Saturday 19 January 2019

Revisiting 40k: Eldar

Eldar were "my" army back in my Warhammer 40,000 playing days, so revisiting modern Eldar material has the feel of visiting very old and dimly-remembered relatives: names like Striking Scorpions, Howling Banshees, Dire Avengers and Dark Reapers, that I have not heard or read in years, unlock certain attic doors inside my brain where it has packed away all sorts of memories it thought it wouldn't be needing anymore.

I have mixed feelings about what has been done with the Eldar. On the one hand, the development of new sub-Eldar factions, the "Drukhari" (sigh) and Harlequins, seems like the worst combination of fan service, raw commercial exploitation, and lazy adoption of current cultural reference points (would there have been an entire Harlequins faction were it not for the success of The Dark Knight?). The name "Drukhari" in particular sends shivers of cringe down my spine: the fact that it has nothing to do with all other Gaelic-influenced Eldar naming conventions, the fact that it uses that terribly bland and over-used plural suffix "-i" as a shorthand for exoticism...then there's also the fact that Eldar are dark enough for there not to need to be a "Dark Eldar" faction at all, the fact that the backstory is completely ridiculous ("To save your own souls you have to become EVIL!!!!"), the fact that the Eldar brand of evil ends up being exactly the same as the human type: slavery and torture.

But all of that said, you would have to say that Games Workshop have managed to make, in the Eldar, a variant of Tolkien's elves which is much more interesting than those found elsewhere - especially more so than your common-or-garden D&D elf. Partly it's because, perhaps perversely, there is a stronger streak of Noldor in them than you tend to get in other Tolkien derivatives; the arrogance, vanity, vengefulness, and also of course the susceptibility to corruption and the motif of a long-running, but ultimately doomed, struggle against an ancient enemy. There's also the fact that, Drukhari aside, the Games Workshop designers didn't shy away from the idea - again ultimately Tolkien's - of elves-as-sidhe. The concept of fae-in-the-far-future shouldn't really work, but does, and is one that I feel they could push even more strongly: I can't help but feel the Harlequins be more interesting if the idea of the capricious trickster was followed through properly and they became true against of chaos in the ordinary sense - souped-up uber-warriors whose true motives are never made clear and who pick fights apparently at random, all in the name of some game that only they understand?

But at the same time, the Eldar also draw a lot from Moorcock and other veins of "weirder" British fantasy writing. I mean, take a look at these models: this is like the Melniboneans turned to 11 (especially the woman with the stilettos and pet alien-cat-thing), and I can't help just loving it:


It is completely, ludicrously camp and silly. But brilliant with it: what in official, bland WotC standard D&D-land comes close to it?

17 comments:

  1. Yvraines pose was so good they re-used it for Skatrott

    https://www.games-workshop.com/en-GB/Gloomspite-Gitz-Skragrott-The-Loonking-2019

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  2. In fairness, the Harlequins were irst available as their own separate faction in 1989, but their more recent resurgence may well be Joker-related.

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    1. I think they would have been way too goofy for modern uber-serious 40k otherwise.

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  3. Yes, the Moorcock influence is strong; the GW Melnibonean miniatures looked very much like low-tech versions of the Eldar: much more so than the high elves.

    I wonder how much direct Tolkien influence there is. If you go way back to the old Regiments of Renown, the sea elves seemed much more decadent and Melnibonean than Tolkienesque (despite the name "Lothern"):

    http://solegends.com/citrr/1rr13lothern/index.htm

    I always feel with GW that they're better at miniatures than background - and that their games were more fun when the background was sketchy in the extreme - consisting mainly of space to come up with your own stuff (Lothern in the link above being an example). They used to come up with lots of settings that got a line or two, or a box insert or not even that. What, precisely, did Ugezod's Death Commandos get up to, and what was their relationship to the Mothercrushers? We were never told ...

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    1. I disagree a little bit about that. It depends what you mean by "background". The very detailed backstories they come out with tend not to be all that interesting, but I think in terms of setting construction that the Old World and the 40k universe are pretty much the best fantasy settings ever created among those which have wide commercial appeal.

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    2. You can draw a clear line from GW's old Melnibonean ranges to the early Warhammer dark and sea elf miniatures.

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  4. I think there was a window of time where the Dark Eldar had a great conceptual space that was distinct enough from regular Eldar to be worth it (for a while there was even an "Eldar Corsairs" faction that could mix and match a bit from each codex, which made the space elves more of a gradient than Good and Bad camps). They were simultaneously the wicked fairies who steal children (but in space) and a kind of slick cyberpunk that doesn't get as much play in other 40k factions. The 6th edition codex was their high water mark for me.

    In general though I think Warhammer hits a real sweet spot between the Tolkien and Moorecock influences. High Elves and Eldar have one of the better fantasy game religions.

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    1. Yeah, wicked fairies who steal children (not for nasty child-abuse reasons but something else) would be a way more interesting motif for the Drukhari than "they like slavery and torture".

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    2. The Hellraiser/Event Horizon influence is very strong with Dark Eldar (using the older term b/c I'm not that familiar w/ the most recent version). I actually think the slavery angle is a good one. It's a materialist, sci-fi justification for why the unseelie courts are always kidnapping people.

      Plus at the end of the day I think there's only so many bad things you can do to people, especially when you're painting in bold colors and broad strokes.

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    3. I dunno. I guess materialist, sci-fi justifications for why unseelie courts would do something seems like a mismatch that can never be satisfactorily reconciled.

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    4. In any other setting I think I'd agree with you, but to me that friction is where most of the best stuff in 40k lives. FTL drives that take you through literal Hell. Biologically engineered demi-god heroes. Space elves running on "any sufficiently advanced magic". Technology worship in which user manuals are passed down as sacred texts and ritualistic oral traditions. Is the Emperor actually divine or just a super-psychic brain on life support, and how would you even tell the difference? That energetic mashup of things that shouldn't work together but somehow do is what makes 40k such a vital and exciting setting to me, and in that context I can get onboard with Imperial humans viewing the dark eldar as cruel fairies who steal people at night while the eldar themselves are simply pirate raiders with better technology who burn through slaves unsustainably fast.


      I also kind of like how the dark eldar sacrifice to their gods as a form of appeasement rather than an act of worship. I definitely get where you're coming from with finding "the bad guys are really into torture" boring and ugly though, because I almost always find it boring and ugly as well.

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  5. Warhammer 40 000 strike a very delicate balance of mass commercial appeal and it's old ancestry of balls-to-the-walls 'weird british stuff', gothic art and surreal euro-comics a la Moebius.

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  6. Yeah, jerkass but not just evil in human terms elves are the best. As long as they're not just ecoterrorists which is so damn boring.

    Had an elf communicating with the PCs in courtly letters delivered by arrows aimed at them. That sort of thing.

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  7. Oh and for making Tolkien rip-offs better by adding more Tolkien, the same thing works for dwarves. Dial up the jealously, greed and xenophobia found in Tolkien, dial down the drunk Scotsman.

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    1. Yeah, the trollslayers had a bit of that, actually.

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  8. Agreed on most points. And I adore the idea of Babylon 5-esque "soul tech" being taken to the point of actually manufacturing gods. (Granted GW was there long before B5, but B5 was the first place I saw that put such things on the tech hierarchy of sci-fi.)

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