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In short, starting from the Fall of Cadia event, we changed the entire story to this:


1.Belisarius Cawl is still a 10 millennia old senior Magos. He has always been qualified to become a forge general, but he did not participate in the competition for this position or lost for some reason——————More importantly, although he was from the 30K era, he knew Guilliman but had never met him. they had never met each other, although had only heard of each other.


2.Belisarius Cawl never got Guilliman's commission to build a super shinny armor for him, and of course he never carried the Emperor's sword. Why? He was just a common low rank Magos at that time, never a big shot in the 30k era,he not qualified to meet the Emperor in person and get a commission.

of course, he was not ordered to build Primaris Marines and keep it secret for more than 10 millennia. for the Emperor's sake, this was a enormous big deal event, involving unprecedented resources, personnel and funds, and unimaginable risks. It could never be kept secret for 10,000 years, and it was even more impossible to give it to a common magos at the time to be responsible for carrying it out.


3.so there are no such "Primaris space marines" at all.but another things————a brand new MKIX "Primaris" pattern power armor and a entire set of weapon system STC go with it.

The MKIX "Primaris" pattern power armor is much more powerful,durable,nimble and reliable than traditional MKI-MKVIII power armor in every way, and the production cost is not increased————but because it has a rather different design, only the helmet and shoulder pads are completely universal and interchangeable(YOU KNOW WHAT I MEAN). although the power backpack can also be interchangeable after modification, many problems will arise.

it also included a lot of new weapons design.such as Primaris Pattern boltgun,which just bulky and longer than old pattern at general,and use standard bolt rounds, but have significantly greater range and power than any legacy version,make them become a 30'range and AP4 monster.

MKIX is a very brilliant design, and Belisarius Cawl has been trying to promote it and make it the standard issue for all Space Marines, but the Adeptus Mechanicus and the Ad Administrum have been opposed to it: ————"We just released MKVIII Errant few centuries ago, and it has still not been popularized. there is no reason to promote your design." "your design is excellent but traditional classical power armor and Astartes weaponary has always been work well, and here is no reason for us to spend a huge budget to change it."


4.Everything else happened as we know it, with Cawl successfully awakening Guilliman with the help of a xenos god, but without his super powered armour, and without the Emperor's sword————Guilliman was indeed given the Emperor's sword, but only after he arrived on Terra and had an audience with the Emperor.

Because of Cawl's great contribution in this matter, his design was finally approved by the Adeptus Mechanicus and Adeptus Administrum, and began to be vigorously promoted. It not only became the standard issue equipment of a lot of Space Marines chapters, but also fell into the hands of many Chaos Marines warbands, and the Chaos army also get the STC to manufacture similar specifications.


5.If a new force other than the Space Marines is really needed, it is only necessary (by order of the Emperor himself) to open the Vault of Rython and awaken the Emperor's greatest legacy, the redesigned and improved Thunder Warriors MKII.

The Thunder Warriors' improvement was a top secret project that the Emperor had been working on during the Great Crusade, and for obvious reasons, it was so secret that no one knew about it before.

In the Emperor's plan, if the Webway Project succeeds, the next phase of the plan will repeat the same scenario, with the Legio Astartes being annihilated by the new Thunder Warriors, and then declared to have died gloriously in the final battle.————the Chaos Gods showed this to Horus, and it was one of the major reasons that led to his rebellion.


This is the plot I envisioned. What do you think?

If they had just said-Hey we are updating the model line and defending our copyright issues. so we are releasing a new mark of power armor called primaris MK XX as our new standard upgraded marine kit and just completely removed the entire Cawl "mary sue" story line. it would have removed pretty much all the backlash and kept the emperor the enigmatic mysterious power in the universe that was able to do all the amazing things nobody else was able to do.

What if the moon was made of cheese?

 RaptorusRex wrote:
What if the moon was made of cheese?

Brother Wallace and Brother Gromit deep striking!

The size of the Ultima Founding means that the Adeptus Mechanicus isn't able to keep up with demand for new tactical dreadnought armour. Instead they develop an up-armoured variant of the Mk.IX suit which trades reduced protection for ease of manufactur, christening it Mk.X 'Gravis'.

Although only intended for use by newly founded Chapters, many existing Chapter forges also adopt the design in order to fill gaps in their armouries.

Sooo much better than super special modular Lego armour.

