A Chicken or the Egg discussion.

[Brother dean]

Apologies if this has been brought up before, I do not frequent this folder like I ought to...

So has anybody noticed that when big E is about to find one of his sons that he always joins up with the "correct" legion and they end up making the drop on the planet to find their own primogenitor? Awful coincidental that... I have three theorys:

Is Big E really that good that he knows which primarch he is about to find? (since he allegedly couldn't find or track them at the time of scattering)

Did Big E actually do the scattering and knows where everyone is so that they would be raised grounded in humanity instead of as gods? (this one has been kinda brought up before...)

Big E just positions himself with a leaderless legion and whichever legion he is with is given to the most currently found Primarch?... If so then did he just chance into being with the thousand sons when Magnus was found?

Edit: And as a sideline, where did all of my Dark Angel esoteric beam and blast weapons from Unremembered Empire go in my current codex...

[dragon950]

Only a small number of times does the emperor arrive with the same legion as the primarch and in the case of the dark angels, the legion actually found their primarch before the emperor showed up.  In the case of many primarchs it was other imperial forces that found them first and then reported back to the emperor/legions.

 

Must have lost all those cool weapons at the same time that rad non-heretical party happened on your planet that made it disappear.

[Brother dean]

Okay, true.  It has been a bit since I read Decent of Angels but you're right, It was a bit between the DA dropping on Calaban and the Emp showing up...  but it is still odd that of a 1 in 20 chance it is the Dark Angels that return Calaban to the fold.  

 

Dont remember who he had with him but The Emperor did have to subdue Ferrus and drink Russ under the table where some of the others immediately recognized "father"..

 

Now I have got to open up those IA articles in my old White Dwarfs...

 

 

 

And hey...  our stasis, displacer and plasma tech survived the house party...  why not conversion beamers and Volkites.  

[Conn Eremon]

If I recall correctly, the First Legion was ordered directly by the Emperor in its entirety to system undiscovered Caliban. Heavily implies that the Emperor somehow knew.

 

In every other case, he seems to be the first contact. Russ, Vulkan, Mortarion, Angron, Corax, Guilliman, Magnus . . . Each of these Primarchs the Emperor somehow knew about, and those not listed just haven't had it expanded upon.

 

In fact, the only one I can think of where the Emperor might not have known was the old IA's discovery of Alpharius. Who now might never have left the Emperor's side in the first place.

[Frosco Toppings]

Clearly the Emperor had a sense of which system each of his sons was in. Don't forget he is humanity's most powerful psyker. This has nothing to to with the chicken and egg thing by the way. Anyone with a clear understanding of evolution would know the answer is egg :p

[daveNYC]

Magnus makes it clear that the Emperor was in contact with him prior to showing up on Prospero.  Magnus is a bit of an outlier though.  Primarchs like Curze or Corax who are prone to staying hidden might not have shown up on the Emperor's radar the same way.

[Conn Eremon]

Magnus makes it clear that the Emperor was in contact with him prior to showing up on Prospero. Magnus is a bit of an outlier though. Primarchs like Curze or Corax who are prone to staying hidden might not have shown up on the Emperor's radar the same way.

And yet, the Emperor did. He was not in constant contact with those two like he was with Magnus, but he did apparently know where they were. In both cases, the Emperor was with the first Imperial contact and in both cases the Emperor decided to delay the normal process of conquest in order to make a one-man journey.

 

The Great Crusade was an impossibly vast endeavor. But the Emperor just happened to switch to Fleets that were going to come across Primarchs? Nah man, he did it because he knew. He might not have been able to throw darts at the galactic map right from the beginning, but he had to have had some sort of sense of where they might be, perhaps becoming more specific the more they expanded.

[Brother dean]

And is kinda my point.  He knew so is he the one that did the scattering in the first place?

[Hrolleif]

It stands to reason that as the Emperor invested some of his power into his sons there would be at the very least a latent connection with those who developed lesser psychic abilities. The more powerful (i.e. Magnus) would be far easier to notice through the warp while those with lesser degrees of the psyker gift would be still locate-able. It is worth noting that this is the being that in semi-death still powers the Astronomicon. Imagine and compare just how much more potent and focused his abilities were when he had control of his limbs.

 

I would think, from a strategic and tactical point of view, that he had to allow the advance of his armies naturally and according to operational needs as to head straight for certain locations would have risked opening up fronts in which they were ill-prepared to fight. Consider having to open supply lanes and securing regions the size of solar systems. Even at the expense of the morale boost of finding one's progenitor as quickly as possible, an army can only move as fast as it's slowest component. In this case both the human element and the vastness that is space itself.