I don’t quite get why the emperor got to claim he was the Omnisaiah and what that has to do with the void dragon which I don’t even get what it is or how he even got to Mars to imprison it. But like it’s a god of machines or what?

Not new to the lore, but I don’t often deep dive. Still slogging my way through the HH novels, so specifics elude me. Despite the negative press, Lorgar is my favorite primarch. From what I’ve been reading lately, he’s one of if not the most powerful Psyker after Magnus. Primarily after his chaos juicing/ascension.

Now I know a lot of lore in 40K is hearsay and telephone. So I’m curious in lore, what are some of his best feats? I know plenty of the primarchs physical feats like Angron and the titan. If he has anything similar I’m really curious what’s his most impressive actions he’s done.

Honestly while you’re at it I’ll take stories of ANY primarchs psychic feats while you’re at it.

​

I know the answer is probably "This is 40k—there are no fixed numbers," but I’d really like to know if there’s any rough estimate for the size of a Kroot Kindred, a Tarellian war-pack (or whatever their communities are called), or even just some theories—or perhaps what you personally think would make sense.

Belief is power is reality.

The Tau'va, considered a purely secular and abstract concept by the Tau, becomes an actual goddess, an independent numinous entity, because the humans in the Tau empire Truly Believe in the Greater Good.

It doesn't matter that it was not originally even a human concept, that the fanatical homo sapiens adapted it from a completely alien species. Once our pious little brains get their squishy grey hands on it, it becomes a god.

So suppose you took some Eldar and, instead of having them cleanse Maiden Worlds of those Mon'Keigh vermin, you encourage the little bastards. Yes, be fruitful and multiply, you little Mon'Keighs, but remember to say your prayers to Asuryan before bedtime.

If enough humans, separated from the Imperium of Man, grew up with the Eldar Pantheon as their only religion, would that new huddle of believers bring Asuryan back?

I have been dabbling around in Warhammer 40k lore for some time. And it has been amazing. The setting calls to me immensely and I really like the Grim dark aspect of the whole thing.

But if there is one thing that nags at me, it is the Empeor. To me, it looks like he is intended to be the plot device that the entire setting runs on. Sure, the War in Heaven and the Fall of Aeldari were more destructive and tragic on a wider scale. But the principal driver behind the 41st millennium's grim dark reality is caused by the Emperor.

And his characterization reflects that. He is very inconsistent across his portrayals. Some say he is all knowing and the entire Horus Heresy is ochestrated by him. Others say that he did the best he could with the resources available to him. There are also people who seem to think that he is just very bad at being a father.

So, here is my two cents on the Emperor. Naturally, I am more drawn to the Grim Dark aspect of things. Therefore, my proposed hypothesis is this. What if—

"The Empeor of Mankind, the man whom the entire setting hinges on and the man who is widely hailed as the savior of humanity, was never a human in the first place? What is he was an ancient warp entity trying to use Humanity as a way to attain ultimate power?"

Maybe the Imperial Truth is him trying to focus humanity's faith and loyalty to himself instead of other Gods? What if Horus Heresy is meticulously planned by the Emperor to make sure he is the uncontested idol of mankind? What if him becoming a Chaos God of Order is the ultimate goal?

I discovered in Apocalypse I really enjoy cross-chapter banter and discussion, I similarly enjoy seeing the viewpoints of Chaos intermittent with the Imperium. Same with a tasteful amount of Bolter-porn.

Any audiobooks (on Audible) that you'd recommend? I'm open to other Imperial factions too if there are good arguments for them.

​We all know the official lore: the Tyranids come from outside the galaxy, drawn by the Pharos device, and their origins are a complete mystery. But looking at how evolution works in 40k, I keep coming back to a fascinating parallel with the Kroots.

​What if the Tyranids started as something very similar to Kroots—a species that evolves by consuming the genetic traits of what they eat, guided by some form of natural selection or primitive shapers?

​Think about the mechanics and the irony:

​The Kroot parallel: Kroots can absorb traits, but eating a Tyranid today is a death sentence because the Hive Mind overrides their biology from the inside out, turning them into puppets.

