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If you could make one major change to the setting what would it be? @ 2021/10/03 17:10:33


Post by: mrFickle


Without it being salty like ‘it turns out there’s a genetic defect in the primaris and they all die”

I would personally make chaos an equal sized empire to the imperium, taking over the dark imperium with the remaining forces of humanity either hiding or fighting a resistance war trying to get supplies in from the remaining imperium.

The imperium and chaos empire are equally fighting on other fronts against Orks, nids, necrons etc.



If you could make one major change to the setting what would it be? @ 2021/10/03 23:21:10


Post by: MinMax


I would remove Primaris Marines from the setting.

You're not my dad, you can't tell me what not to post!


If you could make one major change to the setting what would it be? @ 2021/10/04 01:15:36


Post by: Some_Call_Me_Tim


I would really represent orks as the threat they are. Despite being what I’d say is the most pressing and honestly biggest and oldest threat to the imperium, it isn’t shown. I think they’re just not edgy enough for writers to make stories about or something. I just want to see more captains getting snipped in half then getting laughed at.


If you could make one major change to the setting what would it be? @ 2021/10/04 01:55:28


Post by: oni


Completely rewrite The Gathering Storm story arch. The whole thing reeks of Matt Ward. It’s just fething awful.

Cadia would not have been destroyed.
Beil-Tan would not have been destroyed.
Ynarri would not be a thing.
Roboute would not have been killed and resurrected. I like that he’s back, just the way it happened is frustratingly terrible.

I like the Great Rift, that was a good idea to move the story forward a bit and provide a means for additional conflict & strife through the galaxy.
Primaris Marines are fine, but should have been very limited and integrated into chapters not outright replace Space Marines.

Not to derail the topic but The Gathering Storm story arch was so awful it has turned me off to reading anything new from GW or Black Library.


If you could make one major change to the setting what would it be? @ 2021/10/04 04:05:06


Post by: Wyldhunt


MinMax wrote:I would remove Primaris Marines from the setting.

You're not my dad, you can't tell me what not to post!

Honestly, agreed. Or rather, I'd make "primaris" just be a mark of armour used to explain the size differences between firstborn and the new models. Nothing against those who like the primaris fluff; it's just that I've given it a fair shake and found it to be a really awkward fit.

Failing that, and I swear I'm not trying to stir anything up, I'd go back and make space marine women a thing. Just quietly say that, yeah, there have been lady marines this whole time. It's a lore detail that just hasn't aged very well. It's a bad look.

Some_Call_Me_Tim wrote:I would really represent orks as the threat they are. Despite being what I’d say is the most pressing and honestly biggest and oldest threat to the imperium, it isn’t shown. I think they’re just not edgy enough for writers to make stories about or something. I just want to see more captains getting snipped in half then getting laughed at.

I've seen the sentiment that orks aren't scary enough from time to time. As a non-ork player, what exactly is it you'd like to see? From my perspective, orks are considered a very significant threat. It's just that they're in a setting with other equally impressive threats, and getting killed or captured by orks simply isn't as horrifying of a fate. Like, sure, brutal murder or a life of being an ork's slave doesn't sound fun, but it does sound better than a possibly literal eternity of suffering at the hands of daemons or millenia of suffering under drukhari. Orks are more honest and less obsessed with creating fates worse than death.

oni wrote:
Beil-Tan would not have been destroyed.

Good news. Biel-Tan kind of didn't get destroyed. It got... severely vandalized I geuss? But like, people still live there and are rebuilding and so forth. The "fall" of Biel-Tan was basically a really bad blackout with some extra spooky rammifications for dead eldar.

But I largely agree. Even though I liked a lot of what came from those books (especially the introduction of the Ynnari), there was a lot of half-baked nonsense within the plots of those books themselves. I do kind of like that Cadia fell though.


If you could make one major change to the setting what would it be? @ 2021/10/04 04:27:54


Post by: Sgt. Cortez


I'd probably increase SM numbers. Add 3 zeros everywhere and they don't break my immersion anymore. 1Million Marines per chapter, the Black Legion and DG having 200 Million Marines each? Now I believe you that they can appear anywhere in the galaxy, pose a threat and conquer a planet. With these numbers it's also okay that they sometimes die like flies in Black Library books or non-SM Codizes

Other than that? I would have ripped the Imperium apart with the arrival of Guilliman. Big schisma of the Religious guys like SOB, BT, Inquisition against the more reasonable folks around Guilliman. Make it more grimdark, for once in 10K years there's someone to actually achieve something in the Imperium, but that's also breaking the whole thing.


If you could make one major change to the setting what would it be? @ 2021/10/04 06:03:23


Post by: Dysartes


Rewind to before The Gathering Storm, and make it really fething clear that this is a setting, not a soap opera...

There's enough conflict in the galaxy at 999.M41 without needing to blow thing sup.


If you could make one major change to the setting what would it be? @ 2021/10/04 06:49:00


Post by: Iracundus


Get the scale right. For large scale conflicts, we should be dealing in hundreds or thousands of regiments not the pathetic handfuls GW gives as the numbers. Same goes for ships, materials, logistics, etc... Included in this is less focus on the same characters over and over again as that shrinks the feel of the setting if it is the same bunch repeatedly bumping into each other again. There should be room for every faction to have plenty of new characters doing their own thing, being special or heroic in their own way, yet their efforts amounting to little in the grand scheme (even if they do affect the local scene) due to the sheer scale of the galaxy.


If you could make one major change to the setting what would it be? @ 2021/10/04 07:35:31


Post by: Vatsetis


Gives Astartes to every faction... Orktartes, Necrosrartes, Sorostartes, Taustartes, etc.

Adeptus astartes are such a great concept, and GW is underussing them in the last few years.


If you could make one major change to the setting what would it be? @ 2021/10/04 09:21:32


Post by: Tiberias


I'd change the reason why the Custodes and the sisters of silence have been absent for the last 10k years. When they released the faction they retconned it in a way where they had been doing things, just in secret...which was a missed opportunity imo.

I'd change it just slightly: since the emperor had been interred into the golden throne his power and hence the power of the astronomican has not been steady. He needs a big portion of his power to keep the webway gate beneath the golden throne closed, otherwise Terra is overrun by demons. Imo a better setup for the Custodes could have been if the emperor can not keep the webway gate closed all the way, all the time. So every once in a couple hundred years or so, the Custodes have to fight back small to medium sized demon incursions in the throne room itself.
It would have been a small detail and imo a better explanation in addition to the treaty they signed with guilliman after the heresy which confined them to Terra and the palace. Sure, they would have still done mission in secret away from Terra, but it would have better explained why they did not act at crucial times like the age of apostasy or during the war of the beast (but the beast saga is so unbelievably bad anyway, let's best just ignore it) where Terra was in danger. You don't really have time for any petty squabbles of the imperium if you constantly have to keep an eye out and reserve resources to keep the throne room itself safe from a danger that doesn't come from outside.


If you could make one major change to the setting what would it be? @ 2021/10/04 09:29:16


Post by: Sunno


Rather than remove Primaris, make them really really rare and highly controversial for those chapters who accept and employ them.

Humanity in 40K is meant to be in a state of decline, unable to create new tech, only maintaining what they have through almost adherence to as sort of religious doctrine. They can really only maintain things. The AdMec dont create things they just rediscover.
Just suddenly being able to "create millions of super duper space marines" is completely lore breaking.

Primaris could have been a great plot point, putting strain on relationships in the imperium, creating intrigue. Is Cawl all he seems to be? etc. But instead you have entire legions of new Primaris when the Imperium has issues even maintaining its tanks? Its a bit of a joke. But having Primaris in highly limited numbers would be in keeping.

Also, return to the full grimdark grittiness of older editions, image and lore wise.


If you could make one major change to the setting what would it be? @ 2021/10/04 09:50:22


Post by: Duskweaver


Arguably, this isn't just "one change", but what I'd really want to do can be summarized as "bring the mystery back".

Delete all the Horus Heresy stuff. Explicitly make it non-canon. Delete Guilliman's return. Delete Cawl.

Nobody in the Imperium is more than 1000 or so years old (so Dante can still exist, and you can still have some ancient, senile AdMech magi). Nobody in the Imperium remembers the Horus Heresy, or the Age of Apostasy or any of that. It's all myths and legends. Did it even happen? Is the Emperor even real, or is the Throne room just a sealed room full of machinery nobody understands? Did the founders of the SoB really get taken to see the Emperor by the Custodes, or was that just a story invented to cover up them assassinating Vandire for other reasons?

Nobody knows.

Did the primarchs exist, or were they just the original leaders of the Astartes, or the scientists who designed them, filtered through 10,000 years of ignorance and supersition? Are the daemon primarchs just powerful daemons who have convinced a bunch of Warp-crazy traitor Astartes that they are their fathers, and that they're part of some glorious holy war against "the False Emperor"? Maybe they call him that because they know he never really existed?

Nobody knows.

Is that really Roboute Guilliman in that stasis field on Macragge? Or is it just an ancient abhuman giant in armour? Or a statue painted to look like a living man? You can't see properly through the blurring of the stasis field. And you can't switch the field off to check. If it's really Guilliman, switching off the field might kill him. Or what if that's not Guilliman but rather the traitorous brother who killed him? Switching off the field might unleash a terrifying horror from the ancient past that the present-day Imperium has no way to deal with.

Nobody knows.

Do the Traitor Legions even remember things as they were? Can anyone trust their memories after ten millennia in the Eye of Terror? The oldest of them might remember a great galactic war against a glowing golden figure who led their brothers against them. But did that really happen? Is it a trick of the Chaos Gods to make them want to conquer/destroy Terra? Or maybe they're the ones who fought for the Emperor and then were betrayed, and the 'loyalist' Astartes are really just a later creation (not as strong but more controllable) made to defend the nascent Imperium from their outcast predecessors? Maybe the original Chaos Marines were actually the Thunder Warriors?

Nobody knows.

Maybe Living Saints are real, or maybe it's all a con by the Ecclesiarchy who keeps putting a new mindwiped and hypno-indoctrinated woman in that fancy golden armour every time the previous 'Celestine' gets her head lopped off by Kharn? Even if they're real, are they anything to do with the Emperor, or are they spawned by the Chaos gods as a joke? Or are they just a new evolution of the human psyker gene, the next stage of the human species as designed by the Old Ones? Are they the Eldar gods who have found a way to cheat Slaanesh and are reincarnating in human bodies now? Are they the biological descendants of the Emperor from the thousands of years he spent in hiding on Old Earth? Or are they the last fading remnants of the superhuman subspecies that gave rise to the Emperor in the first place?

Nobody knows.

The point is that I'd ensure the official fluff would present things in such a way as to avoid nailing down anything that the people of the Imperium couldn't possibly know the 'real' answer to. So you'd never have some 10,000 year old supergenius popping up and telling us all "this is how it really happened". Recent events would still be known, and basic facts about the setting (like how space marines are made, or which part of the galaxy Iyanden is in, or how orks reproduce) would still have an 'objectively true' version (even if most people in the setting are wrong about it). But Imperial record-keeping is terrible and anything more than a couple of thousand years in the past should be at least as uncertain as similarly ancient events in our own (pre-)history are to us. To someone in the 41st millennium, the Horus Heresy is as distant as the invention of pottery is to you and me. Even if there are written records from the Heresy era, nobody in the 41st millenium should be able to read them. There should be contradictory stories about even the most basic 'facts' of that time, even down to (for example) different Blood Angels successor chapters having radically different accounts of who Sanguinius was and what he did during the Heresy (was he just a particularly heroic Blood Angels officer? was he the scientist who created the original Blood Angels geneseed? was he the first Blood Angel marine? was he just a psychic gestalt of the legion, or an aspect of the God-Emperor? was he killed by Horus? did he kill Horus? was he Horus' twin and the Emperor killed him accidentally thinking he was Horus? did he kill himself to give the Emperor the power to defeat Horus?).

TLDR: To quote Rick Priestley: "The trouble with the Heresy as envisaged by GW is it just feels like 40K - it doesn't have the feel of a genuinely different society that ten thousand years' separation would give you. Whenever I wrote anything that referenced back to those times I always wrote in a legendary, non-literal style. It's as if you were dealing with something like the Iliad rather than literal history ... I don't get any sense of understanding about 'deep time' when I look at anything GW have set in the 40K 'past'."


If you could make one major change to the setting what would it be? @ 2021/10/04 09:55:31


Post by: Grimtuff


 Dysartes wrote:
Rewind to before The Gathering Storm, and make it really fething clear that this is a setting, not a soap opera...

There's enough conflict in the galaxy at 999.M41 without needing to blow thing sup.


Beat me to the punch. The single biggest problem with modern 40k (and several other franchises) is the notion that everything has to be spoonfed to the readers for whatever reason and the concept of making your own stories and other things that go against the "official" canon (another thing which I think is a quirk of people coming in from other franchises and not understanding that 40k having conflicting and contradictory history is a feature and not a bug) is anathema to them.

40k's biggest strength is the setting and the endless stories you can make in it. Stop trying to turn it into HH 2.0 featuring the 40k Avengers.


If you could make one major change to the setting what would it be? @ 2021/10/04 13:13:37


Post by: Kanluwen


Guilliman reforms the Imperial Army. It's a necessary evil, IMO, fluffwise. Guard is a wrecked concept since Cruddace's fiddling.

The notion that humanity is stagnant is a bit of a misunderstanding of the situation by the by. There's still some innovation. It's just mired down in bureaucracy, dogma, and a lack of patronage.

Cawl's return being tied to Guilliman is how they got past the issues. Guilliman had backed Cawl's program--Back In The Day. It's not like the Primaris Project was completed overnight. It was multiple lifetimes.

Also another slight misunderstanding, seemingly, is that "Cadia blew up".

The planet fractured. There's still fighting going on in the wreckage of the planet, and there's still fighting going on within the Cadian system proper.


If you could make one major change to the setting what would it be? @ 2021/10/04 14:35:44


Post by: Da Boss


Duskweaver said it better than I ever could have.


If you could make one major change to the setting what would it be? @ 2021/10/04 14:44:14


Post by: PaddyMick


Vatsetis wrote:
Gives Astartes to every faction... Orktartes, Necrosrartes, Sorostartes, Taustartes, etc.

Adeptus astartes are such a great concept, and GW is underussing them in the last few years.


This made me laugh

and +1 to deleting primaris. Primaris armour I could get behind, maybe.

Personally though, I think we need loads more aliens, whether they are playable factions or not, and loads more examples of different human societies. And more on civilians.

If I could just have one thing though, it would be a framework to make custom ork clans, in the same way you can dream up marine chapters.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
 Da Boss wrote:
Duskweaver said it better than I ever could have.


+1 just seen the post

Great post Duskweaver, exalted


If you could make one major change to the setting what would it be? @ 2021/10/04 15:41:54


Post by: Mad Doc Grotsnik


Start allowing named characters to snuff it in the background. Properly snuff it. No Marvelesque resurrections.

We’ve two or three off the top of my head in Tycho, Space Pope (Aun’Va?) and Creed - though Creed isn’t necessarily all properly dead in the face with a nasty case of not being alive anymore.

Because when very few actually die? You lose the drama, and you cannot shock your audience. An audience insulated from shock is one prone to boredom.

Example. Ghaz vs Blackmane. With the current status quo, we knew both would no worse than limp away from that particular fight. And so it was kind of unimpressive as a result.

Either could’ve been permanently slain. Blackmane snuffing it would’ve been a minimal change. He’s not a Chapter Master, just a Captain equivalent. Plenty more where he came from. But Ghaz?

Now that could’ve opened up some serious narrative possibilities. His great threat is achieving the Herding Cats stage of wrangling up the Boyz. A head honcho of head honchos. The Warboss’ Warboss, who’ll smack seven shades of Snotlings out of any pretenders.

Having that many Orks as United as they’re ever likely to get is one thing. A big old green fist smashing up whatever Ghaz has decided needs smashing that day. An inexorable, unstoppable tide of lads, laffs and violence.

But, like Abaddon’s role for Chaos? Remove that singular leader, and you might just have made things far, far worse, as the more or less concerted force starts fracturing and fragmenting. Going their own way, each Warboss or Chaos Lord vying to replace the Big Boss Wot Got Ded.

With the Imperium already overstretched by the opening of Gork’s Grin, such a splintering could be far, far worse in the long run. Even fractured, you’re still talking multiple forces entirely capable of wrecking a system without further support. The one raging inferno becomes dozens of blazes in need of putting out. If one requires extra effort, others grow as they spread.

But…instead….we get the Super Ghaz. It could’ve been far cooler if Mad Dok Grotsnik had gone completely tonto and stitched someone else’s bonce onto Ghaz’s fallen body. He is meant to be mad after all!


If you could make one major change to the setting what would it be? @ 2021/10/04 15:43:36


Post by: Kanluwen


Aun'va is dead dead. They bit the big one during Damocles.

The Tau are utilizing body doubles and holograms to make it seem like he didn't. Because all his friggin' bodyguards bit it too.


If you could make one major change to the setting what would it be? @ 2021/10/04 16:27:53


Post by: Pyroalchi


One thing that - in my personal opinion - would have some potential would be a change of the T'au from a small empire +their vasals to the T'au empire as it is as part of a larger confederation of small alien empires that just try to not get snuffed out by the bigger powers. Basically the league of non-aligned worlds. I would shift thus leagues goal from "we are destined to rule the galaxy" to "if we hold together we might stand a chance of surviving this". It would handily explain the presence of this "leagues " forces even far away from the T'au space. Overall it would be big enough that we wouldn't need mental gymnastics to explain them holding out between the bigger powers, ob the other hand each member race would still face the threat of being extremely outnumbered just like the T'au now. So both kind of story can be supported.

Note that in my mind none of the T'au fluff would really need to change. They would just be part of something bigger.


If you could make one major change to the setting what would it be? @ 2021/10/04 16:34:32


Post by: Tawnis


For me, the one thing I would change is to add a 0 to basically every number in 40k. Space marine chapters, 10,000. Still very small and spec ops on a galactic scale, but not so small it feels like their impact is disproportional. Oh that battle for a moon had 100,000 people fighting, now it has 1,000,000 and feels more like a small real war. Super easy to retcon and would make a lot of stuff make a bit more sense.

Failing that, going forward I second what Mad Doc Grotsnick said. Don't be afraid to kill off main characters even if they have a model. There are a few he missed, but I can't exactly call them "main" characters. Guys like Colour Seargent Kell and the Salamanders Chaplain Xavier (does anyone even remember him?), but they weren't exactly huge lore dudes. Currently, it's the Grim Dark far future where you are insignificant and life it cheap, oh and no one important ever dies...


If you could make one major change to the setting what would it be? @ 2021/10/04 16:49:19


Post by: Mad Doc Grotsnik


Even if they’ve got a model, death in the background doesn’t mean removal from the game.

We’ve 10,000 years of Imperial History to play around in, so someone snuffing it is hardly a barrier to play. And if your opponent is one to kick up a stink about a 40K army not being “historically correct”, one suspects that’s the least of the problems you might have in playing them.


If you could make one major change to the setting what would it be? @ 2021/10/04 17:01:02


Post by: Gert


Yay, more complaining about Primaris. Must be a day ending in Y.
Apart from making [REDACTED] able to be [REDACTED], I can't really think of much. Oh wait I know, no Squats. Hate them. 0/10 not a fan. Bloody battle trikes.


If you could make one major change to the setting what would it be? @ 2021/10/04 17:23:44


Post by: Mad Doc Grotsnik


They were far, far cooler in Epic!


If you could make one major change to the setting what would it be? @ 2021/10/04 17:44:07


Post by: JNAProductions


I'll echo "Let Marines pick from all able-bodied individuals, not just dudes."

I'll also echo "Increase the damn numbers!" because 1,000,000 Marines is a paltry sum, and there's gotta be plenty other examples of bad math there too.

I'll also also echo, to a degree, "Make it more mysterious." I like some solidity, but I do agree that GW may be filling in too many details.


If you could make one major change to the setting what would it be? @ 2021/10/04 18:04:10


Post by: Mad Doc Grotsnik


Ahh, but the details are often contradictory, and from there the amusement stems!


If you could make one major change to the setting what would it be? @ 2021/10/04 18:08:02


Post by: techsoldaten


 MinMax wrote:
I would remove Primaris Marines from the setting.

You're not my dad, you can't tell me what not to post!


Removing Primaris would be at the top of my list too.

Would not even retcon them. High Lords of Terra would commit all Primaris forces to a Nihilius Crusade, with the mission of securing a vast, distant, uninhabited galaxy for 40,000 years.


If you could make one major change to the setting what would it be? @ 2021/10/04 18:25:20


Post by: Insectum7


 PaddyMick wrote:

 Da Boss wrote:
Duskweaver said it better than I ever could have.

+1 just seen the post
Great post Duskweaver, exalted

Another +1 from me.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
They were far, far cooler in Epic!
Land Train! Cyclops! (etc. etc.)


If you could make one major change to the setting what would it be? @ 2021/10/04 18:59:32


Post by: Tawnis


 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
Even if they’ve got a model, death in the background doesn’t mean removal from the game.

We’ve 10,000 years of Imperial History to play around in, so someone snuffing it is hardly a barrier to play. And if your opponent is one to kick up a stink about a 40K army not being “historically correct”, one suspects that’s the least of the problems you might have in playing them.


Yeah, exactly. I figured this is what would be happening when they announced Legendary, but that doesn't seem to be the case.

Not to say that they would NEED to use Legendary for dead characters instead of giving them new rules, just what I figured they would do.


