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I had a woman in the club just yesterday, guiding her through her second game.

She wants to pick up Space Marines. What does that tell us?

 a_typical_hero wrote:
I had a woman in the club just yesterday, guiding her through her second game.

She wants to pick up Space Marines. What does that tell us?

that "woman" is not a monolith, and that you're looking to disregard my feelings on this matter, and the feelings of other women who feel similarly

 JNAProductions wrote:
Blood Angels (one of the biggest Marine subfactions) takes cripples for their initiates.

And I'd like to point out that your exclusions are either something that's not inherent or even real (melee units and pyskers) or so broad as to encompass literally every human (breathing units). Except for women.

Do you have a source for that claim? I'd take anything, Youtube video, Lexicanum, something you remember reading in an old Codex or White Dwarf. The only thing I could find was an old Reddit thread were one aspirant had been accepted despite being crippled or something like that.

I am not sure why the realness is relevant. But Space Marines with dwarfism would also be counter to the idea of them being 8 foot tall macho killing machines assuming dwarf Marines were 5 feet tall. The Imperium might even kill people with dwarfism or those born crippled, I don't know. I wouldn't want migrant child Space Marines either. Like Benny the migrant Blooddrinker who managed to get through his process in record time so he's 12 years old and a Space Marine Captain, he also crossed some kind of border on Baal and got separated from his family. Women don't make great special forces operatives, maybe I will be proven wrong like all the bigots who thought women couldn't be scientists, doctors, lawyers, you name it but right now my view of the evidence available to me says women Space Marines don't make sense from a logical or artistic point of view, it only makes sense from a progressive political point of view. I don't want Warhammer to be a space for pushing progressive politics, if you just wanted more female players you could make a new cute faction and make Sororitas the postergirls for 40k, instead of inserting in token roid girls into Space Marines.

 StudentOfEtherium wrote:

 vipoid wrote:

 JNAProductions wrote:
The single biggest 40k faction excluding half the population, in a way that impacts the real world by people using it as an excuse to be actually exclusive and discriminatory towards women is different from a much smaller faction being women-only.

I honestly have no clue what you are talking about with this.

i'm a woman who always feels at least somewhat alienated in the hobby because of the FSM issue. am i not in the real world?

Has someone discriminated against you or excluded you because of the lack of FSM? Or do you just not feel welcome because of a lack of FSM? I get that the hobby might feel unwelcoming and there are certainly gits out there who won't welcome you because of your gender, but I don't think FSM would change those people's stance on you being welcome or not.

 vict0988 wrote:

I am not sure why the realness is relevant. But Space Marines with dwarfism would also be counter to the idea of them being 8 foot tall macho killing machines assuming dwarf Marines were 5 feet tall.

Seems fine to me, then people could use their old minimarine models to represent them!

The Imperium might even kill people with dwarfism or those born crippled, I don't know. I wouldn't want migrant child Space Marines either. Like Benny the migrant Blooddrinker who managed to get through his process in record time so he's 12 years old and a Space Marine Captain, he also crossed some kind of border on Baal and got separated from his family. Women don't make great special forces operatives, maybe I will be proven wrong like all the bigots who thought women couldn't be scientists, doctors, lawyers, you name it but right now my view of the evidence available to me says women Space Marines don't make sense from a logical or artistic point of view, it only makes sense from a progressive political point of view. I don't want Warhammer to be a space for pushing progressive politics, if you just wanted more female players you could make a new cute faction and make Sororitas the postergirls for 40k, instead of inserting in token roid girls into Space Marines.

Mate. They use chainsaws as weapons. It is made up and never made any sense. If the writer says that female marines work, then that doesn't lessen the sensemakery of the setting one bit.

 StudentOfEtherium wrote:

 vipoid wrote:

 JNAProductions wrote:
The single biggest 40k faction excluding half the population, in a way that impacts the real world by people using it as an excuse to be actually exclusive and discriminatory towards women is different from a much smaller faction being women-only.

