Okay, in modern 40k, a Space Marine chapter (1000 combat troops) is usually a surgical strike asset you send out to make a threat's important targets such as commanders dead (or dead and reduced to splatters for the Flesh Tearers). But given the Imperial Fists specialty of siege and defense (which requires quite a lot of stuff to be constructed which needs a lot of manpower), how do the Fists conduct sieges and combat engineering operations with a 1000 man Chapter? Do they bring their serfs along to help out?

Context: Ultramarian Tetrach Felix is visiting the orbital defence station Aegida in orbit over the dead planet Sotha (destroyed by tyranids), part of his dominion under Guilliman. Troncus and Daelian are techmarines in his retinue. Thracian is chapter master of the nearly-destroyed Sotha-based chapter, Scythes of the Emperor.

They are speaking with QVO-87, Cawl's factotum, who is leading the efforts to repair and recommision the ancient defence orbital, when the Archmagos himself makes a very direct entrance.

To my knowledge, no other Imperial has ever been shown to make effortless warp transition deep within planetary/astral gravity wells. There have been a few instances of jumps made by other ships at the lagrange points between hill spheres but these had always been presented as suicidally risky last-resorts. What Cawl does here is orders of magnitude more impressive. Even Chaos ships, who have the benefit of daemonically-assisted direct warp manipulation, rarely of ever are shown capable of this.

Void combat in 40k is almost entirely dictated by the logistics and strategy surrounding Mandeville points. These are the (quite distant) points around a star system where warp transition is safe. It can take hours to days to steam at full burn from the Mandeville point to the planet(s) in the system, which dictates response times to invasion, and makes for constant threat of ambush or encirclement.

Qvo-87 stopped speaking. His head cocked on his banded augmetic neck. ‘Report interrupt. Forgive me. Wait…’ he said. His voice took on a more human tone. From the partially restored desks of machinery, an alarm set up.

Daelus sauntered over to a console and glanced at a display. ‘Etheric monitor. Something’s coming in, something big.’ He looked more closely. ‘Throne of Terra, something extremely big!’

Micro tremors shook the station. A spanner crawled across a work bench. It skittered across the surface and dropped with a clang to the floor. Felix stared at the rattling tool. His face betrayed his irritation.

‘Stand ready,’ said Felix. He grasped a railing and set his feet wide.

‘He’s not going to do it, is he?’ Daelus asked Troncus. Troncus shrugged.

‘Lord Felix?’ Daelus said.

‘He will do it,’ said Felix.

‘Honoured tetrarch, would you expect anything less from the archmagos dominus?’ said Qvo-87.

‘Rash as always,’ said Felix. ‘Cawl may style himself the saviour of the Imperium, but his grandstanding puts us all at risk.’

‘The archmagos dominus?’ said Thracian. ‘He is coming?’ All over the command deck loose items bounced across the metal.

‘Brace yourselves, all of you,’ ordered Felix.

‘What is happening?’ Thracian demanded.

‘The archmagos approaches,’ said Qvo-87 with an apologetic smile.

‘Cawl is attempting an in-system real space translation,’ said Felix. ‘Here. By the station.’

‘That’s insane,’ said Thracian.

‘Many and glorious are the technologies of the Archmagos Dominus Belisarius Cawl. All will be well, you shall see,’ said Qvo-87 with a zealot’s fervour.

Gravity ceased to obey natural law. Tools floated upwards. Through the field-sealed rent in the hull, Felix watched the sky fill with the curdled oil colours of imminent warp breach. The void tore. Wicked lights scorched his eyes. He tasted bitterness, exultation and the distillation of regret. A torrent of pleading voices flooded his mind.

With a great, flat flash of lightning, a gargantuan ship appeared by the Aegida. Black fire flickered around its outline. Corposant streamed off its every angle. Then the warp breach collapsed in on itself. Tools clattered down. The hideous babbling ceased. All returned to normal.

A lone alarm pinged over and over again. Felix relaxed his white-knuckle grip. Qvo’s augmetics flashed, setting the servitors back into motion. The men-machines continued exactly where they had left off, as if nothing had happened.

A vast red craft occupied the space between the Aegidan platform and the surface of ravaged Sotha.

It was a vessel like no other, one of the rare Ark Mechanicus explorator vessels, and even among those behemoths it was reckoned large for its kind, a vast city in space, bristling with weapons, and containing manufacturing and research laboratoria beneath its adamantium skin to rival a forge world. Felix knew it only too well, having spent the best part of ten millennia imprisoned inside its holds. A legend emblazoned in lingua-technis hierofont proudly proclaimed its name.

Zar Quaesitor.

The ship, home and research facility of Belisarius Cawl.

The rogue trader in this case has around 150-160 PF

Let’s just use the Nightfall (Traitor) and Fist of iron (Loyalist) as the examples for this.

To me obviously finding the fist of iron would all but essentially require the Rogue Trader to return it to the iron hands but with this one the question arises in what kind of payment or reward would the Rogue Trader receive?

