Night Lords recruitment

[Scribe]

Mind wiping is mostly a 40K thing I believe. I have no issue with criminals or gangs or what have you being used, in fact I like my marines psychopathic.

And I dont disagree that the initial Nostramo recruits where scared straight, or the product of those who HAD been scared straight, but the back slide perfectly illustrates the fact that the culture of corruption itself had not been removed at either the high (educated/wealthy) or low (street gangs) cultural points.

My issue is...why even have the initial Night Lords come from even distant criminal stock? All it does is forcfully push the fact that the Legion is a pack of criminals, and frankly it detracts from the depth of the Legion itself.

Instead of them BECOMING Night Haunters end game, and BECOMING a seething den of villains due to their own methods, instead of being tainted by their own approach to Compliance, they have a predisposition, and the fact Nostramo has the same one?

I'm kind of shaking my head on it. Its far more fitting in my head to have Night Haunters methods damage his Legion, even those who had no predisposition to the kind of deviancy present on Nostramo.

Now you have a Legion of criminals...lead by a crazy guy who is 100% out of his mind, leading recruits who are tainted...and him going 'they poisoned my Legion!!!!' when the initial recruitment...was criminals!

Perhaps I'm just off on a tangent here, and I need to read the book but I dont think I'm buying in here.

EDIT: yep. I'm upset about this. /nerdrage mode engaged

[Nakuth]

The real reasons the Brits transported people to Australia: The 'convicts' kept beating them at sport.

Yes, I'm aware that's less of the case now days, but oh well.

OT: I can see how it could be perceived as an over-the-top contrivance on the part of FW to state that the Terran recruits for the VIII Legion came from subterranian penal colonies, but it must be said that that sort of environment would more than likely prove fruitful as an Astartes recruitment hub. Hopefully not all Terran VIII Legionaries were from here, though. I seem to recall someone mentioning in the Scars thread something about the final allocation to a Legion occured after indoctrination, training, etc?

[Brother-Chaplain Kage]

And in the Scars book it also showed how "overflow" recruits were sent off to other Legions that needed reinforcements when the Legion they had originally been selected for was full up.

[Chronotonic]

It comes down to the simple fact of the Night Watch

 

What do I mean by this let me explain

 

The Night Watch is from Game of Thorns back in the beginning it was a great honor to be one of the Night Watch your family bla bla bla...but as time went by people forgot about the honor and all they could get were thieves and murderers and beater...either them or those guy get the death sentence...wooo

 

now the knights that actually took the black for the Night Watch were old and sometimes past their prime...so in essence you have one good guy to watch over 100 messed up guys and keep them all in line...not an easy task to do...

 

now take that idea and transp...son of a gun George R.R. Martin is an Night Lord Fan...

 

......

 

...

 

 

transplant that idea onto a Legion...in this case Night Lords

 

...Basic Legion made on Terra did their thing...found their primarch things start to change...they always did...they were a blank slate just like he was when he landed and when they found him they were taught war...and learned on the job now they have their primarch for a guide point...fear...use fear...fear is a weapon just like a blade...but unlike a blade can be used by anyone...

 

As time went by the new recruits were from a planet in complete fear but now they were super human and knew no fear...that lesson was unlearned...and as time went by the planet forget the lesson as well...so the Astartes sent to the Legion knew no fear to begin with thus when they became Astartes they knew no fear and understood very little other then terrorizing victims...

 

also as time goes on those orginal Terran astartes that were the good ones with their own point of view and not a blank slate are becoming fewer and fewer either finally giving into their surroundings or dying in war or from backstabbing

 

The Night Haunter found this lesson to late but stopped the influx anyway by destroying his adopted home world...

 

as for kid killers

 

how is that hard to think of you just named two violent areas...what about those kid armies in Africa used by those warlords...how hard is it to think that another place would not do it...train them young...make them believe what you want them to...now their entire life is spent in your service because they do not know any better...I can see kids at the age of 8-9 doing that...my daughter is 7...she is not a violent person but she is a smart-butt...like her father *ie me...* because I have been around and influenced that point of view...if I had been a homicidal maniac killer then she might have picked up on that and did the same thing...lucky I am not that way...so hopefully she wont be either...

