Hey Everyone,

So I've been trying to learn and absorb as much as I can since starting to GM Rogue Trader OCT 2014...

Part of that is "hearing" tidbits and or hearsay about Gameswork Shop retcon+ning stuff.

What does anyone know about this - again hearsay told me that "they" were doing away with the Hellish / Demonic aspect from the game / warp - that's just ONE THING for example.

What do you know about any of this retcon business?

Morbid

Many of the so-called retcons are actually just interpretations from different writers. The IP does not have a uniform "canon" as you may know or expect it from other franchises - rather, there's a set of major fixtures (e.g. Terra is the capital of the Imperium, the Emperor is a corpse, the Ultramarines wear blue armour, etc), but the more you delve into detail, the more artistic license you may discover, and the more contradictions you will see between individual books.

Famed Black Library novelist Aaron Dembski-Bowden explained it at length in this post.

However, in spite of a surprising amount of consistency over the decades, it is also true that the GW studio is likewise occasionally changing various details here and there. Often, they only do this by adding something that changes the context, rather than outright contradicting themselves, but this has happened too -- most notably when the tabletop changed from its first iteration (also called Rogue Trader) to the 2nd Edition, although we may just witness another notable shift in presentation in some of the recent 7th Edition background.

I would say that GW has actually made the setting less "controversial", but rather by simply not mentioning certain details anymore, or by redesigning some of the miniatures, or by generally focusing more on heroic Space Marine legends than gritty Imperial Guard warfare. You could say it has been distilled into a bit of a caricature or a "breakfast cartoon" by how much recent material focuses on blood and skulls and death, but leaves other aspects of war and Chaos cults entirely unmentioned. But that is not really a problem, considering that you could easily retain them. At worst, it is a bit of a shame that this will no longer be expanded upon, or that older material is sometimes hard to find.

I've recently also heard they started to write Slaanesh out of WHFB and replace it/him/her with another Chaos deity, but although this is a possibility, I don't really see this coming for 40k -- unless they finally do move the timeline beyond 999.M41 and pull a WHFB-style Times of Ending. I consider the chances for this to be rather slim, however.

Yeah, I've often seen it as like the Star Wars Expanded Universe is/used to be, depending on your feelings on the matter, but with even more "artistic license" taken, and even less of a feeling that any one person, sometimes even the Thorpes, Wards, and Cruddaces of the line, actually read any of the stuff anyone else has written. It's sort of like George Lucas said "well, I'm not really in a good position to flesh out this universe more, what with my movie successes, my divorce, and my young daughter, but if you'd like to fill in some spots, since it really is a great, immersive, and wide-open universe, go ahead, oh, and I'll check over what you write", except here Lucas's daughter brought in the coloring book, somewhere around "go ahead", and he's still in the corner, coloring pictures, explaining what mythology possibly inspired this picture, to her.

If you go to GW, I think Fantasy is getting a HUGE revamp, like where several big armies are getting abolished, and lumped together, but I'm really not sure. As for 40K, they might see some hits in the material based on anything Fantasy was "loaning" it, but while 40K does get polluted by Fantasy's crappy rules, sometimes, I doubt the fluff will really change. GW likes to add units, so you need to buy more, and they sometimes change fluff to fit them in (am I REALLY supposed to believe, after almost 15 years of playing 40K, off and on, that Centurion suits and Bullgryns have "always been there"?), but I highly doubt too much will really change; keeping right where they are, despite how their fanbase feels, is almost entirely what GW excels at.

Enjoy what you can of 40k, they have been adding silly stuff for a while now, I am concerned they would do such wholesale butchering of established and interesting fluff to no doubt replace it with a less cool, more campy alternative.

Certainly possible, but I doubt it will hurt me that much. I know people who take the time to remind me of the fall of SW Expanded Universe; I really liked aspects of it, and they really didn't like practically any of it, though they did like that crappy Clone Wars cartoon (some of it was god awful), and I just sort of ignore them. I still use it to explain stuff, I still use it in SW RPGs, when it might come up, and till this new movie happens, and puts to rest my fears that it won't suck, I plan to hold onto what I see as the Star Wars I loved, and grew up with. Marvel can make as many movies depicting "wrong things" as they want; I'll like most of them, and accept that the cinematic universe and the comic universe(s) are separate. In one, Hank Pym is NOT usually a senior citizen (Michael Douglas was great though), and DID create Ultron, while Tony Stark was doing other things, other people, and drinking himself into his Mark VXI Dialysis Suit. In the other, Tony DID make Ultron, and while I whined, it was cool, and a pretty great movie, too.

