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Loxbourne posted:40K is deeply embedded in the standard western nerd adolescence. Games Workshop had pretty much total dominance of the gaming market in the UK for a solid decade or more, and is still the public face of minis gaming in the US and UK. People defend it so hard because they're defending stuff they enjoyed as teenagers, when either 40K was written with a sillier tone or they just didn't notice that the grimdark was deliberate crypto-fascism. I feel like actually there is something wrong with this because it basically boils down to "I'd be okay with this fascism if only..". A lot of the people who like the 40k aesthetic are basically unwilling to reject a whole bunch of ideas which lead to fascism and although they'll walk slowly they're still going in that direction. I think it's time to just throw the whole thing out because as you pointed out people just aren't willing to question what's drawing them to a game that was never meant to be taken seriously. edit: Like, it was fun and cool to have Orks and Blood Angels smash together when I was younger, but I'm not young anymore and it's time I grew up and moved on instead of writing elaborate fiction about how maybe the Blood Angels aren't such bad people for virus-bombing a planet because some kid on it had six-fingers. Ithle01 fucked around with this message at 22:01 on Nov 11, 2020 |
# ? Nov 11, 2020 21:57 |
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# ? Mar 29, 2024 07:43 |
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That Old Tree posted:There's no bright dividing line, but I'm pretty comfortable with the difference between people grappling with a long-running franchise's problematic elements, as opposed to trying to think of ways to make a one-off rape game's gross sex poo poo a little more subtle so that it can still be about coerced sex but somehow not as bad. That works for me. If nothing else, if you don't want to get into the "Only War" stuff, Rogue Trader is right there for a decent ship-based exploration game. Meanwhile, I'm a little bit in love with the Trinity: Continuum multi-era genre-switch set-up. You have (or in this case will have in maybe a year or two) Adventure: A 1930s set pulp adventure ala The Shadow, The Phantom and Indiana Jones Core: A modern action-adventure running the gamete from Die Hard to Big Trouble in Little China to Leverage to John Wick. Aberrant: A near-future (2028) superpowers (not necessarily superhero) game of conflicting interests. Aeon: A far future (2123) game of psionics, conflicts (with the remnants of the now-psychotic and hideously transformed superbeings from Aberrant) and encounters with alien species. Plus initial plans for two more settings. Anima Set in the 2060s after the Aberrant War that revolves around virtuals/augmented reality and might be a version of The Matrix. Ancient A game set in the long past circa Ancient Greece featuring something like mythologies..
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# ? Nov 11, 2020 22:33 |
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Yes, Trinity 2e is pretty good. They've been doing the cultural consultants thing I believe, and Aberrant in particular has benefited from being Actually Mature Content instead of gently caress You Dad Mature. I think the Adventure! KS is early next year, but I don't follow the news super closely.
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# ? Nov 11, 2020 23:07 |
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Aberrant but good?! I'm going to need to see it for myself.
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# ? Nov 11, 2020 23:20 |
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By popular demand posted:Aberrant but good?! I'm going to need to see it for myself.
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# ? Nov 11, 2020 23:21 |
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CroatianAlzheimers posted:Rising Tempest. Brother Szobchak is introduced on page 79. They did a great piece of art for him, too.
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# ? Nov 11, 2020 23:21 |
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By popular demand posted:Aberrant but good?! I'm going to need to see it for myself. As a KS backer I got the full .pdf maybe a week ago, so give it a couple-three weeks before it makes it onto the Drivethru. And an Adventure KS early next year would be a nice "make-up" gift from the universe for the shitiness that was 2020.
