#40k headcanons

[sorormaior]

I’m convinced at this point Cary just has a bingo card of every legion and they’re just making their way through, when they get a full house whichever Primarch they’re currently having a situationship with will actually just ask them out /j

My logic was that since these encounters over the great crusade, it’s not that they were in contact with the same legion all the time, hence having a couple of guys from a couple of different legions. It's efficient!

I also have my own headcanons about differences between great crusade era astartes and modern 40k astartes…

Okay so, my ideas around great crusade astartes are that they are a little less rigid than modern 40k astartes and that after the heresy started the powers that be started cracking the fuck down on these kinds of things. In my mind, things like romantic and sexual attraction are there, but an astartes can just choose to turn them off, ignore them in some way. Some choose to let these emotions run their course- I still have to find a way to rationalise it against the idea that astartes have human emotions but not the humanity to process them. Then the heresy happens, and everyone starts going hard on astartes repression. No More Fun Allowed. Tighter psychological conditioning, greater crack-downs on interpersonal relationships, etc etc.

I also have a headcanon that great crusade astartes ports are symmetrical, but modern marines have a more random pattern because they're rushing to get those guys out there. gogogogo get that fucking guy out there!!!!

[buttstuffbo]

I wanna share my personal headcanons abt the T'au language.

I think the reason it's so hard for humans to learn is that even before the T'au started absorbing aspects of other species's languages it was already a convoluted mash of five very different languages the castes used just kinda forced to work together.

On top of that I'd like to think it varies quite a bit between septs. The ' in most words could mean anything from a glottal stop, a click, to literally nothing.

Also the fact the T'au alphabet looks so much like the font TwoFiftySixBytes makes me think it's designed that way so their ai can read it better, and that they might've only developed their writing system as they built their first computers.

[katesfoxhole]

As far as I've been able to determine, Mordian and the Mordian Iron Guard first appeared in the 2e Codex: Imperial Guard (or possibly White Dwarf 184 but they came out around the same time). And then nothing happened for 17 years. No new lore was added until Mark Clapham's novel Iron Guard came out in 2012, and even he only added one little tidbit--that people living on the dark side of a tidally locked planet tended to like bright colors.

I am writing some fanfic featuring a Mordian regiment, and I've made up a few headcanons or my own.

One is that, reflecting their tidally locked world, they tend toward a kind of binary thinking. Both men and women can serve in the Iron Guard, but regiments are segregated by sex (the Cain novels outright state this is the norm for the Imperial Guard anyway. And of course, nothing's stopping the Munitorum from pulling a 597th if you want a mixed regiment; the Adeptus Terra don't giveadam about some silly local custom). It's fine to be gay, but not bi or pan--pick a side, fence-sitter. Same with gender--being trans is okay as long as you cross over completely; no boymoding, no being genderqueer or agender.

(In case it needs to be said, these are not supposed to be good things btw, this is a flaw, a cultural blind spot.)

Presumably nothing naturally grows on Mordian--the day side is blasted by instantly-lethal amounts of solar radiation and the night side is, well, always nighttime. The only place on Mordian where you see plant life is in manmade gardens and greenhouses. So I've written my Mordians to be weirded out by nature. Their dialect of Low Gothic doesn't even have words for things that are not manmade--that isn't a forest up ahead, it's a very tangled and untidy orchard. How dare the trees grow wherever they want to instead of in neat rows?

I have an unwritten scene where some HQ POGs are making fun of a Mordian recon report: "Are they still calling the river a canal?" "Give 'em a break, they've never SEEN a river before."

They are also--at first--absolutely terrified of sunlight. After all, on their homeworld, dayside = instant radioactive death. The first time they land on an earthlike world, a commissar has to almost shoot someone to get them off the dropship.

Canon Mordian names tend to sound Germanic. I've expanded that to include names from other mid-European sources, particularly Estonian, Lithuanian, and Ukranian. Presumably a lot of the original settlers came from that part of Earth.

It's not as hard as it sounds to keep those fancy uniforms clean. Mordian has an STC for high-tech, moisture- and dirt-repelling fabrics. Textiles are one of the planet's chief trade goods. Mordian Iron Guard are positively horrified by soldiers from other worlds who show up in grubby cotton twill. Yeah, it's hard to stay clean while soldiering in the field, which is why you don't want your uniform making it worse by ABSORBING sweat and dirt omg.

Iron Guard officers wear gold gorgets similar to the ones popular in 18th-19th century European armies. Senior noncoms and NCO vehicle commanders wear silver ones. I'm not the only one who's had this idea.

