Games Workshop loves to bring back characters over and over again across the long histories of their tabletop games. They can die and be resurrected; they can vanish off the face of the universe, only to come back hundreds or thousands of years after the fact; reports of their deaths can be greatly exaggerated. But usually that’s reserved for some very big guns: ancient, enduring superhumans that can cheat death and vast, otherworldly beings that can come back from the brink over and over. It’s a touch rare when the person doing the Somehow Returning is just a guy.
But “just a guy” is certainly no real way to refer to Commissar Sebastian Yarrick, one of the most revered commanders of the Imperial Guard (or rather, the Astra Militarum, as they’ve come to be known since the last time he was particularly relevant to 40K‘s lore)—who’s now back after years of mysterious absences and rumors of his final death for another round of ork slaughter.
This week Games Workshop confirmed that it would soon be returning Warhammer 40,000‘s narrative to the planet Armageddon, which has often been locked in never-ending war (in a future where there is, of course, only war) between its defenders and the various enemies of the Imperium of Man—but most notably against the ork hordes of Ghazghkull Thraka, who have besieged the planet in multiple attempts across the 41st millennium and been pushed back time and time again.
Naturally, because this is also a tabletop wargame we’re talking about, that means new miniatures are on the way. GW has already teased some new updates for the orks, but they need someone to fight against—and that someone, it turns out, is Old Bale Eye himself, making his first appearance in 40K‘s story for four years, since the 9th edition codex for the Astra Militarum removed the character as a legal miniature in active competitive play and seemingly indicated that he’d finally fallen in battle. Turns out he’s very much not dead! And he’s very excited to fight some orks.
Yarrick is perhaps one of 40K‘s best-known characters, especially in terms of figures in the lore that aren’t directly related to the Space Marines in some fashion, perhaps because of exactly that: he’s the rare human figure in the game’s worldbuilding to have gone through an absolutely bonkers amount of should-be-fatal events and come out of it on the other side mostly unscathed. We say mostly, of course, because one of the most defining features of the character is that he replaces his right arm—lost in a battle against an ork warboss during the Second War for Armageddon while defending a Hive City from seemingly certain destruction—with the power klaw wielded by that warboss, making him a legend among human and ork-kind alike.
Yarrick represents the kind of human ingenuity and grit that makes Warhammer such a fun setting, where even in a universe of absolute horrors an ordinary human can survive and thrive through an almost comical level of simply refusing to die, so it’s only fitting that as the game prepares for a new edition on the horizon, a return to Armageddon means a return to Yarrick. He might look a bit long in the tooth at this point, but you can’t keep a good guardsman down.
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