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beast_gts wrote:
The Scouring timeline – How the Warhammer Studio worked with Black Library authors on the new series


One titbit from it -

Here are a few extracts from our Scouring master timeline – it’s unlikely that all of these events will appear in either novel or gaming book form, but they give a hint of things to come.

So does that confirm that Scouring gaming books are coming?

Certainly seems to imply that some events on the Scouring timeline will appear in "gaming books".

Did GW ever refer to their rules as "gaming books" before? Seems kinda weird. Like a "serious" publisher disdainfully having to market a choose your own adventure novel.

It was obvious from the start that what was needed was a convincing and consistent underlying ‘military history style narrative’, a historical backdrop for the character-driven stories the authors wished to tell in their novels, as well as setting things up for any potential future gaming books. This would serve to give both novels and gaming supplements a common foundation and keep the grand narrative moving in the right direction, which, as Warhammer fans know, culminates in the vengeful Loyalists casting the defeated Traitors into the Eye of Terror.

I feel this part made is clear that they are at least considering doing scouring gaming content in the future.

I mean GW has always operated on a "at some point in the future" basis so when the studio has redone all the events from the Heresy for round 2 I'm sure it will move to Siege then post Siege.

It'll be yonks away though. People thought we were getting Terra in HH2 but surprise it was a an edition within 3 years and a redo of Isstvan V.

Actually (trying not to sound like "into it before it was cool!" ) am already playing some Scoring-era gaming using 40k 2nd edition rules - we've had escaping Sons of Horus running into Aeldari raiding parties and attempting to obtain munitions from an Abhuman (Squat/Votaan) mining colony. Its a real cool setting I think and some of the new Corsair and Chaos marine minis are ideal for representing the rag-tag, broken legions trying to escape to the Eye of Terror.

It sounds more like expanding 30k. It's so directly connected to 30k that there's not much point in trying to separate them as two different games. It's closer to 30k than the fall of Cadia is to present day 40k.

Looking at the timeline for the Scouring be like, 'that's now how warfare works.'

"The enemy forces have collapsed, massive reinforcement waves have arrived, now begins the slow process of retaking moons! And little planetoids, and stuff!" Gamifying warfare for games is one thing, now it's got to be young-adult novelized too so they can keep publishing those cheap paperbacks. It feels like the Horus Heresy is less an epic galactic event, and more like a thing that's silly. It's a silly thing full of silly stuff and silly people. A Monty Python movie that they would never have had the budget to actually make.

Some things are just so much better if left to players to imagine out themselves. Though I do look forward to someday when GW's annual report states "We're not a game company... we're not a model company either, we're a terrible novel company."

I mean, pushing the Traitor forces back from Terra, the first stop would be, yknow, the Moon and then Mars.

Moon, Mars, wherever, just please PLEASE no more John Grammaticus or that ridiculous group of misfits they tagged him with.

(I'm 80% of the way through The end and the death part 1, no spoilers pls)

I'll never understand why GW chooses to make those galaxy spanning wars last for only a couple of years when they have a sandbox of literally ten thousand years and most of their main characters are basically immortal.
Seriously, 5 years? Was it clear that this era was that short before? I feel the HH should've lasted a couple hundred years as well instead of just a decade or what it is. The war of the Beast -you had the whole M32 to play with and decided to write a war where the Orks besieged and nearly broke the whole Imperium last only 2(!!) years!
This ain't a Star Trek series where 3 seasons are quite much to fill with an ongoing plot.

Sgt. Cortez wrote:
I'll never understand why GW chooses to make those galaxy spanning wars last for only a couple of years when they have a sandbox of literally ten thousand years and most of their main characters are basically immortal.
Seriously, 5 years? Was it clear that this era was that short before? I feel the HH should've lasted a couple hundred years as well instead of just a decade or what it is. The war of the Beast -you had the whole M32 to play with and decided to write a war where the Orks besieged and nearly broke the whole Imperium last only 2(!!) years!
This ain't a Star Trek series where 3 seasons are quite much to fill with an ongoing plot.

I think the bigger problem is taking what was a setting and turning into a "grand narrative"... I think having crossed that particular rubicon, particularly with the focus on all the (super)hero melodrama inherently shrinks the universe and there isn't much that can be done to fix it when that is the approach.

