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Made in us
Longtime Dakkanaut





Without it being salty like ‘it turns out there’s a genetic defect in the primaris and they all die”

I would personally make chaos an equal sized empire to the imperium, taking over the dark imperium with the remaining forces of humanity either hiding or fighting a resistance war trying to get supplies in from the remaining imperium.

The imperium and chaos empire are equally fighting on other fronts against Orks, nids, necrons etc.

   
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The Frozen North

I would remove Primaris Marines from the setting.

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I would really represent orks as the threat they are. Despite being what I’d say is the most pressing and honestly biggest and oldest threat to the imperium, it isn’t shown. I think they’re just not edgy enough for writers to make stories about or something. I just want to see more captains getting snipped in half then getting laughed at.

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Completely rewrite The Gathering Storm story arch. The whole thing reeks of Matt Ward. It’s just fething awful.

Cadia would not have been destroyed.
Beil-Tan would not have been destroyed.
Ynarri would not be a thing.
Roboute would not have been killed and resurrected. I like that he’s back, just the way it happened is frustratingly terrible.

I like the Great Rift, that was a good idea to move the story forward a bit and provide a means for additional conflict & strife through the galaxy.
Primaris Marines are fine, but should have been very limited and integrated into chapters not outright replace Space Marines.

Not to derail the topic but The Gathering Storm story arch was so awful it has turned me off to reading anything new from GW or Black Library.
   
Made in us
Fixture of Dakka





MinMax wrote:I would remove Primaris Marines from the setting.

You're not my dad, you can't tell me what not to post!

Honestly, agreed. Or rather, I'd make "primaris" just be a mark of armour used to explain the size differences between firstborn and the new models. Nothing against those who like the primaris fluff; it's just that I've given it a fair shake and found it to be a really awkward fit.

Failing that, and I swear I'm not trying to stir anything up, I'd go back and make space marine women a thing. Just quietly say that, yeah, there have been lady marines this whole time. It's a lore detail that just hasn't aged very well. It's a bad look.

Some_Call_Me_Tim wrote:I would really represent orks as the threat they are. Despite being what I’d say is the most pressing and honestly biggest and oldest threat to the imperium, it isn’t shown. I think they’re just not edgy enough for writers to make stories about or something. I just want to see more captains getting snipped in half then getting laughed at.

I've seen the sentiment that orks aren't scary enough from time to time. As a non-ork player, what exactly is it you'd like to see? From my perspective, orks are considered a very significant threat. It's just that they're in a setting with other equally impressive threats, and getting killed or captured by orks simply isn't as horrifying of a fate. Like, sure, brutal murder or a life of being an ork's slave doesn't sound fun, but it does sound better than a possibly literal eternity of suffering at the hands of daemons or millenia of suffering under drukhari. Orks are more honest and less obsessed with creating fates worse than death.

oni wrote:
Beil-Tan would not have been destroyed.

Good news. Biel-Tan kind of didn't get destroyed. It got... severely vandalized I geuss? But like, people still live there and are rebuilding and so forth. The "fall" of Biel-Tan was basically a really bad blackout with some extra spooky rammifications for dead eldar.

But I largely agree. Even though I liked a lot of what came from those books (especially the introduction of the Ynnari), there was a lot of half-baked nonsense within the plots of those books themselves. I do kind of like that Cadia fell though.


ATTENTION
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Contagious Dreadnought of Nurgle





I'd probably increase SM numbers. Add 3 zeros everywhere and they don't break my immersion anymore. 1Million Marines per chapter, the Black Legion and DG having 200 Million Marines each? Now I believe you that they can appear anywhere in the galaxy, pose a threat and conquer a planet. With these numbers it's also okay that they sometimes die like flies in Black Library books or non-SM Codizes

Other than that? I would have ripped the Imperium apart with the arrival of Guilliman. Big schisma of the Religious guys like SOB, BT, Inquisition against the more reasonable folks around Guilliman. Make it more grimdark, for once in 10K years there's someone to actually achieve something in the Imperium, but that's also breaking the whole thing.
   
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Rewind to before The Gathering Storm, and make it really fething clear that this is a setting, not a soap opera...

There's enough conflict in the galaxy at 999.M41 without needing to blow thing sup.

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 Kanluwen wrote:
This is, emphatically, why I will continue suggesting nuking Guard and starting over again. It's a legacy army that needs to be rebooted with a new focal point.

