Valdor: Birth of the Imperium

[Phoebus]

The waste of resources (here and in Consequences) angle just seems so nonsensical in terms of 30K/40K.

 

They are rebuilding in this book, a mountain into a fortress. The leader of the Imperium is Immortal.

 

Resources are not a relevant constraint in the setting really.

Definitely not at this point in the setting.

 

I mean, sure, learly at the onset the Emperor lacked for resources; Wraight describes even the Custodians making do with relatively primitive equipment early on. By the point the events detailed in Valdor occur, however, the Emperor is doing things that would baffle our greatest scientists.

 

 

 

Personally i would not have killed off the Thunder warriors i would have discontinued the creation of new Thunder warriors.

 

The thunder warriors i did have i would send into the hardest battles within the solar system where casualties are going to be high wittling them down slowly while also concentrating on the Astartes project.

 

Once the Thunder warriors are sufficiently whittled down and only the strongest and most stable are left i would have combined them into one strike force to be used in an emergency and as a counterweight to the astartes Legions should the need arise.

 

Simply killing them  all off and trying to hide it is a waste of resources.

This presumes that there was sufficient control over the state of the Thunder Warrior to carry out the control phase-out you propose. Granted, we could be seeing the sort of conflict between older and newer material that the studios advertise as a given for the setting, but Wraight is proposing that the timing of a Thunder Warrior falling apart was not a given. That is, the Emperor didn’t design the Thunder Warriors with a 10-year shelf life, at the end of which their organs would fail; the process by which they were created — a stopgap measure developed before the necessary lore and technology had been recovered — was imperfect and volatile, and resulted in products that would go indiscriminately psychotic, suffer organ failure, or succumb to uncontrollable bio-mass mutation at an unpredictable time.

 

You’re proposing that this force should nonetheless have been used until it was spent. Given what Wraight describes, it seems that by the time Mount Ararat happened maintaining the Legio Cataegis was more trouble than they were worth.

 

Hence not creating new Thunder warriors.

 

You are correct in that the timing of the thunder warriors breaking down is not a given.

 

But then we also have the thousand sons before finding Magnus and the emperor allowing them on the field when they where presumably more prone to break down in mutations then the thunder warriors.

 

The thunder warriors could  become indiscriminately psychotic

 

The emperor tolerated the world eaters for close to a 100 years after they where united with angron and brain boxed into murder machines.

 

Where they really more trouble then they where worth compared to the Legio Astartes when the emperor destroyed at least two legions was close to destroying the world bearers and allowed Curze,Angron and their legions to basically run riot ?

 

I think a managable ammount of the thunder warriors could be stabilized especially with the insight gleamed from the Astartes project once "natural" attrition brought them down to managable numbers.

 

A managable loyal veteran force capable of standing up to Astartes is to valuable a resource to waste If there was a place for Angron/Curze there would a place for Ushotan/Arik Taranis  in the great crusade.

 

The Emperor was pressed for time ? He could have used what was left of the thunder warriors for the first steps of conquering the nearby planets instead of waiting until he had sufficient numbers of Astartes to begin. 

With respect, a lot of this is apples to oranges.

 

The Thousand Sons were a far greater force of psykers, with whose Primarch the Emperor was already in communication. It’s not explicitly stated whether the Emperor hoped Magnus would correct their mutation, but point is that it was an unknown factor. By contrast, the Emperor created the Thunder Warriors with the foreknowledge that the technology involved was unstable. Again, they were a stopgap measure — nothing more.

 

Even the World Eaters are more complicated matter than the Thunder Warriors. The Emperor didn’t desire what Angron had become or what he made his warriors into, and prior to him being rediscovered, the XII Legion had functioned well. We can’t know when exactly Angron introduced the Butcher’s Nails to the World Eaters, but it seems to have happened relatively soon before Isstvan III, as Angron was censured after Ghenna — his legion’s first action following mass implantation of those devices — and after his exile he was sent to Horus.

