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Kylaer posted:I'd much rather see the Tau and Votanns having to deal with Chaos just like the Imperium does rather than having an "easy" way out) The Tau, at least, are definitely starting to have some uncomfortable run-ins with Chaos in the stuff that’s come out since… 8th edition? There have definitely been multiple “oh poo poo, oh god oh god oh god oh god, gently caress!” moments for them, since they started their latest expansions. They’re about to get a quick lesson in “just because your soul is small and dim doesn’t mean it can’t be torn to pieces” from the universe. Broken Record Talk fucked around with this message at 22:22 on Dec 28, 2023 |
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Dec 28, 2023 21:52
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Broken Record Talk posted:The Tau, at least, are definitely starting to have some uncomfortable run-ins with Chaos in the stuff that’s come out since… 8th edition? There have definitely been multiple “oh poo poo, oh god oh god oh god oh god, gently caress!” moments for them, since they started their latest expansions. They’re about to get a quick lesson in “just because your soul is small and dim doesn’t mean it can’t be torn to pieces” lesson from the universe. I believe it started with the auxiliaries (Kroot, Gue'vesa, vespid etc) getting corrupted during 4th sphere
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Dec 28, 2023 22:06
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wiegieman posted:"We can't reform because of the constant threat of Chaos" is the lie that the Imperium tells itself every day. The threat of Chaos is real, but the evil of the Imperium is also real, and is in fact one of the main things that pushes people to Chaos worship. i think its that mixed with the imperium is too loving big and old to fully reform. like its 10k years old and was only "ok" for maybe a couple hundred of those.
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Dec 28, 2023 22:41
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Broken Record Talk posted:The Tau, at least, are definitely starting to have some uncomfortable run-ins with Chaos in the stuff that’s come out since… 8th edition? There have definitely been multiple “oh poo poo, oh god oh god oh god oh god, gently caress!” moments for them, since they started their latest expansions. They’re about to get a quick lesson in “just because your soul is small and dim doesn’t mean it can’t be torn to pieces” from the universe. That's cool, I'm glad to hear about it. I guess there's just not much Tau written material period and so there hasn't been much done on that aspect.
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Dec 28, 2023 22:48
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Kylaer posted:That's cool, I'm glad to hear about it. I guess there's just not much Tau written material period and so there hasn't been much done on that aspect. The stories are poo poo but the one about how their human auxiliaries create the Chaos God of the Greater Good (Marx?) causing the Tau to freak out and purge them all was pretty hilarious.
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Dec 28, 2023 22:52
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The Imperium is bad lol
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Dec 29, 2023 00:10
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DaysBefore posted:The Imperium is bad lol I like that without the emperor concentrating all of humanity under one poorly managed banner there probably would have been way less chaos too, even the emperors ideal version of perfected humanity was a flawed beginning. It's only gotten worse since.
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Dec 29, 2023 00:19
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DaysBefore posted:The Imperium is bad lol Concerning
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Dec 29, 2023 00:31
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DaysBefore posted:The Imperium is bad lol How can the Imperium be bad if I think what they do is cool and good 
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Dec 29, 2023 00:41
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moths posted:Almost through, but holy gently caress I did not expect the Star Child to make a cameo. Ferrus's skull does make it to Medusa, but I think it was Guilliman in the old canon who brought it as part of breaking the legions with the codex astartes Improbable Lobster fucked around with this message at 04:08 on Dec 29, 2023 |
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Dec 29, 2023 01:04
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I didn't realize it at the time, but it's sorta already on Terra anyway. In this new continuity
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Dec 29, 2023 01:11
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D-Pad posted:Wait the book itself got leaked or just the fact he was writing it? The latter. bunnyofdoom posted:I believe it started with the auxiliaries (Kroot, Gue'vesa, vespid etc) getting corrupted during 4th sphere Mainly the humans after the Tau discovered warp travel by accident when that expansion sphere tried using a new slipspace drive to be able to reach out father. The Ethereals obviously suppressed all news about their fate very heavily, even if some of them did survive.
