A discussion of the lore of AoS after 7 years

[Enoby]

Following on from the very interesting discussion on the rumour thread, I've created this for people to continue sharing their thoughts on the past, future, style, direction, quantity, and quality AoS lore. 

[Landohammer]

Summarizing my opinion and followup comments from the rumour thread:

AOS lore is bad. At least compared to 40k and HH. Here is why;

-Only 7 years to build the lore

-Most meaningful advances in the story gets retconned or ignored later (IE Anvil Guard, etc)

-Characters never actually die 

-Too much magic flying around these days...

-No "regular human" perspective. All protagonists are supernatural/magical/immortal

 

[Gitzdee]

Ok, so 40k has all colours of Power Rangers with groupies and some aliens. AoS is more like Marvel super heroes with groupies. J/k.

I thought we left of with, Is it a good thing to kill of main characters?

[Augusto]

no human perpective? 

Gloomspite and Kragnos, for example, have normal human protagonist

Edited June 3, 2022 by Augusto

[EntMan]

29 minutes ago, Landohammer said:

-Too much magic flying around these days...

Aren't the Mortal Realms literally made of magic? 

[Armoured]

32 minutes ago, Landohammer said:

-Characters never actually die 

This doesn't really happen outside of Heresy, though.  Even in Fantasy almost noone ever died until the End Times plotline, when everyone dying was the entre point.

I don't think that characters have to die to make a narrative interesting, anyway.  The wider lore about the mortal realms is intentionally done in broad strokes to allow players to have their own armies in it. 

[Flippy]

29 minutes ago, Kadeton said:

I don't think special characters should be unique, personally. There should be no difference (in terms of power, scope, variety or complexity) between a character that an author creates and a character that you build yourself. You should always be able to unlock the entire potential of your faction without restricting yourself to a specific individual.

If the character-building mechanics we have are not interesting enough to represent named characters, then I'd argue they're not interesting enough to represent any characters. Give the generic characters enough options to make them interesting, and then use that exact same system to build representations of the named characters.

Well, being unique makes them special. I have two problems with the characters in AoS.

The first is that you often get only one or two per faction - with at least one being some sort of godly figure (i.e. very expansive, army-defining model). I think the game could use a greater variety of cheap special characters - if I remember correctly, High Elves used to have Caradryan, Korhil, Alith Anar, Eltharion, Alarielle, Belanner, Imrik, Tyrion and Teclis - 9 special character, starting from Caradryan around 100 points and finishing with Imrik somewhere around 900, with the rest somewhere in-between. This is my benchmark.

And the second problem (which exacerbates the first one) is the pitiful choice of artefacts and command traits for the generic characters. I play Ironjawz and I only get three (sic!) artefacts & command traits for the Boss, with nothing flavourful for the Shaman & Warchanters. I know that some people apparently prefer the short list of useful stuff, but what we have now is a sad joke.

 

[Twisted Firaun]

My opinion of AOS lore is that the so-called villains, Death and Chaos, somehow have the most developed storylines and background. 
Nagash and Co (particularly Neferata of all people), have been the main focus of an entire Edition and numerous books and short stories. Shyish is honestly one of the most developed realms, with decently developed nations and empires throughout the realm. Heck, we even see the Mortarchs actually debate and strategize when they’re not at each other’s throats! 
 

Chaos started out at the top of their game all the way back in the realm gate wars, and honestly they haven’t really stopped being there. We’ve seen entire civilizations and continents dedicated to the dark gods that are actually realistically functional. Thanks to Warcry we now have tribes that worship chaos without actually worshipping “Chaos” if you catch my meaning. In addition to the above, Chaos has had the most characters (with models and without) return in the lore and game, so they have a strong cast to work with. 
 

Honestly the only faction that comes close to this with Order are the Duardin as a whole. We’ve seen the Kharadron Code be developed as each edition caused changes, and they currently have 3! Named characters with models (Brokk Grungsson, Dagnai Holdensotck, Drekki Flynt), and a couple of moves and stories to their name. The Fyreslayers may not have the most models, but they have interesting lore and some decent short stories tied to them. Grungni has returned to the realms, and is trying to make amends with his kids. Finally, Gotrek Gurnisson…. I think I made my case.

destruction has so much potential to be epic…. BUT GW DOESN’T DO ANYTHING WITH THEM!!! The Kruleboyz are cool but they don’t really appear outside of dominion, and they haven’t upgraded the Beastclaw Raiders despite the Everwinter apparently being this world ending force.

[Landohammer]

59 minutes ago, Iksdee said:

Ok, so 40k has all colours of Power Rangers with groupies and some aliens. AoS is more like Marvel super heroes with groupies. J/k.

I thought we left of with, Is it a good thing to kill of main characters?

I like it. Some of my favorite media ever has major character deaths. Game of thrones, MCU, and even LOTR to a lesser extent. 

 

44 minutes ago, Augusto said:

no human perpective? 

