THE GREAT MOCKERY: HAMMERS 40,000

Hello all!

[Editor’s Note: You are going to need a wikiped-page open to understand my jargon.]

This is my most dangerous post yet. Not kidding, the company I’m about to critique is notorious for its cease-and-desist orders and suing people for the slightest infraction. I don’t have that kind of money to uphold my right of free speech in that kind of court. Especially since they’re a British company and…wait, by God! I’m an American! FREEDOM!!!

But seriously, I’m about to kick a giant in the testicles and it may turn out poorly for me. I never shy away from controversy (ugh).

Who do I speak of? The only, the legendary, the infamous, the notorious, the blasphemous (mostly), the mighty—James Morkshop! (JM)

See? I have to cover my tracks already, that gosh-darn James. Just Google ™ his full name and Britian and you’ll see. Or just search for ‘hammers’ and ’40,000’ of them. I’ll wait. Go ahead. JM has spectacular art, dark, grim, grimy, moody, glorious, over-the-top-notch-grade explodium. JM has the finest gnomes toiling away in the plastic factories, creating the best—truly, the BEST detailed plastic miniature kits of tiny soldiers and monsters that you’d be hard-pressed to beat. As in, a plastic miniature with life-like details, and said mini is the size of your thumb. Now put hundreds of those life-like minis on a table-top battlefield.

I speak of course of the games giant that has taken its place among the other giants of the Nerd Industry, along with Wizards of the Coast (Dungeons and Dragons, Magic: the Gathering) and White Wolf (The World of Darkness RPG line). These three are the giants because they’re so big you can see them on the regular whenever you walk into a game shop. Look in the direction of Nerds and you’ll see these three immediately. Look at the stock market and they own the kingdom.

I can’t speak of their history as frankly as I did with other posts. That’s too much evidence. Just, look them up on a wiki-page and you’ll get the names and timeline. The other problem is that JM is notoriously secretive, and (as my friends put it) they act like bug-aliens trying to pretend that they own a human game company. As an example, crack open one of a DND or WOD RPG book and you’ll have the names of the whole design team in the credits section. Do the same with a game book in JM’s case and you’ll get nothing. In earlier days, you got the name of ONE person, on the cover, but I don’t know if said person was the lead designer or the only designer. Now they don’t even do that. (Appropriate, as JM sometimes acts as alien as Mork from Mork and Mindy, 1978-1982.)

Note: As far as I now JM is NOT doing anything illegal, they’re just abusing their fabulous amount of power in a very niche market. You know, like a Medieval robber baron on his own lands. But they do have very strict contract law with their employees. I don’t know if that is a British thing in general or if that is JM-specific.

Why I am doing this then? What’s my objective in this series of posts? Yes, it will be a series, especially over the 10,000s of thousands of hammers game. …I’ll get the Freudians out of the way. It is not because of ‘childhood trauma’. I had an unhappy childhood and teenaged years by the time I was introduced to JM by my best friend and his older brother—specifically, when JM teamed up with Relic Entertainment to make a fun video game that had way better voice-acting than it deserved. (It came out in 2004.) If I had a happy childhood-teen years, I would have eaten it all up. If I was happy, I would have never taken JM and its games seriously and just run along with the crazy, the same as anyone else. But I was unhappy, and then combine that with my gullibility, my natural inclinations to take the most ridiculous thing as God’s spoken truth, I took JM and its games very seriously. Especially the cosmology.

I’ve thought a lot about Hammers 40.000, and I was given a simple, elegant conclusion:

It entertains darkness.

I mean this in multiple senses, for it makes the dark and macabre into funny things. Second, it entertains the idea ‘Make a cosmology with no inherent goodness—what does it look like?’. Third, it hides behind ambiguity to keep people laughing with the darkness without striking at its core implications. …Seriously, H-40.0 is a masterclass in sophistry and hiding behind ill-defined bullsh*t, all in the name of making sure that there are no ‘good guys’ in the setting. I learned all their tricks from growing up in the damn setting. It was H-40.0 who took my gullibility and sharpened it into a fine-class bullsh*t detector.

A fourth, related, reason to all this is that H-40.0 is a Playground of Extremes. H-40.0 is every trope found in adventuring, sword & sorcery, pulp fiction, and RPGs in general, all taken to their maturity and fullness-in-extreme. You can say that H-40.0 is a reductio ad absurdum* as a setting. The setting is also an example of keeping extremes and absurdums in a kind of permanent statis. If you take anything to its extreme, it self-destructs. H-40.0 either ignores this or has self-correcting mechanisms. H-40.0 is every weird-fiction trope taken to its heights, while giving the tropes a distinct spin, for marketing purposes.

[*Taking a logical thing to its extreme, even to the point that it would be very silly or contradictory. Ex. “If the Earth were flat, we would have proof of people falling off the edges”, or ‘Everyone’s opinions are equal, which makes them all equally meaningless’ or ‘If ignorance is bliss, then we should stop educating our children’.]

