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The Fantasy world used to be "no really I swear you guys" not in the 40k universe (nudge nudge wink wink). This was borne out by the Albion campaign, which ended with magic items that were just 40k items (a Rosarius, a Bolter) being made available to numerous factions. It also included sketches of warriors of Chaos who came from the Realm of Chaos and were just Chaos Space Marines. Also the rumors that Sigmar was a lost primarch and that the whole Fantasy world was in the Eye of Terror as a training ground for aspiring Chaos champions. Basically GW's fluff has never not been hosed eight ways from The Feast of Saint Kiodrus and attempting to unfuck it is boring and lame.
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Jul 23, 2012 19:55
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Olanphonia posted:There was a great bit in the Night Lords series where Talos talks about how they were attacked by Astartes who were utilizing the Codex and he basically said that there was pretty much nothing they could have done to prevent getting their poo poo ruined. Yeah, in Know No Fear they talk about how philosophically troubling it is to have that segment in the Codex because of its potential use as an ex post facto justification for literally any act of war. In the end I guess they decided to keep it in, there is always more and it is always grimmer (and darker).
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Aug 27, 2012 20:13
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vigorous sodomy posted:It's widely supported that Johnson was. Luther was probably the loyal one. The Heresy stuff we've seen in Savage Weapons, Prince of Crows, Descent of Angels and Fallen Angels, and Unremembered Empire basically shits all over that theory, sadly. I always liked the theory but it's very, very explicit that Jonson was loyal and Luther was a traitor.
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May 1, 2014 14:26
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Khizan posted:The Shira Calpurnia books by Matthew Farrer are sort of mystery-esque, I suppose. They're about the Arbites and 40k policework, at least. Crossfire, Legacy, Blind, I think. I LOVED After Desh'ea so I bought the omnibus and I have to say I found Crossfire to be unbearably draggy and bland, like put-me-to-sleep-while-reading bland. Also the plot thread didn't seem very strong (lots of "why are we here again?") and the "twist" was obvious and stupid. I could not finish the omnibus. Maybe I just have Bad Opinions though because I loved Pariah and I think Ravenor Returned is the single strongest thing Abnett has ever written (although No Know Fear, Only in Death, Necropolis, and Malleus are all so close as to be a four-way tie for second place).
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May 21, 2014 22:32
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Just read The Magos after like.... 6 years of not keeping up. God drat, was it good. I loved Pariah more than most anyone I talked to, and this sets it up so well. also if drusher and macks don’t get a happy ending, like an on-camera happily ever after ending where we can be really sure they’re ok, I will cry
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Dec 26, 2018 06:50
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Every legion is hosed up in some way, every legion is poisoned by its ideology, but the loyalist legions managed to try to compensate for their flaws and demonstrate some humility and the chaos legions just fell rear end first into their own bullshit. The night lords are the perfect illustration of this. One of my favorite scenes in 40k fluff is where Curze is hallucinating and Sevatar goes to meet him in his mind, and Curze says something like “I hate you all because you are just sadists who torture people for fun. That makes you evil, I do this because I have to and because it’s the only way to keep humanity’s evil in line, but I hate myself for it and I hate that I have to do it.” And sevatar comes right back with “how do you know it’s the only way? It’s the only way you’ve tried. You love murder and torture as much as the rest of us, you hypocrite, you just can’t accept that about yourself.” Curze had a really complete character arc and died thinking he was vindicated, but he wasn’t “right.” Nobody was. Every chaos legion thought they were smart enough to use chaos against the greater evil of the emperor and every chaos legion was wrong. Every loyal legion thought the emperor’s vision was worth defending and they were all wrong! The Horus heresy books are in many ways a mess and the quality varies tremendously but I do like how effective they are at capturing the idea that history is about points of view. And that doesn’t mean “guy who wants to skin 1000000 people alive” is equally right with “guy who doesn’t want to do that” but it does mean that the legions who fell did so for reasons other than being “so darn evil.”