[Brother Heinrich]

*snip*

 

Yeah but that's what I'm saying, Nostramo isn't the house of 1,000 corpses, it's a corrupt metropolis like Gotham. Every child is not raised by some psychopathic cannibal family bent on murdering everything and taking a bath in blood. It functions as a collective of gang territories where each one holds sway over their own resources, this isn't the war-torn :cusshole that Africa is. That is how Cthonia functions, it's basically Mad Max, post-apocalyptic street gangs who kill one-another for simple survival. Nostramo is an elegant killers haven, murder is done in the shadows, dark deeds are still performed, but it's not some midnight orgy of psychotic behavior. 

 

Look at Xarl, Talos and Mercutian. All of them have relatively 'normal' upbringings, true they have more violent tendencies and are callous in regards to life (i.e. Xarl's dog) but they also attend school, go home to an apartment, and have mothers who cook home meals for them, and this was in the last days of Nostramo remember. These aren't the orphaned children of some village who are drugged up and forced to shoot their families. If anything, it is the already existing doctrines and practices that twist most of the legion. You take a kid who has been exposed to violence and the ugly side of life, make him nigh-on invincible, and then train him to kill other people and wield fear like a weapon, and it's no wonder they all end up being psychos.

 

I'm not saying Nostramo is some nice place like Macragge, but I am saying that it's no Barbarus or even Baal for that matter. You don't spend every waking minute on Nostramo trying not to be eaten by cannibal mutants or the living :cussing dead. I think a lot of why they are the way they has to do with the encouragement of their father. You take kids, some of them with traumas and mental instabilities (looking at you Sevatar), make them Astartes, then give them a father who says, "go kill people and make sure they piss their pants beforehand" and they aren't going to see the greater importance. They aren't going to see the over arching plan of their deranged father, their just going to kill people and get off on the same thing every predator does, the scent of fear and weakness.

 

You cannot underestimate the social pressure of your peers either. Doesn't matter if they're super-human, they'll still emulate their superiors. This means that even if someone comes from a relatively 'normal' Nostraman upbringing, they are eventually gonna find themselves taking heads and flaying bodies, "because everyone else does it too."

[b1soul]

Ehhhhhh I dont know if I buy into this (Australian jokes aside).

 

I kind of wanted the Legion to have a different beginning. Having the initial legion be criminal/lawless stock, and then having the same environment in Nostramo?

 

Seems a touch forced no?

 

 

I would have to agree...unless the Emperor knew Curze landed on a corrupt, crime-ridden planet.

 

Note that the Terrans are convicts in prisons whereas the Nostramans are mostly just criminals operating on the streets, not necessarily prisoners. Still, it's a bit of a golly gee coincidence.

[Wade Garrett]

Xarl and Talos had a normal childhood. If stabbing shopkeepers to death and gunning down other kids in the street is your idea of a normal upbringing, I'm glad I don't live in your neighborhood.

[Brother-Chaplain Kage]

Normal, as in not living like feral animals in the underground tunnels beneath a penal colony, or the wastelands of Cthonia. There was a structure to Nostramo like many other worlds of the Imperium, but it had a cancer, and that cancer was crime.

[Hyaenidae]

Xarl and Talos had a normal childhood. If stabbing shopkeepers to death and gunning down other kids in the street is your idea of a normal upbringing, I'm glad I don't live in your neighborhood.

 

I was joking earlier, but now I'm going to be serious as a stroke. I grew up in a :cuss hole. I had to wear boots when I played outside as a kid, because of the heroin needles in the parking lot. Every day on the way to school, I had to walk through blocks of abandoned neighborhoods full of crackheads, thugs, squatters, and the worst of American society. I considered myself lucky to get out of that hell, and figured what I had seen was the worst childhood imaginable.

 

Then I went to Iraq, and Afghanistan.

