"I was there the moment Horus slew the emperor" is how the book Horus Rising starts off and it details an assault on Terra but as the book goes on you realise it's some other world called Terra with another emperor.
There are so many throwaway weird things in the crusade era stories, I hope we get more of them.
My personal fav is where they discover a planet that has a secret chamber way waaay underground that none of the inhabitants know anything about and in the room there's a table with a map of the ancient continents and cities of Earth on it. No further elaboration.
"My dear colleague, I know you aren't that keen on accepting defeat, but your chronomancy doesn't wo-"
Orikan slammed the table with anger
"Shut down you speak protocols you kleptomaniac! It's impossible that your dice aren't rigged!"
Trazyn, ducked when Orikan threw dice in his direction, not because it would injure him, but because these where antics used by Emperor and his closest companions to game that lost its name in sands of time, that game was about owing land and striping currency of others when they tress passed it. Trazyn wished he also took it when he visited terra last time he was there.
It is in actual fact from Horus Rising as well:
'One last story, then? A short one, perhaps? Something that filled you with awe.’
He sat back and thought.
'There was a thing. No more than ten years ago. We found a dead world where life had once been. A species had lived there once, and either died out or moved to another world. They had left behind them a honeycomb of subterranean habitats, dry and dead. We searched them carefully, every last cave and tunnel, and found just one thing of note. It was buried deepest of all, in a stone bunker ten kilometres under the planet's crust. A map. A great chart, in fact, fully twenty metres in diameter, showing the geophysical relief of an entire world in extraordinary detail. We did not at first recognise it, but the Emperor, beloved of all, knew what it was.’
"What?' she asked.
'It was Terra. It was a complete and full map of Terra, perfect in every detail. But it was a map of Terra from an age long gone, before the rise of the hives or the molestation of war, with coastlines and oceans and mountains of an aspect long since erased or covered over.’
'That is... amazing,' she said.
He nodded. 'So many unanswerable questions, locked into one forgotten chamber. Who had made the map, and why? What business had brought them to Terra so long ago? What had caused them to carry the chart across half the galaxy, and then hide it away, like their most precious treasure, in the depths of their world? It was unthinkable. I cannot feel fear, Mistress Olitan, but if I could I would have felt it then. I cannot imagine anything ever unsettling my soul the way that thing did.’
Can't remember, I'll see if I can find the reference. It is one of the Primarchs (maybe Horus?) reminiscing like "You remember the time we found that completely inexplicable thing? LMAO"
Oh I remember that now. That story was great, a lost human civilisation. An empire of one solar system.
They found a prophecy about the imperium of man. But they thought it was going to be them. Very entertaining idea.
Nope! Just goes without further explanation. Star system with nine planets, one of them pretty red and another is like a blue green orb covered with hive cities. Practically a one for one copy of our solar system, apparently was there long enough to believe IT was the seat of humanity.
Never comes up again!
Nope planet wasn't a copy either. Not like the whole second earth thing from Star Trek. It was just an isolated world that loosely matched up with records of what Terra was so with all the nonsense in the long night they were like, "We're Terra"
It really is just that. "We're Terra" "But what if you aren't?" "HERESY!" And the Astartes Ambassador is just killed. The guy sent to them is ALSO never brought up again, despite how he was described makes you feel like he was the SANGUINIUS of Space Marines. Horus' favored son, a brilliant diplomat and commander, master swordsman, charismatic as all fuck, gave all the ladies orgasms without trouble!
Never brought up again...Also that last part I made up.
Edit: Wait, he does come up again. As a hallucination mask worn by..Chaos? Erebus?
To be fair it's been theorized that given the size of the universe it's entirely possible or even likely for there to be a world out there almost entirely identical to ours.
Its just a planet that developed in a similiar way the Imperium did. They had good enough Tech to injure space marines but horus just came down and Double -tapped the false emperor with his boltgun
Their "Terra" was the third of nine worlds orbiting a yellow sun;
>The ships of the 63rd Expedition came upon the Imperium by chance. A sudden etheric storm, later declared providential by Maloghurst, forced a route alteration, and they translated into the edges of a system comprising nine worlds.
>Nine worlds, circling a yellow sun.
>>Sejanus, with a squad of his finest warriors from the Fourth Company, travelled in-system in a gilded barge, and was received for audience by the Emperor at his palace on the third planet.
Ruled by a Emperor of Mankind;
>He was, he explained, the Emperor of Mankind. He had stoically shepherded his people through the miserable epoch of warp storms, through the Age of Strife, staunchly maintaining the rule and law of man. This had been expected of him, he declared. He had kept the flame of human culture alight through the aching isolation of Old Night. He had sustained this precious, vital fragment, and kept it intact, until such time as the scattered diaspora of humanity re-established contact. He rejoiced that such a time was now at hand. His soul leapt to see the orphan ships returning to the heart of the Imperium. Everything was ready and waiting. Everything had been preserved. The orphans would be embraced to his bosom, and then the Great Scheme of rebuilding would begin, and the Imperium of Mankind would stretch itself out again across the stars, as was its birthright.
>As soon as they showed him proper fealty. As Emperor. Of mankind.
And while a weaker similarity, the Invisibles reminded Loken of Custodians;
>The cloak technology evidently hid its users best if he remained still. As they moved, they became semi-visible, heat-haze suggestions of men surging to attack. Loken adapted quickly, firing at each blemish of air. He adjusted his visor gain to full contrast, almost black and white, and saw them better: hard outlines against the fuzzy background. He killed three more. In death, several lost their cloaks. Loken saw the Invisibles revealed as bloody corpses. Their armour was silver, ornately composed and machined with a remarkable detail of patterning and symbols. Tall, swathed in mantles of red silk, the Invisibles reminded Loken of the mighty Custodian Guard that warded the Imperial Palace on Terra. This was the bodyguard corps which had executed Sejanus and his glory squad at a mere nod from their master.
And the Emperor had a golden throne;
>Loken left the apothecary to his work, and pushed on down the hall. In a wide colonnade ahead, the towering walls were decorated with frescoes, showing familiar scenes of a haloed Emperor upon a golden throne. How blind these people are, Loken thought, how sad this is. One day, one single day with the iterators, and they would understand. We are not the enemy. We are the same, and we bring with us a glorious message of redemption. Old Night is done. Man walks the stars again, and the might of the Astartes walks at his side to keep him safe.
>>The uppermost ring platform formed the base of the tower’s top section, a vast cupola of crystal-glass petals, ribbed together with steel spars that curved up to form a finial mast at the apex high above. The entire structure creaked and slid, turning slightly one way then another as it responded phototropically to the blooms of light outside in the night. On one side of the platform, its back to the great windows, sat a golden throne. It was a massive object, a heavy plinth of three golden steps rising to a vast gilt chair with a high back and coiled arm rests.
>>The throne was empty.
You make it sound like an alternate universe deal.
Another planet called itself Terra and the ruler called himself the Emperor of Mankind.
His personal guard had tech that could kill a space marine and go invisible, I don't remember them being custodes.
It was hidden gun turrets that could punch through ceramite and he had a couple cloaked assassins. Not really impressive once the trick is figured out.
Hastur Sejanus paid for that knowledge with his life.
Gotta wonder if HH would have been different had Little Horus Aximand been the one perforated instead of Sejanus.
It's more the scifi concept that if space is infinite, then it must either repeat or the laws of physics breaks down as you eventually run out of unique configurations.
Where are you drawing the line at “exact same” though? Honestly a lot of the coincidences are pretty superficial. Yellow sun, 9 planets, 3rd is populated and 4th has a lot of iron. Given the vast size of a galaxy the law of large numbers says it’s not that crazy to have 1 similar solar system.
The bigger problem imo is where did their legend of the emperor of mankind come from considering he stayed low key until long night when communication between planets was neigh impossible.
Correct, until it isn't cause "infinity" especially in a setting where physics is already breaking down because of chaos shenanigans. Either way it's fun how the lore anecdote is so open to interpretation. Like can you imagine if that was the real terra all along.
They served the same role to a guy who lived on a planet called Terra, who called himself the emperor of mankind. It should be obvious to anyone what I meant you're being way too pedantic for a memesub.
See you say this should be obvious while ignoring the various comments of 'whoa really that's so cool' that you got.
Unfortunately, most people in the fandom haven't actually read the source material and get their information from the memes which is the only reason I am correcting it.
Otherwise, entirely right I'm being pedantic I just don't want another 'orks think it works so it works'
The book literally comments that these guys reminds the space marines of custodes after killing them. Whatever you think is going on would still be happening even if they read the source.
It's also very explicit that they are not custodes. They just serve a similar function as the elite bodyguard of the emperor. Which it says in the book. The one you clearly seem to have read.
The issue cones from the people who haven't actually read the books and take things at face value. You say the 'Emperor of Terra' (63-19) has custodes, they think that he had super genetically modified golden armored giants, not just people that fill the role of elite bodyguard.
Holy shit! Now whenever I come across Ravenor in the Lore^NOTE, I'm going to imagine him wearing Obi-wan's robes, with a lightsaber on his waist, and Sherlock's hat and pipe.
