Warhammer 40,000/Tropes/A to H: Difference between revisions

* [[After Action Report]]: Battle reports, a long-standing feature in White Dwarf magazine.

* [[After the End]]: Though there have been about five "ends" for humanity alone, each more awful than the last.

** Tau drones are also entirely well-behaved. Mind you, their AI is approximately the same as a squirrel (OK, [[Call a Rabbit a Smeerp|pterasquirrel]]), though it does increase as more of them are networked together.

* [[Air Jousting]]: Eldar Shining Spears: space elf knights on flying bikes with laser lances.

* [[Boring but Practical]]: Or as close to 'boring' as it gets in the setting anyhow... all armies are able to field powerful special troops, amazing heroes and crazy war machines, but you generally cannot win without a good chunk of your army being made up of some variant or another of your standard rank-and-file troops, a fact often referred to as 'Boys before toys'.

* [[Boring Invincible Hero]]: Every faction tends to get this treatment in its own codex, in a manner appropriate to the race (EG the Space Marines tend to emerge triumphant against overwhelming odds, the Imperial Guard tend to win through attrition and great loss of life, the Orks tend to win by being [[Crazy Awesome]], etc.). Conversely, if a faction appears in someone else's codex, it usually means they're getting [[The Worf Effect|Worfed]].

* [[Brain Bleach]]: What you'll need after reading ''[[Old Shame|Space Marine]]'' (the tabletop game, not the new video game). Or some of the stuff on [[Image Boards|/tg/]].

* [[Brain-Computer Interface]]: For those few with cerebral implants, the issue is moot - they ''are'' part computers. For everyone else there are: Mind Impulse Unit (aka sense-link), its limited (and seen outside Mechanicus more often) variant Weapon MIU - effectively third eye sight with HUD, and humble "interface port" (usually on the neck, but may be just about anywhere) - lesser version available very widely even for scribes that eases work using computers, but doesn't have tactical uses other than repair.

* [[The Collector of the Strange]]: Chaos, the Orks, and the Dark Eldar collect the skulls (and occasionally other body parts) of their enemies as trophies. The Imperium collects the skulls of particularly pious servants for use as relics and [[Attack Drone]]s.

* [[Colony Drop]]: ''[http://warseer.com/forums/showthread.php?t=33310 Deconstructed]'', if you can believe it, but also used straight on occasion. "In close consultation with his advisors, Orkimedes determined that the best solution to the tactical flexibility of Imperial forces was to drop big rocks on them." A surprisingly common Ork technique to both deploy close to the enemy [in fact on top of a portion of them] and weaken aforementioned enemy.

** Space Marines especially; many chapters feel that adding camouflage patterns to their armor would be "[[Honor Before Reason|dishonoring the colors of the chapter]]," and intentionally dress in bright and highly-visible colors so that their enemy can see them and quake in terror at their approach.

** Eldar are colour coded to the extreme- not only does each army have their own colour schemes, but each DIFFERENT KIND of soldier has their own colours- orange for Fire Dragons, green for Striking Scorpions, blue for Dire Avengers, and so on...

** The Slaaneshi weapon aptly named "Lash of Torment".

* [[Comes Great Insanity]]: A rich tradition among leadership figures within the Imperium, from Horus to High Lord Vandire. Generally, reforms follow in their wake to stop similar incidents happening. For example, after the Horus Heresy, the Space Marine Legions were divided into smaller Chapters. In the case of Vandire, no-one was ever allowed to become both the head of the [[Obstructive Bureaucrat|Administratum]] and the [[Church Militant|Ecclesiarchy]] again. And the Ecclesiarchy couldn't keep men-at-arms. [[Amazon Brigade|Which they got around]].

* [[Commissar Cap]]: [[Trope Namer]], and not entirely restricted to Commissars - a few regular regular officers and the odd Inquisitor wear similar hats, and some Orks love looting them.

