This would also be an excellent way to introduce one of my favorite aspects of Rogue Trader back into modern 40k: Non-Chaos Renegade marines. Have them be isolated marines who got trapped defending various planets, and whose pyschic conditioning degraded as the Imperium didn't heed their prayers for aid, becoming more like the humans they defend and acting as local sheriffs, perhaps still loving the Emperor, but finding the modern Imperium to be an abomination that abandoned them and their people, and thus going Renegade without supergluing spikes and severed knobs all over their armor.
Isn't some of the irony that the Imperium isn't a necessary evil? Humanity during the golden age and even dark ages didn't need to be so repressive. The imperium tells us it's necessary because it served their interests and silences anyone who says otherwise just like a true big bad government would.
Yes but also No, the Imperium of Man is essential an Extreme Response to the Age of Strife and the Subsequent issues faced by Humanity after it especially from the limiting POV of the Big E, AI was Banned because it Rebelled, Xenos are to be destroyed because they took advantage of Humanity's Weakened state, the Planets of Humanity were divided and persue their own interests and finally the Chaos Gods want to feed on Humanity, In Response the Big E Made the Imperium of Man a Xenophobic, Totalitarian, Anti Religious and Accelerationist State in response to this, at this point the Big E Wants to Solve these issues by literally and Metaphorically "Evolving" Mankind at Any Cost be it Moral or Lives Lost the Emperor Calously Didn't care, After the HH an Ultra Conservative Mindset set in, Thanks to the Emperor's Hard Handedness His Cult of Personality transformed into a Religion, His Words are now Used and Abused by Many Parties in the Imperium, this Ultra Conservative Response to the HH while not Completely Unjustified is an enevitable response by a Society that Saw its Near Destruction Twice. In Short while the IOM has some Merit in what they do and did, its ultimately less of a Measured and Calculated Response and more them Trying to fight fire with fire or more basically the IOM said to itself "why should I care to be Better when everyone I see is Bad, in fact I should be Worse because it insulates me".
@@Chuck9852 bringing up the nids is irrelevant for they weren't even in the galaxy until the LAST 2 CENTURIES OF THE SETTING like if that somehow jusfties the imperium xenociding for the last 10 thousand years other unrelated aliens.
The Hammer and Bolter episode “In the Garden of Ghosts” does a wonderful job of portraying the Imperium as it seems through the eyes of another faction. They didn’t even hedge their bets by making the Space Marines Flesh Tearers or Black Templars or some other “disreputable” chapter. No, they went right for the jugular and made them the shining Ultramarines; bastions of courage and honour.
The scene of the dreadnaught mowing down civilians with a weapon that could take out a light tank while chanting about the "emperors mercy" is just, yeah... Thats how the imperium should be depicted. Also i do think "Bound for Greatness" is a pretty good critique of the imperium too. Showing that the institutions that are supposed to be responsible for quashing the influence of chaos can easily be pawns of the dark gods and be the means by which a planet succumbs to chaos corruption.
@@marcusaaronliaogo9158 To each their own, I guess. To me it has a "Liquid Television" vibe (if you're old enough to remember). Either way, its strength is not in the artwork but in the stories.
That was quite confusing to me though? Why would the ultras attack a civilian world if not provoked? Especially when gulliman is literally meeting with eldar to advise him on the imperiums future?
@@ataerus3066 because they're intolerant fascists? And in the real world, fascists do dumb self-defeating stuff all the time. Operation Barbarossa, for example.
Follow-up: how cool would it be that the 2 missing primarchs never did anything wrong nor heretical, only they peeked beyond the veil: there can be a viable human society outside the Imperium and that's why they were executed/held in the Black Cells
Adding to that: what if that’s why most Primarchs can’t recall anything about them. Emps being Emps. What if Russ - we know how he values self reliance and independence and also how he only looks as being a savage- actually spared them - seeing some weight to their arguments but staying loyal to Emps- and let them go? What if he eventually left everything to check on them/ally with them to fight Chaos?
@@alejandrorp5160 this doesn't work, Canon stories have had the other Primarchs talk about how the 2 "missing" Primarchs had suffered a horrible fate. And Horus even tried to dare speak their names to Malcador but failed to do so before Malcador knocked him down. So with current canon every Primarch knows what happened to the 2 of them and it was likely Russ killed them.
I always liked to think that one of the missing two had landed on a world not dominated by humans but he was raised by a now extinct alien species. Meanwhile the other one landed on a world were humans and aliens lived together in harmony, raised even by a mixed species family. Now this actually wouldn't have been much of an issue in of itself for the Emperor, so long as these two wayward sons pledged loyalty to him and got to crusading in his golden name and etc. No, it was because both ill fated Primarchs utterly rejected the Imperium's human supremacist rhetoric and the mankind's manifest destiny narrative bullsh*t, instead both wanted to create similar interstellar civilizations were all species could live together in peace. Basically they wanted to do a t'au empire of multiple species before they even discovered fire but were humans and aliens would be on equal footing. One of them may have even suggested that the Emperor should create new Primarchs NOT based on humans but on the various other species across the galaxy to help further their dreams of a hopeful future. This did NOT go over well with the Emperor, hence their untimely deaths!
You know the meme about "Magnus did nothing wrong"? Well, the reason he became a Daemon Prince of Tzeentch was because Horus intercepted the Emperor's message, telling the Space Wolves to burn Prospero when Magnus was meant to stand trial on Terra. Imagine an offshoot/renegade warband of the OG Thousand Sons who weren't present on Prospero, and thus not subjected to the Rubric of Ahriman. There are already Blackshields who were once part of the Emperor's Children, so a greater focus on that would make for some excellent storytelling!
Hang on a minute... The path Ian suggests, of a greater emphasis on splintered human societies cut off from the Imperium that develop their own societies and way of doing things (and possibly even their own distinct genetic evolutions which leads them to becoming, over the millennia, their own distinct sub-species) rings a bell for me... 40k HAD that. But they got Squatted. Time to bring back the Wee Grumpy Bastards!
The Great Crusade as well had an abundance of lost human worlds and it never finished so in theory there may be a lot still out there. I liked that about the first Horus Heresy books.
@@stevepirie8130 It was true when I got into 40k back in first edn. It's probably why I'm trying to build a separatist guard army, because I just like being contrarian and want to play the 40k I remember as a kid 🤣
I mean sure but by the designer’s own admission the squats only fit in 1st edition an by second were a little too goofy and didn’t really have any growth for a line. I like them as auxiliary units*coughbringbackroughriders* but as a stand alone I don’t think they would work well.
What annoys me is the Tau were a good chance to make not good guys, But a coalition of alien races working together and having other factions unable to just destroy them despite there age as a civ and size. But then james workshop pressed the grimderp button
Apparently, standing not even a slimmer chance to survive threats thousands of times bigger than the size of T'au Empire is not dark enough for a lot of people. tbf, even in 3rd edition, there are some subtle hints to the T'au Empire being not entirely good, maybe 90% okay and 10% "that's kinda sussy". But then again, I doubt people who whine about the T'au not being dark could sniff out those grey signs anyway.
See the tau empire is still a "good faction" in the WH40K setting. Just... Dont take it from 40k and put somewhere else. They would be objectively the most evil faction.
@@anti-mate407 tbf, the universe itself is hostile to these ideals. Its hard to keep a straight man in a universe that can and will devour you given the chance.
I found out that plenty of people were hoping the Imperium Nihilus would be this "free for all" realm that you're describing in the video, and it is an untapped source of interesting stories and factions. It would allow people to turn their Imperial armies into independent factions without need for a different army to be made by GW. Kind of like how in Warhammer Fantasy, the Border Princes were a way for people to make their own little factions out of existing kits and armies. Still, an actual Rebel faction could also be an interesting introduction. I truly believe that the Squats might be a very good contender for that. In fact, the fluff from Rogue Trader and second edition kind of directed them into that archetype and would be a very nice way reintroducing them into the setting.
@@paulyg405 to be fair, those are the squats that have been included in the imperium. The homeworlds and their ships are potentially still out there - isolated, independent and so very, very dwarfy. You can imagine it now. An imperial ship, spat out of the warp, all the consoles fried bar the astropath, still barely hanging into life and sanity. And then, a single message is received... Or rather, a ongoing series of messages. *Diggy Diggy Hole intensifies*
We kind of already have this, with the Votann and the T'au. The other options don't HAVE to be human, as long as it's close enough. I really think the main issue is that everything is written from an Imperial perspective. Even if what you suggest here happened, it wouldn't do much good unless we actually got some stories where those other factions are the protagonists.
This actually echoes an idea I had for a faction based around some 30K models but in 40K: What's the Imperium's greatest nightmare? A functioning human civilization, who'd backslid technologically as the Imperium had, but whose society was directly derived from the pre-age-of-strife human federation - and that was just a bit too big, or in a spot that was too strategically awkward, for the Imperium to squash. I had them on the trailing edge of the halo stars, and they were acting as a bulwark against a Slaugth empire that the inquisition has decided the Imperium is not (yet) ready to tangle with, especially given current events.
Reminds me of a quote I read from a director a few years ago to the effect of "It's impossible to make an anti-war film focusing on the soldiers. When the audience sees people trying to do something hard they will eventually start rooting for them" which is the opposite effect that he was aiming for. Since Imperium humans are the POV characters for most of the fiction it's hard to make compelling fiction without encouraging the audience/reader/player to identify with the characters and indirectly their goals.
Current Necromunda lore mentions hive leadership meeting with Eldar and Squat ambassadors. There's Ork mercenaries. It's clear that there's plenty of "heretical" behavior happening within the Imperium of man. It's just not mentioned enough in the codexes and a large portion of the Black Library material. Bring back cross faction allies, so that we see things like Guardsman bolstered by Ork troops etc.
Warhammer is a wargame, the "home front" often takes a backseat. It's not a game about all the things leading up to apocalyptic battles (or just a squad of marines sitting on a farm to guard it). WFRP grew in parallell with Warhammer Fantasy Battles, an RPG needs to look at things at a lower level.
@@davemeggison4283 Indeed, its not so much a fall from grace is it is a pivot into a different brand of madness. Eisenhorn is a great example of how unlikable people can be very compelling.
@@ArbitorIan Oh yeah, he was great when he was just trying to preserve the structures of the oppressive, xenophobic, totalitarian Empire that subjugates quadrillions, as soon as he started messing around with demons he went right of the deep end though.... Great videos by the way mate
I've often wondered if the reason the Squats were so easily removed from 40k wasn't because they were too similar to the Imperial Guard as a faction, but because they were one of the few races that weren't demonstrably "bad." They just wanted to be left alone so they could dig holes and play with their train sets. 🤣
Interesting point, there really wasn't anything wrong or suspicious about them, didn't buy into the superstition around technology (back when the superstition was objectively wrong before machine spirits moved from a silly belief to an actual thing) they weren't a shadow of their former glory like the Eldar of mankind. They didn't like Orks and Eldar but for good reason and really who would? Definitely the most sane and reasonable faction.
@@danielmorgenstern3942 Yes, but that come from the Eldar leaving them high and dry when the Orks made a sudden attack on there home world. it was especially bad given that the Eldar AND the Orks were major trading partners with the Squart up until then. So really its less prejudice as more a long held grudge.
I think a good first step would be to add a faction where the leader was some sort of travelling merchant with a retinue of security to ensure that the goods don't get taken. We could name the hypothetical 10th edition after this faction, a Warhammer 40,000 Rogue trader if you will.
@@navilluscire2567 There is an official one The Severan Dominate. They have a very Roman aesthetic. They're not much less authoritarian thank the Imperium but they are independent. They were made for the Fantasy Flight ttrpg though and they've since lost the licence so they probably aren't coming back.
There is an imperial merchant marine. They are not rogue traders, they don't have fancy writs giving them rights like that. But they are the ones moving basic goods around a sector or subsector within established imperial space. Ships are hugely expensive things so only large merchant combines own them. These guys aren't a full military faction but they have their escort ships and household troops.
@@NoNoNah306 You get to fight them in Only War. They're one of the possible warfronts of the Calixis sector I think. They are practically a little pocket empire holding out for a time while the Imperium deals with a constant array of threats. One thing you could do in Only War was to play in the low-priority warzones where you and four other regiments are all that's available and you're doing mop-up actions or garrison duty.
The annoying thing is that some of the other factions, notably the T'au, get the opposite treatment to the imperium: highlighting the bad they do while ignoring the comparatively strong justifications.
@@silver4831 And the Primarchs and the Emperor do? They all pretty much don't give a FUCK about humans as people nor care for their consent, they wouldn't hesitate to destroy or kill anyone who refused to bend the knee to them, we've seen this happen multiple times.
@@navilluscire2567 Least they have some emotions. The books make the Etherials without emotion and some freaky hive mind. I highly recommend crisis of faith, it's a great example of how the T'au society may look nicer on the outside but isn't really.
@@silver4831 And the Imperium is somehow nicer on the inside once you get past the outside appearance of a bunch of hyper religious, skull obsessed, militaristic, human supremacist, (even though said empire is ruled by transhuman freakshows) genocidal maniacs? Oh the Primarchs have emotions? That's wonderful, tell me how well did that turn out for the trillions that died at their hands?
@@silver4831 And without emotions? Literally one of the favorite things for some of the writers to do to the ethereals is to make these sopposedly super intelligent, thoughtful beings act like arrogant, oblivious, petty humans because *"ha ha, T'au are so naive and dumb".* Even though they're sopposedly a ever advancing interstellar civilization that isn't filled with superstitious idiots and are basically always gathering information about the wider galaxy to the point they should basically know all about the other major players in the galaxy yet somehow the few instances they made mistakes (most of which happened centuries ago from the current most time point) is somehow to forever condemn them to the naive corner, nevermind the the stupid mistakes the other factions have made (and continue to make!) despite sopposedly being OOOHH so wise apparently.
At first, I was like, "What are you saying about my favourite setting?" **Angry noise** But then I listened to your ideas, and there is definitely a core of truth and possibilities in it. My suggestion would be to stop focusing 99% of all attention and promotion material on the Spacemarines. And spread it out evenly among all the races. Comparing the life of an eldar civilian (which we have limited info on) with an oppressed human or human among the Tau. More stories about the lives and troubles of "regular" people (human, mutant, and xeno) in the 40k might be a way to also poke holes in the "Imperium is good". Like you said alternative and variable viewpoints are needed.
The sad thing is, Space Marines sell, so GW being one of THE most terribly greedy companies, focuses on where the money is. Notice how even when other races are getting their releases...there's still like 2 or 3 Space Marine sets coming out as well.
When you play the tabletop RPG, the marine chapter deep lore is virtually useless. The players are chasing some git and she bolts in a truck. They want to know if they can get a techno-gothic taxi or not. So now we got to figure out what civilian transport looks like.
I have always felt that the "Imperial" Knights fit this mold aswell, if you look closely at their lore the Questoris Familia aren't truly Imperial citizens. They are actually (extremely) long term mercenaries bound by oaths and on the Questoris Mechanicus side by blood connections more so than law and if the Imperium or Mechanicus failed to uphold their end of the bargan these oaths would be broken and they wouldn't have a reason to fight for them; not to mention they are technically the last remaining remnants of pre imperial humanity and have the ancestral memories/spirits to prove it due to the mechanisms behind Knight bonding.
The Imperial knights, basically human mecha suits and their pilots are some of the most interesting parts of the lore, there's a lot you can do with them! Also imagine some mecha knights and t'au crisis suits duking it out only to put that on hold to...fight of an Imperium expeditionary force set to reintegrate the world their own back into their fold.
“We must be the good guys, we eat corpse bars”. Also the Mitchell/Webb skull uniforms thing applies. This may also be a problem fed by the disproportionate weight in the model range given to imperial stuff. And the army equals species equals race thing, whilst by no means unique to this fantasy setting, does rather limit possibilities. Cf. Late era Pratchett, with its inter-species couples and profess towards an industrialism underpinned by the value of labour, not capital. Anyway, more tales of elder/Ork throuples farming as retirement projects. Heck, there’d be a fun story to be told of how the Tannith got on as peacetime settlers at the end of the Sabbat crusade, something beyond the usual ptsd everywhere. I can’t imagine the imperium’s version of the va is great at augmetic upkeep, for example. Also,worth noting - the commissars’ origins and habit of shooting anyone who turns around are Stalinist. Plus the Red Army’s doctrine of piling men at objectives regardless of losses, equipment or alternatives is reflected in quite a lot of the black library Imp guard stuff I’ve read. Autocrats in fascist drag with a theocratic underpinning might be more accurate.
Important point here and a reason we shouldn't launch right towards buzzwords like 'fascism' simply because we see something dehumanising we don't like. Many aspects of the Imperium are indeed functionally more Stalinist, and Nazism as the hallmark of fascism valued the individual.
@@WK-47 to be clear, there are plenty of bits of the imperium that draw on fascist ideology too. Space Marines as Nietzscheian supermen, perhapß (my German nihilism is a bit rusty). More specifically a society-wide lionisation of military service and centrality of arms to the economy. Weirdly it doesn’t have the focus on traditional gender/family roles (female soldiers allowed, though they also were in starship troopers). Possibly as a legacy of its 80s origins, it‘s also a deeply heteronormative setting. It is somewhat depressing to think that in 30,000 odd years, one man and one woman will still be the normal childcare arrangement.
I also wonder to what extent the decision to draw design cues from military hardware from the first half of c20 was a result of being able to greeble on existing kit moulds (rhino is a backwards ww1 mk ii, there’s the ork plane that‘s just a mig 15). Makes me wonder if the aesthetic and thus the bumph was shaped by porting in designs from elsewhere that imply ideologies.
@@bobbler42 also the countries who most lionize their militaries are p much all socialist with the exception of WW2's most notorious badman so I don't think it's really accurate to attribute that specifically to fascism. There are stories involving other, nonstandard mating or child rearing setups btw including some vat grown caste systems like in one of the Primarch novels: AFAIK it's not really seen as special or remarkable in universe but probably is about as rare as it is now because human reproductive instincts would likely not have changed much in 38k years if there were endless trillions of us on earth alone and endless trillions more across a million worlds: the non-standard setups simply cant match the fecundity and economical efficiency of two hetero normies bumping uglies the old fashioned way.
Hmm, I always thought the point of the 40k universe was that there _are_ no good guys. Giving a more positive and hopeful alternative to the Imperium basically contradicts the basic elements of the story.
Right ?! I dont know where all this shit has come from recently. I got into Warhammer coz it was not like the other sci-fi with good guys and bad guys like star trek, star wars. 40K was grim dark, it all went to shit for humanity and they are just about holding on, as shit to gets worse and worse. Why does it suddenly have to start being nice coz of a few randoms you dont agree with ?
@@brokenhalo2001 I mean the setting has already been doing it in lore. With Guilliman returning, the invention of Primaris, the Emperor possessing Lil' G and proving that he truly is conscious and alive, the plans to fully revive him.. It's all looking incredibly hopeful for the Imperium.
I sorta like the idea that the Imperium is kinda the only option, but only because by its own volition it destroyed every other possible option, seems to be what they’re building up at the moment
Great video, Ian! Thanks for sharing some of the history and your analysis. I'm watching this video two years later, as I get back into 40k, and I'm curious if the 10th edition ended up heading in the direction you've suggested, which does sound rather compelling. When I played 40k about a decade ago, I crafted my army's back story to fall into a similar place to one of your suggestions of space marines allying with Tau against a common enemy, then growing away from the Imperium in the process.
If I get the time and money together to collect again, I'd like to do an army of Guardsmen, Tau, some Eldar and a few Astartes, that have broken away from their own factions and are doing their own thing. No gods, no masters.
I can see Imperium Nihilus splintering and having Dante have to deal with sheperding the new factions into a rough alliance to maintain a grip on the other side of the rift, that makes sense. I don't think they would really manage that well though if left to their own devices, maybe prior to 40k, in the time between the current setting and the Horus Heresy it could have worked but nowadays there's just too many threats. I think another promising choice is to have Guillimain continue his work of reforming the Imperium while also having the Imperium begin to soften some of it's positions simply out of dire need. Specifically with regard to xenos. There is basically an alliance between Guilliman and the Ynnari but not too much has come of it lately, showcasing this a bit more and having the relationship formalized such that the Imperium and those Eldar aligned with the the Ynnari reach some diplomatic agreements to not screw each other over and cooperate goes a long way towards moving past xenophobia and endless war. As does an agreement with the farsight enclaves. You'd still have the main Tau Empire and most of the Eldar as potential enemies but some permanent alliances would start to form out of necessity. The discovery of a world or collection of worlds occupied by a surviving remnant of the dark age of technology human civilization has also been posed by some where you see humanity as it used to be.
