The Ragged Knight - Spoilers

[Marshal Rohr]

Given the depth of knowledge Khayon has about the Albigensian Crusade, is it safe to assume that chaos space marine will have a better knowledge of human history that most, because they can actively seek out daemons created by events and question them?

[Loesh]

Given the depth of knowledge Khayon has about the Albigensian Crusade, is it safe to assume that chaos space marine will have a better knowledge of human history that most, because they can actively seek out daemons created by events and question them?

 

I just work under the assumption that Chaos Space Marines know way, way, way more about humanity then the modern Imperium. It both gives them a lot of justification for their madness, as well as actual justification from a story standpoint.

[Vesper]

Plus French daemons are cool daemons.

[A D-B]

Given the depth of knowledge Khayon has about the Albigensian Crusade, is it safe to assume that chaos space marine will have a better knowledge of human history that most, because they can actively seek out daemons created by events and question them?

 

Definitely, though through a distorted lens. Khayon knows about the Albigensian Crusade (among.... certain other historical events to be shown later) from the Ragged Knight - which is to say he knows what the daemon has told him; what he's seen through the daemon's senses; what he's stolen from the daemon's memories; and most importantly from the daemon's very existence, which comes with its own resonance, presence, psychic 'flavour', and so on.

 

In this case, it's probably easiest to sum up what Khayon knows of that particular Crusade is an amalgamation of what everyone in the city of Toulouse knew at the time it burned. Everyone who was killed, or did the killing - take their knowledge and perceptions, mix it up in a barrel, and throw it thousands of years forward in time. Many will have known nothing but panic and horror and pain. Others will have known exactly why they were swinging their swords and throwing torches into houses.

 

Understandably, Khayon knows a lot about that particular conflict because it was the genesis of one of his Higher Arcana daemons, and because he has an interest in the effects of faith on mortal thought processes.

 

Stuff like this is what makes the series so much fun to write. 

[Marshal Rohr]

Is it safe to say there is no specific 'angelic hierarchy' in the pantheon, like the Christian and Islamic hierarchies, but something proportional to the psychic after scream of an event? Like a demon created by a murder or a suicide wouldn't be as strong as a demon created from a genocide?

[A D-B]

Is it safe to say there is no specific 'angelic hierarchy' in the pantheon, like the Christian and Islamic hierarchies, but something proportional to the psychic after scream of an event? Like a demon created by a murder or a suicide wouldn't be as strong as a demon created from a genocide?

 

That's a pretty safe assumption. Also, said genocide could've bred a squillion less-powerful daemons instead of the mightier one. Or bred them as well as the powerful one. Or the powerful daemon could divide into squillions of lesser daemons created at the same event if it chose to. Or it might not be able to do that at all.

 

Consensus in these things is... mutable. No pun intended. Daemonic hierarchy is as changeable as the Warp itself, for obvious reasons. And one sorcerer/summoner/librarian/cultist/ritualist/eldar/whatever's means of categorising them might not match up with anyone else's, especially as - much like ancient religious mythology of daemons and angels or Cthulhu-style evil - most of it is recorded in scary, unreliable old tomes and seen without any objective way of measuring or quantifying just what you're seeing.

[Marshal Rohr]

 

Is it safe to say there is no specific 'angelic hierarchy' in the pantheon, like the Christian and Islamic hierarchies, but something proportional to the psychic after scream of an event? Like a demon created by a murder or a suicide wouldn't be as strong as a demon created from a genocide?

 

 

That's a pretty safe assumption. Also, said genocide could've bred a squillion less-powerful daemons instead of the mightier one. Or bred them as well as the powerful one. Or the powerful daemon could divide into squillions of lesser daemons created at the same event if it chose to. Or it might not be able to do that at all.

 

Consensus in these things is... mutable. No pun intended. Daemonic hierarchy is as changeable as the Warp itself, for obvious reasons. And one sorcerer/summoner/librarian/cultist/ritualist/eldar/whatever's means of categorising them might not match up with anyone else's, especially as - much like ancient religious mythology of daemons and angels or Cthulhu-style evil - most of it is recorded in scary, unreliable old tomes and seen without any objective way of measuring or quantifying just what you're seeing.

Ok, so there may not be a correlation between the size of the events psychic signature, and the power of creation in the warp.

 

When you say higher arcana daemons, what do you mean by that? I'm not familiar with esoteric stuff, and all I could find was a tarot deck.

[A D-B]

 

 

Is it safe to say there is no specific 'angelic hierarchy' in the pantheon, like the Christian and Islamic hierarchies, but something proportional to the psychic after scream of an event? Like a demon created by a murder or a suicide wouldn't be as strong as a demon created from a genocide?

