#40k advent

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Welcome to the first day of me popping open my Warhammer 40k Advent Calendar. Appropriately enough, on our first day, we start with the First: a Dark Angel!

Unfortunately, I’ve never cared about the Dark Angels, so I don’t actually know a ton about them compared to other chapters. Good start for the calendar.

Repent! For tomorrow you die!

The Dark Angels were the First Legion, in that they were the first ones the Emperor created to serve in his armies. Their practices would become the basis for how all the other legions would operate, the basic template to be edited. And they were total pricks about it.

Ironically, the First would be reunited with their Primarch, Lion El’Jonson*, pretty late in the Crusade. Up to that point, the First was dealing with some real problems with being prideful and unwilling to change, which had messed them up real bad in their wars. The Lion renamed them the Dark Angels, and led them to glory, yadda yadda. During the Heresy, the Dark Angels started out far away from Terra; they’d spend the war doing some big campaigns and messing up the traitor legions’ homeworlds.

At the end of the war, they went back to the Lion’s homeworld of Caliban, only to get shot at. Turns out, the Dark Angels that had stayed on the planet along with the Lion’s adoptive dad, Luther, had decided to turn to Chaos**; they had to go conquer the place, and in the process, the Lion got mortally wounded and got put into suspended animation (like father, like son), to return in the time of his sons’ greatest need. Now, every single loyalist legion had elements that went traitor and became Chaosy. For reasons that have never been clear to me, the Dark Angels thought it was a HUGE problem for them to have their own traitor elements, and they’ve spent the subsequent 10,000 years being super paranoid about guarding the secret and hunting down the traitors (and anyone who knows about the traitors), called the Fallen.

The Dark Angels were always kind of horny for secrets and faint cultism, which only grew under their Primarch. They had a whole complicated set of different wings and orders within the legion that specialized in different forms of warfare. The modern chapter retains two of them: the Deathwing, a veteran company that fights in super-heavy armor painted bone white, and the Ravenwing, a light formation focused on going really fast with motorcycles and landspeeders and the like (and who are also the primary hunters of the Fallen). The whole chapter is set up as a mystery cult, with troopers learning more and more about their grimdark history and their grimdark rituals as they rise through the ranks.

Aesthetically, the Dark Angels tend to lean into a Medieval Knight kind of look, with some Arthurian elements sprinkled in (see: the Lion is a King Under the Mountain). They really like wearing robes and tabards, or big winged knights’ helmets. They also have Weird Little Guys: the Watchers in the Dark. They’re mysterious little Jawa-sized folks who live on Calaban and do menial work for the Dark Angels, like holding books and swords; they also keep watch over the Lion’s body, and they disrupt nearby psykers. What are they? Why haven’t they been murdered by the xenophobic Imperium? What’s their goals? Who knows. But look at this little guy.

*Yes, the father of the Dark Angels was named after Lionel Johnson, author of the poem “Dark Angel”. Buckle up, because the names do not get any less goofy from here.

**What is Chaos?

Well, the big thing to know is that in 40k, our physical reality is accompanied by another dimension called the Warp. It’s a realm of non-material that’s fundamentally affected by the thoughts and emotions of sapient beings in real-space. And because the Warhammer universe is a miserable, awful place, the strongest emotions that have affected the Warp are things like rage, sorrow, greed, and megalomania.

The Warp is important; it’s where psykers draw their magic powers from, and it’s how human ships can travel faster than light. But it’s also dangerous. Over the millennia, the suffering and emotions in the Warp have congealed into several powerful, malevolent consciousnesses, powerful as gods: Khorne (murder, bloodshed, rage), Nurgle (rot, sickness, sorrow), Tzeentch (magic, change, ambition), and Slaanesh (greed, ecstasy, perfectionism). Each of them also has hordes of demons--sorry, ‘daemons’, this is a British game--that are always itching to go through any hole in reality to go fuck up real-space. These are the corruptive powers of Chaos, whose very nature is to seek out places that aren’t Chaosy and make them a bit more gruesome.

The Chaos gods can’t go running into realspace all willy-nilly. They need agents. Psykers are inherent gateways to Chaos, which is why the Imperium tends to hate them and go witch-hunting. They’re also aided by a galaxy full of cultists who work to open up portals to the Warp, so that the daemons can come rampaging through. Horus’ rebellion started as a mundane power grab, striking a bargain with the Dark Powers to aid in the fight; as time went on, they got more and more lost in the sauce, and now most of the remaining traitor Astartes are fully worshipers of the dark gods.

