Scars

[Excessus]

Word Bearers...they are not an army, they are a fanatical religious cult!

[Conn Eremon]

They are a fanatical religious cult. Perhaps even the most fanatical.

 

Who also happens to be more highly militarized than most militaries.

[b1soul]

.....errr....is this sarcasm?

If not, you need to read the first few pages of Prince of Crows by ADB ....... didn't have to be saved by one of his marines while another primarch chokes him out in the dirt...

No...In Savage Weapons, the Lion has to be saved by one of his marines as Curze chokes him out in the dirt

ADB has mentioned on another forum that this fight was supposed to be a draw (see quotes below).

However, judging by the way it was written, I honestly thought the Lion would've been totally fu**ed if the marine hadn't jumped in to save him. Maybe the Lion would've saved himself but based on the way it was described, it looked like a slim chance at best. My views clearly differ from the authour's. Here's what he had to say:

As a writer, I ultimate chose that I wanted the Dark Angels to win the Thramas Crusade, and I wanted the Lion to slit Curze's throat, effectively being one of the few primarchs to legitimately beat another. And it was a conscious choice with Savage Weapons to show:

- The Dark Angels care about their primarch more than the Night Lords care about theirs.

- The Dark Angels are smart enough to try to tip the odds of an otherwise balanced fight, while the Night Lords get distracted with bloodshed or are too arrogant to care.

- The Lion was better than Curze with weapons, but Curze was better in a feral rough and tumble brawl.

- Curze is Chaos-tainted already, and had an advantage, but it still ends at 50/50. This implies the Lion is "better", for want of a better word.

- The fight ebbs and flows, with the advantage changing places. Had it gone on for longer, it probably would've swapped back.

But the debate here, as from Corswain's perspective, I'd say you're right - absolutely, he thought the Lion was screwed. It definitely looked like that to him.

Objectively? No. It's clearly a story from his perspective. Very clearly. It's intensely subjective, and with all we know about the primarchs, we can see his bias clearly.

Sure, when the fight was broken up, the Lion was on the losing side. But how many squillions of fights between heroes/characters/protagonists/villains have we seen where the guy on the losing side has a second wind (cracking a rock against the head of the guy strangling him) and turns the tide a moment later. It happens all the time. These are warriors that can fight for days and days. Yet another mortal wound is nothing to them.

[Cerbero666]

I just want to add that the Ultramarines do have a flaw: "Disobeying the codex, even for a noble cause, is simply the first step towards the belief that the ends justify the means, and from the to total anarchy"  Now tell me how thinking that way is not a flaw. The Imperial Fists if I recall train their marines to be able to think for themselves if a dificult situation develops and sadly the Ultramarines kind of lack this. "If its not in the codex we dont do it".

 

But on the topic: Its good to see that the WS get some atention although I was a bit confused with the artwork at first, them fighting amoungst eachother.

 

I recall a quote from the Space Marine videogame about the codex: "The Codex Astartes is a set of rules, they guide us, shape us as Ultramarines, teach us to hold honor and duty sacred above all. But how we live by those rules is the true test of a Space Marine". 

 

I think it described perfectly the idea of the codex. There's some astartes who are more hard line and other astartes who are not respecting the codex. IIRC Guilliman included some quote about thinking for themselves, because the codex couldn't cover every single situation. 

 

So is a more individually way of thought than a whole chapter kind of thing. Of course there are chapters more recpetives to the codex and others that aren't, but at the end of the day is more a personal opinion of each warrior. 

 

 

The Imperial Fists if I recall train their marines to be able to think for themselves if a dificult situation develops and sadly the Ultramarines kind of lack this. "If its not in the codex we dont do it".

 

You recall wrong. Specifically, you recall wrong about the Fists. The Raven Guard might value independence and iniative, but sons of Dorn do their duty and obey orders to the letter. Always. End of story.

 

Look at the Retribution Fleet, snatching defeat from the jaws of victory thanks to the Praetorian's recall order.

 

Well even when it's true that the IF and their successors are known for their duty and obediance (Legion of the Damned by Rob Sanders described this perfectly) , I doubt that the call from Dorn was more a matter of IF obedience than a matter of "hell is our damn Primarch, we must obey HIM". I mean, in the same situation almost every other legion would have done the same, except probably the more independent legions like the Night Lords (who, with the exception of Sevatar and some others, wanted to runaway in Prince of Crows) or the World Eaters (Delvarus in Betrayer being an example of this). There's a strong devotion to the Primarchs from the legions, they're fatherly figures, great commanders, an inspiration for them. So in that particular case I think the Fists did what they did because Dorn was calling them back with urgency.

