The setting at present

[Antarius]

 

I’ve said this before, but one of the big problems here is actually that 40K, as a setting, stopped having a story. It stopped having a direction or an arc or a comprehensible “present”. There’s a lot of plots - so many plots! - but they don’t lead anywhere, or even feel like they ever will.

I think that's a good way of putting it.

It's not that I think it really makes sense to point to a specific point where I said "ok, that's it, I'm out" but the part in Rise of the Primarch (or whatever it was called) where Cypher reaches Earth and then ...nothing... happens was a bit of a revelation.

I mean, it would have been totally fine for him to never actually get there, but to take a big, long-running plot like that and just let its climax be a big pile of nothing, before functionally returning to the status quo (as far as I can tell he's back to running around the galaxy and being chased by Dark Angels for "reasons") really made me think that it's a bit like the "Lost" series and the writers don't really know where they're going with this, but are just throwing new stuff at the wall all the time. Which is sort of oddly okay, when the setting is frozen in time, but markedly less so when there's the illusion that the story is moving forward.

Edited September 11 by Antarius

[One Paul Murray]

I agree with lots of what has been said on here, to be honest. 

 

Before the fall of Cadia, Primaris / RG's return and all that jazz, the setting seemed fairly stable. The value that gave you was that you was that there wasn't a focal point that you had to keep your eye on, so you could go wherever you wanted as a writer and deepen the lore. Someone mentioned the Imperial Armour doing just that, but there were also the Codexes dropping  bread crumbs of lore that you might find interesting, such as the War of the False Primarch or the Abyssal Crusade. Just as a bit of mystery.

 

All the integrated books around the Sabbat Worlds crusade that I've read were really good. The Iron Snakes books in general are some of the most enjoyable Marine books I've read too. The whole thing felt like a contained story that the authors could do what they wanted with, they could kill any characters they liked, really. The scope was smaller.

 

One of the reasons I think the Eisenhorn and Ravenor books that I've read are so good is because the stakes feel smaller. You know GW isn't going to kill RG and the Ultramarines, but they could kill the Iron Snakes, or have Eisenhorn fall to chaos, or see the planet that he's trying to save sacked into the warp.

 

As soon as you get back to taking forward the main narrative I think you start to lose some of the intrigue. Nobody expects to see Calgar, Abaddon or Dante die. All the Loyalists are going to survive to get new Primaris sculpts. This limits the jeopardy and limits the scope for me.

 

I'm not sure whether the time hop and retcon of 100 years back and forth was an attempt to give their artists a canvas to draw their stories onto, but I think something like that could be very useful again. 

 

[Arkangilos]

I don’t think it helps that everything seems to be the same chapters and regiments everywhere. 
 

Cadian Remnants? In every war.

Main Space Marine chapters? Same ones everywhere.

I think something that would help the setting is growing the scale so we hear of Cadians and such less, and hearing of other ones more.

 

Honestly, what I kinda wish they would have done is make a new Imperial Guard standard, which could be based off Cadian gear or off of the older style models (the old metal ones) as a, “Crusade” type force, where they were standardized in some degree but maintain customization options based on operations. (Jungle operation regiments would follow the Catachan model, Desert would follow Tallarn, Winter the Valhallan, etc.), and the space marines would follow gene line (Codex Blood Angels would become Sons of Sanguinius, for example, with Templars and Fists being Sons of Dorn). Customization would still be a thing. The reason for the rebranding would be specifically for a psychological aspect. That would be that people would stop thinking of “Blood Angels” and “Cadians” being everywhere and instead, “Sons of Sanguinius fought in X Campaign with the Astra-Militarum Jungle Regiments.” Then it makes it bigger because it’s not the same chapter and destroyed planet (or small death world) fighting across the ENTIRE galaxy.

I could be wrong, but I feel like it would cultivate making a more diverse setting.

Edited September 12 by Arkangilos

[Scribe]

 

I think that's a good way of putting it.

It's not that I think it really makes sense to point to a specific point where I said "ok, that's it, I'm out" but the part in Rise of the Primarch (or whatever it was called) where Cypher reaches Earth and then ...nothing... happens was a bit of a revelation.

I mean, it would have been totally fine for him to never actually get there, but to take a big, long-running plot like that and just let its climax be a big pile of nothing, before functionally returning to the status quo (as far as I can tell he's back to running around the galaxy and being chased by Dark Angels for "reasons") really made me think that it's a bit like the "Lost" series and the writers don't really know where they're going with this, but are just throwing new stuff at the wall all the time. Which is sort of oddly okay, when the setting is frozen in time, but markedly less so when there's the illusion that the story is moving forward.

