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Admittedly, I haven't been able to read the Guy Haley novel yet, but in the rulebook, it seems like a great deal of time is spent talking about the turmoil that warp storms caused, and the Cicatrix is presented as a horrible impediment to travel, communication, reinforcement and resupply.
But storms in the warp, for the most part, simply affect warp travel. This would be really, really bad for the Imperium, while it lasted, admittedly, but the Cicatrix is a TEAR IN REALITY allowing warp energy into realspace. This seems to be way, way worse, for the entire galaxy.
The creation of the Eye of Terror eviscerated Eldar civilization and killed billions (trillions?) of Eldar, as well as rendering the planets (and, of course, the entire solar systems) lying within that warp rift basically inimical to life. That warp rift only occurred in one portion of the galaxy.
Now we are talking about a warp rift that slices across the entire galaxy from one side to the other, right across the part of the galaxy most densely populated with stars, and presumably throughout the galactic plane (otherwise, ships would simply sail 'over' or 'under' the tear). It has to have consumed billions or trillions of SOLAR SYSTEMS the way the Eye of Terror consumed thousands of solar systems. The loss of life would make the Eye of Terror event look trivial. The galaxy would have lost an appalling number of lives (and souls) to the warp, on a scale that would render all previous Imperial casualties irrelevant (not even counting all the non-human species lost).
Instead, after the warp storms abate and the Astronomican starts peeking through, Guilliman and reinforcements start showing up. People start worrying about the Imperials trapped on the north-eastern side of the galaxy, and the depradations of an energized Chaos Legions. What about the incomprehensibly massive loss of life and war materiel from the massive rift in reality that's RIGHT THERE?
It's as if a gigantic earthquake split the entire US apart, opening a huge chasm from the coast of Virginia to the coast of California a mile wide, destroying millions of lives and hundreds of trillions of dollars of property. And then we were all immediately concerned about rebuilding interstate highways. How will people get from New York to Florida?
I don't mind that the storyline was advanced in such a major and catastrophic way (although I do think that a catastropic event on say, the order of the Fall of the Eldar, would have been sufficient). I'm just really confused and disappointed that GW inserts such a immensely destructive cataclysm into the storyline, but seems to think that the warp storms preceding it, and the confusion after it, are really what needs to be focused on in the fluff. If they didn't want to address the consequences of trillions upon trillions of lives lost and billions of solar systems rendered uninhabitable chaos wastelands, then don't put a warp rift across the entire galaxy. Make it more of a hairline fracture in reality, that allows warp energy to bleed across and inhibit warp travel across it. But if you are going to unleash the most apocalyptic destruction the galaxy has ever seen on trillions of planets, don't act like "What happened to Cadia?" is really important.
If the Yellowstone caldera erupted and killed millions of Americans, I'd hope the world news wouldn't cover it as "George Clooney dead".
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