Let's Read the Horus Heresy 5: Fulgrim

"The danger for most of us," Ostian Delafour would say on those rare occasions when he was coaxed to speak of his gift, "is not that our aim is too high and we miss it, but that it is too low and we hit it."

 - The Horus Heresy: Fulgrim, Graham McNeill

Yes, I am. Do you know my poetry?

 - Cornelius Blayke, presumably

In the fifth Horus Heresy novel, we get to spend some time with the Emperor's Children. Graham McNeill's at the wheel again; if it wasn't written on the cover, you could tell from the fact that every time we meet a woman, we're told about her breasts. Having said that, though, given that this is a book about the fall of a legion to Slaanesh, I was expecting a lot worse.

**

Fulgrim is quite a long book. It tells us about the Emperor's Children destroying a xenos species called the Laer, which also turns into the start of their fall to Chaos, and specifically Slaanesh, as both the Astartes and their attached remembrancers start pursuing ever more extreme sensations. Delightfully, this is underpinned by the philosophy of Cornelius Blayke, who seems to be an amalgam of William Blake and some other characters in the Warhammer timeline. I thought he was a wonderful invention, and the process by which the real Blake seems to have become confused with other historical persons is quite recognizable from actual history. Fulgrim also meets Eldrad Ulthran. I hadn't realized Ulthran was that old.

The co-starring legion in Fulgrim are the Iron Hands. Fulgrim's gang has a decent space opera interlude as they battle the fleet of a human civilization and its alien allies. During the climactic final battle, McNeill has this to say:

Trapped against the furnace of the Carollis Star, the democratic, multi-part confederacy of the Diasporex was proving to be its undoing. Set against the iron leadership of Ferrus Manus, their many captains could not co-ordinate quickly or ingeniously enough to outwit the tactical ferocity of a primarch.

 - Fulgrim, p. 193

Because as we know, multicultural democracies lose naval wars against strong leaders. So at times, the political values are quite clearly visible.

Eventually Fulgrim and Ferrus pick their sides, and the Emperor's Children fall so completely to Chaos that they invent Noise Marines. From a revisit to Isstvan III we go to the epic battle on Isstvan V, where the Iron Hands, Salamanders and Raven Guard are nearly wiped out, and Fulgrim kills Ferrus Manus.

**

I've complained about it being unclear why the traitor Legions fall to Chaos in the first place. When it comes to the Emperor's Children, it both is and isn't quite clear. They're primarily corrupted by the Laer, but the alacrity with which most of them embrace it does strongly suggest that the legion was already headed for a fall. Why is that? Why is it that Bill and even Fulgrim himself have abandoned official Imperial xenophobia and are so willing to experiment with xenos technology, even organs? As with the Luna Wolves and the Death Guard, we're just not told.

I do like that Fulgrim is eventually a tragic figure, but I would have appreciated at least a little more insight into why he basically allows himself to be possessed by a daemon. I just don't really get it.

If the Emperor's Children remain slightly confusing, I have to say I feel bad for the Iron Hands, because they're such stooges throughout. The way the friendship between Fulgrim and Ferrus Manus is told, with the forging competition and everything, is actually really good. But it never really gets a chance to feel significant, especially since at worst, Ferrus Manus is a caricature like Rogal Dorn in Eisenstein. His elite Terminators get unceremoniously butchered by the Emperor's Children, and his "tactical ferocity" on Isstvan V consists of recklessly charging into a fight with Fulgrim and losing. I mean it's not like the Iron Hands have ever been a particularly popular legion or chapter, but still, I felt they were treated unreasonably poorly here.

**

So Fulgrim had some good bits in it, like Cornelius Blayke and the hunt for the Interex fleet. But overall, especially given its length, I think that of all the Horus Heresy books so far, this is the one I'd be least likely to re-read. Even though it has Isstvan V in it, most of it wasn't very memorable, and at worst, it was almost a slog. They can't all be winners, I suppose.

Let's Read the Horus Heresy 4: The Flight of the Eisenstein

In the void, the vessels gathered.

- The Horus Heresy: The Flight of the Eisenstein, James Swallow

We're back with the Horus Heresy series, and the fourth book starts with what could be a reworking of the first line of Black Sabbath's War Pigs. This one's by James Swallow, and he takes us back to before the Heresy started, with the Death Guard. Our main character is Captain Nathaniel Garro, who we already briefly met, so we know where this is going.

