Let's Read the Horus Heresy 16: Age of Darkness

He wanted to weep, but the last two years had turned his heart to stone.

 - Rules of Engagement, Graham McNeill, in The Horus Heresy: Age of Darkness

This time on Let's Read the Horus Heresy, it's another short story collection, called Age of Darkness.

**

McNeill opens with a story about some Smurfs doing combat simulations; it's not bad, but they really are the most boring legion. Liar's Due by James Swallow is a really good Alpha Legion story, and after this and Nemesis, I'm kind of a fan. Nick Kyme's Forgotten Sons is, sadly, also very forgettable.

The first Horus Heresy novel I actually read was by John French, and this collection has his story The Last Remembrancer. I quite liked it, and on reading it, I realized why I've developed such a dislike of Rogal Dorn. He's a bully. I'm not sure I've seen an appearance from him yet where he doesn't threaten to murder people for crimes like disagreeing with him, or telling him something he doesn't want to hear.

Chris Wraight's Rebirth is a visit to the ruins of Prospero, and speaking of bullies, the comparison made in it between the World Eaters and Space Wolves is very apt. The World Eaters are a tragedy: genetic super-soldiers literally driven insane by their desire to emulate their deeply damaged Primarch. So far in these stories, in their interactions with the other legions, the Space Wolves and Leman Russ just come across as hypocritical assholes. Y'know, sorcery is terrible, unless a "rune-priest" does it. I freely admit I never liked the faux space viking thing, but it's not as if anything I've read so far has made me change my mind.

Gav Thorpe's story, The Face of Treachery, was just flat and boring. Little Horus, by Dan Abnett, wasn't really anything that special, but the quality of his writing really is head and shoulders above everyone else. I still like the Luna Wolves because of Abnett, and am trying to resist adding yet another legion to my Epic collection. Rob Sanders's Iron Within is a decent enough story about some loyalist Iron Warriors, and Aaron Dembski-Bowden finishes on a strong note by taking everything that was good about Descent of Angels and running with it.

**

So far, these anthologies have been a bit of a mixed bag. Both ones I've read have had some really good stories, a couple of bad ones, and several very forgettable ones. A I write this, though, Black Library are charging 6.49€ for an anthology, and 3.49-3.99€ for a single short story, so basically if there are two stories in an anthology that I'm interested in reading, it's actually cheaper to get the whole thing. So maybe I'll be reading a few more.

Let's Play Cuba Libre

Mmm... organized crime.

 - Homer Simpson, Last Exit to Springfield, the Simpsons, season 4

I remember seeing a copy of Colonial Twilight: The French-Algerian War, 1954-62 at our friendly local gaming store and thinking to myself that anyone who makes a board game out of the Algerian war has got to be mad. Of course, I now know more about GMT Games and can testify that they are, indeed, quite mad. Still, I was intrigued by the idea of an entire series of counterinsurgency games, and since the publishers themselves suggest starting with Cuba Libre, that's what we're going to do.

**

The first impression I got was sheer delight at how small the game board was! We're used to games taking up the entire table, so it was a delight to have some actual elbow room. Despite its tiny size, the board is very functional, and the cards and wooden pieces are excellent.

We're playing as four factions fighting over Cuba: the government, Fidel's rebels, the Revolutionary Directorate of 13 March, and the US Mafia. While the government is trying to hold on to power and suppress the rebels, the rebels are trying to control enough territories to overthrow the government, while the mob is trying to keep its casinos open and make money. While all factions have different win conditions, I was very interested in the asymmetrical nature of the Mafia faction, so that was who I played as.

Cuba Libre is a card-driven game, but in a very clever way: players don't hold cards in their hands, but a card is revealed from the deck, and then the top card of the deck is turned face up. So there's always one card in play, and you can see what the next card will be as well.

The icons at the top of the cards determine the order in which the factions act that turn. In that order, they can decide to pass, play the event, or conduct operations on the map. Once two factions have played, play moves on to the next card, and the factions that took an action last turn have to sit the next one out. In some cards, like Herbert Matthews above, you pick one out of two possible event outcomes.

It's a very clever system, which forces you to think quite hard about your decisions every turn. Furthermore, victory points are scored whenever a Propaganda card comes up; they're distributed throughout the deck, one per quarter.

We started as we went on: I was trying to open casinos and amass wealth, the Directorio massed in the central highlands and Fidel's gang founded bases in the east. Santiago de Cuba attracted huge amounts of police, military and guerrillas throughout, and somehow none of them got much done. The most miserable people on the island must have been the unfortunates who lived in Las Villas, which was constantly being shaken down for resources by the Directory's guerrillas.

When the game ends is determined by when the last Propaganda card comes out. If the deck is prepared properly, it should be in the final quarter of cards: one of cards 40-52. In our case it was card number 49. So with the third Propaganda card showing up surprisingly early, the last campaign turned into a bit of a slog. However, in the end, the Directory won a surprisingly tight game.

We all enjoyed the game and found it quite simple to pick up and play on a weekend day. The asymmetry between the factions and the card-driven system are excellent. I've put in a P500 order for Pendragon, the COIN game set in Roman Britain. Before it shows up, I'm pretty sure we'll bust out Cuba Libre again.

Let's Read the Horus Heresy 15: Lorgar: Bearer of the Word

The Tower of Infinite Lords was less impressive than its name suggested.

 - The Horus Heresy: The Primarchs: Lorgar: Bearer of the Word, Gav Thorpe

Greetings from Kor Phaeron! The Lord Phaeron! The Bearer of the Word! The Warrior of the Wasteland! The Ayatollah of Rock and Rolla!

