Lowest moment in 40k fluff?

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**Devastator**

Melissia wrote:Stormtroopers are the best non-Sororitas soldiers in the Imperium.

i would place Skitaari predatorians above stormtroopers (and the sisters).

**GeckoOBac**

Melissia wrote:Meh, fething strawman arguments. Not touching that with a twenty meter nemesis force weapon.

Where I can get one of those? How many inches is that in the tabletop? If it's long enough perhaps GKs have just found their AT capability

Automatically Appended Next Post:
Also, whoever linked tvtropes should be jailed naked in a warp rift and be left there to rot for all eternity.

**Cryage**

While I do agree the GK / SoB thing was a bit... weird.

The Necron & BA alliance made me roll my eyes...

But I have to saw the lowest moment in 40k fluff is probably the 5th edition codex for Tyranids. Don't get me wrong, some of it is very well written, but its very hard to feel inspired when every story in there leads to their defeat :(

**pretre**

Cryage wrote:
But I have to saw the lowest moment in 40k fluff is probably the 5th edition codex for Tyranids. Don't get me wrong, some of it is very well written, but its very hard to feel inspired when every story in there leads to their defeat :(

Umm. It took me about 30 seconds to refute this:

P8-9, The Death of Tyran. Spoiler Alert: The Swarm wins.
P11, Thandros, Imperial Explorator Fleet Dosari, Imperial Cruiser Investigation, Occulus Observator Station, The Star Krumpas. All lost to Behemoth. That's a lot of wins for Behemoth before it is ultimately stopped.

That was in the first couple pages of the book; I stopped there.

Are you looking for the Tyranids to be overall triumphant? So the universe is devoured?

**Cryage**

More specifically I was talking about the stories of the hive fleets. A first encounter win is nothing new in a codex... Also a few 2 sentence blurbs on page 11 is hardly a way to inspire a person to feel good about their army, where you pick up any other codex and its well written stories about how amazing their tactics and firepower are... yet with tyranids they describe how cunning and adaptive they are... and then they get stomped out.

And regarding the universe being devoured? Well, you can't stop the inevitable

**KingDeath**

Meh, there are so many low moments/parts in 40k fluff, it is difficult to name a single one as the worst.

3. Marneus Calgar defeating several companies wort of Nightlords with the help of some peasants...
2. Lord Draigo-nuff said
1. The very worst moment of 40k fluff for me is nothing but a single short quote from the Chaos dex:
"Let no good deed go unpunished, let no evil deed go unrewarded" This just hurt...badly.

**withershadow**

Lara wrote:This piece doesn't, in my honest opinion, explain action X. It doesn't say why the Sisters had to die. If he'd even written "because they needed all the blood they could get", or "they did it for the lolz", or "they looked at our shiny armour funny", it would be a reason. Maybe not a great one (that's a matter of personal taste), but my major objection to this piece would be addressed. It is a technical objection. It's just such a glaring technical fault to me that I can't get past it.

Um, well, the reason is pretty clear and stated multiple times throughout the codex: NO WITNESSES.

So instead of 1. Kill sisters and take their blood, and 2. go wreck daemon face, you would prefer they:

1. Safely extract minimum amount of blood.
2. Hope none of the sisters succumb to the corruption and sabotage their plans while they muck about.
3. Go wreck daemon face.
4. Come back and kill the sisters.

That sounds way too complicated. They don't have all day, you know.

**micahaphone**

A Tau navy defeating a hive fleet before it touched down with NO LOSSES was pretty poor, too. It could have been written "with minimal losses" to show that they are adept at space combat, but nope, they went for the ridiculous.

**Grey Templar**

micahaphone wrote:A Tau navy defeating a hive fleet before it touched down with NO LOSSES was pretty poor, too. It could have been written "with minimal losses" to show that they are adept at space combat, but nope, they went for the ridiculous.

well, to be fair, it was a tiny hive fleet

**Pacific**

pretre wrote:
Cryage wrote:
But I have to saw the lowest moment in 40k fluff is probably the 5th edition codex for Tyranids. Don't get me wrong, some of it is very well written, but its very hard to feel inspired when every story in there leads to their defeat :(

Umm. It took me about 30 seconds to refute this:

P8-9, The Death of Tyran. Spoiler Alert: The Swarm wins.
P11, Thandros, Imperial Explorator Fleet Dosari, Imperial Cruiser Investigation, Occulus Observator Station, The Star Krumpas. All lost to Behemoth. That's a lot of wins for Behemoth before it is ultimately stopped.

That was in the first couple pages of the book; I stopped there.

Are you looking for the Tyranids to be overall triumphant? So the universe is devoured?

Actually, I think in the current Dex they have been written as far more dangerous than in previous ones. You are left having read the background with the sense that despite their losses, there are plenty more when that came from (just 'splinter' fleets, the main trunk is still on its way!) and a great shadow is hanging over the Imperium. Which is kind of what we have always been lead to believe.

On top of my previous argument about Horus' reasons for turning against the Imperium being woefully underwritten, I think the transformation of 'Chaos' away from the force of 'disorder' and towards cackling, evil marines with spikes on their armour is one of my biggest disappointments.

"Let no good deed go unpunished, let no evil deed go unrewarded" This just hurt...badly.

