YorkNecromancer
09-06-2015, 08:00 AM
Frodo Will Never Get To Go To The Moon.
World-building: noun. The process of constructing an imaginary world, sometimes associated with a whole fictional universe.
In Which YorkNecromancer Meets His First Olympian.
I was never one for sports until I left school. Blessed with the stamina of a sad potato and the physical might of a bedridden sea cucumber, I could not be described as a natural athlete. Condemned to the bottom set in every PE class, I had to participate in no fewer than thirty two separate kinds of running alongside the other fat kids, asthmatics and genuine outright psychopaths. After playing rugby with a rat-faced lunatic who actually once tackled an opponent with a running shoryuken, the concept of sport went from something I merely disliked to something I outright despised.
Imagine my surprise when, after university, I discovered wrasslin’. The staged theatrics of faked wrestling were a sweaty revelation. Within a month, I could run for the first time in my life. After three, I was throwing two hundred pound men around like they were made of cardboard. Turns out I hated sports because they were missing a vital ingredient: violence.
And after I realised that, there was no stopping me.
That’s how I came to be talking to Cheryl (not her real name, obviously) about her time at the Olympics. Cheryl was not what you might expect of a legitimate Olympic athlete. She was head of history, and deeply unassuming. Five foot nothing and cloaked in a perpetual scowl, she lived every day of her life the same, regardless of rain or shine, failure or success: beginning the day in a state of general contempt, she would slowly move through scorn, derision, disdain and disapproval before finally arriving in condescension just in time for staff meetings. She could have won the lottery; the winning ticket would have been met with little more than a raised eyebrow and a cold sneer.
Needless to say, I liked her immensely.
After trying kendo, I had tried escrima. After escrima, I’d been fencing for about a year, and to this day, I still maintain that no other combat sport is faster. Boxing may require more resilience, MMA more tactical thought, but for sheer speed, there is nothing faster than fencing. Nothing. You’ve not seen speed until you’ve watched someone who knows what they’re doing flash across eighteen feet of floor towards you with two and a half feet of steel in their hand, all in less time than it takes to blink. It is a deadly, deadly style.
You just look like a bloody numpty while you’ve doing it.
http://usercontent2.hubimg.com/5338399_f520.jpg
Pictured: the only sport where standing like a monkey in the throes of anaphylactic shock is obligatory.
If I’m honest, I felt like an absolute idiot keeping my non-sword hand up in the air behind me unless lunging – I couldn’t get past the certainty that I was coming across as less ‘dashing warrior hero’ and more ‘prince of the fruits’. I mentioned this self-consciousness to Cheryl, who swivelled at me with the same kind of look that’s normally only reserved for men who dress up as Santa all year round. She stared me dead in the eye and it felt the temperature in the room dropped ten degrees.
“Well, when I was at the Olympics, if I’d fought any other way, I’d have been dead.”
“Cheryl,” I asked with no small surprise, “you were at the Olympics?!”
“Yup.” She replied, the weight of her unblinking eyes slowly turning into a physical sensation. “And let me tell you: if you worry about that sort of thing in a proper sword fight, you’ll be dead.”
“Why?” I asked, desperate to change the subject, to have her look away, anything so I didn’t feel quite so completely inadequate.
“Four nanoseconds.” She replied.
“What?”
“If you keep your arm up, then lower it when you lunge, it makes you four nanoseconds faster. Those nanoseconds are the difference between you hitting them, and them hitting you. So stop being such a bloody coward and keep your arm up.”
She turned and sipped her tea, and I found myself both grateful for this new piece of knowledge, and that I had already been to the toilet.
“How do you know the time so specifically?” I asked.
“We timed it. Needed to know; had to compare my speed to the other fencers.”
“Were you quicker?”
“Do you think I’d be here if I was?”
And that was when I learned what desolation really looked like.
Well, That Was A Lovely Depressing Story, But What The Deuce Does It Have To Do With Wargaming?
So Sauron’s in a lovely suit of armour, has a bloody great mace, and is laying waste to everyone. He’s Herohammering his way through an entire army of capital-m Men and the skies are black and damn, son, but he is evil like, for real.
And up steps Welshname, Son of Welshname, Heir to the Throne of Wales, and he’s all like “Aargh Sauron! Check it, fool. Taste these knuckles!” But Sauron’s all
KAPOW
And Welshname, Son of Welshname, Heir to the Throne of Wales drops in his plate armour and Sauron steps on his magical broadsword and Sauron’s all WELL WHAT NOW BRO? and Welshname, Son of Welshname, Heir to the Throne of Wales is all
http://38.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m9nlq3vZP41rsmws3o1_500.gif
"Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysilio gogogoch forever!"
“Broken sword, son!” and cuts off Sauron’s magic ring and then ten thousand years pass and everyone still wears the same plate armour, fights with the same broadswords, wears the same fashions and nothing, LITERALLY NOTHING has changed in the intervening 3,650,000 days.
Oh, it may say ten millenia have passed, but they haven’t. Nothing meaningful has happened in those ten thousand years. It might as well have been a hundred years. Or thirty.
Forget the dwarves, dragons, elves and leather jerkins. No significant change in fashions, music, culture or technology? In 10,000 years?!
That is f**king absurd.
Medieval stasis (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MedievalStasis) is a trope that always wrecks my personal willing suspension of disbelief (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suspension_of_disbelief). It’s silly I know, but I just can’t get past it. I mean, I know it should be completely minor, that just saying ‘A Wizard Did It (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/AWizardDidIt)’ should be good enough because the characters and their emotions are the important thing, but nnnnnnnnnnnaaaaaaggggghhhh!
Ten thousand years have passed! They should have invented spaceships by now! We’ve only had a thousand pass since men wore armour and we’ve cracked the human genome! Dragons are one thing, but ten thousand years of every single sapient species on the planet somehow not building on the successes and innovations of the generations that came before them?!
This is all I find myself thinking when I encounter this particular trope, and before anyone thinks I’m bashing ‘Lord of the Rings’, okay, I am a little, but only due to my very specific personal tastes in speculative fiction. See, despite one or two exceptions (primarily ‘Crank 1: Jason Statham Kills Everyone’ and ‘Crank 2: Jason Statham Kills Everyone Else’) when it comes to fiction, I generally like it hard.
http://davelandweb.com/celebs/images/1972_Deliverance2.jpg
Pictured: I will use literally any excuse to post this picture. So should you.
