I genuinely WANT to like the setting

[GhostShark]

I think the big problem is that people are comparing AOS to something that has decades of well developed background (much of it benefiting from being based on the real world or popular fiction). AoS is actually fairly well fleshed out (and in my opinion, fairly interesting) for its age. Of course more would be better! 

For those of you saying that as an adult you've found you can't have the same enthusiasm for a setting as you did as a kid... I don't think that's universally true. It isn't for me, anyway. I hope its not that way for you! I wonder if looking for AOS to fill that gap for you is a mistake. That's not a criticism (of you or the game), but maybe there's a different setting out there that would light that fire for you? 

[Skreech Verminking]

On 3/19/2023 at 10:55 AM, Kosmion said:

My main problem with AoS has always been the lore. I love the gameplay! Many units/models are really cool -  not everything is perfect ofc, but in general there are many armies I really vibe with. 
But Ive never been able to shake that feeling of the lore and setting just being thrown together as an "experiment" to see if it would sell. WHFB was uninspired in many ways no doubt (I mean the world map is pretty much earth with each corresponding culture in their places) but it had a more grounded feeling and events/actions had weight and meaning. 

I stumbled on this video and the man said pretty much my every thought on the setting. 
I feel kinda depressed because I WANT to like the setting because it has so much potential, but currently it just feels thrown together with minimal effort so we have something at least to throw dice within (basically what he says in the vid). 
However, Im now looking for any information that would change my mind. Is he right about what hes saying in the video? If not, please help me see why I should care about AoS, because I really, really want to.

Cheers!

The vid:

 

I remember a time in aos where there was basically no fluff at all.

but while I do agree that the lore of aos, is still a bit iffy, gw did prove that they can slowly build up on it.

i think when it comes down to the lore of aos certain factions like the city of sigmar are greatly established in the mortal realms.

with all the books and such as well as the warhammer tv series the cities of sigmar seem to start blooming a lot more then they did back in the days.

yet not every faction are like the city of sigmar, and this is probably that is something I find very sad as it is currently standing.

armies like the skaven, great movers, destroyers of cities and killers of gods (I’m not joking they made a weapon specifically to kill such beings in the old world) or beast of chaos, children of true chaotic power, just don’t seem to really get any light in the wholesomeness of aos, at which point I would always start telling somebody interested in the fluff in sich armies to have a look at books written about those faction in the old world.

and that just makes this whole thing a bit sad.

I mean for skaven for example they are really missing a lot.

they are this huge thread that should need to be dealt with and yet, they have been doing nothing really in the late few years, then to just foil a few plans of nagash, kill a few fish-things with a miss placed whole and such.

and the bit of fluff that exist kinda just gets ignored because it isn’t great at all.

i mean the whole idea to make the greater clans that existed in the past as a name to describe multiple smaller clans that basically follow the description of what does bigger clans all where about just seems, less intimidating, i personally think they should just keep with the old world fluff on that

[Beliman]

22 hours ago, Skreech Verminking said:

I remember a time in aos where there was basically no fluff at all.

but while I do agree that the lore of aos, is still a bit iffy, gw did prove that they can slowly build up on it.

i think when it comes down to the lore of aos certain factions like the city of sigmar are greatly established in the mortal realms.

with all the books and such as well as the warhammer tv series the cities of sigmar seem to start blooming a lot more then they did back in the days.

yet not every faction are like the city of sigmar, and this is probably that is something I find very sad as it is currently standing.

armies like the skaven, great movers, destroyers of cities and killers of gods (I’m not joking they made a weapon specifically to kill such beings in the old world) or beast of chaos, children of true chaotic power, just don’t seem to really get any light in the wholesomeness of aos, at which point I would always start telling somebody interested in the fluff in sich armies to have a look at books written about those faction in the old world.

and that just makes this whole thing a bit sad.

