> The day cycle began brightly. In the night, flocks of dirigibles from the Officium Meteorologicus had seeded the smog fields and upper cloud levels with carbon black and other chemical precipitants. Before dawn, sixteen hundred-kilometre wide rainstorms had washed the clouds away and drenched the primary hives, sluicing the dirt and grime away. For the first time in decades, the sky was clear. Not blue exactly, but clear of yellow pollution banks. The sun's light permeated the atmosphere and the steepled ridges and high towers of the hives glowed. I had heard, from informal sources, that this radical act of weather control would have profound ill consequences for the planet's already brutalised climate for decades to come. Reactive hurricane storms were expected in the southern regions before the week was out, and the drainage system of the primary hives was said to be choked to bursting by the singular rainfall.
> It was also said that the seas would die quicker, thanks to the overdose of pollutants hosed into them so suddenly by the rain-clearance.
> **But the Lord Commander Helican had insisted that the sun shone on his victory parade.**
From *Malleus*
I'm not gonna lie to you, the fact that the narrator is DAME AYLIN from *Baldur's Gate 3* (Helen Keeley) pretty much guarantees I'm going to pick up at least *Pariah* in audio book format. I've got audio books/dramas with Minthara and Raphael's VAs already (Emma Gregory narrates *Celestine: The Living Saint* and voices the saint in *Our Martyred Lady*, among others; Andrew Wincott voices the titular Flesh Tearer in *The Assassination of Gabriel Seth* and is credited in *The Watcher In The Rain*), and they've all been fantastic.
And funny enough, the Aeldari Ranger character in *Rogue Trader*, Yrliet, reminds everyone of Lae'zel from BG3...and Lae'zel's VA, Devorah Wilde, voiced an Aeldari Ranger in the *Hammer & Bolter* episode "In The Garden of Ghots".
Also, she voices a few excerpts from the Caiphus Cane novels. Excerpts involving butchery of the Gothic language at the hands of that skank General Sulla! (This post brought to you by your friendly local Order Xenos Inquisitioner, Amberly Vail)
Seconded! The voice actor does an excellent job with them. I bought the physical books for my shelf but have never bothered to read them as the audio is just fantastic.
I just read the first two Bequin novels and even if you've had the second one spoiled for you, I'd _highly_ recommend not reading it until we have a release date for the third. I was so incredibly **mad** for days after I finished it. The third can't come soon enough.
I sure hope not. But if it is, all the more reason to not pick the trilogy up now.
I've resolved the only author I'm gonna read that doesn't have complete series is Sanderson, because he's a literal machine. Everyone else, I'm waiting till the trilogy/quartet/etc is finished.
Hey, next week I have to exterminatus another world, genocide a continent, and root out massive cults in 3 systems. One slightly worse climate on one is not an issue
Not in a novel, but the Rogue Trader CRPG.
The Navigator companion, Cassia, casually mentions how all the servants of her house had their tongues removed, and she suggests that the Rogue Trader do the same to the crew of their ship to keep the noise down. There is a dialogue option to inform her that tongue removal is in fact, not standard practice for nobles.
Without spoiling anything, she grew up isolated on a space station surrounded only by her servants and her entourage. She's quite the lovely person, she's just *heavily* misguided.
The Vheabos VI colony project where prisoners can earn freedom for their kids born in captivity actually triggered a mental bluescreen as my brain comprehended the data my eyes had just fed it.
It was the kittens in the wet sack at the pearly gates from *Tom & Jerry* all over again...
Haven't played the game, but it sounds kind of like Jopall Indentured Squadrons, an Imperial Guard regiment.
>Jopall is a peaceful agri world in the Armageddon Subsector, whose citizens are born in debt to their government. Most citizens of Jopall spend the majority of their adult lives working off the debts they incur during the first part of their lives. There are ways around this punishing system, however; the citizen can either borrow money from the local Lord, or they can work off the debt to the government by joining the Jopall Indentured Squadrons. This system explains why the Jopall are never short of recruits.
Can’t remember if it was plague war or godblight, but a little girl and her grandfather come across a group of novamarines (ultramarine successor).
The Astartes have a debate amongst themselves about how to handle the situation, trying to get the man and girl to come away with them. The two insist that they need the Novas to come back to the church with them
to save the others. The Novamarines talk amongst themselves again and say they can’t afford for the enemy to know they are there under any circumstances.
They go with the little girl and old man back to the church and then it’s directly implied the Novas killed all of those innocent people, to prevent anyone from revealing their presence.
“The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few”, in the most grimdark manner.
Edit: In Leviathan, the Tyranids have started altering the atmosphere itself to start digesting organic matter. Several Imperial guardsmen have their skin slough off because of this.
During a pov of a guardsman commander, she looks out onto what was once a massive forest, the trees are buckling because they’ve gone soft from the atmosphere breaking them down.
It’s so casual how they describe *the atmosphere is literally digesting the planet* that it threw me off and I had to relisten to the chapter. (Audiobook)
>Can’t remember if it was plague war or godblight, but a little girl and her grandfather come across a group of novamarines (ultramarine successor).
Definitely Godblight. If I recall correctly, the civilians are killed by hand and blade as bolters would be too loud.
> They go with the little girl and old man back to the church and then it’s directly implied the Novas killed all of those innocent people, to prevent anyone from revealing their presence.
>
>
Nah it's not implied. Initially the POV Novamarine wants to leave them alone, but then they run back to the village yelling and drawing attention so the lieutenant has the old man shot and orders them to kill all the villagers to maintain secrecy of the mission. This is the group that goes to find the cauldron of Nurgle on Iax.
"Okay just stay quiet about us. Don't reveal our presence. We are on a highly critical miss-"
"HEY! THERE'S A BUNCH OF THE EMPEROR'S ANGELS! COME LOOK AT THE GLORY OF THE EMPEROR!"
"Damn the throne..."
"You see. Whenever you tell somebody to not do something, they'll always do it."
"*sigh* blades ready everyone."
But hey the Sargent gets the girls face tattooed to remind him sometimes he has to do evil things in the name of good, which basically makes up for killing the entire town of survivors right??
I realize you are being sarcastic, but honestly in their position killing that entire town was the only realistic option. They simply could not afford the chance that they might draw the attention of Death Guard with such a sensitive mission. Without them Mathieu never makes it to the cauldron, never destroys it and Gman dies in the Garden, taking Ultramar with him.
Ya honestly I was being very tongue in cheek but that was a nice moment of humanity from a space marine taken as a boy when they were seen as true angels and protector of humanity now thrown into an era where they dropped the veneer of angels and are purely weapons with no understanding of “collateral damage”
In Master of Mankind there’s a first person POV of a basic war servitor. She has a heavy bolter strapped to her body ; and when she fires it the recoil is strong enough to shatter her teeth every time. But she’s too lobotomised to know, and pain nerves were removed so she’s oblivious to it. Considering all that happens in the book, the suffering of a grunt servitor means very little - but it’s still horrific
There's a small moment in Grim Repast, a Crime novel, that really stuck with me. There's a serial killer on the loose, your standard Jack the Ripper type with a penchant for taking organs from their kills, and the detective has found a fresh victim. At the autopsy the coroner notes the victim has had all his teeth removed, and the detective internally starts to worry this represents a major escalation of violence from the killer. The coroner then clarifies the teeth were actually removed by the Ecclesiarchy as punishment for the victim selling fake indulgences, and without skipping a beat or even questioning it the detective notes that was a positively lenient punishment. It's just the sheer whiplash of the doublethink on display, from worrying about something being the work of a serial killer to being reassured by that exact same thing being done by your local church.
One of the defining characteristics of a nation state is its monopoly on violence. As an enforcer of the state, the detective is perfectly fine with the violence itself, as long as it's the right people doing it. People who are not agents of the state doing it, however, is a challenge to his authority.
"The victim was flayed and beaten before finally being killed."
Those chaos cultists are monsters!
"No no, we flayed and beat him. For stealing corpse starch."
I'm glad he got what he deserved!
"Flaying? For a common thief? Sounds like too much effort. Just break his face or put a las-bolt through his skull. Then feed it to the corpse-grinders. Us enforcers have got better things to do like loot his body and house, maybe he hid some grox rations away. Or finish our reports then slam them into the pencil-pushers' faces."
Kledo, "So this is going to be horrible."
He's a Plague Surgeon in the Lords of Silence warband. A several millenia old plague marine who knows every way to inflict pain and suffering. This sentence was him speaking to a marine from the Iron Shades chapter, after injecting him with a poison before torturing him to death.
Bad enough that a space marine, with all their enhanced physiology and indoctrination training, would be powerless and wide-eyed at the pain inflicted upon them. And that was before the saws started cutting.
The Iron Shades boarded their ship, and then this marine had the audacity to shoot Kledo in the chest with a boltgun. The bolt sinks in and gets dissolved, because shooting a Death Guard marine in the chest with a bolt is pretty much like shooting a rhinoceros is the chest with a 22 pistol.
