Worst 40k author

>huehuehue

You'll get b& if you don't use comprehensible English.

Eisenhorn was great, though. Remember, at that time a lot of things weren't set in stone yet.

For instance, the dead Space Marine is recommended to the Primarch of the White Consuls, where it should be Chapter Master.

But he set the groundwork for a lot of things to come. Ravenor and the later Gaunt's Ghosts novels are a lot more focused. (Eisenhorn was my first Black Library novel, and it was great. Malleus, in particular, was a good example of how I expected America to react after 9/11.)

You can travel through the warp without a navigator.

You can travel without navigator. It's just not a good idea on the less stable routes.
The rogue traders in eisenhorn all had navigators.
The one of Eisenhorns bro was heavily augmented and fixed at his station like many servitors.

Graham McNeil. His writings about Chaos are pretty good, but his characterization and dialogue? Jesus fucking Christ. It hurts to read. It's like he's an alien whose understanding of human behavior comes from Mexican soap operas. It's so bad. I couldn't get past 50 pages of Fulgrim.

*shudder*

It varies. Some stuff they do good, others bad. Gav Thorpe should stick to Elves and the Dark Angels... his Raven Guard stuff wasn't very good.

Dan Abnett can write a good story, but he knows fuck all about 40K lore - hover bikes owned by civilians, a servitor-Navigator (I'm pretty sure the Navigator houses would flip if you servitor-ed a member), Inquisitors having to turn up at civilian courts to answer for their methods (what part of answer only to the Emperor wasn't clear?), etc

Graham McNeil... is wank. He seems to view 40K as the marvel universe, and can't stand the idea of 'grey', your character is either super good, has no spots on him, or he's an irredeemable bad guy. Shouldn't be allowed to write 40K at all.

>C. S. Goto

Funny thing is, his last novel was 'alright', and I think people wouldn't mind Space Marines armed with Multi-lasers and backflipping Terminators rising atop Razorbacks so much if the guy hadn't been such as asshole with a "well the BL published it, so I think they know more than you" to the FANS.

>Graham McNeil. His writings about Chaos are pretty good, but his characterization and dialogue? Jesus fucking Christ. It hurts to read. It's like he's an alien whose understanding of human behavior comes from Mexican soap operas. It's so bad. I couldn't get past 50 pages of Fulgrim.

It's because Fulgrim will turn into a bad guy... so McNeil can't handle the idea Fulgrim has any good in him... as we all know, good people never do bad things, so Fulgrim must have been an unknown asshole from the very beginning...

I liked Mechanicum and the first two of the priests of mars books. The third was 100% shit it went from rouge trader politics and slice of life admec in space to standing around on a robot planet for the entire fucking 250 pages shooting at literally 7 fucking robot dogs.

Every time I think, oh hey, i'll give him a chance and keep reading, he fucks it up. He gets the lore well, and he has mega street creed company wise, but the fact he left to work on league of legends tell you how relevant he really is.

Where is Titanicus on that list?

gaunts ghosts?

>soul drinkers
>good

At least I didn't have to go far down to see that the list is trash

I really like Eisenhorn, but by 2001 most of the stuff was already set in stone. We were playing 3rd Edition for two years already by that time.
Abnett has always played fast and loose with the lore and he's always been critizised for it. Eisenhorn and Ravenor just have a special place, because they aren't just another instance of Bolterporn, Lasgunporn or the odd Shuriken or Dakkaporn.

>dakkaporn
Man I remember when GW was holding their totally fake black library fan submission and they mentioned that they would love to see a book from the orks perspective.

How would it even work?

Sandy Mitchell is utter trash, completely missing the point of the setting. There is 0, fucking 0 respect for what loose canon there is or any individual act of heroism.

DKoK? Combat druggies, nobody could ACTUALLY stand unflinching in the jaws of death

Inquisitors? Not actually tactically astute, need other people to do that for them

Astartes? Well, they're big and strong, and they have great gear, but they don't actually fight any better than an extremely skilled normal man in hand to hand combat.

Regiments are about a thousand men, in every war it's the PDF doing most of the work. By the way, despite how PDF are mentioned to always suck, they do about as well as guardsmen whenever Cain is with them.

Chaos? Not that big of a deal, really (According to an Inquisitor!) Half the time they're too stupid to even fire their guns, and others are apparently less capable fighters than an underhive gang.

Utter trash.

... you know there have been stories written from an Ork perspective right, like "Evil Sun Rising"?

Because 40k is always super, super cereal business all the time, no exceptions.