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Dec 29, 2023 01:23
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Dapper_Swindler posted:i think its that mixed with the imperium is too loving big and old to fully reform. like its 10k years old and was only "ok" for maybe a couple hundred of those. Yes... but also no. I think we have the issue that we view the Imperium as a generalized thing. A single chain of command/authority runs from the peasant who tends the fields all the way to the Highlords of Terra. Something that gets played with a bit (especially now that the Maledictum is a thing) but should be more prominent is that the Imperium is a space version of the HRE at it's most fractious. Everyone nominally follows the orders of the High Lord, but each planet or system is effectively it's own kingdom responsible for trade, defense and the Law. Only in the most extreme circumstances would the Imperium intervene beyond a strongly worded letter. And I mean Most Extreme on the planetary level, not sector or beyond. A person could spend their whole lives and never see anyone from off planet. While part of the setting is that cosmic horror aspect of beings beyond the veil that can make your head explode, and an oppressive facist government bound to operate that way because it feels that is the requirement to survive, a majority of people live in levels above and below the line of the average helot on a Marine Chapter world, or Cadian. The entire point of Necromunda is that there are other paths than those, and the Bequin novels show the same with there being hints of a middle class in her tales. For a VAST majority of the Imperium's subjects, I would expect life is okay. They don't have a Chaos fleet pouring in system, they just get up, go to their job, earn pay, go home, and cheer for their local town's sports team against the other town. They pray to the Emperor over their dinner, and the news talks about how the economy might slow because a trading partner three systems over is having a Founding.
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Dec 29, 2023 03:15
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^^^People will not agree that some imperial worlds are okay because something something supports facism. I think last time we had the discussion people were stating that Fifteen Hours, a book about the horrors of being an imperial guardsmen and the callous and destructive nature of Imperial Bureaucracy, was written as Imperial propaganda because the agri-world the main charcter comes from is fairly nice.Cooked Auto posted:The latter. Yes and etherals are also sub-contracting out DAngels to purge their human populations of psykers in return for information on the Fallen. Telsa Cola fucked around with this message at 03:42 on Dec 29, 2023 |
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Dec 29, 2023 03:38
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wiegieman posted:"We can't reform because of the constant threat of Chaos" is the lie that the Imperium tells itself every day. The threat of Chaos is real, but the evil of the Imperium is also real, and is in fact one of the main things that pushes people to Chaos worship. The good authors understand this
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Dec 29, 2023 03:55
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Kylaer posted:
Both Tau and Votann have psykers and can fall to Chaos. Votann use warp based tech instead of genes to control warp stuff, which the imperium probably could also do if they didn't ban innovation and invention. The Tau are naturally psychically frail and "weak" in the warp, which is why they have to either use short but still risky warp jumps like the Votann or much slower conventional travel and cryogenics. A couple Votann novels would help, I think
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Dec 29, 2023 04:01
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Calax posted:Yes... but also no. I think recent stuff posits instead that the quality of life throughout the imperium as a whole is way lower than that, with most citizens being illiterate, raw labor that is ground into dust and have very little to look forward to outside of their work. The nicer planets exist but are a rarity, because the imperium runs on blood and needs a lot of it to fuel the war machine, the one thing its mainly focused on, so the comfortable aren't the norm. Especially with the recent massive warp storms throwing the general supply lines into chaos and tossing planets out of their comfort zones, theres even less safety to go around and a lot more to threaten it. The Tithe is a big part of the administration and while planets routinely slip from the notice of the massive, crushing, inhuman bureaucracy every planet is expected to pay its due. The opposite also happens where the beauracracy screws up and the planet suddenly needs to provide way more to the imperium or be purged of at least its leadership. A marine helot especially in say Ultramar is a very comfortable place to be, and the average imperial laborer would envy. I remember them being taught to read as part of standard education is real unusual for the imperium as a whole. The balance of natural world to industrialization would also be a huge shock to anybody used to how the regular imperium operates. Given enough time Gully's reforms might have spread to every corner he can reach, but I imagine the pressure of keeping the imperium alive is probably gonna derail his plans to improve the quality of life. Living on a planet the imperium forgot about and has no active hand in governing or resource extraction is probably pretty alright though. Depends on how many technobarbarian desth gangs you have to worry about in your daily commute. Life on small agri and fuedal worlds where all you need to worry about is the tithe and the depredations of your own nobles. But the vast majority of the imperium is in forge worlds and hives and I can't really think of any positive depictions of life in those places for your normal person.. Sharkopath fucked around with this message at 05:21 on Dec 29, 2023 |
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Dec 29, 2023 04:15
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And all of that is just me using a lot of words to say what the last paragraph of the old grim dark intro did succinctly, and the redone version spells out even more explicitly.
