Bubblehammer - reasons against

I think I’m safe now to not spoiler-break anyone by saying that, at the end of End Times Archaon, the world of Warhammer as we knew it disappeared down the gurgler. It even looked like that in the art.
(Fantastic stories were told in End Times though, so I urge one and all to read them. Think of it as a celebration of all the memories built up of the setting)

In the closing lines of the book we read of someone -  who don’t who – glimpsing a new world and doing something miraculous, and there being a new beginning.

What that becomes is probably the biggest question in tabletop fantasy miniatures gaming right now. Even if you don’t care so much about the lore, the physicality of the new setting is an essential issue, because it could have so much meaning for the new factions.

I don’t hold with this bubble-universe rumour.

I may have to eat my hat on that later but I just don’t see how it enables anything. The old setting - pre-End Times - already had dark forests, cities, frozen wastes, treacherous mountain passes, volcanoes, storm-wracked shores, deserts, mutated landscapes….

 

True, not all of these things were in spitting distance of, say, Athel Loren and it was hard to see a narrative reason why Lizardmen would face Wood Elves… but so what? If you really wanted to have a battle between those factions you’d just do it… and no-one and nothing is the poorer for it.
Now I’ve read a lot of Moorcock where the characters cross from reality to unreality to another unreality and so on and 9^th could operate in a multiverse but… again, to what end?

And people love their maps. Maps are the relationships between settings - and THAT is lore. "Here is next to There" is lore. Maps are lore, and lore is a non-negotiable. You have to have it. Otherwise dwarves are short hairy guys with no books of grudges or rock-hard codes of honour, and elves are just skinny dudes with nice skin.

40K has an entire galaxy and millions of planets, it still has maps and it still has that over-arching continuity.

I can’t have armies fighting in some kind of metaphysical soap bubble, it just doesn’t work. And even if it did it wouldn’t be fantasy, which trades very heavily on its settings. All those grim fortresses and forests of doom speak to something inside us all, that’s why fantasy works even for people who don’t normally go for it, they still get the symbology.

So I think there will be a contiguous and defined physical setting.

And if I’m wrong about that, or there is sneakiness I hadn't considered then…. My dismay is only equalled by my curiosity about what the heck they're going to do.