40K: Substance Over Style?
Times they are a changing. Even the background and storytelling within Warhammer 40,000 codices has shifted gears – but for the better?
An editorial by 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?
