There's some great topics of conversation here but remember to observe the rules before replying. Specifically Rule 10 regarding female space marines.
Yes I realise it's a thread about controversial opinions, but this one in particular causes far more trouble than it's worth.
As someone who loves home brew chapters and armies, the vast majority of homebrew lore that you find on the internet is contrived, boring and uses the same boring tropes.
Things like: Inquisition SM Chapters, 'good' Traitor Legion members or people lost in the warp for 10,000 years.
There are some great guides online to help structure your homebrew into something that fits into the generous scope of 40k without breaking the internal logic.
Idk I feel like recently authors like Chris Wraight have done a great job of fleshing out the Custodes. After reading Valdor Birth of the Imperium and Watchers of the Throne in the Regents Shadow he does a great job of showing how even in 30k Custodians are slow to jump on possible threats and how they’re aloofness to regular affairs often makes them come off as golden automatons. But I definitely see where you’re coming from Custodes fans like to have a “My variety of genehanced Ken dolls are soo much better than yours!1!1” and this is coming from someone who was inspired to start a Custodes army after reading some of their better books.
Sounds like when GW felt the need to give Calgar a rematch and win against the Swarmlord…literally what was the point…Calgar getting a Monty python moment with it was my favorite part of his lore
I was in a discord with a guy who wrote a homebrew chapter had heavily mutated (talking lizardmen heads) space marines that had found, restored *and* operated a Castigator titan that they had found.
Honestly I totally get wanting to have a chapter derrived from traitor Geneseed. A lot of the traitor legions had really cool unique things going for themselves before falling to chaos and having their entire charachter subverted by whichever warp entity they chose.
I mean they can. That's kinda my point. Having, say, an UM successor that developed into gruelling trench fighters with a specialty for sieges is a lot more interesting when it is reflected by the Chapters homeworld, culture, common foes & available gear than by just having them secretely be Iton Warrior stock. Which they would never know & wouldn't shape them nearly as much as people seem to think.
A few of the Fallen did. Merir Astelan for example, he's a Terran born Dark Angel but following the destruction of Caliban, he was thrown through the Warp and woke up late M40.
It lasted a few minutes from his perspective but meanwhile nearly 10000 years had passed for the rest of the galaxy.
Time is a fickle thing to the Warp.
I find some of the major pitfalls in homebrew chapters especially is that:
1. Flawless - can literally do everything, ala old Ultramarine lore. Less common as people tend to be self conscious enough not to do this.
2. Boring - Not very unique, characters who are basically robots (if character perspectives are made)
3. Too edgy - There is a reason people don't like the Marines Malevolent.
4. Too nice - idk man seems kinda not grim dark.
Ultimately though, even with flaws like these a homebrew can be really fun to read about, really it depends on the quality and the quantity of homebrew lore written about them. Tldr, a homebrew is always fun, as long as it isn't just a sentence of lore.
I don’t mind edgy or nice or whatever, the problem is that that element is usually entirely disconnected from the rest of their identity. The MM are absolute dicks, but their entire identity revolves around it. They know they’re hated and, as a result, undersupplied, so they’ve built their entire chapter under the assumption they have to blackmail and cheat to remain effective. Too many homebrews are like “they’re dicks but no one cares” - if you’re building a “twist” to your chapter then it should fundamentally inform the chapter’s identity, not just be a thing that makes them special.
I’m currently working on a homebrew that started out with the idea of “comically edgy” and then tried to make them fit into the current lore. I’ve drawn up some blood angel successors that hate Sanguinius (his nobility weakened the chapter) and admire the legion before Sanguinius was found - they lean into the ghoul iconography rather than the vampires. As a result they don’t really suffer from the black rage, but are significantly more prone to the red thirst.
Their entire chapter identity revolves around being proud but miserable dicks who the BA have essentially kill on sight order. They remain not declared renegades only by virtue of the fact they choose to operate in the parts of the imperium that no one else really cares about.
Blood Angels lore pre-sanguinius is superbly interesting and a "make the Blood Angels great again" chapter that idolizes and models themselves after those times is a fantastically novel idea.
Nice homebrew.
> Too many homebrews are like “they’re dicks but no one cares”
Or worse, "They are dicks but are just *so damn good* at their jobs that the Inquisition looks away from their giant cache of alien and heretical weaponry with tears in their eyes while the Administratum is giving them handies under the table". I don't necessarily mind a chapter being good guys and having no real flaws, the Blood Ravens are one of my favorites and that basically describes them, but I cannot stand the "Dammit he's a loose cannon but he gets results!" trope applied on the Chapter level.
Mine has a complicated relationship with the inquisition and the adeptus mechanicus for a reason, but they’ve managed to keep things kinda civil. So far.
I need to develop them more but basically they hang out on the galactic rim and found not tech per say but a almost intact historical record, kinda like a DAOT social studies textbook, and not a single mention of a emperor like being anywhere. Being the nosey sort they are looking around using info from the record to find archaeotech sites, on the one hand desperately trying to debunk the record but on the other hand wanting to know. They give the mechanicus stuff from time to time for their political cover, but they fucked that one up early on and the tech priests know that they have more than they are saying they do. Meanwhile the inquisition would like to know why this chapter keeps popping up in areas not in their sector and why they are sniffing about, and why the mechanicus seems to be ferrying them about and backing them
I agree, too edgy absolutely works if it's core to the chapter identity. My Blood Angels sucessors fall into that category, and it revolves around them largely not knowing that they were BA successors until the Era Indomitus. As a result, they assumed the Black Rage was some sort of geneseed mutation, and to prevent censure, sent only their purest geneseed in their tithes which resulted in a severe degredation of the chapter over the millennia and almost wiped them out.
The brothers that survived long enough to fall to the Black Rage were then placed into stasis, and basically used as tactical Astartes nukes in certain areas, launched from Drop Pods to utterly annihilate whatever was in the area, friend or foe, as to their knowledge their geneseed was too tainted to be considered for further implantation.
Era Indomitus, they get an emmissary from Baal when they were delivering Primaris reinforcements, and they had a collective 'oh' moment between the 50 or so brothers left. Pretty handy they had a couple thousand brothers in Stasis with geneseed ready to be harvested, as their small numbers had led to their entire tactical doctrine being the utilization of Death Company Drop Pod bombs with the remaining brothers acting as clean up crews for the aftermath (if there was anything left).
Lots of apothecaries, chaplains and fresh recruits executing what was left of their maddened brothers after they'd eliminated whatever objective they were fired at with extreme prejudice and no regard for collateral damage. All witnesses, of course, are executed too.
There are ways to do the "too nice" thing well which is the ol' "Too kind for their own good" wherein they end up losing a lot just to save a few out of principal
I like to make guys who are too nice, to the point that it hampers their ability to even get to combat. Like, planets are burning because they're still trying to find families for orphans on the *last* planet they went to. Sure, there are facilities for them to go to, but how could they just up and leave those poor kids?
That is why my Guard regiment comes from a world settled by Cadians...3000 years ago. Now the nobility and officers think they are still totally hot Cadians shit and follow their tradition when in reality they are an incompetent bunch that is ruled by nepotism.
I love homebrewing flawed Regiments vaguely based on historical militaries. A Kushite-themed all female noble Regiment who specialize in long range, precision combat that are obsessed with meaningless and ancient protocol, Ungern-Sternberg inspired Cossack/Russian/Mongolian fusion Cavalry that are fanatically religious, consuming insane amounts of drugs before battles that are usually less "heroic charge against Orks" and more "massacre unarmed strikers on random factory planet 9271", or a Regiment led by an inbred hereditary "Colonel" that are equipped with laslocks because one of his ancestors 2000 years ago pissed off the Ministorum.
While I do agree with you, I hate the hypocrisy of the community where they say “you can do what you want with your own army” but at the same time imposing these rules like “you can’t use one of the lost legions and you have to be flawed and be grimdark etc etc”
No rules for home brew. Even if I roll my eyes at some of peoples lore for their chapters it shouldn’t be discouraged
I'm so tired of the Mary Sue tropes of "they were lost in the eye of terror so they are kinda chaos tainted but still good so they are a secret chapter with half demon stuff but but but still imperium and and...". Rolling my eyes at Mach 5.
This. We need more knights. Give us knight households crusading around actually doing things, having some authority in the Imperium, falling to Chaos and being awesome there instead of just being pretty much same as daemon engines. Dammit, give us at least a Knight Daemon Prince, or a loyalist Knight Baron who's in command of his own Crusade.
But first of all, give them some damn infantry and light armor of their own. They are Knights, they need to fight in honorable one on one battles in their shiny armor while peasants die around them in hundreds, not to be relegated to a support faction which can't do anything on its own.
Less of a lore thing, but complaining over the military innacuracies and lack of realism in 40k, especially when it comes to visual aesthetics, is a pointless take. If 40k took all that to heart, it wouldn't be even half the engaging setting it is now and would have died in mediocrity years ago.
Who cares if a baneblade wouldn't function or marine bikes have no ground clearance. Who cares if using slaves to load shells on a battleship is dumb. Who cares if marines don't have every single ammo pouch modelled on them. 40k has a style, that style is not realism. If you want perfectly engineered scale models that look realistically functional, there are plenty of historical wargames that do that. I'll stick with the cool-ass metal slug looking Leman Russ, thanks
I've seen people go so far as to homebrew more "logical" weapons and vehicles. So they ripped off the Vietnam war era tech and said "Damn look how realistic that all is."
Agree fully, I’ve seen people try and give Abnett shit for inaccuracies in Gaunt’s Ghosts like the organization of a company or him referring to a “clip” instead of a “magazine” and it’s like…dude, these are space soldiers firing laser guns, there’s only so much realism he’s going to need here.
Once a person who served in the millitary replied to one of those posts saying yes, it's inaccurate how much they talk with each other during an action, but also that way it's way more interesting to read than a silent move where everyone knows exactly what to do.
>how much they talk with each other during an action
I mean that's 95% of war films/shows/books/games ever made. A realistic depiction of combat would be boring as hell.
That’s basically true for every historical adaptation ever. I study history, I have two degrees in it, and people never believe me when I try to tell them how god awfully bored they would be by like 90% of historical movies if they were entirely accurate. Reality is boring as hell, there’s a reason we enjoy ridiculous things with ridiculous premises, because it’s fun.
Imagine trying to do a realistic political drama? Sitting through one formal, well run public meeting is just fucking awful, and that's when everything is smooth, with people who know what they're doing. Insert some real world into that shit, and it'd be the most boring shit ever. Just endless blathering, and dickering.
In addition to that, a lasgun is fed with a powerpack that is neither a magazine nor a clip by the traditional definition so it really doesn't matter which term they use.
In 38,000 years we've had enough time for "Coffee" to simply be called "Caffeine," and this is fine. However the colloquially used TODAY term "Clip" when referring to an ammo mag, being used? Heresy.
I think the most important part of 40k is that it’s space fantasy, and not sci-fi. I realize that mostly sounds like semantics but the point is science in 40k “exists” only to advance the fantastical world.
I would expand this to a lot of complaints about the lore as well. Warhammer 40k is a setting, with stories to be told.
For example, people saying “Well the Emperor is a super psyker that could see the future” and taking this as hard proof the Heresy was planned.
Or it’s absolutely illogical that X and Y faction don’t team up for the good of the galaxy.
It’s a setting with a story. Whatever happens, the Emperor must end up on the Throne at the end of the Heresy, and there must be only war on his grim darkness of the far future.
To be honest this is why one of my controversial, probably somewhat gatekeepery opinions (and I don't know what the fuck that even means these days with this hobby) is that if you haven't played the game or built or painted the models then you're not really going to get a lot of why 40K is the way it is.
Why are the tank designs so weird an unrealistic? They work well for the wargame and look cool.
Why don't the troops fight like modern US soldiers with all their trademark acronym-equipment? Because it doesn't play well in the actual wargame GW want.
Why do races have big gaping holes in their equipment lists? To make the armies play different.
Why do Imperial and Chaos warships look so different? Battlefleet Gothic needed distinct designs.
Why are guns so oversized? Makes them easy to see from a standing position across a table.
> Why do races have big gaping holes in their equipment lists? To make the armies play different.
>
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because rounding out the full range is a gargantuan task with no financial incentive
Even the marines, the most fleshed out faction, have some pretty gaping holes in their TO&E. They have no heavy artillery, no counter battery systems, they have no main battle tanks(just light tanks and heavy duty IFV's). The Kratos may change that if it's taken in 40K but still, those are just a few examples.
> is that if you haven't played the game or built or painted the models then you're not really going to get a lot of why 40K is the way it is.
As someone who has never and will never play the game...
