Let's Read the Horus Heresy 29: Eye of Terra

‘I was there,’ he would say, right up until the day he died, after which he spoke only infrequently.

 - The Wolf of Ash and Fire, Graham McNeill, in The Horus Heresy: Eye of Terra

It's another anthology! One that starts with Graham McNeill echoing the beginning of Horus Rising, in a somewhat forgettable story about the acrual Emperor himself. After what I said about anthologies previously, you may wonder why I'm reading this at all. It's because of Aaron Dembski-Bowden's Aurelian, which is worth the price of admission on its own. It's followed by another Dembski-Bowden story, Massacre, a Night Lords vignette I also liked, and later on he takes us along on another section of Sevatar's journey.

My main complaint with the Night Lords stuff is that I'm already collecting enough legions and don't need to start taking a liking to them as well. Speaking of which, Matthew Farrer's Vorax made me want to buy more Mechanicum robots. I also enjoyed John French's Eagle's Talon, and Iron Corpses by David Annandale.

So yeah, this was an anthology with some pretty good stories in it.

Epic: Men of Iron

Advances in Computer technology have made possible the new science of Robotics, which was previously the realm of science fiction. Robotics concerns the design and building of machines capable of mimicking some modicum of human action. These machines can sense changes in their environment and take limited action based on this information. Robots are essentially computer-controlled machine tools that can be programmed to perform tasks such as welding car parts. They are especially useful for tasks that are monotonous, dangerous, or tiring, where they are often more productive than their human counterparts.

Last year, I fielded some Thallax Cohorts against the Imperial Fists, and they were spectacularly successful. As I've already painted some 28mm robots as well, I thought it was high time I got to their epic-scale versions.

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I was playing around with Legion Builder one day, and realized that I have something like 1 500 points of Knights that I've built for Titanicus, and I was seriously thinking about getting some more Cerastus Lancers after their excellent performance in our last game. So I could definitely field a Knight army in Legions.

This led me to look at the Bonded Cybernetica support formations for Knights, and I found that if I made a Retainer Cohort with the Vultarax Stratos-Automata, I could give my Lancers Outflank. What's more, the Vultaraxes looked pretty easy to build. So I started with them, and painted them in Auxilia Daedra colors.

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The other Vanguard choice in the box is the Vorax Battle-Automata. I thought I might add them to my Brethren of Iron, as they're a unit that could actually use a Cortex Controller to give them orders; on their own, they can only March or Charge, meaning they'll never get to fire their weapons.

There's two 32mm bases of Voraxes in the box, and they're impossibly fiddly to build. Here's my first complete one, and the bits of the next one laid out.

You can mix and match pairs of legs and arm weapons with the torsos, to create differences that are pretty much imperceptible on the tabletop.

Three Voraxes crowd a 32mm base, and the box makes two bases. I painted them in Word Bearers colors.

I mean I'm not gonna say this was the most annoying model I've ever built; I've had far worse experiences. But they've tended to involve resin or metal. This may be the fiddliest thing I've ever done in hard plastic, and again, because most of the details are indistinguishable on the tabletop, it isn't even worth it.

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So that was annoying. Luckily the two Domitar robots were much more fun to build.

I made them Word Bearers as well, because I thought the Domitars Perturabo has hanging around in Angel Exterminatus were cool.

The two Arlatax Battle-Automata are going to join my Titan Legion, so they're in Legio Venefica livery.

They're actually a conversion. For some reason, I can't stand the leaping-off-a-tactical-rock pose that James Workshop fell in love with in the 2010s or thereabouts, so I made the Arlataxes stand properly. It wasn't too hard to do.

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So, that's a bunch of 8mm robots! After the Voraxes, I have to admit I didn't have the stomach for the Castellax stands. I'll get to them later. All in all, though, I liked the robots, and I'm looking forward to trying them in the game.

Let's Read the Horus Heresy 28: War Without End

Slender tendrils of fragrant smoke drifted from fang-mouthed oil burners, filling the bed-chamber with a delicious mix of cinnamon and honeysuckle.

 - The Devine Adoratrice, Graham McNeill, in The Horus Heresy: War Without End

It's another anthology!

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Graham McNeill kicks things off with The Devine Adoratrice, a prequel to Vengeful Spirit, about Knight House Devine. I didn't like it any more than I did the Devine plotline in that novel.

There are two Dembski-Bowden stories here, Howl of the Hearthworld and Lord of the Red Sands, and the latter is why I got this collection. Howl of the Hearthworld, though, is about Space Wolves, and while it's well written, it still confirms what every other Space Wolf portrayal I've read also tells me: that they're deeply unpleasant, arrogant bullies. Most of the story is about a squad of Space Wolves being assholes to someone who did nothing to deserve it. By contrast, Lord of the Red Sands stokes my growing love for Angron and the World Eaters.

Other standout stories include James Swallow's Gunsight, a sequel to the excellent Nemesis, and Guy Haley's Twisted, also set on Horus's flagship. The rest of them are mostly all right, I guess?

To be honest, I don't really know how I feel about these anthologies. The good stories are good and I enjoy them. Even the mediocre ones are fine to read while commuting or such. But I don't really remember anything about them. Would I buy these if I wasn't doing this reading project? Probably not.