The Narrative Joy of AoS.

[Mr Mystery]

Afternoon all.

This is something that's been ticking away in my brain for a few weeks now, and it was spawned by my reaction to all the bits of background that I've read (so far I'm only two books behind).

At first, I found the background for AoS somewhat jarring. We knew straight off their were Nine Realms (including the Realm of Chaos), and bits and bobs about them. But, that was about it.

Now, contrast and compare to this, which was my first brush with the Old World, via Heroquest....

http://www.heroscribe.org/baloban/MAP.jpg

Cartographical, as Finn the Human might say.

From the get go, at least in my very personal experience, The Old World, geographically speaking, was well defined. And that definition was only added to as I immersed myself ever further.

As one might expect, that was a pretty cool experience. The game was defined as much by geographical bounds as the nature and spirit of its inhabitants. And boy have I got the books to prove it.

Age of Sigmar, for the most part, just doesn't have that level of definition. Well, not yet at least - being an ongoing and 'evolving' setting, who knows what we might see in the future. It's a hell of a blank canvas, that's for sure.

However, once you accept that and start to think around it, there's a lot of potential for your own army. Thanks to such things as Realmgates, you can battle it out pretty much anywhere, against anyone. Indeed one of the earliest short stories (part one of Call of Archaon if you're particularly interest) shows that with the right know how, the destination of a Realmgate can be changed.

The old 'problem' of Warhammer is removed, namely 'but my guys live all the way over here, how likely is it we'd run into your guys who live waaaaaaay over there?'. (Never stopped a game like!).

Narrative campaigns now have a far wider scope, as there's very definitely room to carve out an Empire of your own - potentially a Realm Spanning one thanks to Realmgates.

And it's that very same lack of a set geography and racial lore that gives us a lot of room to carve out our own narrative. Got two players with Empie armies? Yeah those can be from anywhere. Their agenda can be whatever we want it to be

Don't get me wrong, I'd still love to see books dedicated to each of the realms, giving us legendary locations etc for us to build off. But even with those, it's clear the Mortal Realms are unimaginably vast. For instance, there's a Plain in the Realm of Ghur which is said to be so vast no man could cross it on foot in a single lifetime.

As the various Battletomes are released, the spirit and culture of the races becomes better defined, letting us come up with our force's own motivation - yet there very much remains the core of their Old World predecessors as well (Dwarfs for instance are no longer facing extinction, but still have plenty of ancient holds to be wrestled back, alongside new ones to be founded).

It's not going to be to everyone's tastes, and some may find the lack of definition detrimental. And fair enough. To each their own.

But as soon as I've got a gaming board up and running (some time this year, I'd imagine) I'll definitely be running a Narrative Campaign and see what my players and I come up with.

[Ben_S]

That HQ map brings back memories...

I quite like the 'blank canvas' approach, but this is hardly unique to AoS and, even where games have their own fluff/background, you can always ignore it in favour of your own.

[Erik Setzer]

People who couldn't answer "My army is based here, why would they fight those guys who are based there?" have so little imagination that a blank canvas is lost on them. I could quickly come up with reasons for armies fighting each other based on the fluff. It was easy.

The answer isn't to blow everything up and make it a very, VERY vague setting where everything's connected via magical gates and there are no defined realms, no nations, no civilization, nothing interesting in the core game. Why should you care about the guys your toy soldiers represent?

Sure, the blank canvas means you can run Stormcasts alongside Skaven summoning Khorne Daemons supported by Dwarf artillery, and have Elves backed by Chaos Marauders summoning Slaanesh Daemons. The rules allow it, and the canvas is so blank that there's nothing to say you can't do it.

Even if there was, a sufficient imagination could work around it. Corrupt/Fallen Stormcasts, Dwarfs being paid off, Elves who've been corrupted by Slaanesh into doing its bidding...

None of this is new to AoS. People did that all the time in WFB.