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Dec 29, 2023 04:51
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Sharkopath posted:I like that without the emperor concentrating all of humanity under one poorly managed banner there probably would have been way less chaos too, even the emperors ideal version of perfected humanity was a flawed beginning. It's only gotten worse since. I appreciate that one of the narrators near the beginning of the HH novels was basically like "I met the Emperor once and could immediately tell that he was a bloodthirsty tyrant, absolute garbage dump of a person, barely even human"
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Dec 29, 2023 05:19
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I mean aside from a nice planet or two in books mostly written by Dan Abnett the Imperium at a ground level is pretty much always written as horrifically dystopian, hell the very existence of Servitors and their completely ubiquitous use alone is enough to knock even the normal planets Dan Abnett planets from "basically fine" to "this is a nightmare society from a 1950s Weird Tales story", the Warhammer Crime books in particular have been great for really exploring civilian life and they almost universally depict it as highly stratified, vacillating between over and under policed, and pretty much every consumer product being low quality junk that barely works or, in the case of foodstuff, borderline poisonous. I would take serious issue with the "vast majority" of the Imperium being a totally ok place to live. It is the "cruelest and most bloody regime imaginable" after all.
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Dec 29, 2023 06:09
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Every single nice planet only exists to be part of a tragic backstory and/or tragically invaded.
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Dec 29, 2023 06:39
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AnEdgelord posted:I mean aside from a nice planet or two in books mostly written by Dan Abnett the Imperium at a ground level is pretty much always written as horrifically dystopian, hell the very existence of Servitors and their completely ubiquitous use alone is enough to knock even the normal planets Dan Abnett planets from "basically fine" to "this is a nightmare society from a 1950s Weird Tales story", the Warhammer Crime books in particular have been great for really exploring civilian life and they almost universally depict it as highly stratified, vacillating between over and under policed, and pretty much every consumer product being low quality junk that barely works or, in the case of foodstuff, borderline poisonous. I would take serious issue with the "vast majority" of the Imperium being a totally ok place to live. It is the "cruelest and most bloody regime imaginable" after all. The novels tend to focus on planets that are more similar to current day life but the gamebook narrative sections really hammer home the whole "trillions living in the worst possible conditions imaginable" part of the setting.
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Dec 29, 2023 06:41
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yeah "For a VAST majority of the Imperium's subjects, I would expect life is okay"? ok fed. ok where's your loving rosette you loving grok you have to tell me if you're an Inquisitor
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Dec 29, 2023 07:39
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Sharkopath posted:Living on a planet the imperium forgot about and has no active hand in governing or resource extraction is probably pretty alright though. Depends on how many technobarbarian desth gangs you have to worry about in your daily commute. Life on small agri and fuedal worlds where all you need to worry about is the tithe and the depredations of your own nobles. But the vast majority of the imperium is in forge worlds and hives and I can't really think of any positive depictions of life in those places for your normal person.. "At least maybe the agri-worlds are okay to live on" is a longstanding notion in warhams (see Fifteen Hours, as mentioned above) but there was a lot of effort toward deconstructing this idea in Lords of Silence The conclusion being that an agri-world is just as awful as a forge world, it just makes grain instead of nuts and bolts I think this was partly editorial wanting to ram home the grimdark and partly wraight knowing maybe a little more science than some of the 90s/00s authors and realizing that a whole planetary biosphere converted to crop monocultures would be a nightmare
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Dec 29, 2023 08:01
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Eisenhorn does that pretty well with the agri-world that's just a miserable place where it rains thick sap all the time as a byproduct of the constant threshing by titanic harvesters. Let's just ignore how weird that part is otherwise what with the r-slur and whatnot.