Hard vs. Soft
All speculative fiction, as I’m sure you’re aware, exists upon a scale. TV Tropes refers to this as The Mohs Scale of Sci-Fi Hardness (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MohsScaleOfScienceFictionHardness), and to save time, I’m just going to quote them on the difference between ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ fiction:
Example: a character is shown a machine for traveling into the past and asks, "How does it work?"
In soft SF: "You sit in this seat, set the date you want, and pull that lever."
In hard SF: "A good question with an interesting answer. Please have a seat while I bring you up to speed on the latest ideas in quantum theory, after which I will spend a chapter detailing an elaborate, yet plausible-sounding connection between quantum states, the unified field theory, and the means by which the brain stores memory, all tied into theories from both Albert Einstein and Stephen Hawking."
In really hard SF: "It doesn't. Time travel to the past is impossible." N.B. General Relativity allows for solutions for Kerr black holes where closed timelike curves, and therefore time travel, are possible. It is expected that a proper theory of Quantum Gravity will remove this possibility.
Now, we all have different tastes, and the type of fiction (and especially the tropes) you like will be no different; looking at my initial example, I’m sure many (probably most) of you ignore the medieval stasis in ‘Lord of the Rings’. Why? Because you just like everything else so much.
It bears stating: there’s nothing wrong with ‘soft’ stories. They’re no more inherently stupid than any other kind. ‘Hard’ isn’t an innately better style than ‘soft’, any more than Friday is better than shelving. It’s only one’s personal taste that makes either style stand out, and as we’ve already established, I bloody love ‘Crank 2’, one of the most unrelentingly stupid films ever released, so I’ve got no grounds to criticise anyone’s personal taste ever.
Now, 40K is a game which argues that in the far future, men will legitimately wage war by swinging axes roughly the size of a shed door into other men’s faces. These axes will have chainsaw blades in them, and be unironically named things like ‘Gorechild’ and ‘Gorefather’. Men who look after their army’s book collection will be capable of opening literal black holes roughly three metre across by thinking about it. These singularities will not destroy the planet they spawn on, along with the local star system and everyone in a 100 light year radius, but they will lead directly into a literal hell populated by lady daemons made almost 90% corset. So yeah, I think it’s fair to say that 40K is not hard sci-fi. In fact, 40K is a sci-fi setting so soft it could be made of cream cheese.
http://vignette4.wikia.nocookie.net/warhammer40k/images/1/1b/Angron_Primarch2.jpg/revision/latest?cb=20120629041033
Khorne: for when you want to bring a knife to a gun fight and WIN.
You may have spotted an obvious inconsistency in my tastes. How can I possibly claim to dislike ‘soft’ sci-fi, then make out that I like 40K? Because 40K isn’t a story. It’s a setting, and the two things are fundamentally different. A story has a narrative; a beginning, a middle and an end. There are characters who grow along sustained arcs, who develop and grow.
40K doesn’t have that per se. It’s less ‘Spec Ops: The Line’ (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NRy_dhn1FR8) and more ‘Saints Row’ (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SZaE7QkME38). Rather than a harrowing journey into the crucible of war that leaves you a hollowed-out broken husk, traumatically questioning your own morality, desperately searching for even the slightest remnants of humanity, 40K is a game of smashing Space Barbies together in the name of breaking things. Even in codicies, characters never really develop, learn anything, evolve or change except in terms of their statlines getting better at crumping stuff. (And note: I am talking very exclusively about the wargame here, not any of Black Library’s product lines).
For example, Ghazghkull is never going to meet a little girl who he has to care for and tend to, leading to a hilarious sequence where he’s got to disguise her in an adorable purple monster suit to hide her from his boss, all the while slowly learning a lesson about life, himself, and that scaring children by being a monster is a less effective way to power his city than getting them to laugh.
No, the only thing the Lord Of All Waarghs is going to realise is that the dobber he’s been using to crump skulls with becomes way more effective if he bangs a bloody great spike through it and renames it The Advanced Dobbing System.
http://i2.wp.com/willowhavenoutdoor.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/batchete-studio1.jpg?resize=576%2C384
Pictured: The Definitive Dobbing System – when words fail you, nothing speaks louder than thirty nine pounds of bladed hatred swung into an enemy’s face.
However, just because 40K is soft sci-fi, that doesn’t mean it couldn’t benefit from a little hardness. And that’s something we (as fans) can do for ourselves. Why?
Because even in a soft, non-story setting, hardness leads to interesting and exciting ideas.
Yes, I Know This Next Section Isn’t Perfectly Accurate, But Work With Me Here, I’m Writing In Broad Strokes To Make A Point, Okay?
https://c1.staticflickr.com/3/2323/2153970868_622a0f89d8_z.jpg?zz=1
I think there’s a rule that says everyone who loves action when they’re a little kid decides, normally around the age of twelve, that katanas are the Greatest Swords In The World. I also think there’s a second rule that says that around the age of twenty, they have to get into super-serious arguments about this Great Truth, normally over beers. Not to mention a third rule that says that when they’re thirty, they realise that actually, katanas aren’t as great as all that.
Katana have so many myths surrounding their manufacture that the truth can be astonishingly hard to get to. However, a lot of the myths that sound impressive are not as impressive as they seem. For example, numerous historical accounts from both China and Japan claimed the katana capable of cutting through enemy swords, which sounds amazing. And there’s also a weight of evidence that bears this myth out. China’s standing armies were massive, and so therefore needed a huge number of swords. As a result, those swords were mass produced and made of cheap, inferior steel. They also had been treated in such a way that the blades were sharp, but brittle (because any time you make a blade harder, you lose tensile strength and vice versa). The katana, cleverly engineered to be hardened while retaining their tensile strength (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Differential_heat_treatment), would smash them. So, an incredible myth that seems likely to be true. Impressive too… Until you consider that a modern piece of machined steel (with or without a blade) would probably be able to break those swords too. Why? Because modern engineering and manufacturing techniques are light years ahead of anything available during the time both types of swords were manufactured.
