LETE said:

It's completely wrong. It is essential for any follower of The Way to come to peace with oblivion itself, and the very essence of Taoism is strongly opposed to the concepts of Chaos as making oneself empty neuters the emotional drives that serve to empower the Ruinous Powers. While the folk religion which adopted parts and the name of Taoist philosophy did seek alchemical means to immortality, the philosophy itself (like Buddhism) made a point against self-destructive obsession. When one understands The Way power, such as that of the Chaos Gods or the Emperor, is realized to be inconsequential for happiness. The closest Alignment a Taoist would come to would be that of Tzeentch, but even the Lord of Change is ironically too bound in his ways compared to the philosophy's ideal.

Back On-Topic:

I see good-minded people who attempt to use Chaos in the same way that I'd see a cook who barbecues over an open flame while drenched in fuel. While a possible means to an end, there are much better ways of doing the same thing. As such it is only the truly desperate and/or foolish who find themselves using Chaos to enact a noble cause. While Chaos/Immaterium remain tainted by negative emotions you're, at best, playing with fire. However, these character are infinitely more fulfilling than Chaotic Stupid characters made so vile that the player cannot sympathize with them at all.

LETE said:

Now that's a movement we should all get behind, the "Chao is Good" propoganda machine churning out art, inspirational quotes and iconography that the dumb as a brick Imperial citizen can get behind. From henceforth-

It is not a Black Crusade, its Abby's Big Day Out

Rogue Traders will be referred to what the actually are- Hereditary drunkards with WMD's ... (heck, even the English have all but abandoned theirs) I mean really, what kind of government gives some inbred noble a huge space ship with massive guns and let them do what they want? Oh thats right YOUR government does!

Ultramarines are only to be depicted from this moment on as being blood soaked, blue armoured murdering bastards THAT ARE ALWAYS BETTER than you Joe Public, because they're on steroids and have huge guns. Please adjust your word cogitator to auto-replace the words Ultramarine Chapter to "Annoying Wankers", if you're having trouble with this, please contact your Heretek Support Line

Speaking of which Those **** Tech Priests , they don't even worship the emprah, so why should you? The imperium only really keeps them around as someone to blame when their Leman Russ wont start in the morning to get to work on time, even then they wander up whenever the f**k it pleases them, wiggle some **** around under the bonnet, swear in some language no one can understand... the secret is, even they don't know what the hell their doing!

Adeptus Administratum... these arseholes don't even have to be painted in a bad light, they're already that terrible. I mean, people have waited in line at the Dept of Redundancy for 3 generations, born, died and concieved in a queue just waiting for a change of address from Bumhole Swamp Apartments #1560 to #2304. The public service doesn't work, it creates nepotism and inefficiency. Burn them and let the private sector sort it out!

Inquisition, this bunch of nosey neighbours wouldnt be put up with in a real system, but noooo... carte blanc to just kick open your door, slap your wife, kick your dog in the middle of the night kind of guys. In a normal society, this is called "Home Invasions" and best dealt with by a shotgun to the face. Then after several hours of gruelling tortures, "woops, **** wrong address!" because the Inquisition employees Dickheads that are collectively called "Acolytes", pays them nothing and generally recruits from the most retarded from their respective careers.

You know that guy at work who's always loosing the forms, steals autoquils from the cabinet or sits by himself in the lunchroom because he makes life so unbearably annoying for everyone else. That's an Acolyte. Too dumb for a real job, so he's making yours miserable in between running around on missions setting people on fire and wrecking their ****. Shotgun to the face.

Nice. Almost Pythonesque.

crisaron said:

His!

Sorry for being such a noob but what is/was the Black Legion?

Thanks!

L

LETE said:

merashin said:

He is also a giant ******.

For some reason I did not like his character in the HH fluff novels at all.

Bladehate said:

All right, thanks!

Why do you dislike him? Is he on par with Annakin Skywalker's unbelievable naiveté & astounding stupidity, perhaps? Or is he more like Skeletor/Hordak/Dr. Claw/Monstarr/Mum Rah (ie., suppossedly incredibly ruthless & powerful & ancient & ready-for-anything, yet idiotically & incredibly defeated time & time again? Or, is he just a dumb thug?

