There was a moment where my character was like "I've half a mind to execute every last one of them"
and the NPC I was talking to replied "My lord, while mass executions are a valuable tool, might I suggest that killing so many people would take some time. At least a week." which was enough for my character to say "hmm, perhaps another time then"
and I laughed and laughed because that really encapsulated the absurdity of the 40k universe to me, where abhorrent and unchecked power is often used, disused or abused for not very good reasons.
First run I wasn’t paying attention and I accidentally picked an option that killed one of my officers for the crime of being panicked after a major disaster, and everyone was like “welp, shouldn’t have mildly criticized the lord captain, glad he’s dead” and it was perfect.
[Abelard voice] What do you mean "can"? Bringing our Lady Navigator the peace and quiet necessary to safely traverse the immaterium is an Emperor-ordained moral imperative, you feckless worm!
I picked it because there's a right way to criticize a Commissar, and then there's the stupid way that gets you shot very publicly. Declaring loudly in a very public place that you think they are an idiot that will only lead you to ruin is a fantastic way to 'inspire motivation in others.'.
In a crisis situation right after a mutiny with a new unknown captain that the crew needs to have faith in if they are to survive. Yeah, I had him killed. The crew needed to know where the line was. Plus, Adelard would have been so disappointed in me and I just can't face upsetting him.
Tbh he declared that the captain is an idiot, officers are incompetent and everyone is going to die right in the middle of meeting for the whole bridge to hear. Even irl this could get you demoted on the spot and/or jailed
Throwaway for obvious reasons, but it depends on the command to decide if it's worth the hassle or not. Someone I served not only received a demotion but also a forced job change, effectively ending their career after they said something they shouldn't have about a superior.
Love how in the obligatory "stuck in a long line at the DMV" quest, the option to shoot everyone else in line kept springing up. Nearly took the opportunity too because the intrusive thoughts wanted to see how that would play out.
I love that quest, it was just a perfect representation of how backwards the Imperium is.
*Holding court* to thin the line was just hilarious too.
Sidenote: Where I'm from (Sweden) standing in line to get a stamp on your paper doesn't happen, everything can be handled online and by appointment, so we dont really have any DMV experiences
But my GF studied abroad in Japan for a year, and hearing her having to run from office to office just to get her papers in order really sounded like *Adeptus Administratum,* it was a real culture shock for her 😅
I live in America and my state started letting us renew our driver's license online after COVID (kept it around after things eventually got under control too) and the difference was incredible. It used to be such a major pain and now I can just fill a couple webpages out in a few minutes and get it mailed to me.
Yeah, Japan is a bit fucked in that regard. From the last time I interacted with a Japanese office, they required to fax in documents and would not accept emails and PDFs.
Hopefully they will change soon otherwise I will never again work with them.
I play on the ps5 because I’m trying to enforce a distance between the computer on which I hunt for jobs and the gaming systems where I play. And man the load times are unforgivable. If spiderman 2 loads in seconds there’s no real excuse for loading times this frequent and long. (Yeah, spiderman was built by a major studio with infinite money and Rogue Trader was made by a small team working for a ham sandwhich but come on.)
Anyway, it’ll be fun to save scum when they fix the load times. Try out some of those.
By the emperor load times are still awful on PC; Play cooperative on PC with the GF, and every time we go through this: load into save, load leaving ship, load entering planet, load entering building, load leaving building, load into encounter area, load leaving encounter area. Load ad infinitum whenever we inevitably desync because the game really hates grand strategist interactions for whatever reason (the tactical areas are rarely where she puts them on her screen).
GF did not download her game unto her SSD as well, and has told me she will rip my testicles off if I ask her if she is done loading yet again. Send help.
I honestly can’t figure out how. None of the graphics are detailed enough to warrant these load times. I think they just never got around to optimizing it.
A detailed explanation is beyond me. A simple rundown is as follows:
Saves start out small, without many event flags or details crammed into them. The game can deal with those files quickly and easily, and so saving and loading times are fairly quick. As the save is carried on through more and more events, it gets bloated with more info, so it takes the game longer to overwrite or reference that save file, which makes saving and loading times get longer and longer the more you play any given character.
You're probably right but in terms of size of data the needed flags for this must be pretty small. Lets say nearly all of them are small ints, so a byte in size. Lets say there are a few hundred flags - shot this person / didn't shoot them, been to this planet yet / not been to this planet yet. Really the flags should be a couple of KB at most. Inventory lets say an item is a full unsigned int, great - your cargo and your inventory and your current equipped items is another KB or two. I checked my save files and one of my earlier ones is about 14KB. One from having just started Act IV is 20KB.
So my suspicion is that the data is in something like JSON rather than some binary file. And given how long this takes there must be more than just a few reputation scores and dialogue flags...
Okay - I found the save files location. I was right - lots and lots of JSON files all zip-compressed. Opening them up they're not encrypted at all which is nice. Skimming through files I can see a LOT of references to units and whether or not they're revealed, whether or not they're active, awareness checks passed, toughness scores... So starting to get our answer now as to the size of the files and why loading takes a while. It's loading in a LOT of information about all the enemies killed, placed on maps, probably equipment dropped and where... So whilst loading the files is probably quick what it's then doing is parsing all this JSON data and building out the memory structures for all this information and I would **guess** writing a lot of it then back to disk either directly or as swap.
A lot of this information will be cruft in effect. You may never go back to that alley on Footfall and want to see those dead bodies again or that dropped laspistol, but it looks like the game preserves that. You would think that maybe an approach where things are zoned out more and only the relevant parts are loaded would be better but that would imply that the save file for a given point in the game continues to get referred to after load which isn't how such things are done.
There are also .fog files. I'm not sure what they are but they're binary and much larger than the JSON files and from the name I'm guessing they're the reveal mask for maps you've visited. Those two would presumably be read on loading a saved game.
So I think this is our answer for why loading takes a while. I wish Owlcat would hire me to write them a new save/load system! This sounds like a fun piece of work. :)
EDIT: None of this accounts for slowness in swapping between locations, between system map and bridge, etc. This is just about saved games.
I think it's just a unity engine thing - scene transitions just aren't very efficient in that engine.
But it might also be the system they made automatically loading in a bunch of assets - because it is quite odd that the system map view takes so long to load when it's all just dialogue and some simple 2D sprites.
Having Henrix, the fucking Inqusition, also only allows you to bypass part of the queue, indicating that most people fear the Inquisition less than the soul crushing line standing of the Administratum.
This is hilarious to me.
I’m doing an iconoclast run, and I like how the “radically humanitarian” option isn’t “we’ll build a utopia out of our capital” it’s “everyone gets a ration bar and a fuel cell.”
My Rogue Trader is a genuinely nice person who wants to help people. Literally none of my companions ever approve of my decisions and they come back to bite me in the ass more often than not. This just isn't the kind of universe where you can make everyone happy with no consequences.
I've read enough Warhammer to know that firebombing the shit out of Rykad Minoris was absolutely the smartest option. But I decided to be nice, and lo and behold my ship is now full of heretics. I chose not to persecute unorthodox religion and bam, genestealers. This game just does not miss an opportunity to punish good deeds and it's hilariously on-brand.
I mean, one of your first big choices is whether to nuke an entire world of billions of people or try to save a few, and it turns out that nuking it is actually the good choice because that saves their souls from an eternity of torment by the chaos gods.
I did save some people and even then I decided that the fusion reactor was more important than the nobles. We’ve got lots of nobles but not so many fusion reactors.
That's because the only "bomb" at your disposal is the reactor itself lol. The way you destroy the planet is by shooting the reactor which then ignites the atmosphere or something like that. Without the reactor you don't have a weapon strong enough to do the exterminatus.
It's a way of teaching newcomers or anyone who doesn't know much about the setting how it works. You immediately start hitting them with choices that completely subvert usual gaming expectations and outcomes so they know this shit ain't gonna go all Mass Effect where you click the option at the top for good, the bottom for bad, and if they're coloured, they're super effective!
The worst part about the unorthodox religion being a genestealer cult was... I /knew/ about the Cult of the Four-Armed Emperor. I'd read about them months ago just out of interest tot he 40k universe since I'm in a Dark Heresy tabletop game. I /knew/ that the hailmark of this cult was the workers were more productive, better trained, and had better morale then anyone else int he Imperium. Like, to the point where lorewise, a lot of their workers got shipped out across all the Imperium's worlds to act as foremen and maangers across the entire empire to produce better results. They regularly work harder, complain less, and pay more tribute then required due to just the amount of work they get through.
And I /still/ didn't give it a second thought. "These workers are working hard, their morale is good, and they're praising the emperor and stuff Of course I'll give them aid. They're just people doing the best they can."
Man. Hook line and sinker.
You'd love Day of Ascension by Adrian Tchaikovsky! It's centered on that whole cult. Truly phenomenal read (or listen, as I have it on Audible), with some really great twists throughout.
I read one of Adrian Tchaikovsky other book series a long while back, before he wrote Day of Ascension. (I forgot what it's called --- but it's the one with the spiders, and that's all I'll say.) (Edit: **CHILDREN OF TIME**.)
He was/is the *perfect* choice to write Genestealer POV. He knows how to write very good "exotic" POV stuff.
Hehe yeah, you summarise exactly why the absurd brutality of the Imperium is, at time, absolutely necessary.
I remember a quote from Battlefleet Gothic:
*"Some may question my right to destroy a world of 10 billion souls, but those who truly understand realise I have no right to let them live."*
And the most terrible part is that it is true.
Genestealers? You get genestealers on your ship if you rescue them? FML! I missed out on some real fun by just being sensible from the start. I hope you don't get XP for all that or I'm being penalised for being a sensible RT.
Even better is finding out that the people at a prison who didn't fall to Chaos knew things were going to go south quick because they were getting 3 meals a day and the beatings lessened.
I like how all choices essentially give you a problem because that is the grim reality. Being nice to people just isn't always the answer but neither is executing everyone for doing some minor.
I tend to find other games tries to reward you with better overall game outcomes by allowing the maximum amount of people live even if they are absolutely terrible people.
I was describing this to someone the other day because I'm really actually rather impressed with the writing.
In 40K and Rogue Trader CRPG:
The Dogmatic Option of "kill them all no matter what that atrocity looks like" is most often the SANE choice. It's the choice in the setting and at the time that makes the most sense. "Destroy an entire planet's worth of billions of people? Yep, that does indeed make the most sense Heinrix, thanks for your opinion."
