No wolves on Fenris?

[SeanyPrawny]

Makes you wonder why they've only given us single models in our packs rather than a death company style unit... ah well.

[Lord Ragnarok]

Keep in mind Fenris was probably always hostile. The original settelers may have used genetic manipulation to deal with the environment. Maybe something went awry in their experiements. Also remember this would have been during the Dark Age of Technology where tech. was more or less more advanced then during 30-40k.

 

I'm guessing this will be addressed in "Prospero Burns"

[Ration]

But is Canis helix taken from Russ as a way to transfer his geneseed to space wolves? becuase then its seems like quite a coincidence that the people that inhabitated Fenris beforehand evolved/Used it. Does it state anywhere that the gene still lives on in the people who live on Fenris?

[Wolf Lord Hallbjorn]

The problem in my mind with the theory of the first settlers having the canis helix in them or developing it to cope is the Cup of Wulfen. The two ideas, in some ways, seem to contradict each other. Possibly the only way I could see that both things would hold true at once is that the contents of the Cup is just some sort of catalyst that's designed to awaken the latent gene in their DNA. If it's not a catalyst and it's really how they introduce the canis helix to the aspirants, then it doesn't make sense that the canis helix was there long before. As others have said, hopefully it will be explained more clearly in Prospero Burns.

[Lord Ragnarok]

But is Canis helix taken from Russ as a way to transfer his geneseed to space wolves? becuase then its seems like quite a coincidence that the people that inhabitated Fenris beforehand evolved/Used it. Does it state anywhere that the gene still lives on in the people who live on Fenris?

 

Yes it is a dilemma. But remember the Ruinous powers scooped up the primarchs and shot them throughout the Galaxy. Probably Tzeentch, and Probably due to its master plan as the greatest schemer known to anyone. My opinion is that Tzeentch knew the strands of fates which would eventually bring the Imperium to its knees and Magnus in his lap.

[Raulmichile]

After all the new fluff concerning the wolves and the wulfen, I tend to think that the culp of the Wulfen is only a cocktail of chemicals that detonate the canix helix, thus promoting muscular growth, etc... although the backfire is that all those sudden changes have a probability of getting weird results because some incompatibility with the canis helix of the aspirant.

 

I have never been fond of the theory (or established fluff) of getting the canix helix via some drinks the other day. How can you possibly affect your DNA structure with some beverage? It's much more reasonable to think in awakening this latent gene via chemical stimulation than simply drinking it and absorbing it directly into your DNA chains.

[Vash113]

Personally I'm chalking this up to Graham McNiell's poor writing and terrible fluff and am not even going to try and justify it. Yet again someone thinks to take the Werewolf idea way... way... way too far and it's just plain stupid.

[Lord Ragnarok]

Merrett has to approve all of this so you really mean "GW's poor fluffmanship".

[Jarl Kjaran Coldheart]

Personally I'm chalking this up to Graham McNiell's poor writing and terrible fluff and am not even going to try and justify it. Yet again someone thinks to take the Werewolf idea way... way... way too far and it's just plain stupid.

 

Aint that the damn truth. but his crayon scribbles is in print now, so it will be accepted as fluff.

 

WLK

[obs0l3te]

....I don't think you guys are reading this right....

 

"The wolf staired at Ahriman with a look of intelligance in its eyes...."

 

"There are no wolves on fenris..."

 

 

Meaning something more terrible... a basic wolf is smart... but not that smart.. these... they are basically very smart wolves.

[Vash113]

Merrett has to approve all of this so you really mean "GW's poor fluffmanship".

 

True, very true.

 

Aint that the damn truth. but his crayon scribbles is in print now, so it will be accepted as fluff.

 

Well given the rather poor standards of fluff consistency in Black Library novels and given the near total lack of acceptance for the Soul Drinkers, Blood Angels and even much of the Ultramarines series, I don't think we'll have any problem tossing "A Thousand Sons" out the window.

 

I just wish we didn't have to wait till next January for Prospero Burns... but at least we dodged a bullet with the switcheroo and pulled Abnett instead.

[Lord Ragnarok]

Vash did you even read "A Thousand Sons"?

[Vash113]

Vash did you even read "A Thousand Sons"?

 

I couldn't have read the book and not liked it? Of course I read it and quite frankly I really didn't like it.

[Gerwulf]

I have thought long about why the legions reflected their primarchs even before they met.

 

I think the marines created on Terra already reflected the traits of their primarchs to a certain degree.

 

As far as I know, the first space marines were made by using DNA (or "geneseed") from the primarchs on humans from Terra. Ok, so there is a connection there.

 

So then, why did Russ land on a "Viking" world, Mortarion on a poisonous world, etc. ? And when did the primarchs acquire their specific traits?

