Horus Heresy Weekender - Part Two

Day One: 7^th February (continued)

Opening Ceremony

The most exciting thing here happened before the ceremony had even begun – someone ran in with a picture of a hulking new Daemon model (it looked like there was a Marine next to it to show scale, but on second viewing this turned out to be a Contemptor Dreadnought), excitedly proclaiming that it was Samus. Watch out! Samus is the man sitting beside you. This was confirmed to be true before the Weekender was over.

Tony Cottrell of Forge World started things moving as chair of the seminar, and he would act reliably as the compere for a lot of the events over the Weekender. Really, this was just a rundown of the hotel’s layout. I didn’t pay much attention as I knew I’d be in the seminar room for most of the event. I assume that many people prioritised gaming or autograph collecting, considering the mass exodus as soon as the opening ceremony closed – but I guess seminar one wasn’t the sexiest thing in the world.

Forge World Horus Heresy Book Four: Conquest

The speakers here were Alan Bligh and his “beautiful assistant” Andy Hoare. Since most people in attendance had bought the book already, there was a quick run-through of the ‘Conquest’ powerpoint. The highlight was seeing the legendary ‘timeline’ slide, which has been much-distributed on the web, but is always fun to see. I had a bit of a shock when I considered how close the end of Tallarn is to the beginning of the Siege of Terra; I guess most of Perturabo and the IV Legion’s story arc leading up to the finale has now been told.

The tone here was a fairly measured explanation of what they’d set out to achieve for ‘Conquest’ and while I feel that book’s a bit disappointing compared to the other three, I do think they met their stated goals – though apparently they did not anticipate the Legion Relics to “set the internet on fire”. Apparently conquistadors were a primary inspiration for the Solar Auxilia in their methods, if not necessarily their look. A&A also drew inspiration from the idea of Rogue Trader – the character type, and the classic game, as the Solar Auxilia are really not meant to feel like vanilla Imperial Army, and have a bit more of an exotic feel. (Sadly, I think they ended up looking incredibly uniform and vanilla; if any troop type needed a shitload of bells and whistles added to them, it’s the rather drab Solar Auxilia.)

They talked about the Knights army list, which I found the highlight of ‘Conquest’s rather dry rules section, and how they wanted to show how different Knights are to the Imperial norm – but that they could also be a coherent force, not just towering mega-engines to provide support. That in fact, this was a more appropriate way to field them in some ways, considering the Knight Houses tend to an isolationist nature.

Q&A

Q: What made you decide to turn the Legio Tempestus traitor? They’ve been loyalists elsewhere (‘Mechanicum’).

A: Tempestus have always been traitors, in fact, some of the earliest fluff about Chaos Titans describes the corrupted Tzeentchian Tempestus engines at the Siege of Terra. It was an interesting challenge to expand on their background though, and they’ve generally tried to make the fluff non-absolute so if you want to field Traitor members of a Loyal faction (or vice versa) or field members of a faction supposedly wiped out, you can do that.

On that note, towards the end of the FW Heresy books, rules and fluff for corrupted Chaos Knights and Titans will start to come in, along with models. That won’t be for a while, though there are some new Knights on the way, including some which are “more Chaotic” coming in the next few months.

Q: Dorn’s chainsword is ‘unwieldy’? What the heck?

A: Alan: It’s very big. (big laugh) It’s very, very big. (Conference room goes fucking nuts with hilarity, I unconsciously check for the exits)

Q: Can we expect a more straightforward non-Auxilia Imperial Army list at any point?

A: Yes, eventually, there will be more on the way for Imperial players who want something other than Solar Auxilia or Legion armies. The ‘Imperial Army’ It may end up being a lot of smaller lists in future books – the Imperium is so wide-ranging and non-standardised that getting them all into one book might be difficult.

Q: Any chance of a return to the Rogue Trader-era stuff of humans/Imperial Army using Rhino and Land Raider tanks?

A: Maybe. Tony jumped in here and explained this historic rule was due to the fact GW’s resources were limited back in the Rogue Trader days, so they could only make a few different tanks and they had to adapt the fluff accordingly.

Q: Will there be a GW Heresy-era Space Marine box in plastic rather than resin?

A: (Tony) There are options in the future for Heresy-era stuff if we see it as appropriate, but that it may have too focused an appeal to be viable. (I was not optimistic at the tone of his answer. I love those Forge World models but I kind of hate working with resin.)

Apparently Alan and the Forge World writers get very frequent requests for new campaign structures, which might explain why there has been a new one in every book so far; I inferred from this seminar this will probably be the case for most of the Forge World books to come. Kind of a bummer for me as I find them the most uninteresting part of the books, but I’m sure some people are happy about it.

Alan is very interested in exploring not just the how but “the why” of the Traitors’ betrayal. We can expect to see more on divisions within the Traitors’ ranks as many of their warriors may resent the Emperor and support an insurrection against him but “didn’t sign on for the horns and the tentacles”. We may see some more stuff about open conflict within the traitor forces – and later on, there will be conflict within the Loyalists during the Scouring.

