Pandorax stuff.

[RapatoR]

Well I suppose that DMR (dying marines rate) is similar to loyalist one. They might not fight themselves (other SM and/or other imperials) as much as CSM do, but still they fight xenos more frequently, in addition to chapters being wiped out because of =I=. So if loyalists with their meager 1000-marine chapters can handle it, why CSM shouldn't?

[the jeske]

Well the problem is a lot of our dudes are stuck in the most deadly of places a mortal has ever seen . We should have have higher death rate , that combined with mass csm deaths out of the eye should make our methods of creating csm and the flow of new renegades huge.

[Wade Garrett]

Well, that's kinda obvious. First off, they don't have And they shall know no fear, plus everybody knows living in the Eye of Terror makes you suck as a warrior.

Wait. It all makes sense now!

 

Abaddon's plan for the Thirteenth Black Crusade, I mean.

 

He overloads the Cadian pylons, the Eye expands, the Imperium is subjected to its competence draining qualities as well, and BAM!

 

On to Terra.

[Vesper]

 

Good stuff.

 

So the Black Legion don't really get many screen time. They don't battle at all ?

On the ship getting blasted, how is it happening ? Isn't it supposed to be part of the Black Fleet ? You mentionned "primary fleet", that means there are more ?

Any other Black Legion character ?

How is Abaddon ?

Cool stuff about the Black Legion ?

 

i copy pasted the part about primary so I guess there are more fleets.

 

have to go to work will post later today

We're still waiting for the good stuff, buddy :).

[Sception]

My main question is, how the hell did Abaddon even get a fleet that size out of the eye?  This isn't during a Black Crusade or the Ghost Wars or anything, just 'herp, gonno go fight some loyalist over in the pandorax system, hey Cadia, I'll don't mind me on the way out or back in'.

[Iron_Within]

Cadia is not the only way out of the Eye, it's the easiest and most consistently stable exit, all others are dangerous or labour intensive.

[Vesper]

 

So the Black Legion don't really get many screen time. They don't battle at all ?

On the ship getting blasted, how is it happening ? Isn't it supposed

to be part of the Black Fleet ? You mentionned "primary fleet", that

means there are more ?

Any other Black Legion character ?

How is Abaddon ?

Cool stuff about the Black Legion ?

Could you answer my questions, Mal, once you'll get the supplement and the novel ?

[Sception]

Black Legion characters mentioned:

 

Abaddon - leading the planetside force

 

Malgar Irongrasp - leading the chaos fleet, consisting of a battleship, a grand cruiser, a heavy cruiser, a cruiser, three raiders, seven destroyers. Not a particularly huge fleet altogether - a strike force rather than Abaddon's full strength.

 

Kreator Rex - Black Legion warpsmith in charge of the construction and maintenance of the Black Legion warmachines and daemon engines at pandorax. Also apparantly one of the first obliterators. Sadly no real way to represent this guy in game, it's a shame warpsmiths don't have an 'obliterator body' upgrade to match the loyalist servo harness. Oh, well. There is an apocalypse strategem card representing his work with additional hull points for chaos demonic superheavies.

 

Corpulax - former Consecrator who contracted the zombie plague fighting Typhus. Survived, but transformed into a plague marine. Made his way to the Eye, and is now one of Abaddon's lieutenants, spreading the zombie plague wherever he goes. Since zombies are restricted to one of two special characters, there isn't a real way to represent this guy, either. His portrait looks like he's wearing terminator armor, so I'd run him as counts-as Typhus rather than the FW nurgle sorcerer.

 

Abaddon specifically survives, but it is unclear whether or not the others do in the supplement. The book may be more straight forward. The Black Legion fleet isn't completely destroyed, and several crippled ships escape to the warp, so from the supplement it isn't clear if Irongrasp survives or not.

