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Preechr posted:Honestly, every time I see a reference to modern or ancient culture in 40k it always feels weird as hell. Like when scholars of ancient history know french or english or whatever. The setting is more than 3 times further ahead in history than all of human recorded history up to this point; why would any vestige of today survive until then through multiple apocalypses and active attempts to erase history? They (the authors) are up against it here. Yes, it would make more sense if their cultural references were to the dominant empires of the 20th-30th millenia, and everything in actual (real life) history was an obscure footnote. But that is extremely hard to make up convincingly on the fly. And existing, real world history has resonance with the readers and is there for the taking. As nonsensical as it is, I think hearing them blather on about the ancient philosophers of the gobbledegook empire of 23000-27000 AD would be more tiresome.
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Jul 28, 2021 18:01
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Ardent Communist posted:No, I'm thinking of a paragraph or two blurb in a codex, where the guy is part of some horse culture that gets whipped up to fight the Imperium. They end up charging space marines (with obvious results) but the one guy gets close enough to put his lance into one, which a Chaos Space Marine exploits, then offers the guy to be made into a space marine. From the second 3rd edition Chaos Codex (commonly referred to as 3.5). Really great piece. Cool idea to think about the Chaos legions recruiting from chaos-worshipping cultures.
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Oct 22, 2021 14:34
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I watched Angels of Death and found it super disappointing compared to something like Astartes. The animation quality and directing isn't up to scratch for me. I find it very clichéd and immersion breaking just how bad the space marines are at being soldiers. They walk slowly around the place blundering into ambushes. Enemies appear and they stand there being dramatically surprised for a moment, and then start shooting, which isn't seen to be that effective. Every element of their planning and tactics is shown to be deficient, they don't seem scary as they only triumph by their enemies somehow failing to kill them despite having every advantage. Ruins it for me.
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Nov 25, 2021 12:25
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Dog_Meat posted:Yeah, this got a little stale pretty quickly. I get that the astartes are giant, proud fight machines with oaths and vengence, etc - but they're also supposed to be super-brained tacticians with eidetic memories and strategic geniuses (compared to a baseline human), so constantly bitching and fighting on the eve of a cataclysmic war with the fate of the entire bloodline and possibly the Imperium in the balance seems a bit... off. I mean this is a constant tension when describing Astartes between what they're supposed to be, and the genre conventions. Like they're supposed to be elite and highly effective soldiers . . . but the narrative construct for most 40k adventures in these pulp books is for them to turn up, have no idea who their opponents are, get surprised as a big threat is revealed, and then spend the rest of the book blundering towards a mcguffin while everyone except a couple named protagonists gets killed. Which clearly can't be your MO if you want your organisation to survive!
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Mar 1, 2022 22:00
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Geisladisk posted:I'm reading my way through Ghostmaker and apparently Comissar Gaunt is 2.20 meters tall, which is about 7'3. I always thought that Dan Abnett was prone to doing what a lot of older British/American people do and assumed (at least when talking about height) that 1 metre = 3 feet. If you convert that to 2.2 yards it's 6'6" to 6'7", which is probably more or less what he meant. Or everyone's 7 foot plus, I don't know. Wouldn't be the first time scale was just wacky in a BL book.
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Apr 28, 2022 23:20
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moonmazed posted:rereading eisenhorn in preparation for bequin/magos and it reminded me, is ravenor pronounced rav-enor or raven-or? Sorry, what's an r word in this context?
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May 2, 2022 08:53
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Arquinsiel posted:3:1 is the generally recognised required ratio for an attack to not bounce. Not to be pedantic, but (in modern military terms, admittedly not planned for titans or orbital bombardment) the 3:1 ratio is to push an offensive into territory where the enemy has had time to plan a defence and/or prepare positions. Fortresses aren't really a concept due to increasingly lethal fires, up to and including tactical nukes, but if we take urban areas as an analogy, those require a much higher ratio. I second the Christian Cameron recommendation though. A very prolific author, competent prose, all his plots and characters, regardless of era, have a certain similarity (martial artist military officers with strong ethics) but his books are highly enjoyable if you're interested in military history.
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Aug 17, 2022 20:24
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poo poo you want the first and second sieges of Rhodes.
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Badly Jester posted:I just decided to look up CS Goto on Wikipedia to see what he has been up to (haven't heard about any of his work since the dreadful Dawn of War novels), and, well, this greeted me at the top of the article: I'm not a Wikipedia editor or anything, but surely the whole point of an online encyclopaedia is to store information? The argument that the info is too obscure to be recorded seems counter to the spirit of the whole thing. Why would you delete it?
