Patrick Stuart's Blog, page 8
April 18, 2023
RoC RaW - The Creation of Tristian le Tigre, Slave to Darkness
Of course, the fact that I now possess both means I can attempt the impossible; rolling up a Chaos Champion using the 'Realms of Chaos' system, RaW, that's Rules as Written.
I attempted this wonder on a friendly Discord, I have edited out the other responses but thank you to the unnamed person who came up with a PDF of 'Warhammer Armies' by Nigel Stillman.
(Yes, rolling on this wonderous labyrinth of tables did indeed require access to a totally seperate and long out-of-print book, in addition to the two expensive reprints I already had.)
Without further ado, let us witness the birth of Tristian le Tigre, Champion of Carnalpierce!
Part One - a Standard Human?
pjamesstuart;
Ok, #RoCRAW here I go..
"Generate the Champoins Starting Profile using the Starting Profile table..is there a dice roller on here?
[1d100] Roll: [57] Result: 57
They are a... Human!
[1d100] Roll: [2] Result: 2
A standard human! 😭
Move 4, Weapons Skill 3, Ballistic Skill 3, Strength 3, Toughness 3, Wounds 1, Initiative 3, Attacks 1, Leadership 7, Intelligence 7, Cool 7 Will Power 7
Literally the most standard human you could imagine, no wonder they turned to chaos.
Next, the Starting Equipment Table
So, this is a point-spend thing where you get a certain semi random number of points and get to spend them depending on your level, but that level starts at "5 Hero or Wizard" while I am level 1 or zero, and this isn't mentioned, so I suppose I get no equipment
Next, I receive a 'Mark of Chaos' from my Patron. I am allowed to choose whether to follow Korne, Slaanesh, Nurgle, Tzeentch or Chaos Undivided.
I am also allowed to generate a Chaos Patron demon, so I will do that next.
Creating a Patron - the birth of Carnalpierce
My Demonic Patrons Origin is;
[1d3] Roll: [2] Result: 2
Its is "a composite demonic entity founded upon one or more highly focused souls - such souls are not dissolved in the warp but retain their own integrity as deamons."
Next, choose a mortal creature as a basis for the demon, refer to the Universal Creature Table and randomly generate a creature from it.
[3 1d10] Rolls:[3] Result: 3[4] Result: 4[7] Result: 7
its a Troglodyte ...
[1d100] Roll: [33] Result: 33
just a standard Troglodyte...
Move 4, WS 3, BS 3, S 4, T 4, W 2, I 1, A 2, Ld 9, Int 4, Cl 9, WP 9
So despite being a standard demonic immortal Troglodyte this thing is actually better than my standard human champion, except for intelligence where it seems like I am smarter than my Patron
So this is clearly some shitty back-alley demonic patron deal between the absolute bottom of the barrel demon and some random schlub
Refer to the Chaos Attributes table and generate D6+3 attributes. (If it turns into a spawn or becomes mindless I am meant to re-roll.
[1d6+3] Roll: [2] Result: 5
Ok five attributes, here we go..
[5 1d100] Rolls:[46] Result: 46[13] Result: 13[25] Result: 25[1] Result: 1[5] Result: 5
Ok that was meant to be 5 d100 so I will roll a d10 for each and add that as a single digit to the end
[5 1d10] Rolls:[6] Result: 6[5] Result: 5[5] Result: 5[2] Result: 2[9] Result: 9
So me results are ...
466 - HORNS!135 - BESTIAL FACE (see main chart...)255 - CHAOS WERE (see main chart)12 - AGILITY59 - BESTIAL FACE (see main chart) again, I guess it can have two?
So for the 'Bestial Faces' there is a sub-table where usually they get the face of their patron god, but I feel like the horned troglodyte is a servant of chaos undivided so I will roll twice on the sub-sub table..
[2 1d20] Rolls:[10] Result: 10[18] Result: 18
One face is that of an EAGLE! (+1 bite attack and excellent vision gained.
The second is that of a SPIDER (+1 bite attack)
So the horned, agile troglodyte Demon has the face of an Eagle and the face of a Spider, but its also a Chaos Were, which means it has a second form, which means more sub-tables...
Generate a random Chaos Creature under the procedure set out under 'Instant' Chaos Spawn, but only give it D6 Chaos Attributes. Keep a seperate record of this creature, including a seperate record of fear points, as this is the mutants Chaos Were-Form
The mutant is now subject to frenzy, when it becomes frenzied it must make a WP test or become frenzied for the rest of the battle.
It gains +2 fear points when it changes into its new form
Ok, on to page 65 of 'Slaves to Darkness', only give it D6 Chaos Attributes
So, basic form first;
[1d6] Roll: [1] Result: 1
[1d10] Roll: [1] Result: 1
So its were-form basis is that of a GIANT BAT
How many Chaos Attributes..
[1d6] Roll: [2] Result: 2
TWO Chaos Attributes
[2 3d10] Rolls:[8, 8, 5] Result: 21[8, 6, 5] Result: 19
885 is ... TELEKINESIS!
865 is... TALL!
No sorry, 865 is TAIL!
"This tail is not strong enough to give the mutant a tail attack, nor can it manipulate anything if prehensile"
So! My Chaos Patron is a Demon of CHAOS UNDIVIDED. It has the form of a horned Troglodyte with two faces, one of an Eagle and one of a Spider. It is an agile being.
But it is also frenzied and if enraged will transform into the form of a giant bat with a prehensile (but not otherwise dangerous) tail, with the power of TELEKINESIS
"Modify the creatures profile as follows;
Strength - double up to a maximum of 10
Toughness - add +2 up to a maximum of 10
Wounds Double
Initiative Double"
Its stats should now be ;
Move 4, WS 3, BS 3, S 8, T 6, W 4, I 2, A 2, Ld 9, Int 4, Cl 9, WP 9
So still a lesser demon but now a bit more obviously demonic
"The creature grows to 1 1/2 times its size. It acquires horns, wings and a tail if it does not already have them....
Kind of feel like rolling horns to begin with was a bit of a waste but ok
So now its a HUGE horned, winged betailed troglodite which is agile with the face of an eagle and that of a spider, and it can were into a HUGE Giant Bat with Horns! Which is telekinetic!
C;he had horns before it was cool
pjamesstuart;
The creature becomes demonic and is subject to the normal rules for Greater Demons, ie;
1. It cannot be harmed by normal weapons...
2. Its own attacks are magical
3. In the material universe the Demon will be subject to instability
4. It is not effected by psychological affects other than those caused by one of the four Great Powers in person
5. If it has spell casting powers it can use them without expending magic points.
6. It can fly as a swooper with a max speed of 32 and etc etc
7. Causes fear
So now he needs a name. "A name can be generated by the demonic name tables in 'Slaves to Darkness',
Ok, lets go..
"The number of elements in a Deamons name depends on the number associated with the Chaos God it serves.."
Its not quite RAW but lets say a D6
[1d6] Roll: [1] Result: 1
It has one element to its name..
[1d6] Roll: [6] Result: 6
[1d10] Roll: [7] Result: 7
So the demons TRUE NAME is..... EE
But it will also have a 'Use-Name'
First part..
[1d10] Roll: [4] Result: 4
[1d20] Roll: [2] Result: 2
'CARNAL' is the first part
Second part..
[1d10] Roll: [7] Result: 7
[1d20] Roll: [16] Result: 16
'PIERCE' is the second part
So, I serve the demon 'Carnalpierce' who's True Name (speak it not) is 'EE'
He beeth a great trogolodyte with wings, horns and a tail and one face be that of an Eagle for he sees all, and the other that of a Spider'
Yet he have a second more wrathful form, that of a great horned Bat, Huge as a dragon, which castes all about with only a thought.
'Carnalpierce' is a composite demonic entity founded upon one or more highly focused souls, and serves Chaos Undivided!
"Roll D6+3 times on the 'Demonic Trappings' table below..."
ok
[1d6+3] Roll: [1] Result: 4
[4 1d6] Rolls:[3] Result: 3[4] Result: 4[2] Result: 2[4] Result: 4
He wears CHAOS ARMOUR
He is MIGHTY in STRENGTH, making his Stats now
Move 4, WS 3, BS 3, S 10, T 6, W 4, I 2, A 2, Ld 9, Int 4, Cl 9, WP 9
And he wields a might CHAOS WEAPON
His weapon is....
[1d100] Roll: [38] Result: 38
a LONG BONE (eg femur)
A fitting weapon for the Dweller in Stone
I think thats it for the patron?
The Gifts of Chaos
The Champion recieves the 'Mark of Chaos' from his Patron.
ok
The Mark of Chaos Undivided...
"If the new Champion chooses to worship Chaos in its undivided glory rather etc etc.. he receives a Random Reward from the Chaos Rewards Table, he also receives a random Chaos Attribute.
Ok, the random Reward..
[1d100] Roll: [34] Result: 34
ok thats just a random attribute, so thats two attributes then..
[3 1d10] Rolls:[4] Result: 4[5] Result: 5[10] Result: 10
450 is.... GROWTH! D3+1 times original size!
[1d3+1] Roll: [1] Result: 2
TWICE THE SIZE OF A MAN, his stats are now..
Move 5, Weapons Skill 3, Ballistic Skill 3, Strength 5, Toughness 4, Wounds 2, Initiative 2, Attacks 1, Leadership 7, Intelligence 6, Cool 7 Will Power 7
Plus one fear point
"Durrr, Carnalpierce make me big an strong durrr"
Z;Hail Carnalpierce! EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE
pjamesstuart;[3 1d10] Rolls:[10] Result: 10[7] Result: 7[8] Result: 8
78! is... BESTIAL FACE
[1d20] Roll: [19] Result: 19
The face of a TIGER! Plus one Bite Attack, plus Night Vision! Plus an extra Fear Point!
Move 5, Weapons Skill 3, Ballistic Skill 3, Strength 5, Toughness 4, Wounds 2, Initiative 2, Attacks 2, Leadership 7, Intelligence 6, Cool 7 Will Power 7
Fear Points - 2
"Raww grrr ragghhh"
Now I roll on my RETINUE TABLE...
F;Someone has to kitbash this dude.
The Retinue of Tigerface
[1d100] Roll: [71] Result: 71
2d4 Mercenary Band and Captain
"Mercenaries retain their soldierly organisation and bravado but are otherwise very much like warbands in their way of life. Sometimes they will join a Chaos Champion whose reputation suggests a promise of loot and mutual protection."
"Mercenaries can be represented by any of the troops types included in the Bretonian or Empire Armies or Human Mercinary or Ally contingents in Warhammer Armies. Alternately you may prefer to equip them as a standard type with a basic profile, light armour, shields, and either double-handed swords, spear or crossbows.
It is certainly more interesting to generate them as if they were part of a defeated army. refer to Warhammer Armies and choose the list you wish to use. Randomly determine an army list from amongst all the ranks and file troops available to the army. All troops come with the basic equipment listed in the box, and there is a 50% chance the entire unit will be equipped with up to D3 of the options listed.
The Band is lead by a mercinary captain who will be of the same nationality and type as the others - he has a randomly determined profile...."
[1d100] Roll: [34] Result: 34
Captain is a 5 Hero - Move 4, WS 4, BS 4, S 4, T3, W 1, I 4, A 2, Ld 7, Cl 7, WP 7
[2d4] Roll: [2, 2] Result: 4
He leads a band of four men!
I don't think I have even a PDF of Warhammer Armies, if anyone does let me know
K;Yes, I have that oneI have pdf54 mbLet me upload it to GDrive
pjamesstuart;Thanks!I feel like we are using it in the spirit intended.
C;So I was picturing a Troglodyte like the D&D monster but they're presented a little differently here
sort of proto-kroxigor?pjamesstuart;So, shall we go with Brettonian or Empire army?
Well, we can let the die decide. 1 for Empire, 2 for Brettonia.
[1d2] Roll: [2] Result: 2
A defeated Brettonian army!
Z;are Bretonnians in this era of Warhammer already Francophone Round-Table knights?
C;Pretty much
pjamesstuart;It looks like even more so.
