Forum adverts like this one are shown to any user who is not logged in. Join us by filling out a tiny 3 field form and you will get your own, free, dakka user account which gives a good range of benefits to you: No adverts like this in the forums anymore. Times and dates in your local timezone. Full tracking of what you have read so you can skip to your first unread post, easily see what has changed since you last logged in, and easily see what is new at a glance. Email notifications for threads you want to watch closely. Being a part of the oldest wargaming community on the net. If you are already a member then feel free to login now.

It has been a while since the Fall of Biel-Tan. At the time, it seemed to me that they were going for the idea that the most "hopeful" of craftworlds (read: proactive and with an end goal of rebuilding their former glory) was devastated but that a new style of hopeful faction (the ynnari) would emerge as a result. But then GW seemed to pump the breaks on the ynnari, and as far as I'm aware we haven't really seen much from Biel-Tan since then.

So uh. What's going on with Biel-Tan these days? Are they rebuilding? Are they just kind of Iyanden 2.0? Are they fine, actually, and most of the damage was just to the infinity circuit but their living population is largely in tact?

What direction do you want to see them go with Biel-Tan moving forward? Maybe their craftworld is slowly falling apart, and they're forced to stop being a "craftworld" and start building up permanent bases on the maiden worlds they spent so much time protecting. Sort of forcing them to put their money where their mouths are on the whole "rebuilding" thing. Or maybe they become a living mirror of Iyanden: lots of veteran aspect warriors and massive numbers of exarchs with too few people *not* on the path of the warrior for their craftworld to remain sustainable. Or maybe they become the extra bitter craftworld? Ticked off at the ynnari for wrecking their home and walking off with so many of their people?

Biel-Tan's "fall" was kind of a nothing burger in FoB, and I've sort of been waiting to see what actual impact it ends up having on them.

They lost about half their population to the fracturing and defections to the Ynnari.
Biel-tan itself is largely ruined and it's held together only by nonstop efforts of its Bonesears.
The majority of its remaining Swordwind went ape and have just started genociding everyone they find on any world that belonged to the Aeldari.
So overall, not great.

So Biel-Tan are now the Black Templars of Eldar?

 Haighus wrote:
So Biel-Tan are now the Black Templars of Eldar?

Always have been.

It's funny you mention Biel-tan Christmas Elfs as Iyanden-
One of the games in 3rd, the Eldar guy I was playing against had a "biel-tan craftworld". Now, codex-wise this mesnt he could run aspect warriors as Troops. So you'd expect a lot of Aspect Warriors, right? WRONG! He took 2 dark reaper squads as troops, freeing up Heavy slots that were then filled by wraithguard and a wraithlord... And an Avatar, because- why not? Well, I was rolling Deff Skull orks, so we got Tankbustas as troops, so I had those. The Avatar took some wounds from the Rokkits, he charged the Busta squad- miraculously, they held and the Nob's Klaw finished the "Hot Git". Most of the rest of my squads died to the heavy fire of the reapers and wraith constructs. But I killed the Avatar! Ork morale victory!!

I hate what they did to Biel Tan. I am not a fan of the advancing timeline in general. I always thought that one of the themes of old 40k was stagnation. It's been 10,000 years since the cataclysm and nothing much has changed. Except now there's a bunch of changes at the (now) end of the timeline. Ynnari. Primarchs. Primaris. I find none of it to the good of the setting.

At one point I was considering making a thread about Eldar that would touch on Biel Tan and how their approach to the path affected population growth. But now that they've been blown up, it's a moot point.

On one hand I am surprised they threw one of the OG big five craftworlds under the bus like that. On the other hand choosing a lesser craftworld or inventing a new one (hello, malantai) for the new plot point wouldn't have had the same narrative weight. Iyanden was built broken from the start so they weren't a good choice. Saim Hann is on all the boxes. Ulthwe is already damned, but more skilled at reading the skein to avoid such tragic outcomes. So it was either Alaitoc or Biel Tan who had to get schwacked. Maybe Biel Tan got selected because Alaitoc got beat up in the Path novels. Maybe they flipped a coin to see which craftworld would fall out of formation and founder. In any case I'm just glad they didn't nuke Iybraesil.

I guess all of this in inherent with being a fan of an NPC faction. You get rolled now and again so that the player factions can have cool moments. Didn't somebody around here point out that there are a lot of imperial heroes who have earned their stripes by punching an Avatar in the naughty bits?

