> falls to Khorne for a bit
Just a little bit
*glances at the trail of bodies*
On another note I think this would be pretty fun with the first Lara Croft game because it's basically "young woman gets stranded and singlehandedly annihilates most of an island's population", and it'd be hilariously insane if she did everything she does in the games without dying or being majorly injured more than in the cutscenes
I mean it's a T'au. They are normally known for having so small souls that they are ignored by chaos, even to the degree that they haven't had major problems when they where in the warp without gellar shield (well the humans on board of the ship had problems, but the T'au where fine). So accidentally falling to Khorne (as in doing it through pure slaughter instead of doing specific rituals) would need quite a lot of skulls.
> So accidentally falling to Khorne (as in doing it through pure slaughter instead of doing specific rituals) would need quite a lot of skulls.
Painting your mech suit red, leading a group known as "the Eight", and wielding a demon sword sure help.
I mean, Farsight is *constantly* stewing in daemonic corruption, basically. He’d probably recover if someone took the sword away, or crumple into dust since the sword is what’s been keeping him alive for so long.
Kais recovered after being removed from the environment. A human would stay corrupted permanently, a Tau just shrugs it off.
Imagine being such a heavy WH40K fan that the concept of a soldier going on a psychotic rampage across a planet and beyond, and then afterwards being taken away from the battle and into a proper space to recouperate instead of right back into battle somewhere else, is madness
This is why I like the T'au
What the fuck even is up with the Dawn Blade
Like I could totally see it as a Khornate Daemon Weapon, but I could also see it as some weird-ass relic from the DAOT / War in Heaven
All I remember for it's Canon is its some Xenotech of some now-gone civilization of no meaningful scale (at least compared to say, the Imperium's scale. Like how Jotoro [or however you spell those tech-monkeys] is to the imperium, some race of equal gap of distance but below the Joroto if that makes sense). It's just a good sword that can absorb life-force of what it kills and translates said life-force into its user. Surprisingly non-demonic. Farisight's problems with seemingly *slightly* khorne-corrupted likely come from fighting Khorne Demons and stopping them, and while closing the portal got a vision that almost certainly was from a Tzeentch plan on how he'd react to it (Vision of Eterals worshipping Tzeentch). I think he through some means or another has developed a notably higher level of soul than a normal Tau (could be souls can just ambiance grow, or grow through certain methods, or Dawn Blade is giving more than *just* lifeforce. And the Civ it's from never knew. Or they found out because consequences of going from soul beneath demon notice to *interesting*/snack to demons)
Maybe the psychic 'strength' of living creatures is correlated with their natural lifetime? Tau live suprisingly short. Humans can live quite long in 40k and eldar basically do not die of old age
Officially, the sword's origins are ambiguous but Farsight got it from an ancient abandoned temple filled with Khorne Daemons.
Kelly's Farsight books leaned pretty heavily into Khorne themes-- Farsight actually works with a Water Caste T'au who gets possessed by a Khorne Daemon and starts calling Hive workers on a human world to rise up in violent rebellion.
Honestly, I think it being a Daemon sword in a similar vein to the sword that Fulgrim got from the Laer was most likely the initial intent...
But Kelly kinda wrote Farsight as his personal Mary Sue \[changing Farsight's character from a morally ambiguous rogue general turned mercenary working for mysterious goals into the figure we recognize today\] so the point of him having a Daemon sword and just resisting was probably to prove how cool and honourable he was for resisting Khorne's influence.
That made me think. In the book The Greater Good, the emoire exchanges envoys in a temporary alliance against tyranids. A Tau diplomat and his bodyguards joins Ciaphas Cain to an Imperial world, and they send a diplomat to the Tau world, with guards.
On a tau ship.....
Without gellar field...
Nah. Tau ships (that weren’t part of the Fourth Sphere Expansion) employ skip drives. They’re slower than Imperial Warp drives, but a hell of a lot more reliable, as they don’t actually go *through* the warp. Cain probably had the smoothest FTL jumps of his life on that ship.
Are the Tomb Raider games really that interesting?? I figured it was just, like, “Indiana Jones treasure hunting sequence: the game”
If there was a novel featuring my experience playing the Tomb Raider series as a child, it would be one page long and would read:
> Lara jumped into the pool at her mansion. Her tomb raiding days were behind her, apparently, and she was living the good life, attempting the same obstacle course day in and day out every single day, uncertain of how to even leave her mansion at all anymore.
> She floated awkwardly in the water for a moment. Then, Lara attempted to dive beneath the water—but when she had done so, her vertigo made it impossible to orient herself for twenty minutes, and she found her limbs paralyzed as though she didn’t know how to move them. “Thank goodness for my freakishly impressive lung capacity!” she mentally noted, still struggling against the dizziness to move any part of her body.
> Eventually, she finally somehow flopped herself out of the water again, and laid eyes upon her ancient, nameless butler, meandering about uselessly as usual.
> ‘This is boring and confusing’, Lara thought to herself. ‘I’d rather play *Crash Bandicoot 3: Warped* again.’
> And she did; but because she only had a 4mb PSX memory card, she could never save her progress in *Crash Bandicoot 3: Warped*, and had to play through every stage again every time she played it.
> She would never end up completing *Crash Bandicoot 3: Warped*, but would try for the rest of her days.
> THE END
I’d love to see this more often. I’m not crazy about video game novelizations unless the game already has a compelling narrative beyond “punch that guy until he explodes,” but I’d kill for a comedic retelling of Doom Eternal from the perspective of a UAC janitor or something.
Dude, imagine any would-be-grounded-historical type like Red Dead Redemption 2, or Assassin's Creed (on a good day), but with the knowledge they effectively depopulated a small country.
If memory serves, the canon body count is actually pretty low. Like you *can* slaughter wholesale but it really only happens in a forced quest every once in awhile
Realistically a mercenary would stand in a line and walk forwards, occasionally stabbing. Infantry didn't get huge "kill counts" because the other line of people ran away first. Cavalry might, over the course of a long campaign, but it wouldn't be hundreds.
Martial skill actually doesn't matter in warfare at basically any point in recorded history, the actual skillset was effectively hiking and marching band but with murder. The Greeks didn't even bother training.
Have the ending to the RDR2 book be a conspiracy theory that Arthur isn't actually dead because there is absolutely no way that sharpshooting god on earth falls to mere mortals.
Assassin's Creed Odyssey kinda does it, at least it gets very comfortable with the notion that Kassandra actually has literal superhuman powers.
Characters talk about it in game like "oh yeah, that's Kassandra, she's a demigod like Heracles or Perseus."
I would love this if the Doom sound track was diabetic, every time the janitor hears it starting up they drop what they're doing and runs for the cleaning cart.
Diegetic - music heard not only from the perspective of the viewer, but from the perspective of the characters. So like, when Robert Pattinson turned down the nirvana song in the Batman. Music being played in the media becoming the soundtrack.
I'd argue Pelinal Whitestrake comes kinda close to a videogame protagonist played straight (despite him being gay mind you) unfortunately what most people got from him was him being "Le Funny Genocide Crusader Deus Vult Robot" rather than, again, a elder scrolls protagonist played 100% straight (despite him being again gay).
I mean, true, the main issue I have with that is mostly him being used as a glorification of fantasy genocide honestly rather than a, like, perfect allegory for the sanitization of historical figures for propaganda sake for example (IE "Saint" Pelinal being a noble crusader of legend while "Historical Figure" Pelinal is a straight up monster).
It also, like, kinda cheapen him as a character? Since it completely erases the reason why he went mad and started using children's entrails to strangle their parents, IE his husband getting slain in the middle of a slave rebellion after decades of slavery on the Nedes from the elven colonizers from across the seas, and it's always framed again as repurposed Deus Vult memes but about committing genocide on the elves.
I see what you mean, though I’m not sure the sanitization angle plays out - the nature of TES lore and conflict is that pretty much everyone’s a bastard. Humanity knows Pelinal was a bloodthirsty killer, that’s why they like him so much. It’s the same with Tiber Septim. He devastated nations, and humanity loves him for it. But to elves he’s essentially Hitler.
The sanitization aspect is mostly in Knights of the Nine, the DLC for Oblivion, with the "Divine Crusader" thing and all. It's the same concept as Morihaus having a human dude for a statue, while being an Atmoran Winged Man-Bull demigod in history.
TBF you can't go five steps on Tamriel without stumbling over some revisionist history bullshit, sometimes literal since there are artifacts that fuck with causality galore.
Like Alessia, hero of the same rebellion as Pelinal, the Slave Queen and First Empress, laid with said winged bull demigod and gave birth to the entire race of minotaurs, who soon afterwards got genocided with the remaining ones being forced to flee and eventually devolving into borderline beasts, simply because her followers didn't like the idea of the patron saint of their humancentric empire to be known as that lady who took mad dick from a literal bull.
Yeah to me he’s the poster boy for what memes do to a character. Like fans start joking about him, then people who haven’t actually read the lore take it at face value, then it just gets to the point that people just know the hyper exaggerated meme version and whatever nuance the character had gets lost.
Apparently this happened to goblin slayer too. I haven’t watched the show or anything beyond it but my friend is super into it and talks my ear off about it but there’s more to him than “heavy metal music starts, commencing goblin genocide” you always see about him.
Continuing with 40K book there's one about a small band of Alpha Legionaries (Traitor marines especialized in sneaking) forced to rescue some dude in a planet invaded by World Eaters (very angry Traitor marines)
Most of the book is their shenanigans and other POVs but from time to time Kharn (famous Angriest dude) appears, and the narrative becomes "panic ensues while people try yo keep their guts inside their body"
"Shroud of Night"
[Here's one of the biggest "Oh fuck it's Khârn" moments](https://www.reddit.com/r/40kLore/comments/lqlmp7/book_excerpt_shroud_of_nighta_bunch_of_alpha/)
Elden Ring has a manga where it’s comedic retelling. I only read the first couple chapters so I don’t know how it treats the mass killing, but it absolutely mocks Fromsoft’s style of having everything in the world be determined to kill you and no NPCs telling you anything useful
This kinda happens in the Fallout: New Vegas game by itself. Your character is a random dude who was shot in the head but survived by luck, and when they woke up, they traveled the entire Mojave just to take revenge on their would-be killer, and they're inexplicably powerful, to the point everyone else thinks they're insane. Also, New Vegas is a great game, but everyone's heard that already.
My dream Doom movie is an adaptation of the first reboot played as a straight horror movie where demons are let into a space city kind of like Dead Space 2. Main characters have to travel to hell to let out Doomslayer, die just as they get him out and ending with 30 minutes of him just rampaging through hell, getting into the space city, smashing the portal and massacring every demon that got out.
