The Horus Heresy Horus Heresy: The Battle for Beta-Garmon

[Marshal Rohr]

Daemons and Militia both feel like victims of the internal “no models for two systems” decree from on high. They need rules for armies people had built, and put out an “Index” to get them on the table but without investing any time into making them on par with the other armies. 
 

If anything, Blackshields make me hopeful I am right and newer versions of the pdf armies will find their way into Expemplary Battles Volumes. 

[lansalt]

I preordered the book and I got it today. Sadly after devouring it in one go, I'm very dissapointed. My main interest was the lore inside, and the most relevant parts of it are mediocrely written and out of character.

The White Scars parts seems to have been written by somebody that hasn't read their HH books or willfully dismisses it, with the Khan and the WS being short tempered glory hounds that fall into traps all the time and have to be rescued. It's like all of it, including the interactions with Dorn and Sanguinius, was written for Russ and a Wolfsbane campaign and was later repurposed changing the names and little else.
This trend continues with retconning out of nowhere Meduson's character and his death to be after Beta-Garmon just to have save him the WS, or Hibou Khan having actually no part in the story, and being also described in terms that do not match his BL stories.

The Blackshields part is better, with decent examples of how to do mysterious non-standard legionaries. But then FW again turns the small guerrilla warband of Endryd Haar into a ridiculous chapter size force directly under Malcador as if the Knights Errant did not exist. If at least the Blackshields decal sheet included their icon...

 

All of this was already slightly noticeable with Siege of Cthonia, but at least being it's own separate narrative and unique characters made it more acceptable. Not so much in this book when it involves well know fan favourites like the WS or Meduson.

 

Having in hand Betrayal next to this, the decline in FW writing  during this decade is very obvious  (Despite the occassional legit brilliant bit). I get that not everybody can be Alan Bligh and John French wortking together, but come on: After more than a decade the style blueprint for these books should be within the reach of any competent professional background writer.

Given that my group of friends are not really into the HH game despite my best efforts (so the rules do not matter to me), I think I'll probably sell it. I doubt it's going to become a collector's item like even the much criticized Malevolence.
 

 

Edited April 16 by lansalt

[Etruscan]

1 hour ago, lansalt said:

I preordered the book and I got it today. Sadly after devouring it in one go, I'm very dissapointed. My main interest was the lore inside, and the most relevant parts of it are mediocrely written and out of character.
 

 

 

I couldn't agree more. If you compare the writing in the original Black Books with the recent HH books, the difference in quality can really be quite stark. Aside from the narrative, I have also found some of the grammar really bad. Sometimes it comes across like it was rushed or even written by AI; just poorly structured sentences.

 

I'm a lore junkie and the relative lack of artwork is another disappointment. I loved reading the stories of all those individual Space Marines with the pict capture illustrations. Now it seems we get a token handful with each new book.

[SkimaskMohawk]

4 hours ago, lansalt said:

I preordered the book and I got it today. Sadly after devouring it in one go, I'm very dissapointed. My main interest was the lore inside, and the most relevant parts of it are mediocrely written and out of character.

The White Scars parts seems to have been written by somebody that hasn't read their HH books or willfully dismisses it, with the Khan and the WS being short tempered glory hounds that fall into traps all the time and have to be rescued. It's like all of it, including the interactions with Dorn and Sanguinius, was written for Russ and a Wolfsbane campaign and was later repurposed changing the names and little else.
This trend continues with retconning out of nowhere Meduson's character and his death to be after Beta-Garmon just to have save him the WS, or Hibou Khan having actually no part in the story, and being also described in terms that do not match his BL stories.

The Blackshields part is better, with decent examples of how to do mysterious non-standard legionaries. But then FW again turns the small guerrilla warband of Endryd Haar into a ridiculous chapter size force directly under Malcador as if the Knights Errant did not exist. If at least the Blackshields decal sheet included their icon...

 

All of this was already slightly noticeable with Siege of Cthonia, but at least being it's own separate narrative and unique characters made it more acceptable. Not so much in this book when it involves well know fan favourites like the WS or Meduson.

