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 CthuluIsSpy wrote:
Aren't those over though?

The Realmgate Wars are over, yes, and was something of a victory for the forces of order, but the endgame is still Allpoints/Eightpoints. Its just that other distractions have come, like Nagash’s shenanigans and the various Destruction factions throwing a wrench in the machine. In addition to new free cities that need to be founded and defended.

 CthuluIsSpy wrote:
It seems to me that they aren't fighting over the realmgates anymore and just sort of slugging it out on various worlds,

Yeah, the war effort has kind of stalled and spread out because of the aforementioned distractions. They are slugging it out in various realms because the Realmgate Wars weren’t as successful as Sigmar had hoped.

 CthuluIsSpy wrote:
and the war was primarily fought by Stormcast and Chaos anyway.

Because they were the only factions capable of fighting a long campaign after the Age of Chaos. The Stormcast because they were gathering their strength for centuries and Chaos was reigning across the realms for the most part. Now the forces arrayed against each other are much more diverse as new factions rose while they fought.

 CthuluIsSpy wrote:
I was hoping for more of like a free for all brawl, where you have all of these factions on this hub world just slugging it out.

If the narrative goes the route that the forces of Order/Destruction/Death all make a push for the Eightpoints, that may happen. I think Chaos is geared up for a big push back though. It’ll be fun to see how the story develops.



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pm713 wrote:
Why is the goal to take all gates rather than go realm by realm? Why can't they seal or destroy realmgates and fix important ones later? What do they actually live on?

I'd like answers to all of those. Especially the last one.

Picture the Allpoints as a hub with a bunch of main highways converging on it. Sure you can get somewhere avoiding it in a roundabout way, taking the scenic route and back roads, but you can move more and move faster with access to the Allpoints.

Once/if the Allpoints falls, Chaos will struggle to put troops where needed, hence why it was such a fatal blow to lose it when Chaos took it. Conversely, sealing of some of the realmgates is why a bunch of Free Cities were able to be raised.

They can seal Realmgates, its how Sigmar was able to marshall his strength during the Age of Chaos and strike back. As far as destroying them, it is possible, but I don’t think you’d want to do it for the main realmgates that lead to the Allpoints. If the goal is to take Allpoints, you still need it functional

Not sure what you mean by live on.

Nothing... I play kings of war.

And honestly, I don't mean that to troll y'all. KoW is just that good.

 Darian Aarush wrote:

What do you miss? And how have you adjusted to AoS?

Not that much, I really didn't care for the 8th edition gameplay at all...


And it's been 4 years, yes, I've been able to get over it.

 Inquisitor Gideon wrote:

pm713 wrote:

 nels1031 wrote:

 CthuluIsSpy wrote:
So then why isn't it the primary focus? If its that important, shouldn't the primary plot behind the game be controlling this area?

It is, and has been since the very beginning, hence “The Realmgate Wars”.

Why is the goal to take all gates rather than go realm by realm? Why can't they seal or destroy realmgates and fix important ones later? What do they actually live on?

I'd like answers to all of those. Especially the last one.

Because it's the hub. You control those, you have instant access to all the realms at all times. Going realm by realm would be nearly impossible due to their size and trying to locate the gates. Especially considering they're not necessarily just portals but can actually be living things. What do you mean what do they live on?

Okay but that's still the main strongpoint of Chaos. It makes more sense to cut them off first seeing as they do need food etc and half of Chaos does very badly locked up.

But why? They had all that time before Chaos came to have maps and Stormcast literally come from the sky wherever they want. They could be arriving and destroying things before someone can say "Hey who are those big blokes over there?". If it's a living thing you can still blow it up.

Ah I see why that's hard to get. What do people live on as in what are the Realms? Are they floating discs, actual planets, weird warp places that only semi exist, infinite stretches of land or do we not know?

 pancakeonions wrote:
Nothing... I play kings of war.

And honestly, I don't mean that to troll y'all. KoW is just that good.

been on the fence on that one...gotta see if we have a KoW forum or thread.

Yes though the facebook group is much more active than the mantic section here.

