I still remember the Fantasy-40K connection back in the day that you could find warriors of chaos with plasma pistols, dark elves with power fist, and the story that Sigmar came from space and may have been a lost primarch... good times.
@@abcdodd if you ever get the chance, read the background lore in the 6th ed WHFB rule book. It’s implicated subtly that Sigmar Heldenhammer crashed landed as a baby.
One of the old fantasy short story collections featured a chaos champion of khorne fighting his way across the wastes to become a Daemon Prince, and one thing he found during his journey was essentially a laser. Plus, in the old Realm of Chaos books, a chaos champion could be directly gifted items such as chainswords by their patron.
Maybe I'm misremembering, but wasn't at some point, the world of classic Warhammer be implied to be a world inside the 40k universe, surrounded by a warp storm that essentially cut it off from the rest of the world?
@@evanharrison4054 Basically, yeah. The old Realm of Chaos books makes it pretty blatant, near enough the first page of Slaves to Darkness talks about how the 'Old Slann' (the Old Ones nowadays) travelled between worlds and set up gateways on each world they visited, then describes how they collapsed on the fantasy battle world creating links to warpspace. The text even ends describing how the Imperium of Man is also assailed, so it was clearly in the same universe in the lore at the time.
NGL the idea of Chaos Cultist Genestealers sounds absolutely incredible. Like imagine an Aberrant who worships Khorne and got blessed- it’d be ridiculous
Chaos was very random on the early editions, lots of charts. So you could have say a Patriarch possessed by a Daemon but you could roll a Bloodthirster or a Nurgling.
You know, Horus Heresy takes up too much oxygen in the fandom and lore these days. Bring back focus on the Badab War and Age Of Apostasy. Return to tradition.
I’m still waiting for a book series on the Badab War. Seriously BL need some books focusing on the massive span of time between the HH and “Modern” 40k. Sure we have The Beast Arises series but…I mean come on
@@parkermaisterra8532The beast series was so random. Orcs got a random power boost nearly destroyed the Imperium and bam everything back to status quo. I hate them making huge events that don't change anything about the setting anyways
@@parkermaisterra8532 agreed, right now the timeline of the Imperium feels both too front loaded and too back loaded. Hell, I'd like a shorter series about the First War Of Armageddon. A lot of important figures in the current era were around for that.
@@livefromtheblacklibrary honestly, Vraks is another one for me. The FW campaign books fleshed that one out a lot and it would be cool for some fiction about it.
my favourite piece of old-warhammer trivia is where the whole idea of chaos came from. The story goes that basically, back in the day, designing and printing unique models was much more expensive, too early to justify at this early stage, so they needed a reason to include 2 near identical armies in the same box as enemies, hence we got space marines and chaos space marines (I think it actually might've been titans, but you get the idea), and the Horus heresy was written just to justify a cost saving
Hi. Complete Eldar simp stuck in the 80's and former GW employee here. I have a few notes on this video (as I happen to be going through the 1st edition book anyway) 1. Sisters of battle are in the Rogue Trader. Or rather Adepta Sororitas. Page 269 2. Space marines, if anything have gotten FAR more weird since "1980s commandos in sci fi powered armour" Now we have Space vampires with wings? 3. The Eldar were glorious; they were simply better, more expensive, etc. 4. The most important bit is how fair things were, because there was ONE wargear list, one Psionics list, etc. 5. Any and everyone could be in a chaos band, but there were no 'keywords'. there REALLY should be Chaos Everyone now. 6. Rogue Trader was not an RPG 7. ZOATS!!!! (Still in my Corsairs army) Some things you may have missed: a. Jokaero b. Flora and fauna (Gyrinx, Catachan Dev.....everything, etc) c. off board support weapons d. ROBOTS (you had to write a flowchart program for them. they got their own phase. e. Psicannons were tiny pistols with bullets coated in emperor excrement. f. Everyone had dreadnoughts. Dreadnoughts were what we might call Invictor warsuits' today. g. Mentor Legion.
