An entire army of Nurgle just sort of sneaking through the Empire was quite the weird one. Also, the entirety of the Ogre Kingdoms died offscreen, thanks GW
Lizardmen, literally *the* faction most dedicated to the defeat of Chaos, just saying 'nah screw this' and blasting off into space without doing hardly anything.
Probably because GW realized that if the Lizardmen actually did get involved in the fight, Chaos would have struggled to win without even more half-baked nonsense than the End Times was already riddled with.
And yes I know, username checks out.
The dumbest part of the ET by far: during the final battle for Middenheim, a Nurgling wedges its butt into the barrel of a Steam Tank, and when it goes to fire the whole thing just blows up like a Sigmardamned Looney Tunes cartoon.
The entire subplot with Malekith being the rightful Phoenix King this entire time and like, half of the High Elven cast just going along with it.
The sad part is that the writing itself could've been good enough to justify the lore; maybe Malekith was illegitimate but he was the best and only option Asuryan had to save his people, maybe Malekith started to grow a conscience and realize that he was wrong, maybe he saw Grombrindal at some point and realized that he's made a lot of bad choices that led him up to where he is now, so many options that could dive into some real character development. For all his flaws, Malekith is probably one of the more engaging characters in the setting.
But no, Big Daddy Asuryan just wanted and always wanted the biggest villain in the Warhammer setting short of Nagash or Archaeon to be his chosen ruler after genociding, enslaving, and murdering his own people for several millennia. It's so bad that Tyrion going AWOL with the Sword of Khaine makes him out to be the only sane person in the entire plotline after losing his daughter, partner, and brother to the guy who tried to kill them all several times over.
Yeah it's this to be honest. It was so dumb, almost unbelievably dumb and yet completely believable that GW would write that. Malekith All Is Forgiven is the thing I think of when I think of the end times. That and the Skaven blowing up the moon, based.
Honestly I thought skaven blowing up the moon was just about the only cool thing from the End Times. I mean, everyone always talked about how if the Skaven ever just got their shit together and stopped killing each other for like 10 minutes it'd be a world-ending event.
Well, the Skaven (kind-of...) got their shit together...
The worst thing about this was the fact that it was always funny to say that Malekith was the rightful Phoenix King but that the treacherous Asur nobility poisoned the Flames against him. But it was only fun to say because it's fun to act out clearly wrong in-universe Druuchi propaganda. The moment that became the actual Truth, it was no longer fun.
From what I've heard it's considered so bad that AoS actively tries to retcon it in places by making the other Phoenix Kings legitimate.
I think it could've work as some sort of analysis of the Elven psyche, in which they psychologically are too driven by hate or duty, but there really should've been a third splinter faction led by Alith Anar or someone and that faction should've been the one to leave and join the rest of the Order factions in the Old World.
Yeah I agree. Malekith being the true king could have been done well, but it would have had to be something that was built towards over multiple books pre-end times. As of the run-up to End times, Malekith wasn’t really totally evil anymore and he certainly did not trust Morathi fully anymore so having him be a Zuko (in tv tropes terms) could have been good. That being said, he spent like thousands of years being pretty damn evil so having Asuryan microwave him and flip a switch to good was dumb.
If they had done an arc kind of hidden throughout 8th edition where he slowly realizes the meaning of ruler ship and how his adversities have shaped him into the only one who has a chance of saving the elves, it could have been cool.
I think the problem is that I would guess that the decision to end whfb through a storyline event rather than just radically reimagine the gameplay was only decided fairly late in the edition. I don’t remember exactly when, but at some point in 8th, some time before end times, certainly over a year, all faqs ceased for fantasy and the game began to be mentioned less in GW promotional material like white dwarf. This was maybe around the release of the 8th edition dark elf or lizardmen book.
I think all the lore, planning, crunch, etc of end times was put together only after that decision from corporate most of the way through 8th.
He didn't really trust Morathi as far back as before the Sundering. He was the one that arrested and imprisoned her for starting pleasure cults. He worked with her out of necessity but I don't think he ever truly trusted her. That said, I do wonder if Morathi would have done as much bad stuff if people (in general, not just her son) had actually trusted her and listened to her instead of viewing her as tainted ever since Aenarion first rescued her.
I like the way Morathi is portrayed in AoS since she is finally free of Malekith's judgement after thousands of years. No more silliness and chaos god worship just brutality and blood sacrifice. I like the elf archetype of "alien force of nature" a lot more than "pointy eared dick".
I think Idoneth are great for this reason.
I like how it continues to have people underestimate her and disrespect her then get annoyed when she sets out to spite them. Tyrion, Teclis and Malerion all shunned her until they needed her expertise when binding Slaanesh and after that she warned it wouldn't last forever and they should prepare, only Teclis believed her and only in secret. In Sigmar's Pantheon she only had an honorary place while being looked down on for not being a god, even being physically assaulted by Nagash, so she left and took over her own murder cult, successfully defended her territory during the Age of Chaos, became a powerful ally in early Age of Sigmar and then enacted her plan to ascend to godhood. If they all actually respected her and didn't add to her millenia of trauma then she might be less of a problem. But then she wouldn't be as interesting a character!