 - Castora, herald-slave of the Covenant of Vharadesh, probably

I decided it would be a good idea to follow up The First Heretic with Lorgar, to stay on a Word Bearers kick. This one's by Gav Thorpe, who was something of a controversial figure back in the day in the Warhammer hobby. I read a short story of his in Tales of Heresy, and it wasn't great. In this Primarchs novel - they don't seem to be numbered - he's taking us to the Word Bearers' homeworld of Colchis.

**

The book starts with a bunch of impoverished nomads on a desert planet, who come across Kor Phaeron's Mad Max caravan. Because I mean of course the religious fanatics are a desert people. There actually hasn't been a whole lot of orientalism in the Horus Heresy series so far, but Lorgar goes a long way toward fixing that. I half expected Kor Phaeron to have a harem.

Anyway the nomads have discovered a remarkable child in the desert. It's Lorgar, obviously, and Kor Phaeron takes him into the caravan and starts teaching him the faith. Even though there's an actual sandworm, it's a lot more Mad Max than Dune, because the religious content is really just thinly veiled Chaos worship. No human sacrifices, daemon-summoning or that kind of thing (yet), but it's very obvious that the Powers who rule Colchis are the Chaos gods.

Lorgar is instructed in their worship, but when he starts having visions of the Emperor and C. Magnus the Red, he replaces Lorgar as the Ayatollah of Rock and Rolla and starts preaching the faith of the One, who will soon descend to them from the sky. Lorgar goes on to take over the biggest religious organization on Colchis, the Covenant, and unify the planet into a theocracy, while Kor Phaeron is an evil bureaucrat.

The problem is that this is all incredibly boring. It's not a bad story, but Thorpe's prose is so lackluster that nothing feels like it matters. Again, Lorgar is a sympathetic character, and so are several of the others, while even Kor Phaeron gets some good moments. But there's nothing exciting, interesting or memorable here, not even any really interesting fluff for wargaming. Given that the Primarchs ebooks currently cost twice as much as the main series, I would strongly recommend avoiding this even if you're a Word Bearers fan.

Epic: Let's Paint a Word Bearers Host

"I would sacrifice the entire Host in order to fulfil the will of the Dark Council, if such was needed."

"And the warrior-brothers of the Legion will lay their lives down if that is what is required of them."

 - Anthony Reynolds, Word Bearers: The Omnibus

I'm hoping to get a chance to play Legions Imperialis soon! So all I need now is to expand the Word Bearers from the starter set into a proper army.

**

To do this, I have an Astartes Battle Group boxed set. It includes models like these Tarantula sentry guns.

And these Rapier platforms, both laser destroyers and quad launchers. The latter are still the only kind of space marine artillery we get. I've painted everything with more or less my Word Bearers standard scheme: Burnt Red basecoat, Dark Red drybrush, details as required.

The Battle Group also includes the fast attack box, which means Land Speeders:

And Scimitar jetbikes.

Two detachments, in fact.

And some Javelins:

And all this means I can now assemble my third formation: a Sky-hunter Phalanx.

**

There are also Leviathan dreadnoughts.

I already painted all my little space marine tanks, so I also went and bought some Land Raiders.

A friend gave me a box of Spartans for my birthday, so I painted two of them for my Word Bearers.

**

Finally, the infantry box in the Battle Group means I can now build full detachments of the support troops, starting with the Terminators:

Followed by plasma gunners:

Missile launcher support marines:

And assault marines:

Not to mention my second demi-company, the 1st (Air Assault) Demi-Company of the 4th Company, II Battalion, Morbid Fane Chapter.

**

So that's a whole pile of Word Bearers!

I'm very happy I've got all this painted up, and delighted that the summer preview told us we're getting heavy armor and artillery. Having painted two companies of tactical marines, though, I have to say I really hope we could get more infantry!

Painting 8mm has been a lot of fun. I won't pretend I'm achieving anything beyond tabletop quality, if even that, but I like the end result and enjoy the process, especially with the vehicles. I hope I get a chance to play soon!

Let's Read the Horus Heresy 14: First Heretic

The first falling star came down in the heart of the perfect city.

 - The Horus Heresy: The First Heretic, Aaron Dembski-Bowden

"No Recall or Intervention can work in this place. There is no escape."

 - Lorgar Aurelian, probably

Here we finally are, with my legion: the Word Bearers. This is my first Aaron Dembski-Bowden book. He's highly rated by both Horus Heresy tier lists and reddit users, so let's see what we get. There's almost an element of danger here, because I'm kind of looking forward to this one.

**

I'm quite happy to say that The First Heretic more than fulfilled my expectations. Dembski-Bowden writes well, and I think he gets a crucial point: the Horus Heresy is, first and foremost, a tragedy.

So, the book finally stars the Word Bearers. Lorgar's seventeenth Legion, formerly the Imperial Heralds, known for their fanaticism in the Imperial cause and as the inventors of Chaplains, the skull-helmed heralds and confessors of the legions. The problem has been that in the previous novels, the Word Bearers have mostly been pantomime villains.

In The First Heretic, we finally properly see things from their point of view. The Word Bearers thing is that they're very religious, and basically worship the Emperor as a god. When we've encountered the Imperial cult in the previous volumes, their holy text has been the Lectitio Divinitatus, which attests the divinity of the Emperor. Lorgar wrote it.

Emps himself, however, does not approve. He also thinks the Word Bearers are moving far too slowly for the Great Crusade, and to chastize them, he sends the Ultramarines to destroy the city of Monarchia that the Word Bearers spent ages building for his glory. The inhabitants of Monarchia get to evacuate and send one distress call, which has the entire legion rush back. Emps himself then forces them to kneel in the ashes of the city, in ritual humiliation.

As I'm sure you can imagine, this is a tremendous success and the Word Bearers immediately mend their ways.