You really hit the nail on the head - I'd also add the following things missed - a. Vortex grenades b. plasma grenades c. conversion beamers d. power fields on dreadnoughts and robots e. didn't dreadnoughts have jump packs back in the day? f. The game board sized vehicles you could use as a map g. Flight packs! h. All the ork bionics
h. Warp storms worked almost the other way around: the disturbances kept dangerous Warp creatures _away_ in the same way that birds will fly away from a tornado. The Eye of Terror was actually the safest place in the galaxy from malevolent Warp entitites, it was just impossible to use Warp travel inside it because of the storms.
Speaking of goofy Space Marines: Back in the era of Space Hulk 1st ed (I think just before WH40K 2nd ed) there was an article in Dragon magazine for a Space Hulk campaign in which your marines wore normal beaky armor and carried a boom box because their objective was to fight their way into a space hulk to literally dance in face of humanity's enemies and terminator armor is too bulky to dance properly.
@@Shoutatclouds Haha, omg, yes. I hadn't read that for 30 years, but found the archived pdf: The Space Marine Recreator Squad " In short, the Recreators enter Genestealer Space Hulks and dance, just to prove they can. A squad broadcasts to Space Marine chapters throughout the Imperium demonstrates its courageous triumphs over the enemy." "The Recreators' special armor, customized by the Imperium's Adeptus Mechanicus, gives the waist flexibility they need to perform their lumbering but strangely majestic dances."
Considering the Tau's colony ships and scouting ships are travelling father then ever before the Tau are looking for any good possible colony worlds even in the remote ends of space, it's probably not long before the Tau stumble onto some remote worlds with small populations of Zoats on them...
@@heitorpedrodegodoi5646 Originally in 40k they were the old ones but then they got retconned to just be a servant race of the Old Ones. Like in the modern day 40k continuity the Slann still exist, they just got rid of most of their technology and live simple lives on fringe worlds (or at least they did before the Great Rift was formed.)
@@chaoticantifreezeehhh kinda, it’s more like they view civilians as resources to be expended in war (letting a bunch of Orks rampage a refugee camp so they can have the Orks in one spot to blow them all up with artillery) still fucking evil tho
@@bingusmingus2937 Why do Salamanders, Lamenters, and Imperial Fists even allow the Marines Malevolent to keep going? I feel like Vulkan would absolutely wreck their primarch if they had one.
Yes, they were a parasitic race from the moon of Ymgarl, and the native "base" form had a leech-like head and a long tail. Eventually these "Ymgarl Genestealers" were retconned as an aberrant offshoot of the Genestealer genus.
Honestly, I still recommend Ian Watson's 40k book, because despite some of the gross stuff, they give you that sort of "First Time Experience" akin to watching Apocalypse Now, for the first time. You are descending into this demented world, full of horrors, following demented characters who can only partially comprehend the world around them, being warped by it, both mentally and physically. There's this quite existential, psychedelic horror atmosphere to them. Moreover, Watson made W40k WORK. Like think about it, at the time w40k was, as of yet, a shapeless mass of ideas snatched together from Judge Dredd, Starship Troopers, Elric Of Melnibone, Aliens, DnD, Dune, Lovecraft and probably more. Then, they gave that bag of clustefuck to a writer who drops Acid like it's gummy bear - and yet, it somehow worked. (P.S: I, for one, do wish that GW would bring back the 80's metal vibe, even if only in terms of aesthetics.)
Honestly, 38,000 years in the future and all those names are derived from the myths of old. It's basically like being named Gilgamesh or Hercules. Hell, we have kids now who were named Dovahkiin by their parents, why couldn't this dude's parents just really do him like that and name him after their favorite ancient movies?
