Henry Cavill back again as Superman! Oops, nevermind.
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Age of Sigmar has lore? I mean, aside from Chaos fucked everything, Sigmar did a thing, and now everything sort of is for reasons.
Yeah, I just popped onto a site to look at AoS lore. It's... not great. Bit too much faff with all those different realms. But I guess they can build it up.
I notice some things called "Stormcast Eternals". Did... did GW just make fantasy Space Marines? Is Sigmar not basically now The Emperor of Mankind?
I believe the standard nickname for them is "Sigmarines".Yeah, I just popped onto a site to look at AoS lore. It's... not great. Bit too much faff with all those different realms. But I guess they can build it up.
I notice some things called "Stormcast Eternals". Did... did GW just make fantasy Space Marines? Is Sigmar not basically now The Emperor of Mankind?
I used to play a fair bit of WHFRP, so when GW blew up the old world I wouldn't have checked out AoS through sheer sour grapes, even if the replacement hadn't looked so visually off-putting.
Other than something along the lines of "the races' respective gods made a shelter for their mortal followers in the warp and now everyone fights all the time" I know very little about the lore, although from what I've heard it's not much more than that.
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Er, yes. I've just read more of the setting and lore, and it's strangely unsatisfactory. Messy, over-complex and incoherent.
A major problem, as per Zyklon, is the 40Kification that in the grim future of the post-world fantasy, there is only war. I understand that it's there to support a tabletop wargame, but it's as unsatisfying and superficial as a history that thinks there's nothing worth knowing except a list of kings and the battles they fought.
Yeah, throwing every bad fantasy trope at a setting needs to have that setting grounded in something. Real world medieval history is a good basis. If you say Brettonia is grimdark France, well, people know (or think they know) what France is like, there's lots of material there you don't have to do yourself.
Yes. It's funny, but it pretty much makes WFB look good.
I don't really get what eight planes add, and some sort of etheric gold, and a massive load of cosmic dragons / titans / beasts, especially when they seem to be profoundly irrelevant except to run through the same tedious shit of being things that have to be put down if corrupted by Chaos. Nor have I ever been a fan of pointless renaming: it's an elf. No-one's confused about that, calling it an "aelf" just looks pretentious.
"Elf" is a generic term that GW can't copyright. GW had some trouble with IP laws just before the great renaming of everything.
Though yeah, it looks stupid, and in some cases GW dropped names they had already created in order to replaced them with new made up ones.
Not really no. It would be very easy to make a WC3 movie adaption that has little to no reference to WC1, 2, and BtDP at all. It's the same way any new story establishes it's setting without having to explain every little detail of how the town/city/world/universe got to that point. Just introduce that there is this alliance of kingdoms on one part of the land, this horde of Orcs on another, and mention in passing that they have been in conflict before at some point. Done, it would probably take 10 minutes tops. Even if all the events leading up to it are the same as in the games they are not particularly relevant to anything that happens in the game WC3 and doesn't need to be in the movie adaption either.
Fans of Warcraft will already know the story and everybody else just needs to know that a kingdom of humans exists and a Horde of orcs exists, they live in the same world, and they've been to war against each other at least once during their history. As far as all the new viewers are concerned the "other world" the orcs came from, the corruption the orcs, subjugation of the orcs, etc. can be skipped over to be functionally the same as if the IP had started off with "the human kingdom has always existed in this world, the orc Horde has always existed in this world, they've fought against each other in the past." It's what happens after this minor bit of world building that actually makes the difference here.
As for the movie, I think it bombed more due to how the story was presented. They should've put a lot more emphasis on the war itself, tossed out the star crossed lovers story completely, made the orcs more like the bad guys with a few good apples rather than sympathetic from the start, had a lot more action and a lot less people standing around talking, and just generally focused on the "war" part of Warcraft. The stronger focus on character building is something they should've left for later movies.
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You don't have to cover every little detail leading up to that point (same reason why the LotR films don't cover the Silmarillion), but that's a serious compression of time and lore. And while this is a minor point, it's incorrect to say that the Alliance is on "one part of land" when there's significant geographic distance between its kingdoms, and when the Alliance of WC3 is in a fractured state. Similarly, the orcs aren't on another patch of land, but in internment camps. So you have a status quo, that's been adjusted from another status quo.
So faced with all this history, why start a story this far through its run rather than at the start?
Again, it's a massive simplification. There isn't one "human kingdom," nor has the Horde always existed in this world, etc.
Basically, all it's showing is that if you jump straight to WC3, the story pays a price for it.
Completely disagree. Okay, maybe not completely, I wasn't a fan of the KhadgarxGarona thing either, but I disagree on every other point, in that:
-Pure evil orcs are a tired cliche at this point. Warcraft orcs didn't start out in shades of grey, but the setting is infinitely better for it. "Good humans" vs. "bad orcs" would be just trite.
-Focusing on war on the expense of character...okay, has that ever worked, like, ever? If there's no reason to be invested in the characters, why care about the war they're fighting in?
What's ironic is that I'd argue that the movie drops the ball on characterization. The orcs are okay, the humans are generally bland.
This strikes me as spurious reasoning on a number of fronts.
First, a large amount of fantasy fiction (I'd wager most) deals with action, both in its present, and in its backstory. Lord of the Rings, A Song of Ice and Fire, etc., are both examples of settings where war is the norm, rather than the exception for large chunks of history. Even if you take a fantasy setting that's more peaceful, the actual stories tend to deal with action. Chronicles of Narnia might be a relatively peaceful setting for instance, but 4 of the 7 books involve war/battles. Avatar: The Last Airbender operates on the principle of four nations living in peace until the Fire Nation attacked, cue 100 years of war (seriously, it's a meme at this point). I can think of a few settings where war is near non-existent (e.g. Earthsea), but again, very much the exception. I'm sure you'll agree that war tends to move history very quickly, so if you've constructed a fictional world, war is a sound method of moving plot along.