Kings of war is indeed solid.

pm713 wrote:

 Inquisitor Gideon wrote:

pm713 wrote:

 nels1031 wrote:

 CthuluIsSpy wrote:
So then why isn't it the primary focus? If its that important, shouldn't the primary plot behind the game be controlling this area?

It is, and has been since the very beginning, hence “The Realmgate Wars”.

Why is the goal to take all gates rather than go realm by realm? Why can't they seal or destroy realmgates and fix important ones later? What do they actually live on?

I'd like answers to all of those. Especially the last one.

Because it's the hub. You control those, you have instant access to all the realms at all times. Going realm by realm would be nearly impossible due to their size and trying to locate the gates. Especially considering they're not necessarily just portals but can actually be living things. What do you mean what do they live on?

Okay but that's still the main strongpoint of Chaos. It makes more sense to cut them off first seeing as they do need food etc and half of Chaos does very badly locked up.

But why? They had all that time before Chaos came to have maps and Stormcast literally come from the sky wherever they want. They could be arriving and destroying things before someone can say "Hey who are those big blokes over there?". If it's a living thing you can still blow it up.

Ah I see why that's hard to get. What do people live on as in what are the Realms? Are they floating discs, actual planets, weird warp places that only semi exist, infinite stretches of land or do we not know?

As i said, you can't simply due to the sheer size of the realms. And if you try to take the Allpoints directly, you're going to die. It's where Archaon's tower is, where the Varanspire is. Incidentally where Warcry is set as well.
Because they assumed they didn't have too. They had a lot of time of peace and prosperity when chaos was nowhere in sight. And with peace comes laxity. When chaos came, it hit like a tidal wave and wiped out basically everything. If there were maps, they were either lost or it wasn't considered worth the risk at the time.

And Stormcast do do that. There's numerous stories about where they fight for control of gates not only against chaos but numerous other races to either control or seal them.

Well, they live on the ground like anyone else? It's hard to answer that without sounding condescending. They live in towns, mountains, forests? Only the Kharadron specifically live in the air on their flying cities and the Idoneth in the oceans that we know of currently.

I think he's talking about actual geography. Like, are the realms spherical planets, or are they a discworld sort of thing where you have a flat plane on the back of a turtle, something like that.

I enjoyed my old Southlands Skinks army and literally running circles around my opponents’ blocks of infantry while peppering them with blow darts and javelins and arrows.

Once I finish my CoS I'll likely jump on KoW, unless GW decides to release the rumored light elves at the time. The design and feel of AoS game sits less and less with me.

pm713 wrote:
What do people live on as in what are the Realms? Are they floating discs, actual planets, weird warp places that only semi exist, infinite stretches of land or do we not know?

That's still kind of difficult to explain, but according to a video released just before 2.0 came out, the realms are sort of discworlds. Each is attuned to a wind of magic. They aren't infinite, but they "may as well be". Basically, the closer you are to the middle of the realm, the more earth-like and stable it is. As you move outward, the winds of magic grow stronger until the realm basically just turns into magic, so on Chamon, for example, if you go too far from the middle, you'd just turn into liquid metal and float away. Because of this, the mortal races are settled around the middle of the realms.

See now just that little detail makes the setting SO MUCH cooler to me. Gah. Why haven't they made that stuff more obvious to draw people in?

Eh, its ok. Its still not clear how or why these worlds interact. Do they always fight over realm gates or something? How does that even work? Do two factions stumble across the same realm gate and fight over it?
Can you even have a middle in an nigh-infinite space? How big is a middle?

 EnTyme wrote:

pm713 wrote:
What do people live on as in what are the Realms? Are they floating discs, actual planets, weird warp places that only semi exist, infinite stretches of land or do we not know?

That's still kind of difficult to explain, but according to a video released just before 2.0 came out, the realms are sort of discworlds. Each is attuned to a wind of magic. They aren't infinite, but they "may as well be". Basically, the closer you are to the middle of the realm, the more earth-like and stable it is. As you move outward, the winds of magic grow stronger until the realm basically just turns into magic, so on Chamon, for example, if you go too far from the middle, you'd just turn into liquid metal and float away. Because of this, the mortal races are settled around the middle of the realms.

