Characters / Warhammer 40,000: Chaos Primarchs

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"When the traitor's hand strikes, it strikes with the strength of a legion."

—Horus

At the end of the Great Crusade Warmaster Horus fell to Chaos, and eight of his fellow Primarchs followed him against the Emperor, resulting in a full-scale civil war known as the Horus Heresy.

For information on the Space Marine Legions that they lead, see the Heretic Astartes character page.

See Horus Heresy for tropes applying to that series, and the Horus Heresy: Age of Darkness Gaiden Game, which isn't mentioned in the main tabletop game.

General Tropes

• Antagonistic Offspring: They all now despise their "father", the Emperor, for a variety of reasons and seek to destroy his works.
• Broken Ace: While most of the Primarchs were this to at least some degree, the traitors took it up a notch. All of them had severe, often crippling emotional problems long before Chaos wormed its way into their minds. It was their very nature as broken beings that made them so vulnerable to corruption.
• Calling the Old Man Out: Most of the Traitor Primarchs turned due to actions that the Emperor or their loyalist brothers did to them that they never forgave. Some of these were legitimate (Lorgar's faith in his father being shattered due to the Emperor's destruction of the crown jewel of his work and falling prey to Chaos in his moment of weakness; Angron losing all of his friends and comrades when the Emperor refused to help them take their world and only saved Angron when he could save Angron's army as well) while others were blown out of proportion or misled completely (Horus tricked into believing the Emperor intended to rule humanity as a god; Magnus being played like a fiddle by Tzeentch).
• Demon of Human Origin: The surviving Traitor Primarchs (aside from whichever of Alpharius or Omegon that wasn't killed by Rogal Dorn) have ascended to Daemon Prince status.
• The Dreaded: As the mightiest servants of the Chaos Gods, the Traitor Primarchs inspire fear and dread in all who still know of them. The Imperium treats the emergence of even one of them as a top-priority threat.
• Dysfunction Junction: All the Primarchs had their issues to begin with, but the traitors were all far more damaged than their loyalist brothers. Angron and Curze were barely controllable at the best of times, Mortarion and Perturabo were petulant and bitter, Lorgar was a zealot looking for any gods to serve, and Alpharius and Omegaon were compulsive schemers. Horus, Fulgrim, and eventually Magnus all started out levelheaded, if arrogant, but quickly devolved into twisted parodies of themselves as the Chaos Gods tightened their grip on their minds. Before his own decline, Horus lamented that his more reliable brothers remained loyal while he was left to lead a group of "broken monsters".
• Enemy Civil War: After the Horus Heresy, the surviving Traitors split off to serve their own ends. Since then, they've warred amongst each other in service of their Chaos God masters or for their own reasons.
• Even Evil Has Standards: While all the Traitor Primarchs sank into the evils of Chaos, there were still some actions terrible enough to cross what few ethical boundaries they retained.
  • Horus, Perturabo and even Angron grew disgusted and horrified with Fulgrim as his worship of Slaanesh caused him to indulge in progressively more depraved behavior purely to sate his ever more twisted urges. Horus in particular once considered Fulgrim one of the Primarchs he was closest with but finally decided he was done with Fulgrim when the latter ignored any orders during the Siege of Terra and simply launched the Emperor's Children at the citizens of Terra in a depraved mess of slaughter and violence for sheer sadistic pleasure.
  • A number of the traitor Primarchs made it clear that they didn't like cooperating with daemons:
    • Horus himself didn't quite trust the Chaos Gods and was confident that he could use the Ruinous Powers to his own ends, rather than the other way around. He was wrong.
    • Perturabo worked hard to prevent his Iron Warriors from becoming too heavily corrupted due to his disgust with the Forces of Chaos, using mechanical augmentations to replace body parts that had been twisted by Chaos. By the Siege of Terra, once Perturabo saw that Horus had been completely overtaken by the Chaos Gods, he took his legion and left the system.
    • The Night Lords refused to allow the Word Bearers near them after learning that the Word Bearers had been deliberately allowing some of their number to become hosts to daemons. Even Konrad was disgusted at meeting daemon-possessed Marines.
    • Mortarion never intended to serve Chaos in the first place, only being interested in political gain and nursing his grudge against the Emperor for his Kill Steal. He only pledged himself to Nurgle to save his Legion from eternal suffering, something he remains bitter about.
    • In his rare lucid moments even Angron was wary of daemons, and as a result was left extremely bitter about forcibly being raised to daemonhood by Lorgar.
• Evil Is Bigger: The Daemon Primarchs dwarf their already-giant loyalist brothers. While technically not a daemon at the time, by end of the Siege of Terra, Horus was so swollen with Chaotic power that he had grown larger than the Emperor Himself.
• Evil Is Easy: The Primarchs got a massive boost in power when they fell to Chaos. Best demonstrated when Angron and Horus fought Sanguinius–The Great Angel proved so skilled and powerful that both of his corruption brothers basically had to cheat to keep up, and for Angron, even that wasn't enough to win.
• Fallen Hero: Each of them was once one of the Imperium's greatest warriors and leaders. Now their names are spit upon by those who still remember them and they seek to destroy the empire they once served.
• Freudian Excuse: Many of the Chaos Primarchs have these to justify their betrayal.
• Motive Decay: All of them started out with the intention to improve the world around them in some way. A combination of the savagery of the Crusade, bitterness towards the Emperor or their brothers, personal trauma, and the corruption of Chaos warped their originally noble goals into something unrecognizable and nakedly malevolent.
• Near-Villain Victory: The Horus Heresy was just barely a loss. The Emperor was left an inch from death after battling Horus and only managed to kill him thanks the interference of a figure who has been lost to history providing a critical distraction to get his head in the game at the last moment. Most Chaos Marines hold Horus in contempt as they are convinced that they would be ruling the Imperium now had he not fallen at the last hurdle.
• Never My Fault: Remove this character flaw and most of the Traitor Primarchs never turn against the Emperor. More than even the manipulations of Chaos, a lack of self-awareness combined with an inability to take responsibility for their actions is the main cause for most of these Primarchs rebelling.
• Not in This for Your Revolution: With the sole exception of Lorgar, none of the Chaos Primarchs actually joined Horus out of agreement with his ideals and all of them had their own agendas.
  • Once Fulgrim got over his daemonic possession he just wanted an excuse to indulge in the ever-increasing sadism of Slaanesh.
  • Mortarion was only ever interested in nursing his grudge against the Emperor for his Kill Steal, and he was mostly interested in removing psykers from humanity, admitting he didn't care about Horus' fate.
  • Angron wanted revenge against the Emperor for forcing him to leave his gladiators to die — what happened afterward was no concern of his.
  • Perturabo was convinced the Emperor would never forgive him after putting down the rebellion on Olympia — and he mostly wanted an excuse to lash out against the Imperium that he was convinced treated him like dirt. He was extremely wary of the Forces of Chaos, recognizing that its corruption would only cause problems.
  • Konrad Curze just wanted an excuse to sow fear and terror throughout the Imperium. He was openly disgusted with Chaos practitioners and daemons, at one point telling daemonically-possessed Word Bearers to stay the hell away from him.
  • Magnus never wanted to join Chaos in the first place and was effectively press-ganged into the Traitor forces through a combination of Horus' manipulation and Poor Communication Kills by Leman Russ. Magnus ended up using it as an excuse to exact revenge on everyone he perceived as having wronged him, which continues to this day.
  • Alpharius is the most difficult to discern given his motives are so unclear.
• One-Man Army: They are were capable of defeating entire armies of enhanced soldiers alone as humans. After being enhanced by Chaotic magic or outright becoming daemons themselves, any one of them is enough to ravage an entire world. Nothing short of sustained artillery bombardment or incredible psychic power is enough to have any hope to beat one.
• One-Winged Angel: Their transformations into Daemon Princes have changed them in monstrous ways, with Angron and Fulgrim being the best cases (Angron now resembles a Bloodthirster and Fulgrim is a four-armed snake-man). Several of them, like Magnus◊, still prefer to appear in a close approximation to their original forms, but for others it's not an option or they don't care.
• Orcus on His Throne: Only Angron has ever left his daemon world to war with the Imperium in a large scale. Magnus took part in a direct assault on the Space Wolves' homeworld but was defeated and hasn't left the Immaterium since.
  • Possibly subverted as of Wrath of Magnus, with it being noted that several Daemonic Primarchs have been seen moving to Cadia.
  • As of the opening of the Great Rift, all of the Daemon Primarchs have begun to mobilize. Angron, Magnus, and Mortarion have been most active, but the others have been making rumblings of their own.
• Resurrective Immortality: The Daemon Primarchs cannot be permanently killed. The most that can be done to them now is to banish them back to the Warp by destroying their current bodies. No matter what, they'll always eventually return just as powerful as ever. Since the opening of the Great Rift, not even banishment gives much relief as they will return within a few months, rather than the centuries it used to take. The only things that could end them for good is the direct intervention of the Emperor himself or possibly Roboute Guilliman wielding the Emperor's Sword, which is saturated with His psychic power.
• Start of Darkness
  • Fulgrim taking up the daemon-possessed Laeran Blade, although to a large degree it only amplified his existing flaws of pride, insecurity and perfectionism.
  • Perturabo's legion crushing their homeworld's rebellion with excessive brutality after yet another hellish, thankless siege.
  • Konrad Curze destroying his own planet after its backsliding into criminal anarchy convinced him he had wasted his time bringing law and order to it.
  • Angron losing all of his fellow slave-gladiators to a massacre, after his father saved him against his will and refused to aid them.
  • Mortarion having his victory over his adoptive father "stolen" by the Emperor.
  • Magnus learning to project himself into the Warp and making contact with Tzeentch.
  • Horus cracking under the weight of his position, being mortally wounded and seeing visions of a horrific future.
  • The Emperor humiliating Lorgar, destroying Monarchia and shattering his beliefs.
  • Alpharius/Omegon have the least clear breaking point since no one knows what their exact intentions are.
• Tragic Villain: All of them, though some more than others. At one point, while they had their own ways and ideas of doing it, they legitimately wanted the best for the Imperium and humanity as a whole. However, a combination of personal doubts, bad luck, strained relationships with their brothers and father, horrible circumstances, and manipulations from the Ruinous Powers made them turn on it. Forsaking their prior life's work for vengeance and power.
• Ultimate Job Security: Most of the traitor Primarchs were already unstable tyrants, criminals and madmen when the Emperor found them, but he still put them in charge of personal armies of super powered space soldiers. Likewise, the Emperor looked the other way towards their leadership flaws and excessively brutal actions as so long as they didn't hold up his Great Crusade.
• Unperson: One of the Emperor's final orders was to expunge traitor Primarchs and their legions from the Imperium's official records. The only remnant of them and actions that is widely known throughout humanity is a fabricated religious story of nine devils who threatened the Imperium and were easily defeated by the Emperor and his nine Primarchs.
• Unwitting Pawn: Each of them was used by the Chaos Gods as a weapon to strike down the Emperor and ruin his plans to destroy them. Those who are now daemons exist solely to serve their dark masters for eternity, whether they like it or not.
• Villain Has a Point: For all their crimes against humanity and blatant Chaos corruption, each Traitor Primarch had legitimate grievances with the Emperor and gave valid points about the many flaws of the Imperium. Had it not been for the influence of Chaos, they may well have had a better justified cause than their loyalist brothers did.
• We ARE Struggling Together: During the Horus Heresy, they were barely able to tolerate each other, sticking together more out of necessity and shared hatred for the Emperor than any sort of camaraderie. It only got worse as they grew more corrupted by Chaos and their own disagreements. During the Siege of Terra, their already strained sense of unified purpose all but collapsed: several of the traitor Primarchs were so sick of the others that they packed up their legions and abandoned the battle altogether while most of the remainder were so corrupted that the siege became less of a tactical military assault than an advancing riot of blood and depravity. In the Scouring that followed their defeat on Terra, the last traces of an alliance between the Traitor Legions vanished and they've been periodic enemies ever since.
• Where I Was Born and Razed: Angron, Curze and Perturabo each destroyed the worlds they had grown up on and every traitor Primarch except Lorgar^note Who would have been there but was dismissed for trying to usurp Horus. and Curze^note Who had been captured by Lion El'Jonson and jettisoned into space in a stasis coffin by Sanguinius took part in the Siege of Terra.

Traitor Primarchs

Fulgrim, Primarch of the Emperor's Children

That which causes us trials shall yield us triumph, and that which makes our hearts ache shall fill us with gladness. For the only true happiness is to learn, to advance and to improve. None of this could happen without rejecting error, ignorance and imperfection. We must pass out of the darkness to reach the light.

The infant Fulgrim was deposited on the decaying world of Chemos, where most orphaned children were put to death as a waste of resources. His rescuers saw something in the child that made them defy that tradition, and as Fulgrim quickly grew he was able to contribute to the world's industrial production. His improvements in technology and efficiency reversed Chemos' decline so that it finally produced more than it consumed, allowing a renaissance of arts and culture.

When the Emperor and a force of battle-scarred yet civilized warriors came to Chemos, Fulgrim knelt and offered his sword without a single word. Though an accident had reduced the Third Legion to a mere two hundred warriors, Fulgrim gave such an inspiring speech to his soldiers that the Emperor immediately renamed them the Emperor's Children and gave them the unique honor of bearing the Imperial aquila on their armor. Fulgrim believed that his legion should embody the perfection of not just warfare but Imperial culture, and formed a strong friendship with both Ferrus Manus and Horus during the Great Crusade. He would also earn the distinction of being the one Primarch who could form a friendship with Konrad Curze.

While cleansing the alien Laer, Fulgrim recovered a sword from its Slaanesh-worshipping population that contained a greater daemon, which subtly began to corrupt him. He ignored Eldrad Ulthran's warnings about the weapon and Horus, and encouraged his legion to turn to forbidden methods to improve themselves until the Emperor's Children became just as devoted to the God of Excess. Fulgrim sided with Horus against the Emperor and killed his Brother Primarch and close friend Ferrus Manus during the Drop Site Massacre on Istvaan V, an act that broke Fulgrim's mind and allowed the daemon in his sword to possess him fully. Fulgrim soon recovered and embraced Chaos, and mortally wounded Rouboute Guilliman in the aftermath of the Horus Heresy before being driven into the Eye of Terror.

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Historic

• Ace Custom: Fulgrim's armor The Gilded Panoply which gave him free reign to use his phenomenal speed and agility in battle.
• Agent Peacock: Definitely running for the most "beautiful" Primarch with the exception of Sanguinius, and stands as the only traitor Primarch aside from Horus himself to have slain a loyalist Primarch in battle.
• And I Must Scream: Spent some time trapped in his body, forced to watch while a daemon acted in his stead. But then he got better — well, worse...
• Animal Motifs: The Phoenix, due to his homeworld's miraculous rebirth. Fulgrim's bodyguard was known as the Phoenix Guard. Perhaps also Foreshadowing his eventual rebirth as a Daemon Prince.
• Artifact of Doom: The Silver Blade of Laer, which contained a Greater Daemon of Slaanesh. Its corruptive influence perverted Fulgrim's desire for perfection into hedonism, caused him to attack Eldrad Ulthran when the Farseer tried to tell Fulgrim about Horus' turn to Chaos, and made it easier for Horus to turn Fulgrim against the Emperor. The daemon would later take complete control of Fulgrim, although he later wrested control back through unknown means.
• Beauty Is Bad: Fulgrim is on par with Sanguinius as the most handsome Primarch and is a giant sociopath.
• Berserk Button: Emperor help anyone who actually manages to wound Fulgrim and mar his "perfect form". Guilliman found this out the hard way when he managed to slash one of Fulgrim's arms in their duel. Fulgrim's response was to immediately drop any pretense of civility and go into a full on fit of rage.
• The Caligula: Fulgrim went from being the most cultured Primarch to an unspeakably cruel and selfish tyrant.
• Chronic Backstabbing Disorder:
  • Everyone who ever trusted him got burned. He betrayed the Emperor, then his best friend Ferrus Manus, tried to sacrifice Perturabo for daemonhood, abandoned Horus' war to do his own thing with the majority of his Legion, and even during the battle of Terra itself his forces ran around butchering random civilian targets rather than participate in the actual siege.
  • Ironically, this gets bounced right back at the Emperor's Children in the novel Clonelord, where the Emperor's Children board Fabius Bile's ship and discover a clone of Fulgrim — specifically, an uncorrupted Fulgrim who is still loyal to the Emperor.^note Clone Fulgrim is the only fully successful Primarch clone that Bile has managed to create, and even Bile himself isn't sure what made this one different than all his other attempts. The traitor Marines are completely unable to even hurt the clone as he ruthlessly slaughters them.
• Commonality Connection: His deep friendship with Ferrus makes a lot more sense when you realize that the proud, vain Fulgrim grew up working with his hands as a factory worker and coal miner in a dreary, dying world. On the surface they're opposites, but at a closer glance they're probably the most similar Primarchs.
• Early-Installment Weirdness: One of Fulgrim's earliest profiles^note from the 1994 Renegades army book for the Epic game portrayed his fall to Chaos differently from the current canon. Fulgrim is described as first parleying with Horus after the rebellion's beginning and only then being corrupted by Slaanesh (as opposed to later material where Fulgrim is seduced before the Heresy even begins).
• Evil Feels Good:
  • When he was forced to watch as a daemon of Slaanesh puppeted his body, he slowly came to enjoy the freedom and pleasure the depravity it used his body to indulge in. When he eventually overcome it to take his life back, he chose to continue down the same path purely for his own pleasure. Eventually, he became so enthralled by the seduction of Chaos that he pledged himself to Slaanesh and became a daemon out of his own free will.
• Evil Former Friend: To Ferrus Manus; once close friends, they became bitter foes after Fulgrim's corruption, ending with Fulgrim killing Manus.
• Fatal Flaw: Fulgrim held a deep mistrust of the other Primarchs, and he also constantly sought to perfect himself to emulate his father, an obsession which quickly drove him to hubris and madness. Fulgrim was very easily tainted by Slaanesh for his perfectionist tendencies.
• Force and Finesse: The finesse to Ferrus' force. Fulgrim preferred assymetrical warfare and precision over set battles and straightforward tactics.
• Foreshadowing: One of the workers who found Fulgrim carried a book which he presumed was just full of fairy tales. In fact, they were a depiction of Fulgrim's life (illustrated most clearly when the worker in question flips to a page depicting a multi-armed serpent fighting a blue-armoured giant; years later, Fulgrim—by then a daemon prince with a serpentine body and numerous arms—mortally wounded Roboute Guilliman in personal combat).
• Four Is Death: The fourth Primarch found and the first to kill another Primarch.
• The Friend Nobody Likes: Fulgrim was one of the less popular Primarchs outside of his bonds with Horus, Ferrus Manus and Konrad Curze, often being looked down upon for his theatrics, personality and flamboyancy. Rogal Dorn considered him "unmanly" and Roboute Guilliman outright referred to his vanity as a Fatal Flaw (which he would be absolutely correct about). He also butted heads with Leman Russ, Corvax and Lion El'Jonson on separate occasions. Most of his allies among the Traitor Primarchs including Mortarion, Angron and especially Perturabo considered him a foppish annoyance at best. Even Horus got sick of Fulgrim's behavior when, after his corruption, he would usually rampage around the galaxy rather than actively contributing to campaigns.
• Hero Killer: Fulgrim killed Ferrus Manus and fatally wounded Roboute Guilliman.
• Inferiority Superiority Complex: Fulgrim's constant bragging and preening masked a deep-seated insecurity that nothing he did was ever good enough to match his impossible standards.
• Irony: His Start of Darkness was the attack on and extermination of the Laer, a race of Snake People with no legs but two pairs of arms, that was (unbeknownst back then) completely devoted to Slaanesh. After his apotheosis to a Daemon Prince, Fulgrim mutated into... a serpentine daemon devoted to Slaanesh, without legs but with four arms.
• Long-Haired Pretty Boy: Fulgrim had long, flowing white hair and was one of the most handsome of the Primarchs. His model sadly doesn't really show his handsomeness, but this is fairly common with the model line in general.
• Master Swordsman: Fulgrim was considered in the running for the greatest duelist of the Primarchs before his fall, and after his turn to Slaanesh his enhanced abilities allowed him to give Guilliman a Curb-Stomp Battle during the Battle of Thessala.
• More than Mind Control: The daemon of the Lair Blade didn't possess him immediately. It slowly infiltrated his mind by preying on his ego and insecurities to weaken his will until it took full control. By the time it was exorcized and Fulgrim regained his body, he had been fully corrupted and willingly gave himself to Slaanesh.
• My God, What Have I Done?: Fulgrim was shocked back to his senses after killing Ferrus Manus, and was so overcome with remorse that he agreed to let the daemon in his sword escape. It promptly took over his body and trapped his soul inside a painting in his mind.
• Narcissist: A trait he passed on to his legion. Even before his fall, Fulgrim was known as a proud peacock who constantly strove for (and believed in) his own personal perfection. By the time he became a Daemon Prince, his vanity had reached megalomaniacal proportions.
• Nice Job Fixing It, Villain: Rather than join the other Traitor Legions in assaulting the Imperial Palace on Terra, Fulgrim and the Emperor's Children spent the Battle of Terra slaughtering the civilian populace. Horus bitterly comments that the loss of a Traitor Legion contributed to their inability to breach the Palace before the arrival of loyalist reinforcements.
• Non-Action Guy: Only before being reunited with the Emperor. Unlike every other primarch, who all butchered or conquered their way to supremacy on their adoptive homeworlds, Fulgrim united Chemos with diplomacy and negotiation alone. He was the only primarch to have never known battle before being recovered by the crusade. Needless to say, this changed completely once he started leading a legion.
• Not Brainwashed: While he was originally forced into villainy by being possessed, when he's freed he tells Perturabo that he has chosen to serve Chaos out of nothing but his own free will.
• Odd Friendship: Would you believe a guy like him would be friends with the likes of Konrad Curze?
• Only Friend: With Konrad Curze. It was Fulgrim who trained the antisocial and fearsome Primarch in how to become a proper leader of the Night Lords and was the one person Curze felt comfortable with sharing some of his dark visions of the future.
• The Perfectionist: He always strove to epitomize what it meant to be a Primarch. His Start of Darkness began when his obsession with perfection started overtaking his cares for anything else.
• Religious and Mythological Theme Naming: Fulgrim is named after the water-bringer from Chemos' creation myth.
• Rousing Speech: Fulgrim gave a speech so rousing the Emperor renamed his legion the Emperor's Children and allowed them to bear his aquila symbol on their armor.
• Sanity Slippage: Fulgrim took to speaking with a painting after failing to convince Ferrus Manus to join him in rebellion. He turned full evil after regaining control of his body.
• The Smart Guy: Fulgrim united Chemos using only diplomacy. He is the only Primarch known to have no combat experience whatsoever prior to being rediscovered.
• Tragic Bromance: Out of all the Primarchs, he was the absolute closest with Ferrus Manus. Guess who Fulgrim ends up beheading....
• Tragic Villain: Despite being The Perfectionist, he was loyal before he unknowingly took a Laer sword possessed by a Greater Daemon of Slaanesh, which led to his Legion's ruin.
• Uncanny Valley Makeup: During his final spiral into the arms of Slaanesh, Fulgrim tried his hand at stage makeup, with grotesque results.
• The Unfettered: After falling to Slaanesh, Fulgrim lost any sense of mercy, compassion, honor, or loyalty. There was nothing off the table when it came to his pursuit of pleasure and power.
• Unwitting Pawn: Poor Fulgrim had no idea what Slaanesh had planned for him in the end.
• Used to Be a Sweet Kid: Originally, Fulgrim was one of the most kindhearted and idealistic of the Primarchs. He strove to protect and enlighten his sons on their duty to not only protect humanity, but to help them elevate themselves by showing what they're capable of becoming. That all changed when he found the Lair Blade and began his downward spiral. After his corruption, he became the most sadistic and cruel of all the Traitor Primarchs. The depths of his depravity disturbed even his fellow Traitor brothers.
• "Well Done, Son" Guy: In his Horus Heresy novel, he tells Horus how much he longs for the Emperor's love and respect... something he can never attain.
• White Hair, Black Heart: Double Subverted; originally Fulgrim was a nice guy despite his eccentrics and braggart persona. Eventually, Fulgrim ended up falling to Chaos though by getting daemonically possessed.
• Wild Card: Despite firmly being one of the traitor Primarchs, Fulgrim was a very unreliable ally. The corruption of Slaanesh made him more concerned with bouncing around the galaxy with the Emperor's Children indulging in their hedonistic pleasures than contributing to campaigns. Horus in particular complains about Fulgrim when lamenting how most of the traitor Primarchs are broken monsters. It winds up ultimately biting the Traitor Primarchs hard when Fulgrim rampages around Terra, slaughtering civilians for sheer pleasure during the Siege of Terra rather than do anything useful. This deprived the Traitor forces of an entire legion which likely contributed to the Traitors' ultimate loss.
• Working-Class Hero: Fulgrim went from a lowly worker to a planetary executive.
• Young and in Charge: Fulgrim was one of Chemos' top executives when he was just 15.

