Editing Albion (section)

==Warhammer Fantasy==
Funnily enough, despite being mostly ignored in the modern era, Albion was one of the first human nations to be featured in Warhammer, alongside similarly forgotten [[Nippon]] all the way back in First Edition. Yeah, much earlier than [[The Empire (Warhammer Fantasy)|The Empire]] and almost two decades before [[Bretonnia]]. Their army in 1st ED is called '''Prince Wilhelm's Expedition''' and features generic medieval Western European army with Knights, Longbows and Men-At-Arms, which is opposed to the Norse invaders who wants to take over Albion. tl;dr Albion initially was an early prototype of future Bretonnia, but it didn't stick too well and was dropped and replaced with a more Celtic type setting...

Now Albion appears in the [[Warhammer Fantasy]] setting as its version of Roman-era Great Britain. Sitting in the seas west of [[Bretonnia]] and [[Norsca]], Albion is home to one of the oldest human civilizations on the planet, but very little is known about it because the island is shrouded by a magical field of concealing mists and has been for thousands of years.

In the ancient days when [[Chaos]] first ravaged the world, the Druids of Albion were one of the forces who worked to contain the destructive forces of magic. Like the High Elves of Ulthuan, they came up with the idea to perform powerful magical rituals to transform their island into a living sinkhole for magic, draining it away - it's implied, if not but alright stated, that Caeldor's Great Vortex wouldn't have worked if Albion hadn't been working on their project at the same time.

With the aid of the local [[giant|giants]], the Druids erected a network of menhirs in strange circular patterns; these "Ogham Stones" acted as lodestones for the wild magic that blew from the great polar rifts, siphoning it and discharging it directly into the earth. The Druids also erected great fields of mist, to shield Albion from ambitious Chaos worshippers who might be tempted to destroy the Ogham Stones and thus empower Chaos' grip on the world.

Of course, these actions had their punishments - Albion became a dismal land of eternal rain and mist, with monster-choked sodden forests interspersing great swamps and fens, and its people slowly declined into inbred barbarism on par with the [[Orcs & Goblins|Savage Orcs]], but hey, this is [[Dark Fantasy]]; what were you expecting?

Albion came to the Warhammer World's attention in 2001 (real-time), when [[Games Workshop]] launched the Dark Shadows seasonal campaign. The basic idea is that a mysterious entity called the Dark Master (later revealed to be [[Be'lakor]]) had corrupted a portion of the druids of Albion, who had set about trying to destroy or pervert the Ogham Stones in order to channel their power to the Dark Master. This disrupted the warding spells that had shielded Albion for all those centuries, and both the fallen druids ("Dark Emissaries") and their light side counterparts ("Truthsayers") began seeking out armies in the rest of the world and luring them there to Albion to fight their battles for them. This was covered in the form of a free mini-booklet providing Albion's lore, stats for the druids as mercenaries (as well as their Fenbeast guardians), linked narrative missions, a unique environment table, unique rules for handling the unpredictable effects of Albion's Ogham Stones on the Winds of Magic, and a unique weather table.

The Dark Shadows campaign was covered in [[White Dwarf]] - specifically, the July, August, September, October, November, and December of 2001 issues. The results would be finalized in April 2002's issue. One of these issues provided rules for recovering magical relics left behind by the Old Ones during your campaign on the island - which, since this was 5th or 6th edition Warhammer Fantasy, were clearly homages to devices from [[Warhammer 40,000]].

Albion has had very little impact on the Warhammer world; the events of the Dark Shadows campaign were mostly ignored by subsequent editions of Warhammer Fantasy. The 6th edition Lizardmen book ended its timeline with Kroq-gar being tasked by Mazdamundi to spearhead the foundation of a new temple city in Albion, with the scar-chieftain choosing the first batch of new saurus spawned there as his personal guard (where the spawning pools came from is a mystery, much as how did they spawn the specialized cold one riding breed of saurus on a dinosaurless island). This plotline was more or less dropped in later editions.

A guy called Mike Headden did create an Albion army for [[Warmaster]], which made it into the Warmaster Trial Armies Compendium of 2009; here, it was presented as a force of fairly generic human warriors supported by slingers, cavalry and chariots, with more exotic units consisting of ogres, giants, packs of wolfhounds, giant eagles (which can also double as steeds for your leaders), and fenbeasts. They are led by a generic human chieftain and can take a Truthsayer (well, Druid) as the army's wizard. You can find it here: http://wm-selector.appspot.com/pdfs/Warmaster_Trial_Armies_2009.pdf

Albion did feature in the [[Gotrek & Felix]] novel "Giantslayer", where it claims that there exists an elite subgroup of female druids called Oracles, who posses prophetic abilities, and they are defended by spear-wielding warrior-women known as the Maiden-Guard.

[[Warhammer Army Project]] created their own take on an Albion army, and we have a page about it over here: [[Warhammer_Army_Project/Albion]]. Their version is much more fantastical, mixing Warhammer style parodies of famous British/Scottish/Irish figures of history/myth with inspiration from 2000AD's [[Slaine]] and more generic Celtic lore. [[Centaur]]s, [[Pixie]]s, [[Giant]]s and [[Mastodon]]s all show up.