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I was playing with the different chat bots asking inane questions that would get me beaten to death on these forums, when I asked about the Imperial Knight: Draco from Dawn of War...

It's possible that you may have seen an Imperial Knight Paladin named Draco with heraldry that resembles the Blood Ravens Space Marines in one of the Dawn of War video games. However, it's important to note that the Dawn of War video games are not part of the official Warhammer 40,000 canon, and are not considered to be official sources of lore or heraldry.

That being said, there's no reason why you couldn't create an Imperial Knight Paladin with heraldry that resembles the Blood Ravens Space Marines if you choose to do so. As I mentioned earlier, there are no official references to Imperial Knights wearing the colors of specific Space Marine factions, but that doesn't mean that you can't create your own custom heraldry that draws inspiration from those factions.

If you do decide to create an Imperial Knight Paladin with heraldry that resembles the Blood Ravens Space Marines, I would recommend doing some research and studying the Blood Ravens' heraldry to ensure that your custom heraldry is accurate and visually distinct from the Space Marine models themselves. You might also consider using different shades or tones of the Blood Ravens' colors to create a unique and distinctive look for your Imperial Knight.

Remember, the most important thing is to have fun and create an army that you enjoy playing with and that looks great on the tabletop. Don't be afraid to experiment and try new things, and don't be afraid to make mistakes - they're all part of the hobby!

So, the games aren't apart of the Canon? Does this mean only the stuff from the CS Goto novels are Canon? Or is there a third option?

Thanks.

There are no real hard and fast rules when it comes to what is or is not canon at any given time.

The events of the Dawn of War games happened, but the specifics are unknown because they are ultimately player-led decisions that lead to different game endings.
The only thing we know for sure is that any game ending where Gabriel Angelos dies didn't happen because he's alive in the Era Indomitus.

Any book written at any point under the 40k brand is considered canon until it isn't.
The likes of CS Goto and Ian Watson are difficult topics because they often deviated so far from what was accepted as "the norm" that they are roundly considered not just bad writing but bad sources of information.
They are politely ignored by the majority of the community for this reason.

Ian Watson in particular is a tricky one. Those books are so old they pre-date much of the current framework of lore that stabilised at the end of 2nd and into 3rd edition.

Goto has no such excuse.

As an aside, the AI probably just misinterpreted something it was fed or made up the stuff about canon. AI is a terrible source of anything factual.

Abominable intelligence indeed.

Canon is definitely a weird one in terms of 40K. Everything is canon, but nothing is canon.

My personal preference for reliability is, very broadly….

1. GW published Codexes/Source Books
2. Black Library published novels, stories and RPGs
3. GW licensed stuff (so Dark Heresy et al).

And even then, there are ranks within ranks, and individual sources can be placed higher due to being particularly interesting or insightful.

Example? I’m the proud owner of a complete set of Rogue Trader books. They’re cracking reads, but contain an awful lot of stuff which hasn’t really been mentioned again, or has been outright changed (such as Primarchs being special beings, not just a military rank, and indeed Marines being genetically enhanced).

The Ufthak Blackhawk books are great reads, and offer some fresh Orky Insight I consider prime canon. Specifically? Orks aren’t naturally poor shots as such - they just don’t waste time aiming, instead preferring to sling as much lead down range as they can, and let Gork & Mork decided who lives and who dies. Also that as an Ork develops into a leadership role (Nob and higher) their brain grows along with their body, allowing them to be a more effective leader through greater cunnin’ - and this being considered by Blackhawk at least a bit of a burden, as sometimes he just wants to be running around biffing stuff, but someone’s got to do da finkin’, so as few Boyz as possible get perished.

None of that is really touched on in the RT books, but I consider it up there with them in terms of fantastic world building.

Also. Keep in mind it’s a really, really big galaxy. So even fan fiction has its place, provided it’s not spread around as ‘the secret truth’ known only to a few in the studio etc, and doesn’t take liberties

Yeah, most of that AI text is obviously derived from GW warhammer community and white dwarf statements. The thing about the Blood Ravens or games in general is nonsense, though. GW gave the Ravens official rules in 8th, made models for them and we had a book series about them, so of course they're part of the "canon".

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:


1. GW published Codexes/Source Books
2. Black Library published novels, stories and RPGs
3. GW licensed stuff (so Dark Heresy et al).

Yeah that's the ranking I'd give, plus a lot of cross referencing through codex editions for finding consistencies.

In general AI is really good at sounding confident about whatever its talking about. The thing its it can be utterly wrong. Remember AI has no real comprehension behind it. It's one massive exercise of copy-paste and vast pooling of data and cross referencing.

