Royal Mail issues Warhammer stamps celebrating 40 year anniversary
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With all that said it is very amusing to see the British govt create a series of stamps that commemorate a game setting that could be summed up as "religious facism with roman empire themes".
While I don't at all doubt that it goes over the head of some of the fanbase, I don't get the sense that the existence of a religious fascist empire in the game is really an endorsement of that as a political philosophy...
Part of the point of 40k (which certainly DOES go over the head of some of the fanbase) is that the humans really are the bad guys. I mean, so are lots of other factions, but that's the dark future of the 41st millenium for you.
Ehhh... maybe that was the satirical intent in the 80s, but it's pretty clearly not true anymore. The Imperium as a whole kinda sucks, but Roboute Guilliman is simply a protagonist, there's no subtlety that the fanbase is missing.
But as a stronger statement, I don't think the Imperium is even presented as an evil faction anymore. The Inquisition is the darkest traditional faction, but look at their presentation in something new like Darktide. It's at worst morally comparable to a "grey" protagonist like the Punisher in other media.
"In newer 40k media, you are intended to root for humans working on behalf of the Imperium"
is a true statement IMO. That makes them "the good guys", even if overall kind of crappy.
“Humans are the bad guys” does not imply that all humans are bad. Just that overall they are really not good. So pointing out one archetypal white knight type is not a refutation of the point.
I do agree that some, maybe even most, of the sarcasm targeting Reaganism that was the foundation for the lore back in the 80ies is weaker in the new official lore. But I think that is just because the current writers are moving on to make fun of more modern things like the anti-intellectuals you see on the far-right today. I do think they are much more successful with that in Age or Sigmar than in 40K, but I don’t think they are writing the imperium to be the good guys either. Sure some people will see “humans” as the good guys, and sure, a lot of the anti-fascism is going to be lost on some people, but it honestly always has been.
Xenos ? Purge without question, even if they are peaceful
Human colony wanting to be just left alone ? Nope, can't have that, conquer and make them pay tribute.
Mutated in wrong way ? Probably chaos, purge just in case.
Human rights ? Only human right is to sacrifice life for Emperor.
Sure the world requires such level of sacrifice just to survive the threats from rest of the universe but that doesn't make Imperium not evil
Then again, every other major faction is too... maybe except Tyranids, they just hungry
IMO they should have made the Tau not evil (make the mind control vibes just imperial propaganda that is the result of actually encountering people motivated to do good).
As it is, the Orks seem to be the least evil faction.
A lot of the stuff the Imperium does is not just evil but also stupidly counterproductive. Planets starving due to rounding errors in the filing system is hard to take as an endorsement. And I couldn't disagree more with the Tau, if anything I wish they had made them more sinister. Having a whole faction of non-tragic good guys in the setting really spoils the vibe.
But the Orks - agree so hard. There's a quote in a Codex somewhere from an Eldar philosopher waxing on the point that the Orks are thriving and living their true lives, while the Eldar are decaying as a result of their own corruption and therefore the Orks are morally superior, and it rings quite true.
Well, it is written off like that in lore too. "We do bad things because war machine needs to be fed, because our entire existence depends on it" is recurring theme.
Even the "good" Tau are pretty fucking bad when you start looking into their practices of casual eugenics...
Frankly only non-evil-at-core one would be Tyranids which are only hungry
> As a bit of an analog for late 20th century / early 21st century western interventionist culture I've always assumed that the Greater Good is ultimately for the benefit of the T'au and if others get something out of that's just a bonus. The fact that they are even willing to work with other species is pretty unique and progressive among the factions of 40K, rather than rampant genodical, xenophobic armies. The thing about the Great Good is that it is, in the long term, as inflexible and authoritarian as the Imperial Creed or the all-consuming Tyranids. It still comes down to the Greater Good or Death (tm). I've tried not to make it too sinister being within the T'au sphere, though in the original Apocalypse book I introduced a variety of NATO-style innocuous three-letter-acronym formations, like Mobilised Hunter cadre, Dispersed Retaliation Cadre and Forward Commitment Contingent. None of them say 'battle' or 'war'... I cazn imagine the news back home is quite a sanitised version of the reality - like when we watched videos of 'smart' bombs and gun cameras blowing up stuff in Iraq but were totally unaware of what was really happening on the ground.
