The traitor primarch and the missing legions

[Augustus]

It's possible that is what happened? It's a valid theory. Quoting 2nd edition sources as gospel...

 

"it wasn't" and "it's very unlikely" have very different connotations, Legatus. Fission can like it and believe it if he wants. If he pushes it as gospel than he's in the same boat as you.

 

 

(Personally I don't believe that's what happened)

[Conn Eremon]

So because it is a Word Bearer who say that it MUST be false ?

I don't say that it MUST be true either.

 

I was just searching for a different point of view on the matter of the lost primarch...

Nah, brother. It's a false rumor because the author of the book outright stated that it was not true when he realized people were taking it more seriously than intended.

 

It's understandable that you believed in it. A lot of people did. According to the author, we were meant to take it more as them joking around than as a valid theory.

[Wade Garrett]

I'll take 2nd Edition over gossip from a bunch of guys who, literally minutes after bellyaching that Guilliman assimilated the Lost Legions, decided it would be a grand idea to blow up their Gellar Field generator while voyaging through the Eye of Terror.

 

When even a Daemon Prince tells you to "cease this insipid conjecture", well...

[Kais Klip]

 

Damn angron why you kill your brother!

"He was never my brother! My brothers...my brothers and sisters...DEEEAD! ALL DEAD! DEAD AT DE'SHELIKA RIDGE!"

 

Serious answer:

When Horus first encountered Alpharius, his fleet was fighting the Imperium.

 

If Angron and the World Eaters found a Primarch leading his people against the Imperial Army, I honestly think the Red Angel would see killing him with his family and friends instead of taking him alive to lead a Legion for the Emperor as doing right by him.

 

Edit @ Cormac:

The "Well, why erase all records of his Legion, then?" is a bit of a stumbling block, yes.

 

But censuring Angron to boot...eh, taking a fully grown Primarch prisoner, especially one that's in full war mode, is no easy task, even if you are the Emperor.

 

I think there's just enough shreds of doubt and "Well, maybe it wasn't all his fault" for Angron to slide on this, although it could well be what prompted Russ to stage an intervention.

 

 

Here’s a thought; how far past the “recover before” expiry date would the Emperor bring a son back under his wing and at what point would it be proclaimed a tragedy best left unsaid? I’m proposing a situation not that far from the Diasporex or any one of the countless factions/regimes that were absolutely ‘healthy’ in theory but too far lost for the Imperium to co-exist with.

 

A cybernetic primarch leading an army of cybernaughts with tech that would put the Keys of Hel to shame? Time warp shenanigans that displayed the results of generations worth of xenon interbreeding? A daemon prince primarch, or one so infused with the warp (not corrupted in a sense) that it was a generally bad idea to bring him back out to real space? 

 

See now I’m considering a tragedy not in the sense of “whai, horus?” but rather “Oh ho ho this is grim dark, that dude is so- Ah, my lord, greatest condolences, lord.”

 

 

 

Damn angron why you kill your brother!

"He was never my brother! My brothers...my brothers and sisters...DEEEAD! ALL DEAD! DEAD AT DE'SHELIKA RIDGE!"

 

Serious answer:

When Horus first encountered Alpharius, his fleet was fighting the Imperium.

 

If Angron and the World Eaters found a Primarch leading his people against the Imperial Army, I honestly think the Red Angel would see killing him with his family and friends instead of taking him alive to lead a Legion for the Emperor as doing right by him.

 

Edit @ Cormac:

The "Well, why erase all records of his Legion, then?" is a bit of a stumbling block, yes.

 

But censuring Angron to boot...eh, taking a fully grown Primarch prisoner, especially one that's in full war mode, is no easy task, even if you are the Emperor.

 

I think there's just enough shreds of doubt and "Well, maybe it wasn't all his fault" for Angron to slide on this, although it could well be what prompted Russ to stage an intervention.

For the first time ever I just wondered if Angron without the Nails would have been a "Bruce Banner" in contrast to ,with Nails, raging kill monster.