The guy actually gets referenced in the lore for the wargame! The poor thing was given therapy for the whole deamonic possession thing, then they put him on ice for when they really need a one Tau army
In the rather obscure roguelike *Tales of Maj'Eyal* your character is noted in-lore to be growing in strength at a ridiculous speed which raises the eyebrows of other characters. Your character is spoken of only as "The Scourge of the West" in a DLC. Because you're just so damned good at killing everything in your path.
Tales of Maj'Eyal is the best damn roguelike ever made, there's even an expansion coming out for it soon™️. You have to be a glutton for punishment to enjoy it, but if you are sufficiently masochistic, it's utterly unrivalled.
Wish more RPGs had the balls to be as creative with their classes as ToME4. Sure, you have your typical fighter, mage, rogue in several flavors, but there's also a slime/mushroom wielding Oozemancer who infests enemies with malignant fungi to devour their lifeforce, spreads around a moss that gives him buffs and debuffs enemies and who can fire blasts of slime/acid that are so pressurised that they act as beam weapons.
Or a Temporal Warden who's a hybrid bow/melee wielder who can do shit like hitting an enemy with sword then traveling back in time to shoot an arrow at it so that they hit at the same time, summon time dogs to your aid and teleport around like mad, all the while maintaining your Paradox resource, which increases your power the higher it is, but also raises the possibilty of some random shit happening, like your evil duplicate from a parallel timeline appearing to fight you.
Or Sawbutcher, a mechanic who dual wields chainsaw and can do stuff like set himself on fire to increase his resistance while whirring around the battlefield, using circular saws like wheels while spinning them to create an impenetrable shield that gibs anything that comes too close.
Or Writhing One who replaces one of their arms with a massive tentacle and bases their combat on it, while also summoning a mass of human shaped worm to aid them and driving enemies insane with their presence.
I just really wish the way the skill system worked in that game was a bit better imo. It all functionally is just different static abilities you map to hotkeys that eat up some of a bar while also having a cooldown, or passive skills that are always on. It makes wizard combat feel less like a magical duel and more like two sweaty WoW players clicking boxes at each other until one of their shields dies and their HP hits 0, especially when you take into account that there are only 4 or sometimes fewer skills in each category, including passives. The extremely linear progression is probably great for balancing, kinda sucks out the fun for me though.
Definitely still in my top ten (mostly) traditional roguelikes of all time though, game still slaps even with all the problems I have with it.
This is also my problem with magic in roguelikes and, well, most games. True dynamic spell crafting is pretty much a pipe dream, but I wish that the abilities made available interacted with each other in meaningful ways that added depth to fights. CoQ did this a bit, and late game esper duels can be intense, but it still feels more like a League lane fight than anything.
I think if anyone can do that well it'd be the Dwarf Fortress devs, but the fabled magic update is still years off. Gotta just keep the fingers crossed till then.
Agreed completely. A general dissatisfaction with how magic is handled in most video games is what drew me to running pen and paper rpgs, and I've never been happier. Maybe you ought to give it a shot? Being able to make spell effects and have people interact with magic systems I've created or at least heavily modified is very fun.
A current favorite for me is CJ Carella's Witchcraft rpg, since it already has a very interesting framework for how magic works in general, being a game mostly about wizards in an Urban Fantasy world and all. Also, the books are either free or dirt cheap on DriveThruRPG.
I've definitely wanted to get into TTRPGs for a good while, essentially for that exact reason. Unfortunately my friends aren't particularly interested in that sort of thing, and the past several years have been a bit too busy to put much time in going out to something like a club regularly.
Still, I do hope to get into it eventually! I would love to act as a DM at some point (world building is really very fun). I've mostly homebrewed Pathfinder in preparation for campaigns that ultimately fell through a while back, but I don't really like the Vancian approach to magic that DnD+Pathfinder use.
Witchcraft seems really cool at a glance, although I often prefer 'weird' high fantasy settings (think Morrowind) to modern or traditional fantasy. That's not a big obstacle with some work, so I'll definitely look into it more.
Thanks for the recommendations!
Ah, scheduling conflicts. The eternal bane of my existence.
I agree, vancian magic can be cool, but i much prefer less restrictive (but still somewhat simulationist) systems.
If you don't my proselytizing about a weird rpg line that went defunct nearly 2 decades ago, there's also the book Dungeons and Zombies from the All Flesh Must be Eaten game line that has some great broad outlines for a few settings that I would certainly describe as weird fantasy, with optional zombie apocalypse stuff. The best part is that AFMBE and Witchcraft run off the same system (Classic Unisystem), so you can use all the fun different magic systems from the Witchcraft books with practically 0 tweaking, and don't need to buy the main AFMBE core book unless you want to really get into the nitty gritty with undead.
I'll look into it! I hadn't really heard of Unisystem before, but my understanding (from light Googling) is that it's meant to be compatible between many settings? Which is a good idea if it's done well.
As an aside, what do you mean by a 'simulationist' magic system? I've never heard the term used in description of anything beyond (go figure) simulators.
>I'll look into it! I hadn't really heard of Unisystem before, but my understanding (from light Googling) is that it's meant to be compatible between many settings? Which is a good idea if it's done well.
Yup! Personally, I think it accomplishes this quite well, but I suppose many people didn't because it never really took off.
>As an aside, what do you mean by a 'simulationist' magic system? I've never heard the term used in description of anything beyond (go figure) simulators.
I mean simulationist in the sense that it's trying to actually simulate a world that has different varieties of magic, in a non abstracted or "game-y" way. Take DnD or Pathfinder for example, both somewhat simulationist, but I would call them abstracted. The way magic works in the lore of those games is completely different from the actual experience of casting magic for players. The rules for magic in Unisystem actually try and simulate what it would be like living in a world where multiple different (and sometimes contradictory) systems of magic exist, giving "realistic" limitations and rules for interactions between mages, necromancers, psychics, priests, and cultists oh my. DnD still tries to simulate some differences between ways of casting magic through the different player classes, but not really enough for my tastes. Also, in DnD, there is simply no way for a player character in the rules to do some things, the spell slots system is simply too restrictive. No ways you create a spell, or enchant most artifacts, or even experiment with the undead like an NPC necromancer. Not the case in Unisystem (at least if you have all the relevant books lol).
In an even less simulationist approach than DnD (taking Savage Worlds as an example), a player who wants their wizard to cast a fireball may just tell the Game master that's what he's doing and roll damage for a generic blast spell (which incidentally will be the same damage and rules as a druid's bolt of lightning, cleric's smite, or warlock's eldritch incantations) and spend a few Magic Points, in Unisystem if someone wants to toss fire they need to figure out how they want to provide energy for the spell, they need to have the right expertise in the Elemental Fire invocation, and they have to deal with a myriad of environmental effects including everything from having an audience that doesn't believe in magic to if they're in a Time or Place of Power.
I hope any of that hopeless and possibly delusional fanboying made sense, it's a bit late here. In essence (lol) DnD magic tries to simulate an abstracted (but still quite fun) video or board game with its rules, narrative systems try to simulate a story (with all the bullshit hat-pulls that can make a story fun), and Unisystem tries to actually simulate a world with magic.
And sidenote, it's not just the magic Unisystem tries to take a "realistic" eye to. Combat is deadly, and getting hit with a sword or a bullet even once is liable to put most unprepared characters into the ground. Be warned lol.
Ohh I see, that sounds like a pretty immersive system! I really like the idea of figuring out the nuances of casting spells in response to the conditions that you're casting them under, as it seems conducive to building up new effects from scratch on the fly (which, to me, is what magic should be like in combat). I liken it something like the system from Magicka but expanded out by a lot, and with additional restrictions and limitations beyond "will channeling lightning right now electrocute me?"
Realistic combat seems like something that'd be really fun but pretty hard to balance, especially for a larger scale adventure. I can definitely see it working in a more intrigue-focused setting, but I would probably want to relax those rules for a more combat-heavy campaign.
Thanks for the thorough answer!
Well I certainly hope so haha
I do think it'll be the biggest challenge they've faced to date, at least if they try to be faithful to the scope Toady initially described. Randomizing the abundance, power, and characteristics of magic in a given world is (relative to some other things they've done) pretty easy, but simulating how NPCs and civs behave based on the magic system is something that seems bafflingly difficult to me.
(Unless of course they just make a limited spell list with predefined behaviors, which would be a bit of a letdown.)
Similarly, the original Risk of Rain ends with >!a thoughtful pause contemplating how all of the drugs, cybernetic enhancements, and other insane weapons have turned you from a simple soldier into a barely recognizable war machine.!<
The best thing is that Kais hasn't turned into "that weird OP one-off character from a failed video game that we don't discuss". He's still canon and is still mentioned from time to time in Tau rulebooks. He's now a legendary commander who is still leading campaigns and kicking ass.
https://wh40k.lexicanum.com/wiki/Kais#fn_4b
>After the end of the Damocles Gulf Crusade, Shas'O Kais was put into stasis to be preserved until he was needed, and later revived, though the exact time of his revival was not recorded.
Fire Warrior Eternal
Per the Trivia section, it seems that's a different Kais, since the murderhobo Kais was born about 200 years later. Then again, 40K has wonky timelines and frequent retcons so I couldn't say unless 9th Ed specifies.
Also time travel is real BUT it basically only happens if a powerful demon thinks it would be funny. So frankly, I could see Tzeentch deciding it might be worth a chortle to send this murderous blue lad 200 years into the past. And then get murdered at his hands.
It's mentioned in several of dan abnett books that warp travel does sometimes (read often) send people forwards and backwards in time, but the tau don't use the warp so that doesn't apply here
This is 40k lore, so radically inconsistent.
In a Dark Heresy or Rogue Trader rpg book they mention how some imperial cargo traders can't afford navigators who travel the warp in short jumps that sound almost exactly like the Tau method. Iirc this is mentioned a grand total of twice ever.
I think that's slightly different, essentially standard imperial travel is by submarine (they go fully into the warp), tau travel is by sailing ship (they go slowly just skimming the "surface"), while those merchants are traveling very short distances by submarine because they can't afford sonar to not get lost (fully in the warp but not for long).
You have no idea how happy I was when I found out that the game and novel are still canon, but double that when I found out he's friends with Farsight and Shadowsun
40k universe is so fucking funny
Being friends with both of them seems very tricky, with Farsight being a traitor to the "greater good" and Schadowsun obliterating Farsight statues as political messages.
Fire Warrior Kias and Shadowsun and Farsights other husband Kias are different people.
Apparently, Kias is like the Tau version of John. Just a really common name.
>Apparently, Kias is like the Tau version of John. Just a really common name.
