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[Dorsidwarf]

Just found this. (warning: extreme swearing and uncomfortably oiled custodians)

[nenjin]

Been posted already, I'm pretty sure.

[Loud Whispers]

Don't need to click it to know it's battle bruva alfabusa. Well-oiled custodians can only mean one thing.

[Loud Whispers]

Gaunt's 2spookys is pretty great, and Dan the man loves his human enemies and loves making them human (no skullfucking chaos lolrandom burnpillagers, they have administrators), for better and worse - no shiny xenos sadly. Nevertheless, sexy writing is abound.

Abnett manages to write unaligned Chaos baddies in a way that almost makes them seem cooler than your garden variety champion of the big 4. Heritor Asphodel is like one of my favorite baddies ever.

Also....

"Samus is the man beside you. SAMUS IS YOU."

PYRAMID TANKS
CRAB TANKS
DANK TANKS
Siege of verghast best day of my lyfe

[Grim Portent]

After reading one GGs omnibus at my brother's recommendation and spending an hour ranting at him for how much of it was stupid in the context of 40k I've never bothered to pick up another of Abnett's books.

Stupid highlights included: A chaos dreadnought being killed with a jerry rigged lasgun powerpack and some cactus, a khornate champion telling his army to commit suicide rather than fight to the death against the Imperial Guard, lasguns on max settings being able to kill chaos marines in one shot, a commissar refusing to shoot any of the treacherous, treasonous or heretical people around him, a complete absence of any enginseers in the guard camps either as background descriptions or as characters, and the lamest psyker ever.

From what he's told me of the other books in the GGs series, there's an even lamer bunch of psykers, more not shooting of treasonous people and piles upon piles of incompetents running every regiment that isn't the Ghosts or friendly to the Ghosts.

[Loud Whispers]

1. Several thousand xenocactiparasites on an already severely damaged dready
2. Said champion convinced that the Imperials have broken through already and won, with aforementioned champion's philosophy being suicide and death
3. Considering this is 40k's only Colonel Commissar... And as for the psykers... Spoilers.
4. Varies from book to book; the Imperium is a clusterfuck of administration. Buuuuuuuuut... There are some *really* notable exceptions.
Fair enough, not your cake. Dan is definitely more concerned with the human aspects of humanity than with showcasing the 40k universe, at least until shit gets crazy much later on. And even still - the human side takes front stage.

[Grim Portent]

Fair enough, not your cake. Dan is definitely more concerned with the human aspects of humanity than with showcasing the 40k universe, at least until shit gets crazy much later on. And even still - the human side takes front stage.

It's all well and good saying he's writing about the human aspects, but when those human aspects aren't properly written to fit into the setting it makes them come across as badly written and dissonant with other books set in the same universe.

Let me put it this way, in most 40k books there's at least one human cast member, and I sympathised with most of them.

Wrath of Iron: I pitied the humans, respected their bravery and understood their horror at what was going on. They acted more or less how I'd expect people to act under the circumstances.
Word Bearer's Omnibus: Some of the best humans I've ever read, focusing on their responses to the horrors of chaos and the inhumanity of their own allies, and  their faith and hope in the face of adversity.
Night Lords Omnibus: The humans in this serve as a fantastic contrast to the inhumanity of chaos marines and show that even heretics are human. (Personal favorite 40k story)
Death of Antagonis: A reasonably written, though poorly paced at times, exploration of why humanity is something that must be cherished but which you must be ready to sacrifice if the need arises. Largely focused on the sacrifice of of ones own humanity and why the horrible lifestyle in 40k is needed.
Storm of Iron: More humans who I respected and felt where good representations of the guard and the emotions they felt when dealing with the inhuman.

Compared to GGs where I spent most of the time going, 'Man the people of Tanith are whiny and ill-disciplined, and wow are chaos incompetent in this sector. Roll on Tyranids I guess.' It was like the Batman 'my parents are dead' meme but more annoying since they didn't even blame the right person or demonstrate any animosity towards the people who actually killed the planet, they just bitched that Gaunt didn't let them die there.

The only worse depiction of humans in 40k I can think of is from Siege of Castellax, where they piss and moan and freak out at the fact that *gasp* protein paste is people! AAAHH! *sigh* I was so happy when those humans died... At least everything else in the book was good.

[Grim Portent]

Some photos of Age of Sigmar stuff that've been leaked, in case anyone here's interested.

Hawk men! DIIIIIIIIIIIVE! 

[nenjin]

First and Only Hate detected

I've always thought DA's strengths were in details and world building. His people are only soso written, and if you're only focusing on the Tanith then yes, there's a little bit of "Too cool for personality" going on there. I always thought his regular ass citizens were pretty well written though, he seems to have a thing for refugees.

I won't go over your gripes in detail, mostly because I haven't read the series in a while. Most of that never stuck out to me. Particularly the not shooting of heretics. (Although the book deals far more with Gaunt as a frontline commander and political figure than doing the rounds shooting heretics and cowards.)

Compared to GGs where I spent most of the time going, 'Man the people of Tanith are whiny and ill-disciplined, and wow are chaos incompetent in this sector. Roll on Tyranids I guess.' It was like the Batman 'my parents are dead' meme but more annoying since they didn't even blame the right person or demonstrate any animosity towards the people who actually killed the planet, they just bitched that Gaunt didn't let them die there.