Like all weapons, the katana was a specific result of the economics and particular circumstances of its geographical origins. Japan was not a metal-rich nation at the time, and what steel there was was thick with impurities which lowered its quality even further (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_swordsmithing#Metallurgy). The much vaunted techniques of making them (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_swordsmithing#Construction) were as much to do with dealing with the poor quality of the materials as they were producing the perfect sword.
As far as the era and location it was used in goes, the katana probably was pretty much the perfect sword. For a number of complex reasons, Japan didn’t develop or produce European-style plate armour; China was the same. After all, what was the point of armouring up its disposable peasant armies when you could take all the metal you were going to use for armour, and instead making another hundred blades for another two hundred terrified farme – sorry, brave soldiers? With so few soldiers in anything remotely approaching effective armour, in the East, a blade with a cutting edge retained huge utility. The locally-produced lamellar armour - a mix of wood, heavy fabrics and metal pieces – while tough, could still be decimated by slashes. The tip of the blade is pointed for stabbing, but you can see the way a katana is intended to be used from the curve to the blade. A curve is better for slashing than a straight edge, because it means that no matter where the blade connects, the smallest possible point will be touching flesh, therefore increasing the force of the slash. The comparatively heavy blade helps drive it through meat and bone. Everything about the katana is engineered almost exclusively to simplify the task of cutting people into pieces.
In short, it was an ideal design for the very specific circumstances of its time and the place of its creation… But if it had come up against European armies, it would have run into trouble.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RFu11mSutd0
European medieval armour was really effective. As you can see in the above video, chainmail essentially turns cutting weapons into clubs. Plate armour, on the other hand, turns them into a joke. A fully armoured up knight would not have been at any meaningful risk from swords. Even arrows had a hard time; it’s why the English aimed for the horses rather than their riders at Battle of Crecy (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Cr%C3%A9cy). After all, a French knight trapped under his own steed can’t fight back when you push your misericorde (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Misericorde_%28weapon%29) up his armpit and into his heart.
That’s why, while Japan was creating the perfect slashing weapon, European weaponry cheerfully evolved down a completely different path. Where the Japanese soldiers had the option to cut their opponents into chum, European weaponry needed to be armour piercing. First, the heavy cutting swords became triangular, then finally turned into long, razored spikes, designed exactly to kill the enemies they might face. Broadswords evolved into rapiers.
Then, as their use spread, they became lighter, and faster. Fighting stances changed; compare the way a fencer stands when fighting with epee or sabre to a rapier – rapiers are all about maximum speed, because once everyone had one, well, that was how you won a fight; as Cheryl explained to me, it still is. You have to be in a silly pose, with your hand up in the air, holding a weapon as thin as a needle and as light as bone, all to gain those precious nanoseconds of time that mean it’s your life that continues, not your enemies.
You can compare the sword styles of Europe and Japan, and see the evolution of war there. Now, it's not to say that Japanese sword styles are slow. Japan has some horrendously fast techniques; iaijutsu is a style possessed of inhumanly terrifying speed… But comparatively, on an empirical level, it’s simply nowhere near as fast as fencing, because it didn’t need to be. Not when the opponent was swinging around a (comparatively) heavy lashing weapon.
Here’s the thing: all weapons are products of their time, place, and economy. So many factors combine, and people then develop things that work. Techniques, styles and ideas evolve within the limitations that the world imposes upon them. Things that work are kept; things that don’t are discarded. There’s a reason the SAS go to war with short, double-bladed daggers as their default hand-to-hand weapon instead of nunchucks.
http://www.damnlol.com/pics/108/9a4046b87b44f10a4bfabdf08af7b0ef.gif
Pictured: exotic weapon mastery.
There’s a reason no armed force in the world still uses the original, plastic M-16 assault rifle, and it’s the same one that keeps the AK-47 in ubiquitous service worldwide. There's a reason fencers keep their non-sword arm up, even though it looks ridonkulous. Local necessity defines form, function and success rate, and so two places can evolve radically different weapons, which are then used in radically different ways. If something is necessary, and it works, then no matter how absurd it is, people will use it.
And that’s something that Forge World really gets… Something that I would argue elevates their product above other game companies.
Forge World: Where Hardness Reigns.
The Siege of Vraks (http://www.forgeworld.co.uk/Imperial-Armour-The-Siege-of-Vraks) is an amazing setting, and not just because the Death Korps of Krieg still look utterly incredible. It’s also amazing because of the thought that’s been put into it.
Basically, Forge World wanted to do a 40K equivalent of the trench warfare of WW1, so they came up with this setting to do so. A chaos cult, led by an apostate preacher, sets out to seize the world of Vraks from the Imperium. They don’t count on the Death Korp, a culture whose language includes fifty three words for ‘attrition’, over two hundred for ‘glorious death’ and none for ‘common sense’. A war that, anywhere else, would be a swift military action, turns into a knock-down, drag-out slog. As each side slowly burns through resources, the fight claims millions of lives.
So far, so WW1. But how does this translate onto the battlefield? Well, for the Imperium, they start out with their standard Leman Russes, their Rough Riders, and at least nine hundred and forty one different kinds of artillery. By the end, the Russes are slag, the horses are all dead, and the only cannon they’ve got left are fired with gunpowder and crossed fingers. With all other options exhausted, the Death Korp dig the Malcador (http://wh40k.lexicanum.com/wiki/Malcador_%28Heavy_Tank%29) out of storage.
Now, for those of you that haven’t seen it, the Malcador may perhaps be the ugliest tank in the history of 40K. Looking like the result of a shame-filled one-night stand between an artillery piece of limited morals and a brick with herpes, the ‘standard’ Malcador is a little more than a diesel-powered block of unrelenting hatred. With battlecannon in a limited-traverse turret, heavy stubbers in limited-arc sponsons, and a distinctly underwhelming statline. It’s not bad per se… But it ain’t good. Not when compared to a modern Russ. Oh, it used to be good; field it in a Horus Heresy game, and the thing’s a Fast Tank, capable of wrecking face harder than Brock Lesnar on a sugar high. But in 40K, it’s distinctly underwhelming. Slow, under-gunned, and far, far too big, it might as well have ‘TRY IT PLEASE’ written on the side in luminous paint.
Why have the Death Korp turned to it?