 

One answer could be, that the primachs had their special traits already from the beginning and the powers that scattered them took care that they landed on suitable worlds.

Then the marines made on Terra would already have their traits.

 

Or the powers that scattered them actually gave them their unique traits (Sanguinus' wings, Alpharios' dual soul, Russ' wolfish nature)

And the genetic similarities that the legions shared with their primarchs kind of resonated through the warp (which was mentioned in passing in A Thousand Sons) .

 

Or the primarchs landed on certain worlds and took on the traits of those worlds, through their genetic closeness those traits got passed on to their respective legions.

 

Sorry for going off topic... but this has been bothering me for quite a while

[Vash113]

Well actually the traits of the Primarchs were IMO simply honed on their homeworlds. Magnus' Legion was always predisposed towards psychic powers, but it took the arrival of the Primarch and his origins on Prospero to nurture the Legion into the heavy use of Sorcery.

 

Likewise I doubt the Night Lords were terror causing psychopaths before the coming of Konrad Kurze.

 

Not to mention that the Terran Marines that we have seen in the Horus Heresy material have not shared the same traits as New Legion Marines, and this often caused friction in the Legions. The Old Legion marines had different cultures, experiences and histories from those shared by the New Legionaries and their Primarchs and didn't necessarily share the same tactics and tendencies.

 

The Dusk Raiders for instance who became the Death Guard. The Dusk Raiders were an assault force specialising in destabiling the enemy by attacking during the hours of dawn and dusk when enemies had the least reliable vision. Completely different from the Death Guard who specialised in fighting enemies in the most inhospitable places. The Old Legion marines could participate in this new direction and these new tactics, possessing the same genetic abilities as their New Legion counterparts, but had not fought or used such tactics until being re-united with their Primarchs.

 

It's also possible that New Legion marines created with new material gathered from the Primarchs after they were found did possess some abilities and traits that the Old Legionaries did not. For instance the Night Lords, the marines raised from Nostramo would have had over a decade of experience living and fighting in almost pitch darkness. Where as the Old Legion marines will have lived most of their lives without much experience Night Fighting and would not likely be nearly as effective at the Konrad Kurze's night haunting terror tactics as their violently criminal New Legion counterparts.

 

The Canis Helix is however far more uncertain. Did it exist in the Old Legion Space Wolves or was it something that came about from locating Russ on Fenris? Not sure. But it might be that the Canis Helix simply unlocks the latent potential of the Space Wolf gene-seed. Thus even if the Old Legion Marines did not have the Canis Helix to begin with, did not have Wulfen or long fangs, they might have been able to have those traits awakened in them by the Canis Helix.

 

It's interresting to ponder how the Old Legion marines would react to that, perhaps the battle hardened and disciplined Terran Vets were better able to cope with the Canis Helix and awakening of the Wulfen.

[Ration]

It is really interesting to talk about all the posibilitys of how and why the legions and their primarches where combined and gained their traits.

 

As far as i know the wolves in the end of A thousand sons become wulfen when they assult their brother marines on prospero.

If this is becuase of the chaos powers manifesting on the planet or that they are in a frensy is hard to say.

So they must have been new legion marines wich would not be to hard since that was at the end of the crusade.

 

It could also be that the Canis helix on Fenris is airborne? that Russ got the gene from his Wolf family when he was young or mabe from the mother (mothers milk) and responded to it really well.

And as an above speaker said, the drink is just a catalyst to bring out the full potencial of the gene making them a tad unstable but fearsome fighters at the same time.

 

The posibilites are endless and very fun to speculate about.

[Skalver]

As the statement was from magnus i beleive to be more of a slur on the space wolves than a statement meant to be taken literaly.

 

That is plausible but remember that at the time of him saying it the SPace Wolves had not done anything to deserve his distaste. Whilst the other Primarchs may have harbored dark brooding s of Magnus's witchery, Magnus himself was always trying to create bonds of friendship with his brothers, he did not hate any of the, not even Russ

 

Yes, but remember the entire story of A Thousand Sons is Ahriman's retelling of what occurred and thus any slur's on the Space Wolves could of course have been edited into the story by him well after the fact.

 

Personally, I loved the portrayal of the Space Wolves in the book. I felt they came across with an aura of contained savagery that is very much lacking in most of the other background fluff. I welcome the move away from the ale guzzling frat boy marines that seems to be a bit overly dominant in a lot of the Space Wolf fluff. The general ditching of the Viking imagery seemed to make sense. That the people of Fenris as a people live in a technological state much similar to that of viking times is fine, but that their culture is basically a total copy of viking culture always seemed almost ridiculously unlikely. I am reminded of the old movie making adage - "People will accept the impossible but not the improbable".