 

That's a pretty safe assumption. Also, said genocide could've bred a squillion less-powerful daemons instead of the mightier one. Or bred them as well as the powerful one. Or the powerful daemon could divide into squillions of lesser daemons created at the same event if it chose to. Or it might not be able to do that at all.

 

Consensus in these things is... mutable. No pun intended. Daemonic hierarchy is as changeable as the Warp itself, for obvious reasons. And one sorcerer/summoner/librarian/cultist/ritualist/eldar/whatever's means of categorising them might not match up with anyone else's, especially as - much like ancient religious mythology of daemons and angels or Cthulhu-style evil - most of it is recorded in scary, unreliable old tomes and seen without any objective way of measuring or quantifying just what you're seeing.

Ok, so there may not be a correlation between the size of the events psychic signature, and the power of creation in the warp.

 

When you say higher arcana daemons, what do you mean by that? I'm not familiar with esoteric stuff, and all I could find was a tarot deck.

 

 

It's just the terms Khayon uses to categorise the daemons he binds and makes pacts with, given the specific way he summons them (since he doesn't use a book, like the artwork of many sorcerers). The most powerful ones are Major Arcana or Higher Arcana, the weaker ones are Minor Arcana or Lesser Arcana. 

[Marshal Rohr]

Ok that's cool and seems more appropriate than carrying a massive book into battle.

 

 

Edit: Is there a level of difference between what the 30K legions can do with their lore and the Nine Legions in the Eye? I would assume yes, but if not I don't want to presume the traitor legions couldn't do something. It seems like the legions used an entry level lore in the heresy and only later did they unlock higher truths.

[Zeratil]

Remember it may not be just knowledge from daemons that Khayon, Prospero was a world of libraries and recovered knowledge from all across the worlds conquered by the Great Crusade and as Abaddon says, Khayon has the heart of a scholar.

[Marshal Rohr]

The other part the confused me was the way the Astronomican and the Radiant Worlds interacted. Do they block the light of the Astronomican? Or does the beam rotate with the Earths orbit? Is it more like a halo around the whole earth projected in a beam into the Segmentum Obscurus?

[A D-B]

Ok that's cool and seems more appropriate than carrying a massive book into battle.

 

 

Edit: Is there a level of difference between what the 30K legions can do with their lore and the Nine Legions in the Eye? I would assume yes, but if not I don't want to presume the traitor legions couldn't do something. It seems like the legions used an entry level lore in the heresy and only later did they unlock higher truths.

 

That's fairly self-evident, yeah; at least, it's certainly not new. Eternity in the Eye of Terror (or at least, dwelling within it) has served as a form of education for a lot of Chaos Marines. The primarchs' ascension and their focus on the Great Game is one of those aspects - think of all the things Lorgar and co. understand now that they had no hope of realising before. And so on.

 

This is something we talk about behind the scenes a fair amount, and it's something I've discussed with a lot of different designers and authors. There's occasionally a misconception in the online fandom that Chaos was at its strongest during the Heresy, which obviously isn't true: 40K has the theme of "Two minutes to midnight" for a reason. The Dark Millennium is, well, when everything's darkest. Chaos is at its strongest on the edge of M42, and a huge part of that is the mortal, corporeal threat of the Traitor Legions and their ilk. Everything is cyclical. Doom has come around again, and this time it's likely to win. The Traitor Legions may not line up in neat parade ground ranks anymore (except for when they do) but they're stronger overall... when you overcome the difficulties of uniting them into a force.

 

So you can occasionally have an imbalance that, sadly, makes 40K come off a little worse in perception.

 

 

The other part the confused me was the way the Astronomican and the Radiant Worlds interacted. Do they block the light of the Astronomican? Or does the beam rotate with the Earths orbit? Is it more like a halo around the whole earth projected in a beam into the Segmentum Obscurus?

 

There's no easy answer. It's nothing simple enough for geography to describe - nothing about the Astronomican is, really. There's no absolute geography to a psychic force emanating through the Warp.

 

But if you imagine hearing a shout or seeing a light from far away, it's a little like that. The part of it that reaches you as a faint cry, an echo, or a dim illumination, is still energy. Now imagine that energy turns into liquid fire instead of sound or light energy in the air around you. The Eye is a roiling storm of psychic energy meshing with Realspace, and the Firetide (and the Radiant Worlds) is where the psychic energy of the Astronomican is visible and palpable within the Eye. If you imagine the roar of the Astronomican going through the galaxy as a permeating sound rather than a directed thing, it meets the shrieks of the Eye's own sound, and... mixes in places. 

 

It's two psychic shouts meeting, with all the difficulty in geography that suggests.

[Marshal Rohr]

As I've said elsewhere, I prefer the heresy to be a military contest, and ToH has brought back the early 2000's feel to the contest between Chaos and the Imperium, where it's a war of broken souls. The use of the warp by the traitor legions in M30 only feels like a taste of what chaos can really do, and Talon of Horus makes it clear Chaos was waging a limited war for limited ends and the 13th Black Crusade is the

apotheosis of Chaos' power.

