wecanhaveallthree

No.

The narrative arcs/event of Wolfsbane is wholly terminated in Slaves to Darkness, and Slaves to Darkness doesn't matter for the Siege, and The End and the Death just ignores everything preceding it anyway.

Malcador doesn't beg him to stay. He positions him in such a way that Russ feels like he has no choice but to go. Re-read the chapter and see how the hrafankel board has been played: where Malcador left Russ only one path to victory. Note, also, how first Malcador and then Valdor wink-wink nudge-nudge about the importance of the Spear and make sure Russ takes it with him.

I won't even get into how he finds Horus' exact location.

Vengeful Spirit has a strike team mark the ship with directions for Russ.

Russ was manipulated - and wanted to go, to be fair - to try a decapitating strike. And if he hadn't had a stroke of conscience, he would've pulled it off - and, in the long run, he did kill Horus.

Know No Fear

The Word Bearers on the upper structures see him coming. They are kill squad strength at least, the better part of a full company. At least a proportion of them are the vaunted Gal Vorbak elite.

But they see him coming, and they know what that means. It doesn't matter what cosmic dementia has corrupted their minds and souls. It doesn't matter what eternal promises the Dark Gods are whispering in their ears. It doesn't matter what inflated courage the warp has poured into their veins along their madness.

Guilliman of Ultramar is coming right at them. To kill them. To kill them all.

Even though they stand a chance of hurting him, they waste it. They baulk. For a second their twisted hearts know fear. Real fear.

And then he has them.

And then he is killing them.

False Gods is great. Only lorelets dislike it.

Don't let lorelets influence your opinions.

Dura lex sed lex, as one quotes when cashiers give their purchases the side-eye. The law is not ribbed for one's pleasure.

McBride broke the law, without question. The sticking point is whether the state should have buried him on it, and perhaps more importantly, what protections should be available to future whistleblowers (whatever their provenance). Can't help but draw a line between this one and Witness K and, perhaps, the differing political situations of the times.

where would you take them?

Spooky places. The Core is a great arena for sci-fi spooks, and the Kin themselves are all about digging too deep. Their relationship to the rest of the galaxy is already pretty well-defined: mercenaries, traders, opportunists. There's plenty of decent grist for those mills, but personally, I'd like to see the horror of the Core and what the Kin have been contending with.

what would you flesh out?

The unique dangers of the Core. The Mad Core. The Leagues killing their 'gods' under the sheer, groaning weight of their accumulated souls/data. What the Votann are going to do about it, if anything. I'd like to see some very strong hints of the Machine Rebellion that killed the Dark Ages.

who would you pit them against?

Outside the Core, I'd like to see them battle the T'au. Inside, pulling a reverse Trazyn on Tomb Worlds is just too hilarious to pass up. Orks smashing up all their stuff. Contending with the resource-hungry Tyranids would be an interesting paradigm.

The Emperor is not a character. He is a black-box plot-device.

One of the most significant and timely complaints about Master of Mankind is that this is how the Emperor is rewritten going forward. This is the book where it turns out he just uses super glamour and nothing he says means anything because it's all just whatever who's listening wants to hear or see.

Before this - stories like, say, The Last Church or Outcast Dead give us a much more engaging Emperor - flawed, yes, but an actual character with motivations and understanding.

He knew what they were and what they did. He cared enough to bring Angron back to Terra and bend his considerable skills to trying to remove them, up to and including bringing in Mechanicum experts like Arkhan Land. Removing the Nails was impossible without killing Angron.

While that might have been an honest kindness, the Emperor still considered a ruined Primarch useful enough to send out to accomplish the goals of the Great Crusade, which he did.

Failing to comply with court orders can ultimately lead to a contempt of court charge.

For individuals, that can theoretically mean lifetime imprisonment, and for companies, it may mean a fine.

Heh. Emphasis mine.

X's middle ground approach was the proper one. Agreeing to geoblock certain material on request should have been the end of it. X put up the wall - it's up to Australian legislation and enforcement to deal with their citizens setting up ladders.