Current

When Roboute Guilliman was revived during the chaos of Abaddon's 13th Black Crusade, Fulgrim was the first to take action against his brother, greeting Guilliman with an attempt to corrupt his mind through a cursed wreath. While he didn't get involved in Guilliman's Terran Crusade, the Era Indomitus has seen the Daemon Primarch become more active than he has been for millennia.

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• Break the Haughty: Thousands of years after the Horus Heresy, Fulgrim would return to Istvaan III, drawn there by a message from Ancient Rylanor, a surviving loyalist Deadnought of the Emperor's Children. Fulgrim would offer Rylanor a chance to be remade by Slaanesh, but Rylanor steadfastly refused. It turned out that Rylanor was waiting in ambush with a virus bomb, and while Fulgrim survived the detonation of the world-killer, Rylanor's steadfast loyalty and rejection of both his Primarch and the gifts of Chaos would leave Fulgrim's pride shattered.
• The Corrupter: In The Gathering Storm an agent of Fulgrim offers a wreath to Roboute Guilliman which shows him visions of potential glory in an attempt to corrupt the resurrected Primarch into Slaanesh's service.
• Curb-Stomp Battle: Gave one to Guilliman during the Battle of Thessala, which put Roboute in his 10,000-year life support. Keep in mind this was after Guilliman had previously recovered from injuries resulting from fighting both Lorgar and Angron after the latter became a Daemon Primarch.
• Evil Makes You Monstrous: Fulgrim is now a Daemon Prince, thanks to conning Perturabo into activating powerful Eldar artifacts on a Crone World and then allowing him to destroy Fulgrim's body in retaliation.
• Godhood Seeker: The logical conclusion of Fulgrim's hunger for perfection was to become a Daemon Prince. He succeeded.
• Hated by All: He's the most vile of the Daemon Primarchs and engenders nothing but hatred to anyone outside of other servants of Slaanesh. Even Chaos Marines find Fulgrim's complete lack of honor repulsive.
• The Hedonist: Fitting his new master, Fulgrim's main goal is to sate his urges with little care for anything greater.
• Multi-Armed and Dangerous: Fulgrim's daemon form has four arms.
• Psychopathic Manchild: After his corruption, Fulgrim acts more like a spoiled, sociopathic teenager than millenia-old cosmic being.
• Orcus on His Throne: Legend has it that Fulgrim rules over a pleasure planet of Slaanesh somewhere in the Eye of Terror, but any who find it never return. In any case, he hasn't been seen since the Heresy, though Guilliman's revival near the tail end of the 41st millenium has finally pushed him back into an active role.
• Redeeming Replacement: Fabius Bile created a perfect clone of Fulgrim once. The clone had all of powers and memories of Fulgrim before his corruption. He was disgusted with the actions of his counterpart and the depraved state the Emperor's Children had devolved into. He swore to undo all of it and return the Legion to the Imperium. Before he had the chance, Bile betrayed him and traded him to Trazyn the Infinite to avoid falling under the sway of a Primarch again.
• Replacement Goldfish: Fulgrim has repeatedly ordered Fabius Bile to create clones of Ferrus Manus in the hopes of having his deceased favorite brother back on his side. Each time, the clone refused to join Chaos and attacked Fulgrim, forcing Fulgrim to kill them as he did the original. Rather than admit to himself that Ferrus would always reject what he has become, Fulgrim simply blames Fabius for making the clone "wrong" and demands he try again.
• Snake People: He became a rather hideous one snake-like monster after becoming a Daemon Prince.

Perturabo, Primarch of the Iron Warriors

Tell them ruin has come to their world, death, despair and red war. Tell them their hopes and pride have come to nothing. Tell them their empty whispers fall upon deaf ears — their gods are dead, human logic has killed them. Tell them the Angels of Death have come. Tell them that nothing can save them now.

Perturabo's youth was spent on the planet Olympia as the ward of Dammekos, the Tyrant of Lochos. A cold and solitary child, he rejected all attempts by Dammekos to bond with him while devouring all manner of scholarly learning. Perturabo mastered the siegecraft that Olympia's warring city-states used against each other and soon became Dammekos' most valuable asset, a fearsome force on the battlefield and a potent source of innovation and invention in all manner of technical crafts.

After being discovered by the Emperor, Perturabo was given command of the IV Legion, and forged these Iron Warriors into an uncompromising force that brutally crushed its opponents through attrition. His expertise in siege warfare meant that he was expected to endure some of the worst campaigns of the Great Crusade, only to have his legion split up and assigned garrison duty on the worlds he conquered. Perturabo's sanity was eroded by the combination of the stress on his legion and a lack of respect from his fellow Primarchs, especially a bitter rivalry with Rogal Dorn, and when the unthinkable happened and Olympia rose in rebellion, he snapped.

The Iron Warriors put down the revolt, massacring millions, and in the aftermath Perturabo realized the Emperor would never forgive him. He threw in his lot with Horus, and the Iron Warriors took a grim satisfaction in dismantling the Imperial Fists' defenses during the Siege of Terra. After getting his revenge upon Rogal Dorn in the Iron Cage incident, Perturabo ascended to daemonhood, and currently rules over the fortress-planet Medrengard within the Eye of Terror.

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• Ace Custom:
  • Perturabo wore the Logos, a Cataphractii pattern suit of artificer-quality Terminator armor that incorporated many advanced features such as a teleport homer, and could link Perturabo to all his forces in the field, acting as a mobile command center.
  • He rode his own personalized Shadowsword tank, nicknamed the Tormentor by his men, which featured additional armor and weapons and whose superstructure and engine had been heavily modified to convert the tank into a transport for Perturabo and his soldiers. He also had an (unnamed) Thunderhawk which he customised with heavy armour and outsized engines, letting it literally drop him into the middle of a hostile fortress and stand a good chance of making it out again.
• Arm Cannon: The Logos had two belt-fed combi-bolters, one mounted on each wrist, which fired specialized bolts that caused the target to explode into flame and were designed to punch through Astartes armor.
• Bad Boss: One of his first acts upon assuming command of his legion was ordering its soldiers to decimate themselves (i.e. every tenth man was beaten to death by the other nine). This was not for any specific failure, but for failing to live up to Perturabo's expectations. To put things in perspective, even the likes of Angron and Konrad Curze didn't do this when handed command of their own legions (though the former did beat numerous high-ranking officers of his legion to death upon being handed over to them by the Emperor, but this was out of grief and rage rather than anything calculated and deliberate, as was the case with Perturabo and his decimation order). Life for the legionnaires under his rule didn't improve much from there; everything under him was a slow, grinding slog without thanks or compassion. In his plans, thousands would be sacrificed without hesitation or remorse as long as victory was achieved.
• Because You Were Nice to Me: His reason for siding with Horus during the Great Heresy. The Emperor and most of the Imperium treated him like crap. He always got the crap details, his soldiers were considered cannon fodder at best, and despite showing himself more capable in more areas than most of his brothers, he was still forced to do said crap-tier jobs. Any victories he did have were rarely if ever attributed to him, even if they were feats his peers failed to accomplish. Horus was the only person to ever AT LEAST give him a pat on the back and tell him "Good Job". It's little wonder he turned traitor and continues to hate the Imperium more than he hates Chaos (which is substantial).
• Being Watched: Perturabo never told anyone, but he had an uncanny connection with the Eye of Terror, and could sense it from anywhere in the galaxy. He felt like it was always watching him, judging him. Incidentally, he's the one who gave it its current name.
• Big Little Brother: Not so with his biological ones, but while younger than his adoptive siblings he grew much larger than any of them.
• Butt-Monkey: The other Primarchs and their Legions rarely respected Perturabo and his Legion with their well-worn use being breaking sieges with time and blood... and then his Legion later was relegated to garrison duty. In one novel, a Son of Horus shoveling up earthworks at the Drop Site Massacres asks one of the Emperor's Children why the Iron Warriors aren't doing this sort of drudge work.
• Boring, but Practical: Of all the Primarchs, Perturabo is the most dull-looking of the lot. Yet, his ruthless strategies meant that he was a master of logistics and siegecraft. Even in his quasi-daemonic form, Perturabo still looks shockingly pedestrian compared to the flamboyant transformation of his other traitorous kin; resembling a super-Obliterator with lots of guns, but overall, looking much the same as he did 10,000 years ago. Yet as a daemon of Chaos Undivided, he's more than powerful enough to overwhelm many of his more obviously twisted brothers in single combat.
• Cain and Abel: The Cain to his adoptive sister Calliphone’s Abel, which is especially tragic as out of all of his adoptive family, she was the only one he was ever close to. Then in a fit of rage during his siege on Olympia, after a very apt and deserved What the Hell, Hero? from her, he ends up snapping her neck. She dies with pity in her eyes for what her brother "Bo" has become. and Perturabo himself is horrified by what he had just done.
• Carry a Big Stick: He is the current wielder of Forgebreaker, the warhammer Fulgrim forged for Ferrus Manus. When Fulgrim slew Ferrus Manus, he presented Ferrus' head and the hammer to Horus. Horus in turn decided to celebrate Perturabo and the Iron Warriors joining him by giving Forgebreaker to Perturabo as a symbol of their alliance.
• Chronic Backstabbing Disorder: Perturabo betrayed his adoptive father Dammekos to the Emperor. Then he betrayed the Imperium for Horus.
• Combat Pragmatist: Perturabo feels no need to fight fairly or honorably in war, and uses whatever he feels is most practical to defeat opponents. When faced with the daemonic Angron, he had his men batter him with artillery barrages rather than the one-on-one duel most of his brothers would try.
• Depending on the Writer: Perturabo has variously been depicted as a stone-cold schemer with zero regard for anything but victory, a deeply meticulous intellectual with a surprisingly human side driven by bitterness over his treatment, a brilliant but staggeringly narcissistic Renaissance Man with strong jealous tendencies, and a Saturday morning cartoon villain who kills flunkies bringing him bad news before storming off in a huff. The official description of him as "mercurial" might explain this, or have been adopted to explain it.
• Deus ex Machina: Both times when he has been on the cusp of destroying Dorn's works entirely, some random thing just manages to happen at the last to force him to pull back.
  • During the Siege of Terra, the only thing that kept him from leveling the palace to the ground was Horus dying, thus causing the Sons of Horus to retreat, leaving the Iron Warriors outgunned and exposed.
  • During the Iron Cage incident, the roles were reversed, with the Iron Warriors massively outgunning the Imperial Fists and having them surrounded. Dorn saw that he and his men were doomed and resigned himself and his legion to die...cue Roboute Guilliman with the Ultramarines coming in from out of nowhere to save Dorn and his men.
• Dirty Coward: Downplayed and it's subtle, but before the Heresy, there is a definite streak of cowardice to his personality. When he doesn't get credit from his brothers for bailing them out, he never confronts them about it. He complains and seethes that dear ol' dad gives him the worst jobs, but never bothers to ask him for better ones. He is bitter that Horus keeps giving him the worst assignments and, you guessed it, Perturabo never confronts him. The only people he is willing to directly threaten with retribution and violence are those much weaker than him.
• The Dog Bites Back: There's a long list of reasons why Perturabo was angry and turned to Chaos and the Horus Heresy. The biggest bite was probably the "Iron Cage" incident in which the Imperial Fists were drawn into attacking a heavily-fortified Iron Warrior fortress that was trap upon trap. It bled the Imperial Fists such that they were unfit for combat for nineteen years.
• Dude, Where's My Respect?: Perturabo's achievements in the Great Crusade were often overlooked or downplayed, something that bothered him deeply.
  • When he overcame the orbital defences of the Ork Warlord Overdog Mashogg, which had stymied attacks by both the Space Wolves and the White Scars, he was credited by historians only as a nameless "comrade-in-arms".
  • During a campaign involving the Iron Warriors, the Imperial Fists, and the Blood Angels, Dorn was widely lauded in the aftermath of the conflict and presented with a medal, while Perturabo was offered nothing. When a master painter produced a painting of the campaign that prominently featured the Imperial Fists, while the Iron Warriors only appeared in the background, Perturabo requested the painting and, as soon as the artist handed it over, burned it to cinders while explaining that if his legion was not properly honoured in the aftermath of a victory, he would prefer they not be remembered at all. Dorn was furious at the action and tried to convince the painter to redo the work, but said painter seemed to have got the message and declined to do so.
• The Engineer: Perturabo was actually quite brilliant at this, but he never got the chance to express it in any meaningful way. On Olympia, he was limited by a lack of materials (as Olympia had been strip-mined during the Dark Age of Technology and consequently lacked the resources to make advanced technology possible) and during the Crusade he got typecast into destroying buildings rather than making them.
• Evil Counterpart:
  • To Rogal Dorn. Both being designated specialists in siege warfare and being direct rivals to one another. Both requested to construct the defenses of the Imperial Palace, but the Emperor chose Dorn over Perturabo as the Emperor did not consider BUILDING defenses to be Perturabo's job. His job was to DESTROY defenses. Upon turning against the Imperium, Perturabo decided to destroy any defenses that Dorn built, and build defenses that Dorn could never overcome. He has been successful on both counts.
  • Like Guilliman, Perturabo was raised as a Blue Blood and is skilled in numbers and logistics. Unlike Guilliman, he wasn't fond of his adoptive father and betrayed him when the Emperor came, and he lacks the empathy Guilliman has for his men. Moreover, Guilliman matured and behaved like an adult, whilst Perturabo stayed a manchild. Their connection is strengthened in Dark Imperium, when Guilliman realizes (as Perturabo did) that the Emperor only sees his "sons" as tools for his Imperium. Guilliman took this in stride and didn't think too much less of his father, unlike Perturabo who turned traitor upon realizing this.
  • To Ferrus Manus as well. Both were The Engineer mastering/creating new technologies and despised weakness in any form.
• Even Evil Has Standards: Even someone as borderline sociopathic as Perturabo became utterly disgusted and dismayed by what happened to the traitor forces by the time of the Siege of Terra. Perturabo may have hated the Emperor and Dorn, but he never, ever trusted Chaos since his birth. His humbling of Angron and the sheer depravity of the Emperor's Children only served to strengthen Perturabo's wariness of Chaos, as the constant usage of daemons made him incredibly uncomfortable. Him being betrayed by Fulgrim in having part of his soul used to fuel the latter's daemonic ascension did not help at all. When the Siege at the Lion's Gate was on, Perturabo lamented that his chance to best Dorn one-on-one in proper siege warfare was being smeared by raging idiots, depraved perverts, megalomaniacal egotists and backstabbing, self-serving hypocrites. By the time Horus took control of Perturabo's forces to be used as cannon fodder that even Perturabo found wasteful, he finally snapped. Perturabo gathered his remaining Iron Warriors, blasted Horus for being as much of a monster as the Emperor, declared the whole rebellion as a lost cause, took his legion and fled the system.
• Evil Is Petty: Perturabo was never able to let even a mild slight to his pride go.
  • The best example being his artistic contests with his adoptive brother Andos. As his brother was an unaugmented human, naturally, Perturabo would win every time with no effort. Despite this, Perturabo kept issuing the challenges well into his brother's middle age purely to publicly humiliate him. One day, against all odds, the brother produced a statue of such artistic merit that it bested Perturabo's technically perfect one. In a fit of rage, Perturabo destroyed both statues out of spite. It only got worse when he joined Horus' rebellion.
  • Another notable example of his pettiness was shown when he was retreating from the Siege of Terra. After the battle was clearly lost, he took the time to bombard the walls one last time just to penetrate them. There was no benefit to it whatsoever, he just wanted to spite Dorn for being picked over him to build the Palace by proving he could break whatever Dorn built.
• Evil Overlord: Of both Olympia and Medrengard, though he didn't start out that way in the case of the former.
• Fatal Flaw: Perturabo's biggest flaw, as pointed out by his adoptive sister, is that he constantly makes things harder for himself than he has to. He takes the hardest, most miserable path to solving his problems, expecting other people to notice his pain without actually talking to them about it: in other words, a martyr complex. While it wasn't entirely his fault that his accomplishments went unacknowledged by his father or brothers, his mindset did not help at all.
• The Friend Nobody Likes: Perturabo was not well-liked by most of his brothers for his dour dispositon, humorlessness, inflexibility, and sense of superiority. While some did respect him more than others, only a few would be willing to go out of their way seek out his company.
• From Nobody to Nightmare: From one of the most disrespected and disregarded primarchs, to the one who basically served as the engine of Horus' army. The longer the Heresy goes on, the more we see how deadly Perturabo truly is.
• Gadgeteer Genius:
  • He designed and built his own Terminator armour, giving it bells and whistles such as an inbuilt teleporter and wrist-mounted bolters capable of tearing an Astartes apart with a single salvo. Perturabo also designed and built a number of Ace Custom vehicles, a bunker whose defences included Alien Geometries, and a number of designed but never built art projects.
  • It's implied the "exotic" rounds he used when battling Daemon Primarch Angron were designed and invented by him specifically to combat Warp creatures.
• Green-Eyed Monster:
  • His main character trait was his perpetual envy of Rogal Dorn as one of the Emperor's favourites. His rivalry with Dorn is legendary, culminating into the Iron Cage incident.
  • It is also worth noting that on Olympia Perturabo would regularly challenge his adoptive brother Andos to competitions of skill, for no reason other than to humiliate him. The one time Andos won, creating a soulful and evocative statue judged the superior of Perturabo's technically perfect but emotionally hollow work, the Primarch destroyed both in a fit of jealous rage.
• Hidden Depths: As implausible as it seems for such a taciturn and brutal creature, Perturabo has (or at least, had) a creatively artistic side that he rarely indulged in public. For instance, during the Heresy he had an entire private workshop dedicated to various geegaws and elaborate contraptions of his own design. He was also the one who gave the warp storm created from Slaanesh's birth its evocative name: the Eye of Terror.
• Hypocrite: For as much as Perturabo hated being treated like a tool, he saw no problem in treating the men of his legion the exact same way.
• I'm Standing Right Here: Played for Drama. Rogal Dorn said, when asked, that he could penetrate any fortress Perturabo built, seemingly not caring that he was within earshot. Perturabo was very angry at this and it set the tone for their relationship from then on. The Iron Cage Incident was Perturabo's way of paying him back for this remark.
• Instant Expert: Unlike many of his brothers who had to learn the craft of their homeworlds during their formative years, by the time Perturabo was found he was already capable of instantly mastering whatever tasks he was put up to. He already knew about arts and ethics, didn't need to be taught from textbooks, and his literal first task upon being presented to his "father" was to forge a perfect sword faster than any craftsman on the planet, which he did. However, he hated the fact that he was robbed of the sense of wonder he might have felt at looking on impressive works of art or learning how to do things the long way.
• Insufferable Genius: Even among the Primarchs, Perturabo was known for his intelligence. Unfortunately, he happened to develop an ego and sense of entitlement to match his brilliance. This combined with his innate lack of humor made him understandably unpopular.
• Jerkass: Perturabo's infamously petty, childish, and mercurial personality made him incredibly unpleasant to be around even as a youth, and he actively spurned the efforts of his adoptive father to connect with him while going out of his way to humiliate his adoptive brother for no real reason.
• Lack of Empathy: Even before his turn to Chaos, Perturabo wasn't very big on "getting to know" his men. For him, war could be dummied down to mathematical equations where strategies could be gleaned through available weaponry and expected attrition rates. He saw the battlefield in terms of units with stat blocks; that every soldier could be reduced to a number based on his armament or capability which would factor in to his arithmetic of war. It made him effective, yes, but it also fostered paranoia among his officers who wondered which one of them would be considered "expendable" in the newest engagement and contributed to his legion's reputation as "Corpse Grinders", since any auxiliary units assigned to the legion tended to be the first to be used as cannon fodder. It wasn't long before only condemned criminals were allowed to be used as auxiliaries for the Iron Warriors, because many of the Imperial Guardsmen assigned to them would rebel and get slaughtered just to get it over with.
• Lonely at the Top: In the end of the day, this was part of the reason why Perturabo had such a miserable outlook in life. Like Guilliman, Perturabo actually grew up in a very well-off and politically powerful family, with siblings who loved him or at least tried to connect with him. Unlike Guilliman however, Perturabo was never taught anything new, since he already mastered all there is to know. Therefore, his personal relationships was extremely limited as no one could connect with him on a personal, equal basis at least on Olympia. This lack of guidance since he already learned and mastered everything before the age of ten, meant that Perturabo ironically, never mentally grew up which worsened his infamous Petulant Manchild reputation. When the Emperor arrived to pick up Perturabo, his situation worsened. This is attributed that now, instead of being at the top, he is often outclassed by some of his betters especially Rogal Dorn. Years of being raised as the top dog and the master of all, shook Perturabo's psyche to his core when his reputation shifted to one of dull mediocrity and, despite Caliphone's best attempts, only served to further socially isolate Perturabo from the rest of the wider Imperium.
• Loners Are Freaks: He isn't on the same levels as Konrad, but Perturabo is definitely the most introverted of the Primarchs. He prefers dabbling in his hobbies crafting miniatures and architectural plans, secluded in his own room rather than attending pomp ceremonies like some of his brothers. The only ones who can even get some sense into him is Caliphone and Magnus, not even Horus came close.
• Lonely Rich Kid: With someone as sour as Perturabo, you would expect he had a shitty childhood like Angron or Mortarion right? Nope, Perturabo actually grew up into one of the richest and most powerful families in Olympia. The only one who can compare is Guilliman. Sure Dammekos was no Konor Guilliman, but at least he tried to connect with his adoptive son once in a while. Unfortunately, all that wealth, political power and opulence was wasted on Perturabo's inability to handle criticism because he felt himself too beyond that of mortal men.
• Master of All: While all the Primarchs are this, Perturabo is one to make it most apparent. Creating technology to rival Ferrus Manus, fortifications to surpass Rogal Dorn, artworks to match Fulgrim, and forgeworks to impress Vulkan.
  • Being such a perfectionist in all fields is what led him to brutally decimate his own legion upon gaining command, as they had not already proven themselves better than all the other legions in every way.
  • Upon ascension to becoming a daemon prince, he became a prince of Chaos Undivided. This means he has the blessings of ALL the Chaos gods and can call upon their forces for his own purposes.
• Mistreatment-Induced Betrayal: He and his legion turned on the Imperium after finally having had enough of almost everyone else in the Imperium treating them like dirt and giving them no respect. Previously, Imperial Guardsmen assigned as auxiliaries to the Iron Warriors started rebelling against him. Since Perturabo was going to use them as Cannon Fodder anyway, they thought they might as well get it over with.
• Mood-Swinger: Has been described as "mercurial," perhaps as a way to explain his Depending on the Writer treatment in the Horus Heresy books — sometimes he's a cold schemer, sometimes he's a resentful would-be intellectual with an oddly human and humane side, at others he's just an almost-cartoonish Card-Carrying Villain.
• Morality Pet: His foster sister Calliphone was about the only person on Olympia who tried to connect with him on a personal level without using him, and he did treat her kindly... but then he ended up personally killing her in a rage when he and the Iron Warriors crushed the rebellion of Olympia after she pointed out it was his own flaws and refusal to listen to others that caused it to happen. This, of course, broke him even more.
• My God, What Have I Done?: After calming down from his rampage on Olympia, Perturabo was horrified at the devastation he caused out of what was effectively an extended tantrum. He was only shaken from his despair when Horus came to him and offered him forgiveness in exchange for joining his rebellion.
• Mysterious Past: Unlike the other Primarchs, Perturabo was found as a young man possessing all his skills by his adoptive father. His own first memory was of quite literally being halfway up a cliffside feeling like a great eye was watching him from the sky, with no clue how he got there.
• Never My Fault: Perturabo had an extremely hard time accepting responsiblity for any of his actions. It's true that he got the worst jobs, but a couple of things have to be taken into consideration in regards to his complaining.
  • He volunteered to do the dirty jobs when he got his legion, to prove how tough he was.
  • He never actually bothered to ask the Emperor if he and his legion could do something else. Like his sister points out, he wants people to acknowledge his pain, but he doesn't want to actually talk to them.
  • His sister also mentions that he always takes the hardest path to getting things done. Sieges may be a pain, but he made things extra hard for himself for no reason.
  • For all of his technological know-how and engineering skills, he never used those abilities to rebuild planets conquered by him and his legion. As a result, pretty much nobody other than Magnus and Horus actually knew about his architectural skills. Rogal Dorn on the other hand rebuilt one world after another and as a result his abilities as an artisan were known to all, so it's no mystery why one was given all the cool building jobs and the other was passed over.
  • He deliberately had his legion decimate itself with no real rhyme or reason to the process. He cost himself thousands of veteran fighters and demolishing morale of an already worn down legion before doing anything of value just because he didn't think they were good enough for him.
  • He kept sending his legion in with grinding, relentless assaults, treating it all as a numbers game. Resulting in massive losses and massive slogs that could have been resolved in other ways.
  • He never told anyone his real desires or of his dissatisfactions. As far as anyone knew, he took the dirty jobs and refused praise out of sheer loyalty and dedication.
• No Challenge Equals No Satisfaction: While being an Instant Expert allowed Perturabo to swiftly master whatever he needed to, this ended up bringing him nothing but misery: he hated the fact that he could not marvel at works of art like others, experience the exhilaration of discovery, or take satisfaction in a job well done. Part of why he took the most grueling assignments of the Crusade was that he subconsiously wanted something that would force him to struggle.
• No-Respect Guy: For all his skills and accomplishments, Perturabo never got the respect he felt he was due. Of course, part of it was due to him rejecting most who tried to offer him praise.
• No Social Skills: He may not like to admit it, but Perturabo shares the same bluntness as his brother Dorn. Just that, whilst Dorn could at least act like an adult, Perturabo is an angsty teenager in a demigod's body. Suffice to say, he barely got along with anyone other than his sister, Magnus and - before the Siege of Terra - Horus.
• Odd Friendship: This humorless siege expert got along well with arch-sorcerer Magnus the Red, as both had a love of learning and study.
• Only Sane Man: By the time of the Siege of Terra, Perturabo was the only member on the traitor side who still had his head screwed on correctly. His close friend Magnus was presumed missing but was actually doing his own thing separate from the Heresy. Meanwhile, Mortarion had given himself up to Nurgle, Angron was nothing more than a rabid dog, Alpharius Omegon was too busy being possibly dead, Konrad Curze was on the other side of the galaxy terrorizing Macragge's populace, Fulgrim no longer cared about the Heresy and was too busy fornicating, and Lorgar was banished from the Heresy after trying to usurp Horus. Even Horus, someone Perturabo used to admire, revealed himself near the end to become a complete megalomaniac high on warp dust. Seeing how much the traitors went bonkers finally manage to convince Perturabo that the Heresy is now a lost cause and promptly left.
• Orcus on His Throne: He seemingly hasn't been active in the over 10,000 years since his ascension to a daemon prince, besides occasionally blowing up a Forge World or two. Subverted as of 9th, where he orders the Iron Warriors to begin a massive siege of the Imperium and even has a family reunion (read: violent punch-up) with Mortarion over some Chaos artefacts.
• Pet the Dog:
  • In-universe, this is what Calliphone speculated was the reason for Perturabo's behavior toward Dammekos after Olympia became part of the Imperium; despite his resentment for him, Perturabo did arrange his adoptive father to be kept on as Olympia's planetary governor, and he likewise knew about Dammekos' attempts to reestablish his power but chose to ignore them rather than take any action to punish him for it.
  • He also is quick to defend Vulkan's skills as a craftsman against Fulgrim's fragrant criticisms at them, showing that at the very least Perturabo has enough respect for Vulkan as a fellow artifice to acknowledge his skills as worth protecting even after their fall to the side of Chaos.
• Plunder: After Fulgrim killed Ferrus Manus, Horus gifted Perturabo with Manus' warhammer Forgebreaker.
• Psychopathic Manchild: Perturabo, for all his brilliance and accomplishments, was a deeply flawed and immature man. At times, he acted more like a maladjusted teenager than a superhuman Primarch. He was emotionally volitile, nursed grudges for every slight to his pride, felt entitled to praise and comfort without giving it, lashed out at anyone who dared question him, wasn't ever able to empathize with people, brooded with self-pity, blamed all his problems on others, was deeply jealous, enjoyed petty acts of revenge, never took initative to change the situation he dislike, and never seemed to be able to face honest introspection on his motivations. Most dangerously, he was prone to fits of anger that could result in terrifying levels of violence and destruction before he regained his senses. After joining the Traitors, his worse traits only became more pronounced.
• The Quisling: Perturabo overthrew his adoptive father Dammekos and pledged himself all too willingly to the Emperor, believing that he could finally put his talents to their true calling. It didn't work out, to put it bluntly.
• The Resenter: He hated being stuck with the worst, most grinding sieges of the Great Crusade. He hated having his legion split up and assigned to garrison duty. He hated having to always tear things down instead of getting a chance to build something. He especially hated that nobody noticed or cared how miserable he was. That said, he always chose to accept his jobs without complaint and never bothered to voice any of his dissatisfactions, leading most of his brothers to assume he was just that loyal. His own adopted sister called him out this, saying that he deliberately makes things harder on himself so he can wear his resentment like a badge of honor out of a perverse sense of superiority.
  Perturabo: [to Fulgrim] You don't know the things I dream. No one does, no one ever cared enough to find out.
• The Rival: Perturabo hated Rogal Dorn, who got the privilege of being asked to design the Emperor's Palace while Perturabo and his legion were pigeon-holed into destroying such things and who often got the glory and credit that Perturabo either deserved at least a share of or felt he did in some campaigns.
• Sanity Has Advantages: While the other Traitor Legions had their own advantages and Chaos-spawned powers, the corruption of Chaos drove much of their forces into irrational extremes, making them next to impossible to control. Unlike them, Perturabo's Iron Warriors were left uncorrupted enough to think rationally, leaving them to run the ground assault near-singlehandedly as their demonic brethren rampaged around uselessly looking to sate their urges rather than win the war.
• Screw This, I'm Outta Here: Perturabo held-in not only Fulgrim's betrayal but also the debauchery the traitors had degenerated into. He finally snapped when Horus left his throne and took command over his forces, clearly indicating that Perturabo is no longer needed. Disgusted by both the loyalists and traitors. Perturabo did something completely out-of-character. He stood up, gathered his sons, and left the entire Heresy all together.
• The Stoic: Although Perturabo hated the greulling sieges and horrific campaigns he and his legion were forced into, his sense of duty meant that he mostly accepted his lot without complaint... until he finally snapped around the time his own homeworld rose up in rebellion. He vented his fury upon the planet, slaughtering millions, before finally deciding he'd had enough and throwing in his lot with Horus.
• The Strategist: While not to the extent of Guilliman in that he had far less concern for his men's lives, Perturabo is very skilled in numbers and logistics, which was how the Iron Warriors could afford to take such horrific losses and still bounce back. In fact, pre-Heresy the Iron Warriors were second only to the Ultramarines themselves for the largest of the legions in terms of numbers, and they likely could have surpassed even them had they not constantly suffered such high casualty rates.
• Straw Vulcan: Perturabo lived by a cold, brutal logic and assumed everyone else did the same. He treated his subordinates as numbers to be expended in his calculus of war. He would always choose tactics that would cost him enormous casualties as long as it completed his objectives more efficiently, not caring at all about the psychological effects on his own forces. When his homeworld Olympia chose to rebel rather than continue sending their citizens into the meat grinder of his war machine, Perturabo couldn't understand why. To the modern setting, he convinced himself that it had to be one of his loyalist brothers manipulating Olympia instead of it being a consequence of his actions (he's actually right, but it was Lorgar and Word Bearers).
• Surrounded by Idiots: Perturabo lamented that most of the other Traitor forces consisted of raving daemons and Astartes so drunk on Chaos that they were hardly any better. When he realized it was impossible to organize this rabble into following a coherent strategy, he gave up and abandoned the siege entirely.
• Undying Loyalty: Subverted. Perturabo himself muses that he thought his loyalty was unbreakable prior to the Heresy, until the endless campaigns and maltreatment finally wore it down. The same fate befalls his loyalty to Horus - starting out seemingly unbreakable, then slowly being ground down over the course of the Siege of Terra.
• The Unseen: His daemon form has never been given a depiction or even detailed description. The short story Halfbreed finally gives us a look at him: he's essentially the same as before beyond being physically bigger and his skin gaining a deadened, necrotic appearance; he even still wears the Logos and carries Forgebreaker, though they're both heavily corrupted by Chaos and (in the case of the Logos) upgraded to the point where it looks like a Dreadnought..
• WarGaming: Funnily enough, Perturabo actually plays in-universe Warhammer 40,000 with his sons from time to time. They literally bring out a set of miniatures and try to best one another on the best strategies and tactics to be applied in real life.
• You Are What You Hate: After a lifetime of despising the idea of the supernatural and Chaos especially, he became a daemon himself...sort off, it was left really ambigous on his situation. Although the latest Iron Warriors novel states his daemonhood, Perturabo looks...shockingly normal if albeit decrepit after 10,000 years. Sure the Logos had been upgraded to the size of a Dreadnought and he now looks like a super-Obliterator as a result. But given his own strong distaste of Chaos and using Warp energy to fill-in the hole where Fulgrim soul-sucked him, how much this would qualify for daemonhood is up to debate. In the end of the day, Perturabo is still the same old, bitter man as he was in the 31st Millennium, and possibly the only traitor Primarch that is more renegade than full-blown Chaos worshipper.
• You Have Failed Me: Perturabo wasn't at all forgiving of failure from subordinates. To put it in perspective, his first order to his legion after being given command of them was to have ten percent of them randomly selected to be beaten to death by the other ninety percent. This wasn't for any one failure in particular. He just felt that the legion hadn't been performing up to his standards from the battle reports he read and needed to be collectively punished for it. Even his mightiest subordinates fear this from him; the opening fluff for one White Dwarf battle report around the time of the second 3rd edition Chaos Codex had an Iron Warriors Daemon Prince, an enormously powerful servant of Chaos in his own right, note he wasn't so powerful that he didn't fear his Primarch's wrath in case of failure.

