Games Workshop really did it. Fall Of Cadia Discussion. (SPOILERS WITHIN)

[Zykon TheLich_v1legacy]

I predominantly see it as another problem where grimdark is shit and the old 40K from the 80s and very early 90s was better.

Ollanius works better as just a guy who epitomized where courage and heroism can take you. To an early grave. But at least one where you'll be remembered. And this is the immediately failing of modern 40k. A central theme in the original Rogue Trader was the idea you'll never be missed. Which is a horrifying enough problem now with 7 billion, but in a galaxy where humanity is dominant, and thew people are inexhaustible, where does that leave you?

As a moaning old grognard I have to chip in with my general agreement. The moment they started making their own named characters who were a cut above the normal guys with their own special rules (IIRC their non conversion Ghazghkull & Comissar Yarrick) and then followed it up with more (Ragnar, Njaal etc) the fluff and in some respects the game started to become about mighty heroes, daemons and gods, I started to loose interest. It changed from dystopian sci-fi to the gothic sci-fantasy we have today. I mean, they didn't even have chaos in MRB Rogue Trader.
I'm not going to come out and say I think current fluff is shit, it clearly appeals to a lot of people and I'm not going to crap on their taste, but it has certainly developed in a way that is not to my liking. At least they still make really cool looking little toy soldiers.

 

[bastardofmelbourne]

I should probably point out that the logic is theoretically sound here. Total War was announced years ago, long before the decision would've been made to End Times and AoS the setting. And Fantasy, sadly, was failing. 8th edition was a steaming pile that exacerbated everything wrong with GW, and the game didn't recover. What were GW (from thier point of view, remember) supposed to do? Wait years with a failed system for a video game that would hopefully generate some buzz? Or do what they could to make one of their major two product lines profitable again? Really, it's not much of a choice.

For a company like GW, launching a new model line is significantly more expensive than simply maintaining an existing one. Most of GW's production costs go into art, model design, casting moulds, and so on; once that's set, it's not terribly expensive to keep producing models.

If they had sense, they'd have focussed on cutting down production costs for WHFB by selling digital or print-on-demand copies of the rulebook, and by selling their WHFB merch by mail order only to cut down on storefront and distribution costs. Then they would have held on a couple years to see what effect Total Warhammer would have had on sales, and whether it was worth keeping the line going.

Instead, they dumped the entire setting and model line and invested what was presumably a significant amount of money and resources into new art, new unit designs, new casting moulds, new rules publications, new Black Library novels, and so on and so forth, and managed to time it all so that the game line launched at a time when nobody was interested in changing to a new and unfamiliar setting. It was a terrible business decision.

Also, Sanguinius can eat a dick. Ollanius blew a chunk off Horus' armour with his humble lasgun. That story is way more epic.

You did not just diss my man Sanguinius!

The whole appeal of Ollanius Pius was that he was just a regular dude like any other dude in the Imperium, but he had the sheer uranium-density balls to try and stand between the Emperor and Horus despite not having a chance in hell. It was both the purest possible display of bravery - short of a chicken trying to fight God - and an excellent metaphor for the state of the Imperium by the 41st millenium; it's hopeless, we're doomed, let's fight anyway.

So making him into a near-unique breed of immortal kind of destroys that whole schtick. I normally love Dan Abnett, but if he was the one who suggested that plot development, I'd slap him around the ears for missing the point.

Spoiler: *Caution: I will now tell you about my roleplaying game*

So no shit, there I was, running a Deathwatch game. The Deathwatch is an inquisitorial organization made up of two types of Space Marines: the ones the Chapter thinks would make good command material and who they want to get training for weird situations and improvisation; and the fuckups who can't fit into a normal Space Marine organization, so they get pawned off on the Inquisition to do something useful away from their normal brethren. Guess what most of my players were.

