The Horus Heresy - A Retrospective?

[Marshal Rohr]

Riffing off Roomsky, a legion by legion retrospective:

 

-Dark Angels: Vacillated between good and bad, and never capitalized on their cool Forge World background. Completely wasted the opportunity get into the nitty gritty of Calibanite culture or make the Legion feel as serious as its reputation. 
-Emperor’s Children: Suffered massively from “tone bleed” from Graham’s 40K chaos stuff, turned into boob and dick monsters almost immediately, and only the few brief outings by CW (that had to purposefully say these characters are different from all the other EC) made them anything but a burden to skim. 
-Iron Warriors: Needed a culture book. Critically underutilized outside of Tallarn, Slaves to Darkness, and Saturnine. All of the great character moments about Perturabo being a misunderstood genius never really worked, in spite of being fan favorites. French also wrote him as too much mythological Demi-God controlled by his Achilles/Hercules like rage. Perturabo should be a great and uncompromising general. He doesn’t need to kill his subordinates in fits of rage when things like the decimination are so much cooler and more sinister. 
-White Scars: Excellent portrayals all the way through except the terrible accents in the audiobooks. Chris nailed them. Probably the best Legion representation on the page. You know all about their culture and they have great character arcs. 
-Space Wolves: Too many cooks in their kitchen. Needed a much cleaner and more concise portrayal across authors even if it was Dan’s rewrite of their culture. 
-Imperial Fists: Needed a culture book, too character centric, and basically just filled generic loyalist roles instead of, I don’t know, being the sickest and coolest legion ever made. They do get some great redeeming moments. Camba-Diaz line, the Phall space battle, Sigismund stabbing that dude as he teleports in, “not as broken as you”. 
-Night Lords: They did extremely well. They got the ADB treatment. One of the rarer instances of the FW background being worse than the BL background. 
-Blood Angels: Needed a culture book. Hell they needed books that weren’t about other legions. The Signus arc sucked. By the time ADB got to echoes he had already publically said he was sick of Heresy. Wraights Sanguinius book was 10/10 but couldn’t fix it by then. 
-Iron Hands/Salamanders/Raven Guard: Doing these all together because so did Black Library. The Shattered Legions plots sucked. They individual legion stories sucked. Each one of these legions got done dirty. It’s not that the writers aren’t good writers, it’s that there was no vision or individual cultures and they got turned narratively into the A Team over and over and over. It’s especially tragic because the Iron Hands carried the Great Crusade and Ferrus was one of the greatest generals, the Salamanders have the strongest cultural deep dive potential next to the Scars and Wolves, and the Ravens should’ve been suited to an awesome arc of sabotaging supply lines even reduced and instead they just got some BS about their mutant project failure. 
World Eaters: They got the ADB treatment and that helped smooth the edges of them just being 40K World Eaters in most other novels. ADB shepherded their most important arc and Wraight did a good job killing Khârn off, probably the best grudge match of the whole series. Overall they come out on top portrayal wise. 
Ultramarines: In dire need of a culture book. Know No Fear was pretty good and then all of the stuff about Ultramar and its cultures just kind of dropped off. Their arc suffered from treading a lot of water but they did get their coolest depictions ever in Betrayer. 
Death Guard: the clash between the two portrayals was so jarring it was like reading about two different legions which killed their whole arc. 
Thousand Sons: McNeills best work in the Heresy but a little too much esoterica for my personal tastes. Still really well developed and those threads persisted into other portrayals of them. I think they would’ve benefitted from not having every time they show up be some ritual or warp chicanery, that’s too 40K. 
Sons of Horus: I can’t tell you a single thing about them that can’t be said about other traitor legions. They are all over the place. Sometimes they are the premier legion and other times they are human waves like world eaters and other times they are as bad as Word Bearers. They needed a much clearer direction. 
Word Bearers: Same deal as the World Eaters. ADB gave them their arc and French hit all their character traits for a pretty consistent main story. They suffered from being moustache twirlers in other novels, but still ended up in a good place because of the work ADB and French did. 
Alpha Legion: Another legion with better Black Book portrayals than novel portrayals but things like Alaxxes were done well. They got troped too hard in everything else. The cabal plot going no where sucked and left them worse than they started by the end. 

[Roomsky]

The traitor legions! Why am I doing this, besides for my own amusement? I'm sure I'll figure it out by the end!

 

Emperor's Children - We're entering territory where someone with a preconceived notion of the Heresy might have wildly different opinions. I've heard many different interpretations of the Emperor's Children's fall from hobby veterans so I can't really speak to any specific one. All I knew going in was that a bunch of warrior poets fell so in love with their awesomeness they turned into hedonistic  monsters. What we got wasn't too far off, I just think the novel, Fulgrim, was poor. Daemon sword, unlikeable, yada yada it's old hat. But I liked them as antagonists in Angel Exterminatus and Path of Heaven, and Reynolds came in with the :cuss:in SAVE on crusade-era Fulgrim. I dunno, I just like how unabashedly evil they become. Neutral.

 

Iron Warriors - About what I expected, though some bonus points for making Perturabo in prose sound far less childish than he sounds in codex entries. Neutral.

 

Night Lords - There is precisely 1 good long-form Night Lords story in the Heresy, and it's Prince of Crows. I'll forgive Pharos for their incompetence because I found the characters memorable at least, but Curze himself turning into a complete cartoon is probably one of the worst treatments a primarch received. Good thing we have Lord of the Night and ADB's Trilogy to read instead of this crap. Made worse.

 

World Eaters - The big surprise. A bunch of angry dudes who really like violence get extremely consistent writing and a compelling degeneration into mindless crazies. It helps that they were both rarely tackled by lesser authors, and even when they were, they were in the grip of the nails so you can write the appearance off as "they were having a bad day." Improved; if Scars got the best deal out of the loyalists, I think the 12th got the best deal of the traitors.

