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[Loud Whispers]

Which book?

[LordBaal]

The one about Luther almost (re)killing the emperor and a conclusion that he might have been Omegon all along.

[Loud Whispers]

The one about Luther almost (re)killing the emperor and a conclusion that he might have been Omegon all along.

The 40k realisation: have I been pathos all along?

[MrRoboto75]

Orks be like: Oh no... anyway

[nenjin]

As much as people complained about not advancing the timeline, thousands of years in a galaxy with lots* of star systems means practically infinite possible stories.
Guess that's what RP is for. They should make more RPG books! :p

*I don't remember how many stars are in our galaxy but it's at least a hundred!

And all of them fade away, so we can have a hundred episodes of Guilliman saves the day whilst Abaddon chuckles villainously. Guilliman's fine and all but they have to get rid of Abaddon. That useless fucker was not meant to be a good villain for 40k literally every character he interacts with is more qualified to lead and represent chaos. E.g. Lorgar for actually believing in Chaos and starting both the Imperial and Chaos religions that everyone follows. Perturabo for actually doing the whole "I use chaos, I don't serve it" thing Abaddon pretends to do. Or regular people like Moriana who survived for 10,000 years, were on the winning side of the Heresy and the long war, and actually seized all of their power instead of just having it constantly handed to them on a silver platter like Abaddon.

Abaddon from the start never seemed like a character. He was just Horus's big attack dog. There was never any depth. But their insistence in not killing him off, the one possible silver lining to "advancing the timeline," despite killing off the entire Imperial Guard character list, is so frustrating. Because then they have to do all this copium "Oh yeah Abaddon really is failing upwards every time he gets beat up by a geriatric eldar or regular Imperial Navy captain or guardsmen." And his one apparent trait of "he bends chaos to his will, not the other way around" is such conceited crap. The Alpha Legion and the Iron Warriors actually do this, using chaos to carry out their own agendas. But Abaddon walks around with a mark of chaos on his forehead, a mark of chaos on his flagship, only ever doing the will of chaos using the powers chaos has willingly given - and can at any moment take back.

I've heard someone else describe it as like an elite soldier leaving the marines, joining a neo-nazi group, carving a swastika on their forehead and then spending the next 100 years carrying out a neo-nazi's group agenda whilst claiming he's just using the group and hasn't bent to their will

Gotta remember though. For the longest time Abaddon was the most tangible living link to the Heresy days. (NM that the Blood Angels Chapter Master had also been alive for 10,000 years...GWS put paid to that idea a while ago.) He was the big baddy from the halcyon days when GWS never thought they'd write the Heresy. So he's the natural fit for the continuing 40k storyline. He is to 40k what Archaon was to Old World Fantasy.

....except once you've Abbadon as a brash, loud-mouthed, emotional, intemperate 2nd in command it makes it harder to take his current incarnation seriously. I've even bitched about this many pages ago: the Abbadon novels post the HH series getting underway paint a completely different picture of Abbadon. In the HH he's all the things I just said. In the novels after the HH, he's playing fucking 4d chess with everyone. They make him out to be thug in the HH novels, and a mastermind of the current era. You can argue he matured in the 10k years since the Heresy but.....it's just never sat right with me. But then, consistency between how characters get written by different authors has never been the Black Library's strong suit.

[Loud Whispers]

Idk. Even before the Horus Heresy series came out he had a reputation as being useless, with a shitty model whose arms always fell off. In all of the league games he'd always be portrayed as the 500 IQ mastermind and then fail with the post-game explanations just sounding like utter copium. Even the battlefleet gothic rules for him introduced his rules as a team killing idiot (somehow this is portrayed as genius) who got his planet killer ship destroyed by frigates (retconned later to cruisers, retconned later again to never having been destroyed at all) and sacrificed multiple blackstone fortresses for... To destroy planets in an era where exterminatus weapons are plethora without having to waste war in heaven era weapons

[nenjin]

Ya preaching to the choir. He's always seemed like a hammer rather than a scalpel. But I guess someone over there is carrying water for him.

Even the battlefleet gothic rules for him introduced his rules as a team killing idiot (somehow this is portrayed as genius) who got his planet killer ship destroyed by frigates (retconned later to cruisers, retconned later again to never having been destroyed at all)

As evidenced by this.

[Loud Whispers]

I just wish his screen time would go to literally anyone else more interesting ;-;

[Tack]

Black library has a ton of authors who've done good work in creating explainable depth for shallow characters. I was angry when they did it to Ahriman, but I can't argue that it's done wonders for his PR.

Someone just needs to do one of those books for Abaddon. Give him a big ol' grow moment in his own book.
Or better yet, have someone kill him and steal his name.

[Loud Whispers]

Yeah. Give it to someone who's truly a villain like Erebus

[nenjin]

I like the part where he gets his face cut off.

[Kagus]

Question... In the grim darkness of the 41st millennium, how do the traitor legions deal with their casualty rate?

I mean sure, there were a lot of them that left and joined chaos, but surely that supply of chaos marines must be running dry? The loyalists have the geneseed collection and facilities to create new marines (right?), but the forces of chaos presumably haven't invested in that much infrastructure. And sure, you get new recruits on occasion, but I imagine there are far fewer new corrupted marines than normal folk turning to the dark powers. I have a hard time seeing how that could replenish their losses with how bloodthirsty they tend to be.

