Wargaming Wednesday: The Pure Insanity of Warhammer 40,000

NOTE: Cross-posting this from my Post Modern Pulps Blog, going to post one of these a day until I get caught up, and then I'm going to cross-post Wargaming Wednesdays every week.

I'm dedicating Wednesdays to wargaming and role-playing games. Although in recent years I haven't been able to get in much (or really any) of either tabletop wargaming or pen-and-paper RPG playing, I still count both among my hobbies and interests.

Today I just wanted to highlight the wargame I am most invested in on an emotional level - Games Workshop's Warhammer 40,000. For those who don't know what it is - I'll do this REAL QUICK - a bunch of British tabletop miniatures folks had a set of wargaming rules called Warhammer. It had armies of Elves and Dwarfs and guys with swords and pikes, and orcs and goblins, even skeletons and ghouls and "chaos" warriors and monsters. Basically every fantasy trope you can think of circa 1985 or so, thrown into a blender. Warhammer became super popular, and as it grew, they decided to do a version of the game as a sci-fi skirmish game, which they decided to call "Warhammer 40,000".

Just Another Day in the 41st Millennium

The universe of Warhammer 40,000 has changed somewhat in the 30+ years since its inception, but, well, I'll just cut and paste in the quote that appears at the beginning of most of their products:

It is the 41st Millennium. For more than a hundred centuries The Emperor has sat immobile on the Golden Throne of Earth. He is the Master of Mankind by the will of the gods, and master of a million worlds by the might of his inexhaustible armies. He is a rotting carcass writhing invisibly with power from the Dark Age of Technology. He is the Carrion Lord of the Imperium for whom a thousand souls are sacrificed every day, so that he may never truly die.

Yet even in his deathless state, the Emperor continues his eternal vigilance. Mighty battlefleets cross the daemon-infested miasma of the Warp, the only route between distant stars, their way lit by the Astronomican, the psychic manifestation of the Emperor's will. Vast armies give battle in his name on uncounted worlds. Greatest amongst his soldiers are the Adeptus Astartes, the Space Marines, bio-engineered super-warriors. Their comrades in arms are legion: the Imperial Guard and countless planetary defence forces, the ever vigilant Inquisition and the tech-priests of the Adeptus Mechanicus to name only a few. But for all their multitudes, they are barely enough to hold off the ever-present threat from aliens, heretics, mutants - and worse.

To be a man in such times is to be one amongst untold billions. It is to live in the cruelest and most bloody regime imaginable. These are the tales of those times. Forget the power of technology and science, for so much has been forgotten, never to be re-learned. Forget the promise of progress and understanding, for in the grim dark future there is only war. There is no peace amongst the stars, only an eternity of carnage and slaughter, and the laughter of thirsting gods.

Yeah, it's like that. This is the kind of science fiction wargame you dream up when you're a young British nerd who subsists on a diet of heavy metal, Michael Moorcock, Tolkien, the punk aesthetic, European political chaos, Dungeons & Dragons, Star Wars, the Alien franchise, Hammer horror films, and a thick, heady dose of Generation X nihilism.  The "good guys" in the Warhammer 40K universe are the Imperium of Man, but you quickly realize that in 40K, "good" just means not quite as demonically horrifying as the "bad guys", but still pretty goddamn awful. The Space Marines, genetically modified super-humans in a suit of nigh-invulnerable power armor, might be call "the Emperor's finest", but they're also know as "The Angels of Death", and they'd stomp your skull into paste as soon as look at you if they thought you were a threat.

'Ello Guv'ner!

Even the Imperial Guard, the "good little guys" who were just your normal humans in basic body armor and carrying basic guns - somewhat analogous to regular army guys of today, just with sci-fi trappings - are often portrayed as psychotically violent and xenophobic, or just plain insane. Many of them come from "death worlds" where everything there tries to kill you, and it's basically Rambo with a plasma rifle and a chainsaw sword.

