🗺️ Factional History: Tracing the Cultural Coding of Total War: Warhammer 3’s “Immortal Empires” Map (forthcoming)

Extended Abstract: In early 2022, Creative Assembly released the long-awaited conclusion to the Total War: Warhammer trilogy. As with the first two games in the series, Total War: Warhammer 3 (TW:W3) introduced a selection of new playable factions that players could choose to control over the span of a multi-hour 4X strategy campaign. Many of the series’ previously released factions had obviously taken some thematic—though often superficial—inspiration from real-world histories and cultures. For example, the Lizardmen’s feathery fashion and stone architecture strongly recall the Aztec Empire, and the Tomb King’s mummy-like units and pyramids bring to mind many popular representations of Ancient Egypt. This historical grounding continues on into TW:W3, with the three new humanoid factions—Kislev, Cathay, and the Ogre Kingdoms—each having been based on the Russian, Chinese, and Mongolian empires, respectively. In addition to introducing these historically-rooted factions, Creative Assembly also released a new game mode called “Immortal Empires” that connected together all of the series’ previous factions and campaign maps into one seamless fantasy world for players to explore and conquer. Significantly, this enormous, completed map makes it abundantly clear that the Warhammer Fantasy setting that the Total War: Warhammer series is based within is only a slightly skewed version of Earth with many familiarly shaped continents, waterways, and land masses. This chapter builds on previous game studies scholarship on the imperialist qualities of videogame cartography (Mukherjee 2015, 2021), how race is handled within fantasy settings (Higgins, 2009; Young, 2016), and the history and culture of Games Workshop and the Warhammer brand (Cova et al., 2007; Williams & Tobin, 2022), in its examination of how power functions within and outside of TW:W3. As the three Eurasian factions that Creative Assembly chose to feature in TW:W3 are all based on pre-existing miniatures and/or published lore books from the tabletop game, this chapter will argue that TW:W3 uniquely functions as a synthesis between historical gaming and videogame history. In building this argument, this chapter also addresses the following research questions: How does the ethnic coding of a particular faction within a strategy game impact the way that its more vaguely themed factions are read? How does a deliberately authored starting position on an Earthlike map influence how players ethnically and/or racially read any given faction? What are some of the problems involved with mapping a fantasy world to the real world when some of its factions are depicted as monstrous and/or evil? And finally, to what extent is the Warhammer franchise bound to its own often problematic history of racial and ethnic stereotyping? To answer these questions, this chapter methodologically engages in textual analysis of the Total War: Warhammer series and paratextual analysis of articles and forum discussions where Warhammer fans (both the original tabletop game of the franchise’s many digital adaptations) have speculated on the relationship between the game’s factions and real-world cultures and histories.

Keywords: Total War, Warhammer, power, strategy, colonization, postcolonialism, maps, factions, Eurasia

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Recommended citation: Bailey, A. (2024). “Factional History: Tracing the Cultural Coding of Total War: Warhammer 3’s “Immortal Empires” Map.” In Depictions of Power: Strategy and Management Games, edited by Simon Dor, Bloomsbury