In 2015, Games Workshop did something almost no franchise dares to do: it ended its 30-year-old fantasy world for real — cracked the planet in half and let it die. Here is how the Old World fell, and what rose from its ashes.

The Old World was never going to win. From daemon-haunted poles to a rat empire under every floor, here is why Warhammer Fantasy is a story about civilizations fighting entropy with one hand tied behind their back.

Dwarfs who write their grudges in a book that never ends. Rats who deny their own existence. Elves split by a single denied throne. A tour of the powers fighting over a dying fantasy world — and the hatreds that keep them from ever uniting against the thing that will kill them all.

A dark-medieval Europe that never was, eight invisible winds of magic, and a hole in the sky at the top of the world. This is the Old World — the fantasy setting Games Workshop built over thirty years, then deliberately blew up in 2015.