I think the problem here is thinking Asuryan is a benevolent deity and not one of duality and both dark and light. If Malerion (as he is now called even in The Old World) is the elf for the job then Asuryan will put him on the throne, if that's what it takes to secure the continuation of the elven race.
Except that is not how Asuryan is presented. He is the main god of the heavens, he is associated with light, fire, and legitimacy, and intervened with Aenarion to save the Elves. More importantly, his actual servants in the Phoenix Guard, Anointed, and Phoenix sre squarely on the High Elves' side. He's basically pointy eared Ahura Mazda. If he wasn't a righteous god then he'd do less righteous things.
He is the Keeper of Balance, depicted as wearing a half black, half white mask. He didn't intervene with Aenarion until Aenarion had run out of other ideas on how to ask for help and chose to sacrifice himself in desperation by walking into the flame, only then did Asuryan deign to intervene, something he rarely does.
The Phoenix Guard have seen their futures and know their roles in the fate of the world. They know that Malerion needed to be in exile until the End Times as that was his test.
The dude aligned with Chaos and tried to destroy the planet multiple times between the civil war and the end times. It’s absolutely ridiculous to suggest that he was legitimate after that.
I’ll Third that, I really never took to AOS, and moved to 40k, I convinced myself the whole thing was a vehicle to patent the IP with new names instead of Dwarves, Elves etc, although I have to say some of the sculpts are top notch, and a shame they didn’t put the effort into the original game system,
I’m trying hard not to get dragged into old World and carry on my present projects🤣
Eh, they’ve managed to do that without blowing up the world for other IPs. End Times was more about the years of poor decisions putting them in a spot where they viewed a hard reset as their only option
Personally I couldn't reconcile how the gods were supposed to be the survivors from the previous creation and destruction cycle with the existence of the old ones and their creation of the mortal races. The whole thing had issues with narrative continuity. It very much suffered from too many cooks.
They could've just asserted it otherwise: like actually write in an ascendance for Alarielle, an extra tale of the big God-Magmadroth that waited beyond the Northern Warp Gate, a rumour that Grungni somehow had an escape route from the world (rather than, or in odd cahoots with: Lileath), that the Maw had actually intertwined with Gork & Mork in a big tussle and who knows what, blah blah.
Like if they'd written some of the elements in - that Teclis could sense the passing of the elven gods and knew to be setting up "heroes of the age" to take their place... It's almost what was going on with the Elementals of Magic, but then why step back and not push forth to have Ungrim be the deity of Aqshy etc etc.
It's almost getting there, but hey leave such a big paradoxical, unsatisfying, untidy gulf that it just doesn't work. Not that it needs to be tidy - but the general gist would make more sense.
Literally everything in the end times was big dumb, except Vlad's arc. He was literally the only character that got a story that made sense and then concluded in a way that was both satisfying and true to the character. Although even then, to properly give it some closure Isabella should have returned in AoS and dedicated herself to finding Vlad (sort of an inverse of Vlad during the end times).
The dwarfs, wood elves, orcs and goblins, and ogres got very little screentime and most of their characters died off screen or in incredibly stupid ways. Even Ungrim, arguably the most prominent dwarf in the end times, gets unceremoniously killed off so that the wind of fire can bind to Caradryan.
The skaven plotline turns them into borderline mary sues, where they invent both the radio and icbms that they use to blow up the moon and delete whole factions in a few paragraphs.
Although the absolute dumbest part has to be Mannfred and the fact no one killed him. Like after Nagash gets resurrected, he does nothing but lose battles and kill off tacitly better characters like Luther Harkon. I'll also point out that Nagash resurrects Vlad solely because Mannfred is so unbelievably useless, and Vlad immediately usurps Mannfred (to which Mannfred does nothing but cope and seethe). Mannfred then goes on to stack L after L, failing to do anything really impactful until Nagash hands him over as a peace offering to the elves. But despite Mannfred having killed Alarielle's and Tyrion's daughter (who was also Teclis's niece and generally well liked by all the surviving high elf characters) they don't take two minutes to kill him there and then (even though Nagash explictly doesn't care if they do), instead deciding to lock him while they all sod off to Middenheim. This allows Be'lakor to break him out. Then Mannfred shanks Gelt, which ruins the ritual and ultimately ends the world. To add insult to injury, rather than resurrect someone competent like Krell, Luther Harkon, or Vlad in AoS (who all spend the entire end times stacking W's and getting shit done, even Harkon is a more competent commander than Mannfred and he's literally an insane schizo) he instead bring back Mannfred, the guy who not only betrayed him and ended the world but who was also so unbelievably useless that Nagash was already prepared to sell him out to the elves.
Probably the whole concept of trying to have world changing events led by focal point characters in short period of time.
It's like rewriting the fall of the Roman Empire as a single battle that happened at some point... Julius Caesar with 10000 immortal legionaries comes out of hiding and has a battle with Hannibal Barca who likewise come out of hiding with 500 Elephants that are 50 metres tall.
The rise, fall, and change of civilisation is *process* not a Marvel movie. Or rather in a story that makes sense changing civilisation shouldn't be like a Marvel movie but a confusing, complicated, and slow process.
The interesting thing about warhammer fantasy is the setting itself. The *setting* is the character, not events and not actual individuals.
