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.

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

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!

I'm pretty excited about this - compared to the many who've written about DA (even in passing), I think Gav's is the most solid and engaging take I've found on them. The Unforgiven in particular I found to be very good indeed. That said, he's also writen a few I'd be less effusive about (Ravenwing, Kadillus), but that's more because I found them to be fine for my tastes, just not particularly nice. (In contrast again to the likes of the Path of the Eldar series, or The Red Feast etc.) Even saying that, I do find his prose to be distinctive from others' - 'drier' is how I usually describe it. If you don't like that, there's no sense in calling it bad, if what you mean is it's not to your tastes. But then I don't think many people (myself very much included) can even perceive their own tastes, let alone can properly distinguish the technical aspects that work and don't work and how they factor into them. What I said above for Gav can be applied with John too - he's a distinctive writer, but that distinctiveness can be divisive too. I think there's a lore-based reason that the Ahriman stories don't really feel like a Thousand Sons story: they aren't. Ahriman is to the Thousand Sons as Slaanesh is to the Aeldari, or Archaon is to the old Warhammer World. He's their doom, not their shining salvation. He's wrapped up inextricably in their fate, and is fundamentally a part of their story. But the character of Barry Thousand, Son of Magnus, whose life and works are all about expanding the fiefdom of change and magic and arcana to progress their own standing on the Planet of the Sorcerers? That's a fundamentally different story to the story of Ahriman. --- It's, in some respects, a good illustration of a possible avenue that Gav's story might take too: how much of Luther's story is fundamentally a Dark Angels story, and how much of any story of the Dark Angels is inherently also a story (sometimes in negative/omission) of the Fallen? They're linked in quite deep ways, but one is not really the other if you get me? Or not necessarily, at least. I think it's a touch sad that very few, if any stories really get into the other spaces that the Dark Angels inhabit, and manage to make much of anything without the Fallen being a feature. The Wrath of Magnus and the Ritual of the Damned is maybe the closest that angle's come in breaking away from being all about the Fallen? (It's arguably an odd switcheroo with the Space Wolves, transitively linking that because Dark Angels rival Space Wolves and Space Wolves rival Thousand Sons, there's gotta be some story in the Dark Angels rivalling the Thousand Sons too? Could have been different again, a strange "rival of my rival is my friend" angle, where the Thousand Sons and Dark Angels' penchants for secretive, obscure, hermetic conspiracies plays a significant part? But even that's not really touched on, it's just played straight: Dark Angels get caught up in it because they begrudge the Wolves, and somehow get swept along into Ritual of the Damned too because, y'know...?)

For my tastes, many short stories are worth a lot more than many novels. Where it comes to my favourite authors, many of their sentences are worth a lot more than some novels. --- Again, I'm pretty certain there's an adage or truism or some other sort of relevant quip about this. My old fishwife is muttering something about covering judges in books, but that can't be right.

I don't believe the barbarism existed at that time, nor most of those features. He's the legion's free spirit and informality which defined it when the series began, and in fairness to Garro he was a resilient guy, which is about as far as the Death Guard's lore would have carried him as well. Both I'd say are more distinct than Raldoron, who I can't agree is obviously anything. I agree the problem is for Garro to have been the POV into his legion, Morty and sons should have had their own books. I just can't agree Loken is a cookie-cutter generic hero, because in Horus Rising he has an ambiguity to him that Garro does not. Garro is a parody of Loken, all the conviction with none of the doubts or missteps. As an aside on Raldoron - he could be so much, even just in the capacity of 'most boringly competent Marine in any Legion' - like he could be so archetypally un-Blood Angel-y that he loops right back round. There's huge plays one can do with that, without making him anything too specific or edgy or extreme too. He doesn't need to exemplify the Legion, but for goodness sake at least let him be wonderfully boring. But he isn't. He's a tedious non-entity. He's not like a nondescript sort of everyman a la Loken, Garro, and Tarvitz. He's not... not. A placeholder more than a character.

In Ahriman: Exodus there is a scene where Big Named Demon shows Ahriman/Ctesias a scene of a Demon Prince of Tzeentch, once a Thousand Son, battling a Demon Prince of Nurgle, once a Son of Horus (if I am remembering things correctly) - and we never find out who this is or who this will become. The fan-favourite theory I've seen is Helio Isidorus, which is particularly dark I do hope this is explored in any future Ahriman works, and based on a few titbits here and there it seems John French intends for Ahriman to try experimenting with Necron chronomancy (which is presumably a failure, before his quest for the Black Library begins) so more Ahriman works might be on the horizon! We "know", thanks to the "delights" of the Gather Storm books, that somebody has the very real ability to undo the rubric. Unfortunately we "learn" this in the cheapest, tackiest, jump scare I've read yet. (And this is a book series where Cadia splits open, Biel-tan falls apart and R. Guilliman doesn't bat an eyelid and being killed, resurrected, encased in armour and in cahoots with xenos and maverick machine priests to nip off and tour the Maelstrom and spar with his ol' pal, Magnus the Red. So the low point being what's used to kick down the Ahriman sandcastle is pretty low indeed.)

