WarHammer Is For Romantics

In The Grim Darkness Of The Far Future, There Is Only War. This original tagline of WarHammer 40K is where the term “Grimdark” comes from. It encapsulates the setting of the game in a perfect single sentence. There is no hope, no joy, only violence and death.

That’s really all that’s needed for a wargame setting, an excuse to endlessly send masses of your little army dudes against your friend’s little army dudes and roll dice. Create a few stories about why everyone is stuck fighting everyone else and can’t stop, and go have fun. But like anything that captures the imagination people will write ever more about it, and increasingly flesh out the world between games. And since it’s already an over-the-top game of extremes, the pictures painted go hard into the limits of what humans can endure.

The Space Marines, in particular, are fascinating. Ripped from their families at very young ages, their bodies are distorted into massive violence machines. Their minds are shackled with religious extremism we can barely comprehend. In one source book a log of the typical marine’s day accounted for every minute between waking and sleep with drilling, conditioning, training, prayer, and religious studies, with a single period of personal time lasting 15 minutes (in which they were advised to meditate upon the Emperor). They will likely never see a woman again, or watch a sunset in peace.

They dedicate their lives to fighting, and the question the reader keeps come back to is… why? Why keep fighting? The Emperor is a corpse. The Empire is bloated and corrupt. Lives are mostly brutal and short, impoverished and dirty. Marines arguably have it better than most humans, at least they have their brothers-at-arms to feel bonds of solidarity. Most people have only misery and the constant fear of demonic incursion or alien invasion when they aren’t dying of disease or crime or famine. Why keep trudging from star to star on bleak warships, just to slaughter and die over and over?

And the only answer is that they are still human, so they still have hope. Somewhere, out there, there must be something beautiful. Something that is worth protecting, and worth dying for. Maybe it’s in a corner of the galaxy they’ll never see, or maybe it won’t be born for another thousand years. But somewhere there is light. They don’t need to see it themselves, because they have faith. Because you have to have faith that something worth all of this sacrifice exists.

If you didn’t believe that, you wouldn’t fight. You’d lay down your boltgun and your chainsword and you’d let the darkness take you. Every marine must believe, somewhere deep inside, that there is beauty out there and it’s worth dying for, even if he’ll never see it himself.

That faith is a level of romance I don’t think was initially intended, but it’s what taking the world-as-presented seriously leads you to. People who just play the game for fun don’t need to bother with it. But the people who fall in love with the world, and the sacrifice it portrays at its absurd scales, are showing their deep romantic hidden cores. There must be some good somewhere, and someday our species will find it, and this will all have been worth it.