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I'm really confused about the year thing in 40,000 because everything is listed in a timeline and all of the battles seem to already have taken place, except for the games that people play. For example some of the Space Marine Novels are from a few thousand years after the Horus Heresy and others are from the third war on Armaggedon. I am really confused by everything and I hope that somebody can explain this to me.

40,999. Been that way for a loooong time. GW is adamant about not changing it, which sucks to me. There are many stories to be told in the years following. Oh well...

The current timeline is virtually stuck in the year 999.M41 - Games Workshop really doesn't like the idea of going over that mark. That said, there's no specific "now". All the battles in canon or throughout various novels happen somewhere in the past, it's just that our perception of said past is continually expanded upon the more events are added to the list.

Man thats not very cool at all. But thank you for helping me figure this mess out.

Glad to be of assistance!

Likewise!

Shayden wrote:40,999. Been that way for a loooong time. GW is adamant about not changing it, which sucks to me. There are many stories to be told in the years following. Oh well...

As the popularity of the Horus Heresy series has demonstrated, there are plenty of exciting stories to be told in the ten thousand years before the game's 'present'.

The mood and atmosphere of Warhammer 40,000's setting depend upon a feeling of stagnation, and the growing certainty of a coming end. Progress and closure would rather negate that; if you want something uplifting and progressive, go and read... well pretty much any other well-established science fiction franchise.

When I play the tabletop game I don't feel THAT connected to the story so I haven't really noticed the stagnant story. If the day comes where a person like me notices how stagnant the background lore is, it will probably need a change.

Well you certainly tell it like it is English Assassin. It would be interesting if, in the next edition, GW did something to halt the tyranid expansion or any xenos and traitor expansion in 40k, maybe that could open up some doors and give some new found hope for mankind, even though there is only grim darkness in the far future.

In retrospect, I didn't intend to sound quite so bad-tempered.

Edit: To clarify my point in a less forthright fashion, Warhammer 40,000's background primarily serves to set the mood and tone (i.e. it's grim, it's dark, it's grimdark) for a game of fighting with little lead men; it's not about creating an ongoing narrative.

Incidentally GW has actually extended the timeline in the GK codex (though accidentally). If you look at the timeline for when Draigo entered the warp that occurred in 999.M41. But then in his fluff it goes on to say he has since come out again in the future to help out Jostero as well other planets. They cocked that one up.

Some novels I think go beyond 40999 (I think it was Cain)

kenshin620 wrote:Some novels I think go beyond 40999 (I think it was Cain)

Well, yeah, but it isn't ever so far ahead that we see any changes. Any big ones at least. I don't know, maybe I've been playing video games so long that I expect 40k to tell a story. Ah, well, one can hope!

There goes my hope that one day GW would allow the Sororitas to find out what happened to the Abbess, so they could get on with it and elect a new one.

Any other factions have a missing supreme leader, with no way to get another? Or are the Sisters the only ones who get the honor of that shafting?

Dr Mathias wrote:
Any other factions have a missing supreme leader, with no way to get another? Or are the Sisters the only ones who get the honor of that shafting?

Does Alpha Legion count lol?

The sense of impending doom will be there no matter how the story progresses, because it's a false fear based solely upon looking at the scariest things and imagining them overcoming an empire that outguns them all a dozen times over, collectively and at the very least. As it's not based on rational analysis, it will always persist in the tone, just as similar sentiment persists in reality. Normal and good are unremarkable, while bad is always unnerving, no matter how small, distant, or misreported it is.

The current 40k year is 40.999, or 999.M41.
And GW refuse to advance the timeline.

Dr Mathias wrote:There goes my hope that one day GW would allow the Sororitas to find out what happened to the Abbess, so they could get on with it and elect a new one.

Any other factions have a missing supreme leader, with no way to get another? Or are the Sisters the only ones who get the honor of that shafting?

Humanity.

Not according to the Fanbois.

Big E is still hanging in there, barely, and if the fanatics are right he gets reborn when he finally pops his clogs

GW doesn't and shouldn't advance the narrative because, well, it's not a narrative. It's a setting. The 40k fluff is a slice in time within which any player can come up with their own stories. Anyone is welcome to make up their own future scenario and have the Imperium collapsing or this or that alien race being wiped out.

However, if Games Workshop advances the plot any further past the relative balance that exists now, all subsequent players are basically playing a different game. Anyone who started playing in the past 10 years is still playing in the same slice of time I was playing in 15 years ago when I got started. If they had decided to advance the plot in any significant way before you bought your first rulebook, you would be playing Warhammer 41,000: Where Everything Gets Wacky. Instead you got a chance to play 40k as we know it today, and as I knew it when I was 12.

