Got deep into WH40k lore and this has to be the most batshit insane piece of fiction I've read. Everything about it is so absurd that it loops to become great.
Ork lore is very funny. I love it when WH 40K gets weird instead of grimdark and serious - some of the writers kind of forgot that it's supposed to be satirical and humor is allowed.
Ork lore is my favorite, too. The whole concept that an Ork machine works because Orks believe it’ll work is hilarious, but also genuinely kind of interesting and unique.
That has been really over-stated by the fandom. Afaik shootas aren't just empty boxes full of loose screws and bits of metal. They are guns. But when the imperium tries to shoot them they jam constantly and are prone to fouling, while for orks the waagh smooths things over just enough to keep the mechanism running smoothly under sustained fire, and even then they blow up pretty regularly.
Why the red unz go fasta is ambiguous - maybe the psychic force of the waagh is pushing them faster. Maybe the mekboys just have a knack for knowing which war buggies are the fasest and paint them red.
Mekboys, and all orks, have an incredible amount of technical knowledge written in to their genetic material. If a mekboy lives long enough and is part of a big enough waagh field they'll just know how to build a warp drive the way human babies just know how to crawl.
I’m not that fussed with the degree to which the Ork waaagh functions, I just like the idea that at least part of their functionality as a civilization is literally based on vibes.
WE'LL DRINK AND DRINK AND DRINK AND DRINK AND DRINK AND DRINK AND FIGHT!
I'm so hyped for Rogue Trader considering it's Owlcat making it. Next up I want a Larian 40k game.
Chuds may not like it but the ideal space marine army is painted in gaudy camo and has at least 20 instances of the word kill written in big blocky letters on their armour.
The pinnacle of imperial guard generalship is sending millions of largely untrained fanatic conscripts to their meaningless deaths because choking tyrannid war beasts to death under a mountain of human corpses upholds the glory of the emprah!
I saw someone say that guardsmen are all trained to the standard of navy seals of some bs and it really made it clear how long it's been since a conscript army really went to war.
My favourite 40k quote is the one by a Kreig guardsman explaining his illiteracy
I think it’s this one
“Nah, soon as you're old enough you're sent to join the regiment. Colonel Stagler don't approve of educated men, says it was educated men that got Krieg bombed to shit in the first place. The colonel says that all a man needs to do is fight and die. That's the Krieg way.”
-Krieger when asked if he knows how to read
Self-assembling fungal nanotech bioweapon eco(no)system growing genetically engineered gene-memoried supersoldiers (7ft tall Bri'ish football hooligans)
It reads like a BMF post
A pretty good litmus test of 40k player coolness is whether or not they love the Orks.
(If you don't love the space himbos who zip around the universe with vibes-powered warp drives, you're no friend of mine.)
Back in my misbegotten youth, I was one of those insufferable WH40K fans who thought the Imperium of Man was awesome and TOUGH MEN DOING WHAT NEEDED TO BE DONE and WHOA LOOK AT THE BADASS SUPERMEN MOWING DOWN THE ALIEN SCUM THAT MUST BE EXTERMINATED. This was also how most other fans I'd met engaged with it.
Grew up, realized how gross and fashy my thinking was, and now I can't disentangle the thought of enjoying the franchise from my early views on it.
To be fair the rule books literally had the line "To be a man in such times is to be one amongst untold billions. It is to live in the cruellest and most bloody regime imaginable". 40k isnt exactly subtle about the imperium being absolutely monstrous in many ways. Then again media literacy in the kind of people who would think the Imperium are the "good" guys is probably pretty low.
It goes back and forth with the authors. A lot of their writers have also forgotten that the imperium is a turbo-nazi nightmare empire of unlimited suffering. Like in a good amount of media these days the eugenicist ubermensch super-soldier turbo-nazi genocide marines are depicted as clear good guys.
Kinda sucks.
Really, i think a lot of it is the world has moved so far from the 200ad satire of the thatcher era, and 40k has ossified with gw refusing to advance the plot for decades. So now 40k is a satire of a world that hasn't existed since half of it's players were born. They haven't updated it to mock starmer or sunak or trump, they haven't updated it to mock the neoliberal hollowing out of the uk or the "immigrant crisis" or the new alleged king. It's just grown out of the 80s and without that grounding in political and social satire it's run in to a wall: you can't tell compelling stories when everyone is a totally unlikeable asshole with goals that are stupid and suicidal (you can, i know. Asoiaf). So they want character growth and heroism and cool shit and whatever for their cool space guys, and slowly but inexorably the turbo-nazis become portrayed as the goodies.
