The Siege of Terra: The First Wall

[Marshal Rohr]

That’s a fair assessment. I’m sensitive to exposition after a bout of Haley novels these past few months. He doesn’t do this for Dorn and Malcador, where the scene really works. Edited March 1, 2020 by Marshal Rohr

[grailkeeper]

Just getting started with this. Khârn seems a lot more down the path of being a berzerker than he was previously. He seems way more like his 40k version than his relatively restrained 30k version. Last I saw him was a rose watered with blood. Have I missed something? He seems a lot less dignified and nuanced.

[Scammel]

Just getting started with this. Khârn seems a lot more down the path of being a berzerker than he was previously. He seems way more like his 40k version than his relatively restrained 30k version. Last I saw him was a rose watered with blood. Have I missed something? He seems a lot less dignified and nuanced.

 

Glad I'm not the only one who noticed this, he was far more compos mentis only a single novel ago, and I don't recall him being particularly devout whereas now he's outright proselytising. The path of devolution is already very well played-out by Angron. The more I reflect, the more Forrix and co. seem like the redeeming feature of the novel.

[RedFurioso]

Last I saw him was a rose watered with blood. Have I missed something?

Prince of Blood - Slaves to Darkness - Rose watered with blood - The Lost and the Damned - The First Wall

[Allart01]

I agree with the sentiment.

Khârn's arc got a lot of short stories/secondary appearences showing us the different phases but it didn't really feel organic, nor give us anything deeper than "dad's a big deamon now... time to give up and go full blood for the blood god, I guess?"

Edited March 3, 2020 by The_Bloody

[Fedor]

Khârn definitely seemed like there was a story or two missing for how he got to where he is in this, though his servile nature towards Angron was always going to quickly lead there once  Angron became Khornate. We've just not really got much from his perspective since Betrayer to flesh out the arrival. Possibly something for one of the upcoming books if he's a perspective character there.

Edited March 3, 2020 by Fedor

[Moonreaper666]

Khârn definitely seemed like there was a story or two missing for how he got to where he is in this, though his servile nature towards Angron was always going to quickly lead there once Angron became Khornate. We've just not really got much from his perspective since Betrayer to flesh out the arrival. Possibly something for one of the upcoming books if he's a perspective character there.

Maybe this was done to show just how inhumanely powerful Khârn has become? I know some people weren't happy that in the current millenium poor Celestine was brutally decapitated by the Betrayer

 

At this point, Khârn has never lost a duel to normal mortals (compared to him, Astartes are just puny mortals now). Both Azrael and that Blood Angel Captain Dophanael-something both run away that face the Breaker of Legions

 

(Reminds me of the terrifying nature of Khornate Berserkers in Last Chancers: Armageddon Saints. Yarrick, Ghagzhakull, Schaffer and Kage would run away screaming than face Khârn)

 

No wonder the present day Sons of Dorn fear Khârn, he defeated Sigismund at his prime and it took Dorn just to put Khârn into a coma, not kill him!

 

Wouldn't surprise me if an entire company of Loyalist Astartes would run away in fear than face Khârn

[mc warhammer]

wasn't his descent charted in a Goulding short? or am i misremembering?

[Astartes Consul]

Given how well he wrote him in Betrayer, I’m hoping that we get a good pay off for Khârn’s arc in ADB’s book.

[grailkeeper]

I'd forgotten he was in Lost and Damned. He wasnt that far gone then.

[Preliminary Bombardment]

Wasn't there a short story which showed Khârn choosing the path of Khorne, painting his armour red etc?

[KJB]

I'm up to chapter 18 and I genuinely hope that the Adabba troopers get to the palace only to be wiped out by friendly fire, I find them that annoying

[DarkChaplain]

So far, I'm really enjoying the troopers and their journey. It's a point of view I wish we'd have had earlier in the series, running up to the Siege in general. It serves to highlight how Terra had been preparing and changing since the outbreak of the war at Isstvan, and does so in a more heartfelt way than the tiny snippets we got in short stories every other year. It's one of the things the later Heresy really dropped the ball on, in my opinion. Where in the first 20 books we still had a lot of human / army povs, from the 30s onward, that kind of stuff got ridiculously sparse. Human characters were mostly confined to Legion support roles, part of Legion hierarchy. There was Tallarn, but that, too, abandoned what made Executioner stellar in favor of... Ironclad.