** In fact, Nork Deddog, a (comparatively) super intelligent Ogryn bodyguard was rewarded a [[Commissar Cap]].

*** It's also an expy of ''Dune'''s Galactic Empire. The Imperium even has a God-Emperor and a class of mutated transhuman hyperspace navigators.

** The [[Alien|Xenomor]]- er- Tyranids.

** Commander Farsight was a prominent leader of an Empire's military forces. He eventually led some of his brethren in a rebellion against the powerful ruling cast, whose whims most Tau serve their entire lives. [[Stargate SG-1|He is also known as O'Shovah.]]

* [[Extreme Omnivore]]: Tyranids eat everything up to and including ''entire planets'', right down to the bedrock, ''including the atmosphere''.)

* [[Genre Busting]]: It doesn't matter if the tropes the series uses are from Scifi, Fantasy, Horror, or whatever, as long as they make the setting [[Darker and Edgier]].

* [[Genre Savvy]]: Ork madboyz have been known to [[Medium Awareness|mutter about "Rolls" and "The meta game"]]...

* [[Geo Effects]]: Placing units in or behind pieces of terrain can greatly increase their chances of survival thanks to various rules for movement, shooting, and close combat.

* [[Get a Hold of Yourself, Man!]]: Common among the Imperial Guard. Occasionally delivered via bullet.

** Other eyepieces range from trivial like Mono-sight (cable-linked with camera sight on a gun, to aim without sticking your head out) to augmented reality systems like Targeting Monocle (Mono-sight that also is a ballistic calculator automatically taking into account range, wind, etc plus an extra function - either motion predictor, light amplifier, IR or telescopic sight - and looks really posh) or Ocular Catechizer (shape recognition unit that needs to be held on target for a little while, but functionality ranges from identification of vehicles [[Stat-O-Vision|with overlay of helpful notes]] to highlighting the needle in a rustled haystack, to translation of written text, as long as one has access to relevant source data).

* [[Golem]]: Eldar wraith-constructs. Also, vat-grown Servitors/Cherubim/Gholam.

* [[Gone Horribly Right]]: The book ''Farseer'' ([[Fanon Discontinuity|if you count it]]) has an Eldar character admitting that some of the Eldar, shortly before the fall, were actually deliberately trying to engineer the necessary psychic-resonance to create a new god of pleasure that would allow the Eldar to transcend mortality and live in eternal bliss, leaving behind the concerns of the mortal realm. [[It Got Worse|It did not work out quite as they intended]].

* [[Good Is Boring]]: Fortunately, there's very little of it around.

* [[Hologram]]: Holo-projectors are fairly widespread. Large-scale "holo-lanterns" are used as stationary art pieces or as cinema. While "holo-wafers" the size of a name badge (projectors holding a single holo-pict) are not quite commonplace, but cheap and has myriads of obvious uses from 3D map to pocket altar to assassin's [[Calling Card]].

** [[Hologram Projection Imperfection]]: Usually a somewhat flickering cone of blue-ish or green-ish light is involved.

* [[Homage]]: Tonnes and tonnes of 'em, some minor, like planets named after Games Developers or deodorants, some much more major. The best example of a major homage would be the Necrons, started as a clear and blatant homage to the ''Terminator'' films: mysterious robotic skeletons, who carried on trying to kill you even if reduced to crawling torsos with no legs, and a special rule called "I'll Be Back". Later changes [[Retcon|departed from this]], focusing more on their image as impossibly ancient servants of even more impossibly ancient monsters. Essentially now a bunch of [[Ancient Conspiracy|Ancient Evil]] [[Determinator]]s with rather too much scalpel imagery, they maintain the robo-skeleton and "I'll Be Back". "I'll be back" has since been redubbed resurrection protocols and their fluff has moved them further than a simple Terminator [[Expy]].

** In what may be a twisted homage to the original Terminator's flesh gradually getting messed up to reveal the robotic endoskeleton (as well as a reference to the Aztec deity Xipe Totec), Necron Flayed Ones invert this: they start as machines that then ''drape themselves in the flayed corpses of their victims''.