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^burtle posted:Still riding in the comfortable embrace of Gaunt over the last three weeks for the Holiday and I've smashed Guns to halfway through His Last Command and you guys weren't kidding about DAbb's endings. The amount of poo poo that just gets cast aside or quickly wrapped up is a head scratch, but I've learned to just let it roll now. I'm finishing up the Ravenor Omnibus now. DAbb has about 50 pages to wrap up a time travel plot, multiple secret daemonic possessions, two Xanatos Gambit chaos schemers, Ravenor dying in surgery a millennial before the novel began, half the party being taken prisoner by the villains, a semi-psychic molirror kid learning how to use his skills, multiple Xenos prophecies, a psychic TARDIS, etc, and then set everything up for the next group of books. Can he do it?!? ...Maybe?
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Jan 7, 2019 21:04
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susan posted:I'm finishing up the Ravenor Omnibus now. DAbb has about 50 pages to wrap up a time travel plot, multiple secret daemonic possessions, two Xanatos Gambit chaos schemers, Ravenor dying in surgery a millennial before the novel began, half the party being taken prisoner by the villains, a semi-psychic molirror kid learning how to use his skills, multiple Xenos prophecies, a psychic TARDIS, etc, and then set everything up for the next group of books. Can he do it?!? ...Maybe? Narrator: He could.
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Jan 7, 2019 21:50
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Oh. I emailed BL about the Audiobook delays on Titandeath etc, and they confirmed they are planning on releasing them but there has been a quote:Production Delay  I note the new Gaunt book does specify pre-order available in MP3 as well, so hopefully it hasn't effected a lot of their schedule. Deptfordx fucked around with this message at 22:17 on Jan 7, 2019 |
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Jan 7, 2019 22:15
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bango skank posted:hell yeah dude holy gently caress this rules I don't see it, there's a split second where he appears and then cuts to a close up when he's putting bolts into the two guys manning the heavy gun. What I miss? quote:e: dude that shot of the multi-laser bolts impacting on the one marine followed by the plasma The whole thing where the marines are killing just so matter-of-factly. Employing tactics with absolute precision and timing. Just look at the marines who keep moving when the heavy gun starts shooting through the wall at them and the marine behind them pauses and waits for the sneaky marine to pop those two into bloody mist.  Someone I was chatting with on a discord said the marines should be taking casualties cause there is no tension but this isn't a clip from a war movie, it's an execution. These guys are horror movie monsters and they just have a lot of victims between them and some other horror movie monsters they have been fighting against for millenniums. MariusLecter fucked around with this message at 22:20 on Jan 7, 2019 |
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Jan 7, 2019 22:17
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There is not supposed to be tension until they hit the traitor marines yes. Also im like 90% sure there is an astropath or navigator in the metal ball thing.
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Jan 7, 2019 22:21
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MariusLecter posted:I don't see it, there's a split second where he appears and then cuts to a close up when he's putting bolts into the two guys manning the heavy gun. What I miss? MariusLecter posted:The whole thing where the marines are killing just so matter-of-factly. Employing tactics with absolute precision and timing. The precision and unstoppable advance is a big part of what makes this great in my opinion. There's the one bit where they're moving down a hallway towards a group of defenders behind a barricade that are firing on them and you just see four rounds come down the hallway from the marines, picking each defender off almost simultaneously but not before one gets a rocket off, allowing for the marines to sidestep and set up this badass shot as it explodes behind them: 
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Jan 7, 2019 22:50
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I just read Warmaster by Abnett. While it was a fun thing to read it was pretty jarring when it just stopped, rather than having a proper ending.
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Jan 8, 2019 01:17
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abnett.txt
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Jan 8, 2019 02:01
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At this point I have just accepted that the Ghosts books are not a 15+ book series of novels, they're one epic novel published as a serial like Sherlock Holmes etc used to be.
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Jan 8, 2019 04:20
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I just finished Ravenor and want to pick up Magos and Pariah, but is Pariah good as a self contained work? It looks like Abnett has been taking a break from that trilogy for a while, and I'd rather not bother if it's a cliff hanger with no sequel in sight.
