How to Read a Legion Dossier

VII and IV: both siege, different moralities (to hold or to break, gratitude or accounting). At Phall, Tallarn, the walls and in the cage they rhyme. V and XIV: the freedom of the wind against the survival of the poison; Khan and Mortarion say this aloud in the canon, and the map shows the Path of Heaven against the plague fleet. XVI and XIII: the spear’s point against the regulation-bound empire; Ullanor against Ultramar; Davin against Calth.

XIX and VIII: shadow as precision and shadow as terror — a similar instrument, a different object. XV and VI: Nikaea has already paired them. III and IX: perfection and the beautiful; one falls into sensation, the other into sacrifice. Do not compare the XX with anyone “head-on”: there is no honest column.

A practical gesture: two dossiers in a row, one theatre, one window of time. If a pair never met among the sides of a single event, the comparison is academic; make a note of that for yourself. The atlas does not draw a “ranking of primarchs”. It draws who stood with whom in one system at one time.

The III before the Laer and the III at the walls are different armies under one numeral. The XII before the mass implantation of the Butcher’s Nails and the XII after Nuceria — likewise. The XV before Prospero is a psychic Legion; after it, a shard of Tzeentch. The XIX before Isstvan V is the knife of the crusade; after, a wound. To read tactics as eternal is a mistake. Read the note on the switch and the window of time.

The loyalists drift too: the VII from “reserve of the crusade” to “garrison of the Palace”; the XIII from builder of an empire to underground Calth and to the Codex. On the map this is visible in a change of theatres, not in a change of paragraph. If another article refers to a dossier, read it twice: before the break and after.

A Legion’s colour on the map does not change saturation with corruption — corruption lives in the world statuses, not in the sigil. The sigil lies with its stability. Compensate with the window of time and the Legion’s fate. Notable warriors tied to events are the human scale of doctrine: Loken is the spear’s point that refused; Sigismund is the wall that went off on an eternal crusade; Khârn is the nail driven all the way home.

Astartes heads, estimates, without Titans, without the Excertus, without the Custodians. Orders of magnitude that can be used: the XIII is the largest (about 250 thousand, the best-supported of the “soft” figures); the IV is one of the largest (150–180 thousand by Forge World’s estimate); the XVII is very large (about 150 thousand); the VII is large, but its exact figure is not fixed; the V about 80 thousand — one of the smaller; the XIX about 80 thousand before Isstvan V and a few thousand after (4,724 as calculated from Journal Tactica, “less than three thousand” in the audio drama Raven’s Flight — the exact number is disputed); the XVIII brought almost everything to Isstvan, about 83 thousand, and lost almost all of them there.

Not to be used as a census: “113,000 Iron Hands” and “8,000 Thousand Sons”. The notes to the dossiers in the atlas say so directly — for the X the overall strength is disputed; for the XV there is no clear pre-Heresy figure at all, it is known only that on Prospero the Legion lost nine tenths of its strength. The notes to a line are part of the data, not a footnote for a pedant.

If you are building the conclusion “Horus had more bodies in 014”, check that you are not counting the III as a corps, nor the XII likewise, and that the IV is already on its way out. The sum of the traitor columns lies unless you weigh the type of formation. Doctrine matters more than the sum. This sentence is the whole article.

Take the XIII, XVII, XVI and their dossiers. 000.M31: the XIII and XVI are loyal and huge, the XVII is secretly the enemy. 007.M31, Calth: compare the XIII and XVII in the theatre of Ultramar — regulation against liturgy, not “250 against 150”.

014.M31: the XVI at the walls, the XIII late, the XVII without Lorgar as a front. Three frames, three doctrines, one war. Repeat with the VII, IV and XVI at Phall, Tallarn and the walls. Repeat with the V, XIV and XVI at the Path of Heaven and the Lion’s Gate. When the exercise settles in, the bestiary will end and the atlas will begin.

Books: the spine for the XVI, Know No Fear and “Betrayer” for the XIII and XVII, “Saturnine” for the VII, “Scars” for the V. Black Book I for the early orders of battle. If you want “who would win in a vacuum” — close the atlas, that is not its question. In a vacuum there is no orbit, no lodges and no Veridia. The Heresy does not happen in a vacuum. That is why the tactics in a dossier are always shorter than the event in which they met someone else’s tactics. Read the meeting.