What year is it, currently, in the 8th edition universe?

[brother_b]

Good sirs and madams,

 

If one could be so kind in pointing me to the current year, in game, for 8th edition, that would be great. There's all sorts of information out there online but nothing I could find in my limited search time today to show the current in game year.

 

I'm away from my books.

 

Cheers, and thanks for the help.

 

 

[m0nolith]

Its somewhere post 111.M42, but not really. Basically its either M41 or M42, and its up to you to decide.

 

This is due to two issues:

1. With the great rift popping up, dating is really hard to do. Different places in the galaxy now experience different speeds at which time passes.

2. Because of an internal conflict in the Ordo Chronos, the standard dating system is not accurate by any imagination. According to Gullimans own calculations, the time presently is anywhere between the beginning of M41 and M42. Literally a thousand year margin of error.

Edited July 26, 2019 by m0nolith

[Commander Dawnstar]

The simple answer is that it varies. There isn't any one single answer.

 

Following the opening of Great Rift temporal anomalies spread throughout the galaxy and Guilliman was ultimately forced to concede that it was no longer possible to mark the time and date across the Imperium by a single logic. Different parts of the Imperium now apply their own chronologies, with most using the emergence of the Ciciatrix Maledictum to mark the start of a new era measured by a system specific to their experience of the passage of time.

Edited July 27, 2019 by Commander Dawnstar

[Sete]

Whatever you want it to be.

[Marshal Rohr]

Time B U B B L E S in full effect. Each Indomitus Fleet has its own time. 

[templargdt]

Its somewhere post 111.M42, but not really. Basically its either M41 or M42, and its up to you to decide.

 

This is due to two issues:

1. With the great rift popping up, dating is really hard to do. Different places in the galaxy now experience different speeds at which time passes.

2. Because of an internal conflict in the Ordo Chronos, the standard dating system is not accurate by any imagination. According to Gullimans own calculations, the time presently is anywhere between the beginning of M41 and M42. Literally a thousand year margin of error.

Is this from a Dark Imperium novel or something?  I haven't read any fiction since 8th dropped.

[Marshal Rohr]

Time dilation from the rift will be more severe the closer you are to it. So as The rift snakes across the galactic core as an X axis everything along the Y axis will be more effected close to 0,0 and at the very edges it won’t have any effect at all. You would be able to standardize time outside of the rifts time dilation zones, where it would be something like 110+ years after Cadia. They whole time dilation effect was invented so they could introduce stories like Age of Sigmar has without having to maintain an internal consistency. Pretty weak sauce, but it is what it is. It’s a boon for narrative players, though. You can set your own time passage independent of the main stories without having to worry about what’s happening with Guilliman or anything else. Edited July 26, 2019 by Marshal Rohr

[killersquid]

In Vigilus Defiant, they use a new timestamp designating when the Cicatrix Maledictum appeared in the sky, as the was no way to have a universal system of time anymore. Pretty much, most systems are on their own. Especially those near the Great Rift.

 

So, each warzone would have it's own unique timecode, based on the opening of the rift. Universal imperium time isn't a thing.

 

So, yeah, the time can be whatever you want it to be to fit your narrative.

[Ascanius]

Is this from a Dark Imperium novel or something? I haven't read any fiction since 8th dropped.

Yes, it's from Dark Imperium, no subtitle.

 

To give an example of how the time dilation works, it's also the case that the Tyranid invasion of Baal, home system of the Blood Angels, occurred in 999.M41 - but due to the effects of the Great Rift, the Indomitus Crusade arrived at the system with Primaris reinforcements for the Chapters of the Blood immediately afterwards, even though the invasion of Baal had started before Guilliman was resurrected.

[Redcomet]

No one really knows for sure. In one of the new books it is mentioned that there are several points of view, of what the year is.

[plastic_slug]

Dark Imperium the book was published alongside the launch of the 8th Edition game. In my e-book version, the relevant section occurs on pages 188-189. Guilliman is contemplating the state of the Imperial Calendar. I don't think a brief quote breaks any rules, but I will put it behind a spoiler.

 

“During the Great Crusade and the Heresy, the standard dating system had provided some idea of the order of events over time, but like everything else the Emperor had created, the calendar had become degraded by both dogmatic adherence and thoughtless revisionism. Various rival dating systems had evolved from the Imperial Standard, making a true chronicle of the galaxy almost impossible to construct. By the five main factional variants, Guilliman calculated the current year to be anywhere between early M41 and a millennium later, and that was leaving out the numerous lesser, more heretical interpretations.”

Excerpt From: Guy Haley. “Dark Imperium.” Apple Books.

Edited July 28, 2019 by plastic_slug

[MegaVolt87]

Very surprised RG didn't put his boot down and sort this out with his word as final, he is just that kind of guy. 

[Kinstryfe]

Very surprised RG didn't put his boot down and sort this out with his word as final, he is just that kind of guy.

 

He probably would have if he could have answered the question of what year it was, but I think the point was that the Imperial dating system is so messed up that even a Primarch couldn't figure it out.

[Brother Captain Ed]

 

Very surprised RG didn't put his boot down and sort this out with his word as final, he is just that kind of guy.

 

He probably would have if he could have answered the question of what year it was, but I think the point was that the Imperial dating system is so messed up that even a Primarch couldn't figure it out.

Plus the Cicatrix Maledictum is actively screwing with linear time. It simply cannot be done.