L

Basically he's a dumb thug, with anger management issues.

Seriously, I don't know what the Chaos Gods see in him. Lucius' pic is pretty much spot on.

Considering how normally unforgiving chaos and it's followers are of failure, they seem to give Abaddon a lot of slack.

Ryder said:

That is, of course, because you are assuming each Black Crusade was a failure.

I wouldn't call getting one of the most powerful daemon weapons currently out there, capturing or destroying all the Blackstone Fortresses, making several entire sectors into civil-war zones, and in the 13th Black Crusade, swarming out of the Eye of Terror well enough that war is still waging on Cadia, Chaos holds a few different planets in the Cadia system, and an entire militarised Hive World, and the local Penal Legion military prison world, were both destroyed - one by the Planet Killer, and the other by the Imperium because it had been entirely lost to Chaos.

It might not be "we defeated the Imperium", but then it's a massive assumption to presume that that was the objective of any of the Black Crusades.

This is why I like Abaddon - everyone thinks he's a loser, but he's done a lot more for Chaos' ultimate victory than anyone actually thinks.

I think you like him just to be contrary =P.

Nah, I just think that people hate on him, when if you look at the actual objectives of pretty much all the Black Crusades he's attempted, he's at least pulled it out as accomplishing most of his goals.

I think he was cooler before the HH books though, they just make him look like a whiny kid.

The only possible merit Abbadon could conceivably have is that if that whole "Cadia has a Necron Pylon that's keeping the Eye of Terror mostly closed" thing is true, then Abbadon MIGHT be close to disabling it, letting people exit the Eye of Terror freely. On the other hand, he ruined some irreplaceable Blackstone Fortresses, which could have been used to destroy the C'tan (IIRC), so... I don't know.

There really isn't anything to look up to him about, though. He routinely betrays fellow Chaos Space Marines who believed in his leadership, spat on the memory of Horus (who, unlike Abbadon, did utterly cripple the Imperium), kills people just for looking at him, and stranded an entire Black Crusade on the surface of Cadia. If you sign up for him, you're gonna die , never having known the objectives of his real mission.

MILLANDSON said:

Most of my dislike for him stems from those books.

Teenaged anger angsty bully who sulks when he doesn't get his way.

Deinos said:

And if doing that gets him one tiny step closer to eventual victory, so be it. He's not a noble paragon of truth and justice, he's a tyrant whose goal in existence is a long, slow, painful revenge against the Imperium. He doesn't have to care about the warriors who have pledged their loyalty to him... he only needs to be feared and obeyed.

The sacrifice of your own followers, often for seemingly trivial reasons, is hardly something unheard of in the Imperium, or amongst the Orks or Dark Eldar. I fail to see why Abaddon should be accused of it above any others.

I'm just not convinced he has any redeeming qualities as a character. I don't mean "good" qualities, I mean in terms of what purpose he serves in a literary one.

The INTENT seems for him to be some sort of threatening Big Bad Evil Guy... the Sauron of the setting. But I can't really conceive of any aspect of him that is at all intimidating, in any fashion more than, say, Carron or Bale from DoW are. He's a reasonably nasty guy in terminator armor wandering around confusedly on the surface of Cadia dodging orbital bombardments, possibly searching for the Necron Pylon, possibly just hoping evac will show up. He'd be really unpleasant of a fellow to run into, and would be almost unstoppable if he remembered to wear a helmet, but I can't figure out what's supposed to be threatening about him in a world which has tanks, orbital bombardments, and so on.

What he comes off more as, is basically a huckster, like one of those crazy apocalyptic leaders who promises "this time, its for real real." I can't see how his followers think they will benefit by serving him. The Black Legion just seems like a depressing, desperate group of has-beens who have constantly been trying to reinvent their image, constantly trying to launch Black Crusades, and having killed massive amounts of themselves by enabling mass possession and shifting deific allegiances.

I really have no idea how he's been getting "closer" to defeating the Imperium, or indeed, if he's made any progress at all.

Deinos said:

And that's exactly how he wants it. He wouldn't have received the blessings of all of the Chaos Gods without having some of Tzeentch's manipulation and "long term plan"-ness in him.

