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Deptfordx posted:I didn't like the reveal that the Beast is actually multiple giant Orks Is is true that the whole thing was basically one giant excuse to make the terrible "Prime Orks" pun  ?
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May 28, 2020 18:02
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I was about to add 'Rogue Trader open-world exploration game like a grimdark No Man's Sky' and that reminded me of something: Rogue Traders really seem like they don't fit in the WH40K universe. The overarching theme is 'everything is bloody, fanatical, oppressive, and you have entire species locked in perpetual war with no quarters', and then RTs add the caveat '... except these Very Special Guys®, who can go wherever they like, answer to no-one, have fantastic adventures, explore the wild frontiers, meet interesting xenos without necessarily killing them, and recruit interesting people from all walks of life!'. Normally the explanation is obvious: someone wanted to shoehorn into an existing setting a role for the players, so they have to make up an excuse why they aren't just living the same highly regimented life as 99.9% of humanity. But Rogue Trader was the first edition of 40K. Why did they make a game about freewheelin' adventures in space, and then filled the book with fluff about corpse emperors and legions of space marines and vast armies? I know 1st edition was more satiric and tongue-in-cheek than how the setting eventually developed, but the initial blurb was virtually unchanged and already promised 'to be a man in such time is to be one amongs untold billions, it is to live in the cruellest and most bloody regime imaginable', and to follow that up with stories of space conquistadors boldly going where no man has gone before seems like it would strongly undermine the satire. Important disclaimer: I haven't actually read the 1st edition sourcebook, so this is all based on second-hand wikis and discussion. Let me know if some of the things I thought I learned are wrong.
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Jun 8, 2020 09:30
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MrNemo posted:I think originally it was a way to let people have free roaming adventures within a strict and rigid social setting. From a gameplay perspective it makes sense of you've got a dystopian and xenophobic society but want players to be able to do stuff like have team ups to use some cool new models. My understanding of first edition is that it had more of an RPG element to it and without the more richly developed lore we have now, space privateers is a pretty good way of justifying whatever army compositions or stories players might want to use. Yeah, as I said, it makes total sense if the dystopia was there from the start and the RPG adventure had to fit in. But RTs were there from the start, so you would have expected the setting to be much more fragmented and fluid, so that they could have as much room for adventure as possible. I guess I am expecting some editorial backstory hinting that the game started out as a more military themed tabletop, but then a shift into a more RPG direction happened, and the Traders were invented to support it. I mean, if the game was conceived of as Rogue Trader from the start, why did it have a literal pile of Space Marines on the cover, engaged in a massive firefight? Why not, you know, a Rogue Trader with his team?
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Jun 8, 2020 12:25
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Even the Eisenhorn series visits pretty nice planets. Gregor settles on Gudrun because it's a pleasant place, and what we see of it as he travels around it incognito seems to confirm it's not just on the surface. Ravenor usually takes a random mind-walk through each new planet to get a sense of what it's like, and while we see some awful poo poo on the acid-rain Administrum hive, another one is a sunny low-tech world that feels like a sleepy Mediterranean town.
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Jun 8, 2020 21:40
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euphronius posted:40k universe makes more sense and is more humane than current western capitalist hell states goons.txt
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Jun 12, 2020 06:41
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Demiurge4 posted:I think one of the Ravenor books has one of the characters run into a Soviet action figure of Yuri Gagarin in an antique shop. Close - they were three Soviet toy rockets. But their survival only requires that our Earth existed at some point in the 40k timeline; it doesn't need it to have become Holy Terra. Mind you, I think it would be insanely dumb if HT wasn't Earth, given that the lore is full of references to only slightly altered Earth names, cultures and religions, and that the solar system matches the Sol system to a T. I haven't read the Horus Heresy snippet being alluded to, but the only way I can see it making any sense would be if DAOT humanity had used their godlike tech to build a clone of the Sol system, perhaps after some catastrophe befell the original. And it would still be a huge stretch to describe that as "making any sense".
