Warhammer 40K: The Land Enigma

What doesn’t Games Workshop want you to know about Arkhan Land? 

Everyone has heard of the Land Raider, one of the most iconic vehicles in the 41st millennium. But do you know that it’s not called that because of raids over land, it is called that because it was rediscovered by renowned technoarchaeologist Arkhan Land. It’s really Land’s Raider.

Of course you know this, dear reader! It’s one of the best stupid things in Warhammer. It’s our hobby’s equivalent of when Viggo Mortensen broke his toe for real when he kicked that Uruk Hai’s head in The Two Towers. You just have to let everyone know. I try to tell everyone I know this in every game where I run a Land Raider. It’s one of the classics and for good reason.

Then you hit them with the Land Speeder, and after that they’re eating candy out of your hand. If you bring this witty anecdote with you to an event, you’re sure to get tons of sporting votes. This has worked for me for 100% of the best sporting votes I’ve ever won (0 of 0).

In this article, I want to explore the other vehicles Land invented or rediscovered. We’ll start with the stuff you know about, then the ones that only I know about.

I am the world’s foremost expert in Arkhan Land. I’ve spent 12 full months of journalism researching this article and performing technoarcheology of my own. I’ve dug through archives, interviewed gamers much older than me, investigated old White Dwarves, and read poorly maintained wikis. At points, I even made use of the forbidden “Wayback Machine”, which soundly like something Land might himself have found in the Librarius Omnis. I think I’m getting paranoid.

Established Lore

Land was in charge of a multi year expedition into the continent-spanning “Libarius Omnis”, looking for a big STCs database. He failed but he did find four usable STCs:

1. The Land’s Raider Main Battle Tank, known later as the Proteus. All the other Land Raiders reference this one, the Explorator, the Phobos, the Redeemer, the Crusader, the Terminus Ultra, dozens more. Land discovered the basis of all these tanks.
2. Land’s Crawler, a multi-purpose heavy utility vehicle. This is basically a truck, tower or tractor, used in farms and factories across the galaxy.
3. Land’s Engine, used in the construction of the Onager Dungecrawler deployed by the Adeptus Mechanicus.
4. The anti-gravetic plating used in Land’s Speeder, and all its resulting variants.

The only question left: what other vehicles of Imperial design did Arkhan Land also have a hand in?

1. The Land Behemoths are enormous warmachines that are the mobile fortresses of the Iron Hands. We learn about these in the Voice of Mars, and they seem to be the equivalents of the Mechanicum Ordinatus engines in terms of firepower and size. This absolutely sound like it’s really Land’s Behemoth.
2. Land Leviathans are also enormous custom-built vehicles, designed as weapons of war by individual Mechanicum Archmagi. It stands to reason that Land built one first for himself, and the rest were designed by other Magos in his image. The one appears in Lord of Mars is 300m x 50m; a pretty big vehicle.
3. Meanwhile, a Land Carrier is a big wheeled aircraft carrier that Chaos forces used in the Sabbat Wars crusade. They must have stolen this idea from the big man.

The Imperial spaceship which discovered the Tau was called “Land’s Vision”. Coincidence? I think not. It’s obviously Arkhan Land’s personal spaceship!

Squats

Everyone has heard of the Land Raider, but what about the Land Train? What about the Hekaton Land Fortress? The use of LAND simply cannot be coincidence. Everyone knows that dwarves steal things, especially intellectual property, and we all know Land likes naking things after himself.

During the Great Crusade, Land must have collaborated with the Squat Engineers Guilds and the Brokhyr of the Leagues of Votann to create these machines.

How can I confirm this outlandish claim? The Hekaton Land Fortress is named after the Hekaton which means one hundred in Ancient Greek, and Hekaton is also a type of Siege Claw used by Imperial Knights from the Mechanicum. Space Dwarves couldn’t possibly know Greek, but I bet Arkhan Land does. Clearly there has been some trading between the Leagues and the Mechanicum, and who better to do it than our own man who loves his own name: Arkhan Land.

Okay, that was the first joke I could come up with, but I need to write at least 1000 words to get paid and I need that money to buy more Space Marines. Horus Heresy is an expensive hobby. What follows is an increasingly tenuous and hopefully humorous list of naming coincidences, or as I now call them “Land’s Nomenclature”.