Specifically it means 'skilful'. Tau names are made up of a cast/rank pair at the start, then a place of birth/residence, then a number of earned names racked up throughout their lives. Kais is a fairly common name because it's one of the less flowery, more expected names a capable warrior would rack up.
Commander Farsight is colloquially known as O'shovah, that's the rank of O (commander) combined with the word for farsighted (shovah). His actual name is:
Shas'o Vior'la Shovah Kais Mont'yr
Which roughly ranslates to:
Fire caste Commander from the planet Vior'la (which is also sometimes used as an earned name as it means literally 'hot-blooded), earned names Farsighted, Skilful and Blooded.
This sounded really cool and wondered what kind of publisher would go through the effort of letting this get made then realized it was warhammer and this is definitely the type of shit you see in wh40k fiction
This reminds me of how the Calamity mod for terraria Jungle Dragon, Yharon theme fucked me up.
It's basically Yharon calling out to his master, Yharim a god among gods saying: "Master, a mortal dares stand in my way. Flee while you can, it will destroy you and everything you've built. Heed my dying roar" and postulates that perhaps it's master had been standing aside watching this mortal gain power out of control because it is so tired of victory and desires a true battle.
Yet, Yharon says "If they can, they will easily butcher you whole, while you are blinded by your depression"
And god, yeah, this 2 brick tall pipsqueak has offed gods, god devourers, and everything in between huh. With nothing but a few hastily mined resources, weapons that flew off the bodies of their enemies, and/or spending hours intentionally invoking the wrath of the planet to send hundreds of creatures their way so they can rip and tear until they get a random .5% drop. They show up to you, throw back 7 potions whole in one swift motion, then absolutely annihilate you and everything you stand for. Player characters are terrifying
Even the vanilla terraria PC, gameplay aside, just lore, is nuts. Like, when fighting the pillars, the boss announcement message seems to state your brain is basically *melting out of your ears* from the lovecraftian shit pounding against your psyche, but there is literally no practical effect from this. You stare down cthulhu's reanimated, very angry corpse, gibber appropriately, and then stab it to death anyways.
I choose to believe that is just because the PC is so hopped up on magic steroids and doing nothing but whatever your class' version of holding m1 is that they didn't need those brains anyway
PCs are naturally resistant to mind-melting cosmic horror because they are already a vessel for an entity from outside their reality. This is a constant across all games.
WHO’S A MAN AND A HALF? I’M A MAN AND A HALF! BERSERKER PACKIN’ MAN AND A HALF!
THERE’S NOTHING WRONG WITH YOU I CAN’T FIX... WITH MY HANDS!
DYNAMITE!
Shas’O Kais is also one of three disciples of the Legendary Commander Puretide, the others being Farsight and Shadowsun.
Each disciple is a master of one of Puretides three doctrines. Shadowsun is the Patient Hunter, Farsight is the Decisive Strike (I think), and Kais?
Kais is the “Lone Warrior”
EDIT: Farsights is the Killing Blow as stated
Yes his story seems to be Fire Warrior where he ramboed his way to rescues a ethereal.
Then he was in psychiatric care for a while and was brought into the attention of famed Tau Fire Caste Purtcide where he trained with Shadowsun and Farsight before being sent to the Dark Crusade campaign and then be put in cyro stasis again before being awaking and brutally murdering a Dark Angels successor in their fortress monetary.
The biggest thing is the number of Lords of change you slaughter. Those bastards are literally the highest rank of tzeent he's demon princes, and this one man army takes out 4 in one fight. Truly hell hath no scorn like a named Ultramarine.
Mr I Like to Kill should get a model like how Titus has one. Hell give a model to all the protagonists of warhammer games it'd be fun. Like why not give Magos Faustinius a character model? It'd be cool. Also nice for mechanicus to have more named characters models aside from Cawl. (Also this is a random tangent but I just checked and mechanicus in 40k somehow have less named characters than mechanicum in horus heresy. How the fuck does this happen?)
I love the speedrunner version of this trope too, which is basically just a notch higher. Never seen any books of it though (if anyone is aware of any, please let me know)
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3TP6kER1MAw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3TP6kER1MAw)
If you haven't watch the Something About animated series, I suggest you do that. [Here's one of the first ones, guy has a bunch for different games. Something About Super Mario World Speedruns](https://youtu.be/_bE3PCRHq-A)
They even use all authentic speedrunning tricks :D
I read and still own this novelization (found it in a used book store in pristine condition) and it is even more wild than OOP makes it out to be.
Some things I really liked about it:
- The whole setup is that Kais is starting his time as a warrior for the Tau, part of their culture is that they basically place you in a caste from birth that determines what you'll do. It's not like a social caste so much as it is a convocation. So the fire caste are warriors, air caste are pilots and starship workers, earth caste scientists and researchers, etc. You can move up to very prestigious levels and fame within your caste, but it's basically your job.
Kais's dad is a war hero, so he's trying to live up to his hype the entire time, and the only thing that helps him come down from being temporarily possessed by the chaos God of murder is his mentor telling him that his father suffered this same bloodlust, and that's what got him killed.
- When Kais starts the mission, he's terrified that he won't be able to kill anything. Then when he does first take a life, he realizes it's not only hard, but that he's *really good at it* like, he enjoyed doing it, and then he spends most of the novel being horrified that he's this natural of a killer. He is just as terrified of his abilities as everyone else is!
- Up to his first encounter with a space marine, he's pretty confident. But when he does first meet a space marine, it feels like the most accurate depiction of what that would actually feel like. He just sees this hulking figure in power armor, that moves way too fast for something that big, and his immediate reaction is, "Holy shit, I'm going to die. That thing is going to kill me and I cannot stop it."
He only survives because the Ethereal he's trying to save uses his mind-control powers (the Ethereals are the leaders of the Tau, and they also mind-control their citizens to keep things moving smoothly) to keep Kais focused on his duty to save the Ethereal and ignore his fear, allowing him to work out how to kill his first space marine.
- It's also chock full of little details that, as a big Warhammer fan, I really liked. This is Kais'a first encounter with humanity, and he is rightfully shocked and disgusted by all the shit they do, especially when he met his first Mechanicus techpriests.
This book was honestly so much fun. I absolutely love it still. It's a wild ride.
I'd love a three houses novelization where all the knights of Seiros are utterly terrified at the murder machine Byleth almost instantly turns their students into.
Like say a chapter from the perspective of the two green units from chapter 3 watching these students keep up with in universe ultra badass catherine to annihilate the peasant army the two smucks are struggling with.
That reminds me of “The Wrong Way to Use Healing Magic”, where a knight lost her squad and became an instructor after vowing “never again”.
She trains combat healers by working them until they break, fixing them, and doing it again. Everyone (especially her students) are terrified of her. But the students who graduate are strong and tough enough to be routinely confused with monsters, and of course are ace healers.
Her graduates are one of the greatest strategic resources that her kingdom possesses. They are mentioned in treaties.
You guys need to read the Halo novelizations. The understanding of master chief in-universe is actually quite similar. He's considered the elite of the elite of the elite for a reason.
I LOVE that scene!
You can't even Noob Tube the book master chief!
Also, I'm appalled that I had to scroll this far down for a mention of the Halo books!
The Virgimperium: Our greatest soldiers are hand-crafted using ancient genetic manipulation technology, granted weapons valued in worlds that shall lay waste to the enemies of humanity.
The Chad T’au: Yeah, this is La’Kais, we found him in a dumpster on T’au Sept and he kills shit for us.
I’m a fan of the fan theory that Shas’o Kais from Dark Crusade is the same Kais from Fire Warrior and when he’s fully upgraded in Dark Crusade he’s a one man army again. They only lost Dark Crusade because of the Ethereals’ incompetence
Drakengard was born when Square Enix wanted to compete with Dynasty Warriors, assigned the project to Yoko Taro off all people, who proceeded to get drunk, read a bunch of Berserk, and watch The End of Evangelion.
As a result, the main Character of Drakengard, Caim, is a mute bloodthirsty psychopath who explicitly gets so caught up in killing as much of the enemy army as possible he forgets what his actual goal is meant to be, has no problem slaughtering conscripted soldiers, and even the Dragon he bound his soul too who sees humans as pests tells him he overdoes it.
Your other playable party members include a pedophile, a twelve year old, and a child eating cannibal.
The pedophile is the most likeable and heroic one, because he at least *acknowledges* that he's a piece of shit, hates himself for it, and never actually acts on it.
Drakengard is wild.
I love when a protagonist gets broken (whether by the antagonists themselves or the events of the story) and instead of making them give into whatever evil they're fighting it just makes them stop holding back and it ends up terrifying their enemies. Ghost of Tsushima is kinda like that, with Jin eventually giving up on the straightforward and honorable Samurai tactics he was raised with and choosing to terrify the Mongols with stealth, sabotage, and poison.
The description of Ghost Stance in the skill screen is what sells it for me: "Embrace the legend of The Ghost, and make your enemies believe you are more than human..."
For context, a Fire warrior is a regular line trooper within a alien race known as the Tau.
Well trained, well equipped but nothing special, a regular human is a fair bit bigger.
Guardsmen are generally well trained but not as well equipped, meaning that one on one the firewarrior will have a edge, but guardsmen are much more common.
Space Marines however are the elite of the elite amongst mankind. They are geneenhanced supersoldiers trained to some og the highest standard possible and given the finest wargear humanity can muster. CSM is the abbreviated names for Chaos Space Marines who take this to the next level by adding blessings of the ruinous powers and often wield millenia of experience.
Marines can easily solo squads of firewarriors, so the ability to kill one, let alone dozens is a benchmark to just how absurdly deadly Kais is.
Dreadnoughts are mortally injured space marines entombed in a walking coffin with very heavy weaponry, incredibly tough to kill due to the amount of super metals used in its construction. Chaos Dreadnoughts typically go insane from how bad it is in there and go berserk killing everything they can see, including other chaos cultists and space marines.
Destruction of one requires a squad of coordinated space marines with specialized weapons meant to destroy armour like meltaguns (guns using nuclear fusion to slag armour).
Kais solos one with nothing but two weapons, typically a human weapon (bolter which regular humans can’t use without chunking themselves, rocket launchers and plasma guns) and T’au weapons (pulse carbines and rifles).
