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Backflipping terminators and razorback/landraider transformers. Thanks, C. S. Goto.

 Troike wrote:

Vrashnar wrote:
In regards to the Cain & Sister of Battle issue. I think it's important to keep in perspective that there are literally thousands of worlds, trillions upon trillions of humans.

But the thing with the Sisters is that they've had memories of their past lives erased, been put through a heinous amont of brainwashing, been specifically selected on the basis that they took to this brainwashing notably well compared to their fellow Schola students, and then gone off to train and live with others who have been similarly brainwashed. And this is what makes the Sisters special, what gives them their edge in 40K. That they believe in their faith so hard.

For a Sister to just "losen up on" this extremely rigorous mindset and lifestyle, to start drinking and having casual affairs doesn't really fit. Did... She just decided let go of a lifetime of indoctrination?

There's also the additional issue that a Sister wouldn't even be at the Schola to begin with. Sisters don't train Novices at Scholas, Schola students leave to train with the SoB directly if they are selected to be Novices.

Not to be the one who draws real history into a discussion of fluff...but history is replete with examples of indoctrinated, pious, and/or highly disciplined soldiers engaging in far more reprehensible behavior than drinking and gambling. Usually it's rape, theft, murder, or senseless brutality. We are, after all, the species that sent hundreds of men to isolated monasteries to practice the word of The Bible...and they end up producing and consuming large amounts of alcohol, with monasteries becoming known for their beer brews or their wine vineyards.

The extreme discipline, outside of combat, throughout history seems to usually be put in place for the rookies. Young soldiers are held to high moral standards, when it is necessary to instill the extreme culture of discipline, but the grizzled old military contractors grow out their beards, lose the uniforms, and more freely engage in illicit behavior. But they get away with it because they're veterans who can instantly snap into a combat mentality when necessary. I imagine the Sisters of Battle, or any other organization in 40k, might have a similar experience, and it's often built into the fluff where the old hands are calm and cool under pressure, but raucous in their free time (Dwarf Longbeards, IG Veterans, etc.)

Ultramarines being second to the Emprah marines, and Black templars/space wolves striving to be like Calgar and ultramarines, but unable to match them because they told Guilliman where he can stick his smurfbook... Khornate Knights, and C.S. Multilazor cramming the damn things on Land raiders, and Mantis warrior marines. Or Eldar race worshipping Slaneesh, and Dark eldar Psykers living in the Eye of Terror


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 Toastaster wrote:
Not really a single piece of fluff, but you'll have to let me off because I've been harboring this hatred for too long.

Khorne.

Older Khorne was so much cooler than new khorne. He was all about martial prowess, being the best you can be, not letting yourself be weak, even being honorable and not killing those who are unarmed or weak. Nowadays he's all 'HURR DURR BLUD N SKULS', and it kind of ruins chaos for me sometimes. It makes me think why would anyone actually turn to khorne, because you're just going to turn into a blood-crazed madman who kill themselves when there is no more blood to be spilt. Very silly.

yeah, i hate that too... From grimdark to grimDERP

 Troike wrote:

epronovost wrote:
I must admit after reading James Swallow works on SoB the last thing I thought they would do would be gambling and drinking (or doing anything fun related).

Yeah, Swallow was a pretty good reflection of studio SoB. Though, in my opinion, the codex Sisters are presented as even more indoctrinated.

epronovost wrote:
Cain himself is a jerk, a coward and selfish man who happens to be commissar. If a commissar can be so low, perhapse a sister can too (yet I do think that a Sister would be much, much less prone than a commissar to such issues.)

Eh... The thing with Cain is that it's very doubtful that he could develop that mindset in the first place, were he in studio fluff. In codexes, the Scholas are extremely heavy on the brainwashing. In comparison, Sandy Mitchell has Scholas that are more easygoing. And the thing with the Sisters is that they are chosen from Schola pupils who have particularly bought into the brainwashing.

Especially having just read Codex Tempestus Scions, yeah, Sandy is full of gak on Scholas being easy-going. Overall the Cain books seem to bear little to no resemblance to W40K, more of a glorified in-joke.

