Upcoming HH Novel: White Scars/SW/AL by Chris Wraight

[Kol Saresk]

Yeah, it's not necessarily a loss for the Traitors so much as slowing them down. Couple minor battles that are iffy and could have gone either way except for a stroke of luck there or a stroke of luck here. And then one frikkin huge battle where the Traitors push ahead. Thramas. It was a standstill. And then the Lion happens across some weird entity that allows him to move multiple ships through the warp virtually instantaneously and exactly where he wants them. Doesn't keep the Dark Angels from getting a bloody nose, but it does enough to break the stalemate, ambush Curze and put him on the hospital bed for a while. However, the current state of the Thramas Crusade is unknown. We assume that because the ships who were with Sevatar split into six fleets and were ordered to divide the rest of the Legion, that is what happened. We have no way of knowing. We truly do not know where Curze is and for all we know he could be getting a tan in the light of the Invincible Reason's engines or on a different flagship(as I recall the Nightfall being a burning hulk), reorganizing the Legion to do exactly what Sevatar wanted to prevent. For all we know it is actually happening still. Even then, it is still possible that there are isolated Night Lords Warfleets that are still fighting it. However, the point of the Thramas Crusade s to keep the majority of the Dark Angels Legion focused on the Eastern Fringe. Last we saw, there was a possibility of it being lost due to Sevatar's orders to the new Kyroptera, but it was still serving its purpose and could be considered a "win" for the Traitors.

 

Phall. Starts out good for the Imperial Fists. Yeah, they get some bloody noses going when the IV first show up and they are still slowly losing ships as the battle pushes on and where ever Perturabo is, it seems like a lost cause, but the Retribution Fleet is definitely buying its destruction with a good portion of the IV. And then a way home appears. They start to retreat. And what happens? Now they're getting slaughtered worse than when they were doing the killing. And the last ship out, which happens to have the commander of the Fleet on board, winds up who knows where.

 

Calth. Technically I'm hard-pressed to call this a victory for anyone. On the ground, atleast half of the ground forces and civilian population were wiped out in the opening bombardments. The Ultramarines Fleet takes a huge beating. The Veridia Forge(the producer of the Praetor-pattern Power Armor) is destroyed. And when all is said and done, one of the rising new capitals of Ultramar is left as a burning ball of cinders, the surface only tansversable by Astartes in working power armor and even then only for short amounts of time. True, the XIII turn around and give Kor Phaeron's Word Bearers a royal beating and its safe to say that when the overall tally of the Underground War is put up, most, if not all, of the Word Bearers who were left behind are dead. But look at the long term goals. Calth is effectively put out of the war and so is most of the Ultramarines' contingent that was mustering there. The Ruinstorm is birthed. The Ultramarines are pretty much thrown into disarray. I mean, by the time they are able to respond to the other 99 planets being attacked, they can only respond to the last planet, Angron's homeworld. And the fleet Guilliman brought there was described as unorganized with the sole intention of getting troops on the ground and then overwhelming the enemy troops and fleet with sheer numbers. Actually kind of desperate on Guilliman's part, and if it wasn't for the king-ship or Angron's ascension, might have worked. Oh, and let us not forget that Calth was also to be where the Word Bearers' chafe was to be sacrificed. So in that respect, it did and did not serve its purpose as a great many Word Bearers were lost there, but not all of them like Lorgar had hoped.

 

So with Calth, it could really go either way on what you define as a "victory" as it was a Pyrrhic victory for both sides. The Ultramarines there survived and Guilliman went on to fight another day, at the cost of at least half of his troops, a forge, a star and a planet's surface rendered uninhabitable. The Word Bearers were able to create the Ruinstorm and lose a good portion of those deemed necessary sacrifices at the cost of pretty much everyone on the surface except for M'Kar.

 

Out of those three, the only one that could be looked at and declared a "victory" is the Thramas Crusade. Phall, it may have been a bloody battle but ultimately it swings towards the IV Legion. So let's call it a draw. And Calth. Definitely leaving that as a draw.

[Aegnor]

And as Horus says in Warmaster, it doesn't matter how the galaxy burns, only that it does. He wants the storm, the chaos, everywhere so that when he does strike his enemies don't see it coming/are powerless to prevent it.

 

Doesn't make as much sense as an immediate lunge for Terra after the Dropsite Massacre while the Ultramarines, Blood Angels,Dark Angels and Space Wolves are all out of position and powerless to intervene, but that's not the direction Black Library and GW have taken it. They have some decent reasons for making it so much more extended, but on one level it makes no sense.

[Kol Saresk]

Well an immediate lunge would have meant going from one warzone straight into a potentially even bigger warzone without time to recover.not exactly the best solution.

