Warhammer: The Old World

Zekiel’s note: I’d just finished writing this post about Warhammer: The Old World (the wargame, officially released yesterday) when Cubicle 7 dropped the surprise news that they’re going to be producing a new RPG for it!

This is huge news – and it means that Cubicle 7 will be producing five different RPGs based on Warhammer properties (WFRP 4e and The Old World in the Warhammer world; Soulbound for Age of Sigmar; Wrath & Glory and Imperium Maledictum for Warhammer 40k) – along with various non-Warhammer RPGs. I was already a little concerned about how the release schedule for WFRP 4e was slowing (and it feels even slower for Soulbound) – so one would imagine this might slow it even more! To give them the benefit of the doubt, it’s entirely possible that C7 will just employ the services of more people and that this won’t affect WFRP 4e’s release schedule at all.

I guess my hope is that the new RPG might be more-or-less compatible with WFRP (perhaps – as Tydirium7 suggested on this Reddit thread – using similar rules to Imperium Maledictum, which is apparently a sort of 4.5 edition of the WFRP rules) and that therefore the content might be broadly compatible. That’s just hopeful speculation at this stage.

With that said, let’s talk about something we do know concrete things about: the wargame Warhammer: The Old World.

I love this map. Copyright Games Workshop 2023

The Warhammer World returns

There’s a huge amount of buzz about the launch of The Old World on social media at the moment (I frequent Reddit & Twitter, and I’m sure there’s plenty elsewhere). It’s the new wargame from Games Workshop which is essentially a new version of the old Warhammer Fantasy Battles¹ game, set once again in the Warhammer World².

I have very fond memories of playing loads of Warhammer Fantasy Battles (4th Edition) back in 1990s and from what I’ve read from the rules previews of The Old World it sounds pretty similar: units of models in rank and file smashing into each other, cavalry leading daring flanking manoeurves, artillery units at the rear coming under attack from flying monsters and so on.

I’m not intending to get into The Old World myself – too pricey for me, and I don’t have the time to devote to it – but it is genuinely lovely to see all the affection and excitement for the Warhammer world. There was a lot of anger when Games Workshop decided to bring the Warhammer World to a close in 2015 and its great to see so much enthusiasm for its return.

A couple of friendly faces. Copyright Games Workshop 2023

I think Games Workshop look to be positioning The Old World as a more grounded wargame when compared to Age of Sigmar (the successor wargame to Warhammer Fantasy Battles). I’ve had a fascinating time reading the Age of Sigmar: Soulbound RPG (I’ll do some posts about it sometime), and I think they’ve created an interesting setting, but it is undeniably much more high-fantasy and heroic than the Warhammer world was. The Old World certainly has its share of high fantasy elements – wizards, pegasi, whole armies of animated skeletons etc – but the bulk of the armies look more like they map (at least vaguely) onto real-world concepts; much more so than some of the more zany concepts in Age of Sigmar which features Dwarfs with steampunk jetpacks and Lizardmen teleporting down from sky-ziggurats. Sure, The Old World features legions of walking skeletons (in the Tomb Kings) but if you look beyond the presentation, the core army is basically just “real-world Ancient Egyptians (who happen to be undead)”.

As the name implies, The Old World (wargame) focuses on the Old World (geographical region). More controversially it also focuses on a limited number of armies – specifically Empire, Bretonnia, Dwarves, Wood Elves, High Elves, Greenskins, Tomb Kings, Beastmen and Warriors of Chaos. So no Dark Elves, Skaven or Vampire Counts³! (Although army lists will be available for those factions.) I’m sure it is very deliberate that the majority of the factions they’re focusing on are those which either don’t feature as full armies in Age of Sigmar (like Empire, Bretonnia, Tomb Kings and Wood Elves), or are presented very differently (like Dwarves and High Elves). Personally I wouldn’t be surprised if Games Workshop later expands the game to cover a wider geographical area and brings in more factions if it proves successful.

The lore, and how this is relevant to WFRP

Interestingly, The Old World is set in 2276, some 250 years before the usual default time period of the Warhammer World, which is somewhere in the early 2500s (the original Enemy Within campaign was set in 2512; WFRP 2nd Edition was set in 2522 in the aftermath of the Storm of Chaos (which was later retconned away); the End Times which brought the whole thing to a close took place in 2519-2528). This date puts The Old World right at the end of the Age of Three Emperors – an improbably long period lasting centuries when the Empire was decidedly not unified and three different rulers claimed the throne. This came to an end when a massive Chaos army invaded Kislev in 2301, and Magnus the Pious succeeded in unifying the Empire provinces and marching to the aid of its beleagured northern neighbour.

I’m not at all knowledgeable about this period of Warhammer history so I’m very interested to see what lore emerges from the wargame – and how Cubicle 7 will implement it in the new RPG.

