So I’ve had a couple of articles in the hopper for about a year, maybe about five thousand words over a couple of different essays in the last few months. Most of my writing has been focused on my academics recently; researching and writing about religious liberalism and the Protestant Mainline in the post-war world is my primary focus, though I’ll likely drill into a particular time and place before it’s all said and done. I’ve enjoyed it immensely but I always want to return to writing for the blog. Blog writing is much more low stakes, especially blog writing about elf games that isn’t read by anyone, and it lets you get the bad habits out while trying new things. In academic writing, you build up to a golden sentence, with each paragraph and sentence lining the way. For blog writing, you can attempt to make every sentence gold and if you fail, fuck it, again, who is even reading this? It’s like poetry: you get better at wielding words by using words, shuffling them around like a marked card in a magic trick. There’s also the additional tension of blog writing for me in that I still haven’t formed a group and rolled dice since I moved last year. How can I still have gaming thoughts if I’m not gaming?
As such, I want to start putting out smaller articles to get some of these words out into the open. I need to break the habit of writing a thousand words for an introduction and then never finishing the article. Some great game bloggers write like that (Angry GM being the first that comes to mind), but I’m a child of the OSR first: scrappy, DIY, make it work or die, run under fire… the Game Master as Bass Guitarist for the band to keep the groove going. A thousand words are good for your personal notes, but when it’s time to run at the table, you succeed or fail, and reading your players a novel isn’t successful.
So, if this blog was an anime, consider this a beach episode. I’m going to write, and then edit, and then post, and then I’m going to do it a couple more times until all these words are posted. I’m going to do it in WordPress as a way to prevent myself from spiraling off into tangents. And then I’m going to put “blog writing” on the project management board I use for all my other work and do this more constantly. And then I’m going to find a game group. Promise.
Stuck in the Wrong Room
So, before I get too far into it, I wanted to quickly say that I was on a podcast with some good friends, talking about RPGs, almost six months ago. You can listen to the episodes Girl Genius and Labestomy here. I say some naughty words, I think, and I pontificate about elf games with the best of them. Also, go buy Trackmarks: Dieselpunk Fantasy Adventure here and subscribe to the Wrong Room podcast here.
Stuck in Drama Hell
There’s drama in the Warhammer community again, with a lot of more right-leaning people abandoning ship for a game called Trench Crusade, only to find a bunch of left-leaning people already camped out. Culture War bullshit ensued.
You know, thinking back on my time as a tabletop gamer, it’s actually kind of sad. I was a huge Warhammer fan for such a long time, but I’ve really fallen out of love with the setting as I’ve gotten older. DCC artist Stefan Poag had an interview where he mentioned that usually at some point you fall out of love with superhero comics and you can never get back in. That’s happened to me with all the Marvel slop, but it’s kind of happened with Warhammer as well.
Like with so many franchises and mediums, there is this fatigue that so many commercial communities are suffering from nowadays that stems from the general cultural fatigue we’re all feeling at this point. Jacques Barzun introduces this idea in his book From Dawn to Decadence about how the loss people face in the modern world is that of “possibility.” “The forms of art as of life seem exhausted,” he writes, “the stages of development have been run through. Institutions function painfully. Repetition and frustration are the intolerable result. Boredom and fatigue are great historical forces.” Another author who talks about this is Byung-Chul Han in The Burnout Society: “The complaint of the depressive individual, ‘Nothing is possible,’ can only occur in a society that thinks, ‘Nothing is impossible.'”
“Oh God,” you’re thinking, “the academic is out of the cage! Someone get your gun!”
Well, I’m not really “out of love” with the setting. It’s more like what I love now is how I imagine the setting should be. As the official setting moves further and further from my internal picture of what Warhammer is really about, the less devoted I am to the official lore. There’s some cool stuff nowadays; I don’t hate the Leagues of Votann with a passion and actually think there’s some cool stuff there once you stop seeing them as Squats, and I’m glad the Horus Heresy is finally coming to an end considering it’s long overstayed its welcome. But those things aren’t what Warhammer really means to me. This is healthy, by the way. The point of “franchises” should be to inspire your own creativity, especially when you’re running games at the table. There is only one canon, and it is Christ’s. Everything else is negotiable.
