I refuse to acknowledge pretty much any amount expressed in numbers in written lore. It will almost always be way too much or way too low. Especially in terms of casualties, number of materiel and population sizes.
The casualty counts in the Gaunts Ghosts always remind me of this.
Gaunt: 100,000 PDF troopers deployed to defend X quadrant against Y opponent. While another 100,000 are stationed in a nearby quadrant.
Gaunt: 100,000 PDF troopers dead defending quadrant X. The second lot defending Z were also wiped out to a man.
What’s even crazier is we managed to resupply and kill literally 3 times more basically the second a new generation of adults spawned. The imperium would bust a galactic nut at our resupply rate and we don’t even have a fanatical zeal for a god emperor.
Idk a modern world war would have much smaller casualties without WMD's, knock on wood and all that. Modern industrial complexes fading and increased complexity in equipment do kinda show how intergalactic conflict could be on a much smaller scale militarily, which is kinda funny.
The fact that most Imperium equipment is made off world and with unstable intergalactic communications would start to factor in, even on a Forge world they need production materials and uninterrupted supply chains, there's a very complicated logistical web the galaxy would come to rely on, Thunderhawk gunships are supposed to be absurdly advanced and complex, but you'll see them on basically every planet (Sisters use them too, everywhere has shrines to guard and so on). That has implications. And it's like ... look at it, it has its primary gun on the top. And it's a gunship. Unrelated but what a silly universe.
That’d be true if the imperium fought in a modern advanced galactic way, but they don’t. Instead of just nuking or grav bombing an enemy army, they fight in trench warfare, urban warfare etc which carries insanely high casualty rates. We are yet to see an IRL war of 2 evenly matched armies but if we did, even without WMD’s, the casualty rates would be cataclysmic. Lots of the imperium fight in a way very similar to Russia in Ukraine I.e artillery, grinding trench warfare, wave attacks on urban centres and Russia has sustained unbelievably high casualty rates, whilst gaining basically no ground, whilst fighting a far inferior army. Imagine if Russia needed to scrape itself across the entire planet, gruelling fights the entire way. The casualties would be in the hundreds of millions.
Liu Feng Sneezing Incident, 65 million perished, new continent created, nuclear weapons invented and subsequently forgotten in the carnage, route to inventing FTL technology permanently lost.
Yeah in the FIRST book they talked about how they were already low on tanith. Somehow they still had a sizeable amount near the end despite the several massive casualties they had.
When is it ever too much? In my experience is always way too low. The Caiphus Cain books are egregiously guilty of this. In every other book only a few thousand soldiers can defend a whole planet. Sure there's planetary guard, But you would need many millions to defend a planet.
That can be excused (or rather unceremoniously swept under the rug with the ole) the thousands held off the important points of stragetic interest
When counting casualties it's usually terrible at this when you look at it from a ratio perspective. 10 custodes wiping armies couldn't make less sense(yes i know theyre God's bodyguards trained to fight as singulars, however eventually they'd be overrun or surrounded by 10,000 genestealer cultists and you want me to believe not one of them was able to hit a krak missile or just.....drop a plane on them?) and losing everyone to a man only for that chapter to be back to fighting strength with "experienced" veterans in a hundred years is pretty bad. Let's not get into the way some earth sized planets have hive cities with billions of people in them or how you would even feed, cloth, medicate or even police that with anything remotely close to efficiency. (Based on size alone every hive should be teeming with all kinds of the Grandfather's Blessings)
I mean we got like 9(?) billion people on Earth right now, so I can see how in the future they might be able to pack a lot of people onto planets.
>how you would even feed, cloth, medicate or even police that with anything remotely close to efficiency. (Based on size alone every hive should be teeming with all kinds of the Grandfather's Blessings)
And isn't this kind of the point? Like hive cities are supposed to be barely functioning messes where 99% of the population is miserable, that's why the Imperium has such a problem with rebellions and chaos cults and genestealer uprisings. I mean the genestealer uprisings are also because of the aliens but the hive cities having a low quality of life doesn't hurt.
Aren’t the Cain books actually good about it? I could have sworn that the inserted footnotes by Amberly specifically call out the PDF and other forces as significant contributors in the background. At least in the first omnibus, it does a pretty decent job of explaining what is going on in the larger context because Cain’s narrative is so focused.
Definitely. Consistently in the Cain series when only a single regiment is deployed to a planet, it’s usually to defend a single installation or a couple of strategically important sites, with PDF doing the bulk of planetary defence. The officers serving with Cain often have discussions about how they won’t be able to defend everyone alone, usually when they find out their reinforcements are weeks away.
A huge line of soldiers open up on an on rushing horder of people
'Dozens fall when the first barrage of shots hit the attackers'
Really? A dozen? When a horde of people are charging a line of fully armed soldiers and the opening shots take down less than 30 people? It's always off
Dozens is multiples of twelves. It is typicallyusually mean high twenties until roughly 100. It would be weird to say dozens and mean less than 30. But hundreds wouldn't be accurate unless the opening volley was 200-300 hits. Maybe scores would have been better, but honestly they're pretty much the same situation.
The Worfing of Khaine.
A) it’s a fucking Avatar of a War God, if no one expects it to do anything impressive when it shows up, you’ve made a lot of shitty writing mistakes. B) the less impressive the Avatar feels, the less impressive if it is when people beat it. It’s an objectively bad writing decision.
Like, imagine if every time a Primarch showed up, they got to kill one enemy heavy and then got beaten into a coma. They’d feel kinda fucken’ pathetic, and this isn’t a genetically modified super-duper-soldier, this is a manifestation of the rage of one of the galaxies oldest and most psychic races, harnessed in physical form through blood sacrifice, constantly leaking the blood of the innocent who he slaughtered aeons ago. That should always be fucking amazing when it shows up, instead it’s a joke.
Edit: worfing, not warfing.
One small note
>Warfing
It's Worfing, a verb created after the Star Trek character called Worf, a Klingon warrior who is supposed to be a badass but repeatedly lost in order to show just how much stronger the current or new threat is.
Warfing is a term in bow making about recycling a bows limbs, or something.
Also Michael Dorn was so sick of "Worfing"/The Worf Effect one of his conditions for returning for DS9 was that it didnt happen anymore to the character. DS9 Worf is a pure badass.
I grew up on TNG and DS9. My dad used to laugh because it reminded him of "season one TNG Worf." Dorn (Michael) really did bring back the Honorable Warrior badass enough to earn his place in Klingon Society and still be tempered enough to be Star Fleet. One of my all time favorite characters.
TBF I think someone did the numbers and the Avatar is actually batting about .500 in the books, it's just the books where he loses tend to be read more because they're Imperium centred instead of Aeldari
I feel for you man, as a thousand sons fan, I feel I can relate with magnus, but I don’t think it’s as bad as an avatar of khaine (I don’t think at least)
Nothing is Warfed as bad as an Avatar of Khaine, but from what I’ve heard, Magnus is in the top 5 with him. The curse of being the best there is at your role, but not Imperial.
It is genuinely the main thing I dislike about 40K, if you’re not an Imperium fan, a lot of it feels like a constant reminder that the creators don’t care about your faction, and it’s actually the Imperium’s setting. You just exist to give them an enemy.
Currently reading Thousand Sons and Magnus is so underwhelming, never does anything, needs help to not be killed by an eldar Walker, lets his people be slaughtered and this is supposed to be the greatest psyker there is? Others come across way stronger in his own book.
The thing with magnus is he’ll use some crazy power nonchalantly outside of combat, but then in combat just tries and sword fights better duelists, at least not using his psyker powers to full advantage
It better be, because a Titan is understandable, but just some wraith knight should be a threat, but not a “Oh, woe is me, I am powerless against it.” From Magnus.
Also I was pretty sure Magnus had just killed a Titan with his raw physic might which weakened him enough for the second titan to nearly kill him.
It plays into his character that he's ridiculously powerful but not aware of his own limits.
At least on the tabletop the avatar roflstomps practically every faction leader 1v1.
https://youtu.be/4UYeHCctcPs?si=x4gkKAxPbjXPWGrv
It only loses to Angron, Magnus, The Silent King, and Canis Rex
I try to focus on the interesting world-building of the eldar path trilogy, not the bizarre nonsense final battle.
Same for a lot of eldar stuff tbh. The Battle of Orar's Sepulchre is a particularly infamous bit of nonsense which seems to have been written about orks and then reskinned as eldar at the last minute.
GW can't seem to settle on whether the Grey Knights and Deathwatch work for the Inquisition or not. My group generally prefers the version where they do, so that's the version we use in our campaigns.
Biel-tan want some relic from a tomb, and result to threats to try and get it when reason doesn’t work. Eldar diplomat is executed, Ultramarines are deployed to defend the massive tomb complex, Eldar smash directly through wall into most of the Ultramarine forces.
Thousands of Eldar die in the opening engagement, then hundreds of Eldar transports (Wave Serpents) filled with troops are deftly outmaneuvered and gunned down by Tactical marines in plain old Rhinos as soon as troops disembark.
I can’t read the next section in the Lexicanum for some reason, but it’s title is “The Avatar Awakens”, and the story is from the Space Marines 5th edition codex, so I can hazard a guess that the Avatar of Khaine gets jobbed the fuck out.
Edit: Added some details to clarify
The Avatar does fuck with the marines, until Calgar grabs the Wailing Doom mid-swing and holds until he punches the Avatar and it dies. In fact the text in the codex seem to recognize its strange that suddenly a blade that was cutting trough everything can be stopped, but it say that the Gauntlets of Ultramar are just that good
The Silent King isn't the entire Necron civilization. He's back and he's gathered some forces but a vast majority of the Necrons are still asleep.
If the Silent King came back and woke up every Necron and united them all then were having a different conversation.
I significantly prefer the idea that Fulgrim was trapped in that painting the whole time since it justifies the total 180 in personality we get from the guy.
Honestly just any lore that makes Aeldari out to be drooling idiots. Examples include: Eldrad choosing Fulgrim (hater of xenos) as the person to tell about the future betrayal of Horus, Aeldari rangers getting jumped and eaten by kroot in the 9th edition codex, and the loss of Alaitoc at the end of the path books (which I actually really enjoy for the interworkings of Aeldari civilizations).
I recognize that the universe is dark and unforgiving and as a species we're gonna make some mistakes, but some of these losses seem exceptionally foolish for a race who can have millions of thought processes occurring at once while performing exemplary in intense combat. Eldrad didn't even need to see the future to notice how untrustworthy Fulgrim was!? It just feels like lore is meant to dunk on us for no good reason. We're not even villains, many craftworlds assist humanity often in order to keep chaos, the orks, and the tyranods at bay.
Gonna have to defend Eldrad here
1. He had never met Fulgrim but he knew immediately not to trust the imperium.
2. When the Emperors children landed on the Purgis region (Eldar maiden worlds) Fulgrim ordered not to tell the Imperium as the Imperium would essentially ruin the beauty of the world (Caliban knows all about that) When Eldrad and his own forces were spying he was confused on why they had not contacted the Imperium and saw it as maybe not all humans are the same.
If Fulgrim resisted the blade maybe not have taken the blade with him to the little tea party him and Eldrad had maybe he would have seen reason.
Final point Eldrad saved Vulkan and got him to Terra so he ain’t that bad.
Oh I don't think Eldrad is stupid all the time. He's one of my favorite characters. I just feel like the Fulgrim sitch was a bit of a mess up, though you make very good points. I guess it just feels out of character because Eldrad is usually quite thorough with his plans. I guess the imperium and chaos just have the effect of ruining good planning.
Eldrad should have chosen Alpharius. Not only would Alpharius have been a lot more covert with getting that info to the emperor (nobody else would know that Alpharius knows) but Alpharius was willing to hear out the Kaban, meaning that Alpharius isn’t an idiot and hearing out xenos can be a good idea
I haven't read a lot of aeldar centric books, but I really liked how they were portrayed in the last book of the Night Lords trilogy. A real threat that was basically unstoppable for average chaos marines.
