text
stringlengths 27
208k
|
|---|
Dark Brotherhood - Dark Brotherhood: Note: This article concerns the Dark Brotherhood Space Marine Chapter of the late 41st Millennium. For the marauding Blackshield force of the Horus Heresy era, please see Dark Brotherhood (Blackshield Force).The Dark Brotherhood is a Codex Astartes-compliant Loyalist Space Marine Chapter of unknown Founding and origin. Almost nothing is known about this Chapter in Imperial records.
|
Dark Brotherhood - Chapter Colours: The Dark Brotherhood primarily wears slate grey Power Armour. The white squad specialty symbol (Tactical, Assault, Devastator or Veteran) is indicated on the right shoulder pauldron. A red Roman numeral centred on the squad specialty symbol indicates squad number. The wings of the Aquila or Imperialis on the chest guard, as well as the backpack, are black. Most unusual, the colour of the skull on the Aquila or Imperialis on the chest guard indicates company number in accordance with the Codex Astartes -- i.e. White (1st Company), Yellow (2nd Company), Red (3rd Company), etc.
|
Dark Brotherhood - Chapter Badge: The Dark Brotherood's Chapter badge is a white Maltese Cross, with a large red skull centred on it, on a field of slate grey.
|
Dark Brotherhood - Sources: Adeptus Astartes: Successor Chapters (Limited Release Booklet), pg. 29Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader (1st Edition), pg. 10
|
Dark Brotherhood (Blackshield Force) - Dark Brotherhood (Blackshield Force): This article concerns the Dark Brotherhood Blackshield force of the Horus Heresy; for the Space Marine Chapter of the 41st Millennium, see the Dark Brotherhood.The Dark Brotherhood was a large and notorious Blackshield Space Marine force that carved out its own corsair empire on the edge of the Pale Stars during the Horus Heresy in the early 31st Millennium. It fought a long war against an Alpha Legion hunter-killer force tasked with crushing resistance to the Warmaster Horus' Dark Compliance in that region.The Dark Brotherhood formed around a warrior known as the "Nemean Reaver", or simply "The Nemean," a title likely referring to the impenetrable Artificer Armour he was said to wear in battle or to suggestions that he was preternaturally strong and impossible to slay.Of the origins of this war leader very little is certain, though some accounts claim he was a Terran scion of the Ist Legion, the Dark Angels, and a veteran of the Third Rangdan Xenocide, a notion at least partially borne out by elements of the sparse personal heraldry he wore and by the terrible scars that marred his features.
|
Dark Brotherhood (Blackshield Force) - History: Almost from the outset, the war of the Horus Heresy was a vast cataclysm and one whose events moved with such quicksilver pace that mystery, supposition, lies and simple ignorance cloaked much of the bloodshed even as it occurred, casting a veil over much that would never be lifted.Despite the paucity of records, accounts of small warbands that were once part of the known Traitor Legions fighting independently persisted throughout the war. In some cases, outcast forces proudly bore their original colours and may have regarded themselves as the true inheritors of their Space Marine Legions.Further to this, and perhaps an even more sinister enigma, are the persistent reports of Space Marine forces appearing bearing no sign or seal of heraldry or origin at all, or stranger yet, heraldry which bears no mark known during the Great Crusade.A handful of extant accounts, now sealed beyond all retrieval, makes reference to a loosely-termed and non-formal class of warrior known as the "Blackshields". The majority of Blackshields appear to have been of the Legiones Astartes, though some may once have belonged to other factions.
|
Dark Brotherhood (Blackshield Force) - The Ruinstorm: One of countless shadow wars fought during the Horus Heresy which would only be known to history by the piecing together of scattered archival fragments, the war for the region to the galactic south-west of the Warp phenomenon known as the Maelstrom was one fought far from the front lines and outside of the chain of command of either side.When word of the outbreak of the Horus Heresy reached the individual planetary rulers, most recoiled in horror at the Warmaster Horus' base betrayal of the Emperor, yet none dared declare openly against him for they dreaded the gaze of Horus and knew that should they provoke his wrath, he could crush them out of hand.Several lonely voices denounced such vacillation as craven and dishonourable, imploring the Imperial Commanders of the region to stand together in common defiance of the Traitors, yet these voices were few and quickly silenced.It was against this backdrop of dread and recrimination that the worlds of the region began to suffer a range of creeping horrors. At that time, none could know of the great and terrible rite that the Traitor Primarch Lorgar had enacted at Calth, that in the sacrificial murder of the Veridia star during the Battle of Calth he had brought the Ruinstorm into being, a Warp storm of such scale and ferocity that the Imperium would be sundered in twain.As the shock wave of the Ruinstorm struck the Pale Stars, terror and insanity erupted across the region's worlds. Thus, as the light of Terra was smothered by the oncoming Ruinstorm, so entire swathes of the galaxy fell silent to the masters of the Imperium.The loyalties of the worlds of the Pale Stars remained unknown to Terra, lost to the galaxy-wide clamour of all-consuming civil war. But for the coming of a great, yet unsung hero of the Imperium, the fate of the Pale Stars might have gone unremarked in the story of the great Horus Heresy; that warrior was Nathaniel Garro -- the so-called Agentia Primus of the Knights-Errant -- and Malcador the Sigillite.
|
Dark Brotherhood (Blackshield Force) - Envoy of Terra: With the Ruinstorm surging across the galaxy, the War Council of Terra sought by any means to gauge the true scope of the unfolding calamity. Blinded as it was, the council was desperate for other ways to measure the disposition of the Warmaster Horus' hosts and the allegiances of planetary rulers.Astrotelepathic communication was by that point all but impossible, the Warp stirred into a howling cacophony that either drowned out their messages or corrupted their content in insidious ways.The only means of assaying the status and allegiance of the scattered worlds of the Imperium would be to despatch envoys and agents to do so in person, even though the War Council knew that such a hazardous mission would be the deaths of countless loyal and devoted servants of Terra.
|
Dark Brotherhood (Blackshield Force) - Convergence: Even as Terra readied their flotillas to send to the beleaguered star system, other forces were converging upon the Pale Stars. One was an alliance of Legiones Astartes who had, each for their own very different reasons, renounced or severed their ties to their sire-Legion and obscured their heraldry; the other served an equally shadowed cause, albeit one that most others associated with the Traitors -- the Alpha Legion.Which faction came to the Pale Stars first is one detail amongst many now lost to history and none can tell if their appearances were linked or simply coincidental -- most likely the tides of the unquiet Warp simply stranded both there at the same moment in time.The first group would come to be named the "Dark Brotherhood" by the peoples of the Pale Stars and later other regions, though none can tell if the group itself ever acknowledged or used this name.Very little is known for certain about the Dark Brotherhood, and even less of the circumstances of its formation, but it is clear that this band of what would become known as "Blackshields" had formed around a warrior known as the "Nemean Reaver," or simply "The Nemean," a title likely referring to the impenetrable artificer-wrought armour he was said to wear in battle or to suggestions that he was preternaturally strong and impossible to slay.Of the origins of this war leader very little is certain, though some accounts claim he was a Terran scion of the Ist Legion and a veteran of the Third Rangdan Xenocide, a notion at least partially borne out by elements of the sparse personal heraldry he wore and by the terrible scars that marred his features.The Nemean was a taciturn and brooding warrior and leader, but by 008.M31, he had bound the disparate warriors of the Dark Brotherhood into a coherent whole and moved quickly to establish a haven, a sovereign domain deep in the void beyond the spiral arms where he and his brethren might forge their own destiny in a galaxy fallen to insanity.It was at the trinary star system known as the Eridayn Cataract that the Dark Brotherhood found refuge. A dense shroud of asteroids circled the system's three stellar bodies, concealing secrets and hazards that only the most accomplished of void masters could hope to navigate.The Dark Brotherhood were possessed of such individuals, their small fleet of light but fast and agile vessels crewed by a motley assortment of Void Born and captained by Legiones Astartes who had seen service in some of the most arduous campaigns of the Great Crusade. Having established a secure base of operations deep within the asteroids, the Dark Brotherhood laid claim to the entire stellar realm and the boundless natural resources that orbited its three stars.Within solar months the Dark Brotherhood was aggressively defending its interests, ranging the surrounding Warp routes to clear them of any foe that might contest their mastery, from Human and xenos void pirates to patrol vessels sent out by the small Imperialis Armada squadron stationed at Phargos Rex.In late 007.M31, the Dark Brotherhood launched a sudden and overwhelming assault upon the nearby system of 771/51-6. There they brutally purged the Human-xenos hybrid pirate clans that had preyed upon the region's outlying worlds since the time of Old Night, the Nemean executing their master by his own hand as an undisputable message to all of that abominable strain.The name of the Dark Brotherhood's brooding reaver lord was soon known across a dozen and more systems, and whispers of his formative stellar pocket empire spread still further. Soon after this event came word of the arrival in the region of a Traitor Legiones Astartes strike force of the Alpha Legion, commanded by Strike Master Ijax, a bloody-handed veteran of the Drop Site Massacre at Isstvan V.Strike Master Ijax had come to the Pale Stars as an emissary of the Traitor cause, his mission to ensure that the region's planetary rulers declared for the Warmaster Horus' cause. Instead of presenting himself directly at Phargos Rex, Ijax divided his command and despatched lieutenants as envoys across the region, each going before a planetary lord to deliver the Warmaster's missive.Each recipient was informed that their peers were being made the very same offer at the very same moment. In so doing, each ruler was compelled to reach their own decision without recourse to their fellows, the Alpha Legion envoy standing before them feeding their darkest fears about what the Warmaster's fleets might have in mind for their world while simultaneously appealing to their most venal desires with insinuations of the favour they might earn upon declaring for the Warmaster.The presence of the Dark Brotherhood however forestalled immediate acquiescence. Upon learning of the Nemean and his pocket empire, Strike Master Ijax saw at once the necessity of neutralising this rival faction and an opportunity to seal the compact with the planetary rulers.If the governors would commit their own forces to his command in the joint endeavour of ridding the Pale Stars of the Dark Brotherhood, then the Warmaster would surely bless each ruling house with his unconstrained largesse. The rulers saw no choice but to comply.
|
Dark Brotherhood (Blackshield Force) - Shadow War: The compact sealed, Strike Master Ijax's subcommanders assumed direct command of the planetary musters of a dozen worlds and their system defence flotillas. While most of these forces were but crudely equipped and barely-trained, the Alpha Legion war leaders soon remade them into highly effective armies, utilising each muster's unique knowledge of its homeworld and the particular skills honed there.Having established a core of defensive armies on the key worlds, Ijax ordered his disparate hosts to press outwards into the Pale Stars, thousands of warriors transported in the holds of a motley armada of cargo vessels attended by Alpha Legion escort ships.The strike master's intent was to challenge the freedom of movement the Dark Brotherhood had enjoyed since coming to the region, and in so doing to precipitate an escalation in the conflict, dictated by his own strategic ends.The Dark Brotherhood were far from idle as the Alpha Legion raised the planetary musters and when the Traitor-aligned fleets pressed into the void, they were immediately opposed by the Nemean's vessels. Across the Warp routes of the Pale Stars, the black-hulled warships of the Dark Brotherhood fell upon their foes, exacting a fearsome toll upon those who would oppose their mastery of the Warp routes.The Traitor-aligned ships teemed with militia troops, their holds crowded way beyond capacity, and so the Blackshields' boarding actions were met with such a press of bodies that they were repulsed as often as they were successful. The Dark Brotherhood turned dozens of militia transports into charnel houses, driven by the twin goals of dissuading future attack while capturing what vessels might find employment in their own ragged fleet.The fighting was most intense where Dark Brotherhood and Alpha Legion warriors came face to face, on several occasions upon the burning bridge of some stricken vessel wracked by shuddering death throes. No quarter was given and none sought in such bitter confrontations, and countless Legionaries from both factions went to their deaths rather than concede defeat.Dark Brotherhood and Alpha Legion war ships clashed across a dozen systems, the conflict spilling onto the surfaces of numerous worlds as the Traitor-aligned militias were deployed wherever their masters willed. The mortal hosts were mostly treated as less than cattle by Strike Master Ijax and his officers, their presence often serving as provocation to incite attack from the Nemean.The Blackshield lord was no fool however, matching the Alpha Legion's cunning with his own so that thousands-strong militia armies were often deployed to isolated regions at great effort to no effect, falling prey to hazardous local conditions or simply starving to death while the Dark Brotherhood committed their efforts elsewhere.At Larsa V for example, transport barques out of Phargos Rex deposited thirty cohorts of the planetary muster into the rhodium dune seas, which dispersed across the ergs and established a chain of fortified strongpoints. The Dark Brotherhood declined to take the bait however and within a solar month the entire army of occupation had perished from exposure to the highly irradiated environment.At Mirdath, three Dark Brotherhood vessels succeeded in bypassing the quasi-sentient out-system defence monitors protecting the Dark Mechanicum forge-fane that had long orbited in the system's outer reaches. Striking directly for the fane's macro-provender chambers, a Dark Brotherhood boarding force captured and escaped with hundreds of tonnes of high value supplies.During their escape though, they encountered some manner of mechanical horror of whipping mechadendrites that slaughtered half their number before they could break clear. It would later be determined that this creature was the product of the Mirdath forge-fane's inner foundry, the holy-of-holies where unspeakable machine blasphemies had long lain dormant.At the outlying system of Dissolution, the Alpha Legion envoy ordered the recall of an army of occupation that had been engaged in a decades-long campaign to eradicate a primitive, yet highly pernicious native xenos strain. As the garrison forces mustered in orbit, the long-suppressed xenos rose up against the remaining Human colonial holdings, achieving in a single local day what the garrison had fought for solar decades to hold at bay, and tens of thousands of settlers were sacrificed to the primitive aliens' chthonic fire-gods.Even as the militia watched its world burn from orbit, the Dark Brotherhood struck and a fierce battle erupted across Dissolution near-space. Thousands of Traitor-aligned militia died as their transports were cast burning to the surface below, but the Nemean's forces suffered concomitant losses, for the Alpha Legion had used the garrison force as bait to draw the Blackshields into an ambush by their own vessels.Though the war that erupted across the Pale Stars divided the belligerents between those aligned to the Warmaster and their enemies, the Dark Brotherhood fought not for Terra but for their own cause. That cause, so it would later be claimed, was simple survival, the Blackshields having determined that in a galaxy fallen to darkness, survival lay in the seizing of their own destiny.The Nemean was bitterly opposed to the Traitors' campaign to force the local commanders to declare for the Warmaster, for them doing so was detrimental to his own ambitions of a safe haven for his kin.The populations of the worlds of the Pale Stars knew horror at the war the Traitors had brought to their worlds, but any who looked to the Nemean for deliverance would find only disappointment, the Dark Brotherhood unheeding of their suffering.
|
Dark Brotherhood (Blackshield Force) - The Storm Rises: With the coming of war to the Pale Stars, there soon followed yet another woe. The turbulence that had afflicted the Warp for so many solar months now flared into a raging tempest, fuelled, so it seems to us now given what we have learned of the Empyrean, by the shedding of so much blood among the Pale Stars.The planetary musters raised at the command of Strike Master Ijax had borne the brunt of the suffering, and the losses sustained by the Alpha Legion and Blackshields were insubstantial in comparison.As the deaths mounted in increments of many thousands, so the Warp grew ever more restive, immaterial tendrils groping in the darkness towards spilled blood like unseen predators about a drowning man. Later studies would conclude that this phenomenon had been brought about with deliberate intent, but others doubt that Strike Master Ijax was fully party to the fell wisdom possessed by Erebus of the Word Bearers and his peers.As ever more blood was shed, Dissolution, Phargos Rex, Mirdath and Larsa were subsumed in a seething mass of what Navigators once referred to as a Warp/realspace interface, but which now is known by far less mundane terminology as a Warp rift.With the Warp Storms came further waves of insurrection and insanity more intense than any before, and if but a fraction of extant accounts from this period are to be afforded any credulity, things born of the Abyss now walked amongst Mankind. Nightmares made flesh tore themselves from the shadows and fell upon the peoples of a dozen worlds, and it is said that the streets ran with torrents of blood.Worse still, great swathes of the population of Phargos Rex reportedly joined the unnamed creatures and turned upon their fellows, rendered by Warp-touched madness to atavistic cannibals and savage murderers.