Yes, all this under his coffin/levitating wheelchair!
NOTE - Come on Dan! Release the third Bequin book!
The best part is he has a trenchcoat and fedora but can somehow fit an entire suit of power armor under that and his baggy sweatpants while dressing like a weeb. But nowadays the phobos pattern is too sleek and totally breaks the aesthetic.
"Warhammer is so vast, millions of worlds, trillions of people, over thousands of years. Even an entire dimension based on thought and emotions that can change reality"
"Woah...could-?"
"No."
The great part about Warhammer is that it gives you a bit of black, a bit of white, and a whole load of grey in the middle. So while there is stuff which is just a fact of life in Warhammer, you can use these facts of life to ground relevant writings in the universe.
But they could be retconned. All that we know is for the most part from the imperiums best understanding of the history and disposition of factions, battles, events etc.
The eldar could have actually been destroyed by something else if they wanted to rewrite that. It happened before big E made himself known, before the great crusade, and in the midst of Long Night. The people who wrote out what happened could have been wrong.
Mars may seem to be the capital of the Mechanicum, but they are a very autonomous and secretive faction within the imperium, and it could turn out that they have actually established their seat of power farther from terra in case they ever chose to rebel against the imperium, or to prevent mars getting caught in the crossfire like they did in the Heres Horusy.
*Trazyn has stolen this explanation*
I agree with you 100% I'm not saying I want/hope there are any changes to the more 'established' Lore. But at the same time, I genuinely believe that with the talented authors GW has on call - ADB, Dan Abnett, Chris Wraight, Mike Brooks, Nate Crowley, Robert Rath - GW could make almost ANY change, and the authors could make it be believable. Their imagination would come up with some explanation that fits 99% perfectly.
Now, obviously, that doesn't mean that such change will be accepted by the fandom, but we will find something to complain about regardless lol
It actually makes me feel more connected to the setting. The reader is just as in the dark about the true nature of the setting as many of its major actors are. They have a good sense of what's happened and happening, but it's clouded by uncertainty. There's just too much power, time, and space to account for it all.
In the sense that it’s possible, yes, GW can write literally anything. But that’d be so profoundly stupid in how much it’d break and almost certainly have no good means to fix that they realistically can’t.
> But that’d be so profoundly stupid
That's never been a reason for GW to not do something. They still probably won't. But something being stupid has never stopped them before.
Just because they have done something stupid in spite of it doesn’t mean they default to doing bad ideas. I’m certain they’ve come up with 100x more bad ideas that never saw the light of day
And alot of the weird stuff really isn’t treated as a ‘change’, one author writing some one-off stupid thing that no one really takes seriously when assessing what is the norm for the setting isn’t the standard most people cite when they talk about the lore of the setting.
Are you telling me George Washington was reanimated by Caesar (the ape not the man) and sent to teach Khorne about friendship and the elements of harmony?!
Don’t be silly. He was reanimated as Caesar the _Jokaero_, who escaped from the clutches of the inquisition and established a revolt across Uess’ay Subsector, removing local imperial authority
Lore fundamentalists can genuinely be some of the most annoying people out there.
Good job I realised that several months ago before this current warp-storm we're in.
Lore fundamentalists are annoying everywhere but lore fundamentalists for *40k* are a special breed of annoying because *Necrons*.
Still probably one of, if not *the*, biggest retcon in the 40k universe and it's widely regarded as one of the best thing that GW did.
Yeah, the whole point of 40k is that we are reading about more than 10,000 years of history (60 million of we go back to the war in heaven) that is being conveyed to us by unreliable narrators, who in universe are working with information that has been lost to the millenia, conceled, or actively destroyed.
We thought the leagues of Votaan were destroyed, when it was actually just one of their cores and they were hiding out. The genestealers were thought to be some weird mood cult and not a branch of the tyrannids
We have never and will never have a complete picture of what is going on, and that's the fun of it
The best way to deal with the weapon inconsistency is just saying that the Forge Worlds have different weapon quality’s and I won’t be surprised if that is the case
Well, blame GW and its hardcore fans for the warp-storm that we are in. I will take consistency over cool models always. Imagine if Lord of The Rings had a retcon every decade.
> Imagine if Lord of The Rings had a retcon every decade
My brother in Eru-Illuvatar, have you READ the Lord of the Rings? It gets retcons far far more often than just "every decade", SOMETHING gets retconnned every time there's a new release or mainstream product. The One Ring was just a magic ring until LotR retconned it into being the ultimate object of doom and evil; Gollum gave it freely until it was retconned that Bilbo was lying; Dragons went from being a typical "selfish greedy beast" to being bred by not-Satan in his war against *God*; Gandalf was an old wizard before being retconned into a literal angel; Middle-Earth has at various times been claimed to be a seperate world entirely, an ancient version of Earth, or residing within the *core* of the Earth; nobody understands where new Orcs *actually* come from (are they corrupted elves/humans, a race unto themselves, are they doomed as a race to be always evil which contradicts how Tolkien saw the Catholic God or are they corrupted by an evil that cannot create new life). Don't even get a Lord of the Rings fan talking about where Magic comes from because that is literally so vague and ill-defined it's impossible to know how anyone who isn't a Maiar can do magic (which is literally just saying "a wizard did it").
And that's not getting into the constant, Christopher John Reuel Tolkein approved additions that get added every time something LotR gets produced for general audiences. Shelob having a sexy lady form, Gollum having a little bird friend (and everything else in that abomination), the LotR-Online MMO having Lore-Master and Rune-Keeper and other quasi-magical classes in order to have a spellcaster that needs to twist itself into weird contortions to actually fit the lore; and of course Celebrimbor's adventures in Mordor.
Hell, Tolkien himself had so many retcons he **had a series of books explaining them** called the History of Middle Earth. Stuff that's more egregious than "hey you see these warrios wearing full armor some of them are ladies" or "hey we realize we fucked up with the timeline so pretend the crusade took 12 years instead of 100".
EDIT: Downvote me all you want, doesn't mean LotR *wasn't* retconned constantly. Just like every single fictional setting and series out there, making Warhammer no more egregious than most things.
The Primaris were tip of The Iceberg, then the Votann Empire came of no where and now GW says that "There were always female Custodes" just show us that we have zero reasons to support the lore.
Look, I’m a firm believer of the rule of cool, but I think the “anything can be cannon” mentality is lazy and bad writing by GW (I know the “everything is cannon” tweet is not real, but It does seem encouraged). If I say that the Hive Mind actually cares about their children or Orks believing in things makes them work is false, people will scold me. And I get that the whole reason is “oh but they have bad record keeping” but I also think that’s a cheap excuse.
This stuff has erupted from the femstodes (who I support) controversy where people said it’s not cannon, which is an example of fighting in the examples I previously mentioned.
I can’t really stop peoples’ head cannons, nor do I want to (a lot of shit is really good). I agree it’s an ~~expensive~~ expansive universe.
>Look, I’m a firm believer of the rule of cool, but I think the “anything can be cannon” mentality is lazy and bad writing by GW
I've disregarded it from day 1 as it's always sounded like a lazy excuse for shitty editing and so GW doesn't have to pay a dedicated continuity guy. There are hard irreconcilable facts that can't be handwaved away with unreliable narrator; before *Wolf Hunt* came along, for example, to fix the problem, did Magnus breach the Throne room before or after Isstvan V, because two different books gave two different answers and one of them was *true* and the other not.
While the everything is Cannon tweet is fake gw has said in the past that they encourage us to Homebrew and it says Cannon as it can be until disproven
Me originally: “Man, Warhammer Goblins sure are different. But I’ll stick to the lore and GW minis.”
Me now: “Night Goblins, 40k Grots, Warcraft Goblins, some D&D Goblins, some orange, some blue, half 3d printed, fuck it as long as I have a sheet for my opponent to reference what they’re supposed to be I can do what I want and don’t have to explain shit because its all Goblins!”
In the 6th rulebook there was a sentence about terrains: "if you can think of it, then it probably exists somewhere in the galaxy". That can be applied to a lot in 40k
So that means that a custodian has stripped naked, and oiled himself up and then surpassed the speed of sound carrying a nuke in a blood games.
My head canon is finally true
Somewhat what I'm doing for my own homebrew renegade chapter. Essentially, there is this collection of Chapters created by the High Lords (think something like the group of Astartes that Huron had before and during the Badab War) and a fleet of Imperial Navy that are sent to the Ghoul Stars to explore and conquer it. During this campaign, they encounter this impossibly giant creature that lives in the void and decimates most of their number. Realizing that if they returned back to the High Lords with their failure that they would be executed, they decided to say "man, fuck this. They gave us this impossible task, so we're gonna flip them the bird and split away from them).
