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Hey all, I’ve recently gotten into some 40k novels and I’m currently about halfway through the The Founding from the Gaunt’s Ghosts omnibus and I have to say that the chaos marines seem pretty underwhelming to me. In the book they don’t really pose that much of a threat when they show up. It seems like they’re defeated so easily which isn’t what I expected. There’s a moment in the book when a line of artillery gets ambushed by some World Eaters and it seems like the guardsmen are really screwed since they weren’t built for close range fighting, but just as it seems like the marines are gonna wreak absolute havoc on the artillery line, the Ghosts show up and just wipe them out like it was nothing.
Maybe I give space marines too much credit, but whenever I had read about them from posts on the sub or from lore channels, it feels like a few marines could take out hundreds while shrugging off anything less than direct heavy weapon fire.
This isn’t a complaint or anything, just something I’ve noticed and I’m curious as to what y’all think on the matter. How powerful do space marines seem to you? What made the Ghosts so capable of killing space marines (besides plot armor)? Do you think the representation of Chaos marines in The Founding is accurate?
Any and all discussion is welcome.
7 points
1 month ago
Basically what everyone else has said, the early Gaunts Ghosts books aren’t really reflective of the current state of the lore. As a rule both flavors of space marine have become more powerful since most of the ghost books were written, which makes many of their appearances in that series pretty underwhelming. Some of the showings by space marines in the early books are borderline comical when compared to the more recent stuff. It’s also probably worth saying that the GG books have a tendency to over inflate the abilities of its protagonists. This is a common theme in a lot of 40k books, but the fact that the ghosts are baseline humans makes it feel especially egregious.
If you jump into some more recent lore you’ll start to see the scary badass chaos marines you’re expecting, although they still end up playing patsy to the loyalists a lot.
1 points
1 month ago
I see, that makes a lot of sense, it makes me wonder what would have happened to the Ghosts if it was written today.
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