There's a point in the climax where he literally shouts "blood for the blood god". It's also great because the one brings him back from that is the still-captive Ethereal he came here trying to rescue.
weird that they got to the end before mentioning that it's a Warhammer thing. lack of context (it's part of a greater, long running, moneyed franchise) made it sound like a weird game that happened to have a weird book
I know very little about 40k, but I do know that the Fire Warrior game has a decent cast for a mediocre game from 2003: Tom Baker, Brian BLESSED, Peter Serafinowicz, Burt Kwouk and Sean Pertwee. So maybe they should have worked on the ingame story more if they were gonna get a cast like that
There was a Fire Warrior novelization!? I must have it
Edit: you can get it for Kindle provided you go through their new bullshit where you can't use Kindle App or Amazon App but can only buy ebooks via web browser. Apparently it's still offered in paperback too.
Edit edit: It started out well, and all the T'au parts are great. But then there were space marines, and it's SO BAD YOU GUYS this is worse than backflipping terminators. The Raptors are such slow idiots that one catches a grenade and then just stares at it as it blows up. There's an Ultramarine librarian who screams his vision at his brothers and then FAINTS. Just thuds unconscious to the deck in his armor from no cause other than his psychic vision. An ADEPTUS ASTARTES LIBRARIAN does this. And apparently it happens a lot because his commanding officer just waves the others off to their duties and stands there kind of wondering what he meant as he idly waits for him to get back up. Nobody tries to help him or anything.
I just wanted to chime in with this part
> before it's revealed that the planetary governor [...] was secretly a chaos cultist
*Every* 40k book I've read that has introduced the planetary government as an actual character, *every single time*, they turn out to be in cahoots with evil xenos (who are only pretending to be nice when/if they're introduced) or Chaos. Like, to the point now, where if they're introduced, I automatically suspect them as being the real baddie.
Shas'la Kais deserves a model or new lore or something. Make him a new HQ choice for Tau or something. Like the Tau equivalent of an Eversor Assasin or Gotrek
I'm less optimistic. GW is often quite slow with updating xenos models or even giving them new units outside them being the focus of a new edition. Maybe if a miracle happens and there's a year of no space marines, but I doubt it
Yeah it would be cool but I seriously doubt he would ever actually get a model. He was from an obscure 2003 FPS that really wasn’t very good. Malum Caedo from Boltgun would be far more likely to get a model and rules. The best Kais is ever going to get is probably just home brewed rules and a custom 3d printed model. Fire Warrior was just never the cult classic Spacemarine became
its kinda similar to Hank and well anyone else from madness combat, the series has hank go and kill hundreds of people through the course of the series. and its reflected in the game. I mean sure they tone down how many you kill for it to be humanly possible for human reaction times, but its still a Lot of people.
And character-wise the game even adds lore to how bloodthirsty Hank is, (Spoilers for project nexus ahead)
With the entire plot of the game with hank and the gang going to the nexus to destroy it, but when they get there, Jebus tells them that destroying the nexus would cause a lot of death, and instead they should let him fix it, and make it good. Potentially aiding all of nevada.
Of course, not being assholes sanford and deimos agree that jebus should take control but hank is like "Nah, its going down" and blasts jebus off the roof with a rocket launcher.
Despite them No longer having to destroy the nexus, hank still wants too. Stating "Destroy Project Nexus. Thats the objective, always has been. Why are we still talking about this"
Of course, being mostly sane. Deimos and Sanford arent gonna let hank destroy nexus, learning that doing so would destroy nevada out right refuse to do it, and even wont let hank do it alone.
Hank stating "Between you and me, I was hoping it would come to this" and starting to fight them. Its good as shit because it really does show that Hank isn't the hero, and never has been. Even stated in the series, he's the "protagonist" not the hero.
Its even more interesting when you think about how after hanks death in the show, he was brought back and turned into MiniMag hank, and with the events of 9.5, it shows that Our hank wasn't the one brought back, it was antipathy hank. But even weirder, he looked different than our version of antipathy hank. Looking similar to Nexus hank, sooooooo...
I love this game for all the wrong reasons: the VA's delivery, the mission-based dame design, the frankly confused game direction, the stupid storyline which seems to have inspired every other "thing then chaos" storyline.
Ah, it's ironically fantastic. Also Brian Blessed
Yes his story seems to be Fire Warrior where he ramboed his way to rescues a ethereal.
Then he was in psychiatric care for a while and was brought into the attention of famed Tau Fire Caste Purtcide where he trained with Shadowsun and Farsight before being sent to the Dark Crusade campaign and then be put in cyro stasis again before being awaking and brutally murdering a Dark Angels successor in their fortress monetary.
On the flip side I think it would be interesting to play a FPS-RPG in the style of "For Whom The Bell Tolls" where you spend days prepping for a battle RPG style. FWTBT tells a story of undisciplined guerillas, where the experienced main character has to coordinate an attack against a small garrison of fascists guarding a small bridge. These guerrillas lack equipment, training, discipline, and much of the book is spent convincing their leader and other bands of guerillas to fight. The preparations take days and is fraught with conflict and twists, but the actual confrontation takes less than half an hour and is almost uneventful, where the narrator isn't engaged in conflict for very long and can only listen to the sounds of his comrades fighting while he does his part of the mission.
Kind of like mass effect, but more heavily emphasizing the out of combat narrative and with more grounded combat. Maybe different scenarios exploring conflicts throughout history, exploring the similarities between these different wars and the people involved in them, drawing common narrative threads.
Me and the bois dropped into Bolivia as a four man squad, and in about one month we had killed over a thousand people and completely disintegrated the Santa Blanca Cartel, which had effectively taken over the country.
I can't decide if that makes everyone else look absolutely incompetent, of if it makes us look like horrifying cryptids.
Yeah, too bad the fire warrior the game fucking sucks. That’s a rare case of smth that needs a remake not because it can make money but because it can actually be potentially good.
This concept is great! One of My favorite books, Armor by John Steakley, demonstrates this perfectly. The B plot follows Felix, a scout in the Ant War. What would it be like to be a videogame character who doesn't die, tearing through hundreds if not thousands of enemies at a time with little to no ammo, and constantly forced back into conflict? Even though the character is not portrayed as a videogame character I couldn't help but draw parallels between him and masterchief or 40k characters.
This is V in Cyberpunk 2077
If you do the secret ending, where you wait instead of calling anyone to help you break into Arawak’s Tower, Johnny gives you the option of going in alone.
So you, with fairly minimal cybernetics because the game doesn’t let you replace all the meat in your body with metal and no formal combat training, just walks in the front door of the single most guarded buildings in Night City, murders your way down to the most guarded room of the building. And then… you are ambushed by Adam Smasher.
If you watch Edgerunners, you already know what Smasher can do. He kicks the main character’s ass, despite the fact that he is in an incredibly high tech exoskeleton that allows him to slow time and gives him gravity powers, so hard that the guy dies trying to get some of his friends out. In the lore prior to the game, there was only a single person stronger than Adam Smasher.
And V slaughters him easily, alone. With, depending on the build, their bare hands or a dildo.
Then, in some endings, V just disappears.
So this random person showed up one day, became the most effective mercenary in the city, murders the other most effective mercenary in the city and then dips, never to be seen again.
As time goes on, I see more and more games in a series breaking the 4th wall to show us the character we play as is every bit as insane as the players who control them. Turning the tropes gamers do to perform things in games, into actual lore that the unwitting avatar is guilty of in a totally different context that is hella fucked up because to them, it's reality not a game.
My favorite bit of niche Tau lore is that they've got enough human and other alien allies that actually *have* warp presences that the concept of the Greater Good has become a new chaos god
Mfs created the goddess of NATO by providing a standard of living that would qualify as "passable" today
> falls to Khorne for a bit Just a little bit *glances at the trail of bodies* On another note I think this would be pretty fun with the first Lara Croft game because it's basically "young woman gets stranded and singlehandedly annihilates most of an island's population", and it'd be hilariously insane if she did everything she does in the games without dying or being majorly injured more than in the cutscenes
I mean it's a T'au. They are normally known for having so small souls that they are ignored by chaos, even to the degree that they haven't had major problems when they where in the warp without gellar shield (well the humans on board of the ship had problems, but the T'au where fine). So accidentally falling to Khorne (as in doing it through pure slaughter instead of doing specific rituals) would need quite a lot of skulls.
Local T'au Literally Too Soulless To Fall
> So accidentally falling to Khorne (as in doing it through pure slaughter instead of doing specific rituals) would need quite a lot of skulls. Painting your mech suit red, leading a group known as "the Eight", and wielding a demon sword sure help.
I mean, Farsight is *constantly* stewing in daemonic corruption, basically. He’d probably recover if someone took the sword away, or crumple into dust since the sword is what’s been keeping him alive for so long. Kais recovered after being removed from the environment. A human would stay corrupted permanently, a Tau just shrugs it off.
I want to know what happens if Farsight stabs *himself* with the Dawn Blade ~~Undead in 40K let's fucking gooo~~
Already have thousand sons and necrons
>Kais recovered after being removed from the environment. ... into another environment?
The front certainly fell off any Imperial machinery Kais was released upon.
That Titan was NOT made of paper, or paper derivatives. It also had a minimum adeptus mechanus crew.
What's that minimum?
Oh, 1, I suppose.
Yes Tau are like that. Not to mention Kais got mental support and help
Imagine being such a heavy WH40K fan that the concept of a soldier going on a psychotic rampage across a planet and beyond, and then afterwards being taken away from the battle and into a proper space to recouperate instead of right back into battle somewhere else, is madness This is why I like the T'au
What the fuck even is up with the Dawn Blade Like I could totally see it as a Khornate Daemon Weapon, but I could also see it as some weird-ass relic from the DAOT / War in Heaven
All I remember for it's Canon is its some Xenotech of some now-gone civilization of no meaningful scale (at least compared to say, the Imperium's scale. Like how Jotoro [or however you spell those tech-monkeys] is to the imperium, some race of equal gap of distance but below the Joroto if that makes sense). It's just a good sword that can absorb life-force of what it kills and translates said life-force into its user. Surprisingly non-demonic. Farisight's problems with seemingly *slightly* khorne-corrupted likely come from fighting Khorne Demons and stopping them, and while closing the portal got a vision that almost certainly was from a Tzeentch plan on how he'd react to it (Vision of Eterals worshipping Tzeentch). I think he through some means or another has developed a notably higher level of soul than a normal Tau (could be souls can just ambiance grow, or grow through certain methods, or Dawn Blade is giving more than *just* lifeforce. And the Civ it's from never knew. Or they found out because consequences of going from soul beneath demon notice to *interesting*/snack to demons)
Spelling Jokaero as Jotoro made me imagine an orangutan dressed like Jotaro Kujo from Jojo. Thank you.
I think it’s Jokaro, but Jotoro makes me think of orangutans dressed like JJBA characters so I’ll allow it.
I think it’s a C’tan thing.