Of course, you're quite right. Tobias Maxilla, the lone human on an all-servitors crewed ship. That might be why my mind's displaced it to "maybe the guncutter was warp capable". :D (0.o, as we used to say.)

In terms of defining the Abnett-verse, a lot of it comes from the early distance from 'core lore'. Like in Xenos where the Marines - if I recall right - think of their Primarch as if they're still up and about, just over...there. The Eisenhorn books were chief-most tie-in novels to the Inquisitor game, but were not always looked on strongly by fans of the =][= game, because Eisenhorn is much more of a super-hero detective spy than the stylistic approach of the game. That's not the best description, I find it difficult to articulate, but if you look at the sort of grimy, messy impression (almost Blanchihtsu) that the =][= game had, gelling that alongside Abnett's more breezy style is tough. Eisenhorn travels through space on a ship the size of a jumbo-jet, or smaller. But Space Marines can't do that, the Ad Mech don't do that. Even Navigators seemed to travel on cathedral-space ships, not rickety junkers that any goon and his henchmen could (gun)cut about on. Where's the tech-priest? Where's the astropaths? The navigators? All the sort of essential touchstones weren't 'just out of sight', they were replaced with a detective institution made of... Pariahs. It feels absurdly pedantic to pick at these, in this day and age - especially given how superior (for my tastes) Abnett's writing, characters, story, scene-setting... the whole kit and kaboodle is over the of-the-day much-ballyhood Inquisition War trilogy. So it's not like Abnett's setting is bad, but when you're intrigued by the =][= setup and the people, it's difficult to sustain enthusiasm for it when someone's turned it all on its head and made it a bit thoroughly sci-fi with laser-swords and hover-cars and consequence-less magic powers of little relation to 40k's style of psychic powers and selling-souls and things. Put that alongside Colonel-Commissars who might as well have just been a Colonel, as he did flip-all Commissar-ing. Y'know. --- The Magos and Pariah were worth it, given this sort of foolish complaint I'd be on about. Even as far back as Titanicus I was starting to feel that Dan wasn't just writing awesome stories adjacent to 40k, but really diving into the heart of it and being an almost seamless, deep addition to the setting. And the likes of the Ravenor trilogy really starts to get away from the "problems", by making the Abnett-verse much more explored and mad and detailed, and really brushing past any discrepancies by just not looking at them very much. There's much fewer occurences of discrepancies, and when they're there, they're forgivable, or earnt, or so cool they feel like they were considered and chosen as deliberate transgressions. It's good stuff. --- By contrast, consider Peter Fehervari's work as an almost similar pocket universe. It's not quite so strongly discrepant, but it is so distinctive and strange and intricate and isolated from the wider world. (See also also Henry Zhou's pocket universe. Well, I say Zhou's - obviously there's that non-trivial, deeply dodgy detail of some of it not even being his contribution in the first place.) Most other authors tend to be a bit more connected and immersed in wider things - not necessarily between authors (as others have said: McNeill & Abnett have collaborated a lot [Titanicus/Mechanicum being the forerunner for Prospero Burns/A Thousand Sons - both authors - if I recall rightly - noted that the collaboration was invigorating and stimulating, and for my tastes between the two authors, I think it also led to some of their most distinctive and memorable works!]), but in a more sort of 'using known things', where Dan's much more keen to... Re-invent the wheel? It's usually used as a dismissive thing, but in such a thing as creative writing & fiction, I could have the wheel re-invented time and again, seeing how well done they can be. I guess it's just jarring when you want to read about a specific iteration of the wheel, and the author keeps introducing Colonel-Commissars and highly bureaucratic "City Hall are giving us hell, the Space Mayor'll have your badge and your gun!" Inquisitorial Conclaves... :D

I suppose - conceptually - the big question is what would work for them thematically? I guess something big is the attraction. We've seen with Warwalkers and Dreadknights and Hip-shooting Sneaky Dreadnought... all of that can work. I'm not sure I've got the vision for it, but if they can keep it agile and dynamic enough - maybe a little like one of those shapeless sculpting mannequins that can be put in cool dance positions? - then I could totally see it being awesome. Somewhere between Wraithguard and Riptides in that sort of 'poseability' look. Not static, but easily reposed? Harlequins who, with the unleashing of the Ynnari, think it's maybe absolutely the sort of time to let the Jokaero built them a... punchline? Who knows. Not 'wraith' though, not made of dead in the Ynnari-style. Gotta be somehow Cegorach-y. I could see that. Same with something maybe closer in style between the new Pteraxi, Swooping Hawks, Scourges and Hellions. Hell, even parody things, like 'impersonations' of iconic things from other factions could work. Like stylised "Gunners" parodying Ork Lootas, or 'Farce Suits' joking around with Crisis visuals. Again, my vision for it's not quite right, but I feel there's some room for some stuff in there. And because it's Harlequins, having something bigger makes them a bit more appealing to general modellers. Trying to paint diamonds on the damn players is a nightmare for hamfisted goons like me.

