End of the world

So the cat is among the shit and the pigeon has hit the fans. Apparently a monthly magazine called White Dwarf is being axed and in its place there's going to be a weekly magazine called - er - White Dwarf and a monthly magazine called Warhammer Visions. In some respects this isn't big news. Firstly, it's still just a rumour (albeit one that seems confirmed), and secondly it's more a rejigging of Games Workshop's publication strategy than an outright cull. Most importantly, many would claim that White Dwarf has long been in a state of living death, reduced to the humiliating status of a hard-sell peddler with a below-average command of the English language.

But when an old friend dies (or is at death's door) it often prompts people to reflect upon their own mortality and the increasingly undeniable decrepitude of those who they grew up with. And so the question comes up: if White Dwarf pops its clogs, who will be the next to go?

For Orlygg over at Realm of Chaos 80s the not altogether outlandish conclusion is that Warhammer Fantasy Battle is itself living on borrowed time:
"Just look at the Specialist Range! With that cut, and mostly likely WD next, what is left to go to streamline the company and increase profits for the shareholders? Warhammer Fantasy Battle itself!"

Whiskey Priest at the leadpile seems to agree:
"This is really the nub of the problem. You have two product lines. Both require the same amount of capital input, support, shop space, tooling costs, warehouse space, packaging costs, printing costs, R&D costs etc etc. However, one sells a fraction of the other and it's sales are falling all the time. It's gotten to the point where it's financial viability is seriously in doubt. What do you do?"

Now to be honest, I don't have a position on whether or not Warhammer is going to be sent to the knacker's yard. I'm not well enough informed about GW's business strategy, and although I can sometimes come across a bit grumpy about the decisions they've made, in general I wish them well as they are a British business and an employer that would leave a hole if they were to simply disappear, quite aside from what it would do to the hobby.

But this does lead us onto a slightly different question: could the death of Warhammer even be a good thing? Is the game going out of print something we should actually look forward to? This is Warlord Paul's provocation:
"Won't it be a blessing if Warhammer goes though, really? A curse, lifted?"

That's what I'm going to discuss for the rest of this post.

Paul focusses on the fact that, rules-wise, we already have what we need. The early editions give us the tools for fun narrative play. Get yourself 2nd or 3rd ed and away you go. GW's business model relies on our wanting to upgrade, expand, replace - planned obsolescence. Except, really, the old rules were never truly obsolete. They're still there for anyone to pick up and have fun with, and some would argue that GW's subequent attempts to gild the lily have just killed it.

So I think Paul's is a good point. Oldhammer players have, effectively, entered a parallel universe where new rules releases, new army lists, new gimmicks have very little relevance. As long as we have some old books and some toy soldiers, we don't really need any 'upgrading'.

In that sense, Warhammer's demise wouldn't really trouble us that much. But in terms of whether it would be a blessing, I think there's a bigger point. An albatross that would be taken from around our necks. And it's one that's been hanging there a long time.



Take a look at the 3rd edition rulebook (for some, the epitome of the golden age): on page 189 it asks "Why a Warhammer world?" Why indeed. They answer that "Games are always more satisfying when set firmly within the context of a credible society", and assure us that "Suffice to say, we fully intend to expand the concept of Warhammer to include the entire world, and several supplements are already in preparation"

The message is clear: this is Games Workshop's world, and they're going to flesh it out for you. Don't get me wrong, this is a sensible business strategy. Why a Warhammer World? Intellectual property rights of course. But this makes it quite clear that the players are customers, not creators in their own right. Whose Warhammer world? Games Workshop's Warhammer World of course. Not yours.

Warhammer Armies continues this rot. Although the goal was to provide balanced armies for "tournament gaming", what we're left with is a flat-pack version of a fantasy world where you're given the pieces and all that's left for you to do is assemble them. The effect is a narrowing of imagination, a narrowing that continued apace with the army books of 4th edition and beyond.

For me, this would be the biggest and most exciting opportunity that would open up if Warhammer was to become out of print. It would kill off the idea of an "official" Warhammer world. I'm not saying that people won't look to old publications for inspiration; but why should the map of our own imaginations be coloured predominantly by 'official' merchandise? With the Warhammer IP mothballed, the world in which we actually play our games of oop Warhammer is ours to create and recreate. Sure, there's nothing to stop us already thinking up new worlds, new continents, new armies. Some of us do that already. But by and large we're operating within artificial constraints - an accidental fantasy geography that gave GW something of their own to sell. Time for people to draw their own maps, to create their own lands to imagine and explore.

A new world - indeed, many a new world - awaits.

Let's take this further: imagine GW never produced any more fastasy miniatures (it's easy if you try...) Imagine future players of warhammer fantasy battle had to cast their nets around different suppliers. No more would there be a straightforward one-to-one correspondance between an army list and a particular set of miniatures that stand for a particular unit. No, instead you'd have to mix and match, building up a motley collection from different oop and in production lines. And that collection would be unique, full of new stories - not just an indentikit army. And you'd need to think up new unit types, new rules, for the quirky models that you found from different companies.

The long and the short of it is that the Warhammer World has become a straightjacket. To a certain extent, the oldhammer movement has already set itself free from that straightjacket - it looks for inspiration from the past but isn't (too) subservient towards it. And yet still... the idea of what could happen if the stagnating pastiche that is the Warhammer World died tomorrow... well that's somewhat intoxicating.

