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PurpleXVI
Oct 30, 2011

Spewing insults, pissing off all your neighbors, betraying your allies, backing out of treaties and accords, and generally screwing over the global environment?
ALL PART OF MY BRILLIANT STRATEGY!

Kurieg posted:

I wouldn't be surprised if this happens to 40k at some point too since GW has shown that they can't defend their Space Marine copyright.

I still don't get the desperation over it. All they can't defend is the NAME. The aesthetics and, you know, everything else, should still be pretty clearly something others aren't allowed to copypaste.

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Night10194
Feb 13, 2012

We'll start,
like many good things,
with a bear.

unseenlibrarian posted:

There's a reason they've really pushed forward with calling them "Astartes" and similar in tie-in media, IIRC.

Admittedly, Astartes actually sounds cooler than Space Marine.

Aside from the fact that it's the name of an old mesopotamian fertility deity.

Desiden
Mar 13, 2016

Mindless self indulgence is SRS BIZNS

SunAndSpring posted:

I just don't understand the reboot. Like, what're the loving stakes now in AoS? I really don't give a gently caress if the Sigmarines get killed in droves because they can come back or some poo poo. Used to be nothing but a dozen normal humans jamming their halberds into some filthy Chaos beast in a desperate attempt to save their homeland, families, payrolls, etc. without getting killed or mutated in the process, and now it's a bunch of golden tincans hitting them with hammers who can't be corrupted and will just come back if the Daemon rips them in two. So dull.

It's a lesser version of why I hate Space Marines too; if all a character does is fight in wars I really don't give a drat if they die, they might as well be robots. It's why I like Sisters of Battle and the Imperial Guard better; they've got poo poo other than murdering xenos/Chaos/rebellious humans to do.

Here's what amazes me about AoS.

You have a setting in which a bunch of wacky fantasy-ish races live on floating island kingdoms in the aether that embody conceptual aspects of reality, and are constantly jockeying for position with one another. You've got elf-lords running lightning raids imprison the demonic god of desire after he's distracted by eating a world, dwarf ancestor gods fighting the primal mother of salamanders, and reincarnated valhallan warriors literally riding lightning down for surprise attacks on people wearing nothing but skulls. It should, by all conceptual metrics, be a glorious setting of insane over the top wackiness.

And yet its mostly just dull and nowhere as interesting as the premise.

That to me is the the truly baffling part of the reboot. Not that they trashed a long running and rich setting, not that the rules are utter shite. Its that at the end of the day they took what should have been a gonzo setting hash that practically writes itself in awesomeness, and somehow managed to make it uninteresting. How do you even manage that?

Vox Valentine
May 31, 2013

Solving all of life's problems through enhanced casting of Occam's Razor. Reward yourself with an imaginary chalice.

Night10194 posted:

Admittedly, Astartes actually sounds cooler than Space Marine.

Aside from the fact that it's the name of an old mesopotamian fertility deity.
"They shall be called the Aspartame and they shall know no caloric content." -Age of Sugarmore

Selachian
Oct 9, 2012

Nuns with Guns posted:

this is neat! Do you have a write up of how your party played through it anywhere?

My particular group was a bit hesitant as to this sandbox-y portion. They managed to ambush and kill Varning's patrol and the dwarves, and killed another patrol that went out looking for Varning before Balentyne figured something was up and stopped sending out patrols. They managed to use Mama Louisa's food to poison the castle (lucky for them, they got a really good roll on how many guards were incapacitated). They also murdered the reeve of Aldencross and partly burned down the inn. They managed to catch Father Donnagin outside the castle when he came to investigate what was going on in the town, and got rid of him too. They completely missed the play and the romantic triangle, however.

At the climax, they snuck into the castle, took over the gatehouse, and held it against an attack by the wizard and his ice golem until Sakkarot was able to show up. They did see Sir Thomas once or twice but never faced him, but still earned enough VP for a close victory. I had Sir Thomas go down fighting under a horde of monsters, finished off by Fire-Axe himself.

Bieeanshee
Aug 21, 2000

Not keen on keening.


Grimey Drawer

Crasical posted:

And for the first time in the whole campaign, months of play, sessions and sessions of being a lump, Useless 3rd Party Psychic declares he'll use telekinesis, and rolls a natural 20.