 

 

The Loyalist fleet that responds to distress signals from Pythos is larger, with one battleship, four cruisers, three light cruisers, five frigates, six destroyers, and five escorts. The text points out that the Pandorax system is very near the Maelstrom, so there are significant loyalist forces nearby able to respond quickly. Also, the supplement specifically calls out that the loyalist fleet's capitol ships include carriers with significant fighter bays, while the chaos fleet does not. Abaddon's fleet gets reinforcements from Huron (which eventually allow the chaos ground forces to escape), but the Imperial fleet gets reinforcements from the entire Dark Angels chapter, including the friggen Rock itself, so... yeah, the outcome is a forgone conclusion.

 

But that's fine! One bit I like mentions specifically the resource gap involved between the Chaos and Imperial forces:

 

"At first, the ships of Abaddon's fleet held the upper hand, inflicting heavy losses on the Imperial flotillas as they repeatedly attempted to pick a way through the asteroid belt. However, in the long run, this was a campaign Abaddon could not hope to win, as the material superiority of his adversary - and the willingness of the Imperium to accept stunning losses to break through to Pythos - slowly but surely eroded the strength of the Chaos fleet."

 

That, IMO, is pretty much how any chaos vs. imperial fluff should be written. Imperials as the assumed victor due to superior reserves, with the only question being whether the chaos forces can achieve their objectives, how much damage they can do in the process, and how clean an escape they can make, before overwhelming imperial power arrives to drive them away. And from that perspective, Chaos comes out looking pretty good from the supplement at least. The only thing missing is a note about imperial worlds lost to marauding aliens or chaos forces from the Maelstrom due to the forces diverted to Pythos.

 

If the book drones on about chaos losses that might sour things, but as it is the Black Legion fleet is damaged but not destroyed, with several of the crippled chaos ships escaping back to the warp. The chaos marine ground forces largely spank the guard forces around (of which there are many - local defense forces and catachans who lose the primary hive city but manage to hold out in the hills, but also other large guard forces, including cadians, who show up in support). The Dark Angels are also described as mostly losing to the Black Legion forces in skirmishes when they tried to aid the guard forces defending the remote outposts. Imperial Forces do pretty convincingly win when the maries abandon those outposts to their fate to focus on retake the hive, but even then most of the chaos forces they're described as cutting through are daemons or plague zombies - utterly expendable forces.

 

In the end, the imperials shut down the warp gate, and the chaos forces take that as their cue to leave - the remains of hurons fleet cutting through the imperials long enough to get the ground forces out of there. Again, the novel may completely turn this on its head, but from the sound of the supplement, Abaddon is committing a relatively small chaos force here, and escapes largely unscathed. He doesn't leave with the Damnation Cache, but from the way it's described it's not clear if it even can be moved off planet. It seems mostly like Abaddon was only using it to draw out the Grey Knights, one of whom he succeeds in capturing. If I'm reading this book and the Black Legion supplement correctly, this Grey Knght is the same 'psycher of exceptional purity' that he later trades to Fulgrim for the support of the Emperor's Children in the 13th crusade, the one Fulgrim uses as a daemonhost for Slaanesh itself, allowing the chaos god to possess one of the Blackstone Fortresses. So yeah, pretty big win for Abaddon here, considering he comes out of it with the support of an entire chaos legion - almost certainly more war bands than the 30ish that were even committed in the Pandorax campaign (23 Black Legion war bands plus an unnumbered handful of allied forces), so even if he lost all his men (and from the supplement he seems to have lost relatively few actual marines) he still would have come out ahead in manpower. Not to mention coming out ahead in god-possessed, moon-sized daemon engine star fortresses.