Some of my favorite parts of 40K are when things get delightfully subversive. There are nuns in 40K, but they are sociopathic religious zealots running around in black powered armor with all-white hair (white head covering, black outfit, like a nun's habit), blazing away with guns and flamethrowers, slaying heretics and the "impure". The Space Marine chaplain isn't a kindly older man giving you spiritual guidance...well okay he is, but he's also an eight foot-tall crazed murder machine in coal-black armor with a skull-shaped helmet, smashing people to pieces in the name of the Emperor and driving on the troops with his "inspiring presence". Yeah, it's like that. Even the Librarian is a force to be reckoned with, as "Librarians" are actually Space Marines with psychic powers, who can blow your body apart with their minds, set tanks on fire, and cause all sorts of supernatural havoc.

Yes, this is one of the Good Guys.

If anything, my biggest criticism of 40K in recent years is that they seem to be toning down the darker, more punk-rock elements of 40K in favor of something a little more family-friendly. There are still demons and mutants and heretics, but the Good Guys are a little more Good and the Bad Guys are a little more Bad. While 40K has always bee appealing to teenagers, I think Games Workshop knows that they need to aim for a younger audience, in order to get brand loyalty at an earlier age *and* tap into the "toy money" of the parents, rather than 30- or 40-somethings who have discretionary income, but who can also say "$35 for a single model an inch and a half tall? Ehhh...".


And that's my other big complaint - the cost. New model kits and new pricing structures mean that a playable, "competitive" army can set you back $400 or more if you buy everything at store prices. Sure, hobbies can be expensive, but the nature of wargaming is such that you feel the need to buy the newest, coolest stuff, as the rules and the "meta" changes to give different armies an advantage.

Glorious Old-School '90s Boxed Set Artwork!

But despite these problems, I really like the universe of Warhammer 40,000. It's cruel and violent and cynical and bloody as hell - in fact, it reminds me of that other British dystopian setting, JUDGE DREDD, in a lot of ways - but back in its earlier times, 40K didn't take itself as seriously as it does now, and I think the new, more serious 40K has lost a little something because of that.

Now, pardon me while I go burn some heretics - I mean, search on eBay for an out of production miniature...

Old School 40K Crimson Fists Scout Squad

First, apologies for not having posted anything in such a long while. I'm currently on vacation, and I am using some of this time to catch up on blogging as well as working on my miniatures, so hopefully this week and the following weeks, I'll have more content for you to read.

While my last post featured a ten-man Crimson Fists scout squad for Warhammer 40K, I had mentioned that five of those minis were from the Space Marine Land Speeder Storm boxed set. However, I felt that it was silly to put five boltgun-armed marines on a vehicle whose best purpose seems to be delivering a small squad up close and personal for an assault, something boltguns aren't well suited to allow.

So then, who do we put in the LSS? These cranky old cusses, that's who.


These are five very old Space Marine scouts given to me by my 40K buddy and fellow blogger Darkwing from over at Arcadia Prime. The three metal models (#'s 1, 4, and 5 from left to right) are as-is except for the addition of a couple grenade packs. The second model is plastic, and I gave him a modern bolt pistol because the original is just hideous looking (I actually think the metal scout bolt pistols don't look half bad, considering). The scout sergeant in the middle is, I think, a little more recent (and by that I mean still probably from the early 90's), but I got rid of his crappy-looking bolt pistol and his ugly chainsword and instead gave him one of the new pistols and a power fist, which was originally a Space Wolf 'fist that I converted by carefully removing the wolf's head emblem from the back of the hand.

And before anyone comments, I am an absolute crap painter. I'm especially bad at painting faces, and it's made all the worse by the fact that these supposedly near-juvenile scouts all look like mohawked clones of Ernest Borgnine. I suppose my mediocre painting skills are one of the reasons I was attracted to Necrons and Orks for so long - both races are pretty easy to paint, the first because they are fairly simple, the second because, well, they are supposed to look messy and ramshackle. Regardless, here they are - my first painted Crimson Fists.

