To celebrate, let's have a look at some of the classics from this long-lived franchise. ![]() The most recent release was the first expansion pack for Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War II, Chaos Rising, which proved to be very good. There's 12 games in the series, with two more on the way. Which translates to an awesome setting for gaming. Warhammer: there's a hint in the name, is a world of constant conflict, constant, well, war. There's nothing particularly admirable about the good guys, no 'will Thrall and Jaina kiss?'-worthy allies. Each and every faction is an aggressive bastard, not interested in being particularly sympathetic. And I never saw anyone jumping to hyperspace in Star Wars run the risk of demonic possession or getting their ship mutated or being eaten by space locusts. As for Palpatine, 40K's Emperor is a shrivelled corpse who drinks the souls of a thousand Jedi a day and who makes commercial shipping possible galaxy-wide by concentrating very hard indeed. Darth Vader would have been considered a great general of the people. ![]() Star Wars is a place of innocent farm boys rescuing princesses and optimism, but if Luke had been born in the Imperium, he would have been lobotomised, personality wiped, bionics and new glands and organs chucked into him, slaved to a weird warrior brotherhood. It mixes bone-deep nihilism and cynicism with a 2000AD delight in fascist nastiness then, somehow, manages to get a lot of laughs. There's a deep baroque feel to the setting, a scavenger impulse that takes what it likes from world history and art and recasts it as a widescreen epic, mixing fantasy, horror and science fiction. But it took a long time to get there.īut that's one of the keys to 40K's success. Warhammer 40K has become one of gaming's most cherished franchises. Is it any wonder humanity fairly quickly devolves from a forward-looking race of adventurous, secular crusaders into a sort of horrifying Catholic Church in the Dark Ages but only in space? No, no it isn't. And of course, the foul and sorcerous daemons of Chaos, the Archenemy. The undead robot Necrons, who enjoy wearing human skin for socks and feed off the epic genocide of their gods. Tyranids, which are like if Giger's Xenomorph met the Starship Troopers Arachnids for a long-standing date to do meth, but with magic brain power. The Eldar, cunning immortals, trick and deceive. ![]() The Orks, a race of cheerfully brutish soccer louts, are pretty much the best of it. Warhammer 40K is the far future of our own world. The Imperium of Man arrived and the most grimly depressing, yet oddly funny, science fiction setting ever was here to stay. Suddenly, proper armies, proper worlds, a proper background was provided. Then the second edition came out and 40K got a lot more organised, a lot more rigorous. The very first 40K publication, Rogue Trader, was a madcap thing, war game rules with RPG elements, a punk DIY aesthetic encouraging homemade modelling, which pretty much amounted to spray painting shampoo bottles and calling them weird names and pretending they were tanks. Space elves, space orcs, space magicians. Spinning off from the Warhammer Fantasy Battles, 40K started out as a WFB in space. Warhammer 40,000, or as it's known by lazy typists, 40K, is a franchise juggernaut.
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