Mortarion: The Pale King (Volume 15) (The Horus Heresy: Primarchs) [Hardcover] Annandale, David

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As well as establishing Mortarion’s character as a stoic puritan, it also hints at where we know his arc will go. The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products.

Mortarion's inferiority complex over being unable to overthrow the tyrant of his homeworld is developed here. Some good insight into Mortarion’s character, through the lens of his first campaign and “compliance”. When Keri and I decided to dive into the Primarch series, we divided up the primarchs based on who we were most interested in reading about. Keeble delivers a great performance, While his choice in Mortarion's voice surprised me, it never irked me.Given that I entered with a serious concern after the last death guard book I read, the buried dagger, which I really did not like, I am happy to say this is what warhammer is all about. We follow Mortarion directly a lot so we get to know what he thinks, but also get a bit about people around him. questionable treatment recently in the novels so I was half-expecting that slightly woeful track record to continue. Then one of the "units" appears and while afraid tells Mortarion how she finished her allotted corpse counting.

I only mention this because I don’t know if these issues with his writing are present in everything that he’s penned, or if they’re unique to Mortarion. In my opinion, the backstory and motivation for each of the traitor Primarchs are significantly more interesting than that of their loyalist brothers. By devoting space on the page to the philosophy and world view of the tyrants in power on Galaspar we get a better understanding of why Mortarion has to be so brutal in removing them from power, which builds understanding and sympathy towards the Primarch as he’s questioned by his brothers.

However a big part of the novel is action which I think might make some people enjoy it less and I think the fans of the Death Guard will enjoy it because it all pretty awesome. They encounter heavy fire, but Mortarion prepared asteroids with engines on them to screen them from the planet-to-space fire and uses old ships as fireships to distract their fleet. It is, quite like the death guard themselves, brutally to the point and embodying the "arriving precisely when it needs too when it comes to pace. Also this "The Imperium, but even more swarm-like and worse" is in a few of the novels in this series so maybe they all have the same origin.

This isn’t really a bad book, it’s just so boringly inconsequential that you’re really going to get nothing from it. A large section of the book could easily have been labelled as merely "Bolter-Porn" but through leveraging Mortarion's character arc, several interesting side characters and the evolving character of the nascent Death Guard, none of the constant butchery seems gratuitous at all. However, my favorite part were perhaps the Digger/Sinis scenes and the way in which she perceived Morty. Horus and Sanguinius arrived on the main planet of the Galaspar cluster first and are looking about.Meanwhile Mortarion meets these reinforcement head on in a brutal battle using rad weapons and phosphex, but they cant win against millions of tanks. Either that or make the narrative follow one squad so that the character-focused prose could keep the reader tied into the story. Thanks to different video games about WH40k ( Dawn of War for Jen, Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine for Keri), they delved deep into the rich lore and haven’t looked back since. All of them have very unique perspectives not only on their father, the Emperor but also on the Great Crusade and the burgeoning Imperium as a whole. For all those who love to read great crusade era stories and especially those who love to read pre heresy traitor legion stories, this book is for you.

The minuscule amount of character study that does exist in the novel may as well function as a prologue and epilogue, bookending a drab play by play of how a horribly ran star system gets invaded by an equally horrible primarch who lacks any sort of strategy. Back in the present Mortarion tells the woman how this debate with himself about his methods is done. Though I don't think Morty's "voice" as written by Annandale quite matches the one I have in my own head. You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice. In this prologue he is watching Abysrtus exterminatus and talking to an augmented woman watching it with him from the bridge of The Fourth Horseman.

Everyone takes a varying amount of some drug that keeps the population docile or makes the overseers more aggressive. We don't actually get to learn much about the leader of the Death Guard that we didn't already know, but we do get to glimpse fan-favourites Garro and Typhon in their earlier days and, through the framing device, get some insight into Mortarion's relationship with Sanguinius and Horus. The other two tell him that because of his methods and brutality the people dont know what to do with their freedom and his body counting decree made it so he just replaced another tyranny with another. It is a super strict stagnant regime with a massive disparity between the classes and a huge bureaucracy.