Warhammer 40k Fluff Thread IX: "Post-human Centipede"

[Lix Lorn]

Remember, the Eldar adhere to a rigid caste system on pain of Slaanesh. The path of the outcast, of which corsair is one option, is a way to be free from this caste system.

(As for the dark eldar, they're psychotic murderous hedonists who get slaves via piracy, so)

[Darthteej]

At least Space Marine has the decency to explicitly say it's an alternate universe game. The only problem is, fluff-wise it wasn't too bad, Captain Titus instead of Cato Sicarius aside and some mechanics over fluff choices with equipment like the Iron Halo.

That always confused me as to why it was set in an alternate universe, instead of just earlier in the timeline. There weren't any tau, necrons, or tyranids, so they pretty much could have set it anytime after the Age of Apostasy right? Unless I'm forgetting something.

[Wraith]

There weren't any tau, necrons, or tyranids, so they pretty much could have set it anytime after the Age of Apostasy right

The insignias on Titus' shoulder pads show him to be the Captain of the 2nd Company.

The present captain of the 2nd is Cato Sicarius, who has been so (as of 014.M42) for over 160 years. His predecessor is Severus Agemman, who is the current Captain of the 1st Company.
Which suggests that, if Titus' markings are correct, his actions on Graia must have occurred something like 250-300 (or more) years prior to the current date.

My guess is that the writers didn't want to have to establish a continuous lineage any further back, as this could make life difficult for the Black Library writers who might clash with either the Captain's identity or his Company's whereabouts if a precise time WAS established in the game. If they just say "It's an alternate universe, it doesn't matter when it happens" they can avoid it pretty neatly.

...At least, until Nick Kyme wrote Veil of Darkness and had Cato Sicarius paying homage to statues of famous, dead Ultramarines.... One of whom was "Captain Titus"...

[Platinius]

It is important to honour the few Ultra Marines that actually kicked @ss in the past

[Cheesegear]

It is important to honour the few Ultra Marines that actually kicked @ss in the past

Remus Ventanus approves of this message.

[comicshorse]

Quick question: Do the tyrannids get anything out of fighting Necrons ? Can they actually break down the Necrons metal bodies into usable material or are the Necrons a complete waste of time ? Also if Necroins exist on a dead world does this mean the Tyrannids would have zero interest int hem ?

[Grim Portent]

Quick question: Do the tyrannids get anything out of fighting Necrons ? Can they actually break down the Necrons metal bodies into usable material or are the Necrons a complete waste of time ? Also if Necroins exist on a dead world does this mean the Tyrannids would have zero interest int hem ?

The Tyranids can't consume them as far as I'm aware and usually avoid Tomb Worlds.

I think it's similar to how Tyranids view Daemons, as rivals rather than food. They'll fight them if they're in the way or killing stuff the 'nids wan't to eat, but otherwise will just ignore them.

[Eldan]

Yeah. It's been mentioned a few times that Tyranid fleets actually move around tomb worlds, keeping their distance.

[comicshorse]

The Tyranids can't consume them as far as I'm aware and usually avoid Tomb Worlds.

I think it's similar to how Tyranids view Daemons, as rivals rather than food. They'll fight them if they're in the way or killing stuff the 'nids wan't to eat, but otherwise will just ignore them.

Hmmm, and as we now have (I believe) new rational Necrons, would that make them the perfect mercs. to fight Tyrannids for you (given the huge problems of finding something the Necrons want in the first place)

[shadow_archmagi]

Hmmm, and as we now have (I believe) new rational Necrons, would that make them the perfect mercs. to fight Tyrannids for you (given the huge problems of finding something the Necrons want in the first place)

You also have to have something they want, and some reason why it's easier for them to kill 'nids than you.

[Alex Knight]

You also have to have something they want, and some reason why it's easier for them to kill 'nids than you.

Well, if the 'Nids eat all the people, it'll make it that much harder to research a way to reverse biotransferrence...

Besides, the 'Nids are eating Future Necron Subjects. And we can't have that.....

[Oracle_Hunter]

The novel Path of the Outcast has quite a stretch in which the protagonist is a corsair.

