Xisor

As someone with a fondness for both Tzeentchian mortals, Tzeentchian non-Thousand Sons, Thousand Sons and very offshoot/non-Thousand Sons Thousand Sons (e.g. the Crystal Harbingers), I'm quite passionate about diversifying the range. Not diluting, per-se, but making it be a thing where there's incentive/reward/penalty for playing Thousand Sons versus Tzeentch-heavy Tzaangors versus off-piste Thousand Sons. Frankly, I think it was a mistake to have Ahriman and Magnus be described and gamed as having 'bonded' again. Maybe allow it to be technically feasible in rules terms (model sales!- no sense ruling out options wholly), but emphasise the army-wide special rules take a hit. You can't be fielding an entirely "Magnus did nothing wrong!" army if Ahriman's there, and it can't be a "Ahriman's ambition is the only thing that matters!" army if Magnus is about, you know? (Well, it can, moustache-twirlingly. But at least have conflicting keyword-benefits where you can only bond them by going very holy/Tzeentch's masterplan, or something.) ---- Anyway, the long and short of that is: 1- it's a no-brainer for sales to include possibilities like the Gaunt Summoner (DP-adjacent?) and even the Ogroid Thaumaturge. 2- you'd surely want some mortal magisters in there, with rules (strategems?) to reflect their sacrificial nature as pawns of the Astartes, but also where they can be their own force where Astartes are minimal. 3- In terms of new models, there was some disappointment that the much-mentioned 'Flux Cairn' of the Tzaangors never manifested as a terrain piece in AoS. I think GW would be missing a trick if they didn't blur some of the lines: a new Tzeentch model, but also allow a Noctlith Crown, and perhaps even 'hijacked' a Webway Gate to be chosen. (If nothing else, it's thematic and offers up further flexibility.) 4- More than anything: something new that's very specifically Thousand Sons-y, maybe a variant Astartes kit - Rubric-Revenants, partially re-animated Rubricae who've suffered immense metaphysical axiomatic damage - who's souldust's partly gone, who've been blasted by C'tan or meddled with by Ynnari or got on the wrong end of a D-Cannon - things that even the Rubricae wouldn't necessarily come out of 'intact'. 5- Sorcerous-leaning possesed - Possessed, Greater Possessed, Daemon-Engines, Hellbrutes and whatnot - have them plainly be psykers. Perhaps not fully-fledged psykers a la sorcerers, but even nominally being sorcerers gives them the authenticity of being 'real' Thousand Sons without being questonable in their proximity to Rubricae. (Like how would a non-Psyker Thousand Son come to be? If you implant Thousand Sons geneseed into a non-psychic aspirant, do they become subject to the Rubric, or do they too-quickly fall prey to the flesh change?) 6- I'd be kinda happy if they did a conversion sprue, to allow for Rubric+Sorcerer Havocs, Chaos Marines etc. It feels peculiar that they don't exist, but I can understand why they don't. (And yet, they could exist for GW but for the sale of an extra upgrade sprue...) Obviously wish-listing, but as many others have said: it's Tzeentch. There's huge realms of possibilities to reach out into. It's sad (in a manner of speaking) that it's actually quite a tight, uniform and orderly visual army for something that really shouldn't be. --- All of that again hinges on the detail: it'd be nice if there was an alluring angle that meant you could play not-quite Thousand Sons, without simply reverting to normal Chaos Astartes, or having it essentially be headcanon. Getting the 'variety' of available options in there would be good, but in terms of new releases an Upgrade Sprue would really help add new possibilities (Havocs, etc) without totally compromising the idea that you can freely, happily play 'pure' Thousand Sons as you'd wish to.

For what it's worth, I thought Wrath of N'kai was amazing. Proper pulp, but better than most BL stuff in sticking straight to the core story, but with the feel that it's meandering, even though it's pacy and done in a nice and fairly tight style. Like you feel the benefit of a nice wandering, expansive, introspective varied story - but on reflection it's a still a pacy riot of an action-packed story. Best of both worlds, so to speak. Highly recommended. --- I wonder if the problem was less a direct relationship issue with an editor or colleague or two at BL, but more that people elsewhere in the organisation were muscling in on it, either by putting pressure on the editors or Josh's agreed workload. Like if someone from sales (whom I think BL still have to get on-side to actually green light a novel?) has a bee in their bonnet about how only Josh's 'straight arrow Space Marine books' sell well, and how 'every time he puts jokes in, it bombs', then that could be a huge, draining burden on the author and editors both - making it a damn hassle to work 'professionally' where no-one else is being tormented on the same basis. Speculation, of course, but I could see it being the sort of thing that really makes a job slip from 'nice, I could do this for ages' to 'actually, I'd take a pay-cut and risk reputation damage just to avoid this'. I don't think needlessly tormenting (or even boring) oneself constitutes professionalism. (And still, it's also credible that it could be 'an impulsive change'. Like no straw that broke the camel's back, just some things that were a little annoying and a lust for something a bit more... exhilarating. Leaving a fairly cushy, comfortable gig where the only burden is 'fewer jokes, more professional' would fit that neatly.)