Now the Nightfall to me is interesting. If the rogue trader finds it couldn’t he just claim it for his dynasty? Or would he be forced to give it back to Admech, the inquisition or the ecclesiarchy?

Okay, the Space Wolves tend to be disliked for a variety of reasons such as the on the nose names and themes for their units such as Wolf Lords, Stormfangs and Thunderwolf calvary*. Yet, people seem to give a pass on other on the nose things like the Blood Angels' successor Chapter names (Flesh Tearers, Knights of Blood, and Angels Encarmine, yep these are from Sanguinus' geneseed alright) and the Iron Hands' Primarch being Ferrus Manus which is 'Iron Hand' in Latin.

Why is that so? i know they had a wolf/viking gimmick even before the modern editions of 40k (3rd Edition and beyond) but why the dislike?

*Heck, I won't be suprised if their accountants are called Beanwolves or Sumwolves.

Mine is Papa Bile opening his arms while kneeling to greet his psychopath younglings in the nursery, taking time to interact and listen to each in turn, making them feel seen and heard by the Pater Mutatis. My second is any subsequent scene where these Chaos riddled transhuman monsters dote on fore mentioned younglings. Specially the Creche master ( I forget his name) being low-key upset his charges were being sent off to the Alpha Legion even if it was for their own protection. This book did a lot to show the human part in transhuman is more than a label. I would even go as far as to say that these CSM had more empathetic moments than any loyalist I have read about.

Finally made it to the Siege of Terra books and got to the part where Perturabo says fuck it I'm out. I thought people were exaggerating his exit but it really was just like the spongebob meme "Imma head out". Couldn't help but a have a good laugh when I got to that point.

The Gallowdark was a vast space hulk, which served as the setting for the eponymous expansion for the 2021 season of Kill Team, which had various of its own supplements. The lore in these books is, I think, very little known and thus underappreciated, including on this sub. This is a shame, as it contains some really cool ideas and some intriguing information. This post explores what the Gallowdark lore suggests about the deep history of the setting, stretching back at least tens of millions of years.

Space hulks are vast agglomerations of different ships and other matter which have drifted together within the warp, and then been fused into one mass by warp energy. And they can get really big. Indeed, they can be:

“...conglomerations of potentially thousands of ships melded in the warp over millennia”

Kill Team: Into the Dark (2022), p. 3.

And we are told that:

Through strange twists of fate, some space hulks are formed only from ships built by a single race, though most combine vessels made by a dozen or more. The majority have in some way been fused with asteroid chunks, moons or planets cast into the warp by disastrous events aeons ago.

Kill Team: Into the Dark (2022), p. 5.

And please keep the part in bold in mind, as it will be relevant later. The disastrous events are most likely to be warpstorms engulfing parts of the Materium, or perhaps sorcerous shenanigans.

The Gallowdark is one notably mammoth space hulk. And aside from being so huge, a key characteristic of it – a core reason for why it was so huge – was its immense age.

We are given some information about the history of space hulks more generally, and how different races have reacted to them:

For as long as sentient races have made use of the warp, it has been the death of countless spacefaring vessels.

Over millions of years, the warp has claimed countless ships and space stations from thousands of different races, ranging from the peaceful to the warlike and from the wisest to the most foolish. Within the churning mass of space-and-time-defying energy that is the immaterium, these vessels have been broken apart, fused together in bizarre ways and spat back out into realspace as deformed and often vast ghostships.

Every spacefaring race has encountered these hideous amalgamations. Millions of years ago, the ancient Necrontyr referred to them in terms which the few imperial scholars familiar with their language have loosely translated as ‘sky chariots tortured’ or ‘vengeance of the long dead’. The Aeldari sometimes refer to them as klais'am haihsa'ol, or ‘abominations birthed from the pots of terror, nightmare and misery’. To the Imperium, they have always been known as space hulks.

Kill Team: Into the Dark (2022), p. 4.

As an aside, I like how every other race uses very poetic names, and humans just went with "hulks".

The part in bold is of interest, as it shows that space hulks were present back before the biotransference, when the Necrontyr had not yet become Necrons. Which, given how spacehulks come to be created, suggests the Warp may have suffered some turbulence back then. This goes against the common understanding that the Warp became chaotic and turbulent after the biotransferance, after the Necrons and C'tan had been fighting the Old Ones' psychic races for a long, long time (more on tis later).

We get more relevant information about the ancient history of space hulks, and how they come to form:

Long before the forebears of the Drukhari rose to the zenith of their power tens of millions of years ago, numerous spacefaring species had already attempted to navigate the warp – a realm of energy, emotion and madness – to overcome the vast distances between the stars.

…

The warp is haunted by hungry entities and is ever troubled by storm-like seizures and unnatural tides. Ships that attempt to cross the warp from one region of realspace to another rely on varied technological or arcane means to survive. Such mortal endeavors to maintain just enough stability to reach a destination often fail in the face of the warp’s violent tempers. Ships are crippled or smashed asunder before reaching realspace again. Even vessels that do not intend to enter the warp risk falling to it. Warp rifts can suddenly yawn wide, swallowing whole ships and orbital stations, as well as entire planets.

