Damn right, last time I counted, I'd spent about £500 on this plastic crack, and that was a few years ago! Never regreted it though, hardly ever play, but I still get more out of it than anything else I could spend the money on.ciortas1 said:
Warhammer 40k: Where Shall I Start?
- Thread starter KingGolem
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I'd go along with that. I tried to collect 40k, but it's just too damned expensive so i'd really recommend getting the dawn of war games. Even without the warhammer universe adding to it, your looking at one of the best RTS around, of course i'm only reffering to the first DOW as I have yet to play DOW2. Added bonus being the original is old so you should have no problem running it.ottenni said:
If RTS games arn't really your thing, wait around for warhammer 40k: Space marine, it's going to be a third person shooter and hopefully awesome.
Lastly, to the man I quoted is your avatar a picture from fawlty towers or am I being bat shit insane?
I go solely for painting. I customize my soldiers to look like badasses, and then paint them up nice.
Warhammer 40,000, known informally as "Warhammer 40k" or just plain "40k", is a miniatures-based tabletop strategy game by Games Workshop. Drawing heavily on their previous Warhammer Fantasy game, it began as "Warhammer In Space", but has over time grown distinct from (and far more popular than) its fantasy counterpart.
Thirty-eight thousand years in the future, the mighty Imperium of Man has expanded across the galaxy... to discover that the galaxy is a hell that would make Hieronymous Bosch shit himself in terror, and that it has a hell. From without, the Imperium is assailed by alien monsters from the depths of space, nightmare death-machines and soulless daemons (as well as soulless death-machines and nightmare daemons); from within, treachery, heresy, mindless incompetence and the festering taint of Chaos threaten to tear it apart.
Warhammer 40,000 is not a happy place. Rather than just being Darker And Edgier, it paints itself black, takes a running jump and hurls itself head first over the edge, bellowing "WAAAGH". The Imperium of Man is an oppressive, stark, and downright miserable place to live in where, for far too many people, living isn't something to do till you die, but something to do till something comes around and kills you in an unbelievably horrible way - quite probably something on your own side. The Messiah has been locked up on life support for the past ten millennia, laid low by his most beloved son, and an incomprehensibly vast Church Militant commits hourly atrocities in his name.
The problem is, as bad as the Imperium is, they're not quite as bad as many of the other factions. Death is about the best you can hope for against the vast majority of the other major players in the battlefields of the 41st Millennium. The basic premise of 40k, insofar as it can be summed up, is that of an eternal, impossibly vast conflict between a number of absurdly powerful genocidal, xenocidal and in one case omnicidal factions, with every single weapon, ideology and creative piece of nastiness imaginable turned up to eleven. The basic sidearm of a Space Marine is a fully automatic armour-piercing rocket-propelled grenade launcher. The Astronomican, a navigation aid, has the souls of thousands of psychic humans sacrificed to it every day, dying by inches to feed the machine. The faster-than-light travel used by most factions carries with it a good chance of being eaten by daemons. There are also chainsaw swords, armored gloves that crush tanks, mountain-sized daemonic walking battle cathedrals, tanks the size of city blocks and warships that level continents, if not simply obliterating all life on an entire planet just to be sure. And sometimes even that doesn't work. There is no time for peace, no respite, no forgiveness; there is only war.
And you are going to die.
