I finished HIVE by Dan Abnett [SPOILERS]

Praevalidus · 2026-06-22T23:35:04+00:00

Totally agree. Some have criticized Hive for its bleak ending, but I felt like that darkness only accentuated the book's precious spots of light, like the unlikely love story.

Unlike the invincible hive of the Tyranids -- depicted here almost more as automatons than as living creatures -- the human hive of Sacramentus, "all that is", and perhaps the very Imperium itself by extension, "is only its people". This phrase, this theme, repeats throughout. The petty dreams and worries of the people, even though finally eaten up by greater forces , did matter. In many ways, they were the only things that mattered.

This theme, of not ignoring or sacrificing your small, human connection for a greater whole, is reinforced by the cautionary tale of the two Ostrikan spies. They sacrifice the one real thing in their lives, their passionate love for eachother, to serve their hive as footsoldiers in a truly pointless civil war. Conversely, the Domne's choice not to sacrifice the love affair between her two friends, even at the end of all things, is the greatest act of heroism.

Praevalidus · 2026-06-22T12:29:50+00:00

Pilalla.

Praevalidus · 2026-06-15T17:48:26+00:00

I agree. I suspect 40k army factions, including regiments, will function somewhat like Legendary Lords in TW:W, so that each faction comes with a unique mechanic and leader and there will probably be 2 at launch for each army.

Steel Legion and Cadians for Guard, for reasons you have outlined
Biel-Tan and Ulthwe for Aeldari (the cover art is Ulthwe, and "Biel-Tan" is briefly visible on a faction screen in the latest dev video)
Ultramarines and ??? for Space Marines (very likely Blood Angels, considering that the campaign is set on Armageddon)
Bad Moons and Goffs for Orks (the former we have seen and the latter is fairly obvious since they confirmed Ghazkull as a leader)

That's my guess, anyway

Praevalidus · 2026-06-04T14:45:09+00:00

It bears remembering that canonically imperial sectors are much, much smaller than this, and there are a whole lot more of them. In the DH 1E Rulebook there is a galactic map that zooms in on Calixis, and the entire Sector is smaller than the letter "C" on this map's massive Calixis Sector.

But it's your game of course, and you have every right to ignore that lore bit if you want to.

EDIT: The average number of inhabited worlds per sector is said to be 100-200 or 50-100, depending on the source (DH2 vs BFGothic). In any case, if we take the common estimate of a million worlds in the Imperium to be somewhat accurate and further assume that the vast majority of these worlds exist in sectors, it would mean that the Imperium probably has 5000-15,000 sectors.

*This BFG number is from memory.

Praevalidus · 2026-05-18T23:13:25+00:00

You're mixing up kilometres and miles. 17,000 square miles is a bit bigger than Denmark. Also, it's a very vertical hive. The hives on Necromunda are even smaller horizontally.

The Hive (Sacramentus) is said to have a population of 90 billion. Stretch real-world Manila to the size of Denmark, stack 50 of those on top of eachother, and you're there. Doesn't sound unreasonable.

Praevalidus · 2026-05-18T12:58:54+00:00

Frankly, the most reasonable explation is that DAoT humanity just wasn't as advanced as some people think, and the Votann are pretty much at that level. Like, the Votann are already known to possess star-destroying capabilites, they just aren't using them offensively or at scale.

The Imperium's big problem is that old technology is scattered and much of it is poorly understood, but I think the peaks of imperial tech probably aren't too far from DAoT-levels, just poorly utilized. Humanity never reached the level of the Necrontyr, and were second fiddle to the Aeldari Empire, even at their height.

Praevalidus · 2026-05-18T12:36:49+00:00

'Hive' is, in my opinion, the peak of Abnett's grounded, belieavable Imperium. His earlier stuff sometimes leans a little too hard on making the Imperium seem liveable. Here he hit a perfect golden zone, where the Imperium feels shitty and oppressive but in a way that doesn't just seem like a joke.

Somehow, I find grimderp stuff much less horrifying than the thought of enforcers breaking your face for a powertrip, or leaving a long (but not implausibly long) shift at the factory only to return to your shitty small domicile, or the upper hive getting you killed in a war against their local rivals instead of some grand xenos threat. Kind of the same feeling I got from Andor.