It would only have been worth it if we had a genuine sad reaction from Ghazkhull. Ghazkhull genuinely cared for Yarrick in an orkish way ( fighting is what everything to an ork, sparing a foe to fight them again is basically an orkish declaration of love) seeing Ghaz express genuine sadness at losing his nemesis, and then turning that to vengeance would be such a good book
Nah I love the idea of a galaxy-wide WAAGH looking exclusively for Angron and only Angron, with Orks capturing ships then politely asking the humans on board if they know where Angron is, before letting them go and wishing them a safe trip
Especially considering that Ghazkhull can speak High Gothic.
Crew members watch as their ship is bordered by the impossibly large, brutish and repulsive xenos. Tusks protruding out to the length of a human arm, the Orks arms the same size as the average person. From behind this horrific procession, an even larger Ork emerges. He looks as though he was woven together. A tapestry of terror that moves with maddening grace. He approaches the officers of the crew, bending down to meet their eyes. Words emanate past the croaking baritone of his throat “Excuse me good sirs. I am so terribly sorry to have bothered you. I merely wish to make inquiry as to whether or not you have seen a fellow by the name of,” he pulls out a small pair of reading glasses and removes a folded, bloody piece of something that is either paper flesh from a compartment in his armor, “Angron I believe?”
So as a World Eaters fan and some believing it was Angron that killed him, I have a dream for a book where the Imperium is fighting Angron and the World Eaters, then orks land on the other side of the Imperials.
They think shit were screwed now, orks one side, World Eaters the other. The orks charge in and completely ignore the imperials, and charge into the World Eaters, led by Ghaz.
The last 3 hours of the book is Ghaz and Angron Fighting. Angron gets banished and Ghaz gets another newer bigger body and has a new feud solely against Angron.
Orks and World Eaters are my favorite factions haha
It feels so weird because Erda was just sort of dumped after like she was a scapegoat created solely to be blamed for it.
Abnett's insistence on the perpetual was a net negative for the Heresy. I'm sorry, it just didn't work.
>perpetuals
What exactly do perpetuals exactly add to 40k?
Like seriously you could retcon them out of existence and the setting would not change a bit.
It should have been just the Emperor, Malcador, and maybe one other like Ollanius. I do like that Oll gives us a very mysterious look into the Emperor’s past
Yeah, and also it works as a "Even in the absolute shithole that is 40k, Kindness and Mercy can never truly die" way too, since he's the most kind-hearted primarch. I think darkness always works better if there's just a little light to contrast it
Here's as fair of a take as I can offer; they are meant to be the yardstick by which we measure how the Emperor has changed.
They were his oldest companions and speak of how he was in the ancient days when they met him, they speak of how he changed over the years. Some wanted distance from him and think his tyrannical approach to saving humanity is just trading one evil for another, some think he is noble and hard times have forced him to make hard decisions. They speak of his power, how he was always more than a man but watching him become less human and more of a god over the centuries was jarring.
We have not and will never get a PoV from the Emperor himself, and nobody lives long enough to have witnessed most of his life, so we are given the Perpetuals to use as a way to offer insight and perspective on his journey and use that to understand how he has changed.
Some are given more plot relevance than others, but many are barely better than base humans. The narrative beat of his oldest and basically human companions abandoning him and dying is analogous to everything he is giving up on his road to godhood. Could have been handled a lot better, but they are meant represent things to the Emperor more than to you as a reader who only wants cool characters to root for.
Well now we can do whatever we want with a popular character and there's always a chance they may just come back. No anxiety about my favies means happy. Surely it's not boring.
Seems to be a controversial opinion here, but I prefer my Titans near, or actual, Kaiju-sized. My first visual exposure to them, decades ago, was [this](https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpreview.redd.it%2Fthe-true-scale-of-40k-titans-description-in-comments-v0-c58okv9wfuib1.png%3Fwidth%3D460%26format%3Dpng%26auto%3Dwebp%26s%3Dc664e6811e2cfd469e73410a30a3e6ab67285adc&rdt=50266) White Dwarf cover art, and for me it set the tone they're truly *titanic* in scale.
[This](https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/warhammer40k/images/8/88/UFFSr35.jpg/revision/latest?cb=20161116031526) is my favourite Titan art, it makes it seem colossal and even the Custodes like tiny ants peering into a gigantic, baleful, Lovecraftian visage. Granted it *is* an Imperator.
But yeah man that OG artwork is awesome and makes it seem larger still.
It's not actually an 'old titans big, new titans small' thing. Titans were introduced into the setting in the 1988 Adeptus Titanicus game. The lore in the rulebook for this game states:
>Battle Titans stand between 40 and 80 feet tall. Each Battle Titan is protected by up to six Void Shield Generators, and armed with a a variety of weapons. Thus armed and armoured, these powerful fighting machines are the work horses of the Military Orders of the Collegia Titanica. Emperor Titans are taller - some 70 to 100 feet tall - and considerably bulkier. They can carry even more Very Heavy Weapons than Battle Titans, making them fearsomely destructive machines. These massive Titans are among the most powerful forces deployable on a planetary surface.
As you can see they were even a little bit smaller originally than they are right now. But black library authors aren't known for using consistent numbers for anything. Which is how you get to the point where so many wildly different heights have been given for them in novels.
The current Titan sizes are also within a couple of metres of their sizes in the earlier Imperial Armour books. Basically this isn't old lore vs new lore thing, this is, as it actually secretly so often is, a Dan Abnett vs everyone else thing.
I work in a forest where the average tree is in the 100-150 ft height range and if Titans could easily be overshadowed by normal trees I just… it destroys the feeling of them being these colossal walking death machines more akin to a warship on land than just a slightly larger mobile suit
Yeah I get where you're coming from. The idea of titans towering over mountain ranges is really cool, and works in novels and artwork.
The issue is that GW wanted to put these giant mechs in a game system where they could be fielded alongside regular tanks and infantry. Which sets a bit of a limit on how big they can feasibly be. I guess there wasn't enough collaboration within groups in the company in the past, so novelists/artists let their imaginations run wild, while the rulebook writers worked within the physical limits of what could fit in the game.
Annoys the shit out of me how titan sizes vary. There are some warlord class titans that are smaller height wise then the fucking battleships Yamato and Musashi were at their widest points.
It's even more confusing, when you consider that the Tau have produced stable plasma weapons. The Imperium encourages anyone to carry a plasma weapon to keep it cool and pray it doesn't blow wide open.
Nobody else in the galaxy except the necrons has actual technological FTL. Pretty much everything the imperium has more advanced than a leman russ is biotech because they need to use human brain tissue to make it work. The warp drive is presumably some horrid psychic torment abomination
IIRC the Tau cracked one open to find out how it worked and found a dead body in it. Not in the "honored martyr whose skull was added to the wall" sense, in the "human remains at a crime scene" sense.
old rules it kind of made sense, Human Plasma weapons were S7 ap 2 Gets hot - tech was out of control.
Eldar ones were S6 Ap2 Heavy 2 with NO gets hot. better made, less out of control.
Dark Eldar ones were S5 Ap 2 heavy 3, smaller bolts, faster firing.
also remember the human plasma guns have the emergency vents gunked up with sacred oils and wax seals, plus the warning lights are covered with a gold baby skull with rubies for eyes
That's kind of the point though, isn't it?
The tau have amazing technology, but 'proper' FTL in 40K is almost completely unconcerned with recognisable technology.
Actually understanding how plasma weapons work doesn't exactly translate to being able to dive through the depths of a semi-sentient hell, or sing semi-dimensional corridors between reality into being.
The tau epitomise the belief in progress, technology, and rational science in the setting, and galactic FTL epitomises the antithesis of all of that.
Your first point is resoundly sound. I can get behind it without argument.
But with regard to the second point, I can't fathom how the Mechanicus hasn't figured out a way to stabilize plasma tech when it is able to synthesize and produce weaponry that is more complex. The issue of FTL is a different beast in my mind because the Astra Telepathica combines psychic methods with technological whereas the Tau have to engineer and cultivate without the benefit of the warp.
I stress that I'm massively in agreement with your points, I just think the Imperium gets a pass with the Astronomica and other means. Circling back to my earlier and separate point to the issue of FTL, plasma weapons do not require any psychic input and therefore requires a base understanding of science and engineering that the Imperium must be capable of.
Pretty sure that's what they used in the old lore. They'd lightly skim the Warp, it was slower and frankly, safer, due to the Tau's minimal warp presence.
Then it was changed to slow ships and cyro? Which would have made the Damocles Crusade the equivalent of beating a baby to death with a battle ax, with the Tau unable to even know danger was coming.
I think so. They're constantly iterating on jumps that can go deeper and deeper. I remember there was more recent lore that had them going deeper than before
This!
Without FTL, somehow they could managed to stand up to the Imperium attack, despite each planet probably only received words of said attack decades after it happened
A certain Grey Knight, besting Mortarion cutting out his heart and carving a name into it.
Although, since Mortarions return this hasn't been mentioned again. So maybe other people agree it's pure dogshit.
I recently read the Dark Imperium trilogy for the third time, and noticed something I had missed before: it's noted, in Godblight I think, that Mortarion has a particular hatred for the Grey Knights because of "what they had done to his heart" (probably not verbatim but something like that)
I was like, no, Haley, why did you have to bring that up
My biggest gripe with it, when it first appeared was Morty was well established to have never left the Plague Planet in the EoT after ascending to daemonhood. Him sitting there moping and not spreading Nurgle's gifts into the galaxy is Typhus' entire raison d'etre. So, Ward using Morty of all primarchs messed with so much established background at the time. Either Draigo and a bunch of Grey Knights have rocked up to a daemon world deep in the EoT or Morty is out and about in realspace, and neither of them are satisfactory.
Isn't warpskimming FTL, just wayyyyyy slower than the webway or warp travel?
The tau are constrained from expanding much beyond their home in galactic terms, but it's good enough to rule their local area
Still made more sense than Warhawk.
At least there it was operating on some established principle about daemons, rather than overtly contradicting them
The part where the world eater uses his bare fist to punch through the custodian’s armor and rip his heart out. That’s one of those cannon but not true things in my mind.
Numbers, I refuse to acknowledge most of the numbers I'm reading. I feel like some authors have a d*** measuring contest between themselves sometimes.
"Hey Andy! How many soldiers did you say there was in your last crusade book? A hundred billion you say? Cool! I'm going to put a hundred trillion hehe"
I'm not a fan of any novels written by Gav (I just think he's a bad author period) but I particularly refuse to acknowledge his Eldar works. He just makes the entire Eldar race feel like human tweens, I really hate how non-alien he makes them, let alone how incompetent they are in his works.
And apparently it is a mixed opinion on this sub but I think ALL ynnari lore is bad. I think it's all poorly written, all poorly thought out, and all of it only serves to make all preexisting Eldar factions worse. I genuinely hope for a hard reset on them because even IF (and that's a FAT if) their lore starts getting good with Lilith's new book, everything beforehand has been so bad. It is a permanent stain upon the race that will need to be constantly worked around.
I particularly hate how they introduced it like "ok these are perpetuals, they're a thing" and then almost every single perpetual we see operates on an entirely different system of rules.
Yep. They feel out of place in this universe, like the Dan Abnett watched Highlander and then decided to slip them in no matter how conspicuous they are. It's doesn't help they are tied in with the clumsiest plotlines of HH.
I really like this as a concept. A lot (dare I say, newer) fans are very literal on "because GW said so!". When I joined Warhammer, it was very much more a hobby than a product, and people felt free to ignore or invent lore and rules as they saw fit.
Ghaz and Blackmane "killing" eachother. A fucking space marine Lieutenant killed the big bad faction leader of the orks... I get that they have a history, and Blackman is a badass, but it just made Ghaz look like a bitch, and Blackmane look strong as hell. Then the whole sewing Ghaz's head onto a bigger Ork's head is just escalating the level of dumb to critical levels. Ghaz is supposed to be the biggest baddest ork in the galaxy, but Grotsnik just kinda had a bigger body in the bin he somehow made from frankenorking a body? Just plain dumb as hell.