The rank and file troops choices are;
Villains, Ribalds, Arbalstiers, Rapscallions, Brigands and Rascals
Those are the actual troops choices names
Z;delicious!
pjamesstuartSo if we go1. Villains, 2. Ribalds, 3. Arbalstiers, 4. Rapscallions, 5. Brigands and 6. Rascals
[4 1d6] Rolls:[2] Result: 2[2] Result: 2[5] Result: 5[2] Result: 2
Three Ribalds and a Brigand
K;three "2"?This is rather nice(I initially mis-saw the roll as it it was 4 "2" hence the reaction)
C;ah nice, you roll for each individually?
pjamesstuart;Its says "Randomly determine an amry list from amongst all the ranks and file troops available to the army." so I improvised
C;Bretonnians of this edition are more frog and snail focused than they would be later
pjamesstuart;These are 'Ribalds'
K;This is not what dictionary told me but makes more sense
pjamesstuart;Brigands
"All troops come with the basic equipment listed in the box, and there is a 50% chance the entire unit will be equipped with up to D3 of the options listed." what?
Ok a 50% chance for the Ribalds!
1 is yes, 2 is no
[1d2] Roll: [2] Result: 2
NO!
K;I.e. Brigant might have a two-handed sword, I think
pjamesstuart;And for the Brigand![1d2] Roll: [2] Result: 2
No!
K;Nope
pjamesstuart;So they just have crappy weapons and armourmakes sense if they have been defeated.
Z;(Hope you don't mind me taking a look at the book @K damn, the book is fucking charming
K;The link is free for allI'll take it down in a few days but if people wish the pdf the pdf is here to download
pjamesstuart;So according to this book a Level 5 Brettonian Hero is a 'Baron'
K;Robber baron?Or is it a Captain?
pjamesstuart ;I will roll randomly to see what kind of unit he might have belonged to1. Chevalier D'Honnour2. Chevalier De Notre Dame de Battale3. Noblesse d Epee4. Chevallier Rampants
[1d4] Roll: [4] Result: 4
K;Rampants...ram-pants? 🐏 + 👖
pjamesstuart;
Did he keep his barding and shield? 1 is yes, 2 is no
[1d2] Roll: [1] Result: 1
Yes! Mon Baronne!
So this was a Brettonian army that was badly beaten. This young Baron managed to escape with a handful of men.
If we take the original stat line as a guide, my Chaos Champion was just a Ribald to begin with, before he made a deal with 'Carnalpierce, the Dweller in Stone'. Now he 'leads' (he's a pretty dumb giant tiger-faced man) this doomed group of mercenaries, their honour long forgotten!
There are some 'Narrative Tables', the most omni-applicable looks to be the 'locations' table, lets see what we get..
[1d100] Roll: [22] Result: 22
"The wastelands of the north are full of ruins. Most were prosperous cities before the incursions of Chaos swept them away.Many of those desolate places shelter hidden treasures buried by their destruction. Most house more recent inhabitants in the form of warbands, rampaging bands of Beastment and other unwelcome creatures."
A bit boring but ok. Looks like we delved too greedily and too deep and I was confronted by 'Carnalpierce' in the caves of a ruined city in the northern wastes, and made a deal with Chaos.
K;Holed up in wastelands after going for Chaos after the defeat and looking for some chaos artifact for their patron?
pjamesstuart;All to save mon beloved Baronne..
I went here for a name for Mon Baronne https://www.realmofplastic.com/warham...
And got 'Gornemant de Grescfort'
Another random generator gives me;
The Champion of Carnalpierce - Tristian le Tigre!
His Mortal Lord - Sir Gornemant de Grescfort
Three Ribalds - Huchon Pie, Talbot Marcel, Guibert de Bonpre
And the Brigand Evrard du Mesnil
We stand ready to battle for Chaos! (and gold)
Its more poetic if he got warped there out of pure feudal loyalty, despereately trying to preserve the life of his lord!
So that was fun
Curious that most of the other characters were more interesting than the main chaos champion but still fun to do
Evrard, you brigand! Were you somehow behind all this?
April 13, 2023
The End & The Death - BINGO!
Before the publication of ‘The End and the Death (PartOne)’, I came up with a BINGO CARD; would I, a man who has read or audiblednearly the entire Horus Heresy series, be able to predict the end?
Only Part One is out so far, lets see how I am doing…..
Erda: she’s back baby! Back from the VASE.
Erda! The Emperors sort-of GF and mother of thePrimarchs (not Amar Astarte, a differentone). She had enough of Neoth and his spooky ways and, after playing some partin the triggering of the Scattering of the Primarchs, went off to live in thedesert and be a super-witch.
Dan Abnett invented her out of whole cloth, and at thelast minute, I think in Saturnine? Then I think Chris Wraight packed her awayneatly in ‘Warhawk’ (I think?). I had assumed she was just too similar inconcept to Amar Astarte, the Selinar Gene Witches and a few other factions.
Last seen – beat up by a bunch of chaos demons and herremaining anima… in a vase?
I had assumed that since Abnett had invented her shewould magically pop back up in the final book. I was wrong! So far… One of thefew Abnettverse characters who doesn’t get a look in, I retain highhopes for her rebirth in the last volume FOR SOME REASON.
Enuncia
The magical Enochian word-of-god super-sorcery languageAbnett invented in the middle of the Heresy, and gave as part of the backstoryto Oll Persson and the Emperor while at the same time integrating it into hislatest Eisenhorn books set 10,000 years later.
YES! Of course we have to have more Enuncia. Or atleast its mentioned. John Grammaticus still has a magic word he can say oncewhich will do something super-magical though he doesn’t know what.
It’s a free get-out-of-plot tool and I fully expect Johnto say his magic word in the next book.
Place your bets for what the last word of the super-magiclanguage to be spoken will be in the comments below!
GASP! Something-someones-on-the-golden-throne!
So there are a bunch of 40k conspiracy theories about whoends up on the Golden Throne and how. Some say the Emperor dies and Horus endsup on it, others Malcador or whatever.
Its book one so too early to see but at this state Ihighly doubt any jiggery-pokery will take place. Abnett seems committed toproducing a relatively orthodox interpretation of events with sketchinground the edges but no massive twists.
I will call this now – The Emperor ends up on the GoldenThrone.
He Wrote Three Fucking Books
And
O My God He Wrote Four Fucking Books!Failed so far and I would judge unlikely to be fulfilled.
HOWEVER
The Book we do get is not only physically gigantic butVoluminous as hell. A huge, rambling, staggering baroque Titan of a thing,stumbling towards its end.
Will the next book be any shorter? Mmmmmmaybe. It willcertainly have all the actual events in it. For reference, the lastscene of the previous book; Echoes of Eternity has the Vengeful Spirit loweringits shields. It takes until the last third of this one for the Imperials toactually go up there.
Euprati Keeler; LETS BURN!
Not only wrong but so ridiculously wrong its nearlylaughable. Keeler, so long as Abnett was writing her, was a classic Abnettylikeable Paragon. In ‘Warhawk’ Wraight takes her on a hard right turn intoproto-Torquemada, she is found wandering around with skulls, carefully planningmass suicide assaults on enemy Astartes where her flock will clog the enemieschainsword with their own flesh, simping for Sigismund in his super-sayanpuritan mode and talking about how aces the power of pure hatred is.
I half-expected this to carry on in ‘TEatD’.
It does not at all. Abnett pretty much ignores theKeeler of ‘Warhawk’ and just rotates Keeler back to being the paragon saint ofa pretty-reasonable-actually Imperial Cult;
“What I’m sayingis that hope contains the future, and it’s the one thing we have. More potentthan a cartload of shells.’
‘Is this where youtell me the Emperor has a plan?
…
‘Alright then. Ithink He does have a plan, and its contingent on us believing in it. Ourhope in it, our faith in it, makes it happen. We are the plan and the plan isus. The Emperor doesn’t have a plan that, if we perish, will still come tofruition. The plan is us.’
Basilio Fo! Remember me? Supervillain guy? Kill-All-Astartes-Guy? Remember?
Well if we didn’t before we will now!
Basilio Fo turned up in an Abnett short story ages ago; aformer Age-of-Strife Warlord/Evil Scientist, a Mega-Bile if you will, who wasdriven off Terra by the Emperors rise. A super-evil (?) plot-armoured ‘genius’,he has a plan to make a super-weapon to kill all the Astartes, good and bad. How?Who fucking knows. He turned up in Saturnine and was involved in variousshenanigans, now he is back for a sub-plot of his very own where the Custodesand Malcadors-chosen are fighting over him and his last-option super-plot.
His sections are a little silly. He outwits custodies bybeing arch and mysterious. He will for sure be back to do something inthe final book! Although since that something clearly isn’t setting off hisanti-astartes super weapon fuck knows what it will be.
jJHonN GramATTIcuS
A character that absolutely no-one but Dan Abnett likes,but he’s the one writing this book so FUCK ALL YA’LL, it’s John GrammaticusAdventure Time baby!
Strangely, one of the only pseudo-American accentedcharacters in all of the Audiobook-universe of 40k, John is some dingus who wasmade immoral by creepy aliens in return for turning on his own species. Thealiens had a plan to make sure Horus won, thinking he would ‘burn out’ chaos ina grand madness that would end with humanity extinct and the galaxy at peace.In pursuit of this, old John ran around doing secret agent stuff.
He helped turn the Alpha Legion to the xenos’ cause,tried to off himself, changed sides (?), met Erebus, met Eldrad Ulthuan, nearlykilled Vulkan but healed him instead? Got magic scissors(?). Just did a bunchof random ping-pong shit, generally without a stable plan and while complainingabout himself, ended up joining up with Oll Persson with some kind of, againvery vague, plan to somehow something-something the Emperor. Oh along the wayhe got a fragment of Enuncia.
I am pretty sure Abnett thinks this guy is a sexy enigmawrapped in a tantalising interior moral conflict where as he is just the avatarof the least interesting aspects of Abnetts writing style. The wholeget-Oll-into-the-Palace plan is riddled with last-minute janky plot bullshit,ultimately Grammaticus has an “I know this guy from work” moment where he meetswith Vulkan again in the Throne Room and Vulkans like I know you, you stabbedme with that thingy that time back in book twenty or something.
Probably this tiresome fuck will play some kind of majorrole in the final (?) book and speak his magic word somehow.
TROOP-PER-PER-SON
So.. Oll Persson, have I explained this yet? I will tryto be quick.
Oll Persson (“All Person/Everyman”) is a Perpetual Abnettinvented in ‘Know No Fear’. He has been alive maybe longer than the Emperor butinstead of becoming a super-psychic magic man or Dr Who or something he hasjust lead life as a near normal guy. Heis allegedly ‘Catheric’ and has a crucifix (which gets stranger when Abnett infersthat the Emperor might have been Jesus at one point;
“He has appearedas male or female or neither, as child or elder, peasant or king, magician orfool. He as been an entire cartomantic arcana, for the Master of Mankind ifalso a master of disguise. He has performed all of these roles ell, withdelicacy. He has been humble when humility was needed, gentle when softness wasthe best device, sly, amiable, reassuring, commanding, caring. He was beenterrible when terror was the only recourse, and sometimes meek in order toinherit the Earth.” [Italics mine].
Oll was the Emperors original ‘Warhampster’ and helpedhim destroy the Tower of Babel (I know, it gets worse), before literallystabbing him in the back. After the fall of Calth he picks up a magic knife andan assortment of symbolic/representative followers and has been traipsing aboutthe Galaxy planning to reach the Emperor in order to do…. Something? Honestlyfor the sheer amount of blood and treasure expended in it, Olls plan is prettyfucking vague.
One of his followers is ‘Graft’ a farm servitor who seemsto be getting a bit more sentient after exposure to a galaxies worth ofmadness, and its Graft who calls him ‘TROOP-PER-PER-SON’. And yes Graft is inthis, though doesn’t do much! Maybe he/they will do something in the next one.
DOOM-BREED
Ok so the Emperor canonically fights Hitler on theVengeful Spirit. (It hasn’t happened yet).
Arguably he does. In the 2nd EditionChaos Codex DoomBreed is mentioned as a Demon prince who was a warlord of oldearth and became a chosen of Khorne and there are vague suggestions he may havebeen Hitler.
But Ok, even if he isn’t Hitler, he’s still awarlord of old Earth which means the Emperor almost certainly knew of him, andwe know Doom Breed-related demons are on Terra during the siege as Horus namesthem.
SO, if the Emperor doesn’t meet Doom-Breed and at leastsay something like; “Ah, we meet again.. Ghengis Khan” or some shit likethat, I will be well pissed off.
But it hasn’t happened yet.
Dream-War in the Warp
Not that much in this book really.
