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Laughing God wrote:
Kan you do come off snide and all knowing, stating things as "Fact" when your dealing with matters of opinion. You're coming off as some all knowing lord of SM fluff.

I am stating facts. They're pulled from the various books, and have nothing to do with opinion. They're in black and white print.

It is possible that Magnus is the Primarch of the Blood ravens here is my argument why:
1: hints previously stated (alot of psykers, the profecy of the raven of blood rising from the ashes of prospero, ect)

If you're going to use the 'prophecy of the raven of blood', you will be wrong because it has says nothing of 'rising from the ashes of Prospero'.

Just so we can get rid of this constant stream of people citing this prophecy as some kind of evidence:

A Thousand Sons, page 430 3rd paragraph down wrote:
"It's too late...the Wolf is at the door and it hungers for blood. Oh, Throne...no, the blood! The Ravens, I see them too. The lost sons and a Raven of blood. They cry out for salvation and knowledge, but it is denied! A brother betrayed, a brother murdered. The worst mistake for the noblest reason! It cannot happen, but it must!"

There's the entirety of the prophecy. Some of it could be pointed at as evidence of the Blood Ravens...until you realize it's just poetic language(prophecies always are) and that the Thousand Sons have a Cult within their ranks called the Corvidae.

2: You say they don't display the gene marker of freakish mutations, guess what... GW/BL can just make up some reason for why they were spared the mutation, perhaps Arhimans rubric worked differently on the sons outside of the warp than in it?

...You realize that there were no Sons outside of the Warp when the Rubric was cast, right?

maybe when the chapter was created the flaw was purged from the geneseed? The thousand sons didn't align themselves to chaos in any way and if anything were at the head of the pack in trying to stop horus, but by a tragic twist of fate were forced to betray the emperor. On these grounds it not hard for me to believe that the emperor would have tried to give them a second chance and recreate the legion as a chapter during on of the foundings.

The Emperor had already ordered the Thousand Sons purged for experimenting with sorcery. He'd also destroyed or locked away their gene-stocks.
Add to it that there was no 'purging' the flaw in the gene-seed...

All speculation of course of all of which has just as much evidence and reason and logic as your points sir, just because you dont like them doesnt make them "absurd"

It's not that I don't like them...it's that I find it silly that people immediately jump to conclusions based off of a single line of text in a book published years after the introduction of the Blood Ravens.

Really if GW can say that all of the imperiums technology is based off the dreams of a C'tan "ref mechanicum" a fact that was "hinted at" but never actually revealed until recently, anything is possible in the 40k universe.

Yeah...I'm pretty sure that's not what was going on in Mechanicum.

They hinted at the Omnissiah, in reality, being The Dragon. That's all.

I personally dont believe its horus or magus but the way you kind of come off as insulting ("people trying to fit square blocks into round pegs" "absurd" Really? they are that dumb because they believe a theory with some descent evidence?)

People aren't believing a theory with some "decent evidence". They're jumping to conclusions based off of one line of text.

It's like hearing hoofbeats in the woods and thinking zebra, because hey...hoofbeats! When in reality, if you hear hoofbeats and you're not in the Serengetti...you're going to be seeing horses or deer. Not zebras

P.S. The Salamanders gene-seed is fine and pure. They have dark skin and red eyes because of the radiation on nocturne not some flaw in there gene-seed.

Actually, it is a flaw in their gene-seed. The same flaw that gives the Raven Guard their ghost-white skin is what reacts with the radiation on Nocturne to give the Salamanders their jet-black skin.

Ishamaelus wrote:See one thing I've never understood about the Blood Ravens situation.

Now the Blood Ravens are all Space Marines, and are thus required to submit a Gene-seed tithe to Terra, to ensure there is no corruption right?

How hard is it to simply cross reference all the genetic material they have to identify where the gene-seed originates/has highest matching markers? Surely if there was such a degree of corruption to this make this impossible why would the inquisition or the High Lords simply not order their destruction?