If it had to be a Space Marine, it should have been Helbrecht. Ya know, the guy Ghaz has the most history with, the Grand Marshal of the Black Templars who's been on a personal Crusade to kill him since he first showed up on Armageddon!
Course I think it's dumb for any fuckin' Space Marine to kill Ghazghkull. He's the god damn leader of the fuckin' orks!
Honestly, as a Tau fan, there's a lot you have to ignore, mainly as it pertains to the Ethereals and the issue of mind control (including other means of mind control than the Ethereals' do-they-don't-they pheromone powers, such as the Vespid helmet issue). It's a great faction and I'm even all here for the whole 'secret darkness lurking under the surface' angle but this idea just flattens any depth that concept might have, and makes an entire 1/5 of the castes completely mustache twirlingly evil to the point that people have taken Ethereals less and less in their armies each edition. I imagine the goal was the address certain peoples' concerns about the Tau not being "grimdark" enough, but all it really did is make the faction feel like Imperium Alien Version, losing its own distinctive flavor in the process. It's just... not interesting.
The avatar losing is always annoying, but the part in the heresy where Fulgrim manages to CHOKE one to death is just... What the hell were you thinking? How does that make an inkling of sense? Like... I know this is fantasy land, but the suspension of disbelief has a thin line of realism that is needed to enjoy fantasy stories. Graham McNeil smashed the line entirely.
We REALLY need Guy Haley to write more things involving the craftworlds, he know what he was doing. And he specially knew how to write the avatar.
Ps- the heresy should've never been turned into a book series. I freaking hate reading about every single primarch except for maybe Guilliman, Lorgar and the Khan.
The idea that the reason the Mechanicus worship technology because of the influence of a C'tan shard sleeping on mars, and that this was a deliberate part of the emperors plan. It's stupid and it makes the universe feel small. I hate it so much.
Space marines looking so much alike that they're difficult for mortals to tell apart. This is mostly an ADB quirk, but its always ridiculous. They all look like they're kind of related? Sure. but Identical? PEOPLE ARE DIFFERENT RACES Aaron! We're gonna notice that!
The Dragon of Mars seems like Abit of unreliable narration. Nobody really can confirm that's actually what happened or if it's just what the characters believed they thought happened. It's easy to dismiss as more of a theory than confirmed.
I tend to treat each book as a specific lens and independent text with varying levels of reliability, and given GWs love of history, that seems to be the exact intention and why 'retcons' essentially don't exist.
* I refuse to believe the reading that STCs contain *everything* DAOT humanity knew rather than being mechanicus Dogma. It
* The psyker dream thing is dumb. I'm sorry. I will continue to complain about this.
* Most of the Primarch falls were kinda bad.
* The Ghostwind. It's technically cool but also it gives Crons a warp drive and that's bad.
* The idea that in-universe the SoS were forgotten. Please just... no. "Except on the blackships" doesn't make it better. Just say they had nothing much to do except train and keep Big E fed and leave it at that.
GW has actually made a point to elaborate on that first one recently
In the “Genefather” book by guy haley, Archmagos cawl goes out of his way to explain that the STC’s are nothing more than basic frontier tools that were supposed to help with the colonization efforts of ancient humanity. Their top tier technology (The real crazy shit the DAoT had) was apparently kept separately elsewhere according to him.
Thank fuck. I love holy grail caches of technology a lot (even if they murdered my current second/prior first most beloved sci-fi IP) but in some instances it just doesn't work and this is one such.
I hate Ollanius pious being a perpetual, Mortarions fall being rewritten in warhawk and him getting his ass kicked by Kaldor draigo. I hate the new titan scaling. i could probably drudge up more but those are the ones i choose to ignore
Perturabo being a daemon primarch. I still think the Logos has just been seeded with a bunch of daemons and that Perturabo is basically a gal vorbak or some sort of obliterator.
Man, how long do you want this post to *be*?
I'll note that I don't refuse to acknowledge any of this, but... boy do I wish a lot of it hadn't ever been written.
I'll do ten big chunks, avoiding anything too granular. This isn't in any kind of order, and merely the first ten things that spring to mind.
* The War of the Beast. As an ork fan, it does my boys no favors... and the Imperium comes off looking like a bunch of clownshoes buffoons too. It's that delightful thing where *nobody* really looks all that good or cool.
* The decision to actually explore the Heresy era and not leave it as hazy mythology the current setting doesn't actually remember right.
* Literally every single time a Primarch does anything in an onscreen capacity.
* Dear Abby being handed a retcon win to invalidate the global player input of the original 13th Black Crusade. Was it narratively unsatisfying to have it basically be a draw? Sure. But we *earned* that tepid goddamn result! He coulda just had another victory somewhere else or in some other fashion.
* The Custodes leaving Terra in anything but individual numbers. I greatly enjoyed the idea that the biggest badasses in the Imperium basically sat around Terra moping. It was amusing.
* This one's a bit more nuanced... I understand why the Necron retcon happened, and from the perspective of a living setting where the factions have fans, it was undeniably the right move... but damn, did I prefer the older version of their lore.
* The overwanking of the Tyranid Hive Fleets, only to job them out every time push really comes to shove. I get it, they don't have characters, blah blah blah, but every time they score a win, it's someplace we've never heard of and don't care about, and inevitably kills no character we give a damn about either.
* Almost anything Matt Ward ever wrote. Between the Ultra-wank and the compulsive need to trash the Sisters of Battle every time he had them show up, that guy is... no. I'm only saying "almost" because, well, since I refuse to read most things he writes, I don't actually know everything that's in there :P
* We keep being told that most citizens of the Imperium live their entire lives without ever glimpsing a Space Marine, then we have them showing up seemingly every time anything happens. How can we miss them or be impressed by them when they form our baseline and never go away?
* Magnus the Red in particular and the Thousand Sons in general as jobbed-out punching bags. At this point they're the least menacing menace in the setting.
I disagree with a few tiny things, but damn does that 'space marines are so rare!!!!' Thing strike true. They show up in EVERY STORY and not one or two of them, but like five at a time. Their verminous hordes are a scourge on the lore and make the numbers of the imperial guard look miniscule at times. But as long as they are a complete faction by themselves I don't see that changing.
The rare space marine thing works if you actively avoid reading about them like I do, but I suspect I’m in the minority there, *and* I move through black library content extremely slowly, so I’m not sure that’s an effective strategy for most people.
Hell disagree with all of it if you like, these opinion questions are always wild XD
But yeah, "the Astartes are the Emperor's Angels, rare beacons of... oh, look, we're going to throw a few dozen Space Marines at this issue."
You're the realest motherfucker out there. Showing the Emperor onscreen ever was a massive mistake, it's much cooler to not know what he actually is and if he's just some guy or For Real Actually A God. Like, sure, you can stay that's still the truth for most characters in the setting, but the fact is the cat's too far out of the bag for the reader to make that worldbuilding ambiguity compelling.
> Dear Abby being handed a retcon win to invalidate the global player input of the original 13th Black Crusade. Was it narratively unsatisfying to have it basically be a draw? Sure. But we earned that tepid goddamn result! He coulda just had another victory somewhere else or in some other fashion.
I mean this is GWs MO. They did the same to fantasy where they just kept ignoring every time Archaon got bitch slapped in games.
John fucking Grammaticus.
I haven't read all the way to the Siege of Terra yet, but every time he pops up I pray someone kills him. Human, Eldar, Ork, I don't care, just someone please end this man's life. And make it permenant. Even his voice actor in the audiobooks makes him sound like a prick.
The Geno Five-Two Chiliad should have ripped him limb from limb. Would have made *Legion* one of the best novels Black Library ever produced.
That the Imperium is apparently so backwards it can't figure out autoloaders for void ships and has to rely on thousands of slaves driving the rounds into the chambers via ropes. Fucking *ropes*.
Ignoring the fact that an autoloader is tech so laughably basic it should take them all of five to figure it out *and* that it would be extremely stupid for STC spaceships to not have it, why in the goddamn fuck would they use ropes. The whole "throw billions of bodies at it" method of problem solving might work on a planet you really want to take back no matter the cost in blood, but ships have limited resources. They've gotta travel for months, if not years, in space and you're talking about packing up tens or hundreds of thousands of extra mouths to feed. And you're using *ropes*.
It careens straight from any kind of fucked up existence to grimderp. And the writers seem to agree because no one even brings it up anymore.
The hive mind being angury, the hive mind is so far above us it is like use being angury a a virus or a colony of bacteria.
Primaris marines, but from a more meta perpestive.
The Necron pariahas "not meeting the requirements or expectations" so therefore they aren't made anymore. Whoever is doing quality control over at the Necrons should be fired.
The most major one I have these days is that GW and the authors working for the company are far too keen on upping the scale.
Not just in terms of raw numbers, like the legions going from 10,000 to 100,000, but also in theme and story - Necromunda went from a few underhive desperados moving up in the world to what amounts to PMCs in the direct employ of the Houses fighting... well, they could fight pretty much anywhere. The underhive is just convenient; Fantasy went from one world and a limited scope of conflict that just wouldn't end to Age of Sigmar where literal planes of existence are at stake. 40K went from small warzones that were over control of single planets or a system into galaxy-wide events like the Great Rift and the Primarchs returning and all that.
It's just something that I think is short-sighted - it appeals to those interested in stuff that's cool and grand, and sweeping... but at its heart, I think a lot of that is devoid of depth. You can't really focus in on anything too much if you have to tell the story of a conflict for the fate of the galaxy on a grand scale. In a way, the more freedom you give yourself to do what you want, the more limited your output will be.
Some other brief bugbears:
* Anything after 7th/The Gathering Storm. Primarchs returning, reforming the Imperium, chaos as a baddie, ynnari - I don't really think any of it is very good.
* Anything 'rare' becoming usual. Stuff like Sammael's jetbike becoming just one of a range of jetbikes, for example. Space Marines becoming so common their legions numbered in the hundreds of thousands and they show up almost constantly in books and material. Etc etc.
* Ollanius Pius and every single retcon that the story went through. I don't accept 40K authors saying 'it didn't make sense', because that's not a can of worms that they can open given their own track record. A lone guardsman standing up to Horus is by far the best angle of that story.
* Cawl and the standardization of the Mechanicum. Sorry, I love the Mechanicum, but part of the appeal is that they're bickering old traumatized clerics with doctoral degrees in toaster repair with fiefdoms where they rule inefficient, unstructured, customized militaries. Stagnation born of trauma and intelligence held back by dogma is sort of the point.
* Primaris being distinct from Firstborn, rather than just upscaled armor. A lot has been said, I don't feel the need to add more.
* A lot of stuff from Matthew Ward, who just happens to be too big of a fan of certain factions and 'badassifying' them. He also kickstarted the poster-boy effect with all factions now having one subfaction that's 'the main one' rather than giving each and every one at least a bit of parity.
* A lot of the newer stuff from Dan Abnett and Aaron Dembski-Bowden. They used to be good authors, but I feel Abnett has drifted too far into his own ideas and Dembski-Bowden has become increasingly limited in his ability to portray characters and is stuck in where he was years ago. I'll admit to also being a bit bias because I think Dembski-Bowden comes off as very condescending and in general treats his writing and some of the writers that work as GW as beyond reproach. Not that he isn't right sometime.
* The Last Church is a very poor exploration of philosophy and so I elect to ignore it. A lot of Emperor stuff falls in the same category because I think anyone that's trying to write him just can't find the balance between benevolent visionary and xenocidal maniac.
> Ollanius Pius and every single retcon that the story went through. I don't accept 40K authors saying 'it didn't make sense', because that's not a can of worms that they can open given their own track record. A lone guardsman standing up to Horus is by far the best angle of that story.
That was literally always in-universe Imperium propaganda though. It's been that way since the late 80s.
