There's more to Warhammer 40,000 than just great video games, and we think there's some things that just need to be explained...
It occurred to us when we read a comment in our recent Blizzard Xmas card article, that for a lot of people the Warhammer 40,000 universe is merely a collection of video games taken from some strange tabletop game that uses toy soldiers. The comment in questions was “My life is better for knowing that Noise Marines exist,” which is a fair thing to say, but also implies that before reading about them in the story, the poor dude was ignorant.
This is just wrong. On top of that, it’s also a good excuse for a nice list early in the week – our last week at the coalface, by the way, so you enjoy it while you can – on just about one of our most favourite topics ever. We’ve touched on Warhammer outside of computer games before – in our Space Marine game v. game feature and our longer History of Warhammer piece, but here I want to explore some of the stuff that 40K video gamers may not know about the universe.
So... Noise Marines Warhammer may be dark and grim and gothic and all that, but it also has Noise Marines, which are basically Games Workshop’s tongue and cheek answer to cock rock hair-metal bands. Sure, these servants of Chaos (the eroto-insane God Slaanesh, to be exact) are pretty dark and nasty these days, but when first introduced to the canon, they featured Mohawks, leopard-print armour and guitar-guns.
Silly doesn’t begin to cover it.
The reasoning behind these guys is that as Marines who have turned against the Imperium and taken up the worship of the Ruinous Powers, these superhumans require superhuman stimulation. Some Slaaneshi worshippers turn to dirty sex, some to sex changes, and others... well, Noise Marines. In the modern take they really are quite... nasty, but in the early days of the game’s development I always pictured the game’s designers as giggling naughtily to themselves about the whole thing. But that leads me to my next thing you may not know about 40k...
Evolving universe With each edition of the rules, each new Codex listing a new army, hell, sometimes each new article in the house mag White Dwarf, the Warhammer universe changes. Sometimes this is a change in the game’s history, like saying that Arch Minister X actually did Y at some important meeting rather than Z, other times it’s more sweeping. For instance, at one point during the game’s Second Edition it was possibly the most brightly coloured, insane game you could lay eyes on. Everything was bright blue, or bright pink, or bright... whatever. Thankfully someone reminded GW that the game’s tag line began “In the grim darkness...”, and that darkness has now returned somewhat – the changes to units like Noise Marines above are a perfect example of that change of tone in action.
The other thing that's caused perhaps the most change is the fact that the game has been a huge financial success. Once upon a time it was bunch of pals writing a simple set of rules that could be used as either a wargame or an RPG, that could use whatever models you had lying around, to possibly the biggest cash-spinner of a publically listed corporation. As that’s happened, the rules and the way they are developed have changed drastically. Sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse.
1000 souls a day And when we say that the game is dark, consider this...
For most people – and I’ll lump myself in this corner – the Imperium are the good guys. They’re the plucky humans, the noble Space Marines, the wary Inquisition... you get the drift. In video gaming terms, the humans are pretty much always the main playable race, and often the ones cast in the most heroic light (Fire Warrior, of course, being the exception that more or less proves the rule). The reality in the full depth of the background is much, much nastier – in the far future of humanity, we are racist, fascist, jingoistic, religious extremists. And we’re weak, to boot, being responsible for one of the greatest blood-lettings the galaxy has known in the shape of the Horus Heresy, a vast star spanning civil war. We should probably be left to go extinct, but thankfully/sadly we have the Emperor looking out for us. Or, at least what’s left of him.
You see, he’s pretty much dead. He’s a lingering corpse kept alive only by the literal sacrifice of a thousand human souls a day. It’s really pretty monstrous, all these innocents – and they are, for the most part – dying so that the majority may struggle to live.
But that’s one of the interesting tricks the 40k writers have managed to pull off – they’ve placed players inside a gothic combination of 19th century American ‘Manifest Destiny’ and Hitler’s Third Reich, and made it kinda cool...
Bureaucracy Okay, here’s an interesting fact – for all the genetic super soldiers, all the epic wars and eldritch horror, there is one force in the Warhammer future that outweighs all others – bureaucracy.
Yep, if there’s anything keeping humanity alive – aside from the brutal sacrifice – it’s the power of the pen-pushers. The Adeptus Administratum are not only the largest public service in the history of government, they’re practically a religious power unto themselves. What’s more, the Administratum is huge. Like, entire planets made up of nothing but scribes, huge. For every Guardsman, there are hundreds of clerks making sure that he gets his next ration of Corpse Starch (seriously, the dead get to serve too!), for every Marine... tens of thousands. The minutiae of running the Imperium is so labour intensive, by the way, because of a deep distrust of intelligent machines.
And really, computers are complex and hard to run – but there’s no lack of warm bodies to harness to the word mill.
Humour Even we admit we’re getting a little too grim now, so let’s remember something important about Warhammer. It’s not only silly – see: Noise Marines – it’s also a grand example of a bunch of lads just having a laugh. The first edition of the game in particular, Rogue Trader, was full of in-jokes. There was the Marine chapter with a multicoloured emblem called the Rainbow Warriors, the vast number of human colonies that looked pretty much like Mad Max on crack, and then there’s some of the names of the oldest characters in the canon. Look at the Dark Angels primarch, Lion el’Jonson – a corny variation on the British poet Lionel Johnson, who wrote the poem The Dark Angel. There’s the Night Lords primarch, too: Konrad Kurze, a name taken from Joseph Conrad and his character from Heart of Darkness.
The authors didn’t take themselves at all seriously either, and each writer in the team had a caricature in the inside cover of the first book. Below is great game writer Rick Priestley’s rather non-serious portrait...
Not a lot of grim-dark there. However, at the end of the day, it’s very illustrative of the end goal for the entire Warhammer setting. It’s meant to be fun, and while it doesn’t mind being literary or alluding to darker materials to make a point, it’s still ultimately a game where you push toys around a table while chuckling with your mates. It’s easy to forget that sometimes.
And it’s easy to forget that there’s a lot more to 40k than just what’s shown in its video games.
Issue: 137 | June, 2012