On October 28th there will be new Premium Cosmetics available in Lohner’s Emporium of Wonders on all platforms. There will be one all-new character skin and hat for each hero, totaling up to 10 new premium cosmetics.

Each of the cosmetics will be available in bundles and as separate items on Steam.

Previews of the items follow below, but for a closer look at each piece, check out the Dev Blog over on the Official Vermintide Website

---

Embrace your inner beast and roam the Stirland wilderness as a champion of King Taal.

Career: Huntsman

---

Don the garb of a temple handmaiden of Ellyrian; stern, austere and unflinching before those who would threaten Ulthuan.

Career: Handmaiden

---

It's time to set sail for plunder with the famed slayer pirates. Or it would be, if there was any sign of their ship.

Career: Slayer

---

Garb fit for the most magmatic of magicians. Unleash the fury of Aqshy in inimitable style.

Career: Battle Wizard

---

Though the shipwreck drowned your companions, Sigmar has saved you for a higher purpose - one steeped in skaven blood.

Career: Zealot

An absent-minded man of mysteries, Franz Lohner relies on his bulging journal to keep track of occurrences, intrigues and arguments around Taal's Horn Keep. Sometimes his notes are even useful, believe it or not. The Franz Lohner Chronicles are extracts from that journal.


Well, this is one of them red letter days. Literally, I mean, because I’ve had another missive from Okri in its usual natty red envelope. At least, I think I have. It’s hard to be certain of a letter’s provenance when you’ve never seen its author. Harder still when said letter shows up in a variety of unusual ways.

Okri - and let’s assume it is Okri, for the sake of sanity and wotnot - is an inventive soul. I’ve had letters sent down the chimney. Delivered by couriers of all shapes and sizes. Although that ogre had eaten half the envelope before I wrangled it off him, price of dying it in blood, I suppose. Carrier pigeon, that was another one. Bardin ate it, as I recall. The book of challenges was dropped off by airship, or so I understand. It was a cloudy day. Endless ingenuity at work. I admire a fellow who puts in the effort, if I’m honest.

Anyhow, everyone’s totally real dwarf has a new task for our delightful Ubersreik Five. Seems that a few grudges have gone past the point of aging gracefully, and have now become urgent business. Specifically, there’s a bunch of monstrous individuals lolloping around, and Okri has marked them for death. A Grudge Mark, if you will - and I would, if I could.

Alas, the hunting of ferocious beasties is long behind this grizzled grey head of mine, but it sounds like a splendid way for the Five to keep themselves limber, doesn’t it? Everyone wins. Okri gets his grudges settled. The Ubersreik Five get a bit of much needed exercise. And me? Well, never you mind. It’s win-win. Well, not for the monsters, but I think we can count them as being acceptable casualties, all things considered. Not that they’ll be easy targets - these are the worst of the worst, with a bevy of cruel characteristics that’ll keep our heroes on their toes.

Should be fun. Worthy of song, even. Might even have another crack at poetry, if I’m stirred to it. Five Go Slaughtering Monsters. Not sure about that as a title, but you’ve got to start somewhere.

Of course, I’ll have to be a bit more circumspect about the particulars this time. I don’t want to set Kerillian off, as she’s not one to respect the bounds of poetic licence. We’ll keep it all anonymous this time around. Yes! That’s the stuff of folk tales: desperate danger, slavering monsters, plucky heroes - an unspoken whiff of romance between Cerrilian the archer and Kroober the proud knight. All carefully separated from reality, and thus old Franz safe from the doghouse.

And if it all goes wrong, I’ll just blame Okri. It’s not like anyone’s to know better, is it?

On October 28th the free update Grudge Marks will be available on all platforms together with Geheimnisnacht. Besides the new content, we have also added some Quality of Life changes, and in this dev blog you can read all about the upcoming changes.

---

The TAB menu has gotten a make-over. The new features will show the equipped equipment of all the players and a new, more condensed layout, makes it easier to see any incoming enemies even when viewing the TAB overlay. The new overlay also shows active modifiers for the mission in progress and maintains the original functionality you’re accustomed to, such as muting players or being able to click through to their community profile on Steam.

