Just curious...

[Crimson Fisting]

Now, I'm not a big Blood Angels fan, but I've noticed a lot of people complaining about changes to the fluff in the new BA 'dex. They're one of my least favorite Chapters (don't bite my head off), and I haven't really got a chance to take an in depth look at the new book, so I was just curious as to what changed or got reworked because from what I've noticed (and, like I said I'm no Blood Angels expert) their fluff doesn't seem all that different to me. So, could some of you Brothers Sanguine site me some examples, please?

[Captain Juan Juarez]

I think the prime example is the Blood Angels/Necrons love in...

[Brother Nathan]

and the mephy is a deamon prince thing... and the rather crappy thought out astrorath fluff. still better than a pdf....

[Crimson Fisting]

Isn't the Mephiston thing just a maybe, though?

[Brother Chris]

The previous versions were more vampires in space and there was a lot of debate about how vampiric the chapter was. The new codex came down firmly in favour of angelic rather than vampiric, so there are two new angel special characters, a whole unit of angelic-looking elite assault troops etc. I prefered the ambiguity. The fluff concerning Astorath makes no sense at all (he is an uber chaplain of BA and all successors) and the previous top chaplain has been demoted to a supporting role.

 

The writer could not be bothered to cross reference to previous fluff, so the captain of the second company has a different name and known events (Space Hulk, for instance) aren't covered. This was just laziness. It is very easy to ret-con existing fluff. A very silly minor change was to alter the helmet colours of the Vanguard (previously Veteran assault) troops. This had the effect of making nicely painted figures 'wrong' for no reason. Still we are used to this as the chest eagle and pauldron edges have also been changed arbitrarily in previous books.

 

These are all fairly trivial in the great scheme of things and generally the fluff is atmospheric and inspiring.

[Chapter Master Ignis Domus]

They changed around Lemartes so that he is no longer(:sniff: :) ) the Chief Chaplain. They then put Astorath in there. Also, you've got the Sanguinator, who has never shown up nor been hinted at in the fluff before.

[Crimson Fisting]

What did the Vanguard vets helmets get changed to, and from what?

[Wolf Priest Haelaeif]

The last time I read any BA fluff was in 2nd edition, and I always liked that old fluff. Compared to that, they changed a lot of things. In 2nd, the BA were not very different from other chapters. They had the flaw, but it was not made so central, ie, it was perfectly likely that many battles would happen completely without any red thirst or even black rage happening. The vampire hint was there, but it was no more than that: a hint. Today, it is a real in your face thing, and I do not like it.

 

I also don't think the new units like sanguinary guard, sanguinor, storm raven really add anything. BA now have five different elite squads, not counting terminators (in case you are wondering: vanguard, sternguard, honour guard, sanguinary guard and death company). C:SM has three, and that is almost too much already. Sometimes it looks as though they didn't even have any bog-standard marines anymore. And that is not good, because the bog-standard marine guys are the core of all that marine coolness. Without them, things like sanguinary guard stink.

 

Also: black trim was better.

 

Back in the day, everything was better. :)

[Chapter Master Ignis Domus]

Yes, I agree. Even in the .pdf, they weren't the massively divergent chapter they are today. They had a few extra units, like Veteran Assault Squads, their command squads were Honor Guard, and they had the special characters, but none of the whole Librarian Dreadnought, only chapter with Reclusiarchs, Stormraven insanity.

 

EDIT: Missed one little period.

EDIT to the EDIT: And of course I manage to stick a comma in where it shouldn't be when typing the reason for the edit. :)

[Vodunius]

They changed around Lemartes so that he is no longer(:sniff: ;) ) the Chief Chaplain.

 

I'm not sure he actually was, he held the title of Guardian of the Lost but Imperial Armour volume II listed him as the 3rd Companies Chaplain which would fit with him being a friend of Tycho's.

 

Of course changing him into someone who has fallen to the black rage but is still capable of functioning takes away some of Mephiston's uniqueness.