 Lord Damocles wrote:
Sooo much better than super special modular Lego armour

A Space Marine has fallen into the river in the Eye of Terror!

Would have been great if this was just Mk9 armour, and they sorted out distinctiveness between forces (e.g. guard get all the stubbers, marines get all the bolters, etc. etc.), but they didn't. So justifications, retcons and fudges abound. Seems to have worked out for them.

What if the Emperor was actually Bees in a trenchcoat this whole time?

Nah.

Cawl serves as an interesting foil to the general stagnation of the Imperium.

His works stand to show what can still be achieved given sufficient time and resources.

Everything else the Imperium churns out is akin to “just in time” supply and demand. There’s little chance or impetus to improve anything, because you need it now.

Cawl however had the left overs of The Emperor’s own secret projects, and most importantly? The time and resources to actually do something with that.

As I’ve argued before, following the abduction of the Primarchs the Astartes were a necessary bodge job. An improvement on the Thunder Warriors, but by no means whatsoever a finished product.

Are the Primaris a finished product? Not necessarily, no. We know there’s at least thing Cawl just can’t crack which prevents him just making more Primarchs. But they and their equipment stand as proof improvements can be made.

The previous marks of Power Armour are all the result of new technologies being discovered and incorporated in a very short period of time, or the pressures of constant war needing their own bodge jobs.

To think for a second The Emperor had no plans, intention or ability to get us to where Cawl has feels…churlish. And MkX’s modular nature does make sense. A single, mass produced undersuit and armature, with mission profile suited plating and gubbins which can be bolted on.

Nah. I'm okay with things as they are.

Modular plate armour isn't particularly unrealistic. Medieval plate armour was modular with men-at-arms wearing different components for the same harness in different settings (if they could afford the extra pieces of course). This is particularly notable with helmets.

If we're removing the Primaris marines and therefore no Ultima founding reinforcements, can we have the Kin be the ones to save Baal? Far more narratively interesting to have them do it, re-emerging into the galaxy in a massive Vengeance Fleet to take on their ancestral foe, saving the forces of the Imperium in the way that the Imperium catastrophically failed to do for them.

this is basically writing fanfic at this point. a "what if" of such tremendous proportions... just write it for yourself at that point. if you think GW's story is so bad, ignore it and write your own

aphyon wrote:If they had just said-Hey we are updating the model line and defending our copyright issues. so we are releasing a new mark of power armor called primaris MK XX as our new standard upgraded marine kit and just completely removed the entire Cawl "mary sue" story line. it would have removed pretty much all the backlash and kept the emperor the enigmatic mysterious power in the universe that was able to do all the amazing things nobody else was able to do.

That's pretty much how I feel about it. If they wanted to sell us truescale marines, just do that. The primaris lore was kind of awkward when it was introduced, and it has arguably become even more awkward as they walk back/don't pull the trigger on the implied fixed genseed, astartes civil war, etc. angles. I didn't like those plot threads, but not following through on them makes it feel like they've been spinning their wheels and makes primaris as a whole feel largely pointless.

Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:Nah.

Cawl serves as an interesting foil to the general stagnation of the Imperium.

His works stand to show what can still be achieved given sufficient time and resources.

I'm okay with exploring something like that high-concept. Heck, I'd have enjoyed seeing some small portion of the imperium actively managing to progress their overall tech level. But I think the way they handled it with Cawl kind of sours a lot of the potential positives. He was just so out of left field, upstaged the established character of Bile by casually doing offscreen what Bile had spent multiple irl editions failing to do (or succeeding with terrifying side-effects.) Plus, successfully tampering with genseed/marine-making just kind of threw out the idea that messing with the process was taboo for a reason that they'd established with the 13th founding and with Bile. And yeah, they sort of spun the 13th founding to be prototypes, but it still feels weird.

And on top of that, he also pumped out a bunch of new tech on the side. So upstaging Bile wasn't even a full-time job.

And the end result of all that is just a marine who's vaguely harder to kill because reasons and also a bigger target. With a more bolty-bolter and more armory power armor.

So he comes across as a Gary Stu and just ignores some of the established tropes/rules of the setting (albeit with in-universe explanations, mostly), and the end result isn't even all that interesting. Just... marines+1. Who seemed like they might do a civil war and then didn't. Who seemed like they might be over all those pesky geneseed flaws but (fortunately for us) weren't.

The new tech was such a shame on so many levels, a complete disregard for the setting. So disappointing.

