Forum adverts like this one are shown to any user who is not logged in. Join us by filling out a tiny 3 field form and you will get your own, free, dakka user account which gives a good range of benefits to you: No adverts like this in the forums anymore. Times and dates in your local timezone. Full tracking of what you have read so you can skip to your first unread post, easily see what has changed since you last logged in, and easily see what is new at a glance. Email notifications for threads you want to watch closely. Being a part of the oldest wargaming community on the net. If you are already a member then feel free to login now.

 LunarSol wrote:
They're just a Space Marine redesign.

In pure corporate terms, yes; but that's missing [ignoring] the point of the complaints with regards to them narratively.

They're 'just a Space Marine redesign' which upended millennia of tradition in essentially every Chapter, re-wrote Marine organisation, reverted the changes made in the Codex from Heresy organisation, contradicted the Imperium's technological stagnation, are accepted by basically everyone; and yet arrived from literally nowhere narratively and were imposed on a long established setting requiring the existing Firstborn to be literally killed off to make way for them.

'Just a Space Marine redesign' would be rolling the scale change out to the core Marine range, and maybe adding a new armour mark.

 Lord Damocles wrote:

 LunarSol wrote:
They're just a Space Marine redesign.

In pure corporate terms, yes; but that's missing [ignoring] the point of the complaints with regards to them narratively.

They're 'just a Space Marine redesign' which upended millennia of tradition in essentially every Chapter, re-wrote Marine organisation, reverted the changes made in the Codex from Heresy organisation, contradicted the Imperium's technological stagnation, are accepted by basically everyone; and yet arrived from literally nowhere narratively and were imposed on a long established setting requiring the existing Firstborn to be literally killed off to make way for them.

'Just a Space Marine redesign' would be rolling the scale change out to the core Marine range, and maybe adding a new armour mark.

Let me be clear. When I say just a Space Marine redesign, I'm not talking in the fictional setting. I just mean in real life. The lore of "better" marines was always a flimsy excuse to give some degree of compatibility to the old sculpts until their replacements were ready. Had GW not balked on an End Times full reboot, the lore would just be "marines got new armor during the time skip" and all the rubicon surgery stuff to explain why some models are taller than others wouldn't be a thing.
The lore does not dwell on Primaris superiority anymore and neither should the players. Marines are just marines again and firstborn just don't exist, because there really wasn't ever supposed to be a distinction in the first place.

Custodes lore tends to emphasize that Space Marines are basically a rush job rather than "perfect" creations, and that clearly implies a lot of improvements could be done.

But I cannot recall if that is new lore or old lore.

 LunarSol wrote:
Marines are just marines again and firstborn just don't exist

But they did and do.

 Lord Damocles wrote:

 LunarSol wrote:
Marines are just marines again and firstborn just don't exist

But they did and do.

They did, but don't really anymore. Like, sure, lore from 8th is full of nonsense like "these new Primaris aren't so bad after all" and the like, but modern stories don't refer to Firstborn at all outside of occasionally mentioning that a marine is old enough to have had the Rubicon surgery. You're not seeing marines anymore that aren't Primaris, because there aren't really any units anymore that have to be first born. It doesn't even seem like the Rubicon surgery prevents you from wearing Terminator armor, though realistically it should. It's just not important to the setting anymore because its role as a marketing patch is largely over.

 Lord Damocles wrote:

 LunarSol wrote:
They're just a Space Marine redesign.

In pure corporate terms, yes; but that's missing [ignoring] the point of the complaints with regards to them narratively.

They're 'just a Space Marine redesign' which upended millennia of tradition in essentially every Chapter, re-wrote Marine organisation, reverted the changes made in the Codex from Heresy organisation, contradicted the Imperium's technological stagnation, are accepted by basically everyone; and yet arrived from literally nowhere narratively and were imposed on a long established setting requiring the existing Firstborn to be literally killed off to make way for them.

'Just a Space Marine redesign' would be rolling the scale change out to the core Marine range, and maybe adding a new armour mark.

What Damocles said.

As well as the lore you have a redesign of the ascetic. Suddenly the vehicle range hovers (apart from the land speeders that are now mario carts), the classic vehicles are awkwardly forgotten and the high tech redesign is bizarrely married to stubbers of all weapons.

Now a redesign where they got all the bolt weapons and all the Imperial Guard tank and infantry weapons had the bolters taken away and replaced with stubbers (insert Guiliver edicts etc.) would have at least been something. Instead the look isn't grimdark, the weapons make even less sense, the model scale triggered a round of enbiggening with the SOBs are now primaris size, etc. etc.

Sisters are not the same size as Primaris, like at all.

Also lmao, sure Space Marines were "grimdark". The bright blue and gold round dudes with big white emblems where the further up the ranks you get the more shiny you become.