For 40K, I expect much of the same. I play table-top only rarely, and often, unless you are playing Space Marines, only so much "fluff" gets incorporated into it; GW was better some time ago with making a wider range of theme models, and occasionally more books that let you field an army the way "Biel Tan", or "Saim Hann" would, rather than "Eldar". If you aren't playing Space Marines, you might have to hope you like "Imperial Guard/Astra Militarum", or at least "Cadian" or "Catachan"; Elysians are sort of doable, and not just sort of spendy, while many of the rest are no different than the last. So, little fluff changes won't hurt; Necrons was BIG, and it DID hurt a bit, but I can see it, and lots of other people really did like that some "life" got breathed into the army of deadbots. I don't read the books much (I have the GK Omnibus, the IG Omnibus: Part 1, and Eisenhorn sitting around, waiting to draw me in, someday), and those differ as much as Transformers vs. GI Joe vs. He-Man might've, when I was younger. These RP books are already written, so they won't change, and if I were running something, I'd just adapt with the fluff I know, remember, and like. I doubt they'll do too much to hurt it, and if they do, well, I've proven here, and elsewhere, that I can whine and complain with the best of them. If they don't kill the Emperor, wake the Emperor, and/or ruin the Imperium in a quick way (it does the slow way all on its own), or mechanically make the Space Marines crap, or the Sisters and Nids GOOD, I doubt much will actually be different. So much of their material had been, at least at one time, "fill in your own material. Make the game YOURS!", anyway, so I can happily take, and leave, whatever I really want to. That's me, of course.

I still use it to explain stuff, I still use it in SW RPGs, when it might come up, and till this new movie happens, and puts to rest my fears that it won't suck, I plan to hold onto what I see as the Star Wars I loved, and grew up with. Marvel can make as many movies depicting "wrong things" as they want; I'll like most of them, and accept that the cinematic universe and the comic universe(s) are separate.

On a sidenote, that's how I will treat Star Wars as well. As much as corporate execs may believe they've buried the EU, all they did was split the fanbase in two. I for one do not believe their new canon will be as interesting as what has been "lost", so I'll just cling to the latter. I won't just drop several decades of entertaining background and memories because some Hollywood bigwig decided I should.

Join the Rebellion!

Like venkelos said, the biggest change was that the Necrons underwent a massive personality and faction shift between editions, but so did the C'Tan which went from all-powerful Lovecraftian shards of horrordeath to Pokemonesque shards of horrordeath.

The Squats are another example. They were originally humans that were mining in heavy gravity areas and became Dwarfs... IN SPAAAAAAAAAACE. They had advanced technology and knew how things worked, and were in an interesting political alliance with the Imperium who needed them and could crush them, but recognised they were more useful alive to the annoyance of the Mechanicus. Unfortunately their Lore never really came together, and they disappeared quietly after second edition, having been eaten by the Tyranids and then never spoken of again. They may or may not be the Demiurg now.

"fill in your own material. Make the game YOURS!" - I'm totally "down" with this philosophy, problem is some players come to the table expecting certain facets of "canon" dressing in their game setting...

The most extreme retcon a GM could do I suppose it - after the group rolls up the worst Warp Event - which basically "offs" the group - a GM could rather instead - port the group to M44 and populate the galaxy and the like AS THEY SEE FIT lol

The expectation vs. what you as a GM delivery is the most contentious aspect of play - heck I respect someone who knows their lore in any game - plus some of that adds to the pot - as those who are knowledgeable infuse the game with more flavor (at least conceptually)

I saw the Vaults of Terra latest video which is actually about Adhumans - OMG - I hate how 40k has its own version of the Thundercats! WTF?@

Stay GAMING

Morbid

The expectation vs. what you as a GM delivery is the most contentious aspect of play

Absolutely. That is the downside of such a "free" setting. When you have "tens of thousands of overlapping realities in the imaginations of games developers, writers, readers and gamers", as Gav Thorpe himself has said, then it is small wonder that finding common ground, a necessity for playing together, can at times be a problem.

