Robin Cruddace is one of the designers for Games Workshop. He's nowhere near as good as Jeremy Vetock or Phil Kelly, he is considered the Bane of Tyranid and Tomb Kings players due to his Tyranid and Tomb Kings Codices.
Mostly, his Codices are just boring. They're not particularly well-balanced internally (as Pyrovores will attest), but they aren't guilty of Phil Kelly's monobuild (Aside from 6E Nids). They also aren't very well externally balanced (i.e. against other Codices), but they're nowhere near as bad as Ward's. And his fluff is... well, it really depends on how much of a 'Nids fan you are. In other words, the crunch was crappy bad but still workable with a few good lists, and his fluff can either go from being tolerable, or straight up to Matt Ward levels of pure undisputed bullshit.
In the end, Cruddace will be forever hated by Tyranid players who want to feed him feet-first to a Ripper Swarm for the travesty he inflicted upon the 5th & 6th edition codices. He should probably avoid aquariums or river cruises to South America, lest some disgruntled Neckbeard try to fulfill the aforementioned prophecy by throwing him into a school of Piranhas.
Eventually, Cruddace was mostly trapped in Warhammer Fantasy Battle, possibly because Games Workshop realized nobody likes him that much, or maybe because he legitimately liked the other game better and chose to design for it. The latter seems fairly unlikely, though, as he's a really, really big treadhead. This probably explains why his Imperial Guard 'dex (read: army with dozens of tanks) was so much better than his 'Nids 'dex (read: army with absolutely zero tanks). It's kind of hilarious how GW keeps giving him the infantry only armies, and how he gave the Daemons vehicles.
Also, for some reason, a lot of people spell his name "Cruddance." It has yet to be determined whether this is a shitty attempt at a pun ("crud" + "dance") or just people being inconsiderate faggots (see: Bretonnia v. Brettonia).
Robin Cruddace is a codex writer for Warhammer 40,000 and Warhammer Fantasy Battle, and an utter treadhead. This means, of course, that there is one army he is very good at writing, but not too many others, and there is much wailing and misery over the utter hackjobs he's pulled on the Tyranids, the army he was least suited for. It's also possible that he's not really a treadhead either - the guy's an Imperial Guard player, just like Matt Ward is an Ultramarines player, so like Ward it's easy to see he definitely played a bit of favoritism with his own guys. On the other end of the spectrum, it appears he may have been in the camp of believers that Tyranids were overpowered with overpowered MCs, since that's what he nerfed the hardest, and then he took away all their equipment options so they couldn't even be accidental bargains somehow.
He also filled the Tyranid fluff with page after page of losing battles for Tyranids, rather than the enigmatic analysis on their rapid development and adaptability which they were previously known for (their crunch now makes them among the most rigid armies in the game). In fact, he has one story about how well the Tau were able to out-adapt the Tyranids by tricking them into disadvantageous evolutionary paths. The Tau won that battle by beating Tyranids at their own game. In the Tyranids' own codex. (And thus, the Pyrovore was born!) And then the Tau were killed off by Necrons. Also, he removed all the awesome fluff about Inquisitor Kryptmann (aka spehss Alan Grant from Jurassic Park with a hint of Ripley from Alien/s). Fortunately, with the 6th edition Tyranid codex, someone else realized how stupid this was and brought Kryptmann back, along with adding the story of Tyranids wrecking both Grey Knights and Chaos Daemons in the Shadowbrink campaign. If only they could've saved the crunch from Cruddace.
Editors' note: /tg/ is pretty damn sure that if Cruddace had the power to, he would buff imperial guards to the point of being stronger than A certain selection of model Cheeses and turn them into an army of literally nothing but 9 Tanks and a creed that would wipe out anything short of a primarch on the first turn, and completely kill any remaining units in the second turn while simultaneously Literally Retconning the Tyranids and their entire existence, threat and presence as well as playability from 40k. Let's just hope he never obtains said power.As per the newest Octarius book, it seems he succeeded.
We don't know what's wrong with Cruddace, but if he writes your army's codex, you better hope he likes your army. One theory is that if it kills his guardsmen, he'll hate you forever (no wonder he despises Tyranids as much as the Inquisition despises freedom of speech and opinion.) On that note, the Eldar better hope that Cruddace is never allowed near any of their future codices, but the Dark Eldar have likely already fallen victim to his writing.