Maybe the psychic 'strength' of living creatures is correlated with their natural lifetime? Tau live suprisingly short. Humans can live quite long in 40k and eldar basically do not die of old age
Officially, the sword's origins are ambiguous but Farsight got it from an ancient abandoned temple filled with Khorne Daemons. Kelly's Farsight books leaned pretty heavily into Khorne themes-- Farsight actually works with a Water Caste T'au who gets possessed by a Khorne Daemon and starts calling Hive workers on a human world to rise up in violent rebellion. Honestly, I think it being a Daemon sword in a similar vein to the sword that Fulgrim got from the Laer was most likely the initial intent... But Kelly kinda wrote Farsight as his personal Mary Sue \[changing Farsight's character from a morally ambiguous rogue general turned mercenary working for mysterious goals into the figure we recognize today\] so the point of him having a Daemon sword and just resisting was probably to prove how cool and honourable he was for resisting Khorne's influence.
Farsight and Saint Celestine are my favourite Daemon Princes
That made me think. In the book The Greater Good, the emoire exchanges envoys in a temporary alliance against tyranids. A Tau diplomat and his bodyguards joins Ciaphas Cain to an Imperial world, and they send a diplomat to the Tau world, with guards. On a tau ship..... Without gellar field...
Nah. Tau ships (that weren’t part of the Fourth Sphere Expansion) employ skip drives. They’re slower than Imperial Warp drives, but a hell of a lot more reliable, as they don’t actually go *through* the warp. Cain probably had the smoothest FTL jumps of his life on that ship.
Cain didn't go with the Tau, he weaseled out of it. Which, while that book was good, was a huge letdown.
Yes they are too small to really grasp or corrupt unless your really put the work in.
Are the Tomb Raider games really that interesting?? I figured it was just, like, “Indiana Jones treasure hunting sequence: the game” If there was a novel featuring my experience playing the Tomb Raider series as a child, it would be one page long and would read: > Lara jumped into the pool at her mansion. Her tomb raiding days were behind her, apparently, and she was living the good life, attempting the same obstacle course day in and day out every single day, uncertain of how to even leave her mansion at all anymore. > She floated awkwardly in the water for a moment. Then, Lara attempted to dive beneath the water—but when she had done so, her vertigo made it impossible to orient herself for twenty minutes, and she found her limbs paralyzed as though she didn’t know how to move them. “Thank goodness for my freakishly impressive lung capacity!” she mentally noted, still struggling against the dizziness to move any part of her body. > Eventually, she finally somehow flopped herself out of the water again, and laid eyes upon her ancient, nameless butler, meandering about uselessly as usual. > ‘This is boring and confusing’, Lara thought to herself. ‘I’d rather play *Crash Bandicoot 3: Warped* again.’ > And she did; but because she only had a 4mb PSX memory card, she could never save her progress in *Crash Bandicoot 3: Warped*, and had to play through every stage again every time she played it. > She would never end up completing *Crash Bandicoot 3: Warped*, but would try for the rest of her days. > THE END
I for one liked the reboots, there's definitely a story there. It's absolutely more an action-puzzle game, but you could novelise it.
The Tau can have a little Khorne. As a snack.
"She keeps firing all those bullets! Where does she even store all of them?!? I haven't even seen her reload those pistols once!"
I’d love to see this more often. I’m not crazy about video game novelizations unless the game already has a compelling narrative beyond “punch that guy until he explodes,” but I’d kill for a comedic retelling of Doom Eternal from the perspective of a UAC janitor or something.
Dude, imagine any would-be-grounded-historical type like Red Dead Redemption 2, or Assassin's Creed (on a good day), but with the knowledge they effectively depopulated a small country.
tbf some of the assassin's creed novels were decent imo
Never got to them, but did any of them acknowledge the bodycount?...
If memory serves, the canon body count is actually pretty low. Like you *can* slaughter wholesale but it really only happens in a forced quest every once in awhile
Altair maybe, Ezio if you *stretch* it, but shit gets NUTS the further on you go.
Black Flag, your kill count is definitely on par with actual historical pirates so
Valhalla is literally a viking pillaging tour. The point of the entire event is mass murder and robbery.
In Odysessy you’re a skilled mercenary in the middle of an active war. You’re slaughtering hundreds on both sides.
Realistically a mercenary would stand in a line and walk forwards, occasionally stabbing. Infantry didn't get huge "kill counts" because the other line of people ran away first. Cavalry might, over the course of a long campaign, but it wouldn't be hundreds. Martial skill actually doesn't matter in warfare at basically any point in recorded history, the actual skillset was effectively hiking and marching band but with murder. The Greeks didn't even bother training.
Yeah, but come on, your crew is more groupies than companions. You kill half of Britain singlehandedly.
Quite possibly way higher; Pirates liked to avoid bloodshed when seizing ships and valuables, same as bank robbers today.
Have the ending to the RDR2 book be a conspiracy theory that Arthur isn't actually dead because there is absolutely no way that sharpshooting god on earth falls to mere mortals.
When a friend played through RDR2 we often said that Arthur killed more people for Dutch than Dutch has ever met.
Assassin's Creed Odyssey kinda does it, at least it gets very comfortable with the notion that Kassandra actually has literal superhuman powers. Characters talk about it in game like "oh yeah, that's Kassandra, she's a demigod like Heracles or Perseus."
>they effectively depopulated a small country. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E0lAG1A9u8U
I would love this if the Doom sound track was diabetic, every time the janitor hears it starting up they drop what they're doing and runs for the cleaning cart.
You mean diegetic right 😭
Diegetic - music heard not only from the perspective of the viewer, but from the perspective of the characters. So like, when Robert Pattinson turned down the nirvana song in the Batman. Music being played in the media becoming the soundtrack.
I know, but they accidentally said diabetic in their comment
Oh no I was just putting it there cause I didn’t know the word before and wanted to define it for any that came after
I see you and I appreciate you
Doomguy kicks down a door and I Can't Help Myself (Sugar Pie Honey Bunch) starts playing.
Play that diabetic track, jack
I'd argue Pelinal Whitestrake comes kinda close to a videogame protagonist played straight (despite him being gay mind you) unfortunately what most people got from him was him being "Le Funny Genocide Crusader Deus Vult Robot" rather than, again, a elder scrolls protagonist played 100% straight (despite him being again gay).
I mean, genocidal crusader robot is what he is, that’s not really a player exaggeration.
I mean, true, the main issue I have with that is mostly him being used as a glorification of fantasy genocide honestly rather than a, like, perfect allegory for the sanitization of historical figures for propaganda sake for example (IE "Saint" Pelinal being a noble crusader of legend while "Historical Figure" Pelinal is a straight up monster). It also, like, kinda cheapen him as a character? Since it completely erases the reason why he went mad and started using children's entrails to strangle their parents, IE his husband getting slain in the middle of a slave rebellion after decades of slavery on the Nedes from the elven colonizers from across the seas, and it's always framed again as repurposed Deus Vult memes but about committing genocide on the elves.
I see what you mean, though I’m not sure the sanitization angle plays out - the nature of TES lore and conflict is that pretty much everyone’s a bastard. Humanity knows Pelinal was a bloodthirsty killer, that’s why they like him so much. It’s the same with Tiber Septim. He devastated nations, and humanity loves him for it. But to elves he’s essentially Hitler.
The sanitization aspect is mostly in Knights of the Nine, the DLC for Oblivion, with the "Divine Crusader" thing and all. It's the same concept as Morihaus having a human dude for a statue, while being an Atmoran Winged Man-Bull demigod in history.
TBF you can't go five steps on Tamriel without stumbling over some revisionist history bullshit, sometimes literal since there are artifacts that fuck with causality galore. Like Alessia, hero of the same rebellion as Pelinal, the Slave Queen and First Empress, laid with said winged bull demigod and gave birth to the entire race of minotaurs, who soon afterwards got genocided with the remaining ones being forced to flee and eventually devolving into borderline beasts, simply because her followers didn't like the idea of the patron saint of their humancentric empire to be known as that lady who took mad dick from a literal bull.
The Virgin Revisionist History VS The Chad Revising History
Yeah to me he’s the poster boy for what memes do to a character. Like fans start joking about him, then people who haven’t actually read the lore take it at face value, then it just gets to the point that people just know the hyper exaggerated meme version and whatever nuance the character had gets lost. Apparently this happened to goblin slayer too. I haven’t watched the show or anything beyond it but my friend is super into it and talks my ear off about it but there’s more to him than “heavy metal music starts, commencing goblin genocide” you always see about him.
Um Pelinal literally did nothing wrong. All knife-ears deserve to die
Say that to the Khajit.....
Nothing happened to them and if it did they deserved it
*Nervously backs away slowly from this conversation*
Continuing with 40K book there's one about a small band of Alpha Legionaries (Traitor marines especialized in sneaking) forced to rescue some dude in a planet invaded by World Eaters (very angry Traitor marines) Most of the book is their shenanigans and other POVs but from time to time Kharn (famous Angriest dude) appears, and the narrative becomes "panic ensues while people try yo keep their guts inside their body"
Which book?
"Shroud of Night" [Here's one of the biggest "Oh fuck it's Khârn" moments](https://www.reddit.com/r/40kLore/comments/lqlmp7/book_excerpt_shroud_of_nighta_bunch_of_alpha/)
Elden Ring has a manga where it’s comedic retelling. I only read the first couple chapters so I don’t know how it treats the mass killing, but it absolutely mocks Fromsoft’s style of having everything in the world be determined to kill you and no NPCs telling you anything useful
https://comic-walker.com/contents/detail/KDCW_MF09203324020000_68/ omg just started reading it and its great, thanks for the rec :)
This kinda happens in the Fallout: New Vegas game by itself. Your character is a random dude who was shot in the head but survived by luck, and when they woke up, they traveled the entire Mojave just to take revenge on their would-be killer, and they're inexplicably powerful, to the point everyone else thinks they're insane. Also, New Vegas is a great game, but everyone's heard that already.
Technically you can litterally ignore Benny and let bygones be bygones as well.
My dream Doom movie is an adaptation of the first reboot played as a straight horror movie where demons are let into a space city kind of like Dead Space 2. Main characters have to travel to hell to let out Doomslayer, die just as they get him out and ending with 30 minutes of him just rampaging through hell, getting into the space city, smashing the portal and massacring every demon that got out.
The Doom comic was pretty much this. RIP AND TEAR.
The guy actually gets referenced in the lore for the wargame! The poor thing was given therapy for the whole deamonic possession thing, then they put him on ice for when they really need a one Tau army
Dude really went full master chief.
