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[Tack]

Got my epic scale Rhino painted today.  Went with Space Wolf colors, though the blue should really be softer, its more cyan than a proper periwinkle.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

If you're curious, left to right for the mechs is the Grasshopper, Longbow, and Marauder

Kinda love the rhino in scale with battletech mechs.

[Loud Whispers]

Very nice, now paint the Rhino going to epic university and getting an epic degree

Spoiler: I GUESS (click to show/hide)

I'm so proud of my boy

[nenjin]

With Darktide coming soon, and playing a lot of a Chaos Campaign in Total Warhammer 3 lately, something has been on my mind.

Game developers need to be a little braver and expand their thinking when it comes to which Chaos Gods they choose to build their game around.

For Fatshark in particular, they've only really done Nurgle across 2 games now: Vermintide 2 and now Darktide. The Chaos Wastes expansion showcased all four gods and their various takes on their themes, but by and large they've lavished their attention on Nurgle.

And I get it. In my mind Nurgle is the safe, low-hanging fruit when it comes to building a faction or theme around the Chaos Gods into your game.

1. They're undeniable bad. All the Chaos Gods are in their own little particular realm, but Nurgle telegraphs stuff every person gets on a visceral level: disease, rot, zombies, corruption, gross stuff. Nurgle shows up and "ooo there's a plague!" It's physical and obvious, and it doesn't require the kind of understanding that Tzeentch or Slaanesh requires. The only other Chaos god that telegraphs as clearly what they're about is Khorne, which I'll get to.

2. They're easy to create workable designs and themes around. Same story for designers as for the audience they're designing for. Take your garden variety medieval or sci-fi scene. Now, cover it in goo, green/yellow mist and some tumorous looking plants. Nurgle (and Khorne) don't require as much creativity from the art team to create a good foundation for the visuals of a game. Consider what the design notes look like for the creative team when talking about Tzeentch vs. Nurgle.

3. Nurgle isn't completely one note, unlike Khorne. Nurgle can cover a few bases and ideas pretty easily where as you have to work harder to come up with something for Khorne beyond SKULLS and BRONZE and CHAINS and SPIKES and KILL. Nurgles' themes are transformative, additive. You take something and then add X, Y and Z to it, to change what it is. Khorne on the other hand is often subtractive. His themes are still transformative but in a way that tends to leave a thing as less than what it originally was. It's fair, that's part of destruction, but from a design standpoint it's harder to work around and gets repetitious much faster. You either set something on fire or blow it to bits....or just add SKULLS everywhere. Skull pillars, skull doors. Maybe some chains.

(As an aside, I think you could go deeper on Khorne's themes but then it starts to exceed the (ha?) just shy of R rating 40k tends to stick to. Khorne's themes would focus on the absolute psychotic brutality of war. Mutilated, not just dead, bodies everywhere. Not just bodies, but red meat. Impalement galore. Savagery on an mind-shattering scale. But as I said, that gets problematically dark with a lot of people quickly. Slaanesh is the only other one IMO that creates problems by its very nature when you get too deep into their themes.)

I'd like to see more stuff based around Tzeentch and Slaanesh, is what I'm saying. I think they're the two Chaos Gods that are harder to create for. Slaanesh for obvious reasons, knowing how far you can push the boundaries on taste. (Ironically being the exact thing Slaanesh is about.) And really finding the tone and voice of it. Tzeentch can go so many different directions and has the highest threshold for creativity that having a tone and theme that works can be tough. In Fantasy the solution has always been easier. You go with color-coded bad guys, cartoonishly evil dialog, lean heavily on your motifs (like birds for Tzeentch) and you have a serviceable product. In 40k though, I feel like the bar is often higher (while still acknowledging these are all GWS products and everything that fantasy leans into, 40k does as well) and there's more room to expand on themes and how they're executed. It's why I've always found 40k more interesting, because Sci-fi is about exploring ideas and themes where as fantasy is usually more about celebrating them.

