#warhammer lore
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Okay so, I don’t think the Emperor was ever Alexander the Great. Since the historical facts simply don’t add up.
Even around the time of the actual historical Alexander’s death there were still other kingdoms and places that he could have conquered. This is just the Emperor lying to his son to seem more cooler than he actually is. But he’s making the mistake of saying that he was a very famous historical figure, since anyone with a good enough knowledge of that historical figure can disprove his claim.
But the quote about Alexander weeping does exist outside of the warhammer novels, specifically here:
So in conclusion, while there’s absolutely no chance that the Emperor was Alexander the Great, there’s definitely a possibility that the Emperor watched Die Hard (1988) and decided to quote it to his son. Which, to me, feels way more in character for him
#what historical figure could he have actually been? Ea-nasir#wh40k#warhammer#warhammer 40k#warhammer 4000#god emperor of mankind#emperor of mankind#horus lupercal#warhammer lore
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Why The Tau Were Never 'Too Good' For 40k
The Tau were added midway through Warhammer 40,000's 3rd edition, though according to some records the idea had been floating around since Laserburn. In the twenty years since their introduction to the 41st millennium, the Tau have remained one of the most consistently reviled and hated aspect of 40k lore, with all complaints around them boiling down to one core issue: they're too good for 40k.
By that, people mean that they are too morally good to fit within the grimdark narrative of the 41st millennium. This has always been the primary complaint levied at them, since they were first introduced in 2001. And GW has seemingly agreed with them, and spent the last 20 years trying to inject grimdarkness into the Tau Empire.
The first attempt to grimdarkify the Tau came very early on, with the Tau campaign in Dawn of War: Dark Crusade
It's explained how in the decade following Tau victory on Kronus the remaining human population was subjugated, oppressed, forced to give up their culture, and eventually simply sterilized and allowed to die off naturally to create a Tau and Kroot ethnostate on Kronus. It explains this over images of prisoners of war being fed to Krootox in prison camps and humans huddling together in slums.
This is obviously a departure from the image of the Tau as it was established in Codex: Tau (3rd Edition), as that codex makes explicit mention of the Tau trading and making alliances with frontier human colonies. This is also a departure from... common sense. Why exactly would the Tau accept Kroot, Vespid, Nicassar, Demiurg, Tarellians and many others into their ranks but then arbitrarily draw the line at humans?
This would become a pattern that I like to call "The Grimderp Tau Cycle." It's not exactly a stretch to say that the Tau are easily the most morally good society in the 41st millennium. Their tolerance toward other species alone makes them head and shoulders above almost any other species in the galaxy. So to remind people that there are no good guys in the 41st millennium and that this is a very serious and grimdark setting that you need to take seriously because there are no good guys or whatever, GW will occasionally have the Tau commit a completely out of character, random, and nonsensical atrocity. This was also seen at the end of In Harmony Restored, the short story that came out alongside 8th edition's Psychic Awakening: The Greater Good.
For context, In Harmony Restored is a short story about a group of Gue'vesa soldiers (human auxiliary troops fighting in the Tau military) performing a desperate defensive rearguard action to halt an Imperial advance long enough for Tau reinforcements to come and smash the delayed invasion force. The Gue'vesa are able to do this, though at great sacrifice to themselves, and then when the reinforcing army does arrive and makes quick work of the Imperial army they then continue on to butcher the Gue'vesa soldiers who performed this valiant holding action for... Seemingly no reason? Assuming the Tau forces thought they were more Astra Militarum soldiers, the Gue'vesa step out of cover pleading for mercy, only to be gunned down. With one of the Gue'vesa at the end noting that the language one of the Battlesuit pilots is using is very reminiscent of the way the Imperium talks about those they've labeled undesirables.
The message here is clear: these humans betrayed the Imperium in order to escape from the Imperium's genocidal regime... Only to end up in the equally merciless clutches of an equally ruthless oppressor. But, from a lore standpoint, that defeats the entire purpose of the Tau. It makes them wholly indistinct and, frankly, boring. But that doesn't even scratch the surface of how stupid this is, because it has clearly been stated in the past that the Tau do not hold bigotries toward client species on the basis of their faiths. And that makes sense.