I know it's me being simple but it's bugged me for ages as to why it's not been asked before

P.S. Also, having read Legion, Kan is right. It's inferred that all the other SM chapters are too set in their ways, either following the Emperor Blindly, or already in Horus' pocket to be approached. Alpha Legion is trained to question everything, and view all sides of a situation and see the bigger picture, hence why the Cabal approach them.

I agree with all of this. But whos to say that there has to be corruption in the geneseed just because its based off a traitor legion? Also wouldnt this only be further evidence that the geneseed could be from a traitor primarch as the mechanicus has no generecord to cross referance with because they are all locked up!? bum bum BUUUUUMMMM!!!!

Bwuh?
There's no way the gene-seed could be from a Traitor Primarch. That stuff's locked away under heavy guard and only the Emperor can open that vault. Seeing as how the Emperor hasn't been doing much moving around lately...

HiveTyrant25 wrote:Ok, I am making it clear to all of you right now. The Blood Ravens Primarch probably hasn't even been fully thought out yet.

The Blood Ravens were created for the THQ game Dawn of War by THQ! Other than maybe 2 articles about the Blood Ravens that GW has let out, and a handful of pics in army books etc., the Blood Ravens are not associated with GW and they wouldn't waste much time devising a background for them.

BL has released Blood Ravens Novels, but only to accompany a Dawn of War game. So don't look to GW for the answer, look to THQ. Since they probably don't think about it too hard, there are only hypothesis and theories that can be made about their origins. Based on above, Kan is correct about which Primarchs that you can weed out.

Just remember that this is all speculation, and until the real world creators of the BR tell you or hint very, very strongly at a candidate, all you can do is guess.

Aaaaaaannnnnddddd this ^ more than anything is what I think. Though I don't agree with Kans process of elimination

You can not agree with it all you want. It doesn't make you right

But yeah HiveTyrant. The novels to accompany a Dawn of War game can even be discounted, because they're by that toolbag C.S. Goto. You know, the guy with backflipping Terminators, transforming Landrazor Raiderbacks, surfing Eldar Farseers, kids with rocks downing a Falcon, etc.

Just saw a clip that could illustrate my point all the more...but I'd love to see what you all say about it, anyway. What could this mean?

http://youtu.be/cSJuY3hFQww

I tried to waller through all the posts and hope I didn't miss the reference, but did anyone mention Dawn of War, Tempest? When the Blood Ravens Libby ends up with Ahriman, he calls him brother (of course all marines could do that) but there are a few refrences to it being something much deeper. Yes, Magnus AGAIN.
About the chapters not using traitor gene seed, er, what about the grey knights first marines? Death guard and Luna wolves. (Aww crap, they were traitors). On the same vein didn't an index astartes book discuss the cursed founding and using some less then reputable gene seed. No it doesn't say it was THAT seed, but it does discuss it coming from sources under lock and key.

Kanluwen wrote:

۞ Jack ۞ wrote:A few of the BL books have hinted it to be magnus.

No, they haven't.

People have made the assumption that certain innocuous phrases are "OMG MAGNUS IS THE PRIMARCH!".

The closest that it makes sense is the fact that one of the Cults within the Thousand Sons is referred to as 'Corvidae', which really isn't that big of a deal in the end since it refers to a Cult which is particularly gifted in the area of farseeing/divination.

Which, incidentally, a lot of mythology tied to Ravens tends towards being related to their presence foretelling something--or even, in the case of the Tower of London, the destruction of something if the Ravens ever flee.

Ravens are associated with knowledge in Norse Mythology. Odin gets his information from two Ravens; Thought and Memory. So it would be perfectly logical for the TSons to have a group named Corvidae (the family name in the scientific classification for Ravens). Not necessarily logical to jump to Blood Ravens.

th salamanders gene-seed is fine, it's the radiation that does that
Even if it was a flaw in the gene seed it wouldn't be apparent in any successor chapters as Nocturne is unique.

i realise there is alot of hostility about taking lines from books out of context but i've just finished the Age of Darkness short story about the Thousand Sons.


this would just help to fit in a bit with the magnus/blood ravens primarch thing IMHO.



EDIT: [i]i edited again because i wrote blood angels instead of blood ravens, sorry.