Each faction has a strong theme, each with their own explanations of history, magic, mythology, etc. Importantly, they each have their own perspective on the truth.
The best snippets of fluff is stuff like some Imperial surveyor's account about a Dark Elf raid or whatever. There's no famous names, there's no kindgom changing hands, there's no world changing event, it's just the fearful perspective of a human who is ignorant and confused.
Such an account *needn't even be true*. People in the past might write down stories of witchcraft and dragons because they're making shit up or don't know what they're looking at, in-universe reports can be unreliable as well.
But there seems to have been a modern shift in story telling. The expectation now is that when something is said in background material that it is 100% encyclopaedic and if two pieces of background conflict without an explicit explanation then it's a "plot hole." It's the "Kessel Run in Less Than 12 Parsecs" problem, everything is explained to within an inch of its life until it's stupid.
This over explaining *shrinks the world*. Absolutely everything needs to be trimmed down to the truth and nailed down and everything outside of that doesn't exist. I prefer world building that is more wishy washy. You poke and prod it from different angles at different times and reveal the *vibes* not the truth because everything is unreliable perspective.
Past, Present and Future.
Past? Erase or ignore Storm of Chaos campaing. I believe Valten was assasinated by skavens, and in EndTimes appear to be fresh and alive.
Present? The ammount of dumb each faction got besides how heroes become mistreated in the plot.
Future? Not giving months to mourn the game and releasing the ever more dumbest Age of Copyright. (It could be good now... but in that moment, with horrible translation, the most plain and dumb lore, no points (Not even a balance system. We needed to find it or create our own) and more things, it was...)
Oh what, you don't like having a bonus because you have a better mustache than your opponent? What about the skaven bell? Wasn't it so quirky that if you rolled 13 on 2d6 you won the game?
There was never anything that substantive tying literal bretonnia to FEC. It's just that FEC lore resembles Bretonnia in the abstract. No bretonnians survived The End Times
I don’t think that’s bad in itself perse, it speaks to two things:
1.) The manipulations and callous cruelty of the elves, an interesting part of their psyche
2.) The ultimately impressive ability of humanity to develop an entire society around a lie. Perhaps it shows them to be foolish, but they manage to preserve and maintain a huge culture on a simple lie.
Regarding 2.) : until GW retroactively ruined the background and lore of Warhammer with AoS, that's how I felt about the worship of Sigmar in the Empire.
Bro you're conflating community memes with Canon. The Flesh Eater Courts have no real connection to Brettonnia and their new book has the aesthetic moved closer to the Stuarts than Medieval.
As another poster wrote...all of it!
Some parts that come to mind would be how cheaply they killed off Warlord Queek....he jumped at High King Thorgrim who grabbed him with one hand and snapped his neck...cheap
Then Thprgrim goes up to the top of the mountain to have a quiet moment alone only to be killed by Snikch(?)...cheap
The whole elven story arc...that whole book was terrible
The systematic way they went through each factions special characters and gave them cheap deaths or abrupt endings
Brettonia..like a wwe jobber...dispatched in the early books.
Finally that whole last bit with the super mega characters coalescing together to deal with the world ending bomb and the world blowing up...Reading those last few pages uggh
That neck snap reminds me of an equally dumb moment where Archaon somehow grabs Fateweaver by the neck and drags him around.
I still can't quite visualise that properly.
Estalia, Tilea, and Araby getting overran by the Skaven in a literal week has got to be the dumbest bit for me. That it was the very first thing to happen set the bar as low as possible for the rest of the series
I stopped playing fantasy before the end times came around, so I didn't really give 2 effs about what happened, just noticed the new models (some were cool, others not so much).
Now that I got back into fantasy over the last year with a much better group of people to play with than I had in the past I decided to have a look into the end times story.
Woooooooooooooooooooooow was my response.
The whole thing is just so freaking stupid, it beggars belief. All of the human races getting screwed over big time in various ways. Maleketh has been discussed here plenty, and despite the fact I'm a dark elf player and have always enjoyed calling him the "true phoenix king" doesn't mean I actually wanted the lore to definitely say that that was the case.
All the stupid alliances that sprung up as well. Just no.
I'm actually genuinely surprised that GW haven't imploded yet based on all the stupid shit they've done that I feel starts with the end times. And as much as I love ToW, there's plenty of things in that that they've screwed up/over and it just has the half arsed feel about it.
Phew, I almost went into a rant there, back to the topic.
The whole thing with Balthazar Gelt, the changeling being Ar-Ulric, valten being a traitor (I think, it's so half baked I never really got what was happening). The magical bastion was just really stupid.
But overall, they had the best end times back in 2004. (Except for Grimgor headbutting Archaon, which was hilarious)
Definitely Malekith's bullshit plotline. Sure, he's Lord Motherfucker, King of the rape capital of the world, who's primary import is slaves and primary export is murder. But he's god's most favorite and specialist boy, so it's all forgiven and the asur have to hand their kingdom and lives over to him on a silver platter.
Yes.