His motives boil down to 'he was bored and it seemed fun'.

Which is basically the central issue of the Eldar Psyche -- they're so superior that they basically "do whatever" if they have too much free time. This is how The Fall happened, and why The Paths are so important. One of the better fluff bits IMHO.

It should also be noted that much of the Imperial discussion of "Eldar Pirates" actually referred to Dark Eldar. Not all of it, clearly, but the fact that the Imperium seems to have a hard time distinguishing between "good" Eldar Pirates (e.g. Yriel) and "bad" ones (e.g. Dark Eldar) is one of the reasons why the Imperium gets along worse with the Eldar than you'd expect.

[Grim Portent]

The Imperium doesn't really distinguish between the Eldar much at all, most humans don't know that there are Craftworld Eldar and Dark Eldar, let alone knowing about the smaller Eldar factions.

Corsairs do tend to assault human (and xenos) ships and worlds though, they just have different goals than Dark Eldar raiders. Corsairs want loot, weapons, armour, tech, food and so on. Things they can trade with other Eldar factions or use themselves. Dark Eldar do the same sort of things, and occasionally work with Corsairs, but they want slaves and little else. Corsairs kill and rob their victims, Dark Eldar capture them.

[Grim Portent]

Something has been puzzling me about the Crimson Slaughter warband.

Why?

Why has GW placed so much emphasis on them?

First they appear in Dark Vengeance as generic bad guys, then they start getting books and a codex supplement and so on.

Why them? Why all the effort to profit from them?

I can't help but think it's something to do with the fact that neither the Black Legion or Red Corsairs are really popular among chaos marine players and they're trying to make a new Diet-Black Legion like they did with the Corsairs. But if that's the case then why make another warband led by a character who's fundamentally the same as Abaddon and Huron? Why not find the most popular generic chaos faction and try to cash in on that?

[Cikomyr]

Hmmm, and as we now have (I believe) new rational Necrons, would that make them the perfect mercs. to fight Tyrannids for you (given the huge problems of finding something the Necrons want in the first place)

Thing is, the Nids fighting Necrons always lose. Even if they win, the Ripper gun makes sure the Hive cannot reprocess its losses back into its biomass, and lack of bodies to eat means not new biomass.

[comicshorse]

Thing is, the Nids fighting Necrons always lose. Even if they win, the Ripper gun makes sure the Hive cannot reprocess its losses back into its biomass, and lack of bodies to eat means not new biomass.

I think you misunderstood my point. I was suggesting that people would want to hire the Necrons to fight the Tyrannid's for....well exactly the reasons you stated

[LCP]

Regarding Tyranids and Necrons - I'm sure I've read about Tyranids stripping minerals out of the crust when they consume a world. So I don't think they'd get nothing out of consuming a Tomb World - just that the costs outweigh the benefits.

It's conceivable that a hive fleet that was running on empty would attack a Tomb World if it didn't have the range to reach a less prickly ball of rock. I guess it depends on what hive ships use for fuel.

[Cikomyr]

I think you misunderstood my point. I was suggesting that people would want to hire the Necrons to fight the Tyrannid's for....well exactly the reasons you stated

I know. I was adding to your point.

[Darthteej]

Something has been puzzling me about the Crimson Slaughter warband.

Why?

Why has GW placed so much emphasis on them?

Games Workshop really doesn't seem to understand that the vast majority of CSM players are in it for the legions or dedicated cult armies. I think their thought process goes like this-"Space Marine players enjoy customizing and creating their own chapters, so we'll give Chaos players the same options with renegades." Thus, the emphasis on the CS as a poster boy for what Chaos Marines have been going for since 4th edition. GW must also know that Khorne is popular, so the CS have that going for them as well.

"We'll create a new faction that combines the best parts of the World Eaters(kids love berzerkers!), the Black Legion, and daemons(they're possessed!). The fans will LOVE them."

[Cheesegear]

First they appear in Dark Vengeance as generic bad guys, then they start getting books and a codex supplement and so on.

