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The old ones and the necrons fought and the Eldar and krork were left standing.

What happened in the tens of millions of years between then and now?

The Eldar would have 6000 imperiums worth of history and stories before even the Emperor existed.

I would love to see what stories and calamities occurred during this time. The rise of the Eldar galactic Empire.

There may have even been species that lived whole eons in that time only to die out.

The degeneration of the krork into the Orks, the loss of the brainboyz etc.

Colonial history.

Nothing of import happened in the galaxy until man strode the stars.

The fact that the Eldar have this huge, vast, complex history, full of technological and cultural achievements beyond imagining, and almost all of it was wrecked in a single instance due to their self-absorbed debauchery, and now all that's left of them is a nearly extinct race with a few scattered craft worlds who've had to devote themselves to strict monastic practice, some maiden worlds who voluntarily abandoned all the tech and culture, a few travelling interdimensional performance art troupes, and a big interdimensional pirate city of sadistic, selfish backstabbers whose souls are all slowly draining away… well, that's the whole dang tragedy and point of them, innit! They were galactic top-dog for millions of years, and now they're a just a small dying shadow of their former selves, with 99.999994% of their culture and history and tech already lost forever. And the aforementioned performance art troupes being the only ones who are making a serious effort at preserving their culture and knowledge, while all the other Eldar are preoccupied with the constant struggle just to survive.

That's true in the same way the horus heresy was the tragic past of the decaying superstitious imperium and we know how little that particular event has been explored.


We don't even get much of the actual fall itself. They expanded the heresy to a size and complexity vastly beyond its origin as a few lines describing something that happened in the imperiums past, they can do exactly the same to the fall.

There is no magical reason the imperium is capable of having millions of extra words invented from nothing but no one else can.

I'm pretty tired of primarch of the week and who is more loyal or the bestest son.

There is plenty to explore beyond this sliver of time

Hellebore wrote:
That's true in the same way the horus heresy was the tragic past of the decaying superstitious imperium and we know how little that particular event has been explored.


We don't even get much of the actual fall itself. They expanded the heresy to a size and complexity vastly beyond its origin as a few lines describing something that happened in the imperiums past, they can do exactly the same to the fall.

There is no magical reason the imperium is capable of having millions of extra words invented from nothing but no one else can.

I'm pretty tired of primarch of the week and who is more loyal or the bestest son.

There is plenty to explore beyond this sliver of time

Well, since one of the facets of GWs' newfound economic savyness is due to them having discovered that they actually have an interesting setting within their own intellectual property to sell, I suspect you won't have to wait all that long before they more or less run out of space marine materiel and has to try and recuperate their losses by moving longer back in their universe' history. They will move forward too, but by god, let's not think about that before we have had some more coffee.

Now, when the last drop of material is squeezed out of the Heresy, they will jump on the Unification wars. It is going to be horrible, with all the mythical grandeur, mysticism, problematic, gluttonous yet satirical indulgence in humanity's worst sides streamlined and made selleable to kids. Emps' totalitarian ideology and genocidal madness will be downplayed, a random map closely resembling the one of present day Earth will be drawn, Thunder Warriors will be the NEXT BIG THING, even bigger than Primaris! ...

After that disaster* they will move on to Eldar, which might turn out great, I think, because where else are they gonna go?

EDIT: *I'm in a bad mood today, just ignore me

There's still plenty of history they could tell storys in yes, although personally I'd prefer it remain ambiguous rather than getting the 'Heresy' or 'Beast' treatment.

Currently I see the Imperium as the 'main character' of the setting because it is the most relatable (we're humans too after all, we experience the world in the the same way) and they've had decades to slowly build up the story of the Imperium.

Telling a galaxy spanning space opera whilst introducing and fleshing out Eldar pre-fall politics and culture along with getting us to relate to the characters is something only the tip-top sci-fi writers could do, and they certainly don't work for GW!
Eldar, with their heightened emotions, long lives and psychic abilities, should experience the world in a fundimentally different way to a human but GW has never really got that across effectively.

When you think about the mosts successful GW stories, Seige of Vracks, 3rd War for Armageddon, Badab War etc., they're all small scale military histories with a human viewport.

Hellebore wrote:
The old ones and the necrons fought and the Eldar and krork were left standing.

What happened in the tens of millions of years between then and now?

The Eldar would have 6000 imperiums worth of history and stories before even the Emperor existed.

I would love to see what stories and calamities occurred during this time. The rise of the Eldar galactic Empire.

There may have even been species that lived whole eons in that time only to die out.

The degeneration of the krork into the Orks, the loss of the brainboyz etc.

Gav Thorpes Jain Zar is the closest we have to this. It delves into the pre fall Eldar and the experience of the fall itself. It’s brilliantly done, I really hope he does some more using the Phoenix Lords series to expand on this.