 

Exactly, and how any new plastic character is going to have a massive heaping helping of plot armour, right up until its time to Legends them.

 

The a metaplot is just so unnecessary for 40K to really shine.

[calgar101]

Some good posts above. To me it is definitely feeling more of an active story now rather than a setting, and I feel it's for the worse. Perhaps if they didn't always use the same old characters, this might feel better? 

Everything being pushed lots, is cheapening the setting in my opinion as lots of 'major' things being pushed at once. This is doubtless being driven from the higher ups for sales.

[Gamiel]

 

I’ve said this before, but one of the big problems here is actually that 40K, as a setting, stopped having a story. It stopped having a direction or an arc or a comprehensible “present”. There’s a lot of plots - so many plots! - but they don’t lead anywhere, or even feel like they ever will.

Was not one of the main complaints of old that the setting was just stomping on the same spot without anything really happening?

 

Also, I think there's a real upside with all the many different plots since that gives people lots of different conflicts and settings to have their stories in that are a bit more then a mention in a Codex timeline about something that happened centuries ago. And many of those new conflict zones comes with rules to make each campaign different.

 

 

[Kallas]

 

Was not one of the main complaints of old that the setting was just stomping on the same spot without anything really happening?

I think some of that type of complaints stemmed from the writers trying to cram everything into M41, meaning 9XX.M41 is just absolutely jam packed with stuff, because nobody wanted to breach the millenium. It was the whole '30 seconds to midnight' sensation, a constant edging of the setting, "Everything is gonna kick off when it ticks over!" kind of thing.

[Deus_Ex_Machina]

 

For a futuristic wargame not enough people die.

In older lore it was easier to kill or simply 'uninvent' Yarrick, Tycho, that Salamanders chaplain, Solar Macharius, Doomrider, Nazdreg and the like because the story was new enough that no one had a vested interest in whether or not such and such survives.

 

To my way of thinking, each big character reveal should coincide with the death of something else that has at least an impact.

Magnus returns - Ragnar Blackmane dies. Guilliman returns and wipes out Hive Fleet Jormungandr, the Lion destroys the Red Corsairs, Abaddon virus bombs Catachan, Jain Zarr kills a famous Tau, Vect returns and kills a necron world, the Silent King returns and destroys a big forge world that isn't Mars and so on. 

Something big but also ripe for the chopping block, like nuking the old Ragnar Blackmane model to promote Magnus' return, or knowing that Krieg are going to overtake Catachan as the 2nd IG regiment, so it is sacrificed to advance the lore.

 

Blowing up Cadia and the return of Guilliman was a big deal - especially the blowing up Cadia part. Guilliman's return was, IMO of course, overshadowed by the Primaris Marines and the Shark Jumping that that entailed. 

If Guilliman had returned and simply commissioned brand new super duper armour but the marines inside were still 'firstborn' then I'd have been much more on board with new40k.

ABBAddon bombing Catachan?! That won´t happen even if 40K had multiverses like DC comics does. Each time ABBAddon tries to press the red button in an alternate universe Sly Marbo appears behind him, pins his hand to the command console with his combat knife while spouting wise words:

 

"The enemy can´t push a button, if you disable his hand. ABBAddon, this was your Waterloo."

 

Classic 40K lore by the way.

[Karhedron]

 

That being said, I personally vastly preferred when 40K was a setting, not a storyline. But luckily noone's forcing me to engage with modern 40K lore, if I'd rather not. So my view is that it's there for those who want it and the old lore is (still) there for those who prefer that.

 

Funnily enough, 40K was a storyline up until around the end of 3rd edition. There was a definite linear progression of events. Armageddon 2, the 1st Tyrannic War, the Gothic War, the Necron awakening, the 1st Sphere expansion, Armageddon 3, the 13th Black Crusade. GW had strongly implied that the outcome of the 13th BC campaign would strongly influence the direction of fluff in 4th edition but then they backpedalled. Everything from 4th until the end of 7th was just frozen and static for over a decade.

 

Personally, I found the Gathering Storm felt like a return to the good old days but that probably just dates me as a player to my own personal golden age. 

[Lexington]

 

Was not one of the main complaints of old that the setting was just stomping on the same spot without anything really happening?

Sure, but people often weren’t thinking that through. They wanted the confrontations to come to a head, the sacred seals to be ripped away and have the big dangling prophecies fulfilled, but what happens after that? The thing with resolutions is that they resolve stuff. If GW had done it right, according to the promises and internal story logic of the setting, there wouldn’t be any more 40K afterwards.