 LunarSol wrote:

 Lord Damocles wrote:

 LunarSol wrote:
Marines are just marines again and firstborn just don't exist

But they did and do.

They did, but don't really anymore. Like, sure, lore from 8th is full of nonsense like "these new Primaris aren't so bad after all" and the like, but modern stories don't refer to Firstborn at all outside of occasionally mentioning that a marine is old enough to have had the Rubicon surgery. You're not seeing marines anymore that aren't Primaris, because there aren't really any units anymore that have to be first born. It doesn't even seem like the Rubicon surgery prevents you from wearing Terminator armor, though realistically it should. It's just not important to the setting anymore because its role as a marketing patch is largely over.

The 10th edition Crusade rules for Space Marines make a VERY clear distinction. You can't promote Scout company units to be either Tactical or Devastator Squads, and you can't promote units to be Vanguard Veterans, either (even if they're a Firstborn unit!).

Tyel wrote:(I'm not saying anyone especially wants Chaos Custodes before there's massive outcry.)

I totally want Chaos Custodes - think of the modeling opportunities!

I do think the Astartes rescaling could have and should have been handled differently. I can understand coming off the back of the rather poor End Times to AoS transition GW was scrabbling for a different softer reboot option for a core 40k element and probably went for something a little TOO soft.

Either that, or they literally didn't have a plan ala the Star Wars sequel trilogy but managed to survive it anyway. 8E spent quite a few words speculating about how New Space Marines might be different from Old Space Marines but now as we're seven IRL years into it that seems to have largely faded away.

And, perhaps, from a business PoV, all that makes sense; I don't know that your average casual purchaser is watching internet people, let alone reading the novel line or following the supplement churn in 8th and 9th where most of the Primaris: Will they Won't They plots were presented. Or at least, they don't seem to be following the plot and deciding not to buy Space Marines.

The stat differential between old and new marines has been collapsing steadily, and even primaris stuff is collapsing a bit ala the intercessor bolt rifle stat. If I'm explaining 40k to someone new to it, there's nothing terribly engaging about the Primaris plot at all. Just tell someone these are Space Marines and the company decided to make them bigger and did a bad explanation and move on.

What IS a bit of a shame is that instead of just a direct rescale we also got a reorg, and that's just harder to match your model collection to without a bunch of extra work and/or proxying, but that's happened to lots of other factions before; it's just that it generally used to land lightly on the Space Marines.

 Lord Damocles wrote:

 LunarSol wrote:
They're just a Space Marine redesign.

In pure corporate terms, yes; but that's missing [ignoring] the point of the complaints with regards to them narratively.

They're 'just a Space Marine redesign' which upended millennia of tradition in essentially every Chapter, re-wrote Marine organisation, reverted the changes made in the Codex from Heresy organisation, contradicted the Imperium's technological stagnation, are accepted by basically everyone; and yet arrived from literally nowhere narratively and were imposed on a long established setting requiring the existing Firstborn to be literally killed off to make way for them.

'Just a Space Marine redesign' would be rolling the scale change out to the core Marine range, and maybe adding a new armour mark.

It's interesting that had Cawl been a throw away line in an outbox from a codex in 3rd, or even 6th ed, like the quiescent perils of the c'tan, doing something mysterious, and they pulled that thread out, I think you'd see less problems with it. GW have mined most of their history though, so there are fewer of those available now.

Which ironically is the same as Bile - there were zero hints or suggestions about mad chaos apothecaries modifying the geneseed until he was released.


I'm not particularly a fan of the whole primaris thing, but it's going to be completely impossible to make people comfortable with 'new' things in 40k unless they decided to plan out a decade long slow burn. Which wouldn't happen because the return isn't fast enough.

It's amazing how something just having been around for a while grants it legitimacy. I don't doubt that in 18 years Cawl will be as part of the fabric of 40k as Bile is now.

 Hellebore wrote:

It's amazing how something just having been around for a while grants it legitimacy. I don't doubt that in 18 years Cawl will be as part of the fabric of 40k as Bile is now.

That's likely true, but it could also be like the Tau, where despite being about a year younger than the Black Templars changing from being a Codex Chapter there's still people wailing and gnashing their teeth about it.

Some of that again just goes back to volume of content; if going forward either Cawl gets lots of backfilling OR the primarising quietly just stops getting mentioned, eventually it'll just fade out of consciousness as the volume of stuff that either normalises it or ignores it outweighs the amount that talks about the controversy.

Interesting thought about the red herrings being mostly mined; I'm not quite sure that's true. We've had more plot hooks here and there over the years; it's just that GW doesn't often go to the recent ones. Presumably the generation that grew up thinking about those 80s and 90s hooks is more interested in chasing those down - perhaps when the next turning of the clock happens there'll be a wave of staff mining loxatl, hrud, the ordo chronos, or other stuff from 90s and 00s.

