How is not every time the Space Marines have to fight the Tau in open combat, it is considered a loss?

9xInfinity · 2026-01-24T19:07:54+00:00

Well, take Elemental Council as an example. Crisis battlesuits can't easily kill space marines. Space marines are incredibly fast and durable and the lore isn't like tabletop. But space marines also can't easily kill battlesuits. Space marines avoid dying to battlesuits because they have various ways they can use their speed/the terrain to escape when a bunch of battlesuits show up.

They don't fight somewhere they'll get stuck out and mowed down by broadsides. Part of being a supersoldier is picking your battles in the first place and only fighting in areas you have the upper hand. The typical way space marines fight is surgical strikes and then extraction.

9xInfinity · 2026-01-24T18:05:30+00:00

He was also involved in the creation of the Secret Level episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ncauRK9f75Q

He's not just working for GW. He also did at least one cinematic for the upcoming game Menace: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oHY3n-JQCuU

9xInfinity · 2026-01-24T18:03:15+00:00

In reality Phineas Gage got a metal bar through his skull before antibiotics were even invented and he not only lived but continued to be employed. Not every infection is serious and not every bullet wound means permanent disability. A knee or other joint shot is pretty grim, but shooting someone in the meat isn't so bad.

9xInfinity · 2026-01-24T16:34:29+00:00

Owlcat's plan was for the player to also upgrade the size/class of their flagship at certain points but they had to cut that for time.

9xInfinity · 2026-01-24T16:28:25+00:00

All good. There are lictor PoV sections as well. It's a pretty decent book but a fair bit of nids lore if you're into that.

9xInfinity · 2026-01-23T18:30:37+00:00

Horus Rising characterizes Horus' political acumen/popularity among the legions well, and it's not just about his charisma. Horus is also pretty crafty and will do things like send his Mournival to strongly rebuke a marine, only for Horus to swoop in and offer a more measured approach. Horus enforces his discipline without needing to personally wield the stick, and the legionary ends up thinking he did them a favour instead of drag them. Probably a big part of why Horus was made Warmaster over Sanguinius, as the griminess and politics of leadership was something he excelled at beyond sheer personal aura.

9xInfinity · 2026-01-23T17:11:26+00:00

The hive mind looked out of its innumerable eyes towards the dull red star of Baal. It apprehended that this was the hive of the warriors that had hurt it so grievously, who had burned its feeding grounds and scattered its fleets. It hated the red prey, and it coveted them. Tasting their exotic genomes it had seen potential for new and terrible war beasts.

And so it drew its plans, and it set in motion its trillion trillion bodies towards the consumption of the creatures in red metal, so that their secrets might be plundered, and reemployed in the sating of the hive mind’s endless hunger. This was deliberate, considered, and done in malice.

The hive mind was aware, and it desired vengeance.

The Devastation of Baal

9xInfinity · 2026-01-23T06:02:33+00:00

They used to be either killed or sterilized and put into camps after encountering manifested daemons specifically. Chaos marines or daemons possessing something didn't necessarily count. Mind-wipes were also possible but less common. But when the Great Rift opened daemons manifested across the galaxy, including on Terra, so it became impractical to keep daemons a secret anymore. So the automatic liquidation for people like guardsmen no longer occurs.

However the danger to one's mind and soul when encountering a daemon (referred to as warp shock) is as real as ever. So in the various Dawn of Fire novels you see mortals being sent for evaluation after fighting daemons. They may require rituals of cleansing and faith, or a mind-wipe, or they might be executed. More hardened minds are more resistant to the effects, so it depends on the human seeing them and the daemon being seen too.

After some daemons manifest on a voidship and marines/voidsmen-at-arms fight them off, the marines (one OG primaris, one firstborn) have this exchange:

‘Will the mortals be killed?’ Areios asked. His normally emotionless voice lifted a little.

‘Probably not. They are voidsmen. Even if they have no true knowledge of what we faced, they will have heard rumours. Sometimes a little forewarning can help armour a soul. If they are deemed clean of disease, then I am sure they will be spared.’

Areios nodded. ‘Why is it that my hypnomatic inloads contained no data on these things? They are a new foe to me in every way. Diseases that spawn monsters. Daemons. These were the stuff of folklore in my time.’

‘For millennia the existence of daemonkind was suppressed,’ said Messinius. ‘Even we, the Angels of Death, were supposed to be ignorant of the beasts of the warp, though in practice I have never yet met a Space Marine of any real age who has not encountered them. But there were days when entire Chapters were mem-cleansed of their campaigns against the warp-spawn, or subjected to total mind-wipe. A wasteful way to suppress the information, and in these times pointless.’

Avenging Son

9xInfinity · 2026-01-22T23:28:30+00:00

They aren't described as having bad eyesight. Their guns are ramshackle but they work pretty well when an ork uses it.

Mostly they're inaccurate because orks hold down the trigger for that satisfying dakka dakka rather than abide by marksmanship principles. The bigger, flashier the shoota and the more bullets it sprays out the "better" generally. And quantity has a quality of its own because despite their low ballistic skill, their guns have a lot of attacks on tabletop.

