Can you make "epic" stories out of 40k?

[Zablorg]

I was watching the trailer for that WH Fantasy MMO, and thinking "Wow, that looks pretty epic". And I began to think about the various difficulties in making similarly "epic" stories for 40k. By this I mean the sci-fi equivilant of something like Lord of the Rings.

Such things include a far smaller amount of hidious creatures, having races living entire light-years away, and other things that make big epic confrontations somewhat hard.

On the other hand, 40k is far more fantastical than your average sci-fi, with an abundance of melee weapons, daemons, and even zombies. So it's clear that the potential is there.

So would it be possible to make such a 40k fiction with the right plot conveniences, or is it just not designed to be written that way?

[Adrian Laguna]

Of course WH40k can do epic. Here, let me show you an example:

It is the 41st Millennium. For more than a hundred centuries the Emperor has sat immobile on the Golden Throne of Earth. He is the Master of mankind by the will of the gods, and master of a million worlds by the might of his inexhaustible armies. He is a rotting carcass writhing invisibly with power from the Dark Age of Technology. He is the Carrion Lord of the Imperium for whom a thousand souls are sacrificed every day, so that he may never truly die.

Yet even in his deathless state, the Emperor continues his eternal vigilance. Mighty battlefleets cross the daemon-infested miasma of the warp, the only route between distant stars, their way lit by the Astronomicon, the psychic manifestation of the Emperor's will. Vast armies give battle in his name on uncounted worlds. Greatest amongst his soldiers are the Adeptus Astartes, the Space Marines, bio-engineered super-warriors. Their comrades in arms are legion: the Imperial Guard and countless planetary defence forces, the ever vigilant Inquisition and the tech-priests of the Adeptus Mechanicus to name only a few. But for all their multitudes, they are barely enough to hold off the ever-present threat from aliens, heretics, mutants - and worse.

To be a man in such times is to be one amongst untold billions. It is to live in the cruelest and most bloody regime imaginable. These are the tales of those times. Forget the power of technology and science, for so much has been forgotten, never to be re-learned. Forget the promise of progress and understanding, for in the grim dark future there is only war. There is no peace amongst the stars, only an eternity of carnage and slaughter, and the laughter of thirsting gods.

You really can't get any more EPIC than that, 40k practically defines the term.

[speaker-to-trolls]

I'd just like to add that I'm not sure where you're coming from with these:

Such things include a far smaller amount of hidious creatures, having races living entire light-years away, and other things that make big epic confrontations somewhat hard.

There are hideous creatures by the planetfull, mutants, chaos-spawned abominations, cyborgised obscenities of the adeptus mechanicus, orks, miscellaneous aliens, etc, etc. You'll note from that list that some of the hideous things are actually on the good guys side. And the distances? That's what the superluscent space ships are for, spaceships which, I might add, travel through hell to get from place to place.

[Shroom Man 777]

And demons that possess tanks, turning them into mang-eating monstrosities. Goddamn I love 40k.

[Zablorg]

Oh shit, I completely forgot the possibility of multiple forces on the same planet. The problem I was having was mostly that "epic" tales like LotR often have lots of interaction with other races. I thought for such a thing to happen in 40k one would have to travel planet to planet, and the sequence would get fairly tedious after a while.

But if there was a planet with defined territories of the race like in WH Fantasy, there would be much less fuss.

[Hawkwings]

You're thinking too small. 40K EPIC is on a much grander scale. Limited to a single planet? Pshaw. Well, if you must, think of a movie depicting the 13th Black Crusade, for example.

*drool*

[Imperial Overlord]

Read Eisenhorn.

[NecronLord]

Oh shit, I completely forgot the possibility of multiple forces on the same planet. The problem I was having was mostly that "epic" tales like LotR often have lots of interaction with other races.

You can most certainly do that. Rogue Traders have peaceable interaction with aliens all the time.

[Peptuck]

If you can't come up with anything epic for 40k, you're doing it wrong.

I'll let TVtropes tell it how it is.

Warhammer 40,000, known informally as "Warhammer 40k" or just plain "40k", is a tabletop strategy game by Games Workshop. Drawing heavily on their previous Warhammer Fantasy game, it began as "Warhammer In Space", but it has grown to include more Sci-Fi elements of its own.

Thirty-eight thousand years in the future, the mighty Imperium of Mankind has spread across the galaxy, to discover that the galaxy is a hell that would make Hieronymous Bosch shit himself in terror, and that it has a hell. From without, the Imperium is assailed by alien monsters from the depths of space, nightmare death-machines and soulless daemons; from within, treachery, heresy, mindless incompetence and the festering taint of Chaos threaten to tear it apart.