H-40.0 and JM aren’t the same beasts that they were in the early days. They’ve changed. I’ll give you a picture: Tolkien creates the modern Fantasy Genre with the 1954-55 Lord of the Rings. Those kids who grew up on LOTR then make their own fantasy stories when they reach adulthood. They grow up, either praise Tolkien, or hate him, or reject him, or are inspired by him. These same kids have the attitudes of the 50s, 60s, and 70s rattling in their heads. Gygax and Arneson publish Dungeons and Dragons in 1974. The guys who start James Morkshop, in Britain, originally import copies of DND to sell in the English markets, 1975! They at JM make their own games, import DND, and do traditional board games like backgammon. Then, in 1983, they finally make their first original product, …uh, oh Gawd, how to make a sue-proof name for it….uhg.

In 1983 they release ‘Battles of Fantastical Nature involving Hammers used for Warfare’ [BFNHW], which is just Gygax’s idea of ‘a wargame with miniature soldiers and fantasy monsters’ BUT with their own British spin. [Chainmail! They just take Gygax’s ideas for Chainmail and make it better!] Then, in 1987, JM publishes Hammers 40.0, which was, at first, ‘Battles of Fantastical Nature involving Hammers use for Warfare IN SPACE!’.

Remember when I said, in my “Flexible Concrete” posts, that each genre goes through four phases? Early age, Golden Age, Deconstruction Age, and Death & Parody? Well 20 years after Tolkien, in the 70s and 80s, there was a lot of Deconstruction of the fantasy genre going on in Britian. It shows in the early works of JM products. ‘Battles of Fantastical Nature involving Hammers used for Warfare’ and H-40.0 were originally, Parodies. They were both satires!

The 70s and 80s were also the era of the Elder Nerds, not just of Gygax and friends, but well-educated and incredibly creative people. They were smart people who make SMART games for smart people, and then they got greedy and sold the games to less smart people. Anyway, I mean this as a compliment, but the guys at JM who designed BFNHW and H-40.0 are demented geniuses, in a similar vein to how Monty Python was a troupe of demented geniuses. They were playful, intelligent, sarcastic goofballs who may have cracked jokes at things they should not have. This playful, creative, and demented genius colored the art and style of BFNHW and H-40.0, for about the first three editions each.

The early rules of BFNHW were simple and robust. They were designed for game-nerds to, literally, throw together hodge-podge armies of anything—anything! and have the armies duke it out with dice and rules. Early DND? It was mostly playing pretend with rules. The same with BFNHW. Believe it or not, the main focus of the early games was fun and narrative. Yes, Narrative! Why were all your armies of freaks and weirdoes fighting it out? Who were the main characters on the battlefield? Make them as crazy as the setting! Like DND, early BFNHW was a cooperative story told between two big imaginations. …And cursing at the hatefulness of six-sided dice.

This is in contrast to early H-40.0, whose first edition was—it was so complex that you needed a rulebook for the rulebook in order to even get a battle-robot to fire its gun. Early H-40.0 was not the players fighting each other, it was the players fighting the rulebook and the dice as they tried to get their goofy sci-fi armies to shoot at each other. …And for some games today, that’s still the case. It is an inexplicable enjoyment.

The early editions of BFNHW and H-40.0, their energy I mean, can be seen as ‘if Conan was in the 80s but everything is dying’. I tried to write about this in another post, but that was scrapped for something else. See, in the first 3 editions of both games, the world was dying. Each world (fantasy or sci-fi) was dying, for it was being conquered by the forces of evil. Like with Conan, in both settings the main characters are the people out doing the adventuring and/or fighting, because ‘civilization’ is uselessly corrupt. In BFNHW, the art is a vibrant slew of heavy metal colors, not out of place for the decade, as colorful heroes smash equally colorful freaky monsters. In H-40.0, though, the contrast was darkness. Sure, in BFNHW there were dead bodies, gross demons, skulls everywhere, but the art and mood of H-40.0 was black, white, and grey, like charcoal drawings. The morbid glumness was broken by sharply contrasted gargoyles or by chainsaw-on-monster violence. In both settings, the ‘heroes’ were adventurers fighting over the scraps, or corpse, of a once great civilization; it was only a matter of time before the darkness conquered all. The exhilaration was in staying alive…

There. Right there! Do you see the first theme that JM exaggerates? The Decline of Greatness, so prevalent in Tolkien, was taken in a weird direction by the BFNHW and H-40.0 games. Both settings, sci-fi and fantasy, had men, orcs, elves, dwarves, halflings and the like, and their own (re-)branding of ‘chaos monsters’*, but the Decline of Greatness was treated as a given. For Tolkien, the Decline was like a long, slow fall-from-grace, but BFNHW and H-40.0 took it as ‘yeah, life sucks, it’s a given.’

[*Michel Moorcock is a famous British fantasy author of the time, and his dark, morbid, deconstructive, and ‘edgy’ stories are a primary inspiration for the antagonists of BFNHW and H-40.0. …Oh my God. Okay, so Moorcock is on record for saying that he liked JRR Tolkien, as a person, but Moorcock thought the Lord of the Rings was wimpy as a story. BFNHW and H-40.0 are what you get when you combine Tolkien with a guy who hates Tolkien. Holy, wow I never realized that…

Oh God! OH GOD! BFNHW and H-40.0 are Tolkien nerds trying to be silly edgelords! I…I…I need a break in light of these revelations. I got a book to publish tomorrow, see you then and next post.

…More to follow! (sobs)