Warhammer Adventures- Not as Bad as You Think

                                                                                                                                                                       Games Workshop

 

When Games Workshop announced a line of young readers’ books titled Warhammer Adventures, there was something of a mixed response. Which is to say the primarily adult fans of Warhammer 40,000 and Age of Sigmar reacted with a mixture of anger, disdain, and mockery. I’ll admit I was in the last category. The various Warhammer products have been “toned down” throughout their history to accommodate a younger audience. But Warhammer Adventures is the first time Games Workshop has tried to explicitly market the settings that coined the word “grimdark” towards young children. The idea of converting the violent, oppressive worlds of Warhammer into kid’s books seemed downright laughable. But having read the free extracts, I’m surprised to say that Warhammer Adventures is surprisingly decent, all things considered.

The major concern about Warhammer Adventures was that they’d water down the settings. Some saw it as a personal attack on the hobby they loved. I was more confused how they intended to do that with Warhammer 40K, which is by design the worst future imaginable. My concerns about the setting being misrepresented were met by Warhammer Adventures: Attack of the Necron’s significantly abridged version of 40K’s iconic opening text. It begin with “Life in the 41^st millennium is hard” and skips over the “eternity of carnage and slaughter and the laughter of thirsting gods” and “whatever happens, you will not be missed” portions. Aside from that, it’s a surprisingly faithful if more concise rendition the original. It reflects the rest of Attack of the Necron, which is accurate to the setting while still very much for kids.

The book isn't the most stimulating of reads for an adult, or even someone in their teens. But Attack of the Necron is perfect for what it is. It captures the mechanics and tone of the setting as accurately as it can. The story follows a group of kids at an archeological site for various reasons, brought together by circumstance and an invasion of Necrons. The book actually explained they aren’t robots, a common if understandable misconception. It didn’t get into the Faustian bargain that cost the ancient species their minds and souls but I didn’t expect the book to. I also have to compliment author Cavan Scott for avoiding the obnoxious “Space Marines as heroes” narrative that gains more traction with each passing year. The power armored super soldiers save the heroes by accident and even the children know it’s not safe to be around them. My main concern is that Warhammer Adventures would make the nightmarish Imperium of Man out to be the good guys. Thankfully it seems to have remembered they're far from the good guys. This is especially notable when you consider how the Warhammer media aimed at adults has trouble remembering that.

As for how Attack of the Necron reads, it has pretty decent characterization and dialogue for a children’s book. There’s a real peril to it and Scott wisely has the adults fully aware of grim realities that the kids are oblivious to. Though the older characters reactions are enough to tell them that something’s wrong. By the end of the excerpt I had a good grasp of who everyone was and what they value. I’d go as far to say that Attack of the Necron is in many ways superior to a lot the content Black Library puts out. Their books have long been referred to as “bolter porn” by the fanbase for their emphasis on fight scenes and little else. Even the excerpt of Attack of the Necron proves to be more inventive than that.

City of Lifestone drew a lot less derision than Attack of the Necron, mainly because Age of Sigmar has very little influence outside of the hobby, especially compared to 40K. However, I’ve always thought that Warhammer Fantasy Battle’s successor was closer to a Saturday Morning Cartoon than its far future brother. The much less developed setting also makes it a bit more suited for what Warhammer Adventures is trying to be than the comparatively rigid background of 40K. Age of Sigmar also sports a “good vs evil” cosmology that’s largely absent in most other versions of Warhammer, though this clear morality works better for a young readers’ book. 

However, City of Lifestone is much darker than its Attack of the Necron, despite the opposite usually being true when Age of Sigmar and 40K are usually compared. Most of the excerpt takes place in a slave camp, and the protagonist’s adventure starts with the death of her mother. Her subsequent arrival at the titular city, in which she discovers its little more than ruins and not the promised paradise, was handled in a very tragic way. Author Tom Huddlestron also doesn’t beat around the bush about the sort of moral code (or lack thereof) worshippers of Chaos follow. It’s not as graphic as I make it sound but it’s a lot more than I expected from a young readers’ book.

City of Lifestone reads very similar to Attack of the Necron, even in terms of setup, circumstances, and story beats. While I’m not compelled to read the full versions of either book, I will say that 40K got the better end of the deal than Age of Sigmar. Attack of the Necron has a little more going on with its setup and the way it handles certain elements and takes a lot less time to get interesting. That being said, City of Lifestone managed to make me laugh with the line “The Realm of Life was rightly named, every corner of it overrun with living things. The trouble was, most of them wanted to eat her.

