Warhammer 50k

[sargaule]

With the latest White Dwarf I have read about the Fall of Cadia. 
The Imperium will never the the same again, is the quote.
I cannot help but think back to the End Times of Warhammer Fantasy Battles, the 4 or 5 books released to play out the end times, eventually leading to the end of fantasy battles completely.

I fully expect that within the next 12 months, Abaddon will make it to Terra, and the Emperor will no longer be on the golden throne, whether that releases him from his cage or marks the end of his life for good, I'm sitting on the fence, but I am 90% sure the golden throne is finished.

So to follow the story arc at a high level, either the good guys win, or the bad guys win. 
If Imperium defeats the 13th Crusade, then we progress the back story, but essentially the game of W40K remains much the same.
If the bad guys win, then Games Workshop have the perfect catalyst to change the game, complete overhaul, just like Age of Sigmar. Following on from this, we enter a new age of strife, solar systems are on their own, every man for themselves. Does Games Workshop let us live out this time for ourselves, desperately hanging onto the past, or do we skip ahead, like Age of Sigmar did and join the game again in the future, once a new baseline has been established?

I'm probably just being pessimistic, but I currently feel that we will have Warhammer 50k coming, 10,000 years after the golden throne was destroyed, each  and every race will have the chance to have a new, fresh, background due to having a massive time gap. Most important though, is whether they think its worth changing the rules, making Age of Sigmar ruleset the way forward for 40K as well?

I have so many work in progress armies and hobby items in play at the moment, starting to think to myself that I should stop spending the cash, and wait to see what happens. Alternatively, maybe I go hard and finish my W40k armies so that when we get a completely new game, I have the option to stay with the current rules instead.

Am I just being paranoid, or is there a real chance that the end of W40K is just around the corner?

[Grimmaw]

i highly doubt the will AoS their best selling game,

[Geifer]

It all depends on what kind of end you have in mind.

Changing the rules won't be the end of the world. 2nd ed to 3rd ed did a good job of keeping the tone and background, and shaping it even further, even though it was a massive streamlining of the rules and left some people unhappy with the lack of detail. On the positive side, it brought about the age of clashing armies rather than small strike forces, and made things work a lot smoother. 5th ed, which still belonged to that design philosophy, brought in a tone change in the background to a more heroic and large miniature focus, which in the rules was introduced in 6th ed and only finalized in 7th ed.

Personally, while I always liked the depth of 2nd ed and technically 7th ed as well, the streamlining of 3rd ed was for the best, because it brought about a measure of balance to 40k not seen before or since. Steel coffins aside,  I think my favorite edition was 4th ed, because it built on that philosophy and only started to introduce greater detail, whereas these days we are drowning in unbalanced and probably not very thoroughly playtested rules. As far as I'm concerned, 40k needs a serious rules overhaul.

Technically, the background has nothing to do with how exactly the rules are shaped. With Age of Sigmar, GW wanted to change the background. There was no need for completely dumping the old world in favor of the new one just to change the rules. They did it anyway. For this reason alone, I'm not going to worry much just yet. GW could advance the 40k background without needing to trash the background. Whether they will remains to be seen, of course.

I even like the idea of an advance. After twenty years, reading the same stories all over gets a bit dull. I've always had the historic gamer's approach to background. I don't have much of a problem if GW advances army background because I'm happy to have my army themed around a time period that doesn't have to be the 'present'. I'm cool with that. I have a much bigger problem with retcons like the Necrons received where things were simply changed, past, present and future.

Truthfully, though, I think the writing talent and vision to make a good timeline advance is entirely absent in today's studio. I found the End Times badly written (Nagash started off interestingly, but it went downhill from there), the first two or three Age of Sigmar campaign books (and it should tell you something that I don't even know anymore what exactly I read) even worse, specifically very repetitive with no sense of the world around the characters, and the characters very stereotypical, and Shield of Baal, the last 40k background book I read in its entirety, was pretty dodgy as well. I thought the Age of Sigmar timeline jump to the reign of Chaos was not very elegant in that skipping the post-apocalyptic time for another post apocalyptic time is just bogus. I certainly hope they won't do that with 40k.

I have no problem with, say, Abaddon making it to Terra, either him or Cypher killing the Emperor and then Abaddon installing himself as new emperor of the beaten parts of the Imperium that now either rally behind him or get destroyed by Chaos, while a remnant Imperium still hangs around and is held together by loyalist Primarchs. I imagine that would be an interesting setting (as there are now two human empires, but mankind is split, so xenos forces have an easier time to gnaw away at both because there is no longer the monolithic power of a united Imperium) and still not invalidate current armies.

The issue isn't that change cannot or must not happen, but that it requires skill and elegance or else it will end in disaster (also known as Age of Sigmar ). Technically I agree with with Grimmaw in that GW isn't going to deliberately kill their best selling game, but I have no confidence that they won't 'improve' it the wrong way by accident. However, there was nothing smooth to the transition from Fantasy to Age of Sigmar and GW's financially reports showed it. The General's Handbook is unprecedented in GW's recent history as a quick hotfix to this problem. Because of this, I'm not going to be pessimistic for now and believe that GW will be a bit more careful when it comes to 40k.

[sw1]

Didn't the 13th Crusade already happen in the fluff and were just seeing the story arch being fleshed out?

The Imperium isn't the same after a certain big red or is that blue daemon dude with one eye got his planet out into real space rather than the warp.


Hasn't Cadia been lost and then re-conquered multiple times as it's slap bang in the only really stable route out of the eye? The great no mans land where most of the stalemate happens?

[Geifer]

We had the Eye of Terror summer campaign about fifteen years ago that was indeed about the 13th Black Crusade, but GW never made anything of it. Chaos kind of won, but the results were ignored until 5th ed, at which point GW went back to the time shortly before the crusade. As in, timelines in codices were written to end before the 13th Black Crusade, and they very slowly moved towards the start of it with every book. Now we're getting the Gathering Storm, the opening narrative of the 13th Black Crusade reboot.

Technically, the Planet of Sorcerers being located in real space now by itself doesn't do all that much. It's a good bastion of Chaos in real space and a staging area for invasions, but those existed before. Now there's just one more, but with a big name attached to it, which no doubt makes it more relevant than most others.

Cadia used to be contended in the Eye of Terror campaign as I recall, with the Chaos side dominating. Since this has basically been retconned afterwards, Cadia never fell to that invasion. And I don't recall Cadia ever falling to Chaos before. It's always been the tightly controlled Imperial fortress world that stopped Chaos from launching all out attacks that for the most part stopped large Chaos invasions from happening.