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# ? Nov 11, 2020 23:35 |
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Everyone posted:Okay. I don't play it but I've been reading a bunch of posts and so far the game seems to have gone from: The tone of Warhammer 40,000 has changed drastically over the last 33 years, and a lot of the setting's core elements were solidified long, long before anyone here got into it, which makes trying to figure out what it was "originally" like difficult. It's also been written by many authors and in terms of scholarly literally analysis it's not exactly written by people from an academic writing background, which further complicates the whole issue of analysis because you have to make allowances for mistakes being made. However, I believe that Warhammer 40,000 was originally intended not so much as satire as a somewhat black humour take on New Wave science fiction of the 80s. The New Wave of sci-fi, spreadheaded by what we now recognize as "cyberpunk", was a movement that reacted to the stagnant, often utopian and antiquated takes on sci-fi of the late 70s, and presented instead radically modern futures. To be crass and reductive, 70s sci-fi had disappeared up its own rear end and was presenting a view of the future that was already a retro-future, and New Wave sci-fi decided to bring sci-fi kicking and screaming into the 1980s. And so when Rogue Trader says "Forget the promise of progress and understanding, for these is no peace among the stars, only an eternity of carnage and slaughter" that's what it's talking about : a better future? No, it's going to keep sucking. Erika Chappell, the author behind Flying Circus, has written about how a lot of cyberpunk is the fear that that the future will be exactly like it is now, and that's what Rogue Trader really did: imagine a future where instead of things getting better, they just keep sucking: Thatcher keeps crushing the labour unions, Reagan keeps rattling the sabre, there's always a war in Afghanistan or the Middle East, the crime wave doesn't end... ...and then use that to justify having armies of anime elves and pickelhaube orks with machine guns fighting the Starship Troopers. Really, if WH40k is a satire of anything, it's not that the evil space empire is the good guys, it's that it's ripping into classic SF where the "good guys" are often weirdly like an evil empire. Additionally, something that's been lost in later editions is that the Imperium of Man exists in contrast to the idyllic peaceful utopias of the Eldar and the Lost Worlds at the centre of the Eye of Terror, where the Imperium's brutal order does not reach and you get stuff like humans and orks grudgingly cooperating to survive. So like... is the Imperium of Man's brutal order actually necessary? Rogue Trader doesn't actually say. That's the first edition. 2nd edition was very different, and 3rd edition is basically the modern setting, with the irreverence slowly scraped off over the next... oh gently caress are they at ninth edition now? Yare yare, I remember when fifth edition was new.
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# ? Nov 12, 2020 00:09 |
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LatwPIAT posted:The tone of Warhammer 40,000 has changed drastically over the last 33 years, and a lot of the setting's core elements were solidified long, long before anyone here got into it, which makes trying to figure out what it was "originally" like difficult. Speak for yourself. I had the original Rogue Trader rules feedmegin fucked around with this message at 00:39 on Nov 12, 2020 |
# ? Nov 12, 2020 00:36 |
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feedmegin posted:Speak for yourself. I had the original Rogue Trader rules same
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# ? Nov 12, 2020 00:41 |
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feedmegin posted:Speak for yourself. I had the original Rogue Trader rules drat, should have said "most people here".
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# ? Nov 12, 2020 00:47 |
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LatwPIAT posted:However, I believe that Warhammer 40,000 was originally intended not so much as satire as a somewhat black humour take on New Wave science fiction of the 80s. The New Wave of sci-fi, spreadheaded by what we now recognize as "cyberpunk", was a movement that reacted to the stagnant, often utopian and antiquated takes on sci-fi of the late 70s, and presented instead radically modern futures. To be crass and reductive, 70s sci-fi had disappeared up its own rear end and was presenting a view of the future that was already a retro-future, and New Wave sci-fi decided to bring sci-fi kicking and screaming into the 1980s. And so when Rogue Trader says "Forget the promise of progress and understanding, for these is no peace among the stars, only an eternity of carnage and slaughter" that's what it's talking about : a better future? No, it's going to keep sucking. I remember when it came out, it was clear it was just an excuse to have armies of Space Orks and Space Elves and Space Demons fighting Space Humans In Power Armor fight each other and not to be taken too seriously. It wasn't my cup of tea (too cartoony) so I didn't pay too much attention to it, and I was shocked years later to discover that it had accumulated this huge corpus of complicated, detailed, and very very serious setting fluff about it.