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Sep 6, 2022 20:22
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FPyat posted:You gotta have some rule preventing random people from flooding the site with articles about themselves, the people they know, local businesses, etc Deptfordx posted:Wikipedia has deleted stuff not judged as meeting it's 'Notability' requirements since day one. How interesting. I hadn't considered the issue of people writing about themselves or those they know personally. And I suppose that if the site has a page for every published author and work, it would just become unmanageable.
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Sep 7, 2022 00:13
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Siivola posted:Any choice bits or is it all just "woo sturmtruppen"? I take an equally dim view of that book. From what I remember, they described almost all the training and selection as lethal. This really irked the pedant in me. I am more of a fan of Abnett's imperial guard type stuff, which is steeped in 40k's grimdark setting atmosphere but also owes something to fictionalised real world military stuff. Now in the real world, all training is on a spectrum from 'train through', ie you want to get as many of the starting trainees as possible through the program, and 'select out', where you purposely have summative tests where any failure of the standard, or indicating that you don't want to be there, gets you off the course. The 8th ed Militarum Tempestus is the latter approach dialled up to a truly stupid degree. I know all 40k at any time is supposed to be ridiculous, and the fact it wouldn't really work could/should be taken as a commentary on the toxicity of the Imperium. But the stormtrooper (sorry, Tempestus Scion) training at the Schola Progenium described in the book just wouldn't produce any trained soldiers. The trainees get killed en masse. The 2 approaches I mention above do correlate with how 'elite' the trained product is, but even more than that, they're dictated by how big the recruitment pool is. The recruitment pool for the Schola Progenium is explicitly orphans of imperial servants. So regardless of how big the Imperium is, its scale is strictly limited relative to the overall military machine. It doesn't make any sense for them to be this selective. Like the space marine selection stuff mentioned in many other silly books, they're slaughtering potentially very good soldiers at a high rate, often in tests that aren't controlled at all, so it's not like the better trainees are necessarily the ones that survive. The one that sticks in my head is that for the commissars or scions, I forget, one of the final tests, to check their resolve or some bullshit, is to execute another student. At this rate that's one of a very small surviving percentage of passed trainees. Boom, that's it, killed them to prove a point to one of the others. I mean this could all be taken as satire, but the general tone seemed 100% serious and full of fawning over how incredibly hard the fully trained scions are. Classic spartan-myth-worshipping bollocks. "We'll make all of them crawl miles through broken glass, presumably some of them will survive and naturally they will be superb soldiers!" "No, I have a better idea. Let's rigorously train a load of hand-picked child soldiers from exclusively indoctrinated backgrounds, literally for years. Then we'll do your thing, ensuring only a small percentage will actually give any return of service" "Wonderful idea lord-general"
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Oct 19, 2022 18:28
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notaspy posted:That has consumed species far greater than humanity. This is one of my pet pedant-hobby-horses about the 40k lore. Humanity would be turbo-turbo-hosed. They love to put in pictures and explanations of the Imperial Guard and assorted other humans fighting against Tyranids, Daemons, Orks, etc. While a common theme in these stories is that things do go badly for a while, and regular human soldiers are shown to be overmatched, often it sort of turns out alright with some pluck and determination and a cunning plan. Bullshit. Everything about how we think of waging war, all the tanks and munitions and formations of troops etc, is the concentration of so much effort. You need an enormous tail to put say a division of troops in the field and keep them supplied, and even in ideal circumstances they will get worn down and need to be rotated out fairly soon. Warfare, because it is between humans, has tempo and intensity dictated by human limitations. Many of our ideas about strategy centre around targetting the enemy logistics or their cohesion, their confidence and willingness to fight or ability to do so in an organised, effective way. If you put any human force or civilisation against something like Tyranids, which are evolved killing machines that outnumber humanity, communicate instantly, have no logistics beyond needing to eat stuff to keep going, have no fear or hesitation, don't stop to plan or consider or find out what's happening on their flanks, they would be annihilated incredibly quickly. It would not be close. It doesn't matter how good at all the enabling activity of war the human civilisation is - the Tyranids don't need to do any of that stuff. Human forces would break and be eaten almost as soon as they came into contact.