Gloomspite and Kragnos, for example, have normal human protagonist

Sorry dumb question: Are those the names of specific novels. Are they any good?

Most of my experience dabbling in AOS novels is stormcast protagonists. The human perspectives were only for temporary redshirts about to die horribly lol. 

30 minutes ago, EntMan said:

Aren't the Mortal Realms literally made of magic? 

Yes and thats fine. But like Nagash/alarielle/belakor/morathi/Teclis etc doing X gigantic magic event to further the plot/win a battle isn't interesting to me. 

Maybe i just have unrealistic expectations, but big events in 40k reverberate among the fandom. Like people still quote events like Horus vs the Emperor, Abaddon vs Sigismund, the fall of Cadia, Helsreach, etc. Those events had major character deaths, impacted the timeline, and people build armies around them.

Does anyone care/remember the Necroquake, broken realms, etc?

21 minutes ago, Armoured said:

This doesn't really happen outside of Heresy, though.  Even in Fantasy almost noone ever died until the End Times plotline, when everyone dying was the entre point.

I don't think that characters have to die to make a narrative interesting, anyway.  The wider lore about the mortal realms is intentionally done in broad strokes to allow players to have their own armies in it. 

Something I liked about Fantasy (and 40k/HH does this too) is that you often get game rules for characters that are dead. Like many of the bretonnians/empire and even some of the other races like Dwarfs had characters who would clearly be dead in the current timeline. So it doesn't really matter if the hero ultimately dies, as long as he has plenty of timeline where he COULD have been fielded, or experience adventures.

So for example, if Gotrek died in an epic finale, you could still use him similar to how Anvilguard still has rules even tho its destroyed.

 

[Kadeton]

23 minutes ago, Flippy said:

The first is that you often get only one or two per faction - with at least one being some sort of godly figure (i.e. very expansive, army-defining model). I think the game could use a greater variety of cheap special characters.

Right - and if you had a system of options that allowed you to build whatever characters suited your army, including facsimiles of those legendary heroes with names, you wouldn't have just two, or nine... you'd have potentially hundreds of special characters. That's essentially what I'm dreaming about - a flexible character-building system that doesn't require special one-off exceptions to represent notable individuals, and doesn't lock the representation of those individuals to a single moment in their character arc.

Edit: Yes, like the Anvil of Apotheosis. Except faction-specific, with greater scope and flexibility, and much better balanced. An Anvil of Apotheosis with actual effort put into it.

Edited June 3, 2022 by Kadeton

[CommissarRotke]

1 hour ago, Landohammer said:

Summarizing my opinion and followup comments from the rumour thread:

AOS lore is bad. At least compared to 40k and HH. Here is why;

-Only 7 years to build the lore

-Most meaningful advances in the story gets retconned or ignored later (IE Anvil Guard, etc)

-Characters never actually die 

-Too much magic flying around these days...

-No "regular human" perspective. All protagonists are supernatural/magical/immortal

 

I will also reiterate that these are problems with all Warhammer systems and should not be held solely against AOS:

If it's got a model for tabletop, they aren't dying.

Most of the 40k books we see have been HH, (primaris) Marines, or Inquisitor/other human elite types. Even the WH+ anims are all some flavor of this.

The 8e complaints that reached my ears involved lore retcons.

40k even got new rules for magic and psykers I heard.

(some my comments, some from others who know 40k better)

[novakai]

53 minutes ago, Flippy said:

Well, being unique makes them special. I have two problems with the characters in AoS.

The first is that you often get only one or two per faction - with at least one being some sort of godly figure (i.e. very expansive, army-defining model). I think the game could use a greater variety of cheap special characters - if I remember correctly, High Elves used to have Caradryan, Korhil, Alith Anar, Eltharion, Alarielle, Belanner, Imrik, Tyrion and Teclis - 9 special character, starting from Caradryan around 100 points and finishing with Imrik somewhere around 900, with the rest somewhere in-between. This is my benchmark.

And the second problem (which exacerbates the first one) is the pitiful choice of artefacts and command traits for the generic characters. I play Ironjawz and I only get three (sic!) artefacts & command traits for the Boss, with nothing flavourful for the Shaman & Warchanters. I know that some people apparently prefer the short list of useful stuff, but what we have now is a sad joke.

 

I mean that a gameplay problems not a lore problem and having less artifacts  and command trait is just a design choice in 3.0 because GW realise they not imaginative enough to create that many meaniful choices in a army, hence why they took away choice to go more streamlined.

36 minutes ago, Landohammer said:

I like it. Some of my favorite media ever has major character deaths. Game of thrones, MCU, and even LOTR to a lesser extent. 

 

Sorry dumb question: Are those the names of specific novels. Are they any good?

Most of my experience dabbling in AOS novels is stormcast protagonists. The human perspectives were only for temporary redshirts about to die horribly lol. 