|
Dark Brotherhood (Blackshield Force) - Witness: It was to this region of blood-stained space that Rogue Trader Militant Lorn Orpheus finally came. His flotilla had traversed the tumultuous Warp routes from Terra, through the outer marches of the Segmentum Solar and across the depths of the Orion-Crux void. Fewer than half of the flotilla survived the passage through the Khymaran Drift, for here they encountered the leading edge of the Ruinstorm as it surged across the galaxy.The flotilla that at last translated into realspace at Phargos Rex bore scant resemblance to that which had departed Terra only solar months earlier. Those vessels that survived were visibly wounded, their hulls scorched black by immaterial fires and their armoured flanks rent and buckled as if they had been caught in the grasping talons of some god-daemon of ancient myth.Limping in-system, it was immediately apparent from the flood of signals, both electromagnetic and astrotelepathic, that the Pale Stars were in the grip of some terrible woe. Among the numerous names and images repeated throughout this torrent of vox and psychic traffic was that of the Nemean, as if the peoples of the Pale Stars sought his protection and protection from him in equal measure.The envoy of the Council of Terra knew that not only had the ancient tales of the horrors of Old Night been true, but those very horrors had returned. Funeral pyres the size of cities burned across the darkness of Phargos Rex's night side, while a pall of dense smoke obscured the terrors being inflicted upon the surface of the day side.Orpheus however had come too far and risked too much to turn tail and retreat back to Terra, if indeed a return voyage was even possible given the ever-rising intensity of the Warp Storms and the woeful state of his flotilla.The envoy resolved to travel to the surface and to determine if anything remained of the planetary government or the Terran administration mission that had been based there. But Orpheus was well aware of the risk he was taking, and so he prepared a message packet for Terra, to be carried through the Warp Storms upon the fastest vessel remaining to his flotilla.The message that Lorn Orpheus composed for the Council of Terra was as full an accounting of the horrors that had consumed the Pale Stars as he was able to compose. He described the Warp phenomena that had assailed his vessels as they braved the storms, of crewmen driven to rabid insanity and the bloodbath that had ensued.He spoke of the apparitions that had tormented them as they plied the turbulent Empyrean and which lingered still at the edges of vision even days after translation.He recounted something of the unfettered, impenetrable insanity that had drowned the vox channels and the flood of pain and horror which the few surviving astropaths were broadcasting far and wide.He concluded his message informing them that he intended to descend to the burning surface of Phargos Rex and to seek out any vestige of authority in an effort to fulfil his mission, and to learn the identity of the individual whose name and face appeared in so many communications -- the Nemean.
|
Dark Brotherhood (Blackshield Force) - Dark Compliance: It would be many solar weeks before Orpheus' message runner reached Terra, the fact that it survived the return voyage at all nothing short of a miracle. In the meantime the horrors that afflicted the Pale Stars intensified many times over.The void boiled as other-worldly energies burst across space, the skies above each planet ripped asunder in a livid display of seething insanity. The anarchy that Orpheus had encountered at Phargos Rex cascaded outwards and subsumed each and every world in the region, millions rising up and tearing down planetary governments before turning upon their own.Ruling bodies were compelled to flee the rioting hordes and abandon any pretence of control, and many Imperial Commanders found their authority entirely reliant upon the support of the Alpha Legion.Across the worlds of the Pale Stars, Ijax's subcommanders deployed Legion assets to defend the rulers from their own rebelling populations and, in short order, the strike master became the de facto power in the region, able to precipitate the downfall of entire planetary governments simply by withdrawing his forces and allowing the mobs to exact their bloodthirsty vengeance.Even those rulers not under siege by their own peoples were acutely aware that with their Planetary Defence Forces directly controlled by the Alpha Legion, they were entirely reliant on Ijax for protection from the Dark Brotherhood.At a stroke, the Pale Stars had fallen to the Traitor cause -- Dark Compliance to the Warmaster's shadow empire had been achieved.
|
Dark Brotherhood (Blackshield Force) - One of Twenty: It might have been expected that the worlds of the Pale Stars would have been lost to the Imperium, as were so many other regions. The Ruinstorm now split the galaxy asunder and hundreds, even thousands of star systems were drowned in blood or brutally crushed beneath the heel of the Warmaster Horus, the Great Betrayer.Countless worlds were lost for all time, consumed in the raw stuff of the Warp, their names to be struck from the stellar cartographs and their approaches seeded with navigational warning buoys. Warp travel became all but suicidal and astro-telepathic communication nigh impossible.No doubt such a fate would indeed have befallen the Pale Stars were it not for the fact that not only did Orpheus' message runner somehow make it back to Terra, but one important detail in his message had caused it to be routed directly for the attention of Malcador the Sigillite, Regent of Terra and the second highest authority in the entire Imperium. That detail was the naming of the leader of the Dark Brotherhood.The warrior dubbed the Nemean was already known to Malcador, for he was one of a score of Legionaries identified by the former Luna Wolf and member of the Crusader Host, Severian.The Sigillite's intent was to gather each of those named by Severian and muster them into a cadre of warriors directly under his control, a band he would dub the Knights-Errant. It fell to the most senior of these, the Agentia Primus Nathaniel Garro, to go forth into the galaxy and recruit all twenty to his master's cause.And thus Garro was dispatched to the Pale Stars, his mission to return with the leader of the Dark Brotherhood at his side that the Nemean might swear himself to the cause of Malcador the Sigillite.
|
Dark Brotherhood (Blackshield Force) - Coming of the Herald: At 017.008.M31, a grey-hulled, dagger-prowed Warp-sprinter named Eusebeian Herald plunged from the churning Warp Storms closing in upon the outlying system of Optera, a trail of rapidly dissolving Warpstuff forming a kilometres-long contrail in her wake.The Herald had been laid down at Saturn by the hands of the most skilled ship-wrights of that domain and utilised hybrid technologies jealously guarded by the Terrawatt Clans of Ancient Terra and denounced as heresy by the Martian Priesthood.Not only had she survived the tempest but she had made the journey in mere solar weeks and carried her passengers safely through the otherwise impenetrable Immaterium to the frontier of the Pale Stars. It was a voyage few would have dared and even fewer could have survived.Aboard the Eusebeian Herald was a contingent of the Knights-Errant -- Nathaniel Garro, formerly of the Death Guard, Callion Zaven, once of the Emperor's Children, and Tylos Rubio, a scion of the Ultramarines. Each Legionary had been named by Severian and the Sigillite had foreseen they would each prove vital in averting the fall of the Imperium and combating what he had prophesised would come in its aftermath.In the Dark Brotherhood and their mysterious leader, Malcador hoped to secure another weapon for his long, silent war against the darkness.
|
Dark Brotherhood (Blackshield Force) - Conclave of Optera: At Optera, Garro ordered the astropath assigned to his mission to send forth a signal, its allegorical cipher imprint unique and composed for this specific circumstance. The message could only be understood by an astropath bound to the service of the Legiones Astartes, and its precise content only deciphered by one whose loyalties lay truly with Terra.The message called for the recipients to gather at Optera and Garro chose as the meeting place a ruined, megalithic structure high atop a rocky plateau overlooking the cratered wastes of Optera IV.There were numerous risks inherent in the sending of such a message, but in the Sigillite's view, still greater advantage to be won, and so the astropath's mind-song went out across the storm-wracked reaches of the Pale Stars. Twenty solar days later, Nathaniel Garro convened his parley.In the shadows of the cyclopean ruins of the ancient alien fane, Garro and his fellow Knights-Errant waited in silence as the churning skies were split by the contrails of a dozen gunships and landing craft of varying types.Each circled about the ruined fane several times before committing to land, and after a solar hour, the wide temple plaza had come to resemble the landing apron of a Legiones Astartes operating base, Garro, Zaven and Rubio standing impassively at its centre.At the appointed time, a dozen assault ramps lowered and from each vessel a group of warriors emerged, some openiy bearing Legion colours, others with heraldry deliberately obscured.If Garro and his fellow Knights-Errant were at all taken aback by the Legion colours represented before them, they hid their surprise behind stony countenances or blank-faced battle helms. In truth however, aside from the black-clad reavers of the Dark Brotherhood, none could have anticipated the presence of Legionaries from two other Legions.The first such group were clad in the distinctive red and gold of the Blood Angels, a Legion which had vanished almost to a man having been despatched to the far galactic east almost five standard years earlier and not heard of since.It was known that a small honour guard had been drawn by lots to remain on the Legion's homeworld of Baal, while the remainder mustered at the Nartaba System before proceeding to follow the deployment orders issued by the Warmaster some time before his betrayal had been revealed at Isstvan III.Garro was stunned to see before him a captain of the Three Hundred Companies, putting a lie to the tragedy of the supposed extinction of the IXth Legion and its beatific primarch, the Angel Sanguinius.The second group of warriors were clad in ivory-white battle plate, each a suit of Mark II Crusade Power Armour heavily modified by the Legion's artificers and bearing the lightning bolt icon of the Vth Legion -- the White Scars. The status of the Vth was known to Garro, but he would not speak of such things openly, for now at least.The remainder of the Legiones Astartes who gathered beneath the towering columns of the xenos temple were a disparate band indeed. No two warriors wore exactly the same mark or pattern of armour nor carried the same class of weapon. In many cases their battle plate was a heterogeneous admixture of components clearly acquired from a wide range of sources, some elements entirely foreign even to Garro's experienced eye.The one feature common to each and every one of these warriors was the fact that their armour was uniformly black. Here and there however, micro fractures, scars and buffs betrayed hints of older colours, from blood crimson to sea green, hinting at prior allegiances.Considering the panoply of gunmetal grey in which the Knights-Errant themselves were clad, Garro once again declined to pass comment on the strangers' appearance.At last, the leader of each group stepped forward into the centre of the gathering and Garro did likewise, the four Astartes leaders removing their battle helms so that they could address one another face to face, according to the ancient laws of war.The leader of the Blood Angels declared himself battle-captain of the 121st Company of the Three Hundred, naming himself Serron. Garro knew that the 121st Company had failed to assemble at Nartaba and Serron proceeded to recount how the war ships bearing his command had been caught in a fierce Warp Storm and cast upon the turbulent currents of the Immaterium.Swept along helplessly for what the Blood Angels perceived as mere solar days, the vessels were ejected violently from the Warp on the fringes of the Maelstrom, which for no explicable reason had been stirred into a raging vortex that cast its baleful tides for hundreds of light years in all directions.The vessels of the 121st had fought valiantly to escape the currents of the Maelstrom and, according to Serron, detected Garro's astro-telepathic call as they traversed the Mirabala Straits. Though Serron's company had known great hardship during their voyage, for them the order to muster at Nartaba had been issued mere solar weeks before -- meanwhile, over four standard years had passed in the material universe.The leader of the White Scars contingent was a cold-eyed warrior, his stony features marked by a web of intricately applied ritual scars. He named himself Nirun, leader of a band of five hundred or so Legionaries drawn from several different Legion sub-groups, known to the White Scars as "Brotherhoods."Garro knew that the Brotherhoods of that Legion were far more to them than tactical divisions -- each was a band of warriors so tightly knit that a Legionary could no more transfer between Brotherhoods than he could between Legions.The spectacle of a group of White Scar Legionaries drawn from different Brotherhoods was highly unusual, but Garro perceived an explanation in the Warrior Lodge tokens many of them bore.Every token carried the same symbol -- the serrated beak of a Chogorian raptor. Nirun offered no explanation for his presence in the Pale Stars, and Garro did not seek one, for now at least.And then the leader of the Dark Brotherhood stepped forward and lowered the hood that had obscured his features. The stark light of Optera's sun revealed the warrior-leader's face as a mass of scars that twisted his mouth into a permanent scowl, his eyes jagged shards of black ice.Garro knew instantly that the Nemean was indeed the warrior he had been tasked with recruiting to the cause of Terra, but how he would do so given the presence of the remainder of the Dark Brotherhood as well as the Blood Angels and White Scars contingents was another matter entirely.
|
Dark Brotherhood (Blackshield Force) - Fulcrum: Facing the three leaders gathered at the heart of the ruined xenos temple, their mustered hosts arrayed behind them, Garro began an address he hoped would stir the hearts of each and convince them to return at his side to Terra. Unsure of the extent of their knowledge of the disaster that the Warmaster Horus had brought down upon the Imperium, he resolved to offer a true and complete account of events, knowing that in this matter above all others truth was his greatest ally.He spoke first of the events of Isstvan III, eliciting a stunned denial from Captain Serron, followed by grim-faced and stoic acceptance of his words. When he spoke of the massacre at Isstvan V, he noted a stirring in the ranks of the Dark Brotherhood, silenced at a stroke by the slightest gesture from their brooding leader.He spoke of Loyalist and Traitor, terms that were anathema to many of those gathered before him and yet seemingly familiar to others. He described the desperate battles fought along the leading edge of the Warmaster's advance on Terra and the treachery that had been brought to bear on distant Calth, decribing it in his own words, for unknown to all but Rubio and Zaven, Garro himself had witnessed the horrors that had unfolded in its immediate aftermath.All of this the three Legiones Astartes war leaders heeded with little interruption, until at the last Garro reached the crux of his mission to the Pale Stars.Malcador the Sigillite had ordered him to recruit the leader known as the Nemean into the ranks of the Knights-Errant, but before him lay the opportunity to achieve so much more. And so the Sigillite's Agentia Primus invited all three leaders and their warriors to return with him to Terra and to serve the Emperor's regent in the coming war.His address complete, Garro stepped back to stand alongside his fellow Knights-Errant and await a response. Silence rang out for an age, before at last Captain Serron stepped forward.If it was true that Sanguinius was lost, Serron declared, his grief barely contained as he spoke, then the 121st Company had no place in the galaxy other than at the very forefront of war.Serron would bend knee to no other, he swore, instead stating that he and his warriors would go forth into the fires of war and seek out the foe wherever they might be found.Garro nodded grimly, knowing from the cast of Serron's voice that the Blood Angel would consider no other path. With those words, Serron turned and departed, the Legionaries of the 121st Company not hesitating to follow him from the alien temple.Next, the leader of the White Scars stepped forward to declare his position. His primarch's wishes in this matter were unknown to him and until such time as he received orders from the Great Khan himself, Nirun would continue on his current path. What that path might be, he would not relate to the Agentia Primus nor any other, and with his refusal of Garro's offer Nirun led his warriors from the temple and was gone.At the last, the Agentia Primus and the Nemean faced each other in the centre of the cyclopean ruins, the wind that keened through the jagged marble columns the only sound. The Blackshield lord had but one question for Garro -- what of his sire?But before Garro could answer, a bright explosion blossomed in the sky far overhead, followed seconds later by the rolling thunder of an explosion -- it was a sound that every warrior present had heard many times throughout his service. It was the sound of a spacecraft destroyed in low orbit by enemy fire.All eyes turned to the skies as debris arced downwards, each fragment as large as a gunship and trailing a churning black contrail behind. Moments later, the shout went up from the ranks of the Dark Brotherhood -- a shout accusing the Knights-Errant of a betrayal as craven as any that Garro had laid at the Warmaster's feet. Weapons were drawn as curses echoed about the temple, and a second explosion rent the skies.Garro's vox-link chimed in his ear and the captain of the Eusebeian Herald confirmed what he had already guessed. The Traitors must somehow have broken his astropath's cipher, a feat that only the Alpha Legion could achieve.In an instant, chaos claimed the formerly solemn gathering. Blackshields bellowed in rage or denial, some at the skies, some at their brothers but the greater number at Garro and the other two Knights-Errant.It appeared in that instant that Garro's entire mission to the Pale Stars stood at the brink of failure, until the Nemean spread his arms wide to ward his fractious warriors back. Locking eyes with the Agentia Primus, the Nemean repeated his earlier demand -- what of his sire?Garro answered with truth -- Terra had received no word from Lion El'Jonson, the primarch of the Ist Legion, the Dark Angels. The Nemean responded with a solemn nod, but before he could address his band, a shouted curse went up from his warriors and gunfire split the air.The Dark Brotherhood fractured into rival groups and a vicious, close-range fire fight erupted. What followed remains unknown, only that the meeting descended rapidly into armed conflict. Hard rounds and las blasts slammed into Garro as he withdrew, Rubio and Zaven attempting to drag him into cover before the weight of weapons fire grew too heavy even for his artificer-wrought Mark VI Corvus battle plate.Garro hesitated, sensing a turning point and an opportunity. Detaching a Teleport Homer from his belt he locked eyes with the Nemean. The other warrior took one glance at the chaos behind him and then nodded grimly.Garro thumbed an activation rune. With a flare of light and the crump of displaced air, all four were gone, teleported to safety aboard the Herald even as the Knights-Errant vessel dove hard through the skies above.