**

As Garro hangs out with his battle-brothers and fights the xenos with Morty, the vibe is very Horus Rising, and that's definitely a good thing. I really like the first chapters. I like Garro, I like the camaraderie of the Death Guard, and Morty is entirely charming. I still don't get why they storm Isstvan Extremis. The retelling of the events at Isstvan III is very well done, and the various reactions of Garro and his command squad are well portrayed and add depth to the events. I like that the Sisters of Silence are there as well.

When I wrote about Galaxy In Flames, I said it felt like a real shame that we're not getting at all into what really happened to make the traitor legions fall to Chaos, and to be honest, I still don't get it. In the Death Guard, it's very clear that Typhon is in on the plan and Garro isn't. There's tension on the subject of the warrior lodges, with Garro holding very similar views to Garviel Loken of the Sons of Horus. Captain Grulgor of the Second Company clearly resents Garro because he's from Terra, but Grulgor comes across as pretty much an asshole. So as with the Sons of Horus, I feel like we're being given the mysterious warrior lodges and some petty personal prejudices as the reasons entire legions turned on the Emperor, and marines are entirely ready to murder their comrades in cold blood. It's quite unsatisfying.

Once we get to Isstvan III and the titular flight of the frigate Eisenstein, Swallow is in fine form as the horror thriller of a harrowing trip through the warp unfolds. They picked up Euphrati Keeler and her gang, and I was actually a bit surprised by how marginal they ended up being to the story.

One of the weaker moments of the book is their encounter with Rogal Dorn, who is almost buffoonish in his wild mood swings. I'm coming around to thinking of the Primarchs as something like Norse or Greek gods, except desexualized. Dorn's silliness is definitely inspiring me to paint more traitor Imperial Fists.

What is the thing with asexual space knights, by the way? Space Marines and their Primarchs are even less sexual than the Jedi. I'm not complaining about it, but I'm wondering why it's a thing. Sure, there's a sense in which Horus is Mordred, but the Emperor has no Empress, and there's not a Lancelot to be seen.

However, it's worth noting that the female characters are also quite desexualized, which is good compared to some other works in this series.

**

If Flight of the Eisenstein is reduced to a single main theme, it's the story of Nathaniel Garro's conversion. With the aid of his housecarl and Imperial saint Euphrati Keeler, Garro finds the God in God-Emperor. Because it's a conversion narrative and a very silly space adventure, it's easily the most entertaining conversion story I've ever read.

When I studied conversion stories as part of my degree in religious studies, one of the interesting points made in the literature was that conversion stories are almost always written from the perspective of the new faith, and not from that of the pre-convert. So as actual accounts of what led to the conversion, they're not very useful. That's sort of the case here, as we understand what Garro is converting to, but not really what from.

Part of this problem is that so far, the pre-Heresy Imperial Truth doesn't seem to make a whole lot of sense. It's presented as a sort of almost militant atheism and rationalism, somewhat reminiscent of revolutionary France. But in a space fantasy world of warp demons and psychic powers, its practicioners come across as hapless Scully skeptics, completely denying the observable reality before their eyes. When they chide people for believing in the Emperor as a god, or in daemons, it comes across as prejudice rather than an actual system of beliefs. So sadly, we've now been among the Luna Wolves and the Death Guard, and we still don't really understand why any of them fell to Chaos.

**

Overall, I liked the Flight of the Eisenstein. It was an enjoyable space fantasy, I liked many of the characters, and the thriller/horror elements worked. Good entertainment.

Epic: Let's Build Dropzone Commander Terrain

Now that I've played Adeptus Titanicus and built some terrain for it, it's time to come up with more. Preferably the destructible kind. In other words, we're adding buildings to the desert planet of Lautan Lama. They've already appeared in their unfinished state in several battles, but what with Legions and everything, it's high time to get them properly finished.

**

I was reading up on Titanicus at Goonhammer ages ago, and in their article on terrain, they suggested looking into TTCombat's Dropzone Commander for some cheap but quality more-or-less-epic-scale buildings and stuff. I got the Ruinscape terrain set, and while I was at it, I thought what the hell, why not, and splurged on the two-player starter set. And soon enough they were here!

