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Yeah, DoK is a big mix of that in their hatred of chaos and that they have a heavily political and structured mindset. They have interests in their kingdoms back in the realm of shadows and the free cities with equal parts operating in them and manipulating them with activities that make them look benign while hiding any misdoings.

The Deepkin are more isolationist but pretty varied between soul greedy who are rather malevolent in striking simple villages to the deepkin kingdoms that either only go after the strong and dangerous like in Ghur to the kingdom mentioned in the Portents story which only went after souls already claimed by the raging seas and thus hurt no one.

 frozenwastes wrote:
I think Order might be best defined as opposition to Chaos. So the Indoneth and the Daughters of Khaine could be order purely out of their opposition to Slaanesh.

Though I also think they really do have orderly societies. They may end up being stratified and not just, but certainly orderly.

Being anti-Chaos is pretty much how GW defines it temselves.

"The forces of Order are the Mortal Realms’ shield against Chaos. Order is a loose alliance of the free peoples of the realms – humans, aelves and duardin, alongside staunch defenders of law like Sigmar’s Stormcast Eternals, more exotic forces including Alarielle’s Sylvaneth and the mysterious Seraphon, as well as more sinister forces with their own goals and agendas, such as the Daughters of Khaine and Idoneth Deepkin."

I said it before and I'll say it again, I wish they just played into the hints that Khaine was Khorne and the Dark Elves were chaos elves, and put them there where they could have fun daemon allies, or else throw them into Destruction as raiders out for themselves slipping between realms on their ships Spelljammer style.

 Mangod wrote:

 frozenwastes wrote:
I think Order might be best defined as opposition to Chaos. So the Indoneth and the Daughters of Khaine could be order purely out of their opposition to Slaanesh.

Though I also think they really do have orderly societies. They may end up being stratified and not just, but certainly orderly.

Being anti-Chaos is pretty much how GW defines it temselves.

"The forces of Order are the Mortal Realms’ shield against Chaos. Order is a loose alliance of the free peoples of the realms – humans, aelves and duardin, alongside staunch defenders of law like Sigmar’s Stormcast Eternals, more exotic forces including Alarielle’s Sylvaneth and the mysterious Seraphon, as well as more sinister forces with their own goals and agendas, such as the Daughters of Khaine and Idoneth Deepkin."

Meanwhile, the DoK "live for the thrill of open war and spilt blood" and "revel in slaughter", which sounds a lot more like "plunging headlong into battle at the slightest provocation" and "sating their primal need for violence" to me. But yeah, I guess if all that's needed to be in the Order club is to say "Oh yeah, we totally hate Chaos too," then they qualify. It just makes the Order allegiance feel like the bucket of leftovers to me - it's the faction for everyone who isn't dead, devoted to Chaos, or a savage monster race.

It's not really at the slightest provocation. They have shrines and covens located in most the big cities as well as emissaries to most other races. They don't lose it at the drop of a hat. Think of them as a berserker race, they can act perfectly well in polite society, but can switch on the murder/death/kill mode when a battle starts.

Dark Elves going over to Order was one of the dumbest things from End Times, and there were a lot of dumb things.

jonolikespie wrote:
I think I'd actually be playing AoS right now if it did have a lower model count. As a skirmish game with 20-30 models per side I'd quite happily put up with the rules I don't like and make up my own fluff and just play with some well painted models. But every time I see a table being played (or god forbid a GW battle report or pictures in WD where the tables are covered in models) all I can think is holy hell why did you move from rank and file to skirmish but keep the same number of models?

I've been playing a ton with the Skirmish supplement and it works well. As does doing a skirmish-normal game hybrid as you get closer to the 700 point mark. We play a lot of our games with 30-40 models per side. It works at 20-30 too. The campaign system in the skirmish supplment takes you from about 150 or so up to over 500. Which is around where you might transition into the Path to Glory thing, but that's never really worked for us. We find that grows too rapidly and prefer to keep adding small amounts that you choose rather than rolling randomly and adding full units of stuff at once.