 

See ADB’s work on Angron brought him out to me as one of the white hats in terms of morals; the guy realises the ‘truth’ of the Emperor’s regime in a true cynical critical fashion,  and yet has no qualms with acting as the bad guy simply because that is the cards he has been given, only loosing his cool at the sight and sound of hypocrisy of what they are doing. 

 

“Maybe if I was a better man I’d ascend the steps and take the slaving bastard’s head.” threw Angron as one of the “deepest” personalities in 40k to me yet. It really makes you curse the Nails, with just a slightly longer attention span them he might have written a heart-moving treatise on morality. Instead I need an army of Haruspexii and a field of entrails to get my daily Grimdark Morals quota fulfilled at the behest from rage-boy. 

[fission]

I wasn't aware that ADB stated it was false.

In this case I agree with you Legatus that my idea was wrong.

 

One solution resolved .. a hundred more to come ;)

[Legatus]

Well, seeing it has already been resolved... two points, though.

 

One, the Ultramarines' growth is also explained in the 5th Edition Codex (p. 13, under "Fortress Macragge"), not just 2nd Edition. So there.

 

And B - Authors love to throw in their own little conspiracy teases into the novels, without really meaning it to be a drastic new reveal. In 'Angels of Darkness' Gav Thorpe has one of the Characters (who wasn't there, doesn't really know, and dislikes the loyal Dark Angels) say "why wasn't Jonson at the Battle for Terra? I think he deliberately waited to see who would win!" And 80% of the people reading it immediately went "omg, Jonson waited to see who would win".

In 'The First Heretic'  A D-B has one of the characters (who wasn't there, doesn't really know, and dislikes the Ultramarines) say "how did the Ultramarines get so big? I think they absorbed the missing Legions!" And again, 80% of readers went "omg, the Missing Legions were absorbed by the Ultramarines".

Previously, Simon Spurrier in 'Lord of the Night' had one of his Characters (who wasn't there, doesn't really know, and dislikes the Emperor) say "why did things go so bad for the Night Lords? I think because the Emperor had conspired against them from the beginning. My trustworthy Primarch told me so!" And 80% of the readers went "omg, the Emperor tried to off the Night Lords even before the Heresy".

 

Each of those conspiracy theories was explicitely refuted by the lore we had had up to that point. Yet people took the unsubstantiated and subjective theories from those characters at face value. As for 'Angels of Darkness', Gav Thorpe in the afterword for the special edition mused how he had never forseen such a strong reaction to that linie, and that he hadn't really meant anything by it. Just a spicy little line that came to him spontaneously while writing. A D-B has expressed something similar for the line in 'Know No Fear' in this forum. The authors are not meant to reveal anything about the missing Legions, but they are allowed to have a bit of conspiratorial fun with it.

As far as I know there has been no such explanation from Simon Spurrier, though in his later Night Lords books, A D-B has somewhat relativised the statements from that character, and had presented a very different picture of the Legion and Curze's mindset.

[Wade Garrett]

Re: Simon Spurrier

 

He did have another Heresy era Night Lord turn up specifically to laugh in Sahaal's face and say "Nah, we were always just a bunch of sadistic thrill killers and our Primarch led you up the garden path with lies so you'd stop whimpering about morality and get on with the skinning of old women."

 

But that guy couldn't John Mclane his way around a hive city in a Jump Pack and Lightning Claws. So we ignored him.

[Augustus]

Interesting. AD~B came out and said it was unequivocally false? IMO It doesn't really sound like him. I thought the spirit of what he said was: it's military gossip. Just because they think it and say it doesn't make it true; and later he said that the fate of the Lost Legions will never be known. This is my remembering of those conversations. 

 

Yeah. The 2nd edition..older editions. How much can we pick and choose? Just because there are discrepancies between the fiction then and the fiction now doesn't mean we can blatantly ignore parts that we don't like. (maybe we can actually..)  I say this while defending Fission's support of the theory while personally disagreeing with  it. 

 

Conspiracy theories can be right you know! lol..tin foil hat is now double wrapped.

 

Someone mind posting that quote?