Wouldn't Drukari be classified as Chaos Eldar of Slannesh? Extreme emotional highs: ✅ Debauchery: ✅ Masters of t0rture: ✅ Fast and nimble: ✅ Devouted to pleasing Slannesh:* ✅ *Because otherwise they would die
@kacperkonieczny7333 Technically but they don't worship or relish the God itself. Drukhari are basically doing what the Eldar was doing en masse before the fall. Slaanesh basically stole the good days away from them and made it a obligation to prevent themselves from going to hell when they used to be immortal and able to do whatever they wanted whenever they wanted. Now they're mortal,can't use powers and their souls are getting sucked. None of the benefits all of the cons
One important aspect of the early 40K lore that frequently gets overlooked: there wasn't an existential threat to the Imperium of Man. In the Rogue Trader book, Tyranids were just another race, not a locust swarm poised to devour the entire galaxy. Necrons, Tau and Dark Eldar weren't a thing. There were no Traitor Legions trying to destroy the Imperium from the Eye of Terror either (not until Adeptus Titanicus): when demon-like Warp entities got summoned into realspace, their first priority was to try and get _back_ to the Warp because they didn't like it here. Orks were mere barbarians, and the chief reason they were all over the galaxy was that the Imperium wasn't competent enough to keep them in check. IG commissars looked like the Gestapo, not like Napoleonic hussars, and space marines were basically Sardaukar. Everything about the lore made it clear that Imperial propaganda was bullshit, that the Imperium was its own worst enemy and that literally any other political system would have been more effective at protecting mankind from external threats. Of course, when it became clear that WH40K was evolving into a wargame focused on pitched battles between armies, other races had to be beefed up so they could compete with the Imperial Guard and the Space Marines on the tabletop. But taking that route meant validating the Imperium as the "defenders of mankind" because suddenly there _really_ were other factions that could swallow up the galaxy if the forces of the Imperium weren't there to stop them, and for me that weakened the central element of the lore. I enjoy current WH40K, but I do miss the time when the real reason the galaxy was "grim and dark" was not that there were ugly monsters out there, but that the people who were supposed to protect you from those monsters were in fact The Fucking Worst.
You make some really good points. One of the things I like most about 40k is some of the darkly humorous satirical lore stories about how many rich nobles/highborn in 40k are selfish psychopathic weirdos who spend way too much time plotting against each other, unintentionally messing things up for other people through their arrogant incompetence and/or doing dumb heinous $h1+ instead of properly doing their appointed jobs of being the royalty overseeing governments or just peacefully enjoying their lives of wealth and privilege. It's like the setting is making fun of itself. At first glance the setting makes it seem like it's implying that a human galactic empire run by the nobility might actually be a good idea. However the setting then ruthlessly parodies itself and skewers thr idea of the nobility ruling a galaxy by showing that that kind of government would only possibly work out okay if it was run by benign superhumans like the Emperor or one of the Loyalist Primarchs instead of just flawed normal human beings who additionally have messed up views about life due to their inherited wealth and privilege. (Some examples are Herman von Straub, Goge Vandire, Sepheris Secundus, how horribly inefficiently run Terra is, how many Planetary Governors are just selfish psychopathic obese oafs, Duke Severus XIII and the Severan Dominate, the Scintillian Fusiliers, the Ventrillian Nobles and all the lore from about what $h1++y people Lord Gerontius Helmawr and most of the other nobles of Necromunda are like as well as how terrrible Necromunda is in general.) Also I kind of wish there was like 2 lines of warhammer 40k lore like maybe "warhamme40k grimdark" for the modern day lore and like "Warhammwr 40k cartoony" or "warhammer 40k retro" for the more classic style lore.
I liked the old narrative battle generator in the back of the RT book, especially the one involving an administrative error where 2 identical forces are sent to a planet to fight shapeshifting aliens but end up having to slaughter each other instead!
@@SurprisinglyDeep It's not so much that they "had to" but that they each assumed that the _other_ contingent was the shapeshifting enemy. Because neither had been notified of the other's presence.
Space Marines now: The emperor protects. Space Marines then: Hold on, I gotta rub the blood of the elderly onto my bolter so that I won't miss a shot and baby feces onto my visors so that I can see better.
The goofy vibe and art style speak to my inner 80s kid, love it. In moderation it could offset the grimdark and bring more people into the lore. Caiphas Cain, ect.
Hah, yeah man. Highly recommend all his stories - it gets even better. Keep the garbage California modernity out off 40k at all costs. Striking that gallows humor balance with the classic gut wrenching grimdark go authentically and naturally together. Remember that warhammer young adult bs run they tried? Brilliant marketing... ah hahah.
