Warhammer 40K Tabletop Thread XLIII: "This Is A New LoW For Us All"

[Easy e]

I will say, Warhammer 40K (and D&D, Battletech, and a few others) greatest achievements as games is that they have given their fans a lot of things to talk about outside of playing the game. Therefore, the draw is more than just the games themselves, but the list building, the fluff, creating your own world niche, the modelling techniques etc. That is what seems to drive its popularity as a "hobby" more than any tabletop actions.

People seem to talk about "the hobby" in a 1 hour played to 10 hours talking/thinking about it ratio.

[Dragonus45]

For the benefit of those in the cheap seats: Internet weirdos who piss and moan about other people 'not doing it right' are invited to enjoy their dark little corner all alone, where no one else has to visit while we're all having fun doing other stuff. They're not even to be considered, let alone negotiated with.

Interesting. So when you refer to the people who do pay attention the baseline cannon of the stories as written and prefer to stay within the realm of it's possibility as

"a bunch of us internet weirdos are trying to one-up each other"

you aren't basically telling a wide swath of the player base they are 'not doing it right'? At the least you certainly seem dismissive of them, and anyone else who is interacting with the hobby differently then from how you want them too. Personally I say go for it when it comes to ignoring stuff from a series that you don't like, for the most part I think of cannon as a lie told to us by people terrified of losing the income they gain from being in control of our modern storytelling and mythology long after the original minds who created the worlds involved are gone from the picture. Personally I would say that The Last Jedi never happened, The End Times were bad a dream I had after eating too much pizza before bed, Age of Sigmar is a fun bit of fanfiction some friends of mine like, and Primaris Marines are just firstborn marines with a bigger model and more lore accurate rules, the ending of the Zeta Gundam compellation movies sucked and the series' was better so I just tell people to watch the end of the series and use it's ending instead, I could go on! But that doesn't give someone a moral high ground versus the people who do pay attention to that kind of thing or follow it more closely.

[LeSwordfish]

In addition, correct me if I'm wrong but Star Wars and Star Trek both at some point excised huge sections of their canon - 100% in the case of the latter, right? So clearly the publishers of said canon are happy to discard it when needed. Comics ditch their canon all the time, whereas the MCU is absolutely crippled by adhering to it in such a way that every new film requires homework to understand.

I like the style of canon that the Fast and Furious films use (and apparently also Eastenders): if it's canon to this work, it'll be brought up in this work. If not, don't worry about it. Seems like a much healthier standard to apply to media than to allow them to simply nod at "canon" that a viewer is meant to understand. There's sensible reasons Darth Maul is in Solo, in the canon, but believe you me I'm not watching Rebels just to find out what they are. Make me care about something here and now, in this book/film/episode, or don't include it.

[Wraith]

Interesting. So when you refer to the people who do pay attention the baseline cannon of the stories as written and prefer to stay within the realm of it's possibility as you aren't basically telling a wide swath of the player base they are 'not doing it right'? At the least you certainly seem dismissive of them, and anyone else who is interacting with the hobby differently then from how you want them too.

If that's what I had been doing, then yes I would probably agree with you. However, I never said that enjoying the canon was a bad thing, or not a legitimate way to be a part of the hobby, or even that I didn't take part myself - I had hoped that the crossed out phrase would have been understood as hypocritical humour. Frankly, if anyone is guilty of launching into storytime about 'what it says in the book' then I'm probably the most repeated offender in the GitP 40k threads.

I don't think that's the same, however, as telling people they're "not allowed" to do something different or that they're "wrong" to enjoy the game in a different way to me, which is the example that has been given above. That's the kind of person I'm disparaging - not the people who celebrate the game differently to me, but those who aren't so much interested in the game as they are in appearing to be 'the elite of the community'. That isn't celebrating the game in their way, that's trying to stop me from celebrating it in my way, y'know? It's sort-of-kind-of related, but approached from the opposite side.

Like, I'll happily tell you what it says in the books and what implications for that are in other areas of the stories. If you then tell me 'that's dumb and I hate it', the difference is... I'll probably agree with you, rather than call you names and say you don't deserve to be in the community, or aren't "as good" as another fan of the same thing.

That's like, being intolerant of intolerance is a good thing, or something? Doesn't that cancel out? Also, we live in a society.

[EDIT] In completely unrelated news, lets lighten the mood a little with some actual 40k miniature and/or hobby stuff. I've actually painted an army! Like, ALL of it! The only completed project in.... 8 years, maybe?

Spoiler

Show

Primaris Dark Angels, in Heresy-era colours. Because I already have a Black Templars army which ISN'T painted black/white/red and nothing is allowed to be simple. 2x Ancients, 10x Intercessors, and 5x Hellblasters.



Primaris Apothecaries. I have 3 Squads of Bladeguard who are going to proxy for Company Veterans with Storm Shields that I packed away before taking pictures, 2 of which will be led by these guys an the third led by....



Primaris-ised Chief Apothecary conversion. I learned a while ago while building Grey Knight versions of other Chapters' Chapter Masters that the Space Marine kits are more-or-less interchangeable, so I made a horrible, frankenstinian amalgamation of Primaris Apothecary, Primaris Librarian, and a minor but generous addition from Forgeworld East. He's an abomination of parts, rules, and nature alike, but I'm truly overjoyed with how neat the conversion was to put together.

Just need a red DA transfer for the Chief's shoulder and a third Ancient for the last squad, and they're pretty much done.

[Renegade Paladin]

Okay, going back to the 2nd/11th Primarchs: There is no answer because there's not allowed to be an answer.

