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Oh man one book from each Primarch's perspective on how they perceived things as going down would have been epic.

 NinthMusketeer wrote:
Oh man one book from each Primarch's perspective on how they perceived things as going down would have been epic.

This I can get behind.

The early books were pretty spectacular, as they let us get to know the Primarchs and their various mindsets. Unfortunately, the series’ success lead to serious meandering and Wimbriling, yeah, Wimbriling.

For me, as someone who dropped out during the format change (they want hardback, then large paperback. Such things irk me), and found themselves having forgotten much by the time they released the newer books in the original size format? I was left with too much to read and catch up on. There’s just too much “ooooooh, aren’t the Traitors simply awful type stuff for me to pick back up.

Not to mention their period of obsession with limited editions and that.

I don't feel that I am really "missing out" by only reading the books by good authoers. If you cut out the bad stuff, you end up with:
Horus Rising
Legion
A Thousand Sons
First Herectic
Prospero Burns
Know No Fear
Betrayer

That's 7 books out of the first 30 or so. Keep up the same rate and the series is about 10 books long. Seems manageable to me.

I just won't read anything else by Graham McNiell, Ben Counter, Gav Thorpe or James Swallow. I am prepared to give Guy Haley and John French a go each, though I suspect they may be somewhat McNiellish.

 Da Boss wrote:
I just won't read anything else by Graham McNiell, Ben Counter, Gav Thorpe or James Swallow. I am prepared to give Guy Haley and John French a go each, though I suspect they may be somewhat McNiellish.

I love Haley and French, but even I would say their Horus Heresy contributions are weaker than their stories outside of that series.

Any recommends outside the Heresy?

The Ahriman trilogy (and most of the Dark Heresy sourcebooks) for French.

Death of Integrity, Dante and Devastation of Baal for Haley Imperium.
Engine of Mork, Evil Sun Rising, and Valedor for Haley Xenos.

 Da Boss wrote:
I don't feel that I am really "missing out" by only reading the books by good authoers. If you cut out the bad stuff, you end up with:
Horus Rising
Legion
A Thousand Sons
First Herectic
Prospero Burns
Know No Fear
Betrayer

That's 7 books out of the first 30 or so. Keep up the same rate and the series is about 10 books long. Seems manageable to me.

I just won't read anything else by Graham McNiell, Ben Counter, Gav Thorpe or James Swallow. I am prepared to give Guy Haley and John French a go each, though I suspect they may be somewhat McNiellish.

Give Chris Wraight a chance as well. Scars and the sequel were both fantastic books. I won't read anything by Nick Kyme after the dumpster fire that was Vulkan Lives.

Thanks for the recommendations guys, I will give them a look.
I accidentally confused John French and James Swallow a while back and bought Fear to Thread by mistake.
Hooooo boy.

I disagree with the OP. Without the book series, I would be willing to be there would be no HH game which, I'm not sure about others here, I have enjoyed immensely since its release. No game, no amazing models from FW, and likely not as much time/money put into the non-mainline games from the specialist studio like Necromunda or Bloodbowl. Like some others in the thread have already said, if you don't like it don't buy it, art is subjective and you're allowed to not like it but wishing it didn't exist is a bit much. It's hardly the only thing BL has released at any point in time.

As someone who was really excited for fantasy content that was announced and even previewed but got cut in favor of a game that I could not even afford to play my perspective is somewhat different than yours. The whole 'don't like it don't buy it' approach stops working when your game starts taking things away from mine.

I'm not sure what you mean with regards to the fantasy content. Was FW planning on making more WHFB models in 2012 when the HH game was released? Or do you mean there were more WHFB novels planned in 2006 when the HH book series was released?
I'm not being snarky btw, I'm a 40k/30k main, and Fantasy was at the end times shortly after I started WH.

jareddm wrote:
For a more unpopular opinion, I would make a simple change. Remove all Graham McNeil novels from the Horus Heresy. Yes, all of them. Some of the events could be written by a different author, but others I would be happy to see them gone, and something completely different in their place.
A Thousand Sons was fine but I would say everything else has done more harm than good in terms of making the truth worse than the myth. At least Nick Kyme has the decency to limit his garbage to (mostly) a single legion.