 

Abaddon never meant to hold the planet long term - it's made clear that he always knew that the Imperium would be able to send more reserves than he could handle. He expected an insurmountable tide of guard reserves capable of overwhelming his forces through sheer attrition backed up by grey knight strike squads to close the warp gate. The grey knights were the entire reason he was there, even. Basically Abaddon's only miscalculation was that he didn't expect an entire space marine chapter to show up quite that quickly along with the rest, but even then he a couple more ships and a few more marines than he had expected or wished to, but in the end he still got out of there with the better part of his forces and the captive that he had come to get, so... yeah. From the supplement, anyway, this is what a Chaos victory looks like. Though, again, the book may look a lot less favorable.

 

 

The only questions I have are how Abaddon got all the way to the Maelstrom or back to the Eye in the first place, and why the imperial fleet didn't just virus bomb the hell out of the planet the moment they got there, considering it was overrun with daemons and the Arch Heretic was planetside, and from my understanding either one of those conditions would warrant immediate exterminatus. I mean, this is the kind of campaign where the Grey Knights are supposed to massacre the surviving loyalists afterwords anyway, just to make sure none of them are possessed. And the zombie plague was on planet for that matter. In the aftermath the text specifically mentions that guard forces are fighting daemonic outbreaks on the planet to this day, that's not the kind of thing I expect the Imperium to put up with. And the only valuable resource on the planet is mineral - ie, still totally there to be mined post exterminatus. Heck, given the way the death world is described, it would probably be easier to mine post exterminatus.

 

I haven't gotten very far in the novel yet, but that book starts with an inquisitor who virus bombs one planet basically for nothing more than looking at him funny, which will only make it more glaring if there isn't a good reason why they wouldn't resort to such methods later.

 

 

There's also the comparatively minor issue of why the Imperial fleet doesn't just fly around the asteroid belt forcing the smaller chaos fleet to break cover if they want to stop them getting to the planet, but I'm not sure exactly when this campaign is set, maybe the Tyranids haven't yet taught the imperium the tactical mysteries of the 3rd dimension, yet.

[the jeske]

I count the BL dudes on huron ships as lost , because there is no way huron would give them back .

[Vesper]

Thank you for taking the time to answer my questions.

[Sception]

I count the BL dudes on huron ships as lost , because there is no way huron would give them back .

They include Abaddon himself, jeske. If anybody was taking anything from anybody, than those ships are part of the Black Legion now.

 

However, despite what stupidity may be written in the novel, I doubt either Abaddon or Huron is in a big hurry to antagonize the other. They have to much to gain from being on good terms with each other, and to much to lose otherwise.

[the jeske]

I know that , but abadon aint on all ships . Huron would be a fool to not use the confusion. When we had an office change , tons of stuff went missing . From simple stuff like laptops , to stuff like 2 tons of high grade cement , one conteiner of ADDIS[yes Addis] shirts/shoes/caps/etc . I would orther the killing of realy small groups to get the gear and the bigger ones would be transported on a different space lain to a different space station . Huron is suppose to have a few of those in the strom . And abadon would be transported as fast as possible to his designated BL transport . Although that does rise the question of how would he get from strom to eye , war travel may make it faster , but ships still have to refuel ,get food\water and replace dread crew members.

[Sception]

Yeah, if he tried it, there'd be a lot more of those 'dead crew members'. That and the chaos gods are high on abby abd his crusades, and folks in the maelstrom are as subject to their whims as those in the eye. I don't doubt some of the black legion warbands stayed in the Maelstrom, as part of their usual sort of 'we help you out, you do your part in the next crusade' sort of arrangement, but not an a matter of huron kidnapping black legionnaires against their will. As for just killing them and looting their bodies, even if any of the black legion groups were small enough on a given transport to overwhelm, suviving super heaviesbwould not be overlooked, while i strongly doubt small arms would be something he'd be willing to risk Abaddon's fury and the ire of the god's themselves over.

[RapatoR]

Well, there were dudes who tried something similar before. You can read about their horrible fates in Black Legion supplement.

I really doubt that Huron would do something as reckless as risk conflict with BL over some equipment, when his force (as 2nd biggest force) probably got excessive amounts of equipment and can probably manufacture new/ gain it by looting Imperium/smaller warbands.

