Nick Davis talking about current times in Warhammer

[Agramar_The_Luna_Wolf]

Nick Davis, former  writer and member of GW staff, maked this post in his personal  Twitter account today, about the events happened this past weekend, his work in GW and the current times coming:

 

"I worked for Games Workshop for a very specific part of its history. I started in the Mail Order Trollz and worked my way up into the Studio, finishing out my career with GW working on White Dwarf magazine, UK and then US edition.

During my time at the company, especially during my White Dwarf years, I had one mission. I wanted to share the joy the Warhammer hobby gave me, to lift up that mystic veil and show, who you, the average gamer (like me) could participate no matter your skill level.

In short, take some of the mystery out of what is drybrushing... lol 

I like to think I mostly succeeded in this mission, and I am heartened when I hear from now Vets in the hobby who cite me as a positive influence. 

The 'hobby' as I like to call it is supposed to be fun, a uniting force between gamers, to create friendships, a social fucntion, something to be enjoyed and share. 

You never were supposed to build silos of lore, because the very idea of the Warhammer and Warhammer 40,000 universe was the history was so convoluted and fragmented there was no such thing as 'fact'

Everything was supposed to contradict... That was the purpose. 

That being said, I am overjoyed seeing the hobby that once gave me a means to live, being so inclusive. Seeing female, LGBTQ+ gamers and seeing them represented at the highest level of GW toy soldiers is pure joy.

I love it. 

I wish I had seen more of it during my time at Games Workshop. But we are here now and you've made this old White Dwarf'er very proud.

Play well "

 

Thoughts and opinions?
 

[terminator ultra]

I for one like where games workshop is going with inclusivity

but I think it might be drifting away from its roots in the lore department a little.

Edited April 16 by terminator ultra

[Brother Captain Arkley]

Are people even allowed to have a different opinion?

 

If you do you are a -ist or a -phobe.

 

I for one like the idea of female toads... 

 

 

 

 

Edited April 16 by Brother Captain Arkley

[Marshal Rohr]

I stopped collecting and working on my massive Black Templars army (over two hundred models, dozens of vehicles, multiple hand crafted characters) when the 6th Edition Codex changed the Black Templars from Imperial Truthers to Imperial Creeders. I am something of a lore purist. If it was the lore in 3rd and 4th, it is the lore. If it was the lore in the Black Books it is the lore. It was a brutal stab in the back to have collected so many models based on the lore that there was a chapter out there continuing the mission of the Great Crusade, and that was the reason I bought and spent money on that specific chapter. I switched over to mainly doing Heresy because of it, Forge World felt more stable and respectful of the 3rd and 4th reboot from 2nd, and that’s when 40K lore really peaked in coherency and mystique and scale. It feels like even though there is no real truth, and things change as needed, they at least tried to stay consistent with the scale and baseline of the setting. Nothing they’ve done has really felt right since changing the Templars randomly. 

[MoriyaSchism]

45 minutes ago, Agramar_The_Luna_Wolf said:

You never were supposed to build silos of lore, because the very idea of the Warhammer and Warhammer 40,000 universe was the history was so convoluted and fragmented there was no such thing as 'fact'

Everything was supposed to contradict... That was the purpose.

 

I really don't get this agrument. When the company that puts the product out says "This is how things are now" you can't really contradict that or pretend they never said that. I see this unreliable narrator thing and contradiction stuff only ever get brought up as an argument when new fluff some people don't like comes out. It gets used as a bludgeon against the people who don't like the change. I honestly don't get what he's saying. The last stentence makes it sound as if he's ashamed of his past workplace because it wasn't progressive enough.

[Lay]

I play Alpha Legion. Any negative opinions I hold about retcons are auto-invalidated.

[Marshal Rohr]

I think the main underlying issue is that fandoms are such low trust spaces online and GW is far more opaque about its process than even other monolithic billion dollar corps that both sides see their political enemies moving behind the wall. Some lore changes must be the work of one bogeyman and the lack of lore changes must be the work of another bogeyman. Everyone knows there is some wrong thinker at GW personally stopping the “right lore” because of some political agenda. If GW came out and said “we’d like more people from X group to buy our products so we’ve started including miniatures to represent X group” the reaction would be the same in spite of the honesty, simply because online (as amply demonstrated here and elsewhere) everything is a war. If Warhammer was just a story, changing the all male guardians of the emperor who are fifty percent of the Emperor’s personal army (where the other fifty percent is all female) would be pretty jarring after however long it’s been since Collected Visions, but Warhammer isn’t a story. It’s toys. The point of toys is to be sold to the maximum number of kids. The lore is a bunch of darts thrown at a wall to make you buy toys. Star Wars is toys. Transformers are toys. Marvel is toys. They are all trying to sell toys. 40K isn’t trying to teach you to be a better person, like Lord of the Rings. It’s not warning you about the dangers of groupthink, like 1984. It’s selling you toys dressed as Lord of the Rings and 1984. So if you don’t like some of the bits on the sprue now, we just have to do what we told people for years to do, make our own - no one is stopping us. The online spaces will never heal from the social media wars and distrust. The internet isn’t inclusive, no one is wanted here, everyone is just a profile picture to unload your anger at the world on. The best we can hope for is to enjoy seeing cool models wading through the sludge of culture war posts. 