I think The Scouring might be the ideal opening narrative to introduce a space battle game. After all, there has been rumours of 30K-era BFG.

Sgt. Cortez wrote:
Seriously, 5 years? Was it clear that this era was that short before?

They added, altered and retconned a lot since 1988, but somehow not changed that it was less than a decade.

World of Warcraft has the same issue of making everything be TEN THOUSAND YEARS old but then never doing anything meaningful with that span of time, including making these supposed immortals act like teenagers.

I don't know what it is about TEN THOUSAND YEARS that makes it so special.

 Ashiraya wrote:
World of Warcraft has the same issue of making everything be TEN THOUSAND YEARS old but then never doing anything meaningful with that span of time, including making these supposed immortals act like teenagers.

I don't know what it is about TEN THOUSAND YEARS that makes it so special.

You can refer to it as a hundred hundred years, which sounds funky. The expression seems to have fallen out of favor in more recent times, though.

 Gert wrote:
I mean, pushing the Traitor forces back from Terra, the first stop would be, yknow, the Moon and then Mars.

That part was meant to be covered by my, that's not how warfare will ever work comment. Because if you have forces enough to hold the Moon and Mars, then maybe you might have thought to deploy them during the pivotal Siege of Terra, the battle which decided the entire conflict. Unless of course, the Chaos Gods tell you to hold them back so you can stretch that book line out more.

After all, who can forget the Fall of Constantinople in 1453. Followed then by the Fall of the Immediate Suburbs of Constantinople in 1454. Proceeded then by the Fall of the Exburbs of Constantinople in 1455. Which then set up the famous Fall of the Outlying Villages Immediately Surrounding Constantinople in 1456. And then of course... well I don't want spoil anything for people who haven't read the whole Fall of Constantinople novel series.

I think initially there was a very real reason Rick Priestley set the Heresy 10000 years before and he has said as much in his interviews - basically for all of it to be lost in the mists of time. No one can be sure what happened, the missing Legions, and all of these semi-mythical characters that may or may not have existed because it was all so bloody long ago.
Then all of the heroes are long gone and dead, and all that time later the Imperium is holding on by its fingertips.

Of course things have evolved a lot since then, both the nature of 40k, and with the Heresy not only do we know those characters exist, but even what brand of footwear they were wearing on a given Tuesday.

It’s also a comfortably and relateably long period of time.

In terms of human history, it’s around the same time period from the building of Gobekli Tepe to today, give or take a thousand years. Which is a long old time, but not one we necessarily struggle to comprehend.

 frankelee wrote:
That part was meant to be covered by my, that's not how warfare will ever work comment. Because if you have forces enough to hold the Moon and Mars, then maybe you might have thought to deploy them during the pivotal Siege of Terra, the battle which decided the entire conflict. Unless of course, the Chaos Gods tell you to hold them back so you can stretch that book line out more.

Almost like there were large numbers of Traitors who fled the Siege and stopped at Luna and Mars to plunder them. Oh yeah, and Mars was entirely held by the Dark Mechanicum, which was at that very point building up more forces for the upcoming re-conquest of the Galaxy under the rule of Horus.

Or maybe Horus was making sure the important locations the Traitors had taken had defences in case of counterattacks by yknow, Guilliman, the Lion, Russ, and Corax so they didn't immediately lose the vital gene-forges of Luna and the Forge World to end all Forge Worlds.

But of course, no general would ever leave troops in defence of their vital supply locations. That would be utterly insane. /s

So if they're gonna do a Scouring game, do you think we're gonna get updated Mk7 Marines?

Mark 7 is inevitably going to come, whether as part of the Scouring or just as a Siege of Terra-era kit.

 Gert wrote:

 frankelee wrote:
That part was meant to be covered by my, that's not how warfare will ever work comment. Because if you have forces enough to hold the Moon and Mars, then maybe you might have thought to deploy them during the pivotal Siege of Terra, the battle which decided the entire conflict. Unless of course, the Chaos Gods tell you to hold them back so you can stretch that book line out more.

