No primarchs ...

[Helias_Tancred]

On 4/19/2024 at 10:26 AM, phandaal said:

 

Knights would be better as allies than as standalone armies, in my opinion. I don't know what the right answer is there because some people really have spent a :cuss:load of cash on their Knight armies.

 

That's always been my thought about them too, you can ally in with an imperial faction . 

 

[Helias_Tancred]

As a die-hard lore fan since getting into the hobby around 2013 or so, I've recently grown bored with it. 

 

Why?

 

Because GW slow walks their lore because it's used side by side with their marketing to sell products. And we know there will never be a conclusion to the latter ;) thats what the company does, sells models ...as someone mentioned previously in my thread, it's actually "low stakes", and I agree. On the surface it may appear to be high stakes lore but in truth it's not. Just strung along to support product releases and sales, and seriously no real characters of any importance die or are killed off.  Don't rock the boat mentality. 

 

GW is a very conservative company, and this also comes into play when we talk the development and progress of the lore for 40k.  I'm 52, at this rate I've come to accept 40k lore is a very intentionally slow walked, never-ending story, and I'm going to die of old age before anything truly epic happens in it, or there is any sense of a conclusion to the story. That realization is one of the reasons why my interest in it and the whole hobby has waned. I don't think I'm the only one either?

 

People play the game, and buy the models for a variety of reasons, and for those of us who are driven first by the lore ... for me, it's grown stale and anything new generates an "Oh ... big deal?" response or thought in my head.

 

Dear GW,  have the sack (and quality writers) to shake up your lore a bit and be bold ... if you don't you're gonna lose some long time fans and customers.

 

 

Edited April 25 by Helias_Tancred

[roryokane]

1 hour ago, Rain said:

I guess the idea is that different sapient species experience emotions differently, so they create different warp gods. Ultimately I think it’s a matter of only human factions having Chaos “versions” of themselves as separate factions and models, so that’s all that’s ever talked about in lore. There’s no reason that there shouldn’t be Khornate Orks, Tzeentchian Eldar, Slaaneshi Dark Eldar, etc., but such things have never had models, so they’ve never been mentioned.

There definitely were Khornate Orks in the Rogue Trader era - especially Stormboyz. Nurgle Orks definitely got a look in in 3rd/4th Ed during the 13th Black Crusade in some semi-official stuff (plus some artwork that was pretty unmistakeable in the 13th Black Crusade Codex - ). Genestealer cults were often also Chaos-affiliated!
(Also Ork-genestealer Hybrids were very much acknowledged as a "thing" FWIW.)

Edited April 25 by roryokane
Clarification.

[Rain]

28 minutes ago, roryokane said:

There definitely were Khornate Orks in the Rogue Trader era - especially Stormboyz. Nurgle Orks definitely got a look in in 3rd/4th Ed during the 13th Black Crusade in some semi-official stuff (plus some artwork that was pretty unmistakeable in the 13th Black Crusade Codex - ). Genestealer cults were often also Chaos-affiliated!
(Also Ork-genestealer Hybrids were very much acknowledged as a "thing" FWIW.)

Rogue Trader might as well have been a different IP. Things were very different back then.

 

Nurgle corrupted Orks have been mentioned in newer lore as a codex blurb, that’s fair enough. They were implied to be Orks unknowingly infected with a demonic Nurglite disease and not Chaos worshippers per se, but close enough. Haven’t heard about Orkstealers, but I believe you.

 

Overall, however, the vast majority of Chaos corrupted forces and characters mentioned in lore are human. Which is a shame, really. Chaos Eldar are a really cool concept, but given how little attention Dark Eldar get, I doubt the idea would make economic sense for GW. Maybe as an offshoot of DE like the Cult of Pleasure Dark Elves in WHFB.

[gideon stargreave]

Perhaps one of the pitfalls we have fallen into as a community is the very word ‘lore’.

once upon a time it was called ‘background’ and so by definition it spoke of things that had already happened. This meant that even with detailed names characters, you picked them up at the end of their saga-so-far (barring some exceptions like solar macharius). The stakes then, were your own. 
for a while we used the word ‘fluff’. By definition this implied a low importance. That what we had was snippets and gossip.

but now we have ‘lore’. This is an altogether different word. It has connotations of tradition, of something learned and transmitted, almost sacred. 
 

so what does this mean for primarchs?

 

obviously, if they were mere background, we wouldn’t be able to play them, at least not officially, and like the old days, maybe we would see fan rules and conversions and so on. 
if they were fluff, by default, they would have to lack ‘crunch’

but with them in the world of lore, we have a problem. They must have a solidity to their actions, and the story must be affected by them, for the stories that continue in any case.

