If you could change anything in the lore what would you change?

[Kaede45]

Full disclosure, this is kind of a way to promote the club I made & hopefully stir up interest; but it is also a valid question for me to ask.

 

There is a lot of “controversy” surrounding changing… well, ANYTHING in the lore. Of them, while some are justly criticized, others may be blown out of proportion. I’m relatively new to WH40K so I don’t have as great of a connection to the lore as others, but I have some opinions on what could be changed & I'm sure I’m not alone in that regards.

 

For instance, I kinda wish there was more Human-Xenos cooperation. I’m not saying that they all should hold hands & sing Kumbaya, but it would be cool if there were alliances between 2 or more factions/sub-factions.

I would also like it if the Tyrannids had more personality. They’re portrayed as an apocalyptic threat, yet they’ve had no meaningful victories on any known worlds. All the worlds they’ve conquered are just random names with no real connections to the story except as Tyrannid fodder. It would be cooler if the Hivemind was less United. Like the different hive fleets have different Hiveminds that work towards a common goal, but are often opposed in their methodology.

 

These are just a few things I’d consider changing, but what do the rest of y’all think? Is there something in the lore that you'd change for one reason or another? Do you think any of my ideas are worth considering? Let me know!

As always, thank you very much for your time & God bless!

[Scribe]

Oh I'll be back for this one, assuming it survives my work day.

[phandaal]

33 minutes ago, Scribe said:

Oh I'll be back for this one, assuming it survives my work day.

 

I'll save you some time and summarize using my precognitive abilities:

 

Guy 1: I want to roll the lore back to pre-8th Edition.

 

Guy 2: PRIMARIS HATER REEEEE

 

Guy 1: OH YEAH??

 

*ANGERY COMMENTS FOLLOW*

 

God bless and enjoy your day. 

 

Edited September 30 by phandaal

[AvePicante]

I can't stand the idea of perpetuals, it seems so lazy. "Our super special character can live for 40,000 years and if he dies he just comes back because shut up." Do I have a better idea? Absolutely not. Or even make the Emperor the only perpetual, just one, he's a freak of nature and no others exist. Maybe Vulkan, he can be gene edited using the Emperor's DNA, but he comes back wrong when he dies, like just a little more tainted every time.

 

1 hour ago, Kaede45 said:

It would be cooler if the Hivemind was less United. Like the different hive fleets have different Hiveminds that work towards a common goal, but are often opposed in their methodology.

 

This is just the Leagues of Votann but space bug. I think Tyranids are fine as is, they're mindless creatures. Of course they're going to be portrayed as losing a lot, there are no survivors to tell of the times when the Tyranids win.

[Scribe]

34 minutes ago, AvePicante said:

I can't stand the idea of perpetuals, it seems so lazy.

 

Oh we going to 30K roots?!?

[ZeroWolf]

1 hour ago, phandaal said:

 

I'll save you some time and summarize using my precognitive abilities:

 

Guy 1: I want to roll the lore back to pre-8th Edition.

 

Guy 2: PRIMARIS HATER REEEEE

 

Guy 1: OH YEAH??

 

*ANGERY COMMENTS FOLLOW*

 

God bless and enjoy your day. 

 

You haven't got the lottery results as well have you by any chance 

 

Im all for the Nids staying as they currently are. They're a nice case of the unknownable, and that needs to stay. Not every army needs a personality, at least one should just be a force of nature.

 

Now, to what I'd change...I'd probably try and find a way for pre-5th Edition Necron lore to co-exist with post-5th Edition because there was some fun stuff that got retconned out of existence by that change. Only way I could see it was that the C'tan werent defeated but badly hurt (including their egos) and had managed to escape with a portion of the Necron race still in thrall to them.

[The Praetorian of Inwit]

The Tyranids need to be an unknownable force of nature beyond human comprehension or understanding. That is what truly makes them a threat. They are truly alien whereas Orks, Necrons, Aeldari etc have motivations we can understand and humanoid forms. 

 

I'd like the Terminus Decree changed to something that isn't ass. No way are 1000 GK (if they can even assemble that many) are getting past several thousand Custodes, Let alone all the other defenders. How are GK even supposed to stop the Emperor when the Dark King was on Chaos god level power. 