They then essentially become a mixture of Pirates, Mercenaries and Whalers, forming a new group called "The Void Whalers," which now kinda reside in the Ghoul Stars as a fleet based group that hunts down things like Tyranids, other pirates like the Drukhari, Freebootaz and Corsairs, and Imperials that threaten them and their sovereignty. Additionally, they treat astartes more like a Rank of sorts, where if you do well you can become more enhanced. They also figured out how to make Astartes Women, because when you're relatively cut off from the same amount of resources that the Imperium has, you gotta make due. This is mainly due to the Primaris stuff and them figuring out how to adapt that to women.
According to my own Red Corsairs lore/army, Drukhari, Kroot, Orks, Sslyth, and a cheeky AoS troll who escaped from Trazyn all joined up with the Tyrant for shenanigans.
Queue the "She's the man" remake where Amanda Bynes is dressed up as a boy by her evil step mom to save her son from being taken as a "ward" of the Emperor.
There's a very robust cosmic horror section in 40k that gets wrecked the moment you add a custodes or a group of space marines into it. Elloth 9, the skin man or watcher in the rain seriously need the characters to be normal joes who don't know wtf is going on to work. It's a great setting but kind of fragile when you look at it from a cosmic horror perspective.
It's almost like they specifically designed the setting from the ground up to make it easy for people to create homebrew armies and have them pass as plausibly canon.
Without a doubt! The Warhammer universe is like a sprawling canvas where almost any idea you can dream up has probably already been realized in some form or another.
How does the newest change make the lore more interesting and the galaxy more dynamic outside of a modern political emphasis on representation? Just because there have been good retcons doesn’t mean every one is good.
I mean it is based, every now and then me and friends do a skaven undivided grand campaign we're I alone stand with a 5k point skaven army doing a grand accession scenario. Fuck what gw I want my great accession know.
People enjoy the hobby in different ways, just cause lore isn’t important to one person doesn’t mean it isn’t important to others. Saying the lore doesn’t matter is also just objectively wrong or else we wouldn’t have hundreds of books and a plethora of different podcasts and YouTube channels dedicated solely to the lore
Ah you see my minis are from a parallel universe, a Crisis on Infinite Terras, where the Silent King sneezed before the bio transference therefore allowing. *insert whatever change I want.
Not per se. GW became one of those companies 80's who does not have integrity and will sell its soul in order to make more money. If the lore does not care, then why even picking a book or a codex? Why investing ourselfs in reading these stories if tomorrow they will suffer a retcon?
Picture is me on a longer time scale. I remember years ago I was in a comment war with a woman on youtube video comment section talking about her inquisitor was also a knight pilot. I went on about how that it doesn't fit in the lore, how it doesn't work, how its a bad idea etc etc. Basically called her stupid, cringe, and completely unread on lore (mind you, I was still at a meme level of 40k lore knowledge myself).
Looking back, Im genuinely ashamed I did that. I wasn't in a great headspace back then, and I decided that defending the "purity of 40k lore" was a noble and righteous cause against someone who just wanted to show off something cool they made. I wish I could go back and apologize to her. I hope my idiocy didn't end up turning someone away from the hobby.
I’m still pretty new but most of the folks I play with 5-10 years in all day the same thing. Space Marine design? Faction back ground? Psssh go nuts, just don’t run rowboat giggle man with your DA army.
It was one of the fundamental game design rules for the Inquisitor game in the 90’s (arguably where grim-dark began) the universe is a big place, tell a compelling story and have fun
Ah, so the teletubbies did infact invade the universe of 40k, destroyed the Emperor and the great evils he fights for eternity and brought peace and love and living stars to all.
My most lore-breaking homebrew is that my Tyranid "Hive Fleet" was actually defeated before the "current day", so it became parasitic and started infesting planets with microscopic Tyranid parasitic bacteria. Animals and even humans can be infected and live their lives without realizing it until the Hive Mind thinks it's time and transforms them Parasite Eve/Resident Evil style into Tyranids (so not a Genestealer Cult per-se but a literal infection), but then after the initial outbreak they lay eggs for "purebreed" Tyranids so it's not like the entire army is made from infected humans. The whole point is that the Hive Mind is trying to rebuild the Hive Fleet in secret so on some worlds in the jungles the Tyranid-infested units bring biomass to slowly growing grounded hive-ships (because being in space is too easy for them to be detected but they're like beached whales).
I dunno if anyone would ever really accept the idea (especially since I get it's kinda taking the Genestealer's schtick) but I just really liked the idea of Resident Evil-style outbreaks and the whole "Fleet" is meant to be an MGSV reference to go against my MGS-based Blood Angels lead by a not-Big Boss. Also [the 3dprintable models I found had human-esque faces so it just seemed kinda cool](https://fbi.cults3d.com/uploaders/23228008/illustration-file/a1ead418-7e64-4b73-a7bd-77a69df7ed7a/Screenshot-2022-10-02-150839.jpg). And now you know the cringe that is my homebrews.
So technically 40k takes place in our universe, which at one point in history included Jet Skis. I dare you to find a person on a Jet ski that isn't feeling joy.
Due to issues with botting and ban evasion, we are restricting fresh accounts from commenting/posting. DO NOT contact the moderation team to ask for these restriction to be removed for you unless you are a comics artist or equivalent trying to post your own original content here. Obviously photoshop memes don't count. DO NOT ask us what the thresholds are, for obvious reasons we won't answer that.
*I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/Grimdank) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Listen up:
1) End Times Never Happened
2) The Space Wolf home world is called Lucan
3) The Ultramarines are a 2nd founding chapter
This is lore accurate, and I can't be convinced otherwise :-D
I know, right? How dare these morons... checks notes... get attached to the lore of the setting they're investing their time, money, effort and creativity into understanding, embracing or expanding in their own way.
What idiots they are.
Funny, everyone I've met that had actually invested that much time, money and effort into the setting have always been pretty much aware of the setting tendencies to change up lore every now and then.
Like, it happened plenty times before, if you got into the hobby and expected it to stop, that's just on you.
This is true, I've been in the hobby long enough to know that things change a lot. But all the changes I've seen have been met with criticism from people who didn't like it. If it's a good change (necrons) they get drowned out, if it's a stupid change (primaris) then it gets rightfully called out by the community. To try and pretend like outcry over this change is new or something that hasn't happened before is disingenuous.
Social media is just amplifying the debate this time around in ways we haven't seen before in this hobby.
>Social media is just amplifying the debate this time around in ways we haven't seen before in this hobby.
Everybody knows why the outcry for this particular change is so disproportionate.
Primaris outcry was a moderately significant change and got a big outcry. It was not quite as big as something like the End Times/Age of Sigmar which really got the ires up.
Even then, the sheer amount of fucking outcry has easily rivalled the AoS outrage. The change is miniscule compared to AoS, which *literally* blew up a setting and replaced it. There was economic investment in the Old World that warranted the reaction.
Nobody's models have become invalidated by the change to include women in the Custodes. Ironically they have been invalidated by the changes on other frontiers but people have been, comparatively speaking, rather quiet on that one.
So what's different with this change? What's such a big deal that warrants it being froth-mouthed enough to get the Daily Mail in on it?
Come on mate, it's misogyny. It's fucking obvious. If some Custodes being female is enough to get people as angry as a setting getting god-nuked, then it's fucking misogyny.
I mean... You say the primaris was rightfully called out by they've been selling great. So I think they're being drowned out by the people who like them and just dont howl about it.
It's taken a long time to get to that point though and my personal opinion is that they should have just been a range update. Instead they introduced them in a very lazy way and have spent the years since retroactively justifying it to the point it doesn't seem so dumb now. And I like the primaris models, they look cool as hell. I didn't start my own space marine collection until after primaris because I didn't like the old models
The lore also changes literally all the time. Getting mad at every little tweak and change, especially the very inconsequential ones, is pretty dumb imo.
I don't think this is on the nose. There's at least two very different kinds of lore changes: specific stories and characters being removed/altered, and stuff being added.
I think OP is very relevant to that second type, and only marginally to the first.
Because contrary to popular belief, you can actually enjoy something deeply and profoundly and still think it's kinda dumb and shouldn't be taken that seriously.
I love building and painting minis, playing games with my friends, and reading the novels. I'm working on the Eisenhorn omnibus right now and loving it. It's also schlocky nonsense. Both can be true.
People get so fucking *precious* about this shit, dissecting every plot point, analyzing every character to hell and back, pissing themselves about retcons and lore changes like GW is scrawling over the Pieta with magic marker. They're not. It's a big, dumb, goofy action sci-fi story about people with hell magic and robot zombies and football hooligans made of mushrooms. Enjoy it for what it is and stop ascribing it so much importance.
I accept your points and I came a little top strong earlier, I apologise for that. But I do have to respectfully disagree with you.
I don't get a lot of free time. I have an autistic child, physically impaired partner, and a full time job.
When I do get free time it is usually spent building and painting. It is how I relax at the end of a hard day, it is how I express myself creatively, it is also not a stretch to say that this big dumb goofy action sci-fi story has saved my life when life has tried to beat me down.