I love this idea, and to be fair, in the Dark Heresy / Imperium Maledictum games I run I always have the motif that there are better ways than just "conform or die, heretic". Many of my players love 40k but their escapism isn't behaving like fascist tropes, so they tend to want to be good as a form of rebellion and exploring how that's possible is what they enjoy.
I think part of the problem is GW has taken the setting more and more seriously. Rogue Trader was an obvious grab bag of popular sci-fi ideas and very clearly didn't take itself serious. The Imperium was obviously satire. I understand as 40K became more its own unique thing that faded and needed to a bit but I feel the whole thing takes itself way too seriously (except maybe orks). Plus lots people get exposed to the setting by games which usually focus on the battlefield and fighting and don't give any indication what those factions you are playing are really like.
Owlcat Games' Rogue Trader did a pretty good job of showing the ridiculous side of the Imperium in the midst of sector-shaking events, but yes, compared to say, Dawn of War or Space Marine 2 I don't think it was as popular. At the very least though, they definitely seemed to get the satire.
Okay, so your proposition is make 40k more like Rogue Trader again, right? I'm on it. I think this video, more than any other, shows how much you are knowledgeable and how much you cara about the setting, congratulations, man! With that said, I've always been puzzled at the fact that we don't see a lot of non Imperium, non Chaos, non Mutant rebel factions in the game. It would be really cool if we had a sort of "Rebel Alliance" Faction, you don't even need to make a whole complete line of models for it, just make them use a lot of Imperium vehicles and weapons, almost like the Genestealer Cults. Also, I would love to see some Gue'vesa models (is it spelled right?). Heck I would even go one step ahead and make the Tau try to sort of reverse engineer geneseed and make their own, obviously inferior, Gu'vesa space marines (I don't know, maybe they just start collecting geneseed from dead marines, which would make the Imperium completely mad about them).
A reason why there are no anti-Imperium human factions is because it would use the same codex as the Astra Militarum except for removing Commissars and the Navy. That's the gaming reason at least. The background reason is that the Imperial Guard is deliberately raised and kept separate from the Imperial Navy so if a rebel army is created, it cannot leave its planet.
@@blindlobster I see, maybe they could some sort of extra regiment option in an Imperial Guard codex, like, you would have Armageddon, Cadians, Krieg, etc, and then the option to run your IG as rebels, at least something like that
Also, it's not grimdark... a "Rebel Alliance" would be good guys, as he says, "fighting the good fight". There is no good fight, and that's what makes 40k great.
@@nielsstilson9834 I mean, no one said that they should be good guys, I just find awkward that if you're a human you're either inside the Imperium or under Chaos with the GSC, without any sort of in-between factions represented in the game itself, even though we are well aware that there are human pirates and other stuff like that in the fringes of the Galaxy. So yeah, maybe a Rebel Alliance in 40k would be more like a bunch of just regular humans (no chaos, no crazy mutants) scoundrels, pirates, and smugglers, just wanting to their own evil stuff instead of the Imperium's evil stuff. Also, sometimes you can have too much of a good thing: too grim and too dark will end up sorta of justifying the whole existence of the Imperium, just like Ian said, and just like he sorta said as well, you can break it up a little with some more nuance what's currently presented. I would definitely say that there's some lack of self awareness in 40k, as far as marketing material and what's presented in the codices go.
From the Baneblade/Shadowsword books, I really quite like what happened with the planetary governor's viewpoint at the start of one of them. Receiving an Imperial delegation requiring more soldiers/resources, and the governor gives them a powerful speech about how they're totally bled dry and suffering and just can't keep doing it. The Imperial ambassador just refuses to listen, and that starts the route to war. Granted they did then fall to Chaos and blah, blah, blah, but I felt that viewpoint had worked really well to show how oppressive the Imperium is.
This shows a problem with how it's currently done. Every single time someone rebels against the Imperium, they fall to Chaos. This continues to justify the Imperium's response to any dissidents. Instead of being quick to violence and overly paranoid, they're usually potrayed as being right, actually. Just once I want a greedy self-serving governor-turned-seperatist to be just that.
@@RaptorShadow Oh for sure. I think the plot of "The Taros Campaign" was really good in this regard, showing how the T'au were able to use sneaky gifts and diplomacy to slowly turn a planet from the Imperium.
To be honest I've never seen the imperium as Fascist, more like Space Feudalism. I see it as a fallen Empire that is desperately trying to hold on to its territories and this allows corrupt and despotic rulers to carry on unchallenged so long as quotas are met. in spite of this there are still genuinely heroic characters, and how these said characters deal with the realities of the setting are what make it interesting.
I see where you're coming from, but Ian's point about them being coded fascist still remains. As a new comer to all this, my first impressions were very much "ok so they're straight up Nazis". It's not just dress, the whole fixation on purity and absolutism has very little to do with feudalism and everything to do with fascism. Feudalism is a set of economic relations, and describing them as such just skirts all the more overly fascist sociocultural aspects of the Imperium.
There's a quote floating around about this, don't know who it's by but: "The Imperium does not survive because it is horrible, it survives despite the fact that it is horrible." It is incredibly easy for GW to bring in a human faction that isn't hell bent on exterminating anything that isn't them. You could take your own custom knight houses, build militias using necromunda kits. Lasguns could be salvaged from dead IG or family heirlooms.
I really like the idea you present of the Great Rift getting worse and splitting off more of the Imperium's former territory. You don't reference it directly, but it's similar to the Age of Strife following the birth of Slaanesh, which adds to the credibility of it as a plot point. I've also been keen generally to see more done narratively with the Imperium Nihilus, since that's currently underexplored.
As has been said ever since Warhammer+ went live GW have done themselves a disservice by putting all the animation behind a paywall. One of my favourite episodes so far of Hammer and Bolter has been "In the Garden of Ghosts". It really turns up the Imperial bastardry to 11 in that show and was fantastic for it.
The thing is, 40k is very very much founded in 1980s British culture. Now it’s gone global, it has increasingly found an audience who just don’t have that same sense of irony
While I agree with the desire to reduce the Wehrmachtboos from the fandom, and can see the obvious focus of removing the "Imperium is a necessary evil" angle from the lore, I think that would ultimately do more harm than good. I'll speak to a second reason - that your storyline would just set up the Imperium as a martyr "see what happens these people will abandon you in your darkest hour" narrative - at the end of this TEDtalk, but to start with, I think part of the parody/cynicism at 40k's heart is that both sides are right - the Imperium is a self-justifying fascist state that is clearly manipulating citizens into believing it's their only hope, and yet that doesn't change the fact that the Imperium is actually right about that, regardless. The universe is portrayed in 40k as logistically being simply too large for things like democracy, free will, and such to interfere with the need for vast armies and vast supplies for said armies to be amassed, so that the Imperium doesn't care how individual worlds operate as long as the expendable life keeps flowing. Even in the perfect ideal outcome of the Great Crusade, the physical size of the galaxy precludes any meaningful level of efficient and consistent administrating of the Imperium. So the Imperium will always need to be fascist and oppressive in the sense that, ultimately, it will always have to choose to let local regimes do whatever they want as long as it doesn't stop the troops and ammo and food from being delivered - and if their evils are seen as actually helping that happen, so much the better. And in the context of 40k, the cynical reality is that there really is something worse than the mortal fascism of High Lords and Inquisitors, and that's the immortal fascism of Chaos and the genocidal tendencies of most alien races. In other words, I think your argument is largely sound, but maybe a bit too dependent on reading the existence of Imperium propaganda and self-justification as proof that the message itself is a lie. Part of the deeply cynical satire of 40k is that such things are also often the truth. Yes, the authorities clearly do not have your best interest in heart and yes you're just a worthless cog in a great machine, but guess what, that's actually the galactic truth no matter what. The universe is simply too big, too lethal, too violent for anyone to matter, not even the transhuman ones. The real problem, IMO, is what you alluded to early on - the willingness to make Marines a poster boy "good" faction to make the game fit into the standard Saturday morning cartoon narratives of GIJoe, He-Man, Transformers, etc. The "new" Black Templars were an imperfect first step, but I think effectively retconning the Marines back to what they originally were - little more than traumatized child soldiers operating as deputized war criminals - would go a long way to 'fixing' the appeal of seeing them and the greater Imperium as the 'good' guys. But this would somewhat involve rolling back a lot of the themes that GW likes to lean into - eg the Blood Angels as Renaissance-esque artisans, the Space Wolves as noble Viking savages, etc., which unfortunately I don't see GW ever being willing to really do. Also, I think it's important to point something else that you didn't touch on. Part of the appeal of fascism (and classism and racism and sexism and most forms of bigotry) is that the bigot assumes they're part of the side that benefits. They never accept that they could still be one of the have-nots or on the 'wrong' side of their hate. Here in the United States, for example, most European Americans (eg Southern, Eastern, Irish - essentially Catholics and Orthodox Christians in general) weren't considered to be "White" until less than a hundred years ago, when post Civil War racism needed to reinforce the racism towards and segregation of Black Americans by firmly bringing otherwise second-class European Americans onto the side of what we now call WASPs - White Anglo-Saxon Protestants. The irony being most modern US racists themselves wouldn't have been considered "white" by the historical bigots that they idolize, even relatively 'modern' ones like HP Lovecraft and the Klan. So they embrace their racism under the belief that they would have, will, and always will benefit from it as a 'white' person. Back to 40k, the point being - I think if the larger narrative focused more on showing just how crushing the Imperium is to the average citizen, and how *you* (dear gamer) would almost certainly be one of those being crushed, rather than the Baneblade commander or Imperial Fist captain or Vindicaire Assassin or Sister of Battle initiate doing the crushing - I think that narrative shift would also help greatly. Because I think the other flaw in trying to Balkanize the Imperium to show it isn't the only option is that it'd only add another layer of martyr complex to the Imperiumboos. In other words, the people you're targeting to get out of the hobby or change their mindset wouldn't see this as proof the Imperium as wrong, but as proof that the Imperium was right - that most humans are traitors and backstabbers who can't be trusted to be loyal to you as shown by all these new human empires and societies abandoning the Imperium in its darkest hour. They would cling to their Imperial armies and make mental notes of the people - of the kinds and types of people - flocking to all these new more progressive or liberal human armies. Which makes me think this would ultimately only make the issue worse, not better. YMMV, of course.
It depends on how it's presented. The way I understood it wasn't planets leaving the imperium, it's the imperium leaving planets to fend for themselves because they don't have the resources to deal with the threats. And that's something the imperium already does. It picks which planets matter and does its best to control them. The only major difference is an increase of focus on these abandoned sectors. So I don't think it feeds into the -ists narrative or plays into the Imperium is a martyr that you're claiming.
I’d just love to see RG proclaiming the Imperial Truth, the Ecclesiarchy being none too pleased about it and the Indomitus Crusade being declared the Indomitus Heresy
They could also focus on humans who willingly join other factions. Could have a reasonable chaos vassal empire outside the eye of terror, or release a Gu'Vesa lead Tau Auxileria codex, or release models to show off canonical human mercenaries who work for the Dark Eldar, a genestealer patriarch who doesn't call the hive fleet and builds a new home for his Brood (Arguably already Hivecult), etc Showing that humans have more alternatives to the Imperium shows the horrible grimdarkness that the Imperium is wholly needless and exists only due to its own weight.
Problem with your suggestion is the Emperor basically killed off all of the alternatives that could of worked simply because he was so arrogant he wanted his way to be the only way. In one of the Horus Heresy books he kind of hints to this as one of the reason he created the dark angels legion during a conversation with Lion El'Johnson. So yes...The Emperor was a REAL asshole in the setting, but also one that was akin to a highlander style 'Immortal' that never dies.
Something that's come to mind whilst watching this is a mod for hearts of Iron called the New order. For context, hearts of iron is a WW2 grand strategy game focused on controling a nation-state from 1936 onwards, and much like warhammer it has a issue of attracting a signifigant number of far-right (and authoritarian left) people. The new order is an overhaul mod set in the 60's, in a world where the various axis forces won WW2, and the German Reich is now the most powerful and prestigeious faction on the planet. However, much like the imperium, it is a hollow, rotting, dying state that brings untold misery to millions of people and is fundermentally unable to hold it's self together, eventually collapsing into a civil war after the death of Adolf hitler. The new order is a deeply interesting world to me, because whilst the world it presents is one consumed by fascism and totalitarianism, the creators of it utterly disavow the ideologies presented within this world, and much of the writing is focused on both showing both the awfulness and misery of fascism, and also showing how alternative forces still exist and struggle, and are fighting to present an alternative to Nazism. Obviously the two settings are not a 1-to-1 comparison, but I think there's a lot of potential ideas that could be mined from TNOs premise and would map incredibly well to the setting of 40k. A key example of this to me is the presence of Albert Speer within the setting, who acts as something of a 'moderate' nazi with the aim to pass reforms to the Reich - but only to allow it to continue to exist and to quell the disent and corruption within it. Ultimately he still wants to perpetuate this awful, horrific system, and I think there's a potential for some really interesting parallels with Guilliman here. How many of Guilliman's reforms are done in the name of what is right and trying to sincirely make the imperium a better place, and how many are done out of nessessity and begrudingly for it's survival? I think this is a great oppertunity to interject some grey into his charecterisation and something that should ultimately come down to personal interpritation, and being a great demostration of reform vs revolution when compared to some of the independant break away states.
When I was writing the back story for my chapter, I had them explicitly sent in to crush a nascent human republic. Their great crime? Giving equal rights to mutants. They had no problem with chaos. Then the Imperium steam rolls them, and NOW they have a problem. I agree wholeheartedly with you. I think the main thing the setting lacks is contrast; the Imperium is all there is, so no one in setting can really point out the flaws.
@@adamjg5061 Evolution is not a fixed, predetermined thing. Evolution is just the combination of random mutation and natural selection resulting in changes in the characteristics of the members of the population. That is it. Also, evolution in a psychic species may be a common science fiction and science fantasy trope, but it does not make much sense in the context of Warhammer 40k, with the Warp and psychic powers being so dangerous. If anything, evolving in the opposite direction, into blanks would actually be much more advantageous if you look at things logically.
I'm always put in mind of the sad tale of the Diasporex, from one of the early HH books. Its very similar to what you conceived for your chapter. For those who aren't familiar, they were a nomadic and diverse society of humans and xenos. The Imperium found them and invites the humans to join the fold, once the xenos were exterminated of course. Naturally, the Diasporex refused and fled. The Imperium gave chase, eventually trapping them by destroying the solar collectors needed to fuel their ships. Then the Imperium wiped them out. The last message sent by the Diasporex simply read "we just wanted to be left alone".
A 10th edition like you described here might actually get me back into the setting. These days I'm more into Battletech just because its significantly less fash while remaining gritty and dark.
I'm about to get into 40k role-playing with some old D&D friends, we're going for Only War to start with and I've warned them that they're in just as much danger from their own commanders as they are the enemy.
Still of the opinion that Imperium Secundus should be the change that Guiliman will enact to cut out the chaff and beaurecracy of the Imperium Proper. Shit will still be horrible because of shortages and the like, but it will be focused on a goal and with a plan for a somewhat essential peace with the Eldar and Tau.
The thought that came to me while listening to your thought experiment, was that you were essentially calling for a return to Rouge Trader. And it seem, looking over the comments, many think that as well. It would be splendid if 40k retraced back to its roots of Rouge Trader to move forward as a game.
@@evangelosvasiliades1204 Rouge trader wasn't exactly all sunshine and rainbows...it just didn't lean so much into grimderp and demanding everything end in a needlessly painful way. (still plenty of violence ofcourse) Also "silly" fun can and should be allowed to exist in 40k, *it's a HUGE galaxy for a reason,* you can still have your grimdark fantasies in one brooding corner of galaxy while places liken to *"Logan's world"* can exist in another corner. That's part of why I like the scale of 40k's setting, *literally anything you can imagine, no matter how silly can and does exist somewhere.* I never understand why people think just having say humans and orks coexisting on ONE planet that isn't an apocalyptic battlefield (atleast most of the time..) would somehow upend the WHOLE series, it just *comes of as gatekeeping and being drama queens.* Heck, we even had a world in the lore where humans and eldar lived on the same planet...and not trying to genocide each other (though weren't exactly all buddy buddy ofcourse) but didn't need to be grimdark to the max to be interesting, heck if anything it makes things more grim because out of like 99% of all human and eldar interactions, there's was atleast ONE, instance of it not eventually turning into a blood bath or a whole *"next we meet, there will be no mercy"* after begrudgingly working together kind of thing but an actual lasting coexistence. (before they were all murdered by the galaxy's most 'friendly' war criminal)
Interesting concept. Last time I was into Games Workshop stuff was in the mid/late 2000's, where WH40K was in its 3rd edition with most of the basic fluff written from the Imperium's viewpoint of itself as a necessary evil but most players I encountered viewed the Eldar as the closest thing the setting had to "good guys". For me it seems like the Eldar are meant to be written as metaphors for real-life Celtic peoples - notice the Craftworlds being named after Druidic festivals like Beltane (Biel-Tann) and Samhain (Saim-Hann) - as far as WH40K maps to real life politics. I don't know what this says about more than my own anecdotal experiences?
I remember in 2nd edition the Eldar were portrayed as being more aloof and distant with inscrutable motives which the humans didn't really comprehend, they leaned pretty heavily on Fantasy elfs in space motif. There was story elements in the old army book "Codex Imperialis" which came with Second Ed box which were written from PoV of an inquisitor that was in the Black Libray it was pretty interesting stuff. 3rd edition things changed a bit they introduced Dark Eldar. The 2nd Ed Eldar Codex had lists for Exodite Eldar but Dark Eldar were a completely 3rd ed invention. It was around this time the lore changed to be much more grim dark in general They also got rid of some of the more fun units like Harlequins in 3rd ed which were some of my favourite Eldar models and lore. I think they eventually bought them back but I felt like they were really missed at the time.
@@1norwood1 yeah 3rd edition 40K was a lot more selfconsciously serious than the first two editions so many of the weirder elements had to go, similar relationship 6th edition WFB had to the previous ones
Ah yes, the eldar, a race who literally birthed a demon god with their degeneracy. They're the 'good guys'. I guess that depends on your perspective...
Having "multiple human Imperiums" in alliance would be a good way to reintroduce other loyalist Primarchs. E.g. Russ or the Lion as leaders of their own portions of the galaxy.
It was a wargame, the home front always took a back seat. I think you can play up the independence of the subsectors and worlds and make them as different as you like.
I wouldn't make this a "new" thing, which can be construed as a development post-plot advancement. I'd propose this as a new faction for a new edition, but that it would be emphasised that these guys have always been there - it's just that, as minor worlds and/or pirates and raiders, they haven't been referenced until now. If you have worlds that have never been part of the Imperium, where there is at least some co-operation between humans and Xenos*, and that haven't turned to Chaos, then the Imperium has never been necessary, and it returns to being a joke that "certain people" didn't get. If they are a direct result of the plot advancing, then you can argue that they were necessary prior to that point, but not after it. To emphasise this, I'd build the aesthetics off of Logan's World, and have it be an "update and expansion" on the pirate/mercenary army list in the Book of the Astronomicon. Alternatively, clarify that the suffering the Imperium causes is directly feeding and strengthening Chaos (making it a positive feedback loop), that the Astronomicon did indeed attract the Tyrannids, and that the reason all Xenos life seems hostile, is because they've slaughtered all of the reasonable ones. *and, no, not in a peace-love-and-harmony way. I'm talking more the Host of Mordor, less the Fellowship of the Ring.
To be fair the Imperium did wipe out many, MANY civilizations of peaceful xenos or even humans during the Great Crusade, no wonder that any remaining xenos or even independent human civilizations that have heard or somehow know about this horrific event wouldn't be so inviting as they had been before. I wouldn't be suprised if there's hundreds if not thousands of civilizations out in the galaxy that have desperately tried to not attract the attention of the Imperium, seeing them as a very serious existential threat. (oh the irony!)
@@navilluscire2567 The model for the suggestions in my post is one of my own pet projects, which is "the ships that survived the slaughter of the Diasporex, after they've spent 10,000 years living like the fleet from Battlestar Galactica"
@@arfived4 That sounds awesome! Yeah, the tragic fate of the Diasporex is one of the rare instances where the Imperium isn't justified in the least and felt quite frankly surreal in how the SPACE marines talking about how they couldn't even fathom how or why humans and aliens could live together peacefully, really showing the depths of their conditioning and the human supremacist rhetoric they were feed all their lives. We NEED more media where the Imperium are the antagonists, where the irrational thinking and hate fueled actions are presented bare for what they are.
