Age Of Sigmar - R.I.P. Warhammer Fantasy

When I was a child, I loved playing board games with my family (still do as a matter of fact). As a result of this, board games were not uncommon as a Christmas present in our household. Although most of them were fairly normal, at the age of 8 I got a rather different one – Space Crusade by MB games.

Space Crusade was one of several MB games that were licensed to use Games Workshop IP. The game was essentially a simplified version of Space Hulk, using Tactical/Devastator squads in place of Terminators and providing the Aliens players with a horde of 'Chaos' characters that also included Orks, Tyranids and 'androids'.

The very concept of this game was rather outside of anything I'd played before and I couldn't make heads or tails of the actual rules. In a touching display of fatherly affection, my Dad stayed up all night figuring out how to play it. Over the following years we played many campaigns, with him always serving as the 'bad guys'. I loved it enough to get myself both HeroQuest and Battle Masters in subsequent years, but Space Crusade remained special.

The next big shift came in about 1993, when I chanced across an 'Imperial Space Marine Squad' (known to some veterans as the RT01 'Womble Marines') in a model shop. I bought two 10 man squads in quick succession for use as additional models in Space Crusade (the term 'game balance' was as yet foreign to me). More importantly, I was given a product catalogue for Games Workshop and became aware of their main lines for the first time.

Despite my fondness for Space Crusade, it was the Warhammer Fantasy boxed set that captured my imagination. As luck would have it, I actually had enough money to make the huge box mine. I'd been doggedly saving up my pocket money for a long time with the intention of buying an original Star Wars AT-AT toy that I'd found in a shop – after some consideration, I changed my target and got myself a copy of Warhammer instead.

My Dad drew the line at the huge tomes of rules that came in the box (it had taken him all night to learn Space Crusade after all). Thankfully, several of my friends were interested enough to start collecting armies and playing Warhammer against me. I decided that financial constraints made it most sensible to build on one of the two armies provided, so after reading the background material for both I settled on the humorous Orcs and Goblins.

My army grew and grew and our dining room table was occupied for days at a time by huge battles. Unfortunately the interests of my friends eventually declined, whilst mine remained strong. This is pretty much typical for me – once I get keen on something I very rarely go off it. 

The box that started me off.

My lack of opponents prompted me to attend the games held at my local Games Workshop store. Frankly, these games usually sucked – I was only able to field one or two units as part of a large team battle and the prohibition on characters meant that my leaderless Greenskins typically routed as soon as battle was joined. The staff also barred the models I brought on some occasions because they were 'old models' or in one case because the sides of the bases weren't painted. However, it was at this store that I found an advert for the Worksop Wargames Society.

I loved the Society when I tried it out and it rapidly became my most important weekly leisure activity. The club introduced me to the wide array of games that existed beyond GW – such as Magic: the Gathering. I'd already been briefly introduced to D&D by a Warhammer opponent and the club offered a degree of role-playing opportunities too. In hindsight the place was far from perfect – there were no regular female members, the role-playing standards were about what you'd expect from a group of teenage boys and the keenest Warhammer player was a neo-Nazi and a bad loser. But it was perhaps the first time I'd had a large group of friends, especially one based on shared interests. The weekly schedule also did a lot to structure my gaming into a real hobby activity, backed up by the geek culture that the society provided.

Although the club did a lot to broaden my gaming horizons, Warhammer remained my most commonly played game with the possible exception of Necromunda. I was loyal to the Greenskins until 1999, when a new-found adolescent fascination with vampires happened to coincide with the emergence of the Vampire Counts army. I immediately decided that I wanted to collect a Lahmian force. Thankfully a combination of second hand models from club members and customised spares allowed me to raise the army quite cheaply. I was never very good with them – most battles consisted of Lahmians reaping enemies worth a fraction of their own value while the rest of their army got destroyed – but the implacable dead and the mighty Vampiresses made a welcome change from the fractious Greenskins and relatively puny Goblin lords. 

A Lahmian Thrall and a Necromancer flanked by Grave Guard. Honest. 

The thing that eventually caused my Warhammer gaming to decline was my move to University after 2000. This was in no way because I abandoned my interests in order to pursue 'grown up' or fashionable activities exclusively. The Clubs and Societies Fair in the first week was pretty much a welcome to paradise and the Wargames and Roleplaying Society (WARPSoc) was the best one that I joined.

WARPSoc has a focus toward role-playing and the gender-diverse society offered a massively higher standard than I'd experienced before. After a little hesitation I joined the weekly LARP and found my love of role-playing being combined with my lifelong appreciation of Medieval Re-enactment and sword-fighting (the only competitive physical activity I excel at). This caused me to focus more on RPGs, but I still loved the cerebral competitive element of wargames too much to just give them up.

The real problem was that I didn't have access to my parent's dining table any more. Unless the society booked a location, it was almost impossible to secure an ideal playing surface for a game of Warhammer. Even then, WARPSoc sessions were usually a bit of a tight fit for an entire battle. By comparison the swift and portable Magic: the Gathering was great for social play around the campus, leading to Magic taking over. I attended the Worksop club during the holidays for a while, but then moved to Wales full time.