I honestly have no clue what you are talking about with this.

i'm a woman who always feels at least somewhat alienated in the hobby because of the FSM issue. am i not in the real world?

Notwithstanding the fact that that wasn't actually the claim being made in the post you quoted, could you explain why you feel alienated?

Once upon a time I wanted FSM as I used to be amongst the dumbasses that tried to frame the Emperor, the Great Crusade and early IoM as justified.

Nowadays I just accept the Emperor was misogynistic (and an idiot), makes the hyper masculine boys only SM easier to accept.

 Tyran wrote:
Once upon a time I wanted FSM as I used to be amongst the dumbasses that tried to frame the Emperor, the Great Crusade and early IoM as justified.

Nowadays I just accept the Emperor was misogynistic (and an idiot), makes the hyper masculine boys only SM easier to accept.

That doesn't really jive with the setting, though.
The Imperium of Man has tons of issues. But modern-day bigotries don't number among them.

They are callous, brutal, stagnant... But they aren't (as a whole) sexist or racist or anything like that.

 JNAProductions wrote:

 Tyran wrote:
Once upon a time I wanted FSM as I used to be amongst the dumbasses that tried to frame the Emperor, the Great Crusade and early IoM as justified.

Nowadays I just accept the Emperor was misogynistic (and an idiot), makes the hyper masculine boys only SM easier to accept.

That doesn't really jive with the setting, though.
The Imperium of Man has tons of issues. But modern-day bigotries don't number among them.

They are callous, brutal, stagnant... But they aren't (as a whole) sexist or racist or anything like that.

"Excuse me, sir - we may be murderous, fanatical, xenophobic, genocidal maniacs, but we're not racist."

 JNAProductions wrote:
That doesn't really jive with the setting, though.
The Imperium of Man has tons of issues. But modern-day bigotries don't number among them.

They are callous, brutal, stagnant... But they aren't (as a whole) sexist or racist or anything like that.

My point isn't that the IoM is sexist.

My point is that the Emperor was sexist. The non-sexist nature of the IoM is a happy accident, just like how its theocratic nature is a blatant deviation from the Emperor's blatant radical and violent atheism.

And that's probably more than enough of the same arguments over female space marines. Take it somewhere else and let's get this thread back on topic, hmm?


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Crimson wrote:

And while we are it, lets increase the chapter sizes at least tenfold. Thousand marines is just laughable number. And no, do not increase the amount of ships they have, just increase their carrying capacities as the current ones make absolutely no sense whatsoever.

Is the thousand marine cap even still a thing? I mean, it was always somewhat malleable, but the addition of Primaris Marines would seem to have stretched things somewhat.


But yes, Chapters should have always been considerably more than a thousand. That number was supposed to represent their super-elite status, but on a galactic scale it really just makes them seem largely insignificant, and makes Chapters far too vulnerable from casualties in protracted or particularly brutal conflicts.

 insaniak wrote:

But yes, Chapters should have always been considerably more than a thousand. That number was supposed to represent their super-elite status, but on a galactic scale it really just makes them seem largely insignificant, and makes Chapters far too vulnerable from casualties in protracted or particularly brutal conflicts.

I honestly think that was kind of the point, both in-universe and out. In universe because of the breaking up the legions into smaller, less threatening bands. And out-of-universe because the galaxy IS really big, and the sandbox allowed for world-thratening dramatic events to take place using smallish forces, but the galactic narrative would grind on with hardly a notice.

1. Grey Knights + Inquisition overhaul
2. Catachan overhaul + catachan devil
3. 40k Perturabo

Dammit wrong thread.

If I were in charge I'd put a lot of you to work. I had out assignments to all of the fans of certain factions of 40k or HH that I'm not sure about.

For instance, I'd love to continue the Horus Heresy into the ages leading up to 40k began...

But how would we implement it... it can't be as easy as adding Eldar, Orks, and.... uhhh...the Inquisition?