In all honestly, [the Space Wolves] weren't involved with the Lost Legions. There's no answer to what happened to the Lost Legions, so whenever there's a suggestion or a hint, you can take in the spirit it's intended. Even on the HH team we know there's no answer, so we know the Wolves didn't do it. They can't have done - because if they did, that would be an answer.

To be clear: It's not a case of "We know the answer and we're not allowed to say except in hints." It's a case of "There is no answer, at all, and there's not allowed to be an answer."

[Blackhawk748]

In addition, correct me if I'm wrong but Star Wars and Star Trek both at some point excised huge sections of their canon - 100% in the case of the latter, right? So clearly the publishers of said canon are happy to discard it when needed. Comics ditch their canon all the time, whereas the MCU is absolutely crippled by adhering to it in such a way that every new film requires homework to understand.

I can't recall Star Trek utterly excising a huge portion of its canon. Star Wars did that and it created a gigantic rift in the entire fanbase that only got worse when fans of the de-canonized stuff started seeing it be redone in the new work but just worse.

Seriously, Rise of Skywalker is just Dark Empire done worse and the original was pretty hated in the first place.

I like the style of canon that the Fast and Furious films use (and apparently also Eastenders): if it's canon to this work, it'll be brought up in this work. If not, don't worry about it. Seems like a much healthier standard to apply to media than to allow them to simply nod at "canon" that a viewer is meant to understand. There's sensible reasons Darth Maul is in Solo, in the canon, but believe you me I'm not watching Rebels just to find out what they are. Make me care about something here and now, in this book/film/episode, or don't include it.

No, Maul is in Solo as an attempt to bend over backwards in order to make Fan Service happen. I watched Rebels, he was good in it, he had no reason to be in that trainwreck of a film.

You don't have to be a slave to canon, but just casually throwing it away completely defeats the point of having it in the first place. Like, the entire point of having a shared world is that things affect other things and that they go into each other. If you aren't doing that, why isn't everything just in its own Timeline? Cuz that's an option too.

Gosh, decades? That must be the gold standard then. I mean, imagine if there were stories that got picked up and retold by different people centuries or millennia after they were first written, and each retelling and spin-off made editorial changes to the characters and the events that were often incompatible with other versions, but still people would recognise them as the same story and read them (or watch them or listen to them) anyway. I mean that would be mad, wouldn't it. Like imagine if someone did a version of Hamlet where he was a lion, everyone knows he's a Danish man.

It's almost like that's not what Im talking about.

Retelling a story is not the same as adding stuff to that universe, so Hamlet and the Lion King aren't any sort of counterpoint. I am talking about a continuous body of work that gets added to, either by the same or other people, that continues that overall universe. Dune is a good example of this. Hamlet is not, because Hamlet doesn't have a shared universe with... well, anything. Its a standalone work that Disney scrubbed the barcode off of and put in a Lion costume for Lion King.

Hell, the Arthurian Mythos would have been an actual counterpoint, because people are still adding stuff to that to this day. Except, they split it off from each other because of the exact issues that have been brought up in here. There's a lot of stuff and it doesn't always mesh with the other stuff. And that's why it gets broken up into various pieces that all share canonicity to one another and can, or can not be, compatible with other sets of work.

Like, Lancelot being "he who Lances a lot of Women" is a meme from FATE that is taken from a french dude's work that happened like, 700 years after the original was made. Lancelot being that way, is only true in that work and work that chooses to utilize that part of the canon. That's why it's a separate canon. This is also the same reason Gundam made different timelines. But if that doesn't happen in the work, then you have to reconcile the giant pile of stuff that is all going on at once, and if there is too much dissonance in it, you have problems with keeping people invested because the canon suddenly doesn't matter, so why am I going to bother?

For personal interest, I went and checked, and while I was unable to verify this, apparently the first use of the term in this sort of context was in reference to Sherlock Holmes. It referred to the stories specifically written by Arthur Conan Doyle, while all other authors using the character are 'non-canon.' If true, this means that originally, it wasn't about things which are confirmed to exist at all, it was about who had written them (Which makes sense, given the history of the word itself, no more on that here.) Following that logic, Frank Herbert's Dune is canon, while everything Brian Herbert did is not. Which I am ok with, incidentally.

This would get a little muddled though when you run into things like Star Trek, which has had numerous writers through its history, or 40k, which is an ascended tabletop game with multiple creators. Star Trek was created by just one person - Gene Rodenberry - but plenty of Star Trek that has been made without his input is still considered canon.

From my understanding that's even how the Dune community seems to view it, there's Frank's work, which is indisputably canon, and then Brians is optional, which makes sense cuz he's continuing his dad's work, and he tries, but he isn't his father.

As for something like Star Trek, I agree that's harder, usually that goes by what is in a primary source that doesn't conflict with the rest of the primary sources. For this, that would be the TV Shows and any movie made by Rodenberry, so TOS and TNG. The stuff after that would probably go TV and Movies that remain generally in line with what was already made and doesn't go running off into ridiculousness or massively contradict what was in group 1.

Won't lie, its less of a hard science for that than an art form that goes by feel, simply because if a work flies massively in the face of the themes, tone, or generally power level of a setting it sticks out like a sore thumb and gets ignored, because it doesn't fit.

That is why G Gundam gets treated the way it does. And as much as I love it, that's perfectly fair.

[Avaris]

Hell, the Arthurian Mythos would have been an actual counterpoint, because people are still adding stuff to that to this day. Except, they split it off from each other because of the exact issues that have been brought up in here. There's a lot of stuff and it doesn't always mesh with the other stuff. And that's why it gets broken up into various pieces that all share canonicity to one another and can, or can not be, compatible with other sets of work.

