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

[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.

 

 

[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. 

[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.

[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

[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.

[Marshal Reinhard]

3 minutes ago, Trysanna said:

I feel like that was already the case though? I can guarantee that our personal versions of 40k are different and probably contradict each other, but we're still able to talk about it and work from a shared understanding of the setting. Dragging this metaphor out a bit more, we're all historians trying to piece this setting together, and like real world historians, not all of us are going to agree. There's a pretty agreed upon framework, but like every rulebooks version of the setting being a bit off, all of our own versions are going to be off too.

Well for certainly they do, as you are not me or vice versa.

 

I think we agree in large part. A point where we might not is just how encompassing this agreed upon framework is. I'd guess my idea of the shared framework is so detailed that it includes the return of Guilliman and the destruction of Cadia, it's not something I feel like I can just write out, regardless of how I feel about these events.

[Robbienw]

40k is a setting.  I find rather than trying to headcannon changes I dislike to the 'current 40k time' that GW is at, instead I concentrate on earlier eras of the setting and the lore from earlier periods of GW.  You can still share this with others if you want to because you will find many fans who also like earlier periods and ignore 'current 40k'.

 

 

[TrawlingCleaner]

=][= Let's stick to the topic folks. If a comment breaks our rules, please report it and we will deal with it =][=

[Matcap86]

29 minutes ago, Trysanna said:

Totally fair! I recognize those are both extreme examples and are a bit of a push, but I just like how malleable this setting it. It's a really interesting aspect I haven't seen anywhere else besides maybe being a GM in TTRPGs? I like how it mimics our real world problems with figuring out historical truths and the like. Also, y'know, this way I get to ignore everything that made the Templars boring

 

 

 

To a point I find I do the same, but like real world historians I do have issues with someone stating for example "The US Civil War didn't happen." or "The Roman Empire has never fallen". Interpretations and filling in gaps I'm all for, but at some point there needs to be a coherent shared framework to engage with others. 

 

I'm all for diversity and representation in the 40k universe, but (for me personally) I'd expect that to happen in the "regular people" factions. Which for me form the reference point as the "Human experience" compared to all of the bizarre stuff that's out there.

All genetically modified forces are so over the top and dialed to 11 (as is 40k's wont) that I have a hard time reconciling modern identity and cultural frames applying to them. 

Edited April 17 by Matcap86

[Redcomet]

7 minutes ago, Matcap86 said:

 

To a point I find I do the same, but like real world historians I do have issues with someone stating for example "The US Civil War didn't happen." or "The Roman Empire has never fallen". Interpretations and filling in gaps I'm all for, but at some point there needs to be a coherent shared framework to engage with others. 

 

I'm all for diversity and representation in the 40k universe, but (for me personally) I'd expect that to happen in the "regular people" factions. Which for me form the reference point as the "Human experience" compared to all of the bizarre stuff that's out there.

All genetically modified forces are so over the top and dialed to 11 (as is 40k's wont) that I have a hard time reconciling modern identity and cultural frames applying to them. 

For Marines yes, they are so crudely enhanced that they become coarse and lumpen.

 

Custodes are individually crafted to be perfect beings, so completely different.