Warhammer 40,000

Based on Wikipedia: Warhammer 40,000

The Darkest Joke in Gaming

In the grim darkness of the far future, there is only war.

That tagline—equal parts absurd and chilling—launched an entire subgenre of fiction. The word "grimdark" literally comes from it. And the game that spawned this cultural phenomenon started as something almost quaint: a tabletop wargame where people push around little plastic soldiers and roll dice to see who wins.

But Warhammer 40,000 became something far stranger and more influential than its creators at Games Workshop could have imagined when they published the first rulebook in September 1987. It's now the most popular miniature wargame in the world, with a devoted following particularly strong in Britain. The setting has inspired dozens of video games, hundreds of novels, and a way of thinking about dystopian futures that permeates contemporary science fiction.

What makes it remarkable isn't the game mechanics. It's the joke at the heart of the whole enterprise.

A Universe of Deliberate Excess

The fictional universe of Warhammer 40,000 takes place roughly thirty-eight thousand years from now. Humanity has spread across the galaxy, but this is no Star Trek utopia. Human civilization has stagnated completely. Scientific progress stopped millennia ago. Society has calcified into a theocratic autocracy called the Imperium of Man, ruled in name by a corpse sitting on a golden throne.

That's not metaphor. The Emperor of Mankind was mortally wounded ten thousand years before the game's present day and has been kept technically alive through arcane technology ever since. His psychic power—because yes, there's space magic—holds together the infrastructure that allows faster-than-light travel. So quadrillions of humans worship a man who can't speak, can't move, and whose original intentions have been twisted into dogma by a bureaucracy that would make Franz Kafka weep.

The Imperium faces threats from every direction. Hostile alien civilizations want humanity extinct or enslaved. Supernatural beings from another dimension—called the Warp—want to corrupt and consume human souls. And portions of humanity itself have turned traitor, worshipping the very entities that seek to destroy them.

Here's the crucial point: the setting is designed to be ridiculous.

Everything is turned up to eleven. The theocracy isn't just repressive, it's comically totalitarian. The war machines aren't just large, they're cathedral-sized walking fortresses. The enemies aren't just dangerous, they're extinction-level threats arriving simultaneously from every direction. The whole thing reads like someone took every dark science fiction trope and said "yes, but more."

Satire Disguised as Sincerity

The original creators of Warhammer 40,000—Rick Priestley and his colleagues at Games Workshop—were British science fiction fans working in the mid-1980s. They drew inspiration from sources as varied as J.R.R. Tolkien, H.P. Lovecraft, Frank Herbert's Dune, John Milton's Paradise Lost, and the British comic anthology 2000 AD, which gave the world Judge Dredd.

That last influence is telling. Judge Dredd, for those unfamiliar, is a fascist law enforcement officer in a dystopian future city. The comic presents him as the protagonist while making absolutely clear that his world is a nightmare and his methods are monstrous. It's satire that looks like action adventure if you're not paying attention.

Warhammer 40,000 operates on similar principles. The Imperium of Man is not presented as good. It's presented as humanity's only option for survival, which is a very different thing. The tagline doesn't say "in the grim darkness of the far future, good triumphs over evil." It says there is only war. Endless, pointless, grinding war that delays extinction but never prevents it.

The heroes of Warhammer 40,000—if you can call them that—are not fighting for a brighter tomorrow. They're "raging against the dying of the light," to use the game's own Dylan Thomas reference. They sacrifice everything to buy humanity another day, another year, another century. But they cannot win. The setting is explicitly constructed so that the good guys, such as they are, face inevitable defeat.

This is either deeply pessimistic or deeply funny, depending on how you look at it.

The Hobby Within the Hobby

Before we go further into the setting, it's worth understanding what Warhammer 40,000 actually is as a game. Because the experience of playing it is unlike almost any other tabletop activity.

You don't buy a box and start playing. You buy boxes of plastic parts that need to be cut from sprues, glued together, and painted. A single Space Marine—one of the iconic super-soldiers of the setting—might have a dozen separate pieces that need assembly. And you'll need dozens of models to field an army.

This takes weeks. Sometimes months.

Players spend extraordinary amounts of time learning to paint miniatures well. There's an entire subculture of painting tutorials, competitions, and display pieces that never see a gaming table. Some people buy the models purely to paint them, treating Warhammer 40,000 as an expensive sculpture hobby rather than a game.

