Suprise, Warhammer Fantasy is coming back (sort of)! Here are five ways GW could get hobbyists playing in the Old World again.
Trav here writing this from my winter vacation home aboard the Spikey Bits Yacht and news just reached me that GW is bringing back Warhammer Fantasy. Funny enough only one of those statements is now false, (I really wish I was on a Yacht) and I wanted to weigh in on my thoughts about the announcement.
First a little history: I have never played 40k ever, but I did dabble in some Warhammer Fantasy a long time ago. I started with the Lizardmen vs Bretonnians starter set and had a lot of fun with it playing games with some friends at the local card shop. (I was around 11 or 12) A lot of weekends and sleepovers were spent moving the miniatures across tables with saltshakers as houses and pieces of paper as water. It was fun, but you know what we hardly ever got right… The rules, and we tried our best to follow the guidelines and battletomes and this and that, but the rule book was an insane number of pages with rules for everything.
We often just ended up making up our own story and when we didn’t know about a rule we often just came to an agreement. Which thinking back on it the best part of the game wasn’t the actual game (way to complicated) but the setting. I was a very big fantasy reader (hello William King, Margaret Weis, and Tracy Hickman) and making up our own stories and battles was, in this eleven-year-old’s opinion, the best part of the Old World. To me, if they can bring a way to create your own “end times” stories that might be the best place to have this game.
20 Years later Age of Sigmar is a breath of fresh air in an otherwise stale and saturated fantasy setting. Sure, the original AoS was terrible at release but GW stuck with it and now many people argue it is in a better place than 40k currently is. (I have no opinion as I have never played or want to play 40k). What AoS does do is allow GW to protect their IP, but also, they can do whatever they want to do in terms of the setting. Dinosaur space lizards: check, Elves riding sharks: check, Bone Golems demanding tithes: Check. It all works and fits because the setting is unlike any other sort of fantasy setting out there and it’s so open-ended that they can make it stick. It also gives them the freedom to do campaigns, settings, etc. every year if they wanted and focus on certain areas without anything getting too stale.
The question is; could I, 20 years later with the internet, video games, and all these other fantasy settings, go back to one that I did love at the time, but today seems exactly like all the others? Probably not, when I was heavily into it, I had not read the Lord of the Rings, Terry Prachet, countless other fantasy authors or played countless video games like The Witcher, Dragon Age, WoW, etc.. Now it seems like a muddled mess, vampires are bad, dwarves mine gold, elves still shoot bows, etc. What Sigmar did was take most of that and say we’re not following this pattern anymore and that is what I love about the setting.
There is a couple of ways though they could grab my interest in the game however and might get me to dip my toes into it.
- First, I want to use my AoS models in this setting without rebasing. Circle bases look better, is easier to store, and frankly I am too lazy to rebase an entire army. Make some movement trays that slot the circles (Song of Fire and Ice style) that I can use, and I will then read the rules.
- Second, the rules need to be different from Age of Sigmar but not so complicated that I need to study and bookmark pages. It should be able to fit on a small 4-6 page tear out that I can use to refer to should we need to.
- Third, make the setting interesting and unique with small stories or battles. By that I mean if you say there is a big bad vampire in a castle, and we are storming it with some vampire hunters I am going to check out of that setting fast.
- Fourth, make the games interesting in that rank and file is fine but it is the End Times! I want battles with meteors falling from the sky, clouds of magic swirling across the battlefield, volcanic eruptions, etc. It shouldn’t be we line up and march at one another.
- Finally, make it a low cost of entry game in that if you require end times models that cost thousands of dollars to even get into the game it is going to be a hard pass. Make your money on the rule books, scenery, and some special models (that can also be used in AoS). Want to release a character from the lore that is great, just make sure the model can use some sort of Warscroll from AoS and both camps will buy it.
Overall, I have seen some people say they should let old fantasy die or others say it was the best fantasy setting ever created. Personally, while it was a good fantasy setting, I can see why they needed to move away from it legally (IP protection) and from “an everyone else is doing it point of view”. I am also for getting more people into the hobby, and if they want to play a rank and file game set in the old world that could be amazing.
Will I play it? Probably not, I am a huge fan of Age of Sigmar and the setting (if I want old school fantasy I would play Lord of the Rings) and I love the open-world feel and chaos that is the mortal realms. However if the entry-level is cheap, the rules are good, and the setting is fresh I won’t be completely against giving it a try.
More AoS How-To For Beginners!
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