Forum adverts like this one are shown to any user who is not logged in. Join us by filling out a tiny 3 field form and you will get your own, free, dakka user account which gives a good range of benefits to you: No adverts like this in the forums anymore. Times and dates in your local timezone. Full tracking of what you have read so you can skip to your first unread post, easily see what has changed since you last logged in, and easily see what is new at a glance. Email notifications for threads you want to watch closely. Being a part of the oldest wargaming community on the net. If you are already a member then feel free to login now.

One day good ol Empy decides he doesn't need the Thunder Warriors anymore. Trouble is, there's too many of them. So he gets the Custodes to gun them down. That still leaves too many witnesses. He comes up with the story of them dying to the last man. That sorta covers it.

But what did the Emperor intend to do? Get rid of the Custodes after that? Or outlive them and make sure they took the secret to their graves?

Didn't have to. The Custodes are very, very loyal. They are designed to be the perfect bodyguards, after all.

very, very, very, very, very, very...very.

Maximus Bitch wrote:
One day good ol Empy decides he doesn't need the Thunder Warriors anymore. Trouble is, there's too many of them. So he gets the Custodes to gun them down. That still leaves too many witnesses. He comes up with the story of them dying to the last man. That sorta covers it.

But what did the Emperor intend to do? Get rid of the Custodes after that? Or outlive them and make sure they took the secret to their graves?

What's the source for the Emperor killing off the Thunder Warriors? Seems like a waste of good soldiers, and they'd all just get old eventually anyway. Weren't they just normal humans in power armor?

 argonak wrote:

Maximus Bitch wrote:
One day good ol Empy decides he doesn't need the Thunder Warriors anymore. Trouble is, there's too many of them. So he gets the Custodes to gun them down. That still leaves too many witnesses. He comes up with the story of them dying to the last man. That sorta covers it.

But what did the Emperor intend to do? Get rid of the Custodes after that? Or outlive them and make sure they took the secret to their graves?

What's the source for the Emperor killing off the Thunder Warriors? Seems like a waste of good soldiers, and they'd all just get old eventually anyway. Weren't they just normal humans in power armor?

http://warhammer40k.wikia.com/wiki/Thunder_Warriors

No, they were genetically engineered warriors. Basically proto-Astartes, except stronger...and more erratic.

 argonak wrote:

Maximus Bitch wrote:
One day good ol Empy decides he doesn't need the Thunder Warriors anymore. Trouble is, there's too many of them. So he gets the Custodes to gun them down. That still leaves too many witnesses. He comes up with the story of them dying to the last man. That sorta covers it.

But what did the Emperor intend to do? Get rid of the Custodes after that? Or outlive them and make sure they took the secret to their graves?

What's the source for the Emperor killing off the Thunder Warriors? Seems like a waste of good soldiers, and they'd all just get old eventually anyway. Weren't they just normal humans in power armor?

They were unstable so the Emperor had them killed off.

It's heavily hinted in Outcast Dead that the Emperor had them wiped out - certainly it was Unity troops that were responsible.

To an extent, yes, all you have to do is let them die of old age and/or biologic malfunction - they weren't immortal like the astartes and their implants weren't intended to last.

But at the same time, the Astartes were involved in the final Unity battles (the Imperial Fists were at Roma), and they were immortal, so if he wants the thunder warriors removed from "living memory" it had to happen before then.

As far as the custodes were concerned, no problem.They would happily keep whatever secrets were required (after all, they had a damn good idea what was involved with the primarch project and the golden throne project, and they covered that up).

Maybe the whole "Space Wolves as executioners" thing is because they drew the short straw and were part of the force to purge the Thunder Warriors. Then they took their randomly assigned role to heart.

Living memory, but the marines, the custodius espechily are 100% loyal to emperor at this point, and always are in the latter's case.

They could live into 40k and will still keep secret to the end. There the ultimate body guards who far as I know not one has ever defected in 10,000 years.