I very much feel that various historic mythos are, for me, the right way to approach canon in any large fictional universe. The stories of the various historical pantheons - Greek, Nordic, Celtic - were often self contradictory, because the stories were told by many different storytellers over a large period of time, and then embellished by others. But a story featuring Thor was still a story featuring Thor - even if he logically couldn't do everything in all the stories told, or is a weakness in one would prevent a victory in another, it didn't matter - he was still Thor.

As far as I am aware, the idea of the single, constant canon being superior to all other forms of the story being told is VERY modern. Comics didn't care until relatively recently, for example, but now you have the stereotype of someone obsessively cataloguing it all and demanding answers to inconsistencies. Which is fun for some people! But it isn't the way people have been telling stories through most of history. And I feel applying that logic to a setting like 40k, an explicitly creative endeavor, is doing it something of a disservice. Exploring canon is good and fun! Holding others to it is not.

[Renegade Paladin]

Comics didn't care until relatively recently, for example

Which is why comics are awful.

In seriousness, though, having a consistent timeline and consistency in characters is what makes a story a story. The less consistent you are, the more you destroy the willing suspension of disbelief. If I'm supposed to believe that Ciaphas Cain was assigned to Valhallan regiments for his entire career, you'd best not write a story wherein he's been assigned to the Steel Legion all his life; similarly don't show me that the Executor is roughly twenty times longer than its escorting destroyers on screen in Empire Strikes Back and then try to tell me it's only five times the size in the RPG later (and then get salty enough about being corrected to work your way into being put in charge of continuity at Lucasfilm only to immediately start sabotaging efforts at said continuity to get back at the correctors of your mistakes, Pablo Hidalgo).

[Avaris]

Which is why comics are awful.

In seriousness, though, having a consistent timeline and consistency in characters is what makes a story a story. The less consistent you are, the more you destroy the willing suspension of disbelief. If I'm supposed to believe that Ciaphas Cain was assigned to Valhallan regiments for his entire career, you'd best not write a story wherein he's been assigned to the Steel Legion all his life; similarly don't show me that the Executor is roughly twenty times longer than its escorting destroyers on screen in Empire Strikes Back and then try to tell me it's only five times the size in the RPG later (and then get salty enough about being corrected to work your way into being put in charge of continuity at Lucasfilm only to immediately start sabotaging efforts at said continuity to get back at the correctors of your mistakes, Pablo Hidalgo).

You're right, that's what makes a story a story. A comic arc should be consistent within it's own narrative. But once something gets so large as to be a setting/mythos/multiverse/whatever, I'd say that becomes less important. Once it becomes beyond reasonable expectation for anyone to consume all material produced for any given thing, it ceases being a single story!

40k, and other similar properties, is not a single story. It's a setting. And as such it can, and should IMO, be much more woolly around the edges.

[LCP]

Retelling a story is not the same as adding stuff to that universe, so Hamlet and the Lion King aren't any sort of counterpoint. I am talking about a continuous body of work that gets added to, either by the same or other people, that continues that overall universe.

You mean like Rozencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead? Or the Aeneid?

[Wraith]

So there's Hard and Soft Canon. The 'hard' canon of (for example) Sherlock Holmes would be all the stuff written by Arthur Conan Doyle, and the soft canon could be the stuff written about the same character, in the same universe, but by other authors that have the blessing of the ACD estate. It's all canon, but some of it is more equal than the rest, as it were.

Even in that sort of continuity, even where the timeline still adds up and the new authors don't contradict the old ones, there's a fracture in the continuity where the fans recognise that all of it is canon, but then argue over which of it is the "right" canon. Nobody would argue that A Study in Emerald* by Neil Gaiman was part of the THE Sherlock Holmes canon, however for the most part it has virtually all of the hallmarks of a soft canon story.

Now do that for the Horus Heresy, which has ~15 authors. They're all 30k, they're all sponsored by GW, but some of them have to be the 'main' story while others are valid, but less important, and others still are just of tenuous relation. Or for the Star Wars EU, which has more like ~50 authors. Which is which?

Trick question! The answer is, "it doesn't really matter, so long as you're enjoying the bits you have read and aren't trying to get cancelled people who have different opinions".

* If you aren't familiar with that one, it's where...

Spoiler

Show

...The Queen of England is a Starspawn, a la HP Lovecraft's mythos, and Holmes is a V For Vendetta-style terrorist trying to bring down the alien monarchy.

[Destro_Yersul]

Interesting. So when you refer to the people who do pay attention the baseline cannon of the stories as written and prefer to stay within the realm of it's possibility as you aren't basically telling a wide swath of the player base they are 'not doing it right'? At the least you certainly seem dismissive of them, and anyone else who is interacting with the hobby differently then from how you want them too.

There's a pretty critical difference between telling someone they're doing it wrong, and telling someone that they can't tell me I'm doing it wrong. If someone wants to adhere stringently to the canon stories and try their best not to write anything contradictory, that's fine. The problem only arises when that hypothetical person tells someone else that they have to do that too. Or at very least, that them not doing so is somehow terrible.

[Drasius]

Something that a LOT of people on here don't want to hear, but *nobody* gives a **** what deviations from the established canon you make. You can have whatever weird crap you want happen in *your* version of 40k, but you can't argue with the world that the authors have written.

Should Angron have been able to bench press a Titan? No, it's ****ing stupid, but it's words that ADB put on the page and were accepted by the publishers. I'm going to keep ignoring that it happened that way, but I can't argue that it didn't when it's brought up. Do I hate the Newcron fluff? Absolutely. Do I think the previous way was better? Without a doubt. Do I think that I can ignore that this is how things are now when it's being discussed? Nope.

