The Chopping Block. Who needs to meet their end?

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**Platuan4th**

Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
I’m on the fence there.

For most of its existence, 40K was pretty much a sandbox setting where nothing ever changed.

40K has been an evolving storyline and a setting since Armageddon 3 in 3rd ed and thus far longer than it was ever just a sandbox.

**Mad Doc Grotsnik**

Kinda? I’m not sure Psycho Tycho and Ghaz zogging of necessarily counts.

Neither at that time really changed anything on the galactic scale. And that wouldn’t happen until 8th when the Great Rift and Cawl fundamentally shifted things.

**Platuan4th**

Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
Kinda? I’m not sure Psycho Tycho and Ghaz zogging of necessarily counts.

Neither at that time really changed anything on the galactic scale. And that wouldn’t happen until 8th when the Great Rift and Cawl fundamentally shifted things.

3rd was a build up to Armageddon 3 then to the Black 13th then Medusa V which explicitly took place after the Black 13th. Starting with the retcon in 5th, everything was a build up to the opening of the Great Rift at the end of 7th. It's just that at the time, everything was written in ways to appear self contained until about Wrath of Magnus, but when you go back and look over it as a whole, it was all small parts contributing to the story that culminated with The Fall of Cadia - Rise of the Primarch arc.

The main difference is that GW is more clearly leading into whatever end of edition campaign they have planned through out an edition. It's not a shift in what they're doing but how they're doing it.

**Ashiraya**

Da Boss wrote:
I'm against making anyone a perpetual. It's one of the dumbest things in 40K. I would be SORT of okay if they were like the Highlander in that they just didn't die naturally, but regenerating back from death like Dr Who is awful for the setting.

The evolving narrative and focus on characters is not something I enjoy at all, and it seems to me that having this along with the only characters who die being designated respawning jobbers is the worst of all worlds.

Because it's focused on their characters rather than yours (negative) but still stays stagnant because "no one's ever really gone" (negative) makes the universe feel smaller because these named heroes are in every conflict or the focus of every piece of fiction (negative) and ruins the gravitas of any character or being that can come back from the dead (Lucius, Avatar, Swarmlord, Vulkan and even Ghaz to an extent with comic book Ork medicine).

Killing characters in the moving narrative is the ONLY way to make 40K feel right if you're going to move it forward.

We had more characters dying back when it was a fixed setting than we do now. Makes for awful writing.

I sympathise with this a lot but mainly because of the bolded bit (emphasis mine).

I won't rant too much about it as it's rules-centered and therefore can easily go off topic, but the increased emphasis on named characters in 40k overall and the reduced customisation and flexibility of unnamed characters has been a problem for both the game and the narrative, by turning the cast of characters with current miniatures into the Avengers who show up everywhere all the time.

I feel like Titus is becoming especially egregious in this regard as GW is looking to milk his popularity as much as possible.

**Da Boss**

I liked Space Marine 1 a fair bit, not played 2, but I'm completely disinterested in anything to do with Titus.

**Hellebore**

They should time jump and kill every named character in the intervening millennia. All of them dead, footnotes in The endless history of 40k.

Only unnatural daemonic or spirit types would continue, daemon primarchs, named greater demons, phoenix lords etc.

Everything else that is flesh, should be dead.

Also, any character that has been narratively built up as the locus for a faction needs to die. The silent king is pretty much the worst example of this, he takes up far too much singular importance.

But to a lesser extent vect, ghaz and Eldrad all fill this role (in descending order from most key to least key).

The silent king sucks and is keeping the ward OTT crap of his necron retcon alive. He is the poster child of authorial insert uber character that I hate the most about 40k. No other character is anywhere near as entwined into their factions existence and powerxas him. It would be like having the emperor invent humans and mind control the whole species.

No character should be built like that.

**Mad Doc Grotsnik**

On The Silent King? Defo read Titus.