Books are opened, heads are scratched, paragraphs are pored over, rules are found and analyzed. It turns out that the force he's able to apply at that level, with that roll, with all the skill buffs and boosts he'd gotten, was in the 'hundreds of thousands of tons' range. There's this awkward pause.

"...Well, hell. Just tear the fortress to bits, then."

Our poor, long suffering GM threw up his hands at that point, declared that that was what happened, and our useless joke-character lump of a party member suddenly and explosively one-shots, not the final boss, but the final DUNGEON.

This is magnificent.

Doresh
Jan 7, 2015
Psion Supremacy. Flick dragons around like they're flies.

Kurieg posted:

That's the thing though. Other than the art (Which I will not be posting) it's just trends from the bizarre to the disgusting. Definitely nothing worse than what Fields produced.

Like, apparently if your butt gets big enough when you clench your rear end you turn invisible, also you can climb along walls and ceilings propelled entirely by your rear end.

And if your stomach is fat enough you can mind control people by balancing on it.

I can tell that the person who wrote this was definitely getting off on it, but I remotely fathom how.

Magical: The Realmening. A daring and new spin on the dimension-hopping genre.

Bieeardo posted:

This is making me want to review that d20 tentacle monster supplement.

Which one?

(I don't actually know of any aside from that Black Tokyo stuff, but I'd be damned if there aren't at least half a dozen different supplements from different publishers.)

Night10194 posted:

It's because GW is creatively bankrupt, and accidentally invalidated a bunch of their copyrights/proved that you cannot copyright Elfs or whatever, so they wanted to make a totally new setting to be about Deathrattles and Land Marines and Aelfs.

GW is awful.

I shed a manly tear when I found out they didn't even have the decency to call their skeletons skeletons. Instead we get nonsense that sounds like it's been generated by some algorithm. Think of any stupid grimdark name (like, I dunno, Grimbone Graveskull), and there's probably a AoS model for it.

Also Lizardmen are now called Seraphon. For some reasons.

unseenlibrarian posted:

There's a reason they've really pushed forward with calling them "Astartes" and similar in tie-in media, IIRC.

Except they will always be Space Marines for everyone. It's like if a new D&D edition tried really hard to retcon Dragons into Duragonns. Or Beholders into FreakyEye HoverBalls.

They're also pushing to have the Imperial Guard known as the Adeptus Miliwhatever, but good luck making that stuck into anyone's head.

Though I guess the crazy AoS setting could be somewhat interesting if the Sigmarines had actual faces and Nagash was Skeletor.

Doresh fucked around with this message at 18:18 on Dec 13, 2016

Evil Mastermind
Apr 28, 2008

Desiden posted:

That to me is the the truly baffling part of the reboot. Not that they trashed a long running and rich setting, not that the rules are utter shite. Its that at the end of the day they took what should have been a gonzo setting hash that practically writes itself in awesomeness, and somehow managed to make it uninteresting. How do you even manage that?

If I had to guess, it's probably because GW only sees the Warhammer Fantasy setting as a secondary thing to selling minis. I mean, I have no evidence one way or the other and I'm not really familiar with the ins and outs of it, but I haven't really gotten the impression that GW cares about the setting or lore in general beyond being a source of little plastic mans.

wiegieman
Apr 22, 2010

Royalty is a continuous cutting motion


GW is currently being run by the inmates, so of course they don't get what made whf good.

Kurieg
Jul 19, 2012

RIP Lutri: 5/19/20-4/2/20
:blizz::gamefreak:

Evil Mastermind posted:

If I had to guess, it's probably because GW only sees the Warhammer Fantasy setting as a secondary thing to selling minis. I mean, I have no evidence one way or the other and I'm not really familiar with the ins and outs of it, but I haven't really gotten the impression that GW cares about the setting or lore in general beyond being a source of little plastic mans.

If I remember the investors meeting notes from a few years back. Their prefered customer base are the people who will buy every figure that they put out, meticulously paint and decorate them, then put them on display and never use them. The game is only valuable as a means to turn people into moneywhales. People who actually play the game for the enjoyment of it are a section of their customer base that they are intentionally trying to kill.