Warhammer 40,000 is not a happy place. Rather than just being Darker And Edgier, it paints itself black and hurls itself over the edge. The Imperium of Man is an oppressive, stark, and downright miserable place to live in where, for far too many people, living isn't something to do until you die, but something to do until something comes around and kills you in an unbelievably horrible way - quite probably someone on your own side. The Messiah has been locked up on life support for the past ten millennia, laid low by his most beloved son, and an incomprehensibly vast Church Militant commits hourly atrocities in his name.

The problem is, as bad as the Imperium is, the other forces in the galaxy are generally far, far worse. Death is about the best you can hope for against the vast majority of the other major players in the battlefields of the 41st Millennium. The basic premise of 40k is as an eternal, impossibly vast conflict between genocidal, xenocidal and in one case omnicidal civilisations, with every single weapon, ideology and creative piece of nastiness turned up to eleven. The basic sidearm of a Space Marine is a fully automatic armour-piercing rocket-propelled grenade launcher. The Astronomican, a navigation aid, has the souls of thousands of psychic humans sacrificed to it every day, dying by inches to feed the machine. The faster-than-light travel used by most factions carries with it a good chance of being eaten by daemons. There are also chainsaw swords, gloves that crush tanks, daemonic walking battle castles, tanks the size of small cities, warships that can level continents, if not simply obliterating all life on an entire planet just to be sure. There is no time for peace, no respite, no forgiveness; there is only war.

The 40k universe is a spectacularly brutal playground of tropes and horrible things taken to their absolute extreme. Entire planets with populations of billions are lost due to rounding errors in tax returns. Orders of capricious, fanatical, genetically engineered Super Soldier Knights Templar serve as the Imperium's special forces, while its regular armies have for the last ten millennia been enjoying a galaxy-spanning re-enactment of the Great War, with lasers. A futuristic space Inquisition ruthlessly hunts down anyone with even a hint of the taint of the heretic, the mutant, or the alien, and is backed up by legions of supercharged daemonhunting super soldiers and fanatical battle nuns. The ancient and debased manipulator-race contrive wars that see billions dead; their depraved cousins cannot live without torturing numberless innocents to death in unimaginably horrible ways. There's a Bug Swarm trying to eat everything in the galaxy, a light-years wide hole in reality through which countless daemons and corrupted super-soldiers periodically attempt to destroy the universe, and an entire civilisation of undying Omnicidal Maniacs serving their star-god masters' desire to exterminate all living creatures, everything down to the last bacterium. Everywhere you go, there's the genetically-engineered survivor warrior species that's infesting every corner of the galaxy and cheerfully trying to kill everything else in the galaxy because it's literally hard-wired into their genetic code. The closest thing to the good guys you can find in this setting is a tiny alien empire sandwiched between all the other factions, and they have a thing for forcing new subjects into their empire through orbital bombardment, sterilization, and concentration camps.

[CaptainChewbacca]

That is, quite possibly, the best summary of 40k ever. It doesn't even need more cowbell.

[LadyTevar]

Read Eisenhorn.

Shit... read YOUR fanficts!

[Ford Prefect]

Honestly Zablorg, I don't know what you're talking about. Warhammer 40,000 not as epic as Lord of the Rings or Warhammer Fantasy? Quite frankly, there is no fantasy setting which is as epic as Warhammer 40,000.


This is a lie, but whatever.

[MKSheppard]

Because we all know grim and dark is so epic.

[Ford Prefect]

Oh Shep, you're so funny sometimes.

[Adrian Laguna]

Because we all know grim and dark is so epic.

It's not the grim and dark that's epic, it actually sometimes gets a bit tiresome. The epic comes from things like the 100 metre tall, bristling with artillery, walking castles equipped with city-levelling doom cannon, and protected by energy shields capable of laughing-off kilotons of energy

[Ford Prefect]

Actually, that's not why it's epic either. Epic is a handful of Crimson Fists making their last stand on a hundred metre tall mountain of bodies, standard curling in the bloody air, with a handful of missiles descending to kill them, and they don't care.

Epic is Captain Aurellian and his Grey Knights standing in front of their human brothers like a wall of silver in the face of an onslaught by a dozen multi-storey demons lead by one of the greatest warriors ever produced by mankind.

Epic is Ibram Gaunt striding out a fox-hole, his cape billowing and his sword singing, rallying his men for the big push into Blood Pact forces.

Epic is Maugan Ra standing as unmoving as stone and letting an immense Tyranid monstrousity fall upon him, gutting it with his sycthe.