[Scribe]

The super basic ones.

 

HH

 

Ravenguard Retcons - DELETED with extreme prejudice. Horrible books. Ninja Marines in full armour? Get out.

Salamanders - Nearly all of that lore? DELETED. VULKAN LIV...BLAM. No. No. Just horrible.

Perpetuals? - Horrific. DELETED and never to be mentioned again. Absolutely terrible.

Ol - Should have just been a Guardsman. Oh and remember the whole 'totally not Catholic' trash? Never mentioned. One of the few things Abnett self corrected on.

 

(Lets not even open the door on The End and The Death of my interest in anything he ever writes again).

 

Oh, Prospero Burns? DELETED. It was done way better in Thousand Sons. Executioners, what a horrible entry into the canon.

 

I'm sure more will come to me, but I have a talent for tossing bad lore into a mental blackhole.

 

40K

 

YIKES.

 

Cawl - DELETED

Primaris - Just upscaled mini's, a new armour mark, thanks, goodbye.

Robs Resurrection - No. The whole of that Ynarri arc? No. DELETED. He healed. He got better. That was always the lore. We didnt need the Eldar, and we SURE dont need Ynarri. DELETED. See how the Lion just woke up? Like he was supposed to? Thats how you do it....oh wait, the 'Forgiven' or whatever. GROSS. DELETED.

 

Haley Books - Emperor in the Garden of Nurgle?! GET.OUT. DELETED.

 

One the plus side, its actually so easy to fix most of the massive mistakes GW has made since 8th. On the other hand, some of their choices were just so bad.

[OnePaulMurray]

It's hard to say what would be deleted, but a general thing that I would like tweaking about 40k is that in-universe things need to make sense, and sometimes they don't as a means of selling the grim and the dark.

 

For instance; travel through the warp can't be as dangerous as it's made out, people wouldn't do it. You certainly wouldn't have merchants chugging space lanes if one in every hundred journeys was going to kill them, they'd stick to in-system travel.

 

Scale the power of races appropriately too. If 10 Iron Snakes can lock shields and kill 1,000 Dark Eldar, then there is no way that a lord is coming along who can 1-on-1 Priad. Makes no sense.

[Scribe]

Before I forget, whoever had the Terra Nightlords, coming from hive prison caves, and specialize in terror?

 

I'll blame French, hold the L sir.

 

Erda?!? ROFL, DELETED. 

 

World Spirit of Fenris protecting the Space Wolves, I think that was just a hallucination right?!

[SvenIronhand]

Make Iyanna Arienal the Ynnari leader.

[Scribe]

IRON HANDS JUST WANT TO GET BACK TO THEIR FEELINGS.

 

NUKED FROM ORBIT.

 

You mean it wasn't @SvenIronhand someone actually wrote that?! DELETE.

[Kallas]

5 hours ago, The Praetorian of Inwit said:

I'd like the Terminus Decree changed to something that isn't ass.

 

For me, I think this boils down to a lot of problems I have with the lore since the Heresy novels started up: stop demystifying everything. I actually don't want to know what Dorn had for breakfast during the Siege of Terra; I don't want to know about Calgar's dental health; I don't want to know so many things because they're more interesting when the questions aren't answered.

 

The Terminus Decree is a great example. It was meant to be an "Oh " order that only happens in the direst of circumstances, and we weren't really ever meant to find out what it is. And, inevitably, when they answered their own question, it was disappointing - it was always better left unanswered.

 

In a similar vein, but still different, the Primarchs need to  off back to the Heresy. The Daemon Primarchs? Sure, they've been around and active, that's fine, but stop bringing back all of the loyalists, the despair of the Imperium is kind of the point. Guilliman's ressurection and the Lion's return, meh. Guilliman's slow death and the hopeful "guys, he's totally healing in that stasis field!" cope were a good metaphor for humanity's desparation and need to find hope in places where it just doesn't exist so they can keep going. The Lion probably being in the bottom of The Rock, but why, was an interesting thing that let people speculate and have ideas about, and create their own stories from - bringing him back and forgiving the Fallen, bleh!