The final nail in the coffin was provided by GW themselves. Their regular habit of publishing new backward-incompatible editions of Warhammer meant that eventually my rulebooks became obsolete. I couldn't prepare an army without re-buying the army books and I couldn't fully understand the army book without re-buying the core rules – creating an unappealing level of investment for an occasional game and thus barring me from play altogether.

WARPSoc is a wonderful group of people and most of my close friends have come from the ranks of the society. It provided me with a place where I could be different and still belong and a gateway into the rest of the Alternative community. I loved the society so much that on the day I handed in my Masters Dissertation I went straight over to the Clubs and Societies Fair and helped their stall get more new recruits. One of my signings was a wonderful Christian girl who had been trying to weigh her genuine desire to try out role-playing against the last echoes of the 1980s D&D moral panic. We've just celebrated our seventh wedding anniversary and we both game with members of WARPSoc every week.

Without Warhammer, I'd never have joined the Worksop club or WARPSoc after it. I like to believe that God's plan for me would have led certain things to happen in different ways, so I can't say with certainty that my life would be completely different if I'd bought that AT-AT instead. But it is fair to say that my marriage, my social circle and my hobbies today all owe a great deal to the day that I came home with a big red box full of Elves and Goblins. I may not have played very often in the last decade, but Warhammer Fantasy Battle has had a surprisingly important place in my life.

The reason I recount this tale now is that Warhammer Fantasy has come to an end as of this year. Technically this demise took place across a series of 8^th Edition supplements called The End Times which started in 2014, but I've only become aware of it now due to the highly public way in which GW has chosen to mutilate the corpse.

In a large fanfare of publicity, GW has unveiled a new Fantasy Battle game called Warhammer: Age of Sigmar. This has been accompanied by a radical shift in their business model – the game's core rules and all of the army lists for the existing races have been placed online for free download.

Needless to say, I was very excited. Just a few mouse clicks and I would possess up to date core rules, a new army list for my Vampire Counts and even a list for my old Greenskins! Being now in possession of a dining table of our very own, Warhammer would become a thing that I could do again.

Then I read the rules.

In retrospect, my first comment after doing this – that it was as if E. L. James had rewritten Star Wars from the perspective of Jar Jar Binks – was slightly harsh. But only slightly so. The game discards victory points in favour of a 'fight to the death' system which is nostalgic to me but clearly favours killer models over clever tactical play. It discards points values in favour of 'field whatever you like' – a system that me and my friends tried exactly once and found too uneven to be worth bothering with. It discards unit formations and manoeuvring rules in favour of loose mobs moving in a fashion stolen from Warhammer 40,000. It ditches psychology and routing units in favour of testosterone-fuelled brawls to the last man. The practice of rolling a die to decide who moves first has been extended to every turn of the game, meaning that whoever moves second must make tactical decisions without knowing who will move next. I'm not sure that Age of Sigmar is a bad game in itself, but it is so obviously inferior to the preceding editions of Warhammer in every measurable way that it makes no sense as a sequel from the same company.

Having read up on the subject, the sad truth is that Age of Sigmar was never intended to be a true sequel to 8^th edition. Games Workshop have always sold more Space Marines than anything else, but reports suggest that the overall sales of Warhammer 40,000 items had made Fantasy into a tiny portion of their profits. With the large range of Fantasy models taking up as much shelf space as their more profitable sci-fi rivals, GW decided to scrap it and bring out a new second string that they hope will be more popular.

This is why so many of the distinctive and vaguely authentic-feeling rules of medieval battle have been switched out for something that plainly resembles 40K. It is also the reason that a new faction of obvious Space Marine knock-offs have been prominently introduced in the first wave of new releases. More subtly, it is why the game rules give these warriors a massive play advantage over everyone else. There is no restriction on the number of models you can deploy in Age of Sigmar, but a severely outnumbered force is given a special potentially game-winning advantage. Unfortunately the loss of the points value system means that one powerful model is no longer considered equal to three or four weak ones when it comes to counting heads. It is a fair bet that the Stormcast Eternals will be the strongest troop type in play, meaning that a player with a big enough box of them should be able to defeat anyone by deploying the correct number of men. Presumably GW hopes that Space Marine fans who try out the Eternals will love the instant mastery of the game that this brings them.

Space Marine Commander Dante and an original new character from Age of Sigmar.

GW also seem to be basing their new strategy on the knowledge that any fan-base is a pyramid. A small group of really keen fans sit loftily above a far wider base of people with a more casual interest. As a result they have decided to lower the level of interest required to play the game in the first place. On the one hand, the new rules make any form of serious and rewarding competitive play impossible. On the other, they allow anyone who buys (and assembles) a box of models to play a 'proper' game anywhere without further preparation. Such tactics might knock the tip off the pyramid, but if the base expands as planned GW will make far more money.