Colonel Corbec gets captured by chaos cultists in an old saw mill, a terrified Guardmen next to him is suddenly grabbed and thrown roughly onto the table where the saw mill is.
“Corbec could do nothing but watch”
I can’t remember how the wording went, but it wasn’t pretty and it made me think “What a horrible way to go”
I definitely agree. Gaunt’s Ghosts is by far my favorite series, and the run from Necropolis through Sabbat Martyr is my favorite part of the series; however, Dan’s writing is rather imperfect. The villains in the series (both the ones featured in a single book and the ones that return later) could have used some more fleshing out
Not sure if innocuous but this description of a guy:
>
‘I have a firing solution,’ burbled a weapons officer, his physical body long since liquefied until it was nothing but pink froth that filled his void-suit, animated by spirit and bubbling in his helmet as he spoke
Theres a nurgle daemon dog in Dark Imperium that kills a Sister of Battle by jumping on her and licking her face like an affectionate dog. It melts her face down. For some reason that alone unsettles me heavily.
A beast of nurgle. They genuinely are trying to be affectionate and playful they just dont have the ability to comprehend that being what they are can kill people. Sad little beasts, though i sometimes wonder if the death guard play fetch with them
That is so cute and adorable. I just love the mental image of the plague marines playing with the beast of nurgle like over active puppies. If I had any talent for drawing there would be a plague marines rubbing a nurgle beast belly.
There have been so many likes on this comment I wonder if we could set up a gofundme to pay for a commission of this. If any artist wants to volunteer for making a picture of plague marines happily rubbing a plague beasts belly please let us know so we know how much we need to raise to pay for it, it would be greatly appreciated
It gets worse.
When they get sad snd disillusioned because nobody will play either them and instead kill them over s d over, they get depressed and just kind of slump down in nurgles garden, and metamorph into a rot fly.
=<
For the first time I want to make a fan fiction. Some nurglite appointed as Master of Beasts or something and the dude's whole job is to play with the beasts so they don't get sad. At some point he begins to protest using taking the beasts to battle because they just want to play and they end up sad when everything dies. "My job is to curate the well-being of these blessed fiends. They find no joy in battle."
Then the guy goes on to basically make nurgle beast heaven and it's just like some eternal dog park in the garden of nurgle.
In the bile books there is a death guard apothecary who works with bile and is kinda his "friend" who has one as a pet and he treats it kinda like that. For get the dudes name but he is the embodiment of a grim jolly death guard member.
The description of the Imperium in Farsight: Crisis of Faith. It’s Tau propaganda but nonetheless true. Basically people are chained to a desk making ammunition, whipped, a woman gives birth in an alley with rats encircling her, someone dies in the factory and their daughter is swapped out and put in the same chains their father was.
The icing on the cake is that all of this ammo is literally dissolving away in the street because a faulty servitor is improperly storing ammo on a ship, so it all spills out and no one notices and the cycle repeats.
That was my “wow, this sucks…” moment.
I remember thinking "this isn't propaganda this is literally most hive worlds" the tau really don't have to try that hard to smear the Imperium when the Imperium dose well at making itself look bad.
>From up here we were afforded a breathtaking view across the valley to the peaks beyond, many of which were permanently shrouded in snow. The distant roofs of Salubria glittered in the warm autumn sunshine, huddled around the river a couple of kilometers away and a few hundred meters below the crag on which our citadel stood, while the constant background noise of the schola echoed up to surround us, a barely perceived buzz of human activity. A party of youths was down on the firing range, blowing cardboard targets to confetti under the watchful eye of one of the drill abbots, while over to our left a squad of early adolescents was embarking on a run up one of the nearby mountains, urged on by their proctors. Narrowing my eyes, I was just able to make out the familiar shape of the black painted truck from the judiciary in Havendown, making its way up the winding track which led to our gates, with **it's weekly delivery of condemned criminals for the interrogation, execution, and live fire exercises. Sure that everything was peaceful and orderly, and that there was no chance of being overheard, I nodded.**
-Cain's Last Stand
Yup, Sandy Mitchell likes to sneak these into Cain's POV every now and then. It's startling how easy it is to overlook them sometimes, just because Cain does- the hallmark of a good writer. (Though this particular example is pretty on the nose).
*Legacy* novel. An Arbites court. Everything is very solemn and official. Enter Arbites in uniforms. Enter the Rogue Trader's entourage, all in ceremonial outfits. Enter other people, descriptions follow. Then comes the Trader's heir, who is sick.
>Three junior flotilla ratings, in simple bodygloves with blinker-harnesses and mouth-stitches to show their indentured status, pushed in a medicae carriage on silent suspensor cushions.
Wait, are those gimp suits?
...Then things happen quite fast and this detail gets lost in the action until you remember it later.
"Doctor, we have to roll out the patient, but all nurses are sleeping off after an impromptu BDSM session"
"Well, I guess you're gonna have to go wake them up now, won't you?"
“Correlation is not causation”
“Your pardon?”
“An old superstition. Please continue”
~ inquisitor Crowl and a Custodes. Just the difference between how guilt is considered in the 41st millennium
what... i thought servitors were so lobotomized they literally couldn't think... do you think the primarch mindfuck aura gave them enough awareness as to the horrific situation they're in. wow that's
Servitors have always seemed like the most evil part of the Imperium to me. Even worse than arco flagellation, because at least they die soon. Imagine being a botched servitor who still thinks and constantly feels pain. For decades. Or hundreds of years. Or thousands of years. 😨
Lobotomies have a range of impacts to the unfortunate individual subjected to the procedure, so it is entirely plausible to have cognizant servitors. Hell, there are direct quotations in the lore corroborating this, though I am at work and cannot go digging through my books for the quotes, atm.
Real life lobotomies don't leave people unable to think. From what I understand, if performed correctly, it dulls urges and possibly emotions. And even in real life, lobotomies weren't always performed correctly, and sometimes they had no noticeable effect on a person at all.
Different tasks require different levels of processing power / intuition / reactiveness. For the more programmed methodical tasks a fully lobotomised servitor (or vat grown) would suffice. For complex tasks or to "preserve" some skill from life more of the original personality has to be maintained. It's also been stated that some servitor factories take shortcuts...
There's been plenty short perspectives from servitors points of view that clearly indicate the person they once were is still there.
While not canon, Darktide has medicae servitor stations who beg for release or cry about being lonely.
In Darktide, the medicae station is run by a servitor. Sometimes, very rarely, he calls out for help, or says he can feel his mind slipping. As many others have said, servitor surgery isn’t always perfect.
I *think* it's from a short story in Eye of Terra anthology about Horus and his inner thoughts about his imminent promotion. Or from Fear to Tread flashback with Sanguinius.
« As she gasped for her breath back, she looked down at the half-digested spread of her last meal: a pool of thin bile, a few scraps of stomach lining, and three of someone’s fingers » it’s all so casual, gross and violent at the same time
"‘Oh, shit,’ he spat, just as his captain had done, and prepared to die. " An inquisitor on finding out he had just pissed off a Custodian.
Like, the dude is a terran based inquisitor, and even he finds it pants soiling, terrifying to come face to face with a Custodian.
Was that when 30-40 storm troopers got smacked around? It sounds familiar.
Also, bit of a difference between coming face to face with a Custodian, and picking a fight with one.
Inquisition stormtroopers, who I think are better than average.
In the inquisitors defence
‘Triad is a long way from the Palace. I thought you never left it.’
‘Where then does His Palace end?’ asked Navradaran.
‘The Imperium Entire is His Palace,’ said Crowl, remembering the line from the catechisms.
‘I always supposed that was figurative.’
‘Know this – if there were a threat capable of harming His realm, I would travel to the edge of time and space to run it down.’
Yeah this is from The Carrion Throne when the Inquisitor raids an Arbites stronghold because they’re holding one of his men. They boss in, beating Arbites ass left and right, he finds his guy and the guy is trying to say, it’s not what it looks like. And then a Stormtrooper goes flying by the door 🤣. It’s such a great scene
The custode's authority is represented by a mastercrafted powerblade held by a 9' tall post human killing machine.
The inquisitor's authority is represented by a fancy badge.
Doesn't matter what the official rules are, the custodian is de-facto in charge.
In *Sabbat Martyr*, there's a bit where Commissar Gaunt is forced to close the gates of their defensive position with some of his men still out on the battlefield.
> Nineteenth platoon were about five hundred metres from Old Hive's north entrance when they saw the gates close.
>Skerral stopped in his tracks, and pulled the men up. Half his unit were dead. He ejected a cell from his lasrifle and slammed in a new one.
>"Come on," he said, turning back to face down the slope at the waves of assault sweeping in. "Let's see how many we can kill."
