The world's first academic conference dedicated to all things Warhammer
Computer scientists have used various techniques to explore the strategy spaces of deterministic games like chess and checkers. Less work has been done to find techniques that can explore strategies in tabletop wargames like Warhammer: The Horus Heresy, which mix the spatial movement of chess and checkers with random outcomes.
Games Workshop repeatedly asserts that Warhammer 40,000 is satire, and the setting uses grimdark exaggeration to critique the real world. Many works of satire, especially those in the Juvenalian mode often employed by 40K, view the laying bare of social ills and hidden assumptions to be the ultimate goal. This lines up with Mikhail Bakhtin’s …
The detection of xenos presence before the emergence of visible threats remains one of the major challenges of planetary biosecurity. Orkoid spore contamination, Genestealer infiltration, and Tyranid early stage invasion are just a few examples in which early detection of xenobiological hazards may enable timely intervention and protective measures, potentially avoiding the considerable economic and …
In 1990, the board game Space Crusade was published by MB in collaboration with Games Workshop. It is the science fiction spin-off of the much more popular game HeroQuest (1989). Although still significantly underdeveloped, the game’s narrative borrowings from Warhammer 40,000 are clearly recognizable. For example, there are already Marines, Chaos (Marines), Orks, and Genestealers. …
The pre-imperial human settlers who colonized the galaxy during the Dark Age of Technology initially spoke a variety of Low Gothic. During the Age of Strife, however, their colonies were cut off from Old Earth for millennia. As a result, the standard version of Low Gothic spoken on Old Earth/Holy Terra and the many local …
The paper explores the complex existential situation of an Astartes Space Marine between humanity and artificiality and the implications of the peculiar type of purpose they follow from an existentialist and technical-philosophical perspective. Astartes are superhuman soldiers, trialed, enhanced, and trained to defend the Imperium of Man from the xenos, the heretic, the daemon. Unlike …
The Warhammer 40´000 setting is characterised by its proverbial “grim darkness”. Its take on the far future is a highly dystopian one. The most important polity in the setting, the galaxy-spanning Imperium of Man, is described as the worst possible regime. It is a militaristic, xenophobic, highly repressive dictatorship. By contrast, the T’au Empire is …