So if things are near infinite, why do I care? In Fantasy if the city of Nuln was destroyed there were visible consequences in terms of weapon production, land control, money and so on. But with Realms it doesn't matter because you can just move somewhere else. Fighting Chaos is pointless when you have a choice because they're endless and you can just leave and go elsewhere.

The whole Realmgate War seems dumb because if the only way between each Realm is the Gates then it would have been much smarter to take a look at a map, strike at every Gate in a target Realm and destroy/seal the ones you don't want open and use the ones leading to friendly territory to bring in reinforcements and clean up. Then repeat in the next Realm. That way you can negate the numbers of Chaos and actually make progress.

So much of the basic lore of AoS is flawed because it's plain stupid and unthought out. Things like people not putting Nagash in charge because he can actually match Chaos more than other people is a reasonable thing because while it makes sense in terms of killing Chaos, Nagash would stab you in the back for a cold coffee. But things like waging war in a way you cannot win despite a better way being obvious just doesn't. Let's not even mention the giant weight dragging things down that is the remnants of Fantasy lore.

I dont know that its stupid. It seems like a deliberate attempt to ape magic the gathering, which the rules of the game also moved more toward (only using models).

I dont think thats stupid because magic the gathering is probably the most popular game in existence. It is the GOAT. That gw would want to tap that audience is smart (and indeed the number of our local ccg people that jumped into aos because it moved away from wargame and more toward what they were familiar with, setting and experience, cannot be underlined enough.

I think for those that want a wargame and a concrete landscape to play on need to move on to a game that caters to that, because we have not been the target audience for some years now.

Ehh, it's not really an attempt to mimic Magic the Gathering. If anything its an attempt to ape 40k.

The Realms are huge and massive, the same as a galaxy. Just as there are random planets and Forge World out there where you can create your own Guard Regiment/Space Marine Chapter etc. The Realms are big enough where you can create your own City of Sigmar, or Stormhost.

I don't really see how it can be stupid in AoS yet, when 40k does the exact same thing, it's not?

Its big and limitless which allows players to come up with their own story/army tailored as they want.

Of late there have been few things that are gnawing me on this topic. There seems to be an obvious intent to expand the potential of the themes that you can produce, take for instance MtG, you can have anything you'd want (except naturally the plane that was classified as a fiasco from the salesman perspective), from ancient myths of Egypt, Babylon, China, Greece, aether punk India and so on, however, you need to have some cohesive plot that binds everything together.

Looking at AoS, they aren't quite sure what they want from their realms or the story, apart from treating it as a black box from where they can pull a different product. The end result is that the setting comes off as incredibly thin and unconvincing. Should the planes had larger weight on the armies in how they need to look and behave it'd be more interesting from my point of view. That apart from Gotrek we don't really have any major freelance players that have a realistic chance to go against the gods is also not contributing to the excitement or interest.

There sure are a lot of similarities between aos and mtg both in narrative world building as well as game mechanics and player experience to say theres no mtg influence or leaning at all in the game.

Da Boss wrote:See now just that little detail makes the setting SO MUCH cooler to me. Gah. Why haven't they made that stuff more obvious to draw people in?

It was part of the main promotional effort for 2.0. How would you prefer they make it available other than posting the video to Facebook, YouTube, and their community site?

CthuluIsSpy wrote:Can you even have a middle in an nigh-infinite space? How big is a middle?

pm713 wrote:So if things are near infinite, why do I care?

I'll address both of these together. The realms aren't "nigh-infinite". They "may as well be" infinite, meaning you can't reach the edge, not that the realm is infinitely large. The example I (and the video I was referencing) gave is that on Chamon, you will turn to liquid metal long before you reach the edge, so no one knows just how large the realm is. What they do know is that the realms have a finite amount of liveable area, and that area is precious. That is what everyone is fighting over.