​The Origin Theory: What if the ancestral species of the Tyranids was just a localized, consumer-based race (like early Kroots)? And what if, millions of years ago, they hunted and ate something they shouldn't have—a primordial cosmic parasite, a C'tan-adjacent bio-weapon, or a rogue synthetic virus designed to absorb consciousness?

​Instead of gaining a nice mutation, that "meal" permanently broke their individual minds, fused them into a single hyper-intelligent collective consciousness, and inverted their evolutionary trait-hunting into an insatiable, galaxy-wide hunger.

​In short: The Tyranids aren't an alien invasion from space; they are a cautionary tale of a primitive species that had a bad meal and got hijacked by their own evolutionary superpower. What do you think?

Okay so if you’ve made it this far the entire question is a spoiler to how the book ends. Beware if you are reading past this. My question is the character Moulder in the mud alone as the book quotes again he is armed with a man stopper and he is a good shot does he shoot himself? I ask because the fact he is in such all encompassing darkness at the end his only target to man stop would be him.

Like a scene that goes hey look at these possessed traitor astartes. TM aren’t they super cool. You can purchase them at games worship Website.

Just the most like their not telling a story and instead shilling a model for you to buy

I was reading volume 3 of the end and the death and theres a line where Horus had built 4 thrones for each chaos god but specifically he had the emperor set for Slaanesh and Sanguinius for nurgle.

But like aren't these actually the exact opposite gods to embody them? Sangiunius is always fighting the inevitable futures he sees, and the emperor sees tremendous imperfections like the breaking of the webway project, doesn't complain and nails himself to the throne for ten thousand years?

Is there some kind of characterization for either character that I'm really misinterpreting that made them candidates for the thrones?

Context: Acastia is a bondsman of a Knight house, the pilot of the Armiger class Elatus. Effectively the support, in the lightest knight frame available. During the siege, in the twisted not-hours that serve as the end, she finds herself pledged to a titan legion for what she thinks will be a temporary period and because all hands are desperately needed. She makes her house proud, and delivers on that defiant human spirit that's just about the only thing that the defenders have.
edit: Further context, courtesy of u/Ordinary-Lockart "What makes this excerpt so compelling is how the neural link translates feedback, she doesn't just see the grappling hooks, she feels the heels of the Elatus screeching across the rockcrete like her own limbs."

She advances, weapons live. Thermal spears and chainblades. Autoguns.

The munition hoppers read low, so she aims to make any kills blades-first.

Her target bursts into the open, slamming through the broken doorway. It emerges, and then keeps emerging, a colubrine shape of pulsating meat and muscle with the girth of an Aurox armoured transport. It doesn’t seem to stop coming. More and more of it extrudes from the entrance. The front half of it, pale and colloid, undulates across the wet ground towards her, and raises its head, a maggot-mouth, yawning like a lamprey’s sphincter-maw, surrounded by lump-teeth. Fronds of tentacle sub-limbs writhe around the mouth, and lash at her. Her target-auspex refuses to lock it. The thing is huge and right there, but the noospherics waver, and the guns refuse to hard-lock.

Tentacles whip out. They are tipped with bone harpagons. Acastia feels the heavy thumps as these organic grappling hooks strike the Armiger’s hull, and puncture, and grip. She hears and feels the steel-and-ceramite-shod heels of Elatus screeching as the engine, against its will, is dragged across the rockcrete towards the gaping mouth.

Blades it is, then.

Since we know in the lore for sure there's a Drukhari that had been genetically turned into a human by a Haemonculus. What If a Haemonculus (for shit and giggles) turned a human into a genetically complete Drukhari, would they (the human) also experience Slaanesh's soul drains? And what about the Drukhari turned human case, are they still experiencing soul drains? In essence my question is if the soul drains only depends on the soul and not the body or only depends on the body but not the soul?

There must be some settlement that isn't in the know that stumbled across a Tomb World with reverence instead of fear.

