Narrative Gaming in Age of Sigmar – Inspirations & Challenges
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Narrative Playbook is a regular column written by Martin from Narrative Labs, taking a look at the many and varied aspects of narrative play in the many worlds of Warhammer. This week Martin looks at narrative gaming in Warhammer Age of Sigmar. Check out Narrative Labs on Twitch, Twitter and Facebook for the latest streaming times, and for some fantastic interactive narrative gaming.
I love telling stories in both the Warhammer worlds of the 41st Millennium and the Age of Sigmar. Every time we go live on narrative labs, ready to tell a new story, I get a little thrill of excitement. Each setting presents its own inspiration, but also its own set of challenges. In this article I’m going to talk about what I love about narrative gaming in the Age of Sigmar and what challenges I find when creating narratives in this setting.
One of the things that most inspires me about the way the lore of the mortal realms is constructed is just how flexible it is. Maybe it’s a byproduct of it still being relatively new, but I rarely find myself in a situation where I find my creativity is being impinged on by the setting.
Sometimes I just want to create a short, isolated story that takes place in one small location in the realms that will never be visited again (unless it’s to be trampled upon by a marauding horde of mega-gargants who will crush all my lovingly created locations into rubble, oblivious to the havoc they’ve caused). Where this is my goal, I love how limitless the setting feels. The distant past of the Age of Myth combined with the new age of ‘enlightenment’ Sigmar is trying to bring lets me create almost any setting I can think of – be it traditional fantasy, high fantasy, horror or even a bit of science fiction if I want to.
We know so little about the Age of Myth that anything seems possible. Who knows what might be found in some corner of the realms that’s not been visited since the Age of Chaos? The ruins of ancient civilisations can be found everywhere, with secrets long-since hidden and treasure abandoned centuries ago. Perhaps a mystical illusion still protects a great civilised nation which isolated itself from the ravages of Chaos and waits to be rediscovered, still populated by artisans who have far greater grasp of technology than even the Kharadron Overlords, or know of magics that even the Slann have yet to understand.
At other times I want to create my own mini universe within the setting, weaving a myriad of separate stories together into a larger tapestry, drawing in all sorts of factions and characters with each adding their own part to the wider narrative. Yet even when doing this, I very rarely find myself feeling constrained by the lore, no matter who becomes involved.
One of the great things about the way the lore has been created is that any two factions can fight each other – there’s always a good reason why factions that should be the staunchest of allies can engage in battle. Stormcast can go up against a city of Sigmar suspected of being corrupted by the Chaos gods. Katakros, Mortarch of the Ossiarch Bonereapers, might be called upon to pursue an errant vampire lord seeking to pursue his own agenda against the wishes of the Nagash, Supreme Lord of the Undead (all hail!).
The same can be said for almost any alliances. Lots of factions can easily be brought into the service of others. We’ve seen Fyreslayers side with the Nighthaunt, and almost any Destruction army could be ‘persuaded’ that the best fight can be found against the local Chaos warlord rather than the Idoneth Deepkin enclave they were heading towards.
There are definitely some alliances that are harder to justify. I find it difficult to fathom a mighty lord of Khorne choosing to side with a chamber of Stormcast warriors, but while it’s very difficult it’s not altogether beyond the realms of possibility if a threat of suitable scale manifests itself.
The resources available to narrative players for Age of Sigmar are really diverse and interesting. I feel that narrative gaming is always at the forefront of the developers’ minds when they release new content for the game, down to having at least one new narrative scenario in every battletome released. After 5 years the number of narrative scenarios that have been created is huge, and there are always fresh ideas coming with each new release.
Beyond the scenarios themselves we have other tools like Regiments of Renown (units gaining new abilities - see the General’s Handbook 2019), Anvil of Apotheosis (custom characters - GHB 2020) and rules for entire campaigns (e.g. Season of War: Firestorm) – and those are just a few of my top picks. I see a huge effort going into making sure narrative gamers have an ever-expanding toolbox of resources available to them either to use directly out of the box, or to pick bits from and blend together with their own ideas to create something new and exciting.
Supported by all this content, the narrative community for Age of Sigmar is incredibly strong and vibrant, with so many people coming up with new and exciting ideas to try. The NEON community requires a special mention here – a network of Narrative Event Organisers who share ideas and keep each other supported and motivated. I look forward to joining in on the Animosity global campaign every year.
However, there are some limitations and it’s worth drawing some out.
As part of Games Workshop’s commitment to narrative gaming, Age of Sigmar has an ongoing ‘grand narrative’ that usually evolves on an annual basis. We’ve seen the Realmgate Wars, the Seeds of Hope, Malign Portents, the Soul Wars, the revelation of the Stormvaults and (at the time of writing) the Broken Realms series. This is all amazing narrative content and helps provide the ever-expanding set of resources I mentioned above.
However, sometimes it can be a challenge to keep up with this grand narrative, especially when it can sometimes impinge on your own story telling. If you’re half-way through telling you own tale when the next big event happens you can either feel a need to incorporate it into your story, or you can be so desperate to create something new off the back of it that your current story loses its momentum. Even if you want to push on with your current narrative, other players in the group might feel differently.
If you feel the need to round out your current story quickly, then so be it – it’s always better to do something you’re inspired by, rather than trudging through to the end of something that no longer excites you. On the other side, however, I don’t think there’s a need to keep up with this grand narrative if you don’t want to. While the latest chapter in the grand narrative is always inspiring, there’s great fun to be had going back into the previous chapters to revisit those ideas you never got the chance to explore, or even ignoring the larger story to create your own narrative, with characters who act in complete ignorance of what goes on in the rest of the realms.
While we’ve had nearly 6 years of great lore books, novels and short stories with a lot of content in them, the lore certainly isn’t as deep as Warhammer 40,000 or the Old World and there can be a challenge in that. I tend to build my stories based on the players who are involved and the armies they play. With a 40K story, I can immediately see a way to combine the various factions into a story that I can work with (even if the alliances themselves can prove tricky), but with Age of Sigmar I find this takes a bit more work. This is especially true with destruction factions, whose motivations are not always very deep and it’s hard to think of a better reason for them to be involved than just looking for a good scrap!
I also find that within a fantasy environment there are certain limits within the setting. Maybe it’s the scale of a science fiction setting like Warhammer 40,000 or maybe it’s just that I generally read more science fiction than fantasy, but I do find there’s a wider array of concepts available for 40K than AoS. There are some equivalent stories for some ideas - if I want to create a scenario similar to an anti-air battery shooting drop-pods out of the sky I can do something with Kharadron Overlords or disc-riding Tzeentch Tzaangors. However, I find that fantasy settings generally can be a lot more constrained in some of these areas.
For me, however, the positives vastly out-weigh the constraints, and those constraints I see as more of a challenge that any real limit. Narrative gaming is alive and well in the Age of Sigmar and I’m always excited to see where that storytelling takes me next.
