What's your headcanon?

[Rain]

(1.) Fulgrim never reclaimed his body, and is stuck in the painting forever. The demon realized that it was discovered and bluffed the events of The Reflection Crack’d. 

The reason that Fulgrim’s demon form looks like a Laer is that the demon from the sword was originally the Laer that turned its species toward Slaanesh worship. For delivering its entire species to Slaanesh, it was made into a demon by Slaanesh, and bound to the sword to exist outside of the warp, and watch over its former kin. It then bound Fulgrim in the painting as an allusion to its own imprisonment in the sword, forced to watch as his sons fell into corruption just as it watched its fellow Laer after being trapped in the sword.
 

After possessing Fulgrim, it uses the opportunity to retake its old familiar serpentine multi-armed form.

 

(2.) Primaris aren’t a thing. Primaris armor is just Mk X and its derivatives, and their vehicles are one-off acts of tech heresy unknown to the wider Imperium.

 

(3.) The Tau were genetically engineered by a small enclave of surviving Old Ones, which explains their extremely fast progress of tech, and their inability to use warp travel, as the Old Ones were wary of potential Chaos corruption of their latest creation.

 

(4.) The Chaos Legions have been able to retain meaningful numbers of Astartes in M41/42 because vagaries in the warp allow for multiple temporally displaced copies of the same individuals to exist simultaneously, so there are multiple “versions” of many individual Chaos Marines of varying ages, active simultaneously. Effectively multiplying the Chaos Legions’ numbers.

 

 

Edited August 4, 2023 by Rain
More detail added to the Fulgrim point

[ThePenitentOne]

Thought I had posted in this thread, but it looks like I haven't.

 

So first up, let me say that my attitude toward fluff and background is somewhat different to the attitude of most: I believe that fluff which has no impact on the game is not actually fluff, but merely empty words with very little actual value- often attributable to or excused by the unreliable narator trope. I'm not the kind of guy who ever thinks it's better or scarier when we don't see the monster.

 

So for me, headcannon impacts the game.

 

For example:

 

Sisters: 

 

- the women in the Triumph are NOT pronatus; the are canonesses of the order whose relic they bear; in game, this means I can use my magnetized Triumph Sisters as standalone Canonesses carrying a single relic from the Triumph as a Legendary Crusade Relic

- while the model is is the Triumph of Saint Katherine, Triumphs of any of the other five founding Saints. Since each Saints relic is included regardless of whose procession it is, the actual rules don't change- you just have to have different magnetized bodies that can fit in the coffin

 

Drukari:

 

- while Lhamaeans are part of a unit with their own datacard, they are really just Drukhari warriors... So why couldn't a Lhamaean rise to the position of Archon? In my Drukhari army, the Lhamaean stands with the Archon at her own discretion, and many of the units in the army are loyal to HER, and will only continue to serve the Archon for as long as SHE commands them to do so. In game terms, this would allow me to use the Lhamaean model as an Archon, and rules wise, I'd use the Archon's stats, but I'd ad her power (ie. data-sheet special rule- if I recal, it's a poison buff aura).

 

GSC/ Nids

 

- when Nids arrive, they accept the patriarch as a Broodlord into their army; it keeps it's GSC Battle Honours, despite being a Tyranid

- Purestrains are also welcomed home, and are used as "leaders" for freshly spawned Nid Stealers- I use the distinctive Space Hulk models to rep my GSC purestrains, so I just add one to each Tyranid Stealer unit- I don't give the model special rules or anything- it plays just like a regular Nid Stealer... But you can tell by looking at the unit that it is the leader

- GSC non-Patriarch characters will try to get off world and find another fledgling Cult to join rather than be reabsorbed, occasionally taking a very limited number of body guards with them, while sacrificing the rest of the army to reclamation in order to cover their retreat

- cells of GSC cultists can exist as mercenaries that are not actively trying to grow large enough to attract Nids- I've got a Twisted Helix Biophagus who lives on an research station with a custom-engineered Abominant and a brood of custom engineered Aberrants- they aren't trying to grow their cult at all, they just want to do research and share that research with other cults

[Cpt.Danjou]

All Sisters of battle speaks with a french accent.