|
Dark Brotherhood (Blackshield Force) - Blood-Stained Stars: In the aftermath of the Alpha Legion's ambush at Optera, a bloody and bitter shadow war erupted across the systems of the Pale Stars. The Dark Brotherhood carved their way across the region, slaughtering any force that stood in their way until they vanished into the Eridayn Cataract, not to be encountered again for an age.The Blood Angels under Captain Serron threw themselves into all-out conflict, as if consumed by the need to atone for the sin of their own survival. The 121st Company clashed with Alpha Legion forces deep in the tainted mines of Kyro IV, upon the inner moons of 771/58 and through the xenos-haunted mire-seas of Sidaiva.Serron's force was last seen at Psiom Zeta-I, where it broke suddenly and inexplicably from a battle they were undoubtedly winning and instigated a hasty Warp jump along a vector that would have taken the small fleet broadly in the direction of the Segmentum Solar.History does not record for certain what became of the Blood Angels' 121st Company, although rumours persist that at least some of the company's number were counted as present at the very climax of the great heresy at the Siege of Terra.Of the White Scars that Garro encountered at Optera, still less can be said for certain but one fact alone is known. Nirun and his small force clashed with an Alpha Legion element under the direct command of Strike Master Ijax at Pharghos Rex, mere solar hours before the raging storms closed in upon the system and drowned it in the raw stuff of the Warp.That storm has yet to lift even now, and so the ultimate fate of both Legiones Astartes leaders remains beyond Imperial scholars' knowledge. Though none know the reason why, the name of the White Scars leader is entered into the roll of honour of the House of Orpheus, hinting at some confluence of Nirun's fate with that of the Rogue Trader envoy Lorn Orpheus.All that remains then is to complete the account of Garro, Zaven, Rubio and the warrior they had come to the Pale Stars to recruit to the cause of Malcador the Sigillite. The Nemean would take his place among the twenty chosen warriors that Garro had been tasked by Malcador to gather, but that is a tale that has yet to be satisfactorily concluded.Some say that the Nemean mustered with the defenders of Terra and that he stood to the last upon the walls of the great palace as hell itself descended upon the birth world of Humanity.As with so many accounts of those final days of the Horus Heresy, the truth is hidden beneath a pall of ashes and the crushed bones of the greatest heroes of the shattered Imperium.
|
Dark Brotherhood (Blackshield Force) - Notable Dark Brotherhood Members: The Nemean (Nemean Reaver) - Though the facts surrounding the establishment of the Dark Brotherhood remain largely obscured, it is known that the Nemean was the group's first master, and it was to him that numerous Blackshields rallied as they sought to carve out their own domain deep with the Eridayn Cataract during the middle years of the Horus Heresy. He garnered a reputation throughout the Pale Stars, as was often referred to as simply "the Nemean." It is generally believed that he was once an officer of the Ist Legion -- the Dark Angels -- though even this was far from certain. Unconfirmed rumours circulated that he was a survivor of the Rangdan Xenocides, the apocalyptic conflict that saw the nascent Imperium threatened with destruction earlier in the Great Crusade, and he had already entered into the legends of the Legiones Astartes long before the Horus Heresy. At the Conclave of Optera, however, he renounced his position and departed with Nathaniel Garro, Knight-Errant of Malcador the Sigillite, for Terra, leaving his lieutenants to take command of the Dark Brotherhood and lead it as they saw fit. It is believed his duty to the Sigillite culminated at the Siege of Terra upon the walls of the Imperial Palace during the very climax of the Horus Heresy.
|
Dark Brotherhood (Blackshield Force) - Warband Colours: The Blackshields of the Dark Brotherhood often wore battle plate constituted from different Legiones Astartes power armour patterns, and often included elements of dubious nature and origins.Other elements usually included improvised repairs and field modifications combined into a new divergent mark of armour. Not two examples of battle plate were exactly the same, especially when employed by the often highly idiosyncratic Blackshields.The only distinctive trait that was utilised by every warrior of this Blackshield warband was that they were all coloured uniformally black.
|
Dark Brotherhood (Blackshield Force) - Warband Badge: As the Horus Heresy ground on, many Blackshield warbands developed their own unique heraldic identifiers or came to use their own often highly idiosyncratic sigils and identifiers.The Dark Brotherhood for example, came to be known for the use of a ragged, skeletal version of the Imperial Aquila, rendered in ghostly white or pale gold.It was by such symbols of death and doom that many Blackshield groups would become known, making for a spectacle as terrifying as any Space Marine Legion force deployed in the armies of Loyalist or Traitor alike.
|
Dark Brotherhood (Blackshield Force) - Sources: The Horus Heresy - Book Six: Retribution (Forge World Series) by Alan Bligh, pp. 29, 84-91, 94-96, 226-227
|
Dark Castellans - Dark Castellans: The Dark Castellans is a Chaos Space Marine warband of the Iron Warriors Traitor Legion. Its Heretic Astartes are led by the Warsmith Kallus. The Dark Castellans were instrumental in overthrowing their brethren on the Hell-Forge of Taris, and took their place as the new garrison in order to supply the Black Legion with much-needed war materiel.The warband's leader, Kallus, who had hoped to join the Black Legion to put an end to the garrison duty he found so onerous was instead betrayed by his new master, Abaddon the Despoiler, and transformed into the cybernetic overseer of the Hell-Forge's manufactoria.
|
Dark Castellans - History: The Warsmith Kallus had tired of serving Perturabo, his Primarch, as a garrison-captain on one of the many fortresses of the Daemon World of Medrengard. Kallus thought to betray his Primarch and pledge his loyalty to Abaddon, the Warmaster of the Black Legion.In order to prove his loyalty to his new Traitor Legion, Abaddon tasked Kallus to conquer Taris, a Forge World outside the Eye of Terror. The planet was an ancient world, pre-dating the founding of the Imperium. It was discovered by the great Astra Militarum commander Macharius during the Macharian Crusade, and lost again following the outbreak of the Macharian Heresy. In that time, companies of Iron Warriors took over the world, who transformed it into a primary source of weapons for that Traitor Legion.The Hereteks of the Dark Mechanicum, servants of Abaddon, aided the Dark Castellans with escaping the Eye of Terror. Abaddon developed a plan to take over Taris, which Kallus put to use. Kallus and his small company of men landed on Taris and surrendered themselves to Taris' Iron Warriors garrison.Kallus' former warband comrade, Terrox, the Iron Warriors garrison-captain of Taris, interrogated Kallus, demanding to know the truth. Kallus lied and told him that he had come to Taris to relieve Terrox of his duty, so that Terrox could return to Medrengard. Terrox did not trust Kallus and informed him that he would verify this presumed order with their Daemon Primarch. If it was proved false, Kallus would be severely punished.For three solar days Kallus was present in his prison-chamber, secretly uploading scrapcode into the Forge World's Noosphere, a malignant computer virus created by Abaddon's Hereteks. By the time the Dark Castellans were in position to strike, Kallus had accomplished his task -- he had survived long enough to completely upload the code.The virus was a true technological marvel, a data-infestation that would allow the Dark Castellans to take over the cybernetic Skitarii warriors that composed the majority of the Dark Mechanicum forces defending Taris.The plan succeeded and the Skitarii were turned against their former allies. Terrox was slain and Taris conquered by the Dark Castellans in the name of Abaddon.In the wake of his triumph, Kallus was ready to join the Black Legion and take the battle to the servants of the False Emperor. But this was not to be, for Abaddon had other plans for the former Iron Warrior.To his horror, Kallus was forcefully wired to the Command-Throne of the planet's Forge-temples. His mind would control the forges of the planet and defend it against any and all threats that presented themselves. Its resources now belonged to Abaddon and it would provide its bounty of manufactured weapons to the Black Legion.
|
Dark Castellans - Notable Dark Castellans: Warsmith Kallus - Kallus was a Warsmith of the Iron Warriors Legion and the current Castellan of the Dark Castellans warband of the Iron Warriors and the ruler of the Hell-Forge of Taris. Warsmith Kallus betrayed his Primarch Perturabo to unite his warband with the Black Legion. While a Traitor to his own Legion, Kallus did not foresee his own betrayal by Abaddon and realized too late what the Warmaster of Chaos had in mind for him -- to spend the rest of his existence overseeing the production of a Hell-Forge, the very same duty he had been so desperate to escape when he still served Perturabo.Brane - Brane was the second-in-command of the Dark Castellans warband and led its assault against the Iron Warriors garrison present on Taris.
|
Dark Castellans - Dark Castellans Fleet: Fallen Empire (Battle Barge) - The Battle-Barge Fallen Empire serves the Dark Castellans as their warband flagship.
|
Dark Cells - Dark Cells: The Dark Cells, or Black Cells as they are sometimes called, are shadowy oubliettes located deep beneath the Imperial Palace on Terra that contain entities and artefacts that date back to the Age of Strife that could be used to annihilate the Imperium of Man itself if they were to break free or be used by those with nefarious purposes. It is unknown if the Dark Cells are the same location as the Vaults of Rython that were used for an identical purpose by the Legio Custodes before the Horus Heresy.Guarded by the Shield Host of the Adeptus Custodes known as the Shadowkeepers, the technology used to keep them sealed includes runic locks, psychic wards and sanctic circles. The corridors of the Dark Cells are patrolled at all times by a hundred Custodians of the Shadowkeepers. Although neither light, nor sound can escape from the cells, the dread air surrounding the facility is capable of even putting the iron-willed Custodians on edge.Even worse, when the Great Rift opened, the Custodes discovered that several of the cells actually now stood empty, the entities and artefacts once contained within spirited away by some unholy force to curse the galaxy once more. Fearing the consequences of such dread remnants of Old Night falling into the wrong hands, the Shadowkeepers at last sent warriors out into the galaxy. These jailers must trammel that which should not be, slaughtering all who seek to impede them, before returning their foul prizes to the cells where they belong.
|
Dark Compliance - Dark Compliance: Dark Compliance was the term used during the Horus Heresy to refer to worlds in Imperial space that were conquered by the Traitor forces of the Warmaster Horus.In the late 30th Millennium, when a world was liberated -- or subjugated -- by the Imperial forces of the Great Crusade, or willingly joined the ever-expanding domains of the Imperium of Man, it was said that it achieved "Imperial Compliance."The "Dark Compliance" is a cruel mockery of this noble endeavour. The term has since become a byword for countless atrocities, having been coined during the dark days of the Horus Heresy and the Warmaster Horus' rebellion against his rightful Emperor for those worlds that were subjugated militarily by the Traitors or somehow coerced to secede from the Imperium and join Horus' shadow empire.
|
Dark Compliance - Imperial Compliance: Having conquered the entirety of sacred Terra during what was to be named the Unification Wars, the Emperor of Mankind looked to the stars, intent to reconquer those worlds Humanity had lost during the baleful centuries of the Age of Strife. With the securing of the Treaty of Mars and an alliance with the Mechanicum, the Emperor now commanded immense armies of Human soldiery as well as the beginning of what would eventually grow into the Legiones Astartes, the Space Marine Legions.As the Emperor undertook His mission to free Humanity from the xenos and Warp-creatures that had nearly destroyed it, He conquered world after world, exterminating the mutants and aliens that had threatened Mankind's rightful place amongst the stars. Where Human society had survived, it was made part of the Imperium, or rather it "achieved Compliance with the Imperial Truth" as the parlance of those great days would have it.Sometimes this integration were achieved through diplomacy and the promise of a better future and the promised restoration of Humanity's great stellar empire of the Age of Technology. Often it required a show of force to subjugate planetary rulers and dynasties that had grown used to governing their worlds for standard centuries and even millennia. Even more often, Imperial Compliance had to be obtained by force of arms. In these great wars, tyrants were cast down and witches burned, planets purged of the foul taint of mutants, xenos and Warp-beasts such that eventually these campaigns of planetary conquest became known as Imperial Compliance campaigns or, more simply, rendering a world "Compliant."These Compliance campaigns were carried out by every military branch of the Imperium: from the countless regiments of the Imperial Army and the coldly-logical ranks of the Mechanicum's Taghmatas to the towering representatives of the Titan Legions of the Collegia Titanica, but greatest amongst these were the Space Marines. Countless worlds were brought into the fold of the Imperium by these gene-enhanced warriors, at whose heads stood the eighteen primarchs, the Emperor's own sons from whom the Space Marine Legions had been raised.Yet even these multitudes were not enough to police and control the entirety of the Emperor's domain, and while some of the Legions indeed erected mighty keeps and fortresses to keep watch over the newly Compliant populations -- most notoriously the Imperial Fists, the Iron Warriors and the Ultramarines -- many were the primarchs who refused to squander their warriors in such "administrative" tasks. Yet peace had to be maintained, and to fuel the Great Crusade's ever-growing need of supplies, voidships and manpower the Emperor devised a grand plan, the installment of the Great Tithe, which every world of the Imperium would have to submit itself to.In accord with the Tithe Grade established by the newly founded Office of the Administratum, every world would offer up its most precious resource for the Emperor: supplies, precious minerals, rare crystals or chemical compounds, weapons and ammunition, tanks and voidships or even just its manpower. Entire planetary populations were moved and sent to colonise planets far from their homeworlds, while the most troublesome and dangerous peoples were pressed into Imperial Army regiments and sent to the frontlines of the Great Crusade. For many more warlike cultures, such as the many Knight Worlds that populated the galaxy, this was in itself an immense recompense: the chance to gain glory and renown amongst the stars.When the Warmaster Horus' true intent became apparent, the usurpation of the Throne of Terra, the Warmaster did not annihilate what had come before him, but would pervert what he had helped establish in new and terrifying ways.
|
Dark Compliance - Dark Compliance: On many worlds the seeds of corruption had been sown long before the hand of betrayal struck at the Battle of Isstvan III. When the Warmaster Horus led his forces into civil war, hundreds of Imperial worlds not directly connected to his power base declared for his cause. On these planets and dominions, many scattered around the dangerous peripheries of the Imperium's frontiers, it was because his agents and those of his allies within the Mechanicum, the Alpha Legion and the Word Bearers, had already poisoned their hearts against the Emperor.Horus had been chosen to become the Imperial Warmaster by the Emperor precisely because of his diplomatic nature. It should then have been no surprise that he would have known how to use words and promises to sway the allegiance of entire Imperial worlds to his side. Many hundreds more, from isolated and otherwise unimportant Imperial colonies to keystones of the Imperium's economy and military strength would fall under his sway as the civil war progressed in a process that soon became known as the "Dark Compliance."To each world over which the Warmaster's shadow fell, a simple choice was given: total submission and surrender or total destruction and brutal subjugation -- slavery or death. There were to be no other options and the question would be asked but once. It was a perverse parody of the progress and glorious goals of the Great Crusade, but served as more than mere scorn for the Emperor's dream or even the vainglory of a tyrant, for there was an underlying method and intelligence beneath the apparently wanton savagery, far different from the pure and utter chaos and violence that define subjugation by forces of Chaos in the 41st Millennium.When one militant world or stubbornly Loyalist star system was punished by apocalyptic destruction for their brave defiance, such fear was created in others nearby that their surrender came as a rapid and forgone conclusion, often without a shot being fired in their defence. Even to those worlds that resisted, the Warmaster offered mercy and servitude once his victory was unquestionable.Each world that joined the Traitors' shadow empire added not simply territory but manpower, production capacities and supplies, feeding a war machine that was growing exponentially in power. Further, those worlds marked for death -- where possible -- can be seen to have been more strategically expendable compared to those spared to fall through fear, deception, corruption or treachery, or the measured if no less brutal decapitation strikes for which Horus' own Sons of Horus Legion had long been famed.It can also be observed that the devastation visited during the Dark Compliances was never so thorough that survivors were not left to spread the word of what terrors they had beheld, and of the price this new shadow emperor exacted for defiance of his will.
|
Dark Compliance (Audio Drama) - Dark Compliance (Audio Drama): Dark Compliance is the forty-third audio drama for The Horus Heresy series that was not originally released as part of an anthology or other release. Dark Compliance was first released as an audio drama in July 2017.
|
Dark Compliance (Audio Drama) - Official Synopsis: As Horus's rebellion gains momentum, more and more worlds flock to his banner. For some, it is through fear of annihilation; for others, it is out of malicious desire. Any that consider resistance are given one chance to swear fealty. To do anything other is to court disaster and worse. Accazzar-Beta is one such defier, but in bringing this heavily-fortified Mechanicum world to heel, just how far is the Warmaster willing to go and what truly is the meaning of a Dark Compliance? As two fleets engage across the gulf of the void, Accazzar-Beta will find out.
|
Dark Council - Dark Council: The Dark Council is a group comprised of the eldest and most venerated of the Dark Apostles of the Word Bearers Traitor Legion that rule their Legion from deep within the Eye of Terror on the Daemon World of Sicarus in the name of their Primarch Lorgar.These venerable Chaos Space Marines were members of the XVII Legion during the initial corruption of the Word Bearers by Erebus and First Captain Kor Phaeron some four solar decades before the outbreak of the Horus Heresy in the early 31st Millennium. They have survived and thrived through the Heresy and corrupted untold billions of mortals into worshipping the Chaos Gods.The Word Bearers are one of the only Traitor Legions that still retain some of the unity they had during the Horus Heresy, and because of this, the Dark Council has been able to rule over them without the complete anarchy that now defines the operations of most of the Traitor Legions.The influence of the Dark Council and the esteem in which they are held by their reverent brethren is one of the primary reasons the Word Bearers have maintained their unity across the entire 10,000-year span of the Long War against the Imperium of Man and its False Emperor.