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# ? Nov 12, 2020 00:50 |
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I always forget that the original wargame was called Rogue Trader, in addition to the FFG RPG from ten years ago But if I remember correctly, they they both had a similar premise of "you're a special guy who can ignore the Imperium's boring rules and do whatever you want" FMguru posted:To me, the biggest influence on O.G. 40K was the 2000AD weekly comic book (unsurprising, since GW published a Rogue Trooper boardgame and a Judge Dredd boardgame and RPG). If you were going to do a snotty, cynica,l over-the-top rendition of heroic space warriors and publish it in weekly 6-8 page installments in a British weekly anthology, it would look a lot like 40K 1E. That, and various heavy metal album covers (especially Iron Maiden and Megadeth) really set the tone for early 40k. The funny thing about 2000AD is that despite being uberviolent, it was originally sold as a children's comic. Today it's more aimed at teens/adults. If you walk through a public library the older Dredd case files are shelved with the "serious" graphic novels because they're retroactively assumed to be gritty and mature. The best part though is that unlike 40K, the writers of series like Dredd haven't tried to purge all the old silly stuff from the canon. To this day, you'll see the main character interrupt his uber-serious serial killer mystery to reminisce about the time he ate some candy that was so delicious he almost went into withdrawal and died. mellonbread fucked around with this message at 01:26 on Nov 12, 2020 |
# ? Nov 12, 2020 01:21 |
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mellonbread posted:But if I remember correctly, they they both had a similar premise of "you're a special guy who can ignore the Imperium's boring rules and do whatever you want" Yeah, in Rogue Trader the Imperium vs Chaos thing was summed up as "They're both screaming fanatics who sacrifice babies. The difference is that the Imperium sacrifices babies to the Emperor and Chaos sacrifices babies to the Dark Gods." The Imperium was supposed to be treated as just as crazy and hostile as Chaos or the Eldar or the Orks or whatever else you find.
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# ? Nov 12, 2020 03:18 |
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mellonbread posted:The funny thing about 2000AD is that despite being uberviolent, it was originally sold as a children's comic. Today it's more aimed at teens/adults. If you walk through a public library the older Dredd case files are shelved with the "serious" graphic novels because they're retroactively assumed to be gritty and mature. The best part though is that unlike 40K, the writers of series like Dredd haven't tried to purge all the old silly stuff from the canon. To this day, you'll see the main character interrupt his uber-serious serial killer mystery to reminisce about the time he ate some candy that was so delicious he almost went into withdrawal and died. One of the great things is that originally the Judges, or at least Dredd, were a lot less "ascetic monk order of justice" and Dredd had a housekeeper with a hideously racist accent and an idiot robot butler, and both of them also pop up later in the stories. It's been a while since I last read any Dredd but it started out very story-of-the-week with relatively little carrying over from issue to issue, and then it slowly started growing longer plotlines, during which it started to take itself a bit more seriously(in the sense of having internal consistency), it never really felt like it lost its sense of humour, though, and it always seemed to have a pretty clear understanding that the Judges weren't clear-cut good guys, not even Dredd. For instance, after the storyline where Dredd is part of putting down peaceful pro-democracy protests, he realizes he's done something incredibly hosed that shouldn't have been done, like the comic doesn't bother to rationalize it as HARD MEN MAKING HARD CHOICES, but explicitly have the main character state that they're doing something loving awful, and his response to that realization and guilt over it drive at least a few major plotlines after that point.
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# ? Nov 12, 2020 03:29 |
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Terrible Opinions posted:The Imperium being sexist shitheads would be okay, if all the other factions posed an alternative. After all they are the fascist theocracy, you know the bad guys. In theory we have more gender equal tau, but only one lady gets a name and model. The orks are asexual canonically but heavily male coded. Chaos is almost all dudes for no reason at all. Etc etc. The Tau have gotten better about that apparently, there's female heads for the Fire Warriors and at least one of Farsight's inner circle is female.
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# ? Nov 12, 2020 04:03 |
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Well that's cool. Something I'd really want is just adding in some female VAs for orks in 40k video games. Grumpy den mom warboss when?
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# ? Nov 12, 2020 04:08 |
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Servetus posted:I like the some of the trappings of the Jedi: Weird science fantasy melee weapons, a fun space religion that seems open to a lot of different interpretations and arguments, some funky space opera hairstyles. One of the reasons why I like WEG Star Wars is that I think it handles this very well from both a narrative and mechanical perspective. The default Force using archetypes are a Padawan who survived the Clone Wars and is an aging drunk, a youth who's discovered that they have the Force, a weirdo who has some Force powers and play acts as a Jedi, and an alien with their own distinct Force tradition. The way character creation and advancement work makes Force skills a major investment and ensures that Force users don't outshine other characters. Also, while you can start as a Force user, you can also start without any Force skills and go on to learn them from a teacher.