---

Steam Rich Presence has been added to Vermintide 2! You can now easily spot if your fellow ratsmashers need another hero to fight alongside them, what difficulty they are playing, and which mission.

---

This hardly requires much of an introduction: in the next update players will be able to open multiple chests at once! It’s possible to see the quality of the items in opened chests which aren’t the current focus, so for those just grinding out reds, a cursory scan of the dots atop the screen will let you know if a red item was pulled from an opened chest.





The border on the [OPEN 5] button indicates the last action done, so you can repeat it by just pressing spacebar.

---

Whilst not the most common of problems, it’s certainly an egregious one when it raises its head. Previously, when a player was awarded a bunch of items whilst not in the game (say through the purchase of a DLC), each item would be awarded one a time when they next logged in. Now, when the player logs in, they will be presented with an interface showing them all the items obtained that they can browse at their leisure or simply close off and get back to the game. No more waiting to cycle through a train of pop-ups. Nice.

---

The Mission select screen has seen some love, now showing players information about completion statistics, such as which heroes have bested the mission and how many of the total collectibles have been found within each mission.

---

Gone are the days where you have to flick through pages and pages of challenges to find the status of a specific ask from Okri. A search bar has been added allowing you to easily find a specific challenge and see its completion state. You’re also able to use text-based queries, such as reward:art or completed:true in order to bring up a list of specific challenges that meet the query.

These are the currently available filters:

The Chaos Wastes was released right before the summer, and you have been exploring these unpredictable lands ever since. In this dev blog, you can find out more about the next addition to Chaos Wastes: the Grudge Mark Update.

The Grudge Mark Update is free to all players and will be released on October 28th on all platforms together with Geheimnisnacht.


In Chaos Wastes you start out with a low power level and as you move through the expeditions you become increasingly powerful. With this update, we want to give you something to hit that is more resistant to the heroes’ ever-increasing power in the Wastes.

"With the End Times approaching, Okri's grown concerned that a number of long-held grudges might go unfulfilled. Accordingly, he's taken the unusual step of asking the Ubersreik Five to settle accounts (as drengbarazi, they're as near to being honourary dwarfs as makes no difference) for families wiped out by war."

The Grudge Marked enemies are not your everyday Chaos Spawn, Bile Troll, or Rat Ogre. Recognizable by the spears poking through their backs, a grudge-marked monster provides an extra challenge in the Wastes.



The Grudge Marked monster receives a random set of attributes modifying their offensive and defensive behavior. Any hero wishing to survive should pay special attention to these attributes. There are 10 attributes total coming in this update, and we will reveal more about them leading up to the release.

The number of attributes applied depends on difficulty. A Grudge Marked monster can have a minimum amount of 0 attributes and a maximum of 3.

Within Chaos Wastes you will face a Grudge Marked monster at the end of an expedition in the arenas, and they also have a chance to spawn from Cursed Shrines.


Together with the Grudge Marked monsters, Okri is providing you with more challenges to complete with new rewards to be earned.

Each career will have a new set of challenges rewarding a new character skin color variation at completion. We are adding 60 new challenges and 15 new character skin color variations to unlock*. You can track the progress of these challenges in Okri’s Book from within the Keep.

*Owners of a Premium Career(s) will receive 4 extra challenges per career to unlock an extra skin color variation per owned career.

New Premium Hats and Skins will be available for purchase in Lohner’s Emporium of Wonders.

This time we are adding new premium cosmetics to the following careers:

• Kruber - Huntsman
  
• Kerillian - Handmaiden
  
• Bardin - Slayer
  
• Sienna - Battle Wizard
  
• Victor - Zealot

An absent-minded man of mysteries, Franz Lohner relies on his bulging journal to keep track of occurrences, intrigues and arguments around Taal's Horn Keep. Sometimes his notes are even useful, believe it or not. The Franz Lohner Chronicles are extracts from that journal.


Well, they do say no good deed goes unpunished.