A Thousand Sons, and other McNeil novels, aren't bad per se. It's just that McNeil is an author committed to "Tell, don't show" and so he does some great work with codex-style books, and other world-building. The Alan Bligh FW HH books are a great example of what could have been.

Yeah, setting and world building is a really different skillset to writing dialogue and characters.

 Gert wrote:
I'm not sure what you mean with regards to the fantasy content. Was FW planning on making more WHFB models in 2012 when the HH game was released? Or do you mean there were more WHFB novels planned in 2006 when the HH book series was released?
I'm not being snarky btw, I'm a 40k/30k main, and Fantasy was at the end times shortly after I started WH.

FW were planning more WFB books in the vein of the (pretty awesome) Tamurkhan book. They had started previewing the next of these (Blackfire Pass) and even started releasing models for it (mostly goblin stuff, plus some dwarfs).

This stopped around the time HH came out (though tbh WFB being imminently destroyed should have had much to do with it as well)

What is more annoying to me tbh though is the really awesome models made alongside Tamurkhan and Monstrous Arcana going OOP without warning so FW could focus on HH...

There’s quite a few of them I would have bought had they been out a few more months (most annoying I was intending to get the Carmine dragon lady for Xmas before she went OOP with little warning in like Nov)

Indeed. They were filling out Monstrous Arcana and it is a shame we never got to see some of the monsters in it. There was also the K'Dai destroyer which instead got unfortunately turned into one of the many big Khorne things as I recall, and further expansion of the Fimir. Finally, it could be perception bias on my part but it certainly seemed there was a slow but steady feed of fantasy models from FW for several years that dried up right as HH transitioned to being a full on game of its own.

Ah ok I see what you mean now. I do agree that the WHFB stuff was pretty cool I considered getting a dragon or two at one point. I realise I've focussed on HH the game rather than HH novels so I'm gonna do some points on the books. I don't think that getting rid of some mystery and replacing it with new mystery is a bad thing. Horus is a much more interesting character as Horus the Warmaster than Horus the General from 1st ed. Also the fact that the Emperor is confusing and makes no sense is great. We shouldn't be able to make sense of him because he's not supposed to be understood because he's utterly insane. I like the added backstory that helps build the character of all the legions into what we know in 40k. Same with the big names like Abbadon, rather than just being in charge we now see why he's the Warmaster of Chaos. The tragedy of all these heroes and villains fighting to protect or destroy an empire we know is slowly dying is brilliant imo.

Removing mystery in settings is a great way to kill a lot of the magic and interesting potential of it. You'd think 40k players of all folks would understand this when the whole selling point of the universe is an age of regression and lost knowledge. The heresy series is the perfect example of screwing this up. Don't get me wrong, there are good books in the series that stand on their own merit, but as far as the setting, it's done irreparable damage to the 40k universe. Sadly this sort of thing isn't limited to 40k or 30k, similar stuff has been going on in star wars for example and I hate it there for the same reasons.

Before the heresy, it was easy to believe the Emperor and primarchs were these demigod like beings of unmatched intelligence and charisma. Their deeds were steeped in myth and legend, and other than the most basic of things like Sanguinis dying to protect the emperor and Horus mortally wounding the Emperor which led to his internment on the golden throne, we didn't really know what happened. That let us fill in logical gaps ourselves. We knew they had crazy advanced technology compared to the "modern" 40k, and that helped as well because there were devices that bordered on magic (and potentially were) to explain the weirder and more esoteric mysteries. Think of it like how Jedi were described in episodes 4-6 of star wars, only to then go to the clone wars and the prequels and we get every little detail hammered out, down to literally meeting the embodiments of the force (God I hated that episode.)