If you could make one major change to the setting what would it be? @ 2021/10/04 19:24:17


Post by: Mad Doc Grotsnik


I think I’d want them to avoid putting them into Legendary status.

Codex doesn’t mean Background, after all.

There is however a solid argument they might never receive an updated model. But….that being said….we know pretty much all the forces in 40K venerate relics and equipment to one degree or another.

So, Tycho’s Deathmask, armour and combi-melta can simply be recycled in that way. Similarly the Tau have at least some capacity to record and upload memories. It’s not a massive stretch to turn that into a total, near Phoenix Lord level of personality wipe, where the bearer literally becomes the fallen Commander.

There are a lot of ways the permanent death of a character need not mean the retirement of a given model, or indeed no more updates for said model.

If anything, it adds to the horror and ongoing stagnation of the setting.


If you could make one major change to the setting what would it be? @ 2021/10/04 20:27:52


Post by: Vatsetis


Reveal the great secret... That indeed Primaris has always been FSM since their creation... No need to change a single miniature... Just let the Galaxy (and the net) BURN!!!!


If you could make one major change to the setting what would it be? @ 2021/10/04 20:35:32


Post by: xerxeskingofking


Give chaos the Dark imperium.


In the wake failed attack on terra, chaos make a fighting retreat to the line of the Rift, Giving up ground before the Indomitus Crusade but trying to maintain their force, trading space for time. they use this time to properly take control over the majority of the Dark Imperium. Bhaal still stands under the blood angels legion (and allies), plus a few other mostly isolated locations but the majority of the region is under chaos control, and used to rebuild the Traitor legions to a threat able to grind the indomitus Crusade into a standstill. However, Abaddon soon finds that conquering territory is much easier than holding it. Orks, Nids, the tau all expand into the same vacuum, creating strong local empires that are extremely difficult to stomp out, and the imperial holdouts begin slash and burn raids into the lost territory, all of which draws troops off the Crusade front to deal with this "secondary" theatres. on top of this, chaos lords drunk with success being pursuing personal agendas, establishing pocket empires of their own which rapidly start fighting each other as much as the external threats. Despite his position as the notional leader of the forces of chaos, Abaddon finds he is powerless to deal with these issues, he simply cant afford to take the troops off the imperial front to force these breakaways back into line.

The net result is that while Chaos is technically in control of vast swathes of the galaxy, and at its strongest since the Heresy, it is now beset by the same issues of too many local problems that keep siphoning off troops that the Imperium has been hamstrung by for millennia. The Imperium, too, is unable to make significant headway past the great rift. the front swings back and forth over a broad area of systems, but no great advance is possible. billions die in the fighting, but no victory is in sight, only a endless war.....


If you could make one major change to the setting what would it be? @ 2021/10/04 22:14:52


Post by: FezzikDaBullgryn


Remove Knights and LoW from non apoc games.


If you could make one major change to the setting what would it be? @ 2021/10/04 22:26:41


Post by: GoldenHorde


Make the imperium split into two factions


If you could make one major change to the setting what would it be? @ 2021/10/05 01:17:24


Post by: macluvin


As much as I hate primaris, from being a full model overhaul for one of the armies that needed it least, to fluff that I really don’t agree with or like, to bringing tacticool aesthetics to an army I preferred to lack them (shoulda left that to Tau) I can not support a retcon or fluff change designed to strip them from the tabletop. People have invested heavily in primaris and I can not support taking those models away from the tabletop game altogether. And no legends BS either; that still stings that my chaos bike lord is in that atrocious category XD

Instead, I like the idea that chaos and the imperium are a delicate balance struggling for ultimate control of mankind. Make it akin to the marriage of heaven and hell, where the imperium represents authoritarian order and chaos an expression of yearning for libertarian freedoms, and where either extrema ultimately leads to ruin. For irony, make it so neither side is capable of understanding how much one needs the other.

The imperium would be confined to the old ways of doing things, and chaos would constantly be attempting to innovate and evolve. Let both methods have their merits and flaws.


If you could make one major change to the setting what would it be? @ 2021/10/05 01:49:08


Post by: Wyldhunt


macluvin wrote:
As much as I hate primaris, from being a full model overhaul for one of the armies that needed it least, to fluff that I really don’t agree with or like, to bringing tacticool aesthetics to an army I preferred to lack them (shoulda left that to Tau) I can not support a retcon or fluff change designed to strip them from the tabletop. People have invested heavily in primaris and I can not support taking those models away from the tabletop game altogether. And no legends BS either; that still stings that my chaos bike lord is in that atrocious category XD


Retconning primaris away doesn't necessarily mean getting rid of the models though. My pitch on the first page was basically just to say that marines got all the primaris gear without the super-sized marines themselves. So intercessor models are basically just a chance to get truescale tactical marines. Interceptors are just a new type of unit made popular throughout the galaxy now that the tech is available. Etc.

As a more likely alternative, I could see future fluff basically saying, "Yeah, firstborn and primaris are both still around, but they're functionally very similar. Turns out those extra organs weren't important enough to represent on the tabletop. Both firstborn and primaris marines end up assigned to 'bolter squads.' Instead of assault intercessors and assault marine, you just have 'chainsword squads.' "


If you could make one major change to the setting what would it be? @ 2021/10/05 07:13:27


Post by: macluvin


Wyldhunt wrote:
macluvin wrote:
As much as I hate primaris, from being a full model overhaul for one of the armies that needed it least, to fluff that I really don’t agree with or like, to bringing tacticool aesthetics to an army I preferred to lack them (shoulda left that to Tau) I can not support a retcon or fluff change designed to strip them from the tabletop. People have invested heavily in primaris and I can not support taking those models away from the tabletop game altogether. And no legends BS either; that still stings that my chaos bike lord is in that atrocious category XD


Retconning primaris away doesn't necessarily mean getting rid of the models though. My pitch on the first page was basically just to say that marines got all the primaris gear without the super-sized marines themselves. So intercessor models are basically just a chance to get truescale tactical marines. Interceptors are just a new type of unit made popular throughout the galaxy now that the tech is available. Etc.

As a more likely alternative, I could see future fluff basically saying, "Yeah, firstborn and primaris are both still around, but they're functionally very similar. Turns out those extra organs weren't important enough to represent on the tabletop. Both firstborn and primaris marines end up assigned to 'bolter squads.' Instead of assault intercessors and assault marine, you just have 'chainsword squads.' "


Seems like a sensible way to patch a few things up. I personally love this idea.


If you could make one major change to the setting what would it be? @ 2021/10/05 07:27:29


Post by: Flipsiders


A lot of other people have posted some very good ideas, but here's one that's gone undiscussed:

Retcon things so the Emperor is dead.

No comatose state. No Star-Child. No "if the Emperor dies then the entire solar system gets flushed down his magic warp toilet" nonsense. The Emperor is unequivocally a rotting corpse, and all the daily sacrifices are just to power his golden chair and let the Imperium pretend he's still kicking. If that's too much, make it so he is comatose, but is explicitly never coming back or doing anything important under any capacity. Make it so the guy can't form conscious thought at all.

Obviously, if this were done, all the stories from the Imperium perspective would still treat Big E as if he were alive. It wouldn't stop being heresy to suggest that he died. It would only add another layer of tragedy and dark humor to those discussions, since it's so obvious that the Imperium is in a state of collective religious denial.

That will of course never happen because it conflicts with the power fantasy of having a big hypermasculine shiny guy who can come down and solve all your problems for you, but what can you do, right?


If you could make one major change to the setting what would it be? @ 2021/10/05 08:10:02


Post by: some bloke


another +1 to upping the mystery. It used to be that there were theories (Which could never be confirmed or denied as they had never written the answer) that it was Horus, not the Emperor, who was sat on the throne in a comatose state. Now we have basically explicit things where people are going to see the emperor, and I think it's a bit rubbish to be honest.

+1 for killing off some characters. Shake things up a bit, push factions into big fights, allow new characters to rise. If needs be, make a "second age" of 40k, and have it so that you cannot include 1st-age and 2nd-age units in the same army as they wouldn't have existed at the same time, or something.

I think that my changes would include:

1: More prominence of the T'au empire taking humans into their fold. The T'au empire is supposedly one of the better places to live - I can see why humans would ditch the imperium for them.
2: More terrifying tyranid-ness. They used to be unstoppable, every world they touched they eventually consumed. Now they seem to be more of a pest that you can slap on the nose to stop it knawing on solar systems.
3: Split the imperium - perhaps Guillimann finds out that Horus is actually in the golden throne, and seeks to destroy and replace him. The primaris side with Guillimann, the firstborn with the emperor. Everyone thinks they're in the right. Primaris start making their own rules and creating new technology, and the firstborn & inquisition claim it to be heresy. Guillimann, in his arrogence, will ultimately move towards AI and potentially doom the galaxy to men of iron.


If you could make one major change to the setting what would it be? @ 2021/10/05 08:51:59


Post by: Just Tony


I would have one of the Fallen turn himself in at The Rock and have him be spared execution as he's seen as being both uncorrupted as he was led on by Luther rather than down the path, AND because he had been taking the fight TO the Fallen in the interim. It would be a cool story to tell which gives us a character with some depth, AND it would and a moment of complete altruism from the Dark Angels no less that would grate on all the nihilistic grimderp edgelords that obsess over the thought of the setting being totally amoral.


If you could make one major change to the setting what would it be? @ 2021/10/05 09:10:13


Post by: robbienw


There is a genetic fault in the Primaris....and they all die.



If you could make one major change to the setting what would it be? @ 2021/10/05 22:38:02


Post by: KidCthulhu


 Duskweaver wrote:
Arguably, this isn't just "one change", but what I'd really want to do can be summarized as "bring the mystery back".

Spoiler:
Delete all the Horus Heresy stuff. Explicitly make it non-canon. Delete Guilliman's return. Delete Cawl.

Nobody in the Imperium is more than 1000 or so years old (so Dante can still exist, and you can still have some ancient, senile AdMech magi). Nobody in the Imperium remembers the Horus Heresy, or the Age of Apostasy or any of that. It's all myths and legends. Did it even happen? Is the Emperor even real, or is the Throne room just a sealed room full of machinery nobody understands? Did the founders of the SoB really get taken to see the Emperor by the Custodes, or was that just a story invented to cover up them assassinating Vandire for other reasons?

Nobody knows.

Did the primarchs exist, or were they just the original leaders of the Astartes, or the scientists who designed them, filtered through 10,000 years of ignorance and supersition? Are the daemon primarchs just powerful daemons who have convinced a bunch of Warp-crazy traitor Astartes that they are their fathers, and that they're part of some glorious holy war against "the False Emperor"? Maybe they call him that because they know he never really existed?

Nobody knows.

Is that really Roboute Guilliman in that stasis field on Macragge? Or is it just an ancient abhuman giant in armour? Or a statue painted to look like a living man? You can't see properly through the blurring of the stasis field. And you can't switch the field off to check. If it's really Guilliman, switching off the field might kill him. Or what if that's not Guilliman but rather the traitorous brother who killed him? Switching off the field might unleash a terrifying horror from the ancient past that the present-day Imperium has no way to deal with.

Nobody knows.

Do the Traitor Legions even remember things as they were? Can anyone trust their memories after ten millennia in the Eye of Terror? The oldest of them might remember a great galactic war against a glowing golden figure who led their brothers against them. But did that really happen? Is it a trick of the Chaos Gods to make them want to conquer/destroy Terra? Or maybe they're the ones who fought for the Emperor and then were betrayed, and the 'loyalist' Astartes are really just a later creation (not as strong but more controllable) made to defend the nascent Imperium from their outcast predecessors? Maybe the original Chaos Marines were actually the Thunder Warriors?

Nobody knows.

Maybe Living Saints are real, or maybe it's all a con by the Ecclesiarchy who keeps putting a new mindwiped and hypno-indoctrinated woman in that fancy golden armour every time the previous 'Celestine' gets her head lopped off by Kharn? Even if they're real, are they anything to do with the Emperor, or are they spawned by the Chaos gods as a joke? Or are they just a new evolution of the human psyker gene, the next stage of the human species as designed by the Old Ones? Are they the Eldar gods who have found a way to cheat Slaanesh and are reincarnating in human bodies now? Are they the biological descendants of the Emperor from the thousands of years he spent in hiding on Old Earth? Or are they the last fading remnants of the superhuman subspecies that gave rise to the Emperor in the first place?

Nobody knows.

The point is that I'd ensure the official fluff would present things in such a way as to avoid nailing down anything that the people of the Imperium couldn't possibly know the 'real' answer to. So you'd never have some 10,000 year old supergenius popping up and telling us all "this is how it really happened". Recent events would still be known, and basic facts about the setting (like how space marines are made, or which part of the galaxy Iyanden is in, or how orks reproduce) would still have an 'objectively true' version (even if most people in the setting are wrong about it). But Imperial record-keeping is terrible and anything more than a couple of thousand years in the past should be at least as uncertain as similarly ancient events in our own (pre-)history are to us. To someone in the 41st millennium, the Horus Heresy is as distant as the invention of pottery is to you and me. Even if there are written records from the Heresy era, nobody in the 41st millenium should be able to read them. There should be contradictory stories about even the most basic 'facts' of that time, even down to (for example) different Blood Angels successor chapters having radically different accounts of who Sanguinius was and what he did during the Heresy (was he just a particularly heroic Blood Angels officer? was he the scientist who created the original Blood Angels geneseed? was he the first Blood Angel marine? was he just a psychic gestalt of the legion, or an aspect of the God-Emperor? was he killed by Horus? did he kill Horus? was he Horus' twin and the Emperor killed him accidentally thinking he was Horus? did he kill himself to give the Emperor the power to defeat Horus?).


TLDR: To quote Rick Priestley: "The trouble with the Heresy as envisaged by GW is it just feels like 40K - it doesn't have the feel of a genuinely different society that ten thousand years' separation would give you. Whenever I wrote anything that referenced back to those times I always wrote in a legendary, non-literal style. It's as if you were dealing with something like the Iliad rather than literal history ... I don't get any sense of understanding about 'deep time' when I look at anything GW have set in the 40K 'past'."


There are not enough exalts in the universe for this quote. This is how I've felt about the 40K lore for a long time.


If you could make one major change to the setting what would it be? @ 2021/10/06 01:12:10


Post by: Goose LeChance


I'd remove the Space Wolves


If you could make one major change to the setting what would it be? @ 2021/10/06 01:25:20


Post by: Wyldhunt


 Flipsiders wrote:
A lot of other people have posted some very good ideas, but here's one that's gone undiscussed:

Retcon things so the Emperor is dead.

No comatose state. No Star-Child. No "if the Emperor dies then the entire solar system gets flushed down his magic warp toilet" nonsense. The Emperor is unequivocally a rotting corpse, and all the daily sacrifices are just to power his golden chair and let the Imperium pretend he's still kicking. If that's too much, make it so he is comatose, but is explicitly never coming back or doing anything important under any capacity. Make it so the guy can't form conscious thought at all.

Obviously, if this were done, all the stories from the Imperium perspective would still treat Big E as if he were alive. It wouldn't stop being heresy to suggest that he died. It would only add another layer of tragedy and dark humor to those discussions, since it's so obvious that the Imperium is in a state of collective religious denial.

That will of course never happen because it conflicts with the power fantasy of having a big hypermasculine shiny guy who can come down and solve all your problems for you, but what can you do, right?

See, I feel like we already have the tragedy/dark humor you're going for. The Emprah doesn't seem to be in the habit of swooping in and solving problems. He's been rotting for 10,000 years, and he doesn't show any sign of getting better. He's not exactly taking charge of the situation and giving orders. He's certainly not pulling on his armour and jumping into battle. But the masses of humanity don't know that and suffer horribly in the name of a largely inert skeleton because of ecclesiarchal propaganda said skeleton would despise.

We have the tragedy/comedy. Have I missed some recent hands-on activities he's been involved in?


If you could make one major change to the setting what would it be? @ 2021/10/06 02:25:15


Post by: Dekskull


Get back to sharing the lore development with the players through sponsored campaigns. The fun of the old days was when players felt like they had a role in shaping the story lines.

With social media, GW doesn't even need to run big worldwide campaigns anymore. You could have several mini campaigns that are designed to tie up some of the loose ends for the many unresolved campaign narratives out there.

The way I would do it would be to have one GW Store as the "anchor" to run the campaign and host the big events. Then let local gaming groups register with the store and report results through social media.



If you could make one major change to the setting what would it be? @ 2021/10/06 03:31:48


Post by: H.B.M.C.


Lot of interesting suggestions in this one, I don't agree with all of them (I think making the Imperium unsure if the HH ever happened or if the Emperor is on the Golden Throne is perhaps creating too much mystery), but interesting nonetheless.

My change is simple:

The thing during the HH that brought the Tyranids to our galaxy. Remove it. Delete it. Pretend like it never happened.

Universe-shrinking events such as that one boil my brain.

 Gert wrote:
Yay, more complaining about Primaris. Must be a day ending in Y.
A lot of people discussing alternatives, some in quite a lot of detail, and you boil it all down to "complaining about Primaris"?

Remember what I said about a week ago about how you seem to go around shutting people down? This is an example of that.


If you could make one major change to the setting what would it be? @ 2021/10/06 03:37:20


Post by: Flipsiders


Wyldhunt wrote:
 Flipsiders wrote:
A lot of other people have posted some very good ideas, but here's one that's gone undiscussed:

Retcon things so the Emperor is dead.

No comatose state. No Star-Child. No "if the Emperor dies then the entire solar system gets flushed down his magic warp toilet" nonsense. The Emperor is unequivocally a rotting corpse, and all the daily sacrifices are just to power his golden chair and let the Imperium pretend he's still kicking. If that's too much, make it so he is comatose, but is explicitly never coming back or doing anything important under any capacity. Make it so the guy can't form conscious thought at all.

Obviously, if this were done, all the stories from the Imperium perspective would still treat Big E as if he were alive. It wouldn't stop being heresy to suggest that he died. It would only add another layer of tragedy and dark humor to those discussions, since it's so obvious that the Imperium is in a state of collective religious denial.

That will of course never happen because it conflicts with the power fantasy of having a big hypermasculine shiny guy who can come down and solve all your problems for you, but what can you do, right?

See, I feel like we already have the tragedy/dark humor you're going for. The Emprah doesn't seem to be in the habit of swooping in and solving problems. He's been rotting for 10,000 years, and he doesn't show any sign of getting better. He's not exactly taking charge of the situation and giving orders. He's certainly not pulling on his armour and jumping into battle. But the masses of humanity don't know that and suffer horribly in the name of a largely inert skeleton because of ecclesiarchal propaganda said skeleton would despise.

We have the tragedy/comedy. Have I missed some recent hands-on activities he's been involved in?


From my understanding, things have really devolved since the HH books started. There's at least one instance a few years back where (IIRC) Mortarion was scared off in the real 41st millennium by a psychic ghost/projection of the emperor or some nonsense, and the BL books in general give off this general vibe that the Big E was planning to get himself chaired the whole time, and it's all a part of his brilliant master plan to save humanity. There's a couple other things, too, but those are the big ones.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
I could be wrong, but it's felt as if for the past five years so there's been an overwhelming sense that the Emperor will come back Soon™ and save humanity from chaos once and for all, just like he always planned.


If you could make one major change to the setting what would it be? @ 2021/10/06 04:49:07


Post by: Jarms48


I want a greater emphasis on the existential horror of the setting. The majority of stories should be human focused, not super-human. There are quadrillions of humans, and approximately 1 million space marines.

Space marines make up 1 in 1 billion regular humans, even smaller than that actually as that’s only 1 quadrillion. The odds of actually seeing a space marine is so incredibly small 99.99% of the Imperium would have believed them to be myths.

Having more stories based around the Regular Joe humbles the reader. Making them fully understand the insignificance of humanity in the setting and how little the Imperium as a whole cares about the individual.

Even planets mean nothing to the Imperium. Worlds are re-discovered, settled, re-conquered everyday. As are worlds lost or corrupted. The loss of any 1 world, even dozens of worlds mean nothing to the Imperium. Unless it’s Terra or Mars.

Scale is another issue, it detracts from the existential horror as well. When we read that squads of marines, or individual marines conquer planets it’s ridiculous. The same goes to a handful of Guard regiments with a tens of thousands of soldiers.

To put this into perspective, the Germans invaded the Soviet Union with 3 million soldiers. That’s a single country, not an entire rebel world. To reinforce this point, over the entire duration of the Battle of Stalingrad there were approximately 2 million in losses combined from both sides. That’s a single battle over a city.

Imperial Guard deployments should be in the millions minimum.

To be a human alive at this time should be giving the reader a sense of dread. Their lives mean nothing, yet they keep going on.


If you could make one major change to the setting what would it be? @ 2021/10/06 06:47:06


Post by: Da Boss


Though I think the mystery is the most important thing to bring back to the setting, if I had to choose another change it would be to make the influence of the Warp on realspace much much much much less obvious and easy.

SOB faith would not have obvious in universe effects. Stuff like Euphrati Keeler burning hordes of demons with her faith would not happen. To burn demons you need to be a psyker. Faith is not enough unless it's over a population of trillions, and even then all you're going to do is create some minor warp entities that would still only be contactable by psykers.

The Ork "Anzion" theory I would relegate back to being the theory of one Tech Priest baffled by ork tech. I'd scale back the ork psychic field to being something much less physically influential, and really just a sort of collective mood enhancer, with some extra amplifying effects during REALLY big Waagh. "If Enough Orks Believe It" is so Tinkerbell and I hate it so much. Ork Meks are geniuses, their tech works because they're really smart, not because of space magic.