That's not to say that you have to like it. I basically dropped out of 40k at launch day of 8th, and the few novels I've read for the "new" 40k have left a very bad taste in my mouth, to the point where I doubt I'll ever interact with them again. I've caught up on all my backlog, and will now get back to catching up on the HH stuff I've missed, but just like Battletech's WoB arc and the timeskip was enough for me to stop following along with something that I had an almost religious devotion to for over a decade, it's quite likely that the "new" 40k will be enough to turn me away from anything to do with modern 40k going forward. I can't deny that they exist, and I can't argue against them if they decide to retcon stuff, because it IS canon, no matter how dumb I think it is.

[Cheesegear]

Lucky I'm fast at typing...

At which point, I wonder, does 'fracturing the community' instead become 'there is more than one community'?

Partial agree. But the problem arises when those two communities refuse to interact with one another.

Hey, Gav Thorpe was a game designer for 3rd and 4th Eds., and still remains to this day a reasonably prolific author at BL. He was responsible for maintaining IP for a while, like that was his job. I think he knows what he's talking about when it comes to this sort of thing.
Nah, **** him. We have nothing to talk about.
o rly? I guess we don't have common ground then.

Because the issue seems to be more along the lines of, here are two different ways of approaching the subject...

Yeah. Of course there is:

This is what it says in the book.
No it doesn't. Or, if it does, I'm ignoring it.

Again. This is for things that don't matter - fictional narratives about toy soldiers. We can't even go along to get along. I wonder if this applies all the way up to something, something real-world example where being able to agree on things absolutely does matter and we still don't do it.

'Rules' is the social contract that all must reach consensus in order to participate - even if its understood to be only temporarily in the case of an experimental/homebrew/'just for fun' army list. 'Story' happens in my head and there's not a damn thing any of you can do about it.

Correct.
Rules are more or less official. They're the ones you use in tournaments. However, you in your own home, with your friends and no outside influence, can totally make up any rule you want. You want Tactical Marines to be 13 Points and only have 1 Wound again? Done. You want Scouts-as-Troops again? Done. Hell, maybe you want to go all the way back to 8th Ed., and just keep playing that. But no-one outside your specific group is...Well...Obligated to play with you, and when you go online, you're gonna find out that the world has moved on, and Tactical Marines aren't 13 Points anymore and Scouts aren't Troops anymore and whatever you're talking about is fairly specific to you.

Fluff...Is also that. There are books that are written. Things happened in them. Some of them good, some of them bad, some of them totally stupid. I will never not be mad that Kor'sarro Khan was character assassinated. I will never not be mad that Iron Warriors were able to teleport directly onto Phalanx and summon Demons inside it. But those things did happen. And now I have to go on knowing that those things happened.

...If you want to write a fanfic about your part of the Universe. You can do that. You can even post it where other people will see it. Will people like it? Maybe? Will they care? Who knows? But how do you respond if people don't like your part of the Universe and think it's dumb? That's right. Personal attacks and labels!

But my point is, that only matters if we agree that we want it to.
Canon has no authority, except when a bunch of us internet weirdos are trying to one-up each other a collaborative group of acquaintances on a forum are recounting the most-commonly recognised narrative.

What you choose to do with that narrative is entirely outside of everyone else' scope, and getting cross with each other about that holds about as much importance as whether or not you liking the colour of the shirt I'm wearing today does on whether or not I'm going to wear it anyway.

Yeah I'll try and find what Gav Thorpe said.

But if you're at a table, in front of someone, ready to play a game, in the next ten seconds:

Is that Guilliman? Painted in Deathwatch colours? Why?
Does it matter?
Not really. But it is Guilliman, right?
Yes.
... ... I rolled a '5' to deploy first.

No when you go on the internet; People theoretically have unlimited time and nowhere else to be. People can copy their post into a Notepad for later and come back two days later with a 1000-word post about how you're wrong. On the internet, things don't get ignored because they don't need to be. Also, some people type real fast whilst their girlfriend is watching TV.

At the table, things get ignored all the time. Unfortunately, the internet isn't real life. As literally everyone who has ever been on the internet, knows.

I don't think that's the same, however, as telling people they're "not allowed" to do something different or that they're "wrong" to enjoy the game in a different way to me, which is the example that has been given above.

I'm not big on fanfics. But my girlfriend is. Harry Potter for life - you know how it is. She's still mad I refuse to do a House Test or whatever it is. I think it's funny that she's mad. I bet she thinks it's funny when I'm mad about my thing ("Toy soldiers are serious business")...In fact I know she thinks it's funny. Because just like Harry Potter doesn't matter, neither do toy soldiers. But hey, people like what they like.

There is absolutely a right way, and a wrong way, to write fanfics. When someone deliberately goes out of their way to break canon, they have to or should label it as such*. That way everybody understands before they even read it that you can't really criticise it - you can only praise it (oof). Because all criticism against your canon-breaking fanfic can - and will - be met with 'Well I just like it this way.' And that's game. You also understand that with that canon-breaking tag, you know you don't need to read it because it's not important.

*I just asked my GF. She said 'Alternate Universe (AU)'. That would confuse the **** out of me because if something was labeled (AU), I would assume that the author is Australian.

In completely unrelated news, lets lighten the mood a little with some actual 40k miniature and/or hobby stuff.

Looking pretty good.
Unfortunately most of my hobby-stuff these days isn't GW-related and I can't engage.

Okay, going back to the 2nd/11th Primarchs: There is no answer because there's not allowed to be an answer.

He can't say stuff like that. Because my immediate question is...

Kasper: There's a first time for everything.
Russ: Exactly.
Kasper: The unprecedented. Like...Astartes fighting Astartes? Like the Rout being called to sanction another Legion?
Russ: That? ((Sad Laugh)) Hjolda, no. That's not unprecedented.