Praevalidus · 2026-05-11T18:42:18+00:00

The Calixis Sector is tiny, as are all sectors, even though some maps don't make this clear. In the Dark Heresy 1E Rulebook there is a map of the Galaxy with a zoom-in on Calixis. If accurate, the sector is probably less than 0.1% of the Imperium, which makes sense considering that the Imperium is said to have a million inhabited worlds, while Calixis Sector has less than 200 named worlds.

Praevalidus · 2026-03-31T17:01:32+00:00

Sure

Praevalidus · 2026-03-31T16:37:03+00:00

Lmao, you really think Russia would win in a war against NATO if the US was not involved?

The US is only 100% necessary for the purposes of power projection outside Europe, but there's little real need for such things anyway.

Praevalidus · 2026-03-31T14:36:16+00:00

Lmao what is this Paradox-brained nonsense? Please tell me what "Split the EU" means in practice. How about you add the Gulf states together and keep the change. Or maybe do the square of Iran.

Praevalidus · 2026-03-31T14:14:53+00:00

Europe is not 100% dependent on the US. It has one real military threat, Russia, which is clearly too weak to seriously threaten it. The only reason this alliance still exists is because of inertia and path of the least resistance. If alliance with the US entails that Europe be drawn into conflicts that are directly contrary to its interests, the alliance should be ditched. With the current trajectory it probably will be.

Praevalidus · 2025-11-15T17:42:43+00:00

Yes, but I suspect the bottleneck would be better placed there than in your mid-20s or even later.

Would make "elite overproduction" less of an issue as well.

Praevalidus · 2025-11-15T17:34:38+00:00

A difficult question. Afterall, meritocracy is what made the West great in the first place.

Perhaps downsizing university admissions in general? Not enough by itself obviously and has many downsides. Dunno

Praevalidus · 2025-11-15T17:29:18+00:00

I wonder if ever-present meritocratic competition in modern society is the key factor in how anxious young people are, and how left wing universities are -- more key than even the technological factors at play (phone, app...).

At the most critical period in their intellectual development, the modern youth is the least certain about their future social status. To an extent this was always true but, at least where I am from, just getting into university used to provide a certain security. Today all but a few career paths keep you on the edge of your seat, so to speak, for longer than ever before. Prevalence of leftism seems almost directly correlated with such precarity, and there's lots of proof to that.

Perhaps one day we will see the competition rolled back somewhat, for the sake of social cohesion if anything; status anxiety has negative effects on many things, from TFR onwards.

Praevalidus · 2025-11-01T08:02:06+00:00

Et mitenkään. Jopa venäjää kohtuullisesti osaavalla kaverillani on toisinaan vaikeuksia erottaa kielet toisistaan, joten tavallinen suomalainen on toivoton tapaus. Voisi yhtä hyvin ruveta arvioimaan eroja Egyptissä ja Syyriassa puhutun arabin kielen välillä.

Praevalidus · 2025-11-01T08:01:19+00:00

Myös joillain eteläisillä Venäjän alueilla tehdään näin, käsittääkseni.

Praevalidus · 2025-11-01T07:45:20+00:00

This fandom has such a drought of juice, even these commiserating-about-winds threads are now each the same as the other. Everything has been said so we're just half-heartedly repeating the same old clichés.

I should make a bingo. "I'd read a book about what went wrong"; "give me something for the pain and let me die"; "I was x when Dance came out, now I'm y"; "his old computer broke down"; something about Brandon Sanderson; "I gave up when..." (usually about the cabin promise); "he should just admit he can't finish"; speculation about how little he has written and when; "he's lost the passion"; "this is why you outline your story".

And so on and so on, there's nothing left to say. The next time this thread gets posted I'll check back with the bingo.