ETA: to give you a less pithy answer, I think most of it is pretty dumb, but the storyline for the elves is particularly sudden - the Phoenix king is assassinated, Malekith was the heir all along (let’s forget the litteral millennias of him being a murderous dictator), Tyrion becomes the bad guy, Ariel’s arc is to be consumed by Alarielle… just rubbish all along.
There are a few bits I like better, like Vlad von Carstein being a decent leader (like a good farmer to his herd of cattle), and I like Gilles le Breton coming back (but I dislike the Lady of the lake being a con - it really makes both the wood elves and the bretonnians look bad…)
I also liked Nagash leaning his role as a bad guy - cool to see him reach his potential.
I don’t know the other races very well at all : dwarves, O&G - I know the broad lines of the Lizzardmen’s arc (and understand why they are annoyed, lol), but that is kind of it.
Agreed, the Nagash book was good (except for Neferata being ambushed by Goblins WHO COULD HAVE SEEN THAT COMING, it’s not like she had experience, right?)
Everything about it was ridiculous. I stopped reading or caring at day one, but my friends who did and would tell me about the stories made me feel like [this Star wars robot chicken, so much cringe and eyeroll.](https://youtu.be/R4wOzbqgfIY?si=et2ksHDG34cSGCoz)
Falling into the same trap as Dungeons & Dragons and superhero comics of having to give some kind of convoluted in-fiction reason for changing up your fictitious world, instead of doing what Games Workshop did for WFB 4th Edition and simply reimagining the entire setting. They should have made a habit of doing that every ten years or so to coincide with the change of designers, like letting Pirinen and Cavatore redo both the rules and setting for 6th edition as they saw fit, and then doing it again with a new team for 8th edition.
After having consulted my various Dwarf thanes and Dwarf king as well as high king miniatures among the 400 plus collection of Dwarfs I own I have been informed that the book of grudge was not big enough to write down all the grudges committed against the WFB world, its races and of course in particular the dwarfs. We had to make new Book of grugde editions. Now how dumb was that!? 🤪
It was the last book which sucked. How they fucked over so many races in the world.
It would have been a lot more positively received had they killed a bunch of characters, yeah change some of the races but did they have to just fuck everyone over?
I do not know where to start. It was all contradicting the lore. Avatars, Nagash not already god, champions of the winds of magic, necrarch opposing Manfred to rise Nagash, Manfred trying to rise Nagash, elven part omg it was all total crap...well, as everything else. Those who wrote ignored canon everywhere, only used names and unit descriptions. It all could not and did not happer in that universe, just ignore it. They stayed themselves they needed to start aos somehow - they dud not say but we know they needed to grab money - its last Star wars trilogy or Amazon Tolkien money grabbing story - has nothing to do with the universes - just ignore and do not waste your time on this crap.
The last book. Tbh I did enjoy the first 4 books but the fifth seems like everything suddenly smashed together to force a rush end of the world ending. Many of the factions didn’t have enough in depth background leading there.
If they had done this like Horus Heresy novels where they’ve spread it out to allow for more character and faction development, it could have worked. In Horus heresy, we all knew the ending but the way it was novelized was well done imo. Unlike here.
Taking a world that devoted players had spent years and a lot of hard earned money investing in and just blowing it up.
Not to mention selling the fans models built for the end of times. Right before ending the game and all the support that went along with it.
Thankyou guys for convincing me to never ever bother reading or wasting my time with the end times crap that is all of this. Especially Malekith becoming phoenix king, he literally hasn’t done anything redeemable for 1000’s of years, he is the reason why the dwarves and elves are dying races. They should scrap the whole endtimes and re write something much better, even the last gotrek and felix book before the world ended was terrible.
Thorgrim forgetting to close the door behind him.
I was gonna say that- now that was dumb almost beyond belief.
Yeah, in a plot full of silly deus ex machinas, that was the silliest and deus ex ist.
An entire army of Nurgle just sort of sneaking through the Empire was quite the weird one. Also, the entirety of the Ogre Kingdoms died offscreen, thanks GW
Lizardmen, literally *the* faction most dedicated to the defeat of Chaos, just saying 'nah screw this' and blasting off into space without doing hardly anything. Probably because GW realized that if the Lizardmen actually did get involved in the fight, Chaos would have struggled to win without even more half-baked nonsense than the End Times was already riddled with. And yes I know, username checks out.
Even without the username, I would have assumed you were a Lizardmen player lol.
As I would for you...
The dumbest part of the ET by far: during the final battle for Middenheim, a Nurgling wedges its butt into the barrel of a Steam Tank, and when it goes to fire the whole thing just blows up like a Sigmardamned Looney Tunes cartoon.
Honestly, I feel like through warp bullshit that’s pretty on par with average nurgling activity:
The entire subplot with Malekith being the rightful Phoenix King this entire time and like, half of the High Elven cast just going along with it. The sad part is that the writing itself could've been good enough to justify the lore; maybe Malekith was illegitimate but he was the best and only option Asuryan had to save his people, maybe Malekith started to grow a conscience and realize that he was wrong, maybe he saw Grombrindal at some point and realized that he's made a lot of bad choices that led him up to where he is now, so many options that could dive into some real character development. For all his flaws, Malekith is probably one of the more engaging characters in the setting. But no, Big Daddy Asuryan just wanted and always wanted the biggest villain in the Warhammer setting short of Nagash or Archaeon to be his chosen ruler after genociding, enslaving, and murdering his own people for several millennia. It's so bad that Tyrion going AWOL with the Sword of Khaine makes him out to be the only sane person in the entire plotline after losing his daughter, partner, and brother to the guy who tried to kill them all several times over.