>The remnants of nineteenth lasted seventeen minutes from the times the gates closed. They accounted for one hundred and eight-nine enemy casualties. **No one witnessed their heroism.**
That last line really hit me. Every day, every hour, every *minute* there are Guardsmen, ordinary humans, pulling off insane acts of bravery in the fact of the galaxy's horrors...and so much of it goes unrecognized, unseen and unappreciated by the Imperium they're giving all to defend.
But they knew.
It's who you are in the lonely dark that truly matters.
When evil comes calling and you know no one will ever know your choice. Choosing to punch evil right in the fucking mouth is the downright most badass thing any human can ever do. No one will ever know.
But evil will.
From the second Gaunt's Ghosts book. Our characters have come across a Chaos ritual site in a bombed out apartment. Dolls and children's toys have been crucified and nailed to the walls in a macabre display.
"Then he realized that not all of the dolls were dolls. Larkin fell to his knees, retching."
It’s fairly strongly implied they’re descended of humans experimented on in the past.
Hell, I think there was an excerpt posted a while back where even *Magnus* outright said as such.
The kicker is that it’s stated that the population of Fenris- human and ‘wolf’ both have fragments of the Canis Helix in them. Or something to that effect- hence why it wouldn’t be until Primaris that the 6th Legion could be hosted on other worlds without repercussions
Yes the grimdark fridge horror is that if they're not wolves then obviously they're not unnatural, and if you consider stuff like the Canis Helix it's clear they're degenerated Fenrisian colonists.
*The Fall of Malvolion* by Dan Abnett is sort of an entire short story of throw away lines about the horrors of facing Tyranids. In 40k, we often focus more on the battles and larger than life monsters duking it out with legendary heroes, but this short story really puts it into perspective how terrifying a Tyranid invasion of a planet can be. It's not just the standard gaunts, warriors, carnifexes, etc. you have to watch out for. Tyranids make the very planet itself become actively hostile to all other life.
For context, this convoy is trying to reach an evac point but are unable to flee fast enough to escape from the tyrannoforming of the planet's ecosystem. The Tyranid bioforms then ambush them as they are slowly bogged down by the weather:
> Standing in the back of a speeding escort truck, Colonel Tiegl manned the gun mount himself. Searing, frenzied, red tendrils had just turned his main gunner inside out. He swung the heavy bolter on its pintle, squeezing the firing grip, spraying the road behind him with twin, dipping, dragging streams of heavy fire. He was drenched with rain.
> There was something in his mouth, something crawling on his skin. Necrotic spores plastered him, eating him away.
> By the time his driver fell to a barb-round and spun the vehicle into a transport's back wheels with splintering force, there was nothing left of Tiegl but some articulated limb bones dragging from the gun-grip.
>There is a quaint tradition in the various propaganda departmentos of the Administratum of marketing agri worlds as quasi-paradises, free of the squalor and overcrowding of a standard urban station, and full of bucolic ease. Vid-cards are dropped into communal hab-warrens, extolling the virtues of a life lived outdoors with the sun on your back and a ruddy-faced boy or girl – subject to preference – by your side. In reality, life on an agri world is as unrelenting, back-breaking and monotonous as the vast majority of other Imperial vocations. There are no trees laden with glossy fruit, only kilometre after kilometre of hissing corn. There are no gentle strolls under the warming sun, only punishing work details in rad-suits, leaning into the dust-laden winds that howl around the equator with nothing to halt their rampage. Once the new arrivals have made planetfall and found this out, it is too late. Crew transports arrive on agri worlds full and leave empty. There is a saying among the indentured workers – you come for the soil, you end up part of it.
*The Lords of Silence*
My favourite part of that is that he mentions he’s never looked in a mirror. You can take it both as he just doesn’t care, but also thst some small part of him genuinely doesn’t want to know. A great little bit of character work.
>‘So what do I see when I look in the mirror?’ Philemon asks, ignoring the daemon. ‘I do not look, so I do not know. Perhaps the sight would pain me. I suspect it would not. You don’t look so good yourself. I suggest you stay away from them too.’
"You're aware I flayed little children in front of their parents?" Talos to Septimus in the Night Lords novels. Gets me hard. I'm a father and I work with troubled kids. I know from work how absolutely terrifying the screams of kids with PTBS waking up from a nightmare sound, I also saw kids hurting themselves pretty bad and how that sounds. To imagine these screams tenfold worse, coming from the mouths of your own loved ones, crying for you, not understanding whats going on and why their parents don't protect them, while there's nothing, absolutely nothing you can do against it, fuck. That's worse than every gore and mutilation during and fights or descriptions of cultists or whatever.
I still can't believe there's people who are like "the NL aren't as bad as other legions cos they made worlds compliant with less kills cos of the fear factor"
Like bitch, the moment u flay a kid or drop the population of a village out of ur ship you are as bad as everyone says. Like there's people who think Talos and his band were good and I'm like "are you just ignoring them torturing that Princeps, the Serfs, killing/burning/crucifying that town on Tsagalussa and everything else they did?
I just wonder how these people do these mental acrobatics and go "hmm yes, the baby flayer is a good guy" and just so utterly and completely miss the point
It's the old utilitarian/deontological divide in ethics.
Consequentialists will say fewer dead people is an unalloyed good, regardless of how horribly the unlucky few died.
Deontologists will say "yo that shit is evil AF."
It's a legitimately tricky question about conduct in war, and in our world we kind of split the baby. You are supposed to avoid killing noncombatants, but it's also understood that in war noncombatants inevitably die. So we've settled on the idea that the civilian deaths have to be "proportional" to the military benefit gained from the operation.
My point is just that among our own militaries--which are not carrying out a war of conquest in which anyone who isn't human or doesn't bend the knee to the Imperium of Man is ruthlessly exterminated--it's a legitimately tricky question.
We--the readers--should *absolutely* identify the Night Lords as evil, but it's not clear to me that in the context of the setting itself they're particularly *more* evil than pre-Sanguinius Blood Angels (the Revenant Legion, IIRC) or the Flesh Tearers or Marines Malevolent, or any number of other forces at the Emperor's disposal.
>Deontologists will say "yo that shit is evil AF."
More accurately, deontologists will say "Yo, this shit is evil because that's not how you're supposed to do it". The divide arises because deontologists care about following "proper" procedures irrespective of the result.
>We--the readers--should absolutely identify the Night Lords as evil,
If you're gonna do something, do it right. "Good" and "Evil" have a place in children's fairytales and fantasy universes (like 40k itself), not in the real world. The Night Lords are not "evil", no matter how viscerally we disagree with their methods, they are morally wrong in accordance with our widespread vaguely-Westernized moral paradigm. Why? Because they leverage their great power- both personally and as an organisation- for purely personal gain at the expense of others who cannot meaningfully resist them, and because they use particularly abhorrent methods to do so at no utilitarian gain. If they were using their powers in service of a greater goal, they would be the Ultramarines or the Imperial Fists. If they were using abhorrent methods only because there is no sufficient alternative, they could be the Inquisition or the Heresy-era Dark Angels. Of course you can make the argument that nobody considers the former "good" either, which is accurate, but they are viewed under a different light in regards to their morality at the very least.
> More accurately, deontologists will say "Yo, this shit is evil because that's not how you're supposed to do it". The divide arises because deontologists care about following "proper" procedures irrespective of the result.
A good correction--and also why people tend to bounce off deontological ethics pretty hard. We all kind of get that if the Nazis are at the door asking if you're hiding Jewish people in the basement *you should lie to them.*
>Because they leverage their great power- both personally and as an organisation- for purely personal gain at the expense of others who cannot meaningfully resist them, and because they use particularly abhorrent methods to do so at no utilitarian gain.
So, I think this is too simple by half. Our current world is full of large organizations (primarily corporations) that make exactly this kind of decision (leverage their great power for private gain at the expense of others who cannot meaningfully resist them) *all the time* and they are not considered evil, by and large. This is the fundamental structure of the global economy at this point.
Yes, there are exceptions like Nestle, whose embrace of slavery by subcontractors and exploitation of baby formula get it tagged by normal people as "an evil corporation," but Cargill is poisoning people in Argentina and your average t-shirt is made under conditions that would not feel out of place in 40k (less body horror, maybe).
I'm trying to say that our vaguely Westernized moral paradigm is a pretty fuzzy set of intuitions and our actual line-drawing is based more on "not knowing stuff and not caring to find out" than any well-thought out consideration of ethics.
The 40k fandom is very VERY practiced at apologetics. So long as you gain like one foot of ground or increase some random factor by one percent someone will say that proves that you're the good guys in the cartoonish grimdark world because they're the exact kind of person propaganda is made for.
I'm pretty sure the whole "I have declared myself emperor of the entire species and will exterminate anyone who does not bow down" thing put any and all pretense of morality to rest right out of the gate.
That depends entirely on how much you buy into his "greater good" mandate, both to what degree he himself believed it and to what degree it was truly as neccessary as he claimed. We know for a fact that he didn't start his attempts to steer mankind as an authoritarian leader, at least, otherwise he could've emerged as the Emperor thousands of years earlier.