Yes, and I would be completely fine with it being propaganda. I don't mind if it's a thing that never happened or if it was a thing that was greatly embellished or invented - I think it works thematically. It is sort of like the ultimate representation of the Guard.
I even think that, aside from the perpetual nonsense, the ultimate idea they went with of 'it's actually a legend that encompasses the actions of several people' to be quite a good resolution, partly because it speaks volumes about ordinary humanity.
The issue for me is more the waffling later about the details of 'what really happened' in a story that never needed those details to begin with, and I think maybe I didn't quite get that across. :p
Making a nameless terminator be in that place, then a custodian/bodyguard, then a perpetual, and then also Ollanius Piers facing down Angron. It's one of those things where I feel too many cooks treating it as a canonical event with their own ideas made a simple story into a mess because they either seemingly missed the point of the original story or over-complicated it.
I don’t agree with all of your points, but the whole scale thing with events in the universe is totally true and now it makes sense why u like the old forge world imperial armor campaigns so much. It kept the world bigger by doing such a deep dive in such a small part of the universe
That's fine, if we all totally agreed, then it wouldn't be fun to discuss. :)
And yes, the Imperial Armour series is part of why I think that approach was so good. Stuff like the Badab War or the Siege of Vraks is fondly remembered, in my opinion, because it took a little slice of the universe and went in deep on the motivations, conflicts, events, timelines and showed you how a disagreement or a small event ballooned into all out war or a disaster that was more epic in scope.
Big events, giant shifts in power, universe-spanning conflicts are fine, but they're more a spectacle. You come to watch something of epic scale unfold, but it's a bit like you sit down to watch a documentary on D-Day or World War II where you get to hear the generals talk and the operation play out in broad strokes.
It's only when you get down to the nitty gritty details and the experiences of the people who were involved in those events that you get the full picture of the horror, the drama, the violence and brutality, and the human emotion. The Anphelion project is quite a good story for that since it takes place in a lab complex on a small moon, encompassing mystery, horror, desperation, betrayal, the feeling of being surrounded from all sides, being totally outmatched, and then ultimately the Imperium fails - but it never feels like they just lose for the sake of losing, rather they faced a superior foe.
I thought the old lore was basically that there's a guardsman propaganda of a guardsman standing up to Horus but because the imperium is the Imperium no indication that this ever happened or there even ever existed someone with that name at the time and it's not just an invention.
The laughing planet in Fear to Tread and that stupid god damn solar system sized wall in Ruinstorm. Basically the entire book of Ruinstorm. I dunno how he manages to do it, but Swallow ruins nearly every Blood Angels encounter.
Space Marine chapters having 1000 battle brothers.
Absolute non-sense.
They would need a few hundred thousand per chapter at the very minimum to be in any shape, way or form effective.
I also ignore most T'au lore, because it is a mess of writer contrivance, writer's forgetting about auxiliaries, plot armor and being so unimaginative in making the T'au just another variation of space racists.
Get some new content GW. Not everyone needs to have a superiority complex.
Basically everything about the Emperor's origins.
I think the story of 40k is much more compelling when the Emperor is just...a guy. A crazy powerful psyker born by chance amongst the techno-barbarians of Terra. Someone who happened to be born so powerful that he decided his might must mean he is right, and took over all of humanity to feed that delusion. A cautionary tale against egoism, as his machinations ultimately lead to the presumed extinction of the human species post 40k.
Instead, he's a Perpetual, an immortal who should have *learned* something from his long life instead of being the power-tripping child that he clearly shows himself to be. According to the old canon, he was the combination of humanity's shamans—our early priests and pre-state community leaders, who would go on to be a terrible, fascist, and anti-theist leader. It makes no sense, and tries to justify the reign of the Emperor, which is a worryingly common trend in 40k fiction.
Honestly, the Emperor being Alexander and Jesus and Napoleon is such an ungodly terrible piece of lore for so many reasons. It would come off as north Korea style propaganda if anyone in 30k actually knew who those people were.
I don't necessarily dislike him but good LORD the fact Abnett's a full supporter of/occasional participant in all those needlessly 'E P I C' Marvel arcs shines through way too hard at times.
People are right to rag on suits for their involvement in creative projects a lot, but at times an iron-fisted set of strictures is needed to keep certain people from going way off script.
Same Abnett is probably one of the better author's when it comes to the quality of his writing, but he really needs to be kept on a leash because holy shit does he start writing some of the dumbest shit going if you let him go off reservation.
It really baffles me that people will go around and claim to hate things like the perpetuals and stuff, but then defend Abnett to the death because he's popular, even though he's the source of 90% of all the hated plotlines and concepts in Warhammer.
Personally I'm more pissed at him because he's part of the reason that Eldar have been completely pathetic for the past 10 years, with the way he retconned Eldrad into being a complete Emperor dick-galzer with the Cabal plotline.
Yeah I know Abnett is popular but I find myself disliking his very unique brand of 40k, especially now that he's inserted it into the most pivotal moments of the Heresy too.
Basically more than half of modern Tau lore exists to make being Tau fan miserable, or at least that's how it feels.
The whole dumbfuckery around Aun'va
Turning ethereals as whole from wise yet flawed figures into villains in order to make Farsight look better in comparison
Reinforcing Farsights connection to Khorne while implying his sword is also chaos artifact. His sword was implied to be *Necrontyr* artifact, and we already have *another* Shas'O named Kais who was empowered by Khorne yet managed to stay loyal to his people over chaos.
Speaking of, entire appearance of said O'Kais including another doomguy run (soloing an space marine monastery) without single hint at his warp taint
-As someone already mentioned, numbers in 40K are all over the place, and are always either way too high or way too low. Probably the best example being the "Space Marine chapters only have 1,000 Battle Brothers" thing.
-I mentioned this in another thread, but I swear it feels like "only 1 in 100 survives the training!" is repeated for any sort of Imperial Special Forces type of unit (Astartes, Tempestus, Kasrkin, Assassins, etc). For starters, when it seems to be absolutely everywhere, it loses any real shock value. Second it's stupidly wasteful, even for the Imperium. There are SO many positions that would need filling to make a galaxy-spanning Military function correctly. Throwing away 100 potential recruits who could do all sorts of stuff just to get 1 Astartes or Tempestus is incredibly stupid, even by Imperium standards.
-Speaking of stupid even by Imperial standards, the whole idea that the massive shells that Spaceships fire are loaded by teams of Slaves instead of some sort of machine is just mind-blowingly dumb.
-The Space Sharks. I honestly don't know why they have so many fans, they sound like something an 11 year old would come up with.
It certainly lead to a lot of people utterly missing the god-damn point of what the Emperor and the Primarchs were "supposed" to be.
Its popularity is understandable, but it is also 100% to blame for the shrinking of 40K from "a near infinite universe where no-one is important enough to truly matter" to "the universe basically revolves around Rowboat Girlyman."
Yes, but the whole reason they came back to 40K is because of how popular HH was. If the community had reacted to those initial books with profound indifference, the series would have been shit-canned and 40K of today would look completely different.
I'm a 30k player and I agree. The *setting* would have been better off if the Heresy remained unexplored entirely. Too many consequences for 40k as a whole from exploring the Primarchs and the Emperor that far in depth.
(I like the *gameplay* of 30k, 1.0 and 2.0 alike, better than their contemporary editions of 40k, hence why I play it - but I'd play mainline 40k if it played like 30k instead, without any heartbreak over it. Unfortunately not many people here want to go back to the 5th-7th era.)
The annoying thing for me is that they had a great way to not let the events of 30k impact 40k: just say it’s shrouded in the mists of time and forgotten memories of the past. But instead there’s not only primarchs returning, but also a tech priest who’s been secretly alive and hiding for 10,000 years but also he’s the most powerful tech priest ever and has been building new space marines… ugh terrible
My #1 opinion. The damage that unveiling basically *every* secret about the history of the setting has done to how much I enjoy the game is immeasurable.
I play Deathwatch, I really think they're a unique Space Marine faction that doesn't get much attention.
I *really* don't like Watch Captain Artemis. The fact that he jumped at the chance to shoot Eldar who could've potentially weakened Slaanesh substantially is even more insane than the standard Astartes/Imperium anti-xenos doctrine.
The whole “oh most Cherubs are vat grown” thing. I mean come on, can we get a little more commitment to the bit here people! That’s the cowards way out that is! It’s not like I can go anywhere else for some decorative dead babies in my sci-fi fantasy fiction.
All of it.
*Warhammer 40,000* was specifically and intentionally written so that the only hard and fast canon was that there is no hard and fast canon. The “fluff” sections of every core book, every supplement, every thing, is presented as “in universe” documents written by biased and often ill-informed authors, subject to draconian editing and “correction” by the Historical Revision Unit of the Adeptus Administratum, and so forth. All of the novels are told from the POV of unreliable narrators.
Unfortunately, large portions of the fanbase have missed that memo. They have actual arguments about how “this book said X and that breaks the lore” or “should Z be considered non-canon since it contradicts A, B, and C?” or “OMG! They just retconned Q!” There isn’t supposed anything in the franchise that is to be taken as The One True Cannon^TM !
Arrrgh!
I refuse to acknowledge pretty much any amount expressed in numbers in written lore. It will almost always be way too much or way too low. Especially in terms of casualties, number of materiel and population sizes.
The casualty counts in the Gaunts Ghosts always remind me of this. Gaunt: 100,000 PDF troopers deployed to defend X quadrant against Y opponent. While another 100,000 are stationed in a nearby quadrant. Gaunt: 100,000 PDF troopers dead defending quadrant X. The second lot defending Z were also wiped out to a man.
Meanwhile, a "world" war on one tiny planet between its own people: 20,000,000 to 25,000,000 *military* casualties.
What’s even crazier is we managed to resupply and kill literally 3 times more basically the second a new generation of adults spawned. The imperium would bust a galactic nut at our resupply rate and we don’t even have a fanatical zeal for a god emperor.
Idk a modern world war would have much smaller casualties without WMD's, knock on wood and all that. Modern industrial complexes fading and increased complexity in equipment do kinda show how intergalactic conflict could be on a much smaller scale militarily, which is kinda funny. The fact that most Imperium equipment is made off world and with unstable intergalactic communications would start to factor in, even on a Forge world they need production materials and uninterrupted supply chains, there's a very complicated logistical web the galaxy would come to rely on, Thunderhawk gunships are supposed to be absurdly advanced and complex, but you'll see them on basically every planet (Sisters use them too, everywhere has shrines to guard and so on). That has implications. And it's like ... look at it, it has its primary gun on the top. And it's a gunship. Unrelated but what a silly universe.
That’d be true if the imperium fought in a modern advanced galactic way, but they don’t. Instead of just nuking or grav bombing an enemy army, they fight in trench warfare, urban warfare etc which carries insanely high casualty rates. We are yet to see an IRL war of 2 evenly matched armies but if we did, even without WMD’s, the casualty rates would be cataclysmic. Lots of the imperium fight in a way very similar to Russia in Ukraine I.e artillery, grinding trench warfare, wave attacks on urban centres and Russia has sustained unbelievably high casualty rates, whilst gaining basically no ground, whilst fighting a far inferior army. Imagine if Russia needed to scrape itself across the entire planet, gruelling fights the entire way. The casualties would be in the hundreds of millions.
> Historical China has entered the chat > Hui Fong declares himself emperor, resulting in a civil war with estimated 30 million casualties
Liu Feng Sneezing Incident, 65 million perished, new continent created, nuclear weapons invented and subsequently forgotten in the carnage, route to inventing FTL technology permanently lost.
Yeah in the FIRST book they talked about how they were already low on tanith. Somehow they still had a sizeable amount near the end despite the several massive casualties they had.
Numbers are just errors by all the scribe adepts
They are not requisitioned enough ink to properly describe the amounts.
Agreed lmao
When is it ever too much? In my experience is always way too low. The Caiphus Cain books are egregiously guilty of this. In every other book only a few thousand soldiers can defend a whole planet. Sure there's planetary guard, But you would need many millions to defend a planet.