Vox Valentine
May 31, 2013

Solving all of life's problems through enhanced casting of Occam's Razor. Reward yourself with an imaginary chalice.

All I know is that, allegedly, they didn't really include any mechanics that balanced armies between players like a point limit outside of common sense and not being a dick which is incredibly bad for their core base of tournament players. Again, I cannot source these claims, they are just complaints I've heard, but this does sound a lot like something GW would do in an attempt to get players to buy as many minis as they want without worrying about total army cost or actually playing the game.

Doresh
Jan 7, 2015

Kurieg posted:

If I remember the investors meeting notes from a few years back. Their prefered customer base are the people who will buy every figure that they put out, meticulously paint and decorate them, then put them on display and never use them. The game is only valuable as a means to turn people into moneywhales. People who actually play the game for the enjoyment of it are a section of their customer base that they are intentionally trying to kill.

They also have no way of actually telling whether or not this is their actual customer base, because they don't believe in market research.

Kurieg
Jul 19, 2012

RIP Lutri: 5/19/20-4/2/20
:blizz::gamefreak:

Hostile V posted:

All I know is that, allegedly, they didn't really include any mechanics that balanced armies between players like a point limit outside of common sense and not being a dick which is incredibly bad for their core base of tournament players. Again, I cannot source these claims, they are just complaints I've heard, but this does sound a lot like something GW would do in an attempt to get players to buy as many minis as they want without worrying about total army cost or actually playing the game.

This is also probably the reason why they made it so that old armies are either mechanically lacking, or flat out embarrassing to play.

Kaza42
Oct 3, 2013

Blood and Souls and all that

Hostile V posted:

All I know is that, allegedly, they didn't really include any mechanics that balanced armies between players like a point limit outside of common sense and not being a dick which is incredibly bad for their core base of tournament players. Again, I cannot source these claims, they are just complaints I've heard, but this does sound a lot like something GW would do in an attempt to get players to buy as many minis as they want without worrying about total army cost or actually playing the game.

These claims are true. When Age of Sigmar was first released, there were no point values for anything. The closest thing they had was that if your opponent outnumbered you by enough you got a bonus victory condition to make things easier. This was just numbers, by the way. 20 dragons are the underdogs against 50 goblins.

They also treated EVERYTHING you could bring like a unit, even stuff like hills that were just terrain and couldn't be targeted. So if you just bring one hill as your army, you are outnumbered and can pick a victory condition like "if they haven't killed your hill in 6 turns, you win".

They have since released a new book that contains point costs for things, but it's still really bad.

Evil Mastermind
Apr 28, 2008

Kaza42 posted:

They also treated EVERYTHING you could bring like a unit, even stuff like hills that were just terrain and couldn't be targeted. So if you just bring one hill as your army, you are outnumbered and can pick a victory condition like "if they haven't killed your hill in 6 turns, you win".
That's loving hilarious. Please tell me someone did that in an official tournament.

ZorajitZorajit
Sep 15, 2013

No static at all...
I feel like "A Hill" is a really meta dependent list which quickly gets out-paced by "One guy and a hill" as a silver bullet for your mirror match against the other guy playing "A Hill."

Asimo
Sep 23, 2007


Kurieg posted:

If I remember the investors meeting notes from a few years back. Their prefered customer base are the people who will buy every figure that they put out, meticulously paint and decorate them, then put them on display and never use them. The game is only valuable as a means to turn people into moneywhales. People who actually play the game for the enjoyment of it are a section of their customer base that they are intentionally trying to kill.
Judging from F2P MMO market dynamics, games being bolstered by super whales seems perfectly. It's not really an inherently bad idea to cater to the profligate.

The problem though is in forgetting that these sorts of whales are ultimately a percentage of your total player base, and more importantly, you don't know which customers will be big spenders until they're already invested in your product. So you absolutely, positively need to have a game that appeals to people with sane budgets with elements that cater to the whales, rather than giant cash walls at the front that new players don't want to surmount because the game isn't exciting or interesting. And that's not even getting into dynamics like how some whale spenders really need other players around to flaunt their wealth/collection in front of...

Doresh
Jan 7, 2015

Asimo posted:

And that's not even getting into dynamics like how some whale spenders really need other players around to flaunt their wealth/collection in front of...