Oh, ok well that does make sense. It would have helped if they actually explained that off the bat, but that does give a plausible casus belli. I still don't like the overall presentation of AoS and the whole realm of magic concept, but I get behind land grabs.

Are lizardmen still imaginary spirit monsters though, or are they still born from spawning vats and hang out in temple cities? I really hated reading about how they are just summoned by Slann now instead of being physical creatures of flesh and blood.

 CthuluIsSpy wrote:
Oh, ok well that does make sense. It would have helped if they actually explained that off the bat, but that does give a plausible casus belli. I still don't like the overall presentation of AoS and the whole realm of magic concept, but I get behind land grabs.

Are lizardmen still imaginary spirit monsters though, or are they still born from spawning vats and hang out in temple cities? I really hated reading about how they are just summoned by Slann now instead of being physical creatures of flesh and blood.

I don't think the discworld thing was part of the plan at launch. Remember that the old CEO basically just wanted the lore to be a vague setting to give players a "reason' to fight as they banged their toy soldiers together and made "PEW! PEW!" noises. They didn't really start writing concrete lore until after the first GHB. The lore was incredibly vague even in early battletomes. As far as the Seraphon, if a Slann needs more soldiers, he dreams them back into existence on the battlefield, but they aren't just specters or anything. They are physical beings. Some who survive the battle go back to the starships with their Slann masters. Others remain on the realms living amongst the other races or carving out their own communities.

 Commodus Leitdorf wrote:
Ehh, it's not really an attempt to mimic Magic the Gathering. If anything its an attempt to ape 40k.

The Realms are huge and massive, the same as a galaxy. Just as there are random planets and Forge World out there where you can create your own Guard Regiment/Space Marine Chapter etc. The Realms are big enough where you can create your own City of Sigmar, or Stormhost.

I don't really see how it can be stupid in AoS yet, when 40k does the exact same thing, it's not?

Its big and limitless which allows players to come up with their own story/army tailored as they want.

40k uses planets and has various things that make the loss of something actually problematic. For example if Eldar lose a Webway gate or the Imperium loses a Forge World that's a permanent loss of transit through an area or production of some weapon types. AoS just tells you a city falls with no reason to care.

pm713 wrote:

 Commodus Leitdorf wrote:
Ehh, it's not really an attempt to mimic Magic the Gathering. If anything its an attempt to ape 40k.

The Realms are huge and massive, the same as a galaxy. Just as there are random planets and Forge World out there where you can create your own Guard Regiment/Space Marine Chapter etc. The Realms are big enough where you can create your own City of Sigmar, or Stormhost.

I don't really see how it can be stupid in AoS yet, when 40k does the exact same thing, it's not?

Its big and limitless which allows players to come up with their own story/army tailored as they want.

40k uses planets and has various things that make the loss of something actually problematic. For example if Eldar lose a Webway gate or the Imperium loses a Forge World that's a permanent loss of transit through an area or production of some weapon types. AoS just tells you a city falls with no reason to care.

Do they though? Or does the narrative just come up with planets or gates that have never been mentioned before to fill in for the ones that were lost? I think that happens far more often.

 Inquisitor Gideon wrote:

pm713 wrote:

 Commodus Leitdorf wrote:
Ehh, it's not really an attempt to mimic Magic the Gathering. If anything its an attempt to ape 40k.

The Realms are huge and massive, the same as a galaxy. Just as there are random planets and Forge World out there where you can create your own Guard Regiment/Space Marine Chapter etc. The Realms are big enough where you can create your own City of Sigmar, or Stormhost.

I don't really see how it can be stupid in AoS yet, when 40k does the exact same thing, it's not?

Its big and limitless which allows players to come up with their own story/army tailored as they want.

40k uses planets and has various things that make the loss of something actually problematic. For example if Eldar lose a Webway gate or the Imperium loses a Forge World that's a permanent loss of transit through an area or production of some weapon types. AoS just tells you a city falls with no reason to care.

Do they though? Or does the narrative just come up with planets or gates that have never been mentioned before to fill in for the ones that were lost? I think that happens far more often.

