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I started reading the novels, years before I stated playing the game.

A whole row of my bookshelf is crammed full of 40k novels.
A friend of mine got me started with the Horus Heresy books, when they first started coming out. I've read the several of the Horus Heresy novels, all of the Gaunt's Ghosts novels (more than once), the Eisenhorn and Ravenor series, and both Ultra Marines Omnibuses, etc..

Knowing the fluff, makes the game much more fun and interesting for me.

Just to comment on the quality of the fluff, the general metaplot and background is amazing. What is mostly terrible is the actual writing.

Love the fluff and have vast amounts of material - dozens of codex and most of the BL output

koooaei wrote:When i don't know the fluff, i make it up and act as if i knew it all along.

Don't worry, so do GW! Any other questions, see the Stormraven/Centurion retcon!

I think I know enough to explain the setting/major events, races and characters pretty comprehensively, both in 30k and 40k. I've read the first 3 HH books, and mean to get around to some more soon, and as far as 40k goes, it mostly comes from codex/ruleboook/online fluff, the only novel I've read is The Fall of Damnos.

I know it should be called 'lore' and not 'fluff'.

I've mostly only read the codices for the armies I collect. I have read a couple of the novels, they were okay but not good enough for me to delve in to more of them.

I do enjoy reading Lexicanum from time to time, so I probably know more fluff than most people who have read the same amount of official GW publications (which isn't saying much in the context of the frea... I mean fans... who have an encyclopaedic knowledge of 40k ).

I know eldar fluff decently well, and have a very extensive knowledge of tau, knowing lots of obscure things about them as well (for example, it is written canon that one charge pack provides a pulse rifle/carbine with ~50 shots). My general knowledge of the setting is actually kind of poor, i mostly know things about the imperium.

I have five editions of the big rules books, about 35 codexes, 20ish special publications (Index Astartes, Imperial Armour, etc) and somewhere in the neighbourhood of 100 BL novels.

Most of this was bought before BL went down the drain a few years ago, and GW doubled the price of codices.

Not surprised the 70% ish of all polled know their fluff well, it certainly isn't GW's rules that bring people in... at some level the fluff (as OTT as it can be) has to do heavy lifting

Martel732 wrote:
I care not for the fluff. Actually, I think GWs prose is pretty awful and their back story extremely silly.

I'm trying to figure out why you still play this game, Martel. You think the rules are garbage, you don't care about the fluff, and you're not too impressed with the models either.

What do you get out of it?

I know 40k through the novels, old comics, and FFG books (which are excellent).
I actually know more about fluff than rules and tactics
I'd hoped that knowing lots of fluff would make me a good player, but it turns out that my fluffy lists do not fare well in tournaments :(

 Unit1126PLL wrote:

Martel732 wrote:
I care not for the fluff. Actually, I think GWs prose is pretty awful and their back story extremely silly.

I'm trying to figure out why you still play this game, Martel. You think the rules are garbage, you don't care about the fluff, and you're not too impressed with the models either.

What do you get out of it?

I can get a game. That's basically what it boils down to. That's why people eat at McDonalds. Ubiquity. I get sick of playing faceless foes in Starcraft, and this is the only alternative in my area.

I do think the models are quite nice. I'm just not a good artist myself

I know the TruCron fluff and that's enough for me. It tells me everything about the lesser races.

 ChazSexington wrote:
Just to comment on the quality of the fluff, the general metaplot and background is amazing. What is mostly terrible is the actual writing.

It varies author by author. I haven't been disappointed by any of the 40k books by Dan Abnett, or Graham McNeill .

 BuddhaTattoo wrote:

 ChazSexington wrote:
Just to comment on the quality of the fluff, the general metaplot and background is amazing. What is mostly terrible is the actual writing.

It varies author by author. I haven't been disappointed by any of the 40k books by Dan Abnett, or Graham McNeill .

Yeah, when it comes to all things Imperial, Abnett and McNeill are probably their best writers, although even they have the occassional turd now and then.

My biggest gripe with 40k (and WFB for that matter) lore is GW's complete and utter disregard for logistics and basic tactics.

For example, take Tyranids....every Nid story has billions upon billions of Nids being held back by a single city defense force. Why in the world would the Hive Mind bother spending so much of its biomass to destroy a single city on an entire planet, when it could just ignore it and consume the rest of the planet and move on its merry way?

Then there are the ever so eye-rolling battles of marines vs orks (typically a handful of marines holding out against 500K orks). How much ammo are those marines carrying? Eldar, the "dying race" is actively involved in multiple war fronts, often being the aggressor, when in reality, they would have avoided conflict as much as possible if their numbers were as low as advertised.

The whole war against Chaos is one big middle finger to logistics. The original legions were driven off to the Eye o' Terror millenia ago by the remains of an Imperium that had taken everything the Chaos forces could throw at them, and still managed to chase them off. So those legionaires that actually made it alive to the Eye are likely a small fraction of their original numbers. Infighting and the perils of the Eye itself has allegedly reduced them even more (according to the Black Legion supplement, the Sons of Horus were almost wiped out when Abby took his sebatical). While its not unheard of for a more recent loyalist chapter to turn to Chaos, its is mostly a rare occurrance, and not without its own casualties. Despite all this, Chaos Marines have a seemingly infinite number of marines, armour, ships, vehicles, and ammo even though their means to resupply are inconsistent at best. Enough to supply 13 Black Crusades in addition to the thousands of other incursions.

Huge, huge, huge fluff guy since the days of 2nd edition, just over 20 years now. Was so happy when a couple of years back I finally was gifted a copy of Rogue Trader, which I have always wanted. Read it cover to cover just for fun.

I figure I know nearly all the fluff except for most of the latest Horus Heresy novels (though with some of them I have read, and other I have heard about, lead me to believe I am not missing much in terms of quality, lol).