When you spend over 300 quid on 5 books, the accompanying novels, a sweet t-shirt, and the net result is the destruction of the Warhammer world and 3 decade’s worth of fluff and literature, you have to question your sanity. The clue was in the name, they called it the End Times for a reason. Typically, the crybabies are upset, it’s all Matt Ward’s fault, and they’re firing shots from the cover of their keyboards. See this example directed at Josh Reynolds (author of the book 5 novel). So much rage, I’m guessing a new Chaos god of tears has been birthed
So, where do we go now, and what’s coming next? My plan for an all mounted Norscan Marauder army is in a holding pattern. What’s the point in spending all that money and time on a project that might not exist going forward? Yeah, I could stick to playing 8th, as I can see that becoming Oldhammer v2.0 if the gaming community are not happy with the next edition. Even when popular podcasts such as The Black Sun, Skull Bros Awesome and Point Hammered, who are battle standard bearers for WHFB, are taking time out from the main game with campaigns, other games such as Darklands, Wrath Of Kings and Saga and even going balls deep in 40k, you know something isn’t right. Hobby time, and money, is precious, so whilst things are in a state of flux, I’ll just stick with 40k, and hopefully check out Hordes in the meantime, or I could just stare into the void every evening, wasting time online.
According to chatter on the intertron, we’re a few weeks from seeing a possible skirmish/round base game. Is this 9th, or is it a bridging 8.5 to get us used to any wholesale changes coming down the pipe in 9th with Sigmarines/Holy Warriors and new warped factions replacing generic fantasy tropes? I just can’t get my head around any setting that’s 5 minutes to midnight and replaying those final epic moments (whether they took minutes, months, centuries) when we know the end result of the bad guys winning, and the world being swallowed by the realm of chaos anyway. The last few pages of End Times: Archaon make it clear the world is toast, ended, gone, finished, or is it a new beginning? The warp is a good excuse for any resetting of the timeline or bringing people/races back from the dead though, but then are we back to square one, and we’ve just experienced another retcon, a la Storm Of Chaos?
Then we come to the biggest rumour of all, that GW would ditch the mass battle system, and most of the existing races/models are gone? Does this include all those nice new models released in the past few months like Nagash and Mannfred? Surely they can milk more profit from those moulds? This I cannot understand at all, even if the game itself doesn’t make much money. But when you have Mantic positioning themselves to allow races from other games into this summers’ King Of War 2 (see here), do they know something we don’t? Mantic get a lot of stick for riding on the coat tails of GW and their own take on the ditched specialist games, but it’s not like you can call GW original when they copied others in their early days. One bonus of being able to use those nice Citadel miniatures in KoW2 though is you’re not forced to use the god awful Mantic restic minis. I’m willing to give it all a try though
“This is the end. My only friend”
Everything should be become clear over the next few months, and we could see some epic rage-quitting and tears if the next edition of Warhammer really does change things up, or it could cleverly balance using your old collection alongside new factions/settings with battles that scale up from skirmish to the big blocks we all know and love. Whatever it is, I’ll give it a go, as I’m a clearly a sucker for the setting.
May you live in interesting times