Every day, the Imperium continues their grim wars against Chaos, fighting daemons on the battlefield and hunting down any sign of cults within their society. Going to war against the concept of ‘warfare’, going into an ecstasy of Emperor-worship to ward off the concept of ‘ecstasy’, killing billions in the name of fighting ‘death/decay’, keeping infinite secrets to fight the concept of ‘secrecy’...  it’s going about as well as you’d expect. Chaos is going to eat the Imperium someday, if the aliens don’t get to them first. Maybe then, the gods will starve, having finally extinguished their source of fuel. Cold comfort for the people who died along the way, though.

Master post here

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Day 8 means we’re back to successor chapters, and today is the first chapter I didn’t recognize on sight. Today I learned about: the Silver Templars!

Focus and Fury!

The Silver Templars are another Ultramarine successor (we’ll get to the Ultramarines next week, I promise). The reason I didn’t know about them is that they’re brand new--the Silver Templars are one of the first purely Primaris chapters.

See, Primaris Space Marines are the product of a mad genius named Belisarius Cawl, who’s spent thousands of years tinkering with the Emperor’s original supersoldier formula. Cawl had a bunch of test marines sealed in stasis, along with the tools to turn Firstborn marines into Primaris, and the tools to raise up new aspirants as Primaris right out of the box. The debut of these Primaris soldiers was the ‘Ultima Founding’. Many of the new marines went to already-existing chapters whose geneseed they used, filling out their ranks with a wave of new extra-big recruits. But many new chapters were founded around this time, made entirely of Primaris marines, and the Silver Templars are one of them.

The Templars’ main claim to fame is their focus on one-on-one duels. They believe in focus-firing down one opponent at a time, and on a broader strategic level, will often carve a bloody swath through the enemy army to murder their leader. Interestingly, this resembles the behavior of one of the lost traitor legions, the III Legion Emperor’s Children (who got so lost in their pursuit of military perfection that they fell to Slaanesh). Hopefully the Silver Templars don’t walk the same path.

The Silver Templars also have a culture of bonding with their weapons*. They’ll formally and ritually connect themselves to a particular weapon, mastering that particular tool’s use. Losing the bonded weapon is a Big No-No, and they’ll go through hell to get their bonded weapon back.

So that’s the Silver Templars. They don’t have a ton of lore, since they’re so new; as far as I can tell, their backstory is mostly told in some rulebooks and a single novella. But they’re kinda neat. I like their aesthetic, and being “the super duelist-focused chapter” is a cool distinctive trait while still mechanically being similar to others. Sometimes it’s nice to learn about a new thing.

*Hey, what weapons do Space Marines use, anyway?

All the little guys in my advent calendar are holding bolters. A bolter is a weapon designed based on cutting-edge speculative future tech... in the ‘80s. They’re gyrojet weapons (which means the bullets have their own little rockets that propel them once they’re fired) with giant explosive bullets. They’re designed to hit armor, punch through, and then detonate inside the target, turning their insides to soup. Bolters are the standard firearm of the Space Marines, and they come in a wide variety, including sniper, machine-gun, and super-fancy-rounds.

The next step up in power is plasma weaponry. These are glowy blue guns that shoot a lump of super-heated... well... plasma at the enemy, hitting enemies with star-stuff. Plasma weapons can be super-charged to shoot enemies real hard, but the Imperium is bad at making and maintaining plasma weapons, so there’s always a risk that they’ll get too hot and explode on their user.

Then there are specialized ranged weapons. Melta guns use the power of nuclear fusion to punch holes in any solid matter at close range (they’re used for tank-hunting). Flamers are flamethrowers, burninating large swathes of enemy nerds. Missile launchers shoot missiles, it’s not that complicated. Tanks and heavy weapons platforms will carry large auto-weapons (basically a regular gun) and laser weapons. They’re rare these days, but the Legions used to also use graviton weapons (gravity guns that use a target’s weight against them) and volkite weapons (basically heat rays, cooking people inside their armor). I’m probably missing a lot of other obvious weapon types; Space Marines are not short on ways to kill people.

