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HerbertWigglesworth t1_iuiyime wrote

Genuine question… from an outsiders perspective I am kind of aware of what it is, but how would you sell it to me?

At current all that comes to mind is people painting figurines and playing with them like dungeons and dragons.

What would be an equivalent - existing - programme that you would compare it to to try draw me in? Is the style of this example how you would want it to be presented?

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Archamasse t1_iuj2gqg wrote

Game of Thrones is the most obvious comparison imho, so think of that but throw in spaceships, demons, people duelling with chainsaws, BDSM aliens, and the beach landing of Saving Private Ryan happening so often that individual wars, never mind battles, can be forgotten by the in universe history.

The world of Warhammer 40k is scifi with a lot of gothic influence and religious mania, factional grudges and subcultures. There's a big emphasis on the control of information, propaganda, and the the idea the golden ages are all over and all that's left for everyone is entropy.

The main "storyline" is that about 10k years ago, the human imperium was split apart by a civil war. The traitors/heretics have allied with demons, and the surviving Imperium has turned itself into a fanatical cult of bureaucratic lunacy that fetishizes the lost heyday to the point of regression. The war wiped out all the heroes who might have prevented the ongoing collapse of everything that is now just a forgone conclusion.

You can think of the result as a mixture of Judge Dredd, Game of Thrones, Event Horizon and Battlestar Galactica. There are warp drives sure, but there are also flamethrower wielding nuns. There are interstellar empires, but AI is considered so dangerous that most machinery must have an organic component - ie a lobotomised human - integrated into it and be religiously blessed. The Imperium is technically still standing, but all its fundamental structures and tech is failing.

The Traitors may have failed to win and collapsed into infighting, but they're still out there and their gods are alive and taking calls, so their day's going to come eventually.

Both Imperial and Traitor factions have subgroups within, also, with distinct cultures of their own. So there are Mongolian biker horde or Soviet conscript flavored Imperials vs traitor plague zombie knights or Egyptian sorcerer Traitors.

On top of that you've got Orks (football hooligan orcs who fight for the love of it), Eldar (shifty space elf supremacists who consider humans disposable apes), Necrons (Egyptian flavored space Terminators who want to wipe out all life), Tyranids (space bugs who devour worlds at a time) and Tau (anime flavored nice guy fish men who are largely irrelevant, but are developing tech humans no longer can). All factions are at war, but sometimes enter into allegiances of convenience which can be a ton of fun.

It is very dark in the sense that every happy ending usually comes with a reveal of how shitty the cost of the win actually was, but there's also a lot of black humor in it, particularly in stories of how average day to day humans are getting by in the middle of all this operatic craziness.

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HerbertWigglesworth t1_iuj3h9y wrote

Thanks for spending the time writing that.

Sounds up my street - fine with obscure sci-fi nerd imagination, and the idea of ultra twisted dark themes throughout is kind of what I want to see on screen.

Seems quite accessible to be honest based on some of the recent things I have seen, and there is a gap in the market for more justified shock/to the bone productions.

Do you think it is viable as something for the screen, as someone familiar with the universe?

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Archamasse t1_iuj4v6p wrote

I think it would be possible if you picked a "street level" human to start with, yeah, to give you a sense of the overwhelming scale of the universe and battles they're living in the middle of, and if you had a HBO scale budget commitment.

The main thing though is to be really careful to depict the human Imperium as a bad thing.

The game lore has faltered on this lately as an accidental byproduct of making some beginner game packs accessible "good guys vs bad guys", and the side effect has been to suggest that the atrocities they've committed may have been necessary evils, rather than an illustration of its ongoing downfall.

That sounds like splitting hairs, but it’s a really important distinction that could be really easily lost in translation to tv - there are individually good and heroic humans, but the human imperium as it is, is a monstrous, mindless abyss of suspicion and indifference. If you don't get that right, it reads too much like a fascist apologetic - all the intentionally insane in-universe warcrys and mottos etc will just turn into Facebook motivational shit people take deadly seriously.

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Delicious-Tachyons t1_iujrs3e wrote

WH40K is this dark future where it's perpetual warfare.. they sorta took the Tolkien-style races and moved it to the future plus added new scary aliens and whatnot. The concept that travelling faster than light has to basically go through hell (like Event Horizon, the movie, which is considered a spiritual prequel to WH40K) is really neat.

It's a neat universe. But to make a TV show everything would have to be custom made props, etc, as it looks like a gothic nightmare. There's nowhere you could film in real life that could be used as a set... so it's so very very expensive.

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jamtwin1 OP t1_iuj0k7j wrote

the appeal of the game is how dark and gritty the universe is.

every faction in the game is evil to morally grey. the humans in the game all worship an evil demi-god who they sacrifice thousands of souls too every day keep him alive and in order to conduct space travel. they destroy, pillage, and dominate anyone that also doesn't worship him and consider them to be heritics if they also don't worship him. they're evil

it doesn't matter which faction you chose to play as you're always the bad guy on some level but that can be inherently fun. Everyone gets to be the bad guy!!! it's really niche and nerdy but i really like it. i think the universe, lore and aesthetic are also pretty cool

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HerbertWigglesworth t1_iuj1uxe wrote

Thanks for the response.

I suppose support for the ‘anti-hero’ as a viewer could be interesting, would make good viewing if the audience were all split on whose ‘side’ they took so to speak, or were routing for throughout.

Would be curious to see how they balanced this on screen.

Are there factions within the universe that are either majorly loved or hated by fans, to the extent the producers would want to consider where the fan bases allegiance currently sits?

I suppose favouring the current fan bases story arcs could make it more ‘elitist’ and less open to outsider viewers if they feel there are under/over represented factions. Equally if popular factions are underrepresented, do you think this would piss off the ‘original’/current fans, and receive criticism?

Depends what you are looking for… allegiance to the current client base or adoption by the masses. Sure there is a middle ground, Rings of Power is a recent example, some die hard fans think it’s awful, I am a Lord of the Rings fan but not a lore nerd, so I am not dissecting it as much.

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[deleted] t1_iuj38ot wrote

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Archamasse t1_iuj5mku wrote

He believed that the end justified the means.

The lore leaves just enough room for the jury to stay out on whether that was really true.

Earlier stuff was more overt about it, but don't forget how much of the fluff is meant to be in universe propaganda and mythology, from unreliable or compromised narrators.

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