Long story short, shenanigans managed to launch them and their highly advanced, inquisitorial stealth cruiser millennia back in time with a handful of squad mates. Now obviously, what you're supposed to do if figure out why that happened, minimize your impact on the timeline, and get back to roughly your own time. What my players did, without any discussion amongst themselves, was take their highly advanced ship with ridiculously advanced weapons and go fuck up an ongoing siege they knew would be happening on Terra by the time they got there.

So they sneak their ship into high orbit above Horus' Battlebarge, get to point blank range, and unload everything they have at his plasma engines. Due to their stealth tech and relatively advanced weaponry, this largely works as a surprise attack, crippling the engines. The Deathwatch cruiser, naturally, can't withstand the return fire for long, to they overloaded its plasma engines, because fuck you, that's why.

As they made their escape from the ensuing fireball in a Thunderhawk, they came up with their next scheme: take the vortex torpedoe warhead they evacuated with (because of course they did), overload it, and fly that into the gaping holes they put into that battlebarge. They craziest fucker in the group naturally volunteered. So that happened, crippling the battlebarge further and forcing Horus' final confrontation with the Emperor to happen planetside.

But, 'lo, they were not yet done ramming fast things filled with explosives into things. See, they escaped the Thunderhawk by piling into a transport landspeeder. After heading down to the ultimate showdown, they notice that adorn is busy, Sanguinius is already down, and the Emperor is locked into a psychic duel with Horus. So they pile up all their remaining grenades, rockets, meltabombs, and plasma canisters and wrap that sucker at full speed around Horus' face, jumping out just before impact.

I mean, this didn't kill Horus, but he wasn't happy. So they lent what Bolger rounds, sniper fire, and meager psychic attacks they had to the Emperor for the rest of the duel, while the warpgate underneath the swung open to reveal a horde of daemons and the crazy pilot assault marine who'd detonated the vortex torpedo warhead from earlier, because that's how vortex weapons work. The other player didn't know if the daemons were attacking them or running away from him, but they never got to ask, because the first thing the assault marine did upon leaving the portal was bonsai charge the scariest ************ in the room, which despite his injuries was still Horus.

Despite the stupidly high stats I gave Horus and the blatant disregard for their comerade's well-being displayed by the other marines shooting wildly into close combat, the assault marine lasted a surprisingly long time. Still died, natch, but made it so the Emperor didn't. All in all, successful time travel story. Sure, the timeline is irrevocably changed, but most of their fancy tech didn't survive. So the Emperor gets to emperor on, and I was using the old-school emperor, hand waving later interpretations of the Emperor as propaganda spread by the high lords and the priests, and maybe, just maybe, the galaxy doesn't turn to complete shit.

Spoiler: !

In all seriousness, I feel compelled to point out a key error: in 40k, older is better. The Imperium's technology c.40,000 AD is not any more advanced than its technology c.30,000 AD. If anything, it's worse, because most of the really awesome shit they had ten thousand years ago they've forgotten how to build. Even the Inquisition's best stealth tech is either leftovers from the Great Crusade or just stolen from alien races - most of whom got obliterated by Crusade-era fleets anyway, so what does that tells you?

Your players would have popped out into the Battle of Terra flying their five-kilometre strike cruiser and been immediately demolished by the errant crossfire of Horus' twenty-kilometre Gloriana-class [http://wh40k.lexicanum.com/wiki/Gloriana_Class_Battleship] battle barge.

But don't let that get in the way of your fun, by any means.

One of my friends want's a female half-Eldar Space Marine Librarian? Sure, why not. Space Marines get oodles of implants and gallons of hormones injected so their base form hardly matters, and half-Eldar Space Marines are good old fashioned Rouge Trader canon, so fuck it.

Spoiler: 0.0

 

[Thaluikhain]

And this Fall of Cadia nonsense, as if hammered out as if this massive fuck-you thing ... seems laughably naive to people who play the old Rogue Trader because planets dying was aready a common enough motif.

In fairness, planets dying is common in modern 40k as well. Only, Cadia is an important planet, and has been for decades, it's not like that campaign they ran after the last 13th Crusade with some planet nobody knew or card about before getting killed off.

But yeah, GW doesn't want me to like 40k, it seems.

