Forum adverts like this one are shown to any user who is not logged in. Join us by filling out a tiny 3 field form and you will get your own, free, dakka user account which gives a good range of benefits to you: No adverts like this in the forums anymore. Times and dates in your local timezone. Full tracking of what you have read so you can skip to your first unread post, easily see what has changed since you last logged in, and easily see what is new at a glance. Email notifications for threads you want to watch closely. Being a part of the oldest wargaming community on the net. If you are already a member then feel free to login now.

This is not the start of a Flame-War, but an honest question:

Is any of the armies / fluff (in either Fantasy or 40K) original work? Or is it all just stuff that was regurgitated in one way or another?

We all know about the obvious - dark and light elves, dwarfs, demons, giants, etc. We know that armies are based off of different societies. ie - Lizardmen = Aztec, Bretonnia = Camelot, etc.

Just wanted to see if there was anything that I was missing and mainly just out of curiosity.

Thanks.

Knights in space. Totally original. Not starship troopers in space, that's been done. I'm talking about knights in space.

I'd like to say flying babies, as those are totally awesome, but they're merely cherubs in space. :(

Necrons? Skaven?

The enormous talking rat in the corner of my living room informs me that Skaven were totally ripped off.

Necrons are Terminators... with a sprinkling of Egypt.

Didn't Shakespeare have something to say about this?

To an extent nothing is every really original, because its all just an addition to our collective unconciouss : ).

That aside Necrons are basically the undead robots. The name gives it away. They look like skeletons. It' a mix between the shambling hordes idea and adding the uncaring emotionless but efficient robot concept.

Skaven? Can you say Master Splinter?

Skaven was pretty much the brain child of Jes Goodwin wasn't it.
I remember he did essentially all the art and all the minis when they were first released.

thing is GW has been around long enough and has been borrowed from often enough that it is hard to say.

Their gothic-ness, electropreists and servitors seem like their own invention to me.

Rogue Trader and 2nd 40k was pretty original stuff. Science fiction is a pretty knew genre, other than Frankenstein and themes borrowed from mythology. Especially non-steam punk stuff. Steam-punk as in "Victorian Sci-fi" as it is known. Pre transistors and nuclear power.

There is probably written sci-fi from the 50's, 60's and possibly even earlier that includes servitors etc. But as an image 40k was pretty leading edge, following as it did from the 80's and post 70's D&D stuff. I am thinking Heavy Metal and maybe some Anime. Which was presumably practically unheard of in Britain at the time.

Heavy Metal
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heavy_Metal_%28magazine%29

------------
And necrons have nothing to do with Terminators . Egypt, yes. Undead, yes. Especially considering Space Hulk terminators are somehow derived from maintenance armour, are they not?

This is actually quite interesting to me, I may research this to completion within the next year or two. I am an expert in written science fiction (I know who Gernsback is, and I have read Wells), so if anyone has any information or wants to put their heads together please contact me.

Science Fiction really is a very new genre, at least the imagery. Fantasy too, for that matter, although Fantasy (and Science Fiction which follows Fantasy) obviously has roots in fairy tales etc.

Tacobake, I think he meant the Movie terminator, where the robots unskinned looked like necrons.

Giant walking cathedral fortresses w/ guns. I actually think that's all GW.

Ogre Kingdoms?

jfrazell wrote:Didn't Shakespeare have something to say about this?

as well as Ecclesiastes:

Nothing new under the sun.

Ungentle wrote:Necrons?
Skaven?

Terminator? (though the ancient undead thing about necrons has me guessing it is a huge conglomeration of themes)
Secret of Nimh/Wind in the willows/watership down?

Hellfury wrote:

jfrazell wrote:Didn't Shakespeare have something to say about this?

as well as Ecclesiastes:

Nothing new under the sun.

Churchie.

Skaskull wrote:To an extent nothing is every really original, because its all just an addition to our collective unconciouss : ).

I was thinking the same thing...

Skaskull wrote:Tacobake, I think he meant the Movie terminator, where the robots unskinned looked like necrons.

ah yes, my bad.

Actually the walking cathedral fortress is similar to the God Warriors of Nausicca of the Valley of Wind, Howl's Moving Castle and so on.

Skaven are remarkably similar to the rat-like Wombloid creatures in a series of children's books published in the mid-80s. I can't remember the name, and can't look up the books as they are in storage.

So no, nothing GW have done is really original. Still, originality is an over-rated virtue. They have pulled together material from a variety of sources to create an internally consistent universe.

Necrons bear a very close similarity to Cybermen from Dr Who and servitors are mentats from Dune. The RT era Space marines owe much to Sardaukar from Dune. 40k's Gothic imagery bears a resemblance Nemesis the Warlock.

Skaven owe a lot to James Herbert's Rats books.

malfred wrote:Churchie.

The concept of the warp as a place where souls/psychics have a presence, where people's souls go to die, and as well as this, the warp as faster-than-light mode of travel seems to be original to me. Has anybody seen that beyond warp-speed travel anywhere else?

legoburner wrote:The concept of the warp as a place where souls/psychics have a presence, where people's souls go to die, and as well as this, the warp as faster-than-light mode of travel seems to be original to me. Has anybody seen that beyond warp-speed travel anywhere else?

Lovecraft wrote about "The spaces that lie between" as in a place where nefarious things try to break into our world that are beyond human understanding and would drive a man insane trying to comprehend the whole idea.

