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 Overread wrote:
It is but its also riding the coat tails of Space Marine 2 being insanely popular.

It's pretty wild how Titus went from largely abandoned to essentially the lead character of the franchise on the back of a game that's just actually that good.

I'm probably more excited for what this means for SM3 than what it means for 40k, but I do really like the 500 Worlds as a microcosm of what 40k should be. I think places like Armageddon are hard to appreciate as a battlezone when far too many stories have been resolved with exterminatus. Shifting the goal to reclamation helps tell stories where that's not really an option and gives a lot of potential to tell stories with something at stake the readers can care about.

I also think, in general, the world is just not in a place where Grimdark is as fun as it was in the 80's and 90's. The doom and gloom isn't as edgy and rebellious as it once was. There's honestly value in characters who exist to challenge and change things. That doesn't mean that the setting shouldn't still be a meat grinder of human misery; just that it's okay for there to be factions that question it and even act to protect their people from it.

Lets face it it was going to be Titus or Gabriel and at least Titus has an army in the GW roster right now whilst everyone just mixes up Bloodangles and Bloodravens

Not a rumour per se but speaking with a friend we noticed the Eldar Corsair Voidscarred box it's absolutely gone from the GW webstore.

Maybe just an error in web listing but since there were Corsair rumours for new units maybe it's not a coincidence.

 Lord Perversor wrote:
Not a rumour per se but speaking with a friend we noticed the Eldar Corsair Voidscarred box it's absolutely gone from the GW webstore.

Maybe just an error in web listing but since there were Corsair rumours for new units maybe it's not a coincidence.

Probably getting re-packed in 40k branding instead of Kill Team branding.

So the revived Guilliman story arc is more of the idealist from 30K being worn down and becoming jaded, and having his ideals erode to the point he accepts the very things he initially wanted to change.

So for some reason, this has really stuck with me, and this ideas being worming around in my head so... here we go.

There was a rumour awhile back that seemed to be persistant that GW were looking to do some kind of Imperium civil war - not strictly a Heresy, but an internal struggle. I wonder if this 500 worlds thing is a very slow run into that; Guilliman builds a 'good' Imperium in the form of Imperium Secundus, which leads to other Primarchs returning to fill the void and a more idealised version of the Imperium.

Ever since GW did that campaign which focused on the idea of the Imperium being split in half there's been rumour that they were going to deal some kind of major blow to the Imperium and fragment a huge chunk of it.

It's also something a lot of xenos players get excited about because story and lore wise one of the biggest creative barriers is the dominance of the Imperium. Even Tau have to pull all kinds of tricks to survive against a faction that could, very easily, destroy them entirely.

So the idea of the Imperium fragmenting suddenly creates a lot of scope for minor xenos factions to "rise up"



It also creates options for GW to make even more Imperial stuff cause now you've more subfactions on the major part of the story to focus on

"Ultima Heresy" would certainly be far more interesting way to use Guilliman.

That would gonna be self repetition for GW. There should be something else. Like Big E stand up from throne and go rampaging around shocked what the gak people do.

 LunarSol wrote:

 Overread wrote:
It is but its also riding the coat tails of Space Marine 2 being insanely popular.

It's pretty wild how Titus went from largely abandoned to essentially the lead character of the franchise on the back of a game that's just actually that good.

I'm probably more excited for what this means for SM3 than what it means for 40k, but I do really like the 500 Worlds as a microcosm of what 40k should be. I think places like Armageddon are hard to appreciate as a battlezone when far too many stories have been resolved with exterminatus. Shifting the goal to reclamation helps tell stories where that's not really an option and gives a lot of potential to tell stories with something at stake the readers can care about.

I also think, in general, the world is just not in a place where Grimdark is as fun as it was in the 80's and 90's. The doom and gloom isn't as edgy and rebellious as it once was. There's honestly value in characters who exist to challenge and change things. That doesn't mean that the setting shouldn't still be a meat grinder of human misery; just that it's okay for there to be factions that question it and even act to protect their people from it.