 

[Silentpony_v1legacy]

But yeah, GW doesn't want me to like 40k, it seems.

They like it in that 40k is a massive money maker. But GW absolutely despises 40k players. They hate tournaments, they hate writing rules, they hate doing FAQs, they hate holding events. If people just decided to buy models and paint and never play the game again, GW would be in heaven

 

[Zykon TheLich_v1legacy]

They like it in that 40k is a massive money maker. But GW absolutely despises 40k players. They hate tournaments, they hate writing rules, they hate doing FAQs, they hate holding events. If people just decided to buy models and paint and never play the game again, GW would be in heaven

What was the statistic that got thrown out at some GW board/investors/whatever meeting? Something like 75% of people who buy GW products never play the game and of those 25% that do it's only 50% that play with any regularity?

 

[Silentpony_v1legacy]

They like it in that 40k is a massive money maker. But GW absolutely despises 40k players. They hate tournaments, they hate writing rules, they hate doing FAQs, they hate holding events. If people just decided to buy models and paint and never play the game again, GW would be in heaven

What was the statistic that got thrown out at some GW board/investors/whatever meeting? Something like 75% of people who buy GW products never play the game and of those 25% that do it's only 50% that play with any regularity?

And something like 80-90% of sales are Space Marines.

 

[Smithnikov_v1legacy]

*peeks outside of Hive Primus.*

Yea, still nothing out there worth worrying about there. I'll just keep playing Necromunda, guys.

 

[TheMysteriousGX]

In all seriousness, I feel compelled to point out a key error: in 40k, older is better. The Imperium's technology c.40,000 AD is not any more advanced than its technology c.30,000 AD. If anything, it's worse, because most of the really awesome shit they had ten thousand years ago they've forgotten how to build. Even the Inquisition's best stealth tech is either leftovers from the Great Crusade or just stolen from alien races - most of whom got obliterated by Crusade-era fleets anyway, so what does that tells you?

That's a misconception. See, part of the conceit I was using for the time travel episode was that I was using old depictions of 40k tech instead of the new ones, so power creep didn't set in. The reason there were more Imperial jet bikes and vortex grenades and stuff isn't because they knew how to build them in the 30,000th millennium, but because their stockpiles of golden age technology were a bit more flush.

The part of "older is better" that people forget is that when 40k peeps refer to "older", they mean "compared to the Golden Age of Humanity or the Dark Age of Technology". Modern Space Marine armor is strictly better than than what the Imperial legions were running around in (according to their Deathwatch stats), and stuff like the Land Speeder, Razorback, and Predator Annihilator flat out didn't exist.

Or in other words: the stuff they have left over pre-Emperor is better than stuff they make, but the stuff they're making now is better than the stuff they could make when the Emperor was mobile.

And despite your claims of heresy, the half-Eldar Space Marine Librarian is a dude that totally existed.

Back on topic: Hooray, Abbadon the Despoiler suddenly remembered he owned several planet crackers.

 

[American Tanker]

And despite your claims of heresy, the half-Eldar Space Marine Librarian is a dude that totally existed.

For those who question: https://1d4chan.org/wiki/Illiyan_Nastase

 

[bastardofmelbourne]

And despite your claims of heresy, the half-Eldar Space Marine Librarian is a dude that totally existed.

Of course he did. It was the 80s. Back then, Space Marines were just regular dudes in armour, Chaos didn't exist, the Orks were into hair metal, and these handsome bastards [http://i39.photobucket.com/albums/e162/lopezc98/Minis/Squat.jpg] roamed freely across the galaxy like careless sprites.

What bugs me about that librarian is the fact that he's a ripoff of Spock. Look at him! [https://1d4chan.org/wiki/File:1255136711848.jpg]

 

[rosac]

I still cannot believe that warhammer fantasy has gone and will be unlikely to forgive games workshop for it... I keep thinking that I'd like to return , make an army of beastmen that looks visually impressive, with blocks of beastmen annnnnnnnnnd then I remember that Age Of Sigmar is a thing and WFB isn't

would it have killed them to make Archaon decide to recreate the old world that is constantly chaotic, whilst sigmar fucked off and make sigmarines, thus meaning both WFB and AoS could exist together? But no. Dicks.

