Afternoon all.

This is something that's been ticking away in my brain for a few weeks now, and it was spawned by my reaction to all the bits of background that I've read (so far I'm only two books behind).

At first, I found the background for AoS somewhat jarring. We knew straight off their were Nine Realms (including the Realm of Chaos), and bits and bobs about them. But, that was about it.

Now, contrast and compare to this, which was my first brush with the Old World, via Heroquest....



Cartographical, as Finn the Human might say.

From the get go, at least in my very personal experience, The Old World, geographically speaking, was well defined. And that definition was only added to as I immersed myself ever further.

As one might expect, that was a pretty cool experience. The game was defined as much by geographical bounds as the nature and spirit of its inhabitants. And boy have I got the books to prove it.

Age of Sigmar, for the most part, just doesn't have that level of definition. Well, not yet at least - being an ongoing and 'evolving' setting, who knows what we might see in the future. It's a hell of a blank canvas, that's for sure.

However, once you accept that and start to think around it, there's a lot of potential for your own army. Thanks to such things as Realmgates, you can battle it out pretty much anywhere, against anyone. Indeed one of the earliest short stories (part one of Call of Archaon if you're particularly interest) shows that with the right know how, the destination of a Realmgate can be changed.

The old 'problem' of Warhammer is removed, namely 'but my guys live all the way over here, how likely is it we'd run into your guys who live waaaaaaay over there?'. (Never stopped a game like!).

Narrative campaigns now have a far wider scope, as there's very definitely room to carve out an Empire of your own - potentially a Realm Spanning one thanks to Realmgates.

And it's that very same lack of a set geography and racial lore that gives us a lot of room to carve out our own narrative. Got two players with Empie armies? Yeah those can be from anywhere. Their agenda can be whatever we want it to be

Don't get me wrong, I'd still love to see books dedicated to each of the realms, giving us legendary locations etc for us to build off. But even with those, it's clear the Mortal Realms are unimaginably vast. For instance, there's a Plain in the Realm of Ghur which is said to be so vast no man could cross it on foot in a single lifetime.

As the various Battletomes are released, the spirit and culture of the races becomes better defined, letting us come up with our force's own motivation - yet there very much remains the core of their Old World predecessors as well (Dwarfs for instance are no longer facing extinction, but still have plenty of ancient holds to be wrestled back, alongside new ones to be founded).

It's not going to be to everyone's tastes, and some may find the lack of definition detrimental. And fair enough. To each their own.

But as soon as I've got a gaming board up and running (some time this year, I'd imagine) I'll definitely be running a Narrative Campaign and see what my players and I come up with.