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DeathKorp_Rider wrote:
Doesn’t this effectively mean they are going to be seperate from the Inperium? Doesn’t sound like they have any intention of swearing fealty to the emperor

It's not like the Mechanicus really swore fealty either - it's more of a trade agreement relationship. The Admech pay lip service to the Emperor being the Omnissiah, but the Forge Worlds more or less do what they want, exchanging technology for raw materials (including people) with the Imperium.

The Leagues of Votann probably were strong enough to require serious effort in conquering, but the Horus Heresy probably mucked up any chance of the Imperium to give it a go.

So the Leagues go 'yay humanity' once in a while and trade stuff with the Imperium.

 John Prins wrote:
It seems from the article that the Votann include the personalities of important squat ancestors. This is tech the Tau have dabbled in (Puretide Engram Chip, Aun'va Hologram), and it sounds a lot like the Kree Supreme Intelligence from Marvel Comics.

I'm not fond of the 'computer can't handle 10000 years of operation' concept, because if it's a true AI with lots of engrams you think they would have recognized any long haul issues after the first 1000 years or so of operation and found a work-around - and presumably before the Age of Strife got into full swing. I mean, if an AI can't foresee and solve a problem like "I need more memory and processing power", it's not much of an AI to begin with. Same if it can't foresee issues with having lots of personality engrams loaded into it memory banks.

I'd much rather have the Votann being properly inscrutable AI playing some kind of long game the Squats themselves don't understand, but the AIs run the show and there's not a lot they can do about it even if they did suspect the Votann to be having ulterior motives.

Dunno if it is "true" AI, but (as ArbitorIan points out elsewhere) the name is clearly heavily inspired by the old high Germanic name for Odin (Wuotan) and these things that share that name, assuming the first picture in the WHC article are them, are a reference to the head of Mímir.

So, yeah, looks like they're going heavily in the Norse mythology with them.

 John Prins wrote:
It seems from the article that the Votann include the personalities of important squat ancestors. This is tech the Tau have dabbled in (Puretide Engram Chip, Aun'va Hologram), and it sounds a lot like the Kree Supreme Intelligence from Marvel Comics.

I'm not fond of the 'computer can't handle 10000 years of operation' concept, because if it's a true AI with lots of engrams you think they would have recognized any long haul issues after the first 1000 years or so of operation and found a work-around - and presumably before the Age of Strife got into full swing. I mean, if an AI can't foresee and solve a problem like "I need more memory and processing power", it's not much of an AI to begin with. Same if it can't foresee issues with having lots of personality engrams loaded into it memory banks.

I'd much rather have the Votann being properly inscrutable AI playing some kind of long game the Squats themselves don't understand, but the AIs run the show and there's not a lot they can do about it even if they did suspect the Votann to be having ulterior motives.

From what I read I don’t think they were full AI, they were super computers used to solve problems, manage space travel and the STCs. It’s only recently (in the context of their long life span) that they have developed some eccentricities that are giving the appearance of personalities. My interpretation anyway.

I wonder if GW will will formalise the whole Tyranids eating them to near extinction story as that might be a reason why they have become so dependent on the Votann and started to revere them. It might also explain why the Votann started to break down as they rapidly started trying to solve the problem of the nids eating huge swathes of the population, and in the end they could only solve it by doing something drastic like nuking 80% of the population

I'd be disappointed to see the Tyranid thing played out, it was a quickfire attempt to answer a random question and people hooked onto it as canon.
Having a species make its decisions based on the calculations of a great machine, only for the machines to begin to fail thousands of years down the line, is good enough on its own without making the Leagues *have* to be another regressive society relying on genocide. They're clearly intended to be a foil to the Imperium, just like the T'au, let them be that foil.

Millenia old computers. Going a bit eccentric. Everyone believed they were dead Dave?



Boys from the Dwarf indeed.

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
Millenia old computers. Going a bit eccentric. Everyone believed they were dead Dave?



Boys from the Dwarf indeed.

Good spot! I wonder what their shuttlecraft are made from

Adapted mining ships. Rumours of Men of Iron. Seemingly computerised versions of the deceased……all we need is a Felinid.

I can see a situation where the Tyranids attack and the Squats ask their computers for how to survive. The computer answer is that it is impossible. They are too numerous to hide yet not strong enough or numerous enough to fight them off successfully. The Squats ask again for the computer to work on a solution. After processing and as most of the Leagues get eaten, eventually the answer is "Now you are not too numerous to hide". And so they hide until the Tyranids pass through.