 

I know some of this will come off as old man yelling at clouds, but part of the fun of the old lore was thinking about it yourself, not being given every answer, it gave us more tools for the sandbox and the push to demystify things is only taking away from all of that (which isn't all that surprising, since GW has been moving further and further away from the "Your Guys" mindset for a long time now.)

[darkhorse0607]

This is the most catharsis @Scribe has gotten in months

[Hfran Morkai]

I'd want MkVI to go back to 'not really around during the Heresy'.

 

[chapter master 454]

I would change all the things that have been the way they are because we all hate how things are now.

I would undo all the things that were changed from what they always were because we all hate change.

 

...wait...

 

Personally if I got to just chuck one thing in the bucket: Ynnari. They were clearly meant to be the new in all in one faction for the Aeldari when we were going to Age of 40k like how fantasy did with sigmar but because of how that went down, they hard pivoted away and now the Ynnari are no longer really anything. All the markers for being such is there, hence why they were inclusive of all aeldari. I theorise that the plan was for there to be a second chaos wake where the eye of terror ripped open with Slannesh making a play for power to win the game but was contained and defeated by the actions of the ynnari who would then go on to be the last survivors of the Aeldari kind as it took the combined efforts of the entire race to not be consumed by Slannesh. They would likely go on to be a faction with notable clout among the alliance of order equal within this time-line but rarely seen fighting on any front.

 

However as it stands now, they are just another faction that is just a dead-end who had all these major end-game plot devices to go find but we now know that something like 2-3 of them are now well long gone beyond their grips and so is a just a faction that exists for a time-line that never was. 

 

By all measures, I would like to just put the terminus decree back in the box. The thing about those things is they are better when they aren't known what they are. Think Pulp Fiction, we never knew what was in the case, all we needed to know was it was important.

 

Since things come in threes, a last one:

Yarrick's death. Not because he should be immortal, but because they fridged him. Off screen, no ceremony. No grand battle...no last stand against Ghaz. Nope, apparently he is some trophy for Angron now.

Personally I love the short comic someone made of Angron meeting Ghaz: "You're going to die over a human?" "Someone iz!"

[Scribe]

38 minutes ago, chapter master 454 said:

However as it stands now, they are just another faction that is just a dead-end who had all these major end-game plot devices to go find but we now know that something like 2-3 of them are now well long gone beyond their grips and so is a just a faction that exists for a time-line that never was. 

 

Yes! I've said for so long, its just a flawed, aborted faction. It never stuck the landing and feels so insanely out of place.

[Corswain]

Yeah, as predicted, Primaris and 40k Primarchs for me. Would have been much happier if they just made a new MK and told us they were rescaling. 

And for me the appeal of Space Marines in 40K was that they were the lesser sons of greater fathers, raging against the dying of the light with no real hope of succeeding. That's gone now, sadly.

 

For those that enjoy the lore as it stands I am very happy for you, it's just not for me. 

[N1SB]

11 hours ago, ZeroWolf said:

They're a nice case of the unknownable, and that needs to stay.

 

10 hours ago, The Praetorian of Inwit said:

...an unknownable force of nature beyond human comprehension or understanding. That is what truly makes them a threat...

 

5 hours ago, Kallas said:

And, inevitably, when they answered their own question, it was disappointing - it was always better left unanswered.

 

I was told by Andy Chambers what Rick Priestley told him, "It never pays to tie up loose ends."

 

These were the original designers of 40k, from the lore to the game.  I was going to say everything EXCEPT the miniatures...except I remember the Ork Warlord Ghazghkull Thraka, mentioned above, WAS Andy Chambers's, he was a conversion he made for a White Dwarf as a sample character, it was the Warboss of his own 2,000 pts list.

 

So I'm listening to everyone, not just the ones quoted above, and what they said is so true.  Not saying this is universally the case for other games or a D&D campaign setting, but true of 40k.  40k was designed by those guys with that philosophy in mind.  The grim darkness of the far future was partly caused by this thick fog of war.

