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 Hybrid Son Of Oxayotl wrote:

 RiTides wrote:
I do love the idea of the Old World being "legend" or "myth"

Would be pretty weird as the WFB was WAY more grounded than the AOS fluff. You had normal people going to other places using boats and horses lol.

There's a whole thing in the Idoneth Deepkin book talking about how the Idoneth were first just raiding/sinking ships before they started going after colonies and settlements.

 BobtheInquisitor wrote:
"Legends tell of a time when heroes were smaller than life. They strode the land like ungiants, and carried upon their backs a reasonable amount of provisions for a surprisingly short period of time. Their deeds echoed across the land but only inside valleys or empty buildings."

You jest, but to me there's something about an unremarkable everyman going forth and conquering whilst beset by horrors. Probably why I always enjoy the Imperial Guard and The Empire so much. Individually, they haven't a hope of surviving but they still endure

 Kanluwen wrote:

 Hybrid Son Of Oxayotl wrote:

 RiTides wrote:
I do love the idea of the Old World being "legend" or "myth"

Would be pretty weird as the WFB was WAY more grounded than the AOS fluff. You had normal people going to other places using boats and horses lol.

There's a whole thing in the Idoneth Deepkin book talking about how the Idoneth were first just raiding/sinking ships before they started going after colonies and settlements.

Do you have to be on all the time? The man was making a joke.

 zedmeister wrote:

 BobtheInquisitor wrote:
"Legends tell of a time when heroes were smaller than life. They strode the land like ungiants, and carried upon their backs a reasonable amount of provisions for a surprisingly short period of time. Their deeds echoed across the land but only inside valleys or empty buildings."

You jest, but to me there's something about an unremarkable everyman going forth and conquering whilst beset by horrors. Probably why I always enjoy the Imperial Guard and The Empire so much. Individually, they haven't a hope of surviving but they still endure

I agree. My jest was building on an earlier comment about how silly it is for WHFB to be the Time of Legends for AOS.

unremarkable everyman is just a lot more relatable, and the low fantasy makes it a lot easier for everyone to get in on it.

I can explain to my mum what an Elf or Dwarf is, if she didn't already know. But an Idoneth Deepkin? I don't even know what that is.

Many people misunderstand how (and why) the Old World came about. It's a pastiche to include everything, especially that could potentially have figures be used to cover D&D or even historical wargaming.

It's got pretty much every type of fantasy-trope culture going. Haughty nobility a la medieval France, check. Crazed religious empire a la HRE, check. Violent orc thugs, check. High elves, check. Wood elves, check.

There deliberately wasn't much truly original in there - most things had a slight slant to help things fit together, but that was the point. It made everything recognisable. It was easy to imagine a village of halflings, or an Empire town, an Orcish village. We'd all read dozens of books that described these very things.

Warhammer took those staple, stable tropes and deliberately cranked them up to 11 for maximum ridiculousness - satirical extremes of flagellation in the Empire and arrogance of the nobility and class gap in Bretonnia. We all knew there was literally NOBODY poorer than a Bretonnian peasant (DENNIS! There's some lovely filth down here!). Let's not mention Araby (flying carpets), Nippon (ninjas), Cathay (jade empire), or the Pygmies in Lustria. Political correctness wasn't a requirement back then, so those tropes too, predictably dialled all the way to the right.

The original Realm of Chaos dropped with a similar reckless abandon. Moorcock influences mixed with Assyrian mythology, with a dash of GWAR added for good measure.

It was never a Tolkien rip-off any more than Moorcock was, or Brooks, or Weis and Hickman. It took ALL those fantasy tropes, shoved them in a pot and gave a damn good stir.

And I loved it for it. From a critical analysis, as a game setting, and marketing tool for miniatures, it's actually pretty damn close to perfect, if nobody else is really competing on the miniature quality or production mass.

Age of Sigmar's background is... well, I'm not so fond. I hated it at first, but slowly it seems to be firming up and my opinion is improving. It needs grounding - as others have said, it's missing the familiarity that a really good setting needs, even if dialled to frankly very silly levels of overexaggeration. Strides seem to be being made in that direction with fleshing out some of the Free Peoples cities and so forth, but we need to see more of that.

Yes, but not just yet.

AoS's background is still developing from "nearly non-existent", and dropping a big wargame with a much more developed background into GW's rotation runs the very real risk of torpedoing that altogether.

