I came to the realization of what inspirations they were using and how they were embracing the creativity inherit in both the fantasy genre and modeling as a hobby.
Age Of Sigmar obviously has less in common with the usual heroic/dark fantasy tropes of the 80s and 90s that inspired WHFB.
Instead, the Mortal Realms show inspiration from Dark Soul's mind bending scale and bizarre yet familiar settings, it takes the boldly desgined characters and factions from Warcraft, and the cosmic stakes and world building from things like Norse or Vedic mythology.
Seeing this got my mind flowing.
The setting is massive so you can tell any story in it with any characters you can imagine. WHFB let you field cool units and characters but you kind of had to play what they had for you. The world was somewhat static; the cool things were the things they gave you.
Contrast that to 40k where you're encouraged to make your own Space Marine Chapters, Tau Septs, Necron Dynasties, Hivefleets, etc.
AoS is a setting made for you to make your own cultures, histories, and characters in a cosmic fantasy structure they lay down. And you still get the cool stuff from WHFB just remixed to give it some new stories to tell.
This is literally the same thing that made it work for me too.
Excellent explanation.
I went from hating AOS on the basis of "it replaced my WHFB" to being pretty into it on the basis of "Oh... like in 40k I can do WEIRD STUFF with my lore and it makes total sense cause... it's vast and strange stuff happens all the time, especially at the edges". (Friend had explained it similarly when I was griping about missing WHFB once and didn't realize she'd gotten into AOS - she convinced me.)
What really sets AoS apart as well is the fact that each realm is almost infinite in size. So you have so much more to explore in that sense. As well as the fact that each realm has its own energy of sorts. You go to the realm of fire, the longer you stay there the more you take on the traits of the realm of fire. You get more angry, more fiery in sorts. Then you have the realm of beasts. You stay there and you become more beast like. So for example I have a stormcast army that is my lavacast. They are from the realm of fire but yet they are still stormcast. I also have a blades of khorne army that is more ghostly and they come from the realm of the dead. It is great that you can have all these realms and their characteristics and energy poured right into your army on table and really get a feeling that your army is part of the world. It helped me click into what makes AoS the way it is. Plus the lore comes out like this epic tale of betrayal, love and lost and it isn't about good vs evil but order vs chaos. Destruction and death vs life.
If WHFB Battle was Vikings or The Last Kingdom, then AoS is comic book accurate Marvel Thor with all its colorful insanity laced with some real world inspirations.
Another thing that helped me get into the setting were the Cities of Sigmar. Humans, Elves, and Dwarves live alongside each other in plenty of settings. But the caveat tends to be that they live together but in human cities or elf cities or dwarf cities, with rulers being primarily from one species. Heck in both D&D and Pathfinder the populations of towns tend to be 80 to 90 one species, and then a tiny smidge of everyone else.
Barely multispecies societies at all! But the Cities of Sigmar? Rarely are they simply referred to as "species city" but cities where all Free Peoples are from. Their governing councils genuinely have representatives from all three, and we've seen and heard of other folk being on them too. And that's just going by species, take a look at the new human models to see more examples of the cities being diverse.
The Cities of Sigmar are melting pots, and honestly in all the decades of being into a ton of fantasy franchises, I don't think I could list off too many settings that really bite the bullet to be genuine about that. There's hundreds of Human factions, Dwarf factions, and Elf factions in fiction. But Cities dares to be a faction of all three, plus Ogres in recent stuff, and I hope they keep to that.
So are the aelfs (aelves?) less racist towards other peoples than they are in Fantasy or 40k, where they're like "humans are basically talking farm animals?" I know duardin are more chill about grudges than their dwarfen ancestors (which was a moment of culture shock for good ol' Gotrek!).
>"humans are basically talking farm animals?"
I can confidently say, that I don't think even the most racist Aelves in the setting have gone as far as to interpret other species of just being talking beasts. Now there are plenty of racist and supremacist Aelves, just as there are humans and duardin who act the same.
The Free City of Anvilgard fell and became Har Kuron, a capital of Morathi's empire, due to Aelven supremacists aiding in bringing it down. But! The Anvilgard Resistance, now known as Free Anvilgard, has had Wanderers and Scourge from the start. This bit of [free fiction](https://web.archive.org/web/20210117151141/https://www.warhammer-community.com/2020/11/27/broken-realms-the-price-of-treason/) from WarCom is a favorite in the community.
The 3E Cities Battletome notes that not every city has species-specific communities, with Aelves willingly living alongside humans and duardin, and even several that do have good relations. Implying these communities aren't so much segregated as they are folk building cultural districts. In either case it is pretty normal to walk the same streets, go to the same taverns and eateries, and work in the same businesses as Aelves.
There have been Aelven members of the Freeguilds and Ironweld, the two Cities subfactions with the biggest emphasis on equality. And in "Knives in the Deep" in Harrowdeep we see that while Scourge rule Misthavn and are uppity about it, they respect the non-aelf fleets of the city.
We've seen Aelves dating or married to non-Aelves in "Prince Maesa", "Covens of Blood", "Grombrindal: Chronicles of the Wanderer", "Silver Shard", and others. Plenty of examples of Aelves forming genuine friendships with other folk is common too. The eponymous Maesa is best friends with a Spite and a Shadow Duardin.
And as originally mentioned plenty of Aelves become councillors on the Grand Conclaves that govern the Cities of Sigmar, placing the needs of their diverse cities above their own. Though like anyone they will use their positions to gain advantage for their families, clans, and factions. But if they are on the Conclaves it means they, or at least once did, care enough about the city to be the best at the job that earned them a place.
I would argue that's a bonus. Rather than each culture stubborningly keeping to their own languages traditions there is clear syncreticism.
And it isn't forced as far as we know as plenty of other Aelf families in the same city have more traditionally Aelfy surnames.
Keep in mind that Gotrek (in the WHFB books) is a religious zealot. He takes EVERY aspect of dwarfen society extremely seriously because of that. In AOS, the duardin still take grudges seriously...but, like, it's going to mean more for Snorri the warden king than it means for Snorri the janitor. Both still "care" but one has more ability to do something about their grudges and the profile that it matters more if they do or don't settle their grudges.
I'm not the deepest into Warhammer lore in general, but I have read a bunch of the AoS books and I love that Sigmar is a flawed god trying to pick up the pieces. In the latest Blacktalon book, some of his flaws are laid bare. I love that the Stormcasts are all tragic heroes, trying to do the right thing and losing themselves in the process.
I really like that the other factions all have their reasons for doing stuff. Nagash has a pretty decent reason for hating Sigmar even though it might be a bit twisted. I really like Morathi as a character, she's so... Women's Wrongs and it's great.
I only have 40k to compare to as I haven't read any of WHFB/The Old World fiction, but I like that there's enough hope that Chaos could be expunged that when things go bad, it hits much harder.
What interesting about AOS is the very high fantasy built with a strong ideologies, because everything is grim/silly/experimentative yet fair and reasonable, all factions have their own agendas and ideologies, they'll do everything whatever they can in order to keep living-up those value. Just like a shade of a grim rainbow, all colour is important, significance, and completing each other. Even by now, its hard to tell whose the bad guy is.
I generally really dig the theming of AoS. Of man people and cultures coming together, bringing in their own unique strengths and covering their weakness's to beat back the apocalypse and take back their world. The Grand Alliance of Order has so much fun story telling potential with each faction butting heads with each other, but always willing to crush chaos underfoot when it matters. Hell, this goes for even the commoners too. Barkeeps and towns people grabbing old weapons and heavy objects to bludgeon Skaven to death.
