Warhammer 40k

Okay, next time try explaining without sounding like a 4chan retard. Though, reading that 1d6chan posts, the guy really has huge hang ups on Big E.
The 1d6chan stuff is correct, although in the grand scheme of things(and ignoring his excuse about why femstodes weren't in the ultimate guide) he's not any worse off than any other BL author that's written more than a couple of books over the years. There are plenty that are for more egregious, and laughably so that they'll basically never write for GW again(hopefully) https://1d6chan.miraheze.org/wiki/C.S._Goto compare that to ADBs page and it makes ADB basically nothing by comparison.

If you want a consistently decent author who doesn't shove his retarded shit into his writing, I'd suggest Chris Wraight
 
Okay, next time try explaining without sounding like a 4chan retard. Though, reading that 1d6chan posts, the guy really has huge hang ups on Big E.
That’s all true though.

ADB insists on pushing the “muh freedom fighters” narrative onto CSM and Abaddon, rather than the heavy metal, over the top evil space knights that literally everyone who likes them knows and loves. He will always, have a squad of quirky yet likeable diverse MCs with a token human woman who is treated as an equal. If that sounds like that awful Bad Batch show, you’d be correct.

However, unlike that mohawked retard who did the Lelith novel and put Sargon into 40k, ADB has talent, that formula he uses was good, the first time. Night Lords is great.

It was after Night Lords that problems started to develop, but what’s bad about him making slop, as opposed to that retard Abnett, is that ADB can still make good stuff. Betrayer is one of the greatest HH novels, even the two Black Legion books have some interesting elements. He’s just someone who never should’ve been given slack in his leash.

He also openly fetishizes Serena Williams, which is so, so telling. That tweet is in the thread highlights if you wanna see it.
The 1d6chan stuff is correct, although in the grand scheme of things(and ignoring his excuse about why femstodes weren't in the ultimate guide) he's not any worse off than any other BL author that's written more than a couple of books over the years. There are plenty that are for more egregious, and laughably so that they'll basically never write for GW again(hopefully) https://1d6chan.miraheze.org/wiki/C.S._Goto compare that to ADBs page and it makes ADB basically nothing by comparison.

If you want a consistently decent author who doesn't shove his retarded shit into his writing, I'd suggest Chris Wraight
Wraight is a pro, White Scars, EC, Death Guard, the man writes very different factions and unlike ADB, doesn’t use the same template for his novels.

It’s a crime Lords of Silence didn’t get the trilogy treatment, like Word Bearers, Thousand Sons and Night Lords got.
 
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Gotta get them hooked early.
 
next time try explaining without sounding like a 4chan retard
I am a (former) 4chan retard.
ADB has talent
Talent is worth nothing if he keeps using his novels to rag about his daddy issues. He's been using BL novels in lieu of therapy for more than a decade, and it's tiresome.

Also, holy shit, I just saw a recent picture of him while googling and his metamorphosis into the perfect bugman is almost complete. All he needs is a cringe Nintedno tattoo somewhere.
Wraight is a pro, White Scars, EC, Death Guard, the man writes very different factions and unlike ADB, doesn’t use the same template for his novels.
And unlike so many other BL writers, he can write convincing religious characters that can and do rise above their own flaws and doubts through the power of faith.

Wraight should have been Head of Narrative.
 
Any recommendations for novels by this Chris Wraight guy? I need a new book to pick up.
Valdor, Watchers of the Throne and Vaults of Terra all give great glimpses into "normal" life on terra both in 30k(pre crusade, end of unification war) and in 40k as well as what happens when the shit hits the fan, sisters of silence, etc.

His White Scars books actually cover things like the Council of Nikaea, founding of the librarius, legions interacting with eachother, how a loyalist primarch with a functioning brain can act reasonably during the heresy. Basically he provides a lot of lore for the white scars and their interactions that had largely been ignored or treated purely as memes previously.

Couldn't tell you about the Space Wolf stuff at all, but people seem to like that as well.

Considering how harsh 1d6chan can be about BL authors, they don't have any bitching to do about Chris Wraight and their summaries for at least the stuff I've read are accurate.
 
Black Library has made the lore of Warhammer immeasurably worse. It was much better when it was confined to snippets in White Dwarf, rulebooks and codices/army lists. It played into the unreliable narrator aspect better and allowed for more creative freedom, both for the creators of the games and the players.