|
Dark Council - History: The Word Bearers primarily reside on the Daemon World of Sicarus within the Eye of Terror. Beneath churning clouds of pendulant fire and blood the surface of Sicarus is covered by massive temples, towering cathedrals and blasphemous monuments dedicated to the worship of the Chaos Gods in the form of Chaos Undivided.Millions of slaves toil endlessly in the construction and raising of new structures and monuments of dark devotion. New levels are built upon existing crumbling edifices which results in towering spires that reach kilometres into the foreboding sky. This results in the creation of the sprawling subterranean warren of labyrinthine passages that interconnect the various devotional structures.From this daemon planet, the Word Bearers' Dark Council, a collection of the Word Bearers Legion's most powerful Dark Apostles, is the ruling body that leads the XVII Legion in the absence of their Daemon Primarch Lorgar.The Aurelian has isolated himself in meditation for long Terran millennia within the great Templum Inficio on Sicarus, and thus has played no role in the direction of his Legion while he pursues enlightenment and an ever-deeper understanding of the mysteries of Chaos at the hands of the Ruinous Powers.The seat of the Dark Council is located within the immense cathedral-fortress known as the Basilica of the Word. This structure is crowned with hundreds of five-kilometre-high barbed spires, each studded with jagged spikes, upon which are impaled countless living sacrifices dedicated to the Dark Gods.The Dark Council is involved in many decisions that affect their Legion. Most importantly, they decide who deserves to rise to the coveted rank of Dark Apostle in situations where the current reigning Dark Apostle is no longer fit to command their Host within the Legion.A Dark Apostle may not be able to command their Host for many reasons, most commonly because he has died in the service of the Dark Gods.Whether this death is caused by the actions of someone within the Legion is irrelevant as the Chaos Gods encourage competition and "initiative" within the ranks of their servants, but in the end, the Dark Council will always make the final decision of who will become the rightful successor and take the former Dark Apostle's place as the leader of a Host of the Word Bearers.
|
Dark Council - Notable Dark Council Members: Kor Phaeron - Kor Phaeron was the First Captain and Black Cardinal (High Priest) of the Word Bearers Legion during the Great Crusade in the late 30th Millennium. He served as a spiritual counsel and foster father during the years of Lorgar's youth on the Word Bearers' homeworld of Colchis, before Lorgar was rediscovered by the forces of the Imperium of Man. It was Kor Phaeron's influence and continuing devotion to the Colchisian Old Faith -- a faith dedicated to the Dark Gods -- that corrupted his Primarch and the XVII Legion into repudiating their oaths to the Emperor of Mankind and becoming willing pawns of Chaos. Kor Phaeron is currently involved in a millennia-long struggle with his rival Erebus on the Dark Council for control of the Word Bearers' direction.Erebus - Erebus held the prestigious position of First Chaplain of the Word Bearers Legion during the end of the Great Crusade in the early 31st Millennium. He was a fearsome and intimidating Astartes warrior and wore tattoos depicting sections of the Book of Lorgar across his shaven scalp to terrify his enemies. Erebus had willingly turned to the service of Chaos even before he had ascended to become an Astartes and was personally responsible for corrupting his own Legion's Primarch Lorgar, Horus and the Death Guard First Captain Calas Typhon to the worship and service of the Ruinous Powers. He is presently one of the ruling Dark Apostles of the Word Bearers Traitor Legion and has an ongoing but subtle war with Kor Phaeron for control of the XVII Legion's direction.Ekodas (Deceased) - Word Bearers Grand Apostle. Kor Phaeron, in his role as Black Cardinal of the Word Bearers' Chaotic faith, bestowed the title of Grand Apostle upon Ekodas, who served as the senior-most member of the ruling Dark Council of the XVII Legion after the end of the Horus Heresy. However, Ekodas was also a secret member of The Brotherhood -- a clandestine, internal sect within the Word Bearers Legion that had been formed at three different periods during the XVII Legion's history to maintain the Word Bearers' theological purity. Primarch Lorgar had ordered its formation on two separate occasions, the first during the purging of the Covenant and the old religion on Colchis before the coming of the Emperor of Mankind to that world. The second occasion was after the Pilgrimage of Lorgar during the Great Crusade when Lorgar had first gained knowledge of the existence of Chaos. With the realisation that the Chaos Gods were the true divinities of the universe came Lorgar's understanding that the Old Faith, the ancient religious beliefs of the people of Colchis that he had swept away, were true. The Old Gods, not the flawed Emperor, were the only powers that Lorgar believed were worthy of the Word Bearers' faith and worship. With the second reformation of The Brotherhood, the ranks of the XVII Legion were purged of all Terran-born Loyalists, leaving only those Astartes native to Colchis -- and thus loyal solely to Lorgar -- behind. In the latter part of the 41st Millennium, Kor Phaeron ordered The Brotherhood's formation a third time in order to overthrow the Dark Apostle Erebus, whom the First Captain felt had too much sway with the will of the Dark Council. Ekodas later led the Word Bearers' assault against the Boros Gate System but was killed by the elite Astartes of the secret Grey Knights Chapter before his duplicity could be revealed. In battle, Ekodas was able to use incredibly powerful psychic abilities through his unshakeable faith in Chaos Undivided. Ekodas commanded the Word Bearers' 7th Host, successfully leading an unholy crusade of retribution upon the Black Consuls, which succeeded in almost wiping that Successor Chapter of the hated Ultramarines from the galaxy.Ankh-Heloth - Ankh-Heloth was the Dark Apostle who led the 11th Host of the Word Bearers. Ankh-Heloth had risen to the esteemed position of Dark Apostle under dubious circumstances. While it was the Dark Council of Sicarus that had instated Ankh-Heloth as the First Acolyte of the 11th Host, this was only at Grand Apostle Ekodas' insistence. Less than a decade later, Ankh-Heloth ascended to the position of Dark Apostle to command the Host after his predecessor was killed under circumstances engineered, many believed, by Ekodas. Ankh-Heloth did not garner much respect from his fellow Dark Apostles of the Dark Council, many of whom regarded him as "Edokas's whipping boy."Belagosa - Dark Apostle of the Word Bearers' 30th Host, Belagosa was a tall and gaunt figure. In an act of devout faith, Belagosa clawed out his own eyes centuries ago. Nevertheless, he was still able to turn his head towards the direction of those that spoke to him, his empty eye sockets still far from blind, which bled red tears down his cheeks as a gift from the Dark Gods for his devotion.Jarulek (Deceased) - Jarulek was a Dark Apostle, and served as a former First Acolyte to the Dark Apostle known as The Warmonger during the Horus Heresy at the assault on the Emperor's Imperial Palace during the Battle of Terra. He later served as the Coryphaus to the First Captain Kor Phaeron. Through his extreme devotion to Chaos Undivided, furious passion and fiery oratory, he brought countless millions into the truth of the Eight-Fold Path. Millions more who had chosen to remain ignorant and resistant to the true faith had been slain upon his orders. Jarulek was slain on the world of Tanakreg by an awakened Necron Lord after successfully recovering a potent artefact from the Necrons' stasis tomb.Marduk - Marduk was a Dark Apostle and the former First Acolyte of Jarulek. He was a member of The Brotherhood, the secret internal sect within the XVII Legion that eliminated all Word Bearers who failed to comply with the new direction of the Legion following the conversion of Lorgar to the service of the Chaos Gods, including all Terran-born Word Bearers. Marduk fought at Calth against the Ultramarines Legion during the Horus Heresy and was elevated to the position of Dark Apostle and leader of the 34th Host following the death of his former master at the hands of a Necron Lord on the world of Tanakreg in the late 41st Millennium.Mothac - Mothac was a Dark Apostle who was encased within ensorcelled daemonic armour that was a gift of the Daemon Primarch Lorgar. He was the keeper of the forbidden tome known as The Dark Creed, a thick book bound in the skin of fallen Ultramarines. This book contained the holy writings of Lorgar after the end of the Horus Heresy and the XVII Legion's flight to Sicarus.Paristur - Paristur was a Dark Apostle who was known for his shrewdness and savagery. He had killed the Blood Angels Chaplain Aristedes in single combat on the walls of the Imperial Palace during the Battle of Terra in the closing days of the Horus Heresy.Sarabdal - Dark Apostle of the Word Bearers' 18th Host. Within the elite ranks of the Dark Council, Dark Apostle Sarabdal had led his Host the longest. Sarabdal had been groomed to become the Dark Apostle of the 18th Host by none other than Lorgar himself. Raised in the scriptorums of Colchis, Sarabdal had been little more than a child when he had taken part in the brutal Schism Wars that fractured the Covenant, the dominant religious order of that Feudal World before the arrival of the forces of the Emperor in the late 30th Millennium. Impressed with the youngster's religious fanaticism for his new faith and fiery demeanour, Lorgar had taken the boy under his wing and once reunited with the Space Marine Legion created from his genome after the Imperial takeover of Colchis, had personally chosen Sarabdal as one of the first Colchisian natives recruited to join the Word Bearers. Few Dark Apostles garnered more respect than Sarabdal. Other Dark Apostles even bowed at his venerable presence.Sor Talgron, The Warmonger - During the Great Crusade Sor Talgron took part in bringing Forty-Seven Sixteen into Imperial Compliance. He fought on Terra during the Horus Heresy. He was known to have worn Terminator Armour with a Chaplain's Skull Helm. Once he had been amongst Lorgar's most favoured and devout Chaplains, the first Dark Apostle of the 34th Company Host that was later led by the Dark Apostle Marduk. He had fought alongside the Primarchs, and counted such exalted heroes as Erebus, Kor Phaeron and even Abaddon as his Battle-Brothers. He was also known to have fought at the walls of the Emperor's Imperial Palace during the Battle of Terra. Eventually, Talgron rose to the esteemed rank of Dark Apostle, though he was later mortally wounded in battle and interred within the chassis of a Chaos Dreadnought. Though the other warriors interred within the Dreadnoughts of the Host had long ago lost any semblance of sanity, cursed as they were and unable to attain oblivion, yet denied the physical sensations of war and blood, the Warmonger retained a coherent self-awareness, and was a source of great wisdom and council. It was his unshakeable faith in the Ruinous Powers that kept him lucid when all others had fallen to madness. Erebus believed the power and conviction of his rapturous beliefs were what kept him from toppling off the precipice into the madness that consumed almost all other Chaos Dreadnoughts, though at times even The Warmonger's hold on reality slips, and he believes he is once again fighting alongside his Primarch during the Horus Heresy.
|
Dark Crusaders - Dark Crusaders: The Dark Crusaders is a Loyalist Space Marine Chapter of unknown origins and Founding.
|
Dark Crusaders - Chapter Colours: The Dark Crusaders primarily wear dark olive-drab green power armour. The Aquila or Imperialis on the chest as well as the shoulder pauldron inserts are bone.The black squad specialty symbol -- battleline, close support, fire support, Veteran, and command -- is indicated on the right shoulder pauldron. A white High Gothic numeral centred on the squad specialty symbol, indicates squad number.The colour of the trim on the shoulder plates indicates company number in accordance with the Codex Astartes -- i.e. white (1st Company), yellow (2nd Company), red (3rd Company), etc.
|
Dark Crusaders - Chapter Badge: This Dark Crusaders' Chapter badge is an ebon cross crosslet on a field of bone.
|
Dark Crusaders - Canon Conflict: In older editions, such as Codex: Space Marines (3rd Edition), the Dark Crusaders were depicted as wearing all black power armour with a golden Aquila or Imperialis, with a white skull on the Imperialis. The Chapter icon was a white crosslet, instead of a black one.
|
Dark Crusaders - Sources: Adeptus Astartes: Successor Chapters (Limited Release Booklet), pg. 30Codex: Space Marines (3rd Edition), pg. 20
|
Dark Disciple - Dark Disciple: A Dark Disciple is a normal human Chaos Cultist who serves the Dark Apostles of the Word Bearers Traitor Legion and other Heretic Astartes forces.Dark Disciples are true believers in the Chaos Gods who seek to spread their worship and influence across the worlds of the Imperium of Man.
|
Dark Eagles - Dark Eagles: The Dark Eagles is a Loyalist Codex Astartes-compliant Space Marine Chapter of unknown origin and Founding, though it is suspected of being a rare Successor Chapter of the Raven Guard. Unfortunately, at this time almost nothing is known about the Chapter beyond its name and Chapter appearance. It hails from the world of Moriorum.
|
Dark Eagles - Chapter Colours: The Dark Eagles primarily wear olive-drab green Power Armour. The Aquila or Imperialis on the chest guard is yellow. The white squad specialty symbol on the right shoulder guard designates operational specialty -- Tactical, Devastator, Assault or Veteran. A black Roman numeral is stenciled on the centre of the squad specialty symbol which indicates squad number. The colour of the shoulder plate trim indicates company number in accordance with the dictates of the Codex Astartes -- i.e. White (1st Company), Yellow (2nd Company), Red (3rd Company), Green (4th Company), etc.
|
Dark Eagles - Chapter Badge: The Dark Eagles' Chapter badge is a single, stylised, white eagle's wing, centred on a field of olive green.
|
Dark Eagles - Sources: Adeptus Astartes: Successor Chapters (Limited Release Booklet), pg. 30Imperial Armour Volume Two (Second Edition) - War Machines of the Adeptus Astartes, pp. 8-9Imperial Armour Volume Eight - Raid On Kastorel-Novem, pg. 104Insignium Astartes, pg. 59
|
Dark Fury Assault Squad - Dark Fury Assault Squad: A Dark Fury Assault Squad was a specialised Legion Assault Squad utilised exclusively by the Raven Guard Legion during the Great Crusade and Horus Heresy eras during the late 30th and early 31st Millennia.Equipped with the finest wargear, they would launch silent aerial assaults against unsuspecting high-value targets in a vicious decapitation strike.
|
Dark Fury Assault Squad - History: The Dark Fury Assault Squads were utilised by the Raven Guard Legion to conduct focused decapitation strikes upon specific, pre-designated enemy leaders against the backdrop of the carnage of battle. Far from subtle assassins striking unseen from the shadows, the Dark Fury ascended into the very midst of the battlefield, equipped with vicious Lightning Claws fashioned after those carried by their Primarch Corvus Corax.These squads were often deployed from the holds of specialised transport vessels such as the Darkwing Pattern Storm Eagle Gunships or the open frame Whispercutters, leaping from great heights to descend upon the silenced retro thrusters of their Jump Packs directly onto the heads of their unsuspecting target. Their squad leaders, known as the Choosers of the Slain for good reason, engaged the target while the warriors cut down any retainers who dared attempt to intervene. The result of a successful decapitation strike was utter confusion in the ranks of the foe, and the complete breakdown of the enemy's chain of command.
|
Dark Fury Assault Squad - Unit Composition: 4-9 Dark Furies1 Chooser of the Slain
|
Dark Fury Assault Squad - Wargear: Power ArmourPair of Lightning ClawsFrag GrenadesKrak Grenades
|
Dark Fury Assault Squad - Optional Wargear: Melta Bombs (Chooser of the Slain Only)
|
Dark Hands - Dark Hands: The Dark Hands is a Loyalist Codex Astartes-compliant Space Marines Chapter of unknown Founding and origin.
|
Dark Hands - Notable Campaigns: Aschen War (307.M40) - The Aschen War was a series of brushfire revolts and incursions that erupted across the Aschen Sub-sector in 300.M40, after a bloody cult-inspired revolt on the Cardinal World of Dimmamar exposed how overstretched Imperial control over the surrounding region had become. Slowly stripped of much of its defences over the course of several generations to provide for the needs of other pressing conflicts nearby, this border region was ill-equipped to stave off catastrophe when it came. The Imperial counter-invasion was led by the combined forces of two Space Marine Chapters -- the Dark Hands and the Exorcists, backed by the Necromundan 54th and 60th Imperial Guard Rifles and the Battle Sisters of the Order of the Valorous Heart. The Exorcists quickly realised that one of the keys to victory would be locating and destroying the single dark master of many names that lurked behind the divergent Chaos cults in the region, a daemonic creature that on Dimmamar was known as the Horned God. The Exorcists finally cornered the Daemon Prince in the maze-like pre-human ruins of the Dead World of Belphago. The Exorcists with the aid of a hastily composed Ordo Malleus strike team managed to banish the vile Daemon Prince back to the Immaterium, though fully a third of the Exorcists Chapter had perished. But with this victory the tide of the war was now in the Imperium's favour, and within a year, the sub-sector was brought back under Imperial control.The Cleansing of Cinchare (844.M41) - A massive Hrud infestation on the Imperial Mining World of Cinchare was defeated by Terminators drawn from the 1st Company of the Dark Hands with support from the Imperial Guard's 39th Cadian "Xenobane" Regiment of the Cadian Shock Troops. The combat was fought in the close, shadowy confines of the myriad mining tunnels that snaked through the planet's crust like a rat's nest. Imperial forces successfully rid several worlds in the Chinchare System of the xenos Hrud, halting what was later determined by Ordo Xenos investigators as the beginning of a potentially devastating entropic infestation.