As a joke, I've named one of the hives on Mordian--not the capital--Dsenta Vitta. I bent it out of a mishmash of Latin and Estonian and it means, roughly, "where those cunts landed". This is an ancient name, going back to first settlement, and to the Mordians its meaning has of course long since been lost to antiquity.

Anyway, those are my Mordian headcanons. I would definitely be insterested in anyone else's, if you have them.

"Why is the sky leaking!?" "It's called rain. We were briefed on this."

[hmaitla]

40k Factions Headcanon Part 1

So I’ve always kinda had problems with the way 40k factions are presented. Not because there’s necessarily anything wrong with them, but because I feel there are a lot of missed opportunities. No one asked for this but I’ve been turning it over in my head for a while and I at least wanna write this stuff down, and possibly get some feedback on it. So yeah, here’s how I’d change the 40k universe.

General

Forget Dark Imperium, I’m dialing it back to classic 40k. I’d lose the flyers, they’ve never made sense to me - they’re essentially just another kind of “tank” in that you have to buy specific weapons for to take them down or risk being fucked by them. I’d re-jigger scenarios so the goal in battles is not just to kill all your enemies, its to seize objectives. This will change the meta so the emphasis is on building well-rounded armies instead of sinking all your points into one unkillable deathstar and laughing as your opponent struggles to get kill-points. I’d ditch most of the smaller factions too - do we really need Genestealer cultists to have their own army book? Can’t we just have IG “count as”? Plus this allows us to create distinctive feels and playstyles for each faction we do have. The factions I’d retain are: Space Marines, Imperial Guard, Sisters of Battle (forming the “Holy Trinity” of Imperial Armies, each representing a different aspect of the Imperium), Forces of Chaos, Tau,  Necrons, Crafworld Eldar, Dark Eldar, Orks, and Tyranids. I’ll do Space Marines as part of this post, then knock out the rest as I get to them.

Space Marines

So first of all there’s only one space marine book. If you want armies of Inner Circle Terminators or White Scars bikers use one of the alternate force org charts from the rulebook. They don’t need 50 fucking rulebooks for one faction.

Crunch-wise, I’d make them the Elite Multi-Wound Faction of 40k. There’s no such thing as Primaris Marines, they’ve always been that big. Every non-scout space marine has a 40mm base, 2 wounds, 2 attacks, a storm bolter and relentless. The basic tactical marine clocks in at about 40 points too. I’d have dreadnaughts be a HQ option alongside captains, librarians and chaplains. I’d strip down their options for heavy support/fast attack to the bare minimum and have everything that wasn’t assault marines, devastators or a thunderfire cannon be overpriced compared to its value. Land Raiders are now the standard space marine transport instead of rhinos, and predators etc are based around this larger frame. If this seems like it would make a squad of space marines too expensive, don’t worry - EVERYTHING has access to drop pods now, if not flat-out teleportation, and drop pods are the :typical” troop transport. I’d make it so they do not have a huge variety of tanks, and they do not get superheavy tanks. Instead, their super heavies are all special characters like Marneus Calgar, Mephiston or a generic Chapter Master (who would come with big auras to boost their fellow marines), or a group of especially heroic marines like grey knights, legion of the damned, etc.

This is to emphasize the marines as a small, elite force of heroes rather than the “average” vanilla 40k force. They’re very powerful, but its an army where if you lose a squad its really going to hurt you. They’re contrasted with the other elite army, Craftworld Eldar, in that their units are less “specialised” and generally more flexible, jacks-of-all-trades. This gives them a distinctive feel, and again it emphasizes the idea that even the basic Tactical Marine is a superhuman champion.

Fluff-wise, I’d change it up a lot. The Space Marines would be tragic figures, rather than big awesome heroes. It’d be stated in the codex that they aren’t really relevant to the Imperium’s current military situation - the Imperium controls everything touched by the holy light of the Astronomicon. Taking or settling new worlds isn’t really an option anymore, instead they want to hold onto the ones they already control. A small, elite force meant to decapitate hostile civilizations or militaries and conquer a planet within hours just isn’t that useful for holding defensive positions. Especially since they were divided up into Chapters  after the Horus Heresy so they’d never be a threat to their own side again - now even the largest force of space marines is only a thousand or so strong. To defend the Imperium, the Astra Militarum will deploy forces of men millions strong across a single planet. One thousand soldiers, no matter how skilled or well-equipped, are just not that useful. Here’s a quote I’d stick on the inside cover of the codex:

“A Space Marine is a mighty hero, an unrivaled champion of battle, easily worth twenty lesser men. But a Leman Russ Main Battle Tank is worth fifty, and the tank is cheaper and faster to produce.” - some jagoff from the Guard.

