FW/GW creative process

[Brother Handro]

Ha, your logic will never defeat our sense of self-entitlement and ownership towards a beloved shared universe!

Seriously, that's why there's conflict. The universe is deliberately left room for interpretation, and yet this creates a problem when one person's vision conflicts with another's. Then suddenly put some of those people in charge of deciding what's canon and what's not and you can hardly be surprised at the outcome...

[Brother Heinrich]

Honestly I've never had any issue with AD-B on the forums. That dude is a stand up mother:cusser. The tone and content in Gouldings post is something I've never seen from AD-B

[SkimaskMohawk]

I agree with Heinrich, I've never seen AD-B act in that way on this forum

[Jarl Kjaran Coldheart]

A D-B is a solid contributor here, and frankly puts up with alot more backtalk than I ever could in his shoes.

 

WLK

[DuskRaider]

I actually haven't seen AD-B comment in a while... then again, I'm only in the 30K forum these days, so I may just be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

 

In any case, while I understand it's probably tiring to hear comments, criticism, and unwelcome ideas.... you put yourself out there. You let it be known that you're a BL employee, you write books for the frontrunner series, and you're in the know. If you expect to let the proverbial cat out of the bag and then just disappear back into the shadow of the internet, you're sorely mistaken and a bit foolish, TBH. I realize it can be frustrating, but you really shouldn't go about blowing off the fans like that. I can't walk into my job, have a user call me up about a complaint, tell them to deal with it, and slam the phone down in their ear. There's a professional courtesy involved. Hey man, I dealt with the public at large in former places of employment before, I get it. People suck. I'd hate to deal with a lot of 40K fans, a large number are whiners (Warseer). Either ignore it and realize you're towing the company line and are the face of said company on that particular forum, or close the account and start a new one under the guise of a generic user.

[Marshal Rohr]

A D-B is a solid contributor here, and frankly puts up with alot more backtalk than I ever could in his shoes.

 

WLK

That's my point. When he posts it's solid, but you can tell the fan base has worn on him. ;)

[Marshal Rohr]

I actually haven't seen AD-B comment in a while... then again, I'm only in the 30K forum these days, so I may just be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

 

In any case, while I understand it's probably tiring to hear comments, criticism, and unwelcome ideas.... you put yourself out there. You let it be known that you're a BL employee, you write books for the frontrunner series, and you're in the know. If you expect to let the proverbial cat out of the bag and then just disappear back into the shadow of the internet, you're sorely mistaken and a bit foolish, TBH. I realize it can be frustrating, but you really shouldn't go about blowing off the fans like that. I can't walk into my job, have a user call me up about a complaint, tell them to deal with it, and slam the phone down in their ear. There's a professional courtesy involved. Hey man, I dealt with the public at large in former places of employment before, I get it. People suck. I'd hate to deal with a lot of 40K fans, a large number are whiners (Warseer). Either ignore it and realize you're towing the company line and are the face of said company on that particular forum, or close the account and start a new one under the guise of a generic user.

We aren't 'users' though. We are consumers. Unfortunately, model kits are consumables, and they are only responsible to us for the quality of the kits, not the background. If you buy a book you don't like you have no recourse but to just not buy the next one. I got Kauyon to see if the studio had stepped up it's game recently. It hasn't. I read the thing, so I can't return it. I just won't bother with Mont'ka. If we were talking about cars or computers, we'd have an expectation of response to our displeasure, but these are plastic models and fiction. Our reception doesn't matter individually if sales are good enough collectively.

[Jarl Kjaran Coldheart]

A D-B is a solid contributor here, and frankly puts up with alot more backtalk than I ever could in his shoes.

WLK

That's my point. When he posts it's solid, but you can tell the fan base has worn on him.

I wonder.

his posts, which are usually found in the Black Library subforum, havent really changed their overall tone. he's just about always respectful of his fellow commentators, regardless of how ridiculously wrong they are.

Frankly, he's damn close to the model B&C poster.