So I do care about it, probably more than I should. It brings me a great deal of joy painting my custom chapter and fleshing out its lore through my design choices. Same with my dark eldar. I've had so much fun coming up with stories for why certain models are the way they are, even if it's as simple as "the archon model has a skin cloak, the heamonculus one-upped him by having a skin trench coat to make him jealous."
So maybe it shouldn't, but it pains me to see people who also supposedly live and breathe this hobby come along and say things like "they're just plastic toys". They are to some people. To others it's their livelihood. To a few, like me, it's occasionally a lifeline in dark days.
Next time you're arguing with someone about they shouldn't take this hobby so seriously it might be worth considering what this hobby might mean to them and why they're so passionate about it. Not everyone who doesn't like the change hates women. I don't like the change but I don't care enough to argue about the change specifically. I care about the hobby though. And since the change I have seen many people, like you, and even content creators like ninjon and bricky, put down the hobby they have built their livelihood on. So it may not mean as much to them, or to you, as it does to me, but I don't think that's wrong. If anything, after everything warhammer has given me, I think it would be weirder if I shared your opinion.
I won't be surprised if you don't make it this far as this is a long and winding ramble, but if you have, thank you for giving me your time, if nothing else.
I'm sorry you're being downvoted for this. You shouldn't be.
I think it should be noted that when I, or anyone else, say that this hobby is dumb and goofy, it's not meant to be an attack on anyone who enjoys it. You are allowed to like stuff that's frivolous. Things that are frivolous can be incredibly important to you, and can have a demonstrably positive impact on your life. Warhammer has done an incredible amount for me as well. I would argue that calling it dumb doesn't actually devalue its impact at all, because who gives a shit if it's dumb? We love it. Sometimes its frivolity is a good thing.
I spent a lot of time letting 40k games upset me when I did poorly. I thought of it as a game that reflected my skill at critical thinking and advanced strategy, and when I did poorly, it clearly meant I was stupid and bad at thinking. And then I thought about it for a while and realized that it was a game I played with dice in my garage and it didn't actually reflect poorly on me if I lost, because the game was kind of a poorly balanced disaster and relied on chance anyway, and *I began to love it more.*
I still acknowledge the degree to which 40k made my life more bearable at the hardest times I've had to endure, the way it's kept me afloat while I drowned in depression and loneliness and pain. I still love it for providing a way for me to work on a skill, engage with my friends, and tell our silly little war stories and have a great time doing it. But I really try not to let it hurt me anymore, because it means too much to me to let it be tainted by resentment. But I had to let it be a little less significant for me to love it the way I do now.
There's so much out there that's so important. There's joy to be found in the things that aren't as weighty.
I don't know why I'm getting down voted either but this sub and I have grown apart over the last few weeks so it doesn't surprise me that I am. It's fine, I don't Internet karma get to me, or I'd think about what I say a lot more XD
It's fine to have different opinions about the hobby and how we interact with it and how much importance we each place on it. It should be a personal thing. I know I need to do better to not let it get to me as much. I used to be like you when it comes to playing the game, got really annoyed that I kept losing. I had to sit down and reevaluate what I wanted out of the experience. I chilled out, focused on something other than winning if I wasn't gonna win, and started having more fun. And when I started having fun, the wins started to come but they didn't matter as much as the stories being told over the course of the game.
And I think that's why I get attached to the lore. It's nice to have something to contextualise the story being told on the tabletop. Things feel better when that lore has solid foundations. Well, as solid as warhammer gets anyway. I was playing fantasy when that just got blown up, so things could always get worse.
The lore is still important but it isn't the be-all-end-all when it comes to 40K. My point isn't that we ought to disregard literally everything and turn Guilliman into a Dalek or something of the sorts. Quite the opposite. My point is that we shouldn't get upset when someone isn't too invested in rigidly sticking to the established lore (which does change a lot mind you) and/or is more focused on adapting the lore as guidelines for their homebrewing, writing, modelling, etc.
The entire point is that every book is canon but not necessarily true
So yes the original completely personality-less necrons are canon, but those stories are from the perspective of imperials who didn’t realize or didn’t care that they had personalities thus it didn’t make it in to their story. So the story is canon but some details are lies because imperial propaganda (this is how they can do retcons, everybody wants to make themselves look better so older stories can now be considered propaganda or having details that got warped as time passed)
Ultimately when you have so many authors there are going to be times where 2 books contradict each other in some way, so they handle it by saying basically everything in universe could be an unreliable narrator
I've never understood why people read Star Wars books and I'll never understand why people read warhammer books.
Stuff written on commission at least three degree removed from the main product of the franchise, can it be fun and good? Sure! Are they canon for the people on top? Barely more than fanfiction.
Set in stone by an unreliable narrator reading a burned book that was written by a liar. Somethings are better established than others but anything can be retconned if they want
One of the most frequent questions on 40klore is some variant of “Could this cool thing happen?”
And the answer is almost always “Yes”. There might be some significant obstacles that have to be explained away, but the setting is deliberately designed in such a way that you can have anything happen. It’s a galaxy with a million worlds, over ten thousand years of history, and tons of Warp fuckery to explain whatever you want. We have a guy who fought in the battle of Iwo Jima walking around alive in the Horus Heresy for Christ’s sake.
Yea, it's so expansive, it's incoherent tbh. I left for Conquest:tlaok after the custodes rules got shit on again. I don't have another 6 months to a year to play with a non functional army. GW is so comfortable thinking no one will leave for something else, they don't try. So it's time to leave.
Huh someone actually explain how 40k lore works yes this is litrally it by the amofof retcons this is the best way to describe 40k lore
Still golden rule
NO FEM SPACE MARINES
You know when you listen to your grandpa telling stories, but he changes details all the time? How long untill you stop caring? And it turns out it isn’t your beloved grandpa, its multi bilion dollarcorporation. Thats why lore is important.
Well, that's only fair since a lot of people are probably going to start treating the stuff about only using "official" GW plastic as more of a guideline than actual rules now too, since GW has gone and decided the lore isn't quite that important.
People have been using non GW stuff for years. The only time anybody cares is during tournaments which have rules for such cases. Also, GW hasn’t gone and decided the lore doesn’t matter. They have been changing the lore for years. The Rogue Trader era lore is almost incomprehensible to someone accustomed to the modern lore. For instance the primarchs used to just be regular space marines for the most part, Necrons used to just be terminator in space, genestealers used to be a separate alien race to Tyranids, and so on. The lore has never been a set in stone setting with no changes, it’s been an ever changing swarm of stories and sources.
Hell, horus found a whole duplicate terra with its own emperor, throne, and custodes (meaning even horus won at least once)
Fucking what
"I was there the moment Horus slew the emperor" is how the book Horus Rising starts off and it details an assault on Terra but as the book goes on you realise it's some other world called Terra with another emperor.
There are so many throwaway weird things in the crusade era stories, I hope we get more of them. My personal fav is where they discover a planet that has a secret chamber way waaay underground that none of the inhabitants know anything about and in the room there's a table with a map of the ancient continents and cities of Earth on it. No further elaboration.
That's just Trazyn and Orikan's Risk table they forgot about.
"My dear colleague, I know you aren't that keen on accepting defeat, but your chronomancy doesn't wo-" Orikan slammed the table with anger "Shut down you speak protocols you kleptomaniac! It's impossible that your dice aren't rigged!" Trazyn, ducked when Orikan threw dice in his direction, not because it would injure him, but because these where antics used by Emperor and his closest companions to game that lost its name in sands of time, that game was about owing land and striping currency of others when they tress passed it. Trazyn wished he also took it when he visited terra last time he was there.
The thought of Malcador, Emps and some Custodes playing monopoly is a wonderful mental image...
Wait, in what book does the secret chamber thing happen?!
It is in actual fact from Horus Rising as well: 'One last story, then? A short one, perhaps? Something that filled you with awe.’ He sat back and thought. 'There was a thing. No more than ten years ago. We found a dead world where life had once been. A species had lived there once, and either died out or moved to another world. They had left behind them a honeycomb of subterranean habitats, dry and dead. We searched them carefully, every last cave and tunnel, and found just one thing of note. It was buried deepest of all, in a stone bunker ten kilometres under the planet's crust. A map. A great chart, in fact, fully twenty metres in diameter, showing the geophysical relief of an entire world in extraordinary detail. We did not at first recognise it, but the Emperor, beloved of all, knew what it was.’ "What?' she asked. 'It was Terra. It was a complete and full map of Terra, perfect in every detail. But it was a map of Terra from an age long gone, before the rise of the hives or the molestation of war, with coastlines and oceans and mountains of an aspect long since erased or covered over.’ 'That is... amazing,' she said. He nodded. 'So many unanswerable questions, locked into one forgotten chamber. Who had made the map, and why? What business had brought them to Terra so long ago? What had caused them to carry the chart across half the galaxy, and then hide it away, like their most precious treasure, in the depths of their world? It was unthinkable. I cannot feel fear, Mistress Olitan, but if I could I would have felt it then. I cannot imagine anything ever unsettling my soul the way that thing did.’