Then you have Tanaris and the other
Outcasts who were still kicking up until the Heresy, wonder why he didn't try and go public.

I don't think it has ever really been confirmed that there was an execution was there? I thought he used and expended them until they were essentially gone.

Taranis strongly hints that they were actively wiped out.

2x210 wrote:
Then you have Tanaris and the other
Outcasts who were still kicking up until the Heresy, wonder why he didn't try and go public.

Well, at least according to the wiki (I didn't read the book, myself), Taranis actually agreed or at least understood why the Emperor did what he did and wasn't bitter about it. So maybe Taranis didn't out him because why cause trouble for yourself for something you aren't even mad about and believe might have been justified? If you don't want revenge or justice, there isn't much point to bringing it up when you're better off just living your own life under the radar.

2x210 wrote:
Then you have Tanaris and the other
Outcasts who were still kicking up until the Heresy, wonder why he didn't try and go public.

You don't really want to draw attention to yourself if you are supposed to be dead.

locarno24 wrote:
Taranis strongly hints that they were actively wiped out.

But how, maybe the Emperor created them with some form of killswitch that didn't get them all, as we know there were survivors. We know they were unstable, perhaps this is what was meant.

The fluff for the thunderwarriors always claimed they had a shelf life, potentially intentional.

I agree there is fluff saying they were killed, but the existing fluff really emphasised that they were not made to be long lived. I am not sure why the Emperor would have needed to actively kill them off.

In the book, he despite the beytratal has no I'll will.
Understanding they had a shelf life and they where surplus to requirements.
Even learned from him, ernough to grow a geneseed and understand quite advanced genetic science

What says it was even a "secret". Even the Space Marines were expendable in the Great Crusade, and by the time it got to the Heresy, there had been several "generations" of Legionnaires, and a definite divide between the Terran Marines and those created after the discovery of their Primarchs in some Legions.

It's entirely possible that by the time of the Heresy, most of the Marines just hadn't been around when the Thunder Warriors had been killed off, and it wasn't a topic the older Legionnairies discussed.

I mean, it's entirely possible that the Terran Marines who were there didn't even think that the event held any significance. After all, they weren't around when the Thunder Warriors were the Emperor's principle force, so the "importance" of the Thunder Warriors could be quite relative to their perspective.

I don't think the destruction of the Thunder Warriors was any kind of big secret. They were always intended to be disposable.

The only possible negative thing that could happen would if the Marines began wondering if the same thing would happen to them.

 Grey Templar wrote:
I don't think the destruction of the Thunder Warriors was any kind of big secret. They were always intended to be disposable.

The only possible negative thing that could happen would if the Marines began wondering if the same thing would happen to them.

Great point. This definitely did happen in the HH books--in several different ones Space Marines (and even Primarchs) wonder what will happen afterwards. In Prospero Burns there is even quite an explicit discussion of the "Wyrd" of the different Primarchs.

Here's a kicker: is Angron any different from the Thunder Warriors? The Emperor clearly knew the Butcher's Nails couldn't be removed, but he sent him and his legion out on Crusade anyway. Maybe some Primarchs weren't supposed to survive after (or even until?) Compliance was complete either.

Definitely some Machiavellian logic at work in the Emperor's mind...

Seriously, though, another question is how did the Emperor keep the massacre (if that's even what happened) of the other two LEGIONS a secret?

 pantheralegionnaire wrote:

Seriously, though, another question is how did the Emperor keep the massacre (if that's even what happened) of the other two LEGIONS a secret?

The dissappearance of the other two Legions in general has become nonsense. Kinda like Emps but to an even worse extent, BL writers are not allowed to come up with an ACTUAL "canon" reason for it yet were allowed to bring up the subject in various stories, which has led to all sorts of plot holes.

