The Fall of White Dwarf and the Death of Warhammer Fantasy Battle?

My wife took my son down to the cinema for the first time today. Its not far and must have been a lovely rite of passage for him because he was so inspired by the film he watched, he asked for his Play-Doh when he got home and quickly set about building his only funny creatures out of the stuff, inspired by the film. Inspiration is a strange thing. A single moment can spark an interest that burns, periods of dormancy accepted, for the rest of a natural life. When I think back to my own childhood and the things I witnessed that got my imagination racing there are many memories of note. The massive battles I played with Star War figures with the boys on my road. You know the sort of games. Everyone congregated around a friend's house, you all took you toy collection around and WHAM! You were off. It was no doubt similar with He-Man and all the other things that I enjoyed playing with. But looking back, I find that the 'thinking' was done for me by the toy manufacturers. 

The names of the characters, their personalities and the very stories we would act out were already decided for us. That was until my sister got involved and told us all that my AT-AT was a cow and would go off and milk it. As many of us who grew up in the 1980s have come to realise, it was a golden age for toys of all shapes and sizes. But as I said, the 'thinking' was done for you in many respects. It certainly didn't encourage me to become creative, nor did it stoke my imagination to such a degree that I become totally absorbed in my thoughts. 

In hindsight, the most exciting places for me were newsagents. It seems a strange thing to state but its true! But that excitement didn't stem from the dubious activities of some of my peers... There was no cigarette or booze buying for me. Nor did I find myself slipping copies of Razzle between the pages of the Beano and taking the comic to the till in the vain hope that the nice old lady behind the counter would fail to notice Sam Fox's knockers poking out. It was the magazine covers of the fantasy and computer game publications that really got me inspired. Zzap 64, Your Sinclair, Dragon, Warlock, Interzone, Amiga Power, White Dwarf (of course) and all the other magazines that knocked about back in the day. Looking back, it was the front covers that drew me towards the magazines in the first place, which was the point after all. The covers all seemed to be paintings of one sort on another, with the odd photo montage here and there. I find that art really inspires while photographs, though interesting, don't always stir the creative juices. It was thus in my youthful self back then too.

Now where is all this rambling taking me, you may well ask? What's the droning recollections of an Oldhammerer got to do with the fall of White Dwarf and the death of Warhammer Fantasy Battle? Well, let me explain a little. Actually, before I explain anything I want to make a statement. I am sure you are all well aware that White Dwarf, as we have known it as a monthly magazine, is to be no more. It was re-launched fairly recently with a new glossy style but really failed to address the over-riding issues that the publication had. Decent, well written articles and over reliance on advertising new releases. Now we see another 'relaunch' which will see the magazine split into two publications which will effectively see the punter paying much more (if it works out favourably) hard earned cash for magazines that GW used to be able to produce with aplomb for a much smaller price. Think back to what is becoming known as the 'Silver Age' when Paul Sawyer was at the helm of the magazine and its pages were jam packed with good articles about Warhammer, 40k, LotR and Specialist games! Then Fanatic Magazine came and went. As did Paul. The 'Giant Issue' must have been the final nail in the coffin for many. We have seen magazines come and go from GW in the past, and I am sure this relaunch will follow with the inevitable cancellation of White Dwarf (and most likely Warhammer Visions too) because not enough people are buying them. Its wrong to blame the twenty-first century for this too. I don't feel that the death of this magazine has anything to do with technology, after all a quick trip to the newsagent will lead you to discovering about four or five other wargaming magazines on sale. And many of them have digital versions of themselves. Only those magazines have articles in them that are well written and of actual use to the reader. Unlike White Dwarf sadly. Which is why its sales figures have so slowly dwindled away.

And what do big companies do with unprofitable products?

They try out a few relaunches, and if they fail, they cancel them. Then the energies are focused into those products that are profitable.

Right, here goes. My statement. Personally, I feel that GW will soon cancel Warhammer Fantasy Battle entirely and will focus on 40k almost entirely. Yes you heard that right. Warhammer Fantasy Battle, the grand-daddy of them all will be phased out. The reason? Its not profitable enough. Sure, much of my conjecture is based on my limited knowledge about sales figures and popularity but its not hard to see that 40k dominates GW sales. GW have proven that they will cancel games that do not sell enough stock. They have even turned Games Day (you know, a day when you play games) into a sales exercise.  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! I had a little cruise of the internet to see if any other bloggers out there had similar opinions to mine or who had more actual evidence to support this view. This was the best I found. Have a read...

http://www.houseofpaincakes.com/2014/01/the-ballbusch-experience-death-of-titan.html

It's nice to have this blog quoted there by the Knight of Infinite Resignation...

