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Sympathy for the heretic

Geedubs said:
I haven't read that quest so I obviously can't comment on how well it escapes the fascist mindset, and I'm far too burnt out on 40k to be willing to start reading it for this disagreement.

That said, I don't think giving us a nice Inquisitor who doesn't buy into fascist ideology is inherently a rejection of the setting's structural fascism anymore that canon giving us nice Space Marines or putting Guilliman in charge & having him start trying to reform the Imperium. "The system can be internally made more moral and less inefficient by putting the right people in power" is not a message which is inimical to fascism.

All it does is soften the fascism, make it seem like it's not all that bad. 'See look, they aren't evil there's real heroes in here!' It's the reason I dropped the Imperium Regent quest. Couldn't not see it as making Fascism With A Human Face, even if that's not what it was supposed to be. One of the only good things TNO ever did was subvert the Speer path.

Anyway, I'm getting a little sidetracked. I still don't think 40k canon had anything to offer other than: a) a setting where the fascist worldview is objectively correct and so you can shamelessly embrace it; b) deep lore for dumb internet nerds to enjoy (Hello Pot, I'm Kettle); and c) some poorly-written family drama epic. 40k fanon might be able offer something else, but in doing so it is just as much a repudiation of 40k as it is an celebration of it.
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Murder mysteries where you're the pressganged victims of a fascist theocracy trying to survive and also help the people being crushed at the bottom like you, while actual demons empowered by the fascist theocracy with its boot on your throat hunt in the margins, eternally feeding in the shadow off the horror generated by a war the demons won 10,000 years ago.

Age of Sail space piracy and colonialism/anti-colonial rebellion in the far future, where the crumbling expansive power cannot move far past the edges of its territory, and something like freedom can be found. You're probably the bad guy, but this might also be the only chance you ever have to be free of the Hell you left behind. Free of the Imperium and its wars, free to live in the strange wonderful spots beyond the edge of the map, in which there be monsters.

Play a pressganged conscript fighting in the wars of feudal lords and distant tyrants, trying to survive conflicts whose scope and nature are never explained to you and which investigating into is horribly dangerous. A cog in an evil machine you cannot escape, trying to scrape what existence you can while the gods laugh and laugh.


Dark Heresy, Rogue Trader, Only War. 40k is a big fucking setting with lots of gamelines and a vast amount of space to tell stories in. Stop declaring that the only appeal is to the fascist neckbeards that even the hardcore wargamers fucking hate.
 
Nyvis said:
I feel like Deliverance probably escapes this fate because it gets to remain a space marine fortress world and that's easily as much political weight as a forge world, even if that's less economic weight. But it would be interesting to explore if the codex reforms split the Raven Guard successors around disagreements about the role of the national liberation movement and their responsibilities in a very much unfree imperium.
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Deliverance should have escaped this fate, but one of the reasons the Corax-focused HH books are Pretty Fucking Bad is that it does not. Corax actually gets confronted by an old comrade once, a friend from his revolutionary days (or perhaps one of their kids, I never read the full story) who tells him that things are the same or perhaps worse than ever, the very same tech-guilds they fought against are back in power and the Emperor/Imperium just let it happen.

Corax takes the bold stance of saying that this blinkered fool does not understand the true necessity of their choices or the horrors of the galaxy, really if you think about it it is Corax who is the victim here, he was forced to commit genocide, so shut up and lick the boot before I kill you.

It's a fascinating subset of the general problems the HH books have of not actually comprehending that loyalists ought to have a reason to be loyal, rather than operating off the blind axiom that loyal = good.
 
Maugan Ra said:
Deliverance should have escaped this fate, but one of the reasons the Corax-focused HH books are Pretty Fucking Bad is that it does not. Corax actually gets confronted by an old comrade once, a friend from his revolutionary days (or perhaps one of their kids, I never read the full story) who tells him that things are the same or perhaps worse than ever, the very same tech-guilds they fought against are back in power and the Emperor/Imperium just let it happen.

Corax takes the bold stance of saying that this blinkered fool does not understand the true necessity of their choices or the horrors of the galaxy, really if you think about it it is Corax who is the victim here, he was forced to commit genocide, so shut up and lick the boot before I kill you.

