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Totalwar1402 wrote:But there have been many, many guardsmen novels....some of which became mutli book series.

Hell they even gave Sisters of Battle two novels despite them being all but discontinued as any army. That's twice as many books as tau got and that one was a video game spin off.

Yep, and until the revamp of the Tau codex, nobody (well, a relatively insignificant porportion) cared about Tau, and to this day, there are still many people who want the Tau removed from the 40k universe (note I am not one of those people). The Tau empire has, what? 100 worlds? Based on "empire" size, the Tau should consider themselves to get a novella, let alone a codex.

Phyrekzhogos wrote:That being said, I think I'd really enjoy reading something from an Ork perspective. And rather than treating it comically, it could focus on a middle tier ork brutally handling members of different groups as well as his own as he grows towards a role higher in the pack.

Thing is, that would be really difficult to write, and certainly unrelatable. So it probably wouldn't sell well at all, and that's more or less why you're probably not gonna see that happen.

On a side note, have you read any Eldar Fan fiction? Actual Eldar novels are almost unnecessary since the Eldar fan novelists have already decided their spece Elfs are literally better than anything or anyone in the whole universe ever and real honest Eldar novels probably trample all over those dreams. Some of them are genuinely so ridiculous as to be spelled out rediculous.

They did something like that for the orks, it's called deff sqwadron and is written as a graphic novel (because Orks) and was pretty good. http://www.blacklibrary.com/warhammer-40000/deff-skwadron.html

Totalwar1402 wrote:

 BlaxicanX wrote:
Should the Black Library try to write more stories from a non-human perspective? Yes.

Will they? No. Because Games Workshop is who decides what the authors write, and the most successful series in the BL are about Space Marines (both varieties), Imperial Guard and Inquisitors. There are some decent Xenos novels, like the Eldar/Deldar books, but it seems like very few people are interested in reading them.

So they're writing 99% of their novels about a faction which only represents 60% of 40k sales? If the purpose of black library is to sell novels that promote the game then it really doesn't make sense to simply not write books or lore about factions who are (unlike the armyless Sisters of Battle who have had novels) popular and for which there is interest.

Just because they are the only series black library writes does not mean that they are the most successful. If you're only going to get your joke writers to do the occasional one off book (CS Goto Eldar) or 60 page novella (Shadowsun) then they really shouldn't be surprised that they don't do well. Do you really think they shifted that many copies of Faith and Fire off the shelves? I don't think so at all.

If even 20% of your audience play Tau (as opposed to 60% for marines), which one do you think it makes more sense to write about? The one where most people will buy it, because at least one of their armies is marines, or to you cater for the small subset, and have 80% of your playerbase not care because it's about Tau (I assume the number of people who will buy it desite not playing Tau roughly equals the number of Tau players who won't buy it)?

As to Faith and Fire, I bought both that and Hammer and Anvil. If you want to complain that Tau don't get more love after being out for 20 years, make your argument for Sisters as well since they've been around for even longer. At the end of the day though, BL prints what sells, same as GW. The vast majority of people want SM, they sell us SM. Same reason why every starter set has SM vs something. Same with the BL books, SM fighting something.

I don't know if you've noticed, but 40k is more the story of the gradual decline of the imperium and it's mightiest warriors fighting against hopeless odds, not something meant to cater for every faction.

I'm a LONG-time ork player and collector, so I would love to see more about them, but I do think that BL has a difficult balance to strike with xenos stories.

If you write alien races with genuinely alien perspectives, it's going to be really, really hard for readers to emphathize with them, simply because the main character's perceptions and emotions are actually foreign to the reader.

If you make aliens that are relatable to the reader, you are, in effect, not really writing very well about aliens. These xenos should be way more different to us than medieval monks, or feudal Japanese, or cavemen. They would be the products of billions of years of evolution that is completely different. Genetically, we would have more in common with sponges and moss than an ork or an eldar, and maintaining a reader's connection with the alien is going to be hard when the reader genuinely doesn't think the way the alien does (heck, how does the writer imagine it?).

