Armies are likely being condensed, meaning there will be a single elf army, a single human army, etc. The regimented combat, with ranks of troops, will be scuttled in favor of a skirmish system, a la Warhammer 40000. A new edition of Warhammer is coming out this summer and it’s taking the game in a nearly unrecognizable direction.
The rumors are remarkably consistent about what’s coming, though the small details will almost certainly not be 100% correct when everything is out. What is different is that this time they’re not joking about ending the world after flirting with it and always backing down. But there’s been plenty of bad writing out of Games Workshop’s fiction wing (and a bit of good), so that’s not that different from the norm. The writing is, if the final snippet is anything to go by, less than stellar. Quite against historical type, the good guys are lining up on one side and the baddies on the other for a big conflict. Novels are being released, as are army lists and miniatures so you can fight the End Times, as they’re calling it. Over the past year, they’ve cooked up a story that ends with blowing up the world. Games Workshop is killing Warhammer Fantasy Battle. I spent a 1996 vacation in Exeter, ostensibly to visit my mother, gaming all hours with the local store manager, a guy named Dan who loved raves, beer and Orks. I remember working at Cosmic Castle, Greensboro’s greatest gaming store, in 1995 and befriending a fellow GW nut, playing Necromunda in 10 hour sessions at his tiny house. In my teenage swagger, I lost my copy of Realm of Chaos: The Lost and the Damned-the greatest book Games Workshop ever published-in a game of 8-ball. I still loved roleplaying games, but my first love, for most of my life, was Games Workshop. And a White Dwarf subscription, several times. Then Warhammer 40000 ( Rogue Trader, no real army lists!) and Blood Bowl. I got Warhammer Fantasy Battle and Warhammer Siege. The lone hero of D&D was fine, but the invisible general of a Warhammer army was even better. I was looking at regiments of fantasy bad guys, fighting each other (bad guys fight each other?) with magic swords and demon wizards swooping around.
In those days, Games Workshop limited their reports to diagrams of the action rather than photos, but it didn’t matter. I could touch these miniatures, if I had them, and make them mine.Ībove all, I was smitten with the battle report in the issue, Orcs vs Chaos (what the hell is Chaos?). White Dwarf showed me something visceral and tangible. I loved D&D, but in those days the pictures of cool monsters were weighed down by dry text trying to get you to simulate drowning or falling or dimension hopping that 12 year old Ian glossed over in favor of going all in on little boy Monty Haul power trips. All of it was so British and 80s and heavy metal (it even says, in the painting galleries, that it’s “’Eavy Metal”) that it was completely outside my frame of reference. A whole section on what orc society is like in space. Diagrams of tanks with drills and laser cannons. There are demons with big faces giving the reader the finger. Page after page of lead figures, painted up in garish colors. You can scroll through that scan of the magazine and see. Instead, it had weird stuff we’d never seen before. White Dwarf 123 didn’t have any Dungeons & Dragons material in it. She saw White Dwarf and reckoned it was up our alley. She knew that my brother and I were into Dungeons & Dragons. My mother, an ex-pat living in England, sent it to me. I remember my first encounter with Games Workshop: White Dwarf, issue 123.
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