 

You have to remember, so much of what we’re talking about here is predicated on conjecture. You’re assuming the attrition rate of the Thunder Warriors was manageable, or that it could be stabilized, or that their battlefield losses would somehow get better in interstellar conflict, or that Astartes technology was relevant to the Catigae project in any way other than the sharing of really broad terminology like “gene-crafted.” By contrast, we know that while the Emperor pushed his minions “punishingly hard” and had a major setback with regard to the Primarchs, he nonetheless had ...

 

... ten thousand Angels of Death ready by the time this novel occurs; that the Astartes project was so far along that the attempt to sabotage all their stores under the Imperial Palace was allowed to happen — because it couldn’t meaningfully impact the Emperor’s plans.

None of that indicates someone who was obliged to maintain a stopgap fighting force that — again — was never meant to go to the stars. As Scribe said, by the time things had reached this phase, the Thunder Warriors weren’t even relevant as a resource.

Edited May 4, 2020 by Phoebus

[Scribe]

The Thunder Warriors were a force used to take a single world, that could not be mass produced.

 

It's simply a matter of scale. The TW were not needed, and replaceable. As such, why keep a force that was noted as mentally, and physically, unstable? Why bother?

 

Cull them and move on, this is the IMPERIUM and a very short time after, it will have conquered the Galaxy.

[Lord_Caerolion]

Everything we know of the Thunder Warriors is that they're shoddy. It's not just that they become indiscriminately psychotic, it's that they physically break down as the process done to improve them ends up destroying them. Given how long the War of Unification took, this seems to have taken on average only a few years for each Thunder Warrior, given how inherent of a problem it is shown to be. Some are obviously outliers, but saying "just throw them all into battle" is in no way a guarantee that you'll be left with the most stable. You're just left with the survivors. 

 

Also, the Thousand Sons mostly hid their afflictions from the wider Imperium, so it's possible the Emperor didn't know. With the World Eaters, the only thing that was known at first was that the Nails strongly increased aggression, nothing more. It didn't literally destroy their bodies, which is what was happening with the Thunder Warriors.

 

The Thunder Warriors were literally designed as a stop-gap measure, with no intended long-term use. Look at when they were created. The Emperor didn't have access to any of the high-level gene labs that he did later. These are soldiers that were created with the most base of gene-tech, haphazardly augmented in the most crude ways possible to get the soldiers that the Emperor needed at the time.

 

Look at it this way. The Astartes are cars, let's say Toyotas, easily able to be mass-produced, and able to do everything that's required. The Custodes are expertly hand-crafted luxury sports-cars, the pinnacle of their craft, but take crudloads of time and resources to do properly.

The Thunder Warriors... are a wheeled platform with an unstable rocket stuck on the back, welded together by some guy in his garage. Sure, it gets you where you need to go really, really fast, but it's dangerous as hell, and you've got cars now to do that. You don't keep the rocket around in case you're running late one day, you get rid of the potential explosion that you're keeping next to your house.

There's literally no purpose to keeping the Thunder Warriors around. They're dangerously unstable, and can't really do anything that the superior Astartes can. 

 

Could some be stabilized? Maybe, but again, why? You're devoting a whole lot of time and resources to saving a failed project when you've 1) got a superior project already, and 2) have a limited amount of time to get everything done. There is no reason to keep them around. It provides zero benefits.

 

 

EDIT: Also, let's not forget that Curze/Angron weren't allowed to just run rampant. If the Heresy hadn't happened, both those Legions would have faced heavy censure, akin to what happened to the Thousand Sons. In the initial aftermath of the World Eaters being given the Nails, they were censured and sent to the Sons of Horus to be straightened out. Night Haunter was supposed to go in for questioning after his beatdown on Dorn, but he blew up Nostramo and disappeared until Istvaan.