The 40k universe is a spectacularly brutal playground of tropes and horrible things taken to their absolute extreme, and in some cases, beyond. Entire planets with populations of billions are lost due to rounding errors in tax returns. Orders of capricious, fanatical, genetically engineered Super Soldier Knights Templar serve as the Imperium's special forces, while the trillions of soldiers in its regular armies take disregard for human life further than most people could believe possible. A futuristic space Inquisition ruthlessly hunts down anyone with even a hint of the taint of the heretic, the mutant, or the alien, and is backed up by legions of supercharged daemonhunting super soldiers and fanatical power-armoured battle nuns. The ancient and mysterious manipulator-race contrive wars that see billions dead so that small handfuls of their own may survive, while their depraved cousins cannot live without torturing numberless innocents to death in unimaginably horrible ways. There's a Bug Swarm trying to eat everything in the galaxy, a light-years wide hole in reality through which countless daemons and corrupted daemon-powered super-soldiers periodically attempt to destroy the universe, and an entire civilisation of undying Omnicidal Maniacs serving their star-god masters' desire to exterminate all living creatures, down to the last bacterium. There's a genetically-engineered survivor warrior species infesting every corner of the galaxy and cheerfully trying to kill everything else in the galaxy because it's literally hard-wired into their genetic code. The closest thing to the good guys you can find in this setting is a tiny alien empire sandwiched between all the other factions, and they may or may not have a thing for forcing new subjects into their empire through orbital bombardment, sterilization, and concentration camps, but they will at least offer you admittance to their club. And you may even find solace like that, being, as most of their race, mind-controlled by a few "benevolent" elites. That's your best bet at happiness in 38 000 years from now.
As well as the game itself and its rulebooks, faction-specific, setting-specific and campaign sourcebooks, 40k has spawned a range of spinoff games and publications. Over sixty 40k novels and short story anthologies, including the successful Gaunt's Ghosts, Eisenhorn, and Ciaphas Cain novels, are published by the Black Library, a subsidiary of Games Workshop, who also published the now out-of-print comic book Warhammer Monthly and short story magazine Inferno. Boom! Studios now publish comics set in the Warhammer 40K universe, in the form of various mini-series, rather than an ongoing title. There is even a full-length fan film, Damnatus, which was approved, made, banned over conflicts between British and German IP laws, then leaked online. Spinoff tabletop games include the space combat game Battlefleet Gothic, large-scale strategy Epic 40,000, gang-based Necromunda, all-Ork Gorkamorka, small scale Alien-influenced Space Hulk, RPG-influenced "narrative wargame" Inquisitor, and the more traditional RPGs Dark Heresy, Rogue Trader, and Deathwatch. A small but growing number of 40k videogames have also been made; early examples include the Space Hulk series and a slightly obscure isometric Genesis / Mega Drive game called Aspect Warrior. More recent are Warhammer 40,000: Dawn Of War and its sequel Dawn Of War II, a pair of Real Time Strategy games for the PC; Warhammer 40,000: Fire Warrior, a First Person Shooter; and Warhammer 40,000: Squad Command, a turn-based tactical game. Currently in development are a third-person shooter, Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine, and a MMORPG under the imaginative working title of Warhammer 40,000 Online. An official CGI movie, Ultramarines, was recently announced, following up on a number of live-action shorts shown at various Games Day events in the 90s. Before you start screaming about the former, consider that the script is written by Dan Abnett.
Thirty-eight thousand years in the future, the mighty Imperium of Man has expanded across the galaxy... to discover that the galaxy is a hell that would make Hieronymous Bosch shit himself in terror, and that it has a hell. From without, the Imperium is assailed by alien monsters from the depths of space, nightmare death-machines and soulless daemons (as well as soulless death-machines and nightmare daemons); from within, treachery, heresy, mindless incompetence and the festering taint of Chaos threaten to tear it apart.
Warhammer 40,000 is not a happy place. Rather than just being Darker And Edgier, it paints itself black, takes a running jump and hurls itself head first over the edge, bellowing "WAAAGH". The Imperium of Man is an oppressive, stark, and downright miserable place to live in where, for far too many people, living isn't something to do till you die, but something to do till something comes around and kills you in an unbelievably horrible way - quite probably something on your own side. The Messiah has been locked up on life support for the past ten millennia, laid low by his most beloved son, and an incomprehensibly vast Church Militant commits hourly atrocities in his name.