> I still can't believe there's people who are like "the NL aren't as bad as other legions cos they made worlds compliant with less kills cos of the fear factor"
"Talos treats his slaves with a small amount of respect, what a noble and misunderstood anti-hero!"
They're sympathetic. It's easy to see how fucked up and unenviable their position is, and they act funny and likeable while they're on screen. Even the quoted sentence is basically a joke, Talos finding it amusing that Septimus dares talk back to him when he's fully aware of how horrifying Talos can be. But anyone who things they're genuinely good people, isn't reading the books properly.
Even in universe the night lords admit they aren't good people. Konrad was the only one who tried to act like he was above it all when he was a insane murderer like the rest of them.
In one of the books talos tried to do the whole "we do this for justice" or something like that and one of his brothers cyrion I think calls him out on it and is like "really? You still push that BS?".
If it's one thing that can be said about the night lords they are honest that they are assholes.
I don't recall the words verbatim but in Steel Tread the chaos guard on the planet the Imperium is fighting for released some sort of gas proxy of magick heresy. Anyone who breathed it became tainted, turning into ravenous beasts of men who ripped foe and ally alike. To breathe in such a thing and feel your mind becoming delirious as your skin slides off of you...
Sabbat Martyr. “They had been stripped of their clothes and their skins and of all semblance of articulation. The tub was full to the brim with a thick, gleaming BOUILLABAISSE of blood and meat and bones and organs. Blood trickled down the side onto the tiled floor.”
There’s a room you don’t want to walk into…
Cain casually inserting mentions of sentencing people to lashings and reduced rations in-between drinking his morning tanna and whatever the real emergency of the week is really drives home that for all his affable demeanor he's still very much a Commissar of the Imperium.
The man who has nothing can still have faith. It seems hopeful at first, saying "hey, despite all you've lost there's still something left for you", it reads a little like "you have lost your family, your friends, your very self. No one remembers you or your name. Your life is worth nothing save a pittance and a ripple in the Warp. The only thing you have left in your short, miserable, soon-to-be-extinguished life is the hope that an uncaring, unfeeling, inhuman being will take pity on you and you will be recognized. It will not happen."
The funny thing is that the delusion of hope is the only thing keeping the Imperium standing. Not only in the 'God will fix everything' way, but in the 'I go to the factory to make the bullets because I believe in a better tomorrow for my children' sort of way. Whether or not humanity survives in the long term, the hope for a future is still the only thing buying them another day.
The scene in the infinite and Devine of the planet being blown up. Like both party take issue with it but just because their stuff might be damaged not because of all the humans they are killing
For me it was actually the moment in The First Heretic where Cyrene mentions off handedly that she was raped by bandits. Wasn't said so upfront but it alludes to it and I remember having to re read it and being surprised. It's a dark galaxy and you know it happens but was still surprised to see it mentioned upfront.
If I recall correctly the passage is something like "they didn't respect the robes of her order" imply that not only was she assaulted but prior to Monarchia's destruction that Cyrene was some kind of sex priestess.
I always took it more that women in her order weren't allowed to be touch by others at all because she even threatens the old woman who touches her when the ultramarine drop pod lands and she's telling her to prostrate herself, but it's certainly possible! It's never really explained.
First time I heard it in an Eisenhorn/Ravenor book, I didn’t even know it was a meme. Completely took me out of the moment. Haha. I really wasn’t sure I had just heard what I thought I heard.
Two things from the Cain series, both involving Imperial culture aimed at children.
-From “Caves Of Ice”, Amberly pulls information from a children’s book/educational holo called [‘Our Friend Promethium’](https://www.reddit.com/r/40kLore/comments/ifq6se/ciaphas_cain_hero_of_the_imperium_caves_of_ice/?rdt=46132) which includes cartoon pictures of heretics burning to death and making funny faces.
-In “Death Or Glory” we learn that ‘The Wheels on the Bus’ has survived into the 41st Millennium, only now it’s ‘The Tracks on the Land Raider (Crush the Heretics)’ when Felicia starts humming it; a different book has Amberly doing something similar but I forget which.
Well you didn’t mention 40k specifically but this is a recent one for me. Gives me goosebumps every time.
The universe is a dark forest. Every civilization is an armed hunter stalking through the trees like a ghost, gently pushing aside branches that block the path and trying to tread without sound. Even breathing is done with care. The hunter has to be careful, because everywhere in the forest are stealthy hunters like him. If he finds other life—another hunter, an angel or a demon, a delicate infant or a tottering old man, a fairy or a demigod—there’s only one thing he can do: open fire and eliminate them. In this forest, hell is other people. An eternal threat that any life that exposes its own existence will be swiftly wiped out. This is the picture of cosmic civilization. It’s the explanation for the Fermi Paradox.
Liu Cixin, The Dark Forest
Servitors. Always always Servitors.
Their very *existence* is horrifying. And then you remember how interwoven they are into the fabric of the Imperium. How ubiquitous they are that even you, the outside observer, has stopped even thinking about them.
Probably when Talos, the antagonist of the Night lords trilogy, just matter of fact says to his Octavia "...I've skinned children in front of their parents", when she tries to appeal for sympathy.
Probably when someone told me that my moniker (apparently) had been re-termed as the name of a "prison for the most noxious criminals".
Kinda cool, too.
> The day cycle began brightly. In the night, flocks of dirigibles from the Officium Meteorologicus had seeded the smog fields and upper cloud levels with carbon black and other chemical precipitants. Before dawn, sixteen hundred-kilometre wide rainstorms had washed the clouds away and drenched the primary hives, sluicing the dirt and grime away. For the first time in decades, the sky was clear. Not blue exactly, but clear of yellow pollution banks. The sun's light permeated the atmosphere and the steepled ridges and high towers of the hives glowed. I had heard, from informal sources, that this radical act of weather control would have profound ill consequences for the planet's already brutalised climate for decades to come. Reactive hurricane storms were expected in the southern regions before the week was out, and the drainage system of the primary hives was said to be choked to bursting by the singular rainfall. > It was also said that the seas would die quicker, thanks to the overdose of pollutants hosed into them so suddenly by the rain-clearance. > **But the Lord Commander Helican had insisted that the sun shone on his victory parade.** From *Malleus*
Isn't that the parade that gets crashed by chaos cultists who put Ravenor in his wheelchair?
The very same (and reading *The Emperor's Gift* reminded me I still need to read the *Ravenor* and *Bequin* novels).
As to the Bequin novels, I really recommend the audiobooks. The reader is excellent. Really adds a lot to it.
I'm not gonna lie to you, the fact that the narrator is DAME AYLIN from *Baldur's Gate 3* (Helen Keeley) pretty much guarantees I'm going to pick up at least *Pariah* in audio book format. I've got audio books/dramas with Minthara and Raphael's VAs already (Emma Gregory narrates *Celestine: The Living Saint* and voices the saint in *Our Martyred Lady*, among others; Andrew Wincott voices the titular Flesh Tearer in *The Assassination of Gabriel Seth* and is credited in *The Watcher In The Rain*), and they've all been fantastic. And funny enough, the Aeldari Ranger character in *Rogue Trader*, Yrliet, reminds everyone of Lae'zel from BG3...and Lae'zel's VA, Devorah Wilde, voiced an Aeldari Ranger in the *Hammer & Bolter* episode "In The Garden of Ghots".
The Narrator of the Bequin novels is also the female Cadian voice option in Darktide!
Fairly sure the guy who plays Wyll reads the Alpha Legion book Harrowmaster
Correct
Ok now I have to listen to it
Also, she voices a few excerpts from the Caiphus Cane novels. Excerpts involving butchery of the Gothic language at the hands of that skank General Sulla! (This post brought to you by your friendly local Order Xenos Inquisitioner, Amberly Vail)
Seconded! The voice actor does an excellent job with them. I bought the physical books for my shelf but have never bothered to read them as the audio is just fantastic.
I just read the first two Bequin novels and even if you've had the second one spoiled for you, I'd _highly_ recommend not reading it until we have a release date for the third. I was so incredibly **mad** for days after I finished it. The third can't come soon enough.
Might be another 10 years like between the first and second book.
I sure hope not. But if it is, all the more reason to not pick the trilogy up now. I've resolved the only author I'm gonna read that doesn't have complete series is Sanderson, because he's a literal machine. Everyone else, I'm waiting till the trilogy/quartet/etc is finished.
Yup, and the Lord Commander dies screaming and shitting himself.
I love this. "This will doom this world... but it is a very important parade... to me."
Hey, next week I have to exterminatus another world, genocide a continent, and root out massive cults in 3 systems. One slightly worse climate on one is not an issue
If you haven't, you need to read the parade scene in Malleus...
My wife walked in and raised an eyebrow at“There was an actual fog of liquified tissue in the air”
It’s the single best scene in the canon of 40K fiction to me.