The only issue is the breaking of the Legions, which would cause a lot of headaches... or would it?

Honestly I think if you want Xenos and old style marines forget 30K think 20K or rather think Grand Cruade.

THAT would be WAY more fun. You get LOADS of marines and Primarchs to play with and you get ALL the myriad of species of Xenos that got wiped out.

Now granted you know most of those Xenos will die off or at least be pushed into the fringes of space (hint hint fringes of space and hiding means they could return in 40K). but it gives you so much creative freedom on the Xenos side of things. You can go utterly Age of Sigmar levels of wild faction creation because you've the whole populated Galaxy to suddenly play with.

Sure you know the grand narrative is that the Imperium, broadly, wins. You know that the Abominable Intelligence machines will rise up and cause trouble; that the Primarchs will eventually half fall to Chaos along with their Legions.

However in the here and now you've a brutal struggle as the Imperium stretches its wings and charges forth whilst brave Xenos fight to the bitter end. Eldar and Orks are steadfast going to survive; others will get beaten down ;but there's so many stories you can build into that.

 Overread wrote:
Honestly I think if you want Xenos and old style marines forget 30K think 20K or rather think Grand Cruade.

THAT would be WAY more fun. You get LOADS of marines and Primarchs to play with and you get ALL the myriad of species of Xenos that got wiped out.

Now granted you know most of those Xenos will die off or at least be pushed into the fringes of space (hint hint fringes of space and hiding means they could return in 40K). but it gives you so much creative freedom on the Xenos side of things. You can go utterly Age of Sigmar levels of wild faction creation because you've the whole populated Galaxy to suddenly play with.

Sure you know the grand narrative is that the Imperium, broadly, wins. You know that the Abominable Intelligence machines will rise up and cause trouble; that the Primarchs will eventually half fall to Chaos along with their Legions.

However in the here and now you've a brutal struggle as the Imperium stretches its wings and charges forth whilst brave Xenos fight to the bitter end. Eldar and Orks are steadfast going to survive; others will get beaten down ;but there's so many stories you can build into that.

That's a much better idea! I'm putting you in charge of Game Design on my imaginary staff!

Something that I would love to do, is the Ages of the Eldar.

There's 60 million years between the eldar fall and the war in heaven. So much would have happened during those years, galactic shaking events on a scale the imperium has never seen. It would be amazing to see what was happening then.

Imagine Ascendant Eldar vs Prime Krorks having DBZ wars across the stars.


I would love to see the era of decline, as the eldar have everything and start to fall. The kind of tech they would use to have fun with - teleporting force field safari suits to go hunting humans for fun, diving into suns and surfing the plasma waves.

The eldar robot armies that formed an unending wall around all their holdings so they could ignore what everyone else was doing and concentrate on their debauchery.

I envisage massive robots like the titans and larger, with warp engines built in powering automatic wraithbone factories that just channel warp and build new robots in unending waves upon waves.

Basically Master Mould from Xmen, they just iron giant fly around to different worlds, land and start pumping out unending waves of robots that use warp cannons and void spinner wraithbone parasites to annihilate everyone.



IMO the only reason humanity exists is because the eldar's ability to scour a planet was so thorough and continuous that they keep the orks in check for millions of years.

And the orks, well their tech tends to mirror who they are fighting, currently it's all imperial and looted imperial. But when they are looting ascended eldar tech and haven't degenerated as much, well it would look spectacular.

Wow, that's a pretty cool idea. Would it be its own stand-alone game or would it use the HH rules?

Huh? Werent the Krork created to help the Eldar fight the Necrons?

Play a game of 1.9K using bolt action minis.

Or a Necromunda-like game set on Nostramo where one side is just Night Haunter using his bare hands.

chaos0xomega wrote:
Huh? Werent the Krork created to help the Eldar fight the Necrons?

the old ones made them both to fight the necrons, not to create peaceful empires. Do you think they would be friends for 60 million years and then poof! orks who fight everyone?