I really liked Low Lives too. As with much of Necromunda, the style is somewhat similar to other things - the difference with Kal, IMHO, is that it's not Kal. A wise-cracking smartass scraping along on his wits is as much John Grammaticus from the Heresy as it is Bronislaw Czevak, Inquisitor, as it is Nathan from Misfits, or Saul Goodman from Breaking Bad/Better Call Saul. I think in Necromunda, proximity to Kal - who's already larger than life and hogging the limelight - is what's troubling. (But that's more an issue with Kal than with Low Lives, IMHO.) But it's far from the multiplicity you get in the Heresy with Garviel Tarvitz Garro, and other identically bland characters.

Pythation of Damnos? Edit: Ooooh, Praetorian of Dorn!!

MvS, Marius von Stauffer? Author of Liber Chaotic books 2-5 (Richard Williams was Liber Khorne), and prolific Internet forumite from the halcyon days when lore discussion was detailed and at length. Good ol' Warseer & Portent.net

I couldn't tell you, to be honest. I was more irate with the Crimson King's total (& miserably poor) thieving of the plot of French's Ahriman trilogy. Lucius and the crew of Space Ninja Adventurers Enterprise were in it, if memory serves. To be honest, that's a cash grab I'd have half a mind to ask for my money back on. That and plagiarising a multi-page section of another novel of his in a separate novel, word for word. The ongoing adventures of Captain Japan I could have done without too. Or the just so story about how the gang got together for Storm of Iron. Actually, I'm sensing a theme here. --- I'd happily take some Heresy-adjacent stories too. Give me the early days of the Adeptus Arbites. (I'd like to believe it was more like a wartime privitisation of a bouncers & gumshoe conglomerate/cartel, but I'll read whatever they put out all the same.) The Adventures of the Pioneering Exploration Fleets - the ones led by Rogue Trader types gallivanting off far beyond the Imperial frontier and getting into all sort of Primarchless, Legion less scrapes. I'd take the Space Marines who retire to found their own startups, the ones who never fell back under the wing of the main Legion & Primarch because they were too far away for far too long. Give me the (good) story of the Astropaths and Navigators, where they don't have to navigate the warp, but navigate bureaucratic meetings with Iterators where they deftly deal with why the process is "soul binding" when souls aren't a thing nd a lot of doublespeak has been put into excising vocabulary from the fresh faced Imperium! Let's Hera more about the Techmarines (yeah, Cybernetica was getting here, but its not like it exhausted the story opportunities!) What about the natural schisms of the Mechanicum, the fact that Mars isn't really that pre-eminent because other forges can f-off and do their own thing anyway, Mars is a popularity contest, it doesn't own all the power! --- Yeah, there's money to be made out of me and the Heresy yet. (Probably not if it's McNeill writing. Somehow - since ATS - he invariably and completelys zigs when I want him to zag, and vice versa. Which is triply annoying, as he spins a great yarn.)

Follow up the "forgotten threads" of the Heresy without jamming them into the Siege. E.g. What happened to the remembrancers from A Thousand Sons? Let's see what the agents of Malcador actually got up to. What happened to Ultramar after the Legions abandoned ship for Terra? Who actually reacted to the "theft" of the Abyss? Let's see Isstvan in many-viewed and/or in-depth prose, as Roomsky mentioned. The fallout of Nikaea, as viewed by all Legions. If everyone thought someone else made a good Warmaster? Let's see some of that fleshed out, at length and in deeper depth? I could take a lot of that sort of cash grabbiness.

Agreed Madao. I'd like for TrawlingCleaner's take to be the case, but I'm afraid that it isn't. The way Graia's rule is worded, it has always made it clear that it's a '6 to avoid death', not 'six to avoid wounds'. So if my Kastellan takes six wounds, I only get the Refuse To Yield roll on that last one. If it takes eight D1 wounds, it takes 5 wounds, and a save on the sixth. If it passes, it has to test another twice. If it takes two D6 wounds (3,4), it takes 3, and then gets a single save against the 4D from the second. Or at least that's been my reading of things. --- Sadly, I have not got a clue how that interacts with FNP saves. I'd guess you take your FNP, and then any time you have the option of taking a FNP or RtY against a point of damage, that's where you have to chose. But I really am not certain on that.

