With the recent announcement from Henry Cavill about working on a 40k series for Amazon, I thought this video was worth sharing for those who don't know much about the 40k universe and its lore.
With the recent announcement from Henry Cavill about working on a 40k series for Amazon, I thought this video was worth sharing for those who don't know much about the 40k universe and its lore.
I settled on WesHammer's videos for the refresher - a bit longer but still quite brief in this context. This one franchise has more canon than all of the D&D settings combined, it's been quite the...
I settled on WesHammer's videos for the refresher - a bit longer but still quite brief in this context. This one franchise has more canon than all of the D&D settings combined, it's been quite the rabbit hole. Calling it the polar opposite of Star Trek seems like the simplest possible description for newcomers.
I almost reflexively disagreed with this, but I looked it up and GOOD LORD there are a lot of 40k books. I'm still not completely sure I believe that it actually does have more canon than all D&D...
This one franchise has more canon than all of the D&D settings combined.
I almost reflexively disagreed with this, but I looked it up and GOOD LORD there are a lot of 40k books. I'm still not completely sure I believe that it actually does have more canon than all D&D settings combined (there are a lot of D&D settings and a bunch of them have extensive publishing - both novels and sourcebooks) but it might actually be true despite my skepticism.
I had a similar reaction - D&D was the undisputed king of canon by volume, boasting a larger body of unified world-building than anything except perhaps for real world non-fiction history itself....
I had a similar reaction - D&D was the undisputed king of canon by volume, boasting a larger body of unified world-building than anything except perhaps for real world non-fiction history itself. In fact there's so much out there that a complete / authoritative list is impossible to create.
40k's four hundred novels does put it on a level to actually compete with D&D for the crown, though. There were at least three hundred D&D novels at the end of the 90s when TSR closed shop, with several magazines boasting hundreds of issues, multiple comic/manga series and dozens of video games - not to mention the hundreds of official roleplaying game books and campaign settings. The veritable explosion of third party content that came with the Wizards era added on top of all that, but also made it impossible to keep track of it all.
Even with all of that on the table it's clear that 40k is able to hang tough with the king in every one of those categories. I'd always avoided it because I'm not into miniatures or the expense of that sort of tabletop gaming, or grimdark canon in general... though I confess after digging into it all that 40k is so comically grimdark it becomes oddly charming.
Yeah it's undeniably huge. And I'm with you that often the 40k lore is so ridiculously over-the-top (and intentionally satirical) that there's some charm to it. I definitely don't care for...
Yeah it's undeniably huge. And I'm with you that often the 40k lore is so ridiculously over-the-top (and intentionally satirical) that there's some charm to it. I definitely don't care for grimdark fiction that takes itself too seriously. That tendency to revel in horrible stuff just doesn't appeal to me, and in the case of 40k in particular there are enough fascist overtones that fans and works that are too into the lore and think the humans are the "good guys" make me a little wary, tbh. But there's a lot to like about 40k lore as long as you don't "eat the onion".
With the recent announcement from Henry Cavill about working on a 40k series for Amazon, I thought this video was worth sharing for those who don't know much about the 40k universe and its lore.
I settled on WesHammer's videos for the refresher - a bit longer but still quite brief in this context. This one franchise has more canon than all of the D&D settings combined, it's been quite the rabbit hole. Calling it the polar opposite of Star Trek seems like the simplest possible description for newcomers.
I almost reflexively disagreed with this, but I looked it up and GOOD LORD there are a lot of 40k books. I'm still not completely sure I believe that it actually does have more canon than all D&D settings combined (there are a lot of D&D settings and a bunch of them have extensive publishing - both novels and sourcebooks) but it might actually be true despite my skepticism.
I had a similar reaction - D&D was the undisputed king of canon by volume, boasting a larger body of unified world-building than anything except perhaps for real world non-fiction history itself. In fact there's so much out there that a complete / authoritative list is impossible to create.
40k's four hundred novels does put it on a level to actually compete with D&D for the crown, though. There were at least three hundred D&D novels at the end of the 90s when TSR closed shop, with several magazines boasting hundreds of issues, multiple comic/manga series and dozens of video games - not to mention the hundreds of official roleplaying game books and campaign settings. The veritable explosion of third party content that came with the Wizards era added on top of all that, but also made it impossible to keep track of it all.
Even with all of that on the table it's clear that 40k is able to hang tough with the king in every one of those categories. I'd always avoided it because I'm not into miniatures or the expense of that sort of tabletop gaming, or grimdark canon in general... though I confess after digging into it all that 40k is so comically grimdark it becomes oddly charming.
Yeah it's undeniably huge. And I'm with you that often the 40k lore is so ridiculously over-the-top (and intentionally satirical) that there's some charm to it. I definitely don't care for grimdark fiction that takes itself too seriously. That tendency to revel in horrible stuff just doesn't appeal to me, and in the case of 40k in particular there are enough fascist overtones that fans and works that are too into the lore and think the humans are the "good guys" make me a little wary, tbh. But there's a lot to like about 40k lore as long as you don't "eat the onion".