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Which edition lore do you like most and why?


b1soul

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3rd and 4th for fluff, loved Armageddon and the original 13th Black Crusade. Codex City Fight may be the best campaign book GW has ever written IMO.

 

Game play wise

 

Game was much more simple, didn't require you to haul around 5+ books to play 1 army. Allies were not a thing and game seemed eternally more balanced. Not everyone was running around with the latest "Netlist" to try to stomp you into dust. Game seemed more narrative play, as there weren't ways to spam things. Titans and Knight sized models were in EPIC where they should have stayed. Or played in Apocalypse solely.  

 

Krash

Probably 5th edition for me. 3rd had mini codex which didn't really have much lore. 4th was an improvement but 5th was when the codex size were expanded further and felt like they added alot. 6th and 7th were very short editions and the lore seemed to either push battle bros or formations. 8th was a bit of a rush job imo, but the campaign books and the most recent marine books added a ton of cool background hopefully the other version 2 books follow suit.

First edition. The game was intended to scale from an (implied) RPG to the size of armies we see today. Ambitious, and ultimately less practical than anticipated. As for fluff... anything goes, and Warhammer Fantasy was explicitly in scope for crossover gaming. Wahoo! gaming at it's mad finest! Inquisitor Obi-Wan Sherlock Clousseau FTW! (Half-Eldar Chief Librarian of the Ultramarines for a close second place.....)

The Golden Edition of Lore was the time period between Armageddon and the 13th Black Crusade up to the Space Marine Codex in 5th Edition when it spiraled down. The Golden Edition of Models is right now. The Golden Edition of Rules is right now between quick to play 40k, Quick to Play Apocalypse, Game in a Box releases, Kill Team, Necromunda, and Age of Darkness.

The editions aren't really separated. I think it's more like there are three eras:

 

Rogue-Trader -> 2nd Edition, where lore was wild, unsettled and contained many things that are now non-canon

3rd - 7th edition, which codified pretty much everything that we understand as 40k lore and maintained that status quo

8th edition, the first serious effort in decades to move the story forward, as yet unfinished.

 

Overall, eighth has been a mixed bag, but I still prefer it to keeping the story static for another decade. 

3rd. A lot of clever world building was done back then by describing things from an in-universe perspective, like reports from Inquisitors and such. I like the resulting ambiguity of that approach.

 

Rogue-Trader -> 2nd Edition, where lore was wild, unsettled and contained many things that are now non-canon

3rd - 7th edition, which codified pretty much everything that we understand as 40k lore and maintained that status quo

8th edition, the first serious effort in decades to move the story forward, as yet unfinished.

 

2nd edition wasn't that different from 3rd in terms of fluff. I'd say it's more like:

- 1st

- 2nd to 4th (Ending the timeline with the Fall of Medusa V campaign)

- 5th to 7th is when they retconned (Necrons, 13th Black Crusade), revised (Dark Eldar, Horus Heresy) or simply ignored (Medusa V) a lot of stuff

- 8th is post retcons and a time jump; basically a soft reboot

Codex City Fight may be the best campaign book GW has ever written IMO.

That's a shame. I ordered that book but what turned up was Codex Strausskampf. Pictures are nice though.

 

I agree with what's been said before, 8th is essentially a reboot of the entire system, especially how they set it up with the indices. 4th is my favourite lore wise, but then that's probably because that's when I started.

3rd. A lot of clever world building was done back then by describing things from an in-universe perspective, like reports from Inquisitors and such. I like the resulting ambiguity of that approach.

 

 

I liked this approach and hated it. I liked it for the way it presented the information for an Imperial player to understand how they should view things if they were "in the know" and the air of mystery it created at time; but it also annoyed me at the same time. As a Xenos player* it had a psychological effect on me in that the lore for my faction wasn't from my own faction's perspective but from the Imperial Perspective. It almost felt to me like the fluff was saying that I shouldn't be interested in really knowing my faction but should see it from the eyes of the Imperium who I should be playing. To me, part of the purpose of the lore in the Codex is to help you understand the history, thinking, and approach of the faction you are playing and 3rd edition didn't really aid in this for the non-imperial; the information and the approach was from an outside perspective for them.

 

 

* My first Marine army was with the Horus Heresy.

3rd.

Why? Because that's the edition I started in therefore it's the best.

Honestly though I feel like that was where the setting really found its feet in terms of tone, it was just the right balance of stark, chilling dark sci-fi and campy self-aware humour. Previous editions were too far on the goofy side, and subsequent editions have taken it altogether too seriously.

Not only that, but the way the lore was delivered was flat out more compelling- You had little snippets of historical accounts here, fragments of documents there. You didn't have 200+ pages of literal walls of text describing every detail of how a space marine eats his Weetabix. We didn't have 40+ Black Library books detailing every day of each primarch's life. Those things were lost to history, and we could only speculate as to the truth. Just like the people of the Imperium themselves.

The Horus Heresy, the Emperor, they were legendary, mythical figures of ancient times, just like Jesus is to us in the real world. Those things happened 10,000 years ago and the Imperium of M.41 is more or less a cargo cult that believes tanks have souls.

The problem with modern lore is that we simply know too much.

You had a whole page describing what space marines do everyday :wink:

 

More like half a page ;)

 

A chunk is taken up by artwork of a predator, with the quote "Consider the Predator. Let thy soul be armoured with Faith, driven on tracks of Obedience..." etc. The bottom quarter is footnotes.

 

It doesn't even tell us what flavour electrolytic nutrient brine they have for their midday meal!

2nd / 3rd / 4th, more or less in that order, but like a lot of people here I think they form something of a particular era. RT is hard to pin down, since it went from being a sort of 2000AD riff to being fairly indistinguishable from 2nd Edition within the span of a few years.

 

The 40K of that era really felt like a place, hitting a lot of intellectual and emotional points in a way that made the universe feel big and full of possibilities.

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