Some lore questions

[Lord_Caerolion]

I mean, it technically could? Dark Eldar Soul Traps can contain human souls, and they're basically just a weaponised version of the Infinity Circuit/Soul Stones/World Spirit. Given how xenophobic the Exodites are though, I can't see them willingly including human souls in their World Spirit. Humans could certainly hijack one that they have captured from the Eldar, although the Craftworlders aren't exactly going to want to let them keep it.

 

As for a planet creating an Avatar, you could argue that this is essentially what the Yncarne/Ynnead is, a God formed from the dead spirits comprising the Infinity Circuit. A smaller Infinity Circuit, like a World-Spirit, could technically form its own Avatar, which if being Eldar spirits would probably be a "Greater Daemon of Ynnead", I would think, almost like a second Yncarne. Human souls? Probably something akin to the manifestation of the Astronomican/Emperor that we see in Talon of Horus.

 

I could definitely see this as an awesome basis for a Thorian Inquisitor to investigate though, given their goals of essentially reincarnating the Emperor.

[pandion40]

ADB’s Talon of Horus and Black Legion are 2 great books if you want to know about how Deamons are created. Mortal actions are constantly creating minor Deamons of no significance, but to create a powerful Deamon needs a significant event. Symbolism seems very important to.

 

One example was a bunch of Heretics in the Middle Ages took refuge in a town. Most of the people in the town were normal catholics but when the knights came to kill the heretics they massacred the whole town, believing god would find his own. This created a very powerful Deamon, partly because of the bloodshed and partly because of the symbolism of the protectors (the Knights) massacring the very people they were supposed to be protecting

[Lord_Caerolion]

Yep, a Daemon, the Ragged Knight, formed from the Albigensian Crusade, particularly the Massacre of Beziers. That was a particularly awesome scene.

[Iron Father Ferrum]

And Drachnyen, Abby's sword, is possessed by a daemon of the same name that was formed from the emotional shock of the first time one human ever murdered another. More awesome more ADB, this time Master of Mankind.

[Isghamor]

Is Malice(the fifth god) canon? 

[MARK0SIAN]

I could be wrong but I don’t think he’s ever been declared non-canon which is probably a more useful way to look at it. He may have been sidelined/ignored/phases out of the background but I don’t think they’ve ever officially declared him to not exist so I would say use him if you want in your writing.

 

I wouldn’t take my word for it though, it’s quite possible he has been officially removed and I just haven’t read that particular article or book etc.

[Isghamor]

Mostly beacuse í stumbled upon it while reading the Wiki and basically it's perfect :D

[Lord_Caerolion]

Basically, way back there was a god called Malal, who was essentially an anti-Chaos Chaos God. Due to Malal's creator leaving GW, and taking the rights to the god with him, GW was no longer able to do anything with Malal, and he basically got retconned. Internet communities being what they are though, he got a very vocal following, and when the 3.5 Chaos Codex came out, with a warband called the Sons of Malice, in quartered black/white armour (black and white being Malals sacred colours), and people began to say that they were Malal worshippers.

Since then, there have been a handful of short stories in Black Library about the Sons of Malice worshipping a god called Malice, which is basically Malal under a new name. However, Malice has yet to feature in anything more than that. It's certainly not appeared in any codices, other than the single paint scheme and warband name several editions ago. It really depends on how you take the idea of "canon". GW has such a loose sense of the term that coming to any one idea of a full, comprehensive canon is kinda impossible. I mean, you could take the route that only the codices are canon, but several of them explicitly refer to events from Black Library books (the Ad Mech codices reference the Lords of Mars series, for example). You could take all Black Library books as canon, but then you've got the tripe of C.S. Goto, like Eldrad Ulthran being a secret Slaanesh-worshipper, etc. 

 

In short? You like Malice/Malal, feel free to use him/her/it. Just don't expect to see any rules for it any time soon.

[Panzer]

Yeah that was the time when all the designer owned their creations and before GW started to buy the rights off of them. Basically the same thing that happened to the Squats and why they introduced the Demiurg as new space dwarf race according to some old statements you can still find floating around the web. How that fits together with the new Squat bounty hunter for Necromunda is anybodys guess. ^^

[Lord_Caerolion]

I'd heard the Squats were, well, squatted merely over bad sales. This is the first I've heard about ownership issues being involved. The whole Demiurg thing more came across as "well, the Squats failed the last time we tried them, what if we rebrand them as cool aliens instead?" Surely if there had been a rights issue we'd have heard about GW buying them back?

