Teetengee

And thank you, good (evil?) doctor, for your work in running this!

well, failure is incompletion, but I did get a *lot* of paint down, and after years of very little hobby, I'm so happy to have done all this. Now I just need to still finish before a trip to Nottingham next month (hoping there's some open tables so I can take pictures with my minis, but at the least I can get some shots at bugman's) These are the unfinished and I did fully finish (save bases) almost a dozen minis to a standard I've never done before:

Alas, my hands were starting to shake earlier and a nap has not resolved it, so I shan't finish my vow in time

Granted, I do think the stormvermin are very pretty

Well, I'm not going to get things done to the standard I had hoped to (spent way too much time on my stormvermin and had some life get in the way), but gonna try to paint all night to get things done to at least a 3color/tabletop standard by the deadline. Wish me luck!

"Best" case scenario, PFP is replaced by tailored individual benefits that make sense for each unit specifically when near death and suffering. (best being that it would be very characterful, but I can imagine that many things to track could be hell for tourney style players)

First model done! 69 (or 68, depending on how you count) to go!

Ok, I've done a little more work to push contrast, and try to suggest some weathering (staining in the cloak, warpstone staining around the points of emission, oil on the joints) as well as cleaning up some pieces here and there. I think this is done until basing:

I definitely want it to be a metal, but I could render it in gold? The blanche set came with a rust effect paint, so I'll look how to use it!

Alright, first maybe done paint job, though curious if anyone things it needs more. Right now it is pretty understated. I am limiting myself to the john blanche army painter paints + tesseract though, with the goal of pushing myself a bit. it probably doesn't help that the lighting is very weird

and a multipart is rarely part of a starter box for some time

at least the eldar consider the loss of human lives a sacrifice instead of a goal, even if a miniscule one. Like, both positions are xenophobic in the extreme, but only one is setting up their win condition on the other's death, and it's not the aliens.

I mean, moral relativism is itself not something everyone agrees with, but yeah, we do kind of have to decide on what morality structure we are dealing with when having these discussions for anything meaningful. OP's question seems to be framed about a modern understanding of good/evil, though obviously that still comes with some debate as well. As for "why judge the setting by our standards" well, it's not real. It's created by our contemporaries and people of our recent past. Everything in the 40k world was put there because someone wanted that exact thing there for one reason or another (in GW's case, the reason is frequently to sell whatever new mini just came out). Because of that, it definitely doesn't exist completely separate from modern sensibilities, even if it is not intended to reflect them. It's interesting to think about what that means. As a quick example, a tree in fiction doesn't exist for the same reasons a tree in our world exists. In our world, we have trees because a seed landed there and the tree didn't get eaten, cut down, and had the necessary nutrients, water, etc... to grow. In fiction, a tree exists because the author put it there. Maybe because symbolism. Maybe because their character needed something to lean against or hide behind. In any case, analysis of literature/game settings/whatever doesn't follow the same rules as historical analysis because they're completely different. You say this as if the Imperium doesn't do all of these things and worse.

I've always assumed all the weird allies/weird enemies stories exist purely to justify you and your buddy playing a game as a team against some other person(s) using whatever ally rules are currently available (if any). GW is in the business of selling minis, not writing compelling stories in their own right, after all.

Yeah, I mean, the point of this whole topic is "what if 40k had good guys?" and the fact that it doesn't (per OP's definition for good) is kind of part of the setting, so necessarily any discussion would be about big changes to it. I'm not sure anyone here is advocating for actually making the changes we're thinking about, but just considering the what if which was posed by @Inquisitor_Lensoven Some folks in this thread have stated that there are good factions though, but have largely been very vague about what definition of 'good' they're operating under (clearly not OP's).