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What characteristics did all Primarchs have? I know they had a lot beyond that, but what would a "generic" Primarch look like, before you slap on all the extras unique to them?

Pre-heresy Horus & Guiliman are pretty generic IMO.

Hmm, would you consider Lorgar the baseline Primarch? Not really great at anything in particular, fairly weak compared to the others. Not the brightest of them either. Handsome in that he resembled big E closely but not nearly as good looking at Sanguinius or pretty boy himself.

cody.d. wrote:
Hmm, would you consider Lorgar the baseline Primarch? Not really great at anything in particular, fairly weak compared to the others. Not the brightest of them either. Handsome in that he resembled big E closely but not nearly as good looking at Sanguinius or pretty boy himself.

Lorgar also had good psychic potential as well. He's very middle of the road.

Wasn't that more after he went down the chaosy path? I've read his main novel and am reading the first heretic right now. At first it seemed like he could sense things were coming in the most vague manner, kind of like Perty could see the eye of terror before it was a thing. But wasn't super active like some of the other gifted primarchs. Then again that sort of just further cements his averageness in a way huh?

Traits that seem to be common to all primarchs (or enough of them to possibly be possessed by all of them even if it isn't explicitly stated...)

* Larger-than-astartes size with Alpharius being the only primarch to come close to the size of a "normal" Alpha Legionnaire (who in turn seem to be on the tall side for a marine; possibly as a result of the purity of their geneseed causing them to take on Alpharius-esque traits more reliably).

* Superhuman strength, speed, reflexes, and intelligence.

* The ability to awe humans with their presence. It is unclear whether this is a purely psychological response to size and feats or a variation on the Emperor's own (more overtly supernatural) charisma. Alpharius seems to be capable of hitting the dimmer switch on this power when he's using his unique "blending in" power.

* Maybe pre-installed understandings of weaponry, tactics, and language. We have a scene where Alpharius claims to know about such things in the moments after he was stolen from the imperial palace, but any information offered by Alpharius is suspect.

* Minor stretch, but I get the impression they all have some amount of "warp power." Not necessarily overt psychic ability, but a weight in the warp. We see it when Jaghatai is able to harm some warp fauna on Prospero while his marines are explicitly unable to do so (with the exception of the psykers present). Similarly, Russ is able to have his whole interaction with the Erl King, and that seems to be physically "real". He probably wasn't just astral projecting while his body remained stationary or whatever. I suspect that this "warp weight" is part of the reason that a daemon prince primarch seems to carry so much favor with their respective gods, and I wonder if it's a "demigod" phenomenon comparable to the eldar phoenix lords. Where they're mortal, but they seem to have one foot in the supernatural without being psykers in the traditional sense.

The Primarchs were made using a fragment of power and its noted by Vulkan in the Beast Arises series that this is the case for all of his siblings. It boosted their resilience to warp based weapons/magics and obviously some had more obvious psychic abilities like Magnus, Curze and Sanguinius.

cody.d. wrote:
Wasn't that more after he went down the chaosy path? I've read his main novel and am reading the first heretic right now. At first it seemed like he could sense things were coming in the most vague manner, kind of like Perty could see the eye of terror before it was a thing. But wasn't super active like some of the other gifted primarchs. Then again that sort of just further cements his averageness in a way huh?

Yeah. IIRC after going Team Chaos, Lorgar got access to most of his psyker powers.

So most likely he did some sort of sorcery instead of pure psyker powers and said sorcery allowed him to use psyker powers. Or rather the Chaos Gods borrowed him their power and Lorgar was merely their conduit.