Everything that is an ork came from the krork. So unless for some reason krork don't reproduce by spores, have inherent psychic gestalt fields that generate violent frenzies or genetic knowledge on how to do things, they would be a hyper violent apex predator in the galaxy with no enemy to fight and the ability to spawn feral populations on any planet their spores appeared.

How long do you think it would take for them to try and fight anyone else that was left? The way orks are genetically encoded to need to fight, it's a fair assumption that the krork were a shake and bake, fire and forget eternal war weapon, that just keeps fighting. I'm sure the old ones had some kind of kill switch to stop them once they'd done their jobs, but they all died and the krork spread across the galaxy unchecked, except for the other ascendant species at the time, the eldar.


Even if you go with a generous friendly period, a 'golden age' of hand holding after the war in heaven, for a mind boggling 30 million years, you've still got 30 million more for violent warfare. I find it hard to believe that the 40k galaxy (of all galaxies) only saw massive scale warfare 60 million years ago and for the last 30,000 in the current timeline. 6000 imperium lifespans exist in the gap and I can't take the notion seriously that no all out wars that didn't include humans, old ones or necrons occurred. It's a very biased approach that only the cool wars worth covering occurred with the imperium involved.

Also given that the war in heaven was original the eldar's war with their gods, and not the necrons, only retconned and stolen from their mythology, the eldar have been at war plenty of times in their long history.

Krork aren’t necessarily Ork, particularly given the millions of years between the time of Old Ones and C’Tan, and now.

Krorks may be an ancestral species to modern Orks, but really, we’ve never had a firm description of the Krork culture or physiology to the best of my knowledge.

The similarity of the words are of course a sneaky suggestion, but carries no more weight in terms of evidence than claiming Which? Magazine is a monthly tome of consumer spells and rituals.

I had a great idea, that Mad Doc Grotsnik inspired:

Warhammer 40k HeroClix!

I'd put Mat Ward in charge of the project, and introduce a new battle world that is a Eldar Space Station lost in time and space...

I wonder if I could get Ian Watson and C.S. Goto to write it.

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
Krork aren’t necessarily Ork, particularly given the millions of years between the time of Old Ones and C’Tan, and now.

Krorks may be an ancestral species to modern Orks, but really, we’ve never had a firm description of the Krork culture or physiology to the best of my knowledge.

The similarity of the words are of course a sneaky suggestion, but carries no more weight in terms of evidence than claiming Which? Magazine is a monthly tome of consumer spells and rituals.

the krork being the ancestors of the orks is a classic GW 'warhammer mystery in nothing but name' so I don't really entertain any of that. Virtually no rumour GW ever published in their background ever turned out to be wrong. They've spent the last decade mining all those explicit mysteries into tangible truths.

So yeah, the krork are the brain boyz and somehow they genetically degenerated into the orks. Probably because the old ones were pumping out species to fight for them very fast and weren't trying to QC what they made. They needed an endlessly reproducing meat shield that could fight forever, they didn't care whether they were genetically stable or not, because they probably weren't supposed to survive the war anyway.

Only the eldar seem to have been a creation with deliberate longevity.

I always saw Orks as a "balancer" force. That is Orks don't want to just win in a fight. They want a brawl. A drawn out battle with lots of fighting which is tooth and nail bitingly close to who might win or lose.

Their whole society and structure needs challenge to fight against to maintain numbers and order. Without it they fight with themselves.

I figure the Krork were similar. Bio-engineered to rise to any challenge that the Old Ones put them against. BUT with the limit that the Orks wouldn't go beyond that challenge. They'd win and then if there was nothing else they baiscally internalise and start shutting down their advanced weapons. You can't have a good scrap if you win in 1second with a doomsday weapon.

Just the ideal bioweapon to throw at your foes and which, importantly, won't come out stronger and then come after you! Just isolate them and wait for them to settle down.