Yes and thats fine. But like Nagash/alarielle/belakor/morathi/Teclis etc doing X gigantic magic event to further the plot/win a battle isn't interesting to me. 

Maybe i just have unrealistic expectations, but big events in 40k reverberate among the fandom. Like people still quote events like Horus vs the Emperor, Abaddon vs Sigismund, the fall of Cadia, Helsreach, etc. Those events had major character deaths, impacted the timeline, and people build armies around them.

Does anyone care/remember the Necroquake, broken realms, etc?

Something I liked about Fantasy (and 40k/HH does this too) is that you often get game rules for characters that are dead.

Most of those event happen in 30K, and most of those event people knew about character death way before the novels every happen (Sanguinius death was in the background fluff for ages) in 40K and fantasy there isn’t many character with models that are dead except for That one crazy elector count nor where there many big events until Endtime.

equavalent is basically be Behemoth’s death in the realm gate wars or Mathalann death at the hand of Slaanesh 

Edit: AoS is in a building up phase they no need to destroy many thing when so many things are left unexplored, Endtime was purposely a wholesale deconstruction and basically whip out the whole character cast for AoS to be ground zero

 

Edited June 3, 2022 by novakai

[CommissarRotke]

It's not that I disagree with all complaints against AOS, it's that I think players need to blame GW more for their issues with it. The pandemic likely stagnated their narrative plans, yet even through that it feels like there's only a backlog of games and books for 40k, and never AOS.

There are already a ton of novels and shorts out that cover most of the Mortal Realm's denizens; from the superpowered or supernatural to the mortal and mundane. These have seemed to freeze lately, and instead Soulbound has been picking up GW's slack since its release in 2020.

I'll close this out by mentioning that if GW were to actually market things like Soulbound, I think more people would come to appreciate the lore AOS has so far.

[Enoby]

As for my opinion of the lore, personally I think that the reason AoS lore has quite a bad rep outside of its own fandoms is because early AoS lore (2015) was actually poor. I say this as someone who wasn't involved in WHFB or 40k so I had no past ties, and I really wanted to love AoS's setting - I read most of the Realmgate Wars Black Library series and all of the Realmgate Wars campaign books (those huge things full of some pretty cool battle plans).

New AoS lore is considerably better, and I much prefer it to 40k, and I think it's superior to WHFB for wargaming (but not for stories). It's still not perfect - as mentioned on the Rumour Thread, Broken Realms 4 felt like a rushed job that knocked a lot of life out of the series, which was incredibly disappointing. 

I'll go over my thoughts in chronological order to try explain my thoughts a bit better, and perhaps to give some insight to those who have more recently joined AoS and didn't go through the Realmgate Wars. 

A Rough Start

It'd be no surprise to hear that AoS had a rough start; after all, the setting came out of the destruction of another established and beloved world. To rub salt in the wound, it was just after Warhammer Fantasy was shown a bit of attention from the End Times releases, so the end of the setting was likely to sting that bit more. To make matters worse for the WHFB crowd, the new AoS setting seemed to be incredibly vague - there were realms that corresponded to the winds of magic, and it was an age of never-ending war. Gone was the Earth-sized word with identifiable continents and cities with normal people living normal lives, replaced with mysterious expanses that had yet to be developed besides "in the Realm of Fire, there's fire". Even though I came into the hobby right at the start of AoS, I wasn't sure exactly what was happening with all of the characters on the print out rules I had - it was, for at least a few months, totally unknown whether they were alive, and if they were, what they were doing. I certainly couldn't tell you of how people lived in the Realm of Fire. 

So, as far as starts go, it was messy. 

As mentioned before, the Realmgate Wars series is likely one of the reasons people outside the fandom don't look at AoS's lore very fondly. It's said that first impressions are the most important, and unfortunately for AoS, many people's first impressions where "big storm people beat up Khorne over a variety of desolate battlegrounds in fights that lack tension or memorable characters". 

That sounds very harsh, but it's the most honest review I can give of the first book of the series. Most of the Black Library Realmgate Wars books (henceforth referred to as BL RGW) were a collection of stories were Stormcast fought their way through a variety of 'bad guy' armies to achieve goals that we're told are important, but because there has been close to no development given to the places they were meant to be saving so it was hard to care. For those who weren't around during this time, one of the most asked questions on FB groups were "are there still normal humans in AoS" and it was quite a big thing when a group of straggling humans appeared in a later BL RGWs. At this point, Stormcast were very disliked by some of the fanbase - and I will admit I was one of them.

Now, it wasn't because of any "Sigmarines" stuff, but rather because at the time they just couldn't lose and it became almost pitiful to watch Chaos get slapped around again and again. It was like reading a synopsis of an easy video game level, where Stormcast clobbered through a load of Chaos mooks without much resistance, only to get to the boss fight and beat that without much of a care either. If I recall correctly, Korgus Khul ("Mighty" Lord Of Khorne) wanted a Vandus's (Lord Cellestant) skull for his DIY project to please Khorne and give him immortality; this Khul guy was built up as the big bad throughout the book. However, the stand off involved a Stormcast flying at him, getting sent to the Realm of Chaos with the axe, and then Vandus beating Khul with relative ease, only for Khul to trip over his pyramid and get covered in skulls so the Stormcast didn't mercy kill him there.