 

So, of course, they did it wrong and gave us lots of Big Drama without any real resolution. GW tried to have their cake and eat it, too, and is now left listlessly pushing the crumbs around.

 

 

Also, I think there's a real upside with all the many different plots since that gives people lots of different conflicts and settings to have their stories in that are a bit more then a mention in a Codex timeline about something that happened centuries ago. And many of those new conflict zones comes with rules to make each campaign different.

I mean…40K’s always had that, right? It’s a huge setting of a million-plus worlds and conflicts. Giving players the space to go do what they want was kind of the point. If anything, there’s much less room for that now that every campaign and story has to pretend that it has galactic consequences.

Edited September 12 by Lexington

[SvenIronhand]

 

Sure, but people often weren’t thinking that through. They wanted the confrontations to come to a head, the sacred seals to be ripped away and have the big dangling prophecies fulfilled, but what happens after that? The thing with resolutions is that they resolve stuff. If GW had done it right, according to the promises and internal story logic of the setting, there wouldn’t be any more 40K afterwards.

 

The thing about millenarianism is that it ends in a Great Disappointment.

[Marshal Rohr]

 

Sure, but people often weren’t thinking that through. They wanted the confrontations to come to a head, the sacred seals to be ripped away and have the big dangling prophecies fulfilled, but what happens after that? The thing with resolutions is that they resolve stuff. If GW had done it right, according to the promises and internal story logic of the setting, there wouldn’t be any more 40K afterwards.

 

So, of course, they did it wrong and gave us lots of Big Drama without any real resolution. GW tried to have their cake and eat it, too, and is now left listlessly pushing the crumbs around.

 

I mean…40K’s always had that, right? It’s a huge setting of a million-plus worlds and conflicts. Giving players the space to go do what they want was kind of the point. If anything, there’s much less room for that now that every campaign and story has to pretend that it has galactic consequences.

You can’t write a good story around sales and marketing projection. Primarchs returning piecemeal to satisfy a quarter’s bottom line is the kind of decision only GW managers could make and only 40K fans would put up with. 

[Gamiel]

 

Sure, but people often weren’t thinking that through. They wanted the confrontations to come to a head, the sacred seals to be ripped away and have the big dangling prophecies fulfilled, but what happens after that? The thing with resolutions is that they resolve stuff. If GW had done it right, according to the promises and internal story logic of the setting, there wouldn’t be any more 40K afterwards.

 

So, of course, they did it wrong and gave us lots of Big Drama without any real resolution. GW tried to have their cake and eat it, too, and is now left listlessly pushing the crumbs around.

Based on what I have seen of our fandom so could they have done exactly as you suggest and just as many people would have complained and have declared what they did as bad, wrong, and/or stupid.

 

Personally I liked what they did. They gave Chaos a big, big win and then created reasons to why the Imperium just did not fold, and gave us the players/painters a reason to have successors to Legions that it has been said to lack successors. That we also got bigger marines is a plus.

 

 

 

I mean…40K’s always had that, right? It’s a huge setting of a million-plus worlds and conflicts. Giving players the space to go do what they want was kind of the point. If anything, there’s much less room for that now that every campaign and story has to pretend that it has galactic consequences.

Feel like you missed the "that are a bit more then a mention in a Codex timeline about something that happened centuries ago. And many of those new conflict zones comes with rules to make each campaign different" part of my comment.

 

 

 

[Antarius]

 

You can’t write a good story around sales and marketing projection. Primarchs returning piecemeal to satisfy a quarter’s bottom line is the kind of decision only GW managers could make and only 40K fans would put up with. 

I absolutely agree on the first part, but I do think lots of companies make similar decisions and lots of fans of other franchises put up with similar stuff.

[Jscarlos18]

Yeah, I share the sentiment of the lore not feeling like it has these very big events happening that change the setting or factions in small or monumental ways. Status quo is king for 40k, with the exception of when justifying adding new units to the tabletop. Until 8th the galaxy was mostly unaltered and even blowing Cadia didn't affect the regiment and models still being in the universe.

 

Advancing the story-line had not been a priority for GW until very recently.

 

Primarchs returning seem to only matter in the lore for campaign and BL books being released. As a xenos fan, I dread their come back because I know that GW and the fans will only care about them and their stories. They are lore black holes, dragging every other faction away/towards them. Look at the Ynnari, used to bring back Guilliman and quickly discarded soon after due to poor sales and an awful lore dead-end with Phoenix Rising with their purpose done.