 

Normal is as normal does. Myself running through the streets to try to get home before the streetlights kicked on, is nothing compared to getting home just in time for a car bomb to go off outside your home.

 

I've heard stories from dudes getting home from AFRICOM, of 8 year old kids forced to fight or die, and far worse besides.

 

So yeah, Xarl and Talos, in comparison to how bad it could have been, grew up pretty normal.

[Brother Heinrich]

Xarl and Talos had a normal childhood. If stabbing shopkeepers to death and gunning down other kids in the street is your idea of a normal upbringing, I'm glad I don't live in your neighborhood.

I was joking earlier, but now I'm going to be serious as a stroke. I grew up in a hole. I had to wear boots when I played outside as a kid, because of the heroin needles in the parking lot. Every day on the way to school, I had to walk through blocks of abandoned neighborhoods full of crackheads, thugs, squatters, and the worst of American society. I considered myself lucky to get out of that hell, and figured what I had seen was the worst childhood imaginable.

Then I went to Iraq, and Afghanistan.

Normal is as normal does. Myself running through the streets to try to get home before the streetlights kicked on, is nothing compared to getting home just in time for a car bomb to go off outside your home.

I've heard stories from dudes getting home from AFRICOM, of 8 year old kids forced to fight or die, and far worse besides.

So yeah, Xarl and Talos, in comparison to how bad it could have been, grew up pretty normal.

Thank you Heathens. I saw some heinous ass :cuss in Africa, Pakistan too for that matter. Compared to that, they had decent childhoods. At least they still had mothers to cook dinner for them. This just lends more to my theory about Nostramans all having the potential for corruption that was unlocked by the already established methods and mindset of the legion.

[Chronotonic]

I think Octavia said it best with something along the lines of *just a bunch of thugs trying to play at poets*

 

or something like that...I think of the Night Lords Home World I think of a bunch of Don's sitting there enjoy the high life

[Conn Eremon]

I don't know. To me, Nostramo sounds more like Iraq/Afghanistan than the American ghetto, and I speak only of the definitions of each given here. Having been fortunate to not have to deal with the worst of either, I am making no statements whatsoever about present day life and I certainly don't intend to insult anyone who did.

 

But Nostramo doesn't sound like a world where crime is just common, it sounds like a world that IS crime. It breathes, feeds it, is nourished by it. It is the sport, the entertainment, the profession, the fact of life. The childhood of Talon and Xarl are horrifically wrong, made all the worse that they cling to those minor elements of their lives that they could interpret as normal only because they had no proper base to compare it against. There is no normalcy to Nostramo. It is a world that requires you to fight and kill to survive, but nobody does. They do it, but not for survival. That's an animal's instinct, a basic trait but the Nostramans are not immoral like an animal is. It isn't that they are void of the very concept of morality, it's that their population rests entirely on the wrong end of its spectrum. It takes Curze, a freaking Primarch, decimating their population in order for that animal instinct to kick in and become dominant. It is a world void of anything positive in humanity.

 

Cthonia, on the other hand, does have its positive elements. It is a world of mafias and gangs, who operate under rigid codes that make the best of their dwindling resources. Honor and respect is enforced, not just within a group but between them. There would be no Cthonia if it operated like Nostramo. It is a world of dark, harsh brothers and sisters, Nostramo is a world of predators and prey. Cthonia breeds thugs with thieves honor. Nostramo breeds deranged killers with unhealthy appetites. They are both bad, terrible laces. But Nostramo blows Cthonia out of the water when it comes to who is the worst.

 

Edit: I think of a strong Nostraman, and I see a man waiting with a smile for the thugs who fear him to bring him a fresh victim for the chains and knives

 

I think of a strong Cthonian, and I see the Godfather, doing what he can to keep his small empire going on a world whose capacity to sustain life has been nearly drained.

[Adra'Melek]

The classic psychological studies into obedience (get the study to think they're inflicting great pain on someone under orders to see how far they go) show people do things if ordered to. After a bit I suppose it would become habit.

