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if all skaven are super selfish backstabing egocentric cowards how can they organize countless waves of hordes to bash against their enemies
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Jul 10, 2015 17:09
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| # ? Jun 2, 2024 02:48 |
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iT jsut doesnt add up
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Jul 10, 2015 17:10
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They only back stab each other if there is no one else to backstab
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Jul 10, 2015 17:11
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Mans posted:if all skaven are super selfish backstabing egocentric cowards how can they organize countless waves of hordes to bash against their enemies They wait until victory is assured to really begin backstabbing over who gets credit for the victory, which leads them to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory and results in the entire horde scampering madly for their rat holes while squeaks, explosions, and roaring flames echo throughout the tunnels. Skaven will always be their own worst enemy and to make it worse, they know that.
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Jul 10, 2015 17:13
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Night10194 posted:Skaven will always be their own worst enemy and to make it worse, they know that. Which, obviously, is why they backstab each other so much. How can they trust those treacherous bastards? Better get theirs in before they get theirs.
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Jul 10, 2015 17:25
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Night10194 posted:They wait until victory is assured to really begin backstabbing over who gets credit for the victory, which leads them to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory and results in the entire horde scampering madly for their rat holes while squeaks, explosions, and roaring flames echo throughout the tunnels. This is also the explanation for why Chaos doesn't win in 40k.
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Jul 10, 2015 17:34
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Mans posted:if all skaven are super selfish backstabing egocentric cowards how can they organize countless waves of hordes to bash against their enemies They rally behind the Captains of the Industry, obviously
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Jul 10, 2015 18:00
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Neruz posted:Malal occupies an interesting place as the status of his official existence is unclear and debatable but every now and then something referencing him shows up in official stuff. This lack of information and uncertainty actually completely fits the way Malal is presented in-universe and I can't decide if that is just a coincidence or a clever plan. I thought the reason Malal no longer gets mentioned was the bloke who invented him getting fired or leaving and retaining his IP, so things like Squats (space dwarves) and Malal and whatever else suddenly disappeared. I mean there's no way general 40k fluff authors could pull off decent Malal rumours if they could just bludgeon you over the head with him.
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Jul 10, 2015 18:05
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Korgan posted:I thought the reason Malal no longer gets mentioned was the bloke who invented him getting fired or leaving and retaining his IP, so things like Squats (space dwarves) and Malal and whatever else suddenly disappeared. I mean there's no way general 40k fluff authors could pull off decent Malal rumours if they could just bludgeon you over the head with him. He's referred to as Malice these days and he sometimes shows up referenced in an item's text or alluded to in an example paint job. I think it's also suggested that he might not be a full Chaos God but instead a really really powerful Undivided Daemon King.
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Jul 10, 2015 20:34
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Neruz posted:He's referred to as Malice these days and he sometimes shows up referenced in an item's text or alluded to in an example paint job. I think it's also suggested that he might not be a full Chaos God but instead a really really powerful Undivided Daemon King. Isn't there a 40k story where they're trying to pull Malice into real-space like a Chaos Primarch? That somewhat suggests he's just a really powerful King rather than a true Chaos God (though it doesn't keep people from worshiping him).
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Jul 10, 2015 20:37
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Zaodai posted:Isn't there a 40k story where they're trying to pull Malice into real-space like a Chaos Primarch? That somewhat suggests he's just a really powerful King rather than a true Chaos God (though it doesn't keep people from worshiping him). Yeah I think so, there's also an example army of Chaos Space Marines who wear his colors and are noted as spending most of their time fighting other Chaos Space Marines and an axe with his symbol on it that is noted as being especially effective against minions of Chaos.
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Jul 10, 2015 20:38
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Nice ending for that new E3 trailer, no SigMarines at sight  Added to OP! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gluogeTdqng
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Jul 10, 2015 21:57
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Cythereal posted:This is also the explanation for why Let's be fair.
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Jul 10, 2015 22:04
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Mans posted:if all skaven are super selfish backstabing egocentric cowards how can they organize countless waves of hordes to bash against their enemies https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YdXQJS3Yv0Y
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Jul 11, 2015 09:54
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Mans posted:if all skaven are super selfish backstabing egocentric cowards how can they organize countless waves of hordes to bash against their enemies Skaven leaders lead from the back and make very, very certain that their minions and followers are more scared of them than they are of their enemies and this trickles down. The sub-leaders are super scared that their leader is going to loving kill them if they fail so they make sure that their own followers are piss-themselves scared of them and so on and so forth. If your options are to force your mob of clanrats to run screaming into that wall of pikes or try to slink away and get blasted into a radioactive puddle by your angry angry gray seer or something then you're probably going to take your chance with the pikemen. Skaven morale is a shaky thing at best and usually breaks down entirely when the enemy is legitimately scarier than the skaven in charge unless the skaven have truly massive strength in numbers to bolster their confidence. There's no such thing as a skaven last stand.
