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 omly 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.

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.