Dark Imperium

[Petitioner's City]

Just interviewed Guy again last night for Dante. excited for Dark Imperium and will be having him on to discuss it soon after its release.

Just saw what follows on from Dante aka the Devastation of Baal and can't say I'm happy with it. Here's hoping Guy can rock the novel at least.

Guilliman really needs to stop being everywhere at once, though. It just doesn't make sense.

I guess Guilliman has the same teleporter Varys has in GoT

Only TV show Varys though... Book Varys is mostly always in King's Landing. But also TV show Littlefinger :D

[b1soul]

While Ven is certainly portrayed as formidable, I don't see him taking down Lorgar...even post-humiliation, "weak pathetic" Lorgar who has yet to find his purpose

 

IIRC, Ven stopped because he found a bolter muzzle right in front of his face. If he had hadn't paused, he probably would've died sooner

[HeritorA]

While Ven is certainly portrayed as formidable, I don't see him taking down Lorgar...even post-humiliation, "weak pathetic" Lorgar who has yet to find his purpose

IIRC, Ven stopped because he found a bolter muzzle right in front of his face. If he had hadn't paused, he probably would've died sooner

Exactly. As for the Gorro orks killing Custodes - Gorro orks slaughtered Luna Wolves right and left, even for the orks they were an exclusion of the rule.

veterannoob

'Just interviewed Guy again last night for Dante. excited for Dark Imperium and will be having him on to discuss it soon after its release. '

- we could expect a Dark Imperium podcast? Starter, fluff and novel discussion?

[veterannoob]

While Ven is certainly portrayed as formidable, I don't see him taking down Lorgar...even post-humiliation, "weak pathetic" Lorgar who has yet to find his purpose

IIRC, Ven stopped because he found a bolter muzzle right in front of his face. If he had hadn't paused, he probably would've died sooner

Exactly. As for the Gorro orks killing Custodes - Gorro orks slaughtered Luna Wolves right and left, even for the orks they were an exclusion of the rule.

veterannoob

'Just interviewed Guy again last night for Dante. excited for Dark Imperium and will be having him on to discuss it soon after its release. '

- we could expect a Dark Imperium podcast? Starter, fluff and novel discussion?

We can't discuss the novel yet but we should do a quick 15-20 mins interview on it a couple weeks after release. So air end of June. :)

[Laughingman]

How old was Guilleman when he 'died' - it was a few hundred years after the Heresy, right?

But I do hope Haley embraces a 'man out of time' aspect to Roboute - but I wonder what guise? The righteous indignation of Taylor in Planet of the Apes (1968), the utopian turtleneck aspirations of La Jetee (1962), the occasional comic moments of The Voyage Home or Back to the Future or Futurama, or something else?

Since it is a huge trope in sci-fi, I'm curious how he will do it. Honestly I hope there are some allusions to Gene Wolfe's Urth of the Sun or Soldier of Sidon somehow

Second the 'Sidon' note

But Robi in general is not Latro or Xerxes. New resurrected Guilli is more like a case if Caesar was resurrected after the stabing.

As for the Haley - he could do it right, but at the same time he could fail gloriesly if he will follow in the footsteps of the GS lore-writers.

Also he need a big bad to fight against. Some DG corpulent lord of daemon is not a threat against Guilliman that would make us worry even a little. The case of Guilli vs Morty on a contrary would add the needed level of menace and threat to the novel.

Its like Caesar being resurrected as the western roman empire collapsed, a couple hundred years after his death.

[Marshal Rohr]

We are about 8,000 years away from what it would be like for Guilliman to be comparable to Caesar waking up.

[HeritorA]

While Ven is certainly portrayed as formidable, I don't see him taking down Lorgar...even post-humiliation, "weak pathetic" Lorgar who has yet to find his purpose

IIRC, Ven stopped because he found a bolter muzzle right in front of his face. If he had hadn't paused, he probably would've died sooner

Exactly. As for the Gorro orks killing Custodes - Gorro orks slaughtered Luna Wolves right and left, even for the orks they were an exclusion of the rule.

veterannoob

'Just interviewed Guy again last night for Dante. excited for Dark Imperium and will be having him on to discuss it soon after its release. '

- we could expect a Dark Imperium podcast? Starter, fluff and novel discussion?