Both Warhammer Adventures stories are accompanied by illustrations done by Magnus Norén. They’re better than most of what I’ve seen in children’s literature (a genre I admittedly haven’t been exposed to in a while.) However, it does run into a problem with Attack of the Necron. So much of 40K’s aesthetic relies on skulls, cyborgs, and other horrors. It’s difficult to translate all that into something kid appropriate and the at times simplistic art shows that. It doesn’t help that 40K art traditionally has a very intimidating, oppressive atmosphere that’s just hard to emulate in this playful style. Norén does a decent job for Attack of the Necron but his work is much better with City of Lifestone. The much tamer art direction of Age of Sigmar is better suited to the sort of atmosphere Warhammer Adventures is trying to capture and for its target demographic.

It goes without saying that Warhammer Adventures is for children. While the books don't contradict anything in the main material, it clearly isn’t meant to be a substitute or even a "real" addition. Barring extreme circumstances, I don’t expect a 35$ finecast Mekki miniature to come out. That makes the more vitriolic reactions even more confusing. I fail to see how Warhammer Adventures threatens the hobby and settings in anyway, despite the insistence of asmall but vocal group of fans. Warhammer Adventures is only meant to introduce younger people to the settings of Warhammer 40K and Age of Sigmar and I think it will do a decent job of that, at least from what's in the free sample.

Unlikely Inspirations- Ray Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles

                                                        Bantam Books

I’m the sort of Game Master that provides the players a lot of input in the story. That leads to a good amount of improvisation on my part, which in turn can lead to a somewhat disjointed narrative. But real life never follows a rigid narrative arc. So that means mean seemingly disparate events over the course of a campaign can’t link up to have a larger meaning. Plenty of books adopt this sort of approach but Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles is closer to Roleplaying Games than most other examples. The book links up short stories written across his career, the only constant being the use of Mars as a setting. However, the repetition of certain themes, characters, and concepts, along with the stories written to unify the others, gives the anthology a surprisingly coherent storyline. The Martian Chronicles taught me that as long as a GM can keep a few fundamental elements consistent, they don’t have to worry about the individual sessions of a campaign forming a more conventional plot.

               While each story has considerably different characters, circumstances, and tones, they all share a common setting. Each story helps build up Bradbury’s vision of a habitable Mars and the strange, wondrous beings that built it. Alternatively, they establish the circumstances on earth that brought Mars’ human colonists to the red planet. Most of the stories also share themes about exploration, colonialism, technology, and nuclear war. The way in which The Martian Chronicles builds a larger narrative out of smaller, self-contained stories forms a close parallel with the way many RPG campaigns play out. It also shows that one "whole" narrative isn’t necessarily more effective or meaningful than a more fragmented one.

               In addition to offering insights into how to run a campaign, The Martian Chronicles features some strong ideas for them. While only a few stories feature direct violence, each one has significant stakes and an eerie atmosphere to accompany it. The Martian Chronicles helped teach middle school me that there’s more ways to convey threat in a story than just an adversary or some other form of direct harm. Just because science fiction can features monsters, ray guns, and the like doesn’t mean it absolutely has to. Imagery like 50s style American towns built over Martian cities and automated houses that run even after the end of the world also gave me a sense of what an unconventional, colorful but still familiar setting could be. The Martian Chronicles had a considerable influence over me as a kid and its impact extended to how I run RPGs.

Short Fiction- Fantasy Action Roleplay System

I recently took a short fiction class and I ended up writing a short piece trying to encapsulate the roleplaying game experience. Or my roleplaying game experience, at the very least. Hopefully I wasn't too far off.

Fantasy Action Roleplay System

“The troll is… Jeff, pay attention…”
A half minute passed before Jeff looked up from his phone. He had tuned out at some point during the group’s thirty minute tangent about which Nightmare on Elm Street sequel was the most tolerable. He had managed to ignore the in depth explanation of the series’ sexual subtexts that forced the group to abruptly turn their attention back to the actual game. Jeff looked over the table, feeling even more regret. Dice, pencils, and sheets were scattered across a table far too small for a group of six. Half of it was covered by a fold out screen, decorated with the images of various fantasy creatures with 80s haircuts painted in earthy tones, unified by an inexplicably green tinge. Beneath a crooked elf and some three armed reptilian was text with a stone-like font, “FARS: THE FANTASY ACTION ROLE SYSTEM.” It left whatever was happening on that side of the table a mystery to all but one out of the five of them.

Dan insisted that was the point of it.