Machine Spirits are not actual ghosts in most cases. (There can be exceptions to this). They're the mechanicum's explanation for ancient AI or subroutines or whatever. A bolter doesn't have a warp spirit associated with it.

Daemonic Incursions should be rarer, and generally only happen in areas of significant realspace overlap or where there's been enormous ritual effort.

Just generally tone down some of the sillier "the Warp did it" crap in the background.


If you could make one major change to the setting what would it be? @ 2021/10/06 09:38:10


Post by: Mad Doc Grotsnik


When we dig into the Orky psychic thing, it is very much up in the air whether the thing really should not work (trigger does nothing, complete lack of firing pin, no ejection port) or if the scientists studying them just don’t understand the principle behind it.

It’s the old science vs magic, but coloured by Orks being seen as very primitive and brutal.

Without meaning to get political, consider Ancient Aliens, and how much boils down to “if Europeans couldn’t explain how it was done, it must’ve been Aliens”.

It’s quite likely a mix of the two.


If you could make one major change to the setting what would it be? @ 2021/10/06 12:34:24


Post by: Nurglitch


It's a vestigial left-over from the days when GW left more up to the customer's imagination.


If you could make one major change to the setting what would it be? @ 2021/10/06 14:43:45


Post by: Tawnis


 H.B.M.C. wrote:
Lot of interesting suggestions in this one, I don't agree with all of them (I think making the Imperium unsure if the HH ever happened or if the Emperor is on the Golden Throne is perhaps creating too much mystery), but interesting nonetheless.

My change is simple:

The thing during the HH that brought the Tyranids to our galaxy. Remove it. Delete it. Pretend like it never happened.

Universe-shrinking events such as that one boil my brain.



It's kinda funny how different some people will take certain aspect of the lore. I mention this because that specific scene was one of, if not my all time favorite scene in the HH. It made me feel like watching Planet of the Apes for the first time as seeing the statue of Liberty. Suddenly the curtain is pulled back and you realize that it was all humanity fault, that they screwed up so badly they pretty much doomed everything. Don't get me wrong they've royaly fethed up the galaxy plenty of times, but I think it's safe to say that the Tyranids are objectively the greatest threat to the galaxy in the lore. It was also the first time in the lore that I realized that Tzentch was verifiably not all knowing as I can't imagine any reason why the Tyranids showing up in thousands of years would be part of one of its grand master plans. (Maybe everyone else knew this before, but I wasn't that much aof a lore buff before HH, so it was news to me).

Not to say that you're wrong in your opinion or to come down on you or anything, I do certainly get where you're coming from, I just find it interesting how differently people see things sometimes, that's all.


If you could make one major change to the setting what would it be? @ 2021/10/06 14:51:03


Post by: H.B.M.C.


I love my Tyranids. I love that they're this extra-galactic force of super-hungry bugs hell bent on eating everything in their path.

I don't like that they found us because the Horus Heresy over explained something.


If you could make one major change to the setting what would it be? @ 2021/10/06 14:59:08


Post by: Mad Doc Grotsnik


More so that it was already long theorised they were Mothboying toward the Astronomicon in the first place, believing it to be an Astronomnomnomnomicon.

Pharos really didn’t bring anything to that.


If you could make one major change to the setting what would it be? @ 2021/10/06 15:50:12


Post by: Mentlegen324


 Duskweaver wrote:
Arguably, this isn't just "one change", but what I'd really want to do can be summarized as "bring the mystery back".

Delete all the Horus Heresy stuff. Explicitly make it non-canon. Delete Guilliman's return. Delete Cawl.

Nobody in the Imperium is more than 1000 or so years old (so Dante can still exist, and you can still have some ancient, senile AdMech magi). Nobody in the Imperium remembers the Horus Heresy, or the Age of Apostasy or any of that. It's all myths and legends. Did it even happen? Is the Emperor even real, or is the Throne room just a sealed room full of machinery nobody understands? Did the founders of the SoB really get taken to see the Emperor by the Custodes, or was that just a story invented to cover up them assassinating Vandire for other reasons?

Nobody knows.

Did the primarchs exist, or were they just the original leaders of the Astartes, or the scientists who designed them, filtered through 10,000 years of ignorance and supersition? Are the daemon primarchs just powerful daemons who have convinced a bunch of Warp-crazy traitor Astartes that they are their fathers, and that they're part of some glorious holy war against "the False Emperor"? Maybe they call him that because they know he never really existed?

Nobody knows.

Is that really Roboute Guilliman in that stasis field on Macragge? Or is it just an ancient abhuman giant in armour? Or a statue painted to look like a living man? You can't see properly through the blurring of the stasis field. And you can't switch the field off to check. If it's really Guilliman, switching off the field might kill him. Or what if that's not Guilliman but rather the traitorous brother who killed him? Switching off the field might unleash a terrifying horror from the ancient past that the present-day Imperium has no way to deal with.

Nobody knows.

Do the Traitor Legions even remember things as they were? Can anyone trust their memories after ten millennia in the Eye of Terror? The oldest of them might remember a great galactic war against a glowing golden figure who led their brothers against them. But did that really happen? Is it a trick of the Chaos Gods to make them want to conquer/destroy Terra? Or maybe they're the ones who fought for the Emperor and then were betrayed, and the 'loyalist' Astartes are really just a later creation (not as strong but more controllable) made to defend the nascent Imperium from their outcast predecessors? Maybe the original Chaos Marines were actually the Thunder Warriors?

Nobody knows.

Maybe Living Saints are real, or maybe it's all a con by the Ecclesiarchy who keeps putting a new mindwiped and hypno-indoctrinated woman in that fancy golden armour every time the previous 'Celestine' gets her head lopped off by Kharn? Even if they're real, are they anything to do with the Emperor, or are they spawned by the Chaos gods as a joke? Or are they just a new evolution of the human psyker gene, the next stage of the human species as designed by the Old Ones? Are they the Eldar gods who have found a way to cheat Slaanesh and are reincarnating in human bodies now? Are they the biological descendants of the Emperor from the thousands of years he spent in hiding on Old Earth? Or are they the last fading remnants of the superhuman subspecies that gave rise to the Emperor in the first place?

Nobody knows.

The point is that I'd ensure the official fluff would present things in such a way as to avoid nailing down anything that the people of the Imperium couldn't possibly know the 'real' answer to. So you'd never have some 10,000 year old supergenius popping up and telling us all "this is how it really happened". Recent events would still be known, and basic facts about the setting (like how space marines are made, or which part of the galaxy Iyanden is in, or how orks reproduce) would still have an 'objectively true' version (even if most people in the setting are wrong about it). But Imperial record-keeping is terrible and anything more than a couple of thousand years in the past should be at least as uncertain as similarly ancient events in our own (pre-)history are to us. To someone in the 41st millennium, the Horus Heresy is as distant as the invention of pottery is to you and me. Even if there are written records from the Heresy era, nobody in the 41st millenium should be able to read them. There should be contradictory stories about even the most basic 'facts' of that time, even down to (for example) different Blood Angels successor chapters having radically different accounts of who Sanguinius was and what he did during the Heresy (was he just a particularly heroic Blood Angels officer? was he the scientist who created the original Blood Angels geneseed? was he the first Blood Angel marine? was he just a psychic gestalt of the legion, or an aspect of the God-Emperor? was he killed by Horus? did he kill Horus? was he Horus' twin and the Emperor killed him accidentally thinking he was Horus? did he kill himself to give the Emperor the power to defeat Horus?).

TLDR: To quote Rick Priestley: "The trouble with the Heresy as envisaged by GW is it just feels like 40K - it doesn't have the feel of a genuinely different society that ten thousand years' separation would give you. Whenever I wrote anything that referenced back to those times I always wrote in a legendary, non-literal style. It's as if you were dealing with something like the Iliad rather than literal history ... I don't get any sense of understanding about 'deep time' when I look at anything GW have set in the 40K 'past'."


This is the biggest problem I have with how things are done now, really. So many questions just get answered with effectively a simple "Yes" and that's it or linked together in a way that makes the setting feel smaller. The Imperium believed the Emperor was a God, so the lore decided they're right and he pretty much is, rather than an important figure distorted by millenia of half-truths, superstition and propaganda.. The Space Marines believed their Primarchs to be great extremely powerful figures, so the lore on them made that the case rather than just stories of men that had been heavily exaggerated over the years. The lore implied there might potentially be more to the Tau and that there might be some sort of insidious mind control plot, so the lore now has them actually have some insidious mind control, even though the original idea was that the the Imperium didn't know that and just couldn't believe they'd be obedient any other way so suggested mind control. There was a theory suggested by the Imperium that Orks could make stuff work via the gestalt field they generate, so several bits of lore have tried to turn out to be Orks could make stuff work via the gestalt field they generate, no alternative explanations considered. The story of the Men of Iron and how powerful they were and all that destruction caused, now there's just one casually walking around and they're little more than just a sentient robot.

So many things answered with the simplest, most boring answer, with no nuance or subtlety. Just taking away the mystery and thought-provoking aspects of the lore to answer those things with a "It's as simple as it seemed, nothing more to what was suggested".


If you could make one major change to the setting what would it be? @ 2021/10/06 18:56:53


Post by: Kanluwen


I'd kill off the idea of "Renegade Chapters". Either make them all fall to Chaos or just have varying degrees of savagery and independence going on. Not every Chapter needs to be going down a highway to moustache-twirling villainy because an Inquisitor says they've been naughty.


If you could make one major change to the setting what would it be? @ 2021/10/07 15:54:34


Post by: Grimtuff


Jarms48 wrote:

Space marines make up 1 in 1 billion regular humans, even smaller than that actually as that’s only 1 quadrillion. The odds of actually seeing a space marine is so incredibly small 99.99% of the Imperium would have believed them to be myths.


It's quite odd that the only recent book that seems to have done this right is The Infinite and The Divine. At one point in the maguffin planet's history it gets invaded by Orks (IIRC) and Trazyn and an army of Necrons have to go out to repel them, lest the tomb world and the maguffin(s) contained therein are lost to rampaging Orks.

In honour of this glorious victory, the inhabitants of the planet erect a statue of the commander and there are stained glass artworks etc. all depicting the "Silver Skulls" Marine chapter and their great victory. Later on, the Inquisition (well, Trazyn in disguise as it was a damned fine-lookin' statue and he wanted it), mysteriously confiscate the statue in the town centre. But that little snippet shows, how little the Imperium at large knows precisely what Astartes are. They should be mythological figures, the Emperor's Angels of Death- spoken only of in whispers and rumour as the average citizen will never have seen one.


If you could make one major change to the setting what would it be? @ 2021/10/08 02:46:40


Post by: H.B.M.C.


I thought of one other:

I would have never revealed who or what the Legion of the Damned are.


If you could make one major change to the setting what would it be? @ 2021/10/08 04:15:07


Post by: Insectum7


 H.B.M.C. wrote:
I thought of one other:

I would have never revealed who or what the Legion of the Damned are.
Oh no. . . were they revealed somehow?

 H.B.M.C. wrote:

The thing during the HH that brought the Tyranids to our galaxy. Remove it. Delete it. Pretend like it never happened.

Yeah that's silly.


If you could make one major change to the setting what would it be? @ 2021/10/08 04:36:12


Post by: Flipsiders


 Insectum7 wrote:
 H.B.M.C. wrote:
I thought of one other:

I would have never revealed who or what the Legion of the Damned are.
Oh no. . . were they revealed somehow?


I think he's just alluding to the suggestion which has been around for a while that they're all Fire Hawks.


If you could make one major change to the setting what would it be? @ 2021/10/08 05:18:28


Post by: Wyldhunt


Another one from me: I wouldn't have introduced Yvraine or (probably) the Visarch; I would have had them be Malys and maybe Yriel respectively. It really feels like this might have been the intention at one point in time what with Yvraine having the fan and the fluff mentioning that Malys was Yvraine's arena patron.

This would have been a neat continuation on some old Malys and harlequin fluff, would have given Malys a model and some updated rules, and would have given them a chance to update Yriel's spear and rules.

Seems like someone just wanted to do the whole, "I've had coffee with all the major eldar factions" thing with Yvraine for obvious thematic reasons and changed plans at some point in the development process. But honestly, as much as I love the Ynnari? Yvraine herself has come across as pretty bland so far.



If you could make one major change to the setting what would it be? @ 2021/10/10 12:16:53


Post by: Zenithfleet


The one change I would make to the setting is rewind it all to the background circa late 3rd / early 4th edition. Before it went all Saturday Morning Cartoon.

But failing that--heck, even along with that--I would make the Necrons the Men of Iron.

None of this War in Heaven vs the Eldar, millions of years old, new-big-bad malarkey that 3rd edition tried to push.

No, they're human-created robots and AI that rebelled against us and caused the downfall of the Dark Age of Technology. And now they're back.

That's why they appear designed specifically to look frightening to humans.

And the reason working STCs are pretty much nowhere to be found is because humanity destroyed them all to stop them pumping out Necrons.

Possibly the real threat were the helpful AIs that came packaged with every STC, which went rogue in classic Skynet fashion. I expect they were called STC-TAN. The most advanced--the Class One minds, as Brian Aldiss might put it--could oversee whole solar systems. Thankfully they were all destroyed. Oh wait, we missed that one controlling the Dyson Sphere out in the boonies. But I'm sure we killed off the one running Mars. Didn't we?

Also, Necron gauss flayer weapons are actually very painful teleporters. They break you down and transmit you back to the tomb, where some part of you (brain, consciousness, whatever) is installed in an emotionless Necron body, Cyberman style.

The rationale for all this is that Necrons were supposed to be Undead In SPAAAACE... but no incarnation of Necrons has ever really been scary, because all they do is kill you. Many things in 40K do much worse to you than that. Newcrons, Oldcrons, Old-oldcrons... none of them really hit the mark.

Undead in Warhammer, on the other hand, kill you and then raise you from the dead to join their ranks. Therefore Necrons in 40K should do a sci-fi version of that.

Chaos is raw emotion? Then the logical solution is to remove emotion from humanity in order to save us from ourselves. By making us all emotionless zombie bots. "Necrons will remove fear. Necrons will remove grief. You will become like us. This is a kindness." Etc.

Edit: And you can include the Tomb Kings style Newcrons too, because they're the ones who retained more of their human personalities after a botched 'conversion'.



 Flipsiders wrote:
 Insectum7 wrote:
 H.B.M.C. wrote:
I thought of one other:

I would have never revealed who or what the Legion of the Damned are.
Oh no. . . were they revealed somehow?


I think he's just alluding to the suggestion which has been around for a while that they're all Fire Hawks.


Wasn't that revealed way back in 2nd edition, in the White Dwarf article that made a full army list for them, with a Dreadought and Rhino? But yes, even as a kid I was annoyed by that.


If you could make one major change to the setting what would it be? @ 2021/10/10 12:29:40


Post by: locarno24


Not exactly.
Whilst all fire hawks ended up in the legion of the damned, not all legionnaires were originally fire hawks.

1) we have an example of the legion 'recruiting' (sort of!) In the short story Animus Malorem.

2) the legions' first appearance predates the loss of the fire hawks chapter

3) at least one strongly hinted first appearance is during the war in the webway during the Horus Heresy in Master of Mankind. The name 'legion of the damned' isn't used, but the description is spot on. The marines in question are the ghosts of the istvaan dropsite massacre.

4) it's worth noting that the fire hawks flagship, Raptorus Rex, shares it's name with the original name of Kor Phaeron's flagship at Calth.


If you could make one major change to the setting what would it be? @ 2021/10/10 13:30:59


Post by: H.B.M.C.


That's just another example of the HH books going and over explaining something and making it all linked to the HH.

That kinda gak is the stuff we need less of, not more of. What's next, the Horus Heresy was responsible for the activation of Necron awakening protocols? Some random HH battle accidentally altered the genetic code of some Tau, thereby creating the Ethereal caste?



If you could make one major change to the setting what would it be? @ 2021/10/10 13:58:49


Post by: Gert


Kor Phaeron's flagship was renamed to the Infidus Imperator and was destroyed by the Ultramarines. The Fire Hawks flagship was a mobile space station. Ships get named the same thing all the time *cough*Enterprise*cough*
As for the ghosts seen during the Webway war, real world events have an effect on the Warp. With the Emperor being a sort of conduit for Warp energy, you could say that the psychic backlash from the events of Isstvan were powerful enough to manifest a new form of Daemon, one tied to the Anathema rather than one of the Four. The Legion of the Damned don't actually seem tied to any one specific origin and it could just be that any soul that becomes bound to the Emperor has the chance of manifesting as one of His Daemons.


If you could make one major change to the setting what would it be? @ 2021/10/10 19:40:43


Post by: Karak Norn Clansman


Mimic Byzantine history more by having the Imperium of Man successively shrinking over ten millennia of dogged resistance, slumps and temporary silver ages of succesful fightback and reconquest.

The Imperium holding the line at a million worlds by constant reconquest, colonization and succesful defence is a lovely feature, but it does not play up the Byzantine decay, multifront warfare and faltering military as much as a long-term shrinking Imperium would do.

Let Imperial rot show in the number of worlds under Holy Terran control. Let there be more of late antique and medieval Roman empire in space:



If you could make one major change to the setting what would it be? @ 2021/10/10 19:46:01


Post by: jeff white


 MinMax wrote:
I would remove Primaris Marines from the setting.
Spoiler:

You're not my dad, you can't tell me what not to post
!

Exactly this.
New models for OG marines. Done.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
 Da Boss wrote:
Duskweaver said it better than I ever could have.

Absolutely! Almost pulled a muscle I hit that exalt button so fast!


Automatically Appended Next Post:
Zenithfleet wrote:
The one change I would make to the setting is rewind it all to the background circa late 3rd / early 4th edition. Before it went all Saturday Morning Cartoon.

But failing that--heck, even along with that--I would make the Necrons the Men of Iron.
Spoiler:

None of this War in Heaven vs the Eldar, millions of years old, new-big-bad malarkey that 3rd edition tried to push.

No, they're human-created robots and AI that rebelled against us and caused the downfall of the Dark Age of Technology. And now they're back.

That's why they appear designed specifically to look frightening to humans.

And the reason working STCs are pretty much nowhere to be found is because humanity destroyed them all to stop them pumping out Necrons.

Possibly the real threat were the helpful AIs that came packaged with every STC, which went rogue in classic Skynet fashion. I expect they were called STC-TAN. The most advanced--the Class One minds, as Brian Aldiss might put it--could oversee whole solar systems. Thankfully they were all destroyed. Oh wait, we missed that one controlling the Dyson Sphere out in the boonies. But I'm sure we killed off the one running Mars. Didn't we?

Also, Necron gauss flayer weapons are actually very painful teleporters. They break you down and transmit you back to the tomb, where some part of you (brain, consciousness, whatever) is installed in an emotionless Necron body, Cyberman style.

The rationale for all this is that Necrons were supposed to be Undead In SPAAAACE... but no incarnation of Necrons has ever really been scary, because all they do is kill you. Many things in 40K do much worse to you than that. Newcrons, Oldcrons, Old-oldcrons... none of them really hit the mark.

Undead in Warhammer, on the other hand, kill you and then raise you from the dead to join their ranks. Therefore Necrons in 40K should do a sci-fi version of that.

Chaos is raw emotion? Then the logical solution is to remove emotion from humanity in order to save us from ourselves. By making us all emotionless zombie bots. "Necrons will remove fear. Necrons will remove grief. You will become like us. This is a kindness." Etc.

Edit: And you can include the Tomb Kings style Newcrons too, because they're the ones who retained more of their human personalities after a botched 'conversion'.



 Flipsiders wrote:
 Insectum7 wrote:
 H.B.M.C. wrote:
I thought of one other:

I would have never revealed who or what the Legion of the Damned are.
Oh no. . . were they revealed somehow?


I think he's just alluding to the suggestion which has been around for a while that they're all Fire Hawks.


Wasn't that revealed way back in 2nd edition, in the White Dwarf article that made a full army list for them, with a Dreadought and Rhino? But yes, even as a kid I was annoyed by that.


Agreed and wow! There is some killer stuff in this thread. Almost pulled my other muscle!


If you could make one major change to the setting what would it be? @ 2021/10/11 07:44:14


Post by: morganfreeman


"Ork tech works / is enhanced because they think it should be."


"Orks break reality with group think" isn't explicitly cannon, it started as an in-universe theory postulated by a frustrated Tech Priest. Keeping in mind that the Mechanicus doesn't even understand old human tech / thinks its magic, it's more likely that Ork tech functions normally but they refuse to think that such "primitive xenos" could have found simple and functional solutions to problems they struggle with. And while the most recent codex leans more heavily into it, it doesn't take it beyond merely a possibility with some evidence pointing to be being fairly plausible.

I'd love if we could do away with this being an actual possibility (keep it as the "imperium view") and just boil it down to what makes sense. Stuff along the lines of:

When a Mek makes a bomb with a larger than usual payload, they paint it yellow without any additional thought.

When a vehicle accidentally has an out-sized engine / chasis made out of a lighter (but equally durable) material / something else which would let it go noticeably faster, its painted red to signify this.

Blue paint is worn by orks who're tough, more resilient, and just more prone to taking cover or ducking so they don't get their head shot off.

Orks instinctively knowing how Ork tech works, despite not consciously knowing how it works, is 110% setting friendly.


If you could make one major change to the setting what would it be? @ 2021/10/11 12:36:02


Post by: stonehorse


 Duskweaver wrote:
Arguably, this isn't just "one change", but what I'd really want to do can be summarized as "bring the mystery back".

Delete all the Horus Heresy stuff. Explicitly make it non-canon. Delete Guilliman's return. Delete Cawl.