Deinos said:

Which might be the case, if he was promising each time that the Black Crusade would end with Terra ablaze and the Emperor's corpse trampled beneath his boots. There's no evidence that the central objective of any of the Black Crusades is the annihilation of the Imperium. It's invariably the long-term plan that they all contribute to, but assuming that the 13th Black Crusade is simply Abaddon strapping on his armour and muttering "thirteenth time's the charm" under his breath seems to be a frankly oversimplified view.

Deinos said:

They're numerous, powerful and haven't fragmented anywhere near as much as most of the Legions (only the Word Bearers are even remotely unified; the Legions for the most part barely exist except as a memory). I imagine that they gather the might of a Black Crusade through intimidation (serve or be annihilated) or the promise of glory (because a Black Crusade is a rare opportunity to wreak havoc and spread discord in the name of the gods on an immense scale - doesn't matter whether you care for Abaddon's motivations, the chance to raze worlds and slaughter and/or defile millions of innocents is too good for many servants of Chaos to pass up).

Deinos said:

The Gothic War is a good example. By the conclusion, Abaddon had escaped with the only two remaining Blackstone Fortresses - weapons of vast power in their own right - and successfully employed the newly-constructed Planet Killer. It was a Black Crusade, but it wasn't a direct assault in the direction of Terra (indeed, each Black Crusade appears to have struck against a different Sector as the primary target, with the 13th Black Crusade being the largest yet, spread across a number of fronts), and it achieved significant gains for Chaos before it was over.

Every one of the Black Crusades has been sufficient in the glory it has brought to Chaos that the Dark Gods have offered Abaddon Daemonhood... and each time, he's turned it down in favour of his long-term plans (because Daemonhood changes your perspective on existence, and thus alters your priorities - Abaddon will not stop until his goals are achieved, no matter how long it takes, and he doesn't want Daemonhood to interfere with that).

You've, basically, said what I was trying to say, but a lot more eloquently, N0-1. Thanks!

Most of the Abaddon hatred stems from him being "an imbecile" for "losing 13 crusades" against an enemy that outnumbers chaos with EQUAL FORCES by about 2 to 1 depending on who you ask (that just being the Space Marines), having to fight out of something fleet-wise equivalent to the Omaha Beach landing at every opportunity, and he still manages to knock out some major, and at times irreplacable targets before falling back, exactly as No-1 described.

Admittedly, it's hard to bring the full might of the imperium to bear, but Abaddon doesn't exactly start on an equal footing when he pulls these off.

Autarkis02 said:

This is, of course, assuming that those objectives that he accomplishes aren't the ones he set out to do - I don't believe he's actually lost any of them, at most the Imperium has drawn them.

What makes you think the loyalist astartes outnumber the CSM? Even if we assume only a grand total of TWO chaos space marines survived the Horus Heresy and escaped to the eye of Terror, and 95% of all Chaos Space Marines die before passing on their geneseed or fail to pass it on, and that no loyalist has ever went to Chaos and passed on his geneseed since, over 10k years...

There'd STILL be 1.275 BILLION chaos space marines! All just from Adam and Steve.

Likewise, according to acquisition rules, loyalist space marines are of "Unique" rarity while CSM are of "Extremely Rare" rarity, which means its as easy to find 101-1000 CSM as it is to find a single loyalist astartes. Even in imperial space, its easier for a heretic to find "vast" (11-100) quantities of CSM to work with him (-40 total acquisitions test), as it is for an inquisitor to find a single loyalist astartes (-70 total influence test).

Makes sense if you remember that the loyalists have been utterly crippled by the Codex Astartes, while the Legions (which initially numbered, what, 200,000 or so?) were all created with the resources of but a single solar system.

Deinos said:

Hi:

I was wondering if there could be a book in the future to tie both sides (the Screaming Vortex & the Eye of Terror, with stats & adventures involving Abbaddon, & Co.), would this be feasible or even seriosly thought by FFG-Central?

I was also wondering if a PC in Black Crusade can make it to all the way lead one, what number would this one be? Would it be based on Abbaddon's attempts or each new leader starts the count again (#1, #2, etc.)?

Thanks!

L