 Wyzilla wrote:

 Troike wrote:

epronovost wrote:
I must admit after reading James Swallow works on SoB the last thing I thought they would do would be gambling and drinking (or doing anything fun related).

Yeah, Swallow was a pretty good reflection of studio SoB. Though, in my opinion, the codex Sisters are presented as even more indoctrinated.

epronovost wrote:
Cain himself is a jerk, a coward and selfish man who happens to be commissar. If a commissar can be so low, perhapse a sister can too (yet I do think that a Sister would be much, much less prone than a commissar to such issues.)

Eh... The thing with Cain is that it's very doubtful that he could develop that mindset in the first place, were he in studio fluff. In codexes, the Scholas are extremely heavy on the brainwashing. In comparison, Sandy Mitchell has Scholas that are more easygoing. And the thing with the Sisters is that they are chosen from Schola pupils who have particularly bought into the brainwashing.

Especially having just read Codex Tempestus Scions, yeah, Sandy is full of gak on Scholas being easy-going. Overall the Cain books seem to bear little to no resemblance to W40K, more of a glorified in-joke.

To be fair, the Codex Tempestus Scions book is also one of the worst reading codex books out there (I'm a huge IG fan and always wanted a Stormtrooper book, and reading this book felt like reading bad fanfiction, with instructors squashing children's heads with hammers and whatnot), and is, in and of itself, a pretty massive retcon of some long established things (and published 11 years and 4 game editions after the first Cain novel was published), not the least of which is the Scions themselves, who were the *very* different "Stormtroopers" up until that point.

Anytime anyone references a specific number. Weither its planetary population, space craft crew, number of people in a cult, whatever.

40K authors have no clue about real world logistics and what it takes to actually get anything done, resources consumed, or populate and police a planet let alone an entire galaxy at war.

Imperial Guard and Space Marines are the worst offenders when it comes to this. Particularly the Imperial Guard. GW fluff acts like a few dozen regiments is supposed to be a lot. `

Thatguyhsagun wrote:
Backflipping terminators and razorback/landraider transformers. Thanks, C. S. Goto.

Don't forget, terminators can be physically overpowered with ease by spore mines, and Space Marines "forget" that they have their weapons and "struggle to remember" their briefings.

 Melissia wrote:

Thatguyhsagun wrote:
Backflipping terminators and razorback/landraider transformers. Thanks, C. S. Goto.

Don't forget, terminators can be physically overpowered with ease by spore mines, and Space Marines "forget" that they have their weapons and "struggle to remember" their briefings.

Eldar also may or may not have kidneys.

The 40k writers claim that armies smaller than the one the US used to invade Iraq are massively epic armies. Heck, the Russians in WWII had the largest army in history and all they could do was occupy eastern Europe. The writers have no sense of their own scale.

 TheCustomLime wrote:

PastelAvenger wrote:
Everything the blood angels name with a prefix of "blood"

Blood strike missiles
Blood shard bolts
Bloodsong
Blood Champion

The list goes on.....

Then there is the Tyranids with the word Hive.

And the CSM having a stupid habit of saying thins like:

"I am a Chaos Terminator Aspiring Champion, this is my pet Chaos Dog, and that over there is my best buddy, Chaos Daemon!"

-.-

When is a daemon not a chaos daemon...


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 MWHistorian wrote:
The 40k writers claim that armies smaller than the one the US used to invade Iraq are massively epic armies. Heck, the Russians in WWII had the largest army in history and all they could do was occupy eastern Europe. The writers have no sense of their own scale.

Damn yes. One moment you have a hundred guardsmen holding down an entire city, the next 25 trillion have died trying to hold a village.


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 TheCustomLime wrote:
Imperial Guard and Space Marines are the worst offenders when it comes to this. Particularly the Imperial Guard. GW fluff acts like a few dozen regiments is supposed to be a lot. `

Tbf, a regiment in the IG is not like one of our regiments, and tends to consist of hundreds of thousands of men.

The Swarmlord.

I'm a huge Tyranid fan-boy but I don't like how they wrote the Swarmlord.