Konrad Curze, the Night Haunter, Primarch of the Night Lords

The Space Marines fear no evil, for we are fear incarnate.

The infant Konrad Curze crashed into the night world of Nostramo, an industrial hell wracked with pollution and lawlessness where an affluent ruling class exploited and repressed the rest of the population. No family fostered the young Primarch, who matured as a wild thing preying on the animals that haunted the outskirts of Nostramo's hive cities. At some point he switched targets to lawbreakers and corrupt officials, leaving their mutilated bodies as a warning to others. A year after his arrival, Nostramo was crime-free, its population united in mortal terror of the Night Haunter, a king who ruled from the shadows and personally butchered any who defied him.

Curze was eventually reunited with the Emperor, who gave him command of the VIII Space Marine Legion, his Night Lords. Under the tutelage of Fulgrim, Konrad Curze quickly learned the ways of battle, and while he was never able to comprehend diplomacy or negotiation, the Night Haunter was adept at the ways of sowing terror. His legion's horrific reputation was able to quell worlds into obedience without a single shot, but the Night Lords' violent excesses, exacerbated by the sociopaths and criminals that made up its ranks, caused grave concern among other Primarchs. After a violent confrontation with Rogal Dorn, Curze fled before his brothers could render judgment, and ordered the Night Lords fleet to return to Nostramo and detonate the world's core.

Any attempt to bring the Night Lords to justice was derailed when the Horus Heresy erupted, and Konrad Curze sided with the traitors, leading his legion on a campaign of genocide and sickening violence. After Horus' defeat, the increasingly unhinged Night Haunter battled on against overwhelming odds until he was tracked down by a Callidus agent on the world of Tsagualsa. Rather than fighting back, the Night Haunter seems to have accepted his fate, and is the only Primarch to have been assassinated. His death had little effect on his legion, however, and the Night Lords continue to prey upon the Imperium without cause nor mercy.

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• Arch-Enemy: For Lion El'Jonson. It all started when Curze slandered El'Jonson, leading to a brawl that had Curze almost strangling The Lion to death. Out of all the Traitor Primarchs, El'Jonson hated Curze the most.
  • He and Vulkan shared enmity for their differences in ideology. It only got much worse after the Dropsite Massacre when Curze captured Vulkan. Curze spent months torturing Vulkan to try to break his will. The only reason Vulkan didn't kill him the moment he got free was to disprove Curze's insistence that he was just as brutal as his maddened brother.
• All Crimes Are Equal: Torture and painful execution without trial was the punishment for crime under his rule.
• Always Someone Better: Admits that he felt inferior to Corax, who despite being so similar to Curze, was vastly superior in their shared specialty of stealth. In his own words, Konrad haunted the night; Corvus owned it.
• At Least I Admit It: When his brothers confront him on his actions, he correctly points out that Emperor designed him and his Legion for his savage terror tactics and tacitly approves of them since he has allowed their acts this far. In his mind, his so-called-noble brothers have no right to judge him as their hands are covered in just as much if not more innocent blood as his were after the Crusade.
• Ax-Crazy: Had occasional bouts of psychosis, which grew more and more frequent after the Siege of Terra. His actions towards the end of the Great Crusade were increasingly done with no real goal in mind beyond sowing terror.
• Bad Boss: Curze grew to despise his Legion as more and more of it was staffed with Nostraman recruits who were guilty of the same crimes he tried to wipe out on his homeworld. He openly told his second-in-command that he couldn't care less about the lives of any of his "sons".
• Black-and-White Insanity: To Curze, there were only the innocent and the guilty. Once someone became "guilty", there was no punishment too cruel to inflict on them. An innocent suffering in the process of him eliminating the guilty was an unfortunate, but acceptable loss. As the Crusade went on and his mental state declined, his standards for guilt quickly expanded until he could justify targeting anyone to himself.
• Colonel Kurtz Copy: Fittingly, given his name. The Night Haunter is a barbaric renegade general who commits atrocities under lofty pretenses, and by the end of it all he succumbs to madness and grief.
• The Cowl: Once again, GW took a page from Batman.
• Combat Clairvoyance: Part of what made Curze such an effective combatant is that he could use his psychic gifts to predict his opponents and avoid lethal attacks. Combined with his natural abilities and psychological warfare, this made Curze one of the most dangerous combatants of his brothers despite being less formally skilled than many of them.
• Combat Pragmatist: Curze had no limits to what he'd do to win a fight. The growing up in the filth of Nostramo's underworld drove any notions of honor, fair play, or mercy from his mind from an early age. He shared this philosophy with his Legion.
• Creepy Souvenir: Night Haunter's armor was covered in the flayed skin of noteworthy victims.
• Dead Guy on Display: Something he did countless times. The corpses were usually brutally savaged, but he had the common sense to leave the victims' faces intact enough to be recognizable.
• Death Seeker: By the end of the Crusade, Curze stopped caring about anything. He abandoned his Legion and the Heresy as a whole to deliberately antagonize four of his loyalist brothers, practically begging them to kill him. When the Imperium sent the assassin M'Shen after him, she found that he posted no guards or other security measures at his palace, allowing M'Shen to infiltrate all the way into his sanctum. When she arrived, she found Curze unarmored doing everything short of holding the knife to his neck for her despite being capable of killing her effortlessly. By then, all he wanted was to to die at her hands to vindicate his dark visions to absolve him of responsibility for his actions.
• Disproportionate Retribution: His modus operandi as Curze saw himself as a punisher rather than a conqueror. He rarely took prisoners and believed that any crime, no matter how slight, was grounds for a horrific death so they could serve as an example to terrify others into submission.
• Doesn't Like Guns: For ranged combat, Curze preferred his Widowmakers, Nostraman throwing knives he was scarily-skilled with. In gameplay turns he can throw them as far as a pistol can shoot, and has a chance of ignoring not just his target's armor save, but Invulnerable save as well.
• The Dreaded: While the other Primarchs were renowned for their martial prowess and great intellect, the Night Haunter was feared. Dead Guy on Display was a common undertaking for Curze.
• Dreaming of Things to Come: A dark variant. He had prophetic dreams that showed him the worst possible futures. Constantly pressed by visions of doom and gloom, he developed a cynical and nihilistic attitude and came to believe that there was no hope.
• Eerie Pale-Skinned Brunette: Had dark hair and pale skin, and was terrifying even at his most constructive.
• Evil Cannot Comprehend Good: Curze was good at one thing only and that was killing in a terrifying fashion. Unlike most of his brethren, he had no grasp of diplomacy or statesmanship. He attempted to force his brother Vulkan into various depravities to prove that he wasn't so different, but Vulkan resisted, much to Curze's distress.
• Evil Counterpart: To Corax — both were stealth experts who favoured jump troops and guerrilla tactics, but Corax was raised by civilised people while Curze was left to his own private hell, which left them very different people.
• Fatal Flaw: Konrad constantly sought to uphold justice and he became ever more brutal in enforcing it.
• The Fatalist: His dark dreams, and his never-ending, seemingly unwinnable struggle against his violent urges, caused him to develop a fatalistic attitude. Even when shown direct evidence that his visions were not infallible, he still clung to this belief. In his more lucid moments, he acknowledges that his greatest fear is that his belief in predestination was wrong. If the future was not fixed, that would force him to admit to himself that all the unforgivable crimes he had done really were his responsibility alone.
• Fate Worse than Death: Konrad went out of his way to find new and inventive ways to make his targets beg for death.
• Foreseeing My Death: Konrad's uncontrolled precognitive ability meant that he knew that he would be killed by the Imperial Assassin M'Shen long before he was reunited with the Emperor. When the time of his death approached, Konrad let M'Shen kill him as he believed that by doing so it would vindicate his actions.
• Friendless Background: Curze was the only Primarch who was not raised by someone (or, in Russ's case, some wolf) on his home planet. Even when he joined the Imperium proper, he typically kept to himself and was distant from both his brother Primarchs and the officers of his legion.
• The Friend Nobody Likes: Even compared to other "outcast" Primarchs like Magnus or Perturabo, Curze was distrusted and disliked by virtually all of his brothers and even elements of his own legion. The feeling was mutual for the most part. In fact, the only Primarch that Curze ever came close to truly trusting was Fulgrim, who was responsible for tutoring Curze in the ways of the Imperium and running his Legion.
• He Who Fights Monsters: He despised corruption and criminals so he resorted to violent, murderous terror tactics to punish criminals and deter corruption. His unyielding sense of right and wrong, his constant visions of the worst possible outcomes, combined with his inability and/or unwillingness to use anything else besides terror tactics and brutal psychological warfare, led him to become one of the very monsters he so despised. He also managed to turn this around on the Imperium in allowing the assassin M'Shen to kill him. He claimed that this act made the Imperium every bit as barbarous as he was; he was simply more honest about it.
  1d4chan: Warped as it may have been, he did at least have a sense of justice. Unfortunately, his desire to protect the innocent was eviscerated and left to die in a gutter by his desire to punish the guilty.
• Hypocrite: His twisted sense of morality relied on this and he didn't like having it pointed out.
  • The hypocrisy of him brutal killing a young girl who attempted suicide, which he declared an injustice, and himself doing a suicide-by-cop is absolutely lost on Curze.
  • He condemned the Forces of Chaos as psychotic murderers despite conducting his own campaign of fear and terror both before and after turning traitor.
• I Did What I Had to Do: He seemed to take this view of his actions on Nostramo at least for a time, judging by a conversation he has with his lieutenant Sevatar. Sevatar tells his Primarch that he doesn't buy the excuse.
  Konrad Curze: There was no other way.
  Sevatar: Oh? What other ways did you try?
• Insane Troll Logic: By the time he died, Konrad was operating firmly on this. He allows an assassin to kill him because he had forseen it, thinking this "proves" that You Can't Fight Fate and somehow vindicates all of his actions; this in spite of the fact that he could easily have prevented this, or even just allowed his legion to do so, meaning it clearly wasn't inevitable, and he actively had to take steps to make damn sure things happened as he foresaw.
• Klingon Promotion: Konrad Curze took power on Nostromo through sheer violence. He killed anyone he thought was irredeemably awful, and forced the rest to bow to him or join the former. Unfortunately, this didn't mean he was in anyway competent at laying down public services for the future — he proved to be a capable and fair ruler (until you committed a true injustice), but he did not create a framework to keep Nostramo running well in his absence. Indeed, as soon as he was away from Nostramo, the surviving crime families that had been smart enough to keep their heads down literally and figuratively during his rule promptly resurfaced and usurped the Imperium-installed planetary government in a coup, paying lip service to Imperial law while doing whatever they wanted. This ultimately culminated in Nostramo's destruction at the hands of Curze.
• Knight Templar: Curze had an extremely strong sense of justice and saw himself as a divine punishment to be wielded upon the unworthy. He terrified his homeworld into becoming a prosperous, crime-free planet (by horrifically butchering anyone who dared commit crimes) and was noted for being one of the most ruthless and merciless of the Primarchs when it came to punishing recalcitrant worlds. In a rather sad irony, as the Great Crusade progressed Curze became the head of a legion of butchers and criminals (Nostramo having slipped back into crime and tyranny after he wasn't around to Scare 'Em Straight) and turned into one of the monsters he so hated. Curze is notable as the only Primarch who came to despise his legion (and himself) and his death was more or less suicide-by-assassin.
• Leave No Survivors: Played with. Curze saw his Legion not as an army or a weapon, but an instrument of divine retribution. To him, if the Emperor ordered his legion to act, then the time for diplomacy had passed and only punishment for daring to oppose the Emperor's justice remained. He typically turned down surrenders and pleas for mercy from an enemy. He would occasionally leave survivors, but only so they could spread stories of the horrors he had inflicted and sow panic amongst the enemy.
• Loners Are Freaks: Does not even begin to cover it...having literally no upbringing was certainly an issue for Curze.
• Machiavelli Was Wrong: Played with. When crimes weren't involved, Curze was said to have been a fair and temperate ruler for Nostramo. However, Curze also believed that terror was the only way to create order and peace, and practiced it on his own homeworld by leaving the disemboweled corpses of gang bosses and corrupt nobles on display. It worked, thus appearing to be an aversion...until he left the planet to join the Great Crusade. Since he never bothered to train a fighting force to watch over the criminals or a government to improve conditions of Nostramo, the planet ended up slipping right back into the Wretched Hive he fought against shortly after he left. Compare to the Ultramarines under Roboute Guilliman, who wished to be respected and showed their people respect in turn. He built a thriving kingdom of proud but good-hearted citizens that managed to remain the jewel of the Imperium for more than 10,000 years without him to guide it.
• Make an Example of Them: Curze's main strategy to eliminate crime was to brutally murder any perpetrators he found and publicly broadcast their fates to deter anyone else. While it pacified his world while Curze was there, this tactic ultimately proved ineffective in the long term. His brute force intimidation tactics suppressed active crime, but he didn't do anything to fix the social framework that empowered the corrupt and criminal elements of Nostramo in the first place. The moment he left for the Great Crusade, all the criminals that were smart enough to bide their time retook power now that nobody was around to enforce Curze's threats.
• Meaningful Name: Named after Conrad Kurtz. He arguably has a lot more in common with the Apocalypse Now version compared to the Heart of Darkness one, though Curze certainly has their similarity of them being deeply affected by a brutal environment regardless.
• Murder Is the Best Solution: His main solution to crime was to brutally execute all criminals he captured.
• My God, What Have I Done?: Once he realized that he had gone a bit too far off the deep end, he allowed an assassin from the Inquisition to kill him.
• Never Found the Body: The recording of M'Shen assassinating Curze cuts off right before M'Shen's killing blow, leading some to suspect that Curze is not dead at all. This appears to be a subversion as, unlike most other instances of this trope, Curze is still generally accepted both in the official lore and in the fandom as dead (making him the only Chaos Primarch other than Horus and maybe Alpharius to be killed off).
• Never My Fault: Curze was always looking for something to vindicate his actions. For all his lamentations about his dark visions and the corruption of his home planet, Curze never accepted that he could be part of the problem himself. Instead of working to solve the causes of crime on Nostramo and building it up into a new state like many of his brothers did on even less civilized worlds, Curze relied on needlessly sadistic fear tactics to scare it into quiet obedience. He rarely did anything to avert the dark futures his visions revealed to him and often went out of his way to set up the events to create these futures while ranting about how it was all predetermined. Sevatar outright tells Curze that he blames the world around him for his actions because he can't accept the possibility that he really was the monster and not just a victim of circumstance.
  • The greatest example of this was his actions after capturing Vulkan in the wake of the Dropsite Massacre. He spent months torturing Vulcan physically and psychologically during the Heresy to break him down. In Curze's mind, if he could break Vulkan, the most compassionate of his brothers, into sharing his mindset, it would "prove" his point that they're all programmed for killing and absolve Curze of responsibility for his actions.
• Ninja Pirate Robot Zombie: He's written as some sort of horrifying combination of The Punisher, Batman, Vlad the Impaler and of course, Conrad Kurtz.
• Odd Friendship: With Fulgrim. Strange as it might have been, it was Fulgrim who tutored Curze in both the Imperium and how to be a leader to his Legion, and he was the only Primarch who Curze felt comfortable talking about some of his nightmarish visions with.
• One-Man Army: While not in the normal sense of him being able to take on an army single-handedly, the fact that the loyalist Primarchs felt the need to mobilize one in order to handle him when he went loose on Macragge says something. When confronted, he proved to be a match for both Guilliman and the Lion in combat at once.
• Pay Evil unto Evil: His modus operandi in his loyalist days. Often overlapped with Disproportionate Retribution.
• The Peter Principle: Curze slaughtered his way into become the leader of all of Nostramo because everyone else still alive when he did wasn't dumb enough to dispute this. Unfortunately, he didn't really know anything about laying the foundations for a functioning society (his lack of an upbringing probably explained this), so when he left Nostramo and it accordingly wasn't imminently fearing his wrath, it fell back into being a Wretched Hive again. The discovery of this news caused his Start of Darkness.
• Raised by Wolves: Unlike the other Primarchs, Konrad wasn't raised by anyone or anything. He survived on his own and learned from observing the humans around him. Given that he had no emotional support and his only role models were the people of Nostramo, it's not surprising that he developed into psychological mess of a person.
• Red Baron: Whether "Night Haunter" was an epithet or a completely separate personality is subject to much speculation.
• The Resenter: Konrad stated that while he didn't trust his brother Primarchs, the only one he actively hated was Corvus because his ability for stealth was always greater than Konrad's.
  Konrad Curze: Envy of his mastery lay behind my hatred. I haunted the night, but Corax owned it.
• Sadist: For all his talk of justice and his many denials, Curze's behavior showed that took deep satisfaction in the pain and suffering he inflicted on his victims.
• Sanity Slippage: As the Great Crusade wore on, Curze's actions became less and less defensible and he increasingly slipped into psychosis. Soon even his own legion began to see him as crazy.
• Scare 'Em Straight: Literally. While he was a loyalist, the mere mention of Curze and the Night Lords would cause rebellious worlds to become compliant, as his intervention was seen as a Fate Worse than Death. Unfortunately, this meant that the worlds he took only remained loyal so long as someone was there to keep them afraid. When he wasn't there, the fell back into their old ways, as shown with his home planet Nostramo.
• Self-Fulfilling Prophecy: Invoked Trope. He foresaw his own death… and did nothing to prevent it, even not allowing his own Legion to help, all to "prove" that fate is inevitable.
• Serial-Killer Killer: The Night Haunter preyed on the criminals of Nostramo until none were left.
• Shock and Awe: Both literally and metaphorically; he was famed for wielding a pair of master-crafted Lightning Claws as his preferred terror weapons and his armor was decorated with living lightning that charged up and down its plating, and his preferred method of waging war was to strike swiftly, mercilessly, and with such horrific malice and sadism that it would terrify the opposing force into surrender and compliance just from the rumor that the Night Haunter was coming for them.
• Smiting Evil Feels Good: He took satisfaction in enacting punishment on the criminals on Nostramo early in his career. Unfortunately, as time passed and his savage judgments were used on larger and larger scales, his original grim satisfaction in enacting his idea of justice warped into something much darker and more selfish. By the end of the Great Crusade, all pretense of a higher purpose was dropped and he was torturing mass numbers of people for sheer personal pleasure.
• Split Personality: One common theory to explain his actions is that he had one, with Konrad Curze being the just and idealistic leader of men and the Night Haunter being a psychopathic vigilante. Part of his fall to Chaos came when the Night Haunter, rather than Curze, became the dominant personality as a result of the Crusade.
• Straw Nihilist: The constant dark visions, and his own cynicism and despair and fatalism, left him without any hope, and caused him to gradually abandon all claims of justice or morality. There's multiple hints that he even feared the possibility that his dark assumptions could be proven incorrect.
• Terror Hero: What he used to be before falling to Chaos.
• Torture Technician: Curze was the foremost expert on crafting methods to inflict physical and mental agony on anyone unlucky enough to end up on his hit list. He passed that skill on to his Legion.
• Tragic Villain: Big time. Curze ended up on a planet of endless night where evil scum ruled through fear and violence. He survived in the sewers, eating vermin (and occasionally people as well). He went mad as he really wanted to do the right thing but the nature of his homeworld and people didn't allow that, so he became the worst of all of them but in the name of peace and order. He brought his world to heel... and then he had to leave, causing it to devolve into an even worse state than ever before. This completely fractured his mind and drove him insane, and into the waiting arms of Chaos. He lived a life without love or hope, and he was eventually so horrified by what he became that he allowed an assassin to kill him.
• Vigilante Man: Taken to its logical and horrific extreme.
• Villainous Breakdown: The latter part of the Heresy was an extended one for him. He slowly became less rational and more obsessed with enacting torment on convenient targets out of an increasing obsession with his visions of his impending death. By the time the assassin of his visions found him, he was locked in a fortress filled with the remains of his victims, "arguing" with a statue of the Emperor he crafted out of flayed flesh.
• Villain Has a Point: For all his cruelty, he was correct that his brothers weren't much better than him with the number of lives they've taken. His criticisms of Lion El'Johnson's excessive and often needlessly brutal actions were particularly accurate given that the Lion had wiped out entire cities of Ultramar in his hunt for Curze out of his obsessive need to salvage his honor.
• Where I Was Born and Razed: He personally destroyed Nostramo after seeing how it had reverted in his absence.
• When All You Have Is a Hammer…: Curze did one thing — Scare 'Em Straight with sneaky, brutal killings. However, it clearly doesn't work any more after he's left as it does nothing to address the root causes of the crime and corruption.
• Wolverine Claws: His signature weapons were a set of master-crafted lightning claws the Night Lords referred to as Mercy and Forgiveness. What their actual wielder called them is unknown.
• You Are What You Hate: By the time he realized he had become one of the monsters he despised, he was a broken, self-loathing, and suicidal man.
• You Can't Fight Fate: Curze firmly believes that his visions proved that fate was immutable and free will doesn't exist. Even when presented with evidence that his visions were not flawless, he clung to them anyway. His greatest fear was that his visions were wrong as believing he was a pawn of fate that had no choice but to be a monster let him absolve himself of responsibility for his horrific actions.