 Wyldhunt wrote:
Who seemed like they might be over all those pesky geneseed flaws but (fortunately for us) weren't.

The early Primaris plot threads were so blatantly there to cover for the lack of model support.

Ooh maybe Primaris aren't affected by the Black Rage. Oh, now there's a Primaris Death Company kit, so they are.

Ooh maybe Primaris can't become Inner Circle. Oh, now there's Veteran Primaris models, so the Deathwing isn't even all Terminators anymore.

Ooh, maybe there aren't any Primaris Grey knights...

 Lord Damocles wrote:

 Wyldhunt wrote:
Who seemed like they might be over all those pesky geneseed flaws but (fortunately for us) weren't.

The early Primaris plot threads were so blatantly there to cover for the lack of model support.

Ooh maybe Primaris aren't affected by the Black Rage. Oh, now there's a Primaris Death Company kit, so they are.

Ooh maybe Primaris can't become Inner Circle. Oh, now there's Veteran Primaris models, so the Deathwing isn't even all Terminators anymore.

Ooh, maybe there aren't any Primaris Grey knights...

bingo...

Sure. Which would also have been less awkward if they skipped the whole "primaris" thing and just fluffed the new kits as new tech being rolled out.

No GK primaris? They just haven't finished running the maintenance checks on all those suits of gravis armor Mars sent over.

I'm pretty okay with the idea of Cawl being the exception to the "no tech innovation" rule. You wouldn't even have to make him some ancient super brain that spent 10,000 years on a project. You could just say he was some ambitious tech priest who convinced a reborn Guilliman to stamp the paperwork on his pet projects. The skimmer tanks are still a bit meh though; purely because they make various xenos factions feel less high-tech.

In my personal headcanon, I'm actually pretending that Cawl doesnt exist, and all that ever happened was that IoM got issued Gravis Armour from the Admech, who refuse to elaborate whether it is new technology or based on some long lost STC. Therefore, no Primaris, no mess, only Gravis. Makes as much sense as anything else

To be fair, if you wish to make up that head cannon for yourself, go ahead. Their's nothing stopping you. I for one, as I always say, just pretend evrything fall of cadia never existed, play my games as a dinosaur in the pre fall of cadia setting, i'm totally happy with that.

also because frankly, that level of amending the lore changes would be too much efforts to me compared to just deciding that nope, didn't happen in MY timeline

Honestly, Yea Cawl just rolling out new technology to make better space marine armor and tanks would have been enough of a change. Super Duper marines and it's consequences has been disastrous for modern 40k.

40k has fallen, millions must be purged ect ect

but seriously, I've been imagining a future where they scale back the use of primaris. IDK if they could fully retcon the primaris marines out, but having a future where primaris start to become unstable or have become sleeper agents for Cawl's usurpation of the imperium over guiliman would be a fun grimdark plot line.

make is so that primaris marines are not good anymore and chapters have to roll back to using firstborn, albiet firstborn with new armor and weapons would be a good enough change.

 Tiger9gamer wrote:
Honestly, Yea Cawl just rolling out new technology to make better space marine armor and tanks would have been enough of a change. Super Duper marines and it's consequences has been disastrous for modern 40k.

40k has fallen, millions must be purged ect ect

but seriously, I've been imagining a future where they scale back the use of primaris. IDK if they could fully retcon the primaris marines out, but having a future where primaris start to become unstable or have become sleeper agents for Cawl's usurpation of the imperium over guiliman would be a fun grimdark plot line.

make is so that primaris marines are not good anymore and chapters have to roll back to using firstborn, albiet firstborn with new armor and weapons would be a good enough change.

I'm not sure you even need to have primaris become unstable or anything. Unless they've updated the lore to make the primarisification process safer, it's kind of just a bad "upgrade" in-universe. Like, the process for creating a marine is already super deadly. A tiny percent of your candidates actually become marines. The Salamanders Omnibus has a bit where a scout sergeant is thinking about his latest batch of recruits and is like, "Well, maybe one of these guys can go on to become a marine, but idk." Making someone into a primaris instead of a first born means that an even smaller percentage of candidates becomes marines. And what are the benefits? You become a bigger target and are vaguely more durable than firstborn... Except that primaris marines now have the same number of wounds as firstborn, so even that is kind of iffy.

