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

[Doghouse]

On 10/19/2025 at 10:20 PM, OnePaulMurray said:

While I do hear you with that, are you really saying that you would be happy with the game staying the same for another decade? It's hard to have huge stakes in a story set in M38, if we already know that the planet exists in M39, so do you not risk the same issue of ennui creeping in when the story stakes have to be kept frozen?

 

Also, if you can't go forward in the story then you can only go backwards... at which point you start colouring in all the blank bits on the canvas and plenty of people don't really want that either.

 

I think it's easy to criticise, and it is perfectly fine to have a favourite 'window' in the lore, but I do feel that there are people that basically want GW to sit on their IP and do nothing with it because they feel it had already peaked.

 

For me personally speaking yeah I would have genuinely been fine for it staying the same for another two decades to be honest. There is so much room for people to create their own lore in the ten thousand years prior that you could easily create massive events that have simply been forgotten or not recorded by the Administratum. You can create your own high stakes and still have it lost to time within the labyrinthian and poorly kept records of Terra. The lore has always been a framework for you as a player to build upon and create your own adventures.

 

I have always been a firm believer in the players using their own imagination and to be fair there is nothing stopping GW retconning new items into the lore like they have done in the past with things like the storm eagle, vindicator, predator, etc. It's never really stopped them expanding in the past. We have even had new armies added such as the Necrons and the Tau prior to the 41st millennium and it never tanked the setting and new people continued to take up the game. In fact I'd say prior to 8th edition there was far more focus on the rules and balance causing issues than the lore.

 

The other thing to remember is that the moving story can also create the same issues that you have raised filing in all the blanks bits of the canvas and uncovering all the mysteries that were never meant to be revealed with a glaring spotlight. Things like the Dark Angels being a favourite example of mine. The ten thousand years of shame that was a closely guarded dishonour to the Chapter to the point they would kill other Space Marines or Imperial Forces and their Primarch slumbering beneath the rock much like an Arthurian legend of old just hand waved away as the Lion wakes up and begins traveling around in a cloud of pine scented Febreze as he turned the Fallen into the Risen. It's this kind of stuff that sucks the darkness and mysticism from the setting and cheapens it for me as they just became a bland regular Chapter in my eyes. And the other thing to remember is that by progressing the story they are at greater risk of painting themselves into a corner.  

 

Truth be told it could have all been kept within the 41st millennium but objectively it doesn't fit in the what has become the mainstream corporate image of what the game universe has become. I personally think it's more about establishing a solid foundation they can copyright and license out to third parties generating cash streams where they have to do very little work themselves.

 

But these are just the ramblings of an old man like me wishing for a return the good old days.

 

 

[ThaneOfTas]

11 hours ago, Captain Idaho said:

There's not a single person in the known universe, under Cthulhu's malevolent gaze or the demon-sultan Azat.hoth's decadent etched contemption, that bought into 40K because the company advanced the storyline.

Hi there, it's me, I'm the guy who bought in because GW were finally advancing the setting. I'd looked into it several times over the years, thought that the models looked cool, but whenever I tried to dive into the lore through the various wikis I kept hitting roadblocks where stories that sounded really interesting were set up, then deliberately left sitting there because the setting was permanently stuck at 1 second to midnight. Hearing about the Gathering Storm from friends who were already actually in the game grabbed my interest in a big way though, because it seemed like things were actually finally happening.

 

We can argue about the execution all the live long day, and you'd likely have some good points about it. But that doesn't change the fact that the reason that it took until the very end of 7th/start of 8th for me to actually dive into the hobby was because I felt that the lore from what I had seen already was unfinished and unsatisfying, cool ideas but no meat to be found. That impression was not entirely accurate looking back, but I stand by it based on my position at the time as an outsider.

Edited 1 hour ago by ThaneOfTas

[ThePenitentOne]

For me, it was mostly the promise of plastic Sisters and the return of the GSC... But Gathering Storm WAS a hook- I though Uvraine and the Ynarri were soooo cool. I still think they are BTW, but I wish GW would grow them a bit- create an actual Ynarri battleline unit and a generic HQ. But see, that kinda requires advancing the story, right? It would mean that the Ynarri had grown to the point where they were fighting on too many fronts for one of the triad of characters to ALWAYS be the Warlord.

