My 40k Favorites

I mostly played Orks. They were goofy, crazy, and unpredictable. They were a gambler's army. Every action was a major risk - they had incredible power, but it was always tempered by at least a 1-in-6 chance of your superweapon totally backfiring. "This is either a jet pack or a carbomb, depending on what I roll - I'll strap it on and pull the pin." I loved the way this handicapped me - one of the folks I played with a lot was a very poor strategist. I didn't have to "dumb down" my actions to make it a challenging game, I could just choose riskier troop types.

In that sense, Orks were the army (that I played) where the mechanics best matched the concept. The other armies I'd occassionally dipped into included Chaos ("undivided" or mixed forces mostly, though I had fun converting "normal" marines to Slanesh Noisemarines while the latter were out-of-print), Imperials (Spacemarines, sometimes with Battle Sisters or Imp Guard allies), and Tyranids (or sometimes the interrelated Genestealer Cult) in roughly that order. All those other armies just magnified the disconnect I'd noticed between the setting "fluff" fiction and the actual game rules.

Yet I loved - I mean LOVED and still do love - the setting. Richer and more completely realized than any other game on the market. The "world" of Warhammer 40k is a masterful blending of sci-fi and fantasy, with a consistent internal mythology, oodles of flavor, and several ominous dark truths hidden throughout the metaplots. It is a close second behind the 7th Sea on my personal list of favorite settings. I've made three different attempts at modeling it as an RPG, and was over 40-pages in to the most recent when they first announced the official 40k RPG. Probably for the best that I stopped, since I would have been deep into infringement territory, and a legal case could be made for it damaging their ability to publish their own version.

Yet again, I'm caught in a tangent, and fail to tell the tale I'd intended. Let's give it yet another shot.

Rockin' Ork Art by Flying Debris Guy.