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Jan 8, 2019 04:56
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I keep forgetting I’ve never read Ravenor. Soo many space Barbie books, so little time. Just started in on Titandeath, it’s a goodin.
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Jan 8, 2019 05:19
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Arcsquad12 posted:I just can't get into Age of Sigmar when the Old World is so much more interesting. The lore and setting has vastly improved so there is nothing wrong with giving it a chance now.
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Jan 8, 2019 05:49
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abrosheen posted:I just finished Ravenor and want to pick up Magos and Pariah, but is Pariah good as a self contained work? It looks like Abnett has been taking a break from that trilogy for a while, and I'd rather not bother if it's a cliff hanger with no sequel in sight. I recently did a full read-through of the Magos reading order. Read Pariah as part of the whole Magos experience. It'll be fine.
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Jan 8, 2019 06:16
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abrosheen posted:I just finished Ravenor and want to pick up Magos and Pariah, but is Pariah good as a self contained work? It looks like Abnett has been taking a break from that trilogy for a while, and I'd rather not bother if it's a cliff hanger with no sequel in sight. The sequels are in sight, Abnett has confirmed he has them in his writing schedule, I think for release this year and next year or something like that. The delay was because he got ill combined with BL poo poo management policies, both of which have apparently been brought under control these days.
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Jan 8, 2019 10:49
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MonsterEnvy posted:The lore and setting has vastly improved so there is nothing wrong with giving it a chance now. If it's not too much trouble, is it possible to get a synopsis of what has changed?
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Jan 8, 2019 10:52
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Dodoman posted:If it's not too much trouble, is it possible to get a synopsis of what has changed? The forces of order have retaken a lot of the land that was lost. As a result Kingdoms, cities, and towns are once again set up throughout the realms or make contact with each other. Normal people start setting up and living their lives. We get some more details about how the realms work and its history. For example the realms are generally large disc shaped masses of land and water that are normal in the center area of the disc, but become weirder and more fantastical the closer you go to the edge. Nagash and the forces of death are currently the big threat, chaos is taking a bit of a back seat for now. Gotrek is back and complaining about dwarfs not being called dwarfs. These are just some things. The best starting book for learning about thing is apparently the book "Hammerhal and Other Stories."
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Jan 8, 2019 22:33
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I can attest that that is a good intro book; it has one long story which is pretty cool and a bunch of shorter stories with a variety of races. It also includes perhaps the best Black Library story ever written, Beneath the Black Thumb.
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Jan 8, 2019 22:49
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Finished Ravenor and found it really disappointing. Main characters gently caress up so much, yet chance and coincidence wins the day. I'm hoping the rest of the omnibus picks up. Bought the magos at the same time, but should have held off.
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Jan 9, 2019 06:18
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DARPA posted:Finished Ravenor and found it really disappointing. Main characters gently caress up so much, yet chance and coincidence wins the day. I'm hoping the rest of the omnibus picks up. Bought the magos at the same time, but should have held off. I actually struggle to remember how it all ends as I read it a while back, but I do recall thinking "Jesus these people are not acting like the badass throne agents they should be". Really felt like a plot convenience to have Ravenor not lock all that stuff down tight. Overall I love the series, but I did find the ending a bit of a downer. Eisenhorn would have just stared at Thonius until he cried like a cherub and confessed, then probably turned him into a pet daemon.
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Jan 9, 2019 16:29
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Yeah I always found it a little far-fetched that one of the brightest psykers in the Imperium couldn't spot a daemon manifesting itself in one of his close agents
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Jan 9, 2019 16:32
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Demon Of The Fall posted:Yeah I always found it a little far-fetched that one of the brightest psykers in the Imperium couldn't spot a daemon manifesting itself in one of his close agents I kinda liked that, ravenor is so caught up in his feel sorry for me arrogant I know best bent that he often misses the obvious. I’m hoping this ties into bequin trilogy more with him thinking he has to over compensate for previous errors of compassion/trust.
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Jan 9, 2019 18:06
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My reading order was Eisenhorn, Magos, Ravenor. Ironically, I'm less hyped for the eventual showdown now than I was before I read Ravenor.