In his defense... that was from Rogue Trader era.

You left off the ridiculous picture.

I see nothing ridiculous.

I think you are completely missing the point of the Cain novels. Just because Cain thinks something is the case doesn't make it actually true.

But that's silly, but over the top silly. 40k is supposed to be how IN THE FUTURE, everything is BIGGER and BETTER but at the same time UTTER SHIT. It's not a setting about ordinary people, it's a setting about over the top exaggerations meeting each other.

Mitchell either doesn't get this or doesn't give a shit. I'm banking on the latter

ADB, people still try to pretend he's good.

Poor quality bait.

So Cain "only thinks" that a Guard regiment has about a thousand people? He "only thinks" that the DKoK losing "scores" of their people is a major loss? He "only thinks" the things that Inquisitor Vail says, or annotates his books later with? He "only thinks" that there's but a vague sense of unease around a blank instead of atavistic hatred? He "only thinks" that washing away a couple thousand orks would cause a severe disruption to their attempt to overrun a fairly major planet? He "only thinks" that he held his own against a CSM, hitting the guy twice and not taking a blow in return?

Pull your head out of your ass.

And yet they are still infinitely more readable than Bolter-Pron issue #4,371 or another iteration of Everybody Dies: The Grimdarking

It sounds like you need some Tana and Sandwiches

For the last part, if you consider the fact that CSM are WS4, mechanically it'd be possible.

Cain would probably be WS4 or possibly even 5 as a character.

>How would it even ork?
FTFY

Ooooo thanks user, I skipped looking at all the tie in books from the campaign books.

I personally hold you responsible for delivering me high quality content, and i want to see plenty of apostrophe abbreviations and terrible grammar.

I got something even better from an Orks perspective

your one salty dog m80. If you haven't noticed, 40ks cannon shifts around like crazy. Even in codexs they change stuff all the time, really really badly too.

>why do you read them if you don't like them anyway...

Assume it's propaganda?

regimental-standard.com/2016/09/07/the-betrayer/

Which part is propaganda? The secret memoirs Cain writes knowing nobody will ever read them, or the Inquisitorial edits made to those?

This is retarded orks should be monstrous creatures hell bent on extermination not the DAKAA LELE LETS TALK LIKE RETARDS.

I understand its the grimdark future but no fun fags are really starting to bother me on Veeky Forums

>despite how PDF are mentioned to always suck

Where?

Grimderp fags are beyond the help of mere Tana Tea.

>orks should be monstrous creatures hell bent on extermination

>orks should be monstrous creatures hell bent on extermination

Then they'd be Chaos Space Marines...

Your "should be" is retarded. We have enough brain damaged shit hell bent on extermination. Also, your arsecanon directly contradicts every scrap of actual canon.

Oh look its the one guy who likes the "Beast Arises" series

Where did the beast touch you user?

He picked me up actually while he fed me mutated cow humans.

Nigger, they messed up up a letter and forgot a word, respectively. Apply yourself.

>Missing the point this badly

It's not that it's "inconsistent" with previous lore. I know that 40k is a mass of contradictions. It's that the fundamental premise of 40k, is "Amp it up to 11. No wait, go further than that".

Everything is exaggeratedly over the top. There might not be agreement exactly how it's over the top, but whatever's going on, it's over the top. Mitchell tries to bring things back to reasonable reality, and it just doesn't work.

In Cain's own comments for one.

>Of all the duties being a Commissar dumped in my lap, liaising with the PDF trolls had to be the most onerous.

Underrated post.

I mean its right

The amount of "lets apply real life logic to 40k threads" are getting to retarded levels

ADB, he clearly doesn't like Space Marines and yet continues to write about them all while inserting his waifus and sjw agenda.

Are you that guy who made an entire thread on atechans Veeky Forums saying how Black library are full of SJW cucks?

>sjw agenda

Name ONE, just ONE example.

No.

He inserts girl power everywhere.

>He inserts girl power everywhere

... was that the Navigator lady that GOT RAPED in the Night Lords trilogy?

Yeah, totally SJW, GRRL POWAH there.

>He inserts girl power everywhere.

Thats a tradition with some writers though.

I think i remember being put off from nWoD because everything in their rulebook was like; SHE put the magazine down, and picked up HER pen. It was in the whole book and i felt like they were trying to forcefully change my brain gender. Or get everyone who played the game to play a female, reguardless of weather they were themselves male or not. In other words, magical realm shit.

Just for the record: EVERY SINGLE BLOODY WoD BOOK, old or new, defaults to female pronouns for gender neutral stuff. Why do people like you even exist?