You're right about the Orks, of course. They're just out there living their best life! #GreenBoySummer
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/40kLore/comments/b3pc01/qa_with_gav...
Strange as it sounds, imo the least evil faction is the Tyranids. Though they're (or I guess technically it, because they don't have individual minds) intelligent, its an entirely different form of intelligence which makes them more like a force of nature, no more evil than a tornado is.
Tau would be pretty fascist too
IMHO it's no coincidence that the first human civilizations were autocratic. It's basically the default form of government. This is a very important, if uncomfortable truth. Too often liberal societies fool themselves into thinking that liberty "just happens" and is "inevitable", a feature of the natural world, requiring no effort from the individuals that compose it. This is not just foolish but destructive. It is why, for example, that fascism rises in democracies like the US even though the vast majority do not support it: the majority doesn't bother to vote, thinking they don't have to.
Perhaps there is also something a bit alluring in the fantasy of being a zealot, though. To be untroubled by the nuances of a complicated world, serving only as an extension of the Emperor's glorious might, has a certain perverse simplicity to it.
Yiu might as well ask "why people choose playing bad guy in (c)RPG" ? Because it is something different than the usuall
Also it's most about cool shit the whatever faction you like do. The misery of the world is only a background to show the unimaginable scale of the conflict in the world where a seed of chaos or genestealers in a small community can lead to entire planet being doomed if not handled appropriately. The stakes are massive and the conflict is on awesome scale.
> IMHO it's no coincidence that the first human civilizations were autocratic. It's basically the default form of government. This is a very important message to spread because too often liberal societies fool themselves into thinking that liberty "just happens" and is "inevitable", a feature of the natural world, requiring no effort from the individuals that compose it. This is not just foolish but destructive. It is why, for example, that fascism rises in democracies like the US even though the vast majority do not support it: they don't even bother to vote, thinking they don't have to.
I think that's spot on; also most people don't really want to be bothered to run the bigger scale as long as their lives are fine enough (from their perspective, as they might not know any better).
Like society when everyone is involved in every decision on wider area (let's say small city) would be obnoxious enough, every fucking day there would be half a dozen issues to decide upon so that would naturally evolve to deciding to pick (and pay for their trouble) some people to deal with some kind of issue and as it is hard to know who would be good at, the most charismatic one wins...
The fact that the Salamanders are praised because they think of the people before nuking a planet really does tell you quite a lot about the shining beacon of Humanity that the Adeptus Astartes are supposed to be.
> I mean, so are lots of other factions, but that's the dark future of the 41st millenium for you.
Basically, it’s a setting where there are no good guys. Except maybe the Tau, but nobody likes them anyway.
The fact that humans are actually quite terrible from a moral perspective, and that most other factions have aspects you can sympathise with is actually very interesting, and makes the universe compelling. For example Nurgle followers really are benevolent good guys from their perspective, and that is very well documented. There is basically only the Drukhari (and tyranids, but that’s different because they have no moral compass whatsoever) that are really purely evil, even from their point of view.
This appears to be an urban myth. Nobody has ever managed to find any evidence that there was a gay club called Caliban or The Rock in Nottingham, or that anything was named after one.
Lion El'Jonson, though, definitely: https://www.poeticous.com/lionel-johnson/the-dark-angel-dark...
Most times it's played as a joke. I mean I doubt there is a single living being that goes "yeah 40k imperium is such nice place to live as a normal human".
Artists can put significant effort into showing an ideology or something as "clearly the bad guys" and people will choose to ignore that. See for example, all the people yelling that Tom Morello is "getting political" and how the original star wars film was intentionally an anti-vietnam film.
Most are probably just roleplaying bad guys for fun but there is always someone that doesn't...
Take Fight Club which you're 'supposed to' take as criticism of explosive violence but it still basks in it. Or superficially anti-war movies like Black Hawk Down which are basically war porn aesthetically. The Young Pope is another good recent example. Superficially it's satire but on every other level obviously sympathetic to what it portrays.