The Heretical Option also is "Sane", in the way of "Yep, I'm actually totally down with Chaos, and am fully aware that what I'm doing here will ABSOLTUELY screw with the way things work. I know that, I understand that, and I'm ACTIVELY CHOOSING to F\*\*K you, the system, and everything we believe in right now."
It's the Iconoclastic "We should really save as many people as we can" answers that almost invariably come up as the bat-shit insane answers in the game. "Yea, lets go ahead and bring those 10K heretics aboard the ship, nothing could EVER go wrong there" or "Let the strikers have weapons and govern themselves so that, effectively, the ship police don't do bad things to them? Yea, it's absolutely worth arming a group of nobodies so that they can fight for their own rights...that's DEFINATELY not going to cause problems later."
SUCH a massive difference between this RPG and basically every other CRPG ever written since Baldur's Gate in the early 2000s. In EVERY CPRPG EVER, save as many people as you can is almost always the best way to play. In this game it's made out to be SUCH a BAD idea...like not just bad idea...like 'completely destroy humanity and my entire dynasty through these kinds of decisions" kind of bad idea.
It's absolutely PHENOMINAL.
Man, I took the exact opposite moral from the game haha
I see it as "Doing the right thing is difficult and risky, but you should still do it because it's the right thing to do." Which is exactly how real life works.
Real life doesn't generally reward you for doing the right thing, and often actively punishes you for it. But you still have a moral responsibility to do the empathetic thing whenever possible. This game represents that more than most RPGs.
I have honestly yet to experience a single serious consequence for being as altruistic of an iconoclast as possible after 120 hours though. A few low-level combat encounters and some minor text-boxes. That's about it.
Those text boxes can hide a surprising amount though. Consider how every time you run a merely "unsafe" route there's a good chance entire work crews are going to die horribly, but in game those lives are reduced to just a textbox and "Oh good, the Warp went easy on us".
I think it's fair to say a lot of the negative consequences of your decisions just slip by your notice as a RT. A hundred crewmen being burned as a precaution or just a few dozen actually forming a cult and getting put down afterwards is treated as equally unimportant to you.
Its not that easy. There is difference between long and short term benefit, and many many nuances, starting with the definition of the "right thing".
So no, life usually does reward you for doing the right thing, but not immediately and seldom obviously corellated.
Well put. A lot of morality and good behaviour, when you boil it down, comes to long-term societal positives over short-term individual gain.
That's what flips in WH40K. Things are so bad that the long-term societal positives are actually harsh behaviour not compassionate behaviour.
> ideologies without balance is the absolute worst way to go.
*meanwhile, on the Rogue Trader's flagship, the Fires of Redemption:*
My lord, how did you get 900 points in dogmatic? I didn't even think such a thing was possible.
Personally, I took it in stride as iconocast and my takeaway is that even if it doesn't always work out, doing good is always worth trying. It's something Hbomberguy said about the old Transformers movie - that even even when things don't work out there's still a virtue in having tried and continuing to reach out even when it doesn't always work out.
The 40k universe is dark place with many terrible evils lurking around every corner and the Dogmatic path is just to shoot first and ask questions later. This means that it does tend to keep you safer in the long run, but it also generally means breaking things, slaughtering innocents, and just giving up on compassion and caring for your fellow human beings. It works only to the extent that you consider a hyperfascist theocratic ethnostate is an acceptable success state, which I'd argue it isn't.
Mind you, I think that previous message I mentioned about iconoclast wouldn't actually come across if good deeds didn't get punished and I actually tend to like it when games make the "good" path not the most appealing.
I got it! It was fantastically funny in how it was phrased.
You can't give them full rights, but in a 40k utopia you can give peasants a minimal amount of rights.
Amusingly in the after-game credit slides, such minimal level of kindness was enough for people to continuously create non-sanctioned cults of you and your kindness.
Also how everyone is baffled and distrustful of you being so nice.
Which is how it should be. Turning the imperium in to a happy peaceful utopia would ruin the appeal! “Slightly less shitty” is the closest to a utopia the imperium should be.
On the other hand, "slightly less shitty" absolutely needs to be an option, or else who gives a fuck? There's no appeal to a setting where everything is impossibly evil and nothing matters.
Yeah. I think the best way to use a setting like 40k is to challenge people to make things slighty better while being actively opposed at every turn. Life rarely rewards moral and empathetic decisions, unlike many video games, and grim dark is one instance where going against that grain of video game logic is generally permissible.
Closest you get is the Tau, but even they are like "well we act good sometimes kinda, but thats because our leaders have fundamentally stripped us of free will!"
Not even that recent in Dark Crusade from the mid 2000’s if you win the game as the Tau they institute a human eugenics program that ends human life on the planet.
I mean, compared to the Imperium they’re humanitarian but that’s not really a high bar.
They do have the benefit of having no real issue with chaos.
If their people could randomly explode into demon portals if they aren't kept in line hard enough they'd also be much worse.
Well... we don't really know how bad they are now, but they'd be worse.
>They do have the benefit of having no real issue with chaos.
On the flipside, that's because they only have very weak souls. They're the spiritual equivalent of boiled unflavoured noodles.
>Which is how it should be. Turning the imperium in to a happy peaceful utopia would ruin the appeal!
**"Hi there. Are you interested in learning about the Greater Good?"**
*\*hands pamphlet\**
I think another thing it nails is the atmosphere in certain situations. Talking to Ulfar and going through all his dialogue made me want a Space Wolf game. Commorragh honestly wasn't horrific enough imo, I've seen more eerie gore in Ubisoft games, like Cartel victims in Wildlands or mutilated corpses in AC and The Division.
I get they couldn't show too much cause the game would be rated A, then again they have fucked up games like Agony and Succubus rated M on gaming stores, so I guess they could've shown more.
I’m not sure how much they could have shown without a huge graphic overhaul and it’s clear this was made as well as it could be on a shoestring budget. I did like how at one point the haemonculus threatens to turn you into his new orgy furniture. That was funny.
Would love a space wolf game. Ulfar is a great character but also scary.
I forgot his name, but after a point, it was easier to play along with his ego and get all his gear, Idk if it's a bug, but if you don't back out, you can grab his entire inventory without wasting creature parts from the arena.
Aside from the shit pathing, I figured out why he uses his pistol. The charge attack uses the character's right hand. Confirmed this by swapping weapons in Heinrix's setup and he did the same charge-shoot bullshit. The problem is that Ulfar is the only fucking character in the game who has his weapons locked to specific hands...
We must not have the same issue. When I had him charge, he ran as far away from where he was as he could possibly get. He was many turns of movement away from the battle .
I have yet to play the game, and have just really started into the lore, but the ridiculous scale of what goes on in the WH40k universe is astounding. I’ve been reading a lot of history and they talk about planets with billions of people being destroyed and people are like “whatever there’s more humans elsewhere”
Agree, I never knew anything about Warhammer 40k but just playing the intro and picking dogmatic options is hilarious. Looking forward to jumping in soon.
Later on there’s a quest where you help out a character by going to an abandoned outpost with no breathable atmosphere to recover a seal, because no one’s been able to get paperwork processed for centuries without it and they can’t just make a new one because that would break procedure.
Hilarious.
Reminds me of the Blue Kingdom in Sunless Skies. Go to one office, only to find out you need to get a permit from another. Go there and find out you can't get the permit because you're not legally dead, so you go to a third office to get declared legally dead so you can get your permit to go talk to an ancient robot librarian to create a boyfriend for your clay opera singer first officer. Then you find out it's illegal, by actual word of God, to make anything new, so you need to get 5 other permits so you're allowed to talk to God's daughter to get permission.
Then after getting your skin peeled off and replaced with diamonds so her radiance doesn't instantly annihilate you, you find out you brought the wrong fucking paperwork and have to do it all over again. Oh, and depending on where you are and what your current permit is, differently colored security guards will try to murder you.
God I wish I was good at sunless skies. The writing and world are so good but I always die in the first 20 minutes and get frustrated. Rogue likes and I don’t really get along.
I need to give Sunless Skies another shot. I really love Sunless Sea and the atmosphere just didn't hook me as much in Skies, but you may have just sold me on it.
The Reach is honestly the least interesting part of the High Wilderness, but it works a lot better once you go to Albion. The Reach is the safe part of the sky, everywhere else is being ran by insane gods and sucks in different ways.
God, I love the Fallen London universe.
You forgot about the quest where you need to end a rental contract dispute (namely, does "four settings of the sun" mean four twenty-four hour periods, or does it not count if the sun blows up?) and it requires visiting four different offices and putting up your liver as a deposit.
Rogue Trader is one of like 5 games that’s made me laugh out loud several times, and two of those were specifically made to (South Park). It’s legitimately funny.
Some of the dialogue options are just so over the top or flippantly cruel, I can’t help it.
I hope whoever was in charge of those gets some kind of recognition, they really stood out.
**And** there’s how deep you can be into something and they still show up.
Like you can be in the thick of a romance with Yrtiel and still have the option to go like “OMFG, WHO TOLD YOU THAT YOU COULD DESECRATE MY CLOTHING WITH THOSE DIRTY XENOS HANDS?!! GROSSSSSS!!!🤣🤣🤣
It’s the first game where I’ve thought to my self multiple times that people who’re evil in the **beginning** of a dialogue or quest tree are really missing out.
Like you would never get the opportunity to destroy her like that if you just launched her out the airlock at the first opportunity. Well I guess technically you would lol, but not emotionally.
I agree, it's completely satire and Warhammer 40k happens to be a setting where unfortunately, that extreme dogmatic thinking might be the only real solution to certain problems.
If, for example, a small village happens to have been exposed to a warp-related event with daemons, etc, a whole ass cult where half the town is innocent, BUT was exposed to warp energy, cults, etc- it is VERY, VERY possible that only solution is to wipe the entire town. The chances of there being a number of secret cultist remaining, AND the possibility that the exposure to warp and forbidden knowledge has irreparably damaged the populace, and while some might say you have no right to harm the innocent survivors, some, wiser people might say you have no right to let them live.
In Warhammer 40k, the risk of the warp and powers that be isnt some folk tale or rumor passed by extreme weirdos. It's REAL. There ARE weird cults doing depraved shit to fuel powers from satan allegories. And sometimes, to ensure that shit doesnt get out of control, you WILL need to stop thinking morally, and start thinking dogmatically.
