Golgothos

Golgothos the Fervent
Discovered (world)	Sepulchra
Discovered (period)	898.M30
Legion	Sixth
Heraldry/Sigil

This page details people, events, and organisations from The /tg/ Heresy, a fan re-working of the Warhammer 40,000 Universe.

Golgothos has disappeared. From this day on many will ask if he is dead, and as the years turn to centuries men will more often believe that he could not have survived so long. I put it that the whole question is absurd. Golgothos' stubborn will embodied the spirit of mankind. So long as there is one man to wonder if the Primarch lives, it can be certain that he does.

(Excerpt from Golgothos the Eternal by Gaspard Lumey)

History

Youth

The Galaxy was hardly a joyful place after the Age of Strife. This calamitous epoch left countless worlds scarred beyond recognition in its wake, but few emerged from it as damaged as Sepulchra. Aeons ago, this blasted planet was a thriving bastion of geneurges and biomancers whose services were highly sought after in all four corners of the human dominion. Wealthy beyond measure, the citogogues of Sepulchra soon fell victim to pride and ordered the construction of massive catacombs and necropolises to preserve their glory for long after they cast off their mortal shells. Alas, this investment in prestige turned out to be utterly misplaced when Sepulchra was cut off from the rest of the Galaxy by a cascade of warpstorms unleashed upon the Materium by the begetting of Slaanesh. Then again, all of their wealth combined could not buy the biomancers safety from the fuming rage of the realm of daemons. The troubles resulting from their sudden isolation from the rest of the human domain were further exacerbated by the effects of the warpstorms, such as bouts of mass madness and epidemics of hitherto unknown and seemingly incurable malaises. Stalwart though it was, Sepulchra was slowly yielding to the onslaught of malicious forces beyond human comprehension.

Driven to utter desperation, the geneurges finally decided to attempt to save the planet the only way they knew how. They set forth to upgrade Sepulchra's entire population by means of reforging their genes, making them able to withstand the perils of the Warp. It is impossible to tell whether this insane plan was ever within the realm of possibility or if it was born of minds already poisoned with the emanations of the Immaterium, but it was a failure of epic proportions regardless. In their misguided attempts to set things right, they accidentally created a plague so potent that not even the malodorous cauldrons of Nurgle could have spewed it forth. Any victim to this affliction passed away within mere hours, only to rise again as a nigh-indestructible ghoul with an intense craving for human flesh. The plague of necrowalkers spread like a wildfire and soon enveloped the entire planet, forcing the survivors to cower inside the great necropolises while their cities were taken over by the shambling hordes. Such was the sad result of the pursuit of immortality by the geneurges of Sepulchra.

As generations went by within the sealed necropolises, the survivors of the calamity slowly began to forget their origins. Legends and superstitions replaced history and science, and within the span of a few centuries the people of Sepulchra degraded to the level of technobarbarians. No longer able to make sophisticated tools and weapons, these people depended entirely on salvaging the technological artefacts from the abandoned cities for their survival. But each scavenger raid on the ghoul-infested hives entailed enormous danger, and many tribesmen who left the safety of the necropolises inevitably joined the ravenous dead. It is, then, little wonder that their societies became greatly reliant on faith as the last consolation as time went on. Eventually, they created a pantheon of several grim and unforgiving deities, chief of whom was Terminus, the Deathgiver. People in most societies crave few things more than life after death, but the survivors of Sepulchra were far too familiar with it and its unfortunate implications. For them, there was nothing as beguiling as the finality of total oblivion after death, and this was the greatest boon they begged Terminus to grant them.

It all changed during one of the routine scavenger raids conducted by one of the necropolis tribes. Amidst heaps of rusty metal and crumbling concrete, they found something not seen on Sepulchra for centuries - an artefact fashioned from shimmering metal untouched by entropy. It appeared to be a container of some sort, which was proven to be correct when the lid on it slowly slid aside after a couple of pokes from a rusty spear. Much to the bewilderment of the tribesmen, it contained nothing but a human child of slightly above average size. The cleric in charge of the raid interpreted the finding as a gift from Terminus, and so the boy was taken back to the necropolis to be brought up as a warrior-priest. Christened Golgothos, he was adopted by the family of the cardinal himself.