Not only does this contradict previous lore, not only does it render the Tau a boring palette swapped version of the Imperium, it also just defies practical sense. If you're a race like the Tau, who expand primarily through ingratiating yourself with other races and convincing them to join your collective, you'd naturally want as few barriers between potential client races and joining as possible. No human colony is going to voluntarily join the Greater Good if the Tau's version of the Greater Good happens to require that the human population of that planet lose all sense of their heritage and culture through forced reeducation and the abandonment of their faith, and in the long term for that human population to slowly go extinct through gradual forced sterilization and confinement to ghettos and slums.
It's deeply stupid, lazy writing on the part of GW to repair the image of the Tau in the eyes of a fandom who accused the faction of being "too good." Except, uhm, here's the thing: the Tau were never too good to begin with. Lets rewind back to 3rd Edition's Tau Codex, our first introduction to the Tau in the 40k universe. From the very beginning it was very clear that the Utopian idealism of the Tau Empire held beneath the surface a significantly more sinister and malevolent nature, and it all roots from the mysterious and enigmatic fifth caste of Tau Society: the Ethereals.
In 3rd Edition, the Ethereals are spoken of more like mythological beings than the slightly mundane way they exist in modern 40k. All we know about them out of this book is that they are the autocratic leaders of the Tau Empire who inspire radical devotion among the Tau, though are rarely seen or heard from. They reorganized Tau society with pursuit of the Greater Good in mind first. But the specifics of what that means matters a lot. Tau are born into a caste that roughly determines, from birth, what role in society that person will fulfill. Those born into a caste are not allowed to have children with members of other castes, are not allowed to take up any job or position that contradicts the societal purpose of their caste, and generally lack self-determination in regards to things like career choice.
so, bam, the setup for Tau as a flawed and morally ambiguous faction are already present. They're a faction who fight for a better future, for a galaxy where all can exist in harmony with one another, so long as that harmony is kosher by the standards of the Ethereal caste. In that sense they're somewhat similar to the Dominion from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. A multispecies interstellar collective who seek to create a galaxy harmoniously unified... in service to the Founders. Just taken from this vision of the Tau Empire, they're already an autocratic dictatorship who fight in the name of an ideology that declares itself to be for the greater good of all who ascribe to it while also relying on the assumption that the tyrannical power of the Ethereals must inherently be for the Greater Good. I reject the idea that the Tau were ever "too good" for 40k. Rather that they were written with a realistic level of nuance, with an understanding that dictatorships are built upon cognitive dissonance, not on perfectly consistent virtues.
TL;DR
THEY'RE NOT FUCKING COMMUNISTS, THEY LITERALLY HAVE A CASTE SYSTEM, WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT?!
#warhammer40k#warhammer#warhammer 40k#t'au empire#t'au#fire warrior#in this essay i will#wargaming#warhammer lore
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Nostraman Nature Sucks: An Attempted Lore Post
Ave dominus nox Night Lords fans. I thought I'd take some time to go through the various NL stories I have to hand and see what I could find out about the animals that lived on Nostramo. Might come in useful for something, who knows?
Sharks and Whales
As a child, on several coastal journeys with his father, he had witnessed the eyeless barrasal sharks that would group together to hunt the great whales of the open ocean. (Night Lords Trilogy)
His voice filters into something savage and predatory, as hungry as the eyeless white sharks of Nostramo’s blackest depths. (The Long Night)
Not a big surprise since they talk about them fairly often and have the Space Sharks as a successor chapter but Nostramo does have sharks. Pretty gnarly-sounding sharks if I'm honest.
I didn't know what "barrasal" meant, so I looked it up and only found one thread on r/40klore that had the same quote in it as above. Hmm.
Assuming it's not a typo or a more straightforward reference to something I'm just not getting, I'd venture a guess that barrasal, understood here to mean of or relating to "barras" like with "abyssal" could be connected to the French Revolutionary leader Paul Barras who is mostly remembered for supporting Napoleon's rise to power before being overthrown by him.