I've heard tell that five close-combat scouts loaded in a LSS (which can be armed with a heavy flamer for close-in support) make for a nice disruption unit. Their Scout abilities, open-topped nature of the speeder, and the overall speed of the unit means that it can threaten most any enemy unit on the table, especially good for going after vehicles or fire support units that can be threatened by these boys in close combat. I highly doubt they'll survive the whole game, and probably won't perform all that well every game anyhow, but I'm looking for a unit that's interesting for me to play, not necessarily something that will win games every time.

My next miniatures-related post should feature some Space Wolves, so stay tuned.

40K Friday: New Crimson Fists Scout Squad

Although it seems a little silly to do so, I've actually begun work over the last few months on not one, but two Warhammer 40,000 Space Marine armies: the Space Wolves and the Crimson Fists. I've always had an interest in the Space Wolves - their unorthodox fighting style, a great range of wild, unkempt models, and cool techno-barbarian flavor. I began buying their models as soon as their new codex came out, although I attempted to collect them years ago just before I began the Ork army I've focused on for the last five years or thereabouts.

But to flesh out the model range for my Space Wolves, I've bought a few boxes of standard marines, and with all the extra bits I began accumulating, I began thinking of a Codex: Space Marines force that I could build as a possible "beginner's army" to help new players learn how to play Warhammer 40K. Around this time, the Space Marine Battles novel Rynn's World came out, depicting the epic battle to save the Crimson Fists chapter after their world was invaded by orks and their Chapter-Monastery was destroyed, wiping out hundreds of marines and leaving alive only a fraction of the chapter's manpower to defend the world against the Ork invasion. I found myself really drawn to the fluff written about this chapter - an army fighting back from the brink of annihilation, a shadow of its former strength, and yet still committed not just to surviving and rebuilding, but to continuing the fight against the enemies of the Imperium.

Because of their vastly depleted numbers, one of the unit types you commonly find in a Crimson Fists army are Scout squads. Scouts are newly inducted Space Marines who have not been raised to full Battle-Brothers and serve as skirmishers and raiders, learning how to fight in the Astartes fashion from the flanks and rear of the battles rather than toe-to-toe with the enemy. As the Crimson Fists would be relying on these new recruits to do a lot of fighting until their main battle companies are brought into full strength, I decided to pick up some scouts as one of the first units of Crimson Fists I was to build.

With this in mind, I grabbed one box of standard scouts, and one Land Speeder Storm, a fast skimmer vehicle that transports a five-man squad of scouts into battle. While I have another unit of Scouts that I'll be using in the LSS, I did decide to use the scout models that come with the transport and mix them with the five-pack of scouts I had purchased to make one ten-man unit equipped with boltguns, a heavy bolter, and a Scout Sergeant who could be represented rules wise by Scout Sergeant Telion - I felt that having a grizzled, extremely competent scout sergeant leading my men makes sense for an army like the Crimson fists, who must now rely more than ever on these new Astartes to keep the chapter alive.

Here are the standard Scout models I've got assembled (but as yet unpainted). The heads for the heavy bolter scout and my Telion stand-in are actually Space Wolf Scout heads.


These five scouts are the models I converted from the Land Speeder Storm box. I always thought it a little silly that a rapid strike vehicle like the LSS, open-topped and perfect for rapid assault strikes, was modeled with boltgun-armed scouts, weapons that would prevent the scouts from charging from the LSS after firing. I guess the scouts just looked too cool with their bolters, like a bunch of Delta Force commandos about to hop out of their AH-58 Little Bird and kick some unsuspecting bad guys in the teeth.


The combat blades are left over from the other scouts box, the second model on the left and the rightmost model actually have standard SM bolters from the Tactical Marines box. The three marines on the right are standing on pieces of plaster "brick" that I broke up to give them something to stand on - their poses wouldn't have worked otherwise, but I think they look just fine here, and actually make the unit as a whole a lot more dynamic and more interesting than simply having ten guys standing around holding their guns in two hands and looking in various directions.

Comments and questions are welcome - hopefully next week I'll have some more 40K models to show off!