The absence of breakfasts
Jasper Fforde's third Thursday Next book begins with his detective character on a witness relocation program living inside a novel. One of the things she has to adjust to is the absence of breakfasts.

I think it's not that all fiction lacks breakfasts though, but pulp ones tend to. And it's a nice short hand to break down the difference between certain media - it's a summary of a kind of detail level, and a sense of humanity. Conan does not have breakfast. Luke Skywalker - no toast, muffins or hash browns. The reason Spiderman was such an influential superhero is because he was the first superhero to HAVE breakfast. Buffy has breakfast a lot...but Alias? No breakfast at all.

See where we're going here?

Now, when Bambra, Gallagher and the other guy came up with the Warhammer fantasy world, they had both roleplaying and wargaming in mind. And in their roleplaying ideas, they put in a lot of breakfast concepts. In fact, you could say that the whole difference between WFRP and D&D is that D&D lacks any breakfasts at all. NOT to impune D&D, but it has a focus, and it's away from breakfast. But WFRP - it's all about the breakfast. That's really a huge part of why it rocks.

BUT when they came to do 40K, they didn't have to do any RPG elements. Instead they focussed on wargaming, and producing a world where wargaming was the lifeblood. The result? No breakfast. Not in the 40K world. Sure, the intensity is done so over the top it can't help but be silly at times, but it's the kind of silliness that's played dead straight. If it wasn't, it wouldn't work.

But point is: 40K has no breakfasts. Inquisitor Antioch has no muffins before crushing a planet beneath his feet, except to demonstrate contrast between the two activities. That is to say, any breakfasts appearing would be epic breakfasts.

Now there's nothing wrong with this at all. As I said, D&D has no breakfasts, and neither does Vampire. A lot of great games have no breakfast (and one of the nice things about Shadowrun is it swung both ways, which is also possible). But WFRP was all ABOUT the breakfast. So the 40K RPG, when we see it, is probably not going to be to the 40K wargame what WFRP is to WFB. It won't bring the breakfast in. Nor do the wargames match that much to begin with.

What I'm taking a very long time to say is that 40K is a very different aesthetic to Warhammer. Much less humour, no history, no sense of grift and graft, a far less humanistic and breakfast-based approach, replacing it instead with a kind of passion play focussed on the virtues of men under fire shining more brightly in the hell that they find themselves in. It's going to be really interesting getting my head around that and making it work for me. To go from breakfasts to passion: that's my task.

Wish me luck!