 

It is interesting that so many people came away with different interpretations of the "No wolves on Fenris" remark. My personal take on it was that the people and creatures of Fenris were genetically modified to be able to survive there, hence the superhuman endurance and senses of the people of Fenris. This however it does not seem to me could have been done with the canis helix. The canis helix is a gene added to a space wolf recruit as a precursor to their becoming a Space Marine. This makes me feel that the canis helix as a precursor gene is used to alter the (already genetically altered) fenrisian native so that his body is compatible with the standard Space Marine genetic modifications. The people of Fenris are fundamentally incompatible with the process of becoming a Space Marine due to their altered genetic make up. The canis helix is used to correct this and the instability it causes is presumably due to the canis helix itself being created after much of the knowledge that went into the original Space Marine program was lost.

 

The book itself was good overall I felt. A bit overlong and, like a lot of the later Horus Heresy books could do with the remembrancer's being edited completely out of it. That all of the books basically contain versions of the same three stock remembrancers - The wise old guy, the pretty yet doomed girl and the nice but otherwise uninteresting third character who is just there because it is hard to write any interesting dialogue with just two remembrancers all the time - doesn't help either. I am guessing the idea of the remembrancers was to try and get some characters we could empathise with (and/or lust after) into the books but the move seems to have proven to be utterly unneeded. I can go through the old books and just from the titles name most of the marine characters, for the most part I can't remember any of the remembrancers though. To paraphrase the famous watchmen quote, "who remembers the remembrancers?". Hopefully someone somewhere in the black library will decide that future books should not have remembrancer characters unless they add something more to the plot than showing that at the time Space Marines tended to interract with humans more than they do in the 40k version of the universe. We care about the history, not the historians so please don't force us to hear about how they walked around making sketches and writing memoirs. It is strange that A Thousand Sons is written from the perspective of one of the major characters yet he constantly tells us about the historians who were there to document all of this. Wouldn't it make more sense to have one of the historians telling the story? Why are none of the Horus Heresy books written from the viewpoint of a remembrancer when, that is, ostensibly, the entire point of having the remembrancers there? The only answer is because the remembrancers almost without exception are boring, uninteresting side characters who add nothing to the story being told.

[Lord Ragnarok]

It is really interesting to talk about all the posibilitys of how and why the legions and their primarches where combined and gained their traits.

 

As far as i know the wolves in the end of A thousand sons become wulfen when they assult their brother marines on prospero.

If this is becuase of the chaos powers manifesting on the planet or that they are in a frensy is hard to say.

So they must have been new legion marines wich would not be to hard since that was at the end of the crusade.

 

It could also be that the Canis helix on Fenris is airborne? that Russ got the gene from his Wolf family when he was young or mabe from the mother (mothers milk) and responded to it really well.

And as an above speaker said, the drink is just a catalyst to bring out the full potencial of the gene making them a tad unstable but fearsome fighters at the same time.

 

The posibilites are endless and very fun to speculate about.

 

They were already Wulfen. The 13th Company were Wulfen prior to Prospero.

[Ration]

Did the old gen marines become wulfen to? becuase the 13th comp was like any other comp with the exeption for go looking in the eye after Russ, thats when the whole bunch turned right?

[CainTheHunter]

Not really. According to the 13th company fluff in the Codex:Eye of Terror, in them the Curse of Wulfen manifested itself the most. But they were not Wulfen. Some of them became later - but that's another story.

[Ulriks Minion]

If they are "were-people-wolves" that explains them being abnormally large in size

[Simo429]

i may need to re read it because i certainly didnt read it as the wolves are devolved humans

 

i thought it was saying that the wolves were already there on fenris when the settlers got there so they werent wolves at all but an alien species that just closely resembled wolves and so the original settlers called them wolves, now after so much time and long night very few people know the truth so its kind of an in joke that the 1k sons know more about fenris than the barbarians that live there

[Captain Juan Juarez]

I read A Thousand Sons and found it ranks only just so far above Goto or Swallow/Blood Angels abominations.

 

"There are no wolves on Fenris" I think is a pithy line that some other author now has to justify, rather than a coherent concept.

[Simo429]

i hated 1k sons

 

not because of the wolves bits but the custodes

 

ive always been a fan of them and believed they were even more hardcore than marines because of the likes of collective visions and then they got butchered by the thousand sons like imperial guard

[Lord Ragnarok]

Well in collected visions you can see them taking some whoopings by other traitors. Also remember Ksons powers were much heightened during the battle of prospero. Also note, that just because one on one you may be physically stronger does not give you an auto win. Lots of factors come to play. If they were immortal then they wouldn't have needed to send Us.