 

Death Guard - No wonder his name's Swallow, because he sucked all the life out of these guys. Mortarion loses his sympathy for the masses in exchange for daddy issues and a hatred of magic so intense that sort of clashes with his allegiance. The legion becomes bland marines, except for when they're plague marines before anyone but Grulgor should be a plague marine. Wraight did some decent damage control, but `twas not enough to match the tragedy of a comparatively simple set of in-universe myths. Made worse.

 

Thousand Sons - I have to give McNeill credit, he really gave new life to these guys. Sympathetic Ahriman, fun supporting characters, and a Magnus who's blowing up of the Webway was slightly more understandable. Totally worth the hairbrained move of swapping Nikea to be about ALL warp magic, instead of just sorcery. Improved.

 

Sons of Horus - You know, we give them a lot of :cuss:, but I don't think they made out too bad. They have more memorable characters than average, and not too many of the plots surrounding them are that dumb. Horus is unfortunately sidelined, but he only really has a lack of exposure if you treat it as a "proper" series (as in, ~5 books out of 54, vs ~5 books compared to everyone else's 3 or less). That being said, for the paragon legion they didn't feel all that cool, only the gang culture details from Forgeworld really set them apart, and while I've grown more forgiving of Horus' characterization I don't think it's the driving force it should be. So… Made worse? But not to the insulting degree of some others.

 

Word Bearers - C'mon, 100% better. The only thing that sets them below the World Eaters for me is that more authors using them means more poor showings. ADB, Abnett, French, Reynolds 2, all contribute to a legion whose fall you understand enough to believe their atrocities. It's enough to overwhelm all the times they show up to go "nye he he, I'll destroy these FOOLISH interlopers, once I'm finished my prayer set under enemy fire, and stabbing my commanding officer in the back at the worst possible moment!" Improved.

 

Alpha Legion - Okay so I knew nothing about these guys going in so I had nothing to compare them to. Even then, they just seemed like plot devices in good books about someone else. Loved Legion, which was about Guardsmen and John. Loved Praetorian of Dorn, where the strength of their portrayal was essentially just as foils to the Fists. It took until Brooks for Alpharius to be a truly strong character, but now that we have that piece of the puzzle… they're pretty damn solid. Despite how often they use villain teleportation, I appreciate all they brought to the series as a sort of secondary antagonist to everyone else. Improved…?

 

---

Again, this is just through my lens, your history with the hobby and when you started reading the novels are going to make a HUGE difference. I think, generally, the Black Books did legion culture uniformly better, and the novels only succeed when they have a really compelling event to cover, or have strong character work. They just don't work on the same "give me a good book about my dudes" level that the Forgeworld books do.

 

And like, that's not why I got into the series, so no skin off my nose. I take no faction portrayals personally, I just lament missed potential. The Dark Angels should be so cool, and they're complete bums until they start pilfering from Forgeworld anyway. But it IS fiction as much as it's periphery advertisement. For someone like me, who you couldn't gift a model, I'd still like for it all to make me think "wow, what a fun tale!" or "wow, what a cool group of dudes!" And for a lot, I think they succeed for people inside and out of the hobby. Anyone I know who enjoys low sci-fi and fantasy liked The First Heretic. I just wish, you know, those Salamanders could have been as cool as their premise suggests.

 

---

WECHAT - well spoken, as always. I actually mostly agree with you about Russ, and I'd be less annoyed by it if the series wasn't horribly oversaturated with primarch duels (and if Haley didn't write Horus like such a cartoon.) By the time Wolfsbane actually landed, in the context it landed, I was a bit sour on the premise at large.

 

BC Arkley - Yeah, I mean Know no Fear isn't my favourite, but I went into the novels as a fandom baby already saturated by bad memes. I think I had many people's experience of opening that book and going "Yo, this guys are actually kinda cool?"

[DukeLeto69]

Fraters I won’t hear a bad word said about Know No Fear! It is an awesome book. It clearly made vanilla marines waaaay more interesting. It was exciting. Had 70s disaster movie feels (just missing Charlton Heston). What’s not to like?

 

Also when everyone else (and I do mean everyone) had followed the common/standard approach to writing their HH novels, only Abnett had the balls to try something different stylistically. And it works beautifully using present tense to drive a timebound clock countdown narrative. It is not a gimmick because it is the right choice for THIS story. 

 

It astounds me that the same author could write both KNF and TUE! I mean TUE isn’t the worst HH novel, there would be a quite a knife fight to solve that argument, but it is certainly up there!

Edited January 31 by DukeLeto69

[Valkyrion]

Some personal highlights;

 

The scene in Flight where Dorn flattens Garro without Garro even realising.

Loken remarking to Torgaddon that 'you'd never make an Ultramarine'

Lucius being scolded for using a Xenos limb as a weapon.

The St George and the Dragon story arc running through Mechanicum, even if it was a little on the nose at times.

The Word Bearers talking about the Ultramarines absorbing one of the lost legions. 

 

The lowest of lowlights;

Wet leopard growl. 

 

[Astartes Consul]

Can we talk about how insane it is that the Dark Angels got Descent of Angels and then Fallen Angels both within the first eleven books? And that both books did little to advance the overall narrative or build momentum.

 

If you look at the first fifteen books of the series, their presence in there stands out like a sore thumb. 

[Valkyrion]

2 hours ago, DukeLeto69 said:

It astounds me that the same author could write both KNF and TUE! I mean TUE isn’t the worst HH novel, there would be a quite a knife fight to solve that argument, but it is certainly up there!

 

You can put your knives away and safely agree that Battle For The Abyss is the worst book in the series. You can get your knives back out if you want to argue whether or not it is the worst book ever written. 

[System Sound]

19 minutes ago, Valkyrion said:

 

You can put your knives away and safely agree that Battle For The Abyss is the worst book in the series. You can get your knives back out if you want to argue whether or not it is the worst book ever written. 

