Book One: Betrayal (Forge World publication)

With feelings of guilt and self-hatred, I bought this from Forge World for £70 (plus P&P). After paying large amounts of money for the Collectors Edition of 'Visions Of Heresy' (by no definition worth it) and 'Macragge's Honour' (probably about halfway worth it), I was quite cautious and held off buying it for quite awhile. But... I'd finished 'Scars' ages ago, and it was over a month before 'Vengeful Spirit' would come out, so... I decided I NEEDED MORE HERESY STUFF. Yes, I'm aware this is kind of compulsive behaviour.

GET A LOOK AT THIS SHIT

I'm very pleased with this purchase. First of all (not that this really matters) the book is gorgeous. It's a full-colour, leather-bound 400 page monstrosity with hefty corner guards and a big fabric bookmark. You get several highly detailed pictures of Legion armour with their colour schemes at various points of their military careers, some of them even pre-Crusade. Did you know what the Dusk Raiders looked like before Mortarion reshaped them into the Death Guard? I sure didn't.

This is how you add pictures of minis, you make them look like actual paintings.

The layout is absolutely beautiful, the pages are the same cracked-parchment colour as the 'Visions Of Heresy' book, and also have the same deep red border full of High Gothic (I think?) text. My (minor) first complaint here is that a lot of the page layouts are only half text or sometimes closer to 25% text with a lot of the lower half of the page taken up by a sepia-tinted, bleached-out photo of Forge World minis in frustratingly amazing 'Isstvan III' style terrain. I don't dispute the photos need to be there (Forge World gots to get that PAPER, plus they are amazing minis) but I feel they didn't need to be so processed to look like ageing, yellowed photographs of a smoky warzone. In fact I feel they could have made them a lot stronger, and have them as full-colour like all the other pictures in this book.

...and the bottom half of this layout is how minis are shown far too often in 'Betrayal'.

It feels like maybe the Forge World Horus Heresy Range had only a few models available at the time of this book being put together (MKII, MK III and MKIV tactical squads; Contemptor Dreadnoughts... and of course the Forge World obligatory TANKS AND TITANS). So you do tend to see photos of the same 'units' again and again. This is Forge World though so the miniatures themselves are fucking beautiful.

So the book looks wonderful, how about the content? Nothing worse than presentation being excellent and substance being completely absent. Luckily, 'Betrayal' is excellent and has some great, substantial content. The first half of the book is dedicated to background and the second half is for rules. Of course, the background part was my absolute favourite. We open with a historical overview of the Age Of Strife and the Emperor's unification of Terra. Then in much more detail we learn of the Space Marine Legions and the creation (and 'dispersal') of the Primarchs, the Great Crusade, and the Seeds Of Treachery that led to the, well, Betrayal of this book's title. After this, we have a lengthy section on each of the Legiones Astartes this book focuses on: the Sons Of Horus, the Emperor's Children, the World Eaters and the Death Guard. We get about 20 pages for each Legion.

Each Legion gets several full page spreads like this, concerning the subtly different armours worn through their history.

I'm a big, big fan of the Horus Heresy novel series and stuff about the Primarchs in particular so I was expecting a lot of this to be familiar to me. But no. Alan Bligh writes with skill and enthusiasm about the 'first four' Traitor Legions and while you already know the gist of it, there's lots of fresh insight, background and characteristics here for these four very distinct Legions (in fact, to use a pet hate of mine, there's more material here on the Death Guard than there has been in the whole of the series so far). As well as an overview of their Unification, Crusade and pre-Isstvan history, you get a section some 'Exemplary Battles' of each Legion, in which their principles of warfare are demonstrated and you get to marvel at the Primarch's genius (yeah, even Angron a little bit).

Here's the only real problem with this part of the book. There are a lot of typos, mostly grammatical, but a few spelling errors. They didn't ruin my enjoyment of this book but they reinforced that Games Workshop, Black Library and Forge World all seem to view copy editing as something completely optional and not worth spending a lot of time on. But garbled sentence structure doesn't stop something from being good (I better hope that's true). The only thing that came close to annoying me was the frequent use of the word 'panoply' - it felt like this was being used once per page at some points. But hey, as a result I LEARNED A NEW WORD, so who am I to complain?

