Rune Priests and Psychic Nulls

[Greyall]

Actually, I don't think it could've been any more 'Just as Planned' than the tutelaries turning on their masters and making a horrifying mess out of it. And you can see their influence (or some of it) since some of the TSons captains pretty much went corrupto at the battle - in the sense that they fully embraced the Warp and went absolutely bananas with it. One of them realized it, even, letting Valdor spear him through. The others burned and exploded.

 

So even if just at the end, you realize the Sons have kept daemons (if it comes from the Warp, it's either Drago or Daemons) around for at least the duration of their Captaincy careers, keeping them "material" by likely providing a bridge through their ill-controlled powers.

 

Of course tutelaries don't provide much (until they turn the battle) but, in hindsight, they're a very cruel plot device that not so much hammers but punctures the point home - do not embrace that which you can't embrace with your arms.

[Peter the Hermit]

I think the most important part of  "aTS" book is when TS-s kill that chick to get a glimpse of the future and Lemuel opens his eyes...

 

This was Tzeenchian cult in his origins.....IMHO....

 

O yeah, don't forget how cyclops went through webway with his fat arse and screwed many souls in the process...

[Greyall]

So many stuff goes/is done wrong it's hard to keep track of them all...And for a while the Legion is all smiles up their faces and pride in their hearts - understandably since their one-eyed papa forgot to tell them they were messing with scheming monstrosities. That's the glory of "A Thousand Sons".

[daveNYC]

Actually, I don't think it could've been any more 'Just as Planned' than the tutelaries turning on their masters and making a horrifying mess out of it. And you can see their influence (or some of it) since some of the TSons captains pretty much went corrupto at the battle - in the sense that they fully embraced the Warp and went absolutely bananas with it. One of them realized it, even, letting Valdor spear him through. The others burned and exploded.

 

So even if just at the end, you realize the Sons have kept daemons (if it comes from the Warp, it's either Drago or Daemons) around for at least the duration of their Captaincy careers, keeping them "material" by likely providing a bridge through their ill-controlled powers.

 

Of course tutelaries don't provide much (until they turn the battle) but, in hindsight, they're a very cruel plot device that not so much hammers but punctures the point home - do not embrace that which you can't embrace with your arms.

 

I'm creating a somewhat artificial distinction between warp entities that are tied to one of the four (calling them daemons), and warp entities that are part of the natural ecosystem of the warp.  Roughly the difference between sharks, and those smart sharks from Deep Blue Sea.  Neither of which make good pets.

 

The fact that everything turns against the Sons at the end works well in the novel.  All their decisions regarding the warp come back to bite them in the butt.  The hubris wasn't thinking that they could control the warp, it's thinking that they could master it.  Think of sailors or mountain climbers.

 

I have to disagree that the tutelaries turning worked out well.  An ideal outcome of the battle would have been for all the Wolf forces to have been ground up in battle, with a small group of survivors left that decide to take of and nuke the entire site from orbit (which given the losses to the Sons that were providing the kine shield for the city would have been possible).  Or maybe these were Tzeentch daemons, and Tzeentch decided that having the Wolves win (sorta) in order to get him a pet legion was more important than the elimination of an entire loyalist force.  It's Tzeentch, he's a riddle wrapped in an enigma, wrapped in a crispy tortilla shell.  My personal taste though is to have Tzeentch just set events and motivations up like a gigantic Rube Goldberg machine and then just get the ball rolling, as opposed to being a micromanager who has agents at each step of the way to make sure things work out the way he wants.

[Greyall]

Or maybe these were Tzeentch daemons, and Tzeentch decided that having the Wolves win (sorta) in order to get him a pet legion was more important than the elimination of an entire loyalist force.

 

That's my view. And yes, he sort of sets events in motion. He's a master at anticipating mortals' motivations and actions.

[Kol Saresk]

Or maybe these were Tzeentch daemons, and Tzeentch decided that having the Wolves win (sorta) in order to get him a pet legion was more important than the elimination of an entire loyalist force.

 

Although, by getting a pet Legion, Tzeentch also succeeded in removing a Loyalist force. I mean, with all the warp know-how they have, could you imagine if the KSons went Daemonhunter? They'd make the Grey Knights look like party clowns. Instead, the Architect of Fate lined up all of his ducks in a neat, little row and with one blow, he destroyed a Loyalist Legion, gained a Traitor Legion and severely maimed the Space Wolves.

[Jarl Kjaran Coldheart]

 

Or maybe these were Tzeentch daemons, and Tzeentch decided that having the Wolves win (sorta) in order to get him a pet legion was more important than the elimination of an entire loyalist force.