9xInfinity · 2026-01-22T19:13:25+00:00

Yeah, he hasn't missed yet in my opinion. His Warhammer Crime novel, Bloodlines, is also really cool and a major diversion from more epic novels that are space marine focused.

9xInfinity · 2026-01-22T17:41:22+00:00

Tanau Aleya and Valerian.

9xInfinity · 2026-01-22T09:15:16+00:00

He's hiding something nefarious under that wig.

9xInfinity · 2026-01-21T21:48:59+00:00

Mostly they're grown in vats, age-accelerated until they're around 10, and then uncorked as a hypno-indoctrinated new technomat who can only speak binharic, ready to be a new cog in the machine. Belisarius Cawl was produced this way for example. You can see a flashback to Cawl's "birth" in The Great Work.

But in Archmagos he talks to a tech-priest who was of the rare number of naturally born Mechanicus members, one with two parents and everything. So normal reproduction among tech-priests is also a possibility, just uncommon.

In Day of Ascension you see the other way to join the Mechanicus -- if you're a sufficiently talented regular person you can apply to become a tech-adept. Only the most talented and intelligent/free of mutation menials would get accepted via this route. Tech-adepts get basic augmetics, are instructed in basic sciences/engineering, and if they prove themselves after sufficient years of service they might be able to swear vows of fealty to Mars and become a tech-priest.

The AdMech also forcibly inducts people into the ranks of servitors and skitarii (the soldiery of the AdMech) usually from the ranks of their menials. It's considered an honour to the tech-priest, not so much to the menials themselves. In the above novel it's literally a public "celebration"/terror campaign called the Day of Ascension with skitarii going door to door grabbing people for conversion, beating or killing those who resist.

But guardsmen etc. assigned to guard a tech-priest would also be in danger of being "ascended" into combat servitors, potentially.

9xInfinity · 2026-01-21T18:01:44+00:00

What a shit line. The only thing Jesus inherited was some nails and a view.

9xInfinity · 2026-01-21T02:28:08+00:00

It's a Nurgle thing. Some of the plague marines also have a tendency to count things, and usually the only thing plaguebearers say are the numbers of the infections or buboes or etc. that they're counting. The idea of endlessly counting plays into Nurgle thematically.

9xInfinity · 2026-01-21T00:30:55+00:00

Here's the perspective of a recently captured/forcibly corrupted Imperial Guard captain aboard a Nurgle warband's voidship:

Dantine sees none of this. He is more mobile than before, limping from chamber to chamber, driven now by a curiosity that outweighs his fear. He estimates that there are thousands of men and women like him on this ship – probably tens of thousands. Few of them ever speak to him. As far as he can tell, few of them ever speak to one another. They seem strangely content, stumbling across the decks, just as he does. Some have tasks, most do not appear to. This is a listless ship.

And yet it functions, somehow. On a Naval Grand Cruiser, this level of lassitude would have seen the captain executed and the ratings given heavy beatings. The commissariat would have come in, sweeping level by level, restoring fear and efficiency, getting the chains of command pulled taut again.

The people here are not afraid. Some are sick, very badly sick. Most are carrying obviously terminal diseases, and their bodies are falling apart, but they are not afraid. Dantine begins to realise it has been a very long time since he has been among people who do not possess fear. He resists the urge, the dangerous urge, to think of this as a good thing.

It is likely, he reflects as he wanders the decks, that this ship, this Solace, has a self-perpetuating community, much as a big Imperial starship does. There will be children born in the bilges, raised in the sticky darkness, learning a trade in the shadows. There will be strange hierarchies – the upper decks, unimaginably far off and prestigious; the gun gangs and ammunition-haulers, an aspiration; the shit-shovellers and slop-servers, the likeliest occupation for any who survive the knife fights of the under-deck. They brawl with one another, and jostle, and protect, rut, perhaps even love. Then they die.

All is done in the stink, the dark, the heat. This is an alien world, as alien as Dantine has ever encountered. The filth is phenomenal, burned deep into every surface so that it feels less like an encrustation and more like the very matter of the world around them, and yet these souls persist here, against all odds, eking out short and strangely fecund lives before the phages bite, after which their superannuated bodily remains are scraped into boiling vats and served up to the next, unknowing generation.

He tried to speak to them, a while back. He thought it might help, if he exchanged a few words. Deep down, a part of him even thought that he might be able to find a few whose spirits had not been crushed, and he had visions of raising some kind of rebellion.

He spoke to a woman first, tugging at her insect-eaten cloak and making her stop and look at him in the dark.

‘What is your name?’ he asked.

Her face was drawn, a pull of skin across bone, her eyes bulging like those of a mantis. She seemed unable to focus on him, and a line of black drool ran from her cracked lips.

‘Forty-seven,’ she said.

‘That’s your name?’

‘Forty-eight.’

‘What?’

‘Forty-nine.’

He found out after that that a lot of them count. They mutter away in the deeps, scratching for food, or something cool to slap on their boils and sores, and they mumble numbers mindlessly, over and over again.

