Gamers Can't Handle the Imperium

So I was playing Space Marine the other day and I got to thinking:  wouldn't a Warhammer 40k RPG be just awesome?  You know, set it up like Dragon Age.  Party based, tactical combat, the whole nine yards.  If this seems far-fetched, just remember that Dawn of War II already follows a lot of this formula.  So I wondered, what if that concept was fleshed out?  What if you took DoW II, nerded it up with more stats, a big world (or several!) to explore, loot, loot, more loot, and a good story?

Well I’ll tell you what would happen:  almost nobody would play it.

For the Emperor

Imagine the ass groove in this chair!

I won’t go too deep into describing the world of Warhammer 40k.  For anyone interested, here is the wiki  -- render yourself unconscious.  But I do need to explain some of the background in order for this post to make sense, so here’s goes nothing.

In the year 40,000, the human population has exploded into the hundreds of billions and mankind has spread across the galaxy.  At the center of this Imperium of Man lies the Emperor, an undead God revered by all humans, kept alive in his magical space throne by the daily sacrifice of hundreds of psychically gifted humans whose essence allow the Emperor to maintain the Astronomicon, a sort of telepathic beacon that allows humans to travel through the Warp – the shifting energy plane that makes up subspace, and the road by which humans can travel the stars.   The Emperor’s will also helps to hold back the various races and hellish creatures  that seek the annihilation of man  – The Eldar, the Orks, the Tyranids, and above all, the demonic forces of Chaos.  Needless to say, to live in this time period is to exist on the utter edge of madness and ruin, constantly battling a fear of death (or worse) not only from the countless species out to do you harm, but by your race’s own insanely bloated bureaucracy.  The Imperium is a xenophobic theocracy, where anything non-human is ruthlessly exterminated and adherence to the spirit of the Emperor is the only chance for salvation.

A Blood Raven

The Few. The Proud. The Insane.

Chief among the many warriors pledged in service to the emperor are the Space Marines, the Adeptus Astartes, genetically engineered super-warriors who are chosen at a young age for their aptitude in battle.   With the proper genetic tinkering – along with some powerful but no longer understood technology – these young men eventually reach 9 feet tall, grow several new organs, and learn to fight in power armor, which essentially makes them walking tanks.  Also, they are devoted to the Emperor, literally brainwashed from their earliest days of training to place the Emperor’s will above all else, and to see to the continuation of Man through the eradication of other species.  To say they aren’t really nice guys is understating the point. 

So how on Earth do you make a role playing game when this is your background material?  It seems impossible.

Weighty Conversations Over Brandy

I asked a friend the other day how he would classify the political structure of the Imperium of Man.  He responded with Theocratic Feudalism*, which I think is a great start.  I also think there is a strong streak of dictatorial control in the Imperium (theocracies and dictatorships are different, so this isn’t redundant) and when fully realized, we could call the imperium a Theocratic Feudalist Dictatorship.   I’m not just splitting nerd-hairs, here, because this background has a profound effect on how you would create a game – especially a role playing game, a game that demands the player invest in an imaginary character.  Why would this be a problem?

"It was the 80s! Big shoulders were in!"

Well, consider:  would you like to play the role of a xenophobic lunatic?  That’s what playing a Space Marine is going to be like; which is a problem, because your average Space Marine is not really an identifiable creature to most human beings.  Role playing games especially need the player to identify with the character they are playing, but how do you ethically or morally identify with a xenophobic killing machine who is in the business of exterminating entire races?  This is not a character that your average gamer would find enjoyable to play for fifty hours at a pop. They’d need to ship the game with bottles of Xanax.

   

What I'm suggesting isn't revolutionary, either.  Generally, when games feature protagonists who are ugly and soulless, gamers notice.  Who wants to feel like a rotten scumbag when they put the controller down?  Even the most violent, brutal player-character has to have some redeeming, identifiable attributes to make him or her relatable.  Without this, your game is nothing more than an exercise in boring misery, or worse, juvenile stupidity.  Either way, nobody is going to seriously waste their time with it.

Well, Crap.

Powered by the corpse of a Space Marine. No, really.