All planets do not have one kind of environment.

All cities in the Imperium are not Gothic, There are places inside the Imperium that are not only factorium hive cities, where everyone are slaves forced to work making bolts for the war machine.

As ships have a crew of small towns, there should be bars, entertainment, and other mundane things that the crew use in their free time. Ships tend to have defined cultures, when the crew and their families has been working on the ships for generations, a ships cultures some quirks and oddities. It takes less than a generation to change how people speak, so crews from ship X can't understand crews from ship Y, if they are not in the same fleet. etc. 

 

The warp tear has never happened

-Oh noes we can't go to the other side of the Imperium, because of tear in the fabric of reality.

Go around it then morons, the Imperium map can't logically be flat. If the tear hinders ships going from Earth to Ultramar, it must surround one of those places, as like inside a sphere, and not just be a line on a map. GW must start to think i 3 dimensions than a geographical map of Earth.

 

Space Marines can't manage everything better than humans, League of Votann ships corridors and rooms should have a lower ceiling, because of logic and efficiency. If marines boarded a Votann ship they would probably have to crawl or walk in awkward and combat inefficient ways. Send in ratlings or short humans, with meltaguns, flamers and grenades instead.

 

- Sire, the squad we sent in after the insurgents in the swamp hasn't been heard off in two days. The last communication we had with them was; "We being draaaaaaa...". Shall we send in the the dreadnoughts and Terminators even though they are heavier and even more worthless in a boggy and deep swamps?

How much do a PA wearing Space Marine weigh? Half a ton? Not the greatest idea to use them if the area they are fighting for is a swamp, bog or riddled with quicksand. Even scouts are too heavy for that kind of terrain. 

 

 

 

[Rain]

26 minutes ago, Cpt.Danjou said:

All Sisters of battle speaks with a french accent.

 

This is now also my headcanon. They are all Leliana from Dragon Age: Origins 

 

Quote

All planets do not have one kind of environment.

All cities in the Imperium are not Gothic, There are places inside the Imperium that are not only factorium hive cities, where everyone are slaves forced to work making bolts for the war machine.

As ships have a crew of small towns, there should be bars, entertainment, and other mundane things that the crew use in their free time. Ships tend to have defined cultures, when the crew and their families has been working on the ships for generations, a ships cultures some quirks and oddities. It takes less than a generation to change how people speak, so crews from ship X can't understand crews from ship Y, if they are not in the same fleet. etc. 

 

Pretty sure this is actually canon, or close enough that it might as well be.

 

Quote

Go around it then morons, the Imperium map can't logically be flat. If the tear hinders ships going from Earth to Ultramar, it must surround one of those places, as like inside a sphere, and not just be a line on a map. GW must start to think i 3 dimensions than a geographical map of Earth.

 

The Milky Way is a rough disc. The warp may not allow for travel outside of the plane of the galactic disc because there is not enough consciousness out there to sustain the warp, and sublight travel out and over over the plane of the disc would take millennia. So, it's "plausible" as far as demonic space magic goes, in my opinion.

[Remain_Indoors]

C'tan are still the four stargods of the material universe. All this shards being trapped and used by Necrons is a grand manipulation by The Deceiver. The Void Dragon is still trapped on Mars, Ferrus Manus killed a C'tan on Medusa and thats where his metal hands came from, and the Outsider is still in its Dyson Sphere and the real reason Leviathan went west - they are swerving well away from it.

Eventually everything will click into place and The Deceiver will reveal that all those C'tan "trapped" and under the control of Necrons are just part of his plans and the Necrons are still the slaves the C'tan made them into.  The Silent King is as much a puppet of Mephet'ran as the rest.