Confirmation of why no-one should listen to Kanluwen when it comes to the IG - he doesn't want the IG, he want's Kan's New Model Army...

tneva82 wrote:
You aren't even trying ty pretend for honest arqument. Open bad faith trolling.
- No reason to keep this here, unless people want to use it for something... 
   
Made in au
Longtime Dakkanaut




Get the scale right. For large scale conflicts, we should be dealing in hundreds or thousands of regiments not the pathetic handfuls GW gives as the numbers. Same goes for ships, materials, logistics, etc... Included in this is less focus on the same characters over and over again as that shrinks the feel of the setting if it is the same bunch repeatedly bumping into each other again. There should be room for every faction to have plenty of new characters doing their own thing, being special or heroic in their own way, yet their efforts amounting to little in the grand scheme (even if they do affect the local scene) due to the sheer scale of the galaxy.
   
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Dakka Veteran




Gives Astartes to every faction... Orktartes, Necrosrartes, Sorostartes, Taustartes, etc.

Adeptus astartes are such a great concept, and GW is underussing them in the last few years.
   
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Longtime Dakkanaut




I'd change the reason why the Custodes and the sisters of silence have been absent for the last 10k years. When they released the faction they retconned it in a way where they had been doing things, just in secret...which was a missed opportunity imo.

I'd change it just slightly: since the emperor had been interred into the golden throne his power and hence the power of the astronomican has not been steady. He needs a big portion of his power to keep the webway gate beneath the golden throne closed, otherwise Terra is overrun by demons. Imo a better setup for the Custodes could have been if the emperor can not keep the webway gate closed all the way, all the time. So every once in a couple hundred years or so, the Custodes have to fight back small to medium sized demon incursions in the throne room itself.
It would have been a small detail and imo a better explanation in addition to the treaty they signed with guilliman after the heresy which confined them to Terra and the palace. Sure, they would have still done mission in secret away from Terra, but it would have better explained why they did not act at crucial times like the age of apostasy or during the war of the beast (but the beast saga is so unbelievably bad anyway, let's best just ignore it) where Terra was in danger. You don't really have time for any petty squabbles of the imperium if you constantly have to keep an eye out and reserve resources to keep the throne room itself safe from a danger that doesn't come from outside.
   
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Rather than remove Primaris, make them really really rare and highly controversial for those chapters who accept and employ them.

Humanity in 40K is meant to be in a state of decline, unable to create new tech, only maintaining what they have through almost adherence to as sort of religious doctrine. They can really only maintain things. The AdMec dont create things they just rediscover.
Just suddenly being able to "create millions of super duper space marines" is completely lore breaking.

Primaris could have been a great plot point, putting strain on relationships in the imperium, creating intrigue. Is Cawl all he seems to be? etc. But instead you have entire legions of new Primaris when the Imperium has issues even maintaining its tanks? Its a bit of a joke. But having Primaris in highly limited numbers would be in keeping.

Also, return to the full grimdark grittiness of older editions, image and lore wise.
   
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Watch Fortress Excalibris

Arguably, this isn't just "one change", but what I'd really want to do can be summarized as "bring the mystery back".

Delete all the Horus Heresy stuff. Explicitly make it non-canon. Delete Guilliman's return. Delete Cawl.

Nobody in the Imperium is more than 1000 or so years old (so Dante can still exist, and you can still have some ancient, senile AdMech magi). Nobody in the Imperium remembers the Horus Heresy, or the Age of Apostasy or any of that. It's all myths and legends. Did it even happen? Is the Emperor even real, or is the Throne room just a sealed room full of machinery nobody understands? Did the founders of the SoB really get taken to see the Emperor by the Custodes, or was that just a story invented to cover up them assassinating Vandire for other reasons?

Nobody knows.

Did the primarchs exist, or were they just the original leaders of the Astartes, or the scientists who designed them, filtered through 10,000 years of ignorance and supersition? Are the daemon primarchs just powerful daemons who have convinced a bunch of Warp-crazy traitor Astartes that they are their fathers, and that they're part of some glorious holy war against "the False Emperor"? Maybe they call him that because they know he never really existed?

Nobody knows.