Also let's be real here. If they retcon or ignore the Tyranids killed the squats thing, it would be totally disrespectful to all the Nid fans out there.

Think about it, Nids are the only faction bad*ss enough to make someone's army unplayable for two decades lol.

Please don't take that away from us GW!

 Dekskull wrote:
Also let's be real here. If they retcon or ignore the Tyranids killed the squats thing, it would be totally disrespectful to all the Nid fans out there.

Good thing it was never a part of the background in the first place then...

The tyranid thing isn't even a canon event in the slightest though. It was an answer to an angry fan mail letter and in the same letter the unnamed GW employee suggested they'd they'd been sacrificed to the Emperor for making too much noise with their motorbikes.

It was actually mentioned in the compendium of one of the first ever 40k novels - the inquisition war series by Ian Watson.

You mean the books that have been massively edited from their original script and are cursed beyond rational belief?

As the LOV and Imperium humans share a common ancestor I wonder if this makes it more of a friendly place for humans to go and live, assuming LOV society is not a brutal as the imperium. If humans will go and live amongst the Tau as a better option then I'd have thought they would be happy to live with the LOV

I'm assuming that genetically Imperial humans and LOV abhumans are relates like neanderthal and homosapians and so there might even be some inter breeding which means there maybe humans living with them. I suppose we know there are some people from the LOV living on imperial worlds like Necromunda.

mrFickle wrote:
As the LOV and Imperium humans share a common ancestor I wonder if this makes it more of a friendly place for humans to go and live, assuming LOV society is not a brutal as the imperium. If humans will go and live amongst the Tau as a better option then I'd have thought they would be happy to live with the LOV.

Dwarfs in fiction traditionally are very insular and distrusting of outsiders, from what we've seen of how they jealously guard these Votann from said outsiders I don't really see anything different in that respect.

The lore tease is amazing. I think it has really great potential.

I think it's very likely that the new LoV codex will be the fastest selling codex in the history of W40K. Not for game play purposes, but solely for the lore. That's why I'll be buying it.

So this new direction in the fluff is interesting. It's the first major shake up of the background* since the 3rd edition Necron and Tau codicies that came out within a year of each other. It's nicely building both the old Squat material from 1st edition and those tantalising hints of 'Men of Iron' from the 3rd edition rulebook. GW world building has always been best when they carve out from old hints and whispers from past work and take inspiration for ideas from some of the best Sci-fi and fantasy (as much as Moorcock and his ilk grumble). AI is a much bigger topic now than it was 20 years ago and seems the right time to inject that into the material.

Now, for me the biggest loose end is not just the Tyranid thing (which as mentioned above was a throwaway line) but the serious work that was done by Jes Godwin, among others, to define the Demiurg. If I remeber correctly these were revealed in early 2001 in the old BFG magazine. But from comments Jervis made they was a concerted effort to introduce them sometime before that as a full replacement for the Squats when they were a kind of silent embarrassment ignored from 2nd edition. Now they could just quitely drop them but they built them up so much that some kind of connection with the Squats will be necessary - whether they retcon them as non-Xenos or just a similar semi-allied alien species, I don't know, but the newsletter seems to me they aren't going to drop them. I hope they do something cool with this, making them a Tau aligned, so abhuman they seem xenos subspecies would be a really nice way to tie this saga to together, I'd say, though that's probably a controversial opinion.

Isn't it funny how GW back in the late 90s/early 2000s was so worried about 40k being seen as fantasy in Space, but after years of relentless focus on Imperium vs Choas and HH the revamped "Squats" might actually be just what the game needs to refocus a little on the alien/galatic side to the background which I feel has been neglected in the last 15 or so years.

* Apart from the Guilleman plot line which was kind of more of the same, a Horus Heresying of the background that had been the dominant strain in 40k since about 2005.

I kind of prefer the Demiurg stay Xenos than them being retconned back into something Kin-related. Allies, sure... Seperate evolution, maybe... But keep them a distinct race.

I actually prefer the opposite. I would prefer the Demiurg be a major branching of the Kin, in an analogous way that Eldar Corsairs or Dark Eldar or Exodites are a branch of Eldar. The Demiurg could be the freelance nomadic miners, traders, and mercenaries, so most like Eldar Corsairs. Perhaps they could be ones that have been cast out or decided to separate or stop revering their ancestor cores for whatever reason. Maybe the Leagues are still tied to their ancestor cores and fight to protect them or get resources to try and keep them going, while the Demiurg rove further and have done business further afield, such as with the Tau.