SM2 wasn't that great it just had zero competition making all eyes and hype and social media metrics turn on it. Gameplay honestly wasn't as fun as SM1 and it carries a lot of the bloat and crap people have become burned out with over the last 12-15 years of games. But it was still tethered to a pretty simple and fun game mechanics. What it did really well was the aesthetics and ambience. I remember the forge world that had the amazing sky that looked straight out of the 2nd ed box art, bright with sharp white clouds contrasted with the gothic black structures around you. (Can't say the same for the other planet where despite being in the throes of a nid infestation all the plant life looked washed out and dull. Pretty boring place all around, though I did laugh at the copious numbers of cabbage trees on the exotic alien world. Weird to see Saber are an American dev with offices seemingly everywhere but Britain.) As before the magic of SM2 going viral wasn't just the increasing awareness of 40k as a setting (Which is, in turn, going to destroy it) but the lack of competition and people being burned out on the mainstay franchises at the time. I look forward to Saber burning the SM franchise into the ground through the same processes that killed it's competition. Will SM3 feel like a real sequel and not an expansion pack at full price? Probably not.

I find it interesting how some people are more and more openly saying they don't like the grim dark setting. Is it the difference between people who enjoy settings and people who enjoy narratives? The latter of which seem to need to identify with characters?

Also funny to see Acheran get squatted since a lot of Americans found it silly that there was a guy with a Scottish accent as a Space Marine. I thought it was cool but felt it aligned more with the Dark Angels, a disproportionate number of ads in Britain have Scottish accents since it was found people trusted and found it more authorative. But these are the same people who complained the Eldar had Irish accents (Everything should be latin and with English accents like the HH books!) despite half the vocabulary of the Eldar being derived from modern Irish. (Maybe too much to ask but old Irish would have been better) Still funny they kept the wrong noun/adjective order for uigebealach over 30 years after Ian Watson's mistake, it should be bealachuige, it'd translate as wayweb.Though as recently as Firewarrior the Space Marines were still depicted with American accents like they were in the older games in the early 90s. By Dawn of War they were fully English public school boys before a weird reversal with DoW 2 where most of the Blood Raven characters now had North American accents. Though given their icons and colours are inspired by Haida art (Due to Relic being from Vancouver) maybe that's why? Still make more sense then to make them sound and look more like First Nations.

I do like the arguable juxtaposition of the Loyal Primarchs being forced to save humanity from itself.

We’ve seen Guilliman rapidly learn he needs to tread carefully. Sure, the Imperium is in desperate, dire need of wholesale reformation. But now is not the time to Just Get It Done. Too many foes, too much dissent, too many fingers in too many pies.

The Astartes as a whole lack the numbers and kit to do a full New Crusade and push back the darkness. Instead they remain scuttling around trying to put out fires.

And so the backbone of the defence lies with the Administratum and Munitorum. Who are all pretty flipping religious.

There’s also the chat he had with The Emperor. I don’t think we’ve been told what transpired, but I imagine it was Paw explaining to Son “I don’t like it either, but we’ve got to go with it”.

I do want to see more background on The Lion though. He’s a proper no nonsense “if it stands in my way, I’ll smash its face in” Crusading Warrior. And to be honest? Imperium Nihilus is probably his ideal playground. It has no Administratum to tut and beancount or challenge his wisdom. So he’s comparatively free to Just Kick Everything’s Head In.

Also? He never consented to the Codex Astartes, on account he was in stasis. So, given that and the extreme circumstances? He can probably, at least initially, get away with swelling the Dark Angel ranks to nearer Legion strength.

Would he then agree to breaking those forces down into smaller, at least nominally autonomous chunks once things have settled down?

I mean….maybe? He’s a Primarch of action, but not one without reason.

I find it weird that people think the Heresy era Primarchs were good guys, or that the Heresy era Imperium had a coherent ideology. I mean the Iterator speeches and arguments in Horus Rising are laughably bad, I thought on purpose to lampshade that it's just hollow propaganda to keep people going.

The Primarchs are all inhuman freaks, weapons designed to conduct genocide on all Xenos and any human populations that didn't submit. They're just as bad as the modern Imperium, and also very stupid and ignorant of how the universe actually works if we're to take the novels as true.