They're selling a tabletop game with a specific tone and feel. It's not a video game where anyone who buys it gets to start at the beginning and play the whole story. It has to be relatively constant, or else new generations of players sort of miss out on the common setting that unites everyone's armies in a moment in "history" of desperate, knife-edge balance.

That said, lots of people already seem to be wishing for Horus Heresy era miniatures (some of which exist by now, thanks to ForgeWorld) and a specific ruleset.

If GW ever expands on this by selling Horus Heresy rulebooks for the TT, they may just as well add other eras as well, including one set in M42. The changes to the setting would likely be smaller than between "now" and the Heresy era and would amount to a few different units and allegiances, whilst the majority of changes would only concern details of the background, depending on the direction the story would take.

I don't really expect an apocalyptic event that would shatter everything we know. Even a civil war with a reborn Emperor would just pit already existing armies against each other.

It's not inconceivable to imagine that Games Workshop might some day release an 'End Times' supplement offering rules, scenarios and fluff for the ending (or more likely several different, contradictory endings) to the Warhammer 40,000 universe. White Wolf did a reasonable job of doing much the same thing for their game universe a few years ago - but did so only because they were reimagining the setting entirely.

Were it ever to happen, however, it would happen because somebody at the studio came up with strong ideas which would make a decent game supplement, not because a few fanboys on the internet are persistently vocal about how they want one.

Edit: I'd be far more excited to see, as Lynata has posited, a Horus Heresy sourcebook - a prospect that's distinctly more plausible.

Horus Heresy .mmmm.. exciting for all those players that aren't into chaos-hink, tank companies or power armour

I know it's already tending that way, but i have next to no interest in playing Warhammer 30K.

It's great if you are into daemons or the IOM/Renegade IOM thing, and i do enjoy some of the fluff, but at the same time it would make the game even more of a power-armour fest, and make it even less likely to find a xeno opponent since 'the xenos weren't involved in the HH, so you can't play them'.

I've actually been told this by someone with a pre-heresy themed army.. not cool. Presumably the other races were still around, after all.

See, that's just an attitude issue of the players, not GW's fault. They deliberately keep their canon rather vague to allow people (including BL writers) more room for creativity and their own ideas.

I could probably come up with a dozen reasons for a fight between a pre-Heresy IoM army and a xenos race right now:

Necrons weren't awake back then? Well, that's what most Imperial commanders think! Little do they know that in M30 on the barren world of Plotia VI, a routine mission turned into an encounter with pure horror as the 14th company of the Iron Warriors stumbled upon a hidden Necron base that had been unearthed by the local population the Legion seeked to subdue. Records of what happened in the ensuing conflict are sketchy, as the Inquisition has sealed all records of the incident - indeed, to this day, only a handful of Inquisitors of the innermost circle of the Ordo Xenos even know it had occurred at all!

The Tyranids weren't anywhere near Imperial space back then? Fortunately, one should say! Good fortune, however, was not with the Troopship "Laurel of Terra", as a weird flicker in the warp sent the ship off-course and through a heavy storm. After an odyssey that seemed to last for months the Navigator finally saw it safe to have the ship re-enter realspace, but to the horror of all the vessel had re-emerged in an area of space both unknown and uncharted. As the Laurel was finally close to running out of supplies the Captain had decided to land the vessel on a seemingly hospitable planet, only to see it already inhabited by something far more dangerous than any alien creature the soldiers of the Imperial Army had encountered before.

The list goes on. Tau? Timetravel. Eldar, Dark Eldar and Orcs would probably work as they do now and don't require any silly stories, though.

Seriously, if someone else doesn't want to play, it's because he doesn't WANT to play. His choice.

I don't know. I think the 5th Edition Rule book and C:SM hinted a lot at an advance in the story line. But maybe all the codex's and rule books have been like this since the eighties. I wasn't playing back then so I don't know.

I would think they would advance the story line. A lot of people are more into the lore than the game. And honestly, I think it's possible that the Horus Heresy stuff is just a primer for moving past 999.M41.

This is all just my opinion, so don't put any stock into it.

Lynata wrote:See, that's just an attitude issue of the players, not GW's fault. They deliberately keep their canon rather vague to allow people (including BL writers) more room for creativity and their own ideas.

I could probably come up with a dozen reasons for a fight between a pre-Heresy IoM army and a xenos race right now:

Necrons weren't awake back then? Well, that's what most Imperial commanders think! Little do they know that in M30 on the barren world of Plotia VI, a routine mission turned into an encounter with pure horror as the 14th company of the Iron Warriors stumbled upon a hidden Necron base that had been unearthed by the local population the Legion seeked to subdue. Records of what happened in the ensuing conflict are sketchy, as the Inquisition has sealed all records of the incident - indeed, to this day, only a handful of Inquisitors of the innermost circle of the Ordo Xenos even know it had occurred at all!