[SirAstartes]

And as Horus says in Warmaster, it doesn't matter how the galaxy burns, only that it does. He wants the storm, the chaos, everywhere so that when he does strike his enemies don't see it coming/are powerless to prevent it.

 

Doesn't make as much sense as an immediate lunge for Terra after the Dropsite Massacre while the Ultramarines, Blood Angels,Dark Angels and Space Wolves are all out of position and powerless to intervene, but that's not the direction Black Library and GW have taken it. They have some decent reasons for making it so much more extended, but on one level it makes no sense.

 

“He knows now, the fire is lit and all that was is cast to the wind. We are are committed he and I, my brothers and our legions. All humanities futures bound together in this circle of blood. We are all the storm now, the Imperium will fall and raise by my hand or fall and fall and fall.”

 

Warmaster is an awesome piece of Audio from BL/HE.

[Wade Garrett]

Thramas had no clear victor?

The Angels killed a fifth of the Night Lords, their entire Titan support Legio, shattered them as a unified Legion, and left their Primarch on life support.

 

In return the Night Lords...well, Sevatar looked really cool surfing a space fighter.

[Aegnor]

Well an immediate lunge would have meant going from one warzone straight into a potentially even bigger warzone without time to recover.not exactly the best solution.

"Immediate lunge" meaning as soon as practical - a matter of weeks, maybe a couple of months, not 7 years.

[Kol Saresk]

That's what I thought you meant that, but just between Istvaan III and Istvaan V we see some serious mobilization on the part of the Imperial Fists. true, he could have blitzkrieged Terra but blitzkriegs might be fast, shocking and do a ton of damage but they don't exactly do anything for consolidation. That has to come afterwards and if all(or most) of the Traitors were gathered in Terra, I don't think the Loyalist Legions(the Ultramarines alone being at full-strength since Calth and the Ruinstorm wouldn't have happened) would have given the Traitors some pause like "Crap, that's a huge hammer heading our way. Lorgar, why didn't you do something about that? Oh right you needed your Legion and te World Eaters to burn 100 worlds as fast as possible and we said no because you wanted to take two years. Well, crikey. This is gonna hurt."

 

Sorry, I don't know if that's coming across as rude or not. I don't mean it if it does. I'm just a bit scatterbrained at the moment from lack of sleep and watching Ross Noble. So I do apologize if it comes across as rude.

 

@Wade: Do we know the Thramas Crusade is over? I mean, IIRC in Prince of Crows Sevatar said he was ending it. But at the same time he was going have part of the must ler scatter to the four winds and the rest of it blaze through the Dark Angels fleet and then join in the scattering. Curze had a different opinion when he boarded the Invincible Reason. And since we currently do not know where Curze is, there are two probabilities. Well three but that's because one splits into two.

 

First one, he isn't in charge of the Legion. Second he is. And from there he is either doing what Sevatar wanted or striking back as impulsively as he did when he recovered from eleven fatalities that would have killed a Space Marine each. Or doing who knows what.

 

But, that's beside the point. Why I consider the Thramas Crusade to not be a defeat for the Traitors. As in all the Traitors, not just the Night Lords. No, they took a beating. You're right, they did lose. Anyway, practicality. The Thramas Crusade was probably nothing more than to keep the Dark Angels in the Eastern Fringe, just as the Word Bearers and World Eaters kept the Ultramarines in Ultramar and the Alpha Legion is supposed(I say supposed because we don't know how that's turned out yet) to be keeping the White Scars in Chondax while(as far as we know) the Sons of Horus and Death Guard are doing something, the Thousand Sons are in the Eye and the Iron Warriors and Emperor's Children are frolicking through the warp.

 

So in the aspect that the Thramas Crusade kept the Dark Angels in the Eastern Fringe, it is a "victory". Or at least "not a defeat". It's sort of the "Lose the battle here to hopefully win the war there" sort of thing. For the Night Lords, yeah it was like slipping and rolling down the asphalt at sixty miles an hour because you were on your motorcycle and a nice patch of water decided to make the bike dump you off. And trust me, I know from experience how bad that can hurt. I assure you, my backpack got it worse than I did.

 

But for the overall Traitors, specifically Horus an Lorgar, it was a success. True, the Night Lords got hit pretty bad but now they're on equal percentages with everyone else and the Dark Angels aren't leaving the Eastern Fringe for a while as they hunt down stragglers.

[Týr]

 

Well an immediate lunge would have meant going from one warzone straight into a potentially even bigger warzone without time to recover.not exactly the best solution.

"Immediate lunge" meaning as soon as practical - a matter of weeks, maybe a couple of months, not 7 years.