 

People have their issues with novels like Nemesis and The Outcast Dead (and so do I), but they went a long way towards establishing the Heresy as an actual civil war. As the series went on, it became a Legion war more than anything, leaving the civil aspect far behind. This plotline in The First Wall remembers the regular folks, at least, and gives them character by painting their own "tragic" lives before and since the war. I wish the series had remembered these sorts of people more often.

[1ncarnadine]

Wasn't there a short story which showed Khârn choosing the path of Khorne, painting his armour red etc?

Yeah, I think it was A Rose Watered with Blood by ADB, where he accepts the role of the caedere at the end. We could expect that he has the caedere horns/wings on his helmet now too (and maybe has painted all or some sections red), though any art that's depicted him is still showing him based right off the 30k model. My memory isn't perfect, so that scene could have also been in Prince of Blood by Laurie Goulding, which directly precedes ARWwB and follows off of Betrayer.

[caladancid]

Finally finished. I know I am way behind most of y’all (I wait for the ebooks dang it!). Really did not like it. Felt like one of those filler books in the HH series that I thought Siege was supposed to avoid. The fact that it is covering such a cool siege makes it worse.

 

I think 6.5/10 is probably generous though not outrageously so. I continue to believe that BL needs to edit Gav Thorpe’s work much more heavily.

[Moonreaper666]

How many people live in the various population centers or Hive Cities? Any more light shed on civilian deaths during the Siege?

[Astartes Consul]

Finally finished. I know I am way behind most of y’all (I wait for the ebooks dang it!). Really did not like it. Felt like one of those filler books in the HH series that I thought Siege was supposed to avoid. The fact that it is covering such a cool siege makes it worse.

 

I think 6.5/10 is probably generous though not outrageously so. I continue to believe that BL needs to edit Gav Thorpe’s work much more heavily.

 

So much more editing. So much. 

[aa.logan]

Really interesting to see that the reactions to this book vary so wildly; most titles have a pretty clear consensus but this doesn’t.

 

Maybe there’s some confirmation bias since I enjoyed it so much (comfortably Gav’s best work in my eyes, also in the top level of the Heresy), but it seems to get as many positive reviews as negative (and equal number of mediocre)...

[b1soul]

I would not place this anywhere near the finest contributions to the HH series. Thorpe's style is very bland and he tends to tell, not show.

[caladancid]

So far, I'm really enjoying the troopers and their journey. It's a point of view I wish we'd have had earlier in the series, running up to the Siege in general. It serves to highlight how Terra had been preparing and changing since the outbreak of the war at Isstvan, and does so in a more heartfelt way than the tiny snippets we got in short stories every other year. It's one of the things the later Heresy really dropped the ball on, in my opinion. Where in the first 20 books we still had a lot of human / army povs, from the 30s onward, that kind of stuff got ridiculously sparse. Human characters were mostly confined to Legion support roles, part of Legion hierarchy. There was Tallarn, but that, too, abandoned what made Executioner stellar in favor of... Ironclad.

 

People have their issues with novels like Nemesis and The Outcast Dead (and so do I), but they went a long way towards establishing the Heresy as an actual civil war. As the series went on, it became a Legion war more than anything, leaving the civil aspect far behind. This plotline in The First Wall remembers the regular folks, at least, and gives them character by painting their own "tragic" lives before and since the war. I wish the series had remembered these sorts of people more often.

 

See I always thought of the HH as a story of the Legions with everyone else dragged into the conflict.  And then yeah, maybe they did take part but it really didn't matter what non-Astartes did.

 

One of my favorite scenes was from Pharos when the humans of Sotha looked at the loyal Marines as little better than the Night Lords- with a ton of bitterness that they had been pulled into a conflict largely focused on the posthumans.

[DarkChaplain]

I've never really thought of the HH as solely the story of the Legions. They're center stage, yes, but I've been too invested in the fates of the likes of Mersadie Oliton, Kyril Sindermann, Ignace Karkasy, Lemuel Gaumon, Ostian Delafour, the Geno Five-Two Chiliad, Kasper Ansbach Hawser, and even the regular population and rising unrest in Nemesis, and so forth to shrug the regular humans off as mere bystanders, dragged into a war. The effects of the Legions' fall on the regular folk, the galaxy at large, as it slips from relative peace and structure into anarchy. Monarchia and its razing was hugely interesting and tragic to follow. The rapid industrialization of medieval Caliban, and the mass-recruitment causing unrest among the populace, was fascinating. Regular, spirited away imperial army soldiers being brought to Titan in secret, the struggles of the Sotharan commoners to defend their homes and rise to the occasion - that's the kind of stuff I find more interesting than yet another million boltshells being spent in action scenes.

