Warhammer Armies Project – the 9th edition of Warhammer that Games Workshop never gave us?

Let me start with a confession: I have never played Warhammer Fantasy Battle.

I missed it. By the time I got into wargaming, the Old World had just been blown to pieces, and all that was left of its regiments were boxes in attics and stories from friends about how things used to be.

For a long time I wondered whether there was any point getting into a game that officially no longer existed. But it wouldn't leave me alone. I fed on the lore, the characters, the old army books and the artwork, with a world spilling out of them that was dark, earthy and absurdly colourful all at once. In the end I started looking for a system that could be the heir to WFB.

And I found more than I could have asked for: the Warhammer Armies Project.

This is the story of how it came to be. Of one man who wanted to write one book – and ended up with an entire game.

I'm telling it after the author's own blog. Since 2010 Mathias has recorded every step of the project there – from the first pages of Dogs of War to his troubles with Games Workshop. Most of the dates, numbers and quotes in this piece come from there.

"I'll just do this one project"

Anyone who has even a single shelf of miniatures at home knows that sentence.

"I'll just paint this one unit." "I'll just buy the starter." "I'll just do this one project." And then you wake up a few years later with a 3D printer, a dozen armies for a dozen systems, and no clear memory of when it all happened.

In early 2010, Mathias Eliasson joined a collaborative forum project: updating the Dogs of War army for the seventh edition of Warhammer. The mercenaries' rules at the time remembered the days when phones were for making calls, so somebody had to sort them out.

Not a word about a new edition. Not a word about a big system. Just one army.

In September that same year, Dogs of War 4.0 came out together with the Regiments of Renown supplement – more than 160 pages in total. While still working on it, Mathias proudly posted on his blog that he had 140 pages done, and immediately reassured his readers: "no, I'm not THAT insane" – he'd simply been at it for months.

Looking at the next sixteen years of the project: he was that insane.

A map full of blank spaces

The trouble with Warhammer was that its world was far bigger than what Games Workshop let you collect and put on the table.

The maps, the stories and the old supplements were full of whole lands – Kislev, Araby, Cathay, Nippon, Albion, Estalia – that got a paragraph of background at most, a single unit, or a passing mention along the lines of "there are some more people somewhere out east". Those factions were treated a bit like distant relatives: everyone knows they exist… and that's about it.

Mathias started filling in the blank spaces.

In the very first year he produced books for Araby, Kislev, Cathay, Nippon, Norsca, Albion and the Amazons. Then came Halflings, Hobgoblins, the Kingdoms of Ind and the Pirates of Sartosa.

And these weren't notes on a napkin. While working on Estalia, Mathias spent a few days gathering material from all over the internet and ended up with about a hundred pages of sources – just notes, before the first sentence of the book was written. The finished Estalia grew to more than a hundred pages and was one of the longest books he had made.

Mathias also has a weakness that helped the project a great deal: he's an amateur history buff. He built his armies on the real cultures those lands were clearly inspired by, and added a pinch of fantasy on top. He describes them himself as pseudo-historical armies with fantasy elements, rather than fantasy armies with a bit of history.

That's why Estalia has conquistadors and the Inquisition, rather than "Empire folk in different hats".

Then he took a step that changed the nature of the whole undertaking. Chaos Dwarfs and Bretonnia never got an eighth edition army book from Games Workshop – so he made them himself.

The project no longer just answered the question "how might a Nippon army play?". It now also answered "how do you play an army its maker forgot about?".

Which is where the name comes from. The Warhammer Armies Project is – in the author's own words – a project to create army books for Warhammer, nothing more. No revolution in the title. Modesty itself.

Complete first, balanced later

When Mathias moved on to the official armies, he adopted a principle that still sets WAP apart from most systems.

He dug through every edition of Warhammer and put into the books everything that sensibly fitted a given army. The aim was simple: whether you have models from third edition or from the End Times – and sometimes even from Age of Sigmar – you can field them.

In his own words: the books weren't meant to be as balanced as possible, but as comprehensive as possible – and then balanced from there.

Add to that WYSIWYG – "what you see is what you get". The weapons on the model should match the weapons in the rules. To make that work, Mathias added medium armour – something between a breastplate and full armour – and several new weapon types. He wrote unit rules while looking at old GW models, third-party miniatures, the lore and the artwork.

Got an old lead hero?

There's a good chance he has rules.

Got a weird regiment from fifth edition?

Check the army book.

Got a model even Games Workshop has forgotten about?

Mathias probably remembers.

2015: the world goes up in smoke

Games Workshop ended Warhammer Fantasy Battle in a remarkably subtle way: it blew up the entire world.

The End Times, and then a new game – Age of Sigmar. The Old World literally ceased to exist, regiments on square bases went back into their boxes, and thousands of players were left with their armies and one question: "What now?".

