Of all the factions being updated, the Imperial Knights were easily among the most prominent which needed to be examined. Ignoring both the fact that they were getting plenty of shiny new toys, and enough units to field an individual army, their lore made them stand out. This was a group (well, groups) which had endured the fall of the original human empire covering the galaxy. They were the best suited to wait out the Warp storms which followed and adapt to whatever Chaos threw at them, as the Imperium was split in two and everything fell to pieces. As such, it left the door open to no small number of story opportunities, ideas and even new stories. These groups have had no shortage of questing knights, crusaders or participants in larger war efforts as well. Out of all the Imperial factions - save perhaps the Cadians - they were the most open to new stories or developments.
Did it live up to these hopes? Well, judge for yourself as we covered the best and worst of the book.
The Good
The previous Imperial Knights codices have been a mixed bunch in terms of lore. The original was a gold standard for Imperial factions, while the second squandered a lot of what had been introduced in that book. As such, this Edition's codex needed to both adapt to a brand new setting while simultaneously repairing what had been done with the prior release. You can actually see this from the very start as, while it doesn't fully step back from some ideas, it tries to at least correct them.
The pages themselves are broken up into a number of key components, starting with a general description of the army, how it is viewed and the approach it takes on the battlefield. Also, to a lesser degree how it is regarded by the rest of the Imperium. Following that, it outlines their full history and how they were established. It's an old concept that most people know by this point, and while certainly much shorter than previous outings, it does a better job of incorporating certain elements from the pre-Imperium era. For example, details and ideas surrounding how the worlds were established were skimmed over here. We lack some of the finer details shown there and how they handled certain aspects of constructing settlements or mining resources. That's irritating, but nothing too terrible. In its place, there's a greater focus placed on how they became archaic, regarded as backward "quaint" settlements left to their own devices, and were largely laughed at. Yet, most pressingly, it details that this sort of thing is exactly why they survived:
"The Knight worlds became ever more conservative and insular. They rejected advances in human technology and were slowly sidelined. They became a source of amusement to the intellectually and culturally superior masses of Humanity. Ironically, it was the Knight worlds' very isolationist nature and refusal to adopt new technologies that would protect them from the horrific apocalypse that devastated the rest of Mankind.
[...]
humanity's fall was swift and terrible. Emergent psykers drowned worlds in warp storms and daemonic incursions. Thinking machines carried out genocidal purges. Gene-wars buried entire star systems beneath writhing tides of fleshy abominations.
The Knight worlds had burned their psykers as witches. They had turned away the thinking machines, citing the value of hard labour and a distrust of artificial intelligence. They had left their genetics untouched. Now, they had stoked their watchfires, bolstered their defenses and simply endured."
Personally, I like this as it helps to further enforce just why the galaxy is such a hellhole, and why the Imperium could so easily slide into becoming a dystopia. Many fans, old and new, tend to forget that the more forgiving or progressive elements were wiped out during this era, and ironically it was the more backward "burn the witch!" mobs who endured thanks to their isolationism. Combined with the events of the Horus Heresy, and the xenos incursions, and it's a miracle anything good did truly survive. It's a good reminder of how the thematic rules of this setting tend to work, and just what can end up becoming entrenched in societies thanks to the hellish nature of the universe.
The subject of how certain knights are aligned more to themselves or the Imperium while others are closer to the Mechanicus naturally comes up. Yet, there's definitely a far better attempt to integrate and separate the two than past efforts, especially in how the latter relates to the Mechanicus or Titan Legions. Each are given a page to flesh out their details, and to expand on how their worlds operate, along with just how some knights can become permanently seconded to a legion. Yet, rather than completely stripping away their identity, it tries to take the time to better establish that they retain much of their pride and defining qualities thanks to the deeply ingrained character traits of their dynasties. It's a good thing to have, as it allows the army to still retain its own prominence, identity, and concepts rather than simply being reduced to lackeys.
Much of the book also carries an undercurrent of diversifying the worlds themselves over the harmonization we saw in the previous book. This is evident at every point, as they discuss how they treat outsiders, the worlds vary or their Sacristans are treated as everything from necessary Mechanicus spies to loyal members of the households. This even extends to the dynasties themselves, as it's noted matriarchies are roughly as prominent as patriarchies, and there's no end to what traditions or societies could be formed from them. So, you could easily end up fielding a fleet of Celtic themed mecha warriors who worship the Emperor as the undying guardian of the elements, and it would work, for example. This isn't explicitly highlighted at any point, but the constant reminders are enough to give this book some much-needed life and variety.
The timeline itself is also fairly good. While it does admittedly suffer from very short and fleeting citations during much of the initial timeline, this improves considerably as it goes along. Besides a possible doomsday scenario - and expect an article on that quite soon - it helps to further establish how the two groups differ considerably from one another. A particular highlight is how a death-obsessed Knight world approaches a Tyranid Splinter Fleet invading their world, and their entire reaction to the event. Even without this, however, it also continually pushes to further expand on how knights are recruited or offer suggestions on just how the new ranks are implemented within their armies. There's a hierachy here, but there's enough of a general description offered to help give players ideas.
The bad, meanwhile, is a short but important part on here.
