IRL I would rather have 200 Night Lords capture me alive then have one Emperors Children capture me dead. That's generally how I regard the Legions when it comes to fear. The Night Lords are good at implementing fear tactics, but I don't regard them as actually being the most terrifying force. If tabletop were accurate to the setting, Imperial Guard players would have to roll dice for suicide chance whenever they ran into an EC unit.
Perhaps they'd see an Emperor's Child wearing the flesh of some random guy and screeches at the guardsman causing the Guardsman to quote Alucard "Wussed out like a bitch". Night Lords are still one of the coolest Legions. Much more interesting than the Word Bearers, Black Legion and most others.
Depends, sometimes they can be a bit underwhelming. But ADB writes them beautifully and Sevatar is awesomeness embodied.
Well almost all of the Heresy stuff has them as the antagonists and we see little of them apart from when they're being killed. Sevatar is one of the coolest Astartes, he's also a really funny guy. So long as you're not on the receiving end of his jokes...
I mean, to dig into it deeper, I tend to feel all the Chaos Legions are cool and when they aren't it's more due to perspective or the author. Given the right person handling the material, I could get behind any of the Nine. That's something I don't really feel off the loyalists that much. Yeah some of them are cool, but others are like...regardless of the actual authors quality, I just can't get excited about them.
The Black Legion gets significantly more interesting with The Talon of Horus. While the Night Lords trilogy essentially triggers Stolkholm Syndrome in the reader, the Talon of Horus gives the Black Legion considerable depth of purpose by comparison. They're driven to redefine the Long War in terms less /wrists than the usual "vengeance in the primarch's name" material or Night Lords-style wangst -without losing the hungry cruelty of the Chaos Gods in the process.
The Loyalists are what's been relentlessly pushed as the introduction of the setting. They're not hard to understand because there's very little to think about. They're the Gary Sue Corps who never lose, who are the protagonists of everything 40k, and who are on the "right" side minus the burden of being the Imperium. If you like Master Chief-style neutered, barely characterized totalitarian wank-fest icons of hateful carnage they're what you'll gravitate towards. And if you want more than that, you've got a bit of a shortage of material. The Eldar have no compelling official material and are described from the perspective of the Stalinist Nazi Empire 90% of the time. The Orks are the focus of even less decent fiction -woe be Da Boyz. Ditto the Necrons, despite being redefined as complex and varied -and the Tau. The rest are either Imperium factions or the space locusts. All that's a testimony to ADB's writing skills to me given how he was able to take the most sadistic Traitor Legion and generate tens of thousands of admirers for them. I'd love to see an ADB Necrons trilogy. Or for the Battle Sisters.
For me there's a specific incident that concretizes the NL's having the top slot. The Raptor Champion Lucoryphus, having survived a battle with a group of Swooping Hawks, and having suffiently excruciated an unknown eldar to know the secrets and purposes of the waystones, digs out the soulstones of the Hawks and swallows them. Said soulstones begin to make a noise that he finds pleasant as the eldar inside begin to scream in fear. This is brilliant, and here's why. Screaming is, as I'm sure we're aware, a communication of extreme distress. Absence for the stimulus for the distress or running out of breath with which to scream are general ways to ramp down from that kind of fear. A bunch of dead eldar women trapped in their murders's stomach are unlikely to find either. So they will scream in horror and mind-devouring fear until their soulstones are destroyed -whether by weapons fire or by dissolving in Lucoryphus's stomach acid. At which point they will be swallowed by the warp, and end up being excrutiated eternally by She Who Thirsts. And they have no capacity to know when the former might happen, and no way to escape the dread of the latter inevitable doom. It's simple, it's nightmarish, and it's almost utterly inescapable. Someone would have to slay Lucoryphus without destroying his abdomen and think to rummage through his guts for them to have any chance of being recovered. Now the soulstones are making noise, but notably Jain Zhar, who was within a few meters of Lucoryphus didn't notice so it's unlikely that anyone else would hear them nor detect them psionically amongst the mass of corrupted flesh that is their "host." That's pretty much unique. Even forces that sacrifice eldar souls in rituals don't bother making them linger quite so, and those that do use them as batteries so for all the agony of the mind trapped inside there is a definite suddenness to their release into the Warp. That's impressively cruel. And simple to replicate. That's a Night Lords kind of evil.
Now you see, this mildly confuses me because...really that;s not even entry level Emperors Children torture. Do they swallow Soulstones? more then likely yes, their Daemonettes certainly do. But that's getting off easy. What happens when you're given to Melencholian Fleshshapers? Emperors Children Blood Magi? What happens when you're given over to Fabius Bile who even as a Renegade from their Legion is still tutoring them if the Thirteen Scars incident is anything to go by? Horror is their meat and their wine and they use Xenos technology coupled with a dark mastery of techniques that can date back to the Dark Age of Technology where other Legions won't even go there. There's something to be said for simplicity, but even among heretics, they are considered heretical
