Coping with the Rumor-Mill

So my January has been a lot less productive when it came to painting and gaming. And I know exactly why: all sorts of rumors about Warhammer Fantasy 9th Edition. New editions are always somewhat tumultuous, and in the past year the strange and accelerated pace of Games Workshop's product launches have only made worries worse. The big energy sapping rumors are twofold: first, the rumor that round bases will replace square ones. Which would be an enormous change that would leave the game simply not like its prior editions. Second, the dramatic changes to the Warhammer world. Instead of a traditional fantasy setting, rumors have it going to pockets of isolated reality, with some of the standard races merging or being removed from the game entirely. If rumors are to be believed, the undead will be condensed, all three elf races will be condensed, and the Lizardmen are going to simply fly off into space and not be around anymore.

Many believe this is a picture of a ziggurat-shaped spaceship lifting the Lizardmen army right out of the game of Warhammer Fantasy.

Our own reactions as a group of players have been a part of my concern as well. Some sample comments I wanted to save and share (I'm Andrew):

The questions of the round bases rumor: how could it change the game and how could we be expected to rebase hundreds (or thousands) of bases?

Using the age-old trick, of not saying something new in a blog--just re-expressing your prior opinions.

Why all these rumors have lagged my hobby drive is because I experienced this once before: when Dungeons and Dragons 3.5 was replaced with a Fourth Edition of the game. At the time, I had been playing a great deal of Living Greyhawk--a massive combined game of Dungeons and Dragons with thousands of players across the country. It was an amazing way to play Dungeons and Dragons, and some of my favorite gaming memories are from that era. But with Fourth Edition, the company stopped supporting the prior game. This generated a schism in the gaming community, with some jumping on board with the new game and others trying to play the prior. It was all made worse because Fourth Edition fundamentally changed the way the game played: in an attempt to compete with video games, they made the game more like an MMORPG. So the new product simply wasn't what many of us came to love about the game. I was left with a massive pile of books that governed a great game, but Living Greyhawk was killed and the edition had moved on.

I'm worried about the same with Warhammer, honestly. As I said in that message screenshotted above, the game is something that I've enjoyed relatively unchanged for 19 years: over half of my life. If I trusted that Games Workshop was going to do something similar, just a set of refined rules that make the same game even better, I'd be more enthused. In fact, I think that a 9th edition is absolutely needed to clean up some features of the game: unified mount and rider profiles, changes to some of the spells, and some clarity with certain unit types and situations. And I'm inclined to be okay with the current move of Games Workshop to try and lure newer players by making smaller forces viable (thanks to larger points investments in the large Lord and Hero models and big Monster kits lately). But I'm worried that they've got their eyes more on usurping their competition--all the burgeoning skirmish games like that of Privateer Press--than on refining their own product and making it better.

I already have my Privateer Press force painted as adversaries for a Role Playing Campaign that I run. I enjoy that game, but skirmish isn't as grand as the big armies. 

So I'll be honest. I got all worried. I thought "hmm, maybe I should just sell all my armies." I painted other stuff: a unit of Dark Reapers for my Warhammer 40k Eldar army. I played Fallout New Vegas when I could have been painting.

But I think ultimately the feeling of discouragement has passed, at least for now. I still enjoy painting models, I still laugh whenever I think about how silly my Skaven force will be when it hits the table, and I still smile at the thought of fielding a fully painted force of Skaven yet again (third time's the charm). So I'll proceed with cautious optimism, even in the face of potential changes to a game that I do truly love. 

And if my Skaven fly into space, get onto round bases, and join the 40k universe? Well, then I just have a Hrud army ready to go.