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Given all the Ward hate, I was wondering, what would you change in fluff if given the ability to do so?

I'll post my own in a bit, just so it doesn't become the focus of the topic.

Drop Space Marine riding on (! Cyper-)wolves.


Do it now.


Seriously.


Make that it never happend. It blights the game like nothing else.

I am tempted to say just the grey knights and leave it at that. Their fluff annoys me deeply. They are just too perfect and too powerful, and in a universe where a god emperor can be struck down by his son, such perfection just must not exist. They need flaws. I can name the flaws of every other race / army in 40K but I cant name a single one for the grey knights (ok I cant really think of anything for the boys in blue but they don't come across as perfect as much).

The next one I would look to change is the necron flayed ones. Making the cause of their madness a curse and an illness feels a bit hollow to me. I preferred the older version of them being stuck awake and in their metal bodies and immobile and without will for the millenia the necrons slept which drove them to madness more.

Almost all of the other fluff, I must say I quite enjoy, I thought I would have more gripes, but most of the fluff more or less fits. There might be things I find silly (like the above mentioned wolf riding space marines) but that is more a personal thing and not a problem I find with the fluff particularly.

Make Draigo a chaplain for starters. Maybe he got lost on a space hulk that warped out or something. Have him some how linked to a certain person, that allows him to warp in on his position briefly to assist before being sent back to the warp. Tortured constantly by the gods, has yet to crack (being a chaplain and all). However, his sanity is definitely leaving him, so he may well be the first GK to turn, but nobody knows if or when.

It's not the greatest fluff in the world but it's leagues ahead of that...disaster ward made up.

The one thing that really, really irks me is the idea that all Space Marine chapters should want to strive to be Ultramarines, forsaking their own traditions and Primarchs for Rowboat Girlyman.

Dark Elf Decapitator should also go.

I have no fething clue what they where smoking when they wrote up this guy, but before all the established meta-physics and aeon-long wars, Chaos, War in Heaven, the Emperor, Tyranids invading the Galaxy, etc..,etc.. you name it, it seems odd that all this doesn't matter and the end of the universe will be brought about by one random freak with black eye-shadows collecting skulls in his own private dimension that hasn't ever been mentioned anywhere else in the entire history of 40K fluff.

Oh, and black-holes-in-a-box should either go, or, if they stay, should behave like proper Black Holes!. The entire Bugs-Bunny/Loony-Toon-theme they have going in new Dark Eldar Codex is fairly disappointing and out of synch with the rest of the 40K-universe.

Short version: Remove ward's abuse of sisters from fluff, and put them back where they were.

Longer:
A) Return sister fluff to 2nd edition or 3rd edition, as the new WD fluff and casual slaughter of them in other books sawbones them.

B) Remove the GKs, the previous were already pretty bad because it took the EVERYONE IS DOOMED nature of the universe and gave you something that doesn't have to worry about the daemons, which I feel really undercut grimderp

C) Return Necrons to non-sentient killing machines, rather than Tomb Guard in spaaaaaace

D) Orks could do with a 2nd edition dip too

Grey Knights - I think a decision needs to be made here, are they good guys are not? If they are then fluff about killing sisters, using chaos against chaos, using xeno tech, being best buddies with the monkeys etc has to go. If not then GW has to say what they are, radicals and go from there.

Necrons - One thing that's been neglected about CHaos since like RT days is that chaos is fed by emotions not explicit worship. A brave guardsman picking up is rifle is feeding khorne, a doctor giving flu shots is feeding nurgle, a husband and wife in bed are feeding Slannesh, a professor outlining his proposals for better government feeds Tzeentch. You don't have to be wearing spikes and skulls, it's desire that feeds them.

SO! The only way to starve Chaos is to deny emotions, and who does that? Our Robotic Overlords of course! So in my take, the Necrons are the Lords of Order, they plan to save the galaxy by killing or roboticizing EVERYONE. This is about as grimdark as you can get, your choices are mutating into a tentacled blob or being gauss flayed.

But no one asked me...

SylvanaSekNadin wrote:I am tempted to say just the grey knights and leave it at that. Their fluff annoys me deeply. They are just too perfect and too powerful, and in a universe where a god emperor can be struck down by his son, such perfection just must not exist. They need flaws. I can name the flaws of every other race / army in 40K but I cant name a single one for the grey knights (ok I cant really think of anything for the boys in blue but they don't come across as perfect as much).

They have flaws. They're singlemindedly driven toward one goal, at the cost of countless lives, with everything they do ultimately being for naught. That's a huge flaw. You can't stop chaos, no matter how powerful/flawless/incorruptible you are. How frustrating would it be to have one goal and know that everything you do brings you no closer to it?

Necroshea wrote:Make Draigo a chaplain for starters. Maybe he got lost on a space hulk that warped out or something. Have him some how linked to a certain person, that allows him to warp in on his position briefly to assist before being sent back to the warp. Tortured constantly by the gods, has yet to crack (being a chaplain and all). However, his sanity is definitely leaving him, so he may well be the first GK to turn, but nobody knows if or when.

