Jstove is back and he brings the heat in this editorial that gives a strong argument to why Games Workshop needs someone to manage their lore!
Jstove here, and we’re going to try a new trick for our editorial today. We’re gonna take a sweet slice out of a Spikey Bits comment and throw it up on the wall and see how it sticks. Let’s get the conversation going…
EDITOR’S NOTE: this article was written BEFORE the whole Sanguinius may be alive, but in a bad way reveal from Games Workshop last week. However I feel like that may just cement the whole perspective of this piece even more?
So our homeboy and resident Blood Angel fan, Punisher, thinks that the Blood Angels aren’t getting a fair shake in the new book. More importantly, he thinks the boys over at GW aren’t doing their reading homework. Before I tell you what I think, I want to talk about the parties involved.
First, there’s the matter of Dante. Apparently, he’s a big deal. I’m not a Blood Angels player and I don’t read Black Library novels about the Blood Angels, so I don’t know if he’s the strategic genius that Punisher says he is. I do know, however, that Dante is one of the oldest living space marines in the 41st millennium, so he should be a pretty smart guy. (Not counting Primarchs or guys stuffed into dreads.)
Second, there’s the matter of Mephiston. Mephiston is a big deal and has always been a big deal. You don’t have to be a Blood Angels fan to know that Mephiston has always been a BAMF in the space wizard game. He went crazy, then beat the Black Rage and went on a spiritual journey or something like that, and came back more of a BAMF than ever. He has even got a huge stat line to prove it.
My only problem with Mephiston is that it’s hard to be the biggest BAMF space wizard in the galaxy because literally every space wizard in the galaxy is reaching for that crown. Eldrad, despite being always wrong, is supposed to be the best. Tigurius, who has the singular distinction of being able to read the Tyranid Hivemind through the Shadow In the Warp without going crazy, is supposed to be the best. Njal Stormcaller has lucky charms or some crap like that. Ezekiel is supposed to be one of the greatest telepaths alive. Ahriman is 10,000 years old, was the Chief Librarian of an entire legion of sorcerers, and was responsible for casting what is probably the second biggest spell in the history of the Adeptus Astartes. Then, there’s Ahriman’s dad, Big Bird, Magnus himself, who actually did cast the biggest spell in space marine history, broke the warp to tattle on Horus, and teleported Prospero to the Eye of Terror. So, it’s pretty hard to call out any single Librarian as the top of the game. Not only is there a lot of competition for the belt but Magnus the Red, the guy who freaking invented it, is out there going ham.
But the big question is this: Does GW do their own reading homework? My guess is this: They don’t. But more importantly, they can’t. It’d take too long.
Case One – GW can’t read their own lore because they didn’t write half of it.
Anyone who remembers Rogue Trader knows that originally, Warhammer 40k wasn’t what you would call an overly ambitious and unique setting. It was literally just every classic science fiction genre trope taped together and shoved into Warhammer Fantasy. At some point in the 80s, someone thought it was a good idea for space dwarves to exist. Then they decided it was a bad idea, and had the Tyranids eat them.
Most of the biggest principles of the way the 40k universe works were unrepentantly stolen from Heinlein, Herbert, and Asimov. Super soldiers in power armor? Not a new idea. Psychic navigators tripping balls through alternate dimensions to steer starships? Dune did it first. A deified god emperor worshiped by the entire galaxy? Also Dune. So do you think everyone that works at GW has read Starship Troopers, Dune, and Foundation? When it was just Jervis, Priestly, and Andy kicking ideas around, maybe that was true. But today? I really doubt it. Half of you kids probably haven’t read Dune and Dune is the ORIGINAL 40K NOVEL!
Case Two – GW can’t read all the crap they actually did write.
Here’s another thing. Black Library does have writers’ meetings where all the guys sit around a table and decide where the 40k lore is going. However, I really don’t think all the game designers are sitting around that table. Gav Thorpe was but he doesn’t do rules design for GW anymore. Even if all the game designers did sit in on the writing meetings, it’d be impossible for them to cover everything. If we only look at say, for example, Aaron Dembski-Bowden’s 30k novels, that’s a freaking library by itself. I really doubt that every GW rules designer reads every ADB book, reads every 30k book, and reads every 40k book. There’s only one man who could do that. That man was Theodore Roosevelt, who read a whole book everyday, even while he was president and running the country. He is dead, and more importantly, he’s not from Nottingham. So… GW would never hire him.
Case Three – Most of the lore that shaped the 41st millennium didn’t exist until ADB showed up.
Up Until the Horus Heresy novels, the lore of the 40k setting was a crap shoot. The first time the Horus Heresy was ever really explained in barely any detail was in the Lost and The Damned and Slaves to Darkness books, the first Chaos books ever written. In these books, the Heresy was barely outlined and it was mostly a backdrop to introduce the big 4 Traitor Legions that each had one of the patron Chaos gods. There was lore in the codex books of 2nd, 3rd, and later editions. However, it was diet lore, zero calorie lore told from the perspective of an UNRELIABLE NARRATOR. That is, a narrator that is compromised by an innate bias.