 

Tension and small skirmishes because of "I like that fancy sword of yours."? Sure why not. But Huron sanctioning massive stealing? I doubt it. That said, it would be an interesting basis for novel. I would love to see BL-Corsair interactions, tension, arising conflicts, bonds friendship and whatnot.

 

It is however nice to see supplement confirming that Imperials are willing to throw away lives more eagerly than CSM. This, I suppose could confirm that Imperials indeed have higher DMR than CSM.

[Sception]

Huron always needs stuff, but yeah, not enough to start a feud with Abaddon over it.  And I doubt there was opportunity to get black legion forces isolated enough to begin with - from my reading there were only about three transports carrying the surviving chaos marine forces off world to begin with.

[Iron_Within]

Do you think the Daemon Engine formation will make Forgefiends more viable? I magnetise my monsters so they can be either. 2 Hades cannons per Fiend with 5 fiends all firing at BS 5 sounds pretty nasty.

[Sception]

It's an apocalypse formation.  Does 'viable' even have a meaning in apocalypse?  I mean, yeah BS5 dakkafiends would be great, I'd imagine.  Only, they're in Apocalypse.  If people are playing apocalypse for competitive advantage, those forgefiends are going to disappear under a torent of laser-destroyer death, just like everything else.

 

I mean, I'm not trying to be negative about it.  It's a cool formation.  If my army were apocalypse scale, I'd certainly be looking to pick up a couple more fiends to try it out.  It's just, 'viabilitiy' isn't really the name of the game in Apocalypse, and no apocalypse formations are going to solve problems with the the way units perform in the core game.

 

 

Speaking of formations, the Chosen of Abaddon is slightly less cool than first throught.  The units lose their champions (at no discount), so those characters are arse in the wind if a competent duelists shows up to challenge them, and you don't get all that much out of it.  Still a neat formation, but not as cool as I was hoping.

[Shifte]

"Huron paused. He would have to choose his words very carefully. To say something incorrect would cause a blood-feud between the Black Legion and the Red Corsairs. A conflict that, currently, the Corsairs would not win."

 

^ The above is me paraphrasing some of Huron's internal monologue during the book. Abaddon frequently calls Huron "usurper", and seemingly recognises the long term threat of the Tyrant. However, by the end of the book, they seem to have come to an understanding. Pandorax really puts Huron over big time because of the respect Abaddon grants him (the respect you'd grant a rival). Whilst it is made abundantly clear that the BL could destroy the Red Corsairs, you can really tell that this may not always be the case and that even Abaddon doesn't want that conflict.

[Iron_Within]

It's an apocalypse formation.  Does 'viable' even have a meaning in apocalypse?  I mean, yeah BS5 dakkafiends would be great, I'd imagine.  Only, they're in Apocalypse.  If people are playing apocalypse for competitive advantage, those forgefiends are going to disappear under a torent of laser-destroyer death, just like everything else.

 

I mean, I'm not trying to be negative about it.  It's a cool formation.  If my army were apocalypse scale, I'd certainly be looking to pick up a couple more fiends to try it out.  It's just, 'viabilitiy' isn't really the name of the game in Apocalypse, and no apocalypse formations are going to solve problems with the the way units perform in the core game.

 

 

Speaking of formations, the Chosen of Abaddon is slightly less cool than first throught.  The units lose their champions (at no discount), so those characters are arse in the wind if a competent duelists shows up to challenge them, and you don't get all that much out of it.  Still a neat formation, but not as cool as I was hoping.

 

Viable in the competitive tournament type of sense? You're right you cannot attach that form of meaning. No what I meant was viable being fun and interesting and have the power for the Apocalypse sized game (D-weapons not withstanding - besides though, you use the super puppet master and laugh and silly D-Weapons).