Several of the previous Horus Heresy novels have featured Word Bearers First Chaplain Erbs, always sort of lurking around, doing something villainous and best visualized as Mike Myers's Dr. Evil with his little finger to his lips. We now know where Erbs learned his trade: from Lorgar's adoptive father Kor Phaeron, a fairly ancient augmented human (i.e. not a proper space marine, he was too old for the procedures) who clanks around in Terminator armor like a mechanized Palpatine. The two of them encourage Lorgar to go on a quest to find gods who are willing to be worshipped, and again, those of you who know the lore know how this goes.

At the forefront of Lorgar's quest is captain Argel Tal, a name many people will recognize. He's an excellently written character, and so is Lorgar. The two of them carry the narrative, with Argel Tal as the point-of-view character who has his doubts about whether these are the kind of gods they should be worshipping. The story culminates in the Drop Site Massacre at Isstvan V, where Lorgar duels Corvus Corax of the Raven Guard.

**

This is a very successful book. It's a tragedy for just about everyone involved, from the Emperor on down. It's a successful one because while Erbs and Kor Phaeron are still mostly just being evil, the motivations of the key characters are deeply understandable.

There's some talk in the book that each Primarch embodies some attribute of the Emperor, and passes that on to his legion. It's stated here that Lorgar's attribute is faith, which makes all of his Word Bearers fanatically loyal to him, and at least somewhat explains his deification of the Emperor. Now, because we've read The Last Church, we know that Emps is an angry New Atheist, so we get that this pisses him off. But Lorgar apparently never realizes this until the destruction of Monarchia and the humiliation of his legion.

You really do have to wonder what the Emperor was thinking. If Nicaea and sending the Space Wolves to destroy Prospero were terrible decisions, and Emps not telling Magnus what he was up to seems inexplicable, I think there's a good argument that the ritual humiliation of Lorgar and the Word Bearers is what kicks off the whole Heresy.

Lorgar's greatest personal tragedy is that he's a genetically and sorcerously engineered super-soldier who doesn't want to be a soldier at all. He's a leader but not a warrior, but it's not like the Emperor asked him. He's the Primarch who doesn't want to be a Primarch. Clearly he's happiest doing theology and building cities for the Imperium, so I don't know, why not let him do that?

During the Drop Site Massacre, he charges Corax even though he knows it's a duel he can't win. But he's rather die than watch his legion butchered. That's real heroism. Like I said, how do you not feel for the guy? So far he's a rare Primarch in not being at all a buffoon or a lunatic.

Argel Tal is also very sympathetic. Like I said, he has serious doubts about what they're doing, but his loyalty to his Primarch is such that he doesn't just follow along, but volunteers. Of course, he comes to suspect that he's doing this because of the gene-seed he has from Lorgar, but he does it anyway. The stories of Lorgar and Argel Tal are properly tragic, the setting is very space operatic, and the whole thing is just a satisfying, well-written story.

**

The First Heretic also features a Legio Cybernetica unit attached to the Word Bearers, where some of the battle-automata have been inducted into the legion as honorary members. So I'm very much afraid that's all the justification I'm going to need to paint some Word Bearers robots in Legions.

Finally, I want to point out that Lorgar is consistently described as golden, and after the dramatic events on Khur, he spends quite a long time brooding and smearing himself with ash while wearing only a loincloth.

This, by the way, is where I abandon publication order. Like I said at the start of this project, I absolutely will not read all fifty thousand Horus Heresy books, and even though I've heard good things about Prospero Burns and Abnett's been quite good, I have to be honest and say that I find the whole space viking thing so unbelievably boring that I cannot face the idea of a whole novel of them. Because there will apparently never be another Elder Scrolls game, I have to reserve my viking cliche tolerance for another playthrough of Skyrim. So I will be back next time with something out of sequence.

To sum up, I found The First Heretic grand and intoxicating. It's by miles the best Horus Heresy novel so far, and I'd say that if you're interested in Warhammer and are going to read one book in the whole series, I'd make it this one.

Let's Play Chaos in the Old World

Back before the pandemic, when I was looking for board games for our little group to try, I kept coming across the out-of-print Chaos in the Old World, and finally, I cracked and bought a second-hand copy.

**

Chaos in the Old World is a four-player game where each player controls a Chaos God and tries to corrupt and destroy the Old World.

The board and components are excellent, but I do have one complaint: the miniatures. I like the design, but it's the War of the Ring problem again: they're made of soft plastic, so quite a few of them are bent out of shape, and some of the cultist models have lost their Chaos icons entirely.

Everyone gets three kinds of models: cultists, daemons and a single greater daemon. Cultists generate corruption tokens, and daemons can fight peasants and each other. Each turn, each player gets a set of power points they can use to summon models onto the board and play chaos cards.

There are three ways to win the game, and one way to lose it. First, each chaos god has a threat dial. If they do certain thematically appropriate things, they get to advance the dial; for example, if Khorne kills other gods' models, they get a dial token. If a player manages to advance their dial all the way, they win.

You can also gather victory points by dominating areas, that is, having enough models in them to exceed their conquest value. If a player gathers 50 victory points and no-one's maxed out their dial, they win.

You also get victory points from ruining areas. If an area has twelve corruption tokens on it, it becomes ruined, and everyone who chipped in corruption tokens gets victory points. If five areas get ruined, the game ends and the player with the most victory points wins.

Finally, there's a deck of Old World cards that represent random events in the world; when the deck runs out, the game ends, and if no-one has achieved any of the victory conditions, everyone loses! I like it.

**

We decided the only thing to do was to try playing! We divided up the Chaos gods, and I shamelessly picked my personal favorite, Slaanesh.

At the beginning of the game, the map gets randomized a bit with various tokens scattered in the different areas. As Slaanesh, I was particularly interested in the Noble and Hero tokens, as I get to move my dial if I can place corruption tokens in areas with them. Luckily, one of the early Old World cards had a hero arise in the Troll Country.