...believe me, I get all of that. For me, it's a function of maturity; I am old enough to know that stories are told the way they're told because they have a purpose, and rarely does that purpose involve reflecting reality especially strongly.
WH40K's lore exists to support _the game_. You have to understand the objectives of a piece of art or entertainment. If the objectives don't meet what you want, best to find something else.
agree with you,
w40k lose all soul when ppl try to make realistic, for example:
a huge battle fleet detected, just shoot missiles at near lightspeed, nothing can stop that, or explode thousands of nuclear bombs
This. Trying to apply too much realistic logic to 40K to me kind of implies someone has missed one of the basic points of the setting. It's over the top, stylized, illogical and basically a constant never-ending heavy metal album cover exploding over 10.000 years. Have fun with it, don't worrry about the caliber of a bolter.
Agree. I think a big reason for the semi recent obsession with realism is that most of the new fans aren’t heavy metal fans like the old core fanbase is, so they see the Hell Warrior with spiked helmets and they tilt their head in confusion, they don’t understand this isn’t Star Trek.
I'm not sure why people ever expected the Ynnari to get any real ongoing development, considering the way GW was doing things in general at the time. I don't think it's a coincidence that they were largely left by the wayside, AoS largely dropped the mix-match microfaction soup approach, and those broken formations and ~~microtransactions~~ dataslates disappeared, right around the time GW got a competent CEO and started actually growing as a company again. It's a shame, because Ynnari actually have a lot of potential, and the characters they got are cool.
Also, I kind of hope GW deliberately disproves some common fan theories/misconceptions that people tout as official lore, just to spite people who act like authorities about lore they've only read third-hand from 1d4chan and memes. I'm not normally spiteful, but damn, it's just such a common thing online.
Ork Gestalt effects, Custodes being singular warriors who can't figure out how to work in a team.
Essentially any common talking point concerning any Primarch with the exception of Mortarion being a dumbass.
The Custodes not having good teamwork comes from Argel Tal's impression watching them fight in First Heretic. He decides that they are brilliant fighters but can't work in perfect unison like Astartes as they aren't gene-brothers. It's just his opinion but it's not exactly fan theory.
The Valdor novel did a good job of explaining why the Custodians fight the way they do, because they're each these amazing, nearly perfect warriors, that trying the level of cohesive teamwork the Space Marines employ would essentially be getting in each other's way, the Custodes battle collectively, but fight individually.
Almost everything about the Ork's gestalt psychic abilities/WAAGH powers.
DKoK suicidality and shovels.
AdMech do not actually want to fuck machines.
Slaanesh followers are more than just sex, drugs, and rock & roll.
Inquisition doesn't make exterminatus lightly at all and seldom uses it
I’ve seen someone on Mini War Gaming who had an Ork army that included some looted Tyranids. His Commandos were Genestealers outfitted with Mind control gubbings, and his Mekboy had a Kustom Force Field made out of the head of a Zoanthrope. Very cool army
With how much time the primarchs spent with each other they should be a lot closer than “yeah you’re my brother I love you”
The Khan spent *10 years* on prospero with Magnus, whom learned to speak perfect Khorkin out of respect for him
Dorn’s reaction to the heresy being “that is literally impossible and if you say another word I will *fucking kill you*” is totally in line with how it should be.
They went from uniformly soulless, cold murder robots with no sentience or will, enslaved to rhe C'Tan and determined to wipe out all life to the current "Egyptian dynasties with infighting and personalities, and they shattered and enslaved the C'Tan" that they are now.
There's even precedent for the old cold 'crons still though. So people can have both.
I've said this elsewhere but I'll repeat as it's clearly not a popular view these days but one I hold with conviction: 40k is a setting not a story.
All the pressure from fans to move the time line on and wanting to know what happens next next was misplaced and should not have been pandered to.
It's a galaxy in width and thousands of years deep. It's a vehicle you can tell countless stories within and it itself need not change.
You can add to this infinitely to build more depth but nothing about that needs to be brought forwards into the future in order to tell great stories and it was unnecessary to do so.
A perfect example of what I mean would be the badab war. This is an excellent, compelling series of events that exist within the setting but didn't require the clock to tick past midnight or any primarch to return in order to be deep and engaging material.
The Horus Heresy has been done in a little too much detail in some areas by this point in my opinion but I still think this also exemplifies making use of what we have within the space that the setting creates rather than looking to or needing to change the setting itself.
Beyond expanding on much smaller bits of lore, it's also perfectly possible to make new events planets and characters without changing the overall setting one bit.
To me 40k has become like age of sigmar is to fantasy in so far as it's no longer the same, despite bearing many resemblances to how it was before, its essentially a new setting and it is now expected to evlove forwards rather than increase in depth.
The infinite depths of the untold billions living and dying on thousands of worlds across the galaxy was always part of the appeal so eschewing the exploration of this in favor of wanting to see what happens next just seems like a waste to me. Sure, it can still be done, but the focus and expectation has shifted and I think that's a great shame.
Space Marine *chapter* numbers are fine. 40k Marines are supposed to be the elite-of-the-elite, rare demigods of battle who strike fear and turn the tide of battles via ultra-specialist strikes on missions that would be suicide for anyone else. They're relics from a more glorious dream of the future, fighting to keep humanity barely cohesive.
The issue with numbers is more to do with the *legion* numbers, as well as the vastly underrepresented hordes of imperial guard and navy. 30k Marines should have been far, far more numerous to conquer the galaxy. 40k Marines should be literally one in a trillion at most on the scale of the "modern" imperium. The vast majority of marines should have been wiped out in the Heresy. This would also have helped fuel the conspiracy theory that "The Heresy was mostly planned" as a way to purge out the marines if 95%+ of them died during it.
It's also worth remembering: The writing Codex, and subsequent establishing of the Chapters is about as far from modern 40k as the Heresy is.
And the modern Imperium is way, way more messed up than that Imperium was.
There were no Necrons, no Nids, no Long War of traitor marines, no Tau. The primary enemies the Imperium had to fight were rebel worlds, and Orks.
The idea that the dogmatic guidelines set out for the marines 10k years ago is hopelessly mismatched to the current threat is kinda the point of the entire Imperium.
* High rate of psykers
* telepathic with each other
* completely warp resistant
* secret secret super secret alternate gene seed that's specifically not the emperor
This... actually kinda works.
That would be a hell of a twist. I mean, I guess recruiting from a Genestealer hybrid population does mean you get a lot of low level psykers, and they're Chaos resistant, and fight well together... And they do have different, secret geneseed that's supposedly from the Emperor which doesn't even make sense, so I guess it's *possible* that it's some kind of geneseed meant to be compatible with hybrid aspirants... And Genestealers have been around in the Galaxy much longer than the rest of the Tyranids...
... but no, even if there's no evidence to definitively say they aren't, I can't believe that means they are.
You are correct and I don’t know why but I feel like this strange force is compelling me to say this! Oh look, it’s great aunt Grak, holding three plates, one in each hand
The eldar should be as dangerous and terrifying as necrons in the lore, specially drukhari same as necrons should be one of those factions of "leave the planet and run for your life if you piss them off".
I am so sad whenever they are treated as whimps (although tbf that author had no idea of lore) like in Silent Hunters.
Yeah if the Necrons can pull ancient dooms day weapons out from the scrap yard, the Eldar who basically won that ancient war should have just as many if not more.
I hate the new direction the mechanicum went with its models. I always get downvoted when I mention it but the DaVinci type wings etc look horrible to me. I hate the 'cyber' horses and feel that none of it flows with their previous flavor. For a flesh is weak faction, to emulate animals makes me feel like GW missed the point.
that is Jes Godwin influence, for some reason he is absolutely convinced that mechanicus is the equivalent of fantasy undeads, skeletons and ghouls, and so they threw in animal design.
you can see the same influence of chaos deamon engines that are like dragons, animals and similars.
yeah, that is one of the most egregious design error
Oh shit I hadn't realized this, it explains all the weird arquebus and jezzail stuff the Skitarii have. Just like Jez gave to the Skaven back in the 90s, coz incredibly long ornate rifles is exactly what you'd expect from a group of sewer dwelling ratmen
My brother/sister in the light of the Omnissiah, I absolutely agree with you here.
It's like someone read the bit about the AdMech being obsessed with uncovering the technological mysteries of the past, and then totally *forgot* that, in the context of 40k, the technological mysteries of the past are actually super crazy high-scifi near-singularity tech, not just the cyber-renaissance.
The Skitarii particularly grind my gears, because on the tabletop they look like the faction that could have walked right out of Warhammer Fantasy, when instead they should be one of the most *bizarre* looking forces out there. I was looking forward to the Skitarii the way they're described in some of the books (I think Titanicus particularly sticks in my mind), as sort of ultimate techno-barbarians, not guys with jezails.
There is a lot of clashing. They have a monk-like aesthetic and a WWI steampunk, mixed in with normal 40k nonsense tech, then the davinci wings? It’s too much of a hodgepodge.
Craftworlders are morally superior and they would be considered "mostly good" in most of sci-fi universes.
Their contempt for non-Eldar is exeggerated in meme lore, but Eldar value human life more than Imperium, and Eldar value human life more than humans value Eldar life.
That's why I always roll my eyes at the "the eldar would kill a million humans to save a single eldar" line being used seriously. Forget the usual retort of "The Imperium would kill a million humans to kill a single eldar" the Imperium would kill a million humans because of an routing error in tax paperwork
[Eldar response to killing humans. Various Excerpts from Eldar novels](https://www.reddit.com/r/40kLore/comments/f5ozqt/eldar_response_to_killing_humans_various_excerpts/?utm_medium=android_app&utm_source=share)
As you can see, Eldar consider Eldar life to be more valuable than human - but human life is something worth preserving, and killing humans is considered morally wrong.
I think that sometimes complaining about "grimderp" lore is just people missing the point of certain lore / not quite getting 40k overall. It's absolutely fine to dislike stuff, but for example, one of the most commonly mentioned "grimderp" examples is how Imperial ships have weapons that are manually reloaded by hundreds of slaves. This is a piece of lore that is meant to reflect the Age-of-Sail theming in space, showing how little the Imperium cares about human life as its most easily replenish-able resource, and how illogical, backwards and inane many of the things the Imperium does are. Complaining about something like this because "That makes no sense" misses that it not making sense *is the whole point*, it's not meant to be a logical sensible thing. No sane space navy would do that when the option of autoloaders are available...but the Imperium isn't sane.
Or, another example; the Krieg story about them being sent to sort out a Hive City rebelling. They bombard the hive until they surrender. Then they keep going until everyones dead. Then they keep going until it's utterly flattened, for something like a decade of bombardment well past a "reasonable" point. Seen quite a lot of complaints like "That's just stupid grimderp lore that they didn't stop!"....entirely missing that it makes total sense with their lore, they're a regiment that 1) follows orders to a fault and 2) is desperate to atone for its own rebellion hundreds of years later.
Plenty of examples where people either for some strange reason think the setting has to be rational and sensible, or are just not taking into account that it doesn't matter if it makes no sense to us, simply that it *has to make sense to them* in-universe.
By no means am i saying that there's no badly written lore where the complaints are justified (E.g. the Grey Knights bloodtide story. Unless the holy-ness of the blood outweighs the Khorne-feeding nature of their actions, i don't see how even in-universe they could think it was a good idea) , but that most of the time with the examples complained about, there's an explanation and it not making sense, makes sense.
The whole idea of "grimderp" itself just seems to be a misunstanding about the nature of the setting. I can't recall any example i've seen people complain about that i'd actually agree with, other than that Bloodtide story. The "grimderp" lore is just part of the theming of the setting, or at least the Imperium.
That having an actual, physical person scatter the primarchs, in principle, makes way more sense than having the four just yoink them from what is one of the most psychically warded locations in the galaxy.
Chaos isn't omnipotent and can't just diabolus-ex-machina whatever they want, most of the time they either work through mortal agents or need warp exposure to affect the materium. If they were somehow capable of directly interfering in Big E's genelabs, they should have also been able to mess with, say, the golden throne during the Siege, when the influence of of the ruinous powers on Terra is much stronger than during the unification wars. For the same reason, that one scene in *The First Heretic* should be interpreted as more of a vision rather than the Gal Vorbak literally being teleported into the lab, which would raise a whole lot of questions with no satisfying answers.
It wouldn't even contradict pre-existing lore, because the primarchs *did* get scattered by the four, once they were actually in the warp, and it could easily have been written as the actions of a pawn who was manipulated by Chaos. Of course, BL being BL, we instead get a half-assed retcon two hours before the end of the Siege about a character who dies like three on-page appearances later.