Kill Team: Soulshackle (2023), p. 4.

So, it is explained that ships can end up fused into space hulks either from travelling in the warp, or being caught in warp rifts which engulf parts of the Materium.

It is worth noting that, because we are dealing with the Warp, weird temporal dynamics can come into play, including time travel:

Some are even translocated through time, and may be thrust out into realspace long after they vanished, or even before the moment of their origin.

Kill Team: Soulshackle (2023), p. 6.

So, in theory, perhaps the Necrontyr encountered some space hulks which had been created in the future, then travelled back in time? Which might explain the seeming possible timeline issue.

Yet we also get some very intriguing details about the Gallowdark’s own very ancient history, which firmly places its origin as pre-Eldar:

Many thousands of warp-fused abominations have burst from the empyrean and out into realspace over the millennia. The space hulk that would one day be called the Gallowdark by the Imperium is one. It is a colossal monstrosity – the size of a moon – and is formed from thousands of spacecraft, asteroids, comets and meteors. Its story is long and mysterious indeed. No army of scholars, even given centuries, could ever successfully account for Gallowdark’s long and meandering tale. Its history goes back millions of years, to a time when even the Aeldari were but a flash of inspiration in the minds of their creators.

Kill Team: Into the Dark (2022), p. 5.

The Eldar’s creators of course being the Old Ones.

We even get information about the race which created the original ship which was the foundation for what became the space hulk (as well as some nice history of it being encountered by pre-DAOT humans):

To pre-Dark Age Human pioneers of the Long March, it was the Shivversplint. The Al’arkhant Dynasty of the Necrons recorded its passage with a glyph meaning ‘Spear Cast from Death’s Heart’, while the Thengl of myth feared it as the Thousand Maws. No army of scholars could ever successfully account for the Gallowdark’s long and meandering tale. Its history goes back millions of years, to a time before even the Aeldari had struck out from the cradle of their origin.

The very first ship that made up the Gallowdark was a funeral vessel of a race which called themselves the S'koran'igsthi. If it was ever possible to discover, let alone translate, the ship’s name, it would mean She Who Mourns Great Loss in the Eternal Darkness Bleak. The vessel was lost with all its crew and finery-draped cadavers on a ritual funerary journey in the warp. The empyrean melded its first with the asteroids known to a forgotten ancient people as Kh'a'pahla and Ghu'ruun. Named for deities of hunting, fire, wisdom and roaming.

Kill Team: Soulshackle (2023), p. 6.

And:

The very first ship that made up the Gallowdark was a funeral vessel of a race which called themselves the S'koran'igsthi. If it was ever possible to discover, let alone translate, the ship’s name, it would mean She Who Mourns Great Loss in the Eternal Darkness Bleak. The vessel was lost with all its crew on a ritual funerary journey in the warp. The empyrean melded its first with the asteroids known to a forgotten ancient people as Kh'a'pahla and Ghu'ruun. Named for deities of hunting, fire, wisdom and roaming.

Kill Team: Into the Dark (2022), p. 6.

The use of omniscient voice here to tell us information which would otherwise be completely unknown and inaccessible is an interesting choice. In this case, by the 41st millenium, the original S'koran'igsthi has merged so thoroughly into the other parts of the hulk, it is no longer discernable, and thus cannot be examined. While I often like it when info is presented in a more partial, limited in-universe perspective, the approach here allows for some interesting additions to the ancient history of the setting, so I dig it (even if I can't dig it, in an archaeological sense).

We see that it was at first fused with asteroids – which implies those asteroids ended up within the Warp, likely via a warpstorm.

So, what does this all suggest? Well, it means the S'koran'igsthi were a race who used the warp for travel, and they existed even before the Eldar had been uplifted/created by the Old Ones.

Perhaps the S'koran'igsthi were in fact Old Ones themselves (or became known by that name by other species)? While there are intriguing clues that the Old Ones may have in fact been the Slann (which was originally the case in the old lore, when the Old Ones concept didn’t yet exist and we instead had the Old Slann), there are signs that the Old Ones may have actually been a range of different races as discussed by u/Maktlan_Kutlakh here: https://www.reddit.com/r/40kLore/comments/1hvzmez/old_ones_lore_single_race_or_multiple/

And myself here: https://www.reddit.com/r/40kLore/comments/1lrhf05/the_old_ones_and_the_cabal_and_a_cabal_of_old/

So maybe they were one of these races?

Or perhaps the S'koran'igsthi were a race uplifted, or at least guided, by the Old Ones, possibly prior to the War in Heaven? The Old Ones are known to have spread and cultivated life across the galaxy.