 

I haven't read the book yet but I'd prefer it if there wasn't such a clear link to the pre and post Primarch legion behaviours. I don't like that the War Hounds were on the verge of being psychos before the Nails. It takes away some of the tragic nature of Angron, his nails and the things his sons took on to get him to like them.

 

It's perhaps not so bad for the Night Lords as they kinda needed something to explain why the Terran marines also went along. Also in Betrayal didn't it mention the Night Lords recruited from Alba like the Death Guard?

 

I'm still holding out for loyalist Night Lords. Wait and see if it would fit. There are some decent Australians are there?

[Emperor's Furor]

Well, it states that the legion did eventually back slide as most if not all of the Terran marines were eventually replaced with Nostromo criminals, who were simply the most base of murderers and criminals. The problem is though Curze saw the decline but did nothing, it states this, he let them continue on, this may of been in conjunction however to the decline of Curze's mental health due to visions etc. Also early on the legion was used as the Emperor's punish for continued sins and rebellion, both on Terra and worlds brought under compliance but had fell into rebellion etc.

 

I do agree though that the back story and the way Curze was brought up was a bit forced, albeit it appears the Emperor knew full well how Curze would end up since it's claimed the legion was the model of integration because they were so well matched, that Terrans were perfectly happy but there was favoritism towards those from Nostramo in the form or promotions etc.

 

Also us Brits love the Aussie, we are just competitive with other, I'd say Australia is perhaps one of our most favourite countries.

[Emperors Immortals]

Funny you should mention it, the trial was the Milgram Experiment;

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment

 

I was studying it for a while under a former student of the Australian version of the trial;

http://www.theage.com.au/victoria/la-trobe-torture-study-anguish-20120425-1xlmf.html

 

 

Pretty much anyone who has gone through that process can end up in an emotionally detached state which enable further atrocities to be commited. Guilt can be relieved temporarily by revisiting the trauma, in Nostramos case though I feel it fits teh norms of a cult.

 

There is a heavily enforced moral code, resources and access to power structures are completely controlled and only given as a reward to those who comply. Its no wonder teh NL ended the way they did, Kurze is perhaps the most tragic of all the primarchs.

 

 

I helped returned veterans from different conflicts, and there is some terrible tragedy in the world. Im just glad we recognise the need for help these days.

 

 

[q]There are some decent Australians are there?[/q]

 

 

 

Allegedly ;)

[Kol Saresk]

In Betrayal, it does say that the Night Lords recruited some stock from Albia. From what I've heard in this thread, themajority came from a penal colony.

 

Conjecture:

 

Maybe Capitano is onto something. Maybe by the time the Night Lords came along, the only place left to recruit from was the penal colony. So as a result, most of the recruits came from there, while the rest came from places like Albia, in the hopes that with indoctrination and the presence of a non-criminal element, the Legion would be able to function normally. And when it first came to Nostramo, the first few batches of recruits would have helped with that normalcy. But as Curze began to implement his teachings combined with the backward slide of Nostraman society, the Legion started going backwards and instead became the very monsters Curze once hunted and then displayed in public?

[b1soul]

If stabbing shopkeepers to death and gunning down other kids in the street is your idea of a normal upbringing, I'm glad I don't live in your neighborhood.

 

 

This is not that abnormal for kids living in war-torn areas of Africa or the slums of Rio. There are kids on planet earth in the 21st century who live harsher lives

[Emperor's Furor]

In Betrayal, it does say that the Night Lords recruited some stock from Albia. From what I've heard in this thread, themajority came from a penal colony.

 

Conjecture:

 

Maybe Capitano is onto something. Maybe by the time the Night Lords came along, the only place left to recruit from was the penal colony. So as a result, most of the recruits came from there, while the rest came from places like Albia, in the hopes that with indoctrination and the presence of a non-criminal element, the Legion would be able to function normally. And when it first came to Nostramo, the first few batches of recruits would have helped with that normalcy. But as Curze began to implement his teachings combined with the backward slide of Nostraman society, the Legion started going backwards and instead became the very monsters Curze once hunted and then displayed in public?

