Warhammer: The Old World – and let's give it its full title – is not just a relaunch of a familiar game, but a return to the classic Warhammer format after an absence of nearly nine years. In 2015, Games Workshop took it upon themselves to destroy the Warhammer setting, supposedly for good, in a campaign they called The End Times. This heralded the exit of the old Warhammer game and paved the way for the new Age of Sigmar take on fantasy – a modern, whizzy all-action tabletop affair featuring all sorts of superheroes and monsters in comic book style. I think. To be honest, I could not bring myself to look.
And so, the world – and the whole concept of the mass-battle fantasy game – was consigned to the dustbin of history: blown up in some cosmic cataclysm, consumed in chaos, and cast to oblivion. Games Workshop had come to the conclusion that the game was no longer commercially viable nor the ‘property’ defendable in terms successor saw classic fantasy creatures given new, bizarre, and rather undignified names in a visibly uncomfortable effort to impose trademark law upon the realms of folklore and mythology.