I'll take a "Floating Gardens of Bahb-Elonn" over a dozen trash novels that give mid-authors a soap box for their hang-ups.
 
Any recommendations for novels by this Chris Wraight guy?
I really liked his Vaults of Terra books - they follow a duo of, Inquisitor and Interrogator - one old and bitter, pretty much going through the motions, and one young and new, very zealous.

The trilogy is really about Crowl being born again in the religious sense. His speech at the end of the third book has to be my favorite moment in any BL book to date.
 
I don't really care about Aaron Dembski-Bowden enough to roll into a fit of rage. To me he's just another autheur shoving his finger into an already tampered cauldron soup of melangiated lore, stories, contradictions and redundancies. The thing that Rage Grifters latch on to is his support of Current Year stuff like femstodes, or writing strong-womyn into every possible position that isn't an established character. And that he seems to genuinely hate the god-emperor for purported personal reasons.
It's the same thing that happened to Ward years ago with his idiotic codices and they way he propped up the Ultramarines. That stuff was bad, but not "oh I'm gonna send you a death threat" bad at all.

I would much rather see Robin Cruddace take an extended leave from writing datasheets and rules because my god, has the game turned into a joyless disastrous rigmarole.
 
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It's the same thing that happened to Ward years ago with his idiotic codices and they way he propped up the Ultramarines. That stuff was bad not in no way "oh I'm gonna send you a death threat" bad.
Ward has stated in an interview a year or so back that his favorite chapter is Imperial Fists. The reason I think this matters, is he likely was just following a directive from upper management but made it so fucking over the top it made everyone hate the ultramarines for years, which if you consider he's an IF fan, would be fitting.

Strangely enough he also said that he didn't get any death threats or anything like that either at the time, and it isn't like he's got a reason to lie about that(or at least never got anything directly and had the testicular fortitude to ignore dumb shit said online). I'll see if I can find it, it was actually interesting.

edit: Well ok that was fast

Gotta get them hooked early.
That's actually a program they've had for a few years now, even in the US.
 
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Any recommendations for novels by this Chris Wraight guy? I need a new book to pick up.
The HH White Scars stuff, with Path of Heaven being the highlight (avoid the audiobooks), anything with him writing the Death Guard, the short stories like “Daemonology,” Buried Dagger is great for the moment Mortarion breaks and in culmination of the novel’s flashbacks, it shows every moment he has bowed to a “father” he hated, the alien necromancer, the Emperor and the fat, disgusting face that the “stars” have reshaped into and Mortarion resigns himself to being a slave.

Lords of Silence is the best showing of the 40k Death Guard.

Wraight also has the honor of fixing Abnett’s incompetence. Eidolon, under Abnett’s pen was comically pompous and arrogant, incompetent and utterly unbelievable as a Lord Commander when compared to say, Julius, who was also arrogant but wasn’t……. Lord Farquad levels of inept.

McNeil brings back Eidolon and Wraight, in the short stories and later, Path of Heaven and The Soul, Severed makes him into the best EC character.

Then? Abnett gets ahold of Eidolon for his Siege of Terra finale and just like every other character, he reverts them to their characterization from the start, from “his novels,” he was so lazy, he didn’t even look up Eidolon’s model and know HE WIELDS A HAMMER

Wraight has a gift for repairing characters, taking inconsistent characterizations and mending them, Mortarion and Eidolon are his two biggest achievements and I think that’s why he made them get along so well.
 
Something like Custodes, or even a lesser extent Space Marines, do work because they don't require special rules to make it on the table. Elite armies always have a trade off of losing maneuverability for consistency. Even if your Elite units are really fast, if you are limited in how many you bring you can't be everywhere at once. While 2+ on everything is the most consistent, it still means when something goes wrong it goes catastrophically wrong. A failed charge on some chaff is not a big deal. A failed charge on a 200pt unit means you probably don't have a back up plan. Being out of position is even more punishing. Every failed save and every miss hurts a bit more. They can be balanced, but the reason people don't like them is because people like a death match. I know points win games, it's a strategy game, but at the end of the day what people actually care about is killing models. Armies like custodes mean only one person is really allowed to kill models. To win the other player is expected to out maneuver, and out score them. This is easy enough to balance by point costing units properly so that both armies have a similar damage output/survivability, but people don't want that. They want to sweep models off the board. That's why game have gotten bigger over time.
Here's a simple solution make the tabletop reflect the actual loye of the game I know it's novel concept.
Or have an elite different game for things like Imperial Knights Titans undiant walkers you could call them let's say apocalypse style games where the massive military conflicts.
I still hate how they got rid of battle fleet Gothi
 
Here's a simple solution make the tabletop reflect the actual loye of the game I know it's novel concept.
The lore itself is an inconsistent mess. Which part of the lore do you follow? Where a custodian loses a 1v1 to an iron warrior? Or where an interrogator(not even inquisitor) can stand in a fight against a space marine? Or needing thousands of guardsmen on the tabletop while one can solo a space marine no problem with a melta?