Edited April 16 by Marshal Rohr

[Scribe]

13 minutes ago, Marshal Rohr said:

The online spaces will never heal from the social media wars and distrust. The internet isn’t inclusive, no one is wanted here, everyone is just a profile picture to unload your anger at the world on. The best we can hope for is to enjoy seeing cool models wading through the sludge of culture war posts. 

 

Nailed it.

[Ayatollah_of_Rock_n_Rolla]

29 minutes ago, MoriyaSchism said:

 

I really don't get this agrument. When the company that puts the product out says "This is how things are now" you can't really contradict that or pretend they never said that. I see this unreliable narrator thing and contradiction stuff only ever get brought up as an argument when new fluff some people don't like comes out. It gets used as a bludgeon against the people who don't like the change. I honestly don't get what he's saying. The last stentence makes it sound as if he's ashamed of his past workplace because it wasn't progressive enough.

 

I don't think he brings it up as an argument. I read it as an observation that back in his times lore was a lot simpler & written with different "philosophy" so such discussions would not have been possible but the times they are a'changing.

[MegaVolt87]

Its just exhausting seeing real life bleed into fandoms/ hobby spaces meant to be an escape from the grind. Leave that crap at the door and enjoy the high priced plastic + resin together, simple as. 

[gideon stargreave]

Charmingly put. I loved this era of white dwarf, and the GW company in general. That is my nostalgia time. 
he is right about the lore. Things did often contradict themselves, and to be honest we had very little to go on. A short story on inferno, a few pages of comic in warhammer monthly, side bars in WD and a codex. It gave us so much space to play out our own ideas. 
his last comment - I’m glad to see people who aren’t only like the people who played back in those days too.

[N1SB]

6 hours ago, Marshal Rohr said:

The internet isn’t inclusive, no one is wanted here...

 

Brother Rohr, are...are you saying the Internet is a big place, and whatever happens, you will not be missed?

 

Everyone, you see this?  This is someone who is so immersed in Warhammer it's like how fish don't need a word for water.  I've never seen someone so genuinely demonstrate they've achieved enlightenment via The Hobby as Brother Rohr.  We should all follow his school of thought, and just swim.

[Marshal Rohr]

I am one with the churn

[Trysanna]

It's always nice to see an artist reflect on their work with honesty and be open about how it could have been better. We all have implicit biases and no art is free from the flaws of its makers, etc etc. No work is perfect and, especially with some hindsight, it's good to acknowledge and be honest about where it could have been better. 

 

The worst thing you can do as an artist is look back at your previous work and find no faults with it, because it means you haven't grown or learned anything. If cosmic horror had never acknowledged Its issues with race (thanks Lovecraft) and tried to move past it, we would have missed out on a great genre. And hey, an open acknowledgment that 40k is and always was supposed to be contradictory and inconsistent. Look at that.

 

Since it's been brought up, it would be easier to keep these spaces free of politics if a vocal portion of the community didn't see the inclusion/presence of marginalized people as inherently political in and of itself, or if said inclusion attempts weren't seen as inherently bad and/or part of some plague upon all modern media that will ruin the setting if left unchallenged

 

Edited April 17 by TrawlingCleaner
Removal of quoted

[Mike Zulu]

I do not know who this Nick is…

 

“You never were supposed to build silos of lore…”

 

Arguably the main draw of the hobby was the “silos” of lore of the setting; it certainly was for me. Everything from the various Space Marine Chapters and their iconography, to the many battles and locales of the Imperium, to the myriad of xenos factions vying for their corners of the galaxy; all of this (and more) built upon the setting of 40k. What GW has failed to do (and possibly did so deliberately) is to properly collate this lore, leaving us to do it ourselves (Lexicanum), or for third-parties (FFG) to do it for them, albeit within their “slice” of the 40k universe.

 

“… the very idea of the Warhammer and Warhammer 40,000 universe was the history was so convoluted and fragmented there was no such thing as 'fact'”

 

There is a difference between a contradiction as a result of the passage of time or information within the setting, and a contradiction due to a failure of co-ordination between authors, past and present. I do not believe Nick understands this.