Still love it, though. It's so gloriously stupid.
The mechanicus is a good example of how things changed - back in the day they were an insane cult devoted to stealing and hoarding all the technology they could. Experimentation and innovation where heresies that would get you killed. They believed the machine spirits were animistic spirts that inhabited machines. When they explicitly did not know how their technology worked and could only reproduce some of it by rote using truly ancient design documents. They prized STC diagrams above everything becuase the STC stuff was complete and actually workewd - they couldn't fix anything else and would kill anyone who tried. In modern stuff all their chanting and prayers are glossed as doing actual programming and engineering but they use religious terminology. Back in the day it really was useless, unproductive, time consuming religious prayer and ritual, a direct mockery of the bigotry, ignorance, and superstitions of the church.
Modern mechanicus build all kinds of wacky sci-fi technology, they have tons of exotic weaponry, war machines, and ships, they know how to work with their tech, they research, innovate, and improve. It's a complete 180 on their previous depiction.
Yes, this saddens me the most. I really loved one snippet of flavor text I read once where a tech priest is doing a sacred annual "chant of healing" on some piece of machinery, but the canny reader might notice it's actually the phonetic pronunciation of a command to activate its self-repair systems, and the "sacred balm" he applies is just engine lubricant, and so on and so on. Then when he's done with all the steps of the 'ritual', he sticks another purity seal to this enormous mound of them where countless priests, with equally little understanding of what they were actually doing, have performed the exact same 'ritual' for thousands of years - all to keep one ancient piece of equipment of unknown, maybe useless, function, turning over deep in the bowels of a grimy, rusted-out technological hellscape. It's compelling dark science fiction!
Now as you say, they're simply (much more marketable) wacky space inventors... truly, old good, new bad 😞
The Adeptus Mechanicus, as a whole organization, remains deeply conservative in its approach to technology. The vast majority of the AdMech still adhere to ritualistic maintenance of machines and most tech-priests do not innovate in any significant ways. There are exceptions to this rule, however. For example, the Xenarites are a radical and secretive sect within the Adeptus Mechanicus that focuses on studying and using alien technology. This is obviously considered heretical to varying degrees, but as long as they don't flaunt it openly, the Inquisition seems willing to turn a blind eye (for the most part).
You can innovate, experiment, and even introduce new technology within the Mechanicus, but only if you possess enough clout and influence. Even then, you are up against 10,000 years of tradition. The Mechanicus still hoards technology and conducts searches for lost STCs with explorator fleets. In fact, high-ranking members of the Mechanicus often keep rare tech for themselves instead of sharing it with the wider Imperium or even other Forge Worlds.
The Mechanicus does have superior tech compared to most of the Imperial Guard/Astra Militarum, but it's not surprising that they keep the best weaponry and equipment for themselves. Most of that tech is not "new" but rather 10,000 years old and has been produced in the same manner, with only minor adaptations, since the year 30k. The really exceptional stuff, like various types of robots, only exists in highly limited capacity and is usually only brought out for truly important battles or the direct defense of the Forge World.
I'm not saying you're wrong about the old Mechanicus lore being different, but from a player's perspective, I prefer the new lore. Many old elements are still present, and the Mechanicus remains an organization that is superstitious and often, due to dogma, less efficient than it could be.
In a way the new lore makes it easier to make your Admech army your own flavour of monstrous theocratic cyborgs and Im always in favour of giving players more options to make an army "your" dudes.
I imagine the backstory was changed specifically so that the Mechanicus could have it's own armies instead of just being the weird technical class of the Imperium. It's hard to build an entire army out of fanatics who know how to make toast but think the toaster has a toast spirit inside it that only makes toast when they sing to it.
In my defense, I never read an original piece of lore, just got all my info from people secondhand and played a bit of Dawn of War.
Gw's lore sucks anyway. The bonkers community stuff is much better.
Just browsing around Lexicanum is a good substitute for reading source material.
What growing up in a diseased western society that values fascism over solidarity does to a mfer.
In the way of nerd stuff it is good, bur the fans ruin in. In one of the original versions Margaret thatcher was an evil demon
An Ork. Ghazghkull Mag Uruk Thraka.