[Osteoclast]

Not sure if headcanon or just current crack theory, but: The Emperor has no name, and is simply ever The Emperor, because in his dealing with Chaos, the means by which he became the Master of Mankind “by the will of the gods” is that he was transformed/became the vessel/avatar of the warp concept of imperium, in the sense used by the Roman Republic. Thus also the requirement for everyone to submit to the Imperium; his self-conception literally does not permit the existence of another authority over mankind. 

[Chyttering]

On 8/4/2023 at 10:29 AM, Rain said:

(4.) The Chaos Legions have been able to retain meaningful numbers of Astartes in M41/42 because vagaries in the warp allow for multiple temporally displaced copies of the same individuals to exist simultaneously, so there are multiple “versions” of many individual Chaos Marines of varying ages, active simultaneously. Effectively multiplying the Chaos Legions’ numbers.

 

Pretty sure this is actually canon, though only through a commentary in White Dwarf. I can't cite the issue, author, or even time period beyond "early 2000s" but I know there was a Q&A specifically about how there were still any surviving Legionaries by M40, and the response was, among other things, that the warp is a wild place and that 'a ship of Thousand Sons might go into the warp once and exit the warp twice at different times and places' or something to that effect. To my knowledge this has never been dug into in a BL story or anything, though.

[Brother Casman]

High Gothic and Low Gothic do not correspond to modern or ancient languages at all. The difference between High Gothic and Low Gothic is like the difference between Latin and English, but that should not be misconstrued into High Gothic = Latin.

 

Likely a losing battle, that one! 

[The Unseen]

2 hours ago, Brother Casman said:

High Gothic and Low Gothic do not correspond to modern or ancient languages at all. The difference between High Gothic and Low Gothic is like the difference between Latin and English, but that should not be misconstrued into High Gothic = Latin.

 

Likely a losing battle, that one! 

I mean, that isn't even headcanon, it's Canon.

Low Gothic is what the unifying "common" language of the DAoT human empire spoke, left to mutate and change over time when the DAoT ended with the AI rebellion left disparate human colonies all over the place who experienced linguistic drift. High Gothic is the codified original language, that's now kept in its original state as a matter of both religious faith and beaucratic necessity. So each planet has its own Low Gothic variation, that may be more or less understandable to other people from other planets depending on how far each has drifted; like we've been told that say, Chogoris' native tongue is either drifted VERY far from its original roots OR what I find more likely is that Chogoris was settled by a minority group that was bilingual, and when the DAoT empire fell they fell back on their mother tongue and not the empires language. But the upper echelons all know a *standardized* High Gothic with little regional variation, to facilitate communication, legal documentation, historical record, etc.

 

But the primary language of 40k is English, since that's where the writers and developers are from, and the "Ancient, Codified, and Rigid unchanging language" that English came from is Latin, but its still associated with religious ceremony and kept alive in popular conscience; so the real world parallel is used. Plus Latin sounds cool most of the time, that helps, since 40k runs on like at least 80% rule of cool. But Low Gothic sounds nothing like English, even if you want to make the claim that the DAoT Empire spoke it (which is not certain at all) we're 5x more removed from English to Low Gothic than we are from Old English to Modern English.

 

And for those who doubt the power of linguistic drift, try and have a conversation with someone speaking "English" from the 11th century, a *mere* 2,000 years ago, from one planet. If anything, the fact that Low Gothic is still mostly understandable world to world is one of the most *unrealistic* things in the entire 40k verse.

Edited August 12, 2023 by The Unseen

[alfred_the_great]

Point of note - English isn’t based on Latin. It’s best described as a complete magpie language, but if you were to be utterly reductive the best point of reference is a Germanic tongue. 

[Cactus]

Quote

We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary.

James D. Nicoll

[Sky Potato]

2 hours ago, Cactus said:

James D. Nicoll

The most Terry Pratchett thing to have been said by somebody entirely different…

[alfred_the_great]

17 minutes ago, Sky Potato said:

The most Terry Pratchett thing to have been said by somebody entirely different…

I thought it pTerry!

