OSSR: Warhammer: 40K: Colons
Fluff!
Tongue in cheek yes, but this is a fairly accurate depiction of one of the pivotal events in Warhammer history.
For musical accompaniment we are going to be listening to
Manowar, because it is America's loudest band. Fuck yeah!
Koumei:
Honestly, the fluff of 40k could have a review thread all on its own. We’re not doing that, though, we’re talking about 3rd Edition, except when pointing out weird changes and differences, or because blood-alcohol levels say it’s a good idea to ramble about
Rainbow Warrior Space Marines or something.
FrankT:
The fluff of 40K is and always has been something rootless and intangible. There is not now and never has been any kind of world bible or even any single person with any serious editorial control. There are lots of different outlets for writing about the setting of WH40K, and people who get contracts to write for any of them pretty much put anything they feel like into the setting. Very frequently people will write wholly incompatible things, and the result is that contradictory descriptions of things simply exist. Sometimes there are elaborate fan theories about how obviously incompatible statements in different books and magazine articles are actually simultaneously true, but honestly fuck those theories and fuck the people who make them.
Regardless, the big takeaway is that “major events” in the storyline are all retconned in – and they can be retconned out just as easily. The entire Horus Heresy plotline (and the Chaos factions as we know them) comes from Servants of Darkness – a book that came out well after Warhammer 40,000 was a thing. When the Space Marines were first unveiled there were no original chapters or successor chapters, no Chaos chapters. There were just a thousand chapters and they gave 12 example chapters. The whole idea of primarchs and gene seeds and shit all came later.
Included: Rainbow Warriors and Ultramarines. Not included: Black Templars or any Chaos legions.
By 3rd edition, the game had been a going thing for over a decade, so you'd think that things would be pretty stable, and you'd be wrong. One of the two armies in the 3rd edition box set was the Dark Eldar, which were new to this edition (though in some ways similar to the Eldar Privateers that had existed before). And of course in 2nd edition you had Zoats and Squats and shit that were trashbinned when the new edition came out. And 3rd edition also laid down some foundations for expansion, and some were eventually followed up upon (there are now Kroot that you can field) and some were not (the Hrudian Night Warrior army never happened).
Koumei:
When it comes to declaring that something is “true” in 40k, you have to go with Schroedinger’s Canon. That’s not to be confused with Schroedinger’s
Cannon, which is artillery loaded full of potentially-dead cats. They were commonly used in WWI to shoot down messenger pigeons. That’s a fact, you can just take my word for that rather than looking it up somewhere.
Anyway, Schroedinger’s Canon is what it sounds like: any statement is both true and not true at the same time until specifically tested or written about, at which point it is one of the above, specifically for that piece of writing. Half-Eldar exist, that’s a thing. Also, Half-Eldar cannot possibly exist, Eldar are a completely biologically different species from humanity. If a given book decides to include a character who is Half-Eldar, they have chosen which statement is true
for that book. If they decide to talk about someone fucking an Eldar (you would be surprised what the odds are of them doing that. Actually you wouldn’t be surprised), then that might raise a question and they might choose to answer it, and that answer will be correct and true for that book.
The same applies for basically anything else – Sisters falling to Chaos (or harnessing the Warp for their Faith, or… actually there are a bunch of unknowns for them), the Squats existing any more, several questions about the Dark Angels, where all the Tyranid intelligence and decision-making is located, what the Chaos Gods actually want out of their worshipers and what they have to offer your average cult leader or rogue lieutenant or whatever… there is a lot of stuff that has multiple equally correct yet contradictory answers. It’s the game of Zen, where the points mean nothing (or possibly not) and if it makes sense, you haven’t understood the question.
Also, I’m kind of surprised that nobody has ever really made any noise about the Zoats. I vaguely remember seeing some kitbashed minis for them, and the role they played, but for all the “Bring back Squats!” (didn’t happen) and “Bring back Genestealer Cults!” (did happen), there was never “Bring back Zoats!” There have been more people arguing for the introduction of Hrud (hasn’t happened yet) and Adeptus Arbites (3rd Edition Witch Hunters let you rename your Stormtroopers to Arbites, changing their Hellguns out for Shotguns, but that doesn’t really count). For the record, Eldar Corsairs did make their way back via Forgeworld, but not Eldar Exodites – you can’t play Elven Dino-Riders (equipped with the most modern technology of “sharpened tree branches”), and that saddens me a very little bit.
