Fantasy Warhammer

[Extravagance]

This probably caters to quite a small audience, but eh.

Did any of you Warhammer Fantasy (The one with swords and knights and so on, you know) players get annoyed by the Games Workshop ending to the Storm of Chaos campaign a year or so back? This is the official ending to the storyline, no matter the true results of the campaign.

In essence: Chaos beat almost every Empire army, were vastly far ahead in terms of victories and points. So Games Workshop got Grimgor Ironhide to magically appear, kill the grand high Chaos leader (Archon) and then wander off again. The Empire/Good side's super-hero, Valten, did effectivly nothing, and was defeated so many times that they magically made a Skaven assassin appear and kill/wound him and Valten magically dissapears. The Empire gets a win, all the main hero's can't be used anymore, and pretty much everything goes back to how it was before with some minor additions to some character's backstory.

For example, the Grand-High-Theogonist was utterly stomped on early on in the campaign, so they magic'd him alive again at the end of it so they wouldn't have to come up with an entirely new character for the post-Storm Fantasy world.

This seems like a massive cop-out, used to make sure Games Workshop wouldn't really have to change anything post-campaign. I personaly like the idea of a shattered Empire fighting for survival from the ground up, rather than being in essentially the same shape it was before.

Thoughts?

 

[Zykon TheLich]

Warhammer is a setting, not a story, what else do you expect? It's like an episode of the Simpsons, despite all the wacky hijinks it's all back to normal for the next episode.

 

[Imperial Dane]

And here i thought it was a thread about the lack of Warhammer fantasy based games the only ones really being Mark of chaos which was decent at best (although i did quite enjoy it) and Warhammer online.. which just seemed bleh to me and not really tapping into the warhammer fantasy universe.

As to the campaign. Quickly imagine the results of what you just wanted. Sure it might seem fun at first but it would also be highly limiting in many ways and how would the empire continue fighting even then ? The point of the many warhammer things is to have a constant struggle against evil that always looks like the forces of extreme evil and anarchy are about to win. Every fight is desperate, if what you got what you wanted then the warhammer universe would be fucked, sort of like the equivalent of the Warhammer 40k campaign with Cadia and the 13th black crusade.

The issue more specifially being GW were a bit foolish and did not account for what might actually happen if the bad guys won and so basically had to say "sod that" and as you may notice. Aren't really doing events like that again.

 

[illas]

Yes, the ending did seem a bit of a cop-out. Everything resolved a little too easily (did Grimgore Ironhide really *kill* Archaon? I thought he just wounded him) for my liking, and the majority of armies neither gained or suffered as a result of the campaign - unlike the previous year's "Albion" campaign.

The idea of the Empire as a broken and dispersed force would be an interesting and dramatic shift, but would go against the reason most players play Empire in the first place, I would imagine.

Then again, I play 40k, so my knowledge is limited on this

 

[Neverhoodian]

Well, it is Warhammer we're talking about. Both the Fantasy and 40k versions are the biggest moneymakers for Games Workshop, so they're not going to officially end the storyline. Each race/faction has its own rabid fan base, and having any one of them win decisively would result in millions of pissed off players and a sharp decline in revenue. Therefore they have to keep the status quo of a perpetual stalemate.

 

[Gildan Bladeborn]

That's the problem with the Warhammer Fantasy setting - the world isn't big enough for them to actually let players truly shape the direction the game takes via the outcome of table-top campaigns. With 40K, the setting is the universe - any given world campaign event they decide to create takes place within a microcosm of the larger setting, and deciding the ultimate fate of the battlefield based on the arbitrary outcome of a series of table-top games isn't going to create huge sweeping changes to the overall setting itself; you can have real sweeping victories and defeats, and it's not going to break the universe.

With Fantasy, there's just the one world, and that world is the setting: deciding the fate of that entire setting based on the outcome of random dice rolls is a bit less prudent, because real sweeping victories/defeats would directly impact the overarching framework of the setting.

So the real problem is GW promising their players what they have no intention of delivering. Now me, I don't play either TT game and I don't care about Warhammer Fantasy at all, so I don't really care either way.

Well, I did at one point get noted WHF author C.L. Werner to claim he was going to write a character named after me (he also said he "might" not kill that character horribly, though torture and other gruesome fates were all still on the table, heh), so I have been sort of curious whether he actually did that. Just not curious enough to take an interest in Warhammer Fantasy to find out for myself, so if anyone happens to read the Warhammer Fantasy novels, C.L. Werner's in particular, I'd be quite interested to learn whether that was something he actually did (now that I think about it though... Werner has started writing short stories set in 40K... I should really re-read those again with that in mind).

 

[Extravagance]

I understand that having a shattered Empire and so on wouldn't necessarily benefit the game at all, and they were probably limited in how they could respond to the campaign in terms of story.

It's more the ways in which they resolved it that irritated me. The Empire couldn't physically beat Archon so Grimgor appears, the Grand Theogonist (one of the more powerful characters in the army list) gets beaten badly, and so effectivly reincarnates when everything is done. Valten gets defeated by Chaos so many times that he's 'dissapeared' by a Skaven assassin. For a big, obviously important Fantasy campaign that lasted several months, it could of been done far, far better at the end.

 

[Cracker3011]

I prefer 40K myself. Though a progressing, player-influenced storyline would be nice, they kind of need to maintain the status quo or else completely retool the game every few years.

 

[Valkyrie101]

They did the same thing in 40K with the Eye of Terror campaign. They promised to advance the storyline: then when Chaos won, they realised that that would royally fuck things over, so made it a stalemate where Chaos made some minor gains but were being pushed back. Should have thought it through beforehand.