have been inspired by the news but, due to a series of unfortunate miscommunications, the rumours have been wildly misinterpreted by the Flesh-eater Courts, who have begun to rank up like the mighty armies of yore.

The move has been met by bemusement by many of the ghouls’ rivals, who are used to their eccentric behaviour.

“Yeah, it happens pretty often,” confided a regular opponent of the Flesh-eaters. “Sometimes they’ll bring out this big battle standard and try to join up with the Soulblight, sometimes they’ll assemble their army according to some arcane percentage-based system. They normally get sick of it pretty quickly though.”

We sent our reporters to survey the ghouls, and they wrote back describing great wheeling formations of squares and wedges. Their account also included descriptions of violent arguments erupting over how many degrees different regiments had shifted or the approach made by adversaries as they charged into flanks. Whether the Flesh-eater Courts will stick with this style of maneuver or return to a more civilized mode of war remains to be seen.