They were already being used to bring tough justice to the Emperor's foes before Curze showed up, he just furthered their tactics and make them more complex. 

 

The legions first recruits came from the linked prison systems, none came from albia, all the albia soldiers went mainly to the Death Guard and Secondarily to the Iron Hands. The recruits they drew from were called the "night children" by the prisoners for they moved silently and were pale skinned. "The geneseed of the VIIIth had been well paired with the human stock of it's first recruits, if anything it seemed as if one had been made with the other in mind."

[Kais Klip]

I agree with the general vibe of the night lord boys here. It would have been neater for the pre-Haunter night lords legion to recruit from a regional-focus standpoint, at which case it would have been perfectly acceptable for a prison complex to be present in said assigned region. My main gripe, if it can be called that, is my belief that most legions, at least pre-primarch and then perhaps only excluding Dorn's sons, would be more than happy with the type of stock that prisons would provide. So instead of having a prison focus, I would have preferred for the 'lords to recruit with a regional focus, with a significant prison presence being a minor detail.

 

I only wonder if flat out, at least modern, regional references for each legion would be... distracting, unless they are kept to an ancient timeframe references (even then, phrases like "Vikings/Romans in space" come to mind.

[Gree]

I rather dislike the idea that the Night Lords were recruiting from prisons before they found Curze. I kinda cheapens the idea that the recruits from Nostramo poisoned the Legion and why Curze grew to hate it. 

 

I had always imagined the Night Lords to be a more conventional Legion in the same vein as perhaps the Ultramarines or Luna Wolves used to be, before they found Nostramo and Nostramo began to influence them. The IA talks about the early Night Lords being brutally efficient witch hunters before the ''corrupted'' recruits from Nostramo began to filter in.

[Wade Garrett]

Going home to your sex slave mom after a hard day of gunning down other kids in the streets = practically a Norman Rockwell painting. Okay.

 

You know, Angron's not really that mad. The last time I stubbed my toe, let me tell you, THAT was mad. Butcher's Nails, Flucher's Smails.

[Flint13]

I think one problem that is getting overlooked a bit here is that old Sci-fi staple of assuming every planet is adequately represented by any 5 square kilometers of its surface. In this case, we have to remember that there would be a *huge* amount of variation in the types of people taken into the Nightlords legion, even if they were all "criminals." Maybe not as much so as the Ultramarines or World Eaters, who had dozens of worlds to pull from, but still a very large range of differences.

 

While they may have all been prisoners to begin with, not all prisoners are the same. Just like there are different social stratas, there are differing criminal variants. For the most far reaching parallel I can think of, look at the differences between Christian Bale's character in American Physco and Kurt Russell in Deathproof. Both are murderers, both have a serial history of murder, and both have heavily implied sexual assault histories as well. But the characters themselves couldn't be more different. The exact same thing can be seen in the Nightlords legion. Looking at A D-Bs novels, Talos and Xarl, even though they grew up together, are only barely similar in their outlooks on life, personal philosophies and talents. Even wider is the gap between both of them as street kids and Mercutian, who grew up as the son of a hive noble. A mafia don is a different criminal from a poverty level drug dealer who is different from a upper-middle class beater. From there, the "older" legionaries (those recruited before Nostromo's backslide after the Haunter left), especially Talos have what may be considered a more "moral" view of crime, torture, violence and the like than the recruits that came after. It has been discussed many times that since the Legion only takes the fittest of the fit, and the criminals of Nostromo always had the same philosophy, the murderiest and most violent fought their way to the top of the pack to become Nightlords. This, then caused the gradual "poisoning" of the legion as a whole. The amount of influencing factors that go into a legion from its recruitment pool seem to be drastically overlooked in so many cases, even more so the Legions who pull from more than one homeworld.