It's written as a personality and an individual in the swarm. The swarm has no individuals.

Tyranids outsmarting everybody is obvious, everyone else is a lower form of life. However it should occur as a response of the Hive mind (in game terms special rules etc) . Not some Skeletor wannabe pretending he's a Hive Tyrant.

I found that with the introduction of the Swarmlord they anthropomorphized the Tyranids and made them more like human villians. This has dumbed them down and made them more like every baddie out there.

Eldar may or may not have kidneys? What?

 TheCustomLime wrote:

PastelAvenger wrote:
Everything the blood angels name with a prefix of "blood"

Blood strike missiles
Blood shard bolts
Bloodsong
Blood Champion

The list goes on.....

Then there is the Tyranids with the word Hive.

I'm actually fine with the Tyranid naming, since it's largely the result of slang names assigned by the Imperial forces that have encountered them. Even the faction name is a reference to the first world attacked by The Great Devourer.


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 Wyzilla wrote:

 Troike wrote:

epronovost wrote:
I must admit after reading James Swallow works on SoB the last thing I thought they would do would be gambling and drinking (or doing anything fun related).

Yeah, Swallow was a pretty good reflection of studio SoB. Though, in my opinion, the codex Sisters are presented as even more indoctrinated.

epronovost wrote:
Cain himself is a jerk, a coward and selfish man who happens to be commissar. If a commissar can be so low, perhapse a sister can too (yet I do think that a Sister would be much, much less prone than a commissar to such issues.)

Eh... The thing with Cain is that it's very doubtful that he could develop that mindset in the first place, were he in studio fluff. In codexes, the Scholas are extremely heavy on the brainwashing. In comparison, Sandy Mitchell has Scholas that are more easygoing. And the thing with the Sisters is that they are chosen from Schola pupils who have particularly bought into the brainwashing.

Especially having just read Codex Tempestus Scions, yeah, Sandy is full of gak on Scholas being easy-going. Overall the Cain books seem to bear little to no resemblance to W40K, more of a glorified in-joke.

The Cain novels aren't really 40k. Mitchel borrows some vocabulary, but at their core, the novels are pulp sci-fi that's essentially Black Adder in space. Cain recalls the Schola Progenium as if it were just another private school full of ivy-encrusted architecture, football pitches, and the foreboding darkness of the Headmaster's Study.

 Selym wrote:


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 TheCustomLime wrote:
Imperial Guard and Space Marines are the worst offenders when it comes to this. Particularly the Imperial Guard. GW fluff acts like a few dozen regiments is supposed to be a lot. `

Tbf, a regiment in the IG is not like one of our regiments, and tends to consist of hundreds of thousands of men.

They're not usually that huge. Gaunts Ghosts Tanith First and Only starts out at 6,000 and eventually gets run down to less than 2000. The Cadian 8th, home of Creed, is 8,000 strong, most Steel Legion regiments number 2-3 thousand strong plus vehicles/crew (another couple hundred). Most usually are between actual regimental or divisional sized organizations. Relatively few are the (quite ridiculously) huge 100,000 strong formations. Another case of GW numbers being very ridiculous

And the CSM having a stupid habit of saying thins like:

"I am a Chaos Terminator Aspiring Champion, this is my pet Chaos Dog, and that over there is my best buddy, Chaos Daemon!"

-.-

When is a daemon not a chaos daemon...

There are non-chaos Daemons you know.

 TheSilo wrote:
Not to be the one who draws real history into a discussion of fluff...but history is replete with examples of indoctrinated, pious, and/or highly disciplined soldiers engaging in far more reprehensible behavior than drinking and gambling.

Sure, it happens historically. However, I doubt that any force in our history had the brainwashing locked down quite as tightly as the Sisters did.

Although... Thinking about it, it's not quite right to apply that to the Cain Sister in the first place, since she's gone through Mitchell's apparently less harsh version of the Schola. So I'll just stick to my main complaint of her misrepresenting the Sisters, and not really fitting with the "spirit" of the army. Same goes for Amberley's line about the Sisters being allowed to have sex if they feel like it.