The Bad
The issue with the negative points within the army doesn't surround where they failed so much as what they didn't fix. For example, the big one notable from the very start is the incredible amount of padding in the second half of the book. Pages upon pages of enlarged photographs, or vast images of knights with minimal text are offered up, dominating huge chunks of the codex, while offering very little actual content. You could honestly narrow it down into perhaps a third of the space by downsizing a few repeated basic colour scheme images, and you wouldn't lose anything. What's especially frustrating about this is that the book even does this during the final half, where it compressed multiple examples of Freeblades together. Even then, this segment is only a small fraction of the size of the usual one, so it honestly comes across as if it was shunted in at the last second when it honestly just needed a general reworking of the parts prior to it.
Another definite problem with the book is that a few of its overall depictions of events, details and ideas tend to be quite nebulous. Yes, anything which can offer fans more fodder for their own creations is always welcome, but there needs to be something definitive. The few knight houses who end up getting a moment in the spotlight don't offer up anything more than a few basic and very generic concepts. There's nothing fully fleshed out about them, and it lacks something for fans to really use an identity as a defining starting point for their armies. Furthermore, because of this, most descriptions of Knight worlds tend to be very general. We are given enough to know that they vary considerably in nature, design and environment, but that's it. Unlike the descriptions of Macragge, Fenris or others, it's all something generalized and inserted into a single sentence.
Yet, perhaps the most irritating part still is how it doesn't do anything truly noteworthy with the new status quo. The best we get is the aforementioned doomsday possibility and a tantalizing mention that Mechanicus systems have been fortified within the great rift, creating small pocket Imperiums within the Warp storms. Yet, besides that, it's unfortunately just business as usual for this lot. There needed to be much more offered up to the army, something to help push the overall timeline or story forward within the book and show how events have been influenced. Without it, there's little to really help indicate that things have truly changed.
These sound like very short segments, but you need to keep in mind that these are obvious and quite evident problems. I can't break down or fully detail the problems with each, as there's little to no detail to actually work with. It's more of a case that so much of it is barely in the book rather than anything else.
The Artwork
The artwork here is good, but it heavily relies on reused pieces from the past. while we are offered a small number of new works here and there, almost all of it is stuff we saw in the first codex. This isn't to say that it's bad by any means, or even that it's unpleasant to look at, but it's difficult to say that there shouldn't have been more here.
The Verdict
This one is very mixed indeed. It's a perfect case of taking two steps forward and then one back, failing to fully build on what other novels had set up for it. There's certainly nothing truly criminal about it, nothing stupid and no true blind spots (as we even get a few character bits for Freeblades) but it just doesn't make the leap needed to work within this new altered universe. So, it's good on the whole, but unambitious, unfortunately.
So, that's the lore done. Next time, we'll be moving onto the rules.
I have the feeling GW didn't really know where to go with the Knights, since most of this is just a repeat of information we already know with some additional flavour text and minor characterization. As you point out they didn't do too much to differentiate each house from each other and I feel that keeping the Knights in the feudal structure they're in is a bad idea as it inherently cripples any differences between the houses aside from their names and colour-schemes.
ReplyDeleteNow I'm not saying that they should drop the idea of Knights, Kings and Queens, but there are other ways of presenting it while keeping the core concept intact. The ideals imprinted in the earliest nobles (before they even called themselves nobles) could have been interpreted in many different ways depending on the culture of the people on the planets, but since they kept them all having the same interpretation we're left with very little that could be expanded so long as we stick to the main Knight worlds.
Unfortunately too there's not even a way to fix this since the idea of them all becoming feudal-style nobles is hard-coded into the Knights themselves, no matter how you look at a Knight trying to have successors (or even something radical like a Freeblade trying to found a new Knight House) they're going to be programmed to fall back to the same system everyone else is in.
I think the issue for the most part here is that they had a very good basis for things, and a very good start. The problem is that they were written originally (back in the days of Epic) as a relatively minor part of a larger galaxy, whereas now they have become an army unto themselves. They are at least trying to build on and imply differences in the feudal structure now, both where it comes to the standing of Knights and the various Houses themselves, but they seriously need to push forward and start differentiating the groups on the whole. The Mechanicus ones have a few solid concepts behind them above all else, but it's always reduced to little more than general flavour text more than anything else. As such, it never has any true impact on major events or helping the individual figures stand out.
DeleteThe main way I might hope that this could evolve might be to the context of some worlds themselves, as there are multiple feudal systems of governing which can have more depth than simply direct rulership. Compare Japan with France of the same era and, while there's more than a few differences, there are also a multitude of major differences between the two as well, but there has yet to be anything to help them work with this to diversify the factions.
My main hope is that the event implied in the book - a major conflict between multiple Knight worlds and a rising tide of Necrons - might help to force a change within the army, but I also just hope that they don't end up breaking the army's lore in an attempt to innovate.
I think one way in which they might have been able to fix this is if the various Knights affected the personalities of their pilots in different ways. Sure right now their pilots tend to one or another because of personal preference (and you can argue that there are minor differences), but I'm talking about having a suit give change them in a major way, to the point they eventually have different values. This could lead the different Knight worlds to still have their own feudal cultures while giving letting them differ a lot in how they're run based on which Knights their leaders pilot (or how many of those Knights they might have).
DeleteRight now Forgeworld kind of implies something like this is the case with their Knights, but it only really applies to them.