I staked out a presence in Norsca to corrupt their nobility, and Tzeentch homed in on the warpstone in Kislev, where we had the first, inconclusive, battle of the game.

Over the first turn, we all homed in on where we thought our strengths would be. I started corrupting the north, and Tzeentch infiltrated Kislev and the Empire. Nurgle favors populous areas and focused on Bretonnia, while the Khorne player mistakenly thought he'd get to advance his dial by killing peasant tokens and carved a bloody swathe through the south.

I realized I was slightly hemmed in in the north, and made a play for Tilea in the south. Nurgle wanted it as well, and we got into a fairly epic fight, with both sides summoning their greater daemons.

Unfortunately for me, Nurgle was victorious, but some of my cultists survived to land a corruption token with the Tilean nobility.

Nurgle switched their attention to Estalia, Tzeentch invaded Norsca, and Khorne started making inroads into the Empire. Nurgle also continued to pile up corruption tokens in Bretonnia at an impressive pace.

Soon enough, we were ready for total destruction. The mechanics for ruination are interesting: everyone who's placed corruption tokens in the ruined area that turn gets victory points, and then the players with the most and second-most tokens in the area get a bigger points haul. It leads to some good scrambles as everyone tries to get in on the action. Nurgle's efforts bore fruit in Bretonnia, and Tzeentch led the way in blowing up Kislev.

The game was now definitely nearing its end. We only had one turn left, and it looked like a pretty foregone conclusion that I would be able to advance my dial to win. Meanwhile, several players were closing in on the 50-VP win condition, but if we somehow failed all of these, we'd actually all lose! So we decided to work together to blow up as much of the Old World as possible.

In the end, we ruined not only Bretonnia and Kislev, but also Norsca, Estalia and the Empire. I maxed out my dial and took the overall win, but all of the other players also exceeded 50 victory points, and we ruined five regions, which means that we fulfilled all of the victory conditions on the last turn of the game. So I feel like in that sense, we all won.

**

I decided I'd do the same with Chaos in the Old World as I have with some other games, and paint the winning models. It took me such ages to finish writing this post that I painted all the Slaanesh models before it was done.

Since they are board game pieces, I wanted to make it very obvious which Chaos god they belong to, so pink and purple were the order of the day.

**

We had a great time playing Chaos in the Old World. The mechanics are surprisingly smooth, and I really enjoyed the theme and the gameplay. Your choice of Chaos god does constrain your options somewhat, so I don't know, maybe this'll get repetitive after some point. I'd love to get the Horned Rat expansion, but it's only available second-hand for absolutely outrageous prices. But the base game itself is just an excellent time, and I highly recommend trying it.

Let's Read the Horus Heresy 13: Nemesis

Gyges Prime was a murdered world, dead now, all but an ashen ember.

 - The Horus Heresy: Nemesis, James Swallow

This one's by James Swallow, who also did Flight of the Eisenstein, which I liked. Nemesis tracks a team of assassins sent to kill Horus, and a murder investigation on an Imperial world. It's quite good.

**

Like so many scifi novels, Nemesis has two plots that initially start out completely separate from each other, but obviously the reader knows that they'll eventually meet. This requires some faith in a author, and I remember giving up on Peter F. Hamilton's Reality Dysfunction when he introduced what felt like the twentieth separate and unconnected plot. Nemesis also requires a little bit of faith when one plotline is an Execution Force of Imperial assassins working up to murder the Warmaster, and the other is a detective story that seems to have nothing at all to do with it.

It's worth it, though. The Assassinorum plotline is a very classic one where they assemble a team of dysfunctional individualists to do an apparently impossible mission. You've seen the movie, you've played the video game, you know how this goes. But it's competently done and enjoyable; as with Eisenstein, Swallow writes a good Warhammer thriller. Oddly enough I think the experience is enhanced by the fact that if you know anything at all about the Horus Heresy, you know they won't be successful.

I also really liked the police procedural plotline. The Horus Heresy books are so focused on the space marines that it's just good to read a story where for something like 90% of the time there isn't a suit of power armor to be seen. The way the two stories link up is actually interesting enough that I'll just say that I thought this was a very good Horus Heresy book and leave it at that.

Something Nemesis has in common with Eisenstein is that in both books, Rogal Dorn is a complete moron. Here he tries to pick a totally pointless fight with the Custodes and is just generally an ass. I'm coming around to the idea that one way to look at the Horus Heresy is that the whole Primarch project was just a really bad idea.

**

So anyway, I liked Nemesis. And speaking of Primarchs and really bad ideas, next up, it's Lorgar.

Let's Read the Horus Heresy 12: A Thousand Sons

The Mountain had existed for tens of thousands of years, a rearing landmass of rock that had been willed into existence by forces greater than any living inhabitant of Aghoru could imagine.

 - The Horus Heresy: A Thousand Sons, Graham McNeill

It's time to finally properly meet C. Magnus the Red and his legion. It's a Graham McNeill joint, which we can tell because the first chapter discusses how fuckable the young female Remembrancers are. Lexicanum tells me that this was the first Black Library novel to ever make the New York Times bestseller list, so let's see how he did it.

**

A Thousand Sons (nb. there are more than one thousand of them) starts with the titular legion hanging out on a desert world, meeting some Space Woofs, and going on to fight some bird-dudes with the woofs and the Word Bearers. Our main point-of-view characters are Ahriman and a human remembrancer dude.

The juxtaposition of the hapless human Remembrancers and the inscrutable superhuman Astartes is honestly kinda boring by now. I understand that it's useful to have regular humans alongside the space marines, but I feel like we've already done this same exact thing with the Sons of Horus and the Emperor's Children. The Remembrancers are sympathetic enough, but some of the sub-plots involving them feel like unnecessary padding in what's already a fairly long book. Shades of Fulgrim, in other words.