WLK

[Marshal Rohr]

A D-B is a solid contributor here, and frankly puts up with alot more backtalk than I ever could in his shoes.

WLK

That's my point. When he posts it's solid, but you can tell the fan base has worn on him.

I wonder.

his posts, which are usually found in the Black Library subforum, havent really changed their overall tone. he's just about always respectful of his fellow commentators, regardless of how ridiculously wrong they are.

Frankly, he's damn close to the model B&C poster.

WLK

ADB for Mod? :D

[DuskRaider]

 

I actually haven't seen AD-B comment in a while... then again, I'm only in the 30K forum these days, so I may just be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

 

In any case, while I understand it's probably tiring to hear comments, criticism, and unwelcome ideas.... you put yourself out there. You let it be known that you're a BL employee, you write books for the frontrunner series, and you're in the know. If you expect to let the proverbial cat out of the bag and then just disappear back into the shadow of the internet, you're sorely mistaken and a bit foolish, TBH. I realize it can be frustrating, but you really shouldn't go about blowing off the fans like that. I can't walk into my job, have a user call me up about a complaint, tell them to deal with it, and slam the phone down in their ear. There's a professional courtesy involved. Hey man, I dealt with the public at large in former places of employment before, I get it. People suck. I'd hate to deal with a lot of 40K fans, a large number are whiners (Warseer). Either ignore it and realize you're towing the company line and are the face of said company on that particular forum, or close the account and start a new one under the guise of a generic user.

We aren't 'users' though. We are consumers. Unfortunately, model kits are consumables, and they are only responsible to us for the quality of the kits, not the background. If you buy a book you don't like you have no recourse but to just not buy the next one. I got Kauyon to see if the studio had stepped up it's game recently. It hasn't. I read the thing, so I can't return it. I just won't bother with Mont'ka. If we were talking about cars or computers, we'd have an expectation of response to our displeasure, but these are plastic models and fiction. Our reception doesn't matter individually if sales are good enough collectively.

 

Hmph... true. I'm not sure what to say then.

[Jarl Kjaran Coldheart]

A D-B is a solid contributor here, and frankly puts up with alot more backtalk than I ever could in his shoes.

WLK

That's my point. When he posts it's solid, but you can tell the fan base has worn on him.

I wonder.

his posts, which are usually found in the Black Library subforum, havent really changed their overall tone. he's just about always respectful of his fellow commentators, regardless of how ridiculously wrong they are.

Frankly, he's damn close to the model B&C poster.

WLK

ADB for Mod?

I'm against anything that delays his writing.

I need my next fix *ahem* I mean novel.

WLK

[Black Cohort]

I think part of the problem is that the horus heresy book series has suffered from a lack of focus, a string of mostly bad novels and a slow release schedule recently. The best thing I can compare it to is a ship with a broken rudder drifting through uncharted waters. Someone needs to get their back to that rudder and steer the ship back into some charted waters and stop trying to milk the series popularity to make money off poorly written filler novels. It isn't like there is a lack of other awesome stories talented authors can tell in the setting if the Heresy Series runs its course.

[Joe]

Huh, I literally just remembered the Liber Chaotica. That certainly wasn't PG-13. We never did get a 30k/40k version of that, sadly.

 

AD-B =/= Goulding, I agree. I may disagree with the direction that Abaddon was taken (combating the whole 'he's a failure' meme that sprang up; that could have been handled in a way that didn't make it seem like 40k would be inevitably End Times'd), however I have thoroughly enjoyed what he's written for the character so far, alongside his other works. 

[Petitioner's City]

Ahaha, I'm a wee bit annoyed because the person's (Ahriman's aide's) excellent & often wonderfully written review that raises Laurie's ire uses or even just plagiarises some of my/our review comments here (it is dated 17 Nov, after most the thread's conversation). But (perhaps because of this) also i agree with them very much so! But still phrases like 'grey dust on grey armour' and 'to see the end of Know No Fear from a 'traitor' POV, as the world quickly turns to hell from the orbital strikes to the solar flare' were me! Grrr.

