A discussion of the lore of AoS after 7 years

[EccentricCircle]

The Old World Bestiary for wfrp 2e is one of the best monster books ever written, for any game. Its worth noting that one of the experts they quote in the Scholars View is a skaven deathmaster who just tells you what poisons to use to kill them. It just oozes character, and gives you such a sense not just if the world, hut how it all fits together. That hasn't been done many other times. A few other books have used the in character style ( thondia did it recently, al mos certainly as an homage to the 2e book, the Monsternomicon books for Iron Kingdoms are also great) but few have the same depth as the wfrp one.

[Enoby]

39 minutes ago, EccentricCircle said:

The Old World Bestiary for wfrp 2e is one of the best monster books ever written, for any game. Its worth noting that one of the experts they quote in the Scholars View is a skaven deathmaster who just tells you what poisons to use to kill them. It just oozes character, and gives you such a sense not just if the world, hut how it all fits together. That hasn't been done many other times. A few other books have used the in character style ( thondia did it recently, al mos certainly as an homage to the 2e book, the Monsternomicon books for Iron Kingdoms are also great) but few have the same depth as the wfrp one.

It's definitely one of the best RPG books ever for how enjoyable it is to read. I think my favourite is the scholar who blames everything on Chaos in the North - every time any other threat is mentioned, he deflects to accusing Chaos throughout the entire book. Only for there to be another paragraph from a witch hunter's perspective about burning the guy at the stake for being a Chaos cultist. 

[Skreech Verminking]

On 7/26/2022 at 7:13 PM, Enoby said:

I think a potential problem that has to be overcome for an AoS game is who the player can actually play as. Unlike 40k, where you can slap a space marine or other Imperial on a game and call it a day, AoS has a much wider range of popular factions. 

If they make a Stormcast game, which are probably the most popular faction, then quite a few people won't be interested because they don't like the Stormcast aesthetic. And by "quite a few" I mean that, anecdotally, a majority players don't care all that much about Stormcast (not dislike, but just don't care enough to buy a game about them). Same as if they made a Chaos game, or an Orruk game, or a Vampire game, or whatever. No single faction is popular enough to get everyone in AoS interested (tbh, Chaos would probably be the most successful simply because it may get 40k players in). 

Of course, making an MMO style game where you can play anything and start in your own zone would be amazing, but also hard to do and unlikely. 

I do think the only faction that could appeal to most is Cities of Sigmar, simply because playing as a normal human is pretty relatable and you'd get the standard option of dwarves and a aelves too (and maybe Stormcast). 

Alternatively, you could do a Total War style game where you play as an army rather than a character, and they can include a lot of factions (just look at Total Warhammer), but that's a very specific type of game that Total War is already doing, so it may feel second fiddle to them.

Personally the best AoS game I can imagine is an expensive first person RPG where you can play as any faction and explore your own zones before going to others, and each faction would react to you differently. But I also accept that's a pipe dream and likely unobtainable (and if it was, the resources would be given to 40k). 

Well… I could see a  few reason why a game with stormcast could become interesting.

1. It uses the combat system of that of vermintide.

2. The stormcasts are either the faction being fought against or there is one corrupted stormcast trying to bring ruin to the stormcast lineage in which case normal mortal beings not blessed by a spirit of the past, that possesses the body of a deadman, believing to be a god, Are trying to stop.

3: your playing as a mad sqaut of elite skaven warlocks trying to plant a warpbomb in the realm of heaven, doing so they have to fight their way through a horde of stormcast with their doom bringing weaponsx

 

[Neil Arthur Hotep]

10 hours ago, Enoby said:

I own the Warhammer Fantasy RPG (WHFRPG) 2e Bestiary, and I've flicked through the Soulbound Bestiary.

I can't rate the Soulbound one as it was a very quick look through and not enough to give any sort of well formed opinion. However, one thing it didn't seem to have (and correct me if I'm wrong here) is the very personal touch that the WHFRPG Bestiary had

 

The Soulbound Bestiary is a very good book, though. Extremely usable from the perspective of someone running an RPG. In that respect, it is likely a better book than the Old World Bestiary, in my opinion.

I especially appreciate the subsections included in the faction overviews about how to use them in your game/in combat. They contain advice about what kinds of stories specific factions are especially suited to tell and how to convey what they are about through the tactics they use on the battlefield. This is super helpful GM support you don't usually see.

There is still a good amount of lore in there, and the book still has a "rumours" section for every faction that is written from an in-universe perspective. I imagine the people at Cubicle 7 had a choice to make between including more fluff in the book and getting stats for all the units of AoS in there without splitting the book into two parts. From a quick count, the Soulbound Bestiary seems to contain about double the amount of stat blocks compared to the Old World Bestiary. I can't really fault them for choosing to put out a single book that focusses on playability rather than lore delivery.

[Enoby]

3 minutes ago, Neil Arthur Hotep said:

 

The Soulbound Bestiary is a very good book, though. Extremely usable from the perspective of someone running an RPG. In that respect, it is likely a better book than the Old World Bestiary, in my opinion.

I especially appreciate the subsections included in the faction overviews about how to use them in your game/in combat. They contain advice about what kinds of stories specific factions are especially suited to tell and how to convey what they are about through the tactics they use on the battlefield. This is super helpful GM support you don't usually see.