On top of this, their leaders are beholden to no-one, not even the Inquisition, and they roam the galaxy seemingly at random. You can’t order them to hold a certain position or strike in a certain place, you can’t even get them to stay and fight if they feel they have something more pressing to attend to. Although the arrival of a strikeforce of space marines can be an emperor-sent miracle that changes the course of entire wars and the fate of planets, you can’t really depend on them when you’re planning out a military campaign.

The individual space marines are tragic too. I’d emphasize their transhuman nature visually by giving them inhuman proportions like Dark Mechanic’s art of them. Overlarge bodies while retaining normal human-sized heads (which is why they have such big shoulder pads). After decades or centuries of war, they almost certainly have multiple augmetic limbs, the result of wounds sustained during combat with traitor tanks or tyranid warriors. The older they are, the more augments they have. This creates a kind of visual “scale”, starting with the mostly-human scouts (who would have helmetless heads and human proportions to emphasise their still-human nature). Then as they gain more augments they become larger, less human and more machine-like. The Tactical marines all wear helmets, using Dark Mechanic’s non-human look. Terminators a step beyond Tactical Marines, even larger and more mechanical, and Dreadnaughts are a step beyond them. Becoming a dreadnaught is less a tragedy that befalls a few especially unlucky space marines and more the inevitable fate of space marines who live long enough, as they slowly lose more and more of their humanity over the centuries. Slowly transforming, until there’s nothing left but an inhuman warmachine that only knows the battlefield and the inside of a stasis unit.

They’re the ultimate warriors, built to fight a war that ended ten thousand years ago. They give up so much of themselves to achieve greatness, but they’re functionally irrelevant. Of the three Imperial Factions, they represent the faded glories of the great crusade and the Golden Age of the Imperium, the bright colours of their famous heraldry contrasted with their tragic nature.

So yeah. That’s how I’d re-do the space marines to make them more characterful and interesting. These guys are one of the bigger changes I’d make theme-wise, essentially taking the poster-boys for giant badass heroes and all but explicitly making them useless. Tune in next time to hear how I’d change up the other imperial factions, then I’ll probably move on to the Eldar.

[ladymirdan]

What no one tells you about the Skull Throne is that it is litterally a beanbag filled with skulls.

[hmaitla]

40k Factions Headcanons Part 3

Mkay, moving on to part 3 of my series where I explain how I’d change the armies of 40k if I woke up one morning and had control of GW. Holy shit this is taking so much more time and effort than I thought it would. Well at least with this one I’ll be finished all the Imperial armies. So when it’s done I’ll have finished three multi-hour writing efforts out of... ten?

sob

Also, something I left out of the start of the first post - there is no allies system in my version of Warhammer 40k. You get what’s in your codex and nothing else. The point of my redesigns is to give each faction a distinctive feel, both thematically and in terms of their playstyle. If you can just mix-and-match freely when you listbuild it makes it much harder to balance the game, because you have to playtest each unit fighting alongside every other unit in the game rather than just the ones in the same codex. If you want to run something that the codexes don’t allow (Gue’vesa Auxiliaries for example, or a strike force of Chaos Space Marines) you can just use the “count as” rule, using different models for one of the codex entries. It won’t make everyone happy. Remember, my redesign is based around getting the themes of the Guard across while ensuring they have a distinctive feel and playstyle, and that each unit is distinct enough that there’s little “overlap”.

Imperial Guard

The Imperial Guard (or the Astra Militarum if you’re a GW exec trying to maximize your intellectual property) can be both the least “40k” of all the army factions and the most “40k” of them. On the one hand, factions like the Death Corps of Krieg and units like Commissars really capture the feel of 40k and of the Imperium. On the other hand, its very easy to write the Guard as being a fundamentally good, human force triumphing over the horrors of the galaxy. This is a trap. There are no “good guys” in 40k, especially not the Imperium. The themes of the Guard are humanity and inhumanity. The Guard is about sending countless humans to fight and die in suicidal actions against the most horrific enemies in the galaxy because it protects humanity. Or because your commander is an incompetent blue blood who only received a commission because of your obnoxiously rich family and his brilliant military strategy was to bayonet charge Ork Nobs. The Guard is about executing a man because he took poor care of his lasgun, because the Guardsman is infinitely more replaceable and therefore worth substantially less than the single most-available weapon in the galaxy. It’s about ordering tens thousands of young people to charge across an open field at a Tau gunline - because the Tau will run out of ammo before you run out of conscripts.

