Now that the hammer of betrayal has fallen at Istvaan III, we will look a little bit more at Loken on a personal level, because it is at this point that he begins acting more as an individual and less like a machine in a legion-level cog.
This is the system we have created to protect the ethical integrity of competitive play in the ITC and to not apply it when a player has violated the rules discredits the entire system.
There’s new Blood Angels stuff to talk about, so out I pop from my quarantine rabbit hole to offer some analysis. These interim rules have been out for a couple of days now, and while there’s a lot to be excited about, there’s also some mourning to do.
What do we mean by innocence when talking about Garviel Loken? It is hard to imagine a decades-old galaxy-wide bio-engineered super-soldier having innocence. Of course, innocence isn’t here as a “guilty vs. innocent” comparison but is instead the lack of knowledge or ignorance that he and many other Astartes operated under.
If you were asked who the “main character” of the Horus Heresy story is, you’d be hard-pressed to find an answer that could cover the 50+ novels of the Horus Heresy story. It is, after all, so incredibly vast and covering so many different characters that there’s no real way to say that one character is the main one in all of the stories. Some might say Horus since this is all titled after him. Some would say that it is the Emperor since all of the heresy’s conflict is done in support of or in spite of his dream for humanity. For me, I choose Garviel Loken.
This debate is a question of game ethos. To GW, what does being a good matched play/tournament player mean? This is the foundation of the social contract that applies to matched play at home and tournaments. Can we even take a moment and just appreciate that GW has taken the time to more clearly formalize a social contract? No one can say that GW doesn’t have a right to do it, either.
Hello, 40K fans! I’ve got something a bit different from the usual philosophy lineup, but not too far a deviation.
Essentially, a warrior will live on after death through the passing forward of his genetic material to new initiates via the progenoid glands. Progenoids are not a phallus, but Freud knows what they are there for as clear as daylight.
I definitely respect storytelling that is more than black and white representations of people and circumstances. That said, giving fans of 40K or even fans of “good guys” something good to root for isn’t making the grimdark a black and white moral picture.