I raise you the salamander books and "Vulkan Lives stomp stomp". Probably the only books that got me close to not reading them till the end...

[Nagashsnee]

15 minutes ago, Valkyrion said:

 

You can put your knives away and safely agree that Battle For The Abyss is the worst book in the series. You can get your knives back out if you want to argue whether or not it is the worst book ever written. 

 

 

I dont know, Battle for the Abyss was bad, but i remember it had a plot, a story it told (very very badly). On a theoretical level i can see the outline for the book and would indeed approve it.  Aspiring word bearer commander uses super ship to attack Ultramar at its very heart while a small band of loyalists try to stop it. Like i can understand why it was green lit.  Its a classic race against the clock action movie. 

 

TUE... its about setting up a second imperium? Not really and anything to do with that happens in the last 5% of the book. Its about the Lion and G man and the relationship between them? Not really again. Its about Vulkan going insane and pretending he was the hulk, no not really. Its about the night hunter let loose and the epic chase to capture him....no not really.  Is it about how Sanguinius got to Ultramar and the delicate process of proclaiming him Emperor? Nope. 

 

What is TUE actually about? Its all of the above. Someone pitched a book where (deep breath) 'While the Lion and G man have a face off because the former thinks the latter is setting up a second imperium while the hunter gets loose in the capital and triggers a fake invasion, while vulkan becomes a hulk like rage zombie, while G man tries to set up a second Imperium while they all chase eachother while Sanguinius shows up and is proclaimed emperor, also G mans mom, also also lots of other stuff'. 

 

Battle for the Abyss is written much worse, but as a book? I would say above TUE. The TUE is not a book, is a 200 page pitch meeting for 3 other books, 2 comics, 4 short stories and some WD articles polished up by a very competent writer masquerading as a book.  It should never have passed editing and never been green lit ( i would love to know how far from the original pitch, if at all it ended up). 

 

TUE was basically a set up for a entire narrative arc (Imperium Secundus) that died in the crib.

[wecanhaveallthree]

I'd argue very strongly for Deathfire being worse.

 

Abyss isn't great, but I think it gets a legitimately bad rap for 'not advancing the story' rather than being a truly poor book. It's functional enough - it's Hunt the Bismarck! IN SPACE! - it's got a cast of cliches who, at the very least, are characters. It has a reasonably interesting premise and the Warp chase is fun. Doesn't really go anywhere, doesn't really accomplish anything, but it doesn't make anything worse, either. Abyss goes along at a fair clip, while Deathfire goes nowhere, slowly.

 

Also I will fight to the death anyone who doesn't think Fulgrim is a great book, solely for the bit where they bring him his sword and you realise all of a sudden that the Legion has been corrupt for a long, long time, way before Laer. McNeill isn't generally known for being subtle, but he has some absolute blinders in his best books.

[firestorm40k]

Having finished the final book (albeit in audiobook form ) the other evening, I had been considering writing some thoughts about the Heresy series, so I am glad that others also had the same idea and started/contributed to this thread! 

 

To start off, I write this from a place where maybe I haven’t got as much, for want of a better phrase, ‘emotional’ investment into the series – I did not follow it all the way over the years; if I’m honest, although I did get the first 5 books when they were released, by about 2/3 of the way into Fulgrim I felt like there was some repetition coming into the way the stories were being presented (corruption – fall – loyalists die, pretty much the same arc as the first three books), and I thought that if the entire series was going to be like that, then it was going to be a bit of a drag.

 

I decided to go back to the series a couple of years ago – when the new edition of the Heresy game was announced, I’d already decided I was going to get that as I loved the Mk6 models (and after some deliberation decided I would paint them as Imperial Fists, but that’s another story ).  So I decided to go back, and as the series at that stage was getting on for 60 books, I sought out a road map, and started the series again – albeit in Audiobook form, as I listen to those of an evening when I’m painting.  I think I listened to just over half of the novels – I skipped the DA, Salamanders, Shattered Legion focussed books, and anthologies.

 

Doing it this way, I overall enjoyed the experience – I think it helps that I avoided what are widely acknowledged as the ‘duds’ of the series.  The ones that are lauded were just as good as they had been made out to be – Legion, The First Heretic, Betrayer, Master of Mankind, Scars; they’re up there with Horus Rising not just as top tier Black Library works, but also great pieces of science fiction.  There were some that surprised me – Know No Fear was probably the one that gripped me the most (up to the Siege of Terra books), it actually reminded me of Necropolis (3rd Gaunt’s Ghosts novel, and coincidentally my top all-time favourite 40k novel); when Abnett is at his best, he is a master at ramping up tension, and with the build up to the Word Bearer’s treachery there was no end of that (I like the comparison to a 70’s disaster movie – that is a good way of looking at it!).

 

I was also surprised by Ruinstorm - I know it's looked down on for the most part, but I enjoyed the portrayal of each of the Primarchs, and was impressed that the author gave each of them something resembling an arc in the novel (I enjoyed Guilliman's the most - I think it was a novelty just to see him wrestling with the temptation of using a warp-tainted weapon; not quite the 'Mary Sue golden boy' that he's often dismissed as! ) 

 

Another one that surprised me – to a point (and I’ll get to that) – was Tallarn; the first half of the book (Tallarn Executioner, I think?) is an excellent, tense war novel – it was brilliant to get the perspective of base-line human soldiers (tank crew), in a desperate situation, but for once almost on an even footing to the Astartes (thanks to their tank, and the fact that the surface of the planet is deadly to both).

