Horus Heresy

It was pretty much this.

The Horus Heresy is the single biggest event in Warhammer 40,000 fluff. The only real competition is the War in Heaven between the Old Ones and the Necrons and maybe creation of Slaanesh by the Eldar.

In the Horus Heresy, the Emperor's favorite son, Horus Lupercal, formerly Warmaster of the Imperium, rebelled against the Emperor, taking eight Space Marine Legions, their respective Primarchs, and a large part of the Imperial Army and Mechanicum with him. After waging war across the galaxy, Horus and his traitors eventually reached Holy Terra itself, hoping to murder the Emperor himself. He beat the Emperor within an inch of his life but was killed in turn. The Chaos gribblies he had been allied with disappeared and the now Chaos Marines that had followed him sulked back to the Eye of Terror, starting the Long War.

Because the Emperor was fucked up to the point where he had to be permanently attached to a life-support machine known as the "Golden Throne" just to survive, logic within the Imperium gradually decreased, eventually turning into the Grimdark empire it is today. And it was already pretty damn grimdark.

Warhammer 40,000 Fluff

The Horus Heresy screwed almost everyone's plans (except the Chaos Gods' of course, but they always win) and changed the flavour of the Imperium's Grimdark from Stalinist Soviet "if you breathe a word about religion, we rape you with knives" to Catholic Inquisition "if you breathe a word about the wrong religion we rape you with knives".

The heresy lasted for several years (somewhere between seven and ten) and was fought all over the galaxy. The following are the most important battles and campaigns during the Heresy:

• Battle of Isstvan III
• Burning of Prospero
• Drop Site Massacre
• Battle of Calth
• Shadow Crusade
• Thramas Crusade
• Signus Campaign
• Battle of Phall
• Siege of Terra

The Board Game

First published in 1993 by Game Designer's Workshop, it was the Emprah versus his evil bastard of a son in the scorched earth of Terra. Units include titans and Chaos spawn. *GLARBLBLBLBLBLBL*

The more recent edition (2010) is published by Fantasy Flight Games. Also a two-player war game, it includes over 100 sculpted minifigs, sculpted buildings, and even Horus and the Emprah themselves are units on the board. It also adds more territory, as the fight can be pushed back onto the traitor's flagship Vengeful Spirit. Combat is less dice-y and more card-y. (Not to be confused with the lame Horus Heresy card game, who's only saving grace was the awesome card art that would appear in the Horus Heresy artbooks anyway)

The Book Series

For the last few years, Black Library has been publishing novels that explore the events of the Horus Heresy, looking at the rivalries among the Primarchs and exploring just why everything went down the tubes. The novels are by a selection of different authors, which is a total pain if you like to organise your books alphabetically by author. Generally all the books in the series are damned good (except the ones that suck (just like all of Black Library's publications)), especially the first three. Mmmmm, Dan Abnett...

Of course, like we mentioned, there's some that are... um...

Okay, look, comparing them to Twilight is doing them a favor.

The worst of the worst is, arguably, Fear to Tread. It's not all bad (the characterization of Sanguinius and his relationship with Horus are both well fleshed out, and some of the horror moments are well-played-out), but it has all kinds of very, very stupid shit, justified with "because Chaos." We're talking giant planets with frowny faces, inhabited by garbage monsters, throwing city-sized rocks at space ships, as well as a nearly-stereotypically-gay Slaaneshi daemon, who doesn't actually serve any purpose in the story. It also introduces a villain called the Red Angel, despite the fact Angron already took that name... oh, and the book goes out of its way to rub it in the readers' faces. That's not to mention the fact that Sanguinius basically acts like a complete idiot the whole time; for instance, he doesn't realize Horus lied about the whole "this specific race of aliens is still hiding out in one specific subsector, no really, I swear, also please take these Word Bearers with you for an unexplained reason, who communicate with me with some sort of dark magic" until he crash-landed on a planet filled with daemons, surrounding a giant temple of skulls, after all Warp travel and the stars themselves were blotted out.

As mentioned, it's not ALL bad. Sanguinius is pretty badass, there's a lot of neat fluff explored, and some of the Chaos-warp-magic elements are genuinely frightening. But it's surrounded by so much suspension-of-disbelief-breaking material that it's hard to take it seriously.

Then again, it ended up being Black Library's most financially successful book and hitting thirteen on the New York Times bestseller list, but when did anybody take Warhammer seriously?

The Tabletop Wargame

Forge World is producing a new line of books and models (in addition to Imperial Armour and Warhammer Forge) to allow players to fight battles from the Horus Heresy in Warhammer 40,000. This includes rules and models for the Primarchs (both pre- and post-fall, for the Traitors) as well as ancient vehicles. No xenos, unfortunately. Presumably this came about because GW felt that they just weren't making quite enough money from die-hard marine/chaos players and figured they could literally buy a dump-truck full of gold plated cocaine each if they made a version of the game that requires only Forge World minis AND thousands upon thousands of them. Still worth it, though.

Betrayal

Forge World starts big, as their first book covers the battles on Istvaan III, in which Horus sent the remaining loyalist elements of the Sons of Horus, Emperor's Children, Death Guard, and World Eaters to the surface, ostensibly to rout the anti-Imperial resistance that had taken hold in the capital city, and then fired Exterminatus torpedoes (of the life-eater virus bomb variety) onto the city to wipe them out.

Unfortunately for Horus, not everything went as planned; not only did the loyalist Death Guard frigate Eisenstein escape to the Phalanx with word of Horus's betrayal, but loyalist elements on other ships were able to disrupt the bombardment and warn the loyalists on the ground that it was coming. Between the disruption, the warning, and good old-fashioned Space Marine toughness, only a third or so of the landed force had actually died. Horus would have fired another bombardment, but Angron and his traitor World Eaters jumped the gun and made planetfall; the other traitors were left with no choice but to deploy themselves and destroy the remaining loyalists personally.

Betrayal contains a Great Crusade Legion army list (for which we have a tactica), and rules for special characters and units from the Sons of Horus, Death Guard, Emperor's Children, and World Eaters Legions, including their Primarchs (even Fulgrim, who was not actually at the battle) and several major characters from the book series such as Garviel Loken.

See Also

• Alternate Heresy, for a discussion of other possible outcomes of the (not necessarily Horus) Heresy.

External Links

• Horus Heresy (1993) at BoardGameGeek
• Horus Heresy (2010) at BoardGameGeek