 

But perhaps there is another way, a synthesis.

 

let us instead agree that the primarchs indeed have a background, and a lore, rather than being the background and lore. From here, we might open a present moment where they are again our guys, and we are the ones who move the story forward in our games.
If we take the responsibility to use them as our own storytelling mechanism, to decide if and when and why the Lion is at an engagement with a bad moon warclan, we can have our cake and eat it. The new stories that BL produces are stories about their guys, not ours, the present and the future are our own

[Karhedron]

8 hours ago, Helias_Tancred said:

GW is a very conservative company, and this also comes into play when we talk the development and progress of the lore for 40k.  I'm 52, at this rate I've come to accept 40k lore is a very intentionally slow walked, never-ending story, and I'm going to die of old age before anything truly epic happens in it, or there is any sense of a conclusion to the story. That realization is one of the reasons why my interest in it and the whole hobby has waned. I don't think I'm the only one either?

 

It is very much the same as comic universes. Very few heroes or villains are ever killed off and even more rarely for good. Johnny Storm's death led to the Fantastic Four temporarily replacing him with Spiderman for a while but he returned after a while. Comics don't like killing people off for good because they are popular with fans and it precludes future stories with those characters.

 

40K is the same. There will never be an "ending" to the narrative because GW will always want to sell new models. Look at the kerfuffle caused when it was revealed that Yarrick had died "off-screen" at the start of 10th edition. The closest I think we will get is Gathering Storm which was the biggest shakeup of the lore in over a decade but even there, GW held back from blowing up the setting. They did this with Fantasty but only because sales had fallen to around 25% of the value of 40K and they decided for a radical reboot.

 

Maybe if 40K sales plunge in the far future then GW will reboot the setting by having the Imperium fail and the Emperor get up off the Golden Throne (they did a lite version of this with Guilliman and the Indomitus Crusade).

[ZeroWolf]

2 hours ago, Karhedron said:

 

It is very much the same as comic universes. Very few heroes or villains are ever killed off and even more rarely for good. Johnny Storm's death led to the Fantastic Four temporarily replacing him with Spiderman for a while but he returned after a while. Comics don't like killing people off for good because they are popular with fans and it precludes future stories with those characters.

 

40K is the same. There will never be an "ending" to the narrative because GW will always want to sell new models. Look at the kerfuffle caused when it was revealed that Yarrick had died "off-screen" at the start of 10th edition. The closest I think we will get is Gathering Storm which was the biggest shakeup of the lore in over a decade but even there, GW held back from blowing up the setting. They did this with Fantasty but only because sales had fallen to around 25% of the value of 40K and they decided for a radical reboot.

 

Maybe if 40K sales plunge in the far future then GW will reboot the setting by having the Imperium fail and the Emperor get up off the Golden Throne (they did a lite version of this with Guilliman and the Indomitus Crusade).

I think the WFB -> AoS thing is interesting in this context, as that is an example of GW doing something drastic within a setting (though it took time to find its feet after that free fall). Problem is, there was a lot of outcry over that decision, so the solution of "shake things up" in a big way gains the following asterix *Only if it's the right thing to shake things up.

 

For a hypothetical, if GW did a reboot of sorts, with Big E finally making a move and dropping with a glorious miniature (with an accompanying one for HH with Final form Horus), some people would absolutely love that, but how many people would absolutely hate it? At what point should narrative risk be decided by consumers.

[Karhedron]

43 minutes ago, ZeroWolf said:

I think the WFB -> AoS thing is interesting in this context, as that is an example of GW doing something drastic within a setting (though it took time to find its feet after that free fall). Problem is, there was a lot of outcry over that decision, so the solution of "shake things up" in a big way gains the following asterix *Only if it's the right thing to shake things up.

 

For a hypothetical, if GW did a reboot of sorts, with Big E finally making a move and dropping with a glorious miniature (with an accompanying one for HH with Final form Horus), some people would absolutely love that, but how many people would absolutely hate it? At what point should narrative risk be decided by consumers.

 

I totally agree and I think that it would only be worth GW's risk if 40K sales were tanking the way WFB's were before they blew up the Old World.  As long as 40K remains profitable, we can expect more of the same.

 

My personal feeling is that 40K setting is a bit more distinctive and different from anything else out there. WFB was always a mashup of LOTR/D&D/Eternal Champion etc.

[Helias_Tancred]

8 hours ago, Karhedron said:

 

It is very much the same as comic universes. Very few heroes or villains are ever killed off and even more rarely for good. Johnny Storm's death led to the Fantastic Four temporarily replacing him with Spiderman for a while but he returned after a while. Comics don't like killing people off for good because they are popular with fans and it precludes future stories with those characters.

