Fantasy Yog-Sothothery

I'm really not a fan of the Age of Sigmar setting, especially because the original Warhammer world setting was so good. It also seems like a really bizarro business decision to get rid of your classic setting and move to a new untested one literally at the same time you're launching a hit video game set in the old setting in the form of Total War. 

Although from a business perspective it's a much smaller deal, the relaunching of the Enemy Within TTRPG campaign in a "director's cut" format was also at this same time. The old Warhammer world lives on, and in fact seems to live on bigger and better than ever in some ways, during the Age of Sigmar. Which, as near as I can tell, has not really been a super big hit. Maybe I'm just missing all of the Age of Sigmar lore videos on YouTube, and whatnot, but the buzz for the rebooted setting seems to be low energy, while there's still a lot going on with the old setting.

That's neither here nor there, though. The old setting is well documented, so regardless of what you think of one or other other of the Warhammer settings, the old setting is certainly useable. Warhammer sometimes suffers from confusion of tone. When its at its best, it's dark fantasy, the literal origin of the term grimdark, and works as Yog-Sothothery; literal Lovecraftian horror. Other times, it's very tongue in cheek humor, puns and silliness. Not that that doesn't have its place too, even occasionally in a dark fantasy setting, but I'll venture to say that Warhammer as a setting is much more famous and much more beloved for its horror and darkness than it is for its humor and silliness.

Of course, Lovecraft himself wrote plenty of fantasy. Here, for the fun of it, is a Lovecraftian fantasy story from Youtube, next to a Warhammer Yog-Sothothery story, again from Youtube (with a few minutes of framing, mostly after the story is over.) You'll probably note that if anything, the Warhammer story is a more effective horror story than the Lovecraft one is. Not only that, the skaven, when not silly and goofy, are a more effective horror element than something like Deep Ones anyway. I'd venture to say that most people are more icked out by rats than by fish.

Now, I'm on record as saying Lovecraft was very influential, but it's not because he was a great writer; it's because he had innovative new ideas. It's not actually shocking to me that a Warhammer story would be better than a Lovecraft story. Of course, to be fair, "The Doom that Came to Sarnath" has a similar title and similar theme to "The Doom of Kavzar"—and even a similar plot, although the latter is clearly riffing on the Pied Piper story—but Sarnath isn't really meant to be one of the horror stories either. So there is that.