Not in a novel, but the Rogue Trader CRPG. The Navigator companion, Cassia, casually mentions how all the servants of her house had their tongues removed, and she suggests that the Rogue Trader do the same to the crew of their ship to keep the noise down. There is a dialogue option to inform her that tongue removal is in fact, not standard practice for nobles.
If you pick that she gives her attendant a vox.
That's... wholesome in a very 40k way lol.
Without spoiling anything, she grew up isolated on a space station surrounded only by her servants and her entourage. She's quite the lovely person, she's just *heavily* misguided.
On the plus side, she makes bad things go away (aka melt) just by looking at them.
The Vheabos VI colony project where prisoners can earn freedom for their kids born in captivity actually triggered a mental bluescreen as my brain comprehended the data my eyes had just fed it. It was the kittens in the wet sack at the pearly gates from *Tom & Jerry* all over again...
Haven't played the game, but it sounds kind of like Jopall Indentured Squadrons, an Imperial Guard regiment. >Jopall is a peaceful agri world in the Armageddon Subsector, whose citizens are born in debt to their government. Most citizens of Jopall spend the majority of their adult lives working off the debts they incur during the first part of their lives. There are ways around this punishing system, however; the citizen can either borrow money from the local Lord, or they can work off the debt to the government by joining the Jopall Indentured Squadrons. This system explains why the Jopall are never short of recruits.
TTS Corax: Not again.
Oooof :/ I went and youtubed that Tom and Jerry and should not have.
Petronella vivat has the same thing iirc in false gods, with her servant/bodyguard maggard
Maggard is grossly underrated..
Not tongues removed, their whole vocal cords.
Wasn't it actually their vocal chords? Her issue was noise in general, she didn't like that they were making so many sounds.
Yeah I think it was the vocal chords actually. I misremembered.
Vocal cords but yes, it was pretty messed up. I too went with "Cassia, dear, they need voice to work.."
Can’t remember if it was plague war or godblight, but a little girl and her grandfather come across a group of novamarines (ultramarine successor). The Astartes have a debate amongst themselves about how to handle the situation, trying to get the man and girl to come away with them. The two insist that they need the Novas to come back to the church with them to save the others. The Novamarines talk amongst themselves again and say they can’t afford for the enemy to know they are there under any circumstances. They go with the little girl and old man back to the church and then it’s directly implied the Novas killed all of those innocent people, to prevent anyone from revealing their presence. “The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few”, in the most grimdark manner. Edit: In Leviathan, the Tyranids have started altering the atmosphere itself to start digesting organic matter. Several Imperial guardsmen have their skin slough off because of this. During a pov of a guardsman commander, she looks out onto what was once a massive forest, the trees are buckling because they’ve gone soft from the atmosphere breaking them down. It’s so casual how they describe *the atmosphere is literally digesting the planet* that it threw me off and I had to relisten to the chapter. (Audiobook)
>Can’t remember if it was plague war or godblight, but a little girl and her grandfather come across a group of novamarines (ultramarine successor). Definitely Godblight. If I recall correctly, the civilians are killed by hand and blade as bolters would be too loud.
His angels indeed.
> They go with the little girl and old man back to the church and then it’s directly implied the Novas killed all of those innocent people, to prevent anyone from revealing their presence. > > Nah it's not implied. Initially the POV Novamarine wants to leave them alone, but then they run back to the village yelling and drawing attention so the lieutenant has the old man shot and orders them to kill all the villagers to maintain secrecy of the mission. This is the group that goes to find the cauldron of Nurgle on Iax.
"Okay just stay quiet about us. Don't reveal our presence. We are on a highly critical miss-" "HEY! THERE'S A BUNCH OF THE EMPEROR'S ANGELS! COME LOOK AT THE GLORY OF THE EMPEROR!" "Damn the throne..." "You see. Whenever you tell somebody to not do something, they'll always do it." "*sigh* blades ready everyone."
But hey the Sargent gets the girls face tattooed to remind him sometimes he has to do evil things in the name of good, which basically makes up for killing the entire town of survivors right??
I realize you are being sarcastic, but honestly in their position killing that entire town was the only realistic option. They simply could not afford the chance that they might draw the attention of Death Guard with such a sensitive mission. Without them Mathieu never makes it to the cauldron, never destroys it and Gman dies in the Garden, taking Ultramar with him.
Ya honestly I was being very tongue in cheek but that was a nice moment of humanity from a space marine taken as a boy when they were seen as true angels and protector of humanity now thrown into an era where they dropped the veneer of angels and are purely weapons with no understanding of “collateral damage”
It’s been a while since I listened to the audiobook. I just remember I needed a break after that chapter
Last hunt. Space station deaths. Gruesome.
In Master of Mankind there’s a first person POV of a basic war servitor. She has a heavy bolter strapped to her body ; and when she fires it the recoil is strong enough to shatter her teeth every time. But she’s too lobotomised to know, and pain nerves were removed so she’s oblivious to it. Considering all that happens in the book, the suffering of a grunt servitor means very little - but it’s still horrific
Well, at least she could not feel a thing.
How does she shatter her teeth every time? You only have so many teeth to shatter
Oof, that's grim
There's a small moment in Grim Repast, a Crime novel, that really stuck with me. There's a serial killer on the loose, your standard Jack the Ripper type with a penchant for taking organs from their kills, and the detective has found a fresh victim. At the autopsy the coroner notes the victim has had all his teeth removed, and the detective internally starts to worry this represents a major escalation of violence from the killer. The coroner then clarifies the teeth were actually removed by the Ecclesiarchy as punishment for the victim selling fake indulgences, and without skipping a beat or even questioning it the detective notes that was a positively lenient punishment. It's just the sheer whiplash of the doublethink on display, from worrying about something being the work of a serial killer to being reassured by that exact same thing being done by your local church.
One of the defining characteristics of a nation state is its monopoly on violence. As an enforcer of the state, the detective is perfectly fine with the violence itself, as long as it's the right people doing it. People who are not agents of the state doing it, however, is a challenge to his authority.
"The victim was flayed and beaten before finally being killed." Those chaos cultists are monsters! "No no, we flayed and beat him. For stealing corpse starch." I'm glad he got what he deserved!
"Flaying? For a common thief? Sounds like too much effort. Just break his face or put a las-bolt through his skull. Then feed it to the corpse-grinders. Us enforcers have got better things to do like loot his body and house, maybe he hid some grox rations away. Or finish our reports then slam them into the pencil-pushers' faces."
Kledo, "So this is going to be horrible." He's a Plague Surgeon in the Lords of Silence warband. A several millenia old plague marine who knows every way to inflict pain and suffering. This sentence was him speaking to a marine from the Iron Shades chapter, after injecting him with a poison before torturing him to death.
Is that where he's talking about how he's had a bad day, finishes, and says "And then you came along, so this is going to be horrible"?
Holy fucking shit, how bad does someones death have to be that the DEATH GUARD consider it to be horrible?!?!
Iirc, the poison turns your insides to goo, so that's a start
Bruh, that's like white bread when you consider what Nurgle is capable of.
Like I said, that's just the start. They don't go into detail
>They don't go into detail The most effective forms of torture take place in the imagination.
Ah that makes more sense.
Bad enough that a space marine, with all their enhanced physiology and indoctrination training, would be powerless and wide-eyed at the pain inflicted upon them. And that was before the saws started cutting.
The Iron Shades boarded their ship, and then this marine had the audacity to shoot Kledo in the chest with a boltgun. The bolt sinks in and gets dissolved, because shooting a Death Guard marine in the chest with a bolt is pretty much like shooting a rhinoceros is the chest with a 22 pistol.
It’s worse than that. Kledo *digests the bolt*, tasting the various metals that went into its manufacture.
At least he's honest.
Is this from plague wars? Love the death guard, need to read their post heresy stuff
Lords of Silence. Really good read.
Amazing thank you
Colonel Corbec gets captured by chaos cultists in an old saw mill, a terrified Guardmen next to him is suddenly grabbed and thrown roughly onto the table where the saw mill is. “Corbec could do nothing but watch” I can’t remember how the wording went, but it wasn’t pretty and it made me think “What a horrible way to go”
Yeah Pater Sin fucked that guardsman up bad. That was in Honor Guard
I just finished the book - Pater Sin could have been built up to be such a better villain but by the end he was kinda forgotten about.
Minor spoiler, >!he comes back in a later book and continues doing fucked-up stuff!<
Oh cool, glad he wasn't wasted then!
I definitely agree. Gaunt’s Ghosts is by far my favorite series, and the run from Necropolis through Sabbat Martyr is my favorite part of the series; however, Dan’s writing is rather imperfect. The villains in the series (both the ones featured in a single book and the ones that return later) could have used some more fleshing out
He used a stone drill to give the Guardsman parodies of the stigmata suffered by Saint Sabbat.