And that doesn't even consider that the game uses a d6, where a scale of anything working needs to be represented on a 2-6 so a custodian hits on a 2, a space marine hits on a 3, a guardsman hits on a 4, and an ork on a 5? Where do you fit something else into any of that with so few degrees of separation available?

And then apocalypse games? Most people will never play an apocalypse game and even when GW has tried to promote apocalypse, it still fails because most people either don't have the model counts, the space, or the time for that shit.
 
The lore itself is an inconsistent mess. Which part of the lore do you follow? Where a custodian loses a 1v1 to an iron warrior? Or where an interrogator(not even inquisitor) can stand in a fight against a space marine? Or needing thousands of guardsmen on the tabletop while one can solo a space marine no problem with a melta?

Most tabletop games suffer from the "arrow in the eye" problem, but its really blown out of proportion in 40K when you start to consider the lore. Especially when you apply it to the kind of scale 40K is pitched at. I've always maintained that if you want to play a battle with more than 4 squads per side you're better off just playing it epic scale.

You have superhumans with reflexes far faster than a normal human, with augmented senses, encased in armour that can shrug off las rifle and small arms fire, but when they're on the tabletop they can (and often do) fall to the likes of chaos cultists, splinter rifles and grots with glorified flintlocks. Thats before you get into the clusterfuck that is melee combat.

There isn't a palatable fix for this from a rules perspective (is anyone going to consult a table in modern 40K?), but if the writing wasn't so retarded to begin with you wouldn't have the disconnect between game and lore in the first place.
 
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A system is as dead as its players. Battlefleet Gothic had more gaming presence at the recent Adepticon than Trench Crusade, despite having been abandoned for fifteen years.
Isn't OPR making a Battlefleet Gothic like ruleset?

... I wonder why more people don't just sell their "totally not space marines" 3d prints as being for the OPR ruleset, actually. It would be a valid defense against GW's lawyers, yeah? "These aren't Space Marine proxies, they're miniatures for the I Can't Believe It's Not Astartes factions for Grimdark Future."
 
unlike that mohawked retard who did the Lelith novel and put Sargon into 40k
As in YouTuber Sargon of Akkad? As in, Lotus Eaters and Sargon of Applebees guy? Why? How?


Here's a simple solution make the tabletop reflect the actual loye of the game I know it's novel concept.
Or better yet, make the lore reflect tabletop.

Mini rant, but something I've learned over years of trying to get into Battletech/Mechwarrior after hearing decades of nostalgic praise followed by constant bitching, is that wargames of the 80s and 90s made a loose, bare-bones setting to justify infinite tabletop games where your guys and other players guys can co-exist without destroying canon. Then so many novels meant to inspire more toy soldier games grew and grew until it became an impenetrable mess where continuity lawyers will sperg out because in novel 539 on page 75 clearly states that green lenses on scopes don't exist so your army is invalid.

40k very much has this problem. It's why Custodes are such a flawed faction because they're very limited and specific.


ADB insists on pushing the “muh freedom fighters” narrative onto CSM and Abaddon, rather than the heavy metal, over the top evil space knights that literally everyone who likes them knows and loves. He will always, have a squad of quirky yet likeable diverse MCs with a token human woman who is treated as an equal. If that sounds like that awful Bad Batch show, you’d be correct.
And personally, I wouldn't have a problem with this. I have retarded lore for my own guys. The difference is I'm not trying to make Dredd's I Can't Believe It's Not Starship Troopers GW canon. And even if I did, I'd want it to be a background thing like the Badab War chapters where it's a paint scheme and half a paragraph of backstory.

And fuck it, let's beat a dead horse. I never liked the "Imperium are bad guys and fascists" bullshit. Yeah, it's a fun hypothetical or one off interpretation. But it really gets away from the spirit of the faction imo.
 
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