The Gaming Den

Orca wrote:The bigger problem is that people forget that any inhabitable planets are likely to be at least on the order of the size of Earth. A couple of spaceships landing in random locations will likely be dealing with different environments, and without common, constant worldwide communications then they will most probably be dealing with different cultures too. A few hundred years of history is plenty for new cultures to emerge and space opera often gives you thousands.

Most planets (of note) are likely to have worldwide communications, though they generally only ever have one environment type anywhere, yeah.

Notable exception of Necromunda, in which even in the same city there are a number of cultures/tribes/nation states.

Most planets (of note) are likely to have worldwide communications, though they generally only ever have one environment type anywhere, yeah.

Monoculture monoterrain planets with "yeah here's one city and one dungeon" really bug me. I prefer less planets overall, but more fleshed out individual planets.

OgreBattle wrote:

Most planets (of note) are likely to have worldwide communications, though they generally only ever have one environment type anywhere, yeah.

Monoculture monoterrain planets with "yeah here's one city and one dungeon" really bug me. I prefer less planets overall, but more fleshed out individual planets.

Monoterrain planets are more common in real life.

Mercury: All Hot, Everywhere, all the time.
Venus:All Acid, Everywhere, all the time
Mars: All red dust, Everywhere, all the time
Earth: Multiple terrains and Biomes.

So, out of all the non-gas-giant planets we have experience with 1/4 of them are multi-terrain, 3/4 are mono-terrain.

hyzmarca wrote:

OgreBattle wrote:

Most planets (of note) are likely to have worldwide communications, though they generally only ever have one environment type anywhere, yeah.

Monoculture monoterrain planets with "yeah here's one city and one dungeon" really bug me. I prefer less planets overall, but more fleshed out individual planets.

Monoterrain planets are more common in real life.

Mercury: All Hot, Everywhere, all the time.
Venus:All Acid, Everywhere, all the time
Mars: All red dust, Everywhere, all the time
Earth: Multiple terrains and Biomes.

So, out of all the non-gas-giant planets we have experience with 1/4 of them are multi-terrain, 3/4 are mono-terrain.

That doesn't seem a fair assessment, we haven't exactly surveyed any of them to the same detail as we have Earth.

Especially the Venus one - Earth would likely be "All Hot, Everywhere, all the time" to a life form that somehow evolved on Hoth.

Mars has polar ice caps. It has areas covered in red dust, but it also has areas covered in snow. The idea that Mars only has a single climate region is completely counter factual.

-Username17

They're all inhospitable wastelands, though. The sample size so far may not be great, but the pattern is that inhabitable planets have multiple biomes and uninhabitable ones do not.

In the Solar system only one planet has biomes at all, but other bodies have diverse climates.

Europa, for example, has mean surface temperatures varying by 60 degrees C from the equator to the poles, comparable to what we have on Earth. Now, either way, it's cold and there's no atmosphere so you die outside, but it isn't the same. More to the point, Europa probably has a liquid ocean under the icy crust, which would kill you in an entirely different way.

It seems likely that planets with native alien life - which abound in 40K - would have diverse climates and biomes. So http://warhammer40k.wikia.com/wiki/Catachan is pretty unrealistic.

Let me change the subject for a bit and get back to the ridiculous numbers. There are even fewer Catachans than there are space marines - including children.


Meanwhile, http://warhammer40k.wikia.com/wiki/Ichar_IV

has an official population of 500 *billion*, and is supposed to care about *1000* Ultramarines, as well as some imperial guard battalions with like 2000 guys in them? According to whatever source the wiki people found, there are >30,000 planets with a population over 10 billion each which is >3 *quadrillion* people. And, they have big enough space fleets to export meaningful quantities of fucking manufactured goods from these places, who could thus trivially evacuate Catachan.

Would the different hives on Ichar IV differ in local climate? Yeah, probably. Not the 50th most unrealistic thing about the setting, though. The Imperium is totally metal (with a side of English) but makes about as much sense as Dethklok.