Tell me specifically what that means, ADB. Because if that doesn't mean what I think it means, and ADB comes out and says it can't mean what I think it means...Then he should either tell me what he did mean it to mean, or, he should never have written a cutesy-baby-games-reference in the first place. And no author should have ever made any reference to the Lost Primarchs/Legions - with editorial approval, I'll add - ever.

The problem is that authors did and do make references to the Lost, with a "wink, wink, nudge, nudge" to the audience, on purpose...And now I get to ask people whether their Lost Primarch was the one Leman Russ almost-probably executed, or is theirs the one that almost-definitely did something so bad that the Emperor Himself chewed them out, and not even by proxy using Malcador. Or maybe because it's just vague enough...Did they get chewed out by the Emperor and executed by Russ, and that was the horrific thing that 9 Primarchs were gathered to witness that one time that they're not allowed to speak of to anyone ever...

Now do that for the Horus Heresy, which has ~15 authors. They're all 30k, they're all sponsored by GW, but some of them have to be the 'main' story while others are valid, but less important, and others still are just of tenuous relation. Or for the Star Wars EU, which has more like ~50 authors. Which is which?

Are Blood Angels red? So far, so good. Let's easily agree. That was an easy one. I also remember specifically Gav Thorpe bringing this up. I will find it.
Umm akshually Death Company are black and Sanguinary Guard are Gold and- Yeah, okay. Maybe it wasn't that easy and we're gonna play baby games, where people are gonna pretend that they don't know what 'Blood Angels are red' means. Your presonal preferences aren't really important, because we all understand that Blood Angels are red.

Is Guilliman a ****? ...Maybe. Maybe not. Discuss. Nobody will necessarily be wrong. Do you like Guilliman, or not?

Official Badass, Aeonid Thiel is confirmed for Alpha Legion. When was Thiel replaced? Is Badass Thiel real, or is Badass Thiel actually the Alpha Legion one and it's all a scam. Aww poop. Let's try and figure it out. To be able to do this you need to know about Thiel. There isn't necessarily a right answer. But the conversation requires a level of knowledge about Thiel. What you like isn't really relevant, because what actually matters is establishing - or trying to - a timeline.

If Frauka has a limiter than can turn his Blank-ness off, can't they just make more. If not, why not? Why are Blanks even a problem if Dan Abnett said that Blanks aren't really a problem? This doesn't make sense. Did Abnett do an oopsie? ...Uhh...We don't know. But we can - as individuals - decide whether or not we like the fact that Frauka has a limiter. If we like it, we run with it. If we don't like the idea that Blanks can just turn their Blankness off, then we relegate Frauka's limiter to Ravenor only and we never need to bring it up again...But Frauka does have one. Surely Commissar Cain with his rank and Inquisitorial connections could've got one for Jurgen - that would've solved some social problems.

Female Spa- Shhh...Shhh...No we can't talk about that one. The second we engage that one labels and personal attacks start getting thrown around.

Horus was right and Imperials are Naz- No don't! Not that one!!!1!
*Cheesegear lives in a State that has banned rabbits, and still breaks his foot on a rock and falls down a rabbit hole so deep Lewis Carroll rolls in his grave.*

Something that a LOT of people on here don't want to hear, but *nobody* gives a **** what deviations from the established canon you make. You can have whatever weird crap you want happen in *your* version of 40k, but you can't argue with the world that the authors have written.

Agreed.

and the few novels I've read for the "new" 40k have left a very bad taste in my mouth, to the point where I doubt I'll ever interact with them again.

I would like to forget that the Siege of Terra happened, and I would definitely like to forget that Dorn was nerfed into a potato to make the Siege work. But that is apparently what I'm working with.

[LeSwordfish]

Tell me specifically what that means, ADB.

Could that not be a reference to the wolves censuring the World Eaters? The Night Of The Wolf?

[Cheesegear]

Could that not be a reference to the wolves censuring the World Eaters? The Night Of The Wolf?

I know nobody reads Dawn of Fire; In The Wolf Time, written last year by...Gav Thorpe (ain't that a coincidence)...

Custode: If Guilliman was to turn on the Emperor then the Space Wolves would be one of his first opponents.
The history of the Ten Thousand with the Eleventh Legion is a reminder of that.
Why would Guilliman be so keen to arm and expand such an obstacle to his ambition?

This is a strong implication that XI rebelled against the Emperor, and the Space Wolves were sent to deal with it. However, once again, I have to reconcile that with the fact that Horus, and the Luna Wolves and the Sons of Horus - and the Black Legion - still get their names.

Was XI that bad? Or was Horus and the Traitor Legions simply...Well, more Galaxy-spanningly obvious that they couldn't be wiped from history?

EDIT; ION
I'm very impressed that New GW is offering refunds on the Leagues. That's a very big step in the right direction.

[Destro_Yersul]

Do I think that I can ignore that this is how things are now when it's being discussed? Nope.

And that's where you're wrong. It goes like this: "oh, I didn't like that part, so when I'm writing my own stuff I don't count it."

Because that's what this whole thing is about. Ignoring canon when you're writing your own army's backstory, or your own stories, being a thing you can do. That's the point. So when you say that nobody cares what you put in your own stories, welll...

Either you're right, we agree that people can write what they want, and we all go home happy. Or you're wrong, and we've just had three pages of conversation sparked by how people very much care what you put in your stories.

[Artanis]

I'm not big on fanfics. But my girlfriend is. Harry Potter for life - you know how it is. She's still mad I refuse to do a House Test or whatever it is.