Is that the AM (the other AM lol) where you can shoot the turret weapon twice if under half speed? I guess that would work and id certainly take it, but it again means you are moving about slower. What about a sort of... scuttling advance for the Onagers? As they are now, vs +4"Mv for -1 to Hit, or something like that. Could be fun! Vague wishing aside, I'd hope the 3+D3 thing comes in; GW have a license at the moment to break loose from what went before, and it sounds like they've been seizing it heartily for Marines and Necrons. If it's not this for Onagers, imagine what wonders we could experience if they sought to make Fistbustor Kastellans a goer, or Ruststalkers where they've got something impressive and fun to do!

He wasn't gruff but surprisingly well liked, was he? (GB once patted me on the head as a baby, and was my MP for ages.) Or well known for being very fond of a fairly specific local team? Depending on how the character went I suppose, and if memory serves Gordon Rennie's a Fifer (or thereabouts) - but it's possible Will McDerrmott actually knows GB and GB's a reader. (Or loathes GB, and wants to take even a petty dig at him. Who knows.) Odd though! --- I've just picked up SF myself, hoping to do a bit of a Necromunda binge now shortly too - Fleshworks, a proper restart of T:O (as I was enjoying it, but somehow haven't read any since before lockdown), and Road to Redemption as well as Soulless Fury. I'd take McDermott's work with the same expectation as Sandy Mitchells - more pulpy and daft, less grim and despairing. At least in tone and focus.

There's something to this, but I don't think it works on a book by book basis, or perhaps a setting by setting basis. It only works if you have someone popping out of 40k to speak to someone in 30k. Otherwise you're implying that within those settings, everyone's monolingual. (Or whatever the equivalent is for accents.) In that respect, it's a grand failing of BL. (And of most SciFi I've read, to be fair. Very little of what I've actually read bothers to push any linguistic boundaries. Look at Arrival and compare that to Yesugei in A Thousand Sons. One's visionary and impressive. The other - up to that point in the series where everyone essentially spoke the same language without issue or comment - is a racist caricature of the howlingly offensive Ching Chong Chinaman variety.) One example I always go to is Captain Corelli's Mandolin (great novel, by the way) - which is set on a WW2-era Greek Island (Cephalonia, if memory serves). The cast's big and varied, but one of the characters (isolated on a mountain, and speaking mainly with a young local shepherd) is a British paratrooper. Being British of the old boys network, he was selected for this mission based on his expertise and familiarity with Greece & Greek via his education. His education which was in Ancient Greek. So to this perplexed shepherd, he's got some soldier with a radio halfway up a mountain yammering at him with "hark, forsooth wherefore art thy be" etc. Absolutely wonderful stuff. But BL don't touch it with a bargepole. It's just cod-Latin and maybe some startup-ified greek words. Or an outright fantasy language that is basically just English word-swapped. (Hell, even then there's few enough of those around.) It's a perennial problem that I'm not sure I've seen tackled well. Hell, even for Britain, only the 'guide to pronunciation' in White Dwarf several months back started to illustrate what they're missing. E.g., did you know the Nottingham (+Midlands) accents are fairly distinctive? That all the time they're Scots- or Brummie-ifying the scant phonetic pronunciations to make it sound more authentic, they could be doing any number of other tricks that are much more illustrative of stuff that even within the UK barely gets time of day? Look at a film like This Is England (or Trainspotting) and think that it would be trivially easy to riff on some of the things like that. Not to make Orks more Corkney, but to actually explore and invoke and adapt real life stuff. The authors likely have reams and depths of it to engage with, but it's all filtered through to a fairly neutral output. When was the last time a Space Marine was seen to be mithering? 'Cause they do it all the damn time. --- Back on the Necromancy wagon, after a fashion: Speaking of all of this, one of the few authors I recall who resolutely put some local flavour into their works was Bill King. Of the latest of his I read (the Macharius books, I really enjoyed them - decent 6+ or 7/10s for the first two, though I've still not read the last) there wasn't quite as much to go on (though the guardsman who was convinced he could be promoted to Space Marine was a gem of misunderstanding the likes of which we only recently started to see again in Chris Wraight's Terra books). But from his old WHFB Gotrek & Felix? The character Malakai Makaisson? I always thought he was rendered as 'daft scottish', but when I re-read some of them recently, it's pretty un-daft - in fact it's pretty much close to the only bit of written Scots that BL's produced (to my knowledge). And to think that for other aspects of the UK's languages and culture that are basically excised out - and for what? (Let alone persistent examples of other cultures feeding into the 41st Millennium and beyond!) (This is not a 'make Britain great' angle, but a 'why be shy about getting into the rich, vibrant weeds of nearby culture when we'll more fervently [and badly] Aztec-ify lizards?)