So, to combat the drama, instead of bitching and moaning, I instead offer a small modicum of what I think Warhammer is about and the humble beginnings of a setting that might give fans a way out. I’m jumping to the end of the article here, but the takeaways are to just fucking make your own shit, stop consuming other’s work uncritically, and if you don’t like a community, make something so unapologetically you that everyone who would be interested can’t escape the magnetic pull of your own tastes.
Old Hammers, Rusted Nails
I was playing Darktide and they released a new cosmetic for Psyker and it caused me to have a (1) thought, something unusual when anyone is playing Darktide. (By the way, Darktide itself also had a whole bunch of drama when it was originally released. Maybe Warhammer and drama really are just inseparable?) And I had this image that was interesting enough for me to devote some time writing about it. But first, (here we go), I have to explain what I think Warhammer is about. I’m going to try and be brief.
I think there are two elements to answer what Warhammer is. The first is simple and springs from the ‘87 to ‘98 editions: heavy metal ascetics. Many gamers are now flocking to what is affectionately called “Oldhammer:” the old art, the old models, the old lore. There’s something “SOVL”-ful about the game from this era, and there are bits and pieces of art and lore that don’t neatly fit together like they do now. There were Space Marine half-elves and butt tattoos and weirdly named Inquisitors and everything felt a little more gonzo and goofy. It was grim and dark, but not so grim and dark that you couldn’t go “hell yeah, that’s metal.” To put it another way, it was not so grim and dark that you couldn’t see your hand in front of your face. The Chaos Marines of the era fucking rock, with just enough long hair and helmet horns to make you want to headbang. There’s no long and tragic backstory; they’re the bad guys because they’re bad guys. You can hate them or love them, do what you want, I’m not a cop. There’s motion and character and color. God, is there color. And there’s something missing from the lore now because it takes itself so seriously. Much of this is likely nostalgia-bait, to be honest, but there’s nothing inherently wrong with a little nostalgia, like putting honey in your tea in the mornings.
The second element comes from the more serious lore of the ‘04 and ‘08 editions of the game. The Imperium of Man is a shitty place to live. It’s a fascist, authoritarian hellscape of a society that literally feeds people to a dead machine god on life support. It’s a bad place to live. But the tension and the horror of the setting isn’t that the Imperium is a shitty place to live (and it sure as hell isn’t saying that fascism and authoritarianism are cool and people should seek to recreate it in their everyday lives), it’s that the alternative is worse. The Chaos Marines get more Hellraiser-y because yeah, you live in a factory where the foreman gets to beat you to fight against the Forces of Darkness and if you fight back they scoop your brains and make you a servitor, but living in a factory is worse than if the Forces of Darkness win. It asks the question “What if you lived in a world where this shitty way to live was actually justified? What if this actually was better than the alternative? How would people react?” It’s not a deep question and it’s handled inelegantly at times, but it’s an interesting enough question to stop and think for a bit about. It’s kind of like reminding yourself that you would be just as shitty as you are now in the 1960s, or the 1930s, or whatever era in the past you imagine yourself to be in and that you should be better now.
I could throw a couple hundred words here about moralism in art, the loss of media literacy, and the rise of the New Puritans, but I’m trying to be brief. So let me just say that the first element was lost as the franchise needed more and more artists and creatives to maintain its market cap and the second was lost as people tried to tell new stories in the setting and to carve off the weird angles of old stories. It changed, and considering that the franchise of Warhammer has been around for almost forty years, it was bound to.
What If The Victorians Were Right?