The problem is, as bad as the Imperium is, they're not quite as bad as many of the other factions. Death is about the best you can hope for against the vast majority of the other major players in the battlefields of the 41st Millennium. The basic premise of 40k, insofar as it can be summed up, is that of an eternal, impossibly vast conflict between a number of absurdly powerful genocidal, xenocidal and in one case omnicidal factions, with every single weapon, ideology and creative piece of nastiness imaginable turned up to eleven. The basic sidearm of a Space Marine is a fully automatic armour-piercing rocket-propelled grenade launcher. The Astronomican, a navigation aid, has the souls of thousands of psychic humans sacrificed to it every day, dying by inches to feed the machine. The faster-than-light travel used by most factions carries with it a good chance of being eaten by daemons. There are also chainsaw swords, armored gloves that crush tanks, mountain-sized daemonic walking battle cathedrals, tanks the size of city blocks and warships that level continents, if not simply obliterating all life on an entire planet just to be sure. And sometimes even that doesn't work. There is no time for peace, no respite, no forgiveness; there is only war.
And you are going to die.
The 40k universe is a spectacularly brutal playground of tropes and horrible things taken to their absolute extreme, and in some cases, beyond. Entire planets with populations of billions are lost due to rounding errors in tax returns. Orders of capricious, fanatical, genetically engineered Super Soldier Knights Templar serve as the Imperium's special forces, while the trillions of soldiers in its regular armies take disregard for human life further than most people could believe possible. A futuristic space Inquisition ruthlessly hunts down anyone with even a hint of the taint of the heretic, the mutant, or the alien, and is backed up by legions of supercharged daemonhunting super soldiers and fanatical power-armoured battle nuns. The ancient and mysterious manipulator-race contrive wars that see billions dead so that small handfuls of their own may survive, while their depraved cousins cannot live without torturing numberless innocents to death in unimaginably horrible ways. There's a Bug Swarm trying to eat everything in the galaxy, a light-years wide hole in reality through which countless daemons and corrupted daemon-powered super-soldiers periodically attempt to destroy the universe, and an entire civilisation of undying Omnicidal Maniacs serving their star-god masters' desire to exterminate all living creatures, down to the last bacterium. There's a genetically-engineered survivor warrior species infesting every corner of the galaxy and cheerfully trying to kill everything else in the galaxy because it's literally hard-wired into their genetic code. The closest thing to the good guys you can find in this setting is a tiny alien empire sandwiched between all the other factions, and they may or may not have a thing for forcing new subjects into their empire through orbital bombardment, sterilization, and concentration camps, but they will at least offer you admittance to their club. And you may even find solace like that, being, as most of their race, mind-controlled by a few "benevolent" elites. That's your best bet at happiness in 38 000 years from now.
As well as the game itself and its rulebooks, faction-specific, setting-specific and campaign sourcebooks, 40k has spawned a range of spinoff games and publications. Over sixty 40k novels and short story anthologies, including the successful Gaunt's Ghosts, Eisenhorn, and Ciaphas Cain novels, are published by the Black Library, a subsidiary of Games Workshop, who also published the now out-of-print comic book Warhammer Monthly and short story magazine Inferno. Boom! Studios now publish comics set in the Warhammer 40K universe, in the form of various mini-series, rather than an ongoing title. There is even a full-length fan film, Damnatus, which was approved, made, banned over conflicts between British and German IP laws, then leaked online. Spinoff tabletop games include the space combat game Battlefleet Gothic, large-scale strategy Epic 40,000, gang-based Necromunda, all-Ork Gorkamorka, small scale Alien-influenced Space Hulk, RPG-influenced "narrative wargame" Inquisitor, and the more traditional RPGs Dark Heresy, Rogue Trader, and Deathwatch. A small but growing number of 40k videogames have also been made; early examples include the Space Hulk series and a slightly obscure isometric Genesis / Mega Drive game called Aspect Warrior. More recent are Warhammer 40,000: Dawn Of War and its sequel Dawn Of War II, a pair of Real Time Strategy games for the PC; Warhammer 40,000: Fire Warrior, a First Person Shooter; and Warhammer 40,000: Squad Command, a turn-based tactical game. Currently in development are a third-person shooter, Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine, and a MMORPG under the imaginative working title of Warhammer 40,000 Online. An official CGI movie, Ultramarines, was recently announced, following up on a number of live-action shorts shown at various Games Day events in the 90s. Before you start screaming about the former, consider that the script is written by Dan Abnett.