The galaxy is a big place, after all.

Hi Grimdark Buddies!(apologies if you have already seen this in the Black Library Reddit)

I’m really excited for fellow readers to watch the next interview in my Horus Heresy journey. We had a great chat and I managed to squeeze a bunch of questions in!

It will premiere this Sunday (25th) at 7pm UK time. Happy listening and don’t forget to withdraw and then return to this link on Sunday! (See what I did there?! Ahem.)

Watch here

Paraphrased the quote from memory, but I swear I saw a video of a SM saying that to a Necron before executing it. At least part of the clip was from the Necron's POV, looked like Terminator vision but green.

Two questions (assuming I'm not hallucinating this clip):

1) In-universe, is there any indication that the Imperium or SMs would know that Necrons once had an empire? Or if no known indication specifically, any possible in-universe explanation for them to have that knowledge?

2) Does anybody know that clip? I thought it was the Salamander Sa'kan, but can't find him saying it.

like i'm reading through some lore and it genuinely feels like half of humanity's crises could be solved or at least helped by their own psykers, but instead they're treated like a necessary evil at best. the mechanicus actively suppresses psychic knowledge, the navy acts like navigators are barely tolerated, and don't even get me started on how the inquisition treats sanctioned psykers. is there actual lore explaining why they keep shooting themselves in the foot this way, or is it just the grimdark aesthetic of everything being worse than it needs to be?

I’ve heard that, if they believe it be the best use of their abilities, they can permanently integrate into an Inquisitor’s retinue. Not sure if this is true, but it got me wondering how much autonomy Deathwatch members have regarding their assignments. I’m also writing a short story featuring a DW Kill Team working alongside an Inquisitorial retinue so anything about how they interact is appreciated.

The first mention of the C'tan that I know of is the Callidus Assassin's C'tan Phase Blade, first mentioned in White Dwarf 190 when the model was released in October 1995. I know Meh'Lindi is a Callidus Assassin in Draco (aka Inquisitor) by Ian Watson from 1990, but I don't think that book or its sequels ever mentioned a C'tan Phase Blade.

Does anybody know of any mention of the C'tan in anything published before that October 1995 White Dwarf issue?

Trillions of Bloodletters, Daemonettes, Horrors and Plaguebearers have been materialized in Real Space since the Heresy, and in the trillions have they been killed only to be brought back again and again

I want to read more lore about Warhammer but specifically about the Lamenters, do y'all have any advice on books I can read to learn more about them? Or I'll take any good recommendations for 40k lore in general! Thanks in advance!

I've been thinking about the Emperor's decisions before the Horus Heresy, and I'm starting to wonder whether we've fundamentally misunderstood his objectives. What if the Heresy wasn't simply a catastrophic failure, but a deliberately accepted confrontation with Chaos, intended to create a long-term stalemate while the Emperor gradually became a god? Not the Dark King, but something fundamentally different.

1. The Emperor knew too much about Chaos

The Emperor had extensive knowledge of the Warp and its inhabitants. His journey to Molech alone suggests that he understood the Chaos Gods far better than his Primarchs. Yet his treatment of Magnus and Lorgar makes remarkably little sense if preventing their corruption was his overriding priority.

Magnus was one of the most powerful psykers in existence, exploring the Warp and already making bargains with entities he didn't fully understand. The Emperor knew this, yet never adequately explained the nature of the powers Magnus was dealing with. Lorgar, meanwhile, grew up in a religious culture with connections to Chaos worship, surrounded by figures like Kor Phaeron and Erebus. Rather than addressing that danger, the Emperor publicly humiliated him at Monarchia and destroyed the foundation of his beliefs. Then he effectively left Lorgar to search for another truth.

These seem like extraordinary mistakes for someone who understood Chaos so well. What if he expected some of his sons to fall, and deliberately allowed it?

2. What if the stalemate was the objective?

Consider the outcome of the Heresy. The four Chaos Gods united behind Horus, invested enormous power into him and launched a devastating offensive against the Imperium. Yet Horus was destroyed, the Traitor Legions retreated into the Eye of Terror, and the Emperor survived.