Anyway, as for this, it's going to be an excuse to wank off normal space marines even more, probably introduce a new chapter and a new subsection of the black legion and then forget it existed.

 

[Tiger King]

Is there somewhere I can read the fluff/backstory to this in more depth? or is it based in novels?
I checked on lexicanum but it seemed a bit bare regarding info on this.

didn't the thirteenth pink crusade get released a decade ago? I remember the online campaign where people could submit results that would allegedly determine the outcome of the war.

 

[Mangod]

Is there somewhere I can read the fluff/backstory to this in more depth? or is it based in novels?
I checked on lexicanum but it seemed a bit bare regarding info on this.

didn't the thirteenth pink crusade get released a decade ago? I remember the online campaign where people could submit results that would allegedly determine the outcome of the war.

Yeah, but those annoying players didn't produce the end result that GW wanted, so they're retconning the entire thing, without any of that pesky "player interaction" to ruin GW's narrative.

 

[Addendum_Forthcoming]

In fairness, planets dying is common in modern 40k as well. Only, Cadia is an important planet, and has been for decades, it's not like that campaign they ran after the last 13th Crusade with some planet nobody knew or card about before getting killed off.

But yeah, GW doesn't want me to like 40k, it seems.

And that's the first failing. If you had read the rest of my post. The point is that if they want to spend so much time missing the point why the 40k galaxy was a horrible place to live and actually appealed to the idea of being meaningless. For example, in 1st Ed you had the Crimson Fists basically fuck up a planet by simply handwaving an Ork invasion as if; "Pffh, stinking Orks ain't no thing..." (almost those same words, too) and planets disappeared because of it ... and yes, that is literally how it played out.

A string of strategic worlds disappeared because of apathy to act because a foul-mouthed Trump wannabe lieutenant (at the time) in the Crimson Fists spouted off some populist rhetoric. And nobody gave a fuck. It occupies a blurb of text that comes off as merely humourous, LOL gubmint.

Then they made said guy, the same said guy, as if a fucking hero and trumpet the garbage as if he's some expert Ork stomper.

The irony being in 1E and Dark Millenium Pedro Kantor was precisely the uncaring, jaded, apathetic arsehole you may become. To thd point of seeming downright incompetent becsuse you really don't give a shit. And modern 40k and modern GW misses that point so hilariously ....

The horror of the 40k universe in 1E isn't that the empire of humanity is challenged on all sides, not the insidious evils of Chaos, not the machinations of the xenos ... it's the fact that humanity has won already and nothing can or will challenge it on any sort of real existential threat, and there's little reason to fight what piddling 'skirmishes' left that will end your existence, unloved and uncounted across all the stars in the heavens and nothing can make that system of ruthless facelessness end.

The death of Cadia would be met with a shrug of thr shoulders and two words; "Bad investment." It's not tragic, it's not meaningful, just a thing some person scratches out of a tally book and made up for by conquering thousands of other worlds by the titular Rogue Traders ... and perpetuating the system of diminishing returns upon the human soul and the value of life.

 

[Thaluikhain]

The death of Cadia would be met with a shrug of thr shoulders and two words; "Bad investment." It's not tragic, it's not meaningful, just a thing some person scratches out of a tally book and made up for by conquering thousands of other worlds by the titular Rogue Traders ... and perpetuating the system of diminishing returns upon the human soul and the value of life.

Sure (though the value of Cadia varies in text), but I meant it's important to the players who buy the products. They've not been game to do that before. Last campaign promised things to happen, players were going to see new exciting changes, then GW went "nope", same as they'd done with Albion, SoC and Armageddon.

Now, in practical terms, not saying writing Cadia off will mean much, but it's more then they've been game to do so far to 40k.