When I looked into buying this, many of the reviews I read skipped over the first section and focused on the rulebook part. This reminded me that many people are fans of Warhammer 40,000 as a game rather than fans of the Horus Heresy novels. After reading the 'fluff compendium' first half of the book, I was in the mood to read through this whole thing in its entirety but my resolve to do this quickly disappeared as I realised you can't power through a rulebook the same way you can read a novel. In fact by the time I had read about 20 pages of the rules I was pretty bored and started just skimming through.

If you want to recreate the battle of Isstvan III as a tabletop campaign, perhaps you could use an INSANELY FUCKING DETAILED AERIAL PHOTOGRAPH OF THE DEPLOYMENT ZONES?? JEEEZ GUYS

However, I do still have a bit of interest left over for 40K rules and there were some really great ones which further added to the character of these four Legions and showed how you can easily translate their dogma and fighting style into actual working rules:

• Due to their bitter pride, the Sons of Horus can't benefit from their allies' Warlord traits... but, if they outnumber their enemies in close combat at the end of a fight, they can all attack again - reflecting that very few opponents can withstand a coordinated assault from a large amount of 16th Legion troops.
• World Eaters get bonuses for wiping out units in close combats and must always consolidate towards their enemies (I found their special rules the least imaginative, though, but what can you do with Angron's mob except force them to run towards the enemy screaming?)
• Emperor's Children always have to issue or accept Challenges if possible, and if their champion loses, the unit gets an additional -1 to Leadership tests thanks to the blow to their Legion's pride. To reflect their propensity for fast-moving assaults, they get bonuses when Running or making Sweeping Advances.
• Death Guard on the other hand are given a -1 penalty when making Sweeping Advances, but to offset this, they're immune to Fear and Pinning, and they get bonuses when making Difficult or Dangerous Terrain checks. A shelled-out wasteland full of toxic waste is like a day at the beach for these guys, after all.

But that's not all, each Legion has access to unique units, like the World Eaters' Butchers Nails-crazed Rampager squads, given close-quarters weaponry influenced by the gladiatorial culture of their Legion. Some of these units seemed a little bit dull (like the Justaerin Terminators, I mean you gotta put em in there, but it seems like you're paying way more for a much smaller unit of Terminators with WS 5 and Ld 9). And of course, Forge World makes amazing (and amazingly expensive) models for all these specialist units.

Before any of this, though, there's the 30K era 'Legion Army List' which all your HH-era armies are to be based on. There are of course similarities to the Space Marine and (more obviously) Chaos Space Marine current codexes. But a lot of it is quite different to how the Codex Astartes dictates you set up the bomb. Makes sense, since Guilliman hadn't written that shit yet. There are small but significant differences in here - in 30k, if you want a squad of less than 10 Astartes it's gonna have to be a Support Squad and all of them will be carrying a Special Weapon. Then we have stuff like the 'Destroyer' units which use borderline 'illegal' weapon loadouts - guns which leave battlefields as irradiated, burned-out wastelands (well, even more so than before, anyway - this is the Warhammer universe we're talking about, everywhere's kind of fucked). I think this was my absolute favourite unit in the list, perhaps I'm biased as I've really enjoyed Destroyer appearances in the fiction series. (The short story 'Distant Echoes Of Old Night' features a Destroyer unit as its main characters, and AD-B did an excellent portrayal of a Destroyer in 'Betrayer'.)

There are statlines and special rules for several special characters who've never seen print before, including a Death Guard loyalist I hope we see more of in the 'proper' series.

The target audience for this book is the full-time, dedicated hobbyist, the person who has the disposable income to drop almost £80 (including P&P) on a rulebook. This person should be both a Horus Heresy novel series fanatic, and someone who actively collects, paints and plays 40K Space Marine armies. I don't really fit with many of these criteria. However, I'm certainly going to buy 'Book II: Massacre' and, since the forthcoming 'Extinction' features the Alpha Legion and Raven Guard, it's likely I'll buy that as well. Do I think these are worth their exorbitant price? No, but they're closer to "worth it" than some of the stuff GW has fucked me with, and that counts for something.

I give this 8/10 (docked from a perfect 10 for the hideous price, but I can't stay mad).

New to PurpleHeresy? Head on over to the index page to see a more chronological list of the Horus Heresy reviews on this blog.