Alex Kierkegaard's Metaverse

[icycalm]

Join the biggest Warhammer Preview of the year at AdeptiCon 2026
https://www.warhammer-community.com/en- ... ticon-2026

The year's most exciting Warhammer Preview event is next week, and you can see all of the incredible reveals live on Wednesday 25th March.

Join Us – Warhammer Preview Live! AdeptiCon 2026
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n3SK2ur ... XVyolQO3wj



This is a fun trailer, very different to what we're used to as videogamers, check it out.

Tune in to the Warhammer AdeptiCon Preview this week!
https://www.warhammer-community.com/en- ... -this-week



I know I said that I'll livestream this as if it were CitizenCon, but after some research I changed my mind. I'll still watch it with great interest from bed (it's 2-4 AM my time), and then post the news in the forum over the next few days/weeks, but I won't bother making a big fuss about the event itself. Because the way GW unveils stuff is that they drag out and dribble it over months instead of amassing it and blasting the biggest reveals at once like CIG does. Even if they show off some of 11th Edition on Wednesday/Thursday, they'll hold at least half back to show next month in another show, and it'll be like this all the way to release. They hold 4-5 previews at least a year, and I aint livestreaming all of them, so I may as well livestream none. This is similar to how Paizo does it btw, they too hold half a dozen events a year, but the difference is they fully unveil each product at each event instead of cutting it up and doling it out in parts over the year. Of course I am not livestreaming THOSE events because spoilers, but again, even without spoilers I wouldn't livestream half a dozen events a year: it's just too much and there's no point to it, I am not THAT much of a journalist.

So, you can tune in to the GW event if you're anywhere near as excited as I am, or you can just sit back and let me present the news to you on Insomnia. A third option is to just go to their website, which I visit twice daily now, it's great, and get the news from there: https://www.warhammer-community.com

Of course on Insomnia you'll get added commentary and insights on how the content will be incorporated into Battlemaster.

Note that I'll only be reporting on games/settings that have already been unlocked in my metaverse, therefore only 40K for now. As more GW games and settings are unlocked, I'll be expanding my coverage to ultimately include everything GW publishes, including their gorgeous LotR game (which I will pair with Free League's One Ring RPG for a complete LotR roleplaying-tactical metaverse). If you're wondering what all this stuff is, you can start researching it now, or you can wait to encounter it in my game.

[icycalm]

'BIGGEST' REVEALS Incoming! Hopes & Predictions!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Jx4sCphiLA

AdeptiCon is just a few days away! Games Workshop have stated that this will be the 'BIGGEST' preview show of the year! Here are my hopes and predictions mixed with some rumours!

Valrak's 15-minute pre-show prediction & rumor roundup. I watch every video this guy puts out now, and it's really helped orient me in GW's world and community drama, plus he's always a fun watch in himself.

[icycalm]

Warhammer 40K: The Grimdark Game That Built a Billion-Pound Empire
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JlJMnCGbZeo

Warhammer 40,000, Games Workshop, Rick Priestley, Space Marines, Rogue Trader, tabletop wargaming, miniatures, Henry Cavill, and the birth of a billion-pound plastic empire all come together in this deep dive into the real story of how Warhammer 40K conquered the world.

It is the biggest tabletop game on the planet, a company on the London Stock Exchange worth billions, with a Henry Cavill film deal and video games that have sold more than twelve million copies. And it is all built on tiny plastic soldiers, hand-painted by grown adults, fighting a war so bleak the entire joke is that nobody can ever win. It started with three friends selling other people's board games out of a rented flat in London, scraping together a few hundred pounds to keep the lights on.

This video tells the real-world story: the London flat and the six wooden boards, how Games Workshop became the company that brought Dungeons and Dragons to Europe, the designer named Rick Priestley who poured punk comics and British black comedy into a game about a hopeless galactic war, how the name Warhammer 40,000 came from a lawyer's problem, the razor-and-blades machine that sells you an army one model at a time, and how a cult object from nineteen eighty seven became a Hollywood production with the former Superman fighting to make it.

Whether you've painted a Space Marine or you're discovering this world for the first time, this is how a punk game about an unwinnable war built one of Britain's most valuable companies.

From the same channel that made the D&D video I posted last night [ > ]. I know way less about Warhammer than I do about D&D so I am not in a position to call out any errors in the analysis, but it seems roughly consistent with what I've learned about Warhammer over the past year that I've been researching it. In terms of an understanding of the game's mechanics, it doesn't do much, but it really drives home the Britishness of the aesthetics, from 2000 AD and Judge Dredd. And it also makes a point of connecting the story to D&D's, so if you've watched the other video you should be able to see that Warhammer is essentially a side-story to it. More in my VGART essay coming when I've mastered Warhammer in a year or two. Until then, this is worth a watch.

[icycalm]

Warhammer Fantasy Battle: The Game That Built an Empire, Then Got Murdered By It
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qzxg1GRt80Y

Warhammer Fantasy Battle, Games Workshop, the Old World, Warhammer 40,000, Age of Sigmar, the End Times, Total War: Warhammer, and Citadel Miniatures all come together in this deep dive into the game that built an empire—and the company that deliberately destroyed it.

In 1983, three men in a London shop made a fantasy wargame to sell their own miniatures. It became the hit that turned Games Workshop into a global company, funded Warhammer 40,000, and gave the world the word "grimdark". Then, in 2015, Games Workshop did something almost unheard of: it blew up its own thirty-year-old world in the apocalyptic End Times, killed off its beloved characters, stopped making the models, and replaced it with Age of Sigmar. Fans revolted. A decade later, they forced the murdered world back from the dead.

This is the full origin, rise, destruction, and resurrection of the Old World—the game that started it all.

Whether you commanded the Empire yourself, met the Old World through Total War and Vermintide, or you're discovering it for the first time, this one's for you.

In short, Warhammer Fantasy Battle is the original game from 1983 (later shortened to Warhammer Fantasy, and finally just Warhammer). That was eventually killed in 2015 in The End Times event, followed by Age of Sigmar, which is the current iteration. But in 2024 they brought back the original world in The Old World, which is also current. The whole story is quite dramatic and told quite engrossingly in this video. I knew all the rest of the story more or less, but I didn't know where The End Times fit in, and now I know. Sounds awesome, and I'd love to run it at some point. Problem is, the miniatures for it haven't all been digitized yet, but I am sure they eventually will.

Worth a watch to get your head around the various iterations of the fantasy game. Especially useful if you're planning to play Age of Sigmar, which we're not far from unlocking in Battlemaster.