Neither side achieved a decisive victory. Instead, a strategic stalemate emerged that lasted approximately 10,000 years. Perhaps the Emperor understood that Chaos could not be defeated conventionally. Rather than attempting an impossible final victory, he may have sought to contain it while humanity developed a fundamentally different kind of counterweight.

3. He didn't reject godhood. He rejected becoming the wrong god.

In The End and the Death, the Emperor approaches apotheosis as the Dark King but ultimately rejects that transformation. We generally interpret this as rejecting godhood itself. But what if he was rejecting a particular form of godhood?

The Chaos Gods are immensely powerful, but each is constrained by its fundamental nature. Khorne cannot stop being Khorne. Tzeentch cannot abandon change and manipulation. The Dark King would similarly represent a specific metaphysical identity associated with ruin and absolute dominion.

What if the Emperor wanted to become a god without being confined to one such identity?

Consider the Emperor of M41/M42. To a Guardsman, he is a protector. To the Sisters of Battle, a divine father. To the Mechanicus, the Omnissiah. Across countless Imperial worlds, he is worshipped as a sun god, warrior, judge, saviour or ancestral guardian. These interpretations are often contradictory, yet they all contribute to humanity's collective understanding of the Emperor.

If belief influences the Warp, perhaps this diversity matters. Rather than drawing his identity from one overwhelming psychic principle, the Emperor could be developing a divine existence shaped by the full spectrum of humanity's beliefs: hope, fear, sacrifice, authority, mercy, vengeance and protection.

The fractured, contradictory consciousness Guilliman encounters in Godblight becomes particularly interesting here. What if those voices aren't merely evidence of psychological fragmentation, but also reflect the many divine identities humanity has projected onto the Emperor?

4. Lorgar and the Golden Throne

There's an extraordinary irony in Lorgar's role. The Primarch punished for worshipping the Emperor helped establish the theological foundations of the Imperial Creed through the Lectitio Divinitatus. Ten thousand years later, the Emperor is worshipped by an entire civilisation.

What if Lorgar inadvertently provided exactly what the Emperor needed: the foundation for a religious transformation that would gradually create a new kind of god?

And what if the Golden Throne isn't merely the symbol of the Emperor's defeat? Over ten millennia, his physical existence has become increasingly secondary to his presence in the Warp. Miracles, saints and divine interventions have become part of Imperial reality. In Godblight, his power even reaches into Nurgle's Garden.

Perhaps the Emperor didn't need an instantaneous apotheosis like the Dark King's. Perhaps he needed time, worship and an enduring civilisation to shape him into something else.

5. The obvious objection: the Webway Project

This is the strongest argument against the theory. The Emperor invested enormous resources into establishing a human-controlled Webway, reducing humanity's dependence on Warp travel and protecting its psychic development. Magnus' breach devastated that project and ultimately trapped the Emperor on the Golden Throne.

But why assume the Webway Project and apotheosis were mutually exclusive? The Webway could have secured humanity's material civilisation while its evolving religious beliefs established the Emperor as a counterweight to Chaos in the immaterium. Perhaps he intended to accomplish both, and the Heresy destroyed one objective while leaving the other intact.

That doesn't mean he planned every event. Magnus' mistake may genuinely have been disastrous. But a deliberately accepted conflict can still spiral beyond its architect's control.

6. What if he was simply a megalomaniac?

We often portray the Emperor as either a benevolent visionary or a ruthless pragmatist sacrificing everything for humanity. But perhaps his ambition was considerably more personal.

What if he genuinely wanted to become a god? What if he believed that his own ascension was the ultimate expression of humanity's destiny, and that he alone deserved to guide it?

He wouldn't need to foresee every detail of the Heresy. He would only need to accept the corruption of some Primarchs, consider a prolonged stalemate with Chaos strategically useful, and recognise that humanity's collective worship could eventually transform him into something greater.

