Lorgar - Daemonhood

[Nazguire]

As far as I was aware, all the Traitor Primarchs (barring Horus and Night Haunter) were daemon princes by the time of the Siege of Terra.  To my knowledge, the HH series hasn't depicted Lorgar's ascension as yet.

 

Bets on when this will occur and how?

[Marshal Loss]

Perturabo is also not a Daemon Primarch at the Siege of Terra, and Lorgar does not ascend to daemonhood until after the Heresy; not to mention that as of Slaves to Darkness, he is not going to be present at the Siege anyway. No idea what will prompt his ascension though - IA just mentions him being rewarded for his atrocities committed in the name of the gods. Maybe he'll sacrifice an entire planet/system, something grand like that, during the Scouring. I'm sure BL will get around to it eventually.

[dice4thedicegod]

Id thought that be’lakor was the only undivided daemon prince... but isn’t logar one as well?

[Gederas]

Id thought that be’lakor was the only undivided daemon prince... but isn’t logar one as well?

Lorgar and Perturabo are also undivided. It might get retconned or changed depending. But Be'lakor is the only Daemon Prince who was empowered by ALL FOUR Chaos Gods.

 

Lorgar might be ascended by Chaos ITSELF.

[WickedJester1013]

There’s a lot of interesting theory behind the idea of chaos undivided and what that means. Seeing as the two undivided primarchs are not center stage they don’t get talked about. Be’lakor was blessed with a portion or all 4 gods so they each have a certain sway over him whereas the other two primarchs might be in a similar boat or maybe something else. There is a theory a a deeper beast of chaos undivided or maybe even that the 4 gods are really parts of a whole god. But as far as I see that’s a deep lore diving kinda theory and I’m afraid untill one of them gets more love we may never know what a prince of undivided means.

[Sception]

Lorgar and peturabo (and night haunter) were all undivided princes in the lore, but that was before gw added the retcon that only belakor was an undivided prince and literally every daemon prince since then has been aligned.

 

Since that retcon gw has seemingly gone out of their way to avoid saying anything definitive about the nature and alignment of any of the non-cult daemon primarchs. I expect a conclusive decision on how to square this particular circle hasnt even been worked out by the devs yet.

 

There are multiple ways they could do it - either make them aligned (they've been cosying peturabo up with nurgle a bit), or just re-retcon away the bit about belakor being the only undivided prince (maybe the chaos gods were willing to make exceptions for primarchs once they at least had one of their own each), or they could make the unaligned daemon primarchs something other than straight forward princes. Like maybe peturabo isn't a daemon prince per se but rather a sort of super obliterator. Maybe lorgar attained daemonic status not through princely elevation but rather through simultanious possession by and mental subjugation of powerful daemons of each of the four gods, making him a sort of super possessed.

 

But as it is there's no clear official answer to this contradiction at the moment, and I wouldn't expect one any time soon.

[Panzer]

For Lorgar I think it would be possible and interesting if he figured out how to ascend on his own. No clue about Perturabo though.

Honestly, the question how they managed to ascend and of what nature that ascension is, is one of the big questions in 40k currently. No amount of speculation can answer it because GW hasn't thought of it yet (or at least not before they started to actually control the information flow to the community and tie it to campaigns and releases).

[dice4thedicegod]

I definitely like the idea of lorgar managing to engineer his own ascension through Chaos itself.

[Gederas]

For Lorgar I think it would be possible and interesting if he figured out how to ascend on his own. No clue about Perturabo though.

Honestly, the question how they managed to ascend and of what nature that ascension is, is one of the big questions in 40k currently. No amount of speculation can answer it because GW hasn't thought of it yet (or at least not before they started to actually control the information flow to the community and tie it to campaigns and releases).

I get the strangest feeling Perturabo's ascension could be tied with the Obliterator Virus.

[Furnace Lord]

I had the same vibe about Perturabo. I can't recall where due to my recent massive fluff infusion to catch up, but I recall him described as basically a giant overpowered obliterator.