Warhammer's background, and 40ks, was hammered together over decades as winterdyne said. It took a bunch of really recognisable stuff and built something unique - a large strength was that it WAS recognisable stuff. You don't really have to explain what a Dwarf is.

Currently it seems like AoS lacks a sense of PLACE. Warhammer had that, for certain - and Mordheim had sense of place in absolute spades. Look at the Mordheim rulebook, it's a work of art.

Frostgrave, a game where the background could be written on a sheet of A4, has a sense of place.

Shadespire is interesting to me, because it too seems to have a lot of sense of place, for all that I've read is the web page.

The realms really don't. Everything seems massively overblown, with a lingering sense of "but what do these people eat? Where are the normal folks?" Surely not everyone is a Stormcast.

winterdyne wrote:
Many people misunderstand how (and why) the Old World came about. It's a pastiche to include everything, especially that could potentially have figures be used to cover D&D or even historical wargaming.

It's got pretty much every type of fantasy-trope culture going. Haughty nobility a la medieval France, check. Crazed religious empire a la HRE, check. Violent orc thugs, check. High elves, check. Wood elves, check.

There deliberately wasn't much truly original in there - most things had a slight slant to help things fit together, but that was the point. It made everything recognisable. It was easy to imagine a village of halflings, or an Empire town, an Orcish village. We'd all read dozens of books that described these very things.

Warhammer took those staple, stable tropes and deliberately cranked them up to 11 for maximum ridiculousness - satirical extremes of flagellation in the Empire and arrogance of the nobility and class gap in Bretonnia. We all knew there was literally NOBODY poorer than a Bretonnian peasant (DENNIS! There's some lovely filth down here!). Let's not mention Araby (flying carpets), Nippon (ninjas), Cathay (jade empire), or the Pygmies in Lustria. Political correctness wasn't a requirement back then, so those tropes too, predictably dialled all the way to the right.

The original Realm of Chaos dropped with a similar reckless abandon. Moorcock influences mixed with Assyrian mythology, with a dash of GWAR added for good measure.

It was never a Tolkien rip-off any more than Moorcock was, or Brooks, or Weis and Hickman. It took ALL those fantasy tropes, shoved them in a pot and gave a damn good stir.

And I loved it for it. From a critical analysis, as a game setting, and marketing tool for miniatures, it's actually pretty damn close to perfect, if nobody else is really competing on the miniature quality or production mass.

Age of Sigmar's background is... well, I'm not so fond. I hated it at first, but slowly it seems to be firming up and my opinion is improving. It needs grounding - as others have said, it's missing the familiarity that a really good setting needs, even if dialled to frankly very silly levels of overexaggeration. Strides seem to be being made in that direction with fleshing out some of the Free Peoples cities and so forth, but we need to see more of that.

You've really nailed how I feel about WHFB. It annoys me when people call it a rip off of Tolkien or Moorcock or whoever, because they are dismissing the brilliance it took to make an ultimate fantasy sandbox that is compelling in its own right. Warhammer, and 40k back in 3rd edition, is greater than the sum of its parts, and the parts are all the fun tropes in fantasy. No other setting ever pulled off the same trick. Saying WHFB is just a rip off is like saying Robocop is just an action movie.

the problem with AOS is also that the setting is as compelling and detailled as those you find in pay to win korean mmorpg. To be honest, it seems to be getting a bit better recently, but there is still a ton to do

 Kanluwen wrote:

 Easy E wrote:

 Kanluwen wrote:

 Easy E wrote:

It would actually give them a chance to scale it back abit and carve out some of the bloat and focus on the core of the game.

What do you think is too "bloated" about AoS that wouldn't be for a WFB return?

I am sure everyone would have different ideas about it. However, for a start I would really focus in on the Old World vs. the Non-Old World. I mean, Forgeworld can only do so many models, so they would probably need to start a bit smaller and then expand outward once some core forces were defined. To me, the Core foes in Warhammer are Empire vs. Chaos Wastes and would have to be first in my mind. If those go okay, you could then expand outward.

And why do we need a separate game for that?

Slaves to Darkness exist still, as do the Free Peoples.

Well, I really don't need a new game. There are many other games I can play and set them in the Old World even, but people were asking if GW should bring back the Old World; and I was proposing a method they could do that.