I mean for skaven for example they are really missing a lot.

they are this huge thread that should need to be dealt with and yet, they have been doing nothing really in the late few years, then to just foil a few plans of nagash, kill a few fish-things with a miss placed whole and such.

and the bit of fluff that exist kinda just gets ignored because it isn’t great at all.

i mean the whole idea to make the greater clans that existed in the past as a name to describe multiple smaller clans that basically follow the description of what does bigger clans all where about just seems, less intimidating, i personally think they should just keep with the old world fluff on that

I completely agree!! AoS has more in common with 40k feeling than Fantasy (or any other wargame that needs a really good narrative with some story archs for each factions because nobody knows the setting and they need to make it right from the start):  The narrative has the same feeling of a big events that moves the story for 3-4 factions; meanwhile, all other factions are punchbags or have a shoehorned story about a 1 new heroe that was released at the same time.

Let's see how the Dawnbringers campaign ends.

Edited July 19, 2023 by Beliman

[pnkdth]

9 hours ago, Beliman said:

I completely agree!! AoS has more in common with 40k feeling than Fantasy (or any other wargame that needs a really good narrative with some story archs for each factions because nobody knows the setting and they need to make it right from the start):  The narrative has the same feeling of a big events that moves the stroy for 3-4 factions; meanwhile, all other factions are punchbags or have a shoehorned story about a 1 new heroe that was released at the same time.

Let's see how the Dawnbringers campaign ends.

A part of AoS even feel like a prequel to 40k or 40k is an alternative future (whichever makes you happy). All the various gods of AoS get their shards broken and put into the primarchs (or turned to something even more otherworldly) while Sigmar ascends to become the emperor, and in the epic cataclysmic fight the realms go big bang mode and expand or join into the larger universe. You could even say this is where he got inspired to call his new super-soldiers "thunder warriors" cause, well, SCE. There's lots more connections you can make I'm sure.

I also think they do this intentionally to stoke fan theories/fiction.

Overall though I do think I'm starting to get into AoS now. Just need a bit more work on establishing the world through tangible locations and space cause it still feel a bit abstract and it is hard to appreciate what the stakes are since I have no idea what it would actually mean if X or Y city fell. Most importantly of all, they need to bloody stop resolving conflicts and moving on. That is the number one issue I have with AoS, real conflict doesn't just resolve itself and yeets itself out of existence. Every time you add something you need to build on what you've already established. That is how you make sure your world feels lived in and how you involve multiple factions in a conflict without adding horribly contrived plot points to put them in there or, worse, completely forget about them.

Solve that piece of the puzzle and I think AoS could blow up as a setting (hopefully not literally).

 

[Neverchosen]

For me the lore is an expansive network of myths and my armies get to play with these myths as archetypes. In other words, my Slaves to Darkness have never marched under Archaon but might know the name, my Stormcast were reforged and sent right back to where they were born never exploring Azyr beyond knowing it as a type of heaven. The idea of different Realms would be as faith based to my armies as they are to people in our world. The lore of AOS is a tapestry in which my narrative would simply exist as a single thread. 

I like this sort of narrative freedom, like the idea that one of my factions can utterly wipe out another army, not realizing that it was just a small fraction of the larger faction in the lore. My Slaves to Darkness are crusaders that were corrupted by demons and have returned to their homeland to impose their new faith as they had once tried to do for their former Godking (Sigmar). The Stormcast were the faithful few that never gave up their faith and have been brought back to resist this invasion. My Ogors just want to keep their lands free from the unceasing fight of light and darkness they never asked for, once tolerating these opposing factions they now ride to war against those that would bring ruin to their ancestral lands. These story beats are informed by the lore but are just my own interpretation of the armies and their stakes.

In other words, for me the lore of AOS works best as the shared mythology of a world of your own invention. 

