A History of Warhammer 40,000 Rogue Trader in 5 Less Obvious Objects - Part Four - Space Vampires!
Why the space-gothic was a key part of what makes 40K so, well, 40K.
This edition of the newsletter is part of a series of posts inspired by a Grognard Files podcast episode that looked at the history of the RPG company Chaosium. In that episode Chaosium boss Rick Meints talked about 5 items from the companies history. Interestingly, Rick picked 5 less obvious objects and in the process made it a fun journey. I’m doing the same thing, so not going for the obvious things - e.g. the release of 40K Rogue Trader itself, RTB01, Realm of Chaos etc. The series of ‘A History of Warhammer 40,000 Rogue Trader in 5 Less Obvious Objects’ can be found here.
Part Four - Space Vampires!
Vampires are very much a cultural touchstone of horror and gothic fantasy. Set in our past, Dracula is a fantastical novel whereby a group of heroes attempt to stop the global threat of vampirism as it arrives at the shores of late Victorian England. As such while most of Dracula/vampire adaptions are also set in the past, a handful of creators have sought to imagine them as monsters of the future. In the 1935 story ‘The Shambler from the Stars’ by Robert Bloch, vampires become more SF as they are depicted as trans-dimensional beings. The 1976 novel ‘The Space Vampires’ by Colin Wilson has them as energy sucking, body-transferring horrors (later made into the 1985 film ‘Lifeforce’.
In the 1965 film ‘Planet of the Vampires’ they become body-stealing corpse-reanimators from an alien world. This in-turn inspires Alien, which in turn, is one of the many SF media artefacts that inspires 40K.
So why am I writing about Space Vampires? I feel it represents the cultural inspiration and evolution of gothic horror into a new SF setting, that of Rogue Trader. So while D&D casts an influential shadow of fantasy and the genre into space, the creatures from the shadows of our nightmares such as Star Vampires, bring the gothic horror into space. Without these inspirations, 40K does not have that gothic horror element that will become the 40K we know and love.
(Image - Two human crew members take cover behind the landing gear of a spaceship. A still from the 1965 film ‘Planet of the Vampires’. Source here.)
So while the Star Vampire of mythos fame was far from new to Games Workshop; White Dwarf 56 back in 1984, where a Call of Cthulhu scenario set in the far future, would feature a Star Vampire. (One could think of its appearance casting a cosmic shadow perhaps foreshadowing the SF-fantasy crossover to come?) Rogue Trader would have its own take on the SF vampire, titled simply ‘Vampire’. On pages 205/206 of Warhammer 40,000 Rogue Trader we get this Vampire stat block as monster that the GM can drop into play:
(Image - Combined image from pages 205/206 of Warhammer 40,000 Rogue Trader, combined by author)
The Rogue Trader version of a SF vampire has a melding of ideas - it has the bat-like form and shapeshifting of gothic fame, it draws on psychic energy-feeding that is also in the 1976 novel The Space Vampires, and it has parasitism that is also in 1965’s Planet of the Vampires. Plus it shares the the corpse-animating/mind-hopping abilities of both the preceding items.
While the horrors of the Chaos gods, ossification of the Imperium and the ship-swallowing-storms of the Warp will all transcend the space vampire for gothic-space horror, the initial inspirational infection comes from creatures such as these blood-sucking beings and ensured that Rogue Trader was never only going to be SF - it was going to be much more!
Thanks for reading!
PS. A few links of note:
I also wrote about ‘The Meme-ification of Gaming’ on my other newsletter.
Note! There is more about this project here. The direct chat for this project is here. You can comment here or find me on BlueSky.
Also note! This book project is a personal one and not affiliated with any company that, in my day job, I work with or partner with.
Today when people mention space vampires in relation to 40K, they almost immediately go to blood angels. I expected that to at least get an acknowledgment in the text when I saw the headline. It might make a good lead, because while I own a copy of Rogue trader, I didn't even remember it having vampires. Mephiston's original and contemporary's sculpts lean into the stereotype of the vampire lord for sure with lots of Gothic vibes when he's portrayed in stories... there's also the Blooddrinkers, which is right on the nose...
This time I feel I'm disagreeing with you. Vampires mostly faded out of Rogue Trader in a very quick and unspoken of manner, and they ended up being nothing more than one of the fantasy tropes that filled up the book and then were easily forgotten for years. Their role also somewhat was overlapping the Enslavers' one, and Enslavers were more interesting (while still also losing immediate traction - but they then had more luck as years, editions and fiction went by).