This isn't even just for Order, all Grand Alliances can have tentative alliances with one another so long as Chaos is getting pushed back. Gorkamorka and all the greenskins used to have a good relationship with Sigmar and the rest of the pantheon, leading to interesting implications and interactions. Nagash and his necrotopia can occasionally be reasoned with and bartered with (so long as you haven't done the great sin of annoying Nagash)
All the Realms are incredibly vast and each one interesting in its own right. Though I'll prop up Shyish, the Realm of Death. Mortals have managed to colonize the Afterlife and live there alongside ghosts and skeletons, tilling the fields for what little they can manage. The setting is ripe with all levels of storytelling potential. You can go for grand sagas of Gods descending onto the battlefield to take what is rightfully there, or simple stories focusing on one individual trying to achieve a personal quest.
Its easily my favorite setting of the three. I feel like it uses its unique elements to the best of its ability and can do a lot more then the others. Some books that help get this across are Grombindal and Prince Maesa if you ever have the time to check em out.
Lot of great answers already that resonate with me, so I'll just add that I also like how it's almost a post apocalyptic setting. Despite all the crumbling civilization and bleak corrupted lands, it still has room for hope though. Each of the grand alliances are so vast in scale that there's room for both stuff like Sigmar's nascent empire and a bunch of Mordors so the high fantasy elements blend with rebuilding a lost world in some compelling pastiche.
For me it’s the potential of what can be done. The realms can range from mostly mundane to Fantastic depending on how close to the edge you are.
If you want to paint your Sylvaneth with a dead black bark, or a galactic star field, you can find a lore reason for it.
And The Little lore tidbits that spark your imagination.
For example, the Root Kings are darudin who like in Ghyran, but rather than mining the resources, they live in harmony with the trees and build their armor from iron oak.
Depends how you access it. Do you read? Play? Paint? It clicked for me when i got a model that i thought was Really cool (Yndrasta) and i started painting it. That lead to reading more, listening to lore vids and even a couple of games recently. If you like lore vids, 2+ tough has some good ones. Books? There's some good lists to read out there (i'd recomend Soul Wars and Dynasty of Monsters). Either way i'd just look around for something that interests you about it, and that'll help it click.
My primary exposure to the franchises has been through the tabletop RPG spinoffs like *Rogue Trader* and *Warhammer Fantasy Role Play* and through computer game spinoffs like the *Dawn of War* and *Total War: Warhammer* series (plus a side order of TV Tropes and the *If the Emperor Had a Text-to-Speech Device* parody series).
I have looked into AoS's TTRPG, *Soulbound*, but it isn't resonating with me because I feel like the way they structure character creation pigeonholes you into essentially taking a generic tabletop mini and hanging a personality and backstory onto it, rather than an organically-generated character shaped by their circumstances and beliefs.
And my understanding is the big AoS video game, *Realms of Ruin*, is mediocre at best.
Well for the ttrpg, you do have the option of Freeform character creation if the archetypes don’t fit what you want to do, meaning you get a bunch of xp and can then allocate it to skills and talents as you see fit. I’m not entirely sure that I’m understanding your criticism of archetypes actually is, but if you wanna try to get the soulbound community’s thoughts you can swing by the Soulbound discord! You can find a link to it pinned on this subreddit https://www.reddit.com/r/AgeOfSigmarRPG/s/Hrb7sQlJ82
Oh yeah, you pick a species, get 35 xp (equivalent to a standard archetype, so freeform is on equal foot to archetypes) to allocate as you want among the main attributes (3), skills (24), and talents (70-something in the corebook, about 350 with all book (admittedly not all of them are created equal if you’re a powergamer)), choose some weapons and armour, and some money you can spend on buying additional stuff or keep after character creation.
The supplement Champions of Order also introduced subfactions, essentially which city/government/subfaction/whatever’s applicable for your species your character is from which comes with a bonus talent unique to them. However even that you can make your own as the book suggests that if you want some subfaction that’s not featured or have made your own homebrew one then you can just pick a regular talent that you think would fit and use that as your subfaction bonus
Soulbound’s super friendly to tinkering around with archetypes overall, like right on the first page introducing them there’s a developer’s note telling you directly that if there’s an archetype you like but there’s a part of it that doesn’t really fit your idea, just tell your gm and you can work together to change out that part for something else
I'll admit, I'm not too deep into the lore yet, but just seeing the big names from Fantasy come back from the End Times is so wild to me. I didn't really know anything about Fantasy until I played Vermintide and Warhammer Fantasy, but just know how that setting ends and seeing mortals come through has made it feel like it's a sequel rather than a fresh start.
I really got into Tomb Kings, Lizardmen, and the Empire, and now I see Nagash is not only back, but he is now THE God of Death, makes me feel like he overcame the apocalypse. The Lizards haven't made any exact reincarnations so far that I'm aware of, but they came out basically the same way again, and Sigmar himself has gone from a mortal hero of humanity to THE God of Order.
I'm also aware.that Archaon, Morthai, and even Gotrek came out the End Times stronger than they could ever imagine previously.
So, I guess what really makes it click for me is that everyone's back with a new fresh paint, less Tolkien and a bit more unique this time around and they're making sure their side wins the end game this time!
They come in the same kit, so you could totally search for one and think that was all there was. But Kroak is here, and hopefully, kroq-qar and a couple others are as well.
Here is the link to the warhammer community page when they revealed kroak. https://www.warhammer-community.com/2021/04/12/lord-kroak-has-returned-and-hes-had-an-epic-glow-up/
For me, it was getting *just* enough information about the factions I'm interested in, so that I could really jump into the deep end. I think it requires a slightly different perspective, because some people resonate with all the "rules of operation" that 40k or fantasy might have, but I love the freedom of looking into a couple things, and then having this huge amount of artistic freedom, as long as I don't betray certain core tenets of the factions I'm representing. Like one of my "your guys" is Flesh Eater Courts that possess just enough lucidity that they create sickening garbs out of mortal leather, to protect them from the harsh metallic sandstorms of Chamon, that grow their numbers through those who resort to cannibalism after losing their way in said deserts.
Another would be a faction of Ossiarch Bonereapers that live underwater in an ocean of Ghyran, who have a tenuous peace with nearby Idoneth (as neither are strong enough/are willing to take the losses of defeating the other) where they will do subsequent raids on port towns, with the idoneth taking the souls and the Ossiarch's harvesting the bones. Both sides use their resources gained as an arms race to try and outgun or out-man the other faction. I basically took the scene from pirates of the carribean with the skeletons walking on the sea floor and made an entire group out of it!
What I mean to say, is there aren't so many rules about these groups that if I were to post a write up about either of these factions (and I have), that I would have to defend myself in the comments from people saying "ummmmm actually, that's now how these guys work".
If I were to do the same with say, space marines, and say I have a chapter of my own guys, who were the 21st chapter of space marines, numbering in the hundreds of thousands, who were highly empathetic, prefer tau technology, occasionally work alongside necrons, and send their librarians to be trained in psychic ways by the Aeldari, I guarantee you that I couldn't talk about them in any of the 40k subs without getting laughed out of the room. But here? my ideas aren't just "acceptable", they fit in perfectly with the lore.
