In The Grim Darkness Something Something War!
Pictured: Black Templars. Not included in this book: rules for Black Templars. Also: go fuck yourself.
Our musical accompaniment for this shall be D-Rok because it's metal that is literally about Warhammer 40K. Look, we don't have quite the talent pool to work with as when we're doing Cthulhu inspired Metal or vampire inspired music. At least we aren't doing Bolt Thrower. At least, not yet. Depends on how much we drink during this project.
Koumei:
Warhammer 40k and D&D both have some interesting similarities: I started with 3rd Edition in both cases, and 3rd Edition is the best Edition in both cases. Also elves are almost always better than orks in both games (regardless of edition). I’ll stop scraping for similarities. I first walked into the store and asked about getting started just a few weeks before 3rd Edition 40K hit, so they set me up to pre-order the box set, and an extra Tactical Squad (the exciting new one that wasn’t all snap-fit mono-pose!)
This is what you had before that. Your average army probably had 30+ of those.
What this means is my first purchase included some plastic palm trees, the rules, dice and templates, two plastic measuring sticks that really hurt when you whack someone on the forearm with them (probably why they stopped using these), and two Tactical Squads, a Land Speeder and some number of Dark Eldar Warriors. It was actually an exciting time in Warhams, because a new faction was released (and was spiky and edgy even before goth turned into “new” emo, and their basic Troops were multi-pose with lots of bits) and the iconic SPACE MARINES were getting new plastic kits with all sorts of bits and pieces. Crazy times.
So the take-away of this is that my knowledge of prior editions comes mostly from three sources:
- 1. Various tales and references by others.
2. Looking over old Codices, which had crazy shit. Seriously, check out the individual vehicle damage tables back then.
3. Necromunda, which is basically 2Ed.
FrankT:
With Koumei taking the heavy lifting of someone for whom 3rd edition was a gateway drug, I guess I'll be playing the part of someone who had already been playing 40K when 3rd edition came out. Probably the biggest questions you have going into this are probably “What the hell is Warhammer?” and of course “Why should I care?” Well, WH40K is a sci-fi spinoff of a fantasy tabletop miniatures game, and you care because it's the biggest game in the tabletop minis sector and has been for more than twenty fucking years. And in the tabletop minis business, popularity is quality. The sad fact of that matter is that the barrier to entry to start playing is hundreds of dollars worth of little army guys, and if you want your army to not look like ass it's going to take hundreds of hours painting and assembling it. This means that it very much isn't like an RPG that one of your friends can lend you the book after badgering you to give it a shot. You need other players and other players are only going to exist if they know there are other players for them and so on.
Without another player who has spent hundreds of dollars on their miniature army, this is all you can do with your toy soldiers.
So right around the start of the 90s, WH40K eclipsed Warhammer Fantasy Battles as the biggest minis game, and that meant that when the third edition of 40K came out in 1998 it was already going to be the best minis game by definition just because of playability. Was it good? Bad? Compared to what? In table top miniatures, most games are literally unplayable outside of gaming conventions. You don't fucking know enough people who have Full Thrust or Critter Commandos miniatures to have a league so those games might as well be written in Farsi.
In any case, we should probably be drinking something appropriately British. For this I nominate Trooper, the Iron Maiden flavored beer. The label says “Premium British Beer” and I definitely agree that is British.
In all reality, I believe we're going to run out and drink “whatever is left in the cupboard.”
Koumei:
You think it’s hard now to find a group for any other minis game? These days, Privateer “PLAY LIKE YOU HAVE A PAIR OF BIG METAL MANLY BALLS” Press exists at all, much as we might lament this fact, Star Wars has some kind of thing going that is pretty damn popular, and you can get micro-groups here and there for stuff like Anima Tactics or Infinity. Also, the Internet means you can more easily organise a small group or find someone in your city who plays the game you backed on Kickstarter or whatever.
Back then, that was not the case. You either played Warhammer Fantasy, or you played Warhammer 40K, or you played a spin-off like Epic 40K. Or you fucked the hell off. To think I could have chosen that last option. It’s very possible I wouldn’t have found my way into roleplaying, but on the other hand…
FrankT:
The origins of 40K are basically pretty stupid. Games Workshop made shit for D&D in the 70s and in 1983 they decided that they should probably release some half assed rules for playing games with their fantasy minis. When they realized that they could become a vertical monopoly they did so in 1984 – becoming their own distributor, producer, and store. By 1985 they had a virtual stranglehold on the entire United Kingdom gaming community, and they decided in 1987 to steal a bunch of shit from Laserburn of all fucking things and make a science fiction spinoff of their fantasy monopoly. The science fiction version rapidly became more popular, and the guy who made Laserburn went on to join the company and then take it over in some kind of wasp eggs in a caterpillar type scenario.
So 40K is literally Poochy the fucking Dog – a spinoff of an established franchise, incorporating a bunch of stolen elements from other stuff because someone in marketing heard the kids like that shit. The setting is just the fantasy armies of the time in space. And that space part is just a bunch of stuff from other science fiction games and Heavy Metal Magazine.
Yes, this Heavy Metal Magazine.
There's a giant pile of lore for 40K, but that shit is all post-hoc, which is a big part of why none of it makes any sense. It's also why it's constantly contradicting itself. Warhammer 40,000 exists because of a marketing need, and everything that entails. You don't care about this game because of the fluff, the fluff is all retconned bullshit anyway. You don't care about this game because of the rules, the rules weren't exactly cutting edge in the fucking eighties and seven editions later they still aren't. You care about Warhammer 40K because it's effectively the only game in town and if you want to actually do this fucking hobby you can like it or lump it.
