Warhammer Fantasy (setting)
narrative universe of the Warhammer Fantasy tabletop miniature wargame
Warhammer Fantasy (later renamed Warhammer: The Old World) is a fictional fantasy universe created by Games Workshop and used in many of its games, including the table top wargame Warhammer, the Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay (WFRP) pen-and-paper role-playing game, and a number of video games: the MMORPG Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning, the strategy games Total War: Warhammer, Total War: Warhammer II, Total War: Warhammer III and Total War: Warhammer 40,000, and the two first-person shooter games in the Warhammer Vermintide series, Warhammer: End Times – Vermintide and Warhammer: Vermintide 2, among many others.
Warhammer is notable for its “dark and gritty” background world, which references a range of historical cultures such as the Holy Roman Empire, Mesoamerica, ancient Egypt, and medieval France, and is populated with a variety of races such as humans, high elves, dark elves, wood elves, dwarfs, undead, orcs, lizardmen, and other creatures familiar to many fantasy/role-playing settings.
The development of the setting began with the release of a game simply called “Warhammer” in 1983. In 2014, Games Workshop introduced The End Times, a setting-wide event that culminated in the destruction of the Warhammer world. The setting is followed by a soft reboot known as Warhammer Age of Sigmar, created in 2015. In 2024, Warhammer Fantasy was brought back in a reboot known as Warhammer The Old World, which brings a new version of the old rules and updated models.
Background
The Warhammer world drew inspiration from Tolkien’s Middle-earth, but also from Robert E. Howard (Conan the Barbarian) and Michael Moorcock (Elric of Melniboné), as well as real-world history, particularly European history. What is recognisable as the Warhammer World began with the expansion material to the first edition of the game Warhammer, but was formulated as a distinct setting with a world map in the second edition.
The Warhammer World borrowed considerably from historical events and other fantasy fiction settings. The Old World is recognisably Europe approximating to various historical periods including the Renaissance—the Empire being set over what was the Holy Roman Empire—medieval France, Roman Italy and Celtic Britain.
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This entry incorporates text from “Warhammer Fantasy (setting)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.