Scouring Series - What Would You Like to See?

[LordOfIron]

To take us away from the siege thread let's make one about the Scouring

What stories do you want to see?

Setting or series?

Characters you want to see go out?

Chapters you want to see founded?

Questions we have about the period we want answered?

[Robbienw]

The Fall of Caliban

The Iron Cage

The Grey Knights going into the warp on Titan and their return to the material universe.

The splitting of the legions into the second founding (technically this took place when the Scouring finished, but still)

[DukeLeto69]

Thanks for setting this thread up. Was tempted to paste across my post in the Siege of Terra thread but not sure that is within the forum rules?

 

However, as I said over there, my personal preference is a "setting/era" rather than a "connected story" or " sequential series".

 

I want to see a multitude of stories set during M31 after the end of the Horus Heresy and before The Beast Arises to "partially fill in the gap" though not done to death with 100s of books/stories like the HH. Some of those stories would rightly be considered to be actually a part of The Great Scouring such as Iron Cage, while others just happen to be set during the same period (the formation of the Inquisition for example).

 

Personally I would like to see this same approach applied to other "key eras" in the timeline between M30 to M41.

[LJF]

I expect BL to be a bit more reasonable with the scouring, HH became way too bloated with many books we didn't really want or need, also certain legions that were previously overshadowed need a place to shine.

[Kelborn]

I like the idea of handling it like the Battle series. Not in a bolterporn-ish way but as a format. And hell yes to politics stuff like Dorn / Guiliman or Codex Astartes or the Inquisition or the Founding of the Grey Knights or the development of individuality of certain chapters under the guidance of HH heroes (I'm looking at you Sigismund).

 

The relation or rather the rising conflict between the traitors. The return of the xenos' threat.

 

Yes to all of this!

 

Certain topics can and should be be treated in a trilogy or such instead of rushing through them in a single novel.

[BLACK BLΠFLY]

I would love to read a novel about the Iron Cage but there would have to be a Primarch duel with Dorn handing Pert his arse.

[Roomsky]

Definitely hoping for a Battles / Primarchs format / label. I honestly hope its another sprawling juggernaut like the Heresy, because there's a lot of cool stuff / active characters in that era I want to see explored. Certainly I want the Iron Cage, the Second Founding, and all that jazz to be great standalones not wrapped up in a 50+ book kudzu plot, but there's no reason not to fill the space in between with things like: humanity solidifying its distrust of astartes, and the continued exploits of characters like Polux, Raldoran, Azkaellon, Sigismund, Corvo, and all the characters we haven't even met yet who might go on to be chapter masters. And if BL learned anything from the response to TBA, we might even get some dedicated politicking in there too.

 

I'd also ask people to consider that some of the best works of the Heresy probably only came about because it's so enormous. While I also like to imagine a somewhat smaller collection brewed up by BL's cream of the crop only, that's a rather unrealistic  scenario. Heck, it seemed the goal at the start and we got our first bad entry at #3. Who's to say we would have gotten ADB's glorious contributions if it had been tighter, dude's said it himself he prefers to write 40k proper. And atop that, much of the community doesn't even like ADB's work, who then really gets to say who deserves to write those novels? And honestly, I hope the Scouring is something similar. Give me more wild cards over the "safe bet" any day. I hardly think Guymer and Hill are seen as some of BLs superstar authors, and yet they produce some of my favorite stuff. I'm not saying drag out things that have no business being dragged out (hello, Dark Angels), but there are so many gaps between those big events it would be easy to fill without mucking everything up.

 

Just my single nickle, we don't use pennies anymore.

[BLACK BLΠFLY]

Roomsky these are valid reasons for the series and I think it’d be quite the smashing success too. After all the Traitor love that is HH I feel that Imperials deserve some awesome battleporn.

[Felix Antipodes]

Another 'vote' for it being a setting rather than a series. That way BL are not tied into too rigid a timeline/sequence of events. I do want to see all the stories listed above but there must be background politics sprinkled liberally throughout.

[Mellow]

The Fall of Caliban

The Iron Cage

The Grey Knights going into the warp on Titan and their return to the material universe.

The splitting of the legions into the second founding (technically this took place when the Scouring finished, but still)

What did the Grey Knights do?