[A D-B]

Oh, man. What a thread.

 

 

 

I think this settle once and for all the question of the design studio and FW working together on the Heresy. Lets see how long before the 40K fluff tone seeps into the Heresy.

 

 

Yes and no. It's not a new thing, though. People honestly imagine a much, much wider separation than there really is. Which is what Laurie was explaining, and one of the main things people continually get wrong about the company/lore. 

 

That's the thing. People always make assumptions - huge ones - about every movie, game, novel, whatever, tying in their assumptions for why the creators/company does X, Y, or Z. You see it all the time across social media for practically everything. And it's almost always just guesswork. Guesswork that gets enshrined as Truth by an internet-based narrative.

 

You know that yourself, Marshal; you mention why forums can grind people down, and that's why. A lot of people don't want the truth. They want their beliefs to be validated and their snide suspicions to be right. The truth is of zero interest. Every decision GW makes is bad, and "stupid", and "just for more money". They've started doing sales for the first time in an epoch? The thread is about how the sales are on useless units or the wrong things or not enough stuff. They announce they're going to make Specialist Games again? There are countless replies on forums that complain how long it took, or that they won't be as good as they were. Rule X for Faction Y is no good? Well, the clear, perfect solution to their complete lack of playtesting is definitely this homebrew rule; forgetting of course that almost every group will come up with their own opinion of how to fix it, if it even needs fixing at all. People pine for the informal days of the "golden era" Studio, ignoring the fact that there have always been rules people disagreed with and GW has always encouraged people to generate their own scenarios, rules, and so on. It's just as informal now in a lot of ways as it always was, but now - with mass-communication - rules people disagree with aren't seen as "I'll change this one for my group", they're seen as "This is underpowered/wrong/GW are incompetent/Andy Chambers would never have done this".

 

And on, and on, and on. Any fandom's online elements can become an echo chamber where they believe their uninformed opinions are actual insight into the way something really functions. Look at Abaddon being a failure. That's one of the best lore things that I still struggle to understand. John French, Alan Bligh, and I have spent hours chewing over this. We all own and have read every single word ever published about Abaddon, and there's never anything like the tide of unremitting nonsense that the online fandom has generated about the character. Now imagine you have to write a novel about the guy, knowing that a lot of the time you're going to immediately be judged as invalid or getting the lore wrong, despite knowing it as well as anyone on Earth. You know?

 

Look at the vicious arguments about whether FW was legal or not - and whether BL was canon before that. FW has always been legal. BL has always been canon. But the arguments raged for a decade. They raged even when people attached to the companies explained it. The closest I've ever come to PTSD was arguing about it a few years ago on 3++, trying to explain to frothing tournament players desperate to resist change that they weren't just wrong, they'd been wrong for a decade. They didn't want the truth. They didn't care about how other people had fun. They wanted their preferences to be globally right.

 

So much of the time it's so tediously, stupidly, endlessly negative. Negativity based on assumption and opinion, yet touted as ironclad fact. 

 

Fortunately for me, I don't tend to deal with that stuff much any more. And it's very, very rarely about my work personally. Hence me still posting (especially on B&C) when stuff jumps out as awesome. 

 

 

Well, goood ol' Laurie should re-read Fulgrim, because that novel wasn't FSK12 (pegi 12? not sure what's the right term), and it was awesome ...

 

On that note, a few scenes in The Night Lords Omnibus were edited (I wasn't aware at the time) to remove certain events. The key is that for all the things you can and can't show, as far as I know it's explicit violence against innocents that are a no-no. It doesn't matter what happened 5+ years ago, nor is it a change with some new and exciting draconian measures. There are just more, better editors at GW/BL/FW, etc. now, and the company takes the novel arm of things much more seriously than it did when Dan, Graham, Bill, and Sandy were the only people really writing ten years ago.

 

But, of course, that gets bent into a narrative of "They're censoring things now" and blah blah blah. Technically true, but not out of cowardice or malice or policy shifting. People immediately leap to The Worst Possible Reason and use it to tarnish GW. It's not just boring. It's puerile. 