 

I certainly wouldn’t say I regret listening to any of the books (well, with one exception that I’ll get to below), though I’d say there were two that I think were disappointments as they could have been more effective in different ways.  First of these is Deliverance Lost – I went into it knowing it’s not a well-regarded novel in the series, but I wanted to see if I could get an understanding of the Raven Guard post-Istvaan, and of Corax (and how he eventually succumbs to the bleak mood that sees him withdraw entirely).  I know Gav Thorpe’s writing has its critics – I don’t think characterisation is his strongest point, especially evident at how kind of bland Corax is) – but I would argue that editorial decisions undermined the story this novel tells.  I think if they had kept the sabotage of the Alpha Legion hidden in the plot until a twist near the end, instead of making it abundantly clear from the start, then there would have been some tragic impact to the Raven Guard’s plight and the failure of Corax’s project.  This would have given more believable basis to the deterioration of his mental state by the end of the Heresy as well, I think.  I’m not sure who’s decision it was to make the Alpha Legion a big part of the story from the beginning – Thorpe’s or the editors at BL – but I think it ultimately prevented it from being as impactful as it might have been.  Having said that, clearly this novel did make some impression on me, as I’ve started building a small allied Raven Guard force to go with my Imperial Fists..! 

 

The other disappointment, despite what I said above, was Tallarn – this is because the first part was so excellently done, building tension and portraying gripping action in a superb manner – that when you get to the ‘twist’, I kind of rolled my eyes.  Again, the ‘surprise, it was the Alpha Legion all along!’ twist was beginning to feel a bit of a trope that didn’t need to be in most Heresy stories.  If the entire novel had been focussed on this crew, telling the story of the Battle for Tallarn almost entirely through their eyes, I think it would have been one of the best novels in the series.

 

As for the Siege of Terra series, overall I really enjoyed it – it was entertaining, and kept me gripped for the most part.  I think it’s a microcosm of the strengths and weaknesses of the series, especially perhaps the weaknesses – too many characters with too many plot threads to bring together, and it was obvious that each author had particular threads they disliked, either down-playing them or ignoring entirely.  While I don’t think I’d want to revisit the Heresy series again (except the absolute stand-out works from it), I would listen to, or re-read, the Siege of Terra again.  Admittedly, I did skip Sons of the Selenar, and wish I had done the same for Garro Knight of Grey, but even if there is varying quality between works, I enjoyed it all.  Mortis and parts of each End & the Death volume did get to be a bit of a slog – again, this comes down to my previous comment about character & plot bloat that’s an issue for the series as a whole.  But the Garro novella – I genuinely wish I hadn’t bothered with that; his final confrontation with Mortarion could have been a couple of chapters in another novel, and that’s before we get on to how Keeler’s portrayal is entirely inconsistent with the novel that preceded it..!

 

As for The End & the Death – for the most part it was a satisfying conclusion; I would have completely ditched the Basilio Fo plot entirely, and cut out some of the repetitive skirmishes that some characters go through.  I think, almost like with the series as a whole, these three novels highlight Abnett’s strengths, as well as his, shall we say, worst habits.  There’s some great sweeping moments of war, and I like how the confrontations between Horus and firstly Sanguinius and then the Emperor are portrayed.  I enjoyed Horus’ monologuing descriptions of the events – I know some people found them repetitive, but I like how they showed the level of delusion and corruption he’d succumbed too.  I thought the final duel between the Emperor and Horus was entertaining and well portrayed – my only disappointment was that

 

Spoiler

In the end, the Emperor was not as messed up as John Blanche made out in a recent interview when he said that the Emperor is really bits of organs floating in jars!

 

But I did enjoy how ‘weird’ things got, as the Warp really overtook Terra – I must admit that was beyond what I might have imagined for how the end of the Siege would be: death and carnage aplenty – yes, but reality seeming to come apart at the seams?  Well played! 

 

As for weaknesses, well one of Abnett’s worst habits (for me) is how he kills off central characters – he does that offscreen quite often (especially at the fall of the Spaceport in Saturnine), which I think is one of the laziest and most annoying tropes that any author can use; but it’s when he does it as an attempt at a shock twist or un-needed ‘gut-punch’ at the end of a novel that it grates my nerves most – it’s the reason I gave up on the Gaunt’s Ghosts series not once, but twice.  He does it here with

 

Spoiler

Loken – ok, from a story-telling perspective, I do love a bit of circularity, and ending with the ‘creation’ of Samus is that; but really, it’s Loken?  By Erebus??!  I can cope with the fact Loken dies – in this story, many do, and he’s not mentioned beyond the Heresy, so it felt kind of inevitable – but like that?  Really?!  I think you could have done better, Dan.  I certainly can’t help but feel that Loken deserved better..!

 

There is a bit of a sense of anti-climax about the ending, and I think that’s intentional; the description of

 

Spoiler

How the survivors are kind of in a numb daze at the very end, asking if that’s it and if it’s really over

 

Kind of reflects how you feel, as the reader, at that point.  Maybe there could have been more –

 

Spoiler

I was expecting to see the arrival of the 1st, 6th & 13th at Terra –

 

But I can understand why it was left at that.

 

In all, the Heresy series has most certainly left its mark, and there are points that will remain talking points for fans for many years to come.  It’s given us some outright greats, and some forgettable duds – what series hasn’t, though?  In retrospect – and hindsight is always 20/20 – maybe more consistent editorial work, and perhaps trimming a few plot points, would have led to less of the duds, and mitigated some of the complaints people have about the series.  I confess I am hopeful that the Amazon-GW deal might someday lead to a TV adaptation of the Heresy series, which the optimistic part of me hopes can address those issues..! 

[DukeLeto69]

2 hours ago, Nagashsnee said:

 

 

I dont know, Battle for the Abyss was bad, but i remember it had a plot, a story it told (very very badly). On a theoretical level i can see the outline for the book and would indeed approve it.  Aspiring word bearer commander uses super ship to attack Ultramar at its very heart while a small band of loyalists try to stop it. Like i can understand why it was green lit.  Its a classic race against the clock action movie. 