As others have said before, it wouldn't really be a problem if people saw the Cain novels as more a comedic take than a completely serious portrayal.

 Vaktathi wrote:
To be fair, the Codex Tempestus Scions book is also one of the worst reading codex books out there (I'm a huge IG fan and always wanted a Stormtrooper book, and reading this book felt like reading bad fanfiction, with instructors squashing children's heads with hammers and whatnot), and is, in and of itself

Eh, I liked it. I think it was suitably dark and brutal, the Imperium using the most extreme sort of education to produce its most loyal and elite human soldiers.

 Vaktathi wrote:
a pretty massive retcon of some long established things

How so? The Stormtroopers aside, it felt fairly in-line with the old studio fluff on the Scholas, to me. We were told that they were tough places, and this stuff just seemed like an expansion to that.

 Selym wrote:
Damn yes. One moment you have a hundred guardsmen holding down an entire city, the next 25 trillion have died trying to hold a village.

My favourite instance of this is where Chenkov managed to lose ten million Guardsmen in taking one citadel.

 Troike wrote:

 Vaktathi wrote:
To be fair, the Codex Tempestus Scions book is also one of the worst reading codex books out there (I'm a huge IG fan and always wanted a Stormtrooper book, and reading this book felt like reading bad fanfiction, with instructors squashing children's heads with hammers and whatnot), and is, in and of itself

Eh, I liked it. I think it was suitably dark and brutal, the Imperium using the most extreme sort of education to produce its most loyal and elite human soldiers.

 Vaktathi wrote:
a pretty massive retcon of some long established things

How so? The Stormtroopers aside, it felt fairly in-line with the old studio fluff on the Scholas, to me. We were told that they were tough places, and this stuff just seemed like an expansion to that.

It really just read...poorly to me. I mean, I love me some Grimdark, but the Scion book just read like violence-porn and took things beyond the level of believability.

I mean, it's one thing to have lots of recruits die or suffer injuries in harsh training. People's bodies shut down, live fire exercises go wrong. someone slips and falls, equipment fails, etc. It's one thing to die in intense training, but when it involves active killings, especially on the part of or orders of instructors, it just stops being believable.

TL;DR It read like Harry Potter torture porn to me.

 Leech wrote:
The Swarmlord.

I'm a huge Tyranid fan-boy but I don't like how they wrote the Swarmlord.

It's written as a personality and an individual in the swarm. The swarm has no individuals.

Tyranids outsmarting everybody is obvious, everyone else is a lower form of life. However it should occur as a response of the Hive mind (in game terms special rules etc) . Not some Skeletor wannabe pretending he's a Hive Tyrant.

I found that with the introduction of the Swarmlord they anthropomorphized the Tyranids and made them more like human villians. This has dumbed them down and made them more like every baddie out there.

I've always seen the Swarmlord as the Manifestation of the Hive Mind itself.
It's the best strategic genius because it has EVERYTHING every single tyranid ever learned in it's head.
Then again,that is pretty much nulified at Ichar IV when Marneus CallGak beats him somehow by outsmartsing ze nidz

 Jinx Magiga wrote:

 Leech wrote:
The Swarmlord.

I'm a huge Tyranid fan-boy but I don't like how they wrote the Swarmlord.

It's written as a personality and an individual in the swarm. The swarm has no individuals.

Tyranids outsmarting everybody is obvious, everyone else is a lower form of life. However it should occur as a response of the Hive mind (in game terms special rules etc) . Not some Skeletor wannabe pretending he's a Hive Tyrant.

I found that with the introduction of the Swarmlord they anthropomorphized the Tyranids and made them more like human villians. This has dumbed them down and made them more like every baddie out there.

I've always seen the Swarmlord as the Manifestation of the Hive Mind itself.
It's the best strategic genius because it has EVERYTHING every single tyranid ever learned in it's head.
Then again,that is pretty much nulified at Ichar IV when Marneus CallGak beats him somehow by outsmartsing ze nidz

IIRC the Ultramarines outsmarted the Tyranids by challenging the Swarmlord to a duel. Only for the Swarmlord to get jumped by a bunch of Ultramarine heavy support and killed him. Ever since then the Swarmlord hasn't responded to honorable duels or something like it.