So basically we have a complete wipe out of two legions AND their primarchs (the way it's implied in the stories) that MANY OTHER PRIMARCHS KNOW ABOUT and somehow this was kept a secret? That's just bizarre. It'd be one thing if Emps snuck those two Primarchs into a dark alley and gutted them himself or with a few custodes doing it and then never telling anyone, but the fact that many other Primarchs know about it and know about the missing legions in the first place makes it very hard to swallow that it's such a well-kept secret now and just bizarre how little info we're allowed to see on it (the actual reason being the BL writers aren't allowed to show the legions or the reason they're gone, but it makes it nonsense from the reader's perspective when reading the books and these ghost legions keep getting mentioned. What the hell is a reader who didn't know that out-of-universe they're apparently supposed to not have an official explanation supposed to think about this? It's just ludicrous)

The fate of the 2 legions was known to the Primarchs and any marines who were present at what ever happened. They've just been sworn to secrecy. A secret everybody seems to have taken to the grave.

Not everybody knew, and those who did know has kept silent. It must have been something terrible indeed for even the traitors to never make mention of it.

Thought they were designed to die off from organ failure and stuff like that except for the GREAT! Babu Dhaka (Arik Taranis) who managed to survive and start a crazy gang that ran around breaking heads on terra...

And Babu had to steal organs from space marines.

Yeah, it's not that the missing legions are a secret. It's definitely not. It's just something they don't talk about.

Like your creepy uncle who went to prison for molesting a kid. Everybody in the family knows it happened, but nobody talks about it because it's uncomfortable.

It definitely created a weird black hole in the fluff though. When the idea was first created, the idea was actually that the "deleted" legions had been deleted as a reward for perhaps coming back after defecting from Horus, and the deletion was to erase the stain on their honor. At least according to Rick Priestley.

However, that idea eventually was removed (it was never canon anyway. It was just something he said one time in an interview). When the Horus Heresy was just a basic outline of a story "Horus and half the Legions went bad, and now they're all Chaos Marines", the Missing Legions could occupy any space your imagination wanted.

Can't do that when there is a long, drawn out novel series.

The worst part is though, the timeline of Primarch Discovery the Black Library drew up makes no sense. I mean, the Missing Legions had to have disappeared really early in the Great Crusade, and yet a couple of them are fairly late in the process.

 Grey Templar wrote:
The fate of the 2 legions was known to the Primarchs and any marines who were present at what ever happened. They've just been sworn to secrecy. A secret everybody seems to have taken to the grave.

Not everybody knew, and those who did know has kept silent. It must have been something terrible indeed for even the traitors to never make mention of it.

That's precisely what I mean. The idea that NO ONE would mention it when it's "canon" that "lots" of people knew (and by "lots", I mean "more people than just the Emperor and the custodes") and would "take the secret to the grave" when several of those are TRAITORS makes this very VERY VERY hard to swallow.

That said, if the BL writers are ever allowed to make a "canonical" reason for it, it'd be hilariously over-the-top and IMHO awesome if it really actually does end up being something so bad that even the Chaos Gods themselves prefer that no one ever remember the missing legions (which would thus explain why even traitors never bring it up).

Back in the days of 2nd edition, the 2nd legion was the Gray Knights, even said so the the Dark Millenium rules expantion set.

That's precisely what I mean. The idea that NO ONE would mention it when it's "canon" that "lots" of people knew (and by "lots", I mean "more people than just the Emperor and the custodes") and would "take the secret to the grave" when several of those are TRAITORS makes this very VERY VERY hard to swallow.

The surviving Traitor Primarchs seem very much resigned to the fact that they basically got screwed by Chaos in the Heresy, and are now just making the best of their situation. They have nothing to gain by releasing that information and, besides, who would believe them?

 Ribon Fox wrote:
Back in the days of 2nd edition, the 2nd legion was the Gray Knights, even said so the the Dark Millenium rules expantion set.

No it didn't.

They were Second Founding. Not Second Legion.

There has never been a 2nd or 11th Legion named. The idea of there being 2 Missing Legions happened at the same time as there being Legions in the first place, and there being 20 of them and what those 20 were.