 

Having in hand Betrayal next to this, the decline in FW writing  during this decade is very obvious  (Despite the occassional legit brilliant bit). I get that not everybody can be Alan Bligh and John French wortking together, but come on: After more than a decade the style blueprint for these books should be within the reach of any competent professional background writer.

Given that my group of friends are not really into the HH game despite my best efforts (so the rules do not matter to me), I think I'll probably sell it. I doubt it's going to become a collector's item like even the much criticized Malevolence.
 

 

 

The quality of the lore matches the quality of the edition lol. 

 

They have like one guy typing out both the fluff and rules and it's showing. 

[Marshal Rohr]

It’s just two guys. 

[MegaVolt87]

1 hour ago, Marshal Rohr said:

It’s just two guys. 

 

Must be nice to perform poorly and still be employed. The writers have access to the literal sauce and they got the lore this badly put together. They had an existing framework to structure, and add some extra flavour, they blew it with all the ingredients already done for them. 

Edited April 17 by MegaVolt87

[Marshal Rohr]

Truly a mystery why the designers stopped talking to people and explaining things. 

[Noserenda]

Id argue the confusion and hostility was a direct result of GW hiding credits are refusing to ever explain themselves and their thoughts in anything but the most superficial marketing. 

Like, i know who at least some of the writers are and what they were thinking and im a lot more positive than most even when the rules are a bit of a :cuss:show.

[Gamiel]

1 hour ago, Noserenda said:

Id argue the confusion and hostility was a direct result of GW hiding credits 

Based on how the fandom reacted before they hide the credits, I will have to disagree. There was a lot of confusion and hostility back then also.

[Taliesin]

13 hours ago, Etruscan said:

 

I couldn't agree more. If you compare the writing in the original Black Books with the recent HH books, the difference in quality can really be quite stark. Aside from the narrative, I have also found some of the grammar really bad. Sometimes it comes across like it was rushed or even written by AI; just poorly structured sentences.

 

I'm a lore junkie and the relative lack of artwork is another disappointment. I loved reading the stories of all those individual Space Marines with the pict capture illustrations. Now it seems we get a token handful with each new book.

 

You've already read Battle for Beta Garmon already? Or referring to a previous book like SoC?

 

8 hours ago, MegaVolt87 said:

 

Must be nice to perform poorly and still be employed. The writers have access to the literal sauce and they got the lore this badly put together. They had an existing framework to structure, and add some extra flavour, they blew it with all the ingredients already done for them. 

 

You have read this new book too?

 

Mine is still in transit.

Edited April 17 by Taliesin

[Matcap86]

20 minutes ago, Taliesin said:

 

You've already read Battle for Beta Garmon already? Or referring to a previous book like SoC?

 

 

You have read this new book too?

 

Mine is still in transit.

 

I also have had it since last week and the quality of the lore is a step down from Siege of Cthonia unfortunately (which was middeling at best). 

 

Very out of character actions by previously robustly established characters and plot points/time issues that would've been easily sidestepped with even the most cursory of checks. This felt like a 40k campaign book in all the worst of ways if I'm honest. I was content with SoC as it was at least passable and more heresy, but this (so far) is mostly forgettable stuff. 

 

 

[Halandaar]

6 hours ago, Noserenda said:

Id argue the confusion and hostility was a direct result of GW hiding credits 

 

Yeah not like the good old days when everybody knew that Mat Ward had written their codex and was universally kind and polite to him.

[Lord Marshal]

So as a disclaimer, I actually enjoyed the Siege of Cthonia quite a bit. I also enjoyed Malevolence and Crusade, despite the 'post-Alan Bligh filter' that people often default to negatively viewing them through. However I didn't really like the Battle for Bacon-Gammon's lore at all. Actually, that's not entirely true but I'll get onto the positives later. 

 

There were two main problems with it for me. First is that is that it feels aimless. I'm not somebody who bemoaned when the Horus Heresy novels didn't move the metaplot forward; I'm a sworn-in member of the Damnation of Pythos Defence Force, but The Battle for Beta-Garmon barely deserves the title. The 'campaign fluff' mostly amounts to Jaghatai going on a side-quest while Sanguinius is off doing the actually interesting stuff off-screen. The lore can be summarised as: Jaghatai gets a sulk on because he's such a tsundere and doesn't inspire mortals like Sanguinius-senpai does, so he goes off to reave the peripheries of the Beta-Garmon Cluster while his brother rallies the frontlines. Along the way he bumps into some familiar faces (available from Warhammer.com right now!) and gets into a fight with another Primarch (which previously we hadn't read about iirc?). Also a lot of descriptions of Inductii dying. That's it. 