 

It's very exciting. Just don't forget some of us like the Imperium, and are fine with it getting wiped out, but we want to die screaming in defiance, not whimpering in fear. ;)

[A D-B]

As I've said elsewhere, I prefer the heresy to be a military contest, and ToH has brought back the early 2000's feel to the contest between Chaos and the Imperium, where it's a war of broken souls. The use of the warp by the traitor legions in M30 only feels like a taste of what chaos can really do, and Talon of Horus makes it clear Chaos was waging a limited war for limited ends and the 13th Black Crusade is the

apotheosis of Chaos' power.

It's very exciting. Just don't forget some of us like the Imperium, and are fine with it getting wiped out, but we want to die screaming in defiance, not whimpering in fear.

I've used all my Likes in one day for the first time ever, so that post is going unLiked for now. But I was on my rowing machine earlier today, playing out the Abaddon/Sigismund fight in my head, trying to put it into some kind of order given I'll be writing the book soon.

The Imperium will give as good as it gets - and often better. Don't worry about that.

One of the things I'm looking forward to most is a similar theme that was showed in Void Stalker, when the Ultramarines and the Primogenitor Chapters showed up to hammer the Night Lords. The idea that for all the Chaos Marines' arrogance and exciting new tricks, there's still that sense of "Oh, Jesus, what the Hell's going on?" when they fight the Imperium's new aspects for the first time.

"Who are these black-clad, angrier Imperial Fists who are so great at one-on-one duels and why are they beating our heads in? It's like Sigismund's elite warriors became a whole Chapt-- Oh."

"How come the Ultramarines are predicting every move we make and reacting almost as swiftly as we act? Did they finish that book they were writi-- Oh."

"Holy Balls, who are these psychic knightly fellows armoured in silver and carrying force halberds who are literally deleting all our summoned daemons?"

"Jesus, who are these Blood Angels in black who keep eating our faces and shouting that they're Sanguinius?"

"What have all you guys been drinking while we were in the Eye?"

[Marshal Rohr]

As I've said elsewhere, I prefer the heresy to be a military contest, and ToH has brought back the early 2000's feel to the contest between Chaos and the Imperium, where it's a war of broken souls. The use of the warp by the traitor legions in M30 only feels like a taste of what chaos can really do, and Talon of Horus makes it clear Chaos was waging a limited war for limited ends and the 13th Black Crusade is the

apotheosis of Chaos' power.

It's very exciting. Just don't forget some of us like the Imperium, and are fine with it getting wiped out, but we want to die screaming in defiance, not whimpering in fear.

I've used all my Likes in one day for the first time ever, so that post is going unLiked for now. But I was on my rowing machine earlier today, playing out the Abaddon/Sigismund fight in my head, trying to put it into some kind of order given I'll be writing the book soon.

The Imperium will give as good as it gets - and often better. Don't worry about that.

One of the things I'm looking forward to most is a similar theme that was showed in Void Stalker, when the Ultramarines and the Primogenitor Chapters showed up to hammer the Night Lords. The idea that for all the Chaos Marines' arrogance and exciting new tricks, there's still that sense of "Oh, Jesus, what the Hell's going on?" when they fight the Imperium's new aspects for the first time.

"Who are these black-clad, angrier Imperial Fists who are so great at one-on-one duels and why are they beating our heads in? It's like Sigismund's elite warriors became a whole Chapt-- Oh."

"How come the Ultramarines are predicting every move we make and reacting almost as swiftly as we act? Did they finish that book they were writi-- Oh."

"Holy Balls, who are these psychic knightly fellows armoured in silver and carrying force halberds who are literally deleting all our summoned daemons?"

"Jesus, who are these Blood Angels in black who keep eating our faces and shouting that they're Sanguinius?"

"What have all you guys been drinking while we were in the Eye?"

I've teased you about the Primogenitor thing previously, but joking aside, it's those kind of things and all the deliciously tasty references in ToH that breathe life into the universe and I'm glad we are getting them. As soon as I finish this paper, I'll be rereading the book to catalogue all my favorites.

[daboarder]

eh, we're seeing a lot more "history" being thrown into the 40k unniverse by authors, for example there are pages discussing "frankish" relics in pariah by adnett, I'm not a fan, it seems concieted to think that anything at all of the last 1000 years or so would survive for another 30,000 years, let alone 40,000, theres just a HUGE difference on scale

[Vesper]

As I've said elsewhere, I prefer the heresy to be a military contest, and ToH has brought back the early 2000's feel to the contest between Chaos and the Imperium, where it's a war of broken souls. The use of the warp by the traitor legions in M30 only feels like a taste of what chaos can really do, and Talon of Horus makes it clear Chaos was waging a limited war for limited ends and the 13th Black Crusade is the

apotheosis of Chaos' power.