Guilliman sending out a bunch of fresh batches of primaris to everyone was helpful to chapters less because the marines were *primaris* marines and more because they're just marines period. Arguably, the main benefit of the primaris project wasn't that marines got an up(?)grade but that Cawl simply spent a bunch of time stockpiling a ton of marines to be shipped out en masse. Cawl thought he was helping by building new toys, but he was mainly helping by building more boys.

Plus PRIMARIS is a goofy name .

Purely subjective and maybe that's me not being a native English speaker or something, but I've always found it goofy. You'll tell me that space marines itself is goofy, and I'll totally agree. Somehow I feel like piling in all seriousness yet another 12 yo title that PRIMARIS is a tad too much.

Pardon this quick name related digression.

What, he got the Emperor's sword before meeting the Emperor ? It was such a mess and an uninteresting event when it was realized that I already forgot haha but yeah, yours make more sense

 Gert wrote:
What if the Emperor was actually Bees in a trenchcoat this whole time?

The Astronomicon was just really loud bees buzzing all along

 NOLA Chris wrote:

 Lord Damocles wrote:

 Wyldhunt wrote:
Who seemed like they might be over all those pesky geneseed flaws but (fortunately for us) weren't.

The early Primaris plot threads were so blatantly there to cover for the lack of model support.

Ooh maybe Primaris aren't affected by the Black Rage. Oh, now there's a Primaris Death Company kit, so they are.

Ooh maybe Primaris can't become Inner Circle. Oh, now there's Veteran Primaris models, so the Deathwing isn't even all Terminators anymore.

Ooh, maybe there aren't any Primaris Grey knights...

bingo...

Well yeah, sure: I mean, essentially, a new type of post-human was released into the wild to save a galaxy that had been torn in half. These storylines can't not occur- If there's a brand new species of post human, then yes there will be a story about the first one to become a chaplain, or to manifest a psychic power. If you choose to ignore the cool Frankenstein's monster vibes that you could bring to these raw materials because GW authors didn't do a good enough job of writing the books, that's your right as a reader and a player.

But man, I saw the Primaris as the seeds of Heresy 2.0, which will probably happen for the 40k 50th anniversary, or the 40th edition or whatever. I say it often in the General Forum: the 9th edition Crusade rules for Torchbearer fleets is some of the coolest rules writing I've ever seen. Those stories were cool- you could replay a TorchBearer fleet through a Crusade a half a dozen times and never end up with the same thing twice.

The thing that made the original lore great was what we, the readers brought to it. You made Blood Angels cool by embracing the Death Company trope rather than questioning it and dissing it, and it's the games you played when you put that Death Company on the table more than how well their lore was or was not written that made you love the army. I was quite skeptical of Primaris myself, but those Torchbearer rules highlighted for me the story potential in the "otherness" of Primaris.

Like I said though, absolutely your right to insist that GW writes background well enough to meet your standards rather than looking for ways to put your own spin on it.

 PenitentJake wrote:

 NOLA Chris wrote:

 Lord Damocles wrote:

 Wyldhunt wrote:
Who seemed like they might be over all those pesky geneseed flaws but (fortunately for us) weren't.

The early Primaris plot threads were so blatantly there to cover for the lack of model support.

Ooh maybe Primaris aren't affected by the Black Rage. Oh, now there's a Primaris Death Company kit, so they are.

Ooh maybe Primaris can't become Inner Circle. Oh, now there's Veteran Primaris models, so the Deathwing isn't even all Terminators anymore.

Ooh, maybe there aren't any Primaris Grey knights...

bingo...

Well yeah, sure: I mean, essentially, a new type of post-human was released into the wild to save a galaxy that had been torn in half. These storylines can't not occur- If there's a brand new species of post human, then yes there will be a story about the first one to become a chaplain, or to manifest a psychic power. If you choose to ignore the cool Frankenstein's monster vibes that you could bring to these raw materials because GW authors didn't do a good enough job of writing the books, that's your right as a reader and a player.

But man, I saw the Primaris as the seeds of Heresy 2.0, which will probably happen for the 40k 50th anniversary, or the 40th edition or whatever. I say it often in the General Forum: the 9th edition Crusade rules for Torchbearer fleets is some of the coolest rules writing I've ever seen. Those stories were cool- you could replay a TorchBearer fleet through a Crusade a half a dozen times and never end up with the same thing twice.

