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Personally it's a tie between Daemons and Tyranids, Tyranids are a little easier since they are for the most part non intelligent you pretty much just need to make a list of worlds they've consumed and maybe give a reason why this has affected the composition of the fleet.

Daemons on the other hand I have a harder time with, they're pretty much all mini versions of the god they came from. Sure they can slaughter, seduce, infect and warp millions (hopefully not in that order ) and then either just fade back into the warp or are banished. Then they just emerge a couple thousand years later and do it all over again. Daemon princes are one thing since they where mortal at one point and have varied backgrounds but when it comes to actual daemons I have a hard time coming up with unique fluff for daemons.

Anyone else have issues coming up with fluff for a specific army?

Well, I only play one 40K army, so I don't really have a proper method of comparison, but I find it kinda hard to write fluff for my sisters.

First of all this is because I always field either Celestine of Jakobus (and like the models, so no counts-as there), and that limits fluff-writing a lot as you are confined to their campaigns.

Second of all, since sisters are only trained in a few places, there's no 'unique' SoB army that does anything more special than wearing differently-coloured robes IMO.

Then again, I also limited myself by painting them in the livery of the Order of Our Martyred Lady, which is already well laid out in the fluff...

I would imagine select armies are difficult as any variations or themes given to them would be impossible or defined as "silly" in all regards. demons and bugs are two of those,
Grey Knights are another, I mean they can't be super different, a Grey Knight is a Grey Knight.

But that won't stop people from trying.

There was a guy at my store, kid younger then I that had multiple armies all at the same time. iirc, Imperial Guard (vallhalens, voystroyans and cadians) , Eldar (with fugaen), Chaos (marines, multi god but mostly nurgle), and Grey Knights he had concocted the strangest (and frankly dumb) story that had them all running around as a single army group. it all flew in the face of lore but others and myself in the store ignored it

 Engine of War wrote:
I would imagine select armies are difficult as any variations or themes given to them would be impossible or defined as "silly" in all regards. demons and bugs are two of those,
Grey Knights are another, I mean they can't be super different, a Grey Knight is a Grey Knight.

But that won't stop people from trying.

There was a guy at my store, kid younger then I that had multiple armies all at the same time. iirc, Imperial Guard (vallhalens, voystroyans and cadians) , Eldar (with fugaen), Chaos (marines, multi god but mostly nurgle), and Grey Knights he had concocted the strangest (and frankly dumb) story that had them all running around as a single army group. it all flew in the face of lore but others and myself in the store ignored it

Inqusitor's retuine?

It wasn't a retuine. It was silly, I think either the Eldar or the IG were the "main guys" of the group and had gathered together the others.
it had something to do with fuegan (that phoenix lord guy I think) and he had gathered them together for X reason.

Creating characters and fluff for them and their armies is one of my favorite parts of the hobby. Usually I will come up with a character, create the fluff for him/her and the characters army (since most armies are shaped by their general) and finally build a model to represent them. I also tend to tie my characters stories together, I've created characters for just about every army (including Grey Knights) wether I own them or not.

I don't know how anyone can make fluff for tau. They seem like the most soulless of all the races. Quite literally perhaps, as they don't register in the warp. And even Pariahs were at least creepy.

pax_imperialis wrote:
I don't know how anyone can make fluff for tau. They seem like the most soulless of all the races. Quite literally perhaps, as they don't register in the warp. And even Pariahs were at least creepy.

How is the race that is probably the closest to modern humans the most soulless? The reason, have relationships (even though they're all platonic), have work shifts & free time, & even have a relatively lax government for the setting. Could you please try to elaborate as I'm genuinely confused?

How is that in any way like people? Most of the world lives in abject poverty, with no education and the constant fear of death from starvation, disease or ethnic cleansing. The Tau are like the anime crazed 1st year philosophy major's idea of a sci fi race. Classically, an entity's depth is decided by its level of duality, shame and redemption and the Tau have none.

But by all means, to each their own. I just don't find them particularly believable (for an adolescent sci fi setting admittedly) or interesting. I'm likely just butthurt from broadside spam though.

I really struggle to think of lore for Tyranids. I can't tie them into my other lores in any way....drives me mad.

Tyranids, GK, Chaos Daemons, and Tau are probably the armies I have the most trouble with.

Nids are, by their nature, difficult to do much in terms of fluff as they don't, and really shouldn't, have characters of any kind basically just being an army of faceless foes to challenge. The best one can do is describe the movement of the hive and perhaps some of its iconic tactics.

GK are difficult more because of how restrictive they are. It doesn't really make too much sense for them to fight anything but Chaos Daemons (at least not at the frequency one will usually end up using them) and are all basically stuck with a very narrow definition of what to do.

Tau are the least challenging here really but they are a small minor force that has minimal models to represent auxillery and I just can't grasp their tactics to make fluff. Doesn't help they retrict you to one area.

Chaos Daemons can come up with charming personalities for DP and the greater daemons but the drawbacks are two-fold. One, the most logical fluff is mono-god which means extremely restrictive model options and two, the low ranking daemons won't even really have much personality. Basically all of the character comes from HQ (bar how DP can become heavy) and the fact that Daemons should be very infrequent. Perk is that they can die and return in a very logical manner rather then herp derp survived death somehow again.

The fact the nids have no fluff kind of IS their fluff, but yeah i would find it hard to create any kind of narrative around them that isn't "we're here to omnomnom you". I was probably being unfair to tau, i find the nasty races in general more characterful, that's all.