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Dec 27, 2020 02:04
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Fulgrim was the most psychologically brittle of the Primarchs early on. His fall more than anyone else’s is about his weakness rather than his ambition or hubris. Unfortunately The Reflection Crack’d, in addition to being probably the worst piece of prose in the HH series, undoes all the fulgrim development in the first five books and makes him just another mind lashed servant of chaos
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Dec 27, 2020 03:31
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it’s rare that a short story is so bad that it retroactively makes other much longer stories worse but mcneill pulled it off, absolute masterstroke
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Dec 27, 2020 15:20
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Shockeh posted:I mean, he was though. The Imperium only survived because it's willing to use Assassins, and terror weapons, and generally be itself. He's quite literally right about that, and his Dad was wrong. I mean, curze believed “you have to constantly brutalize people with the most savage terror imaginable to keep them in line.” Most depictions of the imperium show it using a wide variety of methods of social control, most of all religion! Curze was absolutely wrong, and the reason we know this is that the imperium functions day to day without building huge cathedrals of living flesh and flaying people alive in the public square. Even in Curze’s time the great crusade needed discipline, sometimes very harsh discipline. What made him wrong wasn’t that he killed people for stepping out of line, it’s that he only ever had one setting, which was “nightmarish horror movie brutality” deployed the instant anyone stole a loaf of bread.
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Dec 28, 2020 13:50
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Improbable Lobster posted:Yeah, ever primarch was shaped by where they landed and a bunch of them just had no chance from day one I think there has been some effort put into the backstory to put the lie to that. Perturabo landed on a basically functioning society and was taken in by its leader, like Guilliman. Lion el'Jonson landed in the middle of a monster-infested wood, plus all the monsters were Chaos tainted. Fulgrim landed on a planet that was dealing with shortages, but had a fundamentally functional society; Sanguinius landed on an irradiated desert wasteland. I could go on-- look at where Corax wound up (and what he did there)! I will grant you that Angron was basically hosed from Day 1, though.
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Dec 28, 2020 21:28
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Kaal posted:I don't know about that. Angron is basically Evil Spartacus, and there's a lot of versions of that story which don't end with him deciding that the slavers were right, everyone deserves chains, and human life is worthless. spartacus didn't have the portions of his brain that can feel emotions other than pain and rage surgically excised, though a big part of the plot of betrayer is that angron will literally die within months or weeks, certainly before the end of the heresy, and there is absolutely no way to stop it without making him into a daemon. that's about as railroaded as you can get, imo. poor guy.
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Dec 29, 2020 01:48
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one good thing about the emperor’s story is that it showcases how the mistakes that led to the heresy were his mistakes and derived from his known frailties. specifically his complete lack of empathy for individuals and inability to relate to them. He thought on the species-scale so no individual’s needs or weaknesses registered to him. If he had just teleported his custodes down to nuceria, fought alongside angron’s slaves in the last battle, and then brought the survivors onboard to join the legion—hell, even if he’d left them there alive—angron would have never turned. There’d be no heresy, since the world eaters would have turned on Horus the moment he broached the topic. But the emperor couldn’t understand what angron needed in that moment and so he made his son hate him.
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Dec 29, 2020 03:19
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The Butcher’s Nails are a classic example of what “archaeotech” should mean in the lore: not “gun, but better,” but “this is basically magic and we wouldn’t even know where to begin doing this ourselves.”
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Dec 29, 2020 04:25
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there are a lot of angron apologists who imagine him as this noble freedom fighter who hated his father for his tyranny, and maybe he justified his actions to himself that way, but if that angron ever existed he died on the operating table. nails-angron was such a fundamentally different person from non-nails angron and the latter never got a chance to grow up so we don’t know what he would have done. it’s pretty clear that nails-angron’s actual loyalty was to his gladiator pals, not some abstract idea of freedom. if they had survived he would be perfectly content to psychotically butcher millions in the emperor’s name until the machines in his skull killed him. it’s a mistake to think of the nails as an injury, though. they scooped out big portions of his brain. Primarchs are tough but they can die, and they can also suffer permanent maiming. the nails permanently altered angron’s mind in a way that can never be taken back because he doesn’t have those parts of his brain anymore.