[Marshal Rohr]

The new time system won’t be a problem unless they :cuss it up by trying to move historical events into current events. The Badab War, for a good example was decades before Cadia. There should never be a timeline where Badab was actually happening at the same time as Cadia because of timely-wimey distortions.

[Bryan Blaire]

The new time system won’t be a problem unless they :cuss it up by trying to move historical events into current events. The Badab War, for a good example was decades before Cadia. There should never be a timeline where Badab was actually happening at the same time as Cadia because of timely-wimey distortions.

Aside from working out which forces would have been able to be at which, why would it matter?

 

I'm not advocating that it should happen, I don't think it should either, GW should leave "past" events in the past, and just not indicate exactly what the time difference between two events really is. It's an honest question though, since you were specific in saying "never" - what would it really change?

 

I actually also very curious about why the time of things seems to impact folks so much? It seems really, really important to some, while a lot of my games could have been late M39 to early M42 and it wouldn't have mattered in the slightest.

[Marshal Rohr]

Why would the Astral Claws Rebel against the Imperium if Guilliman had arrived and given them new wargear and reinforcements while relaxing Codex restrictions? Not to mention Badab was already moved from bordering the maelstrom to being across the gulf between spiral arms. Why is the outflow of Armageddons factories to the Segmentum Solar so important that 50,000 space marines are committed to its defense against Orks who can no longer get there because the tribes of Golgotha are on two sides of the rift? Not to mention, Golgotha itself is swallowed up.

I’m not being snarky, these questions were the first that I thought of when I heard a poster elsewhere on the internet suggest Badab be retconned into the Dark Imperium as a oldmarines vs Primaris story. The Armageddon questions are just questions I asked myself because 3WfA is and always will be my holy grail of 40k projects. Also, for selfish reasons, I can do Primaris Executioners if their hundred year penance is finished and they can recruit again.

 

Also, before anyone tries to lock the thread, I’m not interested in expanding on the questions I just put forward or discussing them further, I was just trying to answer BB’s question honestly and not derail the thread.

Edited August 1, 2019 by Marshal Rohr

[Volt]

As of right now in the setting, there is literally a war going on in part of the Inquisition to decide what the date is. Nobody knows, only that roughly a century has passed since the rift exploded. It could be M42, or maybe it was M39 all along.

[OutlawSixActual]

The problem with the "rift dating system" is that it still doesn't help.

 

If the sun exploded right now, we wouldn't see anything happen until 8 minutes from now. If Jupiter exploded, it would be several hours before we saw anything.

 

There are places in the Imperium that shouldnt see the rift open for tens of thousands of years from now - unless they see it sooner or immediately due to warp shenanigans, which means that the rift dating system still won't mean anything for timekeeping across sectors.

[Kinstryfe]

I think you're right about time keeping across sectors, but I can sort of see the logic of it. Before, Imperial time was tied to degrees of confirmation of contact with Terra. This is effectively setting a new year 0 for everyone (which as said, is it's own set of problems), and then time is measured from a closer reference point. It would fix things some on the micro scale; two neighboring systems would probably no longer be 500 years apart; but would still have huge problems on the macro scale.

[Bryan Blaire]

It abandons the "macro scale" anyway, so that part doesn't really matter.

[ElDuderino]

I wonder how you'd even go about trying to keep time universal on the scale of the imperium. Keeping a common time would be hard enough due to relativity and all that, but throw in warp travel with those timey wimey implications and things gets even messier.

 

Maybe the astronimican beams out a time signature or something, that'd be a pretty nifty solution.

[Bryan Blaire]

I wonder how you'd even go about trying to keep time universal on the scale of the imperium. Keeping a common time would be hard enough due to relativity and all that, but throw in warp travel with those timey wimey implications and things gets even messier.

 

Maybe the astronimican beams out a time signature or something, that'd be a pretty nifty solution.

Nothing we’ve seen indicates that it does - it’s more like a metaphysical lighthouse.

 

Time distortion was why there was the check digit in the old system, to indicate how close the date indicated was to the “reality” of Terran standard - the larger the check digit, the more unreliable the date indicated. I think the ideas of using a standard time system with that check digit got a lot of people thinking that time was correctly recorded in the game books, when in reality there was always a “guesstimate”/uncertainty exactly what date stamp things were really occurring on, and the only things you could truly trust to correspond accurately to Terran standard were things happening within a couple of systems proximity to Terra where quicker contact and date correction could be enacted. Anything beyond that and you start getting off by quite a bit due to relativity and Warp shenanigans, as you said.

 

So now GW is just indicating that there’s not going to be an attempt to estimate the dates between large portions of the Imperium and to just use the local time convention.

[b1soul]

From what I understand, they don't even know for sure what the year on Terra is

[Irbis]

I wonder how you'd even go about trying to keep time universal on the scale of the imperium. Keeping a common time would be hard enough due to relativity and all that, but throw in warp travel with those timey wimey implications and things gets even messier.

 

Maybe the astronimican beams out a time signature or something, that'd be a pretty nifty solution.

 

Astronomicon doesn't, but from reading canon psychic messages, don't they always have date attached in header? Then it would be as simple as triangulating warp distortions by sending messages in a grid and measuring what year approximately the neighboring systems have.

 

Funnily enough, GW didn't really even 'advanced' the story that much as the latest dates in post-Indomitus crusade books are still well short of when Amberley was publishing Cain archive. There's still good 80 years to century before 8th edition catches up with Cain books...