This is a good moment to bust a popular myth. WAP was not born as a fan rebellion after the End Times. By the time GW shut down the Old World, Mathias's project was already five years old and had a whole shelf of books.

That was when Mathias made his decision: if nobody was going to make a ninth edition, he would make it himself. He would fix what bothered him most about eighth and build the game he wanted to play.

It turned out that after the Old World's destruction, quite a lot of people wanted to play exactly the same thing.

15 February 2016: the ninth edition beta

The first version of Warhammer: 9th Edition came out on 15 February 2016. Mathias called it a sort of "Best of" Warhammer – a mix of sixth, seventh and eighth edition with his own additions.

He warned straight away that the changes wouldn't please everyone, and left the choice to the community: take what you like, ignore the rest. A kind of honesty you don't often see in this hobby.

What did he fix? Eighth edition had a few features players loved and cursed at the same time: very long charges, powerful Steadfast, overpowered magic, weak shooting and monsters everywhere. In WAP, infantry charges are slower, Steadfast has limits, magic is calmer, shooting matters again, and there are fewer monsters.

The result? A game that's more about manoeuvring and flanking than about building the biggest block of infantry and hurling it at your opponent. Or about pouring all your power dice into one spell that ends the battle in turn two.

It still feels like eighth edition. But more of what people loved about the earlier editions comes back.

Production started right after the beta. Mathias announced he would finish one army list a week, so people could get their old armies out of the cupboard as soon as possible. The Empire came first, with High Elves announced for the following week.

2017: sixty books and a full Google Drive

For a while Mathias tried to support two editions at once: every army had a version for eighth and one for ninth.

Sounds sensible, until you do the maths.

In 2017 he worked out that he had about sixty books to keep up to date. Every typo, every layout fix and every piece of artwork had to be corrected twice. On top of that, the project had grown so big that he was running out of space on Google Drive. A fan-made edition of Warhammer was literally outgrowing a free cloud account.

So Mathias did what a sensible person does: he made the decision together with the community. In a poll, 60% voted for ninth edition and 40% for eighth. From then on, the full books were made for ninth, while eighth got condensed army lists.

That's probably the moment WAP stopped being a set of add-ons for someone else's game and became a game of its own.

One author, a whole army of helpers

"Mathias Eliasson's project" is true, but a bit of a simplification.

Mathias is the author and lead designer. But over the years a community grew up around WAP without which this colossus would never have stayed standing. Players playtested the rules, reported bugs and proofread the books. The Discord moderators made spell cards, the online version of the rules and the Battlescribe files – and kept the server peaceful along the way, which with Warhammer fans can be a task worthy of the defence of Middenheim.

Mathias himself admitted he couldn't have done it without them.

2023: Games Workshop casts Dispel Scroll

WAP's story has its own little End Times, too.

At the end of June 2023, Mathias announced that Games Workshop had contacted him. The old WAP books were huge, beautifully laid-out compendiums – rules, but also lore, bestiaries and artwork. And the text and artwork belonged to GW. The company asked him to remove everything that infringed its rights.

The internet loves to turn stories like this into "corporation sends assassins after a fan", so for the record: Mathias himself stressed that GW had been very polite and in no way threatening. He didn't hold a grudge either – the world was theirs after all, and the project could only go on for as long as the owner tolerated it.

On 30 June 2023, every download link to the books disappeared from the blog. That included the non-GW armies, because almost all of them contained some piece of official lore or artwork.

Mathias wrote honestly that he didn't know what would happen next. Warhammer: The Old World – the official return of the Old World – was on its way. If it turned out to be good, a large part of the community would probably move over to it, and rewriting all the books would no longer make sense. He added that he'd been running the project for over thirteen years, had a wife, a full-time job and lots of miniatures to paint, so he wasn't promising anything.

It sounded like a farewell.

"WAP is back, baby!"

The farewell lasted a little over a week.

After what he called "over a week of 'WAP is now dead'", Mathias sat down and checked how much work it would take to release just Kislev in a rules-only version. It turned out to be doable.

On 9 July 2023 he announced the comeback. The books would move to a rules-only format: units, stats, magic items, special characters and lores of magic – without GW lore and artwork, around fifty pages for the big armies instead of more than a hundred. He ended the post with a line that deserves to hang framed in every club: "WAP is back, baby!".

A Patreon launched at the same time, with a caveat that says a lot about the author. Nothing went behind a paywall: the rules and the Discord stayed free, and patrons could only vote on which army would be updated next. Money wasn't going to affect the rules, because – as he wrote – the last thing he wanted was a "pay to win" game.

Five days later, Kislev came out. The first book in the new format, 36 pages, the first update for that army in six years. A few days later Mathias was already pushing out fixes and making no secret of his delight: patching bugs goes much faster when you don't have to wrestle with over a hundred pages of lore and layout.