So this is exactly where we run into a problem.  WH40k, when viewed through the zoomed-out lens of a strategy or tactical squad combat game, is a suitably bloody and visceral mythology, just the sort of thing that sets up the firebombing of entire planets and the ruthless extermination of whole races.  But once you zoom it in, and get into the nitty-gritty details of character development, of giving your NPCs interesting and identifiable personalities, it starts to break down.  All of those things that work on a macro-gaming level make a more personable gaming experience completely ridiculous.  When you’re just moving your little army dudes around on a giant chessboard, it is easy to laugh at (or ignore) the absurdity of an undead god-emperor rotting on his throne and people praying to sentient machine spirits in order to power their rocket-firing machine guns and walking sarcophagus tanks.  It’s a lot harder to laugh when you’re rolling your player character and you need to choose his origin story (“Murdered at Age 9” or “Tyranids Ate My Parents”) and have him pick a religion.

The problem with taking WH40k in the direction of an RPG is the necessary demand of softening the brutality of the universe.  And in fact, this has already happened; they did it in Space Marine.  Captain Titus is a fairly nice guy.  He thanks people.  He cares about the Imperial Guard (a force most Space Marines view with indifference, if not outright derision).  During the game itself, we never hear him mention anything horrifically racist, and neither do we hear him voice any fanatic religious statements – the closest we come to any of these are the little phrases we hear upon dying, or the short devotionals we read during load screens.  Titus, despite being a badass, is basically the Heroic Space Warrior archetype, indistinguishable from the bevy of similar characters we find in most futuristic shooters.  The things that otherwise make him a real Space Marine – an Adeptus Astartes, a pitiless, blood drunk motherfucker bound to the will of the Emperor -- are not even addressed.  He is drawn as a virtuous paladin, when your average Space Marine is closer to a reaver. 

The other problem with the setting is its physical locations.  The universe of Warhammer is no gentle fantasy cliche, where you can come across some guy picking corn and get offered a quest to find his missing shovel.  There is very little going on in the WH40k universe except for 1) Battle 2) Death and 3) Chores.  Most of the inhabited planets in the Imperium are either overpopulated slums where crime and villainy run rampant, or undeveloped backwaters where the inhabitants live out their lives in constant fear of rampaging aliens, natural disasters and bloody tribal warfare.

Gamers Can't Handle Xenophobic Holocausts.  No, Seriously, They Can't.

I'm sure she appreciates the boob-room
in her armor.

I don’t think a lot of gamers would be comfortable playing the role of a real Space Marine.  In fact, with today’s culturally enlightened, almost post-modern approach to gaming, I very much doubt the game would leave shelves without some heavy criticism.  If you tell people you are making a real WH40k game, complete with xenophobic epithets, religious persecution, wholesale murder, apostate killing, environmental destruction and human sacrifice, you might have to set up a website to handle the outrage.  Oh, and I haven’t even mentioned the enduringly sexist overtones (there are no female Space Marines, this is as close as they get) and the parallels between modern racism.

The good news (and here I’ll just invalidate my entire blahg post) is that some authors have done a fairly good job writing WH40k fiction.  They have managed to make relatable characters, Space Marines like Ragnar who, while not the most deeply written, have dimension and heft.  I can read a Space Wolves omnibus and feel like Ragnar is – at least a little bit – still a young human male struggling to find his place in a horrific universe. 

Welp.

So maybe that’s what needs to happen?  Maybe THQ, if they ever plan on making a WH40k RPG, should hire someone like Dan Abnett to write it.  And maybe they will have to soften the universe, make it a bit more palatable to the average gamer. 

Or . . . perhaps I am overstating it?  One of the greatest CRPGs ever made was a gloomy, twisted romp through the afterlife with an unkillable amnesiac as the main character.  It could be that I’m underestimating my peers’ desire to play a game that challenges their sense of the absurd, a game that forces them to play depressed, if only for a little while.  This is probably all a waste of ink anyways, as there are no current plans to make a WH40k rpg.  So I’ll stop now – writing this much on why a game that hasn’t been made will probably never work anyways has me feeling a little silly.

* Individual planets and sectors are usually left to their own devices, so long as the tax money flows.  There is essentially no freeholding allowed -- everyone who works, works for a local governor or quasi-noble.