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Jun 15, 2020 12:27
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Zasze posted:Your thinking of the 3rd alpharius, the Hydra has 3 heads so obviously triplets quote:A fun nod to Euncia is in book 8 of the heresy black books you can take it as a special relic wargear option. It will kill the user more often than not it's great. Enuncia is perhaps my least favourite part of the Eisenhorn books. 40k is a massive universe with dozens of potential sources of godlike powers, each with rich lore and plenty of connections to the rest of the universe, any one of which could have been a perfectly suitable MacGuffin for the Cognitae to chase. Instead, Abnett just throws out this crazy powerful universal magic that was supposedly around the whole time even though there was never a single hint about its existence until the late 41st millennium. It's like the dumb-rear end Perpetuals, perhaps my least favourite part of the entire setting. Oh, hey, some random humans are just randomly super-ultra-duper-immortal to the point of reforming after disintegration and there's no explanation at all, no connection to the Warp or the C'tan or any other part of the setting. It might have been fine if they were just some footnote hinting at a larger mystery to be explored in the future, but no, there's at least three of them playing critical roles in the Heresy. It's like Tom Bombadil in LOTR, if Tom had decided to follow Frodo and Sam all the way to the Cracks of Doom.
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Jun 20, 2020 22:18
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Gideon is a dude who's been dealt a truly poo poo card of hands by fate and is trying real hard to do the right thing nonetheless. Gregor is cold by nature. Gideon is cold because his real emotions are a giant ball of angst and envy for the physically abled, and he can't let those out because he must be a leader to his team of highly skilled, athletic acolytes who go out in the sun and mingle with people and jump around and do everything he'll never, ever do again. Quite frankly, it's a miracle of selflessness that he didn't just find a weak-willed guy and start flesh-wearing him 100% of the time. Imagine offering a quadriplegic the power to do that, and a special badge giving him full legal authority to do that. Satan himself couldn't come up with a bigger temptation.
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Jun 23, 2020 03:04
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NUMBER 1 FULCI FAN posted:What did I blink and miss in Eisenhorn book 1 between him getting injured on Gudrun and then suddenly they're on another planet where people are speaking old English (gothic)? Are they just looking into learning about the Pontius? Seriously I got a work call and missed a few minutes of the audiobook and now I'm on another planet. I just kept listening figuring I'd catch up but nah. No. The Ecclesiarch who was a guest / friend of the Glaws was involved with a missionary order on Damask that the family was sponsoring. It's mentioned twice, once during dinner and once by Eisenhorn as he ponders his next step, and both times only in passing so I imagine it would be super easy to miss it in an audiobook
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Aug 11, 2020 23:13
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SerCypher posted:Speaking of Cain, I am almost done reading every one of his books and one thought keeps coming up. There's a short fan story with the first three commissars that's hilarious and also shows why a full crossover wouldn't work very well. Let's see if I can find it. e: found it. Not as funny as I remember NihilCredo fucked around with this message at 20:45 on Aug 28, 2020 |
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Aug 28, 2020 20:42
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StrixNebulosa posted:I enjoy the huge amounts of information we get access to so I disagree with you, but on the other hand it's fantastic when the characters in the setting don't have the same information. There was a fantastic sequence in the second Ultramarines book by Graham McNeill where a whole community was all "tyranids? on my planet? nah we're not gonna evacuate we'll be fine" At the other end of the spectrum, in the second Fabius Bile book (which is much better than the first, incidentally), he and a bunch of CSM run into memelord Trazyn and it felt super weird that none of them had any clue what the Necrons were. Fabius and his gang are ten-thousand-year-old scientists with extensive connections and agents around the galaxy, and Fabius in particular is a serious scholar of Eldar lore, he should at least have heard of the War in Heaven and been able to connect the dots.
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Sep 2, 2020 17:24
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Arquinsiel posted:It's a solid bolter porn book to be fair. If friendo doesn't like it then maybe the wider setting just isn't for them. TBH I like the setting but I have zero interest in bolter porn and nonetheless the Library has plenty of stuff for me to enjoy. I've read the Cain books, then Eisenhorn/Ravenor/Pariah, then Requiem Infernal, I'm now finishing the Fabius Bile trilogy, and will probably grab either Bloodlines or Shira Calpurnia afterwards. My least favourite part of every single book so far has been the apparently-mandatory firefights.
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Sep 6, 2020 13:52
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Caesar Saladin posted:I'm currently reading the second one and he definitely smiles at his buddies occasionally, and then a few chapters later Abnett with remember that he can't smile and be like "he would have smiled if his nerves weren't frozen" so its pretty funny. In either the second or third book he gets a girlfriend, sort of, and I found it hilarious to imagine him smooching and trying to be all sexy with a Max Payne 1-style permanent grimace
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Sep 10, 2020 10:38
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From the last Fabius Bile book that I just finished:quote:‘A new phase of the Long War has begun, and the old gods have returned to stride the stars. Guilliman has returned. And he has not come alone.’ Also a few paragraphs later, Fabius when told of the Primaris Marines: quote:Fabius dismissed the image. ‘Ezekyle wants something to counter them, doesn’t he? How predictable. They make oversized warriors, we make oversized warriors.’ He shook his head. ‘A galaxy of children, squabbling over their toys.’ 