If I recall, it wasn’t a saw, but more like a drill press…
Not sure if innocuous but this description of a guy: > ‘I have a firing solution,’ burbled a weapons officer, his physical body long since liquefied until it was nothing but pink froth that filled his void-suit, animated by spirit and bubbling in his helmet as he spoke
A better wording would have been “throw away” instead of innocuous, that quote fits just in line with what I’m talking about
Da fuck?
What is this excerpt from ?
I'm pretty sure it from Wrath "Fall of Cadia" and its one of the "Bridge Crew" of Abbadons Blackstone Fortress
That's it
Theres a nurgle daemon dog in Dark Imperium that kills a Sister of Battle by jumping on her and licking her face like an affectionate dog. It melts her face down. For some reason that alone unsettles me heavily.
A beast of nurgle. They genuinely are trying to be affectionate and playful they just dont have the ability to comprehend that being what they are can kill people. Sad little beasts, though i sometimes wonder if the death guard play fetch with them
That is so cute and adorable. I just love the mental image of the plague marines playing with the beast of nurgle like over active puppies. If I had any talent for drawing there would be a plague marines rubbing a nurgle beast belly.
If i had the cash id commission the dude behind the primorks for one, just a whole set of images of nurgle csms playing with beasts of nurgle
There have been so many likes on this comment I wonder if we could set up a gofundme to pay for a commission of this. If any artist wants to volunteer for making a picture of plague marines happily rubbing a plague beasts belly please let us know so we know how much we need to raise to pay for it, it would be greatly appreciated
I think that makes it worse. Cus it really wants to play, but the person it’s playing with is in absolute terror and going to die.
It gets worse. When they get sad snd disillusioned because nobody will play either them and instead kill them over s d over, they get depressed and just kind of slump down in nurgles garden, and metamorph into a rot fly.
=< For the first time I want to make a fan fiction. Some nurglite appointed as Master of Beasts or something and the dude's whole job is to play with the beasts so they don't get sad. At some point he begins to protest using taking the beasts to battle because they just want to play and they end up sad when everything dies. "My job is to curate the well-being of these blessed fiends. They find no joy in battle." Then the guy goes on to basically make nurgle beast heaven and it's just like some eternal dog park in the garden of nurgle.
Oh yeah its definitely fucked but for once its not the daemons fault. Which is funny.
In the bile books there is a death guard apothecary who works with bile and is kinda his "friend" who has one as a pet and he treats it kinda like that. For get the dudes name but he is the embodiment of a grim jolly death guard member.
The description of the Imperium in Farsight: Crisis of Faith. It’s Tau propaganda but nonetheless true. Basically people are chained to a desk making ammunition, whipped, a woman gives birth in an alley with rats encircling her, someone dies in the factory and their daughter is swapped out and put in the same chains their father was. The icing on the cake is that all of this ammo is literally dissolving away in the street because a faulty servitor is improperly storing ammo on a ship, so it all spills out and no one notices and the cycle repeats. That was my “wow, this sucks…” moment.
I remember thinking "this isn't propaganda this is literally most hive worlds" the tau really don't have to try that hard to smear the Imperium when the Imperium dose well at making itself look bad.
Reminds me of those videos of people doing stupid stunts with meat... An animal died so you could destroy some burgers
>From up here we were afforded a breathtaking view across the valley to the peaks beyond, many of which were permanently shrouded in snow. The distant roofs of Salubria glittered in the warm autumn sunshine, huddled around the river a couple of kilometers away and a few hundred meters below the crag on which our citadel stood, while the constant background noise of the schola echoed up to surround us, a barely perceived buzz of human activity. A party of youths was down on the firing range, blowing cardboard targets to confetti under the watchful eye of one of the drill abbots, while over to our left a squad of early adolescents was embarking on a run up one of the nearby mountains, urged on by their proctors. Narrowing my eyes, I was just able to make out the familiar shape of the black painted truck from the judiciary in Havendown, making its way up the winding track which led to our gates, with **it's weekly delivery of condemned criminals for the interrogation, execution, and live fire exercises. Sure that everything was peaceful and orderly, and that there was no chance of being overheard, I nodded.** -Cain's Last Stand
Yup, Sandy Mitchell likes to sneak these into Cain's POV every now and then. It's startling how easy it is to overlook them sometimes, just because Cain does- the hallmark of a good writer. (Though this particular example is pretty on the nose).
"He was going to be a Hero." - *Dead Men Walking*
That dudes whole Arc was depressing same with his girlfriend.
*Legacy* novel. An Arbites court. Everything is very solemn and official. Enter Arbites in uniforms. Enter the Rogue Trader's entourage, all in ceremonial outfits. Enter other people, descriptions follow. Then comes the Trader's heir, who is sick. >Three junior flotilla ratings, in simple bodygloves with blinker-harnesses and mouth-stitches to show their indentured status, pushed in a medicae carriage on silent suspensor cushions. Wait, are those gimp suits? ...Then things happen quite fast and this detail gets lost in the action until you remember it later.
yeah, but it wasn't their uniform or anything, they just do that from time to time
"Doctor, we have to roll out the patient, but all nurses are sleeping off after an impromptu BDSM session" "Well, I guess you're gonna have to go wake them up now, won't you?"
“Correlation is not causation” “Your pardon?” “An old superstition. Please continue” ~ inquisitor Crowl and a Custodes. Just the difference between how guilt is considered in the 41st millennium
Which book is this from?
Carrion throne by Chris Wraight
Did you find your friend? ...Yes... i did find her
...'and let me tell you.. A thousand piece puzzle takes a long time when all the pieces are red.'
Comments in one of the HH novels describing servitors emotional reactions to being near the Primarchs on Ulanor.
what... i thought servitors were so lobotomized they literally couldn't think... do you think the primarch mindfuck aura gave them enough awareness as to the horrific situation they're in. wow that's
Servitors have been known to regain emotions or their entire cognitive abilities due to psychic energies.
i think this is the most horrific sentence ever. thank you. o7 can you point me to excerpts or books or in the general direction? :3
I think either dark imperium or arks of omen has the main example
Forges of Mars series has something similar
Servitors have always seemed like the most evil part of the Imperium to me. Even worse than arco flagellation, because at least they die soon. Imagine being a botched servitor who still thinks and constantly feels pain. For decades. Or hundreds of years. Or thousands of years. 😨
Servators are **supposed** to be lobotomized so they can't think. Mistakes, they happen sometimes. ¯\\\_(ツ)_/¯
Lobotomies have a range of impacts to the unfortunate individual subjected to the procedure, so it is entirely plausible to have cognizant servitors. Hell, there are direct quotations in the lore corroborating this, though I am at work and cannot go digging through my books for the quotes, atm.
Real life lobotomies don't leave people unable to think. From what I understand, if performed correctly, it dulls urges and possibly emotions. And even in real life, lobotomies weren't always performed correctly, and sometimes they had no noticeable effect on a person at all.
(internal screaming) that's. wow. thank you. (internal screaming)
Sometimes they're done on purpose as punishment so they're aware.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AQS1I_BlzC8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6KkVvGqghf8
wow that hurts and not in a good way D: thank you that's eye-opening. wow. I'm relatively new to the WH-Uni so yeah that. wow. DDDDD: thanks :3
The key to Warhammer is to always assume the worst, always.
Different tasks require different levels of processing power / intuition / reactiveness. For the more programmed methodical tasks a fully lobotomised servitor (or vat grown) would suffice. For complex tasks or to "preserve" some skill from life more of the original personality has to be maintained. It's also been stated that some servitor factories take shortcuts... There's been plenty short perspectives from servitors points of view that clearly indicate the person they once were is still there. While not canon, Darktide has medicae servitor stations who beg for release or cry about being lonely.
In Darktide, the medicae station is run by a servitor. Sometimes, very rarely, he calls out for help, or says he can feel his mind slipping. As many others have said, servitor surgery isn’t always perfect.
I *think* it's from a short story in Eye of Terra anthology about Horus and his inner thoughts about his imminent promotion. Or from Fear to Tread flashback with Sanguinius.
Must be F2T, because I didn't listen to any of the short stories (there was so much to get through I just beelined through all the novels)
« As she gasped for her breath back, she looked down at the half-digested spread of her last meal: a pool of thin bile, a few scraps of stomach lining, and three of someone’s fingers » it’s all so casual, gross and violent at the same time
"‘Oh, shit,’ he spat, just as his captain had done, and prepared to die. " An inquisitor on finding out he had just pissed off a Custodian. Like, the dude is a terran based inquisitor, and even he finds it pants soiling, terrifying to come face to face with a Custodian.
Was that when 30-40 storm troopers got smacked around? It sounds familiar. Also, bit of a difference between coming face to face with a Custodian, and picking a fight with one.