 

BA now have five different elite squads, not counting terminators (in case you are wondering: vanguard, sternguard, honour guard, sanguinary guard and death company). C:SM has three, and that is almost too much already.

Death Company are the only one that's really unique - BA Honour Guard are the chapter specific variant of vanilla command squads whilst Sanguinary Guard are just the BA variant of vanilla Honour Guard.

 

Personally I like the split of Sternguard/Vanguard, but that's because when I think Blood Angel 1st Company I still picture this (middle) dude first:

http://i143.photobucket.com/albums/r155/khromash/RTBASternguard.jpg

[Sabadin]

The vampire hint was there, but it was no more than that: a hint.

 

You skipped the mephiston entry and the part about us locking up the crazies in the tower back then I take it? ;)

[JamesI]

For me it was the Necron fluff and what is going on with Mephiston.

 

Astorath's fluff is weak, no one man could handle the job of dispatching all those who fall too far to the curse for all the sons of Sanguinius.

[BOBMAKENZIE]

Isn't the Mephiston thing just a maybe, though?

 

Yes but he went from being "HOLY CRAP THIS GUY BEAT IT WOO!" To "O...M...G HE MIGHT BE A DAEMON" Just eh.. Its heavy handed.

 

Sanguinary Guard were an abrupt addition which is fine just eh. I dont entirely see how they fit in really not entirely. They could have worked them in better I think. Perhaps they could have been the initiates to become Sanguinary Priests or the Subjects of their tests not just super bad ass self control guys.

 

They Introduced Astorath and just :cussed: all over previous fluff. Lemartes being no longer the heroe. Astorath being able to travel fast enough to deal with DC. The Amero (Is that his name?) Prodcedure during which Death Company were bound as part of the process to try and catch onto the rage and figure out what it did.

 

There is rediculous things like The Number of land raiders we have. Its cool but when we only have 3 transports in the whole Chapter armoury to carry (1 at a time) of the darn things.... It doesnt really add up at all.

 

Necron-BA love in thats a blatant copy past job from the BRB. (Matt Ward you tricky devil, swapping Ultras to BA just so we look worse)

 

The Lack of control of the Death Company. Things like Death Company Tycho being totally solo (I mean really? he is described as being part of a bigger Death Company force in the fluff...) AND in the Grey Knights book they are introducing the perfect representation of Tycho's killing blow >:D

 

They also dont go into too much into the Whole mysticism in blood angels rituals which I think is a damn shame.

 

As mentioned Helmet changing issues.

 

No Venerable Dreads makes me a little sad. We went from having crazy old guys to have some crazy guys and some psychic guys.

 

 

And in return we've traded in alot of our stuff to space marines *little sigh* @_@

 

I can keep going if you like :3

[HB66]

Ive been playn 40k sense back when it was the "Angles of Death" codex....they put BA and DA in the same book, so 15 yrs or so....

- i buy every codex that is made, Fantasy and 40k, cause i like following all the fluff and read about every Black Library book i can find.....I dont mind all the changes they make to BA, and any other army or race for that matter. Yeah some of it is weird, Mephy as a demon, NO!.....but i dont mind it, they probably just added that so the conspiracy nutts can have fun :)

- Overall though i think they just add more fluff here and there to keep people thinking and to stir things up a bit, but thats just my opinion. I love the new Astorath and all the new stuff they added to BA's. Really gives them a solid foundation i think. makes them the calm on the outside crazy berzerker pretty boys of the space marine world.......dont worry the crazy berzerker bearded viking boys still goes to the Wolves :)

 

HB66

[AngelOfDeathXIII]

I also don't think the new units like sanguinary guard, sanguinor, storm raven really add anything. BA now have five different elite squads, not counting terminators (in case you are wondering: vanguard, sternguard, honour guard, sanguinary guard and death company). C:SM has three, and that is almost too much already. Sometimes it looks as though they didn't even have any bog-standard marines anymore. And that is not good, because the bog-standard marine guys are the core of all that marine coolness. Without them, things like sanguinary guard stink.

