We may have found the least violent Warhammer 40k fan game ever made – a digital dress-up game that allows you to choose outfits for the Dark Eldar Archon Aestra. Created by graphic designer and illustrator Jet Black Raider, who has been making exquisite Drukhari fan art for seven years, ‘Dress Up Aestra’ is free to play now, and has everything from battle gear, to red-carpet dresses, to extremely skimpy lingerie.
New Zealand based Jet Black Raider (aka JBR) has twenty years experience as a graphic designer, as well as being a long-time Warhammer 40k fan. She started drawing the Drukhari Archon Aestra, and a cast of her flunkies, rival, and hangers-on, in 2018. “I was too embarrassed to commission the art I wanted”, she says, “so I started sketching it out myself”.
She decided to create the Dress Up Aestra game as an alternative to drawing daily illustrations for the Inktober 2024 challenge. It’s essentially a digital paper doll: you can dress Aestra with all sorts of clothing pieces, and there are plenty of accessories and hairdos to style her with.
Dress Up Aestra is freely available on Itch.io, but clicking ‘clear’ to reset Aestra’s clothes will strip her down to her birthday suit – so this probably isn’t a game to play around your co-workers, elderly grandparents, or local religious leaders. You’ll find JBR’s illustrations on both Tumblr and Bluesky, but be advised that some of them are not safe for work at all.
JBR explains her fascination with the Drukhari: “The contrast is my favourite part”, she says, “the mix of a delicate and refined fae combined with the worst behaviour you have ever seen”. The decadent space elves have a good claim to being the most evil Warhammer 40k faction, vampiric pirates who sustain their existence by capturing slaves from other species and elaborately torturing them to death.
She adds that “they are pretty unique in 40k in that they have their own city-state/rabbit warren, Commorragh, which is a character in itself”. The Dark City is a den of horrors that defies human comprehension, but it’s also the set for one of the cattiest soap operas in the 40k canon, as rival Archons vie for power, pleasure, and profit.
JBR’s cartoons are witty, casting the Drukhari as hot messes with high opinions of themselves. Her illustrations often catch them in undignified moments that deflate their mystique – evil overlords with bad hangovers and last night’s vomit drying on their high-heeled boots.
JBR says she’s inspired by “so many” other illustrators. “’20s to ’70s illustration is my favorite, but I’m constantly finding more”, she says. “Ronald Searle is the GOAT”, she adds, calling him “darkly humorous, whimsical, and brilliant”. Searle drew “everything from schoolgirls smoking to war crime trials to cats”, and though his “work looks effortless… every line is precise”.
JBR’s illustrations also capture her love of couture clothing, with her Drukhari always immaculately turned out (though often in a state of disarray). Some of the clothing items in Dress Up Aestra were inspired by the work of real world designers.
You can dress Aestra up in a slashed gown that resembles a look from Iris van Herpen’s Sensory Seas collection from Spring 2020, or give her a massively ornamented choker resembling a pair of lungs, similar to the Golden Lungs from the Schiaparelli Fall 2021 Couture collection.
While Dress Up Aestra has totally different gameplay to most Warhammer 40k games, it has more in common with the creative side of the hobby than any shooter or strategy game. Painting model Space Marines isn’t that far from playing dress up with dolls – you’re taking a plastic avatar of a character and creatively personalising it so that it looks just right and tells the story you want it to tell.
For another femme-coded take on the Warhammer 40k hobby, make sure you check out the Hello Kitty themed Space Meowrines. Or if you’d rather dress yourself up like a Warhammer character, check out our interview with Beol Miller, chief creative officer at Burgschneider, the firm creating official Warhammer cosplay and reenactment clothing.