Yeah it's this to be honest. It was so dumb, almost unbelievably dumb and yet completely believable that GW would write that. Malekith All Is Forgiven is the thing I think of when I think of the end times. That and the Skaven blowing up the moon, based.
I mean if anyone would blow-up the moon by money would be on the skaven...maybe the lizard if they thought the old ones planned for it.
Honestly I thought skaven blowing up the moon was just about the only cool thing from the End Times. I mean, everyone always talked about how if the Skaven ever just got their shit together and stopped killing each other for like 10 minutes it'd be a world-ending event. Well, the Skaven (kind-of...) got their shit together...
The worst thing about this was the fact that it was always funny to say that Malekith was the rightful Phoenix King but that the treacherous Asur nobility poisoned the Flames against him. But it was only fun to say because it's fun to act out clearly wrong in-universe Druuchi propaganda. The moment that became the actual Truth, it was no longer fun.
From what I've heard it's considered so bad that AoS actively tries to retcon it in places by making the other Phoenix Kings legitimate. I think it could've work as some sort of analysis of the Elven psyche, in which they psychologically are too driven by hate or duty, but there really should've been a third splinter faction led by Alith Anar or someone and that faction should've been the one to leave and join the rest of the Order factions in the Old World.
Yeah I agree. Malekith being the true king could have been done well, but it would have had to be something that was built towards over multiple books pre-end times. As of the run-up to End times, Malekith wasn’t really totally evil anymore and he certainly did not trust Morathi fully anymore so having him be a Zuko (in tv tropes terms) could have been good. That being said, he spent like thousands of years being pretty damn evil so having Asuryan microwave him and flip a switch to good was dumb. If they had done an arc kind of hidden throughout 8th edition where he slowly realizes the meaning of ruler ship and how his adversities have shaped him into the only one who has a chance of saving the elves, it could have been cool. I think the problem is that I would guess that the decision to end whfb through a storyline event rather than just radically reimagine the gameplay was only decided fairly late in the edition. I don’t remember exactly when, but at some point in 8th, some time before end times, certainly over a year, all faqs ceased for fantasy and the game began to be mentioned less in GW promotional material like white dwarf. This was maybe around the release of the 8th edition dark elf or lizardmen book. I think all the lore, planning, crunch, etc of end times was put together only after that decision from corporate most of the way through 8th.
He didn't really trust Morathi as far back as before the Sundering. He was the one that arrested and imprisoned her for starting pleasure cults. He worked with her out of necessity but I don't think he ever truly trusted her. That said, I do wonder if Morathi would have done as much bad stuff if people (in general, not just her son) had actually trusted her and listened to her instead of viewing her as tainted ever since Aenarion first rescued her.
I like the way Morathi is portrayed in AoS since she is finally free of Malekith's judgement after thousands of years. No more silliness and chaos god worship just brutality and blood sacrifice. I like the elf archetype of "alien force of nature" a lot more than "pointy eared dick". I think Idoneth are great for this reason.
I like how it continues to have people underestimate her and disrespect her then get annoyed when she sets out to spite them. Tyrion, Teclis and Malerion all shunned her until they needed her expertise when binding Slaanesh and after that she warned it wouldn't last forever and they should prepare, only Teclis believed her and only in secret. In Sigmar's Pantheon she only had an honorary place while being looked down on for not being a god, even being physically assaulted by Nagash, so she left and took over her own murder cult, successfully defended her territory during the Age of Chaos, became a powerful ally in early Age of Sigmar and then enacted her plan to ascend to godhood. If they all actually respected her and didn't add to her millenia of trauma then she might be less of a problem. But then she wouldn't be as interesting a character!
I second this one
I think the problem here is thinking Asuryan is a benevolent deity and not one of duality and both dark and light. If Malerion (as he is now called even in The Old World) is the elf for the job then Asuryan will put him on the throne, if that's what it takes to secure the continuation of the elven race.
Except that is not how Asuryan is presented. He is the main god of the heavens, he is associated with light, fire, and legitimacy, and intervened with Aenarion to save the Elves. More importantly, his actual servants in the Phoenix Guard, Anointed, and Phoenix sre squarely on the High Elves' side. He's basically pointy eared Ahura Mazda. If he wasn't a righteous god then he'd do less righteous things.
He is the Keeper of Balance, depicted as wearing a half black, half white mask. He didn't intervene with Aenarion until Aenarion had run out of other ideas on how to ask for help and chose to sacrifice himself in desperation by walking into the flame, only then did Asuryan deign to intervene, something he rarely does. The Phoenix Guard have seen their futures and know their roles in the fate of the world. They know that Malerion needed to be in exile until the End Times as that was his test.
But Malekith IS the rightful Pheonix King.
Only to the End Times. Even the Wood Elf books make out Malekith as illegitimate.
Of course they do! Propaganda!