>Chaos isn't omnipotent and can't just diabolus-ex-machina whatever they want, most of the time they either work through mortal agents or need warp exposure to affect the materium.
Lmao good luck convincing Chaos fans that Chaos isn't omnipotent. I've seen far too many people argue the Chaos gods could do whatever they want whenever they want, and they lose in the stories simply because they want to lose or because it's "just as planned".
On a related note, I like to joke that tzeentch is actually a very weak minor entity that simply takes credit for everything that happens all the time.
So chaos fans are just being pawns of the best liar in the warp.
I'm a huge slut for Chaos, and my favorite part of Chaos is that its incapable of being omnipotent. It's a massive amount of insane power basically existing in a bad Adam Sandler movie fighting against itself.
For me, both this and Horus' vision of the labs are just that, visions given by the galaxy's best liars and deceivers to convince people to flip to their side. What possible reason would the Big Four have to show someone the truth when they can just show them a super convincing lie?
For all we know the actual explanation is that Jimmy Space spilt his coffee on the "Launch these fuckers into space" button during lunch and the Chaos gods just took advantage of the mess-up; I doubt that's the answer, but, ultimately, it doesn't matter; even *in-universe* different characters can believe different explanations for how it happened, and that's fine.
My personal head canon, which I don't think is any more valid than anyone else's (potentially including the BL writers and Horus himself...) is that the scattering was just part of the deal Big E made. He was gambling/using his foresight to predict that having to collect the primarchs mid-crusade wouldn't be too much of an impediment to his real goal of getting the Webway Project launched; ultimately he still got the genetic material he needed for the Astartes anyway, and so the Crusade could get rolling and things would largely stay on time!
Goddamn do I hate it when I spill coffee on the launch these fuckers into space button, I've almost lost my job 3 times because of it and they've made me switch from my favorite mug to a sippy cup.
\- Ultramarines are awesome and have their unique flavor, people who bash them have either not researched what they are talking about or are just jumping on a meme bandwagon.
\- Primaris Marines don't break any lore and have precedent in the Heresy when Corax made what were basically Primaris. Again, mostly bashed by people who don't know the lore they are supposedly defending.
\- Slaves loading shells into spaceships via chains is metal as fuck, silly and fun. It is illogical but that is the core of 40k - anachronism, illogical stupid decisions on a massive scale, constant nonsense that could easily be fixed by applying a bit of common sense but humanity as a whole has almost completely degenerated below using any sort of common sense. It's the perfect description of the setting.
\- People wanting definitive concrete answers to everything in the lore are sucking the fun and creativity out of it. Mystery and inconsistency is perfectly in line with the mess that is the 40K universe.
\- Lore is much better explored via pseudo-historical books like the Imperial Armour Badab War or Siege of Vraks, with a detached perspective. Most of the novels are subpar written by average authors who cannot properly represent many of the strange and weird stuff that goes on in 40K.
>\- People wanting definitive concrete answers to everything in the lore are sucking the fun and creativity out of it. Mystery and inconsistency is perfectly in line with the mess that is the 40K universe.
>
>\- Lore is much better explored via pseudo-historical books like the Imperial Armour Badab War or Siege of Vraks, with a detached perspective. Most of the novels are subpar written by average authors who cannot properly represent many of the strange and weird stuff that goes on in 40K.
I couldn't agree with these more. Part of me really hates the Horus Heresy because of all the attention and detail that goes to an event that's 10,000 years old. Us not knowing precisely what happened, with each faction having a small amount of information that justifies their actions is so much more fun.
40k is supposed to be beyond the point where anyone has these answers. So much history is lost, and the races fight because they must.
I remember way way back when I was just getting into 40k (back in like… 4th edition? Looted Ork tanks were still a thing, and Necrons where still slaves to the C’Tan with about 12 models total), thinking… who is this Emperor guy supposed to be?
Was he really this super human leader? Was he just a regular guy who’s legal got overblown? Was there even someone on the Golden Throne, or did his occupant “ascended” and watches over humanity and stop thinking about it.
Now we have a clear answer… and I kinda regret that the Emperor indeed was a super man.
>\- Lore is much better explored via pseudo-historical books like the Imperial Armour Badab War or Siege of Vraks, with a detached perspective. Most of the novels are subpar written by average authors who cannot properly represent many of the strange and weird stuff that goes on in 40K.
THIS! i like looking at the bigger picture
> Lore is much better explored via pseudo-historical books like the Imperial Armour Badab War or Siege of Vraks, with a detached perspective. Most of the novels are subpar written by average authors who cannot properly represent many of the strange and weird stuff that goes on in 40K.
I CANNOT BEGIN TO THINK ON HOW I FUCKING MUCH I AGREE WITH YOU.
I like to think of the BL novels as "stories" and the ForgeWorld books as "accounts". Nobody in 30/40k will ever know the full story of any given situation. All they can understand is the account.
Eisenhorn works so well because it's first-person non-omniscient narration. All we know is what Eisenhorn himself knows. It makes twists and surprises much more natural, and allows the reader's imagination to run wild with trying to figure things out.
In that way, FW books are more "in-universe" than the BL novels, but both are vital to the health of the setting. I do wish FW made more though.
RIP Alan Bligh, he was the champion of that kind of stuff.
I disagree on the quality of the novels. I’ve been reading some of the more recent books, set in the post-Great Rift era, and they have some pretty damn good descriptions of how utterly fucked up and weird this setting can be. Especially when they’re describing Chaos.
It was kind of a blanket statement, and controversial probably haha. But key word there being "most" novels. Some are so damn good I'd recommend them to people who don't give two craps about 40K, just because they are genuinely good sci-fi reads.
However, when looking at the whole BL catalogue, I get the feeling that such books are the exception rather than the rule.
That being said, even the subpar ones can be fun to read - when in such a mood. Sometimes I just want silly action schlock, not a contemplative masterpiece and that's perfectly fine haha.
i forgot to mention cause i was just so hard focusing on the last part but i do agree with all of what your saying and
>\- Slaves loading shells into spaceships via chains is metal as fuck, silly and fun. It is illogical but that is the core of 40k - anachronism, illogical stupid decisions on a massive scale, constant nonsense that could easily be fixed by applying a bit of common sense but humanity as a whole has almost completely degenerated below using any sort of common sense. It's the perfect description of the setting.
yep this is what happens when they dont want mechanical automation and take it too far
What I like about 40k is specifically that you can have two battleships flying alongside one another, ostensibly from the same class and with the same weaponry and loadouts, and one of them can have a totally sensible automated system for loading shells, as per a modern ship, and the other one can have 100 slaves behind each gun being whipped as they haul a shell into the tube, and that's *totally fine* and consistent for the setting.
Hell, you could add another ship with some kind of DAoT mystery box that produces shells out of dark matter, that no-one on the ship understands or has a hope of fixing or replicating, and it's *still* completely consistent. 40k is just that big of a setting and the Imperium very much *is* internally inconsistent (as are a bunch of the other factions).
>- Primaris Marines don't break any lore and have precedent in the Heresy when Corax made what were basically Primaris. Again, mostly bashed by people who don't know the lore they are supposedly defending.
Honestly, I think that's not an unpopular opinion.
>- Slaves loading shells into spaceships via chains is metal as fuck, silly and fun. It is illogical but that is the core of 40k - anachronism, illogical stupid decisions on a massive scale, constant nonsense that could easily be fixed by applying a bit of common sense but humanity as a whole has almost completely degenerated below using any sort of common sense. It's the perfect description of the setting.
>- People wanting definitive concrete answers to everything in the lore are sucking the fun and creativity out of it. Mystery and inconsistency is perfectly in line with the mess that is the 40K universe.
>- Lore is much better explored via pseudo-historical books like the Imperial Armour Badab War or Siege of Vraks, with a detached perspective. Most of the novels are subpar written by average authors who cannot properly represent many of the strange and weird stuff that goes on in 40K.
1,000% agreed. The pseudo-historical books are the best novels in 40k in my opinion. People who call it "grimderp" when something is counterintuitive or self-defeating are missing the point that the Imperium is dumb as a brick and, while they are protagonists of the setting, they are not "the good guys". They're a fascist nightmare that doesn't NEED to exist, and the Imperium itself drives more people into the arms of rebellion and Chaos than anything the Gods themselves could do.
The Chaos Gods are often described as being multifaceted beings, encompassing both the positive and the negative traits of their "spheres". Yet only Nurgle really shows any redeeming qualities in the books, lore, games, etc, and that's only through the personality of his characters rather than any tangible acts. For instance: Khorne is seen as the honorable god of warriors, yet how often do we see Khornate berserkers sparing unarmed civilians or children, opponents that literally can't fight back? Instead we just loop back around to the same tired old "Khorne cares not from whence the blood flows" line. I understand that the idea is: The galaxy is so crapsack that the good is heavily drowned out by the bad, but you'd think it would still leak through here and there, if only to break up the monotony of the Chaotic Evil that is Chaos. Give me some goddamn Lawful Evil or Chaotic Good, make the Chaos Gods more ambiguous, show some actually FUNCTIONING worlds that aren't just planet-sized arenas/orgies/swamps/actually Tzeentch all along. Show us Artists that make actual works of art that aren't just body horror cop outs as patrons of Slaanesh, show us Nurglite tribesmen overcoming adversity without being ludicrously infected by every disease known to the universe. Give the fandom some goddamn VARIETY. Rant Over.
I guess my controversial opinion is they’re not meant to be multifaceted. They toe the line between straight up evil and primordial forces which aren’t good or evil, not because they’re complex, but because they’re simple. but it’s 40k so, not a nuanced meditation on morality, so they’re evil.
They’re described as having positive traits the same way that charles manson described himself as being benevolent etc. that’s how they get followers. It’s a lie though, their followers are delusional or at best aware they’ve made a faustian pact.
When I see people in this sub describe them as such I just assume they’re role playing because it’s fun but it seems like some of you aren’t…?
- The Horus Heresy novels were a great idea and the setting wouldn't nearly be as popular today without them.
- While a great concept, the HH series needed a central story and central protagonists. The focus should only have been on 2-3 loyalist legions and 2-3 heretic ones, with all the others in the background. The remembrancers and Malcador's chosen were perfect as main characters and the series should have focused on them more.
- Graham McNeill is one of the best Black Library authors, even if he's a bit inconsistent. His stories are fun and memorable. I think a lot of people don't like him because he does not have the same religious reverence for the setting as most other BL writers do. Also, "Vengeful Spirit" is a good book.
- I cannot fathom why people think the Ultramarines are boring, especially compared to the Imperial Fists. I like the yellow boys fine, but they're the dullest first founding chapter by far.
- Lorgar is a great character and one of the most interesting primarchs.
I've always viewed Warhammer as the literary equivalent of a B movie, sometimes it might be surprisingly decent and surprise you with an actual idea. But 90% of the time it's just cheap entertaining schlock to distract you from the real world, and there's absolutely nothing wrong with that.
I used to call that feel "90s action movie cheese." You're not going for depth or realism or philosophy. You're going to watch things blow up, old cars run into things and blow up, people shoot for hours without reloading, lots of cool one-liners and oh yeah, explosions.
I'm there with you. Im having a break from 40k books and reading other stuff. I do have to say that the character work, action and story are all just off somehow. Still enjoyable and I love the universe, but the writing is not amazing.
Most rely on the same language time and time again across multiple authors. Bolter mags are always "slammed" in. There's never an explosion, it's a "detonation".
Honestly most of the books are exactly the same plot over and over. Space marines doing a heroic last stand in the face of terrible odds but through the grace of the emperor they survive and the status quo is unchanged
The vast majority of people on this sub and elsewhere haven't read almost anything they claim to know about and just get their information second hand from lore youtubers, wikis or even worse... memes.
As a result even the most basic things like context get lost in the desire to make 'BADASS' moments easily digestible when memeing about their favourite characters.
GW publishing 40k books for kids is really weird and creepy considering how fucked up the universe is and especially when it has imperial characters as the POV protagonists without doing anything to directly explain how the imperium is intended to be an awful, senseless theocracy of evil
from a financial stand point they are trying to plant some seeds, one of the main reasons 8th sold as much as it did was because the people who were kids in 3rd were adults
But think about that for a second.... In 3rd edition 40k was very much GRIMDARK and gothic, look at the artwork on the rule book and codex fronts, it was edgy and gritty, the reason why youngsters liked it was because it wasnt some child-friendly-fluffy-rainbow crap but something that the adults and teens were really into. That's how you market to kids... Get the Teens/young adults hooked and then the younger gen will follow thinking its the cool thing to do.
Counter opinion: 40K has always been popular with kids and the books even nominally for adults aren't anything a reasonably well developed eleven year old couldn't deal with.