This is something I always wanted to see. Hell, it's practically stated outright in some of the books (as mentioned in the vid). This is what caught me about chapters like the space wolves - they are more often than not butting heads with the imperium and how it works and stick to their own sectors. (at least, pre the destruction of fenris) This is what I wanted more of - humans coexisting with xenos through tentative alliances; humans aware of the dangers of the warp and working against it in responsible ways. Hell, these are shown to be common place for some more radical commissars, why not have it be right there under the imperium's nose. Doesn't even have to be pleasant - a feudal world has a trade deal with the dark aeldari, exchanging thousands of slaves in exchange for designer drugs and incubus bodyguards. The potential. The potential!!
Yeah, more worlds that have dark but practical packs with xenos. Imagine a world's government being in league with some t'au sept, trading tech and them (the humans) gaining access to new markets through the t'au's other member or allied species, turning the human world into the Warhammer 40k equivalent of Nar Shada from star wars i.e. multiple species living on the same planet engaging in a sort of planetary bizarre where all sorts of crazy goods are traded. Ofcourse with the human governor taking a sizable cut of proceeds while the t'au handle most market security in exchange for using the planet as a new staging point for future campaigns, establishing permanent military bases. Actually imagine U.S. bases for the t'au's presence and role there like in Japan with the planet being like a mashup of Tokyo and Las Vegas (who doesn't love space casinos!), but in (partial) hiveworld form!
I thought the overarching view of the emperor had was that once he had conquered the galaxy, he would usher in a time of peace and prosperity. With the going narrative that the imperium now is a twisted warped version of what it was meant to be. Therefore the imperium now not really being a necessary evil but rather a failed version of what could have been - with guilliman confirming as much with his disgust at the current state of the imperium, while also comparing it to the blissful peace of the worlds of ultramar.
That's true, but in the Heresy novels that's questioned a LOT. The Imperium he's building is still very much a brutal dictatorship, just a more benevolent one.
@@WingZeroCustom001 I mean he literaly sets up an Imperial senate, installs a democratic council to lead terra, and is trying to conquer the webway so that it can be used as a form of transport and communication so tjat mankind can effectively rule itself. But sure, the blue anon guy says a random thing is alt right so ignore that.
@@GusOfTheDorks I mean there was still a senate in the days of the emperor but that didn't suddenly make caesar not a dictator and the emperors also did a lot of horrific shit in the name of the empire when not doing those things was always possible. The emperor and the supposed golden years of the empire are themselves a critique of benevolent dictators and what is justified in the name of bettering an empire and acquiring resources because well it all went to shit and collapsed into dogmatism and fanaticism pretty fast now didn't it.
Imho, they could also just play up the feudal aspects of the Imperium. Generally they could deal far more with indivudual worlds and organisations doing their own thing, and even fiting in petty equivalent to feuds amongst each other. Any sort of partaking in the larger affairs and coordination between components only gets done when the instititutions of holy terra come knocking themselves, and even then they could have far more limited authority per imperial law. Think more Dune or the Empire in WHFB (or rather the holy roman empire...), where the individual bodies making up the Imperium act like completely independent nations 90% of the time and Space Marine chapters more or less doing whatever they want. All of that is already there, it just needs to be played up more.
You mentioned Judge Dredd and I think they experienced a similar issue, and they resolved it largely with the comic Origins, SPOILER, in the finale of this series they recover the original Judge, and he expresses total regret at making the fascist dystopia of Mega City One, it's really something that rattles the core of the story. I know 40k doesn't have quite the pacing opportunities of a comic book, but they'd only need to establish this core regret once, and it would tremble through the universe.
Yeah, I kinda hoped they'd take this route with the Horus Heresy right at the start, but I understand the way they went - that the Imperium was always delusional. But it means that they can't do the same Judge arc with Guillimans return, as while he's sad at the religion and decline, he's still as much of an authoritarian dictator as he was in the Heresy.
Having the Emperor finally shake free of the Golden Throne, get denounced by the Ecclesiarchy as a Heretic and a Daemon, flee to the Ultimar Sector, and get back on track with his original plan for humanity could be a good way to shake things up. We'd get actual heroic Space Marines, once the Emperor and Guilliman de-Nazify the Ultramarines; meanwhile, the Imperium would continue to be the horrible, decaying menace that they've always been.
Reflecting on this, I feel this is so uneeded. Imagine the people who actually look at the state of the Imperium and say "that sounds great, I want to be a part of that." The Imperium is broken. It's always been broken. But! There is plenty of genuinely human and heartfelt moments throughout setting. I root for the humans because they can still show humanity in such grim dark settings. In fact with the exception of the Dark Angels I don't recall any protagonist characters that excelled because they are better 'facists' then others. The subtle destinction that most people don't want to accept is that the Imperium is a tool made of armies, industry and the Emperor's light. Unchecked human 'Ignorance', 'hate', and 'fear' gave space for a facist humanity. That quality of humanity has been the number 1 roadblock to the Imperium's victory. The setting screams that fact.
I'm kind of repeating myself in another comment, but I think the issues isn't that people think the Imperium is a great place to live. I think Ian's point is, that those people see the horrific state of the Imperium is *justified* in the face of the threats it face, and that this version of the Imperium is the only thing holding the excinction of humanity at bay. That's the narrative you want to tackle. The goal is not to try and convince that "the Imperium is bad, actually", it's to convince them that the Imperium could have taken a different form, actually, and that the form didn't have to treat everyone diverging from the norm as anathema.
@@MiBasse The other alternative would be the emperor "surviving" the horus heresy and continuing the great crusade/webway project which would result in most if not all of the other races being exterminated. I've been partaking in the hobby for over 20+ years and I've never encountered a fascist, maybe the odd edgy joke but that's about it. It's most likely people making a mountain out of a mole hill.
@@DMKA94 It really isn't. You probably just don't hear the dogwhistles. They don't just walk in announcing 'Hello! I am mr. Fascist! Would any of you like to do some hate crimes?' They only say what they really think to people they think agree with them. Once they're in their safe space, if you will. They'll still find ways to make your life miserable if they decide they don't like you though.
Welp… the Leagues of Votann have already done this! They live in even harsher conditions than the Imperium, and they’re unambiguously NOT evil. Maybe not GOOD per say (maybe kinda lawful neutral?), but they definitely show that the Imperium is not the only way. Before the Votann, we could also kind of count the Tau, even though they’re not human, and they have some (comparatively) slight evil undertones. But still.
They're definitely not good. They're artificially constructed beings that are extremely insular and paranoid of outsiders and give zero shits about causing mass destruction in order to obtain resources. All while borderline worshiping a malfunctioning supercomputer.
One thing to remember for such a time jump forwards is that Guilliman originally created the Ultramar sector, which was a well run comparative utopia. You could actually have sectors taking on board his learnings in such a way that new ultramar like territories spring up- great places to live, yet still part of the Imperium. Based on how religions tend to deviate from their starting points, you could actually have groups of Ultramarines denouncing their own Primarch as not following the true imperial creed- maintaining that back ground element of reasons where supposed allies could come to blows with each other. Throw in the return of Russ or The Lion, who have different opinions on what the Imperium should be working towards, and you can get a seriously diverse setting within the human (and trans human) populace. Oh and of course, bring back the Squats! It would be great to see them as a 'mostly good guys' faction, who have spent centuries hiding from a repressive Imperium that wanted to exterminate them, but have now returned out of compassion for sentient life and their own interests in resisting the galaxy's greatest menaces and threats it has seen in millennia.
Socialist only like look at 1st edition and be like ya it's facist and move one. While in other editions it's more nuance then that hell the Guard infantry in 40k forces acts more like the Soviet Union troops. Hell most of the time the imperium acts like HRE then a socialist state but then again I'm talking to a socialist the only nuance they know is what boot color design they like licking
Brian stableford wrote a book from the point of view of chaos cultists. It was excellent probably the best one I've read, it tackle the issue of the empire being evil really well. Your sympathy wasn't with the chaos cultists, it was with the poor villagers caught in the middle.
This is a good summation and solution to the crypto-fascist nature of a non-satirical grime dark. I think that moving the focus away from the big "heroes" would be a helpful idea too. Focusing on lesser characters can up the tension. If Guilliman is in the story, we know he isn't in any danger; if the focus of the story is some Inquisitor, Governor, Squad Leader, Autarch etc; there can be real narrative jeopardy.
I really like this! I'm a fan of every faction's fluff being presented as propaganda for their side - making it willfully inconsistent. People (especially kids!) can still have their heroic marines fighting mindless bugs or spikey dudes, while any folks who care to look a little deeper can have that subverted. Tau are a step in that direction - a more subtle kind of fascism, at least - and an option that says that it's possible for species to work together peacefully. That Blackstone Fortress game too. The galaxy is a big place, so it should feel diverse.
I saw u irl the other day Ian at secret cinema but as a staff member I couldn't break the immersion to shake your hand and say thanks for the content! So I'll say it here! Love it all and I'm pretty indifferent about 40k lol keep it going and much love xx
Aha! Where were you working/who were you playing? You totally could have got away with it on account of me working for them too (as a designer though, so I don't have to worry about breaking character).
Watching this and knowing the Squats are coming back is probably a good sign that there may be new human factions that will be separate from the Imperium. It's a good start I say, and we may get new alien factions too.
I'm not sure one needs to "change" 40k just because of an admitted tiny minority. Why skew it around a few nutters? Just turf them out any club they show up in. The most I'd say is yes, some stories from the Black Library on these areas would be nice. (Since none of what you said is 'new') But I wouldn't go shifting an entire edition around them. On the Marines though, I always saw the Marines the way Abnett writes them, that they are the vestiges of an era when they were genuine protectors of humanity and not the misled forces to devastate any deviation and that there still exists the potential in them for it. The way he has their true humanity and care sometimes squeak through, that they are curious about humans as much as humans are about them, and that they do follow Roboute (who comes from a more enlightened, less facist era) show they are more of a mishandled tool, not in and of themselves a horrific evil. And that makes their story of the fall from 30k to 40k all the more tragic in my eyes, helping cast them as the posterboys. The ones who COULD, but after so long have been mantraed and bound until they AREN'T...except for the times they do. And those times are the core, genuine heroism of 40K's lore. The flashes of hope and possibility in the darkness of the original vision to free humanity from Chaos and suffering. The vision that opposed the very thing humanity turned into. Gaunt's Ghosts is also a fantastic study on this, casting a commissar was such a genius move. That it shows people moving under the height of the cult above them, they have to fit in or facec consequences from it (sometimes tragically so, poor Soric) but ultimately are still people just trying to do the right thing for one another. 40k is best shown as flashes and possibility of something better, rather than outright just having a "good side". It's less about "everyone's evil" more "everyone has a tragedy that they fell into misery and hate/fear/whatever from". Thats the real wrinkle that needs to be protected in theme.
I disagree with the idea that the Space Marines were ever "genuine" protectors of humanity, and that they weren't always meant to annihilate any deviation from the Emperor's ideal. They may have believed they were genuine protectors, but their purpose was to expand the borders of the Imperium, usually at the end of their bolters. I do like Abnet's look at this disconnect in Horus Rising with both 63-19 and the Interex: both were thriving human civilizations that would have gotten along just fine if the Imperium hadn't come along (even if 63-19 had a lot of the same concerning hallmarks the Imperium had), and peace with the Interex was so tantalizingly close, but very few beyond Horus even believed it was possible or even desired. Loken was the only voice we saw that potentially agreed with Horus that it could maybe be done. So their purpose wasn't to protect HUMANITY so much as it was to protect THE IMPERIUM, in the same way that the Roman army's purpose was to protect Rome, often by expanding its borders and subjugating everyone nearby and then taxing them for the trouble. I'll definitely concede that it was a more enlightened time, but with the caveat that the particular bar in question is hilariously low. Also there was the whole "all xenos are a potential threat to humanity and so shall not be permitted to live" thing that the Emperor DEFINITELY had going on even back during Solar Unification. And the brutal suppression of religion that I find utterly appalling, even as an atheist who would love for religion to go away
It’s very much in dialogue with the themes of power and control in the Dune series, which also has a complex interplay between “necessary evils” and the brutal limitations of feudal imperialism as a system which the people in the setting can never seem to shake.
I always liked the idea that each codex served as propaganda from their point of view. Like if you read a Space Marine codex, then the Emperor is this noble hero of the past and we should aspire to be worthy of him. But then if you read a Chaos Marine codex, the Emperor is a corpse and a false idol who never really cared for humanity, but the Chaos Gods are promising you the galaxy and immortality. It makes it so you essentially get a bunch of factions going "they're all bad but I'm good", rather than acting like, as you say, the Imperium are a necessary evil from every point of view. It doesn't help they've been cleaning up the art style and writing for years to be less openly ridiculous and satirical. It kind of lost that sense of humor in the pursuit of having a heroic face to a setting that was never intended to have one.
It's very good to see the many Warhammer RUclipsrs that break the stigma we have as fans. Adeptus Ridiculous, Poorhammer, Mr bones, numbskullz, dawnstir, you all work to undo the damage scum like arch have made.
I'd say one starts this with the reintroduction of the Squats, followed by a massive expansion to the Renegades and Heretics. I'd like rules to field human pirates, like Corsairs or Freebootas. While we're at it, release that Mercenaries codex GW has been teasing for almost 20 years.
You just earned yourself a subscriber, my good man! I've toyed around with the idea of a small, independent human faction of my own for quite some time now. I imagine a fringe world that was cut off from the Imperium by a warp storm during the Horus Heresy, forcing the inhabitants to develop a more pragmatic approach in order to survive. Not only did they loosen restrictions on scientific and technological research, resulting in building their own tech and even making some small scale innovations, but their views also became more tolerant. They have slowly but surely started coming into contact with the outside galaxy again as the storm gradually subsides, resulting in alliances of necessity with mercenaries, Rogue Traders and even some xenos. For example, they have an uneasy alliance with a contingent of Blood Axes, the agreement being that the Ork raiders help deal with a persistent feral Ork infestation (the result of a large WAAAGH! rampaging through the sector during the Great Crusade) while leaving the 'humies alone. In exchange the Blood Axes get to keep all battlefield spoils and are given Ogryn volunteers, who it turns out integrate into Ork society very well. Knowing that it's only a matter of time before an inevitable confrontation with the Imperium, the people are weighing their options. Reintegration with the Imperium is out of the question at this point, as it's seen as a fate worse than death. Will they go out in a blaze of glory like so many other rebellious worlds, or will they manage to relocate to another planet or become shipfaring nomads traveling the stars of a hostile galaxy?
I intensely love these frontier regions, but there would be a good balance to be careful with, because something would be lost if what you propose is done too much. The despair maybe. The artistic charm is not only that the Imperium is bad, it's also that it is nearly inescapable. Free souls and pirates live in uncharted territories but many bigger factions able to negate the imperium on the long run would lessen the oppressive, suffocating threat of Terra.
it reminds me the planet's developpement table from 40k third edition rule book. You could clearly see that some planets have survived with post industrial civilizations. It could lead to so many stories that depicts life in 40k instead of constant wars againt arch evils. Always talking about war makes it bearable and that's why people tend to see the Imperium as a necessary evil... because in the far future... there's no alternative. (and not even talking about prehistoric planets where you could see Monsterhunter style tales especially with Exodites ones).
I like the idea of Semi-grimdark because farsight enclave are basically backed into a corner and there only say to survive is to defend there territory and relay on temporary alliances, and the grimdark part is that they are like the red-shirts from Star Trek.
I always try to emphasize the fact that there are no good guys in 40k when talking to people getting into the setting. If people ask me who I would consider the good guys to be, I usually say the Tyranids because, frankly, all the other factions getting wiped out would be a benefit to the universe and the Tyranids at least aren’t doing what they’re doing for petty or hateful reasons. They just eat stuff. It’s what they do.
I would argue that the Craftworld Eldar and Harlequins aren’t so much evil as they are ruthless and somewhat dickish. And Exodites, while basically irrelevant on a galactic scale, aren’t really evil either. And then you have the Farsight Enclaves, who are of debatable morality.
For that matter, the Orks are also sort of 'good'. They fight because they love to fight (and because that's what they were created to do), There's no underlying malice or active hatred toward other species, they fight them like they fight one another if there's no one else to fight, like a drunk in a kebab shop picking a fight with their own reflection.
I don't why people still think of the Tyranids as not evil. Even if it's their nature and they hold no ill intent, their objective is destruction of all life in the galaxy except for them. Also, with the genestealer cults I'm not so sure they aren't conscious of what their doing
I think this is a great solution and I've always thought it was implied that there already was this sort of thing going in the setting. Perhaps I was wrong though and creating this juxtaposition more obvious would be a great thing for the imperium. For example, in my head cannon the Alpha legion run an alternative interstellar colony in the eastern fringe as a kind of alternate moral and social organisation.
This both brings back the rogue trader feel that people like me really want, let's eveyone have their cake and eat it, and even allows GW space to bring out even more new models and faction stuff making yet more money from people... Shame it'd need them to be self aware and care about the game.
Couldn't agree more. To me, Guilliman is the biggest problem. Picture an Imperium with the High Lords at its head, anonymous beaucrats and noblemen of which we know nothing, and that's the point, the horror is that the Imperium runs on intertia. The cogs all turn, the broken pieces are replaced not by an engineer but by other pieces. We are doing this to ourselves. The fact that we never knew the name of the HL was genius to me. Life is hell, but who's to blame? Now there is someone to blame. Roboute Guilliman. He is indisputably in charge and he has mostly cast aside the HL and replaced them. He has much control. Yet, life is still hell. Why the heck do people not rebel against Guilliman now? Genestealer cults, sure, but... Come on, not all rebels must be secret Tzeentch worshippers or Tyranid cosplayers. Sure, yes, there's faith and other social glue in place, but come on, if there ever was a place for new human factions or a straight on civil war in the Imperium it was now!
I like the idea of dwelling more on the independent human empires, which as you say have always been present in the background, but there is a reason we tend to see them getting conquered or obliterated when they appear on camera - the nature of an Imperium is imperialism, a core tenet of how empires operate is by subjugating and oppressing their neighbours. Demonstrating to the real world audience that there is another way also means demonstrating that to the Imperial citizenry, which is something the Imperium as an entity cannot tolerate. You might be miserable here, says the Imperium, but look how much worse you'd have it over there (because we spent years bombing it flat). The facists and idiots who buy in to the Imperium as a necessary evil or even a force for good like to ignore the morality and even the colossal waste of effort and resources spent holding and dominating non-hostile populations, which could have been funnelled into infrastructure, public works, or even just pointing those same weapons at the acid spitting psychic bugs instead of innocent civilians. But of course, aside from the acid spitting psychic bugs, none of that is actually fiction.
Idea for a faction: A "democratic" faction that also has conscription. The twist is that the party in power might try and stifle voters by sending them into unwinnable battles.
@@heckinmemes6430 The Tau aren't democratic. They do the greatest good for the greatest number but they don't really consult them about it. The Tau would say they're so harmoniously in tune with the ideal of the greater good that they don't need to vote the same way you don't need to vote on whether or not to eat or drink, or how gravity works. Others would say they're just ruled by the Ethereals and the Ethereals don't want to be questioned. A democratic faction would be interesting and be something new, but it would be difficult to pull off. For one it's hard to have the kind of communication a modern democracy requires without breaking some of the limitations of the universe. Also one of the reasons there's no democracy in 40k is that it's a satire, and if you satirise a democracy or make it match the grimdark tone you could end up doing the exact opposite of making the setting less appealing to fascists. It's probably easier to do a corrupted republic than it is a true democracy in 40k, but I'd worry a faction claiming to be democratic but not being would just end up being very similar to the Tau.
A Democracy with conscription isn't anything new (or outdated). Indeed, that's how democracy worked since the beginning. In Ancient Rome and Athens the definition of "Citizen" was to have certain rights, most especially the right to vote and it was the main duty of the Citizen to take up arms in defense of his nation/city. Modern Day Switzerland (basically one of the last places in the world that practices direct democracy), South Korea (had issues in the past, got better in more modern times), Turkey (authoritarian right now, but used to be more democratic a decade or two ago), Israel (which has many issues, but is internally quite democratic, at least within it's primary Jewish demographic) all have compulsory military service.
I appreciate this video and the sentiment behind it, I really agree with almost everything. However I think that the true horror and grim dark of 40k comes from the idea that the imperium (the defacto horrible facist system) is legitimately the only option to surviving in the galaxy. With other human options that are completely morally better than the imperium and alliances rather than the overbearing imperium, it kind of robs the setting of what makes it unique in sci-fi to me. It’d also radically change the balance of the established lore, these other human factions would realistically have to be at least as strong as the 500 worlds of macragge to have any hope of surviving against any concentrated effort by a tyranid fleet or necron invasion, or even eventual absorption into the tau empire. Your points about the imperium being portrayed as heroic is spot on I believe. Much more work should be done to paint the brutality of the imperium, ideally from the xenos pov, and I also want space marines to be less human again, closer to their original non noble selves. Good video, just the one idea I don’t agree with, would make the setting too generic when it already has problems with stolen ideas haha.