 Jinx Magiga wrote:

 Leech wrote:
The Swarmlord.

I'm a huge Tyranid fan-boy but I don't like how they wrote the Swarmlord.

It's written as a personality and an individual in the swarm. The swarm has no individuals.

Tyranids outsmarting everybody is obvious, everyone else is a lower form of life. However it should occur as a response of the Hive mind (in game terms special rules etc) . Not some Skeletor wannabe pretending he's a Hive Tyrant.

I found that with the introduction of the Swarmlord they anthropomorphized the Tyranids and made them more like human villians. This has dumbed them down and made them more like every baddie out there.

I've always seen the Swarmlord as the Manifestation of the Hive Mind itself.
It's the best strategic genius because it has EVERYTHING every single tyranid ever learned in it's head.
Then again,that is pretty much nulified at Ichar IV when Marneus CallGak beats him somehow by outsmartsing ze nidz

Hive Tyrants have always been incredibly intelligent and "self aware" in a sense. The Swarmlord is just a particularly experienced Hive Tyrant consciousness that can be imprinted on a Hive Tyrant body during maturation.

The Valedor novel actually features the Swarmlord, and when the Eldar Farseer protagonist looks at its "strand of fate" he sees the individual intelligence of the Swarmlord, but also that this individuality is just a clever illusion that we force upon it to understand what we are dealing with; the Swarmlord is just another in a long line of vat-bred Hive Tyrants with a specific intelligence imprinted onto it, just as much a part of the Hive Mind as any other Tyranid. Valedor even sheds doubt on the Swarmlord being truly unique.

All Tyranids are "individuals" in a sense, but they are all chained up inside the synaptic web. The group mind dominates its components. Synapse creatures are the conduits through which that dominion is orchestrated, because they interract with the universe on a smaller scale and can better oversee the swarms. It's all part of one vast structure though.

 Vaktathi wrote:

 Troike wrote:

 Vaktathi wrote:
To be fair, the Codex Tempestus Scions book is also one of the worst reading codex books out there (I'm a huge IG fan and always wanted a Stormtrooper book, and reading this book felt like reading bad fanfiction, with instructors squashing children's heads with hammers and whatnot), and is, in and of itself

Eh, I liked it. I think it was suitably dark and brutal, the Imperium using the most extreme sort of education to produce its most loyal and elite human soldiers.

 Vaktathi wrote:
a pretty massive retcon of some long established things

How so? The Stormtroopers aside, it felt fairly in-line with the old studio fluff on the Scholas, to me. We were told that they were tough places, and this stuff just seemed like an expansion to that.

It really just read...poorly to me. I mean, I love me some Grimdark, but the Scion book just read like violence-porn and took things beyond the level of believability.

I mean, it's one thing to have lots of recruits die or suffer injuries in harsh training. People's bodies shut down, live fire exercises go wrong. someone slips and falls, equipment fails, etc. It's one thing to die in intense training, but when it involves active killings, especially on the part of or orders of instructors, it just stops being believable.

TL;DR It read like Harry Potter torture porn to me.

Maybe they wanted to emulate the training scenes from Starship Troopers but even more Grim Dark?

Maybe? Though even in there, the one death was an accident, and the knife incident with the instructor was to show a specific point related to the lesson being taught and then medics were immediately called over, as opposed to bashing kids heads in for disobedience and having recruits kill other recruits (who as far as could be told were exemplary students) just as loyalty tests.

Well, the brutality of the instructors and the fact that they have potentially lethal live fire training kind of reminded me of it. Either way, whoever wrote it clearly wanted to have a "training from hell" aspect to the Stormtroopers lore but forgot that having GrimDark for the sake of GrimDark gives you GrimDerp.

That was kinda my impression. Grimdark is great, and I'm all for gratuitous violence, there's Grimdark...and then there's Grimderp as you say.

