The truth behind many ideas needed to be pieced together by individual players, and everything was put into question to some degree. Players were greeted with half-truths of older eras, an age of decline and a time when greatness had been seeping out of the galaxy. What often drew many people to Warhammer 40,000 was the same thing which made Dark Souls' lore so fascinating. Yet, because of this much of the initial mystery and wonder born of the original work seems to be gone. It would be a difficult uphill battle, it would be a chance to more thoroughlyВ explore the speciesВ than anything seen before and, for all the criticisms I had of Fracture of Biel-Tan, a well executed approach would be an engaging narrative. Equally, the idea that the eldar could be united once more as a race is a genuinely good one. The return of a primarch to the Imperium alone is enough to send shock-wavesВ across the galaxy, and his reaction to things like the Imperial Church, new powers, technologies and threats the Legions never faced is ripe for story opportunities. With that seal broken, writers can begin working and experimenting with many of the ideas which have been hinted at for decades. The obvious aspect it has gained stems from the creative freedom on offer now. It's more hopeful, more upbeat and positive despite everything, and in some ways it seems to have gained and lost something in equal measure. What the lore focuses upon now is less an age where Chaos might reign supreme so much as the era of a new Eldar Empire or second Great Crusade. The problem is, now we have removed that stopper, and the game itself seems to have been shifting about us.

The grim darkness of the far future was as defining a theme for this setting as boundless optimismВ was for Star Trek. It was akin to how the Cthulhu Mythos handled its own tales, and while some tales such as Gaunt's Ghosts, the Ultramarines saga, Ciaphas Cain books or others would lessen the effect, they could not escape it entirely. The whole point was that almost every story focused upon a dark, almost nihilistic tone to one degree or another, where characters knew that something grim awaited them in the next millennium. Often a step forwards was either only made by building upon what little had been recovered, or it was reclaiming what had been lost, like with the Storm Eagle entering production once more. Relic weapons, vehicles and even baseline psychicВ concepts were all taken from a better age. Save for the likes of the Tau Empire or the daemons of Chaos, every faction is working with remnants of better ages. While some have exaggerated the technological decay of the Imperium, it cannot be denied as a factor in storytelling. Some were ascending, annihilating everything in their path, others were gripped in civil wars, while a few were fighting a desperateВ battle for survival. Every codex from the Fifth Edition onward repeatedly emphasisedВ this point, over and over again by adding in more and more gigantic Armageddon grade events for each faction. Warhammer itself has always been made based upon the idea that it was just a few years away from annihilation. While that might sound like a obvious statement, please seriously stop to consider what this means for a moment. The very fact we're advancing the story is a massive change unto itself, both thematically and in terms of future books. Plus, we'll also be looking into a few of the mistakes which were made in my opinion because there are some structural flaws here which simply cannot go unremarked upon. Specifically how they might reflect upon how future events will be handled and how the thematic approaches of future tales will differ from past works. So, having read through this, the question is so what happens now?Д«ecause of how prominent this question is, and just how far reaching the possibilities are, this part will be both referring back to events in the book, but considering what they might imply. As the name also implied, this seems to have also been an opportunity to have Warhammer 40,000 spring-board its way into larger events, and a much bigger ongoing narrative.

Obviously this was a massive game-changer, and it has reinvented a number of major parts of the setting on the whole. With it we have witnessed a number of sweeping changes to three of the setting's major factions, and the re-introduction of a number of major elements within the narrative. With the ending of this book, the Gathering Storm trilogy has come and gone.

Warhammer 40k the gathering storm