 

[Addendum_Forthcoming]

Sure (though the value of Cadia varies in text), but I meant it's important to the players who buy the products. They've not been game to do that before. Last campaign promised things to happen, players were going to see new exciting changes, then GW went "nope", same as they'd done with Albion, SoC and Armageddon.

Now, in practical terms, not saying writing Cadia off will mean much, but it's more then they've been game to do so far to 40k.

And this is part and parcel of the problem.

Before the buyout much of the setting had a black comedy to it. Nuke a planet you found wasn't responsible for selling you out? Oops. Genocide an alien species for giving you space herpes? Probably once or twice. Do you know what the biggest fuck up of GW to date? Chaos. In the process of trying to create weird takes of cosmic good and evil that threaten the very soul of humanity it takes away from the true threat of inconsequence's heel on your throat and fighting the monstrous normality of infinitely numbered humanity.... and clawing someway into the annals of history that may even fathom your presence a year from now.

Prior to the Chaos gods basically becoming everpresent and omnipresent, and *enforced hardship* because apparently humanity will die if it has white rice instead of millet cake. And I quite like Slaanesh and Tzeentch... they're fun... but the Archenemy is hardly as impactful as the old continued story of the human creature's march to their own meaninglessness that 1E had, and thus the sudden frightful ugliness when confronted with personal aspects of the unknown. The fact that humanity had no comparable other was ultimately its ugliest burden.

That which will inevitably be conquered, but will you survive the process or will people even bother to reconcile the question of ohy you died?

It never needed a strict canon beyond; "Terra is like Rome, and you can be a one of the populares, a general with a horde of alien slaves, undreamt technologies, and a mountain of precious materials ... marching down the streets of hive cities to adoring, bloodthirsty fans of humanity's *worst* (you and your friends), subjugating their own or other sapient creatures.... clearing the way for humanity to colonise and spread its ugliness ever owards in an irresistable tide of banal cruelty."

The game itself was both head to head and had narrative components.

And it didn't need the spectre of constant doom. Rather the opposite, humanity is forever indomitable, we'll crush all with our feritility rate and capacity to be spontaneously violent and glorify it. We're fucking tribbles. With poisonous barbs. We also bounce off the walls on a whim and then acquaint ourselves with a xeno's face.

And this is the thing ... the fall of Cadia should be treated as a mistep in the war that is *inevitably won* and thus the costs *meaningless* in their totality. It's not a strategic loss. It's a mere whisper of a papercut filing away the documentation of how the Empire of Man had already destroyed all its adversaries.

To pretend otherwise is a joke.

 

[Thaluikhain]

Do you know what the biggest fuck up of GW to date? Chaos. In the process of trying to create weird takes of cosmic good and evil that threaten the very soul of humanity it takes away from the true threat of inconsequence's heel on your throat and fighting the monstrous normality of infinitely numbered humanity.... and clawing someway into the annals of history that may even fathom your presence a year from now.

Going to have to disagree with you there, though I must admit I started with 2nd ed.

 

[Addendum_Forthcoming]

Going to have to disagree with you there, though I must admit I started with 2nd ed.

Don't get me wrong, as I wrote afterwards I think Tzeentch and Slaanesh are awesome and fun, what I dislike is the ridiculous metaphysics that went on to transform them into the likeliest possible victor. I wouldn't mind if they represented merely capiricious elements of the world they exist in, just like I had no problem with daemons in game.

But the ridiculous clore that gets canon-ed, and then retconned, then canon-ed again is directly a facet of the idea they don't really fit as they are presented.

It's a ridiculous grimdark device to explain why humanity must be rigid, largely immobile and pathetic. Which is ... it leads to ridiculous heroes being heroes at their most ridiculous, and vice versa for their opposition. And to not merely make it a credible threat, but to make it as if to seem then a near inevitability just seems to be trying to solidify the idea of humanity's doom. All when you really didn't need it and as a narrative device falls far short than what Rogue Trader did with its existential horror of being that was simply living in the 41st millenium.