When you do play, you need a large table—the official recommendation is at least forty-four inches wide—covered with terrain representing a battlefield. This terrain might be commercially produced buildings and ruins, or it might be homemade from foam board and household objects. The game doesn't use a grid like chess or checkers. Instead, players measure distances with tape measures, moving models up to their maximum allowed distance each turn.

A new player should expect to spend at least two hundred pounds just to get started. Tournament armies can cost many times that. This is not a cheap hobby.

How the Game Actually Works

The core of Warhammer 40,000 is straightforward once you strip away the jargon. Each player builds an army from a catalog of available units, subject to certain restrictions. These armies are balanced using a point system: a basic infantry soldier might cost thirteen points, while a massive tank costs two hundred and forty. Players agree on a point limit before the game—commonly between five hundred and two thousand points—and each builds an army that doesn't exceed that total.

Players then set up their armies at opposite ends of the table and take turns. On your turn, you move your models, shoot at enemy models, and potentially charge into close combat. Attacks are resolved with dice rolls: you roll to see if you hit, roll to see if you wound, and your opponent rolls to see if their armor saves them. Simple arithmetic determines the outcome.

Models are grouped into units that move together. Every model in a unit must stay within two inches of another model from the same unit—picture a squad staying in formation. If models get killed, the unit shrinks but continues fighting until eliminated entirely.

Games last five turns each. Victory is determined by controlling objective markers placed around the battlefield, not simply by killing enemy models. This creates interesting tactical situations where you might need to sacrifice units to hold a critical position, or race across the battlefield to contest an objective in the final turn.

The wrinkle that makes Warhammer 40,000 strategically interesting is army composition. Before the game starts, you choose which units to include. Do you take lots of cheap infantry that can hold objectives but die easily? Or expensive elite units that kill effectively but can't be everywhere at once? Fast units that grab early objectives or durable units that hold them against counterattack? Every army represents a theory about how to win, and games are often decided by these list-building choices as much as by tactical play.

The Factions of the Far Future

The game offers a bewildering variety of playable factions, each with distinct aesthetics, playing styles, and roles in the fiction.

The Imperium of Man fields several different military forces. The Imperial Guard—ordinary humans with laser rifles and tanks—represents the backbone of humanity's military. They die in droves but there are always more. The Space Marines are genetically modified super-soldiers encased in powered armor, eight feet tall and capable of spitting acid. Each Space Marine is worth a hundred normal soldiers, but there aren't many of them.

Then there are the Adeptus Mechanicus, the tech-priests of Mars who maintain humanity's machines but have essentially become a separate civilization. They worship the Machine God and view flesh as weakness. Their armies field bizarre walking machines and cyborg soldiers more metal than meat.

The enemies of humanity are equally varied. The Orks are a race of green-skinned fungoid creatures who exist only for fighting. They're essentially English football hooligans with guns. Their technology shouldn't work—and arguably doesn't—but their collective psychic belief that it works somehow makes it function anyway. They're comic relief that can still destroy planets.

The Aeldari—once called Eldar, the name changed for trademark reasons—are space elves, an ancient civilization that accidentally created a god of excess and has been slowly going extinct ever since. Their dark cousins, the Drukhari, live in a nightmare city and raid other species for slaves and torture victims because suffering is the only thing that keeps their souls from being devoured by that god they created.

The Necrons are robotic undead, an ancient race who traded their flesh for metal bodies and then slept for millions of years while younger species rose. Now they're waking up and want their galaxy back. The Tyranids are a hive-mind species from outside the galaxy, a living tide of bioengineered monsters that consume all biomass they encounter to make more of themselves.

And then there's Chaos.

The Warp and Why It Matters

The Warp deserves special attention because it's central to what makes Warhammer 40,000's universe work—both narratively and thematically.

In the fiction, the Warp is a parallel dimension of pure psychic energy. All living things with souls are connected to it. Faster-than-light travel works by dipping ships into the Warp, where the normal rules of physics don't apply, and emerging somewhere else in real space. Faster-than-light communication works through psykers—humans with unusually strong Warp connections—who can send and receive telepathic messages across interstellar distances.

The problem is that the Warp is alive. Or rather, things live in it. Daemons, to use the setting's terminology. These aren't biblical demons exactly—they're more like manifestations of emotion and thought given malevolent form. The Warp responds to and reflects the psychic emanations of the material universe. Millennia of warfare, cruelty, and despair have shaped it into something nightmarish.