It's a fascinating subset of the general problems the HH books have of not actually comprehending that loyalists ought to have a reason to be loyal, rather than operating off the blind axiom that loyal = good.
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This does work as an explanation for why Corax doesn't rebel, to be fair: he made his peace with fascism as long as he's part of its chosen sons rather than its victim. Not all oppressed people remain principled when offered a place as part of the ruling class. I think it's a missed opportunity to not give the raven guard a split in the manner of the dark angels over this issue though, since it's fundamental to their identity and I can't see all of them accepting this like a hive mind. Maybe they never get the opportunity because they're all dead on the fields of Istvaan V.

Or maybe the horus heresy is all pre written and the books are only allowed to fill the blanks :V

I agree with your last paragraph though. The horus heresy books all walk backward from "the heresy was bad" right into "the imperium was good" in the purest campist tradition.
 
Nyvis said:
This does work as an explanation for why Corax doesn't rebel, to be fair: he made his peace with fascism as long as he's part of its chosen sons rather than its victim. Not all oppressed people remain principled when offered a place as part of the ruling class. I think it's a missed opportunity to not give the raven guard a split in the manner of the dark angels over this issue though, since it's fundamental to their identity and I can't see all of them accepting this like a hive mind. Maybe they never get the opportunity because they're all dead on the fields of Istvaan V.

Or maybe the horus heresy is all pre written and the books are only allowed to fill the blanks :V

I agree with your last paragraph though. The horus heresy books all walk backward from "the heresy was bad" right into "the imperium was good" in the purest campist tradition.
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Corax did a soft purge of his legion and then most of the rest got wiped out at Istavaan, then they all kind of went mad. Remember, the Heresy is at its core a big Soap Opera; the freedom fighter ending up on the same side as the Super Fascist is appropriate because of his personal grudges even as it breaks his principles.

The bigger problem is how they turned Corax's Folly into an Alpha Legion plot. Undermined the shame and tragedy of it just to be "teal marines stuck their fingers in the stew" instead of it being a tale of Corax pushing too hard, too fast on things he did not fully understand.
 
Mutton said:
Corax did a soft purge of his legion and then most of the rest got wiped out at Istavaan, then they all kind of went mad. Remember, the Heresy is at its core a big Soap Opera; the freedom fighter ending up on the same side as the Super Fascist is appropriate because of his personal grudges even as it breaks his principles.

The bigger problem is how they turned Corax's Folly into an Alpha Legion plot. Undermined the shame and tragedy of it just to be "teal marines stuck their fingers in the stew" instead of it being a tale of Corax pushing too hard, too fast on things he did not fully understand.
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The whole plot of the alpha legion over the heresy is garbage honestly.

It was a lot funnier and in character when all we knew was "well they were absent for most of it doing alpha legion things and they joined chaos, we have no idea why". Constantly guessing if things are alpha legion psyops or not and never revealing whether they were is exactly how it should be.
 
Nyvis said:
The whole plot of the alpha legion over the heresy is garbage honestly.

It was a lot funnier and in character when all we knew was "well they were absent for most of it doing alpha legion things and they joined chaos, we have no idea why". Constantly guessing if things are alpha legion psyops or not and never revealing whether they were is exactly how it should be.
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Alpha Legion had the issue of their initial plot with the alien Cabal being so terrible and stupid that even the 40k writers realized that and ditched it. They just didn't actually put up anything in its place so you have a giant ? where any sort of story should be.
 
Mutton said:
Alpha Legion had the issue of their initial plot with the alien Cabal being so terrible and stupid that even the 40k writers realized that and ditched it. They just didn't actually put up anything in its place so you have a giant ? where any sort of story should be.
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Wait they made the cabal plot non canon entirely? I thought it was in the Alpha Legion Horus Heresy books?

Honestly I don't mind a big ?, that's great.
 
I must say there is something (unintentional on GW's part, no doubt) fascinating about the
implications of Corax's background new HH background. Even discounting the fact that we have to go on Corax and the IoM's word that the initial rebellion succeeded since everyone else is long since gone / hypno-indoctrinated.

That after the Crusade reached them the planet is actively scummed of the very same people who might be best used to facilitate its uprising / freedom (the smartest, the most physically able, the most proficient at violence)… fed into the Clockwork Orange, and used as the new enforcers of the system they might have tried to dismantle. And that the population undoubtedly knows this. Do you think the IoM has created a system wherein tearful families try to hide their child's quick thinking? Scold them for physical acts of greatness (such as freeing a fellow laborer before an adult can be summoned to lift the same fallen machinery) because these are the sort of kids who are dragged away to prop the system that has put them in there?