Nobody in the Imperium is more than 1000 or so years old (so Dante can still exist, and you can still have some ancient, senile AdMech magi). Nobody in the Imperium remembers the Horus Heresy, or the Age of Apostasy or any of that. It's all myths and legends. Did it even happen? Is the Emperor even real, or is the Throne room just a sealed room full of machinery nobody understands? Did the founders of the SoB really get taken to see the Emperor by the Custodes, or was that just a story invented to cover up them assassinating Vandire for other reasons?

Nobody knows.

Did the primarchs exist, or were they just the original leaders of the Astartes, or the scientists who designed them, filtered through 10,000 years of ignorance and supersition? Are the daemon primarchs just powerful daemons who have convinced a bunch of Warp-crazy traitor Astartes that they are their fathers, and that they're part of some glorious holy war against "the False Emperor"? Maybe they call him that because they know he never really existed?

Nobody knows.

Is that really Roboute Guilliman in that stasis field on Macragge? Or is it just an ancient abhuman giant in armour? Or a statue painted to look like a living man? You can't see properly through the blurring of the stasis field. And you can't switch the field off to check. If it's really Guilliman, switching off the field might kill him. Or what if that's not Guilliman but rather the traitorous brother who killed him? Switching off the field might unleash a terrifying horror from the ancient past that the present-day Imperium has no way to deal with.

Nobody knows.

Do the Traitor Legions even remember things as they were? Can anyone trust their memories after ten millennia in the Eye of Terror? The oldest of them might remember a great galactic war against a glowing golden figure who led their brothers against them. But did that really happen? Is it a trick of the Chaos Gods to make them want to conquer/destroy Terra? Or maybe they're the ones who fought for the Emperor and then were betrayed, and the 'loyalist' Astartes are really just a later creation (not as strong but more controllable) made to defend the nascent Imperium from their outcast predecessors? Maybe the original Chaos Marines were actually the Thunder Warriors?

Nobody knows.

Maybe Living Saints are real, or maybe it's all a con by the Ecclesiarchy who keeps putting a new mindwiped and hypno-indoctrinated woman in that fancy golden armour every time the previous 'Celestine' gets her head lopped off by Kharn? Even if they're real, are they anything to do with the Emperor, or are they spawned by the Chaos gods as a joke? Or are they just a new evolution of the human psyker gene, the next stage of the human species as designed by the Old Ones? Are they the Eldar gods who have found a way to cheat Slaanesh and are reincarnating in human bodies now? Are they the biological descendants of the Emperor from the thousands of years he spent in hiding on Old Earth? Or are they the last fading remnants of the superhuman subspecies that gave rise to the Emperor in the first place?

Nobody knows.

The point is that I'd ensure the official fluff would present things in such a way as to avoid nailing down anything that the people of the Imperium couldn't possibly know the 'real' answer to. So you'd never have some 10,000 year old supergenius popping up and telling us all "this is how it really happened". Recent events would still be known, and basic facts about the setting (like how space marines are made, or which part of the galaxy Iyanden is in, or how orks reproduce) would still have an 'objectively true' version (even if most people in the setting are wrong about it). But Imperial record-keeping is terrible and anything more than a couple of thousand years in the past should be at least as uncertain as similarly ancient events in our own (pre-)history are to us. To someone in the 41st millennium, the Horus Heresy is as distant as the invention of pottery is to you and me. Even if there are written records from the Heresy era, nobody in the 41st millenium should be able to read them. There should be contradictory stories about even the most basic 'facts' of that time, even down to (for example) different Blood Angels successor chapters having radically different accounts of who Sanguinius was and what he did during the Heresy (was he just a particularly heroic Blood Angels officer? was he the scientist who created the original Blood Angels geneseed? was he the first Blood Angel marine? was he just a psychic gestalt of the legion, or an aspect of the God-Emperor? was he killed by Horus? did he kill Horus? was he Horus' twin and the Emperor killed him accidentally thinking he was Horus? did he kill himself to give the Emperor the power to defeat Horus?).

TLDR: To quote Rick Priestley: "The trouble with the Heresy as envisaged by GW is it just feels like 40K - it doesn't have the feel of a genuinely different society that ten thousand years' separation would give you. Whenever I wrote anything that referenced back to those times I always wrote in a legendary, non-literal style. It's as if you were dealing with something like the Iliad rather than literal history ... I don't get any sense of understanding about 'deep time' when I look at anything GW have set in the 40K 'past'."


This, all of this.


If you could make one major change to the setting what would it be? @ 2021/10/12 02:00:32


Post by: Dekskull


 Flipsiders wrote:
A lot of other people have posted some very good ideas, but here's one that's gone undiscussed:

Retcon things so the Emperor is dead.

No comatose state. No Star-Child. No "if the Emperor dies then the entire solar system gets flushed down his magic warp toilet" nonsense. The Emperor is unequivocally a rotting corpse, and all the daily sacrifices are just to power his golden chair and let the Imperium pretend he's still kicking. If that's too much, make it so he is comatose, but is explicitly never coming back or doing anything important under any capacity. Make it so the guy can't form conscious thought at all.

Obviously, if this were done, all the stories from the Imperium perspective would still treat Big E as if he were alive. It wouldn't stop being heresy to suggest that he died. It would only add another layer of tragedy and dark humor to those discussions, since it's so obvious that the Imperium is in a state of collective religious denial.

That will of course never happen because it conflicts with the power fantasy of having a big hypermasculine shiny guy who can come down and solve all your problems for you, but what can you do, right?


That sounds a lot like the thread I started here called how I think GW will kill the Emperor. I really do think they will make it part of the Guillemon story. (The father passes off the empire to the son!) Kill the Emperor off, nothing [that] bad happens, and a vague prophecy (which is interpreted differently by chaos) that the Emperor will return in the distant future to right the wrongs of the universe. The more interesting aspects of the story would be the internal Imperial conflicts that would surface and chaos's attempts to exploit that.

Regarding the "Give Chaos the Dark Imperium." I think it's already strongly implied that this has happened in the majority of the Dark Imperium. It
s probably not necessary to say it outright though because there are still some Imperial worlds struggling to survive, and (2) More importantly, Chaos could never function as a coherent empire. Despite Abaddon's best efforts, Chaos is far too fractious. Every time they win territory they inevitably start fighting each other. So more territory for chaos doesn't really do a while lot to further their strategic ends other than give the Imperium something to strive to retake while Abaddon hatches his next master plan.



If you could make one major change to the setting what would it be? @ 2021/10/12 03:03:50


Post by: Flipsiders


 morganfreeman wrote:
"Ork tech works / is enhanced because they think it should be."


"Orks break reality with group think" isn't explicitly cannon, it started as an in-universe theory postulated by a frustrated Tech Priest. Keeping in mind that the Mechanicus doesn't even understand old human tech / thinks its magic, it's more likely that Ork tech functions normally but they refuse to think that such "primitive xenos" could have found simple and functional solutions to problems they struggle with. And while the most recent codex leans more heavily into it, it doesn't take it beyond merely a possibility with some evidence pointing to be being fairly plausible.

I'd love if we could do away with this being an actual possibility (keep it as the "imperium view") and just boil it down to what makes sense. Stuff along the lines of:


I know this idea is a popular one, but personally, I've never been a huge fan of it. 40k has always partially been about the power of belief, whether in a social sense (the Imperium continues to exist because it pretends to be more in control than it really is) or in a literal one (the Chaos Gods). Having Ork tech work because they want it hard enough is a fun comedic bent for this theme and a positive addition to the setting. it also allows for a lot of fun modeling and unit decisions, such as weapons and vehicles that seemingly work in spite of themselves. I see no reason to get rid of the idea other than that some people are tired of the internet memes.


If you could make one major change to the setting what would it be? @ 2021/10/12 05:17:37


Post by: H.B.M.C.


The problem is that theory gets taken to the extreme illogical conclusion "Anything an Ork thinks can/will happen!".

Honestly it's fine if a Slugga works because only an Ork can make it work, but the idea that an Ork can think a planet to explode is something the game could do without.

Thankfully that, at this time at least, remains in the Flanderised realms of fanon and isn't part of 40k.


If you could make one major change to the setting what would it be? @ 2021/10/12 06:49:42


Post by: mrFickle


 H.B.M.C. wrote:
The problem is that theory gets taken to the extreme illogical conclusion "Anything an Ork thinks can/will happen!".

Honestly it's fine if a Slugga works because only an Ork can make it work, but the idea that an Ork can think a planet to explode is something the game could do without.

Thankfully that, at this time at least, remains in the Flanderised realms of fanon and isn't part of 40k.


To be fair it isn’t that an ork can think a planet to explode and if you only had 1 ork on its own it couldn’t make a shoots work. It’s collective warp energy from all Orks in a vicinity working together unconsciously. So maybe you would need 1 million Orks to all think the same thing at the same time to make a planet explode but they don’t understand their own power so it won’t happen. But they all believe their guns work.

I’m not saying I think it’s a great idea but at the same time the ork race isn’t made up of billions of Dr Manhattans


If you could make one major change to the setting what would it be? @ 2021/10/12 06:58:27


Post by: BlaxicanX


Jarms48 wrote:
The majority of stories should be human focused, not super-human.
Why?

There are quadrillions of humans, and approximately 1 million space marines.

Space marines make up 1 in 1 billion regular humans, even smaller than that actually as that’s only 1 quadrillion. The odds of actually seeing a space marine is so incredibly small 99.99% of the Imperium would have believed them to be myths.
Who cares? What does that have to do with books and other media being made about them?

Having more stories based around the Regular Joe humbles the reader. Making them fully understand the insignificance of humanity in the setting and how little the Imperium as a whole cares about the individual.
This is gotten across to the reader just fine even when making stories from Marine PoV.


Scale is another issue, it detracts from the existential horror as well. When we read that squads of marines, or individual marines conquer planets it’s ridiculous. The same goes to a handful of Guard regiments with a tens of thousands of soldiers.

To put this into perspective, the Germans invaded the Soviet Union with 3 million soldiers. That’s a single country, not an entire rebel world. To reinforce this point, over the entire duration of the Battle of Stalingrad there were approximately 2 million in losses combined from both sides. That’s a single battle over a city.

Imperial Guard deployments should be in the millions minimum.
I agree. All organization sizes in the setting that have hard figures should be upped by at least a factor of 10. 10,000 marines per chapter, etc.

To be a human alive at this time should be giving the reader a sense of dread.
It does, but bumping up numbers would not enhance this. To quote Stalin since we're evoking the Soviets, 1 death is a tragedy, 1 million is a statistic. There is no difference, thematically, between "1,000 guardsmen died to take this city" and "100 billion guardsmen died to take this city". Figures without context mean nothing.

When people complain about the lack of grimdark in 40k I'm pretty sure what they're actually asking for is slice of life stuff. People love to go on about the Guard and muh saving private ryan in space and muh flashlights, but IG suffer just as much from big damned hero syndrome as marines do. How many people has Ibram Gaunt personally slaughtered at this point in that franchise? 200? 300? What about Rawne and Larkin, or Eisenhorn?

If you really want to see what the grimdarkness of the 41st millennium looks like then you'd probably want a story about some guy who's a scribe and works 19 hours a day, or a menial aboard a ship who has never seen natural sunlight before and dies at 30 from vitamin D deprivation. But be honest, would 300 pages of that really be more fun to read or watch than Ultramarine Capitan Slaughterus or Cadian sargeant Killface murder 300 tyranids in a epic last stand? Search your heart and tell me I'm wrong.


If you could make one major change to the setting what would it be? @ 2021/10/12 08:08:40


Post by: Sgt. Cortez


mrFickle wrote:
 H.B.M.C. wrote:
The problem is that theory gets taken to the extreme illogical conclusion "Anything an Ork thinks can/will happen!".

Honestly it's fine if a Slugga works because only an Ork can make it work, but the idea that an Ork can think a planet to explode is something the game could do without.

Thankfully that, at this time at least, remains in the Flanderised realms of fanon and isn't part of 40k.


To be fair it isn’t that an ork can think a planet to explode and if you only had 1 ork on its own it couldn’t make a shoots work. It’s collective warp energy from all Orks in a vicinity working together unconsciously. So maybe you would need 1 million Orks to all think the same thing at the same time to make a planet explode but they don’t understand their own power so it won’t happen. But they all believe their guns work.

I’m not saying I think it’s a great idea but at the same time the ork race isn’t made up of billions of Dr Manhattans


Funny thing is, I like both approaches. On the one hand it's nice to see the Imperium as being too stupid to understand Ork tech, even in M32 the Orks were already more advanced than the Imperium, the mechanicus had to steal the Orks' teleportation devices to get the upper hand. On the other hand the Waaagh energy stuff gives Orks a bit more of an Alien nature, they're not just Orks in Space, they're also mushrooms with a galaxy spanning psychic connection that makes them stronger and more intelligent when their numbers rise and yes, sometimes it makes them break physical barriers. But well, in 40K nobody cares about physics anyway, this ain't Star Trek .


If you could make one major change to the setting what would it be? @ 2021/10/12 09:27:01


Post by: Niiai


I would add female space marines. In my eyes the setting would be better. It is an easy fix. Just either retroactivly change it in 10th edition, or have Cawl fix it in the setting. Or something different.

As for the models just include some headswaps and it is fine. Space Marines are 3 meters tall muscular killing machines who are essentially child soldiers once you look at it closer in the setting. It is a dark humored dystopia. I generally like it in the surface level. My point beeing female space marines would also bee 3 meters tall muscular killing machines. No need for new models or armour. Just include the headswap on some spruces.

I would like it just for it's own part. I geniully think it would help the setting. I also like it from two other perspectives: It would make the game more inclusive, something I am for as an ideolagy. I also think it would really upsett end perhaps drive out or change some of the worst player types this game sometimes attrackt. I do not enjoy playing them. Good riddance in my eyes.


If you could make one major change to the setting what would it be? @ 2021/10/12 15:00:31


Post by: Sunno


 Niiai wrote:
I would add female space marines. .






If you could make one major change to the setting what would it be? @ 2021/10/12 15:11:22


Post by: Some_Call_Me_Tim


 morganfreeman wrote:
"Ork tech works / is enhanced because they think it should be."


"Orks break reality with group think" isn't explicitly cannon, it started as an in-universe theory postulated by a frustrated Tech Priest. Keeping in mind that the Mechanicus doesn't even understand old human tech / thinks its magic, it's more likely that Ork tech functions normally but they refuse to think that such "primitive xenos" could have found simple and functional solutions to problems they struggle with. And while the most recent codex leans more heavily into it, it doesn't take it beyond merely a possibility with some evidence pointing to be being fairly plausible.

I'd love if we could do away with this being an actual possibility (keep it as the "imperium view") and just boil it down to what makes sense. Stuff along the lines of:

When a Mek makes a bomb with a larger than usual payload, they paint it yellow without any additional thought.

When a vehicle accidentally has an out-sized engine / chasis made out of a lighter (but equally durable) material / something else which would let it go noticeably faster, its painted red to signify this.

Blue paint is worn by orks who're tough, more resilient, and just more prone to taking cover or ducking so they don't get their head shot off.

Orks instinctively knowing how Ork tech works, despite not consciously knowing how it works, is 110% setting friendly.


I think this sorta thing should just be left up to interpretation. We have it both ways where there’s bullet tubes and then there’s just full professional meks. I like to go with the in between where meks know what they’re doin, but the gestalt bumps it up to 110%


If you could make one major change to the setting what would it be? @ 2021/10/12 16:34:50


Post by: Grimtuff


Sunno wrote:
 Niiai wrote:
I would add female space marines. .






Okay, I 'll add Misters of Battle.


If you could make one major change to the setting what would it be? @ 2021/10/12 16:42:57


Post by: JNAProductions


 Grimtuff wrote:
Okay, I 'll add Misters of Battle.
I can just imagine the "Oh, got 'em!" expression on your face, but shockingly, people who want female Space Marines don't really have an issue with male Sisters of Battle either.

If there were to be male SoB, though, I'd have them be legally female, within the Imperium, and, same as with Marines, be basically just a headswap.


If you could make one major change to the setting what would it be? @ 2021/10/12 16:46:08


Post by: Grimtuff


 JNAProductions wrote:
 Grimtuff wrote:
Okay, I 'll add Misters of Battle.
I can just imagine the "Oh, got 'em!" expression on your face, but shockingly, people who want female Space Marines don't really have an issue with male Sisters of Battle either.

If there were to be male SoB, though, I'd have them be legally female, within the Imperium, and, same as with Marines, be basically just a headswap.


Well I don't want female marines. At all.


If you could make one major change to the setting what would it be? @ 2021/10/12 17:02:54


Post by: JNAProductions


 Grimtuff wrote:
 JNAProductions wrote:
 Grimtuff wrote:
Okay, I 'll add Misters of Battle.
I can just imagine the "Oh, got 'em!" expression on your face, but shockingly, people who want female Space Marines don't really have an issue with male Sisters of Battle either.

If there were to be male SoB, though, I'd have them be legally female, within the Imperium, and, same as with Marines, be basically just a headswap.


Well I don't want female marines. At all.
You may want to examine why that is the case.


If you could make one major change to the setting what would it be? @ 2021/10/12 18:17:25


Post by: Niiai


Sunno wrote:
 Niiai wrote:
I would add female space marines. .






Ladies and gentlemen my honest opinion is considered so controversial that it can not be considered true.

Witch is probably one of the key issues and why I want it in my game.


If you could make one major change to the setting what would it be? @ 2021/10/12 18:22:12


Post by: JNAProductions


You're not even the first one to mention it, Niiai.

Gert sorta mentioned it, on the first page, and I did too.


If you could make one major change to the setting what would it be? @ 2021/10/12 18:32:00


Post by: Las


No primaris fluff, just make it a scale update.
Guilliman goes back in the tank. Cawl is gone. And Astartes tanks have tracks again.

The cicatrix can stay, fine. The rest of the terrible plot progression too. Just please retcon this.


If you could make one major change to the setting what would it be? @ 2021/10/12 19:50:23


Post by: GoldenHorde


 Niiai wrote:

It would make the game more inclusive, something I am for as an ideolagy. I also think it would really upsett end perhaps drive out or change some of the worst player types this game sometimes attrackt. I do not enjoy playing them. Good riddance in my eyes.


I want male space marines to get pregnant and give birth to mini marines.

Why not?


If you could make one major change to the setting what would it be? @ 2021/10/12 19:58:00


Post by: JNAProductions


 GoldenHorde wrote:
 Niiai wrote:

It would make the game more inclusive, something I am for as an ideolagy. I also think it would really upsett end perhaps drive out or change some of the worst player types this game sometimes attrackt. I do not enjoy playing them. Good riddance in my eyes.


I want male space marines to get pregnant and give birth to mini marines.

Why not?
Because Space Marines aren't sexual, or at least really shouldn't be.

They're indoctrinated child-soldiers, given ridiculous surgeries and gene therapy to turn into 8' tall posthumans. Pregnancy is not exactly conducive to active warfare, and sex is not conducive to maintaining their focus on soldiery.

If you want to sexualize Marines... I mean, you can. But I wouldn't.


If you could make one major change to the setting what would it be? @ 2021/10/12 20:25:10


Post by: Voss


Biggest change?

More aliens...
Give all those Xenos-haters something to do.


If you could make one major change to the setting what would it be? @ 2021/10/12 21:12:28


Post by: Hankovitch


Every Primarch is returned to life, and all of them get into the same Space Hulk so they can have their Big Dumb Cry-Fight of Ultimate Destiny, but the Space Hulk falls into a black hole and everything on board is rent into subatomic particles and sucked into sheer entropic nothingness for the remaining history of the entire universe.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
 H.B.M.C. wrote:
The problem is that theory gets taken to the extreme illogical conclusion "Anything an Ork thinks can/will happen!".


No, see, the Ork gestalt causes tech to work the way they expect it to. But orks are not as ridiculous as 40k players are, and so they would never believe that they could (for instance) blow up planets with their mind. Thus it cannot happen.

Every now and then, the greatest minds of the greenskins assemble in a Filosofikk Orkaposium to debate these ideas. But before such topics can be addressed, the entire gathering invariably dissolves into hand to hand combat, fire, and explosions.



If you could make one major change to the setting what would it be? @ 2021/10/12 22:04:19


Post by: Las


I honestly think that much of the hollow, pathetic thematic tenor at the heart of the story of the space marines and the primarchs wouldn't work as well if they weren't exclusively male.


If you could make one major change to the setting what would it be? @ 2021/10/12 22:05:07


Post by: JNAProductions


 Las wrote:
I honestly think that much of the hollow, pathetic thematic tenor at the heart of the story of the space marines and the primarchs wouldn't work as well if they weren't exclusively male.
Why do you say so?


If you could make one major change to the setting what would it be? @ 2021/10/12 22:08:30


Post by: Las


 JNAProductions wrote:
 Las wrote:
I honestly think that much of the hollow, pathetic thematic tenor at the heart of the story of the space marines and the primarchs wouldn't work as well if they weren't exclusively male.
Why do you say so?


Honestly, I don't think I could totally articulate it on an internet forum. However, the short of it is that the story at its core is a story of the relationship between brothers and fathers.

In my opinion, it just wouldn't have the same 'oomph' if they weren't all male.


If you could make one major change to the setting what would it be? @ 2021/10/12 22:11:30


Post by: JNAProductions


See, I don't see why siblings and parents would have to be male to have the same story. Especially given it's set 38,000 years in the future. (Well, 28,000 for 30k stuff.)


If you could make one major change to the setting what would it be? @ 2021/10/12 22:26:46


Post by: Las


 JNAProductions wrote:
See, I don't see why siblings and parents would have to be male to have the same story. Especially given it's set 38,000 years in the future. (Well, 28,000 for 30k stuff.)


