Lord_Caerolion

Only things I’ll add on are that the Iron Hands were the “anti-technology” Legion, Ferrus even created a bunch of “Vaults of Mimir” scattered across the galaxy to lock away what couldn’t be used. The other thing is that using Chapter culture as proof of geneseed should always be taken with a heaping pile of salt. Geneseed can have some psychological effects on the implantees, but when you start going “well this Chapter ALSO uses grail iconography, that proves they’re a missing Legion”, that’s… not how it works. The recruitment world culture is a far larger driver of Chapter culture in the vast majority of circumstances, outside of direct attempts to override it like the Dark Angels. Spears of the Emperor was basically written entirely to show how Ultramarine Successors don’t have to look like Ultramarines at all. I have a strong dislike of the other interpretation of geneseed, it basically makes it that all Successors can only ever be direct clones of their founder Legion in different colours, which is just not how even the canon Chapters work. Lastly, Soul Drinkers being 2nd Founding IF is just… not tonally consistent. We’re initially told that when the Fists Legion split, the die-hards remained as Imperial Fists, moderates joined the Crimson Fists, and the most vengeful joined the Black Templars. All psychological reasons. Then the Soul Drinkers came along, and go “we were created from the void specialists!” So now, for a single one of the 4 resulting Chapters, it’s not psychological, but strategic specialty. We have an odd one out for an authors special snowflake Chapter, and the twist of them not actually being Fists Successors was amazing, until they rolled it back. Personally, I still headcannon that the Soul Drinkers are not Imperial Fist Successors. edit: to add to the Chapter culture thing, I saw the Libators held up as “well they’re not like Ultramarines, so that PROVES” they’re Missing Legion guys!” Said proof is grail imagery, and lots of blood rituals, which is not Ultramarine-y and thus evidence of a Missing Legion. You guys, uh… you guys realize we already HAVE a canon Chapter/Legion with grail iconography and blood rituals, right? Unless the Blood Angels are also entirely comprised of Missing Legion members, along with all THEIR successors, then no, your point does not work.

The way I interpret him is that he’s the ultimate junkie, whose tolerance has gone too high. Every other Slaaneshi, once warp-drugs and other Slaaneshi “treats” become too mundane, can experience at least one truly climactic act - they can die. However, for Lucius, even THAT is denied to him now. Stabbed? Done. Exploded? Done. Eaten? Done. Decapitated? Done. He’s just wandering the galaxy, searching for ANYTHING new after 10,000 years of ennui that literally even death cannot dissipate.

No, Dorn didn’t have a pity party, he just threw the tantrum to end all tantrums after the Siege and decided that the only thing left to do was “suicide by Traitor”. As for the Primarch latitude, we know that Primarchs were routinely deployed by the Crusade Command. Sanguinius was sent to Signus, Khan to Chondax, Guilliman and Lorgar to muster at Calth, etc. Each of those was not mentioned as being unusual in a Primarch being ordered to deploy in a particular location.

The Legions that ignored Nikaea were by-and-large either those already turning traitor, or did so only in overwhelming proof of their necessity. Then you’ve got the Space Wolves, the Emperor’s Specialest Boys, to whom no laws apply and consequences are a thing for other Legions. As for being “a dour order follower”, that was Perturabo’s thing too. It was what the Legion was known for even before he arrived. It’s literally why they got picked so often for garrison duty, because they were the ones that followed orders. Edit: I’ll also add that the Primarchs had latitude and freedom to command, but seemingly only in how they handled the actual deployments. The Emperor/Horus would still give an unarguable order of “Sanguinius, take your Legion to X System”. Once there, they could carry out the campaign in the way they saw fit, but they were still ordered to carry out the campaign.

The one thing I’ll just point out in defense of Perturabo is that orders you don’t like are still, y’know, orders. He was part of the Great Crusade, and while he had control over his Legion, he was still under the authority of the Emperor and later the Warmaster. There’s no “but I don’t WANNA” exception to your orders. Sure, some Primarchs would ignore or reinterpret orders, and they were basically universally looked down upon for doing so.

Overlords felt to me like it was written by someone who had only the vaguest idea what the Kharadron were. From memory, several times it describes the characters seeing each others faces inside their helmets, like they’re wearing astronaut-esque gear. For a good Kharadron book, I’d recommend Arkanaut’s Oath, the first Drekki Flynt novel. Much better, and helps show a bit of life outside Sigmars empire.

The larger Legion sizes weren’t present at the start of the Black Library series, though, it was only part-way through, roughly when Betrayal was being worked on, that the sizes increased.

The start of the Heresy novels were very different, they also had the reduced Legion sizes where most were around 10,000 Astartes, before Forge World changed it so that 100,000 was the midpoint, with the smallest being 80,000.

It’s also worth remembering that a common tactic used by the Iron Hands was exactly what was done by Ferrus. Use an initial smaller force to bait out the enemy into deploying in full, then unleash a second wave to annihilate the opposition. If the second wave hadn’t turned out to be traitors, it’d be a textbook example of one of his Legions standard tactics.

The cables on the pistol in the new art kinda fade into air, not connecting to anything.

It looks like they fed this older artwork into an AI and told it to remove the monkey, change the head, and add colour.

There’s always been a bit of knightly influence to the Imperial Fists as well, the Black Templars are essentially just Scouring-era Dorn.

I’m hoping that’s translatable to “I can’t say anything before the official announcement”, because if anything needed a closing epilogue, it was this series.

There was an apparently not-insignificant number of Iron Hands who threw in with Horus after the Massacre, following their “might makes right” philosophy.

We are told that each Primarch lead their Legions, although that depends on if you interpret that as including the Missing Primarchs as well. The most likely answer is that one of them rebelled against the Emperor, but did so alone, with only a portion of their Legion. Given the smaller scale, it was able to be put down with relative ease, but given the precarious nature of the fledgling Imperium it would be politically unfeasible to show a Primarch rebelling against the Emperor, so it gets swept under the rug. The only reason this isn’t done with the Horus Heresy is a matter of scale. Most Imperial citizens aren’t aware of the Traitor Legions outside of religious dogma, but the Heresy was so widespread and foundational an event that a complete coverup is impossible, so it’s just restricted to various levels of how much people get taught.