 

Actually the HH is 14 years long according to this guy who went to the Horys Heresy weekender: http://apocalypse40k.blogspot.dk/2013/05/more-forge-world-horus-heresy-q.html

[Kol Saresk]

Yeah I still want to know when that jump happened. I asked him if there had been an increase and as far as I know I have received no reply and since one thing that was "announced" at the Weekender was pretty much effectively debunked, my skepticism is at an all-time high, especially concerning background changes. Wouldn't be the first time someone went "the background's changed!" and I believed them and then found out it was a misunderstanding because of a typo.

[Kol Saresk]

I asked Forgeworld on Facebook about it and the response was that they think the official timeline is in the Collected Visions so I guess whatever is in there is the deciding factor on how long the Heresy is.

[Týr]

I asked Forgeworld on Facebook about it and the response was that they think the official timeline is in the Collected Visions so I guess whatever is in there is the deciding factor on how long the Heresy is.

 

The plot thickens...

 

IMO 14 years of Heresy isn't that bad. This way both sides can engage in big battles and take a beating, and still have time to regain their strength before Terra.

[Aegnor]

@Kol Saresk - take your point, but that assumes consolidation is even important in this scenario. The situation, and Horus's whole philosophy of war is the speartip to the throat to decapitate the enemy (excuse the mixed metaphor) before he is prepared for the fight.

 

For me, Horus going to Terra should never have been about taking and holding Terra. It had to be about killing the Emperor and the Council of Terra. If Horus achieved that, he'd win the war - even if he then had to withdraw ahead of the Space Wolf/Dark Angel counter-invasion. Without the Emperor, Terra would fall to daemons (which Horus must have known), the Astronomican would go out and the loyalists would splinter. Any other objective was nowhere near as important.

 

If straight after the Dropsite Massacre, Horus had sent half the Word Bearers to delay the Ultras, and the Night Lords to do the same to the Dark Angels, he still could have shown up with 5 and a half reasonably intact Legions to take on just the Imperial Fists and maybe the White Scars.

 

Once they killed the Emperor, huge chunks of the loyalists would have defected to Horus, surmising correctly that he was the only one who could win the war. With the Astronomican out of commission, only those of the traitor side could have travelled via the warp with any speed, and Horus would have been free to isolate and crush the remaining loyalists one legion at a time.

[Kol Saresk]

True enough

[RapatoR]

By the way if you are eager to read about AL loosing, you should probably read (almost) any piece of 40k lore about AL (or play DoW game, BAWKSEEEES!!!), except IA, Siege of Vraks and few short stories is AL portrayed as whipping boys at best and totally incompetent legion as worst.

[Wade Garrett]

Running straight to Terra with no preparations or groundwork is counterproductive to Horus's goal, which isn't just to kill the Emperor, but to install himself as Master of Mankind in his place. That means securing the galaxy ahead of time.

 

The Chaos Legions blasting their way in, razing Terra, and bailing is the best case scenario. Worst case is that they're still trying to break down the door when the Scars, Wolves, etc. show up behind them. Then they get exterminated.

[Aegnor]

If I were Horus, I would have bombed Terra literally to pieces with cyclonic torpedoes and left a new asteroid belt around Sol, then gone and conquered the galaxy

[Excessus]

If I were Horus, I would have bombed Terra literally to pieces with cyclonic torpedoes and left a new asteroid belt around Sol, then gone and conquered the galaxy

Terra is the central seat of power, it was/is needed to completely rule the galaxy...

[SirAstartes]

If I were Horus, I would have bombed Terra literally to pieces with cyclonic torpedoes and left a new asteroid belt around Sol, then gone and conquered the galaxy

 

I think he wanted to try and take Terra with as little damage as possible, he wanted somewhere to rule the galaxy from, something that he could show he'd conquered, not a pile of rubble.

[Legionator]

If I were Horus, I would have bombed Terra literally to pieces with cyclonic torpedoes and left a new asteroid belt around Sol, then gone and conquered the galaxy

 

For a superhuman military genius, Horus made really stupid mistakes. A normal man could have won the Heresy.

[Vesper]

You know, a normal man would've been better than the emperor at basically everything.

[Excessus]

...and that would be such a boring setting...

[Wade Garrett]

Given that it took the ten thousand year old super scientist god tier psyker and the Thunder Warriors just to unify Terra, I think "A normal man would be better than the Emperor at everything." is pushing it.

[Conn Eremon]

I think he's given to be about as old as the setting itself, right? In 30k, he's pretty much 30k years old, give or take a few thousand years. I think that was established in the same book that detailed his origins as a really whole lot of scared shaman souls in one guy.

[Kol Saresk]

Well, 30K would place him as being made in 0000 A.D. I'm a little confused on when the Shamans created him exactly. Sometimes it seems like it was way older than 0000 A.D. And other times it seems like he was made somewhere within that 30,000 years.

[Excessus]

Mechanicum has him in an ancient setting(slaying the dragon), but I don't remember enough details to pinpoint a time period...