Given the age of the eldar race, they were a civilized culture before we were homo sapiens. How many spider monkeys could write believable novels about human motivations (and how many other spider monkeys could read and understand them?). The weakness of the Eldar and Dark Eldar trilogies was that they made Eldar too much like humans, in my opinion. I never really stopped reading the book and thought, "Why would he (or she) possibly do that?". If I had, would I have realized that the author was capturing Eldar psychology, or would I have criticized the author for sloppy, unbelievable motivations?

I do think that BL should be having a LOT more stories with humans interacting with xenos (not just screaming threats and shooting them), since it would serve to look at xenos psychology, but still maintain a human perspective on the whole thing. I keep toying with a Moby Dick pastiche where Ishmael is a crewman about a Rogue Trader vessel and Queequeg is a Blood Axe Ork Freebooter working for the humans.

 Drasius wrote:

Phyrekzhogos wrote:That being said, I think I'd really enjoy reading something from an Ork perspective. And rather than treating it comically, it could focus on a middle tier ork brutally handling members of different groups as well as his own as he grows towards a role higher in the pack.

They did something like that for the orks, it's called deff sqwadron and is written as a graphic novel (because Orks) and was pretty good. http://www.blacklibrary.com/warhammer-40000/deff-skwadron.html

Neat! Thanks man, I'll have to check that out

 Totalwar1402 wrote:

BrianDavion wrote:
GW has always been of the mentality that the universe focuses on the IoM and that the xenos are basicly "third tier actors" as it where

Even though there are far more xenos players than chaos? Which probably means sales for those armies eclipse spiky marines and demons Hell I am pretty sure there are more craftworld eldar and tau. At my club theres at least three elder armies, two/three dark elder and three tyranids. Outside of the forgeworld Horus Heresy they simply don't touch the chaos armies at all..

It has nothing to do with the number of players per faction. Their narrative is focused on humanity and humanity's greatest threat is chaos.

What do you mean we don't hear enough about the xenos races? I've learned basically everything there is to know about all of the non-Imperium races..... they all need to die, end of story.

EDIT: That aside, I genuinely wouldn't want to read a book from the perspective of an eldar. From what I understand their mind should be so developed beyond mine.... they know what it's like to live for 1000s of years... their emotions are so powerful it takes effort to keep them in check, and they did the whole Slaanesh fiasco..... if the book made clear sense to me and I could relate to any of the characters, it wouldn't be a book genuinely about the eldar. The only way they could properly do it is to have a human perspective in there somewhere, and following 40k background there won't be many instances of humans forming close bonds with eldar.

 Totalwar1402 wrote:
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The cerabites were sentient and vying for power even in the first starcraft and each had their own personality; notice how they bicker and argue during cutscenes. Hence why the Overmind sends you, one of the cerabites, to command part of the swarm. Broodmothers like Zagara are a continuation of this trend. So the overmind was never the monolithic controller of every single zerg organism; there were limits to its control. Broadly speaking the zerg seem to have one supreme psychic leader and a number of smaller and weaker nodal commanders. This is exactly how the tyranid army is organised with the larger beasts like the Dominatrix going down to lesser hive tyrants. This is the same regardless of whether it is the Overmind or the Primal Queen of Blades.

The Overmind was the monolithic controller of every Zerg organism, it thusly created the Cerebrites in order to assist it in this task. Because, despite how awesome the Overmind was, keeping track of every zergling on every battlefield, and every drone / building in every hive, was fething insane.

Starcraft 2: Heart of the Swarm is very much a human tool. Kerrigan is basically just using the Zerg as a tool in order to achieve her (very human) goals of vindication, revenge, and weirdly enough even love / redemption.

Show me a Hive Tyrant that gives a flying feth about redeeming its good name, exacting revenge on a specific enemy, and is also striving to become noble and redeem themselves in the eyes of their Elder ex lover. I dare you.

 morganfreeman wrote:
Show me a Hive Tyrant that gives a flying feth about redeeming its good name, exacting revenge on a specific enemy, and is also striving to become noble and redeem themselves in the eyes of their Elder ex lover. I dare you.