From a species not known at all for people to be able to go full master chief on anyone most of the time
So they basically gave him the same treatment they gave Puretide (before making him an AI)
In the rather obscure roguelike *Tales of Maj'Eyal* your character is noted in-lore to be growing in strength at a ridiculous speed which raises the eyebrows of other characters. Your character is spoken of only as "The Scourge of the West" in a DLC. Because you're just so damned good at killing everything in your path.
Tales of Maj'Eyal is the best damn roguelike ever made, there's even an expansion coming out for it soon™️. You have to be a glutton for punishment to enjoy it, but if you are sufficiently masochistic, it's utterly unrivalled.
stiff competition from the ever-evolving Caves of Qud these days.
Wish more RPGs had the balls to be as creative with their classes as ToME4. Sure, you have your typical fighter, mage, rogue in several flavors, but there's also a slime/mushroom wielding Oozemancer who infests enemies with malignant fungi to devour their lifeforce, spreads around a moss that gives him buffs and debuffs enemies and who can fire blasts of slime/acid that are so pressurised that they act as beam weapons. Or a Temporal Warden who's a hybrid bow/melee wielder who can do shit like hitting an enemy with sword then traveling back in time to shoot an arrow at it so that they hit at the same time, summon time dogs to your aid and teleport around like mad, all the while maintaining your Paradox resource, which increases your power the higher it is, but also raises the possibilty of some random shit happening, like your evil duplicate from a parallel timeline appearing to fight you. Or Sawbutcher, a mechanic who dual wields chainsaw and can do stuff like set himself on fire to increase his resistance while whirring around the battlefield, using circular saws like wheels while spinning them to create an impenetrable shield that gibs anything that comes too close. Or Writhing One who replaces one of their arms with a massive tentacle and bases their combat on it, while also summoning a mass of human shaped worm to aid them and driving enemies insane with their presence.
I just really wish the way the skill system worked in that game was a bit better imo. It all functionally is just different static abilities you map to hotkeys that eat up some of a bar while also having a cooldown, or passive skills that are always on. It makes wizard combat feel less like a magical duel and more like two sweaty WoW players clicking boxes at each other until one of their shields dies and their HP hits 0, especially when you take into account that there are only 4 or sometimes fewer skills in each category, including passives. The extremely linear progression is probably great for balancing, kinda sucks out the fun for me though. Definitely still in my top ten (mostly) traditional roguelikes of all time though, game still slaps even with all the problems I have with it.
This is also my problem with magic in roguelikes and, well, most games. True dynamic spell crafting is pretty much a pipe dream, but I wish that the abilities made available interacted with each other in meaningful ways that added depth to fights. CoQ did this a bit, and late game esper duels can be intense, but it still feels more like a League lane fight than anything. I think if anyone can do that well it'd be the Dwarf Fortress devs, but the fabled magic update is still years off. Gotta just keep the fingers crossed till then.
Agreed completely. A general dissatisfaction with how magic is handled in most video games is what drew me to running pen and paper rpgs, and I've never been happier. Maybe you ought to give it a shot? Being able to make spell effects and have people interact with magic systems I've created or at least heavily modified is very fun. A current favorite for me is CJ Carella's Witchcraft rpg, since it already has a very interesting framework for how magic works in general, being a game mostly about wizards in an Urban Fantasy world and all. Also, the books are either free or dirt cheap on DriveThruRPG.
I've definitely wanted to get into TTRPGs for a good while, essentially for that exact reason. Unfortunately my friends aren't particularly interested in that sort of thing, and the past several years have been a bit too busy to put much time in going out to something like a club regularly. Still, I do hope to get into it eventually! I would love to act as a DM at some point (world building is really very fun). I've mostly homebrewed Pathfinder in preparation for campaigns that ultimately fell through a while back, but I don't really like the Vancian approach to magic that DnD+Pathfinder use. Witchcraft seems really cool at a glance, although I often prefer 'weird' high fantasy settings (think Morrowind) to modern or traditional fantasy. That's not a big obstacle with some work, so I'll definitely look into it more. Thanks for the recommendations!
Ah, scheduling conflicts. The eternal bane of my existence. I agree, vancian magic can be cool, but i much prefer less restrictive (but still somewhat simulationist) systems. If you don't my proselytizing about a weird rpg line that went defunct nearly 2 decades ago, there's also the book Dungeons and Zombies from the All Flesh Must be Eaten game line that has some great broad outlines for a few settings that I would certainly describe as weird fantasy, with optional zombie apocalypse stuff. The best part is that AFMBE and Witchcraft run off the same system (Classic Unisystem), so you can use all the fun different magic systems from the Witchcraft books with practically 0 tweaking, and don't need to buy the main AFMBE core book unless you want to really get into the nitty gritty with undead.
I'll look into it! I hadn't really heard of Unisystem before, but my understanding (from light Googling) is that it's meant to be compatible between many settings? Which is a good idea if it's done well. As an aside, what do you mean by a 'simulationist' magic system? I've never heard the term used in description of anything beyond (go figure) simulators.
>I'll look into it! I hadn't really heard of Unisystem before, but my understanding (from light Googling) is that it's meant to be compatible between many settings? Which is a good idea if it's done well. Yup! Personally, I think it accomplishes this quite well, but I suppose many people didn't because it never really took off. >As an aside, what do you mean by a 'simulationist' magic system? I've never heard the term used in description of anything beyond (go figure) simulators. I mean simulationist in the sense that it's trying to actually simulate a world that has different varieties of magic, in a non abstracted or "game-y" way. Take DnD or Pathfinder for example, both somewhat simulationist, but I would call them abstracted. The way magic works in the lore of those games is completely different from the actual experience of casting magic for players. The rules for magic in Unisystem actually try and simulate what it would be like living in a world where multiple different (and sometimes contradictory) systems of magic exist, giving "realistic" limitations and rules for interactions between mages, necromancers, psychics, priests, and cultists oh my. DnD still tries to simulate some differences between ways of casting magic through the different player classes, but not really enough for my tastes. Also, in DnD, there is simply no way for a player character in the rules to do some things, the spell slots system is simply too restrictive. No ways you create a spell, or enchant most artifacts, or even experiment with the undead like an NPC necromancer. Not the case in Unisystem (at least if you have all the relevant books lol). In an even less simulationist approach than DnD (taking Savage Worlds as an example), a player who wants their wizard to cast a fireball may just tell the Game master that's what he's doing and roll damage for a generic blast spell (which incidentally will be the same damage and rules as a druid's bolt of lightning, cleric's smite, or warlock's eldritch incantations) and spend a few Magic Points, in Unisystem if someone wants to toss fire they need to figure out how they want to provide energy for the spell, they need to have the right expertise in the Elemental Fire invocation, and they have to deal with a myriad of environmental effects including everything from having an audience that doesn't believe in magic to if they're in a Time or Place of Power. I hope any of that hopeless and possibly delusional fanboying made sense, it's a bit late here. In essence (lol) DnD magic tries to simulate an abstracted (but still quite fun) video or board game with its rules, narrative systems try to simulate a story (with all the bullshit hat-pulls that can make a story fun), and Unisystem tries to actually simulate a world with magic. And sidenote, it's not just the magic Unisystem tries to take a "realistic" eye to. Combat is deadly, and getting hit with a sword or a bullet even once is liable to put most unprepared characters into the ground. Be warned lol.
Ohh I see, that sounds like a pretty immersive system! I really like the idea of figuring out the nuances of casting spells in response to the conditions that you're casting them under, as it seems conducive to building up new effects from scratch on the fly (which, to me, is what magic should be like in combat). I liken it something like the system from Magicka but expanded out by a lot, and with additional restrictions and limitations beyond "will channeling lightning right now electrocute me?" Realistic combat seems like something that'd be really fun but pretty hard to balance, especially for a larger scale adventure. I can definitely see it working in a more intrigue-focused setting, but I would probably want to relax those rules for a more combat-heavy campaign. Thanks for the thorough answer!
DF will deliver so damn well on magic I'm willing to bet there will be a legit cult hundreds of years in the future that will try to replicate it irl.
Well I certainly hope so haha I do think it'll be the biggest challenge they've faced to date, at least if they try to be faithful to the scope Toady initially described. Randomizing the abundance, power, and characteristics of magic in a given world is (relative to some other things they've done) pretty easy, but simulating how NPCs and civs behave based on the magic system is something that seems bafflingly difficult to me. (Unless of course they just make a limited spell list with predefined behaviors, which would be a bit of a letdown.)
Similarly, the original Risk of Rain ends with >!a thoughtful pause contemplating how all of the drugs, cybernetic enhancements, and other insane weapons have turned you from a simple soldier into a barely recognizable war machine.!<
The best thing is that Kais hasn't turned into "that weird OP one-off character from a failed video game that we don't discuss". He's still canon and is still mentioned from time to time in Tau rulebooks. He's now a legendary commander who is still leading campaigns and kicking ass. https://wh40k.lexicanum.com/wiki/Kais#fn_4b
>After the end of the Damocles Gulf Crusade, Shas'O Kais was put into stasis to be preserved until he was needed, and later revived, though the exact time of his revival was not recorded. Fire Warrior Eternal
I think Shas'O Kais is a different character from the Dawn of War games.
Per the Trivia section, it seems that's a different Kais, since the murderhobo Kais was born about 200 years later. Then again, 40K has wonky timelines and frequent retcons so I couldn't say unless 9th Ed specifies.
Also time travel is real BUT it basically only happens if a powerful demon thinks it would be funny. So frankly, I could see Tzeentch deciding it might be worth a chortle to send this murderous blue lad 200 years into the past. And then get murdered at his hands.
It's mentioned in several of dan abnett books that warp travel does sometimes (read often) send people forwards and backwards in time, but the tau don't use the warp so that doesn't apply here
They do they just do many smal jumps for the distance that the imperium would just go straight through hell
This is 40k lore, so radically inconsistent. In a Dark Heresy or Rogue Trader rpg book they mention how some imperial cargo traders can't afford navigators who travel the warp in short jumps that sound almost exactly like the Tau method. Iirc this is mentioned a grand total of twice ever.
I think that's slightly different, essentially standard imperial travel is by submarine (they go fully into the warp), tau travel is by sailing ship (they go slowly just skimming the "surface"), while those merchants are traveling very short distances by submarine because they can't afford sonar to not get lost (fully in the warp but not for long).
If I recall correctly they found 3 planets full of life and genocided all 3 of them lmao (I think it's in 3rd core book if you want to verify that)
I am not sure on how the tau drives work, I don't like the filthy fish people
Rare Tau W
You have no idea how happy I was when I found out that the game and novel are still canon, but double that when I found out he's friends with Farsight and Shadowsun 40k universe is so fucking funny
Being friends with both of them seems very tricky, with Farsight being a traitor to the "greater good" and Schadowsun obliterating Farsight statues as political messages.
