the majority of fans only know the new, awful one!
I've actually never encountered anyone who hadn't first heard of the original ollinus, and who didn't like the common-soldier version of him better.
Questions about the Adeptus Mechanicus
* Including a very interesting conversation hidden in the cover art. I shall be very interested to see how they address that bit when the Horus Heresy series gets there.
It would be interesting to see, for sure. The Thorian sourcebook fills this out some. Though, even within the novels there are differences as to what is Thorian and what is not. Eisenhorn seems to consider Almathians as more moderate than Thorians, even though one could argue that Thorians are the most Radical faction there is.
Sorry for the tangent...
The Inquisitor wargame - kind of the spiritual predecessor to dark heresy and the origin of pretty much all the background on the factions of the inquisition
Those PDFs are an amazing resource and inspiration. It's worth pointing out that Dark Heresy and the other FFG 40k games went different ways on some fluff details, so there will be contradictions that would have to be sorted one way or the other by anyone who wants to use these.
I've actually never encountered anyone who hadn't first heard of the original ollinus, and who didn't like the common-soldier version of him better.
Huh? Where did you pick that quote from? That's not what I wrote.
What I'm saying is that the majority of fans seems to treat the Horus Heresy novels as a sort of authoritative source, as if they had the power to override and cancel out previous versions of events - including the original Ollanius Pius. It's part of the "40k canon" misconception that runs rampant in the community.
It would be interesting to see, for sure. The Thorian sourcebook fills this out some. Though, even within the novels there are differences as to what is Thorian and what is not.
The novels, of course, suffer from the very same "problem" mentioned in regards to the Inquisitor game above.
As fans and gamers, we can only cherrypick what we like more. To expect consistency in this franchise only leads to disappointment, or even frustration as to why author X doesn't write about Y like it was in Z. I'm still reeling from what
Blood of Martyrs
did to the SoB here.
anyone still wondering whether Mechanicus can get married or fall in love at least.
Of course they can. Whether they would want to (the answer is usually no), and whether they would be ostracized by their peers (the answer is usually yes) is another matter, but tech-priests are born human and have emotions all the way up until they undergo the Rite of Pure Thought (although even they, they're probably still programmed with emotions such as righteous indignation). They may be Chem-Gelded before that, though, which would make falling in love hard.
It really depends on how you want to see the Cult Mechanicus! Maybe they have a chastity clause like some RL churches, or maybe they don't. Or maybe Forge Worlds do not allow marriages out of love in general, but rather assign people to live together (I think there was a blurb like this in the Inquisitor's Handbook, about FW populations being treated as numbers) a la THX 1338...
Don't tell me you don't get a 40k AdMech vibe from this!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4hLXOVCZr-8
But really, such comparatively minor details are not part of the common ground of the setting, which is why everyone - from novel authors to FFG's writers to individual gamers like you - will have their own ideas regarding this. It all comes down to how inhumane and different you want to depict such an environment, or how important a certain idea is for a character you have in mind, and how the rest of the party thinks about it.