Is that really Roboute Guilliman in that stasis field on Macragge? Or is it just an ancient abhuman giant in armour? Or a statue painted to look like a living man? You can't see properly through the blurring of the stasis field. And you can't switch the field off to check. If it's really Guilliman, switching off the field might kill him. Or what if that's not Guilliman but rather the traitorous brother who killed him? Switching off the field might unleash a terrifying horror from the ancient past that the present-day Imperium has no way to deal with.

Nobody knows.

Do the Traitor Legions even remember things as they were? Can anyone trust their memories after ten millennia in the Eye of Terror? The oldest of them might remember a great galactic war against a glowing golden figure who led their brothers against them. But did that really happen? Is it a trick of the Chaos Gods to make them want to conquer/destroy Terra? Or maybe they're the ones who fought for the Emperor and then were betrayed, and the 'loyalist' Astartes are really just a later creation (not as strong but more controllable) made to defend the nascent Imperium from their outcast predecessors? Maybe the original Chaos Marines were actually the Thunder Warriors?

Nobody knows.

Maybe Living Saints are real, or maybe it's all a con by the Ecclesiarchy who keeps putting a new mindwiped and hypno-indoctrinated woman in that fancy golden armour every time the previous 'Celestine' gets her head lopped off by Kharn? Even if they're real, are they anything to do with the Emperor, or are they spawned by the Chaos gods as a joke? Or are they just a new evolution of the human psyker gene, the next stage of the human species as designed by the Old Ones? Are they the Eldar gods who have found a way to cheat Slaanesh and are reincarnating in human bodies now? Are they the biological descendants of the Emperor from the thousands of years he spent in hiding on Old Earth? Or are they the last fading remnants of the superhuman subspecies that gave rise to the Emperor in the first place?

Nobody knows.

The point is that I'd ensure the official fluff would present things in such a way as to avoid nailing down anything that the people of the Imperium couldn't possibly know the 'real' answer to. So you'd never have some 10,000 year old supergenius popping up and telling us all "this is how it really happened". Recent events would still be known, and basic facts about the setting (like how space marines are made, or which part of the galaxy Iyanden is in, or how orks reproduce) would still have an 'objectively true' version (even if most people in the setting are wrong about it). But Imperial record-keeping is terrible and anything more than a couple of thousand years in the past should be at least as uncertain as similarly ancient events in our own (pre-)history are to us. To someone in the 41st millennium, the Horus Heresy is as distant as the invention of pottery is to you and me. Even if there are written records from the Heresy era, nobody in the 41st millenium should be able to read them. There should be contradictory stories about even the most basic 'facts' of that time, even down to (for example) different Blood Angels successor chapters having radically different accounts of who Sanguinius was and what he did during the Heresy (was he just a particularly heroic Blood Angels officer? was he the scientist who created the original Blood Angels geneseed? was he the first Blood Angel marine? was he just a psychic gestalt of the legion, or an aspect of the God-Emperor? was he killed by Horus? did he kill Horus? was he Horus' twin and the Emperor killed him accidentally thinking he was Horus? did he kill himself to give the Emperor the power to defeat Horus?).

TLDR: To quote Rick Priestley: "The trouble with the Heresy as envisaged by GW is it just feels like 40K - it doesn't have the feel of a genuinely different society that ten thousand years' separation would give you. Whenever I wrote anything that referenced back to those times I always wrote in a legendary, non-literal style. It's as if you were dealing with something like the Iliad rather than literal history ... I don't get any sense of understanding about 'deep time' when I look at anything GW have set in the 40K 'past'."

A little bit of righteous anger now and then is good, actually. Don't trust a person who never gets angry. 
   
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 Dysartes wrote:
Rewind to before The Gathering Storm, and make it really fething clear that this is a setting, not a soap opera...

There's enough conflict in the galaxy at 999.M41 without needing to blow thing sup.


Beat me to the punch. The single biggest problem with modern 40k (and several other franchises) is the notion that everything has to be spoonfed to the readers for whatever reason and the concept of making your own stories and other things that go against the "official" canon (another thing which I think is a quirk of people coming in from other franchises and not understanding that 40k having conflicting and contradictory history is a feature and not a bug) is anathema to them.

40k's biggest strength is the setting and the endless stories you can make in it. Stop trying to turn it into HH 2.0 featuring the 40k Avengers.


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If you break apart my or anyone else's posts line by line I will not read them. 
   
Made in us
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Gathering the Informations.