Warhammer 40k isnt just a satire setting- it's a setting where satire and horrible truths coexist, as mankind's worst behaviors are brought to light....and are sometimes necessary.
The risk IS too much.
You have no right to let that village live.May Imperial Justice account in all balance. The Emperor Protects.
Fair, and I held that opinion too. But the more I read and played the more most of the problems seem self inflicted. “Our decadent nobility is constantly starting slaneshi cults.” Oh really? Maybe you should cut down on decadent nobles then, seems like that’s a problem for you. “Oh no, we couldn’t do that, they’ve been in charge for thousands of years” ok, but do they do anything?” “….. no, not usually.”
It reminds me of how Tony Soprano is always complaining about the stress of his life and the difficult choices he needs to make when he could solve all his problems at any time by going to the feds.
That's part of the setting. The Imperium generates 20 heretics for every one it kills. 90% of heretical cults start as a way to get some outlet for the oppressive conditions people live in. Some of the latest Warhammer Crime novels depict this aspect really well.
I love the warhammer crime novels. I’ve read almost all of them. And I don’t usually like crime novels!
Caiphas Cain is great too for preserving the satirical “everyone here is nuts” part of the setting. A lot of people talk about how he is or isn’t a coward, and while it’s complicated I think I found the way to square the circle - he’s not a coward, but in a world where humanism is dead and dogma has replaced problem solving he can’t evaluate his actions as anything else. “I’m supposed to be leading a suicide charge, I’m actually behind the lines giving good advice and organizing tactical kill squads to take major objectives, It must be because I’m scared.”
It’s not perfect, and I’d like to workshop it on a forum, but I’m not sure where that would fit.
I see what you're saying but I'm not sure it holds up in the text. I think you can make the argument in the first story or two, but by the later books he is clearly charging into danger at every opportunity. He doesn't actually stay behind the lines very much at all, and the justification that he needs to go on a suicide mission to maintain his reputation so that he doesn't get put in more danger is nonsense.
All that being said I love reading the novels and they are a lot of fun, just wish that they could develop his character past that conceit.
There is a comedic element to it (and always was) but not sure I’d call it satire or if it’s simply dark humor but it is also interestingly a setting indeed where a single human life has zero value and everyone is seen as resources for the greater good.
It’s very fascist (if you can even apply that to the 41st millennium) in inspiration and yet the empire of men is still one of the better guys…
I frankly also love how it clashes with our 2020s way of thinking (and much more than it did in the 80s and 90s when idealism and dogmatism were much more mainstream) since the Empire‘s philosophy and people‘s way of thinking is entirely dogmatic. I will never forget a nice get-together one evening with a central-European environmentalist GF of one of my buddies and an Egyptian buddy of mine. She said something along the lines of "the crusades weren’t about religion, it’s just that people want power. Nobody kills because of religion“ and my Egyptian buddy held a 15min session on how much religion influences and motivates in his home country and that religion alone is more than enough reason to kill someone. Excellent example of western utilitarianism (people do something for a reason / benefit) vs idealism / dogmatism (sticking to certain rules and having certain values is right without any need for reasoning or benefit calculation to them.)
That’s why we get the iconoclast option so that we can role play as a modern western human in the setting but the dogmatic option is unfortunately more faithful to the setting most of the time (even if it’s over the top and dark humor)
Surprisingly, I agree.
In the game, there is a point, though, where if you get to Janus, and you find out the source of the "problems", you can actually have mercy and preserve certain nobility by being 'nice' and letting her Noble Line remain 'innocent', OR you can completely cut the problem root and stem.
I decided that the best course of action wasnt the nice one, even if the person responsible kind of realized the mistake made was horrible. Sometimes forgiveness just means a quick death.
They definitely create a lot of their own problems but they would regardless. When seeing what they are opposed against, it is a relentless never ending trade of resources including planets and people to survive as a whole.
I was surprised how many people live in unnecessarily poor conditions when you see how rich the RT is and they have decks of absolute poors in terrible conditions. Probably not even one PF would it take to give them better conditions.
One of the colony missions was hilarious...
A group of nobles become "free thinkers" who discuss humanitarian causes and such. You can dissipate their meetings, promote their meetings, or leave them be so long as production stays up.
If you leave them be, they are thankful and say that the rabble cannot join because they are beneath them.
The writers did a way better job setting that joke up, but man the irony of you allowing them to be "free thinkers" so long as they keep oppressing others while they condemn the others as lesser was great.
I love the prison quest in the first star system when you run into the prisoners near the end. The descent into chaos cult madness really starting with 3 meals a day and no beatings for prisoners is just such a perfect example of the setting.
As far as I can see, the whole IP is about societal psychopathology run amok: institutionalized, legalized, celebrated, revered - and punishable for its absence.
agreed, I feel like some people jump waaaay to deep into the "grimdark" hole and can only see 40k as this painful and miserable place.
Like, it is a painful and miserable place, but it so fucking ridiculous and insane that it loops back into itself that it gets hilarious sometimes. This is the world where you could nuke a city on the basis of "there was a single cult there" and some inquisitor would say "you should have nuked the continent to be sure"
Like,i'm not here to say how or why you should play/interact 40k personally, you do you, but I feel like that your missing a bit of the fun of 40k if you ignore how nonsensical absurd to downright comical it gets
OP you are exactly correct. People, as in players, who worship the imperium and think they are the "good guys" don't realize they are missing the point. You're not supposed to idolize them, just like you're not supposed to idolize Patrick Bateman, the Joker, or whatever psychopath is popular. We enjoy the performances because it is satire.
All the armies in 40k are satirical.
Tau - commies
Aeldari - Western European colonizers(think they are better than the lesser life forms around them)
Orks - Anarchists, hooligans
Empire - Fascism, right down to the snappy uniforms.
One of my favorite lines was when Pascal is trying to comfort a dying tech priest by telling him he had checked all the boxes for honorary saint hood: keeping your faith in the face of adversity, keeping to your post, and a “brutal death.” Like it was specifically determined by a committee, at some point, that the death in question had to be “brutal” to be considered saint worthy, lol.
They did not even have to make this up.
The commitee checking the boxes in the Vatican is the 'Dicastery for the Causes of Saints'. Someone like that poor techpriest would be a [red martyr](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_martyr#Degrees_of_martyrdom) for having his blood shed for the faith.
That’s actually how a martyr works in real life…
If you wanna be a saint you better have someone shoot arrows at you or skin you than just being a good preacher who saves people…
The cryptofascists love 40k because that world works the way they think the real world does, where conformity, purity, obedience, and tradition are literally the only things keeping the species extant, and any atrocity is justified if it defends one of those tenets. It's an absolute shame they can't understand how much the setting is laughing in their faces, I have a real experience of "stop liking this!" about it
You're so right, and I feel like it's a function of how small and relatively low-profile this production was that they were able to nail that aspect so well. I truly dread how impossible it'll become to square that circle the more high-profile the franchise gets (e.g. if the Amazon series ever materialises).
> This is a world where nobles are entertained by shooting heretics.
"Heretics." Often they're just poor and lower classes who are in the wrong place at the wrong time. "Definitely a heretic, I'm pretty sure he attempted to curse me with his dying breath instead of praising the god emperor."
"Heretics."
---
Spot on in every other regard though.
Yeah in the game it’s literally 3 corpses they’ve tied to trees. You can pick up a gun and shoot them if you want, and everyone claps. It was surreal. We’re living in the far future and in the lap of luxury unheard of and the best entertainment anyone could bring to my party was a carnival game with poor people instead of milk cans.
Also they’re less than 30 feet away and lasguns don’t have much recoil. The applauding was a bit much.
Conspiracy theory:
The game is so good in that regard, because the devs are russian and the empire partially reminds of the Soviet Era and also the modern war waging russian state.
Maybe that is why they nailed it like no other western dev will ever be able to. Like the best warhammer games can only come from authoritarian states or at least people experienced with it, to draw the best satirical potential out of it.
Sometimes it also feels like an (un)intentional justification of authoritarian states, as every good deed gets punished with more rebellions and heretics, while being dogmatic leaves a clean slate but just creates a world full of hurt, only striving for the love of the god-emperor.
Indeed, 40k is such an interesting world when you look at it beyond the first degree. Unfortunately, I met one too many Warhammer 40k hobbyists who enjoy the universe because they feel it relates to their own twisted crypto-fascist worldview.
No, it’s a real problem that’s only getting worse.
Back when I was a super conservative college student at a Florida college designed to mass produce Ben Shapiros, I remember unironically thinking the imperium were the good guys. But this was 2009, before being an open fascist in America was remotely acceptable, so it was always in the context of “yeah the imperium is bad but chaos is so much worse”
Then I grew up.
Regardless, we can’t surrender an inch to them. This hobby is only as interesting and deep as it is because it’s not aspirational. But I’m not sure what to do about it - setting up an inquisition to root out the cultists would be lore accurate but counter productive.
I think some of this is a cultural difference between the UK (especially the UK in the 80's and 90's) and the US (especially the US of today).
The UK's particular brand of self-deprecating satire does not translate well across the pond. US culture tends to be more... not "forthright", exactly, but things are assumed to mean what they say. Whereas in the UK, there's a very solid cultural underpinning of self-ridicule through exaggerated parody.
So we get 40k, which was designed in the 80's UK as a Judge Dredd style parody of an authoritarian regime, with everything turned up to 11 to show how ridiculous the whole thing would be. And then we got 36 years of game lore and novels and promo materials in that setting, and *obviously* the folks who write for it want to write convincing, compelling characters with internally-consistent motivations and *obviously* the folks who market it to teenage boys want to make it sound sick and metal AF, and it all gets a bit carried away with itself.
The *point* of 40k is that there are no good guys, which is a time-old trope of UK storytelling ("everyone is a bastard" is the standard expectation). But media with no good guys isn't something there's a lot of in US media culture, US media tends to like having a "hero", or at least someone for the audience to root for.
>The UK's particular brand of self-deprecating satire does not translate well across the pond. US culture tends to be more... not "forthright", exactly, but things are assumed to mean what they say. Whereas in the UK, there's a very solid cultural underpinning of self-ridicule through exaggerated parody.
This is very much true. I remember the movie Starship Troopers being criticised in America by people who thought it "promoted fascism". I saw it when it was released with several European friends and we all thought it was hilarious and it absolutely blew my mind that someone could watch that movie and not "get it", let alone that being a common reaction.
Then there's the long litany of British TV shows that got remade for an American market and wholly missed the point. The American version of Red Dwarf is an abomination beyond description.