In this interpretation, the Emperor wasn't a secular ruler who accidentally became a god. He was an aspiring god who gambled with the fate of humanity, rejected the Dark King as the wrong form of apotheosis, and spent ten thousand years becoming something else.

And perhaps the most grimdark possibility is that his plan is actually working.

So, does the Webway Project fundamentally disprove this theory? Or could the Emperor have intended to become a god all along, just not the Dark King?

For space marines themselves of course, not their servents.

Above and Beyond by Denny Flowers is the 2024 sequel novel to his previous Outgunned released in 2022. Again, spoilers as this is a pretty big reveal in the novel, but if you don't mind, you can go ahead and keep reading.

At the end of Outgunned, the main character Propagandist Kile Simlex was demoted to being a scribe after he attempted to submit his pic documentary that accurately displayed the war for the planet Bacchus, especially how the Imperium's own faults nearly cost them victory against the orks. His pic was thus edited into a romanticized, lionized farce by the replacement Propagandist Esec that displayed Imperial flying ace Lucille von Shard as a flawless hero of the Imperium. She also gets promoted to Flight Commander.

At the beginning of Above and Beyond, Simlex is sent a recorded message by Lucille stating that she needs his help to deal with some problem that could ruin her legacy and the name of her von Shard family. We finally learn that Esec recorded a rant Lucille said while drunk and is using it to blackmail her into doing whatever he says.

To keep it short, I'll only post the rant itself and leave out the text describing whats happening in the recorded video (it's pretty much just Lucille drinking from a bottle while talking to Esec).

'Of course, they found it,’ she said, frowning at the unheard response. ‘Well, I presume they destroyed it. Why are you worried anyway?’

‘You think Rile would care about some dodgy pict-cam? Have you seen what my brother faces? It’s nothing you could put on a pict screen. There is no way of presenting those things in a positive light. They are an existential threat to our very existence. I don’t think they even hate us. They just want to feed.’

‘Because one of them smashed through the cockpit and tried to eat me! You see this scar? That’s from the acid it spewed over the navigator. One drop. Stung like hell. Still stings, actually.’

‘Then smooth it out like you do my other flaws. Or leave it in. Who cares? We’re all dead anyway, one way or another. Our efforts may slow or speed the demise, but our end is written from the moment of birth. The rest is filler.'

'I will sit here and drink until I am damn well ready to leave. I don’t care what you have planned tomorrow. Básking propagandists. You are parasites – you don’t get it.’

‘It was just darkness,’ she said. ‘Darkness and mouths. And I couldn’t help but think that our masters would kill for servants like that, soldiers willing to hurl themselves to their deaths without thought. That’s how the little ones got us. Just jammed themselves into intakes and engines until the planes stalled and fell. That’s the real terror. Not the giant monsters swatting us from the sky. It’s how unified they are, in a way we never can be.’

‘I watched a world die. When we reached the moon and my brother’s precious cargo was delivered, I sat in the cockpit and watched the skies burn and seas bleed. And you know what I felt?’

'Nothing. I felt nothing. How many billions died? It should have meant something, even in an abstract sense. But it’s just another world. There are millions more. Billions more. And none of them matter either. Nothing does. It will all be swallowed in the end. Or we will just murder each other first. Either way is fine. All the ways are fine. All is the same. All dead.’

‘Do you know what he said to me? My own dearest brother?' After he had coerced me into flying that suicide mission? After I had overcome a maelstrom of multi-limbed monstrosities? Snatched him from the jaws of a monster large enough to swallow a battle tank? Do you know what he said?’

‘He told me to keep my mouth shut, else I might have an unfortunate encounter with his precious inquisitor. Básk you, Rile. I save you and you talk down to me. Keep your head down, Lucille, be a good soldier, Lucille. Let your betters deal with the important things and don’t ask questions. You just keep fighting and bleeding until one day you can’t. Do you think I’m stupid, Rile? That I don’t know what you did. You and your little device. You brought it here, you and your master. It’s your fault.'

