Leagues of Votann Introduction and The State of The Tabletop
The Interdependent Arising of Metas across Video and Tabletop Games
To the rejoice and chagrin of many, the 10th edition base Codex of Warhammer 40K has released, with another primarch returning after 10,000 years, Lion El’Jonson. In the spirit of resurrecting older lore and factions, GW has removed the term “squat” from the lexicon of grognards bemoaning the loss of old bits of lore due to profitability. But is this term truly gone?
Sure, the “Squats” have returned (which in lore is now considered a slur, per GW’s new inclusivity policy), but is it for love of the game and the world in which it is set? Let’s find out.
A few years back, a game called Deep Rock Galactic was released on PC and console. The premise is the players form a team of space dwarves mining asteroids infested with alien bugs. You couldn’t make a more obvious Squats vs. ‘Nids game if you tried. The game reached popularity in lockdown, as many multiplayer games did for folks who had internet access and friends but couldn’t meet them. The simple premise and intense gameplay made for a great afternoon running missions, and for those with an aesthetic bent, the barebones lore of drunken short roughnecks slaughtering alien arthropods for profit was quite the inspirational fire for the imagination.
Meanwhile, many studios have kissed the ring of GW to make many truly enjoyable video games within the IP. Mechanicus is a good turn-based tactical game (so I’m told, that particular genre isn’t my cup of caff.) Darktide released to rave reviews from players, being the 40k answer to Vermintide everyone asked for.
It’s no secret GW is always on the lookout for infringement, as their new fan-creation policy doesn’t mince words over their hawkish attitude towards parody (requiescat in pacem, If the Emperor Had A Text-To-Speech Device). I’m sure someone at GW had their blood boiled by the popularity of a game that could very easily fit in their IP and they never saw a cent of it. Surely there must be a market demographic overlap. Surely we could do the opposite and bring Deep Rock Galactic to the tabletop. Enter the Leagues of Votann.
The base lore of the Leagues of Votann is very much a justification for their absence from models and fluff for decades and their reintegration as a Deep Rock Galactic army for folks who wanted exactly that (and I can name a few members of that target demo I know personally.) Long before the first true expansion of humanity into the galaxy, at the beginning of the Dark Age of Technology, the Kin (the squats’ name for themselves) were sent into the galactic core in sub-light generational ships on The Long March. Instead of being simple abhumans who are particularly short and thick, they are clones made from enough genetic material to ensure physical integrity. This also pre-dates the War with the Men of Iron, so robots are treated as inorganic brethren within the Kin. Their society is ruled by an Abominable Intelligence they almost-worship (a true religious mythos is a faux-pas in SFF these days) called The Votann. It’s made up of all of Old Earth’s knowledge, plus the knowledge of the Kin that die and get their consciousness (organic or artificial) reuploaded to it; a neat way to work in the fantasy trope of dwarven ancestor-worship to a modern 40k audience. Now for the grimdark side of things: this AI wasn’t made to last 10,000 years, and is full of the experiences (many of which are illogical and irrational) of 10,000 years of abhumans in the hellish galactic core, which means it’s going insane, like a PC forced to update to Windows 11 when it’s been running Windows 7 perfectly fine for a decade.
Other fantasy dwarven tropes include a sacred hearth for each hold, dwarves being born from stone carved by other dwarves (in this case the kin are born from ‘crucibles’ under the will of Votann), and being mostly immune to magic (their genes have dampened their souls in the Warp, making them less susceptible to Chaos). All this to bring the very bog-standard Deep Rock Galactic dwarves to Warhammer 40K. But this cannot be for love of the old fluff or because suddenly a bunch of folks at GW decided that DRG was their new favorite pastime and they just had to have it in the tabletop. No, this was to capture a new demographic, and to make sure it wouldn’t become deadweight later, they made it the new meta.
Others have covered how the Leagues of Votann have broken the meta, so I’ll just summarize: they have all the best features of all the strongest armies of the previous metas, and they do it for much cheaper in terms of points-per-model. They negate almost any advantage another army might have and they do what other armies do better and cheaper. Anyone who has the time and dough to spend on plastic and paint will now have an army of space-dwarves to field against space marines, eldar, orks, tyranids, and every other denizen of the galaxy. And until a new codex is released to counter them, or Emperor forbid 11th edition, they’ll rule the meta, just to make sure GW has all the cash it can milk from introducing a new faction made purely to integrate a game they wish they had made.
All this being said, it’s not exactly like I can call for a boycott; GW, WOTC, Paizo, and others seem to be too big to fail. So, when they pull stunts like GW’s fan content policy or D&D’s OGL 1.1, it doesn’t matter the backlash, they can just print more money and do as they please. I suppose the reason I’m writing this is to inform the reader of the state of tabletop games. It’s up to you how you engage with the hobby from here on out.