Horus Heresy Pages from the Black Books

[Lord Marshal]

Looks to be a new series of articles pulling from the pages of- well, the Black Books.

 

First up are the Night Lords.

 

Quote

This is only the first sheaf from a vast library of lore that we’ll be dropping each Thursday for the foreseeable future, so come back next week when we open the file on the notorious Thramas Crusade – the Night Lords’ three-year campaign of terror against the Emperor’s worlds.

 

Edited 22 hours ago by Lord Marshal

[MoriyaSchism]

This resolution sucks. Looks insanely compressed when you try to zoom in. I'm surprised they released something like this even if it's free. You actually can't even get a good look at the artwork. I scan every document or book at 600 DPI with a relatively cheap commercial scanner so I'm not sure why they can't give us a better resolution when they probably have the raw print files. Even my 200 DPI scans look better than this. 

 

Genuinely terrible

Edited 21 hours ago by MoriyaSchism

[4b4dd0n]

They running out of ideas^^ Instead of talking about the "Black Books" they should bring them back. I think many people would love to see a Mars black book and the serie to continue, IF they can keep the level of lore frome the first "Black Books".

[StrangerOrders]

This can only be a good thing, I have all the Black Books and they do more for alot of the Legions in terms of flavor and identity than Black Library ever did (cough*Iron Hands*cough).

 

Giving free and easy access can only be a positive for getting people into Heresy.

 

Edit: I hope they release the BB Knight Houses and Titan Legions down the road too. More people need to know about the Loyalist Nightmare-Mushroom-People Knights!

Edited 21 hours ago by StrangerOrders

[LameBeard]

Fans: the Black Books were great but are out of print and were super-expensive and unwieldy 

GW: <makes bit of Black Books available for free>

Fans: GW why you treat me so bad?

[Lord Marshal]

20 minutes ago, 4b4dd0n said:

They running out of ideas^^ Instead of talking about the "Black Books" they should bring them back. I think many people would love to see a Mars black book and the serie to continue, IF they can keep the level of lore frome the first "Black Books".

 

If they brought the Black Books back, they'd be drowned in "this is slop because Alan Bligh wasn't involved" regardless of quality, so I can understand why they'd want to move away from it. Hell, even the much cheaper 2nd edition campaign books (Book 9 was £90 by the end iirc) didn't escape that comparison despite being of similar content wise.

 

When the alternative was probably paywalling it behind Warhammer+, I think dropping them for free - albeit being drip fed - is a cute idea.

 

Edited 21 hours ago by Lord Marshal

[dicebod]

Wow, the negative reactions to this are the epitome of "my free ice cream is too cold."

I have all the black books, and crack them open periodically exactly for this reason - to read the lore on each of the legions. I think it's great that everybody else will have the same opportunity.

[Brother Casman]

25 minutes ago, MoriyaSchism said:

This resolution sucks. Looks insanely compressed when you try to zoom in. I'm surprised they released something like this even if it's free. You actually can't even get a good look at the artwork. I scan every document or book at 600 DPI with a relatively cheap commercial scanner so I'm not sure why they can't give us a better resolution when they probably have the raw print files. Even my 200 DPI scans look better than this. 

 

Genuinely terrible

[snip]

Double-check your settings? I'm looking at the pdf and it doesn't look nearly this bad on my screen, even when zoomed in.

[darkhorse0607]

This is super welcome, and I hope they do this with the other Forgeworld books (Badab, Imperial Armour campaigns, etc). I love criticizing GW but I don't see a negative here at all

[MoriyaSchism]

3 minutes ago, Brother Casman said:

Double-check your settings? I'm looking at the pdf and it doesn't look nearly this bad on my screen, even when zoomed in.

I checked the pdf of the scan of book two I have and it looks fine while this new file I downloaded from GW always looks terrible like this. Nothing is wrong with my settings. The text scales just fine, the images included in the GW upload are just low resolution and compressed to hell. 

[Daylight]

This is perfect. I own most of the Black Books, but wasn’t able to snag all of them. I loved these sections that discussed the legions prior to finding their primarchs and where on Terra they recruited from initially. Stuff like the Iron Warriors and Alpha Legion having super high rates of gene-seed acceptance was a great way to explain how a legion could take such high casualties and keep going or be everyone at once like the AL. At the time these first came out there was so little information on what the legions were initially like, so I am glad fans who couldn’t pick these up back then can now have access.

[Fire Golem]

3 minutes ago, darkhorse0607 said:

This is super welcome, and I hope they do this with the other Forgeworld books (Badab, Imperial Armour campaigns, etc). I love criticizing GW but I don't see a negative here at all

Probably not, because they’re on the Vault as part of Warhammer Plus already. 

[No Foes Remain]

This is amazing news. I hope GW release the campaign sections as well

[Marshal Loss]

Phenomenal move from the team - gives the community (particularly newer fans) a great resource and having it be a regular thing on WarCom will get more people interested and keep heresy on people's radar. 

[Corswain]

I missed a couple of the black books and would jump all over a reprint but this is a nice consolation prize.

Really looking forward to these.