It's no fun owning 20 Nagashes if you can't slam then on the table to roflstomp Aelf players.

From a marketing perspective, it's also very funny how WHFB - aka Sir No Longer Existing - has a pretty succesful run of video game adaptions.

(Video game adaptions are also a source of income GW sees as tertiary at best in terms of importance. Never mind their ability to attract potential newcomers to the hobby or anything.)

Doresh fucked around with this message at 19:23 on Dec 13, 2016

Kaza42
Oct 3, 2013

Blood and Souls and all that

Evil Mastermind posted:

That's loving hilarious. Please tell me someone did that in an official tournament.

Official what now? They don't do those

Kurieg
Jul 19, 2012

RIP Lutri: 5/19/20-4/2/20
:blizz::gamefreak:
This is your reminder that one of the "updated" Fantasy armies has a rule that allows you to say "Whoever wins this roll on a d6 wins the game" and another model that allows you to say "I rolled a 10 on this d6".

Evil Mastermind
Apr 28, 2008

Kaza42 posted:

Official what now? They don't do those
I probably should have guessed that was the case.

Kurieg posted:

This is your reminder that one of the "updated" Fantasy armies has a rule that allows you to say "Whoever wins this roll on a d6 wins the game" and another model that allows you to say "I rolled a 10 on this d6".
Meta is the new meta.

I'm guessing GW doesn't believe in playtesting anymore, eh? I mean, it'd just slow down mini production.

That Old Tree
Jun 24, 2012

nah


Nothing will beat combining the models that get you roll bonuses by drinking from a goblet and pretending to ride a horse while you speak with a silly accent.

Games Workshop!

Doresh
Jan 7, 2015
There's also a model that gives you bonuses if you talk to it. You get an even better bonus if the model talks to you.

(I'd totally mod that one to have a sound chip)

Kurieg posted:

This is your reminder that one of the "updated" Fantasy armies has a rule that allows you to say "Whoever wins this roll on a d6 wins the game" and another model that allows you to say "I rolled a 10 on this d6".

Bullshit unit abilities encourage good narrative forging.

Then again similar stuff can even happen in 40k. One Tau player managed to win in a tournament against a White Scar player before the game even started.

(The White Scar player didn't put any of his models on the table because he was planning to have them all deep strike in later, which in itself is very cheesy and a known dick move. Then the Tau player used his huge amount of scouts - who can be placed anywhere on the table as long as they aren't too close to an enemy unit - to wall off the White Scar player's edge of the board, preventing his models from ever arriving. You automatically lose if you don't have any units on the table for X turns. In this case, X could've been any arbitrary positive number.)

Doresh fucked around with this message at 19:49 on Dec 13, 2016

Kurieg
Jul 19, 2012

RIP Lutri: 5/19/20-4/2/20
:blizz::gamefreak:

Doresh posted:

Bullshit unit abilities encourage good narrative forging.

Then again similar stuff can even happen in 40k. One Tau player managed to win in a tournament against a White Scar player before the game even started.

(The White Scar player didn't put any of his models on the table because he was planning to have them all deep strike in later, which in itself is very cheesy and a known dick move. Then the Tau player used his huge amount of scouts to wall off the White Scar player's edge of the board, preventing his models from ever arriving. You automatically lose if you don't have any units on the table for X turns. In this case, X could've been any arbitrary positive number.)

Eh, the WH40k story is more "This guy was doing an incredibly bullshit strategy and the other guy had the perfect counter." If guy #1 had deployed even one of his models at the start the Tau player couldn't have locked him down.

Kaza42
Oct 3, 2013

Blood and Souls and all that

Evil Mastermind posted:

I'm guessing GW doesn't believe in playtesting anymore, eh? I mean, it'd just slow down mini production.

What? No of course they test models! How else do you think they get those detailed pictures of painted models?




Oh wait, you said playtesting. Nope, no idea what you're talking about there.

Evil Mastermind
Apr 28, 2008

This whole topic really just makes me sadder about the Games Workshop/Fantasy Flight split. The FFG Warhammer stuff was really good!

But no, now instead of getting supplements for the really enjoyable and easy-to-expand Warhammer ACG we get the $150 built-it-yourself Silver Tower monstrosity.