The War on Tallarn

My first impressions on the panellists here were scribbled hastily: “Laurie Goulding looks like a young Henry Rollins. John French looks like he should be on an American sitcom.”

This seminar was heavy on the mechanics of retro-engineering a 40K setting into 30K. The idea for the Tallarn Horus Heresy stuff began being floated about 2 and a half years ago. In a lot of the background from the early 90s, written by Rick Priestley, there were tantalising references to the Heresy. In fact, there were lots of references to Tallarn through 40K’s history, though not always consistently. (I can relate – in my beloved 2^nd Edition Chaos Codex, Tallarn is mentioned in the Horus Heresy section only as a victory for the Alpha Legion.) John wanted to try to make the disparate branches of the fluff work together when possible, so he tried to put as many factions in as have been noted to have taken part: White Scars, Mechanicum, Dark Mechanicum, Iron Hands, Imperial Fists, Dark Angels, Knight Houses and Titan Legions. Some are only alluded to, some play more central roles in his writing.

As has been widely reported, around ten million tanks were involved in the year-plus conflict, and a million of them ended up destroyed. Therefore, John had to make this into a conflict involving more than just the Imperial Army and Iron Warriors, since their participation alone simply wouldn’t be enough to reach that number.

The conflict ends up being a colossal game of chicken as everyone pours more and more resources into the planet. The stakes are too high for either side to give up; all they can do is escalate.

The key difference from Isstvan’s virus bombing was that there was no ignition of the toxic gases, leading to the very different battle conditions – Alan also noted that the Imperium has a wide and varied armoury, and this will include more than one type of virus bomb.

There are plans for Forge World to fill in the wider ‘fake historical’ narrative behind John’s stories. A key element of making these more engaging and believable is having commanders – even Primarchs – on both sides making mistakes. John had an idea while writing his books that eventually, Alan and his team would need to go in and write a lot of background for it, so he wanted to help them out by adding an element of plausibility. That’s not completely possible, since canonically this is the largest tank battle in human history, but he did research noted historical tank battles for inspiration. For example, Kursk, which he described as the largest recorded tank battle of the 20^th century, involving 5000 Russian tanks versus 2000 German tanks – it’s very difficult to conceive of increasing that scale to involve ten million tanks (and last over a year, off and on). Knowing that the Forge World books are so good at covering the ‘wide angle’ background (hell, he’s helped write a bunch of it himself) John wanted to start by taking a much more focused, ground-level view of the battle – hence ‘Tallarn: Executioner’ with its story following just one tank squadron. With ‘Tallarn: Ironclad’ he took a different approach, describing it as “the secret history of Tallarn” – more mysterious, kind of a Heresy equivalent to the breaking of the Enigma code.

Originally, Tallarn was set to be just one novella – John is glad they let him expand on it. Chronologically, the story of the battle ends with ‘Ironclad’, which begins with the Third Battle for the Sightless Warren, and the audio drama CD ‘Iron Corpses/The Eagle’s Talon’ fills in some of the blanks between ‘Ironclad’ and ‘Executioner’. John hopes to write at least one more Tallarn story, dealing with why the Loyalist reinforcements began to arrive. (The timeline in ‘Tallarn: Executioner’ says that a distress call was sent by a surviving Astropath found under the Sapphire City, but I guess John implied there was more to the story than that.) Deliberately, some loose ends have been left in an ambiguous state, possibly to be picked up later, possibly not – unanswered questions make it feel more real. John likes the gaps in the background – vague hints and “people just don’t know” shrugs can be more interesting than hard facts.

Q&A

Q: Could we see a return of Warhammer Epic-scale rules to deal with the colossal tank battles of Tallarn?

A: The focus of the Forge World Tallarn book will probably be on terrain rules for the unique conditions on Tallarn – a change in scale is very unlikely.

Q: In ‘Desert Raiders’, didn’t it say that the inhabitants of Tallarn abandoned their ruined world and then found the desert world they ultimately settled?

A: John said he hadn’t read ‘Desert Raiders’, but rather drew from the extensive collection of background in rulebooks, codexes and even the backs of old model boxes. (Sounds like ‘Desert Raiders’ might be the non-canonical one here.)

Q: Was it challenging working out what happened to the other nine million tanks?

A: Yes! It’s a logistical nightmare for the Iron Warriors to withdraw their surviving forces when they retreat. Actually it takes a great deal of time for both sides to organise themselves – but time isn’t necessarily something they have a lot of.

Q: Will we see more stuff about the void war around Tallarn?

