It is, quite like the death guard themselves, brutally to the point and embodying the "arriving precisely when it needs too when it comes to pace. Keeble delivers a great performance, While his choice in Mortarion's voice surprised me, it never irked me. Annandale does incredibly well is the introspection and reflection on the motives of his characters and the events that unfold. This isn’t really a bad book, it’s just so boringly inconsequential that you’re really going to get nothing from it. Given that I entered with a serious concern after the last death guard book I read, the buried dagger, which I really did not like, I am happy to say this is what warhammer is all about.

Though I don't think Morty's "voice" as written by Annandale quite matches the one I have in my own head. This is a disambiguation page — a navigational aid which lists other pages that might otherwise share the same title. Mortarion's inferiority complex over being unable to overthrow the tyrant of his homeworld is developed here. However, in the parts where the author is left to merely describe combat or simple dialogue, we see not only a lack of clear reportage but also a lack of quality in the prose overall.High levels of radiation, everything is poisoned, blown up and there are literally hills of bodies next to the spires on the planet with people crawling over them. Whereas Corax seeks to liberate and uplift, Mortarion sees little hope and opts to flip the game board over, as it were. A few really keen moments where we get a peek at Mortarion’s personal character flaws and the beginning of his descent into treachery. With The Buried Dagger and several shorts being dedicated to Mortarion’s life on Barbarus The Pale King inevitably falls into the latter camp. He has a deep desire to use his station as the commander of an army to liberate, which is rare in the world of Warhammer.

I'll avoid giving spoilers but he really ties in themes and arcs from all parts of Mortarion's story and synthesises them expertly into a relatively short runtime while still managing to reframe Mortarion's overall lacking narrative in the Great Crusade and early Heresy. The only thing I didn't enjoy was it pretty much 95% a battle and its rather chaotic and I get a bit lost in the big 40k battles sometimes and find it difficult to understand and picture what's going on but it wasn't too bad. The idea that Mortarion's style of fighting is materially different from the average Primarch is a joke. They manage to blow them up, but many die after the tunnels are filled with molten ore from the factories afterwards which earns Typhon a promotion. Annandale devotes time to the enemies of his protagonist in an effort to show the overwhelming power of the space marines, but it also leads the reader to an understanding of just how evil the antagonists of the Death Guard really are.He's exactly like you'd expect him to be before his first campaign with his newly baptized Death Guard. A large section of the book could easily have been labelled as merely "Bolter-Porn" but through leveraging Mortarion's character arc, several interesting side characters and the evolving character of the nascent Death Guard, none of the constant butchery seems gratuitous at all. Then one of the "units" appears and while afraid tells Mortarion how she finished her allotted corpse counting. One of the things I’ve always enjoyed about Mortarion is that he shared Corax’s distaste for oppressors.

When Keri and I decided to dive into the Primarch series, we divided up the primarchs based on who we were most interested in reading about. Mortarian is a Primarch that has been given thw thin edge of the wedge in recent years, all too often the villain that gets shown up, foiled and humiliated. It is still vulnerable from above down the shaft it came down so a force including Garro is sent that way. Annandale doesn’t give the reader an understanding of what the arcology looks like or how the different zones of battle relate to one another.The parallels he saw between Galaspar and Barbarus were compelling (although not entirely convincing at times) and reflected his character well. We don't actually get to learn much about the leader of the Death Guard that we didn't already know, but we do get to glimpse fan-favourites Garro and Typhon in their earlier days and, through the framing device, get some insight into Mortarion's relationship with Sanguinius and Horus. We follow Mortarion directly a lot so we get to know what he thinks, but also get a bit about people around him. The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products.