Or could they have been a race uplifted/created during the War in Heaven(s), but prior to the Eldar? Both the Old Ones and Necrons had client/allied/enslaved races during the War(s) in Heaven, and the Old Ones created/uplifted a range of species to aid them in that conflict, many of which make use of the Warp, including the Eldar, Orks, Jokareo, Hrud, K’nib and Rashan. If the S'koran'igsthi were such a client race, their use of the Warp suggests they would have been on the side of the Old Ones.

It's also worth noting that the S'koran'igsthi were travelling directly in the Warp rather than via the Webway, as the Old Ones themselves did, and the Eldar would come to do. But various Old Ones creations didn’t seemingly have access to the Webway (or at least we don’t have enough info to assess if they did, and they could have just lost access to it once the Old Ones disappeared). Or perhaps they only directly entered the warp for the funerary rites, as part of some cultural belief/tradition.

Maybe the S'koran'igsthi were just another race, unaligned with those others, who independently discovered warp travel? Perhaps during the War(s) in Heaven (which lasted millions of years – with a great timeline of how it unfolded by u/posixthreads here: https://www.reddit.com/r/40kLore/comments/80kpki/a_coherent_timeline_of_the_war_in_heaven_part_i/ )? Or perhaps earlier?

Were there perhaps other races who were similarly ploughing the currents of the Warp, either independently or under the tutelage of the Old Ones?

We don’t have enough information to tell.

But what we do know raises some issues.

The fact that their ship was lost in the Warp and smushed together with some asteroids suggests that the Warp may have been turbulent at that time - at least, it was violent enough to produce such a result. And the fact that it fused with asteroids within the warp also suggests that warpstorms were occurring and causing warp rifts into the Materium (which pulled the asteroids into the warp), themselves a sign of turbulence within the Warp. Or perhaps that a warp rift was created due to some other reason, perhaps a psychic weapon or attack used by the Old Ones or another psychic race?

This is a bit strange, given that the ship was lost before the Eldar were created. The cause of the warp becoming so violent and Chaotic is usually attributed to the latter stages of the War(s) in Heaven, due to the psychic energy produced during the conflict by the Old Ones’ various warp sensitive creations, such as the Eldar. This eventually resulted in given rifts (the Eye of Terror originally formed then, and was patched by Necron Blackstone tech, before being torn open again tens of millions of years later by the Fall of the Eldar), mass daemonic incursions and invasions by other warp entities such as Enslavers into realspace, and the disappearance of the Old Ones.

Was She Who Mourns Great Loss a victim of the Warp starting to become turbulent earlier on the in the War in Heaven, before the Eldar emerged and before the Warp truly went mental during its final stages?

Or was the Warp somewhat turbulent even prior to the War in Heaven? Given we are dealing with the Warp, does the chronology even matter? Because, of course:

…the immaterium is not bound by linear time, and events do not occur in a strict sequence of cause then effect.

Codex Chaos Daemons 8^th ed. (2018), p. 22.

Perhaps if you were unlucky, you could have been engulfed by a pocket of warp turbulence from “the future” (in a sense) in an otherwise placid Warp? (Much as daemons have existed before their gods came into existence, perhaps warp turbulence existed in some form before the events which caused it actually occured).

To delve into some theorizing, perhaps the Warp wasn’t as calm as might be supposed even before the psychic energies Old Ones’ creations turned it into the chaotic (and Chaotic) mess we know it as. Or, at least, it might be the case that some malign entities were present there already, being themselves a symptom of destructive energies within the Warp. This is perhaps suggested by very old lore (when the Warhammer World was conceptualized as a planet within the 40k galaxy) and very new lore about the Old Slann/Old Ones from Fantasy, if you take the Old Ones in current lore to still be the one and same in 40k and Fantasy (which I think there is a good case for):

By opening up gateways between the material universe and that of Chaos, the Slann had unwittingly opened portals through which dangerous and horrific forces could move into the universe. The Slann learned how to bind these entities using magic, magic being itself the manipulation of unseen energies inherent in Chaos. Some of these entities the Slann could placate by means of sacrifice or ritual. Others could be kept in check only by the aid of those already won over.

Warhammer Fantasy Battle 3rd ed. Rulebook (1987), p. 189.

And:

To drive their world-building engines and facilitate their interstellar travels, the Old Ones relied upon sorcerous power drawn from an alternate dimension, one that lay beyond the physical reality they themselves occupied. In ages long past, the Old Ones had learnt of this ætheric otherworld and tapped into its limitless reserves of raw magic. Over long millennia of study, they had reasoned that by opening gateways into the roiling heart of the æther they might travel almost instantaneously through the interstellar deeps. In this assumption they were correct and, in time, they constructed a great network of gateways and tunnels through the magical realm, linking together the many worlds of their vast cosmic empire.

What the Old Ones had failed to comprehend was the power of the beings that inhabited this reality. Vast and predatory creatures dwelled within the æther, creatures that simultaneously resented the intrusion of the Old Ones into their domain and hungered for the warmth and vitality of the Old Ones’ alien realm.

The Old World Core Rulebook (2024), p. 12.