Warhammer 40k is a world that loves its hand-to-hand combat, too, and Space Marines have options in spades. The standard close-combat weapon is a chainsword, which is exactly what it sounds like--a chainsaw stuck on a sword hilt, used to saw through enemy armor (no, this would not actually be effective). Chain weapons also come in axe and bayonet form. Then there are power weapons, which have an in-built force field that reacts violently to any matter they encounter and can thus cut through armor like it’s butter. There are normal-looking power weapons (swords, axes, clubs, Wolverine claws), then there’s thunder hammers (they go ‘boom’ when they hit something), and then there’s power fists. Power fists are giant gauntlets that Space Marines use to punch tanks to death. Some power fists come with a chain-blade attachment, and they’re called chainfists. This shit gets silly.

Last major weapon category is force weapons. A force weapon is basically a power weapon, but instead of having ancient super-tech juicing it up, force weapons are powered by the wielder’s own psychic power. Obviously, they’re only really usable by psykers; for anyone else, it’s just an overly-fancy normal weapon. They’re really good at fucking up daemons.

Again, I’m sure there are obvious weapons I’m forgetting. It gets hard to keep track of all the ways that Space Marines have to murder people. And when they’re in a pinch, they always have their acid spit.

Master post here

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Day 17 brings us the lurking menace of the Carcharadons, also known as the Space Sharks!

The Carcharadons are another chapter with a murky background. It’s strongly suspected that they’re descendants of the Raven Guard who their Primarch disliked, who were sent out to the edge of the galaxy to patrol against threats to the Imperium. This makes for a fun example of how the same aesthetic can produce multiple results; Raven Guard geneseed gives Space Marines deathly pale skin* and pitch-black eyes. Normally this is used to emphasize Super Goth Space Marines, but it also totally fits the vibes of sharks.

The Carcharadons, as you might expect of sharks, are extremely aggressive and bloodthirsty, with a fondness for chain-axes and other gnarly close-combat weapons. They organize themselves like a standard chapter, but with a lot of extra edgy names, like calling their assault troops ‘Devourers’ and their heavy armored veterans ‘Red Brethren’. Their recruitment drives are called ‘Red Tithes’, when they swarm a random Imperial world, kidnap a bunch of people (turning most of them into chapter serfs), and send the strongest in for recruitment. They tend to keep to themselves, lurking in space for the opportunity to tear into a new enemy.

The biggest bit of lore that the Carcharadons were involved in was the Badab War, which came up yesterday as well. I’ll try to sum it up as fast as I can: The Badab Sector was located at the edge of a dangerous warp rift called the Maelstrom. A bunch of Space Marine chapters had been stationed there to defend against incursions; the most prominent of them was the Astral Claws. The new leader of the Astral Claws said, “we want to launch a crusade into the Maelstrom, and to do that, we’ll need all the local resources, so we’re not paying Imperial taxes anymore”. This went over poorly, and before long, the Astral Claws were declaring secessionfrom the Imperium. The Claws dragged in several other chapters bound to them by old alliances, who didn’t quite realize they were going for a full-on Imperial civil war until everything went to hell. A whole lot of Space Marine chapters were brought in to fight on the loyalist side, too, including the Minotaurs and the Carcharadons. Most of the Claws’ allies would be re-integrated into the Imperium after their defeat, though they were sent on penitent crusades in shame; the Claws themselves went full Chaos and fled into the Maelstrom.

Aesthetically, the Carcharadons have some Maori influences, mostly borne as decorations on their armor and in the name of their chief Librarian (Te Kahurangi). Otherwise, they’re... well, sharky. Lots of chain weapons and big knives; anything that can be considered ‘toothy’, they use. Their chapter master is big even by classic Space Marine standards. Fun thing about their color scheme, which I learned in an old article on GW’s website and that I don’t think is part of their official lore: The grey of a Carcharadon’s armor is the default primer color used by Space Marines. They just don’t bother to paint it. Which I think is fun, in a utilitarian ‘we don’t care about frills’ way. Of course, like a lot of Badab War veterans, the Carcharadons also have some old goofy art that is... not ‘plain unpainted armor’.

Camouflage. 

*Yeah, geneseed changes skin color sometimes. It’s... an awkward bit of the lore, to realize that there aren’t any supposed to be any dark-skinned Raven Guard successors, regardless of what an aspirant’s original skin color was. Like many bits of 40k lore, this is probably best ignored.

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Day 6 means it’s time for the VI Legion, the Space Wolves!

Awoooooo!

