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00:00Generally, by the point where Horus and the Emperor are fighting each other, the rest
00:04of the traitor forces are a series of crazed warbands roaming through the palace, killing
00:10whatever they can, and the loyalists are so broken down that they're not really any better.
00:16You betrayed me, you betrayed us all.
00:21Hello, I am Arbiterian, I talk about Warhammer on the internet, and today I'm here to answer
00:27your questions about the Horus Heresy.
00:34The last two times I've been on IGN I've answered your questions about 40k, but there's a new
00:38edition of the Horus Heresy out, and so this time we're going to delve into the legends
00:41of the Horus Heresy.
00:44The Horus Heresy is kind of the founding myth of Warhammer 40k.
00:5410,000 years before the entire setting of Warhammer 40k, the Emperor arises on terror, unites the
01:00planet, and then sets off into the galaxy with his 20 space marine legions.
01:07He unites the galaxy under the rule of the Imperium, and then a civil war happens.
01:11One of the Primarchs, Horus, the most trusted Primarch, is corrupted by chaos.
01:15Nine of his brother Primarchs side with him, and he leads a war on the Emperor.
01:33The war lasts a decade, it rages across the entire galaxy as worlds, armies and legions
01:39of space marines all declare, either for the Emperor or for Horus, and it culminates in
01:44the Siege of Terror, when Horus comes to Terror, breaks his way through the defences, and eventually
01:50fights the Emperor in single combat.
01:52The Emperor wins, Horus is defeated, but the Emperor is mortally wounded, and whatever plans
01:58he eventually had for the Imperium lie ruined and in tatters.
02:02And the Imperium we see in 40k is the result of that.
02:07Nicoru Nicori asks, who's really to blame for the Horus Heresy?
02:13That is a question that has a number of different ways to answer it.
02:17So the Horus Heresy starts, in its simplest reading, when Horus is corrupted by a demon
02:23weapon, turns a load of brothers to his side, and fights against the Emperor.
02:27But we could go back further and say, well, the demon weapon is put there by a different
02:31Primarch, by Lorgar of the Wordbearers.
02:34Lorgar of the Wordbearers is raised on a planet that are extremely religious and kind of worship
02:40chaos.
02:41They don't really understand what it is.
02:42But when the Emperor turns up, Lorgar turns the whole planet into worshipping the Emperor,
02:46which the Emperor really doesn't like.
02:47The Emperor, after a while, after a while of Horus turning the planets he conquers for
02:52the Imperium into giant churches, the Emperor punishes Lorgar and tells him off and says,
02:57well, you've disappointed me because you're not meant to be worshipping anything.
03:00And that drives Lorgar even further into worshipping chaos.
03:04And it's Lorgar's Legion that take that demon weapon and put Horus in a position to
03:10be possessed by it.
03:11So maybe it's Lorgar who's the first heretic.
03:14And then we could go further and say, well, all those Primarchs were probably intended to
03:18be raised in terror by the Emperor as loyal sons.
03:22And in fact, the problem is they were scattered all over the galaxy and ended up being raised
03:26on planets like Lorgars.
03:27And the person who did that is a perpetual called Erda who scattered the Primarchs into
03:31the warp.
03:32So maybe she's to blame for the Horus heresy.
03:35Or we could go even further and say none of this would have happened if the Emperor didn't
03:38try and unite the galaxy really, really quickly and steal a load of power from chaos in order
03:44to do it.
03:45Maybe the Emperor caused the Horus heresy.
03:47Much like in the real world, events of this scale are caused by a massive number of factors,
03:52all interacting in the worst way possible.
03:58Epicantha says, why was Horus made War Master in the first place, even though he was completely
04:03emotionally unequipped for it?
04:05And yeah, the Primarchs don't seem to be emotionally equipped for much.
04:09So a lot of these Primarchs don't know each other very well.
04:11They might have quite big rivalries with the other ones.
04:14And sometimes the ones that we might look at, like Gilliman or Dorne and think are the
04:18most logistically minded, the most grown up, the most sensible and stable.
04:24Maybe they aren't the ones that many of the other Primarchs like.
04:27And if you're going to be the War Master, you have to be able to tell all the other Primarchs
04:31what to do.
04:32There are certainly Primarchs who seem a lot more emotionally stable, mature, adult.