Great, now my brain is trying to come up with a joke involving Hufflepuffs and Imperial Fists both wearing yellow

[Forum Explorer]

I'm not big on fanfics. But my girlfriend is. Harry Potter for life - you know how it is. She's still mad I refuse to do a House Test or whatever it is. I think it's funny that she's mad. I bet she thinks it's funny when I'm mad about my thing ("Toy soldiers are serious business")...In fact I know she thinks it's funny. Because just like Harry Potter doesn't matter, neither do toy soldiers. But hey, people like what they like.

There is absolutely a right way, and a wrong way, to write fanfics. When someone deliberately goes out of their way to break canon, they have to or should label it as such*. That way everybody understands before they even read it that you can't really criticise it - you can only praise it (oof). Because all criticism against your canon-breaking fanfic can - and will - be met with 'Well I just like it this way.' And that's game. You also understand that with that canon-breaking tag, you know you don't need to read it because it's not important.

*I just asked my GF. She said 'Alternate Universe (AU)'. That would confuse the **** out of me because if something was labeled (AU), I would assume that the author is Australian.

No, you can criticize it on so many different categories, usually involving a character being OOC (out of character), and you can draw from canon to do so. For example; if I was writing an AU story where Harry Potter was raised in Australia instead of England and then when I had him go to Hogwarts back in England, Hermione was suddenly a giggly cheerleader, people would rightfully criticize me for that because how on Earth does Harry being Austrailian cause that when they never interact before that point in the first place?

When you write an AU story you don't (or rather you shouldn't) ignore canon, in fact you should be hyper familiar with canon so that you can always answer the question of why your premise changed canon. The premise can't really be criticized (well it can, but...) but the actual story can be.

[Drasius]

And that's where you're wrong. It goes like this: "oh, I didn't like that part, so when I'm writing my own stuff I don't count it."

Because that's what this whole thing is about. Ignoring canon when you're writing your own army's backstory, or your own stories, being a thing you can do. That's the point. So when you say that nobody cares what you put in your own stories, welll...

Either you're right, we agree that people can write what they want, and we all go home happy. Or you're wrong, and we've just had three pages of conversation sparked by how people very much care what you put in your stories.

See, this comes back to the first part - Nobody gives a **** about your fanfic/backstory/fluff. Not just you specifically, but anyones. If you want to re-write whatever part of 30k or 40k you want for your own personal canon that doesn't affect anyone else, go nuts. But if someone is sitting at the painting table and ask, "Hey, what's the deal with [x]?" and anyone starts banging on about their special snowflake version of stuff that's not aligned with the word of god, yeah, you're going to get corrected.

I don't care what special stuff you want to believe in your version of 40k, but I will correct you (again, not just you specifically) if you're deviating from what is specifically set down as happening. There's a *significant* difference between "There are no genestealers in *my* 40k" and "There are no genestealers in 40k". The first one is ... fine, if a little odd and should be of no relevance to anyone but you (which brings up the question of why the hell we're discussing it in the first place), the second is flat out wrong and needs to be corrected.

[Lord Raziere]

See, this comes back to the first part - Nobody gives a **** about your fanfic/backstory/fluff. Not just you specifically, but anyones. If you want to re-write whatever part of 30k or 40k you want for your own personal canon that doesn't affect anyone else, go nuts. But if someone is sitting at the painting table and ask, "Hey, what's the deal with [x]?" and anyone starts banging on about their special snowflake version of stuff that's not aligned with the word of god, yeah, you're going to get corrected.

Too bad for you then and your insistence on this, but no one likes or cares about someone going "well ackshually" when they're trying to have fun either. there are people out there will who will just see what your doing as annoying know-it-all insistence on accuracy and being a buzzkill as ruining the mood rather than being some righteous corrector of canon. good luck holding that attitude when talking to communities who take a more memetic and relaxed approach to this.

[Hootman]

SCENE: A relatively quiet thread. Sometimes there won't be posts for a week or more, and conversation is often only in short bursts. A long discussion is about 5 posts in 7 days.

Oh how this thread has fallen from ye days of olde.

Votan release coming up about to be the most broken thing 40k has ever experienced and not a peep about it here.
[...]
What has happened to 40k?

I blame Cheesegear. He got fed up with GW and decided he was done with 40k.

But then, a mere week later...

"Fracturing the community is good actually."

Cue almost 60 posts in under a week. You've got a real gift for bringing everyone out of the woodwork, Siege.

I don't care if no one else remembers 8-Bit Theatre from 2006, it makes me happy.

FWIW, I remember. I always wanted to make a joke-character who used sword-chucks...

Great, now my brain is trying to come up with a joke involving Hufflepuffs and Imperial Fists both wearing yellow

Clearly Alpha Legion is Slytherin, and I guess Raven Guard could be Ravenclaw? Or Ultramarines, they're a bunch of nerds. Now we just need a group who prefer red and being troublesome protagonists. I assume there's a Heresy-era color scheme I don't know about that fits, if Blood Angels aren't a good fit.

[Forum Explorer]

See, this comes back to the first part - Nobody gives a **** about your fanfic/backstory/fluff. Not just you specifically, but anyones. If you want to re-write whatever part of 30k or 40k you want for your own personal canon that doesn't affect anyone else, go nuts. But if someone is sitting at the painting table and ask, "Hey, what's the deal with [x]?" and anyone starts banging on about their special snowflake version of stuff that's not aligned with the word of god, yeah, you're going to get corrected.

I don't care what special stuff you want to believe in your version of 40k, but I will correct you (again, not just you specifically) if you're deviating from what is specifically set down as happening. There's a *significant* difference between "There are no genestealers in *my* 40k" and "There are no genestealers in 40k". The first one is ... fine, if a little odd and should be of no relevance to anyone but you (which brings up the question of why the hell we're discussing it in the first place), the second is flat out wrong and needs to be corrected.