The Guard protects humanity, but it doesn’t value humans. Crunch-wise I’d want to emphasise that, with the focus being on squads rather than individual models. Here’s a quick run down of the list I’d use to make up the Guard:

HQ Command Squad - as is. Nothing wrong with orders, nothing wrong with an Imperial Guard Classic.

Tank Commander - for armies themed around hordes of tanks. Can issue orders to other tanks. Can also take side sponsons, unlike regular tanks.

Commissars - You can take 1-3 of these guys as one HQ choice, and assign each one to an infantry squad while you’re setting up. They allow you to sacrifice one member of that unit to re-roll a failed leadership check, but if you still fail, you remove the Commissar. I’d leave priests out, except in the Command Squad, and let these guys have the “morale buff” role instead. I originally had them in the Elites section, but it was getting pretty crowded, and a bunch of ordinary humans makes more sense for the guard than one big heroic human, so they’re replacing the Lord Commissar here.

Elites Scions - because “storm troopers” has unfortunate connotations, and “Tempestus” sounds stupid. These guys are pretty standard, they have carapace armour and hot-shot lasguns. They have higher leadership than regular guardsmen too. Can take a rhino, a taurox or a chimera

Ogryns/Bullgryns - big guys with big guns. These guys are the biggest, meatiest guys you have. But this is the guard, and they aren’t space marines (why don’t space marines recruit these guys???), so I’d actually nerf them somewhat. They’re still str/tou 4, but they only have one wound each. They get carapace armour and either shotguns (str 4 assault 2) or power mauls and force shields (5+ invuln save). Because they’re smaller than they used to be, they can ride in Metal Bawxes now (and because they’re meant for seizing objectives, so being able to ride in a troop transport is rather important). They’re still giant brutish abhumans, but they aren’t superhuman.

Tech-Priest - Able to restore wounds to nearby tanks and provides a buff to all nearby vehicles (he helps calm the machine spirits with his chanting). This guy is the closest

Psykers - not astropaths, which are in the command squad, but some kind of “Militarum Choir”. Lay psykers discovered by the guard and herded together as a kind of psychic battery. More of them working together makes them more powerful, but they can still fail a perils of the warp check and all turn inside out together.

Troops Guardsmen - because “conscripts” would be redundant. A squad of between 10 and 30 cheap-as-chips guardsmen, wearing flak armour (which I am VERY tempted to say only gives you a 6+ armour save) and carrying lasguns. They have leadership 6, but can use a command squad’s leadership instead if the CS is alive and on the table. For each full 10 Guardsmen you can take one special weapon (plasma gun/grenade launcher/sniper rifle) and one heavy weapon (heavy bolter/missile launcher/autocannon/lascannon). I’m leaving flamers and melta weapons off these guys, because these ones fit the Guard better (especially Gets Hot! plasma guns over melta guns). I was tempted to have the “platoon” system from yesteryear, and have them be two separate squads of guardsmen and a platoon command squad, but this is simpler. Can’t take troop transports.

Veterans - guardsmen with one extra point of BS and Leadership, in squads of 5-10. They can take camo cloaks, which gives a +1 to cover saves, and they can infiltrate if they don’t have a troop transport. For each five of them in a squad they can take two special weapons (plasma gun/grenade launcher/sniper rifles/flamers). These are the guys you take if you want a wholly mechanised force of guardsmen. I swapped the Scions and these guys around because it makes more sense for these guys to be more available than the scions, and because the scions were actually “Elite”.

Transport Chimera - Old Reliable. A middle ground between the Rhino and the Taurox, a multi-laser and a pintle-mounted storm bolter give it some firepower while retaining a full 12-man troop compartment, although its armour is light than the rhino’s. It’s on-board generator means the turn its unit disembarks they can re-roll to-hit rolls of 1 with their lasguns/hotshot lasguns.

Rhino - big and beefy, gets you there safely although not heavily armed. The quintessential Metal Bawx.

Taurox - the Immolator of the IG. Has a top-mounted autocannon, but can only carry 6 people.

Fast Attack Sentinels - ah, the chicken walkers. Nothing wrong with these, although I would give them Heavy Flamers and Plasma Cannons in addition to Autocannons/Heavy Bolters/etc. The they can be upgraded with extra amour, but lose the ability to scout.

