Monday 9 May 2011

What kind of fine is there for returning a book late to the Black Library?


Sometimes it saddens me to be a Games Workshop fan.

Don't get me wrong, aside from poking the odd joke at them, I think they're the best games company in the business. No, my main problem is with the majority of the fans who start to adopt that annoying 'expert' tone on GW forums.

Take this seeminlgy innocuous, innocent query from a hapless forum user for instance:

snrjefe
Questions about The Black Library
Is it in the webway or on some planet not affected by the fall and kept hidden. From what I've read it appears to be in the webway somewhere, but am hoping for confirmation.

Who have seen or visited the Black Library? (Obviously the Eldar, who else?)

I know a few Inquisitors have been there, like Draco when he stole the Rhana Dandra (is that still a valid plot line, and if so, what will become of this prized tome?)

What are the Eldar criteria for allowing outsiders?

Sorry for the volume of questions in one post....


Now you may - as a rational human being - be thinking: Well, as nothing more than a keen fan of the fluff and Black Library novels, I'm only able to answer with any great degree of certainty on very few of those topics. Anything else that I can contribute will be supposition on my part without any basis in fact whatsoever!

(Warning: fail ensuing)

Imagine, if you will, how baffled I was by these responses:

NUrgle_Adorrer
BamOBrien - the Black Library [afair] stores all available Eldar knowledge. That's a LOT. And also, knowledge is power. With combined blessings of Tzeentch, his own potential and something about 60 milion years of eldar data, i would say that arihman would become at least a demigod.


Interesting. Being that Demigods are an abstract concept, largely employed in the metaphorical sense for stylistic licence, I would be interested in seeing the quantitative measurement that NUrgle_Adorrer has applied in order to arrive at this alarmingly confident conclusion.

Wait though, it gets better. Here's the reply:

BamOBrien
Quote:

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i would say that arihman would become at least a demigod.
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Right, a demigod, I know that all that information is there and could considerably increase Ahriman's abilities but still can you honestly say that he would become another Chaos Power through the Black Library?


What I can honestly say, is that:

The Black Library is fictional and a half-cocked concept at best until GW decide to cash in on the years of ephemeral, confused fluff surrounding it!

How can a starry-eyed forum jockey speak with such clout on a subject which even the game's creators have yet to finalise publicly?

Don't get me wrong, a discussion about potential story arcs and possibilities is great. Voicing your conjecture in a tone of absolute authority is far from great.

I've got love for my fellow gamers, but seriously, some of you truly baffle me. Just play the game, paint the minis and spare the rest of us this moronic diatribe. Argue about it once it's fact people.

Peace and love.

4 comments:

Tristan M said...

LOL, great post - it's these kind of posts that I always _start_ to respond, before realizing after 2 mins that I've already wasted 2 minutes of time and there is no point wasting any more....

Uncle Truth said...

Then I hope you won't grudge me that all important 4 minutes.

Thanks for reading.

Andrew Paul said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Andrew Paul said...

After making the mistake of venturing back into the Warhammer 40,000 Background cesspool - sorry, forum - on Warseer, I did find this post from Aaron Dembski-Bowden (one of the Black Library authors):

GrimDark II: Loose canon. It touches on this sort of thing, although more along the lines of "what stuff 'counts'".