 

Lion literally got his first novel a month after his model release, meaning GW had already commissioned an author to write about him way before Arks of Omen, while LoV are only now getting their own story outside codex 2-3 years later.

 

Pariah Nexus is only now having new lore with a small addition in the Crusade supplement that has paused once more, when the concept/plot-beat was mentioned first in Psychic Awakening and re-visited on 9th edition's launch.

 

It's not strange, since lore is secondary to model releases and its not their priority. 40k is more about the concept of Your Dudes, telling their stories and GW is just providing you with the current state of the setting to tell the deeds your characters have done.

 

In the end, while there's plot and more recently an advancement of the storyline, GW doesn't want and will not make much progress in that department and it will move at a snail's pace due to all following the release of new/updated models.

 

Like you mentioned, others have also noticed that GW seems to be doing the bare minimum in the codexes. The lore in them has been painfully basic, just a re-tread of things we already know, just giving the basic of the factions and not much else. For example:

• In the Tyranid codex I have, the Hive Fleets and their individual deal are now short corner blurbs when in previous editions were full pages for each one. There's also no bestiary with the new units and what purpose would serve in the great scheme of the swarm beyond short descriptions in their datasheets. Less lore for the same price, since it seems now the codex are only for rules (that almost always are outdated before release) and not much else.

Edited September 15 by Jscarlos18

[Gamiel]

 

Pariah Nexus is only now having new lore with a small addition in the Crusade supplement that has paused once more, when the concept/plot-beat was mentioned first in Psychic Awakening and re-visited on 9th edition's launch.

"only now having new lore" just wondering, where is your point of reference for when the old lore ended?

[Jscarlos18]

 

"only now having new lore" just wondering, where is your point of reference for when the old lore ended?

9th edition Indomitus box I think

[Gamiel]

 

9th edition Indomitus box I think

Thanks. With that established do I have to disagree with you, the Pariah Nexus had many White Dwarf Flashpoint articles about the conflict, a Kill Team box, one novel and one novella,*  and one animated series. (And possibly more that I have missed.) So I would say that there have been new lore regarding the Nexus since the Indomitus box.

 

*both from 2020 so they may count into your timeframe regarding when the old lore ended

[ZeroWolf]

There was a Pariah Nexus novel?

[Gamiel]

 

There was a Pariah Nexus novel?

Indomitus 

"Drawn to a stricken world, the Ultramarines of Crusade Fleet Quintus, believed by many to be cursed, face a stark choice – fight a desperate last stand or doom a sector to warn the Imperium of the rise of a new Necron empire in the Pariah Nexus."

 

More of a prequel I admit since it take place befoer the big crusade is launched but after the Necrons have begun their campaign. 

 

Edited September 16 by Gamiel

[Antarius]

 

 

Funnily enough, 40K was a storyline up until around the end of 3rd edition. There was a definite linear progression of events. Armageddon 2, the 1st Tyrannic War, the Gothic War, the Necron awakening, the 1st Sphere expansion, Armageddon 3, the 13th Black Crusade. GW had strongly implied that the outcome of the 13th BC campaign would strongly influence the direction of fluff in 4th edition but then they backpedalled. Everything from 4th until the end of 7th was just frozen and static for over a decade.

 

Personally, I found the Gathering Storm felt like a return to the good old days but that probably just dates me as a player to my own personal golden age. 

I see what you mean, and it’s possible that “a setting, not a storyline” is too concise a way of putting it to really be true, at least in the minutiae, but I do think it’s mostly true. It’s partly a question of how things are presented, of course, but I do think that there is a difference in the types of stories they tell now, as opposed to then. Armageddon was important, but it was always just one planet among thousands; Cadia was always built up as the lynchpin of the imperium’s defence against chaos. Tycho was a great hero but he could die without it really impacting the setting; Guilliman is the hero and has actually reshaped the setting.

 

The way I see it, Warhammer 40.000 as a setting always had a timeline (with lots of little stories crammed in all over that timeline) and it always had stories that felt momentous, but it rarely, if ever, had a unified storyline or a storyline that purported to change the setting as a whole (the 13th black crusade is notable to me, precisely because it’s an example of them backpedaling when they realise they have gone too far). All the little lore tidbits and prophetic events or looming catastrophes always pointed towards a future that would never be and it worked very well (“mostly” and “for a time”, one might add).