You misunderstand. Crimson Slaughter got books and a Codex supplement because they were in Dark Vengeance. The response to to the guys in Dark Vengeance, was simply "WhoTF are these guys?"

Oct '12 - Dark Vengeance and Codex: Chaos Space Marines
Mar '14 - Codex: Crimson Slaughter

There's an 18 month gap there. It really looks like that Crimson Slaughter were supposed to be a throwaway Chapter that we'd never see again. 'The effort to profit from them' - your words - comes from us, the fans. We know who the Dark Angels are, they have 20 years worth of backstory we can apply to Balthasar, Turmiel and whoever that Chaplain is. Forging a Narrative is easy. But who are Kranon and Draznicht? Who are the Crimson Slaughter? What are you even talking about? How do I even Forge a Narrative when I don't even know who Kranon is or why he even has a Daemon heart.

and they're trying to make a new Diet-Black Legion like they did with the Corsairs.

I hope you're trying to say Diet-Word Bearers.

Why not find the most popular generic chaos faction and try to cash in on that?

Probably because it is generic. One of the reasons that Games Workshop (or was it all Citadel back then?), got out of historical wargaming all those years ago, was because they couldn't write their own fluff. Now, far be it from me to comment on GW's business model and how laying off employees doesn't actually lead to long term revenue growth, but what GW is doing in 2013-14 and making revenue off of, is making a whole heap of new fluff, and/or fleshing out throwaway one-shot stories - the whole second (?) Night Lords book is based off of a two or three paragraph 'fluff box' in the 5th Ed. rulebook about how the Night Lords and Red Corsairs teamed up one time, Wrath of Iron (turns out, I looked it up because of a conversation a few pages back) is based off a short story in White Dwarf from ten years ago.

Why War Zone: Valedor? Why not War Zone: Iyanden? Same dudes, right? Because we've heard the Iyanden story a million times, that's why. We want new stuff, not more of the old, same stuff. Besides, we got the Black Legion book, and Abaddon is getting his own series soon-ish.

[Grim Portent]

You misunderstand. Crimson Slaughter got books and a Codex supplement because they were in Dark Vengeance. The response to to the guys in Dark Vengeance, was simply "WhoTF are these guys?"

Oct '12 - Dark Vengeance and Codex: Chaos Space Marines
Mar '14 - Codex: Crimson Slaughter

There's an 18 month gap there. It really looks like that Crimson Slaughter were supposed to be a throwaway Chapter that we'd never see again. 'The effort to profit from them' - your words - comes from us, the fans. We know who the Dark Angels are, they have 20 years worth of backstory we can apply to Balthasar, Turmiel and whoever that Chaplain is. Forging a Narrative is easy. But who are Kranon and Draznicht? Who are the Crimson Slaughter? What are you even talking about? How do I even Forge a Narrative when I don't even know who Kranon is or why he even has a Daemon heart.

But why even make a new warband for Dark Vengeance? Why not use Black Legion, Red Corsairs, Iron Warriors, Worb Bearers, Alpha Legion or Night Lords? Why make a new name when the old ones would work just as well if not better?

I hope you're trying to say Diet-Word Bearers.

I do think their rules would make good Word Bearers if not for the lack of VotLW.

Probably because it is generic. One of the reasons that Games Workshop (or was it all Citadel back then?), got out of historical wargaming all those years ago, was because they couldn't write their own fluff. Now, far be it from me to comment on GW's business model and how laying off employees doesn't actually lead to long term revenue growth, but what GW is doing in 2013-14 and making revenue off of, is making a whole heap of new fluff, and/or fleshing out throwaway one-shot stories - the whole second (?) Night Lords book is based off of a two or three paragraph 'fluff box' in the 5th Ed. rulebook about how the Night Lords and Red Corsairs teamed up one time, Wrath of Iron (turns out, I looked it up because of a conversation a few pages back) is based off a short story in White Dwarf from ten years ago.

Why War Zone: Valedor? Why not War Zone: Iyanden? Same dudes, right? Because we've heard the Iyanden story a million times, that's why. We want new stuff, not more of the old, same stuff. Besides, we got the Black Legion book, and Abaddon is getting his own series soon-ish.

