codex crimson slaughter.... yup, GW really hates us.

[Kol Saresk]

 

 

But if that's organized, then what constitutes as less organized than that but not "disorganized"? Just curious is all.

 

But if that's organized, then what constitutes as less organized than that but not "disorganized"? Just curious is all.

People killing each other and betraying each other on a daily basis ?

Huh. I had classified that as disorganized.

[Vesper]

 

 

 

But if that's organized, then what constitutes as less organized than that but not "disorganized"? Just curious is all.

 

But if that's organized, then what constitutes as less organized than that but not "disorganized"? Just curious is all.

People killing each other and betraying each other on a daily basis ?

Huh. I had classified that as disorganized.

People following conflicting orders from a plural leadership, ending up killing and betraying each other on a daily basis ?

[incinerator950]

It's... Chaos.

[Plague Angel]

It begs to ask why Huron should have more than 10k astartes. Granted he is a powerful lord, commanding much of the Maelstrom warbands but I still think that the original traitor legions number much much more than the Red Corsairs. I was under the impression in the Pandorax novel that while Huron is powerful he is still a small fish compared to the traitors, hell even Abbadon states that he has countless fleet commanders much more capable than Huron and that his is only one name in the thousands. It can be just posturing but Abbadon is not one to be dismissed so easily, and a runt that has been around for 300 or so years is a little thing, he and his Red Corsairs, compared to the true might of the traitor legions. 

 

On a side note I think that Huron has much more human elements than the traitor legions, ranging from pirates to cultists... 

 

What Huron has over the Legions, numberwise, is his relative newness. The Astral Claws were already pretty big when they fell, and the Red Corsairs are eager recruiters. And given the lose pirate organization, Marines who go renegade these days probably find it easier to throw their lot in with him than try to join one of the Legions. But he's only been at this for a few hundred years, there's only been time for the positive growth to be apparent (which likely sways more fickle champions from splintered Legion bands who want a shortcut to power and to impress the Dark Gods faster), and not the inevitable negative shrinking.

 

By contrast, the Legions have had 10,000 years in which to fall apart. If Huron, canonically, has about 100k Marines and also, canonically, has the second biggest force after Abaddon, that goes to show that the Legions have fractured to the point where their warbands are all much smaller than that. Even let's say the 50k-75k range, that's well below legion strength. Any one of those warbands might feel that they are still strong in their Legion identity and that everyone else broke away from them, but overall warband strength is curtailed. Given another 10,000 years, the same thing would probably happen to the Red Corsairs.

 

This just goes to show how a warband like the Crimson Slaughter, still unified in its smallness, might have just as much personalized identity to them as a Legion warband would, worth a supplement to begin with. They aren't veterans of the Long War (which, as a side-note, I thought that very veteran status was part of the whole appeal to Legion players; I get that the rule is underwhelming, but why are people treating it as though it's a BL only thing now?), but they are players in it.

[daboarder]

yup, because a thousand special snow flakes have a stronger identity than 50,000.....seems legit

[incinerator950]

Honestly, the Red Corsairs having 100k renegade Astartes is like the Dominion of Fire having 50k Khorne Berserkers.  It honestly sounds like durp writing to me.

[Wayniac]

Okay ignoring the whining stuff it has come to my attention I am extremely weak minded and clicked on every 'spoiler' tag in the thread.

 

Now that I know these spoilers (and have essentially ruined any element of surprise for myself) can anyone tell me the source of all this Crimson Slaughter background?

 

 

So I'm extremely weak willed, but you obviously clicked on this didn't you? Ha! This makes you even worse than me because this isn't even a spoiler!!

 

There are two, maybe three novels with them: Dark Vengeance, Crimson Dawn (retcons stuff - this is the story of how they fell) and I think an audiobook called Ascension of Balthasar that takes place before Dark Vengeance but I haven't listened to that.

[Wade Garrett]

The only things I can recall stating Huron has more dudes and toys than everyone except Abaddon are statements from Talos and Ruven in Blood Reaver.

 

No offense to either of those gentlemen, but I doubt they have intimate knowledge of the numbers and organization of the XVII.