I mean if we want to be absurd reductionaries, why have AoS since 40K all ready has melee weapons and magic. Just choose to eliminate the shooting phase. Why do we need a sperate game for that? I mean, I'm just asking questions.

 BobtheInquisitor wrote:

You've really nailed how I feel about WHFB. It annoys me when people call it a rip off of Tolkien or Moorcock or whoever, because they are dismissing the brilliance it took to make an ultimate fantasy sandbox that is compelling in its own right. Warhammer, and 40k back in 3rd edition, is greater than the sum of its parts, and the parts are all the fun tropes in fantasy. No other setting ever pulled off the same trick. Saying WHFB is just a rip off is like saying Robocop is just an action movie.

To me, this is the difference between a narrative setting and a game setting. WHFB had a great narrative setting, but there was little compelling about it from a game perspective. All of its brilliance was in little details that only came to light when you were already in deep. There wasn't enough hooks from the outside to make the setting stand out from the rest of the run of the mill fantasy out there. No where was this probably more evident than when Age of Reckoning came out and garnered very little interest as a literal digital roleplay setting. There were people who knew better, but for the most part:

winterdyne wrote:Many people misunderstand how (and why) the Old World came about. It's a pastiche to include everything, especially that could potentially have figures be used to cover D&D or even historical wargaming.

It's got pretty much every type of fantasy-trope culture going. Haughty nobility a la medieval France, check. Crazed religious empire a la HRE, check. Violent orc thugs, check. High elves, check. Wood elves, check.

There deliberately wasn't much truly original in there - most things had a slight slant to help things fit together, but that was the point. It made everything recognisable. It was easy to imagine a village of halflings, or an Empire town, an Orcish village. We'd all read dozens of books that described these very things.

Warhammer took those staple, stable tropes and deliberately cranked them up to 11 for maximum ridiculousness - satirical extremes of flagellation in the Empire and arrogance of the nobility and class gap in Bretonnia. We all knew there was literally NOBODY poorer than a Bretonnian peasant (DENNIS! There's some lovely filth down here!). Let's not mention Araby (flying carpets), Nippon (ninjas), Cathay (jade empire), or the Pygmies in Lustria. Political correctness wasn't a requirement back then, so those tropes too, predictably dialled all the way to the right.

The original Realm of Chaos dropped with a similar reckless abandon. Moorcock influences mixed with Assyrian mythology, with a dash of GWAR added for good measure.

It was never a Tolkien rip-off any more than Moorcock was, or Brooks, or Weis and Hickman. It took ALL those fantasy tropes, shoved them in a pot and gave a damn good stir.

And I loved it for it. From a critical analysis, as a game setting, and marketing tool for miniatures, it's actually pretty damn close to perfect, if nobody else is really competing on the miniature quality or production mass.

Age of Sigmar's background is... well, I'm not so fond. I hated it at first, but slowly it seems to be firming up and my opinion is improving. It needs grounding - as others have said, it's missing the familiarity that a really good setting needs, even if dialled to frankly very silly levels of overexaggeration. Strides seem to be being made in that direction with fleshing out some of the Free Peoples cities and so forth, but we need to see more of that.

Enjoy your exalt, this sums it up perfectly.

streetsamurai wrote:the problem with AOS is also that the setting is as compelling and detailled as those you find in pay to win korean mmorpg. To be honest, it seems to be getting a bit better recently, but there is still a ton to do

You too.

No.

But I agree with others who've said that Forge World should do somethings with it a la Horus Heresy.

 LunarSol wrote:

 BobtheInquisitor wrote:

You've really nailed how I feel about WHFB. It annoys me when people call it a rip off of Tolkien or Moorcock or whoever, because they are dismissing the brilliance it took to make an ultimate fantasy sandbox that is compelling in its own right. Warhammer, and 40k back in 3rd edition, is greater than the sum of its parts, and the parts are all the fun tropes in fantasy. No other setting ever pulled off the same trick. Saying WHFB is just a rip off is like saying Robocop is just an action movie.