|
Dark Hands - Chapter Colours: The Dark Hands primarily wear dull mint-green Power Armour. Their gauntlets and knee plates are black. The black squad specialty symbol -- Tactical, Assault, Devastator or Veteran -- is indicated on the right shoulder plate. A white Gothic numeral centred on the squad specialty symbol, indicates squad number. The colour of the Aquila or Imperialis on the chest plate indicates company number in accordance with the Codex -- i.e. White (1st Company), Yellow (2nd Company), Red (3rd Company), etc.
|
Dark Hands - Chapter Badge: The Dark Hands' Chapter badge is a stylised outstretched black, armoured hand facing the viewer as if in a halt gesture, on a field of dull mint-green.
|
Dark Hands - Sources: Adeptus Astartes: Successor Chapters (Limited Release Booklet), pg. 31Insignium Astartes: The Uniforms and Regalia of the Space Marines (2002) by Merrett, AlanImperial Armour Volume Two - Space Marines and the Forces of the Inquisition, pp. 30, 138, 150, 160Imperial Armour Volume Two, Second Edition - War Machines of the Adeptus Astartes, pg. 21Imeprial Armour Volume Ten - The Badab War - Part Two, pg. 126
|
Dark Haven - Dark Haven: Dark HavenImperialKnight WorldSegmentum ObscurusHouse OrhlaccCyclops ClusterImperiumSegmentum ObscurusHumanThe planet was covered in a world-spanning forest of vast fungal and pseudo-coral growths which swallowed up every iota of light, casting the grey earth beneath them into deep shadow and even shrouding its cold seas into sunless deeps. Aggressive and fast-growing, the living web that covered Dark Haven was nevertheless organic, and therefore a precious resource to be used and harvested, although the planet's great toxicity for many years prevented this.This was a world of considerable hazard, as the planet presented its own predators in the shape of hulking ambulatory mycolidae and less well-understood fauna deep within its shadowed depths. During the time of Old Night, the Knight House of Orhlacc, originally of the Lucien Sector, rose to rule Dark Haven as its own. Orhlacc, previously a minor Household, flourished over the decades of its stewardship of Dark Haven before the coming of the Great Crusade in the 30th Millennium.After the Knight World was restored to the Imperium, its valuable harvest, along with certain exotic chemical compounds, were cultivated for export by legions of servitor-arachnid automata, creating a wealth which further increased the power and independence of this world.
|
Dark Haven - History: During the Dark Age of Technology, the lonely, shadowed world that would come to be known as Dark Haven was discovered deep within a mineral rich but otherwise barren region of the void. In order to exploit and colonise this region for Humanity, it had been selected to become a Knight World. And so the House of Orhlacc first came into being, and its domain known, for reasons of literal truth as well as poetic observation, as Dark Haven.It was founded during the latter part of Humanity's first expansion across the stars during the Age of Technology; its founding ark's journey is recorded as originating from what is now known as the Forge World of Lucius. This place was indeed almost supra-abundant in life, but within solar days of the colonising ark's planetfall, a terrible truth had been discovered; the fruits of this benighted world were inimically poisonous to man.The shadowed world was at the very edge of its aged star's habitable zone, and life there had flourished millions of standard years before it ever had on distant Terra. Here the dominant form of that life was akin to fungi, but infinitely more varied and complex than that of most worlds, forming a planet-spanning web of life. Its patterns varied, from towering pseudo-coral-like structures kilometres high, comprising billions of microscopic creatures, which overshadowed the land and covered the seas, stealing the light, to colossal, ambulatory predators whose venom could sear ceramite and eat through plasteel. All of it was to Humanity virulently and fatally toxic when consumed, even given the most stringent methods available for its processing. Dark Haven was a Death World, misjudged as a paradise of life.Undeterred, the Human colonisation went ahead; keeps were built into the few jutting mountain ranges which fought to clear the vast living canopy, attempts were made to clear-cut for settlements and introduce off-world agriculture, supplies were rationed, and additional Magi Biologis (this is used here as a term of convenience based on current Imperial terminology, shrouded as the truth of such things are by time) brought in to attempt to address the difficulties with the certain hope of an eventual solution to the planet's toxicity.During Dark Haven's founding solar decades, progress was slow, and life for the settlers a continuous struggle for survival, but one which they held at bay, at least until the coming of the Age of Strife. With exterior contact and the chance of resupply lost, Dark Haven should have been doomed. As things were, matters rapidly worsened for the dozen Knight Households and their retainers who had made it their cause to dominate the strange world.Soon famine was the enemy, as stockpiled supplies dwindled or became mysteriously tainted. As if sensing the Humans' weakness, the planetary ecology itself seemed to turn on them in a violent spurt of aggressive growth unprecedented in its suddenness or speed, and whole settlements were choked and overrun in a matter of solar hours by berserk fungal growth, their inhabitants slain by ravaging predators or consumed from within by parasitic life.Knightly keeps were only preserved by great trenches and pits filled with volatiles and turned into walls of fire, and the continuous counterattack of the Knights themselves against the forest and the monstrous creatures within it. Soon, as matters worsened, the Knight Houses of Dark Haven began to turn on each other for supplies and to assuage their hunger, and it is said that the most unspeakable acts were forced on those who would survive.This age of violence and decay would last for Terran centuries and should ultimately have been the death of the Knight colony, regardless of the tenacity and bravery of its scions, save for the actions of the House of Orhlacc. This House, accounted as but one of the settlement's minor Households -- renowned more for its learning and the skill of its Sacristans than its might -- had offered sanctuary to the Magi Biologis enclave stranded on the planet once the great decay had begun, just as others had turned against them.Within Orhlacc Keep, the Magi and their acolytes had laboured long, obsessively pursuing a solution to the problem they had been given when they had first been assigned to the world, even as darkness swallowed and separated the Knight Houses and the monstrous biosphere closed in. The solution when it at last came was a radical one; rather than adapt the world to Humanity, they adapted Humanity to Dark Haven, and House Orhlacc was their canvass.It would take generations and many tragedies before their work bore fruit, but they were successful, and as the other Houses of Dark Haven dwindled and in some cases died out entirely, the Orhlacc waxed strong and slowly multiplied. Soon they fought not simply to survive but to dominate, and many of the other surviving Households looked on them as saviours and joined them through alliances of blood, while others who saw them as enemies -- as something no longer fully Human -- perished. Within a dozen generations, only House Orhlacc and its kin remained as stewards and masters of this shadowed and deadly world.Aside from its inherent hostility, Dark Haven had lived up to its name during the Age of Strife, and through this long era of trouble and torment it had endured without being subjected to serious outside attack. Such xenos and Human marauder traffic which did rarely find their way to the world suffered as badly from the local environment as they did from the bellicose Knight House's resistance, while the Orks, long a menace to the worlds of the Cyclops Cluster, avoided the planet as if it was a profound anathema to them. As a result, the House of Orhlacc's dominion of their world went all but unchallenged, while affairs of honour between them and the constant battle to master their homeworld served to hone their fighting skills.When the forerunners of the Great Crusade first contacted Dark Haven, it was by accident, but they found their Vox-hails readily answered in ancient and formal courtesy, and Imperial emissaries were both impressed as well as somewhat disturbed by the macabre and formal reception they received on the sinister planet, of which dim legends had already reached them during their exploration of the region. Despite some misgivings, initial relations went well, and Dark Haven's sealed Imperial Compliance was attained bloodlessly by the 7th Expeditionary Fleet led by Lord Commander Suleiman Grimm of the I Legion in 833.M30, during the fleet's first journey through the region, at a time when much of the Coronid Deeps were still entirely uncharted and under xenos control.To the Dark Angels Legion, it is said that Dark Haven seemed a shadowed reflection of Caliban itself in some ways, while its masters, the Orhlacc, represented a feudal culture at once familiar to them and utterly strange. What most provoked the 7th Expeditionary Fleet's interest, however, was House Orhlacc's military strength, which was largely undecayed in sophistication and extremely extensive in range, including several hundred fully operational Knight armours and a moderate but reliably independent capacity to construct and arm more; a rare jewel of discovery indeed.Mechanicum emissaries were equally impressed, but these the Orhlacc -- perhaps remembering their abandonment long ago -- politely but firmly rebuffed, extracting at best a high price in "gifts" for access to their own techno-arcana, and then only as they saw fit and with much always kept secret. Any acrimony this might have created was quickly and thoroughly forestalled by the authority of Lord Commander Grimm, who ensured the world's smooth path to Compliance and the granting of full rights and titles under the Aquila to House Orhlacc in return for a full third of the Knight House embarking directly under his command as part of the 7th Expeditionary Fleet. This first pact of arms and alliance was to last for nearly thirty standard years of service, and marked only the beginning of the House of Orhlacc's involvement with the Great Crusade.As the Horus Heresy unfolded, House Orhlacc's carefully maintained reserve and independence would see it kept out of the direct machinations of the Warmaster Horus and free of the orbit of forces that would turn Traitor, as well as distrusted somewhat by those of the local Loyalist cause which might quickly turn to it as ally. The Orhlacc in their wisdom had known that Dark Haven, alone as it was, could not be defended against a full Traitor invasion fleet or a Space Marine Legion, and this made them a sitting target; a fate they declined.House Orhlacc reluctantly abandoned its domains due to its untenable strategic position, leaving behind an untraceable token force as caretakers and sentinels of their ancestral home. The mighty fire pits and trenches which, until now, had kept the ever-creeping vegetation at bay were doused and soon the mighty keeps and fortresses of House Orhlacc disappeared under the fungal canopy. Leaving their homeworld behind, House Orhlacc would fight on valiantly throughout the Age of Heresy and even secure itself a secondary homeworld in the Agathean Domain -- the grim world of Wychval.From this point until the end of the terrible wars of the Horus Heresy that were to follow, the House of Orhlacc would remain loyal to the Imperium, but they would fight their cause on their own terms as a nomadic Knight House -- even after gaining territories within the Agathon Domain -- with an eye to their own survival and an eventual return to their shadowed home.In the collective minds of House Orhlacc's Knights, Wychval would only serve as a temporary base, their return to their original homeworld only postponed until Horus' eventual defeat. It is unclear if Dark Haven ever came under assault by traitorous forces affiliated to the Warmaster or the Dark Mechanicum after House Orhlacc's departure and its overwhelming victory against the flotilla of Rogue Trader Charid Undine at the opening of the galactic civil war.
|
Dark Heart (Anthology Short Story) - Dark Heart (Anthology Short Story): Dark Heart is a short story published in The Horus Heresy series that was originally part of an anthology. Dark Heart was first published as part of the Mark of Calth main series anthology in April 2013. The cover image used is that of the e-book version Dark Heart which was republished separately.
|
Dark Heart (Anthology Short Story) - Synopsis: When the Word Bearers launched their surprise assault on Calth, it marked the beginning of their righteous campaign of vengeance against the hated Ultramarines Legion. But for one young Acolyte of Kor Phaeron, it is not the sons of Roboute Guilliman that he seeks to bring low -- through infernal pacts and daemonic power he strives to carve out a destiny for himself in the midst of the greatest war that the galaxy has ever seen. The name of Marduk shall be spoken with awe for millennia still to come...
|
Dark Heresy - Dark Heresy: Dark Heresy is a tabletop role-playing game first published on January 25, 2008 by Black Industries that uses the Warhammer 40,000 Roleplay system and is set within the same dark, Gothic universe as the Warhammer 40,000 tabletop miniatures game. Though the game eventually spawned four other core rulebooks covering different areas of the Warhammer 40,000 universe including Rogue Traders, the Deathwatch Space Marines, the Imperial Guard and the servants of Chaos, the initial releases concentrated on the Acolytes of the Inquisition.Black Industries chose to set the game in a previously undefined sector of Imperial space, the Calixis Sector, within the Segmentum Obscurus. This sector lies adjacent to the Scarus Sector, the famed setting of Dan Abnett's Eisenhorn trilogy. Subsequently, Fantasy Flight Games acquired the license for the game, and eventually expanded it with a short-lived Dark Heresy Second Edition which was set in the Askellon Sector before Games Workshop withdrew the license for all Warhammer 40,000 RPGs from the company in February 2017.
|
Dark Heresy - Gameplay: In Dark Heresy, the players assume the role of a group of Acolytes working for an Inquisitor who sends them on various missions. Depending on the type of mission, the gameplay can involve investigation, combat, intrigue, or a number of other genres. Therefore, the Game Master can tailor his campaign to suit his player group. As the players work for an Inquisitor, most missions involve rooting out heresies or matters relating to them, but the breadth of the game allows for many other missions, including wiping out dangerous gangs, gathering evidence of corruption, or eliminating rogue psykers.
|
Dark Heresy - System: Unlike many RPGs, Dark Heresy uses only 10-sided dice, each player requiring at least 2, which can be read as percentile dice, used individually, or added together. No other dice are required, although occasionally a player may need to roll more than 2d10, such as when rolling a large amount of damage.Characters have 9 statistics:Weapon Skill (WS)Ballistic Skill (BS)Strength (Str)Toughness (T)Agility (Ag)Intelligence (Int)Perception (Per)Will Power (WP)Fellowship (Fel)The values for these attributes range from 1 to 100, although achieving a score higher than 70 is almost impossible for a normal character with the published rules thus far. Differing by a factor of 10 from the Warhammer 40,000 tabletop wargame, average humans possess characteristic scores averaging 30-40 is notable, and 50 is a very strong attribute. Player character characteristics statistically average 31, although that can differ due to a number of mechanics, notably the character's homeworld and background. For example, a character from a hive world has a higher Fellowship, but a lower Toughness.Any given action, such as firing a weapon or using a skill, uses the following basic mechanic:Roll percentile diceAdd bonuses or penalties associated with the actionCompare the result to the appropriate characteristic; equal to or lower indicates success; greater than the characteristic indicates failure.With some actions, the amount by which you succeed or fail can determine degrees of success or failure, allowing the Game Master to further detail the result.
|
Dark Heresy - Career Paths: In Dark Heresy, the players pick a career path for their character which is similar to a class from other RPG systems such as Dungeons & Dragons. There are 8 career paths in the core rulebook, with several further added in subsequent sourcebooks. They included:Adept - A career path devoted to knowledge, logic, and analysis within the Imperial bureaucracy of the Adeptus Terra, though they are not very effective in combat and not always good in social interaction.Arbitrator - Members of the Adeptus Arbites, the elite Imperial law enforcement organisation, are effective both at investigative skills and combat.Assassin - These skilled killers excel in both combat and stealth skills.Cleric - A priest of the Ecclesiarchy trained in a wide range of abilities, but who excel at motivation and leadership.Guardsman - Although the name of this career usually brings to mind members of the Imperial Guard, it also applies to Human mercenaries and other soldiers such as members of a Planetary Defence Force; they are skilled warriors who can also operate vehicles.Imperial Psyker - This career represents an individual with psychic powers, able to channel the power of the Warp to accomplish a wide variety of things.Scum - Criminals, outcasts, thieves, and other miscreants, this class of rogues has a variety of useful skills involving stealth, infiltration and social interaction with less-honest members of Imperial society.Tech-priest - Skilled with machines and technology, they are members of the Adeptus Mechanicus.Adepta Sororitas - Commonly known as the Sisters of Battle, this career path was introduced in the Inquisitor's Handbook and is recommended for veteran players due to the role-playing challenges involved. While superficially similar to clerics, they are even more rigid in their mindset and can perform faith talents.Battle-sister - This career was added to the roster in Blood of Martyrs, it differs from the Adepta Sororitas as income has been modified and it allows characters to start with the common Sister of Battle weapons and armour.Grey Knight - This career was added in Daemon Hunter, and is recommended for veteran players. It was a compromise variant for a Dark Heresy/Deathwatch RPG crossover.To advance in their career path, a player earns experience points (XP) and spends it to gain skills and talents or improve their characteristics. The skills and talents available depend on the Career and the level - or rank - within that path. Once a character has spent the requisite amount of XP , they advance to the next rank of the career, which unlocks new skills and talents for purchase. Each career path also several option for certain ranks, each path specializing in a different branch of the career. Skills cost either 100 XP, 200 XP or 300 XP to purchase, with more powerful or unusual skills having higher costs. The core rulebook recommends players receive 200 XP for every four hours of play, so players can usually purchase a new skill or two after each session.
