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I was chatting to a friend earlier today about the new lore surrounding Primaris and Guilliman's return, and he raised a point that I'd forgotten about; in Dark Imperium, Guilliman mentions that his father's sword alights when he wields it, whilst it's normally just a regular sword. Guilliman muses that this must be due to some latent psychic power that he must posses, but nothing more is really said about it.
We got talking quite in depth about this, and what it could possibly mean, and we've come up with two possible outcomes:

1) It's a throwaway line, and we'll never hear anything about it again.
2) Story progression continues and we get more background on what makes a Primarch, Guilliman begins to train his psychic powers, and starts to manifest slight psker abilities. In game terms, this could be as simple as giving Guilliman Smite and a slight points increase, or maybe some bonuses to DtW.

I (being a long term Ultramarines player) love the idea of #2, especially when we look at both Chaos Primarchs having a bit of fun in the psychic phase.

What does Dakka think, are we set to see a pre and post-psychic awakening Guilliman, ala HH Lorgar, or is it destined to be a forgotten line in a book that already has a ton of fluff digest?

Probably just a nod to the idea that the Primarchs were constructed with a bit of warp craft in addition to more standard mad science. All of them are fundamentally psychic beings, even if they can't consciously control it.

Dark Imperium has an undercurrent of Guilliman coming to terms with magic, Mortarion too. I don't really see them making Guilliman into a psyker but they could.

I agree. Several Primarchs have abilities that are only really explainable as psychic powers. I don't think they "manifest" them in way a regular psyker does, rather they are hard-wired to generate those abilities. Corax's invisibility and Kurze's precognition certainly seem to fit this category. All Primarchs seem to have physical abilities such as strength and accelerated healing that go beyond what simple biology can explain and are probably low-level biomancy.

 Karhedron wrote:
I agree. Several Primarchs have abilities that are only really explainable as psychic powers. I don't think they "manifest" them in way a regular psyker does, rather they are hard-wired to generate those abilities. Corax's invisibility and Kurze's precognition certainly seem to fit this category. All Primarchs seem to have physical abilities such as strength and accelerated healing that go beyond what simple biology can explain and are probably low-level biomancy.

IMO it's not even biomancy. The way I see Biomancy working, is that it manipulates and increase an organism's efficiency. The primarch's body are already the pinnacle of genetic and biological manipulation, so it does the very same thing biomancy does without being psykic. I think the primarch's enhanced physical abilities are just "pure" warp juice boosting them.

It's strongly hinted that all the Primarchs have at least latent psychic abilities in the various HH novels. Some more than others, obviously. For example during the Fall of Prosporo didn't Russ perform some kind of roar that totally seems like a psychic shriek type attack?

All Primarchs are touched by the Chaos Gods to some extents when they were stolen from the Emperor's lab. So I wouldn't be surprised if Papa Smurf turns out to be psyker as well.

bibotot wrote:
All Primarchs are touched by the Chaos Gods to some extents when they were stolen from the Emperor's lab. So I wouldn't be surprised if Papa Smurf turns out to be psyker as well.

I'm not sure it's all from the Chaos Gods. I know at least Magnus was designed to be pysker.