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Made in in
[MOD]
Otiose in a Niche






Hyderabad, India

 Overread wrote:
 Eldarain wrote:
Does anyone recall how long they said Vol2 of Bloodquest was likely to take?


Their Print on Demands normally take a few months to come. Something like 90 days or so I think is the typical quote from other similar books.


The recent color reprint had Books 1 and 2. IIRC there were only 3, any idea what else it might include?


 
   
Made in nl
[MOD]
Decrepit Dakkanaut






Cozy cockpit of an Imperial Knight

For those interested, the https://siegeofterra.com/ site has been updated with the fifth map.



Fatum Iustum Stultorum

 
   
Made in ca
Enigmatic Chaos Sorcerer





British Columbia

 Kid_Kyoto wrote:
 Overread wrote:
 Eldarain wrote:
Does anyone recall how long they said Vol2 of Bloodquest was likely to take?


Their Print on Demands normally take a few months to come. Something like 90 days or so I think is the typical quote from other similar books.


The recent color reprint had Books 1 and 2. IIRC there were only 3, any idea what else it might include?


Thanks Overread. I too am curious about what if anything has been added. The old Vol3 is 96 pages.

 BlaxicanX wrote:
A young business man named Tom Kirby, who was a pupil of mine until he turned greedy, helped the capitalists hunt down and destroy the wargamers. He betrayed and murdered Games Workshop.


 
   
Made in nl
[MOD]
Decrepit Dakkanaut






Cozy cockpit of an Imperial Knight

Finally finally finally finally!



Also:




Fatum Iustum Stultorum

 
   
Made in gb
Longtime Dakkanaut





April dates?
   
Made in gb
Thermo-Optical Hac Tao





Gosport, UK

Danny76 wrote:
April dates?


They’re Saturday’s (17ths) preorders.
   
Made in gb
Decrepit Dakkanaut




UK

I wonder if we finally get the reprint of the 46th Inferno Classic issue

A Blog in Miniature

3D Printing, hobbying and model fun! 
   
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Decrepit Dakkanaut






Cozy cockpit of an Imperial Knight




fething hell is the voice asking the questions annoying as feth.



Fatum Iustum Stultorum

 
   
Made in gb
Thermo-Optical Hac Tao





Gosport, UK

 BrookM wrote:



fething hell is the voice asking the questions annoying as feth.


There’s a transcript here from B&C if that’s more agreeable


Reclusiarch Krieg, on 07 May 2021 - 5:54 PM, said:
https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2021/05/unsolved-mysteries-of-the-warhammer-40k-universe-with-loremaster-dan-abnett/

Here's the link to the video interview, there's also a full trascript that I'm pasting below. Quite a few interesting answers there!

Spoiler:

- Mock signal clear. Resolving communications. Receiving astropathic relay transmission from remembrancer Dan Abnett. Who would prevail in single combat, a Grey Knight or an Adeptus Custodes?

- A Grey Knight versus a Custodes. Oh, my goodness me. That's one of those, you know, who's stronger, the Hulk or Thor, isn't it, kind of type question. Serious answer, my money would just be on the Custodes. Grey Knight's got amazing abilities but I think the Custodes would probably end up winning. However, my real answer to that question is, my God, that's the scene I want to write. Hi, I'm Dan Abnett, author of many novels for Warhammer and Warhammer 40,000. And today I'm going to tackle some of the unsolved mysteries of the Warhammer 40,000 universe.

- Were the twin Primarchs Alpharius and Omegon tricked by the Xenos Cabal, or was it all part of the intelligence gathering and complex plotting the traitorous Alpha Legion are known for?

- I personally believe that the Alpha Legion is not duped by the Cabal at all. What I wanted to set up with the idea was they made a really conscious decision. They weren't being tricked by anybody at all. Now I think they may have later come to believe that they had been tricked or manipulated, but that was not the Cabal's intent. I mean, that was not my intent in writing the Cabal and that was not the intent that I was trying to write into them. Whether or not the Alphareus and his legion went along the route they went simply because they completely trusted what they were doing or whether, as seems more likely in hindsight, they were deploying their usual cunning, which is to go along with something in order to learn more about it, in order to make a better decision further down the line, is I think a very good retroactive reading of what is happening there. So yes, that suggestion you're making in that question, I think is a really good re-reading of the intention of those stories.

