Ah Christ, not again. Evidently you enjoyed parts one and two well enough to return to the trough for more of our slop. Well if the diminishing comedic returns from last week’s article didn’t convince you that reading part three was a waste of time, nothing will. So saddle up and ride with Greg and TheChirurgeon as we tackle legions 11 through 15 and why they’re all trash, except for the ones I play.
XI Legion: <All Records Expunged>
TheChirurgeon: Another completely real, 100% canon, GW-official primarch revealed. You heard it here first, folks. On Goonhammer dot com. Primarch Goku of the Hokage legion of space marines.
Greg: screaming
TheChirurgeon: Now this is a primarch who does not give a hot gay fuck what Malcador says
Greg: Do you have a picture of him not wearing a shirt. I need it for, uhh, reasons.
TheChirurgeon: An entire legion expunged for the crime of demanding the Emperor legalize weed
Greg: I know you only drew this to piss me off, but you fucked up because I actually love him and he rules. Goku makes a ton of sense in 40k, he has magical fighting powers and wears weighted training power armor, and spends half his time standing around screaming.
TheChirugeon: God dammit. This is the exact opposite reaction I wanted when I drew Power Armor Goku. I can already feel people shaking their heads at this part of the article, closing their browsers, and going outside because instead of showing the appropriate amount of straight-man revulsion, you’ve suddenly torn off your jacket to reveal a GUNDAM WING t-shirt underneath and you’re going full Toonami afternoon weeb.
Greg: I ride hard for my fuckin… shonens or whatever. The robot with the goddamn laser scythe was the baddest shit.
TheChirurgeon: Wait, I mean when I found this on the internet. I definitely did not draw this.
TheChirurgeon: Fuck.
Greg: The only good way to be into anime is to be into the worst cartoons because they were on TV when you were in high school, even if you haven’t watched or kept up with them since. I’m not even doing a bit here, there’s probably over a thousand Dragons Ball and mad different type of Gundam by now, and I watched like 3 of them, but I still have a soft spot for Goku.
TheChirurgeon: Dragonball still owns. It just keeps getting more and more insane. Gundam Wing on the other hand, has not held up well at all. The robots still look cool as fuck, though.
Greg: Gundam Wing is an insanely dumb show, and it also owns, but the dumbest thing in there is the dude who’s like “No country could resist that! Not even Luxembourg!” Luxembourg. What the fuck? Anyway, the Dragonballers here are just Good Blood Angels. Assault Marines riding clouds. Death Company but it’s just a bunch of rejects who went Super Saiyan and need to calm the fuck down for a minute.
TheChirurgeon: Yeah, fuck it. I’m sold. Let’s write up some fanfiction about this dude and his legion getting lost in the warp and showing up in modern times to clown everyone so we can have it read on the Badcast.
Greg: You heard it here first, readers. Prepare yourselves for Fast Times at Terra High Z.
FINAL RATING: 5 out of 5 failed ReMixes of Afronova in DDR Max, before throwing up on your roommate’s futon and almost passing out
XII Legion: The World Eaters
TheChirurgeon: The murder legion, with their murder primarch who does murders. These guys have the coolest primarch backstory and quote, and Angron is basically the poster child for how the Emperor was a dumb asshole.
Greg: I love Angron’s backstory. Big ups to the extremely normal people on Nuceria, by the way. I’m pretty sure if I found an extremely jacked infant in the woods, my first thought would not be to install probes in his brain that made him pissed all the time and then hand him a gigantic axe.
TheChirurgeon: Galaxy Nails Brain move right there.
Greg: What would I do if I was subjected to horrifying surgical mutilation that scrambled my brains? Well, I would quite simply force all my friends and their children to go through the same thing. Easy.
TheChirurgeon: So basically the same way I approach having horrible gas after eating at Chipotle.
TheChirurgeon: One of the funnier bits of the Heresy is that it’s real clear early on that the Emperor doesn’t give a fuck about Angron or making his shit work. Like they go through all this trouble to make Lorgar’s weird cult dad a space marine, and to make sure that Lion’o’s weird brother Luther gets to join the club, but when they roll into Nuceria and the Emperor sees this group of ragtag slave warriors about to fight for their lives for the adoptive brother, he’s just like “man, fuck these people.”