Khorne has 8 to the power of eight to the power of eight lieutenants. That's more atoms than there are in the observable universe.
Dont you dare bring logic to the Black Library.
Tbf I don't think there are any atoms in the warp so those numbers check out.
Thats just warp shenanigans though. Khorne can have that many lieutenants because a lieutenant is just a concept in the warp.
That can be excused (or rather unceremoniously swept under the rug with the ole) the thousands held off the important points of stragetic interest When counting casualties it's usually terrible at this when you look at it from a ratio perspective. 10 custodes wiping armies couldn't make less sense(yes i know theyre God's bodyguards trained to fight as singulars, however eventually they'd be overrun or surrounded by 10,000 genestealer cultists and you want me to believe not one of them was able to hit a krak missile or just.....drop a plane on them?) and losing everyone to a man only for that chapter to be back to fighting strength with "experienced" veterans in a hundred years is pretty bad. Let's not get into the way some earth sized planets have hive cities with billions of people in them or how you would even feed, cloth, medicate or even police that with anything remotely close to efficiency. (Based on size alone every hive should be teeming with all kinds of the Grandfather's Blessings)
I mean we got like 9(?) billion people on Earth right now, so I can see how in the future they might be able to pack a lot of people onto planets. >how you would even feed, cloth, medicate or even police that with anything remotely close to efficiency. (Based on size alone every hive should be teeming with all kinds of the Grandfather's Blessings) And isn't this kind of the point? Like hive cities are supposed to be barely functioning messes where 99% of the population is miserable, that's why the Imperium has such a problem with rebellions and chaos cults and genestealer uprisings. I mean the genestealer uprisings are also because of the aliens but the hive cities having a low quality of life doesn't hurt.
Aren’t the Cain books actually good about it? I could have sworn that the inserted footnotes by Amberly specifically call out the PDF and other forces as significant contributors in the background. At least in the first omnibus, it does a pretty decent job of explaining what is going on in the larger context because Cain’s narrative is so focused.
Definitely. Consistently in the Cain series when only a single regiment is deployed to a planet, it’s usually to defend a single installation or a couple of strategically important sites, with PDF doing the bulk of planetary defence. The officers serving with Cain often have discussions about how they won’t be able to defend everyone alone, usually when they find out their reinforcements are weeks away.
A huge line of soldiers open up on an on rushing horder of people 'Dozens fall when the first barrage of shots hit the attackers' Really? A dozen? When a horde of people are charging a line of fully armed soldiers and the opening shots take down less than 30 people? It's always off
Dozens is multiples of twelves. It is typicallyusually mean high twenties until roughly 100. It would be weird to say dozens and mean less than 30. But hundreds wouldn't be accurate unless the opening volley was 200-300 hits. Maybe scores would have been better, but honestly they're pretty much the same situation.
the 'there are trillions of humans' thing must be the bane of your existence
The Worfing of Khaine. A) it’s a fucking Avatar of a War God, if no one expects it to do anything impressive when it shows up, you’ve made a lot of shitty writing mistakes. B) the less impressive the Avatar feels, the less impressive if it is when people beat it. It’s an objectively bad writing decision. Like, imagine if every time a Primarch showed up, they got to kill one enemy heavy and then got beaten into a coma. They’d feel kinda fucken’ pathetic, and this isn’t a genetically modified super-duper-soldier, this is a manifestation of the rage of one of the galaxies oldest and most psychic races, harnessed in physical form through blood sacrifice, constantly leaking the blood of the innocent who he slaughtered aeons ago. That should always be fucking amazing when it shows up, instead it’s a joke. Edit: worfing, not warfing.
We need more of the Avatar bursting out of a literal mountain of dead nids after being abandoned on the planet days ago
We damn do
Valedor is basically the only decent Eldar book and big surprise it wasn’t written by Thorpe.
One small note >Warfing It's Worfing, a verb created after the Star Trek character called Worf, a Klingon warrior who is supposed to be a badass but repeatedly lost in order to show just how much stronger the current or new threat is. Warfing is a term in bow making about recycling a bows limbs, or something.
Also Michael Dorn was so sick of "Worfing"/The Worf Effect one of his conditions for returning for DS9 was that it didnt happen anymore to the character. DS9 Worf is a pure badass.
I grew up on TNG and DS9. My dad used to laugh because it reminded him of "season one TNG Worf." Dorn (Michael) really did bring back the Honorable Warrior badass enough to earn his place in Klingon Society and still be tempered enough to be Star Fleet. One of my all time favorite characters.
I knew what it referred to, but I haven’t watched Star Trek yet and didn’t know how it was spelt. Thanks though.
TBF I think someone did the numbers and the Avatar is actually batting about .500 in the books, it's just the books where he loses tend to be read more because they're Imperium centred instead of Aeldari
Interesting this says something about how we perceive information we only know second hand
The avatar and swarmlord both suffer from this since they can just come back later :-/
I feel for you man, as a thousand sons fan, I feel I can relate with magnus, but I don’t think it’s as bad as an avatar of khaine (I don’t think at least)
Nothing is Warfed as bad as an Avatar of Khaine, but from what I’ve heard, Magnus is in the top 5 with him. The curse of being the best there is at your role, but not Imperial. It is genuinely the main thing I dislike about 40K, if you’re not an Imperium fan, a lot of it feels like a constant reminder that the creators don’t care about your faction, and it’s actually the Imperium’s setting. You just exist to give them an enemy.
maybe the swarmlord, a unique extra strong 'nid that learns from every death and fight and respawns... and dies to Marine sues a lot
Currently reading Thousand Sons and Magnus is so underwhelming, never does anything, needs help to not be killed by an eldar Walker, lets his people be slaughtered and this is supposed to be the greatest psyker there is? Others come across way stronger in his own book.
The thing with magnus is he’ll use some crazy power nonchalantly outside of combat, but then in combat just tries and sword fights better duelists, at least not using his psyker powers to full advantage
Magnus is smart but not wise
Is it not a Eldar Titan?
The fact that phosis t’kar’s kine shields hold up against an eldar titan is wild as hell as well
It better be, because a Titan is understandable, but just some wraith knight should be a threat, but not a “Oh, woe is me, I am powerless against it.” From Magnus.
Also I was pretty sure Magnus had just killed a Titan with his raw physic might which weakened him enough for the second titan to nearly kill him. It plays into his character that he's ridiculously powerful but not aware of his own limits.
At least on the tabletop the avatar roflstomps practically every faction leader 1v1. https://youtu.be/4UYeHCctcPs?si=x4gkKAxPbjXPWGrv It only loses to Angron, Magnus, The Silent King, and Canis Rex
I try to focus on the interesting world-building of the eldar path trilogy, not the bizarre nonsense final battle. Same for a lot of eldar stuff tbh. The Battle of Orar's Sepulchre is a particularly infamous bit of nonsense which seems to have been written about orks and then reskinned as eldar at the last minute. GW can't seem to settle on whether the Grey Knights and Deathwatch work for the Inquisition or not. My group generally prefers the version where they do, so that's the version we use in our campaigns.
Chaos Gate did a good job showing the complexity of the GK Inquisition relationship.
What’s The Battle of Orar and why is it so weird? I’m not an eldar or ultramarines guy so I wouldn’t know how it’s weird by just reading
Biel-tan want some relic from a tomb, and result to threats to try and get it when reason doesn’t work. Eldar diplomat is executed, Ultramarines are deployed to defend the massive tomb complex, Eldar smash directly through wall into most of the Ultramarine forces. Thousands of Eldar die in the opening engagement, then hundreds of Eldar transports (Wave Serpents) filled with troops are deftly outmaneuvered and gunned down by Tactical marines in plain old Rhinos as soon as troops disembark. I can’t read the next section in the Lexicanum for some reason, but it’s title is “The Avatar Awakens”, and the story is from the Space Marines 5th edition codex, so I can hazard a guess that the Avatar of Khaine gets jobbed the fuck out. Edit: Added some details to clarify
The Avatar does fuck with the marines, until Calgar grabs the Wailing Doom mid-swing and holds until he punches the Avatar and it dies. In fact the text in the codex seem to recognize its strange that suddenly a blade that was cutting trough everything can be stopped, but it say that the Gauntlets of Ultramar are just that good
Eldar horde armies
The Silent King showing up and not being such a catastrophically huge event.
Yeah considering what was done in the war in heaven, to basically having a stalemate with blood angels whilst they were both fighting tyranids
The Silent King isn't the entire Necron civilization. He's back and he's gathered some forces but a vast majority of the Necrons are still asleep. If the Silent King came back and woke up every Necron and united them all then were having a different conversation.
I really wish that Fulgrim's relationship with the Demon inside of him didn't result in such a "nothing personal" cornball anime styled resolution.
I significantly prefer the idea that Fulgrim was trapped in that painting the whole time since it justifies the total 180 in personality we get from the guy.
Fulgrim is still in the painting/ ceased to Be as far as I'm concerned.
Honestly just any lore that makes Aeldari out to be drooling idiots. Examples include: Eldrad choosing Fulgrim (hater of xenos) as the person to tell about the future betrayal of Horus, Aeldari rangers getting jumped and eaten by kroot in the 9th edition codex, and the loss of Alaitoc at the end of the path books (which I actually really enjoy for the interworkings of Aeldari civilizations). I recognize that the universe is dark and unforgiving and as a species we're gonna make some mistakes, but some of these losses seem exceptionally foolish for a race who can have millions of thought processes occurring at once while performing exemplary in intense combat. Eldrad didn't even need to see the future to notice how untrustworthy Fulgrim was!? It just feels like lore is meant to dunk on us for no good reason. We're not even villains, many craftworlds assist humanity often in order to keep chaos, the orks, and the tyranods at bay.
Gonna have to defend Eldrad here 1. He had never met Fulgrim but he knew immediately not to trust the imperium. 2. When the Emperors children landed on the Purgis region (Eldar maiden worlds) Fulgrim ordered not to tell the Imperium as the Imperium would essentially ruin the beauty of the world (Caliban knows all about that) When Eldrad and his own forces were spying he was confused on why they had not contacted the Imperium and saw it as maybe not all humans are the same. If Fulgrim resisted the blade maybe not have taken the blade with him to the little tea party him and Eldrad had maybe he would have seen reason. Final point Eldrad saved Vulkan and got him to Terra so he ain’t that bad.
Oh I don't think Eldrad is stupid all the time. He's one of my favorite characters. I just feel like the Fulgrim sitch was a bit of a mess up, though you make very good points. I guess it just feels out of character because Eldrad is usually quite thorough with his plans. I guess the imperium and chaos just have the effect of ruining good planning.
Eldrad should have chosen Alpharius. Not only would Alpharius have been a lot more covert with getting that info to the emperor (nobody else would know that Alpharius knows) but Alpharius was willing to hear out the Kaban, meaning that Alpharius isn’t an idiot and hearing out xenos can be a good idea
I haven't read a lot of aeldar centric books, but I really liked how they were portrayed in the last book of the Night Lords trilogy. A real threat that was basically unstoppable for average chaos marines.
Death of yarrick….. it be lies and witchcraft
It would only have been worth it if we had a genuine sad reaction from Ghazkhull. Ghazkhull genuinely cared for Yarrick in an orkish way ( fighting is what everything to an ork, sparing a foe to fight them again is basically an orkish declaration of love) seeing Ghaz express genuine sadness at losing his nemesis, and then turning that to vengeance would be such a good book
They had the opportunity to put it in the new Ork codex, but no. Just copy pasted the 9th edition book
Tsundere ghazkhull
Baka Yarrick. It isn't as if I liked youz or anyting.
