R.I.P. Warhammer Fantasy Battles: 1983-2015

After wandering the wasteland for years, I will now update this blag.  

Hello,
As many fine ladies and gentlemen in blagosphere have commented upon, Warhammer: The Game of Fantasy Battles has been discontinued by Games Workshop.  After 32 years, It has been replaced entirely by Warhammer: Age of Sigmar, a game with completely new rules, and taking place in a very different setting.  As such, the future of Warhammer is indeed difficult to judge.  There are a number of pros and cons to this new game, and judgement really has to be reserved for a solid 12-18 months to see what GW has in mind for developing this new game, and truthfully, what the sales figures end up looking like.  But below I offer some observations and predictions based on taking a very long view of the Warhammer franchise. 

Warhammer Fantasy Battles was, in 1983, considered to be a very simplistic, fast paced fantasy skirmish game.  It took off like wildfire because the background captured people's imaginations and the rules were considered very intuitive.  This will come as a surprise to many modern gamers, who would describe Warhammer rules as anything but "simple" or "easy to learn".  However, the fact remains, when the game was first released, it was a lot less complex than a lot of the other rule sets people were used to in the late 70's and early 80's, and with example armies consisting of 20-50 models, with typical regiments being only 5-10 models. That old game background that captured the hearts and minds of so many gamers was a mix of Tolkien, Moorcock, Asimov, and real history. It was world that was intuitive to the average nerd, and that counted for a lot over the years. Any time you chose to leave the Old World in favor of the real world for a few years, if you came back to it you'd know, instinctively, where to pick up again.  There were certain practical reasons for all of this, which aren't necessary to delve into here and now, but that's the way it was.  Over the years, rules got more and less complex depending on the edition, but average armies got ever larger, again for reasons that would take up a whole post on their own.    

I have played a game of AoS, once.  The rules are free to download, but there are no points values for any of the units, so we just used the armies from a previous boxed edition, figuring those models would be a balanced match up.  Goblins v. Dwarves it was, fighting in a castle, and the gobbos pulled off a narrow win. The experience was very much in the vein of Heroscape, Warhammer Quest, and other "gateway drug" games. I for one will not be buying the AoS boxed set, or playing games of it with strangers at the local shops.  But I will be using the warscrolls and my old books to make a Frankenstein's Monster of fantasy rules for my own personal use.  The rules tweaks that AoS needs in order for me to enjoy it seem to be so easy, I'm just glad that all army rules are now free.

For a long time, WFB has been struggling to recruit and retain players.  This may be GW's fault, but I don't really know.  It could be that the times are shifting away from generic fantasy worlds, and away from complex core rules sets. Maybe no one in this day and age of the internet actually needs a company to sell them a generic fantasy world. Changes as big as switching from WFB to AoS seem, to me and many other old hands, to be disastrous.  I don't intend to participate in this brave new world of Warhammer but it doesn't dampen my own personal fantasy gaming one bit, to be honest. I was shut out by enough of GW's past design decisions that I've been more or less forced to cut my own path in fantasy gaming as it is. Despite this, the core of WFB still had its uses to me.  For older gamers like myself, watching AoS unfold, it looks as if the baby's been thrown out with the bathwater. A beloved, reliable game universe has been replaced with something alien. For GW to get rid of Warhammer, is as big a deal within the wargaming world as it would be for American football fans if the NFL had permanently canceled the Superbowl. We might be a bit spoiled in this regard, in thinking that WFB would trundle on unchanged, forever.  The fact is, this is a tough industry, and even relatively minor GW spinoff games like Mordheim (R.I.P.: 1999-2013), have enjoyed a longer lifespan than than the entire existence of some reasonably successful wargame companies.  Maybe this Age of Sigmar debacle was inevitable, nobody can win forever. Perhaps this is the Star Wars: Episode I moment of Warhammer.  

Or maybe it will work. Maybe GW actually got back to basics, like way back, back to 1983.  They released a rulebook that is far simpler than most of what is currently out there, just like they did in '83.  Its apparently a game of small forces, just like WFB was in its infancy.  Like a lot of people, I don't approve of the silliness in the new rules, but reading them really felt like reading the old 80's rulebooks.  Books like West End's Star Wars: Miniature Battles and FASA's Battletech. Back then games were nowhere near complete, they unspokenly required the gamers to finish them.  Not a rules set, but a rules kit.  Paint your own armies, edit your own rules. The new, precise background of AoS precludes that feeling of freedom within the Old World that pervaded the generic background of before, but the rules feel much more open to interpretation and negotiation.  Even this weird new game setting could be more generic and open than I am capable of appreciating.  The whole history of fantasy gaming is only about as long as the history of music videos.  Maybe nowadays, with all that has unfolded between Forgotten Realms and World of Warcraft, this business of Realmgates and Sigmarines is intuitive to teenage nerds, the way the Old World and Chaos was to us in the 80's and 90's. The very nature of what it means to be a "generic fantasy setting" could (and probably has) changed significantly over our lifetimes. It is possible (though far from sure) that AoS will succeed for the same reason WFB caught on in '83.  People said that GW needed to get WFB back to its roots after the wayward impulses of 7th and especially 8th edition, but I think GW actually did that. They just took the game even further back into its roots than even the most of the old grognards were familiar with.
  

Now you kids get off my lawn!