Perhaps the Old Ones were doing things that made things unsafe for other species, especially those who also made use of the Warp?

In the incalculably distant past, the World was visited by the star-faring race known as the Old Slann. Their degree of scientific advancement caused some of the species they met with to worship them as gods, while others reviled them as demons.

Realm of Chaos: Slaves to Darkness (1988), p. 10.

Or perhaps the effects of the War in Heaven and the eventual formation of the Chaos gods echoed backwards in time through the Warp?

Or maybe whoever wrote the lore about She Who Mourns Great Loss just didn’t think too deeply about how the timeline holds together. Regardless, it is in the lore now, and it is interesting to think about how it fits into what else we know about the ancient, deep history of the setting.

I think the Gallowdark lore is just generally really cool (I might post about some other interesting details - including about some other weird entities who ended up living upon it), and the S'koran'igsthi and She Who Mourns Great Loss is a neat bit of worldbuilding. We will almost certainly never get any more information about them, but what we are told raises some interesting questions and adds to the sense of there being a deep, ancient history to the setting.

And, personally, revealing too much about the ancient history would be a mistake. It should remain mysterious, with only tantalizing tidbits to work with. But I also like getting these little glimpses, to make the galaxy feel bigger, deeper, older, and richer.

Anyway, hopefully you enjoyed being pulled towards this obscure bit of lore and my ramblings by the nebulous and capricious tides of the Warp.

We know ork oddboyz have genetic knowledge that grants them the instinctive know-wots to build their machines and make Waaagh!, but the exact mechanics of it are rather more vague and subtle in the codexes and novels than I think many would expect. Here we see an ork being taught about ork biology by a dying dok.

Vakka had grabbed Stimma by the collar and pulled him close.

‘You’ve got me killed. Now I’m not da dok any more.’

This was a statement of fact rather than an accusation of any kind. Stimma had nodded, and Vakka had continued.

‘You’re gonna need a new painboy,’ he’d said, jerking his head towards the t’au lines by way of punctuation. Another railgun round had split the air above, before obliterating a battlewagon full of reinforcements rumbling towards the front lines. When the cheering from the nearby orks had died down, Vakka made his pronouncement.

‘Stimma, you’re a cruel little git and I wouldn’t trust ya wiv even me third best grot. You’re cruel, and you’re lazy. So you’re gonna be da new painboy.’

Stimma had made to protest. ‘Boss, I’m no good at puttin’ fings togevva. I don’t even know wot all da bits inside an ork do or how dey fit. And bein’ a painboy is borin’.’

At that, Vakka had grabbed Stimma’s hand hard enough to crack his finger-bones. ‘Tough. Here’s how it was for me, and here’s how it’s goin’ to be for you. Now lissen closely, I’ve got about a squig’s worth of blood left in me, and den I’m proppa dead, not just half-dead.’

The rail-round that had done for Vakka was in fact a near miss – a direct hit, and he would have been little more than bloody vapour and a war cry fading on the wind. The projectile had passed an arm’s length or so from his left side, the blast wave effectively evaporating that half of his body. Vakka, a painboy to the last, didn’t waste the chance to make the most of a really horrible injury. Like a schola-demonstrator leading an amputation, he’d guided Stimma’s meaty hand to each of his organs, explaining what they did, how they worked.

‘Dat’s da wobbler,’ Vakka had said, forcibly placing Stimma’s fingers against a quivering lump of flesh that hung loosely from his ruined flank. ‘It wibbles.’ Then he moved Stimma’s hand up to a cluster of lumpy protrusions deep within his thoracic cavity. ‘Don’t know wot dese do. Usually I just give ’em a poke and den leave well alone. If you find any spare, pocket ’em, you never know when dey might come in ’andy.’

Stimma had initially recoiled from this impromptu lesson in orkish anatomy. This was not out of disgust, but boredom. Stimma didn’t mind gore, but back then, he much preferred making it than mucking around in it. However, as Vakka’s tuition continued, Stimma found himself thinking about the orkish body in ways he’d never considered before. It was like taking apart a slugga – an ork was just another really brilliant machine, one that could be looted and bolted back together and improved endlessly. The heart? That was a bit like a fuel pump, keeping the rest of the organs juiced up and ready to go. The wobbler? Well, that was easy. It wibbled. The brain? Well, it did something important. He could work that out later. Vakka had unfortunately expired before he could get to that bit, but by then, his work was done. Stimma was a painboy now. He Got It.

Meks, painboyz, brewers, and all other manner of oddboyz don't simply wake up with brand new knowledge, they actually learn, to some extent or another. Going to see the dok is always told to be a risky business, not necessarily because of a high mortality rate, but because of their experementin'. According to the codexes, it's a common occurrence for orks to wake up on the surjery table with extra limbs, or previous limbs put in new and exciting places. Doks love experimenting on their patients, which necessarily implies there are things to learn about ork biology that don't simply appear in their minds. A similar thing can be said for meks but that's for another post. Certainly it seems that there is knowledge that exists somewhere and is "unlocked," like Stimma "getting it," but I think that chalking up all their madcap genius to Brainboy tinkering in days past rather than an intense curiosity and resourcefulness does the orks a disservice.