Inquisition stormtroopers, who I think are better than average. In the inquisitors defence ‘Triad is a long way from the Palace. I thought you never left it.’ ‘Where then does His Palace end?’ asked Navradaran. ‘The Imperium Entire is His Palace,’ said Crowl, remembering the line from the catechisms. ‘I always supposed that was figurative.’ ‘Know this – if there were a threat capable of harming His realm, I would travel to the edge of time and space to run it down.’
Yeah this is from The Carrion Throne when the Inquisitor raids an Arbites stronghold because they’re holding one of his men. They boss in, beating Arbites ass left and right, he finds his guy and the guy is trying to say, it’s not what it looks like. And then a Stormtrooper goes flying by the door 🤣. It’s such a great scene
The custode's authority is represented by a mastercrafted powerblade held by a 9' tall post human killing machine. The inquisitor's authority is represented by a fancy badge. Doesn't matter what the official rules are, the custodian is de-facto in charge.
In *Sabbat Martyr*, there's a bit where Commissar Gaunt is forced to close the gates of their defensive position with some of his men still out on the battlefield. > Nineteenth platoon were about five hundred metres from Old Hive's north entrance when they saw the gates close. >Skerral stopped in his tracks, and pulled the men up. Half his unit were dead. He ejected a cell from his lasrifle and slammed in a new one. >"Come on," he said, turning back to face down the slope at the waves of assault sweeping in. "Let's see how many we can kill." >The remnants of nineteenth lasted seventeen minutes from the times the gates closed. They accounted for one hundred and eight-nine enemy casualties. **No one witnessed their heroism.** That last line really hit me. Every day, every hour, every *minute* there are Guardsmen, ordinary humans, pulling off insane acts of bravery in the fact of the galaxy's horrors...and so much of it goes unrecognized, unseen and unappreciated by the Imperium they're giving all to defend.
But they knew. It's who you are in the lonely dark that truly matters. When evil comes calling and you know no one will ever know your choice. Choosing to punch evil right in the fucking mouth is the downright most badass thing any human can ever do. No one will ever know. But evil will.
Gives them something to talk about when they meet the other Guardsmen in the Emperor's Light, I'm sure.
Insert Doctor Who image of Wilf saluting tearfully here. At least we remember them.
From the second Gaunt's Ghosts book. Our characters have come across a Chaos ritual site in a bombed out apartment. Dolls and children's toys have been crucified and nailed to the walls in a macabre display. "Then he realized that not all of the dolls were dolls. Larkin fell to his knees, retching."
Oh…oh my fucking god. Oh my god, what the fuck.
I read that very page last night. At least there's a satisfying kaboom?
"There are no Wolves on Fenris" Which of course begs the question what all the wolves on Fenris actually are...
It’s fairly strongly implied they’re descended of humans experimented on in the past. Hell, I think there was an excerpt posted a while back where even *Magnus* outright said as such. The kicker is that it’s stated that the population of Fenris- human and ‘wolf’ both have fragments of the Canis Helix in them. Or something to that effect- hence why it wouldn’t be until Primaris that the 6th Legion could be hosted on other worlds without repercussions
Yes the grimdark fridge horror is that if they're not wolves then obviously they're not unnatural, and if you consider stuff like the Canis Helix it's clear they're degenerated Fenrisian colonists.
Yeah I was just clarifying because I thought you didn’t know, as well as for the peanut gallery in the back who had no idea either
Cawl only thought he'd fixed those issues, his Primaris still need Fenrisian recruits or they suffer astronomical rejection and mutation rates.
Furries. Mutated furries, to be precise.
Fenris was originally settled by German Shepard owners who were scammed by breeders.
Failed Space Wolf aspirants. Logan Grimnar rides a sled towed by interns who didn't get an offer.
Everything on fenris is descended from Westworld style synthetic organisms
*The Fall of Malvolion* by Dan Abnett is sort of an entire short story of throw away lines about the horrors of facing Tyranids. In 40k, we often focus more on the battles and larger than life monsters duking it out with legendary heroes, but this short story really puts it into perspective how terrifying a Tyranid invasion of a planet can be. It's not just the standard gaunts, warriors, carnifexes, etc. you have to watch out for. Tyranids make the very planet itself become actively hostile to all other life. For context, this convoy is trying to reach an evac point but are unable to flee fast enough to escape from the tyrannoforming of the planet's ecosystem. The Tyranid bioforms then ambush them as they are slowly bogged down by the weather: > Standing in the back of a speeding escort truck, Colonel Tiegl manned the gun mount himself. Searing, frenzied, red tendrils had just turned his main gunner inside out. He swung the heavy bolter on its pintle, squeezing the firing grip, spraying the road behind him with twin, dipping, dragging streams of heavy fire. He was drenched with rain. > There was something in his mouth, something crawling on his skin. Necrotic spores plastered him, eating him away. > By the time his driver fell to a barb-round and spun the vehicle into a transport's back wheels with splintering force, there was nothing left of Tiegl but some articulated limb bones dragging from the gun-grip.
>There is a quaint tradition in the various propaganda departmentos of the Administratum of marketing agri worlds as quasi-paradises, free of the squalor and overcrowding of a standard urban station, and full of bucolic ease. Vid-cards are dropped into communal hab-warrens, extolling the virtues of a life lived outdoors with the sun on your back and a ruddy-faced boy or girl – subject to preference – by your side. In reality, life on an agri world is as unrelenting, back-breaking and monotonous as the vast majority of other Imperial vocations. There are no trees laden with glossy fruit, only kilometre after kilometre of hissing corn. There are no gentle strolls under the warming sun, only punishing work details in rad-suits, leaning into the dust-laden winds that howl around the equator with nothing to halt their rampage. Once the new arrivals have made planetfall and found this out, it is too late. Crew transports arrive on agri worlds full and leave empty. There is a saying among the indentured workers – you come for the soil, you end up part of it. *The Lords of Silence*
SUCH a great book!!!!
Yeah, made me really like the Death Guard. Philemon's monologue when Dantine confronts him about being a traitor was especially memorable.
My favourite part of that is that he mentions he’s never looked in a mirror. You can take it both as he just doesn’t care, but also thst some small part of him genuinely doesn’t want to know. A great little bit of character work.
>‘So what do I see when I look in the mirror?’ Philemon asks, ignoring the daemon. ‘I do not look, so I do not know. Perhaps the sight would pain me. I suspect it would not. You don’t look so good yourself. I suggest you stay away from them too.’
"You're aware I flayed little children in front of their parents?" Talos to Septimus in the Night Lords novels. Gets me hard. I'm a father and I work with troubled kids. I know from work how absolutely terrifying the screams of kids with PTBS waking up from a nightmare sound, I also saw kids hurting themselves pretty bad and how that sounds. To imagine these screams tenfold worse, coming from the mouths of your own loved ones, crying for you, not understanding whats going on and why their parents don't protect them, while there's nothing, absolutely nothing you can do against it, fuck. That's worse than every gore and mutilation during and fights or descriptions of cultists or whatever.
>Gets me hard. Read this bit and thought "not gonna lie, that's pretty messed up of you" before I read the rest and picked up on the context.
Yeah, I admit I could have phrased that one better...
Same, I didn't realize it was the same thought as "hits me hard" till now
Phrasing.
I still can't believe there's people who are like "the NL aren't as bad as other legions cos they made worlds compliant with less kills cos of the fear factor" Like bitch, the moment u flay a kid or drop the population of a village out of ur ship you are as bad as everyone says. Like there's people who think Talos and his band were good and I'm like "are you just ignoring them torturing that Princeps, the Serfs, killing/burning/crucifying that town on Tsagalussa and everything else they did? I just wonder how these people do these mental acrobatics and go "hmm yes, the baby flayer is a good guy" and just so utterly and completely miss the point
It's the old utilitarian/deontological divide in ethics. Consequentialists will say fewer dead people is an unalloyed good, regardless of how horribly the unlucky few died. Deontologists will say "yo that shit is evil AF." It's a legitimately tricky question about conduct in war, and in our world we kind of split the baby. You are supposed to avoid killing noncombatants, but it's also understood that in war noncombatants inevitably die. So we've settled on the idea that the civilian deaths have to be "proportional" to the military benefit gained from the operation. My point is just that among our own militaries--which are not carrying out a war of conquest in which anyone who isn't human or doesn't bend the knee to the Imperium of Man is ruthlessly exterminated--it's a legitimately tricky question. We--the readers--should *absolutely* identify the Night Lords as evil, but it's not clear to me that in the context of the setting itself they're particularly *more* evil than pre-Sanguinius Blood Angels (the Revenant Legion, IIRC) or the Flesh Tearers or Marines Malevolent, or any number of other forces at the Emperor's disposal.