[Robbienw]

Prior to the Siege of Terra, Malcador and some of his marines errant had been sending equipment, support staff and many thousands of suitable recruits from survivors of traitor attacks that involved daemons, to Titan (and building the fortress there) in preparation for the formation of the Grey Knights chapter.

 

Then, during the Siege, the 8 marines errant chosen to be the founders of the Grey Knights went to Titan, and Malcador sent it shielded into the warp to isolate it from traitor attacks.

 

Titan re-emerged from the warp a few years later during the scouring, and the grey knights came out fighting.  The Grey Knights came out as a fully trained brotherhood, and the founders were older, as they has experienced more relative time in the warp.

[Mellow]

That sounds different. Where did that lore come from?

[Kelborn]

Grey Knights codices since - I don't know - 5th edition?

 

As long as I'm enjoying Warhammer, this was already established and I did start with Dawn of War 1.

 

The Marines Errant stuff was later added during the HH series. But the key facts: gathering on Titan, disapear into a pocket dimension (Malchador did cast a spell to hide them) or were hidden from the warp and reemerged during the Scouring as a fully equipped, staffed and trained chapter. For them, they were in said dimension for about 100 years or was it 1000?

In "realtime", they were gone for a couple of years.

[Robbienw]

Yep, in grey knight codices :)

[Marshal Rohr]

The Titan thing is some of the terrible Ward fluff, it didn't exist anywhere before he :cuss it out.

[nagashnee]

I dont know i dislike 99% of wardian fluff as much as the next guy. But that titan bit always rang true to me.

[Marshal Rohr]

It entirely invalidates the reason for the Emperor trying to map and conquer the webway. If Malcador could protect a whole moon from the warp for years even after he had died, there no reason to need the webway. He could've used that same magic to make his own webway or impenetrable Geller Fields for Imperial Ships.

[nagashnee]

Its hard to say without knowing how. I like it because it knew it was a tall ask so left it vague so a future book could explain it in depth, and hopefully make sense and not cause ripples in the fluff.

[Medjugorje]

_{I want to see the secound founding - view from a Black Templar}

[RedFurioso]

Skalathrax novel -  sequel to Khârn: Eater of Worlds

[Beren]

It entirely invalidates the reason for the Emperor trying to map and conquer the webway. If Malcador could protect a whole moon from the warp for years even after he had died, there no reason to need the webway. He could've used that same magic to make his own webway or impenetrable Geller Fields for Imperial Ships.

One moon for a specific amount of time doesn't exactly equal a galaxy wide edifice supposed to last for perpetuity.

[Moonreaper666]

 

It entirely invalidates the reason for the Emperor trying to map and conquer the webway. If Malcador could protect a whole moon from the warp for years even after he had died, there no reason to need the webway. He could've used that same magic to make his own webway or impenetrable Geller Fields for Imperial Ships.

One moon for a specific amount of time doesn't exactly equal a galaxy wide edifice supposed to last for perpetuity.

Its not like Chaos was actively hunting down both Malcador and Titan

[Chapter Master Valrak]

Sigismund unleashed.

[DarkChaplain]

 

The Fall of Caliban

The Iron Cage

The Grey Knights going into the warp on Titan and their return to the material universe.

The splitting of the legions into the second founding (technically this took place when the Scouring finished, but still)

What did the Grey Knights do?

 

 

They fixed up the Pandorax system after Madail and the Damnation Cache threw open a warp rift. That was one of their major jobs coming back from their exile. Epimetheus remained there to watch over it.

 

From Pandorax by CZ Dunn, and through him right from the horse's mouth:

 

 

‘For years, the Regent had occluded the moon of Titan from the eyes of both friend and foe, covertly building a fortress-monastery and equipping it with forbidden technologies and secret training facilities to prepare the new Chapter in its role defending the Imperium from daemonic incursion. In addition to the eight, thousands of others had been taken to the hidden satellite to serve as ancillaries, serfs and the recruits that would form the original Brotherhoods. The Regent’s final gift to the Chapter that would be his most enduring legacy was the gift of time. Using his own considerable psychic talents he removed Titan from time as well as space, granting us long years in which to prepare for the longer war that would await us upon our return.