LongDarkNight
Oct 25, 2010

It's like watching the collapse of Western civilization in fast forward.
Oven Wrangler

wiegieman posted:

Yesssss give us stories about how players managed to mess up everything.

These are good LDN, keep doing them.

Thanks. I'll try to get something written up after the office Christmas party tonight.

Bieeanshee
Aug 21, 2000

Not keen on keening.


Grimey Drawer

Doresh posted:

Which one?

Nevermind, someone beat me to it. https://www.rpg.net/reviews/archive/11/11039.phtml

ZorajitZorajit
Sep 15, 2013

No static at all...
Anecdotal, but I saw more interest and regular play of 40K during Dawn of War (1, of course) than any other time. If I remember correctly that period had rules for skimmers that granted cover to your troops but also gave them a clear shot because the hover tank could hover higher or lower than depicted.

Doresh
Jan 7, 2015
I think those were the Fish of Fury days?

Kurieg posted:

Eh, the WH40k story is more "This guy was doing an incredibly bullshit strategy and the other guy had the perfect counter." If guy #1 had deployed even one of his models at the start the Tau player couldn't have locked him down.

He who lives by the bullshit strategy shall die by another bullshit strategy.


Don't chicken out here because of reviewer dibs.

RocknRollaAyatollah
Nov 26, 2008

Lipstick Apathy

ZorajitZorajit posted:

Anecdotal, but I saw more interest and regular play of 40K during Dawn of War (1, of course) than any other time. If I remember correctly that period had rules for skimmers that granted cover to your troops but also gave them a clear shot because the hover tank could hover higher or lower than depicted.

Yeah, that was a period where a mechanized skimmer army was pretty powerful. The Eldar were especially powerful once they got their codex update because the wave serpent had a high armor value and was hard to hit due to equipment bonuses from what I remember. It was also the era where a kill line of close combat troops or character(s) could leap frog through a gun line army and effectively made Tau unplayable outside of mechanized armies and crisis suits.

Kurieg posted:

Eh, the WH40k story is more "This guy was doing an incredibly bullshit strategy and the other guy had the perfect counter." If guy #1 had deployed even one of his models at the start the Tau player couldn't have locked him down.

This was from around that era too, before they brought back overwatch, and the mechanized close combat army would have ripped through the Tau.

I personally believe that no one on the dev team liked the Tau and made them to trap anime loving kids into buying a cool looking army that usually played like garbage for a long time so they could laugh about it in typical neck beard fashion. For those unfamiliar with GW, you might think that's hyperbole but the dev staff are that childish.

Bieeanshee
Aug 21, 2000

Not keen on keening.


Grimey Drawer

Doresh posted:

Don't chicken out here because of reviewer dibs.

You're right. I've got some spare time this week, I'll grind one out.

Zereth
Jul 9, 2003



Doresh posted:

It's no fun owning 20 Nagashes if you can't slam then on the table to roflstomp Aelf players.

From a marketing perspective, it's also very funny how WHFB - aka Sir No Longer Existing - has a pretty succesful run of video game adaptions.

(Video game adaptions are also a source of income GW sees as tertiary at best in terms of importance. Never mind their ability to attract potential newcomers to the hobby or anything.)
I'm pretty sure they see video game adaptions as like, competitors. The reason we're getting all these videogame adaptations of Warhammer Fantasy is because they killed the setting, not despite it.

Rigged Death Trap
Feb 13, 2012

BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP

I would be entirely too happy if this continues and WHF gets to have wildly successful videogames and tabletops whole AoS rots somewhere.

Night10194
Feb 13, 2012

We'll start,
like many good things,
with a bear.

Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay 2nd Edition

The Many Beatings of Archaon The Everfailure

So, the Storm of Chaos is a good time to talk about GW and the more metafictional aspects of the setting. The Storm of Chaos was an 'awesome' idea GW had to incorporate the game results from players all over, as well as tourney results, to tell a story about a Chaos Lord making his way to Altdorf for the final battle between good and evil (which they apparently really wanted Chaos to win). Several things stood in their way: First, GW is extremely bad at balancing games and so while Chaos was very strong in the fluff, it wasn't hard to beat it on the table. Second, their plan assumed the Orc players would all go along with Chaos and be good little minions, happy to be second banana to a personality-less guy in a horned helmet. If you know anything about warhammer orcs you know this wasn't going to happen, but GW was completely blindsided by it. Chaos was SUPPOSED to sweep down from the north, blow through Kislev, then burn an unstoppable path to Altdorf. Instead, going wholly by game results, GW had to cheat the results to even have Chaos reach the Empire rather than just get their poo poo kicked in by Russians. Not deterred, GW still set up a battle at Middenheim, a city in the northern Empire located on top of a massive plateau and with the strongest defensive position in the Old World, and then had the fight come down to two special characters rolling at one another until the Chaos guy won. Unfortunately for Chaos, this is where the Orcs intervened, with Grimgor Ironhide punching out the Lord of the End Times, telling him 'I's da' best n' you's not worth killin'!', and then moonwalking off the stage, leaving writers who were extremely enamored of Chaos to try to figure out how to explain how this whole mess hadn't just emasculated them as a bad guy. They've been salty about it ever since, and a lot of the miserable End Times storyline was apparently how they'd originally wanted the Storm to go, proving that what we got was a mess but still way better than GW's 'vision'.

So, how did this all play out in the fluff? Well, as we went over with Magnus, it's a normal thing for the Kislevites to face Chaos incursions each spring, as the nomadic people from up north raid for food, gold and slaves. In the early part of the 26th century, though, the armies posted on the north for the Spring Driving were defeated, survivors and warnings coming back south saying that another great and united host of Chaos was coming, led by an Everchosen. Archaon, Lord of the End Times, had united the tribes and was coming south to kill everything, as Chaos is wont to do. Unfortunately for him, the Empire wasn't split into three bickering states at the moment, and so the Grand Theoganist decided this could be sorted out if a badass battle pope decided to take an army up to help Kislev, with Emperor Karl Franz' blessing. Normally, given the track record of Imperial Grand Theoganists, this would have been enough, but the writers were very eager to convince people Archaon was cool and so rather than give him a personality or even any discernible dialogue, they had him easily kill the popular Grand Theoganist of the Empire, Volkmar the Grim (Archaon is the worst. Yes, of course the villain gets a few victories, but the only personality Archaon ever got was that he has treasures that give him many pluses to his stats and GW would occasionally feed a better character to him to try to make him seem impressive). This caused some serious trouble for the Church of Sigmar, as well as one of the more potentially interesting (though GW didn't do anything with it) subplots of the Storm: With Volkmar dead, his successor, Johan Esmer, was an unpopular and corrupt insider among the cult. Someone more interested in maintaining the tithes and gilding the alters than defending the Empire.

Discontent with Esmer and worry about the hordes gave way to a tide of religious fanaticism within the Empire, flagellant bands and schismatics popping up all over the place. In one case, a fanatic named Luthor Huss found a young blacksmith's boy who had managed to defend his village with nothing but his smithing hammer. He managed to convince the mob that the boy, Valten, was literally Sigmar reborn to save them all, and a wave of popular religious insanity brought this untested lad right to the gates of Altdorf, where Huss demanded he be instated as Emperor. This was a problem for Emperor Karl Franz, who was currently in the middle of putting together an international multiracial coalition of 'people who do not want to be murdered by hellvikings' in order to head north and save whatever they could, and who was not eager to hand over all rulership and generalship to a muscular 18 year old boy. At the same time, he couldn't ignore the crowds; people needed something to believe in and simply refusing would have caused a civil war or rebellion. Showing his quick thinking, Franz embraced the boy as a blessed champion and granted him Ghal Maraz, the Imperial Hammer, to wield against the forces of darkness in the name of the Empire...but carefully kept him out of any sort of official or leadership position. By appointing the boy his champion, he'd appeased the mob and kept himself in power to finish his negotiations, quickly putting together a coalition of dwarves, elves, men, and french people (to their credit, the king of Bretonnia instantly recognized this was a global threat and eagerly rallied his knights and armies to help his neighbors. We'll get to Louen Leoncour in the Bretonnia book because he is a great character) to march to Middenheim, linking up with surviving Kislevite armies and preparing to crush Archaon.