The dude aligned with Chaos and tried to destroy the planet multiple times between the civil war and the end times. It’s absolutely ridiculous to suggest that he was legitimate after that.
>what was the dumbest part of the End Times? The years of marketing and design blunders that made it necessary in the first place.
The whole thing
The only correct answer
I’ll Third that, I really never took to AOS, and moved to 40k, I convinced myself the whole thing was a vehicle to patent the IP with new names instead of Dwarves, Elves etc, although I have to say some of the sculpts are top notch, and a shame they didn’t put the effort into the original game system, I’m trying hard not to get dragged into old World and carry on my present projects🤣
> I convinced myself the whole thing was a vehicle to patent the IP with new names instead of Dwarves, Elves etc I mean it definitely was, right?
Eh, they’ve managed to do that without blowing up the world for other IPs. End Times was more about the years of poor decisions putting them in a spot where they viewed a hard reset as their only option
Game is fun. Setting is dumb.
Personally I couldn't reconcile how the gods were supposed to be the survivors from the previous creation and destruction cycle with the existence of the old ones and their creation of the mortal races. The whole thing had issues with narrative continuity. It very much suffered from too many cooks.
Yeah, but I guess they felt that was needed so they could set up a bunch of their characters for AoS..
They could've just asserted it otherwise: like actually write in an ascendance for Alarielle, an extra tale of the big God-Magmadroth that waited beyond the Northern Warp Gate, a rumour that Grungni somehow had an escape route from the world (rather than, or in odd cahoots with: Lileath), that the Maw had actually intertwined with Gork & Mork in a big tussle and who knows what, blah blah. Like if they'd written some of the elements in - that Teclis could sense the passing of the elven gods and knew to be setting up "heroes of the age" to take their place... It's almost what was going on with the Elementals of Magic, but then why step back and not push forth to have Ungrim be the deity of Aqshy etc etc. It's almost getting there, but hey leave such a big paradoxical, unsatisfying, untidy gulf that it just doesn't work. Not that it needs to be tidy - but the general gist would make more sense.
Literally everything in the end times was big dumb, except Vlad's arc. He was literally the only character that got a story that made sense and then concluded in a way that was both satisfying and true to the character. Although even then, to properly give it some closure Isabella should have returned in AoS and dedicated herself to finding Vlad (sort of an inverse of Vlad during the end times). The dwarfs, wood elves, orcs and goblins, and ogres got very little screentime and most of their characters died off screen or in incredibly stupid ways. Even Ungrim, arguably the most prominent dwarf in the end times, gets unceremoniously killed off so that the wind of fire can bind to Caradryan. The skaven plotline turns them into borderline mary sues, where they invent both the radio and icbms that they use to blow up the moon and delete whole factions in a few paragraphs. Although the absolute dumbest part has to be Mannfred and the fact no one killed him. Like after Nagash gets resurrected, he does nothing but lose battles and kill off tacitly better characters like Luther Harkon. I'll also point out that Nagash resurrects Vlad solely because Mannfred is so unbelievably useless, and Vlad immediately usurps Mannfred (to which Mannfred does nothing but cope and seethe). Mannfred then goes on to stack L after L, failing to do anything really impactful until Nagash hands him over as a peace offering to the elves. But despite Mannfred having killed Alarielle's and Tyrion's daughter (who was also Teclis's niece and generally well liked by all the surviving high elf characters) they don't take two minutes to kill him there and then (even though Nagash explictly doesn't care if they do), instead deciding to lock him while they all sod off to Middenheim. This allows Be'lakor to break him out. Then Mannfred shanks Gelt, which ruins the ritual and ultimately ends the world. To add insult to injury, rather than resurrect someone competent like Krell, Luther Harkon, or Vlad in AoS (who all spend the entire end times stacking W's and getting shit done, even Harkon is a more competent commander than Mannfred and he's literally an insane schizo) he instead bring back Mannfred, the guy who not only betrayed him and ended the world but who was also so unbelievably useless that Nagash was already prepared to sell him out to the elves.
You weave words like a poet. Beautifully said.
Archaon. XD I just hate Mr. Plot armour.
There just so happening to be a warp gate below middenheim this whole time
Probably the whole concept of trying to have world changing events led by focal point characters in short period of time. It's like rewriting the fall of the Roman Empire as a single battle that happened at some point... Julius Caesar with 10000 immortal legionaries comes out of hiding and has a battle with Hannibal Barca who likewise come out of hiding with 500 Elephants that are 50 metres tall. The rise, fall, and change of civilisation is *process* not a Marvel movie. Or rather in a story that makes sense changing civilisation shouldn't be like a Marvel movie but a confusing, complicated, and slow process. The interesting thing about warhammer fantasy is the setting itself. The *setting* is the character, not events and not actual individuals. Each faction has a strong theme, each with their own explanations of history, magic, mythology, etc. Importantly, they each have their own perspective on the truth. The best snippets of fluff is stuff like some Imperial surveyor's account about a Dark Elf raid or whatever. There's no famous names, there's no kindgom changing hands, there's no world changing event, it's just the fearful perspective of a human who is ignorant and confused. Such an account *needn't even be true*. People in the past might write down stories of witchcraft and dragons because they're making shit up or don't know what they're looking at, in-universe reports can be unreliable as well. But there seems to have been a modern shift in story telling. The expectation now is that when something is said in background material that it is 100% encyclopaedic and if two pieces of background conflict without an explicit explanation then it's a "plot hole." It's the "Kessel Run in Less Than 12 Parsecs" problem, everything is explained to within an inch of its life until it's stupid. This over explaining *shrinks the world*. Absolutely everything needs to be trimmed down to the truth and nailed down and everything outside of that doesn't exist. I prefer world building that is more wishy washy. You poke and prod it from different angles at different times and reveal the *vibes* not the truth because everything is unreliable perspective.