So maybe the older barrasal sharks will make use of younger ones as temporary hunting partners only to be inevitably betrayed and consumed by them. Sounds about right I think.
As for the whales, where do I even begin? I would imagine they're "whales" in name only like in Dishonored:
This does imply the possible existence of a whaling industry at some stage in Nostramo's history, though.
Crows
Jago reached into his pockets, offering a handful of breadcrumbs. Come, he said to the crows. Food for tonight. Flesh, flesh, flesh, they called back. He laughed as several of the black birds landed on his shoulders and outstretched arm. (Prince Of Crows)
‘Yes. I’ve seen them in books. Is a crow a type of bird?’ ‘Black of feather and dark of eye. It feeds on the bodies of the dead, and sings in a raw, croaking caw.’ (TLN)
Breaking news - legion that keeps referring to crows in shocking has crows on its homeworld scandal. "This is outrageous," said local Nostraman cutpurse and skin disease enthusiast Verxaglryn Quickstabber, "here we are trying to make a good name for Nostramo as a respectable hellhole, a place you'd be proud to exile your worst enemy to, and yet we're surrounded by some of the most intelligent and curious birds in existence. I was shanking someone in a back alley the other night and suddenly I saw a crow learning how to use rudimentary tools! Not on my watch, I said to the rapidly cooling body, and I threw my shiv at it. But it just flew away." At this point Mr Quickstabber was obliged to end the interview due to having been eviscerated by the Night Haunter.
I know their communication with Sevatar is happening in a dream but I really like the idea of the crows adapting to Nostramo by developing some kind of psychic hive mind that's also able to be understood by human psykers.
Crag Cougars
A beast of my home world. When next you see one of the Atramentar, look to their shoulder guards. The roaring lions on their pauldrons are what we called crag cougars on Nostramo. It was considered a mark of wealth for gang bosses to be able to leave the cities and hunt such creatures. (NLT)
Every single one of them is Scar from the Lion King, isn't it? An interesting hint about Nostramo's geography though, of which more later.
Rats
Groundcars whisked by, headlights brighter than deep-hive rats’ eyes, the occupants snug and safe behind armoured glass. (Konrad Curze: The Night Haunter)
No surprises here either. Where there's people there's rats after all.
Something with tusks?
The older Astartes grinned, wolf-like and keen, as the Atramentar either side of the Exalted’s throne growled through their tusked helms. (NLT)
This isn't that conclusive because a lot of Chaos Terminators have tusks no matter what legion they are, but Nostramo being Nostramo they probably belonged to a species of giant carnivorous mammoth that ate babies and sprayed acid from its trunk.
Cows? On My Sunless World?
‘They are still of standard human stock, and not to be mourned. What does it matter if the cattle fear the herdsman?’ hissed Krukesh the Pale. (KC:TNH)
This one's a real reach on my part as it's very likely just a turn of phrase, but I noticed it because wouldn't it be slightly more typical to use a sheep metaphor here? Plus it supports the existence of Nostraman cowboys/ranchers/vaqueros which is fun.
No bats?
His helmet bore a new, spread batwing crest in blatant imitation of Sevatar’s own. (A Safe and Shadowed Place)
A sole space was neat: a circle around an iron lectern fashioned in the form of a bat’s outflung wings, which carried a heavy book bound in human skin. (KC:TNH)
Although they appear a lot in the VIII legion's iconography and artwork, oddly enough I wasn't actually able to find a direct reference to Nostramo itself having bats. Let's cover my ass by saying this aspect might therefore have been brought in by the legion's Terran component instead.
Some Nostraman geography
The Hill Folk lived away from the cities, eking out an existence in the mountains. (NLT)
What's worse than living in a Nostraman city? Living on a Nostraman hill, apparently. This seems to just be an idea of ADB's that doesn't come up again but I've always found it quite interesting. Were the Hill Folk as scummy as the City Folk, just with more of a down-home Dukes of Hazzard vibe? Seems likely.
This also supports the idea of Nostramo not being completely urbanised like some Hive Worlds are. In my view its continents might have had a geographical layout a bit like Italy or Scotland where the cities are mainly on the flatter coasts with a more sparsely populated hilly/mountainous interior.