The thing is Cawl has quite a bit of stuff already. Main feature of Gathering Storm, 2 novels with him as the main character, side character in HH to help establish his ancient history, side character in Dark Imperium.

People just don't like new things because they want the old things to be the main things.
Heck look at Ahsoka from SW. Hated when she was new, now one of the most loved characters after a decade of media exposure.

 LunarSol wrote:
I think of the character dump of that era, Cawl is largely fine. Mechanicus as a whole is full of weirdos working on things that almost always result in disaster and their untimely death, so when one succeeds, that character suddenly becoming "known" doesn't feel particularly out of place.

I think Cawl mostly just becomes a locus for hate of Primaris in general, which I can't help but feel like is a grudge that's gone on far too long. They're just a Space Marine redesign. Whatever "better" they might be touted as ultimately results in them being what Marines have always been. It's just a resculpt line and flimsy lore padding they used to keep firstborn in the game while they rolled out the redesigns really hasn't changed anything. They're just Marines, same as they've always been.

they're just marines, but marine players have so many opinions about what marines should be that any small change in the design would evoke controversy. the fact that they put a name and such a point on this change just gives people a target for gg-like behaviors. even if GW had committed to a simple range refresh, with no lore attached, people would have been pissed because designs would still be changing

 Manfred von Drakken wrote:

Tyel wrote:(I'm not saying anyone especially wants Chaos Custodes before there's massive outcry.)

I totally want Chaos Custodes - think of the modeling opportunities!

when i started picking up custodes, i made the call for it to be a chaos-corrupted force, and it's been fun to integrate that in different ways. doubt we're ever going to get models or lore for that but it's a fun thing to consider and convert

 Manfred von Drakken wrote:

The 10th edition Crusade rules for Space Marines make a VERY clear distinction. You can't promote Scout company units to be either Tactical or Devastator Squads, and you can't promote units to be Vanguard Veterans, either (even if they're a Firstborn unit!).

That's rules though, not anything to do with the narratives being presented. In the narrative, Tac/Dev/Vanguard marines just don't exist anymore.

 LunarSol wrote:

 Manfred von Drakken wrote:

The 10th edition Crusade rules for Space Marines make a VERY clear distinction. You can't promote Scout company units to be either Tactical or Devastator Squads, and you can't promote units to be Vanguard Veterans, either (even if they're a Firstborn unit!).

That's rules though, not anything to do with the narratives being presented. In the narrative, Tac/Dev/Vanguard marines just don't exist anymore.

Huh? Is that true? I havnt read enough recent SM lore to know about that

 VladimirHerzog wrote:

 LunarSol wrote:

 Manfred von Drakken wrote:

The 10th edition Crusade rules for Space Marines make a VERY clear distinction. You can't promote Scout company units to be either Tactical or Devastator Squads, and you can't promote units to be Vanguard Veterans, either (even if they're a Firstborn unit!).

That's rules though, not anything to do with the narratives being presented. In the narrative, Tac/Dev/Vanguard marines just don't exist anymore.

Huh? Is that true? I havnt read enough recent SM lore to know about that

Not to put words in their mouth, but I think what LunarSol means is that these days, when we meet a new marine in a novel, it's not mentioned whether he's Primaris or First Born. Similarly, stories about crossing the Rubicon are passe now- I don't remember when the last one happened. It's not that anyone has published anything saying "There are no Primaris now" - it's just that distinctions aren't being made.

As for gaps in the Crusade Promotion system for Marines- I think that across the board, GW's track record on promotion mechanics is too weak to assume that this is an intentional lore-based decision. I don't think Sisters have a way for a Palatine to become a Canoness, and Sisters Squads can only become Seraphim or Dominions by first taking a Penitent vow and then Redeeming themselves.

That said, I also think that differentiating between rules and lore entirely is not really viable either- rules and lore are undeniably connected, and when BL Fiction conflicts with rules (ie. 5 space marines can solo an entire enemy army), it is clearly the BL Fiction that is misrepresenting the game, not the rules. I've said elsewhere that even when I like BL Fiction (and some of it is great), I don't actually consider it to be lore. It is fiction about Lore.

Lore, from my perspective, comes only from game books. It is far more likely to be consistent with the actual game, which is the root of all things 40k. Unfortunately, it isn't always consistent from edition to edition- but within any given edition, it's usually a better representation of what actually happens on the table than any of the BL books- even the good ones.

I haven't entirely ruled out trying to eventually write a BL book, but if I ever do, it will be based on an actual Crusade campaign so that everything that happens in the book will be table-top possible for the edition in which it was written, and I think far more BL fiction should follow that guideline.