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Dec 29, 2023 08:18
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the best authors are able to construct a pretty horrific imperium whose citizens nevertheless have lives, jobs, families, joys etc. the idea of the imperium as a giant john blanche painting is imo as silly as the idea of a “nice” imperium; people can’t live that way, and it certainly wouldn’t be able to propagate itself for ten thousand years. there are plenty of violent and repressive places on earth (try living in a favela) but people there still ride bikes and play football and write poetry etc. the imperium is a nightmarish dystopia but people carve little lives out of it, because that’s just what people everywhere do. the point of the imperium is to be horrible enough that chaos is meaningfully tempting to people. chaos is never, ever correct, it never has a point, it’s never “better” than the imperium, it’s an entire dimension of sadistic torture demons, but despite that sometimes people are tempted enough to say yes to it, and how that happens is interesting enough to write about.
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Dec 29, 2023 11:20
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^^^ Excellent post, I agree completely. I would also like to add that the "It's all the Imperium causing it's own problems" take discards the fact that Chaos has agency of it's own - the Pantheon and the greater daemons definitely have their own minds, personalities, and ability to plan and act to further their own goals. Take the Orks for comparison. They have agency and pursue their own goals, and those goals are absolutely incompatible with peace with anyone including themselves, because they're the remnant of a bioweapon from 70 million years ago and was MADE FOR FIGHTIN'. If the Imperium was completely different, the Orks would still be the same. Chaos would still be Chaos if the Imperium was different - absolutely, a less-cruel Imperium would offer fewer opportunities for Chaos to get their hooks into people, but again I offer that boredom has been used as a reason to embrace Slaanesh, so there are routes other than despair.
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Dec 29, 2023 11:54
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If the people of the imperium didn't have some kind of perseverance or human spirit or whatever you wanna call it, there wouldn't be much point in telling stories about them, because it's those qualities contrasting with the horror they live in that makes for interesting narratives. Not every life is the legless wretch who spends every waking hour doing their generational job of lubricating a single cog in an enginarium, never having moved more than ten meters from where they were born, but the vast majority of lives are spent under various forms of oppression. 16 hour work days, strict rationing, compulsory mass, constant surveillance and inspection, population control and a million other things are normalized and internalized, and people live their lives, work their 16 hour jobs and meet for Just Like Amasec! brand rotgut after confession, because people can't stop being people. The lucky ones get to fear only the arbites or the munitorum press gangs or the self-appointed witch hunter vigilantes and never see even the trace of anything supernatural, and that makes up a pretty substantial part of the imperium, but it's still hell.
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Dec 29, 2023 12:05
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Kylaer posted:^^^ Excellent post, I agree completely. I would also like to add that the "It's all the Imperium causing it's own problems" take discards the fact that Chaos has agency of it's own - the Pantheon and the greater daemons definitely have their own minds, personalities, and ability to plan and act to further their own goals. Its more that because the imperium existed, Chaos now has massive self propagating armies and space fleets that are exporting misery to every species and corner of the galaxy, when the imperium isn't acting as that horror itself. The imperiums war machine and lifestyle is just empowering every chaos god. Endless fuel for war, bodies packed so tightly that nurgle has a new playground, wealth for bored nobility so excessive that summoning demons for fun becomes an attractive past time, etc. And the Imperiums penchant for ignorance makes it easier for these cults to spread and propagate. In isolation smaller pockets of humanity probably could have acted as better wardens and bastions against a Chaos that didn't have multiple primarchs, Chaos marine legions, and heretek daemon engines as it's agents in the materlum, but because the emperor did what he did now they can reach their hands out and send entire star systems of the galaxy screaming into the warp, and getting stronger every time they do. The imperium is Chaos's greatest ally. Black Griffon posted:If the people of the imperium didn't have some kind of perseverance or human spirit or whatever you wanna call it, there wouldn't be much point in telling stories about them, because it's those qualities contrasting with the horror they live in that makes for interesting narratives. Not every life is the legless wretch who spends every waking hour doing their generational job of lubricating a single cog in an enginarium, never having moved more than ten meters from where they were born, but the vast majority of lives are spent under various forms of oppression. 16 hour work days, strict rationing, compulsory mass, constant surveillance and inspection, population control and a million other things are normalized and internalized, and people live their lives, work their 16 hour jobs and meet for Just Like Amasec! brand rotgut after confession, because people can't stop being people. The lucky ones get to fear only the arbites or the munitorum press gangs or the self-appointed witch hunter vigilantes and never see even the trace of anything supernatural, and that makes up a pretty substantial part of the imperium, but it's still hell. One of my favorite lines in 40k is from Haley's Dante, where right in the beginning when describing his father it lays out that as awful a life as being a rad scavenger on Baal's deserts is, the deprivation hadn't robbed him of all kindness and humility. Sharkopath fucked around with this message at 13:50 on Dec 29, 2023 |
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Dec 29, 2023 13:43
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Telsa Cola posted:^^^People will not agree that some imperial worlds are okay because something something supports facism. I think last time we had the discussion people were stating that Fifteen Hours, a book about the horrors of being an imperial guardsmen and the callous and destructive nature of Imperial Bureaucracy, was written as Imperial propaganda because the agri-world the main charcter comes from is fairly nice. There are places in the Imperium that aren't any worse than our world has been for the majority of people. Those places also have servitorization, which is something people completely skip past as being a part of the horror of the imperium. And no, they're not just all clones who never had sentience.