Like for me, Tzeentch is actually one of the scarier Chaos Gods when it comes to themes. If Khorne is about murder unending and losing yourself to bloodlust, and Nurgle is about body horror and corruption and Slaanesh is about depravity and obliterating your moral compass.....Tzeentch I think is about powerlessness and loss of control. Hear me out. The power of the Warp is built on the theme of like the 40s and 50s Sci-fi ideas about radiation. It seeps into things, taints them, it's an invisible, creeping danger that forever changes you that you can't do anything about except run away from it. Tzeentch's theme of unending change and warping and twisting things randomly goes along with that, is tied particularly closely to that idea of a danger that you can't really prevent or combat, where you eventually lose control of everything. Your body and mind being changed by Chaos against your will is analogous to the idea of being swept up in one of Tzeentch's plots and you're powerless to stop it, just another gnat caught in the web. And it goes along with the Fantasy theme of Tzeentch's mastery of magic, this all powerful force that can do things you don't have any ability to stop. Add in some David Cronenberg style body horror (separate and distinct from Nurgle's style of body horror) and I think you have one of the scarier Chaos gods. That's why the Fires of Changes are so scary, because they hit you and you just change, forever. But with having all that potential, Tzeentch asks for more than the Chaos Gods in terms of how to design and present it. You can rattle off a hundred isolated ideas about what Tzeentch's themes actually look and sound like and they'd be good, but creating a good cohesive framework for describing them (to inform creatives who make things) can be a lot harder. At a surface level Tzeentch gets stuff like "pink and blue!" and "floating stuff" and "wings and eyes" and the occasional "uncontrolled mutation!" But how does one execute on the secrets, the plots, the schemes and the wonderment?

TLDR: I hope 40k and Fantasy devs stop playing it so safe when it comes to the Chaos Gods. Pick some of the ones that ask for and challenge a little bit more.

Thanks for coming to my TED Talk.

[Great Order]

The other disquieting thing about Tzeentch is that not even he's immune to his own meddling. The guy who's in control of the whole thing is also powerless against it, because he's, by his nature, always plotting against himself.

[Loud Whispers]

Also one thing of note is that when it comes to video games, a lot of vidya devs are worried about western and Chinese censorship standards. E.g. does showcasing blood or female nipples get your game bumped up to R18 in the West or banned in China? This can get very funny where Nurgle demons sharting or vomming all over their enemies is fine because no blood (not even kidding) but Khornates rending blood will always get the game pushed to R18 and censored/banned in China. One of the funniest and stupidest things was the censorship controversy over Slaaneshi greater daemons and daemonettes in TW WH. Canonically Slaaneshi daemons are both genders but daemonette nipples are haram because their name is feminine, their VA's feminine and their design predominately feminine, but daemon princes do not because their title is gender neutral and their VA's are male and their design is androgynous. Yet they still have to cover up their left half because their left half is feminine, whereas their right half is masculine so that one is fine

[nenjin]

Yep, and that's just on the surface/visual level. Not even digging into the BDSM nature of Slaanesh or how truly f'd up the pursuit of excess can get.

So yeah, I get why Nurgle is the poster child for fantasy and 40k Chaos. That said, while Khorne and Slaanesh can be problematic, Tzeentch is just straight up harder to conceptualize. And I wish more devs would go out on a limb.

Like, Inquisitor Martyr is the perfect setting for an emphasis on Tzeentch. You're Inquisitors dealing with plots against the Imperium, what better Chaos God to address than Tzeentch? But IIRC, Tzeentch has almost no play in that game. Because it's easier to create a fat, blob of a Nurgle daemon than it is to think about the same for Tzeentch.

[Loud Whispers]

I don't like Tzeentch as a chaos god just because they're the only one that doesn't truly want to win. Nurgle, Khorne and Slaanesh all have a win state where they win the great game and take over the warp and the material world, even if it means they go extinct in the end. Tzeentch is the only one that is trying to maintain status quo, because doing that keeps everything in a state of change which doesn't fundamentally affect the balance of power. Which means that the change god is surprisingly stagnant and unmotivated. He needs to get off his birdbutt and get shit done like fantasy Tzeentch

He's also the only chaos god that unequivocally fucks over his own followers for this exact reason. The other gods get happy when you serve them, Tzeentch is the only one that can look at a faithful follower and think "yep it's chaos spawn time."
What an arsehole.

Admittedly it's also what I like about him. But he'll always be someone who's foiling someone else's plan, otherwise he's foiling his own plan. I could see a fun game where you're tzeentchian and you're fucking with other tzeentchians whilst trying not to get chaos spawned

[Egan_BW]

And yet people love to point out that the orks have won because there is onlywar. :p

If that's endearing, why not funny birdman winning every day he wakes up because the Great Game is eternal?

[nenjin]

Imma bout to blow yer minds.

An unending state of perpetual change is itself a static, unchanging state.

Checkmate Tzeentch.

*drops mic and fades back into the Warp*

(re-reading what LW wrote, I feel substantially less clever now.)

[Egan_BW]

just as planned

[nenjin]

Admittedly it's also what I like about him. But he'll always be someone who's foiling someone else's plan, otherwise he's foiling his own plan. I could see a fun game where you're tzeentchian and you're fucking with other tzeentchians whilst trying not to get chaos spawned

I'm trying to think about what such a game would look like, from the gameplay and development perspective. And I keep mentally coming back to That Which (Shall Not Be Named.) It'd be a tough project. You'd need like randomly generated plots and a high degree of world/story interactivity flowing from decisions you do or don't make. It'd probably end up looking something like Netgain as well. Just a big spreadsheet/progress bar/personality tracking game.