But why make a new generic force when you already have 2 (Black Legion, Red Corsairs) and have four more chaos armies (the other unaligned legions) that are also quite generic and already have an established fanbase? How does it make any sense from either a business perspective or a game design perspective?

Surely it makes more sense to release a codex supplement for the popular legions, make unique models for them, write books about them because you know the fans of those legions will buy them rather than risk spending time and money on a completely new thing that might not become popular? There's a whole lot of chaos factions with existing fans that could be fleshed out and profited from.

[comicshorse]

I know. I was adding to your point.

Ah, my mistake

Posted by LCP

Regarding Tyranids and Necrons - I'm sure I've read about Tyranids stripping minerals out of the crust when they consume a world. So I don't think they'd get nothing out of consuming a Tomb World - just that the costs outweigh the benefits.

It's conceivable that a hive fleet that was running on empty would attack a Tomb World if it didn't have the range to reach a less prickly ball of rock. I guess it depends on what hive ships use for fuel.

I think Tyrannids use Bio Mass for fuel and are quite ruthless in their calculations. So if 'defeating Necrons to strip their world' gets them the fuel but the Necrons will destroy 50,000 Tyrannids and just converting living Tyrannids into fuel only takes 40,000 then I'd think Tyrannids are going to be ordered to jump into the vats

[Cheesegear]

But why even make a new warband for Dark Vengeance? Why not use Black Legion, Red Corsairs, Iron Warriors, Worb Bearers, Alpha Legion or Night Lords? Why make a new name when the old ones would work just as well if not better?

I typed out a whole bunch of things. But I was afraid that you'd concentrate on the wrong things, so I backspaced everything and summarised into one sentence;

Because old things aren't new.

Keep reading that sentence until you figure it out, because it's literally the only thing you need to understand. If you can understand why that sentence is important, then you understand GW's business decisions to invent, and focus on the Crimson Slaughter.

[Wraith]

I see what you're saying Cheese, and in broad strokes I agree with you - GW can't just release the same books over and over again and expect their sales to improve, especially not in the status quo that is the 'main plot'.

Having said that - I do not remember any great demand for Chaos Marine "Chapters", and especially not while books such as the Night Lords Trilogy and the Word Bearers Trilogy hve proven so popular and the Talon of Horus series is awaited so eagerly. GW still have plenty of room for "new" within their existing background and it's a shame that they have left it untapped.

Let me put it another way: How many Ultramarines special characters are there? By my count, in Codex: Space Marines alone, there are five, and yet more in the expansion books.
How many Blood Angels characters? Again, five, if you include both versions of Tycho. Space Wolves?
Six, not including any new ones in the upcoming new release.

And then, how many Black Legion characters are there on the tabletop? Just one. The biggest and most infamous of the Traitor Legions apparently has one guy with a name.
Emperor's Children? Two.
World Eaters? Word Bearers? Death Guard? One.
Night Lords? Iron Warriors? Alpha Legion? None. Zip. Nada.

I think that this is what Grim Portent is getting at; No one asked for Huron Blackheart. I don't think that the supplement in which he was introduced was ever bought in huge numbers, and certainly not for him, and I've never seen anyone so much as buy his model, let alone use it on the tabletop. The same goes for Dark Vengeance in that sense - I don't think ANYONE bought it for the generic on-the-box "Chapter" that the Chaos force represents.

But do you think people would be the same about rules and a model of (non-Forge World) Kor Phaeron? Or Talos? Or even the smallest peek into one of the less well documented Legions, opening up and expending on one of the mysterious forces that we have known little about for nearly 30 years? I'd be willing to bet that people would go nuts for the latter, at the very least.

[Darthteej]

That's what I'm saying. There's a great copypasta about this somewhere that I've missed, but it's basically a satire about how GW does business with the codex writers all sitting around a table. The one meant to represent the Sane Man points out that dedicated forces with tons of history, like the Legions, clearly sells well and that's why Forgeworld makes bank with their Horus Heresy series.

