Paradox and hypocrisy are endemic to all of Games Workshop’s worldbuilding. They form a central tenet to a world where a player can inhabit any contrasting viewpoint with their choice of allegiance and collection. To unravel these ideas there is no better place than Noah Van Nguyen’s Godeater’s Son, a novel which perfectly encapsulates Age of Sigmar’s inherent self-criticisms.
In this Van Nguyen frames the forces of Sigmar as a colonising force, erasing local cultures and rewriting their landscapes under the blanket of a saviour’s narrative. Resisting this are the followers of Chaos who similarly allow themselves to be subsumed in a deific hegemony. Van Nguyen wields these ideologies to great effect, accessing established postcolonial philosophies and proposing nihilistic rejections of well-established belief systems in the Warhammer worlds.
Focusing on two approaches, this paper uses Godeater’s Son as a case study for the critical potential of Age of Sigmar. Firstly, it unpicks the Stormcast Eternals through a postcolonial viewpoint, understanding how Sigmar’s immortal heroes threaten not just the peoples, but the places they seek to ‘liberate’. Secondly, it explores the Chaos-leaning alternatives resisting Sigmarite rule and how Van Nguyen imbues their fractured interpretations of the gods not with rapture, but with an inevitable nihilism that reflects the emptiness of the unending franchise of war Games Workshop sells to its consumers.
Godeater’s Son provides a perfect entry point to understanding how Age of Sigmar undermines the hero narratives it uses in its marketing, and to the introspective intricacies possible in a gameworld designed to remain in constant turmoil. Van Nguyen’s novel is a startlingly honest criticism of the exclusionary ideologies at the heart of the Mortal Realms. Its ingrained, dystopian nihilism lays its actors bare, allowing readers to truly appreciate how: when there is only war, there are only losers.
Author bio
Adam Edwards is an independent UK scholar, based in Nottingham. He has a PhD in Cyberpunk Literature, researching its contemporary relevance and its influence on, and from, neoliberal figureheads. His research interests are in the intersection of SciFi with real life technologies, gaming narratives, and tabletop games of all kinds.