The grim, depressing, and utterly bleak hopelessness of Rogue Trader got to me as a teenager on an existential level - that I would fade before I was noticed, and replaced with newer, brighter lights, and that the future held nothing more than a greater grinding misery than the present, got under my skin in a way that body horror or gore of the later editions has never managed. The "grimdark" that came later has always felt somewhat like catnip for edgy teenage boys.
In the companion/compendium/white dwarfs harlequins could bring looted vehicles like orcs…. Except you had to role at the beginning of the turn to see if it broke down…. Literally a clown car… they were a circus sub faction of Eldar before the aspect warriors became a thing.
The tone of incredulity in this video surprises me. I mean, even today, it's a game with Space Knights, the Space Empire, Space Elves, Space Undead, Space Orks, and, yes, Space Dwarves (a race of short, doughty miners with very Nordic naming conventions? Still dwarves).
I miss the sheer lunacy of the early editions. It's like GW forgot that Warhammer is supposed to be fun. They need to embrace a bit of the silliness, sometimes let things be grimderp for the sake of being grimderp. What 40K needs is its own variant of Blood Bowl. Maybe make a Warhammer 40,000 pro-wrestling board game.
FR. why did they have to take the comedic relief out of every faction but the orks. i like old fantasy lore being so silly (the changeling whoopie cushioning khorne with a nurgling is canon lore) and fantasy really mixed the darkness with the absolute absurdity of the setting quite well so i never felt it was completely serious.
I came up with a lore idea for a 40k Blood Bowl years ago that I think fits will. A radical Inquisitor comes across a Dark Eldar fighting arena and thinks that's just fine. He works with the Dark Eldar to codify the rules, ultimately creating a game that looks suspiciously like space football. In the grim darkness of the far future, there is only FOOTBAAAAAAAALL!
Your forgot to mention some interesting stuff about the Orks, like the Khornate ork boys that were seen as teenargers in aphase and ork genestealer cults with severals arms. It's very important to remember about the genestealers that they were not Tyranids yet, they were their own race from the moons of Ymgarl, wich is interesting
You're talking about the ork stormboyz - they were not necessarily followers of Khorne, but you could also have 'stormboyz of khorne' in your army lists. There were also ork mutants and ork/genestealer hyrbid models (which were two different things)
@@rrwholloway they definitely are 2nd ed. I had the white dwarf where you got a free warrior when they came out. If you Google necron raiders 2nd ed you will see some in 2nd ed blisters etc
Honestly I miss the level of detail and freedom of the old edition. The fact that you learn what certain peoples rations are like and you can have someone in your army pick up an ork gun just makes the world feel more lived in to me. Nowadays every faction has some rigid lore about how they wouldn’t even touch another’s weapons but it just makes each faction feel like it’s in its own universe completely separate from the others
Tau 8ed codex has a whole page about their language and names. Tau 9ed codex is a disappointment. They had a high level of detail up until recently, but detail doesn't make money.
yes in lore but how often do you see it on the tabletop? During the older editions the lore and gameplay seperation was non existent. So yeah a space marine or an ork could field an eldar shuriken rifle. If the the player could field the points. @@ElishaFollet
Part of that came from (at least on the model side) the fact that they didn't have any. The company couldn't make unique things for every army, which is why everyone have bolters and Rhinos. But I think the other change is how toyetic 40k has gotten over the years. Everyone started getting their own wargear in 3rd editon, but this has gone absolutely nuts in recent editions. Entire units existed because their bolter was different from every other bolter, and that happened because GW needed more things to sell. I'm doing a back-conversion to 2nd edition, and it's so refreshing to write "X is just a power axe," or "this thing is a bolter."
The recipe for old 40k was: 1 part space. 1 part fantasy. 1 part post apocalypse, like Road Warrior. Add a dash of satire. Add a teaspoon of spoof. Bake around a game table with lots of laughs. Serve garnished with mohawks and bright colors. For dessert, be - perhaps - surprised it takes off with the fans and needs years of development to become an entirely different dish.
