(This post
deals with the rumoured conclusion of Games Workshop's Gathering
Storm storyline and speculates on where that rumoured conclusion
might lead. Whether the rumour is accurate or not I do not know but,
please, treat this as spoilers and proceed accordingly).
A few days
back, Lady Atia reported on her blog War Of Sigmar a short extract
apparently from the conclusion of Gathering Storm III: Rise Of The
Primarch:
“The
Gathering Storm is over.
“We saw
Cadia burn, a Craftworld shattered, and we followed Eldar and Saint
into the nightmare. We saw a Primarch rise again, and we went to hell
itself to reach Terra.
“The
Gathering Storm is over.
“Old Night
is once again upon us. the gods fight against each other and laugh.
But we won't give up without a fight either. We will muster. A new
Great Crusade must begin. For Terra, and for the Emperor!”
Okay, so
this here's a rant that's been building for a long time.
See, a
problem I think Games Workshop has is that it keeps addressing the
wrong problems. They killed off my beloved Fantasy because it wasn't
selling. Their solution was to destroy the world they'd spent decades
building in order to create a new setting out of mangled Norse
mythology that had golden Space Marines in it, retooling what units
and ideas they could and discarding others including basically the
entire continuity, almost every established character and every
setting they'd ever created.
Why this was
the first instinct to a sales problem in a game that had seen massive
per unit price rises in an edition that simultaneously incentivized
taking forty man or larger block units is anyone's guess.
And now
they're blowing shit up again. They blew up Fenris, they blew up
Cadia and by the looks of things the whole galaxy is about to get a
bad case of warp storm. Also, as with Age Of Sigmar, it looks like
there's going to be shift of emphasis away from the ordinary
footslogging human level to the level of warring gods.
The problem
with 40k, as so many people claim loudly on forums and comment
threads, is that it does not advance. Now, I can understand the
complaint and once you'd lived through a couple of editions the fact
that every few years you buy yet another Codex for your favourite
army for which you get incrementally higher production values, one or
two new units, a slight points rebalancing and exactly the same
background with a polishing rewrite does get a bit frustrating.
But has it
occurred to anyone that maybe just blowing up whole settings is
probably not a sustainable way to grow the story?
I mean,
they've chopped Fenris and Cadia. So much of the unique character of
the Space Wolves comes from living on that ice-covered, pre-feudal
hellhole. Similarly, Cadians are the go to, bog standard Guardsmen in
their fiction and now they're a finite resource in the universe.
Cadia and
Fenris are both planets with unique characters within the universe,
with aspects many writers have used to craft brilliant stories.
Blowing them up was good for a moment of shock value, even if going
for the same shock value twice is a pretty dumb mistake professional
writers should know better than, but it doesn't subsequently offer
anything new for the Space Wolves or the Cadian Shock Troops to do.
It turns the Space Wolves into yet another chapter who lost their
homeworld except that most chapters with that background usually
didn't have such a strong and developed investment in their origins
as the Space Wolves do (everything from their psyker training to the
board games they play are established to have a strong connection to
Fenris). Meanwhile, every Cadian regiment in the galaxy is just the
Tanith First & Only without the Scottish nationalism and we've
already had thirteen novels and a short story collection featuring
those guys (and please, please release The Warmaster soon, Black
Library), nevermind the fact that a couple decades further down the
timeline they'll just all be dead or charging out of the trenches on
their grav-zimmers.
This isn't
plot progression, this is empty spectacle seemingly building to the
creation of a Horus Heresy-esque status quo with a new Old Night and
a new Great Crusade.
Well, okay,
but there are warp storms everywhere already and its not like the
Imperium is short on crusades left, right and centre. Mainly right,
ultra far right (fascism joke). Its not actually much of a change and
how screwing over the Cadians and Space Wolves (the latter, at least
being a really, really popular faction) was useful in setting it up
is questionable at best.
Its just
massive overcompensation. Instead of actually taking a look at the
dozens and dozens of potential plot hooks they've been dangling for
the end of the 41st millennium in their Codex timelines
and using those to drive the plot forward one army at a time they
just decide to make a big noise blowing up perfectly useful planets
for show and trying to make the setting more like The Horus Heresy
because that system is massively popular with high-spending players.
Oh, well,
its not as if I paid much attention when they destroyed the Warhammer
World, is it?
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