Most of the books were like this, where Stormcast were shown to be amazing killing machines and their enemies may as well not have bothered to show up for all the good they did. I personally disliked them strongly because of this - it felt like they were Mary Sues, where instead of their victories making me go "wowee these Stormcast guys sure are cool" it made me think "I feel nothing but pity for Chaos, and I can only assume they got so far because their enemies felt sorry for them". Perhaps the idea was meant to be a rallying cry for Fantasy players - a bit of a "Chaos blew up your world, but they're certainly not capable of it here and we're getting revenge". However, I think this had the opposite effect and it was read more like "it's okay that your Fantasy chumps couldn't hold these guys off, these Stormcast are cooler and better".  In addition, in the 8th book (I think), my at-the-time favourite character Neferata showed up in the book, being chased down by a Slaaneshi lord (who in the campaign book also tripped off something to avoid being killed by Stormcast - seemed to be a running theme). This lord managed to get near Neferata through her blood knight guards, and she was about to be kidnapped, only for the Stormcast to save her. This rubbed me the wrong way as it suggested that Stormcast were stronger than even a Mortarch.

So, the above sums up my feelings on the BL RGWs - a poorly written series of action scenes that had very limited world development and an over-emphasis on Stormcast. I think these books would have been better received had they been from the perspective of a normal person watching this unfold, allowing for more world building, higher stakes (if it's their home that's about to be trampled), and a more relatable perspective from the get go. In addition, it would have been better had they toned down the SCE to match their enemy rather than exceed them, necessitating tactics and teamwork, perhaps with mortals. 

However, there is still the other side of the story - the Campaign Book Realmgate Wars (henceforth referred to as CB RGWs). These huge books are pretty great gaming pieces for their unique battle plans, but unfortunately very poor worldbuilding. You may well have seen some of the maps in the CB RGWs, but if not, they were fantastical themed lands with landmarks that often lacked any context. They were meant to inspire your imagination, but often times they presented unliveable hellscapes that didn't even seem worth fighting over. And yes, this was the point - Chaos had ruined the land, but because we didn't even know this land to begin with, it was hard to feel invested in Barren Landscape No. 24.

The CB RGWs were written in a way to show Order's take back of the realm against Chaos, but as mentioned, it felt flat because we didn't even know the lands that were being saved. The above map was of somewhere in the Realm of Fire which used to be inhabited by people who could control water, and that's how they could live there - cool, that could be interesting. Except that single sentence is all that's left of them, and we're back to fighting over a desolate landscape of fire and blood, similar to the desolate landscape of fire and blood next door to it. 

While I couldn't find the map for it, Asphyxia is a landscape of fire and blood controlled by cannibal Khorne cultists. It's never explained how these guys are still alive (not even a throw away "Khorne throws stuff at them they need to kill to eat"), or why they even stay there any more, considering its a desolate landscape with nothing of value for anyone anymore. 

As mentioned on the other thread, one of the reasons Lumineth have such good lore is because they look into their society and how their past failings have shaped how they live their lives. The lore is still open enough to do your own thing with them, but it gives them a sense of realism that is still often lacking in AoS. Society and history are, obviously, important to worldbuilding but the CB RGWs only had small snippets of history that led to nothing, and no interesting societies to explore. 

I won't go on about each individual book, but I truly did try to like these when I first got into AoS but I just couldn't manage it. They were combat descriptions in big unexplained desolate landscaps that I had no reason to care about. 

A new hope

So, at least for myself, AoS's lore was pretty grim for the first year. In fact, I felt myself losing interest in the hobby as the lore showed no signs of improving past "Stormcast bonk chaos and take more land". However, things did start looking up as a new book, The City of Secrets, was revealed. Finally, a book looking solely at mortal lives in AoS, exploring the City of Excellis in Ghur. I read this book, and while it wasn't perfect (spoilers: I was miffed that the Stormcast had to be involved in the end, but it was much better than before), it did shine a new light on AoS where we could see the realms and their oddities from the perspective of relatively normal people. 

And then came what I would consider to be the big turning point in AoS's lore - Malign Portents. This was, for those who don't know, the lead up to Second Edition AoS. The forces of each grand alliance were converging on Shyish to help or hinder Nagash's plan. Involved in this build up was a lore book that went over what each faction was doing in this time, and what they thought of current events, and more importantly, free short stories.