Incorrect articles; old info; poor phrasing; anything not published online - all those elements and more lead ot huge gaps; problems and potential sources of errors.

AI can be fun to chat with, but never trust it. Plus even more niche information and hobbies makes it even more likely it will make up stuff because it has even less data to work with.

 Overread wrote:
In general AI is really good at sounding confident about whatever its talking about. The thing its it can be utterly wrong. Remember AI has no real comprehension behind it. It's one massive exercise of copy-paste and vast pooling of data and cross referencing.

Incorrect articles; old info; poor phrasing; anything not published online - all those elements and more lead ot huge gaps; problems and potential sources of errors.

AI can be fun to chat with, but never trust it. Plus even more niche information and hobbies makes it even more likely it will make up stuff because it has even less data to work with.

This. They're chatbots, not factbots.

 Haighus wrote:
Ian Watson in particular is a tricky one. Those books are so old they pre-date much of the current framework of lore that stabilised at the end of 2nd and into 3rd edition.

Goto has no such excuse.

As an aside, the AI probably just misinterpreted something it was fed or made up the stuff about canon. AI is a terrible source of anything factual.

Watson's also not a bad writer. Space Marine is a much more interesting and original take on the gelding boy soldiers with two fathers and no mother than the comfortable pap GW eventually closed ranks around. It's an honest-to-god *actual* sci-fi novel and not just wish-fulfillment bolter porn that dutifully namechecks kits available now at your local Games Workshop.

 Altruizine wrote:

 Haighus wrote:
Ian Watson in particular is a tricky one. Those books are so old they pre-date much of the current framework of lore that stabilised at the end of 2nd and into 3rd edition.

Goto has no such excuse.

As an aside, the AI probably just misinterpreted something it was fed or made up the stuff about canon. AI is a terrible source of anything factual.

Watson's also not a bad writer. Space Marine is a much more interesting and original take on the gelding boy soldiers with two fathers and no mother than the comfortable pap GW eventually closed ranks around. It's an honest-to-god *actual* sci-fi novel and not just wish-fulfillment bolter porn that dutifully namechecks kits available now at your local Games Workshop.

Yeah, this. Watson's Space Marine is easily my favorite 40k book.

I liked his inquisition war series too, for the same reasons. It's not the direction gw went in, but they're not bad books.

shortymcnostrill wrote:
I liked his inquisition war series too, for the same reasons. It's not the direction gw went in, but they're not bad books.

Likewise. Watson's books make the universe feel bigger and weirder than a lot of the later material I've read.

Watson isn't the only one that manages to make the universe feel bigger, but he is one of the earlier writers and thus had fewer constraints to work around, and the marketing machine that produces the merchandisable stuff was much less developed.

This isn't necessarily a critique in itself - you CAN come up with good interesting fiction when you're navigating the constraints of a defined canon, just as you can also write bad uninteresting fiction when you can do whatever you want. Indeed, I'd argue that someone like ADB or Mike Brooks (despite the online vitriol from some areas) do some interesting things with, say, the Emperor's Spears and a Navigator House by finding some space and showing us something that doesn't have to consistency-checked into dullness.

shortymcnostrill wrote:
I liked his inquisition war series too, for the same reasons. It's not the direction gw went in, but they're not bad books.

What's the controversy about? I've never had the chance to read it.

 Lathe Biosas wrote:

shortymcnostrill wrote:
I liked his inquisition war series too, for the same reasons. It's not the direction gw went in, but they're not bad books.

What's the controversy about? I've never had the chance to read it.

There's a somewhat awkward love story involving an Inquisitor and an Assassin, which gets weirder later on. There's another plot point of a

But the worldbuilding overall is really great, and I found the language really evocative. It also reads a but like a roleplaying adventure in a way.

Honestly I don't know, I liked it. The only risky/contentious parts I remember are when they encounter some slaanesh person with way too many nipples, and the description of bolters firing striking me as pretty underwhelming.

Oh, and


Then again, maybe there's some terrible bit in there I'm simply not remembering. It's been a few years after all.

Edit: ah, the bit in Insectum's spoiler could definitely make it contentious

shortymcnostrill wrote:
Honestly I don't know, I liked it. The only risky/contentious parts I remember are when they encounter some slaanesh person with way too many nipples, and the description of bolters firing striking me as pretty underwhelming.

Oh, and

Spoiler:

The inquisitor interacts with (a shard of) the emperor in the end I think. This could easily conflict with later lore(?), but this was written in the time when the lore was purposefully kept vague and conflicting.

