Thoughts on Interview with Rick Priestley, Original Creator of Warhammer 40,000

There was an interesting interview with the original creator of the great Warhammer 40,000 in (I think) Tabletop Gaming magazine. I wrote out a quote from the print edition that grabbed me about the inspirations that swirled around its creation…

“We were inspired by things like Philip Jose Farmer’s World of Tiers about a sort of artificial world idea. There’s a lot of that kind of thing in the Cthulhu Mythos as well, the Great Old Ones and galaxy spanning races, or going back to Doc EE Smith, you’ve got these two civilisations that go out and seed the entire galaxy. The Warhammer world was essentially conceived of as a science-fiction world which has gone fantasy.”

In the 1st edition of 40K they also talk about other inspirations which can be seen clearly within the game itself – Dune, Foundation & Empire to name a couple.

I was also interested to see he noted a game called Battle: Practical Wargaming as an inspiration.

Final point I was also fascinated to read was that the reason there is a wide range of factions and races was the idea you could use other game’s minis are stand-ins. For example the Adeptus Arbites were there so you could use the range of 2000AD Judge Dredd minis (which GW, back then sold) in your game.

I could not find a link to the interview, but he has a new game coming soon…