All posts by Quel Tarin
Stranger Things classes her as a telekinetic mutant, which is the definition of certain classes of psyker. The Upside Down is also a nightmare dungeon dimension, cribbed from D&D, which is one of the influences on Warhammer’s warp (not the only one, but most fantasy IP goes back to that mirror world in some fashion)
They had a revamp of the Warhammer Community site and team. Seems a lot of the dedicated sites just stopped getting updates and everything went through the main Warhammer/Community/Black Library.
I imagine they just kept the old sites hosted for copyright reasons.
Cleanse and bu…bble
She sounds like a wonderful companion, I’m sure she’s been very happy to live with you as your family. Like all good dogs, have no regrets.
Anyone with the Sacred Cog as their avatar should already know this one 😉
I think it’s fair given they have all acted in the interests of the legion/chapter rather than the interests of the Imperium. Heresy doesn’t have to be the same thing as treachery. Heresy can be acting in a way that benefits themselves at the expense of others.
As we’ve seen, some of the fallen are not traitors. Some of the unforgiven have amply demonstrated why they shouldn’t be forgiven.
Exactly what a heretic would say.
(Sorry, j/k)
Dark Angels being heretics is just lore.
Flashlights is a big daft given the rules and novels don’t really fit that any more. So I guess it is overused as it doesn’t really work any more (though it has been legit depending on the rulesets at the time).
Space Furries isn’t that common in meme land anymore. It’s mostly pasty Russians getting upset that there are black SW and their Nazi Nordic wet dreams aren’t working out.
I think the Guilliman memes are the most overused. They’re very common but have very little basis in the lore or setting. Except for the Matt Ward baiting ones. They’re fair game.
Tau are mostly Zhou Dynastic/Confucianist collectivists (with the same tendency to have a powerful elite who determine who is being properly collectivist enough). But the Confucianism influence of the societal harmony over the individual’s gain is pretty much the Greater Good’s closest real world equivalent.
I guess political scientists can point out how Confucianist collectivism came to breed state party communism, but they are not the same thing.
But I voted for the shovels. Because, well, no Krieg meme is complete without getting the heavy tactical shovel involved.
The AI trawling is thorough. I’ve had my answers incorporated into AI responses, but so have a lot of homebrew and ranting posts. AI is not actually intelligent, certainly not chatbot LLM. It scrapes and runs answers based on stratified data, so sometimes it’s right, sometimes it’s wrong, and sometimes it just wholesale invents things to please the user’s desire to have an answer (keep asking the same question phrases slightly differently and the prompts will get most AI responses to eventually hallucinate).
I guess it depends on how you define criminal. Since your local preacher often decides if your 19.5 hour work shift was sufficiently devout to spare you from heresy, taking a piss counts as blasphemy against the Throne.
But remember normal humans vastly, vastly outnumber cyborgs. It’s still cheaper to throw ten thousand humans at a problem than waste the augmetics. Even on void ships, servitors are plentiful, but outweighed by slave ratings and press ganged hivers. Servitors are ubiquitous, but those bionics cost a dollar!
Vat replicae isn’t rare for the Ad Mech, it’s the norm. It is rare in the general Imperium (notably outlawed too in most cases, like with the Krieg) but most Forge world populations are primarily replicants rather than womb-births (which is considered a relative oddity of the higher classes).
As noted above, there are vast processing plants to make servitors. Condemnation for heresy is common, but you have to consider that such condemnation doesn’t require a trial or even evidence of suspicion in many cases. That said, I’m not sure why there’d be few criminals in a human population running into the quintillions. There are actual penal colony planets with billions of condemned criminals incarcerated to fill out labour gangs, penal fighting regiments, or get sent off for cyborgisation.
You even have volunteers.
Some parts of the Ad Mech aren’t beneath using corpses barely reanimated with electrical impulses or cutting in an animal brain to a human skull etc. Tolerances vary depending on who’s asking questions.
Poor Grey Knights, destined to get one new sculpt every three years and fade away into oblivion. Soon they’ll be sitting in a bar with the Drukhari nodding at the memes…
But they are both good sculpts.
