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Nessus posted:Which Chaos god do you think will get ya? With my luck? Malal, for sure.
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May 2, 2024 21:45
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Lostconfused posted:I personally do not care about Heresy in the slightest, but people seem to have a lot of attachment to it. So it's more like I'm interested in seeing why everyone else is so hyped about it more than being interested in the novel series itself. The first 5 up to Fulgrim are all sort of threaded together in setting up the heresy up to Istvaan. After that you're in the pointless meandering middle of the heresy section and I'd just read any books for legions you like then the ending if you really want to.
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May 2, 2024 21:46
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I enjoyed tEatD 2 as well, but...DAD LOST MY IPOD posted:It was about 60% too long and the Dark King resolution should have come at the climax of the whole book, not 2/3 of the way through. 
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May 2, 2024 22:12
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I think TEatD worked, despite the lack of twists, because it's the retelling of myth and legend, and despite a billion adaptations of a million stories going "this is how the legend really happened", the nature of legends is that they are ur-stories that represent fundamental ideas and tropes, and the base of the story never really changes, because if it did, it would no longer be the legend. The effect of this, in retrospect is that you've had to face the inevitable the whole way through, and you only fully realize it when you've reached the end, but you kinda knew, didn't you? Sisyphus never conquered his rock, Loki is still bound in entrails and the lake, it is said, never gives up her dead. But Abnett's retelling still gives us the seeds for a hundred legends that haven't been told. It makes the past richer and denser. The years begin there, at the end and the death, and we get an idea of how they keep going for ten thousand cycles, until Eisenhorn calls someone the r-slur in a cornfield on some dreg of a planet, and that's kind of beautiful.
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May 2, 2024 23:23
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abnett’s books tend to work even when they have structural problems because he’s one of like 4 people at black library who can consistently write good prose, and of the 4 his is the best. A book that’s got some interesting ideas but barely readable prose is a bad book.
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May 3, 2024 00:18
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I also appreciate that his books are more literary than average, as in situated in and drawing from the literary canon, but he relies wayyyy too heavily on the portions of the canon you learn in British secondary school (Eliot, Tennyson, Yeats etc). I have to believe he has a deeper quiver than that (and the occasional unattributed allusion to Sartre, etc. validates that belief) so maybe he just doesn’t trust his audience with the hard stuff.
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May 3, 2024 00:20
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Here's some simple pedestrian critique of the Galaxy in Flames. World Eaters are a sucking void that make the book worse by taking up space and adding nothing. All of those pages should have been dedicated to the death guard as they have some relevance to the overall plot. At least Emperor's Children have been around the entire time, so that's something. Also Abaddon and Aximand received no character development for the entire book despite being the climax of it.
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May 3, 2024 00:35
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Lostconfused posted:Here's some simple pedestrian critique of the Galaxy in Flames. World Eaters are a sucking void that make the book worse by taking up space and adding nothing. All of those pages should have been dedicated to the death guard as they have some relevance to the overall plot. At least Emperor's Children have been around the entire time, so that's something. Hey now, Abaddon is mean and Aximand is…there. I don’t remember much of the world eaters in the first trilogy? I think Kharn talks to loken once, and then at the end Angron and his guys have a big world eater fight kind of separate from the SOH/EC battles. Was there more?
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May 3, 2024 01:43
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Lostconfused posted:Here's some simple pedestrian critique of the Galaxy in Flames. World Eaters are a sucking void that make the book worse by taking up space and adding nothing. All of those pages should have been dedicated to the death guard as they have some relevance to the overall plot. At least Emperor's Children have been around the entire time, so that's something. Ben Counter is a really bad author. Black Library has quite a few genuinely good writers working for them these days, but fifteen years ago the talent pool was a whoooole lot shallower. Graham McNeil used to be one of their stronger contributors, and it's not because he was better back then 
Kylaer fucked around with this message at 01:53 on May 3, 2024 |
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May 3, 2024 01:50
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There's a couple of bits more but I'd agree they're forgettable. At the end of the 2nd book Angron murders a bunch of people for no reason to underline a plot point. And in the 3rd one during the final fight Kharn jumps out of nowhere and rants some chaos stuff stuff at Loken before being bulldozed by a random land raider. They tried to develop the world eaters more with Tarvitz hanging out with some captain on Istvan for a bit, but kinda obvious the authors didn't have a good idea of what to do with them.
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May 3, 2024 01:54
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Like the Teatd 3 cover is off putting and weird visually. But it should be ! They are warping
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May 3, 2024 01:55
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D-Pad posted:I am Nick Kyme, the chaos lord of nepotism. I realize this is from a few pages back but.... I think Kyme's problem is that he just can't wrap his head around marines. Or at least not in a way that doesn't make them into an army of Superman. Volpine Glory is good, and his Sicarius books (at least the one I've ready) has a decent concept behind it, but he can't seem to make the jump that Marines are mission driven assholes (for the most part). The guy was the one to push Dempski-Bowden to go full bore on stores too. If you removed the Dark King from the End and the Death it'd be one oversized book, but you wouldn't lose to much.