Hellhounds - a squad of 1-3 scouting tanks. Same armour as a Chimera, but their troop compartments and multi lasers are replaced by a giant flame thrower/acid sprayer. Can receive orders from tank commander.

Roughriders - 5-20 hugely mustachioed men on horseback. Same as they are pretty much, good for taking objectives but piss poor at holding them (their lances count as power weapons on the turn they charge). Allow you to relive the charge of the light brigade in space.

Ratlings - they have to go somewhere, and the Elites section is full enough as is. On second thought, I’d actually drop these little guys and just say their models now “count as” veterans with sniper rifles. There’s nothing they do that the infiltrating vets with camo cloaks don’t do already. There’s no point having TWO units of infiltrating snipers, and Gaunt’s Ghost have a hit book series, so they get first dibs.

Heavy Support Leman Russ Squadron - these guys would actually get stripped down. The emphasis in the guard is quantity over quality, so I’d still have them packing big turret guns and thick armour, but I’d lose the side sponsons (they still have the hull-mounted gun though) and any special rules they might have in order to keep them as cheap and mass-producible as possible. All the flavours of Leman Russ can be mixed and matched here. These can receive tank orders.

Artillery Squadron - wyverns, basilisks, and death strikes.Basically any tank that shoots things it can’t see from your edge of the board, so they don’t have to share a squadron with Leman Russes on the front line. Death strikes are still random, but they share squads with horde-killing wyverns and tank-busting basilisks. These can receive tank orders.

I left out Heavy Weapon Platoons, because they don’t really seem to fit in too well - if you can give every two guardsmen a plasma cannon, why not do that? It makes more sense for the heavy weapons to be mixed in with the regular troops I feel. This has lead to the unfortunate demise of the mortar squad however. RIP little dudes, your dropping mortar shells on Orks in heaven now.

Super Heavies Baneblades - because it wouldn’t be the guard without them. Say it with me now - ELEVEN BARRELS OF HELL.

Imperial Knights - because they have to go somewhere, they’re popular enough that trying to drop them would lead to an uproar. Plus these giant warmachines actually fit in quite well with the guard.

Playstyle-wise, they’re similar to Tyranids, but the focus is on shooting rather than melee. They’re the Tau to the Tyranids’ Sisters of Battle, a horde interested in keeping its distance from the enemy and whittling them down with mass firepower rather than rushing in close.

Fluff-wise, I wouldn’t change much, besides emphasising that the guard and the imperium aren’t the good guys, and that the guard doesn’t value individual humans at all, even though its charge with protecting humanity. I’d make sure to have a lot of stories in the codex about guardsmen and -women being executed for cowardice, being sent on suicidal mass-charges, etc. Basically using North Korean/world war one military strategy, which suits the bleak tone of the 41st Millenium more than heroic world war two stuff. I’ve already said everything I really wanted to say about this at the start of this article.

So yeah. That’s how I’d redesign the imperial guard. Tune in next time to read my ramblings about how I’d change the Chaos so they aren’t just Space Marines with spiky bits.

[flunkyofmalcador]

Baal Secundus headcanon

One of the things that annoys me most about James Swallow’s “Blood Angels” writings is that he has zero world-building skills.  Occasionally he even seems fo forget that Baal and Baal Secundus are two different worlds.  For instance, if Sanguinius is from Baal Secundus, why is the fortress-monastery on Baal proper?

The only thing we know about Baal Secundus (and this applies to Baal too) is that it’s a “rad desert” that is full of roaming hordes of mutants and fire scorpions.

This is annoying.  I first “connected” with the character of Sanguinius the first time i spent a week at our desert house.  Today as I was doing something dull, a whole bunch of headcanon downloaded itself into my head.  This is what I came up with:

The Tribe of the Pure Blood are semi-nomadic.  They have two separate villages, one for what agriculture they can do and another for their flocks.  They spend part of the year in one, part of the year in another.  One for harvest, the other for lambing season (for lack of a better term.)

The oft-mentioned tech nomads are more traveling tinkers than anything else.  They trade their wares for scavenged metal and plastic, or food and water.  As a result, Baal Secundan tribespeople often have bulky-but-functional cell phones, radios, lamps, and flashlights.  The tech-nomads come through villages and towns to sell tech as well as repair it.

As a result, a certain amount of agriculture can be done in caves, although things like mushrooms and root vegetables need little to no light.  The Secundan diet is heavily meat and dairy based.

The Tribe of the Pure Blood are panentheistic.  Everything contains the Sacred, which is why they do all their blood rituals.  What better way to mark a sacred occasion than partaking in the liquid that most symbolizes life itself?