Epic is Khaine and his hundred chosen encircled by endless Necrontyr, fighting for the very survival of their souls against the very bringer of death.

Epic is the Emperor fighting against his eldest, most beloved son. It is not the warmachines and the weapons which make 40k epic; it is the people in it, and the things they do.

[Sidewinder]

Because we all know grim and dark is so epic.

Humans have a tendency to think the grim and dark IS epic. As evidence, note the popularity of the Old Testament, the Ramayana, Norse mythology (the Viking idea of heaven is a place where you constantly fight other warriors to prepare you for the mother of all battles), jidai geki (as cool as it was to be a samurai, life SUCKED for those who weren't samurai, like the peasants), knightly chivalry (just replace "samurai" with "knight"), westerns (let's be honest, the Wild West was NOT a good place to live in, unless you were skilled with guns or were rich enough to hire an army of people who were), the wuxia genre (just replace "guns" with "kung fu")...

WH40K isn't blazing any new trails by presenting grim and dark as epic.

[Stark]

It's not the grim and dark that's epic, it actually sometimes gets a bit tiresome. The epic comes from things like the 100 metre tall, bristling with artillery, walking castles equipped with city-levelling doom cannon, and protected by energy shields capable of laughing-off kilotons of energy

That's not epic in the slightest. That's 'some explosions'. An 'epic' story (even in Zablorg's butchered, half-understood definition) would need to involve broad swathes of time, significant traditional storytelling devices such as 'returning good king' and 'the quest', probably long-term conflicts with depth of relationship and history, and various 'paragons' and 'nemeses'.

In other words, the setting of 40k. It fits every component of 'epic fiction' that I can think of off the top of my head. It might be puerile rubbish, but it's definately epic.

[MKSheppard]

It is not the warmachines and the weapons which make 40k epic; it is the people in it, and the things they do.

No it just makes you look retarded. All of your examples are stupid, and don't matter a fucking damn.

Why?

GW is set on a 40k universe permanently fixed in a stasis-history where events which are touted as "epic" turn out to have exactly no fucking significance at all.

Imagine a Star Wars in which the Rebels blow up the DS as in ANH, but at the end of the movie, instead of a heroic award sequence, we get to see Imperial City and the Emperor unveiling another Death Star, making the Rebels epic sacrifice, etc utterly pointless.

That's 40k's current state in a nutshell.

[Stark]

40k however has a 40,000 year history of great change, which provides the required relationships and depth to the setting which can qualify it as 'epic', even if it's a brand-managed cash-cow at present. None of the races are just 'there', they have extensive and detailed (and inter-related) backstories stretching over millenia.

[Adrian Laguna]

That's not epic in the slightest. That's 'some explosions'.

Make the explosions big and interesting enough and everything becomes epic.

Also, my mind's eye was also attaching a desperate battle against said walking castle by a determined but out gunned military unit. With them taking on the seemingly unstoppable monstrosity despite the odds, while the countryside is levelled by the fierceness of the battle, and civilians flee screaming in all directions. Also, the guy driving the thing likes to laugh maniacally every time the main guns fire. I didn't mention it because it didn't seem that important.

[Stark]

Yeah, but you have to say that or we can't see it too.

[Hawkwings]

Another way of looking at it is that "epic" events such as campaigns over many planets with billions of troops on each side fighting it out in every possible terrain and circumstance... there's at least ten of those going on at any time in the 40K universe.

It's so big that LoTR-type "epic" stuff just doesn't even register, and even said multi star-system campaigns are commonplace.

[NecronLord]

Another way of looking at it is that "epic" events such as campaigns over many planets with billions of troops on each side fighting it out in every possible terrain and circumstance... there's at least ten of those going on at any time in the 40K universe.

It's so big that LoTR-type "epic" stuff just doesn't even register, and even said multi star-system campaigns are commonplace.

Oh, I don't know. There's at least one artifact that can supposedly kill off a chaos god. Use that thing, and we'll have some serious and notable effects from one small group's actions.

[Sidewinder]

It is not the warmachines and the weapons which make 40k epic; it is the people in it, and the things they do.

No it just makes you look retarded. All of your examples are stupid, and don't matter a fucking damn.

Why?

GW is set on a 40k universe permanently fixed in a stasis-history where events which are touted as "epic" turn out to have exactly no fucking significance at all.

Sounds like the quagmire of WWI from 1914 to 1917, times 3333. I wonder if putting some Americans in charge of the franchise will change things, the way the quagmire ended shortly after the AEF arrived in France.

Of course, the fact that Kevin J. Anderson is American means there's no guarantee the change will be for the better; the fact that Berman & Braga are American means there's no guarantee there'll be a change at all.