It's the kind of thing that would drive a dev mad just trying.

Which is also all according to plan.

-Edit-

And since Tzeentch is the god of lolrandom, I feel like many frustrating, run-ending features would come down to RNG. Like, whether or not you get spawn'd might be a weighted average against all these other things....that still end up as a dice roll whether it happens or not. True to form, but would that be fun?

What if we reframe the entire thing.....it's a rogue-like where the death mechanic is just 'spawn'd.' It's not a matter of if, just when. You measure runs by how long you lasted, and maybe some kind of score based on the number of plots enacted/sabotaged. And there's various mystical things you might do stave off Tzeentch's attention for longer. Certain items you might find or conditions you might meet to bring down the secret bar that determines whether you're spawn'd on any given turn. Learning the game and getting good at it would involve a lot playthroughs to figure out the rules and "how Tzeentch thinks" to extend your chances of survival as long as possible. Like, getting rewards from Tzeentch always comes with a non-zero risk of getting spawn'd (except under certain conditions) so you risk/reward that shit, and maybe try to get away with as little help from Tzeentch as possible. Basically the more you lean on Tzeentch the stonger you are but the better your odds get that all his attention turns negative at random.

[MrRoboto75]

The rng should be exactly like how xcom 2 rng drives people mad.

[nenjin]

It'd have to like, save the time you get spawn'd as something that you couldn't easily savescum around either.

[Loud Whispers]

I'm trying to think about what such a game would look like, from the gameplay and development perspective. And I keep mentally coming back to That Which (Shall Not Be Named.) It'd be a tough project. You'd need like randomly generated plots and a high degree of world/story interactivity flowing from decisions you do or don't make. It'd probably end up looking something like Netgain as well. Just a big spreadsheet/progress bar/personality tracking game.

It's the kind of thing that would drive a dev mad just trying.

Which is also all according to plan.

I'm thinking you could abstract it into a card game. E.g. you have one greater world UI where you identify people you want to involve into your plots. But whenever you encounter someone competing for control over that person, you have to play your cards right. This way you could generate a gameplay loop that tells a story without having to put in the work to make multiple branching pre-written narratives.

For example:

You are a chaos sorceror of Tzeentch who is trying to weaken an imperial fortress world in preparation for conquest. You decide to start by targeting the planetary governor of a hive world responsible for supplying las power cells to the fortress world. Other powers have taken an interest in this governor... Now you must play your cards right and identify the power behind the governor and eliminate them before you are eliminated.

The card game phase would have both players effectively having three rounds of "HP" to peel away. The first goal is to play cards that boost your influence (e.g. giving you pieces on the field that can be used to attack or defend), and the other goal is to play cards that damage your opponent's anonymity (as until you know who your enemy is, you are only allowed to attack their pieces, and can never attack them directly). Once you know your opponent's identity, all of your pieces can start trying to attack your enemy directly. The second win-state possible is to just ignore your opponent and focus on maxing out influence on the target - who cares who else is vying for the attention of your target if you can monopolise them first.

This would also allow for a great deal of character to come about in different playstyles. E.g. our chaos sorceror's deck would revolve around manipulating fate with constant card redraws so they always have the cards they want in hand. A rogue psyker's deck would allow for the fielding of massively powerful psyker cards or summoned daemons at the cost of drawing mutation cards. A criminal mastermind deck would revolve around protecting their own anonymity.

On the enemy side you could have Tzeentchians of rival specialisations, e.g. a chaos sorceror who specialises in knowing what cards you have. Slaaneshi decks would focus on maxing out influence over the target faster than you can kill them. The inquisitor deck would focus on identifying the enemy and assassinating the target as quickly as possible. The administratum deck would focus on chain-draw free summons. The alpha legion would have cards that steal your cards.

The final win state would be to reach apotheosis and become a demon prince of Tzeentch, or fail and become a gibbering chaos spawn. Maybe Tzeentch could helpfully start adding mutation cards to your deck every now and then that you're not allowed to discard. The more mutation cards you have, the more likely you are to draw one. Draw too many and... Chaos spawned

And yet people love to point out that the orks have won because there is onlywar. :p

If that's endearing, why not funny birdman winning every day he wakes up because the Great Game is eternal?

Orks are having fun with each other :]
Birdman is mean :[

[Egan_BW]

Birdman has fun with everybody!