( If you want to know more about the lore behind the AoS world, we got an article on it here) This means that The Old World, in a way, is the ancient past of the Age of Sigmar universe, and many of the heroes and villains of the Age of Sigmar have ties to The World that Was, as they call it in AOS. From the ashes of the Old World Age of Sigmar was bornĪrchaon (who you know from AOS!) destroyed the Old World, and from the Chaos that ensued, The Mortal Realms (the setting of Age of Sigmar) came into being. And so the classic lore of the Old World was dead for many years. No matter what the reasons were, Games Workshop ended the Fantasy Battles franchise through a series of books called the End Times, that ended in a total apocalypse for the setting via a calamitous chaos invasion.

It might seem strange that such a rich and successful franchise doesn’t exist anymore, and the theories about why exactly it was discontinued are countless. The entire Old World was massive and could really set your imagination on fire. It has influenced many other fantasy settings, such as the video game universes of Diablo and Warcraft. In a way that the Age of Sigmar is still years away from achieving that Old World warhammer lore (but it’s getting there pretty quickly), the Old World was a deep, insanely detailed fantasy setting with a darker tone than most other fantasy worlds in its time. It was a rank and file tabletop wargame where fantasy armies of orks, dwarfs, elves, undead and humans faced off against each other in regiments on square bases, and it was one of the most popular fantasy games for a full eight editions of its ruleset.Ī great many of the miniatures people now use to play Age of Sigmar, such as most of the Cities of Sigmar models, many of the Death, Destruction and Chaos miniatures, and even monsters like the Treelords or Stormfiends, were originally part of the Fantasy Battles model line.īut – the Old World wasn’t just a setting for at game system.

The title “The Old World” refers to the fictional universe where Games Workshop’s retired game system Warhammer Fantasy Battles took place.īefore the Age of Sigmar, Fantasy Battles was the fantasy twin of Warhammer 40,000 (the space version of Warhammer that we don’t cover much here on this site). 7 The connection between Warhammer Total War 3 and Warhammer the Old World What is Warhammer: The Old World?

Forge of empires playing in a new world