One of the interesting quirks of 2022's Total War: Warhammer 3 is that it featured two major armies that never actually existed in the tabletop game Warhammer Fantasy. Both Kislev (angry, ice-themed Russia) and Grand Cathay (mystical ancient China) had long featured in the lore, but outside of a handful of models and a pamphlet of rules briefly available for Kislev, neither had a real presence on the wargaming battlefield.
It was a departure for the series, which to that point had been almost obsessively faithful about drawing its units and heroes from real miniatures and army lists of the past. But that doesn't mean developer Creative Assembly simply went rogue. The two factions were created in collaboration with Games Workshop—so much so that GW went on to announce that Grand Cathay and Kislev would be factions in The Old World, its then still in-development revival of Warhammer Fantasy. Posts such as this one even revealed that full rules for the two had already been written, to help guide the videogame's implementation, and the implication was that new miniature ranges were on the way.