Dropzone Commander is a 10mm wargame that centers around, well, dropships. There's infantry, tanks, flyers and everything, and a fairly slim rulebook to work it all out with. If If I have a complaint, it's that none of it is really very interesting. The somewhat sparse fluff tells us that Earth has been invaded by aliens known as the Scourge, whose models look something like a cross between Tyranids and Necrons, and several militaristic human factions are fighting them. Eh.

Another minus in my books is that there's no assembly instructions for the models. You can get slightly rudimentary instructions for the various starter armies at the TTCombat website, which I at least think are the same models, but still.

There are a couple of resin models and the rest are in hard plastic. The resin casting is good quality, although there's quite a bit of flash and such. I took a shot at building one of the UCM sprues, and I have to say that the hard plastic is very good! These were a breeze to put together. The one criticism I have is that the flying stands are a bit fiddly and don't always fit together as well as they should.

I tried painting them, and I quite enjoyed it. I picked German Camo Bright Green for the basic color, and I think it worked out okay. Here's the resin HQ vehicle and the APC. The command vehicle especially gives me strong Micro Machines vibes, so I guess that's what I was going for?

The infantry models are simple but functional; their uniforms are in Russian Uniform WWII.

The main problem with the models is really the same as with the fluff and the rules: they're really boring. The scuttly enemy crab commander vehicle is kinda cool, but with everything else, take your eyes off the models and you can't remember what they look like. So overall I have to say I don't find this a particularly evocative product.

**

What we're really here for is the terrain.

The Ruinscape set consists of two parts: some 30cm×30cm cardboard tiles that can be used to build a regulation 6'×4' playing surface, and twenty card buildings. The tiles are cute, and I'm sure they'd work quite decently for Dropzone Commander. I'm a bit leery of how thin the cardboard is, and I think they're unnecessarily crowded.

The buildings, however, are beautiful. There's five different kinds, so four each; they come folded flat and it's a very simple job to glue them together. You pretty much just unfold it and glue the roof in place. The end result looks great.

The big tower blocks are properly big. These are 10mm scale buildings, so technically they're too big for Titanicus. In practice, though, I think they look great, and when you remember that in Titanicus they're basically representing Imperial gothic architecture, I think they work just fine.

I mean of course an Imperial building would have unbelievably massive doors. The smaller buildings are really cute:

And again, there are twenty of them. If that's not an incentive to use the destructible terrain rules in Titanicus, then I don't know what is. I think this set is simply amazing value for money, even if you only end up using part of the card buildings. I built eight of them to start with, which I think will be plenty for Titanicus purposes.

In keeping with the Just Cause 2 theme of my previous terrain pieces, we will be using this set to portray the city of Bandar Setan. There's no reason you couldn't just use them as they are, but I think I'm going to go to the extra trouble of making them little bases. That way I can also make rubble markers the size of those bases for when we blow them up, like we used to have in Space Marine days. So I cut up appropriately sized cardboard bases, and used some spare paper to glue them together.

The result is quite neat!

So I made little bases for all the buildings I assembled, and it was worth it: they now stay standing up straight, and look cute.

Then it was a simple matter of gluing model railroad ballast to the base and painting it Iraqi Sand, and we have some finished buildings.

**

As Dropzone Commander was on its way to us, Goonhammer resurrected Warlord Wednesdays to tell us about TTCombat's MDF terrain, and to be honest, it looked great. I mean look at that Tyrell building! They also have some really cute accessories in the Dropzone Commander line. Now that I'm working on a Legions Imperialis collection, I'm also suddenly very interested in smaller terrain pieces.

But as our Titanicus games have demonstrated, these Dropzone Commander buildings are fantastic, and great value for money. Highly recommended!

Let's Read Warhammer 40,000: Word Bearers: The Omnibus

'He did, sir, upon my honour,’ cried Macdonald, laying his right hand flat upon the table. 'And falsum in uno, falsum in omnibus, I say.’

'Why, yes,’ said Jack, who was as well acquainted with old omnibus as any man there present. 'Falsum in omnibus. What do you say to omnibus, Stephen?’

'I concede the victory,’ said Stephen smiling. 'Omnibus routs me.’

