Let's Read the Horus Heresy 37: Angron

Jochura woke, if the brief, shivering yield to his exhaustion could be called sleep.

 - The Horus Heresy: Primarchs: Ghost of Nuceria, Ian St. Martin

I've read all of the main series Horus Heresy novels that I'm going to, but before I move on to the Siege of Terra books, I want to read about some of my favorite Primarchs. Now, I did already read one of these, namely Gav Thorpe's Lorgar, and it wasn't good. But what with After Desh'ea, First Heretic and Betrayer and everything, I really do like Angron and the World Eaters. So I'm reading what Ian St. Martin did with them.

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First up, I've got Ian St. Martin's short story Ghost of Nuceria. It's a brief look at Angron doing his best Conan the Barbarian on Nuceria, just before the climactic final battle of his ragtag gladiator army with their former overlords. Probably the most important point of the story is that the Emperor is a dick, but then we kind of knew that already.

From there we go on to the Primarchs novel, Angron: Slave of Nuceria. I think a content warning is in order, because the book starts with a slightly grisly surgery scene. It's set after Angron's been reunited with his legion, and they're trying to figure out how to implant copies of Angron's rage implants, the Butcher's Nails, in everyone. Angron has ordered this, but not everyone is very happy about it, especially centurion Mago of the 18th company, who's our main point-of-view character.

About half of the book is Mago, Khârn and the rest of the World Eaters trying to force a recalcitrant planet to return to compliance, while dealing with Angron's erratic and murderous behavior, and debating the wisdom of the Nails. When the legion fails to enforce compliance within Angron's arbitrary timeframe of 31 hours - a day on Nuceria - he goes berserk and starts murdering marines, until the legion's Librarians manage to shut him down. One of the Librarians falls into a coma and starts reliving Angron's memories of his time as a gladiator on Nuceria, which makes up the other half of the story.

Once again, those of us who know the fluff know how this all ends, but it's still a well-written and effective tragedy. Angron is just a really shitty, violent dad to his legion. He humiliates them and kills them when they don't live up to his impossible expectations, and is just generally an asshole to them even though they do their best to be good little legionnaires. The aggression, sulking and unpredictable violence are more than a little familiar to anyone who's survived abuse as a child or by a partner, which does give the story an extra dimension.

Having said that, it's also very easy to understand why Angron behaves the way he does. Not only does he still have the rage implants in his head, but the Emperor snatched him away from his comrades in the middle of their climactic battle, and forced him to take charge of a legion he never wanted. Combine that with Angron's insistence on the World Eaters also being implanted with the Nails, and I'm sorry to say that this instalment of power armor space opera is actually about transgenerational trauma.

In that trauma, Emps is the original shitty dad. The more Horus Heresy I read, the more obvious it becomes that the whole mess is really the story of the Emperor's complete mismanagement of the whole Primarch project. The way he treats Angron is just awful, but it's not like the World Eaters weren't a problem before he showed up. They were already rebelling on their own, and if we recall that Curze and the Night Lords were doing pretty much the same thing, and the senseless humiliation of the Word Bearers and the Thousand Sons, Emps had a pretty good civil war brewing without Horus doing a damn thing.

I've said before that the Horus Heresy is at its best when it's understood as a tragic space opera, and there are few more tragic characters in it than Angron and his legion. If I ever collected Horus Heresy loyalists, I think they'd definitely be World Eaters. Maybe I'll build a 28mm World Eaters Librarian and hope it satisfies this urge.

Anyway, Angron: Slave of Nuceria is a perfectly decent Horus Heresy book, and I'd recommend it to anyone with any interest in the World Eaters.

Let's Paint Warhammer Renaissance

A while ago, I was introduced to Warhammer Renaissance. Bizarrely living on a Facebook page, it's a fan project to take the 4th-6th edition Warhammer Fantasy Battle rules and make them, well, better. I'm interested in trying it, as I should have some folks to play with, and more to the point, a huge pile of Warhammer Fantasy miniatures from back in the day. If Epic was my first love in wargaming, I did also own the 4th edition Warhammer Fantasy Battle box, but got to play far too little of it. This is as good a time as any to fix that.