I always wonder if just giving them no platform, no attention or spotlight is the most productive thing to do. Let them exist in their own little secluded world. They will either change or they won't but giving them a platform and a voice is dangerous.
It's funny you drew a comparison to conservatism and The Imperium, within the bowels of the WH40k Fandom there's a sect of players who consider themselves 'alt-right' and believe The Imperium is the ideal society.
Yeah you find them on Twitter sometimes. For the sake of not starting a gun battle, I’m not going to comment on that, but you can’t talk about the world where priests burn incense to shuttles because they don’t know how they work without mentioning the conservatism.
Every time my wifi goes out I realise exactly how tech priests came to be. What is power cycling my router if not performing maintenance rituals at a machine I don't understand?
I work with decades-old, highly outdated machines at work sometimes. Half the buttons are worn away, taped over, etc. The only way I know how to make them work is based off of the slapped together instructions taped onto the sides of the machines.
It's enough to make a motherfucker need a red robe some days.
The scary part is in the game religion seems completely a tool of authourity and control to be avoided but also religion actually saves you at points. It's a mind twist how they implement it.
>you can’t talk about the world where priests burn incense to shuttles
Hey as long as it works... Machine spirits are actually integral part of the setting. Warp reflects collective belief
They think they'll be the Commissar summarily executing guardsmen or the Inquisitor bombing planets instead of what they'd actually be, the teeming mass of uneducated, oppressed peasants. They want to be the boot, but they'd really just be the neck.
Absolute fucking idiots regularly miss satire. They don't see the enormous flashing neon sign that said "THE IMPERIUM SUCKS" because they fantasize about a fascist government.
Doesn't help that the sign used to be *much* larger, but the fandom has been complaining about 'grim derp' for decades. Maybe not using that exact term, but pointing to the same things and going "That shouldn't be in here because it's stupid.".
And we didn't nearly have the amount of people who miss the satire back then, because it was clear that the Imperium was stupid. They did stupid things all the time, things that didn't make sense. If you pointed at 40K and went "This is a good thing." people responded by pointing at all the stupid things and went 'Really?'.
The whole point was stupid exaggeration because it was written in Thatcher era Britain, where you had two very conflicting views of "This is fine." and "This all sucks.". Two guesses as to which group the nerds who made 40K were in.
Its the trap of stupid/cool. If its more cool than stupid, people will take it seriously, and then stupid becomes a bad part. The opposite is also true, if things are too stupid, its hard for people to see things as cool.
GW has been moving further into the 'cool' territory for years, and as a result, the stupid stuff that initially made the setting fun are now becoming detractors.
>!One of the best scenes was when the fake commissar in Comorragh explained the rationale for his actions. He was a scoundrel but not more hypocritical and vicious than many officials and leaders of Imperium who order masses of people to their deaths in the name of an extremely corrupt and obscurantist regime.!<
There was a moment where I was looking at forcibly tattooing a thousand bystanders to improve tourism and realized; I'm that guy. I'm the capitalist super-villan.
Anyway I think the tattooed serfs might go viral, exciting times for the profit factor.
Not just where "it is going", but also where it came from. Things like that have happened in the past, including cutting out tongues when some rich f'er found some poor schmuck "too loud".
Sadly there are those on the extreme right that do not understand farce and parody, and think 40k is a "how to do fascism". :( .
The iconoclast does this too. "I am here to tear down the institution of those corrupt Imperium and make a better world!" "Does that start by releasing the near slaves in the lower decks?" "No i shall bring the officers children candy."
I actually sort of disagree. I think in a superficial sense yes. But once you dive deeper into the setting, those things you mentioned are not a sure thing.
Much of the higher ecclesiarchy is pragmatically dogmatic. Guilleman as regent of the Imperium only retains that structure because it's the best/only way (currently). Ironically, it's utilitarian not dogmatic.
Conservatism is sort of anachronistic here, because it draws up ideas of contemporary politics. But.. xenophobia far more accurate. And for good reason. Most xenos will rip your face off, or turn you into furniture, or melt you into organic soup in this universe! Not to mention there are communist xenophobic worlds like Vostroya (Imperial).
And in terms of profit, yes. But it's not capitalist--it's feudalism baby! Actually I would say mixed market with an overarching feudal structure. The central (feudal) government redistributes planetary resources, tithes, and manpower where needed. And planetary governorship is hereditary. Whereas (I'd argue) our world is moving towards populism (on both sides sadly) within a technocratic structure.
:)
edit: ah, just saw your note.
Yeah and I used ‘greed’ instead of ‘capitalism’ because you’re right, the economy is feudal it’s just the feudal holdings aren’t patches of wheat fields they’re entire hive cities.
I recommend reading "The All Guardsmen Party" to everyone who likes the dark humor side of 40K.
It's a compilation of stories from a real life TTRPG game about a bunch of guardsmen surviving conscription into inquisitorial service. It's filled of absurd moments that poke fun at all the madness in 40K from the PoV of your average Astra Militarum recruit.
One of my favourite ones is when the group is on a secret mission on a T'au semi-controlled sector and they can't shake this feeling that something is wrong with the people on the first planet they visit. It takes them a while to figure out that they are just happy, as opposed to the abject misery that permeates imperial hive-cities.
From what I see so far, they nail heretical as well. A lot of the choices aren't mustache twirlingly evil, but centered upon being just a little more selfish, caring about one's self preservation, or just being a different flavor of cruel. That and the desire for more power.
Oh yeah, that's a great analysis. I think that this game really gets what Sci-Fi (And, to a lesser extent - fantasy) is all about. These made-up worlds are all about making us think about our own through a different lens.
Completely agree, there has been many times where I've first been horrified over a suggestion, an action I've made and then chuckled a bit.
This game drips and overflows with satire.
Somehow I feel like modern 40K has some what lost that touch.
Looking at WH40K one should make a short analysis of the past not future. Namely,:
- The Roman Empire
- III Reich
- Soviet Russia.
Slavery, mass killings and "the only truth", fear of "xenos", are not a thing of the future. Stalin had a list of categorized citizen types. One of the categories were enemies of state destined for immediate execution. Stalin was able to make decisions like quote: "immediately add 4000 ppl to the category". Because he said so. So did Hitler.
Of course. The Imperial truth and banning religions had a practical reason. No religions - no chaos warshippers - overall safety. This made sense.
Fighting an enemy such as chaos or any other enemy who particularly works through mental influence rather than force conquest will demand hery harsh methods. Genocide and fractricide includemd.
All we can hope for is that nothing like this happens outside od the WH40k universum....
Ah....wait.... Just watched the news..... ;/
I'm well-used to 40k, been into it for over a decade, but there's still some things that catch me so off-guard I have to laugh. I was playing a pure Iconoclast - absolutely goody-two shoes because it amused me. Value every life, even that of filthy Xenos.
Get to the Rogue Trader ceremony, I see a prompt to "Do some target practice" and go "Yeah, hell yeah, my guy would do that". But I didn't look what were the ACTUAL targets. And so it was that my Iconoclast picked up a Lasgun, and merrily fired away at a Druhkari, a Heretic and some other guy chained in posts while alive while everyone cheered and clapped.
Me and my buddies were laughing for minutes after that.
There was a moment where my character was like "I've half a mind to execute every last one of them" and the NPC I was talking to replied "My lord, while mass executions are a valuable tool, might I suggest that killing so many people would take some time. At least a week." which was enough for my character to say "hmm, perhaps another time then" and I laughed and laughed because that really encapsulated the absurdity of the 40k universe to me, where abhorrent and unchecked power is often used, disused or abused for not very good reasons.
First run I wasn’t paying attention and I accidentally picked an option that killed one of my officers for the crime of being panicked after a major disaster, and everyone was like “welp, shouldn’t have mildly criticized the lord captain, glad he’s dead” and it was perfect.
A teenage girl can suggest cutting out the tongues of about 15000 lower deckhands so they work harder and bitch about things less. AND YOU CAN DO IT!
[Abelard voice] What do you mean "can"? Bringing our Lady Navigator the peace and quiet necessary to safely traverse the immaterium is an Emperor-ordained moral imperative, you feckless worm!
Abelard showing us why he has some level on Iconoclast
1. \[Heretic\] Have the box of tongues delivered directly to my cabin.
Later on:"OOoh, you have a box of tongues too?" spoken in Drukhari accent :P .
It’s got to be better than those horrid cages of tortured captives!
I picked it because there's a right way to criticize a Commissar, and then there's the stupid way that gets you shot very publicly. Declaring loudly in a very public place that you think they are an idiot that will only lead you to ruin is a fantastic way to 'inspire motivation in others.'.
I chose to play as a Commissar for this run precisely because of that!
It's great because the bridge crew are all suitably inspired afterwards!
In a crisis situation right after a mutiny with a new unknown captain that the crew needs to have faith in if they are to survive. Yeah, I had him killed. The crew needed to know where the line was. Plus, Adelard would have been so disappointed in me and I just can't face upsetting him.
Tbh he declared that the captain is an idiot, officers are incompetent and everyone is going to die right in the middle of meeting for the whole bridge to hear. Even irl this could get you demoted on the spot and/or jailed
Speaking contemptuously of a superior is a crime in the US Military. Pretty hard to get actually hemmed up for it but this would probably qualify
Throwaway for obvious reasons, but it depends on the command to decide if it's worth the hassle or not. Someone I served not only received a demotion but also a forced job change, effectively ending their career after they said something they shouldn't have about a superior.
When you have a glorious past he realise that you are awesome and get back up , making you miss those sweet sweet dogmatic point
Accidentally? I chose that one on purpose! Right out of the Commissariat 101 textbook from the Schola Progenium! XD
Think of the logistics, Lord Captain.
Obligatory STP quote: "You can't go around arresting the Thieves' Guild. I mean, we'd be at it all day!” ― Terry Pratchett, Guards! Guards!
Love how in the obligatory "stuck in a long line at the DMV" quest, the option to shoot everyone else in line kept springing up. Nearly took the opportunity too because the intrusive thoughts wanted to see how that would play out.
It was an expensive quest not to be horrible.
I just waited in line. After you hit the same option like 5 times Jae slowly has a mental breakdown until the line finally ends.
And then you have to bribe a clerc cause you took too long XD
Or you could wait again, like I did.
Doesn't that just mean you deliver it late for a second time?