 - Patrick O'Brian, Post Captain

I'm currently reading the Horus Heresy novels, or at least as many of them as I can get my hands on. I found the first three at our friendly local game store, but had to order the next few from Games Workshop. I wanted to keep reading Warhammer nonsense, though, so as a dedicated Word Bearers player I got the Word Bearers Omnibus to tide me over.

Whereas the Horus Heresy novels I've read so far focus on telling the big story of the Heresy, as near as I can tell this is a standalone Warhammer 40,000 story. The Word Bearers Omnibus consists of three novels and a short story, chronicling the adventures of the Dark Apostle Marduk. In the first book, they play Epic, in the second they play Space Hulk, and the third book is 40k.

**

I liked this giant of a book quite a lot. The story is pretty good, and I really liked the characters. When I read False Gods in the Horus Heresy series, I was disappointed that the Word Bearers in it, including Erbs himself, were so one-dimensional. Here we have excellent XVII Legio characters, and they really made this omnibus bus. Marduk is interesting, and his interactions with the other Word Bearers are really good. I especially liked Kol Badar. There are several other brief point-of-view characters, and I think the Enforcer from the first book is definitely my favorite.

A couple of random observations. In chapter 12 of the first book, the Elysian brigadier gets incredibly pissy with a techno-magos who suggests that his casualties be reprocessed into nutrients, and later one of his subordinates is horrified by the idea. I get that the point is that the Elysians honor their dead, but surely corpse-starch is a pretty well-known thing? It'd be an interesting plot point for some regiments to be honored with the distinction that their dead don't have to go into the tanks.

There's an interesting bit in the same book on the subject:

Fallen warriors were dragged back, for to leave them upon the field of battle would have been a gross sacrilege, and in addition, the wargear and gene-seed of the Legion were far too precious to abandon. (p. 122)

Wouldn't it be interesting for this to be a story point and a game mechanic? Sadly, it's not even really consistent across the whole trilogy, as the third book describes Word Bearers ignoring their fallen. But it would be kinda fascinating to portray this in a game.

On a broader matter of representation, I wonder if this trilogy happens to straddle an interesting historical moment. The first book, Dark Apostle, came out in 2007 and is aggressively masculine. I think one female character, a Chaos cultist, speaks in it, and she doesn't even have a name. Dark Disciple, 2008, features Dark Eldar women and a brief appearance by a female Explorator, but again, even compared to the roughly contemporary Horus Heresy novels, it's dead butch. Rather like in False Gods, women are there to be leered at or victimized.

But at the beginning of Dark Creed (2010), a White Consul Space Marine is addressing the "men and women" of an Imperial Guard regiment, and it's not the only time inclusive language is used either. So that's a definite change in representation.

As mil-sf, I really liked the first book. The next two were much more 40k, but my only real issue with them was that the Word Bearer casualties seem massive throughout. I'm willing to accept that some of the stuff in the second book is intentional risk-taking, but overall, there are Chaos Marines being killed left, right and center. When we're told someone's a veteran of centuries of fighting or whatever, the only thing you can think at some point is: how? At the rate Word Bearers die throughout the second and third books, how are there any Heresy survivors left any more?

Finally, to echo what I was saying about the Horus Heresy novel False Gods, it's very obvious throughout the trilogy that the Imperium are the good guys. Loyalist Marines are portrayed as literal knights in shining armor; the Imperial fortress world in the third novel sounds like a paradise, albeit a militaristic one. The first novel goes on about how the Word Bearers make an Imperial world they occupy into a polluted hellscape - which is what I thought Imperial worlds already were. So for all that Games Workshop maintain that 40k is a satire and the Imperium aren't presented as the good guys, well, this omnibus definitely doesn't bear that out.

**

Having said all that, I definitely enjoyed the Word Bearers Omnibus. It was a fun read, and gave me lots of fluff ideas for my own Word Bearers host. I really like how it went all in on the Word Bearers as the bad guys, with appropriately diabolic plots and machinations and such. The first book is especially great on this, but I liked the whole thing.

I'll be back with more Horus Heresy soon!