I think you're missing the point. Certain people see brutality as an objectively positive attribute for people to have. Showing the Imprrium to be more brutal would automatically show them as heroic.
I don't really agree. Isn't it more horrific that they're doing all this evil shit, and... they don't even really need to? To me, that's worse than 'we do bad shit because we'll die if we don't'. and yeah, some groups will probably team up into areas of a few hundred worlds, but don't forget that a) when the imperium gets invaded it's not the entire imperium that gets mobilized (they're busy). just the local few worlds. and b) such smaller empires would be WAY more efficient than the imperium. the administratum is so slow and inefficient it is proverbial. smaller groups of planets would relatively be much better at dealing with threats than the Imperium would be.
@@r31n0ut but they all need the astronomicon to even be able to contact each other for trade or mutual defense, which somewhat necessitates the Imperium for any coordination in areas larger than a solar system or without stable and short warp routes.
@@doomguy9049 The Astronomicon doesn't work like that. it's like a lighthouse in the warp, they can't say "hey, you didn't pay your taxes this cycle so you don't get to see it." That's just not how beacons work. Besides, there are like... 7 other major factions in the galaxy that manage to get around just fine without the astronomicon? I'm sure the new human factions would find a way.
When thinking about the imperium and the question of its depiction as the given “protagonist” faction - can entire civilization or society in fiction be understood not as allegory but something along the lines of the classically tragic hero writ large, an entity that’s fun or compelling to follow in a narrative but would obviously be catastrophic to encounter in real life?
I really like this idea. It would also be neat if codexes from different factions gave different accounts of the same event. Could hammer home how the factions will twist the truth or lie to make themselves look good.
I mean, this sounds perfect to be honest.... It sounds so plausible that even as of the moment we could say, to some extend, it is happening already. I mean, in the way to justify actually having good Space marines... It sounds completely convincing and easy to deliver.... damn... nice work!
I had a conceptual issue with Dark Heresy recently: it's hard to shock CHARACTERS with the brutality and fascism of the Imperium even while it might shock the PLAYERS. There's no dichotomy for them to roleplay here, because their characters (being effectively fascist secret police officers) would commit atrocities without a second thought. Great video!
That’s one reason why I like running dark heresy for players who don’t know 40k. The players get to discover how bad things are, and figure out if they want to go along with it, or become heretics themselves.
That's a fun part of DH campaign I've been a part of for years now: almost every character is not truly suited to 40k, which makes them more believable members of the Inquisition, since no one enters the services of an Inquisitor without being at least a little creative and unconventional. For example, we had a character from a world with strained Mechanicus relations who thusly had to be a mechanic, drawing tons of ire from any techpriests we met, but also not exactly doing anything illegal, then later converted to the Cult of the Omnissiah out of genuine belief built from working with machines, or the Judge I play who is old and disillusioned with the whole "letter of the law" affair, now roaming the galaxy as a wandering justice-doer and considering the entire Imperium a precinct in need of protection. Often, playing someone who is internally skeptical of the godliness of the Emperor or maybe doesn't really see anything wrong with mutants is just as realistic as playing a frothing zealot.
@@warhammertrash1626 I agree, I think people, particularly fans of the setting, get too caught up in the playing archetypal 40K characters and it looses the opportunity for nuance.
This is a really insightful comment and I was going to add something about my own experiences with Dark Heresy and how it’s difficult to add the normal RPG depth to playing a fashy religious fanatic with a big chainsaw but then I saw who wrote this comment and decided to just message you, who GM’d Dark Heresy for me, on Facebook instead.
Awesome idea. As others have mentioned the best portrayal of them being evil I’ve seen recently is Garden of Ghosts on hammer and bolter. I’m also wondering if they’re planning a new civil war in the imperium, which could achieve a similar effect if they make one side like you’ve suggested.
I always preferred the vision of the Imperium itself as being a loose grouping of alliances, comprised of radically different societies, cultures, and organisational structures bound together by a sometimes nominal allegiance to the Emperor. Representatives of the Imperium might turn up with demands of a tithe, but that might not amount to much more than a protection racket in practical terms. I might be out of date with how lore is now depicted in the books, but I remember that feeling like the case in 2nd Ed. An alliance between Mars and Terra, but still with certain planets definitely belonging to Mars, Space Marines chapters administrating entire regions around their home planet, an entire segment of the galaxy belonging to the Squat leagues, and with a host of planets ruled over by planetary governors that are elected and govern according to local customs.
well stated and I agree. Partly because I want more variety in human factions. What always attracted me to the setting was its room for creativity - there's absolutely space on a million planets for human societies that are tangential to the Imperium at best, and forgotten in the imperium's endless sclerotic bureaucracy. This doesn't require any retcons of any kind, just additions, and I'm all for it
I think I'm a bit old, but I always retained the very old sense that the Imperium is very diverse with random planets being cyberpunk democracies, monarchies, and son and the Imperium sort of doesn't care if they pay the tithe etc. So it was less monolithic and more of a mess. But Space Marines were a very thin line of all the things the Imperium did back then, which was far more 2000AD .
Yet I never get that impression from alot of the books I read, aside from some local drama or conspiracies, it seems every world. Even the so called "civilized worlds" are basically all orwellian nightmares to one degree or another. And even with worlds were the Imperium's grasp is relatively weak or planets with more distinct cultures (from that of generic, mainstream Imperium traditions), it's not much better with extreme authoritarianism being the norm for many a world's government, not the terrible exceptions. That and LOTS of nepotism through either official, dropped the pretenses noblemen or basically hereditary political dynasties of 'governers' of planets ruling and abusing their populations virtually as much as they please with little hope from freedom or successful revolutions.
Question for you? What is your opinion on the imperium in 30k? Was the imperium good or bad before the Horus? I don’t know much about 30k government so I’m curious what your thoughts are. Others feel free to add opinions in the reply
The major project of the Imperium of in 30k was the Great Crusade which is a euphemism for genociding every planet that is not 100 exclusivly human AND even if the world is 100% human you still have a 50/50 chance of genociding the planet anyway so...
I have an idea I think could work beautifully. I have a pet theory about the missing Primarchs: that instead of producing great conquerors like the other primarchs, the missing two were incredibly charismatic philosopher/religious-type leaders who, catastrophically from the Emperor's point of view, were pacifists. They managed to unite their worlds in absolute non-violence and peaceful coexistence, and with huge success socially and technologically, and when contacted by the Emperor immediately their philosophy spread throughout the Imperial ranks like wildfire, causing the front of Great Crusade to immediately collapse as the troops refused to invade any further worlds and began to believe all xenos should be treated with respect as fellow intelligent beings etc. The reason the two are now "missing" is that they, their legions that bore this dangerous geneseed and any record of any contact with them following this had to be completely expunged for obvious reasons. To contrast what what these missing primarchs achieved through peace with the brutality of the Imperium even at it height would prove a point I think - and you wouldn't have to retcon anything, or even go forward with 40k.
@@RealAugustusAutumn That’s the thing though - perhaps the terrible thing they proposed was some way around that, a way that could work, and was working, wonderfully well. The sort of great work that only beings of the calibre of Primarchs could come up with. A way for all the races of the galaxy to live in peace together, and that was why it was so utterly catastrophic for the entire point of the Great Crusade, and why they and everything associated with them had to be ruthlessly extirpated in favour of brutal human and Imperial supremacy.
@@RealAugustusAutumn The stories of the Great Crusade and the Horus Heresy make it a point several times that the Emperor as well as most people around him were completely convinced that the view your describing - that humanity is superior to any alien race and that the Emperor has it all planned out with just the best intentions for humankind at heart - was true and just - BUT that those views and the methods to achieve them were deeply flawed by hubris. Horus Rising & The Last Church are both but two examples for moments when the "noble" end was just a justification for horrible means that may even outway the "good" they strive to bring about. From the very start, the setting makes it very clear that by trying to save the human body and soul from warp and xenos predators, that very human body and soul are violated and mutilated beyond recognition and everything is doomed to fail because the Emperor and his Legions never even considered an alternative. They chose war to bring about peace, but because of human flaws, humanity had to lose its soul to save it, rendering the entire endeavour a futile exercise.
All xenos??? Lmfao imagine a guardsman refusing to fight an ork because "he's a living being with feelings n shit" and then getting his shit krumped for being a lilly livered grot.
@@pinoarias8601 Eh, there’s a difference between pest control and rampant genocidal xenophobia :P You can’t reason with orks any more than you can a disease. Ditto the Tyranids - but there’s a lot of races and human cultures that the Imperium has encountered and crushed, or is still trying to, that there’s really been no need to.
Very interesting perspective. One thing I'd like to see would be some stories from chaos and xenos points of view (maybe from the point of view of citizens. I note the Siege of Vraks is popular right now. Maybe the story of an impoverished Vraksian who slaved since he was a child in the Departmento Munitorum's labour corps, who in order to give his family a better life enlisted in the Vraksian traitor militia after Cardinal Xaphan's coup? I'd like that story! Or maybe the story of a Gue'vesa unit fighting against their fellow humans for the Tau Empire.
I think it doesn't even need to be super hard, just give us options for Imperial Guard renegades or non imperial imperial guards and make them be able Ally with any other faction, no new models need to even be made
This would be amazing. I play necromunda and love exploiting the gaps in the lore. I run Van Saar and I love their 'heretical' (in the eyes of the imperium) approach to technology. I run them as infected by a rogue A.I that has emerged from their secret STC that is assimilating data from the wider galaxy constantly improving and replicating. Definitely not 'good' but still a different approach to the usual 'suffer not the witch" etc. Id love to see them adopt your suggestion.
Great video I love the ways you find to keep the community thinking about a bigger human picture. That said GW has never had the key to individual creative experiences and has often enough reacted to its community, that one way to make this change it to simply play as if it is true. Leave the individuals who think Fascism is an ideal, missing the fact that their push for a point of view they can call their own may get them trampled under foot, to play in their play groups. While the rest of us play out the story we want to with free thinking friends who allow us to play renegade marine groups or mixed lists of Tau and Imp Guards until GW realise that with that freedom there is no limit to collecting miniatures and an endless possibilities for new rule books.
I'm not sure about that though, you probably know the saying, that restrictions breed creativity and just letting everything go makes no sense from the global perspective - neither lore, nor business. GW plays a lot on the players'/fans' feelings for specific factions - that's why you have them trickling down the releases. From the lore perspective - Imperium (apart from the very beginning of 40k I guess) was about keeping humanity together by the Emperor's vision and rule. Same thing for other "issues" like femal SM - if everything is allowed and homogeneous, what is the reason for SoB existence? And why there aren't any BoB (Brothers of Battle)? Sure, GW could and should endorse some of the less traditional approaches into their lore (like maybe a tiny bit more focus on humans working with Tau, Blackshields, etc.), but unless they just deus ex machina a new region of galaxy for them, it is hard to imagine not seeing the Imperium cracking down on any rebel faction.
Something that I've always wanted 40k to do and that your proposal supports is taking a hard look and deconstructing the impact of real world colonization and decolonization and how disparate cultures evolve and integrate (many times inharmonious) when they come into contact with each other (and what is gained and lost for those who live in it). How do these isolated cultures with radically different traditions take bits and portions of the mainline imperium and use them in their own belief. What are the radically different belief systems, traditions, and symbols of the imperial cult that can manifest? And above all I just want to see all of real world humanity on display in both representation and aesthetics, not just the common European depictions that have been baked into fantasy and scifi over the past century. One of the big things I've learned from indie RPG designers and storytellers is to make space for your audience. To allow areas (and significant chunks too) of blank narrative space that someone can take an idea that they think is awesome and run with it. 40k should be about Your Dudes and the setting should encourage that. (Also this is why I'm in favor of FSMs and misters of battle, even if they're just in fringe cases, cause they allow narrative space and interesting concepts for people to run with)
Eh I think that the imperium being the only faction for man yet being so flawed is the only thing that makes it not the worst or close to the worst, then it would become craftworld elder, tau as just being good and the imperium just being a fleeting evil kinda ruins the grimdarkness
Thank you. I'm starting a Dark Heresy campaign. This has given me some nice ideas for Radicals and other such alternatives to dangle Infront of the group.
I think you really hit the nail on the head with this one. The only problem is no one actually trusts GW to do anything this cool. I think everyone would rather see some other company take the galaxy and burn down GW in the process. It isn't like anything is really original in Warhammer anyway. A nice interconnected suite of skirmish games, role-playing games, battle tech knock-off titans, and X-wing style space pirate games all in a galaxy wide sci-fi setting would be great.
Very well done. You address several things I've been pondering on and off for years now. On the one hand, what I really like about the 40k setting is the fact that it's so faceted, allowing space for both the dystopian, silly Rogue Trader-era punk horror and social criticism as well as its science-fantasy elements allowing for individual heroism and excessive world-building more akin to Star Wars. That way, I have the freedom to focus on individual aspects of it depending on what I like at the moment, bathing for a short time in the horror, the ugly and the bloody, emerging from them like exiting a rollercoaster. The downside is, well, you said it, it attracts actual bad people with actual misanthropic views, completely misinterpreting what it's all about originally. My current fear is that this trend of blunting the satire may continue out of sheer necessity to provide less purchase for the real fascist types. But then again, nobody can tell me what to do within my own pocket of 40k, and if I want to cling to those satirical, silly RT flavours, no change of the universe can stop me. Edit: I really like your version of a sort of second Age of Strife!
I think this is why I find the Krieg books so hard to read. What the Imperium has done to them is monstrous, they’ve had everything that makes them human removed (to the extent that they don’t get a POV character). But it’s also framed as “the only way” to survive, justifying the action.
Because it is the only way to survive. The whole appeal of 40k is that everything is grimdark. There are no good guys and there is no hope. You just have varying shades of gray and black fighting for their very survival.
What has Imperium done to Krieg? Kriegers tried to gain independence. And it was once again Kriegers who nuked their own planet to put down the pro-independence people (traitors to the Imperium or rebels, one might call them) and created the current culture. It wasn't something the Imperium outside of Krieg enforced on it. It was entirely the acts of Kriegers (most especially the Imperial Loyalists, who came up victorious in the end) that created the current results.
@@gokbay3057 It was literally about the rich rulers of Krieg trying to be even more rich by hoarding the resources for themselves instead of giving the tithes to the Imperium. The normal citizens of Kreig didn't even realize they were independent until the Nukes started falling. Not to mention this would've doomed their planet to the horrors of the universe alone without the aided forces of the Imperium. It's a good thing they cleanse themselves with fire when they had the chance.
A good and thought-provoking video but I'm not sure I agree with the pitch for 10th edition. I'd love to see more of what you described but maybe in the books and skirmish games and video games. I can't see GW releasing models and/or rules for a new faction for 40k that's obviously the one Good Guy army. And if they did and lots of new players started collecting them, then had opposing armies of good guys wipe each other out, those good guys would be cold blooded killers on the tabletop like everyone else. IMHO the danger of creating a Good team in 40k is creating accidental hypocrisy instead of the intended hypocrisy of the existing factions. The genius of the setting is, as you mentioned, anyone can fight anyone due to religion, suspicion, aggression, prophecy, treachery or terrible admin. As soon as you change that balance by adding the White Hat faction you lose all the good it does. Every faction in 40k thinks it's doing what it has to do, not just the Imperium, but we're often shown how this belief comes from self-fulfilling prophecies or a bestial, usually corrupted nature. We hear the protagonists say extreme measures are necessary but always invited to see it as the lie it is, or that it's only true because they created the situation that way. For every faction, the ends either justify the means or they're an excuse for the means, which are always killing. And that's the really important thing I feel may have been missed - 40k is a game of killing each other as horribly as possible. Perhaps we're inured to it but, short of GW illustrating the horror of chainswords and meltas in age restricted rulebooks, it's easy to forget that. Creating a Good Guy faction would be saying "these guys are murdering for a good cause so it's ok to be like them", making an in-game philosophy that actually attempts to represent and cultivate a real world morality rather than satirising immorality through grotesque extremity. As it is, no one can justify admiring the Imperium's politics without either admitting they're a Nazi or that they haven't read the background properly. The 40k kids books are all about plucky adventurers fighting nasty stuff. 99.99999% of the kids reading the books will grow up and discover the true horror of the setting. The others... there's not much you can do about them. They pop up no matter what you do. I don't think 40k encourages them, I think it does a good job of showing us what happens if we let them take control.
The funny part is 40k's imperium might be a correct depiction of how a pan-galatic uni-species empire would work realistically *under the condition that FTL travel is unreliable and AI is strictly outlawed* For a civilization spamming through the entire galaxy, one colony might have such a huge cultural and maybe even biological difference comparing to a colony to the other end of galaxy that if a coherent government could hold those planets together it must be extremely oppressive, because we know throughout real history, an oppressive empire exists when a government tries to control larger territory than its technological limit But again, all just be set upon the condition that *1) AI is strictly outlawed so every work must be completed by human hard labor and 2) FTL is so unreliable that a planet will be isolated for centuries without being noticed and maybe 3) gods could physically manifest if enough people believe them*
That's basically the reason the Imperium is a mess and mirrors the end of the roman empire in terms of 'this political body is trying to hold onto *_far_* too much land for it's communications and transportation ability.' I for one actually like that, because frankly the reality is even if Chaos wasn't a thing, trying to manage an empire on that scale with so many desperate cultures and such horrible communications and transport ability? That's insanity. That is literally impossible no matter how loose or tight the reigns are. It's the hubris of the GEoM to even attempt it. Even if the Webway project had worked, that would only alleviate the problem somewhat, not fix it. It's Alexander the Great's 'keep conquering until I run out of land' foolishness... which reflects human nature and history.
The suspension of disbelief is your ability to put aside what you believe to be possible, or true, or your own set of ideas about how the universe works, and exchange them to something else for the sake of fiction. Immersion takes this to an even greater degree, where you can actually feel like the world itself is real, and you are a part of it. The point is, the world you insert yourself into functions differently than the world you know and exist in currently, in every way, including physically as well as morally. A lot of people like to immerse themselves into 40k, and feel like they're a part of the universe. Enough said.
![Diggy Graves - Red Vineyard [Official Lyric Video]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/8Ro085T0mnQ/mqdefault.jpg)
This would also be an excellent way to introduce one of my favorite aspects of Rogue Trader back into modern 40k: Non-Chaos Renegade marines. Have them be isolated marines who got trapped defending various planets, and whose pyschic conditioning degraded as the Imperium didn't heed their prayers for aid, becoming more like the humans they defend and acting as local sheriffs, perhaps still loving the Emperor, but finding the modern Imperium to be an abomination that abandoned them and their people, and thus going Renegade without supergluing spikes and severed knobs all over their armor.
You should be able to make such a renegade Space Marine army with a regular Space Marines codex
YESSSS THIS!
my celestial lions are doing this now cool rad thanks
"...acting as local sheriffs"
Just Googled '40k space marine cowboy', and was NOT disappointed!
Are the Soul Drinkers not still non-chaos renegades?
Isn't some of the irony that the Imperium isn't a necessary evil? Humanity during the golden age and even dark ages didn't need to be so repressive. The imperium tells us it's necessary because it served their interests and silences anyone who says otherwise just like a true big bad government would.
Yes but also No, the Imperium of Man is essential an Extreme Response to the Age of Strife and the Subsequent issues faced by Humanity after it especially from the limiting POV of the Big E,
AI was Banned because it Rebelled, Xenos are to be destroyed because they took advantage of Humanity's Weakened state, the Planets of Humanity were divided and persue their own interests and finally the Chaos Gods want to feed on Humanity,
In Response the Big E Made the Imperium of Man a Xenophobic, Totalitarian, Anti Religious and Accelerationist State in response to this, at this point the Big E Wants to Solve these issues by literally and Metaphorically "Evolving" Mankind at Any Cost be it Moral or Lives Lost the Emperor Calously Didn't care,
After the HH an Ultra Conservative Mindset set in, Thanks to the Emperor's Hard Handedness His Cult of Personality transformed into a Religion, His Words are now Used and Abused by Many Parties in the Imperium, this Ultra Conservative Response to the HH while not Completely Unjustified is an enevitable response by a Society that Saw its Near Destruction Twice.
In Short while the IOM has some Merit in what they do and did, its ultimately less of a Measured and Calculated Response and more them Trying to fight fire with fire or more basically the IOM said to itself "why should I care to be Better when everyone I see is Bad, in fact I should be Worse because it insulates me".
Tell that to the hive fleet.
@@Chuck9852 bringing up the nids is irrelevant for they weren't even in the galaxy until the LAST 2 CENTURIES OF THE SETTING like if that somehow jusfties the imperium xenociding for the last 10 thousand years other unrelated aliens.