In ‘Saturnine’ Malcador goes and visits the Emperor insome dream-scape where he is facing off against the Chaos Gods and Horus, muchof all the Siege books has the Emperors ‘psychic shield’ slowly decaying andfalling apart and in tE&tD the chaos powers are basically melting space andtime in and around the palace, making it even more of a dreamscape (and veryconvenient for moving people around for various scenes). Plus the VengefulSpirit is itself now basically a portal to the Realms of Chaos. But there is noexplicit Dream-War scene.
Dark Angels Turn It Off And On Again
The Astronomican! The Dark Angels are up inside it andare trying to activate it! A bunch of Plague Guys are trying to stop them!There are various plots and business going on! They have not yet turned it onand its looking like in this one instance Abnett may subvert ourexpectations by setting up some kind of psychic beacon in the palaceitself.
Someone makes a pointed comment about history, memory and truth,translation; SHUT UP NERDS.
Ok, not quite. There is no ‘shut up nerds’ but aswe know, every late-period Heresy book must include a digression onhistory and memory so the writer can be sure we know they have a degree.
“…. ‘I meant…what’s the point of a poem? And when does a poem stop being just words andbecome something else? When do words gain power? Under what circumstances?’
‘Power?’
‘You know what Imean. The reason we’re here.’
He does know whatshe means, and yet he still can’t answer. If any abreactive magik lurks in theHall of Leng, he has no idea how they will find it, or recognise it if they dofind it. Where does verse, or prose, or memoir stop, and ritual begin? Canthings be both at once? Are there incantations of control stashed here in thisgreat collection, under lock and key, or merely the indulgent scribblings ofthe ages, the fancy of idle men in easier eras, who set out to do no more thanpraise a lover, or articulate some feeling, or describe a flower or, perhaps,merely rhyme for the sake of rhyme? The arts, whatever they might be, have cometo play an increasingly insignificant role in Imperial life, eroded by Strifeand Old Night, until they are vestigial memories, non-functioning organsdwarfed by rational science and secular industry. He recognises, belatedly, hisown lack of knowledge. Did the arts ever have a purpose, at any time inhistory, or have they always been decorative? Does some art have true functionand capacity and other art not? How does he, with a mind raised in the schoolsof the modern Imperium, even tell?”
Flashback-to-history-as-recalled-in-the-21st-Centry (and noother time. Remember the Age of Terra? No, us neither.)
As we all know, when someone in 30k or 40k quotessomething from the history of man (at least 30 millennia, in which we are inthe 3rd), its always something from ‘our’ history
I may not be able to score a complete victory but I think I can score astrong victory.
“Day will not savethem, and we own the night.”
– HorusLupercal wait, no, Amiri Baraka ??
Opening verses by Charlotte Mew, the Emerald Tablet andCorinthians HE HAS FOUROPENING QUOTES PEOPLE!
In the above mentioned ‘Library’ chapter we have quotesfrom Milton, Tennyson & Shelly!
Fuck It, Oll & Neoth were in WWII Together
Sadly not a score. I can live in hope though.
Of all this Bullshit, only I Kyrill Sindermann survived to tell the tale,and die in a kind of crappy book much later, hey, I’ll take it!
Yes Kyrill is in this, its him crawling through thelibrary. Too late to say if only he survives but if the last book is asmuch of a ‘Greatest Hits’ story as this one, can we expect Kyril to face offwith poor old Samus again?
Sangy Dies in Some Bullshit Way
He ain’t dead yet! And looking at how things are going Iexpect his death to be classic rather than subverting expectations. Abnettloves a paragon and Sangy is the paragon of paragons. I am hoping for Horus tobe like “I could break his spine, but I could not break.. his spirit”and for Sangy to get like four noble death speeches.
“It was all part of my plan”
Pretty much, see ‘Horus Cries’ below.
Hows-Malcador-Doing-Cutaways. OUCH!
Ouch indeed! Not just cutaways but he is the semi-omniscientfirst-person narrator of much of the book!
Its a neat conceit. Malcador is less insanely godlikethat the Emperor so he can talk to the audience almost like a normal person. Hespends a few chapter giving us a lowdown on how things are going. Once he is onthe Golden Throne, as well as being slowly incinerated, he gets quasi DrManhattan powers and can perceive the flow of fate or whatever but can’tactually communicate with anyone in-world, but he can see all the tricks andschemes of the siege, talk to us and do spooky straaands-ov-faate ‘nudges’ totry to stop the unfolding disaster, which links him to almost everyone’soverplot.
I, Robute Guilliman, am also in this book! (And more than you might haveexpected!
Failed! He’s barely in it! Maybe he will be in the next one?
NPC arrives, gives chapter-length “explanation” for another writersprevious fuckups, disappears
Amazingly for a Siege of Terra book, this does not happenat all! (I think.) (But it may in the next one, see below).
The Above Happens More than Once
I don’t think it even happened once. Pain.
Rogal Dorn; “The Emperors Dream is Dead (again, but more this time), also,I am Goth now
Nnnnearly. I was so close, all I needed was a classic‘The Emperors Dream is Dead’ from RG, but I don’t think I even got one. He doesgo a bit dark and edgy towards the end where he is trapped in the chaos realmfor relative centuries.
Oh Fuck the Blood Angels have gone Mental! Fucking ruuuuuuuun!
Hasn’t happened yet but I hold out hope for the nextbook.
Ha ha! Its me; Abaddon, I’m ba… of fuck its Sigismund! Run!
Abaddon is briefly in this, he has a classictraitor siege scene of ‘This is no longer a war of legions boo hoo’, anddecides to go back to the Vengeful Spirit. That’s all we get and I thinkSigismund is still on the surface? So we may not get that meetup.
Surprise Intervention by … Oan Mkoll! He fell through time! (And is also aperpetual)
It was low odds but I almost feel I got this one inspirit. tE&tD is so… Abnetty, I almost wouldn’t put it past himto just go ‘fuck it’ and somehow link it into his 40k work. At least so far ashis heresy books have gone, he has brought back… well, everyone, everycharacter he ever invented, every plotline, every bit of fluffy nonsense, everygood idea and every bad idea. Its like he never left. More and more it seems tome there isn’t one Heresy series but several, with each writer essentiallyfollowing their own themes and tendencies and pet characters, and favouritecharacter portrayals even when it doesn’t quite work.
That Sniper Who Went Mad On The Vengeful Spirit, remember him? Well he’sback, and he snipes someone!
Sadly completely forgotten, though he may still be on the‘Spirit’ and the majority of this massive book was spent just getting the maincast there so I have some hope for book two. What if he snipes Doombreed! Iwill probably shit myself in pleasure.
Dogent Krank (who?) You Did a Thing!
One of Olls not very interesting companions, I think inthis he does actually do something though I can’t remember what.
I Herbert Zyes (who?) am the key to this mystery!
Who indeed. Another of team-all-person. He is in this. Hesays some things? I don’t think he is the key to any mysteries.
The Final Paragraph will be broken down into individual sentences, eachsold separately.
No signs of this so far, unless you could the sheergargantuan SPREAD of the book itself. I feel like there is half a chance thatGW will try something at the end though. Come on geedubs! There is always morecash you can squeeze from a property!
The final sentence will be broken into letters and punctuation marks, eachsold through a gachapon ‘lucky dip’ system, can YOU collect them ALL?
Could still happen.
CORAX! turns up through the webway and helps out Vulkan! SURPRISEMOTHERFUCKERS! (they never meet again)
This might still happen and I am holding out hope! I willhave a cry if it happens!
Russ is useless
Of course Russ is always useless and is so again here. Heis dying on some moon or something.
Actaea; "Yes I was CYRENE VALANTION all this time!
She was! (Or at least says she was). The mysterious blindsorcerer lady who just turned up and who seemed a lot like the sexy blind prophetesswho hung out with the Word Bearers was in fact that lady, or at least says sheis.
One of Olls ablative-plot-armour-companions, she ittraipsing along with them with some vague but mysterious purpose in mind. Willshe turn out to be evil? (It’s the Abnettverse so probably yes.)
Actaea; "Yes I was NOT CYRENE VALANTION all this time! Surprisemotherfuckers!
Ok, this doesn’t happen this book, HOWEVER, its notcompletely impossible that it will happen.
Xtra points if both of the above
We will see……
Yes I, KATT, random psychic farm girl, actually become MORIANA! (youthought it would be Actea but she was actually.. [randombullshit randombullshit]"
SO – Moriana is a mysterious seer in later 40k, she ismeant to be one of the original members of the Inquisition who has “seen toomuch” and turned traitor and gone to hang out with Abaddon. It is not clearwhat she is up to, if she is really a traitor or a double or triple agent orwhat.
Probably someone will turn out to be Moriana, but whom.
Katt is another of Team-Oll. A random farm girl who hasbeen “seeing too much” in the horrible spaces between realities and whose psychicpowers have slowly been growing from exposure to the warp and generalawfulness.
Will this turn out to be the blind seer Moriana, Katt orsomeone else?
Someone turns out to be Promeus!
Promeus is another of the ‘original’ Inquisition. No ideawho this is going to be.
Inquisitor Gregor Eisenhorn closes the book, "And that was the (fictionalised)history of the Horus Heresy somehow, a fascinating text" .. then he WAKESUP - even him reading the book was a DREAM!
It could still happen!
Dream-Sequence where Abnett seems genuinely baked on epilepsy meds but theeditors were all too scared to admit they didn't understand it.
Sadly nothing quite like this yet.
It’s me! Limited Edition Space Marine 2! did a thing! AND I was part of a gigantic overplot which sounds like ajust made it up let me explain very quickly
Erda had a pet space marine she called ‘LE2’, probably areference to a very early GW sculpt. LE2 has joined team-Oll and willpresumably do something interesting at some point. Hopefully.
It’s me! The Fucking Emperor First Person chapter baby! I finally get to dosomething and I am going to look COOL AS SHIT doing it! I FIGHT HITLER IN THIS!
He does NOT get a 1st person chapter, or fightHitler (YET), but we do get to hear more of him speaking (near) frankly withSanguinius et-al and we get to see him actually DO STUFF so that’s nice.Hopefully he will do ever more stuff in the next one. He should try to pack inthe events as he doesn’t have much time.
Yes I, Amar Astarte have returned! To do a thing! Probably ether destroythe Astartes or save them from Basilio Fo offscreen.
She has not turned back up and there is no sign of her sofar. She’s not an Abnettverse character so I would be surprised if she doesturn up.
The final, final FINAL book is actually a series of sub-articles which willbe sold separately through Games Workshops
Ok I overplayed the joke but would you really be THATsurprised if they actually did this?
Horus Cries! (Burning Tears)
Horus!
I have spoken a lot in my Corposant series about the‘black boxing’ of both Horus and the Emperor so we get to see very little ofthe actual drives and personalities who are at the centre of thissuper-mega-war. The Emperor is a multi-minded trans-reality warp-beast andHorus is increasingly shut down, visibly insane, deluded and broken.
Here we get to see Horus actually DO STUFF. He is fuckingnuts! Great.
Ever since ‘Horus Rising, Horus has increasingly beenisolated, insane, erratic, and as I said, hollowed out. In tE&tD Horus isclearly fugueing and has space altzheimers and is barely holding any sense ofreality together.
It looks like what Abnett is going for is thatHorus is SUPER SANE ACTUALLY, or at least, that the real (?) Horus wasdeliberately hiding his true core and now super-demonic personality behind aseries of masks set up to be just competent enough to get him here, and topersuade the Emperor that he was actually as broken and empty as he looked.Then, when the Emperor commits to his final attack, these para-personalitiesfall away and are forgotten and Horus comes out as a cackling super-badass.Will Horus become the ‘Dark King’ who has been prophesied for, well just forthis book as Abnett just made him up, or will fighting him be the catalyst toturn the Emperor into the ‘Dark King’ the 5TH CHAOS GOD BABY!
The ultimate ‘WELL, ACTUALLY’ of a mega-seriesalready well-stocked with ‘Well Actually’. Forget Chris Wraight explaining thatMortarion isn’t dumb, just badly written, or ADB explaining that actually theEmperor said something completely different to Magnus, it turns out that well,actually, all the bits of the series where Horus was written as a puppet ofchaos were ALL PART OF HIS PLAN! SEE ABOVE!
"Its me, SAMUS! Samus is.. scared.. look, just please stop hurting me,please..."
Poor innocent Samus. The first demon encountered by theImperial forces in ‘Horus Rising’, ever since then he has been wheeled out byevery writer imaginable as a secondary rent-a-villain who always ends upgetting beaten and banished by the hero of the book.
