Warhammer 40,000

I poked around in a sandbox a bit to see what that would make. By simply merging the Traitor Legions' general folders in the Chaos Marines page with the character folders on Horus Heresy - Traitor Legions, simply chopping out the latter's introductory trope lists and descriptions for the legions as a whole as redundant, I ended up with about 316k bytes to the 314k on Warhammer 40,000: Chaos Marines. So it... wouldn't help, especially since that would be without actually saving and moving non-redundant examples from the HH page's entries on the Legions as a whole or moving the character folders from the 40k page, which would make an actual merged page even longer.

Hmm. The issue is that the more I think about this, the less I actually like having separate pages for the 30k and 40k periods, chiefly because there is a lot of redundancy — a lot of characters have doubled entries, and there is a lot of duplicate material on the two pages' entries and trope lists for the legions-as-groups. They don't strike me as making good arguments for the two pages needing to be separate, not when so much is shared.

That said, we could actually split the legions. An idea might be to do things like this:

• Characters.Warhammer 40000 Chaos Marines — general entry, plus sections for smaller groups and later renegades.
  • Characters.Warhammer 40000 Chaos Primarchs — keep as-is.
  • Characters.Warhammer 40000 Traitor Legions III To XII — Emperor's Children, Iron Warriors, Night Lords, and World Eaters.
  • Characters.Warhammer 40000 Traitor Legions XIV To XVII — Death Guard, Thousand Sons, Black Legion, and Word Bearers.

And all relevant group and character tropes from the Chaos Marines and Traitor Legions pages get moved to the two new ones as relevant.

Thoughts?

Today's Heresy Thursday are Tiny Termites◊. I've always liked the tunnellers since the Space Marine/Titan Legions era of Epic.

The Termite Assault Drill looks remarkably similar to the Veer-myn Tunneler for Firefight. I could use one of those to convert a Termite for 28mm scale.

EDIT: Nevermind, apparently they already have those in that scale.

Edited by Mara999 on Apr 11th 2024 at 9:14:42 PM

Double-post: Yesterday they posted an article on a really sweet-looking Custodes army. This gorgeous army makes me think the Custodes could be kitbashed with Stormcast Eternals, both for 40K and AOS. I lean towards fantasy, so I would trim off all sci-fi bits from the Custodes. The Custodes' pointy helmets with red crests would look really good on a semi-angelic soldiers. Looking at those golden Dreadnoughts gives me an idea of using them for either steampunk robots, or maybe a Magitek construct like an angelic golem.

Female Custodes are canon and always have been

I don't think we have any crusty dinosaur fossils here who are gonna whine about the change but just in case I'd like to remind everyone to keep things civil if discourse(tm) happens.

Edited by Silentedge89 on Apr 14th 2024 at 5:19:53 AM

Heck, even lore-wise it makes sense that there could have been female Custodes. Or female Thunder Warriors for that matter (though afaik they were still all men in canon).

The reason Astartes were all male was because the original Primarchs were all male. Their gene-seed as a result doesn't work when transplanted into women.

But the Custodes were enhanced through different and superior methods (with the tradeoff that they were massively inefficient and resource intensive).

Edited by M84 on Apr 14th 2024 at 10:39:58 PM

Yup. I think some are also purely vat grown so there's no gene seed involved what-so-ever. I have friends who have wanted canon female space marines for awhile so this is something even better for them. I think this is a super cool thing they finally get to do since the fucker who was overlording over the IP is gone. According to Aaron Dembski-Bowden female custodians were something the writers have wanted to do for awhile but some chud was being draconian about the IP.

It's interesting to see the Emperor's idea of a supersoldier change over time.

• Custodes — the ultimate warriors. But way too difficult to mass produce. The Emperor needed more than few elite to accomplish his goals.

• Thunder Warriors — cheaper and easier to produce. But they're physically and mentally unstable and useless for anything but brutal warfare. The Emperor needed soldiers who could do some things besides slaughter.

• Astartes — An odd middle ground between the Custodes and Thunder Warriors. They're easier to produce than Custodes and last longer than Thunder Warriors. But they're also weaker than both of their predecessors. That's not even getting into the problems with the Primarchs.

The Emperor never really did get the whole "supersoldier" thing right. Though the whole concept is arguably flawed from the start. The only thing the Emperor did right was to not create a whole new species to be his soldiers. We see how badly that went wrong with the Old Ones' Krork turned Ork and Aeldar.

Edited by M84 on Apr 14th 2024 at 10:40:27 PM

That makes me wonder what the Aeldar who fought alongside the Krork were like. Gladius (briefly) depicts them pretty much like the present-day craftworlders, but they probably had weapons and powers far beyond the Aeldar of today. Maybe?

