Bringing back the Primarchs...new primarchs?

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**evil_kiwi_60**

Tiennos wrote:

I agree that a setting can afford to be much more loose and vague than a story, but the moment you make it obvious that a mystery will never be resolved, it stops being interesting. If you can be sure that the lost primarchs will never be explained, then why care about them? If you know that you will never, ever learn anything significant about these guys, they're not relevant to anything. Sure, they can be used for fan works... just like I can say that my original chapter, the Space Monkeys, was created via a secret crazy mechanicus project to make space marines out of jokaeros.

The lost primarchs are one of those things that fans like to talk a lot about, but that will never pay off. We can make all the theories we want, which is fun, but it's ultimately a waste of time as no one will ever be proven wrong or right. If it was sudeenly retconned that they never existed in the first place, the setting would hardly lose anything.

On a side note, please make that army. I would laugh my rear end off it I saw a space marine army with various monkey heads.

On the topic, I think it is the wrong approach to look at a mystery like the lost primarchs with the aim of “solving” it. The point is not about being right or wrong. It’s a mystery that left intentionally blank for the players to fill in similar to say the omega vault from the old Deathwatch RPG. The mysterious vault was never going to be explained because it’s a plot device for the GM to use for the player.

Also “fun but a waste of time” destines most of the background for 40k. It doesn’t carry much weight on the tabletop and certainly doesn’t drive GW’s business model. But the background gives you the context for why your army isn’t just random plastic. The concrete background is an example but the writers leave mysteries and blanks spaces for you to fill if you want to.

**Duskweaver**

pm713 wrote:
Platuan4th wrote:
No, they weren't. They literally never existed to create mystery for the past. GW has confirmed this time and again.

Citation needed. I've never heard that and them existing for fan Chapters makes more sense than them just being not around.

Source is Rick Priestley:

"I left [the 2 missing Legions/Primarchs] blank because I wanted to give the story some kind of deep background - unknowable ten thousand year old mysteries - stuff that begs questions for which there could be no answer. ... I created a thousand Chapters - of which we only gave details of a dozen or so - so there were nine hundred odd Chapters left blank for people to fill in."

**evil_kiwi_60**

“BIFFORD: A popular belief among fans is that you left those two Legions blank so that players of Horus Heresy games could invent their own Legions. Is this true?”

That’s the question posed before your quotes, which are taken from two different statements. He admits that there was no concrete plan for the two missing legions and they were intentionally left blank. He says that everything left blank was done so for the players to work with. Therefore the legions are left blank because.....?

**Hellebore**

The same is true of the entire Horus heresy though.

He left it as mythic and mysterious, unknowable due to the age.

Yet they've gone back and detailed it in mind numbingly boring detail that has never lived up to the mythic hype it was created with.

**Insectum7**

evil_kiwi_60 wrote:
“BIFFORD: A popular belief among fans is that you left those two Legions blank so that players of Horus Heresy games could invent their own Legions. Is this true?”

That’s the question posed before your quotes, which are taken from two different statements. He admits that there was no concrete plan for the two missing legions and they were intentionally left blank. He says that everything left blank was done so for the players to work with. Therefore the legions are left blank because.....?

The quote doesn't say he left "everything" blank for players to work with. It says he left " nine hundred odd Chapters" for people to fill in.

**Voss**

Tiennos wrote:
Grimtuff wrote:
locarno24 wrote:
Ferrus clone back from the dead ala Dinobot 2 from beastwars

Or alternatively, given his cameo in Master of Mankind, Legion Of The Damned Ferrus.

An update to the Legion would be cool

Yes, because let's reveal every bloody mystery in 40k...

Some people just don't know when to say when. Part of the appeal of things sometimes is the mystery, the proverbial door that is just ajar enough to peek in but not get the full picture. Describing every little thing in almost pornographic detail and leaving nothing to the imagination hurts franchises.

On the other hand, never explaining any of the mystery is just frustrating. You can't just hint that there is some shadowy character with an agenda, some secrets waiting to be revealed, some sort of grand plan hidden under the surface... and never actually show any of it. Otherwise you end up with something like the X-Files, where every question was "answered" by asking two more questions until it became obvious that there was nothing hidden at all, just smoke and mirrors to pretend that the story was deep instead of random bs they came up with on the fly.

I'm not sure of the relevance of this. Because these aren't shadowy characters lurking around with an agenda, they're dead. They died, and their legions were wiped even before the Heresy.
The 'grand plan' for them is functionally foreshadowing legion on legion conflict, in a fairly pointless way, since the Heresy had its broad strokes long before they did.

Dead ends serve a better story purpose than yet more special snowflakes returning from death and Armageddon to bother the present-day Imperium. Bringing them back (or Ferrus, Curze, Horus or Sangy) just introduces comic book 'death' on a 10,000 year scale. The game doesn't need that, just for the sake of another series of cardboard cutout characters representing 'mysteries!' That's what eldar (esp. Harlequins) are for. Or Cypher. Or Alpha legion. Or tyranid origins. Or Trazyn the infinite. Or Tzeentch. Or great old ones...