 John Prins wrote:
I'm not fond of the 'computer can't handle 10000 years of operation' concept, because if it's a true AI with lots of engrams you think they would have recognized any long haul issues after the first 1000 years or so of operation and found a work-around - and presumably before the Age of Strife got into full swing. I mean, if an AI can't foresee and solve a problem like "I need more memory and processing power", it's not much of an AI to begin with. Same if it can't foresee issues with having lots of personality engrams loaded into it memory banks.

Try putting more ram and processors into working PC and see how well it will go. And that's assuming they even know how to make said memory/processors. For all we know it's all salvaged Dark Age tech that was produced only on Terra and now no one knows how to make replacements. Might even give the Votann motivation to venture out of Leagues, looking for wrecked Men of Iron for parts (which would be very hush-hush because both Admech and remaining Men of Iron would have rather big problem with this).

Also, you're assuming anyone even noticed this. If PC was getting slower by say 5% every 100 years, both users and the system might not notice anything is wrong but after 10.000 years, you'd have massive slowdowns. Especially seeing AI doesn't have set 'speed' like humans but depends on available processing power and from its point of view, anything works like it always did, the outside world just got faster for some reason.

Iracundus wrote:
The existence of the Squats/Leagues of Votann is interesting because it also punctures the lie of the Imperium being the only way for humanity to survive.

And you reached this non-sequitur how exactly?

For all we know, they only exist thanks to Imperium defeating all challenges to their existence. Much like Luxembourg wasn't annexed by either France or Germany because the other power blocked all attempts to do so - it's like claiming Iceland or Taiwan is as powerful as USA as their military alliance stopped all invasion attempts then go for really ridiculous conclusion it wasn't the threat of US military that mainly dissuaded enemies but the mighty Lögreglan that did so

 Crimson wrote:

 godardc wrote:
Yeah it's a pretty well established fluff that thinking machines end up corrupted. You need a soul, like, a part living machine (servitors) to remain pure and avoid corruption
But whatever...

That's just some bizarre Imperial superstition.

Yeeeah, it's not like full half of Chaos range consists of corrupted machines, vehicles, mechanisms, and other robotic gak-- Oh wait

Not only it does, but virtually every single mechanical bit of Chaos gear, down to armor plates and guns, is mutated, changed, or otherwise twisted into thirsting blood and souls. But gee, all the daemon engines, knights, dark mechanicum, hereteks, obliterators, soul grinders and rest of the stuff is just superstition, eh? Like giant rats in WFB that totally don't exist?

 Mentlegen324 wrote:
No it isn't. That's a belief from the Mechanicus that ties in to their technology-as-religion and backwards superstitious views, it's not something that's meant to be taken as being true.

Except we know it's very much true and possible to do from perspective of the dudes who actually know what they are doing (chaos sorcerers and various daemons). We also know Imperial wards and protections against them are very much effective. Does this mean everything Imperium does is perfectly rational and sensible? Of course not, there is probably ton of misunderstood or corrupted thinking and useless rituals mixed in anti-chaos protocols, but that's the funny thing - warp operates on faith so the badly mangled text on purity seal will still protect whatever it's on because the creator believes it will work.

If Tau can create a greater daemon of greater good with their totally (supposedly) rationalist thinking, the claim Imperium is afraid for nothing is really laughable because Imperium saw not one, not two, but three periods of reality turning upside down and doing exactly what their "superstitious" views said it can do - by that point, it would be superstitious and irrational to claim Mechanicus is wrong, not the other way around. Observations, badly understood and suppressed as they are, 100% confirm their fears. A caveman does not need to know what radioactivity is to fear glowing green rocks causing mutations, especially if his prayers can deflect the rays temporarily. You're trying to apply RL mode of thinking to a setting that very much doesn't run on your set of assumptions.

My theory as to why they’re so slow is maybe some guardsman asked one to make a very good cup of tea.

 Irbis wrote:
Yeeeah, it's not like full half of Chaos range consists of corrupted machines, vehicles, mechanisms, and other robotic gak-- Oh wait

Not only it does, but virtually every single mechanical bit of Chaos gear, down to armor plates and guns, is mutated, changed, or otherwise twisted into thirsting blood and souls. But gee, all the daemon engines, knights, dark mechanicum, hereteks, obliterators, soul grinders and rest of the stuff is just superstition, eh? Like giant rats in WFB that totally don't exist?