Sane Man: "People love the first founding legions legions, not idiots like the Crimson Slaughter! Look at the Space Marine codexes we have-Blood Angels, Space Wolves, Dark Angels, and a book about Ultramarines. THe only 2nd founding chapter was rolled into a book that had tactics for the rest of the loyalist legions!"

Matt Ward: "Silly goose, those people are chapters, not legions."

I get the point about new fluff, but new fluff seemingly comes at the expense of the old fluff in the new Chaos codex. As a little baby I bought the 3.5 Chaos 'dex, and was blown away at all the options it would have given me(though I could never afford the models), and the deep history and tactics of each legion. Come years later when I decide to buy in, and all of those legions are reduced to a paragraph blurb on a single page.

[LCP]

I think Tyrannids use Bio Mass for fuel and are quite ruthless in their calculations. So if 'defeating Necrons to strip their world' gets them the fuel but the Necrons will destroy 50,000 Tyrannids and just converting living Tyrannids into fuel only takes 40,000 then I'd think Tyrannids are going to be ordered to jump into the vats

Tyranids have the objective of consuming biomass because their goal is to continually increase the Hive Mind's bank of DNA. Adapt forever, survive forever. Raw materials are a secondary (but necessary) concern - they don't need to limit themselves to biomass when gathering them. In terms of raw materials, 'biomass' is just carbon and water after it's been digested anyway - and if you think about it they're going to need heavy elements (easily found in minerals) to make all those super-strong Carnifex carapaces etc.

Really the easiest bioship fuel would be hydrogen. It's the most abundant element in the universe, you can even suck it up by trawling through dust clouds far away from planets. And there are a lot of depictions of Tyranid fleets sucking oceans dry... which is a lot of H₂O.

The question then of course is how they get the energy out of it. It's hard to imagine how you could make a biotech fusion reactor... but then if their giant space squid are propelled by essentially chemical rockets that must be monstrously inefficient and slow.

[Grim Portent]

'Nid fleets are described as being very slow and being in a state of hibernation until they near a planet worth consuming, so a chemical or bio-mechanical propulsion system would seem likely to me. Not practical by any means, but then neither is making skyscraper sized bio-titans or using living spacecraft in the first place.

[Voidhawk]

Tyranids have the objective of consuming biomass because their goal is to continually increase the Hive Mind's bank of DNA. Adapt forever, survive forever. Raw materials are a secondary (but necessary) concern - they don't need to limit themselves to biomass when gathering them. In terms of raw materials, 'biomass' is just carbon and water after it's been digested anyway - and if you think about it they're going to need heavy elements (easily found in minerals) to make all those super-strong Carnifex carapaces etc.

Really the easiest bioship fuel would be hydrogen. It's the most abundant element in the universe, you can even suck it up by trawling through dust clouds far away from planets. And there are a lot of depictions of Tyranid fleets sucking oceans dry... which is a lot of H₂O.

The question then of course is how they get the energy out of it. It's hard to imagine how you could make a biotech fusion reactor... but then if their giant space squid are propelled by essentially chemical rockets that must be monstrously inefficient and slow.

In universe, no-one really knows how Tyranid ships function. Out of universe it's never been explained either. But it has been commented that the quantity of biomass they absorb from a planet is absurd, many many times the mass of the Hive Ships that drain it, and of a volume that even if compressed down to star-like densities wouldn't fit inside them. So where does it go? One theory from a codex was that it gets sent back through wormholes to the larger Tyranid fleets outside the galaxy. But really no-one has any idea, and GW doesn't care enough to explain.

[Platinius]

The truth about the Hive Fleets is that after devouring even a few earth-like biospheres (and they have devoured thousands), they would be so massive only the largest Imperial fleet ever assembled would be able to stop them with (somewhat) conventional means. The only single ship/object with the necessary power for such a feat would be the World Engine.

[Grim Portent]

The logical way to write them would have been to depict them as constantly growing new ships and forming new hive fleets that fragment off to spread out and keep the genome safe. This would leave them a fragmented force which is gnawing away rapidly but can be beaten in individual engagements without calling too much into question.