FrankT:
Probably the biggest thing to notice about the fluff in 3rd edition is that it's fairly consistent in
tone. Something which was extremely not true in previous editions. There's a lot of comedy in the 3rd edition rulebook, but it's all in the Judge Dredd style “over the top fascism and atrocity as comedy of the absurd.” The Imperium wipes out all life on a planet because they are weirded out by the natives being friendly, millions upon millions of people die because the Imperial Overlords are stubborn to the point of caricature. But what you don't get are any of the “goofy” comedy elements that some authors had previously written into the setting.
This is an Orc Cheerleader. Orks used to be mammals with a “physiology similar to humans” and have womenfolk.
The idea of Orks being asexual fungus people came much later – but was well established in the canon by the time 3rd edition came out. And by “well established” I mean that it had been repeatedly stated in several official sources. But of course these things propagate slowly through different game lines, and in 1998 the then-current edition of the
Warhammer Roleplaying Game still talked about Half-Orcs.
3rd Edition has lots of comedy, but it's all
ironic comedy. And for a brief period everyone tried to pretend that the “low comedy” elements of the setting didn't exist. Warhammer 40K was, in its third edition, mostly serious and straightforward. You didn't have any armies which began by rolling on comedic technology malfunction tables that caused them to win or lose the game almost immediately. You didn't have any troops that had dumb powers based on juvenile puns.
This firm editorial control lasted... a couple of months.
Andy Chambers, 3rd Edition Ork Codex, 1999 wrote:Ork barbarity is also highly entertaining in itself. If you want a straight laced army that takes itself seriously try the Eldar or Sisters of Battle!
To put that quote in context: when 3rd edition came out, the Eldar stopped having access to a literal space circus full of killer clowns. The Eldar in the main official line of 3rd edition were reasonably straight laced and “for serious.” The Harlequins were relegated to magazine articles in Citadel Journal. But you can see that there were definitely people writing in various channels that wanted to fill up the game with slapstick low comedy, and once the floodgates of magazine articles and codices and shit were opened, some of the authors just fucking did that.
Koumei:
By the time I really heard of Harlequins, they weren’t Crazy Killer Clowns.
If you only know of these guys thanks to the Fucking Magnets meme, I envy you.
For some unfathomable reason, people agreed that having a killer clown party was a really dumb thing in the war game, so it was… sort of changed. Now, the Haemonculi (not to be confused with Homunculus or, going by the helpful advice of LibreOffice,
Harmonica) covens totally bring that back so don’t worry, if that actually was what you wanted, they got your base! But Harlequins became a series of
stage performers, who put on intricate
plays. Much better. And it just so happens that their acted fights are so well coordinated that when they go onto the actual battlefield, their real fighting skill is really good. Like, for 7th Edition when stats are generally kept to a narrow band, the basic Troop choice has WS 5 BS 4 I 6 A 2 and that’s the worst their mini-dex has to offer. So their performance arts has seriously boosted their combat prowess. But they managed to find a mirror’s edge in the fluff of still keeping that general theme of graceful dancing and weird costumes whilst not making readers say “That’s fucking retarded”.
Anyway, yeah. Previous editions had some really fucking goofy stuff in there, and 3rd Edition mostly ironed that out (I still can’t take Noise Marines seriously. I don’t care if sonic pulses are actually a realistic great idea for shattering objects, when you shape it like a guitar and give it to someone called a Noise Marine you undid all that hard work) in favour of dark comedy (which is arguably Britain’s biggest export. Well, once “White Settlers” stopped being the biggest export.) and tongue-in-cheek jabs. I kind of wish this were made during the Thatcher years, I bet there’d be some amazing stuff there. Meanwhile, Fantasy Battle was giving Lizardman heroes with names like Tiktaktoe.
FrankT:
One of the things that constantly pissed off purists was people playing armies that looked absolutely fucking nothing like the fluff. There were many reasons for this, mostly having to do with dollars and points. The fluff had various rants about what the armies were expected to contain, but actual models have costs in points and you have to buy them for real money. This means that players have a tendency to use a lot more elite troops than is typical for the army in question – because you have limits on your time and money and can't really afford to buy and paint really vast numbers of bullshit troops. But also the genuine effectiveness of troops against their points cost is pretty fucking random. The game designers did not and do not do a lot of math hammering (3rd edition rules are more math hammered than literally any other edition before or since and there are some pretty glaring issues even in the main book – starting with the useless sponsons purchaseable for tanks that can't fire them and moving on from there). Many armies have only a few units to begin with (for example: there aren't a lot of different Sisters of Battle models and in 1998 there were even less), so if some of the units your army could include are
fucking terrible (a reasonably common occurrence to be honest) then you're going to want a really small number of actual different kinds of units.