We can't discuss the novel yet but we should do a quick 15-20 mins interview on it a couple weeks after release. So air end of June.

Man how do I pissed with all that promised pre-release info and pre-release titles - Warhammer Fest was such a :cussing fail. No new releases from July/August except poor audio and Crimson King that is already released this Saturday. Same with warhammer tv - nothing new except what would be released in a week. Such a fail - advertisement in BL and GW sucks big time and they still dont figured that out.

Laughingman

Good one ;)

[hopkins]

BL stories linked to GW main studio releases have always been kept quiet

We have been incredibly spoiled with HH and FW teasers, and authors mentioning what they might be working on

[HeritorA]

BL stories linked to GW main studio releases have always been kept quiet

We have been incredibly spoiled with HH and FW teasers, and authors mentioning what they might be working on

'I do Mortarion' - said author A and 'I do Khan' said author B. Right... So much info and teasers lol

Do you remember (if you visited events of course) that where were titles 4 months before release at BL Weekender or BL live in 2014-2015? But after that it's like let's don't do anything - they came for event only....

Plus I do remember several times then they simply forgot the books at the warehouse or brought only 10 copies for sale, lol.

At the same time - where were hundreds of old re-released books of poor quality.

The only good thing so far - we officially know at least 3 months in advance what we would be reading, lol

[Izlude]

http://www.blacklibrary.com/Home/dark-imperium.html

 

I have high hopes for this one although I worry it will be like the Calth books that came out with the boxed game where it was clear the stories were written more at the "introduction" level for people getting into Warhammer. 

 

Looking for:

 

1. Some good Guilliman self reflection "god 40k is all sorts of jacked up"

 

2. Cool introduction to the Primaris SM. While I really don't play 40k, in terms of story material, it has tons of potential.

 

3. Great Mortarian-Guilliman dialogue. That is the appeal of HH over 40k where the latter in my experience is alot of bolter porn (except the obvious stuff like NIght Lord series, Ahriman, etc). I don't recall any interaction between those two during the HH timeline (like Magnus) so this would be interesting to see with Guilliman viewing Mortarian as corrupt and fallen far from the ideals of the Imperium/Emperor and Mortarian viewing Guilliman as a relic and "man out of his element" in the new age.

 

Did order the LE, hope it is better than the Guilliman LE one.

[1ncarnadine]

I downloaded the eBook version of this, and I've started The Crimson King first so it will take me a while to get to this. That being said, I loaded it up and took a look at the title of the first chapter.

 

 

It's an extended flashback to 10,000 years ago, with Guilliman fighting Fulgrim. I'm really looking forward to this one now.

 

[Kelborn]

With the spoilers in the N&R and the seemingly 8th fluff, I'm tempted to purchase this one.

 

Will be interesting to finish Guys Pharus first and then read Dark Imperium.

[Chapter Master Valrak]

No MP3 version? Why do BL hate money?!

[Soldier of Dorn]

Read the leaked version from /tg/ - a short review in the spoilered section below. Suffice to say, I did not like it.

​

I would warn of spoilers for the Warhammer 40k: Dark Millennium novel, but to have spoilers you must first have a plot, and this book doesn't have one.
 
Simply put, do not read this book. All it serves to do is introduce in a series of vignettes the various factions involved in the new 40k, with new units and new characters, without actually resolving anything. The worst part is that this does not become readily apparent until the third and final act of this so-called novel, a...round where the Daemon Primarch Mortarion (who has been mentioned as, essentially, the primary antagonist of the novel throughout the story) is introduced for the first time, where he vows to slay his brother Roboute, and then proceeds to... never appear again.
 