When the Emperor was making the Legiones Astartes, three of them were reserved for some secretive purpose--the VI, the XVIII, and the XX. The first time that the VI were released onto the battlefield, they were a bunch of vicious douchebags who tore apart soldiers and civilians alike in close combat, showing no discipline or restraint. That was apparently what Big E wanted.

In case it isn’t clear, the Emperor was a total asshole.

They were united with their Primarch Leman Russ pretty early, and he started to instill some culture into them. Russ grew up on the icy death-world of Fenris, where he ruled over a planet of pseudo-vikings. That’s the culture he impressed into his legion, pumping them full of Norse language, a skaldic tradition, and a deep fascination with wolves. Russ denounced the use of psykers under other legions, while also promoting his own legion’s Rune Priests, who were literally just psykers with a viking religious skin. Under Russ, the legion developed a grim reputation as the Emperor’s Executioners, his attack dogs ready to slip the leash at a moment’s notice. The Space Wolves were the first Space Marines known to partake in combat against other Space Marines, and it’d all come to a head at Prospero.

I mentioned the XV Legion, the Thousand Sons, who may or may not be the precursors of the Blood Ravens. Just before the start of the Horus Heresy, the Primarch of the Thousands Sons made a big mistake, and Big E sent Russ to go arrest him. Russ was an asshole, and Horus used that to his advantage, changing Russ’ orders to try to kill the Thousand Sons’ leadership. It turned into a big fucking mess that badly weakened the Wolves, and they wouldn’t play a huge part in the rest of the Heresy. Afterward, Russ fucked off into the Warp, with a promise to return in the Final Days.

When all the other legions were broken up into Chapters, the Space Wolves said “fuck that”. It almost sparked another civil war, until a compromise was reached that the Wolves could do whatever they wanted. They thus maintain an absolutely huge chapter, with a wildly different structure form a ‘normal’ chapter, and a different induction method (newbie Space Wolves are organized into close-combat squads, where they tend to die fast and survivors grow up to become ‘real’ Marines). They also developed a lamentable problem with over-theming. Everything in the Space Wolves is wolf-related. They’re led by the Great Wolf, who appoints the Wolf Lord, their medics are Wolf Priests, their veterans are Long Fangs, their home fortress is the Fang. Every chapter becomes kind of a caricature of itself, but when you have the Wolf Lord getting pulled in a floating chariot pulled by giant wolves with a wolf on the prow, it feels like you’ve sorta lost the plot.

Too many wolves.

Hell, even their troops become wolves. Space Wolf genetics are unique, giving them unusually strong senses of smell and long canine fangs. Sometimes the gene implantation goes wrong, and they transform into Wulfen, who’re basically werewolves--extra hairy and fangy Marines who get used as shock troops (basically every special unit in the Space Wolves is a shock troop). This genetic weirdness is part of why the Wolves don’t have many successor chapters; for whatever reason, only Fenrisians take well to the genetic uplifting process.

Despite everything, the Space Wolves have some cool elements. While once they were the vicious civilian-butchering Rout, they’ve grown some nobility. They have a bit of an anti-authority streak, perhaps best exemplified during the Months of Shame. There was a war on a planet called Armageddon against a Chaos incursion. A frequent result of such wars is for the Inquisition* to murder anyone who was on the battlefield, so they can’t spread any hints of heresy abroad, and they planned to do the same at Armageddon. After fighting alongside these soldiers, though, the Space Wolves said “fuck that”. When the Inquisition moved to destroy the leaving troop transports, the Wolves moved their ships in to block them, taking heavy fire and refusing to fire a shot in return. Many Space Wolves died to let normal humans survive and flee, which is not common among civilians. This escalated into a small-scale civil war between the Wolves and the Inquisition. This ended relatively quickly with a negotiated peace, but a bunch of people died in the process. There’s a fan-made song about it, it’s pretty cool.

So, Space Wolves. Space viking werewolves. Both vicious murderers and noble defenders of the common person. They’re one of the most popular chapters. They’re also broadly mocked, because wolf wolf wolfy wolf. I feel like both takes are fair.

*What’s the Inquisition?

The Imperium is a monstrously huge shambling corpse of an empire stumbling forward on inertia. The Inquisition are the secret police of the Imperium, whose job is to keep it shambling for just a little bit longer. They watch the populace for signs of secret deviancy. They see themselves as surgeons, cutting cancers out of the Imperium before they bring the whole thing down. If some innocents get caught up in the crossfire, well, innocence proves nothing (an actual Inquisitorial motto).