 

In my eyes, the Heresy tipped further and further towards Legion-only action flicks as the series progressed. Too many Primarch point of views, too few normal people. It makes you forget that this war doesn't just take place aboard the Legion flagships and their homeworlds, and a select few planets like Calth, Signus Prime, Davin and the Beta-Garmon system, but everywhere, involving everyone. At some point, the series forgot to firmly root the Legions in a galaxy actually populated with people living their lives under a new system established by the Emperor during the Great Crusade. Heck, I'd go so far as to say that Promethean Sun is actually rather interesting to me, even if it's rather dull on the surface level, because it showed normal people changed by the arrival and defiance of Vulkan. So seeing the Siege bring back the regular humans whose lives were inevitably changed by Horus's betrayal, like Katsuhiro, Zenobi, and even in a sense the Alpha Legion operatives, is a great thing.

 

Looking back over the series, I can definitely see a pattern of novels that I enjoyed more than others, and most of them make you remember that it's a civil war, not simply a war waged by superhuman soldiers with explodey-pistols pew pew. By taking the mortals out of the picture, the Legions themselves, especially their Primarchs, also had to move further into the "relatable human" role, which didn't always benefit them. At some point, supernatural battles became commonplace, Primarchs became just another set of primary characters, and stuff like Perpetuals came out of the woodwork all around. But Perpetuals don't serve well at all when it comes to representing the effects of this war. They didn't live normal lives to begin with, their perspectives span millennia, dozens of them. The Imperium of Man wasn't so much all they knew or what changed their lives, but yet another dynasty in a long list of failed dynasties. And yet we now have probably more relevant, prominent Perpetuals than normal army troopers involved in the final stages.

 

As the series went on, I've been having a noticeably harder time to bring myself to really care about it. Used to be I'd binge new releases within launch week, now I sometimes don't even touch the new books until weeks and months afterwards. Obviously, the staggered release pattern isn't helpful there either, but the Heresy's drama has gotten too detached from the floor to feel deeply invested in on a general level. Now I want to see how plotlines play out, things connect and whether or not they can pull the finale of. As I'm writing this, I realize even more just how little I really care about the Legions as a whole now. There's characters I'm interested in, of course, but as Legion depictions have boiled down mostly to a handful of popular characters each a long time ago now, rather than being depicted through a variety of characters of different standings, human serfs and so forth, I've been seeing myself as becoming more apathetic towards them.

 

A lot of this comes down to the realities of writing a series like this, but a lot of responsibility also lies on a - I believe - conscious effort to move away from certain perspectives and closer to the Legions sometime in the mid-20s to late 30s, which is something that stuck around til nearly the end. If I had to put on a tinfoil hat here, I'd wager this might have originated in that dark age of GW's old managemant stifling BL's creativity; it certainly coincided with a significant drop in release pacing.

 

Some authors remember the regular humans more than others, though. Guy Haley has been making an effort in every one of his novels, for example. While people fought over their favorite Legion not being killy enough, I was super happy with Pharos for its rare perspectives and the wider tragedies and acts of heroism. In Wolfsbane, while very focused on the Wolves, there was still enough from common perspectives, the Mechanicus and so forth, that it added perspective beyond the Legions hitting each other in the face. Titandeath was most interesting due to the Titan Legion cultures on display, and less because of the massive explosions on the Beta-Garmon worlds. I cared more about Esha Ani Mohana and Mohana Mankata Vi and their personal tragedies than I have about Typhon, Raldoron, Angron and Fulgrim since going for daemonhood, or even fan favorites like Khârn and Sevatar. I frankly don't even give a flying toss about Zardu Layak, who has become the Word Bearer since Slaves to Darkness, replacing Kor Phaeron, Erebus and even Lorgar during the Siege of Terra. This is a guy whose role especially in The First Wall is supposed to catch my attention, but instead, I just find him a tedious, boring character all around. He had my interest for a while in Slaves to Darkness as an unknown quantity, despite feeling ambiguous about him suddenly being important because FW gave him a model, but by The Solar War, or even the end of StD, he's not been interesting or engaging to me. Meanwhile, I see Zenobi and her co-volunteers to the war effort singing their old work songs, and I know that the war isn't just being fought over Horus' wounded pride, or the Emperor's nebulous ideals, but over those common people working their hardest for their families, their societies and a greater cause they believe in.