It's not the greatest fluff in the world but it's leagues ahead of that...disaster ward made up.

IMO that is really the spirit of what is in the codex about him. The problem though is that a tragic hero of such proportions really needs a very good writer to keep the balance. Something needs to be done.

I feel that is basically the only thing that needs to be redone.

Necrons are fine, good even.

Get them to decide what Draigo is meant to be. If he's meant to be a tragic hero, well and good, stop making him out to be as strong as the Chaos gods in the Warp. If he's meant to be as strong as the Chaos gods, cut the crap making him out to be tragic in the last sentences of his fluff.

daedalus wrote:

SylvanaSekNadin wrote:I am tempted to say just the grey knights and leave it at that. Their fluff annoys me deeply. They are just too perfect and too powerful, and in a universe where a god emperor can be struck down by his son, such perfection just must not exist. They need flaws. I can name the flaws of every other race / army in 40K but I cant name a single one for the grey knights (ok I cant really think of anything for the boys in blue but they don't come across as perfect as much).

They have flaws. They're singlemindedly driven toward one goal, at the cost of countless lives, with everything they do ultimately being for naught. That's a huge flaw. You can't stop chaos, no matter how powerful/flawless/incorruptible you are. How frustrating would it be to have one goal and know that everything you do brings you no closer to it?

Couldn't of said it better myself.

Nothing worse than fighting the most deadliest, horrific and unkillable monsters in the universe.

Not every IG regiment needs to be quirky like a charector in a teenage sitcom.
I want the IG to be MORE generic. Like the differences between modern armies- different strategic considerations, specific technologies and doctrines but broadly the same.

Space Marines in general.

They're inconsistencies and ridiculousness serves really to often take away from the game. Some portray them as basically gruff guardsmen with better armor, sometimes they're silly parodies of action heroes, and sometimes they're elevated to demigod status. We've got pants-on-head slowed stories where a single tac squad kills thousands of dark eldar or where 500 marines assault fortified hive cities and emerge victorious or where a few thousand SM's assault worlds held by billions of veteran guardsmen heavily entrenched and with extensive anti-orbital defenses and it's portrayed as a foregon conclusion the marines will win, and junk like that just explodes right past that suspension of disbelief barrier and destroys it while making the tabletop game feel inaccurate and results skewed. Then we've got stories where they drop like flies and between a squad of guardsmen and some tribal natives kill off an entire squad of Chaos Space Marines.

In general, the actual GW studio material when making comparisons between SM's and Guardsmen puts them about 10 or 12 for 1. The problem is that much of the time this goes right out the window and you get sillyness like Hellsreach, Brothers of the Snake, the third Dark Apostle book, and some of the sillier codex stories.

At the same time, even in many such grossly exaggerated states, given the size of other imperial institutions and the many foes of the universe, a mere million space marines wouldn't be a factor in greater galactic conflicts. Using the studio given comparisons of 10/12 for 1, even multiplied by ten or a hundred fold, the entirety of the Astartes has less military might than the daily IG recruitment intake (given that the IG codex states that there are *billions* of IG regiments consisting of thousands or even tens of thousands of troops each, that means there's tens of trillions of IG troops out there, meaning millions of IG troops per each Space Marine).

I'd tone down the more exaggerated SM elements and stories. An SM chapter isn't going to conquer well defended hive worlds by itself, an SM company is going to get smashed if facing an entire IG regiment (generally being outnumbered 80/100/200-1 or more by an enemy with big guns that care not for power armor and genetically engineered toughness), and they're not going to send a single SM to deal with a crashed dark eldar pirate vessel with dozens of alien pirates sporting advanced weaponry and even faster reflexes opposing him.


The game itself would then be more reflective and we wouldn't have to deal with the internet fanfic level atrociousness of some of the SM stories out there.

Spiku wrote:
C) Return Necrons to non-sentient killing machines, rather than Tomb Guard in spaaaaaace

I'm sorry but...

you can have my ability to actually personalize my army...when you pry it from my cold, dead hands.

If you want mindless, soul-less, personality-less automatons, then you can have your army be comprised of mindless, soul-less, personality-less automatons. I, OTOH, am quite happy with my Tomb Kings in space, and my phaeron will be continuing his harvest of the Tau sept-worlds in an effort to rebuild his forces with the bio forge he had his crypteks retrieve and repair.

Grey Knights - I think a decision needs to be made here, are they good guys are not? If they are then fluff about killing sisters, using chaos against chaos, using xeno tech, being best buddies with the monkeys etc has to go. If not then GW has to say what they are, radicals and go from there.

Being a Radical does not make you evil. It simply makes you a Radical.

I've never owned any Codex that has Matt Ward's name printed on the cover page, so I can't really criticize his fluff writing (if it is his writing).

The Codex's I've read are the Imperial Guard, where the characters are just men with fascinating attributes (Like Creed, devoid of physical prowess but being a Genius Tactician). Or characters with fascinating Regiments (Like Strakken and the Catachans, leaving no man behind. Like Colonel-Commissar Gaunt and the Tanith First, trying to keep the Regiment from becoming obliterated). Or character who are completely unlucky. (Such as Commissar Cain. Ah, a bit of Recaf and some Regicide between fighting Genestealer Cults to Chaos Daemons).