Because they had to. Because with all their other resources spent, they’re using clapped-out old tanks that haven’t been used since the days of the Heresy because there’s nothing else left.
So for me, despite The Malcador being basically a bit unimpressive, I think it’s actually kind of amazing, and that’s all to do with the background. Because it’s pretty much the very first Imperial Tank and Throne does it show. Roughly equivalent to the ‘Mother’ Tank Mk 1 used by the British in WW1, visually, and in terms of design. It’s also been designed to be clearly a step behind the Leman Russ – in the Heresy it may have been faster, but you can see: it was just too damn big. It can’t get cover saves the way a Russ can, nor does it have the 360 degree turret, or the younger vehicle’s more effective sponsons. To have this ancient animal show up in 40K as a burned out wreck of its former self?
That’s brilliant.
The ideas behind it are really believable ones. Realistic? No, not really. But believable. There’s more to the concept than a bit of casual handwaving. Forge World have clearly taken pains to justify the tank evolution of the Imperium… And I really like that.
As for the Chaos side of things, I think that’s just as clever. When the Vraksian renegades start out, they’re all full of blood and thunder.. So of course, they’re consecrated to Khorne. But then the war drags on. And drags on. And drags on. And all those Khorne worshippers go to be with their god, lost and forgotten amongst the other skulls on his throne, and the Khorne worship dies out. So the Chaos worshippers change. Horrible chemical and biological weapons have been used on the battlefield, people are dying of disease (just like in WW1, where, terrifyingly, a Spanish Influenza epidemic which was raging at the same time as the war claimed more lives than all the battles combined). In their desperation, the renegades call out, and Father Nurgle answers. By the final stage of the war, the Vraksian renegades have been reduced to a ruined, shambling horde of plague-infected wrecks, exactly in-line with the fluff as written. It’s logical, brilliant world-building, taking each element as it exists and using one stage to build to the next. Whether it’s for the Imperium or Chaos, I think those are thoughtful and clever extrapolations from the existing fluff, and honestly? I wish there was a little more of it.
Is ‘Emergent Warfare’ A Concept That’s Missing From 40K?
Alan Moore made the point that we're all 'crap superheroes' now; that we carry in our pockets the kind of smartphone supertech that Batman would have killed for in the Sixties.
http://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/mprafrgruz3ygos6y05r.png
Although, to be fair, Sixties Batman was probably too into drugs to have made much use of it.
World building is the not-so-secret passion of nearly all of us, but you rarely see it admitted that what's a superpower for the rich one day is an entertainment for the poor the next. DARPA develop the internet to join us all together; we join together to play games and look at one another without our clothes on. Humanity is always, at the end of the day, a little less glamorous, and a lot less competent than we like to think we are.
The thing about sci-fi is that no sci-fi writer is writing about the future; they’re always writing about the time they’re living in. That’s because, while some technologies can be guessed at, and others inferred, it's actually really difficult to fully appreciate how modern technologies will get integrated and utilised.
Take mobile phones. An item beloved by Yuppies in the 80s is used to very effectively co-ordinate London’s rioters during the summer of 2012. Blackberry went from a tool for managing business meetings to organising mayhem of the most appalling sort: no-one imagined London's poor and disenfranchised youth anonymously co-ordinate napalm-hot pandemonium with almost literal military precision... But they did. The riots were so effective that the police’s response was to literally do nothing. They folded their arms and, like a father with a toddler having a tantrum, said ‘We’ll wait until he’s all tired out’. Mobile phones literally switched London’s Police force off.
I think that should always be the starting point for any kind of world-building, the idea that humans always use technology for wildly unexpected purposes, and I think it makes a great starting point for 40K.
See, there’s huge amounts of fluff out there already, and not a lot of it gets looked at ‘realistically’. There’s loads of little details that could be taken and spun off into all kinds of interesting little backstories, ideas, and developments for your army.
For example, the Big Four Chaos marine legions all favour different Astartes armour marks. Plague Marines like Mk 2 and 3 armour because it only has a single eyeslit, and thus makes them feel 'closer' to Plaguebearers. The Thousand Sons were all in Mk 4 because of their late entry into the Heresy; their entire Legion had done away with earlier marks of armour as they were inferior. The Emperor's Children are pretty much the only ones who tend to have later marks of armour, because they raid more incessantly than any other Chaos marines: they steal it from Loyalist chapters And as for the World Eaters? They love Mk 5 for purely practical purposes; it's cheap, bulletproof, and easy to replace, and that's all that matters. They're not interested in anything except functional armour that honours their god and keeps them safe. They also like the fact it overheats, for obvious reasons.
These little observations aren’t mine either, by the way. They’re Jes Goodwin’s – he released a book of artwork called ‘The Gothic and The Eldritch’, and these ideas accompanied his original sketches of the very first four Chaos Marines.
The thing about effective world-building is that at a certain point, it should stop inventing things from whole cloth. It should stop, and take stock of what’s been done so far and ask: ‘So wait: how would these elements interact with one another?’
Tyranids are highly psychic… So what happens when a Space Marine Librarian experimentally links himself to the severed, but still living head of a Tyranid Warrior in order to access the Hive Mind directly?
http://orig04.deviantart.net/663e/f/2015/247/e/f/tigurius_concept_sketch_by_yorknecromancer-d98d57r.jpg
Pictured: the dictionary definition of ‘a bad idea’.
Or what about the Dark Eldar Haemonculus who decides they want to try being the best at war and so turns themselves into a Talos?
http://i206.photobucket.com/albums/bb183/MaltonNecromancer/Summer%20Holiday%202013/2013-08-21000319_zpsce7ded46.jpg
Pictured: okay, so that one *might* be one of my ideas…
Or what about taking something about 40K you love, and asking how it got to be the way it did? What came before it? What will come after?
Cultures aren’t static. Technology changes, and 10,000 years is an absurdly long time. What did the first Tau pulserifle look like? What were they shooting before then? What’s the next iteration going to be? What might a Dark Eldar rifle modified to hunt Necron hardened against corrosive weaponry look like? What might a Necron hardened against Dark Eldar corrosion look like? There are so very many possibilities, each informing the other, and every single one offers suggestions for a new model you could make, or a new army you could build.
I think what I’m saying is simply this: take what you’ve been given and run with it. 40K isn’t a story; it’s a setting and it’s ours. What can we do with what we’ve got so far?