Let's Paint Dystopian Wars: The Hunt for the Prometheus: the Enlightened

Back in 2021, there was a thing on Bell of Lost Souls about Dystopian Wars, a naval miniature wargame set in like an alternative-history 19th century. Apparently the game has been around for a while, but I've never heard of it, so I went to their website to have a look. Frankly, it's all a bit Scythe, and as with Scythe, I don't entirely get the point of doing a sort-of-alternative-history thing where you give European countries or areas slightly different names, but it still looks like it might be interesting. So I wanted to take a look at the starter set.

Now, it may be that this was because I'd just finished two months of somewhat stressful work on top of a pandemic year, but Helsinki Markov is the most hysterical thing I've seen in ages. This is straight up Masters of Teräs Käsi level shit, not least in that it's just terribly wrong linguistically: the official Russian name of Helsinki in czarist times was Gelsingfors, so for to make any sense whatsoever he'd have to be Gelsingfors Markov - an utterly absurd name. It also sounds like something straight out of Diego Marani's delightful Las Adventures des Inspector Cabillot, which is a bonus in my books.

It's still absolutely hilariously stupid, and given that Games Workshop were being assholes and alienating their fans again (I've been in this hobby since the 90s, this is a core part of the GW business model but no-one knows why), I decided to buy the Hunt for the Prometheus starter set instead of their stuff. Helsinki Markov, here we come.

**

As it's a two-player starter set, there are two factions represented in the box. One is the Covenant of the Enlightened: they're a bunch of deranged super-scientists with a cog-themed logo, which all sounds very familiar. So I think I might be painting them red. And we're going to start with the Prometheus.

The bigger ships are in resin, and it's very crisply cut with almost no flash. The smaller bits also needed very little work, so so far, this is a very high-quality purchase!

The round holes are for generators and gun batteries. Slightly confusingly, the assembly guide gives you no hints whatsoever as to which generator is which; for that, you need the entirely separate Generator Guide, which doesn't come with the box but can be found on the website as a PDF. Looking at the rules booklets, I think there aren't meant to be any generators on board for the opening scenarios? So maybe we'll leave them off for the moment. I did, however, decide to magnetize the guns, starting with the tiniest possible magnets for the turrets.

I then drilled holes in the hull for their opposite numbers.

I have to say that this was one of the fiddliest things I've ever done, and to be honest I'm not that keen on repeating the experience! But it works though.

I then spray-painted all the bits, and got started painting the Prometheus in machine cult colours: Burnt Cadmium Red, Gunmetal Grey and Old Gold. I got started with whatever that thing at the back is, that gets covered up so it needs to be painted before assembly.

I've decided that the Prometheus's pennant number is 05.

I think those are meant to be windows but I'm not sure; I painted them Light Green with a dab of Fluorescent Green anyway to be appropriately scifi. Anyway here she is:

I'm really happy with how the Machine Cult color scheme worked out!

**

To play the first scenario in the Hunt for the Prometheus campaign, we need the Prometheus, and an Enlightened fleet that's trying to stop Helsinki Markov from stealing it. This consists of two cruisers and four frigates, and I think I'll start with two Lovelace class cruisers: La Chymie Charitable et Facile, en Faveur des Dames, pennant number 26, and the Shùsuàn Jiǎncún (27). Those are SRS (short-range squadron) tokens next to them. The cruisers themselves were hard plastic, and a breeze to put together. So far, I'm very impressed with these models.

At this point I realized that my starter set had only come with two Enlightened ship sprues, instead of three like it was supposed to.  We got in touch with Wayland Games, and they have an entirely unnecessarily byzantine process where you have to create an account to communicate with them at all, even on a simple matter like this. However, after we negotiated that hurdle, they very kindly sent us the missing sprue!

Here are the cruisers:

And the SRS tokens:

Then it's time for our first frigate unit, the Merian class frigate squadron Prodromus astronomiae (P42-45).

**

Meanwhile, I was surprised to find a Finnish retailer stocking Dystopian Wars, and to encourage them, I bought a copy of the Islands and Archipelagos terrain set. Again, the resin is excellent quality, very clean and crisp; I love it. Also the little islands are really cute!

I got started by painting up the smaller sandbars with a base coat of Tan Earth and some Iraqi Sand and Tan Yellow drybrushed on.

This was so much fun, I made two more.

And then some.

