Teetengee

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).

you realize there are other options like.... hey, last time we went all in on AI, that didn't work, so let's be a bit more careful about where and how we use machines. There's choices between luddism and machine apocalypse. Similarly, the mistake with treating warp and daemons (not demons) as xenos is that they're not. Daemons are in the 40k universe, largely human subconscious and psychic energy run wild and caught in self-enforcing feedback loops (the chaos gods are just psychic feedback loops, basically the metaphysical equivalent of a prion disease). Now that the humans in 40k understand what chaos, the warp, and daemons are, they wouldn't handle them the same way they handle xenos, but that doesn't mean the actual aliens you can't treat like a people that they are. You seem very absolutist on this and also incapable of accepting that maybe people try something similar but learn from the fatal mistakes so they don't fail the same way again. (again, I understand that learning from mistakes isn't exactly the imperial forte here, but a human faction certainly could do it). As for mischaracterizing your position, that is inevitable when you refuse to detail it, so you may want to do so if you don't want to be mischaracterized.

Tau, Orks, Eldar, and Necrons can all be negotiated with. Necrons it's certainly more complex, but not impossible. And in older lore even nids had negotiators in the zoats. Theoretically, GW could bring back zoats alongside an exploration of what happens to nids cut off from the hive mind beyond just those like the malstrain. I doubt there's any interest in it, as nids are much more narratively useful as force of nature style enemies than as a separate culture, but there might be pockets of it. I do think threat of nids is a useful thing to negotiate a solution to, and one that at least Eldar and Tau would likely be amenable to. The orks and eldar at their height fought well against Necrons, add humans to the mix and necron's current lack of unity, and it might tip the scale to allow for victory, or at least an uneasy draw. The necrons of old were controlled by a single mind and driven by singular hatred and purpose. But now their old enemies are gone, the singular control is broken, and they too are an empire struggling under 10s of thousands of years of decay. Necrons of 40k aren't the Necrons which defeated the Eldar+Krork, and Ghazghul is increasingly moving the Ork toward their past heights. No one group has the strength to defeat everyone, but by working together there would be hope. Of course, 'working together' and 'hope' are tonally inconsistent with the setting and while likely necessary for introduction of a good faction, I still don't think I would actually want that. I like that the possibility is there but no one is taking it because of their own prejudices and traumas; it's why the setting got to where it is, and continuing that way sort of fits. The imperium is the worst possible future precisely because they reject every chance of being better.

I could have predicted that response. We went into this a bit in a discussion about why there aren't role playing games for the non-human factions and it's because most human written aliens are largely just humans in funny suits. Most exist to offer perspectives of outsiders and cultural interaction via analogue and distance as much as any other reason. Necrons are very obviously based at least in part on understandings of Ancient Egyptian culture, of course, but many other xenos species are also rooted in specific real world cultures, just like many imperial factions are.

a coalition of these types who continue to build those ties and unpack the other terrible views they have of each other could engender a good faction in the long run if they could find a way to stick around. Having folks like Guilliman and other heroes of the Imperium on your side would certainly help with that though. I think Guilliman for one is introspective and analytical enough to realize that the imperial strategy can't hold forever, and might be willing to engage in real alliance and coalition building even if only out of desperation now that he's tried the other options. I may be giving him too much credit though.

I think a repair or alternate webway project is the most realistic way that GW might move the setting toward something less fatalistic. Alliance with harlequins might allow for it, bartering with deldar (though...hmmm), or even someone figuring out a way to quarantine parts of the imperial webway could allow for opportunities. And hell, maybe you have to sacrifice terra for it, emperor dies and resurrects, terra is overrun, astronomicon shuttered, but you lock it out of the system and can access it elsewhere so terra and the astronomicon aren't as needed anymore. I don't think anyone in humanity factions are working on such a project explicitly, but it wouldn't surprise me if some inquisitors might try it, or maybe the khan.

I'm less looking at past lore and more looking at what might happen on the return of future primarchs. We've seen previously unparalleled cooperation with xenos (especially yvraine and her eldar factions) and loyalist primarchs have perspective over the 10k fall in combination with the influence to make it a difficult prospect for the Imperium to just destroy them if they step away from orthodoxy. Additionally, the Imperium's ability to crush other attempts is deteriorating with its own crumbling. If the emperor were to die, resurrect, or rise from the throne, there would be enormous tumult throughout the entirety of the imperium and felt through all the galaxy. If a primarch stepped into that vacuum he might have both the influence and perspective to push toward something different, and maybe better. The primarchs themselves might not have the capacity for it, to be honest, but a faction which included a primarch could use the reputation and political significance of the primarch's presence to push for things no other imperial breakaway faction ever could, particularly in the event of a catastrophe like what the recent lore changes regarding the terminus decree suggest might be coming. You'd need a confluence of things 1. Imperial focus sufficiently divided. 2. Perspective on the Imperial decline. 3. The willingness to admit mistakes have been made. 4. A potent enough force to defend until recruitment and alliance can start growing your position. The right people, at the right time, with the right resources, might have a chance. But they'd have to be willing to challenge their own prejudice, bias, and assumption, and make a ton of sacrifices both personal and at larger scales. And you'd have to work very fast to build something up in the wreckage of the Imperium fast enough that you don't get stuck in the "dangerous enough to not be ignored, but not dangerous enough to defend yourself" zone. All that said though...I don't want that to actually occur? I like the idea of it as a hope that fails to be realized better than an actuality, as the measure of that failure is the context by which the tragedy of 40k is given weight. I feel like it would turn 40k into something else, and AOSization that wouldn't really capture the vibes of 40k. I'm of mixed feelings on whether a split in systems between 40k the old world and 41k, age of hope and progress after such an event would be good or not, but I'd definitely not want to see just a pure move into that sort of thematic shift. EDIT: Not sure where to put this in the above, but it's worth noting that not only the Imperium is crumbling, and it seems like everybody's end times are kind of coming around the same pace. Many factions are losing strength, which allows for other factions a little more breathing room and more negotiating power to deal with the factions which aren't (nids, maybe orks, maybe crons)