Captain Anorak's Guide to Gaming
Warhammer 40,000: First Edition
I really enjoyed WH40K. We bought the first edition when it first came out, and it was a great game. Games Workshop had taken the game system of Warhammer Fantasy Battle, removed all the formation rules which made it unwieldy, and put it in a setting where every trooper had an effective missile weapon, so they could engage each other at a distance, which sped the game up enormously.

One good thing about 40K was that though it was a wargame, it encouraged roleplaying within the wargame. Negotiation, character interaction, and even full-blown scenarios might be feasible.

The background was a mixture of good and bad. 40K had a lot of potential for original invention, and this potential was under-used. It did have a lot of good stuff in which I really liked. Here are a few of my favourites:

Tyrannids - Tyrannids have two interesting features: the use exclusively biological technology, and their lifestyle involves descending on entire planets, strippin them of all their reseources, and then leaving just a bare core of rock behind. I thought this was a nice piece of invention (this was before the Borg were ever heard of, so the planet-stripping was quite original).

The Psychneuein - A creature (in appearance like a giant wasp) that lays its eggs inside the brains of uncontrolled psychics. This leads to madness and eventual death. I never actually played a game with a psychneuein in, but it struck me as something I'd never seen in Sf before - someone had come up with an idea and made something from it.

Genestealers - Genestealers reproduced by 'mating' with a creature of any species other than another Genestealer. This resulted in the death of the 'mate' and the production of a hybrid Genestealer, with some of the genetic material of the 'mate'. If a Genestealer bloodline mated with humans over several generations, the resultant offsrping would grow more and more human. I thought this was a great idea, and had lots of potential for roleplaying. The example given of how to use a Genestealer had a 'vampire' holding sway over terrified peasants on some backward world, who turned out to be a Genestealer.

Now none of these is completely original. Organic technology is a well-know SF idea. The Psychneuein is clearly based on those species of wasp which lay their eggs inside living hosts. The Genestealer is said by some to be a rip-off of the creatures from the Alien films, although the only similarity is in how the reproductive system works (which is a fairly minor detail in my view). But they were a lot more original than the standard aliens which one expects to see in hackneyed SF games: humanoid lizards, humanoid canines and humanoid felines are all too common and quite dull.

The real let-down for me was the fact that many fantasy races from Fantasy Battle were just converted directly into SF creatures. Elves, Dwarves and Orcs became Eldar, Squats and Orks. Some of these were 'abhumans', variant humans which had developed away from the genetic mainstream as a result of isolation and evolution under selection pressure. This was a great idea and had a lot of potential for inventing interesting new races, but instead it was just used as a feeble excuse to update the fantasy creatures to SF. As far as possible, even their cultures were taken over from fantasy to SF. Some of the 'justifications' for the abhumans were ludicrous: Ogres became Ogryns, which were unusually big because they evolved on high-gravity worlds with scarce food resources. 'Eh?! What?!?!?' I thought on reading this, 'Under those conditions they should evolve to be smaller, not bigger!'

WARP CREATURES NOT CHAOS

I really liked the warp creatures in original WH40K. These creatures were accidentally sucked into this reality by the effects of uncontrolled psychics. Being stranded here was unpleasant for them, and they wanted to get home. This was done by blood-sacrificing the local creatures (eg. humans) in this dimension.

Of course, local humans interpreted these things as 'demons' which were 'evil' and came here because of the influence of 'witches'. But these were human interpretations. The player could see and appreciate the purpose of the creatures. This gave a background with demons in while explaining them as SF creatures that had a rational reason for their monstrous acts.

Another great thing was that original WH40K had no Chaos in it. It was never mentioned even remotely. It came out in a time when all of Games Workshop's fantasy games were getting filled up with Chaos things, and it was difficult to find anything that wasn't related to Chaos in some way. So it was pleasing to cleanse my palette on a game with no Chaos in it.

CHAOS: THE RUINATION

Unfortunately Games Workshop (being the twats they were) decided to make the game worse in every possible way they could. First, they introduced Chaos into it, and warp creatures became Chaos Demons (or Daemons as they insisted on spelling it). Then they grouped all the 'evil' races (ie. those typically inimical to humanity) under the Chaos banner, so that we got Chaos Orks, Chaos Genestealers and Chaos Tyrannids. It particularly annoys me that an highly ordered hive-society like that of the Tyrannids could be lumped in with the forces of Chaos: Tyrannids are about as non-Chaotic as you can get.

Genestealers were re-branded into things that were very much like the creatures from the Alien films, and a game called Space Hulk came out which was clearly based on Aliens, with Marines with a lot of firepower taking on hordes of Genestealers with numerical superiority. We also got Genestealer Cults, sinister groups which infected humanity with Genestealer blood.

As with all Games Workshop products, the introduction of Chaos made these creatures more uniform and unvarying. This is one thing about GW that pisses me off (O! how many there are of them!). Chaos is supposed to random and unchained, leading to greater individuality and variation. But in GW games, anything Chaotic is made up of things that all look the same and act the same. Every Genestealer Cult was just like every other Genestealer Cult. Chaos Daemons fell into a number of strictly-defined types, of which each member was identical with all the others. GW actually produced some quite interesting stuff about variant human cultures like Rough Riders (mounted police on low-tech worlds, not the textured condoms of the same name). But Chaos, supposedly individualistic, was more regimented and invariant than the Nazis.