Age of Sigmar - OSR?!

 

Is it possible? Can it be true? Can an OSR D&D adventure game utilize the Age of Sigmar as its world?

"But William," I hear you cry, "AOS is high fantasy! There are angels and demons doing battle across countless battlefields! How can you possibly be considering such an idea?"

 

Let me tell you, whoever you are, it's not only possible, it's just as if not easier to use AOS than the original Warhammer Old World. Here's why:

• Age of Sigmar isn't "grim dark" like Oldhammer. In fact, the tone is surprisingly positive, in comparison. It's in better alignment with my personal tastes than the Old World ever was.
• There's always room for creation. The Mortal Realms are vast (and I mean VAST) with any one realm matching the entirety of the Old World in size. Past experience has proven that I really only need a fairly tiny chunk of land to run my adventures, and even that was 95% unexplored.
• High Fantasy in OSR? While it's true the overall game is high fantasy, there are myriad pockets of cities and civilization with various levels of technology. The Kharadron Overlords float around in hulking contraptions powered by pollution and magic, but that doesn't mean every city street is lit by ever-burning steam-flames. In fact, the technology is distributed unevenly across the realms, with the average person living their life in a fashion that is virtually identical to the Old World.
• The World is unimaginably old. There are many time eras described in Sigmar, effectively making the world ten times older even than the Old World itself. Many eras mean many ruins, especially the kind with vast and unintelligible purpose. Just imagine a party traveling a long road to find the outmost reaches of a Realm, to find cities the size of Rome, totally devoid of life. Or worse still, teeming with it.

I'm jotting this stuff down because the Realms have been created as a kind of playground for aspiring Game Masters to romp around in. I don't need to understand the entire world to play, and whatever I make up is fair game; the world is big enough to accommodate any creations I might make, and the players cannot tell what's mine and what's not. Even my little Roadwardens campaign could work here, though the creative liberty granted by AOS has certainly got me thinking about other, stranger things.

Side note: Most of the material created for WFRP can easily be converted to AOS: There might not be as much mud, blood, and shit in my world, but it's still there. There are also magical artifacts that do strange and wondrous things. If I were using ACKS (for example) as my RPG engine of choice, I'd certainly take a hard look at re-flavoring and even entirely altering most of the magic items, to fit the feeling of the game world better.

Plus, the whole travel-by-portals thing is remarkably evocative, and always a great excuse to introduce complications. How strange, to be running a high fantasy game through a low-fantasy lens. I suppose the same can be said of my Dwimmermount game.

In short, this is not only doable in the OSR, it's practically begging to be done.