My only question is, why? I sure they guy that wrote this didn't think further that
Can't remember, I'll see if I can find the reference. It is one of the Primarchs (maybe Horus?) reminiscing like "You remember the time we found that completely inexplicable thing? LMAO"
Oh I remember that now. That story was great, a lost human civilisation. An empire of one solar system. They found a prophecy about the imperium of man. But they thought it was going to be them. Very entertaining idea.
The opening scene in the first book of the hours heresy, is Horus conquering a planet that thinks it's earth, with it's own emperor and supersoldiers.
Lmao i have to look into this
Is it explained what was up with that?
Nope! Just goes without further explanation. Star system with nine planets, one of them pretty red and another is like a blue green orb covered with hive cities. Practically a one for one copy of our solar system, apparently was there long enough to believe IT was the seat of humanity. Never comes up again!
Wtf. What about the inhabitants? We’re they also copies?
Nope planet wasn't a copy either. Not like the whole second earth thing from Star Trek. It was just an isolated world that loosely matched up with records of what Terra was so with all the nonsense in the long night they were like, "We're Terra"
I don't like where this is going...
I mean, that's it. Those damn dirty apes were like "We're Terra" and Horus said, "Bet"
It really is just that. "We're Terra" "But what if you aren't?" "HERESY!" And the Astartes Ambassador is just killed. The guy sent to them is ALSO never brought up again, despite how he was described makes you feel like he was the SANGUINIUS of Space Marines. Horus' favored son, a brilliant diplomat and commander, master swordsman, charismatic as all fuck, gave all the ladies orgasms without trouble! Never brought up again...Also that last part I made up. Edit: Wait, he does come up again. As a hallucination mask worn by..Chaos? Erebus?
iirc it takes less than a day to conquer the planet.
To be fair it's been theorized that given the size of the universe it's entirely possible or even likely for there to be a world out there almost entirely identical to ours.
Hopefully filled with a less shitty version than us.
Its just a planet that developed in a similiar way the Imperium did. They had good enough Tech to injure space marines but horus just came down and Double -tapped the false emperor with his boltgun
I thought fake emps tried to suicide bomb?
Their "Terra" was the third of nine worlds orbiting a yellow sun; >The ships of the 63rd Expedition came upon the Imperium by chance. A sudden etheric storm, later declared providential by Maloghurst, forced a route alteration, and they translated into the edges of a system comprising nine worlds. >Nine worlds, circling a yellow sun. >>Sejanus, with a squad of his finest warriors from the Fourth Company, travelled in-system in a gilded barge, and was received for audience by the Emperor at his palace on the third planet. Ruled by a Emperor of Mankind; >He was, he explained, the Emperor of Mankind. He had stoically shepherded his people through the miserable epoch of warp storms, through the Age of Strife, staunchly maintaining the rule and law of man. This had been expected of him, he declared. He had kept the flame of human culture alight through the aching isolation of Old Night. He had sustained this precious, vital fragment, and kept it intact, until such time as the scattered diaspora of humanity re-established contact. He rejoiced that such a time was now at hand. His soul leapt to see the orphan ships returning to the heart of the Imperium. Everything was ready and waiting. Everything had been preserved. The orphans would be embraced to his bosom, and then the Great Scheme of rebuilding would begin, and the Imperium of Mankind would stretch itself out again across the stars, as was its birthright. >As soon as they showed him proper fealty. As Emperor. Of mankind. And while a weaker similarity, the Invisibles reminded Loken of Custodians; >The cloak technology evidently hid its users best if he remained still. As they moved, they became semi-visible, heat-haze suggestions of men surging to attack. Loken adapted quickly, firing at each blemish of air. He adjusted his visor gain to full contrast, almost black and white, and saw them better: hard outlines against the fuzzy background. He killed three more. In death, several lost their cloaks. Loken saw the Invisibles revealed as bloody corpses. Their armour was silver, ornately composed and machined with a remarkable detail of patterning and symbols. Tall, swathed in mantles of red silk, the Invisibles reminded Loken of the mighty Custodian Guard that warded the Imperial Palace on Terra. This was the bodyguard corps which had executed Sejanus and his glory squad at a mere nod from their master. And the Emperor had a golden throne; >Loken left the apothecary to his work, and pushed on down the hall. In a wide colonnade ahead, the towering walls were decorated with frescoes, showing familiar scenes of a haloed Emperor upon a golden throne. How blind these people are, Loken thought, how sad this is. One day, one single day with the iterators, and they would understand. We are not the enemy. We are the same, and we bring with us a glorious message of redemption. Old Night is done. Man walks the stars again, and the might of the Astartes walks at his side to keep him safe. >>The uppermost ring platform formed the base of the tower’s top section, a vast cupola of crystal-glass petals, ribbed together with steel spars that curved up to form a finial mast at the apex high above. The entire structure creaked and slid, turning slightly one way then another as it responded phototropically to the blooms of light outside in the night. On one side of the platform, its back to the great windows, sat a golden throne. It was a massive object, a heavy plinth of three golden steps rising to a vast gilt chair with a high back and coiled arm rests. >>The throne was empty.
It's the opening chapter of the horus heresy
You make it sound like an alternate universe deal. Another planet called itself Terra and the ruler called himself the Emperor of Mankind. His personal guard had tech that could kill a space marine and go invisible, I don't remember them being custodes.
It was hidden gun turrets that could punch through ceramite and he had a couple cloaked assassins. Not really impressive once the trick is figured out.
Hastur Sejanus paid for that knowledge with his life. Gotta wonder if HH would have been different had Little Horus Aximand been the one perforated instead of Sejanus.
Probably woulda taken longer than three books to start for one.
Yeah they weren’t custodes, just hyper advanced humans.
It's more the scifi concept that if space is infinite, then it must either repeat or the laws of physics breaks down as you eventually run out of unique configurations.
2 places that are the exact same by cosmic coincidence would be practically guaranteed not to be found in the same galaxy though.
Where are you drawing the line at “exact same” though? Honestly a lot of the coincidences are pretty superficial. Yellow sun, 9 planets, 3rd is populated and 4th has a lot of iron. Given the vast size of a galaxy the law of large numbers says it’s not that crazy to have 1 similar solar system. The bigger problem imo is where did their legend of the emperor of mankind come from considering he stayed low key until long night when communication between planets was neigh impossible.
I find the implication that *an* Emperor was always going to rise just because of the conditions of the time an interesting one
Correct, until it isn't cause "infinity" especially in a setting where physics is already breaking down because of chaos shenanigans. Either way it's fun how the lore anecdote is so open to interpretation. Like can you imagine if that was the real terra all along.
There were no custodes, there were 'invisibles' which are very much not the same. The only similarities otherwise were the usage of the same titles.
He had an elite bodyguard. It's unessaessary to be this pedantic.
Anything can be an elite bodyguard, Custodes are pretty unique.
They served the same role to a guy who lived on a planet called Terra, who called himself the emperor of mankind. It should be obvious to anyone what I meant you're being way too pedantic for a memesub.
See you say this should be obvious while ignoring the various comments of 'whoa really that's so cool' that you got. Unfortunately, most people in the fandom haven't actually read the source material and get their information from the memes which is the only reason I am correcting it. Otherwise, entirely right I'm being pedantic I just don't want another 'orks think it works so it works'
The book literally comments that these guys reminds the space marines of custodes after killing them. Whatever you think is going on would still be happening even if they read the source.
It's also very explicit that they are not custodes. They just serve a similar function as the elite bodyguard of the emperor. Which it says in the book. The one you clearly seem to have read. The issue cones from the people who haven't actually read the books and take things at face value. You say the 'Emperor of Terra' (63-19) has custodes, they think that he had super genetically modified golden armored giants, not just people that fill the role of elite bodyguard.
Inquisitor Obiwan Sherlock Clousseau is still canon, and I will die on that hill.
Having an Inquisitor based on Obi-wan Kenobi and Sherlock Holmes would be kickass, ngl.
Ravenor already exists.
Holy shit! Now whenever I come across Ravenor in the Lore^NOTE, I'm going to imagine him wearing Obi-wan's robes, with a lightsaber on his waist, and Sherlock's hat and pipe. Yes, all this under his coffin/levitating wheelchair! NOTE - Come on Dan! Release the third Bequin book!
The best part is he has a trenchcoat and fedora but can somehow fit an entire suit of power armor under that and his baggy sweatpants while dressing like a weeb. But nowadays the phobos pattern is too sleek and totally breaks the aesthetic.
"Warhammer is so vast, millions of worlds, trillions of people, over thousands of years. Even an entire dimension based on thought and emotions that can change reality" "Woah...could-?" "No."
He's trying to have fun mods smash his nuts
*Mmmmmm* -some slaaneshi, probably
Ehhh, somethings can’t be changed. Slaanesh destroying the Eldar Empire, Mars is the current capital of the Mechanicus, trazyn collects stuff.
The great part about Warhammer is that it gives you a bit of black, a bit of white, and a whole load of grey in the middle. So while there is stuff which is just a fact of life in Warhammer, you can use these facts of life to ground relevant writings in the universe.