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Mar 14, 2023 20:41
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notaspy posted:Watching the leviathan video and I have a thought about the utter waste it shows Basically, all modern industrialised warfare is attritional to a greater or lesser degree, and this would presumably be true of the Imperium's wars as well. That fundamentally doesn't work with the heroism and established personalities of the Space Marines so we all agree to ignore it. All the post rogue-trader fluff basically says marines are all invincible heroes who have taken part in dozens of campaigns, are a match for any number of enemies, there are only a thousand in a Chapter but even a Company of a hundred can smash militarised worlds overnight, etc etc. This clearly can't be reconciled with the other factions' background, e.g. Tyranids are portrayed as an endless tide of monsters, we can safely assume they'd commit more than a thousand carnifexes amongst the other forces involved in the invasion of a world, and a space marine can't usually kill a carnifex single handed. If the Imperium were only waging wars against separatists, rebels etc, all humans with a level of tech and organisation at or below that of the Imperial Guard, you can see how space marines could survive and become enormously experienced, similarly to how the longest-serving soldiers in modern western special forces can have done a lot of tours and seen a lot of action over the last 22 years, and survived (not all of them by any means). Because their opposition was inferior in training, intelligence preparation, weaponry and support. But even in that situation it would mean Space Marines being employed as special forces, IE for recon (not really their forte as enormous walking tanks) or strikes on high value targets. The way things like the new 40k trailer tend to portray it, marines are being used as frontline shock troops against enemy forces, and that just wouldn't be possible without taking heavy casualties. So I don't find it very engaging either because it just seems so pointless. Still better than stuff like that Blood Angels animation, which epitomises the dumb plots of so many SM centred bolter porn books. These "elite" soldiers bumble into a situation with no idea of what they're facing or even what their objective is, they get attacked, they take horrific casualties and their units get rendered combat ineffective, ultimately a couple plucky survivors strike a desperate blow and kill the enemy leader, so all the enemies die/give up/melt away. This is ultimately because 40k bolter porn fiction follows the conventions of pulp adventure novels, it isn't military fiction. Dan Annett is one of the only authors that puts a bit more military trapping into his stuff, although it's still fairly unrealistic, and as someone mentioned already, he has a great story about a Tyranid invasion called the "Death of Malvolion" (the name of a planet which forms the setting). Basically, the Tyranids absolutely overrun a planet, the story is from the view of a terrified survivor fleeing amidst it. The SM drop assault in and he thinks they're saved, then the SM all get overwhelmed and wiped out inside 20 minutes, because ultimately there are fewer than a hundred of them and the Tyranids are innumerable. It's a really good gut punch of a story, and to me it encapsulates both how utterly hosed the Imperium is trying to face the nids, and how silly SM numbers are in such a setting. Genghis Cohen fucked around with this message at 19:46 on Apr 30, 2023 |
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Apr 30, 2023 19:43
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Black Griffon posted:The fall of Rome This is great, very well written! You are completely right that any pre-modern society would just be completely thrown by what they would perceive as divine retribution, and submit to whatever the Imperium then demanded. I was thinking more of war against modern industrialised states or the other enemies in 40k, who even if they couldn't match the SM level of technology or competence, would recognise what it was. Some great points by a few people about how SM couldn't be a lone instrument of conquest, but a few in the right place would be very useful. Calax is quite right there's a wider problem of how scale is portrayed in 40k. Very common in planetary sci fi. Every planet basically represents a city, town or rural neighbourhood. If you are looking for Bob on the planet Mortimer, you just take your spaceship over there and ask around. Perhaps you ask the planetary governor, who has the information at his fingertips that a shuttle arrived yesterday, maybe Bob was on that. If you need to attack Mortimer, obviously a quick battle at the capital, Mortimer City, should decide the issue. This is the same syndrome that leads to desert worlds, jungle worlds, worlds with only one culture etc. To be fair some of their authors like Dan Annett and Chris Wraight have gotten much better at incorporating the scale of 40k.
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May 1, 2023 08:25
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DAD LOST MY IPOD posted:It’s very very bad. I also think the book doesn’t hold up even without it, but it’s a bad line, maybe the worst in BL. Would you mind telling us what it is? I'm certain I've read that book, but I often semi-skim the less interesting BL stuff and I can't recall anything that egregious I'd remember it.
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May 3, 2023 22:32
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Black Griffon posted:Sorry sorry I had to get home from work. Wow, that really is something. Surprised it got past an editor. Very early 2000s/late 90s kids TV show energy.
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May 3, 2023 23:11
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OPAONI posted:There's another ADB short RIGHT before Betrayer thats the Word Bearers and World Eaters vs Eldar that also slaps. Oh, do you remember what it's called?