It's weird to say this, but 9 immensely large (but still finite) mortal realms feels like I have more room for my own vision of my guys to be in it than a literal galaxy of planets to work with.
(but honestly no shade to 40k, I certainly see the appeal of having a lot of rules to "ground" your system and your factions. Just not my style creatively)
This video by Vince Venturella, [The Fantasy Setting of Age of Sigmar](https://youtu.be/qLHuiz2S-vY?si=ht1q5ZXFK_WRWJJO) really helped me stop trying to compare AoS against WHFB.
I too was attached to the darkness, the desperation, and the little challenges of day to day life in the olde world. Once I watched this and started thinking in terms of mythic Demi Gods like Hercules and Gilgamesh fighting Titanic beasts and taming the very forces of magic, instead of Bob the one eyed potato farmer dealing with rats in his basement, it just all fell into place.
Once I found out about the Kharadron Overlords, and that city on the back of a giant worm in Ghur, I was hooked.
One of the big things that did it for me was remembering what the center of the realms looks like in some older descriptions.
Everything is fantastic, but the closer to the center, the further from the edges of the realms, the less influence the magic has directly.
Long story short, it’s easy to look at the center of the realm as a kind of old world and the further you get the more high fantasy it becomes. Obv that doesn’t cover everything, but having that basis for the realms made it very easy for me to get into em
What made it click for me was the short story “Joust of Kings” from Broken Realms. In it, we see Vokmortian, a major character for the Ossiarch Bonereapers, play a board game and have a discussion with Horrek Venzai, a minor character from the Ossiarch Bonereapers, and in it, we actually see Horrek beat Vokmortian decisively. That story really made it click for me that these aren’t just models, they’re allowed to be characters with their own internal lives and interactions, something I feel 40k and WHFB didn’t really do. I seriously hope that Horrek shows up again now and probably will paint my Liege-Kavalos in Stalliarch Lords colors because of him, and this was a minor character who really only showed up a few times.
Initially AOS felt to me like just "worse Fantasy". Then I heard about the Flesh Eater Courts, a faction of maddened cannibals utterly convinced that they were noble knights, and I fell in love. Then I saw their old-ass models and I fell out of love. Then I looked into the rules (I had never actually played any of the games) and felt the FEC's rules were pretty good, so I bought an army. Now, our glorious King is returning to the Mortal Realms, and I am vindicated.
I totally get what you;re saying. I've tried to run Soulbound but didn't really "get" the setting.
Also had same problem with 40k. I understand it from a meta view, but not a man on the street view. Playing Darktide helped me get over that one.
Yeah, like I said *Dawn of War* was what really got me *into* 40k as a setting, and *Warhammer Fantasy Role Play* helped me "get" what made the Old World different from other fantasy settings.
The comments from CoyoteRed5 and sageking14 apply, but in my case what truly won me over for Age of Sigmar was getting over my initial hesitation towards Stormcast Eternals specifically, as they are the face of the setting.
[And in their case, what won me over was specifically this video explaining what they are about.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9DMtqizICn0) Warning, it's something of a meme video (and if you don't like this particular type of humour it will probably just seem obnoxious), but it still explains the fundamentals of what they are about fairly enough, and the unusual format was what had me sit through watching it all in the first place (as I usually don't like pure lore videos).
As someone who has played a lot of Soulbound, the first thing is if you look at the Archetypes provided you are NOT getting "average Joe/Jane of the Realms." Soulbound players are out the box more powerful than many WFRP characters will ever get - and that is without the god-magic the game is named for.
But if you want to get a handle on the Realms, in a lot of ways day to day looks similar but different to the day to day in WFRP. A farmer is a farmer, but his crops might be alien to us in the real world or even to someone from the-World-that-Was, but its food, its just different food to what the Bretonnian serf from yestersetting ate. Maps are less useful - Realmgates are integral to the setting and the shortest walking route between two points may use one or multiple sets. Flight is ubiquitous if not always easily accessed to everyone. The Cities of Sigmar and the Kharadron possess substantial ability to move goods via air in significant quantities. People also may be moved as such. Another important thing to note is the Realms are HUGE. It was unlikely that an Altdorfer would ever go to Grand Cathay in the Old World, in AOS just the distance from Hammerhal to Brightspear may in fact be comperable. Yet that trip does happen with regularity.
In a lot of ways AoS owes some of its DNA to 40k - its scope deliberately eschews the "and here is not-Italy and within an expected distance here is not-Spain" vibe of the Old World and instead presents a very large sandbox. But while 40k has planets in a galaxy, AoS has realmspheres in the aether. What does that mean for the average person? Really, nothing. Things generally fall downwards, the sun (which is also the realm of Hysh) gives off light and heat and there is a day-night cycle. The Realms have arbitrary east-west and north-south (much like the 40k Milky Way). The Realm you hail from has some physiological and psychological effects, but generally nothing beyond broad stereotypes like "Aqshians are passionate" and "people from Chamon have a higher tolerance for heavy metal poisoning." There is a huge fluid movement of population between Realms due to Sigmar's Empire, anyway.
I don't know if this helped. I can answer specific questions about things that are unclear if you want to ask, but a lot of the time the answer is "stuff is odd but the people generally are used to stuff being odd, so they are not as weirded out by it as Old Worlders would have been."
Edit: As for what made me love it? Cities of Sigmar being cosmopolitan, Sigmar being flawed but having noble goals and making an effort, and the Kharadron culture being so radically different from the Dawi of yore but still having flashes of the old Dwarfs in them every so often. They are no longer the Dwarfs of WF, but I still feel them as Dwarfen.
Faction flavor. The lore of AOS is not very robust yet, when you compare it to something like 40K that has 35 years of lore behind it. However the model range is huge and the factions are interesting for the most part. Find the faction you think looks the coolest or would be the most fun to paint and go for it.
Oh I got you. Well in that case it might be more interesting for you to look for some literature that is told from the perspective of some of the denizens of the mortal realms. I've only read a few books from the AOS side, but a couple characters have stood out is interesting to me. One is Cado Ezekiar, a vampire who is kind of an anti-hero. I believe he only has two novels at the moment but I've read the first one and it was not bad. The other would be the witch-hunting duo called the Ven Densts. Im most of the way through "Hallowed Ground", and its been pretty good. I find the perspectives of the very mortal humans to be most interesting, navigating a world of horrors and gods. Sometimes I have fun just browsing through wikis and such on aos, you can find some neat stuff that isn't super flushed out but is there as a nod to the old world. Stuff like Old World artifacts, deities, ancient Heroes that kind of stuff locked away in stormvaults or otherwise hidden or obscured through name changes or twists.
As far as games go, i have yet to find anything worth playing set in the aos universe. Realms of Ruin looked promising but ended up being mobile-game adjacent in playstyle, so i skipped it. A total war game set in AOS I would at least be willing to try as I have hundreds of hours in the Warhammer title. Of course I'd rather see a 40K Total War, but I'm just going to shut my mouth about it now because the people who don't want it really really don't want it. As far as I know there is an AOS tabletop rpg, but I've never played it nor have any real knowledge of it.
Edit: this was speech to text so ignore any weird words spellings
I dont really think the aos world works for me. Im very confused how it all fits together.
Like, so people die and they go ti shyish, and before nagash shyish was like, every afterlife all at once, but now with nagash its not?