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Dec 29, 2020 14:24
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I know that angron often says (notably, only in situations where he’s already locked in a fight with fellow legions) that he’s rebelling against the emperor’s tyranny, but the strong impression that I get is that that’s a lie he tells himself to try to make what he’s doing more noble. Maybe there is a speck of the noble warrior he could have been hidden inside him, and before he gets daemonized that speck is driving his self loathing. But his actions indicate that he doesn’t really care much about freedom or tyranny as abstract concepts, only how they apply to him and his legion. He was perfectly happy to eat worlds for the Emperor and he seamlessly switched over to doing it for Horus, without any indication that Horus would be an less of a murderous tyrant. The whole Night of the Wolf only happened because Angron was going murdercrazy on innocents, not because he was too principled for the Crusade. So no, I don’t think Nails-less Angron would really stand up to the Emperor, any more than Jaghatai Khan did (who had a much more caring and noble upbringing but still existed in the same milieu i.e. a member of a low tech outcast group relentlessly hunted and murdered by high tech elites). Still, it’s a counterfactual. It would be nice to see an alternate history where Angron lands somewhere else and we get to see what he’s like without the Nails in his brain. There are plenty of alternate 40k histories, it might be fun to scramble all the Primarchs’ landing locations and see what changes. Some were more shaped by their upbringing than others, but Nuceria, Barbarus, Nostramo and Colchis really seem like they’d badly screw up whoever landed there.
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Dec 30, 2020 02:14
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Arcsquad12 posted:How many loyalists within the traitor legions actually survived Istvaan III? I know at least one group of Iron Warriors were taken in by the Ultramarines and the Death Guard who fled on the Eisenstein joined with Malcador to form the proto inquisition Ordos. probably less than 50 marines total. it was fuckin thorough. e: not all the loyalists were on istvaan, though, especially from the four Drop Site Massacre legions.
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Dec 31, 2020 20:45
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I would bet that every loyalist legion had some traitors but probably very very few in most cases. Wouldn’t surprise me to see some blood angels falling to khorne, some ultramarines corrupted over the course of the shadow crusade, etc. I’d expect the drop site legions to have few or no traitors because there were so few left and they were bonded by the experience of being almost wiped out.
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Jan 2, 2021 16:15
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the new focus on BL is part of a larger initiative by Games Workshop called Project Pull Our Heads Out Of Our Asses. for a long time they had basically no idea who their customers were or why anyone bought the poo poo they sell ("tiny, jewel-like objects of wonder"), they just threw poo poo at the wall and passingly noted what stuck. lately they've realized that they can actually sell more plastic dollies if people give a poo poo about them, which is a big realization and only took them several decades, so there's been a concerted push to Do Something with the [3/4]0k IP.
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Jan 4, 2021 19:49
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Riders of the Dead is excellent. Strong recommendation.
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Jan 5, 2021 20:11
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That book was like Battle for the Abyss in that absolutely nothing of relevance happens and it could be entirely removed without disrupting the canon one bit. The only event in the entire book with any remote connection to anything else is the killing of Z-list named Luna Wolf Luc Sedirae. Nothing else has even a ripple.
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Jan 10, 2021 03:37
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bagrada posted:Looks like February 20th for a whole bunch of fancy preorders including Bequin, Pariah and Liber Xenologis. I loved Pariah, even though I know a lot of fans didn’t, and I am beyond psyched that the sequel is finally here. I am Alpharius gave me chills.
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Jan 20, 2021 17:32
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I think the thousand sons are interesting because they demonstrate what happens when you try to take a purely scientific approach to the Warp. You can consider it just an exotic part of the galaxy and the warp entities there just a unique form of life that adapted like extremophile bacteria to their home. You can measure warp energy like any other fundamental force and study it. You can harness it through practice and diligent research, performing “sorcery” by rigidly following directions in a book. All that stuff works. And if you do it that way you end up completely hosed and ruined because that’s not what the warp is, it absolutely has a spiritual dimension, the chaos Gods are not just large energy anomalies but Gods.
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Jan 24, 2021 16:13
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Gravitas Shortfall posted:My take is that Space Wolves and psychic powers is that they're hypocrites who think their magic is better than your magic, but also are extremely good at sniffing out corruption in their rune priests and dealing with it before it becomes an issue i believe space wolves are like dogs and just sort of do things arbitrarily
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Jan 24, 2021 20:52
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We’re all assuming that Abnett will write the final SoT book because he’s far and away the most competent writer they employ, but it’s possible that it’ll be someone else because black library doesn’t always seem to recognize the varying quality of their stable of authors and gives out assignments to people regardless of their level of skill. witness them assigning galaxy in flames, an incredibly pivotal book featuring one of the most important events of the heresy to ben “soul drinkers” counter.
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Jan 24, 2021 23:17
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CAR-CAR-CARNIVORA still gets me.