 

The German translation of Vengeful Spirit was divided into two books. That happens sometimes with huge translated books, as the page count can't physically hold together in a single volume. But no, there are threads about how it's just GW doing it to make more money.

 

The Spots the Space Marine thing, where GW "sent a cease and desist letter" about "copyright". Nothing like that happened at all, but any explanations were shouted down at the time. They had a legal trademark. That's literally what you do when legal trademarks are challenged. They weren't being mean or sticking it to the little guy. They were legally bound to acknowledge/challenge a money-making use of a term they hold a legal trademark for. It was in the book's title; that was all. They weren't claiming to have invented Space Marines or copyrighting the concept, but that's what everyone raged against. Do you think GW as a whole gave a toss about crushing some unknown author's self-published children's novel? Do you think they were all giving each other high-fives that day? Really? Really?

 

Boardgamegeek has an exciting narrative about GW sending them a cease and desist letter, too. There's a big deal about them not being allowed to put up any GW stuff on their site at all. Why would that ever happen? If it makes no sense that GW would do it, perhaps that's because it literally makes no sense at all. Space Hulk had just been released, and BGG had scans of the whole game and its tiles up online. GW asked them to be removed because, well, it'd be illegal if they weren't. Remove any illegal stuff, please and thank you. But they remove everything, from every game line, and we get more thrilling narratives about the evils of corporate GW.

 

Explaining all of this just gets tedious.

 

I've always found him to be very helpful and polite. That's why I thought it was 'harsh' the way he responded but it has context in the OT. I didn't know so many people disliked him. Again, like ADB, he's harsh because we made him like that. He wasn't always like that, as someone else pointed out. We are just such a bunch of malevolent jackals it poisons the GW posters against us.

 

I'll level with you. It's a grind, sometimes. 

 

It's not about expecting people to unanimously agree with me just because my name is on a few book covers. But there are times when you can explicitly explain the way the company works, or how a certain aspect of lore functions, or whatever else - and you still get worn down by people saying you're wrong. I'm very, very lucky, and I wouldn't change the online fandom's reaction to me for anything, nor would I swap it with any other author's reputation. Not for a second. 

 

But it's often an endless, joyless grind of explaining "No, you're just assuming the company does X" and "It really works like Y", and people will still call you a liar and insist you're being defensive or trying to stick up for GW... despite that being a world of effort for literally no gain. 

 

You see it slightly less often with "ADB wrote X because he thinks Y about faction Z" which is always nonsense at best and idiotically fictitious at worst. And, again, I say that from the point of view of someone blessed with a good reputation among the online peeps and creeps. People still assume, as people always will, and like all assumptions they're almost always wildly wrong. But after refuting them a few dozen times, you start to realise there's no point. It doesn't change anything in the grand scheme of things. 

 

So you stick to fun topics, largely unrelated to work. 

 

 

I found the "no explicit  gore and no torture" stuff weird as there's been a number of books with that stuff in them; Heinrich  already pointed out the Night Lords trilogy, but does anyone remember Anthony Reynold's Word Bearer series? There's a full on Dark Eldar torture scene in book 2 as well as almost all the carnage being described in detail.

 

The tone and shilling difference between Laurie Golding and A.D-B is incredible 

 

See above. 

 

But I'll step in on Laurie's behalf here, (or rather, his defence) which I know will annoy him immeasurably. You have no idea how many terrible ideas Laurie has shot down. The direction of the Heresy, love it or hate it, isn't his fault (or his credit). But he's an absolutely fantastic guy, hands-down one of the most loyal men you'll ever meet, and he lives, breathes, and sweats 40K as much as any of us do. The two smartest people at any HH meeting are always Gav Thorpe and Laurie Goulding; they're the ones with the best ideas, the best heads for mythology and continuity, and the most inspiring presences. (As much as I love Alan Merrett, he's not always there; the guy has a bajillion things to do.)