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# ? Nov 12, 2020 04:27 |
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mellonbread posted:Dredd and Rogue Trooper were big influences, and there was also probably cross polination from Nemesis the Warlock, a 1980 series about a space-future inquisition that killed aliens for being "impure". The eponymous Nemesis was himself an alien wizard, and the inquisitor hunting him was the villain of the piece. After reading Nemesis, I'd say Nemesis the Warlock was the big influence, with probably cross pollination from Dredd and Rogue Trooper. Earth is an ecumenopolis, this holy seat of an empire that purges mutants with Terminators that band into Chapters...
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# ? Nov 12, 2020 06:00 |
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JcDent posted:After reading Nemesis, I'd say Nemesis the Warlock was the big influence, with probably cross pollination from Dredd and Rogue Trooper. Earth is an ecumenopolis, this holy seat of an empire that purges mutants with Terminators that band into Chapters... “Nemesis” is very clear about its intentions. Nemesis himself might not be a traditional good guy but the humans are explicitly bad guys, except for a few and far-between exceptions. They’ve been conditioned to be like that by their leaders, while it’s also clearly shown they can be peaceful under the different conditions because attitude does not come from race, as the Inquisition believes. That kind of progressive counter-culture was 200AD’s trademark back in the day. The double meaning of ‘alien’ during a time where anti-immigration rhetoric was arguably even more rampant than today says a lot about the politics expressed. Of course that’s lost on many modern writers, who just wants to tell stories ABOUT the settings rather than WITH those settings.
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# ? Nov 12, 2020 10:55 |
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Battle Mad Ronin posted:“Nemesis” is very clear about its intentions. Nemesis himself might not be a traditional good guy but the humans are explicitly bad guys, except for a few and far-between exceptions. They’ve been conditioned to be like that by their leaders, while it’s also clearly shown they can be peaceful under the different conditions because attitude does not come from race, as the Inquisition believes. That kind of progressive counter-culture was 200AD’s trademark back in the day. The double meaning of ‘alien’ during a time where anti-immigration rhetoric was arguably even more rampant than today says a lot about the politics expressed. Yes, but it is basically contemporaneous with Hams, and not something the writes discovered in 2005 and decided to ape.
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# ? Nov 12, 2020 11:54 |
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JcDent posted:Yes, but it is basically contemporaneous with Hams, and not something the writes discovered in 2005 and decided to ape. Exactly, I just wanted to expand on the analogy because it’s so strikingly similar to the developments of the WH40K franchise.
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# ? Nov 12, 2020 12:48 |
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Cythereal posted:Yeah, in Rogue Trader the Imperium vs Chaos thing was summed up as "They're both screaming fanatics who sacrifice babies. The difference is that the Imperium sacrifices babies to the Emperor and Chaos sacrifices babies to the Dark Gods." Cut to 30 years of people painting Actual Swastikas on their Land Raiders later and GW finally (finally) started to realize that bending over backwards to justify fictional fascism is a terrible idea because why would you do that, so they're taking baby steps to de-fash the lore (the Tau's willingness to negotiate being a huge existential threat to the Imperium, Guilliman waking up and being ripshit over how badly the High Lords of Terra have hosed up his friend's empire, That One Time we got a black Ultramarine, the merest and casualest implication that female IG exist, etc).
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# ? Nov 12, 2020 14:44 |
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I do want to add that female Guard has had casual implications as far back the 3rd ed Codex. And they've also had a very big presence in both the Gaunts Ghost series past the third book and the Ciaphas Cain books from the first one. But in this case they've taken steps at making their presence more obvious in general. The new version of the Sabbat Worlds Crusade books added plenty of mentions of the female guard, as well as putting a female commander of a whole Imperial warhost into a very prominent position. Either way I'm still waiting for a model of Mira from the Space Marine game.