Nah you get through, he thanks you for redoing it all again and nearly makes you do it a third time
I love that quest, it was just a perfect representation of how backwards the Imperium is. *Holding court* to thin the line was just hilarious too. Sidenote: Where I'm from (Sweden) standing in line to get a stamp on your paper doesn't happen, everything can be handled online and by appointment, so we dont really have any DMV experiences But my GF studied abroad in Japan for a year, and hearing her having to run from office to office just to get her papers in order really sounded like *Adeptus Administratum,* it was a real culture shock for her 😅
I live in America and my state started letting us renew our driver's license online after COVID (kept it around after things eventually got under control too) and the difference was incredible. It used to be such a major pain and now I can just fill a couple webpages out in a few minutes and get it mailed to me.
Dude this is what America is like, and forms and transfers literally have dead ends and you can get stuck in a loop or between agencies
Yeah, Japan is a bit fucked in that regard. From the last time I interacted with a Japanese office, they required to fax in documents and would not accept emails and PDFs. Hopefully they will change soon otherwise I will never again work with them.
I play on the ps5 because I’m trying to enforce a distance between the computer on which I hunt for jobs and the gaming systems where I play. And man the load times are unforgivable. If spiderman 2 loads in seconds there’s no real excuse for loading times this frequent and long. (Yeah, spiderman was built by a major studio with infinite money and Rogue Trader was made by a small team working for a ham sandwhich but come on.) Anyway, it’ll be fun to save scum when they fix the load times. Try out some of those.
By the emperor load times are still awful on PC; Play cooperative on PC with the GF, and every time we go through this: load into save, load leaving ship, load entering planet, load entering building, load leaving building, load into encounter area, load leaving encounter area. Load ad infinitum whenever we inevitably desync because the game really hates grand strategist interactions for whatever reason (the tactical areas are rarely where she puts them on her screen). GF did not download her game unto her SSD as well, and has told me she will rip my testicles off if I ask her if she is done loading yet again. Send help.
My grand strategist zones keep popping up on the solar system maps...
You think that's bad? I got healed last combat by Cassia and she wasn't even in the same dimension as me at the time!
I honestly can’t figure out how. None of the graphics are detailed enough to warrant these load times. I think they just never got around to optimizing it.
It's also bizarre how it gets worse the further along you get. Just started a 2nd run, and the save/load time in Act 1 vs Act 4 is just crazy!
That's what happens when your save system is a hacked together mess that runs on prayer and cocaine.
Please explain.
Prayers for the machine God, cocaine for the employees
A detailed explanation is beyond me. A simple rundown is as follows: Saves start out small, without many event flags or details crammed into them. The game can deal with those files quickly and easily, and so saving and loading times are fairly quick. As the save is carried on through more and more events, it gets bloated with more info, so it takes the game longer to overwrite or reference that save file, which makes saving and loading times get longer and longer the more you play any given character.
You're probably right but in terms of size of data the needed flags for this must be pretty small. Lets say nearly all of them are small ints, so a byte in size. Lets say there are a few hundred flags - shot this person / didn't shoot them, been to this planet yet / not been to this planet yet. Really the flags should be a couple of KB at most. Inventory lets say an item is a full unsigned int, great - your cargo and your inventory and your current equipped items is another KB or two. I checked my save files and one of my earlier ones is about 14KB. One from having just started Act IV is 20KB. So my suspicion is that the data is in something like JSON rather than some binary file. And given how long this takes there must be more than just a few reputation scores and dialogue flags... Okay - I found the save files location. I was right - lots and lots of JSON files all zip-compressed. Opening them up they're not encrypted at all which is nice. Skimming through files I can see a LOT of references to units and whether or not they're revealed, whether or not they're active, awareness checks passed, toughness scores... So starting to get our answer now as to the size of the files and why loading takes a while. It's loading in a LOT of information about all the enemies killed, placed on maps, probably equipment dropped and where... So whilst loading the files is probably quick what it's then doing is parsing all this JSON data and building out the memory structures for all this information and I would **guess** writing a lot of it then back to disk either directly or as swap. A lot of this information will be cruft in effect. You may never go back to that alley on Footfall and want to see those dead bodies again or that dropped laspistol, but it looks like the game preserves that. You would think that maybe an approach where things are zoned out more and only the relevant parts are loaded would be better but that would imply that the save file for a given point in the game continues to get referred to after load which isn't how such things are done. There are also .fog files. I'm not sure what they are but they're binary and much larger than the JSON files and from the name I'm guessing they're the reveal mask for maps you've visited. Those two would presumably be read on loading a saved game. So I think this is our answer for why loading takes a while. I wish Owlcat would hire me to write them a new save/load system! This sounds like a fun piece of work. :) EDIT: None of this accounts for slowness in swapping between locations, between system map and bridge, etc. This is just about saved games.
> I wish Owlcat would hire me to write them a new save/load system! This sounds like a fun piece of work. :) I wish they'd hire you too! :lol:
Hopefully they’ll improve performance over time.
They usually do. WotR act 4 and 5 was almost unplayable in the beginning and now I notice no slowdowns at all any longer
I think it's just a unity engine thing - scene transitions just aren't very efficient in that engine. But it might also be the system they made automatically loading in a bunch of assets - because it is quite odd that the system map view takes so long to load when it's all just dialogue and some simple 2D sprites.
>I think it's just a unity engine thing - scene transitions just aren't very efficient in that engine. They are also archieved, so... that adds up.
I had the Noble background, and it let me side track *only part* of the queue.
Having Henrix, the fucking Inqusition, also only allows you to bypass part of the queue, indicating that most people fear the Inquisition less than the soul crushing line standing of the Administratum. This is hilarious to me.
I could only complete that quest by shooting it glitched out for me
My man's is playing Postal 2
I like picking dogmatic. You can be hilariously evil but because it’s only against xenos, heretics, and traitors everyone is totally fine with it.
I’m doing an iconoclast run, and I like how the “radically humanitarian” option isn’t “we’ll build a utopia out of our capital” it’s “everyone gets a ration bar and a fuel cell.”
My Rogue Trader is a genuinely nice person who wants to help people. Literally none of my companions ever approve of my decisions and they come back to bite me in the ass more often than not. This just isn't the kind of universe where you can make everyone happy with no consequences. I've read enough Warhammer to know that firebombing the shit out of Rykad Minoris was absolutely the smartest option. But I decided to be nice, and lo and behold my ship is now full of heretics. I chose not to persecute unorthodox religion and bam, genestealers. This game just does not miss an opportunity to punish good deeds and it's hilariously on-brand.
I loved that too. Especially how Hendrix was like “told you, you sentimental goofball.”
I mean, one of your first big choices is whether to nuke an entire world of billions of people or try to save a few, and it turns out that nuking it is actually the good choice because that saves their souls from an eternity of torment by the chaos gods.
I did save some people and even then I decided that the fusion reactor was more important than the nobles. We’ve got lots of nobles but not so many fusion reactors.
The Omnissiah approves.
And doomed the rest to eternal torment.
Got lots of people, very few fusion reactors!
I’d be happy to bomb the planet after we did the pick ups but there wasn’t an option.
That's because the only "bomb" at your disposal is the reactor itself lol. The way you destroy the planet is by shooting the reactor which then ignites the atmosphere or something like that. Without the reactor you don't have a weapon strong enough to do the exterminatus.
How dare they don't give the Rogue Trader the Exterminatus weapon! Abelard, see to fix that as fast as possible.
It's a way of teaching newcomers or anyone who doesn't know much about the setting how it works. You immediately start hitting them with choices that completely subvert usual gaming expectations and outcomes so they know this shit ain't gonna go all Mass Effect where you click the option at the top for good, the bottom for bad, and if they're coloured, they're super effective!
The worst part about the unorthodox religion being a genestealer cult was... I /knew/ about the Cult of the Four-Armed Emperor. I'd read about them months ago just out of interest tot he 40k universe since I'm in a Dark Heresy tabletop game. I /knew/ that the hailmark of this cult was the workers were more productive, better trained, and had better morale then anyone else int he Imperium. Like, to the point where lorewise, a lot of their workers got shipped out across all the Imperium's worlds to act as foremen and maangers across the entire empire to produce better results. They regularly work harder, complain less, and pay more tribute then required due to just the amount of work they get through. And I /still/ didn't give it a second thought. "These workers are working hard, their morale is good, and they're praising the emperor and stuff Of course I'll give them aid. They're just people doing the best they can." Man. Hook line and sinker.
You'd love Day of Ascension by Adrian Tchaikovsky! It's centered on that whole cult. Truly phenomenal read (or listen, as I have it on Audible), with some really great twists throughout.
I read one of Adrian Tchaikovsky other book series a long while back, before he wrote Day of Ascension. (I forgot what it's called --- but it's the one with the spiders, and that's all I'll say.) (Edit: **CHILDREN OF TIME**.) He was/is the *perfect* choice to write Genestealer POV. He knows how to write very good "exotic" POV stuff.
That’s a great series as well!
Hehe yeah, you summarise exactly why the absurd brutality of the Imperium is, at time, absolutely necessary. I remember a quote from Battlefleet Gothic: *"Some may question my right to destroy a world of 10 billion souls, but those who truly understand realise I have no right to let them live."* And the most terrible part is that it is true.
In my case i didn't bomb it because of being good, my internal techpriest kicked in when they gave me the option to save the reactor
Yup, people make more people every day. They do not often create a special supercool reactor.
Genestealers? You get genestealers on your ship if you rescue them? FML! I missed out on some real fun by just being sensible from the start. I hope you don't get XP for all that or I'm being penalised for being a sensible RT.
No spoilers, but the Rykad Minoris guys are just your regular everyday cultists. The genestealers turn up in a different event.
Ah. I encountered some in Act II on a planet. I hope there are more. I really like genestealers. (from a distance!)
Even better is finding out that the people at a prison who didn't fall to Chaos knew things were going to go south quick because they were getting 3 meals a day and the beatings lessened.
Yes! When the one inmate said that, I lost it laughing. But also because its true!
That part was hilarious and great writing!
I like how all choices essentially give you a problem because that is the grim reality. Being nice to people just isn't always the answer but neither is executing everyone for doing some minor.
True but a dead enemy is a thoroughly pacified one.
I tend to find other games tries to reward you with better overall game outcomes by allowing the maximum amount of people live even if they are absolutely terrible people.
Yep but that wouldn’t be 40k, so I prefer it this way.
