Why Kraken?

[Nerevars Goat Univeron]

Browsing for Warhammer games, I saw this, and questioned why Kraken got a DLC instead of something more major. Kraken was kind of small and splintered, and meant almost nothing to the imperium of man, no?

[VigorousSnow]

It might be the fact that more 40k fans are aware of kraken than other tyranid fleets. They also have the Behemoth skin pack, which'll be sure to be known by those who atleast somewhat vare about nids.

[Nerevars Goat Univeron]

Behemoth really caught my attention, both because of if being one of the biggest in the lore, and because I personally play behemoth.

[datguy13]

When Space Hulk was first released, Kraken was one of the bigger, more threatening of the Hive Fleets. Retconns and revisions have made a joke out of half the Tyranid fleets since then.

[Hardûn]

Kraken was splintered, but not small at all. Kraken laid waste to just as many systems as Behemoth, including Ichar IV and Craftworld Iyanden, and unlike Behemoth is still a prominent threat by the end of M41 due to individual splinters escaping destruction and eventually feeding themselves back up to the size of a smaller hive fleet. Kraken took a different approach to Behemoth and Leviathan, but is no less dangerous.

[Crankypants]

There were Tyranid fleets when Space Hulk was released? Genestealers had only just evolved from being the lamphrey faced monsters with a bestiary entry in Rogue Trader. The nearest thing you could run in 40k involving Genestealers was a Genestealer Coven with purestrains, hybrids and repurposed guardsmen.

[illitrate]

I believe Tyranids were also mentioned in Rogue Trader, but as I recall, they were only developed into something like what we now think of as a Tyranid swarm about a year or so after the first edition of Space Hulk was released.

I remember being disappointed that their introduction seemed to reduce the role/threat of Genestealers and as a result shunned Advanced Space Crusade because I was such a fan of Space Hulk and had consumed every bit of related rules and lore relating to Terminators and Genestealers, and then abruptly one issue of White Dwarf changed it all

[datguy13]

Escrito originalmente por illitrate:

I remember being disappointed that their introduction seemed to reduce the role/threat of Genestealers and as a result shunned Advanced Space Crusade because I was such a fan of Space Hulk and had consumed every bit of related rules and lore relating to Terminators and Genestealers, and then abruptly one issue of White Dwarf changed it all

Welcome to how Games Workshop works. They made alot of those arbitrary changes back in the mid-nineties, and it wound up costing Chapter Approved dealers a fortune when these sudden changes in rules and canon resulted in having to order hundreds of additional models in order to keep Approved status. There were more than a few grumbled of "Bad Faith" back then over this type of behavior, and the sudden, inexplicable changes to canon resulted in huge amounts of lost sales, even as it generated a new market.

Whatever the case though, yeah, it was "around the time of Space Hulk's release" more than what I said earlier. There were only a couple of references to the word "Tyranid" in the White Dwarf issues around the time Rogue Trader was being phased out, and only one or two small references in Rogue Trader itself if I remember correctly. (I might not, it's been a loooong time since i read RT). Initially, we thought "Tyranids" were going to just be the next evolution of a Genestealer cult, a named unit a step above the Magus or the Broodlord. Turns out, it got blown out of proportions into a whole new army.