You Don't Need to Play Warhammer 40k to Love It: Why the Stories Hooked Me

Have you ever looked at Warhammer 40k and thought it's just enormous, impractically armored muscle heads killing each other forever? Someone on Reddit asked exactly that: a future where there's only war, so why is that interesting? I'm hardly the high lord master of terror, but I first got into this universe at 19 through the books, years before I'd painted a single model, and you don't need miniatures to love it.

So here are a few things that keep me hooked on 40k, and where I'd start if you're curious. There's also a little moment in one book, an eight foot vampire in gold armor talking to his servant, that kind of changed what I thought Warhammer was. I'll get there.

The Reddit post isn't wrong about Warhammer 40k, it just misses most of it

The annoying thing about that Reddit post is that she's not really wrong. That is Warhammer. But it's a bit like describing The Lord of the Rings as four short blokes walking towards a volcano for nine hours. Technically, it's accurate. You've just missed quite a lot.

I don't think the interesting bit about Warhammer is actually the war. It's kind of everything that happens because the universe is so completely awful: friendship, sacrifice, completely unnecessary heroism, tragedy, dark comedy, and every so often an ork doing something so unbelievably stupid that it somehow works.

If I had to answer that Reddit post in one sentence, it would be that "Warhammer isn't interesting because there's only war. It's interesting because somehow in a universe where everything is terrible, reasons are still found to keep going." And also there are chains, so there's that.

I came to 40k through Vampire Wars books and the Blood Angels, not the tabletop

I got into Warhammer in an unconventional way, or at least not the normal way, though I don't know what's normal. I was about 19 and at uni. I was already into Tolkien, D&D and World of Warcraft, and I liked vampires, because apparently I was exactly the sort of person marketing departments were designed for.

One of the staff in Games Workshop recommended the Vampire Wars books to me. I read all three, pretty much back to back, and that sent me down the Black Library rabbit hole. Somewhere along the way I discovered, without sugar coating it in any way, vampires in space. That's an incredibly reductive description of the Blood Angels, but come on. So I looked up who Sanguinius was, and then I found Dante.

I think that was the point where 40k properly got me. I'd expected an enormous bloke in gold armor wandering around being incredibly pleased with himself, and that isn't what I got. Suddenly this thing that from the outside looks like massive men just shooting each other had tragedy, mythology, sacrifice, religion and guilt, all the stuff I'd always liked, sitting right there. It just had bolters now. I didn't even start painting until lockdown. The war was never the thing that got me into it. It was quite literally the stories.

The tragedy of Sanguinius and Dante is the first thing that keeps me hooked

There are a few things that keep me interested in 40k, and weirdly none of them are really because the battles are cool, although obviously the battles are cool. Massive blokes hitting each other with chainswords does help. But the first one is the tragedy. I'm going to talk about Sanguinius and the Blood Angels because I know them the most.

Sanguinius essentially knows where his story is going. You've got a whole legion built around beauty and nobility and trying to be better than what they are, with this horrible flaw underneath constantly wanting to come out. Thousands of years later, you've got Dante, one of the most powerful people in the Imperium. Argue with me if you want, but I won't change my mind. He's lived for well over a thousand years and he's exhausted, to say the least. He's had enough. He's lost people. He's carrying this ridiculous weight of expectation and duty, and even when part of him would, I guess, be quite happy to be finished with all of it, he just carries on.

The moment in that book that really stuck with me is when Dante is talking privately to his servant. He admits that everyone needs Dante to be this legendary figure: the golden mask, the great hero, the one who always knows what to do. But underneath all of it, he kind of says, "I'm still a man. I still need someone to talk to."

I remember reading that and thinking this isn't really a story about an eight foot vampire in gold armor anymore. It's about somebody who's been carrying everyone else's expectations of him for so long that almost nobody remembers there's still a person underneath. That was the moment Dante really clicked for me, and I find that far more interesting than whether their gun is strength four or strength five this edition.

Orks prove 40k knows it's ridiculous

If it was all tragedy, it would be exhausting. So the second thing is that 40k kind of knows it's ridiculous. Yes, it's relentlessly bleak, but it's also deeply stupid in a good way, and orks are where that properly clicked for me. I think it clicks for a lot of people with orks.

Last year, I was sent an ork painting challenge, and it's been done again this year, so I'll be trying to take that on again. At that point it had pretty much all been Blood Angels and Space Marines for me, so naturally my first ever ork ended up painted like a can of Monster Energy. I called him Monster, because apparently subtlety had left the building. I asked people to send me their own orks, and I realized my understanding was basically green football hooligans in space.