'Inhabitable' is totally dependent upon technology level and economic circumstances. Whether you're talking about blanketing an airless waste with dome habitats, terraforming, or going for crazy megastructures it's all about what you can do and whether it's worth bothering to do it. With 40K though, that puts you in a weird place since the technological scenario is um...I feel like 'schizophrenic' would be being rather charitable.

I actually really like WH40K's schizophrenic approach to technology. The idea that certain machines can no longer be reproduced because no one understands them (or is afraid to try to, because heresy) gives you room to put crazy shit into the setting without having to explain why the aforementioned crazy shit isn't in every story where it would be even remotely useful. Technology isn't really like magic where you can handwave away the creation of powerful artifacts as insanely difficult wizardry or constrained by ludicrously rare resources like fresh red dragon dung or whatever. Machines are made of metal, run on electricity, and if they're so complicated you can't actually just teach people to operate them why would they have ever been built in the first place?

Forge worlds are a lot more interesting when the premise is that they house ancient manfacturing technology no one is really quite sure how to reproduce. It means that no matter how mind-bogglingly large the setting's scale is, you will always care when someone mentions a forge world, and any attempt to cobble together a new one will be a massive trial-and-error undertaking by the Adeptus Mechanicus's foremost experts and is the sort of thing that gets talked about at the big picture level even when the big picture level is, what, a third of the entire fucking galaxy?

I like the Adeptus Mechanicus in general being defined by a struggle against entropy coupled with a refusal to innovate. They work together well, because innovation requires consumption of scarce resources and doesn't always work out. You can see how a post-apocalyptic Mars cut off from the galactic economy by the Age of Strife and trying to keep their shit together until the storm has passed might have given rise to a cult that's obsessively dedicated to conservation of mechanical resources even long after they were plugged back into an economy that could, if they would just invest the resources into figuring out how, easily maintain and replicate all of their tech. To the Adeptus Mechanicus, there is no such thing as new technology, or even as new iterations of existing technology. You do not make new titans. You scavenge functioning parts from the wrecks on the battlefield and recycle them into something new, or you find ones from back in the Dark Age of Technology and use those. You can refit old battlecruiser chasses into new ship classes, but you can't make new ones from scratch. You can even extend this to smaller, more common gear. You can make new barrels and hulls for a Leman Russ, but the engine and loading mechanisms are a lost art. You can make as many lasgun barrels as you want, but the conduits that turn a powerpack's energy into deadly lasers is just something we plug into the slots. A couple of Forge Worlds have semi- or fully automated assembly lines that can defy these rules, and losing these is an enormous blow to the Imperium because that may well be the only factory complex in the entire galaxy that can make Godwyn pattern bolters, and if it's lost the Sororitas are stuck recycling the ones they have forever, with less and less to go around every year.

I think it works well with both the AdMech's fanaticism and the general sense of decay in the Imperium.

Yeah, the narrative behind the Imperium is that they are squatters in the ruins of a much greater civilization. Love it or hate it, the stagnation that that implies is quite possibly the single most evocative - and consistent - theme in WH40K setting material. You really kind of need "technology as a secretive lost art" to make WH40K feel like WH40K.

But it also means that you can point to specific places on the galactic map and say "this is important, because there is ancient technology here that we aren't sure we can replace - at least not easily. When you put stories here, they really do matter."

DSMatticus wrote:Yeah, the narrative behind the Imperium is that they are squatters in the ruins of a much greater civilization. Love it or hate it, the stagnation that that implies is quite possibly the single most evocative - and consistent - theme in WH40K setting material. You really kind of need "technology as a secretive lost art" to make WH40K feel like WH40K.

Until the Tau appeared to directly contradict that, and the idea that you have to be an overtly oppressive regime to survive, the other cornerstone of 40k.

Damn Tau

But the Tau pissed off a ton of people for that exact reason. Sure, it wasn't the only reason, but "who got all this sunshine and rainbows in my grimderp" was right up there alongside "fucking weeaboo pandering" and "fuck all the annoying shit Tau get to do!" Thematically, the Tau have always been a poor fit for WH40K. A functional society capable of taking steps towards a better tomorrow? What the fuck is this shit?