- Alphaexodus asks, how much of Alpharius-Omegon's backstory did you have worked out? How do you feel about the trajectory of the legion and twin Primarchs since writing Legion?

- Writing Legion was an opportunity where I really discovered that we were doing a good job of the Horus Heresy. And we weren't sure yet whether the the high lords of Games Workshop trusted what we were doing. There's one guy, Alan Merrett, who is fantastic lore master of stuff, coming to our meetings, tell us what we could do. We'd point out all the contradictions and strangenesses in the lore of the things that we would have to resolve, the choices that we'd have to make about which version we went with, all those kinds of things. I wanted to join the main storyline from a different route, like I was coming on from a different feeder line. Start with a different Legion, one of the less famous ones, show how the heresy was affecting them. And I chose the Alpha Legion mainly because I didn't know much about them, I thought they were interesting. So knowing that they were all about secrets and stealth, I realized the one thing that the book really had to do was to have a big surprise in it. I worked at about six things that I thought could be the big twist in the book. And I went in to see Alan. So I said to him, can I do this? And he went, yeah. And I'm like, Oh, all right, can I do this? And he went, yeah. We went down the whole list and he let me do all six of them. So I came out of the room with permission to not only do the things that I thought were going to be big secrets they might let me do one of, plus this enormously huge one that I never thought I'd get. So I, it was great. I loved being able to be able to do that and to deliver a book that made people just go, what the hell? Because there was stuff in about the Alpha Legion they'd never seen before in their lives.

- Thornybacon. What are your designs for the future of the Gaunt's Ghosts series?

- As soon as I get the chance, I'm going to go back and begin a new arc of books. I've got some fairly cool ideas about what's going to happen in this and things that explore the new dynamic of the regiment because they've ended up in unusual places. And actually, although it's probably a year off before I get into that, without giving anything away, there's going to be some sort of Gaunt's Ghosts niceness to see before then at some point, some really interesting things that we're going to do. So the Sabbat World's Crusade will reappear before, even before I get back into the next major arc of Gaunt's.

- FlatSquashy. Who is your favorite traitor Primarch? And why is it Angron?

- It's not Angron, it's Perturabo. I love the siege warfare angle. I love the fact that he's kind of the demented version of Dorn, and it's totally frustrated. I, Perturabo's my favorite, sorry. Angron is great, but Angron does one thing. He shouts a lot.

- Thornybacon. If you were permitted to explore the missing Primarchs, would you do so? Should they remain a mystery?

- No, I wouldn't do it. I wouldn't do it. I wouldn't do it. I'd be really tempted if there was an official request and they said, we'd finally decided we're going to announce this and we want Dan to write the story in which that appears. That would be such a singular honor that I probably would be foolish not to say yes but they are deliberate mysteries. They are deliberate mysteries first of all, because it increases the sense that this is a huge and ultimately unknowable universe. And that makes it more interesting. There are always things that we don't know the answer to. The universe becomes much richer because, because it allows space for your imagination. The Horus Heresy era, the Primarch's era is the mythology. It's ancient history and it's mythology. And what we have is mythical versions of those stories to play around in the 40k. I always think about it in terms of things like the myth of Hercules. There are so many myths about Hercules and they're actually massively contradictory that he couldn't possibly have done all these things. Some of them are obviously very literal stories, some of them are very symbolic stories. And after a while you have a body of stories about Hercules by the time you get to the Roman era, and virtually none of them, if any of them, ever happened to a person called Hercules. So if you think about that in 40k terms, 10,000 years in the future where a lot of information is lost or deliberately suppressed, how do we know the stories we have, contradictory stories we have about Rogal Dorn are exactly that? They're just, they're just stories. So one of the things we're doing in the novels is to try and work out the best way of telling that that makes the best sense in terms of the story. And we try and find a way of telling it in a brand new way. Ollanius Pius part is a really good one example of that, where what we're trying to do there is to say, yes there was a root to the myths that you know but they sprung from different places and actually here's the real story of it. And I think, again, going back to the missing Primarchs thing, if you go back to one of these things and you try and explain it too definitively, it robs it of its mysteries. That absolutely is the biggest challenge of writing the Horus Heresy books. What we've ended up doing is telling, I don't, I've lost count now, but we're sort of telling four, five or six different versions of the myth. All of these stories, like the Hercules stories I was mentioning earlier, all of these things happened and they were handed down. They were told and retold and retold and retold and eventually they were all hooked onto this name, Ollanius Pius. They all became stories about Ollanius' past but they weren't originally. He has become, he is this composite figure of other people. And that's how the story has reached here.