[Evil Eye]

Another one: most of Cawl's "innovations" are actually just existing technology and STCs mishmashed together to create something ostensibly "new" but in reality is just stuff the Imperium already had combined in various techno-heretical ways and given fancy bodywork. Notably the Impulsor is just a recovered Grav-Rhino STC with a slightly redesigned hull.

 

Also, Lelith does NOT in fact wear trousers, the modern plastic miniature is inaccurate and the following image is canon:

Spoiler

[Quantum]

Oh I have so much headcannon...

 

Primarily, the 3rd edition Necorn lore is still very much valid! The 4+ edition lore merely expanded upon it. The Nightbringer, the Ousider, the Deciever and Dragon are still very much existential threats to the material universe. Yes, the Necorn Dynasties scattered them during their rebellion but deep down, despite their bluster, they know they are mice making merry while the cat is away. The C'Tan were defeated because they turned on one another, the Laughing God tricking the outsider into devouving his kin, then the Deciever manipulated the Nightbringer to turn on those who remained. And while the the C'Tan were tearing each other to pieces only then did the Necron Hyperphase cannons have a chance to shatter what remained of the godlike beings.

 

So now the Necron Dynasties are rebuilding, recreating their realms, parading around the fragments of their fallen gods, loudly proclaiming how they humbled and enslaved them. But deep down they know they are on borrowed time. One day the stars will be right, and the shards of the C'Tan will break from their prisons, reform, and return to their former power. And then a return to their bondage is the best the Necrons can hope for... 

 

Heck, I have even written some fluff where Adept Corteswain meets with an Overlord, who is the castellan of the Dyson Sphere where the Outsider is imprisoned. Originally it was supposed to be the greatest stronghold of the Necrontyr in their war against the Old Ones, but was the only thing the Necrons ever created that was able to contain the Outsider. Even then, the Overlord is forced to harvest younger races to feed it and keep it complacent, or risk it breaking free. In the end the overlord isn't even sure if he is the Outsider's jailer, or if he is its servant waiting on the Outsider's table...

Edited August 14, 2023 by Quantum

[Quantum]

No, Ork technology does not work because the Orks believe in it: crude as it is it works on normal physical principles, even if the Imperium does not understand them (or simply has lost knowledge about them). Ork meks instinctively tap into the necessary knowledge and engineering skills in their genetics to enable it. However, painting a car red and firmly believing it will make the car go faster does allow even a regular ork to tap a bit deeper into its genetically encoded engineering skills so it can instinctively and without thinking about it knows how to get a bit more performance out of it (as well as turning up its already suicidal overconfidence up to eleven...)

 

Orks, being creatures not afraid of death and living for a good scrap, never flee. However, if you kill enough of them eventually they will get the bright idea that the first one back at camp has dibs on his fallen mates' stuff...

 

It is the Time of Two Empires, not Time of Two Emperors! 

 

Warp storms and warp rifts are not the same, although the two are connected.

 

Not every Imperial warp capable vessel has a Navigator; short calculated 'hops' through the warp are possible, but since they become increasingly inaccurate and dangerous with distance, they are mostly reserved for chartist merchants travelling short and relatively stable warp-lanes.

 

Most of the spikes, horns and teeth on the armor of Chaos Space marines and followers are not mutations; most are just adornments to look more fearsome, or even to draw the eye of the the Chaos gods by emulating their marks, added by the wearers themselves. 

Edited August 16, 2023 by Quantum

[apologist]

On 8/12/2023 at 5:54 PM, Brother Casman said:

High Gothic and Low Gothic do not correspond to modern or ancient languages at all. The difference between High Gothic and Low Gothic is like the difference between Latin and English, but that should not be misconstrued into High Gothic = Latin.

 

Likely a losing battle, that one! 

