Facts and Figures from the Age of Darkness

[Tymell]

As some may already know, I've been maintaining some resources related to the Horus Heresy series for a while now, keeping an up to date Dramatis Personnae, ship lists, plot threads summary, etc.

 

Well, the series has now (technically) reached its conclusion. Of course they're still occsionally releasing something under that banner, but the official "final book" is out, so I think it's as good a time as any to have a look at some stats related to the full series!

 

Also, to clarify what I mean by the "full series", what I base all the below on, this includes:

• The full numbered series, Books 1-54, including the anthologies.
• The Primarch series (17 books + Heirs to the Emperor) [we haven't got Horus' one yet, but with seemingly no word on it, I don't feel inclined to wait for it to finally come out]
• The Siege of Terra series (10 novels + 3 novellas)
• All stories not yet collected into the above (currently sitting at 4 novellas and 34 shorts)
• The character novels (Valdor, Luther, Sigismund, Eidolon) and Cthonia's Reckoning
• All the Forge World "black books", I to IX
• All published books for the 2nd edition of HH tabletop, including the digitally released "Exemplary Battles"
• All published books for the latest incarnation of Adeptus Titanicus, again including Exemplary Battles
• All published books for Legions Imperialis

 

So, how many (named) characters were there?

In grand total, across the entire series as given above, there are 5529 named characters, and of those, 2226 were confirmed to have died (or, in the case of daemons, been banished) within it. A further 793 are listed as "unknown", a good number of which I think are likely to have been killed, but we didn't actually get it confirmed.

 

 

Which Legions/non-Legion organisations had the most or fewest named characters?

The Legions with the most named characters were:

• The Ultramarines (363)
• The Imperial Fists (224)
• The Word Bearers (216)

 

If we go beyond Legions, the Imperial Army had 455, Imperial Citizens/Staff had 409, and the general "Pre-Imperial" category had 285.

 

The Legions with the fewest were:

• The Alpha Legion (100)
• The Death Guard (93)
• The Thousand Sons (74)

 

 

Biggest characters by number of appearances [note: I'm not counting "mentions", only stories where a character actually appeared within it]

1. Malcador (54 appearances)
2. Horus (49 appearances)
3. The Emperor (47 appearances)
4. Rogal Dorn (42 appearances)
5. Sanguinius (33 appearances)
6. Fulgrim (28 appearances)
7. Abaddon (26 appearances)
8. Angron (26 appearances)
9. Magnus the Red (26 appearances)
10. Mortarion (24 appearances)

 

Deaths

So, what about K/D ratios and the like?

 

Well, here are your best and worst chances of survival, based purely on the number of named characters killed:

Best chances (Legions):

• Raven Guard (35/160 dead, 78.1% survival)
• Dark Angels (51/205 dead, 75.1% survival)
• Night Lords (27/104 dead, 74% survival)

 

Worst chances (Legions):

• World Eaters (78/127 dead, 38.6% survival)
• Death Guard (49/93 dead, 47.3% survival)
• Emperor's Children (78/139 dead, 48.9% survival)

 

Best chances (non-Legions):

• Remembrancers/Iterators (21/91 dead, 76.9% survival)
• Dark Mechanicum (17/65 dead, 73.8% survival)
• Blackshields (5/17 dead, 70.6% survival)

 

Worst chances (non-Legions):

• Separatists (13/14 dead, 7.1% survival)
• Assassins (14/16 dead, 12.5% survival)
• Cultists (33/44 dead, 25% survival)

 

Also special mention to the Alpha Legion for having 100 named characters and an exactly 50% ratio of survival. That feels right.

 

Which Legions and characters got the most (named) kills?

Obviously many characters were responsible for the deaths of billions, but for this I'm just factoring in named characters across the series.

 

Named kills by Legion:

• Word Bearers: 181
• Sons of Horus: 108
• Alpha Legion: 101
• Night Lords: 88
• World Eaters: 82
• Death Guard: 68
• Ultramarines: 63
• Iron Warriors: 60
• Imperial Fists: 48
• Emperor's Children: 47
• Thousand Sons: 44
• Dark Angels: 42
• Raven Guard: 36
• White Scars: 29
• Salamanders: 25
• Iron Hands: 24
• Blood Angels: 22
• Space Wolves: 18 (poor showing for "the Emperor's executioners"!)

 

And who actually got the most (named) kills across the series?

