Battlemaster

[icycalm]

[icycalm]

Why are we starting in Season 10? Why not 1 as with Pathfinder, Alien, etc.?

Well, first of all this is a tactics game and those are roleplaying games, so with those you can affect the plot, but not with this one. So in terms of mechanics, it makes no difference where you start with Warhammer, whereas with the RPGs it makes all the difference. So there's that.

But even still, isn't it better to start at the start?



Well Season 1 was back in 1987, and the miniatures look like CRAP compared to the newer models. Moreover, they're extremely hard to find even if we wanted to play with them. I have no doubt that some day the fans will get around to 3D-scanning all of them, and we'll eventually have all of them, but currently we don't. So it'd be a bitch to set the game up, and compared to newer seasons, it would be ugly. Finally, the old scale is different, smaller than D&D's/Pathfinder's, complicating integration into VTTs, whereas the scale of newer editions is identical to the RPGs'.

Moreover, there's really not that much going on in the plot in the earlier seasons. It is only in the last couple of seasons that Games Workshop has started leaning heavily into the story and producing an evolving metaplot, inspired no doubt by the roleplaying games which have been at the forefront of this evolution since the '90s. So I'll be soon linking a video that explains that for most of the setting's history, the plot has been "frozen in time", and it's only in the last 5-6 years that cool new events have been happening.

In sum, we CAN'T play the older seasons right now for purely technical reasons (don't have the miniatures), but even if we could we WOULDN'T want to because the miniatures don't look very good plus there's not that much to play from a narrative standpoint: it's just a bunch of battles/missions with no narrative progression until Season 7. And if we're not going to start at 1, we might as well start at the current one which is 10, because we have the maximum amount of miniatures for it plus in terms of missions and narrative it is the coolest, though admittedly not in terms of mechanics, according to most fans. The pinnacle in terms of mechanics seems to be 8th-9th Edition, but this comes at a cost of much higher complexity. So finally even from the perspective of easing into the game with a minimum of friction, Season 10 seems to be a superior choice than 9 or 8 etc. Let's first learn the simpler 10th Edition mechanics, and once we've mastered that and cleared all its content (which is entirely possible, it's only a couple hundred missions or so) we can employ a cinematic flashback technique and play Season 9, then 8, etc. And the further back we go, the less content there is, so the first few seasons from the '80s and '90s will go by in a jiffy if we ever get to them.

Also note that GMing Warhammer is orders of magnitude simpler than GMing RPGs, so I am very open to admitting a bunch of people to the GM role so you can breeze through hundreds of missions per year without my help if you want, finishing up season after season of 40K while I concentrate on the roleplaying worlds. Plus, GMing Warhammer can be a stepping stone to GMing RPGs, for those so inclined.



Season 11 is expected this summer! And there is a massive build-up of narrative campaigns leading up to it, very cool stuff that you can follow in the 500 Worlds thread [ > ]. It is entirely possible for us to have finished up Season 10 by the time Season 11 arrives, or shortly after—certainly by year's end when enough new content will be available to play for the new edition—as long as enough people play, and enough of them help with the GMing. Keep also in mind that 40K seasons are about 3 years now, whereas Pathfinder and D&D take a decade. Also, wargame missions themselves take a lot less time than roleplaying adventures. Most 40K missions take an hour or two, so you can finish a bunch of them in a single weekend if multiple people are playing. And Season 10 is maybe 200 missions? 300 at the max if we include the mission decks? (more on all this soon).

Given that the narrative missions for 40K have never been more plentiful and more complex than they are now, and that there are only a couple of previous narrative seasons that we can use as flashback material, and if we also add that the current edition's mechanics are easier to get to grips with, I believe I can say without much coping/rationalizing that we really did pick the absolute best time and point to jump into the game. And with Henry Cavill's Amazon TV show planned to lead into an entire Warhammer cinematic universe, there won't be a better way and place to tie all the strands of the franchise together and experience Warhammer than Alex Kierkegaard's Battlemaster!

I'll have more to say and share soon, and feel free to post questions or suggestions if you have any, but in the meantime here's an extremely well-produced 3-minute video to give you the most absolute basic facts about the 40K setting.

The Story of Warhammer 40K in less than 3 minutes
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V5slncal0aY

Literally the best big picture Warhammer lore video ever lol.