Cubicle 7 Announces Age Of Sigmar Role-Playing Game!
May 27, 2017 by brennon
As well as working on the new edition of Warhammer Fantasy Role-Play, set during the period of the Old World, Cubicle 7 are also going to be working on one set in the Mortal Realms. Get ready for the Warhammer Age Of Sigmar: Roleplaying Game.
"Warhammer Age of Sigmar is Games Workshop’s epic tale of heroes, gods and monsters fighting a desperate battle for the fate of the Mortal Realms.
Dominic McDowall, Cubicle 7 CEO said, “The Warhammer Age of Sigmar setting is fantasy at its most imaginative. The Mortal Realms are fascinating, highly evocative and hold endless possibilities for roleplaying.
I am enormously excited to explore them with the Warhammer Age of Sigmar Roleplaying Game!”
This is great news and hopefully it continues to build a fantastic picture of the Mortal Realms for us to play in. One would hope that they draw on the systems from first and second edition Warhammer Fantasy Role-Play but with a heroic twist.
As an example, Deathwatch might be a good focus. They managed to make you feel like a Space Marine and hopefully a similar feeling comes across when you get to play as a Stormcast Eternal!
We shall see what comes of this project in 2018.
"This is great news and hopefully it continues to build a fantastic picture of the Mortal Realms for us to play in..."
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Whew! Saw this and thought they changed their minds!
I really dig AoS, but I’m REALLY happy they’re doing both.
This might be a good way to flesh out the mortal realms.
So they are doing both. I find that interesting even if I have no interest on AoS setting.
I hope the system allows for lots of cross over. I like the fantasy setting but throwing in the new realms and races just give it more scope
According to the release the two games are independent lines with different rulesets. Nothing that a back of house-ruling couldn’t fix, I’m sure.
I could see them doing a campaign that leads from one to the other, or between the two, but i hope that that doesn’t happen and that the two settings are kept entirely separate. I think to try to make WFRP compatible with AOSRPG would be akin to trying to make meccano compatible with duplo. I think it would almost certainly mean that at some fundamental level Cubicle 7 had not understood, and therefore would fail to ( re)create, those things in WFRP that i ( and others ) liked about WFRP. One might argue ( clearly i would not ) that it could mean that the AOSRPG would become more like WFRP, but again i would point to my meccano and duplo analogy and i would argue that that would mean that it would cease to be AOS, as far as i can make out, at my safe distance, and i think that’s a lot less likely than WFRP 4th edition giving way to the AOSRPG.
If the rules sets are different they won’t be compatible and this will limit any cross setting supplements.
If the two use the same rules then in theory they are compatible and it then becomes a question of whether they are allowed to make suchba supplement. Personally I think that although GW are allowing C7 to make an RPG set in the old world, they themselves are very much trying to move on from the old setting, allow AoS to grow and stand on its own. Although there are vague hints in the AoS setting about links to the old world they are very much token references and anyone who plays the game having never played its predecessor will have no real frame of reference to it and no information as to what the time before really was. I can’t see GW sanctioning a supplement that links the two settings together and any such games will be house-rules only.
Having played Planescape way back in the day, I think that the Age of Sigmar really has a potential to rival that. It’s the perfect setting with virtually limitless realms in which to play and travel and explore.
Planscape was to me, hands down my favorite campaign setting ever. Still waiting for the skirmish warband version set in the City of Doors. I’m am totally with you on this mate
Makes good sense. Pick up all the fans that way
So $%%^5 happy I loved Old Warhammer FRPG no I can have both. Happy as a porcine creature in feaces,
MEH. I hope people won’t pick it up and Cubicle 7 will just focus on the Old World.
That’s awfully positive of you. I hope people do pick it up, that ut encourages you to play the game with miniatures and that GW start to flesh out the new Age of Sigmar setting.
Why bother? They should just cancel it and release something good.
Because the Age of Sigmar setting is cool and because an RPG offers a new window into that setting and a new way to explore it. That’s why.
Always good to see that the grognards are as toxic as in the WFB days.
Having zero love for the AoS setting I am actually interested in this as it’s a good opportunity to present a properly fleshed out and well developed background, that I feelAoS was missing.
I’m interested to see to what extent GW will let C7 flesh out the background.
The involvement GW will have will be to see everything before it goes to print, as is customary when working with someone elses IP. So the likelihood is, it’ll be interesting seeing the flow of releases more than the content. I should imagine it will go at a snails pace along with GW fleshing out the races and factions for the table top.
Lucas let Westwind do quite a lot of fleshing out of the Star Wars background. GW did Warhammer Fantasy’s background in-house when they did WFRP, and the Black Library has accounted for a lot of 40K’s background, again, done in house. AoS has very little to this point. Whilst anything which would directly bear on the minis game will presumably come from GW themselves, I’m curious to see the extent to which they allow C7 to fill in the gaps.