 

In the other hand we have Grimaldus (a son of dorn) from the Black Templars, who is described in Helsreach as obedient but rebellious in some way (when he left the room with Helbrecth and the other commanders because he didn't agree with the plan).

[Wade Garrett]

Uh, Kol?

 

You might want to clarify how you're equating Calth and Phall because I personally am missing your point by several miles.

 

Also, given that Dorn gives a multi paragraph rant to Sigismund about not doing your own thing, "Our purpose is defined for us. We are not humans that have the luxury of choice. We are the Emperor's warriors. We exist to serve, not to rule our own destinies" etc. etc....

 

I don't think I am talking crazy talk when I say Dorn and his gene sons are not big fans of "Forget the usual procedure! Let's make up something unorthodox and off the wall and do THAT instead."

[Kol Saresk]

You're saying that the Imperial Fists lost Phall because they had a good start but it all ended badly because they followed their Primarch's orders right?

 

Calth, the Word Bearers followed Lorgar's orders to launch an attack against the Ultramarines' muster. It started out good and then ended horribly.

 

What did you miss?

[Conn Eremon]

Sounded to me like he wasn't equating the battles but the loyalties of the two Legions to their Primarchs.

 

Though honestly, I think Dorn's sons can very easily act like that. Its true, they are very much into the duty and obedience thing but they are also about knightly heroism. Which kinda requires going beyond the remits of duty and obedience, no?

 

Edit: Ninja'd by Kol himself, it seems

[facmanpob]

The first few pages of Prince of Crows had Curze's throat slashed. B1soul is referring to Savage Weapons when Curze was to kill the Lion and Corswain went all Brad Pitt in Troy, jumped off a rock and shoved a sword through Curze's spine, which saved his Primarch from death by strangulation.

Oh, I know that.....I was referring to the fact that in Prince of Crows the NL had to sacrifice almost an entire company to push back the Lion from standing over Curze's dying body.....the DA just needed one bloke ;)

[Kol Saresk]

And they needed a whole fleet just to put Curze's body on the ground. ;)

[GrandMagnus]

 

I just want to add that the Ultramarines do have a flaw: "Disobeying the codex, even for a noble cause, is simply the first step towards the belief that the ends justify the means, and from the to total anarchy"  Now tell me how thinking that way is not a flaw. The Imperial Fists if I recall train their marines to be able to think for themselves if a dificult situation develops and sadly the Ultramarines kind of lack this. "If its not in the codex we dont do it".

 

But on the topic: Its good to see that the WS get some atention although I was a bit confused with the artwork at first, them fighting amoungst eachother.

 

I recall a quote from the Space Marine videogame about the codex: "The Codex Astartes is a set of rules, they guide us, shape us as Ultramarines, teach us to hold honor and duty sacred above all. But how we live by those rules is the true test of a Space Marine". 

 

I think it described perfectly the idea of the codex. There's some astartes who are more hard line and other astartes who are not respecting the codex. IIRC Guilliman included some quote about thinking for themselves, because the codex couldn't cover every single situation. 

 

So is a more individually way of thought than a whole chapter kind of thing. Of course there are chapters more recpetives to the codex and others that aren't, but at the end of the day is more a personal opinion of each warrior. 

Except that the Ultramarines (at least the Chapter not the Legion) treat deviation from the codex as heresy and punish the marine who did not follow it by sending him on a suicide mission to the Eye of Terror.

 

And as far as the quote from Space Marine goes, there are two opinions about the Ultramarine/codex relationship: 1st is Matt Wards idea that space marines are ultra-mega-kickass-gods-of-war-better-than-anybody-else-and-the-codex-is-perfect. And 2nd there is the fluff from older codexes and horus heresy fluff (which definetly prefer rather than Wards stuff) that say exactly that, its a guideline but sometimes you need to think for yourselves.

 

What happens in Space Marine to me feels like a confrontation behind Matt Wards fluff (when hes accused of heresy by a brother for not following the codex) and Titus who represents the older fluff, but that is just my own opinion.

[facmanpob]

.....errr....is this sarcasm?

If not, you need to read the first few pages of Prince of Crows by ADB .......

No...In Savage Weapons, the Lion has to be saved by one of his marines as Curze chokes him out in the dirt

ADB has mentioned on another forum that this fight was supposed to be a draw (see quotes below).

