A few weeks back, (OK more than a month, I’ve been busy dammit!) Hoodling posted about how much he hated the new gritty Warhammer world and how tedious it is to have no funny Goblins anymore.

 

I disagree.  For years I hated Warhammer because it was bright to the point of being gaudy, from the spears of the Gobbos to the bolters of the Ultras and the knives of the Orks… even the bloody shops were bright red.  Grab a really old copy of WD and you’ll see what I mean.  The Red period which Hoodling is tending to romanticise was the lowest point in the long and illustrious history of GW and our hobby.  It was all red, and bright and everyone was silly and no one got dirty and everyone was jovial and it was OK to bring unpainted models to tournaments, and models and rules were bizarre in ways that just don’t make sense now.

 

I just can’t get that filthy gobos who live outdoors, don’t shower and kill everything they see are all clean and bright and funny.  That’s not funny, it ludicrous, it’s insulting, it’s just so English.  (They can’t even play cricket, but that’s another story.)  Warhammer is a war game, and war is not like this.  People are not like this.   Gobbos would not be like this if they were real.

 

I think one of the essential premises of fantasy and science fiction is the notion of suspended disbelief.  If you can believe that a Dragon could exist, even if they don’t, then you can read about, buy, paint and play with dragons, and Dragons can fly and eat people and breathe fire, in a game, but it’s a stretch to have a Dragon drive a car ( or a Steam Tank).  It’s the same with Gobbos.  Unless they write into the background that gobos are freakishly obsessive/compulsive about cleaning and washing their bright red outfits and cleaning the blood off their clothes, I’m expecting the see the blood and grime and gore on said clothes. 

 

(Of course this suspended disbelief goes out the window when you compare that Dwarfs, who invented Organ guns, can’t build a volley gun (which was so much better) or that they can build Gryrocopters, but not Steam Tanks, but Imperial pseudo humans who cant’ invent anything can invent those things (obvious contradiction notwithstanding), up to and including a mechanical horse, which even now in the Real World^TM engineers can’t make happen.  This is of course the subject of an entirely separate rant, which has largely been covered by the "I hate Steam Tanks" rant, so I had to bring it up, just to rub in that I own one, and have used it once, and Hoodling pounded it to pieces and I’ve not used it since)

 

But my point, Gobbos aren’t funny.  They shouldn’t be funny to the point of being ridiculous because they hate and kill things and want to take over the world.  (Not that this is to say they shouldn’t be fun, it’s a game after all…they just shouldn’t be funny in a ridiculous sense.) Nor do I think that Empire or Elves or anyone else should be funny either.  There are no good guys, all races have flaws and agendas and are competing for the survival of a world.  Elves shouldn’t be just shiny and white and Empire shouldn’t just drive around in steam tanks with mag wheels just out of the car wash.  If the Warhammer world were like this it would be one-dimensional in a way which encourages players to be one dimensional, to be blinkered in their approach to armies, characters, painting and army selection, all the things which are good now, that made the game silly back then.  It would strangle also the things that made tourneys quite bad back then, but less so now according to a more recent rant by Hoodling.

 

Growth is essential; romanticizing the past at the expense of enjoying the present is a waste of time.  Move with the times.  Embrace the new (Old) World order and accept that if you want funny Gobbos, paint the pink and have people laugh at them, before their Orc mates stomp everyone’s guts out.

 

Now I’m off to write “Trial Rules”^TM for a Chaos Lord, who rides a Dragon, who, in turn, drives a Steam Tank, fitted with a Volley Gun and two Skaven ratling guns.  A bargain at 1150 points, but only if it’s bright red so it can move 7 D6” and the Dragons wings means I don’t have to roll steam points and don’t count as flying.  HA!  Now thats what I call funny.