Gold. Pure gold for establishing the horrific measures enacted by the IoM and the trauma it inflicts on its populations. Why people might take the Devil's bargain with Chaos if it means being able to let their kids be kids. Preventing horror stories like what happened with Talos of the Night Lords, who cut down his own mother without even blinking as he couldn't even recognize her as she approached him during a Triumph on Nostramo from everything scrubbed in his brain.
 
Had a thought while driving to work today. A thought about how it's kind of odd how the Night Lords so starkly changed immediately after Curze's discovery and in a way that doesn't quite match either Curze or pre-Curze established character.

Specifically, Curze based his reign of terror on going after ne'erdowells and such. Some of the newer lore even tries to emphasize this with waxing of how him killing an Archivist during a fit after joining the Crusade caused a breakdown on multiple levels. Meanwhile the Night Lords pre-Curze were heavily Terran in recruitment and while not quite bog standard absolutely did not engage in rolling atrocities.

So why, then, did they almost immediately swing to committing gross atrocities against general populations to intimidate worlds? You can argue the power and authority of a Legion Primarch went to Curze's head in the worst of ways. And could probably make a coherent argument for as much. But I realized I missed a forest for the trees and a couple things rapidly clicked into place.

Think about it for a moment. Think about highly powerful and established politicians IRL. Mega-billionaires and major crime lords. Why would they care about atrocities done on the general population? Let alone that on another planet? Specifically, why would they care so much as to how and scrape at the Emperor's feet? They wouldn't. They would make speeches about how they don't talk with terrorists, gangpress ever more people, then hide in their bunkers until they forced the IoM to give them - specifically - favorable terms, then tell the people to stand down thank them for their sacrifices then go on going on with cushy speaking gigs / slightly higher taxes.

Night Lords were not known for their slaughters, at least initially. That was the World Eaters' territory. Before the Night Lords took it up as well, they were fear. System governments overthrown at mention of Night Lord dispatch. Entire sectors surrendering before any armies had met.

But I refer again to "The sorts of people leading these Empires, Hedgemonies, Petty Dictatorships, et al are routinely established as the sort who wouldn't care how high others' bodies are piled so long as they get a good deal. So long as their interests are hurt less."

So how does this work? Why would the Night Lords take up a strategy different than either of its base components, a strategy which for that matter wouldn't even work? Well, I guess part of it could be them going after everyone. If they string up the nobles and whatnot too after everything's said and done it makes sense why they would surrender so promptly. Resist a little or a lot and they still get turned into boots. But it still doesn't mesh with Curze's original philosophy or Terran tactics prior.

Maybe it's a logistical issue? Only… no? Sure. Let us say that at the start only Curze can do Curze things. Sensible enough considering what Primarchs are. But Curze already proved quite efficient at taking out head honchos on his own. Let the Night Lords park in orbit, drop Curze, and let the guy who coerced multiple Hive Cities into compliance at once do his thing. And in the grand scheme of things it's hard to imagine other Night Lords couldn't approximate the same, swapping out being a Primarch with teleport beacons and Thunderhawks / Drop Pods and Melta Bombs and whatnot. To say nothing of how it's just more work [or time, anyways: Something something job you enjoy].

That's when it hit: Yeah. They absolutely could. Could. But remember what happened the moment Curze left Nostramo. What happened to Angron. In newer lore, the fate of Deliverance.

They absolutely could have kept the old tactics. But to tie it back into the main thread premise, they were probably told in uncertain terms "No". No killing corrupt Planetary Governors. No introducing philosophies of murdering would-be Tyrants. "It's not honorable," some of Curze's siblings would grumble as self-raised Curze wonders what makes the officials less culpable than the conscripts with autoguns shoved in their hands to buy better terms. "It sends the wrong message about the Crusade" Archivists whine as Curze looks at barren worlds repopulated wholesale because the officials would take death over depose. "You would be tearing down institutional knowledge and structures" strategists lament as Curze thinks "Well yes that's kind of the point isn't this to be an enlightened age?".