[Panzer]

That's just what people assume. What I stated above was pretty much an official statement by GW (as official as possible with old GW). Now don't ask me to link it, I of course haven't bookmarked links to everything warhammer I've ever read and would've to google for it myself. It's also not really on topic for the thread and was more supposed to be a JFYI.

[Lord_Caerolion]

Fair enough. Don't want to drag this off topic. Apologies.

[Eddie Orlock]

Before this set of posts I don't think I'd ever heard anything about the squats being squatted over IP ownership issues. Think about it, if IP was an issue they wouldn't have cropped up in the appendices of 7th's rulebooks.

 

All the studio interview bits I recall on the subject in the era fairly consistently pointed to two things.

 

The name, when it came time to update the line for second editions codex line they just couldn't come up with a rebrand name that worked for them. They toyed with some in specialist games some years later, so name alone wasn't fatal.

 

What it really was, it seems, was that they couldn't pin down a coherent version of 'space dwarf' that inspired anyone to actually want to develop the line. Back in that era what the studio turned out was more related to what inspired the staff than it is today, which has lead to some whacky concepts we know and love today from being allowed to free-wheel with some ideas. Part of the issue was trying to reconcile the stubby bikers that made up much of the RT line with the smiths and craftsmen implied by the war engine based Epic line. In the early oughts there was some concept art released around some exo-armour designs as remnants of that reconciliation project.

[Lord_Caerolion]

I did a search for the topic, and basically just found a forum post in which a guy claims that he spoke to Jes Goodwin at the Australian Games Day 2012, and that he said that the guy who owned the rights left the company, and reused them in a minor board game around 1989 or so, so GW isn't using Squats again because they don't want to get sued by the makers of a board game so niche that the poster, a board games fan, has never even heard of it, and apparently won't ever turn up in a google search.

 

Suffice to say, I'm sceptical of the claims. If it were true, then GW would have had to repurchase the rights now that we're seeing the Squats (partially) return, not to mention the snippits of info on them in the rulebooks.

 

The post is here:

 

What happened was, during the time period when Games Workshop transitioned from a private to a public company as the owners previously were in the process of selling the company, a bunch of the then designers at the head studio were not pleased with the decision so decided to leave the company. Before Games Workshop became a formalized corporation, when it was a small business, the way copyright on their artwork, books and written materials were not centralized, only that of the miniatures under Citadel, which at the time was a separate company. As in Games Workshop as a company did not hold the rights to all works produced by it's employees, it was at the time owned by it's individual employees - as before that time Games Workshop was simply a chain of brick and mortar hobby stores that sold a broad range of products, Citadel was their only fully owned company at the time.

Part of the process of the selling of the company involved the formal establishment of ownership of copyrighted materials to be added to the ownership of trademarks of all assets that were produced and sold by the members of the company to then be formalized into the whole. That was part of why those designers and artists left, they were upset about this change as they also did freelance work, they didn't like the idea of Games Workshop "owning" their artwork and writings, before then anything to do with Warhammer fantasy and Rogue Trader belonged to the people who created it, not the company, the company only owned the Miniatures. See where I'm coming from here?

The bloke who created the Squats during the Rogue Trader days was one of the people who left GW before the copyright was formalized, so they were unable to get his permission to acquire ownership of the Squats. Jes suggested it was believed by everyone at the time he did this intentionally because he had grown attached to his creation, felt that it was entirely his right to make money from and that GW as a corporate entity had no right to make profits off his creation. The attitude which the members of the studio expressed towards Squats from that point could be seen as a 'knee-jerk' reaction to what that designer who left in a huff did. Which the resulting was the decision to retcon them.

But it didn't end there. Due to the outcry from fans and also the studio staff who themselves liked the idea of Squats and wanted it to be in the game soon after (as in the following few years) decided to approach the wayward designer about acquiring the rights to the squats name, story, lore and appearance.

Unfortunately, by then the person in question had gone ahead and put the squats in another game, using the same name, the same appearance and the same lore for them. Because they had become an official race in another game (which is a steampunk game if I recall him mentioning, can't remember which name of the game it was, he also mentioned good luck to anyone trying to find info on it on the internet as it was a 90s table top board game that sold poorly from a company you've likely never heard of, given that I go to hobby stores on a regular basis outside the scope of Games Workshop's stores and I've seen many different games, I can confirm you will be pressed to find anything about them on a google search, especially stuff pre-dating 2004). the name "squats" had by then been trademarked and the lore and appearance of them copyrighted to another company.

So as a result, it is now impossible for Games Workshop to use the name and the same lore.

