From End Times to Old World - how Warhammer's world died and came back

March 2015. A player closes a thick book with a single name on the spine: Archaon. It is the fifth and final volume of a series called The End Times, and he has just read how the world he has painted armies for over twenty years ceases to exist. No cliffhanger, no escape. The world is swallowed by evil, and then there is silence.

For four months the publisher says nothing. Then, in July 2015, four pages of free rules appear on the website. The game has a new name, a new world and a new tone. One of the heroes gets to re-roll his failed dice if you have a bigger moustache than your opponent.

Somewhere in a back garden, a man sets up a camera and burns his army.

What Warhammer actually was

For anyone who only knows it as a word on a box: Warhammer Fantasy Battle was not a roleplaying game but a wargame. Two players each put an army of painted miniatures on a table, orcs against knights, dwarfs against vampires, and fight a battle with a tape measure and dice. The game came out in 1983 from Games Workshop in Britain, created by Bryan Ansell, Richard Halliwell and Rick Priestley, and the world written around it soon got a name: the Old World. A crooked mirror of Europe around 1500, with an empire that looks like Germany, a land of knights that looks like France, and everywhere the threat of Chaos: four evil gods who corrupt people from the inside.

That world turned out to be bigger than the game. In 1986 it became the ground for Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, the roleplaying game in which you are not a general but a ratcatcher with a small but vicious dog. For forty years, wargame and roleplaying game grew up side by side, in the same cities, with the same map on the wall.

Thirty years after the start, the wargame had a problem that had nothing to do with stories. An army now ran to hundreds of models, and anyone who wanted to join was months of painting and hundreds of euros in. Meanwhile Games Workshop's other game, the science fiction game Warhammer 40,000, outsold it more than ten to one in many American shops. Games Workshop is, at heart, a miniatures company. A game that does not sell miniatures disappears; it had already happened to Blood Bowl and Mordheim.

A world in five boxes

Instead of a new edition, there was an ending. Between August 2014 and March 2015, five thick boxes appeared, together called The End Times. Each box told part of the story and brought new models, and each tore down something the players thought they knew: cities fell, heroes died, the dead rose. In the last book, a handful of surviving heroes try to close the rift through which Chaos is pouring into the world. The ritual is sabotaged by a vampire, and the world is pulled apart.

What took its place was called Age of Sigmar. The Old World had been replaced by eight floating magical realms, the Mortal Realms, with no map and no history. The rules fit on four pages and were free. Points values, the system two players use to check that their armies are equally strong, had been scrapped: you simply put down what you thought was fair. And the bases, the little discs each model stands on, were no longer square but round.

That sounds like a detail, but it was the heart of the matter. Square bases slide together into regiments: blocks of soldiers that move as one, like real armies around 1500. Round bases do not. Your models become a loose band of heroes, and the game becomes a different game. The names changed too. Orcs became Orruks, elves became Aelves, because you can trademark an invented word and not an ordinary one.

What it ran into

The reaction was fiercer than the company had expected. Players filmed themselves burning their armies. Reviewers laughed at the moustache rule. Part of the hobby moved to Kings of War, a rival wargame that rushed out rules letting you keep using your old Warhammer army. Only in 2016, when a handbook with points values and tournament rules appeared, did Age of Sigmar start to find an audience of its own.

But nobody had asked the Old World whether it was ready to die.

In October 2015, three months after the ending, Vermintide appeared, a video game about a city in the Empire overrun by rat-men. In May 2016 came Total War: Warhammer, a strategy game by the makers of Total War, with exactly the map Games Workshop had just thrown away. Millions of people who had never held a miniature now learned the name of the Empire's capital, and the dwarf strongholds in the mountains, and the land of the knights.

The roleplaying game did the rest. In 2017, Games Workshop and the Irish publisher Cubicle 7 announced a fourth edition of Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, released in 2018. Here the Old World was not remembered but lived in: the same muddy streets, the same careers, and the famous campaign The Enemy Within, about a conspiracy at the heart of the Empire, back in print. A year earlier, another roleplaying game, Zweihänder, had already shown that players were willing to pay for the mood of Warhammer even with the name and the place names filed off.

In November 2019, Games Workshop posted a photo with no explanation: one square base, with one line beneath it. Everything comes round again, even squares. Warhammer: The Old World was released in January 2024, not a new edition but a prequel, set some two centuries before the era everyone knew. The Empire then has not one emperor but three who dispute the throne, and the great war against Chaos is still to come.

That same month, Cubicle 7 announced a roleplaying game for exactly that era. Warhammer: the Old World Roleplaying Game appeared digitally in June 2025 and in print in early 2026, and went straight to the top of the chart on DriveThruRPG, the largest shop for digital roleplaying games, above Daggerheart. A world that had officially ceased to exist in 2015 was number one ten years later.

The messy parts

It is tempting to read this as a victory for the fans, but it is not that simple. Games Workshop never said it had been a mistake. Age of Sigmar is a healthy game with an audience of its own, and the Mortal Realms are here to stay. The End Times are still official: The Old World is set in a world that everyone at the table knows will end in two centuries. The company that blew up the world for business reasons brought it back for business reasons. Nostalgia sells miniatures too.

The choice of era is not purely romantic either. The years in which Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay takes place have been described down to the cobblestones over forty years; invent a town there and a reader will write to tell you it does not exist. Two hundred years earlier the map is empty. A GM gets to decide who the mayor is of the port town where the new game begins. That is freedom for the player and room for the publisher, and both are true.

And in October 2025, Cubicle 7 also announced a fifth edition of Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay for 2026, that game's fortieth year. Two Warhammer roleplaying games now stand side by side in the same world, two centuries apart: one in the familiar era, just before the fall; the other in a younger world that does not yet know what is coming.

What comes round again

The man with the burning army was never heard from again. Maybe he plays Kings of War now, maybe he is building a new army on square bases. But what his video showed was not anger about a rulebook. It was what happens when someone takes away a place you have lived in for years.

A world does not belong to the company that prints it. It belongs to the people who know how the streets of the imperial capital smell and which inn to avoid. That knowledge survived when the books left the shelves: in video games, in a roleplaying game, in boxes in the attic. The new Warhammer: the Old World Roleplaying Game begins in a port town in an empire without an emperor, in a world that does not yet know it is doomed. The players of 2015 did not know that either. They only knew where they belonged. If you want to see for yourself, the Player's Guide and the Gamemaster's Guide are all you need.

Everything comes round again. Even squares.