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You can even set the AoS armies in Old World, and the game still works, cause lore is entirely optional for a wargame.

 NinthMusketeer wrote:

tneva82 wrote:

ccs wrote:

 Overread wrote:
My problem with a lack of a proper timeline is it becomes hard to see the overall story of the setting.

That's fine. The only story & chronology of events that matters is what goes on on our table tops.

That was true when gw games were settings. Then players whined nothing happens so now they are stories so gamers tabletob　stories and events became　irrelevant and only gw stories matter.

Be carefull what you wish for.

Speak for yourself. Me & my mates are really happy they changed to a progressing setting approach and have been enjoying the AoS story quite a lot.

40K has an uphill struggle here, because it’s been the same for so very, very long. I think a chunk of the pushback, at least initially, was based on the assumption nothing else would happen, and no further developments would occur. Whilst that now doesn’t seem to be the case, Paycheck Awakening wasn’t exactly great. Promised a lot, delivered relatively little in terms of background. Indeed, many volumes just sort of....ended. No real conclusion etc

I think the problem was the PA stories and lore were more like fleshed out duel army pack lore. A neat little thing to go with the release, but often as not just a smaller story within the universe rather than saga shattering events or such. And often those do just "end" because the idea is they set the stage and then the players are the "end" with the battle and such.

Passage of time in the Mortal Realms varies from one realm to another, actually. The number of different kingdoms having different ways to measure time (with calendars, seasons and so on) makes it irrelevant to speak about specifics. They wrote about it in a White Dwarf article about why they didn't put dates on the timeline events and this is also why they'd rather talk about "ages" rather than years.

That's the same reason most of the important named characters that appeared in the lore are either immortals, already dead or have very long lives.

Recent V9 codexes in 40k completely removed the timelines with codex related events, though. Maybe GW don't want to bother with them anymore, since it can be annoying when you try to insert new events in it. The more vague you are, the fewer chances you have to make time related incoherences.

But yeah, with AoS it's clear we have the perfect example of the difference between a completely new universe and another that is well established. You have more freedom to create new stuff in the first, undeniably. Destroying the Old World was traumatic for players, sure, but for game developpers and background writers ? It was a blessing.

40k is still crippled with one foot in the past and another trying to move desperatly towards the future (but not too much). It's clear they're scared to really shake the background in 40k.

Cronch wrote:
You can even set the AoS armies in Old World, and the game still works, cause lore is entirely optional for a wargame.

Irrelevant argument, since with it you can also have Space Marines fighting the Old World Empire with historic Romans joining the fray. Just need to adapt the armies to a single system, but it would also work in the end.

Lore isn't optional. It's what defines the wargame. Otherwise, everything is free for all and there is no reason to distinguish one from another.

The problem 40K has is 30 years of 40K marketing and Gw's lore suddenly getting to the near 40999 and rebranding to Warhammer 41K is likely a MASSIVE thing for marketing to even consider.


Plus everyone would still call it 40K like everyone calls Astra militawhatevers Imperial Guard




In the end dates and timelines aren't evil nor are they barriers to advancing stories or depth of stories or any of that. It's down to both the skill of the writers AND skill of whoever is in charge of the setting as a whole.
Authors achieve it all the time, I think the only reason GW is having issues is that they've got so many writers and bits of lore and I don't think anyone has managed to keep track of it all internally well enough. So now they've a bit of a jumble and, in the end, its likely not cost effective for them to unjumble it all whilst also producing new stuff.


I think this is why some other franchises often do big "reset the setting" events. It lets them clear out all the jumble in one go; return to hteir roots and restart everything. Heck Marvel and DC restart things ALL the time. The story lines for many characters have repeated so many times that even casual people who arne't invested into them already know the general setup. A new Spiderman universe setting is likely going to follow several major key events over and over each and every time - and fans do lap it up.


I do wonder if GW could do the same some day with 40K; but at the same time I don't think their market, marketing nor what they've produced thus far really gears them up well for it. I'd wager pushing into Warhammer 41 would be a better move.