**

So yeah, I had a really good time building and painting these! Actually trying the game is on my very long to-do list; the next time I pick this up, I'll try painting the whatever it was they called the Russians.

Let's Read the Horus Heresy 3: Galaxy in Flames

"I was there," said Titus Cassar, his wavering voice barely reaching the back of the chamber.

 - The Horus Heresy: Galaxy in Flames, Ben Counter

That's right, it's time for the third instalment of Let's Read the Horus Heresy. You may notice it starts with exactly the same words as the first one, which is a choice you can make. Again, the story picks up right where we left off, as Horus's fleet arrives in the Isstvan system and the Heresy gets properly started.

**

In this one, we meet Morty, who is amusingly described as being Darth Vader. We also get Saul Tarvitz of the Emperor's Children back as a point-of-view character. While Tarvitz and the Death Guard assault a monitoring station, Horus and Erbs talk to the Chaos Gods. The nascent Imperial Cult on Horus's flagship hides Euphrati Keeler, who does another miracle, and eventually Isstvan III is assaulted by a force including the Sons of Horus captains Loken and Torgeddon, as well as Lucius. Tarvitz stays in orbit to co-ordinate.

Counter's writing is good, and the leering and misogyny of the previous volume are gone again. There's more sloppy editing; chapters 9 and 15 start with almost exactly identical words, for example. But overall this is a pretty good book and carries the story forward effectively.

The thing I talked about with the previous book, the emerging black-and-white divide into the good guys and bad guys, is only getting stronger, and still doesn't really make a whole lot of sense. They're still presenting the secular Imperial Truth as a good thing, but then Euphrati Keeler's cult is also a good thing.

To take an example of the good guy-bad guy dynamic, Tarvitz is shown Fabulous Bill's evil lab and offered enhancements of his own. Tarvitz reacts with horror: it's blasphemous to use xenos technology to tamper with the Emperor's holy gene-seed. Now, you can read this with a sense of irony that the "good guy" is a fanatical xenophobe. But the trouble is that the scene is played entirely straight, with Eidolon and Bill as the cackling villains offering evil temptation and Tarvitz heroically resisting.

This time, there's some pretty good moments with the Sons of Horus, but Abaddon and Horus himself are just pantomine villains, with Horus especially a raging, scenery-chewing, ridiculously cruel bad guy. It's still a real disappointment after Abnett's excellent portrayal of Horus in the first book.

Again, I was left wishing that the second and third book would have gone at least a little into why some Marines stayed loyal to the Emperor and some split for Horus. The only reasoning we hear is some stuff about the Emperor abandoning them and Horus, but it's presented so half-heartedly that it's difficult to tell if the people expressing these sentiments are meant to be serious about them. We've now got traitors fighting and killing loyalists, without really properly understanding why they're doing it. It feels like such a missed opportunity.

**

In military matters, I have to say I don't understand why Horus's forces storm the monitoring station on Isstvan Extremis. If the objective was to silence the station and take out its sensors, why not just bombard it from orbit? But also, destroying sensor systems on another planet isn't going to stop anyone on Isstvan III seeing giant Imperial space cathedrals lumber into orbit and start spewing drop pods.

I'm also very confused by the Titan again. In Chapter 3, we meet the Moderati of the Dies Irae again, as they're preparing the Imperator Titan for battle. And they're doing it on board Horus's flagship, the Vengeful Spirit. Do Astartes command ships really have the capacity to handle Imperator-class Titans and their landing craft? I mean I can't say it's impossible, but until now the biggest thing we've seen launched is a Stormbird. I really would have thought that moving even parts of a Titan Legion around would be a considerable enough operation to require dedicated Mechanicum starships.

But there are combat support troops! As the Sons of Horus are prepping for the Istvan III drop, a communications squad is mentioned. I'm especially pleased since I already painted one. Ground surveys prior to the drop pod assault are mentioned! Even more shockingly, Lucius seems to actually exercise command, and the Emperor's Children have an officer co-ordinating their battle from orbit. On the surface, there's even artillery and armor.

Severe spoilers follow. Having said that there's now at least some attention being paid to warfare, I do need to ask this. After the bombardment, the survivors fight back for what we're told is months. Given that the plan all along was for the first wave to be wiped out in the bombing, why were they allowed to drop with months of ammo? Or how are they resupplying themselves? I'm sure they can scrounge some ammo off the dead, but for months? They still seem to have plenty of emergency medical supplies until the very end. If Space Marines routinely drop with gigantically oversized supply dumps, you'd really think someone would mention it.