Second of all, let's grant that in-universe, there has been "only war" for the last 10,000 years. Let's even grant that there's nothing else of interest going on. That's still leaving out everything that happened prior to that. The history of humanity for instance has three distinct ages before the Imperium, and barring the Age of Strife, they're hardly "only war" scenarios. The eldar weren't waging "only war" for millions of years. The tau were in "only war" until the ethereals, after which their society rapidly changed to be more unified. Thing about 40K is that the universe is terrible, but part of what makes it terrible is that there were periods in its in-universe history where things were distinctly less terrible for pretty much everyone.
This isn't the only case of this. For instance, take the Alien universe. If you chart human history in-universe, things start off okay, then get steadily worse over time. That, IMO, is better worldbuilding than "things are bad, and were always bad."
I agree, and I think it's due to GW's paranoia about copyright. They tried to copyright "Space Marine" FFS. So I guess the reasoning, for instance, is that while they can't copyright "eldar" or "elf," they CAN copyright "aeldari" and "aelf."
If we look at real world history, IIRC, the UK Royal Marines were fighting somewhere every year of the 20th century except 2. It'd be fair to say that the Earth is always at war, because there's always a war somewhere. It'd also be fair to say that the Earth isn't always at war because most of those wars are small scale things most people don't have to care about.
Ghazghkull's invasion of Armageddon was the first major conflict in that system for some 300 years, and after that things were mostly quiet there for another 57 odd. And that's an infamously violent place, but they still had enough peace to build giant cities to fight over later. Necromunda is full of constant small scale fighting in the bad parts, which are proxy wars for the important nations living mostly peacefully in the good parts, and it's also infamously bad.
Ghazghkull's invasion of Armageddon was the first major conflict in that system for some 300 years, and after that things were mostly quiet there for another 57 odd. And that's an infamously violent place, but they still had enough peace to build giant cities to fight over later. Necromunda is full of constant small scale fighting in the bad parts, which are proxy wars for the important nations living mostly peacefully in the good parts, and it's also infamously bad.
In the grim darkness of the immediate present, there is only war.
On the bright side, the past was even grimdarker.
Being an active AoS player, the biggest problem with its lore isn't the lore itself: it's the setting. Or settings. Or the universe. Or is it a multiverse? And I think you can see the problem: even after 8 years of creating lore, events, places and characters, the AoS setting is still incredibly nebulous and vague, and as such hard to get any sort of tangible feel for. There's no scale or connection to any of it. You have no idea how anything connects or how the dynamics work. I own the AoS rulebook, and there are detailed maps with dozens of location names for each different realm, but it's all for naught because of how vague and general it all is. Everybody just sort of exists everywhere, there are no dedicated zones or places that are inhabited by specific factions. It smacks of a DnD world being made up as the campaign goes along instead of being built beforehand. To GW's credit they have been doing an honest push to define the setting more, and actually implementing it into the game itself with various expansions instead of everything being stuck in a stagnant state.
I agree with that in general, but the 90s, despite not having a lot of things we now take for granted, look pretty good in hindsight. Cold War was other, Global War on Terror not started yet, climate change was a problem but there was still plenty of time to do something, fascism wasn't really on the rise yet, etcIn the grim darkness of the immediate present, there is only war.
On the bright side, the past was even grimdarker.
My guess is that this is the fault of trying to have anything. 40k can do this easily: it's set in a galaxy, so any type of planet you can imagine can be the basis for a battlefield.
In WFB, the battlefield is basically anything you might expect to see in real-life Europe, so heavily limited. But someone no doubt has looked at Planescape type games and thought "What about a battle on a basalt plain with lakes of lava?" "What about a battle in a land of ice with crystal trees?" "What about a battle in a world of rusted iron sand and streams of mercury?" and so on. And sure, that sounds lovely, so they created a setting to do that. But the risk is always going to be that it becomes... well, a mess. This is like in computer games: do you want a linear narrative in a detailed world (which means limited, deep material) or an ultimate sandbox (which means lots of vague, procedurally generated, superficial material).
So one way that might be better is one mostly inhabited plane that's "Europe" (or "world") with discrete nations as a central point, and then the factions build realm gates to other exotic planes with exotic resources they can build outposts in and have fights over. This creates a strong and detailed central core, with optional forays into theoretically infinite other planes like lava and ice worlds which can either be invented by GW (expansion booklet ahoy!) or imaginative players ad hoc.
I can see why they would want that, but even done well that would probably have been pointless at best. The default battlefield for WHFB was a flat area of green grass with forest and small hills and maybe a very small amount of structures. Now, you absolutely could play on other battlefields, even if you are confining yourself to not!Europe you can have swamps and heavily forested areas and large towns and mountainous regions and whatnot. But people, it seemed, tended not to. Nor, usually, did they go for the jungles and deserts and snowy wastelands and weird magic areas the rules supporting.
Likewise, 40k has rules for all that, and Necron tombs and crystal trees in ice lands do get mentioned, but it's going to be grass, desert, snow or city terrain for the bases, and not actually tend to use any of the weirder ones that the rules support, if for no other reason than you need the models for the weird terrain, and it's nicer if your bases match.
I'm generalising, and I might be wrong, but the standard terrain to fight over was standard for a reason.