It's just a bad story. That's all there is to it. There is no resolution. The prose itself is enjoyable enough, but when I reached the end, I felt cheated. In the last chapter, our hero Guilliman fights... a sort of boss monster, I guess, in a Greater Daemon of Nurgle? But it's not someone who's been particularly well developed prior to this point, or indeed developed at all (asides from maybe one mention earlier of his name? I honestly can't remember.) Whatever the case, when he appeared, he seemed like a brand new character, and though what little of him we saw seemed interesting, it made for an utterly awful narrative. You are expecting some resolution of the conflict between the protagonist and the antagonist, and it simply never happens.

 
​EDIT: ​All that being said, it does introduce some new units for the Primaris (spoilered because I'll directly quote the novel)
 

 

First out were the Primaris Aggressors. They wore battleplate of a similar type to Felix’s, but more massively armoured: the Gravis class. Before they had exited the troop bay, missiles shot from their shoulder-mounted racks, their exhaust filling the craft’s troop compartments.

 

New equivalent to the Devestators, in Gravis armor with shoulder mounted missile racks (Cyclone missile launchers?)

 

The Overlord shook. Its armour was massively thick, and its engines prodigiously powerful. The new craft made Thunderhawks look like toys. As with so much the primarch had commissioned, the Overlord hearkened back to older designs of insertion craft, improved by the boundless creativity of Belisarius Cawl.

 

Possibly the plastic Thunderhawk that's been mentioned by Hastings in the past? I dunno.

He glanced at his concilia psykana, several Space Marine and Primaris Librarians stationed close at hand.

 

And confirmation of Primaris Librarians.

 

 

[Sandlemad]

WARNING: LONG AS HELL AND SPOILERS FOR DAYS.

Yeah so this was much much better than I expected it to be. Contrary to Psycho I would absolutely recommend it anyone interested in what's going on. I'll not do a proper review or plot summary as I suspect that'll appear elsewhere, just things that grabbed me.

Is it mostly vignettes? Yeah. Does it come to a solid conclusion, plot wise? Not really, no. Mortarion shows up, makes it clear that this is all part of something bigger and doesn’t appear again, despite being lampshaded as the final antagonist. Buuuut the prose is really quite good and there’s more to it than simple lore and background details. There’s a lot of character stuff that I found quite satisfying (though honestly I always find plot to be the least essential and most disposable bit of any novel, 40k or otherwise, so your mileage absolutely may vary). Take it as a grab-bag and it may be to your tastes. It was to mine.

In short, Guy Haley has done a great job complicating things with this book, with more than decent prose and surprising introspection in some long-standing characters. A lot of what I hoped would be present in the 8th ed. background is here: political implications of the primaris marines, RG’s changes to the imperium’s structure, his own doubts and bitterness about the state of the 41st millennium (or rather 116 years post-Gathering Storm). There’s also a few bits that almost seem to anticipate and… maybe mirror the fanbase’s concerns.

And, y’know, some as-yet-unseen flashy primaris stuff making an appearance, for coolness or thematic suitability or sales or all the above. Psycho has listed them but there are also Primaris Reivers: skull-helmed stealth/infiltration CC-specialists with power knives and enlarged left pauldrons.

Everything below is a spoiler for the novel, I guess. This turned out longer than I expected and is a touch stream-of-consciousness so apologies in advance. I have some thoughts on the Nurgle stuff which can go in another post (hint: this is a very good books for Nurgle fans).

The Guardsmen

Haley spends a lot of time, like the equivalent of a chapter and a half, delving into the experiences of guardsmen being sent to Ultramarian medicae facilities. I found this absolutely fascinating and a much more convincing look at a guardsman’s life away from the front than most non-Gaunt’s Ghosts BL stuff, without going full on Imperial Primer/Warhammer Community black comedy.

The guardsmen characters of Varens and Borus are lightly but decently shaded in. They’re not stock characters. There’s a fine anti-climactic scene where they manage to take down a Death Guard trooper in the trenches. All very heroic but the DG topples and falls on Borus, crushing him into the mud. Hayley goes into detail, more than a lot of authors would, I think, of how Borus’s comrades scramble to leverage a fully power armoured mutant corpse off him and the brutal PTSD that comes with it. There was something about the scene that made it stick with me over the usual 40k hyper-violence. Maybe because it felt more mundanely horrific and realistic, I dunno.