[Legatus]

Re: Simon Spurrier

 

He did have another Heresy era Night Lord turn up specifically to laugh in Sahaal's face and say "Nah, we were always just a bunch of sadistic thrill killers and our Primarch led you up the garden path with lies so you'd stop whimpering about morality and get on with the skinning of old women."

 

But that guy couldn't John Mclane his way around a hive city in a Jump Pack and Lightning Claws. So we ignored him.

Ah, totally forgot about that. Yeah.

[Kol Saresk]

Interesting. AD~B came out and said it was unequivocally false? IMO It doesn't really sound like him. I thought the spirit of what he said was: it's military gossip. Just because they think it and say it doesn't make it true; and later he said that the fate of the Lost Legions will never be known. This is my remembering of those conversations.

That is exactly what he said. Of course, it should be pointed that literally the page before, literally the same character who said "Maybe they joined the Ultramarines" commented on how putting down on the Missing Legions was hard.

 

As A D-B said, the point of that whole scene was to pretty much create "yet another" conspiracy theory in wake of "Da Wolfsies Didz it!" that the fans had taken upon themselves to spread after reading Prospero Burns.

[Legatus]

 

The 2nd edition..older editions. How much can we pick and choose? Just because there are discrepancies between the fiction then and the fiction

now doesn't mean we can blatantly ignore parts that we don't like. (maybe we can actually..)  I say this while defending Fission's support of the theory while personally disagreeing with  it.

 

Well, the lore from 2nd to 5th Edition was relatively stable. So a reasonable approach would be to say that everything from 2nd and later is taken as "true", as long as it has not been contradicted by newer material.

In comparison to that, the lore from early 1st Edition was so drastically different, than any source from that era should have to be taken with a grain of salt.

 

So if someone asks about a certain aspect, and someone refers to a 2nd Edition source, that should be seen as adequate, unless there is a more recent source that says something different.

 

In case of the TFH line, it was not a definitive statement but a subjective guess by an unknowing character. In such a case, definitive background descriptions from 2nd Edition should absolutely be legitimate refutations of such guesswork. But as I said, in this particular case the 5th Edition background repeats the material from 2nd Edition.

[BT_Cennar]

Maybe  one of the Primarchs or maybe an entire Legion is still "avalible" to the Imperium as Dorn says/asks  to Malacador that there is another  force he could need/have use of ,with a hint to one of the missing Brothers,  to bolster the lines of his Palace-defending Astartes and Malacador answers he should not even think about it and never mention it again.

 

sorry, not nativ english speaker . 

[A D-B]

 

Interesting. AD~B came out and said it was unequivocally false? IMO It doesn't really sound like him. I thought the spirit of what he said was: it's military gossip. Just because they think it and say it doesn't make it true; and later he said that the fate of the Lost Legions will never be known. This is my remembering of those conversations.

That is exactly what he said. Of course, it should be pointed that literally the page before, literally the same character who said "Maybe they joined the Ultramarines" commented on how putting down on the Missing Legions was hard.

 

As A D-B said, the point of that whole scene was to pretty much create "yet another" conspiracy theory in wake of "Da Wolfsies Didz it!" that the fans had taken upon themselves to spread after reading Prospero Burns.

 

It's been a few years, so I can't even remember at this point if it was a direct response to the falsehoods of the Space Wolf rumours (TFH was first, so I'm not sure it was a reference to PB) but either way, it was ultimately just another dead-end rumour among the others already mentioned in the series.

 

I do try not to say things are absolute, one way or another. In this case, whatever I say is technically meaningless: we already know it's untrue because we already know why the Ultramarines were the size they were. It's not something that balances on my opinion - military gossip and conspiracy theories will happen everywhere, and it's not unrealistic for characters to speculate on that kind of thing, but the lore has famously and frequently already made it clear that it's extremely unlikely. It's possible (that's why the characters say it) but it's not probable.

 

It'd be like one of the Word Bearers saying Rogal Dorn is female. I mean, sure, but... we already know that's almost definitely not true. The author jumping in for clarity isn't the deciding factor.

 

There's a danger with this that it'll come across as "It was totally possible until AD-B said on some forum that it's not true" which isn't exactly what's happening. It's a hugely unlikely possibility offered by an uninformed character (whose own brothers discredit it), which all previous lore already states isn't true.