Angron, Primarch of the World Eaters

I am told to bathe my Legion in the blood of innocents and sinners alike, and I do it, because it is all that's left for me in this life. I do these things, and I enjoy them, not because we are moral, or right — or loving souls seeking to enlighten a dark universe — but because all I feel are the Butcher's Nails hammered into my brain.

The infant Angron was discovered by a slaver on the world of Nuceria, surrounded by the corpses of alien attackers. Impressed with the child's ferocity, the slaver implanted Angron's cerebral cortex with archeotech devices that enhanced his aggression, and raised him as a gladiator. After years of bloodshed in the arena, Angron led his fellow slaves in a revolt, escaping to the mountains and throwing back repeated attempts to bring them to heel. Just when his brothers and sisters were preparing for their final stand, the Emperor arrived to claim Angron as his son.

Angron refused, and would have died alongside his comrades had the Emperor not taken him by force. Without their leader the gladiators lost all morale and were annihilated, and an embittered Angron only reluctantly took command of the XII Legion, renaming them from the War Hounds to the World Eaters. He ordered his Apothecaries to duplicate his implants and subject his legion to the same mental mutilation, and the World Eaters soon earned a reputation as an army of remorseless berserkers. Angron was criticized for his practices and came to blows with Leman Russ and the Space Wolves, but before the Emperor could take further action the Horus Heresy erupted.

It took little convincing from Horus for Angron to side with the traitors against the Emperor, and the World Eaters fought in some of the bloodiest battles of the Horus Heresy, now claiming skulls for the Blood God. Angron was the first through the breach of the walls of the Imperial Palace, and the last Primarch to leave when the Siege of Terra failed. His World Eaters rampaged their way to the Eye of Terror, where they fractured into multiple psychopathic warbands. Angron is one of the few Daemon Primarchs to have launched major campaigns after the Horus Heresy, most infamously leading a horde of berserkers at the First War for Armageddon.

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Historic

• At Least I Admit It: Before going renegade, Angron disdained his brothers' talk about bringing worlds into "compliance" and asking for "tithes" while slaughtering billions in Emperor's name. To him, his brothers were cowards lying to themselves to justify the atrocities they were ordered to commit for the sake of vague ideals. He was brutally frank about how his World Eaters were fighting for a tyrant and killing any who resisted as an outlet for their fury without the need for such cheap excuses to absolve them.
• Ax-Crazy: He wasn't really all there even before the Horus Heresy on account of the Butcher's Nails implants. His bloodlust and murderous rage was so much that Khorne himself took an interest, and eventually turned him into a daemon prince.
• Bad Boss: By all accounts, Angron was a good leader to his gladiators. He did everything he could to empathize with them despite the Nails and refused to abandon them when the situation seemed hopeless. This all changed when he was abducted by the Emperor and placed in command of the then-War Hounds Legion. With them, Angron was, on his best days, a brutal commander who imposed severe punishment on his sons for failing to meet his very strict demands for performance. On his worst days, any of his Astartes who dared to disturb him would likely be beaten to death by his hands. At any point, he couldn't care less about the lives of his World Eaters and sent them to die in droves as long as they slaughtered the enemy quickly enough. He is one of two Primarchs that outright despised his Legion and many of them grew to return the sentiment.
• Bald of Evil: While his Butcher's Nails can be seen as dreadlocks, he's actually bald. He's also an Ax-Crazy primarch driven mad with bloodlust and murderous rage as a result of said Butcher's Nails — enough that Khorne took an interest in him.
• Band of Brothers: His relationship with his fellow gladiators. Angron's legion, the War Hounds (which he renamed the World Eaters) tried to form a close bond with him, but Angron was too wrapped up in his hatred, madness and grief to reciprocate. The War Hounds were like this with each other, until Angron had Butcher's Nails installed in all of them.
• The Berserker: The Butcher's Nails drove him to constant fury and hatred. He couldn't care about anything other than finding new opportunities to shed blood without constant agony. When out of battle, he had be repeatedly subdued by his Legion's psykers just to keep him from slaughtering his allies in sheer rage. One of the many reasons how he became the Daemon Primarch of Khorne.
• The Big Guy: Angron had little more to his skills than blood-raging force of arms compared to his other brothers. He did not lax in it. Ironically, he was actually one of the shortest Primarchs prior to his ascension.
• Black Sheep: One of two Primarchs to fail to conquer his homeworld (the other being Mortarion). However, in the short story "Lord of the Red Sands" its stated that he thinks conquest and the search for glory are motivations for the weak who are too afraid to let their names die, so its possible he was the only primarch to never even try to conquer his homeworld.
• Blood Knight: Even more so than the other Primarchs. The Butcher's Nails warped and damaged his brain so that the only sense of peace and contentment he can achieve is by fighting and killing. When he became a Daemon Prince, he got worse.
• Body Horror: The Butcher's Nails, long metallic coils, were implanted through Angron's skull and into his brain. As if that weren't bad enough, the people who implanted the Nails also removed part of Angron's brain with the Nails acting as a substitute for it. As a result, the Nails couldn't be removed without killing him. And the Nails themselves were slowly degrading his brain. This problem didn't go away even after ascension into a Daemon Prince. It got worse — the Nails bonded even deeper into his body, with flesh growing over them. As a Daemon Prince, the Nails won't kill him anymore but they are now even more a part of him.
• Broken Angel: One of his nicknames was the Broken One, and even his World Eaters were aware that their Primarch was irreparably damaged and deranged, a drooling, ranting beast that was barely cogent outside of battle. Only his ascension to daemonhood saved Angron from an early death from mental degradation.
• The Brute: The Butcher's Nails drove any sense of compassion, strategy, or higher purpose from Angron. All he lived for is sheer violence.
• The Corrupter: Before Angron, the 12th legion, then known as the War Hounds, were renowned for the fierce loyalty with each other. When Angron took command, he renamed them World Eaters, and he had Butcher's Nails installed in all of his soldiers, driving them insane with bloodlust. Afterward, the World Eaters were so renowned for their bloodlust, butchery and insanity that other Imperial forces wanted nothing to do with them.
• Crippling Overspecialization: Angron's Horus Heresy incarnation has few strengths outside of melee combat. The only buff he gives his army is a 12" Fearless aura around him, in contrast to most other Primarchs who give many more buffs to their armies.
• Dark and Troubled Past: He's a contender for having the darkest of all the Primarchs. When he first arrived on his homeworld of Nuceria, he was forced to fight an army of aliens, hinted to be Eldar trying to assassinate him before he could become what he did. He grew up as a slave and a gladiator, and he had the Butcher's Nails hammered into his head, driving him mad. When he finally managed to escape, his army faced years of starvation and constant attacks by his former captors. When the Emperor arrived, he forced Angron to join the Great Crusade, and left Angron's army to be annihilated. Angron never really recovered.
• Death Seeker: Straddles between this and Not Afraid to Die. Angron believed that he should have died (and, symbolically, did die) with his gladiator kin on Nuceria and that the Emperor robbed him of his rightful demise. He leads the World Eaters, but with no particular zeal for his station; instead, he simply kills because that is what the Butcher's Nails force him to do.
• Dramatically Missing the Point: Angron insisted that he won the Night of the Wolf, when his legion and the Space Wolves came to blows. In the battle itself, Angron bested Leman Russ in close combat, but while doing so was surrounded by the Wolf Guard as the rest of the World Eaters fought on, too crazed to notice their Primarch's danger. It took Lorgar to explain that Leman Russ had only spared Angron in hopes that he learned something from the debacle.
• The Dreaded: Even Leman Russ knew not to get on his bad side, and Angron was often the sole exception to the idea of Space Marines not knowing fear because there was a run-on-sight order when facing him. He only got worse after falling to Chaos.
  Narrator: It had often been said that a Space Marine knew no fear. Such a statement was not literally true, a Space Marine could know fear, but he had the training and discipline to deal with it and not let it affect him in battle. Captain Saul Tarvitz was no exception, he had faced storms of gunfire and monstrous aliens and even glimpsed the insane predators of the Warp, but when Angron charged, he ran.
• Dreadlock Warrior: A strange variant. While actually bald, the "Butcher's Nails" are depicted as long metallic coils that evoke this trope. As a Daemon Primarch, they actually bond into his body, with several becoming fleshy dreadlocks.
• Early-Installment Weirdness: One of Angron's earliest profiles^note from the 1994 Renegades army book for the Epic game portrayed him rather differently to his present incarnation. Angron was described as deeply respecting Horus and being the first Primarch to join him in rebellion, believing they were saving the Imperium and humanity. As the Horus Heresy went on Angron realised that they were in fact destroying the Imperium but his ego stopped him from quitting the war and he wound up embracing Khorne as an exemplar of martial pride and honour. This version of the character was dropped in later material, being replaced with a Spartacus-expy turning into a nihilistic bezerker.
• The Empath: He originally had inherent psychic abilities that allowed him to feel and absorb the pain and negative emotions of others. He lost these powers after the Butcher's Nails were implanted into his brain.
• Enfant Terrible: When Angron landed on his adopted homeworld of Nuceria, he was attacked by what Imperial authorities believe were Eldar intent on stopping the rise of the future Daemon Prince. When humans finally found him, he was surrounded by their bodies.
• Evil Counterpart: Like Ferrus Manus, Angron is handicapped by a piece of bad technology. Ferrus has his iron hands which he wants to remove while Angron has the Butcher's Nails which he hates but has become addicted to.
• Evil Feels Good: Angron himself admits that he slaughters people for no reason aside from enjoyment. With the Butcher's Nails in his brain, inflicting brutal carnage is the only thing he can feel pleasure in anymore.
• Fatal Flaw: Angron had several. Quite obviously his uncontrollable rage, but also his obsession with avenging his comrades and his resentment of his father for forcing him to abandon them on his homeworld, and also his Never My Fault tendencies which made him a very hard person to like. Most tragically, his pain at losing his old comrades and his unwillingness to move on made it impossible for him to form a new family with his brothers or his Legion, the later of which in particular would have been very willing to welcome him into their brotherhood with open arms had he just allowed them to.
• The Gadfly: In Betrayer we see him get his jollies by insulting Argel Tal and his "Blessed Lady" until the Word Bearer attacks him.
• Gladiator Revolt: Angron's backstory has him leading one, and he was found by the Emperor the day they were going to make their Last Stand. Instead of joining his father, Angron decided to fight and die with his comrades. The Emperor departed... then teleported Angron away right as they were about to be slaughtered. Angron had issues with that.
• Glass Cannon: In-game, while Angron is a monster in melee combat, he's one of the most fragile Primarchs, with only 5 wounds and a 3+/4++ save along with Feel No Pain.
• Hated by All: Angron was hated by virtually everyone, including his own legion. When he first arrived as little more than a frothing madman, several of the officers insisted to the Emperor that there had to be some kind of mistake, since there was no way the thing before them was their Primarch. In Betrayer, a mortally wounded World Eater demands to be allowed to die rather than being forced to continue to serve Angron and his last words are a bitter chuckle and the phrase "Piss on Angron's grave when he dies."
• Hypocrite: Frequently claimed that the Butcher's Nails were what ruined him, yet had no issue with forcing them on all his sons the moment he took command.
• Jumping Off the Slippery Slope: Towards the end of the crusade and before his fall to chaos, Angron freely admits to Leman Russ that he conquers and enslaves worlds for the Emperor because the butcher's nails compel him to do extreme violence, and the Emperor essentially sanctions it. He even states that if he didn't have the nails, he might (as a good and moral man) just turn on the Emperor for being the "slaving bastard" that he is. Then Horus turns to chaos and Angron is only too happy to ditch the Imperium and go full Omnicidal Maniac, because Khorne the blood god only wants him to kill for the sake of it, which is all that Angron wants anymore too.
• Leeroy Jenkins: Constantly. Most famously, Horus was prevented from launching a second bombardment of the surprised Loyalists on Istvaan III when Angron spontaneously led a Drop Pod assault on their position.
• Lost Technology: The original Butcher's Nails used on Nuceria that were implanted in Angron are ancient archaeotech that even the people of Nuceria barely understood. This is one reason even the Emperor and his best techs couldn't save Angron from them.
• Macho Masochism: Angron has a "triumph rope", a ring of scars on his torso denoting his victories in battle. A loss would be signified by putting dirt on the "rope", turning it black. Angron has no black scars.
• The McCoy: Deconstructed. Of his brothers, Angron seemed set to inherit The Emperor's innate compassion and empathy for others, but the Butcher's Nails warped it beyond repair. It says something about Angron's character that even with the Nails he possessed enough empathy to feel camaraderie and companionship with his fellow slaves, and rallied them to fight for their freedom. Unfortunately, when The Emperor abducted him, this empathy caused him to spiral into a bottomless abyss of anguish and resentment–becoming totally fixated on the brothers and sisters he lost at Desh'elika Ridge, and never forgiving his father's choice to save only him. From then on, it could be said that every single decision Angron made after that moment was fueled by raw unfiltered emotion, it's just that the emotion in question was rage.
• Meaningful Name: Angron's name is very similar to Anger.
• My Greatest Failure: Not being there for the last stand of his brothers and sisters at Desh'elika Ridge on account of being teleported out of there by the Emperor against his will. Before that, it was him killing his foster father Oenomaus under the influence of the Butcher's Nails. When Angron realized what he had done, he howled bestially in despair for days.
• Never My Fault: Quick to blame the Emperor, his upbringing, or the Nails for his problems. While all of these did shape him into the man he became, his refusal to try and better himself in spite of them was all his own doing, as Guilliman pointed out in response to a rant by Angron about how much he suffered compared to the former's patrician upbringing.
  Guilliman: You're still a slave, Angron. Enslaved by your past, blind to the future. Too hateful to learn. Too spiteful to prosper.
• Not Afraid to Die: The Butcher's Nails drove all fear of death from Angron and his legion, albeit at tremendous cost.
• Not in This for Your Revolution: He joined Horus, but openly told his sons that he didn't care about the Traitor's cause or the Imperium at all. All he was interested in was getting a chance to take his revenge against the Emperor. What happened after that was no concern of his.
• Odd Friendship: Eventually developed one with Lorgar, who was the only one of his brothers who cared about saving his life.
• Paint the Town Red: During his days amongst humanity, Angron's pearly white armor got completely covered in red so often that it earned him the name "the Red Angel", and he often was told he should just paint it red. After the Heresy, the World Eaters did just that (or possibly just stopped cleaning it).
• Parental Substitute: Oenomaus, an older gladiator, was the closest thing that Angron ever had for a father. He was also the reason why the Butcher's Nails were implanted in Angron in the first place, as he refused to kill Oenomaus as ordered after the two had managed to triumph over a pair of crazed Ogryn gladiators who had had the Nails implanted in them. As punishment for his defiance, the Butcher's Nails were implanted in Angron... and his first act under their influence was the brutal killing of Oenomaus.
• Rebel Leader: Like many of his brothers, but Angron had the unenviable reputation of losing. The first time he lost, however, was the Emperor's fault.
• Refusal of the Call: Angron refused to go with the Emperor's summons to join him, preferring to fight and die alongside his comrades. The Emperor made him answer.
• "The Reason You Suck" Speech: Gave a brutal one to Guilliman:
  Angron: What would you know of struggle, Perfect Son? When have you fought against the mutilation of your mind? When have you had to do anything more than tally compliances and polish your armour? [...] The people of your world named you Great One. The people of mine called me Slave. Which one of us landed on a paradise of civilization to be raised by a foster father, Roboute? Which one of us was given armies to lead after training in the halls of the Macraggian high-riders? Which one of us inherited a strong, cultured kingdom? And which one of us had to rise up against a kingdom with nothing but a horde of starving slaves? Which one of us was a child enslaved on a world of monsters, with his brain cut up by carving knives? Listen to your blue-clad wretches yelling of courage and honour, courage and honour, courage and honour. Do you even know the meaning of those words? Courage is fighting the kingdom which enslaves you, no matter that their armies outnumber yours by ten-thousand to one. You know nothing of courage. Honour is resisting a tyrant when all others suckle and grow fat on the hypocrisy he feeds them. You know nothing of honour.
  • And received a just as good, though shorter Shut Up, Hannibal! lecture. See Never My Fault.
• Roaring Rampage of Revenge: The man destroyed entire planetary sectors when he left the Warp in order to kick the crap out of the Imperium of Man, still wanting his revenge against them. During the Heresy, his revenge on Nuceria was also this, as he ordered the World Eaters and Word Bearers to first kill all the rulers of Desh'ea, the city state that had enslaved him, then everyone else in Desh'ea, then finally the rest of the planet.
• Smarter Than You Look: Angron could be fairly insightful during his more lucid moments—for instance, he was self-aware about his role in the Imperium and had a dry wit at times. But the Nails made it too painful to think for long, and his Death Seeker mindset set him at odds with his brothers.
• Sociopathic Soldier: To wit, after the Emperor abducted him and had him put in control of a Space Marine Legion, he was simply furious and uninterested. The Emperor had the Legion's Captains talk him down without laying a hand on Angron... until Khârn succeeded, Angron simply killed the unfortunate Captains that tried to talk to him. After becoming compliant, Angron essentially became The Emperor's attack dog–let off the chain for especially brutal campaigns and scorched-earth tactics, of which he excelled.
• Straw Nihilist: After being abducted by the Emperor, Angron gave into his hatred and bitterness completely. From that point onward, he stopped caring about anything other than looking for opportunities to vent his fury on any convenient targets.
• Token Evil Teammate: Angron was the only Primarch to openly despise the Emperor. Not surprising, given how the Emperor forcibly took him away from his fellow gladiator slaves, leaving them all to die against their former captors (or "high-riders," as Angron called them), and made him take control of his Legion.
• Tragic Villain: Perhaps the Traitor Primarch that exemplifies this the most. The Butcher's Nails that were implanted in his skull would either cause his death if removed or lead to insanity if kept in. The Emperor had all the means to save Angron's rebellion, yet only brought Angron on his ship, leaving the rebellion to be slaughtered. This only worsened the Primarch's insanity. The question is not "why did Angron turn?", but rather, "how in the world could he ever have been loyal?".
• Tranquil Fury: On his "better" days, Angron kept enough clarity to be an effective commander despite his eternal fury.
• Trauma Button: Don't imply that he abandoned his brothers or ran from the last stand at Desh'ea.
• Unstoppable Rage: To put things into perspective, Khârn the Betrayer, the bloodthirsty warrior who destroyed two Chaos Marine legions when they stopped fighting, was once considered to be Angron's Blue Oni in comparison.
• Used to Be a Sweet Kid: Maybe "sweet" was a bit strong, but he was more stable and somewhat more affable before the Butcher's Nails were implanted into him. He was also known to have used his latent psyker abilities to calm slave children.
• When All You Have Is a Hammer…: While Angron is as much of a super-genius as any Primarch, the Butcher's Nails induced a fury that severely limited his desire to be imaginative. After he received his legion, his tactics could all be boiled down to "apply brutal violence to the situation until it resolves itself". Given his sheer strength, this proved more effective than you would think.
• Where I Was Born and Razed: He did eventually destroy Nuceria where Lorgar later helped him ascend into daemonhood.
• Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds: Quite possibly the most tragic of the Primarchs. Angron was spirited away by The Emperor against his will and watched his gladiator brethren slaughtered while he himself is tasked the hateful job of bringing worlds to compliance. The Butcher's Nails implanted in his brain gave him terrible pain, rendered it impossible for him to feel any emotion other than rage, was slowly killing him, and dampening his Primarch aura so he couldn't use his empath abilities and his sons don't respect him. When the Heresy broke out, most of his sons abandoned him and sided with the Imperium, while the remaining accepted the Blood God's gifts too eagerly, becoming nothing more than savage beasts. He figured out too late that the Emperor he despised had very good reasons for his actions, and the gods he traded him for are far, far worse. He was transformed into a Daemon Prince against his will, cursed to an eternity of agony and servitude. During the Siege Of Terra, even in his Daemon form he was thoroughly humiliated and beaten by Sanguinius, the Primarch he was unfavorably compared with, with the fight ending with Angron begging and pleading to his brother for mercy as the Blood Angel rid the World Eater of his Nails and brain. Then, he realized that Sanguinius was destined to die in the Siege, a fate he envied and knew he'll never receive.
• You Have Failed Me: Angron gave his legion strict time limits for conquest: if they didn't force a world to submit within 31 hours (a single day of his homeworld), he'd have the group responsible for the invasion decimated.
• Your Days Are Numbered: The Butcher's Nails were slowly destroying Angron's brain. Removing them wasn't an option because they acted as replacements for parts of Angron's brain that were removed when they were installed. Only ascension to daemonhood saved him, and even as a daemon the Nails remain part of him.