Both WFB and 40k had the same theme : the universe is on the brink of ruin and devastation, with constant reminders of the End Times being near. WFB eventually got it, while 40k is still "near midnight's hour".

If 40k finally get past it (and I think GW will eventually, that's the perfect excuse to fundamentally start anew the rules and the factions instead of their bloated state as years pass on), it will certainly change its name as well into something like Age of Guilliman or whatever. When you make something completely different like WFB and AoS, people won't call them the same. They will make the difference (especially if they're attached to one of them emotionally and don't want anything to do with the other).

After all, you never saw AoS being called WFB 2.0, because it was never that in the end. Like Cities of Sigmar aren't really called AoS Empire, because that's not what they are as well.

Har Kuron, on the other end...you may call them AoS Naggarond or Dark Elves...even if technically, they're more tied to Morathi than Malekith...and that's a big difference still.

I think there's a big difference between the lore of a setting moving on and the company changing the entire game in one swoop.

AoS wasn't the lore advancing, it was a straight up destruction of the old lore and most of the old game. It was honestly a horrible mess trying to on the one hand remove the entire background and start fresh; whilst keeping the background characters and models and armies and some stuff.

AoS at launch didn't know what it was and that was mostly because all it was supposed to be was a boutique line of models with some casual rules on the side. The lore, the game, the armies, the collections, the customers - all didn't really matter one bit. All that mattered were making models; selling models and collectors.



I can't see GW repeating that for 40K.
They CAN advance the 40K storyline. It won't end the "end is coming" angle, so much as change the state of it. Thing is you can do that without having to change ANY of the armies on the tabletop. You don't have ot write out the Eldar; change the Imperium from Gothic to Indian; merge the Tau with Orks and remove the Kroot and then change the entire Tyranid line to a flight only army.


You don't have to strip away the old to advance the storyline. If anything a lot of the "story isn't going anywhere" arguments are moot; the story doesn't HAVE to go anywhere for the tabletop side of things.

The biggest letdown in regards to the Psychic Awakening campaign books was that they weren't more like AoS campaign books. Forbidden Power, Wrath of the Everchosen, and BR Morathi have all been awesome.

There's a big divide between people who want to mess around in a setting and people who want to take part in an interactive story.

Time and new things happening are more important for the second group, and GW seem to have identified that as the direction they want to go in.

But they want to have their cake and eat it rather than work hard to make it make sense so they have things be poorly defined and vague for maximum freedom.

I find this sort of story generally pretty insipid, because your big superhero characters that move everything can't really suffer worse than a setback here or there and the quality of the narrative tends to be very poor. That's why I don't care about timelines or whatever.

In my experience there are two main groups. There are people who believe that AoS should just be WHFB 2.0, and there are people who prefer the new direction that the game is headed. For example, many people didn't like the Lumineth Realmlords because they weren't "High Elfy" enough. But the thing about the Lumineth is that they aren't just High Elves is AoS. They are the Lumineth Realmlords, and while they take some visual cues from High Elves, they also have a lot of Greek aesthetics too. My hope is that with the release of The Old World the people who just wanna play WHFB can play there and GW will be free to take AoS in new and bold directions.

Yeah, I think that was particularly evident during first edition. These days most people understand that AoS is its own thing, its never going to be WHFB 2.0, and was never intended to be. But there was (and to a notable extent, still is) resentment at that, IMO understandable given they literally blew up WHFB and replaced it with AoS.

But I do feel there should be a third group separated out for the people who turn to psychopathic hate and light their armies on fire.

On the one hand, I can't say I particularly like the direction AoS has gone in (compared to WHFB).

I'm not a fan of the move from 'traditional'-looking armies to armies that frequently seem to consist almost entirely of dinner-plate sized centrepiece models, competing against one another to be the most overly-elaborate centrepiece model on the table.

Most of the newer aesthetics, as well as the general move towards very high fantasy, just don't really appeal to me.

However, I'll freely admit that this is just down to my own personal taste. So, to be clear, I don't consider most of the new models to be objectively ugly or anything like that. They're just not my thing.