[crimsonhand]

Meh' I'm going to buy it, I'll probably play it for a while. I like it repping the Word Bearers enough.

 

There's also nothing wrong using 30k rules for your 40k army. There's no reason to not use the Night Lord rules from the 2nd heresy book to rep them if you'd like. Anyone who's really bitching is someone you probably don't want to play anyways.

[Wade Garrett]

Meh' I'm going to buy it, I'll probably play it for a while. I like it repping the Word Bearers enough.

 

There's also nothing wrong using 30k rules for your 40k army. There's no reason to not use the Night Lord rules from the 2nd heresy book to rep them if you'd like. Anyone who's really bitching is someone you probably don't want to play anyways.

"Bu-but the Assassin Temples killed Konrad Curze! You can't play his model in the year M41!"

 

"'Twas merely a flesh wound!"

 

"THEY CUT OFF HIS HEAD!"

 

"TWAS BUT A SCRATCH!"

[crimsonhand]

Lol true.

 

 

I'll be honest, I'm more upset there's no havoc and chosen squads like rumored. That pisses me off much more,

[Sception]

In that case, be angry at the rumor mongers, not GW.  GW never said that there were havocs or chosen coming out.  As far as I know, a couple months back none of us would have anticipated any further models before our next codex release, apart from maybe plastic cults, if they ever get around to single cult supplements.  As it is, I think the main push for doing any new models for us before our next book is to free up models currently in the starter box before the new starter box hits, for chapterhouse fallout reasons.  as such, I wouldn't be surprised if we saw a clamshell power armored chaos lord and a box of chosen sometime this summer, but both might just be re-cuts of the monopose DV models, a la the current cultist box.  Or they might not come at all.

[Tenebris]

Well all in all the Thousand Sons got the shaft when comes to numbers, followed by the Emperors Children which were decimated in the slave wars by the rest of the Traitor Legions, World Eaters right after that, leaving Black Legion, Word Bearers, Iron Warriors and probably the resilient Death Guard as the top dogs. On a side note I do not dismiss the Alpha Legion as a really huge legion, granted it is fractured in a myriad of cells, but it also begs to notice that we speak of the XX legion here, organization, training and martial discipline are top kicks in this legion so I guess that when the XX legion pools some resources together it becomes a nasty thing and a deadly rival for power, though their main asset is their knack to use the brain. 

 

All in all to me feels ill suited to consider the Red Corsairs as an army that exceeds the 10k mark in astartes bodies. They have escaped Badab with a few hundred, with most of their wargear and ships lost. They might got strengthened by dozens of renegade companies (I doubt chapters) and squads, they might have created some new marines and forced some more into service as the condition to leave them alive after a raid, but hundreds of thousands, in what, three hundred years... if it would be so easy that the Lords of Terra would have made millions upon millions of marines rather than just a thousand or so chapters. That would imply that a hundred chapters sided with Huron, dozens of traitor warbands... which even if I stretch my logic and imagination to the extreme limits of 40k lore is still a highly improbable theory on the "numbers" of Red Corsairs.

 

Alas, the supplement will give me some nice tools to play until legion things and new kits come out. I will buy it, I will play it and probably if the summer campaign will take place I will use it as main army, with some Tzeentch daemons around for some more fun. Sure I will test all entries in the Crimson Slaughter book but even so I still feel that it was a cashgrab before the rumored new edition hits the shelves and a new starter set is released.

 

Now all I need to do is find some Dark Angels to murder. 

[Sception]

In terms of numbers of surviving original legion members?  Probably Thousand Sons = Alpha Legion < Sons of Horus < Emperor's Children = World Eaters < Night Lords < Iron Warriors = Word Bearers = Death Guard, if I had my guess.  Thousand sons were decimated before they got to the eye, then brought down to almost nothing by rampant mutation before the Rubric "saved" the few that were left, although they haven't suffered real attrition since, so might rank a bit higher.  Alpha Legion didn't flee to the eye, and as such have been less shielded from the ravages of time.  Then again, they don't actually fight as much as the others, preferring to stick to the shadows and work behind the scenes, so they might also have a few more surviving original vets than I'm giving them credit for.