The decision by the scavengers to take the boy in soon proved to be wise, as he quickly grew up to become a warrior to put the ancient heroes of myth to shame. Several times as large and ferocious in combat as any of his peers, the young priest slew hundreds of ghouls and recovered tons of invaluable ancient relics before he turned twenty. As the stockpile of technological miracles from the bygone age grew, so, too, did the curiosity about their origins and the desire to experiment. By way of reverse engineering, the necropolis dwellers soon grasped the basic principles behind the functioning of several relatively primitive tools and weapons. For the first time in centuries, they started repairing machines and piecing them together rather than collecting what was left behind by their distant ancestors. Golgothos himself was at the spearhead of this research effort, keenly interested in all things mechanical and their potential to alleviate the suffering of his downtrodden kinsmen.

In spite of all his technological accomplishments, he remained a deeply religious man at heart. To him, technology was a miracle of Terminus sent as an answer to the prayers of his followers, and engineering was an act of faith. After the death of his adoptive father he took his position as a cardinal, and there was little doubt that he was destined to eventually become the hierophant, the highest religious authority in all of the interconnected catacombs of Sepulchra. And yet, power interested him little, for he had a dream so grand that he dared not even speak of it. Now that he had gathered a formidable amount of ancient weapons and had a good idea how to use them, he was planning a full-scale crusade on one of the abandoned cities. Golgothos wanted to purge it from the living dead, so that his people could live under the sun without fear once again. He just needed some more weapons to make his ambition a reality.

This was when the cruel irony of fate finally caught up with the primarch. It all happened on an ordinary scavenger raid mere months before Golgothos intended to call his tribe to arms. He was far too excited about his impending crusade; in his mind, he was already there, crushing pus-filled skulls with mighty blows of his meticulously repaired power pickaxe and leading his kinsmen forward to a better future. Unsurprisingly, this excitement costed him concentration: lost in daydreaming, he missed a rather obvious ambush by several ravening ghouls. While they were no match for a superhuman such as Golgothos, several of them managed to bite the primarch before they were reduced to piles of rotting flesh. The blackening of veins around the bite marks indicated the spread of the ancient infection.

Although Golgothos possessed a superior immune system constructed by the Emperor himself, he was not completely impervious to disease. The malaise that would kill an ordinary human in hours took its time poisoning the body of the primarch. A week after his fateful accident his organism still fought the disease, but it was a loosing battle, and the primarch begrudgingly realised it. It was not perishing that he truly dreaded, no; rather, he regretted not having enough time to make his dream of living under the sun a reality. The days allotted to him ran by, and he still was too short on equipment to be sure of the succes of his crusade. To make matters worse, his body started giving in to the malaise; first, he lost the use of his lower body, then his joints started growing increasingly stiff. In a desperate effort to finish his business before Terminus would claim his due, Golgothos cobbled together a suit of combat armour for himself, exoskeleton combined with a life support system that somewhat resembled a primitive dreadnought in its functions. This suit allowed him to keep leading raids into the ruins and gathering more equipment for his crusade.

Alas, fewer and fewer people would agree to follow a diseased cardinal as his condition visibly worsened, making the raids progressively more dangerous and less productive. It also didn't help that rumours began to circulate, no doubt incited by the rivals of Golgothos, that he was cursed by Terminus for his hubris. They whispered behind the primarch's back that the grim deity refused to grant him a true death as a punishment for his shameless idolatry of technology. Panic and stress began to pile up as Golgothos finally started realising that even with the help from his exosuit he didn't have enough time left in the world to fulfil his grand ambition. Slowly, his reverence of death started to turn into seething hatred. His final days were so full of pain, anger and self-loathing that some say that it was not the ghoul plague that finally killed him, but a heart failure.

Of course, primarchs don't die that easily, and what appeared to the simple people of his tribe as a death was in fact merely a very deep coma that precedes the final departure. Unaware of the subtleties of primarch anatomy, the necropolis dwellers started preparing a funeral pyre for their deceased cardinal, lest he rise up as one of the living dead. Fire would have surely finished what the disease started, were it not for the extremely timely arrival of the Emperor. Escorted by the Life Bringers, the ruler of Mankind cleared several abandoned cities in search for his wayward son before his senses finally brought him to the sealed necropolis where the last rites were being read to him. Mere seconds before his funeral pyre was set on fire by his gloating rivals, the Emperor smashed it to pieces with his power claw and lovingly picked Golgothos up. One glance was enough to make it clear: one way or another, his son was on the doorstep of Hades.

