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So having watched Baldemort's series on Rogal Dorn, it got me really excited for the idea that all loyalist Primarchs will now soon return along with a cure for the Emperor's affliction bringing him back to the humanity. And then they would start succeeding on building the future the Emperor was building ten thousand years before and slowly turning around the ship that is the IoM achieving the Emperor's goals and victory for mankind and a glorious future for mankind as well.

How would you feel if this happened?

It feels like the kind of thing GW will eventually do. Honestly, I'd hate it. The Primarchs and the Emperor should be mythical figures of legend, steeped in reverential mystery. One of the things I liked about 40k's setting was that for all the huge stakes and grandiose events it remained about the little guy. Sure, sometimes the "little guy" was a Space Marine captain but in a galaxy of billions of planets he still felt insignificant. That worked perfectly as a setting for a game where you can play out your own battles.

The current trend towards ongoing narratives is something I find potentially restrictive at worst, and easily ignored at best. The way theses narratives always seem to revolve around super-important characters like Guilliman becomes tiresome very quickly.

Yea I'd hate this too.
It would turn 40k into a bunch of superheroes fighting the super villians, which has it's place in fiction but not in 40K

The hopelessness and nihilism is what make 40k so brilliant, and the way it perverts anything that might offer solace;
The glorious God Emperor of Mankind is a withered, tortured corpse.
The glittering galaxy spanning empire is backward, cruel and bloody.
The scientists are hidebound, religious fanatics that despise innovation.
The Space Marines can never win, they are spread desperately thin and overrun even as their gene forged bodies break down, their flaws driving them mad and their numbers being impossible to replace.

Just to finish off with a quote from the intro blurb that summarises the setting;
Forget the power of technology and science, for so much has been forgotten, never to be re-learned. Forget the promise of progress and understanding, for in the grim dark future there is only war. There is no peace amongst the stars, only an eternity of carnage and slaughter, and the laughter of thirsting gods.

The same way I felt about the return of the Emperor in Disney's Star Wars.

Speaking of someone who never could get into the Marvel universe films, I don't like when a story about relatively common folks (yes, I know the space marines are superhumans by our standards, but even for them, each individual is but a dime in a hundred dozen even amount their peers). When individuals with actual mythical implications in the grand scheme comes into play, it "hijacks" the story from the common people, and completely shifts the narrative to about these select few, ordained by GW to be the destinated masters.

I like the 30K novels as just back stories that fills out the "past". But I don't need that "now", thank you very much.

The core concept of Warhammer 40.000 is: «In the grim darkness of the forty-first millenium there is only war.» not hope, not victory, not happiness, only war, only, grimness, only darkness. If you take away all of this from Warhammer 40.000, you take away the same soul from the franchise.

 Tyzarion_Kronius wrote:
So having watched Baldemort's series on Rogal Dorn, it got me really excited for the idea that all loyalist Primarchs will now soon return along with a cure for the Emperor's affliction bringing him back to the humanity. And then they would start succeeding on building the future the Emperor was building ten thousand years before and slowly turning around the ship that is the IoM achieving the Emperor's goals and victory for mankind and a glorious future for mankind as well.

This is quite literally the exact opposite of what 40k used to be. I sound like a broken record, but the whole core concept of the game universe was meant to be the death of (human) heroes and the fall of empire.

But nowadays who knows? You are probably right. I wouldn't be surprised at all if most of the Primarchs get 40k miniatures within the next 5 years and topped off with the Emperor, who is brought back to life following an invention of Cawl that's much better than anything that came before (or it turns out, Cawl is actually the Emperor, and is Horus at the same time). The Emperor miniature will be utterly resplendent, giant white/gold armour with about 100 pennants fluttering off it, and he'll be stood on a massive rock with some eagle-lions on chains stood nobly at his feet.

I would honestly prefer a miniature of Golden Throne rather than one of the (revived or 30k) Emperor in the flesh

The problem is the return of the Emperor (Or his manifestation would mean buhbye to the church, which he was 100% against. Means buhbye Insquisition/SoB.

It would also likely mean the halting of the Primaris experiment, because didn't he say that only he alone was allowed to muck around with the Gene-seed science of the Primarchs?

Big E returns and ushers in humanities golden age.

Webway clear for use.

Technology used to dominate the galaxy.

Chaos is no more/held at bay.

Horus fever dream comes true as SM Chapters are Thunder Warriored in the battle for supremacy. A cleansed galaxy doesnt need many sterile warrior monk drones to oversee compliance.

Horus was right.

I think if GW did that I would not be interested at all, it would be further pushing the game background in the direction of a story with the primarchs and a couple of others as the main characters, and I am not interested in that. I prefer a setting where we make our own main characters.