Four great powers dominate the Warp, called the Chaos Gods. Khorne is rage and bloodshed. Nurgle is decay and disease. Tzeentch is change and scheming. Slaanesh is excess and sensation. Each has their own daemonic servants and mortal worshippers. Each offers power to those who serve them. And each, ultimately, destroys what it touches.

Humans with psychic powers—psykers—can tap into the Warp to perform what amounts to magic. They can read minds, throw lightning, see the future. But every time they do, they risk attracting daemonic attention. A psyker who loses control can become a gateway through which daemons pour into real space. For this reason, the Imperium ruthlessly hunts down psykers and forces them into state service, executing those who can't be controlled.

This creates one of the setting's central ironies. Humanity cannot survive without psykers—they're essential for communication, for fighting Chaos, for the Emperor's continued existence on his throne. But psykers are also humanity's greatest vulnerability, potential doorways for the very forces that want to destroy everything. The Imperium's solution is totalitarian control, which breeds the resentment and desperation that makes people turn to Chaos in the first place.

Why Space Marines Dominate the Fiction

If you know anything about Warhammer 40,000, you probably know about Space Marines. They dominate the game's marketing, fiction, and cultural footprint. This is partly commercial—Games Workshop sells a lot of Space Marine models—but it's also structural.

The setting presents a galaxy-spanning civilization of quadrillions of humans. Most of those humans are essentially medieval peasants in space, living short brutal lives in hive cities or on feudal worlds, with no agency and no hope of changing anything. They're not good protagonists. They can't affect events on a galactic scale.

Space Marines can. There are only about a million of them in the entire galaxy—a tiny number given the Imperium's population—but each one is a one-man army. They're created through years of surgical modification, genetic engineering, and psychological conditioning. They don't age. They barely sleep. They feel no fear. They are, essentially, warrior monks dedicated body and soul to fighting humanity's enemies.

This makes them useful for stories. A single Space Marine can plausibly affect the outcome of a battle. A squad can turn a war. A chapter—the basic organizational unit, comprising about a thousand Marines—can conduct campaigns that shape the fate of entire star systems.

The other common protagonists in Warhammer 40,000 fiction are aristocrats of various sorts: Inquisitors who hunt heretics and aliens with near-unlimited authority, Rogue Traders who have ancient warrants permitting them to explore beyond the Imperium's borders, high-ranking military officers. These are people with the resources and freedom to actually do things in a setting where most individuals are utterly powerless.

Grimdark as Genre

Warhammer 40,000's influence on broader science fiction and fantasy is hard to overstate. The term "grimdark"—now used to describe any particularly dark or cynical work of speculative fiction—comes directly from the game's tagline. When people describe something as grimdark, they're invoking the specific aesthetic that Warhammer 40,000 pioneered.

What defines that aesthetic? A few key elements.

First, moral ambiguity taken to extremes. In grimdark settings, there are no good guys, only various flavors of bad. The protagonists might be slightly less monstrous than their enemies, or they might just be the monsters whose perspective we happen to follow.

Second, hopelessness built into the setting's foundations. Things will not get better. The best anyone can achieve is delaying how quickly they get worse. Victory means surviving to fight another day; actual triumph is impossible.

Third, violence that's both excessive and meaningless. Wars are fought not for achievable goals but because war is all that remains. Death is common, ugly, and often pointless. Glory exists but it's hollow.

Fourth, and this is where Warhammer 40,000's satirical origins become important, all of this is presented with a certain deadpan absurdity. The setting is too much. It's so dark it becomes funny. The gothic cathedrals bolted onto starships, the skull motifs on literally everything, the theocracy that's evil but also buffoonish—it's all played straight while being obviously ridiculous.

This tonal balance is hard to maintain. A lot of grimdark fiction that followed Warhammer 40,000 took the darkness seriously without the undercurrent of absurdist humor, and the result can be exhausting rather than entertaining. The best Warhammer 40,000 fiction keeps that knowing wink, acknowledging that yes, this is all very silly, while also making you care about characters trapped in this nightmare.

The Thatcherite Reading

Some critics and fans have noted that Warhammer 40,000 can be read as satire of 1980s Britain specifically. The game was created during Margaret Thatcher's tenure as Prime Minister, a period of aggressive nationalism, social conservatism, and rhetoric about decline and enemies within and without.