The Hammer and Bolter episode “In the Garden of Ghosts” does a wonderful job of portraying the Imperium as it seems through the eyes of another faction. They didn’t even hedge their bets by making the Space Marines Flesh Tearers or Black Templars or some other “disreputable” chapter. No, they went right for the jugular and made them the shining Ultramarines; bastions of courage and honour.
The scene of the dreadnaught mowing down civilians with a weapon that could take out a light tank while chanting about the "emperors mercy" is just, yeah... Thats how the imperium should be depicted.
Also i do think "Bound for Greatness" is a pretty good critique of the imperium too. Showing that the institutions that are supposed to be responsible for quashing the influence of chaos can easily be pawns of the dark gods and be the means by which a planet succumbs to chaos corruption.
Too bad that hammer and bolter has the quality of a powerpoint presentation
@@marcusaaronliaogo9158 To each their own, I guess. To me it has a "Liquid Television" vibe (if you're old enough to remember). Either way, its strength is not in the artwork but in the stories.
That was quite confusing to me though? Why would the ultras attack a civilian world if not provoked? Especially when gulliman is literally meeting with eldar to advise him on the imperiums future?
@@ataerus3066 because they're intolerant fascists? And in the real world, fascists do dumb self-defeating stuff all the time. Operation Barbarossa, for example.
Follow-up: how cool would it be that the 2 missing primarchs never did anything wrong nor heretical, only they peeked beyond the veil: there can be a viable human society outside the Imperium and that's why they were executed/held in the Black Cells
Adding to that: what if that’s why most Primarchs can’t recall anything about them. Emps being Emps. What if Russ - we know how he values self reliance and independence and also how he only looks as being a savage- actually spared them - seeing some weight to their arguments but staying loyal to Emps- and let them go? What if he eventually left everything to check on them/ally with them to fight Chaos?
That's a great idea. Maybe they were even sent by the Emperor to set up some kind of fail-safe in case the Imperium gets too self destructive.
@@alejandrorp5160 this doesn't work, Canon stories have had the other Primarchs talk about how the 2 "missing" Primarchs had suffered a horrible fate. And Horus even tried to dare speak their names to Malcador but failed to do so before Malcador knocked him down. So with current canon every Primarch knows what happened to the 2 of them and it was likely Russ killed them.
I always liked to think that one of the missing two had landed on a world not dominated by humans but he was raised by a now extinct alien species. Meanwhile the other one landed on a world were humans and aliens lived together in harmony, raised even by a mixed species family. Now this actually wouldn't have been much of an issue in of itself for the Emperor, so long as these two wayward sons pledged loyalty to him and got to crusading in his golden name and etc. No, it was because both ill fated Primarchs utterly rejected the Imperium's human supremacist rhetoric and the mankind's manifest destiny narrative bullsh*t, instead both wanted to create similar interstellar civilizations were all species could live together in peace. Basically they wanted to do a t'au empire of multiple species before they even discovered fire but were humans and aliens would be on equal footing. One of them may have even suggested that the Emperor should create new Primarchs NOT based on humans but on the various other species across the galaxy to help further their dreams of a hopeful future.
This did NOT go over well with the Emperor, hence their untimely deaths!
You know the meme about "Magnus did nothing wrong"? Well, the reason he became a Daemon Prince of Tzeentch was because Horus intercepted the Emperor's message, telling the Space Wolves to burn Prospero when Magnus was meant to stand trial on Terra. Imagine an offshoot/renegade warband of the OG Thousand Sons who weren't present on Prospero, and thus not subjected to the Rubric of Ahriman.
There are already Blackshields who were once part of the Emperor's Children, so a greater focus on that would make for some excellent storytelling!
Hang on a minute...
The path Ian suggests, of a greater emphasis on splintered human societies cut off from the Imperium that develop their own societies and way of doing things (and possibly even their own distinct genetic evolutions which leads them to becoming, over the millennia, their own distinct sub-species) rings a bell for me...
40k HAD that. But they got Squatted.
Time to bring back the Wee Grumpy Bastards!
The Great Crusade as well had an abundance of lost human worlds and it never finished so in theory there may be a lot still out there. I liked that about the first Horus Heresy books.
@@stevepirie8130 It was true when I got into 40k back in first edn. It's probably why I'm trying to build a separatist guard army, because I just like being contrarian and want to play the 40k I remember as a kid 🤣
I mean sure but by the designer’s own admission the squats only fit in 1st edition an by second were a little too goofy and didn’t really have any growth for a line. I like them as auxiliary units*coughbringbackroughriders* but as a stand alone I don’t think they would work well.
@Indigo Rodent we just need to petition to make the new squat niche be flatpacked furniture and fairly priced cafeteria meatballs.
Love it
What annoys me is the Tau were a good chance to make not good guys, But a coalition of alien races working together and having other factions unable to just destroy them despite there age as a civ and size. But then james workshop pressed the grimderp button
Apparently, standing not even a slimmer chance to survive threats thousands of times bigger than the size of T'au Empire is not dark enough for a lot of people.
tbf, even in 3rd edition, there are some subtle hints to the T'au Empire being not entirely good, maybe 90% okay and 10% "that's kinda sussy". But then again, I doubt people who whine about the T'au not being dark could sniff out those grey signs anyway.
See the tau empire is still a "good faction" in the WH40K setting. Just... Dont take it from 40k and put somewhere else. They would be objectively the most evil faction.
gw bashed the tau a lil too much imo, they shouldve stuck to keeping tau as the "straight man" of warhammer 40k
@@anti-mate407 tbf, the universe itself is hostile to these ideals. Its hard to keep a straight man in a universe that can and will devour you given the chance.
@@blade8741 thats just a cheap excuse gw uses to be lazy
I found out that plenty of people were hoping the Imperium Nihilus would be this "free for all" realm that you're describing in the video, and it is an untapped source of interesting stories and factions. It would allow people to turn their Imperial armies into independent factions without need for a different army to be made by GW. Kind of like how in Warhammer Fantasy, the Border Princes were a way for people to make their own little factions out of existing kits and armies.
Still, an actual Rebel faction could also be an interesting introduction. I truly believe that the Squats might be a very good contender for that. In fact, the fluff from Rogue Trader and second edition kind of directed them into that archetype and would be a very nice way reintroducing them into the setting.
I am ABSOLUTELY FINE with the idea of Squats returning as the closest-to-good faction!
@@ArbitorIan why does the old space marine shooting an ork feel like meme potential
@@ArbitorIan me too 🙂
Maybe rouge traders too. Sure they can be greedy and out for themselves but that would give them reason to break away and fight the imperium
@@paulyg405 to be fair, those are the squats that have been included in the imperium. The homeworlds and their ships are potentially still out there - isolated, independent and so very, very dwarfy.
You can imagine it now. An imperial ship, spat out of the warp, all the consoles fried bar the astropath, still barely hanging into life and sanity.
And then, a single message is received... Or rather, a ongoing series of messages.
*Diggy Diggy Hole intensifies*
We kind of already have this, with the Votann and the T'au. The other options don't HAVE to be human, as long as it's close enough.
I really think the main issue is that everything is written from an Imperial perspective. Even if what you suggest here happened, it wouldn't do much good unless we actually got some stories where those other factions are the protagonists.
This actually echoes an idea I had for a faction based around some 30K models but in 40K: What's the Imperium's greatest nightmare? A functioning human civilization, who'd backslid technologically as the Imperium had, but whose society was directly derived from the pre-age-of-strife human federation - and that was just a bit too big, or in a spot that was too strategically awkward, for the Imperium to squash. I had them on the trailing edge of the halo stars, and they were acting as a bulwark against a Slaugth empire that the inquisition has decided the Imperium is not (yet) ready to tangle with, especially given current events.
That sounds a little like the Tau?
@@Philip271828 The "Join us or get extinct" Tau?
Maybe the people that are hidden behind the Cicatrix Maledictum would eventually become this.
Reminds me of a quote I read from a director a few years ago to the effect of "It's impossible to make an anti-war film focusing on the soldiers. When the audience sees people trying to do something hard they will eventually start rooting for them" which is the opposite effect that he was aiming for. Since Imperium humans are the POV characters for most of the fiction it's hard to make compelling fiction without encouraging the audience/reader/player to identify with the characters and indirectly their goals.
Current Necromunda lore mentions hive leadership meeting with Eldar and Squat ambassadors. There's Ork mercenaries. It's clear that there's plenty of "heretical" behavior happening within the Imperium of man. It's just not mentioned enough in the codexes and a large portion of the Black Library material.
Bring back cross faction allies, so that we see things like Guardsman bolstered by Ork troops etc.
Warhammer is a wargame, the "home front" often takes a backseat. It's not a game about all the things leading up to apocalyptic battles (or just a squad of marines sitting on a farm to guard it).
WFRP grew in parallell with Warhammer Fantasy Battles, an RPG needs to look at things at a lower level.
"I'm the good guy" said Eisenhorn whilst psychic suicide bombing a Café Nero in a very heroic fashion, whilst keeping a pet demon in his pantry.
Yup, but no bad guy thinks they are the bad guy, people thinking he's the good guy miss the point (just as some do with the setting in general)
Weellllllll. He was kinda ok in Xenos, right? RIGHT?
@@davemeggison4283 Indeed, its not so much a fall from grace is it is a pivot into a different brand of madness. Eisenhorn is a great example of how unlikable people can be very compelling.
@@briochepanda Also a great example that the protagonist is not necessarily the hero
@@ArbitorIan Oh yeah, he was great when he was just trying to preserve the structures of the oppressive, xenophobic, totalitarian Empire that subjugates quadrillions, as soon as he started messing around with demons he went right of the deep end though.... Great videos by the way mate
I've often wondered if the reason the Squats were so easily removed from 40k wasn't because they were too similar to the Imperial Guard as a faction, but because they were one of the few races that weren't demonstrably "bad." They just wanted to be left alone so they could dig holes and play with their train sets. 🤣
Interesting point, there really wasn't anything wrong or suspicious about them, didn't buy into the superstition around technology (back when the superstition was objectively wrong before machine spirits moved from a silly belief to an actual thing) they weren't a shadow of their former glory like the Eldar of mankind. They didn't like Orks and Eldar but for good reason and really who would? Definitely the most sane and reasonable faction.
Today I've realised that I am a tall squat... 😂
@@cheesemarine Look up a certain Terry Pratchett character called Carrot Ironfoundersson. I think you'll like him.
I mean they did have some serious prejudice against the entire races of Eldar and Orks
@@danielmorgenstern3942 Yes, but that come from the Eldar leaving them high and dry when the Orks made a sudden attack on there home world. it was especially bad given that the Eldar AND the Orks were major trading partners with the Squart up until then. So really its less prejudice as more a long held grudge.
I think a good first step would be to add a faction where the leader was some sort of travelling merchant with a retinue of security to ensure that the goods don't get taken. We could name the hypothetical 10th edition after this faction, a Warhammer 40,000 Rogue trader if you will.
Rogue trader founded empires that officially succeed from and resisted re-conquest by the Imperium would be awesome to read about!
@@navilluscire2567 There is an official one The Severan Dominate. They have a very Roman aesthetic. They're not much less authoritarian thank the Imperium but they are independent. They were made for the Fantasy Flight ttrpg though and they've since lost the licence so they probably aren't coming back.
There is an imperial merchant marine. They are not rogue traders, they don't have fancy writs giving them rights like that. But they are the ones moving basic goods around a sector or subsector within established imperial space.
Ships are hugely expensive things so only large merchant combines own them. These guys aren't a full military faction but they have their escort ships and household troops.
@@NoNoNah306 You get to fight them in Only War. They're one of the possible warfronts of the Calixis sector I think. They are practically a little pocket empire holding out for a time while the Imperium deals with a constant array of threats.
One thing you could do in Only War was to play in the low-priority warzones where you and four other regiments are all that's available and you're doing mop-up actions or garrison duty.
@@SusCalvin sorry that was a very elaborate setup for a joke about Games Workshop reusing the same names over and over.
The annoying thing is that some of the other factions, notably the T'au, get the opposite treatment to the imperium: highlighting the bad they do while ignoring the comparatively strong justifications.
I don't think you can justify the Etherials. They come across as very creepy and don't care what others T'au think or feel.
@@silver4831
And the Primarchs and the Emperor do? They all pretty much don't give a FUCK about humans as people nor care for their consent, they wouldn't hesitate to destroy or kill anyone who refused to bend the knee to them, we've seen this happen multiple times.
@@navilluscire2567 Least they have some emotions. The books make the Etherials without emotion and some freaky hive mind.
I highly recommend crisis of faith, it's a great example of how the T'au society may look nicer on the outside but isn't really.
@@silver4831
And the Imperium is somehow nicer on the inside once you get past the outside appearance of a bunch of hyper religious, skull obsessed, militaristic, human supremacist, (even though said empire is ruled by transhuman freakshows) genocidal maniacs? Oh the Primarchs have emotions? That's wonderful, tell me how well did that turn out for the trillions that died at their hands?
@@silver4831
And without emotions? Literally one of the favorite things for some of the writers to do to the ethereals is to make these sopposedly super intelligent, thoughtful beings act like arrogant, oblivious, petty humans because *"ha ha, T'au are so naive and dumb".* Even though they're sopposedly a ever advancing interstellar civilization that isn't filled with superstitious idiots and are basically always gathering information about the wider galaxy to the point they should basically know all about the other major players in the galaxy yet somehow the few instances they made mistakes (most of which happened centuries ago from the current most time point) is somehow to forever condemn them to the naive corner, nevermind the the stupid mistakes the other factions have made (and continue to make!) despite sopposedly being OOOHH so wise apparently.
At first, I was like, "What are you saying about my favourite setting?" **Angry noise**
But then I listened to your ideas, and there is definitely a core of truth and possibilities in it.
My suggestion would be to stop focusing 99% of all attention and promotion material on the Spacemarines. And spread it out evenly among all the races. Comparing the life of an eldar civilian (which we have limited info on) with an oppressed human or human among the Tau. More stories about the lives and troubles of "regular" people (human, mutant, and xeno) in the 40k might be a way to also poke holes in the "Imperium is good".
Like you said alternative and variable viewpoints are needed.
The sad thing is, Space Marines sell, so GW being one of THE most terribly greedy companies, focuses on where the money is. Notice how even when other races are getting their releases...there's still like 2 or 3 Space Marine sets coming out as well.
When you play the tabletop RPG, the marine chapter deep lore is virtually useless.
The players are chasing some git and she bolts in a truck. They want to know if they can get a techno-gothic taxi or not. So now we got to figure out what civilian transport looks like.
I have always felt that the "Imperial" Knights fit this mold aswell, if you look closely at their lore the Questoris Familia aren't truly Imperial citizens. They are actually (extremely) long term mercenaries bound by oaths and on the Questoris Mechanicus side by blood connections more so than law and if the Imperium or Mechanicus failed to uphold their end of the bargan these oaths would be broken and they wouldn't have a reason to fight for them; not to mention they are technically the last remaining remnants of pre imperial humanity and have the ancestral memories/spirits to prove it due to the mechanisms behind Knight bonding.
The Imperial knights, basically human mecha suits and their pilots are some of the most interesting parts of the lore, there's a lot you can do with them!
Also imagine some mecha knights and t'au crisis suits duking it out only to put that on hold to...fight of an Imperium expeditionary force set to reintegrate the world their own back into their fold.
“We must be the good guys, we eat corpse bars”. Also the Mitchell/Webb skull uniforms thing applies.
This may also be a problem fed by the disproportionate weight in the model range given to imperial stuff. And the army equals species equals race thing, whilst by no means unique to this fantasy setting, does rather limit possibilities. Cf. Late era Pratchett, with its inter-species couples and profess towards an industrialism underpinned by the value of labour, not capital. Anyway, more tales of elder/Ork throuples farming as retirement projects. Heck, there’d be a fun story to be told of how the Tannith got on as peacetime settlers at the end of the Sabbat crusade, something beyond the usual ptsd everywhere. I can’t imagine the imperium’s version of the va is great at augmetic upkeep, for example.
Also,worth noting - the commissars’ origins and habit of shooting anyone who turns around are Stalinist. Plus the Red Army’s doctrine of piling men at objectives regardless of losses, equipment or alternatives is reflected in quite a lot of the black library Imp guard stuff I’ve read. Autocrats in fascist drag with a theocratic underpinning might be more accurate.
Important point here and a reason we shouldn't launch right towards buzzwords like 'fascism' simply because we see something dehumanising we don't like.
Many aspects of the Imperium are indeed functionally more Stalinist, and Nazism as the hallmark of fascism valued the individual.
@@WK-47 to be clear, there are plenty of bits of the imperium that draw on fascist ideology too. Space Marines as Nietzscheian supermen, perhapß (my German nihilism is a bit rusty). More specifically a society-wide lionisation of military service and centrality of arms to the economy. Weirdly it doesn’t have the focus on traditional gender/family roles (female soldiers allowed, though they also were in starship troopers). Possibly as a legacy of its 80s origins, it‘s also a deeply heteronormative setting. It is somewhat depressing to think that in 30,000 odd years, one man and one woman will still be the normal childcare arrangement.
I also wonder to what extent the decision to draw design cues from military hardware from the first half of c20 was a result of being able to greeble on existing kit moulds (rhino is a backwards ww1 mk ii, there’s the ork plane that‘s just a mig 15). Makes me wonder if the aesthetic and thus the bumph was shaped by porting in designs from elsewhere that imply ideologies.
@@bobbler42 space marines are more Teutonic warrior monks than Nietzschean ubermensch, but Nietzsche wasn't a fascist either tbh
@@bobbler42 also the countries who most lionize their militaries are p much all socialist with the exception of WW2's most notorious badman so I don't think it's really accurate to attribute that specifically to fascism. There are stories involving other, nonstandard mating or child rearing setups btw including some vat grown caste systems like in one of the Primarch novels: AFAIK it's not really seen as special or remarkable in universe but probably is about as rare as it is now because human reproductive instincts would likely not have changed much in 38k years if there were endless trillions of us on earth alone and endless trillions more across a million worlds: the non-standard setups simply cant match the fecundity and economical efficiency of two hetero normies bumping uglies the old fashioned way.
Hmm, I always thought the point of the 40k universe was that there _are_ no good guys. Giving a more positive and hopeful alternative to the Imperium basically contradicts the basic elements of the story.
Right ?! I dont know where all this shit has come from recently. I got into Warhammer coz it was not like the other sci-fi with good guys and bad guys like star trek, star wars. 40K was grim dark, it all went to shit for humanity and they are just about holding on, as shit to gets worse and worse. Why does it suddenly have to start being nice coz of a few randoms you dont agree with ?
@@brokenhalo2001 I mean the setting has already been doing it in lore. With Guilliman returning, the invention of Primaris, the Emperor possessing Lil' G and proving that he truly is conscious and alive, the plans to fully revive him.. It's all looking incredibly hopeful for the Imperium.
Love when one of my favorite RUclipsrs mentions another of my favorite RUclipsrs :). Lindsay Ellis is great
I sorta like the idea that the Imperium is kinda the only option, but only because by its own volition it destroyed every other possible option, seems to be what they’re building up at the moment
Great video, Ian! Thanks for sharing some of the history and your analysis. I'm watching this video two years later, as I get back into 40k, and I'm curious if the 10th edition ended up heading in the direction you've suggested, which does sound rather compelling. When I played 40k about a decade ago, I crafted my army's back story to fall into a similar place to one of your suggestions of space marines allying with Tau against a common enemy, then growing away from the Imperium in the process.
If I get the time and money together to collect again, I'd like to do an army of Guardsmen, Tau, some Eldar and a few Astartes, that have broken away from their own factions and are doing their own thing. No gods, no masters.
I can see Imperium Nihilus splintering and having Dante have to deal with sheperding the new factions into a rough alliance to maintain a grip on the other side of the rift, that makes sense. I don't think they would really manage that well though if left to their own devices, maybe prior to 40k, in the time between the current setting and the Horus Heresy it could have worked but nowadays there's just too many threats. I think another promising choice is to have Guillimain continue his work of reforming the Imperium while also having the Imperium begin to soften some of it's positions simply out of dire need. Specifically with regard to xenos. There is basically an alliance between Guilliman and the Ynnari but not too much has come of it lately, showcasing this a bit more and having the relationship formalized such that the Imperium and those Eldar aligned with the the Ynnari reach some diplomatic agreements to not screw each other over and cooperate goes a long way towards moving past xenophobia and endless war. As does an agreement with the farsight enclaves. You'd still have the main Tau Empire and most of the Eldar as potential enemies but some permanent alliances would start to form out of necessity. The discovery of a world or collection of worlds occupied by a surviving remnant of the dark age of technology human civilization has also been posed by some where you see humanity as it used to be.
I love this idea, and to be fair, in the Dark Heresy / Imperium Maledictum games I run I always have the motif that there are better ways than just "conform or die, heretic". Many of my players love 40k but their escapism isn't behaving like fascist tropes, so they tend to want to be good as a form of rebellion and exploring how that's possible is what they enjoy.