A Thousand Sons feels like a throwback to the first Horus Heresy books in good ways as well. I like the Thousand Sons characters, and Magnus and Ahriman are particularly successful. McNeill's done well in making Magnus and his legion tremendously arrogant, but in a very believable and human way. The Space Wolves are less successful, mostly coming across as silly barbarians. If you want mindless berserkers, the World Eaters have consistently been more sympathetic and interesting.

The Word Bearers play a small part in the proceedings, but at least they get to be a proper legion doing proper legion things, instead of just having Erbs loom around sinisterly like an Astartes Dr. Evil. We also meet Lorgar, who helps calm C. Magnus the Red and Leman Russ.

After all this, it's time for the Council of Nikaea, where the question of whether space marine legions should make use of psykers is debated. I have no idea why it's been named after one of the great Christian ecumenical councils, especially since no-one gets punched in the face by Santa Claus.

After Nikaea, everything goes from bad to worse. The remembrancers have a totally unnecessary sidequest involving the psychneuein, which seem to have been as annoying in the 31st millenium as they are in Gladius, and everything culminates where those of you who know the fluff know it does.

**

A Thousand Sons is too long, but it's a successful book because in the end, it's a successful tragedy. The decision at Nikaea is wrong and, as we know, eventually gets reversed. Magnus and his legions are wrong to ignore it, and Emps is wrong to not tell Magnus about what he's doing.

So far, the most significant error in this whole mess, the hamartia of the Horus Heresy, if you will, is the Emperor not telling any of his Primarchs what he was up to. It's what makes Horus doubt him, and makes Magnus try to contact him and fuck everything up. Having said that, the decision to send Leman Russ and the woofs to destroy Prospero seems totally insane. So yeah, at the end of the day, if I have to pick a side on this, then I say Magnus Did Nothing Wrong (tm).

This was a good book.

Let's Read the Horus Heresy 11: Fallen Angels

There were no trumpets to announce their arrival, no cheering crowds to welcome them home.

 - The Horus Heresy: Fallen Angels, Mike Lee

We're back with the Dark Angels, as Fallen Angels picks up where Descent of Angels left off. The cousins Zahariel and Nemiel are back on Caliban and with the Lion's crusade fleet, respectively, and Astelan from Tales of Heresy is on Caliban as well.

**

So this is the story of how the Dark Angels on Caliban end up rebelling against the Emperor, told simultaneously with Lion El'Jonson and Nemiel out fighting for the forge world of Diamat against Horus's forces. It's an interesting piece of background, and I wanted to make some Fallen Dark Angels for my 40k Chaos army, but they got dropped in 9th edition, I think, just before I got around to actually building the models. This has happened to me enough times in 28mm GW that I'm kinda tired of it.

There's some shoddy editing: Astelan has a power sword on page 125 of the electronic book, and on 173 it's a chainsword, and there's the occasional typo. The biggest problem of all, though, is that it's all just kind of flat and uninteresting. The way everyone keeps calling everyone Brother all the time, you fully expect Hulkamania to run wild on you, but sadly, in Fallen Angels, nothing really runs wild at any point.

The Lion plotline is honestly just kind of boring? There's some decent action, but it's just really not very interesting, and it doesn't really tie in at all with what's going on back on Caliban. The story there is better, but also rather uninspired, with a very by-the-numbers Aliens knockoff, which the writer apparently liked so much he did it twice.

Plot spoilers, but at the end of the story, Caliban is in revolt against the Imperium and Luther is apparently trying to summon a daemon. This is a bit of an abrupt turnaround for him, and again, why this happens, or why Lion El'Jonson seemingly turned on his homeworld and abandoned his mentor, is never really properly explained, or at least in a way that feels satisfactory.

As with several of the previous volumes, we again have a whole lot of space marines going from swearing eternal loyalty to the Emperor to more or less deciding "you know what, fuck that guy" in pretty much the blink of an eye. Given that this series of books is about, you know, the Horus Heresy, it feels like a pretty big omission that I still can't exactly tell you why the rebels decided to rebel.

As military science fiction, there's not really a whole lot here. There's a very Second World War naval battle in space over Diamat, and the fighting on the planet is intensely 40k with its APC rushes and almost turn-based exchanges of fire. Like I said, on Caliban we get Aliens, but with Warhammer space marines instead of Michael Biehn, and then Aliens again, and never a Ripley in sight.

**

While the pace of the Caliban storyline picks up toward the end of the book, it's still not particularly well executed, and the Diamat part is frankly boring. Fallen Angels isn't as bad as Battle for the Abyss, but it's not very good either. In fact, it's very much like the latter part of Descent of Angels. If I'm honest, even if you're into the Dark Angels, I'd skip this one.

Let's Read the Horus Heresy 10: Tales of Heresy

He had been circling for ten months.

 - Blood Games, Dan Abnett, in The Horus Heresy: Tales of Heresy

Okay so somehow, I feel like I only just started reading these, and here we are with book ten. Tales of Heresy is a collection of seven short stories from various authors: some of them are good, some are not, and some are all right.

**

The first story is Blood Games, by Dan Abnett, and it's apparently one of the first stories about the Custodes, making it the prose equivalent of that John Blanche art. It starts off really good, but I think it'd have been better without the second half. Still, it's not bad, and it's fun to have a Custodes story.

Mike Lee's Wolf at the Door is pretty good, although it's kind of wild how inconsistent different Black Library stories can be with each other. In this one, hordes of Dark Eldar are no match for a squad of Space Wolves, which is really weird to read when the last time I read about them was the Word Bearers trilogy, where they were... different. Still, it's a decently written story, and although the ending is overly dramatic and a bit clumsy, at least the Imperium come away as kinda bad guys.

