Boole (the guy who leaked most of AoS stuff before its release) dropped a bomb "We received word about this a while back — but along with it came a flood of conflicting information. In hindsight, those inconsistencies were probably just staffers throwing up smoke because they were in shock themselves. The worst version of the story is one we’d rather not post here. It wouldn’t accomplish anything — just break the hearts of fans and undo years of AoS’s momentum. But after getting some images and transcriptions of the actual text from the PDFs, we had a discussion internally and can confirm: Rob on YouTube, and the Discord member were accurate. I’ll be upfront — the people behind this account, meaning us, were never fans of AoS. More than a decade ago, we were outright hostile to it. But even we are furious at how this turned out. The dumbest scenario imaginable is happening all over again. WHFB fans won’t pay for this, and AoS fans will be absolutely livid. What makes it worse is that AoS has never been a commercial failure. Last time something like this went down — and you all know what I’m talking about — it was because WHFB had become a genuine commercial disaster by a certain point. That’s what pushed the higher-ups into making a reckless decision. AoS, though? It’s never fallen that low. From what we know, since 2018, it’s been Games Workshop’s second-biggest product line after 40K, for WHFB fans like us, is wild. Even if we don’t like admitting AoS counts as Warhammer Fantasy Miniatures, internally it’s been labeled as the “Greatest Warhammer Fantasy” product. So none of this makes sense. The people still at GW who gave us info don’t get it either. Most of the people who’ve worked on AoS are baffled. But maybe Phil Kelly leaving was the first sign of what was coming. We were going to wait until after AdeptiCon to announce any of this — because this is definitely going to trigger internal investigations at GW — but we just can’t hold it in anymore. We think it’s time to lay everything out. As we posted a few days ago: “Slaanesh is free. The Realms that have been mapped, the Cities of Sigmar, the Chorfs’ cities — they’re not gone.” Because all of those known locations are being merged into a single planet! A Battleworld! The Realms have been combined! Eighty percent of what AoS has spent over a decade building is gone! And yes — this is all thanks to Archaon and the Skaven. Again. After all of it, only the Skaven can call themselves winners. Their lore and their new model range stay exactly as they are — and they definitely come out on top. After the gates of Azyr were breached, Archaon destroyed everything. Anything you can think of in that realm was utterly annihilated by the Everchosen. But at the last moment, Sigmar pulled the trigger on a Big Plan he’d been preparing for centuries. He always wanted to merge the Realms into a single new planet, and in the final hour, he went through with it. So here we are. As for what happened to Sigmar? Archaon killed him like you’d crush a child. His death is written to be even more infuriating than The Death of Sanguinius in <The End and the Death>. You can tell whoever wrote this had it out for Sigmar — and maybe for AoS in general. What about the SCE? I don’t think they can reforge anymore. Their god is dead. The Aelven Pantheon? Nagash? The Ancestor Gods? Gorkamorka? All unaccounted for. Maybe Archaon killed them too. With the Realms destroyed, Slaanesh is back among the Dark Gods, and they’ve accepted the Great Horned Rat as one of them. The Five Gods stand eternal. This new world is called The Last World. Its continents are made up of the regions that had maps in the Eight Realms, stitched together. And the whole thing is a blatant, low-quality rehash of WHFB. For example: the Great Nations of Hysh, home of the Lumineth, now exist as an island nation in the middle of an ocean… CoS have basically turned back into The Empire — fragmented, ignorant, religiously fanatical, and racially divided. We’re pretty sure a lot of the characters AoS fans know and love died in The Last World. They’re not coming back. As for Archaon — I’m not sure. The information we got about him was almost comical. “The Everchosen is gathering a Chaos army at a portal in the far north of The Last World.” We’re not even sure if that “Everchosen” is Archaon. But it sure sounds familiar. Who’s actually going to pay for this? AoS fans — will you? The only advice I can give right now is: if after all these lore changes you’re still willing to buy into AoS, 5th Edition will have way more SCE models with a grimmer, darker aesthetic than 4th — and a ton of Chaos Warriors covered in spikes and Chaos monsters. As for the rest? We don’t know. That’s all we wanted to say. We’re exhausted, and we’re still figuring out if we should scrap this account. This is so big it’s definitely going to come back on us. We have no idea if GW will change anything about Fifth Edition over the next two years, but the first draft is done, and we’ve seen plenty of concept art. So odds of a major rewrite are probably low. The one silver lining — and I mean the only one — is that The Last World will have several new human factions. AoS-Not Grand Cathay AoS-Not Nippon AoS-Not Bretonnia
Well... probably hoard more Lizard models before they are harder to get by. And switch to The Old World - for as long as that may exist(?) Grrr, !mrahil
Before this thread, I hadn't heard about any of this. Surely this is just a narrative change, no? There is no way that Games Workshop would End Times a game as successful as Age of Sigmar.