04:37But they're not the Primarchs that got on the best with all their brothers.
04:42The skill of Horus, who was found first, who had been by the Emperor's side the longest,
04:46the skill of Horus was that almost all of the other Primarchs respected him.
04:50So when the Emperor decided he'd leave the Crusade and the Crusade was finally in a position
04:55where he could go and work on other projects, he left Horus in charge.
04:59Horus was the only one who could tell all the other Primarchs what to do and have a good
05:03chance they'd actually do it.
05:06No investment, 9822.
05:08Why didn't the Emperor prepare for the heresy if he knew he was on such a short timeline?
05:13The thing is, he kind of did.
05:15We get this hinted at a few times that the Emperor and his main servant, Malkador, who
05:21formulated a lot of the plans, they kind of expected there to be some sort of rebellion
05:26of the Primarchs, and maybe they were trying to foster a bit of division because they expected
05:33that at least some of the crazier ones would have to be gotten rid of.
05:37The Emperor and Malkador had done this before.
05:39Before the Space Marines, there was a different set of genetically engineered warriors called
05:43the Thunder Warriors, who were prone to berserk fits of rage.
05:46They were very useful for conquering Terra, but once Terra was conquered and then invented
05:51Space Marines, the Custodes massacred all the remaining Thunder Warriors because they were
05:55too dangerous to stay around.
05:56So there are hints that the Emperor and Malkador did expect at some point, once the crusade
06:02was over, that some of the Space Marines might rebel and maybe had put in place, or they felt
06:07they'd put in place, enough safeguards to make sure that that didn't destroy everything.
06:12That was almost going to be an inevitability.
06:14We know that two Legions were lost.
06:16We don't know why they were lost.
06:17We know that other Legions had to go and censure those Legions.
06:22So we know this sort of thing does happen, but it seems that the scale of the heresy and
06:27particularly the massive involvement of Chaos, certainly the fact that Horus, the Primarch
06:33in charge, was the one corrupted, was something they didn't quite expect.
06:37It's not that the Emperor and Malkador didn't prepare for a Rebellion, it's that the Rebellion
06:42was on a scale much bigger than they'd prepared for.
06:46And it came alongside a load of other problems, like Magnus shattering the Webway project, which
06:52meant that they were on the back foot from the very, very start.
06:55And following on from that, Horus was weak, says, why didn't the Emperor tell Horus or
07:02the Primarchs about the Webway and the Webway project?
07:05The very short answer is because he didn't trust them.
07:09The Emperor has made these things, these giant generals, with some warp power that he stole
07:16from Chaos, we think.
07:17And then instead of growing up under his control, they've been scattered to various human planets.
07:23They often believe different things to him.
07:25Some of them have emerged with actual mutations, like angel wings, that they may or may not
07:30have been intended to have, and many of them don't seem particularly happy with him as
07:35their father, I guess.
07:36So there's sort of a lack of trust between the Emperor and the Primarchs that Custodes,
07:41the Emperor's other most trusted servants, notably say that the creation of the Primarchs
07:46and the Space Marines was a bad idea.
07:48They think it's a bad idea from the start.
07:51So the usual rule as to why the Emperor doesn't just tell the Primarchs everything, all of his
07:55plans, is that he doesn't fully trust them.
07:57They basically have one job, it's conquer real space, and then, you know, we'll see
08:01how many are left after that.
08:03Specifically about the Webway though, the Emperor has this overarching plan, it's kind of the
08:07other half of his plan, to gain access to the Webway, which is a network of tunnels in
08:13reality that run in between the warp and real space.
08:17The Webway is much safer than using the warp for space travel.
08:19At the point of the Great Crusade, the Eldar had been the main users of the Webway.
08:24They didn't make it, but they were the main users of it.
08:27But the Eldar, just before, had been destroyed by the birth of Slaanesh.
08:30So the Emperor wanted to capitalise on that, invade the Webway, take it over for humans,
08:34and use that to do human space travel, be much, much safer.
08:38And he keeps this plan a secret from the Primarchs, who, as we know, may or may not have been corrupted
08:44by chaos, we're not sure.
08:46When some of the Primarchs find out independently about the Webway, like Magnus the Red, who's
08:50the Primarch of the Thousand Suns, he finds out on his own about the Webway.