I've also read the Tau Codex and loved it. The Caste System in its entirety is intriguing, and hopefully, just hopefully, the Ethereals will start trying to breed Warp Navigators within the Air Caste so they can start floating about in the Warp, spreading the Greater Good wherever they appear!

Give Necrons inertialess drives back, get rid of Khornenate knights and Draigo fluff (love the model though).

All of it, every last bit. The fluff is terrible, poorly constructed and shows very little in the way of imagination. Keep the models and hire some actual writers that know what they are doing. BTW do the same thing for fantasy.

Only thing that really sticks out is Orks = veggies thing.

I want scary female Orks beating the snot out of Imperial Guardsmen dammit.

I agree with Vaktaki. Wholeheartedly, and I'm a SM fan.

Mr. S Baldrick wrote:All of it, every last bit. The fluff is terrible, poorly constructed and shows very little in the way of imagination. Keep the models and hire some actual writers that know what they are doing. BTW do the same thing for fantasy.

It is unfortunate, but I must agree.

I have been trying for some time to make changes to the 40K fluff myself to try to improve it. Just in the last few days, I did a complete rewrite of the warp, psychic powers, the Emperor-- I deleted the Horus Heresy, purged everything to do with Chaos, erased about 900 Space Marine chapters... finally, I realized I'd reduced the setting to potted meat. There was nothing left of what defined it as what it was; 40K's single unique element is that it is a vast, bloated sack of derivative decades-old crap that nobody can see the end of. Surgery's not going to save this one, only complete reconstruction.

At this point, I think the best thing for me would be to just make my own original setting with the tiny meat-flecks that are the concepts I actually do like.

Add- subtlety to the fluff. The OLD Grey Knights were fething heroes. They weren't ubermunch mc daemonpants, just hightly trained SM psykers, who were fighting a losing battle agaisnt Chaos. The iconic concept for me was one Grey Knight charging a whole Basilica of Daemons, even though he'd certainly snuff it hard.

Same with the new Necron fluff. The old stuff had a subtle, creepy vibe redolent of Lovecraft or H.G Wells. It could ahve used some MORE fluff, but what it had was good.

The new fluff, just like the new GK fluff reeks of unsubtle "BE IMPRESSED" over the top fanfic, at least as far as i've read so far (not read the whole dex yet, but that seems to be the vibe).

Chaos needs to be more scary. Right now the fluff basically boils down to 'they're really really scary, but always get beaten, while this dead guy keeps their bosses from doing a damn thing'. The Daemons codex take on their motivations is a good deal more interesting.


And most of all- standardize the fluff! Stop retconning established fluff. Make up more if you need to, but don't just declare the fluff to have always been the new way :(

I love 90% of the fluff, even all the way from the beginings in RT days in a universe as vast and multi-faceted as the 40k one it will be impossible to maintain 100% consistancy.

The only things I would like to see done is to advance the fluff, actually make it progress in some meaningful means, and they have done that in some regards, ( war for armegedon, 13th crusade etc. ), but they always end up as stalemates of some sort and dont truly affect anything.

The game has to also function as a competitive venue so that puts limitations on its leeway, and in order to sell each race/faction they each have to have complimentry fluff to enthus people to use them (no body wants to be the whipping boy of the 40k universe )

I do sort of miss the older orks fluff though, when they were not quite so beastial.

I'd like my fething Inertialess Drives back please.

I also sometimes wonder why newer codices can't expand on the old fluff, rather than rewrite it.

Grey Knights didn't use the "powers of the enemy" against Chaos before, and, well, the Necron codex is one big retcon.

I would make Imperium invincible again.

/thread

Brother Coa wrote:I would make Imperium invincible again.

/thread

Listen to this man.

Brother Coa wrote:I would make Imperium invincible again.

/thread

You mean they arent already invincible enough through plot armour?

The Imperium was never invincible. It just thought it was.
Me? I'd change it to be more subtle. More... Scary. Humanity is so far beyond fethed. But right now we aren't fighting a losing battle, where merely holding the line is considered a victory. Instead the imperium has all these uber heroes who can kill em all and then go back to polishing their armour. That's not heroic, that's being the universes largest bully.
I want HEROICS! On all sides. I want Eldar having to make hard choices, (I can only save one craftworld, which one?) I want hordes of enemies being held back by the Space Marines, knowing they're doomed, but fighting so that their brothers and civies can get away. I want Chaos to actually win for once. I want writers who can take something and put an undercurrent in it that makes you sleep with the light on for nights afterwards, without going "OMG THIS IS SOOOOOO SCARY! SEE?!?!?!" because seriously, that doesn't scare me. Subtlety though? that can scare me. And that's what I want. I want to see the horror of the 41st millenium where no one is safe, there is only war, and everyone is fethed. But they still fight because the only other choice is to give up.

I'd do away with bolt rounds being explosive.