What else? (This part is just me making stuff up so feel free to ignore it. I'm not ADB, I'm not even ADB's hat.)
If the rest of Nostramo's marine life is anything like the sharks and whales then it's fucking terrifying. I would imagine, because it's funny, that a lot of Nostraman food features disgusting industrially-processed fish in some way or another. Like the food in Dishonored but even worse.
Is something wrong, dearest offworld husband? You haven't touched your stale bread, whalemeat and jellied eels.
Since all life on Nostramo seems to be comically carnivorous and aggressive, it would make sense in a 40K kind of way for there to be giant predatory penguins living at one or both of its poles. A bit like the monstrous blind albino penguins HP Lovecraft wrote about.
Last known infrared pict-capture of an early Nostraman settler attempting communication with a juvenile specimen of the native penguin species. There were no survivors.
#ended up mentioning Dishonored a lot#fine by me I love Dishonored#shall we gather for whisky and cigars tonight?#warhammer lore#wh40k#warhammer 40000#warhammer 40k#night lords#nostramo#neves loreposts
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#warhammer 40k#warhammer lore#warhammer community#i am curious#what was your gateway drug?#who/what is to blame?#and how many of us get to blame Robert Rath?
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My favorite character in all of 40k has to be Fulgrim.
He is a character so misunderstood and one that causes me to get into many silly debates with a friend of mine because like so many people. He reduces Fulgrim to the result. To the disgusting existence he is in the current setting.
But in doing so he misses the point of the character. You see, with every other traitor primarch we largely see scorned and abused men. Perturabo constantly playing second fiddle to Dorn and suffering the hatred of his brothers, Angron who was looked at as a rabid dog, Kurze who just wanted guidance and became a self made slave to "fate".
Fulgrim was different then all of them. He was potentially the greatest primarch. He was the most artistic and beautiful, he had dueling skills to rival the best of his brothers, he had the tactics and administrative skills second to Guilliman, he had pure love for humanity only dwarfed by vulcan. And he had a gentle heart that once made even Dorn smile.
When we see Fulgrim represented its usually in his Daemon form or after he finds the Laer blade and we see him as an insecure arrogant elitist. And we forget that when he found his sons, two hundred instead of thousands, he gave a speech that made even the emperor tear up. He was grateful to be mentored by Horus and told his sons to follow their own path and become masters of themselves.
He developed the strongest and most loving primarch bond of them all with his supposed polar opposite in Ferrus manus. He captured a planet with 7 marines. Led the fastest campaign in the history of the crusade when he took the Laer.
The point of Fulgrims fall is similar to that of Magnus's fall. It showed us how the emperors caused him to take his sons for granted, that they didn't need to know what he did. They would be fine. He left his sons vulnerable and he deserved their betrayal.
But they didn't deserve it. And yet despite the corruption of the Laer blade. Fulgrim still almost spared Ferrus. In fact if it wasn't for one of his marines giving him his Laer blade when he spotted Horus's ship, he would have ended the Heresy right then and there.
He didn't have a choice in his fall.
Fulgrim could have been the perfect Primarch. More so than even Sanguinius which I find so touching as they are mirrors to each other in a similar way to Ferrus and Fulgrim.
Hes the most underrated and misunderstood primarch similar to Kurze and Angron.
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From people claiming that Salamanders sire children to others claiming that them having families is all memes and no lore, I've seen a lot of hot takes about Salamander's families over the years. I was pretty sure that they maintained connections with families that might be related to but were not descended from them, but I couldn't remember where I read that. Earlier today, I set about trying to find an actual reference. I cracked open my old copy of Deathwatch First Founding... And there it was. (Also, a lovely bit about them taking in apprentices!)
For a more nuanced discussion of this and other information about the Salamanders' lives on Nocturne, feel free to check out the longer and more thoughtful post I wrote on r/40klore:
#salamanders 40k#warhammer 40k#wh40k#warhammer lore#ngl this validates so many of my choices in my current fic hahaha#Not that things need to be canon compliant
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Warhammer Lore Gameshow
Warhammer has many, many named characters, but not all have names that make sense
Answer: number 4, the Rattling Gun
While this is a unit in warhammer, it is present only in Warhammer Age of Simar, not Warhammer 40K. It is a gattling gun created by rats, and therefore is named the Rattling Gun, to the amusement of all
The rest are unfortunately real names of things in 40K
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One of my favourite pieces of artwork from Total War: Warhammer!
