Substance Over Style

[Colonel Kreitz]

I was reading through the Tau Codex over the weekend and was enjoying GW's overview of the Tau fluff and some of the expanded explanation of the 3rd Sphere Expansion.

I subsequently picked up my old 3rd Edition IG Codex, as well as my 3rd Edition Rulebook. The contrast was night and day.

The IG Codex has some narration, but is filled mostly with flavor. There's a partially redacted letter from a Guardsmen to his family. Snippets of mobilization orders and TO&E tables, fragments of after action reports, short vignettes about battles or history, maps, and portraits of famous battles and units. There isn't an overarching story or narrative, but there isn't supposed to be. Instead, there's a snapshot of the 41st Millennium. The 3rd Edition Rulebook is the same way. While there's some narrative, it's mostly short stories, pages from the diaries of pilgrims, astropathic communiques, and concerned reports from Inquisitors. Ever few pages is a piece of John Blanche artwork with a suitably disturbing (and often desperate) catechism or prayer.

All of this also reminded me of my favorite Index Astartes column (and one of my all-time favorite pieces of 40K fluff), which is about the Cursed Founding. It isn't a narrative at all. Rather, it's a sort of epistolary story told through log entries from an Explorator team and an autopsy report on a mysterious giant. It tells a story, but it conveys the feel and the mood of the 41st Millennium. It draws you in, even though it's short on information.

Somewhere in (I think) 4th Edition the style changed. Codices are now filled with information and exposition. They tell the story of a race from the perspective of a 3rd-person, omniscient narrator. Unit entries cleanly tell the tale of a unit's history and its specializations. There is more substance, but less style. Quote boxes and vignettes appear sparingly and there are almost never the sort of vox-logs and after action reports that fill the 3rd edition codices.

I think the last two editions of the game are an unspeakably vast improvement over 3rd and 4th (the words "Rhino Rush" still annoy me) in terms of rules and I think that a fair amount more detail and substance is being packed into the fluff. However, I can't help but feel that this clarity has come at the expense of immersion. It feels like the difference between sifting through newspaper clippings and reading a history book.

Is it just me or is this far less fun?

[Kawauso]

I know what you're talking about, as my first army was Necrons so I was stuck with an ancient codex like that for ages, and got to see this transition first-hand as I started dabbling in other armies as they came out in 5th edition.

I would prefer if they incorporated elements from both styles of codex.
I enjoy the wealth of information and background material the current books offer, but I do miss the little snippets of slice-of-life background the older codices had in them.



That, and I miss the 'hobby' section that the older codices had in them, with cool dioramas or special unit conversions done up by members of the studio, and a more in-depth look at some of the various colour schemes available for a given army and the sects/factions one can choose to represent within it.

[Rev. Tiberius Jackhammer]

Yeah, I much prefer the scrap-book approach to the narrative approach.

I'd highly recommend hunting down Xenology, it's a very well-done scrapbook style with a core narrative that ties all the scraps together (a Kroot is killed, then we're treated to scraps/speculative notes from the dissection of the Kroot).

[apahllo]

^ive been trying to get my hands on one for ages, but i always find ways to waste my money elsewhere in the hobby...

my favorite was the old tyranid codex. 3 or 4 ago, there was a gaunt that had been dissected and funky (obviously imperial) explanations of things, like the red terror and "shoot the big ones" quotes all over the place. you could also make your own species of gaunts, giving them venom cannons or synapse... oh that was a cool book... 4+ armor genestealers was my favorite army.

but the new codex look isnt bad, i love the digital ones and already have 2 for armies i dont even play (ouch on the wallet).

[magickbk]

2nd Edition Codices were similar to what we have now, with full narrative story. Then people complained about the price of the books, so GW started making the small 3rd Edition ones that had only a few pages of history/story, and were mostly rules. People complained about the lack of content, so that's when the releases expanded and had all that neat scrapbook-type stuff. Not sure why there isn't as much, but I have to think it has something to do with separating what you get from GW and what you get from Black Library.