Our latest round table interview with the Warhammer Studio team is all about the lore of the Warhammer 40,000: Armageddon box, and the expansive Operation Imperator book contained within.
Want to know what’s going on in the new edition? Adam and Eddie are joined by Phil Kelly to find out more.
Here are some highlights from this cosy chat. Make sure to watch the whole thing though, there’s a lot to learn about the Imperium’s daring counterattack.
Imperium Sanctus
Phil: We've seen the galaxy split, so this massive warp storm called the Cicatrix Maledictum has come across the whole galaxy – torn it in two – and on one side you've got the Imperium Nihilus, where the lights are off effectively. There are little lighthouses, but really, the whole place is consumed by darkness and fear. And then you have the Imperium Sanctus beneath the rift, which is a little bit more sustainable, and there's still a good fight to be had there.
But yeah, it's dark times. The word Sanctus does quite a lot of hard work when you consider how awful even that side of the galaxy is, right? You shouldn't be thinking of it as like there's a bad side and there's a good side. It's more like there's a bad side and then a really much worse side.
Ghazghkull’s Plan
Phil: So Ghazghkull is the primo Warboss of the Orks – a massive, great, building-sized Ork of doom. Prophet of both Gork and Mork. That's him and he's... my, how he's grown.
When he was first a simple Warboss, his story started by getting hit in the head by a bolt shell and being visited by visions. Over time, we've seen Ghazghkull effectively grow in stature – literally and metaphorically – to become really like the king of all the Orks effectively. And what he has is cunning as well as brawn, which is really dangerous.
Some Orks are not just strong and fighty and mighty beasts, they're also cunning. They know how to hunt, they know how to trick their enemies. And in Ghazghkull's case, they've got vision. They know how to effectively inspire the Ork race. That's what Ghazghkull is doing.
He doesn't just want to attack Armageddon, of course. He wants to bring about a great war where all of the Orks, and I do mean all of them, are infected by this urge to conquer the galaxy, to conquer the Imperium. It doesn't take much doing.
Armageddon’s Tanks
Phil: There's a really heavy kind of vehicular element to Armageddon. It's such a hostile planet, it's so poisonous and toxic that you really want to be inside a Chimera if you're going to go out there into the Wastes.
A Chimera being kind of a big, armoured, sort of fully sealed tank. It's even amphibious.
And Armageddon's home legions are famous for using lots of these vehicles – Leman Russes, Rogal Dorn tanks. Armageddon makes a lot of tanks.
It used to anyway. It's still churning out a few.
But yeah, it used to supply war material to the sectors around it and even further afield. It's like a breadbasket for military machines and ammunition, which is one of the reasons it's so vital.
Ork Clans on Armageddon
Phil: I think, if you're an Ork fan, you might feel that you're sort of honour-bound to have a force following Ghazghkull or Wazdakka, but [the Operation Imperator book] name-drops loads of cool-sounding Warbosses and different types of Ork force, and you could really see the way that spills out into collecting opportunities for you to tailor an Ork force to your taste as well.
Some of us know the Ork clans like the back of our hand by this point. You know the Goffs, the Bad Moons, the Evil Suns, the Deathskulls, the Snakebites, and the Blood Axes, these are beautiful, well-rendered bodies of Ork nastiness that we've been writing about for decades, but they're so colourful. And they're so well-defined, much like the Space Marine chapters. So what you end up with is this really vibrant scene… there's a sense of pageantry to it all.
The heraldry, the insignia – which this book goes big on by the way – there's loads of cool insignia in here, and iconography, which I think is exceptional, and it's really useful for you to be able to paint that on the shoulder pad or on the knee pad. If you want to get into it to that degree of accuracy of what the campaign markings are, it's all in there for you.
We talked to the miniatures team, and they were talking about all the flat panels they'd left on things like the Ork half of the Armageddon box set, and there's a space on the banner for your clan glyph or whatever, and the idea that you could take your inspiration directly from the book and really lean into that story is quite compelling.
That’s all for the lore, and tomorrow, we’re back with painters from the legendary ‘Eavy Metal team talking about the monumental task of painting the incredible Armageddon box miniatures. In the meantime, learn more about Ghazghkull in the Black Library novel, Ghazghkull Thraka: Prophet of the Waaagh!.