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# ? Nov 12, 2020 15:21 |
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SINCE WE'RE TALKING ABOUT 40K AND WHAT A FUCKIN poo poo IT IS, I'm motherfucking BACK. Marneus Calgar #2 came out yesterday and while I am not a fan of hate-reading, I AM GOING TO CONTINUE HATE-READING! First up, if all 40k art looked as good as this cover, I might still give a poo poo about it: gently caress that's hot. Next, after last month's tremendous massacre, some kinda corpse-picking guy gets jumped by a Chaos Space Marine that's not-quite-dead. Marneus shows up with his special boy gloves and blows the only mostly dead CSM away with a quip. (Were there Chaos Space Marines in that battle? And if there were, why are they mooks? Why am I supposed to give a poo poo about this protagonist again??) Marni Calgary says he needs a base of operations to find out how traitors got all up in Ultramar, and the art is pretty good this issue. Calgar Estates, purveyors of fine amesac since 30,492. Some incredibly awkward dialogue later and the Chaos Space Marines back on the moon cap the tech priest after convincing him to lie about his status. This leads into an actually kind of funny but entirely too brief diversion about the philosophy of murders in the name of Khorne. Apparently these Black Legion cats are planning something that's going to make their "Long War" come to an end. Why would they want the Long War to end? These specific cats are implicitly Khorne worshippers. I understand wanting victory, but it seems weird to single out that the war will END. Then we get another boring infodump page about the Great Crusade, the Horus Heresy, the Long War, and the First and Thirteenth Black Crusades, plus another kind of funny line: Please just commit to being silly, comic, you're good at it. So they arrive at Calgar Estates, which looks cool but not cool enough to want to copy+paste art of it, and they talk about how Marneus hasn't been home since BEFORE he went to kiddy kombat kamp, and how What Is A Man? Then Calgar goes back into rambling about his flashback from last issue, with the little Emperor Jungen getting ready to die viciously or else prove that they're space marines. Hooraaaayyyy. Basically they survive the first night and get put on "shooting poo poo" and "welding your face shut" duty. Then he gets oddly melancholic, almost as if the comic wants to address what a brutal and hollow life being raised from birth to murder is, but then it goes into the importance of brotherhood and adherence to scripture and whatnot. Yawn. So the long and short of it is that Calgar and another kid were good buddies that refused to join a more popular clique of authoritarian bullies, and said clique mysteriously vanishes in the night while on patrol, so Calgar and his buddy go find them. They end up being cultists of Khorne, along with their sergeant guy of all things (this actually surprised me), and then Marneus gets stabbed in the heart and loving dies. Holy poo poo. It turns out OUR Marneus Calgar gave up his name of Tacitan to honor his childhood friend, and this is GENUINELY COMPELLING. I am surprised at how much this got to me. We end on a really cool page that kind of wraps up the themes. So this issue had a TON more nuance and depth to it than issue one - I guess they had to lure in the 40kids somehow, and genericness was the key. I think I'll be back for this again next month, in hopes that Issue 3 is as good as Issue 1, which could frankly hold together pretty well on its own if not for all the details reliant on later issues. Until next time, folks.
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# ? Nov 12, 2020 16:56 |
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Did James Stokoe do that cover? It has the same art style as Orc Stain.
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# ? Nov 12, 2020 17:00 |
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mellonbread posted:Did James Stokoe do that cover? It has the same art style as Orc Stain. Eeyup.
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# ? Nov 12, 2020 17:17 |
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mellonbread posted:Did James Stokoe do that cover? It has the same art style as Orc Stain. It is, and he's doing the cover of next issue, and if he didn't have a terminal hatred for laying out comics I'd want him to do the art for this whole series. I'd have been hooked issue one if they'd busted out my man Stokoe.