08:54The Emperor says to him, yeah, I know already, but I've got a project going, and it's very
08:59delicate right now, so whatever you do, don't interfere.
09:03And yeah, that doesn't work out as planned.
09:08Silocat says, how did the traitor Primarchs plan to deal with the custodies in the initial
09:13stages of the heresy?
09:14I think actually, in the initial stages, they didn't plan to deal with them at all.
09:18The custodies of the Emperor's bodyguards, they're sort of around in the Imperium, but
09:23most of them are on terror in the palace around the Emperor.
09:26Horus' plan broadly was the same plan he used on Crusade.
09:29Amass as much power as quickly as possible into one giant thrust, and power their way
09:35towards terror with an overwhelming force before all of the Loyalist Legions, who were spread
09:41out across the galaxy, could effectively get back to stop him.
09:44The intention would be that by the time the traitor forces got to terror, there were just
09:48so many of them that they would overwhelm the Imperial Fists, who were defending the
09:52walls, the custodies who defended the palace, and the millions of regular soldiers who defended
09:57the planet.
09:59Astartes1413 asks, how close were the traitors in winning the Horus Heresy?
10:05The answer is very close.
10:07By the point of the siege, Horus has done a number of pretty clever things.
10:12He's taken the three biggest Loyalist Legions, the Dark Angels, the Blood Angels, and the
10:16Ultramarines, and he'd already sent them on missions far, far away on the other side of
10:20the galaxy.
10:21He was the War Master, so he could do that.
10:23The only Loyalist Legions left were ones that were quite small by comparison.
10:28And then he dispatched the word bearers to raise a great warp storm called the Ruin Storm, which
10:33would effectively stop those three Legions getting back in time.
10:36And then he took over loads of worlds, amassed his forces, and blasted his way pretty much
10:41to Terra within a few years.
10:44For the entire duration of the war, the Loyalists are trying to delay the inevitable.
10:49They know Horus has more forces, and all they're trying to do is hold out long enough that one of those great big Legions can get back through the storms to Terra.
10:58They fight a number of huge battles on Horus' path just to try and slow him down.
11:04And when it comes to the actual siege of the palace, and Rogaldorn, who's in charge of the defense of Terra, knows that his only real plan is to make each wall last as long as possible.
11:14To delay the traitors as long as possible.
11:17There's no hope of beating them, just of delaying them until the reinforcements can get through.
11:22And eventually that is what happens.
11:24But by that point, Terra is ruined and barely anyone knows what side they're fighting on anymore.
11:32Hydra Phantoms asks, why didn't the traitors do a final push after Horus died when they're so close already?
11:40And that's to do with what the traitor forces were actually like by the end of the siege.
11:45One of the problems with the traitor forces is that they were formed of nine different Primarchs who had different grievances with the Imperium.
11:52And by the end of the siege, four of them had fallen directly to the control of rival chaos powers.
11:59And what that means is that while the siege starts relatively organized, as it goes on and as these forces get separated and this gruelling war continues,
12:09a lot of the cohesion in the traitor ranks starts to really break down.
12:13The Emperor's children quit the wars and go and do whatever they want in the civilian quarters of terror.
12:19Perturabo, who's the person in charge of the siege, quits the entire thing when he realizes that winning by magic and demons wouldn't really prove anything about how good a general he is.
12:29Generally, by the point where Horus and the Emperor are fighting each other,
12:33the rest of the traitor forces are a series of crazed warbands roaming through the palace, killing whatever they can.
12:41And the loyalists are so broken down that they're not really any better.
12:46All strategy, all command, all attempt at like fighting a unified war has gone.
12:52And a lot of the marines are dead. They've just been whittled down.
12:56By the time Horus and the Emperor are fighting, the real threat to the loyalists is demons.
13:01The reality of terror has been weakened so much that no one really knows where the palace or Horus's command ship or the warp start and end.
13:11People are walking through the palace and emerging hundreds of miles away because all of reality has started to be twisted.
13:17And the biggest threat is all these demons that have started to turn up within the palace.
13:21And of course, when the Emperor kills Horus, that link is severed.
13:25The chaos gods lose and the demons start to disappear.
13:29By that point, the actual traitor legions, the renegade Astartes on the ground, are in no position to do another push.
13:36They barely get off terror alive.
13:40Which leads into the next question.