 

TUE... its about setting up a second imperium? Not really and anything to do with that happens in the last 5% of the book. Its about the Lion and G man and the relationship between them? Not really again. Its about Vulkan going insane and pretending he was the hulk, no not really. Its about the night hunter let loose and the epic chase to capture him....no not really.  Is it about how Sanguinius got to Ultramar and the delicate process of proclaiming him Emperor? Nope. 

 

What is TUE actually about? Its all of the above. Someone pitched a book where (deep breath) 'While the Lion and G man have a face off because the former thinks the latter is setting up a second imperium while the hunter gets loose in the capital and triggers a fake invasion, while vulkan becomes a hulk like rage zombie, while G man tries to set up a second Imperium while they all chase eachother while Sanguinius shows up and is proclaimed emperor, also G mans mom, also also lots of other stuff'. 

 

Battle for the Abyss is written much worse, but as a book? I would say above TUE. The TUE is not a book, is a 200 page pitch meeting for 3 other books, 2 comics, 4 short stories and some WD articles polished up by a very competent writer masquerading as a book.  It should never have passed editing and never been green lit ( i would love to know how far from the original pitch, if at all it ended up). 

 

TUE was basically a set up for a entire narrative arc (Imperium Secundus) that died in the crib.

Yep that!

 

In the real world I think the writing of TUE coincided with the regime change at BL and the phase where the studio began driving things again and authors like Abnett stopped working for BL for a while. I think it is no coincidence TUE is the shortest HH novel Abnett wrote. I think be lost the love. 

[Roomsky]

So I've talked a bit about "your dudes," but what about that story? As in, what about that cobbled together collection of events and themes that only barely held together until the Visions books came out?

 

That thing about myths

So the beats of the Heresy, in one form or another, have been around for a while. The Eisenstein's been described being variously captained by Garro, Tarvitz, and even Varren I believe, be it was generally agreed that it flew. Thing is, these heroic tales were all framed by their significance to the modern Imperium. As in, the stories were told in ways that focus on what the nightmare future of 40k deemed important, in a way that future deemed proper.

 

So, perhaps the events of the Heresy were always meant as totally literal. Could be! I don't know those earlier codex pioneers. But when the cruelest and bloodiest regime imaginable says that the Emperor's favourite son was a beautiful, blonde haired, golden armoured, literally winged angel guy, or that the Emperor himself was a perfectly sculpted hero who wore ornate golden armour and literally had a sword-fight with the arch traitor, I take that with a grain of salt. Adrian Smith's Horus vs the Emperor, probably the most iconic piece of Warhammer art, looks like a religious painting. I've always been intrigued by the angle that is is literally a religious painting for the zealous masses of the year 40,000.

 

What I'm getting at is that the Heresy being vague didn't just make it fertile ground for the imagination, it made these epic myths suspect, because the Imperium is not reliable. And that's fun! Do you want pure, distilled awesome in Warhammer style? The Heresy is cool. Do you want the recollections of the Great Crusade as "40k but it was nicer" to be Ministorum propaganda? Also awesome, for different reasons.

 

The novels lock everything in, and take away some of that fun. Yes, we saw snippets of the Heresy before, but always from extremely biased narrators. The myth was upheld even while mining the era for a sense of epic history. And while the novels have, I think, gone above and beyond anyone's imagination in at least a few spaces - I'm still remiss that we never got to explore the idea that Sanguinius may not have literally had angelic wings, and Magnus may not have literally been a red giant. I would have loved a novel series framed by a historitor in ~M32 piecing together disparate accounts from the Imperium's dawn, sort of like the framing of the Forgeworld Black Books. Maybe if Black Library ever feels reboot fever, we still could!

 

 

The Great Crusade and the Emperor

 

Further to the above: The Emperor. Horus Rising decided immediately that we were doing the "40k but nicer" angle. Fair enough, it's probably the easiest sell. But The Emperor creates a conundrum: was he or was he not good for humanity?

 

On one hand: he reunified countless worlds cut off by Old Night, elevated societies that had regressed to medievalism or worse, and pushed back the predations of xenos who only wanted to see humanity dead. So too was he working towards Leto II's Golden Path: a bright future for humanity at any cost. The apparent tragedy is that his dream was never allowed to flourish.

 

On the other: there's no version of events where an Emperor of Mankind who commits galactic xenocide can come across as entirely clean. "Oh, what could have been" works fine when he's active 10,000 years prior, less so in the moment where POVs watch him mobilize one of the most destructive war machines the galaxy has ever seen. After all, the Golden Path justifies any suffering if it succeeds.

 

Yeah yeah, different era different moral standards I get it. But these books are being written by people in and for our era, there's a limit to how well you can sell this premise. I assume it's because of that they tried to have it both ways: the Crusade is deeply problematic and brutal, but it's still the herald of a brighter future.

 

Uhh, I don't think this works. Look, I buy that the Emperor is arrogant enough to think that this time, this variety of empire will work. "The difference is I am right" and all that. But history tells us, and any sort of political theory tells us, that this kind of empire is doomed to implode. The very things that make it appealing to those living in those times are the seeds of its own destruction. And you can have the characters believe it will work, they certainly do! But you can't also sell me that there is tragedy because it collapsed if collapse was the only endpoint it was ever going to arrive at. The tragedy needs to be that people believed in the Emperor's dream, and now suffer and die because of it. The tragedy is not that the Emperor's dream, as a concept, failed, because it cannot have succeeded (there are logistical reasons entirely in-setting for this as well which I won't dive into just now.)

 

So what we end up with is a kind of incidental deconstruction of the romanticized past authoritarians use to motivate the masses. It says that yeah, things were never actually that good, it's propaganda. But sometimes the series seems to forget that bit, and the Emperor's dream is suddenly played completely straight. And when it is playing up that irony, those seeds of the grimdark far future or the self-defeating nature of their space imperialism, it undermines that initial selling point of "it's like 40k." Because, if it's like 40k and the foundational myths did happen, but also wink wink nudge nudge we see what we're doing, many things become kind of... stupid. I buy that Mortarion was a flawed man with a harsh upbringing who put too much faith in a childhood brother in arms. I don't buy that a novel series primarch, who are repeatedly described as having super-engineered brainpower and the ability to account for microscopic details in their assessments of people, places, and things, let a glaringly obvious Judas lead him around by the nose. Much less that a galaxy-spanning military campaign was left in the hands of someone as fragile as Horus Lupercal. 