One of these short stories almost single handily brought my interest back to the lore. As mentioned, I was totally burned out with Stormcast and how often the stories had been "and then the Stormcast came and beat everyone up and won", but this short story was from the perspective of a human man trapped in a house as zombies tried to claw their way into his home. He could just about see out of the window into his oncoming demise, but then a flash of lightening whitened the sky and his saviours descended into the undead horde. He watched the Anvils of Heldenhammer cleave through the zombies and he was filled with hope. Until the first Stormcast was overwhelmed, and then the next, and then the next, until he was alone and doomed again. This bit of lore really helped cement the idea that Stormcast were no longer the invincible warriors they were portrayed as. Not only that, but more stories came out about Stormcast dragging people from their homes and executing entire villages for potential corruption - they were quickly losing their "Mary Sue" status and becoming more complex characters with weaknesses. 

Now, Malign Portents did end in a bit of a messy note. Nothing too bad, but it felt like a lot of build up happened about nothing for some of the characters, however the true end was the Necroquake which tied into the new edition and the endless spell releases with Malign Sorcery. This event was important for two big reasons:

- The first was it showed a faction that wasn't Order or Chaos doing something important; yes, it didn't go exactly as planned by Nagash, but it was a new focus on Death

- The second was that something big actually happened. At this point, AoS's lore started edging ahead of 40k's. Yes, 40k would blow up a planet, but lucky for the Imperium they had a second planet in reserve, so Cadia was really just good for the slogan. The Necroquake had a large effect on every faction, both rules-wise and lore-wise.

In addition to Malign Portents, the AoS 2 core book was released, and it had special effort put into looking at some of the societies of the realms. There was nothing too detailed, but it helped make AoS feel like people actually lived in the realms, and it wasn't just a series of desolate landscapes for people to have punch ups in. 

I've not read many Black Library books from this time - even though I think AoS's lore had come on leaps and bound from where it began, there were no books that really caught my eye. Unfortunately this is still the case as I personally don't think GW writes Chaos that well usually, and that's what I'm interested in (I've heard Plague Garden is good, but I don't really like Nurgle all that much and I'd rather not read an older Stormcast book). However, from what others have said, the Soulwars books were actually very good.

As AoS 2 continued, more and more factions appeared and started doing their own thing with their own societies and cultures, without need to be shackled to Stormcast or Chaos. 

Broken Realms and where we are now

I will start this section by saying that BR: Morathi is one of the best campaign books I've seen by GW recently. It's not perfect, but it sets up some interesting concepts and actually has something huge happen - Morathi becomes a god and Slaanesh gives birth! These are two huge and permanent changes to the setting that should shake things up for years to come. 

In BR Teclis, we had Akhan the Black be potentially destroyed in the light of Hyish, and while it was an underwhelming ending for the Necroquake, at least something of consequence happened.

In BR Be'lakor, the first prince concocted a way to stop the Stormcast from reforging which should have been a huge blow to order with new narrative pathways opened for what Stormcast do when they're faced with the potential of a fate much worse than death. 

Unfortunately the final Broken Realm, Kragnos, it all seemed to be a big nothing burger. The God of Earthquakes came to shake the setting up, but was beaten back. Slaanesh's kids were beaten by a few Stormcast and some humans, which is embarrassing. Morathi's misdeeds seemed to be forgiven. We went from everything ramping up to no real payoff, using 40k's signature "while the enemy pushed back, the allied forces were weakened and if the enemy comes again then maybe something will happen, but probably not". It felt like a very rushed book, and I think there were last minute changes - especially because in the AoS 3 CRB it mentions that Morathi defeated Slaanesh's kids, which isn't at all what happened in Kragnos.

Thondia came out recently, and I enjoyed this book. It had a balanced view of all of the factions that appeared, leading to more interesting fights where you didn't know who would come out on top, and the potential of more interesting developments down the road of Beasts of Chaos. 

Overall, the lore is in a much better place than it was and I am excited when we do get new lore for AoS because, usually, something does happen in it. 

In addition, one of the biggest benefits of AoS's lore is that, at the end of the day, the lore is to facilitate the wargame and AoS does that well. There are very few checkboxes you need to fill in when designing an army - you're free to do what you want without conflicting with the lore. This is fantastic for building your own army, though it does leave some issues when it comes to reading books and stories...

Some of the remaining issues in AoS

As mentioned, the lore has come a long way, but there are still a few issues that I think stop AoS from getting the same amount of lore discussion as 40k and Fantasy (discounting the obvious reason of fanbase sizes).

The first is that the lore is intentionally vague and open. I think this is great - necessary, even -  for building your own guys. I thoroughly dislike 40k's way where it feels like you need to fill in check boxes to fit into a certain faction to the point they don't really feel like your guys any more. However, this comes at the price that there's rarely that much to discuss. They were brought up before, but Sylvaneth are a cool looking faction of forest spirits. You can do a lot with them, from having them hate humans to having them work co-operatively with green cities, either would fit well and could be well developed. However they don't really have a true culture or history - nothing that feels as if they're a well developed people. You'll get snippets of lore, but nothing that defines their culture. As mentioned, this isn't always a bad thing, but it can leave the lore feeling empty.