**Trickstick**

Hellebore wrote:
The same is true of the entire Horus heresy though.

He left it as mythic and mysterious, unknowable due to the age.

Yet they've gone back and detailed it in mind numbingly boring detail that has never lived up to the mythic hype it was created with.

Or...

They have created a series of in-universe historical fiction, written in m41 about events 10k years before. Like the 40k version of Romance of the Three Kingdoms. The historical accuracy of the works may be questionable.

**Esmer**

GW's release policy on the primarchs is rather strange.

They bring back Bobby (which I guess makes sense, out of the loyalists he had always been the most important one for the Imperium as a whole) and two traitor primarchs (apparently randomly chosen) in under a year and since then...nothing.

I was expecting a release schedule of something like a loyalist and a traitor per year at least.

Mind, I'd rather the primarchs would not have returned at all, but that's a different story.

**Mad Doc Grotsnik**

pm713 wrote:
Platuan4th wrote:
evil_kiwi_60 wrote:
Please no. The missing primarchs were meant to give you room to build your own background for your space marines outside of the 9 first founding chapters or 9 traitor legions.

No, they weren't. They literally never existed to create mystery for the past. GW has confirmed this time and again.

Citation needed. I've never heard that and them existing for fan Chapters makes more sense than them just being not around.

Weak citation.

First HH Weekender (the only one I attended). Initial Q&A did indeed confirm that the two 'missing' Legions were there precisely so players could invent their own.

Over time, that has of course changed, being more codified with the advent of the HH novel series.

**Duskweaver**

evil_kiwi_60 wrote:“BIFFORD: A popular belief among fans is that you left those two Legions blank so that players of Horus Heresy games could invent their own Legions. Is this true?”
That’s the question posed before your quotes, which are taken from two different statements. He admits that there was no concrete plan for the two missing legions and they were intentionally left blank. He says that everything left blank was done so for the players to work with. Therefore the legions are left blank because.....?

Sorry, I thought the implication was obvious. The two 'missing' Legions/Primarchs were just to create mystery and show that Imperial 'history' is full of holes 10,000 years after the events. The 900-odd unnamed/undescribed later founding Chapters were the ones players were intended to fill in themselves.

He also mentions the idea that the two missing Legions/Primarchs might have redeemed themselves in some way and so earned the consolation prize of being forgotten rather than remembered as traitors. Oblivion being preferable to damnation.

Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:First HH Weekender (the only one I attended). Initial Q&A did indeed confirm that the two 'missing' Legions were there precisely so players could invent their own.

Well, Rick Priestley was the one who invented the idea of two missing Legions, so I will take his word on why he did that over the opinions of people who joined GW years after the event.

EDIT: Unless it was Jervis? Because AFAIK he's the only one still at GW who would have been around back then.

**AegisGrimm**

Well, modern fluff has it that supposedly whatever the two lost Legion did was bad enough that it would have caused a pre-Heresy civil war if they hadn't been suppressed/destroyed, so there's that. I'm guessing it was Xenos influence, or a discovery of demons even before Word Bearers/Horus. Something that would have stalled the Great Crusade as it barely got going.

**Trickstick**

AegisGrimm wrote:
Well, modern fluff has it that supposedly whatever the two lost Legion did was bad enough that it would have caused a pre-Heresy civil war if they hadn't been suppressed/destroyed, so there's that. I'm guessing it was Xenos influence, or a discovery of demons even before Word Bearers/Horus. Something that would have stalled the Great Crusade as it barely got going.

They could bear children.

Silly: female marines.

More serious: I guess if you had marines who could make more marines, and got notions that they were slaves, that would be very bad for the Imperium.

**pm713**

AegisGrimm wrote:
Well, modern fluff has it that supposedly whatever the two lost Legion did was bad enough that it would have caused a pre-Heresy civil war if they hadn't been suppressed/destroyed, so there's that. I'm guessing it was Xenos influence, or a discovery of demons even before Word Bearers/Horus. Something that would have stalled the Great Crusade as it barely got going.

Personally I'm a fan of the idea that they noticed the Emperor was not nice and tried standing against him.

**Tyzarion_Kronius**

One of the most interesting fanons about the lost Primarchs and their Legions is that they were intentionally erased from other Primarchs memories with false reasons. Both of them were sort of black ops / covert ops off the grid specialists along with their Legions.

They were erased from other Primarch's memories and false memories of them were implanted to the Primarchs.

Then they went off the grid with their fleet based Legions doing some black ops operations reporting only to the Emperor and Malcador in the Emperor's absense. They are still out there in the fringes of galaxy taking out threats to humanity before they're even detected by the Imperium itself and report regularly to the Emperor via telepathy.