Speaking of bad guys and Anthony Reynolds, Scions of the Storm is his contribution to the volume, and I don't know. I didn't think it was very good. Once again, the Word Bearers are almost comically evil sneering villains. I like that some of the characters from the Word Bearers trilogy are there, but little else. Which is more than I can say for Gav Thorpe's first appearance in this series, Call of the Lion, which is just bad.

At this point, I was really not sold on this anthology. Imagine my surprise when Graham McNeill's The Last Church, where the Emperor is a New Atheist, turns out to be great, and Matthew Farrer's After Desh'ea closes out the volume by making me like Angron. So there were two excellent stories lurking in there, as rewards for everyone who made it that far. I'm glad I read it.

**

As a postscript, I am now perhaps slightly annoyed that in addition to my Word Bearers and Alpha Legion, this and the sympathetic World Eaters captain in Battle for the Abyss now make me want to paint some of Angron's guys as well. It hasn't even been a year into the 8mm hobby and it's getting out of hand already. Reading these books was a bad idea, and I'm going to keep going.

Let's Read the Horus Heresy 9: Mechanicum

It never rained on Mars, not any more.

 - The Horus Heresy: Mechanicum, Graham McNeill

We're back on Mars, this time with with McNeill and the Machine Cult. There's Knights, Titans, a bunch of protagonists who actually kinda don't really matter, but Knights blow up, Titans fall over and fun is had.

**

I have to say that McNeill's prose has definitely improved since Fulgrim. Even his descriptions of female characters aren't nearly as leering, and none of Mechanicum feels like a slog to get through.

Our protagonist is a scribe called Dalia Cythera, arrested for a tech-heresy on Earth and taken to Mars to assist an adept of the Mechanicum in her super-secret project. She's a sympathetic character, but oddly, the super-secret project and the stuff she gets up to doesn't really matter, because at the same time, we get to follow the outbreak of the Horus Heresy on Mars through a Legio Tempestus Titan princeps and some House Taranis Knight pilots, and frankly that's much more interesting.

Somebody online said that Mechanicum is a YA novel, and that's actually very exactly true of the Dalia plotline. It's not a bad thing, it's just a little surprising.

The stories sort of intersect when a machine run by as abominable intelligence (AI) tries to murder Dalia. I found it a little weird, as the void-shielded murderbot was a good antagonist, but I felt like an abominable intelligence should have been a bigger deal? Men of Iron and all that?

Other than that, though, I don't really have a lot to say about Mechanicum. It has some good background on the Machine Cult, and especially toward the end, there's solidly entertaining mil-sf action with Titans and everything. I enjoyed it.

Let's Read the Horus Heresy 8: Battle for the Abyss

Olympus Mons burned bright and spat a plume of fire into the sky.

 - The Horus Heresy: Battle for the Abyss, Ben Counter

Finally, a Horus Heresy book starring my guys, the Word Bearers. It's by Ben Counter, whose Galaxy In Flames I quite liked. The Word Bearers have hatched a nefarious plot to attack the Ultramarines home world, and only a handful of loyalists stand in their way.

**

Okay, first things first: this is really, really bad. Battle for the Abyss is absolutely the worst Horus Heresy book so far, and it's not even close. It's worse than False Gods and more boring than Fulgrim. If you're reading these, just skip it.

It has the occasional decent moment, and I wanted to like it: it's a story about a battle and chase between starships, and it has Word Bearers in it. But it was just such a slog to get through.

The plot feels like it's lifted from a bad Star Wars fanfic, with some warp stuff stuck on. Everything would make a lot more sense if the titular Furious Abyss was an Imperial death star or super star destroyer, and the protagonists were scrappy rebels fighting the Empire. The Abyss is supposed to be an incredibly powerful mega-battleship with a full chapter of space marines on board, and yet they can't destroy a single Imperial cruiser or defend their ship against a handful of marine boarders. None of this makes any sense at all, and makes most of the plot just fall apart even if you don't think about it.

The Word Bearers are just terribly written. Their leaders are generic sneering villains, and the regular marines are mooks who get slaughtered by the heroes like storm troopers being chopped up by Jedi. It makes no sense at all for a tiny bunch of loyalists to try to storm a battleship with something like a chapter of Word Bearers on board, except that these Word Bearers don't seem to be Astartes at all, based on the way the protagonists just carve through them. This is an exceptional Horus Heresy book in that the enemy space marines aren't presented as equal opponents in any way.

The loyalists themselves are all one-dimensional caricatures of their legions: the Smurfs are insufferably rigid and righteous, and their dialogue is horrible; the World Eaters are insane berserkers; the Thousand Sons officer is a competent psyker who means well but is persecuted; the Space Wolf is a drunken barbarian who hates the space wizard. The World Eaters captain becomes a bit more of  a character toward the end, and I liked the Thousand Sons guy, but most of their interactions are completely forgettable.

My adopted legion identity with the XVII is starting to take root, because I was so disappointed by how badly the Word Bearers were represented, and I really, really hate the Smurfs.

**

When I wrote about False Gods, I noted that entire starships just mysteriously appear out of nowhere, and similar things have kept happening since. As a reminder of the pure physics of these things, in the words of the fantastic Atomic Rockets website: There Ain't No Stealth In Space. Space is cold and empty. It is simply impossible for spacecraft, let alone gigantic floating space cathedrals propelled by massive reaction drived, to hide in space.

Battle for the Abyss forces us to revisit this issue, and ask: how incredibly bad are Imperial sensors?

When the Ultramarines battleship Fist of Macragge fails to show up, the protagonists commandeer an Imperial cruiser and go looking for it. When they reach the site of the last recorded transmission from the ship, they find nothing at all. The author tells us that this isn't unusual, as traces of space battles can simply vanish.