And here's the paradox of the whole story. Games Workshop's request took away WAP's most beautiful part – its encyclopedia of the Old World. But at the same time it saved the project from its own weight. Mathias admitted years later that maintaining the old, huge books forever would have been impossible anyway, and that thanks to the new format updates come out much faster.

Sometimes you have to drop the baggage to get further.

Sixteen years later

Most fan projects live for about three months, and then the author posts:

"Hey, sorry for the lack of updates, a lot going on lately".

Last active: 2017.

WAP is sixteen years old and still getting new versions. By 2025, every army had moved to the new format. In 2026 a big 3.0 update to the core rules came out – it took about a year and a half to make and reworked, among other things, movement, reforming, Stand & Shoot and charges. In May 2026, after Zombie Pirates 3.0 was released, every faction was compatible with the new rulebook, and on 20 June 2026 version 3.1 arrived.

There are now more than thirty armies. Besides the obvious ones – Empire, Dwarfs, Bretonnia, the elves, Orcs & Goblins, Skaven, Lizardmen, Vampire Counts, Tomb Kings, Beastmen, Chaos – there's a whole collection of things a WFB player could once mostly just read about in the background.

Wanted a Nippon army?

Here you go.

Araby with genies?

Got it.

Halflings?

Naturally.

Pirates?

Yes.

Undead pirates?

Obviously, them too.

In terms of convenience, it's no longer "a fan PDF found on a forum" either. There's an online rules index with search, where you can find rules, units, items and spells without leafing through three PDFs and a file called rules_final_final2.pdf. Army lists are built in New Recruit, which counts the points and checks the list. And there's a Discord that has been running since 2019.

And there are people who play it. I won't pretend WAP is as popular as Warhammer 40,000 – it's a niche. But at NOVA Open 2023 there was a five-round WAP tournament with 26 people signed up. Not exactly Adepticon numbers. But it doesn't look like a project played only by Mathias, his cat and one guy from Reddit either.

What about The 9th Age and The Old World?

WAP wasn't the only idea for life after the End Times. Its best-known contemporary is The 9th Age, which over time distanced itself more and more from the Games Workshop world and built its own.

WAP went the other way and deliberately stayed Warhammer: with the Empire, Bretonnia, Skaven and Lizardmen. That was its greatest strength – and, as 2023 showed, its greatest risk as well.

And today the Old World is officially back as Warhammer: The Old World. Good. More square bases in the world is always good news.

I see no need to turn this into a holy war. You can play TOW, you can play WAP, you can play sixth edition. The miniatures won't take offence if you switch systems.

Probably.

You never know with my goblins.

My road to WAP

Back to where I started.

When I found WAP, I got everything I was looking for at once: old heroes I had read about in the lore, rules for armies I knew only from the artwork, and a breath of nostalgia from a good twenty years ago. Nostalgia for times I never even lived through at the table – which is a very strange feeling, and I recommend it to everyone.

I tried to get into The Old World too. I really did. But I never felt at home there. I missed the chaos that made me fall in love with this world: the Mangler breaking free of its leash and spreading random destruction across the battlefield, and goblins who squabble in their own ranks instead of marching into battle.

Because I wasn't looking for balance. I was looking for the experience of the world. The Old World.

The best proof? While learning the rules, I played against myself. Sounds sad, I know. But it was as much fun as a good film: a battle plan falling apart in turn two, a cannon blowing up on its first shot, a regiment running from its own shadow, and a hero suddenly doing something you'll still be talking about at the next game. Even losing to myself, I had a great time.

That's the Warhammer I wanted.

For me, this is the 9th edition

Officially?

No. The Warhammer Armies Project is a fan project and is not affiliated with Games Workshop.

But the hobby doesn't always need the manufacturer's stamp.

There was sixth.
There was seventh.
There was eighth.
Then the world exploded.

And somewhere on the side, one fan who only wanted to fix the mercenaries spent sixteen years writing, testing, rewriting and releasing – until "one project" turned into an entire game.

Is everything perfectly balanced? Of course not. It's Warhammer. If everything were perfectly predictable, you'd have to start suspecting we were playing something else.

What it does have is character, a huge amount of content, and people who care.

For me, WAP isn't a "fan mod for old Battle". It's the ninth edition we never officially got. And quite possibly it's better precisely because it was made by someone who simply didn't want to stop playing.

Useful links

• Warhammer Armies Project – Mathias Eliasson's blog and army books
• WAP Online Rules Index – rules search at the table
• New Recruit – WAP army lists
• Warhammer Armies Project Patreon – support the author

Source: Mathias Eliasson's blog warhammerarmiesproject.blogspot.com – posts from across the project's years and the retrospective "About the Warhammer Armies Project" from October 2024. Cover logo: Warhammer Armies Project (Mathias Eliasson), used under the right of quotation.