For the last 10 years GW designers have at varying times attempted to bring back the Squats under different names and background lore, but each time they have, it has only received cold receptions from the customer base along with themselves having not felt right with the designs, so they never pursued it past conceptual stages, the closest they ever got to it was an experimental shot at them in Battlefleet Gothic.

So that's the whole story and the real truth according to Mr Goodwin.

Why doesn't Games Workshop talk about it?

Because they don't want to get sued, that's why.

[Leonaides]

Does that timeline square with squats being in the 2nd ed black book armylists though? Exo-armoured squats still available via mail order too if i recall...

[Slave to Darkness]

Andy Chambers told me it was due to GW not having a clue how to do 'exo armoured midget imperial guard ork biker miner vikings' as he put it. They were trying to develop each factions own flavour to make them different, Squats had guard numbers, marine armour and the potential mobility of a kult of speed, so they literally said ':cuss this hot mess' and didnt bother.

 

I dont buy the 'designer quit' stuff, exactly the same story about Malal. Did the guy quit in 89? Or the game he used Squats in was released in 89? Either way that was the year after 40k was released, and they were still developing and releasing Squat minis up until 2nd ed. There was even two unreleased Squats with Viking style helmits in the 2nd ed rulebooks, and supposedly more were sculpted as well.

[Lord_Caerolion]

People apparently found it, although the links are now dead. There was a game called Olleys Armies, which apparently featured the non-GW Squats.

[Bryan Blaire]

Wait, you mean THIS Olley's Armies that's on Kickstarter now, that has an army called Scrunts? https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/433105762/olleys-armies-presents-armies-of-the-scrunt-empire

 

Here's the web page: http://www.olleysarmies.co.uk/home.html

 

I doubt someone used the exact same name as a trademarked game from the very late 80s-very early 90s and put it up on Kickstarter so they could get sued. Especially since the name used for their dwarves isn't Squats.

 

I smell some bovine excrement, or an elaborate scheme to get people to look at a Kickstarter and back it...

[Lord_Caerolion]

I hadn't seen it on kickstarter, I just saw a forum that posted a link to http://www.olleysarmies.co.uk/home.html, back in 2015, which is apparently where Bob Olley, who supposedly created the Squats, was now apparently redoing the Squats as they were in Rogue Trader.

 

https://forum.eternalcrusade.com/threads/can-i-ask-whats-the-deal-with-squats.46254/page-2 <- link to the forum topic in question.

 

Personally, I don't see how "Squats" would get covered under a trademark for "Scrunts". They're both sci-fi Dwarfs, but they aren't exactly what the people I'd seen are claiming.

 

Still, we appear to be dragging this off topic, and I apologize for doing so.

[Bryan Blaire]

I think the discussion on it is actually backward - from the Citadel Miniatures catalogues for Squats, they were designed and sculpted by the Citadel Design Team with Alan and Michael Perry.

 

Bob Olley designed and sculpted a side set called Iron Claw Squats. He also designed and sculpted a set called Iron Claw Goblins. There are even Iron Claw Death Rider Skeletons. He seemed to have a company called Iron Claw Miniatures.

 

I'm guessing that if Mr. Olley tried to use the name Squats for a late 80s/early 90s board game, it was probably legally quashed because Citadel owned the trademark for the Squat name as associated with sci-if dwarves of that style. That is likely why it was "so unpopular". He likely hasn't ever been able to use the name Squats except with his sales associated with 40K.

 

GW may even have cannily re-upped their trademark on Squats by producing that single Necromunda miniature.

 

Just takes a few quick searches on Google to see the Squat pages with the Perry Brothers attributions on them, and same for Bob Olley Iron Claw Squats.

 

I don't think the Squats missing from the lore had much to do with "GW lost the name to someone else because they aren't business law intelligent."

[Slave to Darkness]

Nah, GW ripped off every fantasy and sci fi setting going and got away with it, they were business law intelligent even then. :lol:

[Isghamor]

HI, got another question :)  I don't remember where but I heard of a successor chapter of the blood angels that kept the black rage at bay with art and poetry. Does anyone know the name?

[Panzer]

HI, got another question   I don't remember where but I heard of a successor chapter of the blood angels that kept the black rage at bay with art and poetry. Does anyone know the name?

 

That's what all Blood Angels and Successors do basically. And it's the Red Thirst they keep in check with it, not the Black Rage. ;)

[rendingon1+]

HI, got another question :) I don't remember where but I heard of a successor chapter of the blood angels that kept the black rage at bay with art and poetry. Does anyone know the name?

Death of Integrity novel, however the answear is more complicated than this.

[Lord_Caerolion]

The novel Dante actually goes into this in a bit of depth, to continue off sfPanzers post.