 

Giving us insight into minor campaigns and smaller conflicts isn't a bad thing. Retribution is one of my favourite of the Black Books and it's mostly just minor skirmishes and guerrilla warfare. The problem is that isn't really what we get here; it's almost entirely about the Khan reaving a few worlds while rolling his eyes at what a moron Endryd Haar is. Want to hear about the frontlines of the biggest battle outside of Terra? Want to read about what's going on in the actual battle for Beta-Garmon? This ain't it. At the end of every 'chapter' we get a couple of paragraphs about what Sanginius is doing, but it comes off as an advertisement for The Great Slaughter and Titandeath without actually saying it.

 

Say what you will about the Siege of Cthonia, we got the titular Siege of Cthonia. This is Jaghatai faffing about for a bit while getting stuck in a love triangle between him, Shadrak and Endryd (Meduson's a great guy but damnit Haar is just such a bad boy. How will he ever decide?).

 

My assumption is they were conscious of people getting mad at them for reframing existing lore from both BL and FW's Titandeath books and The Great Slaughter, but if that was the case it was a completely unfounded fear. Nobody cared that Calth had been covered in Know No Fear, nobody cared we'd seen Prospero go up in flames from many POVs already when Inferno dropped. People look forward to the Forge World entries because they read more like an historical accounting, giving us the broadstrokes and the nitty-details we don't get with novels.

 

That's my second big problem with the lore on offer here. It mostly reads like a Light Novel. I know people have grumbled about the '40kification' of FW lore in recent years, but this is the first time I really noticed and got annoyed by it in a major way. If you want descriptions of army dispositions, movements of formations, detailed description of planets and their history, you won't find it here. If you want multiple pages from Jaghatai's POV as he slaughters his way through Inductii and Endryd being very, very angry then you might enjoy this. Unfortunately I'm not using that Light Novel descriptor to be snarky, that's literally what so much of the book reads like. That's not to say Black Books avoided narrative flourishes, but it still felt 'detached' in a way this doesn't. We're the camera-man following the Khan, not the person compiling after-action reports. Siege of Cthonia didn't escape this either, but it didn't feel nearly as pronounced. 

 

I've spent an irrational amount of time writing this rant that I'll never get back, so I'll say some nice things in closing: the lore outside of the actual 'campaign' is still good. When it's not written as a Light Novel it's all solid. Some of it is inevitably regurgitated from Retribution (specifically the Blackshields), but there's enough content I believe is new to enjoy reading it, and particularly if you never read the Black Books. The Legiones Auxilia section I also very much enjoyed, as well as the little lore blurbs that matched the rule descriptions for each legion.

 

The colour plates keep coming and they're all pretty nice. I've seen at least one commenter gripe about them all ending with "they vanished and no body was ever found, but that's probably because of how much ordnance was being used at Beta-Garmon" but I like that it gets across what an insane (nay, great) slaughter it was. However even the colour plates tie back into the problem of "gee whizz I would have liked to see what was happening over there instead."

 

TLDR I wouldn't buy it for the fluff unless you didn't manage to pickup Retribution and you don't like reading off Lexicanum, or you really wanted more bolter porn with the Khan.

 

Edited April 17 by Lord Marshal

[Noserenda]

6 hours ago, Gamiel said:

Based on how the fandom reacted before they hide the credits, I will have to disagree. There was a lot of confusion and hostility back then also.

It was very different though, and really the only times when it even approached the deep seated grievances we have today was when GW was similarly opaque. The vast majority of "names" in game design and well regarded by most folks at the time and remain so to this day, even the ones who presided over fairly unpopular products.

[Agramar_The_Luna_Wolf]

On 3/29/2024 at 9:27 AM, Razorblade said:

Has anyone seen the full Blackshield rules yet?