[Loud Whispers]

Question... In the grim darkness of the 41st millennium, how do the traitor legions deal with their casualty rate?

For starters there are standard warp shenanigens.

-Demonically ascended CSMs usually don't die, but reform in the warp when they are banished from realspace.
-For some CSMs the way time has passed for them is such that although they may be 10,000 years old, they've only really lived about 400 years of equivalent real space time. Which is a lot for a human but about equal to a standard veteran of a first company space marine.
-Standard warp shenanigens that can result in time travel nonsense, e.g. an Imperial Crusade arriving centuries before it sets out. This kind of stuff definitely happens to Chaos Marines too, and Battlefleet Gothic gives us a canon example where this is done on purpose in the Infinite Fleet. Tzeentch's Infinite Fleet often contains duplicates of the same ship/crew and Imperials often confirm a kill on a ship from the Infinite Fleet only to fight the same ship again in the future, as they're fighting a past version of it.
-Standard warp shenanigens can allow for greatly accelerated recruitment times & rates compared to realspace. The sorcerer planet of Q'Sal has 800,000 years of recorded history in the same time-span of 40k's 40,000 years. In some places of the Warp, time doesn't pass at all.

I mean sure, there were a lot of them that left and joined chaos, but surely that supply of chaos marines must be running dry? The loyalists have the geneseed collection and facilities to create new marines (right?), but the forces of chaos presumably haven't invested in that much infrastructure. And sure, you get new recruits on occasion, but I imagine there are far fewer new corrupted marines than normal folk turning to the dark powers. I have a hard time seeing how that could replenish their losses with how bloodthirsty they tend to be.

Some chaos space marines like the Emperor's Children and the Iron Warriors turn to warp-tech and weird biomancy horrors to mass-replenish their ranks. But there's also plenty of lore where marauding bands of CSMs essentially recruit exactly the same way as fleet based chapters. They show up to a planet, establish recruiting links with local warrior cults/tribes/death worlds/tithe governors and put them through the trials. Suvivors get inducted.

Black Crusade sourcebooks and this one really neat short story, IIRC it's called the long war or something. If I find it I'll post an excerpt of it here. But the tl'dr of the story is a boomer dreadnought who was a veteran of the Horus Heresy invites CSM champions to his fortress for a competition to see who gets to win the prize (a sack of soulstones). The boomer dreadnought is depressed when the CSMs that show up all fall short of his standards:

-The Night Lord champion offers him the location of a weak point in the Imperial Navy's defences, guarding lots of valuable space hulks that can be refitted and made war-ready. The boomer dreadnought berates him for being a pathetic example of the Night Lords, for a true Night Lord wouldn't be asking for his help attacking the Imperium, they would have just done it.

-The Thousand Son Sorcerer pisses him off because he says he doesn't even really know what the big deal is with the Long War, and he only cares about amassing his arcane knowledge and literally doesn't care about the Imperium at all.

-The Emperor's Children champion seriously pisses him off because he gets distracted and starts bragging about how he stole Typhus's victory from him for fun. The boomernaught gets furious that the champion dared to betray "brother Typhus" who is also a veteran of the long war.

-The Word Bearer champion pisses the boomernaught off the most by saying that they're only here out of respect for the boomernaught's honourable service record. But subtly imply they consider him a has-been, who can't see that the Chaos Legions have already "won" and are free to do whatever they want. The Word Bearer can spread the faith of chaos, the Sorcerer accrue power, the Night Lord be a creepy space goblin and the Emperor's Children do whatever he feels like. At this point the boomernaught asks them how old they all are and their ages vary from 60-300 years old.
The boomernaught is fucking shaken and suffers 40000 stress damage realising how much the galaxy has changed. The Black Crusade rulebooks even bring this up, CSMs are rare and veterans of the long war are even rarer still.

So the answer is... It depends.
Warbands like Iron Warriors, Emperor's Children and Night Lords should be fine. Iron Warriors have geneseed resistant to mutation and shun the warp. Night Lords shun the warp, and Emperor's Children have fabius bile.
Others like the Thousand Sons have more difficulties due to recruiting only from pools or sorcerers and psykers, but with warp fuckery and careful management of what fights they take should stay above attrition.
Word Bearers and Death Guard CSMs actively manage their own worlds with fresh and plentiful supplies of recruits.
Alpha Legion actively steal the geneseed of other Legions, amongst their usual recruitment practices.
I have no idea how World Eaters and Black Legion survive their constant never-ending bouts of team killing and crusading. If the lore was accurate to its own description, I imagine these CSM legions would be diminishing in size.
Rogue warbands like the Red Corsairs basically operate as a standard fleet based chapter.

It's also almost certain that there are just less Chaos Marines now. Around about Horus Heresy the chaos legions inflated their numbers above legion strength and had over 1.2M> marines so there's a good chance they have just lost a god awful number of dudes that they haven't been able to replace

[ZebioLizard2]

The Black Legions recruit from everyone. You can see that a lot of CSM from other legions and renegades tend to crop up in Black Legion under the banner which is why they have a lot of disposal troops.

[Robsoie]

Spoiler: the CSM will recruit everywhere (click to show/hide)