You remember my mate Rosalinde, who helped me get the keep a bit more handy for the purposes of everything we do around here? Used her mastery of Light Magic to shuffle the stones around a bit? Ringing any bells?

Well, part of the agreement for her doing that was that once we’d actually nailed down something approaching a safe route up to the Citadel of Eternity, she’d be welcome to take a look for herself. Not out of any spiritual necessity, I hasten to add. Rosalinde’s always been of the view that she’ll leave the gods alone if they’ll do the same to her, and so far it seems to have worked out quite nicely. Probably works out better for the gods, truth be told. Rosalinde’s the sort of person who redefines the word ‘clumsy’ and I’d imagine granting her any kind of divine protection is a larger job of work than most of our slacker gods are interested in taking on.

And wouldn’t you know it? The Rosalinde factor has struck once more. Happily, it wasn’t up in the Citadel itself. No, the Five managed to keep the Pactsworn off her back while she took her notes and made her sketches – Rosalinde does love her sketching – and everyone came back in one piece.

(Interestingly enough, Rosalinde didn’t hear a peep out of the gods at the pilgrimage’s end. Not sure what that means. Might just be that they’re not interested in speaking to anyone who isn’t prepared to listen, but I might give it a ponder.)

No, the trouble started upon Rosalinde’s return. Decided to try out some of the Citadel of Eternity’s architectural tricks in her own little mansions. I mean, I say “little” but it’s a good sight larger than this here tower. The advantages of reduced labour costs, I suppose. Anyway, things got a bit out of hand. I did warn her that techniques from the magic-suffused wastes might not work out quite how she expected in the considerably more mundane municipalities. And so it proved.

No sooner was the first spell completed than the whole manor twisted in on itself like Bretonnian knotbread. Corridors and rooms look alright from the inside, but somehow loop back around on themselves when you try to make any progress out. She’s now got a kitchen that somehow manages to fill seven rooms and one room all at the same time. And as for getting out? Well, I was the lucky one. Rosalinde gave me a big old magical shove out of the door just as she realised things were going wrong. Haven’t seen her since.

I only know what I know because her and Olesya have been nattering over the Winds of Magic. Olesya, of course, is about as sympathetic as usual – which is to say not at all – but I suppose we’d better add “help Rosalinde escape the prison of her own hubris” to our list of things to do. Morality aside, a good architect is hard to find, and a good architect who owes you a significant favour is a very good person to know indeed.

An absent-minded man of mysteries, Franz Lohner relies on his bulging journal to keep track of occurrences, intrigues and arguments around Taal's Horn Keep. Sometimes his notes are even useful, believe it or not. The Franz Lohner Chronicles are extracts from that journal.


It’s fair to say that Kerillian hasn’t been that chatty of late, even by her low standards, so it was something of a surprise when she stole into the main hall last night and made a play of warming herself by the fire. A clear invitation for a bit of a natter, if ever there was one.

I’m not saying she opened up all at once. No. Like always, she had an array of back-handed compliments and not-quite-threats ready and levelled, but you don’t last long in a life like mine without nurturing a thick skin, oh no. And humanitarian that I am (Olesya calls it ‘prying’, but she’s one to talk) I wasn’t about to leave Kerillian to whatever was eating her up. Last time I did that…? Well, let’s just say Saltzpyre nearly lost his eye the next day, following his own attempt at enquiry. He’s half-blind in more ways than one, which ain’t handy when it comes to reading the signs. Not sure who landed the first blow, but Sienna and Kruber had to separate them sharpish.

Anyway, after a while, Kerillian stopped her ‘leave me to be morose in peace’ act, and started talking. 

Seems one of the goddesses she upped and dedicated herself to in the summer was one Ereth Khial. The Pale Queen, she’s called, and with good reason, what with her taking up residence in a black pit full of stolen elf-souls. Stolen by her, in fact, which ain’t exactly putting rosy complexion on this particular goddess’ character. Seems the elves think so too, because only the mad or desperate even consider acknowledging the Pale Queen, much less offer her worship. That Kerillian’s done what she has makes her mad, desperate, or both. 