 

40K is the same. There will never be an "ending" to the narrative because GW will always want to sell new models. Look at the kerfuffle caused when it was revealed that Yarrick had died "off-screen" at the start of 10th edition. The closest I think we will get is Gathering Storm which was the biggest shakeup of the lore in over a decade but even there, GW held back from blowing up the setting. They did this with Fantasty but only because sales had fallen to around 25% of the value of 40K and they decided for a radical reboot.

 

Maybe if 40K sales plunge in the far future then GW will reboot the setting by having the Imperium fail and the Emperor get up off the Golden Throne (they did a lite version of this with Guilliman and the Indomitus Crusade).

 

It's done from laziness of a creation drive! Avoiding the hard work! It's much easier just to keep the story going with minimal "strategic" changes or occurrences. As long as the product line is making accepted profit (the dominance of profit versus quality), that is preferable versus exciting change that also requires talented creation to take on the new unknown. That sort of thing makes most "we want the riches now" investors  very nervous and not happy at best. 

 

I can do a better job of that in hobbies I have more control over, such as Dungeons and Dragons, versus hobbies like 40k that are strictly controlled product lines. Yeah, comics are the same way. That fact is also an explanation of my waning interest in GW hobbies.  

 

It's sad that it's taken me more years than it should have, to realize this. lol. 

Edited April 25 by Helias_Tancred

[Karhedron]

The lore is just there to drive sales really. The first Dark Imperium novel was the most obvious example of this as you could practially hear them checking off the names of the new Primaris units. Some of the best writing is in the Horus Heresy series and even that is hardly great literature. I have made peace with this and just keep up with the elements that entertain me. At the end of the day I enjoy the models and the game. If some of the lore keeps me reading for a while, all the better. If not, I can just break out the paints and attack my UFO pile.

[ZeroWolf]

17 minutes ago, Helias_Tancred said:

 

It's done from laziness of a creation drive! Avoiding the hard work! It's much easier just to keep the story going with minimal "strategic" changes or occurrences. As long as the product line is making accepted profit (the dominance of profit versus quality), that is preferable versus exciting change that also requires talented creation to take on the new unknown. That sort of thing makes most "we want the riches now" investors  very nervous and not happy at best. 

 

I can do a better job of that in hobbies I have more control over, such as Dungeons and Dragons, versus hobbies like 40k that are strictly controlled product lines. Yeah, comics are the same way. That fact is also an explanation of my waning interest in GW hobbies.  

 

It's sad that it's taken me more years than it should have, to realize this. lol. 

Think you'll find there's also a fair number of fans who wish to avoid change as well, or reverse them where possible. They are the ones who reward the decisions you're talking about.

 

Personally I like change (yes, Tzeentch is my favourite Chaos God, why do you ask?) But at the same time, I can see all the factions in play here.

 

20 minutes ago, Karhedron said:

The lore is just there to drive sales really. The first Dark Imperium novel was the most obvious example of this as you could practially hear them checking off the names of the new Primaris units. Some of the best writing is in the Horus Heresy series and even that is hardly great literature. I have made peace with this and just keep up with the elements that entertain me. At the end of the day I enjoy the models and the game. If some of the lore keeps me reading for a while, all the better. If not, I can just break out the paints and attack my UFO pile.

Okay, I'm curious, UFO pile?

[Karhedron]

36 minutes ago, ZeroWolf said:

Okay, I'm curious, UFO pile?

 

Un Finished Objects. 

[lansalt]

22 hours ago, Karhedron said:

At the end of the day I enjoy the models and the game. If some of the lore keeps me reading for a while, all the better. If not, I can just break out the paints and attack my UFO pile.

I have no doubt that's how GW sees it too, but for me (and I suspect I'm not alone) is the opposite: The lore comes first, the minis second, and the games a distant third.
Bad stories and worldbuilding can be a huge turn off. Even with nice models associated like HH Salamanders, for example.
 

[FoursCompany]

I don’t really have a dog in this fight, but I enjoy reading the discourse. 
 

My first memories of 40k are the 2nd edition  rulebook (that’s the one with the Crimson Fists on the cover right?). I was quite young…maybe 6-8 years old. I remember spending hours looking at the models (on their bright a$$ green bases) and artwork. I still have a spot in my heart for the 2nd edition Dark Angels Captain, the Terminator Wolf Priest, and the buck-toothed Tyranid Warriors. 
 

