Grand Cathay and the 8th edition army book!

As awesome as it would be I doubt they will ever sell the 8th edition Cathay book, as it is literally full of units they don't currently sell miniatures for and by the time they are ready to sell us a gorgeous new army, they will want us playing ToW.

About ten years ago GW sued a third party miniature manufacturer (Chapterhouse Studios) for infringing their intellectual property.  The court, by and large, sided with Chapterhouse Studios (though not 100%).  In particular the court said people are free to make and sell their own miniatures for units/characters that GW writes rules for, but never released official miniatures for.  Ever since then, GW doesn't release rules without a corresponding model.

I was absolutely astonished that GW would go as far as to write a full book, profiles, lore and all. But watching the interview, Andy is actually reading large paragraphs from it, so it must be true. It's madness and such a tantalizing thought, that we might never get to see this!

But will we never get to see it? On the one hand I agree with you guys. If this was published, GW would play into the hands of the 3d printers and all of the various alternative miniature makers. No models - no rules and vice versa has been their mantra for years now.

But then again, why go through the trouble of writing a full book? Some resources had to be assigned to it. From the interview it seems that they were part of the Old World team, which is not large. I can understand them creating the lore, as this is essentially a mostly new faction and Nottingham would want to have a pretty strict creative control over this part. But profiles? Surely Creative Assembly can manage writing balanced stats for their game units without any help, it's what they do for a living after all. Or was this process followed for all of the more odball factions? Is there an 8th Ed Vampire Coast book out there? Are there 8th Ed profiles for Repanse, Grombrindal and some of the other revived special characters? So many questions (none of which were asked in the interview frustratingly)!

Perhaps the book could be a special edition add to the game? Or maybe Warhammer: the old world is so close to 8th rules wise, that essentially what they did is just gave them a draft of the planned Cathay book for the new edition?

Most things around TOW are all conjecture as about all they are giving us is maps! However I’m happy to bite and jump down the rabbit hole and blindly predict that the creation of the ‘8th Ed’ Cathay book could mean that TOW will be heavily based on the 8th ruleset. At the very least, anyone who thinks that it will go back to guessing ranges I’m positive will be sadly disappointed.
The creation of an 8th ed army book isn’t a huge stretch and perhaps shows how much further along they might be than we realised. Even if the TOW ruleset was significantly different, then ‘all’ they’d need to do was perhaps tweak some of the unit stats/entries and special rules. The fluff would remain the same and then both of those could just be ported across to an army/campaign book for TOW.

I can live with GW's "no model no rules" policy.  What I absolutely hate is another policy they implemented in response to the Chapterhouse lawsuit.  Now everything has to have a trademark friendly name.  Dwarf, Orc and Elf?  Nope! Now it is Dwarf, Orc and Elf.  Just so that GW can have a solid trademark on those names.

Blood Bowl continues to use the old, trademark unfriendly, names.  ie. "The Athelorn Avengers - Wood Elf Blood Bowl Team" does not mention "Sylvaneth" in their title or description.  So I hold out hope The Old World will not use the new dumb names.

They already mentioned in the Warhammer Community FAQ that the proper names would return, so that's one good thing confirmed.

Ha ha! Looks like the board admins have a script to automatically "translate" the new dumb names I'm complaining about.