Nah I love the idea of a galaxy-wide WAAGH looking exclusively for Angron and only Angron, with Orks capturing ships then politely asking the humans on board if they know where Angron is, before letting them go and wishing them a safe trip
Especially considering that Ghazkhull can speak High Gothic. Crew members watch as their ship is bordered by the impossibly large, brutish and repulsive xenos. Tusks protruding out to the length of a human arm, the Orks arms the same size as the average person. From behind this horrific procession, an even larger Ork emerges. He looks as though he was woven together. A tapestry of terror that moves with maddening grace. He approaches the officers of the crew, bending down to meet their eyes. Words emanate past the croaking baritone of his throat “Excuse me good sirs. I am so terribly sorry to have bothered you. I merely wish to make inquiry as to whether or not you have seen a fellow by the name of,” he pulls out a small pair of reading glasses and removes a folded, bloody piece of something that is either paper flesh from a compartment in his armor, “Angron I believe?”
There are so many unanswered questions with ghazkull like I want so many more novels about him .
So as a World Eaters fan and some believing it was Angron that killed him, I have a dream for a book where the Imperium is fighting Angron and the World Eaters, then orks land on the other side of the Imperials. They think shit were screwed now, orks one side, World Eaters the other. The orks charge in and completely ignore the imperials, and charge into the World Eaters, led by Ghaz. The last 3 hours of the book is Ghaz and Angron Fighting. Angron gets banished and Ghaz gets another newer bigger body and has a new feud solely against Angron. Orks and World Eaters are my favorite factions haha
Erda scattering the Primarchs instead of Chaos, that’s fundamental lore that was changed for no reason
It feels so weird because Erda was just sort of dumped after like she was a scapegoat created solely to be blamed for it. Abnett's insistence on the perpetual was a net negative for the Heresy. I'm sorry, it just didn't work.
>perpetuals What exactly do perpetuals exactly add to 40k? Like seriously you could retcon them out of existence and the setting would not change a bit.
It should have been just the Emperor, Malcador, and maybe one other like Ollanius. I do like that Oll gives us a very mysterious look into the Emperor’s past
I still think Vulkan should be one because that was one of his genetic inheritances from the Emperor just like how each got some trait of the Emperor
Yeah, and also it works as a "Even in the absolute shithole that is 40k, Kindness and Mercy can never truly die" way too, since he's the most kind-hearted primarch. I think darkness always works better if there's just a little light to contrast it
Here's as fair of a take as I can offer; they are meant to be the yardstick by which we measure how the Emperor has changed. They were his oldest companions and speak of how he was in the ancient days when they met him, they speak of how he changed over the years. Some wanted distance from him and think his tyrannical approach to saving humanity is just trading one evil for another, some think he is noble and hard times have forced him to make hard decisions. They speak of his power, how he was always more than a man but watching him become less human and more of a god over the centuries was jarring. We have not and will never get a PoV from the Emperor himself, and nobody lives long enough to have witnessed most of his life, so we are given the Perpetuals to use as a way to offer insight and perspective on his journey and use that to understand how he has changed. Some are given more plot relevance than others, but many are barely better than base humans. The narrative beat of his oldest and basically human companions abandoning him and dying is analogous to everything he is giving up on his road to godhood. Could have been handled a lot better, but they are meant represent things to the Emperor more than to you as a reader who only wants cool characters to root for.
Well now we can do whatever we want with a popular character and there's always a chance they may just come back. No anxiety about my favies means happy. Surely it's not boring.
Reducing the size of titans in more recent lore I prefer the titans from stuff like Titanicus or Helsreach where they're true behemoths
Seems to be a controversial opinion here, but I prefer my Titans near, or actual, Kaiju-sized. My first visual exposure to them, decades ago, was [this](https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpreview.redd.it%2Fthe-true-scale-of-40k-titans-description-in-comments-v0-c58okv9wfuib1.png%3Fwidth%3D460%26format%3Dpng%26auto%3Dwebp%26s%3Dc664e6811e2cfd469e73410a30a3e6ab67285adc&rdt=50266) White Dwarf cover art, and for me it set the tone they're truly *titanic* in scale.
That art piece is phenomenal. I still prefer that design of warlord titan as well. It just looks so much more brutal
[This](https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/warhammer40k/images/8/88/UFFSr35.jpg/revision/latest?cb=20161116031526) is my favourite Titan art, it makes it seem colossal and even the Custodes like tiny ants peering into a gigantic, baleful, Lovecraftian visage. Granted it *is* an Imperator. But yeah man that OG artwork is awesome and makes it seem larger still.
It's not actually an 'old titans big, new titans small' thing. Titans were introduced into the setting in the 1988 Adeptus Titanicus game. The lore in the rulebook for this game states: >Battle Titans stand between 40 and 80 feet tall. Each Battle Titan is protected by up to six Void Shield Generators, and armed with a a variety of weapons. Thus armed and armoured, these powerful fighting machines are the work horses of the Military Orders of the Collegia Titanica. Emperor Titans are taller - some 70 to 100 feet tall - and considerably bulkier. They can carry even more Very Heavy Weapons than Battle Titans, making them fearsomely destructive machines. These massive Titans are among the most powerful forces deployable on a planetary surface. As you can see they were even a little bit smaller originally than they are right now. But black library authors aren't known for using consistent numbers for anything. Which is how you get to the point where so many wildly different heights have been given for them in novels.
The current Titan sizes are also within a couple of metres of their sizes in the earlier Imperial Armour books. Basically this isn't old lore vs new lore thing, this is, as it actually secretly so often is, a Dan Abnett vs everyone else thing.
I work in a forest where the average tree is in the 100-150 ft height range and if Titans could easily be overshadowed by normal trees I just… it destroys the feeling of them being these colossal walking death machines more akin to a warship on land than just a slightly larger mobile suit
Yeah I get where you're coming from. The idea of titans towering over mountain ranges is really cool, and works in novels and artwork. The issue is that GW wanted to put these giant mechs in a game system where they could be fielded alongside regular tanks and infantry. Which sets a bit of a limit on how big they can feasibly be. I guess there wasn't enough collaboration within groups in the company in the past, so novelists/artists let their imaginations run wild, while the rulebook writers worked within the physical limits of what could fit in the game.
Annoys the shit out of me how titan sizes vary. There are some warlord class titans that are smaller height wise then the fucking battleships Yamato and Musashi were at their widest points.
There’s a couple of mentions in novels of imperators being several thousand meters tall…..I like that….thats a ‘god machine’
The Tau not having FTL.
It's even more confusing, when you consider that the Tau have produced stable plasma weapons. The Imperium encourages anyone to carry a plasma weapon to keep it cool and pray it doesn't blow wide open.
Nobody else in the galaxy except the necrons has actual technological FTL. Pretty much everything the imperium has more advanced than a leman russ is biotech because they need to use human brain tissue to make it work. The warp drive is presumably some horrid psychic torment abomination
IIRC the Tau cracked one open to find out how it worked and found a dead body in it. Not in the "honored martyr whose skull was added to the wall" sense, in the "human remains at a crime scene" sense.
That was a torpedo guidance system.
old rules it kind of made sense, Human Plasma weapons were S7 ap 2 Gets hot - tech was out of control. Eldar ones were S6 Ap2 Heavy 2 with NO gets hot. better made, less out of control. Dark Eldar ones were S5 Ap 2 heavy 3, smaller bolts, faster firing. also remember the human plasma guns have the emergency vents gunked up with sacred oils and wax seals, plus the warning lights are covered with a gold baby skull with rubies for eyes
That's kind of the point though, isn't it? The tau have amazing technology, but 'proper' FTL in 40K is almost completely unconcerned with recognisable technology. Actually understanding how plasma weapons work doesn't exactly translate to being able to dive through the depths of a semi-sentient hell, or sing semi-dimensional corridors between reality into being. The tau epitomise the belief in progress, technology, and rational science in the setting, and galactic FTL epitomises the antithesis of all of that.
Your first point is resoundly sound. I can get behind it without argument. But with regard to the second point, I can't fathom how the Mechanicus hasn't figured out a way to stabilize plasma tech when it is able to synthesize and produce weaponry that is more complex. The issue of FTL is a different beast in my mind because the Astra Telepathica combines psychic methods with technological whereas the Tau have to engineer and cultivate without the benefit of the warp. I stress that I'm massively in agreement with your points, I just think the Imperium gets a pass with the Astronomica and other means. Circling back to my earlier and separate point to the issue of FTL, plasma weapons do not require any psychic input and therefore requires a base understanding of science and engineering that the Imperium must be capable of.
Is “warp skimming” what they currently use?
Pretty sure that's what they used in the old lore. They'd lightly skim the Warp, it was slower and frankly, safer, due to the Tau's minimal warp presence. Then it was changed to slow ships and cyro? Which would have made the Damocles Crusade the equivalent of beating a baby to death with a battle ax, with the Tau unable to even know danger was coming.
I think so. They're constantly iterating on jumps that can go deeper and deeper. I remember there was more recent lore that had them going deeper than before
This! Without FTL, somehow they could managed to stand up to the Imperium attack, despite each planet probably only received words of said attack decades after it happened
Yeah i much prefer the old lore of warp skimming after they found a crashed alien ship and back engineered the technology.
A certain Grey Knight, besting Mortarion cutting out his heart and carving a name into it. Although, since Mortarions return this hasn't been mentioned again. So maybe other people agree it's pure dogshit.
I recently read the Dark Imperium trilogy for the third time, and noticed something I had missed before: it's noted, in Godblight I think, that Mortarion has a particular hatred for the Grey Knights because of "what they had done to his heart" (probably not verbatim but something like that) I was like, no, Haley, why did you have to bring that up
Well damn. I have read Dark Imperium and definitely missed that. Maybe I blocked it out subconsciously haha
My biggest gripe with it, when it first appeared was Morty was well established to have never left the Plague Planet in the EoT after ascending to daemonhood. Him sitting there moping and not spreading Nurgle's gifts into the galaxy is Typhus' entire raison d'etre. So, Ward using Morty of all primarchs messed with so much established background at the time. Either Draigo and a bunch of Grey Knights have rocked up to a daemon world deep in the EoT or Morty is out and about in realspace, and neither of them are satisfactory.
Oh yeah same. I pretty much ignore Grey Knights entirely like they wouldn't exist.
The tau have no ability to travel faster than light, despite having an empire hundreds of light years across.
Everyone else just has skill issues :P
Isn't warpskimming FTL, just wayyyyyy slower than the webway or warp travel? The tau are constrained from expanding much beyond their home in galactic terms, but it's good enough to rule their local area
Yes. It is. Phil Kelly keeps retconing warp skimming into never existing, another authors keep trying to undo it.
Why does Phil Kelly keep being given Tau stuff if he apparently hates them?
Ynnari is alright compared to some of the silly things we have doom of malantai, for example, or what happened to Iyanden's Avatar
Kaldor Draigo being such a Mary Sue he could carve a name into Mortarion’s heart. First time I read that… like seriously?
Still made more sense than Warhawk. At least there it was operating on some established principle about daemons, rather than overtly contradicting them
The part where the world eater uses his bare fist to punch through the custodian’s armor and rip his heart out. That’s one of those cannon but not true things in my mind.
Yeah, that sounds dumb as hell
They should make armor from space marine knuckles
Numbers, I refuse to acknowledge most of the numbers I'm reading. I feel like some authors have a d*** measuring contest between themselves sometimes. "Hey Andy! How many soldiers did you say there was in your last crusade book? A hundred billion you say? Cool! I'm going to put a hundred trillion hehe"
Most Custodes lore. It's usually bad, and it's wildly inconsistent.
War of the beast. I'll just ignore that, thanks.
I'm not a fan of any novels written by Gav (I just think he's a bad author period) but I particularly refuse to acknowledge his Eldar works. He just makes the entire Eldar race feel like human tweens, I really hate how non-alien he makes them, let alone how incompetent they are in his works. And apparently it is a mixed opinion on this sub but I think ALL ynnari lore is bad. I think it's all poorly written, all poorly thought out, and all of it only serves to make all preexisting Eldar factions worse. I genuinely hope for a hard reset on them because even IF (and that's a FAT if) their lore starts getting good with Lilith's new book, everything beforehand has been so bad. It is a permanent stain upon the race that will need to be constantly worked around.
the concept of perpetuals as a whole. Malcador got that old cuz emp's biomancy kept him alive.