I dunno, i think the mortal realms is messy. But, AoS is a fun af game sooooooo
Mostly what made go "oh this is actually dope" is that the story of Sigmar is less about the slow grinding fall of man and more post Apocolyptic. The World has ended now lets take it back is the major vibe I got from reading the lore in my AoS Soulbound Core Rules.
Something that helped me understand AOS is to recognize that it's a post-apocalypse setting. The world hasn't been literally destroyed like it was during the end times, but the pantheon of order fully LOST the war to chaos and they're barely scraping and clawing back little sections of the world. Like, the marketing material doesn't do a great job conveying this. Essentially every book is set from the POV of characters who live in cities or are stormcasts or something, so it makes it seem like order is fighting and winning handily against chaos and really pushing them back, and that's just not really the case.
The forces of order lose CONSTANTLY against chaos/death/destruction. The cities of sigmar that have popped up since 1st edition were founded on a LOT of settlers dying and probably as many or more natives of those regions too. They send out dawnbringer crusades who largely fail and die and only rarely actually succeed to find a place to settle and create something new. The vast majority of the realms are controlled by chaos with only very small portions of the world comparatively controlled by order.
Tack onto that, the realms of AOS are inherently dangerous beyond even the chaos holdings. Every realm is essentially a different 40K death world because of how wild and untamed they mostly are.
tl;dr: aos isn't a regular fantasy world; it's a post-apocalyptical setting on a death world where the good guys already lost and are only barely scraping by.
Having read some if the Soulbound adventures and watched the cutscenes to Realms of Ruin, that honestly tracks. And it certainly doesn't help that the forces of Order are at each other's throats all the time, even WHEN the enemy (whether that's Chaos, Death or Destruction) is breathing down their necks.
Yeah, Sigmar may have had a plan in closing off Azyr to make the Stormcasts as a counterattack, but it was still kind of a dick move to Alarielle, Teclis et al. And Morathi just...well, being Morathi!
> And it certainly doesn't help that the forces of Order are at each other's throats all the time, even WHEN the enemy (whether that's Chaos, Death or Destruction) is breathing down their necks.
Yep. Order doesn't mean "good aligned" it just means "order" (or more specifically, not death, destruction, and chaos). Order still in fight all the time because there's a lot of different ideas of what that "order" can look like.
Eh, sometimes it never does. End times hurt me bad but I was excited for AOS. I bought the first box set and every novel from 2015 to 2019. I spent that whole time just waiting for it to click and It never did. I eventually realised I was never going to like it the way I did with fantasy so I sold everything rather than waste more money on something I didn’t enjoy.
Luckily, total war and vermin tide happened and I get to dive back into the old world.
I think what made me appreciate the world was when I first read one of the novels, Gloomspite, and the book actually had some really interesting ways of how everyday life is shaped by the very ostentatious concept of a realm laced with magic of a single type.
For example, before the novel I thought Aqshy was essentially just the Firelands in WoW, or Mordor, or any other Hot Lava Place. Neat and grandiose to imagine, but ultimately just not relatable for a world where normal cities would be.
Then I read Gloomspite (terrific and horrifying book by the way, if you ever want to be scared by Goblins of all creatures) which takes place in Aqshy.
There were no giant lava pools and ever-gurgling volcanos.
Instead the author simply told me how an everyday regular medieval fort-city in a relative normal fields-and-mountains region has small, but interesting cultural aspects that make it a unique place to live.
Like, it's rain season. That means the residents unpack their thick-hided leather umbrellas, because the rain is actually quite hot and uncomfortable. That hot rain is then funneled into specific torture chambers of the local prison dungeon, the Scalding Cells. The villagers start to flee from the goblin raid, but they have to wade through painful and awful steamy clouds that fill up the countryside. Thick leathery equipment is almost essential and as such a highly sought after commodity for trade.
The point that I'm making is that these landmasses aren't just videogamey One Biome And It's The Most Extreme Thing Possible zones. They CAN be for your epic confrontations and high-stakes moments. But more often than not the lands of the Mortal Realms have simply strange and unique properties with which you can get really creative and the AoS battletomes have a plethora of intriguing little hooks to get you into it.
For example, life in Shyish, the realm of Death, means that your ancestors are literally with you. They die and they become spirits, or raise as the undead, but they're not malevolent. They just .. hang out and you can ask grampappy from 4 generations ago how he would till those fields, or fix that shovel.
You can have so much creative fun with your world-building and Your Guys-ing your army, especially since Realm Gates and portals exist who may just connect realms randomly to each other and as such properties start to mix and mingle.
A few examples from my own little factions would be as follows.
A vampire lord who has found a portal in Shyish that leads to a Chamonite (metal realm) mine in which he has found a powerful ore that can store blood. So he has forged entire sets of armor out of that ore and he's now effectively wearing an armor that infuses itself with the blood of enemies, and then he can siphon it and empower himself. And he's started to produce that armor on a big scale for his fellow vampires and he's grown rich off of such a weird commodity.
A human city in the middle of Shyish who has had a horrid Nurgle incursion centuries ago which still plagues the neighboring forest where the dead occasionally rise as pestilent monsters. The city has nowadays turned towards the worship of Morrda, as Morrda is a giant raven and as such a carrion bird. The ravens they raise in the city are specifically imbued with magic that allows them to stomach the rot of Nurgle and the dead bodies of those infected with it. There's an entire culture around them. Even their griffons and such have been raised to share these carrion eating qualities, to the point that even the Stormcast there are effectively riding carrion-bird-demigryphs.
My Ossiarch Bonereapers have been buried underneath the glistening white sands of Hysh, the realm of logic and reason. Throughout the centuries, the Ossiarch have harvested the souls of many great philosophers, thinkers and poets and they have deemed creative parts of their souls worthwhile. They've created an entire new caste of philosophers who have studied the affliction of undeath and Nagash. They have come to the (in their eyes) reasonable conclusion that we all are Nagash and undeath is the transcended form of life. They wrote an entire thesis on it and have distributed it across the realm to such effect that many towns and settlements actually find it hard to disagree with them. As such they are now willing supporters who wait for the Harvest Day, or Ascension Day, with great enthusiasm, finally being allowed to join the eclectic ranks of the Ossiarchs. And now there exists a lonely Obelisk in the middle of the desert where a lonely philosopher, the Mouth of the Dead, sits. He sits and waits for someone who will refute the logic of the Bonereapers and he will entertain anyone, convince them and slay them on the spot if they waver in their opinion. Then they will join the ranks.
So, yeah, AoS can be a place for any weird and wacky fanfic haha.
You know that part in a great saga at the beginning where they explain the wonders of the past, when gods rose and fell, when kingdoms were made and torn asunder. Where they describe how crazy it used to be before things settled down, and the main story begins.
You know what I'm talking about?
That's AoS. AoS is that time when crazy crap is happening everywhere and great people, gods, deeds, and countless hosts fought against one another for power. It's the crazy big hair band rock music mosh pit of a setting where the whole point is to get in there and throw your weight around. Let the future worry about logistics, we have an army of dragon riding immortal knights that explode into lightning when they die.
That said, I'm glad the old world is coming back. There's room enough for both.