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Jan 26, 2021 03:29
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Master of Mankind also goes into the Emperor’s plans for Magnus. Prior to Magnus’s Folly, sitting on the Throne wasn’t this appalling torture. The job was, as far as I can tell, to be a sort of overseer/traffic controller for the webway. Magnus not only damages the throne itself but also breaks open the webway and fills it with daemons, and from then on the job of the person on the Throne is to keep them out—which is significantly more taxing and unpleasant.
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Jan 27, 2021 13:35
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Angry Lobster posted:Honestly, the Emperor's plan was dead in the water when the baby primarchs were snatched by Chaos and scattered through the galaxy. someone hasn't read saturnine yet 
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Jan 27, 2021 18:49
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Shroud posted:Forget which book it is, but Malcador and Dorn had this exact discussion right before (or during) the Siege. Maclador says that Dorn (and probably others) would not have been able to tolerate an enemy who was so incredibly alien and difficult to really comprehend. They would have researched and studied, and eventually fallen because of this drive to understand it. As I recall, Dorn agreed with the sentiment. it's in The Solar War, I think, or early in The Lost and the Damned. Malcador says that Dorn would have tried to attack Chaos on the physical plane alone, because that's what he understands, and so would have been defeated by it. You actually get a great sense of this with Perturabo (who, of all the primarchs, I think most benefits from the increased screen time he gets in the Siege series). He's probably the smartest primarch in terms of raw computational power, and he certainly has the most sophisticated understanding of technology. You can clearly see what Russ was talking about when he talked about the separate roles for each primarch: Perturabo was clearly meant to lead the Imperium's technological development. He also has a healthy disdain for warp corruption. But he is monstrously arrogant and assumes that the Warp is simply a form of exotic energy and matter with entities living in it. He doesn't understand the spiritual side of it, and so all his attempts to learn to master this "energy" and turn it into weapons for himself to use are doomed. In the end he's going to end up a howling daemon like the rest of them, because he doesn't get that Chaos isn't just like "plasma" or "electricity."
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Jan 27, 2021 19:55
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the beast series I heard implies dorn is still alive, and theoretically corax, Vulcan, the Khan and Russ could all be chilling out on the same beach somewhere
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Feb 1, 2021 23:16
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IshmaelZarkov posted:My absolute dream situation would be two returning Fulgrims. Daemon Fulgrim and clone Fulgrim containing Painting Fulgrim. i'm pretty sure graham mcneill dumpstered Painting Fulgrim, the single most interesting canon change of the entire HH series, in the execrable short story "the reflection crack'd" which also features fulgrim getting a butt plug stuffed up him by his sons
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Feb 2, 2021 00:29
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D-Pad posted:Speaking of Lorgar...I'm not sure I believe it, but I really like this theory: The more I think about this theory the more I buy it. Lorgar turning against Chaos at the end of the Heresy would be huge, earth-shattering, but I can draw a line of logic to it. Lorgar turned to Chaos because he felt he had no choice. He believed, deep in his soul, that humanity needed gods and needed worship. If the Emperor was unwilling to accept that worship, then humanity would seek other gods... and find them, because other gods exist. Humanity would worship those gods in ignorance and be destroyed by them just as the Eldar were. Their only hope was for Lorgar to guide their worship, to turn an unstable cascading chain reaction of worship into a stable and controlled one like a nuclear plant. Then humanity could survive. The actual reality of the Chaos gods he hated. Argel Tal is his mouthpiece here; in Betrayer he explicitly says that the Chaos gods don't deserve worship, but he has to do so anyways. Lorgar's evident favor for Argel Tal (and disdain for Erebus) suggests to me that he subscribes to this view as well. But as of Saturnine, the Emperor is (apparently, at least, though it could just be Malcador acting) accepting the Imperial Cult. He's allowing it, rather than suppressing it. So now Lorgar has an alternative. There could be an outlet for humanity's faith that doesn't require constant horrific atrocities. Of course, now he's in a bind-- because just as he couldn't allow humanity to blindly follow Chaos into the abyss, he can't allow them to build an edifice of ignorance in worship of the Emperor. The result of that is, well, what we see today. That's the Imperium. They've totally hosed it up. Lorgar (who wrote the original Lectitio Divinitatus) could certainly fix that. He could create a theology around the God-Emperor that would be both stable, powerful and uplifting. That's what he's good at (and in fact eventually creating that was probably why he was made--he just started too early). But nobody would ever allow him to now! He's the arch-traitor! He's the first heretic! He would never, ever, ever be trusted or accepted by the Imperium. That's a thorny problem, the kind of problem you meditate on in seclusion for ten thousand years, leaving your irrevocably tainted and broken legion to its own devices. A really next-level moment would be him and Corax swapping places; Corax is corrupted from his years in the Eye and his single-minded pursuit of vengeance on Lorgar. One primarch falls, one rises. This is all speculation but it's a neat idea.
