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.