I think part of the problem is GW has taken the setting more and more seriously. Rogue Trader was an obvious grab bag of popular sci-fi ideas and very clearly didn't take itself serious. The Imperium was obviously satire.
I understand as 40K became more its own unique thing that faded and needed to a bit but I feel the whole thing takes itself way too seriously (except maybe orks). Plus lots people get exposed to the setting by games which usually focus on the battlefield and fighting and don't give any indication what those factions you are playing are really like.
We need more 80's satire in 40k.
Exactly this if the setting stayed as obvious parody you'd have to be impossibly daft to agree with the imperium
@@BulkBrogan. clearly we need an official mini release for Obiwan Sherlock Clousseau. If anything says don't take this stuff too seriously...
Owlcat Games' Rogue Trader did a pretty good job of showing the ridiculous side of the Imperium in the midst of sector-shaking events, but yes, compared to say, Dawn of War or Space Marine 2 I don't think it was as popular. At the very least though, they definitely seemed to get the satire.
Okay, so your proposition is make 40k more like Rogue Trader again, right? I'm on it. I think this video, more than any other, shows how much you are knowledgeable and how much you cara about the setting, congratulations, man!
With that said, I've always been puzzled at the fact that we don't see a lot of non Imperium, non Chaos, non Mutant rebel factions in the game. It would be really cool if we had a sort of "Rebel Alliance" Faction, you don't even need to make a whole complete line of models for it, just make them use a lot of Imperium vehicles and weapons, almost like the Genestealer Cults.
Also, I would love to see some Gue'vesa models (is it spelled right?). Heck I would even go one step ahead and make the Tau try to sort of reverse engineer geneseed and make their own, obviously inferior, Gu'vesa space marines (I don't know, maybe they just start collecting geneseed from dead marines, which would make the Imperium completely mad about them).
Yep, that's how to spell it. And yes, the lack of Gue'vesa on the tabletop is a crying shame.
A reason why there are no anti-Imperium human factions is because it would use the same codex as the Astra Militarum except for removing Commissars and the Navy. That's the gaming reason at least. The background reason is that the Imperial Guard is deliberately raised and kept separate from the Imperial Navy so if a rebel army is created, it cannot leave its planet.
@@blindlobster I see, maybe they could some sort of extra regiment option in an Imperial Guard codex, like, you would have Armageddon, Cadians, Krieg, etc, and then the option to run your IG as rebels, at least something like that
Also, it's not grimdark... a "Rebel Alliance" would be good guys, as he says, "fighting the good fight". There is no good fight, and that's what makes 40k great.
@@nielsstilson9834 I mean, no one said that they should be good guys, I just find awkward that if you're a human you're either inside the Imperium or under Chaos with the GSC, without any sort of in-between factions represented in the game itself, even though we are well aware that there are human pirates and other stuff like that in the fringes of the Galaxy.
So yeah, maybe a Rebel Alliance in 40k would be more like a bunch of just regular humans (no chaos, no crazy mutants) scoundrels, pirates, and smugglers, just wanting to their own evil stuff instead of the Imperium's evil stuff.
Also, sometimes you can have too much of a good thing: too grim and too dark will end up sorta of justifying the whole existence of the Imperium, just like Ian said, and just like he sorta said as well, you can break it up a little with some more nuance what's currently presented. I would definitely say that there's some lack of self awareness in 40k, as far as marketing material and what's presented in the codices go.
From the Baneblade/Shadowsword books, I really quite like what happened with the planetary governor's viewpoint at the start of one of them. Receiving an Imperial delegation requiring more soldiers/resources, and the governor gives them a powerful speech about how they're totally bled dry and suffering and just can't keep doing it. The Imperial ambassador just refuses to listen, and that starts the route to war.
Granted they did then fall to Chaos and blah, blah, blah, but I felt that viewpoint had worked really well to show how oppressive the Imperium is.
This shows a problem with how it's currently done. Every single time someone rebels against the Imperium, they fall to Chaos. This continues to justify the Imperium's response to any dissidents. Instead of being quick to violence and overly paranoid, they're usually potrayed as being right, actually.
Just once I want a greedy self-serving governor-turned-seperatist to be just that.
@@RaptorShadow Oh for sure. I think the plot of "The Taros Campaign" was really good in this regard, showing how the T'au were able to use sneaky gifts and diplomacy to slowly turn a planet from the Imperium.
To be honest I've never seen the imperium as Fascist, more like Space Feudalism. I see it as a fallen Empire that is desperately trying to hold on to its territories and this allows corrupt and despotic rulers to carry on unchallenged so long as quotas are met. in spite of this there are still genuinely heroic characters, and how these said characters deal with the realities of the setting are what make it interesting.
I’ve also seen it as more feudalistic than fascistic.
I see where you're coming from, but Ian's point about them being coded fascist still remains. As a new comer to all this, my first impressions were very much "ok so they're straight up Nazis". It's not just dress, the whole fixation on purity and absolutism has very little to do with feudalism and everything to do with fascism. Feudalism is a set of economic relations, and describing them as such just skirts all the more overly fascist sociocultural aspects of the Imperium.
There's a quote floating around about this, don't know who it's by but: "The Imperium does not survive because it is horrible, it survives despite the fact that it is horrible."
It is incredibly easy for GW to bring in a human faction that isn't hell bent on exterminating anything that isn't them. You could take your own custom knight houses, build militias using necromunda kits. Lasguns could be salvaged from dead IG or family heirlooms.
I really like the idea you present of the Great Rift getting worse and splitting off more of the Imperium's former territory. You don't reference it directly, but it's similar to the Age of Strife following the birth of Slaanesh, which adds to the credibility of it as a plot point. I've also been keen generally to see more done narratively with the Imperium Nihilus, since that's currently underexplored.
As has been said ever since Warhammer+ went live GW have done themselves a disservice by putting all the animation behind a paywall. One of my favourite episodes so far of Hammer and Bolter has been "In the Garden of Ghosts". It really turns up the Imperial bastardry to 11 in that show and was fantastic for it.
The first episode of the Exodite sort of did that too, when the imperial fleet arrives it's like some looming monstrous presence.
@@mrmagpiepromotions yeah. Along with the narration labelling the T'au as naive
@@Deadjim17 These filthy xenos should be grateful that the imperium is putting them out of their misery.
The thing is, 40k is very very much founded in 1980s British culture. Now it’s gone global, it has increasingly found an audience who just don’t have that same sense of irony
While I agree with the desire to reduce the Wehrmachtboos from the fandom, and can see the obvious focus of removing the "Imperium is a necessary evil" angle from the lore, I think that would ultimately do more harm than good. I'll speak to a second reason - that your storyline would just set up the Imperium as a martyr "see what happens these people will abandon you in your darkest hour" narrative - at the end of this TEDtalk, but to start with, I think part of the parody/cynicism at 40k's heart is that both sides are right - the Imperium is a self-justifying fascist state that is clearly manipulating citizens into believing it's their only hope, and yet that doesn't change the fact that the Imperium is actually right about that, regardless.
The universe is portrayed in 40k as logistically being simply too large for things like democracy, free will, and such to interfere with the need for vast armies and vast supplies for said armies to be amassed, so that the Imperium doesn't care how individual worlds operate as long as the expendable life keeps flowing. Even in the perfect ideal outcome of the Great Crusade, the physical size of the galaxy precludes any meaningful level of efficient and consistent administrating of the Imperium. So the Imperium will always need to be fascist and oppressive in the sense that, ultimately, it will always have to choose to let local regimes do whatever they want as long as it doesn't stop the troops and ammo and food from being delivered - and if their evils are seen as actually helping that happen, so much the better. And in the context of 40k, the cynical reality is that there really is something worse than the mortal fascism of High Lords and Inquisitors, and that's the immortal fascism of Chaos and the genocidal tendencies of most alien races.
In other words, I think your argument is largely sound, but maybe a bit too dependent on reading the existence of Imperium propaganda and self-justification as proof that the message itself is a lie. Part of the deeply cynical satire of 40k is that such things are also often the truth. Yes, the authorities clearly do not have your best interest in heart and yes you're just a worthless cog in a great machine, but guess what, that's actually the galactic truth no matter what. The universe is simply too big, too lethal, too violent for anyone to matter, not even the transhuman ones.
The real problem, IMO, is what you alluded to early on - the willingness to make Marines a poster boy "good" faction to make the game fit into the standard Saturday morning cartoon narratives of GIJoe, He-Man, Transformers, etc. The "new" Black Templars were an imperfect first step, but I think effectively retconning the Marines back to what they originally were - little more than traumatized child soldiers operating as deputized war criminals - would go a long way to 'fixing' the appeal of seeing them and the greater Imperium as the 'good' guys. But this would somewhat involve rolling back a lot of the themes that GW likes to lean into - eg the Blood Angels as Renaissance-esque artisans, the Space Wolves as noble Viking savages, etc., which unfortunately I don't see GW ever being willing to really do.
Also, I think it's important to point something else that you didn't touch on. Part of the appeal of fascism (and classism and racism and sexism and most forms of bigotry) is that the bigot assumes they're part of the side that benefits. They never accept that they could still be one of the have-nots or on the 'wrong' side of their hate. Here in the United States, for example, most European Americans (eg Southern, Eastern, Irish - essentially Catholics and Orthodox Christians in general) weren't considered to be "White" until less than a hundred years ago, when post Civil War racism needed to reinforce the racism towards and segregation of Black Americans by firmly bringing otherwise second-class European Americans onto the side of what we now call WASPs - White Anglo-Saxon Protestants. The irony being most modern US racists themselves wouldn't have been considered "white" by the historical bigots that they idolize, even relatively 'modern' ones like HP Lovecraft and the Klan. So they embrace their racism under the belief that they would have, will, and always will benefit from it as a 'white' person.
Back to 40k, the point being - I think if the larger narrative focused more on showing just how crushing the Imperium is to the average citizen, and how *you* (dear gamer) would almost certainly be one of those being crushed, rather than the Baneblade commander or Imperial Fist captain or Vindicaire Assassin or Sister of Battle initiate doing the crushing - I think that narrative shift would also help greatly. Because I think the other flaw in trying to Balkanize the Imperium to show it isn't the only option is that it'd only add another layer of martyr complex to the Imperiumboos.
In other words, the people you're targeting to get out of the hobby or change their mindset wouldn't see this as proof the Imperium as wrong, but as proof that the Imperium was right - that most humans are traitors and backstabbers who can't be trusted to be loyal to you as shown by all these new human empires and societies abandoning the Imperium in its darkest hour. They would cling to their Imperial armies and make mental notes of the people - of the kinds and types of people - flocking to all these new more progressive or liberal human armies. Which makes me think this would ultimately only make the issue worse, not better.
YMMV, of course.
It depends on how it's presented. The way I understood it wasn't planets leaving the imperium, it's the imperium leaving planets to fend for themselves because they don't have the resources to deal with the threats. And that's something the imperium already does. It picks which planets matter and does its best to control them. The only major difference is an increase of focus on these abandoned sectors. So I don't think it feeds into the -ists narrative or plays into the Imperium is a martyr that you're claiming.
I’d just love to see RG proclaiming the Imperial Truth, the Ecclesiarchy being none too pleased about it and the Indomitus Crusade being declared the Indomitus Heresy
They could also focus on humans who willingly join other factions. Could have a reasonable chaos vassal empire outside the eye of terror, or release a Gu'Vesa lead Tau Auxileria codex, or release models to show off canonical human mercenaries who work for the Dark Eldar, a genestealer patriarch who doesn't call the hive fleet and builds a new home for his Brood (Arguably already Hivecult), etc
Showing that humans have more alternatives to the Imperium shows the horrible grimdarkness that the Imperium is wholly needless and exists only due to its own weight.
Problem with your suggestion is the Emperor basically killed off all of the alternatives that could of worked simply because he was so arrogant he wanted his way to be the only way. In one of the Horus Heresy books he kind of hints to this as one of the reason he created the dark angels legion during a conversation with Lion El'Johnson.
So yes...The Emperor was a REAL asshole in the setting, but also one that was akin to a highlander style 'Immortal' that never dies.
Something that's come to mind whilst watching this is a mod for hearts of Iron called the New order. For context, hearts of iron is a WW2 grand strategy game focused on controling a nation-state from 1936 onwards, and much like warhammer it has a issue of attracting a signifigant number of far-right (and authoritarian left) people.
The new order is an overhaul mod set in the 60's, in a world where the various axis forces won WW2, and the German Reich is now the most powerful and prestigeious faction on the planet. However, much like the imperium, it is a hollow, rotting, dying state that brings untold misery to millions of people and is fundermentally unable to hold it's self together, eventually collapsing into a civil war after the death of Adolf hitler. The new order is a deeply interesting world to me, because whilst the world it presents is one consumed by fascism and totalitarianism, the creators of it utterly disavow the ideologies presented within this world, and much of the writing is focused on both showing both the awfulness and misery of fascism, and also showing how alternative forces still exist and struggle, and are fighting to present an alternative to Nazism.
Obviously the two settings are not a 1-to-1 comparison, but I think there's a lot of potential ideas that could be mined from TNOs premise and would map incredibly well to the setting of 40k. A key example of this to me is the presence of Albert Speer within the setting, who acts as something of a 'moderate' nazi with the aim to pass reforms to the Reich - but only to allow it to continue to exist and to quell the disent and corruption within it. Ultimately he still wants to perpetuate this awful, horrific system, and I think there's a potential for some really interesting parallels with Guilliman here.
How many of Guilliman's reforms are done in the name of what is right and trying to sincirely make the imperium a better place, and how many are done out of nessessity and begrudingly for it's survival? I think this is a great oppertunity to interject some grey into his charecterisation and something that should ultimately come down to personal interpritation, and being a great demostration of reform vs revolution when compared to some of the independant break away states.
C'mon Codex: Renegades and Heretics, 10th Edition!
When I was writing the back story for my chapter, I had them explicitly sent in to crush a nascent human republic. Their great crime? Giving equal rights to mutants. They had no problem with chaos. Then the Imperium steam rolls them, and NOW they have a problem.
I agree wholeheartedly with you. I think the main thing the setting lacks is contrast; the Imperium is all there is, so no one in setting can really point out the flaws.
@@adamjg5061 Evolution is not a fixed, predetermined thing. Evolution is just the combination of random mutation and natural selection resulting in changes in the characteristics of the members of the population. That is it.
Also, evolution in a psychic species may be a common science fiction and science fantasy trope, but it does not make much sense in the context of Warhammer 40k, with the Warp and psychic powers being so dangerous. If anything, evolving in the opposite direction, into blanks would actually be much more advantageous if you look at things logically.
I'm always put in mind of the sad tale of the Diasporex, from one of the early HH books. Its very similar to what you conceived for your chapter.
For those who aren't familiar, they were a nomadic and diverse society of humans and xenos. The Imperium found them and invites the humans to join the fold, once the xenos were exterminated of course. Naturally, the Diasporex refused and fled. The Imperium gave chase, eventually trapping them by destroying the solar collectors needed to fuel their ships. Then the Imperium wiped them out.
The last message sent by the Diasporex simply read "we just wanted to be left alone".
A 10th edition like you described here might actually get me back into the setting. These days I'm more into Battletech just because its significantly less fash while remaining gritty and dark.
I'm about to get into 40k role-playing with some old D&D friends, we're going for Only War to start with and I've warned them that they're in just as much danger from their own commanders as they are the enemy.
Still of the opinion that Imperium Secundus should be the change that Guiliman will enact to cut out the chaff and beaurecracy of the Imperium Proper. Shit will still be horrible because of shortages and the like, but it will be focused on a goal and with a plan for a somewhat essential peace with the Eldar and Tau.
The thought that came to me while listening to your thought experiment, was that you were essentially calling for a return to Rouge Trader. And it seem, looking over the comments, many think that as well. It would be splendid if 40k retraced back to its roots of Rouge Trader to move forward as a game.
Having *the* grim dark setting lose it's found niche seems like it would upset more people than it would please.
@@evangelosvasiliades1204
Rouge trader wasn't exactly all sunshine and rainbows...it just didn't lean so much into grimderp and demanding everything end in a needlessly painful way. (still plenty of violence ofcourse) Also "silly" fun can and should be allowed to exist in 40k, *it's a HUGE galaxy for a reason,* you can still have your grimdark fantasies in one brooding corner of galaxy while places liken to *"Logan's world"* can exist in another corner.
That's part of why I like the scale of 40k's setting, *literally anything you can imagine, no matter how silly can and does exist somewhere.* I never understand why people think just having say humans and orks coexisting on ONE planet that isn't an apocalyptic battlefield (atleast most of the time..) would somehow upend the WHOLE series, it just *comes of as gatekeeping and being drama queens.* Heck, we even had a world in the lore where humans and eldar lived on the same planet...and not trying to genocide each other (though weren't exactly all buddy buddy ofcourse) but didn't need to be grimdark to the max to be interesting, heck if anything it makes things more grim because out of like 99% of all human and eldar interactions, there's was atleast ONE, instance of it not eventually turning into a blood bath or a whole *"next we meet, there will be no mercy"* after begrudgingly working together kind of thing but an actual lasting coexistence. (before they were all murdered by the galaxy's most 'friendly' war criminal)
Interesting concept. Last time I was into Games Workshop stuff was in the mid/late 2000's, where WH40K was in its 3rd edition with most of the basic fluff written from the Imperium's viewpoint of itself as a necessary evil but most players I encountered viewed the Eldar as the closest thing the setting had to "good guys". For me it seems like the Eldar are meant to be written as metaphors for real-life Celtic peoples - notice the Craftworlds being named after Druidic festivals like Beltane (Biel-Tann) and Samhain (Saim-Hann) - as far as WH40K maps to real life politics. I don't know what this says about more than my own anecdotal experiences?
I feel like the inquisition, the eclisiarchy and the other various organisations involved in running the imperium say enough tbh
I remember in 2nd edition the Eldar were portrayed as being more aloof and distant with inscrutable motives which the humans didn't really comprehend, they leaned pretty heavily on Fantasy elfs in space motif. There was story elements in the old army book "Codex Imperialis" which came with Second Ed box which were written from PoV of an inquisitor that was in the Black Libray it was pretty interesting stuff.
3rd edition things changed a bit they introduced Dark Eldar. The 2nd Ed Eldar Codex had lists for Exodite Eldar but Dark Eldar were a completely 3rd ed invention. It was around this time the lore changed to be much more grim dark in general
They also got rid of some of the more fun units like Harlequins in 3rd ed which were some of my favourite Eldar models and lore. I think they eventually bought them back but I felt like they were really missed at the time.
@@1norwood1 yeah 3rd edition 40K was a lot more selfconsciously serious than the first two editions so many of the weirder elements had to go, similar relationship 6th edition WFB had to the previous ones
Ah yes, the eldar, a race who literally birthed a demon god with their degeneracy. They're the 'good guys'. I guess that depends on your perspective...
Having "multiple human Imperiums" in alliance would be a good way to reintroduce other loyalist Primarchs. E.g. Russ or the Lion as leaders of their own portions of the galaxy.
It was a wargame, the home front always took a back seat. I think you can play up the independence of the subsectors and worlds and make them as different as you like.
I wouldn't make this a "new" thing, which can be construed as a development post-plot advancement. I'd propose this as a new faction for a new edition, but that it would be emphasised that these guys have always been there - it's just that, as minor worlds and/or pirates and raiders, they haven't been referenced until now.
If you have worlds that have never been part of the Imperium, where there is at least some co-operation between humans and Xenos*, and that haven't turned to Chaos, then the Imperium has never been necessary, and it returns to being a joke that "certain people" didn't get.
If they are a direct result of the plot advancing, then you can argue that they were necessary prior to that point, but not after it.
To emphasise this, I'd build the aesthetics off of Logan's World, and have it be an "update and expansion" on the pirate/mercenary army list in the Book of the Astronomicon.
Alternatively, clarify that the suffering the Imperium causes is directly feeding and strengthening Chaos (making it a positive feedback loop), that the Astronomicon did indeed attract the Tyrannids, and that the reason all Xenos life seems hostile, is because they've slaughtered all of the reasonable ones.
*and, no, not in a peace-love-and-harmony way. I'm talking more the Host of Mordor, less the Fellowship of the Ring.
To be fair the Imperium did wipe out many, MANY civilizations of peaceful xenos or even humans during the Great Crusade, no wonder that any remaining xenos or even independent human civilizations that have heard or somehow know about this horrific event wouldn't be so inviting as they had been before. I wouldn't be suprised if there's hundreds if not thousands of civilizations out in the galaxy that have desperately tried to not attract the attention of the Imperium, seeing them as a very serious existential threat. (oh the irony!)