1. The Emperor (28)
2. Jenetia Krole (24)
3. Angron (23)
4. Corax (23)
5. Konrad Curze (21)
6. Horus (15)
7. Valdor (15)
8. Spear (13)
9. Eidolon (12)
10. Ka'Bandha (12)

 

 

Coverage across the series

Another thing I kept a rough measure of was how much coverage each Legion got across the series. I kept a running tally score for each, with varying scores based on whether a story was a full novel, novella or short, and how much of it was dedicated to a particular Legion. So a full novel devoted predominantly to a single Legion would be worth a full 1.0, while a novella dedicated to them would be worth 0.33, and a shared novel split evenly between two or even three primary viewpoints might give each one a 0.67.

 

Obviously there's a good deal of subjectivity in the exact numbers here, both in what to attribute to each story and the actual values given, and it doesn't account for every single time a Legion appeared, but I still hope it can illustrate generally who got the most attention across the series. In the end, the scores were:

 

1. Sons of Horus (8.45) [worth noting that here I've pre-emptively included Horus' eventual Primarchs book in the score, though it wouldn't change the order if I hadn't]
2. Ultramarines (6.12)
3. Dark Angels (6.04)
4. Imperial Fists (5.44)
5. Word Bearers (5.35)
6. Salamanders (4.96)
7. Blood Angels (4.55)
8. Emperor's Children (4.30)
9. Space Wolves (3.95)
10. White Scars (3.81)
11. Thousand Sons (3.71)
12. Iron Hands (3.70)
13. Alpha Legion (3.22)
14. World Eaters (3.04)
15. Raven Guard (2.96)
16. Iron Warriors (2.95)
17. Night Lords (2.95)
18. Death Guard (2.71)

 

The Iron Warriors, Night Lords and Death Guard all suffered for having the novels focused on them being split with other perspectives (Buried Dagger being split between DG and the Knights-Errant, Pharos between the NL and UM, and Angel Exterminatus between EC and IW). The Imperial Fists also had this, since Praetorian of Dorn was about the Alpha Legion a good deal, but they had enough regular appearances (especially in the Siege) to make up for this.

 

Ships

In case anyone's interested, here are the number of named vessels each Legion had:

• Ultramarines: 108
• Imperial Fists: 70
• Dark Angels: 70
• Sons of Horus: 66
• Iron Warriors: 49
• Word Bearers: 47
• Iron Hands: 47
• White Scars: 43
• Night Lords: 41
• Emperor's Children: 40
• Blood Angels: 37
• Death Guard: 34
• World Eaters: 32
• Raven Guard: 30
• Space Wolves: 30
• Alpha Legion: 26
• Salamanders: 17
• Thousand Sons: 12

 

Maybe I'll come up with some other stats and figures eventually, but thought these might be of interest to some fellow nerds!

 

[grailkeeper]

Best survival rate is the Raven Guard?

 

That seems... historically inaccurate. *Cough* Istvan *cough*

[Tymell]

53 minutes ago, grailkeeper said:

Best survival rate is the Raven Guard?

 

That seems... historically inaccurate. *Cough* Istvan *cough*

 

Raven Guard:

[N1SB]

Great quant work, this was the bit that shocked me:

 

2 hours ago, Tymell said:

And who actually got the most (named) kills across the series?

1. The Emperor (28)
2. Jenetia Krole (24)
3. Angron (23)
4. Corax (23)
5. Konrad Curze (21)
6. Horus (15)
7. Valdor (15)
8. Spear (13)
9. Eidolon (12)
10. Ka'Bandha (12) 

 

Jenetia Krole is truly the Emperor's executioner, it seems.  Great work all around, thanks for this.

 

1 hour ago, grailkeeper said:

Best survival rate is the Raven Guard?

 

That seems... historically inaccurate. *Cough* Istvan *cough*

 

The obvious comedy/tragedy is that this is based on named characters, and they all died before they could get name'd.

[theSpirea]

Excellent work, love it!

 

Now we just need someone to create local LLM and feed all that work to it so we can chat with it. Because totally no one had that idea before and it doesn't exist yet.

[Valkyrion]

Yes, but how many times did a Space Wolf make a 'wet-leopard growl'?

[63-19]

How did the Emperor and Krole get 28 and 24 kills? It's not that I don't believe you, it's just that when I look back at the novels most of the time I just remember them talking for a bit, except for Krole. Are you counting off screen kills or something?

[Alpharius902]

8 hours ago, 63-19 said:

How did the Emperor and Krole get 28 and 24 kills? It's not that I don't believe you, it's just that when I look back at the novels most of the time I just remember them talking for a bit, except for Krole. Are you counting off screen kills or something?

 

The Emperor is probably the Custodian subversion aboard the Vengeful Spirit, while Krole is mainly the Saturnine killing spree