I'm sympathetic to Titandeath, perhaps more because of the slightly wobbly feel than in spite of it. Like the discrepancy between the two Legios, being quite on the nose presentations of masculinity and femininity in aggressively prosecuting war. But even that wobbliness and rough edged presentation felt at peace - like he was taking pains to emphasise that "yes, this is awkward because it's been almost Victorianly prudish until now" - I felt it was more like, I dunno, faltering first steps? Someone trying to walk after months in a coma? I'm happier seeing that sort of not-quite-perfect stuff tried and fall short, than never tried. And, given that it felt like it was emphasising "YES, THIS IS UNUSUAL AND THE NARRATIVE OF THIS SERIES IS NOT WELL TRODDEN FOR THIS PARTICULAR EFFORT TO FEEL NATURAL!", I was actually quite pleased with the results. Imagine if it hadn't been slightly rushed and awkwardly turned round. Given the situation, I enjoyed it. Imperfect, and with surprisingly big/obvious rough edges to it, but it felt a better, more thoughtful and engaging delivery of "complicated ideas done less well than they deserve" than other books in the latter day Heresy. The Buried Dagger, for example, being right next to it in the series. It had an almost unique opportunity to draw together threads that had been evoked and hardly explored. To my mind, the novel closest to Titandeath of the rest of the Heresy is... Battle for the Abyss. It's a sort of flipside. The first story that "didn't need to exist", and a story that was sort of bullied into existence. A story populated by various main characters, but with supporting cast and their not-entirely-relevant plot threads stealing the show. (And certainly it feels like: stealing the authors enthusiasm.) Memorable, novel war and void-war scenes out the wazoo, but where they end up being sort of resented in folk's memory rather than esteemed. Too much visuals, not enough character? JF somehow managed to get away with in the Solar War (and Dan also in Know No Fear), but perhaps they were more explicitly leaning into the disaster spectacle where Guy and Ben Counter held back a little too much, and gave too much over to exploring a few central characters... A sort of unhappy medium amount of compromise! A story where the memorable and enduring characters are essentially independent of the plot underpinning the novel's existence. It's one of those where Guy's endearingly mercenary and absurdly industrious work ethic just rules me up a tiny bit... Like I'd want to sit him down and shake him or buy him a pint or something daft: and he'd rightly think I'm a utter fool for it. But the story of the two legions, even with most of the novel basicly being the same, could have been expanded in places, and trimmed or polished or tightened up in other places... And been wonderful. No great or particular change, per se, just that maybe with more time, or more complimentary deadlines and external pressures that aren't just "meet this deadline". (Collaboration always seems to bring out good stuff in folk - McNeill's best stuff seems to be borne of his very close collaborations where he's trying to excitedly meet and work with other people's stuff: Mechanicum vs Titanicus, ATS/PB, Nouns of Mars vs a bit of everything (but it felt like more in the vein of Mechanicum and Titanicus). And in contrast, when left "unchallenged" to his own devices - say with Angel Exterminatis where freedom for him to tread new ground is very great indeed - it's not that he flounders, but just... Doesn't do as neat/satisfying a thing. Well, not for my tastes.) Anyway, that's also a problem that's plausible across all of the Adeptus Titanicus tie-in novels: Imperator, Warlord, Titandeath - they all seem a touch... Meandering? I'm not unhappy with it, myself - I like the opportunity to see where an author's mind goes on a topic with a loose brief, but it's a risky business. And sometimes that pays off really well. But at other times, and I think this is one of them, the wheels *slightly* come off. It might even have the problem of "Unremembered Empire", where a book has to tie up a lot of loose "fact" ends, but where the author doesn't necessarily feel that excited about the material details at hand. But it's been a wee while since I read it. And I agree with that feeling, I liked it, but every time I try to say something nice about it, I start caveating it with strange criticisms. (And the reverse. When I try to be critical, I get enthusiastic about other bits, like the simple but all too real idiocy Princeps chucking in with bloodletting daemon cults because it'll "stick a finger up to the elites/liberals/progressives back on Terra!".)