Like MDG, you're talking about the Marines pushing back the darkness. The Marines ARE the darkness!

 Overread wrote:
Ever since GW did that campaign which focused on the idea of the Imperium being split in half there's been rumour that they were going to deal some kind of major blow to the Imperium and fragment a huge chunk of it.

It's also something a lot of xenos players get excited about because story and lore wise one of the biggest creative barriers is the dominance of the Imperium. Even Tau have to pull all kinds of tricks to survive against a faction that could, very easily, destroy them entirely.

So the idea of the Imperium fragmenting suddenly creates a lot of scope for minor xenos factions to "rise up"



It also creates options for GW to make even more Imperial stuff cause now you've more subfactions on the major part of the story to focus on

Well, if GW were still interested in keeping 40k as "human history in spaaace" then logically the Imperium should be aping the splitting of the Roman Empire at some point.

However, it seems to me that the current generation of writers are more interested in aping Warcraft and super hero movies, hence why every feels rather MCU-esque to me.
So what will probably happen is that there's going to be a civil war, but rather than the Imperium getting split in two Robot man will just unify the Imperium and make it noblebright.

NightReconnaissance wrote:

I find it interesting how some people are more and more openly saying they don't like the grim dark setting. Is it the difference between people who enjoy settings and people who enjoy narratives? The latter of which seem to need to identify with characters?

I think there's a lot of factors at play. First and foremost, while stagnation is the point, the appeal of the setting has been about new things. New horrors, new ways of dehumanizing people, new levels of bureaucratic incompetence. To a certain degree that has been fairly well explored and the horrors have become increasingly familiar and dare I say rote. While some of that is a lack of imagination, there's also a certain numbness once you've gotten past your mind being enslaved as a floating drone while your body is fed to your starving neighbors who are all devoured in a swarm of bugs before you finally see your world bathed in the fires of exterminatus. The novelty has worn off to a degree.

I think the world has also just changed a lot in the 40ish years since the setting was created. I think the setting feels less rebellious and fun in a world where people feel the weight of a crushing dystopia bearing down on them than it did in a time of relative optimism. When the rot is plain to see, people are just less interested in satire and more looking for exemplars willing to take action.

But then they should look to another setting, you know? 40K is built from the ground up to be this over the top worst regime imaginable so I think it's not salvageable and a clumsy attempt to do so with a "heroic" primarch is really about the worst way possible.

If you REALLY want to turn the setting into something with good guys, you need the Imperium to come up against a remnant human group that can go toe to toe with them and fight them off.

They could also just play Tau, in particular Farsight Enclaves.

But something tells me that isn't what they want.

 Tyran wrote:
They could also just play Tau, in particular Farsight Enclaves.

But something tells me that isn't what they want.

The twins are just propaganda for the Ethereals, since Farsight (the greatest hero of the Empire) told them where to shove it.

I've often said a big part of why its hard to recognize the Imperium as the bad guys is simply because the human rebels are cartoonishly evil monsters as the only real comparison.

I wouldn't say the Primarchs were good people, but I also wouldn't say its impossible for them to be what qualifies as heroes in the current age either. Carving out your own little empire and taking a stand against the self destructive machine humanity has become is both relatively heroic AND self serving of humanities interests.

I'm not sure why everyone is hypothesising about some grand narrative arc starting with 500 Worlds leading to a civil war or fundamental change.

Necrons will attack. They won't win despite having massive advantages. A tiny number of Marines will then repeatedly curbstomp them, possibly with the help of the laws of the setting literally altering to accomodate their success. A cryptek/lesser Dynast/C'tan shard will then betray the Necron Big Bad and deus ex machina a victory for the Imperium which resets the status quo (except for the shocking plot hook which will never be followed up upon).

 Lord Damocles wrote:
I'm not sure why everyone is hypothesising about some grand narrative arc starting with 500 Worlds leading to a civil war or fundamental change.