 

You really haven't answered, though, why the Emperor needs these particular supersoldiers. Could they possibly be saved, if the effort was put in? Sure, but why? He already has supersoldiers, he's got the Astartes. He doesn't need to put in the effort to stabilize supersoldiers, he's already got the Astartes. What benefits do stabilized Thunder Warriors give him that creating an equal amount of Astartes doesn't?

With the time and effort involved, let's be incredibly generous, and say that for each stabilized Thunder Warrior the Emperor could create, he could only have created 2 Astartes in the same period of time. What, exactly, do these Thunder Warriors give him that the two Astartes don't?

Edited May 5, 2020 by Lord_Caerolion

[b1soul]

@ Phoebus

 

The information we have is that Kandawire's family was killed by some desert Mad Max style raiders. To me, it's not entirely implausible that someone emerging from her background could end up being an idealist.

 

As for comparisons between the Emperor and some techno-barbarian warlord (a description not too far off from the Emperor)...I would agree that in general, the Emperor is the less evil option relative to the worst of the lot, but if you are deemed an undesirable by Him (and many were), he's just as bad, more golden and shiny but you have nowhere to run.

 

It would be exceedingly odd for Kandawire to forsake the Imperium for, say, the Crimson Walkers...but to suspect the Custodes of hubris and then becoming disillusioned with the deliberate slaughter of Unity's primary fighting force, didn't break my suspension of disbelief.

[Lord_Caerolion]

She's been so disillusioned with life on Terra for so long, she's basically looking for a flaw in the Emperor.

[Scribe]

Honestly I thought it simply spoke to her character, and what she learned as a child. Builders need to rule. Wasnt that the lesson she learned?

[bluntblade]

One the time note, the Emperor was always pressed for time. He needed to dominate the Sol System before the Mechanicum, Jovian or Saturnine cultures did, and before another Galaxy-bestriding colossus came along.

[Lord_Caerolion]

Or simply had the collective efforts of various xenos or warp-forces killed them all off, not to mention plain old inter-species warfare or lack of resources. Every human world was important, and the vast majority didn't exactly have long life-spans.

[bluntblade]

That too.

[godking]

One the time note, the Emperor was always pressed for time. He needed to dominate the Sol System before the Mechanicum, Jovian or Saturnine cultures did, and before another Galaxy-bestriding colossus came along.

Correct and  he could have used the remaining thunder warriors to get an early start at conquering the Sol System before he had enough Astartes to replace them.

 

I don't see the Jovian or Saturnine cultures having anything to stop the Thunder warriors.

 

The mechanicum would be an issue but then again Mars was not taken by force. 

 

A few years of a headstart in the beginning could make all the difference

[bluntblade]

The Emperor didn't want to smash those cultures. And for the various theatres, anticipated and otherwise you'd need advanced equipment for the troops. Do you want to go to all that expense for unstable troops when you've got a better option available? Especially when remembering that the Mechanicum was a potential enemy, the sort which could waste Thunder Warriors with relative ease.

[Marshal Rohr]

Finished this over the weekend. A perfect book, great plot, tons of cool details, really thematic. Love seeing this time period fleshed out.

[b1soul]

I think Kandawire's mistake was that she viewed the rules and principles of the Lex as sacred...when the Emperor and, by extension, His Imperium were actually utilitarian.

 

To her, the masked culling of loyal forces (even if unstable) went against the spirit and letter of the Lex as she had understood it, and so she suspected Valdor of breaking the Lex for some nebulous personal reasons beyond her full knowledge. She wanted to get to the bottom of it and possibly try Valdor.

 

When she realised that the Emperor had authourized the massacre, she was sorely disappointed that the Emperor only treated the Lex as a tool when convenient. That the Emperor would order the execution of loyal forces probably also shocked her moral sensibilities.

 

On top of that, she wasn't aware of the necessity of the TW-replacements (i.e. the Astartes) to conquer the galaxy and thereby save the human race from ultimately being consumed by Chaos.

 

To her with her limited knowledge, the Emperor acted outside the Lex in a manner like a brutal megalomaniac. This probably also made her role in the Imperium rather a hollow sham (in her view).