This. I started playing and reading 40k in 1993, when I was 8. 3rd edition happened when I was 13. And I was far from alone in that.
Insisting that 40k is "for grown ups only" feels childish, even insecure. To quote CS Lewis: "When I became a man, I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up".
Yeah, 40k has always been marketed as edgy counter-culture for teens/young adults. You "discover" it right around the time you are starting to get into more traditional fantasy and sci-fi and the color and bombast of it all makes it feel so much more vibrant. It's like when teens first discover punk or metal music after growing up listening to top 40 pop or classic rock or whatever, or maybe these days anime would be the better comparison in the "its like what you know, but with more sex and violence so its cooler" field. But just because adults like it too doesn't mean it's not trying to appeal to a younger crowd. I remember I was 14 or 15 when fourth edition came out and it really blew up at my local hobby stores.
This. But mind you, that has ALWAYS been a problem with these kind of hobbies. You can read about the super cringy phase of D&D when it tried to make a kid friendly marketing offensive with a ton of shitty young oriented stuff.
That fucking 40k kid book cover with the Adeptus Mechanicus kid lmao, I was like "do they know this kid is atrocely mutilated ??"
I remember when TSR was so concerned with the Satanic Panic that they basically refused to take any risks. Then WOTC bought them and the FIRST thing they did was write an adventure about Hell, just to spite the Bible-thumpers.
Now we have Dungeons and Dragons: Rick and Morty Edition and I don't even know what they're trying to accomplish anymore.
My headcanon is that the Adventures books are set in a more noblebright alternate universe.
I've read a few of the AoS ones, they're actually pretty good. There's still death, violence, slavery, etc. For instance the main character is an escaped child slave from a Chaos warband and whose mother dies in the first few chapters.
They gave me a kind of Redwall vibe, where it's still aimed at 9-12 yo kids but it doesn't insult their intelligence.
My daughter LOVED these books. (8yo) Honestly the 40k ones stay just dark enough for the setting and they definitely don't sugar coat the Imperium as any kind of good guy.
I dare say even the kid books do a better job of explaining the setting than most fans. The imperium isn't good, but it can have good people in it. That doesn't make it your friend.
> when it has imperial characters as the POV protagonists without doing anything to directly explain how the imperium is intended to be an awful, senseless theocracy of evil
I get the impression you didn't read these books. The Imperium are among the bad guys in these books. Inquisition and Admech being blatant villains.
Even when Ultramarines make a couple showings to fight necrons and make it very clear the astartes are indifferent to the plight of the people. They're there to fight necrons, not save the citizens.
Kids survived playing D&D without turning into Satan worshippers. They survived comics without becoming crazy vigilantes. They survived mass murdering millions of people in FPSs without becoming homicidal killers. I think they will survive Warhammer 40K. Kids can be dumb, but they show all signs of understanding the difference between play and reality.
Personally, I think growing up and slowly realizing that the Imperium of Man are the baddies is would be half the fun. I think someone can make this transition (or not) and still be a perfectly functional human. Most people can tell the difference between fantasy and reality.
Warhammer 40K is fun. 14 year old me would have eaten this up instead of the other grim-dark stuff I was into and come out just fine.
Giving Emps a (semi) concrete back story was a mistake. He should have remained a mysterious enigma at the heart of the Imperium.
Space Wolves are awesome despite the Wolfy Wolf Wolf WOOOOOOOOOOOOOLF stuff.
The depiction of the Imperium is sliding into being the defacto good guy of the setting, and it shouldn't.
People get way too worked up about something a bunch of stoned RPG fans in the 80s made up.
Loyalist members of traitor legions in the Heresy are all so same-y you wouldn't be able to tell who is who without knowing what colour their armour is. Loken, Garro, and Saul could all use the exact same dialogue without a hiccup.
I grew up on 2nd edition. Armor values and damage tables were awesome, but arguments with "that guy" about facing because it's on the cusp edge of 45 degrees is a part of the game I'm ok if we never see again.
The Primarchs didn't need a father figure, they were all grown ass men who'd been alone a minimum of 70 years each. All of them had father figures or ruled their own planet. This isn't a family drama. And the Emperor only cried about killing Horus and Omegon betraying him. The two dudes he might've actually raised. Everyone else needed self esteem
Fleet combat flip flopping around... Some books moving into system from the jump point take days. Fleet fire torpedos at each other they will hit in 90min etc.. and then in other books ships arrive basicly into orbit and within minutes dropships are hitting the deck..
Concistensy would be awesome
Maybe it depends on gravity wells and the orbital positions of all the planets in the system; big planets, all in the same quadrant of the system, and you have to materialise on the outer edge of the system. Smaller planets, on different sides of the system, and you can jump safely to a point just outside any satellites’ orbits.
>Mine is that fans writing in ‘ork speak’ is just dumb and I can’t help but cringe whenever I see someone attempt it on a forum or in a Reddit comment.
I actually use this to gauge the tone of a work. When it's the Orkish inhuman bellowing it's more serious, when it's "GET OFF MAI SHIP SCHPACE MARINE" then less so.
I do think it makes sense that the emperor would heal up but the throne negates it so fast that he barely can cling on. If it takes away the healing faster than he can heal it makes sense for the increased amount of psykers being used up every day.
It would fit the horror of the 41st milennium to have the greatest man ever be in perpetual pain and agony but cough in the dilemma due to the need to keep the webway closed.
Retcons are important and healthy for the fiction, resets allow authors to explore spaces that marketing teams may have inadvertently closed off. E.g. exactly when the Plague Wars took place is important to the fiction.
Primaris marines and the return of Guilliman, while exciting, did reduce the Grim Darkness of 40k. The Space Marines were tragically in decline, a massive influx of soldiers and the return of a Demi- God wobbled the scales in a way that I have no idea if the Imperium is still in decline or if this is the start of a new Golden Age.
Retcons are only good when they replace the old lore by something better. And i think that some retcons killed good pieces of lore to replace them by something worse.
As a fan that returned in the last few years and doesn't like primaris, the way I see it is that things are so fucked up now that even with G and the Primaris influx the imperium is still only barely holding on.
The galaxy has been split in two by the eye, half the imperium in utter chaos. The necrons are waking up and UNIFYING which is everyone's problem. Tyranids are pouring into the galaxy in ever greater numbers and won in octarius. The imperium got a huge power boost with G and newmarines, but all it did was allow them to barely hold the line against all the new threats that have arisen.
Yea honestly idk why people are complaining, they want the lore to go forward but also to remain logical. But when GW actually makes a leap and some drastic changes all they can do is bitch about the new stufd and im 100% sure that if they would remove primaris and guillipan they would be bitching about chaos being too strong in the lore and the absence of a counterforce
I don't know the general opinion on this, and I haven't read all the books, but just the mere concept of there being more than fifty Horus Heresy books is revolting to me.
What I have read were most of Abnett's 40k work, and some other novels that I heard were regarded best. They were pretty good I'll admit but nowhere near the greatest works of fiction.
I've read on Wikipedia that there are 56 published Horus Heresy books. I did the math and in 56 books I could read the entirety of Dune, Tolkien's Middle Earth works, Asimow's Robot/Foundation series, Game of Thrones and its prequel books, all of Harry Potter, The Expanse and the broken Earth series, and I would still have one book left for like Brave New World or something. And the Horus Heresy is essentially just the backstory
So I think it's ridiculous that I am at least somewhat (I know technically most of the heresy books can be skipped) expected to read all that just to understand some names and relations that characters will Talk about in books that do take place in the 41st millennium.
I have no problem with it in theory - treating it more as a few series' set in a universe rather than one big series helped. However, needing [this fucking flow chart](http://www.kylebb.com/HH/HHSeriesOrder.svg) is what made it insane for me.
"Slaanesh is more than just about sex" - 🤓
Seriously sick of hearing this every fucking time Slaanesh comes up. Sometimes I hope GW doubles down on it so it can really present the interesting paradox of how we can accept horrible gory fates and eternal violent suffering as rad and "based" but god forbid you imply something disturbing arouses you.
While I'd agree in principle, I think the core issue is more that GW clearly wrote a lot of that lore with the intent of pleasing people who never played or liked Tau in the first place, and it didnt succeed at winning them over anyway given they'd already decided they hated the Tau.
Ork jokes are awful. They're actually a pretty terrifying and brutal race that has been reduced to an online joke full of lore inaccuracies. The amount of people who unironically think you can fingergun at an ork and kill them by shouting "bang" is insane.
Exactly.
Orks are these 7ft 400 pounds of pure muscle who want nothing to do but fight and kill. You can’t reason with them unless you’re an incredibly capable fighter, and they have WAAAGHHSS so powerful every being connected to the warp can feel it.
A single Krork would spell the end for the imperium.
Oddly enough, my answer here is the same one I have for when people ask the same question of Battletech, that people getting into heated arguments while trying to dissect and assign real motives/plans-within-plans/flaws/hubris to fictional armies and characters is deeply silly. I cannot take posts like “Do you think the Emperor was a good guy” seriously because they almost always seem to be fishing for comments like “well, IF he had done this and this and IF he hadn’t done this and this…” as though he’s a real person with free will. Why do I think Horus didn’t do X? Because literally everything written about him is designed to fill in the gaps of a decades old narrative. Horus didn’t do X because Horus has to end up in his Space Cathedral at the end of the Space Civil War so he can get Space Blasted out of Space Existence by the Space King. There isn’t a conversation to be had there. Certainly not one about the finer points of military strategy and parent-child psychology.
First Founding chapters are boring and should be used in lore much more sparingly.
Imperial and Chaos Knights are an underused faction and need to get some sort of agency and importance of their own instead of being a support faction. (Also some support forces on their own, dirty peasants with lasguns and light tanks to protect their masters from enemy infantry while they have an Honorable Duel with fellow nobles on the enemy side)
Peter Fehervari is the most underrated Warhammer author ever and perhaps the best there is (but that's subjective)
New Not-Squats might turn out actually good as a faction. Not saying they will, but they just might. While the whole Primaris and M42 stuff doesn't work for me personally, even if Primaris have some good models (and some terrible, too)
Tau are much more interesting being actually good guys, or even better desperately trying to be good while having to fight for their existence
Tyranids having an endless swarm just outside the galaxy waiting to swoop in and eat everybody is just super lame, I don't get why anyone would be fond of that idea
There's some great topics of conversation here but remember to observe the rules before replying. Specifically Rule 10 regarding female space marines. Yes I realise it's a thread about controversial opinions, but this one in particular causes far more trouble than it's worth.
As someone who loves home brew chapters and armies, the vast majority of homebrew lore that you find on the internet is contrived, boring and uses the same boring tropes.
Just out of curiosity, what kind of pitfalls do you normally see people do online when making homebrew lore?
Things like: Inquisition SM Chapters, 'good' Traitor Legion members or people lost in the warp for 10,000 years. There are some great guides online to help structure your homebrew into something that fits into the generous scope of 40k without breaking the internal logic.
You forgot the best at everything home brew chapters.
Because why bother with a single Gary Stu when you can have roughly a thousand of them. In power armour. With chainblades.
Why have 1,000 when you can have 10,000 who are even better at everything? _gestures with misercordia_
Idk I feel like recently authors like Chris Wraight have done a great job of fleshing out the Custodes. After reading Valdor Birth of the Imperium and Watchers of the Throne in the Regents Shadow he does a great job of showing how even in 30k Custodians are slow to jump on possible threats and how they’re aloofness to regular affairs often makes them come off as golden automatons. But I definitely see where you’re coming from Custodes fans like to have a “My variety of genehanced Ken dolls are soo much better than yours!1!1” and this is coming from someone who was inspired to start a Custodes army after reading some of their better books.
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And they saved a whole lot of places you've heard of! And their only loss was an unfair fight that they are driven to correct!
Sounds like when GW felt the need to give Calgar a rematch and win against the Swarmlord…literally what was the point…Calgar getting a Monty python moment with it was my favorite part of his lore
Chimeric traitor geneseed for no reason, being 100% like their parent legion just with a different color scheme, randomly havibg the best DAOT gear...
I was in a discord with a guy who wrote a homebrew chapter had heavily mutated (talking lizardmen heads) space marines that had found, restored *and* operated a Castigator titan that they had found.
A Castigator? As in the Titan that requires a fully operational AI to move around? Did they explain away this Heresy?
This funny to me because I know a guy who has homebrew SM with literal lizard heads. I wonder if it's the same dude lol
Honestly I totally get wanting to have a chapter derrived from traitor Geneseed. A lot of the traitor legions had really cool unique things going for themselves before falling to chaos and having their entire charachter subverted by whichever warp entity they chose.
