Welcome to the ImplausiPod, a podcast about the intersection of art, technology, and popular culture. I'm your host, Dr. Implausible, and in this episode, we're gonna take a quick step away from Cyberpunk and Westworld and introduce you to Appendix W.

In the grim darkness of the 1980s, there was no peace, there was no hope, there was no forgiveness, there was only war and a lot of sci-fi titles that ended up forming the foundation of the Warhammer 40,000 universe. And in this series, we will trace the cultural history of science fiction in order to develop a list of titles that were influential to the creation of the WarHammer 40,000 Universe, and an Appendix W, so to speak. 

We're drawing our inspiration partly from the Appendix N that was included in the original Dungeon Masters’ Guide. It was written by E Gary Gygax in the late seventies, and this included a list of the foundational works that inspired the development of Dungeons and Dragons.  When WarHammer 40,000 was released with Rogue Trader in the late eighties, there was no similar list, and that's what we're going to create right now. If you're interested in learning more about the Appendix N, you can go check out the amazing Appendix N Book Club podcast by Jeff Hoy and their special guests.

But right here, right now, we're gonna be talking about Warhammer, so grab a seat, kick back, turn up your headphones, and enjoy as we welcome you to the Grimdark. This more than anything else is the defining adjective for the Warhammer 40,000 Universe. It was a tagline in the original publication of Rogue Trader: “In the grim darkness of the 41st millennium, there's no hope, no peace, no forgiveness, only war”, and it's kind of stuck, that portmanteau of those first two words: Grim and dark is what's been used to describe the aesthetic of the WarHammer 40,000 universe. 

But what is the Grimdark really? it's a nightmare, Gothic future where humanity is decayed and fallen, still living with high technology, that they no longer realize how to build and maintain, a fallen race living in the shadows of their ancestors. Humanity is maintained by a ruthless interstellar bureaucracy, a massive army, and endless brutality, and it's this brutality that defines the 40K universe. It is not a pleasant place. There are no good guys. Whatever side you might think you're on, there's no good side. 

Warhammer 40,000 is a miniature tabletop combat skirmish game that was developed by Games Workshop in the mid to late 1980s. The rules were written primarily by Rick Priestly, and he was assisted by other artists and writers in the Games Workshop’s studio.  The work drew inspiration from a sci-fi rule set called Laser Burn, as well as the number of Games Workshop’s own titles, including the recent released Judge Dredd tabletop game, as well as drawing heavily from their Warhammer Fantasy Battles rule set, which was in the second or third edition by the time 40K was published, and as part of this crossover, we can see the inclusion of traditional fantasy races like elves, dwarves, and orcs, but in a space-faring format. They were different but recognizable. The Warhammer 40,000 universe has expanded significantly since then, but right now we're focused on its inception. 

There's a historical influence that went into the development of the game too. One of the early scenarios published in Games Workshop’s affiliated White Dwarf Magazine presented a human versus ork scenario, based on the Battle of Rourke's Drift, for example. But we'll introduce you to more of the specifics as the series progresses. Right now on this podcast, we'd like to just introduce the concept of Appendix W, give you an outline of where we're going with it and some of the general concepts and terms.

But before we go further, perhaps a brief personal introduction is in order as well.  I'm a PhD researcher that looks at innovation, emerging technologies, new media game studies, and the role of art and aesthetics on all of the above.  In 2008 and 2009, I developed a methodology for the study of transmedia properties.  At the time, I was looking at virtual reality and its development, which is why we've been covering cyberpunk a whole lot in this podcast so far. But part of my game studies work is focused specifically on analog and tabletop gaming, which brings us back to Warhammer 40,000.  So buckle up space ponies, here we go. 

What were the media influences on Warhammer 40,000? Well, there's a lot of everything really. It's very agglomerative. It is every single kitchen sink, and then some. Games Workshop’s underlying ethos was over the top, and that's included even in their influences, which crossed the whole gamut of popular culture at the time, especially those things with a very particularly British flavor.  Warhammer 40,000s influences come from as diverse as instead of sources as science fiction, film, television, comics, music, and especially heavy metal and prog, and art magazines like Heavy Metal. So it's all across the spectrum, and we're gonna be looking at all those different elements over time. We can't do it all in one day, but today's the overview. 