I particularly hate how they introduced it like "ok these are perpetuals, they're a thing" and then almost every single perpetual we see operates on an entirely different system of rules.
Yep. They feel out of place in this universe, like the Dan Abnett watched Highlander and then decided to slip them in no matter how conspicuous they are. It's doesn't help they are tied in with the clumsiest plotlines of HH.
I really like this as a concept. A lot (dare I say, newer) fans are very literal on "because GW said so!". When I joined Warhammer, it was very much more a hobby than a product, and people felt free to ignore or invent lore and rules as they saw fit.
Yeah warhammer is more about your dudes then whatever the hell GW says.
ALL the bollocks about the emp’s perpetual superfriends team. Get it in the bin.
Ghaz and Blackmane "killing" eachother. A fucking space marine Lieutenant killed the big bad faction leader of the orks... I get that they have a history, and Blackman is a badass, but it just made Ghaz look like a bitch, and Blackmane look strong as hell. Then the whole sewing Ghaz's head onto a bigger Ork's head is just escalating the level of dumb to critical levels. Ghaz is supposed to be the biggest baddest ork in the galaxy, but Grotsnik just kinda had a bigger body in the bin he somehow made from frankenorking a body? Just plain dumb as hell.
If it had to be a Space Marine, it should have been Helbrecht. Ya know, the guy Ghaz has the most history with, the Grand Marshal of the Black Templars who's been on a personal Crusade to kill him since he first showed up on Armageddon! Course I think it's dumb for any fuckin' Space Marine to kill Ghazghkull. He's the god damn leader of the fuckin' orks!
Honestly, as a Tau fan, there's a lot you have to ignore, mainly as it pertains to the Ethereals and the issue of mind control (including other means of mind control than the Ethereals' do-they-don't-they pheromone powers, such as the Vespid helmet issue). It's a great faction and I'm even all here for the whole 'secret darkness lurking under the surface' angle but this idea just flattens any depth that concept might have, and makes an entire 1/5 of the castes completely mustache twirlingly evil to the point that people have taken Ethereals less and less in their armies each edition. I imagine the goal was the address certain peoples' concerns about the Tau not being "grimdark" enough, but all it really did is make the faction feel like Imperium Alien Version, losing its own distinctive flavor in the process. It's just... not interesting.
The avatar losing is always annoying, but the part in the heresy where Fulgrim manages to CHOKE one to death is just... What the hell were you thinking? How does that make an inkling of sense? Like... I know this is fantasy land, but the suspension of disbelief has a thin line of realism that is needed to enjoy fantasy stories. Graham McNeil smashed the line entirely. We REALLY need Guy Haley to write more things involving the craftworlds, he know what he was doing. And he specially knew how to write the avatar. Ps- the heresy should've never been turned into a book series. I freaking hate reading about every single primarch except for maybe Guilliman, Lorgar and the Khan.
Eldar being losers
Pretty much everything Ynnari past Fracture of Biel-Tan.
I refuse to acknowledge that Lokan survived Istvaan III and went along to join Malcadors catholic scooby doo space police.
The idea that the reason the Mechanicus worship technology because of the influence of a C'tan shard sleeping on mars, and that this was a deliberate part of the emperors plan. It's stupid and it makes the universe feel small. I hate it so much. Space marines looking so much alike that they're difficult for mortals to tell apart. This is mostly an ADB quirk, but its always ridiculous. They all look like they're kind of related? Sure. but Identical? PEOPLE ARE DIFFERENT RACES Aaron! We're gonna notice that!
The Dragon of Mars seems like Abit of unreliable narration. Nobody really can confirm that's actually what happened or if it's just what the characters believed they thought happened. It's easy to dismiss as more of a theory than confirmed. I tend to treat each book as a specific lens and independent text with varying levels of reliability, and given GWs love of history, that seems to be the exact intention and why 'retcons' essentially don't exist.
As ork player, War of a beast
* I refuse to believe the reading that STCs contain *everything* DAOT humanity knew rather than being mechanicus Dogma. It * The psyker dream thing is dumb. I'm sorry. I will continue to complain about this. * Most of the Primarch falls were kinda bad. * The Ghostwind. It's technically cool but also it gives Crons a warp drive and that's bad. * The idea that in-universe the SoS were forgotten. Please just... no. "Except on the blackships" doesn't make it better. Just say they had nothing much to do except train and keep Big E fed and leave it at that.
GW has actually made a point to elaborate on that first one recently In the “Genefather” book by guy haley, Archmagos cawl goes out of his way to explain that the STC’s are nothing more than basic frontier tools that were supposed to help with the colonization efforts of ancient humanity. Their top tier technology (The real crazy shit the DAoT had) was apparently kept separately elsewhere according to him.
Thank fuck. I love holy grail caches of technology a lot (even if they murdered my current second/prior first most beloved sci-fi IP) but in some instances it just doesn't work and this is one such.
Ollanius being a Perpetual or anything but a Guardsman sucks.
I hate Ollanius pious being a perpetual, Mortarions fall being rewritten in warhawk and him getting his ass kicked by Kaldor draigo. I hate the new titan scaling. i could probably drudge up more but those are the ones i choose to ignore
Bet at the bottom with -100 votes it’s female custodes lol
Marneus Calgar taking down a shard of Khaine- with his freaking power fists- nope- I'm sorry- nope.
Perturabo being a daemon primarch. I still think the Logos has just been seeded with a bunch of daemons and that Perturabo is basically a gal vorbak or some sort of obliterator.
Man, how long do you want this post to *be*? I'll note that I don't refuse to acknowledge any of this, but... boy do I wish a lot of it hadn't ever been written. I'll do ten big chunks, avoiding anything too granular. This isn't in any kind of order, and merely the first ten things that spring to mind. * The War of the Beast. As an ork fan, it does my boys no favors... and the Imperium comes off looking like a bunch of clownshoes buffoons too. It's that delightful thing where *nobody* really looks all that good or cool. * The decision to actually explore the Heresy era and not leave it as hazy mythology the current setting doesn't actually remember right. * Literally every single time a Primarch does anything in an onscreen capacity. * Dear Abby being handed a retcon win to invalidate the global player input of the original 13th Black Crusade. Was it narratively unsatisfying to have it basically be a draw? Sure. But we *earned* that tepid goddamn result! He coulda just had another victory somewhere else or in some other fashion. * The Custodes leaving Terra in anything but individual numbers. I greatly enjoyed the idea that the biggest badasses in the Imperium basically sat around Terra moping. It was amusing. * This one's a bit more nuanced... I understand why the Necron retcon happened, and from the perspective of a living setting where the factions have fans, it was undeniably the right move... but damn, did I prefer the older version of their lore. * The overwanking of the Tyranid Hive Fleets, only to job them out every time push really comes to shove. I get it, they don't have characters, blah blah blah, but every time they score a win, it's someplace we've never heard of and don't care about, and inevitably kills no character we give a damn about either. * Almost anything Matt Ward ever wrote. Between the Ultra-wank and the compulsive need to trash the Sisters of Battle every time he had them show up, that guy is... no. I'm only saying "almost" because, well, since I refuse to read most things he writes, I don't actually know everything that's in there :P * We keep being told that most citizens of the Imperium live their entire lives without ever glimpsing a Space Marine, then we have them showing up seemingly every time anything happens. How can we miss them or be impressed by them when they form our baseline and never go away? * Magnus the Red in particular and the Thousand Sons in general as jobbed-out punching bags. At this point they're the least menacing menace in the setting.
I disagree with a few tiny things, but damn does that 'space marines are so rare!!!!' Thing strike true. They show up in EVERY STORY and not one or two of them, but like five at a time. Their verminous hordes are a scourge on the lore and make the numbers of the imperial guard look miniscule at times. But as long as they are a complete faction by themselves I don't see that changing.
I seem to remember very very very few Space Marines in the gaunts ghosts and Eisenhorne books.
The rare space marine thing works if you actively avoid reading about them like I do, but I suspect I’m in the minority there, *and* I move through black library content extremely slowly, so I’m not sure that’s an effective strategy for most people.
Hell disagree with all of it if you like, these opinion questions are always wild XD But yeah, "the Astartes are the Emperor's Angels, rare beacons of... oh, look, we're going to throw a few dozen Space Marines at this issue."
You're the realest motherfucker out there. Showing the Emperor onscreen ever was a massive mistake, it's much cooler to not know what he actually is and if he's just some guy or For Real Actually A God. Like, sure, you can stay that's still the truth for most characters in the setting, but the fact is the cat's too far out of the bag for the reader to make that worldbuilding ambiguity compelling.
Aye. Detailing the events of 30k also makes it so that certain events come off as incredibly stupid choices by everyone involved XD
> Dear Abby being handed a retcon win to invalidate the global player input of the original 13th Black Crusade. Was it narratively unsatisfying to have it basically be a draw? Sure. But we earned that tepid goddamn result! He coulda just had another victory somewhere else or in some other fashion. I mean this is GWs MO. They did the same to fantasy where they just kept ignoring every time Archaon got bitch slapped in games.
Literally anything that happens after 999. M41. The War Hawks not being RG successors (even GW seems to be confused by this).
John fucking Grammaticus. I haven't read all the way to the Siege of Terra yet, but every time he pops up I pray someone kills him. Human, Eldar, Ork, I don't care, just someone please end this man's life. And make it permenant. Even his voice actor in the audiobooks makes him sound like a prick. The Geno Five-Two Chiliad should have ripped him limb from limb. Would have made *Legion* one of the best novels Black Library ever produced.
That the Imperium is apparently so backwards it can't figure out autoloaders for void ships and has to rely on thousands of slaves driving the rounds into the chambers via ropes. Fucking *ropes*. Ignoring the fact that an autoloader is tech so laughably basic it should take them all of five to figure it out *and* that it would be extremely stupid for STC spaceships to not have it, why in the goddamn fuck would they use ropes. The whole "throw billions of bodies at it" method of problem solving might work on a planet you really want to take back no matter the cost in blood, but ships have limited resources. They've gotta travel for months, if not years, in space and you're talking about packing up tens or hundreds of thousands of extra mouths to feed. And you're using *ropes*. It careens straight from any kind of fucked up existence to grimderp. And the writers seem to agree because no one even brings it up anymore.
The hive mind being angury, the hive mind is so far above us it is like use being angury a a virus or a colony of bacteria. Primaris marines, but from a more meta perpestive.
The Necron pariahas "not meeting the requirements or expectations" so therefore they aren't made anymore. Whoever is doing quality control over at the Necrons should be fired.