I followed the hobby at arms length for probably 20 years (I didn’t start actually collecting, painting, and playing until 8th when I was in my mid-20s and had an actual stable income) only reading rulebooks/codex’s for the lore and pictures, reading a rare  BL book. 
 

For me this hobby has always been models first, everything else second. 
 

I  know there is a lot of heartburn on primarchs /titanic units for alot of people who’ve been in the hobby from far longer than I have. I don’t really *understand* it, simply because I just don’t have the frame of reference to compare it against. Maybe someone can help me get why there’s such a dissenting opinion? I get the lore stuff, but gameplay wise it’s hard for me to understand why it either does/does not make the game worse. 

[The Unseen]

In short: Previous versions of the game were, well, smaller. In both scale and the variety of armies available. 

 

Allowing stuff as tough as Titanic units just necessarily means you have to build and plan your own army around how to take out a list that is ALL hyper durable units that a few editions ago just didn't have an analogue in the base game. You didn't see an army of all tanks or all walkers except in Apocolypse, which was openly admitted to be for fun, not for balance.

 

Previously, only what would now be called battleline would allow you to take objectives at ALL. So even if the double baneblade list tabled you, if you killed the couple squads of infantry they had, you'd at most take a minor loss, or whatever. There were just more limits, and while the competitive mindset was make them as low impact as possible, they still existed. The loss of those restrictions, and the inclusion of ever bigger models, has led to 10th, where the basic infantry units in most armies literally never show up, because they just aren't capable of doing much in the games new scale.

 

And subjectively, some people miss 40k feeling like a skirmish, or a snap shot of a larger battles critical point, and not the rampage of the same named characters and big models.

Edited April 26 by The Unseen

[FoursCompany]

So essentially, if I’m understanding it correctly, the game has shifted from something more akin to a tactical strategy game (maybe something like chess, or Stratego) where the decisions you made felt meaningful to something more like “I win because I have the hardest hitting, most durable units.” 
 

or at least, that’s the view the dissenting opinion holds. The game has been simplified, decisions matter less, and tactical acumen is no longer as important as a data sheet?

[Kallas]

41 minutes ago, FoursCompany said:

So essentially, if I’m understanding it correctly, the game has shifted from something more akin to a tactical strategy game (maybe something like chess, or Stratego) where the decisions you made felt meaningful to something more like “I win because I have the hardest hitting, most durable units.” 

Sort of. I'd say it's like Chess, but...bigger. You used to have pawns, Knights, Rooks, Bishops, a Queen and a King; everything was useful in different ways with some more useful than others, but you could have any piece make a major move and suddenly the game shifted, making that moment memorable - now you've got Big Queens, and then you've got Biggest Queens on top of that.

 

Sure, you can bring your pawns and Rooks to play, but when someone brings their Big Queens, you need to have an answer for them or, well, you get stomped on because Big Queens can't realistically be hurt by Rooks (Bishops can, but it takes a bunch of them); and if they bring a Biggest Queen, well you'd better have your own Big Queens, or at least a heap of Bishops and Queens to stand a chance.

 

Basically - Knights, Primarchs and Titanic units in general skew the game upwards, away from the smaller, more individual units of the game/setting. When you're fighting armies of Knights, it's harder to play with the smaller units because you need the firepower to bring them down; and as you escalate the scale of the individual units, the scope of the game is similarly 'zoomed out' if you will.

 

Where previously you might have a single Tactical Squad make a significant play in a battle and that makes for a memorable game - it's much harder for that to happen now, because realistically a single Tactical Squad isn't going to acheive anything noteworthy since the scale of the battle has increased to the point that individual units really aren't all that relevant unless they're a Queen, Big or Biggest. It's still possible, but it's much rarer - that unit of Guardsmen holding in the face of a unit of Chaos Terminators might happen, but it happened rarely enough before the scale increased; and now even if they manage to just survive against the Chaos Terminators, well there's still a Knight to deal with, so now their maybe noteworthy acheivement just isn't that important. And while things like OC sort of even out the playing field of some units being valuable and others not, well it actually hurts the little guys: previously, that one last, stoic Guardsman that survived the onslaught of Knight and Terminators might actually hold the objective, but now that last guy is out-OC'd anyway, so they lose the objective.

 

Fundamentally, the game has shifted in scale to the point that the little guys are out of focus, and in the process of this zooming out we lose some of the characterisation we could previously get - there's still some, but it's harder to grasp when there are a dozen fights across a game, or when units just get outright deleted with ease in a single unit's shooting.