|
Dark Heresy - Products: Dark Heresy Core Rulebook - The game's core rulebook, including a pre-written adventure.The Game Master's Kit - A game master's screen for Dark Heresy and a 32-page booklet that includes a pre-written adventure, xenos generator, and new rules for poisons and toxins.Character Folio - A notebook designed to be a combined character sheet and journal.Inquisitor's Handbook - Supplement, introduces the Adepta Sororitas career path and new homeworld types as well as an expanded rule system for the original homeworlds, expanded armoury, and expanded skill rules.Purge the Unclean - An adventure anthology containing three adventures, each focusing on a different genre or play style.Shattered Hope - A free preview adventure originally available for download on the Black Industries web site.Edge of Darkness - A free preview adventure by Alan Bligh (and others) available for download on the Fantasy Flight Games web site.Disciples of the Dark Gods - Supplement, information detailing Chaos Cults and other various threats within the Calixis Sector. Includes a full-length adventure.Creatures Anathema - Supplement, a "Bestiary of Aliens, Beasts, and Daemons" for use as enemies.The Radical's Handbook - Supplement, introduces means of playing Radical (Heretical) character types as well as new gear and career advances.Ascension - Supplement, introduces advanced career paths enabling players to become Inquisitors or Throne Agents, high-powered Acolytes who bridge the power gap between Dark Heresy and Rogue Trader characters.Tattered Fates: The Haarlock Legacy Volume 1 - Part 1 of a 3-part adventure campaign.Damned Cities: The Haarlock Legacy Volume 2 - Part 2 of a 3-part adventure campaign.Dead Stars: The Haarlock Legacy Volume 3 - Part 3 of a 3-part adventure campaign.Blood of Martyrs - Supplement, includes new rules, backgrounds, alternate careers and equipment for playing servants of the Adeptus Ministorum, the state church of the Imperium of Man.The Black Sepulchre: The Apostasy Gambit Volume 1 - Part 1 of a 3-part adventure campaign.The Church of the Damned: The Apostasy Gambit Volume 2 - Part 2 of a 3-part adventure campaign.The Chaos Commandment: The Apostasy Gambit Volume 3 - Part 3 of a 3-part adventure campaign.Daemon Hunter - Supplement, expanding on the Inquisitors of the Ordo Malleus and the daemon-hunting Grey Knights Chapter of Space Marines.Book of Judgement - Supplement, expanding on the Adeptus Arbites and Scum of the Calixis Sector with new rules, backgrounds, alternate careers and equipment for playing servants or recidivists of the Adeptus Arbites, the law enforcers of the Imperium.The Lathe Worlds - Supplement, revealing the secret history of the Adeptus Mechanicus' Lathe Worlds, from the founding to the current struggles against tech-heresy. In the book there are alternate careers and equipment for players.Dark Heresy Core Rulebook (Second Edition) - Core rulebook for the Second Edition, changes some of the mechanics (particularly with regard to character creation) in line with other FFG publications such as Only War and includes a pre-made adventure. The setting is also changed from the Calixis Sector to the Askellon Sector.Forgotten Gods - Adventure, set in the newly-introduced Askellon Sector, it concerns the hunt for a xenotech cult and includes new homeworlds for player characters.Enemies Within - Supplement detailing the Inquisition's witch-hunting Ordo Hereticus, provides more character creation and advancement options including the Adepta Sororitas and mechanics for generating heretical cults and adventures.Enemies Without - Supplement detailing the Inquisition's alien-hunting Ordo Xenos, with new player options, statistics for aliens as both allies and enemies, expanded rules for flying vehicles and guidelines for running "explications" -- where Acolytes dissect aliens for clues.Enemies Beyond - Supplement detailing the Inquisition's Daemon-hunting Ordo Malleus, with new character creation options, a full bestiary of daemons and rules for creating Daemon Weapons, binding Daemonhosts and summoning daemons.
|
Dark Heresy - Development: A collector's edition of Dark Heresy -- the first release of the game -- went on sale on Monday, December 10, 2007, at 16:00 GMT. The 200 copies of the game, individually numbered with an accompanying "signature" of an in-game Inquisitor, sold out in six minutes. The regular edition was released on January 25, 2008 and a demo booklet was distributed at Gen Con 2007.The game itself shares many design features with Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay Second Edition.On January 28, 2008, Games Workshop announced that it would close Black Industries -- thereby discontinuing Dark Heresy and all the other games published by the subsidiary -- to allow them to focus on the commercial success of their novels and core tabletop miniature wargame business.On February 22, 2008, Black Industries announced that all Warhammer and Warhammer 40,000 role-playing games, collectible card games, and select board game rights were being transferred to Fantasy Flight Games, who would continue to publish Dark Heresy.During late 2008 and 2009, Fantasy Flight Games started releasing autonomously-developed material for the Dark Heresy role-playing game: a collection of Heretical factions to pit the player characters against titled Disciples of the Dark Gods, a monster manual called Creatures Anathema, and a mini-campaign in three parts dubbed The Haarlock Legacy.Fantasy Flight Games also announced a manual on "Radical" Inquisitors (covering the most extreme factions, their tactics, equipment, and most prominent figures) and a major expansion allowing players to take their characters to the rank of interrogator, bestowed with an inquisitorial rosette, enjoying augmented prestige and able to summon more powerful allies.On September 9, 2016 Fantasy Flight Games announced they would be ending their relationship with Games Workshop from February 28, 2017 for all shared products including Dark Heresy and all other Warhammer Fantasy and Warhammer 40,000 titles. The license for publication of Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay was subsequently transferred to Cubicle 7, Limited, and the license for all Warhammer 40,000 roleplaying properties was granted to Ulisses North America, the North American subsidiary of the German role-playing game company Ulisses Spiele, most famous for its publication of The Dark Eye fantasy RPG in Germany. On August 11, 2017, Ulisses North America announced that it would be releasing the next major Warhammer 40,000 roleplaying game, entitled Wrath & Glory.
|
Dark Hunters - Dark Hunters: The Dark Hunters is a Loyalist Codex Astartes-compliant Space Marine Chapter descended from the gene-seed of the White Scars during an unknown Founding.The Dark Hunters hail from the Night World of Phobian, and ever since the Dellrond Campaign, where a single Dark Hunters Battle Company held the entrance to the Cathedral of the Emperor Ossified for five Terran years against the Orks of WAAAGH! Nagrut, the Chapter has had a reputation for being particularly hardy and resolute warriors.
|
Dark Hunters - Chapter History: The Dark Hunters were founded in the 37th Millennium during the dark days of the Occlusiad War (555-565.M37). The Chapter was raised to combat the heretical Tech-priests of the Adeptus Mechanicus known as the Apostles of the Blind King, who made war upon the Imperium.When the Chapter was founded, Captain Angnar and his brotherhood (company), consisting of ninety-eight Astartes of the White Scars, were chosen to become the core of a newly founded Successor Chapter.Angnar himself was chosen for the singular honour of becoming the new Chapter's first Chapter Master. In recognition of his new rank, Mordonai Khan presented Angnar with a singular gift at the White Scars' fortress-monastery of Quan Zhou before they departed Chogoris.The khan presented Angnar with a relic Power Axe, said to have been used by the Great Khan Jaghatai himself: millennia old, it was double-headed and still crackled with blue flame when Angnar held it aloft.The Dark Hunters took this revered relic weapon of Jaghatai Khan as their Chapter's badge -- the "Axe of Justice" -- which represented vengeance and justice. They exchanged their White Scars livery for the dark of hunter blue, becoming reborn as the Dark Hunters, even as they still bore the honour scars of Chogoris.They were a single company of Astartes destined to become a Chapter and needed to seek out a new homeworld in the void and continue the work of those millions who had gone into the dark before them.The Dark Hunters have a reputation for being particularly grim and resolute warriors. They are one of the seven Space Marine Chapters of the Imperium of Man currently charged with hunting down and eliminating the Renegade Chaos Space Marines warband known as the Punishers.That their first campaign as a Chapter at the Battle of Bloodsteel saw harrowing fighting against the Daemon Engines of Warpsmith Hilghar, and the mutated Warlord Titan Repellus Maximal, has left a deep-rooted mistrust of the machine within the Dark Hunters' psyche.Even today, the Chapter's relations with the Tech-priests of Mars are strained at best.The Dark Hunters retain a particular disgust for the Daemon Engines of Chaos, which they will hunt like oversized prey and bring down no matter the cost to themselves.
|
Dark Hunters - Notable Campaigns: Battle of Bloodsteel (Unknown Date.M37) - The Dark Hunters were deployed to successfully contain an assault by the Warpsmith Hilghar and his Daemon Engines, including Chaos Titans like the mutated Warlord Titan Repellus Maximal. The Chapter took heavy casualties.Zarona Intervention (089.M38) - Inquisitor Galleus took to the battlefield in person and led a force of Dark Hunter Space Marines and Cadian Shock Troops against the Traitors of Zarona. The Inquisitor sacrificed all to close a Warp rift from which the Traitors were drawing sorcerous power, though some mystics claim he lives yet, trapped beyond the ability of any to rescue him.Battle for Phobian (936.M38) - The Dark Hunters defended their homeworld of Phobian against the Renegade forces of the Adeptus Mechanicus Princeps known as the Blind King. The Dark Hunters' tactics and methods of war, however, were ineffective when they encountered a battlegroup of Titans. Chapter Master Jullunai Khan ordered the Ansar Company to penetrate the hull of the leading Warlord-class Titan, and the Ansar Company fought on and succeeded in destroying the Titan from within, granting the victory to the Dark Hunters, but at the cost of the lives of the entire company. In this conflict, 403 battle-brothers (nearly two-thirds of the Chapter) died, their names never forgotten, to be revered in the annals of the Chapter forever. But chief among those names enrolled are those of Captain Mithryan, of Ansar Company, and Sergeant Aekin, also of that company. Their deaths and those of their brethren heralded a new beginning for the Chapter and a new method for making war, becoming shadows of their former selves. And to mark this eclipse, they took a new motto unto themselves -- Umbra Sumus ("We are shadows").First Punisher War (825.M41) - The infamous Chaos Space Marine warband known as the Punishers led a massive Chaos invasion of the Kargad System. The Dark Hunters Chapter participated in the defence of its homeworld of Phobian, but was woefully outnumbered by the forces of Chaos. The Punishers landed a quarter of a million Chaos Cultists in the first wave upon Phobian, with mighty Emperor-class battleships to provide support. Their numbers severely depleted, the Dark Hunters were forced to pull back and made their final stand at Mors Angnar, their fortress-monastery, cradled in the rugged peaks and glaciers of the Argahast Range known as the Silverspears. The Punishers eventually surrounded Mors Angnar and fought their way within. The Dark Hunters were forced to make their final stand within the Chapter's Reclusiam, their numbers reduced to only two hundred battle-brothers. As the Dark Hunters faced certain annihilation, they were saved by their fellow Adeptus Astartes brethren. It took the help of six other Chapters, including the Brazen Fists, Dark Sons, Doomsayers, Shadowhawks and two others unnamed, to finally extirpate the Punishers from the system. Though the Dark Hunters emerged victorious, it was a pyrrhic victory at best. Their numbers had been greatly reduced and many of their ancient vehicles and transports had been destroyed. But the Dark Hunters would persevere, and go on to rebuild their numbers, though it would take many Terran centuries to replace the lost battle-brothers.Battle of the Black Star (939.M41) - In the sable light of the star Antilles, the Dark Hunters struck at the Renegade Punishers' stronghold, claiming over half the Traitor Marines' lives in vengeance for their assault upon Phobian over a standard century before.Siege of Vhot (Unknown Date.M41) - Elements of the Dark Hunters fought alongside the Storm Lords Chapter during the siege of the world of Vhot.Second Punisher War (982.M41) - Jonah Kerne, captain of the Dark Hunters 3rd Company, led his Space Marines to the world of Ras Hanem during the Second Punisher War against the warband of Heretic Astartes known as the Punishers. Kerne was able to hold the forces of Chaos at bay while being assisted by the local garrisons of the Astra Militarum and the Planetary Defence Forces. The Dark Hunters even went so far as to form a temporary alliance with the Asuryani of the Kaelor craftworld, helping those xenos find an ancient artefact precious to their race in exchange for their aid in defeating the forces of Chaos. Despite the deceptions and cunning of the Aeldari, Kerne stayed true to his word and gave the artefact to the Asuryani Farseer, thus committing an act of heresy. The remaining Imperial and Asuryani forces were able to hold the Punishers long enough for the remainder of the Dark Hunters Chapter to arrive with Astartes allies drawn from other Chapters. When the war on Ras Hanem had concluded in the Emperor's favour, Jonah was taken by his Chapter back to their homeworld of Phobian. There, he was taken into custody by the Inquisition to answer for his crime.Dellrond Campaign (Unknown Date.M41) - A single Dark Hunters Battle Company held the entrance to the Cathedral of the Emperor Ossified on the world of Dellrond for five Terran years against the Orks of WAAAGH! Nagrut, displaying an extraordinary level of fortitude and combat resilience, even for the transhuman Adeptus Astartes. Chaplain Hyron of the Dark Hunters 4th Company earned a bloody reputation over the course of the Dellrond Campaign. It was Hyron who rallied his brothers again and again to drive back the seemingly endless tide of Orks. Nights on the moons of Dellrond can last solar months, or even Terran years, and toward the end of the campaign the battered Veterans of Hyron's Command Squad had become known as the Conclave of Midnight, survivors of the endless war within the darkness. The Conclave slaughtered the Ork Warboss on the steps of the Cathedral of the Emperor Ossified in the final days of the conflict. They were then able to oversee the demise of WAAAGH! Nagrut in a storm of blood and fire.The Rusthunt (Unknown Date.M41) - The Rusthunt was a campaign fought between the Dark Hunters and the ramshackle blitz brigade of the Blood Axes Tank Boss Badfragg on the world of Knarr. Using the world's constant blizzards to their advantage, the Dark Hunters fought a successful hit-and-run war that slowly whittled away the Tank Boss' forces, though Badfragg managed to escape after killing many of the attacking Astartes.Lonal Ambush (996.M41) - The Lonal Ambush took place in 996.M41. Hive Fleet Leviathan invaded the world of Lonal only to face stiff resistance from the Dark Hunters. Unknown to their brother Chapter, the Raven Guard also deployed to the planet but used the Dark Hunters as bait to spring an elaborate trap that slew a dozen Hive Tyrants.A Dying of the Light (999.M41) - Imperial fleets on the edge of the Draven Sector became lost in the Warp after an unusual phenomenon caused their Navigators to lose sight of the Astronomican. Investigations uncovered the source of the interference upon the Necron Tomb World of Petk. Dark Hunters Space Marines launched an assault on the planet, but only solar minutes after landing all contact with them was lost.
|
Dark Hunters - Chapter Organisation: Like their forebears, the Dark Hunters are also regarded as a Codex Astartes-compliant Chapter, as their organisation, order of battle and tactical operations adhere closely to the tenets laid down in that most sacred of tomes to the Adeptus Astartes.There are, however, several noteworthy and substantial deviations from Codex-prescribed doctrine. Most notable among these are the use of certain honourific ranks and titles within the Chapter in place of the standard Space Marine ranks. These naming conventions extend to the Dark Hunters' companies as well.
|
Dark Hunters - Specialist Ranks: Kharne (Chapter Master)
|
Dark Hunters - Company Names: The Dark Hunters maintain unique titles for some of their companies.Ardunai (1st Veteran Company)Mortai "the Fated Ones" (3rd Battle Company)Haround Company (4th Company)Makran Company (7th Company)Ansar Company (8th Company)Haradai (10th (Scout) Company)
|
Dark Hunters - Chapter Recruitment: The Dark Hunters recruit their aspirants from the tribes of their homeworld of Phobian.The aspirants are sent into the black caverns below Phobian's surface in squads to baptise their axes in the blood of one of the great savege beasts of Phobian, the Phobian Bats.
|
Dark Hunters - Chapter Combat Doctrine: Unlike the White Scars and their other Successor Chapters, the Dark Hunters favour stealth over fast-moving tactics.There is a legend of how the Chapter earned its name, telling of certain White Scars Legion companies that fought in joint operations with the Raven Guard Legion, and, on their return, the tactics these White Scars had learned from their brethren had become part of the battle-code of their companies.
|
Dark Hunters - Chapter Homeworld: The Dark Hunters hail from the Ice World of Phobian, though the planet is sometimes referred to as a "Dark World" because the sun never shines. The Chapter's fortress-monastery, Mors Angnar, is built atop the twelve-thousand metre shining mountains called Argahast Range.The planet is a home to nomadic tribes such as the Sahrmataes and the Nokyros. The Sahrmatae people who roam the moonlit plains of the Night World fight in silence, for to cry out, even in pain, is to attract the attention of the great Phobian Bats which hunt the skies on silent wings.Normally, the Nokyros prey on the herds of pale, cannibal horses which roam the basin plains, but they will eat a man just as happily, so hunting parties are often formed to clean out those roosts that are too close to human habitation.The Dark Hunters took their name from these beasts, and their tactics -- swift, silent, and merciless -- from the people who hunt them.
|
Dark Hunters - Chapter Beliefs: Due to the events of the Dark Hunters' first campaign as a Chapter fighting against the Daemon Engines of the Warpsmith Hilghar and the mutated Warlord-class Titan Repellus Maximal during the Battle of Bloodsteel, the Chapter as a whole still deeply mistrusts machines, which can all too easily be perverted by the power of Chaos.As such, they still deeply mistrust the Tech-priests of Mars and all the works of the Adeptus Mechanicus.