- ThlintoRatscar. Is there room for hope in the grim dark future of Warhammer 40,000?

- I do hope not because then it won't be the 40k universe anymore. I think the reason that Warhammer 40k is so distinctive is because it is incomparably bleak. We bandy around the word grim dark and all that kind of stuff but it is, it is just, it's an awful, awful place. It has that unique distinction with just about every other fictional, science fictional universe that you can think of. There are always places that you'd love to go and visit. You'd love to go and spend some time in, I don't know, the Star Trek universe or travel with Dr. Who or whatever it is because there are attractive places where you think there might be adventure, there might be danger, but they're also wonderful. Warhammer stands alone as being the place where you would not even want to visit for five minutes because it's so atrociously awful. And I love the fact that the fans have embraced 40k because it literally is the darkest possible timeline. And I think the 40k universe was almost a reaction to fascist Britain and the problems we were having there. It was like, let's take that and make it even worse. It is an object lesson in how things can go disastrously wrong, and you wouldn't want to have anything to do with it. Having said that, there isn't room for hope with a capital H but there is definitely a necessarily room for hope with a small H on the short-term at the human level because otherwise, what we're creating in this fiction would be unbearably depressing, I think.

- Jeanlucpikachu. How involved are you with the Eisenhorn pict-recorded series?

- I don't believe, on pain of excommunication by the Black Ships of the Inquisition, that I'm allowed to talk about that very much at all. Conversations have been had, and I have attended certain meetings. Beyond that, I'm not going to say anything other than I'm very, what's the word? Very optimistic about the way it's going to shape up.

- Can one feel pity for Magnus the Red?

- No. He's a dick. [laughs]

- Medicaean. In Salvation's Reach, the Imperial Guard are aided by three Astartes from three different Chapters. Why weren't the Astartes from the same chapter?

- Oh, that's a good question. I try and keep the focus on the human characters. The Gaunt's Ghosts series obviously about the Imperial Guard. They are about the human level, regular fighters. And to start dropping Astartes and to start dropping Chaos Astartes into those stories is difficult because they are working on a completely different level. So I had to be very careful about it. So I didn't want to have a whole bunch of space Marines turning up and completely eclipsing the importance of Gaunt's Ghosts in the course of the story. By the same token, it was an important mission and it was likely that they would get some support from the Astartes, so the sort of chapters of Knights that you need to petition to, to ask them a favor. The reason there's only three of them is because Astartes are very, very rare in the 40k universe. There aren't really very many of them around anymore so for an Astartes to turn up, for an army of Astartes to turn up, it's like it's got to be a really big deal. And I thought that that was not only in keeping with the nature of the storyline and served by purposes in the storyline but also really showed us a lot about the way the universe worked. The fact that these Astartes were very special and they were literally an unbalancing factor if they appeared. And therefore you had to sort of use them sparingly and one was enough or in this case, three was enough. And I think that works really, really well. I think that book is one of the ones that shows the differences and connections between the regular Astra Militarum and the Adeptus Astartes very, very clearly indeed.

- Eyrelliah. The Noosphere concept seems fundamental to 40k fiction. Did you conceive it for Titanicus and share the idea with the rest of the Horus Heresy team?

- Well, no, I didn't. Noosphere, which is how I presume it's pronounced but somebody I'm sure will write in and correct me, is one of those slightly more esoteric end of things which is really, really interesting. When I was writing Titanicus and I wanted to create the idea of a shared machine language and shared machine consciousnesses, I sort of worked hard to try and think of terminology that worked and I thought it would be great to borrow that and repurpose it in 40k terms. And one of the things that I found writing, even writing Imperial Guard books and certainly when I got to Eisenhorn is, there wasn't regular terminology, in-universe terminology, for all sorts of very obvious things, because no one had ever had to write about it before, because it's the sort of things you needed when you're writing a novel but you don't need when you're playing game on a tabletop. So I was coining words left, right and center just to give myself a vocabulary to use in these books that sounded 40k-esque. I consider it to be my greatest achievement in terms of 40k.