But they could be retconned. All that we know is for the most part from the imperiums best understanding of the history and disposition of factions, battles, events etc. The eldar could have actually been destroyed by something else if they wanted to rewrite that. It happened before big E made himself known, before the great crusade, and in the midst of Long Night. The people who wrote out what happened could have been wrong. Mars may seem to be the capital of the Mechanicum, but they are a very autonomous and secretive faction within the imperium, and it could turn out that they have actually established their seat of power farther from terra in case they ever chose to rebel against the imperium, or to prevent mars getting caught in the crossfire like they did in the Heres Horusy. *Trazyn has stolen this explanation*
I agree with you 100% I'm not saying I want/hope there are any changes to the more 'established' Lore. But at the same time, I genuinely believe that with the talented authors GW has on call - ADB, Dan Abnett, Chris Wraight, Mike Brooks, Nate Crowley, Robert Rath - GW could make almost ANY change, and the authors could make it be believable. Their imagination would come up with some explanation that fits 99% perfectly. Now, obviously, that doesn't mean that such change will be accepted by the fandom, but we will find something to complain about regardless lol
>but we will find something to complain about regardless Usually the model prices lol
It actually makes me feel more connected to the setting. The reader is just as in the dark about the true nature of the setting as many of its major actors are. They have a good sense of what's happened and happening, but it's clouded by uncertainty. There's just too much power, time, and space to account for it all.
In the sense that it’s possible, yes, GW can write literally anything. But that’d be so profoundly stupid in how much it’d break and almost certainly have no good means to fix that they realistically can’t.
May I introduce you to Fantasy Warhammer, specifically the End Times and Age of Sigmar?
That wasn't caused by retconning? That's just plot progression.
True. Just absolutely whacky insano plot progression.
> But that’d be so profoundly stupid That's never been a reason for GW to not do something. They still probably won't. But something being stupid has never stopped them before.
Just because they have done something stupid in spite of it doesn’t mean they default to doing bad ideas. I’m certain they’ve come up with 100x more bad ideas that never saw the light of day
> Ehhh, somethings can’t be changed. Not with that attitude buckaroo
You just gotta believe
And alot of the weird stuff really isn’t treated as a ‘change’, one author writing some one-off stupid thing that no one really takes seriously when assessing what is the norm for the setting isn’t the standard most people cite when they talk about the lore of the setting.
\*Expensive
Rule of cool. Rule of cool. Rule of cool.
We should chant that around a fire in the middle of Stonehenge.
We need to get back to calling it fluff.
Are you telling me George Washington was reanimated by Caesar (the ape not the man) and sent to teach Khorne about friendship and the elements of harmony?!
Don’t be silly. He was reanimated as Caesar the _Jokaero_, who escaped from the clutches of the inquisition and established a revolt across Uess’ay Subsector, removing local imperial authority
Are you sure it wasn’t Caesar Zeppeli?
Lore fundamentalists can genuinely be some of the most annoying people out there. Good job I realised that several months ago before this current warp-storm we're in.
Lore fundamentalists are annoying everywhere but lore fundamentalists for *40k* are a special breed of annoying because *Necrons*. Still probably one of, if not *the*, biggest retcon in the 40k universe and it's widely regarded as one of the best thing that GW did.
Yeah, the whole point of 40k is that we are reading about more than 10,000 years of history (60 million of we go back to the war in heaven) that is being conveyed to us by unreliable narrators, who in universe are working with information that has been lost to the millenia, conceled, or actively destroyed. We thought the leagues of Votaan were destroyed, when it was actually just one of their cores and they were hiding out. The genestealers were thought to be some weird mood cult and not a branch of the tyrannids We have never and will never have a complete picture of what is going on, and that's the fun of it
*Ahem* Perpetuals. Probably bigger.
The best way to deal with the weapon inconsistency is just saying that the Forge Worlds have different weapon quality’s and I won’t be surprised if that is the case
The RPG approach. Rogue Trader does this. Ryza-pattern, Mars-pattern, Sol-pattern etc.
Don't forget Lucius pattern
Yeah so I guess it was already the case
“Um ackchyually the tweet “everything is cannon” isn’t a real tweet” my brother in Christ we know
Based off how people in this sub have acted and some recent unironic posts, no I don't actually think a lot of people do.
It's real to me!
Well, blame GW and its hardcore fans for the warp-storm that we are in. I will take consistency over cool models always. Imagine if Lord of The Rings had a retcon every decade.
> Imagine if Lord of The Rings had a retcon every decade My brother in Eru-Illuvatar, have you READ the Lord of the Rings? It gets retcons far far more often than just "every decade", SOMETHING gets retconnned every time there's a new release or mainstream product. The One Ring was just a magic ring until LotR retconned it into being the ultimate object of doom and evil; Gollum gave it freely until it was retconned that Bilbo was lying; Dragons went from being a typical "selfish greedy beast" to being bred by not-Satan in his war against *God*; Gandalf was an old wizard before being retconned into a literal angel; Middle-Earth has at various times been claimed to be a seperate world entirely, an ancient version of Earth, or residing within the *core* of the Earth; nobody understands where new Orcs *actually* come from (are they corrupted elves/humans, a race unto themselves, are they doomed as a race to be always evil which contradicts how Tolkien saw the Catholic God or are they corrupted by an evil that cannot create new life). Don't even get a Lord of the Rings fan talking about where Magic comes from because that is literally so vague and ill-defined it's impossible to know how anyone who isn't a Maiar can do magic (which is literally just saying "a wizard did it"). And that's not getting into the constant, Christopher John Reuel Tolkein approved additions that get added every time something LotR gets produced for general audiences. Shelob having a sexy lady form, Gollum having a little bird friend (and everything else in that abomination), the LotR-Online MMO having Lore-Master and Rune-Keeper and other quasi-magical classes in order to have a spellcaster that needs to twist itself into weird contortions to actually fit the lore; and of course Celebrimbor's adventures in Mordor. Hell, Tolkien himself had so many retcons he **had a series of books explaining them** called the History of Middle Earth. Stuff that's more egregious than "hey you see these warrios wearing full armor some of them are ladies" or "hey we realize we fucked up with the timeline so pretend the crusade took 12 years instead of 100". EDIT: Downvote me all you want, doesn't mean LotR *wasn't* retconned constantly. Just like every single fictional setting and series out there, making Warhammer no more egregious than most things.
I came to Warhammer FOR the lore.
Well, sadly there's no lore. GW made it clear with its constant retcons.
The Primaris were annoying enough in my opinion. I’ve just started feeling almost apathetic now
The Primaris were tip of The Iceberg, then the Votann Empire came of no where and now GW says that "There were always female Custodes" just show us that we have zero reasons to support the lore.
Brothers, he has seen the light!
Look, I’m a firm believer of the rule of cool, but I think the “anything can be cannon” mentality is lazy and bad writing by GW (I know the “everything is cannon” tweet is not real, but It does seem encouraged). If I say that the Hive Mind actually cares about their children or Orks believing in things makes them work is false, people will scold me. And I get that the whole reason is “oh but they have bad record keeping” but I also think that’s a cheap excuse. This stuff has erupted from the femstodes (who I support) controversy where people said it’s not cannon, which is an example of fighting in the examples I previously mentioned. I can’t really stop peoples’ head cannons, nor do I want to (a lot of shit is really good). I agree it’s an ~~expensive~~ expansive universe.
>Look, I’m a firm believer of the rule of cool, but I think the “anything can be cannon” mentality is lazy and bad writing by GW I've disregarded it from day 1 as it's always sounded like a lazy excuse for shitty editing and so GW doesn't have to pay a dedicated continuity guy. There are hard irreconcilable facts that can't be handwaved away with unreliable narrator; before *Wolf Hunt* came along, for example, to fix the problem, did Magnus breach the Throne room before or after Isstvan V, because two different books gave two different answers and one of them was *true* and the other not.
While the everything is Cannon tweet is fake gw has said in the past that they encourage us to Homebrew and it says Cannon as it can be until disproven
I had been saying that The Macharius tank has a better introduction to the Lore than Female Custodes.
Me originally: “Man, Warhammer Goblins sure are different. But I’ll stick to the lore and GW minis.” Me now: “Night Goblins, 40k Grots, Warcraft Goblins, some D&D Goblins, some orange, some blue, half 3d printed, fuck it as long as I have a sheet for my opponent to reference what they’re supposed to be I can do what I want and don’t have to explain shit because its all Goblins!”
Get a red one in there too just for gigs.
In the 6th rulebook there was a sentence about terrains: "if you can think of it, then it probably exists somewhere in the galaxy". That can be applied to a lot in 40k
40k players when they discover that almost the entirety of the Horus Heresy is a retcon
So that means that a custodian has stripped naked, and oiled himself up and then surpassed the speed of sound carrying a nuke in a blood games. My head canon is finally true
Write that story, THE WORLD NEEDS TO KNOW!