After a while we start to feel sorry for the poor chump.
Well, Samus is back and he gets an whole openingnarration chapter! It seems he was just keeping it loose or whatever forreasons or something, and in fact has a DEEP SCHEME which supersedes the wholeHeresy and which he just didn’t mention until now.
It looks like he has some kind of deal where he wants toend reality or something and is looking for a figure to help him with that.Could this be his big chance to finally end all reality?
Abnett doing a polish on even poor old Samus is prettyemblematic of the book as a whole. Our boy Dan knows who he came in with, andhe is leaving with exactly those people and those FUCKING THEMES THANK YOU.
………………………
Join me and a couple (million?) other people for the LASTFUCKING BOOK at some point in the future!
March 28, 2023
Blue Period - WHAT ARE YOU TRYING TO SAY??!!??
I watched this anime and I had a little spastic meltdown, which I will now inflict on you.
I will start by describing it
So it starts with this protagonist guy Yatora Yaguchi who has socially faked his way though school and high school, superficially, he is reasonably popular and successful; totally empty inside. High social capacity, not really, genuinely interested in anything. Careful, a climber, in low-level despair. Right on course for a functional degree and a job as a competent salaryman.
Out of nowhere, or maybe after a chance encounter, he takes an interest in art. Supported by some small initial success and a perceptive art teacher, over a short period of time he goes from being not that interested at all, to being in the art club, to rapidly gaining skill and interest, to deciding that he is going to go for an art degree.
The big university has a well regarded fine-arts course. The only way he can afford it is to get one of the handful of free spots and the only way to do that is to ace the entry exam, (which almost everyone fails, some people take it two or three times).
From there it’s a race against the clock as Yaguchi focuses on learning skills and discovering art. He sees himself as not being that talented, can relentless hard work and pure desire make up for a lack of talent? Can he learn everything about art and ace the big test and become a real artist?
THINKS LIKED
It was the awakening of an actual, human soul inside someone who was otherwise living in a performance of their own life like an actor inhabiting a role, and maybe the first time this man/boy who had never done anything that wasn't careful and planned did anything purely non-optimal and risky for its own sake.
I like the art teacher and I like the cast of oddballs and weirdoes who make up the various art classes.
I like the procedural stuff about training and technique, common to anime but I would have been happy with more of it.
I like the slow development of the protagonist into a somewhat less empty, and therefore somewhat more usefully-empathic and morally present individual.
I like that his close drinking buddies all knew he was shallow as fuck but didn't really mind, and that one of them is inspired to go to cooking school by seeing Yaguchi follow his dream and grow as a person.
I *think* I liked the somewhat odd cross-dressing/trans(?) best friend plot?
Its an interesting look inside the processes of art school and an art education, but oh my god did I find myself unexpectedly fucking DESPISING parts of this by the end.
NEUTRAL THINGS
Regarding the styles and types of art engaged in by the protagonist and their class, the in-fiction art, I didn't actually like much of it myself, it did not move my heart, and I was fine with this as I expect that from any mainstream entertainment.
I was ok with characters going "Oh, so inspiring" and "your art has really improved etc etc" when I wasn't a big fan of the art being looked at in question. I could still care about the story in which the art was embedded, so my complaints below are, I think, separate to that.
THINGS I HATED
Its complex as all of these things combined and interwove at some point, but to try it one-by-one.
The Japanese testing system
Hey! Lets test children to the point of destruction! And lets valorise their personal self-annihilation!
'Academic Art'
"Oh you won't have to make academic art on this course" says the teacher on the exam-prep course.
(Yes you will and that is all you will learn).
'Academic Art' is apparently a thing where they train examinees in particular.. patterns? I don't know how precisely to define it, but each university has its own particular obsessions, tendencies and fashions in its preferences so they train the Examinees specifically for the University they are applying for, like it was a written test. Perhaps they don't do this 'as-such', but I think they are still doing it in-essence.
WHAT ARE YOU TRYING TO SAY WITH THIS PIECE?
This absolutely disgusts me on every conceivable level. If I had to pick one thing in particular that crawled up my arse and screamed its this.
The looping of the language of criticism (flawed and shit anyway) with the production of art turns emotion into a performance of emotion (IN A SAVAGE TESTING ENVIRONMENT). I FUCKING HATE THIS.
'What are you trying to say, from an examiner, in a test with 200 people where only three are going to get in. Genuinely just shoot me.
Educational systems are primarily agreeability and obedience machines, and secondly analysis of skill and drive, so this definition of a visual static art, where this desperate and very young teenager is meant to have 'something to say', in an utterly silent medium, in which 20 kids in a room paint virtually the same thing, it’s a degradation of thought and emotion guaranteed to produce self-deluding drones who when they come to make art in the future, will ask themselves "what am I trying to say" from the examiner in their head. So everything becomes exam art.
(no relation to MFA culture at all there)
(was it all really the same thing I am complaining about?)
Total separation of 'genre' and 'Fine Art'
So clearly, drawing a dragon or something or something from your imagination or even something interwoven with your imagination, is not going to cut it. This is a silent rule, another one these young exam takers are being inducted into, a very familiar one to me.
'we want to see the products of your heart"
'ok, here they are, they are gauche, atavistic, genre and imaginary'
'well in fact we didn’t mean that at all, and understanding *that* we didn't mean that was part of the test.
What we *meant* was 'we want to see the product of an utterly neutral heart, with a fair amount of skill and drive but almost no real creative imagination, and we want to see that they have 'something to say' (as we would understand it, and about the vanishingly small number of things a teenager might have something to say about that would be coherent to a middle aged drone), and we want that expressed entirely though a still, silent visual medium, and we want it expressed with maybe a dab of 'cleverness'.
What you are creating here is modernism and total emptiness. The painting as 'text' where the quality and "depth" (as if even one of these people would understand anything of actual emotional depth) is decided by how 'cleverly' the teenager can command, ape, combine and recombine the known forms of modernism to produce something of not-too-much emotional content, not too much creativity, but it has 'something to say'.
Do I fucking despise art school and absolutely everything about higher fine art education and the kind of art and culture it produces?
I don't know but I fucking HATED this anime version of it!!!
We have to destroy (Anime) art school!!!
March 19, 2023
Post-Singularity Hardcopy Concepts
So I come to imagine forms of post-reality hardcopy, for when you absolutely postitively MUST calm ever motherfucking in the room.
It needs to be readable to the *naked eye*, (the statements of trusted witnesses that they have seen the hardcopy, reporting directly and in the flesh to others, will be the only real form of proof most will recieve). This is a human thing and is about proving things from one human to another in a world where any digital or transmitted inormation, even through a single screen, like that of an electron microscpe, could be suspected.
It can be the creation of machines but better if it is purely hand made, must be reasonably robust, not decay, at least not if cared for, hard, preferably impossible, to alter and amend
TECHNIQUES
Close-weaved calligraphy - using a scribe to write fancy letters that mesh with each others negative space, both fore and aft but also with each line above and below. I think this was used in rennaisance/early modern counrtly letters, or at least special and expansive designs were placed to fill pages specifically to prevent any additions or amendments to whatever the king etc may or may not have said
BRITTLE SYNTHETICS
Ceramic - could literally be a fine china cup with the contract/text interweaved through it under the sheen
Cut into Gems - you would have to examine these with a spyglass at least. Combining gemcutting with close-weaved calligraphy would make a record easy to transport, worth preserving and hard to alter.
Glass - if a record could be etched in so much the better, if some substance relevent to the nature of the record was included in the glassblowing even more so. Maybe a rare radioactive isotope that decayed at a set rate? That could give you a date? Or combine glass and organic so a leaf or something is part of the artefact.
I feel most metals are out, too easy to melt and reconfigure.. Maybe etched right on the edge of a high-grade blade?
ORGANICS
Bone or ivory is another material that could be treated roughly as a 'brittle synthetic' with scrimshawed or etched intra-calligraphy.
Shell? Could writing somehow be introduced to the natural growth patterns of a shell?
Grown-over wood - carving things into wood sounds good as the interaction between the grain and carved text might make it hard to alter, maybe there could be some way to use the fact that wood can be grown over and around things to 'seal' a ceramic document?
Skin - tattooing might work, combining the fidelity of a named person and their reputation with the record written into their living skin
DNA alteration to make a bunch of apples or whatever produce certain words - sounds a bit overdone and not that useful but could be a handy way of mass-replicating a single record. (Apples etc have the name of god or whatever in them all the time, it shouldn't be too hard to get a single tree to produce a name or symbol).
WHAT AM I MISSING?
What else can be created and 'read' by humans, but is very hard to alter once it has 'been' created?
I want to say; very high grade silk weaving - but the fact that it is 'woven' means it can be 'un-weaved' and re-made. Is there a form of weaving which is *fundamentally* un-un-weavable - that it simply cannot be taken apart and re-assembled once made, even by super-tactile robot hands?
Urban Planning? - you could pay to have the streets of a suburban or urban development effectively 'written' as a cypher of your agreement or record. This would have a natural loss over time but it would take quite a long time and a supreme degree of effort to erode the symbology. The systems of build environments have a tendency to replicate themselves.
How about chemical processes that remain meta-stable but degrade if they are disrupted or interrupted?
Super-clockwork that remains stable so long as it runs very, very slowly, but degrades rapidly if it is sped up slowed down or stopped in any way?
There must be some systems or methods in engineering that are useless or low-utility because they are coherent so long as you don't fuck with them, making them too sensitive or finickity for building r engineering but maybe quite good for this purpose?
March 13, 2023
FMASCI V2.3 please just let me die
praise be to Allah let my labours be here ended
March 12, 2023
The False Machine Adventure System Compatibility Infographic - V 2.1
Here is V2!
Click the image for a link to the file which should allow you to see it larger.Feedback in the comments, on twitter at https://twitter.com/pjamesstuart, on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/pjamesstuart or via email if you can find it.
March 11, 2023
The False Machine Adventure System Compatibility Infographic - Version ONE
With this One Simple Trick I would elucidate the simplest rulesets to use, their relative closeness to each other and any difficulties and challenges of playing False Machine adventures using them.
Of course this is going to be a fucking disaster, if anyone even reads it, but that is why I am classifying this as VERSION ONE. A proto-type infographic designed specifically for your commentary, feedback, analysis and surely-productive-criticism.
Have at ye, click the image for a link to the file which should allow you to see it larger.
Feedback in the comments, on twitter at https://twitter.com/pjamesstuart, on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/pjamesstuart or via email if you can find it.
March 4, 2023
Trailing Corposant #17 WRAIGHT-ON
Somewhere in the darkness Chris Wraight steeples his fingers and smiles an icy smile. Of course he had already predicted this post and the third and fourth-hand effects it would have.. of course he knew I was having macaroni cheese for dinner! All I have done is walk right into his schemes! He slowly closes both hands together, cupping the infinite darkness and slowly, carefully, explains the actual plot up until this point…
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Chris Wraight! He won the Horus Hearsay and BECAME the 30,000th Warhammer. You did it son, now get on your sparkling white motorcycle and ride off into the caverns of the earth.
Probably no other writer has gained so much from the Horus Heresy series. A handful have crashed and burned, several have chugged along like little tugboats, some have surfed the wave, with varying excellence, but in general, a writers reputation coming out of the Heresy is the same as their reputation going in.
ADB is probably the closest to Wraight, his name burnished by Betrayer, The First Heretic, Master of Mankind and Echoes of Eternity. But ADB went in from the already much-loved Night Lords series so he was on a clear upward trajectory and essentially pulled off escape velocity.
Dan Abnett went in with a very heavy rep, a lot of very good books under his belt, and under those books, a whole stack of rather average books, and under those book some rather bad books. He was the architect of the Heresy in novel form, probably more than anyone else, gave it much of its quality and many of its flaws and safeguarded both of those through a solid start, a dithering mid-range and a good-but-flawed (so far) ending. Reputation = PRESERVED.
Who The Fuck Is Chris Wraight?
But who the fuck was Chris Wraight before 'Scars' (2014)? He started with Black Library in the Old World with 'Masters of Magic' in 2008 and from then till 2015 ya boi wrote a FUCKTONNE of Warhammer Fantasy Books;
Masters of Magic - 2008Iron Company - 2009Sword of Justice - 2010Dragonmage - 2011Sword of Vengeance - 2011Luthor Huss - 2012Master of Dragons - 2013The Fall of Altdorf - 2015 Then a leap into Age of Sigmar with The Gates of Azyr - 2015Also during this period he wrote a Stargate Atlantis tie-in book Stargate Atlantis: Dead End.