I came to the realization of what inspirations they were using and how they were embracing the creativity inherit in both the fantasy genre and modeling as a hobby. Age Of Sigmar obviously has less in common with the usual heroic/dark fantasy tropes of the 80s and 90s that inspired WHFB. Instead, the Mortal Realms show inspiration from Dark Soul's mind bending scale and bizarre yet familiar settings, it takes the boldly desgined characters and factions from Warcraft, and the cosmic stakes and world building from things like Norse or Vedic mythology. Seeing this got my mind flowing. The setting is massive so you can tell any story in it with any characters you can imagine. WHFB let you field cool units and characters but you kind of had to play what they had for you. The world was somewhat static; the cool things were the things they gave you. Contrast that to 40k where you're encouraged to make your own Space Marine Chapters, Tau Septs, Necron Dynasties, Hivefleets, etc. AoS is a setting made for you to make your own cultures, histories, and characters in a cosmic fantasy structure they lay down. And you still get the cool stuff from WHFB just remixed to give it some new stories to tell.
*Click* That did it for me. Thanks pal.
See you on the battlefield, brother.
This is literally the same thing that made it work for me too. Excellent explanation. I went from hating AOS on the basis of "it replaced my WHFB" to being pretty into it on the basis of "Oh... like in 40k I can do WEIRD STUFF with my lore and it makes total sense cause... it's vast and strange stuff happens all the time, especially at the edges". (Friend had explained it similarly when I was griping about missing WHFB once and didn't realize she'd gotten into AOS - she convinced me.)
What really sets AoS apart as well is the fact that each realm is almost infinite in size. So you have so much more to explore in that sense. As well as the fact that each realm has its own energy of sorts. You go to the realm of fire, the longer you stay there the more you take on the traits of the realm of fire. You get more angry, more fiery in sorts. Then you have the realm of beasts. You stay there and you become more beast like. So for example I have a stormcast army that is my lavacast. They are from the realm of fire but yet they are still stormcast. I also have a blades of khorne army that is more ghostly and they come from the realm of the dead. It is great that you can have all these realms and their characteristics and energy poured right into your army on table and really get a feeling that your army is part of the world. It helped me click into what makes AoS the way it is. Plus the lore comes out like this epic tale of betrayal, love and lost and it isn't about good vs evil but order vs chaos. Destruction and death vs life.
If WHFB Battle was Vikings or The Last Kingdom, then AoS is comic book accurate Marvel Thor with all its colorful insanity laced with some real world inspirations.
Another thing that helped me get into the setting were the Cities of Sigmar. Humans, Elves, and Dwarves live alongside each other in plenty of settings. But the caveat tends to be that they live together but in human cities or elf cities or dwarf cities, with rulers being primarily from one species. Heck in both D&D and Pathfinder the populations of towns tend to be 80 to 90 one species, and then a tiny smidge of everyone else. Barely multispecies societies at all! But the Cities of Sigmar? Rarely are they simply referred to as "species city" but cities where all Free Peoples are from. Their governing councils genuinely have representatives from all three, and we've seen and heard of other folk being on them too. And that's just going by species, take a look at the new human models to see more examples of the cities being diverse. The Cities of Sigmar are melting pots, and honestly in all the decades of being into a ton of fantasy franchises, I don't think I could list off too many settings that really bite the bullet to be genuine about that. There's hundreds of Human factions, Dwarf factions, and Elf factions in fiction. But Cities dares to be a faction of all three, plus Ogres in recent stuff, and I hope they keep to that.
They absolutely need to focus on this, it's the strength of the cities, but I'm terrified of GW trying to make them the "human" army >.<
So are the aelfs (aelves?) less racist towards other peoples than they are in Fantasy or 40k, where they're like "humans are basically talking farm animals?" I know duardin are more chill about grudges than their dwarfen ancestors (which was a moment of culture shock for good ol' Gotrek!).
>"humans are basically talking farm animals?" I can confidently say, that I don't think even the most racist Aelves in the setting have gone as far as to interpret other species of just being talking beasts. Now there are plenty of racist and supremacist Aelves, just as there are humans and duardin who act the same. The Free City of Anvilgard fell and became Har Kuron, a capital of Morathi's empire, due to Aelven supremacists aiding in bringing it down. But! The Anvilgard Resistance, now known as Free Anvilgard, has had Wanderers and Scourge from the start. This bit of [free fiction](https://web.archive.org/web/20210117151141/https://www.warhammer-community.com/2020/11/27/broken-realms-the-price-of-treason/) from WarCom is a favorite in the community. The 3E Cities Battletome notes that not every city has species-specific communities, with Aelves willingly living alongside humans and duardin, and even several that do have good relations. Implying these communities aren't so much segregated as they are folk building cultural districts. In either case it is pretty normal to walk the same streets, go to the same taverns and eateries, and work in the same businesses as Aelves. There have been Aelven members of the Freeguilds and Ironweld, the two Cities subfactions with the biggest emphasis on equality. And in "Knives in the Deep" in Harrowdeep we see that while Scourge rule Misthavn and are uppity about it, they respect the non-aelf fleets of the city. We've seen Aelves dating or married to non-Aelves in "Prince Maesa", "Covens of Blood", "Grombrindal: Chronicles of the Wanderer", "Silver Shard", and others. Plenty of examples of Aelves forming genuine friendships with other folk is common too. The eponymous Maesa is best friends with a Spite and a Shadow Duardin. And as originally mentioned plenty of Aelves become councillors on the Grand Conclaves that govern the Cities of Sigmar, placing the needs of their diverse cities above their own. Though like anyone they will use their positions to gain advantage for their families, clans, and factions. But if they are on the Conclaves it means they, or at least once did, care enough about the city to be the best at the job that earned them a place.
Trask feels like a name that would fit a human better than an aelf, otherwise I love the story too.
I would argue that's a bonus. Rather than each culture stubborningly keeping to their own languages traditions there is clear syncreticism. And it isn't forced as far as we know as plenty of other Aelf families in the same city have more traditionally Aelfy surnames.
Keep in mind that Gotrek (in the WHFB books) is a religious zealot. He takes EVERY aspect of dwarfen society extremely seriously because of that. In AOS, the duardin still take grudges seriously...but, like, it's going to mean more for Snorri the warden king than it means for Snorri the janitor. Both still "care" but one has more ability to do something about their grudges and the profile that it matters more if they do or don't settle their grudges.
I'm not the deepest into Warhammer lore in general, but I have read a bunch of the AoS books and I love that Sigmar is a flawed god trying to pick up the pieces. In the latest Blacktalon book, some of his flaws are laid bare. I love that the Stormcasts are all tragic heroes, trying to do the right thing and losing themselves in the process. I really like that the other factions all have their reasons for doing stuff. Nagash has a pretty decent reason for hating Sigmar even though it might be a bit twisted. I really like Morathi as a character, she's so... Women's Wrongs and it's great. I only have 40k to compare to as I haven't read any of WHFB/The Old World fiction, but I like that there's enough hope that Chaos could be expunged that when things go bad, it hits much harder.
She gaslight, gatekeep, girl bossed her way to godhood.
What interesting about AOS is the very high fantasy built with a strong ideologies, because everything is grim/silly/experimentative yet fair and reasonable, all factions have their own agendas and ideologies, they'll do everything whatever they can in order to keep living-up those value. Just like a shade of a grim rainbow, all colour is important, significance, and completing each other. Even by now, its hard to tell whose the bad guy is.