I'm not opposed to gods in 40k. It's natural for Rogue Trader to tread some arcane magicks into their game, to make Chaos as it is makes no sense. Hence it gets constantly revised, changed, re-evaluated ... and you get truly fucking bizarre ideas about it not born from artistic whimsy, but simply to in-game philosophize like the world's most creatively bankrupt masturbator.

And this is why the original Rogue Trader was a hell of a lot darker, without the grimdark. Because you were likely to die alone, in god awful conditions, faceless, nameless, and penniless ... and your life is spent in a pursuit of meaning and trying to find something real to cling to. You will not be missed. But in modern 40k, suddenly all humans everywhere have the potential access to malevolent powers beyond reason. And that humanity must be necessarily caged. Not simply caged by having their value divided by the infinite masses just like them and bureaucratic apathy that defaults to the worst possible aspects of visible treachery, viciousness and psychopathy as the only means to get ahead.

To be a Space Marine meant more than likely the employ of a Rogue Trader, and you were beset by that infectious ambition, a tool for unbridled lust for greater glory and wealth ... and suddenly the tone does a 180 where humanity does have access to powers unknowable, but must necessarily be kept ignorant and constrained by hardship to avoid them ... thus reversing bureaucratic apathy into bureaucratic zealotry ... and the greatest problem with this lore shift is it's not even consistently applied.

The whole idea of human souls is merely there to add some plot armour and to make things srs biznus.

(Edit) Seriously, who the fuck cares and why now do they want to care? Even in the modern lore the Emperor is like; "Chaos is bad... but fuck it, not really important right now!" The mnetaphysics are getting in the way of the story. So much so the Emperor is supposed to be some enlightened soul and acts like a total retard. Which is odd for the reincarnation of a thousand wisemen and women.

This is why it pisses me off.

It would totally be better if the Chaos gods just represented actual chaos in the system. If it were just an extension of polarising viewpoints that simply created more paperwork for others, or encouraged dissent and divergence from the image of what it means to be humanity, and thus deemed heretical. Hell, it would even add to the allure of Chaos ... rather than the 4 year old-esque play on morality mechanics, the naive and childish belief that villains have to pay the price for their villainy by forfeiting their soul--ooooooh ... spooky ... and how can you totally know wrongness without someone gambling their soul?

Christ...

The lore is like a kindergartner's take on William Hogarth's serialized morality pieces with added, purposeful stupidity.

The lore didn't need Chaos as it is. It didn't need the Warp as it is. It strikes me as terribly childish feigning maturity. I mean it's not enough that an empire of Space Elves just simply ceases to exist ... no, let's concoct the most contrived thing possible that smacks of stultitia ex machina. With bullshit manufactured heroes in an age of supposed repression but not really.

 

[Frankster]

:S at Cadia falling rather quickly it seems (based only from second hand sources, i aint read any of the books or nada) despite the significant forces there.

After Age of Sigmar there is little scenario more terrifying to me as a 40k fan then GW deciding to want to move the plot.
Plus im honest enough to admit i'd actually hate for 40ks plot to make big progress, lest make the final plot look something like "eldar die out to kill slaneesh, conveniently removes all the kinky and sexy stuff from the setting, eldar both vanilla and dark are reborn into space aelfs" or "imperium fragments and collapses, but god emperor is reborn and makes his own realm, reforges the souls of his former servants into super space marines".

 

[Thaluikhain]

After Age of Sigmar there is little scenario more terrifying to me as a 40k fan then GW deciding to want to move the plot.
Plus im honest enough to admit i'd actually hate for 40ks plot to make big progress, lest make the final plot look something like "eldar die out to kill slaneesh, conveniently removes all the kinky and sexy stuff from the setting, eldar both vanilla and dark are reborn into space aelfs" or "imperium fragments and collapses, but god emperor is reborn and makes his own realm, reforges the souls of his former servants into super space marines".

Hope is the first step on the road to disappointment. The loyal slave learns to love the lash of increasingly embarrassing fluff.

Mind you, nothing to stop people dusting off their copies of Necromunda and playing a real game with sustained fire dice.