No, really, go back and think it through. Now admittedly, sometimes the Tyranids will lose. But a good writer is able to balance a sense of closure with the cosmic horror that there are always more Tyranids out there. When they invaded Macragge they couldn't win because it would kill the Ultramarines forever, and the Ultramarines are pretty damn important to the game. But it was climactic, it was intelligent. It was an epic battle stretching from the dark tunnels of a monastery-fortress to the tundras of the planet surface to the depths of space, both sides fighting tooth-and-nail. It was the entirety of the third biggest group of a theoretically infinite faction, verses the homeworld of one of the most famous and powerful space marine chapters and the heart of one of the most important regions in the Imperium. The Tyranids lost the war as a whole, but they destroyed the entire First Company and decimated the rest of the Chapter, and the Ultramarines could only manage to destroy most of them. Pretty hardcore.
And then there was the Shadowbrink Campaign, where a load of Grey Knights protecting this relic that needs to have rituals performed over it every day to stop a frakload of Daemons from arriving suddenly get a message that the Tyranids are on their way. When said Tyranids arrive, they nom those Grey Knights and the Guardsmen sent to help them, and because those Grey Knights are no longer there to perform their rituals a load of Daemons are unleashed upon the world too. Initially the Tyranids see the Daemons as more food and send feeder beasts to consume them, but because the Daemons are ethereal creatures born from corrupted souls, they can't be eaten, and kill the feeder beasts in all sorts of spectacular ways as they wallow helplessly in a bog created by the Daemons. Realising that that plan went down the toilet, the Hive Mind starts to look upon the Daemons not as prey, but as rival predators after the same food source as the Tyranids (which is pretty much true as Daemons feed off the souls of mortals while the Tyranids devour their bodies). With that in mind it decides to spam a load of gun beasts to blast the Daemons into oblivion, causing the Chaos Gods to fight amongst themselves again now that their plan's going wrong and their Daemons have no more real souls to feed off. A Great Unclean One is blown up by Zoanthropes, Khorne is unable to get any BLOOD FOR THE BLOOD GOD, Tzeentch withdraws his forces early and leaves the other three gods' forces in the shit Just as Planned and Slaanesh decides to be its rival's bitch and follow the Khorne Daemons in a last battle. Sending a load of Tyrannofexes and Trygons to face them, the Tyranids wreck the remaining Daemon forces and force them to retreat back into the Realm of Chaos, before returning to clearing up the rest of the biomass left on the world. Literally the only true Tyranid victory ever mentioned.
In the story Crudface wrote, meanwhile the Tyranids; in their own codex; lost a battle of adaptation to a random Tau force nobody knows. Consider that rapid adaptability was the Tyranids' single most important claim to fame. Then afterwards, Cruddace killed off the whole Tau force anyway. With another faction entirely. The saddest part is how easy it would be to fix: either make it a major Tau world (with the implication that, if the Tau lose, the Tau Empire is nommed), or make the Tau solution something so grimdark and apocalyptic (read: super virus) that the Tau realize the only way to stop the Tyranids when they all finally arrive is to sacrifice the entirety of the Tau Empire (and possibly all sentient life in the galaxy). Hey, its worked in other universes.
But no, he made the Tau better than the Tyranids. Apparently the Ultramarines are just chumps... (he was probably making a remark about how well a certain piece of literature from a certain spiritual liege would realistically hold up against an enemy as dynamic as 'Nids).
That being said, he also made a bunch of the 8th edition Fantasy books, which were, for the most part, pretty good, and seem to be bringing Warhammer Fantasy into *gasp* balance (even if Tomb Kings are still at the arse end of useful). He was also a co-writer for the 7th edition Lizardmen army book, which was considered a strong, but balanced book until 8th edition changes to magic occurred.
There's also a skubtastic argument between Kelly's and Cruddace's fans about the mess of random tables that Codex: Chaos Daemon has become. The book's actually decent overall (unless you relied on Fateweaver to win games for you) and balance wise is in line with the other 6th Edition books. Also, the fluff does a good job in portraying the Chaos Daemons. However, if you even try to suggest that one of the two might be behind the nerf of one unit, you'll find yourself in one of the big shitstorms /tg/ is known for.
He recently wrote the new Space Marine codex, its pretty decent and balanced the Chapters lore pretty well compared to the other previous codices, even if it did leave in a lot of the Ultrmarine wank it was reedited to be more balanced.
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