His short stories such as The silver key and through the gates of the silver key come readily to mind.

The idea that space ships would traverse this space he also used, in a way. The "Metal brain case cylinders" of the mi-go were used to traverse this type of space.

I think GW's idea of the warp come more from a mixture of lovecraftian insanity, and theoretical physics. Black holes being a gateway into a place humans cannot comprehend (Warp = parallel universe), or possibly being able to use them to fold space (in the Frank Herbert's Dune "Spacing guild Navigator" sense) to go from one place to the other. To use fake scientific terminology, to "translate" from one point to another...

On the subject of GW originality though:

It is rather humorous how voraciously GW's defends its IP when one considers how truly little GW has actually created.
(Rogue trade was really cool, but make no illusions, it was heavily influenced by, and in some cases completely plagiarized from various popular fictional sources)

But then again, if you don't defend IP, then you lose it.

Which brings me to why GW is so zealous about that issue.

Perhaps they do it so that they can claim IP on other ideas they have plagiarized, as the originators let it slip away? Thus making GW, "original" atleast legally.

Kilkrazy wrote:Actually the walking cathedral fortress is similar to the God Warriors of Nausicca of the Valley of Wind, Howl's Moving Castle and so on.

Well, the God Warriors didn't really resemble 40K Titans, except that they were big robots. Howl's Moving Castle came out recently, so obviously could not have inspired Titans.

Isn't it possible that on some of these instances that they came from GW without it being "Oh I read/saw this and I am going to steal it"? I imagine that just about anything can be scene as stealing from something older, what with storytelling going all the way back to the late 19th century. Just being similar doesn't always mean plagiarism. As with many things, the originality comes in how they utilized other things, in how they pulled together disparate elements into their own cohesive world.

Pariah Press wrote:

Kilkrazy wrote:Actually the walking cathedral fortress is similar to the God Warriors of Nausicca of the Valley of Wind, Howl's Moving Castle and so on.

Well, the God Warriors didn't really resemble 40K Titans, except that they were big robots. Howl's Moving Castle came out recently, so obviously could not have inspired Titans.

Perhaps not, but Japan holds a nearly racial trademarking for the Giant Robot genre.

Examples would be too many and exhausting to cite.

Ahtman wrote:Isn't it possible that on some of these instances that they came from GW without it being "Oh I read/saw this and I am going to steal it"? I imagine that just about anything can be scene as stealing from something older, what with storytelling going all the way back to the late 19th century. Just being similar doesn't always mean plagiarism. As with many things, the originality comes in how they utilized other things, in how they pulled together disparate elements into their own cohesive world.

I agree that plagiarism is a strong and libelous word to banty around.

I understand that "Inspiration" comes from many sources. But this topic is about GW's originality, of which I have see very little.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Howl's_Moving_Castle

It was a novel.

I like the word plagiarism to describe GWs attitude, after all if it were inspiration as you say Hellfury they wouldn´t be copyrighting like crazy things like:

Varghulf ----> Old German for werewolf

or

Ushabti -----> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ushabti

M.

GW is not as slick about pulling inspiration/ripping crap off from other sources, but Star Wars has a lot more unoriginality than most people think. The good trilogy, at least, is heavily dependent on Joseph Campbell's Hero with a Thousand Faces, Flash Gordon (which is what George Lucas originally started writing, an updated Flash Gordon movie), World War II movies (Dam Busters in particular), and Akira Kurosawa's samurai movies (especially The Hidden Fortress). But, like GW, he managed to mash them together into something new and different.

I think those movies (at least the three original non-horrible ones) don't have as many sources of inspiration because it's just six hours worth of stuff, as opposed to Warhammer 40K, which is 20 years and dozens of rulebooks, scenarios, and codices. I know 40K and Star Wars both have sprawling expanded universes that probably have a lot more bad than good fluff (I've barely looked into either) but at heart I think they're comparable.

Hey, Episode one wasn't bad at all, in fact I think it was the best of the series. It had no bad acting, the things they were doing were rather in line with the original trilogy. It wasn't until the second movie that things started to suck. Seeing as that whole movie (except for the clones, everyone loves genetically modified soldiers) sucked horrible ass. Ditto on the third too. (though I think the reason for this would be Hayden Christiansens utter suckiness)

Though back to Games Workshop, I think they are rather ogirinal, maybe not in the individual cases but the way they have brought them all togther seems rather original to me seeing as I have not seen anything relatively like it. (though I do agree you can see that several items do seem to be "inspired" from other works)

I don't think its fair to say that Games Workshop has little originality. When it comes to truly new ideas pretty much everything has already been thought of by someone else.

At this point, all movies, literature, television, etc are just different iterations of the same ideas.

Where originality lies in this day and age is basically turning age-old themes into your own ideas by combining concepts together in fresh ways.

Games Workshop has had many years to flesh-out and refine their universes and imagery and I feel they have done an amazing job.

The Eldar in Rogue Trader were basically just a rough juxtaposition of the typical concept of elves mashed with science fiction.

Over the years GW has continually refined and added to both the style and history of the Eldar race that at this point what an Eldar looks like and the backstory of their race is very distinct.

The same is true of Space Marines. Anyone with even a passing knowledge of 40k can recognize a space marine as a games workshop space marine.