Yeah, you don’t need the Codex supplement. It just gave more of an overview of the battles and events in a timeline. You can read up on lexicanum or here for a recap.
They were both released as part of the WarZone Fenris event. The novel covers part of these events but in more of a focused way than an overall battle narrative.
Glad you enjoyed it, and I think I had a few minor reservations too. Which is going to be the case when you have an epic conclusion to one of the most epic settings in any IP. It’s almost bound to fail in a few ways, even if the whole thing is awesome in the main.
Just to say, there is a collection of stories called Age of Ruin which follows TEatD III out now. It’s worth a read.
1) I think there’s simply too much story and too many epic battles to give each the emotional climax of an ongoing set of beats. Each battle in the final books is almost an epic movie in itself. It risks becoming a set of novels with repeating climaxes which leaves the later ones a bit hollow. And you can’t let any overshadow the events in the throne room of Vengeful Spirit, even for Sigismund.
Also, Dan Abnett was at pains to give each battle its own flavour and style of writing. Sigismund’s is written in a Pilgrim’s Progress type epic poetry style. It isn’t heavy on detail, more like the sort of mythic overview a future poet might write into the histories once the details started to fade away from memory. I think the pacing of the story just needed to wrap things up, even if it goes off screen to an extent. In many ways, we know Sigismund lives for a long time yet, and his journey will be the secular soldier to the religious zealot mirroring much of the Imperium. We’re going to possibly hear from Sigismund again. Whereas others will never speak or fight again.
2) Keeler and Sindermann are two characters who suffered from author syndrome a bit too much, I thought. Keeler acts more as a plot device than a character (whereas in the Heresy main run she was more interesting as an ordinary person thrust into extraordinary circumstances, giving us readers an anchor point perspective). I think some authors, like Gav Thorpe and Guy Hayley, liked to play up Keeler as more of a zealot, captured by the spirit of the God Emperor. John French and Dan Abnett played her more as a cynic wrestling with her own faith and conscience. I suppose it’s accurate for a person in such extreme pressure to act in extreme ways and display complex behaviour. Few of us would be consistent if we were in the midst of a galaxy ending war with literal hell daemons.
I do think Keeler and Sindermann lost some of their personality though, and became plot pawns, doing plot points even if they seemed to contradict. But as above, maybe we can just put that down to mental stress and personality defects brought on by horror and moral trauma.
And the fact that the fandom apparently drove Dan Abnett to write that as his previous book wasn’t epic enough. So he goes Primarch holds his breath in space to punch traitors to space junk. Fandom: Acceptable.
As Thanatos says, the Primarchs have a mortal side and an immortal/demigod/warp component. They are - physically - very large and much tougher specimens of Space Marines, with the ability to survive insane punishment and heal at rates few creatures could match - and certainly no naturally evolved ones.
They do not have bulletproof skin and can bleed and be wounded with a sufficiently severe blow. In that respect it is very much a transhuman/Astartes thing just taken to its extremes. As mentioned, the main reason they are hard to kill is the hyper accelerated healing potential. Vulkan we all know about, but even those who are not clear perpetuals can come back from severe trauma. Fulgrim essentially regrew parts of his brain and skull after a sniper’s strike. Yes, it wasn’t a true kill shot, but the damage was done and he did recover entirely. Russ recovered from being stabbed through every major organ and bled out. Guilliman just survived ongoing void exposure in space by… checks notes… holding his breath and walking off his blood being frozen to ice.
Also as Thanatos says, there is a warp/spiritual element to their survivability too. Sanguinius shrugged off extreme wounds again and again, to the extent that being almost torn in half was something his physiology recovered from. But, later, a blow from Angron’s warped Black Blade made a savage wound which could not heal. That spiritual energy can be positive - preserving them from truly impossible damage which cannot be explained by enhanced physiology - or it can be negatively influenced. The Primarchs are wounded or killed most commonly when in a state of extreme despair or spiritual angst. That could just be put down to epic storytelling tropes, but it could also be that the warp is fickle and their near immortality can be destroyed by a great spiritual malaise.
Probably be classified as a Xenos or perhaps even a product of the warp given a massive beast emerging at that point would not be treated as something interesting but a threat.