On the other hand, I think AoS is far better off in terms of not having a clear 'favourite' faction with about 10 times as many models and 50 times as much advertising as any other faction. With 40k, you're often left with the distinct impression that the writer of a given codex has never even played the army before and is just doing a rush job so that they can get back to writing more Marine supplements.

Further, in spite of my above complaints, there are definitely AoS models that I do really like. For example, I really like the Sylvaneth Tree-/Spite-Revenants and I think it's a fantastic kit. Hell, I bought a few specifically for DE conversions. I also like the Abhorrant Archregent, and some of the new vampires are fantastic (I expect they'll also make it into my DE army, assuming the upcoming codex doesn't kill my interest in 40k altogether).

Meanwhile, I can't remember the last time I was really excited to own a particular 40k kit.

When Age of Sigmar was getting leaked, I was actually pretty optimistic. I really like rank and flank fantasy, but 8th edition had really gotten out of hand especially in the model count stakes. The idea of taking that and making it into a more loose game where you could throw whatever models you liked on the table in a more warband structure and the rules were less complicated seemed appealing. After all, I always had Kings of War to play if I wanted rank and flank.

But when I saw how it was done, with no points and joke rules, it did get my back up. I had a lot of fondness for WFB and it seemed like they were saying that they thought I was stupid for having that fondness. And then factions started disappearing, and some of the new factions (Fyreslayers) were really underwhelming.

By now I've mellowed out. I think it's got a lot of potential to be cool, the core world concept is quite cool. I still prefer WFB, but I think it's cool that AoS exists for all it's crazy nonsense.

I was much the same, the launch was confusing and crazy and horrible. I saw armies I'd only just got started with and got excited about being fragmented and a management team that clearly didn't have a clue about its market.

Or at least about its gaming market.

AoS at launch was a disaster of a mistake that shouldn't have happened but did. Sad thing is Old World had so many old kits around them that they could well have evolved most armies toward the styles the are now. Heck Tomb Kings had perfect AoS style models with their extreme bone constructs.
I'm still sort of amazed GW didn't bring them back unless the management of the time made them chuck out the moulds too

Still we are getting vampires back this year and I'm loving the new additions - splitting the Chaos Gods has made for some neat twists. Whilst on the one side I can't run the Slaanesh+Khorne demon army I planned to one day run - I can now run a big Slaanesh force with fiends and seeker chariots and new mounted mortal seeker riders and all!

 Overread wrote:
AoS at launch was a disaster of a mistake that shouldn't have happened but did.

It was inevitable. GW was going downhill with their proud commitment to no market research and firm belief that GW customers were generally collectors who did the hobby on the side. Something, a new game or edition completely backed by that mentality to sell poorly as a result, was eventually going to happen.

Age of sigmar is looking way better now, and I been trying to get people to give it a look. But 40k is way to entrenched in the GW gamers minds here.

I still think it needs work, as from reading the setting it still feels like a made by corporate numbers.
The sigmar army’s still look out of place with so much more of the setting and the monotone army’s end up being bland for a lot of players.
The newer stuff looks way better, with a lot of meh GW design.
Stuff like the lumeth archers keep me from buying in at all, can’t take them seriously.
But then seeing the new slaanesh stuff and it’s some of GW best models easy.

Apple fox wrote:
Age of sigmar is looking way better now, and I been trying to get people to give it a look. But 40k is way to entrenched in the GW gamers minds here.

Out of interest how do you try and get them involved?

I've oft found one of the only ways is when people actually start seeing more than one army in person and seeing the game played. It's why so many of those game outreach programs that use fans as local representatives, often require those who sign up to own at least two or more modest/starter forces from different armies. The idea being that they can run demo games on their own; that the person they are introducing hasn't got to pay or do anything save turn up and play. Sometimes its the only way to get people involved.

If you can paint them well and throw them down on a good looking board with some terrain (Eg AOS Terrain) then you can have a good chance at least with tempting them.