The norm of 2000 points seems pretty crazy to me. I basically still see the huge kits like Nagash, Archaon, the Star Drake and so forth as things for large special occasion type games. The game works really well if you stick to 1000 points or less and things under 10 wounds where possible.





Automatically Appended Next Post:
My retrospective on the transition to AoS was that it was hilarious. When the end times rolled around and local people were buying everything, I was like "you know they really mean it right?" And no one believed me. I showed them how in two separate financial reports Kirby talked about how WHFB was failing as a product. They couldn't possibly cancel the game after putting so much stuff out, right? They couldn't believe the End Times was a final attempt to extract as much cash as possible from the 8th edition player base before cancelling things.

Then the AoS launch seemed just as ridiculous. The prices were really really high. The stormcast got adjusted down but some things like the Fyre Slayers are some of the most expensive models ever.

There was simply not enough guidance for most people to get their games on the table. I also saw it as a continued maximum cash extraction rather than a real game. A marketing tool to keep those who dumped a bunch of money into end times stuff on the treadmill. Where the goobering masses could keep buying the "jewel like objects of wonder" that are citadel miniatures

To be fair I thought anyone who played 8th ed fantasy was pretty much a chump as well. The rules seemed like they were all about maximizing model count at the expense of game play. 40k was the same during this time. Spreading the rules for a given army across so many books so they can maximize the front end cost of getting into any army. New army comes out and it's released spread across multiple supplements and codexes. Not a single painting guide for free. Everything costs money. White Dwarf scrapped for this "Visions" thing. It was quite enjoyable watching GW aggressively vacuum money out of people's wallets and still have their revenue fall and fall.

It wasn't until GW's change of leadership and the General's Handbook coming out that I took a serious look at the game again. And even then I didn't get into it until early last year. The skirmish supplement pretty much did it for me. Real support of small games rather than always artificially ratcheting up the model count.

I've liked what they've done with it since. I hope the armies that were released during the dark Kirby days get revisited. Ironjaws, Fyreslayers, Beast Claw Raiders and to a lesser extent Sylvaneth need a few more kits each. And the Fyreslayers need to be adjusted down in price a bit. Or some sort of bundle or change to the start collecting should happen to bring them in line with other armies.

On the fiction side of things the Malign Portents story that has Seraphon existing on some sort of vessel in the stars and actually talking to one another is way, way better than them being dreams made real or whatever. Even if they are dreams made real, I like the idea of them being actual living things once they are made. The simple ideas in that story were way better than the dreamt in and out of existence thing in the battle tome and to a less degree, their appearance in the Clan Pestilens novel.

The novel City of Secrets is probably the first real sign of a change of direction in the fiction. Early last year it comes out and actually has the time line moved forward. It has people living in a city rather than a post apocalyptic chaos battle. The characters aren't sigmarines nor daemon infused immortal chaos lords. Normal people living in a world.

And they've just built on that over the last year and a half. I've thoroughly enjoyed it.

People talk about how popular the lore of WHFB was and yet people did not buy the books or the models. Most people read the lore on wiki's. Josh reynolds broke down how the books were doing and they were not doing well at all. Hell Gav liked the tweet stating he was speaking the truth.

At the end of the day people can talk on the internet about how good whfb was or the lore but the numbers don't lie. People prefer AOS from the game and to the books. Hell I always believed that the forums are always a minority of the player base.

I know here, WHFB books and models didn't move at all. A large swathe of people didn't care about the books or the narrative, and that is still true with AOS today or 40k or whatever game.

The amount of people that care about the fiction is very very small.

The models weren't being bought retail here simply because you could always find a 2nd hand army locally for pennies on the dollar, and if you couldn't find it locally ebay would hook you up.

And if you wanted new models instead of used, historicals would do in a pinch for pennies on the dollar.

