Reply To: WHtOW – fluff and does it make sense ?

[onlyonepinman 18062xp 1]

It’s a fantasy world, Cathay exists in it and therefore it makes sense. You are reading way too much into it.

The Empire being beset by internal strife isn’t a reason for Games Workshop not to introduce Cathay as a playable faction. It’s not like the rest of the world fades in and out of existence based on how busy the Empire is. From the Empire’s point of view it might, but from the owners of the intellectual property’s perspective it doesn’t. That’s a bit like saying Ghengis Khan shouldn’t have showed up in Europe when he did because the Muslims and the Christians were already fighting each other. If you are looking for something that doesn’t make sense, that as an explanation for not going to Cathay would be it.

Why would the Wood Elves know or care about Cathay. Because they’re Elves? The Elves are the most travelled species in the world and the Wood Elves are still part of that. They wood know about Cathay by virtue of the rest of the Elves knowing about Cathay. And Bretonnia? Well, despite the fact that they’re depicted as being about 200 years behind the Empire in terms of technology (which makes them as a faction completely anachronistic), you have to assume that for the most part what the Empire knows, Bretonnia knows. Why would they care? Same reason anyone else would; if you want to match it to something in the real world, the best reasons would either be for trade purposes (i.e. the Silk Road) or because they’re seen as a threat (i.e. the Mongols). Obviously for some of these factions to meet in battle, someone would have to travel but why is that such an issue to you?

Games Workshop, whether you like the lore or not (and I am personally not a fan of the current 40k lore and I don’t follow Age of Sigmar) have a long history of maintaining multiple narrative settings. I don’t really see any reason why they wouldn’t put the same level of effort and detail into the Old World and in particular Cathay. You may not like it, that’s largely subjective, but it WILL be fleshed out when it arrives.

Finally, the lore for Albion was utter rubbish and I am fairly sure it was written that way deliberately so that they could pretty much just forget about it. Forget asking why Bretonnia would care about Cathay, based on existing lore why would anyone give a toss about Albion? In a world that has mostly advanced to 16th century sociopolitical and technological levels, Albion would be even more of an anachronism than Bretonnia. The problem with Albion (much like Tilea and Estalia) is how do you make them unique and interesting without making them either totally bonkers or totally anachronistic. They are always going to end up looking like Bretonnia or Empire or they’re going to end up looking weird and out of place. The Old World doesn’t really need Albion and I doubt very much it would sell even a fraction as well as you think it would. Cathay or Araby would make much more interesting additions to the game than any of the other missing old world kingdoms could. If I was GW, I would have just made Albion an extension of Bretonnia, subsume Norsca into the Chaos Marauders and just have done with it. Stops people asking pointless questions, let’s people play armies from those places and allows GW to focus on other, more interesting factions.