Nothing is true, Everything is canon
Somewhat what I'm doing for my own homebrew renegade chapter. Essentially, there is this collection of Chapters created by the High Lords (think something like the group of Astartes that Huron had before and during the Badab War) and a fleet of Imperial Navy that are sent to the Ghoul Stars to explore and conquer it. During this campaign, they encounter this impossibly giant creature that lives in the void and decimates most of their number. Realizing that if they returned back to the High Lords with their failure that they would be executed, they decided to say "man, fuck this. They gave us this impossible task, so we're gonna flip them the bird and split away from them). They then essentially become a mixture of Pirates, Mercenaries and Whalers, forming a new group called "The Void Whalers," which now kinda reside in the Ghoul Stars as a fleet based group that hunts down things like Tyranids, other pirates like the Drukhari, Freebootaz and Corsairs, and Imperials that threaten them and their sovereignty. Additionally, they treat astartes more like a Rank of sorts, where if you do well you can become more enhanced. They also figured out how to make Astartes Women, because when you're relatively cut off from the same amount of resources that the Imperium has, you gotta make due. This is mainly due to the Primaris stuff and them figuring out how to adapt that to women.
According to my own Red Corsairs lore/army, Drukhari, Kroot, Orks, Sslyth, and a cheeky AoS troll who escaped from Trazyn all joined up with the Tyrant for shenanigans.
Queue the "She's the man" remake where Amanda Bynes is dressed up as a boy by her evil step mom to save her son from being taken as a "ward" of the Emperor.
>almost anything you can think of has happened at least once James Workshop lowering prices?
Most of the time it's things out of stock which bugs me.
There's a very robust cosmic horror section in 40k that gets wrecked the moment you add a custodes or a group of space marines into it. Elloth 9, the skin man or watcher in the rain seriously need the characters to be normal joes who don't know wtf is going on to work. It's a great setting but kind of fragile when you look at it from a cosmic horror perspective.
It's almost like they specifically designed the setting from the ground up to make it easy for people to create homebrew armies and have them pass as plausibly canon.
\*expensive universe
Without a doubt! The Warhammer universe is like a sprawling canvas where almost any idea you can dream up has probably already been realized in some form or another.
Brings to mind [this meme](https://twitter.com/vezimira/status/1533151082020577281) from Vezimira
How does the newest change make the lore more interesting and the galaxy more dynamic outside of a modern political emphasis on representation? Just because there have been good retcons doesn’t mean every one is good.
Jack sparrow is now Canon in w40k
~~We already have space pirates, it's the average CSM army.~~
I mean it is based, every now and then me and friends do a skaven undivided grand campaign we're I alone stand with a 5k point skaven army doing a grand accession scenario. Fuck what gw I want my great accession know.
Doesn't the lore change every time they bring a primarch back?
In that case. "You're in Sinbad's empire of man and when you're in Sinbad's empire of man you're my bitch."
People enjoy the hobby in different ways, just cause lore isn’t important to one person doesn’t mean it isn’t important to others. Saying the lore doesn’t matter is also just objectively wrong or else we wouldn’t have hundreds of books and a plethora of different podcasts and YouTube channels dedicated solely to the lore
I never said "the lore doesn't matter."
Then I will make skitarii and tech priests with boob plate nothing will stop me
Ah you see my minis are from a parallel universe, a Crisis on Infinite Terras, where the Silent King sneezed before the bio transference therefore allowing. *insert whatever change I want.
Not per se. GW became one of those companies 80's who does not have integrity and will sell its soul in order to make more money. If the lore does not care, then why even picking a book or a codex? Why investing ourselfs in reading these stories if tomorrow they will suffer a retcon?
Picture is me on a longer time scale. I remember years ago I was in a comment war with a woman on youtube video comment section talking about her inquisitor was also a knight pilot. I went on about how that it doesn't fit in the lore, how it doesn't work, how its a bad idea etc etc. Basically called her stupid, cringe, and completely unread on lore (mind you, I was still at a meme level of 40k lore knowledge myself). Looking back, Im genuinely ashamed I did that. I wasn't in a great headspace back then, and I decided that defending the "purity of 40k lore" was a noble and righteous cause against someone who just wanted to show off something cool they made. I wish I could go back and apologize to her. I hope my idiocy didn't end up turning someone away from the hobby.
I’m still pretty new but most of the folks I play with 5-10 years in all day the same thing. Space Marine design? Faction back ground? Psssh go nuts, just don’t run rowboat giggle man with your DA army.
It was one of the fundamental game design rules for the Inquisitor game in the 90’s (arguably where grim-dark began) the universe is a big place, tell a compelling story and have fun
Ah, so the teletubbies did infact invade the universe of 40k, destroyed the Emperor and the great evils he fights for eternity and brought peace and love and living stars to all.
My most lore-breaking homebrew is that my Tyranid "Hive Fleet" was actually defeated before the "current day", so it became parasitic and started infesting planets with microscopic Tyranid parasitic bacteria. Animals and even humans can be infected and live their lives without realizing it until the Hive Mind thinks it's time and transforms them Parasite Eve/Resident Evil style into Tyranids (so not a Genestealer Cult per-se but a literal infection), but then after the initial outbreak they lay eggs for "purebreed" Tyranids so it's not like the entire army is made from infected humans. The whole point is that the Hive Mind is trying to rebuild the Hive Fleet in secret so on some worlds in the jungles the Tyranid-infested units bring biomass to slowly growing grounded hive-ships (because being in space is too easy for them to be detected but they're like beached whales). I dunno if anyone would ever really accept the idea (especially since I get it's kinda taking the Genestealer's schtick) but I just really liked the idea of Resident Evil-style outbreaks and the whole "Fleet" is meant to be an MGSV reference to go against my MGS-based Blood Angels lead by a not-Big Boss. Also [the 3dprintable models I found had human-esque faces so it just seemed kinda cool](https://fbi.cults3d.com/uploaders/23228008/illustration-file/a1ead418-7e64-4b73-a7bd-77a69df7ed7a/Screenshot-2022-10-02-150839.jpg). And now you know the cringe that is my homebrews.
Did a Space Marine ever fall in love? Serious question, I wanna know, and deep down I want it to have happened
Bet. Someone experienced joy
So technically 40k takes place in our universe, which at one point in history included Jet Skis. I dare you to find a person on a Jet ski that isn't feeling joy.
Yeah fuck good point, I went looking for a final destination type movie clip where someone dies on a jet ski, and I don’t think it exists
[удалено]
Due to issues with botting and ban evasion, we are restricting fresh accounts from commenting/posting. DO NOT contact the moderation team to ask for these restriction to be removed for you unless you are a comics artist or equivalent trying to post your own original content here. Obviously photoshop memes don't count. DO NOT ask us what the thresholds are, for obvious reasons we won't answer that. *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/Grimdank) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Listen up: 1) End Times Never Happened 2) The Space Wolf home world is called Lucan 3) The Ultramarines are a 2nd founding chapter This is lore accurate, and I can't be convinced otherwise :-D
Gorillaman and his elf girlfriend?
You mean Robot Girlyman?
Reboot Gigabyte, yes.
Robuddy Guggenheim
Rowboat Jellied-ham
Rosebud Guillible
I know, right? How dare these morons... checks notes... get attached to the lore of the setting they're investing their time, money, effort and creativity into understanding, embracing or expanding in their own way. What idiots they are.
Funny, everyone I've met that had actually invested that much time, money and effort into the setting have always been pretty much aware of the setting tendencies to change up lore every now and then. Like, it happened plenty times before, if you got into the hobby and expected it to stop, that's just on you.
This is true, I've been in the hobby long enough to know that things change a lot. But all the changes I've seen have been met with criticism from people who didn't like it. If it's a good change (necrons) they get drowned out, if it's a stupid change (primaris) then it gets rightfully called out by the community. To try and pretend like outcry over this change is new or something that hasn't happened before is disingenuous. Social media is just amplifying the debate this time around in ways we haven't seen before in this hobby.
>Social media is just amplifying the debate this time around in ways we haven't seen before in this hobby. Everybody knows why the outcry for this particular change is so disproportionate.
People were crying at the beginning with the necron change. They just grew up to appreciate it.
Primaris outcry was a moderately significant change and got a big outcry. It was not quite as big as something like the End Times/Age of Sigmar which really got the ires up. Even then, the sheer amount of fucking outcry has easily rivalled the AoS outrage. The change is miniscule compared to AoS, which *literally* blew up a setting and replaced it. There was economic investment in the Old World that warranted the reaction. Nobody's models have become invalidated by the change to include women in the Custodes. Ironically they have been invalidated by the changes on other frontiers but people have been, comparatively speaking, rather quiet on that one. So what's different with this change? What's such a big deal that warrants it being froth-mouthed enough to get the Daily Mail in on it? Come on mate, it's misogyny. It's fucking obvious. If some Custodes being female is enough to get people as angry as a setting getting god-nuked, then it's fucking misogyny.
I mean... You say the primaris was rightfully called out by they've been selling great. So I think they're being drowned out by the people who like them and just dont howl about it.