When I say they weren't being bought I mean exactly that... the GW store and the other FLGS could not move WHFB at all even though it was being played regularly.

The novel City of Secrets is probably the first real sign of a change of direction in the fiction. Early last year it comes out and actually has the time line moved forward. It has people living in a city rather than a post apocalyptic chaos battle. The characters aren't sigmarines nor daemon infused immortal chaos lords. Normal people living in a world.

Excellent post all round that I agree with but just a small nitpick, we did get a earlier version of that change of direction before then too with "Daemon of the Deep"(came out at the end of 2025 i believe) which had people living in a Sigmarite city. In hindsight it's funny that it had a lesson that zealots could be more dangerous than monsters as a priest sentences a child to death and here now 3 years later we have those stories again of the clergy costing lives through their superstition practices.

Baron Klatz wrote:
Excellent post all round that I agree with but just a small nitpick, we did get a earlier version of that change of direction before then too with "Daemon of the Deep"(came out at the end of 2025 i believe) which had people living in a Sigmarite city. In hindsight it's funny that it had a lesson that zealots could be more dangerous than monsters as a priest sentences a child to death and here now 3 years later we have those stories again of the clergy costing lives through their superstition practices.

I never got around to reading those call of chaos quick reads or the advent calender stories. I'll definitely check that one out.

Either way I really like how these actual places where people live are becoming more central to the story line. I guess you can't really have the dead rising and destroying places unless you build them first.

And you have to follow the edicts or the geists will get you.

 shinros wrote:
People talk about how popular the lore of WHFB was and yet people did not buy the books or the models. Most people read the lore on wiki's. Josh reynolds broke down how the books were doing and they were not doing well at all. Hell Gav liked the tweet stating he was speaking the truth.

At the end of the day people can talk on the internet about how good whfb was or the lore but the numbers don't lie. People prefer AOS from the game and to the books. Hell I always believed that the forums are always a minority of the player base.

You are looking at it too narrowly. There is no doubt WFB struggled in the last few years. Price was a huge factor, but on the other hand if all your resources are going into a new game then it is not unexpected that you generate a cycle where it gets worse (your best writers are writing stuff for the new game). You can actually turn it into a self prophesying circumstance. I think you will find that when people refer to WFB lore they are likely to put the last few years of lore into the same 'camp' as AoS (for a personal preference perspective). As in epic epicness, transformers or marvel style writing. Those likely to prefer what a lot of 'older' WFB players refer to us as lore is the material that was generated for the 'love' of it rather than the 'manufacturing' way it was created in the last couple of years of WFB and continued on into AoS (in my view). Hence you really have to look back to what was happening in late 6th edition and earlier (I would argue that Storm of Chaos was the 'watershed moment'). Hence those people that you are referring to preferring the lore are referring to the old lore. The comparison to the last few years of lore is less valid, and yes almost certainly wasn't selling well - but then that wasn't what those people wanted, so hence the outcome.

I definitely like the 4th and 5th edition army books for the lore. And a couple of the 6th edition. But the last decade of stuff? Definitely prefer AoS to that. Similarly, I love my 1st and 2nd edition WH Fantasy Roleplay books. Don't have any time at all for the 3rd edition version.

When you have a decade or more of decline in the game and the lore, that's a long time to have to set aside to make a case for the quality of WHFB.

And even the quality stuff in the past in terms of the older novels weren't selling well. Everyone who was around when they were first published likely already bought it and if someone didn't enjoy the new stuff they'd likely not bother checking out any of the older stuff.

And then there's the very distinct possibility that I'm overestimating the quality of the older stuff and the rose tinted glasses of nostalgia are making me rate them higher than they really do merit.

I've actually played the RPG, a bit of 1st but the bulk of it was with 2nd ed.

That edition came out at the same time as the Storm of Chaos, so I got into the lore, Mordheim and the like.

Of course since the Storm, there is nothing that happened in the lore since then...similar to how there was the Eye of Terror Campaign, and then nothing.