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Thoughts about the Warhammer 40,000 universe

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TheEvilDog:
@Mori, you're kinda being a dickhead now. Just saying.

Neko_Ali:
it's attributing something just shy of stupid maliciousness when it comes to the design of the game. While I could say a lot of negatives about Games Workshop over the years, that's not something I would attribute  to them.

To give a sense of history to the Games Workshop games they started off in the 70s mostly selling board games and as the UK distributor for Dungeons and Dragons. In the 80s they diversified into creating and selling gaming miniatures through their Citadel Miniatures brand. In the early 90s there was a bit of a buy out/management shift and the new people wanted to get into producing and selling a war game to go along with their miniatures. First they made Warhammer Fantasy, a rank and file war game with very Tolkienesque fantasy routes. Humans, elves, dwarves, undead all that standard stuff. It was successful and they decided to do a futuristic spinoff called Warhammer 40K.

And this is the big thing... 40K has never been a science fiction war game. It's a fantasy game set in space. That's why you've got the space marines as armored battle monks, orcs in space and even the Eldar race were originally called Space Elves. Logical warfare choices were never part of the game. And the you add in the people who were the art design for their team of the day which were a bunch of hard core 80s/90s metal heads. So everything is gothic and skulls and outrageously dark and the edge was so real you cut yourself laying your hand on the cover of the book. And that design stuck. It became what differentiates the game from any other science fiction setting. The fact that it's really Science Fantasy and the Grimdark nature of it all. It's absurd, makes no sense and that's what fans adore about the setting.

TheEvilDog:
Yeah, there's a lot I could say about the company, but the actual backgrounds for the settings? No, because there are some things I will gripe about, the fact is that I adore the setting. It was the first setting I came across where humanity was not the paragon of light and goodness. It was the first time I came across a setting where there were no good guys, and there could be no happy ending to the story. If you're someone in that universe, you're either going to not amount to much or you're going to die horribly at something much larger than yourself.

And you know what, at 13 years old, that's actually a wonderful thing to learn. Not that you're not going to amount to much, but that there are some settings where you are always going to be horribly outclassed in somewhere. There's no heroic charge to save the day, the cavalry just gets shot to pieces. And that's okay to realise. There are wins and there are losses, get over it and move on. And that's actually a healthy thing to teach people, because before that, every story you're told is that the hero slays the dragon and saves the day...every single time. And 40K (and by extension, Fantasy), told you in that uniquely British way that more often than not, the dragon kills the hero.

Morituri:
Okay, sorry.  I'll stop now.

I really wasn't thinking 'stupid malicious', though.  I was thinking about the process of making an over-the-top twisted parody.  And how much fun it would be, really, once you had decided that, and nothing else, was exactly what you were setting out to do.  I imagine it's sort of like writing lines for "Conservatives" for the Colbert show, where they're deliberately making something ridiculous by exaggerating everything about it.

I'll fully agree that a setting with "no good guys" is something that is needed every once in a while, especially in eras when nobody's doing it.  I guess I had the same experience realizing that there were no good guys anywhere in "The Godfather" by Mario Puzo.  Everybody there was either scum, or in the process of getting run over by scum. And yeah, getting your head around that possibility, is valuable.

From everything I've heard, this really is a brilliant parody.  If I approached it with utter disbelief, it's because I wasn't even considering deliberate parody as an explanation.

LeeC:
This thread has lead me to find that there is a clear lack of good info graphics of all the different factions and their relations to others. I mean I found some but they are very terrible to show the un-initiated.

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