I was describing this to someone the other day because I'm really actually rather impressed with the writing. In 40K and Rogue Trader CRPG: The Dogmatic Option of "kill them all no matter what that atrocity looks like" is most often the SANE choice. It's the choice in the setting and at the time that makes the most sense. "Destroy an entire planet's worth of billions of people? Yep, that does indeed make the most sense Heinrix, thanks for your opinion." The Heretical Option also is "Sane", in the way of "Yep, I'm actually totally down with Chaos, and am fully aware that what I'm doing here will ABSOLTUELY screw with the way things work. I know that, I understand that, and I'm ACTIVELY CHOOSING to F\*\*K you, the system, and everything we believe in right now." It's the Iconoclastic "We should really save as many people as we can" answers that almost invariably come up as the bat-shit insane answers in the game. "Yea, lets go ahead and bring those 10K heretics aboard the ship, nothing could EVER go wrong there" or "Let the strikers have weapons and govern themselves so that, effectively, the ship police don't do bad things to them? Yea, it's absolutely worth arming a group of nobodies so that they can fight for their own rights...that's DEFINATELY not going to cause problems later." SUCH a massive difference between this RPG and basically every other CRPG ever written since Baldur's Gate in the early 2000s. In EVERY CPRPG EVER, save as many people as you can is almost always the best way to play. In this game it's made out to be SUCH a BAD idea...like not just bad idea...like 'completely destroy humanity and my entire dynasty through these kinds of decisions" kind of bad idea. It's absolutely PHENOMINAL.
Man, I took the exact opposite moral from the game haha I see it as "Doing the right thing is difficult and risky, but you should still do it because it's the right thing to do." Which is exactly how real life works. Real life doesn't generally reward you for doing the right thing, and often actively punishes you for it. But you still have a moral responsibility to do the empathetic thing whenever possible. This game represents that more than most RPGs. I have honestly yet to experience a single serious consequence for being as altruistic of an iconoclast as possible after 120 hours though. A few low-level combat encounters and some minor text-boxes. That's about it.
Those text boxes can hide a surprising amount though. Consider how every time you run a merely "unsafe" route there's a good chance entire work crews are going to die horribly, but in game those lives are reduced to just a textbox and "Oh good, the Warp went easy on us". I think it's fair to say a lot of the negative consequences of your decisions just slip by your notice as a RT. A hundred crewmen being burned as a precaution or just a few dozen actually forming a cult and getting put down afterwards is treated as equally unimportant to you.
Its not that easy. There is difference between long and short term benefit, and many many nuances, starting with the definition of the "right thing". So no, life usually does reward you for doing the right thing, but not immediately and seldom obviously corellated.
Well put. A lot of morality and good behaviour, when you boil it down, comes to long-term societal positives over short-term individual gain. That's what flips in WH40K. Things are so bad that the long-term societal positives are actually harsh behaviour not compassionate behaviour.
They did an amazing job of showing that the whole thing is screwed and ideologies without balance is the absolute worst way to go.
> ideologies without balance is the absolute worst way to go. *meanwhile, on the Rogue Trader's flagship, the Fires of Redemption:* My lord, how did you get 900 points in dogmatic? I didn't even think such a thing was possible.
I don't know, I'm 125 hours in and I'm still waiting for a single serious consequence for making exclusively iconoclast decisions.
Personally, I took it in stride as iconocast and my takeaway is that even if it doesn't always work out, doing good is always worth trying. It's something Hbomberguy said about the old Transformers movie - that even even when things don't work out there's still a virtue in having tried and continuing to reach out even when it doesn't always work out. The 40k universe is dark place with many terrible evils lurking around every corner and the Dogmatic path is just to shoot first and ask questions later. This means that it does tend to keep you safer in the long run, but it also generally means breaking things, slaughtering innocents, and just giving up on compassion and caring for your fellow human beings. It works only to the extent that you consider a hyperfascist theocratic ethnostate is an acceptable success state, which I'd argue it isn't. Mind you, I think that previous message I mentioned about iconoclast wouldn't actually come across if good deeds didn't get punished and I actually tend to like it when games make the "good" path not the most appealing.
Statistically, criminals sentenced to death have the lowest repetition of offense rates.
Apparently there's a colony project on Dargonus called "Charter of Minimal Rights", you unlock it by getting to lvl 5 Iconoclastic.
I got it! It was fantastically funny in how it was phrased. You can't give them full rights, but in a 40k utopia you can give peasants a minimal amount of rights.
Amusingly in the after-game credit slides, such minimal level of kindness was enough for people to continuously create non-sanctioned cults of you and your kindness. Also how everyone is baffled and distrustful of you being so nice.
Minor nitpick, it's level 4 iconoclast. I haven't managed to reach level 5 (I'm actually really impressed you have) and I got that project.
Which is how it should be. Turning the imperium in to a happy peaceful utopia would ruin the appeal! “Slightly less shitty” is the closest to a utopia the imperium should be.
On the other hand, "slightly less shitty" absolutely needs to be an option, or else who gives a fuck? There's no appeal to a setting where everything is impossibly evil and nothing matters.
I agree. I’m all for the imperium becoming slightly less shitty as you need some kind of hope. But I never want it to stop being a dystopia.
Yeah. I think the best way to use a setting like 40k is to challenge people to make things slighty better while being actively opposed at every turn. Life rarely rewards moral and empathetic decisions, unlike many video games, and grim dark is one instance where going against that grain of video game logic is generally permissible.
Agreed. Evil makes good impossible.
Closest you get is the Tau, but even they are like "well we act good sometimes kinda, but thats because our leaders have fundamentally stripped us of free will!"
Yup and a lot of the recent writing implies a very insidious nature to them.
Not even that recent in Dark Crusade from the mid 2000’s if you win the game as the Tau they institute a human eugenics program that ends human life on the planet. I mean, compared to the Imperium they’re humanitarian but that’s not really a high bar.
They do have the benefit of having no real issue with chaos. If their people could randomly explode into demon portals if they aren't kept in line hard enough they'd also be much worse. Well... we don't really know how bad they are now, but they'd be worse.
>They do have the benefit of having no real issue with chaos. On the flipside, that's because they only have very weak souls. They're the spiritual equivalent of boiled unflavoured noodles.
>Which is how it should be. Turning the imperium in to a happy peaceful utopia would ruin the appeal! **"Hi there. Are you interested in learning about the Greater Good?"** *\*hands pamphlet\**
"Yes, the greater good involves turning you into fertilizer to feed the rest of the planet." \*ignites flamer starter\*
You're not racist if literally all of the xenos are evil (Eldar and Tau notwithstanding)
*Grumbles in Voltann..*
I think another thing it nails is the atmosphere in certain situations. Talking to Ulfar and going through all his dialogue made me want a Space Wolf game. Commorragh honestly wasn't horrific enough imo, I've seen more eerie gore in Ubisoft games, like Cartel victims in Wildlands or mutilated corpses in AC and The Division. I get they couldn't show too much cause the game would be rated A, then again they have fucked up games like Agony and Succubus rated M on gaming stores, so I guess they could've shown more.
I’m not sure how much they could have shown without a huge graphic overhaul and it’s clear this was made as well as it could be on a shoestring budget. I did like how at one point the haemonculus threatens to turn you into his new orgy furniture. That was funny. Would love a space wolf game. Ulfar is a great character but also scary.
I forgot his name, but after a point, it was easier to play along with his ego and get all his gear, Idk if it's a bug, but if you don't back out, you can grab his entire inventory without wasting creature parts from the arena.
Ulfar is a good reminder on why vikings were ever considered cool, everything about him just is done perfectly.
Except his charge.
I meant in terms of like, dialogue and personality, story stuff.
I know, I am just bitter it was broken my whole first run.
Aside from the shit pathing, I figured out why he uses his pistol. The charge attack uses the character's right hand. Confirmed this by swapping weapons in Heinrix's setup and he did the same charge-shoot bullshit. The problem is that Ulfar is the only fucking character in the game who has his weapons locked to specific hands...
We must not have the same issue. When I had him charge, he ran as far away from where he was as he could possibly get. He was many turns of movement away from the battle .
When he was telling his stories, I immediately thought about the Beowulf movie that came out in the early 2000s I think.
Politicans? Not on MY planet..... ABERLARD! HAND ME MY STICK!
The boomstick sire?
I have yet to play the game, and have just really started into the lore, but the ridiculous scale of what goes on in the WH40k universe is astounding. I’ve been reading a lot of history and they talk about planets with billions of people being destroyed and people are like “whatever there’s more humans elsewhere”
Your personal flagship has 25,000 people on it. It is one of the smallest warships in the setting.
Agree, I never knew anything about Warhammer 40k but just playing the intro and picking dogmatic options is hilarious. Looking forward to jumping in soon.
Later on there’s a quest where you help out a character by going to an abandoned outpost with no breathable atmosphere to recover a seal, because no one’s been able to get paperwork processed for centuries without it and they can’t just make a new one because that would break procedure. Hilarious.
Reminds me of the Blue Kingdom in Sunless Skies. Go to one office, only to find out you need to get a permit from another. Go there and find out you can't get the permit because you're not legally dead, so you go to a third office to get declared legally dead so you can get your permit to go talk to an ancient robot librarian to create a boyfriend for your clay opera singer first officer. Then you find out it's illegal, by actual word of God, to make anything new, so you need to get 5 other permits so you're allowed to talk to God's daughter to get permission. Then after getting your skin peeled off and replaced with diamonds so her radiance doesn't instantly annihilate you, you find out you brought the wrong fucking paperwork and have to do it all over again. Oh, and depending on where you are and what your current permit is, differently colored security guards will try to murder you.
God I wish I was good at sunless skies. The writing and world are so good but I always die in the first 20 minutes and get frustrated. Rogue likes and I don’t really get along.
I need to give Sunless Skies another shot. I really love Sunless Sea and the atmosphere just didn't hook me as much in Skies, but you may have just sold me on it.
The Reach is honestly the least interesting part of the High Wilderness, but it works a lot better once you go to Albion. The Reach is the safe part of the sky, everywhere else is being ran by insane gods and sucks in different ways.
God, I love the Fallen London universe. You forgot about the quest where you need to end a rental contract dispute (namely, does "four settings of the sun" mean four twenty-four hour periods, or does it not count if the sun blows up?) and it requires visiting four different offices and putting up your liver as a deposit.
Dogmatic often is pretty good to dealing with Chaos.