 

More to come. It's a bloody 60+ book series, oh boy do I have too much to say about it.

[Scribe]

9 minutes ago, Roomsky said:

Uhh, I don't think this works. Look, I buy that the Emperor is arrogant enough to think that this time, this variety of empire will work. "The difference is I am right" and all that. But history tells us, and any sort of political theory tells us, that this kind of empire is doomed to implode. The very things that make it appealing to those living in those times are the seeds of its own destruction. And you can have the characters believe it will work, they certainly do! But you can't also sell me that there is tragedy because it collapsed if collapse was the only endpoint it was ever going to arrive at. The tragedy needs to be that people believed in the Emperor's dream, and now suffer and die because of it. The tragedy is not that the Emperor's dream, as a concept, failed, because it cannot have succeeded (there are logistical reasons entirely in-setting for this as well which I won't dive into just now.)

 

So what we end up with is a kind of incidental deconstruction of the romanticized past authoritarians use to motivate the masses. It says that yeah, things were never actually that good, it's propaganda. But sometimes the series seems to forget that bit, and the Emperor's dream is suddenly played completely straight. And when it is playing up that irony, those seeds of the grimdark far future or the self-defeating nature of their space imperialism, it undermines that initial selling point of "it's like 40k." Because, if it's like 40k and the foundational myths did happen, but also wink wink nudge nudge we see what we're doing, many things become kind of... stupid. I buy that Mortarion was a flawed man with a harsh upbringing who put too much faith in a childhood brother in arms. I don't buy that a novel series primarch, who are repeatedly described as having super-engineered brainpower and the ability to account for microscopic details in their assessments of people, places, and things, let a glaringly obvious Judas lead him around by the nose. Much less that a galaxy-spanning military campaign was left in the hands of someone as fragile as Horus Lupercal. 

 

More to come. It's a bloody 60+ book series, oh boy do I have too much to say about it.

 

Ah, what could have been.

 

To me the tragedy of the Emperor, the Great Crusade, the Imperium, is almost entirely missing. It takes stories like The Last Remembrancer to draw some of that out. To show that just a little scratch under the surface, its all very ugly. Its this which I really really hoped they would pull the curtain aside on the Emperor for, just for a moment.

 

I can only force some of the Primarch behavior to make sense, through a lens of them being those exaggerated Demi-Gods. They cannot be hyper intelligent lords of supreme will. They NEED to be dominated by their emotion, either through a connection to the Warp, or just built into their being. Otherwise, its just poor writing all over the place.

[Karhedron]

2 hours ago, Roomsky said:

Uhh, I don't think this works. Look, I buy that the Emperor is arrogant enough to think that this time, this variety of empire will work. "The difference is I am right" and all that. But history tells us, and any sort of political theory tells us, that this kind of empire is doomed to implode.

 

The implication in Master of Mankind is that the Imperuim was never the end goal. Even as envisaged by the Emperor, it was a necessary evil (although not as bad as it became by M41). The point is that it was intended to be temporary. It was a safe space in which humanity could complete it evolution into a fully psychic species. This is something that was foundational to 40K back in Rogue Trader days but which is not touched on often anymore. Imagine a whole race of perpetuals who are long lived, aware of the Warp and largely immune to it.

 

The Imperium was not a bright shining future. It was a lifeboat cobbled together out of scavenged DAOT tech and morally dubious genetic engineering. It's purpose was to hold together just long enough to get humanity to a brighter future.

[SpecialIssue]

Quote

"For the early Imperium did not only bring feral survivors and scavengers into the Terran fold, but it did also brook no competition. In the long run, the worst crimes of the Great Crusade was the brutal annihilation of all alternative sources of human regrowth, gathering all future paths for humanity across the stars to converge on the one road leading from Terra unto damnation. Such advanced human civilizations as the Interex, the Olamic Quietude, the Diasporex and the Auretian Technocracy were all stamped out by His Legionnaires. The seeds of these interstellar cultures were never allowed to grow and spread and shape the fate of mankind across the galaxy in competing power blocs. Thus was the destiny of all humanity bound to that of resurgent Terra by strangling her daughters in the cradle."

 

From a wonderful series of art and flavourful text that @Karak Norn Clansman has been posting on his own page on the B&C, that wallows in the disgusting nature of humanity and the Imperium in the 41st millennium.

 

I think this problem of the Emperor and his plan is a wider one that GW is confused about - are the Emperor's and Imperium's excesses and violence needed? Is humanity the protagonist in this universe, worth even rooting for?

 

I'd argue that the healthy answer is no. But we are humans, we like to see ourselves as right, or at least powerful. GW wants to make money as well, with a palatable product, and those two things align to make the narrative shy away from the straight answer that no; humanity in the 41st millennium and even the 31st (with the way they fleshed out the nascent Imperium) was just another monster that courted its own destruction. The actions the Imperium undertake are genocidal and unnecessary - yet are brushed aside as 'necessary' by the narrative with little to no reflection on how horrible those actions were.

 

This is something else that makes 40k different from all other scifi - it's pessimistic and loathsome view of humanity, that focuses on us at our worst, for our best has already past. Humanity as the powerful, elder, corrupt and decrepit big bad that deserves to be destroyed - because that is exactly what 40k points so clearly towards thematically, it's just that no one wants to commit to the bit.

 

"No, we needed to ensure the human race was united... we needed to wipe out every xenos race we came into contact with... we needed to violently and quickly enforce compliance across the entire galaxy to one warlord on Terra."

