I ought to hate it. I do, happily, hate aspects of it. The names are horrendous - not just the druadin=dwarves, orruks=orcs nonsense, but the terrible unimaginative pseudo-exotic rubbish monolingual English speakers come up with when they try to think of a place name that sounds fantastical ("Ghur", "Ghyran", "Ulgu" - give me "Bretonnia" any day). The "Stormcast Eternals" concept is dreadful (you can just imagine the conversation in the board room: "People love Space Marines. We've got to find some way to get Space Marines into Warhammer"). It seems on its face to be have been designed deliberately to reward system mastery, which is an approach I instinctively despise. I don't understand what's going on with Slaanesh and the apparent replacement with the Horned God; doesn't the Horned God overlap too much with Nurgle, and isn't Slaanesh kind of cool? And, once again we get huge faction proliferation, mostly at the expense of humans (I had to search really hard to find any information on the wikipedia entry about humans).
Plenty to dislike, then. But, damn it, I do find plenty to like, too. I think the distinctly Moorcockian shift is welcome, even if the Order/Chaos/Death/Destruction split into super-factions doesn't make any real sense: at least it's a bit different from your typical bog-standard fantasy setting. And the separation of the setting into different realms or spheres is reminiscent both of Planescape, which I like, and also Gene Wolfe's The Wizard Knight, which I also like, and that is not to mention Moorcock's multiverse concept itself; all good so far. There is enough actual weirdness in there to genuinely intrigue me: Slaan floating around in cosmic vessels remembering
I think you also have to hand it to Games Workshop for, well, "going big or going home". They went big with Age of Sigmar. It's what there was before, not turned up to 11, but 111. It is absurdly OTT: Bonesplitterz? Aleguzzler gargant? Maggotkin of Nurgle? Swifthawk agents? The lion raiders? Are you kidding me? It's only a few steps removed from what a 9-year-old boy would come up with over the course of a weekend. But they went for it. You sort of have to doff your cap to them. In a strange way, my reaction to it is a bit like my reaction to James Cameron's Avatar. It's not actually very good. And yet.... it certainly was a whole lot of movie. In the same way, Age of Sigmar is a whole lot of Games Workshop. And ultimately there is nothing wrong with that.
Ghyran, Ulgu and the rest were the names of the Winds of Magic as far as I can remember...
ReplyDeleteAs far as I know, they ditched Slaanesh because the pop-culture, meme version of Slaanesh is "Chaos God of Too Much Sex," and there's no way to make that work on a miniature and still keep it American PG-13 (also, possibly related, I don't think the models sold all that well). I think of the 4, Slaanesh has always worked better in the fiction than in the tabletop game.
ReplyDeleteI think the names bug me more because I know for a fact that they're like that as a result of the fallout from a specific IP court case. There's just no world where "aleguzzler gargant" is more resonant than "giant," and one of the things that made Warhammer Fantasy so good was its resonance. Where they've released new models instead of running out the clock on their old stock though the names become less "why would you ever do that" and more simply "not for me". And that's all right.
I think also the other Chaos powers just aligned better with the whole idea of massed army style wargames. Ya got "gross" "weird" and "metal", I dunno if "kinky" fits in there quite as well...
DeleteI imagine it's a rare bird of a wargamer that wants to field an army of Frank-N-Furters.
Then again what do I know, I ditched WH and WH40K after my lizard men kept getting hamburgered by Imperial gunnery and my Tau kept getting ker-stomped by space marines.
Slaanesh is a chaos god(dess) with some misunderstood baggage.But then again just about every Chaos God in both versions of Warhammer suffers from being reduced to a cartoonish version of itself. Slaanesh got reduced to the 'deity of NSFW'.
Delete"As far as I know, they ditched Slaanesh..."
DeleteThey didn't, they just released a daemon boxed set (Wrath and Rapture) with new Slaaneshi and Khornate minis, including a Cenobite-ish herald playing a harp grown out of a man's body.
I always felt as though the chaos gods, ranked in order of popularity for fielding armies, went something like:
DeleteKhorne
Then, a mile behind that, Tzeentch
Then, an Astronomical Unit behind that, Nurgle
Then, a Parsec behind that, Slaanesh
Halharhar has revealed me for someone who stopped paying a ton of attention to Age of Sigmar shortly after its release because it was the polar opposite of most of what I liked about Warhammer Fantasy. Interesting that they're bringing Slaanesh back, I wonder how they'll try and clear the hurdles inherent to the concept this time.
DeleteNoisms, Nurgle's always been more popular than Tzeentch with the mid-20s Warhammer guys I know, at least in 40k. Tzeentch is a hipster or novelty choice there, cool but uncommon.
IMO fantasy names and concepts start to lose a fair bit of consistency and comprehensibility when they MUST be trademarkable. So now lizard men are "seraphons" and trolls are "troggoths" and all the other mangulations. Saw the same thing play out in 4e & 5e when you couldn't just have orcs or goblins, you had "shadowboneripper goblins" and "darkbloodkinblahblah orcs".