 

Even if the Nightlords were all originally created from "criminal" stock, the amount of variation therein is staggering. While I'm not a fan of this "empty out the prisons" take on the legion anymore than anyone here currently is, maybe that was the idea behind the Legion at its creation. It is pretty widely accepted that the Vlka Fenryka were  created as the Emperor's executioners, and I could see the Nightlords being created with a similar thought in mind. Maybe not as another "execution" legion, but as another tool with a very specific purpose. Maybe one that eventually ran off the rails as the Emperor lost control of it. I suppose you could argue that the Nightlords became *too* successful at their original purpose.

 

So how about this thought? Don't take it as "the Nightlords are the "criminal" legion, therefor, they got their start from a penal population."  What if the Emperor needed a very specific weapon in a Legion that personified The Ends Justify the Means, but weren't as uncontrollable and prone to collateral damage as the World Eaters? I could see him using the prisons as just another resource to craft a weapon for his arsenal. 

[Marshal Rohr]

Unless there is something tied to the gene seed that requires certain upbringings that the Emperor foresaw. Besides people drawn from a society built from the descendants of prisoners would mean I would be a potential recruit for the Night Lords as a good chunk of my family is from Georgia, which was a 'penal' colony for a bit.

 

 

Nostramo isn't torn apart by sectarian violence, so exaggerating how bad it is to live in a 'gang' society is oversimplification. Gangs are domestic violent actors. Sectarian terrorists are violent transnational actors, which fall into a different category with similar modus operandi. Nostramo has never been described as people fighting over religion or political ideologies, just territory, which remains at a lower intensity than sectarian civil war.

 

For instance, Gang A is never likely to cross an ocean to exert influence over Gang B. It seems like Nostramo has a standard Marxist model of capital owners who control the adamantium output and manufactories, while the gangs act as the local form of 'government' allowed to operate at the discretion of the capital owners as long as it doesn't interfere with surplus value extraction. In fact this would be further supported by Kurze assuming total control of the means of production through proxy and violently enforcing his harsh rule of law through public execution. The factories ran, and the gangs were subsumed into the laborers in fear of execution, eliminating the class stratification and furthering the amount of wealth to be extracted.

[Scribe]

...

Even if the Nightlords were all originally created from "criminal" stock, the amount of variation therein is staggering. While I'm not a fan of this "empty out the prisons" take on the legion anymore than anyone here currently is, maybe that was the idea behind the Legion at its creation. It is pretty widely accepted that the Vlka Fenryka were  created as the Emperor's executioners, and I could see the Nightlords being created with a similar thought in mind. Maybe not as another "execution" legion, but as another tool with a very specific purpose. Maybe one that eventually ran off the rails as the Emperor lost control of it. I suppose you could argue that the Nightlords became *too* successful at their original purpose.

 

The Wolves as Executioners is the worst addition of the Heresy. Single worst thing, and from what I have seen is almost universally reviled to the point where Wolves in other Legions novels getting killed is now celebrated....

 

Cheapening a Legion by saying its the 'criminal' legion is just decreasing the depth.

 

I've slept on it, and I still dont like it.

[Kais Klip]

 

...

Even if the Nightlords were all originally created from "criminal" stock, the amount of variation therein is staggering. While I'm not a fan of this "empty out the prisons" take on the legion anymore than anyone here currently is, maybe that was the idea behind the Legion at its creation. It is pretty widely accepted that the Vlka Fenryka were  created as the Emperor's executioners, and I could see the Nightlords being created with a similar thought in mind. Maybe not as another "execution" legion, but as another tool with a very specific purpose. Maybe one that eventually ran off the rails as the Emperor lost control of it. I suppose you could argue that the Nightlords became *too* successful at their original purpose.

 

The Wolves as Executioners is the worst addition of the Heresy. Single worst thing, and from what I have seen is almost universally reviled to the point where Wolves in other Legions novels getting killed is now celebrated....

 

Cheapening a Legion by saying its the 'criminal' legion is just decreasing the depth.

 

I've slept on it, and I still dont like it.

 

I was always of the mind that the Night Lords legion were the "enforcement" legion, as in post-Crusade they would be sent to wavering worlds for a stroll down the capitol high street, as a last resort before putting the world under the cannon, as it were.