 

I myself rather like the elite choices (especially the Sanguinary Guard) but I do agree that several new units don't add anything. Mainly the Sanguinor... And while I enjoy seeing the Sanguinary Guard chop pretty much everything to dust it is indeed the "rank-and-file" Blood Angels that hold the objectives and win games for me.

Oh and not to be a total Codex-Nazi or something... but Death Company are Troop choices...

[shatter]

*boggle*

 

I think the new characters & rules like Master of the Host add the ability to build hyper elite armies in varying flavours.

 

How is that not adding something?

 

What do they add to the fluff? Uhmmm... mysticism and awesomeness all at once while hinting at a scary little tang of Imperial Daemonhood?

[Redo]

For me it was the Necron fluff and what is going on with Mephiston.

 

Astorath's fluff is weak, no one man could handle the job of dispatching all those who fall too far to the curse for all the sons of Sanguinius.

 

The Necron stuff really annoys me too! I also find Astorath's fluff a bit too busy. Should have just made him Head Chaplin and all other Orders also have a head Chaplin whos job is to administer the last rights to the DC.

 

I actually miss some of the Vampire stuff, especially in the second edition 'the strangest of all the Chapter's traits is the habit of sleeping whenever possible in the sarcophagi used to creat them.'

[Brother-Captain Devlonir]

My personal opinion, and this is no personal attack on anybody, is that any change or addition to fluff of any kind/game will always result in some people hating it. And the haters are often very vocal on the forums about what they hate. The fans of old fluff also learn very descriptive language to describe how much they hate the new fluff.

 

For me personally, I love fluff changes and additions and retcons mostly because they change my world that would otherwise be stale and unchanging and where the only addition would be personal stories in this grand setting. Warhammer is about grand stories, not small stories. So if you want these grand stories to occur, you also sometimes need grand changes to the setting as a whole.

 

For me, all additions to the fluff and retcons in the latest book (and for me, BA 2nd edition were my BA as well) are therefore welcome and refreshing changes. I do not go 'oh noes, Dante made a pact with evul necrons.. you broke my fluff!', I think: Alright, why would Dante make a non-attack pact with Necrons when he could have put it all on the line to kill them? Oh wait, maybe that shows how he is as a commander and why he is known as the wisest and smartest military commander in the universe. Why fight a war of attrition with exhausted armies with a chapter specialized in surgical and precision strikes you no longer have the manpower for, when you can also part and fight the battle another day?

I am not wanting to be personal here.. but maybe people who hate fluff changes should look deeper into the fluff to sometimes explain why things are changed the way they are and not judge too quickly.

[Morollan]

I think people might be reading too much into Mephiston's fluff. There is only a very, very small hint that something is amiss and nothing really to suggest that it's daemonic in nature. I suspect people might have got carried away with the haters whining that Meph's stats are like a Daemon Prince and put 2+2 together to get 6 (or 666).

[Wolf Priest Haelaeif]

My personal opinion, and this is no personal attack on anybody, is that any change or addition to fluff of any kind/game will always result in some people hating it. And the haters are often very vocal on the forums about what they hate. The fans of old fluff also learn very descriptive language to describe how much they hate the new fluff.

 

For me personally, I love fluff changes and additions and retcons mostly because they change my world that would otherwise be stale and unchanging and where the only addition would be personal stories in this grand setting. Warhammer is about grand stories, not small stories. So if you want these grand stories to occur, you also sometimes need grand changes to the setting as a whole.