 

 

[Trysanna]

14 minutes ago, Mike Zulu said:

I do not know who this Nick is…

 

“You never were supposed to build silos of lore…”

 

Arguably the main draw of the hobby was the “silos” of lore of the setting; it certainly was for me. Everything from the various Space Marine Chapters and their iconography, to the many battles and locales of the Imperium, to the myriad of xenos factions vying for their corners of the galaxy; all of this (and more) built upon the setting of 40k. What GW has failed to do (and possibly did so deliberately) is to properly collate this lore, leaving us to do it ourselves (Lexicanum), or for third-parties (FFG) to do it for them, albeit within their “slice” of the 40k universe.

 

“… the very idea of the Warhammer and Warhammer 40,000 universe was the history was so convoluted and fragmented there was no such thing as 'fact'”

 

There is a difference between a contradiction as a result of the passage of time or information within the setting, and a contradiction due to a failure of co-ordination between authors, past and present. I do not believe Nick understands this.

 

 

I can't seem to find a list of his work, but he was a writer for White Dwarf back in the day and contributed a lot of articles to it, including quite a few hobby related pieces and articles about his own collections. (if anyone has a list of his work I'd love to see it)

 

And this might just be my interpretation of the setting, but even the contradictions due to authors missing stuff always came off as part of the inconsistency, but in a good way. Even with our own real world history, sometimes the people writing about it can't agree on what happened, facts get mixed up or misremembered. And that applies to pretty recent stuff on a single planet, can you imagine the absolute chaos of trying to keep track of anything going on in an entire galaxy? This might just be my own personal way to cope with poor writing, but it certainly makes it easier for me to not get annoyed by it.

[Daimyo-Phaeron Lenoch]

Any time I come across a lore inconsistency, whether or not I actually like or agree with it (and in this case I do, to be clear), I just mutter to myself ‘everything is canon, not everything is true’— works pretty well for me. You raise an excellent point about real-world record keeping, Trysanna, and how that would mushroom into something truly unmanageable over an empire of millions of worlds and uncountable trillions of humans. 

[Trysanna]

Just now, Daimyo-Phaeron Lenoch said:

Any time I come across a lore inconsistency, whether or not I actually like or agree with it (and in this case I do, to be clear), I just mutter to myself ‘everything is canon, not everything is true’— works pretty well for me. You raise an excellent point about real-world record keeping, Trysanna, and how that would mushroom into something truly unmanageable over an empire of millions of worlds and uncountable trillions of humans. 

Right? Like even just on a scale level it would be such a herculean effort trying to keep track of anything, never mind the fact that the Imperium is a horrible authoritarian empire that brutalizes its own population, actively alters or destroys historical records, and endless corrupt individuals making everything even worse. Plus we have 10k years of societal momentum pushing it along, and the fact that not even reality is a reliable thing to count on, not when cosmic horrors lurk just behind the veil ready to absolutely ruin your sunday afternoon. God this setting is so horrible, I love it.

[Mike Zulu]

8 minutes ago, Trysanna said:

… can you imagine the absolute chaos of trying to keep track of anything going on in an entire galaxy?

I very much agree with this, and is what I meant by the “passage of time and information”. But this still follows a

logical progression, from a single “truth” to a contradiction of facts between parties across space and time.
 

It will not accept it as an invitation to make changes at will, and to excuse the change as “The universe is meant to be contradictory,” without any thoughtful consideration as it why the contradiction has occurred within the setting. Especially when some of these changes made are blatant and against well-established lore.

 

Such as the Black Templars, as Rohr mentioned, something that also frustrated me some time ago.

[Trysanna]

1 hour ago, Mike Zulu said:

I very much agree with this, and is what I meant by the “passage of time and information”. But this still follows a

logical progression, from a single “truth” to a contradiction of facts between parties across space and time.
 

It will not accept it as an invitation to make changes at will, and to excuse the change as “The universe is meant to be contradictory,” without any thoughtful consideration as it why the contradiction has occurred within the setting. Especially when some of these changes made are blatant and against well-established lore.

 

Such as the Black Templars, as Rohr mentioned, something that also frustrated me some time ago.

I totally get not liking certain changes, I'm not particularly found of that one myself, and I definitely have my own preferences when it comes to parts of the setting. The words Spiritual Liege still cause me psychic damage.

