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 Lathe Biosas wrote:

 Gadzilla666 wrote:
The Primarchs are the tallest. Duh.

Not always.

Alpharius and his Legions are all the same size, shape and appearance. How else do you think they could fool everybody with their, "I'm Alpharius!"nonsense.

I did read that the Alpha Legion Marines are quite tall also... so that might work in their favor.

Ummmm.....Joke? Obviously?

 Gadzilla666 wrote:
The Primarchs are the tallest. Duh.

Once again, the Orks prove that they have the superior outlook on life.

 Gadzilla666 wrote:

 Lathe Biosas wrote:

 Gadzilla666 wrote:
The Primarchs are the tallest. Duh.

Not always.

Alpharius and his Legions are all the same size, shape and appearance. How else do you think they could fool everybody with their, "I'm Alpharius!"nonsense.

I did read that the Alpha Legion Marines are quite tall also... so that might work in their favor.

Ummmm.....Joke? Obviously?

Humor? I barely knew her!

Whoops. Sorry about that.

 JNAProductions wrote:
Yeah. It serves to remember that the Emperor and the Imperium are NOT good guys.

A point nobody is disputing.

This is all in response to the question of "Why didn't the Emperor just make everyone Custodes?", to which the answer is the Custodes weren't the next step in human evolution, nor were the Astartes or the Primarchs. All were tools to clear out the galaxy so humanity could evolve in safety.

 Lathe Biosas wrote:

 Gadzilla666 wrote:
The Primarchs are the tallest. Duh.

Not always.

Alpharius and his Legions are all the same size, shape and appearance. How else do you think they could fool everybody with their, "I'm Alpharius!"nonsense.

I did read that the Alpha Legion Marines are quite tall also... so that might work in their favor.

Alpharius was the shortest of the Primarchs, and his legionaries are taller than most other marines.

This is still one of the sillier pieces of HH fluff, though, once they decided on the Primarchs being so ridiculously big. If they had just kept the Primarchs the same size as regular Marines, but stronger (and inflated through legend) the whole 'can't tell which one is Alpharious' thing would have made a lot more sense.


Of course, the Alpha Legion being taller than regular marines is also conveniently ignored whenever they're infiltrating or dressed up as other legions...

The difference between 6"4' and 6"5' isn't exactly going to be someone's number one concern when there's a galaxy wide civil war going on though is it?

 Gert wrote:
The difference between 6"4' and 6"5' isn't exactly going to be someone's number one concern when there's a galaxy wide civil war going on though is it?

That's not the issue though. The primarchs are all supposed to be 10+ feet tall. So either Alpharius is an absolute midget and was bent over the knee of any primarch he met, or the alpha legionaries are all absolute giants.

There is no way to have gigantic primarch scale and normal marine scale when you're trying to convince people the alpha legion can hide their primarch. Either their marines are the most uber of all marines ever made, or their primarch is the littlest bitch ever created. Marines are 7 foot, primarchs 10 foot. So either the alpha legion are 9 foot, or alpharius is 8 foot. Either way, one side of that equation stands out like a sore thumb.




As to the original question, part of the reason this is now so muddied is all the retconing around the primarchs and custodes in the first place. The Shaman Emperor's original plan was to usher humanity into being a psychic species like the eldar, and he built weapons of war to accomplish that. The primarchs weren't some weird daemon hybrid stolen from chaos, they were basically what the custodes are now, genetic perfection created to lead the marine legions that suffered mutations when they were flung across the stars and thus ended up with imperfections and abilities not originally designed into them. And they died out. Only those that received immortality as daemon princes survived to the present day.



So there are two versions of the primarchs - the 1st to 2nd ed version that were mortal, the size of a marine and just a normal engineered entity with a bit of warp spice thrown in by chaos stealing them. And the current BL WWE Faces and Heels we have, with them being even more super super special, with some stupid plan to rip off the chaos gods by stealing greater daemons(!?) to enslave in flesh prisons for use as weapons. Even in this scenario, from all the books written about the HH, there's nothing I've seen that indicates the prowess of the primarchs was actually necessary to accomplish the great crusade. They spent more time using their abilities on each other than on their enemies. The aliens and rogue humans in the galaxy didn't have anyone that could go toe to toe with a primarch, and they were never described as requiring superhuman primarch strategic brain power to defeat some undefeatable enemy. there were far more battles fought during the GC where primarchs WEREN'T present, than ones where they were present. It's just numbers, there were only 20 of them, they could only be in one place at a time, and there were hundreds of battlefronts. In the scheme of things, I would think imperator titans outnumbered them and were more useful to the war effort.

The primarchs ultimately don't seem to have served any strategic necessity - their presence might have made their soldiers fight harder, but nothing about their victories suggest they were only possible because primarchs were present.


so why did the emperor make them? Was it all a Dune rehash to have humanity become independent through an engineered civil war? Or maybe he just wanted cool toys and his ultimate goal was ascension.

Legion was the only HH book I read, and I thought that part made no sense.

Am I correct in thinking that primarchs have in-universe plot armor? Like, they all have varying degrees of psychic ability (even the Khan is able to slice up warp fauna that are normally only vulnerable to psychic attacks), and I could have sworn there was a story somewhere that claimed the primarchs had some kind of big warp-related resonance/plot armor that helped them out.

If that's true, then the plot armor makes a certain amount of sense as a reason to invest in primarchs. There's a story where Corax takes a krak missile to the chest. He survives, obviously, but he's obviously wounded by it. It's clear that he's "squishy" *enough* to have to worry about things like krak missiles in a setting where there are krak missiles and worse all over the place. Which would make him a pretty bad investment, right? He's just a few lucky ordnance strikes away from death at any given moment. Unless he's packing some plot armor that means he's destined to never actually lose that last hitpoint and pull through against overwhelming odds.

Basically, I like the idea that the Emperor essentially created a bunch of Gary Stus. And then if an itty bitty bit of that plot armor/Gary Stu power got transferred to marines via geneseed, that would go a long way towards providing an in-universe explanation for some of the nonsensical marine exploits we generally have to handwaive.

Of course a squad of 5 dudes who are each roughly on par with an aspect warrior should probably fail this incredibly dangerous mission. Unless they have geneseed-inherited plot armor that causes realitly to warp around them .

Personally, I don't feel that lampshading your gary stu in any way makes it a useful story tool.

Creating in-universe justifications for poor writing is a bad way of saving said writing. It just looks like the author is giving themselves permission to write tosh. It's basically trying to convince the reader that the bad writing is a feature, not a bug.

Look at it through humanity’s industrial evolution.

First, we more or less mastered Fire. Summoning it when it was required, extinguishing when it’s served its purpose.

Second, realising we could reharness our old friend fire, using it and water (and a contained vessel) to create steam. And so harnessing more of the resultant raw energy..

Third? Nuclear energy. Which is still, after a fashion, Steam Power. We just boil the water in a new way, for a stupendously higher yield.

There? You have Thunder Warrior, Astrartes and Primarch in a completely inappropriate but hopefully understandable 3 Step Package.

I could accept some warp induced fate/plot armor in the same way that I rationalize the Fortune psychic power and the Exarch power Battle Fortune or Phoenix Lord invulnerable saves as bending fate/plot armor, but don't like relying on that as a crutch for poor plot writing.