#bretonnia#warhammer fantasy#warhammer#games workshop#warhammer art#knights#whfb#fantasy#grimdark#knight#warhammer fantasy battle#fantasy art#grail knights#warhammer fantasy art#grail knight#total war#gw#knights of bretonnia#creative assembly#warhammer lore#total war warhammer#tww#warhammer total war#paladins#paladin
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Unification Timelines
Fun facts!
Maulland Sen’s battle was 126 years ago from the Palace Coup.
This implies Thunder Warriors don’t have mortal lifespans, as we see Ushotan, a living Thunder Warrior, fighting at the Palace Coup. Ushotan was at least 144 years old when he fought Valdor, otherwise he’d be a teenager during Maulland Sen.
Also Ra Endymion was born around Maulland Sen. Ushotan is literally older than Ra.
Now, Valdor also implies the fighting took about a century or so, ending upon Ararat. Therefore, Ushotan spent roughly three decades post-Ararat in hiding, before leading the Palace Coup.
Ushotan was also explicitly the last living Thunder Primarch, and was absolutely a sassy, cranky, salty old man with cancer when he fought Valdor.
#constantin valdor#warhammer 40k#thunder warriors#adeptus custodes#wh40k#custodes#warhammer 40000#warhammer lore#ushotan
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“I rounded the corner at speed, and saw my quarry. He was still running, going faster than his gunmetal-heavy armour would have suggested was possible. He might have been making for one of the pulpits higher up, hoping to find some vantage from which to launch a defence, but my pursuit had been too swift.
I opened up Gnosis' bolter, catching my enemy on the shoulder and sending him crashing to the ground. Above us both, banners swayed heavily, caught by the backwash from the explosion.
I raced after him, watching him twist back to his feet. He was a massive brute, crusted with ridged and tarnished battleplate. His helm-lenses glowed a dull red, like magma, and he carried a two-handed war-hammer. The stench of engine fuel hung over him. He might have even approached my own size, my weight, my strength - such were the perversions the warp had wrought on those who had once served the Throne.
We slammed together, and the impact rippled the stone around us. Our weapons crunched into a brace-lock, showering plasma over both of us. I swung away, hilt-first, and smashed him back a pace. He shoved back, aiming to ram the fizzing hammerhead into my chest.
He nearly connected. I judged his weapon was within a few microseconds of an impact that would have cracked my auramite breastplate. That interval, however, was comfortably sufficient to spin my blade over in my grip, ram the spear tip into the Traitor's gorget and fire at point-blank range.
The bolt-shell exploded instantly, blasting his head apart in a shower of blown metal-shreds. His war-hammer spun out of control, his limbs jerked apart and the momentum of my down-thrust sent his head-less corpse crashing to the ground.
I stood over him for a moment longer, breathing heavily, my spear gripped loosely. Blood, viscous as sump-oil, oozed from the rotten stump of his neck. His metal fingers twitched. The aegis of force around his warhammer flickered out. Slowly, carefully, I relaxed. The kill had been clean, with no damage taken.
I was not satisfied with how far this one had penetrated, though. On another run, I would have hoped to have downed him further out. I felt no particular emotion as I studied the body. I understood that my cousins in the Adeptus Astartes reserved an almost pathological hatred for their Traitor counterparts. I wondered if that made them more or less effective on the field of battle.
To me, the surviving members of the Old Legions were like bands of animals - feral threats to the Throne that required culling. I felt no discernible difference in my response to them than that I had experienced when hunting xenotype tyranids and eldar in these same tunnels - they were all dangerous, all worthy of study, but unworthy of expending emotional energy upon…”
— A Custodes faces a Heretic Astartes in the Blood Games. Excerpt from “Watchers of the Throne: The Emperor’s Legion” by Chris Wraight.