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# ? Nov 12, 2020 17:18 |
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Again: WHAT THE gently caress ARE THESE THINGS. They look like jump-pack inlets, but they're not. Calgar don't jump. No other Primaris design has these as far as I recall. WHAT THE gently caress ARE THESE AND WHY ARE THEY THERE. I'm also not a fan of the eagle head exhaust, but that dates back to the Space Marine Commander, which was Space Marine build-a-bear kit the likes of which we'll never get in this the era of monopose. Cooked Auto posted:I do want to add that female Guard has had casual implications as far back the 3rd ed Codex. oh gently caress yeah, this (there's an additional lady in the page I posted and a joke someone pointed out back then was... well, think about WHY Lucky 13 lost a battle named like that) When I was about six or seven years younger and only slighty dumber, it inspired me to engage in Maximum Overguard, a project to write fluff for all of these lads who didn't have any. It failed, obviously, else you'd know me. Warhounds of the Red Moon were previously prisoners on the red moon, working in the deserts, shipping stuff down to the world. So once the nobolity when heretic, and a chance scuffle on the moon revealed that, they were inspired by an Imperial Priest to band together, get down to the world, and show the heretics what for, where they allied with besieged Arbites. They would become a technical-heavy regiment... albeit 40K didn't have many more technicals back then than it has now. Nordian Berserkers are the children of people who survived the Heresy era bombing of their planet by hiding in hydroponic facilities, which eventually transformed into clan hearts from which they strike out at each other over the waste. All knowledge is kept orally, obviously. Since the world is such a mess of wreckage, they're good pilots, to the point where invading Eldar were once beaten back due to onset TIE Fighter In Asteroid Field syndrome. When men go to war, women guard the hearths. One notable action saw a great deal of a regiment get lost due to a massive navigational hazard in some mountains on some world, so the rest pulled a titanic logistic feat to collect their remains. Nordians are often given a lift by the RT that discovered the world. Felt a bit of cringe there? Well, Honorific Order of Tachoman are Roman-styled regiment of ex-slaves who overthrew and enslaved their overlords ("Haha! Justice!" - JcDent, circa 2014) that lived confortable lives in geodesic domes. The ex-slaves are basically melee conscripts with secret Tachomani agents within the ranks that can be triggered in battle kinda like a more sane version that those Gobin fanatics. Ofc, the ruleset didn't support melee conscripts, sooo...
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# ? Nov 12, 2020 17:33 |
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JcDent posted:
Now that was a solid lump of blue fascism.
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# ? Nov 12, 2020 18:20 |
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Cooked Auto posted:Either way I'm still waiting for a model of Mira from the Space Marine game. Speaking of, I'm pleased that the named characters from the semi-recent Mechanicus game feature about half their number as female-pronouned and pleasantly un-sexualized.
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# ? Nov 12, 2020 18:31 |
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Marney looks like Mike Pence in that comic. Yeah now you can’t unsee it either.
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# ? Nov 12, 2020 18:31 |
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JcDent posted:oh gently caress yeah, this I just realized the CLASSIFIED one is modern Genestealer Cults.
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# ? Nov 12, 2020 18:42 |
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Midjack posted:Marney looks like Mike Pence in that comic. All those buzzcut conservatives of a certain age look the same to me.
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# ? Nov 12, 2020 19:43 |
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Midjack posted:Marney looks like Mike Pence in that comic. A useless prick who is second banana to a more powerful fascist and mostly fucks up whatever he's given to do? I suppose it fits. "I'm gonna go get into a duel, lose my arms, and my entire first company has to die to save me from a battle that didn't even matter!" is some nice proof that GW is capable of loving up 'no we swear this guy is cool and competent' on all sides of their conflicts.
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# ? Nov 12, 2020 19:45 |
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RocknRollaAyatollah posted:I just realized the CLASSIFIED one is modern Genestealer Cults. Wait, seriously? I thought they were just some Syndicate looking dudes.
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# ? Nov 12, 2020 19:56 |
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So original flavor Marneus is totally going to have survived and be one of the shadowy figures leading the chaos forces, right? Like, we can all see that coming? There's gonna be a fight where Original Marneus is like "You stole my name and left me for dead!" and Tacitus Marneus is going to be all "You were dead and I took your name to honor you!"
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# ? Nov 12, 2020 22:30 |
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You know that Krikkit superweapon from Life, the Universe and Everything? 40K-verse seems like a good place to use it. If anywhere needs a universe-wide mercy killing, it's that one.
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# ? Nov 12, 2020 23:08 |
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"It'll have to go," the men of Krikkit said as they headed back for home.
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# ? Nov 12, 2020 23:17 |
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# ? Mar 29, 2024 07:43 |
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Young Freud posted:Wait, seriously? I thought they were just some Syndicate looking dudes. I don't know if it's me reaching or now but shady bald dudes infiltrating the IG is their whole MO. The biophagus also kind of looks similar.
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# ? Nov 13, 2020 04:12 |