13:41Sacred Ancestor asks, at the end of the siege, was Horus stronger than the Emperor?
13:46And the answer is, yes, but because of the Emperor's choices.
13:51Near the end of the siege, the Emperor realises the only way to stop this is that he personally
13:55is going to have to go up to Horus's battle barge and kill Horus.
13:59Which is what Horus wants.
14:00They want this big duel where Horus is proven right.
14:04All the war, until this point, the Emperor has had to stay on the Golden Throne,
14:08because a few years before, right at the start of the war, his webway project was damaged to such a degree
14:13that only he could stop hordes of demons pouring in and invading the planet.
14:17So the Emperor hasn't really been able to participate in the war yet.
14:21But at the end of the siege, he finally goes, right, I'm going to have to get off my throne,
14:26go up to the battle barge and try and defeat Horus.
14:29Initially, the first plan is that the Emperor tries to bring in loads of warp power into himself,
14:35which seems to be one of his big abilities.
14:38But this turns out to be a bit of a trick. We realise that if the Emperor does this,
14:43if the Emperor draws in all the power of the warp that he needs to defeat Horus,
14:49he will become this thing called the Dark King, which is a god, a fifth chaos god,
14:55or maybe something bigger than all of them that will ruin the galaxy.
14:58He'll lose all of his humanity and he'll become this primal force of ruin.
15:04That is how much warp power he needs to take in in order to be stronger than Horus.
15:08And he's convinced that that will actually be a bad idea.
15:11So he gets rid of a load of that warp power and he decides that he will fight Horus as a very powerful
15:17Psyker. He's still the Emperor, but Horus has the infinite power of the warp and the Emperor decides
15:22not to have the infinite power of the warp. He goes into the fight knowing that,
15:26and he sort of uses trickery to actually kill Horus.
15:29And the result of that is the Emperor is mortally wounded in turn and all of his plans become
15:33nothing. But at least he didn't become the Dark King.
15:36Basically, by the time of the duel, Horus has all the power of chaos and the Emperor doesn't.
15:42But that is because the Emperor realised that taking on all that power would be a bad idea,
15:48even worse than what happens.
15:51Dimbeldorf asks, what were the Xenos factions doing during the Horus heresy?
15:57And the answer is not much. There were some Xenos who actively took an interest in the heresy.
16:03There's a Xenos organisation called the Cabal who try and influence it, but they aren't really
16:08powerful enough to do anything. Not much comes from that. The Orcs have been shattered at Olenor.
16:12All the really big Orc empires were destroyed. Now, Orcs will, of course, eventually come back.
16:17But at the point of the heresy, all the really big ones had just been broken.
16:20The Eldar were still reeling from their fall and the birth of Slaanesh when all their homeworlds were
16:27destroyed, so they can't do much. The Tyranids haven't reached the galaxy yet. The Necrons haven't
16:31woken up yet. And the Tau haven't evolved into the Tau yet. So while there were alien factions all
16:37over the galaxy, the Great Crusader just killed most of them. So they didn't have much to do in the heresy.
16:42Lord Admiral Spire asks, how many veterans of the Horus Heresy remain active in 40k?
16:50That's an interesting question. On the loyalist side, not very many at all. The most famous one
16:56that everyone probably thinks of is a guy called Björn the Fell-Handed, who is a Space Wolves
17:00dreadnought. When he wasn't a dreadnought, when he was just a guy, he fought at the side of Liman Rus,
17:05his Primark. He fought through the heresy. He's one of the oldest remaining dreadnoughts. So he's one of the
17:10very few space marines that can actually remember that far back. He's only woken up for special occasions.
17:16There are also obviously some Primarks on the loyalist side. We know that Gilliman's alive,
17:20he can remember the heresy. We know that the Lion is back, Lionel Johnson. He can remember the heresy.
17:25Also, there are a few that we think are still around. Korrax is still about somewhere. Vulcan's
17:30still about somewhere. They can remember the heresy. So there are a few Primarks. And then there are
17:35probably a few Custodians. The Adeptus Custodes, we don't know how long they live. But after the
17:41heresy, they went back into the palace and they became bodyguards until almost the 41st millennium.
