Setting Size vs. Game Size

So I’ve got a beef with games that boast huge settings and then don’t live up to them. Normally I’d sit here and rag of GW for their 40k setting and all the races they have but spend all their time focusing only on Space Marines, but today I’m going to go a different route. I’m still going to primarily address GW, but today I’m going to talk more about Warhammer Fantasy.

Now right off the bat Warhammer Fantasy has a huge setting, an entire planet pretty much mapped out for this setting. The thing is, though, that all that setting is pretty much wasted. There are 15 armies available in the game already, which is pretty damn impressive to start with, but there’s just something missing in that several armies aren’t present. It’s also kind of a problem that of the 15 armies already in the game two are Chaos(Daemons and Warriors) and three are Elves(High, Dark and Wood flavors). Now technically speaking you could qualify Beastmen and Skaven as Chaos as well, but we’ll just not even get into that right now. Now the thing that bugs me the most is that two armies are not in the game, and they’re two armies I would gladly play; Araby and Nippon. Yeah I’d play a Nippon army because I love that era of Japanese history that Nippon is based on, and Araby because I’m a huge stickler for Ottoman Empire stuff(see previous post for notice of my being a history nerd).

You may recall that I sold off my High Elves and stopped playing Warhammer Fantasy when 8th edition rolled around, but I’ve been gathering a bit of interest in it again recently. The elusive problem popped up, though, that I didn’t want to simply rebuild my High Elf army and go at it, so I thought of going with Wood Elves since nobody I know plays them and they’re considered under-powered(I like playing the underdogs sometimes). The more I looked at it the more I realized that I simply had nothing to get me back in, and looking at prices I remembered why I pledged to not buy anything from Games Workshop again until they brought their prices down to reasonable, and sane, prices.

Back to the real issue at hand, o army to play. Do you realize how huge the Warhammer setting really is? Here’s a map of just some of the Warhammer world.

Now you have to click on it to get a full sized image(I didn’t want this post to require you to scroll sideways since it’s a large image), but just take a look at it. The insert at the top left has an arrow pointing off the map to Cathay, which means that’s not even visible on this map. Now Araby is a very prominent area on this map, but Araby isn’t really represented in the game itself. You could say the Tomb Kings are the pseudo representative of Araby in the game, but in all fairness the Tomb Kings are Egyptian while Araby is clearly more of an Ottoman Empire inspired army.

Here’s the big thing I’ve been trying to get at; a huge setting with various large powers in the fluff but not giving them all a fair representation on the tabletop. GW is fairly notorious about this. One could say AT-43 had a similar problem with plenty of intergalactic empires not in the game, but considering that game only had a four year run or so I think we can cut it a little more slack than one that has several decades behind it. Now Araby is in Warmaster, so why not in Fantasy proper? Now Privateer Press and Corvus Belli are both quite good at keeping the major players of their fluff in the actual game. Warmachine and Hordes have pretty much all their major nations actually in game; even the smaller nations like Ord are there in the Mercenaries. Corvus Belli has everyone in game because, well, their setting is pretty condensed. Really the only players not on the tabletop at this point with their own formal armies are O-12 and, arguably, Mercenaries.

Now I have found a sort of go around with the whole “no Araby in Warhammer because of whatever silly reason GW came up with;” fan books. I found a site where a guy has made fan books for the various armies in Warhammer that aren’t already in the game(Araby, Cathay, Nippon, Norse, Albion, Amazons, Chaos Dwarfs, Estalia, and Kislev being the major ones they have). Now I’ve downloaded the Araby, Nippon and Norse books to give them a look over, and I’m still a little “eh” about them. The Araby book I’ve used to build a 1,000 point list that I think I would try out, but the question is whether or not the people at my LGS would be willing to let me use an unofficial book. I’ve noticed a few things in the books that might seem a bit over-powered(some magic items being a bit undercosted), but for the most part it seems pretty well balanced.

Maybe I’m just over-reacting about it all, but I gotta’ say that if GW were to make an official Araby army for Warhammer I would be extremely interested. I still wouldn’t use their miniatures(Perry Brothers and The Assault Group make really nice 28mm Ottoman and Crusade era Muslims/Turks that I would rather use and maybe get a Genie from Reaper) unless they bring their prices down to middle class affordable, but I’d be interested.

In the long run, though, this was all about setting size and game size. A simple message; don’t make a game setting with a lot of big players if you’re not willing to give them all their time in the spotlight.

Hope you all have a happy New Years and I’ll be back next week.

As an interesting side note; there’s very few miniatures companies that seem to make Fantasy Arabian themed models. Kinda’ a pain in the ass, especially when looking for minis to use for Dark Sun in D&D. Maybe that’s a subject for next week.