Then again, maybe there's some terrible bit in there I'm simply not remembering. It's been a few years after all.

Edit: ah, the bit in Insectum's spoiler could definitely make it contentious

Astropaths interact with the emperor's spirit, and did back then too. Important people also could talk to him (head of the custodes, inquisitors etc) so And also because the emperor's origin was a bunch shamans it really went into the fact that he's a true gestalt and as he's decaying his mind is fracturing into those original people and they're competing with one another, while issuing orders from one voice, making him seem as though he's contradicting himself.

It really went into the grimdark consequences of an imperfect god going mad chained to the machinery of civilisation, before they kind of flanderised him into the second coming he is depicted as now, where even when he fails it was all part of his plan.

I dunno, it's just kind of needlessly horndog, and it's badly written.

I'm not saying 40k novels are works of literary genius because they aren't but "I want to bump uglies with this assassin/genestealer hybrid" is just yikes.

The concept of an Inquisitor talking to the Emperor is cool enough, just not with the rest of the bad parts.

Ian Watson was an actual scifi writer, rather than a genre writer (Alan Dean Foster for example is a prolific novelisation guy who has written tonnes of genre fiction of other people's stuff). He must have needed the money...

So his writing doesn't follow the same pulp genre conventions of star wars/trek/gate 40k novels. He writes like other scifi writers did then, which was aimed at adults with a range of adult themes as normal and common aspects of the story.

I've got an anthology of scifi short stories from a whole bunch of famous scifi authors (Arthur c clarke and his era) and more than half include sex, explicit and not.

BL fiction is geared toward selling the units and setting and the story is just a framing device to show you the game setting. Real scifi is about the story and the people and the setting is the context in which those people's story occurs.

Bolter porn is just another way to describe this. It's 'setting porn', because the story is just not that important. The status quo is maintained and the characters are interchangable.



It's really interesting when you look at modern IP pulp novels (and the similarly inspired space operas that aren't connected to IPs) and contrast them to independent works of scifi.

Because you see very quickly that the exploration of humanity in the context of the story's conceit (AI, can't dream, no genders or whatever) is the central aspect of the story, not whether they explored it in a gunbuster 5000 with megacanrockits as part of the militant order of fiery balls. Those things might exist, but they are background context for the story, not the front and centre characters of the story.

I fail to see how Jaq Draco wanting to bang a genestealer and Space Marine Scouts eating human waste is an exploration of humanity in a meaningful or metaphoric way.
There's metaphors and then there's just weird.

Just because Watson wrote other non-Warhammer books doesn't make his Warhammer books good by default because they aren't as you put it "Bolter porn".

No what I meant was he was coming at them from a fundamentally different perspective than a genre writer.

Whether you liked the idea of scouts eating waste, it's an aspect of the organs that marines have that is glossed over, and only there for flavour rather than as a topic of exploration.


If it had been an independent scifi, then the idea of modifying humans to digest lots of things in order to survive on harsh worlds would be enough of a conceit to be deeply explored, down to the natural consequences of eating waste if there are no other food sources. He then looked at how a warrior culture would traditionalise such an idea and developed that feast as a part of their warrior identity and training. The topic being gross is beside the point, it's already a deeper exploration of something in 40k than ha half dozen marine bolter porn novels.

For 40k, that's just a piece of fluff to make marines look cool, but in a scifi story, it's worthy of exploration.

I don't remember mehlindi and Draco's relationship very well so I don't recall what was wrong with it. From what i remember they were attracted to each other and she happened to be a hybrid disguise at the time. Unless he was specifically aroused with the idea of banging a genestealer, it sounds more like the subtext is 'i don't care what you look like, i love you for you.'


But no I'm not saying those books were very good or very bad, just that the way he approached it and the things he chose to explore were from a different perspective which is potentially why it comes off as weird.

But I've read a lot of non genre scifi that is weirder, because they're written to explore specific ideas in relation to the human experience, the consequences and what it means to be human in that context.

Modern 'bolter porn' genre fiction is about as scifi as lord of the rings was - it uses technology as an aesthetic skin on its stories to evoke a certain flavour/atmosphere.
Marines are too busy murderslaughtering things in manly poses to spend a few hundred pages explording what the nature of self means when the catalespian node changes your brain's need for sleep and allows you to compartmentalise your consciousness. But there are plenty of scifi stories (and films - eternal sunshine of the spotless mind, the final cut) that explore one conceit in the context of being human, without needing a massive sprawling setting in which to do it.

