Regarding Warren’s comment that GW should’ve kept WHFB ‘in a holding pattern’ while introducing AoS and letting AoS go off and do it’s own thing while WHFB chugs along in the background, something I’ve always maintained is that AoS would have had a far less controversial launch if it had come out as an additional system rather than as a replacement to WHFB; by nuking Fantasy it tainted the well so to speak, and the emotions it generated prevented many from giving AoS a fair chance. There were other issues at launch, but I think that was one of the bigger missteps.

On the subject of GW expanding into Historicals, aside from it being given to a big name within the studio as a pet project, I suppose it’d depend on how easy it’d be for them to reskin their existing rule sets and how much a print run would cost for books. I couldn’t see them branching out into minis for the reasons cited, but if there was a cheap way of skimming some money from the historics pool, they might just do that. It might only be selling a few books, but if the gain outweighed the loss they might think it’s worth it. Also might depend on how likely they think they can convince historics players to move over into sci-fi/fantasy gaming by using Warhammer Historical as a gateway; eg if they based the rules for a Renascence ruleset on WHFB then for any historics players who pick it up they can dangle ‘hey all you need is to buy a wizard and a box of demigryph riders and add them to your historic army and you get an Empire army, plus you already know most of the rules to play already’ in front of them to try and tempt them in before trying to sell them dwarfs, Elves, etc. Of course this probably won’t bring in many of those players and for those that do, selling just a couple of minis to each probably wouldn’t generate enough revenue to be worth it, so it’s likely they wouldn’t go down that route.

One thing I am curious about with this annocement about the Old World is is this something they’ve wanted to do for a long time but felt unable to do because they had to commit to seeing AoS through as trying to go back on it and reverse the decision to nuke the Old World would have been business suicide so early on? Now AoS has had chance to stand on its own merits and tempers have had time to cool down, do they feel it’s now safe to bring WHFB back without upsetting more people?

@warzan – for ideas for the shroom forest, look up vids/images of the Glimwood Tangle from the new Pokemon games; it’d fit in with your fluorescent idea (in the games there’s this dark creepy forest with all these glowing giant shrooms and you can go up to the shrooms and tap them to get them to light up even more, and when you do there’s a chance a goblin/imp Pokemon will jump out and attack you).