Garviel wrote:i realise there is alot of hostility about taking lines from books out of context but i've just finished the Age of Darkness short story about the Thousand Sons.

Spoiler:

the characters are still loyal as they weren't caught in the assault on Prospero by Russ and i believe the last paragraph or so lends a hint to the Blood Ravens past.

It mentions the last surviving thousand son, Arvida, a member of the Corvidae, fleeing his attackers. His last words before he leaves are 'Knowledege is Power' as he leaves on a personal mission to find out what transpired on Prospero. It also gives us a fleeting image of his Iconography on his shoulder plate and guess what, its a black raven. Coincidence perhaps?

this would just help to fit in a bit with the magnus/blood angels primarch thing IMHO.

Damnit I need that Book!!!

There's no way the gene-seed could be from a Traitor Primarch. That stuff's locked away under heavy guard and only the Emperor can open that vault. Seeing as how the Emperor hasn't been doing much moving around lately...

Because Emperor knows that there have NEVER been any other stories/rumors/whathaveyou about traitor geneseed being used to create new *cough*CursedFounding*cough* space marine chapters...

It's been millenia. If someone on Terra wanted badly enough to get that vault open, then it'd be open. It might only be open for a short period of time, but it'd be open.

Mr. Kanluwen is correct.

The idea of Magnus being the Primarch of the Blood Ravens is pretty silly.

I could buy them being Thousand Sons.

People go on about there not being any Thousand Sons who weren't on Prospero when it was sucked into the warp, but (forgive me, I dont have my copy to hand so I might be remembering this wrong), wasn't there a passage in A Thousand Sons where magnus ordered elements of the Thousand Sons fleet away from Prospero when he realised the Space Wolves were on their way?

Going on that & all the tangential hints keep getting referenced (pre heresy Sons colour scheme, lots of psykers, thirst for knowledge, etc), I always assumed that the Blood Ravens were descended from the Sons fleet that fled Prospero, and who perhaps laid low until the second founding, whence the ruling chapter master (possibly a member of the Corvidae, owing to the Blood Ravens' iconography) delberately destroyed all material relating to their origins so no one, including future generations of Blood Ravens, would know their traitorous lineage. Ten thousand years later, with no Blood Ravens from that period being extant, and no information on their origins, they really have forgotten where they come from.

At least thats how it played out in my head. Im just speculating.

Admittedly, the fact they're required to submit geneseed tithes to terra throws a spanner in the works. Maybe they just don't bother. I mean, if they weren't on founding records to begin with, the administratum wouldn't be looking for a tithe from them, & other Imperial forces would hardly question them about such things. Its doubtful anyone has complete records of every chapter from every founding, so no one would catch them out as being fake.

thoughts?

Magnus ordered the fleet to scatter within the star system that Prospero was in. It is most likely that the scattered fleet was destroyed after the arrival and subsequent attack by the Space Wolves.

Its certainly possible that they were. Like I say, I was just speculating.

Somecallmejack had a good point about if the Imperium don't really have records on them then would they have to send their geneseed back?

In the latest HH.....



i think theres a logic to it, however small

Every member of the Corvidae had a raven on their shoulder. It was the symbol of that specific Chapter of the Legion.

And the catchphrase "Knowledge is power, guard it well" is nothing new to the Imperium. One of the Word Bearers uses it in "The First Heretic".

Ohemgee. Word Bearers have red armor. Blood Ravens have red armor. They both like books.

New conspiracy theory!

I think the title of the Age of Darkness story "Rebirth" makes it pretty clear that the story is about the "rebirth" of the loyalist thousand sons. Other hints dropped towards the end of the story are pretty obviously Blood Raven-esque.

Also, the Blood Ravens great father (although from M37, 6000 years after the events in M31) is named Azariah Vidya. Brother Arvida is the survivor. While it's a pretty loose and common "conspiracy" connection, I'd say it's indicative that GW is at least beginning to build some more hardcore fluff for Relic/THQ's Blood Ravens.