[Scribe]

I cant be the only one that sees in this story a parallel to themes from The Last Remembrancer, and anyone that see's in the Imperium a more idealistic interpretation?

 

Kandawire's mistake, is that she believed in a Builders Imperium. One guided by Law, and Logic, and Justice.

 

As the book shows, that just isnt the Imperium.

[nagashnee]

Legally speaking tho, does the Lex actually even apply to the Emperor? By extension the Imperial Household? It is after all the Lex Imperialis and he is well...THE Emperor.  They are his laws placed by him on his subjects. In a very real sense ( memes aside) he IS the law. He could execute every loyal soldier in existence for the giggles, but would that actually be illegal? 

[Scribe]

I mean, possibly, in theory.

 

In practice, quite clearly no.

[Phoebus]

@ Phoebus

 

The information we have is that Kandawire's family was killed by some desert Mad Max style raiders. To me, it's not entirely implausible that someone emerging from her background could end up being an idealist.

 

As for comparisons between the Emperor and some techno-barbarian warlord (a description not too far off from the Emperor)...I would agree that in general, the Emperor is the less evil option relative to the worst of the lot, but if you are deemed an undesirable by Him (and many were), he's just as bad, more golden and shiny but you have nowhere to run.

 

It would be exceedingly odd for Kandawire to forsake the Imperium for, say, the Crimson Walkers...but to suspect the Custodes of hubris and then becoming disillusioned with the deliberate slaughter of Unity's primary fighting force, didn't break my suspension of disbelief.

Is it beyond that realm of possibility that Kandawire could develop a personal philosophy based on the pursuit of principles? Of course not. Is it likely that this would happen given the context of her story? Honestly, it strikes me as far-fetched. As a very young child, she got a very basic introduction on how things might be — before her world fell apart at the hands of cannibal marauders. Her mentor and replacement parent doesn’t come off as an idealist (quite the contrary), and the story doesn’t allude to him nonetheless encouraging that world-view.

 

Beyond that, I’m not trying to argue that the Emperor was “good” in a way that reflects 21st century morals. I’m saying that Kandawire had a great deal of exposure to his Imperium before she became a High Lord of its government. She would have needed to be incredibly naive or obtuse to think the Emperor was ignorant of anything she suspected Valdor of doing, or that principles that were largely window dressing for the previous century and change were suddenly going to dictate policy.

 

I think Kandawire's mistake was that she viewed the rules and principles of the Lex as sacred...when the Emperor and, by extension, His Imperium were actually utilitarian.

 

To her, the masked culling of loyal forces (even if unstable) went against the spirit and letter of the Lex as she had understood it, and so she suspected Valdor of breaking the Lex for some nebulous personal reasons beyond her full knowledge. She wanted to get to the bottom of it and possibly try Valdor.

 

When she realised that the Emperor had authourized the massacre, she was sorely disappointed that the Emperor only treated the Lex as a tool when convenient. That the Emperor would order the execution of loyal forces probably also shocked her moral sensibilities.

 

On top of that, she wasn't aware of the necessity of the TW-replacements (i.e. the Astartes) to conquer the galaxy and thereby save the human race from ultimately being consumed by Chaos.

 

To her with her limited knowledge, the Emperor acted outside the Lex in a manner like a brutal megalomaniac. This probably also made her role in the Imperium rather a hollow sham (in her view).

Everything you just stated here is correct. The question I was raising is whether she should have ever thought the Emperor was anything other than what he so obviously was. Even without knowing about the need for the Great Crusade, etc., Kandawire knew the Imperium made moral compromises all the time: with regard to appointing people to positions of power on the basis of their wealth and political connections, of suppressing information, of turning young women into ticking time-bombs, of waging unilateral wars... I could go on and on. Whatever her personal principles were, it’s just unbelievable to me that she assumed the Lex applied to its author, or that the Emperor was somehow ignorant of anything relating to actual policy.

