[CJ95]

Most of my exposure to the Alpha Legion comes from various short stories and such.

Now while the tales a re fairly well written, I have quickly come to dread them for what I perceive to be a huge OP rendering of the Alpha Legion and everything associated with it.


I have no problem with a sneaky shadowy group that is always 2 steps ahead of their pursuers, but the way the Legion is portrayed its like they are 42 steps ahead of everybody else and have already plotted your downfall a thousand years before you were even born.

The investigators never even get slightly close to catching the bad guys because some lame off the wall plot point will always be pulled out at the last moment:

"You think you have us trapped? Ha ha...In actuality we infiltrated your daycare center back when you were a child and fed you explosive Gerber baby food timed to go off at this exact moment 70 years later...KA BOOM!"



"You think you prevented any leaks in your organization by trusting nobody but yourself? Ha Ha....we secretly infiltrated your dentist as a child and your tooth filling has been feeding us information for all this time!"


It gets pretty silly.:nono:

Anybody else feel this way?

 

[MidnightSun]

Yep. I absolutely hate the Alpha Legion; their writing is increasingly far-fetched and Mary Sue-ish, and their fanbase is one of the most obnoxious (lololol I am Alpharius everyone is Alpharius le epic plan lololol troll u so hard splinter AL fleet destroyed the whole space woof legion fleet trollolol you're Alpharius every random Forge World release is Alpharius fyreslayers are Alpharius aren't I funny isn't this meme still hilarious). You summed it up pretty much perfectly; they're just too good. They seem to have no real flaws and it turns out not revealing who any of the characters are and saying they're all just proxies for the real guys who may or may not exist has a major downside, which is that they have no character at all.

To be fair, I'm probably being harsh on them, it's just that their novel Legion also introduced the plot points of the Cabal and the Perpetuals which are a major part of what's absolutely killed the Heresy series for me.

 

[SoL Berzerker]

I wasn't really a fan as to how members of the Alpha Legion were able to deploy onto Istvaan V, find dead loyalists, steal their faces, and then infiltrate their legions. Any other infiltration scenario would have been okay, but that one in particular was too far out.

Like you said, I like the idea of the legion being expert chess players, but they are straight up on that Tzeentch level.

 

[hailene]

I wasn't really a fan as to how members of the Alpha Legion were able to deploy onto Istvaan V, find dead loyalists, steal their faces, and then infiltrate their legions. Any other infiltration scenario would have been okay, but that one in particular was too far out.

I was actually pretty okay with this. What I didn't like was how the legionaries were left in the dark why they were betraying the Emperor. They seemed okay to follow Alpharius into whatever scheme he wanted...completely different from Abnett's warrior-philosophers we see in Legion.

I liked the Alpha Legion as they were willing to go against their own desires (serving the Emperor) for the greater good. Instead we're left with a bunch of drones following the orders of their primarch.

I also would like if some of these well-thought plans just blow up in their face. Maybe it does happen but we're not told...but I'd love to see a plan 500 years in the making just go balls up and they hit the panic button and pretty much leave the scene as quickly as they can.

Just like everyone else, they can be successful most of the time...just not all the time!

Also I believe the Hunt for Voldorius is a piece of Alpha Legion propaganda to make them look like generic Chaos followers to lower the guard of their enemies. It was terrible.

 

[Nordicus]

"You think you have us trapped? Ha ha...In actuality we infiltrated your daycare center back when you were a child and fed you explosive Gerber baby food timed to go off at this exact moment 70 years later...KA BOOM!"

"You think you prevented any leaks in your organization by trusting nobody but yourself? Ha Ha....we secretly infiltrated your dentist as a child and your tooth filling has been feeding us information for all this time!"

This had me chuckle quite a bit - Thanks for that!

 

[Angel of Blood]

Ugh. Yes.

See Legion was fantastic. Even the idea of perpetuals was good back then, hell it was still good in Know No Fear I think, just went downhill rapidly after there. The Serpent Beneath, was also fantastic as a Alpha Legion novel(short). Everything since then though has been drivel, just utter shite and over powered bullshit. And it started with Deliverance Lost.

Hailene said one of the real issues though. Legion, portrayed the legion as being free thinkers, not restricted to their primarchs views and ideologies, free to challenge then even, they had choice, were philosophical. But then fast forward to Deliverance Lost, and they're back to blindly following their primarchs with no idea as to why.

 

[Battman]

Hmm personally i love the "idea" of the alpha legion. Yes some of their stories may not paint them in the best of lights. But as with factions such as the Cabal they add an interesting little side stories, just as things like the odd little cults, different little armies and even things like the the various mutated space marines (mainly black dragons).