@kanluwen

Don't you think there is even the slightest possibility that the Raven Guard are in fact loyal Thousand Sons? I'm not having a go as I fully accept that you prefer the cold hard facts and that a lot of people do read a lot into a simple turn of phrase.

But a single survivor of loyal thousand sons who already has Raven Symbology on his armour and who is also a psyker who then goes on to recruit other loyal Thousand sons with an aim to find out what happened is a rather believable story IMHO.

I reckon it could be a loose story beginning to appear. It would be better than them being one of the missing legions.

Garviel wrote:@kanluwen

Don't you think there is even the slightest possibility that the Raven Guard are in fact loyal Thousand Sons? I'm not having a go as I fully accept that you prefer the cold hard facts and that a lot of people do read a lot into a simple turn of phrase.

The Raven Guard were a founding Legion(Primarch is 'Corax' in typical GW fashion), so no. That's likely not going to happen.

Now, could the Blood Ravens be loyal Thousand Sons? Chips are really really really stacked against them imo. Unless the authors are explicitly being told now "write in a way for the Blood Ravens to be Thousand Sons"--I'll just hold that they're likely a Chapter that don't know what geneseed they're from. There's examples of the Inquisition and other parts of the Imperium fiddling with the geneseed to make something 'perfect'.

But a single survivor of loyal thousand sons who already has Raven Symbology on his armour and who is also a psyker who then goes on to recruit other loyal Thousand sons with an aim to find out what happened is a rather believable story IMHO.

But there's the rub. The Blood Ravens aren't made up entirely of psykers. They have a large amount of psykers, but their entire Chapter isn't psykers.
Nor do they have all kinds of weird mutations coming up.

I reckon it could be a loose story beginning to appear. It would be better than them being one of the missing legions.

Them being one of the "Missing Legions" just isn't going to happen. They were lost and purged, respectively.

I think the latest HH book gives a pretty 'ham-handed' nod toward the Thousand Sons provenance. So much of a nod that I really don't think there can be any real doubt.

That said, I don't think there will ever be anything completely definitive as GW and BL like to keep all options open.

I think this was done to give THQ some intra-fluff legitimacy.

Kanluwen wrote:
It had nothing to do with, again, some actual physically representable 'taint'. It was flowery language, spoken by an Eldar Autarch within the Cabal. The context is, once again, important.

Yes it most certainly is, an alien with its own agenda is not a reliable source, nor is it correct even if it's not twisting the facts to suit its own agenda. The Eldar civilization was nearly wiped out by the birth of Slaanesh, they're still on borrowed time because of the mistakes they made prior to that. Why should anyone take what these fools say at face value? For all their vaunted wisdom and farsight, they still get caught unawares such as the destruction the nids brought them.

Going back to the Blood Ravens, the seeming fact that they don't suffer the flesh change or have universal psykers would suggest that they do not share their gene seed with the Thousand Sons. Of course their gene seed could be repressed in some unspecific way (grasping at straws here I realise) or they could be the end result of Magnus' repairing of his Legion. Maybe Magnus finally found a stable cure for the flaws but was unable to implement the new gene seed before the heresy occurred.

There is a Blood Ravens story (Goto?) which takes place on an Eldar planet inhabited by adherents to the Laughing God. A Thousand Sons sorcerer is there and he makes a comment to the Blood Raven character that suggests they are related.

cadbren wrote:

Kanluwen wrote:
It had nothing to do with, again, some actual physically representable 'taint'. It was flowery language, spoken by an Eldar Autarch within the Cabal. The context is, once again, important.

Yes it most certainly is, an alien with its own agenda is not a reliable source, nor is it correct even if it's not twisting the facts to suit its own agenda. The Eldar civilization was nearly wiped out by the birth of Slaanesh, they're still on borrowed time because of the mistakes they made prior to that. Why should anyone take what these fools say at face value? For all their vaunted wisdom and farsight, they still get caught unawares such as the destruction the nids brought them.

Well, that's part of it. Like I said earlier about the 'taint', it has everything to do with the Cabal's perception of the Emperor's "utopia" idea as being tainted.