They were probably more like the Ynnari, being Aeldar with access to all of the tech available to their race.

After all, the Ynnari's whole thing is that they are the closest to what the Aeldar were before they splintered apart.

Edited by M84 on Apr 14th 2024 at 11:18:31 PM

TBH that's not even a reason that makes sense either?

Like, you can get an organ transplant from someone the opposite sex from you.

That this matters more than whatever 40,000 of genetic drift, mutation and god knows what from being on planets entire different planets (some of whom have entirely different and innately hostile biospheres) is stupid. Never mind that these organs are genetically engineered to be harvested and implanted to begin with.

The gene-seed stuff already doesn't really work in-universe without some reality bending at work.

That's why Blanks can't be made into Astartes. Their nature erases psyker power, and a trace of the Emperor's psyker power in the gene-seed is what gives the transformation a more than zero chance of success.

Another issue is that the gene-seed isn't just a generic implant that grants superpower. It's a bunch of implants that are specifically meant to make the recipient more like the original donor. In real life, organ implants don't change you to be more like whoever the donor was.

Edited by M84 on Apr 14th 2024 at 11:21:50 PM

I distinctly recall reading Deathwatch's core rulebook and it saying explicitly that all Astartes are biologically male, so I cast doubt on the "always has been" statement.

Having said that, I also don't mind the retcon either.

Edited by Protagonist506 on Apr 14th 2024 at 8:22:44 AM

Sure, but that's again, narrative backfilling. It neither makes more or less sense than anything else.

Heck really there was no reason the had to make all his primarchs male. That happened coz it's an authorial choice. You can canonize that choice for sure and heck make it that it frankly tells your something about how Big E saw the world. But also like 90% of 40K's cast, even if you do not count space Marines, tends to be male, so ya know.

Again, Astartes are not Custodes.

Edited by M84 on Apr 14th 2024 at 11:23:38 PM

Oh, Custodes, ok then.

It less "being draconian" and more "Minis drive lore, no the other way around" and always have being. So maybe there is female custodes on the front really.

The issue with custodes is more "absense of proof is not proof of absence" and "theoretically, it can be" We only see custodes as Male so the idea was they were always male, the fact they work with sister of silence as team kinda said the same. Kinda how in star wars some choices with first movie get expanded later.

As for geneseed....yeah it was mostly authorial fiat and mantain by what I call lore inertia, were some thing are so heavy it cant be change at all(that is why for example, I didnt belive the Thousand sons would beat the space wolfs at all). it a sort of "it is what it is"

That's actually canon in universe as well. There's a conversation between Malcador and Jhagatai in one the Horus Heresy novels "Scars" that he recommended making some or even all of the Primarchs female.

I'd imagine making all the space marines men has to do with marketing. They're the big, tough, hulking warriors, so whatever guy in charge of marketing thinks that only men will want to buy them, so only men are space marines.

Reveals for Necromunda on Warhammer Community today, the Fixer and the Proxy Hangers-On◊. Both are very nice models but I do like the pose and facial expression of the Fixer the best.

I really like the colourful characters introduced for Necromunda. As I've said before, they make me want to play Dark Heresy or Rogue Trader with minis. The Fixer looks a lot like Jason Statham with a cyber-eye, while the Proxy looks like an exaggerated version of Toecutter.

Can't believe Emps had ladies as Companions. What a betrayal to his golden banana friends.

The other reason is probably they didnt know how to make female space marine, as ADB said, minis drive lore and if minis are bad, no lore is on them.

Hell I think someone said the reason most marine are bald is because making hair was a mess. You can said this are material conditions to it. you will be surprise how many lore are drive for silly reasons like that.

84: not really? custodes purpose is both bodywars and companions, they make their funtion as it should, thunder warrior are a stop gap to take terra while space marines are good as conquerir forces

What are you talking about? When I said "Ultimate Warrior", I meant that the Custodes are basically good at everything. The Emperor's first attempts to create super soldiers focused on making the best ones possible. The problem with this approach was that it wasn't feasible to mass produce them. That's why the Emperor needed something else to actually take Terra.

The Thunder Warriors otoh were easier to mass produce. The Emperor realized even supersoldiers need numbers to win. But the problems with the augmentation process meant the Thunder Warriors were only useful for taking Terra and wouldn't last long enough for anything else.

The Emperors' end goal for supersoldiers were supersoldiers who could handle any challenge thrown at them and be a bulwark against any enemy humanity faced. He wanted soldiers who were good at everything and could be produced in high enough numbers to actually matter on the galactic scale. The Astartes led by their Primarchs were simply the latest attempt.

And as I said earlier, they can't be considered a true success either.

Edited by M84 on Apr 16th 2024 at 8:27:47 PM