But like a lot of things in 40k the satire was overshadowed by the serious lore material, and Ghazghkull is just a badass Ork Warboss now.
This wasn't actually intentional by the writers (according to Andy Chambers the name came from a LARP orc language) but it's funny and fits regardless so it's good actually.
(Also possible that Andy was just lying to protect the IP)
There is no way that was not intentional. It'd be like if someone created a goblin called D'an uld Truhmph in 2018 and said they never thought about the American president
Also possible that Andy was just lying to protect the IP
GW being ruthless IP assholes is really funny because they stole literally every aspect of their story from someone else, utterly shamelessly. I'm not aware of anything really original in 40k until... idk, maybe the Tau? Everything else is a direct rip from another sci-fi property.
It's the best depiction of "Movie Marines" ever. I did the math last time I watched it - The Space Marine could actually survive all those blasts from the multi-laser on the tabletop. It's really good.
40K took a ton of influence from 2000 AD comics - guys like Alan Moore being incredibly transgressive and really pushing limits and stuff like that. So there's a ton of crazy shit in there.
Yeah. Dune, star wars, foundation, michael moorcock, 200ad (there are 1:1 rips from judge dredd), starship troopers, aliens, and a bunch of others. Wh40k has very few new ideas and in most cases isan extremely impressive act of copyright violation.
GW takes it to the next level by aggressively asserting IP ownership on very flimsy grounds, then attacking their own customer base.
Love seeing someone mention Moorcock. It's been years, I may have to pick them back up again.
There's a newish faction of IRL straw-nihilist alleged anarchists running around using the eight pointed star of chaos as their symbol and I like to taunt them about being GW nerds because how can you take people who actually embraced straw nihilism seriously?
I'd wanted a chaos star tatoo for years. Glad I was too broke and outgrew the idea.
Agreed. Also, please don't tempt me to get back into it. I have rent to pay.
40k is so big that in between all the schlock and bolter porn there's occasionally something good.
Since we're on 40k again someone remind me who the fringe outer world communists are. It came up in a discussion here in the past and they seemed interesting but I forgot.
the T'au? they are sometimes represented as a socialist civ but are also under control of a cult, they are divided by castes and other things, still they are probably the nicest xenos in the setting by not being mega racists.
the Eldar are a post -scarcity civ so you could call them a communist civilization but it kinda depends on the craftworld
One of the League's of Votann is literally called the "URSR" and they're vaguely coded as a commie faction
Is that what you're thinking of?
Yeah this is one of them, I think another was mentioned too. Or it may have been further lore about the same one I'm not sure.
There's the Valhallans who look like WWII soviets, but they're just another planet in the fascist Imperium.
I enjoy it too. I started getting into 40k back in the early 2000s, around 2003. I've been playing on and off since then. I'm actually getting back into wargaming with the current 10th edition, along with a buddy. I might post some pictures of models after I start painting again. My favorite factions are Tyranids, Orks, and Adeptus Mechanicus.
There's a David Attenborough AI voice lore channel on YouTube that I've been listening to. Never thought I'd be a 40k lore person, but that shits pretty dope
I really like the lore for the Xenos civs, to me they are the most intersting than the human-chaos ones, i really like the tyranids
How do you even get into the lore? Wiki or books or playing the game?
My advice would be to download the PDF of the latest full rulebook and read the lore section. It's written as an introduction and will give you a high level overview of the factions and settings. Then, read the lore sections of any factions you find to be particularly interesting, or find a novel involving them.
I got into it by playing video games (Dawn of War, Dawn of War 2, Space Marine) and reading books (Ciaphas Cain, The Infinite and the Divine, I think some of the Horus Heresy books are good).
I'd say lore youtubers like Arbitor Ian are pretty decent.
I always found 40k to be incredible impenetrable when I only had a vague idea of it's existence. I only really got into it after watching a few of these videos here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M6M9-oFEKpk&list=PLl6BRvEJ-auZ5aYPHj1B3pKJ_pLjg9qNU
Read dune, foundation, starship troopers, and the Judge Dredd comics. Those are the essential books in the GW canon (Because they stole everything from people who were actually literate).
Weshammer's channel's pretty good at dolling out the good 40k slop in an educational, entertaining, and newcomer-friendly way.
Personally I really enjoy his short story audiobooks because it's a decent selection of the diverse works in the universe.