I agree with you – and with @The Unseen. There's a note in the back of Rogue Trader on this. While the term 'Tech' was later supplanted (for the better, I think) with 'High Gothic', the point of the faux-Latin is to evoke the right atmosphere, rather than to be taken literally :)

 

[apologist]

...and on a personal note, I've got a real bugbear about the 'age inflation' of Space Marines. So much so, I wrote a (very long) article about it, if you'd like to have a squizz. :)

 

The TL;DR, though, is that for my headcanon:

• There are between twenty and fifty Neophytes between 10 and 14 years old, who are not part of the 1,000 marine limit
• The Scouts of the Tenth company are between 12 and 21 years old
• A Battle Brother in a Reserve Company will be between 18 and 55 years old
• A Battle Brother in a Battle Company will be between 34 and 81 years old, with members exceptionally reaching 150 years or more
• A Veteran of the First Company will be between 65 and 235 years old, with members exceptionally reaching 300 years old
• An Officer will be between 35 and 300 years old.

[StratoKhan]

Here are some of mine:

 

Ancient relics - In my mind, relics such as weapons or armour that exist for thousands of years with no degradation or failure, would simply cease to function - so there must actually be technology available that can replicate/repair/etc. these items. This doesn't mean that weapons and equipment aren't treasured, but realistically, a bolter or tank or dreadnought that has existed for a thousand years will have had its components or subsystems replaced many times over. In my personal take on the background, it means that there is a lot more production capability still remaining. Design and research capability on the other hand is probably limited. But forges that can build a spare part for a Contemptor dreadnought or MKII, III, IV armour still exist.

 

Chaos - I don't always like how the power of Chaos is depicted as a massively powerful and malignant virus that can just turn people into evil frothing maniacs in the blink of an eye. I think that's a portrayal that robs characters in the Warhammer 30k/40k setting of agency. In my mind, the tragedy is that for whatever reason, the individual welcomes Chaos, because of lust for power, vanity, hubris, etc. The latest Horus Heresy novels almost portrayed the respective 'Marked' Legions (Emperor's Children, Death Guard, World Eaters) as being normal dudes, and then very quickly (i.e. over the relatively short 7-10yr timeline of the Heresy) they arrive at Terra and are completely and utterly warped by Chaos to a degree that they are basically indistinguishable with a Chaos Space Marine that has fought 10,000 years of the Long War. My personal view of how Chaos works is that the descent into Chaos, is in general a much slower progress. The loss of humanity, identity, and the corrosion of a character's ideals is a choice the individual makes. I don't like to dwell too much on the 'constant whispers of Chaos drove me mad, bit it's not really my fault' take on how Chaos corrupts that has been developed by a lot of authors.

 

Dreadnoughts - I like to think of them as having been walkers with pilots, even during the Great Crusade. It was only during the Horus Heresy, with the huge amount of casualties that both sides sustained, that Dreadnoughts became a way to preserve combat-effectiveness and experience of key officers and heroes that would otherwise no longer be able to contribute to the conflict. In my take, this practice then stuck post-Heresy, which is when Dreadnoughts effectively ceased to be used as walkers but became walking tombs. To me it drives home the idea that the Imperium is entering a new era of scarce resources and death-worship.

 

[Cleon]

1 hour ago, apologist said:

...and on a personal note, I've got a real bugbear about the 'age inflation' of Space Marines. So much so, I wrote a (very long) article about it, if you'd like to have a squizz. :)

 

The TL;DR, though, is that for my headcanon:

• There are between twenty and fifty Neophytes between 10 and 14 years old, who are not part of the 1,000 marine limit
• The Scouts of the Tenth company are between 12 and 21 years old
• A Battle Brother in a Reserve Company will be between 18 and 55 years old
• A Battle Brother in a Battle Company will be between 34 and 81 years old, with members exceptionally reaching 150 years or more
• A Veteran of the First Company will be between 65 and 235 years old, with members exceptionally reaching 300 years old
• An Officer will be between 35 and 300 years old.

Having a skim through the article, interesting - it had pointed out something that I had interpreted, is more of an assumption.