But I want to take a moment to just talk about the breadth of influence that really went into the development of the game. Whenever we look at a transmedia property like War Hammer 40,000, that draws its influences from a number of different sources, it's often common to point to a few single elements as the defining source, but that's never the case. For Warhammer 40,000, the main ones might be titles like Dune or Judge Dread or Starship Troopers or Star Wars. And while those did have an outsized influence because of their popularity, it's never ever just one single thing. There are multiple influences that went into this, and it crossed the gamut of different media types and media properties that all came together when the designers created and published WarHammer 40,000.

So part of the method that we need to undertake when we're untangling all those media influences is to kinda lay everything out on the floor. If you had everything on an index card, you kind of toss 'em all out and then start arranging them in a structure that made sense. There are a couple different structures you can go by.  You might want to lay them out chronologically or by media type or by who created it. And in this case, we're gonna use a combination of the three. We're gonna lay out the titles in a number of different buckets based on the media type. We're gonna arrange those chronologically, and then we're gonna start drawing the linkages between the various elements.  Now, those linkages may be due to a number of different things. It could be due to the authorship, it could be due to the country of origin where the production took place, or various actors or writers that appeared on the series. It could be due to the technology. When one item shows up in different, multiple different works, we can generally look at the original work as the source or inspiration.  It can also be due to the various tropes or memes that get replicated, where we have things like Space Marines and Starship Troopers, how they end up showing up in multiple different books after that. And once this is all laid out, these media titles and the connections between 'em, it gives us a kind of a map, a lay of the land, and then we can decide which path we might want to take when we're going through it.

Now, I'm gonna tell you right now, we're not gonna take a strictly linear path through the map. We're not gonna start in like 1940 and then work our way forward. We're going to use the three i's when determining what titles we talk about that's Influence, Interest, and Intrigue. Some titles we've gotta cover because of their influence. Some titles we're gonna cover because, well, I think you'll be interested in them or I'm interested in them. And some titles I think you're gonna find intriguing. You might not have known that they had an influence, but you're gonna find out, and I hope you spread the word. But for the remainder of this particular episode, we're just gonna talk about those buckets now.

When we originally posted about the Appendix W on the Implausi.blog back in August of 2021, we had set those buckets in a couple of major ways, mostly identifying them by media type, as we did earlier in this episode. That included the science fiction, the movies and TV, music, comics, and tabletop role playing games, or tabletop gaming in general.

Now each of these buckets might have some smaller buckets within it. It really is a Matroshka Russian nesting doll of research here. But we'll give you an overview of what our bucket collection looks like. So the first bucket is gonna be science fiction literature, because honestly, this has the biggest influence and the most diversity of sources that were actually drawn into the development of the game.

From there, a couple of our sub buckets include the military science fiction that was prevalent in the day, the dying earth sub genre, and some other more mainstream science fiction titles like Dune or Foundation. And then there's also a lot of fantasy fiction as well that we need to touch on because some of it did directly influence not just Warhammer 40,000, but actually Warhammer Fantasy Battles, and as we mentioned earlier, there is a lot of crossover between Warhammer 40,000 and Warhammer Fantasy Battles, so some of the things that influenced the one will have influenced the other as well. It was less of a clearly delineated world back then, and for Games Workshop, a lot of what they were doing was they were trying to get the most use outta some of their models, like the various chaos models that they were making at the time.

Several of the major titles we'll look at will include, of course, Frank Herbert's Dune and Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun Tetrology, which was highly influential on the aesthetic as well as the language of 40K. We're gonna be looking at Robert Heinlein's, Starship Troopers, and some of the other mil-sci-fi titles, most notably David Drake's Hammers Slammers series and Keith Laumer's Bolo, which I think nowadays isn't as widely known, but at the time was it's about giant Super Tanks, and so we can see a lot of that in some of the Epic 40K that's been produced. 

We look at other science fiction like the Foundation Series by Isaac Asimov, as well as Forever War by Joe Haldeman, and a few short stories will also be included, like the Game of Rat Dragon. I'll give you some more details about that in an episode or two. And lastly, as we said, fantasy has a big influence, and we'd be remiss if we didn't mention the Eternal Champion Series by Michael Moorcock. The defining battles there between law and chaos, as well as the demon swords and the magic that was in introduced were highly influential for 40K, and the incorporation of chaos was part of the universe, so we must make mention of it and we'll take a look at that in depth in the future. 

