The Warhammer World.

This is mostly backstory to the games I play, so no one is entirely lost as to what I'm saying.

So, the games I play are Warhammer fantasy, and Warmachine. I also play some Mordheim from time to time. Each one is different, and here I'll give a brief description of each world, why I like it, what I play, and all of that jazz. I don't play Warhammer 40K. Honestly, it seems cool, but each game takes several hours

Mordheim and Warhammer take place in the same world, Albion. Albion is a world torn into two directions: law and chaos. Virtually no faction in the game is "good" though many are outright evil. And that's not a bad thing, in my opinion. I'm opposed to this idea that one guy has to be the evil orcs and the other has to be the righteous who-the-hell-evers. The world of Albion is like Earth in the renaissance. Men and dwarves have gunpowder weapons, while orcs and lizardmen (who look meso-American) use the most primitive of weapons. Beastmen haunt the forests, orc hordes gather and tear themselves apart with regularity, dwarves are slowly dying off, as their fortresses are slipping away to relentless assault from goblins and all kinds of other things, and they refuse to change their tactics, being bound by tradition. The elves are either living in a forest that bends the laws of time and space, or living on an island in a state of perpetual civil war. The humans live all over, but the two main groups are the Empire, and the Bretonnians. The Empire uses renaissance technology and various fantasy creatures. The Bretonnians are classic knights, riding horses, and backed by peasants. Meanwhile, demons spew out from chaos gates at the poles, which also warp the locals, who are prone to raiding anyway. The skaven, cruel rat-people, live beneath the world, doing what they do. And in the cursed land of Sylvania (guess where this is going) the undead crawl out of their graves, bent to the will of the local vampires.

The thing I like about Albion is their historical randomness. I mean, every world borrows from our own, taking interesting concepts and seeing what they can make them do. But there is no "British" faction, and I love this. The Bretonnians are French-like, the Empire is Germany-like, and that's that. The world has a crazy history too, with lizardmen being created to do the will of "the Old Ones" who created the world as they see it, planting various species found elsewhere in the universe on a single planet. The orcs were a native fungal species, but they spread by spores released from their bodies when they die, and as such, their entire society is based on fighting. Fighting for land, fighting for food, fighting for literally no reason...orcs win at orc life when orcs fight. And if they die, then at least they weren't defeated. Orcs are stupid.

Mordheim is a game based on a single city in Albion. Backstory first. The Empire was established by Sigmar, who is sort of like Jesus, if Jesus wielded a hammer and was also Conan the Barbarian. Sigmar united the tribes and pushed out the orcs, making alliances with the elves and dwarves, before finally leaving his own empire for parts unknown. His birth was heralded by a twin-tailed comet. Mordheim was a city that, one night, found a comet over their heads. They assumed Sigmar was going to come again, so everyone gathered at Mordheim, waiting for the day...but the day never came, and the people got bored, so they went back to their "sinnin' ways." Then the comet struck the city, and lots of people died. The city became ruins almost overnight, and most living people left, because the comet was made of warpstone, which is a valuable  material for most dark magic. The key word there is "valuable." That's where the game starts. Each player has a team of mercenaries, and during their duration in the city of Mordheim, they gather as much loot as they can, fighting where they must.

I LOVE this game, and I love that its campaign-based. When one of your guys goes down in combat, you roll one dice if he's a minion, and two if he's a hero. If he's a minion, he either lives or dies, but his odds of dying are higher than those of heroes. If he's a hero, you roll on the injury table, meaning that he may be fine, or he may lose an arm for the rest of the campaign. He may have been killed, or captured by the enemy, or sold to the fighting pits, or even driven mad. The idea that you suffer permanently for bad luck is great, because its kind of realistic. And the deaths of heroes are almost always awesome.