How many are there left ?

[mactire]

Just a thought I had and hoped you might be able to help. How viable are the Thousand sons at present (40k), after reading Prospero Burns, A Thousand Sons and BOTF it seems to imply that the Sons are almost finished. The are stated to be one of the smaller legions, then the razing of Prospero decimates them, the Rubric wipes out more of them leaving only the most powerful sorcerors in charge of the automations and in the BOTF they seem to be nearly wiped out altogether breaching the Fang. Because of the flaw in the geneseed it would seem to make hard to rebuild numbers (like the Wolves who only recruit from Fenris) so I guess my question is what would their numbers be now ?

 

Thanks in advance

[Excessus]

The number of rubricae are constantly hovering around 600. That's the approx. amount that was 'rubric:ed' on the planet of sorcerers, and they keep getting summoned into new armours when the old ones get destroyed. The sorcerers are not afflicted by the rampant, uncontrollable mutation after the rubric of Ahriman, and got quite a bit more powerful. There are a lot of the more powerful sorcerers left out there, because they got exiled along with Ahriman after the rubric, pre BotF. Some turn into Daemon Princes, some follow their own agendas, some follow Magnus...there are all sorts.

 

You should read Ahriman: Exile, it gives a nice insight to how a Thousand Sons warband functions post heresy. Basically, it's controlled by a powerful sorcerer or daemon prince or whatever, there will be rubricae present, as well as cultists and various renegades gathered together just like any other chaos warband. In all the 40k legion remnants, they have both "proper" legionnaires (in this case, rubrics), more recently recruited renegades and marines created with stolen geneseed. They could quite possibly borrow the aid of the dark mechanicus, just as any other warband, as well as be quite prominent in summoning daemons for their battles. Even the Word Bearers got nothing on them in that regard, hehe!

 

A Thousand Sons sorcerer will take on apprentices (Aspiring Sorcerers) á lá the sith, but not limited to one at the time. They will rise through the ranks and become sorcerers in their own right or perish in the process. These can be renegades or newly created sorcerers with modern geneseed.

 

The geneseed of the Thousand Sons might be stable, but it might also be severely corrupted. After the rubric the geneseed is free of the rampant mutations, but it might also be too corrupted to use for "marinating" new recruits. And then again, the pavoni cult were able to modify biologic matter down to a cellular level, so there might be some masters out there still with the knowledge and skill to make "new" Thousand Sons...albeit at a very slow rate!

[Tenebris]

A Thousand Sons says that "how prophetic, the number of the survivors from Prospero almost equals the namesake of the legion..."

 

Now what this means (IMO):

 

- we have cca. 1000+ Thousand Sons that survived Prospero and escaped to the Planet of Sorcerers;

- Magnus has sent a vast host away from Prospero, since the fleet had Battle Barges and Strike Cruisers, the escaped Thousand Sons most surely number in the hundreds...

 

Post Rubic the geneseed of the Thousand Sons is stable, although we speak of a legion devoted to "Change" so we can expect a strong degradation of the genetic material, but we can also expect a very high degree of success since the Thousand Sons are anything but careless in their works, so between the Pavoni, the slave raids for new recruits, the quite high degree of human psykers in the galaxy and the fantastic magic arts at their fingers I suspect that the "new" Thousand Sons are quite many. 

 

Also we should take in account that the Thousand Sons practice a form of necromancy and bind the spirits of dead astartes to animate the suits of power armor, and while this is the province of the Rubicae I think that the same process can be applied to any astartes soul willing enough to fight for another life, and another, and another... as long as it is given the opportunity to serve himself and his god. 

 

Overall I think that the "original" Thousand Sons are a few hundred at best, but I also presume that the Thousand Sons legion is perhaps one of the most formidable in the Eye of Terror, not only due to all the above but also because the Thousand Sons are creatures of the mind, and as every smart person they guard their resources well and employ them wisely. 

[mactire]

Cheers guys this makes it a little bit more reasonable than I imagined, I really had the impression that they were down to the last few gunslingers. This would make more sense I'd kind of forgotten how clever they are and also that they did'nt degenerate like the EC, WB, WE and DG. Thanks for clearing that up.