We actually know that the Furious Abyss destroyed the Fist of Macragge. The physics of blowing up a massive Imperial battleship without leaving even a spot of wreckage are frankly impossible, so I suppose the only question is: are Imperial sensors so bad that they somehow can't see the debris?

As the heroes pursue the Furious Abyss, it needs to dock for repairs. This is how chapter 9 starts:

The assault-boats docked quickly and without incident, the pilot having avoided radar and long-range scans to insert the Astartes squads outside the main thoroughfares of Bakka Triumveron 14.

So the cruiser Wrathful entered the system, flew close enough to the space station where the Abyss was docked, launched its assault craft, and no-one on the station or indeed the Abyss noticed a damn thing until the World Eaters started murdering people.

The only way this makes any amount of sense is if Imperial sensors are really so bad that stationing people at viewports to look outside would dramatically improve their early warning capabilities.

**

So yeah, sadly Battle for the Abyss is the first Horus Heresy novel that I strongly recommend skipping no matter what you're interested in. It's just bad.

Let's Read the Horus Heresy 7: Legion

The Nurthene uttered some of the usual gibberish before he died.

 - The Horus Heresy: Legion, Dan Abnett

"Brother Alpharius, be so kind as to pass me my powerful Astares binoculars."

"Yes, Brother Alpharius."

 - Alpharius, probably

After the previous novel's post-technological fantasy, here's Dan Abnett with a total change of pace and scenery. The previous Abnett book in the series was the first one, and it was probably the best one so far, so I'm actually kinda expecting something.

**

As it happens, I was not disappointed. Legion is really good.

I'll get the bad stuff out of the way first. Some of Legion is very silly, even by the standards of this series, and the endless macho posturing starts getting very boring very quickly. Abnett is very sure to let us know that everyone is dead 'ard or whatever, and keep letting us know. It's actually very much like the characters in Darktide, which uncoincidentally boasts Abnett as a writer, and which I may have compared to a Guy Ritchie gangster movie parody.

Luckily, even though Legion shares some of the macho stupidity of Lock, Bolt and Two Smoking Barrels 40,000, the British entertainment product it far more closely resembles is 'Allo 'Allo. We have a main character who works undercover, pursues a totally unlikely romance, more or less disguises himself as an onion seller, and tries to stay alive amidst the conflicting schemes of a foreign intelligence organization, the army, the secret police and the Alpha Legion. Go on, tell me Lord Commander Namatjira isn't General von Klinkerhoffen, or that you can't see John Grammaticus bemoaning what a tangled web we weave.

The one disappointment in all this is that as a mirror image of the macho bullshit, Legion objectifies women in a way that Horus Rising very notably didn't. Or I mean to put it another way, I'm sure there was a very solid plot reason to create an Imperial Army regiment that has a permanent cadre of horny teenage girls. It's not bad by mil-sf standards, but combined with the very manly soldier men being dead butch, it starts to get quite tiresome.

What rescues Legion from its flaws is the plot, and especially the Alpha Legion. It starts out as a decently entertaining spy thriller that aspires to Alistair Maclean, and turns into space opera. This is a combination that's intensely Warhammer, especially if you remember that the previous novel was a post-technological Arthurian romance, which makes a wonderful combination. It's also very enjoyable, and clearly rises in quality toward the end.

There are many good characters in Legion, but the ones who really steal the show are the Astartes. In one early scene, there's an Alpha Legion marine pretending to be their Primarch, and another one pretending to be their other Primarch pretending to be a regular marine. And it only gets better from there. When I looked into 28mm Horus Heresy, I found the Alpha Legion interesting; now I'm trying paint schemes for them in 8mm.

**

So far, Legion is the best Horus Heresy novel. Do read it.

Twilight Imperium 3: Are You Threatening Me?

No longer mere earthbeings and planetbeings are we, but bright children of the stars! And together we shall dance in and out of ten billion years, celebrating the gift of consciousness until the stars themselves grow cold and weary, and our thoughts turn again to the beginning.

 - Lady Deirdre Skye, "Conversations With Planet", Epilogue

A little over a year ago, the Yin Brotherhood was victorious in our second game of Twilight Imperium. Now it's time for game 3.

**

After our previous game, it was suggested that last time's winner should play with one of the higher complexity factions next time. I agreed, and picked the Arborec, who I decided were basically Alpha Centauri's Planet after a transcendence victory. On my left was the Nekro Virus, and on my right the Ghosts of Creuss; opposite me were the Mentak Coalition (space pirates) and the Tyranids.

Everyone got started expanding out of their home systems.

The first hostilities of the game were between the Nekro Virus and the space pirates, when the Nekro Virus invaded Sakulag. Their faction specialty is that they don't develop technology, but rather acquire it by consuming other factions' units and betting on the outcomes of agenda votes. So they got things started by eating some space pirates.

Apparently this was by mutual agreement, although I don't think anyone asked the pirates whose part in the deal was to get eaten. While all this was going on, I built the Arborec flagship and seized the Cornholio system right next door to Mecatol Rex, and the Ghosts of Creuss spread their influence far and wide.

On the opposite side of the board, the pirates tried to grab Tar'mann, but their invasion force was wiped out by the Tyranids' upgraded space cannon in the First Cannonade of Tar'mann.

For my part, I cashed in a secret objective by blowing up a Creuss destroyer with my flagship.

The Ghosts of Creuss surprised us by claiming Mecatol Rex, which put them firmly in the lead and ushered in the agenda phase. I was second in victory points, with everyone else more or less sitting tight and building up their fleets. The space pirates sent a larger fleet, which survived the Second Cannonade of Tar'mann, and grabbed the planet.

**

I have to say that the agenda phases in this game were even sillier than usual, and we greatly enjoyed them. The Nekro Virus don't get to vote in the agenda phase, but they can pick one of the agendas to bet on. If they guess right, they get to steal technology from the voting factions. I have no idea what this mechanic is even supposed to represent, but it's damn good fun. With the Nekro Virus bets and various action card riders, it sometimes became a very complicated but entertaining process to figure out who gets what depending on which way a vote goes.