Cawl.

He doesn’t show up in person but he comes across as much more of a dangerous rogue scientist than in other background. Still not a fully fleshed out character but there’s stuff there.

He wants to break out traitor geneseed to make further primaris strains. RG refuses.

He wants to break out the abandoned geneseed of the 2nd and 11th legions. Yeah. RG refuses.

He has his own Cawlite faction now and is petitioning RG for handing complete control of Mars over to him. RG flatly refuses and thinks to himself that Cawl may become a serious problem in the near future.

He also comes across as a supremely annoying chap to work with. He picks at RG about his title, pointing out that ‘Lord Commander’ is already used by a bunch of different imperial offices and is just likely to confuse.

The Numarines.

Decently portrayed. I still fundamentally don’t like the idea but the book touches on some of their creative potential (as ADB mentioned, all the integrating into chapter culture stuff) and clarifies a few points. Some of them just about remember the post-heresy days of the Scouring when they were recruited from their relevant worlds (e.g. the primaris space wolf is a Fenrisian and a true laughing axe thrower, just one who hasn’t been home in 10k years and desperately seeks the brotherhood of his kin). They have all of the non-functional SM organs back but Cawl wasn’t willing to mess around with the “more idiosyncratic” features of the BA and SW geneseed.

Initially most fought as part of a host of temporary chapters collectively called the Unnumbered Sons, informally the Greyshields. These were all mixed geneseed formations - RG’s idea to encourage cross-chapter bonds and decrease the chance of grudges, Deathwatch style - but by the end of the Indomitus Crusade most of them have been hived off to form permanent new chapters or reinforce old ones.

It’s made pretty clear that inexperience was a serious problem at the start and Primaris casualties were high. They are also unused to chaos; not unaware but have less practical knowledge. Twice in the novel a normal astartes librarian has to pull them back from chaotic influence (not corruption, just spiritual despair around DG).

The main primaris character, a Captain Decimus Felix (a POC by the way, nice to note), is pretty reflective about the positives and negatives of the primaris project. He wishes for the experience and flexibility of the normal mixed weapon tactical units but accepts the benefits of better plasma tech for whole squads and the “streamlined tactical choice” that it allows. Sounds a little like an excuse for a simple-to-use army but fine, whatever.

Interestingly enough Felix is also concerned that RG appears to be favouring the primaris marines. Terms like ‘the new paradigm of astartes’ and ‘the older sort of marine’ are used. Curiously there’s actually some doubt about how RG is going about this; another primaris marine thinks that if RG wants to avoid accusations of legion-building and breaking his own rules, this isn’t how you’d go about it.

Ultramarine characters

Some UM characters appear. Uriel Ventris has a conversation with RG and is overawed. Cato Sicarius gets some shade thrown his way by the primarch due to having a big enough ego for all his titles.

Marneus Calgar, now this was interesting. Guess who’s chafing at his new status as Lord Defender. While RG is away he has to put down several terrorist/freedom fighter attacks on Macragge, a bit like in Unremembered Empire. He can’t help feel that this is pretty sorry stuff for a chapter master to do but what really rankles is that he’s not stopping it all, despite sending in the terminators. He’s afraid of failing for the first time in centuries. It’s extremely refreshing to see Calgar feel doubt.

Moreover, he’s ambivalent about RG himself. On the one hand, he is distressed that RG didn’t sweep in and fix everything. The book is very clear that everything RG has done has been limited and restricted by the usual Imperial bureaucratic inertia but Calgar was shocked that this limited his primarch. On the other hand, he’s distressed by how high-handed and autocratic RG is. In fairness, Calgar accepts that this is somewhat hypocritical cos he himself was essentially the autocrat of Macragge but it shocked him out of the idealised view of his genefather. It’s interesting humanising stuff.