[Augustus]

I came into the hobby at 3rd. I really don't know much about 2nd other than that the game had cards? I only mentioned it because I thought the Ultramarines didn't even take part in the Heresy in 2nd and 3rd but now that has been altered.

 

Well. It stands to reason that they know as much as you know about the breadth of the Ultramar Empire and how that would feasibly allow the Ultramarine numbers to swell. But they still believe/think it as least possible that they were absorbed by the Ultramarine's Legion. Of course they could just be very silly.

 

I'm sorry Kol. Do you mean he came out and said it was false? or that he said was military gossip and that it is not necessarily true and shouldn't be taken as fact. (to that general effect)

 

I am very sleepy boy. Ill come back in this conversation after i get some sleep. 

[Conn Eremon]

 

 

 

Interesting. AD~B came out and said it was unequivocally false? IMO It doesn't really sound like him. I thought the spirit of what he said was: it's military gossip. Just because they think it and say it doesn't make it true; and later he said that the fate of the Lost Legions will never be known. This is my remembering of those conversations.

That is exactly what he said. Of course, it should be pointed that literally the page before, literally the same character who said "Maybe they joined the Ultramarines" commented on how putting down on the Missing Legions was hard.

 

As A D-B said, the point of that whole scene was to pretty much create "yet another" conspiracy theory in wake of "Da Wolfsies Didz it!" that the fans had taken upon themselves to spread after reading Prospero Burns.

This is what I was meaning to say, though I guess it came across as too authoritatively or absolutely. I was trying to be short with it, being on a phone and getting ready for work and all. Perhaps too short.

[Legatus]

 

I only mentioned it because I thought the Ultramarines didn't even take part in the Heresy in 2nd and 3rd but now that has been altered.

 

Not in the 40K Codices. The 5th Edition Codex still stated that the Ultramarines only just learned of the events while Terra was already under attack. While the 6th Edition Codex is less clear, neither does it say that the Ultramarines were heavily involved in the Heresy. Though it now does not directly contradict that possibility.

 

Thus far, the Ultramarines being involved throughout the entire Horus Heresy is purely Black Library lore, and has not yet been adopted into the 40K game lore.

 

 

 

I'm sorry Kol. Do you mean he came out and said it was false? or that he said was military gossip and that it is not necessarily true and shouldn't be taken as fact. (to that general effect)

 

A D-B did not categorically say it was false. Just that it was not really meant as a lore change, merely as some unreliable characters speculating. He maintained that "it could be true", but also pointed out that the lore does usually tell us otherwise.

Edit: That is IIRC.

[Adra'Melek]

I seem to remember AD-B stating categorically that the fate of the two missing primarchs/legions simply didn't exist. It has not been, and nor are there any plans too, set out what happened to them. It's a void. Any hints are purely hints to nothing, for fun, to give people ideas. Nothing more.

 

That might be wrong but I vaguely remember reading that from him. Apologies if incorrect.

 

edit: must read all new posts before posting :(

[Phoros]

It's a hugely unlikely possibility offered by an uninformed character (whose own brothers discredit it), which all previous lore already states isn't true.

 

I think one of the problems is that that really doesn't come across in the book, though. As it is, the idea is left on the note of "well, it DOES sort of make sense...", which is probably why so many people read it as "yes, the Ultramarines probably absorbed the Lost Legions" instead of "this guy has no idea what he's talking about and it's all made up".

[A D-B]

 

It's a hugely unlikely possibility offered by an uninformed character (whose own brothers discredit it), which all previous lore already states isn't true.

 

I think one of the problems is that that really doesn't come across in the book, though. As it is, the idea is left on the note of "well, it DOES sort of make sense...", which is probably why so many people read it as "yes, the Ultramarines probably absorbed the Lost Legions" instead of "this guy has no idea what he's talking about and it's all made up".