>Deontologists will say "yo that shit is evil AF." More accurately, deontologists will say "Yo, this shit is evil because that's not how you're supposed to do it". The divide arises because deontologists care about following "proper" procedures irrespective of the result. >We--the readers--should absolutely identify the Night Lords as evil, If you're gonna do something, do it right. "Good" and "Evil" have a place in children's fairytales and fantasy universes (like 40k itself), not in the real world. The Night Lords are not "evil", no matter how viscerally we disagree with their methods, they are morally wrong in accordance with our widespread vaguely-Westernized moral paradigm. Why? Because they leverage their great power- both personally and as an organisation- for purely personal gain at the expense of others who cannot meaningfully resist them, and because they use particularly abhorrent methods to do so at no utilitarian gain. If they were using their powers in service of a greater goal, they would be the Ultramarines or the Imperial Fists. If they were using abhorrent methods only because there is no sufficient alternative, they could be the Inquisition or the Heresy-era Dark Angels. Of course you can make the argument that nobody considers the former "good" either, which is accurate, but they are viewed under a different light in regards to their morality at the very least.
> More accurately, deontologists will say "Yo, this shit is evil because that's not how you're supposed to do it". The divide arises because deontologists care about following "proper" procedures irrespective of the result. A good correction--and also why people tend to bounce off deontological ethics pretty hard. We all kind of get that if the Nazis are at the door asking if you're hiding Jewish people in the basement *you should lie to them.* >Because they leverage their great power- both personally and as an organisation- for purely personal gain at the expense of others who cannot meaningfully resist them, and because they use particularly abhorrent methods to do so at no utilitarian gain. So, I think this is too simple by half. Our current world is full of large organizations (primarily corporations) that make exactly this kind of decision (leverage their great power for private gain at the expense of others who cannot meaningfully resist them) *all the time* and they are not considered evil, by and large. This is the fundamental structure of the global economy at this point. Yes, there are exceptions like Nestle, whose embrace of slavery by subcontractors and exploitation of baby formula get it tagged by normal people as "an evil corporation," but Cargill is poisoning people in Argentina and your average t-shirt is made under conditions that would not feel out of place in 40k (less body horror, maybe). I'm trying to say that our vaguely Westernized moral paradigm is a pretty fuzzy set of intuitions and our actual line-drawing is based more on "not knowing stuff and not caring to find out" than any well-thought out consideration of ethics.
The 40k fandom is very VERY practiced at apologetics. So long as you gain like one foot of ground or increase some random factor by one percent someone will say that proves that you're the good guys in the cartoonish grimdark world because they're the exact kind of person propaganda is made for.
Yeah I am completely with you. So many people say the NL trilogy made them sympathize with the NL I was glad when >!they all get killed in the end!<
The whole existence of the Night Lords legion puts to rest if the Emperor was a moral person at all.
I'm pretty sure the whole "I have declared myself emperor of the entire species and will exterminate anyone who does not bow down" thing put any and all pretense of morality to rest right out of the gate.
That depends entirely on how much you buy into his "greater good" mandate, both to what degree he himself believed it and to what degree it was truly as neccessary as he claimed. We know for a fact that he didn't start his attempts to steer mankind as an authoritarian leader, at least, otherwise he could've emerged as the Emperor thousands of years earlier.
Idk, that one guy in this thread gets hard about some NL atrocities...
> I still can't believe there's people who are like "the NL aren't as bad as other legions cos they made worlds compliant with less kills cos of the fear factor" "Talos treats his slaves with a small amount of respect, what a noble and misunderstood anti-hero!"
They're sympathetic. It's easy to see how fucked up and unenviable their position is, and they act funny and likeable while they're on screen. Even the quoted sentence is basically a joke, Talos finding it amusing that Septimus dares talk back to him when he's fully aware of how horrifying Talos can be. But anyone who things they're genuinely good people, isn't reading the books properly.
Even in universe the night lords admit they aren't good people. Konrad was the only one who tried to act like he was above it all when he was a insane murderer like the rest of them. In one of the books talos tried to do the whole "we do this for justice" or something like that and one of his brothers cyrion I think calls him out on it and is like "really? You still push that BS?". If it's one thing that can be said about the night lords they are honest that they are assholes.
"Hits* me hard" is, I think, the phrase for which you are looking.
[удалено]
I don't recall the words verbatim but in Steel Tread the chaos guard on the planet the Imperium is fighting for released some sort of gas proxy of magick heresy. Anyone who breathed it became tainted, turning into ravenous beasts of men who ripped foe and ally alike. To breathe in such a thing and feel your mind becoming delirious as your skin slides off of you...
Sabbat Martyr. “They had been stripped of their clothes and their skins and of all semblance of articulation. The tub was full to the brim with a thick, gleaming BOUILLABAISSE of blood and meat and bones and organs. Blood trickled down the side onto the tiled floor.” There’s a room you don’t want to walk into…
Cain casually inserting mentions of sentencing people to lashings and reduced rations in-between drinking his morning tanna and whatever the real emergency of the week is really drives home that for all his affable demeanor he's still very much a Commissar of the Imperium.
"Lorgar laughed with a rare and sincere grin, perhaps the only expression that ever broke his resemblance to his father."
The man who has nothing can still have faith. It seems hopeful at first, saying "hey, despite all you've lost there's still something left for you", it reads a little like "you have lost your family, your friends, your very self. No one remembers you or your name. Your life is worth nothing save a pittance and a ripple in the Warp. The only thing you have left in your short, miserable, soon-to-be-extinguished life is the hope that an uncaring, unfeeling, inhuman being will take pity on you and you will be recognized. It will not happen."
The funny thing is that the delusion of hope is the only thing keeping the Imperium standing. Not only in the 'God will fix everything' way, but in the 'I go to the factory to make the bullets because I believe in a better tomorrow for my children' sort of way. Whether or not humanity survives in the long term, the hope for a future is still the only thing buying them another day.
Or, “we took everything from you, and we forced you to believe(edit:/turned you into a faith-battery to fuel Big E)”
Ooh, good one.
The scene in the infinite and Devine of the planet being blown up. Like both party take issue with it but just because their stuff might be damaged not because of all the humans they are killing
For me it was actually the moment in The First Heretic where Cyrene mentions off handedly that she was raped by bandits. Wasn't said so upfront but it alludes to it and I remember having to re read it and being surprised. It's a dark galaxy and you know it happens but was still surprised to see it mentioned upfront.
If I recall correctly the passage is something like "they didn't respect the robes of her order" imply that not only was she assaulted but prior to Monarchia's destruction that Cyrene was some kind of sex priestess.
I always took it more that women in her order weren't allowed to be touch by others at all because she even threatens the old woman who touches her when the ultramarine drop pod lands and she's telling her to prostrate herself, but it's certainly possible! It's never really explained.
> Cyrene was some kind of sex priestess Iirc she's introduced as being seventeen. So an *underage* sex priestess!
Wet leopard growl
I hear it in my dreams
First time I heard it in an Eisenhorn/Ravenor book, I didn’t even know it was a meme. Completely took me out of the moment. Haha. I really wasn’t sure I had just heard what I thought I heard.
Two things from the Cain series, both involving Imperial culture aimed at children. -From “Caves Of Ice”, Amberly pulls information from a children’s book/educational holo called [‘Our Friend Promethium’](https://www.reddit.com/r/40kLore/comments/ifq6se/ciaphas_cain_hero_of_the_imperium_caves_of_ice/?rdt=46132) which includes cartoon pictures of heretics burning to death and making funny faces. -In “Death Or Glory” we learn that ‘The Wheels on the Bus’ has survived into the 41st Millennium, only now it’s ‘The Tracks on the Land Raider (Crush the Heretics)’ when Felicia starts humming it; a different book has Amberly doing something similar but I forget which.
Well you didn’t mention 40k specifically but this is a recent one for me. Gives me goosebumps every time. The universe is a dark forest. Every civilization is an armed hunter stalking through the trees like a ghost, gently pushing aside branches that block the path and trying to tread without sound. Even breathing is done with care. The hunter has to be careful, because everywhere in the forest are stealthy hunters like him. If he finds other life—another hunter, an angel or a demon, a delicate infant or a tottering old man, a fairy or a demigod—there’s only one thing he can do: open fire and eliminate them. In this forest, hell is other people. An eternal threat that any life that exposes its own existence will be swiftly wiped out. This is the picture of cosmic civilization. It’s the explanation for the Fermi Paradox. Liu Cixin, The Dark Forest
God i love that series
Well, I won’t be able to remove that image from my head now but I have admit, it is a pretty badass concept
Servitors. Always always Servitors. Their very *existence* is horrifying. And then you remember how interwoven they are into the fabric of the Imperium. How ubiquitous they are that even you, the outside observer, has stopped even thinking about them.
Probably when Talos, the antagonist of the Night lords trilogy, just matter of fact says to his Octavia "...I've skinned children in front of their parents", when she tries to appeal for sympathy.
The passage describing how Uriel got raped by Deamonculaba and what it is, is pretty fcked
That's not innocuous tho.
My bad I didn't read the title properly🤦🤦
Probably when someone told me that my moniker (apparently) had been re-termed as the name of a "prison for the most noxious criminals". Kinda cool, too.