- What would one see if they entered the Emperor's throne room?

- The ultimate truth is probably something quite horrific sitting on something that vaguely resembles something that used to be a throne but isn't a throne but is actually just a huge, complicated piece of apparatus with pipes and tubes going everywhere. But even that is doubtful as to actually even, even if that is there. To me, the most interesting answer to that is that most people who enter the throne room now in 40k would probably last about four or five seconds before they were killed, just incinerated by the brightness of the light, destroyed by the currents of the Warp that are flying around the throne room, irradiated to the point of instant death by the machines that are running there. It is like the heart of a nuclear reactor that has melted down. It's not in any way, shape or form a conventional throne room that you walk into and bow and at the end of the carpet and look up at the throne, it doesn't work like that. It is a mechanism at the heart of a bigger mechanism at the heart of a bigger mechanism that is the planet Terra. And the notion that there is an emperor sitting on a throne in a throne room is just part of the myth. You know, you've made all the way this pilgrimage of lifetimes to reach the Emperor. What is probably happening to them is they're being consumed by the machine. They're just being eaten up, their souls and everything of meaning on the machine. It's not a nice place.

- Particular-Thought38. Did the Cabal survive in some way despite Eldrad Ulthran and Barthusa Narek's series of assassinations of its members? If so, could the Cabal be playing a role in the rise of the Ynnari?

- Wow. I'd like to think they did. The Cabal was, the Cabal was an oddly oddly rare example of non-human forces actually trying to do something constructive and positive. In fact, several of the Eldar, the Aeldari particularly, are often trying to do positive constructive things, much to the annoyance of mankind and vice versa. So I'd like to think the Cabal do exist in some form or some legacy of them. There's a lot of institutions in the 40k universe, some of which I have created, that clearly are recurring. They might not necessarily have survived intact all the way through, but the notion and the name has recurred and somebody else has gone, that was a good idea, let's do that again. I suppose like the Druids. The Druids may not have existed historically speaking and may have just been an entire invention of Victorian England. But the point is that they were an idea that came back in and people said, let's do this again. So I think the same is true of some of those things, and the same is true of the Cabal.

- Can more Adeptus Custodes be created? By what means are they made?

- I believe they can still be made in 40k universe. I don't think it's been said they can't. I don't think there are, they are a finite supply that's diminishing. They certainly aren't made in great numbers. They are a very precious resource. We know from the 30k era, from the Horus Heresy era and the Unification War, the Great Crusade, that they are far, far more than Astartes. Astartes are almost like the cheap bulk version created by a much simpler, cruder process that only begin to approximate the degree of the build quality of Custodes to the point where it's said that the Custodes aren't even necessarily purely genetic creations but they are something slightly more metaphysical. They have, almost everything about them has been perfected in all sorts of weird ways. What that means is that they are immensely expensive to produce, not just financially expensive, which doesn't seem to matter in 40k universe, but in terms of time, effort, resources, special things, they are... It takes so much to make a Custodes, which is why they are comparatively few of them and why they are given such a special task. And also I think why they feel so frustrated because if, they are almost as godlike as Primarchs. You know, they should be, they feel they should be out there doing amazing things. They basically are posted as sentries, you know. The best soldiers in the universe are kept as sentries. So we know that they are very special. There is, there is more than just a mechanical, surgical, genetic process that results in a Custodes. So that's a good enough answer that I can give for that.

- Was Garviel Loken a founding member of the Grey Knights?

- Ah, that's a good question. If you really, really, really know your lore, there are enough clues already for you to have answered that question by now. That's all I'm saying.

- Who is your favorite Chaos God and why is it Nurgle?

- The Chaos Gods are not gods. They are enormous concentrated saturations of warped energy within the Immaterium that embody certain personalities and therefore give the semblance that to all intents and purposes, they are to us gods, but they are not gods. And it wouldn't be that, it would be, it wouldn't be Nurgle. It would probably be Slaanesh. I like my weekends, what can I say?

- What does the Emperor truly look like?