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May 17, 2023 01:21
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How incredibly (and yet entirely precedentedly) nuts. It's a shame because I really enjoyed Ilium and was looking forward to reading the Hyperion books. I can absolutely see a bit of reactionary old man-ism in the former though. What strikes me as particularly dumb about the logic of his brainworms fictional story there, isn't the message that religious fundamentalism is a serious evil and danger. I do think there's some xenophobia, bad faith and political chicanery in saying that danger comes from Muslims though, in America it's much more likely coming from the already in place Christian fundie groups. The dumb thing is his fictional future has 'Islam' suddenly breaking out in what is implied to be some kind of overwhelmingly destructive military strike on Western nations and suddenly becoming an aggressive global superpower, committed to specifically subjugating Europe and North America. He specifically mentions other regions of the globe, but only in the context that this loss of Western hegemony has given them more power. The biggest national Islamic population in the world is Indonesia for god's sake. Would this caliphate not want to spread its influence into China or Russia, or in Africa? No, because those countries don't matter; in the same way as aliens only ever invading the continental USA and who gives a drat about the other places, evil Islam only wants to bring death to Americans and subjugation to white women. It's dumb. What military or political force is supposed to bring about this super effective Jihad? Does Simmons even understand Sunni and Shia conflict, and that Iran would fight Saudi Arabia about as readily as they'd fight Israel? This isn't even an attempt at short-form speculative fiction, it just uses the storytelling device to try and fool the reader into thinking it's dark and sombre, where in fact it's simply implausible.
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Jun 26, 2023 18:23
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So, this new book is up for pre-order about an 'Inquisitor Sabbathiel' and I remember the preview sort of gave the impression she was an established, returning character. Is this the case, or is it the first appearance?
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Jul 8, 2023 22:22
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D-Pad posted:She was previously a character in three comic series with four issues each. You can read them here, and I would recommend doing so before starting the book: Thank you for that, very helpful! I have read the modern Inferno anthologies, but obviously it didn't make that big an impression. Shame as I love the Inquisition-themed stuff in general.
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Jul 9, 2023 12:58
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Gravitas Shortfall posted:I don't rate Saturnine as highly as this thread seems to, it was just connective tissue with a few good scenes. Weirdly you could say the same about Echoes Of Eternity by ADB, but I rate that one a lot higher. Different strokes for different folks - I found Saturnine's relatively understandable military actions to be more enjoyable than the End and the Death, where honestly I did think the overblown vocabulary and unformatted page-long sentences were a little much. One sequence in that style would have been very impressive but when it was most of the book it got distracting.
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Jul 18, 2023 17:06
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100% Mortis was the worst. Massive Titans breaching the last bastions of the Imperium . . . made boring as hell, somehow.
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Jul 19, 2023 09:03
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Sephyr posted:I love how the setting can't ever really pin down just how strong/killable a Primarch is. It's a tough job, granted. At times they will confidently wade into 200 enemies and come out unscathed to no one's surprise, at others a 10-guy unit of Alpha Legion with basic boltguns are supposed to be a skin-of-the-teeth five alarm dangerous death threat. I think the bit you're referring to is Abnett sort of playing with the much-asked question in this sort of comic-book serial fiction, "could we win this incredibly bombastic, drawn out, visually spectacular war by just shooting the protagonist in the head when he's not expecting it". And while it's a spirited attempt to inject some tension, ultimately the answer is you just can't kill a Primarch except with another Primarch in a suitably dramatic fashion at an appropriately climactic moment, because the plot demands it. I'm definitely in the camp that wonders why capital ships never explode catastrophically in space battles, or get lost in the warp, when anyone too important is on board. But I accept that's not the point of these books.
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Jul 20, 2023 00:33
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Sharkopath posted:I think eldar are unfortunately just one of the least popular factions for the fiction. It's a shame because I think culture wise they have a pretty interesting one with a lot of facets that make it more than just a mashup of other pop culture. Honestly being craftworld seems like one of the more chill ways to live your life in a universe of nightmares, at least until they find you. I think there are a lot of snippets about Craftworld Eldar society that could be cool, but no (good author) has ever filled in the gaps. It sounds interesting that they're kind of post-scarcity, any Eldar can choose to do whatever they want, with some boundaries like the society needs a certain amount of warriors, seers, craftsmen of various types. However all their 'tone', in the absence of any strong vision tying together all the codex snippets, is a really bland and boring 'elves in space' melange. Kind of airy-fairy, lot of contemplating poetry in artificial craftworld meadows. Bit of melancholy aristocracy, last heirs of ancient houses. A dash of pacifistic poets having to become soldiers. It needs some work to imagine how their society and government actually functions, rather than a nebulous socialism with Farseers making strategic decisions and Autarchs appointed for campaigns.