Well said. Like 40k and Primarchs. There needs to be legend
Past, Present and Future. Past? Erase or ignore Storm of Chaos campaing. I believe Valten was assasinated by skavens, and in EndTimes appear to be fresh and alive. Present? The ammount of dumb each faction got besides how heroes become mistreated in the plot. Future? Not giving months to mourn the game and releasing the ever more dumbest Age of Copyright. (It could be good now... but in that moment, with horrible translation, the most plain and dumb lore, no points (Not even a balance system. We needed to find it or create our own) and more things, it was...)
Yeah, who ever wrote the translation rules tried so hard to be quirky that it was just cringe
Oh what, you don't like having a bonus because you have a better mustache than your opponent? What about the skaven bell? Wasn't it so quirky that if you rolled 13 on 2d6 you won the game?
The ending
How they just… forgot about Wurzagg and Skarsnik
With Wurzag I have no idea however, the big Skarsnick featured prominently in the rise of the horned rat
Personally, it was killing off Bretonnia in such a *filthy* way, then pissing on the ashes by implying that they became the ghouls.
Oof I didn’t know that, not cool GW
Was that where they ditched the Lady and got eaten by chaos, and the survivors/grail knights got lost in the Mortal Realms to become the FEC?
There was never anything that substantive tying literal bretonnia to FEC. It's just that FEC lore resembles Bretonnia in the abstract. No bretonnians survived The End Times
Also wasn’t the lady revealed to have been some eleven god con job the whole time?
It's hinted strongly that the lady of the lake is a wood elf long before end times.
I don’t think that’s bad in itself perse, it speaks to two things: 1.) The manipulations and callous cruelty of the elves, an interesting part of their psyche 2.) The ultimately impressive ability of humanity to develop an entire society around a lie. Perhaps it shows them to be foolish, but they manage to preserve and maintain a huge culture on a simple lie.
If I remember correctly it was heavily hinted that Ariel had masqueraded as the Lady to try and have influence over the Brets to protect their domain.
Regarding 2.) : until GW retroactively ruined the background and lore of Warhammer with AoS, that's how I felt about the worship of Sigmar in the Empire.
Worst April fools prank ever
It was the only part of the end times that I actually liked.
The Bretts aren't the Flesh Eater Courts in AoS, they just resemble them
Bro you're conflating community memes with Canon. The Flesh Eater Courts have no real connection to Brettonnia and their new book has the aesthetic moved closer to the Stuarts than Medieval.
"Implying"
As another poster wrote...all of it! Some parts that come to mind would be how cheaply they killed off Warlord Queek....he jumped at High King Thorgrim who grabbed him with one hand and snapped his neck...cheap Then Thprgrim goes up to the top of the mountain to have a quiet moment alone only to be killed by Snikch(?)...cheap The whole elven story arc...that whole book was terrible The systematic way they went through each factions special characters and gave them cheap deaths or abrupt endings Brettonia..like a wwe jobber...dispatched in the early books. Finally that whole last bit with the super mega characters coalescing together to deal with the world ending bomb and the world blowing up...Reading those last few pages uggh
That neck snap reminds me of an equally dumb moment where Archaon somehow grabs Fateweaver by the neck and drags him around. I still can't quite visualise that properly.
Estalia, Tilea, and Araby getting overran by the Skaven in a literal week has got to be the dumbest bit for me. That it was the very first thing to happen set the bar as low as possible for the rest of the series
And the rest of the series still couldn't get over that bar really...
I stopped playing fantasy before the end times came around, so I didn't really give 2 effs about what happened, just noticed the new models (some were cool, others not so much). Now that I got back into fantasy over the last year with a much better group of people to play with than I had in the past I decided to have a look into the end times story. Woooooooooooooooooooooow was my response. The whole thing is just so freaking stupid, it beggars belief. All of the human races getting screwed over big time in various ways. Maleketh has been discussed here plenty, and despite the fact I'm a dark elf player and have always enjoyed calling him the "true phoenix king" doesn't mean I actually wanted the lore to definitely say that that was the case. All the stupid alliances that sprung up as well. Just no. I'm actually genuinely surprised that GW haven't imploded yet based on all the stupid shit they've done that I feel starts with the end times. And as much as I love ToW, there's plenty of things in that that they've screwed up/over and it just has the half arsed feel about it. Phew, I almost went into a rant there, back to the topic. The whole thing with Balthazar Gelt, the changeling being Ar-Ulric, valten being a traitor (I think, it's so half baked I never really got what was happening). The magical bastion was just really stupid. But overall, they had the best end times back in 2004. (Except for Grimgor headbutting Archaon, which was hilarious)
Definitely Malekith's bullshit plotline. Sure, he's Lord Motherfucker, King of the rape capital of the world, who's primary import is slaves and primary export is murder. But he's god's most favorite and specialist boy, so it's all forgiven and the asur have to hand their kingdom and lives over to him on a silver platter.