You could have that story, but you'd have to write it differently. It certainly would not be the same.

The space marines thematically are about brotherhood, and how those brothers relate to a great failure regarding a father. It's related to the dynamic of children/parents writ large, but it's not quite the same 1:1. It certainly changes the story when introducing the themes of brothers and sisters, or sisters and sisters, or brothers and sisters and fathers. These may seem trivial at first glance, but they're not. Especially not given the nature of the story as it has existed and exists to us today.

The time difference is a trivial distinction, considering it's a type of story that intends to relate to us, now, using recognizable human attachments, emotions, etc. Some of those things are tightly bound to what we implicitly feel about and associate with brothers and fathers.


If you could make one major change to the setting what would it be? @ 2021/10/12 22:30:39


Post by: JNAProductions


 Las wrote:
 JNAProductions wrote:
See, I don't see why siblings and parents would have to be male to have the same story. Especially given it's set 38,000 years in the future. (Well, 28,000 for 30k stuff.)


You could have that story, but you'd have to write it differently. It certainly would not be the same.

The space marines thematically are about brotherhood, and how those brothers relate to a great failure regarding a father. It's related to the dynamic of children/parents writ large, but it's not quite the same 1:1.

The time difference is a trivial distinction, considering it's a story that has to relate to us, now, using recognizable human attachments, emotions, etc. Some of those things are tightly bound to what we implicitly feel about and associate with brothers and fathers.
Understandable on the time difference not mattering.

But I firmly believe that the difference between father and son or parent and child isn't really that significant. I understand your point of view, I just don't agree with it.

Question: How would you feel if Cawl changed it so Astartes can be female? So the existing stories of Marines would remain all-male, but future stories would include women.


If you could make one major change to the setting what would it be? @ 2021/10/12 22:33:27


Post by: Las


 JNAProductions wrote:
 Las wrote:
 JNAProductions wrote:
See, I don't see why siblings and parents would have to be male to have the same story. Especially given it's set 38,000 years in the future. (Well, 28,000 for 30k stuff.)


You could have that story, but you'd have to write it differently. It certainly would not be the same.

The space marines thematically are about brotherhood, and how those brothers relate to a great failure regarding a father. It's related to the dynamic of children/parents writ large, but it's not quite the same 1:1.

The time difference is a trivial distinction, considering it's a story that has to relate to us, now, using recognizable human attachments, emotions, etc. Some of those things are tightly bound to what we implicitly feel about and associate with brothers and fathers.
Understandable on the time difference not mattering.

But I firmly believe that the difference between father and son or parent and child isn't really that significant. I understand your point of view, I just don't agree with it.

Question: How would you feel if Cawl changed it so Astartes can be female? So the existing stories of Marines would remain all-male, but future stories would include women.


I wouldn't like it as I think it would disrupt the thematic thrust that I've outlined before. I'd much, much rather them introduce more female sculpts to the guard, tau, eldar, deldar etc.

Just my opinion. I echo your sentiment, just a simple point of disagreement.


If you could make one major change to the setting what would it be? @ 2021/10/12 23:29:09


Post by: Kanluwen


 JNAProductions wrote:

Question: How would you feel if Cawl changed it so Astartes can be female? So the existing stories of Marines would remain all-male, but future stories would include women.

I would feel like it would diminish what Cawl actually is--an amalgam of multiple personalities sharing a body.

Also, it diminishes what the Mechanicus is. They just don't care about gender. They don't consider the Astartes to be male or female, they're simply "Astartes".

Personal take though?
I just don't know how to do it in a decent way without making the lore that came before feel trampled all over. The Primaris project, to me, was acceptable...but it going to women as well as men for the selection pool? It feels like a bridge too far and I cannot exactly articulate why.

I feel like I would prefer the Astartes to go more down the route of logic and knowledge, to the point where their motives feel alien to humans at large, while Sororitas retain their faith and humanity and feel closer to the population at large.


If you could make one major change to the setting what would it be? @ 2021/10/12 23:33:35


Post by: JNAProductions


 Kanluwen wrote:
 JNAProductions wrote:

Question: How would you feel if Cawl changed it so Astartes can be female? So the existing stories of Marines would remain all-male, but future stories would include women.

I would feel like it would diminish what Cawl actually is--an amalgam of multiple personalities sharing a body.

Also, it diminishes what the Mechanicus is. They just don't care about gender. They don't consider the Astartes to be male or female, they're simply "Astartes".

Personal take though?
I just don't know how to do it in a decent way without making the lore that came before feel trampled all over. The Primaris project, to me, was acceptable...but it going to women as well as men for the selection pool? It feels like a bridge too far and I cannot exactly articulate why.

I feel like I would prefer the Astartes to go more down the route of logic and knowledge, to the point where their motives feel alien to humans at large, while Sororitas retain their faith and humanity and feel closer to the population at large.
I certainly wouldn't phrase it as "Cawl makes Imperium more gender-equal!"

It'd be Cawl saying "I figured out how to significantly increase the pool of recruits for Astartes."


If you could make one major change to the setting what would it be? @ 2021/10/13 02:20:01


Post by: Flipsiders


I don't think female space marines (with a large asterisk I'll get to later) should be added to the setting for the sole reason that it is sexist.

One of my favorite fictionalized governments in any pieces of media is the NCR from Fallout: New Vegas. There's an extremely interesting conversation that you can have with one of their soldiers under the right circumstances, in which he mentions that despite the NCR being socially liberal and mostly pro-democracy, they are still extremely intolerant of non-heterosexual people in their society. The soldier also blithely adds that despite being a bunch of fascist slaver jackasses, Caesar's Legion is actually more accepting of gay men than the NCR.

Anyone with half a brain can put a member of a marginalized community in a work of fiction and pat themselves on the back for being progressive. It takes someone who actually knows what they're talking about to include bigotry within their protagonists' ranks, and then critique that perspective and the underlying biases which gave rise to it. The reason why the Imperium doesn't use female space marines is half because they're effectively minmaxing humanity and only using subjects with a pre-existing testosterone supply to aid the process, and half because introducing female soldiers would disrupt the openly prejudiced, hypermasculine "great man"-worshipping cult which most Imperial citizens and all loyalist space marines are a part of. As literature, the Imperium is a critique of conservative authoritarian worldviews, and part of that critique is their unhealthy, self-destructive obsession with an imagined masculine ideal embodied by the space marines. Including female space marines, no matter whether it's justified in the lore or not, is another step towards turning the Imperium from a satirical message about what a fascist "perfect world" would actually look like into a generic science fiction society which, by incorporating surface-level progressive ideas such as gender equality, makes the mass poverty and genocide a lot easier for audiences to ignore.

That being said, the big exception which I would be interested in seeing explored is that of Chaos. Not only do the CSM dudes have no real reason not to try and incorporate female recruits, but as previously mentioned, the male-only aspect of space marines is a big part of the Imperium's philosophy, and making it so a group of people supposedly
modeled in the image of the emperor are now women is a pretty effective form of rebellion. I personally think that having some female berserkers, sorcerers or warpsmiths would do wonders in further distinguishing the chaos forces from their Imperial counterparts, both from an idealistic and visual perspective. Maybe some of the rubric marines were women already!

I also think it's totally cool for people to include female space marines in their personal armies if they feel like it. In fact, I think it's pretty rad.


If you could make one major change to the setting what would it be? @ 2021/10/13 05:23:47


Post by: endlesswaltz123


My counter argument to female space marines in general (and just to be clear, I wouldn't care less if they were retconned in tomorrow) is that actually, the clamour for female marines in part comes down to a lack of representation of strong females or those with enough character depth within the lore.

A novel series about some unbelievably badass sisters of battle (use some of the minor ordos maybe) with excellent writing in the vein of Gaunts Ghosts... Giving a titan of a character like Jenetia Krole her dues and not having her just steam rolled by Khan - which from a lore perspective should happen also, but it was written poorly. If she would have defeated another Khorne champion first, but was spent and then Khan appeared and did what he did, then it would be acceptable.

Not all female characters are poorly written mind, but the good ones never seem to be 'the' character of most novels. Bequin, Kara Swole, great characters but passengers for the most part - Even Bequin isn't the most intriguing/interesting/well written character in her own novel series.


If you could make one major change to the setting what would it be? @ 2021/10/13 05:46:19


Post by: Flipsiders


 endlesswaltz123 wrote:
My counter argument to female space marines in general (and just to be clear, I wouldn't care less if they were retconned in tomorrow) is that actually, the clamour for female marines in part comes down to a lack of representation of strong females or those with enough character depth within the lore.

A novel series about some unbelievably badass sisters of battle (use some of the minor ordos maybe) with excellent writing in the vein of Gaunts Ghosts... Giving a titan of a character like Jenetia Krole her dues and not having her just steam rolled by Khan - which from a lore perspective should happen also, but it was written poorly. If she would have defeated another Khorne champion first, but was spent and then Khan appeared and did what he did, then it would be acceptable.

Not all female characters are poorly written mind, but the good ones never seem to be 'the' character of most novels. Bequin, Kara Swole, great characters but passengers for the most part - Even Bequin isn't the most intriguing/interesting/well written character in her own novel series.


This is a good point. I can count the number of compelling female characters in the 40k lore on one hand. I can count the number of compelling non-imperial ones on one finger.

EDIT: Okay, two fingers.


If you could make one major change to the setting what would it be? @ 2021/10/13 08:05:38


Post by: Cronch


Making female marines fundamentally changes nothing, they're still big, brainwashed meatheads with boom-boom guns with or without dangly bits. There is no real narrative harm to come from that because gender is not integral to marines role.

Anyway, Make Imperium Crumbling Empire again is my change. It holds a million worlds, but it's grasp on each world is by the fingertips only. The local governors know it, and do what human positions of authority always did- either gather more personal power out of greed or in an attempt to protect their local population when the central government fails. The faith in emprah should be ever at odds with the lack of faith in the Imperial Palace and it's siphoning of local resources that never seem to come back to the system/sector because they're used up in another far-away war. Imperium as depicted rn is a magicala place where humans seem to care nothing for how awful their lot is by and large, even if we get occasional mentions of rebels or secession we never really get a scale for it. Like it's all isolated chaos-dummies doing it.


If you could make one major change to the setting what would it be? @ 2021/10/13 10:55:44


Post by: Zenithfleet


I'm going to regret wading into the female space marine debate, aren't I...

 Flipsiders wrote:
I don't think female space marines (with a large asterisk I'll get to later) should be added to the setting for the sole reason that it is sexist.


I concur. And I say this as someone who shoehorns female characters into basically everything given half a chance.

Female space marines across all Chapters would be a bit like the Galactic Empire's military from Star Wars being full of women and aliens. It cancels out its own point.

In the original Star Wars trilogy, the fact that the Empire's forces were all male--and human, and white--gave off a recognisably totalitarian master-race vibe. You don't have to be told they're probably racist and sexist and speciesist because it's continually implied onscreen. The women have probably been told to stay home and breed more sons for the master race. It contrasted nicely with the more eclectic Rebels, who at least had the occasional woman and black guy and alien.

(Yes, I know the Expanded Universe went off and did its own thing, and various authors had their own ideas about the Empire's values.)

For an example of what I'd call 'completely missing the point', see this artwork for an Empire fighter pilot:
Spoiler:

That picture makes my good little progressive head hurt, because half my brain goes "yay for representation!" and "TIE Interceptors are cool!" while the other half goes "hang on a minute..."

And the Imperium in 40K is basically the Empire times ten, with the twist that either it's necessary because all their enemies are even worse (the straight take), or that they've managed to hoodwink everyone into believing it (the satirical take).


However...

...since I do like to shoehorn female characters into everything, I've spent a bit too much time trying to figure out fluffy ways to have female Marines anyway.

As Flipsider says, female Chaos Marines make a lot more sense than loyalists.

If we did have female Loyalists, I'd have them be the two lost Legions whose records were expunged--and have them be made up entirely of women, Amazon style. Why were all records pertaining to them wiped even though the records of the Legions who turned traitor weren't? Because their existence would have allowed Space Marines to breed, and thus be tempted to replace humanity rather than serve it. (Insert sterility retcons here, blah blah.) Of course, just because all records have been purged doesn't mean the Legions themselves aren't out there somewhere...

I also once came up with a loyalist Chapter whose beloved Master got zapped by a Tzeentch sorcerer and turned into a woman, with no other signs of mutation or change of character... leading the entire Chapter to schism over the question of whether she was now tainted by Chaos and untrustworthy. Which was the sorcerer's plan all along, muhahaha, etc. It was basically an excuse to get Kushana from Nausicaa into the game, golden armour and all.

My point is, finding a way to make it work in the existing official fluff for 'your dudes/dudettes' purposes can be more interesting and fun than just wanting the fluff itself to change.


If you could make one major change to the setting what would it be? @ 2021/10/13 13:22:57


Post by: Gert


Zenithfleet wrote:

Female space marines across all Chapters would be a bit like the Galactic Empire's military from Star Wars being full of women and aliens. It cancels out its own point.

In the original Star Wars trilogy, the fact that the Empire's forces were all male--and human, and white--gave off a recognisably totalitarian master-race vibe. You don't have to be told they're probably racist and sexist and speciesist because it's continually implied onscreen. The women have probably been told to stay home and breed more sons for the master race. It contrasted nicely with the more eclectic Rebels, who at least had the occasional woman and black guy and alien.

As far as I'm aware there's nothing that implicates the Empire as being sexist beyond the lack of women officers in the original trilogy, which can very easily be summed up to "it's the 70s/80s" and anyone who isn't white/a man isn't getting a lot of screen time. Yes, the Empire is a SciFi version of the Nazis but it's more the fascist totalitarian with some similar uniform design cue's thrown in for good measure rather than ethnonationalism, sexism, or antisemitism analogies.
From the "Educator's Guide for the Rebel, Jedi, Princess, Queen: Star Wars™ and the Power of Costume traveling museum exhibition":
George wanted the Imperial people to look efficient, totalitarian, fascist; and the rebels, the goodies, to look like something out of a Western or the U.S. Marines.
Many of the costumes worn by the Imperials and the Rebel Alliance were inspired by American Navy pilots, World War I and World War II - era German troops, and Japanese fighter pilots.
The outfits of the Imperial officers include several direct references to uniforms worn by the German military including their tunics, tall boots, and hats — modeled after the elite Alpine troops of Nazi Germany.

So the only things here are about the image Lucas was evoking. People know the Nazis were the baddies so they made the Empire look like the Nazis so we knew they were the baddies. Anything beyond that is conjecture or personal interpretation.
As for the Rebellion, the only alien involved until Return is Chewbacca, who is only there because Han is there and they're partners. The only women we see in the OT are non-com's like Leia (who ends up a combatant for a bit but is a diplomat, not a soldier) or Mon Mothma (who again isn't included until Return). The only reason we know the Rebellion as a haven for all races is purely due to non-movie sources like Rebels, Battlefront 2, Empire at War, and all of these other pieces of media that came along after the OT. Again it's all very much down to "it's the 70s/80s" no women/non-whites thing.

And the Imperium in 40K is basically the Empire times ten, with the twist that either it's necessary because all their enemies are even worse (the straight take), or that they've managed to hoodwink everyone into believing it (the satirical take).

Yet the Imperium also isn't sexist and has had mixed armed forces with 3 very specific exceptions since 40k became 40k proper and not just RT. SoB are only all women because of intentionally poorly worded in-universe law that allows the Ecclesiarchy to have soldiers under arms as long as they aren't "men" under arms, Custodes are an analogy to Alexanders Companions (who BTW were all super intimate with each other all the time ), and then Space Marines who are only males because pseudoscience. Not a single other Imperial institution is mono-sex but we have only really seen male/men characters because for a very long time that was the target audience.


If you could make one major change to the setting what would it be? @ 2021/10/13 13:42:31


Post by: Las


@Gert: With respect, you've missed Zenith's point. He's correctly pointing out that the all-male imperial cast in Star Wars helps your brain subliminally evoke the totalitarian themes that the strengthen the drama of the story, without having to explicitly TELL you what the empire's gender policy is. It's very much a show don't tell thing. And most importantly, whatever real world reason for the all male imperial cast is irrelevant. Whats relevant is how it affects the quality of the story being told when it comes into contact with the audience.

It's why whatever the original, real-world reason that space marines all ended up male doesn't factor into my opinion of whether or not it should change today. Only the story matters.

As for Chaos having female space marines, I also think this would have the end effect of further diluting the themes of the setting. Whether you can rationalize it in the setting is not really relevant, what's relevant is that it would read to our brains as more rational and progressive. Those are not things you want to associate with Chaos if you want them to work as a "character" in the story.


If you could make one major change to the setting what would it be? @ 2021/10/13 14:02:23


Post by: Kayback


 Insectum7 wrote:

The thing during the HH that brought the Tyranids to our galaxy. Remove it. Delete it. Pretend like it never happened.

Yeah that's silly.


Heh, I actually liked that.

I also like the Primaris models. I'm not too keen on the lore or the timeskip but, meh. I do think every faction could do with a re-release of their models.

As for taking away, as much as I enjoyed reading the HH, there was much more wriggle room with "lost to the mists of time".



If you could make one major change to the setting what would it be? @ 2021/10/13 14:07:12


Post by: Gert


 Las wrote:
@Gert: With respect, you've missed Zenith's point. He's correctly pointing out that the all-male imperial cast in Star Wars helps your brain subliminally evoke the totalitarian themes that the strengthen the drama of the story, without having to explicitly TELL you what the empire's gender policy is. It's very much a show don't tell thing. And most importantly, whatever real world reason for the all male imperial cast is irrelevant. Whats relevant is how it affects the quality of the story being told when it comes into contact with the audience.

Except people don't think the Empire is the baddies because they're all men. They think they are the baddies because they did bad things and looked like fascists. If you swap every single man in the cast for a woman and vice verse, the effect is still the same because they still look like fascists and do bad things like blow up planets. And again to reiterate my point, the movies were made in the 70s/80s where white men were the dominant force in the film industry.
How can the Imperials envoke totalitarian themes because they're all male when there is a single woman rebel (Leia) in New Hope, a single woman coms operator in Empire, and then Mon Mothma in Return for a total of 3 women seen in the entire rebellion over the 3 movies. No rebel pilots, soldiers, or crew are women until non-movie media added them in because shockingly enough a galaxy-wide rebellion having only 3 women was a bit bloody stupid. Likewise for the Empire which wasn't developed outside of "they're the baddies" in the movies. It's not believable that the Imperial Navy and Army could basically control the entire galaxy when it only has men in its ranks.


If you could make one major change to the setting what would it be? @ 2021/10/13 14:16:23


Post by: Las


 Gert wrote:

Except people don't think the Empire is the baddies because they're all men. They think they are the baddies because they did bad things and looked like fascists. If you swap every single man in the cast for a woman and vice verse, the effect is still the same because they still look like fascists and do bad things like blow up planets. And again to reiterate my point, the movies were made in the 70s/80s where white men were the dominant force in the film industry.


No one said it was the defining factor in why the empire works as a villainous force, only that it is a contributing factor that makes them work so well. In storytelling, you want every single thing to work in service of the story. That's one of them.

Subjective, I know, but I would argue that the more multi-cultural and egalitarian composition of the First Order in the sequels is a pretty good counter-point to you here. They didn't work as well for a lot of reasons, but this was one of them. It tripped my brain up because it was a clash of themes.

And again, the real-world reason for them being all white and male does not matter. What matters is how the story ends up being told.

 Gert wrote:
How can the Imperials envoke totalitarian themes because they're all male when there is a single woman rebel (Leia) in New Hope, a single woman coms operator in Empire, and then Mon Mothma in Return for a total of 3 women seen in the entire rebellion over the 3 movies. No rebel pilots, soldiers, or crew are women until non-movie media added them in because shockingly enough a galaxy-wide rebellion having only 3 women was a bit bloody stupid. Likewise for the Empire which wasn't developed outside of "they're the baddies" in the movies. It's not believable that the Imperial Navy and Army could basically control the entire galaxy when it only has men in its ranks.


This is minutia and doesn't matter. Part of why the empire reads as totalitarian nazi stand ins is that people recall them as all male, white, and with a European accent. The rebels read as good because they were comparably diverse (even just having alien pilots assisted this) and had American accents. It flicked a switch in your brain that holds the emotional associations of the second world war. The more you dilute these themes, the more you risk the story not being able to flick that switch.

Same for 40k and the switches that if flicks.


If you could make one major change to the setting what would it be? @ 2021/10/13 14:46:41


Post by: Kid_Kyoto


First off great idea for a thread, and second another +1 to everything Dustweaver said.

As for me, some thoughts:

Tyranids are like an advancing glacier. They take years to get anywhere and then years to properly digest a planet. And it is possible to win against them if you make them throw in too many resources so that they're burning up biomass faster than they consume it. I think current fluff with Nids eating a planet over a weekend is just too much.

Movie Marines - A marine should be Captain America in Iron Man armor with Thor's Hammer. I have no problem with 1000 of them being military significant if they play on that level. Obviously then we'd have a very different game, with 10 marines taking on 200+ orks, but that's my head canon. For games I just assume every non-Marine model represent 10 or more normal guys. The super-duper marines like Grey Knights (and now Death Watch and Custodes) should be limited to a squad in a normal marine army, like they were in 1-3rd editions.

Similarly marine vehicles are piloted by serfs/servitors/crippled marines.



If you could make one major change to the setting what would it be? @ 2021/10/13 15:03:20


Post by: Cronch



Movie Marines - A marine should be Captain America in Iron Man armor with Thor's Hammer.