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Making something out of my chaotic collection of Warhammer Fantasy miniatures is very appealing to me, both from the obvious financial standpoint, but also on a deeper level. As long ago as 2019, I read a blog post from a Warhammer hobbyist, written shortly before he passed away. It made me resolve to try to finish modeling projects before starting new ones, so I did: I built some Warhammer 40,000 armies and actually played games with them. I followed that up with a New Year's resolution to not buy any new miniatures in 2024, which I think I mostly kept.

Then in 2025, Legions Imperialis showed up, and I've really enjoyed painting and playing it. I also feel that I've gone about it a lot more responsibly: I have no untouched Legions kits in my collection, and the unpainted stuff all fits in a single Legions Astartes Battle Group box. I'm quite happy about this.

So now it feels like the next logical step in this process is to go back to all the Warhammer Fantasy stuff I've bought over the years, and try to build some workable armies out of that. I'm going to try to do this with an absolute minimum of new purchases. This will make a serious dent in my stash of unpainted miniatures, and that makes me feel quite good.

What's more, we're going to be approaching Warhammer Renaissance through Stillmania. For those of you who have yet to hear the good word, Stillmania is an approach to wargaming named after Games Workshop writer and designer Nigel Stillman. It's basically the antithesis of the current meta-chasing, win-at-all-costs tournament culture.

For me, Stillmania means coming up with heaps of fluff for my army, but especially in my current circumstances, it means that I'm building a Warhammer Renaissance army out of what I have, and playing that army. I'm looking forward to it.

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At a guess, I could probably build three, if not four, whole Warhammer Renaissance armies from what I already own. The easiest one to get into playable condition has to be Chaos; not just because the models cost a lot of points, but because I have so many of them already. For starters, I bought a Wrath and Rapture box back in the day, so I already have a bunch of Daemons we can get into Renaissance shape.

I started with the Juggernauts I'd painted earlier and once fielded in a game of 40k. I'd given them grey bases to match my 40k minis, but it didn't seem appropriate for fantasy models. So I came up with a sort of hell-themed basing scheme of Vermillion with a German Camo Black Brown drybrush:

I like it.

Yeenoghu got the same treatment, and while I was at it, I also painted the base of my Skull Cannon of Khorne to match, even though it doesn't exist in Renaissance.

I'm still kinda happy with the job I did on it, though, so maybe one day...

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Wrath and Rapture also came with Bloodletters, and this project finally gave me a reason to paint them.

I never really thought much of Bloodletters, but they're kinda growing on me. Here's a closeup of the flag for pride month:

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I'm very happy to have this project underway!

Let's Read the Horus Heresy 36: Titandeath

The spires of the Phalanx formed a cityscape as glorious as any once boasted by Terra’s orbital plates, now all the more impressive for lack of suitable comparators.

 - The Horus Heresy: Titandeath, Guy Haley

As a diehard Adeptus Titanicus player, I'd actually been looking forward to this book. We already got some very good Titan action in Legacies of Betrayal and some glimpses of god-engines in Vengeful Spirit and Tallarn, so it's about time the Titan Legions get a novel of their own.

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Luckily, Guy Haley doesn't disappoint, and Titandeath is a very competently written and entertaining Horus Heresy story. It follows Legio Solaria, a loyalist Titan Legion whose command crews are all-female, and their battles with the traitors of Legio Vulpa at Beta-Garmon. I liked the characters, and there's a good balance of battle and personal narratives.

Titanicus players take note, there are several named Titan classes that I think have never had models. There's a tiny Titan: "a Rapier class scout, a lighter, swifter machine than even a Warhound", and several medium ones:

The balance of their engines was of middling classes – Reavers, Nightgaunts and Carnivores – but the aggressive manner in which they deployed them made up for the relative paucity of heavier machines.

Lexicanum identifies a Nightgaunt as a sub-type of the Warlord, but it's clearly described as a Titan smaller than a Warlord in Titandeath. We want these in Titanicus and Legions!

I'm also entertained that they're fighting over Nyrcon City, which I invariably read as Nyrok City. I mean I suppose I can see Fulgrim having an Andy McCoy phase. Again, I have to be honest and say that I don't fully understand why the two sides are fighting over this particular star system, but then I rarely do, and real-world wars and battles don't always make sense either.

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So I liked Titandeath, and shockingly, it's the last main series Horus Heresy novel I'm reading. It's kind of appropriate, too, as Horus and the gang are now ready to start their assault on the Sol system. I think I still want to read a couple of the Primarch novels, and then I'll do some kind of summing up before hitting the Siege of Terra books. It's been a journey.