Necrons will attack. They won't win despite having massive advantages. A tiny number of Marines will then repeatedly curbstomp them, possibly with the help of the laws of the setting literally altering to accomodate their success. A cryptek/lesser Dynast/C'tan shard will then betray the Necron Big Bad and deus ex machina a victory for the Imperium which resets the status quo (except for the shocking plot hook which will never be followed up upon).

Darn it let us have our fun before you bring in the hammer of reality - at least let the campaign ship before bringing the hammer

 Overread wrote:

 Lord Damocles wrote:
I'm not sure why everyone is hypothesising about some grand narrative arc starting with 500 Worlds leading to a civil war or fundamental change.

Necrons will attack. They won't win despite having massive advantages. A tiny number of Marines will then repeatedly curbstomp them, possibly with the help of the laws of the setting literally altering to accomodate their success. A cryptek/lesser Dynast/C'tan shard will then betray the Necron Big Bad and deus ex machina a victory for the Imperium which resets the status quo (except for the shocking plot hook which will never be followed up upon).

Darn it let us have our fun before you bring in the hammer of reality - at least let the campaign ship before bringing the hammer

At least we're likely to get a really cool game where you smash thousands of Necrons before uncovering a Chaos plot out of it.

Didn't one of these result in Chaos winning and splitting the galaxy in two?

And one of the big Craftworlds getting fractured?

Vorian wrote:
Didn't one of these result in Chaos winning and splitting the galaxy in two?

And one of the big Craftworlds getting fractured?

Yes and no. Gathering storm was a fair bit more than an end of edition campaign, it sees the end of "phase 3" of 40ks existence (3rd - 7th), effectively relaunched the game. There is also rumour and significant evidence that it was intended to be an age of sigmar level of culling of the game system and a move to a new game.

I'm never really sure what people mean by "Grim Dark" that 40k "was" but now "isn't". Its always felt like a sort of headcanon from mid 90s to maybe early 2000s at most, when a lot of lore was less defined and narrative. Its got "brighter" for want of a better term with almost every spillage of ink.

But yeah. Its all in service of selling models. And tbh, as someone's whose very anti-Marines, its kind of working. Titus and friends look cool.

One of the perks of CSM for me has been that the cultists make the Marines feel "bigger". If everyones a Marine there's no real scale.

I think as someone said above, seeing a... dare I say adult-painted UM army is pretty rare. I suspect my first 40k model in 1995 or something was a Marine that I slathered blue paint on. (That kit with 10~ bottles of paint, a brush and a tactical marine and chaos warrior in.)

I think the whole "super grim dark with darkness and more dark" is also a product of people who only ever read the rulebook and codex way back when they started.

However the longer they've hung around the more they've at least read things off the main website and seen the stories and lore evolve.

Thing is even if you go back and read old BL books you can see that there were positive parts of the stories involved. The idea that the Imperium is a 100% Grim Dark super-evil setting is a product of people's own imaginations.

There's also an element of casual familiarity. The fact that we are so casually familiar with cherubs; servators, the idea of Necromunda being full of diseas and chemical waste etc... It's all something we are so familiar with that some people have zoned out how horrific those things are and thus go looking for even darker and more twisted things.

Tyel wrote:
I'm never really sure what people mean by "Grim Dark" that 40k "was" but now "isn't". Its always felt like a sort of headcanon from mid 90s to maybe early 2000s at most, when a lot of lore was less defined and narrative. Its got "brighter" for want of a better term with almost every spillage of ink.

40k shares a lot of its early aesthetic with a lot of the 80's punk vibes and a lot of the counter culture in things like the 2000 AD comics, movies like Heavy Metal or Mad Max and the kind of exploitation grindhouse vibes. The same trends that made a lot of early 90's anime like Akira or basically anything Manga Entertainment promoted. Basically whatever was the first thing you saw where a dude's head explodes.

It kind of evolved into a very self serious machine of human misery. Stories of a dogs eating their own tail kind of stuff which is what I often feel like people fear is being lost, but honestly I don't feel like the game has ever heavily sold. The game has pretty much always had this super hero marines saving us from the terrors of space thing going on. The grimdark has mostly been left to the novels, but every big push to make the marines seem like good guys still gets treated like its somehow a new thing.