Oh, I always assumed they were based on the arachnids from Starship Troopers? And likewise, the Terran marines in StarCraft are clearly very similar to the Mobile Infantry in Starship Troopers…
But I guess it's plausible that the depiction of the Arachnids in the 1990s film adaptation took some inspiration from the Tyranids. Which, in turn, might have been inspired by the novel's Arachnids...
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[1] My source for that is the first novel in the Horus Heresy series. In one episode, some marines are on a far-away planet fighting a race of "megarachnids" which are very clearly some kind of forward force of the Tyranids. "Very clearly" given that the Marines are basically slaughtered. They get better.
The internet tells me the planet was called Murder. The internet also is categorical that the megarachnid are a different species than the tyranids, but far as I can tell nobody has any real reason to say that, they all seem to just state it as a fact without further justification. So I says they were early 'nids.
StarCraft was definitely based on 40k with Zerg being tyranids, Terrans being the imperium with their marine unit looking like an ultramarine, and Protoss being like the elder because employees at blizzard wanted to make warhammer games and tried to get games workshop to license it. They altered it just enough to be different when games workshop declined. You can see some of that in Warcraft as well with their orcs being green
That's just theocracy lmao
Ok, they are collectible, but they're still worthless as having value beyond the postage value. Sort of like NFTs.
If you want to collect stamps with any collectible value, ya gotta go before 1940.
I agree with your initial point, but don't follow your distinction at the end.
Yes, absolutely. It's just that the post offices did not recognize the money-making potential of releasing endless varieties of commemorative stamps. Once they did, however, it was game over for philately.
And now people look at Hasbro and WotC and wish they were more like Games Workshop.
Others just fish for foil cards, which apparently are measurably heavier than normal ones and with a precision scale it's possible to tell whether a booster has one.
I'm not a collector, so I stopped buying them when power creep rendered a second deck of mine useless already.
I don't think it's even reliable that the point-for-point best units are the most financially expensive ones. With 40k, i believe the most expensive stuff is often obscure Forge World models that usually have terrible rules.
For example, my friends and I play Pauper [0]. A format where only common cards are allowed. You can get a strong on-meta deck for between USD24-USD90. It has a huge card pool going almost back to the beginning, so you can build really nice decks!
Even in USD1000 formats like Modern or Pioneer. There are "cheaper" decks like 8-Whack, or Mono-blue Tempo respectively. I think around USD100.
GW’s minis are expensive but they are good, fantastic even. They don’t have a monopoly, several other companies also sell very good minis, but injection moulding is expensive so scale matters here.
So sure, printed minis are better than Warhammer minis from 20 years ago, but none come anywhere near the good recent ones. The main thing going for printed minis apart from price is that it’s easier to have different poses and add some variety.
Also, a lot of people play games hosted in GW stores, and i believe GW have a policy that you can only use their minis in their stores.
Yes $150 isn’t cheap but it’s not $1500.
I wouldn't consider one unless I had a garage or shed, and no children.
That's comparable to a high quality board game, computer game, Lego set etc.
A new edition of 40K is out in the next few weeks. The core rules are a free download and the points for all the models will be free downloads too.
For a l4d style horde shooter, vermintide 1&2
For a boomer shooter, the recent 40k boltgun is allegedly excellent
For tactical in the 40k realm the dawn of war 2 is great.
Space marine was a nice linear action game, worthwile on sale.
Demonhunters features the Grey Knights who are a secret chapter of psychic Space Marines who fight the forces of chaos etc etc. It's a nice game, but with a seriously shitty UI. I still enjoyed it.
I've played a bit a couple of others: "Warhammer Total War" (now in v. III) and "Spacehulk: Deathwing", "Battlefleet Gothic: Armada" etc but those were meh-so-and-so. I think the majority of WH games tend to be.
Unrelated: why so many games have an X:Y name?
https://store.usps.com/store/product/buy-stamps/james-webb-s...
But we soon decided that beating inflation with USPS Forever stamps probably wasn't the best ROI of investor funds.
(Codename Raptor (Velociraptor) was an awesome internal app, for eviscerating counterfeiters with swarms of fast-moving iPhones.)
IMHO, dinos (including a team break to brainstorm a suitable next codename) are better for morale than many packaged corporate team-building activities.