The second is the sheer size of the setting. Again, like before, this can be a good thing because you don't run into any issues like you could in Fantasy where you want your people to come from somewhere, but it wouldn't make any sense given the scale of the setting. In addition, in AoS, you have to worry less about stepping on the toes of other factions - if you want your own cities to be the biggest and best for miles around, that's no problem. However it can leave the setting feeling more intangible, where you struggle to care if a particular city is destroyed because the scope is so large than anything short of a realm being blown up could probably be ignored. It's a double edged sword, however, because as seen in 40k, if you make some places too important then nothing ever happens to them (Terra) or something happens and it doesn't make that much of a tangible difference anyway (Cadia - lots of "tell not show" in this case, where it was meant to be terrible but we never see the bad effects). 

Finally, a lot of the named characters in AoS don't feel fleshed out enough - or they're survivors from Fantasy. It's a shame when the most important people of the new setting are the ones from the old setting. More than that, the actual new characters like Brokk just seem to be added in for model purposes, and while we get a small backstory, we rarely see them actually do anything so we just don't get to like them. Or the small snippets we do see of them, while they can be cool, aren't enough to actually develop them. I think this is something that can be improved in the future, but it's notable in 40k discussions when 80% of talks are about named characters - it's obvious that named characters are important for a setting.

TL;DR

Old AoS was actually pretty rubbish, but it's come a long way from where it was and can go further. However, there are some parts of AoS that people don't like which are intrinsic to the way the setting is, and changing them would weaken the setting in other areas. Personally I think AoS is the best Wargaming setting for "your guys", and that's what matters most to me.

[Flippy]

10 minutes ago, novakai said:

I mean that a gameplay problems not a lore problem and having less artifacts  and command trait is just a design choice in 3.0 because GW realise they not imaginative enough to create that many meaniful choices in a army, hence why they took away choice to go more streamlined.

It is a gameplay problem, but a one closely tied with the lore problem. You need a story for a special character and if you prefer that players create their own story and special characters you should give them in-game tools to reflect their special status. Currently we have neither this nor that.

[novakai]

3 minutes ago, Flippy said:

It is a gameplay problem, but a one closely tied with the lore problem. You need a story for a special character and if you prefer that players create their own story and special characters you should give them in-game tools to reflect their special status. Currently we have neither this nor that.

I mean that what narrative, anvil of apotheosis and path to glory is for, creating your own story in AoS setting, there are plenty of tools to make it happen. you don’t need GW to make their own special characters important in the lore and you can do it your self. Reality it just that Match play rule is often time the big default of playing the game where the setting is suppose to be balance/competitive  and less flavourful.

[Kadeton]

Lore-wise, I'd say AoS and 40K have almost the exact opposite problems. AoS is still new, and has vast areas of both space and time that are no more filled out than a rough sketch. They wanted to allow for growth, so they built a setting that was unfeasibly enormous - it's going to be a long time before it's filled out enough to feel grounded. I like what they've been doing with it so far, but I definitely want to see more attention paid to what ordinary people are up to, not just gods slapping each other around. I liked the stuff in the Nighthaunt battletome about how Shyish was supposed to work before Nagash screwed everything up, that actually felt quite well realised.

40K, by comparison, is getting stifled by the weight of its own lore, as secret histories and retcons collide while the writers try to make some kind of coherent sense of it all. This calcification of the setting's history is at odds with the need of a model company to keep producing and selling new stuff, and the result is bizarre elements or story choices that contradict the established tone, tropes or history of the overarching story. At the end of the day, sales will always win out over consistency.

[CommissarRotke]

1 hour ago, Enoby said:

You may well have seen some of the maps in the CB RGWs, but if not, they were fantastical themed lands with landmarks that often lacked any context. They were meant to inspire your imagination, but often times they presented unliveable hellscapes that didn't even seem worth fighting over. And yes, this was the point - Chaos had ruined the land, but because we didn't even know this land to begin with, it was hard to feel invested in Barren Landscape No. 24.

Growing up on Heroes of Might & Magic 3 gave me a deep seated love of fantasy maps like this! I really like that they show a wider-scope of how certain areas can look. I agree with your criticisms though; for a brand new tabletop setting they unfortunately don't make sense over world maps. I only saw them after coming in for the back end of 2.0 and I completely understand why they wouldn't be well-received at the start of AOS

[Skreech Verminking]

In my opinion aos needs more.

the fluff was extremely bad,

it got better and it really seems gw is trying to go into a much needed direction.

what I don’t enjoy is basically how the skaven, and beastmen, are seemingly ignored or just taken out to give a beating.

I would personally enjoy if they did something unexpected  something dramatically changing, that wouldn’t change or kill of any faction.

for example let the skaven destroy the realms of heaven.

let sigmar die-die and have the stormcast now in a truly mortal state, still strong but dwindling in numbers, every time they fight.