I have the starter box all done, but that has mostly been met with no one really interested. I off corse have my fantasy battles army’s to use, but that has got as much interest for going back as for trying Age of sigmar.
And with GW prices I can only afford to by so much, and my ability to paint is very very slow so even my new stuff is going to be months before it’s even nice enough to move to show off the game.

Also all the interesting story elements seem to be in extra books, so really hard to gain interest there.

Can point people to excellent Youtube lore channels. 2+Tough is a personal favourite.

A good angle is roping in the Chaos players with mono-God forces. To 40k the idea of being able to mix & match the daemons, devoted, and marked units of a given god freely without penalty remains novel. Imagine the freedom of being able to combine Death Guard, DoN, and CSM units w/mark of Nurgle into one detachment without losing any of the benefits, for example.

Lore channels is a good start for me, at least if I know the more interesting stuff I can talk about it.

Sadly The death guard player has no daemons as of yet. And another players interest has been purely for the stats in 40k.
My own daemons could be used, but as of yet has been a pure 40k army.

We are a multi game group so I am hoping a mordheim campaign soon will get some interest in Age of sigmar one as well.
As most of the interest in the game comes from outside the GW sphere. So I am hopping with the newer army’s to display I can get some interest.
We don’t have a GW store close enough now, so building interest is weird.

Of the new factions released I think Stormcast, Nighthaunt, Idoneth , Daughters of Khaine and all of the Chaos releases have been pretty good.

The Chaos stuff is really over the top, but it suits the setting. I prefer a slightly more grounded version but can appreciate the new stuff is showcasing what AoS is about.

Stormcast are a cool design. I prefer them as lifeless constructs of Order than big beefy heroes in armour, but that's fine I just never use any unhelmeted heads. I don't like how much new stuff they got at the start, because it does show that the plan is for them to slowly take over the release schedule like Space Marines have for 40K, but that is probably some time away and no one is writing a bunch of novels about how unstoppable stormcast are that are actually popular so I'm good with it.

Idoneth are a cool concept for spooky sea elves. I would have liked more of a Deep One vibe and more lovecraftian monsters, and the flying eels and sharks on forest battlefields is a bit dopey, but they're great minis for roleplaying games where you can have actual underwater adventures.

Nighthaunt are just nicely designed spooky ghosts. Not sure I would make a whole faction out of that concept but if you're gonna these are really nice and push the strengths of the GW casting material to it's limit.

DoK are limited as hell but all of their kits are cool. Would have prefered to see them added to a dark elf list but an entire army of murderous elf ladies with mutant murderous elf ladies is also pretty cool.

Of the other new factions...
Fyreslayers - Stupid lazy name, stupid lazy background (ur-gold, really) and a really disappointing design for the models. Also an "army" from what, 4 kits, all of which are super over priced. Yuck. All the dwarves with helmets bigger than their entire bodies standing on their tippy toes with mushy flame detail sculped onto their hair. Awful. I bet barely anyone plays these and they are one of the worst sellers.

Kharadron Overlords - would be cool for a Privateer Press Game, but the full steampunk vibe is not really jiving with the rest of Age of Sigmar properly.

Cow Elves - The hats man. The hats. The models minus the hats are fine. But. The hats. And so over priced. Also not digging the giant centre piece monster. But it's just a style thing, it's technically good. Oh and Teclis is ugly as sin.

Bonereapers - The big constructs are cool but the basic troops should just have been skeletons. The Skeletor theme here is not working for me.

Nu-Orcs: Urgh. I find these a really ugly, pretty much 40K inspired design. Really don't like them at all. Common Orcs and Goblins are my biggest WFB fantasy army, so I am definitely biased, but I find these to be the worst Orc models GW has ever produced. Giant orcs covered in slabs of metal painted bright colours, it's just ugly as hell and not compelling at all. I also hate the giant boars and the fact that all the stuff I like got squatted for this hideous garbage. No thank you.

So they've got a fairly equal number of hits and misses, and where there are misses it tends to be purely on the model aesthetics. Trying to jack every single faction up into something really over the top. A bit like those ridiculous Skaven Rat Ogres with the gatling gun arms that look like they are for a different game entirely. You need some stuff that isn't like that to sell the over the top stuff or else it just becomes visual noise.