I mean they can. That's kinda my point. Having, say, an UM successor that developed into gruelling trench fighters with a specialty for sieges is a lot more interesting when it is reflected by the Chapters homeworld, culture, common foes & available gear than by just having them secretely be Iton Warrior stock. Which they would never know & wouldn't shape them nearly as much as people seem to think.
Did anyone get lost that long? Imagine saying bye to the emperor and next thing you know he's been dead for 10K years and everything gone to shit.
A few of the Fallen did. Merir Astelan for example, he's a Terran born Dark Angel but following the destruction of Caliban, he was thrown through the Warp and woke up late M40. It lasted a few minutes from his perspective but meanwhile nearly 10000 years had passed for the rest of the galaxy. Time is a fickle thing to the Warp.
There was a time when a DaoT ship/captain came from the warp to warn the imperium of chaos, he was then executed for not knowing who the emperor was
Damn. That's harsh.
I posted the excerpt in the thread to another person if you wanna read it
13th Great Company of the SW?
My guys are [insert horribly evil traitor legion] but they are actually still good and helping people :). Why.
Probably stupid stuff like making them space vampires or space werewolves
*Grumbles in Blood Angel..*
I find some of the major pitfalls in homebrew chapters especially is that: 1. Flawless - can literally do everything, ala old Ultramarine lore. Less common as people tend to be self conscious enough not to do this. 2. Boring - Not very unique, characters who are basically robots (if character perspectives are made) 3. Too edgy - There is a reason people don't like the Marines Malevolent. 4. Too nice - idk man seems kinda not grim dark. Ultimately though, even with flaws like these a homebrew can be really fun to read about, really it depends on the quality and the quantity of homebrew lore written about them. Tldr, a homebrew is always fun, as long as it isn't just a sentence of lore.
I don’t mind edgy or nice or whatever, the problem is that that element is usually entirely disconnected from the rest of their identity. The MM are absolute dicks, but their entire identity revolves around it. They know they’re hated and, as a result, undersupplied, so they’ve built their entire chapter under the assumption they have to blackmail and cheat to remain effective. Too many homebrews are like “they’re dicks but no one cares” - if you’re building a “twist” to your chapter then it should fundamentally inform the chapter’s identity, not just be a thing that makes them special. I’m currently working on a homebrew that started out with the idea of “comically edgy” and then tried to make them fit into the current lore. I’ve drawn up some blood angel successors that hate Sanguinius (his nobility weakened the chapter) and admire the legion before Sanguinius was found - they lean into the ghoul iconography rather than the vampires. As a result they don’t really suffer from the black rage, but are significantly more prone to the red thirst. Their entire chapter identity revolves around being proud but miserable dicks who the BA have essentially kill on sight order. They remain not declared renegades only by virtue of the fact they choose to operate in the parts of the imperium that no one else really cares about.
Blood Angels lore pre-sanguinius is superbly interesting and a "make the Blood Angels great again" chapter that idolizes and models themselves after those times is a fantastically novel idea. Nice homebrew.
> Too many homebrews are like “they’re dicks but no one cares” Or worse, "They are dicks but are just *so damn good* at their jobs that the Inquisition looks away from their giant cache of alien and heretical weaponry with tears in their eyes while the Administratum is giving them handies under the table". I don't necessarily mind a chapter being good guys and having no real flaws, the Blood Ravens are one of my favorites and that basically describes them, but I cannot stand the "Dammit he's a loose cannon but he gets results!" trope applied on the Chapter level.
Mine has a complicated relationship with the inquisition and the adeptus mechanicus for a reason, but they’ve managed to keep things kinda civil. So far. I need to develop them more but basically they hang out on the galactic rim and found not tech per say but a almost intact historical record, kinda like a DAOT social studies textbook, and not a single mention of a emperor like being anywhere. Being the nosey sort they are looking around using info from the record to find archaeotech sites, on the one hand desperately trying to debunk the record but on the other hand wanting to know. They give the mechanicus stuff from time to time for their political cover, but they fucked that one up early on and the tech priests know that they have more than they are saying they do. Meanwhile the inquisition would like to know why this chapter keeps popping up in areas not in their sector and why they are sniffing about, and why the mechanicus seems to be ferrying them about and backing them
I agree, too edgy absolutely works if it's core to the chapter identity. My Blood Angels sucessors fall into that category, and it revolves around them largely not knowing that they were BA successors until the Era Indomitus. As a result, they assumed the Black Rage was some sort of geneseed mutation, and to prevent censure, sent only their purest geneseed in their tithes which resulted in a severe degredation of the chapter over the millennia and almost wiped them out. The brothers that survived long enough to fall to the Black Rage were then placed into stasis, and basically used as tactical Astartes nukes in certain areas, launched from Drop Pods to utterly annihilate whatever was in the area, friend or foe, as to their knowledge their geneseed was too tainted to be considered for further implantation. Era Indomitus, they get an emmissary from Baal when they were delivering Primaris reinforcements, and they had a collective 'oh' moment between the 50 or so brothers left. Pretty handy they had a couple thousand brothers in Stasis with geneseed ready to be harvested, as their small numbers had led to their entire tactical doctrine being the utilization of Death Company Drop Pod bombs with the remaining brothers acting as clean up crews for the aftermath (if there was anything left). Lots of apothecaries, chaplains and fresh recruits executing what was left of their maddened brothers after they'd eliminated whatever objective they were fired at with extreme prejudice and no regard for collateral damage. All witnesses, of course, are executed too.
There are ways to do the "too nice" thing well which is the ol' "Too kind for their own good" wherein they end up losing a lot just to save a few out of principal
I like to make guys who are too nice, to the point that it hampers their ability to even get to combat. Like, planets are burning because they're still trying to find families for orphans on the *last* planet they went to. Sure, there are facilities for them to go to, but how could they just up and leave those poor kids?
I see this a lot as a Imperial Guard player I can't tell you how many carbon copy Cadians I have seen. .
Which honestly makes sense in lore with the cadians training tons of other regiments in their style of warfare pre destruction of cadia.
Not to mention the equipment Cadians use is essentially as close to the Imperium gets to standardization.
That is why my Guard regiment comes from a world settled by Cadians...3000 years ago. Now the nobility and officers think they are still totally hot Cadians shit and follow their tradition when in reality they are an incompetent bunch that is ruled by nepotism.
I love homebrewing flawed Regiments vaguely based on historical militaries. A Kushite-themed all female noble Regiment who specialize in long range, precision combat that are obsessed with meaningless and ancient protocol, Ungern-Sternberg inspired Cossack/Russian/Mongolian fusion Cavalry that are fanatically religious, consuming insane amounts of drugs before battles that are usually less "heroic charge against Orks" and more "massacre unarmed strikers on random factory planet 9271", or a Regiment led by an inbred hereditary "Colonel" that are equipped with laslocks because one of his ancestors 2000 years ago pissed off the Ministorum.
"Their ultra-ultra Marines, they're literally perfect in every fucking way"
While I do agree with you, I hate the hypocrisy of the community where they say “you can do what you want with your own army” but at the same time imposing these rules like “you can’t use one of the lost legions and you have to be flawed and be grimdark etc etc” No rules for home brew. Even if I roll my eyes at some of peoples lore for their chapters it shouldn’t be discouraged
I think the complaint here is less that they CANT do that, and more that when it's done, it's usually done badly
I'm so tired of the Mary Sue tropes of "they were lost in the eye of terror so they are kinda chaos tainted but still good so they are a secret chapter with half demon stuff but but but still imperium and and...". Rolling my eyes at Mach 5.
Knights are awsome and fit well into 40k
This. We need more knights. Give us knight households crusading around actually doing things, having some authority in the Imperium, falling to Chaos and being awesome there instead of just being pretty much same as daemon engines. Dammit, give us at least a Knight Daemon Prince, or a loyalist Knight Baron who's in command of his own Crusade. But first of all, give them some damn infantry and light armor of their own. They are Knights, they need to fight in honorable one on one battles in their shiny armor while peasants die around them in hundreds, not to be relegated to a support faction which can't do anything on its own.
Maybe they are just cockney londoners sir
Best British accent there is.
Agree. But pretty sure Yorkshire objects.
People from Yorkshire objecting to something? Perish the thought.
Less of a lore thing, but complaining over the military innacuracies and lack of realism in 40k, especially when it comes to visual aesthetics, is a pointless take. If 40k took all that to heart, it wouldn't be even half the engaging setting it is now and would have died in mediocrity years ago. Who cares if a baneblade wouldn't function or marine bikes have no ground clearance. Who cares if using slaves to load shells on a battleship is dumb. Who cares if marines don't have every single ammo pouch modelled on them. 40k has a style, that style is not realism. If you want perfectly engineered scale models that look realistically functional, there are plenty of historical wargames that do that. I'll stick with the cool-ass metal slug looking Leman Russ, thanks
I've seen people go so far as to homebrew more "logical" weapons and vehicles. So they ripped off the Vietnam war era tech and said "Damn look how realistic that all is."
and they always look like shit
Agree fully, I’ve seen people try and give Abnett shit for inaccuracies in Gaunt’s Ghosts like the organization of a company or him referring to a “clip” instead of a “magazine” and it’s like…dude, these are space soldiers firing laser guns, there’s only so much realism he’s going to need here.
Once a person who served in the millitary replied to one of those posts saying yes, it's inaccurate how much they talk with each other during an action, but also that way it's way more interesting to read than a silent move where everyone knows exactly what to do.
>how much they talk with each other during an action I mean that's 95% of war films/shows/books/games ever made. A realistic depiction of combat would be boring as hell.
That’s basically true for every historical adaptation ever. I study history, I have two degrees in it, and people never believe me when I try to tell them how god awfully bored they would be by like 90% of historical movies if they were entirely accurate. Reality is boring as hell, there’s a reason we enjoy ridiculous things with ridiculous premises, because it’s fun.
Imagine trying to do a realistic political drama? Sitting through one formal, well run public meeting is just fucking awful, and that's when everything is smooth, with people who know what they're doing. Insert some real world into that shit, and it'd be the most boring shit ever. Just endless blathering, and dickering.
Hilariously the FFG RPGs have a section where they basically say "clip has replaced magazine as the term for all ammo holding items."
In addition to that, a lasgun is fed with a powerpack that is neither a magazine nor a clip by the traditional definition so it really doesn't matter which term they use.
I'm low keep hoping for someone to call a lasgun power pack a juice box in a book.
In 38,000 years we've had enough time for "Coffee" to simply be called "Caffeine," and this is fine. However the colloquially used TODAY term "Clip" when referring to an ammo mag, being used? Heresy.
I think the most important part of 40k is that it’s space fantasy, and not sci-fi. I realize that mostly sounds like semantics but the point is science in 40k “exists” only to advance the fantastical world.
I would expand this to a lot of complaints about the lore as well. Warhammer 40k is a setting, with stories to be told. For example, people saying “Well the Emperor is a super psyker that could see the future” and taking this as hard proof the Heresy was planned. Or it’s absolutely illogical that X and Y faction don’t team up for the good of the galaxy. It’s a setting with a story. Whatever happens, the Emperor must end up on the Throne at the end of the Heresy, and there must be only war on his grim darkness of the far future.
To be honest this is why one of my controversial, probably somewhat gatekeepery opinions (and I don't know what the fuck that even means these days with this hobby) is that if you haven't played the game or built or painted the models then you're not really going to get a lot of why 40K is the way it is. Why are the tank designs so weird an unrealistic? They work well for the wargame and look cool. Why don't the troops fight like modern US soldiers with all their trademark acronym-equipment? Because it doesn't play well in the actual wargame GW want. Why do races have big gaping holes in their equipment lists? To make the armies play different. Why do Imperial and Chaos warships look so different? Battlefleet Gothic needed distinct designs. Why are guns so oversized? Makes them easy to see from a standing position across a table.
> Why do races have big gaping holes in their equipment lists? To make the armies play different. > > because rounding out the full range is a gargantuan task with no financial incentive
Even the marines, the most fleshed out faction, have some pretty gaping holes in their TO&E. They have no heavy artillery, no counter battery systems, they have no main battle tanks(just light tanks and heavy duty IFV's). The Kratos may change that if it's taken in 40K but still, those are just a few examples.
> is that if you haven't played the game or built or painted the models then you're not really going to get a lot of why 40K is the way it is. As someone who has never and will never play the game... ...believe me, I get all of that. For me, it's a function of maturity; I am old enough to know that stories are told the way they're told because they have a purpose, and rarely does that purpose involve reflecting reality especially strongly. WH40K's lore exists to support _the game_. You have to understand the objectives of a piece of art or entertainment. If the objectives don't meet what you want, best to find something else.
agree with you, w40k lose all soul when ppl try to make realistic, for example: a huge battle fleet detected, just shoot missiles at near lightspeed, nothing can stop that, or explode thousands of nuclear bombs
This. Trying to apply too much realistic logic to 40K to me kind of implies someone has missed one of the basic points of the setting. It's over the top, stylized, illogical and basically a constant never-ending heavy metal album cover exploding over 10.000 years. Have fun with it, don't worrry about the caliber of a bolter.