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May 3, 2024 04:05
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Lostconfused posted:There's a couple of bits more but I'd agree they're forgettable. I kinda liked that plot, honestly, the murder of the captain that was going to hold an inquiry into the Mournival maiming dozens of civilians. Combined with the complaining about space taxes it really set up the conflict as being about the Marines resisting the attempts at civilian government, and ties in with the mentions from ADB in the Night Lords and Black Legion series about the chaos marines hating the people who had taken over the Imperium they built. Then, of course, all of that immediately disappeared in favor of Instant Evil by Fulgrim at the latest. (I also think that was supposed to be Kharn’s death scene, and we were supposed to just assume he later came back, but then they decided to write 75 more books)
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May 3, 2024 04:18
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von Metternich posted:I kinda liked that plot, honestly, the murder of the captain that was going to hold an inquiry into the Mournival maiming dozens of civilians. Combined with the complaining about space taxes it really set up the conflict as being about the Marines resisting the attempts at civilian government, and ties in with the mentions from ADB in the Night Lords and Black Legion series about the chaos marines hating the people who had taken over the Imperium they built. The random murder by Angron is during the siege where he gets buried under rubble and only gets out after all the fighting is over, so he ends up doing a bunch of random completely pointless killing. It only serves to underline the "marines are psycho killers, and world eaters more so, and angron the most".
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May 3, 2024 04:46
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Lostconfused posted:I agree that this feels like the core plot of Heresy so far, but all of it revolves around Horus and his legion. Qu'est-ce que c'est?
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May 3, 2024 04:56
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Lostconfused posted:but kinda obvious the authors didn't have a good idea of what to do with them. Not yet they don't. Not until Betrayer.
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May 3, 2024 07:30
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Gravitas Shortfall posted:Not yet they don't. They have a couple good short stories before that as well. The problem is after their arc, most of their character development goes out of the window. During the Siege series, they turn into the archetypical evil red shirts, a never ending tide of frothing mooks to fill out the bolter porn scenes.
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May 3, 2024 09:50
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Angry Lobster posted:During the Siege series, they turn into the archetypical evil red shirts, a never ending tide of frothing mooks to fill out the bolter porn scenes. Yeah, that's my other problem with tEatD where it's really obvious. Kargos gets a good moment during the Siege though (I want to say it's in either Saturnine or Echoes of Eternity), and our special boy "Luc" Lucoryphus gets his due in tEatD.
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May 3, 2024 09:57
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Kargos is in Echoes of Eternity which is superb as might be expected for ADB. Lucoryphus also gets to be special in The Lost and the Damned, they're both good uses of the character. euphronius posted:Like the Teatd 3 cover is off putting and weird visually. But it should be ! They are warping Valid point
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May 3, 2024 12:14
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Angry Lobster posted:People have been following this for a long time, some even from the beginning. Seeing the series come to a close after eighteen years has been huge. Nearly two decades wishing for this crap to end and now that's gone I feel empty. Yeah, I fell out of following it and just occasionally look into threads like this instead of reading the books, but I was one of those around when the series started. I still kind of think of it as a new add-on to the lore, but the HH series is now about as old as the whole game was when they started publishing it. If you mark time from Rogue Trader (1987), 40k itself was 19 years old when they started the HH series in 2006. If you mark a little later when the Chaos books came out (1990), which is when they really codified what the HH and Chaos were, then 40k itself was only 16 when they started.
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May 3, 2024 13:05
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I've been reading the books since the very start so I'm pretty profoundly attached to the heresy as a series. I had read a decent number of warhammer books before (william king's space wolf books, early abnett, gotrek and felix, ciaphas cain, etc) but once I got started on the horus heresy series I started reading basically everything I could get my hands on and have been keeping up pretty well since.
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May 3, 2024 13:11
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I frankly prefer Counter over Thorpe because Daemon World is kinda silly fun from what I remember it and I enjoyed some of his short stories in Let the Galaxy Burn and other older anthologies I've read. And I can't rag on McNeill too much either, because of the glorious silliness that is Business as Usual with Snowdog. Wonder if Goonhammer needs someone who does reviews of Warhammer novels, already been meaning to do one for Godsbane but I also did write down thoughts on a couple of old anthology collections I've read.
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May 3, 2024 14:42
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I actually found the 4th Company stuff by McNeill enjoyable.