High Gothic

Now for a clustered set of Land’s inventions that may not line up perfectly with the normal naming convention, but seem pretty convincing suggestions that Land was involved.

The Skyshield Landing Pad is a repeating, universal and reliable piece of equipment used across the Imperium, just like his Raiders, Speeders and Crawlers. Land’s Pad doesn’t really roll off the tongue as much, so I support our boy Arkhan changing the naming format around.

The Landrian Militia are a random Imperial Guard regiment that shows up in the Deathwatch RPG. If I were as important as Arkhan Land, I’d certainly arm and deploy my own private army.

The more you start digging, more terrifying thoughts poke their heads above the murky waters of possibility. High Gothic is Latin. Earth in 40k is called Terra. You know what Terra means in Latin? You know what Ground / Terra / Earth is a synonym for?

LAND.

Arkhan Land obviously invented, rediscovered or indeed created the planet of Terra. You know what Terra is? The planet Earth. The place we are standing on right now. The terrifying truth has come to light; we cannot simply search the 40k universe for things Arkhan Land could have discovered, but we have to investigate our own history.

We’ve been on Arkhan’s Land since the start. Earth could very well be Land’s Planet. This has Arkhan’s grubby hands all over it.

Entering the Real World

When I first started my spiralling investigation of this topic, I simply presumed that Land’s Raider was just a poorly conceived joke about Land Rovers. This was funny at the time, but the more I think about it, if Arkhan invented or rediscovered the Earth, then maybe he was behind the Land Rover also. They’re a reliable machine used in farms across the galaxy, just like Land’s Crawler. Maybe rich people in 40k drive around cities in Land’s Crawler’s they don’t need, just like in real life.

Land Cruisers are also on the cards.

My next question was this: who sells the most Land Raiders out of anyone on the planet except GW? Wayland Games. After inventing time travel, Land must have been interested in making some quick and dirty cash out of his creations and decided to invest in miniature wargaming.

Is Arkhan Land the shadowy investor behind Wayland Games? Is he its owner or co-founder? Who is “Richard Lawford” really that LinkedIn tells me owns this company? I desperately tried to rearrange the letters of Richard Lawford’s name to spell Arkhan Land, but it simply wasn’t possible.All I could get was ‘railroad’. You can get to ArKhaN LaNd though. Arkhan is a smart guy, he could have swapped the C for a K, and used the 2s N to make a W. Am I a fool, or is this man just a front for a sprawling conspiracy throughout fiction and reality???

Perhaps Land was interested in making some quick and dirty cash out of his creations and decided to invest in miniature wargaming.

(Dear Editor: Do we have an affiliate link for Wayland? Can we get a kickback for this joke? If we don’t have one, is it worth me emailing someone at Land Rover?)

There are more possibilities here… Disney Land, Landmarks, the film Land Before Time, Land Tax, Lando Calrissian, the Land Registry, Orlando Bloom, Land Speed Record, the Land Down Under (Australia), the Landsknecht??  Once you realise that Arkhan may have been founding entire countries, you can see how deep the rabbit hole goes.

Arkhan vs Arkham

I conceptualised and workshopped most of this article while pissed after a Goonhammer Open and eating an enormous curry at a superb Indian restaurant called Herb. As a result, my initial notes are pretty shoddy. In my inebriation it seems I was struggling to spell the word Arkhan correctly:

As a result, I present this (entirely unedited) section of the notes from my phone:

Land’s Lord. Does Arkham Land own property? 

Arkhan the Cruel. Joe Manganiello from Critical Role. 

Arkhan the Black, Mortarch of Sacrament. AoS Crossover? 

Landsraad. Arkhan Land in Dune. Dune predates Warhammer? 

Arkansas. Does he own a state? Where does Kansas fit into this? 

Arkansas -> Arkham’s Saw. Logging or forestry management? 

Cthulu Arkham. Is HP Lovecraft a Land Raider?

Arkham Asylum. Jeremiah Arkham. Does Arkham Land know Batman?  

Please send help. I am lost. Send all opinions on options we could have missed to contact@goonhammer.com with the subject line “please delete this email” cos I know the core team have to deal with enough stupid emails as it is.

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