Roboute Guilliman

I liked this a lot. Here’s a dude who looks around himself and hates what he sees. His internal monologues are peppered with disgust at the 40k baroque: servoskulls, cherubs, skulls everywhere, religion, what he considers hideous architecture.

Being the multitasker he is, RG has a side project of reviewing the past 10k of history and is horrified at how vague, patchy, contradictory and blatantly fabricated the imperial accounts are. In the century since the Gathering Storm he has trained up a small order of historians and pseudo-remembrancers to try and put together some sort of reasonable picture but at every step he’s stymied by the dystopian inertia of a war torn imperium. There;s even hints that the inquisition might be killing them off.

There’s a brilliant scene where he reviews some documents about imperial dating and is disgusted to see that even the calendar has degraded. There has been so much loss of knowledge and poor record keeping RE: the warp variability thing that - and this made me laugh out loud - that he cannot say with confidence if it is actually still the 41st millennium or not. Not too meta?

He’s pragmatic and cynical. He out and out says to his advisors that he doesn;t consider the Indomitus Crusade to have been a true success, just a desperate shoring up of the imperium, but holds a triumph because he knows it’s good vital propaganda.

He wishes he’s held his tongue about the Imperial Truth when he was awoken because as much as he hates it, he needs the wretched Ministorum to hold together. He kicks out the planetary governors of the 500 worlds and reinstalls the tetrarchs, then, in nice bit of rhetorical sleight of hand, brushes aside the shocked concerns of his mortal council by saying that if he could get over how utterly disappointing humanity is in the 41st millennium, they can get over this. Even the loyal Captain Felix notices that RG is good at manipulating his underlings preconceptions to get them to do what he wants.

And then, towards the end of the book, Hayley picks up some of the threads from ADB's Master of Mankind and delves into RG’s throneroom meeting with the Emperor. RG was obviously horrified at the physical state of his father but this isn;t what really shook him. They did commune psychically to some extent - not in words as such - and this is brilliantly described as the Emperor greeting Guilliman

“not as a father receives a son, but as a craftsman who rediscovers a favourite tool that he thought lost. He behaved like a prisoner locked in an iron cage who is passed a rasp. Guilliman had no illusions. He was not the man who brought the rasp; he was the rasp.”

Chills. RG comes to that realisation that the Emperor had absolutely never loved the primarchs as sons but let them call him father and “cloaked his manipulations in love”. Guilliman realises that he was a thing to the person he thought of as a father. He is bitter. He is disillusioned. He thinks that the Emperor lied to them about chaos and the warp, practically inviting the heresy. He thinks that the Emperor gave the primarchs his own flaws, his own arrogance, and in that at least they were more his sons than he thought.

I… can’t say this necessarily squares exactly with how Master of Mankind portrayed the situation (even with its deliberate ambiguity) and the idea of not warning the primarchs about the very obviously evil stuff is not perfect… but it is one jumping off point from this discussion about the Emperor, and I think a very compelling one.

And then his personal ministorum ambassador, weeping tears of joy and awe at the sight of RG slaying a great daemon-dragon with the Emperor’s sword, babbling about feeling the presence of the Emperor, asks him a question:

“Tell me, oh lord regent, truthfully - does the Emperor love us, my lord! Do not say I am wrong!”

Guilliman thinks about the lies the Emperor told him, thinks about how he barely knows the imperium or his own men - particularly “Cawl’s blasphemous hordes” -, thinks about what has to be done… then looks the ministorum priest in the eye and lies to him that yes, the Emperor loves us all.

Around the time Gathering Storm came out, there was some good discussion around how Guilliman’s return could have been done so much better. One of the mooted ideas was having a bitter, hollow shell of a primarch come back, despise everything his father’s dream had become, yet have to force down his bile, and bitterly go about trying to hold it together.

That is not what we saw in the Gathering Storm, it’s not what we saw in the 8th ed. fluff leaks, but that’s what we got in Dark Imperium. I like this Guilliman, he’s decent grimdark.