 

What I always took away from the mess of inconsistencies within the lore is that, ultimately, I get to decide what is true within my own version of the setting. Like, we all have a basic framework to build from, but unlike other settings/stories, events and characterization and even fundamentals of whole factions are up for debate. Like, sure, some new books say that Guilliman is back, but is he? Is that a reliable truth within my version of 40k, or is that just nonsense rumours by the babbling masses. Some people are saying Cadia is gone, but madmen have been saying that for thousands of years, why should I believe them now? And yeah, I suppose those events could both be considered hard facts of the setting, but I like to view everything within 40k as supplemental and up for debate. I'm an active participant in what this setting is. I get to have my own version of it, and it's just as valid as anyone else interpretation because we, as players, were always meant to interpret the setting for ourselves and make it our own. As another example, the Necrons got their backstory changed, but the information presented could have just been some Imperial scholar who likes to talk too much making stuff up about a race he knows nothing about and has no authority on. Maybe they are, in fact, still slaves to eldritch star gods and the commonly accepted truth is wrong?

 

You play a role in it in a pretty unique way. In a video game or TTRPG you play a characters on the stage, but with 40k it's more like an archivist or historian. You have all these stories and reports and books all contradicting each other and new information comes to you from a variety of sources and somehow you, personally, have to make sense of it all. I might be explaining the joke here but that's what I keep in mind when dealing with this setting. 40k has this really unique aspect to it, I appreciate it as an insufferable art nerd.

Edited April 17 by Trysanna
forgot a word

[Robbienw]

It came off as a bit preachy (this is the correct way to enjoy the hobby vibe) and self congratulatory to be honest.

 

Liked his picture of the Imperial Guard army from the 3rd edition codex though, all metal Cadian armies, those were the days, direct hit to the nostalgia gland 

Edited April 17 by Robbienw

[Redcomet]

Lore is always in flux. Especially these days as our society is going through changes and older IP’s are getting polished up for new generations.

 

I will agree with Alanah Pearce, who in a video talked about how she used to get angry and upset, when things didn’t stick with some strict lore, but now she just picks what goes into her personal canon and lore. 
 

I do the same with Star Wars, my main nerdy interest. Some of the content I have consumed just didn’t float my boat and the changes it brought to the lore, I really didn’t like. So I just ignore it as part of my head canon.

 

Getting angry over changes is just a waste of time to me.

[Marshal Reinhard]

I wish I could both disagree and agree with a post at the same time. I'm with you that part of the hobby is making the setting your own. Always been a part of it, especially in the sense of "your guys". You can do anything with that. You essentially bringing your own little fanfiction into the greater whole.

 

But you lose me when you start talking about denying the return of Guiliman, or the destruction of Cadia. Now you're firmly in fanfiction territory. Which is.. ok? Fine? You do you. But you've lost all applicability towards the rest of the fandom. If the argument is "my headcanon can be what I want it to be", then sure? But it will be firmly ignored by everything going forward.

Edited April 17 by Marshal Reinhard

[Trysanna]

Just now, Marshal Reinhard said:

I wish I could both disagree and agree with a post at the same time. I'm with you that part of the hobby is making the setting your own. Always been a part of it, especially in the sense of "your guys". You can do anything with that. You essentially bringing your own little fanfiction into the greater whole.

 

But you lose me when you start talking about denying the return of Guiliman, or the destruction of Cadia. Now you're firmly in fanfiction territory. Which is.. ok? Fine? You do you. But you've lost all applicability towards the rest of the fandom. If the argument is "my headcanon can be what I want it to be", then sure? But it will be firmly ignore by everything going forward.

I used those as a pretty extreme example to illustrate my point. Truth isn't as concrete and unshakable in this setting as it is in others, and to a certain degree it's all fanfiction, because we decide what's cannon. I can go back to my 3rd edition rulebook and say this is the cannon version because even though it might not be the most recent version of 40k, it's still a version and just as valid as any other. And sure, my cannon might get ignored by whatever comes next, but I'm okay with that. It's not all for me, and I'm perfectly happy focusing on the things I like and ignoring what doesn't work for me. I like to think of it as an active conversation instead of holy scripture. The word I keep coming back to is active participant, because I want to emphasize the personal aspect of interacting with 40k.
 

[Marshal Reinhard]

Just now, Trysanna said:

I used those as a pretty extreme example to illustrate my point. Truth isn't as concrete and unshakable in this setting as it is in others, and to a certain degree it's all fanfiction, because we decide what's cannon. I can go back to my 3rd edition rulebook and say this is the cannon version because even though it might not be the most recent version of 40k, it's still a version and just as valid as any other. And sure, my cannon might get ignored by whatever comes next, but I'm okay with that. It's not all for me, and I'm perfectly happy focusing on the things I like and ignoring what doesn't work for me. I like to think of it as an active conversation instead of holy scripture. The word I keep coming back to is active participant, because I want to emphasize the personal aspect of interacting with 40k.
 

Again, you can do what you want. Always been the case, but the cost of this complete freedom, is it also stops being shared at the point when it starts contradicting what's true for others.

 

I guess that's the extent of my point.