Yup. Trasfondistic but less messy than Shattered Legions. I miss the 1.0 version with a proper list. Anyway, I think are more than enjoyable and some of the Oaths are really interesting 

[roryokane]

19 hours ago, Etruscan said:

 

I couldn't agree more. If you compare the writing in the original Black Books with the recent HH books, the difference in quality can really be quite stark. Aside from the narrative, I have also found some of the grammar really bad. Sometimes it comes across like it was rushed or even written by AI; just poorly structured sentences.

 

I'm a lore junkie and the relative lack of artwork is another disappointment. I loved reading the stories of all those individual Space Marines with the pict capture illustrations. Now it seems we get a token handful with each new book.

 

13 hours ago, MegaVolt87 said:

 

Must be nice to perform poorly and still be employed. The writers have access to the literal sauce and they got the lore this badly put together. They had an existing framework to structure, and add some extra flavour, they blew it with all the ingredients already done for them. 

 

4 hours ago, Matcap86 said:

 

I also have had it since last week and the quality of the lore is a step down from Siege of Cthonia unfortunately (which was middeling at best). 

 

Very out of character actions by previously robustly established characters and plot points/time issues that would've been easily sidestepped with even the most cursory of checks. This felt like a 40k campaign book in all the worst of ways if I'm honest. I was content with SoC as it was at least passable and more heresy, but this (so far) is mostly forgettable stuff. 

 

 

 

3 hours ago, Lord Marshal said:

So as a disclaimer, I actually enjoyed the Siege of Cthonia quite a bit. I also enjoyed Malevolence and Crusade, despite the 'post-Alan Bligh filter' that people often default to negatively viewing them through. However I didn't really like the Battle for Bacon-Gammon's lore at all. Actually, that's not entirely true but I'll get onto the positives later. 

 

There were two main problems with it for me. First is that is that it feels aimless. I'm not somebody who bemoaned when the Horus Heresy novels didn't move the metaplot forward; I'm a sworn-in member of the Damnation of Pythos Defence Force, but The Battle for Beta-Garmon barely deserves the title. The 'campaign fluff' mostly amounts to Jaghatai going on a side-quest while Sanguinius is off doing the actually interesting stuff off-screen. The lore can be summarised as: Jaghatai gets a sulk on because he's such a tsundere and doesn't inspire mortals like Sanguinius-senpai does, so he goes off to reave the peripheries of the Beta-Garmon Cluster while his brother rallies the frontlines. Along the way he bumps into some familiar faces (available from Warhammer.com right now!) and gets into a fight with another Primarch (which previously we hadn't read about iirc?). Also a lot of descriptions of Inductii dying. That's it. 

 

Giving us insight into minor campaigns and smaller conflicts isn't a bad thing. Retribution is one of my favourite of the Black Books and it's mostly just minor skirmishes and guerrilla warfare. The problem is that isn't really what we get here; it's almost entirely about the Khan reaving a few worlds while rolling his eyes at what a moron Endryd Haar is. Want to hear about the frontlines of the biggest battle outside of Terra? Want to read about what's going on in the actual battle for Beta-Garmon? This ain't it. At the end of every 'chapter' we get a couple of paragraphs about what Sanginius is doing, but it comes off as an advertisement for The Great Slaughter and Titandeath without actually saying it.

 

Say what you will about the Siege of Cthonia, we got the titular Siege of Cthonia. This is Jaghatai faffing about for a bit while getting stuck in a love triangle between him, Shadrak and Endryd (Meduson's a great guy but damnit Haar is just such a bad boy. How will he ever decide?).

 

My assumption is they were conscious of people getting mad at them for reframing existing lore from both BL and FW's Titandeath books and The Great Slaughter, but if that was the case it was a completely unfounded fear. Nobody cared that Calth had been covered in Know No Fear, nobody cared we'd seen Prospero go up in flames from many POVs already when Inferno dropped. People look forward to the Forge World entries because they read more like an historical accounting, giving us the broadstrokes and the nitty-details we don't get with novels.