The Imperium mirrors certain aspects of Thatcher-era ideology taken to logical extremes. The obsession with past greatness. The fear of internal subversion. The justification of authoritarian measures as necessary for survival. The quasi-religious certainty about national purpose. All of this is present in the Imperium, amplified to comic-book proportions.

Whether the original creators intended this reading or whether it's a case of a setting reflecting its time unconsciously is debated. But it adds another layer to the fiction. Warhammer 40,000 isn't just dark science fiction—it's arguably political satire in the tradition of 2000 AD and other British comics that used science fiction settings to comment on contemporary society.

The Game Today

The tenth edition of Warhammer 40,000's rules was released in June 2023. The game has evolved substantially since 1987, with rules being streamlined, factions added and removed, and the setting's timeline actually moving forward after decades of stasis.

For most of its history, the game was set at an eternal "five minutes to midnight"—the threats were always about to overwhelm humanity but somehow never quite did. In recent years, Games Workshop has advanced the narrative. The Imperium was literally torn in half by a Warp rift. Primarchs—the demigod sons of the Emperor who led humanity's expansion across the galaxy—have returned after ten thousand years of absence. Things are happening.

This has divided the fan community. Some appreciate finally seeing the story progress. Others preferred the static setting, which allowed any story to be told without worrying about whether it fit with "current" events. The commercial logic is clear—advancing the narrative creates demand for new models and books—but whether it serves the fiction is a matter of taste.

The competitive tournament scene has professionalized. Games Workshop bans third-party models and 3D-printed miniatures from official events, insisting players use genuine Games Workshop products properly assembled to match their army lists. This is partly about maintaining the company's intellectual property but also about standardization—if everyone uses the same models, there's no ambiguity about what a piece on the table represents.

The Spin-Off Universe

Warhammer 40,000 has generated an enormous ecosystem of related products.

Other tabletop games explore different aspects of the setting. Necromunda simulates gang warfare in the depths of a hive city. Kill Team focuses on small-scale skirmishes with a handful of models per side. Space Hulk pits Space Marines against alien Genestealers in the tight corridors of a derelict spacecraft. Battlefleet Gothic recreates naval battles between enormous starships. Each offers a different lens on the universe while using compatible miniatures.

Video games have brought the setting to audiences who would never paint a miniature. The Dawn of War series pioneered real-time strategy in the Warhammer 40,000 universe. The Space Marine games let players experience combat from a single soldier's perspective. Darktide drops players into cooperative first-person combat against heretics and mutants. The Rogue Trader turn-based role-playing game allows exploration of the setting's stranger corners.

Black Library, Games Workshop's publishing arm, produces novels at a remarkable pace. The Horus Heresy series alone—depicting the civil war that created the current state of the Imperium—runs to over sixty books. Some are pulpy adventure fiction; others are genuinely literary explorations of duty, corruption, and faith.

Why It Endures

Nearly four decades after its creation, Warhammer 40,000 remains culturally vital. Why?

The hobby aspect creates investment. When you've spent weeks painting an army, you care about those little plastic soldiers in a way you never would about pieces that came ready to play. The time and skill invested creates attachment.

The setting is infinitely generative. Because the galaxy is so large and the factions so varied, almost any story can be told within it. Want military science fiction? Political intrigue? Horror? Detective stories? Religious allegory? All of these exist in official Warhammer 40,000 fiction. The setting is flexible enough to accommodate nearly anything while maintaining a consistent tone.

The satire ages well because the targets are perennial. Authoritarianism, religious extremism, fear of the other, glorification of war—these aren't specific to 1980s Britain. Every generation finds contemporary resonance in the Imperium's dysfunction.

And the fundamental appeal of pushing toy soldiers around a table and rolling dice to see what happens—that never gets old. Humans have been playing war games since ancient times. Warhammer 40,000 just adds a layer of creative expression through model building and painting, plus a richly developed fictional context that makes those battles feel meaningful.

In the grim darkness of the far future, there is only war. But in the present, there's also community, creativity, and a surprisingly funny cosmic horror setting that asks uncomfortable questions about human nature while letting you paint tiny skulls on everything.

That's quite an achievement for what started as a game about pushing plastic figures around a table.