Tyel wrote:

One of the perks of CSM for me has been that the cultists make the Marines feel "bigger". If everyones a Marine there's no real scale.

I really enjoyed the Loyal 32 in 8th edition for similar reasons.

Well, I don't know... I'm currently reading the new lore (starting with 8th edition), and I find it very dark, even grim in places. Even though I have something to compare it to. Maybe some people imagined the situation even worse...

I do agree that desensitization is an element there. It's hard to replicate that initial shock facotr that was initially so appealing and its very easy to find it repetitive after a while.

Actually, part of why I really like the 500 Worlds angle is it gives us something to care about. Part of the problem with the doomed aesthetic is you just don't bother getting attached to anything, so when city after city is burned in exterminatus its just like.... a neat lightshow. They need to spend time, build up places, make us care about them if they want us to feel their loss.

40k is a setting in which every bad human trait is exalted. The Imperial Virtues are hatred, ignorance, paranoia, intolerance, etc.

The Imperial protagonists may be portrayed as heroic individuals, doesn't change the issue the IoM would burn me as an heretic if I get lucky, turn me in a mindless cyborg if I'm not.

 Overread wrote:
I think the whole "super grim dark with darkness and more dark" is also a product of people who only ever read the rulebook and codex way back when they started.

However the longer they've hung around the more they've at least read things off the main website and seen the stories and lore evolve.

Thing is even if you go back and read old BL books you can see that there were positive parts of the stories involved. The idea that the Imperium is a 100% Grim Dark super-evil setting is a product of people's own imaginations.

There's also an element of casual familiarity. The fact that we are so casually familiar with cherubs; servators, the idea of Necromunda being full of diseas and chemical waste etc... It's all something we are so familiar with that some people have zoned out how horrific those things are and thus go looking for even darker and more twisted things.

I think your last comment contradicts your previous one. Those things, the virtual enslavement of humanity across thousands of worlds in horrific conditions, on space ships as loader gangs, as servitors, fed to the emperor, fed into the meat grinder of war, ALL of those things PROVE the imperium is 100% grim dark super evil. They aren't imagined. The very fact that people don't notice them due to that familiarity is the reason some people DON'T think the imperium is super evil.

The well actually devils advocacy of whether the imperium has any 'choice' to do this as a way to avoid making a statement about the evilness of the imperium is a red herring. The imperium is written unapologetically as an evil regime that does terrible things to its citizens and in fact would not exist in its current form without that horror being inflicted - it's literally built on the torture of humanity to exist the way it does.

there are two ways the reader can approach this - from their modern sensibilities and conclude the imperium is evil, or from a fictional justification perspective and conclude the imperium is totalitarian apologia. Because it's one thing to depict the imperium in the 3rd person dispassionate manner they used to, when 40k was a setting that you put your own narratives on and made what you wanted, but its entirely another to build deliberate, elaborate narratives that lionise and extole the virtues of totalitarians propping up such a horrific enterprise.

We talk about the importance of representation for minorities - well it goes both ways. Representation matters to the intolerant as well. When you make protagonists that are clearly the good guys out of dictators and genocidal murderers, you spend your time justifying it to the reader because their sensibilities are different. But for those who sympathise with that particular view point already, you embolden that thinking and tacitly approve of it. There's a reason more and more of these people are emoldened to show their support for 40k.

And no amount of GW putting out statements about how it's all pretend and don't be a dick obscures the fact that their fiction is the most effective totalitarian propaganda that's come out in decades because it's aimed at kids and it turns fascists into heroes. In classic GW style they want to have their cake and eat it too - they want to sell heroes but they want you to know that they're aware those guys are bad. Without ever actually committing to it in writing, becaues it wouldn't sell as well.

 Overread wrote:
I think the whole "super grim dark with darkness and more dark" is also a product of people who only ever read the rulebook and codex way back when they started.

I don't disagree, and it's one of the reasons that I've always said BL shouldn't be regarded as "fluff."