@@navilluscire2567 The model for the suggestions in my post is one of my own pet projects, which is "the ships that survived the slaughter of the Diasporex, after they've spent 10,000 years living like the fleet from Battlestar Galactica"
@@arfived4
That sounds awesome! Yeah, the tragic fate of the Diasporex is one of the rare instances where the Imperium isn't justified in the least and felt quite frankly surreal in how the SPACE marines talking about how they couldn't even fathom how or why humans and aliens could live together peacefully, really showing the depths of their conditioning and the human supremacist rhetoric they were feed all their lives. We NEED more media where the Imperium are the antagonists, where the irrational thinking and hate fueled actions are presented bare for what they are.
This is something I always wanted to see.
Hell, it's practically stated outright in some of the books (as mentioned in the vid). This is what caught me about chapters like the space wolves - they are more often than not butting heads with the imperium and how it works and stick to their own sectors. (at least, pre the destruction of fenris)
This is what I wanted more of - humans coexisting with xenos through tentative alliances; humans aware of the dangers of the warp and working against it in responsible ways.
Hell, these are shown to be common place for some more radical commissars, why not have it be right there under the imperium's nose.
Doesn't even have to be pleasant - a feudal world has a trade deal with the dark aeldari, exchanging thousands of slaves in exchange for designer drugs and incubus bodyguards.
The potential. The potential!!
Yeah, more worlds that have dark but practical packs with xenos. Imagine a world's government being in league with some t'au sept, trading tech and them (the humans) gaining access to new markets through the t'au's other member or allied species, turning the human world into the Warhammer 40k equivalent of Nar Shada from star wars i.e. multiple species living on the same planet engaging in a sort of planetary bizarre where all sorts of crazy goods are traded. Ofcourse with the human governor taking a sizable cut of proceeds while the t'au handle most market security in exchange for using the planet as a new staging point for future campaigns, establishing permanent military bases.
Actually imagine U.S. bases for the t'au's presence and role there like in Japan with the planet being like a mashup of Tokyo and Las Vegas (who doesn't love space casinos!), but in (partial) hiveworld form!
I thought the overarching view of the emperor had was that once he had conquered the galaxy, he would usher in a time of peace and prosperity. With the going narrative that the imperium now is a twisted warped version of what it was meant to be. Therefore the imperium now not really being a necessary evil but rather a failed version of what could have been - with guilliman confirming as much with his disgust at the current state of the imperium, while also comparing it to the blissful peace of the worlds of ultramar.
That's true, but in the Heresy novels that's questioned a LOT. The Imperium he's building is still very much a brutal dictatorship, just a more benevolent one.
@@ArbitorIan that’s fair enough… gotta force those worlds into compliance somehow…. Those poor interex 😂
@@WingZeroCustom001 I mean he literaly sets up an Imperial senate, installs a democratic council to lead terra, and is trying to conquer the webway so that it can be used as a form of transport and communication so tjat mankind can effectively rule itself. But sure, the blue anon guy says a random thing is alt right so ignore that.
@@GusOfTheDorks I mean there was still a senate in the days of the emperor but that didn't suddenly make caesar not a dictator and the emperors also did a lot of horrific shit in the name of the empire when not doing those things was always possible. The emperor and the supposed golden years of the empire are themselves a critique of benevolent dictators and what is justified in the name of bettering an empire and acquiring resources because well it all went to shit and collapsed into dogmatism and fanaticism pretty fast now didn't it.
Imho, they could also just play up the feudal aspects of the Imperium. Generally they could deal far more with indivudual worlds and organisations doing their own thing, and even fiting in petty equivalent to feuds amongst each other. Any sort of partaking in the larger affairs and coordination between components only gets done when the instititutions of holy terra come knocking themselves, and even then they could have far more limited authority per imperial law. Think more Dune or the Empire in WHFB (or rather the holy roman empire...), where the individual bodies making up the Imperium act like completely independent nations 90% of the time and Space Marine chapters more or less doing whatever they want.
All of that is already there, it just needs to be played up more.
Yeah, playing up the feudal confederation aspect of the Imperium is a far better idea to distance the perception of the Imperium from Fascism.
You mentioned Judge Dredd and I think they experienced a similar issue, and they resolved it largely with the comic Origins, SPOILER, in the finale of this series they recover the original Judge, and he expresses total regret at making the fascist dystopia of Mega City One, it's really something that rattles the core of the story.
I know 40k doesn't have quite the pacing opportunities of a comic book, but they'd only need to establish this core regret once, and it would tremble through the universe.
Yeah, I kinda hoped they'd take this route with the Horus Heresy right at the start, but I understand the way they went - that the Imperium was always delusional. But it means that they can't do the same Judge arc with Guillimans return, as while he's sad at the religion and decline, he's still as much of an authoritarian dictator as he was in the Heresy.
Having the Emperor finally shake free of the Golden Throne, get denounced by the Ecclesiarchy as a Heretic and a Daemon, flee to the Ultimar Sector, and get back on track with his original plan for humanity could be a good way to shake things up. We'd get actual heroic Space Marines, once the Emperor and Guilliman de-Nazify the Ultramarines; meanwhile, the Imperium would continue to be the horrible, decaying menace that they've always been.
They already did with Guilliman - and with his conversation with the Emperor showing that the Emperor has become something utterly inhuman
Reflecting on this,
I feel this is so uneeded.
Imagine the people who actually look at the state of the Imperium and say "that sounds great, I want to be a part of that."
The Imperium is broken. It's always been broken.
But!
There is plenty of genuinely human and heartfelt moments throughout setting. I root for the humans because they can still show humanity in such grim dark settings.
In fact with the exception of the Dark Angels I don't recall any protagonist characters that excelled because they are better 'facists' then others.
The subtle destinction that most people don't want to accept is that the Imperium is a tool made of armies, industry and the Emperor's light. Unchecked human 'Ignorance', 'hate', and 'fear' gave space for a facist humanity. That quality of humanity has been the number 1 roadblock to the Imperium's victory. The setting screams that fact.
apparently not loudly enough because there are still way too many people who don't get it.
and clearly all that isn't working because the issue is serious enough that we're watching a video about it
I'm kind of repeating myself in another comment, but I think the issues isn't that people think the Imperium is a great place to live. I think Ian's point is, that those people see the horrific state of the Imperium is *justified* in the face of the threats it face, and that this version of the Imperium is the only thing holding the excinction of humanity at bay. That's the narrative you want to tackle. The goal is not to try and convince that "the Imperium is bad, actually", it's to convince them that the Imperium could have taken a different form, actually, and that the form didn't have to treat everyone diverging from the norm as anathema.
@@MiBasse The other alternative would be the emperor "surviving" the horus heresy and continuing the great crusade/webway project which would result in most if not all of the other races being exterminated. I've been partaking in the hobby for over 20+ years and I've never encountered a fascist, maybe the odd edgy joke but that's about it. It's most likely people making a mountain out of a mole hill.
@@DMKA94 It really isn't. You probably just don't hear the dogwhistles. They don't just walk in announcing 'Hello! I am mr. Fascist! Would any of you like to do some hate crimes?' They only say what they really think to people they think agree with them. Once they're in their safe space, if you will. They'll still find ways to make your life miserable if they decide they don't like you though.
Welp… the Leagues of Votann have already done this! They live in even harsher conditions than the Imperium, and they’re unambiguously NOT evil. Maybe not GOOD per say (maybe kinda lawful neutral?), but they definitely show that the Imperium is not the only way. Before the Votann, we could also kind of count the Tau, even though they’re not human, and they have some (comparatively) slight evil undertones. But still.
They're definitely not good. They're artificially constructed beings that are extremely insular and paranoid of outsiders and give zero shits about causing mass destruction in order to obtain resources. All while borderline worshiping a malfunctioning supercomputer.
One thing to remember for such a time jump forwards is that Guilliman originally created the Ultramar sector, which was a well run comparative utopia.
You could actually have sectors taking on board his learnings in such a way that new ultramar like territories spring up- great places to live, yet still part of the Imperium.
Based on how religions tend to deviate from their starting points, you could actually have groups of Ultramarines denouncing their own Primarch as not following the true imperial creed- maintaining that back ground element of reasons where supposed allies could come to blows with each other.
Throw in the return of Russ or The Lion, who have different opinions on what the Imperium should be working towards, and you can get a seriously diverse setting within the human (and trans human) populace.
Oh and of course, bring back the Squats!
It would be great to see them as a 'mostly good guys' faction, who have spent centuries hiding from a repressive Imperium that wanted to exterminate them, but have now returned out of compassion for sentient life and their own interests in resisting the galaxy's greatest menaces and threats it has seen in millennia.
Fashies don't get irony, unless it has a pepe profile picture
Socialist only like look at 1st edition and be like ya it's facist and move one. While in other editions it's more nuance then that hell the Guard infantry in 40k forces acts more like the Soviet Union troops. Hell most of the time the imperium acts like HRE then a socialist state but then again I'm talking to a socialist the only nuance they know is what boot color design they like licking
Brian stableford wrote a book from the point of view of chaos cultists. It was excellent probably the best one I've read, it tackle the issue of the empire being evil really well. Your sympathy wasn't with the chaos cultists, it was with the poor villagers caught in the middle.
This is a good summation and solution to the crypto-fascist nature of a non-satirical grime dark.
I think that moving the focus away from the big "heroes" would be a helpful idea too. Focusing on lesser characters can up the tension. If Guilliman is in the story, we know he isn't in any danger; if the focus of the story is some Inquisitor, Governor, Squad Leader, Autarch etc; there can be real narrative jeopardy.
I really like this! I'm a fan of every faction's fluff being presented as propaganda for their side - making it willfully inconsistent. People (especially kids!) can still have their heroic marines fighting mindless bugs or spikey dudes, while any folks who care to look a little deeper can have that subverted.
Tau are a step in that direction - a more subtle kind of fascism, at least - and an option that says that it's possible for species to work together peacefully. That Blackstone Fortress game too. The galaxy is a big place, so it should feel diverse.
@@clinch4402 Let me guess you just don't know the Tau lore? They are very much grimdark.
@@clinch4402 So has every part of 40k?
@@clinch4402 Typical braindead imperial fanboy.
@@clinch4402
Gundam crowd?
**looks over to Imperial knights, Imperial titans and eldar titans**
@@clinch4402
Also cynical? The Imperium is practically brimming with self-righteous!
I saw u irl the other day Ian at secret cinema but as a staff member I couldn't break the immersion to shake your hand and say thanks for the content! So I'll say it here! Love it all and I'm pretty indifferent about 40k lol keep it going and much love xx
Aha! Where were you working/who were you playing? You totally could have got away with it on account of me working for them too (as a designer though, so I don't have to worry about breaking character).
@@ArbitorIan just a humble bar keep though in my head canon I'm a veteran of the peninsula wars who took a musket ball to the knee
This is why I wish they'd stop ignoring things like the Nova Terra Interegium. It's got so much potential.
Watching this and knowing the Squats are coming back is probably a good sign that there may be new human factions that will be separate from the Imperium. It's a good start I say, and we may get new alien factions too.
I'm not sure one needs to "change" 40k just because of an admitted tiny minority. Why skew it around a few nutters? Just turf them out any club they show up in. The most I'd say is yes, some stories from the Black Library on these areas would be nice. (Since none of what you said is 'new') But I wouldn't go shifting an entire edition around them.
On the Marines though, I always saw the Marines the way Abnett writes them, that they are the vestiges of an era when they were genuine protectors of humanity and not the misled forces to devastate any deviation and that there still exists the potential in them for it. The way he has their true humanity and care sometimes squeak through, that they are curious about humans as much as humans are about them, and that they do follow Roboute (who comes from a more enlightened, less facist era) show they are more of a mishandled tool, not in and of themselves a horrific evil. And that makes their story of the fall from 30k to 40k all the more tragic in my eyes, helping cast them as the posterboys. The ones who COULD, but after so long have been mantraed and bound until they AREN'T...except for the times they do. And those times are the core, genuine heroism of 40K's lore. The flashes of hope and possibility in the darkness of the original vision to free humanity from Chaos and suffering. The vision that opposed the very thing humanity turned into.
Gaunt's Ghosts is also a fantastic study on this, casting a commissar was such a genius move. That it shows people moving under the height of the cult above them, they have to fit in or facec consequences from it (sometimes tragically so, poor Soric) but ultimately are still people just trying to do the right thing for one another. 40k is best shown as flashes and possibility of something better, rather than outright just having a "good side". It's less about "everyone's evil" more "everyone has a tragedy that they fell into misery and hate/fear/whatever from". Thats the real wrinkle that needs to be protected in theme.
I disagree with the idea that the Space Marines were ever "genuine" protectors of humanity, and that they weren't always meant to annihilate any deviation from the Emperor's ideal. They may have believed they were genuine protectors, but their purpose was to expand the borders of the Imperium, usually at the end of their bolters. I do like Abnet's look at this disconnect in Horus Rising with both 63-19 and the Interex: both were thriving human civilizations that would have gotten along just fine if the Imperium hadn't come along (even if 63-19 had a lot of the same concerning hallmarks the Imperium had), and peace with the Interex was so tantalizingly close, but very few beyond Horus even believed it was possible or even desired. Loken was the only voice we saw that potentially agreed with Horus that it could maybe be done. So their purpose wasn't to protect HUMANITY so much as it was to protect THE IMPERIUM, in the same way that the Roman army's purpose was to protect Rome, often by expanding its borders and subjugating everyone nearby and then taxing them for the trouble. I'll definitely concede that it was a more enlightened time, but with the caveat that the particular bar in question is hilariously low.
Also there was the whole "all xenos are a potential threat to humanity and so shall not be permitted to live" thing that the Emperor DEFINITELY had going on even back during Solar Unification. And the brutal suppression of religion that I find utterly appalling, even as an atheist who would love for religion to go away
It’s very much in dialogue with the themes of power and control in the Dune series, which also has a complex interplay between “necessary evils” and the brutal limitations of feudal imperialism as a system which the people in the setting can never seem to shake.
I always liked the idea that each codex served as propaganda from their point of view. Like if you read a Space Marine codex, then the Emperor is this noble hero of the past and we should aspire to be worthy of him. But then if you read a Chaos Marine codex, the Emperor is a corpse and a false idol who never really cared for humanity, but the Chaos Gods are promising you the galaxy and immortality.
It makes it so you essentially get a bunch of factions going "they're all bad but I'm good", rather than acting like, as you say, the Imperium are a necessary evil from every point of view. It doesn't help they've been cleaning up the art style and writing for years to be less openly ridiculous and satirical. It kind of lost that sense of humor in the pursuit of having a heroic face to a setting that was never intended to have one.
It's very good to see the many Warhammer RUclipsrs that break the stigma we have as fans. Adeptus Ridiculous, Poorhammer, Mr bones, numbskullz, dawnstir, you all work to undo the damage scum like arch have made.
I'd say one starts this with the reintroduction of the Squats, followed by a massive expansion to the Renegades and Heretics. I'd like rules to field human pirates, like Corsairs or Freebootas. While we're at it, release that Mercenaries codex GW has been teasing for almost 20 years.
You just earned yourself a subscriber, my good man!
I've toyed around with the idea of a small, independent human faction of my own for quite some time now. I imagine a fringe world that was cut off from the Imperium by a warp storm during the Horus Heresy, forcing the inhabitants to develop a more pragmatic approach in order to survive. Not only did they loosen restrictions on scientific and technological research, resulting in building their own tech and even making some small scale innovations, but their views also became more tolerant. They have slowly but surely started coming into contact with the outside galaxy again as the storm gradually subsides, resulting in alliances of necessity with mercenaries, Rogue Traders and even some xenos. For example, they have an uneasy alliance with a contingent of Blood Axes, the agreement being that the Ork raiders help deal with a persistent feral Ork infestation (the result of a large WAAAGH! rampaging through the sector during the Great Crusade) while leaving the 'humies alone. In exchange the Blood Axes get to keep all battlefield spoils and are given Ogryn volunteers, who it turns out integrate into Ork society very well.
Knowing that it's only a matter of time before an inevitable confrontation with the Imperium, the people are weighing their options. Reintegration with the Imperium is out of the question at this point, as it's seen as a fate worse than death. Will they go out in a blaze of glory like so many other rebellious worlds, or will they manage to relocate to another planet or become shipfaring nomads traveling the stars of a hostile galaxy?
I intensely love these frontier regions, but there would be a good balance to be careful with, because something would be lost if what you propose is done too much. The despair maybe.
The artistic charm is not only that the Imperium is bad, it's also that it is nearly inescapable. Free souls and pirates live in uncharted territories but many bigger factions able to negate the imperium on the long run would lessen the oppressive, suffocating threat of Terra.
it reminds me the planet's developpement table from 40k third edition rule book. You could clearly see that some planets have survived with post industrial civilizations. It could lead to so many stories that depicts life in 40k instead of constant wars againt arch evils. Always talking about war makes it bearable and that's why people tend to see the Imperium as a necessary evil... because in the far future... there's no alternative. (and not even talking about prehistoric planets where you could see Monsterhunter style tales especially with Exodites ones).
I like the idea of Semi-grimdark because farsight enclave are basically backed into a corner and there only say to survive is to defend there territory and relay on temporary alliances, and the grimdark part is that they are like the red-shirts from Star Trek.
I always try to emphasize the fact that there are no good guys in 40k when talking to people getting into the setting. If people ask me who I would consider the good guys to be, I usually say the Tyranids because, frankly, all the other factions getting wiped out would be a benefit to the universe and the Tyranids at least aren’t doing what they’re doing for petty or hateful reasons. They just eat stuff. It’s what they do.
I would argue that the Craftworld Eldar and Harlequins aren’t so much evil as they are ruthless and somewhat dickish. And Exodites, while basically irrelevant on a galactic scale, aren’t really evil either. And then you have the Farsight Enclaves, who are of debatable morality.
For that matter, the Orks are also sort of 'good'. They fight because they love to fight (and because that's what they were created to do), There's no underlying malice or active hatred toward other species, they fight them like they fight one another if there's no one else to fight, like a drunk in a kebab shop picking a fight with their own reflection.
I don't why people still think of the Tyranids as not evil. Even if it's their nature and they hold no ill intent, their objective is destruction of all life in the galaxy except for them. Also, with the genestealer cults I'm not so sure they aren't conscious of what their doing
Id rather live with the tau or be in the realm of ultramar
I think this is a great solution and I've always thought it was implied that there already was this sort of thing going in the setting. Perhaps I was wrong though and creating this juxtaposition more obvious would be a great thing for the imperium. For example, in my head cannon the Alpha legion run an alternative interstellar colony in the eastern fringe as a kind of alternate moral and social organisation.
This both brings back the rogue trader feel that people like me really want, let's eveyone have their cake and eat it, and even allows GW space to bring out even more new models and faction stuff making yet more money from people... Shame it'd need them to be self aware and care about the game.
Couldn't agree more. To me, Guilliman is the biggest problem. Picture an Imperium with the High Lords at its head, anonymous beaucrats and noblemen of which we know nothing, and that's the point, the horror is that the Imperium runs on intertia. The cogs all turn, the broken pieces are replaced not by an engineer but by other pieces. We are doing this to ourselves. The fact that we never knew the name of the HL was genius to me. Life is hell, but who's to blame?
Now there is someone to blame. Roboute Guilliman. He is indisputably in charge and he has mostly cast aside the HL and replaced them. He has much control. Yet, life is still hell.
Why the heck do people not rebel against Guilliman now? Genestealer cults, sure, but... Come on, not all rebels must be secret Tzeentch worshippers or Tyranid cosplayers.
Sure, yes, there's faith and other social glue in place, but come on, if there ever was a place for new human factions or a straight on civil war in the Imperium it was now!
I like the idea of dwelling more on the independent human empires, which as you say have always been present in the background, but there is a reason we tend to see them getting conquered or obliterated when they appear on camera - the nature of an Imperium is imperialism, a core tenet of how empires operate is by subjugating and oppressing their neighbours. Demonstrating to the real world audience that there is another way also means demonstrating that to the Imperial citizenry, which is something the Imperium as an entity cannot tolerate. You might be miserable here, says the Imperium, but look how much worse you'd have it over there (because we spent years bombing it flat). The facists and idiots who buy in to the Imperium as a necessary evil or even a force for good like to ignore the morality and even the colossal waste of effort and resources spent holding and dominating non-hostile populations, which could have been funnelled into infrastructure, public works, or even just pointing those same weapons at the acid spitting psychic bugs instead of innocent civilians. But of course, aside from the acid spitting psychic bugs, none of that is actually fiction.
Idea for a faction: A "democratic" faction that also has conscription. The twist is that the party in power might try and stifle voters by sending them into unwinnable battles.
best part about this is that it's also suitably grimdark
I think you're describing the orks with more steps
Tau?