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Feb 2, 2021 01:34
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Telsa Cola posted:Bit of a nitpick but Iirc a decent chunk of the lecto divinitus or imperial creed is actually from a loyalistish word bearers dreadnaught. that's the anchorite, but he was transcribing and rewriting something lorgar had previously written-- the lectitio was entirely written and distributed prior to Horus Rising, while the Anchorite didn't convert until the Siege.
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Feb 2, 2021 01:42
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MonsterEnvy posted:It's been revealed that that was just a lie. Real Fulgrim is still trapped. Where’s that? I would like to read it.
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Feb 2, 2021 02:11
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Sephyr posted:Maaaybe fight a primarch to a standstill if it had been weakened before, I think. Abby has come a long way, has 4 deities buffing him and a few powerful artifacts. But 40k has tiers of asskicking and they usually tend to hold true. Primarchs kicks Custodes who kicks Primaris who kicks Astartes. For a long time dorn was canonically dead, like Ferrus Manus level dead. More recently they pulled back from that a bit and while he’s assumed to be dead, the Fists only recovered his hand so theoretically the rest of him could be out there (whereas before they recovered all of him and just removed the hand to keep). And as I referenced earlier, I believe that there’s a scene in the Beast saga where they’re talking to Vulkan and he offhandedly mentions that he’ll tell Dorn what a good job Koorland is doing. Is Vulkan lying? Is he speaking metaphorically (like maybe in the afterlife he’ll tell him?) Had he just not heard about Dorn’s death? Is he crazy? No idea, but it’s a breadcrumb.
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Feb 2, 2021 20:03
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aphid_licker posted:At this point you gotta go at it from the other side and make a list of who they're definitely not bringing back. Emps? sanguinius, horus, at least one of the twins, curze, ferrus manus. all dead, and their deaths are significant parts of their stories. anyone else could theoretically still be alive. the rule seems to be that you have to see the corpse. of course, i think even BL doesn't entirely know who's dead and who's not. there were definitely moments that were supposed to be a send-off that weren't. the clearest example to me is vulkan's "death" in the unremembered empire. it was clearly setting up him being dead-but-not-really and his casket being the final artifact the salamanders had to recover in the 41st millennium to bring him back... but then they decided to wake him up again because they needed him for other stuff.
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Feb 2, 2021 21:23
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NihilCredo posted:I would scratch Sanguinius and the twins off that list. Sanguinius because of the Sanguinor, and the twins because lies is the entirety of their personality. (Which IMO makes them just as boring as Rogal Dorn in their way.) the description of dorn killing "alpharius" on pluto is clearly written to evoke the death of Ferrus Manus. it's a significant event, one "omegon" senses from across space. someone very important died there, not like sheed ranko or some other standin. whether it was alpharius or omegon isn't certain, and may not matter. I think the two are basically interchangeable, and I'm not even convinced of the theory that they were working at cross purposes or fell on opposite sides of the line. and the sanguinor isn't really sanguinius, it's just a manifestation of some of his traits-- it wouldn't swing the tide of a battle singlehandedly the same way sanguinius would.
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Feb 2, 2021 23:47
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i just hope that when we get more loyalist primarch models they look more like the FW versions (grim, dignified) and not like the 40k guilliman (weird proportions, overdesigned, goofy face, doing the splits)
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Feb 3, 2021 01:21
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in fact just let us use the forge world models, are any of them actually bad? maybe russ?
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Feb 3, 2021 01:22
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I’m thinking of getting some of the upcoming limited editions. Where do they go on sale, and when, and how fast do they sell out?
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Feb 3, 2021 04:12
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D-Pad posted:They did release the Solar system map from The Solar War and have plans to release the rest. Finally, I’ll know what the solar system looks like
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Feb 6, 2021 00:43
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