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I hope you'll excuse the click-bait title...

I have a longtime friend who is an absolutely fantastic DM. Recently this friend has invited me to join his group of players in their adventures in the Old World via the Warhammer Fantasy RPG 2nd edition. I've not yet made my character as the game isn't starting up until February, but in order to help assimilate into their group I decided to read and research the Old World. Going in I knew nothing about it, outside of the little tid-bits I'd experienced playing Vermintide. To help I've been reading articles, a couple of novels and listening to the videos the Templin Institute has put up on their Youtube channel.

It's been about three weeks now and holy heck all I can say is I now have a solid understanding of the bad taste the Endtimes and AoS have left in this community. It's not just almost sad that the company blew it all up just so they could add their trademark to things, it's downright atrocious.

If anyone has any novel recommendations from the old world, I'd really like to have them. So far I'm really interested in Lustria and Kislev.

Gotrek is easily the best character ever made too. <3

Yep, very sad.
I miss the general WHFB rules more than the lore though.

Lore? That's variable. My goblins can attempt to storm Nuln, fight in Shyesh(sp?), or invade The Valley of the Druids (a battle in our D&D game, played out using AoS). Or it can just be Sat evening # 2,312: Me (goblins) vs Joe (Sylvanth) at the local shop. Any of it works. None of it but attacking the Druid valley really matters.

Rules? Much harder to get that vaguely historical Rank-&-File feel out of a game of Sigmar though....
Solution: Decide wether tonight is AoS or some edition of WHFB. Depends a bit upon who shows up of course as WHFB doesn't have some of our Sigmar players forces.

Black Library has been steadily making omnibus editions of many of the Old World stories, these collect together 3 or so (typically) full novels and some short stories. They present complete story arcs of characters and major events.

If you want a one-stop visit to most of the Old World and their races then the Gotrek and Felix books (now in 5 omnibus editions) present a really great riot of fun through the various settings and races - these two get around!


The BL site is a bit bad for showing this stuff though and the Old World tab was even removed (its under classics now or something all lumped together). However when I got into reading it I found it a mess and thus I wrote it all down and - made an organised archive of the publications

https://warminiatures.wordpress.com/2018/08/31/warhammer-fantasy-classic-black-library-listings/

Collected Editions are all those combined books I was talking about - in brackets are all the books and short stories within them. Many of the individual stories are still on sale (often in digital form) so its easier to just search the title of the omnibus to find it.


After that there's Individual Series, which right now I'd avoid getting as chances are most if not all will end up with collected edition omnibus books (unless you want the individual hard copies of books of course)

Stand Alone are (far as I can tell) stories on their own though sometimes they get rolled into a collected edition.

Gotrek and Felix get their own tab as does Horror and the Darkblade series

Finally there's the short stories - there's a lot of these, but like the novels and stories they are often being put into combined editions.

One thing I would say?

Dan Abnett isn’t a good Fantasy writer, at least where Warhammer is concerned.

The Malus Darkblade stories are pure gold!!

Also by C.L. Werner.

Well, the novels were. I’ve got the two omnibus editions of Abnett’s WHFB stuff, and I just can’t get into it.

The Elf novels in particular I found really off putting “he began to move fast, shadow fast”.....

Other opinions might well vary

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
Also by C.L. Werner.

Well, the novels were. I’ve got the two omnibus editions of Abnett’s WHFB stuff, and I just can’t get into it.

The Elf novels in particular I found really off putting “he began to move fast, shadow fast”.....

Other opinions might well vary

I thought Riders of the Dead was pretty good. Except the lacklustre ending. But Abnett's endings have never been all that great. "Oops, ran out of word count, better tie it up fast."

As for Bill King, the battle scenes in Gotrek and Felix get a bit repetitive but otherwise they're good fun.

There was a good one about a Bretronian Knight called Leofric lost in the forest of Athel Loren. And the short story collection Tales from the old World (or some such ) was a nice intro to some of the areas I'd never delved into. There was one story that comes to mind about a guy giving a Skaven map to a priest.

I have been systemically buying the Warhammer chronicles books. Miss the Old World, as far as I am concerned Storm of Chaos is the proper timeline. I do recommend tham, and the price is fair. You get a single book trilogy for £15 in paperback.

On asiide WHFB is set after Archaons campaign fails at Middenheim, and the devs kept this so it neatly replaced End Times.

The only good thing to come out of End Times was/is Vermintide.

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
Dan Abnett isn’t a good writer.

Fixed that for you. He wrote one of the consistently worst books the Ultraverse ever had printed.


As far as Old World? I had a massive collection of short stories in one book, can't remember the title. Might have been Tales of the Old World.

I'd also snap up as many cheap army books from previous editions as possible. 5th Ed. Brets and High Elves both have some terrific lore in them. Eltharion's may be my favorite.

 Orlanth wrote:
The only good thing to come out of End Times was/is Vermintide.

It's like the plastic Verminlord doesn't exist to you or something.

The new Verminlord was 8th not End Times. It would most certainly exist if I ever got around to including a skaven army.

There were some nice models, Glottkin for example but I use those for something else.
i have a Glottkin, the large model is a Nurgle Soulgrinder and the characters are stand alones.

I use a number of AOS miniatures in my WHFB army, including the undead pegasus, gryph hounds (as Empire unit fillers), new squigs, the Black orc character set from the skirmish game. Lots of stuff, I will however steer clear of cow elves.