The Inquisition is split into several Ordos, with three really big one. The Ordo Malleus hunts down daemons; the Ordo Xenos hunts down aliens and alien sympathizers; and the Ordo Hereticus hunts down witches, mutants, and Chaos cults. Within each Ordo, there’s a small cadre of Inquisitors, who’re powerful people with decades or centuries of experience who have greater freedom of action than almost anyone in the Imperium. Inquisitors then have their retinues, a hodge-podge of people who’ve been recruited to act as the Inquisitors’ agents (this is a common basis for RPGs set in the 40k universe). Inquisitors have broad license to do whatever they want in the name of preserving the Imperium, up to and including ‘exterminatus’, the eradication of all life on a planet to deny it to enemies of the Imperium.

The Inquisition is also home to a bunch of weirdo cults and philosophies, who contemplate big weighty matters of galactic importance, since the Inquisition is basically the only group that’s allowed to know enough about the secrets of the universe to comment on things like “humanity seems to be evolving into a fully psychic species” or “hey, maybe the Emperor being frozen in half-death is a bad thing for his plans”. Inquisitors generally fall on a spectrum of two extremes: Puritans (who are firm followers of the “suffer not the alien, the mutant, or the heretic to live” and view anyone who’d even think of deviating from that path as anathema) and Radicals (who’re more pragmatic about using any tools necessary, like employing alien weaponsmiths rather than just murdering said aliens).

We’ll be talking about the Inquisition again; they have multiple Space Marine chapters whose whole job is to help them out, and they’ve also come into conflict with plenty of Space Marines. Especially the Space Wolves--the Months of Shame aren’t their first or last conflict with Russ’s boys. They’re a pretty big deal.

Master post here

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Day 24 is the last day of our advent calendar journey, and it’s a special one. The Space Marine that came in the box was unpainted, which I knew would happen going in. The idea is that you can paint him however you want to create your own chapter. So for the last week or two, I’ve been doing just that.

Therefore, I present my creation: The Serpens Hospitaler!

We are the scalpel, we are the cure!

The Serpens Hospitaller were founded during the 22nd Founding, the one that came after the notorious ‘Cursed’ Founding. Created from White Scars gene-stock, the goal with the chapter was to act as an emergency response force, bolstering other chapters and keeping casualties low after the calamities of the previous founding. The Serpens grew into their role of preserving human life, emulating the Emperor himself in becoming masters of surgery and the human body. They became a nomadic fleet-based chapter, roaming the galaxy to lend aid where needed, recruiting new adherents from a number of different worlds--focusing on the keen-ness of the aspirants’ minds, not just their bodies.

The Serpens, like their parent legion, specialize in rapid movement and attack. An iconic operation of the Serpens involves drop pods and aerial transports slamming down around a besieged Imperial force, with the bulk of the battle-brothers emerging to fend off attackers while the chapter’s robust Apothecarion focuses on rendering aid for the survivors. They perform evacuations, supply bodyguards and emergency medical aid to Imperial VIPs, and break through blockades to relieve beleaguered Imperial regiments. In many ways, the chapter functions like a capsule pill, with the many line brothers offering protection to deliver the medicine at their core. When one of their roaming battle barges hears the call for aid, the Serpens respond as quickly as they can, to restore life to human populations and bring death to their enemies. All battle-brothers of the Serpens are trained in at least basic first aid, and even veterans who don’t go into the Apothecarion have usually picked up quite a bit of medical knowledge--which they often put to good use in destroying xenos and heretic forces.

In addition to their large Apothecary corps, the chapter places importance on their Librarians--both for their skill in the oft-grotesque psykic discipline of “biomancy”, and for their preservation of important medical knowledge used by the Apothecarion. The Serpens have built up an astounding body of knowledge on human physiology, poisons, diseases, and dangerous fauna in the galaxy, which they happily share with other chapters when called upon. The Tyranids have been a subject of fascination for the chapter in recent years, with many Apothecaries taking a perverse delight in the arms race against the ever-evolving Tyranid bioweapons.