As an example, when we voted on Representative Government, two players attached riders, leaving two of us to actually vote on the outcome. That would then have been changed by Bribery, but the bribe was sabotaged.

By far the silliest vote was when we drew Public Execution, and the first thing that happened was that the Nekro Virus assassinated my representative. The matter then went to a vote, and the Ghosts of Creuss were chosen - only for them to deploy Confusing Legal Text and have me publicly executed instead.

While all this was going on, the Ghosts racked up victory points by spreading their fleet thin and using the extra mobility provided by their wormholes. As the rest of us were trying to co-ordinate an attack on them, the Creuss player picked the Imperial strategy card and won the game outright by scoring a 2-VP objective.

I came in second with 6 VP. It was a deserved win for the Creuss with a well-executed strategy. I shall henceforth refer to them as I Am Wormholio.

**

So, we saw that Creuss victory coming, but we didn't see it coming that quickly. I think some valuable strategic lessons were learned.

As the Ghosts started racking up victory points, their fleets were outnumbered by their neighbors, that is, myself and the Tyranids. However, our actions were severely constrained by our neighbors. For much of the endgame, there was a considerable Nekro Virus fleet right next to me at Thibah, and the space pirates were massing behind the Nids.

This was an excellent example of the strategic concept of the fleet in being: the fleet at Thibah was a serious problem for me, as I didn't know what it was going to do. If I moved decisively against the Creuss, there would be nothing to stop them from grabbing several of my systems. So I'd have to take a serious risk to stop the Ghosts from winning, and make myself vulnerable to the Nekro Virus.

So far, I'd say our games of Twilight Imperium have been characterized by the security dilemma. Each player sees their neighbors building up their fleet, and feels threatened, and therefore builds a larger fleet. Their neighbors see that, feel threatened by it, and build more starships and space cannon. And so it goes, with large sections of the board paralyzed into mutual deterrence.

The overall strategic lesson I'm taking with me from this instance of Twilight Imperium is that if you camp, you lose. I still feel like the pace of the game is slightly faster than I think, but I'm getting a better handle on it. I like that the game rewards aggressive play for victory points, and I hope we get to play it again!

Let's Read the Horus Heresy 6: Descent of Angels

It begins on Caliban.

 - The Horus Heresy: Descent of Angels, Mitchel Scanlon

The sixth book in the Horus Heresy series isn't available in print, so I bought it as an e-book from Black Library. I got a perfectly decent epub file for my money, and it was a good thing to read on my phone. Descent of Angels is Mitchel Scanlon's only book in the series, and it's a bit of a strange one.

**

Descent of Angels starts on Caliban, the future home world of the Dark Angels, well before first contact with the Imperium. The protagonist is a (very!) young knight called Zahariel, and we follow him as he joins Lion El'Jonson's knightly order. The knights wear primitive power armor and go on quests to rid the forests of Caliban of terrifying beasts. The first half of the novel is basically a post-technological Arthurian fantasy, and I really liked it. The knights' campaign culminates in a sort of medieval-Napoleonic siege and storming of the castle of an enemy knightly order, which at times is pure Sharpe, with the heroic warriors climbing up the breach in the walls with their standard waving. It's great stuff.

Then the First Legion and eventually the Emperor himself show up, and sadly, the story takes a decided turn for the worse. There's some decent stuff as the knights are tested and many are inducted into the I Legion, now the Dark Angels. There's a definite attempt to foreshadow some coming splits in the Legion, but the story feels artificial. There's a sub-plot where some disaffected knights try to assassinate the Emperor, and it's just poorly done throughout.

In the last part of the novel, Zahariel is a full Space Marine, and their chapter is sent to enforce compliance on the world of Sarosh, replacing some White Scars. Given the nature of the assignment, it's a bit of a mystery why a Primarch would be sent to do it. I'm also not too keen on the return to the theme of virtuous warriors versus corrupt civilians. It's a bit too militaristic for my taste.

I do like that the flagship of the Fourth Expeditionary Fleet is called the Invincible Reason, it's very French Revolution of them. I could definitely see a pre-Heresy Imperial ship called the Droits de l'Homme. L'Empereur Souverain? Tyrannicide, I think, would suit my Word Bearers better.

Even though the initial description of Sarosh isn't bad, this last quarter of the novel is clearly the worst part. It turns out everything on Sarosh is not what it seems, and after some events, the Dark Angels have to haul a psychic bomb into a cave on the planet. Again, the whole thing feels rushed and poorly done, and the attempt to foreshadow what everyone who knows their 40k lore knows will happen to the Dark Angels is just kind of clumsy. I've rarely read a book where the quality of the story, and even of the writing, dropped so sharply.

There's also a bit of a discrepancy between Descent of Angels and some of the previous books. In Horus Rising, one of the Luna Wolves is possessed by a daemon, and this is considered unbelievable by almost everyone, and needs to be carefully suppressed. In Flight of the Eisenstein and Fulgrim, daemons are treated as ridiculous superstitions. But in the last part of Descent of Angels, the idea of daemons entering the material world is discussed entirely matter-of-factly, without a 30k Scully in sight. So I'm quite confused as to what's supposed to be going on with this.

**

I've always liked the Dark Angels, not least because the excellent 1993 Space Hulk video game, where you play as the Deathwing, was a formative Warhammer experience for me. So I very much wanted to like Descent of Angels, and as a Dark Angels fan, I definitely enjoyed the first part of the book. It gave me a lot of ideas for fluff for my traitor Dark Angels. But unfortunately there's no getting away from how disappointing the last part of the book was.

On a broader note, the e-book experiment was successful, and I think I might try another one.