Edited July 18, 2023 by Neverchosen

[Ganigumo]

On 3/19/2023 at 8:56 AM, KingKull said:

Honestly I feel the same way. Been trying to read new lore, old lore, books, WD excerpts codices - and just couldn't get to care for the setting (I've got a lot of things I don't like, but the main thing for me is, when everything is super magical and what not, it really feels like an endless stream of "my dad is stronger than your dad" arguments).

The heavy focus on only god-tier characters doing things of importance is just a bad direction for the narrative in general.
Tons of writers, settings, series, etc. Struggle immensely with power and stakes escalation, and fail to understand that its not a treadmill you even need to get on in the first place.
For the most part the game itself is about small armies battling it out, so it feels like there should be a bigger narrative focus on the battles between things like tribes and cities, rather than entire factions.
going back to the escalation problem, you don't always need to find a bigger & badder dad to fight, you just need to create a conflict that matters to the readers/players/watchers. Putting things like characters, tribes, and cities in danger, and actually following through on removing them sometimes can create stakes people care about. Plus you can always just pull a WFB Orcs and Goblins, and let the players play with characters that are long dead.


One of my favorite examples of what I'm talking about comes from One Piece. After a few story arcs where the villains are threats to entire countries, you go to an arc where the only thing at risk are the crew themselves, and its widely regarded as one of the best arcs in the entire series. Objectively there was a de-escalation in the scale of the stakes, but the stakes still felt incredibly important, because the readers cared about these characters.

[CommissarRotke]

On 3/19/2023 at 5:55 AM, Kosmion said:

it had a more grounded feeling and events/actions had weight and meaning. 

I got into WHFB in high school and before I graduated Middenheim had had TWO separate apocalypse level sieges. Fantasy having "more" weight and meaning is because we were younger, straight up. Wargame settings will always have the issue of balancing narratives having weight vs not rocking the boat too much

[CommissarRotke]

13 hours ago, Beliman said:

The narrative has the same feeling of a big events that moves the stroy for 3-4 factions; meanwhile, all other factions are punchbags or have a shoehorned story about a 1 new heroe that was released at the same time.

How much of this is because the loudest outcry is how there's "no normal humans in AOS" do you think? Because even before we got a whiff of COS getting revamped models, a LOT of the books/BL works were still about Cities and/or normal humans.

[Beliman]

8 hours ago, CommissarRotke said:

How much of this is because the loudest outcry is how there's "no normal humans in AOS" do you think? Because even before we got a whiff of COS getting revamped models, a LOT of the books/BL works were still about Cities and/or normal humans.

I think that's not what GW wants for AoS.

Each Battletomes usually have some catastrophic events. I'm not talking about a civil war, or an isolated land conquered by barbarians or a king that died without offspring. There is a bigger scale behind battletomes, I'm talking about entities that can terraform the realms, giant monster bigger than entire continents, magnetic pulse that suck half of the realm, weapons that throw sun-light that can cut mountains in half, mountains eating other mountans, etc

For whatever reason, I was reading 5th edition Drukhari Codex (don't ask), and it has some matching points: Sun-bombs that could remove entire cities from existence, portable dimensions, light-sucking artifacts that can remove souls from entire armies, and this kind of stuff. To be honest, that sounds really familiar to me. 

IMO, the most enjoyable reads that I had were from books without Realm-ending threats every few minuts (dark harvest, city of secrets, silver shard, Code of the sky, Corsairs of Iron Dragon, Arkanauts Oath, etc), even if they have weird things like flying ships, god-like avatars, daemon rifts or whatever. But that talks more about Black Library authors than the whole Age of Sigmar as a setting.

12 hours ago, Neverchosen said:

For me the lore is an expansive network of myths and my armies get to play with these myths as archetypes. In other words, my Slaves to Darkness have never marched under Archaon but might know the name, my Stormcast were reforged and sent right back to where they were born never exploring Azyr beyond knowing it as a type of heaven. The idea of different Realms would be as faith based to my armies as they are to people in our world. The lore of AOS is a tapestry in which my narrative would simply exist as a single thread. 