[mc warhammer]

I'm committing the cardinal sin of commenting on a book i haven't read... but isn't kandawire being incredibly naive or obtuse entirely possible and in line with the setting? zso sahaal, talos, guilliman all represent that to some degree.

 

people often use cognitive dissonance as an insult, but it's a thing. and nobody is immune:

 

"A man with a conviction is a hard man to change,” Festinger, Henry Riecken, and Stanley Schacter wrote in their 1957 book about this study. “Tell him you disagree and he turns away. Show him facts or figures and he questions your sources. Appeal to logic and he fails to see your point … Suppose that he is presented with evidence, unequivocal and undeniable evidence, that his belief is wrong: what will happen? The individual will frequently emerge, not only unshaken, but even more convinced of the truth of his beliefs than ever before.”

[Scribe]

Yeah I think so. I didnt find it out of character with the setting, the time period, or anything.

 

Willful Ignorance, Hope, whatever you want to call it. I think (correct me if I'm wrong) but its even remarked upon in the sections that describe the camp/sprawl going up around the Palace.

 

A hint of people WANTING to believe the Imperium would be different.

[mc warhammer]

yeah, willful ignorance, hope, blind devotion, idealism, it's not even out of place in today's societies. propaganda is powerful, even on people who are aware of it. i'd even argue that it's part of the 40k setting not only because it's a rule of how the universe functions but because GW are one of the few properties that admit and embrace that people can and do act like this.

[Lord_Caerolion]

 

 

One the time note, the Emperor was always pressed for time. He needed to dominate the Sol System before the Mechanicum, Jovian or Saturnine cultures did, and before another Galaxy-bestriding colossus came along.

Correct and he could have used the remaining thunder warriors to get an early start at conquering the Sol System before he had enough Astartes to replace them.

 

I don't see the Jovian or Saturnine cultures having anything to stop the Thunder warriors.

 

The mechanicum would be an issue but then again Mars was not taken by force.

 

A few years of a headstart in the beginning could make all the difference

He already had the Astartes in the required numbers, though. The Astartes were being produced before Terra was fully unified, that’s quite literally the major event in this book. Even before the Emperor took Luna, the Thunder Warriors were defunct, bettered in every way by the Astartes. Gaining ghe knowledge of the Selenar just compounded that.

 

By the time of the cull of the Thunder Warriors, there would have only been several thousand, at best. The events of Valdor show the Emperor already has the numbers of Astartes to equal that.

 

He didn’t wipe out the Thunder Warriors and only then begin work on the Astartes. Keeping them around would have saved him precisely zero time compared to just using Astartes.

 

 

Edit: In regards to Kandawire, I actually see it as a mix. She’s seen the worst of Dark Ages Terra, so she so, so desperately wants the Emperor to actually live up to his claims of enlightenment, but she’s also pessimistic and almost cannot bring herself to believe that he could be.

Edited May 6, 2020 by Lord_Caerolion

[Phoebus]

Cognitive dissonance is definitely a thing — no disagreement there. Zso Sahaal and Talos are psycho-indoctrinated post-human warriors operating on a completely different moral plane, though. They’re essentially responding to brainwashing the way the Night Lords were supposed to before that whole program went to pot. Guilliman is an individual who has the power and authority to both enact his principles across his domain, and is probably built to think and feel a certain way, courtesy of ideological programming.

 

Kandawire is none of those things. She’s a baseline human born with an essentially clean slate whose idealism defies her foundational experiences and most important relationship. We’re essentially saying that she ignored (or suppressed her feelings about) the faults of the Imperium and actively enabled them, carrying out the policies they translate to so well that she got as high as she could in its pyramid. It just feels like a stretch that the tipping point for her contradictory values to resolve themselves into armed rebellion would be the culling of the Thunder Warriors.