 

If it had occurred to me that people would've believed it, probably(?) have thrown in another line of "Duuuude, come on..." to discredit it, but people believing it is fine with me. The fact it's credible is why those characters are saying it; the fact it's ultimately almost definitely untrue comes with background lore knowledge, or it becomes just one of many possibilities mentioned in the series. Of all the false Lost Legions rumours in the series, the TFH one comes a staggeringly distant second place to "The Wolves did it", and I can live with that.

[Marshal Rohr]

 

 

It's a hugely unlikely possibility offered by an uninformed character (whose own brothers discredit it), which all previous lore already states isn't true.

 

I think one of the problems is that that really doesn't come across in the book, though. As it is, the idea is left on the note of "well, it DOES sort of make sense...", which is probably why so many people read it as "yes, the Ultramarines probably absorbed the Lost Legions" instead of "this guy has no idea what he's talking about and it's all made up".

 

If it had occurred to me that people would've believed it, probably(?) have thrown in another line of "Duuuude, come on..." to discredit it, but people believing it is fine with me. The fact it's credible is why those characters are saying it; the fact it's ultimately almost definitely untrue comes with background lore knowledge, or it becomes just one of many possibilities mentioned in the series. Of all the false Lost Legions rumours in the series, the TFH one comes a staggeringly distant second place to "The Wolves did it", and I can live with that.

 

You should have Abaddon musing on the fate of the lost legions in the Warmaster Chronicles, only to abruptly lose his train of thought. People would eat each other.

[fission]

Lol Marshall : a good idea ;)

[Karthak]

 

 

 

It's a hugely unlikely possibility offered by an uninformed character (whose own brothers discredit it), which all previous lore already states isn't true.

 

I think one of the problems is that that really doesn't come across in the book, though. As it is, the idea is left on the note of "well, it DOES sort of make sense...", which is probably why so many people read it as "yes, the Ultramarines probably absorbed the Lost Legions" instead of "this guy has no idea what he's talking about and it's all made up".

 

If it had occurred to me that people would've believed it, probably(?) have thrown in another line of "Duuuude, come on..." to discredit it, but people believing it is fine with me. The fact it's credible is why those characters are saying it; the fact it's ultimately almost definitely untrue comes with background lore knowledge, or it becomes just one of many possibilities mentioned in the series. Of all the false Lost Legions rumours in the series, the TFH one comes a staggeringly distant second place to "The Wolves did it", and I can live with that.

 

You should have Abaddon musing on the fate of the lost legions in the Warmaster Chronicles, only to abruptly lose his train of thought. People would eat each other.

I actually started laughing uncontrollably when I read this (which almost never happens). Well done. :D

[spu00sed]

The real reason for the missing two legions was the cost of the crusade.

 

Costs were high revenue was down. The emperor had no choice but to downsize his legions. The two with the worst performance management records were let go.

 

Official record were changed to say they didn't exist, so that shareholders wouldn't lose faith in the new empire and continue to invest.

 

This is also the reason Horus really rebelled, he hated the pen pushers and the fact the imperium was floated on the stock market in the first place. It was a hostile take over.

[Honda]

In the grim dark future of the 41st millenium, there are only...accountants...

[Kais Klip]

 

 

 

 

 

 

It's a hugely unlikely possibility offered by an uninformed character (whose own brothers discredit it), which all previous lore already states isn't true.

 

 

I think one of the problems is that that really doesn't come across in the book, though. As it is, the idea is left on the note of "well, it DOES sort of make sense...", which is probably why so many people read it as "yes, the Ultramarines probably absorbed the Lost Legions" instead of "this guy has no idea what he's talking about and it's all made up".

 

If it had occurred to me that people would've believed it, probably(?) have thrown in another line of "Duuuude, come on..." to discredit it, but people believing it is fine with me. The fact it's credible is why those characters are saying it; the fact it's ultimately almost definitely untrue comes with background lore knowledge, or it becomes just one of many possibilities mentioned in the series. Of all the false Lost Legions rumours in the series, the TFH one comes a staggeringly distant second place to "The Wolves did it", and I can live with that.

 

You should have Abaddon musing on the fate of the lost legions in the Warmaster Chronicles, only to abruptly lose his train of thought. People would eat each other.

Interrupted by no one less than Erebus, with a timely update of gloat.