West End, not Westwind :s
I think Hammerhal made a good start at Fleshing out the setting, and maybe Shadespire will too. But in my opinion what we really need to see is the good old human factions – something to give it even a small grounding in reality.
You don’t mean like actual humans that we the readers could passably understand and relate too like most fictional settings do you? 😉
Because that would go against GW policies of keeping all narratives in all settings doom and war filled. Nobody is able to have rational debate nor resolution skills that would lead to peace in any of the game settings as that would take away the theme of the games being fight everything and anyone.
One day your wish for its grounding in reality will happen. I just don’t think it be in my life time.
Sure it will happen in your lifetime. Silver Tower introducted the (IMO) pretty amazing Excelsior War Priest – they have already started. It’s only a matter of time.
My only question is…
Will we all be playing Stormcast, or will Free Peoples, Disposessed, or Aelfs be actual playable characters?
Personally, I’d like being able to play as a party of Orruks and Grots (Gork, I feel dirty using these words.)
When they originally announced a remake of WarPG, my whole group was terrified this would be it. When they announced that in fact, they were bringing back the Old World, it was an amazing feeling. It makes this much more palatable.
I understand the reasoning, economically, and this definitely does open up many doors to try and advance the AoS storyline/narrative, but I find it hard to imagine compelling stories in this world.
Both the protagonists and antagonists are effectively immortal, coming back from the dead via Sigmar/Chaos powers to fight endless battles in a world of Only War. Every piece of lore, or every piece of artwork, has depicted gigantic monsters and power-armoured lads fighting each other on some fantastical and war-ravaged landscape.
I suspect that this is going to end up being an extremely combat-heavy RPG, akin to 4th edition Dungeons and Dragons, and maybe that’s okay. I could see that being fun for an evening, whereas I have a really hard time imagining getting any kind of real human growth or story in such a setting.
Did you ever play Planescape? The AoS setting with its various “realms” linked by a series of realmgates is very similar the the multiple planes of existence linked by, you guessed it, gates that defined the Planescape setting. It’s not traditional fantasy, in the way that Warhammer Fantasy Battle was, it’s Fantasy with a twist. I actually think Age of Sigmar, at this precise moment, has far more potential as an RPG than the Warhammer Old World. That’s not to say the Old World is a bad setting because it isn’t, but I don’t think it has the same potential for adventure that AoS has. It’s certainly a lot more predictable than AoS, being based loosely on the real world.
Again, your mileage may vary, and I wouldn’t want to get in the way of anyone’s fun. Ultimately, provided both games get supported, this is the best of all worlds, for me.
What you consider predictable in the Old World, I consider verisimilitude. I’ve never had a problem with the Old World being predictable, because honestly, if there’s anything 2016-17 has shown us it’s that even our ‘real’ world is anything but predictable.
On the other hand, what you might see as predictable, I see as giving the world a sense of reality. Sure, there are patterns to where things can be found, how the world works, etc., but that lends credence to the idea that without the players, the world would continue. It is a living, breathing place, with history and geopolitics, and a frame of reference around which stories can be told.
My issue with Age of Sigmar, however, is that it is obviously a setting for playing games. No attempt has been made to create a world with any sense of believability. Bands of Chaos Warriors roam around the Fire Plane, looting and pillaging and taking prisoners for hundreds of years.
No explanation as to how they feed themselves, how their ‘prey’ replenishes its population, where their women are, etc. etc.
The default explanation will be “Chaos Sustains Them” or some such. I will grant that Age of Sigmar offers unlimited potential, because it’s nothing but anarchy. It’s an extremely loose framework of ‘rules’, regarding the different planes and gates, that allow you to create just about anything. Want to have an upside down floating birthday cake that’s home to a series of 8-legged ogors with flaming mohawks? No problem. You can insert it without batting an eye.
This, to me, makes AoS a decent setting for flying around to different set-pieces and battles, and if that’s what you’re into, that’s great! I’ve just always, personally, been into role-playing more for the characters and worlds, and I have yet to be presented with any example of a character interaction or arc in Age of Sigmar in which the setting hasn’t just been ignored, or a hindrance.
Eg; you could write a story about starving refugees in the plane of fire, and delve into their misery and uncertainty, but to get into those details, you’d have to ignore the lunacy of them somehow surviving in a fire/volcanic wasteland full of immortal, 8-foot tall muscle freaks who run around killing each other all day, volcanoes created by the blood of a Dwarf who got exploded into a million pieces while fighting some giant creature for a God from a previous game who came into the world on the back of a snake and built a space station out of a magical rock he named after himself.
You’d be creating human stories DESPITE the setting, rather than because of it. Different strokes for different folks, is all.
