Where is the timeline?

[Inquisitor_Lensoven]

So when guilliman came back the timeline jumped like 2 centuries and then got pulled back to like 2 decades after guilliman’s return, so what year is the AoO stuff happening?

 

i won’t lie I will be a little annoyed if the lion returns like 20 or 30 years after guilliman returned…after yeah know like 10k years of being absent…

[Scribe]

One of the few pieces of new lore I actually like, is that they dont even know the date anymore.

[Emperor Ming]

Well we know from the dark imperium novels that's its a few decades into the 42m

[Felix Antipodes]

I recently got caught out WRT Arks of Omen: Angron and where it takes place in the narrative.  On a first, quick, read it seemed to be in the DoF period due to how it was written and it tying in a Battlefleet of the Indomitus Crusade.  A closer read shows it to be after Vigilus and Calgar’s set to with Abaddon.  Not sure how far afterwards but it seems like post Indomitus.

 

The Fleet only maintains any semblance of time by using a fleet wide internal time system based on the fleet flagship and is reset to that time regardless of how far out it is from the other ships  So they still really don’t have a clue.  Sort of like the military uses GMT as a standard but without a true standard.

[jaxom]

Yeah, and part of the hand wave is the Ordo Chronos had a nasty civil war, so the Imperial calendar was plus or minus 200 years.

[Urauloth]

4 hours ago, Felix Antipodes said:

I recently got caught out WRT Arks of Omen: Angron and where it takes place in the narrative.  On a first, quick, read it seemed to be in the DoF period due to how it was written and it tying in a Battlefleet of the Indomitus Crusade.  A closer read shows it to be after Vigilus and Calgar’s set to with Abaddon.  Not sure how far afterwards but it seems like post Indomitus.

 

The Arks books are the most "recent" things. There isn't any "post-Indomitus" though, the crusade is still ongoing. Guilliman left his fleet and went back to Ultramar to fight Mortarion after the battle at the Pit of Raukos, but all the fleets are still active.

 

I say "most recent" but as far as I know several of the conflicts set up in earlier books are still being fought. Sometimes there are updates on them in weird places, though. Psychic Awakening: Faith and Fury left the battle for the Talledus system open-ended, but Throne of Light gave it a resolution in passing.

 

Anyway, yes, regarding the Arks of Omen books: Abbadon is concurrent with Rift War, while Angron is right after that. I'm assuming Vashtorr will follow the same pattern.

[Doghouse]

13 hours ago, Inquisitor_Lensoven said:

 

i won’t lie I will be a little annoyed if the lion returns like 20 or 30 years after guilliman returned…after yeah know like 10k years of being absent…

 

 I'd rather they all remained lost. 

[Inquisitor_Lensoven]

1 hour ago, Doghouse said:

 

 I'd rather they all remained lost. 

Me too but here we are

[Sword Brother Adelard]

Arks post date the Dark Imperium Trilogy, and the Trilogy starts some time after the Dawn of Fire series. It seems a reasonable conclusion that Dawn of Fire will eventually catch up with Dark Imperium and overtake it.

 

It also means that things like the recapture of the Macragge's Honour are yet to be seen in print. 

[Redcomet]

1 hour ago, Doghouse said:

 

 I'd rather they all remained lost. 

Mire like Girlyman showing up made the others go “blast him, now our vacation is over, wonder how long we can hide here on Beach Planet” 

23 minutes ago, Sword Brother Adelard said:

Arks post date the Dark Imperium Trilogy, and the Trilogy starts some time after the Dawn of Fire series. It seems a reasonable conclusion that Dawn of Fire will eventually catch up with Dark Imperium and overtake it.

 

It also means that things like the recapture of the Macragge's Honour are yet to be seen in print. 

It is mentioned as having happened in the Huron book

[Inquisitor_Lensoven]

With the apparent loss of imperial calendar, I feel like this is how they ‘solve’ issues about the time line and advancement. No one actually knows when anything actually happened. 
seems like their attempt to rebuild the general sandbox feel the game had before 8th edition.

[WARMASTER_]

Who knows? Post Rift it’s anyone’s guess… From temporal distribution to the fact the Imperiums date could very well be wrong anyway it’s anyone’s guess!
 