Much like Joss Reynolds, Wraight was one of the architects of the fall of the Old World with ‘The Siege of Altdorf’ and like Reynolds he was in at the beginning of Age of Sigmar with ‘The Gates of Azyr’, which I have read and which I seem to remember being pretty good.
But unlike Reynolds, Wraight never returned to the Age of Sigmar, by the time of ‘Altdorf’ he had already written ‘Scars’ and was now ‘the white scars guy’. He had a big future waiting, in the.. big future.
His 40k work starts with 'Battle of the Fang' in 2011, through 'Blood of Asaheim' in 2013 to 'Stormcaller' in 2014, he did a bunch of books about Space Wolves. He only lately came back to complete his trilogy with ‘The Hellwinter Gate’.
'Battle of the Fang', if I can remember it at all, it wasn't great. ‘Hellwinter Gate’ was good (but fuck those guys) and I definitely haven't read any of his Old World stuff.
So, a MYSTERIOUS VOID, there is an early strand of Wraightism of which I know little to nothing.. just like the Khan, I know nothing of him, and he knows everything of me!
So what happened with the White Scars?
The White Scars were one of the original twenty Space Marine Legions and, in the pseudohistory at least, played a huge part in the Horus Heresy. They made it back to Terra and were one of only three Legions to get there and actually stick around to defend the Emperors Palace. Jahaghatai Khan lead an important counter-attack on the Lions Gate spaceport during the siege aaaaaand, that’s about it.
Very few people cared very much about the White Scars for most of 40k history. Future Mongols riding motorbikes. Come from Space-Mongolia. Not that well supported with lore or models.
UNTIL in 2012 Wright comes up with ‘Brotherhood of the Storm which fills in the background and details of the Heresy-Era Scars, and then with ‘Scars’ in 2014 he does their first full-length novel and pretty much everyone loves it. So far as I know, no Warhammer fan dislikes these books, In fact the White Scars strand of the Heresy is one of the most reliably highly rated of all its many threads.
From that strand spirals out a range of books which spread over connected characters, and do deep dives into the Custodes, TWO series bracketing 'modern' 40k, the best book on the Death Guard and the creation of Varangantua, which had and instrumental generative effect on the Warhammer 40k 'Crime' subgenre.
There is a little Wraight-verse woven up in there, not closely geographically focused like the Sabbat Worlds but connections of theme, personality, viewpoint, characters and style.
THAT’S Chris Wraight, in six years he went from nervous anime protagonist to not even taking Dan Abnetts calls* (which he predicted in advance).
*This is a lie.
To discover how it happened and ‘why the Scars’ we will need to dive into the Bibliography;
The Warhammer Fantasy Books
Like I said above, I know almost nothing about these (I think nine books) and additional various short stories. Drop something in the comments if you have it!
The Scars
(Really ‘Brootherhood’ and ‘Scars’ are essentially part of the same story one setting up and adding flesh to the other.)
2012 - Brotherhood of the StormWe meet Jaghatai Khan and the White Scars! What makes them special? This one simple trick; not being retards.
So what has changed between the White Scars being boring space Mongols and being interesting space mongols – in the absolute sense, very little. I mean there are no STUNNING REVERSALS here where the white scars subvert your expectations by not being Mongols or not being in space.
Truth is, you probably had few to no expectations to begin with, instead they fulfil and massively overdeliver on your probably quite-minimal expectations, adding complexity, character and depth.
If there is a TLDR for Chris Wraight its; “I did roughly what you expected, much better than you expected.”
The big metatextual addition Wraight makes is that the White Scars largely escaped the notice of the Imperium and Heresy at large, because they were designed to escape notice. Not in a super-stealthy Corax way or a super-sneaky Alpharius way, but more in a faded uncle way in that you know they are there, somewhere far away, doing something, and you just don’t think about them that much. The Scars, or Jhagatai, were made to be in some sense, outsiders, outriders, or just an outside perspective on the whole Primarch project.
We meet the Scars in the period after Ullanor hanging about in the Chondax chasing Orks. After the Imperium broke the larges Ork empire in the galaxy, the Scars were sent in to do what cavalry do; chase the defeated and cut them down, which they are fulfilling on stellar scale.
Key Things –
The Khan is chill and likes being out of the way. He grew up on planet-Mongola, was adopted by a horse tribe, defeated the worlds major empire and took over the planet before the Emperor turned up to ‘recruit’ him. His tribe were the ‘Ordu of Jaghatai’ and had the facial scar thing, now his Legion is the ‘Ordu of Jaghatai’. Its not clear if, like the real Tenmunjin, the Khans armies left piles of dead and raped civilians behind them or that the rivers ran red with blood and black with ink.
Despite being based on perhaps the most insanely genocidally murderous of all the IRL people that made Primarch templates, the Khan is chill, likes to keep himself to himself, observes everything and thinks about it. Core value; he values life as it is lived, not as a tool or function to get somewhere else. He also doesn’t like forts, cities or empires.
Illyria Ravelion – An Imperial Army General and expert in Logistics. The White Scars are terrible at logistics (gotta go fast!) and are aware of it. Part of the story involved Ravelion being drawn into and tested by the Scars, and she provides a more-likeable ‘mainstream imperial’ point of view both for us and for the Khan.
Yesugai the Storm Seer – Jaghatais bff and key advisor. A super-powerful space marine Psyker raised in the Chogorian tradition as a kind of sky-shaman. Important as he provides a key element for the Primarch; a bff who is almost as powerful as he is, and just as wise, and an important view on the White Scars view of Psykers and the Warp. Typically sensible they see it as ‘drinking poison’, where you have to drink a little but that’s no reason to drink a lot. This is a point of view shared by literally no-one else.
Torgun Khan – A marine recruited on Terra who wanted to be a Luna Wolf but ended up being sent to the White Scars, where he excels but is continually the ‘cultural other’. He is trying hard but the Chogorians are insular wierdoes and also he doesn’t fully want to be there. Also maybe the only way in which the Scars are not Sensible-Marines is their obsession with a war of mavouvre and pseudo-cavalry stuff all the time, every fucking time.
Breakaway – Nonsensical cultural divide. The ethnocutural divide in the White Scars between ‘Terrans’ (assumed to be sort-of-white) and ‘Chogorians’ (assumed to be sort of Asian), makes literally zero sense if considered as a real part of a real universe. Terra should befull of Asiatics, there was a whole ‘Ynodesian Bloc’ at least, the languages and cultures should have all changed a LOT, the gene-lines should have changed a LOT, Astartes are literally programmed with knowledge and no other Legion has an audible accent difference between culture groups. HOWEVER, it does work well from a story perspective. So I will just assume that the Heresy writers are translating a hyper-complex future culture difference into something we can understand.
The Alfafa Legion are UP TO SOMETHING???
In fact Horus has deliberately isolated the Scars in Chondax to keep them out of the way while he does his Heresy, he is pals with Jaghatai and has hopes of bringing him on-side (at the right time). Jaghatai was part of the doomed Librarius project and has always been an outsider ambivalent about the Imperium. Horus has send the Alphas to secretly prolong the war and keep the Scars bottled up until he is ready for them.
2014 - Scars
Jaghatai and the Scars are chilling in the backwaters, cheerfully killing orcs when suddenly - WHOOPS, A HERESY IS HAPPENING! RUSS DID WHAT? HE BURNED PROSPERO??? WHAT THE FUCK IS GOING ON?
(We learn from some Alpha Legion stories (see that entry), that the Alphas themselves are at war within themselves and a rogue faction deliberately broke the isolation of the Scars and allowed Rogal Dorns call for help to get through before Horus would have wished it).
Who will the Scars side with? Horus, who Jaghatai likes and gets along with? Magnus who he also liked? Or his city-building lying crazed authoritarian dad who he does not really like? The stage is set for the Scars to go flying about to try to find out what the fuck is going on. (And also ignoring Russ’s desperate call for help – hilarious).
Meanwhile the Terran and Chogorian factions are forming up, the Terrans are all very pro-Horus and the Chogorians are whatever-Jaghatai-says.
Story culminates in Jags visiting the ruins of Prospero, chatting to one of Magnus’ splinter ghost things and meeting with Morty. I was going to say maybe the worst possible person to send to persuade anyone of anything, but looking at the Traitors ranks, they are not exactly stacked with charisma.
At about the same time the Lodge members in the Scars try to stage a coup to make sure they go the ‘right’ way.
Jaghatai is surprisingly well informed about the Warp and it looks like Horus has demons all over him so he goes with Dad and awaaaaay we go!
2016 - The Path of Heaven
A 'Primarch Ping Pong' book that manages to make something interesting out of 'get Jagatai to Terra'.
How to do? - use SECRET WEBWAY PORTAL. Yes the Emperor had one hidden far away in the darkness. To protec from aliens – NO protec from Imperium!
Emperor’s big plan involves a Human Webway Project. bad news Navigators - scanners really do live in vain, off to the garbage yard with you you useless freaks.
Meanwhile the Death Guard and some of the Emperors Children awkwardly give chase.
There are some nice looks at the death guard and EC trying to get along, and a foreshadowing scene everyone remembers - someone gotta hold the webway portal open! someone has to BURN THEIR SOUL on a magic TORTURE CHAIR. But WHO?
YESUGAI!!! NOOOOOOO!
2018 – Jaghatai Khan: Warhawk of Chogoris
A ‘prequel’ look back at Jaghatai after he has been find and during his integration into the Great Crusade and first missions. Jags knows about the warp and thinks lying about it is dumb. His first mission seems to be a deliberate ploy by Malcador. The Scars are sent to ‘liberate’ a world which has been taken over by psychic super-aliens who the human population believe are gods. The Xenos keep the humans juiced up on a sense of the numinous and transcendent, even once the aliens are killed the humans still hunger for them so.. it looks like the human population is ultimately sent to ‘live on a farm’. Malcador making a point I guess.
I think this is the book where its revealed that Jags can, if he wants to, move at SOOPA SPEED, like the Flash. But generally just chooses not to? This power is never brought up again.
2021 – Warhawk!
Its the siege of Terra baby! Its been pretty mixed so far and kinda boring overall! Lets hit the gas! Wriaght is going WIDESCREEN for this one.
Morty is sitting in the Lions Gate spaceport, harshing the Imperial buzz with NURGLE MAGIC and bringing down heavy armour, and (more prosaically but more importantly probably) supplies and materiel right into the palace area.
Everything seem bollocked but Jaghatai have plan - re-take the Lions Gate spaceport, cripple enemy armour & supplies, hold spaceport for (surely inevitable) return of Robute and victory in the siege, oh and kill Mortarion, now a SUPER DEMAON!
How? BY DOING IT! HAI CHOGORIS!
Good book. Odd final fight.
Head scratching re-write of previous morty stuff in a classic Heresy 'well actually' chapter in which a handy demon pop out & explains to an NPC how actually the previous bad writing of Morty was actually well well this and that you know (this isn't a Wraightism, I don't think he does it before or again).
But what about The Imperial Cult? RELIGION - COULD IT BE BAD SOMEHOW??
Sigismund is back baby, and seriously traumatised, less by the violence than by the collapse of the Emperors dream, which, was the only thing that really justified the very evil things he and daddy Dorn had done up to this point. I mean geocoding a few planets isn't great but if it’s for long-term species survival, and if the species has already nearly died out once, then maybe its TOUGH MEDICINE. Except now the Emperor looks more and more flawed. Also he lied and demons are real.
On the other hand, demons are real so lets go fight them. Siggy goes full 'I AM THE GRIMDANK FUTURE - CANDLES AND SKULLS FOREVER, NO PINK!"" and takes up his super-black sword to go crump Kharn in an anime battle during which the sacred stupid words are said by Kharn;
"Bro do you think you are more fucked in the head than me?" (paraphrased)
To which the answer is; "Not really, you are a lobotomised berserker trying to soul-rape humanity for ever and I am trying to stop that, I can be pretty bad but still not as bad as you. I can, for instance, go to the toilet, knit, (skulls), and spend (grim) social time with peers, you by comparison are literally fucking LOBOTOMISED BY A BLOOD GOD.
its a dumb point of view! But more on this later.