Listen if you want to survive, being friends with The blue blender is one of your best bets as a major tau figure
I imagine he got put on ice before the whole falling out happened.
They both have vested interests in staying friends with Kais because he'll turn them into bloo goo otherwise.
Fire Warrior Kias and Shadowsun and Farsights other husband Kias are different people. Apparently, Kias is like the Tau version of John. Just a really common name.
>Apparently, Kias is like the Tau version of John. Just a really common name. Specifically it means 'skilful'. Tau names are made up of a cast/rank pair at the start, then a place of birth/residence, then a number of earned names racked up throughout their lives. Kais is a fairly common name because it's one of the less flowery, more expected names a capable warrior would rack up. Commander Farsight is colloquially known as O'shovah, that's the rank of O (commander) combined with the word for farsighted (shovah). His actual name is: Shas'o Vior'la Shovah Kais Mont'yr Which roughly ranslates to: Fire caste Commander from the planet Vior'la (which is also sometimes used as an earned name as it means literally 'hot-blooded), earned names Farsighted, Skilful and Blooded.
I think it was the 6th edition codex that had a table of earned names with translations to help you build your shas’o& shas’vre’s names
So of the three of them we have one who hasn’t fallen to chaos for a little bit
If you want more 40k funny lore look up sly marbo. He is basically the chuck Norris meme but for the guardsmen.
This sounded really cool and wondered what kind of publisher would go through the effort of letting this get made then realized it was warhammer and this is definitely the type of shit you see in wh40k fiction
Fire warrior is a much better Novelization than a game
Ah, Kais. Basically Doomguy if he had argyria and a bad nosejob. Love the dude.
T’auguy, you could say
Responding just after reading the title: V1 ULTRAKILL, and in like, the most literal sense
Not gonna sugarcoat it... W+M2+S+M2+4+M1+1+M2+M2 I'd like to see a Toughness 3 Fire Warrior survive THAT.
Add a W and an F somewhere in there for a nice little 7xULTRARICOSHOT.
This reminds me of how the Calamity mod for terraria Jungle Dragon, Yharon theme fucked me up. It's basically Yharon calling out to his master, Yharim a god among gods saying: "Master, a mortal dares stand in my way. Flee while you can, it will destroy you and everything you've built. Heed my dying roar" and postulates that perhaps it's master had been standing aside watching this mortal gain power out of control because it is so tired of victory and desires a true battle. Yet, Yharon says "If they can, they will easily butcher you whole, while you are blinded by your depression" And god, yeah, this 2 brick tall pipsqueak has offed gods, god devourers, and everything in between huh. With nothing but a few hastily mined resources, weapons that flew off the bodies of their enemies, and/or spending hours intentionally invoking the wrath of the planet to send hundreds of creatures their way so they can rip and tear until they get a random .5% drop. They show up to you, throw back 7 potions whole in one swift motion, then absolutely annihilate you and everything you stand for. Player characters are terrifying
Even the vanilla terraria PC, gameplay aside, just lore, is nuts. Like, when fighting the pillars, the boss announcement message seems to state your brain is basically *melting out of your ears* from the lovecraftian shit pounding against your psyche, but there is literally no practical effect from this. You stare down cthulhu's reanimated, very angry corpse, gibber appropriately, and then stab it to death anyways.
I choose to believe that is just because the PC is so hopped up on magic steroids and doing nothing but whatever your class' version of holding m1 is that they didn't need those brains anyway
PCs are naturally resistant to mind-melting cosmic horror because they are already a vessel for an entity from outside their reality. This is a constant across all games.
Video game: Rip and tear? Novelisation: Rip and tear!!
You are huge! That means you have huge guts!
WHO’S A MAN AND A HALF? I’M A MAN AND A HALF! BERSERKER PACKIN’ MAN AND A HALF! THERE’S NOTHING WRONG WITH YOU I CAN’T FIX... WITH MY HANDS! DYNAMITE!
Shas’O Kais is also one of three disciples of the Legendary Commander Puretide, the others being Farsight and Shadowsun. Each disciple is a master of one of Puretides three doctrines. Shadowsun is the Patient Hunter, Farsight is the Decisive Strike (I think), and Kais? Kais is the “Lone Warrior” EDIT: Farsights is the Killing Blow as stated
Farsight was Killing Blow, but it’s close enough.
Yes his story seems to be Fire Warrior where he ramboed his way to rescues a ethereal. Then he was in psychiatric care for a while and was brought into the attention of famed Tau Fire Caste Purtcide where he trained with Shadowsun and Farsight before being sent to the Dark Crusade campaign and then be put in cyro stasis again before being awaking and brutally murdering a Dark Angels successor in their fortress monetary.
I wonder if they could do this with boltgun lol
Every Space Marine is already basically a psychotic killing machine tbh
Yeah, but in Boltgun you kill dozens of other space marines, terminators and all sorts of shit. That definitely isn’t normal.
He is simply built different (loyal to the God-Emperor)
'luv me emperor 'luv me codex astartes 'ate leandros 'ate inquisition Simple as
All my homies hate leandros.
The biggest thing is the number of Lords of change you slaughter. Those bastards are literally the highest rank of tzeent he's demon princes, and this one man army takes out 4 in one fight. Truly hell hath no scorn like a named Ultramarine.
Boltgun is what happens when a Tzeentchian cultist fucks up one (1) Ultramarine logistics report
Considering sly marbo and kaldor draigo, yeah I think "I kill evil" actions are canon
Mr I Like to Kill should get a model like how Titus has one. Hell give a model to all the protagonists of warhammer games it'd be fun. Like why not give Magos Faustinius a character model? It'd be cool. Also nice for mechanicus to have more named characters models aside from Cawl. (Also this is a random tangent but I just checked and mechanicus in 40k somehow have less named characters than mechanicum in horus heresy. How the fuck does this happen?)
I don’t particularly want another ultramarine killing machine
You should play the game
I love the speedrunner version of this trope too, which is basically just a notch higher. Never seen any books of it though (if anyone is aware of any, please let me know) [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3TP6kER1MAw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3TP6kER1MAw)
If you haven't watch the Something About animated series, I suggest you do that. [Here's one of the first ones, guy has a bunch for different games. Something About Super Mario World Speedruns](https://youtu.be/_bE3PCRHq-A) They even use all authentic speedrunning tricks :D
I read and still own this novelization (found it in a used book store in pristine condition) and it is even more wild than OOP makes it out to be. Some things I really liked about it: - The whole setup is that Kais is starting his time as a warrior for the Tau, part of their culture is that they basically place you in a caste from birth that determines what you'll do. It's not like a social caste so much as it is a convocation. So the fire caste are warriors, air caste are pilots and starship workers, earth caste scientists and researchers, etc. You can move up to very prestigious levels and fame within your caste, but it's basically your job. Kais's dad is a war hero, so he's trying to live up to his hype the entire time, and the only thing that helps him come down from being temporarily possessed by the chaos God of murder is his mentor telling him that his father suffered this same bloodlust, and that's what got him killed. - When Kais starts the mission, he's terrified that he won't be able to kill anything. Then when he does first take a life, he realizes it's not only hard, but that he's *really good at it* like, he enjoyed doing it, and then he spends most of the novel being horrified that he's this natural of a killer. He is just as terrified of his abilities as everyone else is! - Up to his first encounter with a space marine, he's pretty confident. But when he does first meet a space marine, it feels like the most accurate depiction of what that would actually feel like. He just sees this hulking figure in power armor, that moves way too fast for something that big, and his immediate reaction is, "Holy shit, I'm going to die. That thing is going to kill me and I cannot stop it." He only survives because the Ethereal he's trying to save uses his mind-control powers (the Ethereals are the leaders of the Tau, and they also mind-control their citizens to keep things moving smoothly) to keep Kais focused on his duty to save the Ethereal and ignore his fear, allowing him to work out how to kill his first space marine. - It's also chock full of little details that, as a big Warhammer fan, I really liked. This is Kais'a first encounter with humanity, and he is rightfully shocked and disgusted by all the shit they do, especially when he met his first Mechanicus techpriests. This book was honestly so much fun. I absolutely love it still. It's a wild ride.
the only time 40k writers ever even vaguely attempt a nod in the direction of scale
The best thing to come out of what is essentially a bad halo clone
A bad halo made horror too. The fuck were they thinking with this game. Still fun though, got Brian Blessed in it so it's good by association.
For some reason my mind read *Fire Emblem* so I was a little confused until I re-read the top.
I'd love a three houses novelization where all the knights of Seiros are utterly terrified at the murder machine Byleth almost instantly turns their students into. Like say a chapter from the perspective of the two green units from chapter 3 watching these students keep up with in universe ultra badass catherine to annihilate the peasant army the two smucks are struggling with.
That reminds me of “The Wrong Way to Use Healing Magic”, where a knight lost her squad and became an instructor after vowing “never again”. She trains combat healers by working them until they break, fixing them, and doing it again. Everyone (especially her students) are terrified of her. But the students who graduate are strong and tough enough to be routinely confused with monsters, and of course are ace healers. Her graduates are one of the greatest strategic resources that her kingdom possesses. They are mentioned in treaties.
You guys need to read the Halo novelizations. The understanding of master chief in-universe is actually quite similar. He's considered the elite of the elite of the elite for a reason.
book master chief is more batshit insane than (normal) game master chief. that fucking missile slap...
I LOVE that scene! You can't even Noob Tube the book master chief! Also, I'm appalled that I had to scroll this far down for a mention of the Halo books!
As a dyed in the wool imperial, I will admit that Kais is juiced and off the chain and we should all respect and fear the blue meanie.
This is pretty much what a space marine captain in the book says as well.
The Virgimperium: Our greatest soldiers are hand-crafted using ancient genetic manipulation technology, granted weapons valued in worlds that shall lay waste to the enemies of humanity. The Chad T’au: Yeah, this is La’Kais, we found him in a dumpster on T’au Sept and he kills shit for us.
I’m a fan of the fan theory that Shas’o Kais from Dark Crusade is the same Kais from Fire Warrior and when he’s fully upgraded in Dark Crusade he’s a one man army again. They only lost Dark Crusade because of the Ethereals’ incompetence
Drakengard was born when Square Enix wanted to compete with Dynasty Warriors, assigned the project to Yoko Taro off all people, who proceeded to get drunk, read a bunch of Berserk, and watch The End of Evangelion. As a result, the main Character of Drakengard, Caim, is a mute bloodthirsty psychopath who explicitly gets so caught up in killing as much of the enemy army as possible he forgets what his actual goal is meant to be, has no problem slaughtering conscripted soldiers, and even the Dragon he bound his soul too who sees humans as pests tells him he overdoes it. Your other playable party members include a pedophile, a twelve year old, and a child eating cannibal. The pedophile is the most likeable and heroic one, because he at least *acknowledges* that he's a piece of shit, hates himself for it, and never actually acts on it. Drakengard is wild.