Current

After the opening of the Great Rift, Angron has once again been summoned into Realspace to wage bloody war against the Imperium (as well as basically anything that gets in his way). With his new Blood Crusade on the upswing the remnants of the XII Legion are gathering to their gene-father, resulting in the greatest collection of World Eaters in one force since the days of the Horus Heresy.

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• Being Evil Sucks: When he isn't too overcome by wrath to think rationally, Angron is quite unhappy as an eternally enslaved pawn to Khorne and laments that he cannot do anything to change his fate. He is noted to envy Sanguinius on Terra as he would die free, something that Angron never will.
• The Berserker: To an even greater degree than during the Great Crusade and Horus Heresy. The Butcher's Nails and Khorne's corruption have for the most part reduced Angron to such a mindless, slavering beast that he barely even recognizes Lion El'Josnon as his brother during their fight. The Lion ends up using this against him.
• Big Red Devil: Became one of these after falling to Chaos, one that even towers over most Bloodthirsters.
• Black Eyes of Evil: In the novel The Emperor’s Gift, Angron shows up and the description given refers to his eyes as "coal pits".
• Black Swords Are Better: For a time, Angron abandoned the chainaxe as his trademark weapon and took up the Black Blade, until it was destroyed during the First War for Armageddon. His current sword Samni'arus is also black.
• Death Seeker: A small part of him still longs to be free of his miserable existence. One of his reasons for seeking the Choral Engine on Malakbael was in the hopes that by personally destroying it, the psychic backlash would be strong enough to fully eliminate his essence and kill him for good. Unfortunately for him (and the Galaxy at large) it didn't work.
• Dual Wielding: By the time of the 42nd millennium he wields two weapons: the titanic Chainaxe Spinegrinder, which he used to kill the inhabitants of the traitor Forge World Persiax after they attempted to offer it to him in tribute; and the daemon blade Samni'arus, forged by beating an insolent Slaaneshi daemon to death with an unworked iron bar.
  Wade: The fact that he's carrying a black daemon blade and a great big chainaxe one in each hand shows you that everything about him is an offensive weapon. He could kill you with his bare hands quite easily, but he's much happier brandishing the tools of his trade.
• Emergency Transformation: Though there were other reasons and benefits, the main reason Lorgar helped Angron ascend into daemonhood was because it was the only way to save him from dying by the Butcher's Nails.
• Feral Villain: Angron's rage has grown so overwhelming that he can barely form a coherent sentence anymore. He's less of a warrior than a rabid dog for Khorne to sic on the universe at large.
• Full-Frontal Assault: Angron's miniature in the Epic scale game system doesn't wear any clothes or armour, relying on his daemonic nature to protect himself. Later books describe his daemon form as wearing a corrupted version of his old armour.
• Made of Magic: Insofar as all daemons are composed of warp stuff, Angron's latest sword Samni'arus is technically this; it is a daemon weapon forged when Angron got so pissed off at the Keeper of Secrets Samni'arus that he took essentially a large metal pipe and beat the Keeper so brutally with it that the Greater Daemon's essence was bound into the cudgel and transformed it into the sword that now bears their name.
• Multi-Melee Master: In the words of one of his model's designers:
  Wade: Angron's gone through many, many weapons in his 10,000+ years of life and he's an expert in all of them.
• Praetorian Guard: During his invasion of Armageddon Angron was accompanied by the Cruor Praetoria, a bodyguard of twelve Bloodthirsters each of whom gained their position for the great deeds they accomplished in Khorne's name.
• Royals Who Actually Do Something: Besides Magnus, he's one of the few traitor Primarchs who actually goes outside of the Warp in order to kick some major ass. In the words of 1d4chan: "He Gets Shit Done!"
• Unskilled, but Strong: One of if not the strongest and most powerful of the currently active Primarchs in conventional combat, but he's been reduced to such a mindless, rage-driven monster that he's incapable of doing anything other than attacking with everything he has. While this makes him nigh-unstoppable in a straight up fight he can be defeated by enemies using sound strategy and tactics, as Lion El'Jonson demonstrates.
• Unusually Uninteresting Sight: Barely registered the Lion's return in Arks of Omen, instead demanding he get out of his way or die quickly so that he could go back to killing Dark Angels.
• Unwanted Rescue: In his rare moments of lucidity Angron hates his fate. Despite his grudge against the Emperor leading him to side with Horus, he's not happy with Lorgar for ascending him to daemonhood and condemning him to be Khorne's slave for eternity. This extends to the World Eaters, who in Blood Prince are shown to hate Lorgar and the Word Bearers by extension.
• When All You Have Is a Hammer…: In true Khornate fashion, Angron can literally do nothing aside from Attack! Attack! Attack!. While this makes him unstoppable against foes seeking to fight him conventionally, Lion El'Jonson turns it against him by fighting defensively and strategically in a way that denies Angron his key advantages.
• Why Won't You Die?: A core gameplay mechanic for his 9th Edition incarnation, and a key factor in his updated lore after the opening of the Great Rift.
  • In-game, a World Eaters player in any phase can spend six Blood Tithe points to revive Angron if he has been killed in the game, putting him into reserves with 8 wounds remaining on his model. As Angron himself generates two Blood Tithe points when he is killed, and a minimum of one is generated any time anything is killed on the table, he is almost guaranteed to come back to life at least once in a 1000 point or higher game.
  • In-story, an effect of the Great Rift and the circumstances of his most recent summoning into the Materium have "anchored" him into realspace, making permanently banishing him nigh-impossible. No matter how thorough one is in killing, banishing, or cleansing his presence, he will revive eight weeks, eight days, and eight hours later on the dot from when he was last killed.
• The Worf Effect: Angron is defeated and banished by the returned Lion El'Jonson during Arks of Omen to show more clearly how a Primarch would fare against one of his transformed traitor brethren when they haven't been worn down by constant fighting and trickery as Gulliman was after his revival. It also speaks to how a Traitor Primarch would fare against one of the warrior Loyalists compared to Guilliman who is more of a bureaucrat by comparison.
• You Are What You Hate: Angron grew up a slave on Nuceria, had his brain carved apart to implant the Butcher's Nails, and called his father out on the hypocrisy of his noble Great Crusade simply being an excuse to kill all those who wouldn't listen to Him. As a Daemon Primarch of Khorne Angron is now and will forever be a slave to the Blood God, the Nails that ruined his life are now so intermingled with his essence that they can never be removed, and he is starting up his own Blood Crusade across the stars to slaughter and reave in the name of Khorne, exactly as he used to for the Emperor. Angron's life has come around full-circle, not that he really has the presence of mind to objectively assess himself anymore.

Mortarion, Primarch of the Death Guard

Pain is an illusion of the senses, fear an illusion of the mind, beyond these only death waits in silent judgment o'er all.

Mortarion was cast to the world of Barbarus, a planet of high mountains swathed in clouds of poison, ruled by monstrous overlords who preyed upon the humans huddling in the livable valleys below. One of these tyrants fostered Mortarion, raising the child in a keep at the limits of the Primarch's toxin tolerance, but the youth eventually rebelled and left to aid his fellow man. With the hardiest soldiers and crude breathing apparatuses, Mortarion took the fight to the alien overlords, until only the stronghold of his former master remained.

On the eve of his final triumph, a stranger appeared and offered his assistance, but Mortarion stubbornly insisted that he needed no help, and marched into the poisonous heights. The last thing he saw before collapsing was the stranger cutting down Mortarion's foster parent with a single stroke. Afterward, Mortarion swore to serve the Emperor, and took command of the XIV Legion, the Dusk Raiders, which he renamed the Death Guard in honor of his original followers on Barbarus. Mortarion passed on his values of fortitude and relentlessness, but the grim Primarch never bonded with his brothers, with the exception of Horus Lupercal and Konrad Curze. Other Primarchs warned the Emperor of the closeness between Mortarion and Horus, fears that were justified when the Warmaster turned renegade and the Death Guard joined him.

After fighting alongside the other traitors in the battles for the Isstvan system, the Death Guard departed for Terra, only to fall victim to a horrific warpstorm and a daemonic plague. Wracked by pain and festering with corruption, Mortarion's superhuman resilience left him unable to die, and in agony he promised his legion's soul to any who would deliver him. The Death Guard emerged from the Warp devoted to Nurgle, and became the first Plague Marines. After the Siege of Terra failed, Mortarion led his forces into the Eye of Terror and was rewarded for his service with elevation to daemonhood, ruling over a plague world he shaped into a miserable mockery of Barbarus.

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Historic

• Abusive Alien Parents: His foster father Necare, the High Overlord of Barbarus and an alien of unknown type, found the infant Mortarion in the remnants of a massacre and raised him to be a weapon devoid of empathy or happiness. When he wasn't sending the young Primarch to slaughter his enemies, he made a habit of exposing him to poisonous mists to the point of death.
• Acquired Poison Immunity: His already superhuman toughness was enhanced from growing up in Barbarus' poisonous atmosphere, and Mortarion kept a cocktail of such toxins in his armor's rebreather systems so he'd stay sharp.
• Benevolent Boss: For all of his many flaws, he actually cares a great deal for his legion and the people of Barbarus.
• Childhood Friends: He first met Calas Typhon, aka Typhus, when he first began to rebel by saving the human boy and his companions. They grew up together as fast friends and waged a war of liberation together. Of course, things became... less than cordial in later years.
• Dark and Troubled Past: Probably the only Primarch able to rival Angron for a shitty childhood. He grew up on a planet where the air itself was poisonous and was raised by a Xenos tyrant called Necare who liked to test his adopted son's endurance by exposing him to the toxic atmosphere until he was on the point of death. Eventually, he left and lived among the people before leading them into revolt against the planet's overlords, but when push came to shove, he failed to defeat his adopted father and watched the Emperor do the deed instead. Even worse was the revelation that the Emperor was a psyker just like his hated foster dad. The resentment he carried as a result coupled with the potential mental damage resulted in the adoption of a strict Social Darwinist attitude and hatred of psykers that eventually pulled him into damnation.
• Deal with the Devil: His desperate plea to Nurgle to make the pain stop.
• Determinator: His specialty, and that of his Legion, was always supreme endurance. His fall to Chaos came when said endurance finally gave out, which ironically only made him tougher in the end.
• The Dragon: The traitor Primarch that Horus trusted and relied on the most.
• Fatal Flaw: Mortarion had some major confidence issues, and this led him to seek guidance from all the wrong people.
• Hypocrite: Hates psykers and sorcerers. Also joins up with the side with most of the psykers and sorcerers.
• Kill Steal: The Emperor's slaying of Mortarion's adoptive father proved to become a grudge Mortarion long held against him and contributed to his eventual betrayal, as he saw it as a trivialization of his great struggles against his planet's warlords only to have final and most personal enemy stolen from him.
• Only Sane Man: During the Heresy, Horus laments that Mortarion, while dour and morose, is one of the few he can actually count on to obey orders. Horus was forced to increasingly rely on him for difficult assignments as the other Primarchs pursued their own agendas or spiralled into madness. Reflected in his legion: the Death Guard maintained its discipline even after Horus' demise, conducting a fighting retreat all the way to the Eye of Terror.
• The Pig-Pen: During the Crusade, Mortarion had an almost compulsive disdain for pageantry. He had his Legion strip their armor's old colors and rarely even bothered cleaning their armor more than absolutely necessary after battle. He and his Legion took a sort of pride from the disgust others had for their grime-caked armor, seeing it as a sign that the other Legions were more concerned with appearance than getting the job done.
• Praetorian Guard: The Deathshroud Terminators, each silent and officially listed as killed in action. At least two were within 49 paces of the Primarch at all times.
• Ray Gun: Mortarion wields an energy pistol of ancient design called the Lantern, which he took from one of the Emperor's armories when he joined the Great Crusade and still uses as a Daemon Primarch. The Lantern is very powerful for a pistol and its rules on the crunch allow it to not just wound one target but wound all models on the trajectory of the shot.
• Rebel Leader: What he used to be, back on Barbarus after recognizing the humans there for his fellows rather than prey as his "father" had taught him.
• The Resenter: He tended to clash with any of his brothers who didn't have a Dark and Troubled Past like himself, hinting that he despised how they got off so easily.
• Social Darwinist: Not to the level of Ferrus Manus, but Mortarion placed emphasis on both strength and the refusal to surrender and chafed at the growing power of non-combatants and civilians in the Imperium, seeing them as unworthy of it. It's heavily implied he developed his obsession with strength after watching the Emperor kill his adopted father when he was too weak to even resist the poisonous air and could only watch his glory be stolen from him.
• Unwitting Instigator of Doom: The short story The Board Is Set reveals that, prior to the Battle of Terra, the Emperor still held out hope that some action of Mortarion's would swing the battle in the loyalists' favor. What exactly that would have been isn't mentioned (given Mortarion's pre-corruption hatred of psykers, it's possible he might have changed sides or rebelled upon realizing what Horus had become), but Mortarion and his legion's corruption by Nurgle just prior to the battle apparently made it impossible. Thus, Mortarion giving in to Nurgle extinguished the last hope of averting the dystopia that the Imperium will become.

Current

Mortarion is the first Daemon Primarch to act after Guilliman's return. He gathers his fleet and makes alliances with Daemons of Nurgle to unleash a campaign against the Ultramar system which would be called the Plague Wars. Eventually luring Guilliman back to Ultramar after the latter ended his Indomitus Crusade, Mortarion finally clashes against his brother but must flee before either dies.

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• Bad Boss: Daemon Prince Mortarion cares little for his sons and thinks nothing of enduring massive casualties in pursuit of his goals. Additionally, the duties of his Deathshroud Terminators include both relaying his orders to the Legion's lords and cutting down any that falter. The irony is that one of the main reasons he turned to Nurgle, was to stop his sons from suffering.
• Became Their Own Antithesis: The Primarch most known for his resistance to disease and toxins now spends his time spreading plagues across the galaxy.
• Being Evil Sucks: Despite siding with the Traitor Primarchs Mortarion only did so out of bitterness against the Emperor for his Kill Steal and due to his closeness with Horus. He only pledged his Legion to Nurgle to save them from eternal suffering. Even ten thousand years later he's bitter about his position and openly says he doesn't see Nurgle as his master, attempting to kill Guilliman out of a sense of fatalism that there was no option but to give in to the Ruinous Powers. The Emperor outright states to Mortarion (through Guilliman) that he is a victim and may one day find redemption.
• Berserk Button: Psykers and Warp-craft in general, before his conversion to Nurgle. And even afterwards he still loathes witchcraft even as a daemonic practitioner of it, hence sorcerers in the Death Guard have a very low status. Also when he gets the news of Guilliman's return, his rage is intense enough to unconciously kickstart plagues on seven very unfortunate Imperial worlds.
• Defeat Equals Explosion: If the enemy can somehow bring down Mortarion, he has a chance to explode, inflicting wounds on nearby non-Nurgle units.
• Did You Just Flip Off Cthulhu?: He regularly exploits his status as Nurgle's favoured Daemon Prince to boss around all manner of daemons up to and including Ku'Gath, who only tolerate this because they don't dare defy Nurgle's will. Though as Godblight shows, when Mortarion defies Nurgle directly there are limits to how much of this he can get away with.
• Didn't Think This Through: Got rid of psykers in the Legions, only to join the side that encouraged them to use their powers.
• Do Not Taunt Cthulhu: In Godblight he decides to openly defy Nurgle and refuse his orders. This ends very badly for him after the Emperor leaves him to his very angry master.
• Does Not Like Magic: Mortarion has always been very anti-psyker; he was the biggest opponent of the Librarian program, and his animosity toward the Emperor was partially because he was a psyker. Even as a daemon sorcerers are still looked down on amongst his Legion.
• The Grim Reaper: He cultivated this look prior to becoming a daemon, wearing a hood and wielding a huge scythe, and becoming a daemon has only made this more emphasized.
• Herd-Hitting Attack: If Mortarion uses the Reaping Scythe profile of his scythe Silence, 3 hits will be inflicted per attack instead of 1, meaning that Mortarion can hit up to 18 times per phase and slice through entire ranks of infantry.
• He Who Fights Monsters: Mortarion uses sorcery and rules a plague planet that enslaves humans, just like his adoptive father used to do.
• Idiot Ball: Grabs hold of it hard when he decides to start openly defying the very same Nurgle who he sold his soul to. It doesn't go well.
• It's All About Me: In Godblight Mortarion's ego reaches critical mass, declaring he has no master and refuses to answer Nurgle's summons for the next round of the Great Game. Even Typhus pleads with him not to do this. When his own scheme fails so hard it actually damages Nurgle Garden and the God himself in the process, Nurgle decides to have a little talk with him about ranking structure.
• Made of Iron: Mortarion is extremely durable and could take enormous punishment in stride. His game stats are in line with those of a Gargantuan Creature.
• Meaningful Name: According to the monstrous tyrant who raised him, it means "child of death."
• Misanthrope Supreme: The Plagueburst Crawler he designed is so deadly in its sheer contempt for all that lives, even daemons of Nurgle look askance at it. Not even the Grandfather's diseased life can survive in places where it has bombarded.
• Not in This for Your Revolution: He joined Horus' rebellion, but never really cared about his so-called ideals or plans for the Imperium. All he really wanted was the chance to remove psykers from humanity's forces. He outright said that Horus' fate was irrelevant to him.
• One-Hit Polykill: Mortarion's Lantern pistol automatically hits every unit in a straight line between him and his target.
• Orcus on His Throne: Typhus in particular is disgusted by how little Mortarion has done since becoming a Daemon Primarch, and views the imitation Barbarus he created as a sickening bit of sentimentality. Guilliman's return finally motivates him to join the action personally.
• Plaguemaster: As a Daemon Primarch of Nurgle. The Hand of Darkness enhances his abilities even further, until the Ynnari steal it from him.
• The Friend Nobody Likes: Godblight reveals just how much he is hated by the rest of Nurgle's forces. The other daemons and Great Unclean Ones look down on him for his Demon of Human Origin status while many of his owns gene-sons hate him for his Orcus on His Throne tendancies. It's gotten to the point where many of the Death Guard view Typhus as their leader. Even his closest ally Ku'Gath doesn't think highly of him, only tolerating him due to his rank and usefulness. Mortarion earns this disfavor as he's determined to be as arrogant as possible, constantly throwing his status as Nurgle's favored to brow-beat others into doing his will. Although as Godblight shows, even Nurgle's patience with his favored daemon prince has its limits, especially when it leads to Nurgle taking some serious damage from the Emperor himself when Mortarion's plans end up biting them all in the ass hard.
• Sinister Scythe: Mortarion's weapon of choice, a Manreaper called Silence.
• Villainous Breakdown: In the climax of Godblight. Mortarion is seemingly on the cusp of victory against Guilliman, having dragged his brother to Nurgle's Garden and infected him with the titular disease, the most potent one ever brewed by Nurgle. Before he can revel in his victory, Guilliman is suddenly revived and possessed by the spirit of the Emperor Himself who proceeds to destroy a chunk of the Garden. Mortarion is reduced to stunned horror when he realizes he is in the presence of his father and left begging for mercy as he is dragged off for punishment by a displeased Nurgle.
• Villains Want Mercy: Mortarion is arrogant, merceliess and utterly terrified when faced with The Emperor at the end of Godblight. He cracks completely, begging for forgiveness from his father. His father in Cruel Mercy consides that it might be possible to redeem him, but he wont. He'll honor Mortarion's choice to join Nurgle, and leaves him to his fate. And Nurgle is displeased.
• Villain Team-Up: Assisted Magnus with his revenge against the Space Wolves in exchange for the planet Midgardia in the Fenris System to pledge to Nurgle. Pretty notable considering Mortarion was the most fervent in opposition to the Thousand Sons' use of sorcery, and that they serve Gods in direct opposition to one another. In true Tzeentchian style, Magnus double-crossed him by arranging for said world to undergo Exterminatus at the hands of the Space Wolves before he could finish claiming it.
• Walking Wasteland: Merely standing in the presence of Mortarion is dangerous, causing all enemies nearby to suffer a Toughness penalty and lose Wounds every turn.
• Winged Humanoid: Mortarion's Daemon form sports a large pair of wings that carry him through the putrid air that surrounds him. The original artwork and model for the Daemon Primarch depicted these as bat-like wings while the wings on his 2017 plastic model and depicted in his 8th Edition artwork are more moth-like (meant to invoke a carrion fly).
• You Are What You Hate: After his ascension to Daemonhood Mortarion becomes a psyker, the very thing he despised prior to the Horus Heresy.
• Your Soul Is Mine!: Revealed to have done this posthumously to his adoptive father Necare, using his daemonic powers to run down and imprison the Overlord's soul in a jar.