At about the same time, Keeler, the Imperial Saint, has gone mental in the ruins. she is no longer being written by Dan Abnett and like a lot of people who are no longer being written by Dan Abnett, she has gone from being a flawed but sympathetic semi-paragon dealing with a dark reality perhaps not quite realistically, but ENGAGINGLY, and turned in to a MEGA CUNT, in the turn of a page. (Not the first Dan Abnett character this has happened to, many such cases.) Now Keeler has gone full Al Qaeda - suicide legions, doom, skull fetish (came out of nowhere your honour) and trying to take down Asartes in the ruins (takes roughly 100 guys to kill one) THIS IS THE FUTURE NERDS.
(Having read ‘The End and the Death – Part One’, by Dan Abnett, she goes right back to normal again in that.)
The Other Heresy Books
2017 - Leman Russ: The Great Wolf (fuck this guy!)
Its 'Leman and Lionel!' The Space Wolves and Dark Angels are both told to go smash a hard-to-find star empire and totally fail to work together because the Lion is massively autistic and Leman is dumb.
Russ stumbles into the main battle, acts out, gets a bunch of Dark Angels killed then is a pissy little boy about it, then starts dickwaving, making oaths about being the first guy to kill the enemy leader
except he fucks that up aaaaaas.. guess what - the space wolves have a tendency to RANDOMLY MUTATE INTO MONSTERS! (just like the Thousand Sons, Blood Angels, possibly the two missing legions), yes the guy who boasts about being the 'Emperors Executioner' and counts killing family members and being mind wiped afterwards as a gold star achievement, has an unstable gene-seed, fucking great.
The Lion finally loses his autistic shit and they have a big fight and finally cold-cocks Russ (I'M GLAD SOMEONE DID!).
2020 - Valdor: Birth of the Imperium
A story about Valdor smashing heads? NO
A story about the disease of authoritarianism, hypocrisy, an Empire built on lies IT WAS SHODDY FROM THE START I TELL YOU!, and about the quiet tragedy of the existence of Constantin Valdor, a man who cannot say no. Basically the Emperors Smithers in a weird way.
This is 'lefty warhammer' where the main problem with the Imperium of Man, even pre-heresy, is the Imperium of Man and the Emperor is a twat, but its basically the grown-up version of that compared to the ADB "Dad you suck!" version.
There was never really any law except the Emperors word, only the illusion of law
WRAIGHTISM - The Cerebral Counter-Puncher
Wraights Custodes, (and many of his characters) are silent observers who are already several moves ahead, and, if they are being empathic, try to communicate this OBLEQUELY. They have a good idea what will happen, are waiting for it to happen, and have a plan ready for what to do then. (they are COLUMBO'S!)
This is largely unknown to whomever the main character is. In this one the cop lady interviews Valdor about "Where were you mister Valdor on the day the Thunder Warriors left on a midnight train to go "live on a farm far away"???
Valdor responds with gnomic tales and stories of Imperial history, which MAY be a form of code, a deniable secret message saying 'hey don't do what I know you are going to do girl'
End bit - Cop girl stages an INSURECTION! Tries to arrest Valdor. Bad news, he predicted it, he and the Emperor knew everything, (did the Emperor deliberately absent himself so this could take place, maybe) and they have a plan prepared, unleash the ASTARTES! (if we didn't before!) (probably this was the 1st Legion and very possibly Mier Astelan, a main charcter in Gav Thorpes Dark Angels books, was in this scene, maybe).
End result, Cop Lady and some of the last Thunder Warriors get crumped. Valdor almost has an OK time fighting the lord of the Thunder Warriors. Thunder guy at least gets to be a fighter and die, Valdor is basically a chess piece in charge of other chess pieces in a game which is not a game. He is having a rough life is old Valdor.
2022- Sanguinius: The Great Angel
A story about Sangy being cool? NOT REALLY! Still pretty good though!
Another bad-from-the-beginning Imperium story, this time IN DISGUISE.
Its Waights swan song for the Heresy and, while the 'on top' story is about an edgy remembrancer investigating the Blood Angels and having a horror-movie experience as he slowly works out that the Imperium’s super pretty boy good guys are actually... SPACE VAMPIRES! (who are fighting the curse).
The 'underneath' story, (which for us is actually the real story as we already knew the space vampire stuff, is about the conflict between different versions of the truth. Remembrancer guy has a lady boss, at first we think she is just a massive Sanguinius simp and mindless super-loyalist, she keeps telling him 'just paint the idea, fuck the reality'.
But at the end we find out that actually, she also knew about the Space Vampire stuff and she is more of a Sanguinius Yandere than a Sangy simp. She actually doesn't give a fuck about Sanguinius or the Blood Angels as anything more than useful tools and is quietly looking forward to .. something .. their 'removal'?? and replacement with the Symbol of them, rather than the reality as the symbol is a useful tool to aid in mass population 'guidance' and control .
She seems to be part of a nascent-inquisition faction (Malcadorists?)
Then we cut to after the Siege, Sangy is dead, bad lady has ordered the writer assassinated, she personally burns the last copy of his book (the complicated truth) and oversees the installation of her giant Mural in one of the first 'Sanguinala's' (the useful truth) - by this point she is clearly part of the proto-Inquisition and, in tone, setting and mentality, links well to the later 'Vauts of Terra' and 'Bannana Guard' books
WRAIGHTISMS - Human/Transhuman Conflict, Information Control
When the main character joins the crusade he very clearly knows less about it than we, who have been reading about it for ages, do, so we get perhaps a better picture of what the 'average' Imperial citizen (if there is such a thing) thinks about it.
He seems to assume that the Crusade is mainly Xenos-oriented, largely about taking worlds away from aliens and is fine with this as he shares a heavy anti-xenos prejudice with the baseline of humanity. He talks about a large proportion of human worlds being brought in by diplomacy, the majority probably? though we don't get exact numbers.
He wrote a book about how the World Eaters, Space Wolves and Night Lords were nutters, based on first hand accounts. It’s not clear if the book itself was censored, but he does say that the censors hurt him less than the general reputational damage from the public, who were not fond of anti-Astartes stuff (and he's still alive)
He very clearly has an 'actual' and partial point of view of his immediate world which conflicts in some sense with that of the reader, and this meshes with the later Vaults of Terra series in which even the main inquisitors doesn't know fully about the Primarchs or the events of the heresy.
This is a degree of implicit information control rare in most 40k writers, its also about ‘information control’ in the setting, Chris is being Meta again/
The 'Modern' 40k Books Vaults Of Terra
The Inquisition do SPOOKY BUISNESS on Terra just before the Great Rift
(2017) - Vaults of Terra: The Carrion Throne (2019)- Vaults of Terra: The Hollow Mountain (Novel) (2022) - Vaults of Terra: The Dark City (Novel)Main Inquisition guy Crowl and friends investigate spooky business which happens to interrelate to key elements of the Imperial Machine, this is set before the 'Gathering Storm' so everyone is absolutely bricking it thinking reality is ending, (it is).
SPOLIERS - the Golden Throne is breaking down, "breaking down, breaking down" and various arms of the Imperium are searching for flex tape – at ANY COST I TELL YOU.
This involves a conspiracy that goes RIGHT TO THE TOP BABY because ITS CHINATOWN JAKE and which Crowl & crew stumble into. If you wanna fix that frone you gotta do a dark deal with the dark eldar.
In sequence the team stop a dark eldar from getting into the palace, investigate Trouble at the Astronmicon just before it BLOWS UP, and go to the MOON, and thence to Comorragh where they spike the arranged agreement.
Good news - the Dark Eldar were up to a creep plan which would have been really bad, they wanted to CLONE the EMPEROR (?!) and use him as flex tape on their own webway collapse.
Bad news - the Golden Throne is still falling apart.
WRAIGHTISM – THE TEXTURE OF GRIMDERP
If you want Peak Piranesi, here you go! welcome to Terra, its FUCKING HORRIBLE, literally THE WORST.
'Vaults' lets Wraight go very deep on just what an unrelenting barely survivable totally insane shithole Terra is for almost everyone on it. The inquisition literally have their own raised highway system because you just can't get anywhere on the ground. Don't forget your facemask, protein ration and stay away from gangs of pilgrims who have hived off the multi-decade queues for the religious sites, here we do crowd control with flamethrowers, oh you have a job above ground, very fancy, my cousin actually leaves the arcolgy for work you know..
Wraight does it again in ‘Lords of Silence’ where we get a look at what an Agri-World looks like; a ‘pleasant day out’? No – an unpleasant day in a world sized toxic nightmare plantation hell place.
Watchers Of The Throne
The Banana Guard on Terra post great-rift. What does it TRULY MEAN to be a Banana Guard??? (mainly see 'Cerebral Counter-Puncher' above). You better not be messing with that throne son!
Watchers of the Throne: The Emperors Legion Watchers of the Throne: The Regents Shadow Watchers of the Throne: Third One – yet to exist but probably will?
Beginning soon after the 'Vaults of Terra' series ends, and I think incomplete at the time of writing, this follows the resurrection or re-energising of two of the Imperiums up-till then quiescent or moribund model lines organisations - the Adeptus Custodes and Sisters of Silence.
The Custodes have been depressed for 10,000 years as their boss is a vegetable. The Sisters of Silence have fallen from being near the Emperors throne into being nearly nothing, some long term scheming, super sketchiness or just general hatred of blanks has lead to their citadel on the MOON being abandoned and the sisterhood scattered all over the galaxy to slowly rot.
The third point of view is from the actual High Lords. The Chancellor of the High Lords (technically a super-secretary but not really) is having a meltdown and wants to kick things into gear.
We see these stories through the eyes of main custode guy Valerian and Aleya the Silent Sister, who are no-cooties chaste work-married and who team up in various ways to fight chaos and just as often the structures of the Imperium itself. They even get a model set! thats love!
The first book is largely about Guilliman pulling these two organisations back into a shape he likes more, along with our pair discovering a super-secret chaos plot to give access to Terra. Guilliman is back baby! And he quietly or loudly encourages the Custodes to go forth and custode, not just on Terra but all over the place.
The second is Chris Wraight being upset about brexitno sorry its about the Hexarchy crisis in which, many of the mortal arms of the Imperium, the Administratum, the Ecclesiarchy and the Assassanorium, with elements of the Navy and Guard, decide they do not want a damned tranhuman monster running things and changing everything and stage a full insurrection on Terra. Chaos stuff and doom is everywhere, no-one knows what is going on.. except lord of the Custodes Trajan Valoris when at the end we discover.... that he and Bobby G had predicted everything in advance, planned ahead and actually intended this rebellion to happen specifically just so they could draw out the conspirators and put it down, oh and also the Assassins were not actually on your side.
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THE SPACE WOLVES - (fuck these guys!)2011 - Battle of the Fang
2013 - Blood of Asaheim
2014 - Stormcaller
2022 - The Hellwinter Gate - (think this one ends up on Cadia around Abaddon smashing it)
I have not read these except for 'Hellwinter Gate' which was ok? Its space wolves, who cares? Chris Wright does I suppose.
There was an eight year gap in this series so it might be interesting to read though purely to think about changes in writing style.
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CRIME! - Varnagantua!
A Crime is doing! Solution? More and better crime!
2020 – Bloodlines 2022 - The Vorbis ConspiracyIn bloodlines Wriaght writes what I think is the first in 40ks Crime series, all set in Varangantua, a Hive City but not a 'Hive City' if you get me
Here we follow a mid level police guy who is horribly morally compromised but trying to do the right thing in a system in which everyone is horribly morally compromised and sometimes trying to do the right thing.
The B-plot or background is the main character slowly being drawn into a genestealer cult, which he does not know or realise is a Genestealer cult - probably he is already infected and his new kid is going to come out looking 'different'.
Core crime plot is the system doing horrible things to young people to get the materials to make rejuvenat treatments (the rich sure do like their eternal life drugs) - the normal supplies are out and everything is strained because its post great rift and the Imperium is bollocked.
Notable as well for being the first Varangantua story of many. at least two of the main books, 'Bloodlines' and 'The Wraithbone Phoenix' I have read and enjoyed.
In ‘The Vorbis Conspiracy’ a bunch of writers do short stories set in and around Varangantua during and after a giant disaster. The different stories follow the various threads and causes of the catastrophe and all the secrets and lies around it.
THA DEAF GUARD! 2018 - Lords of Silence
An oddity! A Death Guard book! Man we all wish 'The Buried Dagger' had been this good.
Turns out they are just some swell guys. You would think it would be a challenge to make the literal plague marines sympathetic, and probably it was, but Wraight manages it and produces probably the best Death Guard book ever.
Not much to say about this except that its very good?