Look: you painted some dolls and put them on the floor. You can play this “game” or you can admit to yourself that you are legally an adult and like to spend your time playing with dolls.
Koumei:
To be fair, you might not buy into the lore in and of itself, but you could very well say “Wow, the art looks fucking metal, and these painted minis look awesome.” And people would tell you bits of lore that appealed to them and then that’d sound awesome to you back then and you’d buy into it. Similarly, you could say “sounds good” to the concept of the game without knowing the actual rules, so you’d buy into it at first for gameplay reasons without knowing you were making a bad decision.
These days we have a thing called the Internet (you’re probably utilising it in order to read this), so you have no excuse for making that mistake.
FrankT:
The first edition of 40K was called Rogue Trader and it's almost completely unplayable. There are random tables to roll on to figure out what guns your little spacemen and space elves get, and I have no fucking idea how you're supposed to actually do that considering that each little space dude is a model that costs actual money to own and real time to paint. Were you supposed to roll your armies up literally months in advance and then buy pieces of them? What the ever living fuck?
Ranxerox is angry. Also formative to the creative process that created the “look” of 40K being basically one of the things that most of 40K's early artists masturbated to in their teens. Not this picture in particular though. Ask your parents.
In Rogue Trader there is no “balance” and it doesn't even seem to have been a design goal. When you buy a major hero you roll 7D6 to determine how many times you roll a d20 and consult a chart to figure out what your stat boosts are over the normal racial profile. Look, it's just fucking insane and playability doesn't seem to have been a concern.
Second Edition was more of a game, but it was also really clunky and had a lot of randumb shit in it. And by dumb, random, and clunky I means that the most dangerous thing in the galaxy was tractor explosions. Vehicles had their own charts and crazy bullshit happened when they got damaged – often ultra-killing models in surprisingly large areas. You could make a degenerate army based on getting a lot of cheap vehicles with supercharged engines and just driving them up to expensive enemy units. It was dumb. Degenerate armies in those days were called “Beardy” by old school Warhammerists because of unfair tactics that Dwarf players could use in a previous edition of Fantasy Battle.
Ramming fucking speed!
And of course the actual galaxy being described changed wildly between editions, with various races and factions vanishing without a trace or being pulled out of some fanboy's asshole with every revision.
These are Squats. That's like space dwarves. I don't think anyone masturbated to these, but they are egg-shaped. We aren't going to talk about Squats, ask your parents.
3rd Edition was a real ground-up overhaul, an attempt to make an actual game you could plausibly collect and play. And because of that, it was very well received. I'm not going to tell you that it was golden rainbows and unicorn flavored candy or whatever, but it was better than what came before (or since!) and it was decent enough for the time. We're talking 1998, a grimdark year for gaming generally, as TSR had gone bankrupt and the biggest RPG was Functionally it meant that Games Workshop could spike the ball on the entire hobby and consolidate their power even more. But such market dominance rarely lasts long, and a few years later Games Workshop was competing against a resurgent D&D and Magic the Gathering and shit and was shaking their proverbial cane at newfangled games played by kids these days to justify falling profits. I mean, it's either that or acknowledge that 3rd edition was popular in no small part because it was faster to play and more streamlined than previous trainwrecks, and that cranking out expansion material that only ever made shit more complicated and longer to play eroded the main selling point.
Much easier to just blame kids these days than admit you made poor decisions.
Koumei:
Yeah, it’s a tricky position to be in: you can’t just release the game then let that be it, so you have to do something to support it. But by the same token, the more assorted shit you release for the game, the more crap that piles up and the more of a tangled mess you end up with. It’s kind of easier with RPGs because there is no hardcore tournament scene, indeed people don’t really play in the stores as much as they do “at Greg’s house”, so they can include or exclude whatever expansions and rules they like, and even buying a new book means one person can provide the rules for everyone with no commitment beyond that. When it’s a tabletop wargame, especially one that involves buying extra minis, that stops being true.
So what this means is they finally made the game playable and a lot smoother than it used to be, but that wasn’t going to last too long. And indeed, looking back at it nineteen years later, it didn’t.
FrankT:
The 3rd Edition rulebook is has a lot of pages, but not that many words. A lot of pages are given over to big splashy pen and ink art, or diagrams, or photos of cool models people did. That's not even a joke. It's actually like that.
Koumei:
I kind of like that, to be honest. And seriously, I mentioned before that one of the reasons you’d start collecting is because you walk past the store and see their quality painted minis there. So you may as well do a similar thing in the actual rulebooks. Often enough they did the same with the boxes:
Sometimes they used drawn art instead, so you saw a rad picture of your Heavy Weapons Squad:
But it’s definitely better to show you what you want your finished product to look like, with a suggestion (or, with earlier stuff that had no alternate options, an exact representation) of what you’ll be making from the parts inside. Complete with Duncan-tier paint jobs.
Duncan is a meme, but also a good-quality (if sort of generic) painter
Anyway, that’s getting off topic. The point is, it’s actually a strength that they didn’t use many words. They provided a lot of pictures that were arguably the selling point for new people they wanted to rope in, and also didn’t give you a complete War and Peace equivalent word salad to wade through. The reason being that War and Peace would not exist – there is only war, after all.
FrankT:
Not only is there only war, but the future has grim darkness. We have overwrought Warhammer 40K cover taglines to thank for the term “Grimdark,” which is a term that now has its own Wikipedia entry. Yes, Warhammer 40K is so metal that it actually creates words that the English language needs to describe how metal it actually is.
3rd Edition Warhammer 40,000 is much better organized than earlier entries, and honestly much better organized than later ones as well. We'll be tackling it in five sections:
- Rules
- Fluff
- Armies of the Imperium
- All the Other Armies
- All the modeling advice and shit plus a wrapup.