- The Emperor presents himself like any good god should in the form that is most useful to him to get across. You think about the Greek gods appearing as rams and snakes and all that kind of stuff, because they, you know, they want to pull a fast one or they want to trick somebody, whatever like that. The Emperor is the same. He's, what he looks like is unknown to everybody. What he appears as, manifests as, is as appropriate to the circumstance. That manifestation, particularly post Unification War, that manifestation has had to be god-like. It has to be as the Emperor. He has had to command respect. So the commonly perceived image of him that we see in paintings, the golden figure on the throne, the sort of westernized emperor and the idea of saints and all of that kind of stuff, all the religious trappings that have gone through into 40k, are almost like a necessary psychological defense to keep the people of the 40k universe sane in the light of the things that they see occasionally and the things that they historically they have seen in great profusion. And it speaks to the fact the Emperor is probably not around as much as he'd like to be, but he hasn't done anything about it. Or if he is around as much as he'd like to be and he is genuinely watching over everybody in a kind of a higher psychic way, maybe he has come to the conclusion that what I said earlier on, he is what he needs to be. Maybe he's realized the way he needs to be now is a god, that people, the only way for human humanity to survive is to trust in something divine above them. Because otherwise with the rise of chaos, everything will be too horrible to bear and everything could be collapsing overnight. It is not definitively official because again, it's one of those things that strays into the mystery box we don't talk about. But, I know it is head can shared by most of the key writers and I believe therefore it makes it semi-official.

- Soundwave 11. How much planning went into the big reveal in your novel Penitent? How vast will the repercussions be not only inside your works, but for the wider lore?

- I have been planning it for a long time, a long time. I had to get permission to do it. It's been a secret thing. There's, there's been an, it's been on a need to know basis only. Only a few select personnel have been allowed to know this until it actually came out. Not going to spoil it except to say, yes there is a huge, huge twist. There are quite a lot of huge twists actually but there's one particularly huge twist in it. It's going to have massive ramifications for, if nothing else, for the third book in the series, Pandemonium, which, which is, which is due. And it will probably have great ramifications for the Eisenhorn Inquisitor series. And I think it will probably, in the long run, have massive implications for the universe as a whole. I quite like the fact that we can sneak a big twist like that into what appears to be a subsidiary story thread. I think it is really fun because I think it made it twice as unexpected.

- Which is your favorite Traitor Legion and why is it the Night Lords?

- Every single one of these, no matter what, you're getting the wrong ones every single time. My favorite Traitor Legion is the, is the, is the Sons of Horus, aka the Black Legion as they became. Cause they are, first of all, I feel a great bond to them having written Horus Rising and set it all in motion but also because I think they've got the most interesting things going on with them, this there's wonderful arc of tragedy. They're not just like cackling villains. They've got this, this extraordinary thing going on so yeah, sorry. It's not the Night Lords. Night Lords are cool, love the Night Lords, but you know.

- Who is your favorite Primarch and why is it Ferrus Manus?

- My absolute favorite is Rogal Dorn because he's just so stoic. And he, he ran that campaign. He is the, he is the epitome of the precise general. I will love writing him as a character. I love the, what he does at the Siege of Terra and the fact that he's just like, tries to out game everything that's happening, even when it is literally, he's playing sort of with chaos mathematics and he can't, you know, it all becomes unpredictable and then the uncertainty principle, and he's still going, no, we can do this. I just need a bigger chessboard. I think that's fantastic and that's why I love him.

- With so many shared threats, what prevents the Imperium, Eldar and T'au factions from working together?

- Underlying tragedy is one of the fundamental rubrics of the 40k universe though surely. I mean, let's face it. It is based originally on a tabletop game where you were meant to field armies against each other. So the idea of maintaining those distinctions and rivalries is vastly important. And if it was too easy for people to become allies, it would weaken the mechanics of the basic game. So that's an important thing to remember but also it shows how difficult these things are. The human race in 40k universe is kind of the worst version of ourselves. They are massively intolerant towards everything that isn't perceived as being normal human. The common ground can't be found very often. One of the things I deliberately did in the recent Gaunt's Ghosts novels is actually really show how the humans on the Chaos side of the war, who they'd been battling now for 15 novels and half a million, 1 million and a half words, they are so similar except their fundamental basis of what they understand as a starting place are diametrically opposed. They'd both been trained to hate the other. And that is a sadness of the human state in the Warhammer universe.

- Will the Emperor of Mankind reincarnate if he dies?