World-building: noun. The process of constructing an imaginary world, sometimes associated with a whole fictional universe.
In Which YorkNecromancer Meets His First Olympian.
I was never one for sports until I left school. Blessed with the stamina of a sad potato and the physical might of a bedridden sea cucumber, I could not be described as a natural athlete. Condemned to the bottom set in every PE class, I had to participate in no fewer than thirty two separate kinds of running alongside the other fat kids, asthmatics and genuine outright psychopaths. After playing rugby with a rat-faced lunatic who actually once tackled an opponent with a running shoryuken, the concept of sport went from something I merely disliked to something I outright despised.
Imagine my surprise when, after university, I discovered wrasslin’. The staged theatrics of faked wrestling were a sweaty revelation. Within a month, I could run for the first time in my life. After three, I was throwing two hundred pound men around like they were made of cardboard. Turns out I hated sports because they were missing a vital ingredient: violence.
And after I realised that, there was no stopping me.
That’s how I came to be talking to Cheryl (not her real name, obviously) about her time at the Olympics. Cheryl was not what you might expect of a legitimate Olympic athlete. She was head of history, and deeply unassuming. Five foot nothing and cloaked in a perpetual scowl, she lived every day of her life the same, regardless of rain or shine, failure or success: beginning the day in a state of general contempt, she would slowly move through scorn, derision, disdain and disapproval before finally arriving in condescension just in time for staff meetings. She could have won the lottery; the winning ticket would have been met with little more than a raised eyebrow and a cold sneer.
Needless to say, I liked her immensely.
After trying kendo, I had tried escrima. After escrima, I’d been fencing for about a year, and to this day, I still maintain that no other combat sport is faster. Boxing may require more resilience, MMA more tactical thought, but for sheer speed, there is nothing faster than fencing. Nothing. You’ve not seen speed until you’ve watched someone who knows what they’re doing flash across eighteen feet of floor towards you with two and a half feet of steel in their hand, all in less time than it takes to blink. It is a deadly, deadly style.
You just look like a bloody numpty while you’ve doing it.
http://usercontent2.hubimg.com/5338399_f520.jpg
Pictured: the only sport where standing like a monkey in the throes of anaphylactic shock is obligatory.
If I’m honest, I felt like an absolute idiot keeping my non-sword hand up in the air behind me unless lunging – I couldn’t get past the certainty that I was coming across as less ‘dashing warrior hero’ and more ‘prince of the fruits’. I mentioned this self-consciousness to Cheryl, who swivelled at me with the same kind of look that’s normally only reserved for men who dress up as Santa all year round. She stared me dead in the eye and it felt the temperature in the room dropped ten degrees.
“Well, when I was at the Olympics, if I’d fought any other way, I’d have been dead.”
“Cheryl,” I asked with no small surprise, “you were at the Olympics?!”
“Yup.” She replied, the weight of her unblinking eyes slowly turning into a physical sensation. “And let me tell you: if you worry about that sort of thing in a proper sword fight, you’ll be dead.”
“Why?” I asked, desperate to change the subject, to have her look away, anything so I didn’t feel quite so completely inadequate.
“Four nanoseconds.” She replied.
“What?”
“If you keep your arm up, then lower it when you lunge, it makes you four nanoseconds faster. Those nanoseconds are the difference between you hitting them, and them hitting you. So stop being such a bloody coward and keep your arm up.”
She turned and sipped her tea, and I found myself both grateful for this new piece of knowledge, and that I had already been to the toilet.
“How do you know the time so specifically?” I asked.
“We timed it. Needed to know; had to compare my speed to the other fencers.”
“Were you quicker?”
“Do you think I’d be here if I was?”
And that was when I learned what desolation really looked like.
Well, That Was A Lovely Depressing Story, But What The Deuce Does It Have To Do With Wargaming?
So Sauron’s in a lovely suit of armour, has a bloody great mace, and is laying waste to everyone. He’s Herohammering his way through an entire army of capital-m Men and the skies are black and damn, son, but he is evil like, for real.
And up steps Welshname, Son of Welshname, Heir to the Throne of Wales, and he’s all like “Aargh Sauron! Check it, fool. Taste these knuckles!” But Sauron’s all
KAPOW
And Welshname, Son of Welshname, Heir to the Throne of Wales drops in his plate armour and Sauron steps on his magical broadsword and Sauron’s all WELL WHAT NOW BRO? and Welshname, Son of Welshname, Heir to the Throne of Wales is all
http://38.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m9nlq3vZP41rsmws3o1_500.gif
"Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysilio gogogoch forever!"
“Broken sword, son!” and cuts off Sauron’s magic ring and then ten thousand years pass and everyone still wears the same plate armour, fights with the same broadswords, wears the same fashions and nothing, LITERALLY NOTHING has changed in the intervening 3,650,000 days.
Oh, it may say ten millenia have passed, but they haven’t. Nothing meaningful has happened in those ten thousand years. It might as well have been a hundred years. Or thirty.
Forget the dwarves, dragons, elves and leather jerkins. No significant change in fashions, music, culture or technology? In 10,000 years?!
That is f**king absurd.
Medieval stasis (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MedievalStasis) is a trope that always wrecks my personal willing suspension of disbelief (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suspension_of_disbelief). It’s silly I know, but I just can’t get past it. I mean, I know it should be completely minor, that just saying ‘A Wizard Did It (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/AWizardDidIt)’ should be good enough because the characters and their emotions are the important thing, but nnnnnnnnnnnaaaaaaggggghhhh!
Ten thousand years have passed! They should have invented spaceships by now! We’ve only had a thousand pass since men wore armour and we’ve cracked the human genome! Dragons are one thing, but ten thousand years of every single sapient species on the planet somehow not building on the successes and innovations of the generations that came before them?!
This is all I find myself thinking when I encounter this particular trope, and before anyone thinks I’m bashing ‘Lord of the Rings’, okay, I am a little, but only due to my very specific personal tastes in speculative fiction. See, despite one or two exceptions (primarily ‘Crank 1: Jason Statham Kills Everyone’ and ‘Crank 2: Jason Statham Kills Everyone Else’) when it comes to fiction, I generally like it hard.
http://davelandweb.com/celebs/images/1972_Deliverance2.jpg
Pictured: I will use literally any excuse to post this picture. So should you.