 Arschbombe wrote:
I hate what they did to Biel Tan. I am not a fan of the advancing timeline in general. I always thought that one of the themes of old 40k was stagnation. It's been 10,000 years since the cataclysm and nothing much has changed. Except now there's a bunch of changes at the (now) end of the timeline. Ynnari. Primarchs. Primaris. I find none of it to the good of the setting.

See, Ynnari are exactly what eldar needed imo. Otherwise, we were stuck feeling like we were losing even when we're winning. Which, yeah yeah. Grimdark etc. etc., but it's hard to get excited about that. I like that they're moving the timeline forward in general, but the way they've handled a lot of stuff feels like wasted potential. Like, wrecking Biel-Tan *could* be a big opportunity for some interesting new lore and events. Instead, it sort of begins and ends with a brief daemon incursion that gets dealt with in an afternoon and has no lingering impact except to leave Biel-Tan unable to do their whole "reclaiming the empire" gimmick. Like, if they did the transitioning-to-planetary-colonies thing I pitched earlier, that would at least be a kind of novel thing to explore. Plus it would give Biel-Tan territory that they personally are defending for themselves rather than just showing up to massacre unsuspecting humans.

tldr; Biel-Tan "falling" is a decent setup, but where's the payoff?

In any case I'm just glad they didn't nuke Iybraesil.

*Iybraesil fistbump*

I guess all of this in inherent with being a fan of an NPC faction. You get rolled now and again so that the player factions can have cool moments. Didn't somebody around here point out that there are a lot of imperial heroes who have earned their stripes by punching an Avatar in the naughty bits?

The avatar and phoenix lords. Need a xenos to punch to prove how cool you are? Most eldar named characters have built-in ressurection, so you can effortlessly win your fight without making GW change the status quo.

(Most recently, the avatar got taken out by some orks in Da Warboss, but I don't count that one because the avatar actually comes across as scary, and the orks had to work for it.)

GW in general seems to have a tough time writing Eldar, since their Ynnari books were very short-lived (cancelled almost as soon as it began) and they haven't gone as far as they could have in the Phoenix Lord books nor even in the "Path of the" series. I think one of the issues is that Gav Thorpe has kind of taken it upon himself to be the primary writer and unlike more versatile writers like Chris Wraight, who has breathed life into underserved factions like White Scars, it means that quality just hasn't been there since no one else has really bothered to take the reins from him.

As Wyldhunt mentioned, it doesn't even need to be a drastic change but even a small development on how they approach things differently like setting up a more clear Eldar presence on worlds rather than hiding out on Craftworlds/in the Webway would be an area to explore. It would be nice to see what the Great Rift actually means for an already psychically attuned race, since it has resulted in even more psykers popping up in the human populace, does this means for Eldar it means more turning to the path of the seer or does it enhance their divination? Or is it worse in the sense that it makes easier for Slaanesh to track them due to the veil thinning between reality and the warp? Heck, this would be a good way to even touch on how it impacts existing technology that's tied to the warp like the backpack generators that the Warp Spiders use and maybe certain Aspect temples or new shrines being created in the wake of the Great Rift to combat the new threats created from this event or conservative craftworld hardliner factions against the newcomers of the Ynnari.

I think our Psychic Awakening book touched on that a little. My stuff is all packed up at the moment, but iirc the exarch powers in PA were implied or directly stated to be the result of the great rift.

My headcanon is that a lot of those powers already sort of existed in a subtler form, thus why no one was freaking out when the dragon exarch's hands were suddenly on fire. The fighting game flashy burning fist thing just went from being metaphorical/symbolic to being diagenic, basically. And maybe dragon exarchs occassionally managed to punch through ceramtie in the past, when the stars aligned and they just sort of *knew* that they could do it for some reason.

But yeah, checking in on the eldar post-cicatrix would be nice. Is the webway impacted at all? Are the usual "seal their third eye" precautions still working as they used to? We know the ynnari have Slaanesh worried. Has she been more proactively messing with the eldar to try and deal with the ynnari?