Think how Chaos used to be, in terms of their original conception in Slaves to Darkness. It was something dark, mysterious and completely unfathomable. They weren't so much 'evil' (although their actions often brought about death and ruin) but acting towards their own principles which only one who had had his mind opened to Chaos could understand. It was truly 'chaos', and the Imperium represented the antithesis of this, of 'order' and control of peoples lives. Far removed from the quite two-dimensional, and childish, conceptions of 'good' and 'evil' existing as self-contained entities.

Nowadays the objectives of Chaos are control of land and resources, physical power and domination - but these are mundane things, properties of the physical, mortal reality. Previously, Chaos was about something far more, something that one could now know without subjecting yourself or giving yourself to it, and by the time you did that it was too late - you were damned. But it was something far more attractive because of it, far more insidious, simply because it was something that could not be understood.

And I also think it made it far more of a frightening concept, Of course, there would still be room for skulls, spikes and the likes, and for the acts of horror that currently constitutes the character of Chaos. But the background behind those actions, the abstract and unfathomable nature of Chaos, which previously had painted Gods playing in the ether (who may or may not turn their attention to the lives of mortals) and us as their playthings, has been lost and replaced with something far more mundane (and less evocative) in my opinion. Look at some of the artwork portraying those who have 'turned' in the old Slaves to Darkness books, as well as the 1st edition Chaos Marines, they are absolutely mental. Such a thing is, in my book at least, far more frightening than a marine with whitened skin, some tattoos and shrunken heads attached to his belt (possibly stroking a sinister white kitten).

**Atramentar**

New Gav Thorpe novel, Purging of Kadillus: 6 scouts give up on life so Belial can be teleported in to break off an orc radar dish. .

I'm still not entirely sure why the strategically brilliant descendants of the Lion couldn't have come up with a better plan with more intelligence and less pointless sacrifice.

**candy.man**

I’m going with Draigoas his fluff is more akin to a Chuck Norris joke than credible story writing. If Ward went the usual SM hero route and made Draig’s fluff as a powerful character who held is own again powerful foes, I’d have no problems with it. The fact that Ward dragged in Mortarion and the Realm of Chaos itself just to make his character “extra bad ass” without proper thematic justification is just bad class.

If Ward writes the next Chaos book, we’d probably get a weird story where Abaddon roadhouse kicks a loyalist primarch.

**Barrington**

Pacific wrote:I knew I shouldn't have written that comment, as I don't have time to write it out in full. Oh well, the crying baby can wait (joke).

The point being, we were treated to very little internal monologue from Horus, very little that touched upon why he actually thought he could do a better job than the Emperor. There was the briefest mention of the Marines worrying about what would happen to them when there job was done, of an Imperium run by petty bureaucrats. But all in all it was barely touched upon. So, we were expected to believe that Horus was turning his back on 200 years of warfare, of fighting alongside his father and being party to his plans, of having that huge responsibility of taking that huge burden on his own shoulders. Not only that, but to do the unthinkable - to destroy his own brothers and progeny, both inside and outside the Legion, to destroy the very Imperium he had helped to create.

He threw all of that away, and decided he could do a better job. And why? There was just not enough rational causality in Horus' decisions, not enough there to convince why he was taking this utterly insane course of actions, and was prepared to destroy everything he had helped to create. And so, the writer turned instead to the 'get out of jail free card', and quite possibly the worst plot device other than 'and then they woke up': 'a wizard did it'. Horus wasn't of rational mind, because he had been stabbed by a magic sword. Thus, there is no recourse to any kind of rational cause and effect in Horus' decision making. Horus emerges from the temple with dark circles around his eyes, and then sets about the business of killing his progeny and ripping the Imperium in half. How much more emotive, how much more powerful it might have been if we had been privy to Horus' own internal monologues about what he was doing? About how he agonised over the path he was taking, but knew that is was necessary to save mankind? Instead, his character is reduced to that of a two-dimensional comic book character, cackling while he plots the destruction of Terra.

To be honest I think it was by far the biggest let-down in the Horus Heresy series. We have seen why the other Primarchs fell; McNeil did a far more convincing job with both Fulgrim and Magnus in A Thousand Sons, and makes me wish he had come to False Gods later on, and presumably away from a strict word-count limit or deadline. So too ADB's handling of Lorgar, whose character was padded out with admirable aplomb. All of the traitor Primarchs were quite tragic characters, whose flawed decision making lead to their downfall. But the biggest one, the grand-daddy of them all and the reason why the 40k universe actually exists in the way that it does has been almost completely forgotten about - almost completely skated over, and what's even more puzzling is how everyone seems to have ignored what could have potentially been one of the most epic and emotional story arcs ever committed to print in the history of Games Workshop.

Remember when the Heresy was first written about, there was talk of the Heresy itself being based upon Milton's Paradise Lost. About how Satan decided that, hey, perhaps it is better to reign in Hell than to serve in Heaven. But, all of the meat of that discussion, of philosophical argument and of rationalising, has been almost completely omitted from the 40k re-telling of that tale.

Just my own thoughts on this of course, and sorry to go off on one a bit!

Now see to that baby

**H.B.M.C.**

The Grey Knight Codex, and anything by Goto.

There is so much fail in the GK Codex it's just absurd. The BA/Cron Bromance is stupid, but it's funny-stupid. Nothing in the GK book is funny-stupid. It's all horrifically bad what-the-feth-were-they-thinking stupid. It rapes the background fluff and then goes back for seconds. It's fething awful.