If you couldn't, that wasn't an issue with the game suddenly "fixed" by AoS. It was a serious lack of imagination and creativity on your part that isn't at all fixed by AoS. If you choose to apply yourself more now than you did before, that's a personal choice to change something about yourself, not a change in the setting's presentation.

They can - and should, and need to in time - define AoS's setting with a lot of detail. But it won't stop those of us who want to have fun and write our own stories. It'll just add more pieces to the stories that can be told, and create a better shared experience as you reminisce with others about battles fought around a famous fortress. Role-playing games provide settings and yet role players don't complain it's stifling; they make those settings their own, but the base setting means that they can talk to others about their adventures in Waterdeep, or staging their operations on the Lighthouse (StarDrive, old Alternity setting), or whatever, even as their adventures are unique and go off in their own directions.

And AoS has already named a lot of locations. We just haven't seen clear maps of them yet, though there's still been plenty of places mapped out. It's just hard to do a cartographic representation of a bunch of rocks floating in space independent of each other. (Plus the potential planets involved.)

[Asymmetrical Xeno]

I like the AoS setting more as it appeals to my love of weird dimensional stuff with floating islands and stuff like that. I like more fantastical and otherworldly scenery in general (hence my own wargame is set in an artificially grown micro universe). The old world was far too earthlike for my personal taste.

[Erik Setzer]

That's fair. I totally get liking it for that reason.

The vagueness of it is affecting my ability to get on board entirely, because I'm still not sure what the setting is. The fluff seems to go in multiple directions. The realms might be masses of floating rocks, or something entirely different. There seem to be references to entire planets. Are those part of the realms? Are they separate?

Just nailing that down a little will help. Right now, you could even theorize that the realms are the floating remains of the World-That-Was (and Sigmar's protecting the core), while there are many other systems and planets, and the "realms" are just one system in a vast galaxy.

Doesn't help that they basically had the Skaven accidentally call up the Eldar in ET: Thanquol... though that doesn't necessarily mean it's the same galaxy, could just be the same universe.

Heck, this could all be one big warp storm floating through the galaxy, for all we know.

The lack of some kind of base, in itself, means that you might come up with a background entirely contradictory to the fluff to a degree that's not reconcilable.

[Asymmetrical Xeno]

Yeah, that's why I reckon they need to release a book similar to the "grand alliance" ones, but instead is just backround and an introduction to the setting. I think that would make it a lot more accessible in general really. All those realmgate wars books and stuff are really expensive and theres already quite a few a few of them too which makes getting into the setting less accessible for a lot of people I think. You could do maps for each of the realms, explain what they are and clarify a lot of what these questions. Hell, with the maps alone you could label areas where they might introduce future factions and stuff.

[Path Walker]

Right now, you could even theorize that the realms are the floating remains of the World-That-Was (and Sigmar's protecting the core), while there are many other systems and planets, and the "realms" are just one system in a vast galaxy.



You bring that up every single time and every single time it has to be pointed out to you that, no, that isn't what the Realms are. You had that idea because you've not read the fluff, every thread about the fluff you come and criticise while making it clear you've not actually engaged with the story on even the most basic level by reading the freely available Primer they put out.

The Realms are not fragments of the Old World. They're each much, much bigger, than the World That Was and separated from each other entirely, travel between them is only possible at the Realmgates, though powerful magic or by whatever the Gnaw-holes of the Skaven are. The Realms aren't part of a cosmos as we have in our universe. They're not planets, they're not a system, they don't orbit a sun. They're each their own dimension formed of the raw stuff of one of the types of magic.

Its almost like you have so little imagination that a blank canvas is lost on you.

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Yeah, that's why I reckon they need to release a book similar to the "grand alliance" ones, but instead is just backround and an introduction to the setting. I think that would make it a lot more accessible in general really. All those realmgate wars books and stuff are really expensive and theres already quite a few a few of them too which makes getting into the setting less accessible for a lot of people I think. You could do maps for each of the realms, explain what they are and clarify a lot of what these questions. Hell, with the maps alone you could label areas where they might introduce future factions and stuff.