- Well, it is, it's very, very difficult. The Emperor, the Emperor is functionally immortal and seems to be all but invulnerable to except, but to the very highest levels of damage that could be applied by say, the living Avatar of Chaos, as is likely to happen at the end of the Siege of Terra. You think the end of the Siege of Terra is bad. You have no idea how horrible and traumatic it is. We all know mythologically speaking, the Emperor ends up on death's door, having been seriously damaged in the final confrontation. We know that. And there is a distinct possibility that very much like, I don't know, an incarnation of Doctor Who, that he has suffered so grievously from his wounds, he would reincarnate perpetual style and come back as the next version, the next, played by a different actor probably, the different version of the Emperor who would then take over. But they, he thinks the Golden Throne is important to this so allegedly, he insists that he is put on the Golden Throne to keep him alive. There is a vice versa thing there cause he also needs to go back on the Golden Throne to keep the Golden Throne alive. So there, there is that aspect. So it's quite possible. And this adds to the tragedy and trauma of what the Emperor has become, is that he's been stuck on, trapped on the Golden Throne, bonded to it forever because people think they're doing him a favor to save his life. But what he's actually doing is dying and reincarnating over and over and over and over again for 10,000 years just to keep the whole system running, which is agonizing and horrible. No wonder he's the, you know, the Corpse God on this throne. So, so yeah. Again, we're straying into the realms of what actually is the truth. Can't tell you, it's a bit of a mystery but there are certainly enough things about the lore there that we know so we can speculate about the true horror of the situation.

- How were the Primarchs named?

- All of these things were being grown organically and they were invented on the hoof. And I cannot believe that the Primarchs, I've no basis for saying this, but I can't believe the Primarchs were not invented out of the names of someone's mate or a combination of the names of two people over there or a conversation in the pub or that sort of thing. Cause we know that a lot of these really simple things came out of exactly the sort of anecdotal fun conversations that friends have when they are doing a hobby together, when they're war-gaming or they're playing role-playing games and something, let's say, you know, they call a character something because that's a fun name to call them. And then it sticks and becomes canon and that's the way it works. It is true to say that the fundamental origin of the Horus Heresy or which is that of say a civil war that racks the universe was originally down to the fact that they were making the original Titanicus game and it was incredibly expensive to produce the Titan models for the game so they can only afford to make one set of molds. They couldn't make two rival armies to look different. And in order to try and make it a functional game, all they did was they cast two sets from the same molds in different colors. And when somebody said, well why are they fighting each other? They're the same thing. Somebody said, oh there was a terrible war where they fought each other. And that was it. That was just the explanation for why that game had to be that. This is the really early days. That's the way it had to be, way it had to be like that. From that, then somebody said, well, what was the war called? Somebody else went, Horus Heresy. And it just added to it, it added to it and then it, and like a, like a boulder rolling downhill, it starts to accrete stuff around it and then it becomes mythology. And then that mythology grows and becomes bigger and then it becomes, it becomes color text in the back of books. And it becomes mentioned over here and then somebody mentioned and that's and that's the way you get it. Essentially, the Horus Heresy was the throwaway remark like the Clone Wars. It was just a thing. Just a thing. Just to give you a bit of color. And now look at us, 67 novels later. [laughs]

- What will happen if the Astronomican and the Golden Throne fail?