Guilliman reforms the Imperial Army. It's a necessary evil, IMO, fluffwise. Guard is a wrecked concept since Cruddace's fiddling.

The notion that humanity is stagnant is a bit of a misunderstanding of the situation by the by. There's still some innovation. It's just mired down in bureaucracy, dogma, and a lack of patronage.

Cawl's return being tied to Guilliman is how they got past the issues. Guilliman had backed Cawl's program--Back In The Day. It's not like the Primaris Project was completed overnight. It was multiple lifetimes.

Also another slight misunderstanding, seemingly, is that "Cadia blew up".

The planet fractured. There's still fighting going on in the wreckage of the planet, and there's still fighting going on within the Cadian system proper.

This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at 2021/10/04 13:14:09


 
   
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Nuremberg

Duskweaver said it better than I ever could have.

   
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Vatsetis wrote:
Gives Astartes to every faction... Orktartes, Necrosrartes, Sorostartes, Taustartes, etc.

Adeptus astartes are such a great concept, and GW is underussing them in the last few years.


This made me laugh

and +1 to deleting primaris. Primaris armour I could get behind, maybe.

Personally though, I think we need loads more aliens, whether they are playable factions or not, and loads more examples of different human societies. And more on civilians.

If I could just have one thing though, it would be a framework to make custom ork clans, in the same way you can dream up marine chapters.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
 Da Boss wrote:
Duskweaver said it better than I ever could have.


+1 just seen the post

Great post Duskweaver, exalted

This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at 2021/10/04 14:48:54


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Made in gb
Ridin' on a Snotling Pump Wagon






Start allowing named characters to snuff it in the background. Properly snuff it. No Marvelesque resurrections.

We’ve two or three off the top of my head in Tycho, Space Pope (Aun’Va?) and Creed - though Creed isn’t necessarily all properly dead in the face with a nasty case of not being alive anymore.

Because when very few actually die? You lose the drama, and you cannot shock your audience. An audience insulated from shock is one prone to boredom.

Example. Ghaz vs Blackmane. With the current status quo, we knew both would no worse than limp away from that particular fight. And so it was kind of unimpressive as a result.

Either could’ve been permanently slain. Blackmane snuffing it would’ve been a minimal change. He’s not a Chapter Master, just a Captain equivalent. Plenty more where he came from. But Ghaz?

Now that could’ve opened up some serious narrative possibilities. His great threat is achieving the Herding Cats stage of wrangling up the Boyz. A head honcho of head honchos. The Warboss’ Warboss, who’ll smack seven shades of Snotlings out of any pretenders.

Having that many Orks as United as they’re ever likely to get is one thing. A big old green fist smashing up whatever Ghaz has decided needs smashing that day. An inexorable, unstoppable tide of lads, laffs and violence.

But, like Abaddon’s role for Chaos? Remove that singular leader, and you might just have made things far, far worse, as the more or less concerted force starts fracturing and fragmenting. Going their own way, each Warboss or Chaos Lord vying to replace the Big Boss Wot Got Ded.

With the Imperium already overstretched by the opening of Gork’s Grin, such a splintering could be far, far worse in the long run. Even fractured, you’re still talking multiple forces entirely capable of wrecking a system without further support. The one raging inferno becomes dozens of blazes in need of putting out. If one requires extra effort, others grow as they spread.

But…instead….we get the Super Ghaz. It could’ve been far cooler if Mad Dok Grotsnik had gone completely tonto and stitched someone else’s bonce onto Ghaz’s fallen body. He is meant to be mad after all!

   
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Ollanius Pius - Savior of the Emperor






Gathering the Informations.

Aun'va is dead dead. They bit the big one during Damocles.

The Tau are utilizing body doubles and holograms to make it seem like he didn't. Because all his friggin' bodyguards bit it too.
   
Made in de
Boom! Leman Russ Commander






One thing that - in my personal opinion - would have some potential would be a change of the T'au from a small empire +their vasals to the T'au empire as it is as part of a larger confederation of small alien empires that just try to not get snuffed out by the bigger powers. Basically the league of non-aligned worlds. I would shift thus leagues goal from "we are destined to rule the galaxy" to "if we hold together we might stand a chance of surviving this". It would handily explain the presence of this "leagues " forces even far away from the T'au space. Overall it would be big enough that we wouldn't need mental gymnastics to explain them holding out between the bigger powers, ob the other hand each member race would still face the threat of being extremely outnumbered just like the T'au now. So both kind of story can be supported.