There is still a good amount of lore in there, and the book still has a "rumours" section for every faction that is written from an in-universe perspective. I imagine the people at Cubicle 7 had a choice to make between including more fluff in the book and getting stats for all the units of AoS in there without splitting the book into two parts. From a quick count, the Soulbound Bestiary seems to contain about double the amount of stat blocks compared to the Old World Bestiary. I can't really fault them for choosing to put out a single book that focusses on playability rather than lore delivery.

I don't want to insult the Soulbound Bestiary - like I said, I only read a small amount into it (the Slaanesh section). In addition, I'm almost certain it would have better rules than the WHFRPG Bestiary because that was a bit messy in that end. In fact, despite running over a year long campaign in WHFRPG (in the AoS setting), I only used the Bestiary for a game aid once or twice. 

My point wasn't that it's a bad book (I couldn't say, but I'm sure it's not), but rather the fluff of the WHFRPG Bestiary seemed much more in depth and personal than what I read of the Soulbound Bestiary. Every monster (not faction) got its own selection of quotes from different people from around the world, usually with some very funny ones sprinkled in (Old Hob being my favourite person). From what I saw of the Slaanesh bit of Soulbound, there was some general fluff, a quote or two (I think an anecdote on a Shardspeaker but I may be misremembering that part), but the fluff was pretty general and reminded me of things I'd already read in the Slaanesh Battletome.

Is that bad? No - in fact, it's totally expected from a Bestiary to introduce those who aren't familiar with the monster to a general overview. In that way, the Soulbound Bestiary was similar to the Pathfinder Bestiaries I enjoy. So I agree with you that C7 likely had the choice of fluff vs crunch and chose crunch to make a more useful gaming book - absolutely nothing wrong with this. 

My point was more just that the WHFRPG Bestiary was oozing with flavour that I didn't see when looking at my favourite faction in Soulbound. This isn't saying the book is bad because there are reasons (as you mentioned), but rather that the Soulbound book likely didn't add as much to AoS's worldbuilding compared to how much WHFRPG Bestiary added to WHFB's world.

TL;DR - the Soulbound  Bestiary likely isn't a bad book, and sounds like it really tried hard to add in as many options as possible which is great. As a gaming aid, it could well be better than WHFRPG. However, WHFRPG seemed to add more flavour to the wargaming setting, at least from my limited experience with Soulbound (so again, please correct me if the Slaanesh section was just a bit more bland than the others). 

[EccentricCircle]

Yeah, I picked up soulbound's Bestiary a few days ago, and its serviceable, but is mainly stat blocks and reused battle tome art. I think I read most of the fun bits on my medium length train journey and haven't been in a huge rush to pick it up again since getting home. Basic industry standard but it definitely relies on love of the wargame to make you care about the creatures.

[Baron Klatz]

8 hours ago, Bosskelot said:

Then the question needs to be asked; why is the AOS loretuber/wiki scene so lacking and why are lore discussion hubs so barren?

For a game we are repeatedly told is more popular than WHFB ever was you'd certainly expect more content about its lore or larger communities around it.

Just going by reddit, r/aoslore has 8600 members compared to the 175k of r/40klore. But this giant disparity isn't really reflected in the "main" subs where r/ageofsigmar has 180k members and r/warhammer40k has 500k. Still smaller but not by nearly as much.

Wait, why did you flip over to 40k hobbies when you were focusing on AoS being more popular than Wfb? 

Is it because their numbers are so barren that you couldn’t pull up a good argument hobbywise with the Wfb sub at only 57,000 subs, the Wfb lore sub at a pitiful 740 subs and even their main game subs of r/vermintide 95,000 & r/totalwarhammer 76,000 not coming close to touching that 180k?

But the question doesn’t need to be asked because we know fully well why. Videogame popularity.

Before the fantasy games launched the Wfb sub took ten years to just get 3000 subs and all the fan forums were dying ghost towns(I was a member of several back then).

Let’s look at the Warhammerfantasy roleplay sub. Oh, 17,742, decent for a long running roleplay sub.

What was it before the games yet around for almost a decade? Around 300 subs. When it sprung up to 15,000 subs and mods asked what happened what were the replies? “I played Vermintide and wanted to check out the rpg scenes.”

 

Safe to say when AoS gets it’s time to shine in the gaming scenes it’s gonna explode to legendary proportions when compared to where it’s already at now without a big videogame carrying it. 🎆 

[Gitzdee]

Yeah plz let someone make an AoS version of Warcraft 3/ Dawn of War. Its a great game for storytelling imho. I agree that games could give a massive boost to AoS. I also think a good animated series could accomplish something similar like what yu-gi-oh did for the tcg or pokemon for the video game.

(Cashgrab games wont accomplish anything in the long run. It needs to be a quality game to gain any momentum for future content)

Edited July 28, 2022 by Gitzdee

[Baron Klatz]

29 minutes ago, Gitzdee said:

Yeah plz let someone make an AoS version of Warcraft 3/ Dawn of War. Its a great game for storytelling imho. I agree that games could give a massive boost to AoS. I also think a good animated series could accomplish something similar like what yu-gi-oh did for the tcg or pokemon for the video game.

I’ll also take any retro pixel games they want to do for AoS like Warcraft 2 or Blasphemous. Just hire Steeljoe and we’re good:

 

 

Or heck, there’s already 40k skins in World of Warships. Let’s get some cameos in other games like AoS gear in Monster Hunter. Just have events where the Palicos go through a rift and come back with new parts from their adventures in the Mortal Realms(Palico Kharadron & Bonesplitterz art)

 

 

 

Edited July 28, 2022 by Baron Klatz