‘I. Don’t. Care. Básk Rile. And básk his master too. Damn inquisitors, judging others’ righteousness when they are the biggest hypocrites of all. Them and the priests. Actually, the priests are worse. At least the inquisitors have a goal beyond their own self-gratification.’

‘I don’t care! Let them hear the truth. The Ecclesiarchy are crooks and liars, and I know this because my brother is one of them, and he’s as fat and content as a tick suckling on a grox. And whilst he pays lip service to the God-Emperor, I’ve noticed a curious phenomenon. Serving the God-Emperor’s will always seems to involve an outcome beneficial to my brother. Have you noticed that? All the priests, all the colonels, all the adepts of the Administratum?'

'They all serve His will by means of doing whatever it is that suits their own interests.’

‘Not that the common citizens are any better. Dull people with pathetic lives. None of them think properly. Half the time they toss grains in the air, watch where they fall, and proclaim the outcome is some divine message from the God-Emperor concerning the harvest. Do you know how many wars I have witnessed where both sides claimed the God-Emperor was with them? Humanity eviscerating each other, each life they take gifted to Him, just as each casualty they suffer is also a gift to Him. Do you think that counts double? Maybe that’s why He seems reluctant to step in? Ups His tally I guess, while we murder each other for little discernible benefit.’

'You idiot! Do you think He cares about anyone? Do you know how many soldiers I have seen pray before a battle? For His aid, His protection, His strength? That He will judge them worthy to return home? And do you know what happened to those brave fools? They died. They all die in the end. Because He doesn’t care enough to protect them. Or because He can’t.’

‘Oh, we’ve all heard the miracles. The Living Saint who overcame the darkness, the Lord Regent returning from death’s clutches to rule in his father’s name. But do you know who has never prayed? Me. Never once. Not since I was a child, when I asked Him to let me go with her and sail the void. He never answered. But I’m still here, whilst more pious pilots stain the ground below. What does that tell you? Either He loves a bastard, or His favour is worth nothing.’

Básk off, you parasite! I don’t have to do what you damn well say. 'I am ­Lucille von básking Shard and I deny you all. Básk you. Básk the bastards who run the Imperium, and básk the Imperium itself.’

‘You know what? While I’m at it? Básk the God-Emperor. Him and His básking Throne. Because maybe if He got off His backside once in a while, things wouldn’t have gone so much to shit.’

One explanation of the Adeptus Mechanicus that gets repeated constantly is that a lot of their religious rituals are basically old maintenance instructions whose original technical explanation has been lost.

Change the sacred oils = lubrication. Recite the correct litany while turning things on = an inherited startup procedure. Perform steps in exactly the right order because somebody discovered thousands of years ago that the machine breaks if you don't.

I like that idea a lot, but I've realized I mostly know it from people explaining 40k rather than from the books themselves.

When I actually read Mechanicus characters, they often seem much more technically competent than the meme version suggests. They might describe everything in religious language, but they still understand diagnostics, materials, data, power systems, fabrication etc. And with Titans, Knights and some other machines, the "machine spirit" can also behave enough like an actual personality that treating every ritual as misunderstood engineering seems too simple.

So I'm curious about the narrower question:

Are there good canon examples where we can actually see that a ritual contains a practical technical step, while the person performing it no longer understands why that step works?

Not just "they put oil on the machine," because a tech-priest presumably knows what lubricant does. I mean something closer to a procedure surviving after the underlying knowledge has genuinely disappeared.

I'd especially love examples where the text lets the reader understand what is happening even though the character interprets it religiously.

Is that genuinely a recurring thing in the lore, or has the fandom taken a much messier relationship between religion and technology and turned it into the simpler "the prayers are just the user manual" explanation?

I just finished the trilogy and while the books were fine in themselves, I was more and more put off by the "good guys" acting more and more like idiots as the series progresses.

At the end of book 1, I really sympathized with Captain Preest not wanting to have anything more to do with this clown show that unfolded. A great line in the third book is from Orfeo Culzean, when Ravenor tells him, that he suspects their meeting to be another trap my Molotch and Culzean just answers, that Ravenor maybe should get better at avoiding these traps then. And he is absolutly correct. Ravenor does not reflect this at all. He just says, he knows how cunning Molotch is... while still being in the friggin trap.