Going old school: Why me? Why now?

What is it that appeals to me about this oldhammer movement? Why have I suddenly had the urge to dust off the old toy soldiers? I'm not inclined to provide a manifesto right now, and besides, other people have already inspired me with their own call to arms; Zhu's Oldhammer Contract and Gaj's explanation of 'Warhammer for Adults' spring to mind. But I thought I'd just get some of my motivations out in the open.


Here are 3 things that appeal to me about 'Oldhammer' right now:

1) Oldhammer is narrative led

(The Old Soldier's Story by Edward Bird)

I like storytelling. For me, fantasy wargaming is about storytelling. I'm interested in how and why the troops have taken to the field. I want to know what their motivations and fears are, what the background is, what the objective is, and what the stakes are. And knowing this makes the game a rich experience, where you're able to weave a tale around the movements of the toy soldiers and the roll of the dice. Ideally, this implies scenario gameplay - not the endless repetition of two equally balanced forces in a pitched battle, but a specific context with specific goals for each side - goals that might well develop over the course of the game. And the outcome of the scenario leads us to thinking about the next stage - how the leaders and their troops respond, where they go next. For me, nothing in wargaming is as exciting as a campaign... but when I was playing Warhammer as a teenager, there were very few opportunities to play campaigns. In fact, over the 4 years I was playing, I recall one glorious campaign, and about a million one-off pitched battles with no story or context, just the sterile world of the army list. Now's the time to escape that and do what I love.


2) Oldhammer exists in an open universe

Narrative gameplay implies an open universe, one in which you are constantly creating the world anew. Oldhammer inspires me through a return to the spirit of "ad-hoc" creation of new corners of the world. I love the approach that inspires something like Richard Halliwell's Macdeath scenario pack: 'what would a comic retelling of Macbeth in the Warhammer World look like? Let's try it and find out!'. Or the Dolgan Raiders scenario in the 1985 Citadel Journal, which seems to have the attitude: 'got an interesting idea for a culture? Great, what would it look like on the battlefield'. For me, far far far worse than any rules lawyers are fluff lawyers. Those who shut down creative ideas through obscure knowledge of each detail of the 'canon'. Why would you want to have a specific Norse culture when the canon tells you that they're all chaos marauders and that's all you need to know? Don't you know that there's a set in stone geography of Albion after the Dark Shadows campiagn? I had a recent reminder of this kind of nuisance when I was picking up some paints at GW and (having been asked what I was working on) was told "There's no such thing as sea elves." Not only is this a somewhat irritating kind of amnesia, far far more disturbing is the apparent willingness to cede authority over our own imaginations to some studio writers. Bollocks to that. Why should I have my desire to tell stories restricted by some slavish adherance to the background? If someone wants a scenario with sea elves, then write it, play it, enjoy it - don't wait for the expensive glossy army book. The world is out there to be explored, the maps are still undrawn, the stories still untold.


3) Oldhammer embraces the pathetic aesthetic

(Old school cardboard house from Erny's Place)

The idea of the pathetic aesthetic was introduced by Dr Bargle on his Known World, Old World blog. I'm massively thankful to him for writing that post, as he's put his finger on something that's very important to me. I am most interested in rank and file figures contesting very specific struggles. One thing that always struck me as odd when I was a teenager was the frequency with which people used special characters from the official army books. Partly this goes back to the point about people ceding authority over their own imaginations, but there was more to my unease than that. I didn't understand why Prince Tyrion, or Archaon, or whoever, were involved in this 1,500 point skirmish. There needed to be a superhero involved to make it 'interesting'. It seemed that what we were acting out was the end of the Warhammer world, again and again, like some comic-book ragnarok. When I questioned this, it was often justified by the idea that the Warhammer world was in a state of "Uber war", and so the stakes were always massive. So massive, it seemed, that they undermined any real involvement, any real storytelling (we had the Black Library to do that for us, after all). This is where the pathetic aesthetic is crucial for me. If we look at the battlefield on the table in front of us, what do we see? A shack. A hill. A narrow river. What are they defending? A minor objective, probably on the say so of a higher officer who will not turn up. And they might have to die for this. Not in defence of the world, not to stop the end of the universe, not to halt chaos swallowing everything. They will die because they've been told to hold the higher ground. Or because they've been told not to surrender the food reserves in the shed. Or, quite possibly, they will die to satisfy someone's pride. Oldhammer is pathetic. That's why I like it.


So now you know a bit about what's drawn me back in, and why I find the Oldhammer movement inspiring. Let's see where this goes... I don't anticipate extreme frequency of posting in this blog, but it'll be good to have a place to record my preparations for the Oldhammer weekend in Nottingham, which I'm very much looking forward to.

Oh, the illustration on the masthead is The Maelstrom near the Lofoten Islands, an illustration from Olaus Magnus reproduced in the book In the northern mists: Arctic Exploration in Early Times by Fridtjof Nansen. Might explain my rationale for using it later, once I've thought of a rationale! The title of the blog comes from my head on alcohol. And yep, the font on the masthead is the font originally used for the cover of White Dwarf, which is called "Arnold Bocklin", named after a Swiss painter who depicted mythological subjects.