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May 3, 2024 15:26
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hopterque posted:I've been reading the books since the very start so I'm pretty profoundly attached to the heresy as a series. I had read a decent number of warhammer books before (william king's space wolf books, early abnett, gotrek and felix, ciaphas cain, etc) but once I got started on the horus heresy series I started reading basically everything I could get my hands on and have been keeping up pretty well since. HH was part of my introduction to 40k and briefly meeting Dan Abnett at Games Day 2012 in Toronto definitely attached me to the series. I went through all of them in audiobook form a bit ago (i read several of them in novel form as they released) and it was mostly fine with a handful of really good novels and a few real pieces of poo poo Improbable Lobster posted:Horus Rising is excellent
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May 3, 2024 15:52
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Cooked Auto posted:I frankly prefer Counter over Thorpe because Daemon World is kinda silly fun from what I remember it and I enjoyed some of his short stories in Let the Galaxy Burn and other older anthologies I've read. Is goonhammer run by a goon or is the name just a coincidence?
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May 3, 2024 15:56
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coincidence, they're part of the other social group that refers to themselves as goons
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May 3, 2024 15:57
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it's actually short for Go On, Hammer
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May 3, 2024 16:06
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Go Go War Hammer!
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May 3, 2024 16:08
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Benagain posted:coincidence, they're part of the other social group that refers to themselves as goons The actual answer is they started here but I think 40k main thread drama caused them, like the Ghostbusters, to go into business for themselves.
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May 3, 2024 16:10
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Pantaloon Pontiff posted:Yeah, I fell out of following it and just occasionally look into threads like this instead of reading the books, but I was one of those around when the series started. I still kind of think of it as a new add-on to the lore, but the HH series is now about as old as the whole game was when they started publishing it. If you mark time from Rogue Trader (1987), 40k itself was 19 years old when they started the HH series in 2006. If you mark a little later when the Chaos books came out (1990), which is when they really codified what the HH and Chaos were, then 40k itself was only 16 when they started. I got into 40k around '91 (my first exposure to GW were the gateway games Hero Quest and Space Crusade with a brief Blood Bowl phase). My first actual 40k was 2nd Edition and I always loved the bits of fluff in the various codex books and paining miniatures more than the actual game. I knew the story of the heresy from White Dwarf and other sources, but never really bothered with the books as i'd not touched the hobby for 15 years. Then later I'm a grown-rear end man on holiday and I saw a book on sale about the heresy and thought "oh wow, they're actually doing a book on the founding legend of that thing I used to be into" and picked it up. "Well that wasn't so bad... guess I'll pick up the next two in the trilogy when they drop"
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May 3, 2024 17:06
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quote:We all comprehend the might of our primarch. Do you think such great men would stand idly by and let subversion take root in their midst?' 
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May 3, 2024 19:27
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"All that is required for evil to triumph is for good transhumans to do nothing" 
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May 3, 2024 20:33
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Improbable Lobster posted:HH was part of my introduction to 40k and briefly meeting Dan Abnett at Games Day 2012 in Toronto definitely attached me to the series. I went through all of them in audiobook form a bit ago (i read several of them in novel form as they released) and it was mostly fine with a handful of really good novels and a few real pieces of poo poo I think this is list is both not granular enough (“bad” is insufficient for some of these) and flat-out wrong in places (there’s no HH book better than Know No Fear).
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May 3, 2024 21:01
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Kylaer posted:"All that is required for evil to triumph is for good transhumans to do nothing" "Evil always wins because good transhumans are dumb"
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May 3, 2024 21:40
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Cooked Auto posted:
I’d read it! Or guest star on a podcast for it, or whatever. And McNeill is good about the admech and very little else IMO.
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May 3, 2024 23:52
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Flight of the Eisenstein is so incredibly dry, you can tell that a science fiction author wrote it. Which is a huge problem for all the space marine bolterporn the book needs to have in it. Edit: That's a lie, you could tell a sci-fi nerd was writing it when the words O'Neill cylinder came up. Lostconfused fucked around with this message at 00:22 on May 4, 2024 |
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May 4, 2024 00:20
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Did anybody else read Renegades: Lord of Excess? I'm a bit interested but the one review in here seemed pretty mixed.
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May 4, 2024 02:04
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DAD LOST MY IPOD posted:I think this is list is both not granular enough (“bad” is insufficient for some of these) and flat-out wrong in places (there’s no HH book better than Know No Fear). when i started to run out words for the bad end of the scale i decided to combine them all i to "bad".
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May 4, 2024 02:17
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Sharkopath posted:Did anybody else read Renegades: Lord of Excess? I'm a bit interested but the one review in here seemed pretty mixed. It's passable, but nothing more than that. Characters are very static and cartoonish even by 40k standards, the plotlines don't really coalesce in interesting ways ("so the guy that was acting like a sly traitor did some sly treason? No way!"). If you want to read interesting egomaniacs in the Emperor's Children mold, this book is the barest scratch to that itch.
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May 4, 2024 02:23
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Lostconfused posted:Go Go War Hammer! Inspector Gadget as a space marine?
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May 4, 2024 07:02
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