#adeptus custodes#warhammer 40k#40k lore#40k#grimdark#wh40k#wh40k art#custodes#black library#chaos space marines#chaos#heretic astartes#adeptus astartes#astartes#custodian#custodian guard#imperial palace#wh40000#warhammer 40000#warhammer lore
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what does the art and music of the 41st millenium look like?
Do Necrons still make music? and if so, with what instruments?
do Orks have theatre?
Do T'au make movies?
Is it still possible to be a full-time actor in the Imperium?
I know it's the grim darkness of the far future and there is only war but... it's still about people. There is never ONLY war.
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Uh oh, some troops got genestolen
#genestealers#miniature painting#painting miniatures#painting warhammer#paintingwarhammer#tyranid#tyranid paint#tyranid painting#tyranids#warhammer miniatures#genestealer cults#genestealer#cute tyranids#ultramarines#warhammer 40k#warhammer art#warhammer#warhammerpainting#warhammer lore#warhammer oc#warhammercommunity#warhammer shitpost#cute gore#painting#mini painting#miniature#mini basing#40k#40kart#wh 40k
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Objective marker/decorative terrain piece is donezo
#Warhammer#warhammer 40k#warhammer 40000#Warhammer Lore#WH40K#death korps of krieg#Krieg#astra militarum#Imperial Guard#kill team#miniature#miniature painting#kitbash
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Bandages on Broken Souls: A Nostramo Culture/Lore Post
Sometimes I think about the wee lower-deck people that were all covered in bandages in the Night Lords Trilogy. Why so bandagey? (Bandagepilled wrapmaxxers, not beating the bandage allegations, etc)
She glanced at the wretch, who was unhealthily tall and sexless in its overcloak, keeping its face behind stained bandages. Several others lurked close to the door, whispering amongst themselves. It was impossible not to smell their sweat, their stinking, bloodstained bandages, and the rancid oil-blood of their bionics.
Those ones. The attendants providing for Octavia's needs as a Navigator. Octavia's attendants.
It turns out ADB does tell us a bit later on:
The chlorine reek of them offended his senses, the way it rose in a miasma from their antiseptic-soaked bandages, as if such trivial protections could ward against the changes of the warp.
This is very interesting to me for a few reasons since it can lead to various interpretations about Nostraman culture, even though it's important to bear in mind that what we're seeing is the degraded situation after however-many thousand subjective years of dicking about in the Warp, Eye of Terror etc.
They believe, or at least Ruven the POV character here thinks they believe, that warp mutation can be defended against with purely physical items i.e. bandages and disinfectant. While it's easy to point to examples of people from all kinds of cultures in the setting using spiritual or metaphysical ways to protect themselves from the warp, I find it interesting that this doesn't seem to occur to the Nostramans.
In fact, unless I'm remembering it wrong (always a possibility tbh) other than a small mention in one of the Gendor Skraivok short stories about there being a secret Lectitio Divinitatus cult among the serfs, there seems to be very little spiritual/religious belief organic to Nostramo itself.
That makes some sense, I think. It is after all Space Gotham, a world of armoured groundcars and looming starscrapers where everyone is living under some form or another of very high pressure just to survive whether that means getting their next meal or keeping their position in high level gang politics. Whatever beliefs the original settlers brought with them to the Sunless World were, I imagine, ground away over time as generations passed and people had other, more visceral concerns.
There are a few scenes in the 1984 nuclear war TV movie Threads that take place in the period about 10-20 years after the bombs have fallen. It's clear that the by now rapidly deteriorating survivors of the pre-war world are trying as best they can to provide some kind of education for their post-war descendants, but this is extremely limited and relies on what they can gather together from whatever books, VHS tapes etc happened to survive the war:
"The skeleton of a cat! A cat's skeleton!"
And we can see that it simply means nothing to the children and young adults whose entire existence revolves around basic survival - mostly food and the things they have to do in order to get it.
This, in a way, is what I think happened to whatever beliefs in anything beyond the material that may have ever existed on Nostramo by the time we see it in the Crusade/Heresy era. It's a sad, stunted little world and I feel immensely sorry for the nasty, skeevy people it produced.