‘When we did finally take our place back in the Imperium, less than a decade had passed in real time, but for the warriors of Titan many centuries had elapsed. Men who were young during the twilight days of the war against Horus were now older than the oldest surviving veterans of the fragmenting Legions. Those eight who had previously worn armour of a different colour had accrued more years than even the most ancient and venerable of Dreadnoughts.’

He paused now, as if what he had just uttered had led him to a new realisation.

‘The galaxy was still in turmoil. Primarchs bickered over how best to prevent a rebellion on the scale of Horus’s from ever happening again, while the defeated traitors preyed upon worlds still loyal to the Golden Throne, as did newly emboldened xenos races. But against this backdrop, the malign influence of the warp had not dwindled – if anything, it had intensified – and the Grey Knights threw themselves straight into the fray. The rips in reality were still shedding horrors, cults had sprung up in every segmentum hoping to gain their patron’s favour by summoning forth the Neverborn, and there were still worlds where doorways remained open into the warp.’

‘Like Pythos.’

‘Like Pythos,’ Epimetheus said matching Tzula’s tone. ‘It was one of the first missions the Grey Knights ever undertook. Three entire Brotherhoods and a quarter of a million Imperial Army soldiers set out to close the Damnation Cache, a warp rift that had been opened during the early days of the war against Horus. It had supplied the traitor forces with allies throughout the campaign, and with turncoat Legions fleeing towards the Eye of Terror the daemons now turned their attention to the worlds surrounding Pythos, seeking to claim them as their own and establish their own debased realm on the material plane. Four entire systems had already succumbed when we got here, and it took years to fight our way across them and finally reach Pythos, harried every step of the way by a daemonic army that would have rivalled the Ultramarines at their peak for sheer numbers. By the time we made planetfall, our own ranks had already been decimated and the Imperial Army regiments accompanying us were down to less than half strength.

‘The war to close the Cache was long and bloody. For every daemon we despatched, another would step from beyond to take its place while our numbers continued to decline. Faced with certain defeat that would eventually condemn an entire subsector to unholy servitude, Supreme Grand Master Janus took the only course of action left open to him. Ordering all surviving Grey Knights and Imperial Army soldiers to launch a diversionary assault, the Supreme Grand Master led a small group of Grey Knights through the maze of tunnels that led to the Cache, fighting their way through wave upon wave of daemons before finally incanting the ritual of binding and sealing the rift shut. Every daemon the Cache had spewed forth was recalled in that instant, drawn inexorably back no matter how far they had ventured from Pythos. And that should have been the end of it.’

‘The prisoner in the Emerald Cave?’ Tzula said.

‘The entities from the Cache were not the only ones present on this world. Drawn by the promise of a daemonic paradise, others of their kind had sought Pythos out. Many of them were of the lower orders, barely cogent things that served as foot soldiers for those who were especially blessed by their patrons, but one in particular was more formidable than any of the others. A greater daemon who served the Plague God, he tore through us with abandon and still we died even though the Cache had been closed. The thing was nameless to us so we did not have the power to banish him, but our combined psychic might was enough to bind him and seal him in one of the vast chambers. A chamber where instead of red Pythosian crystal, green gems studded the walls.

‘Of the three hundred Grey Knights who had set out from Titan to cleanse Pythos, barely twenty of us survived. The Imperial Army regiments fared worse, wiped out to a man during the final battle to subdue the Great Unclean One. With no athame to keep it permanently closed, it was decided to hide seven seals around the planet, each one different and only able to be undone in a specific order. Over the final seal a guard was to be placed, a volunteer from among the surviving Grey Knights.’

 

Seeing how The Damnation of Pythos sets up a great deal of this, and we've seen some of the effects of the Cache's opening through Madail and the Ruinstorm novel, and the city built around the Cache is even called Atika (remember Atticus?), chances are we'll be seeing a novel on those events at some point. We already have the story bookended by The Damnation of Pythos and Pandorax, with other pieces, like Ianius and Malcador's plans to set up Titan, including through Garro's efforts and stories like All That Remains, and at this point it would be just absolutely silly not to have a Grey Knights founding / re-emergence novel.

[Medjugorje]

Sigismund unleashed.

 

yes,... his search after abaddon and a lot of duels against onother foes....