In general, though, when Counter writes warfare, it actually sounds like war and not a tabletop skirmish game, so from a mil-sf point of view, this is by far the best book yet.

**

So the Heresy is now fully underway, with Keeler and the gang making their getaway on the Death Guard ship Eisenstein and the remaining loyalists purged from Horus's legions. I'm still enjoying reading these books; they really are good entertainment.

Epic: Let's Paint Legions Imperialis

"You already have a uniform, Colonel, issued to you by the Emperor. That's who you're fighting for. Let the traitors alter their uniforms."

 - Lois McMaster Bujold, Barrayar

I waxed poetic earlier about how Epic, specifically Space Marine, was my first love in wargaming. That meant that when Adeptus Titanicus came out, I got the starter box and a bunch of stuff, and then went on to buy some Aeronautica Imperialis as well. Hell, I even tried Battletech.

And then, in July, Games Workshop announced that Epic was coming back. And then announced that it was delayed. The delay went on and on, and we were told nothing about what was going on and why. Frankly, I started to feel a little silly that I'd been excited about the whole thing in the first place. We never were told what caused the delay, and I'll admit it played a part in my decision to buy no new minis in 2024.

However, it is now 2025, and I have the Legions starter set.

**

The box comes with a lovely hardback rulebook that's the same quality as the Titanicus books, but easier to read, for which my aging eyes are grateful.

There's an infantry box of space marines and Solar Auxilia each, some vehicles for both, and two Warhound Titans, as well as two whippy sticks, templates and dice. I also bought a Legions Astartes Battleforce, which gave me another pair of infantry sprues and a bunch of other marine things.

If I have a criticism of the starter box, it's that it actually doesn't come with that much stuff. You have enough infantry for two companies, with some attached units, and a smattering of tanks that don't make a formation for either faction. Also there's no terrain at all. This is actually a bit of a problem for us Titanicus players, as most of us won't have bothered with terrain small enough to be useful to infantry!

Another problem, which has been widely noted, is that there aren't a lot of order tokens, and they're printed on ridiculously flimsy card that's very prone to tearing. The comical quality of the printing is such that even the envelope the token sheet was in was terrible, the flap came off in bits instead of opening. How I yearn for anything even remotely like the 2nd ed Space Marine order counters.

As for the rules, my first impression is very positive. They strongly remind me of old Space Marine, which is a good thing, and the basic rules seem fairly streamlined. There's some odd things, but I'll get into those when and if I actually get a chance to play this.

**

What delights me as a Titanicus player is that the two Warhounds come with a whole new suite of weapons. To be honest, Titanicus feels pretty much dead right now, so it was a pleasant surprise to find not just lots of new weapons, but Titanicus weapon cards for them online as well.

Obviously I had to build some of them. I was thinking about ordering a volkite eradicator anyway, and the Incisor melta lances suit my Ferrox Maniple.

The new weapons are the same excellent quality that we're used to with Titanicus.

**

Because the Legions supplement Rise of the Dark Mechanicum includes rules for fielding a Titan army, it turns out I actually have a tournament-size army and then some in my Legio Venefica Titans and Auxilia Daedra Knights: they add up to 3490 points in Legions. However, they wouldn't be a very practical army, as only the Knights would be able to capture objectives. So I'm going to build some Space Marines who can do that.

The first Legions thing I actually did was order the appropriate flying bases for my Aeronautica Marine flyers. So perhaps counterintuitively, I have Titans and aircraft, but no ground troops.

I'm not sure how I feel about the textured bases, but I do know that they don't match the desert aesthetic I had decided on for my Titans. So I tried gluing on different amounts of ballast, and painting the exposed areas Light Grey, and I think it turned out all right.

As you can see, my Marines will be Word Bearers. When I got back into Warhammer ages ago, I decided that my legion of choice would be the XVII, because I had recently finished my theology degree and it was obvious that the Word Bearers were the theologians of the Chaos Space Marines. I carried that over into Aeronautica, and now I'm very surprised to find that the Word Bearers actually have a useful Legion trait! Unlike the other, lesser Legions, I can give orders to Broken detachments. So we're definitely sticking with Word Bearers.