Fortunately, the ruler of Mankind was accompanied by the only person in the Galaxy capable of bringing him back into the world of the living. Johannes Vrach was beyond a doubt an accomplished conqueror, but, above everything else, he was a physician of peerless skill. Ordered by his father to save the life of Golgothos by any means necessary, Vrach immediately jumped at this daunting task. He soon realised that his brother was far beyond full recovery, and that his only chance of ever seeing the light of day again was interment into a dreadnought. Unfortunately, dreadnoughts had barely been discovered and were poorly understood at the time. To complicate the matters further, even a Contemptor would need major adjustments to house a primarch.

In the end, Vrach only had two options - to use a dangerous prototype that could damage Golgothos irrecoverably or to step aside and watch his brother die. He took his chance and attempted for the first time in history to put a primarch into a dreadnought. It stands as a testament to Vrach's genius that in spite of all the hurdles and inhibitions he was faced with, he was ultimately successful in his bold endeavour. And yet, his triumph was tarnished by several adverse repercussions of the operation. Although Golgothos integrated successfully with the dreadnought's neural schemes, the integration was not perfect and required maintenance once in several years, maintenance that only Vrach or a physician of a comparable skill could perform. But this was but a minor inconvenience. More importantly, the neural system of Golgothos was damaged by the integration. Not even Vrach noticed this at first, but the interment into a dreadnought made him slightly more aggressive, prone to single-mindedness and manic fixations. The change in personality was barely noticeable at first, but it grew progressively worse the more time the primarch spent within the dreadnought.

When Golgothos emerged from his slumber of death, the first thing he saw was the Emperor's stern face, looking at him with deep concern in his eyes. Given his upbringing, it's only natural that the primarch first mistook his father for Terminus, the Deathgiver, who came to welcome his faithful servant in the realm of the dead. Although the master of Mankind was quick to dispel the confusion, the dreadnought primarch was never quite able to shake off the association between his father and the god of death. Fully aware of the Emperor's atheist sentiment, Golgothos never spoke of his father as a god, not even to his brothers, but he always viewed him as a divine figure, which found its reflection in his later actions.s of humanity. Once the Emperor deemed Golgothos ready, he was given the Sixth Legion, who he named The Entombed, and the dead marched off to war.

The Great Crusade

Golgothos took to the Great Crusade with unmatched ferocity. Immediately upon being given his legion he led a campaign against the Eldar of craftworkd Kaelor, which floated menacingly close to Sepulchra. The Warlocks of Kaelor were powerful and numerous, but The Entombed had a natural resistance to the powers of the warp, and managed to cripple the craftworld. Golgothos found other victories in pushing back Waaaghs from the northern marches as well as finally exterminating the Orks of Sepulchra.

Soon after his early victories, Golgothos fell ill. None of his Apothecaries could heal him, and so the Emperor was called to his aid. When the Emperor healed his son, he found that the sickness quickly returned, and could not be prevented. The Emperor called upon Johannes Vrach, the most skilled primarch in medicine, to study Golgothos' illness. Vrach performed countless experiments upon his brother, and learned that Golgothos' genes were degenerating. Without constant healing from the Emperor, Golgothos would eventually die. Johannes devised a device which could save Golgothos, a giant mechanical exosceleton with an advanced medical suite, capable of making advanced genetic corrections daily. Golgothos was interred within the armour, thus becoming the first of the Dreadnoughts. Unbeknownst to Golgothos and the Emperor, however, Johannes kept the genetic data he had gathered, and would one day use it as a weapon.

During the great crusade, Golgothos declared a new form of soldier would be created, called a Chaplain. These chaplains invoked the faith of their bretheren to maintain their resolve, or push them against difficult odds. The morale given by the chaplains was instrumental in the success of The Entombed on zone mortalis missions. Where other astartes feared to tread, the mighty armour and implacable will of The Entombed kept them marching onward.