|
Dark Hunters - Notable Dark Hunters: Chapter Master Angnar - Angnar was a captain of the White Scars Chapter who was chosen to be the first Chapter Master (Kharne) of the newly-founded Dark Hunters Chapter. Angnar was presented a relic Power Axe by Mordonai Khan of the White Scars at Quan Zhou, an axe which their Primarch Jaghatai Khan himself had once used: double-headed, millennia old, and still crackling with blue flames as Angnar raised it in the sunlight, a gift worthy of great heroes. The Dark Hunters took this sacred relic as their Chapter icon, the twice-bladed symbol of vengeance and justice.Chapter Master Jullunai Khan - Chapter Master of the Dark Hunters during the 38th Millennium, Jullunai Khan led the Dark Hunters in defence of Phobian against the forces of the Heretic Princeps called the Blind King.Chapter Master Lukullus Nogai - Chapter Master and second founder of the Dark Hunters. Some venerate him as a saint of the Imperium.Chapter Master Kharne Al Murzim - Current Chapter Master of the Dark Hunters in the late 41st Millennium.Captain Ares Thuraman - Captain of Ardunai, the Dark Hunters' 1st Company.Captain Jonah Kerne - Suspended captain of Mortai (3rd) Company of the Dark Hunters. Jonah Kerne led the Dark Hunters on Ras Hanem during the Second Punisher War against the warbands of Chaos Space Marines known as the Punishers. Kerne was able to hold the forces of Chaos while being assisted by the local forces of the Astra Militarum and the PDF. He formed a temporary alliance with the Asuryani of the Kaelor craftworld in order to help them find an ancient artefact in exchange for their aid in fighting against Chaos. Despite the lies and the cunning of the Aeldari, Kerne stayed true to his word and gave the artefact to their Farseer, thus committing an act of heresy. The remaining Imperial and Asuryani forces were able to hold back the Punishers long enough for the rest of the Space Marines of the Dark Hunters to arrive with their allies from other Chapters. When the war on Ras Hanem had ended, Jonah was taken by his Chapter back to his homeworld of Phobian, from where he was taken by the Inquisition to stand trial against the charge of heresy.Captain Fornix - Currently captain of Mortai (3rd) Company and the former first sergeant of the same company.Captain Shaef Darric - Captain of Haround (4th) Company.Captain Nortan Blask - Captain of Makran (7th) Company.Captain Mithryan - Captain of the Ansar (8th) Company. Captain Mithryan was charged by Jullunai Khan to destroy the Chaos-corrupted Warlord-class Titan that was leading the assault against the Dark Hunter's homeworld of Phobian. Mithryan heroically sacrificed himself and the remains of his company to destroy the great Titan.Captain Fell Ambros - Captain of Haradai (Scout) Company.Master of Sanctity Biron Amadai - Master of Sanctity of the Dark Hunters at the time of the First Punisher War.Reclusiarch Jord Malchai - Reclusiarch of the Dark Hunters.Chaplain Hyron - Hyron was a Chaplain in the Dark Hunters Haround (4th) Company who earned a bloody reputation over the course of the Dellrond Campaign as he repeatedly rallied his brothers to drive back the seemingly endless tide of WAAAGH! Nagrut from the moons of Dellrond. Towards the end of the campaign, Hyron led his battered Reclusiam Command Squad, the Conclave of Midnight, into battle with the WAAAGH!'s Warboss and slaughtered him on the steps of the Cathedral of the Emperor Ossified. With the Warboss dead, Hyron and his squad were able to oversee the demise of the WAAAGH! in a storm of blood and fire.Chief Librarian Astanius Tor - Chief Librarian of the Dark Hunters at the time of the second founding of the Chapter in 936.M38.Chief Librarian Graes Vennan - Chief Librarian of the Dark Hunters at the time of the Second Punisher War.Codicier Elijah Kass - A Codicier of the Librarium. Kass was instrumental in leading Captain Jonah through the whole Second Punisher War.Librarian Korso - Korso was the Stormseer (Librarian) of the Dark Hunters during the Battle for Phobian. One of the closest councillors of Jullunai Khan. He was presented on Phobian during the battle against the renegade Titans of the Blind King.Apothecary Passarion - Apothecary of Mortai Company.Techmarine Heinos - Techmarine of Mortai Company. Heinos died while fighting the Punishers in orbit of Ras Hanem.Sergeant Finn March - Sergeant of Primus (1st) Squad of Mortai Company.Sergeant Nureddin - Sergeant of Secundus (2nd) Squad of Mortai Company.Sergeant Orsus - Sergeant of Tertius (3rd) Squad of Mortai Company.Sergeant Greynan - Sergeant of Quatris (4th) Squad of Mortai Company.Sergeant Kagan - Sergeant of Quincus (5th) Squad of Mortai Company.Sergeant Rusei - Sergeant of Sextius (6th) Squad of Mortai Company.Sergeant Corvo - Sergeant of Septus (7th) Squad of Mortai Company.Sergeant Mauron Aekin - Brother-Sergeant of the Ansar Company. Aekin was one of Mithryan's sergeants who followed their captain in the destruction of the Warlord-class Titan. Aekin was one of the few who made it to the head of the Titan, and took the life of the Titan's Princeps, whom he believed to actually be the Blind King. Like his captain, he did not survive the operation.Rausa - An Assault Marine of the Ansar Company. The Chapter was understrength, and so Rausa was taken into the Ansar Company while still a neophyte. Like other members of the Ansar Company, Rausa did not survive the assault against the Chaos Warlord-class Titan.Dreadnought Breughal Paine - Breughal Paine is the former Forge Master of the Dark Hunters, now interred within a Dreadnought. He is the last survivor of the second founding of the Chapter in 936.M38. Breughal decided to become a Dreadnought even though he had not been mortally wounded so that he could preserve his knowledge as a Techmarine for his Chapter for generations to come. Paine did this because the Dark Hunters did not trust the Adeptus Mechanicus enough to allow any new Techmarines to be trained by the tech-priests on Mars.Dreadnought Geherran - Known for his boldness, Geherran chose to be encased in a mighty Dreadnought after his own body was destroyed. He fell with most of his company while fighting against the Punishers on Perreken.
|
Dark Hunters - Chapter Fleet: Ogadai (Gothic-class Cruiser) - Though close to four thousand Terran years old, the Ogadai is the only capital ship the Dark Hunters possess that is still spaceworthy. It is a vast starship which was laid down before the Dark Hunters Chapter had been founded. In its youth it was part of the battle fleet of the White Scars Chapter. The White Scars primarch himself, Jaghatai Khan, had once travelled aboard it, sanctifying the ship with his presence. And ancient though it was, it still possessed enough firepower to lay waste to a planet.Umbra Mortis (Battle Barge) - At present, the Umbra Mortis is nothing more than an orbital battery protecting the Chapter's homeworld of Phobian, stripped of parts and incapable of travelling the Warp.Temujin (Frigate)
|
Dark Hunters - Chapter Relics: Shadow Mantle - The Shadow Mantle is a specially crafted form of Astartes Scout Armour with an integrated bodyglove that provides additional protection. The armour has a built-in Hunter-Killer Auspex, which can be used as if it were a weapon's sight. Although the Codex Astartes recommends that Scout Armour be restricted to a Chapter's neophytes and their sergeants in the 10th Company, even the most fervent adherents to Roboute Guilliman's doctrine grudgingly admit there is merit to equipping more experienced warriors with lighter armour after seeing the Shadow Mantle in action. Its cameleoline-bonded plating renders the wielder nearly invisible, and the Hunter-Killer Auspex has claimed the lives of hundreds of Chaos Space Marines by pinpointing the weak points in older, warped or ill-maintained power armour.
|
Dark Hunters - Chapter Colours: The Dark Hunters don navy blue power armour with a white Aquila or Imperialis on the chest plate.The white squad tactical specialty symbol -- battleline, close support, fire support, Veteran or command -- is indicated on the right shoulder guard or on the left knee plate.Squad number is designated by a stenciled black High Gothic numeral centred within the squad specialty symbol. The Chapter iconography is painted on the left shoulder guard.Shoulder guard trim denotes company designation in accordance with the Codex Astartes -- i.e. white (1st Company), yellow (2nd Company), red (3rd Company), etc.
|
Dark Hunters - Chapter Badge: The Dark Hunters' Chapter badge is the profile of a white, double-bladed battle axe (known as the "Axe of Justice") centred on a field of blue.
|
Dark Hunters - Sources: Adeptus Astartes: Successor Chapters (Limited Release Booklet), pg. 31Codex: Space Marines (9th Edition), pg. 70Codex: Space Marines (8th Edition) (Revised Codex), pg. 40Codex: Space Marines (7th Edition) (Digital Edition), pg. 136, "The Chronicles of Heroes, The Rusthunt"Codex: Space Marines (6th Edition) (Digital Edition), pp. 18, 68, 81, 132, 136, 213Codex: Space Marines (5th Edition), pp. 26, 30Codex: Necrons (7th Edition) (Digital Edition), "A New Epoch Begins"Deathwatch - Honour the Chapter (RPG), pg. 133Dataslate: Reclusiam Command Squad (Background Book), "Notable Reclusiam Command Squad"How to Paint Space Marines (2004), pg. 88Imperial Armour Volume Two, Second Edition - War Machines of the Adeptus Astartes, pg. 18Warhammer 40,000: Dataslate - Reclusiam Command Squad (Digital Edition), pg. 12Legends of the Space Marines (Anthology), "The Last Detail" by Paul KearneyThe Blind King (Short Story) by Paul KearneyDark Hunters: Umbra Sumus (Novel) by Paul Kearney, Dramatis Personae, Chs. 1-2, 4, 18, 23Damocles (Anthology), "Hunter's Snare" by Josh Reynolds, Ch. 4
|
Dark Imperium (Anthology) - Dark Imperium (Anthology): Dark Imperium is an anthology of short stories published in 2001 and edited by Marc Gascoigne and Andy Jones.
|
Dark Imperium (Anthology) - Synopsis: In the war-torn 41st millennium, Humanity stands on the shores of damnation. Its only saviour is the immortal God-Emperor and the massed armies of the Imperium, in this searing anthology of Warhammer 40,000 stories torn from the pages of Inferno! magazine.The anthology contains the following short stories:Apothecary's Honour by Simon JowettDaemonblood by Ben CounterNightmare by Gav ThorpeThe Lives of Ferag Lion-Wolf by Barrington J. BaileySmall Cogs by Neil RutledgeAngels by Robert EarlHellbreak by Ben CounterBattle of the Archaeosaurs by Barrington J. BayleyKnow Thine Enemy by Gav ThorpeThe Wrath of Khârn by William KingAncient History by Andy ChambersSnares & Delusions by Matthew FarrerHive Fleet Horror by Barrington J. Bayley
|
Dark Krakens - Dark Krakens: The Dark Krakens is a Loyalist Space Marine Chapter and a successor of the Salamanders.It is a Chapter composed wholly of Primaris Space Marines and was raised during the Ultima Founding of ca. 999.M41 by Archmagos Dominus Belisarius Cawl.Most of the Chapter's more experienced Primaris Marines were originally part of the Greyshield forces that fought through the early years of the Indomitus Crusade.
|
Dark Krakens - Origins: The Salamanders were kept largely unaware of what new Successor Chapters were created from their gene-seed by Belisarius Cawl, and once they learned of their existence, they were always quick to dispatch a Chaplain to the new Chapter to teach them the ways of the Promethean Cult.The Dark Krakens' oceanic and night-bathed homeworld of Naktis only boasts one landmass capable of supporting a fortress-monastery. Naktis' vast seas are replete with bioluminescent megafauna and shoal-predators, which the native Human population hunt for sport and nourishment.Echoing this culture of Naktis, in battle, the Dark Krakens seek out the largest foes, whether that be in terms of physical size or sheer numbers.
|
Dark Krakens - Cordon Impenetra: With the savage conflict known as the Octarius War between the Tyranids and Orks of the Ork Empire of Octarius spilling over into the Pankallis Sub-sector in the Era Indomitus, Space Marine Chapters have raced to the region's aid. Among these were the Dark Krakens. A powerful assemblage of these transhuman warriors fought to defend the Bianzeer's Hollow System against the Tyranid swarms.The Pankallis Sub-sector borders the Octarian Empire, Ork-held space that has been fought over by greenskins and Tyranids for many standard years. A part of the so-called Cordon Impenetra established by Inquisitor Nashir Sahansun to protect the rest of the Imperium from that deadly fight between the two alien species, the Pankallis Sub-sector was in the midst of preparing for xenos invasion when attacks came without warning.Now the xenos had finally arrived, and they had to be halted lest they break out of the Cordon Impenetra and push into the Imperial star systems beyond.By luring a tendril of Hive Fleet Leviathan into the Orks' Octarian Empire during the Third Tyrannic War, former Inquisitor Fidus Kryptman sought to have the two xenos hordes destroy one another. However, his plan backfired. The Tyranids were fed with incalculable quantities of biomass and genetically adapted to countless kinds of new and different threats, becoming even stronger.The huge scale of the conflict, which claimed millions of Ork and Tyranid lives each solar day, drew in ramshackle greenskin fleets from light years around, and the Orks themselves grew bigger on a diet of endless conflict.Many Imperial observers believed that it was only a matter of time until the roiling conflict spilled out into neighbouring Imperial systems and inflicted untold damage. One of these was Inquisitor Nashir Sahansun, who devised what he called the Cordon Impenetra. Drawing a sphere around the outer reaches of the space fought over by the Orks and Tyranids, he declared almost every Imperial world within the zone of demarcation lost, and he pushed hard for every sub-sector bordering the boundary to fortify itself and be reinforced.Many worlds in the region joined the Cordon Impenetra, which both served as a man-made boundary and was the name given to a defensive organisation made up of worlds along the border. As the worlds of the cordon were reinforced, efforts were made by Imperial troops to destabilise the warring xenos forces to ensure that neither concentrated their strength sufficiently to break through the cordon. Ultimately, these actions proved to be in vain.When the Pankallis Sub-sector was attacked, every invaded star system called for aid, and multiple forces responded. Deathwatch from the Eye of Octos Watch Fortress and Primaris Marine warriors of the Wolfspear Chapter were among the first to arrive. They were followed by a large strike force of warriors from the Dark Krakens Chapter under the command of Chapter Master Mezonyki Reio.Reio dispatched his warriors to all three planets in the Bianzeer's Hollow System, tasking Captain Krijeni Luceior and the 5th Company with fighting the Tyranids on the unusually named planet Death of Bianzeer. This frozen Death World was the furthest planet in its system from its star.After arriving in Death of Bianzeer's orbit, Captain Luceior swiftly partook in a council of war with other Imperial commanders. It included Battle Leader Rakmeyr Bluewolf of the Wolfspear, Watch Master Akrep Xie of the Eye of Octos Deathwatch and Lord General Militant Arneld Heifaast, commander of the Astra Militarum troops stationed on the planet.Before the Dark Krakens' arrival, much had happened, and much had gone wrong. The Wolfspear had slaughtered a huge horde of Tyranids by causing an avalanche that drove all the creatures that survived into the world's Mirror Sea. However, the resulting tsunami destroyed the access point for the promethium rigs on the sea's bed. On the frozen Great Lakes of Peldathusa, thousands of locals had driven swarms of Tyranids onto the weakest part of the ice, sending countless Tyranids into the freezing waters.Despite the apparent victory, many Tyranids survived the extreme temperatures, bursting out from the lakes and devouring the people who had orchestrated the trap. More mysteriously, troops from the Death of Bianzeer Trackers planetary defence militia had observed Tyranids stalking packs of the native ursun-wolves in the Herrdalo Forests north of the world's equatorial permafrost.The wolves were highly intelligent, pack-hunting alpha predators with instinctive knowledge of the local terrain and where Human settlements lay. Their genetic material would be of great value to the hive fleet.Leaving five squads with his ships under the command of Chaplain Talin and Codicier Ekko, Luceior deployed the rest of his forces to the surface. His intention was to engage the Tyranids in the Herrdalo Forests, drive them from the area and therefore stop them from consuming the ursun-wolves. Though it was an unorthodox mission for them to protect wild beasts, if the Tyranids wanted something, Luceior was determined they would not be successful. Success would also mean pushing the xenos away from the world's methane pumps and relays.When additional reports warned of Tyranid monsters attacking the now isolated promethium extraction rigs beneath the Mirror Sea, Luceior ordered Lexicanium Uari and Techmarine Eroan to aid in securing them. Deathwatch Kill-teams deployed alongside them. Akrep Xie of the Deathwatch declared that he would aid the Dark Krakens personally in the forests, alongside several of his own Kill-teams.Lord General Militant Heifaast also approved of the plan, committing dozens of Astra Militarum regiments to sweeping the forests clear while planetary defence militia regiments increased their patrols around the permafrost's industrial areas.The Imperial forces fighting in the forests faced harsh challenges from the outset. They had to scale treacherous cliff faces and wade through towering snow drifts, all while at the mercy of the bitter cold. Soldiers plunged through broken ice into freezing pools or were struck by heavy branches as they broke and fell beneath the weight of accumulated snow.This all meant little to the Dark Krakens. They had slain beasts three times their size on their homeworld of Naktis' ocean floor. On a hundred and more battlefields, many had fought all manner of xenos and abominations of the Warp in the most gruelling conditions imaginable. They had all the rugged determination, stubbornness and resilience of their gene-sire, Vulkan, and they put down any and all Tyranids they encountered, most of their squads operating in loose skirmish formations.Incursors followed the barest tracks from both xenos and ursun-wolves alike, leading Intercessors armed with Stalker Bolt Rifles to dens and nests. Reiver squads rappelled over the most arduous terrain whilst covered by the careful aim of Eliminator squads, who picked off beasts with perfectly aimed shots as ursun-wolves or other predators attempted to intercept the manoeuvring terror troops.This did not mean the fighting was straightforward. The Dark Krakens so admired the power of the ursun-wolves that they endeavoured to shield them from the Tyranids and even forbade the Imperial Guardsmen and militia from killing them, though some did so out of necessity.But the ursun-wolves cared little for that fact, and they attacked Space Marines and Guardsmen alike to defend their territory as well as claim prey. Those with young fought especially viciously, and several Dark Krakens were severely wounded or even killed when these predators successfully isolated them and struck en masse.For the Tyranids' part, broods of Hormagaunts burst from piles of snow, savaging Imperial Guardsmen and bowling into the Space Marines. Lictors emerged from hidden tunnels and cliff overhangs behind and amongst the Dark Krakens, inflicting many casualties before being brought down. Gargoyles hung perfectly still from the highest tree branches, only diving down to attack the Space Marines once the Adeptus Astartes had advanced past the trees they were hidden in.Dark Krakens and Tyranids fought bloody running battles through the forests as the xenos surged against spread-out Space Marine squads. The xenos threatened to break through Imperial lines on multiple occasions, only to be stymied at significant loss.The campaign became increasingly protracted. The ursun-wolves knew their territory well and fought ferociously to defend it. The Tyranids were equally unwilling to cede ground, launching countless raids and counter-attacks that stalled the Imperial advance across the entire front. To force any advance at all in some areas against the aliens, Imperial forces called in continuous Aeronautica Imperialis bombing runs.Marauder bombers dropped countless tons of incendiaries and mole bombs that bored several metres down before detonating. There was no simple way to achieve victory, no single foe to slay that would signal the end. The campaign was pure attrition. Fresh waves of troops were sent behind the first to ensure that cleared areas remained clear.Wherever the Dark Krakens fought, the advance moved more quickly, the Primaris Space Marines slaughtering the toughest enemies and inspiring the exhausted mortal troops who had become anxious and disquieted by the ever-present threat of ambush.The Space Marines were utterly resolute in their task. Just as stalking a megabasilosaur in the depths of the Kesuramir Ocean of Naktis required patience, this was no different. Success meant outlasting their foe and meeting its displays of strength with even greater might of their own.The Dark Krakens were as an adamantine tidewall against a ship-breaking storm. They threw back the Beast-surge of the Glonhil Valley, emerged bloody but victorious after the Night of a Hundred Horrors and held the line after five companies of the 602nd Truskan Snowhounds vanished without a trace. Even as the Space Marines' casualties mounted, they did not waver, spurred by the fiery zeal of Reclusiarch Zitadan.It was many solar months before the first Imperial forces reached the forests' northern boundaries, having finally pushed the Tyranids out. It had required more than four dozen regiments of Astra Militarum and the combined efforts of the better part of a Dark Krakens Battle Company and several Deathwatch Kill-teams. Even then, some forces fighting in other parts of the forests still had much further to advance, their progress hampered by harsh terrain and vicious fighting.Captain Luceior would only declare the mission complete when every Tyranid was driven from the forests. He was drawn away before he could. Word came from Deathwatch Kill-teams elsewhere on the planet. A huge Tyranid swarm was descending on the half-complete Glacialix, a colossal fortress under construction by the Adeptus Mechanicus close to several of the planet's larger population centres.Watch Master Akrep Xie immediately pulled his Deathwatch forces from the Herrdalo Forests. Knowing the strategic importance of the citadel, Luceior deployed some of his warriors to defend it, joining them himself.