Another factor affecting this would of course be the Night Haunter. You don't really need to have a spiritual/metaphorical figure or system dispensing rules and justice when Konrad is actually real and inside your home making it brutally clear what his views on law-breaking are.
So, in my usual roundabout way, we come back to the bandages again. My view, as I've expressed before in my ramblings, is that Konrad didn't truly eradicate crime on Nostramo so much as eradicate the appearance of it.
There's a legend from Ancient Greece about a Spartan boy training to be a warrior which I'll post as a screenshot below since I think we could all do with a break from my writing style for a bit:
"He could steal and suffer and die rather than be found out" is the relevant part here I think. Much like the idea that snitches get stitches or the mafia code of omertà where one's value in society and life itself hinge on a mutual keeping of silence against any and all authority figures.
We know that even before Konrad arrived, Nostraman society functioned on a gang allegiance basis, so already fertile ground for a very insular and secretive type of culture. But then we add the Night Haunter to the mix and the numbers spell disaster for you at Sacrifice the social pressure in this direction ramps up massively.
It's also made very clear pretty much everywhere that Nostramo is a vicious, predatory society. There's a description in one of the Skraivok stories of Phy Orlon, the canonical smallest saddest uwu-iest Night Lord:
It astounded Skraivok how such a vulpine little thing had made it through the selection process. Even bulked by legionary gifts, Orlon still managed to convey the impression of feebleness. Towards the end, Nostramo had been providing only the dregs of the dregs. No wonder Curze had levelled the place.
Weakness was like the scent of blood in the water to the Night Lords. Legionaries like Orlon would always attach themselves to those they deemed powerful, for protection. That explained the ridiculous batwings welded to the top of his helm in emulation of Sevatar, and why he had appointed himself as Skraivok’s adjutant.
It's like prison or high school. Even the transhuman supersoldier Nostramans still function this way. What hope do ordinary people have?
Not much at all, I think. Just in order to survive day to day it'd be necessary to conceal any injury, weakness or deformity at the risk of having it being ruthlessly used against you by just about everyone.
So we come back to the bandages again. Told you I'd get there eventually. We see that the attendants are in fact completely covered in bandages Joshua Graham style:
‘Lord,’ they hissed through slits in their faces that were once lips. Their bloodstained bandages rustled as they shifted and lowered their weapons.
[...]
She raised a bandaged hand, as if she could possibly bar the warrior’s passage with a demand, let alone with her physical presence.
I can imagine the impulse to cover up and conceal any weakness applies very strongly to warp mutations of any sort. Curdled and degraded over millennia roaming the immaterium in the bowels of a ship with the changes becoming worse and worse the longer they go on, it would be plausible for this to develop into a need to cover up and disinfect every inch of oneself in order to maintain some pretence, however flimsy, of being a capable human being.
The saddest part of it for me, though, is that all of the attendants are like this. It's a situation where everyone is quite literally in the same boat, undergoing the same suffering, and yet they still retain this deeply-ingrained need to hide and conceal themselves from each other. It feels like even here, ten thousand years after its destruction, Nostramo's poison is still influencing them, still flowing through their veins to keep them separated, afraid, and deeply alone.
Oh wow, a few paragraphs from ADB somehow led to a great long wall of text. Congratulations if you've made it this far!
PS: This being ADB I feel obliged to consider the possibility of Ruven either lying or being mistaken. I don't think this is likely since he is a) also Nostraman and b) a sorcerer meaning that if there was any spiritual aspect going on he would more than likely have the requisite cultural/magical knowledge or experience to be aware of it or otherwise detect it. Ruven is a conniving goth thot but he has no reason to lie in that particular bit of his own thoughts.