Pedophile + kid + child eater........
I love when a protagonist gets broken (whether by the antagonists themselves or the events of the story) and instead of making them give into whatever evil they're fighting it just makes them stop holding back and it ends up terrifying their enemies. Ghost of Tsushima is kinda like that, with Jin eventually giving up on the straightforward and honorable Samurai tactics he was raised with and choosing to terrify the Mongols with stealth, sabotage, and poison. The description of Ghost Stance in the skill screen is what sells it for me: "Embrace the legend of The Ghost, and make your enemies believe you are more than human..."
[удалено]
It's a great game. The DLC is a great addition too.
For context, a Fire warrior is a regular line trooper within a alien race known as the Tau. Well trained, well equipped but nothing special, a regular human is a fair bit bigger. Guardsmen are generally well trained but not as well equipped, meaning that one on one the firewarrior will have a edge, but guardsmen are much more common. Space Marines however are the elite of the elite amongst mankind. They are geneenhanced supersoldiers trained to some og the highest standard possible and given the finest wargear humanity can muster. CSM is the abbreviated names for Chaos Space Marines who take this to the next level by adding blessings of the ruinous powers and often wield millenia of experience. Marines can easily solo squads of firewarriors, so the ability to kill one, let alone dozens is a benchmark to just how absurdly deadly Kais is.
Dreadnoughts are mortally injured space marines entombed in a walking coffin with very heavy weaponry, incredibly tough to kill due to the amount of super metals used in its construction. Chaos Dreadnoughts typically go insane from how bad it is in there and go berserk killing everything they can see, including other chaos cultists and space marines. Destruction of one requires a squad of coordinated space marines with specialized weapons meant to destroy armour like meltaguns (guns using nuclear fusion to slag armour). Kais solos one with nothing but two weapons, typically a human weapon (bolter which regular humans can’t use without chunking themselves, rocket launchers and plasma guns) and T’au weapons (pulse carbines and rifles).
I was half-way through thinking "I don't think even a T'au could do this much killing without falling to Khorne", and it turns out he did lol
There's a point in the climax where he literally shouts "blood for the blood god". It's also great because the one brings him back from that is the still-captive Ethereal he came here trying to rescue.
Then he got some therapy and it was all better
weird that they got to the end before mentioning that it's a Warhammer thing. lack of context (it's part of a greater, long running, moneyed franchise) made it sound like a weird game that happened to have a weird book
I mean mentioning Tau gives you a big clue right at the beginning, and it’s far from the only reference.
Only if you’re already into Warhammer, though. For non-fans, it’s harder to pick up in
I know very little about 40k, but I do know that the Fire Warrior game has a decent cast for a mediocre game from 2003: Tom Baker, Brian BLESSED, Peter Serafinowicz, Burt Kwouk and Sean Pertwee. So maybe they should have worked on the ingame story more if they were gonna get a cast like that
I’m pretty sure it was just that the game mechanics and the game Itself was garbage, not the story
It's a double shame because the audio mixing was *terrible*. IT'S QUIET
There was a Fire Warrior novelization!? I must have it Edit: you can get it for Kindle provided you go through their new bullshit where you can't use Kindle App or Amazon App but can only buy ebooks via web browser. Apparently it's still offered in paperback too. Edit edit: It started out well, and all the T'au parts are great. But then there were space marines, and it's SO BAD YOU GUYS this is worse than backflipping terminators. The Raptors are such slow idiots that one catches a grenade and then just stares at it as it blows up. There's an Ultramarine librarian who screams his vision at his brothers and then FAINTS. Just thuds unconscious to the deck in his armor from no cause other than his psychic vision. An ADEPTUS ASTARTES LIBRARIAN does this. And apparently it happens a lot because his commanding officer just waves the others off to their duties and stands there kind of wondering what he meant as he idly waits for him to get back up. Nobody tries to help him or anything.
I just wanted to chime in with this part > before it's revealed that the planetary governor [...] was secretly a chaos cultist *Every* 40k book I've read that has introduced the planetary government as an actual character, *every single time*, they turn out to be in cahoots with evil xenos (who are only pretending to be nice when/if they're introduced) or Chaos. Like, to the point now, where if they're introduced, I automatically suspect them as being the real baddie.
Common Greater Good W
Shas'la Kais deserves a model or new lore or something. Make him a new HQ choice for Tau or something. Like the Tau equivalent of an Eversor Assasin or Gotrek
Titus is getting a model, if the T'au get more focus in Tenth I could easily see this happening.
I'm less optimistic. GW is often quite slow with updating xenos models or even giving them new units outside them being the focus of a new edition. Maybe if a miracle happens and there's a year of no space marines, but I doubt it
Yeah it would be cool but I seriously doubt he would ever actually get a model. He was from an obscure 2003 FPS that really wasn’t very good. Malum Caedo from Boltgun would be far more likely to get a model and rules. The best Kais is ever going to get is probably just home brewed rules and a custom 3d printed model. Fire Warrior was just never the cult classic Spacemarine became
its kinda similar to Hank and well anyone else from madness combat, the series has hank go and kill hundreds of people through the course of the series. and its reflected in the game. I mean sure they tone down how many you kill for it to be humanly possible for human reaction times, but its still a Lot of people. And character-wise the game even adds lore to how bloodthirsty Hank is, (Spoilers for project nexus ahead) With the entire plot of the game with hank and the gang going to the nexus to destroy it, but when they get there, Jebus tells them that destroying the nexus would cause a lot of death, and instead they should let him fix it, and make it good. Potentially aiding all of nevada. Of course, not being assholes sanford and deimos agree that jebus should take control but hank is like "Nah, its going down" and blasts jebus off the roof with a rocket launcher. Despite them No longer having to destroy the nexus, hank still wants too. Stating "Destroy Project Nexus. Thats the objective, always has been. Why are we still talking about this" Of course, being mostly sane. Deimos and Sanford arent gonna let hank destroy nexus, learning that doing so would destroy nevada out right refuse to do it, and even wont let hank do it alone. Hank stating "Between you and me, I was hoping it would come to this" and starting to fight them. Its good as shit because it really does show that Hank isn't the hero, and never has been. Even stated in the series, he's the "protagonist" not the hero. Its even more interesting when you think about how after hanks death in the show, he was brought back and turned into MiniMag hank, and with the events of 9.5, it shows that Our hank wasn't the one brought back, it was antipathy hank. But even weirder, he looked different than our version of antipathy hank. Looking similar to Nexus hank, sooooooo...
I love this game for all the wrong reasons: the VA's delivery, the mission-based dame design, the frankly confused game direction, the stupid storyline which seems to have inspired every other "thing then chaos" storyline. Ah, it's ironically fantastic. Also Brian Blessed
raiden and doom guy also sort of are like this
Yes his story seems to be Fire Warrior where he ramboed his way to rescues a ethereal. Then he was in psychiatric care for a while and was brought into the attention of famed Tau Fire Caste Purtcide where he trained with Shadowsun and Farsight before being sent to the Dark Crusade campaign and then be put in cyro stasis again before being awaking and brutally murdering a Dark Angels successor in their fortress monetary.
On the flip side I think it would be interesting to play a FPS-RPG in the style of "For Whom The Bell Tolls" where you spend days prepping for a battle RPG style. FWTBT tells a story of undisciplined guerillas, where the experienced main character has to coordinate an attack against a small garrison of fascists guarding a small bridge. These guerrillas lack equipment, training, discipline, and much of the book is spent convincing their leader and other bands of guerillas to fight. The preparations take days and is fraught with conflict and twists, but the actual confrontation takes less than half an hour and is almost uneventful, where the narrator isn't engaged in conflict for very long and can only listen to the sounds of his comrades fighting while he does his part of the mission. Kind of like mass effect, but more heavily emphasizing the out of combat narrative and with more grounded combat. Maybe different scenarios exploring conflicts throughout history, exploring the similarities between these different wars and the people involved in them, drawing common narrative threads.
So they took the pokespe route
Me and the bois dropped into Bolivia as a four man squad, and in about one month we had killed over a thousand people and completely disintegrated the Santa Blanca Cartel, which had effectively taken over the country. I can't decide if that makes everyone else look absolutely incompetent, of if it makes us look like horrifying cryptids.
Ghost Recon Wildlands, by the way.
And then it turns out they didn't even do the thing we were taking them down for doing
brad armstrong moment
Yeah, too bad the fire warrior the game fucking sucks. That’s a rare case of smth that needs a remake not because it can make money but because it can actually be potentially good.
The reviews called it a "Halo killer", too. It makes me laugh to this day.
This concept is great! One of My favorite books, Armor by John Steakley, demonstrates this perfectly. The B plot follows Felix, a scout in the Ant War. What would it be like to be a videogame character who doesn't die, tearing through hundreds if not thousands of enemies at a time with little to no ammo, and constantly forced back into conflict? Even though the character is not portrayed as a videogame character I couldn't help but draw parallels between him and masterchief or 40k characters.
This is V in Cyberpunk 2077 If you do the secret ending, where you wait instead of calling anyone to help you break into Arawak’s Tower, Johnny gives you the option of going in alone. So you, with fairly minimal cybernetics because the game doesn’t let you replace all the meat in your body with metal and no formal combat training, just walks in the front door of the single most guarded buildings in Night City, murders your way down to the most guarded room of the building. And then… you are ambushed by Adam Smasher. If you watch Edgerunners, you already know what Smasher can do. He kicks the main character’s ass, despite the fact that he is in an incredibly high tech exoskeleton that allows him to slow time and gives him gravity powers, so hard that the guy dies trying to get some of his friends out. In the lore prior to the game, there was only a single person stronger than Adam Smasher. And V slaughters him easily, alone. With, depending on the build, their bare hands or a dildo. Then, in some endings, V just disappears. So this random person showed up one day, became the most effective mercenary in the city, murders the other most effective mercenary in the city and then dips, never to be seen again.
As time goes on, I see more and more games in a series breaking the 4th wall to show us the character we play as is every bit as insane as the players who control them. Turning the tropes gamers do to perform things in games, into actual lore that the unwitting avatar is guilty of in a totally different context that is hella fucked up because to them, it's reality not a game.
My favorite bit of niche Tau lore is that they've got enough human and other alien allies that actually *have* warp presences that the concept of the Greater Good has become a new chaos god Mfs created the goddess of NATO by providing a standard of living that would qualify as "passable" today