Because the point of those stories is the exploration of that concept, the point of 40k novels these days is to tell you about 40k.

And again, I'm not saying that makes 40k novels bad, just that they're doing very different things and Watson was doing one with the mentality of the other.

 Gert wrote:
I fail to see how Jaq Draco wanting to bang a genestealer and Space Marine Scouts eating human waste is an exploration of humanity in a meaningful or metaphoric way.
There's metaphors and then there's just weird.

Just because Watson wrote other non-Warhammer books doesn't make his Warhammer books good by default because they aren't as you put it "Bolter porn".

Uhh. Jaq did not "want to bang a genestealer."

It's always amusing when people so bent on preaching tolerance get weirded out by things they don't immediately vibe with.

I'm not sure what you're getting at? A genestealer is an alien animal, banging one would be considered beastiality so being intolerant of that is pretty normal culturally, whether that's what happened in the story or not.

I'm not sure what you're trying to say. That gert must tolerate bestiality if they expect humans with different gender identities to be tolerated? That you can't expect tolerance unless you use it in a black and white uncritical fashion?

What is your metric for being allowed to advocate for Tolerance of humans?

As far as I can remember, she's not in disguise form when they get down to the horizontal shuffle, and it's specifically noted that her disguise doesn't go as far as extra limbs or the like when she is polymorphined.

It was a human that currently happened to look like a genestealer hybrid that he wanted to bang, not an actual stealer. But I agree with the rest of the book's characterisation. It's written as an adult scifi novel, not gw's later "no naughty stuff, no non-heroic/dirty stuff" approach. I remember wondering how it's themes would land with gw's audience.

And honestly, scouts eating waste seems like the logical conclusion of giving them the ability to digest it. It makes them more different from us regular humans. But marines are mostly portrayed as big heroic manly men, not as the uncanny valley monstrosities the fluff would make them. And having heroes casually nom waste would be pretty jarring.

 Hellebore wrote:
I'm not sure what you're getting at? A genestealer is an alien animal, banging one would be considered beastiality so being intolerant of that is pretty normal culturally, whether that's what happened in the story or not.

I'm not sure what you're trying to say. That gert must tolerate bestiality if they expect humans with different gender identities to be tolerated? That you can't expect tolerance unless you use it in a black and white uncritical fashion?

What is your metric for being allowed to advocate for Tolerance of humans?

Slow your roll mate. She's not a genestealer. I don't even think she's in genestealer form, but even if she was, she's still a human underneath. So no beastiality involved here, more like a furry. Human in a costume. So . . . maybe Gert is kink shaming?

But I'm not talking about just that, but the Scouts eating feces, (which, granted, I don't remember the specifics, but I thibk I recall the scene. A banquet through which they learn about their new abilities) It's a different world with different expectations and they're familiarizing themselves with their new biology and it's a neat way of showing the novelty of their experience. Even if it gives someone the ick

 Hellebore wrote:
No what I meant was he was coming at them from a fundamentally different perspective than a genre writer.

Apologies if I misunderstood, no malice intended.
Only one thing?

Whether you liked the idea of scouts eating waste, it's an aspect of the organs that marines have that is glossed over, and only there for flavour rather than as a topic of exploration.

Did you have to call it flavour?

 Gert wrote:
I fail to see how Jaq Draco wanting to bang a genestealer and Space Marine Scouts eating human waste is an exploration of humanity in a meaningful or metaphoric way.
There's metaphors and then there's just weird.

Just because Watson wrote other non-Warhammer books doesn't make his Warhammer books good by default because they aren't as you put it "Bolter porn".

Depends how you look at it.

Now, I’ve not read the books, but an Inquisitor wanting to have it off with an Alien could be seen as a satire on modern day racists finding those they hate attractive.

The Scout eating human waste? Welcome to the reality of modern 40K. Marines can do that without harm, and there will be situations where it’s that, or death. It doesn’t make it a kinky thing.

But both go to show how far humanity has come, and that depending on how you choose to look at it (there are other interpretations, I’m just offering some) that we might’ve gone too far.

 Gert wrote:

 Hellebore wrote:
No what I meant was he was coming at them from a fundamentally different perspective than a genre writer.

Apologies if I misunderstood, no malice intended.
Only one thing?

Whether you liked the idea of scouts eating waste, it's an aspect of the organs that marines have that is glossed over, and only there for flavour rather than as a topic of exploration.

Did you have to call it flavour?

Are you suggesting it is not tasteful? Maybe we could say it adds texture instead?