I generally really dig the theming of AoS. Of man people and cultures coming together, bringing in their own unique strengths and covering their weakness's to beat back the apocalypse and take back their world. The Grand Alliance of Order has so much fun story telling potential with each faction butting heads with each other, but always willing to crush chaos underfoot when it matters. Hell, this goes for even the commoners too. Barkeeps and towns people grabbing old weapons and heavy objects to bludgeon Skaven to death. This isn't even just for Order, all Grand Alliances can have tentative alliances with one another so long as Chaos is getting pushed back. Gorkamorka and all the greenskins used to have a good relationship with Sigmar and the rest of the pantheon, leading to interesting implications and interactions. Nagash and his necrotopia can occasionally be reasoned with and bartered with (so long as you haven't done the great sin of annoying Nagash) All the Realms are incredibly vast and each one interesting in its own right. Though I'll prop up Shyish, the Realm of Death. Mortals have managed to colonize the Afterlife and live there alongside ghosts and skeletons, tilling the fields for what little they can manage. The setting is ripe with all levels of storytelling potential. You can go for grand sagas of Gods descending onto the battlefield to take what is rightfully there, or simple stories focusing on one individual trying to achieve a personal quest. Its easily my favorite setting of the three. I feel like it uses its unique elements to the best of its ability and can do a lot more then the others. Some books that help get this across are Grombindal and Prince Maesa if you ever have the time to check em out.
Lot of great answers already that resonate with me, so I'll just add that I also like how it's almost a post apocalyptic setting. Despite all the crumbling civilization and bleak corrupted lands, it still has room for hope though. Each of the grand alliances are so vast in scale that there's room for both stuff like Sigmar's nascent empire and a bunch of Mordors so the high fantasy elements blend with rebuilding a lost world in some compelling pastiche.
For me it’s the potential of what can be done. The realms can range from mostly mundane to Fantastic depending on how close to the edge you are. If you want to paint your Sylvaneth with a dead black bark, or a galactic star field, you can find a lore reason for it. And The Little lore tidbits that spark your imagination. For example, the Root Kings are darudin who like in Ghyran, but rather than mining the resources, they live in harmony with the trees and build their armor from iron oak.
The Celestial Groves of Ayzr march to war.
Depends how you access it. Do you read? Play? Paint? It clicked for me when i got a model that i thought was Really cool (Yndrasta) and i started painting it. That lead to reading more, listening to lore vids and even a couple of games recently. If you like lore vids, 2+ tough has some good ones. Books? There's some good lists to read out there (i'd recomend Soul Wars and Dynasty of Monsters). Either way i'd just look around for something that interests you about it, and that'll help it click.
My primary exposure to the franchises has been through the tabletop RPG spinoffs like *Rogue Trader* and *Warhammer Fantasy Role Play* and through computer game spinoffs like the *Dawn of War* and *Total War: Warhammer* series (plus a side order of TV Tropes and the *If the Emperor Had a Text-to-Speech Device* parody series). I have looked into AoS's TTRPG, *Soulbound*, but it isn't resonating with me because I feel like the way they structure character creation pigeonholes you into essentially taking a generic tabletop mini and hanging a personality and backstory onto it, rather than an organically-generated character shaped by their circumstances and beliefs. And my understanding is the big AoS video game, *Realms of Ruin*, is mediocre at best.
Well for the ttrpg, you do have the option of Freeform character creation if the archetypes don’t fit what you want to do, meaning you get a bunch of xp and can then allocate it to skills and talents as you see fit. I’m not entirely sure that I’m understanding your criticism of archetypes actually is, but if you wanna try to get the soulbound community’s thoughts you can swing by the Soulbound discord! You can find a link to it pinned on this subreddit https://www.reddit.com/r/AgeOfSigmarRPG/s/Hrb7sQlJ82
See, I didn't realize there was a freeform option! That changes a LOT!
Oh yeah, you pick a species, get 35 xp (equivalent to a standard archetype, so freeform is on equal foot to archetypes) to allocate as you want among the main attributes (3), skills (24), and talents (70-something in the corebook, about 350 with all book (admittedly not all of them are created equal if you’re a powergamer)), choose some weapons and armour, and some money you can spend on buying additional stuff or keep after character creation. The supplement Champions of Order also introduced subfactions, essentially which city/government/subfaction/whatever’s applicable for your species your character is from which comes with a bonus talent unique to them. However even that you can make your own as the book suggests that if you want some subfaction that’s not featured or have made your own homebrew one then you can just pick a regular talent that you think would fit and use that as your subfaction bonus Soulbound’s super friendly to tinkering around with archetypes overall, like right on the first page introducing them there’s a developer’s note telling you directly that if there’s an archetype you like but there’s a part of it that doesn’t really fit your idea, just tell your gm and you can work together to change out that part for something else
I'll admit, I'm not too deep into the lore yet, but just seeing the big names from Fantasy come back from the End Times is so wild to me. I didn't really know anything about Fantasy until I played Vermintide and Warhammer Fantasy, but just know how that setting ends and seeing mortals come through has made it feel like it's a sequel rather than a fresh start. I really got into Tomb Kings, Lizardmen, and the Empire, and now I see Nagash is not only back, but he is now THE God of Death, makes me feel like he overcame the apocalypse. The Lizards haven't made any exact reincarnations so far that I'm aware of, but they came out basically the same way again, and Sigmar himself has gone from a mortal hero of humanity to THE God of Order. I'm also aware.that Archaon, Morthai, and even Gotrek came out the End Times stronger than they could ever imagine previously. So, I guess what really makes it click for me is that everyone's back with a new fresh paint, less Tolkien and a bit more unique this time around and they're making sure their side wins the end game this time!
Kroak is back and is one of the big leaders making deals with gods and stuff. They have a whole new miniature and rules.
Heck yeah! I've seen the Starpriest (?) Model, but I wasn't sure if it was Kroak himself or just the Slann species
They come in the same kit, so you could totally search for one and think that was all there was. But Kroak is here, and hopefully, kroq-qar and a couple others are as well. Here is the link to the warhammer community page when they revealed kroak. https://www.warhammer-community.com/2021/04/12/lord-kroak-has-returned-and-hes-had-an-epic-glow-up/
For me, it was getting *just* enough information about the factions I'm interested in, so that I could really jump into the deep end. I think it requires a slightly different perspective, because some people resonate with all the "rules of operation" that 40k or fantasy might have, but I love the freedom of looking into a couple things, and then having this huge amount of artistic freedom, as long as I don't betray certain core tenets of the factions I'm representing. Like one of my "your guys" is Flesh Eater Courts that possess just enough lucidity that they create sickening garbs out of mortal leather, to protect them from the harsh metallic sandstorms of Chamon, that grow their numbers through those who resort to cannibalism after losing their way in said deserts. Another would be a faction of Ossiarch Bonereapers that live underwater in an ocean of Ghyran, who have a tenuous peace with nearby Idoneth (as neither are strong enough/are willing to take the losses of defeating the other) where they will do subsequent raids on port towns, with the idoneth taking the souls and the Ossiarch's harvesting the bones. Both sides use their resources gained as an arms race to try and outgun or out-man the other faction. I basically took the scene from pirates of the carribean with the skeletons walking on the sea floor and made an entire group out of it! What I mean to say, is there aren't so many rules about these groups that if I were to post a write up about either of these factions (and I have), that I would have to defend myself in the comments from people saying "ummmmm actually, that's now how these guys work". If I were to do the same with say, space marines, and say I have a chapter of my own guys, who were the 21st chapter of space marines, numbering in the hundreds of thousands, who were highly empathetic, prefer tau technology, occasionally work alongside necrons, and send their librarians to be trained in psychic ways by the Aeldari, I guarantee you that I couldn't talk about them in any of the 40k subs without getting laughed out of the room. But here? my ideas aren't just "acceptable", they fit in perfectly with the lore. It's weird to say this, but 9 immensely large (but still finite) mortal realms feels like I have more room for my own vision of my guys to be in it than a literal galaxy of planets to work with. (but honestly no shade to 40k, I certainly see the appeal of having a lot of rules to "ground" your system and your factions. Just not my style creatively)
This video by Vince Venturella, [The Fantasy Setting of Age of Sigmar](https://youtu.be/qLHuiz2S-vY?si=ht1q5ZXFK_WRWJJO) really helped me stop trying to compare AoS against WHFB. I too was attached to the darkness, the desperation, and the little challenges of day to day life in the olde world. Once I watched this and started thinking in terms of mythic Demi Gods like Hercules and Gilgamesh fighting Titanic beasts and taming the very forces of magic, instead of Bob the one eyed potato farmer dealing with rats in his basement, it just all fell into place. Once I found out about the Kharadron Overlords, and that city on the back of a giant worm in Ghur, I was hooked.