I think it’s easy to look at Age of Sigmar at the moment and say that it lacks detail while at the same time forgetting that the Old World was once like that and the fact that it isn’t fleshed out is actually part of what gives it the most potential. Age of Sigmar is, at present, designed purely to support battle games but remember, that’s how Warhammer Fantasy Battle started out – it was a wargame, not a roleplaying game. All the details and minutia came later when they started writing stories and of course when they release Warhmmer Fantasy Roleplay. And so I grant you that the Age of Sigmar setting has yet to produce the same story arcs and interactions and characters that Warhammer Fantasy Battle did, however remember that Age of Sigmar is only 2 years old, whereas Warhammer Fantasy Old World was 32 years old when it was replaced. I think you will start to see that as they start to produce more literature from Black Library and now from the RPG.
But I have disagree with the assessment that some of the background is “lunacy”. Is Sigmar making the world out some magic space rock really any worse than the Ancient Greeks believing that there was once a massive war between Titans and Giants? Or the Vikings believing that there’s a tree at the root of the world with three women weaving the threads of fate? Or even that God made Adam out of some dust and he made Eve out of one of Adam’s ribs? Fantasy settings take the more fantastical elements of real world mythology and make them “real” within the context of the game world. And while at the moment it might seem like some kind of bizarre impossibility that humans or elves or dwarfs would survive on the plane of fire and live miserable existences, people have survived and cultures developed in some very inhospitable places in the real world – the Arctic Circle, the African Deserts. The fact that we haven’t seen how people survive in those realms doesn’t mean that it’s somehow going to be “lunacy” that they do. It just means we haven’t seen the world in enough detail to understand how, and I think those details are coming. In fact, in the current Skirmish rules, there’s some background about the city of Shadespire on the plane of Death which far from sounding like a hell hole makes it sound very much like it was once a thriving, bustling city that was eventually brought low by Nagash because the inhabitants were trying to cheat death and become immortal. In it’s description it makes reference to the fact that edible vegetation does grow on the plane of death and so already, a tiny detail that actually says a huge amount.
It will take some time for the setting to grow but I think it will grow and as a setting, because of the way it’s designed, I think it has an immense amount of potential. Just like Planscape back in the ’90s.
All fair points, and again; don’t let me tell you your fun is wrong for liking Age of Sigmar.
I didn’t mean to be controversial. I am very pleased that they’re working on both systems. My biggest fear, upon hearing the news that they acquired the WarPG license, was that they would ONLY release an Age of Sigmar game.
To me, that would be akin to hearing that your favourite movie was getting remade, but it would only be available in Japan, or something.
I know it’s not fair to judge the two settings side by side, and I know there’s no accounting for taste. Maybe in 10 years I will look upon AoS and fall in love with it. All I know is that right now, the two settings are worlds apart, and to each their own.
You raise an interesting and fair point about mythology.
I think that personally, why it doesn’t sit well with me, is that there’s no internal consistency.
For example, in a vacuum, Greek or Viking mythology sounds just as outlandish as all this Sigmar stuff. However, it’s consistent with itself. Everything fits with itself, because it all stems from the same culture, and time period.
If, in Norse mythology, there was a Realm of Sky Gnomes that flew on technological machines, with machine guns and laser rays, and that Valhalla was really a space station floating around in space; then it would be a bit closer of a comparison.
It’s just a little bizarre to me to have power-armoured dwarfs with flying machines, power-armoured space marines with teleporting lightning blood, and who knows what else, mix with medieval guilds, or somehow be threatened by skeletons with rotting spears and stuff.
Again, this is all just opinion at this point, and I’m glad you’re excited about the game! The more people role-playing, the better, in my books. Maybe one day you’ll create some truly epic and compelling stories in that universe and totally change my mind. Only time will tell!
And there’s another interesting point. Norse Mythology is internally consistent and Greek mythology is also internally consistent. However the two are very much contradictory. Later religions, such as the Abrahamic faiths, contradict the older pagan myths again. At any given point in history multiple cultures have existed side by side with various contradictory creation beliefs and also at different tech levels. Fantasy settings take these themes and exaggerate them.
And while you might see the Kharadron Overlords as too technologically advanced compared to what we have seen so far, they’re not really any worse than Dwarfs in the original setting who also used airships (no models but referenced in Black Library books) but who also had helicopters. HELICOPTERS! You then had Empire (and to a lesser extent Tilea) with its steam tanks and cannons compared to neighbouring Bretonnia still stuck at a medieval tech level. Bretonnia simply could not have survived a war with the Empire, a state that in real world terms, was something like 400 years more advanced, without keeping pace with their technology. And don’t even start with the Elves who seem to be mostly operating a Roman Era level of technology. But we overlooked those things in the interests of having a diverse range of factions and styles to play with. I fail to see really how Age of Sigmar is any different in that regard, its only real flaw at the moment is that the details that The Old World had have not yet been fleshed out in Age of Sigmar.
Oh, and did I mention the Aztec level of tech sported by the Lizardmen? We all saw how they fared against Cortez and his Conquistadors (i.e. Empire)