Warhammer Taught Me to Read

Anyone else had their first brush with literature at the Black Library?

When I was 10, I struggled with words. I loved books, but only when my father would read them to me. Children’s classics like The Silver Sword passed under my nose, but I gleaned more than a vague sense of what they were about (even Sally the Seagull pushed me beyond my tolerance for frustration). I had no idea this was unusual for my age and thought I was doing really well at school. Since then, I've wonder if my teachers ever noticed, but I was surprisingly proficient at cheating on tests, so perhaps they never realised it was holding me back.

In retrospect it seems obvious I had classic dyslexia – an otherwise smart kid who had a very limited capacity to read. And it might have stayed that way, if not for a fortunate stumble into a new store. It was called the ‘Games Workshop,’ but it didn’t sell computer games and toys. It sold tiny figurines and paints. I’d never seen a tabletop battle game before and as the staff tutored me through a skirmish between silver-clad elves and goblins in shadowy cowls, I was entranced by the models and the concept of battling it out with dice.

I demanded a copy of the game for Christmas. And I got it, or…something? It had the name Warhammer on the box, but then the number 40,000? And there weren’t elves and goblins, but stormtroopers with machine guns and orcs with pistols. Not orcs, ‘Space Orks.’ I was initially disappointed. Where were my elves? And another thing, it came with three huge rule books. Three! Try as I might, I couldn’t persuade my dad to read those to me.

At first, I just flicked through the books, looking at the pictures of guns and gorgeous models. I could imagine how awesome it’d be to actually have a battle. I tried to read the rules and failed. Tried again. Tried again. Got them wrong. Tried again. I just really wanted to play a game! Eventually it stuck. And I started to read the lore too. These weren’t storm troopers, but Blood Angel Space Marines – the coolest set of action heroes I’d ever known.

Slowly, understanding came and with it, that capacity for reading grew as well. I was hungry for lore and I read whatever Games Workshop’s Black Library put out. Then I moved on to other sci-fi. Pretty soon I was so in love with this genre and I was writing my own.

I never did get those silver-clad elves. But I guess, in many ways I was capturing my own when I started the Of Shepherds and Mages trilogy.

So, you know...Thanks Warhammer.