Hard vs. Soft
All speculative fiction, as I’m sure you’re aware, exists upon a scale. TV Tropes refers to this as The Mohs Scale of Sci-Fi Hardness (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MohsScaleOfScienceFictionHardness), and to save time, I’m just going to quote them on the difference between ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ fiction:
Example: a character is shown a machine for traveling into the past and asks, "How does it work?"
In soft SF: "You sit in this seat, set the date you want, and pull that lever."
In hard SF: "A good question with an interesting answer. Please have a seat while I bring you up to speed on the latest ideas in quantum theory, after which I will spend a chapter detailing an elaborate, yet plausible-sounding connection between quantum states, the unified field theory, and the means by which the brain stores memory, all tied into theories from both Albert Einstein and Stephen Hawking."
In really hard SF: "It doesn't. Time travel to the past is impossible." N.B. General Relativity allows for solutions for Kerr black holes where closed timelike curves, and therefore time travel, are possible. It is expected that a proper theory of Quantum Gravity will remove this possibility.
Now, we all have different tastes, and the type of fiction (and especially the tropes) you like will be no different; looking at my initial example, I’m sure many (probably most) of you ignore the medieval stasis in ‘Lord of the Rings’. Why? Because you just like everything else so much.
It bears stating: there’s nothing wrong with ‘soft’ stories. They’re no more inherently stupid than any other kind. ‘Hard’ isn’t an innately better style than ‘soft’, any more than Friday is better than shelving. It’s only one’s personal taste that makes either style stand out, and as we’ve already established, I bloody love ‘Crank 2’, one of the most unrelentingly stupid films ever released, so I’ve got no grounds to criticise anyone’s personal taste ever.
Now, 40K is a game which argues that in the far future, men will legitimately wage war by swinging axes roughly the size of a shed door into other men’s faces. These axes will have chainsaw blades in them, and be unironically named things like ‘Gorechild’ and ‘Gorefather’. Men who look after their army’s book collection will be capable of opening literal black holes roughly three metre across by thinking about it. These singularities will not destroy the planet they spawn on, along with the local star system and everyone in a 100 light year radius, but they will lead directly into a literal hell populated by lady daemons made almost 90% corset. So yeah, I think it’s fair to say that 40K is not hard sci-fi. In fact, 40K is a sci-fi setting so soft it could be made of cream cheese.
http://vignette4.wikia.nocookie.net/warhammer40k/images/1/1b/Angron_Primarch2.jpg/revision/latest?cb=20120629041033
Khorne: for when you want to bring a knife to a gun fight and WIN.
You may have spotted an obvious inconsistency in my tastes. How can I possibly claim to dislike ‘soft’ sci-fi, then make out that I like 40K? Because 40K isn’t a story. It’s a setting, and the two things are fundamentally different. A story has a narrative; a beginning, a middle and an end. There are characters who grow along sustained arcs, who develop and grow.
40K doesn’t have that per se. It’s less ‘Spec Ops: The Line’ (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NRy_dhn1FR8) and more ‘Saints Row’ (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SZaE7QkME38). Rather than a harrowing journey into the crucible of war that leaves you a hollowed-out broken husk, traumatically questioning your own morality, desperately searching for even the slightest remnants of humanity, 40K is a game of smashing Space Barbies together in the name of breaking things. Even in codicies, characters never really develop, learn anything, evolve or change except in terms of their statlines getting better at crumping stuff. (And note: I am talking very exclusively about the wargame here, not any of Black Library’s product lines).
For example, Ghazghkull is never going to meet a little girl who he has to care for and tend to, leading to a hilarious sequence where he’s got to disguise her in an adorable purple monster suit to hide her from his boss, all the while slowly learning a lesson about life, himself, and that scaring children by being a monster is a less effective way to power his city than getting them to laugh.
No, the only thing the Lord Of All Waarghs is going to realise is that the dobber he’s been using to crump skulls with becomes way more effective if he bangs a bloody great spike through it and renames it The Advanced Dobbing System.
http://i2.wp.com/willowhavenoutdoor.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/batchete-studio1.jpg?resize=576%2C384
Pictured: The Definitive Dobbing System – when words fail you, nothing speaks louder than thirty nine pounds of bladed hatred swung into an enemy’s face.
However, just because 40K is soft sci-fi, that doesn’t mean it couldn’t benefit from a little hardness. And that’s something we (as fans) can do for ourselves. Why?
Because even in a soft, non-story setting, hardness leads to interesting and exciting ideas.
Yes, I Know This Next Section Isn’t Perfectly Accurate, But Work With Me Here, I’m Writing In Broad Strokes To Make A Point, Okay?
https://c1.staticflickr.com/3/2323/2153970868_622a0f89d8_z.jpg?zz=1
I think there’s a rule that says everyone who loves action when they’re a little kid decides, normally around the age of twelve, that katanas are the Greatest Swords In The World. I also think there’s a second rule that says that around the age of twenty, they have to get into super-serious arguments about this Great Truth, normally over beers. Not to mention a third rule that says that when they’re thirty, they realise that actually, katanas aren’t as great as all that.
Katana have so many myths surrounding their manufacture that the truth can be astonishingly hard to get to. However, a lot of the myths that sound impressive are not as impressive as they seem. For example, numerous historical accounts from both China and Japan claimed the katana capable of cutting through enemy swords, which sounds amazing. And there’s also a weight of evidence that bears this myth out. China’s standing armies were massive, and so therefore needed a huge number of swords. As a result, those swords were mass produced and made of cheap, inferior steel. They also had been treated in such a way that the blades were sharp, but brittle (because any time you make a blade harder, you lose tensile strength and vice versa). The katana, cleverly engineered to be hardened while retaining their tensile strength (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Differential_heat_treatment), would smash them. So, an incredible myth that seems likely to be true. Impressive too… Until you consider that a modern piece of machined steel (with or without a blade) would probably be able to break those swords too. Why? Because modern engineering and manufacturing techniques are light years ahead of anything available during the time both types of swords were manufactured.