The Entombed were naturally tight-lipped and aloof, and so it took The Emperor a long time to learn of this heresy. He came to Sepulchra in a fury, but learned quickly that things were not as dire as they seemed. He learned that a handful of officers were leading the rest of the Legion astray, and complete extermination was not necessary. Still, the Entombed needed to be punished for their heresy, and so only one in five Entombed were allowed to live. Those Entombed sentenced to death did not fight or resist, they stood implacably in rows, and did not flinch as their brothers were executed beside them. Only one marine resisted, Obitus, the high Cardinal, who had founded and dogmatized this heretical faith, dared to face the Emperor in combat, but did not even manage to strike him before being defeated.

At the end of the crusade, The Entombed numbered Ten Thousand.

The Hektor Heresy

Golgothos was infuriated by the betrayal of Hektor. The thought of in-fighting among the gods when there were so many xenos to purge threw him into a fury. The Emperor knew well the strengths of his legions, and knew that Golgothos and his kin had an unnatural resistance to the powers of the warp. As such, Golgothos was sent with haste to take out Ostium, the homeworld of the Black Augurs. The Entombed's zone mortalis tactics served them well on the small hiveworld, and the Augurs were forced to give more and more ground.

Just as victory seemed assured, the unthinkable happened. A thick red fog filled the streets of the hiveworld, and washed over the Entombed fighting on the eastern and central flanks. The fog seeped into their armour, and turned their flesh to sludge. The fog washed harmlessly over the Augurs and citizens of Ostium, affecting only the Entombed. The people of Ostium watched in horror as the Entombed fell. Many marines endured the pain in determined silence, but many did not. It is from the witnesses of Ostium that the famous phrase comes, "A man who keeps his silence screams loudest." Eight thousand marines died on Ostium, their geneseed reduced to unrecoverable goop.

Golgothos later learned that the horror of Ostium could have been prevented. Aralex Orannis and his War Scribes had investigated an abandoned Life Bringers research facility, and discovered a repository of data containing details into Entombed genetic structures. Had Aralex known the significance of this find, that the Life Bringers were creating a bioweapon capable of selectively targeting the Entombed, he surely would have warned Golgothos. Golgothos never forgave Aralex for his oversight, and declared the War Scribes nonextant: He would treat them as if they did not exist. Forever onward, when the Entombed fought alongside the War Scribes, they would fire their artillery indiscriminately, plan their assaults as if they had no allies, and lend no support. As far as Golgothos was concerned, the War Scribes had ceased to be.

Post-Heresy

Golgothos swore bloody vengeance against Johannes Vrach, primarch of the Life Bringers. Together with his close friend Gaspard Lumey and with the help of the Scale Bearers first company, he assaulted the Life Bringer homeworld of Rai. When they knew they could not win the battle, the Life Bringers destroyed Rai and fled into the Eye of Terror. Unwilling to let Johannes Vrach escape, Golgothos gathered 100 of his venerable dreadnoughts and charged into the Eye of Terror. Golgothos and his men travel from world to world, constantly chasing after Johannes. The Dreadnought and the Daemon Prince have fought countless times, usually resulting in grievous wounds to Johannes, but he always manages to survive.

Centuries later, in M35, The Entombed battled the Life Bringers on the hive world of Mortis III. As the battle raged, Johannes Vrach appeared, and slaughtered Entombed by the score. When all hope seemed lost, a terrible warp storm tore the sky asunder, and from it screamed Golgothos and his Venerable Dreadnoughts. The glorious duel shook the planet itself, and in the end, both Primarchs lay dead.

Personality

Golgothos was the primarch who changed the most over the course of the Great Crusade. When he just left his homeworld of Sepulchra, he was a morose recluse whose menacing appearance and demeanour belied a quiet scholar far more at ease thinking than talking. Frequently lost in thought, he only raised his voice when the matters discussed concerned him directly, but every word of his had the weight of tombstone granite. Few dared start arguments with him, not for the fear of losing, but rather out of respect for his grim wisdom. In any discussion, his words were usually either the first, or the last.

