Pouncey wrote:
Are you aware that I have always considered my personal armies to be fanfiction rather than canon?

 Peregrine wrote:

 Pouncey wrote:
Are you aware that I have always considered my personal armies to be fanfiction rather than canon?

Then if you admit that your fanfiction is just fanfiction your quote about "everyone's interpretation is equally valid" is wrong. Everyone's interpretation is not correct, because yours is not.

 Pouncey wrote:

 AnomanderRake wrote:

 Pouncey wrote:
Generally I believe that the more reputable authors are in business for themselves writing stories of their own choosing, and having them published by reputable publishers, because they don't need to rely on being hired by a game company to make a living and can do better writing their own stuff.

That metric is both helpful and unhelpful at the same time, annoyingly. R.A. Salvatore is wildly successful and has written 20ish novels set in original worlds despite the fact that he can't string two words together, Keith Baker is a godd*** genius and yet everything he's had published has been through WotC. At the end of the day successful original works are an indicator, but the only way to actually tell is to sit down and read the thing.

Are you implying that I have not read a wide variety of books in my life?

Also, Baen is my favorite sci-fi publisher. I particularly enjoyed the first four books of John Ringo's Posleen series. David Drake's Hammer's Slammers series has also been pretty fun to read.

 AnomanderRake wrote:

 Pouncey wrote:
I've noticed a weird thing about lore discussions on Dakka recently.

You guys treat canon and fan theories like they're the same thing. You debate canon like it's a fan theory. You debate fan theories like they're canon. You debate the two against each other like they're interchangeable.

This kind of thinking would explain the undue emphasis you guys place on rumors in regards to the release schedule, but I wonder why it's happening to begin with.

Please explain what's going on, because this is beyond weird.

I'll try.

40k is written by committee. There is no central plan, no organization, and no final arbiter of what is and isn't canon. There are broad guidelines, a few cornerstones that are pretty much always true, but no single solid foundation on which to build.

Over the course of edition changes as lore gets rewritten bits and peices get lost, found, woven back in, changed, and contradict other bits of lore. Sometimes players are okay with this. Sometimes they get mad. I'm going to bring an example out that may trigger residual anger but it's such a perfect illustration of this I can't really avoid it: the 5th edition Grey Knights Codex. In 3rd Edition there were three thousand Grey Knights serving as a specialist daemon-slaying force strongly aligned with the Inquisition. They were powerful psykers, highly secret, led by a cabal of twelve Grand Masters and guided by their divinations, and were deployed to face down the strongest daemonic incursions. 5th comes along, and suddenly there are eight hundred Grey Knights led by Samurai Jack, who massacre their allies to paint their already strongly warded armour in blood so they can ward themselves against Chaos, and who represent the sole military force of the Inquisition.

When lore changes like this happen some players say to themselves "No. This is stupid. My Grey Knight army doesn't perform Khornate rituals and we don't answer to Samurai Jack." And as years go by and some lore becomes stupider, and some gets fixed, every player develops their own set of which pieces of information they take as canon and which they reject.

And the whole mess is inherently inconsistent, for a few reasons: first, the lore in each book is presented to play up one army over the rest because it's trying to sell that army. Everyone's got a metric ton of plot armour in their own books, but becomes cannon fodder in someone else's. Second, because a big part of the tone of 40k is that everyone's firing blind and nobody really knows what's going on, the writers intentionally leave a lot of the underpinnings of the setting ambiguous. What is the Emperor? How do Acts of Faith work? What are Daemons made of? Why do non-psychic Necrons seem to have the ability to affect the Warp strongly? Where did the Tau come from? GW drops hints, but since different writers are working from their own interpretation of how things work their hints point different directions.

So we each have our own personal 'canon', which isn't any more right or wrong than anyone else's and doesn't represent the totality of 'official canon' in any way. And not understanding this we come on forums like this, try to make a point by referencing our own personal canon, and get startled when other people laugh, and angrily accuse them of placing their personal headcanon over the 'real canon'.

There is no 'real canon'. There is a set of facts GW gives us. What meaning you read into them comes from which bits you look at, not from a pattern in the whole thing.

Now as I write this and before the strawmanning comes out yes, there are things that are obviously not true. There is no twenty-first Primarch named Kevin, Lord of the Celestial Badger-Feet. There is no Craftworld where the inhabitants where fuzzy pink bearskins instead of helmets and walk like John Cleese. But unlike a setting with clearly defined canon where things are either true or false 40k canon has things that are true, things that are false, and things that are ambiguous. The point of the vagueness is to leave the players space to write their own armies and their own narratives. And if you try to tell someone else their narrative is wrong because it contradicts your narrative you've missed the point of the gaps quite badly.

BrianDavion wrote:
look ijf you don't like the fiction and lore, more power to you, obviously the level of activity on these forums indicates many people DO, and they enjoy discussing it, theorizing it etc. I mean discussing what the feth the Emperor was thinking when he created the primarchs is honestly a more intreasting thing then "why terminators suck and anyone whose space marine list consists of anything other then a librarian, 2 5 man scout squads and as many grav cents as he can squeeze in is a bad player" again and again and again. I often talk with people whom don't actively play 40k, their intreast? it's not in the game itself, oit's in the game world, Horus Heresy books have appered on the NYTs best seller lists, this BTW isn't intended to claim the novels are good. but that they're POPULAR. it's not the GAME keeping 40k in it's place of primacy, it's the SETTING, so of course people wanna talk about it, for many people it's the primary appeal for 40K. I suspect the novels outsell most if not all mini kits. A lotta people who never play 40k, or have stopped read the novels (it's a lot easier to justify buying a novel then it is spending the hundreds of dollars required to get a 40k army)

to be honest someone who doesn't care about the fluff and just wants to play a game, I don't get, I keep hearing that there are a lot of games, mechanicly better, then 40k.