So what is up with the Q'Orl?

This just makes me wish for a new xenos army.

We haven't gotten a new one since Tau, and I remember when that happened.

Xenology would more suggest that they are an empire similar in size to the Tau one, rather than the Imperium. Their ships are powerful, but no more so than, for example, Imperial designs.They are possibly they are developing warp travel via captured alien psykers and warp drives, but don't otherwise have it, which has limited their expansion and development.

Basically, they're a minor empire in the face of the galaxy, no different from many other alien races or any one of several large ork empires. They would be most comparable to the Tau, but while the Tau are currently in a state of rapid technological development and political expansion, the Q'Orl have been approximately stagnant for at least four thousand years, except when Nurgle dicked them over.

Unless I forgot how to read, no part of that article says they rival the Imperium in size. Though the map does suggest they should have gotten a codex instead of the Tau.

That article is a lot of hyperbole and Q'Orl shilling. They emphasize the size of the empire when it's still dwarfed by the Imperium and Ork enclaves. Someone needs to sort that article out.

I have no idea how OP got the impression that Q'Orl empire "rivals the size of the Imperium's" when in Xenology, a researcher even refers to it as an "aggressive little empire".

And as a comparison, here's a map for the Orks.

The orks are so bad that even half the Eye of Terror apparently has a high level of ork infestation.

How would you design a Q'orl army?

> New aliens faction gathering various races into a ruthless empire
> Evil master race and their vassal or slave races. Sometime the race on the top get overthrown by a vassal race that take its place.
> Style is Byzantine-Ottoman-something clusterfuck, each new leading power building its own style on the previous one.
> Not very resilient to chaos corruption.

> Switch the tau from an empire to a federation (or something similar if it sounds too Star Treky for you) and give them more aliens for variety sake
> Tau are the inclusive but ideologically dominating faction, while new faction is all about power struggle and straight up domination.

Give them some fancy vehicles that can split/combine into larger/smaller vehicles like their spaceships apparently can. Perhaps when a large vehicle loses a certain number of hull points it will be forced to divide, or something like that, though could also split willingly, producing more pieces if done so at higher health.

They seem to favour modularity and standardisation as themes, so should have a smaller number of relatively flexible units that can be tailored to fit specific roles. Basic troops should be relatively weak, but have high leadership. I might tend towards strength and toughness 4, but only a 5+ of 6+ save as standard. Everything should be pretty mobile, with an emphasis more on shooting but with decent combat ability to back it up. No psykers, obviously.

Elite units will be bionically improved, featuring more powerful and accurate shooting plus better armour, but no great improvement in melee.

It's because for the most part the 40k verse is more concerned with the Imperium/Chaos conflict.

Imagine a crusader style game where there's a threeway going on between Sultanates, Christendom and Mongol hordes, and there's a footnote about the Korean peninsula/Japan. Sure, they are there but they aren't really part of the main conflict of the setting. If the story was more about Ordo Xenos than Space Marines and Chaos it would probably have them as a major faction.

Who knows, maybe GW might make them as a new faction at some point. They've been teasing more Xenos for a while.

>Imagine a crusader style game where there's a threeway going on between Sultanates, Christendom and Mongol hordes, and there's a footnote about the Korean peninsula/Japan.
Whoa...kinda want to play this.

They're being obtuse, Black Library stuff is perfectly canonical.

Autists just want to tier the canon Star Wars style even when GW has gone out of their way to say it's all equally canon (i.e. they don't care) and both Black Library and Forge World are literally just divisions of GW.

Go play anything medieval historical.

There's a shit ton of games that already do this though.

What I want to play is Colonial-punk wargaming. I want to crush the Ashanti as a British commander, and send an army of slaves out to soak up French bullets for the glory of Merina.

Canonicity in 40K is dependent on references relative to scale.
If one book references a character of little import, that character is considered canon.
If one, and only one book, references huge character that "controls everything", but that information is never referred to again, it can be presumed the overhead didn't like the direction that plotline was going and retconned it, making it not-really-canon-but-a-good-argument-could-be-made-for-it. If that character does actually appear in more sources, they're canon. Especially if they have an actual noticeable impact on other parts of the universe.
This is why huge things like Draigo appearing in warhammer fantasy end times aren't considered canon crossovers, it's really just an in-joke unless GW picks it up in the future.
Same deal with the eye of terror campaign, which was later confirmed to be not-really-canon by gathering storm and other material which retconned all but the most basic facts.
Xenobiology, as a source, is particularly egregious of these dropped plothooks, as the authors were clearly allowed some deal of free reign, and so quite a number of things said in the book ended up being soft retconned later on, making the credibility of the source overall dubious.
Now, as you said, there is little that isn't canon. Th oft said quote is "everything is canon, not everything is true", and yeah, somebody could make a case for the Q'Orl, but the only sources I see on lexicanum are xenobiology and dark heresy, and they're not exactly the most highly thought of sources when it comes to lore.