- The issues you're talking about there, the operation of the Golden Throne, which is mysterious, the function of the Astronomican, which ultimately is mysterious. What happens when the Golden Throne fails, which is ultimately mysterious. These are all things that if they ever happen, there won't be a Warhammer 40k anymore. There won't be a Warhammer full stop. The universe will end. But these are obviously enormously important issues to the universe. And this is the place where they matter the most. So I'm actually, as a grown man who ought to know better, have spent hours on Skype and Zoom in the last few months talking to other grown men who ought to know better, discussing things like, how does the Astronomican actually work? More interestingly, how do you kickstart the Astronomican and if it's shut down, what do you need? How does the Golden Throne actually work? What is its process of operation? All those sorts of things, all these questions that in terms of lore never need to be answered but this weirdly is the moment when we, they do. Even if I then don't put it into the book in every detail that we've worked out, I need to know in order to make the plot work. And we're making sense of these sorts of things. We're saying, what is the, what is the event horizon of the stuff that we can admit? You know, we can work out a logical explanation for all of these things. But what is the event horizon, once we've laid that out so we can write, what is the event horizon at which we stop and say, we're not going to tell you any more than that. We know more than that. We're not going to tell you any more than that but everything we've, up to that point that we can tell you, is informed by the unknown that exists beyond that. Which sounds like a very pretentious way of doing it but it's the only way you can tackle things of this kind of ridiculous scale. And that is true of the Golden Throne, it's true of the Astronomican. So if, if the fundamentals of that ruin then fell apart, if the last couple of bricks holding the wall up, the Golden Throne, the Astronomican, if they fail, that's it. All bets are off and there would be nothing. The rest would be heat death of the universe and silence. Well, there'd be a lot of shouting for a short while but that it'd be the heat death of the universe and silence and that will be it. You're talking about fundamental building bricks of a fictional universe and you pull those out and everything else just topples. I think one of the great things about Warhammer, really, is the fact that you could do so many things with it. You can read the books. You can play the game. You can paint your armies. You can listen to the audio. It means that people can come to the universe in the way they want to and engage their imagination and creativity with it the way they want to. Thank you for your questions. I'd like to thank all the 40k fans on Reddit and on the Ars Technica forums for a brilliant set of questions that I really enjoyed answering. I hope you've learned something because I certainly have.

- Ars Technica 40,000. [ambient music]

   
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Decrepit Dakkanaut






Cozy cockpit of an Imperial Knight

Cheers for that, some of the stuff is old and some of it is new.



Fatum Iustum Stultorum

 
   
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Otiose in a Niche






Hyderabad, India

The Abnett interview is very cool, thanks for the link.

I liked the bit about how the HH grew from a throw away paragraph to 50+ novels. And he points out that HH is NOT the greatest example of a throw away line growing to a giant. That honor goes to:

"So tell me, Luke... do you know about your father's service in the Clone Wars?"

3 movies, 6 seasons of TV and who knows how many books later...

This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at 2021/05/10 14:40:04


 
   
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Longtime Dakkanaut





I quite like his idea there about "The Emperor on the Golden Throne" not really existing in a conventional sense, where the typical depiction of him sitting there is just a very heavily sanitized version of what it's really like, in no way resembling the actual situation of there just being some horrific mass of unexplainable machinery imbued with the remains of something that doesn't resemble a man anymore to create a terrifying eldritch entity flowing with psychic power.

This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at 2021/05/10 15:09:32


 
   
Made in nl
[MOD]
Decrepit Dakkanaut






Cozy cockpit of an Imperial Knight

Indeed, the novel the Emperor's Legion has a Custodes being chosen to become one of the few who is to enter the throne room and guard it, the Companions I think they're called? At the threshold he catches a glimpse of a massive machine with something hidden away in there that might be the Emperor.



Fatum Iustum Stultorum

 
   
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Hyderabad, India

The madness of Rogue Trader got it right the first time!
Spoiler:



This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at 2021/05/10 21:07:46


 
   
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I'm a bit confused by the new Sabbat Crusade book. Is it just the same one that released last year, only this time there's a limited edition and the normal version is being put as made-to-order?
   
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 Mentlegen324 wrote:
I'm a bit confused by the new Sabbat Crusade book. Is it just the same one that released last year, only this time there's a limited edition and the normal version is being put as made-to-order?

Since there's been no new books, I'd assume so.
   
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lol, that que. Either website crashes or you get to wait 20 mins, jut for all limited editions to be sold out anyway. GG, GW

   
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Thermo-Optical Hac Tao





Gosport, UK

48 minute wait apparently.
   
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Huge Bone Giant






 CragHack wrote:
lol, that que. Either website crashes or you get to wait 20 mins, jut for all limited editions to be sold out anyway. GG, GW


Makes me wonder what generally feels worse to people that miss out on limited stock, having the server crash before checkout or getting placed too far back in the queue.

Nehekhara lives! Sort of!
Why is the rum always gone? 
   
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Longtime Dakkanaut






Yup, just as expected, the tin edition has already sold out by the time I got in. The other one is still available, though. Lolnope, also sold out.
AND the website crashed

This message was edited 2 times. Last update was at 2021/06/12 09:31:23


   
Made in gb
Decrepit Dakkanaut




UK

In fairness in theory when you get into the queue system is the same as if its there or as if you're there without it.