However, judging by the way it was written, I honestly thought the Lion would've been totally fu**ed if the marine hadn't jumped in to save him. Maybe the Lion would've saved himself but based on the way it was described, it looked like a slim chance at best. My views clearly differ from the authour's. Here's what he had to say:

As a writer, I ultimate chose that I wanted the Dark Angels to win the Thramas Crusade, and I wanted the Lion to slit Curze's throat, effectively being one of the few primarchs to legitimately beat another. And it was a conscious choice with Savage Weapons to show:

- The Dark Angels care about their primarch more than the Night Lords care about theirs.

- The Dark Angels are smart enough to try to tip the odds of an otherwise balanced fight, while the Night Lords get distracted with bloodshed or are too arrogant to care.

- The Lion was better than Curze with weapons, but Curze was better in a feral rough and tumble brawl.

- Curze is Chaos-tainted already, and had an advantage, but it still ends at 50/50. This implies the Lion is "better", for want of a better word.

- The fight ebbs and flows, with the advantage changing places. Had it gone on for longer, it probably would've swapped back.

But the debate here, as from Corswain's perspective, I'd say you're right - absolutely, he thought the Lion was screwed. It definitely looked like that to him.

Objectively? No. It's clearly a story from his perspective. Very clearly. It's intensely subjective, and with all we know about the primarchs, we can see his bias clearly.

Sure, when the fight was broken up, the Lion was on the losing side. But how many squillions of fights between heroes/characters/protagonists/villains have we seen where the guy on the losing side has a second wind (cracking a rock against the head of the guy strangling him) and turns the tide a moment later. It happens all the time. These are warriors that can fight for days and days. Yet another mortal wound is nothing to them.

I was just making a reasonably light-hearted comment about the fact that although the Lion had his throat cut by Curze in Savage Weapons, he did wipe the floor with Curze in PoC (proably should have used more smileys!). I actually agree with you in that I read it that Corswain needed to save the Lion, just as the NL sacrificed nearly an entire company saving Curze.....

Interestingly, to ADB's statement...

- The Dark Angels care about their primarch more than the Night Lords care about theirs.

whichever NL commander (can't remember off hand) ordered the company in to save Curze does actually say that he regretted doing it, so there is a consistency between ADB's view of the NL between the stories.

[Kol Saresk]

It was one of the three Kyroptera from the very beginning of the novel. They hadn't been named yet and the one who said it was "the second one". Page 294 of the overall Shadows of Treacherey anthology.

[Wade Garrett]

You're saying that the Imperial Fists lost Phall because they had a good start but it all ended badly because they followed their Primarch's orders right? Calth, the Word Bearers followed Lorgar's orders to launch an attack against the Ultramarines' muster. It started out good and then ended horribly.What did you miss?

Oh. I gotcha now. Although I think Calth went south less because of anything Lorgar did or didn't do, and more because Kor Phaeron decided to gloat and twirl his mustache when he should have been hacking through Rob's spinal cord.

 

Although opinions will vary.

 

As for Savage Weapons...eh. I've always thought it was the height of arrogance to tell an author "You didn't write what you say you wrote. You wrote what I interpreted it as." But c'mon! Curze had that in the bag!

 

And that's OKAY. It's fine for the Bad Guys to unambiguously knock the stuffing out of the Good Guys once in a while. It lets the Good Guy show his character by not despairing in defeat, but rising again tougher añd stronger than before. Look at Rocky III. Would it have been a better story if the first fight between Clubber Lang and Rocky had been some "From a certain point of view what's true for me may not be true for you" murky half defeat to placate fans of Sylvester Stallone and Mr. T, or what we got?

 

And now my headcanon is that to win at Thramas, Lion had to run up and down a beach in slow motion with Leman Russ while wearing neon colored short shorts and tank tops, then they ran out into the ocean and hugged while the music crescendoed...in a very manly heterosexual way, of course.

[Veteran Sergeant]

It's Khal Drogo in power armour!

Edit-...... and is that Ming the Merciless in the bottom right hand corner?

How do you get a helmet on when you have hair that awesome?

The Heresy era Ultramarines are Sues.

Here we go again. People tossing around the term Mary Sue who don't actually know what Mary Sue means.

[Veteran Sergeant]

 

All the legions have some flaw or another: The Space Wolves are fearsome warriors, but are too hot blooded and "lapdogs", the Imperial Fist are the last stand guys, but are some kind of emo, the Blood Angels got the Red Thirtst, the Dark Angels the "not too well hidden secret" and the proud of Lion as a flaw, the White Scars their isolation, and the list goes on. The only thing I don't like about the Ultras, and makes me laugh when I heard about other legions being Mary Sues, is that the Ultramarines are apparently flawless.