Wraightisms The Cerebral Counter-Puncher
SO MANY of Wraights primary characters are in some sense ‘ahead of the game’, having thought faster than both the other characters and the readers, and are planning several moves ahead while giving nothing away. Both Valdor and Valoris of the Custodes are very typical of this. As is the Khan.
In a way it makes his books sightly harder to read/listen to, since their progress really isn’t much like an adventure story. They are often more like detective stories or mysteries, even when they seemingly aren’t. Often a huge amount about character and motivation is implied rather than stated, quite unusual for the pseudo-greek-tragedy of the Heresy.
The Golden Throne = Murder Toilet
A curiously commonly repeated trope with Wraight is that the Golden Throne is a deliberate pain-engine, or based around one at least. This comes up in ‘The Path of Heaven’ when Yesugi sits on the lesser throne, and again in the Vaults of Terra series with its throne-based overplot.
Information Control
Both limited information known to characters in the Dark Millenium, and also the deliberate redaction and alteration of history, wars and conflicts over history and its meaning.
In Vaults of Terra, Crowl doesn’t know there were more than nine Primarchs and this guy is an Inquisitors. In the work of other writers this stuff gets dropped more readily and more easily.
Valdors conversation with copy lady in ‘Birth of the Imperium’, the overplot of the Vorbis Conspiracy (though that may not have been Wraight), lots of ‘Bloodlines’ and of course, ‘The Great Angel’. Also spread throughout his other works. Everyone is arguing about who should be allowed to know what when, despite knowing little themselves.
Human/Transhuman Conflict
The idea of a germinating conflict between Humans and Transhumans is riddled through a lot of Wraights stuff, with elements of the Inquisition, Admanistratum, Ecclesiarchy, Assassanorium and perhaps, Custodes really really not liking Imperial dependence on mutants, psykers, blanks, navigators and especially FUCKING ASTARTES, (pus the fucking PRIMARCH). There are regular low-level conflicts around the ‘Transhuman Question’.
After all, it’s the ‘Imperium of Man’ and the Emperor apparently (based in the most recent siege book) built the whole thing to preserve a core of humanity. But humanity can only survive through employing its transhuman ‘limbs’, whether those be psychic, mutated, gene-altered, cybernetic or anything else. We can think of the Imperium as a kind of janky transhuman containment and exploitation system, designed to maximise the utility from each of these transhuman arms without any of them totally taking over and ‘eating’ the baseline population.
Malcador and the nascent inquisition seem to be a big part of this even as early as the Crusade. Purges and wars to stop the Primarchs and Astartes from getting too powerful. It probably seemed like a good idea at some point, armies in decay are highly dangerous to civilisation, so why not allow them to turn on one another, bring the numbers down and confirm or reveal the more-loyal ones?
He Walks the Margins!
A lot of Wraights successes have been when he has come in at the margins of larger stories, which themselves often weren't being handled 'perfectly' and has fucking aced it, being not only good, but good by comparison, and getting lots of hugs from fans relieved that he has helped prop up the main thing they went in for
In a few cases character literally walk into and out of the scene after or before the big 'main characters' have left or arrived, and do their own sneaky business in the margins and its actually a better story.
In Vaults of Terra, the Chancellor figure arrives just in time to see Guilliman fighting demons on the palace steps and is utterly and totally mindfucked and both inspired but also traumatised. Observing the great events of an epic history from the margins allows Wraight to have his cake (or at least take a sneaky peek at it) and enjoy the HUGE THINGS HAPPENING but also to exploit the power differential between the observers and the HUGE THINGS.
Wraights began like this with ‘Scars’, and with 'Vaults of Terra' and 'Watchers of the Throne' he has told paired stories before and after the 'Main Event' of the Great Rift and Guillimans return. That has its own books describing events directly, but Wraights are better.
He did a Feminism!
Wraight might be the best 40k writer at weaving women into his stories in strong roles in ways that don't necessarily TRIGGER me.
Counting down we have Logistics Ojo-Sama Illyria Ravelion in the White Scars series, Crows assistant Inquisitor bonk-stick lady in in Vaults of Terra, (who becomes the main character after Crowl goes fully mental), Cop Lady in ‘Valdor’, creepy Sanguinius Yandere in ‘The Great Angel’, Aleya in ‘Watchers.
All ‘strong’ i.e. interesting characters with highly differentiated worldviews and behaviours neatly woven into the story in actually-useful ways that 'feel' less woke than ADB (though Wraight is probably exactly as woke). No crushing ‘hello boys’ or ‘marvel tech-girl’ moments.
Of course there is something to say for yet another Abnett-Paragon, and even more to say for yet another ADB EDGE-LADY. I doubt Wraight would ever have the BALLS to have a super-cool Dark Eldar girlfriend with WINGS who HATES YOU but is also INTO YOU and also you have a MAGICAL GOTH WOLF pet but you HATE WOLVES but this one is OK I GUESS.
Is Chris Wraight the MOST Feminist Warhammer writer? I dunno but he may be the BEST Feminist Warhammer writer because you don’t see him doing it
THE WRAIGHT IDEA
Could authority corrupt somehow? It’s a bold stance.
Wraight has said (roughly) that he views chaos as more a deepening and corroding of personality flaws and internal issues that are already present in us all.
This is a pretty solid, even a very good take to assume, for storytelling. Peter Fehervari in his ‘Dark Coil’ has specialised in chaos-as-personal-madness, with an imperceptible flow between slow personality failures, madness and reality decay so that it becomes impossible to tell exactly when things went too far.
It will always be in conflict with elements of Warhammer, as it is with any genre-cosmos where utterly evil supernatural forces are a verified real thing. The call is not coming from inside the house, there are massive rape demons out there and we didn’t make them, pervy aliens did..
So in this universe, spooky scary otherness can’t be a pure reflection of internal angst and, for the most part, Wraight manages the impossible interface well. There are only two times where he has gone full-libtard, once in the Sigismund/Kharn fight, where Kharn goes;
“Aren’t you more fucked up than me tho really bro?”
Despite being a literally-lobotomised mess.
And in ‘The Regents Shadow’ where the rebellious Hexarchy are SECRETLY BREXITEERS.
But other than that, its not too bad.
NURGLING INTERCOM!
‘Little Lords’ - I think Wraight creates this term in 'Lords of Silence'
And in probably the most well-known scene in Warhawk, Typhus aims to remain in contact with his co-conspirators by handing him one of a pair of NURGLINGS and using them as walkie talkies.
Typhus retrieved two objects from the fly-swirled depths of his armour. Or maybe they retrieved themselves, for they were creatures of some kind, fat little things, pocked with sores and boils, with mouths that took up almost all their bulk. They were noisy when they moved. It sounded like they were giggling, or whispering to one another, or just spitting and slobbering. They wobbled up to Typhus' outstretched palms, one on each, and gurned at each other.
Crosius found himself instantly captivated. They smelled strongly, and were as hideously ugly as any dream-goblin of his imagination, but he had to fight not to take them both up into his arms, to pet them, to stroke their spiny backs and fondle their horned scalps.
'What are these?' he asked.
'Fragments of the god himself, it appears,' said Typhus, sounding uncharacteristically affectionate himself. 'The tiniest reflections, but they are appealing, no?'
One of them was almost black, its skin shining dully. The other was almost white, as matt as chalk. They cooed and smirked beneath his gaze, rocking back and forth.
'Fascinating,' said Crosius. 'Utterly fascinating.'
Thats it! Top Tier on that alone baby!
February 16, 2023
Corposant 13 – REEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEssentiment
Corposant #11 - BETRAYER
ADB, Lorgar, Angron, Emperor, Sanguinius, Precis; ADB good, least satirical Warhammer writer, herald of the awokening, found a way to have a black man shot by space cops, helped 'black box' the Emperor, (systemic issue), ship girls, edgy protags, BPD, shifting backstory, wrote Lorgar as being a bit BPD as well?, Echoes of Eternity like a Marvel director suffering under endless Fiege-notes, Sangunius finally good. Peace!
Corposant #12 - VULKAN SHIVS
Nick Kyme. Vulkan. Precis; boring bad books, seems like nice guy, good editor? hard to tell, vulkan gets tortured like black men in genre, he is guaranteed to survive this science fiction movie, not a blessing.
Corposant 13 – REEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEssentiment
from https://twitter.com/arhpriest Is there anything more to say about Perturabo?
I already discussed him here http://falsemachine.blogspot.com/2019/06/pertuarbo-identification-through.html
With this evergreen quote from Wikipedia;
"Ressentiment is a sense of hostility directed at that which one identifies as the cause of one's frustration, that is, an assignment of blame to ones frustration.
The sense of weakness or inferiority and perhaps jealousy in the face of the "cause" generates a rejecting/justifying value system, or morality, which attacks or denies the perceived source of one's frustration.
This value system is then used as a means of justifying one's own weaknesses by identifying the source of envy as objectively inferior, serving as a defence mechanism that prevents the resentful individual from addressing and overcoming their insecurities and flaws.
The ego creates an enemy in order to insulate itself from culpability."
Is there anything more to say?
(The Eye And Schtizophrenia)
The only real reference to schitzoidal thinking in Pertys story; a common theme in the art of Schizophrenics is the observing eye;
kate-fenner-schizophrenia-drawings-2
Iain McGilchrist think this is due to some failure in brain lateralisation, that one part of the mind becomes directly aware of the other, but *as* an *other*, an alien observing presence, capable of reading thoughts, which no-one else can sense.
Well Perty got an eye too, a malignant star that no-one else can see;
and which never goes away. actually kind of useful in a few acts of navigation but just generally deeply upsetting the rest of the time.
from https://twitter.com/arhpriest His PUBLICATION HISTORY **Chapter One - Birth of an Asshole**
(19whatever to 2007) Pops up as a reference in a lot of Horus Heresy metafiction.
(2007) - 'Fulgrim' by Graham McNeil
I don't remember him doing much in this!
(2012) 'Angel Exterminatus' by Graham McNeil
Centre stage baby! We leap into PertuRabos' story mid-heresy, after Istvaan and go right into a cooked-up meta plot about Fulgrim trying to become a god, or at least a demon. Oddly this bizarre pairing actually work as a story engine. Sometimes the goddess of story logistics delivers inspiration.
This is our first look inside PertuRabos' head and it sets the tone for everything that comes after.
The story ends with PertuRabo badly wounded and the Iron Warriors trapped in the Eye of Terror, the same eye which has been watching him his entire life. PertuRabo is (fictionally) born! And born angry!
**Chapter Two - Metafiction**
(2012) - 'Codex : Chaos Space Marines, 6th Edition' by Phil Kelly
(2014) -'The Horus Heresy, Book Three; Extermination' by Alan Bligh
From 2012 to 2015 not much happens. Perty gets some current-year 40k lore about what he is up to post great-rift. He is conquering the segmentum obscurus and fighting Morty for relics.
This is somewhat interesting for future 40k as Perty is (probably still) one of the more sane and better organised Primarchs, one of the few who actually has the aptitude and personality to organise a stellar empire at scale and keep it running. Will the Empire of Iron pop up again in the Imperium Nihilus?
(2015) - 'Black Oculus' by John French
(2017) - 'Tallarn' by John French
(2017) -'Pertuabo: The Hammer of Olympia' by Guy Haley
Perturabo escapes from the Eye in a short story and the goddess of logistics swoops him off to Tallarn to fill in that planets backstory. After getting a suppurating hole in his soul from Fulgrim, this marks Pertuabos 'Wunderwaffen' obsession; if he gets a big enough super-weapon he will feel better about himself.
Perturabo fails in his war on Tallarn by just *this* much and is dragged back into the main Heresy line by a summons from Horus.
At about the same time (in publishing history) he gets his second personal deep-dive, this time from Guy Haley, giving us his backstory, his discovery on Olympus, youth, meeting the Emperor, and gradual slow decay into bitterness and ressentiment. Then his total breakdown after one campaign too many followed by a revolt on his homeland finally drives him into a violent purge of his own planet which culminates in him choking his adoptive sister to death.
This is where Pertuabo "falls", and it has relatively little to do with Chaos, at least explicitly. There are no cackling demons popping out to offer Faustian bargains, no Truman-show theatrics, mind-worms, obvious abusive behaviour or strange invitations to the realm of dream. Curze fell likewise but he at least had very serious and undeniable mental problems, whether you see his sadism as inborn or a partial choice.