It's like the difference between Schindler's List, and Starship Troopers, and Hostel, they're all grim and dark and violent, but one is an evocative story where the violence is something that actually happened and is a major issue in the story, while another uses violence to accentuate and enhance the action and visual elements, while the last is torture porn, and the Scion book started reading to me most like the last there.

 ashcroft wrote:
Perpetuals.

Every last word written about them.

I entirely agree, I just makes no sense at all.

ThatSwellFella wrote:
Ultramarines being second to the Emprah marines, and Black templars/space wolves striving to be like Calgar and ultramarines, but unable to match them because they told Guilliman where he can stick his smurfbook...

That's not what the 5th edition Codex says, if that's what you're referring to.

Several things that don't make sense to me:

1 - Space Orks. They're like Klingons, they fight everyone and everything all the time because they can. How the gak did they get to the point where they're a galactic player? By all counts they should have annihilated themselves early in their creation. Apparently people like soccer hooligans in space more than actual hard-sci fi.

2 - Eldar. THESE douchebags. Their numbers are so small, they make comments about it in every novel/codex/fan fiction and yet...they're willing to sacrifice entire armies for pointless gains, Mymeara anyone? If they're so amazing at running the galaxy why is it that they fix nothing? Could chalk this up to GW never letting any sort of progression happen with the story lines.

3 - The Ecclesiarchy and the Inquisition. You mean to tell me, the Emperor's last guiding words were to his most trusted of trusted homies, "Make sure you create orders that have no checks or balances, can kill/maim/destroy whatever they want just so long as they have this nifty little piece of metal, AND let them worship me as a god."? This annoys me beyond understanding.

4 - The whole "I'm a different Space Marine than you so we can't be bros until we've murdered gak together." or the massively idiotic "Your predecessor marine-brothers did something assbag-ish like ten thousand years ago so we can't fight together. Dick." Seriously? Professional soldiers TODAY don't act like this. Why are Space Marines described as petulant children?

5 - The Heresy. Beyond stupid. I can't write enough on how utterly cocked this entire series of events are.

 Frankenberry wrote:
Several things that don't make sense to me:

1 - Space Orks. They're like Klingons, they fight everyone and everything all the time because they can. How the gak did they get to the point where they're a galactic player? By all counts they should have annihilated themselves early in their creation. Apparently people like soccer hooligans in space more than actual hard-sci fi.

40k isn't hard scifi, it's Swords and Sorcery in Space.

 Frankenberry wrote:
Several things that don't make sense to me:

1 - Space Orks. They're like Klingons, they fight everyone and everything all the time because they can. How the gak did they get to the point where they're a galactic player? By all counts they should have annihilated themselves early in their creation. Apparently people like soccer hooligans in space more than actual hard-sci fi.

2 - Eldar. THESE douchebags. Their numbers are so small, they make comments about it in every novel/codex/fan fiction and yet...they're willing to sacrifice entire armies for pointless gains, Mymeara anyone? If they're so amazing at running the galaxy why is it that they fix nothing? Could chalk this up to GW never letting any sort of progression happen with the story lines.

3 - The Ecclesiarchy and the Inquisition. You mean to tell me, the Emperor's last guiding words were to his most trusted of trusted homies, "Make sure you create orders that have no checks or balances, can kill/maim/destroy whatever they want just so long as they have this nifty little piece of metal, AND let them worship me as a god."? This annoys me beyond understanding.

4 - The whole "I'm a different Space Marine than you so we can't be bros until we've murdered gak together." or the massively idiotic "Your predecessor marine-brothers did something assbag-ish like ten thousand years ago so we can't fight together. Dick." Seriously? Professional soldiers TODAY don't act like this. Why are Space Marines described as petulant children?

5 - The Heresy. Beyond stupid. I can't write enough on how utterly cocked this entire series of events are.

Eldar aren't really dying. The Eldar bitch and moan about how their numbers are so poor, but that's because at their height there were tredecillion Eldar in the Eldar Empire. Now there's -just- billions. However compared to the shear ridiculously large number that is a tredecillion compared to a "mere" couple billion.