The order of connection remains the same so you have just as much chance of getting it with the system as without. However with the system it should streamline access to the GW website and thus reduce the chances of it crashing.

A Blog in Miniature

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Gosport, UK

46 minute wait was 20 minutes in the end. The limited stuff is gone now, but I didn’t start queuing until quarter past (not actually after the limited stuff). The website seems stable once you’re on. Fingers crossed it works out better in the long run. Can’t be much worse than the old system to be fair.

Im just very nervous about getting the last three SoT novels after an awful experience with Mortis.
   
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Bristol

Thankfully wasn’t on for the Ghosts book today, but was online at 09:55 as per usual for pre-orders - only to be dumped in the queue for another 30mins. Does not bode well for the Horus Heresy limited editions. Sigh
   
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Water-Caste Negotiator





Phutarf wrote:
Thankfully wasn’t on for the Ghosts book today, but was online at 09:55 as per usual for pre-orders - only to be dumped in the queue for another 30mins. Does not bode well for the Horus Heresy limited editions. Sigh


Showing up 5 minutes in advance used to be a guarantee to get a book, they usually went up for sale like 2 minutes early as well so as long as you didnt forget to actually be there it was fine. Guess a lot of people will be forced to get scalped on ebay again for the remaining books..

This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at 2021/06/12 20:56:26


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Gosport, UK

MoD_Legion wrote:
Phutarf wrote:
Thankfully wasn’t on for the Ghosts book today, but was online at 09:55 as per usual for pre-orders - only to be dumped in the queue for another 30mins. Does not bode well for the Horus Heresy limited editions. Sigh


Showing up 5 minutes in advance used to be a guarantee to get a book, they usually went up for sale like 2 minutes early as well so as long as you didnt forget to actually be there it was fine. Guess a lot of people will be forced to get scalped on ebay again for the remaining books..


It used to be, but it hasn’t been recently.
   
Made in gb
Death-Dealing Devastator





Liverpool!

Have BL quietly retired a lot of physical editions of books or is it likely a Covid/Brexit supply chain issue?

I've had a load on wishlists and buy a few a month but a fair few now are out of stock on Amazon and BL - Primarch books mainly and Beast Arises 3rd omnibus.

I know a few of them are older but figured I'd still have time to get them!

"We are the Red Sorcerers of Prospero, damned in the eyes of our fellows, and this is to be how our story ends, in betrayal and bloodshed. No...you may find it nobler to suffer your fate, but I will take arms against it." 
   
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London

 foostick wrote:
Have BL quietly retired a lot of physical editions of books or is it likely a Covid/Brexit supply chain issue?

I've had a load on wishlists and buy a few a month but a fair few now are out of stock on Amazon and BL - Primarch books mainly and Beast Arises 3rd omnibus.

I know a few of them are older but figured I'd still have time to get them!


It's notable that there haven't been any discounted BL books on Kindle for two months now. I actually wonder if Amazon and BL are having a bit of a distribution row behind the scenes or mid-renegotiation.

This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at 2021/07/09 10:55:18


 
   
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Decrepit Dakkanaut




UK

Might be a bit of both - that said get yourself a kindle and you can get a lot of the story books at least without much issue from Amazon or BL direct.


A Blog in Miniature

3D Printing, hobbying and model fun! 
   
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Mighty Vampire Count






UK

Some new Horror books

https://www.warhammer-community.com/2021/09/01/feeling-brave-warhammer-horror-returns-for-a-new-season-of-spine-chilling-stories/

like the look of this one


I AM A MARINE PLAYER

"Unimaginably ancient xenos artefact somewhere on the planet, hive fleet poised above our heads, hidden 'stealer broods making an early start....and now a bloody Chaos cult crawling out of the woodwork just in case we were bored. Welcome to my world, Ciaphas."
Inquisitor Amberley Vail, Ordo Xenos

"I will admit that some Primachs like Russ or Horus could have a chance against an unarmed 12 year old novice but, a full Battle Sister??!! One to one? In close combat? Perhaps three Primarchs fighting together... but just one Primarch?" da001

www.dakkadakka.com/dakkaforum/posts/list/528517.page

A Bloody Road - my Warhammer Fantasy Fiction 
   
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Why do books come in seasons now?
   
 
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