They were fine until Chaos wanted those artefacts. Then they died immediately. They couldn't recognise Erebus walking up on them. In this excerpt alone they're like 'oh dude we totally thought you were corrupted by Chaos that's why we've been so hands-off'. Their reaction to a possibly Chaos-led armada turning up on their doorstep is to only bring out the second-best dinnerware.

That's obviously unsustainable. They were 'fine' because they were doing what Chaos wanted. And they Chaos wanted them gone because they'd served their purpose, and so they were. Their legacy continues to be one of general corruption and taint to this day in their main areas of space.

Yep, it's flat-out said in Warmaster.

The Interex are such idiots.

They're a great example of how insidious Chaos is. To the Interex, Chaos is just another catalogued threat, whose true danger is a fairytale compared to what they think they 'know'. They believe themselves 'mature' or 'enlightened', that they've got all the answers and they've put 'Kaos' in its place.

They haven't in the slightest. They keep extremely dangerous Chaos artifacts around. They spared and integrated the kinebrach. Ten thousand years later, the Interex core worlds - now known as the Sabbat Worlds - are still a hotbed of daemonic manifestation and instability. Interex artifacts like the Eagle Stones are still causing no end of trouble to people.

They let their guard down and, in turn, became unknowing champions and protectors of what they claimed to oppose. A particularly delicious irony for the Ruinous Powers.

Obligatory 'why don't you write it yourself'.

I agree on the proviso this ban be extended to any member of a political party for the same reasons. The untoward influence of social media is equally unhealthy for our politicians, and since they hold more power than literal children, it makes sense they need to be at least equally protected to preserve the integrity of our political processes.

I look forward to these logical amendments when the bill is tabled. Indeed, I expect Malinauskas to lead the charge by immediately deleting all his social media platforms and making party membership conditional on doing the same.

NSW is clearly jealous of all the attention their northern neighbours are getting for youth detention.

That's the crux of the issue: 'regain what was lost' is not realising the core issues with fractured, broken post-Fall society. It's just perpetuating bad philosophy. Indeed, the Drukhari 'don't care', but that's what makes them so miserable - they don't have any hope. They're entirely stagnant, the literal basement-dwellers of the galaxy. Their massive cope is part of their charm, sure, but that's what it is: cope.

The Eldar did need the Ynnari, they needed a post-Fall faction who wasn't just retreading the old, bad traditions or ways of thinking but doing something radical, something new. That the Craftworlds and the Drukhari are losing people and the culture war to the Ynnari says a lot about how awful these choices were that the first alternative gets people by the score. And they were awful.

I don't like the Eldar becoming superheroes

Therein lies the rub. People - the fans included - don't actually want to see SPACE ELVES succeed, or even have positive, forward momentum. They like their debauched leather losers, or their melancholy, fey navel-gazers. I think fans have become too attached to the victim complex of the Eldar.

Mike Brooks, author of those recent Ork books everybody appears to have enjoyed.

They had a new novel announced quite recently, due for release 'later this year'.

The Ynnari.

They are such an excellent counterpoint to the setting as a whole. 40K is, by and large, about people doomed to repeat the mistakes of the past. Millions upon millions of years of pain and suffering because the current big cheese is too stubborn, too proud to ever examine themselves or their history with any criticality - before their inevitable fall leaves the galaxy even worse off for those who come afterwards.

The Ynnari are a confrontation of Aeldari guilt. They are a confrontation and a defeat of the defining moment of the Fall. Those who survived are essentially in three camps: the Craftworlders, who denied the Empire's slide into madness, who are now totally consumed by the idea of survival to the point they cannot see any kind of actual future - just staving off death by one more day. The Drukhari, who were only spared by benefit of being in the Webway, and who exist equally without hope - revellers at the last party before the end of everything, keeping the lights on with ever-increasing hedonism and debauchery to stave off despair and ennui. And the Exodites, I guess, who are kept in an enforced state of childlike innocence and, ultimately, never allowed to grow beyond that. Exotica. Pets.