I think Gav said in an interview that the PL and Ynnari series both got cancelled due to lack of sales. Which is a huge shame because the Ynnari books were making some pretty huge statements (insta-avatars, implying the pantheon might be reborn, etc.) that are awkward as heck to leave hanging there. If we can't get more novels in the near future, hopefully we'll at least get some short stories or some decent screentime in other factions' books (like Malys and Sliscus did in Lukas the Trickster.)

 Arschbombe wrote:
Maybe Biel Tan got selected because Alaitoc got beat up in the Path novels.

I'd say it was very symbolic to be Biel-Tan. They're the most backward-looking of the Craftworlds, harking back to long-gone, never-returning former glories, and I say that as someone who favours them. Its shattering clearly marks that those old dreams are just that, and it is time to wake up and seize A future, a hope at a final escape for the race from ancestral doom. Now whether GW actually had that in mind is another matter.

Warning: headcanon ramblings ahead.
I've long held that the Craftworlds were (probably unintentionally) different trauma responses. Ulthwe was taking a very unhealthy interest in the topic.amd going ultra-paranoid, being eternally on guard against whatever it was to the extent you actively screw with other people. Saim-Hann, acceptance that it happened but becoming an adrenaline junkie as a result, life's too short eh? Iyanden, locked into a barely functioning state, simply going through the motions whilst inside you're dead (admittedly in their case after another traumatic event), Alaitoc is internalising the blame and thinking that if you can only be perfect it will never happen again. Biel Tan is actively denying the trauma had any real effect and turning it outward against the world, whilst almost shrinking away from dealing with the cause - recent codexes have brief mentions of their squabbling with other Craftworlds (typically Iyanden) over choosing to fight Orks or other races rather than Chaos incursions. So again, nuking B-T has some deep messages to the Eldar psyche.
Now do I think any of this was actually intended? Massively unlikely. Have I been reading far too much into my space elves to the point that even Eldrad would say "mate, you've gone too far here"?. Undoubtedly. Has it been fun? Oh yes.

 Wyldhunt wrote:

See, Ynnari are exactly what eldar needed imo. Otherwise, we were stuck feeling like we were losing even when we're winning. Which, yeah yeah. Grimdark etc. etc., but it's hard to get excited about that. I like that they're moving the timeline forward in general, but the way they've handled a lot of stuff feels like wasted potential. Like, wrecking Biel-Tan *could* be a big opportunity for some interesting new lore and events. Instead, it sort of begins and ends with a brief daemon incursion that gets dealt with in an afternoon and has no lingering impact except to leave Biel-Tan unable to do their whole "reclaiming the empire" gimmick. Like, if they did the transitioning-to-planetary-colonies thing I pitched earlier, that would at least be a kind of novel thing to explore. Plus it would give Biel-Tan territory that they personally are defending for themselves rather than just showing up to massacre unsuspecting humans.

tldr; Biel-Tan "falling" is a decent setup, but where's the payoff?

I don't think there will be one. The Biel-Tan event feels contrived and hollow to me. It seems like it's all part of a fluff balance pass. Cadia falls. Baal is devastated (in the service of bringing about primarisification). Biel-Tan is fractured. On the Ynnari side the vibe I get is like the Thorian Inquisitors who want to pull the plug on the golden throne so the Emperor can be reborn and save humanity.

*Iybraesil fistbump*

I was only partly joking. The mid tier craftworlds who don't have pedigrees going back to 2nd edition strike me as the most ripe for random exploitation in the name of freshening up the fluff. Like when Iybraseil's color scheme changed in 7th. They were Hawk Turquoise in 4th and 6th. Then in 7th they were suddenly blue-gray with characters having red helmets. I suspect this was to let Mymaera look more visually distinct as a favored child of Forgeworld.

 Wyldhunt wrote:

See, Ynnari are exactly what eldar needed imo.

Yeah, I wanted to build a many flavours of Eldar campaign that focused on Ynarri travelling to various other Eldar factions to recruit new members to the cause. It's interesting to run Kill Teams or small armies in spec ops or Crusade campaigns- for example You might have battles set up for a craftworld force, and Corsairs jump in as allies. And then in the next cycle it's a Drukhari battle... But those Corsairs could show up there too. You end up with a situation where the subfaction that shows up as a small allied force to several of the major factions can quickly become elite by getting so much mercenary work.

Biel Tan going planetside to deal with their crumbling craftworld could be another decent campaign driver, but to do maiden worlds right, you almost need Exodites.