To me, this is the difference between a narrative setting and a game setting. WHFB had a great narrative setting, but there was little compelling about it from a game perspective. All of its brilliance was in little details that only came to light when you were already in deep. There wasn't enough hooks from the outside to make the setting stand out from the rest of the run of the mill fantasy out there. No where was this probably more evident than when Age of Reckoning came out and garnered very little interest as a literal digital roleplay setting. There were people who knew better, but for the most part:

A while before that (wow, it's getting close to 20 years!) I was working on the Climax version as a code monkey (originally on the MMO-RTS concept) and I ran the studio WFRP games as the design changed direction to MMORPG. Many of us kinda wanted to go ridiculously dark with it, and yet keep things tongue-in-cheek in places. Kinda like watching Jabberwocky on a bad trip. There was a lot of love and enthusiasm there.

Could have been glorious, but the studio imploded in fairly short order. Not really privy to why.

I think GW should produce a 9th edition WHFB as a specialist Game. They need only produce the rulebook and three of four omnibus army books, nothing else per se. Though lines would be available via GW retail with square bases sold seperately.

Should they? While my heart says "oh yes, please do!", I know better...so no, they obviously shouldn't. That's a dead end discussion.

However, the new fluff, AoS models and massive direction change have cemented the fact that I will never play a Warhammer Fantasy based property on the tabletop. So, in that GW did lose a customer, but I suspect they gained a decent chunk. Shame too, because had they fixed the rules in the Old World with the old model lines still being supported I may have actually been tempted.

My interest lies in the low gritty fantasy...not elf shark riders and flaming dragon riding wannabe-slayers, etc.

 BobtheInquisitor wrote:
"Legends tell of a time when heroes were smaller than life. They strode the land like ungiants, and carried upon their backs a reasonable amount of provisions for a surprisingly short period of time. Their deeds echoed across the land but only inside valleys or empty buildings."

Perfect summary and it made me laugh a great deal, thanks for that!

 Kanluwen wrote:
There's a whole thing in the Idoneth Deepkin book talking about how the Idoneth were first just raiding/sinking ships before they started going after colonies and settlements.

Sorry if I was unclear but I didn't mean to imply that nobody uses boats in AoS, just that next to nobody uses strange warp teleportation gates in WFB (not very sure what the portals I heard about in AoS are exactly tbf).

 Hybrid Son Of Oxayotl wrote:

 BobtheInquisitor wrote:
"Legends tell of a time when heroes were smaller than life. They strode the land like ungiants, and carried upon their backs a reasonable amount of provisions for a surprisingly short period of time. Their deeds echoed across the land but only inside valleys or empty buildings."

Perfect summary and it made me laugh a great deal, thanks for that!

 Kanluwen wrote:
There's a whole thing in the Idoneth Deepkin book talking about how the Idoneth were first just raiding/sinking ships before they started going after colonies and settlements.

Sorry if I was unclear but I didn't mean to imply that nobody uses boats in AoS, just that next to nobody uses strange warp teleportation gates in WFB (not very sure what the portals I heard about in AoS are exactly tbf).

I guess that it's a close enough, to be fair. IMO it's a bit hard to pinpoint describe what a realmgate is,aside from the basic term of "portal", considering that's what they look like.

Problem with AOS is it is not one world. They could have done one world with different lands but instead we have this stupid realm stuff along with a background that nobody outside of some fans actually cares about or understands.

The only history in the realms is "recent" and has no impact because there is no grounding for it storywise, it's "oh this new place we made had this happen and it changed it before you even knew what it used to be, or cared".

Nagash and the new Nighthaunt units are really nice models but the fluff for them is stupid. "oh you were a hunter in your previous life so I shall make you a rat faced spirit". Why the hell does Nagash even care ? Is he micromanaging every spirit ? This is the guy who killed entire peoples, who came close to conquering an entire world, who has returned from death again and again.

By comparison 40K is based on a background that, whilst occassionaly retconned, is largely the same with the Heresy as its founding stone story wise and more so now that the Black Library series is fleshing it out.

The Old World was a container for a lot of races but it had history that had been built on and made real world sense in that places had borders, different climates, strong dominant races in most locations and Chaos had a clear source ala the Eye of Terror in 40K. Now ? Who knows ?

Could easily change the AOS fluff to bring the Stormcast into the Old World, just have some flying fortress thing flatten somewhere no one cares about in the Old World and dump itself down on it.

 streetsamurai wrote:
the problem with AOS is also that the setting is as compelling and detailled as those you find in pay to win korean mmorpg. To be honest, it seems to be getting a bit better recently, but there is still a ton to do

I find individual factions like Idoneth or Sylvaneth range from good to bad but the overall quality remains awful.