Dark Imperium was moved within the timeline but the timeline wasn’t itself moved so it’s 100 years +/- post Rift give or take. GW are just filling out the timeline like they did before 

 

It could open up some cool narratives like with the Chaos marines stuck within the Eye! We could see warriors that have fought for Millennia thats actually decades to the rest of the Imperium or entire wars that last minutes to any outside the temporal flux 
 

2 hours ago, Urauloth said:

The Arks books are the most "recent" things. There isn't any "post-Indomitus" though, the crusade is still ongoing. Guilliman left his fleet and went back to Ultramar to fight Mortarion after the battle at the Pit of Raukos, but all the fleets are still active.

Spears of the Emperor is set over 100 years after the rift opened so that’ll be the “latest” timeline event so far I believe 

 

[Sword Brother Adelard]

1 hour ago, Redcomet said:

Mire like Girlyman showing up made the others go “blast him, now our vacation is over, wonder how long we can hide here on Beach Planet” 

It is mentioned as having happened in the Huron book

As in it happened in that book, or has happened by the time of that book?

 

It must happen, because it's the flagship in Dark Imperium.

[Felix Antipodes]

Killing dates and the possible 300 year date error were attempts to keep Warhammer 40,000 in W40K, not advancing into W41K imho.  Next edition will probably announce they found the mistake and they are really in 705.M41.  Again.

It was also a popular move amongst the writers (W40K & BL) from what I have read.  Why, I have no idea.

[Inquisitor_Lensoven]

51 minutes ago, Felix Antipodes said:

Killing dates and the possible 300 year date error were attempts to keep Warhammer 40,000 in W40K, not advancing into W41K imho.  Next edition will probably announce they found the mistake and they are really in 705.M41.  Again.

It was also a popular move amongst the writers (W40K & BL) from what I have read.  Why, I have no idea.

laziness thats why

 

[Scribe]

I personally (and I'm Team Canon in 40K is a thing I dont care what GW says about it) love the idea that they have forgotten the date, and that its just part of the setting's charm that they have time mumbo jumbo, missing history, time travel nonsense, a whole Ordo just for trying to keep time..its great.

 

They couldnt even manage a single author's series without back tracking and retconning out a time skip.

 

Its best not to ask too much of Black Library.

[Felix Antipodes]

To each their own I guess.  I’ve never felt they should give hard dates in everything GW/FW/BL put out but it doesn’t hurt, especially when they are telling tales set in the past of the setting.  I used to love those vignettes they used to throw in the BRB and codexes giving random glimpses of battles and incidents from across the millennia.  It gave a small window into the last 10,000 years without going in depth about it. 

[apologist]

7 hours ago, Felix Antipodes said:

 I used to love those vignettes they used to throw in the BRB and codexes giving random glimpses of battles and incidents from across the millennia.

 

Absolutely agree – just like leaving the monster out of sight for most of the film, sometimes the most atmospheric results come from isolated glimpses. 

[RWJP]

I'd argue that's impossible to say where the "current" timeline of 40k is, because GW is telling us stories that happen at several different points.

We know that the events of Dark Imperium and the Plague Wars were retconned to start around 12 years after the Great Rift (and we can assume that they lasted for a while!), we know that the current Dawn of Fire novels are all happening before Dark Imperium, but we also know that Belisarius Cawl: The Great Work and Spear of the Emperor happen comfortably after the Plague Wars (with Spear of the Emperor being up to 100 years later!).

The dates of the events in the Arks of Omen series aren't always quite so clear, but seem to be varying in when they happen. AoO Abaddon is set shortly after Vigilus, but the events of later books could be further out.

At best I think a range is all we can come up with... Assuming that the Great Rift did form at the very end of 40999, then the stories GW are telling are set within a range of 41000 to around 41050 (with Spear of the Emperor being an outlier).

[Bryan Blaire]

15 hours ago, Felix Antipodes said:

To each their own I guess.  I’ve never felt they should give hard dates in everything GW/FW/BL put out but it doesn’t hurt, especially when they are telling tales set in the past of the setting.  I used to love those vignettes they used to throw in the BRB and codexes giving random glimpses of battles and incidents from across the millennia.  It gave a small window into the last 10,000 years without going in depth about it. 