A typical 2nd edition army was almost always one or two high cost character model and then a bizarrely lopsided armylist of weird shit. Mixed armies almost never happened, because why the fuckity fucksticks would you buy squads that weren't whatever your best squad was? And people were annoyed by that. When you see an “army” that is just composed of Chaos Warriors with terminator armor, it kinda seems like the fluff has been peed on and then set on fire.
In second edition, I saw people field armies that were basically just two of these.
3rd edition presented a much more elegant solution to the problem than did previous editions. In 3rd edition you had a force organization chart, where you had to take at least two picks from the “troops” selections and one pick from the “HQ” selections. And you could take no more than 2 HQ and 6 Troops total. And then all the weird shit was divided into Fast Attack, Elites, or Heavy Support picks, and you could only have 0-3 of each of those. This meant that if you discovered that, for example, far and away the best thing Sisters of Battle could get were Retributor Squads, that your army wouldn't literally just be made of Retributor Squads. It would have 3 of them, and then at least 3 other things.
Retributor Squads could pack four heavy bolters for surprisingly reasonable prices, which in turn meant that you fielded as many of them as you were allowed. Every time. But Retributors were also your best source of flamer squads and of anti-tank melta units, so you really wanted more Retributors than you were allowed.
Now this system was not without its problems. The first problem was that some of the missions talked about changing which picks you were allowed. That was seriously bullshit, because as noted these squads cost actual fucking money and if some mission says you are only allowed 2 Fast Attack picks instead of 3, you aren't going to call time and pay fifty dollars to get a new squad and paint it up before starting the game. That was just fucking stupid, and the battle missions that had serious alterations to allowed force organizations were called “the missions you fucking never play.”
But equally important is the fact that this whole thing doesn't scale very well. At super low points totals, the minimum core units use up all the points and you don't actually have much choice of what to field. At slightly higher point totals the points you have past the required core units are a harsher restriction than the limited points totals – when you can only afford 3 squads past the starting 3 units, the fact that you are only allowed 3 Elites or 4 Troops isn't meaningful at all. And of course for really high point totals you run out of things you are allowed to spend points on. The workaround for
that was to allow people to field multiple force organization charts, with 2 troops and an HQ for each – but once you've done that we're pretty much back to the slots meaning almost nothing.
The force organization charts had a sweet spot of between 1000 and 2000 points, becoming one flavor or another of terrible if played on more or less than that.
And of course the very next year the Eldar Codex basically just shat on the entire concept by giving you Craftworld Theme armies that allowed you to turn pretty much anything in the army list into your basic troops. So if you wanted to run an army of all specialist troops you just had to announce that you were one of the holiday themed craft worlds and that the specific specialist units you happened to want to field lots of were core units for you.
The Eldar Craftworlds were an excuse to minmax your army and an excuse to have a feast every couple of months.
Koumei:
To be fair, almost every sub-faction of an army (“This specific Chapter/Legion”, “This Ork Klan”, “This Tau Sept” and so on) is basically written up specifically because someone wanted to run an army with more X and less Y. But the thing is, back then, Eldar (to a vast extent) and Chaos (to a lesser extent) actually got that, whereas if you wanted to play Speed Freaks, you could go fuck yourself. They might have changed that with the Armageddon book (not to be confused with Epic Armageddon) or some other campaign thing. But it totally depended on what gave the writers a stiffy. There was no “Order of Raspberry Sherbet” that made Retributors or Dominions Troops.
There still isn’t, and I don’t have an image macro of the sadness brought by their lack of attention.
Oh wait. I do.
Dark Eldar at the time were in a weird position where, as the Fast Attack army that Attacks Fast, they didn’t have any good Fast Attack things, so they filled their first choices up with 2x cheap HQ in a Raider, 6x minimum Warriors in Raiders (give Dark Lances and Blasters if possible), 3x cheapest Elite choices available in Raiders (give Dark Lances if possible?) and 3x Ravager, so that they can just fly around with an army of paper-thin vehicles that are nonetheless immune to Strength 3 and only Wounded on a 6 by Strength 4 and probably had some kind of Cover Save for going fast or for wargear, I can’t remember, firing out something stupid like twenty Dark Lance shots on the first turn. Then half that on the second turn when a huge number of vehicles turned into flaming wrecks, but whatever, if you made those shots count, you had a chance of winning.
