nathan2004 wrote:
Do you’ll think we will see empire drop in December? Man I hope not, I’m on holiday and dropping some money. Need some time to recover!

 nathan2004 wrote:
Do you’ll think we will see empire drop in December? Man I hope not, I’m on holiday and dropping some money. Need some time to recover!

 Lathe Biosas wrote:
I never knew he was supposed to be a High Elf. I always thought he was a human ally or some such.

 Gert wrote:
Oh boy he is going to really show up just how ancient the Empire Knights are.

 Overread wrote:
I think he means that you can take Old World and basically impose a faux medieval/real world history view onto the setting and fill in all the gaps that the stories and art and such don't tell you.

Eg you can mentally picture how serfs in Bretonnia farm; what tools they have; the kind of crops; the clothes and so forth. Now of course this might all be utterly wrong on the specific details; but you don't need much information to create a fairly representative mental picture.



In stark contrast its very hard to do the same for Age of Sigmar. In fact trying to do so often creates a lot more questions than answers. What measures do farmers have to consider in a land where there are storms of rust particles; how do you gather water when the local lake is literal quicksilver (and save off the madness exposure causes). What happens when you wake up the land transformed from flat fields to a mountainside and how do you deal with it when it then becomes a craggy steppe a month later.

These are questions AoS thrusts at the casual reader and sadly GW don't really have the answers. It's an exciting amazing fantastical setting full of awesome magic oozing from every inch and full of epic elements - but its so epic and overdone that its hard to imagine how anything operates.

Fundamentally that's how the setting was made - it didn't have maps or nations; it didn't have ground rules or much in the way of structure by design. It was made as a massive catch-all setting where anything goes created by fans of modern epic fantasies who grew up on video games.


Fundamentally its a very different approach.

Now granted Old World gets a boost because it also based itself heavily on DnD and Tolkien so a lot of the heavy legwork was done; but still it was indeed just that bit more "grounded"

 AegisGrimm wrote:

 Overread wrote:
I think he means that you can take Old World and basically impose a faux medieval/real world history view onto the setting and fill in all the gaps that the stories and art and such don't tell you.

Eg you can mentally picture how serfs in Bretonnia farm; what tools they have; the kind of crops; the clothes and so forth. Now of course this might all be utterly wrong on the specific details; but you don't need much information to create a fairly representative mental picture.



In stark contrast its very hard to do the same for Age of Sigmar. In fact trying to do so often creates a lot more questions than answers. What measures do farmers have to consider in a land where there are storms of rust particles; how do you gather water when the local lake is literal quicksilver (and save off the madness exposure causes). What happens when you wake up the land transformed from flat fields to a mountainside and how do you deal with it when it then becomes a craggy steppe a month later.

These are questions AoS thrusts at the casual reader and sadly GW don't really have the answers. It's an exciting amazing fantastical setting full of awesome magic oozing from every inch and full of epic elements - but its so epic and overdone that its hard to imagine how anything operates.

Fundamentally that's how the setting was made - it didn't have maps or nations; it didn't have ground rules or much in the way of structure by design. It was made as a massive catch-all setting where anything goes created by fans of modern epic fantasies who grew up on video games.


Fundamentally its a very different approach.

Now granted Old World gets a boost because it also based itself heavily on DnD and Tolkien so a lot of the heavy legwork was done; but still it was indeed just that bit more "grounded"

Age of Sigmar should have just gone ahead and from the start have some sort of magic focus widget that the Stormcast would introduce after establishing a beachhead on a Realm, that forces the land into a "normality" where everything within "x" distance becomes arable and stable land. Boom. Little pockets of "Old World" surrounded by the natural raging craziness of the realm they are on. The stronger the Stormcast presence, the greater the area affected, or as they travel, they put up new focii that link back to the main one to form chains of conquered land.

I think it would have given the setting the same draw as the Old World taps into- a sense of normalcy that can be related to by the players. Like a reverse of what the Chaos Gate does in the north pole of the Old World.

chaos0xomega wrote:
Actually a really neat concept, espevially if the normalized areas were parts of the old whfb map, like shards of the wprld that was reformed in the mortal realms

 kodos wrote:
Accessibility is key, and having a historic setting which everyone knows from school and were plenty of movies are around, combined with magic that again everyone know from somewhere else (be it school or lord of the rings) makes people familiar with the setting without them ever reading anything about except the backcover of the army book

This is also important with unit names, everyone knows what to expect from Grail Knights, State Troops, Battle Wizard, elfen spearman or dwarf miners
No one knows what a Vindictor should look like without reading it.

The same with 40k to a point, and a reason why the exotic new names never really connected with people who know the old ones
Your Space Vikings, you know what to expect, Catachan Jungle Warrior as well, from Intercessors not so much.

They only problem with Warhammer in that case was that its main advantage was also its disadvantage
It was popular in Europe because you had the choice and flavour of detailed history based factions and you know about the history of the Empire with just looking at the time table as everything there was a topic in school.
The further away from England a faction was, the mote stereotype it becomes and everything is merged into one thing without the detailed historical background.
Like there is detailed background for England, Ireland, France, Spain, Italy and Central Europe in Fantasy, while parts of central Europe, eastern Europe and Asia are merged into a single faction, same for everything in south and middle America without actual history involved but just filled with stereotypes