The first book is basically that, but with some extra rules stuff, the starter set also contained a good overview of where the whole thing is starting thats like that as well. There is the Primer available free that gives a very basic overview too. The maps in the books have been my favourite parts so far, loads of cool, evocative place names and ideas to kick start ideas.

[Asymmetrical Xeno]

Yeah, they are a little like that but not quite what I am thinking as they don't give enough of a "full picture" of the setting. I mean something like a single 15-20 quid book that has a few pages of backround on every single faction (so Nighthaunt, Sylvaneth, Everchosen, the new Aelves factions, human kingdoms, the new destruction factions ect) and then full maps of each of the realms. The maps so far seem more like specific sections of the realms rather than the whole ones. We don't even know all of the factions yet either - the Order ones are coming this weekend, but there are still the destruction ones left too. Maybe they will release something like this after the last of the Grand Alliance books (?)

[Morgrim]

They can't do full maps of the realms, they don't have enough stuff to shove in them yet. And even in their very well defined setting of 40k the maps are still incredibly zoomed out and vague overall.

A few pages of setting and then a chunk of map in a suitable realm for every faction would be entirely doable and helpful though.

[Mr Mystery]

True that. Inspiration rather than definition.

[Asymmetrical Xeno]

They can't do full maps of the realms, they don't have enough stuff to shove in them yet. And even in their very well defined setting of 40k the maps are still incredibly zoomed out and vague overall.

A few pages of setting and then a chunk of map in a suitable realm for every faction would be entirely doable and helpful though.

Fair point!

[grimmas]

Why would they do maps of the realms that would just take us back to the Old World. Board strokes with detail added in places like 40K is the ticket. It's not an RPG setting we just need to know what the battlefields are like or could be like. Sure more detail wil be added but it being a massive largely undefined setting is deliberate. Its so one can actually forge a narative that has consequence. Sure Sigmaron is a fixed point but everything else is largely up for grabs. Just like 40K there's a number of defined points but the vast majority of the galaxy is a blank canvas for the players to fill.

[Erik Setzer]

True that. Inspiration rather than definition.

They don't have to be mutually exclusive. They could create a general map of the overall area (of space, I imagine), and general concept maps of the realms, while leaving plenty of area open for interpretation.

It would also help to explain whether the realms really are floating chunks of rock in space. Right now the maps shown off so far make me think of the Warhammer equivalent of Outland, with the World-That-Was taking the place of Nagrand (complete with portals to get on and off the rocks). If that's what they want them to be, okay, but that would also limit the amount of space available.

It's also worth remembering that in some of the fluff they seem to mention worlds that sound like they aren't actually part of the realms, so in theory there could be other worlds out there connected via Stargate... er, Dark Portal... shoot, I mean Realmgate. And there you have infinite space to do whatever you want, no matter how much they define maps of the realms themselves.

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Its so one can actually forge a narative that has consequence.

We skipped that point with the first book, where they said, "Thousands of years of history happened, we don't care about that, let's skip to this: Chaos won, and beat everyone. But rather than destroy everything again like they just did, they bickered and fought among themselves, as they always do, except that time that we just described a few months ago. Sigmar knew they wouldn't ultimately destroy everything, even though he'd already seen them do just that in the past, so he bided his time and built an army. Now, with all meaningful civilization wiped out and no nations to ever care about, Sigmar's fighting back, and driving Chaos back." All stakes removed, just like that.

I think they're trying to retcon at least the part where all civilization was wiped out, but at this point, we already know Chaos can't win and it's just all up from here. Trying to go in media res actually ended up messing up the stakes of the story and leaving it so there realistically aren't any. They can't even fix that without a retcon of the story to date... though 40K showed they're okay with doing serious retcon work when needed (or even when not... looking at you, Necrons).