Naturally, the Serpens enjoy a good reputation among many in the Imperium, who take heart to see their sea-green armor rushing out of their white-painted vehicles to lend succor to the suffering. Other Space Marines are somewhat leery of the combat medics, though. The Serpens have noted a complete willingness to secure other chapters’ gene-seed for them from fallen brothers, which many chapters consider unseemly at best, and incredibly dangerous at worst (especially for those chapters who seek to hide damaged or mutated gene-seed). Imperial military command also find the Serpens frustrating for their frequent refusal to give up on civilian populations and stranded Imperial Guard regiments that other commanders had already written off. Finally, the Serpens are not well regarded by the Inquisition. The chapter’s pursuit of knowledge often risks uncovering (and worse, sharing) information the Inquisition considers best left hidden, especially when investigating the poxes spread by followers of Nurgle. Having seen many well-meaning physicians slip into the hands of the Plague God, the Ordo Hereticus keeps a close eye on the Serpens to make sure they don’t make any unseemly pacts.

The current head of the chapter is Master Chirurgeon Galen Aquinas. Like his predecessors, he rose to his position from the head of the chapter’s Apothecarion, an unusual promotion path in most chapters but standard for the Serpens. He is an adamant believer in Roboute Guilliman’s Indomitus Crusade, and has called the chapter together to rally around his flagship, the Caduceus. The gathered Serpens eagerly strike forth, probing paths into the Great Rift and seeking out human worlds that have long suffered in isolation from the Imperium at large. They were particularly drawn into the battles of the Plague War, a major theater of battle in the Crusade against the Death Guard and other followers of Nurgle. The Serpens took severe casualties during this campaign, with many of their soldiers succumbing to the very diseases they were rapidly developing medicines to fight. As a result, the Serpens have had to ramp up recruitment efforts on the worlds they seek to liberate, and most of the old Firstborn of the chapter have been replaced with new Primaris recruits.

The colors of the Serpens are based on the ancient raiment of medics on Terra--the sea green of the surgeon, the blue gloves and masks of the medicae, and the even-armed cross combined with the ancient medical symbol of the snake. (In other words, they’re dressed in surgical scrubs with latex gloves and a face mask.) Their weapons are cast in stainless steel, and they often favor flame and plasma weaponry for their sterilizing effects when facing weaponized pathogens. Serpens vehicles are usually painted white, with the chapter’s logo prominently displayed on the side, and equipped with searchlights and excavation equipment for digging through ruins for survivors.

...There. I made a chapter that’s all about its Apothecaries, without being a bunch of weirdos like the Red Scorpions. Told you someone could make a better one.

Forgive my sloppy freehand on the painted models; it’s Hard. One of the big advantages of using GW’s own chapters is that you can get decals or sculpted shoulder pads with their icons, without having to paint the bastards on yourself. Closer look at the Serpens icon, a green snake wrapping around an even-armed pink cross:

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Day 23, and while it’s not the Lamenters*, it IS another Blood Angels successor, so I guess that’s good enough. Today, we talk about the Flesh Tearers!

The Flesh Tearers are a Second Founding chapter, formed from the Blood Angels right after the Horus Heresy. They got their name from their first chapter master, Nassir Amit, who had been known as ‘the Flesh Tearer’ because he was a warm and compassionate sweethea--no, just kidding, because he had a tendency to go hard on fighting in hand-to-hand combat and ripping people apart. The lads he recruited for his new chapter shared his predilection.

As the millennia went on, the Flesh Tearers didn’t get any less rip-and-tear-y. They settled on the vicious death world of Cretacia, recruiting from the local populace of hardcore survivalists. They needed the supply of unmutated recruits, because the Flesh Tearer’s geneseed has started falling apart. They have a ridiculously high rate of troopers falling to the Black Rage, becoming even more mindlessly murderous, to the point where they’re having trouble sustaining their numbers. The chapter seemed on the road to extinction, until Guilliman rolled in with a bunch of Primaris marines to shore up their numbers and provide more stable geneseed. This sudden recovery from doom is messing with the poor Flesh Tearers’ heads.

The Flesh Tearers are high on the list of chapters that should really make the Imperiom look at themselves and ask, “Are we the bad guys?”

*BONUS ROUND, let’s talk Lamenters!

Like I mentioned yesterday, the Lamenters are the product of the Cursed Founding. They were an attempt to fix the problems with the Blood Angels’ geneseed, trimming out the Black Rage and Red Thirst. And it worked! Sort of.