And we run into the issue of...so are Aspect Warriors, Tyranid synapse critters and Nobs. Marines are not better than the other factions top warriors, they're equal to them and many, many times better than the baseline human, which is basically gretchin-tier combatant. But BS2 cadians would anger everyone.


If you could make one major change to the setting what would it be? @ 2021/10/13 15:14:42


Post by: Kid_Kyoto


Cronch wrote:

Movie Marines - A marine should be Captain America in Iron Man armor with Thor's Hammer.

And we run into the issue of...so are Aspect Warriors, Tyranid synapse critters and Nobs. Marines are not better than the other factions top warriors, they're equal to them and many, many times better than the baseline human, which is basically gretchin-tier combatant. But BS2 cadians would anger everyone.


Like I said it would fundamentally change the tabletop game, but if we're making a major change to the setting it's the one I would do.

Yes an Aspect Warrior should be as skilled as a marine, but not nearly as strong or tough.
An Ork Nob should be as strong and tough as a marine, but nearly as skilled or well equipped.
A Nid big beast should be stronger and tougher, but the marine faster and smarter.

Marines should not the 'average' army they should be the superior one. Or what's the point of the 1000 Marine fluff, the ~20 organs, the power armor etc.

A marine should be an action hero, a video game character, ordinary foes should just spontaneously die when one hits the field, like in a Schwarzenegger film.

So what's stopping them from overrunning the universe? There's only 1000x1000 of them, no sooner do they fight off 10,000 orks to kill the warboss then it's back the ship because they have to fight through thousands of Tau to stop their Ethereal.

Imagine being the Avengers but spending 24/7 either fighting or traveling to fights cause there's only war.


If you could make one major change to the setting what would it be? @ 2021/10/13 18:13:31


Post by: Cronch


Why not? Why should the humanity's desperate attempt to have anything equal to the other factions of the galaxy be better than everyone else's stuff? Frankly, a tyranid warrior is designed from ground up for war, and has access to the vast intellect of the Hive Mind, with none of the paranoia, mysticism and ignorance that holds Marines behind. By the very nature of tyranid threat, it should be superior to any of the prey species it's designed to hunt.


If you could make one major change to the setting what would it be? @ 2021/10/13 18:31:45


Post by: Dysartes


 Gert wrote:
And the Imperium in 40K is basically the Empire times ten, with the twist that either it's necessary because all their enemies are even worse (the straight take), or that they've managed to hoodwink everyone into believing it (the satirical take).

Yet the Imperium also isn't sexist and has had mixed armed forces with 3 very specific exceptions since 40k became 40k proper and not just RT. SoB are only all women because of intentionally poorly worded in-universe law that allows the Ecclesiarchy to have soldiers under arms as long as they aren't "men" under arms, Custodes are an analogy to Alexanders Companions (who BTW were all super intimate with each other all the time ), and then Space Marines who are only males because pseudoscience. Not a single other Imperial institution is mono-sex but we have only really seen male/men characters because for a very long time that was the target audience.

I know Jenetia Krole was so memorably impossible to picture that she gets killed off by Kharn by accident, but please don't forget about the Sisters of Silence here.

They provide the second Talon of the Emperor to balance the Custodes, in the same way the Sisters of Battle sort of do for the Astartes.


If you could make one major change to the setting what would it be? @ 2021/10/13 19:20:13


Post by: Flipsiders


Cronch wrote:
Making female marines fundamentally changes nothing, they're still big, brainwashed meatheads with boom-boom guns with or without dangly bits. There is no real narrative harm to come from that because gender is not integral to marines role.


Making female marines actually changes a lot; that's why so many people want it to happen. If it didn't matter, we wouldn't be talking about it.


If you could make one major change to the setting what would it be? @ 2021/10/13 19:24:10


Post by: Las


 Flipsiders wrote:
Cronch wrote:
Making female marines fundamentally changes nothing, they're still big, brainwashed meatheads with boom-boom guns with or without dangly bits. There is no real narrative harm to come from that because gender is not integral to marines role.


Making female marines actually changes a lot; that's why so many people want it to happen. If it didn't matter, we wouldn't be talking about it.


100%.

Also, GW/BL wouldn't have achieved the success that it has if it were telling stories about such shallow characters, subjects, and themes.


If you could make one major change to the setting what would it be? @ 2021/10/13 19:59:49


Post by: Son of Sigismund


 Flipsiders wrote:
Cronch wrote:
Making female marines fundamentally changes nothing, they're still big, brainwashed meatheads with boom-boom guns with or without dangly bits. There is no real narrative harm to come from that because gender is not integral to marines role.


Making female marines actually changes a lot; that's why so many people want it to happen. If it didn't matter, we wouldn't be talking about it.


Why does it matter? I really don't understand why it is needed so badly?

Why do we need to mold female characters in a male stereotyp? I think it is just tokenism and forcing female characters in the gene enhanced ultra masculine warrior stereotype just lose their femine side and become little more than carricaturs of females.

Don't get me wrong, a female character doesn't need fullfill only female stereotypes. In fact she must not do that, as it would make a boring and unrealistic character. When writing a good female character you need to take those stereotypes and play with them. Some are fullfilled and in others the character struggles against the stereotype and this shows who she is.

Sisters of Battle are great for the take the Marine stereotype and make their own thing out of it. They may no be as strong as a Marine, but they overcome challenges with a strong willpower and devotion to a cause, which a Marine (a genecrafted killermachine) simply cannot match. For example: Fear has been bread out of Marines. They simply don't care about it. The Sisters of Battle on the other hand feel fear, but overcome it with their faith. They have a human element, that Marines are missing and that makes them in my mind much more interesting than token female space marines.


If you could make one major change to the setting what would it be? @ 2021/10/13 22:06:35


Post by: Cronch


 Flipsiders wrote:
Cronch wrote:
Making female marines fundamentally changes nothing, they're still big, brainwashed meatheads with boom-boom guns with or without dangly bits. There is no real narrative harm to come from that because gender is not integral to marines role.


Making female marines actually changes a lot; that's why so many people want it to happen. If it didn't matter, we wouldn't be talking about it.

What does it change. What crucial aspect of marine-ness hinges on their pronouns. I'm genuinely curious. It's not like marines in lore have any sort of anti-female bias in behavior, nor do they actually have kids, so not like Horusia would suddenly get pregnant during the Heresy. Or is the fact that they call each other "brother" the most defining trait of theirs? Seriously, nothing in lore I can think of would change if every single marine since Great Crusade started suddenly got gender-flipped. None of their plotlines focus on their male-ness, they're basically meat killbots with a fetish for catholic paraphernalia.


If you could make one major change to the setting what would it be? @ 2021/10/13 22:09:53


Post by: JNAProductions


Cronch wrote:
 Flipsiders wrote:
Cronch wrote:
Making female marines fundamentally changes nothing, they're still big, brainwashed meatheads with boom-boom guns with or without dangly bits. There is no real narrative harm to come from that because gender is not integral to marines role.


Making female marines actually changes a lot; that's why so many people want it to happen. If it didn't matter, we wouldn't be talking about it.

What does it change. What crucial aspect of marine-ness hinges on their pronouns. I'm genuinely curious. It's not like marines in lore have any sort of anti-female bias in behavior, nor do they actually have kids, so not like Horusia would suddenly get pregnant during the Heresy. Or is the fact that they call each other "brother" the most defining trait of theirs? Seriously, nothing in lore I can think of would change if every single marine since Great Crusade started suddenly got gender-flipped. None of their plotlines focus on their male-ness, they're basically meat killbots with a fetish for catholic paraphernalia.
In-game, in-lore, all that?
Doesn't change much of anything.

However, out-of-game concerns?
It would (hopefully) diminish things like people who make female Marines getting death threats, and a general "Boys-only" mentality that, while certainly not universal, is present in the hobby.


If you could make one major change to the setting what would it be? @ 2021/10/13 22:12:01


Post by: Mr Nobody


I'd like to have seen the Tau allies get a little more attention. It's a cool aspect compared to the other factions out their and things like the kroot are pretty interesting.


If you could make one major change to the setting what would it be? @ 2021/10/13 22:52:51


Post by: Son of Sigismund


 JNAProductions wrote:
In-game, in-lore, all that?
Doesn't change much of anything.

However, out-of-game concerns?
It would (hopefully) diminish things like people who make female Marines getting death threats, and a general "Boys-only" mentality that, while certainly not universal, is present in the hobby.


Death threats because how you build your minis are gakky behaviour and should never be tolerated. But it don't see this as a valid argument for female space marines. Idiots will be idiots no matter what and as GW mockingly said "they will not be missed".

And for the "boys only" mentality: I think that's more connected to females being generally less interested in wargames than men. That's across all wargames.

Yes, there are females playing warhammer or other wargames and that's great. But there will always be more men in this hobby. Creating female space marines will have little influence on this.

Yes, I understand that representation is important. But why do you wish to force female space marines? Representation can be introduced in so many other levels without breaking the lore on a larger scale than the introduction of primaris marines (which is still hated by many from a pure lore perspective to this day)


If you could make one major change to the setting what would it be? @ 2021/10/14 07:32:54


Post by: Cronch


Maybe if the marines weren't presented as the posterboys of the game, THE superhumans, THE good guys people would not mind having 50% of humanity being excluded from the Defenders of Humanity But Really Cool club.

The funniest and saddest part is, 40k is so wide in scope that you absolutely could have boys-only marines chapter even if the lore supported femarines.


If you could make one major change to the setting what would it be? @ 2021/10/14 07:34:10


Post by: Catulle


Dude, this is literally a thread about making a major change to the lore. Maybe back up a step or two and consider why *this* is the point at which you feel the uncontrollable urge to counter-argue and then just... let it go.

And let the thread do its thing in peace.


If you could make one major change to the setting what would it be? @ 2021/10/14 08:49:15


Post by: Da Boss


To me the change to primaris is genuinely a bigger change to the themes of the setting than having female space marines would be.

But we've had this debate at length, so perhaps it's best to leave it?

On the Ork psyker thing, I am just generally of the opinion that the belief and mysticism parts of 40K have gotten too extreme and I'd like to scale them back. It's just a question of how much fantasy seasoning I want in my sci fi game, whereas others see it as how much sci fi seasoning is in their fantasy game.


If you could make one major change to the setting what would it be? @ 2021/10/14 09:02:30


Post by: grahamdbailey


The only real things I'd like to see would be more exploration into the lesser-know races of 40K, maybe as a 'dogs of war' style units rather than a full army. I know Kill Team is probably the way to do this but it would be nice to see the scope of the game broaden.

That, and kill some main characters off. Let them die, bring in new ones and broaden the 40K 'verse into new narratives.


If you could make one major change to the setting what would it be? @ 2021/10/14 09:18:08


Post by: Son of Sigismund


Catulle wrote:Dude, this is literally a thread about making a major change to the lore. Maybe back up a step or two and consider why *this* is the point at which you feel the uncontrollable urge to counter-argue and then just... let it go.

And let the thread do its thing in peace.


You are right. There is no use in arguing and counter arguing about female marines. Let's continue with the original thread topic.

Cronch wrote:Maybe if the marines weren't presented as the posterboys of the game, THE superhumans, THE good guys people would not mind having 50% of humanity being excluded from the Defenders of Humanity But Really Cool club.

The funniest and saddest part is, 40k is so wide in scope that you absolutely could have boys-only marines chapter even if the lore supported femarines.


While I can not agree with you on the matter of femarines, you are right marines are presented as the posterboys of the setting. I hope for a change in this regard.

The one major thing I would change in the setting is to shift focus from marines to other more interesting elements of 40k. GW should focus more on Xenos factions (the old ones as well as new ones) and on the more human elements of the setting.

It already happens to some degree as more factions are introduceded and fleshed out like the Mechanicus and Xenos factions get some love (sadly only as the enemy of the month for Marines, as seen in the "Old Foes" bundles). I especially hope to see some non-marine Chaos factions, like lost and damned cultists or the Dark Mechanicum.

I personally think Necromunda does an exceptionally well job at this and I really look forward to seeing even more of that hive world.

But it would love to see that focus shift from Marines also in the broader 40k lore. (As marines are GW's main bread winners I don't expect this change coming soon).


If you could make one major change to the setting what would it be? @ 2021/10/14 10:49:11


Post by: Shuma-Gorath


I'd increase more friendly xenos encounters, focus less on space marine and more on humanity.

Less grand changes:
1. I'd bump off permanently one of the Chaos Primarch Daemon Princes probably Magnus, to open up some story possibilities and also define the limits of both daemon princes and primarchs currently.
2. Dark Eldar would just be Eldar Pirates, I find the whole race/culture to be kind meh except for Drazhar.
3. Ignore the whole Squats being consumed by Tyranids to near extinction, move them to being cut off like the Tau.


If you could make one major change to the setting what would it be? @ 2021/10/14 10:56:00


Post by: Kid_Kyoto


grahamdbailey wrote:


That, and kill some main characters off. Let them die, bring in new ones and broaden the 40K 'verse into new narratives.


The weird thing for me is 2nd and 3rd edition had a lot of 'dead' special characters. Lord Solar Macharus, one of the SoB characters, probably more. So 'historical' characters were always a thing. So why is GW so concerned about finally squishing some model from 2004? It'll still be usable.


If you could make one major change to the setting what would it be? @ 2021/10/14 13:05:03


Post by: Insectum7


 Kid_Kyoto wrote:
grahamdbailey wrote:


That, and kill some main characters off. Let them die, bring in new ones and broaden the 40K 'verse into new narratives.


The weird thing for me is 2nd and 3rd edition had a lot of 'dead' special characters. Lord Solar Macharus, one of the SoB characters, probably more. So 'historical' characters were always a thing. So why is GW so concerned about finally squishing some model from 2004? It'll still be usable.
Captain Invictus of the Ultramarines. Tycho of the Blood Angels iirc.


If you could make one major change to the setting what would it be? @ 2021/10/14 13:40:35


Post by: H.B.M.C.


Pretty sure Nork was long dead as well.

Apparently he got better.


If you could make one major change to the setting what would it be? @ 2021/10/14 15:51:35


Post by: -Guardsman-


 Shuma-Gorath wrote:
Dark Eldar would just be Eldar Pirates, I find the whole race/culture to be kind meh except for Drazhar.

Agreed. And instead of making Commorragh purely an Eldar city, I'd make it a hub where you can find lots of renegades and mercenaries from various races of the galaxy. Less evil lair and more lawless trade port, similar to Tortuga (Pirates of the Caribbean), Omega (Mass Effect) and the real-life pirate republic of Nassau.

Regarding the Drukhari, I'm also not a fan of Vect being "Supreme Overlord". I'd rather he only be the leader of the most powerful faction—closer to a glorified mob boss than the self-styled ruler of the city.


If we're talking about a major change to the setting, I would change Chaos as a faction to give it better in-story PR. Instead of being genocidal lunatics who want to turn planets into charnel houses and disease-ridden hellscapes, Chaos leaders should be charismatic visionaries who declare that the Imperium is stagnating and who profess the goal of helping humankind fulfill its true potential. They should actually be a tempting alternative to the distant, indifferent Emperor for all the weary manufactorum workers and oppressed freethinkers.

.


If you could make one major change to the setting what would it be? @ 2021/10/14 16:47:21


Post by: Some_Call_Me_Tim


 Kid_Kyoto wrote:
Cronch wrote:

Movie Marines - A marine should be Captain America in Iron Man armor with Thor's Hammer.

And we run into the issue of...so are Aspect Warriors, Tyranid synapse critters and Nobs. Marines are not better than the other factions top warriors, they're equal to them and many, many times better than the baseline human, which is basically gretchin-tier combatant. But BS2 cadians would anger everyone.


Like I said it would fundamentally change the tabletop game, but if we're making a major change to the setting it's the one I would do.

Yes an Aspect Warrior should be as skilled as a marine, but not nearly as strong or tough.
An Ork Nob should be as strong and tough as a marine, but nearly as skilled or well equipped.
A Nid big beast should be stronger and tougher, but the marine faster and smarter.

Marines should not the 'average' army they should be the superior one. Or what's the point of the 1000 Marine fluff, the ~20 organs, the power armor etc.

A marine should be an action hero, a video game character, ordinary foes should just spontaneously die when one hits the field, like in a Schwarzenegger film.

So what's stopping them from overrunning the universe? There's only 1000x1000 of them, no sooner do they fight off 10,000 orks to kill the warboss then it's back the ship because they have to fight through thousands of Tau to stop their Ethereal.

Imagine being the Avengers but spending 24/7 either fighting or traveling to fights cause there's only war.


Ork nobz in lore are actually usually many many times better than the average marine, better armed, and the ork genetics for better melee really start kickin in. The models a really also don’t do em justice to just how ‘uge they are.


If you could make one major change to the setting what would it be? @ 2021/10/14 21:07:26


Post by: Wyldhunt


-Guardsman- wrote:
 Shuma-Gorath wrote:
Dark Eldar would just be Eldar Pirates, I find the whole race/culture to be kind meh except for Drazhar.

Agreed. And instead of making Commorragh purely an Eldar city, I'd make it a hub where you can find lots of renegades and mercenaries from various races of the galaxy. Less evil lair and more lawless trade port, similar to Tortuga (Pirates of the Caribbean), Omega (Mass Effect) and the real-life pirate republic of Nassau.

That's sort of kind of a thing. There's a port in one of the Fantasy Flight Rogue Trader RPG books that is basically exactly what you're describing. IIRC, it's basically just a webway settlement away from Commorragh proper that acts as a forward operating base/trade center for the kabal that runs it. We see similar settlements in the Path of the Outcast and Salamanders Omnibus, so it's not unreasonable to think that there are other drukhari-run "little Commorraghs" out there that are relatively metropolitan.

Also, while Commorragh itself is definitely drukhari-dominated, there does seem to be a bit of alien presence there. The sslyth are employees rather than slaves, after all. And we know that harlequins and corsairs can do business there. Non-eldar probably aren't terribly safe wandering around the city (and neither are the drukhari), but there's probably some amount of non-eldar presence in at least some sections of Commorragh.

Regarding the Drukhari, I'm also not a fan of Vect being "Supreme Overlord". I'd rather he only be the leader of the most powerful faction—closer to a glorified mob boss than the self-styled ruler of the city.

I mean, isn't that exactly how he's presented? No one seems to be obeying Vect out of recognition of his legitimate legal authority or anything like that. He's obeyed because he's got the raw firepower to kill you and the political power to keep too many other archons from acting out at the same time. "Supreme Overlord" is just a title he gave himself as a flex. It's a thing he makes people call him because it's a reminder that he's powerful enough to make him do so. To use the crime boss analogy, he insists on being called "the Don." If you call him by his first name instead, it might be seen as an intentional show of disrespect, and the possibility that word of that disrespect might make its way through the grapevine to Vect himself means that you end up losing sleep.

How is Vect as presented different rom what you'd like to see? I've always interpreted him as being exactly the way you describe.


If we're talking about a major change to the setting, I would change Chaos as a faction to give it better in-story PR. Instead of being genocidal lunatics who want to turn planets into charnel houses and disease-ridden hellscapes, Chaos leaders should be charismatic visionaries who declare that the Imperium is stagnating and who profess the goal of helping humankind fulfill its true potential. They should actually be a tempting alternative to the distant, indifferent Emperor for all the weary manufactorum workers and oppressed freethinkers.
.

I kind of want both. Like, a chaos marine shouldn't need warp-fueled mind control to convince a bunch of starving, poisoned imperial serfs that things might be better under new management. But also the over-the-top cartoon villains are fun. Also also, Chaos seems to be bad at not mutating and corrupting those it touches. Even if you're vocally anti-chaos god, there's a decent chance you're going to end up crazy and sporting at least one tentacle if you spend too much time in the general vicinity of Chaos.


If you could make one major change to the setting what would it be? @ 2021/10/14 22:41:36


Post by: JNAProductions


Cronch wrote:

It's not a matter of "behaviour" it is a matter of actual physical performance. The science is clear on this too.

Here's the fun part, there is no science to it, because nothing, not a single blessed thing about marine creation process stands up to any sort of scientific scrutiny. It'd be more scientific if you said "wee little elves did it". It's ALL made up. "Due to the transhuman nature of the creation process, it matters very little what gender the inductee was, the end result is so far beyond human physiology any small variables of the original frame are made irrelevant by the artificial musculature and bones that replace their original natural organs". There, voila, fixed your "problem".


In other flippant words, the people who want to see female space marines due to wokeness also want to see a pile of dead little girls and want extra female servitor slaves (nice)

Well yes, I'm woke so I assume all people are equal and dead female soldiers are as bad as dead male soldiers, and female slaves are just as bad as male slaves. You have some sort of ladder of badness where male slaves are a-ok compared to female?
Also, don't Blood Angels (or some chapter) take from a heavily irradiated world? And their applicants all have crippling radiation sickness?


If you could make one major change to the setting what would it be? @ 2021/10/14 23:05:33


Post by: Cronch


 GoldenHorde wrote:
Cronch wrote:

It's not a matter of "behaviour" it is a matter of actual physical performance. The science is clear on this too.

Here's the fun part, there is no science to it, because nothing, not a single blessed thing about marine creation process stands up to any sort of scientific scrutiny.


Except maybe......choosing males based on a higher of baseline athletic performance and natural aggression

Sure. Which matters for unaugumented humans no doubt! Not so much for a being that can bench-press a car, those added 20-50kg of extra upper body strenght really don't add up to much at that scale. But if you insist, we can write that into the new lore too, because, again, there are no space marines, all of it is made up. There is no relation between the small amount of sexual dimorphism humans display and marine-making process cause it literally doesn't exist. It's made up. Wholly. Like eldar, orks, and the rest. It's not real, real life does not factor into 40k at any point, or marines would all just...explode into disjointed flesh parts based on GW descriptions.