Gw ought to simply redux back to 5th edition and fix the issues with those old army books. Or 7th. Either way, AOS is alright. KOW is not a good stand in, and T9A changes rules too often.

WFB needs to return.

Lord Kragan wrote:
I guess that it's a close enough, to be fair. IMO it's a bit hard to pinpoint describe what a realmgate is,aside from the basic term of "portal", considering that's what they look like.

Spoiler:

Thansk for the info/confirmation !

njtrader wrote:
Gw ought to simply redux back to 5th edition and fix the issues with those old army books. Or 7th. Either way, AOS is alright. KOW is not a good stand in, and T9A changes rules too often.

WFB needs to return.

This right here points to the big problem with "bringing back the Old World". What do they bring back? There is the Old Hammer movement around 3rd ed. There is a local group in my area now pushing a 6th ed league and there are other locals talking about doing an 8th ed. Does GW make a whole new RnF game? It's easy to say something can be done till the details start getting put to paper. At that point, you start losing people because it isn't exactly what they want. How would the reaction be if all they did was re-release 8th ed? There was enough bile towards 8th, would you just see the same people suddenly just start throwing out the same complaints they did when 8th came out originally?

winterdyne wrote:


A while before that (wow, it's getting close to 20 years!) I was working on the Climax version as a code monkey (originally on the MMO-RTS concept) and I ran the studio WFRP games as the design changed direction to MMORPG. Many of us kinda wanted to go ridiculously dark with it, and yet keep things tongue-in-cheek in places. Kinda like watching Jabberwocky on a bad trip. There was a lot of love and enthusiasm there.

Could have been glorious, but the studio imploded in fairly short order. Not really privy to why.

I heard some nice things about that game, how mundane equipment got worn lost or destroyed easily and you had to rely on core stats.
How you were encouraged to run and climb a tree to hide if a fight proved tough.
How monsters didn't have visible level information at all, you had to gauge how tough things were by looking at them, and the tougher things got the more it showed.

Absolutely. Square bases, real meaningful movement phases, with marches and formations, ranks of troops. They pissed all that good stuff away in AoS to make it Timmy Smash Toys Together!.

njtrader wrote:
Gw ought to simply redux back to 5th edition and fix the issues with those old army books. Or 7th. Either way, AOS is alright. KOW is not a good stand in, and T9A changes rules too often.

Disagree, If they bring back WHFB they should really take some inspiration from KoW. If they want a RnF game, make it a RnF game, rather then some skirmish game in RnF clothing.

dyndraig wrote:

njtrader wrote:
Gw ought to simply redux back to 5th edition and fix the issues with those old army books. Or 7th. Either way, AOS is alright. KOW is not a good stand in, and T9A changes rules too often.

Disagree, If they bring back WHFB they should really take some inspiration from KoW. If they want a RnF game, make it a RnF game, rather then some skirmish game in RnF clothing.

I'd love to see WHFB come back as a true mass battle rank and file game.

dyndraig wrote:

njtrader wrote:
Gw ought to simply redux back to 5th edition and fix the issues with those old army books. Or 7th. Either way, AOS is alright. KOW is not a good stand in, and T9A changes rules too often.

Disagree, If they bring back WHFB they should really take some inspiration from KoW. If they want a RnF game, make it a RnF game, rather then some skirmish game in RnF clothing.

Only in 15mm or less.

I hate watching KoW in 28+mm, it just feels too close to the action when everything is so abstacted out.

The Old World, yes. WFB as it was, no. That sort of system has had its time.

@Orlanth - there were a great many really good ideas floating around for it, and some of the artwork produced was frankly amazing.

 Whirlwind wrote:
I think there will be an inevitability that WFB will be released at some point but more from a GW perspective. Their IP on it will eventually lapse and put it into the public domain.

After 50 years from publication for the books with no listed author, or 70 years after the author's death in the case of books with an attributed author. I'm pretty sure all editions of Warhammer Fantasy Battles have a named author, and all of them are still alive. So, even if they're all struck by lightning today, none of the text of the Warhammer rulebooks will be in the public domain until 2088. Some of the Warhammer Armies books might enter the public domain in the 2050s.