Your preferred level of fantasy in the AoS setting

[michu]

@Cèsar de Quart What particular questions do you have when creating cities? 

[zedatkinszed]

Seriously I think this is a bit of a confused problem to have with AOS. 

I get it, Stormcast are Space Marine level Superhumans and we all want ordinary people  to relate to. Sure, but having SCE doesn't give me a problem. I mean look at all the factions in Order - Fyrelayers, KO, Sylvaneth, DOK, IDK - they've all got regular Joes and Josephines. Seriously just because they're not human doesn't make their non-superhero perspective a problem for me.

Also - Chaos. We've got books about ordinary guys falling to Chaos (the Korgos Khul book) and we have the Kairic Acolytes, Blood Reavers, all the tribes from War Cry.  As well as the companion novels and novellas. The lore is there.

Sure I would love a new human order army with AOS standard models. It'd be an auto-buy for most everyone I know in the hobby. But TBH the lack of that to date doesn't mean I can't enjoy and relate to AOS.

Edited October 5, 2019 by zedatkinszed

[Dead Scribe]

Everyone is different and has different targets and goals and motivations and requirements for their entertainment.  I don't think people are confused or just not getting it if they don't relate to the game in the same way that another does.

Edited October 5, 2019 by Dead Scribe

[zedatkinszed]

On 9/16/2019 at 10:14 PM, Ironbreaker said:

As others have said, we don't really have a baseline to compare everything to. Most of the armies are supernaturally empowered and feature aspects that we as regular people can't exactly relate to. Most fictional settings need something that the reader/viewer/player can look at and compare it to themselves.

[...]

Again, it's hard to relate to a setting and ground yourself in it if you never get a sense to what the reality of the setting is. A lot of things in the game seem so fantastical that it's so hard to imagine how anyone could possible live in such an environment let alone thrive and create civilizations. My most hated argument is "What does it matter? It's fantasy, it doesn't have to be realistic". What's the point of the setting if nothing has limits or boundaries? It just becomes a playground argument where children continue to invent even stronger and more outlandish events until the bounds imagination are stressed. Battles and struggles look less like a gritty battle of good against evil and more like a Saturday morning romp of Marvel super heroes against the weekly villains.

 

18 hours ago, Dead Scribe said:

Everyone is different and has different targets and goals and motivations and requirements for their entertainment.  I don't think people are confused or just not getting it if they don't relate to the game in the same way that another does.

Sure, but AOS was NEVER sold as a game setting of realism. The expectations were  set pretty clearly from the start. It begins with Sigmar hurtling through space meeting a cosmic dragon. It laid its cards on the table from word go. This was going to a mythic setting of Gods and Monsters. I'm not ragging on ppl enjoying gritty low fantasy - I prefer that myself. But I do think this is a bit like asking Fanta to change its recipe so it tastes the same as Club Orange.  AOS is it's own thing.

Furthermore I actually think the argument is a fallacy. The novellas and novels DO look at things from a pov of mere mortals. That was one of the best things about the Malign Portents short stories. I don't get why people say this kind of thing doesn't exist when it patently does. Moreover we have new battletome armies based on normal Joes - just not Order humans (and again I'm not saying we don't need a new order human one - we do, it's crazy there hasn't been one).

Edited October 6, 2019 by zedatkinszed

[Overread]

I think we shouldn't overlook that our first big steps into the AoS setting were the Realmwars Novels. Books which were basically battle campaign books writtne about superhuman stormcast winning the day every day. Warriors who could march for weeks without food or water through chaos tainted realms; then climb a mountain of steel against a waterfall of silver only to arrive at the top and fight a full battle; run across a molten slag-kingdom and siege a castle. 

That's not just superhuman that's way beyond any human, dwarf or elf army. Even Gotrek would be puffed after that and he's generally shown to be a near superhuman in his original stories and supposed demi-god in his AoS ones. 

 

 

However those early stories set a tone and were the first impressions many had. They didn't have many of the small people in them, and even when we saw them they were either warriors in battle or civilians fleeing for their lives. Basically broken peoples with little to pull them up. The result is that people didn't get the impression of the peoples of the realms, but more the saviours alone. 

Personally whilst it made for an epic opening, I somewhat feel that GW made a mistake in setting the game in the 3rd age of the Realms. They should have set it in the first age and gone through all the factions establishing themselves; building themselves up. Showing the common elf, dwarf, human, ork etc... growing their civilisations. Their strengths and weaknesses etc... However I get the feeling that even the authors of the early novels didn't really have enough GW groundwork to achieve that. 

I think the setting was rushed out and started almost in the middle of the story with not enough work done on the basic ground level world building - which led it into somewhat confusing territories. Esp as its clear that management wanted to push the whole "infinite possibilities without limits" world setting. Which consumer wise makes for a great setting to do whatever you want model wise; but lore wise ends up quite weak because without limits and defined limits the gravity of the story and characters can lose importance. 

 

I think there is a general retconning and firming up of the story and setting going on. Things like the realms being near infinite is steadily being chipped away into "Oh there's limits they are just vast" and we are steadily getting more background on some of the internal and core regions. We are also seeing more adventuring stories and "common warrior" tales and the like. It's getting there, its just probably goin to take another 20 years to get itself sorted out.

[zedatkinszed]

22 minutes ago, Overread said:

I think the setting was rushed out and started almost in the middle of the story with not enough work done on the basic ground level world building - which led it into somewhat confusing territories. Esp as its clear that management wanted to push the whole "infinite possibilities without limits" world setting. Which consumer wise makes for a great setting to do whatever you want model wise; but lore wise ends up quite weak because without limits and defined limits the gravity of the story and characters can lose importance. 

I generally agree but what I find interesting is what Warhammer fans define as limits (it too often smacks of "I want the old world back"). I seriously don't have any problem with 8 infinite and expanding universes of magic. That kinda works TBH. But I agree they needed to populate each realm with something static. Something people could buy into. Even if there was some uncertainty about the edges. Which is what they've done with the last Core Rulebook. And frankly I don't think it's fair to be harkening back to the early days and ignoring 4 years worth of lore. GW provided much of this stuff over the last 3 and a bit years. I mean look at Shadows over Hammerhal. It was an OK game but as a deep dive into the part of the city in Aqshy it was great. From Cinderfall  and the short stories in Malign Portents I learned how the city worked, more than I ever did about Marrienburg, or Clar Karond TBH.

Does that mean I don't want more? No, quite the opposite.

Edited October 6, 2019 by zedatkinszed

[Dead Scribe]

To be fair, AOS didn't know what AOS was being sold as for a few years.  As time has gone on and the lines gotten a lot more solid, people either love it, or are unhitching their wagon and moving on to other things.  It certainly has been a polarizing time regardless.

[IneptusAstartes]

There’s also the weird case of the pastiche supplanting the original. Old Warhammer FB was translated more or less 1:1 into space to become 40k, then 40k ended up far more popular than its parent. You could read articles about, say, “Warhammer” lore and it would be entirely about 40k. A lot of people (myself included...) knew of 40k’s emperor but didn’t know it was a parody of the old empire.

So we have AoS trying to make itself its own thing and taking an opposite tack to its predecessors. This isn’t an opinion for or against the fantasy level, just a bit of context.