 

Primarchs and Knights are cool in their own ways, but they have increased the scale of the game (whether someone likes that or not is entirely up to that person of course). Some of us feel that this increased scale is not actually beneficial (and in varying ways for different folks: some don't like the game balance part where armies need answers for these balancing-skewing units; some the lore aspect where Primarchs should have remained as mythic figures so far away from the current day that they may not even be real, instead of being characters that interact with the setting and in turn warp it further; and so on).

[The Unseen]

56 minutes ago, FoursCompany said:

So essentially, if I’m understanding it correctly, the game has shifted from something more akin to a tactical strategy game (maybe something like chess, or Stratego) where the decisions you made felt meaningful to something more like “I win because I have the hardest hitting, most durable units.” 
 

or at least, that’s the view the dissenting opinion holds. The game has been simplified, decisions matter less, and tactical acumen is no longer as important as a data sheet?

More or less, yeah.

 

And objectively the game is less complex, even as its bloated with extraneous rules. That isnt opinion, a lot of movement and decision making forks have been removed. Whether that's a good thing or not is of course a matter of opinion. Vehicle facings, scatter templates, only charging what you shoot, and only with pistol/assault weapons, consolidate movement, game length, etc, theres a lot, are all complexities that are gone now. 

 

Some of that can be placed at the feet of nostalgia for some of us old timers, in other cases its, imo, the game actually being worse, with 5th often being considered the high water mark. Especially compared to the editions immediately afterward, 6th and 7th almost killed the game. I don't miss, for example, the finicky night fighting rules, or playing against guard wyverns with 4 small blast templates, all rerollable, but vehicle facings and slightly abstracted LoS is way better than "the antennae of my tank is visible over this wall, so for all purposes it's fully visible and can shoot all its guns"

 

(Feels weird to call myself an old timer, I just turned 30, but I have been playing since 4th edition, I started real young with my Dad)

[Scribe]

On 4/24/2024 at 6:18 PM, Helias_Tancred said:

Dear GW,  have the sack (and quality writers) to shake up your lore a bit and be bold ... if you don't you're gonna lose some long time fans and customers.

 

Completely disagree. All the best fiction came from when it was a setting, not a story.

 

The current path GW is on is a failed one. Meta plots suck.

[Orange Knight]

22 minutes ago, Scribe said:

 

Completely disagree. All the best fiction came from when it was a setting, not a story.

 

The current path GW is on is a failed one. Meta plots suck.

 

I disagree with this.

 

The two Cawl books

Watchers of the Throne

The Dark City

 

All of the above are advancing the story in the most current timeline.

These are easily some of the best stories I've read in the 40k setting, keep in mind I've been eating the lore up since the 90s.

[Scribe]

19 minutes ago, Orange Knight said:

 

I disagree with this.

 

The two Cawl books

Watchers of the Throne

The Dark City

 

All of the above are advancing the story in the most current timeline.

These are easily some of the best stories I've read in the 40k setting, keep in mind I've been eating the lore up since the 90s.

 

Dark City didn't advance a single thing. It's a lore blurb from the Ad Mech codex of years ago.

 

Cawl is a trash addition.

 

The Night Lords series, and Wrath of Iron are better than anything in the last decade.

Edited April 27 by Scribe

[The Unseen]

I would also argue that most of those novels could have the elements of overall setting changes scaled back and still be just as good.

 

40k worked a lot better as a galactic wide setting where almost anything could happen, rather than a universe were apparently nothing happens at all without involving 1 of like 3 people.

[Orange Knight]

2 hours ago, The Unseen said:

I would also argue that most of those novels could have the elements of overall setting changes scaled back and still be just as good.

 

40k worked a lot better as a galactic wide setting where almost anything could happen, rather than a universe were apparently nothing happens at all without involving 1 of like 3 people.

 

But that's how things work. Major events, at any given time, are driven by a few individuals. 

 

These "big player" characters also benefit the novels by providing a continuity. 

[The Unseen]

24 minutes ago, Orange Knight said:

 

But that's how things work. Major events, at any given time, are driven by a few individuals. 

 

These "big player" characters also benefit the novels by providing a continuity. 

Not when those events are literally separated by VAST distance of an empire spread out over an entire galaxy, comprising literally QUADRILLIONS of people; like come on. Also, that's a reductionist view on events. The so-called "Great Man" theory of history. Which is generally not a good way of looking at events.

[Marshal Valkenhayn]

I'm honestly surprised anyone thinks Cawl's books are good. The one I read turned me off of Black Library a while, then I came back and tried to read the latest Helbreacht book and couldn't even get past the first fifth.

 

As mentioned above, Night Lords was amazing. I'm also a sucker for Helsreach, but nothing that's come out in the last while has even felt good to me, let alone the best  ever released.