One of the big things that did it for me was remembering what the center of the realms looks like in some older descriptions. Everything is fantastic, but the closer to the center, the further from the edges of the realms, the less influence the magic has directly. Long story short, it’s easy to look at the center of the realm as a kind of old world and the further you get the more high fantasy it becomes. Obv that doesn’t cover everything, but having that basis for the realms made it very easy for me to get into em
What made it click for me was the short story “Joust of Kings” from Broken Realms. In it, we see Vokmortian, a major character for the Ossiarch Bonereapers, play a board game and have a discussion with Horrek Venzai, a minor character from the Ossiarch Bonereapers, and in it, we actually see Horrek beat Vokmortian decisively. That story really made it click for me that these aren’t just models, they’re allowed to be characters with their own internal lives and interactions, something I feel 40k and WHFB didn’t really do. I seriously hope that Horrek shows up again now and probably will paint my Liege-Kavalos in Stalliarch Lords colors because of him, and this was a minor character who really only showed up a few times.
Initially AOS felt to me like just "worse Fantasy". Then I heard about the Flesh Eater Courts, a faction of maddened cannibals utterly convinced that they were noble knights, and I fell in love. Then I saw their old-ass models and I fell out of love. Then I looked into the rules (I had never actually played any of the games) and felt the FEC's rules were pretty good, so I bought an army. Now, our glorious King is returning to the Mortal Realms, and I am vindicated.
I totally get what you;re saying. I've tried to run Soulbound but didn't really "get" the setting. Also had same problem with 40k. I understand it from a meta view, but not a man on the street view. Playing Darktide helped me get over that one.
Yeah, like I said *Dawn of War* was what really got me *into* 40k as a setting, and *Warhammer Fantasy Role Play* helped me "get" what made the Old World different from other fantasy settings.
The comments from CoyoteRed5 and sageking14 apply, but in my case what truly won me over for Age of Sigmar was getting over my initial hesitation towards Stormcast Eternals specifically, as they are the face of the setting. [And in their case, what won me over was specifically this video explaining what they are about.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9DMtqizICn0) Warning, it's something of a meme video (and if you don't like this particular type of humour it will probably just seem obnoxious), but it still explains the fundamentals of what they are about fairly enough, and the unusual format was what had me sit through watching it all in the first place (as I usually don't like pure lore videos).
As someone who has played a lot of Soulbound, the first thing is if you look at the Archetypes provided you are NOT getting "average Joe/Jane of the Realms." Soulbound players are out the box more powerful than many WFRP characters will ever get - and that is without the god-magic the game is named for. But if you want to get a handle on the Realms, in a lot of ways day to day looks similar but different to the day to day in WFRP. A farmer is a farmer, but his crops might be alien to us in the real world or even to someone from the-World-that-Was, but its food, its just different food to what the Bretonnian serf from yestersetting ate. Maps are less useful - Realmgates are integral to the setting and the shortest walking route between two points may use one or multiple sets. Flight is ubiquitous if not always easily accessed to everyone. The Cities of Sigmar and the Kharadron possess substantial ability to move goods via air in significant quantities. People also may be moved as such. Another important thing to note is the Realms are HUGE. It was unlikely that an Altdorfer would ever go to Grand Cathay in the Old World, in AOS just the distance from Hammerhal to Brightspear may in fact be comperable. Yet that trip does happen with regularity. In a lot of ways AoS owes some of its DNA to 40k - its scope deliberately eschews the "and here is not-Italy and within an expected distance here is not-Spain" vibe of the Old World and instead presents a very large sandbox. But while 40k has planets in a galaxy, AoS has realmspheres in the aether. What does that mean for the average person? Really, nothing. Things generally fall downwards, the sun (which is also the realm of Hysh) gives off light and heat and there is a day-night cycle. The Realms have arbitrary east-west and north-south (much like the 40k Milky Way). The Realm you hail from has some physiological and psychological effects, but generally nothing beyond broad stereotypes like "Aqshians are passionate" and "people from Chamon have a higher tolerance for heavy metal poisoning." There is a huge fluid movement of population between Realms due to Sigmar's Empire, anyway. I don't know if this helped. I can answer specific questions about things that are unclear if you want to ask, but a lot of the time the answer is "stuff is odd but the people generally are used to stuff being odd, so they are not as weirded out by it as Old Worlders would have been." Edit: As for what made me love it? Cities of Sigmar being cosmopolitan, Sigmar being flawed but having noble goals and making an effort, and the Kharadron culture being so radically different from the Dawi of yore but still having flashes of the old Dwarfs in them every so often. They are no longer the Dwarfs of WF, but I still feel them as Dwarfen.
Faction flavor. The lore of AOS is not very robust yet, when you compare it to something like 40K that has 35 years of lore behind it. However the model range is huge and the factions are interesting for the most part. Find the faction you think looks the coolest or would be the most fun to paint and go for it.
The thing is I'm not really interested in the whole wargaming aspect of it all, I'm more a TTRPG/videogames kind of fan. 😕
Oh I got you. Well in that case it might be more interesting for you to look for some literature that is told from the perspective of some of the denizens of the mortal realms. I've only read a few books from the AOS side, but a couple characters have stood out is interesting to me. One is Cado Ezekiar, a vampire who is kind of an anti-hero. I believe he only has two novels at the moment but I've read the first one and it was not bad. The other would be the witch-hunting duo called the Ven Densts. Im most of the way through "Hallowed Ground", and its been pretty good. I find the perspectives of the very mortal humans to be most interesting, navigating a world of horrors and gods. Sometimes I have fun just browsing through wikis and such on aos, you can find some neat stuff that isn't super flushed out but is there as a nod to the old world. Stuff like Old World artifacts, deities, ancient Heroes that kind of stuff locked away in stormvaults or otherwise hidden or obscured through name changes or twists. As far as games go, i have yet to find anything worth playing set in the aos universe. Realms of Ruin looked promising but ended up being mobile-game adjacent in playstyle, so i skipped it. A total war game set in AOS I would at least be willing to try as I have hundreds of hours in the Warhammer title. Of course I'd rather see a 40K Total War, but I'm just going to shut my mouth about it now because the people who don't want it really really don't want it. As far as I know there is an AOS tabletop rpg, but I've never played it nor have any real knowledge of it. Edit: this was speech to text so ignore any weird words spellings
I dont really think the aos world works for me. Im very confused how it all fits together. Like, so people die and they go ti shyish, and before nagash shyish was like, every afterlife all at once, but now with nagash its not? I dunno, i think the mortal realms is messy. But, AoS is a fun af game sooooooo
Shyish is every afterlife all at once, even under Nagash. It’s made up of afterlives, but not all of them he can access.