[the emperor is scottish]

Has it been retcon that perturabo ascended after sacrificing the gene seed of the imperial fists killed in the iron cage?

[Sception]

Has it been retcon that perturabo ascended after sacrificing the gene seed of the imperial fists killed in the iron cage?

 

Not officially, but I'm not sure if it's been specifically mentioned & affirmed at all recently, so I'm not sure how firmly that can be taken as canon.

 

While I would expect at least some aspect of that fluff to remain, it wouldn't necessarily preclude changes to his daemonic nature.  For instance, if they make him a nurgle aligned prince instead of undivided, then they could simply say that gene seed was sacrificed to nurgle.  Alternatively, if they change his nature to something daemonic but not exactly a prince - for instance some kind of super obliterator - then the geneseed sacrifice could be used to power that more personalized form of daemonic ascension.

[coabeous]

Would be interesting to see Lorgar gain princely warp power through skill of warp craft and faith, but by the nature of the warp he would have to betray himself to obtain real power.

 

Perturabo Is ripe to go all Techno Savage being constantly tempted with weapons of mass violence. I would like to see him embrace the Dark Mechanicss and become a real heretic using outlawed, taboo science.

[Captain_Krash]

I'd really like to see Perturabo's Demonhood ascension be retconed completely. The IW hate and despise chaos it is 100% against their nature to consort/submit/bow to Chaos.

 

Perturabo needs to just stay is brooding/angry/resentful self.  Making him turn Demon? Just diminishes him as a character going against his own ideals and beliefs.

 

Krash

[Purge the Daemon]

I'd really like to see Perturabo's Demonhood ascension be retconed completely. The IW hate and despise chaos it is 100% against their nature to consort/submit/bow to Chaos.

 

Perturabo needs to just stay is brooding/angry/resentful self. Making him turn Demon? Just diminishes him as a character going against his own ideals and beliefs.

 

Krash

Mortarion despised all of chaos and sorcery and yet hes a sorceress daemon prince such is the nature of chaos.

[Panzer]

I'd really like to see Perturabo's Demonhood ascension be retconed completely. The IW hate and despise chaos it is 100% against their nature to consort/submit/bow to Chaos.

 

Perturabo needs to just stay is brooding/angry/resentful self.  Making him turn Demon? Just diminishes him as a character going against his own ideals and beliefs.

 

Krash

 

You could easily switch out Perturabo with Mortarion in your post and look what happened. 10k years is a long time and chaos corrupts. ;)

[Furnace Lord]

I could see Perturabo being the ultimate daemonsmith, and being the one who designed and released the Obliterator virus with the express intention of using it to engineer his own ascension without needing to bend a knee to the gods. If anyone could figure out a way....

[Captain_Krash]

Mortarion is a bad example as he was forced into it and his didn't take 10k years to form. His ascension was instant. As of writing we don't fully know what happened to Pert other than insert blank Pert became demon.

 

Krash

[Sception]

I'd really like to see Perturabo's Demonhood ascension be retconed completely. The IW hate and despise chaos it is 100% against their nature to consort/submit/bow to Chaos.

 

Perturabo needs to just stay is brooding/angry/resentful self.  Making him turn Demon? Just diminishes him as a character going against his own ideals and beliefs.

 

Krash

 

I would rather see the 'anti-chaos' interpretations of various chaos marine factions be firmly and overtly and forever rejected outright.  They are /chaos/ marines.  Maybe in 30k they held their noses up at the power of the warp, but come 40k they are 10,000 years removed from literally any other source of power and resources.  Those who rejected the warp to the bitter end *must* have been destroyed by it at this point.  Those who rejected the power of the warp had /nothing/ to sustain them over that time, cut off from the resources of the imperium by their defeat in the Horus Heresy and from the infinite power of the warp by their own suicidal obstinancy, and were doomed to fade and fall as a result.  Those who overcame the self destructive anti-chaos brainwashing of the Emperor instead found a limitless source of power to not only sustain but empower them over that time, one that would have provided an insurmountable advantage in the interfaction conflicts within the Eye even before you get to open warfare with the nigh infinite power of a galaxy-spanning military empire.