Amusingly it's another area where the Imperium isn't really ahead of the orks to any appreciable degree. People give the orks a lot of shit for not understanding the unreliable bullshit they build, but meanwhile at the ranch your basic guardsman still doesn't really enjoy being given a plasma weapon. Purity seals, prayers to the Machine God and standard issue flak jackets are all pretty bad at keeping you from being burned to death when your "holy relic" overheats and starts venting everywhere.

It's also amusing when somebody accuses the Tau of being too weaboo for 40k. Consider the following:
-Which faction worships a golden god-emperor?
-Which faction is all rooted in ancient tradition and rituals?
-Which nation is tying banners to the back of their elite troops?
-Which faction is obsessed with swords, including ancient relic holy swords? And also loves to pull ancient cursed daemonic blades now and then?
-Which faction deploys the biggest robots? That also have swords?

People generally accuse the Tau of being a weeb army because they have all those (blocky, Heavy Gear inspired) robots. But let's be honest, a real weeb would play Eldar. It's an army of graceful pretty people with a variety of special martial art styles with their own outfits, the guns fire shuriken, and you have plenty of opportunities for katanas. Also all those magical psychics. If only they had (graceful looking) giant robots as well.



Oh wait.

maglag wrote:It's also amusing when somebody accuses the Tau of being too weaboo for 40k. Consider the following:
-Which faction worships a golden god-emperor?
-Which faction is all rooted in ancient tradition and rituals?
-Which nation is tying banners to the back of their elite troops?
-Which faction is obsessed with swords, including ancient relic holy swords? And also loves to pull ancient cursed daemonic blades now and then?
-Which faction deploys the biggest robots? That also have swords?

What in the sweet fuck do any of those except the last have to do with being a weeaboo?

Imperial cults are not an anime trope. They are not a cultural phenomenon specifically associated with Japan/East Asia.

Adherence to ancient tradition and rituals is not an anime trope. It is not a cultural phenomenon specifically associated with Japan/East Asia. We call it fundamentalism, and fundamentalism is everywhere, even in our not-anime fictional settings.

Banner fappery is not an anime trope. It is not a cultural phenomenon specifically associated with Japan/East Asia. For fuck's sake, Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima. Banner fappery is associated with nationalism, and nationalism is everywhere.

An obsession with swords is not an anime trope. It is not a cultural phenomenon specifically associated with Japan/East Asia. Comic book characters have been using absurdly archaic european weaponry (including swords) since the 60's. An obsession with katanas, sure - that's the mark of a weeb. But that is not at all the same thing. You don't look at a dude with an Carolingian sword and say "what a fucking weeb design."

I actually don't know who deploys the biggest robots in WH40K, but dreadnoughts look like hulking piles of industrial machinery, wraithknights look like the slenderman with guns bolted on, and Tau battlesuits look like mecha. It's really not at all weird that people made the connection. It's weird that people bitched about the connection, because mecha are awesome. I assume everyone was just upset that dreadnoughts look absolutely stupid in comparison.

Koumei wrote:But let's be honest, a real weeb would play Eldar. It's an army of graceful pretty people with a variety of special martial art styles with their own outfits, the guns fire shuriken, and you have plenty of opportunities for katanas. Also all those magical psychics. If only they had (graceful looking) giant robots as well.

Shurikens and katana aside, a pointy-eared race of graceful superhumans who are just all around better than you and also totes have magic/psychic powers beyond your mortal comprehension is an elf fappery thing. I'd expect that to appeal more to a player with a very particular kind of D&D background than someone looking to throw a bunch of gundams down on the table or conquer the galaxy in the name of Team Rocket or whatever.

