Crimson Fists

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Crimson Fists
Battle Cry	"There is only the Emperor." "He is our shield and protector."
Founding	Second Founding
Successors of	Imperial Fists
Chapter Master	Pedro Kantor
Primarch	Rogal Dorn
Homeworld	Rynn's World
Strength	Somewhere around full strength after Ultima Founding
Specialty	Tactical flexibility and spanking orks
Allegiance	Imperium of Man
Colours	Blue and crimson red

The Crimsons Fists are a second founding chapter of the Imperial Fists, formed by the younger and more level-headed members. Noted for their crimson gauntlets, which were inspired by a ritual with Rogal Dorn and an Imperial Fist successor Chapter Master having a manly handshake with cut palms, signifying blood brotherhood between them. The name sounds more like a particularly painful sex act of Slaanesh that ends in internal bleeding, but whatever, they're still cool.

They got fucked over during an Ork invasion on Rynn's World, their home planet, when a stray missile fired from their orbital defense grid struck their own fortress. The damn thing somehow missed its original target, bypassed ALL of the fortress' void shields (we'll get to this freak accident later), and hit the armory directly, not exploding until it was hundreds of meters underground. The chances of this happening are about as likely as rolling 100 d20s and only getting 1s on all of them. (If you're curious, the probability of that happening is one in 1.267651x10¹³⁰. Seriously.)

But it's okay, because the Crimson Fists still managed to beat the Orks with only two-hundred and twenty-eight marines, 100 of which were killed the actual number of marines that survived their fortress monastery being destroyed isn't stated (Rynn's World mentions 16 including Pedro Kantor and Alessio Cortez). Kantor had sent a significant force to New Rynn City to defend it (because, you know, Crimson Fists aren't complete arseholes and will make time to defend the civilians). All that's known is that after the Imperial fleet came to Rynn's World to screw up the Orks there were only a couple of companies left. A Land Raider appropriately named Rynn's Might somehow managed to skillfully pilot itself using only its machine spirit and take out a good chunk of the invading Ork horde, including a warboss, with hellishly accurate weapon fire. When it ran out of ammo, it then tried to run over the Orks and when its treads were clogged with bodies and its doors smashed open, it was entered by Lootas seeking to take it, after which it vented the reactor and killed them all with hot plasma. The Crimson Fists were able to recover the Machine Spirit of Rynn's Might, and are now trying to find a new vehicle to house the Machine Spirit. They probably need a Titan chassis to contain that much awesome.

Let's also not forget that there's a part from the Rynn's World novel where Captain Cortez saves a mother and her kids, one of which is only a baby, from being murdered by Orks. Kantor is quite displeased at this, knowing that there are very few Crimson Fists left and they could not afford to take refugees along for the ride. However, he mentions they can tag along if they can keep up with the Astartes. Eventually the mother fatigues and falters, falling to her knees. The column of marines halt as their Chapter Master moves to the back, where the reader is led to believe that he is about to kill her given his wrist-mounted Storm Bolter is very, very close to her head. She pleads that her children were so heavy and she tried, and what does Kantor do? Let me stress that he did not want her in the first place. What does he do? He replies with, "You did well to bring them this far. It is time someone else carried you now." And then he picks her up in his arms, along with her kids, and rejoins his Battle-Brothers. Do you see the Ultrasmurfs doing such a doubly heartwarming and doubly awesome act of kindness? Of course not *cough*FallofDamnos*cough* (Except this exact thing happened in "Honour to the Dead" except mom dies and baby is rescued/recruited by Ultrasmurfs) then again, the whole point of the book was the Fists learning to care about Rynn's World, and its people, as before that point they just saw it as their base (they didn't even recruit from the place). This was due to the fact they were a fleet-based chapter for most of their history and only received Rynn's World a thousand years before the Orks invaded it. Meaning what Kantor did wasn't just being a cool guy, it was character development, showing the Fists weren't just merely defending a world, they were defending their home.

The Crimson Fists 1st Company is known as the Crusade Company and consists of 128 marines after the Crimson Fists decided to get shit done during the Crusade of Righteous Retribution. During the crusade, the Fists were unable to procure new recruits, and slowly suffered attrition until they ended up with only 128 marines left. Sounds kind of pathetic until you realise that the crusade lasted for over 300 years, meaning that the Fists lost fewer than 3 marines a year. It's now considered a bad omen if they don't have a full strength Crusade Company.

It's also worth noticing that only 9 years after the Battle for Rynn's World, the Crimson Fists were already sending forces to fight in the Zeist Campaign. Crimson Fists obviously do not fuck around.

They've recently been boosted back up to around full strength with the Ultima Founding which probably means the Primaris Marines outnumber the regular marines.

How the fuck did that missile incident happen?

It took the writers a few tries to make it plausible. First it was implied it was a standard missile fired from an orbiting defensive platform, meaning it normally should have done NOTHING to such a mighty stronghold beyond a small crater. They claimed the missile bypassed the void shields entirely, hit a piece of mountainside that was really super-duper weak (and somehow the Crimson Fists didn't know about it) and went deep down into the mountain. The missile detonated the Crimson Fist's weapon stockpile, causing their chapter a lot of hurt.

This was fixed by Steve Parker; the missile was actually fired from one of the fortress's anti-ship weapons bastions, and the void shields had to be dropped to fire them. It was also the type of anti ship missile that formed a melta field over the warhead to bore through ship armor before detonation, to make "tunneled through two hundred meters of solid rock" less stupid. Which is why silos like that should be kept separate from the fortress, so you don't have to drop your shields to fire. While this would expose the silos, you can have one missile each and hide dozens of them far away from one another.

Nah, the Kaptin in charge of the ship told everyone that he would do this and it happened. Ork don't gotta explain.

On /tg/

Also known as "Mexican Marines" because their chapter master, Pedro Kantor, Chaplain Jorge Martinez and suggested names like Alrovez and Sanchev from the Honor the Chapter Deathwatch supplement, and their crazypants 3E captain Alessio Cortez, all have Spanish names, and because alliteration is fun. Although the original Crimson Fists used names of Spanish and Portuguese Conquistadors and GW is British so perhaps "Spanish Marines" is more accurate.

Vidyas

• A Crimson Fists Chaplain in its natural habitat. Also, the police are all Guardsmen.