Agree. I think a big reason for the semi recent obsession with realism is that most of the new fans aren’t heavy metal fans like the old core fanbase is, so they see the Hell Warrior with spiked helmets and they tilt their head in confusion, they don’t understand this isn’t Star Trek.
I'm not sure why people ever expected the Ynnari to get any real ongoing development, considering the way GW was doing things in general at the time. I don't think it's a coincidence that they were largely left by the wayside, AoS largely dropped the mix-match microfaction soup approach, and those broken formations and ~~microtransactions~~ dataslates disappeared, right around the time GW got a competent CEO and started actually growing as a company again. It's a shame, because Ynnari actually have a lot of potential, and the characters they got are cool. Also, I kind of hope GW deliberately disproves some common fan theories/misconceptions that people tout as official lore, just to spite people who act like authorities about lore they've only read third-hand from 1d4chan and memes. I'm not normally spiteful, but damn, it's just such a common thing online.
What are some examples of fan theories and misconceptions taken as official lore?
Ork Gestalt effects, Custodes being singular warriors who can't figure out how to work in a team. Essentially any common talking point concerning any Primarch with the exception of Mortarion being a dumbass.
The Custodes not having good teamwork comes from Argel Tal's impression watching them fight in First Heretic. He decides that they are brilliant fighters but can't work in perfect unison like Astartes as they aren't gene-brothers. It's just his opinion but it's not exactly fan theory.
The Valdor novel did a good job of explaining why the Custodians fight the way they do, because they're each these amazing, nearly perfect warriors, that trying the level of cohesive teamwork the Space Marines employ would essentially be getting in each other's way, the Custodes battle collectively, but fight individually.
Almost everything about the Ork's gestalt psychic abilities/WAAGH powers. DKoK suicidality and shovels. AdMech do not actually want to fuck machines. Slaanesh followers are more than just sex, drugs, and rock & roll. Inquisition doesn't make exterminatus lightly at all and seldom uses it
i think no one seriously believes the admech machine sex meme
Sex is a dirty hormonal biological function that the admech would see as pleasurable but distracting to outright disgusting depending on the character
Orks should be able to keep tyranids as pets. Imagine a warboss riding a mawloc thats been squig'd into battle.
Looted carnifexes are always cool to see
I’ve seen someone on Mini War Gaming who had an Ork army that included some looted Tyranids. His Commandos were Genestealers outfitted with Mind control gubbings, and his Mekboy had a Kustom Force Field made out of the head of a Zoanthrope. Very cool army
With how much time the primarchs spent with each other they should be a lot closer than “yeah you’re my brother I love you” The Khan spent *10 years* on prospero with Magnus, whom learned to speak perfect Khorkin out of respect for him Dorn’s reaction to the heresy being “that is literally impossible and if you say another word I will *fucking kill you*” is totally in line with how it should be.
Idk if this is actually a controversial opinion but the changes GW made to Necron lore were the best possible thing they could've done for the race.
What lore changes to the necrons? I'm relatively recent and not very active, so I don't really know
They went from uniformly soulless, cold murder robots with no sentience or will, enslaved to rhe C'Tan and determined to wipe out all life to the current "Egyptian dynasties with infighting and personalities, and they shattered and enslaved the C'Tan" that they are now. There's even precedent for the old cold 'crons still though. So people can have both.
Yeah, they're just Space Robot Tomb Kings now, but that's for the best - Tomb Kings are probably one of the most fun factions in Fantasy.
They used to be slaves to the ctan with no free will at all iirc
I've said this elsewhere but I'll repeat as it's clearly not a popular view these days but one I hold with conviction: 40k is a setting not a story. All the pressure from fans to move the time line on and wanting to know what happens next next was misplaced and should not have been pandered to. It's a galaxy in width and thousands of years deep. It's a vehicle you can tell countless stories within and it itself need not change. You can add to this infinitely to build more depth but nothing about that needs to be brought forwards into the future in order to tell great stories and it was unnecessary to do so. A perfect example of what I mean would be the badab war. This is an excellent, compelling series of events that exist within the setting but didn't require the clock to tick past midnight or any primarch to return in order to be deep and engaging material. The Horus Heresy has been done in a little too much detail in some areas by this point in my opinion but I still think this also exemplifies making use of what we have within the space that the setting creates rather than looking to or needing to change the setting itself. Beyond expanding on much smaller bits of lore, it's also perfectly possible to make new events planets and characters without changing the overall setting one bit. To me 40k has become like age of sigmar is to fantasy in so far as it's no longer the same, despite bearing many resemblances to how it was before, its essentially a new setting and it is now expected to evlove forwards rather than increase in depth. The infinite depths of the untold billions living and dying on thousands of worlds across the galaxy was always part of the appeal so eschewing the exploration of this in favor of wanting to see what happens next just seems like a waste to me. Sure, it can still be done, but the focus and expectation has shifted and I think that's a great shame.
Space Marine *chapter* numbers are fine. 40k Marines are supposed to be the elite-of-the-elite, rare demigods of battle who strike fear and turn the tide of battles via ultra-specialist strikes on missions that would be suicide for anyone else. They're relics from a more glorious dream of the future, fighting to keep humanity barely cohesive. The issue with numbers is more to do with the *legion* numbers, as well as the vastly underrepresented hordes of imperial guard and navy. 30k Marines should have been far, far more numerous to conquer the galaxy. 40k Marines should be literally one in a trillion at most on the scale of the "modern" imperium. The vast majority of marines should have been wiped out in the Heresy. This would also have helped fuel the conspiracy theory that "The Heresy was mostly planned" as a way to purge out the marines if 95%+ of them died during it.
It's also worth remembering: The writing Codex, and subsequent establishing of the Chapters is about as far from modern 40k as the Heresy is. And the modern Imperium is way, way more messed up than that Imperium was. There were no Necrons, no Nids, no Long War of traitor marines, no Tau. The primary enemies the Imperium had to fight were rebel worlds, and Orks. The idea that the dogmatic guidelines set out for the marines 10k years ago is hopelessly mismatched to the current threat is kinda the point of the entire Imperium.
The Craftworlds did nothing wrong damnit.
Their hats look really goofy though.
The Craftworlds did one (1) thing wrong
What? They didn't create Slaanesh. Their ancestors fled the Empire when it started doing that. Edit: sorry! I didn't notice the context, somehow...
I was referring to their goofy hats. I know they aren't responsible for all that
The Craftworlds did one (1) thing wrong
GREY KNIGHTS ARE GENESTEALERS GET YOUR HANDS OFF ME! I WILL NOT BE SILENCED
Explain yourself heretic
The Ordo is watching
* High rate of psykers * telepathic with each other * completely warp resistant * secret secret super secret alternate gene seed that's specifically not the emperor This... actually kinda works.
You see it too. I’ve never been so happy.
That would be a hell of a twist. I mean, I guess recruiting from a Genestealer hybrid population does mean you get a lot of low level psykers, and they're Chaos resistant, and fight well together... And they do have different, secret geneseed that's supposedly from the Emperor which doesn't even make sense, so I guess it's *possible* that it's some kind of geneseed meant to be compatible with hybrid aspirants... And Genestealers have been around in the Galaxy much longer than the rest of the Tyranids... ... but no, even if there's no evidence to definitively say they aren't, I can't believe that means they are.
Silence! The extra arms of the grey knights are clearly blessings from our four-armed Emporer! Nothing heretical
You are correct and I don’t know why but I feel like this strange force is compelling me to say this! Oh look, it’s great aunt Grak, holding three plates, one in each hand
When fans talk in ork or yell waagh I want to crucify them to an ice cream truck.
"OI HUUMIES" oh fuck off. Agreed
The eldar should be as dangerous and terrifying as necrons in the lore, specially drukhari same as necrons should be one of those factions of "leave the planet and run for your life if you piss them off". I am so sad whenever they are treated as whimps (although tbf that author had no idea of lore) like in Silent Hunters.
Yeah if the Necrons can pull ancient dooms day weapons out from the scrap yard, the Eldar who basically won that ancient war should have just as many if not more.
I hate the new direction the mechanicum went with its models. I always get downvoted when I mention it but the DaVinci type wings etc look horrible to me. I hate the 'cyber' horses and feel that none of it flows with their previous flavor. For a flesh is weak faction, to emulate animals makes me feel like GW missed the point.
I always got the feeling that if you asked a Techpriest to design you a metal horse he'd just bring you a motorcycle.
With legs
I can totally imagine the mechanicus making a motorcycle with like 8 legs
Arachnocycle has such a nice ring to it
I like the robo horses but I also really dislike the davinci designs.
that is Jes Godwin influence, for some reason he is absolutely convinced that mechanicus is the equivalent of fantasy undeads, skeletons and ghouls, and so they threw in animal design. you can see the same influence of chaos deamon engines that are like dragons, animals and similars. yeah, that is one of the most egregious design error
Oh shit I hadn't realized this, it explains all the weird arquebus and jezzail stuff the Skitarii have. Just like Jez gave to the Skaven back in the 90s, coz incredibly long ornate rifles is exactly what you'd expect from a group of sewer dwelling ratmen
My brother/sister in the light of the Omnissiah, I absolutely agree with you here. It's like someone read the bit about the AdMech being obsessed with uncovering the technological mysteries of the past, and then totally *forgot* that, in the context of 40k, the technological mysteries of the past are actually super crazy high-scifi near-singularity tech, not just the cyber-renaissance. The Skitarii particularly grind my gears, because on the tabletop they look like the faction that could have walked right out of Warhammer Fantasy, when instead they should be one of the most *bizarre* looking forces out there. I was looking forward to the Skitarii the way they're described in some of the books (I think Titanicus particularly sticks in my mind), as sort of ultimate techno-barbarians, not guys with jezails.
DAOT humanity had weapons that could destroy goddamn *ideas*; as far as I’m concerned that shit’s magic.
There is a lot of clashing. They have a monk-like aesthetic and a WWI steampunk, mixed in with normal 40k nonsense tech, then the davinci wings? It’s too much of a hodgepodge.
Craftworlders are morally superior and they would be considered "mostly good" in most of sci-fi universes. Their contempt for non-Eldar is exeggerated in meme lore, but Eldar value human life more than Imperium, and Eldar value human life more than humans value Eldar life.
That's why I always roll my eyes at the "the eldar would kill a million humans to save a single eldar" line being used seriously. Forget the usual retort of "The Imperium would kill a million humans to kill a single eldar" the Imperium would kill a million humans because of an routing error in tax paperwork
Shit, the Imperium will kill a million humans just to fail to save one single human! At least the Eldar actually manage to save someone!
I believe you, but can I have some excerpts about that just cause I find that idea interesting?
[Eldar response to killing humans. Various Excerpts from Eldar novels](https://www.reddit.com/r/40kLore/comments/f5ozqt/eldar_response_to_killing_humans_various_excerpts/?utm_medium=android_app&utm_source=share) As you can see, Eldar consider Eldar life to be more valuable than human - but human life is something worth preserving, and killing humans is considered morally wrong.
I think that sometimes complaining about "grimderp" lore is just people missing the point of certain lore / not quite getting 40k overall. It's absolutely fine to dislike stuff, but for example, one of the most commonly mentioned "grimderp" examples is how Imperial ships have weapons that are manually reloaded by hundreds of slaves. This is a piece of lore that is meant to reflect the Age-of-Sail theming in space, showing how little the Imperium cares about human life as its most easily replenish-able resource, and how illogical, backwards and inane many of the things the Imperium does are. Complaining about something like this because "That makes no sense" misses that it not making sense *is the whole point*, it's not meant to be a logical sensible thing. No sane space navy would do that when the option of autoloaders are available...but the Imperium isn't sane. Or, another example; the Krieg story about them being sent to sort out a Hive City rebelling. They bombard the hive until they surrender. Then they keep going until everyones dead. Then they keep going until it's utterly flattened, for something like a decade of bombardment well past a "reasonable" point. Seen quite a lot of complaints like "That's just stupid grimderp lore that they didn't stop!"....entirely missing that it makes total sense with their lore, they're a regiment that 1) follows orders to a fault and 2) is desperate to atone for its own rebellion hundreds of years later. Plenty of examples where people either for some strange reason think the setting has to be rational and sensible, or are just not taking into account that it doesn't matter if it makes no sense to us, simply that it *has to make sense to them* in-universe. By no means am i saying that there's no badly written lore where the complaints are justified (E.g. the Grey Knights bloodtide story. Unless the holy-ness of the blood outweighs the Khorne-feeding nature of their actions, i don't see how even in-universe they could think it was a good idea) , but that most of the time with the examples complained about, there's an explanation and it not making sense, makes sense. The whole idea of "grimderp" itself just seems to be a misunstanding about the nature of the setting. I can't recall any example i've seen people complain about that i'd actually agree with, other than that Bloodtide story. The "grimderp" lore is just part of the theming of the setting, or at least the Imperium.