Don't forget there was some really cool stuff like vampires being warp creatures and lots of flora and fauna for death worlds. I miss these aspects of 40K.
Speaking of metal, warhammer editions in lore, tone and style literally are like the discographies of most 80's and 90's metal bands; - they peak with the debut, radiating with youthful passion and originality - they slowly refine their style with the two followups - get more serious and professional by finding their niche in any given subgenre - do some experimental shit that pisses all their fans off - and eventually they fail spectacularly in trying to get old fans back with a poor attempt at replicating their original style but infused with nu, core or power metal elements to also impress the zoomers, turning it into a complete clusterfuck that somehow still takes off Warhammer is metal af indeed
Hell, Bolt Thrower named themselves after bolters, and made a whole album about Chaos Space Marines (Realms of Chaos), it doesn’t get any more metal than that!
Equipment in RT was limited by tech level not race. So a fast play style was not limited to eldar Squats on powerboards and marines on jet bikes were insane. You need to read RT alongside the compendium and companion to really understand it.
So as someone who got Rogue Trader at its release event can I just say you did a great job. I do feel sometimes some of the rough and ready feel of early 40k has been lost over the years. But it's still fun.
Not only did everyone get bolters, they also could get shuriken rifles, even space marines. And there were humans that painted themselves green and joined an ork warband. And the orks were happy to see them.
Ok I agree, with a few notes. Firstly, 1st and 2nd were grimdark as hell. Despite the odd humor present sometimes. Yeah, 1st edition was also pretty weird. But don't mistake a bright paint pallette for something it's not. Look at some Heavy Metal magazine from the era. For the length of the video, this was a pretty good summary. Forgot to mention Chaos Androids which looked like Necrons. Also, in 1st edition, you could play Ork mercenaries, rogue Space Marines that weren't necessarily Chaos, Eldar pirates and corsairs and mercenaries, and Slaan, who in lore at that time WERE the Old Ones. Also the Eye of Terror was smaller. And the original Legions were different. Everybody had way fewer vehicles because the models didn't exist, and GW wasn't set up to be able to make a bunch of different plastic kits easily. The standard armor you are referring to is Mk VI armor, which everybody should know. Tyranids actually were ALWAYS an extragalactic threat, you were just only given snippets of lore. Canonically, Zoats were diplomats of some of the early hive fleets. Also you could encounter free zoats that presumably were refugees. While the Horus Heresy was barely a footnote at first, it became more of a big deal when they released the original Adeptus Titanicus. I miss Squats, they were cool. They had some lore. I think they actually got more lore in the Space Marine 2nd edition (epic) supplement Ork & Squat Warlords than they did in 40k, although I'm sure there were several White Dwarf articles. I'm not completely familiar with the Leagues of Votann lore, but it seems to be written so that these are the survivors from when the Squat homeworlds got overrun by Tyranids. Maybe that was just marketing, though. I didn't catch at what point the Squats were integrated. Last I knew they were allied with the Imperium. I'm sure it's there, I just don't remember having read it. I didn't really see a lot of lore updates in 3rd other than the introduction of Dark Eldar. Necrons came in at the end of 2nd. 2nd was almost a reboot, though. Rules-wise it was a clean-up of all the evolutions of 1st edition rules, with a lot of streamlining applied. I still like 2nd edition best out of all of them, although 8th comes in a close second. And Lord knows there are problems with both of those. Oh! And on Orks, which also ties in to Tyranids, there was a now apocryphal story (the Space Marine novel is also no longer canin, but you knew that), wherein an Imperial probe sent beyond the galactic rim detects some stuff that might be Tyranids, and much to the horror of the tech-priests, Ork signals from every nearby galaxy (which in terms of galaxies is a looooong distance, I'm sure). The implication everything outside the Milky Way is either Tyranids or Orks. Every nearby galaxy is dominated by Orks unless it's be eaten by Tyranids. I guess the Old Ones spread the Orks to a bunch of places.