See, in normal games my FF :cuss: me off for missing so much, and the increase in BS might be what it needs to make it fun. Hmmm, I wonder if that formation can use the 'formation' like the sword rules, FF with Tank Hunter or preferred enemy at BS 5 would be hilarious.

[Prot]

I just want to say that some of you guys have sold me on the book.

 

I'm glad you're using spoilers because this looks like a great read with some juicy secrets in it...  I obviously don't know how it goes down but it's like I would have thought that Abe and Huron SHOULD work together. I've been saying for years that I felt Huron represented the future of chaos with his alluring personality and ability to recruit from the 'modern' chapters, and you've got Abe someone with close ties to the powers that be and his hands deeply entrenched in the entrails of terra.

 

^This sounds like what a great crusade should consist of. 

 

I can't read all the posts here for fear of ruining something for myself, but I am disappointed the main novel is only available in hardcover? I guess the rule book itself has a fair amount of added fiction/pictures?

[Sception]

**NO SPOILERS IN THIS POST**

 

As a physical product, the novel is only available in hardcover.  Yet.  Which is typical in the book publishing industry.  It's also available as an ebook for, what, halfish the price?  Still more than you'd expect to pay for a paperback version, so not necessarily the best deal there by ebook standards, though the ebook price should go down when and if a paperback edition is released in the future.

[Prot]

Okay, thanks. I'll check out the ebook version for sure on my reader.

[Slayer le Boucher]

The Campaigne book is well written, in the IA books style, with a few new cool illustration, my fav is the one where marines,Deamon engines and spacecraft are on an asteroid, once again giving Proof that the incident of Skalathrax fluff are bollocks, and is the stupidest(bare for GK fluff) of all fluff that i've read.

 

I'm dissapointed in the Mealstorm of Gore formation though...

 

you are forced to put 8 Zerkers units, and a Lord OR Khârn in it, and the models get their Move through covers, Fleet and +3"Assault Range, when they are in a 18radius of the Lord/Khârn, with 8 units of Zerkers, given the disposition of the terrain and ennemy units, its impossible to have more then 3-4 units in the 18radius, so half of the formation gains nothing from it...

 

They could've just put a 1+Lord condition, and each unit in the radius of one Lord and/or Khârn could benefit from it, but no...

 

For this the CSM Warbands from the Apoc book is more interesting, all models in a 12radius of SM models can rethrow their to hit rolls and are fearless, and you have a greater variety and more realistic threshold for the units that joins that formation.

 

Tower of Skulls did become good, with his reknit form giving him back HP's if he kills 10 models in the same phase and still have IWND on top of that and BS4.

 

Hounds of Huron bikes formation, while being bigger in unit size( 5+ units, instead of 3+ from before), is more "viable", you can use their Turboboost+assault each turn now, plus you don't make a dangerous terrain test when using it, plus they gain acute sens and outflank.

 

The Great Scorpion of Khorne is kinda weird, when you compare it with the updated version of the IA Apoc.

 

in the IA it has the Multi-legged terror, where it makes 1D3+2 stomps attacks, and it also have the Frenzied assault rule, where you throw and add 3 dices for the assault range.

 

But in the Pandorax book, while those two rules are absent, the Runes of the Blood god rules is more dangerous, on a double 1 or double 6 the Psyker throw on the Terrors of the Warp table(apoc book pg 65).

 

The Problem i have with the Deamon engines pack is that the target from the pack MUST be an Indenpendant Char..., why not also a Superheavy or Gargantuan Creature?...

 

i mean when you read the Cerberus fluff, its described to climb the legs of Titans to cut them with their Magmacutters and destroy them, so you would expect that your primary target is Super heavies or something..., not an IC...

[Tenebris]

All in all I was really really disappointed by the novel. Again Chaos is simply a punchbag for the loyalists. 

[Vesper]

What is the final fate of the Nurgle Black Legion dude who was supposed to open up the Damnation Cache ? I guess his mission was a success, but what happened to him ?