Magnus the Red, Primarch of the Thousand Sons

The Thousand Sons alone of all the Legions have seen the light beyond the gates of the empyrean. That light will free us from the shackles of our mundane perceptions of reality and allow the human race to stand as masters of the galaxy.

Magnus had the good fortune to land on the world of Prospero, whose psychically-gifted population accepted the cyclopean, red-skinned child rather than slaying him for his mutations. Among these scholars the young Primarch quickly mastered his psyker powers, surpassing his teachers and peering into the depths of the Empyrean, growing in mental strength even as his body developed into a giant. When the Emperor reached Prospero to collect his lost son, there was such familiarity between the two that it is suspected that they had been in psychic contact for some time prior to meeting in the flesh.

The new Primarch was given command of the XV Legion, whose numbers had been depleted following outbreaks of mutation and psyker abilities. Magnus declared that they were his Thousand Sons, and went about instructing them in the ways of safely harnessing their powers, so that even his comparatively small Legion could achieve mighty victories during the Great Crusade. However, other Imperial forces were leery of the dangers of such mutations, which culminated in the Edict of Nikea, where the Emperor disbanded the legions' Librarius programs and forbade the use of psychic sorcery.

Stung and humiliated by this command, Magnus nevertheless continued delving into forbidden knowledge, until his scryings revealed a terrible vision: Horus' betrayal and a galactic civil war. Magnus sent a psychic warning to the Emperor that was intended to vindicate the use of his powers, but unknowingly destroyed his father's greatest project — Webway travel for the Imperium. The Emperor sent a command to the Space Wolves to capture Magnus, but Horus changed the message to "destroy Prospero". After being broken in personal combat with Leman Russ, Magnus called upon the dark god Tzeentch for succor, and he and his legion were drawn into the Warp. The Thousand Sons supported the other renegades during the Horus Heresy and continue to strike back at the Imperium that cast them out, while the now-Daemon Primarch has nursed a ten-thousand-year vendetta against the Space Wolves.

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Historic

• Amazing Technicolor Population: Magnus had a mutation that dyed his skin and hair an unnatural bright red which lead him gaining his title "Magnus the Red".
• Anti-Villain: Though he went against the Emperor's command, he never meant to betray him. Even as a soulless, warp-spawned abomination, he's leagues more reasonable than most of his cohorts: the atrocities of the Thousand Sons have ends and purpose behind them, as opposed to the Card Carrying Villainy of other Traitor Legions.
• Cassandra Truth: Magnus' visions were almost never wrong, and almost never believed. If the Horus Heresy books are anything to go by, the galaxy could have avoided a great deal of trouble if the Emperor and other Primarchs had heeded Magnus' advice more often.
  • He sent a projection to the Emperor warning him of Horus' fall to Chaos. Unfortunately, as Horus had yet to enact his rebellion and the warning involved Magnus bulldozing his way through every psychic ward protecting Terra from daemon invasion despite being ordered to not use sorcery at all, the Emperor understandably wasn't feeling very trusting of Magnus at the time.
• Complexity Addiction: A constant problem of his. Magnus has an issue where he isn't satisfied just winning, he had to prove his intelligence and skill. He comes up with complex plans to take a mile when he could've just been satisfied with the inch he obtained. Particularly when a more complex plan would give him a chance to show off his skill with sorcery.
• Deal with the Devil: The aforementioned deal with Tzeentch: he traded his eye to cure his Legion of the Flesh Change. Unfortunately, for him, Tzeentch was the one responsible for the Flesh Change to begin with, so all Magnus really accomplished was ending up deeper in the machinations of the Changer of Ways.
• The Dreaded: It doesn't come up often, but Magnus and his Legion provoked suspicion and fear even among fellow Astartes for their power and mastery of sorcery. Sanguinius acknowledges this in Fear to Tread when asked if there are any devils among the Primarchs, remarking they should meet his brother Magnus. This superstition directly led to the Council of Nikaea, an informal sanction of the Thousand Sons.
• Driven to Villainy: For all his arrogance, Magnus never wanted to betray the Emperor. Unfortunately, the machinations of Horus and the relentless attacks of the Space Wolves drove him to a point where giving himself to Tzeentch was the only option. Just as Tzeentch planned from the beginning.
• Evil Is Not a Toy: Jaghatai, Mortarion, Russ, Malcador and the Emperor himself all warned him of this when it came to his psyker powers. His refusal to listen sealed the Imperium's fate as much as Horus' betrayal.
• Fatal Flaw: Ultimately, his greatest flaw was his arrogance and the recklessness that led him to. He applied his gifts without thinking of the consequences. He sought knowledge of dark, forbidden arts despite his father's warnings. He tapped into chaotic forces because he believed that he could handle and control anything. He sought out places in the warp because he believed that only he and his Legion could lead humanity into it. It caused unnecessary disaster and it could be argued that Magnus did more damage to his father's plan than even Horus.
• The Friend Nobody Likes: Not to the level of Angron or Curze, but Magnus was generally seen as untrustworthy by many of his fellow Primarchs, due to the fact that he and his legion openly wielded their psychic powers with impunity. The Primarchs who hated psykers, especially Leman Russ and Mortarion, looked down on and despised Magnus.
• Genius Bruiser: All of the Primarchs were superhumanly strong and intelligent, but Magnus was particularly fond of intellectual and cultural pursuits. He also had strength lauded as rivaling Leman Russ'.
• Hypocrite: As Lorgar points out in Betrayer, Magnus has a tendency to criticize others for mistakes he himself makes consistently. Vulkan repeats this criticism when he faces Magnus near the climax of the Heresy.
• Informed Flaw: His widespread unpopularity amongst his brothers is repeatedly mentioned, but the only Primarchs who are explicitly shown to dislike him are Russ and Mortarion. On the other hand, he is the favorite brother of Perturabo, Lorgar, and Jaghatai Khan and he is shown to be at least friendly with Sanguinius and Fulgrim. If we add Horus (who buttered up every primarch), Magnus is liked by 6, which means that he is in fact among the most popular primarchs.
• Insufferable Genius: Magnus was possibly the most intelligent of the Primarchs, but was always convinced that he knew best and ignored advice from others. This arrogance made him far too reckless with his studies in sorcery and too eager to show off his power with spells instead of taking safer, less flashy options.
• Irony: Had he listened to the Emperor and stopped abusing sorcery, he would have been given a path to all the arcane knowledge he could ever want by being seated on the Golden Throne when the Emperor completed his Webway project. Unfortunately, his need to prove himself right lead to him ruining it all.
• It's All About Me: Magnus had a bad habit of getting lost in his personal feelings instead of looking at the bigger picture. The slaughter of Prospero only reached that point because Magnus was so wrapped up in his sense of guilt that he ignored the attempts Leman Russ made to have him surrender himself peacefully and deactivated his own planetary defenses without telling anyone else. His sons and citizens were slaughtered when the Space Wolves began their attack all while he sat in his chambers, wallowing in self-pity. When he finally decided to act as a ruler and defend his people, it was already too late to save Prospero. Even after all this, Magnus was unable to let go of his ego as he was convinced that he is the most important actor in the events of the Heresy.
• Literal Split Personality: Magnus "shattered" when he gave himself to Tzeentch. Innumerable fragments of his being were scattered throughout the Warp and real space. At least one of which merged itself with a Space Marine to form an entirely new entity who went on to become one of the first Grey Knights. Even after more than ten thousand years, Magnus still hasn't recovered all the pieces of his soul, and likely never will given that certain fragments of his soul were either killed by Imperial forces during the Heresy, melded with others to form new beings (like the aforementioned Grey Knight) who then died themselves, or willingly sacrificed themselves to impart knowledge to others (such as a fragment representing his love for his sons and homeworld that stuck around on Prospero after the Burning and got Jaghatai Khan up to speed on Horus' betrayal).
• Living Mood Ring: Well, Eye, singular. Magnus's remaining eye constantly changed colours, depending on his mood. Some of those colours don't exist in the mortal universe, having been drawn from the Warp...
• My God, What Have I Done?: When he realized that his attempt to warn the Emperor of Horus' coming treachery had doomed the Webway Project, removed his chance to gain the knowledge he wanted by being seated on the Golden Throne, and allowed daemons a direct portal to Terra, he was so stricken with guilt the he made no effort to defend Prospero when the Space Wolves came to punish him for it.
• Never My Fault: Magnus often refuses to take responsibility for the mistakes he makes, preferring to blame others for them. His lack of any kind of introspection or ability to accept responsibility not only led to damnation for both himself and his Legion but destroyed the Imperial webway project, which had catastrophic consequences for the Horus Heresy and the Imperium.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: Magnus encountered unexpected resistance when sending his psychic warning to the Emperor. Rather than consider the implications of this and trying another way, he pushed on until he broke through... and realized that he had just shattered the wards protecting the Imperial Palace and the Emperor's prototype Webway gate from a daemonic invasion. This not only caused mass death and destruction on Terra, but ruined the Emperor's attempt to free humanity from Warp travel and the need for the Astronomican. With the wards protecting Terra destroyed, the Emperor was forced to remain on the Golden Throne permanently to use his powers to manually keep the gate closed. Arguably, that one act did more damage to humanity's future than anything else in the Heresy.
  • Years before that, Magnus received a vision of Horus' upcoming betrayal after the Trial of Nikea. Instead of warning the Emperor in private there and then, he chose to withhold the information on the assumption that he could save Horus himself and prove to the Emperor that his psychic powers were too valuable to ban. Naturally, his attempt to influence Horus not only failed miserably, but doing so alerted him that Magnus knew too much to be left alive and gave him ample time to arrange Prospero's doom. Instead of realizing he had bitten off more than he could chew and finally warning the Emperor conventionally, Magnus doubled down and tried an even more powerful and dangerous spell to reach the Emperor which would spell doom for humanity's future.
• No Infantile Amnesia: Through his psychic link with the Emperor, Magnus was aware of himself and his purpose even while he was still in his development chamber. Unlike his brothers, he clearly remembers everything from before he was technically even "born".
• Odd Friendship: Magnus is perhaps one of the few that truly connected with three Primarchs that were known for not being the most beloved: Jaghatai, Lorgar, and Perturabo.
  • Jaghatai and Magnus liked each other specially for the mutual respect that each showed to the other; the White Scar was not afraid of psykers and was willing to help the formation of the Librarius (alongside Sanguinius), while Magnus actively tried to understand the sons of Chogoris instead of treating them like simple barbarians (which is one of the main reasons the White Scars stay away from the Imperium).
  • Lorgar was the most pious of the Primarchs, and showed some contempt for war in general. Magnus took pride in his warcraft and he eternally sought knowledge. What is interesting is that though Magnus himself did not believe in gods, the fact that he tried to understand cultures and also answer the questions of the universe only helped Lorgar become fond of him, since both of them sought the same thing, but their answers came from different places. They would spend time together discussing philosophy after their first meeting.
  • Magnus was one of the few Primarchs who actually treated Perturabo with respect and the two shared a love of learning and esoteric lore. Magnus was also one of the only Primarchs who knew of and admired Perturabo's talents for engineering, as most others simply thought of him as a master of siegecraft.
• Out-Gambitted: Trying to out-scheme the universe's greatest Chess Master is generally a bad idea, as Magnus eventually finds out.
• Papa Wolf: What finally drove him to fight Leman Russ when he initially was resigned to allow himself to be killed out of guilt was hearing the suffering of his Legion in the battle. He rejected a Last-Second Chance from the Emperor as it would require him to let his remaining sons be purged for their Chaos corruption. His love for his sons made him an easy target for Tzeentch's manipulation.
• Person of Mass Destruction: All of the Primarchs could slaughter countless Space Marines in combat and even take on vehicles and win. Magnus could incinerate enormous Titans with psyflame, raze the surface of planets, and bring nightmares to entire worlds as a side-effect of his power.
• Psychic Link: According to him, he never lost contact with the Emperor as they shared a link since he was still in his development tube.
• Redemption Rejection: When Magnus confronted the Emperor during the Siege of Terra, the Emperor offered Magnus full forgiveness for his crimes and a place at his side sitting on the Golden Throne to guide humanity into the future. All he would have to do is allow the remaining members of his legion to be put to death for their Chaos corruption. Magnus briefly considered before rejecting the offer out of love for his sons.
• Tragic Villain: Magnus had nothing but the best of intentions, but Tzeentch and his own arrogance led him into damnation. He attempted to warn the Emperor of Horus' corruption, but accidentally destroyed his father's Webway project in the process. When Leman Russ and the Space Wolves came to capture the Thousand Sons in response after some changed orders from Horus, Magnus actually disabled Prospero's defenses and was prepared to accept his fate. It was only the sight of his sons being massacred that drove him to desperately accept Tzeentch's bargain, sending him spiraling into villainy believing his father had responded to an attempt to warn him of Horus' betrayal by ordering the eradication of the Thousand Sons.
• Unskilled, but Strong: On the tabletop, Magnus has high strength and toughness, even for a Primarch, which is practically his only asset in hand-to-hand combat. He can also bolster it with biomancy, but that just boils down to making himself faster and stronger. His low Weapons Skill and lack of any particular rules that make him good at it still lead to him losing to most other Primarchs in close quarters. His in-lore losses to Leeman Russ and Vulkan, two of the most best physical fighters among the brothers, are both noted to be partly due to this lack of skill on Magnus' part.
• Unwitting Instigator of Doom: Second only to Horus among the traitor Primarchs when it comes to this. His attempt to warn the Emperor of Horus' betrayal destroyed the Emperor's prototype Webway gate, shattering the wards protecting Terra from a daemonic invasion, and opened a permanent Warp Rift right in the heart of the Imperial Palace. The Emperor was forced to stay on the Golden Throne indefinitely to keep the new portal closed. The Custodes and Sisters of Silence entered the new rift to contain the daemons crossing over, only succeeding after the two vast majority of both elite forces were killed in the struggle. In one move Magnus accidentally removed the Emperor, most of the Custodes, and nearly all of the Sisters of Silence from play for the rest of the Heresy. More importantly, the destruction of the unfinished Webway Gate ruined the best chance humanity had to free itself from reliance on the Warp. The fallout of Magnus' misguided act would haunt humanity for more than ten thousand years to come.
• Unwitting Pawn: Tzeentch and Horus played him like a fiddle.
• Warrior Poet: His ultimate ambition was to bring intellectual enlightenment to the galaxy through military conquest.
• World's Strongest Man: Magnus' physical strength was incredible even among his brothers and his psychic powers second only to the Emperor himself. When he and Leeman Russ had their fateful battle, Russ only won with the aid of nearly all the Imperium's elite anti-psyker forces backing him up. In a later battle, Vulkan was only able to defeat Magnus on Terra by exploiting his immortality to withstand blasts that would have killed anyone else several times over.
• You Cannot Grasp the True Form: In Betrayer, Magnus, like his father, is said to be so psychically powerful that most observers see his features constantly shift and change as their minds struggle to process his psychic presence. The only constant between observers is that he always has only one eye.

Current

At the end of the 41st Millenium, Magnus and his renewed Legion launch an attack on the Fenris system while the majority of the Space Wolves were dispatched across the galaxy. Although he is rejected back into the Warp by Logan Grimnar, Magnus successfully sacrifices the planet Midgardia and lays waste on the entirety of the Fenris system. Moreover his sorcerous rituals allow Magnus to transport Sortiarius, the Planet of Sorcerers, near Prospero and create a gigantic Warp-rift in the galaxy.

Magnus then assaults Roboute Guilliman's Terran Crusade which is en route for Terra. He manages to trap the whole Crusade in the Maelstrom and Kairos Fateweaver temporarily imprisons Guilliman. However, the Crusade escapes thanks to the Harlequins and Cypher's Fallen, and Magnus follows Guilliman through the Webway up to Luna, where he battles his brother. Reinforcement from Terra allow Guilliman to win and Magnus is repelled into the Webway, his revenge denied.

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• Affably Evil: Ten millennia later, and Magnus have shown enough maturation to forgive Ahriman's folly. Whilst not an absolute saint (Look at the Wrath of Magnus event as an example), compared to the gallery of deranged, violent and psychotic man-children that comprises the Traitor Primarchs, Magnus the Red is the most level-headed of the bunch.
• Arch-Enemy: To Leman Russ and the Space Wolves, which has led to Magnus trying to invade Fenris many times. Though he has yet to destroy the Wolves, he has always managed to cause them permanent damage each time, such as robbing them of the chance of ever making successor chapters and destroying the cure for the Curse of the Wulfen. Wrath of Magnus has him essentially pull a reverse-Prospero on them, unleashing a full-assault on the Wolves' home planet of Fenris with both his Legion and their daemons that cripples them so bad that they need to unleash the Wulfen to turn the tide. This in turn causes the Inquisition and Grey Knights to come and wipe out most of the planet's population due to seeing the daemons in question and the Wulfen, leaving the Space Wolves in serious danger of dying out in the near future.
• The Archmage: Magnus was an incredibly powerful and gifted psyker, with only the Emperor (and maybe Malcador) as his betters, and this is translated in gameplay to a very impressive psychic output: he knows all powers in the Dark Hereticus discipline, receives a +2 bonus to casting as well as a much more powerful version of the ubiquitous Smite power.
• Batman Gambit: In Wrath of Magnus, he used one of these in order to get Sortiarius, The Planet of Sorcerers, into the material realm. By making the Inquisition and Grey Knights pull off a purge on Fenris after the populations had been exposed to the powers of the Warp, they unknowingly fulfilled an important part of a ritual that the Thousands Sons had put in place.
• Being Evil Sucks: Magnus originally never meant to betray the Emperor, and he's fully aware that Tzeentch played him. He only pledged his soul to Tzeentch to save his Legion which resulted in the return of the mutations he fought so hard to prevent. He's resentful of Tzeentch and his position as a Daemon Prince but he's equally as bitter towards the Emperor and the Space Wolves for their perceived betrayal.
• Benevolent Boss: Even as a Daemon Primarch, Magnus is surprisingly chill. Whilst he did snap at Ahriman, his anger was well justified given that Ahriman conducted the Rubric without consulting him and ended up turning 90% of his legion to dust. And even then, Magnus eventually forgave Ahriman for his faults. This also extends to not just the Thousand Sons mind you. His new min-empire New Kingdom, remains one of the most developed and stable territories of Chaos despite the fact that his patron diety is the God of Chaos itself, especially when you compare to the external strife of Mortarion's Scourge Stars and Perturabo's defunct Empire of Iron. It is telling that, when Magnus first proclaimed a psychic beacon to the galaxy during the Psychic Awakening, countless of Imperial psykers immigrated to Sortiarius by their own volition.
• The Big Guy: Some depictions have him as tall as 5 metres, which is more than twice the size of a normal Space Marine (and this is BEFORE his turn to Chaos). Recent material seems to have him sized much closer to his peers. The novel Battle of the Fang has him be on par with Bjorn the Fell-Handed's Dreadnought^note The model of Dreadnought Bjorn uses is 3.7 meters tall size-wise, as they fight hand-to-hand on an even playing field. Still much taller than a Space Marine, and his peers, but not ridiculously so. By the 41st millennium, however, his daemon form is the size of an Imperial Knight.
• Big Red Devil: He was already red-skinned and very large in his human form, but his daemon body not only made him even bigger, but added horns, claws, and wings to really tie the image together.
• Cyclops: Played with. Magnus only has one eye. Early depictions of him claimed he was born this way, while more recent lore explains that he originally had two eyes but gave one to Tzeentch in return for a stop to the rampant mutations of his legion. In-game, Forge World's model of Magnus has him missing his right eye, while GW's Daemon Primarch Magnus model has three face options, two normal faces which are missing the right eye and a third which is the typical single-eyed Cyclops face.
• The Dog Bites Back: Throughout the years he has often struck at the Space Wolves on their homeworld in revenge for Prospero. Wrath of Magnus saw him unleash the big guns and give the Wolves a taste of what it was like for him when they invaded his planet.
• A Father to His Men: Seems to be one of the few Traitor Primarchs who still cares about his Legion to an extent, as shown with his rage against Ahriman about turning most of the Legion accidentally to dust, and even thousands of years later he seems to have settled that rage down enough to welcome him back into the Legion as a Son, as shown in Wrath of Magnus.
• Feathered Fiend: His Daemon form takes on many avian features like those of a Lord of Change including huge avian wings, but still remains highly humanoid in shape in comparison.
• Horns of Villainy: Magnus' Daemon Primarch form keeps the long horns on his armor's chestplate, and he also has huge horns on his brow.
• Magic Knight: In-game, along with his formidable psychic abilities, Magnus is very dangerous in melee, partly for his stats and partly because of the special abilities of his attacks, one of which can turn slain enemies into Chaos Spawn.
• Magnus Means Mage: A fitting name for an extremely powerful sorcerer.
• Misplaced Retribution: Even though Magnus knows for a fact that it was Horus rather than the Emperor who ordered Leman Russ to burn Prospero, he still actively seeks revenge against the Space Wolves and the Emperor instead of Horus' heirs in the Black Legion. During the Terran Crusade he swears revenge against Roboute Guilliman who had nothing to do with the Burning of Perspero - he just figures that because Russ and the Emperor aren't around he'll take revenge by proxy on Guilliman instead.
• Mr. Fanservice: Probably unintentional, but it's possible to assemble his mini with little or no armor, showing off his sculpted muscles.
• Morph Weapon: The Blade of Magnus can change its form at the merest whim of its wielder. This mutagenic ability can also affect those struck by the mighty weapon, mutating them into hideous Chaos Spawn, represented in the 8th Edition rules by allowing the Thousand Sons player to deploy a new Chaos Spawn model close to Magnus whenever he kills a Character with the Blade.
• Mythical Motifs: His overall appearance is symbolic on many levels:
  • First off, he is associated with the colour red. That'd be odd considering that this colour is associated with Khorne rather than Tzeentch in the universe, but if you consider that Magnus comes from an Egyptian-like planet, it all makes sense: in Ancient Egypt, red was the traditional colour of the god Set, the desert (which is what his homeworld became) and chaos.
  • Second, he is one-eyed. Some art depicts him with a single eye in the middle of his forehead like the Cyclopes, but most depictions show him as blinded in his right eye, Odin-style. Much like Odin, Magnus has sacrificed much to attain wisdom, and though not a trickster god like Odin, he does serve one. As the Norse-themed Space Wolves are the mortal enemies of Magnus and his Thousand Sons, this is, in a way, ironic.
  • Finally, being red-skinned, one-eyed, and physically imposing despite being a cerebral villain first and foremost is how Islamic eschatology describes the Dajjal. With how much the lore of the Thousand Sons is rooted in Middle Eastern culture, this is entirely appropriate.
• Psychopathic Manchild: Downplayed compared to other examples like Perturabo or Fulgrim, but very much there. Because the Emperor and Leman Russ themselves aren't around his idea of "revenge" seems to be indiscriminately throwing a millennia-long Suicidal Cosmic Temper Tantrum by laying waste to everyone and everything associated with them. Essentially this means entire Imperium, regardless of whether or not his victims were involved with the wrongs committed against him or the Burning of Prospero in the first place. He attempts revenge on Roboute Guilliman's Terran Crusade for this reason despite Guilliman having never done anything to Magnus beyond suggesting that he should have been less reckless with his psyker powers. He does show some self-awareness from time to time but also acknowledges that since he's forfeited his soul to Tzeentch, it's too late — so he may as well burn the galaxy along with his perceived enemies.
• Revenge Before Reason: Since becoming a daemon, Magnus has been obsessed with taking revenge for every wrong, real or perceived, ever committed against him and his Legion. He's been plaguing the Imperium and galaxy as a whole for thousands of years, not caring if the victims had any responsibility for or even knowledge of his initial grievances or the innumerable offenses he commits in the process. As far as he's concerned, his revenge will never be complete until everything even tangentially associated with his ancient enemies is destroyed.
• Tome of Eldritch Lore: The Book of Magnus is the Crimson King's masterwork, a book of forbidden lore that originally compiled the knowledge of human and xenos psychic abilities encountered during the Great Crusade. Since Magnus' elevation into a Daemon Primarch, his great book has also undergone its own changes, its text shifting as if alive and the pages increasing in number as if it continues to absorb knowledge.