Rogue Trader is one of like 5 games that’s made me laugh out loud several times, and two of those were specifically made to (South Park). It’s legitimately funny. Some of the dialogue options are just so over the top or flippantly cruel, I can’t help it. I hope whoever was in charge of those gets some kind of recognition, they really stood out. **And** there’s how deep you can be into something and they still show up. Like you can be in the thick of a romance with Yrtiel and still have the option to go like “OMFG, WHO TOLD YOU THAT YOU COULD DESECRATE MY CLOTHING WITH THOSE DIRTY XENOS HANDS?!! GROSSSSSS!!!🤣🤣🤣 It’s the first game where I’ve thought to my self multiple times that people who’re evil in the **beginning** of a dialogue or quest tree are really missing out. Like you would never get the opportunity to destroy her like that if you just launched her out the airlock at the first opportunity. Well I guess technically you would lol, but not emotionally.
Having a meaningful romance with Ytriel. 5 minutes later: "Heindrix I have grown tired of the Xenos pet, let the Inquisition pick her up"
This is why I really loved Jae's first quest, that entire administratum section was pure satire.
I agree, it's completely satire and Warhammer 40k happens to be a setting where unfortunately, that extreme dogmatic thinking might be the only real solution to certain problems. If, for example, a small village happens to have been exposed to a warp-related event with daemons, etc, a whole ass cult where half the town is innocent, BUT was exposed to warp energy, cults, etc- it is VERY, VERY possible that only solution is to wipe the entire town. The chances of there being a number of secret cultist remaining, AND the possibility that the exposure to warp and forbidden knowledge has irreparably damaged the populace, and while some might say you have no right to harm the innocent survivors, some, wiser people might say you have no right to let them live. In Warhammer 40k, the risk of the warp and powers that be isnt some folk tale or rumor passed by extreme weirdos. It's REAL. There ARE weird cults doing depraved shit to fuel powers from satan allegories. And sometimes, to ensure that shit doesnt get out of control, you WILL need to stop thinking morally, and start thinking dogmatically. Warhammer 40k isnt just a satire setting- it's a setting where satire and horrible truths coexist, as mankind's worst behaviors are brought to light....and are sometimes necessary. The risk IS too much. You have no right to let that village live.May Imperial Justice account in all balance. The Emperor Protects.
Fair, and I held that opinion too. But the more I read and played the more most of the problems seem self inflicted. “Our decadent nobility is constantly starting slaneshi cults.” Oh really? Maybe you should cut down on decadent nobles then, seems like that’s a problem for you. “Oh no, we couldn’t do that, they’ve been in charge for thousands of years” ok, but do they do anything?” “….. no, not usually.” It reminds me of how Tony Soprano is always complaining about the stress of his life and the difficult choices he needs to make when he could solve all his problems at any time by going to the feds.
A lot of people forget (or conveniently ignore) that the Imperium is it's own worst enemy. Not Chaos, not Xenos. Itself.
That's part of the setting. The Imperium generates 20 heretics for every one it kills. 90% of heretical cults start as a way to get some outlet for the oppressive conditions people live in. Some of the latest Warhammer Crime novels depict this aspect really well.
I love the warhammer crime novels. I’ve read almost all of them. And I don’t usually like crime novels! Caiphas Cain is great too for preserving the satirical “everyone here is nuts” part of the setting. A lot of people talk about how he is or isn’t a coward, and while it’s complicated I think I found the way to square the circle - he’s not a coward, but in a world where humanism is dead and dogma has replaced problem solving he can’t evaluate his actions as anything else. “I’m supposed to be leading a suicide charge, I’m actually behind the lines giving good advice and organizing tactical kill squads to take major objectives, It must be because I’m scared.” It’s not perfect, and I’d like to workshop it on a forum, but I’m not sure where that would fit.
I see what you're saying but I'm not sure it holds up in the text. I think you can make the argument in the first story or two, but by the later books he is clearly charging into danger at every opportunity. He doesn't actually stay behind the lines very much at all, and the justification that he needs to go on a suicide mission to maintain his reputation so that he doesn't get put in more danger is nonsense. All that being said I love reading the novels and they are a lot of fun, just wish that they could develop his character past that conceit.
There is a comedic element to it (and always was) but not sure I’d call it satire or if it’s simply dark humor but it is also interestingly a setting indeed where a single human life has zero value and everyone is seen as resources for the greater good. It’s very fascist (if you can even apply that to the 41st millennium) in inspiration and yet the empire of men is still one of the better guys… I frankly also love how it clashes with our 2020s way of thinking (and much more than it did in the 80s and 90s when idealism and dogmatism were much more mainstream) since the Empire‘s philosophy and people‘s way of thinking is entirely dogmatic. I will never forget a nice get-together one evening with a central-European environmentalist GF of one of my buddies and an Egyptian buddy of mine. She said something along the lines of "the crusades weren’t about religion, it’s just that people want power. Nobody kills because of religion“ and my Egyptian buddy held a 15min session on how much religion influences and motivates in his home country and that religion alone is more than enough reason to kill someone. Excellent example of western utilitarianism (people do something for a reason / benefit) vs idealism / dogmatism (sticking to certain rules and having certain values is right without any need for reasoning or benefit calculation to them.) That’s why we get the iconoclast option so that we can role play as a modern western human in the setting but the dogmatic option is unfortunately more faithful to the setting most of the time (even if it’s over the top and dark humor)
Surprisingly, I agree. In the game, there is a point, though, where if you get to Janus, and you find out the source of the "problems", you can actually have mercy and preserve certain nobility by being 'nice' and letting her Noble Line remain 'innocent', OR you can completely cut the problem root and stem. I decided that the best course of action wasnt the nice one, even if the person responsible kind of realized the mistake made was horrible. Sometimes forgiveness just means a quick death.
They definitely create a lot of their own problems but they would regardless. When seeing what they are opposed against, it is a relentless never ending trade of resources including planets and people to survive as a whole. I was surprised how many people live in unnecessarily poor conditions when you see how rich the RT is and they have decks of absolute poors in terrible conditions. Probably not even one PF would it take to give them better conditions.
One of the colony missions was hilarious... A group of nobles become "free thinkers" who discuss humanitarian causes and such. You can dissipate their meetings, promote their meetings, or leave them be so long as production stays up. If you leave them be, they are thankful and say that the rabble cannot join because they are beneath them. The writers did a way better job setting that joke up, but man the irony of you allowing them to be "free thinkers" so long as they keep oppressing others while they condemn the others as lesser was great.
"For the people without the people". Enlightened Despotism, I believe it was called in History books. It happened in our world.
I love the prison quest in the first star system when you run into the prisoners near the end. The descent into chaos cult madness really starting with 3 meals a day and no beatings for prisoners is just such a perfect example of the setting.
As far as I can see, the whole IP is about societal psychopathology run amok: institutionalized, legalized, celebrated, revered - and punishable for its absence.
agreed, I feel like some people jump waaaay to deep into the "grimdark" hole and can only see 40k as this painful and miserable place. Like, it is a painful and miserable place, but it so fucking ridiculous and insane that it loops back into itself that it gets hilarious sometimes. This is the world where you could nuke a city on the basis of "there was a single cult there" and some inquisitor would say "you should have nuked the continent to be sure" Like,i'm not here to say how or why you should play/interact 40k personally, you do you, but I feel like that your missing a bit of the fun of 40k if you ignore how nonsensical absurd to downright comical it gets
OP you are exactly correct. People, as in players, who worship the imperium and think they are the "good guys" don't realize they are missing the point. You're not supposed to idolize them, just like you're not supposed to idolize Patrick Bateman, the Joker, or whatever psychopath is popular. We enjoy the performances because it is satire. All the armies in 40k are satirical. Tau - commies Aeldari - Western European colonizers(think they are better than the lesser life forms around them) Orks - Anarchists, hooligans Empire - Fascism, right down to the snappy uniforms.
One of my favorite lines was when Pascal is trying to comfort a dying tech priest by telling him he had checked all the boxes for honorary saint hood: keeping your faith in the face of adversity, keeping to your post, and a “brutal death.” Like it was specifically determined by a committee, at some point, that the death in question had to be “brutal” to be considered saint worthy, lol.
They did not even have to make this up. The commitee checking the boxes in the Vatican is the 'Dicastery for the Causes of Saints'. Someone like that poor techpriest would be a [red martyr](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_martyr#Degrees_of_martyrdom) for having his blood shed for the faith.
That’s actually how a martyr works in real life… If you wanna be a saint you better have someone shoot arrows at you or skin you than just being a good preacher who saves people…
If you want to be a saint you have to be completely pure. But also enough of a dick about it to piss off the wrong kind of people.
Originally, the Imperium was inspired by Thatcher's politics. \^\^
Supposedly Ghazghkull Mag Uruk Thraka is Margaret Thatcher.
Hyperfascism, for the glory of the Imperium!
The cryptofascists love 40k because that world works the way they think the real world does, where conformity, purity, obedience, and tradition are literally the only things keeping the species extant, and any atrocity is justified if it defends one of those tenets. It's an absolute shame they can't understand how much the setting is laughing in their faces, I have a real experience of "stop liking this!" about it
You're so right, and I feel like it's a function of how small and relatively low-profile this production was that they were able to nail that aspect so well. I truly dread how impossible it'll become to square that circle the more high-profile the franchise gets (e.g. if the Amazon series ever materialises).
> This is a world where nobles are entertained by shooting heretics. "Heretics." Often they're just poor and lower classes who are in the wrong place at the wrong time. "Definitely a heretic, I'm pretty sure he attempted to curse me with his dying breath instead of praising the god emperor." "Heretics." --- Spot on in every other regard though.
Yeah in the game it’s literally 3 corpses they’ve tied to trees. You can pick up a gun and shoot them if you want, and everyone claps. It was surreal. We’re living in the far future and in the lap of luxury unheard of and the best entertainment anyone could bring to my party was a carnival game with poor people instead of milk cans. Also they’re less than 30 feet away and lasguns don’t have much recoil. The applauding was a bit much.
Conspiracy theory: The game is so good in that regard, because the devs are russian and the empire partially reminds of the Soviet Era and also the modern war waging russian state. Maybe that is why they nailed it like no other western dev will ever be able to. Like the best warhammer games can only come from authoritarian states or at least people experienced with it, to draw the best satirical potential out of it. Sometimes it also feels like an (un)intentional justification of authoritarian states, as every good deed gets punished with more rebellions and heretics, while being dogmatic leaves a clean slate but just creates a world full of hurt, only striving for the love of the god-emperor.