I think that if you would be excited about that sort of development, then you should do it! Make a project, get some minis together and do your own narrative campaign with your friends. That's how ongoing stories should be done in a game universe in my view - the stories we make ourselves will always be more compelling than anything GW comes up with and you can control it and adapt it to your tastes. I think the idea of doing something like that as a personal project is way cooler than waiting for GW to provide you with everything and fill in all the details.

I bet lots of people would love it though, and it would probably sell really well. Maybe they will do it.

Slipspace wrote:
It feels like the kind of thing GW will eventually do. Honestly, I'd hate it. The Primarchs and the Emperor should be mythical figures of legend, steeped in reverential mystery. One of the things I liked about 40k's setting was that for all the huge stakes and grandiose events it remained about the little guy. Sure, sometimes the "little guy" was a Space Marine captain but in a galaxy of billions of planets he still felt insignificant. That worked perfectly as a setting for a game where you can play out your own battles.

The current trend towards ongoing narratives is something I find potentially restrictive at worst, and easily ignored at best. The way theses narratives always seem to revolve around super-important characters like Guilliman becomes tiresome very quickly.

Agreed 100%. The whole point of the setting was "Humanity was going towards a golden age and then FFFFFFFFFLIPPING HORUS went and ruined everything forever." The whole "Rowboat came back and fixed everything with Mary Sue marines" storyline totally hobbles the concept of 40k as a setting.

 BaconCatBug wrote:

Slipspace wrote:
It feels like the kind of thing GW will eventually do. Honestly, I'd hate it. The Primarchs and the Emperor should be mythical figures of legend, steeped in reverential mystery. One of the things I liked about 40k's setting was that for all the huge stakes and grandiose events it remained about the little guy. Sure, sometimes the "little guy" was a Space Marine captain but in a galaxy of billions of planets he still felt insignificant. That worked perfectly as a setting for a game where you can play out your own battles.

The current trend towards ongoing narratives is something I find potentially restrictive at worst, and easily ignored at best. The way theses narratives always seem to revolve around super-important characters like Guilliman becomes tiresome very quickly.

Agreed 100%. The whole point of the setting was "Humanity was going towards a golden age and then FFFFFFFFFLIPPING HORUS went and ruined everything forever." The whole "Rowboat came back and fixed everything with Mary Sue marines" storyline totally hobbles the concept of 40k as a setting.

Well they have done a small you turn on that canon on Indomitus time lines so looks like Rowboat and his manly manly marines are back to fighting for Pyrhic victories.

All is well with the timeline.

 Tyzarion_Kronius wrote:
So having watched Baldemort's series on Rogal Dorn, it got me really excited for the idea that all loyalist Primarchs will now soon return along with a cure for the Emperor's affliction bringing him back to the humanity. And then they would start succeeding on building the future the Emperor was building ten thousand years before and slowly turning around the ship that is the IoM achieving the Emperor's goals and victory for mankind and a glorious future for mankind as well.

How would you feel if this happened?

Gosh, no.

I'm fine with the current setting and agree with many others. Too many events are now connected to the title names and not "Space Marine Captain Y" for example. I like a bit of hero hammer but the heroes I design and build up with my friends.

The most I would accept are Fulgrim & Angron back along with maybe one other loyalist primarch but even then i'm not sure i'd sit easy on it. I'd lose interest if the Emperor and all the loyalist primarchs came back.

As others have said, the attraction of 40k was the grim darkness and the uphill fight the failing Imperium has.

The only way I could see it possibly being interesting (and this is a very unexplored idea) is if more of the loyalist Primarchs came back but rather than a unified Imperium, their return actually caused a huge fracture/cold war. Maybe Gulliman holding onto Terra to Ultrama and then y'know him having an ally Primarch, with the others vying for different power in the Imperium Nilhius. No return of the Emperor and their only core agreements would be that Chaos = Bad, Emperor = needed. Some may want to ally with aliens like the Eldar and Tau. Some may want to just contain Chaos whilst actually fighting off the Tyranids/Necrons, whilst others might want to directly fight Chaos at the risk of losing frontiers against Xeno races. Others may want to directly fight the Imperium's faith, some may want to actually improve conditions within the Imperium. Some may want to change the way technology is developed. Some could be capitalist, others socialist. There would be interesting ideological differences for players to engage with that went beyond the simple themes already present within the chapters themselves.