I kinda love the idea that space marines being these "stoic warrior monks" is propaganda and that in reality they're just these knuckle dragging, beer-chugging fratboy asshole space cops Just has that grimark satire edge that is slowly being sanded away from the setting so it can be more "heroic"
its absolutely possible there's a successor chapter somewhere that is just like this. ESPECIALLY if they're rolled in with the local guard or pdf. Is it standard, hell no, is it totally possible and almost likely at least somewhere? absolutely. someone should just write that, astartes trained and raised right along guard, who are just cigar smoking, booze pounding, mega bro's.
W40K came out of the very excellent lefty artistic reaction to Thatcherism. Judge Dredd, the RPG paranoia, many, many works of scifi were warning us against top-down conformity and the rising plutocratic class. The snark of these works remains inspirational to this day.
Elaborate and very detailed desciptions of feats, Sex with Shapeshifter, being horny for Genestealers, poop eating ceremonies, killing cats, casually sneaking into the Imperial Palace and being initially ok with turning all of Humanity into a Hive-Mind.
I love the Heavy Metal/Ralph Bakshi era of Sci Fi, and as much as I love what Warhammer is today (for the most part), I do wish that more was being made in that style
4:04 In early warhammer you really saw it was supposed to be a post-post-post apocalypse. Space Marines did actually degenerate from the heresy and while they were monstrus and grimdark they were the best what humanity had. They are portrayed way too heroically now. 6:33 You say it's silly I say they really tried to sell the post-apocalypse vibe. A lot of early 40k lore weirdly echos stuff from African wars. The sisters of battle and why van Dyke created them clearly mimic African Presidentators with their units of harem bodyguards where they have hundrets if armed wife bodyguards. Or the names of Afrian warlords often being silly like General Buttnaked or Rambo Schwarzengger Terminator. Or my favorite duo: General Mosquito and General Mosquito Spray
I love the feel of old editions, where they are much closer to playing an rpg with a squad of guys, rather than a single character. The old scenarios even used to include a game master that would have secret knowledge and spring surprises on the players, or play a third faction interfering with whatever the game objective was.
Here's how I make Chaos Androids coexist with Necrons in my Warhammer 40k universe: making former Men of Iron that used as physical bodies for warp entities As well making both Rainbow Warriors and Valedictors 2nd and 11th legions respectively
"What's wrong with that guy?" "He stared too long into a 1st edition codex" "FEMALE SPACE MARINES, CHAOS ELDAR EXIST, LEMAN RUSS WAS JUST A NORMAL GUY!" "Nobody's ever been able to decipher the rambling"
Rouge trader is really something. I wish 40k still had some of these goofy things still in current setting like the genestealer limos it made 40k feel a little more like a setting that was lived in.
If you haven't been keeping up with the retcons erda was a perpetual who helped make the primarchs it was her that yeeted them. She later got killed by fucking erebus after beating 4 greater demons at once
Dude, Squats are SO much cooler than LoV. A trike, 2 dwarves, a huge barrel of beer with a heavy machine gun mounted on it... SO SO much better than what we have now.
Hot take, but i sorta like the technobarbarian knuckledragger style the old sm had more than modern sm Also, i think you raise a good point with the fast paced playstyle eldar have, because its made me realize that part of the dominance of space marines in general games until now, because sm can play basically any way a player could want.
I feel like you can really see meat of where Warhammer came from when you see theae old editions, other than being more like it's Fantasy counterpart but... in space, you can also see that the people writing it were the same people who worked in 2000 AD.
I kind of miss the old lore of SM being unhinged roid lunatics on a fundemental level, their loyalty and humanity kept in check only by extensive indoctrination.
As a more recent 40K fan, I can't say that I am a huge fan of the goofy, 80s metal aesthetic or a lot of the heavy fantasy-inspirations. I happen to like grim dark and I prefer my comedy more understated. I like gothic horror, but have always been more lukewarm towards high fantasy. That being said, I found this video fascinating! It is always really interesting to see how an idea evolves over time. Even if the roots aren't my cuppa, I can fully appreciate why people enjoyed it.
my favorite facts about 1st edition is the fact that female space marines was canon but was eventually discontinued only because nobody bought any of the models. and the character Illiyan Nastase a half-Eldar, half-Human Imperial Astropath, who became Chief Librarian of the Ultramarines..