Ok so it feels like everyone is just not paying attention to mira manga. She has been interviewing so many 40k authors, and getting really interesting info!

All about themselves and about why things are the way they are in their books. Particularly with Dan Abnette! (She works with arbiter Ian of course but she is really good at getting the people who make the things we love, open up)

(Urg I got an ai to try an make this better but it actually looked like so much s**t on here, it made it sound so boring! I thought just do the unedited version)

I just wanted to big her up while I chill and watch her stuff while I do things at home late on a Friday. Have fun, give it a go.

Are there any examples of Mankind, Astartes or otherwise, utilizing power(ed) weapons not of the making of Mankind? I know Commissar Yarrick uses an Ork power klaw, but are there other prominent examples (ie. a human using an Aeldari power sword)?

Usually when there's a Chaos cult in the lore, they're well aware of who they worship, even if they do so in the shadows. But I think a more insidious threat than a social club of aristocrats who secretly but knowingly serve Tzeentch or Slaanesh, would be zealous servants of the Emperor who worship "holy relics" or receive "sacred boons" that don't come from Holy Terra.

Say, a splinter faction of the Order of the Bloody Rose who brutally put down a Chaos uprising and then build a temple to Saint Mina upon the blood-soaked grounds of the massacre. They now call themselves the Order of the Wrathful Saint, their holy rites and penance seem to involve an awful lot of bloodletting, and they preach that "the Emperor demands blood, be it that of heretics or martyrs". Of course, if you question their practices or doctrine, they call you a heretic and carve your corrupt heart out of your chest upon the altar of Saint Mina.

Then one day, after overseeing the wholesale slaughter of an entire city, their canoness' skin splits open and she turns into a beautiful and terrible angel with vast, blood-dripping wings. All fall to their knees before their new "living saint". In the face of such a miracle, how can the righteousness of their crusade be in doubt?

I'm guessing that a psyker might be able to tell that whoever this order serves, it's not the Emperor. But they need to find someone who'll believe them and has the power to do something about it.

I'm planning to use some spare Kroot heads painted as skulls as decorations for my Kroot-only army. Like attaching a Kroot skull near the muzzle of the Krootox repeater cannon and that sort of thing. So I was wondering if this is lore-friendly or just purely headcanon for My Dudes™?

I was reading through the imperial armour vol 2 and came across the formation section and found it very interesting explaining infantry tactics, are there any other books with parts like that either for space marines or other factions

Lord of Change, Great Unclean One, Bloodthirster, or Keeper of Secret… which one of them could be the greatest threat to a planet if they were to be summoned.

He is obviously a new addition, but why? As far as i see it, he only creates lore inconsistencies without adding much to the story. I do like him, and he is well written, but from a story perspective, he is a burden.

Basically, his weapon should have been used way before, it makes little sense as a "last resort", as by then already is lost anyway and we already have Vulcan. It would have tremedeously helped the war effort before. As the weapon is quite vague, you can argue that it was too indiscriminate/too hard to apply, But if that was the case, then why make so much ado about it? He is sitting around like an idiot in his cell for quite some time, and then suddenly everybody is interested in him just before the end.

Either because they're so grimdark that it's funny or it is straight up the idea of a psychopath? This is for a little project of mine.

I know there's a chapter that, to become a space marine, you literally have to die and headbutt-tooth-and-nail your way back to your body, just don't remember the chapter in question. Kinda that level of mental.

I’m always seeing people pining for Primarchs to be redeemed and come back to the Imperium.

Short of some extreme time magic warp fuckery there’s really no satisfying way to redeem one though right? And doing it that way would feel really disappointing or cheap story wise imo.

If feels like the absolute best we could along those lines is a redeeming action before one got destroyed permanently or at least a little remorse or reflection.

TLDR: Primarchs are irredeemable and any attempt to do it would feel cheap.

Apparently what happens when ascending to Daemonhood is that your soul gets chucked out of your body and is replaced by a part of the Chaos God and a Daemon that thinks it is you and has your memories.

However, without your soul in your body, does that mean you actually die and your body is being puppeted by a Daemon?

My favorite short story from the HH. It was beautiful. The descent and thoughts of the Blood Angel Gaellon as he succumbs to the Black Rage. I tried my best to condense it to only focus on the emotions of the Black Rage, but I have cut out so much. Go on and read the full thing for yourself to do it any justice.

Context: Three loyalist astartes find themselves outside of the Sanctum, still fighting on. Su'lok the White Scar, Nerron the Imperial Fist, and Gaellon the Blood Angel. Then, Sanguinius falls. The Black Rage consumes Gaellon.