"I started Fantasy gaming playing Priestly and Hallowell's game Reaper many years ago (the Tabletop Games publication that prefigured Warhammer), which was a skirmish game for maybe 20 to 40 figures a side. Its interesting to compare that game which was focussed on facilitating player creativity with the complex, proscriptive and expensive behemoth that WHF has become. 

You might be interested in this article: http://realmofchaos80s.blogspot.co.uk/2013/03/ric... 

Knight of Infinite Resignation"

He makes a really good point there, doesn't he? 'Focusing on facilitating player creativity' as apposed to being proscriptive. But even proscription cannot be the sole reason to explain the decline of Warhammer Fantasy Battle. Modern 40k suffers from much the same form of manipulation by sales departments yet is, as far as I can tell, going from strength to strength. I think that part of this is supported by the success of third party products, such as the Dawn of War series and the shed loads of novels the Black Library pumps out monthly, though most of these are set in the Warhammer 40,000 universe rather than the Old World. Oh, and that far more possibilities are probably possible in an almost infinite universe. Still, modern Fantasy Battle has lost much of its vibrancy with zoats, elementals, Nipponese, Norse and even the controversial pygmies no longer supported or discussed. There is certainly plenty of room there for expansion and new ideas. Even Estalian, Tilean or even the forces from Araby could be produced using positive facets from each related nation's history. The excuse of 'rules' is often cited to explain why new forces are not added to the spectrum. You hear, or read, statements like, and I paraphrase,  '40k doesn't need another horde army' or 'Warhammer already has a couple of static line shooting armies' quite often if you read around the wargames community a little more widely. Well if its not about the rules but about selling miniatures, as GW tell us they are a miniature manufacturing company as apposed to a gaming one, why not produce entirely new armies and peddle them to the masses? 

I suspect that the answer to this is an economic one. It just isn't profitable to design, produce and develop background for new models when you can rehash all the old stuff much more cheaply and turn a tidy profit. Warhammer Fantasy Battle is now far more generic than it once was and many of the other developers out there copy this generic style, deliberately or not, to help turn a profit in their own respective companies. The generic feel of fantasy has spread to other media too, from books, television programmes and even computer games! Which is why, as a reader, I found the writing of Robert E Howard's Conan stories so fresh and exciting when I read them recently, even though they are much older than much of Tolkien's writing. But it was Tolkien and not Howard who's vision created the 'stamp' from which many other fantasies are struck; so orcs, elves and medieval fantasy (or late medieval at the least) has remained predominant. Personally, my own first tastes of fantasy were with the Fighting Fantasy gamebooks and later Games Workshop products. But this was a different fantasy world than the one we know today. It was largely undefined but much of the Empire was described as a dark and dangerous place where the majority of people lived in ignorance of the true horrors of the world. 

Very Lovecraftian. 

Humour also made a difference in the early editions of Warhammer (and even 40k, worshiping puddings anyone?) with comedy orcs and dwarfs in the little short stories that were parts of the Citadel Miniature ad, amusing place names (Pissdorf) and characters that poke fun at national British figures and even GW employees. Playing the Enemy Within Campaign for the first time brings up that really amusing moment when the double is signed to by the follower of the Purple Hand. It can be very funny to act out, especially if you don't know the story, and if played for laughs it can turn into a rather ridiculous moment. Reading that entry in the supplement reveals that the authors really encouraged you to play for laughs, as did GW as a whole then. It seems to be that as Fantasy became more poe-faced and serious, so did the company producing the product. It became a vicious self serving spiral down into generic nonsense that feels now totally devoid of life. By 8th edition, the Warhammer World, especially the Empire, had devolved from a highly detailed, fairly believable place (which in my opinion is essential for any fantasy to work) into some hellish nightmare land were every tree and field is out to get the common man and terrible, mind blasting demonic entities casually stroll the earth with impunity. Which always let me asking the question, well how did the human societies even remain in existence then, when even the very land they live on rebels against them?

Whatever the reason, the player base for Warhammer, the beast that started it all, dwindles further, and further until the question is raised... "why not retire it?" If White Dwarf can go, they so can one of the Core games, surely? This leads to another question though, if fantasy is so unpopular, why does Warhammer Fantasy Battle thrive, nay dominate, the Oldhammer movement? Sure Rogue Trader gets a good look in, doesn't it, but have a quick glance around the blogs and social media and you'll see that fantasy stands triumphant! At the Oldhammer Weekend last year, there were at least ten games going on at one point, nearly all of which were fantasy. I think I may have some answers to this, and by this I do mean 'some' answers (perhaps theories would be a better term?) rather than 'the' answer. 

Here goes...