 

The Sons of horus were devastated by other legions after reaching the eye, and that's before Abaddon going on a rampage and slaying all of their surviving leadership and any that wouldn't swear to him when founding the Black Legion, and they they had to have suffered further attrition while rebuilding their reputation.  Note that this is only in terms of heresy era vets of the original sons of horus legion, the Black Legion itself probably has the largest number of heresy vets of current CSM forces due to absorbing splinter warbands of other legions.

 

The emperors children and World Eaters both suffered more heavily than most (apart from the Sons of Horus) from Legion wars within the eye.  Children probably took the worst of it from what I understand, but the eaters seek out combat for its own sake, and have as a result likely suffered more attrition since.  The rest is mostly speculation that the more fractured Night Lords splinter groups following the death of their primarch will likely have suffered more attrition than the more organized & coherent Death Guard, World Eaters, & Word Bearers - though in the latter case that depends on whether you count the faction that still hangs with Lorgar (or at least has their leadership organized from his daemon world) as a separate group from the faction that's more down with Erebus and Kor Phaeron or not.  I guess likewise with Typhus's fleet vs. Mortarion's crew for the Death Guard.

 

 

But that's only in terms of surviving heresy vets.  If you count post-heresy recruits, the disposition looks quite different, with the Black Legion shooting way out in front, and Alpha Legion and Thousand Sons probably moving up several spaces as well, assuming that Magnus, who did not approve of the Rubric at all, has put any effort into rebuilding his forces, which seems reasonable to me.

 

It also depends on how you define "Legion" in the 40k Era.  Do you mean only surviving heresy vets?  Do you mean any splinter group decended from the legions, even if only a tiny fraction of their force are legion vets?  If an exiled thousand sons sorcerer was taken in by a night lords splinter group, and then took command of that group following the death of their prior warlord, would you count them as thousand sons or night lords or both or neither?  Do you count only the largest coherent fighting force carrying the legion's banner?  In that case, the World Eaters are only as large as the force that follows Khârn around, as there are no organizational ties between other world eaters splinter fleets & mercenaries who have attached themselves to other chaos forces.  But then, whenever Angron is ready to launch an assault on the material plane, he sends out a call and all World Eaters answer, from small mercenary bands that normally fight with other forces to large discrete fleets led by world Eaters warlord who still hold onto the World Eaters identity, seek out new recruits, and so on.  Do then they all count as 'world eaters'?  Even the ones who also count as 'black legion'?  The Alpha Legion has corrupted and reprogrammed a number of Space Marine chapters, who do not even know they work for the Alpha Legion until the psychic switch is triggered.  Do they count as Alpha Legion, or are they merely tools of the Alpha Legion?  Do we count hordes of cultists and bound daemon pacts and dark mechanicus contracts and other resources controlled by the warlords of a legion as part of that legion?  Does a Word Bearers cultist still 'bear the word', as it were?  If the Scourged made a pilgrimage to the planet of the sorcerers and bent knee to the Cyclops, and if the Cyclops then accepted them as his own, would they still be the Scourged, or would they then be Thousand Sons?  Would it make a difference what they called themselves or how they painted their armor?

 

Allegience and organization within the Eye of Terror is fluid, but that isn't the same as saying it's non-existant.  The Night Lords may not have a coherent chain of command or any bond of loyalty between their various splinter warbands following the death of their primarch, but that doesn't mean there's no qualitative difference between a Night Lords splinter warband and a World Eaters splinter warband, and such splinter warbands could each easily be a larger and more coherent force in and of themselves than an entire Space Marine chapterd.  Just because Black Legion warbands may have their own warband names and mostly act independently between crusades does not mean they aren't still 'Black Legion warbands'.