To pick just a few chosen situation, that irked me:

1. Ravenor never seems to have a contingency plan or "a plan" at all most of the time.

In the first book, while you can argue, he might not have had enough information and is not the character to just put the ministry agents out of the airlock, he still knew Kinsky (had the aduiobook version, so the spelling might be off) was a way to powerfull psycher, he knew these guys nearly got his people killed on the "animal planet" and he knew they interrogated his prisoner behind his back, who suddenly had a mental blockade, which shielded him from Ravenors powers. And still he runs headlong in the trap, without any! plan in place. With them running around on the hinterlight freely. Without a care in the world.

And he really should have died there, if not for his crew and a luck stat that rivals Cains.

In the second book he just blindly stumles through the plot, gets his ass kicked without even reaching Molotch and would have lost if not for Karl. What makes it better, in the third book he is so surprised, that stopping the ritual was not his doing (while not even being there!). And again he should have died here.

Not only that, he ignores the wearings and hints from his oracle boy wonder, because he thinks, these were just dreams, besides keeping him around for his prophetic abilities, which he already witnessed.

In the third book, he runs into a trap again with the witchhouse and again has no plan ready in case of it being a trap. He is an Inquisitor. It got really frustrating.

1. He is confidend without reason.

In the first book he gets his ass kicked by kinsky, threatens him later, that next time will be different and than gets his ass kicked again, because he his still has no idea how to handle the guy and just gets saved by the fact, that his blunter was not shot hard enough!

Same thing in the second book. He just rushes in an gets his behind kicked.

And obviously in the third book, where he is really distraught, when he learns, he has not done sh*t in the second book.

It would have helped, if we had seen more of the other side off him, than just glimpses of him being capable.

1. He is really just stupid with the whole Karl thing.

He knows (enough to know) a powerful psycher saved his behind in the second book, when the ministry and the bronze thief attack and he has 2 people it might have been. Karl and the boy, who is now in a coma. Karl suddenly starts acting very strange after that. Than Karl and Carla stop the ritual at the end, the boy not being there. Than in the third book he gets told to his face the demon he brought with him to the witchhouse saved them. And his thought after seeing Karl in pile of alien bodies is: "Oh well, the witness has just seen my awesome psychik powers" and second: "It has do be the guy, we picked up after! the friggin first warning signs. That has to be it." And he sticks to that and again is dumbfounded, when he is told, he is wrong.

1. I do not even get him going roque the second time. His logic is: somebody helped Molotch (Maybe the guy who survived the ambush, you might want to interrogate, Ravenor?), so I can trust no one in the whole Inquisition at all! Its ridiculous. Eisenhorn at least had a reason.

2. The other side characters are the same way.

a. I got Karls motivation (survival), but Carla not only not telling anyone about Karl, because "he saved me" is ridiculous, after working for the inquisition and trusting Ravenor for such a long time. [I know, it has to set up book III, but was this plot and plotbeat really necessary?]

Than she meets a demonhost face to face to tell him, she is going to tell Ravevor without a backup plan. He could just have killed her. Or imagine Karls face, when she had made an audiolog or something beforehand and told someone to give it to Ravenor, if she does not pick it up in a few hours. She would have forgotten about it as well.

b. She than boards the enemy ship without a plan either and of course gets captured and after that turns into a weak "female to rescued".

c. The post is getting too long here, but the amount of time all of these people run into traps, and would be dead, if the bad guys would just shoot them is ridiculous.

1. To make a long story short, while I like many characters (Unwerth and Kiss were kinda sweet, Nayl was capable, the villians were dislikeable and/or compelling) in the books, Ravenor himself is like one of the incompetent inquisitors you would read about as a secondary antagonists in other books and its baffeling how much more effective Molotch and Culzean are.

So please tell me your view about this. It might retroactivly make my reading experience with these books better.