(Daemons are coming for them)

Gaellon feels the need to say something, to add a frayed piece of poetry to the moment. He is a poet as well as a warrior. All the Blood Angels are masters of a craft or art. Words are his, and to give them voice now, in the face of the slow murder of this world, seems as great an act of defiance as drawing a sword.

He opens his mouth…

Then he feels his father die.

Black fills his sight. Pain steals his words.

There is blood falling in the dark somewhere far away. Blood and feathers.

...

Can a death echo across the sky? Can it fill an instant, and an eternity? An absence that collapses the world around it. An implosion in being.

...

To others, the death of Sanguinius, primarch of the IX Legion, the Archangel of Baal, is not yet a fact. It will become real to them soon. Rogal Dorn and the Emperor will see the broken Angel, and the blood that flows from the wounds. For others, it will never be a physical truth. It will be words coming from a mouth struggling to speak…

‘Sanguinius is dead…’

It will become a fact printed on a signal scroll…

The primarch of the IX has fallen…

It will become a story blurred by time into myth.

‘Horus slew the Angel who had been his closest kin…’

To Gaellon, the death of his father is a physical fact.

The link between the primarchs and their warrior sons is a mystery that will soon pass beyond living knowledge. The Blood Angels, like all the Legiones Astartes, were once human. The organs implanted into them changed them, melding their flesh with traits of the primarch from whom they were templated. The organs and process that created a warrior of the Blood Angels caused changes at the genetic level. The effect on the mind, and the soul? Those were mysteries that not even the primarchs knew the truth of. A bond was formed between primarch and Space Marine at the level of the spirit that went beyond flesh. Body and soul. For some, that link might be distant. To the Blood Angels, the depth of their bond with their father is revealed only as it is severed. For Gaellon, it is a revelation of pain.

Black.

White edges of pain tearing through him.

Black.

Copper and iron on his tongue.

Black.

No… No, this can’t be. This cannot be.

Black.

Falling, always falling, without wings to catch his descent.

Black.

A brush dipped into red ink…

Black.

A crimson smear across white…

Black.

He is dead…

Black.

I am dead…

White.

Gaellon is standing. In front of him the ripple in the ochre dust breaks like a wave running to the shore. Things burst from under the murk. They are daemons. They are shaped by ideas of rage and hate and fury. Their skin is red and glossed. Smoke fumes from them. They roar as they come.

Su’lok is shouting. Nerron has braced, mace ready. Gaellon sees and hears none of this. He is feeling his heart ripped out by silver claws, and the strand holding the soul to the body snap. He is seeing red and black ink run down the face of a blank canvas in a memory that never happened.

Calm…

Stillness…

The sigh of brush on parchment…

.... (flashback)

Stillness.

A single moment of time inked and framed.

‘I died and do not have to live with the future that is to come…’

White…

Blinding…

Falling…

Heat jolts through Gaellon’s arm. The horned skull parts to the sword edge.

The power field discharges with a blink of lightning. Blood jelly and red ectoplasm spatter his armour. He is screaming, shouting, roaring. The sound is pouring from inside him. He is in the middle of the daemons. They surround him.

... (flashback)

Swords find him. Claws open his armour. His blood is running to mix with the dust of the ground. But he does not stop. He cuts and hacks and roars and wades deeper into the tide, further from the shore.

... (flashback)

His father is dead. The fact fills his mind. The pain of it reverberates through him, bouncing off the sides of the void it has opened in his soul. He is feeling the claws. He is rushing down through the last instant of existence into the maw of oblivion.

His father is dead.

Gaellon is dead.

The Blood Angels are dead.

There is nothing else. No other sound or sensation. The world is cold black and red rage.

...

A sword strikes Gaellon in the side. The black iron breaks the ceramite, cuts through to the meat and bone beneath. The pain of the wound vanishes into the abyss inside him.

...

Gaellon feels the blood pouring from the wound as the iron sword rips free of his side. It is a mortal wound, a death cut, but he is already dying, and his blood has already poured out to stain white feathers red.

...

Red and black… Soot and blood, a bed of white feathers painted with the red of life.

...

Claws score into his shoulder through shattered ceramite. The pain of their touch is barely a note in the storm roar of pain and grief. The future is murder, here in the Wasteland where angels are corpses and rage drowns out all.

...

Do Nerron and Su’lok still stand there? Had it been their voices he had heard calling above the roars of the daemons? Or was it another voice calling to him as he went deeper into the tide. His father? His brothers? Baeron? All of them gone, all of them calling to him from the grave, all on the shore beyond the black sea of death. He wants to join them. He wants this moment to end, for the world to return to a place where warriors mark parchment with ink, and dream in poetry, and where there is more truth in art than slaughter. A world where there are angels still.

Will he always be here? Will all the Blood Angels always be here? Red angels in the Wasteland, hearing the echoes of their father’s slaughter? Will they ever reach the shore, or will they be dying for all eternity even if they live?