 

Don't have anything to add.  It's like it's not about a specific change in the lore, but the nature of the lore itself, that it should have remained ambiguous.

[Snakes of Ithaka]

If I could change any part of 40k lore, it would definitely be the introduction of Primaris Marines and Guilliman’s resurrection. That might be a bit biased though, as I started way back in 4th Edition, and it was the Uriel Ventris novels that first got me into 40k.

 

As for the Primaris, I really wish they had just released the Mk X armour as a new type of power armour (but only the Tacticus, none of the other types). There was no need for the whole “new and improved Marines” angle in the lore. By all means, keep the new scale for the models (they look great), but I feel like the lore was muddied by the way they were introduced. I much prefer the old chapter organisation over the current setup with random 3 man squads. That said, I do admit I like the Bladeguard. Most of Cawl’s tech could be scrapped in my opinion, as I much prefer the Rhino based vehicles and Land Raiders to the newer grav equivalents.

 

As for Guilliman’s resurrection, I would have preferred it to be the result of a miracle, something caused by the Emperor and all the countless pilgrims who had visited him in the Temple of Correction. Old lore hinted that the wound was slowly healing, and I think tying his return to that belief, with the formation of the Great Rift acting as the catalyst, would have felt much more fitting, more mysterious and true to the older feel of the setting.

 

 

 

[Valkyrion]

I can't speak to a lot of the newer lore because the introduction of Primaris really killed 40k as a setting for me, so I'd un-ring that bell if I could.

 

Pre-primaris, I'd wish the novel Rynn's World didn't exist.  It didn't need a novel in the first place, but if one was actually necessary then get Michael Bay in to just write the scene where the fortress blows up, because his over the top ridiculousness is already quite Orky and far better suited than 'missile go up, missile go down, bang, oh no'.

 

HH - wet leopard growl. Ugh. 

[ThePenitentOne]

I'm one of those weirdos that don't mind the lore as it is. I thought the Torchbearer army made for an incredibly cool compaign, and it wouldn't have been possible without the Primaris roll-out. I'm not a fan of Primarchs or named characters as a Crusader, but I just use them very, very sparingly or not at all, and that solves the problem, leaving no need to change the game or the lore.

[Sonder76]

Ive been around since Rogue Trader and i loved all that lore, the models, the games. It all changed and has continued to change and ive made my peace with that.

Nothing they do really bothers me much. I just enjoy it for what it is. Its all a bit dumb really.

 

However... if was to have a pop at some stuff i think was or is being handled wrong then.... 

 

1 - Cawl and his lore is dumb and how they handled a simple rescale was stupid. They have rescaled marines before and they simply rescaled them with a new Mk and it was fine,

However From a painting & modeliing perspective i love the Primaris models. The lore is very janky though.

 

2 - Primarchs are dumb, No need for Primarchs. They are 12yr olds trapped in the bodies of demigods. They supposedly inspire loyalty and should be followed without question but their emotional fragility is insane. Morons... every one of them. Its was better that they were dead or evil.

 

3 - Sorry to "Leagues Of Votann players but i played Squats in Rogue Trader and they have a special place in my heart.

 

4 - The asthetics & lore for Space Wolves and Blood Angels jumped the shark years ago. Thunderwolves Cavalry? what? 

I remember when Leman Rus was just a general in the imperial army. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Edited October 1 by Sonder76

[Schurge]

There is nothing that I feel a burning need to have changed.

 

And, if I had to pick something, I miss Khorne being a more nuanced martial God. In the end it doesn't really matter, my guys are my guys and they don't have to be suicidal, one-dimensional bone-heads, but Khorne was more interesting when I first got into Warhammer than he is now. As a result, his followers were also more interesting.

 

As a general rule, nuance is better. 40k is more interesting when there is nuance. Mystery is also good, when writing about forces, powers, and intelligences beyond us, what we can come up with for motivations or machinations, is always inferior to the mystery.

 

Also, this doesn't really fall under a lore-change persay, but the setting and game would be more interesting if there was more balance in emphasis on the factions ala AoS. That is less a lore change though and more a decision that needs to be made in terms of faction support via models and books.

[SvenIronhand]

Drastanta isn't missing.