 

That's my second big problem with the lore on offer here. It mostly reads like a Light Novel. I know people have grumbled about the '40kification' of FW lore in recent years, but this is the first time I really noticed and got annoyed by it in a major way. If you want descriptions of army dispositions, movements of formations, detailed description of planets and their history, you won't find it here. If you want multiple pages from Jaghatai's POV as he slaughters his way through Inductii and Endryd being very, very angry then you might enjoy this. Unfortunately I'm not using that Light Novel descriptor to be snarky, that's literally what so much of the book reads like. That's not to say Black Books avoided narrative flourishes, but it still felt 'detached' in a way this doesn't. We're the camera-man following the Khan, not the person compiling after-action reports. Siege of Cthonia didn't escape this either, but it didn't feel nearly as pronounced. 

 

I've spent an irrational amount of time writing this rant that I'll never get back, so I'll say some nice things in closing: the lore outside of the actual 'campaign' is still good. When it's not written as a Light Novel it's all solid. Some of it is inevitably regurgitated from Retribution (specifically the Blackshields), but there's enough content I believe is new to enjoy reading it, and particularly if you never read the Black Books. The Legiones Auxilia section I also very much enjoyed, as well as the little lore blurbs that matched the rule descriptions for each legion.

 

The colour plates keep coming and they're all pretty nice. I've seen at least one commenter gripe about them all ending with "they vanished and no body was ever found, but that's probably because of how much ordnance was being used at Beta-Garmon" but I like that it gets across what an insane (nay, great) slaughter it was. However even the colour plates tie back into the problem of "gee whizz I would have liked to see what was happening over there instead."

 

TLDR I wouldn't buy it for the fluff unless you didn't manage to pickup Retribution and you don't like reading off Lexicanum, or you really wanted more bolter porn with the Khan.

 

20 hours ago, lansalt said:

I preordered the book and I got it today. Sadly after devouring it in one go, I'm very dissapointed. My main interest was the lore inside, and the most relevant parts of it are mediocrely written and out of character.

The White Scars parts seems to have been written by somebody that hasn't read their HH books or willfully dismisses it, with the Khan and the WS being short tempered glory hounds that fall into traps all the time and have to be rescued. It's like all of it, including the interactions with Dorn and Sanguinius, was written for Russ and a Wolfsbane campaign and was later repurposed changing the names and little else.
This trend continues with retconning out of nowhere Meduson's character and his death to be after Beta-Garmon just to have save him the WS, or Hibou Khan having actually no part in the story, and being also described in terms that do not match his BL stories.

The Blackshields part is better, with decent examples of how to do mysterious non-standard legionaries. But then FW again turns the small guerrilla warband of Endryd Haar into a ridiculous chapter size force directly under Malcador as if the Knights Errant did not exist. If at least the Blackshields decal sheet included their icon...

 

All of this was already slightly noticeable with Siege of Cthonia, but at least being it's own separate narrative and unique characters made it more acceptable. Not so much in this book when it involves well know fan favourites like the WS or Meduson.

 

Having in hand Betrayal next to this, the decline in FW writing  during this decade is very obvious  (Despite the occassional legit brilliant bit). I get that not everybody can be Alan Bligh and John French wortking together, but come on: After more than a decade the style blueprint for these books should be within the reach of any competent professional background writer.

Given that my group of friends are not really into the HH game despite my best efforts (so the rules do not matter to me), I think I'll probably sell it. I doubt it's going to become a collector's item like even the much criticized Malevolence.
 

 

 

These four posts sum up my disappointment as well - as another Lore Junkie, you guys have encapsulated why it felt so... off? for a big black book. It felt like shallow unsatisfying schlock compared to what I was expecting.

[Loquille]

Probably just me, but I felt the timeline portion laying out what happens should have been after the lore section, laying it out in order for you after reading of the conflict. 

[Noserenda]

Ive not read the latest book, but i dont think people should be looking for something to match the black books at all really. The project has shifted scope and we arent looking at those huge tomes worked on for years with a much wider mandate to look into things and extrapolate, we have the same kind of campaign books the studio has been making for years, working through a story and adding some loosely related rules at the end.

I still think they have been good for what they are but even if you had the likes of Alan Bligh or Warwick Kinrade working on them folks would be disappointed i think, its the nature of SGS compared to Forgeworld ultimately, we at least get them fairly regularly! 