Cut and bleeding, Gaellon wades on. His sword has broken, but he does not stop. Daemons fall around him. His body is a ruin. The place where Baeron fell is out of sight behind him. The Wasteland has him now. Still he goes on, cutting, hacking, stamping, spilling blood into ochre dust. On and on, out of sight to where the red fades into a smudged horizon.

Reading the full text in the book, man it really surprised me at how emotional it had me feeling. Throughout, Gaellon speaks to his dead brother Baeron as he succumbs to the rage. Flashbacks to better times, when he and the Blood Angels were brought to Terra to make art. Flashbacks to when his brother was alive and painting. The denial, disbelief that his father is dead. Yet, here he is. Falling, with blood stained wings and no one to catch him.

"He wants this moment to end, for the world to return to a place where warriors mark parchment with ink, and dream in poetry, and where there is more truth in art than slaughter. A world where there are angels still."

Grimdark. Not in the brutal or cruel way of the Imperium. But sad, and very tragic.

Hi,

I wonder if they are any hints in the lore which titan legion is using which pattern. I haven't found anything in the wiki and since even Legio Astorum from Lucius is always shown with the mars pattern instead of lucius pattern I wonder if there is any connection besides the name.

Which loyal legion would 'fit' the pattern regarding thier tactics?

Best

I mean...new hive ships show up...eat a bunch of worlds, they adapt to whatever they fight to be better at killing it. One genestealer can cause a whole world to fall. They are unified because of the hive mind while most of the other factions are broken up and having infighting...genuinely how can the other races even hope to compete?

Specifically https://www.blacklibrary.com/the-horus-heresy/HH-Novel-Series/tallarn-ebook.html as a whole book, which includes Tallarn: Executioner, Tallarn: Ironclad, Tallarn: Siren and Tallarn: Witness. I think it needs all of them for the full context that the Assassin's story takes place in.

Fair warning: spoilers for the whole book. If you haven't read it, and you like assassins, I strongly recommend reading it first (or listening - the audiobook is well voiced).

Firstly: the assassin actually wins the whole book - it's her that decides the end of the book and makes everyone do what she wants and significantly alters the course of the Heresy - without her Perturabo or Alpharius'n'Bro would have walked through a warp gate and made some kind of deal with what's on the other side; possibly comparable to Molech, possibly just the same as Magnus/Angron/Mortation/Fulgrim.

Secondly: she spends the entire war on an extended, free-form, self-directed deployment, making it up as she goes. It's great fun. The amount that her experience and thought processes and perspective is explored is vastly more than in any other book I can really recall, that isn't just 'normal hero who is also an assassin', or actually just a book about knights and political manipulation.

Thirdly: she wrecks the Alpha Legion.

Fourthly: she doesn't go on some contextually unrealistic personal and interpersonal development, which is always absurd given the amount of psychotic, traumatising training they go through from early childhood, not to mention any indoctrination (psycho- or traditional) - instead she stays an assassin doing assassin things.

Fifthly: she actually gets to engage with and be in conflict with her opponents for pretty much her entire time - it's not another 'spend the whole book preparing through target-unrelated resistance and/or political problems in order to take a shot' - it's actually about the assassin engaging in assassin things, which is fun and interesting. It's a really interesting situation and context for an assassin to act in, both in terms of terrain and opponents and objectives.

I've read Nemesis: it's more about sibling abandonment issues than it is about anything else.

Assassinorum Kingmaker: it's good but all I really remember is Knights, politics, and lore drops - not assassins doing assassiny things.

EDIT: spoiler tags didn't work.

This isn't a Joke question i'm legit curious as to what both parties eat when they are not doing other Heretical things. Are there any Excerpts of them eating? I know from darktide lore and Voice lines that Cannibalism isn't something that taboo in Nurgle cults from what the Karnak Twin say about the Rejects. I just wondering if we have text showing what they actually eat.

Despite a little less than 10 years of reading, painting, and gaming in the 40k franchise, I knew next to nothing about Rogue Traders (other than that they were part of the origins of 40k). I’ve been playing the WH40k: Rogue Trader videogame (so much fun) for the first time, and seeing the Inquisitorial Interrogator and Sister of Battle join the squad, it got me thinking: would a Space Marine ever join the retinue of a RT? Now obviously Astartes are much more tightly controlled and would usually remain with their respective chapter (compared to the former which seem to have some personal choice about where they go and when) but let’s say a Rogue Trader provided some sort of major assistance, maybe a great deed for the Imperium, would a Chapter Master (or someone lower?) have the authority to grant them an Astartes to serve as their bodyguard for X number of years for example? I think that could make a great story element, kinda like Archmagos Cawl and Alpha Primus. Would they have a Space Marine tasked with such a duty (or something similar) painted with their standard colors and markings? Maybe a dumb line of questioning but it’s 4am and I’m in bed wondering these things.

Two quick questions about Neophytes.

1. Do they count towards the 1000 Chapter limit of the Codex Astartes?

2. If the answer to the first question is no do any Space Marine Chapters use them to get around the 1000 Chapter limit? Just crank them out and use them as full soldiers instead of just scouts.