Okay, so if those are the two elements of a Warhammer game, what’s a good idea for a new setting? Some quick inspirations. First, I recently watched VaatiVidya’s five-hour breakdown of the entire lore of Armored Core VI: Fires of Rubicon, my preferred way of receiving FromSoftware games. Spoilers, by the way, but apparently the energy resource MacGuffin that all the factions are fighting over, Coral, is made up of people who died in the inciting incident, the Fires of Ibis, and people can use enough of it to start hearing the voices of the people in the Coral and experience some kind of ascension… I guess? Just go watch the video, I’m sure the game is even more esoteric and weird. I couldn’t help but compare it to Neon Genesis Evangelion and the Human Instrumentality Project, where a secret organization is trying to force humanity to evolve under its control. SEELE in Evangelion and Overseer in Armored Core share a lot of similarities from what I can see. Another inspiration is from the World of Darkness game Vampire: The Masquerade. In OWoD, vampires struggled against their Beast, which was the primal urge to just say fuck it, fangs rule humans drool, and just start drinking everyone’s blood. The Beast was the dark part of you that lets you be as vindictive and petty and cruel and downright beastly to everyone around you. If vampires in the Old World of Darkness were worried that they lost their salvation, then the Beast is their sin holding them back from throwing themselves into the sun. And obviously, Warhammer itself, its Psykers, and that cosmetic from earlier.
So, here’s the pitch: what if everyone woke up and realized that some shadowy organization had completed their secret goal and now everyone had psychic powers? Sure, everyone could throw boulders with their minds and cast firebolt, but it goes much further than that. Everyone could feel everyone else’s strongest-felt and innermost thoughts and feelings, every errant thought and emotion. Everyone is up in everyone’s business, emotionally, mentally, and spiritually. Think Denise Mina’s run of Hellblazer (spoilers, obviously). Of course, there are a couple of decades of the ole ultra-violence before society manages to reunite together without everyone going insane. The shadowy old white dudes who started this mess are either dead or will never face the consequences of their actions, obviously. But society has to figure out a way to come back together, and that’s where the Victorians come in. Everyone decides that yeah, maybe being buttoned-up prudes who just constantly write about sex instead of talking to a woman might be the way to go. Kind of like the Vulcans from Star Trek, only instead of being super emotional because you’re naturally super emotional, you’re emotional because some kid down the street lost his dog and you both can toss around psychic might like the goddamn Phoenix Force. Of course, the horror and tension of the setting is that just because you’ve got a howitzer behind your eyes and an entire society on your shoulders telling you what you can and can’t do, you’re still a person. People still need to love and hate and be happy and scared and mad, all the things that make humans human. This Space Victorian society fukken blows, but it’s the best we got going for us, and tall poppies will be cut.
Ascetically, think heavy metal Pride and Prejudice with sci-fi spaceship and personal combat being even more buttoned up Master and Commander. Think of lots of black formfitting skinsuits with collars up to the ears and crazy-colored eyes. Also think of lots of Dune-style house politics, with different factions that emphasize different ways of looking at the Big Event, religiously or practically or whatever else. Personality is king, with people being hollowed out by those who are the most emotionally powerful but everyone has to pretend everyone is acting reasonably. Not logically. In my fake sci-fi future, everyone has disabused themselves of the illusion that you can act totally rationally. Good table manners keep you and the people around you sane.
Wrap It Up, Chuck
Well, this isn’t even like the beginnings of a setting, but I was less interested in offering something useable at the table and more interested in what I said earlier: when you get mad at something on the internet, especially something related to a commercial intellectual property, please stop. Steal the parts you like, preferably from a dozen different places, and mash them together until you can see yourself or what you want to see in the shapes. Clean it up, send it to an editor, and then sell the PDF for pay-what-you-want or $6.66, the only legitimate options for selling PDFs. But getting mad that people you disagree with are in a particular scene is dumb. As I said, if you don’t want to share something with people you don’t like, then make something so unapologetically you that everyone who would be interested in it can’t escape the fact that they have to like you first.
I set out to edit the thousands of words I’d already written, and ended up writing a couple thousand words I had not already written for a blog post. I’ve got to start getting better at this. I really want to talk about the stuff I’ve been writing for The Long Rim and Most Wicked Man in Texas, and I can’t do that unless I have a better turnaround on posts.
I guess this is just a taste of my own medicine. Hopefully you can’t read this without seeing the stuff I love in it. Make cool stuff.