I do wish GW would bring back some of the concepts from 1st & 2nd edition. There's a lot of charm in those editions that has been lost throughout the years.
diplomatic orks would have been cool. have roving ork traders or mercenary groups looking for a good fight (and some money for drinking), really make the orks feel closer to a real "chaotic neutral" faction that is really just down with anything that is fun and violent, or work that allows them to buy things that bring fun and violence.
I never liked how wh40k took a path of hostility between man and the space elves instead of sticking with the relationship of generally being allies against the Dark in WH Fantasy
Older orks had a lot of fun things going on-orks fallen to chaos, genestealer-ork hybrids, and human mercs are some of my favorites. My blood axes today have some humie mercs as a nod to the older stuff.
Imma be brutally honest. I kinda prefer some of this older lore, it just strikes me as more fun and interesting. I prefer older Squats I like their aesthetic and them just being Dwarfs in space. I'm not the biggest fan of the sleek Votann aesthetic I honestly thought they were Tau auxiliaries when they were first shown. I like the older Eldar Lore were they are much more competent and mystic and I like the idea of Chaos Genestealers because what if a Genestealer eats a chaos mutant or infects a Chaos Cult first. I honestly think this stuff has a place in modern 40k. Now imma not be blind and say its all good like the Poop eating or the silly Inquisitior or the Zoats but there are some concepts I just prefer over the modern setting. Also Beakie armour with visors will always look badass. I wouldn't mind seeing Marines who are more thuggish alongside the more warrior monk style Marines.
I actually stopped playing when second edition came out. I likes the old style armour and Lore. I used to play with my neighbours in a garage using nothing but rogue trader and it was all we needed. in the last year or so I started watching Utube vids about 40k and read a few of the books. I dunno if I like the direction of how some of the content has gone personally. It was a lot more dependant on your imagination back then, and in my opinion that was a good thing.
i agree, old fantasy was like that too and now with everything more written down (and fantasy burned to the ground with AOS) it all feels less silly and loose. even when fantasy got more lore it still felt very much an open world that you could explore or slightly change the dynamics of (you want a morally good tomb king? go crazy, for instance), 40k lore is really so set in stone (and honestly stagnant) that you don't get that magic anymore
I played a while into 2nd edition and have followed the lore since then. But the charm of universe is kind of gone. 40k should not be Taken Seriously. Gradually, some fans who did not get the satire started Taking it Seriously and eventually GW itself also started Taking It Seriously. And now it is just Grimdork. Static, unimaginative and divorced from the original concepts, all at one time :(
The medieval fantasy look mixed with guns is what got me into the games. I liked the old rogue trader look an theme. I like the lore etc now as well, but it doesnt have the same feel to it.
While the modern setting obviously has a lot more content and development, something about the original version's galaxy feels more alive I guess? As in it feels like the galaxy has a lot more weird stuff going on in it potential for bizzare minor factions showing up, there is a lot more unknown factors going on. I kind of wish the setting had more stuff like that, scale all of the big players back in scope a little bit to open gaps of space that no factions have really looked into in depth yet. I know some examples exist but I'd like to see more minor xeno's empires and breakaway human factions that the imperium hasn't gotten around to deal with for several centuries or even more remnants of pre imperium golden age human civilization. I think stuff like this helps sell that this is a vast galaxy mostly filled with rotten empires that struggling to hold on to what they claim, the Tau in concept are basically supposed to show that new civilizations are growing in the cracks but I think they should be far from the only one. On another note, I really do not like what they have done with the Tyrannids, mostly at a plot and scale level, I have no issue with their concept or designs. The old Galaxy based version avoids the two main issues that I have with the tyrannids, they have no character and there is no real insight into how the hive mind actually thinks. Nerf the hive mind's ability to just create any lifeform the plot demands to make them more dangerous to nesscitate them capturing and enslaving more races to the hive mind like the Zoats to cover weaknesses they currently have. This gives them a reason to not just eat everything because some can be more valuable alive. This only expands the kind of creepy and gross alien horror the tyrranids are supposed to have while allowing them to expand or even "communicate" through other races they have turned into flesh puppets. My second issue with the new tyrannids is the overwhelming extra galactic force they present, while this is grimdark it basically means the most likely outcome is that everyone will be overwhelmed eventually, meaning that in the long term nothing that happens really matters, at least scale them back to coming from only one direction. This also limits the potential of other extra galactic entities possibly showing up, stripping more mystery from the setting. I am personally a fan of the idea that a colony could have been sent outside of the galaxy before the collapse and they (or their AI successors) could possibly return and have diverged so far in the past 20000 years as to be virtually unrecognizeable as humans the imperium.