Greg: Treating the slave army on Nuceria as a race of disposable mud-people is high in the running for dumbest thing the Emperor did, unless he was just straight up trying to get his least-chill son to flip all the way out. Was there not enough room on the transports after picking up Lorgar’s dad and Curze’s batmen?
TheChirurgeon: It’s clear that Emperor dad just stops giving a shit after finding the first dozen or so primarchs cause by the time he gets to Angron he just gets sick of going through the whole “oh dad you finally came I knew this would happen all along blah blah” and solving the problems of whatever shithole backwater they live on. They never tell us exactly what order all the Primarchs get found in, but it’s pretty obvious Angron is somewhere in the last five or so.
Greg: I’m pretty sure that by the time he gets that far down the list he’s finding primarchs he doesn’t even remember making, and who can blame him? Why the fuck would you create, I don’t know, an insane immortal murderer, to be one of your generals? He sees what’s going on, then just sighs and draws his flaming katana, and doesn’t even have the energy to go apeshit fixing their crummy planet.
TheChirurgeon: At some point he just delegates primarch discovery to Horus. He’s just like ‘cool, you go handle initiating primarch fuckass when you find him on planet corncob.’ That’s the real reason he goes back to Earth. He’s just sick of dealing with all of his needy orphan sons and their various mental illnesses.
Greg: Hi Angron, I’m the Emperor, nice to meet you. This is Horus, he’s your dad now. I can’t handle any more of your weird shit.
TheChirurgeon: Speaking of weird kids, the World Eaters also get one of the coolest secondary characters in Kharn the Betrayer, whose whole jam is being so into fucking shit up that he’ll fuck up his own dudes if they get in his way. The dude just cranks up his TayTay Murdermix and goes to town, and God help you if you get in his way while he’s working.
Greg: Kharn is another one of those guys who got turned into a meme by the lamer parts of the fanbase, but he has an all-timer of a model and his fluff whips ass. I respect him for being unabashedly horny for blood.
TheChirurgeon: I like the part of the fluff where he’s got an implant in his eye that shows his ongoing kill count. Incredible mood going on there.
Greg: I have the same thing but it’s a running tally of sandwiches I’ve eaten.
TheChirurgeon: I’m pretty sure they did a whole Black Mirror episode on that. Turns out it was bad for society.
FINAL RATING: 4 out of 5 Mike Tysons taking an electric carving knife to a neighborhood kid on their lawn, but he escapes when he runs too far and the extension cord unplugs, so Kharn just stands there screaming until he blows a vessel in his brain and dies.
XIII Legion: Ultramarines
Greg: Cool, a legion for cops.
TheChirurgeon: This is the default when you open up the editor to create your own legion
Greg: You know those armies that have a cool gimmick, where like everyone deep strikes or they get special units, and it gives them loads of character and players love them on account of it? Yeah, the Ultramarines are literally the exact opposite of that.
TheChirurgeon: These guys got a lot more interesting in 8th edition. Before Guilliman came back, the only thing they really had going on was that one time they got fucked up really bad by Tyranids, which wasn’t even in their own Codex.
Greg: The first things that come to mind about the Ultramarines are them getting rolled up on by Tyranids in their own house and all dying, being chumped by Word Bearers (Word Bearers!) so hard they missed the entire Siege of Terra, and their primarch being so bitchmade that he sent Calgar to go fight Abbadon, who obviously fucked him up.
TheChirurgeon: Yeah having your whole thing being the nerd chapter that tried to make the rules for everyone else and all the cool kids were like “nah, we’re good” isn’t a great look. Hell even the Imperial Fists gave us the Black Templars.
I think Games Workshop finally figured that part out though, because for the past decade they’ve just been piling on new special characters for the Ultramarines, until they were finally just like “fuck it, have a primarch.”