17:47It's possible that a few of those actually remember the heresy. So on the loyalist side,
17:51it's probably quite a small number. On the traitor side, it's probably a lot more. After the siege,
17:56all the traitor forces were forced off of terror and hounded by the loyalists into a region of space
18:02called the Eye of Terror. Terror, O-R, not terror with an A at the end. They lived there for 10,000
18:08years. In the Eye of Terror, which eventually would become the Great Rift that we see in 40k now,
18:12the warp and real space cross over so time doesn't work properly. They might have only experienced a
18:17few hundred or thousand years while 10,000 years has passed outside. And a lot of the Chaos Space
18:23Marines that are still attacking the Imperium today, Chaos Space Marines like Abaddon the Despoiler,
18:28they remember the heresy. For them, it might have only been a couple of hundred years since they
18:34left Terror. So on the traitor side, quite a lot of Space Marines remember the Horus heresy.
18:41I-7-986 says, did Alpharius do anything during the heresy that would point to him being loyal to
18:50the Imperium? And that's an interesting question. Alpharius and Omegon, his twin Primarch, are the
18:56Primarchs of the Alpha Legion. The Alpha Legion officially sided with Horus in the Horus heresy
19:01and fought on the side of the traitors. But there are quite a lot of hints that they might have had
19:06some ulterior motive. And that ulterior motive might have been fighting on the side of the Emperor in
19:11disguise, or it might have been fighting for Horus but limiting how bad it got, limiting how far Horus
19:18could go. We don't really know because there were so many splits with the Alpha Legion, so many plans
19:24within plans within plans, some of which didn't survive the war, I mean Alpharius didn't survive
19:29the war, that no one really knows what the intended goal was at the end. We know that the Alpha Legion
19:35certainly did some things that supported the Loyalists. The Alpha Legion deliberately kept the
19:41White Scars out of the war because everyone thought they'd go on the side of Horus, and then let them back
19:46into the war by destroying their own stations. The Alpha Legion hid operatives on terror during the siege
19:52with a load of code words that would point them towards supporting Horus or supporting the Emperor.
19:58And then we know that someone in that Legion activated them with the code word that should
20:03support the Emperor, but we don't know who that was. It's impossible to say that Alpharius,
20:09the Primarch specifically, did anything that would point to him being loyal to the Imperium,
20:14but his Legion did, and those orders had to come from somewhere.
20:20Was it true that Perturabo and the Iron Warriors carried the heresy for the traitors, or is it a
20:25meme? And the answer is, a bit of both. I wouldn't say that they fully carried the entire heresy.
20:31There were definitely a lot of other legions who were big and strong and powerful and did a lot of
20:37the fighting. The Alpha Legion, if they were on the side of Horus, were everywhere. The Sons of Horus,
20:43the Death Guard, huge legions that did some of the biggest and most gruelling campaigns. However,
20:49the Iron Warriors were a very big legion that were very efficient at prosecuting wars, and Perturabo
20:56was a bit of a mathematical genius. He was the one most relied upon to break down the fortresses on the
21:02way, and then he was kind of put in charge of the Siege of Terror. He saw this as his chance to prove
21:09that he was better than Rogal Dorn, whose job was to hold the fortress. So Perturabo did a lot of work
21:15in the Horus Heresy, as did the Iron Warriors. He was in charge of the siege, he prosecuted that siege,
21:20and he eventually left the siege when all the people who were meant to be doing his plans just decided
21:26to do whatever they wanted. So yes, it's definitely the case that Perturabo was instrumental
21:32to how far the traitors got. Without him, there wouldn't have been a great plan to besiege the
21:38Emperor's Palace that anyone would have stood a chance of following. He's definitely very much up
21:44there in being very, very important, but it's wrong to say the Iron Warriors carried the whole war.
21:49There were definitely other legions that did just as big a part on the journey to terror.
21:54I never wanted this. I never wanted to unleash my legions.
22:00There we go. A little look into the absurd complexity that is the Horus Heresy. Hopefully,
22:08that's made a few things clearer, or maybe it's just raised even more questions. But there are a
22:14good 17 novels about the Horus Heresy and a load of campaign books, so you're not short of story
22:21threads to follow up on. Anyway, if you'd like more videos like this, I have a couple more that I've done
22:25for IGN where we answer questions. And if you'd like to hear more about the general law of the
22:29Horus Heresy or 40k, you can find my channel and my Instagram and other social media all linked
22:35in the thing below. See you later, heretics!
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