The Dropsite Massacre by John French

[Astartes Consul]

GW / BL have always had a weird approach to scale. Some publications will have an Imperial Guard force of a few regiments defending a whole world. Many cooks, and all that. Even the far more grounded Imperial Army books suffered from

this a bit.

 

I generally never thought the Heresy series suffered that badly from it though. Certainly not enough for me to stop suspending my disbelief about genetically engineered child soldiers fighting 30,000 years in the future! My personal bugbear is when a Space Marine manages to reload a bolster while simultaneously wielding about ten other weapons at once. 

[StrangerOrders]

1 hour ago, Deus_Ex_Machina said:

I read "Fulgrim" before the "The Vietnam War". The EC have conquered the planet of the Laerans in a SINGLE MONTH while being the smallest Legion. Completely ridiculous and because of that one of the worst books in the HH series. 

 

The transhumanism of the Astartes is for nought when fighting other Astartes. And when they fight aliens it doesn´t mean it will turn out to be a one-sided war as those foes had impressive tech too. Your power armour means nothing when your position gets shelled by artillery or tank shells. Engagements contain several hundreds of troops so the few power-armoured marines will be outnumbered and thus slaughtered.

 

And another aspect has never come up in the few HH novels which have read so far which is the aspect of friendly fire. According to Oliver Stone, Vietnam War veteran and director of "Platoon", friendly fire caused about 15-20% of all casualties the American troops suffered. Meanwhile during the Horus Heresy everything goes according to plan unless some sort of betrayal comes up. I can´t believe this for a second.

Problem there is that you can't really say 'for nought' when most of the factors I said don't relate to direct combat. Two monkeys fighting in the vines doesn't mean their conflict is equivalent to two crabs.

 

If anything it goes to show how bloody weird a battle between two Astartes forces would be because their tempo, considerations and rates would look nothing like two conventional armies. To give credit, the first Black Book did this very well with commanders being jarred by how cumulatively quick and difficult to unengage from Astartes v. Astartes warfare turned out to be. As well as how hard it is for one side to meaningfully erase the other without ending up playing whack-a-mole (given the difficulty to permanently kill, starve or mentally break both sides are).

 

As far as Xenos, we know alot actually from the books, and I think there is a risk is assuming frequency and other considerations. Including our letting ourselves be tricked into thinking the Imperium is more primitive than it actually.

 

Still room for very interesting directions.

Edited Thursday at 06:53 PM by StrangerOrders

[Robbienw]

2 hours ago, Scribe said:

....

 

Isnt the Heresy....over? lol

 

It’s a setting.

[Scribe]

7 minutes ago, Robbienw said:

 

It’s a setting.

 

It was (is?) a series, as well.

[soviet1337]

I recently read Fulgrim and thought it was excellent, and that it did a good job of capturing the dropsite massacre in a short span of pages. The brevity underlined the shock of it.

 

That said, I see the reason to do this book. I haven't read anything by John French so I don't know how good he might be.

 

One thing is 100% sure though - this book is going to have a whole load of super-sized Saturnine guys in it. 

[Marshal Loss]

Wonderful news, keen to get my hands on more heresy from French. Praetorian of Dorn, Slaves to Darkness and Solar War are three of my all-time favourites in the setting. 

 

edit: Just noticed:

This novel – combined with the

second Journal Tactica – will provide the most comprehensive view yet of the infamous bloodbath.

 

I thought the second journal tactica was Saturnine themed, so perhaps this is a reference to a second dropsite massacre journal (part II) coming around the same time.

Edited Thursday at 08:32 PM by Marshal Loss

[SalamandersBro]

Getting

[Commissar Greif]

For about a fraction of a second I thought the article meant John French as in the British general from WWI and my brain just sort of accepted it like "Yeah, I feel like he'd know a thing or two about massacres."

[Kaede45]

11 hours ago, Osteoclast said:

Somehow, Palpatine Heresy returned…

They fly now?