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Dec 29, 2023 14:49
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PupsOfWar posted:The conclusion being that an agri-world is just as awful as a forge world, it just makes grain instead of nuts and bolts I wonder if you could write a story set on an agri-world that is inspired by Thomas M. Disch's The Genocides.
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Dec 29, 2023 15:38
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I reckon you could just as easily do a story based on that premise about survivors on a world where a tyranid invasion has been arrested in some way, or a mutation has caused it to be less deadly or something, and I think both would be fun.
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Dec 29, 2023 15:48
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Hm, that reminded me of an old imperial guard short story I read probably decades ago, about a guy trying to escape a forest fire on a planet with giant trees. Does that terrible description ring a bell with anyone
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Dec 29, 2023 15:53
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Just finished up Brutal Kunnin, and man was that a good time. Definitely going to be on the hunt for more books written from the Ork point of view. Changing things up now and starting Pariah - 50 pages in and I'm already hooked!
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Dec 29, 2023 15:59
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Biplane posted:Hm, that reminded me of an old imperial guard short story I read probably decades ago, about a guy trying to escape a forest fire on a planet with giant trees. Does that terrible description ring a bell with anyone Something extremely similar happens in the new Lion book but that's all I got
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Dec 29, 2023 16:00
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habeasdorkus posted:There are places in the Imperium that aren't any worse than our world has been for the majority of people. Those places also have servitorization, which is something people completely skip past as being a part of the horror of the imperium. And no, they're not just all clones who never had sentience. Most servitors are clones, since there are way more of them than there are criminals. The Imperium makes them out of people anyway because it's a horrifying punishment. It doesn't matter that a servitor made out of a random criminal is going to be vastly inferior to the healthy clones that don't reject implants and have no minds, the horror is the point. There's nothing they can't take from you.
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Dec 29, 2023 17:25
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I thought most servitors are processed, it's just the cherubs that are all clones. The line too far... we still want messed up floating babies to fit our aesthetic but we definitely can't use real babies.
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Dec 29, 2023 17:28
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wiegieman posted:Most servitors are clones, since there are way more of them than there are criminals. [citation needed] this line gets bandied about over and over again but it has basically zero textual support, every time an author actually pays attention to Servitors they make a point of saying they are former heretics and criminals, even in the new Rogue Trader game when you deal with some Servitors acting up you have an option to free them but the Dogmatic choice is a line that says something like "don't free them, they haven't completed their penance yet" especially because cloning is hugely taboo within the Imperium, some stuff is vat grown but thats as close as is officially allowed (Krieg keep it under wraps) also lol that a hyper-dystopian police state has a shortage of criminals
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Dec 29, 2023 17:43
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AnEdgelord posted:[citation needed] I could see on a forge world where the mechanicus already has systems in place for vat growing themselves and a massive need for large numbers of servitors they might mostly be clones.
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Dec 29, 2023 17:49
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Sharkopath posted:I could see on a forge world where the mechanicus already has systems in place for vat growing themselves and a massive need for large numbers of servitors they might mostly be clones. I mean that isn't the case in Day of Ascension, they're harvesting a percentage of the population on the forge world for Servitorization on a yearly schedule. Its the central conflict of the book. I would also like to point out that one of the central traits of the imperium is that its overpopulated as gently caress and has manpower to spare, to the point that their own populations are one of the main sources of food. They have a titanic population to harvest servitors from. AnEdgelord fucked around with this message at 18:02 on Dec 29, 2023 |
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Dec 29, 2023 18:00
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