Sigmar's Toll is a new series on Warhammer+ and I've been watching it. This review contains spoilers, so don't read on if you haven't seen the first 2 episodes yet. I'm not very well versed in the lore of the Age of Sigmar. So far, I've seen the Double or nothing and Undercity episodes of Hammer and Bolter, and the Blacktalon series.
The Stormcast are the chosen warriors of the god Sigmar in the latest fantasy setting of Warhammer, the Age of Sigmar (AoS). I love the look of Stormcast Eternals, and the whole fantasy setting of Age of Sigmar, on the tabletop. It's highly unique, probably the single weirdest fantasy since the glory days of the Trillium series of Marion Zimmer Bradley, Julian May, and Andre Norton, or Dying Earth by Jack Vance.
I have to admit though, I'm not convinced it's translated for me in the fiction.
In Sigmar's Toll, it's Stormcast against the skaven. That's an adequate plot, and I'm going to keep watching for that story. I want to see fantasy battles against armoured brutes and malicious plague rats.
But there's something missing from the setting, by which I mean both the physical location and the characters.
As with Blacktalon, the "cost" of rebirth is belaboured from the start. Every Stormcast you see goes on and on about how much a burden it is to be chosen to serve Sigmar, and about how you lose "something" each time you're reforged. I was willing to care, during the first series of Blacktalon, but in the end I discovered that there was no reason to care. The same seems to be true for Sigmar's Toll. Lacking any kind of relationship with the main characters, I simply do not have the capacity to feel emotions for them.
In fact, the more I hear about them being reforged by Sigmar, the less I care that they're reforged. I don't see the cost myself, so I have to take them at their word. But for me, there's no cost and no stakes. A Stormcast Eternal is a really powerful fantasy warriors who cannot die. When one dies, they come back to fight more. As far as I can tell, all they do is fight, so losing memories doesn't seem so bad to me, as long as they remember how to fight and whose side they're on.
If the [fictional] reality is that they're becoming mere puppets of Sigmar, I need to know them before they're puppets to feel any sense of loss once one has been reforged so much that they've lost their personality. I can's speak for the books yet, but the shows at least haven't endeared any Stormcast to me in such a way that I grow to regret that they're reforged. I've felt more loss when the Doctor (Who?) regenerates, and that still is (and feels like) the Doctor.
I imagine I'd feel threatened by the possibility of character death, and loss from reforging, if it was expressed tangibly in fiction or the game. If a Stormcast on the tabletop died and then came back but sometimes attacked my own army, that would definitely feel dangerous and bad. If I followed a Stormcast through an adventure like The Interrogator only for the Stormcast to get unexpectedly reforged and returned as a completely different character, then I'd probably feel sad.
The cost, whatever it's supposed to be in-world, needs to be true for the player or viewer.
The other puzzling thing about the AoS fiction I've seen so far is that the Mortal Realms seem to be basically uninhabited. We do see the odd city guard or commoner, but we don't know any of them. I can't imagine what they do all day. Maybe they just sit around and cower in fear?
I don't have any sense of what the Stormcast Eternals are fighting for. I understand logically that they're fighting to defend the Mortal Realms, I just don't feel like I know what the Mortal Realms has that's worth defending. If they're only fighting because Sigmar is forcing them to fight, that's good enough for my tabletop games but it's not evoking an emotional response from me in fiction.
Interestingly, I don't have the same dissociation from the space marines of Warhammer 40,000. Notably however, space marines don't complain all day about the sacrifice they are making for the Emperor, or the sense of loss they feel after having lost their old lives. Space marines know exactly why they exist, and they seem complacent in their role.
To emphasize that space marines are especially unique, we often get to see them through the eyes of humans. Everyone in the 40k universe sees Adeptus Astartes as angels, servants of the god Emperor. The universe in which they exist is abhorrently wrong. Any tragedy we as readers feel about space marines isn't for a distant and nonspecific life they've had to give up to become superhuman, and instead we feel for everyone in the setting for very specific tragedies that we experience in the fiction.
Age of Sigmar is still a relatively new setting, and its story is still developing. There may yet be story hooks that evoke sympathy for the Stormcast Eternals. Until then, I'm happy to just let them be nonspecific warriors that look cool on the tabletop.
All images in this post copyright Games Workshop.