Fyreslayers where when our dwarf player noped out hard originally.
The overlords haven’t seen any interest from our warmachine players so I dunno. I think they just kind of weird and both of these look like they should have been part of a dwarf city’s or something.

Otherwise I really wish the storm cast where a bit less “Heroic” don’t even mind they lore for them so much, other than think it’s bland. But I don’t think they fit in so well with the look and feel of basicly everything else.
And the 40k players see them and the jokes are basically the same as originally made.

But new slaanesh models I am just so like these are amazing, and all the newer models in the daughters of Khane line have been fantastic just scary price without a group to play with.

I had high hopes for that release because I love Azers from Dungeons and Dragons, but the models were just crap and overpriced crap at that.

Same reason I'm probably not going to pick up Idoneth or Daughters despite liking the models, 4.40 euro per Witch Elf is really not good enough, especially when the set is two sets of 5 monopose models.

Apparently KO are some of the best selling armies for AoS, even back when their rules were complete doggyfaeces.

That's really interesting to know. I think they are nice models, they just don't fit with my idea of the setting at all. The sky ships are very cool though and not much like that exists in the market. If I was gonna do a steampunk game I would definitely pick a couple up.

I think the steam punk will come along once GW does humans who are supposed to be full of steam punk elements. It's just a design choice that, thus far, hasn't really been developed much beyond the ancient steam tank.

Steam punk can certainly fit; Skaven have been running around with mad-science for years already

Cronch wrote:
Apparently KO are some of the best selling armies for AoS, even back when their rules were complete doggyfaeces.

I wonder if that’s down to them being pretty unique in the Fantasy war games market?

Sure, Steampunk is a thing, and fans of that style are spoiled for choice. But I can’t think of anything else quite like Kharadrons. As someone normally adverse to Steampunk, I appreciate Kharadron because they’re not lazy “stick a cog on it and call it” Steampunk. Rather than uninspired Victoriana, they look like a technology that’d been developed by artisans. Please note this is just me trying to explain my take - don’t take it as a dunk on Steampunk as a thing. If it’s Your Bag, you shine on - my opinion is not important.

In terms of their aesthetic, it’s impressive that they’re not just recognisably Dwarves, but GW Dwarves, whilst also being an original take.

This is something I’d like to see more of from the design studio. After all, AoS is still the relatively New Kid in the Fantasy Market. This gives GW the opportunity to do stuff no-one else is. They’re no longer tied to their Tolkien roots as they were with WHFB.

I think KO are perhaps not integral but certainly a pillar of what AoS is. They more than fit the setting-they fill it out and support it very strongly. Really fantastic design of miniatures and theme. But that's my own opinion.

I will speak up in defense of Fyreslayers; the detail on the miniatures is actually really nice in-person. They have a lot of 'rune bling' on them that may not suit everyone but fits their own style, and the runes in their skin have a sharp detail I feel most companies would struggle to match. The whole 'ur-gold is the name of their currency' thing was just a misinterpretation from when we didn't have the full explanation. Ur-gold is gold infused with divine essence, but non-Fyreslayers just perceive it as regular gold. So the Fyreslayers do mercenary work from payments in gold, hoping that some of said gold will be ur-gold. Ur-gold is what they use to make the runes in their skin that empower them.

Basically the fact that I can look at factions like Idoneth and Stormcast and KO and NOT immediately just go 'yawn, ho-hum it's just another generic fantasy setting but this time with miniatures that cost 3x as much' is the reason i do own an army for AOS and I never in 15 years got an army for fantasy.

Having played TWW, I got an appreciation for how good the lore of the old world is, but man was the fact that on first glance it looked super generic fantasy ever a barrier to entry to me.

That, and the individual models always looked wonky because they were designed for rank basing. You're either huddled up, bunched up, holding your weapon straight up and down, or you're HOLDING BOTH YOUR ARMS STRAIGHT UP IN THE AIR LIKE YOURE CALLING A FIELD GOAL.