Reply To: WHtOW boxed set

[wolfie65Participant 1238xp 0]

The story of Warhammer Fantasy is the story of battles between fantasy races. 3rd edition didn’t have any particular Emperor or time in mind, that only started to creep in during 4th. They just went with the general setting of most fantasy novels, which roughly equals the Dark Ages, Middle Ages and (maybe) early Renaissance.

Professor Tolkien wrote LotR when his publishers told him about the huge demand for a sequel to The Hobbit – LotR is, in essence, the same basic story, massively expanded – and as part of his ‘justification’ for his creation of several fictitious languages, he was, after all, first and foremost, a linguist. It’s basically part of the cultural history of Elves and Hobbits, the humans (pretty much absent in The Hobbit, unless you count Beorn the shapechanger and the short Laketown episode) just provide a point of reference for the reader – who is human and will, in most cases, have a hard time identifying with Elves or Dwarfs.

When I think of Warhammer and what makes it unique among fantasy battle games, it is definitely Chaos, TONS of special rules, lots of dice rolls – some unnecessary – chunky, cartoonish minis with MASSIVELY oversized weapons and armor more likely to injure than protect the wearer and prices that’ll turn your hair white.

Also, green Orcs. They weren’t green before GW got a hold of them, you know. In the 70s and early 80s, Ral Partha had a color called ‘Drow Flesh’, sort of a bluish grey, that many people liked to use on Orcs, Dark Elves, Undead, that sort of thing. In the French fairy tale that first mentions the word Orc, it describes a humanoid sea creature, and since most cold water fish are in the blue-grey color spectrum, that makes sense. Tolkien describes his Orcs simply as ‘swarthy’, in the 1970s White Dwarf story Valley of the Four Winds, the Forest Orcs are described as ‘bearded’ with ‘black blood’.

Skaven are also fairly unique, I don’t know of any games that had Rat people before GW came up with them.

To some degree, the GW image of High- and Dark Elves – deeply steeped in Michael Moorcock imagery – is different from the way they are portrayed in other, pre-Warhammer games and settings.

Renaissance-era pretend-Germans are not unique and the fact that most of the stories are told from a human point of view is, as already mentioned, because the authors are, of course, human and only very, very few people manage to try to think like a non-human creature might. Same goes for the vast majority of their readers.