I like this sort of narrative freedom, like the idea that one of my factions can utterly wipe out another army, not realizing that it was just a small fraction of the larger faction in the lore. My Slaves to Darkness are crusaders that were corrupted by demons and have returned to their homeland to impose their new faith as they had once tried to do for their former Godking (Sigmar). The Stormcast were the faithful few that never gave up their faith and have been brought back to resist this invasion. My Ogors just want to keep their lands free from the unceasing fight of light and darkness they never asked for, once tolerating these opposing factions they now ride to war against those that would bring ruin to their ancestral lands. These story beats are informed by the lore but are just my own interpretation of the armies and their stakes.

In other words, for me the lore of AOS works best as the shared mythology of a world of your own invention. 

I get the point, but I think that AoS is not suited for that. The realms are near infinite to do whatever you want, but you need to put a lot of imagination in doing that. And at that point, all other games can bring the same feeling or better:

• You can't play with named characters because their description don't match (Bastian Carthalos without knowing what Azyr is, sounds really weird). There are other games that accomplish a lot better this same feeling. I suggest to look for Conquest because it doens't have any named character.
   
• AoS Heroes are not customizable enough. You usually will have 1 or 2 artifacts and a trait, and most of the time, all you heroes are going to be clones. There are a lot of other games that let you customize your dudes (Conquest, Warhammer Fantasy, etc...).
   
• The main rules doesn't give freedom to build your army. You can't have a generic subfaction, you usually play a stormhost, skyport, clan, tribe or whatever. KOs had some of the best "build-your-own-faction" with their first Battletome, but not anymore. Look for Oathmark, it has an awesome lists building mechanic that let you create your own "land": If you build an Elf City, you unlock some elven units as main troops, If you have a Forest, you unlock some Elf rangers, etc... but of course, you can't build whatever you want and some buidlings are exclusive to some towns or civilizations. 

I love AoS, but if you play it because you want to build your own army with your own dudes, look for another game.

Note: I'm going to play a Turnip28 the next saturday, there are a lot of people talking about how fun it is if you want to build your little warband.

[Neil Arthur Hotep]

1 hour ago, Beliman said:

I love AoS, but if you play it because you want to build your own army with your own dudes, look for another game.

I disagree with this. I think games like AoS with a medium amount of established structure in the form of world building, narrative and characters are better for "your dudes" play than either games with extremely defined settings like WHFB or games with very loose weave or even non-existent settings like One Page Rules.

It's good to have both established lore to which you can relate your own fiction and enough freedom so that things that could potentially conflict with the established lore could be possible somewhere.

[Beliman]

47 minutes ago, Neil Arthur Hotep said:

a medium amount of established structure in the form of world building, narrative and characters are better for "your dudes" play than either games with extremely defined settings like WHFB or games with very loose weave or even non-existent settings like One Page Rules.

Completely agree. Sadly, AoS don't have rules to support it's narrative freedom, that's why I suggested other games.

Edited July 19, 2023 by Beliman

[Neverchosen]

6 hours ago, Beliman said:

I think that's not what GW wants for AoS.

Each Battletomes usually have some catastrophic events. I'm not talking about a civil war, or an isolated land conquered by barbarians or a king that died without offspring. There is a bigger scale behind battletomes, I'm talking about entities that can terraform the realms, giant monster bigger than entire continents, magnetic pulse that suck half of the realm, weapons that throw sun-light that can cut mountains in half, mountains eating other mountans, etc

For whatever reason, I was reading 5th edition Drukhari Codex (don't ask), and it has some matching points: Sun-bombs that could remove entire cities from existence, portable dimensions, light-sucking artifacts that can remove souls from entire armies, and this kind of stuff. To be honest, that sounds really familiar to me. 