Horus Lupercal, Primarch of the Luna Wolves and the Sons of Horus

Top: Horus during the Great Crusade.
Bottom: Horus after his fall to Chaos.

Some call me Traitor and Heretic, but it is my destiny to rule the stars in the name of Humanity. Am I not the greatest of the Primarchs? The Emperor's first and most favoured son? Am I not therefore his chosen one? It is my right to rule, by natural law of succession, and by right of arms earned on a thousand battlefields.

Horus Lupercal was the first Primarch to be recovered, and for many years enjoyed a privileged position as the Emperor's only son. The two forged a close bond on the battlefields of the Great Crusade, and though other Primarchs were eventually found and Horus rejoiced each time he was reunited with a brother, he always strove to remain the Emperor's favored servant.

The glorious accomplishments of his Luna Wolves during the Ullanor Crusade earned them the right to be renamed the Sons of Horus, and their Primarch was elevated to Warmaster and given command of the Great Crusade while the Emperor returned to Terra. Horus was a tactical prodigy, master diplomat, and strategic genius, employing other Space Marine Legions the way lesser commanders would deploy squads, utilizing the Primarchs' skills to the fullest and even encouraging their rivalries so they would try to outdo each other. Perhaps Horus secretly quaked under this awesome authority, or his power may have led to dangerous hubris. Maybe Horus resented the way the Emperor claimed credit for his victories, or was worried about the fate of the Space Marines after the Great Crusade was over.

After the unthinkable occurred and Horus was gravely wounded on the world of Davin, the Primarch was taken to a primitive warrior-lodge for healing rites that were in fact a Chaos ritual. When the ordeal was over, Horus emerged changed by the visions he had experienced, and incorporated such lodges into his own legion, spreading the taint even further. Horus revealed his true intentions in the Isstvan system, first virus-bombing a rebelling planet and purging the loyalist elements from the legions he commanded, then setting a trap for the Imperial forces sent to bring him to justice. Horus was able to lure fully half of the Space Marine Legions and large elements of the Imperial Army and Adeptus Mechanicus to his cause, thus setting into motion the Horus Heresy, the most terrible conflict in Imperial history.

In the end, Horus and his followers marched on Terra and laid siege to the Imperial Palace, but with loyalist reinforcements en route, Horus risked all in one last gamble. He lowered the shields on his flagship, daring the Emperor to teleport over and face him in battle. He slew his brother Sanguinius and mortally wounded his father, only to regain enough clarity to realize what he had done, begging the Emperor to destroy him once and for all. With his death, the traitors fled in disarray, the Heresy was ended, and the Imperium's grim fate was sealed.

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• The Ace: He was charismatic, a military genius, a genuine people-person, and the only one (besides Sanguinius) who could get along with most of the other Primarchs. He was the first Primarch to be discovered, and was the Emperor's favourite. Many called him the Heir to the Emperor, and he had the most experience out of all the Primarchs. Being named Warmaster only fed his massive ego, at the same time that the Emperor's perceived abandonment wounded it. All the Chaos Gods had to do was convince Horus that he was the only one who could save the galaxy from the Emperor's tyranny.
• All for Nothing: Everything he did and sacrificed in his fall to Chaos was to prevent the vision he was given where he was erased from the history of the Imperium. It happened anyway.
• Ambition Is Evil: He is said to have inherited the Emperor's ambition, and Horus was driven to be the best and most successful Primarch. After his fall, his ambition became to destroy the Emperor.
• Bald of Evil: He has a shiny dome, and he's a primarch and Imperial Warmaster who later betrayed the Imperium to become an agent of Chaos Undivided.
• Be Careful What You Wish For: Horus' greatest fear was that his achievements would be forgotten. Now, he's the most infamous traitor in galactic history...for those who even know the story of the Horus Heresy. Thanks to the Imperium's efforts to erase the Traitor Primarchs from history, Horus' worst fear came true and he somehow simultaneously got what he wanted in the worst possible way.
• Beware the Superman: Horus didn't want to give up the Primarchs' authority to the Terran High Lords who he regarded as inferior because they were normal. He wanted to guide and protect humanity but didn't want to be beholden or accountable to it. Ironically, on this one point, most loyalist marines would agree with him.
• Butt-Monkey: The Chaos Gods tricked Horus into betrayal and death. His body and soul were destroyed. The vast majority of his own sons have rejected him as a failure, to the point that Abbadon uses his cloned skull as a drinking mug. His name is forbidden to be spoken and when it is, it's a curse.
• Carry a Big Stick: His Worldbreaker power maul served as both a signifier of his status as warmaster and as a weapon.
• Deader than Dead: The Emperor didn't just kill Horus, he destroyed his mind and soul, preventing the Chaos Gods from resurrecting him. The closest anyone's come to doing so was when Fabius Bile cloned Horus' corpse, but Abaddon put an end to that.
• Deadly Gaze: When Ollanius Pius (or, according to subsequent retcons, a nameless guardsman or an Imperial Fists Space Marine / Custodian Guardsman) defiantly interposed himself between Horus and the mortally wounded Emperor to defend the latter, the Daemon Primarch flayed him into nothingness in the spot with a single look that was charged with his psychic might. The ''Horus Heresy" novels imply this is a corruption of how he killed the Custodian Guard Calcaetus Dusk, who was blast by chaos energy emanating from the Eye of Horus on the Warmaster's armor - and even that didn't kill him, as he got back up and had to be erased from existence by Horus uttering every name that Dusk had ever possessed..
• Deal with the Devil: He pledged himself to all four Chaos Gods to gain their power. According to Lorgar, parts of his soul were still in the Warp, serving each of his new masters at the same time. In exchange, he gained the power to rival the Emperor himself, at the cost of his mind and very soul.
• Don't Call Me "Sir": During the Crusade he made a point of expressing distaste for formalities and groveling, preferring to speak with his men and even normal humans as plainly as possible. He would often begin assemblies with lighthearted, relatable jokes about the nuisances of bureaucratic nonsense, then promptly urge his prostrated men to stand at ease. Of course, it's said everything Horus does he does deliberately, so he likely uses this persona to endear himself to others and manipulate them.
• Divine Right of Kings: As the Emperor's most prestigious son, Horus believed that only he had the right to political and military authority over the Imperium. This is why he looked down on the Terran High Lords, being normal humans compared to the Primarchs.
• Dying as Yourself: Horus' final moments saw him regain his sanity, shed a single tear, and beg the Emperor to kill him before the Chaos Gods could reassert their control, as he was far too weak to do it himself by that point. The Emperor obliged him, obliterating his essence physically and from the Immaterium to grant Horus the release of death without the possibility of the Chaos Gods reviving him as a daemon prince or torturing his soul for eternity.
• Evil Counterpart: To Sanguinius, the other most respected and adored Primarch, also considered as a potential successor to the Emperor, and they sort of killed each other.
• Evil Is Not a Toy: Despite not fully trusting the Chaos Gods, Horus was confident enough to ally with them thinking that he could use the Ruinous Powers rather than the other way around. He was proven very wrong — despite being one of the more relatively stable traitor Primarchs throughout the Heresy the Chaos Gods gradually corrupted him to the point where he was a walking tear of Warp energy by the duel with the Emperor. He only had a few moments to realize in horror what he'd done when the Emperor fatally wounded him.
• Eye Motifs: Horus has among his most known symbol the eye. He is nicknamed "The Eye of Terra" and his armor sports an impressive number of decorative eyes.
• Face–Heel Turn: The brightest hope of all humanity since the Emperor, beloved by all of mankind, a peerless warrior and brilliant diplomat. Then when on the verge of death, he's shown a grim, dark future where his father is worshiped as a god and he and his fellow Primarchs are nowhere to be found. This, combined with his pride and ambitions, leads Horus to rebel against his father, plunge the galaxy into a horrific war, and ultimately bring about exactly the future that he saw.
• Faceless Eye: His sigil was a red eye with a slit pupil called the Eye of Horus.
• Fantastic Racism: Horus didn't want to be Demoted to Dragon, under the charge of the Terran High Lords, whom he considered inferior because they were just normal humans. At the same time he was also willing to negotiate with the Interex (which cooperated with Xenos) rather than exterminating them, so he was more open minded then Ferrus Manus and Fulgrim.
• Fatal Flaw: Horus above all else wanted glory. His fall began with Chaos' agents appealing to his ego. He ended up demonized and erased from history because of his traitorous acts against the Emperor and the Imperium.
• A Father to His Men: Not uncommon among the Primarchs, but Horus in particular saw the strategic advantage of being beloved by his legion. He made a point to personally address their concerns and forgive their follies in person, and often joked and chatted with his officers and advisors like equals. Those closest to Horus knew that this was most likely just to earn trust and command respect more effectively than by bullying or being professional.
• Fur and Loathing: The man wore as many wolf pelts as he did power armor.
• The Friend Nobody Likes: Ironically, despite being so beloved during the Great Crusade he became this during the Heresy among the other traitors. It's worth remembering that all of the other traitor Primarchs had their own agendas and none followed Horus out of any real loyalty. Lorgar had already turned to Chaos and most of the other Primarchs saw joining Horus as an alliance of convenience at best or a way to get back at the Emperor for wrongs both real and perceived. Magnus originally didn't even want to join Horus, only doing so after being manipulated. By the Siege of Terra Lorgar attempted unsuccessfully to overthrow Horus as leader of the Traitors, and Perturabo was so fed up with Horus' leadership that he took the Iron Warriors Legion and abandoned the fight altogether. It's telling that none of them are particularly saddened that Horus is gone after his death as much as irritated that they came as close as they did to defeating the Emperor.
• Glory Seeker: Horus lived for glory, largely to remain the favoured son.
• Glory Hound: Another interpretation of Horus, especially when it comes from the perspective of Corvus Corax. After the incident of Gate 42 where the two Primarchs nearly clashed due to Horus using Corvus' Terran-born legionnaires as cannon fodder before swooping in to take the credit, Corvus immediately deduced that Horus was not what he seemed from his fame. This incident plus Horus' own abrasive attitude sent the mother of all redflags to Corvus, who felt increasingly unnerved at the prospect of Horus gaining too much power which will snowball a positive feedback loop of more victories = more glory to feed his immense ego = more incentive to glory steal = feed his ambition to gain more power for more victories. To this day, Corvus remained the only person who foresaw that giving a person like Horus the title of Warmaster was stepping into a cliff of catastrophe.
• Hated by All: After the Heresy's ultimate failure and his death, he's almost universally hated and scorned. The Imperium regards him as the ultimate traitor, while most Chaos Space Marines regard him as a weak fool who choked when he was on the cusp of victory.
• Heel–Face Door-Slam: Just before his death, the Chaos Powers abandoned Horus, letting him return to sanity and realize what he had done. The Emperor is said to have recognized this, but proceeded to kill him anyways to be absolutely certain the taint of Chaos would be destroyed. It's also said that Horus wanted this and welcomed it.
  • In the brief moment after being struck with the Emperor's spear by Russ, Horus was freed from the influence of Chaos. Russ offered to bring his brother back to Terra to stop this war. Horus refused and chose to continue his rebellions of his own will.
• The Heretic: The Heretic of 40K 'verse, that the civil war that tore The Imperium was called Horus Heresy.
• Hero Killer: Horus took out both the Emperor, which plunged the Imperium into its current downward spiral, and Sanguinius, who was the one who could have saved it.
• Humanoid Abomination: By the end of the Siege of Terra, Horus was so filled with the power of Chaos that he was less of a human, and more of a walking tear in the Warp. The only reason he didn't transform into a daemon prince there and then is because the Chaos Gods needed his body to remain on the material plane so they could use it as a host to kill the Emperor. It has been said that had he succeeded in killing the Emperor, Horus may well have consumed the souls of those on Terra and ascended to become a Chaos God in his own right.
• Informed Ability: He is continuously called the most charismatic Primarch, but we see pretty much nothing of this. It's constantly a Take Our Word for It situation, with his magnetic personality being shown from the third person.
• Malevolent Mutilation: A long-standing visual motif for Horus' heresy being quite a horrific thing is his heretic self having what resembles exhaust tubes running into his head and one of his nostrils◊.
• Manipulative Bastard:
  • Skilled at playing people, both mortals and even his fellow Primarchs. A good example is in Horus Rising when he has his Mournival harshly criticize an Imperial commander so he can take the guy's side, vicariously expressing his own displeasure and winning the general over at the same time.
  • Horus was able to personally talk over three Primarchs to his cause, playing to Fulgrim's perfectionism, Mortarion's hatred of tyrants and psykers, and Angron's old grudge.
  • It's thought that Horus spread Perturabo's legion so thin just to put stress on him, so that when Horus told him about a rebellion on his homeworld, Perturabo would snap and have no choice but to side with the traitors.
  • In some accounts, Horus tweaked the Emperor's orders to the Space Wolves from "apprehend the Thousand Sons" to "destroy the Thousand Sons," in order to drive Magnus the Red into the traitors' camp.
  • All of this being said, the only reason he was able to bring so many primarchs under his banner, is because many of them were already severily broken to begin with. It's not a coincidence that the ones he recruited were also the most mentally unstable.
• Master of All: Another reason he was so respected. Horus was somewhere between great and the absolute best at everything he did.
• Meaningful Name: Horus is the name of a heroic Egyptian sun god. Lupercal is a Roman celebration of triumph. Horus becomes the opposite of what his name suggests; a Fallen Hero who is reviled instead of celebrated.
  • Lupercal is also the name where Romulus and Remus were suckled by a she-wolf. Romulus started Rome by killing his brother. Horus triggered the end of the Imperium by killing his.
• Mercy Kill: Exaggerated when he's subjected to this by the Emperor. When Horus regains his sanity in his last moments, the Emperor obliterates Horus' very soul from existence so the Ruinous Powers can't resurrect him into their service as a daemon prince or torture his soul for eternity.
• More than Mind Control: The Chaos Gods did use their powers to slowly take control of Horus' mind, but they only got that far by preying on his pre-existing frustrations and desire for glory. Most of the atrocities he inflicted throughout the Heresy were done under his own will. It wasn't until the final stages of the Heresy that Horus was acting on their will above his own.
• Motive Decay: Started out as a Well-Intentioned Extremist out to save humankind from a future as an uncaring corpse-Emperor's slaves, but by the time he reached Terra he was out to tear down the galaxy.
• My God, What Have I Done?: In his last moments Horus' sanity was restored and he broke down in horror at the monster he had become. Knowing that he could never be forgiven and would never be free again, all he had left was to use this last moment of free will to beg his father for a permanent death. The Emperor would oblige his request.
• Negated Moment of Awesome: When Horus attempts a slow and dramatic coup de grâce on Sanguinius with Warbreaker, Horus' moment is interrupted by Sanguinius clawing at Horus' face–showing that The Great Angel was committed to at least slowing him down to the very literal end.
• Nemean Skinning: Horus wore a wolf pelt over his armor.
• Nice Guy: Before his fall to Chaos, he was The Paragon among the Primarchs not only for his martial ability, but his diplomacy and people skills. In addition, scenes in his perspective before his fall show that he actually believed others, even normal humans, deserved to be treated well.
  • When he led the Great Crusade after the Emperor, he sincerely believed that Humanity only needed to embrace Fantastic Racism out of necessity after the Age of Strife, and would be free to befriend and work with them again after the Imperium had managed to get on its feet, as evidenced how he initially treats the Interex. This puts him on a similar footing with the ancient humans from the Dark Age of Technology and the Federation.
• Not Brainwashed: After their battle which saw Horus temporarily purified of Chaotic taint, Leman Russ offered Horus the chance to come back to Terra and be forgiven for his crimes. Horus refused and told Russ in no uncertain terms that his problems with the Emperor were his own views rather than just the lies of the Gods. He would not stop until he had won this war for his own ambitions and freely chose to return to the thrall of Chaos to do it.
  • During the Siege of Terra, Perturabo and Abbadon plot to overthrow Horus after coming to believe that his callous disregard for his men's lives and seemingly suicidal strategies were signs that his Chaos corruption has made him too irrational to lead. When their plot fails, Horus reveals that he's not being controlled: he's fully aware of how wasteful he's being, but doesn't care how many of his men are slaughtered so long as it serves his goal.
• Only Sane Man: Especially towards the end of the Heresy, he was the only Traitor Primarch who wasn't slipping quickly into insanity and could keep everyone on his side together. Hence why the rebellion fell apart so quickly upon his death.
• Parental Favoritism: He was by far the Emperor's favourite son, largely because Horus was actually raised by Him.
• The Paragon Always Rebels: He turned against his father and took half His legions with him. Ironically, Horus thought the real Paragon was Sanguinius.
• Physical God: Horus practically became this after entering a warp gate in Vengeful Spirit. He could have become a god in the Warp but he came back to the material world with his new powers.
• Power Fist: The Talon of Horus, a power claw with integrated combi-bolter. After his death, Abaddon tore it from his body and made it his signature weapon.
• Predecessor Villain: The Big Bad of Horus Heresy, despite being killed long in the past of the main setting, Horus paved the way for the monstrous Abaddon, a big contender as part of the Big Bad Ensemble of the time proper.
• Redemption Equals Death: He realized in his final moments what he had done, and is said to have welcomed his death.
• Reptiles Are Abhorrent: Horus' armor was called "The Serpent's Scales". Appropriate for someone who shed his skin.
• Rule of Symbolism: Wolves are symbolic of teamwork and fine character, whereas snakes are often used as symbols of betrayal. At first the noble and distinguished warmaster Horus is associated with the glorious wolf, then once he turns traitor he becomes a cold-blooded snake.
• Sanity Slippage: As the Heresy went on and the Chaos Gods gained more influence over his mind, Horus' behavior became more irrational and less tied to reality. Horus would sometimes talk to Ferrus Manus' skull, ironically while also bemoaning the fact the brothers who sided with him weren't exactly paragons of sanity themselves. By the time of the Siege of Terra, Horus was completely delusional, acting as if he was dictating his actions to an imaginary remembrancer and only being vaguely aware of his surroundings. When he confronted the Emperor for their battle, Horus' mind was all but gone, consumed by the Chaos Gods.
• Satanic Archetype: Favored son of the God-Emperor, turned to darkness out of pride and jealousy, and turned a third of his hosts against his divine father.
• Self-Fulfilling Prophecy: Horus rebelled against the Emperor because he had a vision of a dystopian future where the Emperor is venerated as a god while he and other Primarchs were expunged from history. His rebellion resulted exactly in that.
• Straight for the Commander: A favored tactic by Horus.
• Surrounded by Idiots: Regarded many of the other Traitor Primarchs as "broken monsters", sometimes musing to himself that he wished he had the Loyalists for subordinates instead. Of course, it was the very fact that they were "broken monsters" that made it possible for Horus to recruit them, while the saner Primarchs remained loyal to the Emperor.
  "Strange is it not, that so many I wish beside me stand against me, while at my back are only the flawed and damaged. I am a master of broken monsters".
• Tragic Villain: It's easy to forget that Horus was tricked into turning against the Imperium. Despite the name of the Horus Heresy, it was really Erebus who was the true instigator of the great civil war by making Horus receive a vision of him and many of his brothers being forgotten by a dystopic Imperium which that led him down a rebellious path which that more or less caused that.
• Universally Beloved Leader: Before his turn, Horus was well-liked and had a natural talent for leadership. His brother Primarchs generally considered him first among equals and while a few were opposed to him becoming warmaster, none could deny his talent and all considered him a worthy leader.
• Un-person:
  • Attempted. It's no surprise that the Imperium would like to bury all accounts of the Arch-Heretic, though it hasn't been successful. Commanders still use the title Warmaster but are aware of its sordid history, the Ciaphas Cain books use expressions like "deader than Horus" and "Horus take the hindmost," and in Damnatus Wodan asks "where the Horus are we now?"
  • Ironically, the former Sons of Horus have embraced this as well. One of Abaddon the Despoiler's first acts when he took command was to destroy the Warmaster's corpse and stop its near-worship, then rename the force the Black Legion.
  • Loyalists within his Legion (for as long as they lasted) also rejected the Sons of Horus name and reverted to being the Luna Wolves to symbolize their rejection of everything about Horus.
• Unwitting Instigator of Doom: And how. His rebellion against the Emperor became a Self-Fulfilling Prophecy that resulted in exactly what he feared. Despite ultimately wanting the best for the Imperium he created with his father and brothers (initially), his actions doomed the galaxy to an eternity of war, misery and suffering.
• Unwitting Pawn: Despite instigating the Heresy and being propped up as the future leader of his faction's vision for humanity, Horus was ultimately nothing but a tool for the Chaos Gods. They used his arrogance and legitimate grievances with the Emperor to turn him into their puppet. Through him, they plotted to turn half of the Imperium's forces against their creator and doom humanity to a seemingly-irreversible dark age. As the Heresy went on, they gained more and more control over Horus' thoughts, convincing him that all the destruction and daemonic corruption he unleashed was his desire as they slowly erased everything but his desire for revenge. By the time of his infamous battle with the Emperor aboard the Vengeful Spirit, Horus was effectively being puppeteered by the Chaos Gods as a weapon to strike down their hated enemy. He finally realizes this in his last moments, recognizing that the Chaos Gods will let him kill his father, but only after allowing him to suffer a beating for rejecting their power to emphasize that they will not be denied.
• Villainous BSoD: Finally recognizes how far he had fallen in his final moments, and begs his father to kill him so that he will no longer be a tool of the Chaos Gods.
• "Well Done, Son" Guy: One of his greatest drives was to remain the favourite son and thus he did everything to please his father. When the Chaos Gods convinced him that the Emperor betrayed him, all that devotion became searing hatred.
• Well-Intentioned Extremist: He honestly believed that his actions were in the best interests of mankind as a whole. Unfortunately, the influence of the Chaos Gods slowly made him lose sight of this in exchange for far less noble intentions.
• You Are in Command Now: The Emperor gave him full command of the Great Crusade after returning to Terra. This would prove to be his greatest mistake.

Lorgar Aurelian, Primarch of the Word Bearers

The difference between gods and daemons largely depends upon where one is standing at the time.

Young Lorgar grew up on the feudal world of Colchis, a once-advanced culture that had regressed following the Age of Strife, until it was dominated by a priesthood called the Covenant that prophesied how a great leader would one day redeem them. Lorgar became a fiery preacher for the Covenant, but when he had visions of a golden savior coming to his world, he sparked a bloody schism by declaring that the old prophecy would soon be fulfilled. He was proven right a year after winning this holy war, when the Emperor arrived to accept Lorgar's oaths of service.

Lorgar was given command of the XVII Legion, the Imperial Heralds, whom he renamed the Word Bearers and joined the Great Crusade with zeal. He rooted out every trace of heresy on the worlds he conquered, taught their populations to venerate the Emperor of Mankind, and constructed grand cathedrals in his glory. These conquests were complete but slow, and the Emperor harshly rebuked the Word Bearers for their unwanted worship, destroying the temple-city of Monarchia, forcing Lorgar and his soldiers to kneel in its ashes, and ordering them to follow the Ultramarines' more secular example. His faith shattered, Lorgar sent his legion on a pilgrimage to Cadia, then entered the Eye of Terror in search of a meaning to his existence.

