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 Wyzilla wrote:

 gorgon wrote:
It's not a plot. It's a background. If you want to know what happens next, play games and create your own narratives.

And if you want Primarchs, there are rules and models being produced. Use them.

Except personal narratives are simply irrelevent, as is headcanon. And the plot has been advancing, albeit at a snail's pace, and largely through retroactive canon. The Black Library has also been slowly crawling forward. And the rulesets only represent Primarchs during the Horus Heresy, and not those rendered Daemon Princes, or post the Horus Heresy.

Again, it's not a plot, it's a setting. It's there to create a universe for you to set your own stories in. Your stories are irrelevant on the world stage, but that's just like someones custom DnD campaign.

As for advancing, it's not. It's expanding. Mostly sideways, with a few small stories set after m40, but most set during or before.

 -Loki- wrote:

 Wyzilla wrote:

 gorgon wrote:
It's not a plot. It's a background. If you want to know what happens next, play games and create your own narratives.

And if you want Primarchs, there are rules and models being produced. Use them.

Except personal narratives are simply irrelevent, as is headcanon. And the plot has been advancing, albeit at a snail's pace, and largely through retroactive canon. The Black Library has also been slowly crawling forward. And the rulesets only represent Primarchs during the Horus Heresy, and not those rendered Daemon Princes, or post the Horus Heresy.

Again, it's not a plot, it's a setting. It's there to create a universe for you to set your own stories in. Your stories are irrelevant on the world stage, but that's just like someones custom DnD campaign.

As for advancing, it's not. It's expanding. Mostly sideways, with a few small stories set after m40, but most set during or before.

See, I agree with the sentiment in broad strokes, but the setting isn't really expanding.

There's two "settings" given attention; M41, particularly the latter half, especially 999M41, and the Horus Heresy.

Everything else is vacant. GW keeps cramming more stuff into these two polar ends, with little more than a few paragraphs for the Age of Apostasy, the Macharian Crusade, this "Nova Terra Interregnum" and so on. We know virtually nothing about the intervening setting.

The immediate reaction by most people to GW not really doing anything with the setting. People naturally want developement; yes, it's a setting, one with lots of unexplore nooks and crannies, but they aren't being explored. More stuff keeps getting crammed into 999M41 or the Horus Heresy, making these periods of time feel extremely crowded and immersion-breaking.

DnD and Pathfinder have done a solid job of creating a setting which doesn't often "advance," but Pathfinder in particular have done a superb job expanding the settings, focusing on specific regions, time-periods and so on which give their players an enormous breadth of area to operate. GW doesn't do that; you've got the Horus Heresy and 999M41 as developed settings, that's basically it, and that's all they focus on or provide for.

Sure, you and a mate can decide you want to run a few battles representing the fight against Hive Fleet Behemoth or whatever, but there's not enough in the game to make that easy.

I admit, I'd like the setting to move forwards at some small pace; let's see what the 13th Black Crusade looks like in full force, post-Cadia, whether Chaos wins or loses that battle and run with it. Go 10 years into M42, shake things up a little bit, nothing dramatic. Failing that, why not do something like an Era system?

Choose a few hinted at areas of the fluff, and expand the info on them and provide some rules which tweak the game for that era. Make some units unavailable, introduce new ones available for that era with some way to use them, in limited numbers, in other eras (See Forgeworld's Chapter Relic rule). Introduce new characters which you can sell to old and new players alike, even whole factions if you're feeling audacious. Frateris Militia for the Reign of Blood? The advanced human empire Macharius defeated whose name escapes me?

GW could diversify their product and rules portfolio (Emperor knows they love setting hardcover books, just these might actually have some bloody content!), they could strengthen their IP, which is the biggest asset they've got, and build no small amount of customer good-will and enthusiasm (New, major plot developments, whether historical or "present" generate buzz, look at the Horus Heresy books sale and discussion before the plot ground own to glacial speeds!). And they could do this all without fear of Warhammer 40k not being 40k if the in-universe calender ticked over to 41,001.

 -Loki- wrote:

 Wyzilla wrote:

 gorgon wrote:
It's not a plot. It's a background. If you want to know what happens next, play games and create your own narratives.

And if you want Primarchs, there are rules and models being produced. Use them.

Except personal narratives are simply irrelevent, as is headcanon. And the plot has been advancing, albeit at a snail's pace, and largely through retroactive canon. The Black Library has also been slowly crawling forward. And the rulesets only represent Primarchs during the Horus Heresy, and not those rendered Daemon Princes, or post the Horus Heresy.

Again, it's not a plot, it's a setting. It's there to create a universe for you to set your own stories in. Your stories are irrelevant on the world stage, but that's just like someones custom DnD campaign.

As for advancing, it's not. It's expanding. Mostly sideways, with a few small stories set after m40, but most set during or before.

Which are building up to 41k, just that GW refuses to advance it forward. The Horus Heresy in particular is building up the story for seeming advancement, especially with Nick Kyme's work on the Salamanders. The "it's a setting" excuse only works when you ignore that the HH books, which creates a plot and makes actual, full characters of the Primarchs is a thing. It's simply the main characters taking a ten thousand year long break.