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Sep 14, 2020 08:04
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Ego-bot posted:Fulgrim killed Ferrus Manus and sent Guilleman into a several thousand year coma. He seems like the most successful of the bunch. Neither the emps nor regular Astartes grow old the way humans do, so it would be super weird if primarchs did.
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Sep 15, 2020 08:04
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D-Pad posted:Lol they announced a Sororitas VR game. I know it's gonna suck but I really want it. The trailer is missing the part where the mother superior makes you kneel on Legos for six hours because the heretic you cooked was improperly charred on one side.l
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Sep 17, 2020 06:33
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At a glance most of those books are from the aughts. Didn't WH have novels in the '90s? edit: Looks like it: this page only lists four books by Ian Watson before 1999. NihilCredo fucked around with this message at 16:50 on Sep 21, 2020 |
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Sep 21, 2020 16:47
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NUMBER 1 FULCI FAN posted:Has anyone read and _good_ 40k Horror books? I just realized they have their own category on the BL page, but I've never heard any of them recommended. I don't know if you mean the category specifically, but Requiem Infernal is a 40k horror book (small "h") and it's pretty drat good.
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Sep 29, 2020 20:18
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Got a link to that fanfiction? Google-fu isn't helping me much. (I did find a set of fanfics where primarchs land in Westeros, and Fulgrim getting adopted by Targs sounds extremely fitting. No idea if they're any good yet.)
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Oct 26, 2020 10:28
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Z the IVth posted:The genestealers themselves are definitely from Alien but I always felt the cult bits had a different origin. It's a pretty clear Shadows over Innsmouth inspiration. Cult of blood-related weirdos who look almost but not quite human and eventually rejoin the terrible otherworldly entities which created them and whom they long for.
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Oct 28, 2020 22:48
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aphid_licker posted:It's a bummer that they already did so much viewpoint poo poo from the heresy era bc revealing that a bunch of stuff got garbled in retelling / was embellished over the ensuing 10k years would've been p cool. WARHAMMER 40K: LEGENDS
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Nov 24, 2020 14:58
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Noted 100% Emperial Fistren successor chapter Sons of the Phoenix are already canonically 80's rockstars, filling You know, the kind of sober, stoic conduct that Dorn would have been proud of.
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Dec 9, 2020 01:06
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lenoon posted:AoS suffers the same issues that all super high fantasy loving about with planes does - magical planes are consequence free in DnD, MtG and AoS. Oh no! The plane of fire is being invaded by monsters from the plane of being a pillock! Who cares? There’s no relatable touchstone (countries, planets, areas of defined size which can be grasped in relation to others) I know nothing about AoS, but the issue you describe usually boils down not to countries or other features but to characters. If the Plane of Fire had a bunch of well-loved stories set in it, and some major characters who consider it their home, then its destruction will be felt no matter how metaphysical it gets. And viceversa, nobody cares about a world that's just a map of random borders.
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Dec 30, 2020 14:34
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IIRC Fabius was his given name, and he's unspecified Northern European, but Bile was a nickname bestowed on him pre-Heresy.
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Dec 31, 2020 12:38
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Were there any traitors from loyalist legions?
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Jan 2, 2021 13:04
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Angry Lobster posted:Sure, the clearest case is the Dark Angels, with almost half of the legion rebelling. Oh. Duh. Ok, other than Luther's guys? I think there were a few White Scars who wanted to side with Horus or something, but IIRC the Khan immediately stomped them and made them redeem by suicide mission. Can't think of other examples, but it seems odd that seven out of nine loyalist legions would have precisely zero traitors. Might make sense for the Raven Guard and Salamanders who got utterly decimated, but not the others.