Meanwhile, Archaon had reached Middenheim and decided to do the stupidest possible thing when confronted with such a strong defensive position: He continually assaulted the walls every day for roughly two months, grinding his army down to paste trying to climb the drat things with ladders, burning every Chaos cult in the city to try to open the gates (unsuccessfully), and generally showing he was not a particularly good general. Worse, he had passed through Kislev as fast as possible in his lust for a decisive battle and left entire armies at his heels; the Kislevites weren't the type to give up and rushed south to assist Middenheim. Even worse, the forces he had sent to 'flank' the Empire from the East had tried to go through Sylvania, and the Vampire Counts were having none of his poo poo. Not only did they defeat his reinforcements, but Manfred von Carstein, son of Vlad von Carstein, decided he had the perfect opportunity to rule the world: The Empire would surely exhaust itself fighting the hordes of Chaos, at which point he could fall on both with all his undead, saving the world from Chaos and securing his rulership of the Empire in one swoop. He marshaled the families and the hosts of the undead, and soon Archaon found himself under assault from the East, as well as the North, South, and the angry Ulricans within Middenheim that were still resisting him. Archaon somehow managed to find himself in a duel with Valten, Champion of the Empire, and gravely wounded the lad...only to be betrayed by his orcish allies, who were sick of fighting for him, and get punched the gently caress out by their warboss, who then (as above) basically moonwalked off the stage while giving GW the finger. Chaos's horde was thoroughly routed by the combined forces of the Old World, and while GW wrote Archaon as surviving the battle but badly wounded, well...I don't think you get to be a recurring villain if you cock up the apocalypse that hard. Manfred then saw the arrayed forces of the Empire, surprisingly fresh after the drubbing Archaon had been given, and bravely ran away back to Sylvania, as Manfred is wont to do. The one wrinkle in this victory was that Valten survived his duel, but was later found murdered in his bed, a crime some whisper can be traced to Karl Franz (It was actually the horrible ratmen, the only villainous faction that accomplished anything; their last action of the campaign was ganking Valten out of spite/to sow religious discord in the Empire because Skaven are awesome).

So, that's the situation of the Old World when Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay 2e picks up: The Apocalypse happened and it was baffling and anticlimactic. Good mustered all it could and...handily beat the poo poo out of Evil. There was plenty of damage, and shattered remnants of the horde have formed bloodthirsty warbands intent on looting and slaughter, but those are good problems for Adventurers to deal with. The time for armies is over, and the time for cleanup and dealing with the fallout has come. I know a lot of people take some issue with WHFRP2e happening right after The Big Thing Happened, but I like it that way. Firstly, because we know how the Storm was supposed to go, now, so the version that so infuriated GW pleases me. Secondly, as I said, it shifts the Empire's problems to the kinds of things a group of 3-6 nervous young people who freshly quit their old jobs to take up ADVENTURE! can help out with. Resettling refugees, battling remnant Chaos champions, investigating the murder of Valten, stopping the cults and things that sprung up in the wake of the wave of apocalypticism... The world is on the path to survival, and your job is to keep it there (and make a living).

Next Time: The Sample Adventure, And Why It Is An Example Of How Not To Run WHFRP2e.

Night10194 fucked around with this message at 14:42 on Aug 4, 2017

Desiden
Mar 13, 2016

Mindless self indulgence is SRS BIZNS

Night10194 posted:

and while GW wrote Archaon as surviving the battle but badly wounded, well...I don't think you get to be a recurring villain if you cock up the apocalypse that hard.

In geedubs land, of course you do! See: Abaddon, now on his umpteen millionth crusade which for really reals this time is gonna doom the imperium. And not just, like, take maybe half of Cadia and then get swept under the rug.

Terrible Opinions
Oct 18, 2013



wiegieman posted:

GW is currently being run by the inmates, so of course they don't get what made whf good.
Except it's not. It's run by investment brokers, all the fanboys left long ago.

Kavak
Aug 23, 2009


Terrible Opinions posted:

Except it's not. It's run by investment brokers, all the fanboys left long ago.

Investment brokers who don't do market research?

theironjef
Aug 11, 2009

The archmage of unexpected stinks.

How many threads are dedicated to GW business chat? It's like seven, right?

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Barudak
May 7, 2007

Kavak posted:

Investment brokers who don't do market research?

The only market research you need to do is the size of the dividends per share.

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