The man made the Last Chancers trilogy, it makes him alright in my book.
Best IG novels I've read, slightly above the best Gaunt's Ghost stories.

ADB
>Feminizes Space Marines
>Inserts powerful women everywhere for no reason
>Wears a hat to cover his bald

The worst.

>>Feminizes Space Marines
?

>Daemon World is not a good book, but it's entertaining.
It would have been a lot better if the Word Bearer subplot was edited out

>girl power

What does that even mean?

Thorpe Elves sucked ass. Gav should not be allowed outside 40k.

>but they don't actually fight any better than an extremely skilled normal man in hand to hand combat

Many normal people can reach WS4

Not him, but I thought it was an article of faith that fluff does not equal crunch, otherwise, we get nonsense notions that like the maximum effective range of the weapons they use is like 100 feet tops, to keep in line with how quickly people can rush into close quarters combat on the tabletop.

>This faggot hasn't read an ork codex

Unless you mean that's how you want them to be.

Then you're having badwrongfun

Fucking this, it felt so unnatural and forced...

That doesn't mean that Space Marines are superior to EVERY normal human.

I'm pretty sure an experienced commisar or a commander could reach a space marine prowess in hand to hand combat.

Especially since Cain was training with Black Templars for a while

Firstly though, it does mean that just because they're equivalent on the board, doesn't mean they should be equivalent in the crunch.

Secondly, SM's have

>Superhuman strength (Amplified even further when in power armor)
>Superhuman speed
>Superhuman reflexes
>Better stamina
>Longer reach
>Better weapons (usually)
>Decades to centuries of both practice and combat experience

I'm pretty sure that an unmodified human, even one who has been a combat veteran, doesn't get to the literally superhuman level. That's like saying that you think a real life, medieval era knight could reach Space Marine prowess in hand to hand combat.

The Ciaphas Cain books are in-universe propaganda, written from the perspective of a character who isn't 100% reliable and edited by another unreliable character. It's possible entire chapters were made-up in universe.

>The Ciaphas Cain books are in-universe propaganda,

This is literally false. They are the private memoirs of an in-universe character, who could easily be mistaken, as well as his editor. (For instance, in the second novel, there's an amberly note that a certain tech-priest who was instrumental in waking up the 'Crons didn't do anything of note after it, despite being assigned to that shrine on Mars I'm blanking on the name on, but the one associated with the Void Dragon)

But they're not propaganda, and I've never seen anything to indicate that they're not accurate to the best of Cain's limited knowledge.

The covers are propaganda

I don't think anything this user mentioned was information included in the covers.

REMINDER THAT CANON INCONSISTENCIES ALA ABNETT CAN REASONABLY BE PUT DOWN TO THE SHEER FUCKING SIZE OF A GALAXY AND THE UTTER IMPOSSIBILITY OF A TOTAL HOMOGENEITY OF SOCIOTECHNOLOGICAL LEVELS EXISTING ACROSS ITS INCREDIBLY HUGE TIMESPANS AND DISTANCES

THINK ABOUT IT YOU FUCKING PLEBS

>its the one guy who likes the "Beast Arises" series
>one guy
If only that were true.

>but they don't actually fight any better than an extremely skilled normal man in hand to hand combat
[citation needed[
>Half the time they're too stupid to even fire their guns, and others are apparently less capable fighters than an underhive gang
The average Chaos cultist isn't a Space Marine or even a traitor guardsman.

Considering how these books are his in-universe memoirs & then edited by an Inquisitor, did you expect otherwise? Amberly adds footnotes about the things Cain exaggerates or gets wrong all the time.

Whoever the hell wrote Bastion Wars.

I was so mad when I found out Khorsabad -name of his villain - was actually the name of a place in Iraq. He's not the worst writer, but he feels like he's basing far too many things directly off of history, and I hated his Inquisitors, who felt very...Victorian. It was like someone was trying to jam Steampunk into 40k.

I wonder how all those footnotes made by Amberley got missed. She notes that most Guardsmen have a poor impression of the PDF, considering them to be poorly trained & disciplined but also notes that they often fail to give them credit when due.

>Iron Guard isn't even mentioned

Come on, it was a great book. Classic grimdark.

Bullshit. The whole point of the Cain archives is to be different from the propoganda circulated among the general populace - they're supposed to be as unedited as possible and meant for Inquisitors to read.

>as unedited as possible
Somewhere in the 40k galaxy, an Inquisitor just had a good laugh.