His first encounter with death left him deeply pessimistic and melancholic for the rest of his life. He stared the grim reaper in the eyes and recognised him as a foe who was far too strong for him. This, in its turn, led to his belief in the ultimate futility of all action. Although he filled this existential void in his heart with the ceaseless fighting of the Great Crusade, he remained sceptical about the outcome of this campaign until his last moments. In any endeavour, he always assumed the worst and saw even his successes as minor victories in the great war that humanity was bound to lose. That being said, he never allowed his scepticism to discourage his soldiers, preferring to keep it to himself.

Some say it was this unwillingness to share his true feelings that eventually drove him to madness. However, most people who knew him agree that his mind was ultimately shattered by his fixation on death. He both loathed it for its cruelty and destructiveness and admired it for its implacability and fairness; his feelings on the subject were perhaps far too complex to be adequately described by anyone but Golgothos himself. Suffice it to say, he spent much of his free time pondering death and its implications. Perhaps he was trying, without much hope, to learn its dark secrets that would help him to defeat it or at least see its point. Unfortunately, he was merely peering into a bottomless abyss that existed for no rational reason and held no secrets to be learned, and this great nothingness gradually drove him insane.

There were, of course, other factors that precipitated his fall. His interment into an experimental dreadnought caused minor damage to his nervous system that was exacerbated by years of constant battles and stressful situations. This caused Golgothos to grow increasingly unstable and unable to control his emotions. While he retained his calm out of battle, on the battlefield he transformed into a violent fiend revelling in destruction. Certain remembrancers noted that he embodied the quiet aspect of death on board of his flagship and its violent side when in combat. But, as the Great Crusade went further on, the violent side started taking over, and it wasn't long before the primarch became notorious for bouts of fury outside of battle as well. It was at this point that even his brothers who had held him in high regard before started getting reservations about him and questioning his character. Only the Emperor and Johannes Vrach knew the true cause behind the dreadnought primarch's deteriorating psyche, but Vrach was too ashamed of his failure to tell of it even to his closest friend, Gaspard Lumey.

The negative influence from Inferox also didn't help the primarch's condition. The two brothers grew close based on their concealed religious feelings and frequently spent time together debating on the shape faith has taken in the militantly atheist Imperium. It was, perhaps, during these friendly discussions that some of the zeal Inferox was notorious for rubbed off on Golgothos. The dreadnought primarch practically worshipped the Burnt King for his blind, optimistic faith, so much purer than that of his own, tarnished by creeping scepticism and existential melancholy. His rational mind and philosophical disposition forever barred him from the pure faith of his brother, and Golgothos secretly despised himself for his useless sophistication. Eventually he began subconsciously imitating Inferox and his simple ways in an attempt to approximate his purity of heart, but by doing so he merely lowered his mind's rational defences that kept insanity at bay.

Driven to the brink of madness by his unhealthy fascination with death and pushed into its embrace by his faulty dreadnought suit and the poisonous influence of Inferox, Golgothos was a vastly different person by the end of the Great Crusade. From a quiet, melancholic fatalist he turned into a raving zealot who fully embraced his menacing image and revelled in it. Reckless on the battlefield and unhinged in times of peace, he was seen by many primarchs as a failure and a hindrance to the Great Crusade. It was only his fanatical loyalty that kept his brothers from making open moves against him, but nobody realised that Golgothos was only truly loyal to his own twisted vision for mankind. Nobody knows if he would have retained his allegiance to the Emperor if the tragic saga of his life wasn't brought to an abrupt finale by a treacherous strike from the Life Bringers.

Appearance

Before his internment, Golgothos had bone white skin and a bald head. He was a skinny, malnourished man, with visible bones from a life of malnourishment and overexertion. His limbs, although gangly in appearance, harboured great strength that was impressive even for a primarch. The emaciated look of Golgothos contrasted sharply with his height. Clad in his blood-red cardinal robes torn by the ravages of the elements, he resembled the archetypal Grim Reaper figure.

Wargear

During the Great Crusade, Golgothos was interred in an Ossuary Pattern Dreadnought. His Dreadnought is massive, dull grey with white details, and his own skull is mounted for the head. The Leviathan-class Dreadnought has a minor modification: flanking the decorative skull, on either side, are repositories with the skulls of fallen Entombed veterans stacked within. These repositories, large rectangular things, would eventually be integrated into the bulkier design of later Dreadnoughts. On one side of the Dreadnought, where an arm should be, is a massive Demolisher Cannon, capable of leveling entire buildings. On the other side is a mighty power fist, which has crushed Golgothos' hated foes many times.