 

I've said that since forever, and it remains true as far as I know, given I've not been at the last few meetings.

 

Don't get me wrong, I'm sure to a lot of folks he comes across as little more than impatient and terse to the point of obnoxiousness, but imagine how much he's not allowed to say. Given all of the context above, imagine all of the things he sees and what he's not actually allowed to say. 

 

I'll never argue that he's a wonderful and charming soul online, don't get me wrong. But like Marhsal Rohr does, I'd give credence to what he says and put his comments in the context of where they're coming from. He's not shilling, and not being purposefully condescending. But he's confronted by the same stuff 800 times a week, and limited in how much he can say to refute it, if at all. 

[Atia]

On that note, a few scenes in The Night Lords Omnibus were edited (I wasn't aware at the time) to remove certain events.

Nooooo >.<

I probably can imagine atleast one scene that got cut a bit to what it is now though

The key is that for all the things you can and can't show, as far as I know it's explicit violence against innocents that are a no-no. It doesn't matter what happened 5+ years ago, nor is it a change with some new and exciting draconian measures. There are just more, better editors at GW/BL/FW, etc. now, and the company takes the novel arm of things much more seriously than it did when Dan, Graham, Bill, and Sandy were the only people really writing ten years ago.

Well lets say ... I like most if not all of the Heresy novels, and most other novels from BL (I think i have read all books besides Imperial Guard stuff) - they are great! But novels like Fulgrim or the Night Lords Trilogy just felt even better, because they had elements that made it more adult literature, that's all. That doesn't mean the other stuff is bad, I'm also reading both Song of Ice and Fire and Harry Potter - both are good, they just have different targets.

Edit:

Another big plus about the Horus Heresy (and your other novels) - Remembrancers and more female characters!

The German translation of Vengeful Spirit was divided into two books. That happens sometimes with huge translated books, as the page count can't physically hold together in a single volume. But no, there are threads about how it's just GW doing it to make more money.

Yeah, it happened with SoIaF books too in german - and atleast we got a cool new cover for the first one!

[DarKnight]

I remember Aaron mentioning the Octavia navigation orgasm scene getting edited. Don't think I miss it.

[Balthamal]

The one thing I'll say for Laurie having met him and spoken with him on a couple of occasions previously, is that his patience is inhuman, especially when it comes to dealing with the never ending tide of questions regarding everything HH related that everyone shoots his way. Not only that but dealing with the unspoken expectation with those questions that the person doing the asking's previous opinions were all correct. And having to listen when those people try, repeatedly, to justify why they're right and he's wrong, Much like ADB with Abaddon and the whole "you don't understand his character and you're writing about him" that cropped up last year. It will burn out anyone's patience. The fact that he fronts up and deals with this on a daily basis just adds to my respect for him. He's stated before that the thing he dislikes most is knowing so many things and being unable to share them when questioned, which is perfectly understandable.

 

As Rohr says, it should be taken in context. I'm not saying it's perfectly acceptable to reply to a comment in that fashion but more I understand exactly where/why that's come from/like it is.

 

As for the editing, I'm reliably informed that several novels had some pretty extreme bits and pieces removed. Just because it's grim dark doesn't mean it should devolve into the kind tasteless trash often seen in films these days. And ADB said before he was forced to cut a scene in Void Stalker of Octavia having an orgasm from flying the Echo of Damnation. Would it have added anything? Not really, he did a good enough job of describing the sensations without being quite so graphic.

 

Edit: Ok plenty of the above has been covered, feel free to ignore

[A D-B]

I remember Aaron mentioning the Octavia navigation orgasm scene getting edited. Don't think I miss it.

 

Yeah, that never made it to print, so no one will have ever read that. It was about as far from sexual and/or arousing as anyone can imagine, though. It certainly wasn't teh hawtness, shall we say. I liked it because it was Rogue Tradertastic in terms of body horror, but I don't miss it.

 

The most recent deletion I can recall (and this is before it hit print, obviously) was that when the crew of the Conqueror were flooding the hallways and panicking, at one point Khârn grabbed one of them by his (or her? I forget) long hair and uses the human as a flail to smash several more out of the way. That counts as abusing an innocent.