 

The Chapters who recruit 'once per generation' I had understood to be 'every five years' as with a viable candidate being 10-14 according to the old chart, that means each youngster in the population gets one chance to be recruited - what I interpreted to be 'once per generation' - if you read it as 'you see it happen once, you might not be the right age for it' then it does seem a bit more grimdark.

[Osteoclast]

On 8/16/2023 at 8:56 AM, Quantum said:

Not every Imperial warp capable vessel has a Navigator; short calculated 'hops' through the warp are possible, but since they become increasingly inaccurate and dangerous with distance, they are mostly reserved for chartist merchants travelling short and relatively stable warp-lanes

I thought that was actual canon?

 

 

Threadtax: The Mechanicus has several worlds it classifies as as Forge Worlds Biologis, though they may be classified by the Imperium at large as agriworlds, or even paradise worlds. These are where tech priests who specialize in biological end of the quest for knowledge practice much of their craft. 

[Indy Techwisp]

My personal headcannon:
T'au have always had decent FTL, but the fact their FTL was (somewhat) safer than Imperium Warp travel made the Imperial Author of the T'au Codex lie and say they didn't have one to make the Imperium look better.
The "recent developments in T'au FTL" aren't the T'au inventing it, it's the wider imperium finding out about it bit-by-bit.

[The Praetorian of Inwit]

My personal headcannon is that the Emperor is a biological weapon from DaoT. His memories are false and implanted to give him some way of handling emotions and whatnot. Think Replicants in Blade Runner. This is why he's not great at emotion and connection with individual humans and sees only the end goal and big picture. It's also why instead of giving regular humans weapons and armour to fight Xenos he created more biological weapons (Primarchs/Astartes).

 

My other headcanon is that the Chaos Gods scattered the Primarchs not the poorly written hastily inserted attempt at woke-pleasing that is Erda. 

[Rain]

19 hours ago, The Praetorian of Inwit said:

My personal headcannon is that the Emperor is a biological weapon from DaoT. His memories are false and implanted to give him some way of handling emotions and whatnot. Think Replicants in Blade Runner. This is why he's not great at emotion and connection with individual humans and sees only the end goal and big picture. It's also why instead of giving regular humans weapons and armour to fight Xenos he created more biological weapons (Primarchs/Astartes).

 

My other headcanon is that the Chaos Gods scattered the Primarchs not the poorly written hastily inserted attempt at woke-pleasing that is Erda. 

 

I gave up reading the HH books when it was clear that they were turning into pointless grindy filler. Has the Emperor's origin ever been conclusively stated? I thought the ambiguity was the whole point, with him maybe being a Chaos God of Order, or a DAOT bioweapon, or a creation of the Old Ones intended to counter Chaos, or a fusion of ancient shamans, or...etc.

 

Also, what is the current canon on the scattering of the primarchs? I know they added in the Emperor's "wife" just from reading forum discussions, but did they make her scatter the primarchs? Genuinely curious here. The idea of a Faustian bargain between Big E and the Chaos Gods allowing him to create the primarchs, but then leading to their scattering and eventual corruption is much better than a lover's spat leading to the wife selling her husband's prized Corvette for a dollar 

 

[Osteoclast]

More isolated headcanon:

Many, if not most, PDF use locally designed equipment built and maintained for the conditions of their homeworld. STC designs are acquired for Guard regiments because equipment commonality for logistics trumps most other considerations. 
 

Most Guard regiments are drawn from the cream of the crop of what we would recognize as Republican Guard style formations and accordingly are not actually very good. 
 

The widespread deployment of regiments formed from Cadia, which spawns Chaos cults to an incredible degree, is the single greatest factor in the spread of Chaos cults across the Imperium. 
 

Imperial propaganda and infantry handbook about how weak and cowardly Orks are isn’t necessarily inaccurate. Gretchin are still Orks and will make up the majority of what are encountered (as they’re pushed ahead of the Boyz and whatnot).