Shifting over to the next bucket, that of visual media, including movies and television. Of course, we have the major titles like Star Wars and Star Trek, which both were influential in a couple of different ways, but in terms of movies, we also have things like Soylent Green and some of the dystopian sci-fi of the 1970s and eighties, especially sci-fi horror titles like Alien and Terminator, and Aliens was also released prior to the launch of WarHammer 40,000. Robocop came out in 1987, so I don't know how much of an influence it was, but it was definitely in the air at the time. 

And in terms of television, we have a more British focus titles like Blake Seven, Space: 1999, a Canadian Import by the name of The StarLost, and of course, Star Trek still showing up and influencing the work that was being done. Other TV series influences would've included the Gundam series as well as the RoboTech series from the mid eighties and given the prevalence of giant stompy robots within the Warhammer universe, I think we can see how much of an influence that had. 

Music was also another incredibly influential type of media. Starting with the New Wave of British Heavy Metal, as well as a lot of the Tolkien-inspired Prog artists that were producing albums in the seventies and early eighties, and the rise of punk in the late seventies, as well as speed and thrash metal in the early eighties, really drove the aesthetic choices that can be seen within the game, not just in the artwork, but also in some of the themes that come out in the writings and the text that's written within the rule books. The Fantasy Warriors of Chaos come straight off of a Man of War album cover, and their daemonic engines are straight off of the Priest album covers of the eighties. 

Our fourth big bucket is that of comics and it's easy to see how much of a bunch of fans the creators of WarHammer 40,000 were. The seminal British comic Anthology 2000 AD had a huge impact because it was there that both Judge Dredd and Rogue Trooper were originally published, and from there we can see the influence of Heavy Metal Magazine, as well as some of the American titles like Epic Illustrated, Alien Legion, and Deathlok, originally published by Marvel Comics.  Of course, Heavy Metal itself started as a translation of the French science fantasy magazine, Metal hurlant, (forgive my pronunciation), and that too needs to be included. 

Our last big bucket is of course gonna be that of tabletop gaming. Now, tabletop gaming in 1987 was a lot different than it is now in 2022, so a couple things need to be kept in mind. There was a lot of overlap between some of the various games, and of course the biggest one at the time was still Dungeons and Dragons. And given Games Workshop’s early relationship with Dungeons and Dragons, and its publisher, TSR, there was definitely some crossover that was included.

Other influential RPG titles included Chaosium's Call of Cthulhu as well as Storm bringer, which was their game that detailed the worlds of Michael Moorcock, especially Elric. And finally, Games Workshop's own licensed roleplaying game based on the worlds of Judge Dredd that appeared in the 2000 A.D. comics. They had also made another board game based on the Rogue Trooper universe, and that'll show up later as well, I have a sneaking suspicion, and of course, war gaming was much different to the time as well. A lot of the games that were released were of the hex and counter, or hex and chit style, including things like Squad Leader, as well as Star Fleet Battles. The key sci-fi war game at the time was BattleTech released by FASA in 1984.  That was one that had an option for using metal miniatures, but often you just use cardboard cutout standups on the hex to actually show where the models were. From there, we saw most of the other war games at the time were focused more on either historical war gaming, including either the ancient period or Napoleonics, or a few titles like Laser Burn, which focused on sci-fi settings. Again, these were the minority. 

Wow. That is a lot of buckets. So we've got a lot to talk about here. I will get the full list up on the blog, which you can find at Implausi.blog, and then just search for Appendix W. The old list is currently up there, and we will post an updated list that we can follow along with going forward. We're going to be interpolating some of the Appendix W episodes. After I get through my backlog of 'em, I've got about four or five that are written and ready to go, and we'll get those recorded and out to you in the next couple weeks. Following that, we're going to bring in back some of the cyberpunk ones and just finish off the Westworld episodes that are in production as we continue forward into the future.

Again, it's been a pleasure introducing you to the Appendix W. I look forward to going into more detail over the coming weeks and months. If you have any questions or comments, please direct them at Dr. Implausible at Implausi.blog. We'll have the link up in the show notes. You can find me as Dr. Implausible on Twitter and some of the other social tools. Just reach out and tag me there and I'd be happy to answer to any questions you might have. Going forward. I think we also have the distribution issues with the podcast sorted out, so we should be up on Google Podcasts as well as eventually Apple. And I'm not quite sure about Spotify as we're not necessarily a fan of their business practices, but we will think about that and see where we can reach the most of you soon.

Talk to you soon. This has been Dr. Implausible signing out.