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Aug 9, 2023 19:50
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Philthy posted:Pariah Nexus was pretty cool. If that wasn't the astartes guy leading it, they sure emulated the best they could. The sound effects were the first of any of the series since that actually sounded GOOD. Everything had weight behind it. I'm not sure I liked the chapter cuts every 10 seconds, it got annoying. The Sister of Battle was.. annoying. Next time use Sister of Silence plspls. The guardswoman was good because she kept making fun of the Sister and somehow didn't get executed. The soldier was nagging at the Sister of Battle so drat much I was kind of thinking she's a figment of her imagination? Like a spectre of guilt from her subconscious or what have you. This was reinforced by the soldier not helping at all during the fight scene. But then some bits, the way it was shot didn't read like that. Guess we will see.
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Sep 14, 2023 20:08
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Khizan posted:That wouldn't make any sense at all, really. There were plenty of times during the Heresy where regular Astartes went up directly against Primarchs. Off the top of my head...loyalist World Eaters fighting against Angron. The Alpha Legion kill team attacking Guilliman in his quarters. Sigismund facing Fulgrim atop the walls of Terra. The Grey Knights facing down a fully daemonic Angron. Their entire thing is that they know no fear. Sidetracking a bit, there are a lot of points in the Siege of Terra series and wider Heresy books where the behaviour of astartes when enemy Primarchs appear just seems deeply stupid or outright suicidal. They're always charging at the primarch from all sides and obviously getting slaughtered. I get there's some in-universe justification for that, they are warriors as well as soldiers, and especially with legions like the World Eaters you could argue it makes sense. For others like the Alpha Legion it feels like very false set-dressing to give the primarch cool things to do. You would think that not only would almost any marines fall back immediately in the face of a primarch - they should be professional enough to not attack in the face of certain death - you would think that some of the genius strategic minds of the imperium/traitors would start just setting up traps to make sure an enemy primarch appeared at the front, and then pointing some kind of orbital bombardment or precision weapon strike at the grid coordinates. I get the narrative reasons that doesn't happen, and at a couple points, e.g. Saturnine and Angron, the authors play with it by showing daemon primarchs just aren't killable by such impersonal methods. But it makes me roll my eyes every time that whenever a Primarch goes into battle there will be a page or two of mighty astartes champions running straight at him and being cut down in one blow. Like don't they ever stop to think?
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Dec 6, 2023 17:06
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MariusLecter posted:It was nice he named the protagonist Sarpedon. I mean if he considered the reference to greek mythology and didn't just pick the name out of a hat. Does it mean anything as a reference? I thought Sarpedon (king of the Lycians in the Iliad) isn't particularly a complex story. He's just a noble man, Zeus' son, shows gentlemanly courtesy to Diomedes, gets killed by Patroclus. I'm struggling to see any symbolism linking him to a forgettable renegade space marine protagonist.
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Jan 4, 2024 17:42
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DAD LOST MY IPOD posted:the next book in the ultramarines series after that is absolutely dreary, though, with nothing to recommend it. it also features the bizarre stylistic choice to name the main baddie after famous Massachusetts general Sylvanus Thayer, father of the army corps of engineers, for no discernible reason. What, really? Like just Silvanus (which is a historical Latin forename) or just Thayer? Either of those would be fine. If it's both together that's weird as hell.
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Jan 8, 2024 22:56
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Grilled Beef posted:Yep. To jump to film real quick: Everyone talks about how Kubrick was obsessive about shots and would go 509 times to get a perfect take, no one talks about how he ran bare bones sets and consistently made a ton of money. Michael Bay is praised as only of the only men in Hollywood who can run a $5m/day action sequence set and get what he needs. Clint Eastwood will go all day but he gets it in the can and comes in ahead of schedule and under budget. You know why Adam Sandler still has a career? Because he consistently makes a profit for his investors. You probably didn’t watch The Out-Laws, but Netflix paid $62m for it and it only cost $47 to make. Paul Blart 2 cost $30m, and it made $107m. Consistently turning out a profitable product matters. I think this caps off some really good points people have made. Ultimately BL publishes to make profits, not to win literary awards. When we, as people who I assume have mostly read way too much genre fiction, but also have at least some wider reading, discuss the subjective quality of different authors' prose, we are (I suspect) in the minority of BL readers. I can remember being 14, I would read absolutely any schlock that mentioned swordfights or any fantasy ideas I found at all interesting. I was not critical. Sure, some of the better written stuff lasted longer in my memory, but I paid the same price for it as the crappy stuff.
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Mar 14, 2024 23:23
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