Too bad for you then and your insistence on this, but no one likes or cares about someone going "well ackshually" when they're trying to have fun either. there are people out there will who will just see what your doing as annoying know-it-all insistence on accuracy and being a buzzkill as ruining the mood rather than being some righteous corrector of canon. good luck holding that attitude when talking to communities who take a more memetic and relaxed approach to this.

You guys are both right. Like if some guy had some elaborate story on how his GSC army works in a galaxy without any Tyranids, I don't in any way feel obligated to adopt his fanon, but I'll listen to it. Unless it sucks, in which case I'll get bored and change the subject, because Lord Raziere is right too: If some guy is talking about his fanon, I'm not going to be 'umm actually that's not canon.' He almost certainly knows that. Pointing it out just makes me look like an idiot who can't read a social cue.

Unless it is something actually obscure like the Ynnari having someone who can transform into a proto-Avatar. That's really weird and I wouldn't expect someone to know that. So I might bring that up in a manner like 'Hey, did you know about...?" or "Hey have you read...?"

Which kinda brings us full circle. If someone wants to talk about their fanon, you don't have to engage with them if you don't want to. You can shut them down in various ways and just play the game instead. Or focus on your painting, or whatever part of the hobby you prefer. But they probably don't want to talk to you about canon either. And that's fine. Not everyone has to enjoy every part of the hobby the same way as you, and fanfics hardly ever actually fracture a community. They might cause fights and arguments, as anyone who has met a shipper might tell you, but different groups of fans can usually mutually enjoy some other aspect of the fandom, even if they don't agree on one part.

[9mm]

If we're still talking about the lost legions...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wL39...nel=ArbitorIan

complete with interesting comments from Rick Priestley in the comment section.

[Destro_Yersul]

See, this comes back to the first part - Nobody gives a **** about your fanfic/backstory/fluff. Not just you specifically, but anyones. If you want to re-write whatever part of 30k or 40k you want for your own personal canon that doesn't affect anyone else, go nuts. But if someone is sitting at the painting table and ask, "Hey, what's the deal with [x]?" and anyone starts banging on about their special snowflake version of stuff that's not aligned with the word of god, yeah, you're going to get corrected.

I don't care what special stuff you want to believe in your version of 40k, but I will correct you (again, not just you specifically) if you're deviating from what is specifically set down as happening. There's a *significant* difference between "There are no genestealers in *my* 40k" and "There are no genestealers in 40k". The first one is ... fine, if a little odd and should be of no relevance to anyone but you (which brings up the question of why the hell we're discussing it in the first place), the second is flat out wrong and needs to be corrected.

So do people care, or don't they? Because when I say Cawl is dumb, Newcrons are dumb, and the big warp rift is dumb and I'm ignoring that they exist, I obviously know they exist. If they didn't, I wouldn't have to ignore them. Why does it need to be corrected?

For that matter, while we're on the subject of things between which there are significant differences, there's a pretty big one between "Oh hey, did you know about [obscure thing] that talks about X?" and "Your version of stuff is wrong. stop fracturing the community you terrible person."

As for why we're discussing it... because the sharing of ideas and stories is fun and has remained so for the past several thousand years?

[Cheesegear]

Cue almost 60 posts in under a week. You've got a real gift for bringing everyone out of the woodwork, Siege.

Nobody's called me that in a while.

I noticed something during 8th Ed. regarding the game; Y'know the rapid fire Codex releases that were so good for everyone? It annihilated a pretty big market - competitive players, who are poor (i.e; Players who spend money every month, regularly, in order to keep up). I've said it before; My area skews towards the lower end of the economic spectrum. But a lot of people - especially younger, more entitled, and more importantly new players - want to win games, they want an army that doesn't suck. If they're gonna be spending money, they need to know it's worth it.

Unfortunately, the game moved too quickly; FAQs dropped. Reformatting the rules. Vigilus came out. Oh ****, you play Guard and don't have the BSF models? Oh this Codex is the new hotness this month, so your army is garbage now and you have to re-tool your collection.

It was too much. The thing that people were praising - "No Codex left behind" - actually drove people away from the hobby. Who could've seen that coming?

Now in 9th Ed. we have FAQs-For-Profit, also the world's economy took a nosedive so who even is keeping up unless your income is tied to your hobby (looking at you, YouTubers)?
New blood comes into the hobby, drops $500 to start a new army, and proceeds to spend another hundred or so each month in order to get to 2000 Po- ...Just kidding, while they were in the process of building their army the game changed and now their army that they don't even have yet, is trash. New blood leaves. No new kids, only grognards.

There are much, much, much better games for competitive gamers on a budget. So those people are just gone. I can't even recommend Kill Team anymore, and I definitely don't recommend getting into Underworlds - not anymore, anyway. Blood Bowl is still fine, mostly. However, if you're a competitive gamer with a massive budget and you do want to play in GW's sandbox...Well, what are you doing in this playground (there's a joke for this forum there somewhere, I know it)?

Then you have casuals (i.e; Usually players who spend a bit of money up front, but don't bother keeping up unless something comes out that they like). Who are happy enough to play with their friends. They don't need to talk with other people and frankly they don't really care to. What? They're gonna get told that they're having fun wrong? **** no. 'Umm akshually the Narrative Games you play with your friends are dumb.' No. They're not gonna take that, and why would they? Fair enough. No-one cares about their Narrative Games, and they don't care about anyone's opinion on their Narrative Games - they're having FUN. So what's the point?

I had a lot of fun playing The Red Waaagh!, and this forum seemed to engage with my story on said Narrative... But then GW never did another one. Or rather, they never did another one that was as good.