Empire soldiers engage in robust diplomacy with Beastmen. Copyright Games Workshop 2023

There’s a really interesting article on the Warhammer Community site about writing the lore which forms the background for The Old World. It suggests that the time period was chosen as being a “hinge point” in Warhammer history, which seems reasonable to me (although I dislike the article comparing it to the Horus Heresy in 40k – Warhammer does not need to ape its sci-fi cousin in everything!) The Great War Against Chaos brought about a lot of changes for the setting: Chaos returned to the Old World with a vengeance; the Empire was finally reunified under a single Emperor; and the Colleges of Magic were established.

The article also contains a nice little nod to WFRP: “Veteran Warhammer fans, those who have read rule books and novels going back 20-30 years, will recognise bits here and there – as well as ideas first seen in various editions of Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay. Those books are a major reason why the world is now so fleshed out, and have been worked on by so many people from inside the studio.” Nice to see WFRP actually get acknowledged by Games Workshop!

Tomb King morality

The above article also has an interesting little segment justifying the inclusion of Tomb Kings in the list of “evil” armies (alongside Chaos, Greenskins and Beastmen). Over on It Always Rains in Nuln, Xathrodox took major issue with this, arguing that Tomb Kings are pretty much the definition of True Neutral (to use old D&D parlance). The wargame writers suggest that Settra the Imperishable is motivated by a drive to conquer everything, which sounds pretty evil. In some ways its hard to argue with that – but on the other hand its hard to justify Bretonnia or Wood Elves as being in the “good” column, what with the former being famously bigoted and massively oppressing 95% of its population⁴; and the latter doing a wonderful line in child kidnapping and manipulating Bretonnia to boot.

Scary yes, but are they evil? Copyright Games Workshop 2023

I wasn’t sure why Games Workshop really wanted to line up all the armies into two columns, given that the nature of a tabletop wargame is that you want to have a ready justification for every faction to fight every other faction. Warhammer 40,000 famously follows a “all factions are basically horrible”⁵ philosophy, which may be depressing but at least enables any faction to have a very good excuse to fight anyone else.

I do wonder if Games Workshop have decided that “shades of grey” morality doesn’t sell very well, and that they’re better of having clearly defined Good Guys and Bad Guys. And that makes me wonder about the forthcoming RPG – will it be skewed to a more heroic approach than WFRP, with players embodying unambiguous Big Damn Heroes? That doesn’t really feel like the Warhammer World I know – and even given the time difference from the period I’m familiar with, it hardly seems likely that the Age of the Three Emperors would be a marvellous golden age of goodness and altruism.

I suppose it would make some kind of sense that with Chaos only just emerging, Chaos cults would be limited in number, and with the Skaven absent too, I wonder if the tone of the RPG will be much more about dealing with threats from without rather than uncovering the Enemy Within – which has been the default for the majority of published WFRP adventures throughout the editions, whether playing the eponymous campaign or not. That would imply that it might be more of a hack-and-slay affair than WFRP traditional is – which tends towards “investigating a hidden evil” types of adventure, particularly in 4th Edition. That would give the Old World RPG a distinctive character compared to WFRP, which I suppose would be sensible – though whether it then ends up stepping on the toes of Age of Sigmar: Soulbound is a different matter. Personally I prefer the more gritty, investigative style of classic WFRP of course.

Anyway, speculation aside it will be very interesting to see what emerges in the next few months!

1. Confusingly the old wargame was rebranded as simply “Warhammer” from its 4th Edition onwards, which is even more confusing after Games Workshop rebranded all its stores as Warhammer Stores some years ago – and then similarly its webstore last year! I’m just going to refer to the wargame as “Warhammer Fantasy Battles” in this post to avoid confusion. ↩︎
2. Continuing the confusing naming, if you see someone online talk about “Warhammer World”, they’re probably talking about the global headquarters / visitors centre of Games Workshop, in Nottingham (UK), rather than “the Warhammer world” where WFRP and the Warhammer wargames took place. (In Age of Sigmar it’s referred to as “The World That Was”, which I think is rather poetic.) ↩︎
3. The justification for omitting my beloved Skaven is that they are all fighting a massive underground civil war during this period, with their long absence resulting in them fading into legend – thus partially justifying the “no such thing as Skaven” thing in the Empire. Which is kind of neat! ↩︎
4. Apparently knights can be female in the new wargame, which is a nice move towards equality, at the expense of retconning lore. The point about peasants being oppressed definitely stands… I’m not convinced Games Workshop are going to be able to pull off “happy peasants glad to labour for their betters” in 2024… ↩︎
5. Except maybe Tau? Or did they turn into mind-controlling Evil Space Communists at some point? ↩︎