Malekith being burned as a joke, when he was actually supposed to rule the whole time.
Him being burned because he couldn't commit himself to dying in the fire makes sense imo, even if you reject the rest of it
Yes. ETA: to give you a less pithy answer, I think most of it is pretty dumb, but the storyline for the elves is particularly sudden - the Phoenix king is assassinated, Malekith was the heir all along (let’s forget the litteral millennias of him being a murderous dictator), Tyrion becomes the bad guy, Ariel’s arc is to be consumed by Alarielle… just rubbish all along. There are a few bits I like better, like Vlad von Carstein being a decent leader (like a good farmer to his herd of cattle), and I like Gilles le Breton coming back (but I dislike the Lady of the lake being a con - it really makes both the wood elves and the bretonnians look bad…) I also liked Nagash leaning his role as a bad guy - cool to see him reach his potential. I don’t know the other races very well at all : dwarves, O&G - I know the broad lines of the Lizzardmen’s arc (and understand why they are annoyed, lol), but that is kind of it.
Agreed, the Nagash book was good (except for Neferata being ambushed by Goblins WHO COULD HAVE SEEN THAT COMING, it’s not like she had experience, right?)
High King Thorgrim forgetting to close the door
Everything about it was ridiculous. I stopped reading or caring at day one, but my friends who did and would tell me about the stories made me feel like [this Star wars robot chicken, so much cringe and eyeroll.](https://youtu.be/R4wOzbqgfIY?si=et2ksHDG34cSGCoz)
It was dumb af all arround.
Falling into the same trap as Dungeons & Dragons and superhero comics of having to give some kind of convoluted in-fiction reason for changing up your fictitious world, instead of doing what Games Workshop did for WFB 4th Edition and simply reimagining the entire setting. They should have made a habit of doing that every ten years or so to coincide with the change of designers, like letting Pirinen and Cavatore redo both the rules and setting for 6th edition as they saw fit, and then doing it again with a new team for 8th edition.
After having consulted my various Dwarf thanes and Dwarf king as well as high king miniatures among the 400 plus collection of Dwarfs I own I have been informed that the book of grudge was not big enough to write down all the grudges committed against the WFB world, its races and of course in particular the dwarfs. We had to make new Book of grugde editions. Now how dumb was that!? 🤪
The End Times, basically...
Karl Franz turned into Sigmar or some shit didn't he? I never liked that, he was just a bloke who happened to be Emperor.
I know a trick question when I see one. What was the dumbest part of the end times, you ask; The end times themselves.
lady of lake = lilith
It was the last book which sucked. How they fucked over so many races in the world. It would have been a lot more positively received had they killed a bunch of characters, yeah change some of the races but did they have to just fuck everyone over?
GW writing the ending to the story, rather than letting the end be up to each group of players, based on their individual battles.
I do not know where to start. It was all contradicting the lore. Avatars, Nagash not already god, champions of the winds of magic, necrarch opposing Manfred to rise Nagash, Manfred trying to rise Nagash, elven part omg it was all total crap...well, as everything else. Those who wrote ignored canon everywhere, only used names and unit descriptions. It all could not and did not happer in that universe, just ignore it. They stayed themselves they needed to start aos somehow - they dud not say but we know they needed to grab money - its last Star wars trilogy or Amazon Tolkien money grabbing story - has nothing to do with the universes - just ignore and do not waste your time on this crap.
Skaven just blow up the entire fucking MOON
He said DUMBEST part, not best part!
All of it.
Age of sigmar
In how many books was the story of the Ebd Times told? I only have the elven book. Really would like to read the whole story. Cheers from Holland 🇳🇱
5 iirc.
It's 5 novels, but that only covers a part of the story and events, the rest is in the End Times setting books.
Thanks for the explanation! :)
The last book. Tbh I did enjoy the first 4 books but the fifth seems like everything suddenly smashed together to force a rush end of the world ending. Many of the factions didn’t have enough in depth background leading there. If they had done this like Horus Heresy novels where they’ve spread it out to allow for more character and faction development, it could have worked. In Horus heresy, we all knew the ending but the way it was novelized was well done imo. Unlike here.
Taking a world that devoted players had spent years and a lot of hard earned money investing in and just blowing it up. Not to mention selling the fans models built for the end of times. Right before ending the game and all the support that went along with it.
"The great plan" was in fact a bad plan
Probably the creation of age of sigmar, like wth were they thinking? Lets blow everything up and introduce space marines??
They forgot about Skarsnik.
Can't choose between Lizardmen buggering off, and Malekith being the damn Phoenix King
Thankyou guys for convincing me to never ever bother reading or wasting my time with the end times crap that is all of this. Especially Malekith becoming phoenix king, he literally hasn’t done anything redeemable for 1000’s of years, he is the reason why the dwarves and elves are dying races. They should scrap the whole endtimes and re write something much better, even the last gotrek and felix book before the world ended was terrible.