The way Kerillian tells it, she could live with that. Her fear comes from the possibility she might well have damned herself into the bargain. You see, Ereth Khial doesn’t intend to keep lurking in the darkness forever. She had herself a bit of a lover’s tiff with Asuryan - the elven creator god - back beyond the dawn of time. Well, I say ‘tiff’. Sounds much more like a determined refusal to heed the word ‘no’ on her part, but the end result’s much the same. 

Whoever’s at fault, the Pale Queen’s nurturing something of a grudge, and means to drown the world in death - assuming the Chaos Gods don’t get there first. As for Kerillian? She’s been dreaming of herself at the head of a dark host, bat-winged spirits rushing around her like the wind. Seems firelight’s the only thing that keeps those dreams at bay, which makes me wonder if they’re not so much prophecy, as a message from the Pale Queen, warning of a debt coming due.

I left Kerillian to it after that. She’d clammed up, and me? Well… I slept with a lantern burning in the corner of the room last night and started awake at every rattle of the window.

Think I’ll make sure we’ve got plenty of firewood in the stores.

An absent-minded man of mysteries, Franz Lohner relies on his bulging journal to keep track of occurrences, intrigues and arguments around Taal's Horn Keep. Sometimes his notes are even useful, believe it or not. The Franz Lohner Chronicles are extracts from that journal.


Dear me, it’s got a bit funny outside. Weather just doesn’t know what it’s doing. Blazing hot one moment, pouring with rain the next. Olesya reckons it’s something to do with our little forays into the north - that we’ve upset the natural order of things. Well, insofar as there is any kind of natural order to be had wherever the Dark Gods’ beady little eyes latch onto the landscape. Natural ain’t exactly what they’re known for, if you catch my drift?
But much as I hate to admit it, perhaps the old baggage has got a point. Everything was just fine and dandy until Bardin tried to bring back some of those weapons from the Pilgrim’s Trail. Didn’t work, of course. No, the blessed things evaporated into memory as soon as they were out of the Bridge of Shadows. Another reminder that these pilgrimages are enchanted right up the wazoo. Whatever a wazoo is. I asked Catrinne, and she gave me a funnier look than normal.

Anyway, point is that all this meteorological disturbance kicked in just after. Could be coincidence, I’ll grant you, but if there’s one thing I’ve learned in my long life it’s that there’s no such thing as coincidence, just a series of jokes where you haven’t yet got the punchline. Bardin broke the rules of the pilgrimage, and now we’re all paying the price.

I just hope whatever power Bardin’s offended gets bored and sets things right before too much longer. The torrential rain’s made the mountain passes damn near unnavigable, and that’s not good for the supply situation. Worse than that, when the weather brightens, Markus has taken to sunbathing in the nuddy atop the tower. That’s not doing a lot for morale, for one reason or another. Some sights should not be seen by man or beast.

Bah. Why am I wittering on so? Never used to complain like back when I was sellswording. You took your lumps during the day, and were grateful to see the fall of night. Could be I’m getting soft, but I can’t shake the feeling that there’s something wicked coming this way - something that’ll make a spot of rain and Kruber’s unbridled glory seem like a pleasant interlude.

One thing’s for certain: I need to have a word with that sticky-fingered dwarf. We don’t need to go borrowing more trouble.

I don’t suppose we can borrow some peace and quiet? That’d be nice.

An absent-minded man of mysteries, Franz Lohner relies on his bulging journal to keep track of occurrences, intrigues and arguments around Taal's Horn Keep. Sometimes his notes are even useful, believe it or not. The Franz Lohner Chronicles are extracts from that journal.


Bardin’s been back in the workshop again. How can I tell? Well, apart from all manner of clanking and hammering at all hours – not exactly conducive to me getting some much-needed beauty sleep – the mountainside’s increasingly strewn with all manner of failed experiments.