Like all weapons, the katana was a specific result of the economics and particular circumstances of its geographical origins. Japan was not a metal-rich nation at the time, and what steel there was was thick with impurities which lowered its quality even further (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_swordsmithing#Metallurgy). The much vaunted techniques of making them (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_swordsmithing#Construction) were as much to do with dealing with the poor quality of the materials as they were producing the perfect sword.
As far as the era and location it was used in goes, the katana probably was pretty much the perfect sword. For a number of complex reasons, Japan didn’t develop or produce European-style plate armour; China was the same. After all, what was the point of armouring up its disposable peasant armies when you could take all the metal you were going to use for armour, and instead making another hundred blades for another two hundred terrified farme – sorry, brave soldiers? With so few soldiers in anything remotely approaching effective armour, in the East, a blade with a cutting edge retained huge utility. The locally-produced lamellar armour - a mix of wood, heavy fabrics and metal pieces – while tough, could still be decimated by slashes. The tip of the blade is pointed for stabbing, but you can see the way a katana is intended to be used from the curve to the blade. A curve is better for slashing than a straight edge, because it means that no matter where the blade connects, the smallest possible point will be touching flesh, therefore increasing the force of the slash. The comparatively heavy blade helps drive it through meat and bone. Everything about the katana is engineered almost exclusively to simplify the task of cutting people into pieces.
In short, it was an ideal design for the very specific circumstances of its time and the place of its creation… But if it had come up against European armies, it would have run into trouble.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RFu11mSutd0
European medieval armour was really effective. As you can see in the above video, chainmail essentially turns cutting weapons into clubs. Plate armour, on the other hand, turns them into a joke. A fully armoured up knight would not have been at any meaningful risk from swords. Even arrows had a hard time; it’s why the English aimed for the horses rather than their riders at Battle of Crecy (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Cr%C3%A9cy). After all, a French knight trapped under his own steed can’t fight back when you push your misericorde (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Misericorde_%28weapon%29) up his armpit and into his heart.
That’s why, while Japan was creating the perfect slashing weapon, European weaponry cheerfully evolved down a completely different path. Where the Japanese soldiers had the option to cut their opponents into chum, European weaponry needed to be armour piercing. First, the heavy cutting swords became triangular, then finally turned into long, razored spikes, designed exactly to kill the enemies they might face. Broadswords evolved into rapiers.
Then, as their use spread, they became lighter, and faster. Fighting stances changed; compare the way a fencer stands when fighting with epee or sabre to a rapier – rapiers are all about maximum speed, because once everyone had one, well, that was how you won a fight; as Cheryl explained to me, it still is. You have to be in a silly pose, with your hand up in the air, holding a weapon as thin as a needle and as light as bone, all to gain those precious nanoseconds of time that mean it’s your life that continues, not your enemies.
You can compare the sword styles of Europe and Japan, and see the evolution of war there. Now, it's not to say that Japanese sword styles are slow. Japan has some horrendously fast techniques; iaijutsu is a style possessed of inhumanly terrifying speed… But comparatively, on an empirical level, it’s simply nowhere near as fast as fencing, because it didn’t need to be. Not when the opponent was swinging around a (comparatively) heavy lashing weapon.
Here’s the thing: all weapons are products of their time, place, and economy. So many factors combine, and people then develop things that work. Techniques, styles and ideas evolve within the limitations that the world imposes upon them. Things that work are kept; things that don’t are discarded. There’s a reason the SAS go to war with short, double-bladed daggers as their default hand-to-hand weapon instead of nunchucks.
http://www.damnlol.com/pics/108/9a4046b87b44f10a4bfabdf08af7b0ef.gif
Pictured: exotic weapon mastery.
There’s a reason no armed force in the world still uses the original, plastic M-16 assault rifle, and it’s the same one that keeps the AK-47 in ubiquitous service worldwide. There's a reason fencers keep their non-sword arm up, even though it looks ridonkulous. Local necessity defines form, function and success rate, and so two places can evolve radically different weapons, which are then used in radically different ways. If something is necessary, and it works, then no matter how absurd it is, people will use it.
And that’s something that Forge World really gets… Something that I would argue elevates their product above other game companies.
Forge World: Where Hardness Reigns.
The Siege of Vraks (http://www.forgeworld.co.uk/Imperial-Armour-The-Siege-of-Vraks) is an amazing setting, and not just because the Death Korps of Krieg still look utterly incredible. It’s also amazing because of the thought that’s been put into it.
Basically, Forge World wanted to do a 40K equivalent of the trench warfare of WW1, so they came up with this setting to do so. A chaos cult, led by an apostate preacher, sets out to seize the world of Vraks from the Imperium. They don’t count on the Death Korp, a culture whose language includes fifty three words for ‘attrition’, over two hundred for ‘glorious death’ and none for ‘common sense’. A war that, anywhere else, would be a swift military action, turns into a knock-down, drag-out slog. As each side slowly burns through resources, the fight claims millions of lives.
So far, so WW1. But how does this translate onto the battlefield? Well, for the Imperium, they start out with their standard Leman Russes, their Rough Riders, and at least nine hundred and forty one different kinds of artillery. By the end, the Russes are slag, the horses are all dead, and the only cannon they’ve got left are fired with gunpowder and crossed fingers. With all other options exhausted, the Death Korp dig the Malcador (http://wh40k.lexicanum.com/wiki/Malcador_%28Heavy_Tank%29) out of storage.
Now, for those of you that haven’t seen it, the Malcador may perhaps be the ugliest tank in the history of 40K. Looking like the result of a shame-filled one-night stand between an artillery piece of limited morals and a brick with herpes, the ‘standard’ Malcador is a little more than a diesel-powered block of unrelenting hatred. With battlecannon in a limited-traverse turret, heavy stubbers in limited-arc sponsons, and a distinctly underwhelming statline. It’s not bad per se… But it ain’t good. Not when compared to a modern Russ. Oh, it used to be good; field it in a Horus Heresy game, and the thing’s a Fast Tank, capable of wrecking face harder than Brock Lesnar on a sugar high. But in 40K, it’s distinctly underwhelming. Slow, under-gunned, and far, far too big, it might as well have ‘TRY IT PLEASE’ written on the side in luminous paint.
Why have the Death Korp turned to it?
Because they had to. Because with all their other resources spent, they’re using clapped-out old tanks that haven’t been used since the days of the Heresy because there’s nothing else left.