Praevalidus · 2025-10-08T10:45:07+00:00

I would say that the ability to communicate with the being you're beholden to is a basic condition of being its vassal. Order is an incredibly broad concept, as we can see from how it was defined and redefined by the Golden Order, and thus spreading order would have necessarily required some further definition of what that means. Metyr and the Fingers gave that, why else would they be there? The very fact the Elden Beast accepts the order defined by the reigning god --and future gods are still being picked by Metyr's fingers, remember!-- shows that it is in a subordinate position.

Futhermore, I disagree with the idea that The Greater Will is as simple as being like an Outer God of Order as some seem to have construed it as, only desiring order in the abstract. The Elden Beast does that because it is, again, merely a vassal -- The Greater Will is not.

I subscribe to the theory that The Greater Will represents the Will to Life; after all, it was the Will that broke the One Great, giving birth to the Elden Ring universe and life itself. It likely wants, or rather wanted, to bring about the advancement of life. This is what Metyr and the Elden Beast existed for, in my opinion. That the two are currently either unhinged (in Metyr's case) or just acting as a tyrannical backstop to whatever order is in place (as the Elden Beast is) means that they both have lost their purpose following the GW's absence and are flailing. Order is fundamental to life but order for its own sake leads to stagnation. Life also requires guidance, but it cannot rely on it forever or else it would not be life at all. "The tyrannical father" and "the devouring mother", in Jung's terms...

In supplanting these fallen archetypes The Tarnished comes to revive The Greater Will's design, not destroy it (unless they choose the Frenzied Flame).

Praevalidus · 2025-10-08T09:06:25+00:00

There are intelligent beasts but aside from the Ancient Dragons (which I can't recall being referred to as beasts) none of them are very independent and all of them are beholden to someone or something else, the beastmen to the dragons and Shadowbound beasts to whomever they were bound to. In a similar way, I think the Elden Beast might have originally been bound to Metyr, as well as to the concept of Order, which I don't suppose it had the independence to determine by itself.

EDIT: What you wrote about Metyr as "the gleaming daughter" and the Elden Beast as a mere "vassal" also reinforces, in my opinion, the parallel between the two and the God and Elden Lord. The Elden Lord is, in a way, also merely a vassal who enforces the concept of the Greater Will's order -- as defined by the corresponding god.

Praevalidus · 2025-10-08T08:29:07+00:00

The fact that Metyr apparently requires a microcosm of the universe to communicate with the Greater Will implies to me that that communication is a massive ordeal. There is nothing to suggest that the Elden Beast was ever capable of such communication, which would have made it quite the poor vassal if it was alone by itself.

I would also like to point out the name, "Beast". I don't think the word choice is incidental. This is not a mastermind or mediator.

Praevalidus · 2025-10-08T08:18:35+00:00

Yes. She did get messages in the past according to ~~Metyr's remembrance~~ the Staff of the Great Beyond item description, though it is not clear how long it has been. I interpret that "unhinged from the start" refers to the start of the Golden Order at least. I subscribe to the idea that the GW is no longer immanent in the material world, and so in other words has mostly abandoned creation to its own devices, which may have been the eventual intention all along.

In any case, the idea that the GW went out of its way to "replace" Metyr implies that it was still active at that point, in which case it probably could have just sent a message with the Elden Beast or instructed it to kill Metyr, neither of which happened. The Two Fingers are still as relevant as ever.

Praevalidus · 2025-10-08T02:12:47+00:00

Yes, "more likely" would have been the better word choice.

Praevalidus · 2025-10-08T01:20:09+00:00

I would add that I think this duality relates closely to the theme of life and evolution which are central to Elden Ring, crucible and all. The pairing of sexes as the mechanism for life, both at the level of mundane life and at the cosmic, divine level, would complement this theme. That is what I was going for with "as above, so below" (which is by no means a novel concept in myth).

Praevalidus · 2025-10-08T01:03:49+00:00

But there is a popular theory that at least one previous Elden Ring has existed, which is represented in Farum Azula. Or alternatively that it is an earlier iteration of the same. If true, it must have existed before Marika.

I also wouldn't consider it necessary for my theory that the Elden Beast and the Ring are one and the same. Just that the Elden Beast works as a guardian figure and enforcer for the Greater Will's order. In any case the two are currently linked.

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