Fluff, is more or less the same.

You have a cadre of ~5 writers; ADB, McNeill, Abnett, and Gav Thorpe, and someone else I'm probably not thinking of. These guys churn out reasonable work, at a reasonable pace, and anyone who cares to, can keep up relatively easily, and all the novels are written with a reasonable amount of quality that no-one is really upset to read. Once a year or so there's an anthology of stories written by authors you've never heard of - you can skip that one.

Then you smash cut to about three dozen authors all churning out their own stories, none of them talking to each other, the quality control simply just...Gone...Due to the amount of stories being thrown out (sorry Kyme, I know it's not actually your fault). No-one wants to read anything because it's inconsistent and no-one wants to read anything because the quality is terrible. Even when Swallow, French and Wraight show up to write phenomenal books, the others are still writing books, and you can't read them all. What do? How does anyone keep up, even with the good stuff?

If you want to read military fiction, heroic fiction, sci-fi space magic...There are so many novels out there. Amazon allows self-publishing now so the books can be $5 a pop, sometimes even free. Amazon just gave me the first three Honor Harrington books for free. Okay. Looks like this is what I'm reading now.

Point is the publishing train just never slows down, and once again, the bubble bursts. People just can't keep up, so they stop participating all together. Cool. So what fluff do people want to talk about if they don't read books? ...Oh, I guess nothing. Cool beans.

Unfortunately I've reached a point where I have nothing to talk about. The only person who would engage with me was Lans, and he got banned ages ago. Let's talk about Leagues of Votann being broken-as-**** and then the following nerf... Does anyone care? Not really. Alright. What has happened to this forum is happening in a lot of places. Hardcore players (and readers) are being driven out, and casuals don't actually care - hence why they're casuals. So what's left?

We're all theoretically "in" the hobby. But what do we actually say to each other? Nothing, I guess. Just everyone do your own thing and nobody talk to each other. Cool? Cool.

[LeSwordfish]

I'm playing more games than I have in ages, and still talk and think about warhammer just as much as I used to, I just talk about it with people I like talking to.

[Mystic Muse]

I'm going to try and do a bunch of painting week after next. So maybe that will help with activity a little.

I've mostly been working on the fluff and such for my Primarch/Legion, which due to the very religious nature of a lot of it I probably can't talk about here, and I don't think anyone here would care even if I could.

It's something I'm personally very invested in, but nobody here has a reason to care.

[Eldan]

You guys are both right. Like if some guy had some elaborate story on how his GSC army works in a galaxy without any Tyranids, I don't in any way feel obligated to adopt his fanon, but I'll listen to it.

Hey, that's not fanon, that's just really oldschool, when the Tyranids were a slave empire and the Genestealers an independent species.

Edit: my problem with the FAQs is that... over 90% of people I play with don't read them. Many have never been to the GW website in their lives, most don't speak/read much English, and they certainly wouldn't bother printing out some FAQ and memorize it. Rules are in books (tm), or sometimes really old White Dwarf magazines. So GW publishes overpowered ****? That either gets shadowbanned (i.e. "Jeff, we don't want to play againts your Votann army, they are overpowered") or homebrew-comped ("Okay, Jeff, I'll play against your new army, but only if you take no more than one of that unit there and you don't use that one rule I hate"). Which is frustrating for everyone.

[Drasius]

Too bad for you then and your insistence on this, but no one likes or cares about someone going "well ackshually" when they're trying to have fun either. there are people out there will who will just see what your doing as annoying know-it-all insistence on accuracy and being a buzzkill as ruining the mood rather than being some righteous corrector of canon. good luck holding that attitude when talking to communities who take a more memetic and relaxed approach to this.

Not really, since I don't care if people don't like being corrected. Being wrong and/or distributing incorrect information should be corrected. Use your imagination on stuff that doesn't already have in universe explainations/facts/statements/reasons. If it's a community of people who are all absorbed in their own version of 40k and not interested in how things actually are, then outside of playing games, no, we probably wouldn't get on and wouldn't really interact or say much other than rolling our eyes at each other across the painting table.

...I don't in any way feel obligated to adopt his fanon, but I'll listen to it. Unless it sucks

That's the thing FE, they all suck. >99.99% of all fanon sucks.

If some guy is talking about his fanon, I'm not going to be 'umm actually that's not canon.' He almost certainly knows that. Pointing it out just makes me look like an idiot who can't read a social cue.

Yeah, but that's not what we're talking about, we're talking about having a conversation around the painting table and people

So do people care, or don't they? Because when I say Cawl is dumb, Newcrons are dumb, and the big warp rift is dumb and I'm ignoring that they exist, I obviously know they exist. If they didn't, I wouldn't have to ignore them. Why does it need to be corrected?

Nobody cares about fanfics and alternate universes, but discussing why you do or don't like stuff, why the canon is dumb or awesome is more than fair game (though as always, it'll be rare to change anyones opinion, but it can happen). Asserting that Newcrons or Primaris or whatever don't exist (going beyond some memes) in canon because you don't like them is a very different matter.

For that matter, while we're on the subject of things between which there are significant differences, there's a pretty big one between "Oh hey, did you know about [obscure thing] that talks about X?" and "Your version of stuff is wrong. stop fracturing the community you terrible person."

As for why we're discussing it... because the sharing of ideas and stories is fun and has remained so for the past several thousand years?

There's also a pretty big difference between people asserting that their personal canon is the same as the actual 40k canon. Everyone's personal 40k canon is different, but the baseline cannot be argued. Share your ideas all you want, but don't be surprised when people point out where your ideas contradict facts Established Canon.