While being bound to a mighty siege Dreadnought presented certain perks for Golgothos, it was more of a curse than a blessing. Golgothos lacked many things his flesh body had taken for granted - sleep, to begin with. He would only experience something close to sleeping when he was placed into stasis hibernation. Always being awake put an enormous strain on his mind, a strain that would quickly break a lesser man. To pass the time and relieve the stress, Golgothos would spend a lot of time thinking - far more than any other primarch. Philosophical by nature, he held long, elaborate conversations with himself, about war, about peace, about life, but mostly about death. All this thinking made him a wise man, but the Great Crusade had little use for such wisdom.

Besides the sleeplessness, there was pain, and it was constant. His mortal body was sheathed in a cyberorganic web, laced into electro-fibre systems, and shut in an armoured sarcophagus. There was be no opportunity to manage pain the way he had done before, no mechanism for pain control. He had to simply hide it and endure, no matter how bad it was. And at times it was truly unbearable.

Naturally, there were also rage and anger - the farther into the Great Crusade, the worse they got. Despite the devastating power bequeathed to him as a Dreadnought, he missed his mortal state. Initially, he resented his death, regretted the circumstances of it, fixated upon it, hated the cold-shell life he had been given in exchange. He consequently went through all of the stages of grief - denial, anger, bargaining, depression - only he was grieving for himself. Finally, he came to terms with his death and accepted it as a fact that couldn't be changed. Already going insane at this stage, he even started finding positives about it. From seeing himself as a pathetic cybernetic zombie, he came to see himself as a true immortal, and the inconveniences of being in a dreadnought as the price he had to pay for immortality. And this thinking naturally led to his desire to share this gift with the rest of Humanity.

A fan's attempt at rules

	Pts	WS	BS	S	FA	SA	RA	I	A	HP
Golgothos:	550	7	6	9	14	13	12	6	6	6

Unit type: Walker, Independent Character.

Wargear: Ossuary Pattern Dreadnought, Vindicator Magnus, The Black Hand, Reliquary Shell.

Special Rules: Adamantium Will, Eternal Warrior, Fear, Fearless, Fleet, Independent Character, Master of the Legion, Furious Smite, (Rage*, Furious Charge*)

Unique Rules: Bitter Rage, Carry On, One Foot in the Grave.

Ossuary Pattern Dreadnought- Unique Leviathan variant dreadnought. Gives Golgothos the walker unit type. Also keeps him from joining all units save for Dreadnought talons.

Vindicator Magnus- A cannon specially crafted by the Techmarines of his legion when he found the weapons of his armor lacking. It fires with the same profile as a demolisher cannon, but Assault 2, range 36.

The Black Hand- A Dreadnought power fist with an underslung Heavy Flamer that also grants the following special rules to attacks made in melee: Armorbane, Instant Death, and Wrecker. Also adds the Furious Smite special rule, which allows Golgothos to exchange half his attacks (rounded down) to make one of his remaining attacks Strength D.

Reliquary Shell- Golgothos has the adamantium-plated skulls of fallen legion veterans displayed on his armor's carapace. This grants him the following rules: Flare Shielding, Armored Ceramite, and Gaze of the Fallen (counts as having assault and defensive grenades). Additionally, no attack may ever cause a penetrating hit on Golgothos on any roll other than a natural 6 (does not affect strength D attacks).

Bitter Rage- Golgothos's sarcophagus does nothing to ease his great pain. Roll a D6 at the beginning of every turn. On a 2+, Golgothos powers through his suffering, using the great pain to power his blows, granting him Rage and Furious Charge. If you roll a 1, the pain becomes unbearable, and Golgothos loses 2 WS, A, and I for the remainder of the turn.

Carry On- Golgothos embodies the bitter determination of mankind. As long as Golgothos is on the field, all friendly units on the field gain +1 to their leadership, to a max of 10, and ignore casualities from shooting. If Golgothos dies, they lose these benefits but gain Zealot.

The Processos- Golgothos's elite dreadnought bodyguards and subcommanders. For +40 points a model, one dreadnought talon receives the following: +1 front armor, +1 attack, Chosen warrior, fleet.