Yeah basically this. "Oh the Tyranids destroy Forge World Tarminion in the Asmun system." What are they? Never heard of THAT world. Yeah is a permenant lose but...the Galaxy is huge...HUUUUGE. Humanity is so prolific , and the galaxy so vast, that you could lose a ton and not have to change all that much. Other then Space Marine Chapter "The Furious Georges" who no one has heard of has to get their tanks from a different Forge World a couple of Parsecs over.

Again, there is no difference between the two when it comes to world building. They are both big and vast with a lot of space for players to fill in the blanks with their own narrative ideas and campaigns. It's just that 40k has been around for 30 years and AoS only 4, so the amount of background info and history that has already been established is significantly less so, mostly due to time.

Though I play AoS and enjoy it, it doesn't hit the spot that WHFB and KoW does.

I choose to ignore the AoS fluff and just picture all the battles taking place in the Old World anyway. I can rationalize a bunch of gates opening to other realms allowing in demons and Sigmarines but my Lizardmen are still defending the geomantic web, damn it.

 Fajita Fan wrote:
I choose to ignore the AoS fluff and just picture all the battles taking place in the Old World anyway. I can rationalize a bunch of gates opening to other realms allowing in demons and Sigmarines but my Lizardmen are still defending the geomantic web, damn it.

Yeah, I'm going to miss Lustria. GW blowing it up and basically killing off Lizards was a dick move. They basically half-squatted them.
Like, they are still in the game, but they aren't the same army, you know? I really don't like this psuedo-craftword Eldar / summoning thing they turned the Lizards into.

 EnTyme wrote:

Da Boss wrote:See now just that little detail makes the setting SO MUCH cooler to me. Gah. Why haven't they made that stuff more obvious to draw people in?

It was part of the main promotional effort for 2.0. How would you prefer they make it available other than posting the video to Facebook, YouTube, and their community site?

Well, for one, it should have been central to AoS 1.0 rather than all the claptrap about sigmar floating around in space with a dragon and so on. It should not take til the second edition to get something so basic and important to a setting to be known.

I had already given up on the lore by then, so I was not checking videos or reading stuff. I did that at the start and found it terrible and insipid, and I was interested to know more about the Realms but there was pretty much nothing available. I also picked up a battletome (Seraphon) and it told me diddly squat about anything.

I don't watch their promotional videos anyway, because they are a bit crappy, so I guess it would need to be in an article somewhere.

They really ballsed up the release of this game. The postapocalyptic Planescape vibe could be really cool and interesting, but instead I feel we got a stupid soap opera with the named characters, most of whom are leftovers from the Old World flanderised into caricatures of themselves.


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 CthuluIsSpy wrote:

 Fajita Fan wrote:
I choose to ignore the AoS fluff and just picture all the battles taking place in the Old World anyway. I can rationalize a bunch of gates opening to other realms allowing in demons and Sigmarines but my Lizardmen are still defending the geomantic web, damn it.

Yeah, I'm going to miss Lustria. GW blowing it up and basically killing off Lizards was a dick move. They basically half-squatted them.
Like, they are still in the game, but they aren't the same army, you know? I really don't like this psuedo-craftword Eldar / summoning thing they turned the Lizards into.

Amen to that. I think it is actually a pretty brave move and quite interesting from a structural point of view, but I really do not like it as much as the Lizardmen just being...Lizardmen, rather than weird magical memories of frogs in spaceships.
I will be ignoring that entirely when I play and my Lizardmen will just be Lizardmen.

I'll put it another way: I started to read the AoS fluff a few years ago when I bought two of the Sigmarine vs Khorne box sets (half off, local store closing). I never finished reading the fluff when I got a headache.

I started reading the Lizardmen book...and stopped when I got a headache reading that my Saurus warriors are now memories.

I started reading the Black Orc book...and stopped when I couldn't find Grimgor.

I play the game to have fun with my friends and I choose to ignore this whole End Times/Age of Sigmar magic portal system. It's the Old World, there are new enemies and battles must be fought. Let's get to fighting.

You both should really look into the post-GHB lore. They didn't really start writing until a year after the game released.