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!