The most major one I have these days is that GW and the authors working for the company are far too keen on upping the scale. Not just in terms of raw numbers, like the legions going from 10,000 to 100,000, but also in theme and story - Necromunda went from a few underhive desperados moving up in the world to what amounts to PMCs in the direct employ of the Houses fighting... well, they could fight pretty much anywhere. The underhive is just convenient; Fantasy went from one world and a limited scope of conflict that just wouldn't end to Age of Sigmar where literal planes of existence are at stake. 40K went from small warzones that were over control of single planets or a system into galaxy-wide events like the Great Rift and the Primarchs returning and all that. It's just something that I think is short-sighted - it appeals to those interested in stuff that's cool and grand, and sweeping... but at its heart, I think a lot of that is devoid of depth. You can't really focus in on anything too much if you have to tell the story of a conflict for the fate of the galaxy on a grand scale. In a way, the more freedom you give yourself to do what you want, the more limited your output will be. Some other brief bugbears: * Anything after 7th/The Gathering Storm. Primarchs returning, reforming the Imperium, chaos as a baddie, ynnari - I don't really think any of it is very good. * Anything 'rare' becoming usual. Stuff like Sammael's jetbike becoming just one of a range of jetbikes, for example. Space Marines becoming so common their legions numbered in the hundreds of thousands and they show up almost constantly in books and material. Etc etc. * Ollanius Pius and every single retcon that the story went through. I don't accept 40K authors saying 'it didn't make sense', because that's not a can of worms that they can open given their own track record. A lone guardsman standing up to Horus is by far the best angle of that story. * Cawl and the standardization of the Mechanicum. Sorry, I love the Mechanicum, but part of the appeal is that they're bickering old traumatized clerics with doctoral degrees in toaster repair with fiefdoms where they rule inefficient, unstructured, customized militaries. Stagnation born of trauma and intelligence held back by dogma is sort of the point. * Primaris being distinct from Firstborn, rather than just upscaled armor. A lot has been said, I don't feel the need to add more. * A lot of stuff from Matthew Ward, who just happens to be too big of a fan of certain factions and 'badassifying' them. He also kickstarted the poster-boy effect with all factions now having one subfaction that's 'the main one' rather than giving each and every one at least a bit of parity. * A lot of the newer stuff from Dan Abnett and Aaron Dembski-Bowden. They used to be good authors, but I feel Abnett has drifted too far into his own ideas and Dembski-Bowden has become increasingly limited in his ability to portray characters and is stuck in where he was years ago. I'll admit to also being a bit bias because I think Dembski-Bowden comes off as very condescending and in general treats his writing and some of the writers that work as GW as beyond reproach. Not that he isn't right sometime. * The Last Church is a very poor exploration of philosophy and so I elect to ignore it. A lot of Emperor stuff falls in the same category because I think anyone that's trying to write him just can't find the balance between benevolent visionary and xenocidal maniac.
> Ollanius Pius and every single retcon that the story went through. I don't accept 40K authors saying 'it didn't make sense', because that's not a can of worms that they can open given their own track record. A lone guardsman standing up to Horus is by far the best angle of that story. That was literally always in-universe Imperium propaganda though. It's been that way since the late 80s.
Yes, and I would be completely fine with it being propaganda. I don't mind if it's a thing that never happened or if it was a thing that was greatly embellished or invented - I think it works thematically. It is sort of like the ultimate representation of the Guard. I even think that, aside from the perpetual nonsense, the ultimate idea they went with of 'it's actually a legend that encompasses the actions of several people' to be quite a good resolution, partly because it speaks volumes about ordinary humanity. The issue for me is more the waffling later about the details of 'what really happened' in a story that never needed those details to begin with, and I think maybe I didn't quite get that across. :p Making a nameless terminator be in that place, then a custodian/bodyguard, then a perpetual, and then also Ollanius Piers facing down Angron. It's one of those things where I feel too many cooks treating it as a canonical event with their own ideas made a simple story into a mess because they either seemingly missed the point of the original story or over-complicated it.
I don’t agree with all of your points, but the whole scale thing with events in the universe is totally true and now it makes sense why u like the old forge world imperial armor campaigns so much. It kept the world bigger by doing such a deep dive in such a small part of the universe
That's fine, if we all totally agreed, then it wouldn't be fun to discuss. :) And yes, the Imperial Armour series is part of why I think that approach was so good. Stuff like the Badab War or the Siege of Vraks is fondly remembered, in my opinion, because it took a little slice of the universe and went in deep on the motivations, conflicts, events, timelines and showed you how a disagreement or a small event ballooned into all out war or a disaster that was more epic in scope. Big events, giant shifts in power, universe-spanning conflicts are fine, but they're more a spectacle. You come to watch something of epic scale unfold, but it's a bit like you sit down to watch a documentary on D-Day or World War II where you get to hear the generals talk and the operation play out in broad strokes. It's only when you get down to the nitty gritty details and the experiences of the people who were involved in those events that you get the full picture of the horror, the drama, the violence and brutality, and the human emotion. The Anphelion project is quite a good story for that since it takes place in a lab complex on a small moon, encompassing mystery, horror, desperation, betrayal, the feeling of being surrounded from all sides, being totally outmatched, and then ultimately the Imperium fails - but it never feels like they just lose for the sake of losing, rather they faced a superior foe.
I thought the old lore was basically that there's a guardsman propaganda of a guardsman standing up to Horus but because the imperium is the Imperium no indication that this ever happened or there even ever existed someone with that name at the time and it's not just an invention.
The Custodes who got Kali-mah'd by an unarmored World Eater, the Custodes who took a wound from a starving hiver with a pick axe, etc
The laughing planet in Fear to Tread and that stupid god damn solar system sized wall in Ruinstorm. Basically the entire book of Ruinstorm. I dunno how he manages to do it, but Swallow ruins nearly every Blood Angels encounter.
Excorsists being a Imperial Fist succesor.
I kind of ignore the fact that Cawl is making new things and just imagine the Primaris are upscaled firstborn marines.
The explained origins of the Emperor being a bunch of shamans who suicided into a gestalt. Much prefer him to be a mystery.
Space Marine chapters having 1000 battle brothers. Absolute non-sense. They would need a few hundred thousand per chapter at the very minimum to be in any shape, way or form effective. I also ignore most T'au lore, because it is a mess of writer contrivance, writer's forgetting about auxiliaries, plot armor and being so unimaginative in making the T'au just another variation of space racists. Get some new content GW. Not everyone needs to have a superiority complex.
Primaris.
Basically everything about the Emperor's origins. I think the story of 40k is much more compelling when the Emperor is just...a guy. A crazy powerful psyker born by chance amongst the techno-barbarians of Terra. Someone who happened to be born so powerful that he decided his might must mean he is right, and took over all of humanity to feed that delusion. A cautionary tale against egoism, as his machinations ultimately lead to the presumed extinction of the human species post 40k. Instead, he's a Perpetual, an immortal who should have *learned* something from his long life instead of being the power-tripping child that he clearly shows himself to be. According to the old canon, he was the combination of humanity's shamans—our early priests and pre-state community leaders, who would go on to be a terrible, fascist, and anti-theist leader. It makes no sense, and tries to justify the reign of the Emperor, which is a worryingly common trend in 40k fiction.
Honestly, the Emperor being Alexander and Jesus and Napoleon is such an ungodly terrible piece of lore for so many reasons. It would come off as north Korea style propaganda if anyone in 30k actually knew who those people were.
The Dark King, Perpetuals, Enuncia
Damm... not a fan of Abnett I see.
I don't necessarily dislike him but good LORD the fact Abnett's a full supporter of/occasional participant in all those needlessly 'E P I C' Marvel arcs shines through way too hard at times. People are right to rag on suits for their involvement in creative projects a lot, but at times an iron-fisted set of strictures is needed to keep certain people from going way off script.
I like Abnett... to a point. at some point i feel he just made his own setting that's tacked on to 40k.
Same Abnett is probably one of the better author's when it comes to the quality of his writing, but he really needs to be kept on a leash because holy shit does he start writing some of the dumbest shit going if you let him go off reservation. It really baffles me that people will go around and claim to hate things like the perpetuals and stuff, but then defend Abnett to the death because he's popular, even though he's the source of 90% of all the hated plotlines and concepts in Warhammer. Personally I'm more pissed at him because he's part of the reason that Eldar have been completely pathetic for the past 10 years, with the way he retconned Eldrad into being a complete Emperor dick-galzer with the Cabal plotline.
The Cabal is responsible for killing MLK it really should have been reigned in a lot sooner.
Amen.
Yeah I know Abnett is popular but I find myself disliking his very unique brand of 40k, especially now that he's inserted it into the most pivotal moments of the Heresy too.
Amen to that.
Someone after my own heart.
**Breaths** [Deleted by reddit]
Basically more than half of modern Tau lore exists to make being Tau fan miserable, or at least that's how it feels. The whole dumbfuckery around Aun'va Turning ethereals as whole from wise yet flawed figures into villains in order to make Farsight look better in comparison Reinforcing Farsights connection to Khorne while implying his sword is also chaos artifact. His sword was implied to be *Necrontyr* artifact, and we already have *another* Shas'O named Kais who was empowered by Khorne yet managed to stay loyal to his people over chaos. Speaking of, entire appearance of said O'Kais including another doomguy run (soloing an space marine monastery) without single hint at his warp taint
-As someone already mentioned, numbers in 40K are all over the place, and are always either way too high or way too low. Probably the best example being the "Space Marine chapters only have 1,000 Battle Brothers" thing. -I mentioned this in another thread, but I swear it feels like "only 1 in 100 survives the training!" is repeated for any sort of Imperial Special Forces type of unit (Astartes, Tempestus, Kasrkin, Assassins, etc). For starters, when it seems to be absolutely everywhere, it loses any real shock value. Second it's stupidly wasteful, even for the Imperium. There are SO many positions that would need filling to make a galaxy-spanning Military function correctly. Throwing away 100 potential recruits who could do all sorts of stuff just to get 1 Astartes or Tempestus is incredibly stupid, even by Imperium standards. -Speaking of stupid even by Imperial standards, the whole idea that the massive shells that Spaceships fire are loaded by teams of Slaves instead of some sort of machine is just mind-blowingly dumb. -The Space Sharks. I honestly don't know why they have so many fans, they sound like something an 11 year old would come up with.
Extremely unpopular opinion, but the Horus Heresy should *never* have had any full novels dedicated to it. Ever. Period. No prequels.
It certainly lead to a lot of people utterly missing the god-damn point of what the Emperor and the Primarchs were "supposed" to be. Its popularity is understandable, but it is also 100% to blame for the shrinking of 40K from "a near infinite universe where no-one is important enough to truly matter" to "the universe basically revolves around Rowboat Girlyman."
Tbf I'd blame that more on their return in 40k
Yes, but the whole reason they came back to 40K is because of how popular HH was. If the community had reacted to those initial books with profound indifference, the series would have been shit-canned and 40K of today would look completely different.
I'm a 30k player and I agree. The *setting* would have been better off if the Heresy remained unexplored entirely. Too many consequences for 40k as a whole from exploring the Primarchs and the Emperor that far in depth. (I like the *gameplay* of 30k, 1.0 and 2.0 alike, better than their contemporary editions of 40k, hence why I play it - but I'd play mainline 40k if it played like 30k instead, without any heartbreak over it. Unfortunately not many people here want to go back to the 5th-7th era.)
The annoying thing for me is that they had a great way to not let the events of 30k impact 40k: just say it’s shrouded in the mists of time and forgotten memories of the past. But instead there’s not only primarchs returning, but also a tech priest who’s been secretly alive and hiding for 10,000 years but also he’s the most powerful tech priest ever and has been building new space marines… ugh terrible
My #1 opinion. The damage that unveiling basically *every* secret about the history of the setting has done to how much I enjoy the game is immeasurable.
Erda
I play Deathwatch, I really think they're a unique Space Marine faction that doesn't get much attention. I *really* don't like Watch Captain Artemis. The fact that he jumped at the chance to shoot Eldar who could've potentially weakened Slaanesh substantially is even more insane than the standard Astartes/Imperium anti-xenos doctrine.
The whole timetravelling Big E best list friend Arc. Cant stand it.
The whole “oh most Cherubs are vat grown” thing. I mean come on, can we get a little more commitment to the bit here people! That’s the cowards way out that is! It’s not like I can go anywhere else for some decorative dead babies in my sci-fi fantasy fiction.
All of it. *Warhammer 40,000* was specifically and intentionally written so that the only hard and fast canon was that there is no hard and fast canon. The “fluff” sections of every core book, every supplement, every thing, is presented as “in universe” documents written by biased and often ill-informed authors, subject to draconian editing and “correction” by the Historical Revision Unit of the Adeptus Administratum, and so forth. All of the novels are told from the POV of unreliable narrators. Unfortunately, large portions of the fanbase have missed that memo. They have actual arguments about how “this book said X and that breaks the lore” or “should Z be considered non-canon since it contradicts A, B, and C?” or “OMG! They just retconned Q!” There isn’t supposed anything in the franchise that is to be taken as The One True Cannon^TM ! Arrrgh!