While I think that it's inevitable that other primarchs are going to come back (someone needs to splash some cold water on the Lion), I highly doubt that 40k is going to become some happy go lucky setting where everything works out in the end, as that would pretty much gut the franchise. As things are going right now, we're just getting a new status quo instead of the old one. Loyalist primarchs are coming back, but so are the traitor ones. There are newer, tougher Space Marines, but the Tyranids keep eating worlds and new types of daemon engines and other Chaos abominations keep cropping up. Also, the galaxy is split in two, with the line down the middle basically a daemon empire while one whole half of the Imperium is practically ungovernable. Things like Guilliman's return and the primaris are not the beginnings of a new golden age, they are stopgaps against total defeat.

 Tyzarion_Kronius wrote:
So having watched Baldemort's series on Rogal Dorn, it got me really excited for the idea that all loyalist Primarchs will now soon return along with a cure for the Emperor's affliction bringing him back to the humanity. And then they would start succeeding on building the future the Emperor was building ten thousand years before and slowly turning around the ship that is the IoM achieving the Emperor's goals and victory for mankind and a glorious future for mankind as well.

How would you feel if this happened?

Confused and disappointed. Sounds entirely antithetical to the setting.

A restored Emperor, victory and a glorious future don't have any place in 40k.

It just means that humanities enemies will get similarly huge heroes to counter. The traitor primarchs, the Ghazgulls, Silent Kings, etc. War goes on.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Pacific wrote:

This is quite literally the exact opposite of what 40k used to be. I sound like a broken record, but the whole core concept of the game universe was meant to be the death of (human) heroes and the fall of empire.

Part of the problem with this is that nihilism has a shelf life. People adapt pretty quickly and at this point a lot of people react to that concept with "are we dead yet? No? Alright, carry on I suppose." I think the setting kind of hit the floor as to how bad things could go and still keep going. Like, the death of a trillion worlds would be shrugged off pretty hard. Sometimes, you have to give people something to care about again to remind them there's still something to lose.

 LunarSol wrote:
It just means that humanities enemies will get similarly huge heroes to counter. The traitor primarchs, the Ghazgulls, Silent Kings, etc. War goes on.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Pacific wrote:

This is quite literally the exact opposite of what 40k used to be. I sound like a broken record, but the whole core concept of the game universe was meant to be the death of (human) heroes and the fall of empire.

Part of the problem with this is that nihilism has a shelf life. People adapt pretty quickly and at this point a lot of people react to that concept with "are we dead yet? No? Alright, carry on I suppose." I think the setting kind of hit the floor as to how bad things could go and still keep going. Like, the death of a trillion worlds would be shrugged off pretty hard. Sometimes, you have to give people something to care about again to remind them there's still something to lose.

Giving people something to care about by switching to character-driven narrative headed by utterly unsympathetic characters? By taking away the joy of having your dude winning battle after battle through the grit of their teeth? By going anime and just up the power level by 9000 and then some? No, sorry, not buying it.

In the argument between people who wanted 40K to be a story and the people who wanted it to be a setting, the story people won.

It is a bit like how in very early dungeons and dragons they did not see the point of selling modules, because they thought you would want to do it yourself. Way back, some in GW thought that special characters were a bit of a waste of time because people would want to do it themselves.

Turns out there is a pretty big contingent who like everything being nailed down and official, who like following the official story, and who like a character based story rather than a setting. Characters used to be used to exemplify themes, but gradually they became more and more protagonists and antagonists who were the cause of everything that happened. This to me is a bit antithetical to a creative game like Warhammer and also kinda goes against the theme of the game - after all the galaxy is a big place and whoever you are, you will not be missed!

More or less. Nerdom is very obsessed with validating the rules of fictional settings and ensuring that nothing upsets their cannon.

 Da Boss wrote:
In the argument between people who wanted 40K to be a story and the people who wanted it to be a setting, the story people won.

It is a bit like how in very early dungeons and dragons they did not see the point of selling modules, because they thought you would want to do it yourself. Way back, some in GW thought that special characters were a bit of a waste of time because people would want to do it themselves.

Turns out there is a pretty big contingent who like everything being nailed down and official, who like following the official story, and who like a character based story rather than a setting. Characters used to be used to exemplify themes, but gradually they became more and more protagonists and antagonists who were the cause of everything that happened. This to me is a bit antithetical to a creative game like Warhammer and also kinda goes against the theme of the game - after all the galaxy is a big place and whoever you are, you will not be missed!

Let's see... back in the day there's a series of DnD campaign called Dragonlance, with every character, every plot twist, every possible move dictated by the eponymous novel series. I guess they thought people would want to have the set-in-stone characters? Guess what, it's now called rail-roading, considered generally a very poor seires of RP modules.

No, the story people did not win; claiming that they had won does not make it so. GW pushed those characters because they are big, expensive models with loads of wounds and immense destructive power on the tabletop -- which is the main part of their business. They know the competitive types would eat them up just to not get shafted in a new Meta.