 

 I tend to think of 40ks pointing towards the coming millennium  like the casual mention of the clone wars in the original Star Wars movie; it’s evocative of a deep and rich universe beyond the specific story and it gives our imagination a lot to work with, but we really didn’t  need to actually see what was behind the veil.

 

I loved the old story of Guilliman’s wounds (maybe) slowly healing while he was in stasis, because it was so perfectly Warhammer 40.000, whether you chose to believe that it was superstition and wishful thinking or the literal truth - but him actually returning was bound to disappoint.

 

It’s similar to how, the whole “Abaddon never does anything lol” take on the setting is a fundamental problem only for those storytellers and fans who have fundamentally missed the point of the setting. Abaddon is awesome but we will never actually see him do the thing that he is prophesied to do, because it would end the game. The big finale will never arrive but it is certain nonetheless - and just around the corner- and therein lies the beauty of it all.

Edited September 16 by Antarius

[sairence]

I wonder how much of this sense that the new lore isn't up to snuff has to do with modern society, interconnectedness and the fast pace of online life.

 

Like...people's general expectations of how quickly an update to something should happen, or how big it needs to be, are vastly different to what they were 20 years ago. People's sense of scale and related expectarions are very different now.

"A thousand Psykers a day are sacrificed to the Golden Throne" was meant to be a terrifying, unimaginably cruel number when it was conceived. Nowadays it doesn't really raise too many eyebrows.

 

I've only been around the game since  7th, but even that feels like a very different time in terms of what is being released for the game as well as how much more closer I personally engage with it.

 

[Karhedron]

I think one reason for complaint against newer lore is that the background was much vaguer in the past. We all filled in the blanks with our own head-canon. Now it is firmly defined exactly what that background is, a lot of feel it doesn't match up to what out imaginations provided all those years ago.

[Kallas]

 

I think one reason for complaint against newer lore is that the background was much vaguer in the past. We all filled in the blanks with our own head-canon. Now it is firmly defined exactly what that background is, a lot of feel it doesn't match up to what out imaginations provided all those years ago.

This is sort of the reason I really dislike the Horus Heresy novels. It took away all of the mystique and unknowable-ness of the past, which was kind of where the religiosity and mysticism of the Imperium stems from: that long-dead past that is so far removed from the present that there was no way of truly knowing what happened...and then we get a ton of novel that details tons of what happened. Now, people are of course free to like what they wrote, I'm just saying that they did "fill in the blanks." It's especially true of the Primarchs: they were previously these demigods that were paragons of certain aspects of humanity (or at least warfare), and while they certainly had their foibles, it was told through legend and tale - and then with the Heresy novels (and beyond, for those that have returned) we see so much more detail that, well, they're kind of just people now; they're minutely detailed, they're no longer the mythic figures of yore that they were.

 

It's seen in other media - people want more detail on background events, but then we get swamped in more sequels and spin offs and people inevitably get bored. Marvel is a great exaample: people absolutely wanted more, but then we got too much and people start to lose interest (to varying degrees of course) as the volume of media expands. To be fair, not all of the loss of interest is because of the increased scope, plenty of it can be attributed to simple fatigue (with Marvel, once you've seen a dozen superhero films, you start seeing more of the same story beats over and over again).

 

But my point about 40k is that we've gotten so much media about the Heresy (and other small, zoomed in details) or other of great events (Indomitus Crusade) that we lose that spark of interest: part of the allure of these events is their mystery. What happened on Prospero? What happened exactly during the Siege of the Imperial Palace? Instead of being able to think about these things for hours and have debates about what possibly could have happened we have definitive answers, and we get them through direct stories rather than, say, a conversation between two bitter rivals in the 41st Millenium (eg, maybe there's Thousand Son who taunts a Space Wolf about killing a bunch on Prospero; or a Fallen trying to convert a Dark Angel by telling them what they saw, be it true or false).

 

Anyway, all that to say that I think filling in the blanks of some stuff has definitely taken away from the setting overall. Many stories are excellent because of the detail (Gaunt's Ghosts, for example), but they're not fundamentally central to the story.

[Jscarlos18]

 

 

Thanks. With that established do I have to disagree with you, the Pariah Nexus had many White Dwarf Flashpoint articles about the conflict, a Kill Team box, one novel and one novella,*  and one animated series. (And possibly more that I have missed.) So I would say that there have been new lore regarding the Nexus since the Indomitus box.

 

*both from 2020 so they may count into your timeframe regarding when the old lore ended

I don't read White Dwarf, so didn't know they gave more lore on it there. I talked about Pariah Nexus because was one of the story-lines I could think of that gave us a campaign book about their lore advancing recently.