A penitent who is loud

If you defeat Isaac Chotiner you absorb his power (you take his job).

Ok but consider the prize when the final guest defeats Chotiner and unravels the source of his power.

Such a interviewee would be like unto a GOD.

Warhammer 40k Orkz, or:

Fungus (Bri'ish)

We already know the Big War of the Large Men was very big and featured many planets going boom, and the subsequent smaller wars of Large Men and Also Women and Enbies and Not Infrequently Fungus also involved planets going boom.

We must also know how they entertain themselves.

Less bolter porn, more palace intrigue and Large Men and Also Women and Enby Soap Opera.

But it clearly exists, and it's a lot more interesting than knowing the precise functions of how their plasma blows things up.

"Unexpectedly emotionally rich and deeply human Mechanicus character" is at this point a 40K trope!

We know more about the esoteric workings of military hardware and the exact means of creating servitors than we do such a basic human question about a major society within the IoM.

*KNF mentions the fact that Mechanicus marry each other*. Or have an equivalent.

How often do 40k books even ask that sort of question? "What is romance and love like among the Mechanicus?"

And honestly I don't think you can sell human readers on "actually all humans in the galaxy are worse than these genuinely alien upsetting nonhumans, down to the last child."

Well, he at least seems to feel very bad about it before Calth.

Permanently destroying his hopes for his realm left a bit of a grudge.

It is significantly more interesting hearing Imperial characters make high minded speeches about human unity and leaving no human alone in a hostile galaxy as justification for horrific violence that they could have probably avoided, then wrestle with it, than it is to hear howling madmen.

When the bullets start flying it's sometiems actually kind of a letdown in HR, because I'm more interested in these very flawed men and women struggling to reconcile their high minded ideals with the bloody cost and the fracture points that are already widening beneath their feet.

I think he canonically IS kind of wracked by guilt for that? He doesn't at all seem proud of what he did to Lorgar.

Russ with Prospero to some degree (Russ is fascinating because he is basically a butcher whose followers became heroic AFTER the worst things they ever did as a chapter?)

Again, what little glimpse we see of Calth in KNF is actually kind of cool. I wanna know more about how Bobby G runs his empire, the internal dynamics, the "purest version of the Mechanicus vision" of techno-synthesis being championed. Astartes grappling with their need for culture is great!

Yeah the best thing about HR and Know No Fear is the glimpse of what a more "functional" Imperium is like, the sorts of serious contradictions it's going to have to resolve, and the capacity for terrible evil that devours out the real elements of techno-optimism & rationalistic crusade.

But yeah TSons especially really feel like they should be tragically trying to fix things.

Hot take: the problem with Chaos is the Old Four are too oppressively present &, arguably, too anthropomorphically evil. They leave very little room for nuance in Chaos.

Look there's a lot of suns to spare! We can move folks around!

Like I get it, Erebus is just That Evil, but he at least needs a sales pitch that isn't just "drown the galaxy in ruin and despair because the scary death metal voices in the blackness say it'll be super awesome."

I'm just saying it would be more persuasive if you were out to murder a sun or two because then your daemon buddies would stop being horrible monsters and start being Your Choice Of Best Bro and/or WaifuHusbando, as opposed to "because I am only roused to emotion by destroying something beautiful"

Thousand Sons marines who retain their friendly daemons who are constantly stuttering into the horrible things the rest of the Galaxy thinks of them as being, with only their partners able to see anything positive in them for long.

It adds a strong tragic edge to the whole thing and opens at least some territory for individual antiheroes & nuance here and there.

But yeah "Chaos (or at least its Neverborn lesser children) WANT to be things of beauty and beneficence, & tell others that's what they truly are until their mortal followers interact with THAT instead of the monsters, but constantly self-sabotage back to foulness" feels like it has legs?

That would be funnier, actually, especially given that the Emps is canonically a shape shifting quasi deity for whom all the Tarot major arcana represent different personas he's taken.

But in any case it's a bit unfortunate that they don't really try at all to make any sort of positive case for Chaos itself. I really wish they would allow individual daemons, at least, to have more variation.

Sure, but those aren't even necessarily *inherently* negative, the canon explanation is because things in the Galaxy were bad enough it fed those specific malevolent manifestations?

(The Old Four don't, of course, they're just assholes exploiting even their poor deluded child-emanations.)

Since again from Ollanius' PoV we see that the horrific forms are like... Wrapping around the daemon's actual essence, something they're forced into to appear in reality.

Angels broken and defiled by ignorance and superstition into forms and habits that are not who they are or want to be - but if the Primordial Truth triumphs, then all will be made wonderful again and the daemons will be things of beauty and benevolence.

Maybe they even believe it themselves.

The idea that the Word Bearers basically just embrace "yeah this is horrible but it's the truth, so we need to work with it" WORKS, but I'd have the daemons who start to appear before Erebus and Horus present their horrifying forms as a product of being twisted by their exile from the Materium.

I dig it, in principle.

A thing I am actually kind of surprised by them not bringing up is the idea that the Warp reflects sapient emotions and the appearance and nature of Neverborn is thus shaped by it. We know from Ollanius' PoV that how they look is not *actually* how they "truly are."

Turns out the mightiest tool in the arsenal of relative liberalism continues to be Microsoft Excel.