@@heckinmemes6430 The Tau aren't democratic. They do the greatest good for the greatest number but they don't really consult them about it. The Tau would say they're so harmoniously in tune with the ideal of the greater good that they don't need to vote the same way you don't need to vote on whether or not to eat or drink, or how gravity works. Others would say they're just ruled by the Ethereals and the Ethereals don't want to be questioned.
A democratic faction would be interesting and be something new, but it would be difficult to pull off. For one it's hard to have the kind of communication a modern democracy requires without breaking some of the limitations of the universe. Also one of the reasons there's no democracy in 40k is that it's a satire, and if you satirise a democracy or make it match the grimdark tone you could end up doing the exact opposite of making the setting less appealing to fascists. It's probably easier to do a corrupted republic than it is a true democracy in 40k, but I'd worry a faction claiming to be democratic but not being would just end up being very similar to the Tau.
A Democracy with conscription isn't anything new (or outdated).
Indeed, that's how democracy worked since the beginning. In Ancient Rome and Athens the definition of "Citizen" was to have certain rights, most especially the right to vote and it was the main duty of the Citizen to take up arms in defense of his nation/city.
Modern Day Switzerland (basically one of the last places in the world that practices direct democracy), South Korea (had issues in the past, got better in more modern times), Turkey (authoritarian right now, but used to be more democratic a decade or two ago), Israel (which has many issues, but is internally quite democratic, at least within it's primary Jewish demographic) all have compulsory military service.
I appreciate this video and the sentiment behind it, I really agree with almost everything. However I think that the true horror and grim dark of 40k comes from the idea that the imperium (the defacto horrible facist system) is legitimately the only option to surviving in the galaxy.
With other human options that are completely morally better than the imperium and alliances rather than the overbearing imperium, it kind of robs the setting of what makes it unique in sci-fi to me. It’d also radically change the balance of the established lore, these other human factions would realistically have to be at least as strong as the 500 worlds of macragge to have any hope of surviving against any concentrated effort by a tyranid fleet or necron invasion, or even eventual absorption into the tau empire.
Your points about the imperium being portrayed as heroic is spot on I believe. Much more work should be done to paint the brutality of the imperium, ideally from the xenos pov, and I also want space marines to be less human again, closer to their original non noble selves. Good video, just the one idea I don’t agree with, would make the setting too generic when it already has problems with stolen ideas haha.
I think you're missing the point. Certain people see brutality as an objectively positive attribute for people to have. Showing the Imprrium to be more brutal would automatically show them as heroic.
I don't really agree. Isn't it more horrific that they're doing all this evil shit, and... they don't even really need to? To me, that's worse than 'we do bad shit because we'll die if we don't'.
and yeah, some groups will probably team up into areas of a few hundred worlds, but don't forget that a) when the imperium gets invaded it's not the entire imperium that gets mobilized (they're busy). just the local few worlds. and b) such smaller empires would be WAY more efficient than the imperium. the administratum is so slow and inefficient it is proverbial. smaller groups of planets would relatively be much better at dealing with threats than the Imperium would be.
@@r31n0ut but they all need the astronomicon to even be able to contact each other for trade or mutual defense, which somewhat necessitates the Imperium for any coordination in areas larger than a solar system or without stable and short warp routes.
@@doomguy9049 The Astronomicon doesn't work like that. it's like a lighthouse in the warp, they can't say "hey, you didn't pay your taxes this cycle so you don't get to see it." That's just not how beacons work.
Besides, there are like... 7 other major factions in the galaxy that manage to get around just fine without the astronomicon? I'm sure the new human factions would find a way.
When thinking about the imperium and the question of its depiction as the given “protagonist” faction - can entire civilization or society in fiction be understood not as allegory but something along the lines of the classically tragic hero writ large, an entity that’s fun or compelling to follow in a narrative but would obviously be catastrophic to encounter in real life?
I really like this idea. It would also be neat if codexes from different factions gave different accounts of the same event. Could hammer home how the factions will twist the truth or lie to make themselves look good.
I mean, this sounds perfect to be honest.... It sounds so plausible that even as of the moment we could say, to some extend, it is happening already. I mean, in the way to justify actually having good Space marines... It sounds completely convincing and easy to deliver.... damn... nice work!
I had a conceptual issue with Dark Heresy recently: it's hard to shock CHARACTERS with the brutality and fascism of the Imperium even while it might shock the PLAYERS. There's no dichotomy for them to roleplay here, because their characters (being effectively fascist secret police officers) would commit atrocities without a second thought.
Great video!
I'm playing in a DH campaign, and... yeah. in any other system all DH campaigns would basically just be 'evil' campaigns.
That’s one reason why I like running dark heresy for players who don’t know 40k. The players get to discover how bad things are, and figure out if they want to go along with it, or become heretics themselves.
That's a fun part of DH campaign I've been a part of for years now: almost every character is not truly suited to 40k, which makes them more believable members of the Inquisition, since no one enters the services of an Inquisitor without being at least a little creative and unconventional. For example, we had a character from a world with strained Mechanicus relations who thusly had to be a mechanic, drawing tons of ire from any techpriests we met, but also not exactly doing anything illegal, then later converted to the Cult of the Omnissiah out of genuine belief built from working with machines, or the Judge I play who is old and disillusioned with the whole "letter of the law" affair, now roaming the galaxy as a wandering justice-doer and considering the entire Imperium a precinct in need of protection. Often, playing someone who is internally skeptical of the godliness of the Emperor or maybe doesn't really see anything wrong with mutants is just as realistic as playing a frothing zealot.
@@warhammertrash1626 I agree, I think people, particularly fans of the setting, get too caught up in the playing archetypal 40K characters and it looses the opportunity for nuance.
This is a really insightful comment and I was going to add something about my own experiences with Dark Heresy and how it’s difficult to add the normal RPG depth to playing a fashy religious fanatic with a big chainsaw but then I saw who wrote this comment and decided to just message you, who GM’d Dark Heresy for me, on Facebook instead.
Awesome idea. As others have mentioned the best portrayal of them being evil I’ve seen recently is Garden of Ghosts on hammer and bolter. I’m also wondering if they’re planning a new civil war in the imperium, which could achieve a similar effect if they make one side like you’ve suggested.
I totally agree, I just fear concentrating on marines cos marines and marines with marine sauce makes more money than charm, subtlety and nuance.
I always preferred the vision of the Imperium itself as being a loose grouping of alliances, comprised of radically different societies, cultures, and organisational structures bound together by a sometimes nominal allegiance to the Emperor. Representatives of the Imperium might turn up with demands of a tithe, but that might not amount to much more than a protection racket in practical terms.
I might be out of date with how lore is now depicted in the books, but I remember that feeling like the case in 2nd Ed. An alliance between Mars and Terra, but still with certain planets definitely belonging to Mars, Space Marines chapters administrating entire regions around their home planet, an entire segment of the galaxy belonging to the Squat leagues, and with a host of planets ruled over by planetary governors that are elected and govern according to local customs.
I think they're doing a good job of working past this by bringing back the Primarchs and juxtaposing then against the current state of the imperium.
well stated and I agree. Partly because I want more variety in human factions. What always attracted me to the setting was its room for creativity - there's absolutely space on a million planets for human societies that are tangential to the Imperium at best, and forgotten in the imperium's endless sclerotic bureaucracy. This doesn't require any retcons of any kind, just additions, and I'm all for it
I think I'm a bit old, but I always retained the very old sense that the Imperium is very diverse with random planets being cyberpunk democracies, monarchies, and son and the Imperium sort of doesn't care if they pay the tithe etc. So it was less monolithic and more of a mess. But Space Marines were a very thin line of all the things the Imperium did back then, which was far more 2000AD .
Yet I never get that impression from alot of the books I read, aside from some local drama or conspiracies, it seems every world. Even the so called "civilized worlds" are basically all orwellian nightmares to one degree or another. And even with worlds were the Imperium's grasp is relatively weak or planets with more distinct cultures (from that of generic, mainstream Imperium traditions), it's not much better with extreme authoritarianism being the norm for many a world's government, not the terrible exceptions. That and LOTS of nepotism through either official, dropped the pretenses noblemen or basically hereditary political dynasties of 'governers' of planets ruling and abusing their populations virtually as much as they please with little hope from freedom or successful revolutions.
Question for you? What is your opinion on the imperium in 30k? Was the imperium good or bad before the Horus? I don’t know much about 30k government so I’m curious what your thoughts are. Others feel free to add opinions in the reply
The major project of the Imperium of in 30k was the Great Crusade which is a euphemism for genociding every planet that is not 100 exclusivly human AND even if the world is 100% human you still have a 50/50 chance of genociding the planet anyway so...
I have an idea I think could work beautifully. I have a pet theory about the missing Primarchs: that instead of producing great conquerors like the other primarchs, the missing two were incredibly charismatic philosopher/religious-type leaders who, catastrophically from the Emperor's point of view, were pacifists. They managed to unite their worlds in absolute non-violence and peaceful coexistence, and with huge success socially and technologically, and when contacted by the Emperor immediately their philosophy spread throughout the Imperial ranks like wildfire, causing the front of Great Crusade to immediately collapse as the troops refused to invade any further worlds and began to believe all xenos should be treated with respect as fellow intelligent beings etc.
The reason the two are now "missing" is that they, their legions that bore this dangerous geneseed and any record of any contact with them following this had to be completely expunged for obvious reasons. To contrast what what these missing primarchs achieved through peace with the brutality of the Imperium even at it height would prove a point I think - and you wouldn't have to retcon anything, or even go forward with 40k.
@@RealAugustusAutumn That’s the thing though - perhaps the terrible thing they proposed was some way around that, a way that could work, and was working, wonderfully well. The sort of great work that only beings of the calibre of Primarchs could come up with. A way for all the races of the galaxy to live in peace together, and that was why it was so utterly catastrophic for the entire point of the Great Crusade, and why they and everything associated with them had to be ruthlessly extirpated in favour of brutal human and Imperial supremacy.
@@RealAugustusAutumn The stories of the Great Crusade and the Horus Heresy make it a point several times that the Emperor as well as most people around him were completely convinced that the view your describing - that humanity is superior to any alien race and that the Emperor has it all planned out with just the best intentions for humankind at heart - was true and just - BUT that those views and the methods to achieve them were deeply flawed by hubris. Horus Rising & The Last Church are both but two examples for moments when the "noble" end was just a justification for horrible means that may even outway the "good" they strive to bring about. From the very start, the setting makes it very clear that by trying to save the human body and soul from warp and xenos predators, that very human body and soul are violated and mutilated beyond recognition and everything is doomed to fail because the Emperor and his Legions never even considered an alternative. They chose war to bring about peace, but because of human flaws, humanity had to lose its soul to save it, rendering the entire endeavour a futile exercise.
All xenos???
Lmfao imagine a guardsman refusing to fight an ork because "he's a living being with feelings n shit" and then getting his shit krumped for being a lilly livered grot.
That's a cool idea.
@@pinoarias8601 Eh, there’s a difference between pest control and rampant genocidal xenophobia :P You can’t reason with orks any more than you can a disease. Ditto the Tyranids - but there’s a lot of races and human cultures that the Imperium has encountered and crushed, or is still trying to, that there’s really been no need to.
Very interesting perspective. One thing I'd like to see would be some stories from chaos and xenos points of view (maybe from the point of view of citizens. I note the Siege of Vraks is popular right now. Maybe the story of an impoverished Vraksian who slaved since he was a child in the Departmento Munitorum's labour corps, who in order to give his family a better life enlisted in the Vraksian traitor militia after Cardinal Xaphan's coup? I'd like that story! Or maybe the story of a Gue'vesa unit fighting against their fellow humans for the Tau Empire.
I think it doesn't even need to be super hard, just give us options for Imperial Guard renegades or non imperial imperial guards and make them be able Ally with any other faction, no new models need to even be made
This would be amazing. I play necromunda and love exploiting the gaps in the lore. I run Van Saar and I love their 'heretical' (in the eyes of the imperium) approach to technology. I run them as infected by a rogue A.I that has emerged from their secret STC that is assimilating data from the wider galaxy constantly improving and replicating. Definitely not 'good' but still a different approach to the usual 'suffer not the witch" etc. Id love to see them adopt your suggestion.
Sick idea. Van Saar rule.
Great video I love the ways you find to keep the community thinking about a bigger human picture. That said GW has never had the key to individual creative experiences and has often enough reacted to its community, that one way to make this change it to simply play as if it is true. Leave the individuals who think Fascism is an ideal, missing the fact that their push for a point of view they can call their own may get them trampled under foot, to play in their play groups. While the rest of us play out the story we want to with free thinking friends who allow us to play renegade marine groups or mixed lists of Tau and Imp Guards until GW realise that with that freedom there is no limit to collecting miniatures and an endless possibilities for new rule books.
I'm not sure about that though, you probably know the saying, that restrictions breed creativity and just letting everything go makes no sense from the global perspective - neither lore, nor business. GW plays a lot on the players'/fans' feelings for specific factions - that's why you have them trickling down the releases. From the lore perspective - Imperium (apart from the very beginning of 40k I guess) was about keeping humanity together by the Emperor's vision and rule. Same thing for other "issues" like femal SM - if everything is allowed and homogeneous, what is the reason for SoB existence? And why there aren't any BoB (Brothers of Battle)? Sure, GW could and should endorse some of the less traditional approaches into their lore (like maybe a tiny bit more focus on humans working with Tau, Blackshields, etc.), but unless they just deus ex machina a new region of galaxy for them, it is hard to imagine not seeing the Imperium cracking down on any rebel faction.
Something that I've always wanted 40k to do and that your proposal supports is taking a hard look and deconstructing the impact of real world colonization and decolonization and how disparate cultures evolve and integrate (many times inharmonious) when they come into contact with each other (and what is gained and lost for those who live in it). How do these isolated cultures with radically different traditions take bits and portions of the mainline imperium and use them in their own belief. What are the radically different belief systems, traditions, and symbols of the imperial cult that can manifest? And above all I just want to see all of real world humanity on display in both representation and aesthetics, not just the common European depictions that have been baked into fantasy and scifi over the past century.
One of the big things I've learned from indie RPG designers and storytellers is to make space for your audience. To allow areas (and significant chunks too) of blank narrative space that someone can take an idea that they think is awesome and run with it. 40k should be about Your Dudes and the setting should encourage that. (Also this is why I'm in favor of FSMs and misters of battle, even if they're just in fringe cases, cause they allow narrative space and interesting concepts for people to run with)
Eh I think that the imperium being the only faction for man yet being so flawed is the only thing that makes it not the worst or close to the worst, then it would become craftworld elder, tau as just being good and the imperium just being a fleeting evil kinda ruins the grimdarkness
When I think of freedom fighters, hope and freedom I think star wars, not 40k
Thank you. I'm starting a Dark Heresy campaign. This has given me some nice ideas for Radicals and other such alternatives to dangle Infront of the group.
I think you really hit the nail on the head with this one. The only problem is no one actually trusts GW to do anything this cool. I think everyone would rather see some other company take the galaxy and burn down GW in the process. It isn't like anything is really original in Warhammer anyway. A nice interconnected suite of skirmish games, role-playing games, battle tech knock-off titans, and X-wing style space pirate games all in a galaxy wide sci-fi setting would be great.
Very well done. You address several things I've been pondering on and off for years now. On the one hand, what I really like about the 40k setting is the fact that it's so faceted, allowing space for both the dystopian, silly Rogue Trader-era punk horror and social criticism as well as its science-fantasy elements allowing for individual heroism and excessive world-building more akin to Star Wars. That way, I have the freedom to focus on individual aspects of it depending on what I like at the moment, bathing for a short time in the horror, the ugly and the bloody, emerging from them like exiting a rollercoaster. The downside is, well, you said it, it attracts actual bad people with actual misanthropic views, completely misinterpreting what it's all about originally. My current fear is that this trend of blunting the satire may continue out of sheer necessity to provide less purchase for the real fascist types. But then again, nobody can tell me what to do within my own pocket of 40k, and if I want to cling to those satirical, silly RT flavours, no change of the universe can stop me.
Edit: I really like your version of a sort of second Age of Strife!
I think this is why I find the Krieg books so hard to read. What the Imperium has done to them is monstrous, they’ve had everything that makes them human removed (to the extent that they don’t get a POV character). But it’s also framed as “the only way” to survive, justifying the action.
Because it is the only way to survive. The whole appeal of 40k is that everything is grimdark. There are no good guys and there is no hope. You just have varying shades of gray and black fighting for their very survival.
What has Imperium done to Krieg?
Kriegers tried to gain independence.
And it was once again Kriegers who nuked their own planet to put down the pro-independence people (traitors to the Imperium or rebels, one might call them) and created the current culture.
It wasn't something the Imperium outside of Krieg enforced on it. It was entirely the acts of Kriegers (most especially the Imperial Loyalists, who came up victorious in the end) that created the current results.
@@gokbay3057 It was literally about the rich rulers of Krieg trying to be even more rich by hoarding the resources for themselves instead of giving the tithes to the Imperium. The normal citizens of Kreig didn't even realize they were independent until the Nukes started falling. Not to mention this would've doomed their planet to the horrors of the universe alone without the aided forces of the Imperium. It's a good thing they cleanse themselves with fire when they had the chance.
A good and thought-provoking video but I'm not sure I agree with the pitch for 10th edition. I'd love to see more of what you described but maybe in the books and skirmish games and video games.
I can't see GW releasing models and/or rules for a new faction for 40k that's obviously the one Good Guy army. And if they did and lots of new players started collecting them, then had opposing armies of good guys wipe each other out, those good guys would be cold blooded killers on the tabletop like everyone else.
IMHO the danger of creating a Good team in 40k is creating accidental hypocrisy instead of the intended hypocrisy of the existing factions. The genius of the setting is, as you mentioned, anyone can fight anyone due to religion, suspicion, aggression, prophecy, treachery or terrible admin. As soon as you change that balance by adding the White Hat faction you lose all the good it does.
Every faction in 40k thinks it's doing what it has to do, not just the Imperium, but we're often shown how this belief comes from self-fulfilling prophecies or a bestial, usually corrupted nature. We hear the protagonists say extreme measures are necessary but always invited to see it as the lie it is, or that it's only true because they created the situation that way.
For every faction, the ends either justify the means or they're an excuse for the means, which are always killing. And that's the really important thing I feel may have been missed - 40k is a game of killing each other as horribly as possible. Perhaps we're inured to it but, short of GW illustrating the horror of chainswords and meltas in age restricted rulebooks, it's easy to forget that. Creating a Good Guy faction would be saying "these guys are murdering for a good cause so it's ok to be like them", making an in-game philosophy that actually attempts to represent and cultivate a real world morality rather than satirising immorality through grotesque extremity.
As it is, no one can justify admiring the Imperium's politics without either admitting they're a Nazi or that they haven't read the background properly. The 40k kids books are all about plucky adventurers fighting nasty stuff. 99.99999% of the kids reading the books will grow up and discover the true horror of the setting. The others... there's not much you can do about them. They pop up no matter what you do. I don't think 40k encourages them, I think it does a good job of showing us what happens if we let them take control.
The funny part is 40k's imperium might be a correct depiction of how a pan-galatic uni-species empire would work realistically *under the condition that FTL travel is unreliable and AI is strictly outlawed*
For a civilization spamming through the entire galaxy, one colony might have such a huge cultural and maybe even biological difference comparing to a colony to the other end of galaxy that if a coherent government could hold those planets together it must be extremely oppressive, because we know throughout real history, an oppressive empire exists when a government tries to control larger territory than its technological limit
But again, all just be set upon the condition that *1) AI is strictly outlawed so every work must be completed by human hard labor and 2) FTL is so unreliable that a planet will be isolated for centuries without being noticed and maybe 3) gods could physically manifest if enough people believe them*
That's basically the reason the Imperium is a mess and mirrors the end of the roman empire in terms of 'this political body is trying to hold onto *_far_* too much land for it's communications and transportation ability.' I for one actually like that, because frankly the reality is even if Chaos wasn't a thing, trying to manage an empire on that scale with so many desperate cultures and such horrible communications and transport ability? That's insanity. That is literally impossible no matter how loose or tight the reigns are. It's the hubris of the GEoM to even attempt it. Even if the Webway project had worked, that would only alleviate the problem somewhat, not fix it. It's Alexander the Great's 'keep conquering until I run out of land' foolishness... which reflects human nature and history.
The suspension of disbelief is your ability to put aside what you believe to be possible, or true, or your own set of ideas about how the universe works, and exchange them to something else for the sake of fiction. Immersion takes this to an even greater degree, where you can actually feel like the world itself is real, and you are a part of it. The point is, the world you insert yourself into functions differently than the world you know and exist in currently, in every way, including physically as well as morally. A lot of people like to immerse themselves into 40k, and feel like they're a part of the universe.
Enough said.