Note that in my mind none of the T'au fluff would really need to change. They would just be part of something bigger.

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Made in ca
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For me, the one thing I would change is to add a 0 to basically every number in 40k. Space marine chapters, 10,000. Still very small and spec ops on a galactic scale, but not so small it feels like their impact is disproportional. Oh that battle for a moon had 100,000 people fighting, now it has 1,000,000 and feels more like a small real war. Super easy to retcon and would make a lot of stuff make a bit more sense.

Failing that, going forward I second what Mad Doc Grotsnick said. Don't be afraid to kill off main characters even if they have a model. There are a few he missed, but I can't exactly call them "main" characters. Guys like Colour Seargent Kell and the Salamanders Chaplain Xavier (does anyone even remember him?), but they weren't exactly huge lore dudes. Currently, it's the Grim Dark far future where you are insignificant and life it cheap, oh and no one important ever dies...

This message was edited 4 times. Last update was at 2021/10/04 16:37:15


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Even if they’ve got a model, death in the background doesn’t mean removal from the game.

We’ve 10,000 years of Imperial History to play around in, so someone snuffing it is hardly a barrier to play. And if your opponent is one to kick up a stink about a 40K army not being “historically correct”, one suspects that’s the least of the problems you might have in playing them.

   
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Preparing the Invasion of Terra






Yay, more complaining about Primaris. Must be a day ending in Y.
Apart from making [REDACTED] able to be [REDACTED], I can't really think of much. Oh wait I know, no Squats. Hate them. 0/10 not a fan. Bloody battle trikes.
   
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They were far, far cooler in Epic!

   
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In My Lab

I'll echo "Let Marines pick from all able-bodied individuals, not just dudes."

I'll also echo "Increase the damn numbers!" because 1,000,000 Marines is a paltry sum, and there's gotta be plenty other examples of bad math there too.

I'll also also echo, to a degree, "Make it more mysterious." I like some solidity, but I do agree that GW may be filling in too many details.

Clocks for the clockmaker! Cogs for the cog throne! 
   
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Ahh, but the details are often contradictory, and from there the amusement stems!

   
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Eye of Terror

 MinMax wrote:
I would remove Primaris Marines from the setting.

You're not my dad, you can't tell me what not to post!


Removing Primaris would be at the top of my list too.

Would not even retcon them. High Lords of Terra would commit all Primaris forces to a Nihilius Crusade, with the mission of securing a vast, distant, uninhabited galaxy for 40,000 years.

   
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 PaddyMick wrote:

 Da Boss wrote:
Duskweaver said it better than I ever could have.

+1 just seen the post
Great post Duskweaver, exalted

Another +1 from me.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
They were far, far cooler in Epic!
Land Train! Cyclops! (etc. etc.)

This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at 2021/10/04 18:27:19


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 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
Even if they’ve got a model, death in the background doesn’t mean removal from the game.

We’ve 10,000 years of Imperial History to play around in, so someone snuffing it is hardly a barrier to play. And if your opponent is one to kick up a stink about a 40K army not being “historically correct”, one suspects that’s the least of the problems you might have in playing them.


Yeah, exactly. I figured this is what would be happening when they announced Legendary, but that doesn't seem to be the case.

Not to say that they would NEED to use Legendary for dead characters instead of giving them new rules, just what I figured they would do.

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I think I’d want them to avoid putting them into Legendary status.

Codex doesn’t mean Background, after all.

There is however a solid argument they might never receive an updated model. But….that being said….we know pretty much all the forces in 40K venerate relics and equipment to one degree or another.

So, Tycho’s Deathmask, armour and combi-melta can simply be recycled in that way. Similarly the Tau have at least some capacity to record and upload memories. It’s not a massive stretch to turn that into a total, near Phoenix Lord level of personality wipe, where the bearer literally becomes the fallen Commander.

There are a lot of ways the permanent death of a character need not mean the retirement of a given model, or indeed no more updates for said model.

If anything, it adds to the horror and ongoing stagnation of the setting.

   
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Dakka Veteran




Reveal the great secret... That indeed Primaris has always been FSM since their creation... No need to change a single miniature... Just let the Galaxy (and the net) BURN!!!!
   
 
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