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Jul 11, 2015 10:14
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The Skaven occupy an entertaining position of being both incredibly arrogant and sure about their own superiority as the chosen ones of the best god while at the same time considering 10 to 1 odds in their favor to be merely adequate. It's important to remember that Skaven are really quite alien in mindset and by Human standards are batshit insane.
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Jul 11, 2015 11:03
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I thought your average line skaven was really fuckin stupid too? Like, the assassins, the engineers, the leaders, they're in a different class.
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Jul 11, 2015 11:19
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it helps to remember that, like how orcs are a parody of the 80's soccer hooligan, the skaven are a parody of the 80's neofascist punk. hence, they're a bunch of racist bullies that act tough as poo poo before someone scarier comes along and then they all break down in tears, and each one fancies themselves the boss and either act like it or try to sell enough people out so they get to be it you can also see them as a more direct parody of the nazis and other fascist groups as a whole, mainly in the combination of ruthlessness and ineptitude that results in things like the the postal service putting in funding to develop nuclear weapons and having at least three separate intelligence services, one headed by an antinazi who undermines everyone efforts and goes largely unnoticed since the other services are, remarkably, equally incompetent and self destructive
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Jul 11, 2015 11:32
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This is taken to the limit in The Serpent's Temple as a Slaan is about to destroy a Skaven Grey Seer named Thanquol when the Slaan notices that Thanquol is fated to be one of the worst enemies the Skaven will ever have and will personally be responsible for causing unspeakable doom, death, destruction and disaster on the entire Skaven race, he promptly lets Thanquol go. That's right, one of the worst and most destructive enemies of the entire Skaven race is one of their own leaders. There is probably an extremely biting bit of political commentary in that somewhere. Neruz fucked around with this message at 11:54 on Jul 11, 2015 |
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Jul 11, 2015 11:51
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(in End Times that prophecy never comes to pass and Thanquol (a major character, mind you) gets beheaded off screen by Archaeon (the megaman of chaos) in the last book (despite being the title character for previous books (did I mention GW hires bad writers?)))
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Jul 11, 2015 12:13
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I dunno to be fair Thanquol brings down a hell of a lot of doom, death, destruction and disaster on the Skaven during his fairly long (for a Skaven) life. Still that was indeed an utterly retarded ending for him, Thanquol deserved more than an off-screen beheading 
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Jul 11, 2015 12:15
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This is a setting where you got pikemen, regular guys with swords, buffer grimdarker guys with swords, orcs and elves and ogres all hitting eachother with spells and big sticks Then there's skaven and their assorted soldiers, like the stormfiends with minigunhands   sorry i mean "ratling cannons" 
Zzulu fucked around with this message at 12:18 on Jul 11, 2015 |
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Jul 11, 2015 12:16
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you mentioned minigun hands, but not the minigun chestpiece
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Jul 11, 2015 12:21
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Neruz posted:There is probably an extremely biting bit of political commentary in that somewhere. Without a trace of sarcasm, one of my favorite parts of WFH/40k is (was?) the fact that the various factions were often supreme parodies of not just real world cultures, but also real world ideologies. It acted to elevated what is otherwise entirely a silly manchild playdoll nerdgame to, well, still a beautiful jewel playdoll game, but with a fair bit of humor, and occasionally pathos (either for the faction in question, or for the completely unaware nerd general who thinks whatever fascist army he's running is the Good Guys). I've been out of the tabletop games for a long time (still keeping some touchstone contact via novels/videogames now and then), so I don't really know where GW is at with this stuff now, but it kiiiiiiiiiinda feels like they may be losing some of the irony based on what I'm seeing right now. If you start to take this stuff seriously on a fluff level, it moves from commentary to almost tacit endorsement, which is sort of creepy and a lot less funny for some of the factions. But that's probably looking at it a little too seriously, being a very, very expensive fantasy/sci fi tabletop game from a publicly traded company, I should probably assume it's more 'focus group tested to appeal to <demographic age/gender combination>' and less 'we replaced all the people who knew this poo poo was a giant joke with people who take it all seriously'.
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Jul 11, 2015 12:22
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toasterwarrior posted:you mentioned minigun hands, but not the minigun chestpiece Skaven are great innovators.