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Jan 2, 2021 15:53
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DAD LOST MY IPOD posted:I loved Pariah, even though I know a lot of fans didn’t, and I am beyond psyched that the sequel is finally here. I got the impression from reading Pariah that it might make a fantastic introduction to the 40k setting, oddly enough for the seventh volume in a series. "Young girl grows up in a creepy orphanage that trains special talents" is a very familiar trope to start the book with, and one that might appeal to those who don't enjoy military fiction. The main character knows virtually nothing about the wider 40k universe and slowly discovers it as the story advances. I think she doesn't really know what the Inquisition is and needs it explained (but to a real-world reader, the name "Inquisition" is usually enough to get a rough idea.) She knows about the Ecclesiarchy, but "creepy, corrupt, super-powerful not-Catholic Church" doesn't require much explanation either. The chaos marines are the only characters that might leave the reader a little confused, but as long as they get the gist of "really strong, demonically-powered bad guys" they should be able to follow the scenes and maybe get enticed into learning more about them. Plenty of successful fantasy settings didn't explain everything that appeared in the first book, especially if the protagonist was a newbie. Am I completely off-base here?
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Jan 20, 2021 21:20
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MrNemo posted:This is, at least 2 books in but not expecting it to change, Fabius Bile's strategy with daemons. They are non sentient, emotion inspired energy manifestations who imitate real consciousness. It really pisses them off and he's important and successful enough that I think the chaos gods are quietly cheering him on because they are dicks to all their followers. Time to quote that scene again: quote:‘Its jurisdiction extends far beyond your ability to conceive, alchemist. You have committed crimes of such monstrous elegance that even the gods themselves grow uneasy. Look – see – they sit in judgement of you.’ A too-long finger drifted upwards, and Fabius followed the gesture. He looked up, and something looked down.
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Jan 24, 2021 23:56
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DAD LOST MY IPOD posted:sanguinius, horus, at least one of the twins, curze, ferrus manus. all dead, and their deaths are significant parts of their stories. I would scratch Sanguinius and the twins off that list. Sanguinius because of the Sanguinor, and the twins because lies is the entirety of their personality. (Which IMO makes them just as boring as Rogal Dorn in their way.) Horus is the deadest entity in the galaxy, and Curze is the one with the most meaningful death. Ferrus Manus... well, he doesn't have a particular reason to stay dead IMO, but he had a clean death and doesn't have any reason to come back either. Maybe as a counterpart if a loyal Fulgrim pops up in some form (which he really should, he had the dumbest fall of all the Primarchs), but that would be kind of gratuitous.
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Feb 2, 2021 22:03
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Do high-rank pariahs actually kill psykers by proximity? I thought they just shut down their powers and made them extremely uncomfortable as a result. The blanks in Eisenhorn / Cain stories may be of the weaker kind, but I just finished reading Avenging Son and even the Sisters of Silence don't banish daemons or kill Chaos sorcerers by sheer proximity, they just weaken them.
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Feb 28, 2021 23:24
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Dog_Meat posted:This is one of the "my immersion" issues I have with the Ciaphas Cain books (which lets face it, aren't exactly hardcore 40k). The fact that Jurgen is this extremely powerful anti-psyker, a goddam badass soldier, fiercely loyal and too dumb/stubborn a believer to be tempted to chaos and yet when an inquisitor discovers him she allows this super rare, invaluable, ready-to-go resource stay in the guard where statistically he's likely to be thrown into a pointless meat grinder war in the rear end-end of the sector and die on a pointless hill somewhere. Mitchell addresses this once or twice as best as he can. Amberley supposedly has Inquisitor rivals / superiors (don't remember which) who would pull rank and requisition Jurgen from her if he were part of her retinue and was discovered how powerful he is. By leaving him with Cain, she knows he isn't in too much danger as an aide-de-camp to a cautious commissar, and she can fetch him whenever she needs a blank more than she needs the psyker/s in her retinue. Plus, it gives her a convenient excuse to visit her boyfriend more often (this wasn't in the text explanation, just my headcanon )
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Mar 2, 2021 09:38
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Z the IVth posted:They'll cross every line possible except the one that leads to management. When I change job this is gonna be my resume's tagline
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Mar 2, 2021 15:03
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The Strange Demise of Titus Endor by Abnett is the best piece of 40K fiction I've ever read and it stands entirely on its own (though it spoils a minor plot point from IIRC the second or third Eisenhorn book). I read a rumor that after it was published, GW decided that they didn't want to ever put out anything so high-brow and depressing again in BL. If true, that would be incredibly disappointing.
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Mar 12, 2021 19:18
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Badly Jester posted:Is there a good resource for plot summaries of Black Library books or more specifically Pariah? I want to read Penitent soon, but that would definitely benefit from a bit of a refresher. In the first few chapters of Penitent, Beta basically recaps everything / everyone you need to know. It's very cheesy from a literary point of view but it definitely saved me from having to look up any names.