 -Loki- wrote:


Again, it's not a plot, it's a setting. It's there to create a universe for you to set your own stories in. Your stories are irrelevant on the world stage, but that's just like someones custom DnD campaign.

As for advancing, it's not. It's expanding. Mostly sideways, with a few small stories set after m40, but most set during or before.

D&D is a bad example of what you're getting at because every last major D&D setting has had an advancing plot. Forgotten Realms has had major geo-political shifts since AD&D times to today's world. Eberron? Same. The "default" D&D universe of Greyhawk? Same.

Does anybody remember the scene at the end of the movie 'Clear and present danger,' when Harrison Ford's character threatens to expose the President's dodgy dealings?

The president tells Ford to save that information for a rainy day.

Bringing back the Primarchs is Tom Kirby's red button, the doomsday scenario for when rival companies overtake GW, and GW are down to their last store in Nottingham, and pots of skull white are selling for £10 a pot, and we're getting a new version of 40k every six months!

GW will release a new race before they ever release the primarchs.

Evidence? The last time there were rumblings of brining back them back, we got the Tau instead.

As far as the calendar goes, I've always thought it would be neat to have it track the current calendar exactly, only 38k years into the future.

So, when it's 2014, all events in the 40kverse are occurring at M40 014.

It would allow a wonderful year-by-year narrative to be developed, yearly campaign events that happen in real-time with new background, minis and characters.

I don't see why going past the year 40,000 would be a problem, the game is call Warhammer 40,000, as long as the date is 40,XXX in that format it doesn't mess with the name, and a year-by-year progression of the date would mean it wouldn't be a problem for another 1086 years.

 Kirasu wrote:
Why.. is this in news and rumors? This entire thread is because of misreading a random little blurb in the current WD issue. There are tons of threads about primarchs in general 40k..

Seriously.. the article in question was simply GW employees talking about "mysteries" in the universe.. the sentence says "As for Gulliman, Glenn is adamant that the Ultramarines Primarch is in fact healing from his fatal wounds....Nobody is willing to mock him too hard, because we rather like that idea".

It's clearly just some guy named Glenn musing over possible scenarios. It's not news, it's just conversation between players. Then again people post threads when a single page on the GW webpage doesn't work.

Quite.

No need for this in News/Rumour

Did everyone get a different white dwarf than i did? Mine only goes up to page 32 Is this in the new visions issue?

EDIT: Had a change of opinion - realised that my reasons for desiring the return of the Primarchs in 40k were outweighed by my reasons against.

I have been out of the game for some time, but forwarding the story line might just be enough to peak my interest again. GW could easily have multiple eras going at one time. Battletech has done this for decades. You can play the early years of their history clear up to hundreds of years in to the future at the most recent time line. Flames of War does the same thing with early, mid and late war eras. Nothing says anyone has to play any one segment.

Primarchs would never make a comeback as it's against GW ethics. The point that so much time has past since the fall of the emperor during the Horus heresy and that marines still have much love for their beloved primarchs who are either list, in stasis or dead it would pretty much ruin the whole wh40k world if not heavily disrupt it. You can't have a primarch coming back in one chapter and not the others as it's about fairness and balance end of the day. Marines who are waiting for a return will continue to wait and primarchs lost will still be as any intro to these guts again will cause heavy riots in the space marines world

What would honestly be cool is if they super dreaded him, then he just bolted off-world apparently at the sight of the imperium. As a data-slate he is usable by both chaos and loyalist. I.e. give some reasonable doubt if it is guilleman or Alpharius/omegon. But that's just me, and I'm biased towards chaos...

 kerikhaos wrote:
Primarchs would never make a comeback as it's against GW ethics.

Sorry, couldn't get past this line. You are joking, right?

 kerikhaos wrote:
. You can't have a primarch coming back in one chapter and not the others as it's about fairness and balance end of the day.

Read the rest of it and you are. Good work

I have absolutely no interest in an "advancement" of the "plot." You can't go forward in time and have any meaningful developments without destroying the "all factions are powerful and are about to do serious work" nature of the setting. If you do somehow advance X years in time and manage some convoluted reason as to why you are still at this precipice its not an advancement at all and won't satisfy you for very long. In fact you might as well just write that event into the past it makes no difference if the end setting is similar.

If this were a story arc you'd be at the point right before the major conflicts happen; where you want to be for a war game. If you advance in anyway, (other than the meaningless oops-back-where-we-started scenario above) you canonize the conflict itself in which case there will be some resolution that logically follows and your setting is destroyed.

Also, isn't Guilliman's 'healing' like immeasurably slow? Couldn't they have like taken a picture when people started to think he was healing and compare to his current status to measure any wound healing? This healing is likely just to be more legend and hearsay. All the primarchs are gone for good, they just sprinkled in some but-maybe-nots here and there to get people interested.

All that being said, a what-if scenario where Guilliman comes back as the only loyal primarch and is disgusted at the empire. He could be driven mad by a lack of a superior/equals to be loyal to and lashes out in purging rampages across the galaxy. With his legion turned to superstitious monks, the empire a mockery, the emperor a corpse, and aliens threatening to end humanity any moment, chaos starts to sound pretty tempting to ol rowboat. That'd be worth a read imo, knock those goody-good ultras down a few pegs.