Of course, Bardin being Bardin, must of them are weapons, refinements on various designs he’s accumulated over the years. There are handguns, pistols, cog hammers – you know, the usual stuff – but there are also plenty of oddities and all. A self-loading longbow he whipped up for Kerillian. Went down like a lead airship, it did. An axe with some kind of whirring, mechanical teeth, which I think Saltzpyre would have taken to, were it not for the face it kept breaking down and was easily twice the weight of a normal one.

What gets me is when the designs get a little more, shall we say “unusual”? That mechanical pigeon, for example. No idea how Bardin cobbled the thing together, or why, much less how he trained it to drop those bombs while on the wing. Says he was inspired by something the Imperial engineering school whipped up, and that much is true enough. Only the Altdorf engineers use flesh and blood pigeons, rather than cog and steam. Unnatural, is what it is. And for what it’s worth, the flesh and blood ones are rather brighter than whatever horror Bardin hammered together. His just flies in circles, and unerringly drops payloads of rotten fruit on Kruber, regardless of the target it’s been given.

Hang on. Maybe Kruber’s the real target, and everything else is just an excuse? Yeah, I can see that being the case. Funny sense of humour, that dwarf.

Anyway, I can see I’m going to have to have a word. The rest of us need a bit of shuteye every now and then. More than that, Bardin’s been muttering about a much larger project. Won’t say what, of course, secrecy’s like breathing to a dwarf, but I think I’d like to put a stop to it before he cobbles together some cog-driven dragon, or tries to staple bloody great legs to the keep. I mean, it’ll be a spectacle for sure, but it’s one I’d rather watch from a distance and with a solid forty winks behind me, if you know what I mean?

Welcome to Year 2, Season 2 of the community-run Onslaught Tournament Series!

• Rules and format walkthrough: 9th of September, 4-7pm UTC, 12-3pm ET, 6-9 CEST, 5-8pm BST (streamed at https://www.twitch.tv/exanimia_).
  
• Tier 1 (Cata 1 Deathwish Onslaught) games: 10th of September, same time as above (streamed at https://www.twitch.tv/fightthetide).
  
• Tier 2 (Cata 3 Deathwish Onslaught) games: 11th of September, same time as above (streamed at https://www.twitch.tv/fightthetide).
  
• Tier 3 (Cata 3 Deathwish Onslaught+) games: 12th of September, same time as above (streamed at https://www.twitch.tv/fightthetide).

The tournament format tests consistency and skill, giving teams of four players three hours to complete four maps in a specific order with three attempts each map. Each failed attempt deducts points from a team’s overall score, with forfeited maps deducting the full amount of points for that map.

To access the rules and regulations, as well as to participate, please sign up in the event Discord.

There are three tiers to compete in:

Tier 1 (Cataclysm 1 Deathwish Onslaught)
• Empire in Flames
  
• Into the Nest (interchangeable with Engines of War),
  
• Righteous Stand
  
• Engines of War (interchangeable with Into the Nest)
Tier 2 (Cataclysm 3 Deathwish Onslaught)
• Hunger in the Dark
  
• Old Haunts (interchangeable with Engines of War)
  
• Righteous Stand
  
• Engines of War (interchangeable with Old Haunts)
Tier 3 (Cataclysm 3 Deathwish Onslaught+)
• Righteous Stand
  
• Blood in the Darkness (interchangeable with Convocation of Decay)
  
• Old Haunts
  
• Convocation of Decay (interchangeable with Blood in Darkness)

There's also a prize pool accrued by the tournament organiser and Fatshark, up for grabs by the winners and runner-ups for each respective tier:

Tier 1:
• 2 Vermintide posters
  
• 2 Warhammer 40k: Sanctus Reach collections
  
• 2 Forgotten Relics codes
  
• 2 Sister of the Thorn codes
Tier 2:
• 2 VT2 tees
  
• 2 character premium cosmetic packs
  
• 4 $20 Games Workshop Giftcards
Tier 3:
• 4 serpent frames
  
• 2 VT2 Hoodies
  
• 2 $40 Games Workshop Giftcards

There is a comprehensive set of rules which can be found in the Discord, but three notable rules worth mentioning here are as follows:

• All teams MUST be able to produce a recording on the same day as the tournament, or stream it and have an accessible vod to review, or risk disqualification.
  