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Mar 16, 2021 13:33
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Schadenboner posted:I guess I feel like "We're going after the sub-sector governor who is connected up to he eyeballs" is already a valid reason to keep it quiet though? The first Eisenhorn book also established that some inquisitors go in all sneaky undercover 007, while others think that you're barely an inquisitor if you don't go around windmill slamming your rosette into everybody's face. My favourite moment from that book is when the then-heroic protagonist doing the action film routine 'I will infiltrate the enemy base under the cover of night!' only manages to get himself captured (surviving only because this is early-00's pulp fiction so the bad guys put him into a poorly-secured bloodsport arena instead of executing him - but I digress), and has to have his rear end saved by the old, curmudgeonly, prejudiced, narrow-minded puritan inquisitor who does not hesitate a second before ringing up the nearest Lord Admiral and requisitioning a bunch of warships to wipe out the most powerful noble family on the planet from orbit. NihilCredo fucked around with this message at 16:41 on Mar 24, 2021 |
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Mar 24, 2021 16:39
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Given that Penitent is set some centuries before the current timeline*, it's safe to say that whatever its ending is setting up, it isn't going to be a galaxy-shattering event despite having all the potential for it. The next book Pandaemonium has basically two options: 1) nothingburger, everything that's being set up fails, although in a suitably epic and tragic fashion; 2) the conflict results in the creation of some long-term assets (people, artifacts, knowledge, whatever) that are going to lay dormant for a few centuries and may come back into play whenever the main plot requires them. I just hope if it's #2, that they do have a plan to actually bring back those assets. The Fulgrim clone plot has always annoyed me because it should be a big loving deal but it's likely to just stay buried in Solemnace forever since it was just a plot device for a (relatively) side characters. Come to think of it, the Glandhounds from the same series also have the same problem. Treating the thing in Penitent the same way as those in Fabius Bile's books would be a lot worse. * Preempting the mandatory "but warp nonlinear timeline fuckery": it's a useful cheap excuse for side stories like BFG2's fleet or the Grey Knights' adventures, but you can't have the main Imperium plot hinge on random time travel throwing $VERY_IMPORTANT_CHARACTERS from the distant past into the current day.
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Mar 26, 2021 18:25
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Yeah, Pariah Bequin was a fantastic character and I enjoyed watching her basically figure out the setting from scratch with nothing but raw guts and wiles. Penitent Bequin feels like she skipped 3-4 books of character growth and instantly became a confident, competent leader and we already have a bunch of those around. The underworld adventure is where it started to go a bit sour IMO. It felt like a perfect 'first initiative' for an enthusiastic but reckless would-be hero who gets in over their head and does get some results but either (a) loses something/someone important in the process, or (b) has to learn some humility when the elder inquisitor has to bail them out (or both, as for Eisenhorn in Glaw House in Xenos). Instead she survives entirely unscathed, successfully completes her objective, and gains a literal guardian angel in the process. Oh, and she also has a far too perfect grasp of the very complex characters surrounding her, she hangs out a little bit with Eisenhorn and even less with Ravenor but seems to know them as intimately as us readers do. Like I said, I loved how she spent the first book figuring out the setting, I was hoping she'd spend the second book digging further into the inquisitors and the Cognitae, giving us a look at the two institutions and their people through fresh eyes. Instead nope, she already knows virtually everything from page one.
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Mar 30, 2021 09:19
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Renner is a decent character, but one thing that really bothers me is when, at the end of Pariah, we learn that his "crime" was actually a cartoonishly noble and heroic act to the point of parody, something like saving a little girl from cruel Ecclesiarchs who wanted to burn her alive. Way to pull your punches, Abnett. It would have been more plausible and interesting if he'd been guilty of something seriously heretical or in any case something Bequin was deeply uncomfortable with. She befriends the entirely unrepentant Cherubael in the next book, it would have been a nice step for her to have to come to terms with caring for a not-quite-yet-redeemed criminal.
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Apr 5, 2021 18:27
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No. 1 Juicy Boi posted:Lords of Silence is a lot of fun so far. It really straddles the line between humanizing the Death Guard and showing how terrifying they are. Like, I guess humans just vomit themselves to death uncontrollably around them? loving wild "Corposant-lit halitosis" is a phrase I'm pretty confident had never been put to the page before, ever.
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Apr 10, 2021 08:41
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Wait, so if the current largest Titanicus models are Warlords which clock in at something like 1500-2000€ IIRC, how much is one of these Warmasters going to go for? 
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Apr 12, 2021 20:46
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