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 Smacks wrote:
I remember from RT the was a picture of two Space Marines arresting a hive ganger for doing graffiti. And this guy has written something like "marines are pigs".

Here's the one you were talking about, although it looks more like he was trying to write "Marines out"



Although rebellions and lost worlds aren't unheard of in today's 40k, the RT rulebook portrayed an Imperium that was strained with warp storms cutting off planets and the Imperium having to re-conquer itself every now and then. The image above is from a section dedicated to exploring the concept of lost worlds, focusing on one called Logans World where humans, mutants and Orks live together. Not exactly peacefully, but compared to "the cruellest and most bloody regime imaginable"?

It always looked to me like he was writing "MARINES LOL"

That just really shows the difference between 80s and 90s fluff for 40k: Here are some Space Marines busting a graffiti tagger instead of purging entire populations for being traitors and heretics. It was a different, weirder time.

I absolutely adore the old artwork though; something about the pen lineart always captured my imagination.

I may be going out on a limb here, but I can't help but think that the artist may have had some inspiration from pictures like the following:




And if so, that adds a bit of a dark context to it.

Oh definitely.

"the NI troubles" were always in the news back then.
There were also more than a few jabs at Tory politicians (and the 'iron lady' herself, Thatcher).

As for the rousting of tagger/burning entire populations. It was more inferred that there wasn't so much a sliding scale of "wrongs" but "they are all equal".

Along the lines of the old "Kill them all, God will know his own."

 Gashrog wrote:

 DarknessEternal wrote:

As for the Primarchs thing, the Horus Heresy, and all that entails, was invented for Space Marine (the second Epic system) so they could have an excuse to have the box come with only marine miniatures.

Not quite, the Primarchs were added by Space Marine but the Heresy therein was otherwise mostly the same as in Adeptus Titanicus and Realms of Chaos: Slaves to Darkness. The First Interlegionary War had received some mention in the first Ultramarines article, and the Horus Heresy may have been namedropped before as well, but it Adeptus Titanicus was the game they needed the civil war for, Space Marine merely continued the trend.

Ah man, AT and SM (original version) had some AWESOME art in them, and side stories. I loved the one picture of Marines fighting Marines in a city, with some Marines tied to a pillar, and Titans stalking the battlefield.

Shades of grey, now everything's a lot more black and white...