One of the best army books in terms of lore that GW ever wrote was Tuomas Pirinen’s Dark Elf book, which was hilariously compromised by a hopelessly one sided unreliable narrator. Ask a narcissistic dark elf noble who the best race in fantasy is, of course he’s gonna tell you it’s dark elves! Factual firsthand accounts from veterans and remembrancers didn’t exist until ADB and the guys on the 30k project invented them. In essence, most 40k lore was WRITTEN BACKWARDS starting around 6th edition, when Forge World and Black Library actually started writing real heresy accounts, not just codex blurbs for Chaos Space Marines.
Case Four – Matt Ward can’t write but that doesn’t seem to stop him.
Unpopular opinion: Matt Ward is good at two things. Writing good rules, (Yea, I said this opinion was unpopular. He wrote good army books. You mad?) And writing heinous, over the top, obviously biased, goofball lore for whatever project he was working on. In a way, this wasn’t a bad thing, because the purpose of the lore in a codex is to sell you on your army. It’s to make you root for your faction and feel like you’re on a winning team. Well, Ward always oversold it, so thank your spiritual liege.
The point is, when the game designers are writing codex lore, I don’t think they’re held to the standard that the Black Library or the Forgeworld writers are. (I don’t think the Forgeworld writers have a standard at all, they just had Alan Bligh, who had vision surpassing all of GW’s standards.) If GW actually had some kind of objective standard that all the codex lore had to fit, Kaldor Draigo wouldn’t exist because he’s the biggest Mary Sue in the galaxy and anyone who actually likes him is an illiterate tool that has never read any book longer than a 150-page 40k codex. (Shots fired)
Case Five – The lore of the setting is inconsistent in their own narrative.
Remember when the Cult of Mars was ruled by superstition and their knowledge was slipping every century? Remember when plasma and grav technology was barely understood, prone to failure, and the last working jetbike in the Imperium was Sammael’s? Remember when every piece of technology that the Imperium advanced was not the product of scientific research but of digging up STC templates, which are basically just 3D printer files from a smarter, bygone age when people weren’t idiots? Remember when all of that went out the window when Belisarius Cawl showed up, brought us new plasma guns, marines, and hover tanks? Was anyone taking notes?
I’m not the only one that’s still mad about that. There are tons of AdMech fans that have been loyally waiting for their Skitari and AdMech armies for years. They finally had them for a year and two and then watched scumbag Belisarius show up and flip the entire Cult Mechanicus upside down.
However, as a Chaos fan, the big question I always had was, “Why the hell do we keep rehashing the same evil-diet-space-marine trope every codex?” Because that doesn’t make any sense. This is what I don’t get about Chaos. I know that they live in a Hellraiser universe and that a lot of their toys don’t work anymore because they’re lazy, or they can’t maintain them, or they left all the cool tanks in the parking lot on Terra during the Siege of the Imperial Palace after they fled. One thing I never understood was this: Time doesn’t exist in the Eye of Terror and the Traitor Legions still have access to professional engineers and scientists that actually knew what they were doing, 10,000 years ago, when the Admech wasn’t crap. Furthermore, these actual scientists aren’t restrained by dogma or tradition.
Yet, despite the fact that the Eye of Terror is full of Dark Mechanicus geniuses that think the Heresy was last Tuesday, the best that Chaos can come up with are satanic Megazords. Chaos got almost the entire Cybernetica and half the Titan Legions in the heresy and yet somehow the only thing we’ve got to show for it are robot dragons. If we’re gonna go for low hanging fruit and work the whole demon angle, can’t we at least get all the cool cyborg hell monsters from Doom?
Case Six – There’s no brand stewardship and no lore librarian.
This is the final nail in the coffin. 40k doesn’t seem to have a brand steward or librarian. The Black Library guys have writers’ meetings to keep their overall plan on track. However, I think GW itself, the actual business of making the toy soldier game, doesn’t have a brand steward to act as the ultimate authority on the narrative of the game. If they do, we’ve never heard from them.
What is a brand steward? A brand steward is the guy responsible for making sure all the design decisions or narrative of a product remain consistent with the direction the company has chosen. Lots of products, both interesting and not so interesting, have brand stewards. For example, at Mattel Inc, in El Segundo, California, there’s a guy who’s job it is to be the brand steward for Winnie the Pooh toys. Every time Disney wants a Winnie the Pooh gadget made, it’s the brand steward’s job to make sure that the new product is consistent with the design direction of Winnie the Pooh that’s already established. By the way, I’ve met that guy. I do not envy his job. Being in charge of Winnie the Pooh my whole career would make me blow my brains out.
Video game companies, such as Blizzard and Riot, also have brand stewardship in the form of lore libraries. Sometimes, they are even actual libraries. The lore librarian catalogs and collects all the fiction and narrative in the game and makes sure it remains consistent with the creative direction chosen. A brand steward but for the story line of World of Warcraft or League of Legends, for example.
It’s my personal opinion that GW doesn’t have brand stewardship, at least not for their narrative in the tabletop game. Horus Heresy probably does because it’s a monumental effort by a team of a dozen fiction writers all working on building ten thousand years of history inside a single cohesive narrative. But I don’t think that Games Workshop itself, as a company that makes games to play with toy soldiers, has a dedicated department for that endeavor.
.And if they do, well, I agree with our friend Punisher on one thing. He’s totally crapping the bed.