TL;DR: Plot and structure is poor to non-existant, good prose, absolutely fantastic character work. Redeemed Guilliman's return for me with a very well written and truly grimdark portrayal.

[Sandlemad]

Nurgle thoughts!

 

This was a shock but goddamn Dark Imperium has as good a depiction of Nurgle stuff as I’ve seen. Hayley gets them, decay and growth together. Everything’s jolly and weird and comical and terrifying and absolutely gross. Hey, how about a great unclean one’s guts hanging out so far that they get caught on his horrible long black toenails, get ripped and start spilling bile everywhere as he strides happily towards his followers? Yeah, I kinda wanted to throw up a little.

 

Spoilers below, for a given value of spoilers.

 

 

Death Guard

Striding into battle through the mist, straight into mass gunfire, chanting their warcries and having to stifle giggles at the same time. Again, much jollyness. One is attacked by a guardsmen who yells at him to die, and grins back, burbling ‘You first!’. Some good plague-knife fighting action against the numarines too. They... don't exactly go down like punks but they're definitely not the showcase.

 

Nurgle’s Rot

There is an extended sequence covering the development of Nurgle’s Rot and how a host grows into a plaguebearer (not a zombie or poxwalker, the actual lesser daemon). This follows the old Liber Chaotic fluff closely and turns out to be quite poignant, given we’ve followed the infected and PTSD-afflicted guard veteran characters to this point. You can see the obvious end coming early on - a guardsmen from a plague warzone acting strangely, what could this be? - but it’s implemented in an effective and pretty weird way.

 

Nurgle daemons in general

They’re brilliant. They arrive into the materium in massive hollowed-out void whales crewed by daemons and the handful of mortals that have survived their stay in Nurgle’s Garden. Of course these can’t support themselves outside of the warp so these colossal rotting fleshy monsters sort of burst out and then flop onto the ground to die and unleash the plague legions.

The daemons themselves are done with such wonderful theatre. Capering and dancing about, the herald clearing his throat and giving ridiculous speeches introducing the greater daemons (seven show up, all lovingly described) like an MC introducing a festival headliner. One GUO actually rips open the voidwhale’s skin like theatre curtains, smiling and waving to his adoring hordes. He then proceeds to play a massive set of disgusting bagpipes made by some rotting thing’s stomach. Yes, really. It’s brilliant.

For the AoS followers, some maggoths appear in the hordes too. 

Having said all this… we don’t really see them in battle, just this lovingly described muster. It’s weird, this part is like half a book. Maybe there’s a sequel, I dunno.

 

Ku’Gath Plaguefather

He emerges yelling at his daemonic brethern to shut up. He’s the one miserable daemon, utterly despondent about proving his worth to Daddy Nurgle. Hilariously and maybe a bit pointedly Mortarion muses that this actually makes him a lot more relatable than most daemons. That joke might have a bit of a razor edge… There then follows some gruesome slapstick where his cauldron gets wedged in the dead voidwhale’s jawbone and can’t quite be hauled free. I loved all this.

 

Qaramar

The final daemon that attacks RG is Qaramar, the great daemon-dragon of entropy, of the final moment before death. It’s built up to be Mortarion,as Psycho sais, so this guy’s appearance is bizarre but I thought he was an interesting alternative monster-boss concept to a GUO. If nothing else it’s nice to see something which is obviously not derived from the tabletop game.

 

Mortarion

Great portrayal, suitably complex, draws a lot from Wraight’s heresy-era work. There’s a lot of good descriptive writing about the disgusting Nurglite ecosystem of jungles and plague-ivy that’s grown up inside the battlebarge Endurance. 

 

Mortarion himself is still bitter and a more than a bit focused on the past. After the heresy he spent a while hunting his adoptive xenos-father’s soul through the warp and has now imprisoned him on a clock as a form of torment.