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Jan 9, 2019 18:07
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DARPA posted:Finished Ravenor and found it really disappointing. Main characters gently caress up so much, yet chance and coincidence wins the day. I'm hoping the rest of the omnibus picks up. Bought the magos at the same time, but should have held off. I kind of thought the same thing about Eisenhorn. He blunders into lots of situations that resolve in his favor due to factors totally out of his control. Also, as opposed to Ravenor just missing the demon manifestation due to another character's bumbling, Eisenhorn's direct actions create his third book, final boss antagonist. I still enjoyed both.
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Jan 9, 2019 19:20
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Agreed about Ravenor missing the obvious. I still dug the Enuncia bits and the sense of world-ending universal power hidden in secret. Stuff like that is why I read 40k, and sci-fi general.
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Jan 9, 2019 19:27
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I felt that Enuncia was kind of silly, and it's mostly dropped after the second book. It doesn't really do anything except get mentioned vaguely in the third, and nobody actually even tries to use it when things are as bad as can be.
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Jan 9, 2019 19:49
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Dodoman posted:If it's not too much trouble, is it possible to get a synopsis of what has changed? What's really changed is that GW actually gives a poo poo about the setting now and is actively devoting time to fleshing it out and grounding it to a perspective that the reader can associate with. Even the Stormcast have personality and are interesting now.
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Jan 10, 2019 14:23
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Agreed with the above thoughts on Ravenor. It also had some weird... I want to say 'anachronisms' but I'm not sure that's the right word for 40k incongruities, but I'm going with it. Like, servitors with personalities who could speak in full sentences. And starships with crews of around 50 people, not 50,000. And the three-way-door bit felt more Harry Potter than Grimdark. It was enjoyable and I'm glad I read it, but it's so weird to me that this was written *after* Eisenhorn, so many of the elements felt less fleshed out to me.
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Jan 10, 2019 17:37
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Abnett is bad at scale, see previous discussions. The talking servitors seemed to be a weird mish-mash of the idea of integrated crew and actual servitors. His ship captains also wander around a lot while his titan Princeps are hard-wired into their bacta tanks, which is basically a straight inversion of pre-Abnett descriptions. The flects were a 40k as gently caress type of drug though, a great conceptual addition to the setting.
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Jan 10, 2019 17:52
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susan posted:Agreed with the above thoughts on Ravenor. It also had some weird... I want to say 'anachronisms' but I'm not sure that's the right word for 40k incongruities, but I'm going with it. Like, servitors with personalities who could speak in full sentences. And starships with crews of around 50 people, not 50,000. And the three-way-door bit felt more Harry Potter than Grimdark. It was enjoyable and I'm glad I read it, but it's so weird to me that this was written *after* Eisenhorn, so many of the elements felt less fleshed out to me. The galaxy is a big place. Depending on the servitor role, it's perfectly understandable for them to be able to speak in complete sentences. They could still be mind wiped and have other cognitive skills disabled though. As for the ship crews, you can run a ship on a skeleton crew. Most of our reference is for battleships which are naturally going to have tons of people just by their nature. I don't remember the example you're referencing in Ravenor, but transport ships could easily get away with smaller crews because they don't need a lot of infrastructure support. Also, depending on the ship, more or less of the crew functions could be served by whatever stands for the ship's machine spirit. Also, unreliable narrators.
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Jan 10, 2019 18:17
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Isn't the main ship they use in Ravenor the rogue trader? Maxillia is the captain or something like that? IIRC he did use servitors over actual crew, so that's why there wasn't a lot of people on there and why they were able to be boarded and taken over fairly quickly by the bad guys.
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Jan 10, 2019 18:24
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Quick question: Is the fall of Caliban covered in any book of the Horus Heresy thus far, or any other ancillary novel? If I recall correctly, we get all of the setup and fluff regarding Luther, Zahariel and whatshiname scheming back on Caliban while the Ruinstorm separates them from Lionel Johnson, or Zahariel being pissed off about Nemiel getting domed, or Zahariel discovering that Caliban is basically alive, but I don't recall ever reading about the destruction of Caliban
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Jan 10, 2019 20:38
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My favorite part of Ravenor was the elite inquisitorial team coming up against their most brutal foe, and failing: the sheer grinding horror of clerical work in the Administratum.