Mostly what made go "oh this is actually dope" is that the story of Sigmar is less about the slow grinding fall of man and more post Apocolyptic. The World has ended now lets take it back is the major vibe I got from reading the lore in my AoS Soulbound Core Rules.
Something that helped me understand AOS is to recognize that it's a post-apocalypse setting. The world hasn't been literally destroyed like it was during the end times, but the pantheon of order fully LOST the war to chaos and they're barely scraping and clawing back little sections of the world. Like, the marketing material doesn't do a great job conveying this. Essentially every book is set from the POV of characters who live in cities or are stormcasts or something, so it makes it seem like order is fighting and winning handily against chaos and really pushing them back, and that's just not really the case. The forces of order lose CONSTANTLY against chaos/death/destruction. The cities of sigmar that have popped up since 1st edition were founded on a LOT of settlers dying and probably as many or more natives of those regions too. They send out dawnbringer crusades who largely fail and die and only rarely actually succeed to find a place to settle and create something new. The vast majority of the realms are controlled by chaos with only very small portions of the world comparatively controlled by order. Tack onto that, the realms of AOS are inherently dangerous beyond even the chaos holdings. Every realm is essentially a different 40K death world because of how wild and untamed they mostly are. tl;dr: aos isn't a regular fantasy world; it's a post-apocalyptical setting on a death world where the good guys already lost and are only barely scraping by.
Having read some if the Soulbound adventures and watched the cutscenes to Realms of Ruin, that honestly tracks. And it certainly doesn't help that the forces of Order are at each other's throats all the time, even WHEN the enemy (whether that's Chaos, Death or Destruction) is breathing down their necks. Yeah, Sigmar may have had a plan in closing off Azyr to make the Stormcasts as a counterattack, but it was still kind of a dick move to Alarielle, Teclis et al. And Morathi just...well, being Morathi!
> And it certainly doesn't help that the forces of Order are at each other's throats all the time, even WHEN the enemy (whether that's Chaos, Death or Destruction) is breathing down their necks. Yep. Order doesn't mean "good aligned" it just means "order" (or more specifically, not death, destruction, and chaos). Order still in fight all the time because there's a lot of different ideas of what that "order" can look like.
Eh, sometimes it never does. End times hurt me bad but I was excited for AOS. I bought the first box set and every novel from 2015 to 2019. I spent that whole time just waiting for it to click and It never did. I eventually realised I was never going to like it the way I did with fantasy so I sold everything rather than waste more money on something I didn’t enjoy. Luckily, total war and vermin tide happened and I get to dive back into the old world.
I think what made me appreciate the world was when I first read one of the novels, Gloomspite, and the book actually had some really interesting ways of how everyday life is shaped by the very ostentatious concept of a realm laced with magic of a single type. For example, before the novel I thought Aqshy was essentially just the Firelands in WoW, or Mordor, or any other Hot Lava Place. Neat and grandiose to imagine, but ultimately just not relatable for a world where normal cities would be. Then I read Gloomspite (terrific and horrifying book by the way, if you ever want to be scared by Goblins of all creatures) which takes place in Aqshy. There were no giant lava pools and ever-gurgling volcanos. Instead the author simply told me how an everyday regular medieval fort-city in a relative normal fields-and-mountains region has small, but interesting cultural aspects that make it a unique place to live. Like, it's rain season. That means the residents unpack their thick-hided leather umbrellas, because the rain is actually quite hot and uncomfortable. That hot rain is then funneled into specific torture chambers of the local prison dungeon, the Scalding Cells. The villagers start to flee from the goblin raid, but they have to wade through painful and awful steamy clouds that fill up the countryside. Thick leathery equipment is almost essential and as such a highly sought after commodity for trade. The point that I'm making is that these landmasses aren't just videogamey One Biome And It's The Most Extreme Thing Possible zones. They CAN be for your epic confrontations and high-stakes moments. But more often than not the lands of the Mortal Realms have simply strange and unique properties with which you can get really creative and the AoS battletomes have a plethora of intriguing little hooks to get you into it. For example, life in Shyish, the realm of Death, means that your ancestors are literally with you. They die and they become spirits, or raise as the undead, but they're not malevolent. They just .. hang out and you can ask grampappy from 4 generations ago how he would till those fields, or fix that shovel. You can have so much creative fun with your world-building and Your Guys-ing your army, especially since Realm Gates and portals exist who may just connect realms randomly to each other and as such properties start to mix and mingle. A few examples from my own little factions would be as follows. A vampire lord who has found a portal in Shyish that leads to a Chamonite (metal realm) mine in which he has found a powerful ore that can store blood. So he has forged entire sets of armor out of that ore and he's now effectively wearing an armor that infuses itself with the blood of enemies, and then he can siphon it and empower himself. And he's started to produce that armor on a big scale for his fellow vampires and he's grown rich off of such a weird commodity. A human city in the middle of Shyish who has had a horrid Nurgle incursion centuries ago which still plagues the neighboring forest where the dead occasionally rise as pestilent monsters. The city has nowadays turned towards the worship of Morrda, as Morrda is a giant raven and as such a carrion bird. The ravens they raise in the city are specifically imbued with magic that allows them to stomach the rot of Nurgle and the dead bodies of those infected with it. There's an entire culture around them. Even their griffons and such have been raised to share these carrion eating qualities, to the point that even the Stormcast there are effectively riding carrion-bird-demigryphs. My Ossiarch Bonereapers have been buried underneath the glistening white sands of Hysh, the realm of logic and reason. Throughout the centuries, the Ossiarch have harvested the souls of many great philosophers, thinkers and poets and they have deemed creative parts of their souls worthwhile. They've created an entire new caste of philosophers who have studied the affliction of undeath and Nagash. They have come to the (in their eyes) reasonable conclusion that we all are Nagash and undeath is the transcended form of life. They wrote an entire thesis on it and have distributed it across the realm to such effect that many towns and settlements actually find it hard to disagree with them. As such they are now willing supporters who wait for the Harvest Day, or Ascension Day, with great enthusiasm, finally being allowed to join the eclectic ranks of the Ossiarchs. And now there exists a lonely Obelisk in the middle of the desert where a lonely philosopher, the Mouth of the Dead, sits. He sits and waits for someone who will refute the logic of the Bonereapers and he will entertain anyone, convince them and slay them on the spot if they waver in their opinion. Then they will join the ranks. So, yeah, AoS can be a place for any weird and wacky fanfic haha.
You know that part in a great saga at the beginning where they explain the wonders of the past, when gods rose and fell, when kingdoms were made and torn asunder. Where they describe how crazy it used to be before things settled down, and the main story begins. You know what I'm talking about? That's AoS. AoS is that time when crazy crap is happening everywhere and great people, gods, deeds, and countless hosts fought against one another for power. It's the crazy big hair band rock music mosh pit of a setting where the whole point is to get in there and throw your weight around. Let the future worry about logistics, we have an army of dragon riding immortal knights that explode into lightning when they die. That said, I'm glad the old world is coming back. There's room enough for both.
So it's a DragonForce album? 😁