These really aren't flaws, they're just tropes and narrative hooks.

 

The nice thing about the Ultramarines, and a few of the other Legions, is that they aren't some kind of trope. They're just Space Marines. Here's the thing: In any collection of similar, but not identical entities, one of them is going to be the best. Games Workshop just decided, at some point, that was the Ultramarines. The Ultramarines are the Generic Marines for the setting. Back in the early 90s, GW established a "Big Four". Blood Angels, Dark Angels, Space Wolves, and Ultramarines. The Ultramarines don't have some ridiculous cartoon flaw because they're just Space Marines doing what Space Marines do. They don't suffer from a gene taint like the Blangels. They don't harbor some dark secret like the Dangels. And they aren't silly vikings like the Spwolves.

Which, of course, is why they've always been the poster boys. They don't require any extra explanation. You know what a Marine is in real life? Now, imagine him in the year 40,000, and well, that pretty much makes sense. No need to explain fangs, emo hoodie bathrobes, or being furries.

 

But it's silly to say the Ultramarines have been depicted as perfect. They've lost battles plenty of times in the fluff. Heck, Graham McNeil's books portray them as idiots, lol. But those are just terrible books because Graham McNeill doesn't understand what the Codex Astartes is supposed to be.

 

The Legions many of you carry on about who have "flaws", don't have flaws, in the traditional narrative sense. They're two dimensional cartoon character Legions, designed to appeal to a certain aesthetic, who have some simple narrative hook. But the Imperial Fists... what's their flaw?  Not being as successful as the Ultramarines?  Somebody has to be second place.  What's the flaw of the Salamanders? Being black? Getting ambushed at Istvaan V?

The Ultramarines just are. They were written into the story as being in the right place at the right time (not at Terra and thus not as heavily damaged as the other Legions), and given a unique Roman Empire style back story where they had been empire building on their own. being successful doesn't make them Mary Sues. Of course, that's the most absued term in the 40K community since 99% of people using it, are using it wrong.  They win the Battle of Calth because, originally, the Battle of Calth didn't even happen, lol. And then the first time it showed up in the fluff, it was after the end of the Heresy. TBL just decided that they could co-opt the idea to write another book(s) for you to buy.

[ShadowMaster]

A Space Marine must be flawed! Or else he is a Mary Sue!

 

Ridicolous...

[Kol Saresk]

Well, usually if they aren't flawed, they're dead.

[b1soul]

I was just making a reasonably light-hearted comment about the fact that although the Lion had his throat cut by Curze in Savage Weapons, he did wipe the floor with Curze in PoC (proably should have used more smileys!). I actually agree with you in that I read it that Corswain needed to save the Lion, just as the NL sacrificed nearly an entire company saving Curze.....

 

Just to clear this up...the Lion was almost choked out by Curze in Savage Weapons. The Lion cut Curze's throat in Prince of Crows. Both primarchs are "saved" by their marines.

 

In Savage Weapons, Corwain stabs Curze to save his primarch. In Prince of Crows, Sevatar enters his primarch's consciousness to "bring him back to the other side", so to speak

[Excessus]

From the BL facebook page:

 

[Conn Eremon]

Is that a frater Scar on the right? Look at that haircut!

[Vesper]

I like to imagine the guy in the middle is all about : "You stop laughing about my haircut".

[evilmittens]

The cover that started this thead (Remember when it was a Scars thread?!), show what appears to be some infighting among the legion. Also the tag line was/is "A legion divided"

 

That could be some really good ideas about the Scars and what happens to them in the early Heresy. Might be an interesting novel. However, like Excessus shared above, I am not sure about serializing the novel :(

[Kais Klip]

The cover that started this thead (Remember when it was a Scars thread?!), show what appears to be some infighting among the legion. Also the tag line was/is "A legion divided"

 

That could be some really good ideas about the Scars and what happens to them in the early Heresy. Might be an interesting novel. However, like Excessus shared above, I am not sure about serializing the novel :(

Time for everyone's favourite legion to but in; "legion divided" could also apply to the XXth as well, taking into account the earlier "aid from an unexpected quarter" remark (I severely doubt this to be wolves, that would be, uh... unexpected),

[Apothecary Vaddon]

Meh about serialized. Phalanx went that way, but I was impartial to mildly annoyed about it.

[Kol Saresk]

Is that a frater Scar on the right? Look at that haircut!

It's Friar Ghenghis!