It's an awesome game if you are willing to give up the time and money to have a functional army.
If you like tanks, go Imperial Guard.
If you like shooting lots of stuff, go Orks.
If you like zerg, go Tyranid.
If you like 8 foot tall armor clad killing machines, go Space Marines or Chaos Space Marines.
And if you like no one to like you, pick up the new Blood Angels...
Read the Gaunt's Ghosts series, as everyone seems to be suggesting. Set up a shrine to Dan Abnet and keep buying his books. There's a reason they let him write the first book in the Horus Heresy series.
Go into your local Games Workshop. Play a few matches with the armies they have on the boards if you can, and spectate any matches going on. Playing with the basic stuff they have out will give you a feel for the rules and how you like to play, whereas spectatiing will let you see what the other armies do and how some of the more advanced players operate, plus they tend to be a laugh.
The Dawn Of War series does an OK job of getting the setting across, though there are more than a few problems with it, like the Vindicare Assassin.
The Ciaphus Cain novels aren't a fantasic intro to the setting, but they're fantastic nonetheless.
If you ever give a crack at reviving that DnD fiasco you mentioned, pick up Dark Heresy. It's an RPG that places you as a single inquisitorial acolyte, so it's just you're party rooting out heresy on various planets and possibly dealing with it. the class system is better than DnD plus it's great for giving a broarder image of the Imperium.
Just in case you got, build a shrine to Dan Abnet. His novels, his comics, hell even his comics for DC and 2000AD.
Also, to play Devil's Advocate, the Horus Heresy series might not be a wonderful shoice, depending on your tastes. I found that the series really started going down hill, with a few characters being altered to suit the new writer on the first 3.
Go into your local Games Workshop. Play a few matches with the armies they have on the boards if you can, and spectate any matches going on. Playing with the basic stuff they have out will give you a feel for the rules and how you like to play, whereas spectatiing will let you see what the other armies do and how some of the more advanced players operate, plus they tend to be a laugh.
The Dawn Of War series does an OK job of getting the setting across, though there are more than a few problems with it, like the Vindicare Assassin.
The Ciaphus Cain novels aren't a fantasic intro to the setting, but they're fantastic nonetheless.
If you ever give a crack at reviving that DnD fiasco you mentioned, pick up Dark Heresy. It's an RPG that places you as a single inquisitorial acolyte, so it's just you're party rooting out heresy on various planets and possibly dealing with it. the class system is better than DnD plus it's great for giving a broarder image of the Imperium.
Just in case you got, build a shrine to Dan Abnet. His novels, his comics, hell even his comics for DC and 2000AD.
Also, to play Devil's Advocate, the Horus Heresy series might not be a wonderful shoice, depending on your tastes. I found that the series really started going down hill, with a few characters being altered to suit the new writer on the first 3.
Unless you're already good at model painting, then I'd recommend starting with the Orks. Frankly, they're the easiest ones to start with because they're supposed to look shabby anyway, so you really can't screw up too much.
If you are good at model painting (or think you'll learn quick enough) then go for whatever army sounds most interesting.
Chaos and Orks generally allow for the most artistic creativity, since you can have pretty much whatever the hell you want decorating them. I can't tell you what army is the best, though I've heard the Imperial Guard recently got much more powerful with their latest book.
As for books you need: the Warhammer 40k core Rulebook (latest addition, 5th I think?), and the codex book for whatever army/armies you find most interesting.
If you are good at model painting (or think you'll learn quick enough) then go for whatever army sounds most interesting.