So, minor nit pick, but realm of chaos books were released in rogue trader (1st edition) and included death guard, thousands sons, world eaters and emperor's children's legions as armies you could run.
Speaking as a Long Fang I think you've blended some first and second edition lore together here. Stuff like the Age of Apostasy, the Sisters of Battle as we know them and Abaddon weren't first edition. Rogue trader can best be defined by the rulebook, Chapter Approved, the White Dwarf Compendium and two Realm of Chaos books maybe with some Warhammer Siege thrown in. Towards the end of the edition we started to see more on the Heresy but that was mostly built upon via Adeptus Titanicus, then Space Marine which focused on the Scouring then the Realm of Chaos books building further on this. I think RT is probably best divided into early, mid and late edition as a subject matter because unlike later editions it substantially evolved within the edition the closer it got to second edition via White Dwarf unlike all editions that were to follow. Stuff like the Badab War though wasn't as huge as people seem to think, it's more like one of those remember berry moments that people seem to think it was a bigger deal than it was probably due to later exposure of the Forgeworld books.
I'd argue that the shift wasn't 3e, it was the 2e Chaos Codex; that was where it went fully grimdark. Also Necrons were introduced at the end of 2e, before the 3e edition was published.
I miss some of the goofy stuff, but I also love Orks as they are currently. A lot of the ideas where half baked and got refined for what we have now. I do miss the Trikes that the Squats used to have, and we have more updated version with the Pioneers. The Beaky helmets have always been a favorite of mine seeing the old art from my cousins playing Fantasy and showing me the old White Dwarf books they had.
Honestly I WANTto see Slaaneshi Dark Eldar. Cause let's be honest they're already pretty much that and there's only one step for them to embrace fully the Prince's embrace
Most people don't know the environment when Rick and the guys hacked Rogue Trader together. The Slaanesh beasts are the Fendahline from the Doctor Who episode Image of the Fendahl. The Nurgle beast is the monster from the old film The Creeping Terror. Traders, pirates, muties are from various Warrior/2000AD comics like Judge Dredd. Chaos demons and lore are from various Michael Moorcock books such as Elric, Hawkmoon, etc. Space Marines, psi marines, and Tyranids are from Heinlein's Starship Troopers (nothing to do with the film of the same name). Genestealers are from the film Alien.... I'll edit if I remember any more.
The Marine units were based on infantry units of the day and they all had jump packs. Think Robert A. Heinlein's book Starship troopers where everything was done in a form of power armour ""On the bounce" . They even had Field Police (MP's) and the Legion of the Dammed was a penal legion for Marines The Imperial Guard was more expendable but backed by numbers and Penal Legions (Suicide Bombers) and I can understand why they disappeared after Conflicts in Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria. This is more grim dark for those of us who lived this than anything GW can imagine as the "Penal Legions" were often kids who should have been playing the game not taking part. In all, I loved this version and the RPG elements allowed us to play up to the point of battle, when the tabletop was hastily arranged into a battle ground. Unfortunately, I lost all my books and mini's in a house fire so when my son's became interested I wanted to show them how I used to play but couldn't remember the rules.
The Realm of Chaos books were the best. Which you can create random warbands. Which included the real offspring and descendants of the Emperor. They were also the first place the chaos legions and Grey Knights were introduced.