Considering the over saturation of imperial armies I’d happily have the primarchs back if it meant that the empire split up into smaller empires with a primarch ruling it and then the narrative became that these are factions regularly fighting over resources and borders even if they aren’t at all out war.

The emperor should stay on the throne

If they bring back the loyalists then they have to bring back the trator primarchs aswell

I would cry myself to sleep and then look for a replacement when 40k is no longer what I got hooked on in the first place.

Oh gods, no...

Seriously. What is it with newer pllayers coming in and wanting to change everything that makes 40k, 40k? FFS, leave it the hell alone. Keep your Primarchs and other such terrible ideas like timeline skips and forcing an overarching "storyline" into a setting that was never designed for one (and GW knows it, with them already maiing retcons only 3 years later that also muck up a lot of stuff) that now makes it 30k-lite.

I don't like the HH as a series, it reveals to much and suddenly literally every little thing in 40k is tied back to it and vice versa. Stop trying to make 40k the same thing.

 LunarSol wrote:


Part of the problem with this is that nihilism has a shelf life. People adapt pretty quickly and at this point a lot of people react to that concept with "are we dead yet? No? Alright, carry on I suppose." I think the setting kind of hit the floor as to how bad things could go and still keep going. Like, the death of a trillion worlds would be shrugged off pretty hard. Sometimes, you have to give people something to care about again to remind them there's still something to lose.

I disagree. I think it just needs a different approach to story telling. For example, the beleaguered Imperium has two major advantages that a good story can tap into: people and time. It's not really a problem having a setting where, say, the Blood Angels are ravaged by a Tyranid Hive Fleet, push them back after much sacrifice, and end up in a state of reconstruction for a thousand years or more. That's an interesting story in it's own right and doesn't require a messianic saviour to show up at the last moment to save everyone.

Or you simply leave the setting as a setting. You don't have to push the narrative forward at all. In fact, you could even explore some of the clouded history of the Imperium. There are 10,000 years between the Heresy and the present day of the setting, all ripe for exploration. The problem with having an ongoing narrative is the size of the setting itself. The whole point of it was to be huge beyond comprehension in terms of distance, number of planets and history. Once you start having the same three guys show up everywhere to save everyone you shrink the setting to the equivalent of a small town in the suburbs of a minor city.

Slipspace wrote:

 LunarSol wrote:


Part of the problem with this is that nihilism has a shelf life. People adapt pretty quickly and at this point a lot of people react to that concept with "are we dead yet? No? Alright, carry on I suppose." I think the setting kind of hit the floor as to how bad things could go and still keep going. Like, the death of a trillion worlds would be shrugged off pretty hard. Sometimes, you have to give people something to care about again to remind them there's still something to lose.

I disagree. I think it just needs a different approach to story telling. For example, the beleaguered Imperium has two major advantages that a good story can tap into: people and time. It's not really a problem having a setting where, say, the Blood Angels are ravaged by a Tyranid Hive Fleet, push them back after much sacrifice, and end up in a state of reconstruction for a thousand years or more. That's an interesting story in it's own right and doesn't require a messianic saviour to show up at the last moment to save everyone.

Or you simply leave the setting as a setting. You don't have to push the narrative forward at all. In fact, you could even explore some of the clouded history of the Imperium. There are 10,000 years between the Heresy and the present day of the setting, all ripe for exploration. The problem with having an ongoing narrative is the size of the setting itself. The whole point of it was to be huge beyond comprehension in terms of distance, number of planets and history. Once you start having the same three guys show up everywhere to save everyone you shrink the setting to the equivalent of a small town in the suburbs of a minor city.

So much this. The modern 40k, post-rift smacks so much of "Sci fi writers have no sense of scale" I'm not sure what to think of it other than disdain much of the time.

Not every faction has 10,000 years of history to explore. Restricting to only exploring the Imperium's past would effectively lock out the players of these factions.

Iracundus wrote:
Not every faction has 10,000 years of history to explore. Restricting to only exploring the Imperium's past would effectively lock out the players of these factions.

Yes, the others in fact (barring the Nids and Tau) have far far more.

FezzikDaBullgryn wrote:
It would also likely mean the halting of the Primaris experiment, because didn't he say that only he alone was allowed to muck around with the Gene-seed science of the Primarchs?

No - Cawl has the Emperor's permission to do his thing.

Iracundus wrote:
Not every faction has 10,000 years of history to explore. Restricting to only exploring the Imperium's past would effectively lock out the players of these factions.

The youngest playable race in 40K is the Tau, there's a good 6 millenia between their discovered and end-41st. The long-running series of the Horus Heresy supposedly lasted a few, perhaps a dozen or so, years. I fail to see how ~6,000 years is not enough to explore.