[RedFurioso]

 

So far, I'm really enjoying the troopers and their journey. It's a point of view I wish we'd have had earlier in the series, running up to the Siege in general. It serves to highlight how Terra had been preparing and changing since the outbreak of the war at Isstvan, and does so in a more heartfelt way than the tiny snippets we got in short stories every other year. It's one of the things the later Heresy really dropped the ball on, in my opinion. Where in the first 20 books we still had a lot of human / army povs, from the 30s onward, that kind of stuff got ridiculously sparse. Human characters were mostly confined to Legion support roles, part of Legion hierarchy. There was Tallarn, but that, too, abandoned what made Executioner stellar in favor of... Ironclad.

 

People have their issues with novels like Nemesis and The Outcast Dead (and so do I), but they went a long way towards establishing the Heresy as an actual civil war. As the series went on, it became a Legion war more than anything, leaving the civil aspect far behind. This plotline in The First Wall remembers the regular folks, at least, and gives them character by painting their own "tragic" lives before and since the war. I wish the series had remembered these sorts of people more often.

 

See I always thought of the HH as a story of the Legions with everyone else dragged into the conflict.  And then yeah, maybe they did take part but it really didn't matter what non-Astartes did.

 

One of my favorite scenes was from Pharos when the humans of Sotha looked at the loyal Marines as little better than the Night Lords- with a ton of bitterness that they had been pulled into a conflict largely focused on the posthumans.

 

The number of Astartes at the start of HH number at around 2000000. It's like 0,00000000000000000001 of Mankind population. The role of Space Marines in Horus Heresy is extremely limited. Three full Legions can't even defend one (although large) Palace without aid of mortals, let alone fight in Galaxy-wide civil war.

Edited March 7, 2020 by RedFurioso

[caladancid]

 

 

So far, I'm really enjoying the troopers and their journey. It's a point of view I wish we'd have had earlier in the series, running up to the Siege in general. It serves to highlight how Terra had been preparing and changing since the outbreak of the war at Isstvan, and does so in a more heartfelt way than the tiny snippets we got in short stories every other year. It's one of the things the later Heresy really dropped the ball on, in my opinion. Where in the first 20 books we still had a lot of human / army povs, from the 30s onward, that kind of stuff got ridiculously sparse. Human characters were mostly confined to Legion support roles, part of Legion hierarchy. There was Tallarn, but that, too, abandoned what made Executioner stellar in favor of... Ironclad.

 

People have their issues with novels like Nemesis and The Outcast Dead (and so do I), but they went a long way towards establishing the Heresy as an actual civil war. As the series went on, it became a Legion war more than anything, leaving the civil aspect far behind. This plotline in The First Wall remembers the regular folks, at least, and gives them character by painting their own "tragic" lives before and since the war. I wish the series had remembered these sorts of people more often.

 

See I always thought of the HH as a story of the Legions with everyone else dragged into the conflict.  And then yeah, maybe they did take part but it really didn't matter what non-Astartes did.

 

One of my favorite scenes was from Pharos when the humans of Sotha looked at the loyal Marines as little better than the Night Lords- with a ton of bitterness that they had been pulled into a conflict largely focused on the posthumans.

 

The number of Astartes at the start of HH number at around 2000000. It's like 0,00000000000000000001 of Mankind population. The role of Space Marines in Horus Heresy is extremely limited. Three full Legions can't even defend one (although large) Palace without aid of mortals, let alone fight in Galaxy-wide civil war.

 

 

I do not agree that a rebellion started by, prosecuted at the direction of, and finished by Space Marines can at all be described as those same beings having a limited role.

Edited March 7, 2020 by caladancid

[Roomsky]

Statistically speaking they are correct, though. Horus' rebellion would frankly not have mattered if the Imperial Army and Mechanicum didn't schism as well. The primarchs are in command, sure, but works like Titandeath show the limited marine presence that must have been spread across hundreds of worlds.

[bluntblade]

Not to mention the amount of support from the civil parts of the Imperium needed to supply the war effort.