Author Topic: Re: WHF 9th edition / Age of Sigmar  (Read 17698 times)

Silver Wolf

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Re: Re: WHF 9th edition / Age of Sigmar
« Reply #30 on: December 13, 2015, 11:19:31 PM »
Actually, chaos looks better than ever!

It looks just the way they used to portray it in the official artwork.
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Jubal

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Re: WHF 9th edition / Age of Sigmar
« Reply #31 on: December 13, 2015, 11:22:51 PM »
I suppose I've always preferred chaos to be relatively "toned down" and Norscan-heavy, with ferocious warriors and insane cultists and then a few really gribbly terrifying odds and ends here and there. Whole vast armies of walking-tanks style Chaos Warriors just always make me wonder what the hell the supply chain is for all those armaments, and overdoing demons and tentacles I think makes them too everyday to be really scary.
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Pentagathus

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Re: Re: WHF 9th edition / Age of Sigmar
« Reply #32 on: December 14, 2015, 01:34:09 AM »
I wasn't commenting so much on the aesthetic rather than the lore and fluff. The whole chaos vs order/good or whatever just takes too much away from any good storytelling the universe has. Good and evil are subjective concepts and I'm not particularly fond of worlds that don't reflect this. Are there no good norscans? Are norscans human?
Even a villain who desires world destruction doesn't necessarily think of themselves as evil, perhaps they've been so broken by life that they can't see past the armadilloty parts of life and genuinely believe that life is a torment. Instead chaos just seems to be some weird physical embodiment of entropy, except of course that is itself impossible so I have no idea what chaos even means in this context. Chaos is an embodiment of armadillo storytelling if it's an embodiment if anything.

Jubal

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Re: WHF 9th edition / Age of Sigmar
« Reply #33 on: December 14, 2015, 07:21:24 PM »
I think Chaos can be done well or badly in the WHFB setting, there's some good fluff there IMO but it gets buried a bit too often.

To my mind, the point of Chaos is not so much that it represents "evil" or thinks of itself in those terms, but that it represents excess and the freedom to act on ones strongest impulses and desires - hence, chaos, the lack of restraint and order. The fact that complete and total lack of restraint tends to create bad guys is I think a reasonable trope, but well-written Chaos is a seductive rather than broad-brush evil force. It manifests best in the soldier whose love of war leads him to turn to a god who thinks of nothing but killing, the desperate wizard who looks at the corruption of the world and turns to Tzenteech in desperation for change, the hedonist who becomes a cultist of Slaanesh, the survivor of a plague-ridden village who turns in despair to worship the force of disease. The demons are sort of vectors for this, they are personifications of this lack of mental restraint that encourage it in others.

Chaos therefore wants two things; firstly, to fulfil the desires of the various cults as personified by the various demons, and secondly to destroy what they see as the shackles on the rest of the sentient races, namely their religions/social order/etc. I don't think a well-written Chaos is really out to annhilate the world in the way some of the WHFB undead are, but they'd like to see a total mess and breakdown of order and dominance of their various cults, demons everywhere etc. The sort of ultras who end up in the actual Chaos armies probably tend to be the most deranged, or perhaps a lot of the marauders have just been recruited en masse with their co-religionists and don't have any way of deserting!

So why does all this not come through in writing for WH? I think it used to more than it ended up doing so; after the Nemesis Crown campaign the writers seemed to be turning more and more to upping the stakes in everything, and ended up completing the journey from the old (say 3rd ed) world which was quite gritty and about continued struggle (including against our own and more literal demons) to a very millenarian end of the world scenario. Like, Storm of Chaos for example was big and rather doomsdayish but it wasn't actually the literal end of the world, just a major catastrophic invasion. The more things were ramped up into "are you on THIS SIDE or THIS SIDE" the more black and white they had to make it and the more you got Chaos just being written as world destruction in army book format.
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Pentagathus

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Re: WHF 9th edition / Age of Sigmar
« Reply #34 on: December 15, 2015, 11:50:41 AM »
Yeah I haven't read much of the older editions' lore, probably should do though, it'd be nice to see the game before GW became the monstrosity I knew and didn't particularly love.
I wasn't being entirely serious with my last sentence of that post, it was basically meant to be a alternative of saying chaos is literally Hitler. I think it could have been a very interesting "race" if done properly, although I can't see it beeing so much a single race. I mean dark elves for example were generally thought to be aligned with chaos, despite having an ordered an  structured hierarchy. I feel an army book for chaos alone doesn't make much sense, but the option of playing a chaotic version of each race/faction would have worked. I guess a pure chaos army  book could have worked with creatures like beastmen and obviously the demons of chaos. Beastmen were cool.
Also orcs always seemed largely chaotic, yet never aligned with chaos. Again, I think the ability to chaotify individual races would have made for a more interesting fluff gaming aspect and could have cut down the number of army books. High elves and dark elves could have just been elves, with a few special units and characters available to each side (wood elves I guess kind of need to be a seperate thing, but their fluff was lame anyway). I know you can obviously just decide your own fluff and backstory, but I'd prefer the official lore and rules to allow more freedom for players without needing  to contradict the canon.

Jubal

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Re: WHF 9th edition / Age of Sigmar
« Reply #35 on: December 15, 2015, 07:44:44 PM »
Well, the "Hordes of Chaos" I think were originally supposed to be specifically Norscans and Old Worlders who'd turned to become warbands or "paladins" of the Chaos deities.

Dark Elves is an interesting one because they did actually explore that at one point - the fluff was that the Dark Elves proper worship a non-Chaos deity who is a war/blood god - but whilst the Dark Elves do enjoy cruelty, they're also in a very regimented system that doesn't encourage true Chaos. Though it was strongly hinted on occasion that their god may actually be analogous to Khorne and they may be worshipping Khorne by accident sometimes. The other thing, though, is that Slaanesh, the Chaos deity always most associated with corrupting elves (the link is made in 40K as well), has a very strong undercurrent/cult in Dark Elf society, and GW did produce a Cult of Slaanesh army list at one point (it was basically DE warriors, lose access to the high-end units but gain access to Slaaneshi daemons). One of the early WHTW releases included the CoS but I got rid of them to put the Dragon Islanders in instead.

As for Orcs I think the point was that they didn't need to specifically worship demonic chaos/didn't see the point of it because they were naturally that way anyway. If Chaos is about unleashing your innermost desires, it has no hold on a species that never put them on leashes to start with!

But yeah, I see what you mean wrt having more flexible fluff, that could have been a good way to go.
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Silver Wolf

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Re: WHF 9th edition / Age of Sigmar
« Reply #36 on: January 12, 2016, 06:21:03 PM »
Weird and expensive new dwarves (Fyreslayers IIRC? Basically slayers with new and inferior fluff).

Spoiler (click to show/hide)


And Daemons of Chaos alternative from Mantic games:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)
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Jubal

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Re: WHF 9th edition / Age of Sigmar
« Reply #37 on: January 12, 2016, 06:22:54 PM »
What the actual hell are those dwarves doing.

*weeps*
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Silver Wolf

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Re: Re: WHF 9th edition / Age of Sigmar
« Reply #38 on: January 17, 2016, 09:29:50 PM »
Their poses, helmets and weapons are absolutely ridiculous. :P
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