If you masturbate to the idea of Japanese people (the concept, as opposed to just a specific Japanese person you find hot or even just your favourite skin tones or whatever) and desperately want to be Japanese, then chances are they basically are elves in your mind. I'm not talking about anime fans so much as actual Japanophiles.
-slender, graceful and athletic (not AMERICA FATS)
-ageless (to a Westerner, there is no earthly way of telling the age of an Asian lady between 15-50 or something to that effect)
-they have their own special magical fighting styles that us mortals cannot possibly fathom
-superior weapon-making technology

You say "slenderman" I say "slender mecha", the kind that can nimbly leap over intervening infantry and fire guns in at least two directions at a time and do wheel kicks. Whereas the Tau stuff has typically looked like the very utilitarian, almost-realistic stuff you see in 90s Western mecha games. Which is awesome, it's a niche that absolutely had to be filled: robots that aren't a potato on stubby legs. But a lot of kids these days don't think of Getta Robo or the shitty mass-produced enemy units in Gundam, they think of a really tall Knight Sabre, or an Evangelion without the flesh inside.

As strange as it sounds, if you want realistic looking warmachines, especially walker, you have to admit that the orks do it best.

Orkz do everything da best.

Koumei wrote: Whereas the Tau stuff has typically looked like the very utilitarian, almost-realistic stuff you see in 90s Western mecha games.

This. Tau battlesuits aren't gundams, they're the original starship trooper units, simply lots of dakka and mobility without any fancy melee weapons or newtype/psyker pilots.

Koumei wrote: Which is awesome, it's a niche that absolutely had to be filled: robots that aren't a potato on stubby legs.

But a lot of kids these days don't think of Getta Robo or the shitty mass-produced enemy units in Gundam, they think of a really tall Knight Sabre, or an Evangelion without the flesh inside.

You mean, like the GK's dreadknight?

Even space marine fanboys groaned at how weaboo those are. Their fluff is "we use those to duel giant monsters on the same scale close and personal" and everything.

Although I'll agree that eldar make a pretty good alternative for weaboo players. Either way Tau are still well behind, not having any fancy newtype/psyker pilots or mecha-scale swords.

Tau are a shoutout to the Real Robot genre of mecha. And I remember having a fit of laughter when, after reading about the 40K lore, I finally got the Tau part and saw that they paint their ships with camo patterns and use drones. The... sensibleness of these actions clashes so powerfully with the rest of the setting that the end result can only be humor.

Jes Goodwin and Gav Thorpe talk about the Eastern influence among other things on Eldar in this interview:

‪ https://gavthorpe.co.uk/2017/05/16/inte ... win/‬
"Banners were a big thing in the 80s (along with big hair) and I wanted to flex my graphic skills, and see if we could come up with a distinctive look for the eldar insignia. John Blanche and myself had done a lot of work on the space marine colours and symbols, and I wanted to get something with a contrast to the gothic feel of the Imperium. The bright colours and bold designs were meant to give them an ‘eastern’ feel, in opposition to the ‘western’ feel of the imperials. I’d studied runes and symbols at college and wanted to get that in too."

Jes has said similar thing about his elves, samurai and Persian influence.

Gav also mentions the mecha anime model kits they had that influenced Eldar design, rounded organic designs like Orguss:

https://twitter.com/gavthorpecreate/sta ... 5820397568

Tau were influenced by blockier mecha like Dragonar's grunt mecha or the perhaps the Studio Nue stuff that inspired Battletech.

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Portraying Japanese inspired characters as more agile type duelists was also popular with British comics that had influence on 40k
The Japanese member of ABC warriors even has a cone helmet

OgreBattle wrote: Jes has said similar thing about his elves, samurai and Persian influence.

I think that the conical Elf/Eldar helmet shapes in WHFB and WH40k might be inspired by Assyrian designs. Conical helmets are among the oldest designs (e.g. Mycenean "boar-tusk" plated leather) of human helmets, but they weren't used by every pre-iron culture. Dome/spheroid helmets seem more prevalent.

Eldar have pointy helmets because they are Irish. That is why all of their craftworlds are named after Gaelic holidays.


A Medieval Irish helmet.

-Username17