1) Nostalgia

Without a doubt, this has to be the most powerful draw for fantasy in Oldhammer. Its what we played as kids. Rogue Trader wasn't released for a number of years before Fantasy Battle and we all merrily lined up our models and just played away with what we had. We were excited, care-free and desperate to own a huge amount of kit that quite frankly, we could have never afforded. Anything and everything looks better through the rose tinted spectacles of nostalgia, even some of Bob Olley's sculpts!! Sorry Bob! Now as adults, often cash rich and time poor, we are eager to escape the troubles of adult life in many myriad ways, and returning to childhood pastimes and youthful pursuits is a very healthy way of relaxing and easing a troubled mind. We can relive our youths with a new bunch of comrades and do exactly the same thing as we used to do, just line up all our models on one big table and bash away! 

A couple of posts back I talked about the types of Oldhammerer I had had the pleasure of meeting. A lot of you who commented and discussed what I had said talked about the thrill of collecting. The addiction to eBay and how enjoyable collecting out of production miniatures was. I think nostalgia plays a big part in this too. I am sure that you are like me when I say that I miss the wall to wall racks of blister packs. You used to walk into the gaming shops back in the 1980s and be confronted by an enormity of lead. Even a solid hour's reflection over those blister packs and their contents would leave fresh discoveries still to be made. Different variants of models, miniatures you have never seen before and sometimes even something mind blasting in its originality, to you anyway, in the bargain box - a preslotta most likely! What is eBay today but our wall of blister packs? Our pleasurable hours cruising the internet site for models is merely a reflection of those days of youth at the blister pack wall, our heads full of dreams and our imaginations fired by the creativity on display.

Much like me in the newsagents with all those cover paintings. 

2) Artistic Style

This must come a close second to nostalgia. Fantasy battle dominates because the older models seem fresh once more, as does the art. Its not CAD. Its not following a house style, in fact, individual artistic styles prevail through the artwork, the sculpting and even the game design. Sure its crude in places, but somehow my orc villager sculpted by Trish Morrison back in 1987 seems fresher and more believable than the latest batch of orc miniatures with all their technological improvements. At the point I gave up on modern Warhammer I had this feeling that no matter how many little extra components there were on the kits I was buying, everything I built, painted or saw in magazines just felt, well, over familiar. I had, in truth, seen it all before. The archetypes had become tired and this was covered up by an never ending tide of skulls, spikes and chains. 

The older models that are so commonly used in Oldhammer games are the polar opposite to this. They are often one piece casts where the sculptor, more often or not, has breathed a little life into the greens from which it came. This is something I just have never felt from a plastic, nor resin kit. But that is just me. I know its a fair few of you followers too!

3) Player Creativity

"You can't paint them that colour!" Have you ever heard or read this statement? What about... "that unit cannot use spears?" Its seems bizarre now, but about four years ago I felt I was the only one who didn't want to blindly follow the dogma recorded in a series of increasingly priced publications. Oldhammer encourages you to be creative and play and paint your way. This opens the box for the individual to go crazy and build the armies that they want rather than what is expected of them. With a massive range of models just in the old Citadel range alone the scale of this creativity is almost unmatched by any other company, trading or not. The same can be said for the rules systems. Warhammer Fantasy Battle 1-3 was not so much a set of rules to follow, but a tool kit for you to produce your own worlds in which to game. If you don't like something, or if a particular aspect doesn't appeal to you, you, as a gamer, were expected to change it. There was no hand holding. Players were even encourage to set up games for other people, producing background, a context and the armylists all by themselves before actually running the game. Hopefully, with the addition of a nice little story for the players to contribute to.

4) Freedom

Similar in many ways to the previous section on Player Creativity. Old School gaming taps you into the freedom of the '80s. The gaming culture back then was steeped in freedom. It was too small scale for the big money men to need to start shoe-horning sales strategies in. Roleplaying, and later fantasy wargaming, best exemplified by Warhammer Fantasy Battle, was underground. It was produced for gamers, by gamers. Games Workshop and Citadel Miniatures were owned by, and run by, pioneers who loved fantasy gaming and wanted others to do so. The profits went into their pockets (and quite right too) rather than into the portfolios of disinterested investors.

To return once more to my newsagent. The type of shop that I remember doesn't really exist anymore. They were the dark, dingy independent places that have long since been replaced by Smiths, Spar or Tesco Extra. They sold magazines, food, drink, fags, computer games on tape, hardware, tools and you name it. Something struck me in Tescos this morning as I pushed my daughter in her push chair past the magazines racks. We stopped at White Dwarf and I plucked the magazine up, flicking through the pages and coming to that back spread of a Lord of Change and its foreboding message. My son will never experience buying WD from a shop like I did, like a generation of gamers before me did! After 37 years or so its all over. Even though the once might magazine has been a poorly written cynical sales device with little or no real content of real merit for some years.

I shall still miss it. 

Nicked from Mr Saturday's Mumblings! Thanks!

1977-2014