by Davane » March 5th, 2021, 1:46 pm
Kurgan, you have this annoying habit of nitpicking over ambivalence, and then running off with it as if it's some kind of win, whilst seeming to completely miss the point. It's fascinating to watch...
The Old World isn't "lazy" - sure, it started off as a variation of Earth, but so have many other fantasy settings. However, it has grown over time, building up in layers of detail that weren't just "let's make an Earth knock-off."
The Empire started off as your standard Medieval Earth setting, but evolved to become more like Germany during the Holy Roman Empire. Guest commentary in the latest incarnations of the Enemy Within campaign for WFRP include facts about how and why things were named. It seems that the GW design team at the time had a perverse fascination for puns, and things just kind of evolved from there.
Turns out the Riekland wasn't actually meant to be German-esque, but was simply an anagram of the main designer, Rick Priestly. It was literally "Rick Land". When sound it out, they found it funny to pronounce it with a heavy German accent, which is quite funny for a bunch of ENGLISH nerds that only ever took a few German lessons at school, and were trying to seem clever. It's amusing that a few years later, as GW spread into Germany, many fans ended up writing to the studio explaining what various places in the Empire actually meant, and that a few of them are actually real places in Germany - typically remote villages that the design team never heard of.
From that, they slowly added other areas, and slotted them in to the setting. They did this, and thus the world grew, and then they realise they had effectively made a fantasy version of Europe, so that's how they created the map. In a very cyclic way, fans and other designers got the joke, and thus the rest of the world was slowly developed. A lot of places began as little more than a name and grew from that - Bretonnia, Tilea and Estalia, Kislev, Norsca, Albion, Araby, Cathay and Ind, Nippon, Lustria. The design team at GW realised that they could slot the world into a fantasy version of Earth, because a lot of fantasy culture have been obviously inspired by real world cultures.
GW was founded selling D&D in the UK as the TSR distributors (although previously they made Backgammon sets), but would evolve to create their own wargame - Warhammer - amid making a whole bunch of games. They founded Citadel Miniatures to primarily make miniatures for their games, alongside miniatures for other games in a variety of settings. The first edition of Warhammer was based more on the models that Citadel Miniatures created than any sort of setting. It wasn't until the "big change" of 1991 that GW would decide to focus solely on GW IP like Warhammer (up until the 2000's, when GW acquired the LotR miniatures license).
From this point on, they designed settings primarily for miniatures, and not the other way around. The aesthetic of the models would define the theme and culture of the armies, as they fleshed out the world in background and lore, through art and fiction. They wanted Warhammer and 40K to be generic, so they primarily added what they thought was missing, and still use this approach sometimes today - right up until they realised that there's so much lore about the Warhammer World that the books essentially write themselves, as it's mostly just filling in the details of bits that have been mentioned in other sources.
There is no Armybook for Nippon, for example, but we all know what a Nipponese Army is like, because we know how Nippo fits into the Warhammer World from other sources. We know that Nippon would slot in around about where Japan would be, and feature a kingdom of shogun, samurai, and ninja. It would be a classic oriental setting, and all of this comes from the mention of Nippon in other sources, such as describing Clan Eshin Skaven assassins and night runners.
There was a point when GW decided that give in and embrace the fact that Warhammer was a fantasy version of Earth, which made sense because the design team back then were serious History buffs. That's why the deep dived into the cultures of places that had already been named and briefly described in other sources. For example, Bretonnia is a mixture of English and French culture, because it's based on the Normans who brought castle-building as we know in what we thing of as medieval, to England. Technically, Bretonnia isn't exactly France, it's the region of Brittany that English and French royalty fought over for centuries.
When the Empire became Germanic, largely due to the influence of Rick Priestly's infamous "Rickland," that pave the way for the Empire to become more Holy Roman Empire, and advance from simply medieval to pre-renaissance, where gunpowder exists but isn't strictly stabilised to the point where you got anything more potent than handmuskets and cannons from the forges of Nuln. This actually took the Empire OUT of the generic medieval fantasy setting it started as, and became a much more enlightened civilisation.
A lot of this is down to the design from WFRP, where the idea of Chaos cults and a gritty adventuring environment called for a setting that was as much about the social issues of the times than it was about killing monsters. There's a clear caste system in the Empire as it has evolved out of feudalism. You have the distinction between the bastions of safety that are cities, full of burghers, compared to the harsh realities of rural villages where horrors do genuinely lurk in the dark. The aristocracy and political elite are practically alien to the lower classes, and both academics and merchants are becoming forces of power in their own right. Then you have the clergy and the mages, with their powers and the will of the gods, dealing with forces known to imperil mind, body, and soul. Finally, you have adventurers, which muddy these waters, as they come from all classes, create dramatic change, and defy all order that would otherwise exist.
I don't think you can call that setting lazy. It's had over 40 years of evolution and development based on what the designers loved most of all - Earth History and Culture. The didn't name their great explorer that discovered the New World Marco Columbo because they were lazy. They did it because they were paying homage to explorers like Christopher Columbus, John Cook, and Marco Polo, who have become famous for discovering the distant places on Earth. The only difference is that in Warhammer, these three great explorers (and others) have all been combined into the great explorer Marco Columbo.
The world of HQ stayed static, whilst the Warhammer World hasn't, despite both being the same world. HQ is a snapshot of what the Warhammer World was like back in 89, compared to what it was before GW decided to throw it under a bus for Age of Sigmar. Many people prefer how the Warhammer World was in the late 90's, when WQ was released, and for many the original WQ is the spiritual successor of HQ because of the setting, and how it had evolved (compared to the Warhammer Quest brand now, which is a bit *lemony goodness*...). This golden age would also include when Mordheim was released, which started as Warhammer Skirmish, but effectively became a narrative skirmish game set in the ruined city of Mordheim (in the Empire), that bordered on being as close to a cross between a roleplaying game and a wargame as you could get. GW would go a bit further in this direction, with Inquisitor but never released a fantasy version of that game (which some think is a damn shame).
Compare that to what Hasbro has done, and you can see why there's a lot of angst and such a deep feeling of loss regarding NuHQ. The bar has been set so high by GW, and it appears that Hasbro hasn't even bothered attempting to get over it. They've deliberately faulted, or just conceded that they couldn't do any setting that was as good as the Old World, so haven't really bothered. I know Steven Baker, Teos, and the other devs had some "good" ideas, but they never really had any sort of shared setting in mind. HeroQuest is the brand, and NuHQ is going to see a bunch of questbooks, which will be a reprint of the original Old World quest books, and some new quest books which are going to be set in whatever area the authors decide to make up for their quest book to possibly make sense.
The problem isn't that NuHQ won't be set in the Old World. The problem is NuHQ won't be set in ANY world as far as Hasbro seems concerned. GW went from making games to making worlds, and their IP has grown over time. But Hasbro makes Toys and Avalon Hill makes games - they don't do worlds AT ALL. Neither of them have really had to - the closest Hasbro has come is to make IPs to sell action figures, and AH's primary classics are set on EARTH. So the closest we will get is some kind of ambiguous Earth/Old World hybrid, that can't be too much of either, but also can't be a perfect blend of both because that's essentially the Warhammer World is.
It's kind of like trying to find a colour between Yellow and Orange, without being able to use either Yellow or Orange, or anything related to them, because both Yellow and Orange, and any associated colours to both, are product identity. So instead, they won't specify the colour, and basically lampshade the whole damn thing...
Doubt they'd be that creative. 
If nothing else it may spur development of my de-magicified version of the world, for all it's needed.