Now that is what I would call drama.

or something similar, just make the skaven and beastmen more interesting foes that can truly be a danger.

not some kind of beat sticks, that do nothing of significant 

Edited June 3, 2022 by Skreech Verminking

[novakai]

22 minutes ago, Skreech Verminking said:

In my opinion aos needs more.

the fluff was extremely bad,

it got better and it really seems gw is trying to go into a much needed direction.

what I don’t enjoy is basically how the skaven, and beastmen, are seemingly ignored or just taken out to give a beating.

I would personally enjoy if they did something unexpected  something dramatically changing, that wouldn’t change or kill of any faction.

for example let the skaven destroy the realms of heaven.

let sigmar die-die and have the stormcast now in a truly mortal state, still strong but dwindling in numbers, every time they fight.

Now that is what I would call drama.

or something similar, just make the skaven and beastmen more interesting foes that can truly be a danger.

not some kind of beat sticks, that do nothing of significant 

Nah, most army don’t get that much either compare to your two biases, simply put GW and the community generally have good guy favouritism and there really nothing intriguing and compelling about true Grimdark and even GW have gone away from everything being consistently helpless.

it probably why the dark sky event was resolve somewhat fast and that went into the expansionism of the dawnbringer crusade, in the end you have to have good guys doing stuff more. 

[Kaptinskaggy]

This is definitely a tough balancing act on GW's part, because you really cannot reconcile the desires of the fans. I'm personally of the opinion that AOS doesn't really need an overarching "narrative" that's constantly moving forward with big changes over who kills who or what place gets destroyed. It doesn't interest me, I don't see the value in it, and I think it can take away from the best part of AOS, which is in creating and exploring a myriad of smaller stories and weird locales, really inspiring players to get creative imagining how "their guys" fit into a broader setting without having to worry about some lore shakeup invalidating their ideas. I think GW should focus on creating the setting baseline and expanding it with new areas and ideas, without changing up the political situation. 

Obviously from other comments here not everyone feels this way, which is why it's such a tricky situation. Stories like Broken Realms can make changes to the setting which I think are needlessly disruptive (like the DOK going rogue, Arkhan getting "destroyed" or whatever), but at the same time don't go far enough to satisfy people who want more narrative juice (Excelsis should be completely destroyed, Morathi should be her own faction, all Stormcast should permanently lose the ability to return to the heavens, and so on. Stuff I would totally hate to see). There's just not much room for compromise here I don't think. Best they can do is just kinda disappoint everyone equally.

[Overread]

My feeling is that the setting lacks a sense of temporal and spatial scale. 

Now GW has started to give us maps so the temporal is slowly improving. Timeline wise its a mess though. We've no real idea what "age" or period of time anything is happening within. Some events seem to last hundreds of years ad then they are over in a flash before there's a 5 year event then a 50 and then suddenly a mortal human from the first event appears so wait was he preserved somehow; has the author just missed the huge span or time or did we infer the span of time wrongly. 

I really feel like GW needs ot stick dates in the book for events. Just what period of time is Gotrek passing through the Mortal Realms; just when are his events happening alongside other  characters. This relationship is so critical. Right now the only points of reference we have are major events, like the Necroquake; like the Rise of Morathi etc...

 

That kind of works when the heroes of stories are gods, which is where the primary elements of the lore's advance are placed. However it falls apart when you deal even with long lived species, let alone short lived humans.

 

I'd love to see a full detailed timeline. 40K manages, even if they sometimes have to ret-con the dates; they at least can place things in relation to each other with numbers. We can tell what age and period characters are running around in; we can tell what will be happening during those times. Things like the Nercroquake should be dated so that a story or bit of lore can be before or after; so we can place things in a chronological sense. 

[Dawi not Duardin]

This is a very good topic. I was one of the old WHFB players who originally lost interest in the settings with The End Times, so I have a lot of opinions on this. In fact, the situation is worse than me losing interest with The End Times - I originally stopped with WHFB back in like 2004, got interested in WHFB again with The End Times as something finally was happening to that setting... and then they nuked the entire thing. It wasn't until I found I found myself with too much time on my hands in recent years - such as with Corona - that I started having a look at this again and started to reevaluate a bit. 

Here are some negatives in AoS:

• A lot of big picture metaphysical/natural-historical things aren't well-worked out, which makes me lose immersion. A pet peeve of mine is how Stormcast are reforged. It is unclear to me how their souls can grow new bodies. But there are also other big questions. Who built the realmgates? Which civilizations were there before Sigmar arrived (and why were there Dragon Ogres, of all things, there battling Drogrukh and Draconiths)? Is Dracothion Sotek? Why were the other gods imprisoned in various ways? There's too much myth and too little natural history.
• It's unfortunately not just metaphysical or natural-historical things that aren't worked out completely, but the same is true for many factions. This is the source of relatability worries for me. I am not particularly concerned with relating to a "human perspective"- it's easy to identify with elves, dwarfs, halflings, orcs, vampires, or whatever if they are reasonably fleshed out - but the problem is that they often are not fleshed-out enough to relate to. Here's where a more Tolkien-style world history, including languages, descriptions of cultural stuff that does not bear on war per se, timelines, maps, etc, works well. You can start to place characters in a history, so things make sense for them, and then things can start to make sense for you as a player. Here I think WHB had a massive advantage over AoS because it often was based on real history. Then you get a lot of the cultural signifiers, timelines, values, etc, for free. You even get languages like the quasi-fake-German of the Empire as a bonus.
• Relatedly, you often see the argument that AoS is good because it allows you to create "your dudes" factions. To me this looks like a figleaf excuse for "we haven't bothered to work out enough creative detail for you to built satisfactory factions, so we'll leave the job to you." Analogy: It is very hard to write a good song without any knowledge of music genres, music theories, instruments, etc, but AoS doesn't give you very much of that kind of knowledge. Tolkien (or WHFB) are much better settings than AoS just because they do provide you with background material to create stories.
• On the other hand, what AoS gives often gets a bit cartoonish. Example 1: I think you could write the equivalent of realmgates reasonably interestingly - Robert Jordan has a version of that in the Wheel of Time - but the AoS ones come off a lot like those you used in kids' platform games like Crash Bandicoot and Spyro the Dragon to jump between various levels. They are too deus ex machina-ish, seemingly aimed to let factions and players jump between "levels" just to give them an excuse to pop up everywhere. Example 2: There are so many gods and superheroes that never die, fighting with armies as backdrops, rather than the other way around. I remember when Herohammer was a complaint against WHFB - and AoS is basically Superherohammer. Example 3: Naming conventions. AoS suffers from not working with well-developed internal languages. The German of the WHFB Empire, the Khazalid of the WHFB Dwarfs, etc, have systematicity and meaningfulness to them, but AoS has little of that. Why the Latin "Excelsis" in the middle of mostly English names? Why was "Anvilgard" not spelled "Anvil Guard"? Why the super-oddly spelled "Misthåvn" (with a very odd umlaut)? Why are "Fyreslayers" spelled with a "y"? 
• Often poor use of WHFB throwbacks. Sometimes it isn't similar enough to the WHFB world, but sometimes it is too similar to it. What I mean with that is that it fails to be similar to it in the regards where the WHFB setting was very immersive and appealing, but instead there are lot of redundant character callbacks. What made the WHFB world strong was that it was a melting pot of an awful lot of cool things with well-established histories sprinkled with a fair bit of very British humour (did you know that "Felix Jaeger" translates to "Happy Hunter"?). But AoS is more esoteric and therefore harder to engage with - instead of the familiar tropes that built WHFB, we see the return of a lot of B-league characters that very much could have stayed dead with the old world, such as Sigvald, Eltharion, or Drycha, or desperate attempts to rationalize why WHFB miniatures with very specific lore should still be usable in this setting where that lore doesn't exist (such as with the dwarfs and elves in CoS).

On the other hand, where AoS is at it's best, it's still intriguing enough to invite me back in.

• It's a post-apocalyptic WHFB, after all, so it makes sense that you would have a bunch of very Mad Max-like factions. I originally thought that it would be best to put a post-apocalyptic WHFB 50 years into the future in the classic WHFB world setting after Chaos had won, with the good guys serving as guerillas, but then again I understand why they may have wanted to start afresh. There were lots of bits of WHFB that you may want to do away with, including the eurocentrism of the good guy factions combined with the racist undertones aimed at some of the other factions: black orcs, aztec lizardmen, eastern steppe chaos marauders, etc... Sure, Warhammer was never about political correctness, but a lot of these concepts are very awkward, so I can absolutely see a reason to move into more fantastic territory.
• I actually like the cosmic and supernatural scale of AoS as a fundamental concept. It's very Lovecraftian in that sense: there's much more going on than what you have on one planet. When it is at its best, it reminds me a lot of stuff like The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath, where the narrator meets all kinds of creatures (including friendly ghouls!). You can develop very fantastic civilizations and ideas against that backdrop. And I think they have done well with most of the individual factions of AoS here (except Cities of Sigmar, which they fortunately seem to be redeveloping). 
• Sometimes they also integrate WHFB with AoS very tastefully. Gotrek, Morathi, Alarielle, Nagash, and some others (the A-leaguers, if you will) are exactly the types of characters that you would expect to see in a post-apocalyptic setting, and they do very well there. Honestly, just following Gotrek alone has been the biggest draw for me to come back into AoS...

So, all in all, it's not a very good setting. But it's ok. And it's improving. Slowly.

[W1tchhunter]

10 hours ago, CommissarRotke said:

If it's got a model for tabletop, they aren't dying.

Edited June 4, 2022 by W1tchhunter

[W1tchhunter]

Isn't Arkhan fully dead now? As well as the other mortarchs mounts.