To be honest I'm not surprised... though many seem to claim AoS remains a popular game, certainly in my area of Britain interest in it has cratered since TOW came out, meaning relatively few people have had a vested interest in AoS as a separate game and background - they were just using it to satisfy their fantasy fix until Warhammer Fantasy came back. Certainly I've only ever bought 'AoS' models to use in Warhammer Fantasy, and I wouldn't be at all surprised if many others have done the same. No new factions to draw in new groups of fans except for the returning Dawi-Zharr and extremely mediocre game changes since the game's peak in 2nd Edition have not helped one bit either. Even if - supposedly - AoS hasn't been a financial disaster in the league that the tail end of 8th Edition Fantasy supposedly was (according to that rumourmonger anyway), it certainly hasn't captured the wealth of people's attention that GW hoped it would in an attempt to get it to match 40K in popularity. Over the past couple of editions it just seems to have become the definition of mediocrity - neither successful enough to become a similar bedrock of modern wargaming as 40K, nor unsuccessful enough to warrant complete cancellation. Though I certainly don't mind seeing Sigmar get killed off at all, I rather think whoever is planning these lore changes, if they are true, is more of an Archaon fanboy than a Sigmar-hater or an AoS-hater... making him win yet again even more easily than the End Times of Warhammer Fantasy is just insufferable - though the mention of just an Everchosen that hasn't been confirmed to be Archaon appearing in the new world gives me hope that he might well ultimately meet his match as the rest of the remaining AoS characters have. Let Grimgor (or his AoS counterpart Gordrakk) kick him in the nether-regions and proclaim himself Da Fightiest once more . With none of the characters in AoS being ones I particularly cared about anyway (especially the few that returned from Warhammer Fantasy, all of which were in my opinion poor or uninteresting choices) this certainly wouldn't bother me. So we're now getting The Last World, supposedly, to contrast with The Old World... will the game be fully going back to rank-and-flank rules? Square bases, too? In some ways AoS has been steadily encroaching back to Warhammer Fantasy territory already, with the Battletomes adopting the red livery from 8th Edition Fantasy, and the game's units being less freeform than they were in 1st and 2nd, so it will be interesting to see if the rules changes they implement will be another big shift back towards AoS' primogenitor. Will I consider the new edition worth picking up? Likely not, as I'm much too invested back into TOW and the Warhammer Fantasy world to care too much. However, I will be interested to watch from the sidelines and observe what truly happens.
I am sort of on the sideline with you guys. I do not play the game. And the Lore of WHFB has always been more interesting than that of AOS. I hope we still get some new models sometime. Grrr, !mrahil
The game that ended Warhammer Fantasy will now be ended itself. And Warhammer Fantasy has come back, just to rub salt into the wound
But doesn't Age of Sigmar sell much better than Warhammer Fantasy did? Does anybody else think that this is just a narrative change and not the death of Age of Sigmar?
Yes, you're right, however it's not a change for the good. I'll cite a friend of mine which is much more into AoS and followed the Lore evolution up til now: "I've seen a lot of people claiming the mortal realms were too weird and this was somehow keeping a lot of people from the game. I don't personally see it, but people claim to have that opinion themselves and i can't say they're lying about their own opinions. Regardless of whether it's generally true of potential fans, it's /certainly/ been true of the modern AoS development team. The AoS team in 1e and 2e like to tell multi-realm style big picture stories - Realmgate Wars, Points of Light, Malign Portents, leading into a 2nd edition that had bespoke rules gor setting individual games in 7 different realms and for theming your army's irigin to any of them, and each new battletome fleshed out new details of different realms & established new ongoing narratived taking part in them. Starting in 3rd, almost all of that wen't away. The people in charge were almost entirely focused on just one realm, new battletomes added very little in terms of narrative advancement at all, and much less detail on anything going on in other realms - Among undead factions the worst impact of this was for Soulblight, where the civil war between Neferata and Mannfred should have been a major event getting a lot of focus, at least within the Soulblight battletome, but it wasn't happening in Ghur so nothing. Even worse - and this is what really kills my hopes for 'battle world' - the studio didn't even seem to have any interest in telling a story within the more narrow scope they had set up for themselved. "Having just a dingle realm to work with will make it easier to establish details and tell a coherent story" - they had only one realm to focus on in all of 3e and they didn't really do either of those things. The narrative books in 1e and 2e actually told stories. The quality of those stories can be debated, but stuff /happened/ in ghd realmgate wars, in the Wrath of the Everchosen, etc. There was a sequence of events leading to various outcomed that impacted the state of the overall setting. In contrast, literally nothing happens in Thondia or Ravaged Coast. These books introduce particular locales & invite players to 'tell their own stories' in them, which is not the same thing. So yeah, the problem with AoS lore, imo, isn't the setting itsdlf, but the current studio's refusal to do anything in it outside of the edition changeover campaigns, and that's not a prpblem that merging the realms together does anything for."
I guess we'll have to wait and see. I don't know enough about Age of Sigmar to comment. Hopefully it turns out well.
That said, I agree that this looks like a narrative change and nothing more. Some AoS players may not like it, but it is unlikely to have any long lasting ill effects on the game.