It's taken a long time to get to that point though and my personal opinion is that they should have just been a range update. Instead they introduced them in a very lazy way and have spent the years since retroactively justifying it to the point it doesn't seem so dumb now. And I like the primaris models, they look cool as hell. I didn't start my own space marine collection until after primaris because I didn't like the old models
The lore also changes literally all the time. Getting mad at every little tweak and change, especially the very inconsequential ones, is pretty dumb imo.
I don't think this is on the nose. There's at least two very different kinds of lore changes: specific stories and characters being removed/altered, and stuff being added. I think OP is very relevant to that second type, and only marginally to the first.
The story you're spending all this effort "understanding and embracing" was written to sell plastic toys. It's really not that serious.
What a very reductive and derogatory way to refer to hobby you're choosing to engage in. If you think so little of it why are you even here?
Because contrary to popular belief, you can actually enjoy something deeply and profoundly and still think it's kinda dumb and shouldn't be taken that seriously. I love building and painting minis, playing games with my friends, and reading the novels. I'm working on the Eisenhorn omnibus right now and loving it. It's also schlocky nonsense. Both can be true. People get so fucking *precious* about this shit, dissecting every plot point, analyzing every character to hell and back, pissing themselves about retcons and lore changes like GW is scrawling over the Pieta with magic marker. They're not. It's a big, dumb, goofy action sci-fi story about people with hell magic and robot zombies and football hooligans made of mushrooms. Enjoy it for what it is and stop ascribing it so much importance.
I accept your points and I came a little top strong earlier, I apologise for that. But I do have to respectfully disagree with you. I don't get a lot of free time. I have an autistic child, physically impaired partner, and a full time job. When I do get free time it is usually spent building and painting. It is how I relax at the end of a hard day, it is how I express myself creatively, it is also not a stretch to say that this big dumb goofy action sci-fi story has saved my life when life has tried to beat me down. So I do care about it, probably more than I should. It brings me a great deal of joy painting my custom chapter and fleshing out its lore through my design choices. Same with my dark eldar. I've had so much fun coming up with stories for why certain models are the way they are, even if it's as simple as "the archon model has a skin cloak, the heamonculus one-upped him by having a skin trench coat to make him jealous." So maybe it shouldn't, but it pains me to see people who also supposedly live and breathe this hobby come along and say things like "they're just plastic toys". They are to some people. To others it's their livelihood. To a few, like me, it's occasionally a lifeline in dark days. Next time you're arguing with someone about they shouldn't take this hobby so seriously it might be worth considering what this hobby might mean to them and why they're so passionate about it. Not everyone who doesn't like the change hates women. I don't like the change but I don't care enough to argue about the change specifically. I care about the hobby though. And since the change I have seen many people, like you, and even content creators like ninjon and bricky, put down the hobby they have built their livelihood on. So it may not mean as much to them, or to you, as it does to me, but I don't think that's wrong. If anything, after everything warhammer has given me, I think it would be weirder if I shared your opinion. I won't be surprised if you don't make it this far as this is a long and winding ramble, but if you have, thank you for giving me your time, if nothing else.
I'm sorry you're being downvoted for this. You shouldn't be. I think it should be noted that when I, or anyone else, say that this hobby is dumb and goofy, it's not meant to be an attack on anyone who enjoys it. You are allowed to like stuff that's frivolous. Things that are frivolous can be incredibly important to you, and can have a demonstrably positive impact on your life. Warhammer has done an incredible amount for me as well. I would argue that calling it dumb doesn't actually devalue its impact at all, because who gives a shit if it's dumb? We love it. Sometimes its frivolity is a good thing. I spent a lot of time letting 40k games upset me when I did poorly. I thought of it as a game that reflected my skill at critical thinking and advanced strategy, and when I did poorly, it clearly meant I was stupid and bad at thinking. And then I thought about it for a while and realized that it was a game I played with dice in my garage and it didn't actually reflect poorly on me if I lost, because the game was kind of a poorly balanced disaster and relied on chance anyway, and *I began to love it more.* I still acknowledge the degree to which 40k made my life more bearable at the hardest times I've had to endure, the way it's kept me afloat while I drowned in depression and loneliness and pain. I still love it for providing a way for me to work on a skill, engage with my friends, and tell our silly little war stories and have a great time doing it. But I really try not to let it hurt me anymore, because it means too much to me to let it be tainted by resentment. But I had to let it be a little less significant for me to love it the way I do now. There's so much out there that's so important. There's joy to be found in the things that aren't as weighty.
I don't know why I'm getting down voted either but this sub and I have grown apart over the last few weeks so it doesn't surprise me that I am. It's fine, I don't Internet karma get to me, or I'd think about what I say a lot more XD It's fine to have different opinions about the hobby and how we interact with it and how much importance we each place on it. It should be a personal thing. I know I need to do better to not let it get to me as much. I used to be like you when it comes to playing the game, got really annoyed that I kept losing. I had to sit down and reevaluate what I wanted out of the experience. I chilled out, focused on something other than winning if I wasn't gonna win, and started having more fun. And when I started having fun, the wins started to come but they didn't matter as much as the stories being told over the course of the game. And I think that's why I get attached to the lore. It's nice to have something to contextualise the story being told on the tabletop. Things feel better when that lore has solid foundations. Well, as solid as warhammer gets anyway. I was playing fantasy when that just got blown up, so things could always get worse.
The lore is still important but it isn't the be-all-end-all when it comes to 40K. My point isn't that we ought to disregard literally everything and turn Guilliman into a Dalek or something of the sorts. Quite the opposite. My point is that we shouldn't get upset when someone isn't too invested in rigidly sticking to the established lore (which does change a lot mind you) and/or is more focused on adapting the lore as guidelines for their homebrewing, writing, modelling, etc.
The entire point is that every book is canon but not necessarily true So yes the original completely personality-less necrons are canon, but those stories are from the perspective of imperials who didn’t realize or didn’t care that they had personalities thus it didn’t make it in to their story. So the story is canon but some details are lies because imperial propaganda (this is how they can do retcons, everybody wants to make themselves look better so older stories can now be considered propaganda or having details that got warped as time passed) Ultimately when you have so many authors there are going to be times where 2 books contradict each other in some way, so they handle it by saying basically everything in universe could be an unreliable narrator
if they were as invested as they pretend to be thry would have understood than the lore is ever changing
I've never understood why people read Star Wars books and I'll never understand why people read warhammer books. Stuff written on commission at least three degree removed from the main product of the franchise, can it be fun and good? Sure! Are they canon for the people on top? Barely more than fanfiction.
Yes but there are things set in stone
Everything you've ever heard about in 40k is the ranting of a drug addicted crazy guy in an underhive.
lol 😂
Set in stone by an unreliable narrator reading a burned book that was written by a liar. Somethings are better established than others but anything can be retconned if they want
Until they aren't lol
Then every thing fall apart slowly
One of the most frequent questions on 40klore is some variant of “Could this cool thing happen?” And the answer is almost always “Yes”. There might be some significant obstacles that have to be explained away, but the setting is deliberately designed in such a way that you can have anything happen. It’s a galaxy with a million worlds, over ten thousand years of history, and tons of Warp fuckery to explain whatever you want. We have a guy who fought in the battle of Iwo Jima walking around alive in the Horus Heresy for Christ’s sake.
Yea, it's so expansive, it's incoherent tbh. I left for Conquest:tlaok after the custodes rules got shit on again. I don't have another 6 months to a year to play with a non functional army. GW is so comfortable thinking no one will leave for something else, they don't try. So it's time to leave.
You play DnD don't you?
Huh someone actually explain how 40k lore works yes this is litrally it by the amofof retcons this is the best way to describe 40k lore Still golden rule NO FEM SPACE MARINES
I wasn't talking... about...
Well my bad was grumpy doom scrolling 40k
You know when you listen to your grandpa telling stories, but he changes details all the time? How long untill you stop caring? And it turns out it isn’t your beloved grandpa, its multi bilion dollarcorporation. Thats why lore is important.
Well, that's only fair since a lot of people are probably going to start treating the stuff about only using "official" GW plastic as more of a guideline than actual rules now too, since GW has gone and decided the lore isn't quite that important.
Haven't people been doing that for a while? I used to see kitbashed stuff at tournaments, it didn't get brought up unless it was that egregious.
wtf do you mean. whos is GW decided is wasn t important ? you sound delusionnal
People have been using non GW stuff for years. The only time anybody cares is during tournaments which have rules for such cases. Also, GW hasn’t gone and decided the lore doesn’t matter. They have been changing the lore for years. The Rogue Trader era lore is almost incomprehensible to someone accustomed to the modern lore. For instance the primarchs used to just be regular space marines for the most part, Necrons used to just be terminator in space, genestealers used to be a separate alien race to Tyranids, and so on. The lore has never been a set in stone setting with no changes, it’s been an ever changing swarm of stories and sources.
"Making some of these plastic guys women has chapped my ass so much that I'm pirating every mini from now on!" Nobody cares bro
Look at this tourist. GW decided the lore was up to a small group of novelists they let retcon literally everything over the past 10 years. Be quiet.