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Jul 11, 2015 12:25
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Zzulu posted:This is a setting where you got pikemen, regular guys with swords, buffer grimdarker guys with swords, orcs and elves and ogres all hitting eachother with spells and big sticks For reference about the ones without miniguns, the one on the right is equipped with flamethrowers that use radioactive magic death napalm as fuel and the one in the middle is armed with grenade launchers that shoot nerve gas grenades. Skaven are pretty dumb/hilarious.
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Jul 11, 2015 13:05
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Kanos posted:For reference about the ones without miniguns, the one on the right is equipped with flamethrowers that use radioactive magic death napalm as fuel and the one in the middle is armed with grenade launchers that shoot nerve gas grenades. Don't they also fairly often just blow up, which the Grey Seer/Warlord then blames on someone else.
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Jul 11, 2015 13:16
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I'm gonna go against the goon opinion here and say that those models are symptomatic of GW's push towards making everything bigger and flashier and more cool/badass, which probably in the end led to fuckin' sigmarines. Normal rat ogres are cool, in my opinion, but those minigun guys are the fantasy equivalent of these idiots: 
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Jul 11, 2015 13:20
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The melee variants of these guys are dumb, but I think the ranged versions look pretty cool 
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Jul 11, 2015 13:31
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I think "crazy and over the top" fits the Skaven really well, though. They've always had ratling guns and crazy tech and slapping that onto their rat ogres makes sense, especially since it was in the context of the End Times and them finally doing their massive surface invasion I think power armor for your power armor in 40K is just silly though Eventually we'll have 4 layers of power armor piloting a mech inside another mech
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Jul 11, 2015 13:40
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power armor for power armor is at least clearly the product of a deranged bureaucracy of one stripe or another.
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Jul 11, 2015 13:47
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Still can't decide which power armor for your power armor is worse: centurions or the nemesis dreadknight.
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Jul 11, 2015 14:01
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Cythereal posted:Still can't decide which power armor for your power armor is worse: centurions or the nemesis dreadknight. Dreadknight no contest.
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Jul 11, 2015 14:06
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Cythereal posted:Still can't decide which power armor for your power armor is worse: centurions or the nemesis dreadknight. Dreadknight dude, come on. At least Centurions look like suits, not a giant loving baby harness
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Jul 11, 2015 14:13
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Cythereal posted:Still can't decide which power armor for your power armor is worse: centurions or the nemesis dreadknight.  peer posted:I'm gonna go against the goon opinion here and say that those models are symptomatic of GW's push towards making everything bigger and flashier and more cool/badass, which probably in the end led to fuckin' sigmarines. Agreed, those rat-ogres looked pretty dumb.
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Jul 11, 2015 14:39
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Zzulu posted:I think "crazy and over the top" fits the Skaven really well, though. They've always had ratling guns and crazy tech and slapping that onto their rat ogres makes sense, especially since it was in the context of the End Times and them finally doing their massive surface invasion Apparently all that is needed to hold back the ratman hordes from the human sewers are a corps of dudes with the grand title of rat catcher and their small (but vicious) dogs. Always remember the dog! 
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Jul 11, 2015 14:41
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Klaus88 posted:Apparently all that is needed to hold back the ratman hordes from the human sewers are a corps of dudes with the grand title of rat catcher and their small (but vicious) dogs. Always remember the dog! Those guys are no joke and absolutely the best little detail in the RPG. That the humble ratcatchers and their small (but vicious) dogs (who actually get a statistical combat bonus over normal terriers and can totally take out a Clanrat) are fighting a heroic secret war against alien ratmen under the sewers and holding them back.
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Jul 11, 2015 14:46
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peer posted:I'm gonna go against the goon opinion here and say that those models are symptomatic of GW's push towards making everything bigger and flashier and more cool/badass, which probably in the end led to fuckin' sigmarines. The key difference is that those rat ogres are basically just being used as platforms for poo poo that the skaven use literally all of the time and have used forever. It's just taking a normal ratling gun or a warpfire thrower or a sack of poisoned wind globes and strapping it to a trained rat ogre so you don't have to rely on teams of scrawny and extremely scared skaven to haul them around. It's extremely tame and not really over the top for a faction that has canonically always used things like gigantic warp lightning powered hamster wheels and gigantic magic bells carried by masses of ratmen that wizards ride around on and ring every so often to cause crazy magic poo poo to happen. Power Armor For Your Power Armor is something brand new, pointless(terminators and dreadnoughts already exist), and idiotic looking.
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Jul 11, 2015 14:51
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So skaven were always in from the beginning? Huh, they felt like a later addition to me like the Tau or Tyranids in 40k.
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Jul 11, 2015 15:03
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| # ? Jun 2, 2024 02:48 |
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Skaven have been around since the 80s.
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Jul 11, 2015 15:09
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