 

Although, by getting a pet Legion, Tzeentch also succeeded in removing a Loyalist force. I mean, with all the warp know-how they have, could you imagine if the KSons went Daemonhunter? They'd make the Grey Knights look like party clowns. Instead, the Architect of Fate lined up all of his ducks in a neat, little row and with one blow, he destroyed a Loyalist Legion, gained a Traitor Legion and severely maimed the Space Wolves.

 

I wonder just how severly maimed the Wolves were. From the ending of "Prospero Burns" they seem quite damaged, but the BRB mentions the Scouring was led by Guiliiman and Russ.

 

With the numbers that Guillman would bring into the fight, I wonder if the strengh of the Wolves  was enough to gain Russ that mention?

 

WLK

[GhostMalone]

Russ says in the scars ep 3 and is backed by Bjorne in ep 4 that the were pretty decimated and the alpha legion are already causing significant losses so I think they could be around the 60% mark of strength considering this is their last engagement of the heresy

[Conn Eremon]

What exactly does the claim that Russ led the Scouring alongside Guilliman have to do with his Legion size?

[Kol Saresk]

Yeah, after the Herey, the Wolves finish with only two thousand or so troops because they have just enough for one Chapter, which happens to blow up in their faces

[GhostMalone]

:cuss I thought it was more than 2000

[Kol Saresk]

Well, that's after the Heresy. That's another 5 years.

[Conn Eremon]

At some point in the Scouring, when the Codex Astartes was laid down and Russ relented, there was only enough to make two Chapters. Considering the 2~3 Chapter-sized 40k Space Wolves, after ten thousand years of slow decay and attrition, can we say there was two thousand at that time? Going with 40k's fluff, it could easily have been ten thousand at the time of the split.

 

Or . . . Is that two thousand number from a canon source?

[Kol Saresk]

The Wolf Brothers are the only Successor Chapter of the Space Wolves. They are a Second Founding Chapter. It took time for their gene-seed to degenerate to the point that the Chapter was declared dead. IIRC, wen the Codex was implemented, each Legion was divided into Chapters of 1,000. So logical deduction would be that if only one Successor Chapter was made, at the time of its Founding, the Wolves only had two thousand Marines prior to the separation as surely more Successors could have been made in the time it took to find out that the degeneration takes place if they had possessed sufficient numbers.

 

EDIT: Which would mean that the 2-3 Chapter-sized Space Wolves are either a result of accumulated recruits, survivors of the Wolf Brothers permanently increasing the number caps or both. Logically speaking of course.

[Conn Eremon]

Why? Because the Codex dictates Chapters are only a thousand? And yet we have the Space Wolves and the Black Templars, both famously disregarding the Codex from the very beginning, are of far greater size by the 41st Millennium than other Chapters, where the Imperium and its many facets are, no matter their current status, far, far less than they were in the 31st Millennium and were both formed during the 2nd Founding as Chapters. I don't think logic dictates that they have slowly accumulated Marines and became bigger. I think logic dictates that their defiance was even greater when still a Legion and that, when they did split, they did it on their own terms, like they continued to for ten thousand years afterwards.

 

To get to the point, I don't believe that the Space Wolves as a Chapter began at a thousand and slowly built up to be nearly triple in size by the 41st Millennium. That's not very 40k-like. What would be is the Space Wolves begin as a Chapter of many thousands, only allowing themselves to spawn a single successor, and have, over the course of millenia of ups and downs, slowly decreased to be as low as two, three thousand.

[Kol Saresk]

And yet, they did build a Second Founding Chapter. O get what you're saying. But there is the existence of a Second Founding Chapter. This is the only time we see them ever obeying the Codex.

 

EDIT: IIRC, I heard something about Battle of the Fang saying that the Wolf Brothers got half of everything.

[Conn Eremon]

The following of one aspect (split the Legion) does not exactly go directly into another (make even, thousand-man Chapters), especially when the one followed nearly led to a second civil war when another Legion disputed it, making it of far greater emphasis than the others, as well as the fact that no other aspects were followed. They never follow the Codex again, but we know they followed at least one aspect at this time. It doesn't necessarily mean that they must followed the whole thing at that time.

 

Let's say you have a bag of gamer dice from d2's to d100's, of any different colors. The rules dictate how you must roll and store them. Two examples of those rules say that they must be divided by color and rolled only one at a time. Me? I don't care. They're all jumbled together and I just toss them all at once. Countless games have progressed this way. But once, when the rules were first introduced, in spite of my own protestations, I did bother to separate them out by color. I don't have as many rainbow colored dice as some, I make two piles. Considering my history with these rules, what's the more likely? I have two piles because I only have two colors? Or I just said whatever, and tossed similar shades together, like lights and darks. Did I also roll them one at a time? Or did I refuse that because I was already separating my dice and I didn't even want to do that? Did I make sure each pile had a maximum of two dice of each type or did I just flip the table on Robert the Rules Lawyer with his three jugs of dice and asinine demands and play somewhere else?

[Kol Saresk]

lol, very true.