That's not completely wrong, but then you start reading and they're fungus. They're spread through spores, so killing them can just plant more, which is reassuring. And if enough orks believe something, it can start nudging reality. Hence red ones go faster.

The orks also tell you something important about the tone of Warhammer. Everybody else looks around this universe and sees hell. They see Chaos ripping reality apart, Tyranids eating planets, humanity slowly collapsing. And the orks are basically standing there going, this is brilliant. They're arguably the only faction in 40k who are actually having a nice time, and I love that. It's bleak, but it isn't humorless, and that's fantastic.

The scale of the history behind the Horus Heresy is the third hook

The third thing is the scale of it, and this is the dangerous bit, because once you pull at one thread there's always another thread behind it. The Horus Heresy is 10,000 years in the past, but practically everything in modern 40k is still living in its shadow. Half the machinery is treated like religion. You've got entire institutions doing things a certain way because somebody did it that way thousands of years ago, and nobody remembers why.

Because I grew up loving Tolkien, this is basically catnip. Tolkien conditioned us to believe that reading about something that happened 4,000 years before the main story is a completely normal, leisurely activity. 40k kind of looked at that and then added bolters and 30 years' worth of wiki pages.

The war in Warhammer 40k is just the backdrop

The last one is the biggest answer I'd give to that Reddit post: the war is just the backdrop. I know that sounds ridiculous for something whose tagline is literally in the grim darkness of the far future, there is only war. But the battles aren't normally the bits I remember. It's Dante being tired. It's Sanguinius knowing what's coming. It's loyalty, grief and duty. Sometimes it's just somebody being decent in a universe that gives them absolutely no reason to be decent.

I think darkness actually makes those moments better. If everything around you is lovely, somebody doing something kind isn't particularly remarkable. But if you're living in 40k and everything is awful, choosing to do the right thing can suddenly mean quite a lot.

So when somebody says, "It's just endless war. How is that not monotonous?" I understand why it looks that way. It's a little bit like saying Band of Brothers is just people shooting Germans. Yes, there's quite a lot of that, but that isn't why people remember it, and it's not why it's one of the best series of all time. Fight me on it.

One character leads to a legion, and you don't have to play the tabletop game

If I could speak to the woman who made that Reddit post, I'd say her description isn't completely wrong. There are an unreasonable number of enormous men. Most of them appear to have bought their armor from the company that supplies American football shoulder pads. And there are skulls on absolutely everything.

But I don't think that's why her husband is spending every night on lore. I think he's probably doing exactly what I do: he finds one character interesting, that leads to a battle, that battle leads to a legion, and the legion leads to something that happened 10,000 years earlier. That's the appeal. I think there's always another door, and you don't actually have to play the tabletop game to enjoy any of it. For years I didn't.

The community I recognize isn't the loudest people online

I don't judge Warhammer by the loudest people on the internet. If I judged football by X, formerly known as Twitter, I'd assume every supporter spends Saturday afternoon threatening the referee's family. When I did that ork project last year, nobody was trying to prove they knew more lore than me. People were just sending me their models and their favorite bits of ork lore, showing me their conversions, telling me some ridiculous piece of lore I hadn't heard before. That's the version of the community I recognize.

That's worth saying because from the outside, Warhammer can still look like a hobby made entirely for boys. I don't talk about this much, because I don't think it's that important what you've got going on anatomically; we're all just the same thing. To some extent I'm trolled, predominantly on my short form stuff, because it's just snippets and people don't really get the bigger picture. That's fine, I really don't care. On my longer work, trolling is quite rare, and I think that's because people have chosen to sit down and listen, and there's some sort of common ground.

The people who send me their models tell me the bits of lore I've missed, recommend books and show me what they're painting. They're all sorts of people from various walks of life. So I don't think the answer is making Warhammer more exclusive or deciding who it's for. If somebody finds something in this ridiculous universe that speaks to them, they're already part of it. There's enough plastic for everyone. There's loads.

Where to start: Dante

If you're thinking, all right, you've convinced me slightly, where do I start? I'm not going to send you a nine hour complete history of the Imperium. I absolutely would, but I'm not, because that's how you stop getting invited places. I'm going to say Dante.

You don't need to know every Primarch. You don't need a spreadsheet. It's about aging and duty and loss, and I think about knowing that eventually you're going to fail and carrying on anyway. It just happens that the man having the existential crisis is over a thousand years old and eight feet tall, drinks blood, and occasionally kills aliens with a massive axe, which to be fair is still healthier than buying a Porsche. And if it doesn't do anything for you at all, if you're still sitting there thinking you don't get it, fair enough.

Which Warhammer 40k character or story would you point a newcomer to first?