Warhammer Old World TTRPG - 300 years before classic Fantasy?

[Jubal]

Cubicle 7 has announced a new Warhammer tabletop RPG, based on Warhammer: The Old World. You may know the company already for its many other games set in Games Workshop's worlds, including Wrath & Glory, Imperium Maledictum, and Soulbound.

The Old World is Games Workshop's ongoing revival of the Warhammer Fantasy setting as a wargame, after its destruction in 2015 to make way for Age of Sigmar. The weird part is, Cubicle 7 already sells a TTRPG based in the Warhammer Fantasy setting, and has for years—it's called Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, and is itself a continuation of a system that first came out in the '80s. This isn't a new edition for that, and doesn't seem to be replacing it—it's a new, separate game. The obvious question is: why?

The announcement is light on detail, but there are a couple of potential reasons why it might make sense to have two RPGs in the same setting. The first is that The Old World wargame takes place about 300 years earlier than the Warhammer Fantasy setting most fans are used to—so a lot earlier than the stuff you'd have seen in, for example, the Total War: Warhammer games, or indeed the default setting books for Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay.

https://www.pcgamer.com/warhammer-fantasy-is-backand-now-its-getting-a-new-tabletop-rpg-too/


This feels interesting but also odd, as a move, apparently GW is doing a lot of Old World fantasy rebooting because it turns out that people actually liked settings that loosely based themselves off things that made sense and had fun reality-inspired bric-a-brac all over the place.

More oddly though, a new TTRPG (and possibly other stuff, the PCGamer article wasn't clear and I haven't done much wider checking) seem to be set 300 years before the setting people used to know and love, which feels an odd choice to me. It's early enough that there are arbitrary lore differences, apparently fewer Skaven and no Colleges of Magic, but also close enough to the setting's old "present" that you don't have a really big difference in tone. I'm not super clear on why I'd want to play in a chronologically older and less well fleshed out part of a setting's timeline. Dunno, any thoughts?

[dubsartur]

Cubicle 7 has announced a new Warhammer tabletop RPG, based on Warhammer: The Old World. You may know the company already for its many other games set in Games Workshop's worlds, including Wrath & Glory, Imperium Maledictum, and Soulbound.

The Old World is Games Workshop's ongoing revival of the Warhammer Fantasy setting as a wargame, after its destruction in 2015 to make way for Age of Sigmar. The weird part is, Cubicle 7 already sells a TTRPG based in the Warhammer Fantasy setting, and has for years—it's called Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, and is itself a continuation of a system that first came out in the '80s. This isn't a new edition for that, and doesn't seem to be replacing it—it's a new, separate game. The obvious question is: why?

The announcement is light on detail, but there are a couple of potential reasons why it might make sense to have two RPGs in the same setting. The first is that The Old World wargame takes place about 300 years earlier than the Warhammer Fantasy setting most fans are used to—so a lot earlier than the stuff you'd have seen in, for example, the Total War: Warhammer games, or indeed the default setting books for Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay.

https://www.pcgamer.com/warhammer-fantasy-is-backand-now-its-getting-a-new-tabletop-rpg-too/


This feels interesting but also odd, as a move, apparently GW is doing a lot of Old World fantasy rebooting because it turns out that people actually liked settings that loosely based themselves off things that made sense and had fun reality-inspired bric-a-brac all over the place.

Gadzooks, you are right that until The Witcher, the Warhammer Fantasy setting was the only major pop culture setting that still had a house style of visuals inspired by something before the 19th century! 

Edit: I guess Game of Thrones came close, but they messed up the later seasons and fandom seems to have shrunk in response; it was also less of a source of third-party inspiration and creativity than the Old World or D&D.

D&D committed to its anime-and-western-comic influenced art back in the days of 3.5 and Pathfinder, and these days Fantasyland has many material tropes out of westerns such as beds with steel springs and cells with walls of iron bars.