 

Why? The warp was calm after the millennia of the Age of Strife. Wouldn't all this violence and turmoil in such a short time just bring the attention of the gods onto us? What about all the alternate springs of a human resurgence that could have happened but were stamped out with no remorse, or instances with xenos and us cooperating? Why didn't we just leave worlds that didn't want to join alone (with appropriate safeguards)?

 

The Emperor is said to have been embodiment of everything great and substantive about our species - and that includes our capacity for hubris. Perhaps the tragedy is that we got what we deserved.

 

But no-one wants to hear that.

Edited February 1 by SpecialIssue

[Roomsky]

1 hour ago, Karhedron said:

Truths

 

I mean, I get that, but from that angle it's an attempt so desperate that the framing of the series is basically all wrong.

 

None of our dedicated POVs know this information. It's not what they're fighting for on a personal level. And that's why we get the Heresy, of course, but it never gets to be the narrative beat it should. It's not a big twist for anyone we've grown attached to. It's far too peripheral to be a proper narrative element.

 

Alternatively, if we should really be on board for this goal, it needs to be introduced early, and well before the Heresy is even starting to take shape. We should be rooting for the galactic underdogs in humanity even though we know it's all destined to fall apart. We know it's unlikely the Imperium will expand far enough, that the webway project will work, and that humanity can ascend to a free psychic race before it all collapses but DANG we still hope that it goes differently this time.

 

If we take that as the true tragedy of what was lost, the Heresy novels are even more tonally and topically deranged than I first thought. 

 

EDIT: This is also the angle I get where the desire for more Emperor POV comes from. If we knew the stakes and had someone who actually cared about them from the get-go, I could buy the tragedy better. 

Edited February 1 by Roomsky

[wecanhaveallthree]

I DISAGREE, OBVIOUSLY

 

Right from the start it's signposted that the Emperor left the Great Crusade pretty hastily, and Horus - our main 'inside guy' for the first two books, at least - is clearly left in more than a little of a lurch when he's named Warmaster and given a functionally impossible task. The Emperor declared the Triumph and rushed back to Terra posthaste without giving people much in the way of guidance. Horus obviously comes to believe it's because the Emperor doesn't actually care about the Imperium and just wants to suck all the wealth out of compliant worlds - or is so weak that he's letting the Council of Terra dictate those terms - and Chaos offers the quite reasonable suggestion that the Emperor has withdrawn to Terra for some nefarious spiritual purpose, to achieve apotheosis (and they're right!). Neither of which are acceptable to Horus, thus starting the Heresy.

 

A Thousand Sons even says, straight up, that the Emperor was looking for something during the Great Crusade, and once he'd found it, he headed right back to Terra. I'm unsure if the Webway Project itself was a firm idea from the start, but it certainly was made clear the Emperor had somethin' somethin' going on back home that even his 'favoured son' wasn't privy to.  A central spine of early speculation is: what's the Emperor up to? Did he intend to become a god from the start? Was Chaos telling the truth, more or less?

 

I think the Webway Project itself is really cool but also really boring, because it's a simple solution to the core problem of 40K: the galaxy is, like, really big, and the Warp isn't very reliable, so worlds can lose contact with each other and whole sub-sectors can go missing or become 'lost'. You have so much cultural drift, so much sinister sneakiness, because you can get up to a lot of shenanigans when the nearest response force or even investigators aren't gonna come knocking for years. The Webway Project just fixes everything: logistics, culture, the flourishing of Chaos in the shadows because every world is then easily, safely, and promptly accessible. The Webway Project doesn't give us '40K but nice', it gives us a more classical sci-fi homogenous empire, where everybody has similar values, similar values, similar beliefs all issuing from Terra. The Webway Project flattens the setting completely. And that's cool! But it's not very sexy for the Emperor's great secret goal to boil down to filling in all the galactic potholes.

[Scribe]

1 hour ago, SpecialIssue said:

The Emperor is said to have been embodiment of everything great and substantive about our species - and that includes our capacity for hubris. Perhaps the tragedy is that we got what we deserved.

 

But no-one wants to hear that.

 

I think there are quite a few fan's of 40K who 100% get this, and absolutely are here for it.

[Roomsky]

I mean, I get the Webway project part. And that eventually we will ascend beyond these vestigial trappings we associate with empire (okay, Comrade Neoth /s) and that particular mystery was established in book 1. But the Webway Projects being "step 1 to make things better, eventually" just turns it all back into "this was, from the foundations, doomed from the start."

 

So I stubbornly maintain that handling this competently would either have either a: got us more on board with the Emperor's Hail Mary from the start with an emphasis on desperation, or b: engaged more with the Webway project as a major revelation that directly impacts our POV characters.

 

Because outside of Master of Mankind (which, while good, doesn't do anywhere neare the damage control the series needed if pursuing this angle of tragedy, IMO) it's still all framed as Horus being at war with the Imperium as it is and a future that rang hollow long before the Emperor lost the webway (see: The Last Remembrancer.)

[Scribe]

8 minutes ago, Roomsky said:

Because outside of Master of Mankind (which, while good, doesn't do anywhere neare the damage control the series needed if pursuing this angle of tragedy, IMO) it's still all framed as Horus being at war with the Imperium as it is and a future that rang hollow long before the Emperor lost the webway (see: The Last Remembrancer.)

 

I think Wraights White Scars arc needs to be accounted for as well.

 

I mean we could probably frame a good meta story out of the books provided, we would just have to chop out a lot.

