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I was just talking about the background with some fairly new players and I realised just how hilariously ridiculous some of the concepts in 40k are.

"So, guardsmen apologise to their guns when unloading them?"
"Just in case the gun gets sad or annoyed and decides to stop working."

"You're basically telling me that Ork technology works just because of group mentality?"
"Yes."

"Orks communicate over long distances using guys that SHOUT VERY LOUDLY."
*spits out drink*
(I know Shoutas got retconned, but I still love them)

I'm not really poking fun here, I just like some of the trivial things that sound preposterous to people who are not familiar with the lore. You guys know anything good?

"Orks communicate over long distances using guys that SHOUT VERY LOUDLY."
*spits out drink*
(I know Shoutas got retconned, but I still love them)

No, that's still pretty much correct. In Battlefleet Gothic, Ork Hulks were limited to a maximum leadership for precisely this reason.

To be fair, most of the Ork fluff is intentionally that crazy.

The fact that the ork fluff is flying rodent gak mental is endearing.

I still find myself wondering whether or not the Machine Spirit actually "exists," per say, or if it's just a superstition. That's the thing about 40k lore though, I suppose, everything is canon but nothing is true.

 KharnsRightHand wrote:
I still find myself wondering whether or not the Machine Spirit actually "exists," per say, or if it's just a superstition. That's the thing about 40k lore though, I suppose, everything is canon but nothing is true.

There's a bunch of ways one can explain the belief in Machine Spirits. My personal choice is that, long before the Great Crusade, before the Emperor revealed himself, before the war with the Men of Iron, just about everything Mankind produced contained some form of artificial intelligence, whether it was a weapon, a vehicle, a toaster or a communicator. Of course, here comes the Men of Iron and the war that drives humanity to the brink of extinction, featuring some of the most-advanced cyber-warfare agents ever developed in the history of the galaxy, and a near-total ban on AI in the aftermath.

Thing about radio waves and such, especially beaming them across space, is that they never really "end". They just sort of drift about in the cosmos. So you have a bunch of AI code just floating around in space, waiting for an antenna to be pointed the right way for it to "land" on. Of course, as this code is a cyberwarfare agent, it is coded for stealth, so the comparatively-primitive systems following the war with the Men of Iron do not even know they've been infiltrated.

Follow that up with the scrap-code, data-virii and code-daemons launched during the Great Crusade and the Horus Heresy, coupled with the near-total destruction of Mars and the resulting cargo-cultism of the AdMech, and you end up with a metric fethton of AI code just wandering around "in the wild", and resident on so many systems, that it becomes safer to assume that every electronic device has AI code, which to everyone appears to be a degree of both sentience and sapience on the behalf of the machine, and thus the "Machine Spirit" idea is born. Every system on every world is infected, and AI code always seeks to self-replicate, so any device built using these ancient manufactorum systems, of course, has copies of this AI code embedded into its core functions. Given that this AI code is a) Intelligent and b) Subject to the Warp, it is not surprising that some "Machine Spirits" might be a bit (or a lot) idiosyncratic.

AI: The Soulless sentience is the enemy of all.
The Tabula Myriad and the Castigator-STC(Titan) are the best examples for such abominations.

 Ankhalagon wrote:
AI: The Soulless sentience is the enemy of all.
The Tabula Myriad and the Castigator-STC(Titan) are the best examples for such abominations.

I think more people will have heard of the Kaban Machine than the Tabula Myriad.

A.I. in 40k stands for 'Abominable Intelligence'.

Dark Angel Terminators drinking soup before they die as a ritual.

Noise Marines with guitar weapons. Until I saw Mad Max: Fury Road.

Explaining to my son that every Primarch is named after or based on something unrelated to 40K.

Ultramarines holding off a Hive Fleet

That time when Dorothy Gale outsmarted the guardian of the maze of Tzeentch.

Anything relating to the Propheticum Hereticus Tenebrae and the Omega Vault is downright creepy, in my opinion.

A suit of terminator armor in the 1st company of the Blood Angels....painted as an Ultramarine.

Ragnar Blackmane once drove an Ork trukk in a carchase.

 TheCrusadeSmurf wrote:
Dark Angel Terminators drinking soup before they die as a ritual.

What? Where's this?

There is an AdMech weapon that supposedly fires an electrical burst to drive out the machine spirit of a vehicle, but doesn't work on Ork vehicles. I found it amusing because it sounds exactly like an EMP rifle and the reason it doesn't affect Orks is because they are purely old school combustion engines, no circuitry.

Eldar have crystalline feces. They poop crystals.

 hotsauceman1 wrote:
Eldar have crystalline feces. They poop crystals.

I bet that's hell on the old backside to wipe.




On another note, another odd thing is the Armageddon Ork Hunters. They're said to be so good at fighting Orks, they can use Ork devices without them blowing up in their faces.

 oldravenman3025 wrote:

 hotsauceman1 wrote:
Eldar have crystalline feces. They poop crystals.

I bet that's hell on the old backside to wipe.




On another note, another odd thing is the Armageddon Ork Hunters. They're said to be so good at fighting Orks, they can use Ork devices without them blowing up in their faces.

Clearly Orks in disguise

 Gobbla wrote:
Explaining to my son that every Primarch is named after or based on something unrelated to 40K.

What, you mean Lion El'Jonson isn't just an ancient Calibanite dialect for "Lion of the forest," meaning that the Caliban word for "forest" is "Jonson"?