You should probably stay silent about that.

Five out of ten for a book that won you over? For my part, it's a solid 7/10 - I found Cadia Stands a really entertaining book. Interesting cast of characters exploring the unthinkable (yet also massively prepared for) happening. The predictable, unwinnable disaster actually happening. I thought it was fascinating, and brilliantly done. And though I really liked Hill's Creed shorts, I thought the novel was much better off for not cleaving closely to any of the Gathering Storm big plot. (Mainly because TGS wasn't very good; the decent parts mainly came in the form of 'cast of characters walk somewhere' sections. The rest? [such as the Phalanx bit] Unsatisfyingly poor.) Cadia Stands on the otherhand? An actual, credible and interesting story done well. Really enjoyed it, all told, and was impressed that a relatively new author to BL managed to really nail the feel of Cadia and the guard. As said, a very solid 7/10. Been quite keen to read more of Justin's for a while - Terminus: Overkill and Cadian Honour are well looked forward to, for me!

I'm happy with things like Khan and Jarl surviving, they're backfitted proxies more than literal things. At least in most cases. Gothic isn't literally pig Latin, but it's analogous to how Latin's been used down the years: a trade language, an invoked better days language, a spooky language for cod magic, an esoteric language for "real names" for things. But Fenris was particularly egregious, because its wholesale *everything*. Not a proxy analogous thing, but as if they've wholly tapped into or revived bits of old Norse culture and myth, Frankenstein style. It grinds in a way that Macragge's romanesque styles don't - mainly because Guilliman isn't Guilliman Caesar, and Macragge isn't Roma, etc. It's in the nose, maybe, but it's more visual aesthetic than Marneus Calgar running about being entrenched in every trope and stereotype of Rome going. --- Contrast that to Captain Japan in The Outcast Dead, and you're right back in Fenris. To keep on topic... --- The Outcast Dead: 2/10, self-plagiarised tripe marginally redeemed by a fun-ish cast of characters, mainly riffing on what worked well in Battle for the Abyss. Captain Japan is particularly egregious in my dislike.

@Sandlemad: definitely. I think with the Grand Master-level stories, you're absolutely right. (Though I can envisage a story that's about the absence of the Fallen - they're all obsessed and looking for a hint, but the point is there aren't any hints because they're living through an age where there aren't any Fallen! That sort of "getting on with life when you can't indulge your passions" story could be very interesting.) Equally, I think the whole shebang has been a massive disservice to any one time's 800 Dark Angels who might never have heard of the Fallen and never really consider them in any greater context than they consider heretics or traitors or recidivists or mutants or any number of other foes of humanity. I think there's a deep, rich tapestry there for the Dark Angels. There must be, not least because without it the Inner Circle, Ravenwing and Deathwing would all be very conspicuous. "Ah, there goes Master Gary of the 7th, off to his secret meetings with all the other robed cultists." "Do you think he knows we know?" "Nah mate, he hasn't got a clue. Useless officers and their pointless conspiracies. I bet I can predict what we'll be doing for the next campaign. "Executing untold millions of innocent mutants 'unting-hay the allen-fay'?" "Brother, you should get a library card." Either that, or line Dark Angels are very thoroughly, regularly mind-wiped or just hideously unobservant. --- Accordingly, I could see that topic being one of Luther's key qualities - unlike the Lion, Luther has charisma that is without conspiracy. The chiefs of the Dark Angels (& the Lion) see him as the conspirator, but I much prefer the idea that he's a very pedestrian conspirator: a decent seeming charismatic person that uncomplicated people just want to follow, that they trust much more than they trust the enigmatic brooding conspirators. You know? That said, it worked well with Astellan too, and is totally there in Zahariel - how many a Dark Angels sees themself as simple, decent people, and yet see everybody else as brooding conspirators, and so - reluctantly! - have to become paranoid, over-complicated, lying, treacherous maniacs in an effort to preserve their own simple decency from these fiends? If anything, the story of the Dark Angels - just like the stories of the Thousand Sons - is one of unreliable narrators. How deluded are these people? How honest are they? --- Despite saying all that - in the same manner as The Unforgiven for which I think I approached with very strong intuitions and expectations - I was pleasantly surprised when Gav deviated wildly from where I thought he was (and entitledly thought he should be going). His actual unravelling of his plots was much more satisfying, I found, than what I'd been anticipating myself. I like that, but I'm always wary of stoking my expectations too much too - there's no sense in me not-enjoying a novel because I'd let my expectations run away with themselves and no sane book could ever live up to them!