Too much of a good thing?

I'll be running my WFRP game today, so here's one I prepared earlier.

Hit town yesterday afternoon in search of mundane things like soap, and popped into my local GW to pick up a copy of WFB's Storm of Chaos. I don't play WFB (got more than enough miniatures to work on without starting a whole new army-building game for goodness sake!). I'd been thinking about getting this ever since I started running WFRP in its new post Storm of Chaos (SoC) incarnation. I was finally persuaded by a reply I got on the Black Industry (BI) forums to a thread (NB. BI forums long since defunct, so I've edited out the dead link) I started asking for more information about Middenheim.

As ever with GW product, this is a very nice book, with lots of colour text and some really nice illustrations, including some beautifully painted miniatures. Some of the illustrations were already familiar to me from the WFRP2 book Ashes of Middenheim (AoH). Others- specifically 2 maps and a lovely 2-page spread painting of Middenheim at the height of Archaon's seige were exactly what I was looking for.

Now it comes as no surprise to me that GW WFB army books contain stuff not in the WFRP2 books. In fact, I have long reckoned that it is one of the secrets of WFRP's success that it the rpg of a successful ttg, so to speak, something I believe that contributes to the Old World's richness, and to the sense of it being a real, happening place. I'm also really pleased that it seems that one of the things GW are doing with WFRP2 is reintegrating the timelines of these 2 versions of their first great trademark product.

So it really doesn't bother me one bit that GW would appear to be setting up their WFRP2 product line so that the WFB army books complement the rpg background material. I mean, I'm really looking forward to seeing how this pans out with the upcoming 40K rpg, me being a big space marine fan and all.

It's just that, well, I do mind more than a teensy bit when something as important to a book like AoM as a proper concrete image of a city as imposing as Middenheim is absent even from the cover. As I said in my BI post, I came away from reading the AoM material with a completely wrong impression of the place.

I'd've bought WFB:SoC sooner or later for the extra background material, which I found worthwhile. But I wish I hadn't had to buy it for something that I should already have had when I bought WFRP:AoM is all.