Agreed on this, but that sounds like the start of the series. Most come to grips with it in later books.

Death of Antagonis

Really? I thought this book was kind of a clusterfuck personally. Started out good but quickly goes into stupid, extreme characters believing extreme things because drama calls for someone to be an idiot for the sake of conflict. The way a space marine first:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Turns on their chapter and its core identity because "I can do it better and purer" and then turns to Chaos, all because an Inquisitor mentions a concept of how to view a situation, that spirals out of control into a full blown delusion of grandeur and some daemonic suggestion for good measure.

Although all that may not be contained in the Death of Antagonis.

[Grim Portent]

Death of Antagonis

Really? I thought this book was kind of a clusterfuck personally. Started out good but quickly goes into stupid, extreme characters believing extreme things because drama calls for someone to be an idiot for the sake of conflict. The way a space marine first:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Turns on their chapter and its core identity because "I can do it better and purer" and then turns to Chaos, all because an Inquisitor mentions a concept of how to view a situation, that spirals out of control into a full blown delusion of grandeur and some daemonic suggestion for good measure.

Although all that may not be contained in the Death of Antagonis.

That's the stuff I was referring to as 'poorly paced'. Possibly an understatement.

The emotions and ideology of the Inquisitor and the rebel Black Dragons are the sort of things that do result in traitor marines and heresy, but it was squished into about 1/3rd of the space it should've been. That book could really have done with being the first in a series of 3-4 books with the individual arcs being fleshed out more, but then the Inquisitor and renegades are only there to serve as a backdrop to the whole 'be the Emperor's Monster' thing with the Sororitas and Volos.

Everything based around Volos and his people was great, everything based around the chaos sorcerer was great, everything based around the Inquisitor and his people was angsty, whiny and annoying.

I have to confess to occasionally imagining what my Dark Heresy Ascension Inquisitor would have done if he was present for that story: Shank that puritanical prick with his daemonsword and have his body turned into a coat rack before they leave Antagonis. Guy was annoying as hell.

[Loud Whispers]

I allowed the whole 2cool2spooky of the ghosts just because they are extraordinary people, favoured by a saint and they're aging - as the books progress and people die, only one person I recall actually getting better in health was that one dude who was healed under exceptional circumstances. Everyone else... Proper ded. They even have a bloke die of cancer. And once they're dead, that's it. The ghost ranks can only ever get smaller

Also sniper statue moments are juicy

[nenjin]

That sort of endeared me to the series as well. It's fairly rare that in a series of novels you get characters you're supposed to care about, and those characters die. It's like playing an RPG with a generational gimmick. In the Cain series he gets old too along with some of the characters, but no one really dies and you never really feel like them or anything is really at stake.

Other than over doing the "how stealthy they are" bits, I thought Abnett gave the Ghosts a pretty decent personality as a people. I think of them like Hillbillies in the US. Clannish, hard to get to know, skilled at the things they spent their lives doing, jovial in their own sort of way.

I dunno, if you didn't try Necropolis (I forget where the book falls in the series) I'd at least give that a try if you haven't. I agree with LW, it's the best the series has to offer.

[Tack]

I thought 'Lasgun turned up to full can one-shot a CSM' was an interesting thought. I mean, hot-shot guns can (They're AP3 in crunch), so how high do these lasguns Go?
Would turning it up to full make you empty the battery in one or two shots? it'd have to, that's why the stormtroopers Tempestus carry backpack batteries.

[Grim Portent]

I thought 'Lasgun turned up to full can one-shot a CSM' was an interesting thought. I mean, hot-shot guns can (They're AP3 in crunch), so how high do these lasguns Go?
Would turning it up to full make you empty the battery in one or two shots? it'd have to, that's why the stormtroopers Tempestus carry backpack batteries.

The problem with that thematically is that it undermines the terror and awe marines inspire in the other books, and also undermines the significance of the deaths of guardsmen who died fighting chaos marines. It changes them from martyrs who fought a vastly superior enemy in the barest hope of scraping a victory through numbers and bravery to idiots too stupid to turn up a dial on their gun and blow the marines head off.

There's also the problem that overcharged lasguns are a thing in other material, and they're vastly inferior to stormtrooper weaponry, having more in common with las-locks as lethality goes.

[Loud Whispers]

Read Necropolis

Spoiler: minor spoiler (click to show/hide)

Gaunt finds a chaos spess mareen in a tank that is basically a giant pyramid of baneblades

It is very much an OH FUCK ME moment

Also in the first book just two chaos spess marines wreck some serious shit, and chaos space marines continue to do some hilarious fun shit (Dorfy Fun). The pinnacles have to be in the Saints and Traitor general bits, I can't remember exactly when, but one of them has a team of xenos assassins and chaos servants on a mission - one of these servants is a dreadnought that bursts through the ground and goes all REEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE. It is very destructive. Veeerry destructive. The traitor general one has the elite of the elite of Gaunt's Ghosts running around on a chaos planet, and before long they attract the attention of chaos space marines. Shit goes down.
Also in regards to cactusnought, it was already very damaged. It couldn't even see them, because the damage was so severe.

*EDIT
Completely forgot to mention the most significant chaos spess marine action. They kinda slaughtered the planet of Tanith Magna to extinction, thereby making the ghosts the last of Tanith and making their special nalwood trees extinct.