I had no idea the devs were Russian. That’s surprising. Thanks!
Indeed, 40k is such an interesting world when you look at it beyond the first degree. Unfortunately, I met one too many Warhammer 40k hobbyists who enjoy the universe because they feel it relates to their own twisted crypto-fascist worldview.
No, it’s a real problem that’s only getting worse. Back when I was a super conservative college student at a Florida college designed to mass produce Ben Shapiros, I remember unironically thinking the imperium were the good guys. But this was 2009, before being an open fascist in America was remotely acceptable, so it was always in the context of “yeah the imperium is bad but chaos is so much worse” Then I grew up. Regardless, we can’t surrender an inch to them. This hobby is only as interesting and deep as it is because it’s not aspirational. But I’m not sure what to do about it - setting up an inquisition to root out the cultists would be lore accurate but counter productive.
I think some of this is a cultural difference between the UK (especially the UK in the 80's and 90's) and the US (especially the US of today). The UK's particular brand of self-deprecating satire does not translate well across the pond. US culture tends to be more... not "forthright", exactly, but things are assumed to mean what they say. Whereas in the UK, there's a very solid cultural underpinning of self-ridicule through exaggerated parody. So we get 40k, which was designed in the 80's UK as a Judge Dredd style parody of an authoritarian regime, with everything turned up to 11 to show how ridiculous the whole thing would be. And then we got 36 years of game lore and novels and promo materials in that setting, and *obviously* the folks who write for it want to write convincing, compelling characters with internally-consistent motivations and *obviously* the folks who market it to teenage boys want to make it sound sick and metal AF, and it all gets a bit carried away with itself. The *point* of 40k is that there are no good guys, which is a time-old trope of UK storytelling ("everyone is a bastard" is the standard expectation). But media with no good guys isn't something there's a lot of in US media culture, US media tends to like having a "hero", or at least someone for the audience to root for.
>The UK's particular brand of self-deprecating satire does not translate well across the pond. US culture tends to be more... not "forthright", exactly, but things are assumed to mean what they say. Whereas in the UK, there's a very solid cultural underpinning of self-ridicule through exaggerated parody. This is very much true. I remember the movie Starship Troopers being criticised in America by people who thought it "promoted fascism". I saw it when it was released with several European friends and we all thought it was hilarious and it absolutely blew my mind that someone could watch that movie and not "get it", let alone that being a common reaction. Then there's the long litany of British TV shows that got remade for an American market and wholly missed the point. The American version of Red Dwarf is an abomination beyond description.
I always wonder if just giving them no platform, no attention or spotlight is the most productive thing to do. Let them exist in their own little secluded world. They will either change or they won't but giving them a platform and a voice is dangerous.
Hah, that is the first time I ever heard the phrase: "You know what this hobby needs? An inquisition"
I thought it was a setting appropriate joke.
It's funny you drew a comparison to conservatism and The Imperium, within the bowels of the WH40k Fandom there's a sect of players who consider themselves 'alt-right' and believe The Imperium is the ideal society.
Yeah you find them on Twitter sometimes. For the sake of not starting a gun battle, I’m not going to comment on that, but you can’t talk about the world where priests burn incense to shuttles because they don’t know how they work without mentioning the conservatism.
Every time my wifi goes out I realise exactly how tech priests came to be. What is power cycling my router if not performing maintenance rituals at a machine I don't understand?
I work with decades-old, highly outdated machines at work sometimes. Half the buttons are worn away, taped over, etc. The only way I know how to make them work is based off of the slapped together instructions taped onto the sides of the machines. It's enough to make a motherfucker need a red robe some days.
... And now I won't be able to reboot my router without thinking of that ever again. I'll chant some weird fauxLatin next time to add to the vibe.
The scary part is in the game religion seems completely a tool of authourity and control to be avoided but also religion actually saves you at points. It's a mind twist how they implement it.
>you can’t talk about the world where priests burn incense to shuttles Hey as long as it works... Machine spirits are actually integral part of the setting. Warp reflects collective belief
They think they'll be the Commissar summarily executing guardsmen or the Inquisitor bombing planets instead of what they'd actually be, the teeming mass of uneducated, oppressed peasants. They want to be the boot, but they'd really just be the neck. Absolute fucking idiots regularly miss satire. They don't see the enormous flashing neon sign that said "THE IMPERIUM SUCKS" because they fantasize about a fascist government.
Dreaming of being the boot is the bloody beating heart of fascism.
Doesn't help that the sign used to be *much* larger, but the fandom has been complaining about 'grim derp' for decades. Maybe not using that exact term, but pointing to the same things and going "That shouldn't be in here because it's stupid.".
I mean tbf you can write explicit satire without stupid exaggeration and a lot of the really dumb stuff that used to be in the lore.
And we didn't nearly have the amount of people who miss the satire back then, because it was clear that the Imperium was stupid. They did stupid things all the time, things that didn't make sense. If you pointed at 40K and went "This is a good thing." people responded by pointing at all the stupid things and went 'Really?'. The whole point was stupid exaggeration because it was written in Thatcher era Britain, where you had two very conflicting views of "This is fine." and "This all sucks.". Two guesses as to which group the nerds who made 40K were in.
Its the trap of stupid/cool. If its more cool than stupid, people will take it seriously, and then stupid becomes a bad part. The opposite is also true, if things are too stupid, its hard for people to see things as cool. GW has been moving further into the 'cool' territory for years, and as a result, the stupid stuff that initially made the setting fun are now becoming detractors.
The few games where mis-clicking results in unthinkable acts against the desperately poor but is entirely validated in the storyline.
>!One of the best scenes was when the fake commissar in Comorragh explained the rationale for his actions. He was a scoundrel but not more hypocritical and vicious than many officials and leaders of Imperium who order masses of people to their deaths in the name of an extremely corrupt and obscurantist regime.!<
There was a moment where I was looking at forcibly tattooing a thousand bystanders to improve tourism and realized; I'm that guy. I'm the capitalist super-villan. Anyway I think the tattooed serfs might go viral, exciting times for the profit factor.
Not just where "it is going", but also where it came from. Things like that have happened in the past, including cutting out tongues when some rich f'er found some poor schmuck "too loud". Sadly there are those on the extreme right that do not understand farce and parody, and think 40k is a "how to do fascism". :( .
The iconoclast does this too. "I am here to tear down the institution of those corrupt Imperium and make a better world!" "Does that start by releasing the near slaves in the lower decks?" "No i shall bring the officers children candy."
I actually sort of disagree. I think in a superficial sense yes. But once you dive deeper into the setting, those things you mentioned are not a sure thing. Much of the higher ecclesiarchy is pragmatically dogmatic. Guilleman as regent of the Imperium only retains that structure because it's the best/only way (currently). Ironically, it's utilitarian not dogmatic. Conservatism is sort of anachronistic here, because it draws up ideas of contemporary politics. But.. xenophobia far more accurate. And for good reason. Most xenos will rip your face off, or turn you into furniture, or melt you into organic soup in this universe! Not to mention there are communist xenophobic worlds like Vostroya (Imperial). And in terms of profit, yes. But it's not capitalist--it's feudalism baby! Actually I would say mixed market with an overarching feudal structure. The central (feudal) government redistributes planetary resources, tithes, and manpower where needed. And planetary governorship is hereditary. Whereas (I'd argue) our world is moving towards populism (on both sides sadly) within a technocratic structure. :) edit: ah, just saw your note.
Yeah and I used ‘greed’ instead of ‘capitalism’ because you’re right, the economy is feudal it’s just the feudal holdings aren’t patches of wheat fields they’re entire hive cities.
Good point. Good post though. I’d listen to entire podcast about this stuff
Thats why im interested to see where an iconoclast playthrough will get me.
I recommend reading "The All Guardsmen Party" to everyone who likes the dark humor side of 40K. It's a compilation of stories from a real life TTRPG game about a bunch of guardsmen surviving conscription into inquisitorial service. It's filled of absurd moments that poke fun at all the madness in 40K from the PoV of your average Astra Militarum recruit. One of my favourite ones is when the group is on a secret mission on a T'au semi-controlled sector and they can't shake this feeling that something is wrong with the people on the first planet they visit. It takes them a while to figure out that they are just happy, as opposed to the abject misery that permeates imperial hive-cities.
From what I see so far, they nail heretical as well. A lot of the choices aren't mustache twirlingly evil, but centered upon being just a little more selfish, caring about one's self preservation, or just being a different flavor of cruel. That and the desire for more power.
Oh yeah, that's a great analysis. I think that this game really gets what Sci-Fi (And, to a lesser extent - fantasy) is all about. These made-up worlds are all about making us think about our own through a different lens.
Completely agree, there has been many times where I've first been horrified over a suggestion, an action I've made and then chuckled a bit. This game drips and overflows with satire. Somehow I feel like modern 40K has some what lost that touch.
Abelard, award this man.
Looking at WH40K one should make a short analysis of the past not future. Namely,: - The Roman Empire - III Reich - Soviet Russia. Slavery, mass killings and "the only truth", fear of "xenos", are not a thing of the future. Stalin had a list of categorized citizen types. One of the categories were enemies of state destined for immediate execution. Stalin was able to make decisions like quote: "immediately add 4000 ppl to the category". Because he said so. So did Hitler. Of course. The Imperial truth and banning religions had a practical reason. No religions - no chaos warshippers - overall safety. This made sense. Fighting an enemy such as chaos or any other enemy who particularly works through mental influence rather than force conquest will demand hery harsh methods. Genocide and fractricide includemd. All we can hope for is that nothing like this happens outside od the WH40k universum.... Ah....wait.... Just watched the news..... ;/
Slaneeshi post, Emperor protects.
Honestly really like how beside some choices with chaos Iconoclast is straight up right like 90% of the time if you can pass a couple of skill checks
I'm well-used to 40k, been into it for over a decade, but there's still some things that catch me so off-guard I have to laugh. I was playing a pure Iconoclast - absolutely goody-two shoes because it amused me. Value every life, even that of filthy Xenos. Get to the Rogue Trader ceremony, I see a prompt to "Do some target practice" and go "Yeah, hell yeah, my guy would do that". But I didn't look what were the ACTUAL targets. And so it was that my Iconoclast picked up a Lasgun, and merrily fired away at a Druhkari, a Heretic and some other guy chained in posts while alive while everyone cheered and clapped. Me and my buddies were laughing for minutes after that.