Games Workshop Hints At Major Warhammer 40,000 Story Development

Games Workshop has been on a roll of late, with no end of new games, rules and models arriving on shelves. Besides the smash hit of Kill Team, the new Titan game has gained no end of attention and the recent campaigns have proven to be supremely popular. The point is, the company has entered a new golden age, and a major part of that can be put down to their vastly improved use of social media. We've seen promos, we've seen trailers (including this glorious creation) and we've seen humourous tutorials, all to help build a sense of community. Well, now we have more hype thanks to posters like this one:

This is a recent development, offering little more than a simple message and some blurry images. However, there are enough general hints here to have gotten more than a few people hyped, especially with the timeline now moving forward. The suggestion of something new and big having been found in the galaxy is enough of a major revelation, but then you have the implication of this being "a" new subject rather than simply new, implying a number of things. The big one, of course, is the idea that this might well be a primarch. Most of the loyalists now have a backdoor to justify their reintroduction into the setting. With El'Jonson taking a nap inside the Rock and Khan possibly lost within the Webway it would be easy to work them into the narrative, while Russ' quest would carry a big impact. The traitors are even easier to work into battles, and people have been wondering when Angron might show up given the bloodshed going on.

However, while the general return of the primarchs is a major ongoing event, they seem like the sort of thing Games Workshop would use sparingly. They have a very limited number of them, after all, and there's only so many times you can build hype around the idea of their resurrection into the modern timeline. Others have instead looked to focus on secondary sources for inspiration, or generally the sort of elements which will cause just as big a splash but will come across as a major surprise. This has led to more than a few fans predicting that a Blackstone Fortress might have shown up. Given how seemingly important these ships were, and the fact one was gifted to Huron Blackheart, that is entirely possible. It's also a subject which was given more credence thanks to Janus Draik's name appearing on a to-be-released novel about those fortresses.

The idea of the Blackstones being a source of interest is the most likely of several rumours, but that's simply the tip of the iceberg here. The mention of rogue traders - a subject that the main Warhammer 40,000 series rarely uses beyond a few fluff mentions - has led to some wondering if we are about to see trader crews emerge as a new army. Ad hoc groups of marines, xenos, mercenaries and the like have been the subject of multiple fan codices, after all, and the last major nostalgic kick the company used proved to be very profitable. It was the Imperial Knights, so it was going to have an advantage, but the point still stands. Especially as, going by those blurry images, this lot apparently have some big walkers of their own.

Even atop of that, however, due to the name of the trader in question. Janus Draik is a newcomer to the setting, and has not been seen before. However, Janus Drake is a very old name associated with a dangling plot thread from a William King novel by the name of Farseer. In it, the aforementioned Rogue Trader operated alongside an Eldar Fareer by the name of Auric Stormcloud in a hunt to claim an eldar relic. By the end, Drake's body had been hijacked by the Farseer due to a spirit stone implanted within his body. Given the hints of a major conflict with the Necrons (both due to a mention during the Gathering Storm about several Craftworld Eldar and Necron battles, and a multitude of other suggestions in their own codex), and the Farseer's own zealous personal crusade, the re-introduction of the character isn't out of the question.

This is, as ever, simply speculation, and it will be only a short while until we get a few answers. Whatever the result, however, they should be quite interesting indeed.