Almost like there were large numbers of Traitors who fled the Siege and stopped at Luna and Mars to plunder them. Oh yeah, and Mars was entirely held by the Dark Mechanicum, which was at that very point building up more forces for the upcoming re-conquest of the Galaxy under the rule of Horus.

Or maybe Horus was making sure the important locations the Traitors had taken had defences in case of counterattacks by yknow, Guilliman, the Lion, Russ, and Corax so they didn't immediately lose the vital gene-forges of Luna and the Forge World to end all Forge Worlds.

But of course, no general would ever leave troops in defence of their vital supply locations. That would be utterly insane. /s

Per Ashes of the Imperium, a nominal force had been left behind on Luna to enforce Horus' will on the local Selenar. They were entrenched, but still were dug out by novel's end.

Mars is a much bigger problem due to the power of the Dark Mechanicum. We know the loyalists retook the world but it can't have been easy.

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
It’s also a comfortably and relateably long period of time.

In terms of human history, it’s around the same time period from the building of Gobekli Tepe to today, give or take a thousand years. Which is a long old time, but not one we necessarily struggle to comprehend.

I think it definitely is a span of time that people struggle to comprehend, GW's writers in particular. It absolutely does not feel like Heresy was ten millennia ago, it feels like it was couple of hundred years ago at most.Ten millennia is twice the length of recorded human history, no matter how stagnant the society is, everything would be completely different. Instead we have the exact same organisations and same tech and even same specific expressions of that tech (like the Mk7 armour that was mentioned) sticking around for all that time. It is just laughable.

When the Heresy was just a myth, things made far more sense, as none of it needed to be true. It could have been just some stories made around barely remembered past, and similarities to the 40th millennium would mostly be just how things in that era imagined it. Like in medieval art biblical or ancient Greek characters were depicted in medieval gear, as people did not really know how it actually was back then.

Most of the numbers in 40K are things people have a hard time actually comprehending.

The distances between planets, let alone systems or the idea of an Empire spanning the Galaxy.
Heck 10K years might even be too short, even with travel faster than light and through the Warp.

 Overread wrote:
Most of the numbers in 40K are things people have a hard time actually comprehending.

The distances between planets, let alone systems or the idea of an Empire spanning the Galaxy.
Heck 10K years might even be too short, even with travel faster than light and through the Warp.

Yet the empire spanning civil war concludes in five years...

Travel is the main reason I wish the Heresy timeline would be extended, honestly. Seven years with warp travel taken into account is just very, very little. Travelling from one system to another can take months. It took Valdor multiple months to get from Beta-Garmon to Prospero, for example (to say nothing of his passage from Terra to Beta-Garmon prior, which is not stated exactly how long it took, but he arrived one and a half months -after- Russ did, despite Russ finishing up a battle and going to Fenris for resupply first!).

 Ashiraya wrote:
Travel is the main reason I wish the Heresy timeline would be extended, honestly. Seven years with warp travel taken into account is just very, very little. Travelling from one system to another can take months. It took Valdor multiple months to get from Beta-Garmon to Prospero, for example (to say nothing of his passage from Terra to Beta-Garmon prior, which is not stated exactly how long it took, but he arrived one and a half months -after- Russ did, despite Russ finishing up a battle and going to Fenris for resupply first!).

I guess you can explain this by virtue of the unusual warp calmness mentioned in Era of Ruin. Warp travel was perhaps the easiest it had been in millennia for a few years after the Heresy.

After the Heresy, yes, but I am talking about the Heresy itself, during which Warp travel was most certainly not eased (especially if you were loyalist, or one of the traitors who hadn't embraced sorcery yet)!

I can see 3 different settings:

Early Heresy: hardly any demons, no chaos corrupted troops (exceptions for Word Bearers).

Late Siege: everything is on the table.

Post Siege: some factions may play differently (example: Blood Angels), limitations on force or and Primarchs. Possibly some new rules/traits.

I don't really think there's a need to separate them, considering 40k itself covers a span of time that is easily more than ten times the Heresy and Scouring combined.

If they can fit everything from Badab to Five Hundred Worlds in one game, we can too.

Sunday Preview – The bigger, brighter Legio Custodes - Legio Custodes Battle Group & Liber, plus the Glaive & Journal Tactica – Mailed Fist: Legiones Astartes Super-heavy Tanks.