This meant they were good to go for 1500 and under, and the further you went over that, the worse it got for you. Note that using multiple charts was not a core rule back then, and I have the feeling it was only some kind of “We here at White Dwarf suggest doing this”. So they wanted “Up to around 1500” or “Apocalypse”. And they didn’t want to ever take Fast Attack choices. Despite the playstyle of that army basically being Fast Attack (a Ravager is Heavy Support, but has similar armour to a fucking
Chimera, and is faster than said Chimera, which is just a Dedicated Transport for Troops and Elites).
Although at least all of the Fast Attack choices back then were related to the Wych Cults (unless Scourges were Fast and not Heavy? I’m not sure I had started drinking or was even old enough, the last time I looked at the 3rd Edition Dark Eldar dex, which means my entire life’s worth of alcohol consumption sits between these two points), so because you weren’t playing a Wych Cult army, you could say you were being fluffy and thematic.
Getting back to topic, the organisation chart was
mostly a good thing, and at the very least you could call it a vast improvement over what came before, or for that matter, the stupid percentage system Warhammer Fantasy went with a few years later. At least if you say “1 HQ 2 Troops minimum, build up from there”, people can build a 1000 point force that fits that, and then add chunks on in 500 point increments or whatever, instead of “This is my Leader for if the game is up to 2129 points, but if it’s 2130 or more, this Lord runs the show instead and changes the playstyle. I had best buy two entire armies.”
FrankT:
In the Grimdark Future, there is only war! Well, in pretty much any table top minis game, there is only war. It's a war game. You march tiny mens around and they shoot and/or stab each other. That's the whole game.
One of the key issues that a wargame has is that in order for
me to field an army I have to buy models and paint them myself. That is a lot of investment, and I need to have people to play with before that investment sounds like something that isn't a giant waste or resources. But the other potential players are doing the same thing. What if we come to the table with armies that have no reason to fight? We could both be playing the same fucking army, for fuck's sake!
A game like Flames of War, that does World War 2 has a big problem with people rocking up with only Axis armies. Hell, it can have the problem where one player brings in a force of Italians and the other player brings in a force of Maoist Chinese, and while they are definitely on opposite sides of the conflict it is also true that those two armies never got within three thousand miles of the same battlefield. This is a big problem.And Warhammer 40K
solves this problem by having all the different factions be at war with all the factions,
including their own faction. So even if both players are fielding the same flavor of Space Marine, there are still constantly internal struggles about hat shape, medallion coloration, egg opening sides, and other important heresies.
Of course even
that doesn't explain conflicts involving the same fucking special character with an individual fucking name on both sides, which makes the decision in the various Codices to bring those fuckers back pretty confusing.
The deal where all the factions and subfactions are horrible villains certainly makes it easy to justify having a fight between whatever fucking army
I brought to the table and whatever fucking army
you brought to the table. But it is also a massive turn-off for some people. Some people don't actually
want to be playing puppy kicking villains, and there exists a thriving branch of revisionism that claims that one faction or another are actually good guys. This gets super creepy when people claim that the literal space Nazis are actually heroes, but there are conservatives who claim that the Empire in Star Wars is actually the good guys, so that kind of fuckery cannot be escaped. There's obvious room for factions that are good, or even just
less bad, but it's instructive how many 40K grognards lost their shit about the Tau.
Koumei:
Honestly, “shitty communications” makes for a great explanation for any number of battles. The Imperium can fight itself not just because they’re assholes (although they are) and constantly picking fights regardless of how smart it is (although they are), but just because a whole bunch of communication signals get distorted in the warp and two fleets bearing on the same planet (or planetary defenders and a “support fleet”) are convinced the other is Chaos. Chaos Marines can fight each other because each warband spots “Some Space Marines over there” and they lack the comms support to ask “Yo dawg, so, do you like Chaos?”
Now, on the topic of good guys, there absolutely are some in the universe. However, it’s not anyone
big and important enough to affect the setting, or even enough people coordinated with each other to affect the setting. Your personal regiment of Guard could all actually be volunteer enlistees dedicated to serving their planetary system and defending it in whatever capacity against aggressors whilst taking in refugees regardless of ear-pointedness or green skin or whatever, and that’s great for their planets. But that’s a sparrow’s tear in a bucket compared to the actual Imperium of Man, or even just “The Imperial Guard” (as the Astra Militarum was known then, and should still be known). You can say your orks don’t just run up and pick fights with people (claiming they’re good as a species because they mean no harm by this, it’s just what they do, is both at odds with some of the lore (see Schroedinger’s Canon above) and also weird because you’re implying there’s nothing wrong with strangling people to death if you’ve had enough concussions to convince you that’s the right thing to do). You can have them trade with humans (this sometimes happens) and accept them in ork society (there was a whole book on this). You also don’t have enough models to break out of “a rounding error” on the total number.