IMO, the most enjoyable reads that I had were from books without Realm-ending threats every few minuts (dark harvest, city of secrets, silver shard, Code of the sky, Corsairs of Iron Dragon, Arkanauts Oath, etc), even if they have weird things like flying ships, god-like avatars, daemon rifts or whatever. But that talks more about Black Library authors than the whole Age of Sigmar as a setting.

I get the point, but I think that AoS is not suited for that. The realms are near infinite to do whatever you want, but you need to put a lot of imagination in doing that. And at that point, all other games can bring the same feeling or better:

• You can't play with named characters because their description don't match (Bastian Carthalos without knowing what Azyr is, sounds really weird). There are other games that accomplish a lot better this same feeling. I suggest to look for Conquest because it doens't have any named character.
   
• AoS Heroes are not customizable enough. You usually will have 1 or 2 artifacts and a trait, and most of the time, all you heroes are going to be clones. There are a lot of other games that let you customize your dudes (Conquest, Warhammer Fantasy, etc...).
   
• The main rules doesn't give freedom to build your army. You can't have a generic subfaction, you usually play a stormhost, skyport, clan, tribe or whatever. KOs had some of the best "build-your-own-faction" with their first Battletome, but not anymore. Look for Oathmark, it has an awesome lists building mechanic that let you create your own "land": If you build an Elf City, you unlock some elven units as main troops, If you have a Forest, you unlock some Elf rangers, etc... but of course, you can't build whatever you want and some buidlings are exclusive to some towns or civilizations. 

I love AoS, but if you play it because you want to build your own army with your own dudes, look for another game.

Note: I'm going to play a Turnip28 the next saturday, there are a lot of people talking about how fun it is if you want to build your little warband.

Personally it has not caused me any issues as named heroes can easily proxy into my narratives as unique characters,  I use Yandrasta with my Stormcast but instead she is a unique character that would be noted for looking and fighting like the legendary hero. Gods can easily be seen as an empowered avatar of their chosen deity or even simply appearing in an hour of need, and cause the faithful to rally. Furthermore it is not much of a stretch for Bastian Carthalos to help this beleaguered Stormkeep in their campaign, similarly Archaon or Kragnos might see some purpose in this region and join my Slaves to Darkness or Ogors but since they are their for a specific purpose it more or less just confirms that this strand does exist against the larger tapestry, not that the insights of my armies have grown beyond finding out their legends have some basis in truth*. Finally the force itself has enough customization for my narrative purposes for these campaigns so the variety in heroic builds has not really had a negative impact in developing my own setting campaign or narratives. 

But of course this is not meant to be prescriptive and it is fine if you don't enjoy the way I play, as I find a lot of fun and fulfillment personally in playing this way and it is fun to develop my little corner of the lore with my friends even if it isn't always the most orthodox interpretation of the larger narrative setting. It is more my way of investing within a larger narrative the idea that my own stories will matter, knowing that they can't impact the larger setting they can influence the setting of my own imagined world and this way anyone can join the campaign without the knowledge of the history of Hammerhall or the Age of Chaos or anything beyond the basic knowledge of the factions and setting.

*Not unlike Tolkien's sheltered Hobbits encountering heroes, creatures and historical figures. Yet still the average Shire citizen is likely to scoff at the idea of Dragons despite their encounter with Sharkey (Saruman)

Edited July 19, 2023 by Neverchosen

[KingKull]

17 hours ago, Neverchosen said:

For me the lore is an expansive network of myths and my armies get to play with these myths as archetypes. In other words, my Slaves to Darkness have never marched under Archaon but might know the name, my Stormcast were reforged and sent right back to where they were born never exploring Azyr beyond knowing it as a type of heaven. The idea of different Realms would be as faith based to my armies as they are to people in our world. The lore of AOS is a tapestry in which my narrative would simply exist as a single thread. 