There are no space marines, there is nothing to defend here.


Also, I propose that Terra must be destroyed.


If you could make one major change to the setting what would it be? @ 2021/10/14 23:23:30


Post by: JNAProductions


How old are aspirants?

Because this Lexicanum article says they join the Marines as brothers (so Scouts) 16-18.
Which would make them even younger when they START the process.

It also doesn't list physical condition (pre-surgeries) as having to be good-it does require them (or at least want them) to have aggression and a killer instinct, but that can be found in people who are not at physical peak. It lists the big issue as compatibility, not physical strength or anything.


If you could make one major change to the setting what would it be? @ 2021/10/15 00:22:44


Post by: Wyldhunt




JNAProductions wrote:How old are aspirants?

Because this Lexicanum article says they join the Marines as brothers (so Scouts) 16-18.
Which would make them even younger when they START the process.

It also doesn't list physical condition (pre-surgeries) as having to be good-it does require them (or at least want them) to have aggression and a killer instinct, but that can be found in people who are not at physical peak. It lists the big issue as compatibility, not physical strength or anything.

And even if physical strength were a prerequisite, it's a big galaxy. One of the space wolf novels (first book of the omnibus iirc) features an aspirant who is notably scrawnier than the others. He's basically the weedy nerd of his group. Now, that kid got eaten by a troll before he could become a blood claw, but it suggests that there's an acceptable range of beefyness for aspirants; they don't all have to be future olympic weight lifters. So uh. It seems like there ought to be some number of young women out there who are at least as beefy as the relatively scrawny fenrisian nerd.

Goose LeChance wrote:Nobody wants female space marines anyway. There's a small group of politically motivated twitter activists, but they aren't worth catering to.

Don't have a Twitter account. Still think that having the poster boy faction be a boys only club is kind of a bad look. That said, I'm not sure how you'd go about introducing femarines. Retconning it in seems super awkward. But saying that Cawl just suddenly came up with a process to allow for it feels really ham-fisted.

It's one of those problems that should probably have been nipped in the bud, solved when primaris were first introduced, or avoided by not having a mono-sex faction be the poster faction. But now it's a hard problem to solve gracefully.

Another major(?) fluff change: Delete the bit about Kheradruakh finishing his skull collection in Commorragh. Making Aelindrach slightly bigger doesn't really add anything to the setting, and it certainly doesn't add anything that couldn't have been explained by the disjunction that was already happening. The skull collection was a cool thing to speculate on.


If you could make one major change to the setting what would it be? @ 2021/10/15 01:41:14


Post by: epronovost


 GoldenHorde wrote:
Cronch wrote:

It's not a matter of "behaviour" it is a matter of actual physical performance. The science is clear on this too.

Here's the fun part, there is no science to it, because nothing, not a single blessed thing about marine creation process stands up to any sort of scientific scrutiny.


Except maybe......choosing males based on a higher of baseline athletic performance and natural aggression


Well, except maybe... because that would be a composition fallacy. A characteristic true to a whole cannot be assumed to be individually true to all the components of that whole. That's what average means. That's why, despite being a man, I am weaker than many women. If you are going for high athletic performance and aggression, you will recruit mostly men, but some women should, statistically fall in there, especially since women exceed men on average in some athletic performances like agility, balance, precision and general coordination and there are always statistical aberration and abnormal results. It would also be very reductive to basically say that aggression and strength are the most important characteristic for a combatant; there are a lot of other key characteristic to a successful soldier like calm, discipline, perceptivity, teamwork, precision, intelligence amongst others.


If you could make one major change to the setting what would it be? @ 2021/10/15 01:53:04


Post by: Just Tony


Bear in mind that the aspirant process also filters out the weaker people in the bunch. That's kind of the reason it exists. Think back to the movie "Soldier" when they executed that kid that couldn't keep up with the group. Same sort of deal.


If you could make one major change to the setting what would it be? @ 2021/10/15 02:35:28


Post by: Wyldhunt


Just Tony wrote:Bear in mind that the aspirant process also filters out the weaker people in the bunch. That's kind of the reason it exists. Think back to the movie "Soldier" when they executed that kid that couldn't keep up with the group. Same sort of deal.


epronovost wrote:
 GoldenHorde wrote:
Cronch wrote:

It's not a matter of "behaviour" it is a matter of actual physical performance. The science is clear on this too.

Here's the fun part, there is no science to it, because nothing, not a single blessed thing about marine creation process stands up to any sort of scientific scrutiny.


Except maybe......choosing males based on a higher of baseline athletic performance and natural aggression


Well, except maybe... because that would be a composition fallacy. A characteristic true to a whole cannot be assumed to be individually true to all the components of that whole. That's what average means. That's why, despite being a man, I am weaker than many women. If you are going for high athletic performance and aggression, you will recruit mostly men, but some women should, statistically fall in there, especially since women exceed men on average in some athletic performances like agility, balance, precision and general coordination and there are always statistical aberration and abnormal results. It would also be very reductive to basically say that aggression and strength are the most important characteristic for a combatant; there are a lot of other key characteristic to a successful soldier like calm, discipline, perceptivity, teamwork, precision, intelligence amongst others.

I feel like epronovost's post addresses this pretty well, no?




If you could make one major change to the setting what would it be? @ 2021/10/15 08:03:46


Post by: Sunno


Iv said it before and I’ll say it again. Any decision about the inclusion of female space marines (or not) will come down to money and sales.

If GW is convinced that there are literally hundreds of thousands of people who would play 40K but don’t because “space marines are only male”, then they will bring female space marines in a flash. Everything is built around getting money from the customer (they are a commercial company after all).

Female Space Marines isn’t really a lore question. It’s a sales and recruitment question


If you could make one major change to the setting what would it be? @ 2021/10/15 08:41:22


Post by: BrookM


Flame bait and other assorted shitposts have been removed, some quotes or posts rising to the bait have also been removed, if I have been too zealous, my apologies. Now I would very much like for this topic to trundle along again, without the pointless shitposting, baiting and whatnot from both sides of that particular argument. If this topic generates more alerts we're just going to lock it and be done with it, I'd rather not do that, as some interesting ideas and observations on other matters have been shared here as well.

Also, still in dire need of sweets..






If you could make one major change to the setting what would it be? @ 2021/10/15 09:32:03


Post by: Niiai


I would like to see some alien allies, like how the empire can band in inquisitors and assassins.

Like the Slaught.

https://warhammer40k.fandom.com/wiki/Slaugth


If you could make one major change to the setting what would it be? @ 2021/10/15 10:21:59


Post by: shortymcnostrill


I'd like to go back in time and keep marines as prisoners. The paladins-in-space archetype never interested me, but I'd definitely play a bunch of murderous convicts pressed into service in power armor and pumped full of combat drugs. I'd have that reflected in the models too. I know current marines can be pretty grimdark too, but the models have more of a noble knight vibe than a murderous bastard vibe to me.

I also wonder how that would have affected the evolution of the popularity of the faction, the neglect of other factions and the rest of the game (bl lore, releases, rules, the works). Would marines still have been the posterboy faction? What would that have looked like?


If you could make one major change to the setting what would it be? @ 2021/10/15 10:30:25


Post by: Cronch


I think you'd inevitably come back to noble knight archetype again over few years/decade unless the studio made conscious effort to keep it from happening. It's like design convergent evolution- all things power armored turn into knights/samurai in time.


If you could make one major change to the setting what would it be? @ 2021/10/15 10:52:12


Post by: Insectum7


epronovost wrote:
especially since women exceed men on average in some athletic performances like agility, balance, precision and general coordination
Oh is that so? Interesting. What's the data on that?

epronovost wrote:

It would also be very reductive to basically say that aggression and strength are the most important characteristic for a combatant; there are a lot of other key characteristic to a successful soldier like calm, discipline, perceptivity, teamwork, precision, intelligence amongst others.
I think 'reductive' is a healthy part of the whole point of the IoM.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
epronovost wrote:
 GoldenHorde wrote:
Cronch wrote:

It's not a matter of "behaviour" it is a matter of actual physical performance. The science is clear on this too.

Here's the fun part, there is no science to it, because nothing, not a single blessed thing about marine creation process stands up to any sort of scientific scrutiny.

Except maybe......choosing males based on a higher of baseline athletic performance and natural aggression

Well, except maybe... because that would be a composition fallacy. A characteristic true to a whole cannot be assumed to be individually true to all the components of that whole.
Right, but at the same time aknowledgement of the statistics can still come in to play, responsibly or irresponsibly. It seems perfectly plausible that a far-from-ideal fictional warlike culture would coldly make the sort of calculations resulting in the fiction that we have. I prefer the view that the Emperor just wasn't motivated enough to develop FSM because of his own ignorance/lack of foresight/miscalculation/obsession.

It's not like I think female super soldiers can't/shouldn't exist. Far from it. Imo the important bit is that the Imperium is incredibly flawed, down to it's very foundation, and that it's flaws are perpetuated in an unbroken cycle, partly because it's heroes and icons are flawed.


If you could make one major change to the setting what would it be? @ 2021/10/15 12:21:49


Post by: epronovost


 Insectum7 wrote:
It's not like I think female super soldiers can't/shouldn't exist.


I hope so, Sisters of Battle and Sisters of Silence are super soldiers by all definition of the term. Though it could be a major change to be made to the Imperium to make it a properly patriarchal and machist society that erases women.

Far from it. Imo the important bit is that the Imperium is incredibly flawed, down to it's very foundation, and that it's flaws are perpetuated in an unbroken cycle, partly because it's heroes and icons are flawed.


That's a rather ''facile'' way of interpreting things. The Imperium has a lot of flaws and is supposed to be an insane and cruel regime, but it doesn't have ALL the flaws possibly imaginable. For example, the Imperium's racism is purely fantastic racism, that is racism toward aliens and other fantasy creature, it's not racist or social darwinian in the way we are accustomed on Earth. It's sexism is also dubious at best. While it does evoque some sexist-ish trope due to the Catholic fundamentalist ''vibe of the Imperium'' it doesn't seem to display any form of overt or class based sexism within the fluff with women found at any rank and position without mentionned of that being exceptionnal, weird or facing rejection from their peers. The Imperium could be sexist, and probably should be to certain extend to make it a properly repressive and ultra-fascist society, but it doesn't seem to be the case. It has its own brand of fantastical fascism.


If you could make one major change to the setting what would it be? @ 2021/10/15 12:24:02


Post by: Cronch


I prefer the view that the Emperor just wasn't motivated enough to develop FSM because of his own ignorance/lack of foresight/miscalculation/obsession.


If that's the case, how about GW show that? There is nothing in the background that to us, the readers, would suggest lack of femarines is some sort of flaw or oversight. It's quite obvious it was not even a conscious decision when the background was written, space marines are all boys cause duh, they are.

It's particularly funny when you realize that IG had female soldiers pretty much from 3rd ed (if not earlier, I don't remember) onwards, which means the dramatic difference between male and female agression and strengh is not an issue for the largest military organization in the galaxy. You'd think with how expensive and rare spaceship lift capacity is, they'd only select the finest, most macho males to serve in the elite Imperial Guard (vs the planetary defense forces).


If you could make one major change to the setting what would it be? @ 2021/10/15 14:01:29


Post by: -Guardsman-


Wyldhunt wrote:
Don't have a Twitter account. Still think that having the poster boy faction be a boys only club is kind of a bad look. That said, I'm not sure how you'd go about introducing femarines. Retconning it in seems super awkward. But saying that Cawl just suddenly came up with a process to allow for it feels really ham-fisted.

It's one of those problems that should probably have been nipped in the bud, solved when primaris were first introduced, or avoided by not having a mono-sex faction be the poster faction. But now it's a hard problem to solve gracefully.

Yes, that's my view too. There probably should have been female Marines all along, but it's hard to change that in a way that doesn't feel forced.

With the Stormcast Eternals from AoS, at least, it was never explicit that they were all male even when all the models were male. So it was fairly easy to introduce female models later on.

.


If you could make one major change to the setting what would it be? @ 2021/10/15 18:32:26


Post by: Kid_Kyoto


shortymcnostrill wrote:
I'd like to go back in time and keep marines as prisoners. The paladins-in-space archetype never interested me, but I'd definitely play a bunch of murderous convicts pressed into service in power armor and pumped full of combat drugs. I'd have that reflected in the models too. I know current marines can be pretty grimdark too, but the models have more of a noble knight vibe than a murderous bastard vibe to me.


That actually would be a pretty cool background for a marine chapter. Murderous criminals drawn from a penal world, kept sedated most of the time then let loose.

Definitely something different.


If you could make one major change to the setting what would it be? @ 2021/10/15 18:51:27


Post by: Gert


If you want a book where that very thing happens then grab Robbie MacNiven's Carcharadons: Red Tithe. It is very good.


If you could make one major change to the setting what would it be? @ 2021/10/15 20:46:58


Post by: Rolsheen


I would like to see the rise or fall of the Eldar, they've been sort of stuck in this limbo of dying race for so long. Move their story a long a bit either kill them off or rejuvenate them some how.


If you could make one major change to the setting what would it be? @ 2021/10/16 00:06:32


Post by: Stephen1974


I'd like to see more Primarchs return and crush the religious nonsense that has arisen around the Emperor. I know that would negatively effect certain chapters like the Black Templars, and that would be a shame, but on the whole, I cannot stand listening to all the religious drivel and I detest all the religious chanting that goes on in videos etc.


If you could make one major change to the setting what would it be? @ 2021/10/16 00:36:04


Post by: epronovost


Stephen1974 wrote:
I'd like to see more Primarchs return and crush the religious nonsense that has arisen around the Emperor. I know that would negatively effect certain chapters like the Black Templars, and that would be a shame, but on the whole, I cannot stand listening to all the religious drivel and I detest all the religious chanting that goes on in videos etc.


I might be wrong, but wasn't the Imperium always sort of religious (but more in the Kim Jung Un sort of cult of personality) before becoming more like straight up Catholics (of the very traditional sort)?

PS: what religious chanting in videos?


If you could make one major change to the setting what would it be? @ 2021/10/16 02:16:04


Post by: Stephen1974


Its been a while so I may get this a little wrong but when the Emperor was unifying Old Terra, part of that was the Eradication of Religion. I think there is a short story called The Last Church which sees the emperor standing over the last churches destruction. The Emperor didn't believe in Gods or Worship and even punished his Sons and their legions if they showed any signs of worshipping him, and quite brutally as well with cities and possibly worlds being destroyed for it.

Religion or rather the lack of religion, is a BIG issue in the events leading up to the Heresy. Lorgar for example worshipped the Emperor as a God and the worlds his Legion conquered in the Great Crusade were taight to workship the Emperor as well, so the Emperor had the Ultramarines destroy one of the greatest Cities that had been built to honour him. This is the reason why Lorgar hates Guilliman so much.

The turning of Horus was very much based on Erabus convincing Horus that the Emperor was misleading people about not being a God

The religious nature of the Empire started during the heresy when cults started secretly worshipping the Emperor as a God. They had to do this in hiding as it wasn't tolerated. Then (i forget her name) a women with physic abilities she didnt know she had, fought off a demon and claimed the Emperor had worked through her, This is where we get the saying "The Emperor Protects" from. She becomes revered by people and even manages to turn some Space Marines (particularly one of the Imperial Fists, again, forget names) to the belief the Emperor is a God.

As the Heresy takes place and people are exposed to the horrors of the warp, they turn to Religion out of fear. Once the Emperor is turned in to the Warps Buttplug, and all the primarchs are gone, there is no one left to correct things, and religion being an excellent form of control, the Administers of Old Terra encourage the religion until the Emperors vision for mankind is perverted in to something he fought so hard to eradicate and the administrators for the imperium have total control, leading to the rise of the Inquisitors and to Commissars etc, none of which existed whilst the Emperor was 'alive'.

As for video, look up 40k videos online (assuming GW hasn't assinated all the fan creators by now) and you'll often hear religious chanting style sound tracks, and watch the 40k movie (its on youtube) and again you'll get that religious chanting all the time.



If you could make one major change to the setting what would it be? @ 2021/10/16 07:18:48


Post by: mrFickle


Yes the emperor was very much a cruel dictator but insisted that he was just a man and there was no god, mostly I think becuase if people believed he was a god they would be open to the idea of other gods and whoops they did the big 4 chaos gods and it all goes wrong.

But the emperors atheist propaganda wasn’t enough a lot of people, they needed something more to cope with the endless war light years away from home. So they invented the cult of the emperor.

I think this was lorgar a point.

So I’m not sure if games Workshop were trying to make an observation on religion or not but it serves as one of those ironic self defeating ambitions that the background of 40K is full of.

I think the other thing to consider is that the emperor and the other perpetuals (suprised I haven’t seen that come up yet in this thread) had probably tried to use religion for millennia to manipulate humanity


If you could make one major change to the setting what would it be? @ 2021/10/16 18:26:13


Post by: Just Tony


Stephen1974 wrote:
I'd like to see more Primarchs return and crush the religious nonsense that has arisen around the Emperor. I know that would negatively effect certain chapters like the Black Templars, and that would be a shame, but on the whole, I cannot stand listening to all the religious drivel and I detest all the religious chanting that goes on in videos etc.


Then do not watch the video. Games shoukd never be altered to cater to any minority point of view from a fraction of the fanbase. If religious people can get along with a game that essentially commits blasphemy against their deity with its lore, then I am sure an atheist can tough it out as well...


If you could make one major change to the setting what would it be? @ 2021/10/16 20:10:54


Post by: Gert


"Gregorian Chants to study and relax to."


If you could make one major change to the setting what would it be? @ 2021/10/16 21:34:31


Post by: GoldenHorde


 Gert wrote:
"Gregorian Chants to study and relax to."


You mean Gertgorian


If you could make one major change to the setting what would it be? @ 2021/10/16 23:32:39


Post by: Cronch


 Rolsheen wrote:
I would like to see the rise or fall of the Eldar, they've been sort of stuck in this limbo of dying race for so long. Move their story a long a bit either kill them off or rejuvenate them some how.

Give us Exodites as the new focus...dino-riding elves with laser cannons that instead of Feeling Sad are willing to lose some INT in return for larger population. This way their rise in numbers doesn't automatically send everyone else into death spiral since they lack the craziest eldar tech like D-weapons.


If you could make one major change to the setting what would it be? @ 2021/10/17 00:08:29


Post by: Wyldhunt


 Rolsheen wrote:
I would like to see the rise or fall of the Eldar, they've been sort of stuck in this limbo of dying race for so long. Move their story a long a bit either kill them off or rejuvenate them some how.

Theoretically, that's what the Ynnari are supposed to be. They're making big, costly, risky plays and (theoretically) shaking up the status quo. And they're putting a little fire in aeldari bellies while they do it. If GW doesn't stagnate them too much, they should theoretically either fail (or turn out to be deceived) tragically or beat down Slaanesh in the not so distant future. Either of which ought to shake things up.


If you could make one major change to the setting what would it be? @ 2021/10/17 01:42:57


Post by: Stephen1974


 Just Tony wrote:
Stephen1974 wrote:
I'd like to see more Primarchs return and crush the religious nonsense that has arisen around the Emperor. I know that would negatively effect certain chapters like the Black Templars, and that would be a shame, but on the whole, I cannot stand listening to all the religious drivel and I detest all the religious chanting that goes on in videos etc.


Then do not watch the video. Games shoukd never be altered to cater to any minority point of view from a fraction of the fanbase. If religious people can get along with a game that essentially commits blasphemy against their deity with its lore, then I am sure an atheist can tough it out as well...


What on earth are you on about? this has bugger all to do with believing in a god or not. It's purely about a style that I find irritating. The Heresy books are a thousand times better than 40k books because of the lack of pious nonsense in them. And as its within existing lore that the Emperor is against religion and the Primarchs were bought up that way as well, its not a stretch to see them want to return to the Emperors teachings. In fact, Guilliman in Dark Imperium, cant stand the religious crap thats occured and its only because its so wide spread and hes busy with the crusade that he doesnt do something about it.


If you could make one major change to the setting what would it be? @ 2021/10/17 06:40:16


Post by: endlesswaltz123


Stephen1974 wrote:
 Just Tony wrote:
Stephen1974 wrote:
I'd like to see more Primarchs return and crush the religious nonsense that has arisen around the Emperor. I know that would negatively effect certain chapters like the Black Templars, and that would be a shame, but on the whole, I cannot stand listening to all the religious drivel and I detest all the religious chanting that goes on in videos etc.


Then do not watch the video. Games shoukd never be altered to cater to any minority point of view from a fraction of the fanbase. If religious people can get along with a game that essentially commits blasphemy against their deity with its lore, then I am sure an atheist can tough it out as well...


What on earth are you on about? this has bugger all to do with believing in a god or not. It's purely about a style that I find irritating. The Heresy books are a thousand times better than 40k books because of the lack of pious nonsense in them. And as its within existing lore that the Emperor is against religion and the Primarchs were bought up that way as well, its not a stretch to see them want to return to the Emperors teachings. In fact, Guilliman in Dark Imperium, cant stand the religious crap thats occured and its only because its so wide spread and hes busy with the crusade that he doesnt do something about it.


The Ecclesiarchy are a core component of the setting, and crucially, to most imperial factions (and obviously every factions outside the Imperium) an insidious presence. They can be argued to be one of the greatest threats to the Imperium, and the ignorance on a whole by the members within the Imperium is part of the charm of the setting. The Ecclesiarchy as well as the Administratum are enemy factions. They need to stick around, they are as core to the setting as the fanatical but almost incompetent Mechanicus.