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The first formation I'm going to build is the most basic building block of Marine armies: the Legion Demi-Company. Entertainingly, the rulebook tells us that Legion companies were made up of three demi-companies. A demi-company has four compulsory detachments: an HQ, a Support and two Core detachments, both of which have to be tactical marines. It can get a whole bunch of different optional detachments, and all non-infantry models in the formation get a bonus when contesting objectives. I like that, as it encourages combined arms.

I got started with the Contemptor Dreadnoughts. Frankly, I've never been a fan of the design, but they're right there on the infantry sprues.

Some of those bits are tiny. But I maybe have to take back what I said, because at this scale, Contemptors are cute.

Each infantry sprue comes with two Contemptors, and building all of them from the starter set and the battleforce box gave me eight: four with twin lascannon and four with assault cannon. They were pretty easy to build, even though the smallest parts were a bit fiddly.

I painted them very simply: Burnt Cadmium Red base coat, Dark Red drybrush, Gunmetal Grey details with a Black Glaze wash. This is the paint scheme I used for my Aeronautica models, and it seems to work quite well at this scale.

They form the Dreadnought Talon As living dwellings in whom the strength of man rejoiceth.

**

What I really need, though, is infantry. Each sprue has a command stand, four stands of tactical marines, and one each of assault, plasma gun support and missile launcher support marines, as well as two stands of Terminators. There are some sergeant models for all of them.

The infantry are, of course, very tiny. Handily, the only assembly that's required is gluing the missile launchers on the support marines, and even though it's a bit fiddly, it can be done on the sprue. The majority of the models are attached to the sprue by their base, so with a very small amount of work, you can paint all the models on the sprue and then clip them off to glue onto the bases.

Painting the models was quite simple, and I went with the same formula as the Dreadnoughts.

As painting all that infantry is very fiddly work, I also built the three Predators from the starter box, and two Rhinos from the battleforce.

Both the Rhinos and Predators have several weapon options, which if I'm honest I'm not sure I'm a fan of. I can understand different turrets for the Predators, but choosing between sponson weapons just seems overly fiddly and unnecessary at this scale. They've also been made quite difficult to magnetize, although at this scale that wouldn't be my first choice anyway.

I also painted the two Sicarans.

Again, it's a bit weird that you get two squadrons of battle tanks, because the only Astartes formation you can make out of the box is a demi-company, and you can only attach one battle tank detachment to it. To make an armored company, you need a heavy armor detachment, like these Kratoses from the battleforce box: the squadron Behold! his mercies flourish.

I also built one of them into a commander. If you make a Solar Auxilia tank company, you have to upgrade one of the tanks to a tank commander, but the space marines only got tank commanders in the Great Slaughter supplement, and they're a separate detachment.

However, this lets me build my first formation: a Legion Armored Company.

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I'm sorry, did I say infantry? I seem to have ended up painting tanks. Here's a tactical detachment.

I've painted these guys to match my 28mm signals squad, so their right shoulder pads are white and bear the signals insignia. Here's the whole demi-company, i.e. the infantry contents of one infantry box: one HQ stand, two tactical detachments, and two stands each of Terminators, Assault Marines, and plasma gun and missile gun support troops. They are the 2nd (Signals) Demi-Company Mightier are your voices than the manifold winds, 5th (Combat Support) Company, 2nd Battalion, Morbid Fane Chapter, Word Bearers Legion.

And here's all the marine miniatures from the core box.

**

So, I quite liked painting little tanks, and painting the infantry wasn't nearly as much of a chore as I'd feared. I haven't had a chance to play the game yet, but frankly, I'm having enough fun building and painting the minis that I want to collect more of them.

I hope GW keeps supporting the game, even though I'm not that keen on the system of releasing themed campaign books that also include rules. There's already some really good models, and I'd love to see some Rough Riders for the Solar Auxilia, more marine infantry and super-heavies, and Rough Riders. There's also still some gaps in the order of battle, most prominently that there's nothing in the marine artillery slot yet.

To conclude, I'm absolutely delighted that Epic is back, and I've enjoyed building and painting these minis more than any hobby project in a long, long time.