So let's talk about the differences, or rather the purpose of each type of book.
But be warned: I'll be praising the Black Books quite a bit, because they are (no hyperbole) the best books I've ever seen in the Grim Darkness™.
The Red Books
This one's easy. Think of the Red Books as your Codices. They even cost about as much. There's one catch though: basically, it's all stats and rules. There's a small piece of background for each unit/character, but that's it. If you use these at the tabletop, you'll be glad you won't have to wade through 50% fluff ... and it's not like there's no fluff available, as we'll soon see.Because the main focus of The Horus Heresy are the Space Marine Legions, you won't be surprised to discover that from the three available Red Books (with a fourth one coming soon), two deal with the Legions. The third one, to get this out of the way, deals with everything Mechanicum. Simple, right? Well, it's titled Mechanicum: Taghmata Army List, and that suggests that there are more kinds of Mechanicum armies ... and hey, they're in this book, too. As stated before, "Taghmata" is just the catch-all term for the available forces, everything else is more specific.
The Legiones Astartes: Crusade Army List features all standard units in the Space Marine Legions, so it's all the stuff available to virtually all Legions: Tactical Marines, Dreadnoughts, Land Raiders, and so on. If you play a Legion, no matter which, you'll need this book. You'll also find the rules on how to build
Legiones Astartes: Age of Darkness Legions on the other hand feature Legion-specific rules and units for nearly (!) all Legions. Without this book, your Legion army would be a bland force indeed.
In essence: if you're a gamer and not (just) a collector, you'll need one or two Red Books (depending on your army of choice). I'd say they're a good investment even if you plan to get all the Black Books. Not only does Forge World add errata in the Red Books, it's also not very practical to reference the Black Books during play (if you're like me and you write down all stats and rules beforehand you might do without them, though).
Note that the first two books (all but the Age of Darkness Legions, which is fine, because that's basically an add-on to the Crusade Army List anyway) includes all necessary rules adjustments too, as well as the rules on how to build your army (Force Organization Charts and such). The Taghmata Army List furthermore includes the basic missions – why these don't also show up in the Crusade Army List, I don't know; they probably should.
The Black Books
Thes Black Books are absolutely fantastic! They offer a serious amount of fluff (well over half of each book), and that alone is a great read. The history of the Heresy is covered, as well as a detailed history of not just the Legions but all other factions as well. And the style of both the (sparingly inserted) illustrations as well as the era-appropriate photo-manipulations (pictures of miniatures in action where it's quite hard to tell that they are really miniatures) are very good. The colour scheme illustrations are way better than GW's Codex versions (which are good at what they want to do, but are not really good looking).As most 30K players value fluff quite a lot, all that material should give you plenty inspiration for your own fluffy 30K army.
And they don't stop with Codex-style crunch either. Rule changes (which, like the stats, are featured in the Red Books, too), new missions, the Zone Mortalis rules (for combat in confined spaces), and probably most important: campaign rules. And oh how many they have. From replaying certain events of the Horus Heresy (for instance: the Dropside Massacre) to a more free-form campaign, it's all there.
I'm contemplating whether to do a review series on the Black Books, because they're well worth it – and there's quite a lot to talk about, really. So some time in the future I'll talk about the content of each Black Book and my overall impression of each – they're all good, but some are clearly better than others, I'd say.
The Other Book
There's a third kind of book you'll need besides the Red and Black Books, and that's the 40K Rule Book. The Horus Heresy is, at it's core, an expansion to 40K and not its own game. Most 30K players will most likely come from 40K, but if not, you'll have to get that rule book from somewhere. My advice: second hand from eBay. Even the small edition from a starter box would suffice, and people often sell those for the cheap, as they bought the box for the miniatures.
Thanks for the explanation.
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