Jeff had known Dan for some time, though admittedly not very well. They had something vaguely resembling a friendship in high school, as they had managed to end up in the same homeroom class three years in a row. They had gotten lunch together a few times and Dan had invited Jeff to join him in the dimly lit Latin classroom full of CRTVs where students played video and card games after school.

Jeff had declined and later felt guilty about it. As far as he could tell, Dan didn’t have that much going on in his life and the smell of the room and its occupants wasn’t that bad.

To Jeff’s surprise, Dan ringed him up a few months after graduation. The latter had essentially disappeared in their senior year, seen only manically scribbling in notebooks far away from any potential disturbances. Jeff told him he had decided to take a gap year.

“Yeah, I’m doing something like that.”

With the formalities out of the way, Dan explained he was hosting a game of “FARS.” After a lengthy explanation of the alleged superiority of the system and his unique take on it, he got around to telling Jeff what it actually was.

“It’s a Roleplaying Game. It’s like a video game but pen and paper. I make a story and you have a character that acts it out. You roll dice when you want to do something complicated to see if you’re successful or not. I do the same for everyone that isn’t your character.”
Jeff hesitantly accepted the offer, even if didn’t actually make sense to him. It was only to finally overcome the longstanding guilt about the Latin classroom affair.

Over the next few days he received a series of emails from Dan. The first had a document titled FARSBACKGROUNDDAN. Jeff let it sit a few hours until opening it to find that Dan had taken it upon himself to rewrite the entirety of FARS elaborate “lore,” which he had felt a need to explain earlier.

Jeff felt like someone had emailed him a severed body part. He got only a few pages into the gargantuan document, stopping after realizing the complex metaphysical dynamics he was trying to parse existed only to explain where goblins came from.

“Yeah, Dan, I read it. Sure, it was cool, I guess.”

After that Dan insisted on meeting with him at their hometown’s library, in order to prepare for the game. The only sort of pre-anything Jeff had ever done before a game involved heavy drinking. Arriving at the agreed upon time, he found Dan seated in the library’s long ignored VHS section, which the fluorescent lights seemingly refused illuminate.

Jeff had never seen Dan outside of his school uniform. Judging from what he wore now, he must have preferred the restrictions imposed by the dress code and didn’t know what to do with this newfound freedom. Dan wore a graphic tee with a character so far from Jeff’s own interests he couldn’t even place what medium it came from.

Admittedly he couldn’t remember the last nonfiction book he had read of his own free will but he suspected that wouldn’t have made a difference.

Dan rushed through their niceties and rushed straight to pulling a hardback book from his satchel. It had never occurred to Jeff to put pins on a bag. Dan’s had so many it looked like some kind of nightmarish neon mushroom patch.

Jeff turned his attention to the book after Dan excitedly smacked it onto the ancient plastic table. It was literally rough around the edges and emblazoned in ancient, exaggerated art. The only thing keeping the book together was so much duct tape that the spine looked mummified. It was much older than Dan but Jeff only wondered what all the pages were for.

“We’re gonna make your character now. Don’t worry, I’ll handle the hard parts.”
Over the course of the next hour, Dan asked him a series of increasingly unclear questions and explaining the consequences of his decisions. Every so often he would roll a dice, briefly explaining the significance and quality of the roll. All the while he filled out a piece of loose leaf in his indecipherable handwriting. Admittedly Jeff knew he wouldn’t understand even if he could read it, so it didn’t really matter.

About halfway through, Jeff entered something akin to a transcendental state, broken only by Dan’s last question.

“Alright, now you’ve got a pretty decent Rhark Skirmisher.”
Rhark? Jeff thought that couldn’t be right and Jeff had misspoken.

“All you need to do is come up with a name and background.”
“Um, yeah.”

Dan promptly packed up his stuff and left the library, leaving a confused Jeff with a scribble covered page. Unable to make the slightest sense of it, he turned back to the “lore,” as Jeff had insisted on calling it.

Rhrark are centaurian sharks, hailing from the under-depths of…

Jeff squinted at the screen. It didn’t matter how antiquated FARS was, there was no way a shark centaur was a major part of the setting. But that meant that Dan had felt the need to add it. That wasn’t a particularly comforting thought.

Eventually Dan sent him the date and time for the actual game, a full three weeks after he had agreed to it. Admittedly, Jeff was excited for it. Regardless of the more questionable details, it seemed fun enough to him. And Dan had obviously put quite a bit of thought into it. Most importantly, if he went to this, he never had to think about the Latin classroom thing ever again.