That’s the thing that has puzzled me - those dates should never have been considered “hard” by folks anyway, because most of them would have been “as reported, subject to error” situations.  At best, most of the dates ascribed to things should have either been from their own frame of reference, where they may not have been aligned with “Imperial Standard Time”, or they should have been recorded with the full Imperial date stamp showing that they were recorded for things so far from Terra that the date that was being reported had an unknown time tolerance due to potential distortion, post-dating in after action reports where true time adherence may have been lost, Warp issues on ship chronometers, etc.

 

The little vignettes were great, but the times in them should have been shown to be potentially to wildly inaccurate, and it would have been cool if GW had really kept up with this concept.

 

Consider how interesting it would have been if you had a date reported for a specific event in one Codex/BRB, and then in the next Edition, there was a shown revision to the date with a note from an Imperial scribe or Inquisitor or some such that indicated “Previous date for event revised for…” and then some reason given.  Instead, people started getting the idea that we were getting a strict timeline that adhered to our knowledge of a single world’s chronometer, when the realty for 40K was that most of it was really supposed to be unknown based on the time/date stuff provided as lore from the early rule books for the setting.

[Inquisitor_Lensoven]

2 hours ago, Bryan Blaire said:

That’s the thing that has puzzled me - those dates should never have been considered “hard” by folks anyway, because most of them would have been “as reported, subject to error” situations.  At best, most of the dates ascribed to things should have either been from their own frame of reference, where they may not have been aligned with “Imperial Standard Time”, or they should have been recorded with the full Imperial date stamp showing that they were recorded for things so far from Terra that the date that was being reported had an unknown time tolerance due to potential distortion, post-dating in after action reports where true time adherence may have been lost, Warp issues on ship chronometers, etc.

 

The little vignettes were great, but the times in them should have been shown to be potentially to wildly inaccurate, and it would have been cool if GW had really kept up with this concept.

 

Consider how interesting it would have been if you had a date reported for a specific event in one Codex/BRB, and then in the next Edition, there was a shown revision to the date with a note from an Imperial scribe or Inquisitor or some such that indicated “Previous date for event revised for…” and then some reason given.  Instead, people started getting the idea that we were getting a strict timeline that adhered to our knowledge of a single world’s chronometer, when the realty for 40K was that most of it was really supposed to be unknown based on the time/date stuff provided as lore from the early rule books for the setting.

i don't think anyone thought we were getting a strict timeline, but a general timeline, like event A clearly happened before event B which itself occurred before event C.
i always assumed the dates given were best knowledge and there could be at least a +/- 10 years or more in 'reality'

[DukeLeto69]

IMO not enough has really been done with warp time dilation shenanigans. A fleet emerging from the warp could have jumped back or forward in time. In fact different ships could have experienced different outcomes.

[b1soul]

If I'm understanding correctly, OP's question isn't about how many Terran years have elapsed since the start of AD 1...is it 42,008 or 41,995 or whatnot...it's simply how many years have elapsed since the advent of the Great Rift.

 

I believe back in 2017/2018 when Gathering Storm was still quite fresh, the events of the Dark Imperium books were happening around 112 (or was it 116) years after the start of the Indomitus Crusade? So basically toward the end of a long-term Crusade with rather mixed results in Nihilus....and the Plague Wars were happening after the Crusade. The Unnumbered Sons were also being dispersed after their century plus of Crusade service.

 

Now, it seems everything in the Dark Imperium books happens no more than approx 12 years after the start of the ongoing Crusade, so the Plague Wars are happening parallel to the likely much lengthier Crusade and the Unnumbered Sons are being dispersed after a much shorter span.

 

I understand the Crusade was launched shortly after the Rift opened/G-man was revived.

 

Vigilus straddles the advent of the Rift whereas Psychic Awakening is shortly post-Rift. I'm guessing Arks of Omen: The Lion will happen maybe 20 years after the start of the Crusade? Would be surprised if it is significantly more than that.

 

From the Imperium's perspective, this is like a great catastrophe followed by a miracle and then another miracle in rapid succession...so like accelerated Ragnarok. Maybe Russ after several years to make it rain for corporate execs and shareholders?