Some of the stories such as the faceswaping is a little on the nose but the other versions of the istivan infiltrations. I like the story which revolves around some salamanders, raven gaurd and a couple of iron hands. At one stage when this infiltrator uses a specific anti marine combat manuver (knife up through groin and shoulder gaurd), this is a non-raven gaurd manuver which an actual member notices and nearly causes the infiltrator to be recognised.

Others are where in a fashion of terrorism where a alpha legion member acts as a leader and creates acts of terrorism to disrupt before inital attacks.

Or even the stories where on a mission a alpha legion captain is injected with the blood of alpharious (or omegon) to cause him to have the deepen voice and increased stature of the primarchs even if only temporally (also showing another trait of space marines or even specific to alpha legion).

 

[DelvarusThePitFighter]

I like the iconography and colours of the AL but yeah their fluff seems a bit, well, 'off'

 

[Tyriks]

I haven't read anything about them, but reading synopses and hearing tidbits here and there, they are definitely dumb. Their reason for turning to Chaos, every interaction they have ever had with other legions that I've heard of, the constant fluff inserts that end with "but this is probably Alpha Legion propaganda because they had an undercover guy leading the inquisition forces that recovered this," crap like that is just too much.

And that crap you guys mentioned about wearing faces to go undercover? If you cut someone's face off and wear it like a mask, you don't look like that person. You look like an idiot with a fucked up face. All of which is pointless anyway since they are wearing fucking helmets! And on top of all that, each legion has such a distinct culture and style that I have a hard time believing anyone would fall for it anyway. If I and all my friends have spent hundreds of years perfecting the way we fight together, some asshole with a child's idea for a "great disguise" would stick out like a sore thumb on the battlefield.

 

[Angel of Blood]

Whilst I don't like that particular plot line. It's a little more than cutting a mans face off, it's intensive and extensive surgery, using practices and equipment 29,000 years or so ahead of us. But again, I still don't like it.

 

[Tyriks]

Whilst I don't like that particular plot line. It's a little more than cutting a mans face off, it's intensive and extensive surgery, using practices and equipment 29,000 years or so ahead of us. But again, I still don't like it.

They'd still need to reshape the skull and musculature of the face perfectly, just to have the illusion lost as soon as you actually interact with someone.

 

[ntaw]

They'd still need to reshape the skull and musculature of the face perfectly

Guy, seriously. Nic Cage and John Travolta did it in Face/Off, and that was the 90's. AL sooo have this.

 

[hailene]

They'd still need to reshape the skull and musculature of the face perfectly, just to have the illusion lost as soon as you actually interact with someone.

They did. From Deliverance Lost:

"His face was still sore from the grafting surgery, particularly where the implanted flesh of his new face met his original skin at the base of his neck and around his throat. The bone beneath had been remoudled and ached, while tendons and muscles that had been shortened or lengthened felt raw beneath his stolen skin."

They also ate the flesh of the dead legionaries to get some of their memories to enhance the act.

 

[CJ95]

Honestly from the ammount of 40k artwork that shows raw screws and bolts used to reaatch lims and close wounds, I wonder if medical knowledge in the grim dark counts as 'more advanced'.
:grin:

 

[Mossy Toes]

Honestly from the ammount of 40k artwork that shows raw screws and bolts used to reaatch lims and close wounds, I wonder if medical knowledge in the grim dark counts as 'more advanced'.
:grin:

Hah. Well, this was 30k where things were almost kind of okay, not 10k years of slow decline later...


I, for one, quite like the Alpha Legion. Their downside is, well, they're arrogant, insecure perfectionists who obsessively need to have mapped out every possible contingency before they engage and waste exorbitant amount of resources covering for that--moreso, in our Heresy depictions, than the Emperor's Children, I think, since the EC are basically sneering fops, not competent utilitarians. Couple that with an unparalleled level of individual autonomy and initiative, meaning that the right hand knows not what the left hand is doing at all times, they're often working at cross purposes with themselves. They don't trust themselves, let alone anyone else, and with good reason: they know how little anyone, even oneself, can be trusted, given their methods.

Guilliman was right when he criticized the Alpha Legion for wasting resources on plots, plans and contingencies when a frontal assault would suffice: the Alpha Legion are so obsessed with efficiency that they pursue every avenue to the nth inefficient degree.

As a generally self-sabotaging individual (hey, I recognize this about myself, okay?) I have quite a fondness for a faction that does the same thing more often than it actually succeeds. We just hear about the occasional dramatic success more often than the self-sabotages because the Alpha Legion spend their best agents eliminating their own other best agents so that nobody hears about their involvement (cref: The Serpent Within).

Basically: the Alpha Legion are competent and audacious, yes, and some BL authors favor them because they're so cool--but they're vain enough that they're winning a propaganda war of "being hyper-effective" more than they are effectively enacting their plans, plots and policies, since they fall into subtle infighting over their own ideologies enough that their gaze is far more introspective than it ought to be, were they to be operating at some hypothetical maximum efficiency.