 

The appearance of the new Blackstone Fortress beyond the Western Fringe of Pacificus was another huge hook for me.

 

And again, the Torchbearer Fleet Crusade rules are some of the best damn rules writing GW has ever done, and absolutely would not be possible without the Primaris event that so many other people have said they hate. Especially since the Torchbearer Lore facilitated greater and more widespread use of the SoS- another supercool plot development.

 

New and emerging Lore was required to bring the Votann back into the fray as well, right? They ARE the Squats... but quite a lot of stuff has happened since those early encounters where the secrets of the Votann were unknown.

 

Respectfully @Captain Idaho, I think talking about what YOU do and don't like is absolutely cool, but you're probably going to run into problems when you try to tell people you don't know and have never met what THEY do and don't like. Ain't trying to pick a fight or anything... But speaking for others is a tricky business.

 

 

[Scribe]

3 hours ago, ThaneOfTas said:

Hi there, it's me, I'm the guy who bought in because GW were finally advancing the setting. I'd looked into it several times over the years, thought that the models looked cool, but whenever I tried to dive into the lore through the various wikis I kept hitting roadblocks where stories that sounded really interesting were set up, then deliberately left sitting there because the setting was permanently stuck at 1 second to midnight. Hearing about the Gathering Storm from friends who were already actually in the game grabbed my interest in a big way though, because it seemed like things were actually finally happening.

 

We can argue about the execution all the live long day, and you'd likely have some good points about it. But that doesn't change the fact that the reason that it took until the very end of 7th/start of 8th for be to actually dive into the hobby was because I felt that the lore from what I had seen already was unfinished and unsatisfying, cool ideas but no meat to be found. That impression was not entirely accurate looking back, but I stand by it based on my position at the time as an outsider.

 

So, assuming you've now gone back, and you fully understand that nothing really changed, no characters are going to die, they will get upsized and 'get better', and its now just a smaller setting of Big Names Swinging...

 

How do you feel?

[ThaneOfTas]

1 hour ago, Scribe said:

So, assuming you've now gone back, and you fully understand that nothing really changed, no characters are going to die, they will get upsized and 'get better', and its now just a smaller setting of Big Names Swinging...

 

How do you feel?

I recognise that nothing at the tabletop level changed that couldn't have been changed in another way. I also recognise that in the most zoomed out meta sense nothing changed or is going to change as the setting cannot end (baring an unlikely and catastrophic loss in profitably) nor can any faction be defeated on destroyed. 

 

But characters dying and factions being destroyed are not the only way to tell stories or to avoid leaving plot hooks perpetually dangling.

 

I've seen a lot of people in this forum decry the so called "marvelfication/mcu-ication" of the lore. And I'm left somewhat baffled by this. At a conceptual level, there does not to me seem to be any meaningful difference between Warhammer Lore and the likes of Transformers or GI Joe lore. Both are examples of wider expanded universes created primarily for the purpose of selling plastic toys and used as vehicles to tell cool stories about those toys. This is not a slight on any of the franchises mentioned to be clear either, simply an observation. But it does mean that complaining that your equivalent of a Saturday morning cartoon is currently becoming too much like a Saturday morning cartoon seems baffling at best. Hell I remember even back when I first started looking into 40k after being introduced to the idea by DoW Dark Crusade that people were calling Abbadon a Saturday Morning cartoon Villain. None of this is truely new. 

 

Of course status quo is king and no foundational changes can be expected, any more than I would expect Optimus Prime to be killed of and replac- oh, well... Anyway, that kind of proves my point, people don't want change but they do want more stories. Sitcom writers have understood this for ever, it's why the Friends lasted for however many seasons and why the Simpsons bloated corpse still gets wheeled out year by year.

 

To bring a long-winded story short. I'm fairly fine with how things are, I've got issues with how the tabletop game plays, and problems with some of the model designs. But by and large I find even the illusion of progressing lore to be vastly preferable to the apparent stagnation that kept me away.