• In order to give players more team and career variety while creating a more-balanced competitive environment, teams MUST use the Tourney Balance Mod (patch notes document can be found here).
  
• Iceolator is currently in the process of overhauling Onslaught+. Please ensure teams download and utilize the archived version of the mod found here.
  
• Participating tourney staff are NOT eligible for prizes.

On top of this, as normal there will be a shoutcast of the event streamed at https://www.twitch.tv/fightthetide, with shoutcasters Ishka, Corbec, and the original creator of Onslaught, Grimalackt. Portions of the proceeds from the channel subscriptions/bits/etc this season will go towards supporting those affected by the floods in Germany and supporting Moopshark during his family’s crisis.

The signups are now open! In the appropriate channel in the discord, please state your team name, the names of each of your players and which tier you'd like to compete in.

Hope to see you all there!

An absent-minded man of mysteries, Franz Lohner relies on his bulging journal to keep track of occurrences, intrigues and arguments around Taal's Horn Keep. Sometimes his notes are even useful, believe it or not. The Franz Lohner Chronicles are extracts from that journal.


Every day that passes, I’m learning more and more about the northlands. I mean, that ain’t to say I’m glad to be doing so – there are some pretty ghastly tales told up there, and no mistake – but they do say that knowledge is the true wealth of a life lived to its fullest. As I’ve little enough in the way of actual wealth, I guess that’ll have to do.

Where was I? That’s right: The Forbidden Trail.

Obviously, describing something as forbidden ain’t exactly the closer it might otherwise be, not around here. Old Saltzpyre will describe anything as “forbidden” or “cursed” if he gets even a wisp of something unsavoury. Once of my biggest bugbears with the Order of the Silver Hammer, that. When everything’s an abomination, how do you tell the truly dangerous from the slightly sinful? Lacks nuance, and in my trade you can’t rely on things beings black and white – you’ve got to be able to read the murky bits in between.

But anyway, this Forbidden Trail the Five have found really is one of the bad ones. Seems there used to be a prosperous northlander kingdom where those trees now stand. Coragoz, it was called, and its denizens went in for unholy worship in a big way. You know the sort of thing. Sacrifices running day and night, with all the vile and bloody ritual that goes alongside. Brought captives from clear across the world to feed the fires keep the gutters running with blood. Worse than that, there was no joy in it. I mean, say what you like about Kerillian’s Naggarothi cousins, they’re at least getting a kick out of being inhuman monsters. This lot were like bureaucrats with flensing knives. Dispassionate. Like being smothered by the colour grey.

Centuries, this went on. Untold thousands with slit thrones, gone to the leaping azure flames. And not a peep of thanks from the Dark Gods. But you know what? The Chaos Gods are, more than anything, captives of passion. Vile, unholy, corrupting abominations they may be, but they do love their work. So while the joyless citizens of Coragoz were trying to garner their gods’ attention, those same deities were looking elsewhere for their jollies, and found it with several of the neighbouring tribes who’d suffered at Coragozi hands.

The result was, quite literally, a hell of a battle. Four god-favoured tribes against a city grown strong on slaughter. It was, as Kruber’s old middenball-playing associates might say, a no-score draw. Coragoz was cast down, and the four tribes wiped out to the last frothing lunatic.

What remains of the city – and its colossal wealth – is now buried deep beneath the trees. Draws the occasional treasure-seeker, but I’ve yet to find one who laid his mitts on something valuable and lived to tell of it. Like I said, it’s not called the Forbidden Trail for nothing. Could be there’s still something living beneath the surface. Could be that the gods still hold a grudge against the place. Could be anything, really. That’s the trouble with attempting to make sense of the divine. For every answer, another question comes trundling along, and brings a few mates alongside.

I’ll keep digging. Like I said, knowledge is true wealth. But in the meantime, I’ll be advising the Five to leave their shovels at home when hiking the Forbidden Trail. I’m not that desperate for answers …