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Ruckdog wrote:I always thought that Tyranids were inspired mostly by the Alien movies, with a dash of Starship Troopers (the book) for flavor. Hard to see how Blizzard could be the source, since the 'Nids date all the way back to the 1980s...

I think you're right there, wasn't there some story about starcraft originally being for GW etc...

Oh, and just for clarification, since my timeline up there is pretty jumbled, this is the chain of IPs:

Starship Troopers (the book)
Aliens
40k
Starcraft
Halo
Gears of War

So don't ever, ever, ever say that anything in 40k is based on a Blizzard product. That's a major Berzerk Button you really don't want to press.

Everything Blizzard has done is a blatantly plagiarized GW product, Zerg being poorly-disguised Tyranids, Terrans being a combination of Space Marines and IG, Protoss being Eldar, and various Warcraft races being obvious expies of WHFB races, at least up until WCIII, when they finally decided to get creative and make their Orcs civilized.

A lot of those WHFB races you speak of existed before GW ever came about...

Hell LOTR was written from 1937 to 1949.

I know it's not 40k but there's an indie-GT Chaos Dwarf codex that's widely accepted. I would think that if you want to make an acceptable fan-dex it takes a great deal of work and a great deal of hustle on your part to get it out there and people playing/OK with it. Go to chaos-dwarfs.com and look under the project development forum...thousands of posts with countless hours of playtesting to arrive at something balanced.

I would say no to "fandexes", but a definite yes to "counts-as" lists. Back in 3rd edition I was seriously considering doing one myself: a Fremen army using the Alaitoc Craftworld list with skimmers as ornithopters and wraithlords as sandworms carrying fremen heavy weapons teams.

Daemon-Archon Ren wrote:

Remember, the chaos gods can twist realities, and the Tyrandis themselves are known to come from another galaxy (The Galaxy of BlizzardentertainmentIPia aka Starcraftia)

http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2006/4/10/

I have been told Kroot mercs is allowed. Rightfully so, as it looks to be the most balanced fandex out there. But other than that no, fandex's generally are not allowed.

The Kroot Codex is not a fandex.

personally, the lot of the WHFB armies seem very LOTR.

Scippio Martinez wrote:A lot of those WHFB races you speak of existed before GW ever came about...

Hell LOTR was written from 1937 to 1949.

Not in the same form, though.

In LotR and D&D, Orcs were gray (not green), hairy brutes (though typically smaller than humans) with little to no intelligence to speak of, and humans were philosophers and knights in shining armor. WHFB made Orcs the big, green hulking monsters who at least had some semblance of intelligence and weren't simply endless hordes of nameless enemies for the heroic humans to murder. WHFB also turn humans into the endless hordes. Kind of reversed the two roles.

Warcraft took the WHFB model and ran with it. Lots of humans, a few Orcs, Orcs are big and green and almost intelligent (up until WCIII when they suddenly WERE intelligent), humans are weak and rely on numbers, with the exception of a few elite units. Virtually the opposite of Tolkienian/D&D humans and Orcs.