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Jan 11, 2019 00:22
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Arquinsiel posted:Abnett is bad at scale, see previous discussions. The talking servitors seemed to be a weird mish-mash of the idea of integrated crew and actual servitors. His ship captains also wander around a lot while his titan Princeps are hard-wired into their bacta tanks, which is basically a straight inversion of pre-Abnett descriptions. Yeah, Maxilla was a recluse who didn't like human contact much so his (her?) crew was made up of extremely ornate servitors. From what I remember of the Princeps thing, wasn't the bacta tank like being put in a dreadnaught? When you get too badly injured or your plugs start to destroy your body you can get tanked and become even closer to the flow of battle? I seem to remember a commander saying he thinks all princeps should be put in tanks as it gives them so much more connection. Agreed HARD on the flects. Such a cool, unique thing to the 40k universe. Dog_Meat fucked around with this message at 08:22 on Jan 11, 2019 |
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Jan 11, 2019 08:16
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Preechr posted:My favorite part of Ravenor was the elite inquisitorial team coming up against their most brutal foe, and failing: the sheer grinding horror of clerical work in the Administratum. What nightmarish look at the beaucracy though like goodamn.
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Jan 11, 2019 13:51
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Arquinsiel posted:Abnett is bad at scale, see previous discussions. The talking servitors seemed to be a weird mish-mash of the idea of integrated crew and actual servitors. His ship captains also wander around a lot while his titan Princeps are hard-wired into their bacta tanks, which is basically a straight inversion of pre-Abnett descriptions. Almost every Titan Princeps I can recall are hard-wired into their Titans, the only exceptions I can think of were the ones from the Priests of Mars series, and even then the oldest ones were hard-wired in or heavily modified with technology. Ship captains seems to be more of a 50/50 split overall from what I've read, some are permanently hardwired into their ships, others are described as having dozens or hundreds of linkpoints when they sit in their command thrones (which raises the question of if the first category are permanently hardwired in, or simply choose to never leave the throne), and then there are the ones that have pilots/engineers fly the ship while they direct.
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Jan 11, 2019 14:10
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Dog_Meat posted:Yeah, Maxilla was a recluse who didn't like human contact much so his (her?) crew was made up of extremely ornate servitors. quote:From what I remember of the Princeps thing, wasn't the bacta tank like being put in a dreadnaught? When you get too badly injured or your plugs start to destroy your body you can get tanked and become even closer to the flow of battle? I seem to remember a commander saying he thinks all princeps should be put in tanks as it gives them so much more connection.
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Jan 11, 2019 15:04
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Randalor posted:Almost every Titan Princeps I can recall are hard-wired into their Titans, the only exceptions I can think of were the ones from the Priests of Mars series, and even then the oldest ones were hard-wired in or heavily modified with technology.
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Jan 11, 2019 15:16
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Although at the same time Abnett wrote the Titan comic series which had the princeps plugging into the Titan in his seat and could leave it whenever he needed to.
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Jan 11, 2019 15:28
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It depends on the book, depends on the situation, like everything Abnett does. He can nail scale in one book and botch it the next. His best look at mass scale combat is probably the initial planetfall in Armor of Contempt when the Navy displaces so much atmosphere that they cause a cascade of thunderstorms dues to the pressure change.
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Jan 11, 2019 16:12
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Arcsquad12 posted:It depends on the book, depends on the situation, like everything Abnett does. He can nail scale in one book and botch it the next. His best look at mass scale combat is probably the initial planetfall in Armor of Contempt when the Navy displaces so much atmosphere that they cause a cascade of thunderstorms dues to the pressure change. That whole combat scene through Dalin's eyes is probably the most insane, authentic look at what mass combat would be like in the 40k universe anyone has ever written. Just absolute nonsensical mayhem and madness and sensory overload.
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