Chaos and Orks generally allow for the most artistic creativity, since you can have pretty much whatever the hell you want decorating them. I can't tell you what army is the best, though I've heard the Imperial Guard recently got much more powerful with their latest book.
As for books you need: the Warhammer 40k core Rulebook (latest addition, 5th I think?), and the codex book for whatever army/armies you find most interesting.
The best advice I could give, KingGolem, is to go to your local Games Workshop. The staff there can tell you all you need to know about any race you're curious about (they love to talk about it, too), and they can also run you through the actual hobby. Also, look on Ebay for the old hardcover 4th ed rulebook; it had quite a lot of fluff in it, and I still love to read it now and again...if you're in Canada, you can just borrow mine.
Well if you want you can go to the gamesworkshop website and download a pile of the old rule books, for the games that are out of print. From this you will get some idea of the lore around the game and would help you when picking what novel you want to start with. A friend of mine says the book Faith and Fire by James Swallow is a good start. It is one of the first books based on the sisters of battle and is about a psyker terrorist.KingGolem said:
If your looking at just collecting rule books, then start with the main book, then read it, find what race you find interesting and go from there.
Books wise you should start with the Horus Hersey series and then COMISSAR CHIAPAS CAIN, HERO OF THE IMPERIUM!!!, I love that series, very well done with the dark humor and snark coming from Cain.
Race wise I'm rather fond of the Necrons and the Chaos factions. Remember kids, that skull throne isn't going to get any bigger by it's self.
Race wise I'm rather fond of the Necrons and the Chaos factions. Remember kids, that skull throne isn't going to get any bigger by it's self.
Tbh iv yet to play a game of =I= 
I just love dreaming up characteurs and them modelling them- went on the GW website adn they have stopped a lot of models, and you dont haev the option of buying parts seperately anymore, which defeats the whole damn purpose IMO
I just love dreaming up characteurs and them modelling them- went on the GW website adn they have stopped a lot of models, and you dont haev the option of buying parts seperately anymore, which defeats the whole damn purpose IMO
There are also Warhammer video games, I don't know what this guy is talking about. It, of course, is foremost a table top game - but you aren't incorrect that there are video games about it and there have been for years. Relic has most famously made them with the Dawn of War series. IMO they are the best 40k games out there.w@rew0lf said:
Step 1: Prepare to enter the most badass Tabletop game ever created. You have been warned.
Step 2: Go read the Horus Heresy books or the Ultramarine ones. Gives you some background information.
Step 3: Go to scribd.com and look up some pdf format rulebooks. Its free.
Step 4: After reading a bit on scribd.com, go to your local Gamesworkshop and ask them about your favourite race which by now you should have.
Step 5: Purchase the Rulebook. The big hardcover one.
Step 6: Read it.
Step 7: Go to Gamesworkshop and buy the Codex of your favourite race.
Step 8: Read it
Step 9: Go to Gamesworkshop and ask for some advice on buying your army.
Step 10: Buy some basic infantries.
Step 11: Paint them.
Step 12: LET THE MADNESS BEGIN!
Done.
Step 2: Go read the Horus Heresy books or the Ultramarine ones. Gives you some background information.
Step 3: Go to scribd.com and look up some pdf format rulebooks. Its free.
Step 4: After reading a bit on scribd.com, go to your local Gamesworkshop and ask them about your favourite race which by now you should have.
Step 5: Purchase the Rulebook. The big hardcover one.
Step 6: Read it.
Step 7: Go to Gamesworkshop and buy the Codex of your favourite race.
Step 8: Read it
Step 9: Go to Gamesworkshop and ask for some advice on buying your army.
Step 10: Buy some basic infantries.
Step 11: Paint them.
Step 12: LET THE MADNESS BEGIN!
Done.
I feel the exact same way as you. I think it's a super cool franchise but I also had no idea where to start, so thanks for asking everyone. This advice is helpful to me as well.