In the original board game players got turned into toads on the regular. It's an even more desperate and serious version of Warhammer 40,000, completely at odds with a chaotic beer-and-pretzels game about chucking dice and laughing at your latest misfortune. This videogame reskins it with The Horus Heresy, a prequel setting 10,000 years in 40K's past that's been the basis for a huge amount of novels, some of which are actually quite good. It was fantasy Snakes & Ladders with PvP. Even if the other players didn't drag you down, the luck of the cards and dice would. It was a race-to-the-centre board game, half of which you spent finding a talisman to let you access the middle of the board, and the other half not letting someone else steal it from you. Games Workshop released the first version of Talisman: The Magical Quest Game in 1983. At other times they seem more like the COOL ROBOT meme with power armor on. You can practically hear the creators striving to outdo each other.Īt their best, videogames have taken the same glee in depicting this baroque world, its cursed inhabitants, and their awful fates.

In the miniatures game Necromunda, the underclass at the bottom of the hive city live on a diet of mold, rats, and food made from the recycled dead.

In the Eisenhorn novels, an Imperial Inquisitor who is so scarred by torture he loses the ability to smile makes compromise after compromise until he's indistinguishable from those he used to hunt. In the board game Space Hulk, doomed space marines are beamed onto derelict craft in oversized power armor and then hunted by aliens through corridors they can barely turn around in.

Though frequently balanced by a tongue-in-cheek sense of the absurd, the various adaptations of Warhammer 40,000 that followed delighted in its grimness.

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