 

For me, all additions to the fluff and retcons in the latest book (and for me, BA 2nd edition were my BA as well) are therefore welcome and refreshing changes. I do not go 'oh noes, Dante made a pact with evul necrons.. you broke my fluff!', I think: Alright, why would Dante make a non-attack pact with Necrons when he could have put it all on the line to kill them? Oh wait, maybe that shows how he is as a commander and why he is known as the wisest and smartest military commander in the universe. Why fight a war of attrition with exhausted armies with a chapter specialized in surgical and precision strikes you no longer have the manpower for, when you can also part and fight the battle another day?

I am not wanting to be personal here.. but maybe people who hate fluff changes should look deeper into the fluff to sometimes explain why things are changed the way they are and not judge too quickly.

 

Hm. In general, I think I agree. You are right, and I may just be blind to the good bits of new fluff, being a grumpy old man in regards to this. But one thing remains, and that is quality. Maybe when I was a kid (2nd edition) I did just not notice it and the writing was just as crappy. But Mat Ward's fluff, just like Graham McNeill's, is so full of Mary Sues and the breaking of the suspension of disbelief, it just isn't fun reading it, imo. It is a steady stream of "he is the greatest of all" - you read about how one guy is the greatest, you think "okay, bit of overstatement, but for dramatic reasons, fine." Then you turn the page and there is another the greatest. And then follows another. It stops being believable, it stops being immersive, and for me, that's when it stops being fun. Its not really the content that is bad, it is the quality of the writing.

[Zealadin]

But Mat Ward's fluff, just like Graham McNeill's, is so full of Mary Sues and the breaking of the suspension of disbelief, it just isn't fun reading it, imo. It is a steady stream of "he is the greatest of all" - you read about how one guy is the greatest, you think "okay, bit of overstatement, but for dramatic reasons, fine." Then you turn the page and there is another the greatest. And then follows another. It stops being believable, it stops being immersive, and for me, that's when it stops being fun. Its not really the content that is bad, it is the quality of the writing.

 

Welcome to the 40k world... where a single space marine can single handedly kill an army of any other race before breakfast, and then destroy their civisilation before dinner all in the name of someone who might have died a long while back and never wanted to be worshipped.

All the marine fluff is like this, its why so many of the books are just terrible, honestly terrible, and barely worthy of being published. They are basically a write up to make people buy an army, and sadly all the writers are so bad you can't even escape the theme by reading novels about OTHER races or armies.

 

Anyway any kind of named character by rights is extremely special, its 40k, your dead otherwise. Anyone to have lived as long as the special characters in BA have to have something to explain their continuing existence.

I like the new BA codex, and feel its quite good and has some character, while balancing all the awesome-ness with the flaw. If the flaw wasn't such a large part of the BA then I honestly don't think they would deserve a seperate codex.

I think the liberal dash of too-awesome-ness is just part of the GWS marketting trend really.

I'm a huge scifi and fantasy reader, and I have to admit that as freestanding publications its very unlikely that many black library books would ever see the light of day, they are to appease an extremely rabid player base.

 

Also as someone else stated people get very heated and angry over changes to fluff, I mean I've been a long time GK follower and collecter and everything I have heard about the new codex sounds like total garbage that will see my love for the Grey Knights totally disappear.

[Wolf Priest Haelaeif]

Don't welcome-to-the-world-of-40k me... sure, SMs are ott by default, but that is not my point. You can write about superhuman supersoldiers and create believable characters, conflicts, and mysteries. Some people did manage exactly that. They wrote about ott guys, but what they wrote was not ott. I'd have to digg out all my old 40k stuff to find out their names, but they did manage that.

 

Mat Ward did not manage that. He wrote ott fluff. And adding to that some of the things he writes do not even make any actual sense. It just doesn't work for me.

 

As I said, maybe my perception is flawed because when I read the 2nd edition fluff, I was a kid, but I do read a story or two in the old 'dexes from time to time, and I enjoy those. Those two accounts of BA campaigns in the current book? They were really, really badly written, with little attention to detail and all attention to superlatives and Mary Sue.