When Jeff showed up another person waited outside of Dan’s garage. He wore a heavy metal shirt from one of the subgenres that took pride in illegible band logos. He smoked from his vape at regularly intervals, in a motion reminiscent of a “Drinking Bird” in its frequency and manner.

Dan hadn’t mentioned that other people would be involved.

“Jeff, the troll.”
“Yeah.”
Dan gestured to a chunk of lumpy metal placed at the center of a hand drawn floorplan. In the right light it did in fact look like a troll, mainly thanks to the club and loin cloth sculpted directly on to it. Usually it just looked like something you righted a too short table leg with.

“Jeff, you still haven’t used your ‘Hunger Frenzy’ ability yet.”

“Right, that.”
The man he had met at the garage, Ted, chuckled to himself. He seemed to have a grasp on FARS gameplay that Jeff lacked. However he hadn’t said more than two sentences at once and his katana wielding character quietly sulked away from anything that didn’t involve combat. Jeff squinted at his character sheet and picked up one of the twenty sided dice. Higher rolls were better, except when they weren’t. He was certain he’d figure it out eventually, especially considering he’d already been in Dan’s basement for two hours.

“Listen, I mean, realistically what has this troll done to me.”
“He’s guarding the amulet.”
That sounded important to Jeff and he vaguely remembered that it came up a few times. Dan had to speak for every character that wasn’t the players but didn’t feel the need to differentiate his voice in any real way. Jeff quickly lost track of who was clearing out barns and who was shattering the boundaries of reality in the game’s story.

“Alright then I just run up and get it.”
“He’s guarding a room that leads to the one that has the amulet in it. It’s not here.”
“Alright can I just sneak around him then?”

“He’ll follow you.”
Jeff glared at the lead troll. He was fairly certain he’d have to make a bunch of dice rolls if the situations were reversed. Sam piped up

“Trolls are a hivemind, right? And since the hivemind is under the sway of Garroth, they’re irredeemable.”
Dan still faced Jeff, though he made a strange face before mumbling a confirmation. Sam seemed to be the only one who actually understand his elaborate take on FARS. At the very least, she could keep track of the seemingly endless elf variants. However Dan seemed to fear Sam, as if her mere presence posed an unacceptable threat to his role as “gamemaster.” Dan’s younger sister spoke for the first time in the game session. It suddenly occurred to Jeff that despite meeting her several times before, she had managed to avoid actually talking to him.

“Then we don’t have to fight them, we just need to talk one out of it to deal with all of them.”
Jeff was relieved that at least someone was on his side.
“Yeah, exactly. I mean he’s not really hurting anyone, he’s spent like the last decade in a cave.”
Sam interjected

“This specific troll might not have but the other trolls have. They’re basically the same entity stretched across a bunch of different bodies.”
“Yes. Sam is right.”
Jeff had never seen Dan so anguished. Nonetheless, he didn’t see a reason for his cartilaginous centaur not to try something other than whacking things with a sword.
“Alright, I’m going to try talking to it.”
Dan made a dice roll behind the screen.
“Your character takes six damage.”
“I didn’t say what I—uh the Rhark was going to tell the troll.”
“It doesn’t matter, he takes advantage of the opening you gave him.”
“I didn’t even speak yet…”
Jeff scribbled a six next to the other numbers gathered on the left hand corner of the sheet. Dan had never got around to explaining how he was supposed to apply the damage he receiving to his character sheet. For now, he just wrote the amounts down until he could figure it out. Ted finally spoke

“I’m going to slice it with my katana. That stacks with the agility bonuses I get for being an Ice Elf.”

Ted didn’t roll so much as drop the dice. It was a twenty, something Jeff was repeatedly told was good. Ted always seemed to roll it. Dan cleared his throat
“In a spray of dark ichor, the troll falls dead.”

Ted looked very pleased with himself. He was the only one at the table who was. Dan shuffled the stack of papers hidden by the screen. He methodically read off of one of them.

“Your party passes through the chamber, having defeated the troll. Now you proceed to the next chamber, faced with a rune inscribed door.”

Another two hours later, the party had killed another troll and the amulet was apparently missing. Or something like that. Ted left immediately and Dan’s sister returned to her room. Sam spoke at length to Dan about the complexities of his take on FARS. He sighed when she finally left. Jeff hoped he could do the same as Dan started gathering the various game materials.

“So, did you enjoy it?”
“As much of it as I understood.”

Dan looked content with that answer. Jeff finally felt relief. The whole Latin classroom ordeal was finally resolved and he could stop feeling guilty about it.

“So, same time next week?”