If you could make one major change to the setting what would it be? @ 2021/10/17 12:07:29


Post by: Iracundus


 endlesswaltz123 wrote:
Stephen1974 wrote:
 Just Tony wrote:
Stephen1974 wrote:
I'd like to see more Primarchs return and crush the religious nonsense that has arisen around the Emperor. I know that would negatively effect certain chapters like the Black Templars, and that would be a shame, but on the whole, I cannot stand listening to all the religious drivel and I detest all the religious chanting that goes on in videos etc.


Then do not watch the video. Games shoukd never be altered to cater to any minority point of view from a fraction of the fanbase. If religious people can get along with a game that essentially commits blasphemy against their deity with its lore, then I am sure an atheist can tough it out as well...


What on earth are you on about? this has bugger all to do with believing in a god or not. It's purely about a style that I find irritating. The Heresy books are a thousand times better than 40k books because of the lack of pious nonsense in them. And as its within existing lore that the Emperor is against religion and the Primarchs were bought up that way as well, its not a stretch to see them want to return to the Emperors teachings. In fact, Guilliman in Dark Imperium, cant stand the religious crap thats occured and its only because its so wide spread and hes busy with the crusade that he doesnt do something about it.


The Ecclesiarchy are a core component of the setting, and crucially, to most imperial factions (and obviously every factions outside the Imperium) an insidious presence. They can be argued to be one of the greatest threats to the Imperium, and the ignorance on a whole by the members within the Imperium is part of the charm of the setting. The Ecclesiarchy as well as the Administratum are enemy factions. They need to stick around, they are as core to the setting as the fanatical but almost incompetent Mechanicus.


The thing is the Ecclesiarchy is also now verifiably one of the most effective means of combating Chaos, with the miracles now granted by the Emperor as warp god. Blessed ammunition verifiably causes more damage to daemons and psykers. That's part of the difficult compromise Guilliman makes. He tolerates the Ecclesiarchy for the sake of these practical benefits, though this in effect perpetuates the ignorance and zealotry that he detests. However by the latest Godblight book, after being saved by two of these miracles, Guilliman starts to have doubts about his earlier position denying the Emperor being a god at least in the 40k era, even if perhaps he was not one in 30k. Ten thousand years of worship by the Imperium may have elevated the Emperor and possibly changed his mind about godhood, in a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy.


If you could make one major change to the setting what would it be? @ 2021/10/17 12:29:57


Post by: Kid_Kyoto


40k definitely runs on the logic that 'worship' gives you psychic energy and enough worship makes you a god.

Not sure who first came up with the idea but I've seen it in Terry Prachett's books (Small Gods especially), Neil Gaiman's books (Sandman and American Gods) and it was the whole mechanism of the old Primal Order RPG.

So... it's possible the Emperor knew this could happen and denied being a god, and tried to choke off worship because he knew where it would lead.

Being a 40k god is not just about having more power. It means you've ascended past your mortal body and spend most of your time in the warp and the Emperor may have wanted to avoid that. Being a god becomes a gilded cage.


If you could make one major change to the setting what would it be? @ 2021/10/17 12:39:29


Post by: Gert


If you can't interact with the physical plane, how can you make sure people are doing exactly what you want.
We see it when the Emperor leaves the Crusade and when he gets put on the Golden Throne.
His biggest flaw is that He never accounts for free will and always just assumes that everyone will listen to Him because He thinks He knows best.


If you could make one major change to the setting what would it be? @ 2021/10/19 04:15:12


Post by: alextroy


mrFickle wrote:
Yes the emperor was very much a cruel dictator but insisted that he was just a man and there was no god, mostly I think becuase if people believed he was a god they would be open to the idea of other gods and whoops they did the big 4 chaos gods and it all goes wrong.

But the emperors atheist propaganda wasn’t enough a lot of people, they needed something more to cope with the endless war light years away from home. So they invented the cult of the emperor.

I think this was lorgar a point.

So I’m not sure if games Workshop were trying to make an observation on religion or not but it serves as one of those ironic self defeating ambitions that the background of 40K is full of.

I think the other thing to consider is that the emperor and the other perpetuals (suprised I haven’t seen that come up yet in this thread) had probably tried to use religion for millennia to manipulate humanity
One of the great ironies of the Great Crusade. The Emperor abolishes religion as part of the Unification of Earth. He starts up his Astartes and Primarch projects, just to have his Primarchs scattered across the Galaxy. He sets out to find them with the Great Crusade, eventually finding Lorgar. Give Lorgar his Legion, but doesn't pay enough attention to realize he is the God Lorgar has been looking for. Lorgar writes The Lectitio Divinitatus, before he is disillusioned by the Emperor at the sacking of Monarchia. But The Lectitio Divinitatus is out and ends up being the formative document of the Imperial Cult during the Horus Hersey and the Emperor is too distracting fighting the war and then getting entombed on the Golden Throne to do anything about it.

As for Ork Tech, I thought it was that Waagh Energy made things that shouldn't quite work operate much more smoothly then they had any business working. Like ramshackle vehicles work that should fall apart sooner than they actually do. Guns that should jam regularly, but just don't seem to do so. Space Hulks that have no business successfully passing through the Warp, yet manage to anyway.


If you could make one major change to the setting what would it be? @ 2021/10/19 06:37:25


Post by: mrFickle


I suppose there is logic that is not addressed with Orks, for example if you kill 80% of the Orks in a waaagh should you see their tech start to fall apart or perform worse? Or only be able to maintain shootas but not shock attack guns


If you could make one major change to the setting what would it be? @ 2021/10/19 11:35:07


Post by: Gert


Thats exactly what happens.
When the Orks were beaten back during the 2nd War for Armageddon, those that remained became feral tribes in the jungles. Left unchecked those tribes would have eventually turned back into a normal Ork Waaaagh with the capabilities to produce the more advanced tech and weapons.


If you could make one major change to the setting what would it be? @ 2021/10/19 14:24:54


Post by: Mad Doc Grotsnik


It also depends what Orkses survived.

The ground up would more be the spores shed maturing, as the emergence Boyz wouldn’t have any older Orks to learn from/copy.

If it’s the remains of an invasion? If it’s just Boyz, much the same as from spores, as they’re not particularly able to maintain their own level of technology.

But, if any Oddboyz are among the survivors, that technological and societal base will be higher, because there’s a Dok, Mek or Runtherd (potentially all three, given Oddboyz do tend to congregate) to keep it maintained to some degree.


If you could make one major change to the setting what would it be? @ 2021/10/19 15:05:36


Post by: Some_Call_Me_Tim


What a lot of people forget is that Gork n smirk are like, the most powerful chaos gods. They don’t really directly fight though cause that’s way less fun than fighting each other, and their boys should be left to their own fights. Now this isn’t saying that orks don’t get blessings from ‘em, it’s shown that occasionally mork will seem to bless bullets and maybe gork will make a blow extra punchy.
If you think about it, orks are the most religious faction. They generate their faith to the ork gods just by being orky.


If you could make one major change to the setting what would it be? @ 2021/10/19 15:47:15


Post by: the_scotsman


I would re-introduce the idea that not everything explicitly said within canon is intended to be literal fact. Bring back 'the setting/the imperium as unreliable narrator.' Bring back stuff like 'the imperium thinks the tau look like fish but they actually live on a desert planet' and 'the primarch's names and appearances are supposed to be cartoonishly silly because you the reader are supposed to be able to think "Hmmm, the founder of the Blood Angels was probably not a literal angel with literal wings named Bloody McAngelson."

You the reader should be reminded that the imperium is superstitious ignorant and foolish by them misunderstanding history and facts and events that you the reader understand.

good recent example includes the admech relic that is given as an "Award" for exemplary individual thought by a member of the skitarii, which is actually a radioactive weapon designed to kill the wearer because the adeptus mechanicus hates individual thought, but the fact that it melts your skin and makes your teeth fall off is seen as an honor from the omnissiah stripping away your weak flesh.



If you could make one major change to the setting what would it be? @ 2021/10/19 17:25:51


Post by: Nurglitch


The Regimental Standard is good for that.


If you could make one major change to the setting what would it be? @ 2021/10/19 18:54:19


Post by: the_scotsman


 Nurglitch wrote:
The Regimental Standard is good for that.


yes, but Black Library is MISERABLE for it, because theyre so addicted to the modern cinema trope of rewarding their fanbase for being good little bois for understanding references to wiki-page background lore and giving them headpats for recognizing the references because theyre True Fans, and all GW really has to draw off of for that now is stuff that happened 10,000 years ago in-universe...

...so I guess the hyper-ignorant propaganda obsessed autocratic regime just keeps perfect historical records of everything and anything that happened literally 10,000 years ago. Great, awesome.


If you could make one major change to the setting what would it be? @ 2021/10/19 19:06:56


Post by: jeff white


I read it as the propaganda made real, as in readers are now in the bubble of hero worship and the veneer of parody has been stripped away… and I see this ultimately as evidence that chaos and heresy have taken GW.


If you could make one major change to the setting what would it be? @ 2021/10/19 20:03:08


Post by: Las


 the_scotsman wrote:
 Nurglitch wrote:
The Regimental Standard is good for that.


yes, but Black Library is MISERABLE for it, because theyre so addicted to the modern cinema trope of rewarding their fanbase for being good little bois for understanding references to wiki-page background lore and giving them headpats for recognizing the references because theyre True Fans, and all GW really has to draw off of for that now is stuff that happened 10,000 years ago in-universe...

...so I guess the hyper-ignorant propaganda obsessed autocratic regime just keeps perfect historical records of everything and anything that happened literally 10,000 years ago. Great, awesome.



They should've had Abnett write the entire heresy in like three books. Horus Rising had a great, psuedo-mythic style to it. It was opaque and almost stiff in a way that really worked for the setting. Made it feel like a half-remembered dream.

The rest of them just read as bog standard BL stuff that evaporated all of 40k's mystery in a torrential rain of "patrician features."


If you could make one major change to the setting what would it be? @ 2021/10/19 23:56:13


Post by: Insectum7


epronovost wrote:
 Insectum7 wrote:
It's not like I think female super soldiers can't/shouldn't exist.


I hope so, Sisters of Battle and Sisters of Silence are super soldiers by all definition of the term. Though it could be a major change to be made to the Imperium to make it a properly patriarchal and machist society that erases women.

Far from it. Imo the important bit is that the Imperium is incredibly flawed, down to it's very foundation, and that it's flaws are perpetuated in an unbroken cycle, partly because it's heroes and icons are flawed.


That's a rather ''facile'' way of interpreting things. The Imperium has a lot of flaws and is supposed to be an insane and cruel regime, but it doesn't have ALL the flaws possibly imaginable. For example, the Imperium's racism is purely fantastic racism, that is racism toward aliens and other fantasy creature, it's not racist or social darwinian in the way we are accustomed on Earth. It's sexism is also dubious at best. While it does evoque some sexist-ish trope due to the Catholic fundamentalist ''vibe of the Imperium'' it doesn't seem to display any form of overt or class based sexism within the fluff with women found at any rank and position without mentionned of that being exceptionnal, weird or facing rejection from their peers. The Imperium could be sexist, and probably should be to certain extend to make it a properly repressive and ultra-fascist society, but it doesn't seem to be the case. It has its own brand of fantastical fascism.

You misinterpret me. I'm not suggesting that the Imperium at large is overtly sexist. I'm 100 percent down with SoS, SoB, female Guard, female Inquisitors, High Lords, all of that. All of that should be there and we should see more of it.

But the foundation of the Imperium is, in a nutshell, the following:
A hyper-patriarch (the Emperor), creates a band of hyper-patriarchs (Primarchs), and then derives from them the means to create his all-male hyper-violent men-at-arms (Space Marines), which in all their souped-up hypermasculinity wind up being very effective. . . but also causes the greatest man-made catastrophe to ever befall upon the human race, the Horus Heresy.

The Imperium, post Heresy, winds up being the exact opposite of what the Emperor wanted. The population worships the Emperor himself as a god, becoming the ultimate super-facist "strong-man". Space Marines are looked upon as great heroes (when they were intended to be tools, and I think done away with, post-Great Crusade), and in general the celebration of military leadership/sacrifice as the sort of ultimate virtue, and enlightenment values are frowned upon/persecuted. It's a total cultural nightmare.

So the Emperor tried to take this shortcut to victory by doubling/tripling+ down on super-ultra-warlord men, and instead created a 10,000 year long cautionary fable for which the moral could be R.B.G.s "Women belong in all places where decisions are being made." lol.


Edit: Oh yeah and I also think that the Custodes should have female members.


If you could make one major change to the setting what would it be? @ 2021/10/20 02:17:28


Post by: epronovost


 Insectum7 wrote:

You misinterpret me. I'm not suggesting that the Imperium at large is overtly sexist. I'm 100 percent down with SoS, SoB, female Guard, female Inquisitors, High Lords, all of that. All of that should be there and we should see more of it.

But the foundation of the Imperium is, in a nutshell, the following:
A hyper-patriarch (the Emperor), creates a band of hyper-patriarchs (Primarchs), and then derives from them the means to create his all-male hyper-violent men-at-arms (Space Marines), which in all their souped-up hypermasculinity wind up being very effective. . . but also causes the greatest man-made catastrophe to ever befall upon the human race, the Horus Heresy.

The Imperium, post Heresy, winds up being the exact opposite of what the Emperor wanted. The population worships the Emperor himself as a god, becoming the ultimate super-facist "strong-man". Space Marines are looked upon as great heroes (when they were intended to be tools, and I think done away with, post-Great Crusade), and in general the celebration of military leadership/sacrifice as the sort of ultimate virtue, and enlightenment values are frowned upon/persecuted. It's a total cultural nightmare.

So the Emperor tried to take this shortcut to victory by doubling/tripling+ down on super-ultra-warlord men, and instead created a 10,000 year long cautionary fable for which the moral could be R.B.G.s "Women belong in all places where decisions are being made." lol.


Edit: Oh yeah and I also think that the Custodes should have female members.


I do agree with you the way you described the Emperor's view of humanity, Space Marines and some of his views on gender. Ironically, while the Imperium in 10 000 years became fervently religious, a militarist society and reason feared and hated, it does seem to have become less sexist than in the days of the Emperor and probably more tolerant of human deviancies like abhumans, psykers, small mutants and other, more primitive cultures (if not by choice, by necessity).


If you could make one major change to the setting what would it be? @ 2021/10/20 07:52:31


Post by: Da Boss


I tend to agree with the view that the horus heresy series demythologized the game's past and made it into a pretty schlocky 40K-lite. The first book was kind of fun and interesting, a look at the great crusade. I didn't take it super seriously, but I enjoyed it a lot. But by Flight of the Eisenstein you had full blown 40K style Plague Marines popping into existence in seconds, rather than any kind of slow corruption, and I knew the series was not going to be consistently worth reading.

But over time it's filled in detail all over the place, and given callbacks (callforwards?) to 40K like having the Pharos Device call the Tyranids and so on. And at the same time we've got 30K stuff invading 40K, having Cawl and Guilleman be around since then really violates core themes of the setting in a series way, or at least changes the core themes significantly so that they are no longer really related to the previous themes.

So maybe I should revise my answer to making the entire Horus Heresy series non-canon.


If you could make one major change to the setting what would it be? @ 2021/10/20 08:13:28


Post by: Kid_Kyoto


 Da Boss wrote:
I tend to agree with the view that the horus heresy series demythologized the game's past and made it into a pretty schlocky 40K-lite. The first book was kind of fun and interesting, a look at the great crusade. I didn't take it super seriously, but I enjoyed it a lot. But by Flight of the Eisenstein you had full blown 40K style Plague Marines popping into existence in seconds, rather than any kind of slow corruption, and I knew the series was not going to be consistently worth reading.

But over time it's filled in detail all over the place, and given callbacks (callforwards?) to 40K like having the Pharos Device call the Tyranids and so on. And at the same time we've got 30K stuff invading 40K, having Cawl and Guilleman be around since then really violates core themes of the setting in a series way, or at least changes the core themes significantly so that they are no longer really related to the previous themes.

So maybe I should revise my answer to making the entire Horus Heresy series non-canon.


My ideal ending to the HH series would big fight, Sanny dead, Horus dead, Emperor on throne everyone sad...

Cut to, Scribe Danil Ahabnaught in his cell. He cracks his knuckles and looks down at the parchment. He's just finished the last book in this little fan-fic speculative fiction project he's been writing with the other scribes in his temple. More than fifty scrolls of adventures set during the time of myth and legend. A fun way to while away their spare time between transcribing 500 year old tax records.

At which point the Inquisition kicks down the door and drag him and his buddies away.

The end.


If you could make one major change to the setting what would it be? @ 2021/10/20 08:40:52


Post by: mrFickle


I always thought it was the birth of slaneesh that made the nids aware of the Milky Way.

I’m not sure how I feel about the tyranids, I feel like they have always just been there but that’s it. I really like them as an army but I feel like there should be more narrative development for them beyond being this swarm eating it’s way through the galaxy. I’d like see them take over a portion of the galaxy and have some agenda, even if it’s natural imperative rather than intelligent.


If you could make one major change to the setting what would it be? @ 2021/10/20 16:38:55


Post by: Dysartes


Prior to the HH series of books, it was unclear what brought the 'Nids to the Milky Way, but one of the HH novels features a scene where this Pharos device is used and it attracts the attention of the 'Nids...


If you could make one major change to the setting what would it be? @ 2021/10/21 09:33:15


Post by: H.B.M.C.


 Kid_Kyoto wrote:
At which point the Inquisition kicks down the door and drag him and his buddies away.
With a quick "Your blasphemous texts are an affront to Immortal Emperor Horus!" thrown in.

 Dysartes wrote:
Prior to the HH series of books, it was unclear what brought the 'Nids to the Milky Way, but one of the HH novels features a scene where this Pharos device is used and it attracts the attention of the 'Nids...
And it's sooooooooooooooooooooo dumb...




If you could make one major change to the setting what would it be? @ 2021/10/21 14:08:26


Post by: Pacific


Yeah I thought that was a bit of an eye-roller, although much less so than many of the other background changes that have happened in recent years.

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
It also depends what Orkses survived.

The ground up would more be the spores shed maturing, as the emergence Boyz wouldn’t have any older Orks to learn from/copy.

If it’s the remains of an invasion? If it’s just Boyz, much the same as from spores, as they’re not particularly able to maintain their own level of technology.

But, if any Oddboyz are among the survivors, that technological and societal base will be higher, because there’s a Dok, Mek or Runtherd (potentially all three, given Oddboyz do tend to congregate) to keep it maintained to some degree.


Question - was the 'come from mushrooms/spores' background in place when the 2nd war of Armageddon background was written?


If you could make one major change to the setting what would it be? @ 2021/10/22 02:51:18


Post by: Tygre


 Pacific wrote:
Yeah I thought that was a bit of an eye-roller, although much less so than many of the other background changes that have happened in recent years.

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
It also depends what Orkses survived.

The ground up would more be the spores shed maturing, as the emergence Boyz wouldn’t have any older Orks to learn from/copy.

If it’s the remains of an invasion? If it’s just Boyz, much the same as from spores, as they’re not particularly able to maintain their own level of technology.

But, if any Oddboyz are among the survivors, that technological and societal base will be higher, because there’s a Dok, Mek or Runtherd (potentially all three, given Oddboyz do tend to congregate) to keep it maintained to some degree.


Question - was the 'come from mushrooms/spores' background in place when the 2nd war of Armageddon background was written?


The 2nd War of Armageddon was written in 2nd edition. Orks at that time had symbiotic algae in their blood, but no spoors mentioned.

The Ork spoor background was introduced in Gorkamorka just before 3rd edition. The spoors were also mentioned from the 3rd edition codex onwards. So when the 3rd War for Armageddon was written (late 3rd edition I think) it was already established.


If you could make one major change to the setting what would it be? @ 2021/10/22 07:47:45


Post by: Mad Doc Grotsnik


In terms of Orky reproduction?

Before the Gorkamorka spore hypothesis (and it is only a hypothesis, written in-universe by a Magos Biologis).

In the Rogue Trader book, it simply described old and decrepit Orks wandering off into the wilderness, and young Orks, also known as Wildboyz, wandering out of the wilderness.

Nothing is explicitly said about exactly where the Wildboyz came from - but the Gorkamorka addition does kind of tie into that.

It’s also worth noting that it was either Gorkamorka or Xenologies that pointed out Orks kept in isolation sicken and just sort of die.


If you could make one major change to the setting what would it be? @ 2021/10/24 08:27:51


Post by: triplegrim


I'd have Abbadon have a real victory. Like tearing Marneus Calgar to pieces and killing him.

Secondly I would add two 0's to all numbers. Like a chapter is 100k marines at full strenght.

I also preferred the Lovecraftian Old Crons. A silent galaxy wide threat. Like the tyranids.

Finally I feel chaos should conquer terra and place a chaos lord on the emperors throne. Pitting 'new emperor' loyal non chaos aligned traitors like night lords black legion and iron warriors against pawns like 10k sons and world eaters. Would make for a fun free for all with the imperium forces put into real dire straits, as opposed to kicking csm ass for 10k years.



If you could make one major change to the setting what would it be? @ 2021/10/24 08:28:34


Post by: triplegrim


Double post.


If you could make one major change to the setting what would it be? @ 2021/10/24 08:28:59


Post by: triplegrim


Double post.


If you could make one major change to the setting what would it be? @ 2021/10/24 08:29:56


Post by: triplegrim


Triple post.