So what's the feral child to do? Simple: They get creative. The IoM refuses to let him target nobles and crime lords directly? Well, what if he includes further down the chain? He did it before on Nostramo. At this some of the voices quiet down. That's… still bad precedent, but it's closer to what the Crusade knows. What if they go for the PMCs and Bodyguards too, the people who aren't technically doing the deeds but actively enforcing the system? That's even closer! Armies fighting armies. He pokes and probes to find something that gets complaints to stop.

And for a while it works. The Night Lords are feared, but most of all by Lords and Ladies. By Merchant Barons who would otherwise see the conflict as a means to fatten their wallets on the deaths of planets. There's the fear of "Will I be seen as culpable?", but also that room now for those "He was noble, of sorts, for a time". Refer back to the toppled governments. They do so both in fear of the Night Lords but also in a tacit understanding they won't face reprisal. The reverse also now holding true too: If the governments don't talk with their people, they'll do so with the Night Lords. And they will have less patience.

But there's a rub. Curze is falling apart in every sense. A ticking time bomb. Not only that, Curze cannot be everywhere at else. He has to delegate. Curze's psyche is straining even before the stress of being told to ignore some compliant worlds because "They already rolled over". Some of the Captains have different standards for culpability. Some disagree with the base premise outright but enjoy the slaughters. Some sympathize with the poor nobles being told to reign it in. Curze is acclimating to his role.

Year by year the system breaks down. More and more do violence for graphic violence's sake. Curze grows further unhinged and further disillusioned at the same times.

Once again, the IoM creates its own monsters.
 
As a more generalizable prosocial niche for chaos, what about resettling worlds which have been stripped of their original biosphere by the tyranids? Maybe sorcery and warp energies are less dangerous, or even overall benign, if you manage to get far enough away from areas or items choked with too many centuries of history and ritual. Digger by Ursula Vernon and Kochab - end discuss some related concepts.
 
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It was a joke.

I just thought it was weird how similar their beliefs were to 40K Chaos.

Especially if (if you speak Swedish) you read their grimoire, which has like 5 sentences that wouldn't make good lyrics for an edgy death metal album.
 
DestinyPlayer said:
Not sure what to do about the Dark Eldar. I think that making the Craftworlds less idiotically selfish would work wonders at making the Dark Eldar be a contrast rather than as the Face of the Eldar, which would help combat the fascist undertones of "hedonistic society of horror we have to fight to protect ourselves and everyone else".

I guess you could intensify the Aristocrats™ vibe and decrease the Gays™ vibe, but I'm not sure how to do that.
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Start by changing a few names.
There are Craftworld Eldar (with rigid aspect paths, abandoning the old ways to build up wraithbone tech from scratch), Exodite Eldar (out in the woods), and Loyalist Eldar (most numerous but collectively least effective, black spikes and skulls everywhere).
There are Craftworld Humans (rigid elemental castes, abandoning the old ways to build up tau drone tech from scratch), Chaos Humans (out in the daemon worlds), and Loyalist Humans (most numerous but collectively least effective, gothic arches and skulls everywhere).
Nominally all six - and others besides - are allies against e.g. necrons and 'nids, then separate during peacetime as a series of empirical experiments to settle philosophical disagreements on how best to run a society. But, like capitalists and the USSR, or protestants and catholics, or many more, they end up fighting each other constantly anyway. Starts as a matter of symbolic prestige, or control of strategic resources, no shortage of ways for foolishness to escalate.

The typical Loyalist Eldar raid isn't actually out to capture slaves, though it's easy to see how a casual witness might get that impression. It's a charity hospital... with no grasp of local consent etiquette, and far-too-broad definitions of "emergency" or "surgically correctable disability." Sunday 26 March 2017 Asking politely would likely be more effective than shooting, as a way to get them to go away. If only you knew the language, or they knew more of yours than half a janky tourist phrasebook. Then it turns out that the hovercraft genuinely IS full of eels.
 
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The Dark Eldar become amazing when you don't treat them as a serious part of a serious setting, and instead treat them as basically Looney Tunes. They're cartoonishly evil and ridiculous, and just lean into how silly they are. Vect should be like Wile E. Coyote, constructing his Acme Brand Pain-inator only for the Guard or Tau or Craftworlds just to stroll on past it.
 
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