ReplyDeleteSure, people are just gonna call 'em what they always called them, but it gets harder for me not to roll my eyes when I see what they've slapped on the boxes. A bit too much of gilding the lily, or perhaps polishing the turd.
Yeah, I'm a crankykeyboardtapper curmudgeon, or perhaps a grognardian bloviator. Elaborate, florid naming of things is a verbal tic that to my weary earbones sounds like "trying too hard".
That being said, yeah, some of the stuff coming out of GW is definitely creative and visually cool, but it's a bit too over the top for my tastes aesthetically, and too damn expensive financially.
Yes, the names are painful, the prices absurd. That said, I can see myself buying some models and painting them up.
DeleteI think there are a few sets that GW puts out as introductory bait for potential new customers that are *relatively* cheap.Still to rich for my tastes, when compared to other companies' offerings.
DeleteI kinda miss the older days (big surprise there) where it was a little easier to order GW plastic minis by the bits or single sprues. I think it's still possible (like at https://hoardobits.com/), but I also kinda had a feeling that GW did some cracking down on the bitz aftermarket a few years back. Nothing coherent or confirmed, but it seemed like sometime in the early 2010's some of the places I could order by the sprue shut down. (One of those being GW itself.)
Plus with the "Age of Sigmar" some of my favorite sets that I used as root stock for kitbashing got discontinued. Chief among these was their "Imperial Militia" which were essentially repackaged sprues from the human warbands from "Mordheim". Great source for custom D&D character minis, that was...
I'm rambling. Sorry. <:)
For the price just do what I did as kids and have risk pieces be grunts, Lego men be leaders, teddy bears be giant monsters, etc. etc. You just need the rules and can do whatever you want. Played out huge battles with my skaven hordes vs. my brother's chaos and was great fun playing through it bit by bit over a week or so on summer vacation. Loved having a huge battery of cannons. Focused fire against demons was great.
DeleteI'm not sure about system mastery; one of the complaints AoS has attracted since day one is that it's too simple and random, like a child's game, but perhaps that has changed as the game has developed.
ReplyDelete(One thing I loved in the early days of the game -- although everyone else hated it -- was that it was quite silly; orc players would get bonuses if they shouted "waaaagh!" when rolling dice, for example.)
I agree with you about the setting; there's something quite evocative about the mashed-together planar setting. I'd love to know more about that world, not least how normal people are supposed to live there.
The Warhammer Quest: Shadows Over Hammerhal board game apparently explores what an urban setting is like, and there's a role-playing game on the way, which I hope will show a more ground-level view of the world.
I found Kill Team a bit too random. From what I can see about AoS it's all about finding out what the "synergies" are between your units, which kind of screams system mastery to me.
DeleteFantasy names are almost always some degree of cringe-inducing, but I too love that GW went big. The overblown faction names are a perfect statement of intent. AoS's setting is getting richer though - you've targeted two of the things I quite like about AoS. The Stormcast thing is dumb on the surface, but gets richer as you see how it plays out in practice, how problematic a god Sigmar is. E.g. what happens to the communities Sigmar screws over when he claims their heroes, how Nagash responds to the appropriation of souls that are rightfully his, and the erosion of the Stormcasts' humanity and identity as they get continually recycled. There's a good bit somewhere in the fluff where it shows how the Stormcasts start to fear this process that's granting them immortality. Also Slannesh being imprisoned in an extradimensional God trap and having its stomach pumped for the (a)elven souls it comsumed during the End Times is just cool, particularly as Morathi has hacked the pump so she gets more souls but weakened the prison in the process etc etc.
ReplyDeleteI like the imprisoned god motif. What was the mad imprisoned god of the Derro called in D&D?
DeleteDiinkarazan, whose brother was Diirinka.
DeleteThat's the one!
DeleteI enjoy actually playing Age of Sigmar more than any previous GW game with the possible exception of classic Necromunda. The best I can describe it is that AoS plays "smoothly" where other GW games are "clunky". The simple-core-rules-overridden-by-unit-special-abilities model always requires some system mastery, but it only took about half-a-dozen games for the buddy I play with and I to figure out how our armies work. That's substantially less complicated than Magic or D&D 4E. And, since we figured out how it works, our games have become battles of wits, maneuver, and figuring out how to recover when the dice screw you over.
ReplyDeleteIt's a game, not a simulation. The fluff is not particularly inspiring. I still think it's ridiculous that GWs games are about skirmishes between company-/warband-sized forces, but their fluff is always about world-shattering clashes between unfathomably large armies. I'm irked that the closest I can get to a functional human army is a Khorne cult (But hopeful about the rumors that this is because there are huge arguments going on at GW about what the humans should be like. They have apparently figured out that "pike-and-shot Germans" is not a super popular fantasy genre.).
It's fun to play, though.
Classic Necromunda and Blood Bowl are the two best games GW ever made by far - as games. They were actually proper games which rewarded intelligent play, while still being fun and knockabout.
DeleteI am tempted to get back into AoS despite not having the time. Maybe I will just develop a sad para-hobby of looking at youtube videos about it.