It's very exciting. Just don't forget some of us like the Imperium, and are fine with it getting wiped out, but we want to die screaming in defiance, not whimpering in fear.

I've used all my Likes in one day for the first time ever, so that post is going unLiked for now. But I was on my rowing machine earlier today, playing out the Abaddon/Sigismund fight in my head, trying to put it into some kind of order given I'll be writing the book soon.

The Imperium will give as good as it gets - and often better. Don't worry about that.

One of the things I'm looking forward to most is a similar theme that was showed in Void Stalker, when the Ultramarines and the Primogenitor Chapters showed up to hammer the Night Lords. The idea that for all the Chaos Marines' arrogance and exciting new tricks, there's still that sense of "Oh, Jesus, what the Hell's going on?" when they fight the Imperium's new aspects for the first time.

"Who are these black-clad, angrier Imperial Fists who are so great at one-on-one duels and why are they beating our heads in? It's like Sigismund's elite warriors became a whole Chapt-- Oh."

"How come the Ultramarines are predicting every move we make and reacting almost as swiftly as we act? Did they finish that book they were writi-- Oh."

"Holy Balls, who are these psychic knightly fellows armoured in silver and carrying force halberds who are literally deleting all our summoned daemons?"

"Jesus, who are these Blood Angels in black who keep eating our faces and shouting that they're Sanguinius?"

"What have all you guys been drinking while we were in the Eye?"

I can't wait.

I mean, we'll have the founding of the Black Legion, the meetings with the Primarchs, the curbstomping of warbands, the first Black Crusade all in the next book. That's literally all I've been waiting for since I started the hobby, a decade back, painting my Chaos Marines black.

This series adds so much flavour to the setting on so many aspects, it will likely to become a reference to cover those ten thousand years from a Chaos perspective.

So, as I said : I can't wait.

[daboarder]

wait... Whose the second primarch killed by the talon?

 

Sanguinius sure, but the seccond? oO

[Kol Saresk]

wait... Whose the second primarch killed by the talon?

 

Sanguinius sure, but the seccond? oO

Finish the novel. Remember, Khayon is looking backwards. It's only normal that he might mix past events with events that aren't quite so far in the past, because both are his past. If that makes sense.

[daboarder]

....I dislike the idea that ADB is changing the history of 40k. the Fates of the primarch are known, whether they are lost or not, changing any of that to "death at the hands of the talon" is a bit ridiculous, on the order of half the blood angel chapter following a dude with wings....and fabius bile disguising himself as a "normal" human from other marines

[Vesper]

I wouldn't mind reading about the death of Leman Russ or Corax. Or Rogal Dorn.

[daboarder]

I would, if only because it diminishes those primarchs, their legions and their promises to return/the apocalypse prophecies of 40k, and as such it diminishes the history and depth of the 40k setting itself.

 

That being said I am enjoying talon and will wait to draw conclusions till I have finished.

 

After all, if it turns out the talon has "slain" one of the deamon primarchs, well thats another matter as death is no big deal to them, and it would help balance out draigo (who at least had his travails through the warp thoroughly toned back in the new GK book)

[Kol Saresk]

....I dislike the idea that ADB is changing the history of 40k. the Fates of the primarch are known, whether they are lost or not, changing any of that to "death at the hands of the talon" is a bit ridiculous, on the order of half the blood angel chapter following a dude with wings....and fabius bile disguising himself as a "normal" human from other marines

Except 1.) he didn't and 2.)we don't know what exactly happens to quite a few of the Loyalists. Look at Ferrus Manus. Before the HH series, it wasn't even clear if he died on Istvaan III, was simply wounded or what. Tere were even rumors that the Iron Hands built him a robotic head and then resurrected him. Of course, all rumors are rebutted by the Iron Hands that the Holy Index Astartes articles state also worship the Emperor, something that we know no Loyalist Astartes has a problem doing.

[daboarder]

I disagree, we do know what happened to all the primarchs, even if its only "was lost in the eye of terror, but prophesied to return" changing that to "was lost in the warp and killed with the talon of horus" is a huge change, one that I do not welcome. as I said, its as bad as the BS mortarions heart business was and is a silly idea for all the reasons that abomination of background is.

[Tenebris]

A question if I may. On the theme of knowledge and learning. In a standard astartes geneforging the marine undergoes the indoctrination via various procedures. Some are arcane, some are mind linked, ... you get the idea. We also know that a marine possesses an eidetic memory, so this helps a lot when you learn, fight, adapt, study. Almost perfect recall.

 

My question is, how much of this practice is left to the chaos space marines? Are they still being indoctrinated via those procedures (standard ones I mean, there are plenty of esoteric ones in the Eye)? Do they have active "indoctrination sessions"?