When he emerged, Lorgar preached a new faith, the Primordial Truth of the Gods of Chaos. For four decades the Word Bearers hid their new allegiance while subjugating worlds to the Dark Gods and spreading the taint of Chaos throughout the other Space Marine Legions. Once the Warmaster declared his rebellion and the Horus Heresy erupted, Lorgar took particular pleasure in ravaging the realm of Ultramar. After retreating to the Eye of Terror at the Heresy's end, Lorgar ascended to daemonhood, and it is said that his psychic birth-scream was one of triumphant vindication. He is content to contemplate the Primordial Truth from the daemon world of Sicarus, while his Word Bearers continue to preach the Word of Chaos and tear down the icons of the False Emperor.

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Historic

• 13 Is Unlucky: Ignoring the first lost primarch, Lorgar was the 13th confirmed Primarch to be discovered by the Emperor and the architect of the Horus Heresy.
• Admiring the Abomination: During the Heresy, Lorgar would observe the horrors of Chaos and daemons with religious awe.
• Break the Believer: Lorgar's faith was destroyed by the Emperor after the Emperor's forceful rebuke and humiliation of his entire legion in addition to the destruction of Monarchia, the crowning symbol of everything Lorgar had believed in.
• The Corrupter: Possibly the worst in human history. It was he and his Legion that started the Legions on their path to falling to Chaos.
• Dissonant Serenity: After discovering and embracing the Primordial Truth, Lorgar could be disturbingly blasé about the horrors of Chaos.
  Angron: Why did you steal [my ship's astropathic] choir? What happened to yours?
  Lorgar: They died.
  Angron: How did they die?
  Lorgar: Screaming.
• Even Evil Has Loved Ones: He seems to have genuinely cared for Angron, and was probably the only Primarch that Angron considered to be anything resembling a friend.
  Angron: If what you say is true, why save me?
  Lorgar: Why is that a question every one of our bloodline must ask in a disbelieving snarl? You are my brother. I would spare you any pain I can, and protect you from harm if I'm able.
• Evil Feels Good: After falling to Chaos, Lorgar abandoned his previous compassion and enacted innumerable atrocities in the name of his new gods with fanatical zeal and open sadistic glee.
• Failure Gambit: The attack on Calth was designed to be one. While Lorgar had the opportunity to potentially kill Guilliman, leaving him alive would cause him to draw the Ultramarines back to Ultramar and away from the fighting at Terra.
• Faith–Heel Turn: Being rebuked by the Emperor for his worship pretty much showed Lorgar that everything he'd believed in was a lie. Kor Phaeron and Erebus introduced him to some entities that not only welcomed such devotion, but rewarded it.
• Fatal Flaw: Lorgar was deeply religious and constantly sought a higher meaning to dedicate himself to. When his father rebuked and humiliated him, Lorgar turned to the Dark Gods.
• The Friend Nobody Likes: Lorgar considered himself a priest and intellectual more than a warrior; the other Primarchs agreed and even talked behind his back about having him and his legion censured, possibly even removed. His only real friend was the similarly-intellectual and philosophical Magnus, and strangely enough, with Leman Russ, who read some of his works and even vouched for Lorgar when the Emperor considered having him removed from the Crusade in The First Heretic (at least, according to Magnus). This extended even after the Horus Heresy started, and the other traitor Primarchs were suspicious of his wholehearted embrace of Chaos. He later on befriended Angron as well.
• From Nobody to Nightmare: While he wasn't exactly a nobody, he and his legion weren't considered anything special and he himself was viewed as a weakling by his brothers for his reluctance at being a general. Suffice to say the fact that he ended up being the architect of the heresy was a surprise to pretty much everybody.
• Gameplay and Story Integration: Lorgar was reputed to be the weakest of the Primarchs before his turn to Chaos. This is reflected in-game by his model's pre-corruption form stats being weak enough that he statistically comes out on the losing end against his brothers (those that have rules, so far) by a wide margin, with the sole exception of Alpharius (to whom Lorgar still loses, albeit not badly).
• Gameplay and Story Segregation: On the other hand, if you play him in his post-corruption form (Lorgar Transfigured), he suddenly turns into an absolute nightmare in close combat, able to easily dispatch the mightiest of his brethren (Angron and Fulgrim, generally accepted to be two of the most ferocious close quarters fighters amongst the Primarchs, get taken apart by Lorgar and even Horus falls fairly easily).
• The Heretic: Although Horus is the trope codifier in-universe, unbeknownst to most is the fact that Lorgar was the original heretic Primarch, and it was through his manipulation that the Horus Heresy started.
• Jerkass Has a Point:
  • Lorgar has no reason to follow the Emperor since he himself said he was just a man. A man is corruptible and fallible. To Lorgar, the Emperor was just another tyrant.
  • After the razing of Monarchia, Lorgar pointed out that the Emperor had known that he and his homeworld had been worshiping him over a century before he decided to publicly humiliate and chastise him and his Legion for their beliefs. This is thrown into question when The Master of Mankind reveals that the Emperor told Lorgar to stop worshipping him multiple times before finally having Monarchia put to the torch.
• The Mole: For Chaos, spreading its taint and corruption within the empire to weaken and prepare it in advance for the coming Horus Heresy.
• Odd Friendship: He ends up becoming the only primarch that Angron likes. Yes, the most martial and least martial primarchs end up as friends.
• The Philosopher:
  • He was raised as a priest, and he was apparently very gifted at philosophy and was not afraid to ask questions. This led him to unusual and unorthodox (for his time) beliefs and practices. This did not endear him to many of the other very warlike and militant Primarchs, nor to the Emperor.
  • He's also THE philosopher for the Ecclesiarchy. His book, the Lectitio Divinitatus, is still used in the 41st millenium to justify the Emperor's divinity.
• Psychopathic Manchild: As another Primarch explains:
  Roboute Guilliman: He is so... changeable. He is so prone to extremes. Eager to please, so quick to take offence. He's so keen to be your best friend, and then, at the slightest hint of an insult, he's angry with you. Furious. Offended. Like a child.
• Rousing Speech: Though not the greatest warrior among the Primarchs, his fiery oratory could convert worlds to the Imperial (or heretic) cause better than any of his brothers. Ironically, he might have done more good as a leader in Imperial propaganda or even the diplomatic body rather than a soldier.
• Sorcerous Overlord: He did not have the raw psychic power of Magnus, but he was a master of Ritual magic. His in-depth knowledge and devotion to the Warp and the powers of Chaos made him far more able to wield the powers of Chaos in a profitable way without being totally screwed over (unlike Magnus).
• The Smart Guy: Of the philosophical variety. There is a reason why his books are still used after so many millennia.
• The Starscream: He tried and failed to usurp Horus right before the Siege of Terra after receiving a vision of his failure to conquer the Imperium. Luckily for him, Horus chose to only banish him rather than kill him outright.
• Took a Level in Badass: Lorgar was probably the weakest Primarch, until he embraced his psyker powers at the Drop Site Massacres and became someone able to go toe-to-toe with the likes of Corax or Guilliman. Similarly, his tabletop stats aren't too impressive (again, compared to other Primarchs), but he can be upgraded to Lorgar Transfigured, allowing him to abuse the Invisibility psychic power and become more or less unkillable.
• Troll: An exchange during the Battle for Calth.
  Lorgar: Have you lost your temper, Roboute?
  Guilliman: I am going to gut you.
  Lorgar: You have lost your temper.
• Unknown Rival: Guilliman had no idea just how badly Lorgar took the rebuke at Monarchia, and how far he would go to repay Roboute for this "insult."
• Warrior Poet: Lorgar was considered a Non-Action Guy because he'd rather pursue intellectual goals.
• Well-Intentioned Extremist: Lorgar believes Chaos is the only thing that can save Mankind from falling like the Eldar.
• You Have Failed Me: After Erebus and Kor Phaeron messed up the Battle of Calth, he refused to send them aid against the Ultramarine forces in hot pursuit.

Current

Lorgar has been relatively silent since the Horus Heresy, even if his Word Bearers are still very much active. He has isolated himself in his temple to meditate and work on spiritual pursuits. The only thing that has broken his meditation was a fight he had with Corvus Corax (which, while Lorgar survived, didn't go too well for Lorgar).

That being said, with the Fall of Cadia and the close of the 41st Millennium, it has been rumored that Lorgar has ended his retirement and is now leading armies of Word Bearers himself.

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• Carry a Big Stick: Lorgar's crozius, Illuminarium. Aside from a chaplain's badge of office, it made a perfectly serviceable bludgeoning weapon.
• Crown-Shaped Head: As a daemon prince, Lorgar now has horns on his head that make a crown-shape.
• The Fundamentalist: First for the Emperor, then for the Chaos Gods.
• Fully-Embraced Fiend: He was enthralled with the idea of Chaos even before becoming a daemon. Afterwards, what little restraint he still had was abandoned and he embraced enacting his sadistic, destructive nature on the universe. He's spent thousands of years ordering his men to inflict mass atrocities in his name and enjoying every minute of it.
• Irony: The religious doctrine he created about the Emperor is the basis of which the Imperial Cult is founded, meaning that the Imperium is designed around the teaching of one of its greatest traitors. Lorgar himself gets no joy from this, as he currently hates the Emperor and now views the Lectitio Divinitatus as an embarrassment.
• Greater-Scope Villain: He's actually the forefather of the modern Imperial Cult, and during the Great Crusade penned the Lectitio Divinitatus that argued the Emperor's divinity. Then he ended up working to corrupt his brothers into the worship of the Dark Gods, making him responsible for the faiths of both sides of the Horus Heresy.
• Light Is Not Good: Daemon Prince Lorgar is both depicted and described as having glowing golden skin.
• Orcus on His Throne: After ascending to daemonhood Lorgar isolated himself within the Templum Inficio on the Daemon World of Sicarus, leaving command of his Legion to a group of powerful Dark Apostles known as the Dark Council. With the opening of the Great Rift, this self-imposed exile came to an end and he has been witnessed leading a massive host of Word Bearers across the galaxy.
• Religion of Evil: Lorgar is passionately devoted to the worship of the Chaos Gods.
• Retired Monster: Since the Horus Heresy, he's been staying in his giant temple, the Templum Inficto, in devout meditation of Chaos. Somewhat Downplayed, as Lorgar hasn't entirely retired - he will rarely join his legion in battle, more frequently after Cadia's fall.
• Sacred Scripture: The Book of Lorgar fills this role for the Word Bearers.
• Tome of Eldritch Lore: The Book of Lorgar, which was penned by the Primarch himself, contains all sorts of information on daemon-summoning. One time a Loyalist scholar named Kyril Sindermann tried to translate the Book of Lorgar, which accidentally summons a daemon that destroys a huge portion of the library.

Alpharius/Omegon, Primarch(s?) of the Alpha Legion

The wise commander utilises his enemy's weakness even more than he utilises his own strength.

— Introit to the Principia Belicosa

The last of the Primarchs recovered, (suspect) sources claim that Alpharius was encountered near the end of the Great Crusade, leading a swarm of fighters and small attack craft that managed to entrap and board a Luna Wolves cruiser. Warmaster Horus led a relief effort, only to have his command ship similarly infiltrated, but a battle for its bridge ended the minute Horus and the invaders' leader got a good look at each other. Alpharius bonded with Horus over the coming months, and eventually was sent back to Terra to be formally received by the Emperor, but the Great Crusade was already in full swing and the two spent little time with each other before Alpharius was deployed to lead the XX Legion.

Aloof, secretive and subtle, Alpharius never revealed his homeworld (to say nothing of the existence of his twin brother Omegon), and had little interaction with other Imperial forces. He trained his Alpha Legion to be both tactically flexible and capable of using every advantage possible to achieve victory, and soon earned a reputation for leading intricate and unorthodox campaigns — tactics that clashed with Roboute Guilliman's efforts to codify "proper" warfare. It is thought that Alpharius' old bond with Horus is what influenced him to side with the traitors during the Horus Heresy, though as always Alpharius' true motives are shrouded in mystery. The Alpha Legion fought alongside the traitors at many key battles, but for the most part Alpharius pursued his own objectives, and seems to have gone out of his way to test his skills against other Space Marines.

After Horus' defeat, Alpharius was cornered on Eskrador by Guilliman and the Ultramarines. Though the loyalists were initially outmaneuvered at every turn, Guilliman eventually led a dangerous attack on the Alpha Legion's command center, where he allegedly struck down Alpharius in single combat. This had no effect on the Alpha Legion's performance, however, and the Ultramarines endured a week of guerrilla attacks and ambushes until they evacuated the battlefield and resorted to an orbital bombardment. The Alpha Legion continues to operate from cells hidden across the galaxy, and whether these forces are still following Alpharius' original objective is as much of a mystery as what that objective was.

Of course, all of this could be nothing more than Alpha Legion propaganda and misinformation...

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• A Form You Are Comfortable With: Like the Emperor, he can control how people see him.
• All for Nothing: His belief that the Imperium was running out of worlds to conquer and thus that he would never be given a chance to equal the other Primarchs was completely wrong. The Imperium is still finding new worlds to conquer over eleven thousand two hundred years later. The Emperor was simply wrong about how many habitable planets there were in the galaxy.
• Animal Motifs: The Hydra. Fitting, considering their command structure averts Decapitated Army. Cut off one head, two more will take its place and the Hydra comes back stronger than ever.
• Anti-Villain: Maybe. He had a secret meeting with the Cabal who told him that if the Emperor won the war then it would doom the Imperium to stagnation and eventually doom by the Chaos Gods, but if Horus won then it would lead to the destruction of both humanity and the Chaos Gods in only a few years. This led him to throw his lot in with Horus. Maybe.
• Always Someone Better: Alpharius seems to have felt this way about Roboute Guilliman. Guilliman's boast of having more victories than Alpharius would ever be able to achieve appeared to rankle Alpharius's pride.
• Can't Catch Up: Encountered almost 200 years after the start of the Great Crusade, Alpharius soon found that he could never hope to match the victory tally of some of his more accomplished brothers like Horus, Guilliman, or El'Johnson. Given that the Great Crusade was running out of planets to conquer, it seemed unlikely the Alpha Legion would ever match the accomplishments of the other legions. He decided to compensate by making every victory as dramatic as possible.
• Chessmaster: Alpharius has shades of this in that he likes elaborate planning with lots of nuance to it.
• Combat Pragmatist: Alpharius preferred subtlety and flexibility to his strategies and tactics, and believed in seizing every advantage possible so that his victory was inevitable. He does not shy from False Flag Operations and other dirty fighting tricks, to the point that Guilliman retreated with a statement that he has "no interest in righteous battle against such a dishonorable foe".
• Complexity Addiction: His Fatal Flaw. Perhaps due to an inferiority complex, but suggested to just be part of who he was, Alpharius was always determined to demonstrate himself to be the smartest person in the room. He repeatedly made battles far more complex than they had to be simply to show off to others in general and his brother primarchs in particular, and did not take it well when his brothers weren't impressed. Much like Magnus, Alpharius' absolute belief that he was smarter than everyone else led him to be Out-Gambitted on occasion to catastrophic results—and fatally so for Alpharius himself at Dorn's hands.
• Confusion Fu: Alpharius and Omegon center their strategies around confusing and disorienting their opponents at every turn. The main reason they disliked Rogal Dorn is because he was the one person who would always be able to see through their deceptions each time.
• Consummate Liar: Alpharius and Omegon thrive on obscuring the truth. They lie with incredible ease and muddle all evidence of their deceptions. They'll even outright tell their target that they're lying and just to turn around and give an equally plausible story without skipping a beat. Not even their superintelligent brother Primarchs with all the resources at their disposal can tell if anything involving Alpharius is what it seemed to be.
• Continuity Snarl: Perhaps fitting, given his/their penchant for screwing with people's heads, Alpharius became the subject of a number of these when Legion significantly rewrote his backstory, motivations, and gave him a twin in the form of Omegon.
• Diagonal Cut: Fell victim to one of these during his fight with Roboute Guilliman. It is said that the two approached one another and paused, saying nothing and seemingly communing silently. Then they both drew their blades and made a single cut; Alpharius fell a few moments later. Of course, the whole thing may have been made up by the Alpha Legion to sow misdirection, but it still makes for a cool story.
• Dramatic Irony: The traitor Primarch who specializes in deceit and subterfuge was also the Emperor's most trusted son and possibly still is.
• Failure Gambit: A weird version of this. Alpharius defects to Chaos, though still secretly works against them as a mole, because he is told that the Emperor's defeat would save the universe, whereas the Emperor's victory would ultimately hand the galaxy over to Chaos.
• Fatal Flaw: His need to prove himself the smartest person in the room. The Cabal and Chaos both found Alpharius ironically easy to manipulate because of it. Or he might never have truly turned in the first place, just to mess with everybody.
• The Friend Nobody Likes: Alpharius's choice of tactics earned him no small amount of scorn. Guilliman famously called them "a waste of time, effort, and the Emperor's bolt shells"; Dorn decried them as "unmanly" and claimed that the Alpha Legion were not fit to bear the Emperor's mark; Mortarion, Leman Russ, Magnus the Red, and even Konrad Curze similarly looked down on the Alpha Legion. Basically the only Primarch who didn't spurn Alpharius was Horus.
• Gameplay and Story Integration: In-game, Alpharius, despite his above-average points cost, is one of the weakest Primarchs and will lose in combat against all other Primarchs except Lorgar. Where he excels is in buffing his forces while messing around with the opponent. This is fitting with his personality, as he prefers to win by cunning over martial skills.
• Highly-Conspicuous Uniform: Though in many cases Alpharius would disguise himself as an ordinary Legionnaire, at times he took to the field in an elaborate suit of mastercrafted armor known as the Pythian Scales. Or rather, someone took to the field in the armor...
• Inferiority Superiority Complex: Alpharius and his legion are driven by a constant need to prove themselves to his brother Primarchs. Famously, Alpharius occasionally made missions more challenging by giving up tactical advantages (such as the element of surprise) in order to make his eventual victory that much more impressive. In a typical twist of fate for this universe, Alpharius' tactics only alienated his brothers further, especially Guilliman, who pointed out that those methods were needlessly complex uses of manpower and resources.
• Inferred Survival: Possibly. Imperial records indicate that Guilliman killed Alpharius, but given the latter's skill at deception and pulling off Twin Switches, this seems unlikely. And even if Alpharius was killed, this still leaves Omegon unaccounted for. To compound matters, Imperial historians, including the Ultramarines themselves, note that the records surrounding the event in question are suspicious. Some question whether it ever happened at all. The Horus Heresy novels simplify the issue somewhat, revealing that Alpharius himself was killed by Rogal Dorn during the Heresy and Omegon assumed his place and identity. According to Head of the Hydra, turns out Dorn killed Omegon and Alpharius is still very much alive... Maybe.
• Insufferable Genius: Alpharius was impressively intelligent even for a Primarch, but he was just as impressively arrogant about it. Most of his strategies were devised as a way for him to show off how clever he was when he could have won in far more efficient ways. Needless to say, his brothers were less than impressed with his wasteful methods, constant trickery, need for attention, and smug attitude.
• Literal Split Personality: After meeting each other for the first time, the twins theorize to themselves that they are the remnants of the original 20th Primarch who was somehow split into two people during their abduction into the Warp in infancy.
• Meaningful Name: Alpharius was the very first Primarch recovered. The guy the other Primarchs met nearing the end of the Great Crusade was Omegon.
• The Men in Black: Omegon and his Stealth units wear black power armor and act very much like this. He also has a suit of unpainted power armor worn by Malacador's Knight-Errant.
• Mind Screw: Due to XX Primarch(s) fondness for trickery, duplicity and obfuscation, no one really knows anything concrete about Alpharius/Omegon and they make sure it stays that way.
  I am Alpharius
  This is a lie

  opening lines of Alpharius: Head of the Hydra
• The Mole: Alpharius is supposedly one of these, having joined Chaos because he believed Horus's victory would doom humanity and save the rest of the universe, whereas the Emperor's victory would keep humanity around longer, but also allow Chaos to grow in power to the point of it consuming everything. Why the Alpha Legion is still pledged to Chaos after Horus's ultimate failure and death is anyone's guess. It's heavily implied Omegon abandoned this plan and began to aid Imperial forces while Alpharius was corrupted by Chaos.
• Mysterious Past: Alpharius was discovered attacking Horus' flagship as a pirate. All else of his past is unknown as he refused to ever talk about it. His book revealed a version of his past, but outright calls itself a lie.
• Out-Gambitted: Alpharius was outwitted and defeated by Guilliman (the most by-the-book Primarch) when the latter went against his instinct and used totally unconventional strategies to win.
• Pint-Sized Powerhouse: Relative to the other Primarchs at least. Whereas the "average" Primarch was roughly twice the size of a normal Space Marine, Alpharius and Omegon were only nominally larger, to the point where they could pass for normal Marines (and have larger members of their legion pass for them). They were still more than powerful enough to easily kill off Custodes in hand-to-hand combat and duel with their larger brothers.
• Riddle for the Ages: The only really concrete thing known about Alpharius and Omegon are their combat doctrine. Everything else, including their whereabouts and whether or not either of them is still alive, is up for debate.
• Self-Proclaimed Liar: Alpharius and Omegon loved to tell people that they were liars just to keep their targets confused and off-balance.
• Single-Minded Twins: Everyone who knows about them considers them this, including each other, but ultimately subverted as the Horus Heresy went on.
• Space Pirate: What Alpharius was before Horus found them. In The First Heretic, his pod is shown to have possibly ended up on a ship (it was too dark in the vision to tell). Whether he even has a homeworld or not is unknown, but his Legion was quickly bolstered from somewhere. In The Primarchs, Omegon had memories of "scheming their way to supremacy" on their distant homeworld, (probably) confirming that they did have one.
• Twin Switch: With each other and their entire Legion.
• Uncertain Doom: Roboute Guilliman killed him in a duel. Maybe. He hasn't been seen since at any rate. Then again, Alpharius was known for pulling off Twin Switches with various members of his legion, so it's unclear if he was actually the one that died (and the Imperium seems to assume he hasn't, just in case). And just to make things really confusing, the modern day Ultramarines have no record of this confrontation in their archives and some doubt that it even happened at all, indicating the whole thing might have been made up by the Alpha Legion and planted in Imperial records just to cause confusion.
  • Also, this piece of lore was written before Alpharius was given a twin in the form of Omegon. What, if anything, happened to Omegon is still not known.
  • Praetorian of Dorn seems to have settled some things. Alpharius was Killed Off for Real by Rogal Dorn in a battle on Pluto early during Horus' drive for Terra, prompting Omegon to take over his twin's identity. This 'Alpharius' was the one duelled by Guilliman... maybe.
• Undying Loyalty: The real Alpharius never turned traitor and is still fiercely loyal to the Emperor. Maybe.
• The Unfavorite: Alpharius was often perceived this way, due to being the last Primarch to be found (and, thus, having to measure up to his 19 "older brothers"). Horus took advantage of this by personally training him and, thus, earning Alpharius's loyalty.
• Unreliable Narrator: His book presents a version his and Omegon's past, but is written in first person and calls itself a lie several times making any information within suspect.
• Weak, but Skilled: Alpharius is the smallest and weakest Primarch in personal combat (besides Lorgar) but he is exceptionally cunning. In the game, most primarchs will utterly destroy him in close combat... but only if they can find him and reach him. Alpharius is quite well equipped for a primarch, able to infiltrate into other squads and appear out of nowhere, and he imparts a number of maluses on the enemy army just by being fielded.
• Why Don't You Just Shoot Him?: Justified in Alpharius' case. His Complexity Addiction led him to forfeit advantages and avoid the easy options for victory, deliberately making monolithic, intricate strategies to make his eventual victory all the more impressive.
• Wild Card: Alpharius and Omegon go out of their way to be as unpredictable to their allies as they are to their enemies. They can strike against their enemies with devastating tactics, then immediately act in a way that seems to sabotage their allies just as badly. All without warning and rarely with explanation. Even more rarely with a true explanation. It's next to impossible to say what they'll do or where their real loyalties lie at any given moment.

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