So for me, despite The Malcador being basically a bit unimpressive, I think it’s actually kind of amazing, and that’s all to do with the background. Because it’s pretty much the very first Imperial Tank and Throne does it show. Roughly equivalent to the ‘Mother’ Tank Mk 1 used by the British in WW1, visually, and in terms of design. It’s also been designed to be clearly a step behind the Leman Russ – in the Heresy it may have been faster, but you can see: it was just too damn big. It can’t get cover saves the way a Russ can, nor does it have the 360 degree turret, or the younger vehicle’s more effective sponsons. To have this ancient animal show up in 40K as a burned out wreck of its former self?
That’s brilliant.
The ideas behind it are really believable ones. Realistic? No, not really. But believable. There’s more to the concept than a bit of casual handwaving. Forge World have clearly taken pains to justify the tank evolution of the Imperium… And I really like that.
As for the Chaos side of things, I think that’s just as clever. When the Vraksian renegades start out, they’re all full of blood and thunder.. So of course, they’re consecrated to Khorne. But then the war drags on. And drags on. And drags on. And all those Khorne worshippers go to be with their god, lost and forgotten amongst the other skulls on his throne, and the Khorne worship dies out. So the Chaos worshippers change. Horrible chemical and biological weapons have been used on the battlefield, people are dying of disease (just like in WW1, where, terrifyingly, a Spanish Influenza epidemic which was raging at the same time as the war claimed more lives than all the battles combined). In their desperation, the renegades call out, and Father Nurgle answers. By the final stage of the war, the Vraksian renegades have been reduced to a ruined, shambling horde of plague-infected wrecks, exactly in-line with the fluff as written. It’s logical, brilliant world-building, taking each element as it exists and using one stage to build to the next. Whether it’s for the Imperium or Chaos, I think those are thoughtful and clever extrapolations from the existing fluff, and honestly? I wish there was a little more of it.
Is ‘Emergent Warfare’ A Concept That’s Missing From 40K?
Alan Moore made the point that we're all 'crap superheroes' now; that we carry in our pockets the kind of smartphone supertech that Batman would have killed for in the Sixties.
http://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/mprafrgruz3ygos6y05r.png
Although, to be fair, Sixties Batman was probably too into drugs to have made much use of it.
World building is the not-so-secret passion of nearly all of us, but you rarely see it admitted that what's a superpower for the rich one day is an entertainment for the poor the next. DARPA develop the internet to join us all together; we join together to play games and look at one another without our clothes on. Humanity is always, at the end of the day, a little less glamorous, and a lot less competent than we like to think we are.
The thing about sci-fi is that no sci-fi writer is writing about the future; they’re always writing about the time they’re living in. That’s because, while some technologies can be guessed at, and others inferred, it's actually really difficult to fully appreciate how modern technologies will get integrated and utilised.
Take mobile phones. An item beloved by Yuppies in the 80s is used to very effectively co-ordinate London’s rioters during the summer of 2012. Blackberry went from a tool for managing business meetings to organising mayhem of the most appalling sort: no-one imagined London's poor and disenfranchised youth anonymously co-ordinate napalm-hot pandemonium with almost literal military precision... But they did. The riots were so effective that the police’s response was to literally do nothing. They folded their arms and, like a father with a toddler having a tantrum, said ‘We’ll wait until he’s all tired out’. Mobile phones literally switched London’s Police force off.
I think that should always be the starting point for any kind of world-building, the idea that humans always use technology for wildly unexpected purposes, and I think it makes a great starting point for 40K.
See, there’s huge amounts of fluff out there already, and not a lot of it gets looked at ‘realistically’. There’s loads of little details that could be taken and spun off into all kinds of interesting little backstories, ideas, and developments for your army.
For example, the Big Four Chaos marine legions all favour different Astartes armour marks. Plague Marines like Mk 2 and 3 armour because it only has a single eyeslit, and thus makes them feel 'closer' to Plaguebearers. The Thousand Sons were all in Mk 4 because of their late entry into the Heresy; their entire Legion had done away with earlier marks of armour as they were inferior. The Emperor's Children are pretty much the only ones who tend to have later marks of armour, because they raid more incessantly than any other Chaos marines: they steal it from Loyalist chapters And as for the World Eaters? They love Mk 5 for purely practical purposes; it's cheap, bulletproof, and easy to replace, and that's all that matters. They're not interested in anything except functional armour that honours their god and keeps them safe. They also like the fact it overheats, for obvious reasons.
These little observations aren’t mine either, by the way. They’re Jes Goodwin’s – he released a book of artwork called ‘The Gothic and The Eldritch’, and these ideas accompanied his original sketches of the very first four Chaos Marines.
The thing about effective world-building is that at a certain point, it should stop inventing things from whole cloth. It should stop, and take stock of what’s been done so far and ask: ‘So wait: how would these elements interact with one another?’
Tyranids are highly psychic… So what happens when a Space Marine Librarian experimentally links himself to the severed, but still living head of a Tyranid Warrior in order to access the Hive Mind directly?
http://orig04.deviantart.net/663e/f/2015/247/e/f/tigurius_concept_sketch_by_yorknecromancer-d98d57r.jpg
Pictured: the dictionary definition of ‘a bad idea’.
Or what about the Dark Eldar Haemonculus who decides they want to try being the best at war and so turns themselves into a Talos?
http://i206.photobucket.com/albums/bb183/MaltonNecromancer/Summer%20Holiday%202013/2013-08-21000319_zpsce7ded46.jpg
Pictured: okay, so that one *might* be one of my ideas…
Or what about taking something about 40K you love, and asking how it got to be the way it did? What came before it? What will come after?
Cultures aren’t static. Technology changes, and 10,000 years is an absurdly long time. What did the first Tau pulserifle look like? What were they shooting before then? What’s the next iteration going to be? What might a Dark Eldar rifle modified to hunt Necron hardened against corrosive weaponry look like? What might a Necron hardened against Dark Eldar corrosion look like? There are so very many possibilities, each informing the other, and every single one offers suggestions for a new model you could make, or a new army you could build.
I think what I’m saying is simply this: take what you’ve been given and run with it. 40K isn’t a story; it’s a setting and it’s ours. What can we do with what we’ve got so far?