After reading the heresy books I wouldn't trust any of the Primarchs to watch a kid for 5 minutes, heck I wouldn't trust them to make a cheese sandwich. It's incredible how good authors are at making these characters look like morons, especially the Emperor. The more they try and explain his methods the more he sounds like a fedora wearing teenager who's just discovered atheism. Some of the Primarchs are so moronic it makes you question how they could ever conquer a planet, let alone run a legion. Not to mention the heresy books go into ridiculous amounts of details to explain every little thing, which just makes the problem worse. It's a miracle the 2nd and 11th primarchs are still unknown. We're already to the point of minor Horus Heresy factions having more lore than currently sold plastic armies like Genestealer cults and Dark Eldar, that's insane.

The whole point was it was a mystery, that there are things unexplained and in all honesty shouldn't be explained. The problem is every time a universe gets popular, some people just can't stand ambiguity. They just have to have every single teensy tiny detail nailed down and unequivocally canonized, and I never really understood why. I wish GW would do some retcons like Battletech does, where many things are "true" in canon, but may not actually be truthful. For example, there's a really cheesy Battletech cartoon from the 80's that completely ignores canon. Battletech made it canon, but canon in that it's a propaganda piece published by a government to bash on a rival power. So yes, it's completely innaccurate and misleadig, that's the point. This idea could've worked really well for the Heresy, for example a more vague and interpreted story of the heresy cobbled together from scraps of surviving accounts, many contradictory or bordering on mythological. The best example I can think of is Oculus Imperia, he does a great job of sounding like an administratum clerk trying to piece together the tattered remnants of Imperium history. If we could've had say a short series, maybe 2-3 books tops, told in Oculus's style, with a ton of footnotes and addendums saying things like "the text states angels descending from the heavens, we can assume this was an orbital drop pod strike, but the details are unclear" would've been really cool.

Net total of mystery is what matters, not whether it is uncovered or not. Mystery can be revealed no problem but it needs to be replaced with new mystery. HH doesn't do that.

 Da Boss wrote:

Legion
Prospero Burns
Know No Fear
Betrayer

I thought you were removing the bad books.

Hah!
Each of those books definitely has some pretty ropey sections. Legion drags a lot, Prospero Burns has an opening disconnected from the broader plot, and Know No Fear is quite choppy in a good few places.

Betrayer suffers from some of the same problems.

But overall I found the prose pleasant to read, which is my main barometer of whether I will tolerate these books or not. All of them have silly plots that are a bit flabby to fit the page count, but some of them are written attrociously as well.

-Guardsman- wrote:
I just want to know... what's the Ollanius Pius situation in the Horus Heresy novels? I know there have been past attempts to retcon him out of existence or replace him with a Space Marine ("not now, puny mortal, the grown-ups are having an argument over here!") and I don't know to what extent he is still canon.

or replace him with a Space Marine

Posting this from Page 1, so I may have missed someone saying this on Page 2, but he hasn’t been retconned out of existence. If anything he’s been retconned into existence. RT had him as a myth, a legend, and a likely incorrect one.
So, there’s now Oll Persson- not sure of what’s happening with him, but he’s a perpetual and a literalspace Catholic.
https://wh40k.lexicanum.com/wiki/Ollanius_Persson
In Saturnine, we get Ollanius Piers, who doesn’t defend the Emperor personally, but is still an absolute badass.
https://wh40k.lexicanum.com/wiki/Ollanius_Piers

 Da Boss wrote:
Any recommends outside the Heresy?

I'll toss Infinite and the Divine in there as well, especially if you want a bit of a break from Space Marines. It's the only 40K novel by Robert Rath, the guy currently writing Extra History, and it's a perspective we don't often get with some nice little details on how Necrons view time, like how two Necrons having a debate can sometimes dramatically pause for two hours to emphasize their points.

I had always just assumed everything was too big and GW just let writers go because there was no hope in controlling it. Then I heard Leutin9 talk about how GW says explicitely that cannon does not exist in thier world. Then I read Fulgrim and that book talks about remembrancers a fair bit. Some are good writers while some are poor writers. Some are trying to push a specific agenda. Some are being forced to write propoganda. I read all GW lore as being written by remembrancers with flaws.

All that being said, my head cannon is that the chaos we see in the lore is a reflection of the chaos in the 40K setting.

