DISCLAIMER: Never played Warhammer Fantasy Battle nor Warhammer: Invasion LCG even (but hope to in the near dark and bleary future...complete with a dash of British humour and Cherry Coke).

I saw a post earlier mentioning the fact that the new army books for WFB takes place before the Stom of Chaos campaign. With the anticipation built up for Invasion LCG, I just had to get acquainted with the Warhammer lore (thanks Wikipedia!) and was especially fond of the SoC storyline. Now Invasion has elements of SoC in the characters of Grimgor (and his camp), Melehk, and a few so-and-so's I did not recognize I'm sure. If SoC is retconned, and that's still a big IF here, what will it mean for the LCG battle packs? Will FFG follow the general trend of its big miniature cousin, adopt the MMO alternate universe storyline, or forge their own path as mentioned a few months back?

What do y'all think? Does it matter?

And most importantly, WWRD?

There is no way of knowing which path they take. I would vote for whichever is going to allow for the most variety and richness in what FFG is going to produce. I suspect they'll weave their way through it, since there is no strict story that needs to be adhered to. The races have been established, heroes for the various sides and locations. Just because one place was destroyed or one person killed in one source doesn't mean it can't be included here. Look at AGoT, the game as a whole represents various points in the characters lives and the series back story as well as near future versions of the characters and locations. The idea was never to force the LCG to fit slavishly to the cannon but instead to capture the full flavor of the world.

Fanboys aside, the last thing the average gamer is going to want is to have to reproduce a set storyline, or re-enact some campaign from the lore in order to play the game. we want a fun, cool, interesting, and challenging game that captures the flavor of Warhammer. They achieved that. In spades.

Honestly I would LOVE to see a SoC battlepack cycle.

I would like to have Archaon as a card and also redo the (epic) battle between him and Valten. There were a lot of nice stuff in those campaign, which could be adapted by this card game.

But on the other hand: The game is still new (not even out as far as that goes) and we will see what the future brings. )

All in all, I agree FFG will do what it does best: create and maintain a fun, lively, and exiting game line. I'm just woolgathering to see what others think of the change of pace for WFB and what it may mean for Invasion.

On another note, after taking a look at AGoT and how many main character reprints are being churned out in contrast to a still large pool of never-before-seen characters waiting to be printed, I have a nagging fear this may also be the fate waiting for Invasion.

Well there is a difference here. The IP for AGoT is more close ended with cannon that must be adhered to pretty tightly when it comes to unique characters. Martin has only put out a limited amount of information concerning the main characters and those who are unique characters that have been introduced or mentioned, but do not play large moving roles in the storyline, are probably planned for eventual release in themed sets. Every block we got a couple of new unique characters, and every cycle so far has seen a new character or two... but lets face it, people play AGoT for the main characters and if there was only a single version of each out more people would be upset by this than having two or even three available.

As long as we get one or two per cycle I'm fine. That will give them plenty of characters to introduce over the years while still keeping the more major characters readily available.

One thing I didn't mention is including what appears to be a more minor character only for it to turn out to be a major character later with a very different personality and agenda than assumed, in which case you end up with a card not at all representative of the books. Something they must constantly be aware of (also why Martin views and approves all unique character cards).

I suspect there are enough characters and units in the Warhammer Fantasy mythos to keep a broad scope of cards from the games active and available, though, yes, I suspect the number of individual unique characters will probably not be as high as it could be in W:I.

The thing with Warhammer is that it's easy to create new unique characters that fit perfectly into the IP even before you start drawing on the special characters from the army books, characters from the novels etc.

Of the unique heroes that we have so far, only Kazador, Thyrus Gormann and Grimgor have ever appeared on the tabletop. Urguck and Melekh were invented for WarCry (Melekh later made it into the WFB as part of the Storm of Chaos, but he was in WarCry first) and as far as I know Valkia and Durgnar are new (correct me if I'm wrong). So there's a lot more scope for unique characters in Warhammer than there is in a more restrictive licence like AGoT.

ChaosChild said:

Valkia is in the new Warriors of Chaos book and if I remember correctly she's from the much older Champions of Chaos book. As for Durgnar, the name is familiar so I'm pretty sure he's from something... perhaps the 5th ed Dwarf book but I'm not sure.

Figured I might have missed one, don't have the new Warriors book (still not happy about the decision to split Chaos into 3 completely separate lists). She definitely wasn't in the old Champions of Chaos book though.

It would make sense to have one character each from the tabletop game and from other sources for each race though.

I'm sure I've heard of her before though. I honestly can't remember where though (Apart from the new book).

I was wondering... are characters from the Black Library available for use in the cardgame?

They're all part of the same IP and they were included in WarCry so I don't see any reason why not.

In fact, wasn't Malus Darkblade mentioned as being included in one of the expansion packs? He was a Black Library character before he was added to the tabletop.

ChaosChild said:

Really? I read the novels but I assumed they were based on the tabletop character.
Kinda like the Space Wolf novels came after Ragnar Blackmane's presence in the codex.

Malus first turned up in the comic book Warhammer Monthly roughly 11 years ago, long before he appeared either on the tabletop or in the novels.

Aah the comics came first? Didn't know that... though I should've realized it. (i read some of them on the BL site) Given the age of the publications. Stupid me.