A: A bit, but possibly less than you would like. John loves writing void war but the focus really had to be more on the ground combat for this story – everyone is jostling around in orbit or near orbit, but it’s more to get troops on to the surface than to gain void superiority. There is, however, a Sons of Horus character in ‘Ironclad’ who is essentially a Space Marine fighter pilot – John described it as “a really butch version of ‘Top Gun’”, leading one wag to shout out “Imagine the volleyball scene!”

If you're a novella hater, don't worry. The Tallarn stuff is going to eventually become available as part of the numbered Heresy series, just like everything else.

Flesh and Steel: The Solar Auxila and the Mechanicum

This began with a preview of some of the forthcoming models for both of these army types. There’s a Solar Auxilia command squad coming soon, which kind of looks exactly as you’d expect, though the Strategos miniature has what can only be described as a ‘battlefield typewriter’.

For the Mechanicum there’s more varied stuff on the way. A Magos Enginseer model is on the way (I remember liking the look of it, but not what it looked like, sorry). Also the weird jellyfish/Matrix monsters, the Scyllax automata. They were explained as being similar to Space Marine Destroyer Squads – using similar ‘banned’ rad-weapons, but they have almost no organic components, so their own safety matters even less than with Destroyers. These looked really cool, and increased my feeling that all the sculptors in Forge World have the most fun with the Mechanicum stuff. For those who are fans of the Castellax Battle-Automata, something similar but bigger (I think) is on the way – the Thanatar-Calix, which I found to be very ‘Fallout’-looking, with a really 50s sci-fi design – fun.

The Mechanicum Ordinatus machine, only showing up in CAD design drawings, got the best reaction of the day – I was a little mystified by this, as I thought it looked really dumb. It looked like two vaguely Chimera-like chassis in tandem, with a really giant ray-gun type thing mounted on the rearmost track unit. Anyway, everyone went fucking nuts, and it’s supposedly going to be a huge kit, so it’ll sell a lot, but probably not to me (this time).

Alan, along with designers Mark and Edgar, talked a lot about the appeal of the Mechanicum – though there was some Solar Auxilia talk, particularly about the cool-looking Ogryn Charonite models, as well as the rules and background. Really though the enthusiasm came through more obviously when they were talking about the craziness of the Mech and the Dark Mech. Mark in particular said he was really inspired by the classic John Blanche artwork which features some of the “craziest, fucked-up stuff” they really want to capture when making the Mech models.

Alan had a few things to say which really stuck with me – firstly, that the Mechanicum are far more advanced than they let on most of the time. (Ominous!) And also, that the Mechanicum are much less unified than the Space Marine Legions are. There are so many different and varying interpretations of what the Mechanicum ‘is’. While customisation choices for Space Marine armies in the Heresy are relatively constrained, in a way, the Mechanicum is an ‘anything goes’ army. That’s going to become ever-more apparent with the Dark Mechanicum as, towards the end of the Heresy, they start experimenting with shortcuts not available to the Loyalists when swelling the ranks of their armies – ie, using daemon-infused technology.

Q&A

For those waiting for an exploration of the more esoteric Heresy-era Adeptus Mechanicus cults in 40K, it probably won’t happen, as they don’t really exist in a notable form in 30K. (Names of cults were named, but went over my head – sorry.)

It’s not likely there will be skitarii models in the foreseeable future. Though they’ve been featured prominently in the novels, the tone of Alan and the designers was that they saw thallaxi and tech-thralls as the primary Heresy-era troop choice for the Mechanicum – so perhaps expect to see more of those in the novels from now on.

Myrmidon weapon packs are on the way soon.

Considering the often close relationship between the Iron Warriors and Mechanicum, there have been some discussions of crossover within their lists. As we know, Perturabo eventually builds a unit of robot bodyguards as he doesn’t trust his own men to protect him – along with the Heretek experiments the IV get into later, this may provide some Astartes/Mechanicum crossover.

Alan did want to explore the Raven Guard’s esoteric tech-use in ‘Extermination’, but there wasn’t room. The rules/background was written, and it will be in a later book.

Everyone is really looking forward to getting their teeth into rules and models for the Dark Mechanicum – “They will get scary.” On the Loyalist side, they may not have the warp-reliant stuff, but they will experiment with dark, historical (pre-Unity? Pre-Old Night?) tech which is just as dangerous in its own way.

There will be Mechanicum transfer sheets on the way – in fact, there will hopefully be a lot more transfers in general in the coming months, as FW have just hired someone to work full-time on decals. “Jes Goodwin’s daughter, funnily enough.” I don’t know if that was a joke or not, but if it means I get Alpha Legion transfers sooner, then cool.

Fabricator-General Kelbor-Hal will get rules and ultimately a model. Hopefully a book – or at least a book section – about the Civil War on Mars will show up somewhere within the next 4 FW book releases.

There are ideas for Mechanicum flyers being floated (hah!) but you may not see the exact flyer described in ‘Garro: Shield Of Lies’ anytime soon.

Next update I'll be discussing the last seminars of the day, and the 'Meet the Creators' session which followed.