[A D-B]

Cheers guys this makes it a little bit more reasonable than I imagined, I really had the impression that they were down to the last few gunslingers. This would make more sense I'd kind of forgotten how clever they are and also that they did'nt degenerate like the EC, WB, WE and DG. Thanks for clearing that up.

 

Basically, take any numbers in any Horus Heresy novel before The First Heretic, (and Prospero Burns, which was written before TFH) and times the numbers by 10. Remember as well that a lot of the Thousand Sons weren't on Prospero at the time.

 

tl;dr -- Thousands and thousands.

[Excessus]

 

Cheers guys this makes it a little bit more reasonable than I imagined, I really had the impression that they were down to the last few gunslingers. This would make more sense I'd kind of forgotten how clever they are and also that they did'nt degenerate like the EC, WB, WE and DG. Thanks for clearing that up.

 

Basically, take any numbers in any Horus Heresy novel before The First Heretic, (and Prospero Burns, which was written before TFH) and times the numbers by 10. Remember as well that a lot of the Thousand Sons weren't on Prospero at the time.

 

tl;dr -- Thousands and thousands.

While doing so on the other legions is kinda natural, I didn't think they would retcon the thousand sons in that way, seeing as being only a thousand left is their "niche".

[mactire]

A D-B replied to my post

[A D-B]

 

 

Cheers guys this makes it a little bit more reasonable than I imagined, I really had the impression that they were down to the last few gunslingers. This would make more sense I'd kind of forgotten how clever they are and also that they did'nt degenerate like the EC, WB, WE and DG. Thanks for clearing that up.

 

Basically, take any numbers in any Horus Heresy novel before The First Heretic, (and Prospero Burns, which was written before TFH) and times the numbers by 10. Remember as well that a lot of the Thousand Sons weren't on Prospero at the time.

 

tl;dr -- Thousands and thousands.

While doing so on the other legions is kinda natural, I didn't think they would retcon the thousand sons in that way, seeing as being only a thousand left is their "niche".

 

Conflicting sources on that, though. In most sources they got their name because they started so small compared to other Legions - they were a thousand sons at the beginning, not because there was just a thousand of them left when the Heresy cleared. So I'm not sure it's their niche; it's not mentioned in many places lore-wise, at least.

 

A thousand of them would be absolutely useless in Legions of 100,000, and we're now moving on it being almost a decade since the Legions were revealed as being much bigger than the IA articles said 15 years ago.

[Kol Saresk]

A Thousand Sons does take the stance that they were down to one thousand by the time Magnus stopped the Flesh-Change the first time. And at the end of the novel, only one thousand Sons survived the Razing of Prospero. But there was that lone wolf in Battle for the Abyss, that one squad that came back to Prospero, the rest who were in the Defense Fleet that was scattered before the Wolves showed up, and who knows how many Expedition Fleets of varying numbers that were spread out across the Great Crusade, keeping up the image that the Sons were still involved in the Crusade so n one would come a-knocking to see why they weren't fighting. Heck, part of Lorgar's put-down was because he was moving slow. Could only imagine what would happen if an entire Legion quit the Crusade.

[Excessus]

I seem to remember one character making a note of how they were back down to a thousand again in the planet of sorcerers.

[Xenith]

I seem to remember one character making a note of how they were back down to a thousand again in the planet of sorcerers.

I remember this too, around a thousand got taken from Prospero to the Planet of the Sorcerers (PotS), according to McNeill.

Presumably the majority of ones that were off planet made their way back to PotS before Ahriman enacted the Rubric, which killed many (I:A) and converted the rest. The old I:A article also said that the Rubric did not make the sorcerers immune to mutation, and that they wore their mutations with pride. Although this is probably more the Magnusites.

An interesting question is what the ratio of strong sorcerers to those with little talent would have been in the Legion. In the books, we only really see those with power, but how we see them operating in 40k is large squads of rubrics led by a single sorceror, maybe 9 or 10:1. Although this number is potentially due to higher attrition rates of sorcerers over rubricae.

This would put the remainder on the PotS at ~800-900 Rubricae and ~100-200 Sorcerers before the rubric, which is tiny.

And then they went to Terra.

Hopefully Magnus will get involved again in the HH series. I'm imagining a 'Timelord' like Deus Ex Mechanica to reveal that there are more TS around than previously thought