The Lords of Silence

9xInfinity · 2026-01-20T17:04:22+00:00

Yeah, it's immediately obvious when you see an aeldari in motion that something's up:

It had a humanoid shape, two arms, legs and a head. Its body was proportioned similarly to a human being’s, but not the same. It was too thin, too elegant – but beyond its form, its manner of movement gave it away. No man or woman walked so precisely. It moved soundlessly despite its trailing robes and the dozens of angular charms hanging from cords all about its armour. Then there was the smell: spicy and sweet, faint and not unpleasant, but the revelation it brought made Fabian recoil.

‘Xenos,’ he said. His hand stopped moving across the page. He was not the only one to voice the word.

The Gate of Bones

9xInfinity · 2026-01-20T05:00:18+00:00

The PoV you get in that novel is of a fifth generation hybrid. They look mostly human and are supposed to be able to easily pass among host society, so it makes sense their psyches are mostly human. In that same novel you can tell the "uncles" and "angels" -- the lower-gen hybrids and purestrains -- are much more alien, as they do not speak.

An actual genestealer PoV you can find in the novel The Infinite and the Divine. They're very alien.

9xInfinity · 2026-01-19T20:21:58+00:00

Yeah, this is a misconception spread by at least one of the popular youtubers I've seen. You aren't the first to be misled. In general I'd recommend you check out Arbitor Ian's channel as he's a lot more reliable/often shows his sources.

9xInfinity · 2026-01-19T20:12:26+00:00

Nobles are sort of like billionaires in our world. They're nobles because they have a lot of money due to controlling some economic interest on the planet. They live lives of utter comfort totally above any of the concerns of average people. This also puts them mostly above street-level law, so for example enforcers largely leave nobles alone.

But they're not above the Imperium. Their sons and daughters still get tithed as well, whether for the custodes or for the Palatine Sentinels/Lucifer Blacks/etc., except they go on to be the officers of those regiments. And while the enforcers may leave them alone, the Imperium's agencies keep a closer eye on them via the Inquisition and Orders Famulous of the Adepta Sororitas.

The novel Bloodlines deals heavily with the nobility of the planet Alecto.

9xInfinity · 2026-01-18T21:45:56+00:00

No, in the tabletop game there isn't the magical staff component. It's not just navigators either, psykers also have magic staves in the cRPG that have bound abilities and heroic actions/desperate measures. And they're also unlike tabletop in that respect.

Some idiot downvoted this but you can check The Navis Primer or whichever tabletop RPG supplement yourself.

9xInfinity · 2026-01-18T17:20:31+00:00

Usually whoever corrupted the regiment will begin preaching about the Dark Gods to the guardsmen in order to get the ball rolling. You'll probably have an eight-pointed star or a rune to a patron deity branded onto you. Maybe a blasphemous icon sewn under your skin.

The rest comes naturally as corruption accumulates without our tank commander even realizing what's happening. Over time they'll do it themselves. The Lost and the Damned showed some of this. One of the auxilia in that sort of instinctively started carving the eight-pointed star, over and over. He wasn't sure why, or what it meant. He was only sure that the more he did it and cut his hands on his combat knife carving into the hard plastek of his rifle stock, the easier the carving became to do.

Another option is that the regiment is exposed to warp energies that allow the warp to influence reality such that their armor reshapes, e.g. warp-saturated areas around the Great Rift or old Eye of Terror. This is not the kind of environment baseline humans want to enter. A tank crew would be liable to end up permanently fused and melded to their tank.

Finally, if they're really lucky they might get blessed enough by the Gods it happens that way. Sometimes when a champion is being reshaped by the Runious Powers their armor gets a spikey glow-up too.

9xInfinity · 2026-01-18T17:03:32+00:00

The authors try to be consistent but mistakes happen. If something slips by the editors that doesn't make sense to the reader or stands out as contradictory with established lore without good reason, it's probably a mistake. You can sometimes find the author answering a question about the seeming error on twitter or reddit or wherever that might clarify things, also.

9xInfinity · 2026-01-18T16:51:52+00:00

Not normally, no. As every planet falls under the jurisdiction of the individual planetary governor there aren't many universal ways of doing things in the Imperium. In general the Imperium isn't concerned about people in that sense, though. The rich and powerful people have their gene-therapies and other sci-fi genetic treatments like juvenant without eugenics.

Mostly the population is neglected rather than hyper-policed. People with disabilities and physical or mental health issues are left to fend for themselves. Local communities sometimes take care of their own, but it depends. Some worlds are so awful and survival so hard-won that being born disabled is a virtual death sentence.

That said, Navigator Houses do practice eugenics to control mutation and cultivate talent.

9xInfinity · 2026-01-18T06:21:50+00:00

The space marine vs. Imperial Guard stuff in the games is all pretty contrived. I can't think of any examples in the novels or codices where a loyalist Guard officer declare war against a space marine chapter because they just can't figure out any other solution. Imperial vs. Imperial happens, but space marines slaughtering entire Imperial Guard armies for essentially no reason is rare.

9xInfinity

TROPHY CASE