 

 

So there's a couple main ways to interpret 'Legion' in 40k.  It could be any warband descended primarily from the same legion heritage, in which case disperate World Eaters and Night Lords splinter fleets would be part of the same legion, but the Black Legion and Red Corsairs might not qualify, since while their origin traces to a particular group, their modern identity is much less based on that heritage.  Alternatively, we could interpret 'Legion' as any coherent chaos force large enough to consist of multiple warbands each following their own warlord, who in turn share allegiance to a single banner & overarching authority, whether it be a simple alliance of those warlords or loyalty to a single greater overlord, in which case the Black Legion and Red Corsairs are definitely legions, and the most powerful legions at that, but splintered World Eater and Night Lord remnants would no longer qualify since, for the most part, none of those fractured forces organizes above the single fleet level owing loyalty to an independent warlord.  Of course, some 40k era chaos forces would qualify under either definition, in particular the Iron Warriors, who are disparate warbands who trace back to a singular Legion heritage, and whose warlords, despite their considerable intra-legion rivalries and independent goals & ambitions, also share loyalty to the same banner with a coherent central command and Primarch overlord.

 

 

I don't think either definition of Legion is wrong, they both have their place in the 40k era, as they can both meaningfully convey aspects of the forces being discussed.

[Tenebris]

Indeed Mali, indeed you have the right of it but lets just take in consideration the warbands that play at being legion. In short the classic force that would identify itself as a warband created in the image of one of the original traitor legions, with a core of heresy era veterans as well as many new bloods stolen, forced, beat, abused or whatever that made them into "traitor legionnaires" and not renegade marines. This is the template for my example, now the miriad of this warbands would amount to the fighting strength of a traitor legion. What I am saying is that this "modern" traitor legions still overshadow anything in 40k in terms of chaos space marines. They are probably greater than all those renegade chapters, most surely greater than the various renegade warbands and I dare say greater than the Red Corsairs.

 

All in all I fail to see how could Huron Blackheart, a curl compared to your average traitor lord, have amassed 100k astartes, for I speak of only astartes numbers, in mere three hundred years. Granted, he knows his job well, he is a formidable opponent and a charismatic leader but it would take a thousand chapter strenght warbands to side with him to reach such high numbers. I will not discount it as impossible, only very very hard to justify in "fluff". And with all that he still has to go to great lengths to secure even one strike cruiser from a loyalist chapter? Somewhere in all this someone went way overboard with numbers. In all fairness I see the Red Corsairs as a warband with something like 10k astartes tops supplemented with a much greater number of baseline humans than the traitor legions, which could very well be the distinctive factor between Red Corsairs and the Traitor Legions, but still only a pale shadow of the numerous hosts of the World Bearers and the Alpha Legion who made from breeding cults and cultists an art form. 

 

That is my point, which can very well conflict with the views of the Red Corsairs fans, but I speak as always after an application of logic to the established fluff. I can be wrong but logic dictates otherwise. 

 

Still we are here to speak of the Crimson Slaughter... I do not have the book yet but I would be grateful for some illumination on the fluff contained in the supplement.

[Wayniac]

Wasn't the Badab War not even 100 years before the current timeline?

[Tenebris]

901-913.M41, which means that only 86 years have passed. So that gives even more credit to my theory, that would be at best two cycles of space marines creation and perhaps some hundred major conflicts which could have also gone bad for the Red Corsairs. And I find it very hard to think that traitor warbands would side for Huron for anything more than to get bodies for their nefarious deeds, much like Honsou did. All in all I am adamant when I consider the Red Corsairs as a big warband due to the charisma and skill of Huron but not that big that could be credited a legion, I think that 10k astartes is a very healthy mark.

[Kol Saresk]

Wasn't the Badab War not even 100 years before the current timeline?

Correct, so real time, Huron has only had like 91 years. But in the warp, who knows? Time flows both ways and neither.

[Tenebris]

Even so it takes roughly 200 years to build to chapter strenght. Lets consider stolen geneseed, warp manipulation, sorcery and the rest of such variables and we come to a conclusion that Huron was able to build something like 2k astartes tops if he was very very diligent in geneseed recovery, implantation and that the whole process was blessed with suitable recruits or slave stock. 

[Vesper]

 

Wasn't the Badab War not even 100 years before the current timeline?

Correct, so real time, Huron has only had like 91 years. But in the warp, who knows? Time flows both ways and neither.

Indeed.

