What's your headcanon?

[Quantum]

Squigs are green.

[Schurge]

Khorne is still a martial God that someone reasonable might serve.

 

The World Eaters have IQs higher than 75.

[Rain]

14 hours ago, Schurge said:

Khorne is still a martial God that someone reasonable might serve.

 

The World Eaters have IQs higher than 75.

I think of the World Eaters as rage addicts. Rage and violence are like a drug to them due to the Nails, and a constant craving. When they “binge” during a battle, they can lose all control and fight in a blind fury, which is where all of the berzerker stuff can really come out.

 

Just like as with drug addicts, however, there are high and low functioning addicts. The high functioning ones are more or less “normal” when out of combat, and perform tasks having to do with running the ships, choosing new targets, making sure the weapons all work, negotiating with other Chaos warbands, etc. they might behead the odd slave or 10 to get their fix after a long day, but that’s about it. They mostly get their fix in battle, and during gladiatorial bouts.

 

The low functioning rage junkies are either physically restrained between battles, or put in their own segregated part of the ship where they can only kill one another, and maybe some slaves dumped there every so often.

[Dagoth Ur]

Space Marine chapters number 5-10k marines per chapter.

 

Hashut (the chaos dwarves god from WHFB) is an aspect of Vashtorr. Or Vashtorr is an aspect of his. I don't really care, I just like Hashut and I think some Iron Warriors serving him would be metal as hell.

 

The Emperor genuinely had the good of humanity in mind - but he is, despite all his power and knowledge, still fundamentally a person. A human, and a flawed one at that. His vision of what entails good is a severely flawed one because most human ideas for what is good for the whole of humanity are severely flawed at best.

 

The Forgewrights (essentially "techmarines" that were trained on Terra) of the Dark Angels legion still exist in the Unforgiven chapters as a parallel entity to the martian-educated Techmarines. The latter exist to pay lip-service to the Codex Astartes, whereas the former maintain the truly ancient pieces of tech of the Unforgiven.

 

While Alpharius is dead, my headcanon is that Omegon still lives - except now the twentieth primarch is not a soul split in two bodies. The soul has now amalgamated in a single one. Alpharius-Omegon.

 

Yarrick still lives in one shape or another. The High Lords tried to pull a Macharius on him - but failed.

 

[Rain]

On 9/13/2023 at 5:31 PM, Dagoth Ur said:

Hashut (the chaos dwarves god from WHFB) is an aspect of Vashtorr. Or Vashtorr is an aspect of his. I don't really care, I just like Hashut and I think some Iron Warriors serving him would be metal as hell.

 

This is a neat idea. I wish the minor Chaos powers got explored more. Both in cases like Hashut from Fantasy, and as "aspects" of the Big Four that are worshipped as separate deities. Especially as the Cult Legions got spun off into their own armies, there is a lot of room for this. Thousand Sons that worship an aspect of Tzeentch that sees all physical matter as insultingly stable and unchanging and have transfigured themselves into translucent ghost-forms. Death Guard that worship stasis, and strive to appear as close to their original incarnation as possible. World Eaters that worship Khorne as an avatar of ruthless Darwinist competition, and "evolve" themselves into greater killing machines through heavy use of bionics and mechanical augmentation. So many ideas.

[Soldier of Dorn]

A lot of my "headcanon" (if you can call it that) is more than anything nowadays a willful ignorance of canonical "truths". Truth be told, I mostly just got tired at discussing ad nauseam subjectively unimportant details like whether Sorositas are celibate or not; whether the size of Space Marine chapters makes any sense and how big they should be; or whether X codex contradicting Y Black Library story constitutes a retcon or not, and if so to what degree. I don't think most questions about 40k are important enough to have absolute answers and I'd rather wind up with a contradiction in my internal narrative (after all, we're told the historical record of the setting is full of them to begin with, so why not just accept that as part of our storytelling when we set out to do so?) than be too stiff-necked in my approach to how the universe functions. It's an extension of what my understanding of "loose canon" is (though I'm told, apparently, that my understanding is either outdated in how the Studio approaches things or that they are taking a different tack in this brave new world post-Cicatrix Maledictum), though I have perhaps taken it further, as it has something of a baring on how I approach fiction in general nowadays. Truth be told, I haven't really kept up with most of the newer 40k publications (I'd honestly say I stopped keeping super up-to-date when Gathering Storm came along) so I'm not overly aware of what might be considered "officially canon" or not.

Some specifics though, on what I sometimes believe about 40k, that might come into conflict with established canon:

 

• There were closer to 20 million Space Marines in the Great Crusade, rather than the ~2m number that we get if we rely on current official sources. I like the thought of hundreds of crusade fleets with tens of thousands of Space Marines each in a massive push across the galaxy, and when I approach the Heresy I tend to think of numbers with that in mind.
• Record-keeping among the Space Marines (and among the Imperium at large) is much worse than consensus suggests, with chapters frequently getting into disputes over the existence of their primarchs, their status as Progenitor or Successor chapters, or even their relative lengths of their histories, largely because I think homebrewing primarchs without falling into the alternate universe or being reliant on the 2nd/11th Legion explanations is an interesting prospect.
• There are also a lot more Space Marine chapters than the official number, but that's more a consequence of me coming up with 20+ chapters a few years ago when I sat down and tried to homebrew a couple than anything else.
• The Imperium sprawls far into many parts of the galaxy where it has limited influence , and the only really ideologically "pure" parts of the Imperium are those within easy reach of the five major Segmentum Fortresses. Beyond that, there exist breakpoints where Imperial Navy logistics becomes unsustainable and petty warlords and Rogue Traders rule over pockets of the Imperium, untouched by Administratum oversight or Inquisitorial authority.
• Chaos is all but unknowable and the stories we're presented of things like Skarbrand's exile and the Kidnapping of Isha are pure myth, invented by Chaos worshipers in a perverse orthodoxy of sorts. The Major Chaos Gods, the Great Game, the established Daemonological hierarchy, etc. -- it's all a shaping of perception by a tradition that holds fast primarily in the major Warpstorms at the galaxy's heart like the Eye of Terror and the Maelstrom. Chaos takes indefinite shapes and forms, and the system given us by the majority of official sources is only one explanation for how everything works.

Edited September 16, 2023 by Soldier of Dorn

[Blurf]

Greyfax and Celestine have been dating since the end of the Cadia series. It's long distance, but they make it work.