Greg: Guilliman is the least primarch. I didn’t leave out a word there, there is just so little about Guilliman that anyone could care about. He’s probably not even an actual primarch, he just happened to be in charge of Ultramar when the crusade got there, and the Emperor was like “well, if this is the best you’ve got, I guess he’ll have to do. Get in the fucking Stormbird, Roboute”. Then Cawl brought him back, and the entire galaxy is once again whelmed by his presence.
TheChirurgeon: The best parts of the new books are basically Guilliman being a semi-regular dude in charge of an insane, backwards theocratic dictatorship and walking around perpetually annoyed and horrified at how bad shit got over the last nine thousand years
Greg: Oddly enough, I think putting Guilliman in charge of the World Eaters would have been a net positive. He’s smart enough to know to only use them as expendable shock troops to clog the enemy’s artillery with their guts, and they’re more interesting than Ultramarines. Mix it up a little bit, my dude, you didn’t have to put your most boring primarch in charge of your most boring legion.
TheChirugeon: Just lol if you think the World Eaters, all hopped up on brain nails, were gonna listen to their fuckin stepdad
Greg: Maybe they can rely on their dozen indistinguishable special characters, such as “expensive tank guy who is slightly more accurate than a regular gunner”, “Old Scout”, or “a marginally better magician”. These dudes are Amazon. Sure, they have everything and you can count on them to deliver, but there’s nothing about them that makes anyone hoot and pump their fists in the air, unless you have a very specific fetish.
TheChirurgeon: Porn for Ultramarines players is just a GIS for stock photos of “woman”
Greg: Legit surprised their logo isn’t a gray rectangle on a beige field.
FINAL RATING: 1 out of 5 backup Imperiums we started after dad wouldn’t return our calls for like two weeks
XIV Legion: Death Guard
TheChirurgeon: It’s good that there’s a legion for people like me to get representation, where the dudes don’t resemble muscled cyborg supermen but rather sacks of garbage you left in the rain for a week. Truly, a diverse and inclusive universe.
Greg: Agreed. In a game where representation can be hard to come by, having an entire army of slovenly puke monsters really shows that there’s a place for us regular joes in the 41st millennium.
TheChirurgeon: An entire legion embodying the philosophy of “I only shower when I take a shit and don’t feel like wiping afterward”
Greg: I like these guys because they never run. I don’t mean that they don’t run away from things, in like a “standing their ground” sense, I just mean that they move very slowly all the time, and buddy: same. Same as all fucking hell.
TheChirurgeon: This is reflected in their army special rule “No, no… you go ahead, I’ll meet you there”
Greg: Turns out the real “gifts” Nurgle gave them were popcorn lung from vaping too much, and chronic back pain.
TheChirurgeon: These guys became the poster boys for Chaos in 8th edition and looking at the Primaris, I now feel like it was to make them look as buff as possible in comparison. It’s like looking at a fight poster and one side has Evander Holyfield and the other side has Butterbean.
Greg: “Buff” is not the word I would use. Astartes are supposed to be the frame of an NBA player with the muscles of a body-builder, and Death Guard are more the frame of a Sumo, crossed with the body of a Sumo, and the skin conditions of your typical sewer ghoul.
Greg: Part of me legitimately adores these sticky bois for how deeply they’re committed to their aesthetic of beat-up equipment with eyeballs oozing out of all the holes, but I also don’t ever want to play them because they creep me out for the same reasons.
TheChirurgeon: So you’re one of those people weirded out by lotus pods? adds Trypophobia to spreadsheet with Greg’s list of fears
Greg: No, unless the lotus pod was bleeding and grafted to a murderous hobo. In which case, yes. Are you not afraid of that?
TheChirurgeon: Having a bleeding beehive of plague wasps growing out of your back is a legitimate medical condition and dozens of extremely normal, regular American suffer from it every year, thank you very much.
Greg: Do you have neck rolls lookin’ like a package of hot dogs, or suffer from Kidneys Outside Your Body disease? Well that’s common here on Barbarus, and no, Legiones Astartes Healthcare does not cover it.