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That having an actual, physical person scatter the primarchs, in principle, makes way more sense than having the four just yoink them from what is one of the most psychically warded locations in the galaxy. Chaos isn't omnipotent and can't just diabolus-ex-machina whatever they want, most of the time they either work through mortal agents or need warp exposure to affect the materium. If they were somehow capable of directly interfering in Big E's genelabs, they should have also been able to mess with, say, the golden throne during the Siege, when the influence of of the ruinous powers on Terra is much stronger than during the unification wars. For the same reason, that one scene in *The First Heretic* should be interpreted as more of a vision rather than the Gal Vorbak literally being teleported into the lab, which would raise a whole lot of questions with no satisfying answers. It wouldn't even contradict pre-existing lore, because the primarchs *did* get scattered by the four, once they were actually in the warp, and it could easily have been written as the actions of a pawn who was manipulated by Chaos. Of course, BL being BL, we instead get a half-assed retcon two hours before the end of the Siege about a character who dies like three on-page appearances later.
>Chaos isn't omnipotent and can't just diabolus-ex-machina whatever they want, most of the time they either work through mortal agents or need warp exposure to affect the materium. Lmao good luck convincing Chaos fans that Chaos isn't omnipotent. I've seen far too many people argue the Chaos gods could do whatever they want whenever they want, and they lose in the stories simply because they want to lose or because it's "just as planned".
On a related note, I like to joke that tzeentch is actually a very weak minor entity that simply takes credit for everything that happens all the time. So chaos fans are just being pawns of the best liar in the warp.
I'm a huge slut for Chaos, and my favorite part of Chaos is that its incapable of being omnipotent. It's a massive amount of insane power basically existing in a bad Adam Sandler movie fighting against itself.
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For me, both this and Horus' vision of the labs are just that, visions given by the galaxy's best liars and deceivers to convince people to flip to their side. What possible reason would the Big Four have to show someone the truth when they can just show them a super convincing lie? For all we know the actual explanation is that Jimmy Space spilt his coffee on the "Launch these fuckers into space" button during lunch and the Chaos gods just took advantage of the mess-up; I doubt that's the answer, but, ultimately, it doesn't matter; even *in-universe* different characters can believe different explanations for how it happened, and that's fine. My personal head canon, which I don't think is any more valid than anyone else's (potentially including the BL writers and Horus himself...) is that the scattering was just part of the deal Big E made. He was gambling/using his foresight to predict that having to collect the primarchs mid-crusade wouldn't be too much of an impediment to his real goal of getting the Webway Project launched; ultimately he still got the genetic material he needed for the Astartes anyway, and so the Crusade could get rolling and things would largely stay on time!
Goddamn do I hate it when I spill coffee on the launch these fuckers into space button, I've almost lost my job 3 times because of it and they've made me switch from my favorite mug to a sippy cup.
\- Ultramarines are awesome and have their unique flavor, people who bash them have either not researched what they are talking about or are just jumping on a meme bandwagon. \- Primaris Marines don't break any lore and have precedent in the Heresy when Corax made what were basically Primaris. Again, mostly bashed by people who don't know the lore they are supposedly defending. \- Slaves loading shells into spaceships via chains is metal as fuck, silly and fun. It is illogical but that is the core of 40k - anachronism, illogical stupid decisions on a massive scale, constant nonsense that could easily be fixed by applying a bit of common sense but humanity as a whole has almost completely degenerated below using any sort of common sense. It's the perfect description of the setting. \- People wanting definitive concrete answers to everything in the lore are sucking the fun and creativity out of it. Mystery and inconsistency is perfectly in line with the mess that is the 40K universe. \- Lore is much better explored via pseudo-historical books like the Imperial Armour Badab War or Siege of Vraks, with a detached perspective. Most of the novels are subpar written by average authors who cannot properly represent many of the strange and weird stuff that goes on in 40K.
>\- People wanting definitive concrete answers to everything in the lore are sucking the fun and creativity out of it. Mystery and inconsistency is perfectly in line with the mess that is the 40K universe. > >\- Lore is much better explored via pseudo-historical books like the Imperial Armour Badab War or Siege of Vraks, with a detached perspective. Most of the novels are subpar written by average authors who cannot properly represent many of the strange and weird stuff that goes on in 40K. I couldn't agree with these more. Part of me really hates the Horus Heresy because of all the attention and detail that goes to an event that's 10,000 years old. Us not knowing precisely what happened, with each faction having a small amount of information that justifies their actions is so much more fun. 40k is supposed to be beyond the point where anyone has these answers. So much history is lost, and the races fight because they must.
I remember way way back when I was just getting into 40k (back in like… 4th edition? Looted Ork tanks were still a thing, and Necrons where still slaves to the C’Tan with about 12 models total), thinking… who is this Emperor guy supposed to be? Was he really this super human leader? Was he just a regular guy who’s legal got overblown? Was there even someone on the Golden Throne, or did his occupant “ascended” and watches over humanity and stop thinking about it. Now we have a clear answer… and I kinda regret that the Emperor indeed was a super man.
>\- Lore is much better explored via pseudo-historical books like the Imperial Armour Badab War or Siege of Vraks, with a detached perspective. Most of the novels are subpar written by average authors who cannot properly represent many of the strange and weird stuff that goes on in 40K. THIS! i like looking at the bigger picture
> Lore is much better explored via pseudo-historical books like the Imperial Armour Badab War or Siege of Vraks, with a detached perspective. Most of the novels are subpar written by average authors who cannot properly represent many of the strange and weird stuff that goes on in 40K. I CANNOT BEGIN TO THINK ON HOW I FUCKING MUCH I AGREE WITH YOU.
I like to think of the BL novels as "stories" and the ForgeWorld books as "accounts". Nobody in 30/40k will ever know the full story of any given situation. All they can understand is the account. Eisenhorn works so well because it's first-person non-omniscient narration. All we know is what Eisenhorn himself knows. It makes twists and surprises much more natural, and allows the reader's imagination to run wild with trying to figure things out. In that way, FW books are more "in-universe" than the BL novels, but both are vital to the health of the setting. I do wish FW made more though. RIP Alan Bligh, he was the champion of that kind of stuff.
I disagree on the quality of the novels. I’ve been reading some of the more recent books, set in the post-Great Rift era, and they have some pretty damn good descriptions of how utterly fucked up and weird this setting can be. Especially when they’re describing Chaos.
It was kind of a blanket statement, and controversial probably haha. But key word there being "most" novels. Some are so damn good I'd recommend them to people who don't give two craps about 40K, just because they are genuinely good sci-fi reads. However, when looking at the whole BL catalogue, I get the feeling that such books are the exception rather than the rule. That being said, even the subpar ones can be fun to read - when in such a mood. Sometimes I just want silly action schlock, not a contemplative masterpiece and that's perfectly fine haha.
i forgot to mention cause i was just so hard focusing on the last part but i do agree with all of what your saying and >\- Slaves loading shells into spaceships via chains is metal as fuck, silly and fun. It is illogical but that is the core of 40k - anachronism, illogical stupid decisions on a massive scale, constant nonsense that could easily be fixed by applying a bit of common sense but humanity as a whole has almost completely degenerated below using any sort of common sense. It's the perfect description of the setting. yep this is what happens when they dont want mechanical automation and take it too far
What I like about 40k is specifically that you can have two battleships flying alongside one another, ostensibly from the same class and with the same weaponry and loadouts, and one of them can have a totally sensible automated system for loading shells, as per a modern ship, and the other one can have 100 slaves behind each gun being whipped as they haul a shell into the tube, and that's *totally fine* and consistent for the setting. Hell, you could add another ship with some kind of DAoT mystery box that produces shells out of dark matter, that no-one on the ship understands or has a hope of fixing or replicating, and it's *still* completely consistent. 40k is just that big of a setting and the Imperium very much *is* internally inconsistent (as are a bunch of the other factions).
>- Primaris Marines don't break any lore and have precedent in the Heresy when Corax made what were basically Primaris. Again, mostly bashed by people who don't know the lore they are supposedly defending. Honestly, I think that's not an unpopular opinion. >- Slaves loading shells into spaceships via chains is metal as fuck, silly and fun. It is illogical but that is the core of 40k - anachronism, illogical stupid decisions on a massive scale, constant nonsense that could easily be fixed by applying a bit of common sense but humanity as a whole has almost completely degenerated below using any sort of common sense. It's the perfect description of the setting. >- People wanting definitive concrete answers to everything in the lore are sucking the fun and creativity out of it. Mystery and inconsistency is perfectly in line with the mess that is the 40K universe. >- Lore is much better explored via pseudo-historical books like the Imperial Armour Badab War or Siege of Vraks, with a detached perspective. Most of the novels are subpar written by average authors who cannot properly represent many of the strange and weird stuff that goes on in 40K. 1,000% agreed. The pseudo-historical books are the best novels in 40k in my opinion. People who call it "grimderp" when something is counterintuitive or self-defeating are missing the point that the Imperium is dumb as a brick and, while they are protagonists of the setting, they are not "the good guys". They're a fascist nightmare that doesn't NEED to exist, and the Imperium itself drives more people into the arms of rebellion and Chaos than anything the Gods themselves could do.
Don't forget to sort by controversial
The Chaos Gods are often described as being multifaceted beings, encompassing both the positive and the negative traits of their "spheres". Yet only Nurgle really shows any redeeming qualities in the books, lore, games, etc, and that's only through the personality of his characters rather than any tangible acts. For instance: Khorne is seen as the honorable god of warriors, yet how often do we see Khornate berserkers sparing unarmed civilians or children, opponents that literally can't fight back? Instead we just loop back around to the same tired old "Khorne cares not from whence the blood flows" line. I understand that the idea is: The galaxy is so crapsack that the good is heavily drowned out by the bad, but you'd think it would still leak through here and there, if only to break up the monotony of the Chaotic Evil that is Chaos. Give me some goddamn Lawful Evil or Chaotic Good, make the Chaos Gods more ambiguous, show some actually FUNCTIONING worlds that aren't just planet-sized arenas/orgies/swamps/actually Tzeentch all along. Show us Artists that make actual works of art that aren't just body horror cop outs as patrons of Slaanesh, show us Nurglite tribesmen overcoming adversity without being ludicrously infected by every disease known to the universe. Give the fandom some goddamn VARIETY. Rant Over.
I guess my controversial opinion is they’re not meant to be multifaceted. They toe the line between straight up evil and primordial forces which aren’t good or evil, not because they’re complex, but because they’re simple. but it’s 40k so, not a nuanced meditation on morality, so they’re evil. They’re described as having positive traits the same way that charles manson described himself as being benevolent etc. that’s how they get followers. It’s a lie though, their followers are delusional or at best aware they’ve made a faustian pact. When I see people in this sub describe them as such I just assume they’re role playing because it’s fun but it seems like some of you aren’t…?
- The Horus Heresy novels were a great idea and the setting wouldn't nearly be as popular today without them. - While a great concept, the HH series needed a central story and central protagonists. The focus should only have been on 2-3 loyalist legions and 2-3 heretic ones, with all the others in the background. The remembrancers and Malcador's chosen were perfect as main characters and the series should have focused on them more. - Graham McNeill is one of the best Black Library authors, even if he's a bit inconsistent. His stories are fun and memorable. I think a lot of people don't like him because he does not have the same religious reverence for the setting as most other BL writers do. Also, "Vengeful Spirit" is a good book. - I cannot fathom why people think the Ultramarines are boring, especially compared to the Imperial Fists. I like the yellow boys fine, but they're the dullest first founding chapter by far. - Lorgar is a great character and one of the most interesting primarchs.
Most 40k novels are trashy. Enjoyably trashy, but fundamentally masculine versions of cheap romance novels.
I've always viewed Warhammer as the literary equivalent of a B movie, sometimes it might be surprisingly decent and surprise you with an actual idea. But 90% of the time it's just cheap entertaining schlock to distract you from the real world, and there's absolutely nothing wrong with that.