 

 

All in all I fail to see how could Huron Blackheart, a curl compared

to your average traitor lord, have amassed 100k astartes, for I speak of

only astartes numbers, in mere three hundred years. Granted, he knows

his job well, he is a formidable opponent and a charismatic leader but

it would take a thousand chapter strenght warbands to side with him to

reach such high numbers. I will not discount it as impossible, only very

very hard to justify in "fluff".

I guess the competition in the Maelstrom isn't as stiff as it is in the Eye, to begin with.

 

 

Even so it takes roughly 200 years to build to chapter strenght. Lets

consider stolen geneseed, warp manipulation, sorcery and the rest of

such variables and we come to a conclusion that Huron was able to build

something like 2k astartes tops if he was very very diligent in geneseed

recovery, implantation and that the whole process was blessed with

suitable recruits or slave stock.

The Warp solves pretty much everything. You can control a world where the time flows super fast, and you can get pretty much an infinite amount of ressources and recruits from it. For example, say two standard hours are like twenty years on that world, you can get a fully operational generation of soldiers every two hours.

That way, you can build gigantic ships in mere days, when it takes decades out of that bubble.

Or you can get the opposite and be stuck on a world where you landed just after the Heresy, and two years later, when you decide to go on a road trip outside, you realize the Galaxy is a M41 one. Or that you're back before the Heresy even started.

[Sception]

Do I remember correctly in saying that Erebus and Kor Phaeron operate out of the Maelstrom rather than the Eye?  In that case, I would guess that Huron has such numbers mostly by being the public face and figurehead for a significant splinter faction of the Word Bearers, absorbing much of their numbers and benefiting from their expertise in corrupting, subverting, and converting enemy factions, which is right up there with that of the Alpha Legion.  Indeed, if I'm remembering that detail correctly, then the Word Bearers might have been discretely planting seeds of heresy and collecting renegade groups into the Maelstrom for centuries or millenia waiting for the right time and right figurehead to position their own alternative Warmaster candidate to Abaddon.

 

 

In addition, Huron has since entering the Maelstrom, become a symbol of resistance to and rejection of the Imperium for marine forces that chafe under imperial control, while not having the same reputation for outright corruption and damnation as the traitor legions of the Eye have.  As such, I imagine that many space marine forces who decide to break with the imperium that, in ancient times, might have sought refuge from Imperial retribution within the Eye have instead made their way to the Maelstrom.

[Tenebris]

But would entire chapters who have stood alone and fought as one brotherhood for hundreds or thousands of years, with their traditions, glories and all side with Huron in anything but an alliance of convenience, would such marines really don the red and willingly deface their insignia in the darkest hour of their chapter? I think not, I think that the renegades come to Huron in squad, company or unit level, perhaps a lone ship, as a rogue squad or as a single renegade marine but as entire chapters, I think not, not by a long shot. The Crimson Slaughter's story is the story of a renegade chapter, the Astral Claws one too, such chapters turned renegade are united in grace as well as united in fall. The Doom Legion and the Blood Ravens story also aptly puts what happens when a company goes renegade or half a chapter, they are hunted by their own brothers to prevent the Inquisition to find the truth, so it again brings us to company level when we speak of renegade elements, the survivors of the purges, those paltry few who managed to escape the retribution of the Imperium. And in all this imagine how many renegade marines will have to flock to the Maelstrom to side with Huron, and lets take in account the very defining element of the renegade and traitor marines, pride...

[Sception]

Those who decide to break with the Imperium?  Yes.  Unless they are positioned to make their own rebellion as Huron did, which few to none are - the entire chapter system of organizing and dispatching marine forces being entirely designed to prevent just that situation - or they do what they must to find refuge where they can, and the Maelstrom and the Eye are the two primary choices, there.  Otherwise, you just get crushed by the wrath of the Imperium, in whatever form that may take, which takes extremely unkindly to rogue space marine forces.

[Slave to Darkness]

Random thought,  if i came into a huuuuge amount of cash. and purchased a chaos army of say, one million marines, and painted them all word bearers and sent gw the picture of the finished army, would they take note and change the fluff? as right in front of them is a million word bearers. 

[Sception]

No.