TheChirurgeon: The same doctors also recommend you get a custom rebreather to pump fart juice directly into your face 24/7. Death Guard apothecaries are basically one step above Goop in terms of credibility.
Greg: I’m not sure I even want to know where they’re inserting the jade eggs on these dudes.
FINAL RATING: 3 out of 6 tentacles on one mutant hand, 3 out of 7 teeth bursting out of the knuckles on the other.
XV Legion: Thousand Sons
Greg: Ah, my poor Buff Wizard sons. They were doing great, but now 90% of them are dust mummies and rest are slowly turning into daemons that look like the last ten minutes of Akira.
TheChirurgeon: All according to plan, friend.
Greg: Yeah it sounds like Magnus’s plan to dick around doing sick crystal-charging moves with his bros while the galaxy burned went flawlessly. Look into the future, you dipshit, and tell me where you see anyone respecting your anime club reject legion.
TheChirurgeon: Magnus looked into the future and saw a truly magnificent pair of nipple horns jutting forth from his chest, and it was good.
Greg: He rules because he spent ten thousand years out in the yard in warp prison getting just shredded as hell, but he also sucks because he’s emblematic of his entire legion’s tendency to constantly out-scheme each other instead of ever getting on the same fucking page.
TheChirurgeon: I like Magnus, and I love his wonderful nipple horns, but the whole “Magnus did nothing wrong” movement is bullshit. He absolutely did do something wrong, and what he did wrong was not murdering Russ when the two of them were duking it out over a burning Prospero.
Greg: Also using his brain to Kramer in and smash up all the webway gates in the Imperial Basement was maybe not the correct move.
TheChirurgeon: No, that was fine. Maybe don’t make your great work a secret tunnel to hellworld in your master bathroom. Completely fucks the resale value.
Greg: The Emperor is, at the heart of it, a suburban dad. Taking on home improvement projects that are way over his head and then spending the afternoon on the throne comes with the territory.
TheChirurgeon: The Imperial Palace is basically Grover House 28,000 years into the future
Greg: Magnus the Red, deadbeat primarch of the Thousand Step-Sons. He let them all get mauled by the neighbor’s dog, and then fucked off to Planet Man Cave.
TheChirurgeon: At least he gets props for being one of the Chaos primarchs who actually does shit. Most of them just fuck around the Eye of Terror these days. Magnus actually seems to have some of his shit together, starting wars between the Space Wolves and the Dark Angels, making planets happen. Dude’s got plans.
Greg: He’d be cooler if his plans involved using his ability to see the fucking future to notice that all his lieutenants were jerk-offs and came off Planet Three-Card Monte to smack them into line.
TheChirurgeon: Hey speaking of which, remember that time Magnus tricked the Dark Angels into bombing Fenris, then they sprung Luther out of the Rock while the Dark Angels couldn’t figure out they’d been tricked by a bunch of empty suits of armor that specialize in up close magic?
Greg: I mean, Getting Hoodwinked By Magicians happens to the best of us (and the Dark Angels are by no means the best of anything), but at least they only got tricked into blasting stray dogs into chum, instead of bombarding anything the Imperium actually needed.
FINAL RATING: 4 out of 5 glorious, three-foot nipple horns that our cultist slaves spend four hours a night polishing to a mirror sheen. Eyes up here, fellas
Ah man, is that it? Why aren’t there more legions.
There are! We’ll be back soon with more execrable tedium for you to scroll through really fast before leaving an angry comment on Facebook or Reddit, that we 100% aren’t going to read or care about. The only Goonhammer-approved way to be a dick to us about our slapdash posts is through contact@goonhammer.com, and we invite you to do so. Hell, send us your chapter of choice, and as long as it’s not the Fighting Tigers of Veda, which fully and unironically own, we’ll do our level best to tell you why it sucks and how you’re dumb for liking it.
Check back next week for part 4, where we cover Legions XVI to XX. Also check back before that for other, better, articles that aren’t filled with a bunch of dumb jokes we got tired of two weeks ago.