The Lamenters are known for having shit-awful luck. The chapter has had to fight a surprising number of desperate last stands; in the biggest incident, when defending against a Chaos Space Marine attack, they got abandoned by their allies and were left to defend a planet’s worth of Imperial citizens on their own, reduced to only 200 survivors before they got relief. Those survivors then immediately got lost in a warp-storm for ages on their way home. The Lamenters found themselves on the wrong side of the Badab War (pulled in by bonds of friendship) and got fucked up by the Minotaurs, before being assigned to a penitent crusade to make up for their ‘rebellion’. The crusade sent them right into the face of a bunch of Tyranids. And most recently, even as they survived that crusade, the Black Rage return, hitting the Lamenters with a vengeance.

Despite the shit they’ve gone through, the Lamenters are still sons of Sanguinius, and they retain a core of nobility. Many of the desperate last stands they take part in happen because they refused to give up on civilians that other Imperial units considered lost causes. Where so many Space Marines are motivated by rage, hatred and contempt, the Lamenters are motivated by love for their fellow human. Their chapter motto says it all: For those we cherish, we die in glory.

Also, there’s a song about them.

Master post here

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Day 14 brings with us the continuation of the theme of ‘blue with red accents’. It’s the Crimson Fists!

There is only the Emperor! He is our shield and protector!

The Crimson Fists are a successor chapter of the Imperial Fists, founded just after the Heresy. Their initial recruits came from the younger and more level-headed marines of the Imperial Fists (contrast them to the blood-mad zealots in their cousin chapter, the Black Templars). They drew their name from an old Imperial Fist tradition where two high-ranked officers would cut their palms and shake hands, letting the blood mingle. Unsanitary.

The Fists spent most of their history as a fleet-based chapter, puttering around space fighting whoever they needed to fight. After sabotaging a large Ork* Waagh,  they were granted a fiefdom, the pleasant agricultural world of Rynn’s World. This, unfortunately, seemed to make them mostly a target. A massive ork invasion killed most of the chapter; the Fists managed to win, but at a high cost. Their rebuilding wasn’t aided by another invasion by daemons as the Great Rift cracked the galaxy in two. Fortunately, Guilliman rolled in with a bunch of Primaris marines, so the Fists have a whole new round of recruits they can use for rebuilding.

The Crimson Fists operate as a pretty standard Codex-compliant chapter. They’ve gotten really good at fighting orks, but they also have a history of being sent after some of the nastiest opponents the galaxy has to offer--including wiping out two rogue Space Marine chapters. The casualties they’ve suffered in some big invasions have forced them to adapt at times to their small numbers, focusing on hit-and-run attacks and infiltration, rather than the “come at me, bro” stance more common to Space Marines.

Ultimately, the Crimson Fists exist for those who want to play Imperial Fists, but don’t want to paint all the goddamn yellow. They were part of some prominent early campaigns in 40k lore, so they hold a respected part in the hearts of old-school 40k fans. They also just look cool; blue and red is a good combination, as we saw yesterday with our Ultramarine sergeant. Nothing wrong with some classic-flavor Space Marines sometimes.

*Wait, Orks? Like, orcs, the fantasy species?

Yup, just like there are space elves, there are space orcs. They’re an odd bunch.

So way back when, the Eldar (the space elves, see Day 5) were created to fight a war against undead skeleton robots. The orks were created for the same war, the perfect engines of destruction. Many millions of years later, the galaxy is still dealing with this bioweapon.

The classic ork is a big, burly, hunched humanoid with big tusks and green skin, made of muscle and violence. The more an ork fights, the bigger and stronger they get; the most powerful warbosses are really chonky gits. Orks can sustain horrific injuries without dying; medics, called “painboys” will just slap them back together, maybe with some cybernetics (creating ‘cyborks’), and they’ll be right back to the fighting.

What makes the orks really pernicious, though, is how they reproduce. When an ork dies, they throw out a cloud of spores that will settle somewhere and grow into fungi; these fungi will then absorb nutrients and create a bunch of new orks. Orks have a genetic instinct for making weapons and technology, and thus come out of the fungus-womb ready to put together a gun and start fighting.  A planet invaded by orks once will never be rid of them for good, barring some  really thorough work with a flamer.

Technically, ‘ork’ encompasses a number of orkoid species, born of the same spores. Alongside orks, you get gretchin (small angry goblins, used as meat shields, punching bags, and menial servants by orks), snotlings (smaller, barely-sapient goblins, used as ammunition and emergency rations), and squigs (a wide variety of non-sapient sacks of meat with teeth, used as attack dogs, explosives, and support technology).