That isn't to say that the stories shouldn't exist, or that some of them aren't good, or that you can't use them as inspiration for narrative games.

But, for example, the extremes of space marine power fantasy are and have always been pure bs, and thinking that the game should work that way is a disease. The folks who write that tripe should beg the forgiveness of actual players, clean up their act and start writing things that are more in line with the actual game- the thing that gave them the subject matter in the first place. Marines can and do lose; they can and do die. Yes they are tough, and should be depicted as such, and some books DO get it right- there may even be some authors that get it right consistently, but the worst of BL is an absolute plague on the game.

 Hellebore wrote:
The very fact that people don't notice them due to that familiarity is the reason some people DON'T think the imperium is super evil.

Again, I don't think it's "familiarity" that does that; I think it's regarding anything that isn't found in a rulebook as primary source that does it.

 Hellebore wrote:

there are two ways the reader can approach this - from their modern sensibilities and conclude the imperium is evil, or from a fictional justification perspective and conclude the imperium is totalitarian apologia.

Those are definitely two ways of approaching the situation, and I agree they are probably the most common. But there are others. You can completely ignore everything that doesn't come from game books; you can selectively ignore the most egregious offenders in the BL canon while accepting the better examples that fit your headcanon. Or, perhaps you're an IRL moral relativist who doesn't believe in objective "good" or objective "evil"... or even objective reality.

 Hellebore wrote:

Because it's one thing to depict the imperium in the 3rd person dispassionate manner they used to, when 40k was a setting that you put your own narratives on and made what you wanted, but its entirely another to build deliberate, elaborate narratives that lionise and extole the virtues of totalitarians propping up such a horrific enterprise.

There are places where a bit of this may even happen in rulebooks, but again, far, far less than it does in BL, in comic books, in videogames... In all the crap that ISN'T a part of the ACTUAL GAME. And it's worth remembering that Rogue Trader dropped in '87- the first BL book only showed up in 1999- a year after the third edition was released. If your "glory days of grimdark" are from Rogue Trader or Second, that ain't because BL was better... It's because BL didn't exist.

I've been playing so long, I hardly even read the game book fluff... I've read it all before anyway. But the few times I have, it's been pretty grim. Some of the 9th ed campaign books had pretty dark moments. I haven't read a lot of content around Guilliman or whatever- non-Chamber marines bore the gak out of me, so it's possible that you, or others have read Imperial Heroism crap that I haven't, even in game books, so I'm prepared to be corrected if I've erred in my admittedly cursory assessment.

 Hellebore wrote:

We talk about the importance of representation for minorities - well it goes both ways. Representation matters to the intolerant as well. When you make protagonists that are clearly the good guys out of dictators and genocidal murderers, you spend your time justifying it to the reader because their sensibilities are different. But for those who sympathise with that particular view point already, you embolden that thinking and tacitly approve of it. There's a reason more and more of these people are emoldened to show their support for 40k.

This is a tough one for me... Because I can't entirely disagree... But I need to push back a bit, because I lived through Dungeons and Dragons Satanic Panic, Tipper Gore's PMRC and idiots who didn't realize that the word "solution" can refer to a chemical compound in addition to "the remedy for a problem," and that Ozzy's song Suicide Solution was about the dangers of alcoholism, rather than a sinister set of lyrics encouraging teens to take their own lives.

At the same time, whenever I hear certain ideologies expressed by particular "influencers" (who shall remain nameless in order to avoid contaminating my 40k with current real-world politics) hide behind the mask of satire, it makes me want to scream, or worse, stoop to their level and do the same. And I think you're worried about some of the same things I am... I'll stand up for Ozzy, but it'll be a cold day in hell before I stand up for the right of influencers to express certain ideologies that should have been laid to rest 80 years ago.

 Hellebore wrote:

... their fiction is the most effective totalitarian propaganda that's come out in decades because it's aimed at kids and it turns fascists into heroes.

Fiction aimed at voters is far worse. Perhaps you've missed the six o'clock news?

PS: Dear Mods- I hope that didn't cross a line, and if so, it wasn't intentional.