Oh Warhammer.

No other game has inspired the love/hate relationship that Warhammer did for me. I had unquestionably the best experience I’ve ever had in an MMO while playing this game, and at the same time I had some of the most frustrating and generally upsetting times there too. And while it’d be easy to say that all of my frustration was in response to game mechanics and such, that’d be unfair. Roleplay certainly played its part. Or to put it more accurately, my crazy fanaticism for lore made some things difficult to appreciate as time wore on.

Warhammer was a game that I first really started following after a couple people pointed out the extensive nature of its lore. Twenty-five years of lore as preached by player and producer alike. My mind boggled at it at first and I delved into what the web had to offer me. There were a few wiki style sites out there that offered what I thought was a rather detailed collection of articles on various aspects of the Warhammer world. Oh how wrong I was.

Now, as much as I love lore I think it’s really just an extension of my deep affection for research. I took a class in college about Conceptual Design and the instructor for it was very adamant that we learn how to research as part of the process. Creativity is wonderful but that experience taught me that the world often offers me ideas that I could never have thought of on my own. The Warhammer universe is an amazing example of this sort of thing but I wouldn’t really learn that lesson until about four months after I created my Knight.

The server she’d been born on, Ostermark, had just been merged with Phoenix Throne and I was trying very hard to view it as an opportunity and not a death knell. The point I tried to focus on at the time was that it offered me a whole new group of people to get to know and roleplay with. In the process of that I started reading through the archives of the Phoenix Throne RP forum on the Warhammer Alliance site. And I found a thread about Doomings.

This is exactly the sort of thing I’m talking about when I say that the world offers me ideas I never would have thought of on my own. Thinking about my character’s dooming, and how she’d have reacted to it and what it’d mean to her opened up some new perspectives that I’d never thought about before. When the author of that article, Charbel, followed it up with an article about the Knights of the Blazing Sun I was hooked.

With the encouragement from a couple friends I started searching for what Warhammer books I could get my hands on, which sounds a lot easier than it is considering that a lot of them are out of print. But still I managed to get my mitts on a stack large enough to crush a baby.

A baby such as would need crushing.

In sifting and searching through those dusty tomes I found out a huge number of things that I hadn’t even concieved of. I really cant emphasise this enough, there were thousands of pages of knowledge suddenly at my fingertips. And in some ways that ruined the game.

There were a lot of things that I’d overlooked, or done myself that contradicted the lore that I was now immersing myself in and.. that suddenly bothered me. It was always hard to look past the people that completely ignored how the Warhammer world worked. After reading that lore it became impossible.

To be completely honest I’m not sure how to feel about the whole scenario even today. On the one hand it would have been amazing to actually play in the setting as it was presented by Games Workshop. On the other hand… what I had wasn’t really BAD in any way. Quite the opposite. I had a lot of fun with things that were pretty out there in terms of what the lore would allow. Should I have ignored the lore and continued to run with things as they were? Or should I have tried to educate people as someone had done for me?

Unfortunately thanks to a variety of events in game and out I’ll never really know what would have happened. I do still think about it at times like this and wonder about all the plans I’d made. When I left Warhammer my Knight was on the cusp of total corruption into a Chosen of Tzeentch. Sometimes I feel like I should dig those books back out and explore the rest of her story, the one that lies beyond the Chaos Wastes.

And with the first eleven levels of the game being offered for free on the Warhammer website and Phoenix Throne being merged into one of the two available servers I may just get that chance. In weird ways Warhammer keeps finding ways to entertain me and make me smile.

PS: If you’re an Ostermark or Phoenix Throne refugee with a hankering for some fun Warhammer reading I have to plug the Cinematic Roleplay Dueling as the best way to get your fix without a subscription or a fist full of Games Workshop books. Aeternis of Warhammer Alliance was gracious enough to collect them all into two PDF volumes that you can find available for download.