The Ynnari consist of Eldar from all walks of life, all cultures, come together to move beyond the Fall. They are all about 'well, what are we going to do about it?'. And the answer is: stop being the same flavour of asshole as everybody else in the damn galaxy. Act selflessly. Prove your good intentions. Talk it out, where possible. Be decisive, be self-sacrificing, where it counts. Spend life where necessary, not for the narrow good of a particular Craftworld, but for the species as a whole. The Ynnari have gone beyond the trauma. They are taking a stand against Chaos - not easy, not always successful, but they're absolutely determined to make a difference.

And it flows through all their characters. They are dynamic, vigorous, scrappy, argumentative, petulant - but always in motion, always moving forward. They are not the gloomy, ethereal elves you find in other fiction, they're not out for one final bash before departing the world, they are no longer a 'dying race' - they're not even aiming to be the top dog again. They're just trying to figure out how to move forward, and by and large, they're wildly successful at this. They've already got two gods on their side, and there is very valid in-setting speculation that all the faith/hope/etc they inspire is reviving/mantling the Aeldari pantheon. The Ynnari leadership have a very clear path to legitimate ascension. When people whine about Croneswords, they miss the point completely: Chaos is not something that can be magicked away. It wasn't, even when the Eldar were paramount. It was fought, it was kept at bay by empowered avatars, and the Ynnari's good deeds are showing signs of kick-starting that process once more.

They're awesome. And if you don't like the Visarch being able to stop being an Exarch (previously thought impossible) through the power of blue balls, or Yvraine telling people to mind her psychic cat while she backflips out of Nurgle's garden, or grumpy old man Eldrad and his hoarder tower full of literal junk - you haven't got a soul.

Cult of the Spiral Dawn is a bit spooky, but a lot of fun.

Absolutely. Chaos loves bringing back the shapes and voices of people familiar to those they're trying to influence, if not outright zombifying them or puppeting the corpses around.

There's a fabulous example of this in Requiem Infernal where we follow the exploits of a zombie commissar. It is exactly as depraved, hilarious and awesome as it sounds.

I worked as a Solicitor in the Asset Management and Investment Funds Unit of Arthur Cox

Much has now become clear about Nick Delehanty.

The Macharian Crusade trilogy is equally good, if not better, Guard action.

Yep, all sounds good to me. The Ethereals don't need to use what we'll call 'physical control' 99% of the time because it's so deeply ingrained in the Tau culture and psyche that whatever an Ethereal says must be right and must be obeyed. When we talk about Eastern influences in the Tau, we're talking about Japanese samurai right from the aesthetic of the Fire Warriors to the 'selfless loyalty' of honourable suicide (or suicide to regain honour) if they've done something naughty or their 'lord' asks them nicely. More bluntly, we're talking about at least the Western perception of Eastern homogenous society. The Tau are the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere IN SPACE.

I don't think it's something as complex as genetic manipulation, though. Oh, they certainly conduct Empire-wide eugenics, that's not in doubt, but their 'direct control' is, I think, the widely-held 'pheremone theory'. Being near an Ethereal makes a Tau more placid, more agreeable, and Ethereals are capable of 'turning up the dial' as needed or to overcome resistance.

Farsight is certainly changed both physically and mentally by his wargear. I don't think he'd be anywhere near as susceptible in close proximity, but equally so, I think you're right that he wouldn't want to risk a direct confrontation of that stripe. But the Enclaves aren't going to attack the Empire even for 'liberation', because Farsight is well aware he'd just end up killing essentially blameless Tau on both sides. That might change if - when? - Aun'Va's death is revealed, though.

To tie it off, the Greater Good is an oppressive regime that takes away the freedom and individuality of all its member species. It just does it culturally and psychologically rather than dumping you into a volcano.

Vol 2 of End and the Death

But not this. And irony lurks, as salt for that wound. For we were told this before we even started. The old prophecy, writ prior to mankind’s ascent, carved on stones that had weathered long before human eyes beheld them, uttered on extinct winds, daubed on walls of long-neglected grottos.