So what you're asking is for a fanfic / rule34 of tyrant x farseer?

 kingbobbito wrote:

 morganfreeman wrote:
Show me a Hive Tyrant that gives a flying feth about redeeming its good name, exacting revenge on a specific enemy, and is also striving to become noble and redeem themselves in the eyes of their Elder ex lover. I dare you.

So what you're asking is for a fanfic / rule34 of tyrant x farseer?

Go on...

 Vaktathi wrote:

 kingbobbito wrote:

 morganfreeman wrote:
Show me a Hive Tyrant that gives a flying feth about redeeming its good name, exacting revenge on a specific enemy, and is also striving to become noble and redeem themselves in the eyes of their Elder ex lover. I dare you.

So what you're asking is for a fanfic / rule34 of tyrant x farseer?

Go on...

Well, I jokingly figured I'd see what I could find.... I accept whatever fate the ordo hereticus deems necessary.

Yeah, the writers of Starcraft 2 went through great efforts to humanize both the Zerg and Kerrigan (the latter having been far more ruthless and inhuman in SC1 and BW then in SC2). Even the Overmind was humanized by being turned into an anti-hero as opposed to his earlier incarnation.

Just a few of the many feth-ups Blizzard made in their handling of the series. I basically crapped on myself when Chris Metzen stated that at the end of the day Starcraft was just a story about a boy and a girl.

I heard there was a whole line Xenos books at the Black library but a Inquisitor succeeded in entering the black library and torched them all

 BlaxicanX wrote:
Yeah, the writers of Starcraft 2 went through great efforts to humanize both the Zerg and Kerrigan (the latter having been far more ruthless and inhuman in SC1 and BW then in SC2). Even the Overmind was humanized by being turned into an anti-hero as opposed to his earlier incarnation.

Just a few of the many feth-ups Blizzard made in their handling of the series. I basically crapped on myself when Chris Metzen stated that at the end of the day Starcraft was just a story about a boy and a girl.

Personally I always kinda liked the "tragic almost love story" of SC1.

To summarise a few things


GW actively humanises the aliens of its universe. In both the coders and spin off titles they are all given human motivations foibles and stories. Some, like orcs are simply comic relief and this worked very well in the Dawn of War games. Eldar speak I the whole Shakespearean mystic talk but really they are portrayed as people. They do this to the exact same extent as Starcraft.

Also, you are assuming that the BL writers are either unwilling or incapable of writing from a not entirely human viewpoint. This is despite the fact thatin the Horus Heresy series they have no problem writing about Primarches and Space Marines whose supposedly different and alien perspective is taken into account.

If however you're saying that the only way to write about the Xenos is to not write about them in order to create a false sense of mystery well that's just bad writing. It doesn't build the world and it means there's no depth to a significant chunk of the factions.

The Horus Heresy is a problem because BL only writes Horus Heresy novels which are purely Imperium versus Chaos. At the same time they continue to write novels which chaos is the principal antagonist. Very few novels feature Xenos as the antagonist. There are almost none which have Xenos versus chaos or lord forbid Xenos versus Xenos.

On the Starcraft point. I never really saw it that way. Kerrigan simply replaced the Overmind and installed the Broodmothers in the place of Cerabites. As for humanising her, this only really happens in Heart fthe Swarm after she and by extension the Zerg are freed from the influence of Amon especially after she exams Primal Zerg and fully cleansed herself. To do otherwise would have made the actions if Raynor in Wings pointless. Even then I know that many people complained that Kerrigan was too dark and evil in HoTS consuming entire planets of dominion and destroying Protoss colony worlds. Plus the Zerg companions she has are noticeably more ruthless as inhuman than her. Plus I disagree that she sees the Zerg as a tool. In the first wings she is very mysterious and a tool of Amon herself. Whereas in Heart she starts of using the Zerg but gradually she herself as being the Zerg and is hostile to those such as the Protoss who she accuses of trying to commit genocide I the Zerg. Basically she is a lost and tortured soul who fuss a place and identity for herself. So she does care about the Zerg in her own way.