 

Was the scenario Wraight proposed an impossible one? No. Was what the reason he chose for Kandawire to rebel the most plausible or elegant one? Again, no. Ironically, I think Valdor’s revelation at the end, with regard to the Great Crusade, would have been a far more likely trigger: “He’s not just going to stop here; everything He did wasn’t just a means to achieve an era of enlightenment and peace that we thought was imminent. He’s going to spread his tyranny across the stars, everywhere we go — and I’m helping it happen. Unless He’s stopped now.”

Edited May 6, 2020 by Phoebus

[mc warhammer]

 

Kandawire is none of those things. She’s a baseline human born with an essentially clean slate whose idealism defies her foundational experiences and most important relationship. We’re essentially saying that she ignored (or suppressed her feelings about) the faults of the Imperium and actively enabled them, carrying out the policies they translate to so well that she got as high as she could in its pyramid. It just feels like a stretch that the tipping point for her contradictory values to resolve themselves into armed rebellion would be the culling of the Thunder Warriors.

 

good points. i'd stress cognitive dissonance isn't just a thing, it's a common thing, alongside it's cousin confirmation bias. we almost all have them to varying degrees.

 

i'd say baseline humans are way more susceptible to both (as opposed to astartes indoctrination which is different). "ignoring the faults" of the system, community or industry you are a part of while "actively enabling them" is what people do. we're amazingly good at turning a blind eye and justifying our own behaviour and that of others ( reminds me of a friend who refused to believe her husband was cheating on her with his students even after she caught them in her house. the need to believe can be powerful).

 

that a person who experienced what kandawire did growing up should be more cynical and aware and less idealistic...i can see that... but that makes assumptions as to how idealism forms and seems to imply that someone can not become a late stage idealist.

 

i agree that the majority of self blinkered idealists don't tend to climb high within their organisations. most of the ones who get to the top, tend to understand intimately what it takes to do so. the ones who "believe the speeches"...that all it takes is honest hard work and luck...tend to only get so far.

 

on the topic of a more convincing turn being "the emperor's tyranny will spread throughout the universe"...isn't the cull of the thunder warrriors just a more localised (and more personal) example of that tyranny? the fear that what happens to the thunder warriors will happen to you and your neighbours next would be more motivating for most people than what happens to strangers on distant planets.

Edited May 6, 2020 by mc warhammer

[Phoebus]

To your closing point, I would say no. What I mean is that it’s not personal to Kandawire in any real way, and I struggle to see how the cull of what were essentially dead men walking would resonate more with her than the unilateral wars and unbridled violence they were used for. Kandawire’s concern is based on procedure: Valdor, she suspects, carried out a private, covert war against a rival organization of the Imperium without the High Lords’ knowledge. I suppose you could plausibly argue that Kandawire is, by extension, also worried about this happening to “you and your neighbors,” but her explicit concerns are only ever on a macro level: that the Emperor is proving to be a tyrant every bit as bad the horrors he defeated.

 

Even so, this has to be said: the baseline citizens of the burgeoning Imperium weren’t prone to homicidal fits or spontaneous mutation, so drawing a line from the Thunder Warriors to average people is rather tenuous. And again, it requires Kandawire’s cognitive dissonance to function when it’s her and her colleagues oppressing the ordinary people they conquered by force, but to suddenly give a damn when the actual leadership’s inner circle eliminate a force that probably wasn’t within the High Lords’ jurisdiction, either.

 

By contrast, I’m not proposing that Kandawire care for people she’s never met on planets she’s never been to more than the citizens of her Imperium. I’m arguing that the realization that the Emperor’s contradictory and authoritarian policies and actions won’t end with Terra’s successful Unification but will continue for an indeterminate period of time is a more powerful motivator.

[mc warhammer]

yeah, having only read the spoilers up till now, i'd be spitballing if i tried to go any further with those questions i raised.

 

from what you're telling me, the specifics of her rebellion obviously need complex answers, that i'd hope an author on wraight's level at least hints at.

 

i'll bookmark this for when i read it mate, and keep your points in mind.