Actually there’s some things we know of the 30.000 years before the great crusade, though not so much on the Eldar front. We know the eldar populated the universe. We know when the great crusade happened it was a unification of humanity, not a re-settling. Hence it seems the Eldar lost a galaxy spanning war before the fall. We know humans made extensive use of robots at the time and that the phoenix shrines weren’t introduced yet so I guess most of the fighting was made by wraith constructs and robots. We know that sometime after humanity populated the stars two bad things happened, the men of Iron civil war and the age of strife. After these two events the fall happened, though the age of strife may have been caused by the fall (Or vice versa) so who knows. So the way I see it either the Eldar where already in decline long before the fal. Humanity started populating the galaxy and the Eldar lost a war so badly they where kicked back into the area that was to become the eye of terror.

Come to think of it shouldn’t there be Eldar ruins literally everywhere? Maybe there is.

Imperium as the 'main character' of the setting because it is the most relatable

I'd sooner sympathize with the Hrud than the Imperium. But you are right, GW sees it as the main good guys, and worse, most of current-day BL writers started out as BL readers it seems, and as such come with Imperial fanboy attitude. So don't expect anything much beyond more Adeptus Fellaticus.

Maybe you should try sympathising for the human characters then...

The Imperium makes sense as the main characters as it's much much easier to write things from a human or altered human perspective than it is for utterly inhuman aliens.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Nerak wrote:
Actually there’s some things we know of the 30.000 years before the great crusade, though not so much on the Eldar front. We know the eldar populated the universe. We know when the great crusade happened it was a unification of humanity, not a re-settling. Hence it seems the Eldar lost a galaxy spanning war before the fall. We know humans made extensive use of robots at the time and that the phoenix shrines weren’t introduced yet so I guess most of the fighting was made by wraith constructs and robots. We know that sometime after humanity populated the stars two bad things happened, the men of Iron civil war and the age of strife. After these two events the fall happened, though the age of strife may have been caused by the fall (Or vice versa) so who knows. So the way I see it either the Eldar where already in decline long before the fal. Humanity started populating the galaxy and the Eldar lost a war so badly they where kicked back into the area that was to become the eye of terror.

Come to think of it shouldn’t there be Eldar ruins literally everywhere? Maybe there is.

The Eldar were not in decline before the fall in terms of power. They were very clearly unrivalled. Nobody was a threat to them at all.

The Age of Strife and Fall are roughly at similar times as the increase in Warp Storms was caused by Slaanesh brewing. The reason there aren't many Eldar ruins around is because a lot of them just lived in the Webway and there's a certain Imperium that destroys everything.

pm713 wrote:
Maybe you should try sympathising for the human characters then...

That would be much easier if the majority of Imperial POV books put out by Black Library didn't focus on Space Marines.

Maybe you should try sympathising for the human characters then...

there are very few books about the tau or normal humans though, so it's hard- most seem to be about Imperials.

Cronch wrote:

Maybe you should try sympathising for the human characters then...

there are very few books about the tau or normal humans though, so it's hard- most seem to be about Imperials.

What? How are tau human characters but ACTUAL HUMAN PEOPLE aren't?

Well, they're more human than 90% of imperial characters who are mostly just religious robots.

The galaxy has hundreds of billions of stars. The imperium controls around a million worlds. Even at the lowest end of the galaxy estimate (100 billion stars) and the assumption that they control the systems within which those planets exist, the imperium would only control 0.001% of the galaxy. The Eldar empire could've been a billion worlds strong (1% of the galaxy) and it could still have never overlapped with those occupied by humans.

I actually think the main reason earth survived long enough for humanity to reach the stars without a waaagh overrunning it, or innumerable alien threats destroying it, is due to the Eldar empire.

This is inference and supposition only, but it is logically consistent.

Take the following information:


The Eldar were masters of the galaxy and were so protected by their Automata that they could luxuriate without a single care for the violence of other species unless they chose to
The great crusade occurred after the Eldar empire collapsed - around a thousand years
In those years xenos empires emerged and the Orks swarmed the galaxy
The imperium spent most of its time fighting off massive Ork waaaghs

So while the Eldar empire existed, it had kept the Orks in check. The Eldar could not give themselves to excess in toto, if they had to worry about perpetual ork waaaghs and primork sized creatures running through their civilisation. Therefore, their Automata kept the Orks subdued to a very manageable level.

We can see what the galaxy looked like after those forces disappeared. Just that intervening time was enough to create the wild feral space the crusade conquered.

So, indirectly, by keeping the Orks in check for however long they did, the Eldar shielded earth from destruction and humanity grew protected in their shadow.