 VladimirHerzog wrote:

 LunarSol wrote:

 Manfred von Drakken wrote:

The 10th edition Crusade rules for Space Marines make a VERY clear distinction. You can't promote Scout company units to be either Tactical or Devastator Squads, and you can't promote units to be Vanguard Veterans, either (even if they're a Firstborn unit!).

That's rules though, not anything to do with the narratives being presented. In the narrative, Tac/Dev/Vanguard marines just don't exist anymore.

Huh? Is that true? I havnt read enough recent SM lore to know about that

I don't read enough of it to say yes in full confidence, but as I've seen certainly this edition there's just Primaris. Intercessors show up everywhere in place of Tacticals as the faceless grunts and Gravis pops up where Devs would normally fill that role.

In particularly its EXTREMELY noticeable in Space Marine 2, where you get to walk around the battle barge and see a pretty complete presentation of an active company out of combat. It paints a very clear picture of what GW wants to sell modern marines as and that separation between Firstborn and Primaris definitely isn't a part of it.

They do take the time to take Titus from his original game self through the Rubicon to Primaris, but even that's done in a way that never directly compares the two. Like you never feel that "this old model could use an upgrade" vibe that people see Primaris as when its mostly a commercial product. Narratively, it just feels like marines have gotten an equipment refresh in the last couple centuries.

 PenitentJake wrote:


Not to put words in their mouth, but I think what LunarSol means is that these days, when we meet a new marine in a novel, it's not mentioned whether he's Primaris or First Born. Similarly, stories about crossing the Rubicon are passe now- I don't remember when the last one happened. It's not that anyone has published anything saying "There are no Primaris now" - it's just that distinctions aren't being made.

As for gaps in the Crusade Promotion system for Marines- I think that across the board, GW's track record on promotion mechanics is too weak to assume that this is an intentional lore-based decision. I don't think Sisters have a way for a Palatine to become a Canoness, and Sisters Squads can only become Seraphim or Dominions by first taking a Penitent vow and then Redeeming themselves.

That said, I also think that differentiating between rules and lore entirely is not really viable either- rules and lore are undeniably connected, and when BL Fiction conflicts with rules (ie. 5 space marines can solo an entire enemy army), it is clearly the BL Fiction that is misrepresenting the game, not the rules. I've said elsewhere that even when I like BL Fiction (and some of it is great), I don't actually consider it to be lore. It is fiction about Lore.

Lore, from my perspective, comes only from game books. It is far more likely to be consistent with the actual game, which is the root of all things 40k. Unfortunately, it isn't always consistent from edition to edition- but within any given edition, it's usually a better representation of what actually happens on the table than any of the BL books- even the good ones.

I haven't entirely ruled out trying to eventually write a BL book, but if I ever do, it will be based on an actual Crusade campaign so that everything that happens in the book will be table-top possible for the edition in which it was written, and I think far more BL fiction should follow that guideline.

They do still mention it when they release character model updates. That's basically all done for now bar Space Wolves (we'll see if we get a Logan and Njal update) though I think there's a chance the next time the codex supplements get a new version we might get Sammael and Corbulo etc. So there's a little still happening, but for the most part it's not worth a mention.

I do think writing BL fiction so it feels like it represents the game rules would narrow the universe further, though. It used to be the case that the fiction was where you saw things that didn't make it on the table, so you got the sense that the galaxy is large and varied and the game is capturing a specific portion of it for out-of-universe commercial success. Doing less of that would make it feel smaller than it already is, to me.

I think it's more that the actual company structure of marines and their nomenclature has changed.

Now a battle company is made up of:

Battleline
close support
fire support

units.


The concept of a tactical marine is now a weapon load out of battleline unit, so they don't really get mentioned.

The traditional company formation uses the unit name to describe their position in the company which is a bit different.

The identity of a company was tac/ass/dev designations.


Those have gone down in the nomenclature from company level divisions to squad level divisions within the new battleline company division.

Originally the tactical squads was the entirety of the battleline division of a company.

A higher level and more extreme example might be taking the name deathwing from the 1st DA company and demoting it to just a type of unit within the first company and renaming the company 'battlewing' or something. Although the name still exists, it sits in a different and lesser part of the heirarchy.

I think the real problem is that there are just too darn many units. I almost long for the days when your choices were Tactical, Assault, and Devastator - maybe some Scouts, Bikes, and Veterans for flavor.

 Manfred von Drakken wrote:
I think the real problem is that there are just too darn many units. I almost long for the days when your choices were Tactical, Assault, and Devastator - maybe some Scouts, Bikes, and Veterans for flavor.

Ironically GW wants that back too, to control their product line sizes... They just want to be able to replace them with the same number of new units every few years to get you to buy them again.