So perhaps the only difference is that the Galaxy was way more dangerous in the time of Krorks. Then when there was nothing else they devolved and weakened into what we consider Orks. Without the guidance of the Old Ones to direct them and focus their efforts; with the influence of Gork and Mork in the Warp; you've got yourself a "balancing" faction that will always rise to the challenge, but which lacks the grand view to really conquer the Galaxy.

At least unless things get so risky and so dangerous that one Ork arises to lead a Waaagh that's greater than any before and can sustain its momentum at the grand scale.

Except there was something to fight: the Aeldari.

What likely happened is that the Aeldari kicked the Krork's colective butt so hard, exterminated them so brutally that natural presure favored smaller more primitive "orks" that could survive just by being ignored.

That is my supposition. The eldar had the grand strategy, warp magic and technology to keep the krork in check.

If you look at the background of the voidspinner superheavy, the weaver fires monofilament with wraithbone parasites designed to strip a planet down to the rock, sterilising all organic life ready for regrowing as a maiden world.

That kind of device would be able ot root out ork spores, because the parasites are seeking out and destroying each tiny bit of organic life they can find, so no spore would be safe.

Which is why I would argue the majority of modern 40k's species even exist - the eldar kept the krorks/orks contained and prevented their spores from colonising and destroying ecosystems across the galaxy.

If spores landed on earth anytime between 60 million years ago and now, humanity's ancestors would have been killed or eaten before they ever developed fire.


The combination of eldar psychic engines which draw limitless warp energy to power themselves indefinitely, and wraithbone, which itself is made from warp energy solidified, you have a tech base that can exceed the rate of ork spore production. Just set up an autonomous robot factory that sucks warp energy in one end and spits endless swarms of uber robots out the other.

That would keep the galaxy stable, orks pushed back and potentially contained and allow other species to evolve and flourish. And of course allow the eldar time to ignore everyone else and get their freak on...

Which is why Ullanor was so important.

Orks is Orks is Orks. And if there’s a whopper of a fight in the offing, they’ll find their way to it.

Ullanor essentially shattered the Orks as a galactic scale threat, for a time.

Had things gone differently, it’s quite possible The Imperium would’ve had the resources and time to basically run suppression against any other Orky forces before they could become a major issue.

And it does make sense that the pre-Fall Eldar were doing just that. Keeping their numbers down to a manageable level, never really letting the Boyz achieve the critical mass required for a proper Waaaagh! to gather steam.

But going back to the Krork? I’m still not satisfied Krork and Ork are one and the same. Related? Sure, I can buy that. But in the same way as Homo Sapien Sapien and Australopithecus are related, but entirely separate species.

Now that could just be evolution having its way, or it could be the result of someone, even the Krork themselves, giving it a helping hand which went a bit wrong.

Gork and Mork could also have had a hand in things in the Warp.

We know that the 4 Major Chaos Gods basically don't want any faction to win so that they sustain themselves on a never ending bounty of emotional energy and souls. Perhaps Gork and Mork did the same way back then - weakening elements of the Krork to create the Orks. It might even have been some kind of twisting element that made them more receptive to sending energies to Gork and Mork in the Warp.

Basically Orks never actually conquering everything is perfect for Chaos Gods. It creates that never-ending stream of power for them.

Nudging back towards the topic at hand...

While I see the appeal of a War in Heaven game, I'd want to go the other way, Unification Wars!

Keeping in mind that Earth is literally the only planet any of us give a darn about, I'd commission a Unification Wars skirmish game.

One faction would be Thunder Warriors of course, brutal and savage Legions. Then others... based on national cliches and Warhammer fluff. So gas-masked cowboys on cyber horses from the 'Merican Wastes, jumping and leaping kung-fu warrior monks from Jong-Kuo, diesel punk tanks rolling out of Aleman, you get the idea.

Let's fight over the scraps of our once great homeworld! Mud covered men in mud colored uniforms fighting in the mud!