As you may have noticed, ork stuff sure sounds goofy. Painboys? Cyborks? Casual cannibalism? Orks are the comic relief species of 40k. They’re a galaxy-spanning swarm of green football hooligans, speaking in an exaggerated low-class British accent. Their concept of ‘stealth’ is... well...

It’s something.

Orks are still one of the most dangerous flavors of alien in the galaxy, though. Their numbers are astounding, with only the tyranid hive-fleets able to compete. Each one is more than a match for a normal human soldier. When a warboss grows influential enough, they can rally Da Boyz together into a vast crusade of mayhem called a ‘Waaaagh’ (which is also the orkish warcry, and the name of their magic), which can and have wiped out whole worlds. The only thing keeping orks from wiping out every other species in the galaxy is their propensity for infighting; orks are constantly jockeying for position by murdering their superiors, and if the leader of a Waaagh is killed, the army will fall apart into competing factions as every ork with some gumption tries to become the new warboss. If a warboss could ever unite the orks into one grand Waaaagh? That’s the galaxy done for. And the greatest ork warboss, Ghazghkull Mag Uruk Thraka, sure is trying his damnedest to make that happen.

Orks. They’re very silly, until suddenly they aren’t.

Master post here

[deflare]

Day 4, and today’s little guy is a Blood Raven!

Knowledge is power, guard it well.

The Blood Ravens are a successor chapter of... someone. The records are unclear. This isn’t terribly uncommon in the Imperium; 10,000 years is an absurd length of time, so information gets lost all the time. Several chapters don’t know who their daddies are. But it gets a bit more interesting in the case of the Blood Ravens; I’ll get into it more in a second.

The Blood Ravens were created to be the main characters in the Dawn of War series, by Relic Games. So they have a lot of ‘standard’ Space Marine qualities, so the player can have access to all the usual toys in the video game. Their standout features include an unusually large number of Librarians*, an unfortunate risk of turning to Chaos (depending on the player’s actions), a general quest for knowledge (especially about their origins), and a tendency to steal other chapters’ relics. The last bit isn’t really canon, per se, but they DO sure have a lot of ‘gifts’ from other chapters in their vaults that the player can equip characters with. The Dawn of War games are good, and the Blood Ravens look really cool, so they’ve become pretty popular outside of that game series.

Now, the Blood Ravens’ background. One of the legions that turned to the side of the traitors was called the Thousand Sons (they didn’t want to turn traitor, they were betrayed by Horus and by hubris, it’s a whole tragic Thing). The Thousand Sons were noted for being a legion full of psykers, wearing red armor. They divided themselves into a number of different cults that specialized in different fields of psychic study; one of them was called the Corvidae. Therefore, there’s a lot of speculation that the Blood Ravens were created from the genetics of the Thousand Sons. This would explain why their origins were kept secret, as the Imperium isn’t supposed to b make new chapters from the genetics of the traitor legions. But hey, if they’re in the gene-bank, why let them go to waste? As more tidbits come out about the Blood Ravens, the writers seem to enjoy teasing this connection even more, but are unlikely to fully confirm it; the mystery is more fun.

*What’s a Librarian (in the context of fanatical supersoldiers)?

So, psykers. An increasing number of humans in the Imperium are exhibiting the ‘psyker gene’ (which is a misnomer, since no one has found an actual genetic link yet). Psykers are vital to the running of the Imperium; the only ways to send messages faster than light are by sending a spaceship (slow, real expensive), or by having psychics send telepathic messages to each other. But also, psychics are dangerous. They have wild, uncanny powers (basically, they’re space wizards), and a momentary lapse of willpower can make them a portal to the Warp, with bad times for everyone involved. Also, a thousand psykers a day are fed to the Emperor to keep the Golden Throne alive. It’s fucked up.

Once in a while, a psyker gets inducted into the Space Marines before their power is discovered. These special Astartes become Librarians. In addition to being lore-keepers and general nerds, Librarians are powerful battle-witches. The average psyker is a twitchy, half-insane weirdo who’s constantly at risk of their head blowing up. Librarians are made of sterner stuff due to supersoldier nonsense. Some chapters have special flavors of Librarian based on their local culture, and a few others don’t use them at all (like the Black Templars, who take their creed of ‘abhor the witch’ to an extreme). The Thousand Sons, as mentioned, were a legion made entirely of psykers. This ended badly for them. Being a space wizard in 40k sucks. But then, being anything in 40k sucks.

Master post here