Going back to the Blood Ravens, the seeming fact that they don't suffer the flesh change or have universal psykers would suggest that they do not share their gene seed with the Thousand Sons. Of course their gene seed could be repressed in some unspecific way (grasping at straws here I realise) or they could be the end result of Magnus' repairing of his Legion. Maybe Magnus finally found a stable cure for the flaws but was unable to implement the new gene seed before the heresy occurred.

No. He wasn't. By the "time the Heresy occurred", Magnus had already drawn Prospero into the Warp and the Rubric of Ahriman came shortly after.

There is a Blood Ravens story (Goto?) which takes place on an Eldar planet inhabited by adherents to the Laughing God. A Thousand Sons sorcerer is there and he makes a comment to the Blood Raven character that suggests they are related.

I'm going to put this in the simplest and nicest terms I can.

Ignore every single thing that C.S. Goto has ever written, and do not ever ever ever attempt to use his works when discussing canon. Everything he wrote, he seemingly wrote as wrong as feasibly possible just to try to troll the 40k community. He has sects of Eldar worshiping Slaanesh, child molesting Eldar, and a great many other things that are so stupidly wrong that it makes some of the fan fiction out there positively look Shakespearean.

Age of darkness which is the latest HH books clears alot of unknown things from around the 40k universe 1 of them being that the blood ravens are indeed a successor chapter of the thousand sons. I wont spoil the story but it clears up the fact that he thousand sons Are not really traitor marines. If youve read the book a thousand sons you would know already ahriman and his kabal are not traitors. They are trying to prove that they arnt. The rubic was supposoe to help but it back fired. Anyway BL books dont always coincide with the. Table top game or video games so for fluff i follow the bl.

In the fluff ive read most of the early history of the chapter was destroyed like they where hiding something so it could very well be horus or any other chaos primarch for that reason.

Just one thing.

The thing about Blood Ravens not being entirely composed of psykers.

Im not sure if the thousand sons were either. Its been a while since I read A Thousand Sons, so I could be talking out of an orifice other than my mouth, but wasn't the gist of the Rubric of Ahriman that the thousand sons with psychic powers had them enhanced, while the ones who were only weak psykers or not psykers at all became Rubric Marines. Perhaps it was only the case that all the named characters in the book were psykers, and they had plenty of non psyker or latent psyker members that we didn't meet.

Thousand Sons were, to a man, psykers.

They weren't all extremely powerful psykers(like Ahriman or the others), and some could only do things like conjure flame, kinetic barriers, and things of that nature.

Like i said get the new book. Ther is a thousand sons story that clears it up. Also there are the first happenings of the inquisition and the fortress on titan. Really good read


Automatically Appended Next Post:
Like i said get the new book. Ther is a thousand sons story that clears it up. Also there are the first happenings of the inquisition and the fortress on titan. Really good read

I was under the impression the Blood Raven progenitor is one of the missing primarchs.

This is GW fluff mixed with THQ fluff and a pinch of CS Goto, as with matt ward, anything can happen, especially when it has not been given much thought.

Im assuming that the remaining thousand sons that were sent out of orbit before the wolves attaxk are what made up the blood ravens. And i also assume that like many other of the loyal marines that escaped istavaan, the thpusand sons that remained in real space anx loyal were given an oppurtunity to make up for their primarchs betrayal

Sanguinius1385 wrote:Im assuming that the remaining thousand sons that were sent out of orbit before the wolves attaxk are what made up the blood ravens. And i also assume that like many other of the loyal marines that escaped istavaan, the thpusand sons that remained in real space anx loyal were given an oppurtunity to make up for their primarchs betrayal

Thats pretty much what I thought.

i think they are probably laying the foundations for the Blood Raven origins with the tale in Age of Darkness.



i know theres not much hard facts but it has more to it than some of the theories for many things 40k that are going around.


EDIT: lexicanum also states "Possessed of powerful Librarians, the Blood Ravens are noted for their ability to predict enemy movements " which was the particular aspect of the Thousand sons that the Corvidae excelled at. they also wore a Raven as their symbol as being a member of the Corvidae.