Chaos can of course corrupt basically anything. But superstition part is that bolting brains on your tech makes it less corruptible. Considering how commonly people are corrupted and souls seem to be the main connection to the warp this probably makes them more corruptible.

Imperium merely is conflating earlier AI rebellions with chaos corruption, even though these probably have nothing to do with each other.

 Irbis wrote:

 John Prins wrote:
I'm not fond of the 'computer can't handle 10000 years of operation' concept, because if it's a true AI with lots of engrams you think they would have recognized any long haul issues after the first 1000 years or so of operation and found a work-around - and presumably before the Age of Strife got into full swing. I mean, if an AI can't foresee and solve a problem like "I need more memory and processing power", it's not much of an AI to begin with. Same if it can't foresee issues with having lots of personality engrams loaded into it memory banks.

Try putting more ram and processors into working PC and see how well it will go. And that's assuming they even know how to make said memory/processors. For all we know it's all salvaged Dark Age tech that was produced only on Terra and now no one knows how to make replacements. Might even give the Votann motivation to venture out of Leagues, looking for wrecked Men of Iron for parts (which would be very hush-hush because both Admech and remaining Men of Iron would have rather big problem with this).

Also, you're assuming anyone even noticed this. If PC was getting slower by say 5% every 100 years, both users and the system might not notice anything is wrong but after 10.000 years, you'd have massive slowdowns. Especially seeing AI doesn't have set 'speed' like humans but depends on available processing power and from its point of view, anything works like it always did, the outside world just got faster for some reason.

I am not a super intelligent AI meant to run and preserve a society.

Presumably the Votann were designed by STC machines, which output blueprints to the people expected to build them. If I'm a super intelligent AI, the first thing I ask is that the STC blueprints that built me are properly preserved so that people can properly maintain me. Heck, I load the blueprints into my memory. These Votann seem to be literally designed to maintain a civilization, so designing them for expansion as civilizations grow it pretty obvious. This isn't like it's a sentient grain hauler going from point A to B. This is a top tier AI - maybe it doesn't have the creative capacity of a STC machine, but I expect it to be smarter than a room full of engineers.

If it can't expand its processing/memory by design, that's another matter. Then it was only a short term solution to a problem.

But if it's expected to maintain a civilization that also means its technology, which it is a fundamental and essential part of, so not knowing how to manufacture its own components or expand its architechture is pretty much failure by design.

And that ignores that the Votann also have the engrams of ancient squats, some of whom may have actually built the Votann in the first place so they know how it was done.

 Grimtuff wrote:

 Dekskull wrote:
Also let's be real here. If they retcon or ignore the Tyranids killed the squats thing, it would be totally disrespectful to all the Nid fans out there.

Good thing it was never a part of the background in the first place then...

The link appears to show how the idea of Nids eating the Squats propagated further within the studio itself, appearing both in the re-issue of the Ian Watson novels and again later in a written statement supposedly by Jervis Johnson himself.

None of which supports the notion that the Squats were consumed by the Tyranids in canon. *If* the design studio decided that's what happened to the Squats, it never made its way into more than one publication by an author who admits they might not have been given accurate information.

^It supports the notion that it was more than a single throwaway line written by a nobody.

It was still a single line that was written by a random GW employee that may have become the accepted "truth" within the design team because they had literally nothing else to work on and even then it wasn't included outside of an edited version of one of the most cursed 40k novels ever written.
It's still a whole load of nothing so the "GW better not retcon it" doesn't apply.

I'd say The Design Team is pretty authoritative, especially if we're talking about someone like Jervis.

It's a forum post from 2004 on a deleted website with no way to actually verify if Johnson wrote the post, bar asking the man himself. The only other time it is mentioned in a GW publication is an edited version of the Inquisition War trilogy purely to erase the Squat character from the original book.
The post says the Squats were "written out" but then that never actually appeared in writing. It could have been an internal memo or it could have just been a decision that never actually got written down anywhere but the fact remains, it's not a retcon because it was never there.
Changing the Ultramarines to have their main colour be red and saying it always was red, that's a retcon.
Not making the Squats be dead when it was never written in any significant capacity that they were dead? Not a retcon.

I don't care if it's a retcon or not, but claiming they weren't "written out" when they were literally removed from an entire series of novels seems rather daft.

A non-insignificant effort was made to remove a main character of three books, and one of the reasons given is apparently "eaten by Nids". It could be a tongue-in-cheek reference, or even a misunderstanding, but it's definitely there.