[GhostMalone]

Ehh if I remember even after the heresy Russ split the legion but never followed the codex as in kept numbers a lot higher

[Grimtooth]

And yet, they did build a Second Founding Chapter. O get what you're saying. But there is the existence of a Second Founding Chapter. This is the only time we see them ever obeying the Codex.

 

EDIT: IIRC, I heard something about Battle of the Fang saying that the Wolf Brothers got half of everything.

Battle of the Fang, page 420

 

"We had a successor: the Wolf Brothers, led by Beor Arjac Grimmaesson. They were to have been numerous as we were, and as powerful. They were gifted a homeworld, Kaeriol, a planet of ice and fire, just as Fenris is. They had half our fleet, half our armouries, half our Priests."

 

We are told what they are were given. However a more specific point in the above text is that the successor chapter was going to be as numerous as the Wolves, not that they were as numerous. If the Legion was split right down the middle, the Wolf Brothers would have been as numerous right from their creation.

 

What has been floated around is that the Wolf Brothers were probably initially seeded with the half of the priesthood as well as leadership; wolf lord and wolf guard to train/lead the newly recruited and created Wolf Brothers from the Kaeriol population. The reason that this idea has some traction is that from other sources there is evidence of Wolf Brothers unaffected by the same fate as the Wolf Brothers in Battle of the Fang. These very well could have been the Fenrisian born members sent to initially seed the successor and thus unaffected by whatever it is that affected those created on Kaeriol.

 

To get a bit back on point, in Prospero Burns, Hawser was designated a "bad star" from his initial appearance by the shamans of the various villages to witness his crash landing. It was such a powerful portent that it united two tribes normally enemies to eradicate the Ascomnii tribe along with Hawser. Now, is it a complete coincidence that a pawn of Tzneetch by specific design is seen exactly for what he was by the primitive shamans of the populace?

[Greyall]

Not sure I get your point, Brother Ramses. You're supporting the claim that there's a difference between Fenrisian psykers and the "regular" ones?

 

If so, I'd say those shamans (we don't even know if said shamans have powers) either acted on intuition or - if they were indeed psykers - simply noticed some kind of "disturbance" in the Force Warp, even if they took it as a portent. Likely the shamans of Fenris don't fully understand their powers and attribute some of their abilites to the planet. Coincidentally, so do the trained, superhuman psykers of the Wolves =p

 

It's probably the only true example of savage-like "backwards thinking" by the Wolves. Traditions, ferocity and pelt-wearing don't really count, mainly because their usually the product of a very characterful world, but also because the Wolves deliberately exaggerate some of the practices to fool their enemies.

[daveNYC]

 To get a bit back on point, in Prospero Burns, Hawser was designated a "bad star" from his initial appearance by the shamans of the various villages to witness his crash landing. It was such a powerful portent that it united two tribes normally enemies to eradicate the Ascomnii tribe along with Hawser. Now, is it a complete coincidence that a pawn of Tzneetch by specific design is seen exactly for what he was by the primitive shamans of the populace?

 

Don't go there.  You're trying to turn a tragic loss of life that comes about due to the superstition and suspicion of the local Fenrisians into necessary defense of their world from the forces of evil that comes about due to the finely tuned instincts of the local Fenrisians.  It's 100% Mary-Sue fodder.

[Greyall]

I haven't read Prospero Burns, but I'm assuming you mean they didn't have to wipe a whole tribe just because of that omen about Hawser, right?

[daveNYC]

Spoilers for the prologue section of Prospero Burns:

 

 

The story opens with Hawser stuck in a crashed Imperial lander on Fenris.  A couple of locals come up and rescue him.  They take him back to their village and a little while later, the other villages show up looking for blood.  Rough upshot is that they saw the crashing lander, and figured it as an omen of woe or a sign of a malefacarum.  Slaughter results, Hawser and his buds make a break for it in an ice boat.  The ice boat is chased, crashes, and before our narrator comes to an untimely end, the Wolves roll in and rescue everyone.  It turns out that the guy in charge of the orbital defenses had forgotten to turn on the IFF system or something, so it's his fault that the lander went down.

 

As written, it's a screw up by the Space Wolves that led to events that triggered extreme violence simply due to the locals beliefs.  Adding in some magic instinct that allowed the locals to sense the Tzeentch influence on Hawser changes things so the tragedy isn't the superstition fueled loss of life, the tragedy is the fact they didn't manage to kill everyone.  Plus it would give the locals magic chaos sensing powers, which is just plain old bad.

 

[Greyall]

Thanks for the info. I'd say it's more a case of duality and leaving the lingering doubt than Mary-Sueism.

 

Anyway, it's often the case in 40K that those whose instincts lead them to suspect another's corruption are often right. Especially when it's the former' pressure that turns the latter. Chicken vs egg and all that.