The thing that made the original lore great was what we, the readers brought to it. You made Blood Angels cool by embracing the Death Company trope rather than questioning it and dissing it, and it's the games you played when you put that Death Company on the table more than how well their lore was or was not written that made you love the army. I was quite skeptical of Primaris myself, but those Torchbearer rules highlighted for me the story potential in the "otherness" of Primaris.

Like I said though, absolutely your right to insist that GW writes background well enough to meet your standards rather than looking for ways to put your own spin on it.

This feels like you missed their point, which is that a lot of the potentially interesting plot hooks and statements about Primaris early on turned out to be cover stories for a lack of model support, and were then reversed when Gw revealed appropriate models years later.

It isn't about whether the lore was good- some of those plot hooks had the most potential at the time of the initial Primaris roll out. It is that much of the potentially interesting lore just got binned in favour of rehashed models, rather than trying something new. Clearly GW thinks, for example, that Primarisified Death Company is a safer commercial option than something new or maintaining a division between Firstborn and Primaris, but it definitely closes off an interesting lore angle and source of conflict for Blood Angels. What if the Dark Angels suffered a schism between those who trust the Primaris and those who don't? Nah it's all good now.

Plus, every single named character surviving the allegedly low chance of being converted to Primaris is a meme at this point. How many original Primaris named characters are there? None come to mind, they are very generic (or not original, like Tor Garadon).

There has definitely been some good lore since the Primaris introduction, but it is getting less frequent IMO and GW is increasingly rolling back interesting developments that came before in favour of serving "safe"* model rehashes and bending the lore to fit.

Of course we can still build our own lore, but GW creates the framework and they are cheapening it IMO. I prefer the framework they were creating up until about 6th edition to most of what has been done since, sadly.


*Except when they stuff up the execution, been a few misses recently...

Almost like there was massive nerd rage because things changed so GW went back to playing it safe and basically just keeping everything the same but with Primaris instead of Firstborn.

The people who complained that GW was changing too much are the same people who now complaining that GW is just replacing all the old stuff with new stuff that's the same but larger.

Primaris weren't going anywhere so this is the solution GW has picked, keep all the same characters and units just make them large.

 Gert wrote:
Almost like there was massive nerd rage because things changed so GW went back to playing it safe and basically just keeping everything the same but with Primaris instead of Firstborn.

The people who complained that GW was changing too much are the same people who now complaining that GW is just replacing all the old stuff with new stuff that's the same but larger.

Primaris weren't going anywhere so this is the solution GW has picked, keep all the same characters and units just make them large.

I feel like we kind of got the worst of both worlds here.

A lot of the fluff being introduced around 8th was kind of bad, and not just for old-man-yells-at-clouds reasons. There was some legitimate criticism there, but complaints at the time were often followed by something like, "Well at least they seem to be moving towards a geneflaw-free civil war direction, so maybe that will be interesting." But as has been pointed out, those threads have all kind of been dropped as truescale versions of old models have come out.

So instead of getting some bad fluff that at least came with some interesting big changes, we got bad fluff with no interesting changes after all.

And it's all just very transparently a matter of the release schedule/marketing trying to justify itself in-universe.
* GW wanted to finally sell those truescale marines we'd been waiting for, but having all the new kits in your army be twice as big as your old kits would look weird. Well, clearly this taller marines aren't just new models; they're a whole new subtype of marine with totally not awkward fluff, and also you can't mix them with your firstborn squads because of how special and different they are!
* People buy a bunch of primaris. You know what? Maybe firstborn marines are *also* pretty tough. Here's a second wound for everyone. Still no plasma allowed in the intercessor squad though!
* Primaris don't have any death company because apparently Cawl just decided to fix the cool-and-tragic geneflaw of the BA as a bonus. Oh, we just finished printing the truescale death company models? Then Cawl actually didn't fix that geneflaw, and it's weird that you thought he did.
* Dark Angels don't trust these interlopers and are keeping them from joining the inner cir- New models just dropped. Turns out primaris are totally chill, you guys. Let them into the circle. Oh, and cancel that whole galaxy wide civil war thing.

There's an alternate timeline where GW just *doesn't* do the primaris fluff, and we all agree that sometimes new models are just bigger than old models.

8th edition and Primaris also exist in the backdrop of falling 7th edition sales.

There may be a timeline where GW just *doesn't* do the primaris fluff, but that timeline deviated during 5th ed as it is also a timeline in which GW didn't make the repeated business mistakes that led to 7th and thus 8th and Primaris.