The Tyranids weren't anywhere near Imperial space back then? Fortunately, one should say! Good fortune, however, was not with the Troopship "Laurel of Terra", as a weird flicker in the warp sent the ship off-course and through a heavy storm. After an odyssey that seemed to last for months the Navigator finally saw it safe to have the ship re-enter realspace, but to the horror of all the vessel had re-emerged in an area of space both unknown and uncharted. As the Laurel was finally close to running out of supplies the Captain had decided to land the vessel on a seemingly hospitable planet, only to see it already inhabited by something far more dangerous than any alien creature the soldiers of the Imperial Army had encountered before.

The list goes on. Tau? Timetravel. Eldar, Dark Eldar and Orcs would probably work as they do now and don't require any silly stories, though.

Seriously, if someone else doesn't want to play, it's because he doesn't WANT to play. His choice.

I came up with variants on those myself. Apparently he has the Iron Clad attitude that his army can only fight IOM, CSM and Daemons. If i was willing to play any of those armies he'd play me, happily. He had another SM force and a Daemons army on hand to lend anyone that was willing (no-one was) , but refused to even tolerate to fluff possibility of any other Xeno race being in the same area of space as his chapter

Ironic really, as his other army are Genestealer cult IG, and some people refuse to play vs them because the purple pimp-limos are not GW models, and are the wrong shape/size for chimeras. I've played him with that army and made some pretty big allowances on wysywig and proxying without complaint (like using a D and D Dire Tyrannosaurus as a Basilisk..because basilisks are lizards too..right...yeah..).

I left him to his narrow fluff thing on that and taught a group of new guys the basics of the game on another table. That was a blast

Glad to hear you still had fun.

"Purple pimp limos" as Chimaeras does sound somewhat awesome, though, if probably more fitting for a not-so-serious Slaaneshi army.

I understand why GW likes keeping things at the year 40,000, but I don't really see why its necessary to keep it at the year 999.41. Novels and books have exapanded the time line into the past and the future already. Ciaphas Cain happens after the year 41,999. The Horus Heresy novels roughly take place 10,000 years before. I understand that the game is called Warhammer 40,000, but that doesn't mean you can't expand past those years. They already went to the 30,000's in the Horus Heresy novels (or is my mental timeline wrong? and its earlier?), but that doesn't mean the game is now Warhammer 30,000. I feel like the timeline could easily be expanded and they could go about it slowly. Very slow in fact. I like the whole feel to 40k and I wouldn't want it to be ruined, but at the same time it needs some progression.

A problem is probably that GW likes to retain a certain amount of control over the setting. Black Library writers get away with a lot of artistic license, but the fandom is very edgy when it comes to the future of the setting - or the far past. Any licensed work set in another era is establishing a precedent in a formerly untouched area, so I can understand why GW would go and say "hell no! don't touch that - we'll do that ourselves" instead of later having an entire novel series rendered void because the setting turns out to be completely different. We are having enough contradictions as is.

It's because of this that I think the "Cain incident" mentioned above was pretty much an oversight by the editor/s and not an intentional push of the timeline.

The Horus Heresy pretty much looks like a big experiment that, if successful, may make GW ease up on the subject. But if you're looking at the Black Library FAQ for new writers right now, it's much more difficult to get approval for a HH novel than for your standard 40k book, and Aaron Dembski-Bowden indicated in his blog that GW/BL keep a much closer eye on the Horus Heresy novels to make sure everything ties together as best as possible.

I still agree with your assessment concerning a lack of progression, though. There's still lots of room to add events to the past, but this (a) increases the likelyhood of contradictions with material set in later times and (b) is not what GW has been doing, instead cramming up the very last years of the timeline with fact after fact, so much so that it now looks crowded.

Personally, I think they're just afraid that their "THE END IS NIGH D:" plot will be discovered as having been overhyped just as much as their precious 13th Black Crusade. They pretty much moved themselves into a corner by claiming year after year that M42 will bring uberhuge changes.

They're too scared to implement drastic changes to a proven setting and too scared to admit that, because of this, they won't do anything at all. So we're in stasis.

Red Comet wrote:I feel like the timeline could easily be expanded and they could go about it slowly. Very slow in fact. I like the whole feel to 40k and I wouldn't want it to be ruined, but at the same time it needs some progression.

Seriously, bearing in mind what has already be written in this thread, what do you really think the addition of a few decades would add to Warhammer 40,000's themes?

Please take it as a given that Games Workshop are not about to end their game universe in a colossal 80-page team-up.