After murdering and enslaving a substantial chunk of his homeworld, Pertuabo is convinced that 'The Emperor will never forgive this" and turns fully to Horus, who is willing to offer the obvious lie of "you did the right thing". Almost the entirety of the rest of their relationship is Horus consistently pressing this button with Pertuabo until it finally wears out.
Probably, actually, the Emperor would actually have “forgiven this”, its just one world and Primarchs have done worse, plus they did technically rebel, plus the Emperor really needs Primarchs at that precise moment.
Adopted Father – rebelled against him while absent and was killed.
Adopted Brother – drove Perty mad by being actually better than him despite being only human, culminated in spastic statue-smashing by Perturabo, but the guy aged naturally and died well.
Adopted Sister – choked to death in a rage.
Father-Creator – slavish obedience followed by (unusually effectual) rebellion.
Primarch Brothers – either betrayed, betrayed by or just generally fuck those guys.
Gene-Sons – orders Legion to decimate itself via random selection and bare hands, things generally get worse from there.
from https://twitter.com/arhpriest
(2018) - 'Slaves to Darkness' by John French
(2019) - 'The Solar War' John French
(2019) - 'The Lost and the Damned' Guy Haley
(2020) - 'The First Wall' Gav Thorpe
(2020) - Saturnine by Dan Abnett
(2021) - Mortis by John French
From 2018 on Perty is pulled into the final phase of Horus' war and, though he gets no single books to himself, does Pretty Fucking Well Actually, fully earning his Most Competent Traitor Primarch badge. (Its not a high bar but whatever).
Tasked with bringing crazy-ass Angron to heel in 'Slaves to Darkness' he pulls it off neatly. It looks like he planned much of 'The Solar War', which ended in a raging success. I don't think he does much in 'The Lost and the Damned' and Horus won't let him just BLOW UP THE SUN, an ambition he shares with Mr Burns, but when finally allowed to get to work he brings down the Palaces shields with the pinpoint music of his lance weapons, outwits Dorn in 'The First Wall' and takes the Lions Gate, bringing Traitor heavy armour directly to the Palace, then, when stymied, he pulls off the rare feat of half-tricking, or at least manipulating Dorn and Abaddon into the Saturnine gambit, humiliating Fulgrim, blunting the power of Horus and giving the Loyalists a temporary win. In 'Mortis', a rather boring book by John French his plans bear fruit and the Palace is cracked open, leading to the beginning of the end.
After being cucked out of the killing blow by Horus and effectively demoted after doing the hard work, instead of being manipulated again he just Fucks Right Off, getting the hell out of the Sol system with the bulk of his forces and goes off to his Empire of Iron to be a massive problem for the future Imperium.
In a way, for Perturabo, the siege is a personal success. Even though the siege as a whole fails he succeeds at almost every challenge he is given, and ultimately just stops caring about how Horus and the rest view him. He doesn't need to be anyone’s special boy any more. This is largely due to him now regarding everyone else as being utter shit rather than any growth in his personality, but for our fake stoic that might be the best we could expect. If you can’t be Marcus Aurelius, be Steerpike.
Peace out nerds! You won't have Pertuabo to kick around any more!
Wait, did Peter Turbo WIN the Horus Heresy? On the Traitor side at least he comes the closest.
Horus – dead.
Morty - stabbed in the head by the Khan.
Lorgar - beaten up like a nerd after a failed coup & made to go sit in his tower.
Curze - suicide-by-assassin.
Angron - tubes ripped out and banished by Sanguinius.
Alpharius - killed by Dorn and then again by Robute. How can the same shit happen to the same guy twice?
Fulgrim - tabled by Dorn and flounces off (though does cut Robutes throat later)
Pertuabo - beats Angron, cracks open the palace, gets the Justarian killed ;-), takes the Lions Gate, leaves of his own accord, humiliates Dorn in the Iron Cage - how was he ever driven to the Eye?
from https://twitter.com/arhpriest
It’s been stated in a few places, but I can't find confirmation that the Hazard Stripes are a form of Heraldry meaning "death to transgressors" which is to me a pleasing idea of a post-apocalyptic human culture preserving and translating the basic concept of 'industrial heraldry' into something new. (Should be more red hexagonal shields in 40k tbh).
What we know of Perty, and what he knows of himself, starts with him hanging from a cliff, half-way up.
We learn from contextual information that he definitely was not just incarnated at this point. When he meets his to-be adopted father, they talk of stories of a hero wandering the hills, fighting monsters, a super-boy doing adventures. If this was Pertuabo, and no reason to think it wasn't, that’s quite a different personality to the one we see from this point on.
While living at court on Olympia he is largely pictured indoors, arguing with his family, giving Dawkins speeches on atheism, locked in his room doing 'research' and later leading brutal military campaigns. The earlier Perty seems to be cut much more in the mould of a classic wandering Greek hero.
SO - what happened to his memory of those days? and why? I think no other Primarch had anything similar happen to them...
Most likely option is that he somehow traded away, or was tricked out of them or they were somehow stolen from him by the Ruinous powers
We know that Perturabo has access to something quite like the Akashic record, that he essentially 'knows' all material things, (though he doesn't know exactly how to combine or use them), but basically he has a perfect internal science wikipedia running continuously on everything he looks at.
This seems to have had a detrimental effect on his character and personality - he loves research and science, but he is a scientist who can't really 'discover' much; he already knows the details, he can just confirm theories
Consider the personality of a classical renaissance man, asking endless questions about nature, conducting experiments, exploring, finding things out, the kind of person that is and the effect they would have on those around them, both from the relative openness of their personality but also that they are engaged in a process that others can also take part in and come along with.
Compare that to someone who has all of Wikipedia in a low-tech society, and can theoretically *do* anything, but they do it alone, discover little or nothing, are just instantiating knowledge they already have and the main challenge is just getting it right. And consider the different societal effects of lets-discover-nature guy and I-know-everything guy. One shapes an entire culture in a possibly-positive way, the other is basically just a living data-bank, respected, sort of, but more of a resource than an inspiration.
We can consider also the effect of losing those early memories. Early, likely original Perturabo was, a wanderer in the hills, a being with no particular status who encountered strangers, peasants, travellers, monsters, whoever, for himself and interacted with each as he would. (probably). Who was genuinely exploring and having an actual adventure. With no societal instruction book he simply set his own goals and went about them, adjusting with understanding.
The Perturabo we actually get is 'born' on that cliff face. First they face the abyss of knowledge about themselves, then their perfect understanding of the material world, then their first social encounters are with guards and then late a manipulative court, which they enter without any contextual sense of self. A name and a strong will, but no story or sequence of experiences and decisions to tell them who they are. A powerful tool, ready to be manipulated and used.
We can have some sympathy with Perty here as the internet has done a similar number on us.
I'm imagining here, something like a classic 'unwise bequest' in which original Perturabo, for some reason we will never know, makes some kind of deal with the Ruinous Powers (in disguise, he doesn't know what they are), for knowledge. (Magnus did something similar for his own reasons).
'Knowing everything' or being able to understand or construct anything, is the kind of thing an intelligent young boy might think they really want, with no understanding of what a personal disaster it might be. And the only price asked is "your memories up to this point" - and who knows how long that is? A few weeks? a few days?
And perhaps the Emperor actually designed Perturabo with access to the Akashic record in mind, and the power that was 'given' to him in this deal is only power that was rightfully his already, but perhaps might have taken time to unlock.
If it’s a gambit of chaos, it’s a beautifully elegant long-term move to cripple someone’s personality while seeming to aid them, and, most beautifully, removing any knowledge or evidence of the deal at the same time.
(I mean never sign a contract were part of the deal is "you will lose any memory of signing this contract")
The first thing I wrote about Perturabo was about Identification through Recognition, and I am far from the only one! This guy has a fair number of fans and or many of them a similar emotion seems to be at play; recognition of some of the best talents and worst traits shared by the nerd/autist personality type and a kind of distant sad sympathy.
Pertuabo is one of a few projections of the Warhammer player into Warhammer itself, something he shares with Trazyn the Infinite (a compulsive collector with literal shelves of space marine helmets and interdimensional poke balls full of lore-accurate period armies which he arranges in actual dioramas in his planet-sized museum), and to some extent, Fabius Bile (a superior atheist who just loves to kitbash).
Pertuabo collects and built figurines (something remarked on several times), trains hi soldiers to fight in computerised and tabletop Kriespiel games, isolates himself when distressed (which is always), is ‘always-online’ via his weird cybernetics, and, as discussed everywhere, has the personality of an angry incel gamer boy.
The blessed gifts of modernity; isolation, technology, FOMO, self-hatred when compared to an infinity of beauty and accomplishment we can never match.
The fundamental battle with ressentiment, perhaps the most powerful of modern drives and the central moral cultural challenge of out generation. Whom amongst us is not Perturabo in our hearts?? Anyone who put their hand up to that one; FUCK YOU GUYS, FUCK YOU RIGHT IN THE ARSE.
Some have said the world is shaped by men who set their hearts on toys. I will say that the world often shaped by the irresolvable desires which prompt relentless action.
So why can Perturabo not name or acknowledge his own desire for recognition? Even though he is utterly driven by it?
It’s painful to look that deep. Its shameful. To look that deep into yourself and accept not only such a consuming need, or flaw, but also the deep sense of weakness that provokes it, to see yourself as weak, as low status, and such an overwhelming history of failure thereby..
I suppose that is what "set in your ways" really means. After all, just living life, day by day, becomes something of a sunk-cost fallacy, tearing out a part of yourself that late in the game only becomes more and more difficult as the years go by, an admission that deep cuts all the way to the core, does it basically invalidate everything that came before? It certainly feels like it does.
THE SAVAGE LIMITS OF REASON
The horror of intelligence
In a way we don't need the nightmare of Chat GPT to show us this, we just need the biographies of mildly autistic and very intelligent men.
Intelligence; swiftness of comprehension, exactness of conception and clearness of memory, rapid and subtle manipulation of abstract values - is a quality that can be cranked up pretty high, and it can gain you so much.
Chat GPT doesn't know why it does what it does, but if you ask it, it can give you an pretty good answer, (that is entirely made up and not actually true).
Likewise, if we ask ourselves why we do what we do probably the average person is only slightly better at working this out about themselves than a random stranger watching video footage of them would be. Nevertheless, press the button and words spill out; explanations, stories, declarations of principals, ideas, histories.
Could all be complete bullshit - how are we supposed to know? Perhaps we just pressed the Chat GPT button in our own minds and what comes out is as free of real self knowledge as a digital neural network would be.
Whenever we find out something meaningful about ourselves it often comes as a slightly uncomfortable surprise, and it often comes as a result of complex action in complex, rapidly moving and hard to predict environments, not the kind of thing you can just think through, and it often feels slightly unpleasant.
The horror of a high IQ and the alienation that often goes along with it, and the lack of self-knowledge that can grow alongside that.
Cracks are inevitable. They begin at single tiny points but once they start they propagate themselves with brutal speed, and in many cases, increasing the hardness of materials won't help much with stopping cracks, instead you need something softish or more flexible to even out the distribution of force. The hard is not much use without the soft.
Oh Lord of Hosts, I beg ye keep my IQ roughly on a par with my intuitive systems, general instincts and broad life experience, not too high above or too low below, for to do otherwise is to become lost, and the worst kind of lost is to not know you are lost.
February 8, 2023
Cryjack, Rare Skeletons and a Request for Aid
Hello everyone. Here are some updates and at the end a request for help.
'Noisms' is nearly at the end of the Yoon Suin 2 Kickstarter.
He's been incredibly successful.. Much more than any of my Kickstarters.
and I for one.
am thrilled by his success...
If you want to hear me an 'Noisms' ramble for an hour about Yoon-Suin, Games and Culture then you can so so here;
I am clearing out my cupboards and selling a bunch of stuff on eBay (UK only sorry), including some rare original C17 Skeletons from the depths of Games Workshop history.
Go take a look if you like...
Third!
We are working through the layout for my own (much less successful) kickstarter for 'Speak, False Machine'. The book is meant to have a central glossy colour photographic section with images used for reference in the chapter on minis.
Does anyone out there know where I might go to hire someone to help me source a bunch of copyright-free photographs of certain specific types of Warhammer minis in various situations?
I am aware of most of the Copyright free sites for images and they are ill provided with photos of the kinds I need. I could try sourcing individual photos from places like Instagram etc by contacting individual creators but that promises to be a long and frustrating process.
Here is an example spread of what I am talking about (from the test print not the new version);