Ironic, almost -- the more you delve into the setting, the more you read up on things, the more likely you are to be disappointed as chances to stumble into something that upsets your expectations rise proportionally.

I myself have a very strong bias in favour of GW's material (which, in my personal "headcanon" I have added some novel authors' and even other RPG gamers' ideas to). I can only hope that I was not too bothersome for my GMs and/or other players in this regard.

That being said, this is also why I think people should just sit down and discuss the setting a bit before playing. Once you know what sort of books everyone has read, it gets easier to find a compromise between those aspects of the setting players find particularly important to their expectations.

The most extreme retcon a GM could do I suppose it - after the group rolls up the worst Warp Event - which basically "offs" the group - a GM could rather instead - port the group to M44 and populate the galaxy and the like AS THEY SEE FIT lol

This sounds frightening and intriguing at the same time! A bit like the Myrador setting book for the German P&P RPG "The Dark Eye" -- where half the map was intentionally left white, and GM's where simply told to make up whatever they wanted.

Fortunately, in 40k, the setting is by default left comparatively "open" just on the basis of there being so many different worlds with so many different cultures. There will always be some contention about things that should be universal, but at least it is not as bad as it could have been.

Actually I thought the Koronus Expanse was designed to be a fill-it-as-you-like sandbox, thus the lack of finer details and heady canon...

Yes some things have been define but much of it is wide open.

Also why I like the setting so much!

I've recently also heard they started to write Slaanesh out of WHFB and replace it/him/her with another Chaos deity, but although this is a possibility, I don't really see this coming for 40k -- unless they finally do move the timeline beyond 999.M41 and pull a WHFB-style Times of Ending. I consider the chances for this to be rather slim, however.

I hope you're right. The WHFB 'End Times' was an interesting idea- try to reinvigorate interest in the game by radically shaking up the setting- but it turns out they just eliminated interesting parts of the Old World (Kisliv, Marienburg) and replaced them with Generic Chaos...

If I ever run an event at a CON - mine session will read "old fashion-esk canon" ROTFL

If I ever run an event at a CON - mine session will read "old fashion-esk canon" ROTFL

1st Edition Rogue Trader?

I don't mind when the retcons come along. They don't really mean much unless you have that guy at the table who wants to spend half of each session talking about it. I never saw demons as supernatural. They are just natives of another dimension whose motives are impossible to comprehend. In fact, the whole comprehend thing goes pretty far when dealing with a galaxy full of weird aliens.

I don't mind when the retcons come along. They don't really mean much unless you have that guy at the table who wants to spend half of each session talking about it.

Back in the early days of the DH1 Forums, there were frequent debates about what constitutes current canon, usually divided into two camps: crusty old timers who insisted that everything after 2nd Edition was invalid, and green noobies who insisted that anything before Dawn of War was invalid...

Oh yes, I remember those, and participated in many of them.

A big problem was that back then, there was little to no information on the official stance, you just had fans arguing against fans based on hearsay. When I got into the hobby about a decade ago, people just told me that it was "all canon", and I believed it, because it seemed like a universally accepted thing. Of course, "trusted" websites like Lexicanum perpetuating this idea did not help either.

It was only when, as a result of these heated debates, I began to actively hunt down interviews and blog posts from the people who actually worked on these products that I had an epiphany of sorts, and almost had to do a 180° turn in my understanding of the franchise.

That's why I keep re-posting those quotes and statements I found whenever possible -- to spare other fans this deception and confusion.

Sounds like a bunch of dweebs arguing over the virtues of girls they'll never get to go out with. Fun.

Just to raise a point - Slaanesh has not been 'taken out' of WHFB - he/she is still very much in the lore and slaaneshi characters are still in the game, but is 'imprisoned and missing' after the End Times - expect to see a 'Slaanesh Released/escapes' as one of the plots in a later release.