Sisters of Battle have been described in short stories to be close, at least in how disciplined they are. If their numbers are equal they might manage to give a Space Marine a run for their money.

But most normal humans suffer from things like fear, actually feeling pain and shock over losing limbs, and being very squishy and able to easily die.

>[citation needed[

That one on Adumbaria, The Traitor's Hand. That first wave has him duel a World Eater for a short while before Jurgen gets him with a Melta. If you look at the blow by blow, he hits the CSM twice, although doesn't do any real damage due to the armor.

It's pretty clear that Cain is the superior hand to hand combatant.

>The average Chaos cultist isn't a Space Marine or even a traitor guardsman.

And apparently, not even as good as a street thug.

I expect Cain to know how many men (within an order of magnitude) were in the regiments he served with, yes. I think he would know about his reaction and the people around him's reaction to Jurgen. There are things that are acceptable error, like how exactly machines around him work, but I wasn't including things like that.

Vail added her annotations, but she went out of her way to not change Cain's words, except adding in things for the sake of background information or skipping parts of little interest.

Even then, you don't need propaganda for the Inquisition.

Best:
Ian Watson (Draco, Imperial Fists)
Guy Haley (IG tanks, Black Templars, Novamarines, Apocalypse novels)
Chris Wraight (Space Wolves, White Scars, Iron Hands)

Good:
Aaron Dembski Bowden (Horus Heresy, Black Templars, Night Lords), though recently I came to dislike many aspects of his work
Dan Abnett (Eisenhorn, Ravenor, Gaunt's Ghosts, Horus Heresy, Iron Snakes, Sabbat Worlds)
Steve Parker (Crimson Fists, Deathwatch)
Steve Lyons (Imperial Guard)
John French (Thousand Sons, Ahriman)
Sandy Mitchell (CAAAAINNNN)

OK:
Anthony Reynolds (Word Bearers)
David Annandale (Yarrick, Salamanders, Raven Guard, White Scars)
Rob Sanders (Carnac, Legion of the Damned)
Matther Farrer (Shira Calpurnia)
George Mann (Raven Guard)

Mediocre, with one or three readable books:
Andy Chambers (Dark Eldar)
Peter Ferehvari (Tau)
Mitch Scanlon (Imperial Guard, Dark Angels)
Gav Thorpe (Eldar, Dark Angels, Horus Heresy)
CZ Dunn (Dark Angels, Grey Knights)
Toby Frost (Imperial Guard)
William King (Space Wolves, Lord Solar Macharius)
Andy Smillie (Flesh Tearers)
Henry Zou (Imperial Guard)
Sarah Cawkwell (Silver Skulls, Red Corsairs, Huron Blackheart)

Bad:
Graham McNeil (Ultramarines, Iron Warriors, Mechanicus, Horus Heresy)
James Swallow (Blood Angels, Sisters of Battle, Horus Heresy)
Johnatan Green (Armageddon)
Nick Kyme (Salamanders, Horus Heresy)
CL Werner (Iron Warriors)

SHIT nigger, what are you DOING:
Ben Counter (Grey Knights, Soul Drinkers, Imperial Fists, Horus Heresy)
C. S. Goto (Blood Ravens)

>Ian Watson still writes books

Absolutely disgusting.

Where's Mark Clapham?

But we can assume Commisars are on the same or similiar level to SoB

As someone who's actually read the book, Cain admits that he stood no chance against the Berzerker & that he'd easily have died in a 1vs1. What he did was taunt, stall & overall try and make his opponent make a mistake and create an opening which one of his allies can take advantage of. The World Eater's the better fighter and could have won had he just shot Cain with his Bolt Pistol.

>not even as good as a street thug
Even a thug has some degree of experience. Chaos Cultists tend to be untrained fanatics whose already poor combat skills are reduced by the lack of any discipline & sanity. Just imagine a drunk or high civilian operating military weapons.

That'd be like saying marines and army officers are on the same level just because they had similar basic training. Commissars are morale officers encouraged to support troops in the thick of the fray but still consider themselves their own men, Sisters of Battle are trained to fight as units and are zealous, but tend to be good at medium to close range. They have different roles on the battlefield and different attitudes towards fighting.

And that's not even taking account of the fact that some Commissars will die quickly as glory-hungry idiots who don't consider survival a high priority, and some sisters will send themselves to the Repentia Squads because they thought the Cannoness had a nice butt for a half a second.

I'm looking forward to Robbie MacNiven's Carcharodon novel. His short stories were pretty good.