I like this sort of narrative freedom, like the idea that one of my factions can utterly wipe out another army, not realizing that it was just a small fraction of the larger faction in the lore. My Slaves to Darkness are crusaders that were corrupted by demons and have returned to their homeland to impose their new faith as they had once tried to do for their former Godking (Sigmar). The Stormcast were the faithful few that never gave up their faith and have been brought back to resist this invasion. My Ogors just want to keep their lands free from the unceasing fight of light and darkness they never asked for, once tolerating these opposing factions they now ride to war against those that would bring ruin to their ancestral lands. These story beats are informed by the lore but are just my own interpretation of the armies and their stakes.

In other words, for me the lore of AOS works best as the shared mythology of a world of your own invention. 

I understand this was not your main argument (and more power to you if you enjoy AoS in such a way), but I don't think AoS does this any better than other games, which is usually brought up in defense of its thematic vagueness and abundance of radically different (and often incongruent) archetypes, sometimes within the same faction (again, not saying you're doing this).

On the other hand, I also never understood why the highly defined setting of WHFB prevented this - my wood elves came from the Crag Halls of Findol, had a personal history and had bespoke conflicts and arch emesis, and were led by an alter lord whose story I made up.

Same thing goes for my mates' Nuln empire and Kharond Kar dark elves - and none of it prevented us from coming up with campaigns, stories and conflicts that we were all highly invested in - without participating in, or contradicting the "main" narrative and established lore. And the more I learned about the WHFB universe, the more possibilities I saw for doing the same thing - and the more I wanted to do it.

[KingKull]

14 hours ago, CommissarRotke said:

How much of this is because the loudest outcry is how there's "no normal humans in AOS" do you think? Because even before we got a whiff of COS getting revamped models, a LOT of the books/BL works were still about Cities and/or normal humans.

Yes, but how many actual hobbyists read those books, let alone people who're marginally interested in the setting and want it to be "sold" to them in a relatively effortless manner?

I *love* WHFB, but I hardly ever decide to spend my time on reading the vastly mediocre BL books about it, let alone a setting in whose lore I'm not nearly as interested in.

This is where the army books and visual presentation comes in, and I haven't discovered anything about the daily lives, cultures, beliefs and habits of the factions that interest me. And when there are such details, they are built around hard to relate to concepts such as magical soul stones and magical mist oceans that make me put the book down and not open it again.

[Neverchosen]

Just now, KingKull said:

I understand this was not your main argument (and more power to you if you enjoy AoS in such a way), but I don't think AoS does this any better than other games, which is usually brought up in defense of its thematic vagueness and abundance of radically different (and often incongruent) archetypes, sometimes within the same faction (again, not saying you're doing this).

On the other hand, I also never understood why the highly defined setting of WHFB prevented this - my wood elves came from the Crag Halls of Findol, had a personal history and had bespoke conflicts and arch emesis, and were led by an alter lord whose story I made up.

Same thing goes for my mates' Nuln empire and Kharond Kar dark elves - and none of it prevented us from coming up with campaigns, stories and conflicts that we were all highly invested in - without participating in, or contradicting the "main" narrative and established lore. And the more I learned about the WHFB universe, the more possibilities I saw for doing the same thing - and the more I wanted to do it.

I completely agree that this is openness is not limited to Age of Sigmar. I also had no issue playing Warhammer Fantasy and having my Dark Elves fight my Cousin's Old World Vampire Counts. Furthermore, as a huge Tolkien fan I also never had much of a hard time justifying playing Games Workshops Lord of the Rings game. I just happen to enjoy that with Age of Sigmar the justification is much simpler in terms of developing my own unique setting that exists in conjunction with the larger world but also not beholden to it. 

For example I am trying to do the same with 40k but I do find myself bumping against the lore more often than with Age of Sigmar. For example, I have some chaos knights and I liked the idea of them having a networked artifical intelligence that fell to chaos, but then I had to try and figure out how an AI would exist in a setting that specifics that AI are exceedingly rare so then I tried to develop a dark mech faction and then this created more questions until I abandoned the idea completely.