[DarKnight]

 

I remember Aaron mentioning the Octavia navigation orgasm scene getting edited. Don't think I miss it.

 

Yeah, that never made it to print, so no one will have ever read that. It was about as far from sexual and/or arousing as anyone can imagine, though. It certainly wasn't teh hawtness, shall we say. I liked it because it was Rogue Tradertastic in terms of body horror, but I don't miss it.

 

The most recent deletion I can recall (and this is before it hit print, obviously) was that when the crew of the Conqueror were flooding the hallways and panicking, at one point Khârn grabbed one of them by his (or her? I forget) long hair and uses the human as a flail to smash several more out of the way. That counts as abusing an innocent.

 

No one is innocent aboard The Conqueror, heretic. (at least not since the Navigator shot herself)

[Olis]

That counts as abusing an innocent.

 

:lol:

 

Just a bit, yeah. ^_^

[Marshal Rohr]

To be honest I like the Khârn that doesn't use people as flails. That seems very post skalathrax Khârn. He's more relatable when the nails make him be horrible and he can't control it.

[Bartali]

Look at the vicious arguments about whether FW was legal or not - and whether BL was canon before that. FW has always been legal. BL has always been canon. But the arguments raged for a decade. They raged even when people attached to the companies explained it. The closest I've ever come to PTSD was arguing about it a few years ago on 3++, trying to explain to frothing tournament players desperate to resist change that they weren't just wrong, they'd been wrong for a decade. They didn't want the truth. They didn't care about how other people had fun. They wanted their preferences to be globally right.

 

GWs problem recently has been communication. All it would of taken is a paragraph in White Dwarf to explain this, but it's not something they seem as wanting to do.

I'm sure it's frustrating for you knowing the intention within the company, they just need to communicate things a bit better to the customer base.

 

 

Rule X for Faction Y is no good? Well, the clear, perfect solution to their complete lack of playtesting is definitely this homebrew rule; forgetting of course that almost every group will come up with their own opinion of how to fix it, if it even needs fixing at all. People pine for the informal days of the "golden era" Studio, ignoring the fact that there have always been rules people disagreed with and GW has always encouraged people to generate their own scenarios, rules, and so on. It's just as informal now in a lot of ways as it always was, but now - with mass-communication - rules people disagree with aren't seen as "I'll change this one for my group", they're seen as "This is underpowered/wrong/GW are incompetent/Andy Chambers would never have done this".

 

I'm sure Jervis et al bounce their collective heads off tables if/when they read some of the online discussions about rules.

House Rules solve 99.9% of issues, and I play with friends without issues.

 

However, problems occur when playing outside with strangers in clubs and shops, and they often have a different interpretation of the rules. Again simple communication with the customer base would solve this, re-starting issuing FAQs again would be a start.

[A D-B]

To be honest I like the Khârn that doesn't use people as flails. That seems very post skalathrax Khârn. He's more relatable when the nails make him be horrible and he can't control it.

 

He was Nailed up at the time, but yeah, I agree.

[Ranwulf]

 

I remember Aaron mentioning the Octavia navigation orgasm scene getting edited. Don't think I miss it.

 

Yeah, that never made it to print, so no one will have ever read that. It was about as far from sexual and/or arousing as anyone can imagine, though. It certainly wasn't teh hawtness, shall we say. I liked it because it was Rogue Tradertastic in terms of body horror, but I don't miss it.

 

The most recent deletion I can recall (and this is before it hit print, obviously) was that when the crew of the Conqueror were flooding the hallways and panicking, at one point Khârn grabbed one of them by his (or her? I forget) long hair and uses the human as a flail to smash several more out of the way. That counts as abusing an innocent.

 

I'll be honest, if that went into the book, I would not care about the person in question being innocent, but the fact that someone is using a dude/dudette as a human flail with their hair. It kinda reminds me of a cartoon character.

 

Ran