I am absolutely including myself here – my collection of Adepta Sororitas are the Order of the Sacrificial Lilac, and I wrote that Order up as benevolent people that serve and protect Humanity in times of need, but that’s still the difference between your local priest who helped get your kid off drugs and paid out of pocket to house some homeless, and a high-ranking child molester and war profiteer in the Catholic Church. If anything, the small scale good is just helping give the large scale evil a good name, which is dangerous.
As for Tau, that’s a weird one, because certain things which are (and also are not) canon state that when they accept people into their society, it’s as sterilised manual labourers to be used as the first bullet shield in times of war, which is better than the Imperium for those same humans in basically the exact way that Poland’s occupation by the Soviets was better for them than their occupation by the Nazis. For the record, we’d have invoked some “Godwin alert, DRINK DRINK DRINK!” rule by now except:
A) It’s fucking Warhammer 40,000. Look at the fucking Imperial banner. They weren’t even pretending the Imperium wasn’t Space Nazis.
B) That law was retired when Trump had crowds perform a Nazi salute when pledging their loyalty to him, and basically it’s not coming back.
So anyway, according to some sources, Tau are still definite villains, they’re just a little less villainous than everyone else. According to other sources, that’s not explicitly the case, however there is still a strong theme in the official lore (as in, codices and core books and campaign books) of “the Ethereals use mind control to keep the order where everyone does their thing. It’s not the Greater Good, it’s mind control.” and they still present them as totalitarian Soviet-style communism rather than nice Scandiwegian socialism, along with a nice slice of British Colonialism.
So you can still make a strong case for them being “another faction of villains, albeit not as bad”. It’s harder to make a case for them being a straight-up force of good, because you need to ignore a lot of hints and assume they’re swerving everyone. What you can’t do is claim they’re AS bad as everyone else though, so whatever.
FrankT:
One area that Warhammer consistently trips on its own dick is with
large numbers. None of the authors seem to have the slightest idea what any large numbers actually
mean. When they say numbers they are almost always basically gibberish. It's like having a discussion with a four year old.
There are over a million inhabited worlds in the empire. There are a
thousand chapters of space marines and each chapter has a
thousand mans in it. And that means that if both those numbers are true, there are less than one space marine for each
inhabited fucking planet in the galaxy. For all the ranting about how important Space Marines are, by the numbers they aren't important at all. They are outnumbered by other people by several billion to one, and if every Space Marine killed a person every minute of every hour of every day, they still wouldn't be as big a social problem as second hand smoke or drunk driving.
Every so often someone will notice that there are actually a hundred billion stars in the galaxy and that there being “over a million” worlds in the Imperium that for every inhabited system there are still a hundred thousand uninhabited ones. It's enough to make you wonder why people are willing to fight over territory.
Koumei:
We should still address the social problem of people going around getting killed by Space Marines. I mean is this really what we spend our taxes on? Something needs to be done about this.
Alternatively, someone needs to field an army of smokers. For Drink-Drivers you basically have Orks, and in fourth or fifth Edition they still had rules for certain vehicles careening out of control before exploding (kind of like second edition, but less powerful!), which is basically what drunk drivers do.
There actually is that quote about there being less than one Space Marine for every star in the galaxy, yet still always enough for the task at hand. The moral of that story is that there actually isn’t that much war going on and they’re barely needed at all. Because the vast majority of planets are therefore never seeing a Space Marine ever, and probably just winging it on Planetary Guard, and seeing as they are not deployed as individuals but as 1500 point armies, you could basically use a lottery system to visit planets and almost always come out free of Space Marines.
Also the sizes of armies in general are just small skirmishes – I’m pretty sure a pair of forces of fifty dudes and a few vehicles is actually fighting over “a town” and not much more than that, and the population numbers for the majority of worlds are bullshit small because “millions upon millions” sounds huge to a person sitting at home in a house of three, but guess what, Earth isn’t a giant planet and currently has around seven billion people. That’s even more than hundreds of thousands.
FrankT:
Next Up: Armies of the Imperium.