 

His new thing is clocks, by the way. He’s been fashioning these clock-like warp devices to harness the Hand of Darkness’s power. Overall he’s showing more subtley than his legion was famed for, they’re a lot more cunning than in the great crusade. Mortarion thinks to himself how he still despises warpcraft but after a spell half-covers him in fungal blooms (it’s for a hololith type communication thing) he’s described as trembling in “ecstasy and abhorrence”. He’s no less of a tormented soul than he was.

 

Typhus, though, is much more willing to sass him and overall they’re very chilly with each other. Typhus calls him Mortarion to his face (not father or master), and essentially calls him Nurgle’s trophy wife or shiny bauble rather than being a worthy champion himself. Typhus rips into Mortarion for his sentimentality and considers himself the primarch’s equal or even superior as a champion of plague. Obviously Mortarion disagrees.

 

 

[Marshal Rohr]

I think the Emperor has probably gone a bit crazy. It wouldn't be possible to say if he ever cared about the Primarchs or not, the first time he sees one, in ten thousand years, trapped in his own skull. He'd be like a drowning man sinking his rescuer for air. I don't think we should just so 'oh, he was a :cuss the whole time' after we've spent months showing he did, in some capacity, actually care about the Primarchs.

[Sandlemad]

I think the Emperor has probably gone a bit crazy. It wouldn't be possible to say if he ever cared about the Primarchs or not, the first time he sees one, in ten thousand years, trapped in his own skull. He'd be like a drowning man sinking his rescuer for air. I don't think we should just so 'oh, he was a the whole time' after we've spent months showing he did, in some capacity, actually care about the Primarchs.

Yeah, Inquisition War style. it's like Walt Whitman said: "Very well, then I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes." I think for the Emperor, particularly the entombed 40k Emperor, we can go ahead and apply that both figuratively and literally.

Ultimately though I don't feel like it closes off possibilities or confirms 100% what Master of Mankind kept ambiguous, as it's still all from Guilliman's extremely jaded perspective. It's not interesting for what it guarantees about the Emperor's relationship with the primarchs but about how it develops and shades in the attitudes and outlook of the resurrected Guilliman.

(There's also the slight get-out-of-jail clause where the Emperor loves all mankind, just not anyone in particular. Guilliman seethes but recognises this, both in his father and to a degree in himself. So when the priest asks if the Emperor "loves us", you could just about get away with a 'yes' followed a mental 'but he'd sacrifice you personally in a heartbeat'.)

[Scribe]

So, what is the current time? Was gathering storm put before the 13th black crusade? If this book is 100+ years after...where are we?

[Scribe]

Wow, read some spoilers and I'm SUPER excited to read this.

[Commander Dawnstar]

So, what is the current time? Was gathering storm put before the 13th black crusade? If this book is 100+ years after...where are we?

 

The events of The Gathering Storm took place during the 13th Black Crusade. I'm not quite sure how long the events of the three Gathering Storm books cover (certainly Book 3 covers a fair bit of time in Ultramar) but the majority of Dark Imperium takes place in the last days of Guilliman's Indomitus Crusade, a campaign stated to have lasted 112 years.

[Marshal Loss]

That Nurgle writeup makes me want to read it. Very happy to hear that he's given Mortarion a good portrayal, especially seeing as he is evidently doing the Primarch novel for him.

[Kelborn]

Thank you, Sandlemad!

 

Will definitively read that on. Seems like a good start of gettung a feeling for the Primaris in order to create a appropiate chapter. :)

[Jarl Kjaran Coldheart]

 

Question about how Guilliman's impression of the Emperor's view:

Could it be possible that this view is what the Emperor wanted Guilliman to see, rather than an accurate view?
The reason i ask is because each of the beings that communicated with the Emperor in Master of Mankind heard the message in the format that best met their perspective.

So maybe here the Emperor wants Guilliman pissed and angry at the state of the Imperium, because that will allow Guilliman to enact the changes that are so needed?

 

[Kelborn]

 

 

 

Could very be!

In order to get rid of all the god worshipping stuff, the Imperium might have to be purged, which would be done by RG.

I'm still calling it: religious vs reasonable Imperium

 

All the while does the Emperor sit on his throne, thinking: At long last...just as planned.