[Marshal Rohr]

“I think the Webway Project itself is really cool but also really boring, because it's a simple solution to the core problem of 40K: the galaxy is, like, really big, and the Warp isn't very reliable, so worlds can lose contact with each other and whole sub-sectors can go missing or become 'lost'. You have so much cultural drift, so much sinister sneakiness, because you can get up to a lot of shenanigans when the nearest response force or even investigators aren't gonna come knocking for years. The Webway Project just fixes everything: logistics, culture, the flourishing of Chaos in the shadows because every world is then easily, safely, and promptly accessible. The Webway Project doesn't give us '40K but nice', it gives us a more classical sci-fi homogenous empire, where everybody has similar values, similar values, similar beliefs all issuing from Terra. The Webway Project flattens the setting completely. And that's cool! But it's not very sexy for the Emperor's great secret goal to boil down to filling in all the galactic potholes.”

The Webway project isn’t boring and doesn’t flatten the setting and you explained exactly why it’s tragic it failed, dooming humanity for all eternity. The Imperium was on the very edge of triumph and the emperor abandons everything to go see to that triumph without telling anyone his plan and the victories of mundanity, uniformity, and proximity are snatched away. No one needs to concern themselves with the webway flattening anything, because the loss of the project is the only thing that matters. 

[DukeLeto69]

I will need to give this more thought to put together a coherent post but some initial reaction to the excellent posts above...

 

”I was there the day GW launched Warhammer 40000 Rogue Trader” well almost. I was a teenager in Britain in the 80s and certainly bought my copy of the red rulebook in 1987/88. As a GenX living with the Cold War and being told we were just a button push away from nuclear war, nihilism was fairly common.

 

W40kRT was clearly derivative (particularly drawing on the comic 2000AD and sharing many of the same artists) and a mismatch of styles. But it was comically dark. It was clear that the Imperium was not good. Possibly not THE baddies but also not the goodies either. The setting was basically “every player gets to play the baddies”. From the start the Imperium has been grotesque and evil (and in the beginning the writing had a distinctly self deprecating tongue-in cheek aren’t we naughty Britishness to it. 

 

I also read the first two novels (and an anthology) when they were released by Boxtree. Ian Watson was barking mad and twisted. But in Inquisitor and Space Marine he perfectly captured the weirdness in tone that was 40k at that time. Not sure if this is right but words are failing me...40k in late 80s/early 90s was more Baroque rather than Gothic, that really came with 3rd Edition which was a tonal shift becoming more serious and perhaps darker still. Certainly a more “professional and coherent IP”.

 

So that is a lot of words to say, my personal take on 40k is very influenced by what came before and it is something I can’t shake, or actually don’t want to shake. I like the universe of 40k to be incoherent madness where nothing really works and the human race stumbles from one crisis to the next. Nothing quite makes sense. The Imperium is a horrific extrapolation of all the nasty regimes from history with the dial turned up to 11. And it was cool admitting it is fun to play the baddies or root for the baddies.

 

With that in mind, the Great Crusade was xenocide on a galactic scale. Humanity wanted total dominance and revenge for the deprivation suffered during Old Night. The Emperor is a psychotic megalomaniac who intends to wipe out anything that is not human. To coin a Dune phrase, there is no Golden Path only a Dark Path.

 

So for ME the whole “The Dark King” concept was really exciting and that they pulled back from that is disappointing. I WANTED the Emperor’s apotheosis to result in The Dark King. I wanted the Chaos Gods to actually ne right (even if manipulating to their own ends). I liked the idea that the horror of 40k is as a result of The God Emperor being (as we in 21st Century might think it) EVIL. 

 

I also liked the idea that The Dark King has a counterpart, The Yellow King (ie the part/fragment of himself that was released/cast aside in Vol2) and that the Bequin books (and others) would reveal something like (words struggling right now) the worship of the God Emperor by quadrillions of humans has ensured his apotheosis has been maintained and in fact powered up! AND...because that worship by quadrillions is full of hope and love etc it is changing the nature of The Dark King and creating The Yellow King (and drawing back into himself the shard/fragment cast aside).

 

Enough rambling. Possibly too head canon. Hope it makes some kind of sense?

 

edit to add: This head canon thing has been playing out for me since Pariah and The Magos ie “who is the Yellow King”. In that thread years ago I was wedded to TYK being TGE. So I really was hopeful I had cracked it when I started reading about The Dark King. Sigh! 

Edited February 1 by DukeLeto69

[TheArtilleryman]

@DukeLeto69 spot on. In the grim darkness of the far future there are no good guys. The expansion of the Imperium is like a massively amplified version of the British Empire taken to its absolute extreme: the subjugation of other cultures, stripping of all their useful resources, the complete disregard for human life and the purging of those populations that are deemed “inferior” or can’t be bent into service. This is what makes it inherently believable. It is history repeating itself to the nth degree. There are those humans who believe they are doing the right thing, but few truly know the extent of the lengths their Holy leaders will go to in order to achieve dominance. Would they still support it if they knew? It is misinformation and propoganda on a galactic scale.

 

”Good guys” and “bad guys” is never more subjective than it is in 40K. It’s way less clear cut than it ever was in WHFB or AoS. The fact the Imperium can’t see past its own sense of human exceptionalism and superiority tells us that even 30k plus years into the future, humanity can never change and will be doomed by its flaws. It’s what we have seen throughout history, what we see today with certain political groups and international relations, and unfortunately it’s a far more believable future than the utopian Earth of Star Trek, for example. Which is all quite sad really. Remind me why we want to wallow in this world so much? 

Edited February 1 by TheArtilleryman

[Marshal Rohr]

1 hour ago, TheArtilleryman said:

Remind me why we want to wallow in this world so much? 

Lasers, space ships, and power armor. Next question. 

[Scribe]

1 hour ago, TheArtilleryman said:

It’s what we have seen throughout history, what we see today with certain political groups and international relations, and unfortunately it’s a far more believable future than the utopian Earth of Star Trek, for example. Which is all quite sad really. Remind me why we want to wallow in this world so much? 

 

Because its unique in terms of being that more dark, more nihilistic, more desperate, future, which validates the feelings some of us have when looking at the way the world runs today.