#night lords#lore#nostraman culture#lore post#wh40k#warhammer 40000#warhammer 40k#horus heresy#nostramo#warhammer lore#in this house we respect Hound who deserved far better than what he got#nightlordposting#is this domestic lore? i feel like it is#domestic lore#this will be the 327th post in which i have mentioned Threads (1984) and i have become exceedingly good at it#neves loreposts
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Morr, God of Death
Urbane Morr, God of Death and King of the Underworld, is
husband to Verena, brother to murderous Khaine, and father of
Myrmidia and Shallya. He sends divine ravens to guide dead
souls to the Portal, the pillared gateway between the mortal
realms and the realm of the gods. He then leads each soul from
there to its final resting place: either Morr’s Underworld, or the
afterlife of another god. He is commonly portrayed as a tall, darkhaired man of aristocratic bearing, with a brooding, intense air.
Seat of Power: Luccini, Tilea
Head of the Cult: Custode del Portale
Primary Orders: Order of the Shroud, Order of the Black
Guard, Order of the Augurs
Major Festivals: Hexensnacht, Geheimisnacht
Popular Holy Books: The Book of Doorways, Libro Dei Morti,
Thernodies of the Raven
Common Holy Symbols: Portals, Ravens, Black Roses
Extracted from Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay rulebook 4e
Morr - Warhammer - The Old World - Lexicanum
Morr | Warhammer Wiki | Fandom
#warhammer fantasy roleplay#wfrp#warhammer fantasy#ttrpg#warhammer lore#morr#god of death#lorelei#sister lorelei#versengold
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A really big thing in 40k when we look at the primarchs is the amount that seem to mirror each other or are two sides of the same coin.
Fulgrim and Sanguinius
Dorn and Perturabo
Corvus and Konrad
These are primarchs that share aesthetics, personality, or upbringing and then change a few crucial aspects that end up putting them down a different path.
It's by no coincidence that each pair has its Loyalist and it's Traitor. So I'd like to take about why these pairings are so interesting(each with their own post) and hopefully cover why they mirror each other in the first place starting with the two brightest brothers, Fulgrim and Sanguinius.
In both Fulgrim and Sanguinius we see quite literally the brightest of all the Primarchs. They are both beautiful, they are wonderful artists, charismatic, fantastic duelists, and very empathetic. Sanguinius had angelic wings and could do no wrong, he was seen as the Emperors perfect Son and the best choice for warmaster, his return to his legion turned the blood angels from hated vampiric berserkers to lovers of art and poetry. He was friends with the most difficult of primarchs such as Khan and Magnus. But Sanguinius had one major flaw. His Geneseed. It left his sons with an addiction to carnage and he felt wholly responsible, he was deathly insecure and guilty and wasted no effort in finding a cure, and it's why he was only one step away from falling to chaos if meros had not sacrificed himself. Sanguinius wasn't the greatest tactician, he wasn't the most intelligent, nor was he ever free from his insecurity but he was the Imperiums Angel. The imperfect God.
Fulgrim on the other hand was brilliant in every aspect. He was a tactical genius, brutally intelligent and cultured, the most beautiful of the primarchs ahead of Sanguinius, and the most well liked. Cultivating a friendship with ferrus manus that was deeper then perhaps any relationship in the setting. Like sanguinius however, his greatest flaw was his geneseed. But instead of giving his soldiers a curse. It decimated his legion, for instead of returning to Terra to a legion of many thousands of sons, he only found 200. It is said that when he saw his sons there was no trace of disappointment. It is said he gave a speech so inspiring that the Emperor cried and gave the 3rd legion the Imperial Aquila and the title "The Emperors Children". Fulgrim spent many years playing second fiddle to his brothers, and when he finally rebuilt his legion he burst ahead brilliantly. The marines of the third legion were among the best duelists, tacticians, and artists of the imperium unlike the blood angels, were extremely well disciplined, and their father was a man who grew in a hellish planet and knew the struggles of the common man intimately. But he pushed himself too far to perfection. Which allowed Fabius bile to prey on his insecurity and mutate his legion over time. Instead of the instantaneous fall to chaos Sanguinius would have had. Fulgrims was slow and drawn out. Instead of Meros sacrificing himself to keep his father from succumbing to chaos. A marine in Fulgrims legion kept him from shooting Horus's fleet and ending the heresy by giving him the Laer blade and damning him completely.
Sangunius was the God who wanted to be a man and Fulgrim was the man destined to be a God.
It's funny how they never really interacted in lore. I think they would have gotten along very well.
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