[gideon stargreave]

Id have loved if the HH series had been handled out of chronological order since it’s inception. It would have felt like exploring the setting as some sort of weird archivist. I suppose I could always read them more or less randomly 

[Laurence]

Really seems like this should have been written last year and released to coincide with the new edition.  

[Dornfist]

On 8/21/2025 at 6:47 PM, Scribe said:

....

 

Isnt the Heresy....over? lol

"Yesterday's series ending is today's new soft beginning"-GW suits justifying the decision lol.

 

I feel we need a ding counter on how many times they will lie to us about the series being over if they keep dropping stuff that happens within the Horus Heresy timeline. I like John French as a 30k author, so I imagine this book will be solid. But I feel I got enough of a sense of what happened at Istvaan V due to how chaotic it is meant to be with the relevant novels and short stories about it. So it's not like I really need to know more. GW however will always make more stuff if there is a profit to be made.

 

I'm more mad we got more Istvaan V before that DANG Horus Primarch novel: that I do care about.

On 8/23/2025 at 10:31 AM, gideon stargreave said:

Id have loved if the HH series had been handled out of chronological order since it’s inception. It would have felt like exploring the setting as some sort of weird archivist. I suppose I could always read them more or less randomly 

I wish this too. It goes to show they did not have a long-term plan and merely started pumping random stuff out when they saw how popular the series got after the first few books. I sincerely hope they do better for the Scouring series in this regard...

[Dornfist]

On 8/22/2025 at 6:41 AM, Kaede45 said:

They fly now?

THEY FLY NOW!!! 

[Blissful Brushes]

Marines also will be constantly being built/trained. Canon varies a lot on how long that takes but to get a marine good enough as an infanteer will not be that long. I always felt that a competently led legion would be able to pretty much replace losses on the fly unless they actively only recruit from a single world or get truly smacked - ala Istvaan V.

 

I always envisioned that the training wing of a legion would probably be a similar size to the legion’s fighting strength, with huge classes of aspirants at various stages of training/implantation. After all the setting pre-HH is one of expansion.

[WARMASTER_]

On 8/21/2025 at 6:41 PM, Deus_Ex_Machina said:

I read "Fulgrim" before the "The Vietnam War". The EC have conquered the planet of the Laerans in a SINGLE MONTH while being the smallest Legion. Completely ridiculous and because of that one of the worst books in the HH series. 

 

The transhumanism of the Astartes is for nought when fighting other Astartes. And when they fight aliens it doesn´t mean it will turn out to be a one-sided war as those foes had impressive tech too. Your power armour means nothing when your position gets shelled by artillery or tank shells. Engagements contain several hundreds of troops so the few power-armoured marines will be outnumbered and thus slaughtered.

 

And another aspect has never come up in the few HH novels which have read so far which is the aspect of friendly fire. According to Oliver Stone, Vietnam War veteran and director of "Platoon", friendly fire caused about 15-20% of all casualties the American troops suffered. Meanwhile during the Horus Heresy everything goes according to plan unless some sort of betrayal comes up. I can´t believe this for a second.

I think the main issue hear is you’re putting way to much weight in to one book based on a real life conflict based between humans in a jungle from the 60’s a war that the US was vastly underprepared for a war where most of their guns stopped working because they were told the M14 would “clean itself” while firing.

 

You’re not using your critical thinking when it comes to the data points you’ve read, Vietnam suffered high numbers of US friendly fire because lots of firefights took place in night ambushes within a jungle by troops trained for around 8/16 weeks terrified of dying 

 

An Astartes of the legions however is superior in every way, they possess heightened senses, sight, fear nothing, lighting quick reflexes and have built in targeting systems that link to there firearms not to mention perfect vision in almost all environments due to there helmet optics 

 

To can’t read a book based on a war fought 60 years ago a draw direct correlation when the soldiers fighting both conflicts are different in almost every way 

 

Your numbers point for another example, I believe someone made the point above but astartes are extremely durable casualties don’t automatically mean dead or even not able to fight for long periods of time. Recruitment is also rolling and speed up during the heresy as we know from the inducti so a much higher number will have fought during the war than the initial numbers given