 

It's not only 40k, too. The WHFB Beastmen book has a load of big ugly monsters, all of which are so terrible they would kill entire armies by themselves. And they are all the worst monster of all. There is no connection to the whole there, it is completely contradictory and it is no fun to read, contains no real character. I had only started collecting beasts a few months before the new book came out, and I then found them to be so bland in their new version, I stopped collecting them.

[Brother Captain Kezef]

Tbh the Angelic theme is what brought me back to the BA's. I love the SG and have an all SG army because the whole angelic theme works so well for me.

 

I've been in the hobby for 20 year so the ret-cons are par for the course for me now.

[Brother Nathan]

i really dont see much use for astro killing the dc. when lemartes guardian of the lost and high chaplin(he was titled as being the high chaplin in the pdf) had them locked in the tower and cared for them there. also theres barely anymention of the tower... what happened it? did the dark angels nick it?

[Brother-Captain Devlonir]

Don't welcome-to-the-world-of-40k me... sure, SMs are ott by default, but that is not my point. You can write about superhuman supersoldiers and create believable characters, conflicts, and mysteries. Some people did manage exactly that. They wrote about ott guys, but what they wrote was not ott. I'd have to digg out all my old 40k stuff to find out their names, but they did manage that.

 

Although I agree with that, I do feel the OTT fluff was always part of 40k. When I try to explain it I simply say: "Warhammer 40k is a setting in the Grimdark of the future where men wear tanks as battle armor and throw themselves from orbit and women are nuns with flamethrowers."

OTT is what 40k, and especially Space Marines, are all about. And when you describe the greatest chapter of all you will need to go the little bit of extra mile to make it even more OTT than other chapters.

 

I think there is too much focus on the details of some of the added fluff.. People trying to figure out how Astorath can be the slayer of every DC marine in the universe that does not die on the battlefield, or why the Sanguinor suddenly arrives and leaves again at specific moments.

 

I actually feel the little short story concerning the Sanguinor's arrival when the overloading warp engine caused the Bloodletter to show himself was a wonderful story! Yes it was over the top.. but seriously, was I the only one who saw the similarities in that battle and the description of the battle between Sanguinius and the Greater Demon? It is subtle in it's OTT details in that it describes just why the Angels feel so invigorated when this 'thing' comes to aid them. He fights like how they see their own Primarch fight in the dreams and visions of the Rage they constantly battle.

 

And I can find more reasonable views of (nearly) everything people dislike about the 5th edition BA fluff if needed.

 

I just want to say it is a matter of opinion and I honestly believe you are right Haelaeif when you say you are probably biased because you read 2nd edition when you were a kid. This is because now, as an adult, you expect more from literature than you did at the time. You do not accept needing to envision things yourself but want the writer to more thoroughly describe the situation as you got used to in good literature you have read in the years. You are not to blame as everyone has that. For me though, I do not mind that level of 'sloppy' writing and gaps in the story in a game.. especially one that invites you to make your own stories like Warhammer! They create a setting where you can pick and choose things.

 

Example: I played D&D for almost 2 decades and the thing I always hated most was the clear power level differences between different powers of good and evil. The fact that for some one demon was 'the most evil thing they ever saw', while in the view of another it was just a scrub is something I missed in D&D after a time. People would not be afraid of a blade demon when they knew the Balrog was a much more dangerous enemy.

Warhammer does that differently.. things that are even better then normal are usually 'the best', as they often are the best of that thing available on one battlefield. It doesn't make them the best in the universe, but the universe is a huge place.

 

Example: Most people in Ultramarines space probably never much heard of Dante and his track record.. so for them, Calgar would be the greatest chapter master in the universe. But Calgar himself actually gave leadership to Dante on Armageddon because he knew he could not lead this battle as good as the old man. But for the people on Ultramar, the truth is that Calgar is the best and not Dante.

 

And this favoring your own is a theme in all of Warhammer and it fits when you think that you want to think your army is the best when you make it!