|
Dark Krakens - Notable Campaigns: Cordon Impenetra (Unknown.M42) - The Dark Krakens Chapter and other Imperial forces are currently fighting a tendril of Hive Fleet Leviathan in the Pankallis Sub-sector of the Octarius Sector. The 5th Company and other Dark Krakens forces under the command of Captain Krijeni Luceior known as Strike Force Luceior have been despatched by Chapter Master Mezonkyi Reio to the Death World oddly called Death of Bianzeer in the Bianzeer's Hollow System to clear it of the Tyranid scourge.
|
Dark Krakens - Dark Krakens Strike Force Luceior: Here follows the force disposition of Strike Force Luceior at the outset of the fighting on Death of Bianzeer, the third world of the Bianzeer's Hollow System in the Pankallis Sub-sector of the Octarius Sector.Most of these assets were drawn from the 5th Company of the Dark Krakens with extra squads detached from other companies per the dictates of the revised Codex Astartes.
|
Dark Krakens - Company Command: Captain Krijeni LuceiorLieutenant Suharth KeneddyrLieutenant Tuemarl HenaCompany Ancient Cahy TaimonChaplain Aperah Talin
|
Dark Krakens - Company Specialists: Apothecary Rirhen Mullel
|
Dark Krakens - Chapter Specialists: Reclusiarch Herrahdura ZitadanCodicier Daranshi EkkoLexicanium Paraon UariTechmarine Kusnad Eroan
|
Dark Krakens - Squads: Squad 1: Battleline – Squad MohiciSquad 2: Battleline – Squad AcaranSquad 3: Battleline – Squad IriagetSquad 4: Battleline – Squad QiaolSquad 5: Battleline – Squad TyrzahnSquad 6: Battleline – Squad SimaeSquad 7: Close Support – Squad BatulanSquad 8: Close Support – Squad AndatiSquad 9: Fire Support – Squad CixinSquad 10: Fire Support – Squad OnotoSquad 11: Veterans – Squad Taiome (Seconded from the 1st Company.)Squad 12: Vanguard – Squad Ketene (Seconded from the 10th Company.)Squad 13: Vanguard – Squad Nomeaor (Seconded from the 10th Company.)Squad 14: Close Support – Squad Akalubis (Seconded from the 8th Company.)Squad 15: Close Support – Squad Rindyah (Seconded from the 8th Company.)
|
Dark Krakens - Armoury: 3 Repulsor grav-tanks2 Repulsor Executioners10 Impulsors2 Gladiators5 Storm Speeders (and crews)1 Astraeus
|
Dark Krakens - Dreadnoughts: Redemptor Dreadnought – Brother NeanzouRedemptor Dreadnought – Brother Jughatun
|
Dark Krakens - Fleet Assets: Strike Cruiser: FathomGladius-class Frigate: SkyllaeGladius-class Frigate: Taniwha
|
Dark Krakens - Notable Dark Krakens: Chapter Master Mezonyki Reio - Mezonyki Reio is the first and current Chapter Master of the Dark Krakens. He is currently commanding the Dark Krakens forces engaged against a tendril of Hive Fleet Leviathan in the Pankallis Sub-sector of the Octarius Sector.Captain Krijeni Luceior - Krijeni Luceior is the current captain of the Dark Krakens 5th Company which is also a part of the larger Strike Force Luceior despatched by Chapter Master Mezonyki Reio to defend the planet of Death of Bianzeer in the Bianzeer's Hollow System of the Pankallis Sub-sector from a tendril of Hive Fleet Leviathan. Captain Luceior is deeply aware that he has little more combat experience than many of those he commands, and he feels that he has much to prove to earn their trust and respect. As a former Greyshield, Luceior fought alongside many warriors descended from the White Scars, Space Wolves and Raven Guard Chapters. He was greatly influenced by their penchant for hunting, taking trophies and hanging fetishes from their armour. Thus, he fully embraced the similar cultures the Dark Krakens found on Naktis. He wears a scaled cloak made from the skin of a maredrak -- a kind of sea dragon native to Naktis -- that he slew. He wears a necklace of shark teeth and squid beaks, and upon his helmet, there is a bladed and stylised dorsal fin modelled on those of the impossibly quick lightning sharks that make their homes in Naktis' many shallow reefs. Being a Primaris Space Marine, Luceior is trained and skilled in the use of a huge range of weapons and armour. However, during the fighting on Death of Bianzeer, he spent much of the time wielding the power sword Ice Piercer and the master-crafted Stalker Bolt Rifle Raven's Reach, from which a corvid skull and feather fetishes hang. The latter was a gift from a fellow Greyshield that Luceior fought with who was descended from Corax – primarch of the Raven Guard -- who went on to join the Rift Stalkers Chapter. Like many Dark Krakens, Luceior has adorned his armour with symbols daubed in bioluminescent chemicals taken from Naktis' deep-sea creatures. Each of his arms is painted with one of the Kraken's Tentacles, representing his ability to strike a foe from a long distance, as well as his implacable tenacity and hunting skill. The Beak of the Kraken represents his captaincy and is painted on his right shoulder plate. He has had a laurel of viperfish teeth painted around the crown of his helmet -- representing a Chapter award for bravery. Other symbols painted onto his armour include angler fish maws, skulls and spine-limpets that represent kill markings, victories, oaths and the like. Lucieor, together with Watch Master Akrep Xie of the Eye of Octos Deathwatch, Battle Leader Rakmeyr Bluewolf of the Wolfspear Chapter and Lord General Militant Arneld Heifaast, commander of the Astra Militarum stationed on the planet, stand against the Tyranid hordes.Lieutenant Suharth Keneddyr - Suharth Keneddyr is a lieutenant of the 5th Company of the Dark Krakens Chapter. He is currently attached to Strike Force Luceior.Lieutenant Tuemarl Hena - Tuemarl Hena is a lieutenant of the 5th Company of the Dark Krakens Chapter. He is currently attached to Strike Force Luceior.Reclusiarch Herrahdura Zitadan - Zitadan's role as Reclusiarch has in some ways been harder than that of those in pre-Ultima Founding Chapters, for the warriors that made up the Dark Krakens upon its formation were all Greyshields. They had spent many standard years fighting alongside battle-brothers hailing from different gene-sires and did not have the Terran centuries of tradition so many Space Marine Chapters could look to for strength and inspiration. It has been important for Zitadan, and Master of Sanctity Sukerno, to forge a culture for their Chapter around which they could unite hundreds of otherwise disconnected battle-brothers. To do this, they wholly embraced the cultures of Naktis' population -- the hunting of colossal ocean beasts, taking skins, teeth and bones to adorn their armour and more. They knew that in time, the Greyshields would be replaced by warriors recruited from the natives of Naktis, so it naturally followed that the world's cultures influenced the Chapter's own. Zitadan spent much of his time as Greyshield fighting alongside scions of Roboute Guilliman, Sanguinius, Rogal Dorn and Ferrus Manus, and so he gained little inclination to slaughter beasts for trophies from them. However, he has all the tenacious pragmatism of his gene-sire, Vulkan, and in the interest of his Chapter now partakes in these pursuits. Upon his right shoulder plate is painted the Eye of the Kraken, which in darkness appears in fluorescent green. This represents his role as the Chapter's second-ranking Chaplain and the Reclusiam's total oversight and cares for the Chapter's traditions and culture. The handle of Zitadan's Crozius Arcanum, Hadosmite, is wrapped with the skin of a deadly sea serpent found around Naktis' equatorial volcanic island chain. His Raider Pattern Combat Bike, Hastam Veneatoris, is adorned with all manner of trophies taken from slain sea monsters. The book chained to it is the second copy ever produced of the Codex Tenebris Abyssor, the collected beliefs, values and legends of the Chapter. The writing on its night-black pages is visible only in darkness, for it is written in the same bioluminescent inks as that many Dark Krakens use to daub symbols on their armour.Chaplain Aperah Talin - Aperah Talin is a Chaplain of the Dark Krakens Chapter. He is currently attached to Strike Force Luceior.Apothecary Rirhen Mullel - Rirhen Mullel is an Apothecary of the Dark Krakens Chapter. He is currently attached to Strike Force Luceior.Company Ancient Cahy Taimon - Cahy Taimon is the Company Ancient of the 5th Company of the Dark Krakens Chapter. He is currently attached to Strike Force Luceior.Lexicanium Paraon Uari - Newly ascended to the Dark Krakens' Librarius, Lexicanium Uari is a psyker gifted well beyond his experience and is already tapped to one day command all the Chapter's Librarians. He is an adept wave caller -- a skilled master of Aquavitalis psychic powers -- as many Dark Krakens Librarians have learned to become. They are masters at corralling the power of the ocean and have embraced the Naktis people's reverence for the sea as a beautiful life-giver and merciless destroyer. He also has a strong grasp of telekinesis and beast-calling, the latter of which has influenced him greatly. Uari has a deep affinity with wildlife of all kinds, to the extent that he can sometimes enter their minds and take over their bodies, and so he eschews the hunting of beasts that so many of his battle-brothers enjoy when not at war. As such, he bears no fetishes, sea-beast skulls, teeth or skins. He does, however, adorn his armour, cloak and robes with bioluminescent symbols, the inks for them harvested from animals he husbands himself so none are slain for the chemicals to be acquired. Octopoid tentacles running horizontally over his arms represent the mastery of the many levels of psychic discipline he has achieved and the series of arduous tasks he completed to join the Dark Krakens' Librarius. Uari paints a symbol or image of every Naktis beast he has ever psychically linked with. Some of these images are so small they are invisible to the naked eye; others he has emblazoned boldly. They include razor sharks, coral scorpions, spinestars, pliosaurs, helikoprids, and tyrannofins. Uari has also painted a skull set in the gaping maws of a shark on each vambrace. Each represents a close battle-brother who was killed by Uari during the fire mastery trial of his Librarius training. Uari was hideously disfigured in the same trial, to the extent that he never takes off his helm. In battle, Uari's powers are more than enough to overcome most foes. However, he also wields the Force Sword Nightclaimer with great skill, delivering controlled, psychically enhanced blows which sever limbs and lop off heads. He is currently assisting Captain Krijeni Luceior of the Dark Krakens 5th Company in defending the world of Death of Bianzeer against a tendril of Hive Fleet Leviathan.Codicier Daranshi Ekko - Daranshi Ekko is a codicier of the Dark Krakens Chapter. He is currently attached to Strike Force Luceior.Techmarine Kusnad Eroan - Kusnad Eroan is a Techmarine of the Dark Krakens Chapter. He is currently attached to Strike Force Luceior.Neanzou - Neranzou is a Redemptor Dreadnought of the Dark Krakens' 5th Company currently attached to Strike Force Luceior.Jughatun - Jughatun is a Redemptor Dreadnought of the Dark Krakens' 5th Company currently attached to Strike Force Luceior.
|
Dark Krakens - Chapter Relics: Raven's Reach - Raven's Reach is a master-crafted Stalker Pattern Bolt Rifle that is wielded by Captain Krijeni Luceior of the 5th Company. It was a gift from a fellow Greyshield that Luceior fought with who was descended from Corax -- primarch of the Raven Guard -- who went on to join the Rift Stalkers Chapter. A corvid skull and feather fetish hang from the weapon in memory of the Astartes who gave it to Luceior.Ice Piercer - A relic power sword wielded by Captain Krijeni Luceior of the 5th Company.Nightclaimer - A relic Force Sword wielded by the Lexicanium Paraon Uari. Uari wields Nightclaimer with great skill, delivering controlled, psychically enhanced blows which sever limbs and lop off heads.Codex Tenebris Abyssor - The Codex Tenebris Abyssor is the collected beliefs, values and legends of the Chapter. The writing on its night-black pages is usually visible only in darkness, for it is often written in the same bioluminescent inks as that many Dark Krakens use to daub symbols on their armour.Hadosmite - Hadosmite is a relic Crozius Arcanum wielded by the Reclusiarch Herrahudra Zitadan. The handle is wrapped with the skin of a deadly sea serpent found around Naktis' equatorial volcanic island chain.
|
Dark Krakens - Chapter Fleet: Fathom (Strike Cruiser)Skyllae (Gladius-class Frigate)Taniwha (Gladius-class Frigate)
|
Dark Krakens - Chapter Colours: The Dark Krakens wear black power armour with purple shoulder pauldrons and arms. The Aquila or Imperialis on the chest plate is dull nickel.The Chapter badge is worn on the left shoulder plate, and the red squad tactical speciality symbol -- battleline, close support, fire support, Veteran or command -- is on the right.A white High Gothic numeral inscribed onto the squad speciality symbol on the right shoulder plate indicates squad number.
|
Dark Krakens - Chapter Badge: The Dark Krakens' Chapter badge is a white kraken centred on a field of purple.
|
Subsets and Splits
No community queries yet
The top public SQL queries from the community will appear here once available.