GW said nothing is canon so that they can get away with making errors (and everybody just ate it up...).

Clearly there is canon. Otherwise they would have no objection to a story about Marneus Calgar the cat girl and his magical adventure in lollipop land - but that's never going to get greenlit.

 Da Boss wrote:
I don't feel that I am really "missing out" by only reading the books by good authoers. If you cut out the bad stuff, you end up with:
Horus Rising
Legion
A Thousand Sons
First Herectic
Prospero Burns
Know No Fear
Betrayer

That's 7 books out of the first 30 or so. Keep up the same rate and the series is about 10 books long. Seems manageable to me.

I just won't read anything else by Graham McNiell, Ben Counter, Gav Thorpe or James Swallow. I am prepared to give Guy Haley and John French a go each, though I suspect they may be somewhat McNiellish.

Agreed. I'll read Dan Abnett, Aaron Dembski-Bowden, Chris Wraight, and John French. Although Anthony Reynolds, Josh Reynolds, and Guy Haley are alright too, if you have time to kill.

Horus Heresy isn't what killed 40k, but it is the point where nobody could avoid acknowledging the transformation of the game world from fundamentally a setting that encouraged players "buy these models, build them however you like, paint them how you like, and craft your little corner of this wild, weird mythology, here are some suggestions to get you started" into "here is an imaginary, canonical history designed to enhance our brand appeal, you as the consumer are to purchase our models, build them precisely as we have intended you to, paint them precisely as we have intended you to, and participate in a complex ordained play ritual designed to reconstruct the canonical events as we have laid them out."

 NinthMusketeer wrote:
Wait there are over 50 HH books now? That seems very excessive.

Its why I didn't bother after the first six or so, which are good reads, another 50 odd books to get to an endgame I know the broad strokes of, thanks but no thanks

But anything that gets folks reading is very much in the plus column

The HH stuff is still a lot of unknowns and "insert your legion here". The books follow bug names at big places and give a broad view of the conflict. 18 Legions with thousands of Astartes plus the forces of the Mechanicum, Knight Houses, mortal soldiers, and Blackshield warbands is hardly restricting the setting. It gave some much-needed love to some 40k Chapters like the White Scars and Iron Hands as well.
There seems to be this feeling you need to read every single book in a series with 50 installments plus numerous other short stories. You really don't. If you're reading Siege of Terra and a character or event is referenced then you can choose to go and read that. Don't care about the White Scars? Don't read the books, I certainly didn't.

the_scotsman wrote:
Horus Heresy isn't what killed 40k, but it is the point where nobody could avoid acknowledging the transformation of the game world from fundamentally a setting that encouraged players "buy these models, build them however you like, paint them how you like, and craft your little corner of this wild, weird mythology, here are some suggestions to get you started" into "here is an imaginary, canonical history designed to enhance our brand appeal, you as the consumer are to purchase our models, build them precisely as we have intended you to, paint them precisely as we have intended you to, and participate in a complex ordained play ritual designed to reconstruct the canonical events as we have laid them out."

Blaming this on the Horus Heresy is just as idiotic as blaming the decline(?) of historical wargames on actual real world events like the Civil War or WW2... which also tend to favor following actual historical equipment, uniform colors, and regiment schemes. To me, being able to play games set during the Heresy is pretty cool, because I like that "historical accuracy" aspect of the whole thing. Nevermind that as a setting/game, 30k is a niche within a niche within a niche and arguably the most expensive aspect of 40k that you could possibly chose to play.

If anything is going to "kill" 40k, it's the ever-increasing bloat of additional codexes, supplements, and rulebooks, along with the increasing cost of new miniatures, as well as all of them practically being monopose with "codex only" options in the box and nothing else.

But sure. Let's blame Horus Heresy.

I don't think anyone is "blaming" the HH. It's simply another symptom of the same disease. More unreliable narrator would have been good

Damn they could have done something like the old "Bible of Sigmar" for WH (Old World) with a different approach.

But it's too late. You can't put a genie back in the bottle, and once a magician reveal his trick the wonder is lost forever.