[No Foes Remain]

I think Beta Garmon has the same issue that the later half of the BL HH books had, it hard focuses on big named characters whose fates you know rather than new names whose fates you don't. And Primarch fights, sweet baby Terra did I get sick of those and Beta Garmon just had to shove a badly narrated one in. I also 110% agree with those commenting on the Khan, he was totally a different character than he was in any prior books and I also agree with Lansalt that if you replace Khan with Russ it makes way more sense. 

 

I've just finished the main campaign but the story wasn't as good as Cthonia's, I've yet to start reading the other lore bits but from what I've heard that's better than Cthonia's which didn't have much in the way of it.

[Halandaar]

18 hours ago, Noserenda said:

It was very different though, and really the only times when it even approached the deep seated grievances we have today was when GW was similarly opaque. 

 

It's nothing to do with opacity; the worst it got was when Matt Ward was essentially hounded out of the company with abuse from the fanbase so pervasive it reputedly included death threats. Robin Cruddace was often on the receiving end too, although not to the same extent. These guys had their names on the books, it was way more transparent than it is today and yet the vitriol level for specific designers was way higher.

 

18 hours ago, Noserenda said:

The vast majority of "names" in game design and well regarded by most folks at the time and remain so to this day, even the ones who presided over fairly unpopular products.

 

Who actually has a strong reputation from their time designing for GW games though? I reckon it's literally Alessio Cavatore, Tuomas Pirinen, Alan Bligh and Warwick Kinrade. Actually maybe Jeremy Vetock as well, I can't say I remember seeing much negative about his work.

 

Everybody else is somewhere on the scale; they can come out with good stuff but just as likely to be panned by the community for whatever their latest book is.

 

[SkimaskMohawk]

Ward caught a ton of flack for the quality of the lore in his codexes and the huge differential in power they tended to have compared to older books. But honestly, the guy made some extremely fun factions to play and list build with. You know if Matt Ward had written a Custodes codex back in 5th the thing would have been completely insane, with tons of options that made it feel rewarding to make a full collection (as the grey knights did). 

 

I don't think most of these people want to do a poor job, but it's clear that writing fluff isn't their forte and they're just extremely short staffed. They also don't have that driving vision that Bligh had for his projects; they're inheriting someone else's project and told to grind it out.

[Allart01]

I must unfortunately agree on the writing quality. Some passages read like fan fiction and the Khan felt particularly out of character.

[Marshal Rohr]

It’s not that the Khan is out of character for everything ever written about the White Scars, it’s that he’s out of sync with Chris Wraights stuff which is pretty much universally heralded as the best Primarch development of the entire bajillion book series. Anyone who read the White Scars vs Tau fluff book from 5th or 6th will know what I mean. 

[loginomicon]

On 4/17/2024 at 9:33 AM, Lord Marshal said:

I'm a sworn-in member of the Damnation of Pythos Defence Force

Almost finished the heresy novel and it's the first time I hear someone talk positively about the book ! I'm curious, what did you like about the book ?

 

Has for beta garmon, I've bought it last weekend and I gotta echo everything that's being said here. I really like the small piece of lore they put in there + the blackshield are awesome and fluffy. The rest though is pretty mediocre, I miss old forgeworld book so much. Games Workshop ,while I enjoy their new plastic quite a bit, seems they have switched to the 40k way of making sourcebook and it's showing. Very vabid and shallow quick sourcebook that give force composition and some interesting thing to play. I wish they take exemple on the old black books and the old imperial armour book because they were in my opinion the best sourcebook ever written. 

[Petitioner's City]

7 hours ago, Halandaar said:

Who actually has a strong reputation from their time designing for GW games though? I reckon it's literally Alessio Cavatore, Tuomas Pirinen, Alan Bligh and Warwick Kinrade. Actually maybe Jeremy Vetock as well, I can't say I remember seeing much negative about his work.

 

Everybody else is somewhere on the scale; they can come out with good stuff but just as likely to be panned by the community for whatever their latest book is.

 

 

Err, Rick Priestley? Andy Chambers? 

And from that later era after these two? Graham McNeill? Nevermind Jervis too!

 

Now if you really want to delve, have a look at the specialist games writers of the 00s - either when it was fanatic, or specialist arms - oft forgotten but brilliant creators, the group from which Bligh and French came!