The setting of Sigmar is also almost entirely unrelated to Fantasy Battle. This is due to the story arc of The End Times, which I have now read a synopsis of (apparently the real thing would have set me back a lot of money). Basically every conflict suddenly became decisive, with established characters, population centres and even entire factions being wiped out with with ridiculous rapidity. This is mostly just destructive, but new and interesting things started to emerge from the havoc – like the Dark Elf Malekith becoming king of the High Elves and the Vampire Counts being recognised as legitimate Imperial nobility. The High Elf Mage Teclis came up with a plan to stop Chaos - he would bind each of the eight winds of magic into a person, creating divine beings that could stand against Chaos on equal terms. Most of the non-Chaos races got an Incarnate with several becoming embodiments of their own gods along the way. The Incarnates rallied all of the good and evil races into the most awesome alliance that the Warhammer World had ever seen and went to challenge Archaon, who was trying to open the mother of all Chaos gates in the ruins of Middenheim. They all lost, the new Chaos rift destroyed the Old World and everyone in it died. The End.

Many players seem to have been hoping that GW would backtrack when 9^th edition came out, declaring it to be just one vision of the end of the world. Until the last book, many hoped that the interesting new alliances and factions were actually going somewhere besides oblivion.
 Unfortunately the new Age of Sigmar proceeds onwards from these events. Sigmar makes new planets with the help of a giant space dragon. The Incarnates become the gods of these worlds and spend an Age collecting Old World souls and sticking them in new bodies. The resurrected populations live in peace and harmony together for many generations until Chaos invades and conquers most of the planets. Sigmar invents magic Space Marines and leads the reconquest, which is the setting for the game. This means that the game takes place in a setting where everything the existing player base cared about has been destroyed, rather than being a simple reboot. It's also a bit weird for a new player compared to the pseudo-medieval setting we've seen in Fantasy.

Given all of this, you have to ask why GW wrote Age of Sigmar versions of the old army lists in the first place. Officially they wanted to 'give the old models a send off' but I don't really buy that. If GW really wanted to leave players with the ability to keep using the old models, they could simply have made the 8^th edition literature available as free downloads instead. The only reason to provide the converted rules is to lure their owners into trying Age of Sigmar, although I can't imagine that actively inviting the direct comparison with Fantasy Battle will win many fans. If I sound like I'm looking a gift horse in the mouth, bear in mind that some of the new rules require the player to engage in physical comedy while using the model. A GW rep has assured everyone that this unprecedented move won't be something we seem more of in the future, but was simply intended to make veteran players too embarrassed to use the old models in public (no really). The old game and the traditional armies haven't been given a decent send off, they've been zombified as billboards in a manner so disrespectful that my Lahmians would wrinkle their noses.

As a role-player, the apocalyptic ending of the Old World ought to put me in mind of the World of Darkness lines produced by White Wolf. After spending many years producing an expanding range of modern horror games set against the backdrop of impeding doom, White Wolf eventually brought their products to a close with a slew of books that detailed the final destruction of the World of Darkness. As soon as the dust settled, however, White Wolf brought out a 'rebooted' range of WOD books that essentially set about remaking the old games. 

Who would DO that?

There are few things that say 'commercialism over art' more plainly than remaking your own successful series the moment you've finished the first version. Many WOD players saw no reason why they would ever want to involve themselves in a line that was simply the same thing without the built up setting elements that they had become invested in.

The reason that the new series managed to thrive in this hostile environment is that it is really good. White Wolf had patiently learned lessons from their previous round of experiences and dedicated themselves to producing the highest quality of product that they could using this knowledge. Most role-players have their preferred incarnation of the World of Darkness, but relatively few would deny that both versions are excellent products within the wider marketplace.

Unfortunately, Games Workshop has not taken the same high road. Age of Sigmar is not an evolved form of Warhammer Fantasy Battle – it's an aggressively diminished parody designed exclusively to appeal to the lowest common denominator, a target identified by a vague perception of current popular gaming choices.

As such, the role-playing event that Age of Sigmar really reminds me of is Dungeons & Dragons 4^th Edition. Once the unquestioned leader of the fantasy RPG field, the makers of D&D went wild with greed when they read about the number of players that World of Warcraft had managed to hook. Seized by the mad delusion that a huge slice of the Western population were now keen fantasy role-players, Wizards engaged in a drastic re-write of D&D that was intended almost exclusively to create a tabletop simulation of playing WOW.

Unfortunately, the results of this effort were far less fit for the purpose of running a D&D game than version 3.5 had been. After a cursory investigation, many D&D fans decided to stick with version that they already owned. Meanwhile the vast armies of WOW fans proved less than interested in leaving their gaming PCs to perform a substantially different activity with whatever WOW-playing friends lived close enough to physically visit their house. Wizards have since released the 5^th Edition of D&D, a tuned-up version of 3.5 that some have described as the 'we're sorry' version of the game.

There will never be a 'we're sorry' version of Warhammer Fantasy Battle. GW ended the game line because it wasn't making enough money – even if the new game fails they have no reason to go back to the last struggling property. The time has come to raise a mug of Bugman's XXXXXX and toast its passing. It was a good game while it lasted and 31 years is an incredible run for any 'living' game. So farewell, Warhammer Fantasy - you will be missed.

Of course, the lack of an acceptable current version of the rules might prompt more people to play with the outdated versions that I still own. I may yet take the field again...