Getting Into Warhammer 40K - "The Hobby"

In the grim darkness of the near future, there is only Warhammer

PART I | PART II | PART III | PART IV | PART V

Warhammer has always been a part of my life. Which is weird, because I’ve never had any meaningful interaction with the franchise until very recently. But the legacy of Warhammer (and Warhammer 40,000 in particular) feels like it has seeped into every corner of my world as a gamer.

This is probably because Games Workshop, the company behind the Warhammer franchise, is very generous with its license, allowing dozens of video games and other products to be made within their fictional universe. So, names like Dawn of War and Battlefleet Gothic have been rattling inside my head for years before I even realized that they were attached to the Warhammer universe.

This is not to mention the actual miniatures core to the franchise, which seem to warrant their own dedicated section in every game and hobby shop. So, by osmosis I knew that Warhammer was about “space marines” in chunky blue “power armor” called “Ultramarines,” before I had ever touched a miniature.

But after a global pandemic gave me and everybody else in the world some unexpected free time, I decided to look at the Warhammer franchise and try to understand what it was about. As I am now two dozen novels, fifteen painted miniatures, and three video games deep into this franchise, I am starting to know my way around and I’d like to share my findings here as a guide to those who, like me, may be wondering what this Warhammer thing is about.

Battlefleet Gothic: A Warhammer 40K video game

The first thing I need to make clear is that “Warhammer” actually refers to two different franchises: Warhammer: Age of Sigmar (previously known as Warhammer Fantasy) and Warhammer 40,000 (or Warhammer 40K, or WH40K, or simply 40K). Warhammer: Age of Sigmar boasts a complex fantasy setting full of all the things you’d expect: dwarves, elves, giants, the undead, and massive human armies struggling against the forces of Chaos. Warhammer 40,000 is all of that… but in space.

The two settings are separate from one another and you can fully immerse yourself in one without ever touching the other. Only the names of the gods that act as antagonizing forces are the same in both, even though they are considered separate pantheons. We can talk about that some other time.

While I’m sure that Age of Sigmar has its strong points, my only experience is with the 40,000 setting, so that is the franchise that I am going to attempt to unpack here.

Warhammer 40K on the table

If, like me, you thought Warhammer 40K was a tabletop game that uses miniatures to simulate mass combat then you are partially right, but mostly wrong. See, Warhammer is not just a game, it’s a lifestyle. If you crack open any of the magazines or rulebooks, you’ll notice that at no point do they refer to Warhammer as a game, instead frequently and somewhat ominously referring to it as “The Hobby.”

My introduction to The Hobby started with the miniatures… for Dungeons and Dragons. During the pandemic I ran a D&D campaign for a local Youth Group, accumulating a handful of plastic gray miniatures in the process. Wanting to bring some life to these dull minis, I decided to try painting them.

I bought a miniature paint set at my local comic book shop, which happened to be having a massive sale on Warhammer sets. (I would find out later that Warhammer 40K had just updated to its 9^th edition, and the comic shop was trying to clear out some of its 8^th edition stock). I was new to miniature painting and was afraid of messing up, so I bought some Warhammer minis to practice on.

I need to emphasize that before this point, I had zero interest in Warhammer 40K. As you might gather over the next four parts of this essay, that changed.

The actual set that got me

The minis I bought included a booklet introducing the lore and basic rules of the tabletop game. There were a few pages on how to assemble and paint the minis - a key part of The Hobby - as well as an introduction to the different methods of play.

The rules, which were towards the back, were surprisingly simple. Two players with an ill-defined number of models pit those models against each other and take turns moving and attacking. “Data sheets” corresponding to each group of models tell you how powerful that unit is and how many dice you need to roll for any given action (all six-sided, perfect for those who cringe at the word “polyhedral”).

The only complicated part is attacking, because of the number of steps involved, not the complexity of those steps. (A player rolls a handful of dice to make an attack, re-rolls the highest of those dice to determine how many potential wounds are inflicted, then their opponent rolls to see how many of those potential wounds become actual wounds that can kill off models).

That’s it. I had always felt that the rules of a massive wargame like Warhammer - a game that requires a full dining-room table and a mountain of plastic miniatures to even play - would have a complicated ruleset to go with it, but as someone coming from D&D, this was pretty simple. Of course, I was only scratching the surface of the rules, but I didn’t know that yet.

After that, I found myself intrigued. I had never felt tempted to explore this world of miniatures and mass combat, but now I had to know just what this whole Warhammer thing was about.

Over the next four parts, I will break this franchise down into its key components, starting with its massive lore, the impenetrable tabletop game, and ending with the vast swath of media that make up this franchise, before finally answering the question: what the hell is Warhammer 40K, anyway?