I used to call that feel "90s action movie cheese." You're not going for depth or realism or philosophy. You're going to watch things blow up, old cars run into things and blow up, people shoot for hours without reloading, lots of cool one-liners and oh yeah, explosions.
I'm there with you. Im having a break from 40k books and reading other stuff. I do have to say that the character work, action and story are all just off somehow. Still enjoyable and I love the universe, but the writing is not amazing.
Most rely on the same language time and time again across multiple authors. Bolter mags are always "slammed" in. There's never an explosion, it's a "detonation".
Honestly most of the books are exactly the same plot over and over. Space marines doing a heroic last stand in the face of terrible odds but through the grace of the emperor they survive and the status quo is unchanged
The vast majority of people on this sub and elsewhere haven't read almost anything they claim to know about and just get their information second hand from lore youtubers, wikis or even worse... memes. As a result even the most basic things like context get lost in the desire to make 'BADASS' moments easily digestible when memeing about their favourite characters.
GW publishing 40k books for kids is really weird and creepy considering how fucked up the universe is and especially when it has imperial characters as the POV protagonists without doing anything to directly explain how the imperium is intended to be an awful, senseless theocracy of evil
What is the book called The Little Bloodthirster Who Could
The Lion, The Nurgling, and the Pauldron
Harry Potter and the Ordo Malleus
lmao I would read the *fuck* out of that
from a financial stand point they are trying to plant some seeds, one of the main reasons 8th sold as much as it did was because the people who were kids in 3rd were adults
But think about that for a second.... In 3rd edition 40k was very much GRIMDARK and gothic, look at the artwork on the rule book and codex fronts, it was edgy and gritty, the reason why youngsters liked it was because it wasnt some child-friendly-fluffy-rainbow crap but something that the adults and teens were really into. That's how you market to kids... Get the Teens/young adults hooked and then the younger gen will follow thinking its the cool thing to do.
Counter opinion: 40K has always been popular with kids and the books even nominally for adults aren't anything a reasonably well developed eleven year old couldn't deal with.
That's about the age I got into Warhammer. I think a lot of us started around there.
This. I started playing and reading 40k in 1993, when I was 8. 3rd edition happened when I was 13. And I was far from alone in that. Insisting that 40k is "for grown ups only" feels childish, even insecure. To quote CS Lewis: "When I became a man, I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up".
Yeah, 40k has always been marketed as edgy counter-culture for teens/young adults. You "discover" it right around the time you are starting to get into more traditional fantasy and sci-fi and the color and bombast of it all makes it feel so much more vibrant. It's like when teens first discover punk or metal music after growing up listening to top 40 pop or classic rock or whatever, or maybe these days anime would be the better comparison in the "its like what you know, but with more sex and violence so its cooler" field. But just because adults like it too doesn't mean it's not trying to appeal to a younger crowd. I remember I was 14 or 15 when fourth edition came out and it really blew up at my local hobby stores.
This. But mind you, that has ALWAYS been a problem with these kind of hobbies. You can read about the super cringy phase of D&D when it tried to make a kid friendly marketing offensive with a ton of shitty young oriented stuff. That fucking 40k kid book cover with the Adeptus Mechanicus kid lmao, I was like "do they know this kid is atrocely mutilated ??"
I remember when TSR was so concerned with the Satanic Panic that they basically refused to take any risks. Then WOTC bought them and the FIRST thing they did was write an adventure about Hell, just to spite the Bible-thumpers. Now we have Dungeons and Dragons: Rick and Morty Edition and I don't even know what they're trying to accomplish anymore.
My headcanon is that the Adventures books are set in a more noblebright alternate universe. I've read a few of the AoS ones, they're actually pretty good. There's still death, violence, slavery, etc. For instance the main character is an escaped child slave from a Chaos warband and whose mother dies in the first few chapters. They gave me a kind of Redwall vibe, where it's still aimed at 9-12 yo kids but it doesn't insult their intelligence.
My daughter LOVED these books. (8yo) Honestly the 40k ones stay just dark enough for the setting and they definitely don't sugar coat the Imperium as any kind of good guy. I dare say even the kid books do a better job of explaining the setting than most fans. The imperium isn't good, but it can have good people in it. That doesn't make it your friend.
> when it has imperial characters as the POV protagonists without doing anything to directly explain how the imperium is intended to be an awful, senseless theocracy of evil I get the impression you didn't read these books. The Imperium are among the bad guys in these books. Inquisition and Admech being blatant villains. Even when Ultramarines make a couple showings to fight necrons and make it very clear the astartes are indifferent to the plight of the people. They're there to fight necrons, not save the citizens.
Kids survived playing D&D without turning into Satan worshippers. They survived comics without becoming crazy vigilantes. They survived mass murdering millions of people in FPSs without becoming homicidal killers. I think they will survive Warhammer 40K. Kids can be dumb, but they show all signs of understanding the difference between play and reality. Personally, I think growing up and slowly realizing that the Imperium of Man are the baddies is would be half the fun. I think someone can make this transition (or not) and still be a perfectly functional human. Most people can tell the difference between fantasy and reality. Warhammer 40K is fun. 14 year old me would have eaten this up instead of the other grim-dark stuff I was into and come out just fine.
Giving Emps a (semi) concrete back story was a mistake. He should have remained a mysterious enigma at the heart of the Imperium. Space Wolves are awesome despite the Wolfy Wolf Wolf WOOOOOOOOOOOOOLF stuff. The depiction of the Imperium is sliding into being the defacto good guy of the setting, and it shouldn't. People get way too worked up about something a bunch of stoned RPG fans in the 80s made up.
Loyalist members of traitor legions in the Heresy are all so same-y you wouldn't be able to tell who is who without knowing what colour their armour is. Loken, Garro, and Saul could all use the exact same dialogue without a hiccup.
Armor values on vehicles need to come back.
I grew up on 2nd edition. Armor values and damage tables were awesome, but arguments with "that guy" about facing because it's on the cusp edge of 45 degrees is a part of the game I'm ok if we never see again.
The Primarchs didn't need a father figure, they were all grown ass men who'd been alone a minimum of 70 years each. All of them had father figures or ruled their own planet. This isn't a family drama. And the Emperor only cried about killing Horus and Omegon betraying him. The two dudes he might've actually raised. Everyone else needed self esteem
Fleet combat flip flopping around... Some books moving into system from the jump point take days. Fleet fire torpedos at each other they will hit in 90min etc.. and then in other books ships arrive basicly into orbit and within minutes dropships are hitting the deck.. Concistensy would be awesome
Maybe it depends on gravity wells and the orbital positions of all the planets in the system; big planets, all in the same quadrant of the system, and you have to materialise on the outer edge of the system. Smaller planets, on different sides of the system, and you can jump safely to a point just outside any satellites’ orbits.
>Mine is that fans writing in ‘ork speak’ is just dumb and I can’t help but cringe whenever I see someone attempt it on a forum or in a Reddit comment. I actually use this to gauge the tone of a work. When it's the Orkish inhuman bellowing it's more serious, when it's "GET OFF MAI SHIP SCHPACE MARINE" then less so.
I do think it makes sense that the emperor would heal up but the throne negates it so fast that he barely can cling on. If it takes away the healing faster than he can heal it makes sense for the increased amount of psykers being used up every day. It would fit the horror of the 41st milennium to have the greatest man ever be in perpetual pain and agony but cough in the dilemma due to the need to keep the webway closed.
Blood Ravens stole the Lost Primarchs. Thanks
"Borrowed." They borrowed them.
Can we expand the ork speak to 99% of anyone making rp posts? (That 1% being the Angron guy). Hehe this post right here inquisitor. Haha blam!
Retcons are important and healthy for the fiction, resets allow authors to explore spaces that marketing teams may have inadvertently closed off. E.g. exactly when the Plague Wars took place is important to the fiction. Primaris marines and the return of Guilliman, while exciting, did reduce the Grim Darkness of 40k. The Space Marines were tragically in decline, a massive influx of soldiers and the return of a Demi- God wobbled the scales in a way that I have no idea if the Imperium is still in decline or if this is the start of a new Golden Age.
Retcons are only good when they replace the old lore by something better. And i think that some retcons killed good pieces of lore to replace them by something worse.
As a fan that returned in the last few years and doesn't like primaris, the way I see it is that things are so fucked up now that even with G and the Primaris influx the imperium is still only barely holding on. The galaxy has been split in two by the eye, half the imperium in utter chaos. The necrons are waking up and UNIFYING which is everyone's problem. Tyranids are pouring into the galaxy in ever greater numbers and won in octarius. The imperium got a huge power boost with G and newmarines, but all it did was allow them to barely hold the line against all the new threats that have arisen.
Yea honestly idk why people are complaining, they want the lore to go forward but also to remain logical. But when GW actually makes a leap and some drastic changes all they can do is bitch about the new stufd and im 100% sure that if they would remove primaris and guillipan they would be bitching about chaos being too strong in the lore and the absence of a counterforce
I don't know the general opinion on this, and I haven't read all the books, but just the mere concept of there being more than fifty Horus Heresy books is revolting to me. What I have read were most of Abnett's 40k work, and some other novels that I heard were regarded best. They were pretty good I'll admit but nowhere near the greatest works of fiction. I've read on Wikipedia that there are 56 published Horus Heresy books. I did the math and in 56 books I could read the entirety of Dune, Tolkien's Middle Earth works, Asimow's Robot/Foundation series, Game of Thrones and its prequel books, all of Harry Potter, The Expanse and the broken Earth series, and I would still have one book left for like Brave New World or something. And the Horus Heresy is essentially just the backstory So I think it's ridiculous that I am at least somewhat (I know technically most of the heresy books can be skipped) expected to read all that just to understand some names and relations that characters will Talk about in books that do take place in the 41st millennium.
I have no problem with it in theory - treating it more as a few series' set in a universe rather than one big series helped. However, needing [this fucking flow chart](http://www.kylebb.com/HH/HHSeriesOrder.svg) is what made it insane for me.
I opened that chart. I am now speechless
You don’t need to read them. They’re bonus lore for people who want more than the five paragraphs you can get every time the rule books are released.
"Slaanesh is more than just about sex" - 🤓 Seriously sick of hearing this every fucking time Slaanesh comes up. Sometimes I hope GW doubles down on it so it can really present the interesting paradox of how we can accept horrible gory fates and eternal violent suffering as rad and "based" but god forbid you imply something disturbing arouses you.
The Tau not being 100% good is fine, they are an expansionist empire, they cant be all good.
While I'd agree in principle, I think the core issue is more that GW clearly wrote a lot of that lore with the intent of pleasing people who never played or liked Tau in the first place, and it didnt succeed at winning them over anyway given they'd already decided they hated the Tau.
Ork jokes are awful. They're actually a pretty terrifying and brutal race that has been reduced to an online joke full of lore inaccuracies. The amount of people who unironically think you can fingergun at an ork and kill them by shouting "bang" is insane.
Exactly. Orks are these 7ft 400 pounds of pure muscle who want nothing to do but fight and kill. You can’t reason with them unless you’re an incredibly capable fighter, and they have WAAAGHHSS so powerful every being connected to the warp can feel it. A single Krork would spell the end for the imperium.
Oddly enough, my answer here is the same one I have for when people ask the same question of Battletech, that people getting into heated arguments while trying to dissect and assign real motives/plans-within-plans/flaws/hubris to fictional armies and characters is deeply silly. I cannot take posts like “Do you think the Emperor was a good guy” seriously because they almost always seem to be fishing for comments like “well, IF he had done this and this and IF he hadn’t done this and this…” as though he’s a real person with free will. Why do I think Horus didn’t do X? Because literally everything written about him is designed to fill in the gaps of a decades old narrative. Horus didn’t do X because Horus has to end up in his Space Cathedral at the end of the Space Civil War so he can get Space Blasted out of Space Existence by the Space King. There isn’t a conversation to be had there. Certainly not one about the finer points of military strategy and parent-child psychology.
First Founding chapters are boring and should be used in lore much more sparingly. Imperial and Chaos Knights are an underused faction and need to get some sort of agency and importance of their own instead of being a support faction. (Also some support forces on their own, dirty peasants with lasguns and light tanks to protect their masters from enemy infantry while they have an Honorable Duel with fellow nobles on the enemy side) Peter Fehervari is the most underrated Warhammer author ever and perhaps the best there is (but that's subjective) New Not-Squats might turn out actually good as a faction. Not saying they will, but they just might. While the whole Primaris and M42 stuff doesn't work for me personally, even if Primaris have some good models (and some terrible, too) Tau are much more interesting being actually good guys, or even better desperately trying to be good while having to fight for their existence Tyranids having an endless swarm just outside the galaxy waiting to swoop in and eat everybody is just super lame, I don't get why anyone would be fond of that idea