 

The sooner 3.5 dies and is forgotten the better, not just by those devs still gun shy over giving chaos marines functional rules less the risk the return of those overpowered days, but also by those elements of the CSM player base who still champion a self-contradictory and self-defeating vision of chaos marines that wants to leave room for the greatest of traitors to somehow simultaneously be more-loyal-than-the-loyalist, the most blasphemous heretics more-pure-than-the-puritans, and who expect model and rule and fluff support for a vision of chaos marines more mechanically and aesthetically removed from chaos than even the imperials.

[Captain_Krash]

Sure lets take options away from players/lore and shoehorn every faction in 4 colors. Oh? Are you angry. You are Red. Or are you sadistic? You are purple. Oh are you obese and smell bad? You are Green. You think to much? You are Blue.

 

That and you literally denounced everything the Night Haunter stood for as well. Red Corsairs numerous other Chaos faction that follow no god but only themselves and want to see the utter destruction of the imperium for destructions sake.

 

The hypocrisy in your statement is insane,

 

I would never want to play in a 40k like that and glad I don't have too.

 

Krash

[Sception]

Night Haunter (what an embarrassingly juvenile affectation) betrayed everything he supposedly stood for himself when he joined Horus's rebellion, and then committed suicide by imperial assassin in a useless attempt to reclaim a moral high ground that never existed. That's the problem with all of the primarchs, and why none of them are or ever were suitable warmasters in the crusade against the Imperium. For each and every one of them, the rebellion was a personal matter, a family squabble over sibling rivalries, adolescent demigods battling for their father's approval and then against that father when they thought they weren't getting it, not because they thought he or his vision were wrong, but because that vision, wrong or not, didn't happen to sufficiently pamper them.

 

Horus was weak, Horus was a fool, but he wasn't the only one. The emperor spoiled his children. He gave them everything, and it made every one of them weak and petty and selfish. The primarchs were, and the surviving ones still are, too high and holy. Too close to the divine, to the point that they, like their father, were blinded by the light of their own halos. It was inevitable, really. When the fate of the universe really does revolve around you, you lose the capacity to envision a cause bigger than yourself. Hubris becomes a black hole, your thoughts incapable of escaping the gravitational weight of your own ego.

 

If the so-called Emperor is a false god, then so by necessity were his children false demigods. Unworthy of their legions. Unworthy of the galaxy those legions conquered through their own strength and sacrifice.

 

But if we're going to get into Night Lords in particular, we should consider the survivors of Curze's legion, rather than their meaninglessly dead and rightfully forgotten primarch, as they provide an excellent example. ADB's much lauded trilogy highlights exactly the natural fate of all chaos-rejecting chaos marines - inevitable decline and death. The overt lesson of the most iconic Night Lords narrative in the setting is that Talos, and by extension Curze, was *wrong*, and that the supposedly degenerate, chaos-embracing elements of not just the 8th legion but the heretic astartes in general were actually right all along, finding strength and vitality where the nostalgia obsessed, ironically backwards-facing seer in his hubris only managed to lead his own warband from failure to failure down a path to near extinction.

 

Embracing the power of the warp does not necessarily mean submitting to the worship of one specific god, but it does mean consorting with daemonic allies where other allies do not exist, experimenting with arcane energy sources where other energy sources cannot be found, exploiting the strength of possession and mutation where other sources of strength have failed, and thinking in terms of symbolism where purely literal thought has buckled under the weight of insanity - with symbols ranging from runes of power daubed in blood to weapons and armor that grow physical horns and teeth and claws because they are the tools of a predator and in a reality defined by the wild fancies of the communal subconscious 'seeming' and 'being' are one and the same.

 

For those who, for so long, lived within the overlapping warp and realspace of the Eye of Terror, personal belief or worship had nothing to do with any of this, it is simply the fundamental rules of the reality they found themselves in, and a traitor marine who refused to accept that fact is as hopelessly doomed as if they had decided to wage war on the very air they breathed. Acting in self interest is not what prevents the Iron Warriors or the Red Corsairs or any other Chaos Marine faction from embracing the power of the warp, it's what *demands* it.

