Warhammer 40k musings.

Thanks to Space Marine 2, I discovered a loyalist space marine chapter that seems right up my alley in many ways: The Tome Keepers!

They're the custom chapter of Games Workshop's "White Dwarf" magazine and they're suitably wholesome. Their whole deal is that they're descended from the Ultramarines and keep meticulous documentation of their foes and battles so as they learn and preserve knowledge, while also valuing human life too, similar to the Salamanders.

They also carry a blank book with them that they fill with details about people they meet, things they see or research in their day-to-day life and have a tradition of passing the book on to others in their chapter when they die, or giving it to humans on their homeworld. Funnily enough, they have a strong distrust of both the Black Templars and Sisters Of Battle due to both of their sheer fanaticism and zealous nature.

I still love the fanatical Sisters though! Purge in holy fire the heretic, the xeno, the mutant!

Here are are some screenshots of these bookish fellas!

I was listening to the Age of Darkness anthology and came across this excellent description of "transhuman dread", the effect the sight of a space marine has on a normal human:

"Transhuman dread. Aximand had heard iterators talk of the condition. He’d heard descriptions of it from regular Army officers too. The sight of an Adeptus Astartes was one thing: taller and broader than a man could ever be, armoured like a demigod. The singularity of purpose was self-evident. An Adeptus Astartes was designed to fight and kill anything that didn’t annihilate it first. If you saw an Adeptus Astartes, you knew you were in trouble. The appearance alone cowed you with fear.

"But to see one move. Apparently that was the real thing. Nothing human-shaped should be so fast, so lithe, so powerful, especially not anything in excess of two metres tall and carrying more armour than four normal men could lift. The sight of an Adeptus Astartes was one thing, but the moving fact of one was quite another. The psychologists called it transhuman dread. It froze a man, stuck him to the ground, caused his mind to lock up, made him lose control of bladder and bowel. Something huge and warlike gave pause: something huge and warlike and moving with the speed of a striking snake, that was when you knew that gods moved amongst men, and that there existed a scale of strength and speed beyond anything mortal, and that you were about to die and, if you were really lucky, there might be just enough time to piss yourself first."

Needless to say, transhuman dread sounds bowel-evacuatingly scary!

I finished listening to "A Thousand Sons" a week or two ago and I've been giving it lots of thought. There is the common ironic meme amongst the w40k fanbase of "Magnus Did Nothing Wrong" when he flew face first into the Emperor's webway project and irreparably destroyed the wards and seals protecting Terra from the warp. Think, y'know, a ship without gellar fields except it's a portal between realspace and the warp. After Magnus' breach (which was indeed made with the intention of warning Big E about Horus' betrayal), the Emperor reacted... poorly, to say the least.

If there is one criticism to give the Emperor is that he overreacted by sending the Space Wolves to burn Magnus' homeworld, Prospero, to the ground and fight their way through their fellow Astartes to capture Magnus. Surely a "son, i'm disappoint" and the sternest of stern talkings to would've sufficed. But on the other hand, Magnus became the single reason that the Emperor had to focus so much of his energy on keeping the webway breach shut using his psychic power. Power which could've been used to whoop Horus' ass even HARDER than he already canonically did.

Part of me thinks that the webway breach was indeed the first nail in the coffin for the Imperium that Big E envisioned. It only got much worse from there.