 

When you don't have access to the resources of a galaxy spanning empire, regular ships rust and corrode and fail for lack of maintenance and material and fuel, while possessed ships can be sustained on sacrificial flesh or draw energy from the warp itself, and can repair damage organically as a living creature might heal its wounds. The puritan traitor marine's autocannon runs dry of ammo and stutters to a stop, while the empowered chaos marine's continues to fire arcane shells of its wielder's consolidated hatred. The close-minded tech's incurious designs fail in the unnatural environment of the eye, or else require tools that he simply no longer has the capacity to maintain. The enlightened Warpsmith bends impossible materials into inconceivable shapes, wires them to the undying psychic legacies of unimaginably ancient atrocities, and then steps back as the nightmare factory they've created gives birth to an endless line of daemonic war engines that even they could never have contemplated.

 

 

In short, this:

 

 

Is not only what Iron Warriors look like in 40k now, it's what the *always should* have looked like in 40k, and the 3.5 era fluff and fiction that tried to pretend this or *any* legion not only did but *even could* remain unchanged and ideologically free from the influence of chaos after turning from the Emperor's path and taking refuge from the imperium's vengeance in the dubious shelter of permanent warpstorms like the Eye or the Maelstrom was always a failure to apply basic elements of the setting's core concept.

 

The warp changes those exposed to it. It warps them. Its influence cannot be willed away any more than the forces of nature. Like a tree caught in a hurricane, you bend with the wind, or it breaks you. 3.5's version of the chaos legions, where they mostly entered the Eye fully formed and never changed in all the time since, completely undercuts the power and presence of the warp in 40k.

 

At least, imo.

 

I am, after all, a Black Legion player, so I would see things this way.

[Quixus]

I definitely like the idea of lorgar managing to engineer his own ascension through Chaos itself.

Are you sure Lorgar would do that on his own and not have Erebus prod him?

 

Also Erebus!

[Iron Father Ferrum]

-=starts slow clap for Malisteen=-

[Sception]

I do want to emphasize the tongue in cheek nature of my diatribe as indicated by the line at the end.  When it comes to 40k fluff, my take is always filtered through my 'Black Legion Apostle / Abaddon Fanboy' filter.  While I disagree with the less warp-influenced, more traditional 'traitor' rather than 'chaos' marine take on the faction, and I feel trying to cater to that concept in the 40k CSM line would be a mistake, I am glad that the 30k game and especially model line exists to provide toys for those players of the opposite opinion, and I'm glad that the new multipart CSM stuff has supposedly been designed with an attempt to maintain at least some compatibility with those models for players who want to split the difference.

[Indefragable]

I think of Perturabo as being kind of a Chaos mercenary: he's too cynical to ever align with one of the four chaos gods, yet too effective for them not to grant him some boon when he achieves objectives that align with his. It'd be cool if he can pick an alignment before each battle and get like 60% of the benefit from it. Would have some interesting options and playstyles.

 

I do love the idea of Lorgar somehow ascending on his own. Or that he is some sort of lore keeper that is able to tap into the benefits of daemonhood as wished without having to "give" anything in return. The idea that he was the "weakest" of his traitor Primarchs and looked down upon, but unlike the rest of them (even Curze or Pert or Alphy in their own ways), he never became a Slave to Darkness but rather always stayed one step ahead.

 

In the book mentioned above, Fulgrim goes to fight Lorgar and it's obvious to all, including Lorgar, that Fulgrim will mop the floor with him, until it turns out Lorgar has....done his homework, we shall say....and disarms Fulgrim with a single word.

 

Post Dark Imperium, I would love to see Guilliman start making progress in the Imperium, (barely) holding Mortarion and Magnus at bay, but then Lorgar shows up and mops the floor with him in ways that only someone harboring 10,000 years of brotherly hate whose genesis is the embarrassment at Monarchia can pull off. Guilliman's disablement as a result is what sets up the return of the next Loyal Primarch.