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Konrad Curze

2023-02-24T07:45:31Z

2601:1C0:5000:CFF0:19D8:F2DB:C571:BE6B: /* First Blood */

{{awesome}}
{{heresy}}
[[File:Konrad Curze Mugshot.jpg|400px|thumb|right|"Yeah this guy seems nice." - Big E at some point.]]

{{Topquote|He who fights with monsters should be careful lest he thereby become a monster. And if thou gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will also gaze into thee.|Friedrich Nietzsche}}
{{Topquote|Oh, you think darkness is your ally? You merely adopted the dark. I was '''born''' in it. '''Molded''' by it. I didn't see the light until I was already a man, and by then it was nothing to me but '''BLINDING!'''|Bane, The Dark Knight Rises}}
{{Topquote|Know how I stayed alive this long? All these years? Fear. The spectacle of fearsome acts. Somebody steals from me: I cut off his hands. He offends me: I cut out his tongue. He rises against me: I cut off his head, stick it on a pike. Raise it high up so all in the streets can see. That's what preserves the order of things. Fear.|Bill the Butcher, Gangs of New York}}

'''Konrad Curze''' was the [[Primarch]] of the [[Night Lords]] Legion (his @ was '''Night Haunter'''). A [[Psyker]] (albeit a latent one), Curze was also well-known for the fact that he was [[/b/|plagued from the moment of his awakening by visions of the most horrific future imaginable, terrifying waking dreams that would follow him from cradle to grave.]] Whilst [[/tg/]] has joked that he suffered the lamest death in history due to falling to a [[Callidus]] Assassin's blade (hence the ''"was"'' earlier). This was only because he let her kill him, for what he had done, and what he became. He is probably the most badass primarch in terms of [[gets shit done|getting shit done]], especially compared to [[Angron|these]] [[Fulgrim|buffoons]].

Equal parts upstanding vigilante and psychosis-wracked terrorist, Curze's schtick was obedience through fear. To wit, if you're sat behind locked doors shitting yourself in terror for the majority of your existence, you're probably going to struggle to lead a life of crime. And if that logic doesn't make you reconsider your wayward ways, perhaps [[rip and tear|being skinned alive, then disembowelled and finally crucified]] will be the wake up call you need. Either way, Curze cut a somewhat tragic figure; he foresaw the events of the [[heresy]] only to be stitched up and censured by his [[Rogal Dorn|arsehole]] [[Fulgrim|brothers]], possibly due to [[rage|the fact he made for a nightmarish poker opponent]]. Of course, having a personality and approach that can be accurately summarized as "some unholy [[Batman]]-[[/co/|Punisher]]-[[Vampire|Vlad the Impaler]]-Predator-Santa-Cassandra-hybrid" didn't win him many fans amongst his brothers, either. Though it might be more succinct to describe both his personality and methods as a combination of The Batman who Laughs and <s>Judge Dredd</s> Judge Death.

His name is an oblique reference to ''Heart of Darkness''.

==History==
[[Image:Curzw-perturabo-Primarchs-.jpeg|thumb|400px|"Yeah he seems pretty balanced."]]
===Nostramo===
After the Primarchs were scattered by [[Chaos]], Konrad Curze found himself upon perhaps the worst of all the planets that any Primarch landed on, [[Nostramo]]. While not technically a Death World by way of either it's environment or fauna, the world was very poorly suited to human habitation, and made worse by overpopulation and pollution. The planet was shrouded in almost complete darkness due to its faint star and the industrial smog that choked its atmosphere. The air and the rain were acidic from pollutants, and the population of the Hives was kept in check by suicide more than anything else. Nostramo had been a mining colony during the Age of Technology, as the world possessed a tremendous amount of naturally occuring adamantium in its crust. The planet managed to weather the Age of Strife relatively intact (for whatever that was worth), and had continued on as a large scale mining operation into the era of the Great Crusade. The planet's population had retained the technology necessary to travel in the void, and so the Nostramons were able to export their adamantium off-world. Nearby systems would pay a premium for the incredibly rare and useful metal, which generated phenomenal wealth for Nostramo. However, this wealth was hoarded by Nostramo's corrupt upper echelons, who hired criminal gangs to enforce their will over what were essentially small fiefdoms within the Hive Cities. Whatever culture the miners had originally possessed had long since been replaced by a strange fusion of gangland territorialism and feudalism.

This corruption, and what came of it, were the elements that made Nostramo possibly the worst of all the planets to receive a Primarch. It wasn't just the environment which made the planet awful; other Primarch homeworlds had biospheres as bad or worse. For instance, Mortarion's home planet of [[Barbarus]] had a just barely breathable atmosphere, and Sanguinius's world of [[Baal]] was like living in a burned out nuclear reactor. However, the people of Barbarus still held a sense of communal solidarity which grew even greater when Mortarion rallied them against their Overlords, and the people of Baal still had the compassion to raise Sanguinius as one of their own. What made Nostramo truly hellish was its populace. On Nostramo, there was no compassion or fraternity. The planet's only resource was adamantium, and its mining and shipping were the planet's only industry. With the adamantium trade under the strict control of criminal kingpins, the vast majority of Nostramo's population was utterly destitute, and had turned to crime practically en masse long ago in order to simply survive. This environment had bred a population so used to depravity and horror that behavior like murder for the sake of cannibalism was quite commonplace. To get a sense of how crappy Nostramo was, Curze himself would later state that he considered ''Terra'' of all places to be a paradise.

===First Blood===
From the moment he landed Curze got fucked over as, unlike the usual stasis-pod-descending-from-a-beam-of-light type landing his brothers made, Konrad ''punched through the crust of the planet'' (the entire planet was made of adamantium, though... warp phukery perhaps?) and had to crawl his ass out from the core as a TODDLER. After somehow surviving an asteroid level impact event, Curze's life got even worse as, when Curze reached Nostramo's surface, exhausted and starving from his climb out of the planet's crust, he killed and ate the first living thing he could find. His meal was a member of the human populace of Nostramo, and like most people on the planet, was a criminal. As a Primarch, Curze possessed the innate ability to absorb the memories of any creature whose brain matter he consumed (presumable this was his Primarch grade [[Gene-seed|Omophagea organ]]), and Curze's first meal included every even remotely edible piece of the criminal. He saw in the man's memories a broken, fearful, pitiless lifeform existing amongst countless others just like him; beings who environment and circumstance had reduced to a status little better than that of feral beasts.

Needless to say, this was just about the worst first impression of humanity that Curze could have gotten, and it started him immediately down the path of believing the worst of the human spirit. To top it all off, unlike his brothers, Konrad wound up with no one to take care of him. Nobody on Nostramo would have even considered something as altruistic as willingly taking on another mouth to feed. Konrad was forced to raise himself on the lawless hell-hole of Nostramo, eating animals and garbage when he could find such things, and people when he couldn't. The more people he consumed, the more memories of evil he experienced, and the more he became convinced of humanity's unworthiness and cruelty. As he grew older, Curze became increasingly disgusted by the behavior of Nostramo's populace, and he decided to take matters into his own hands after he became large enough to do so.

===A Deadly Vigilante===
Stalking the eternally-dark streets as a sort of [[Awesome|Space Marine Batman]], Curze began hunting down anyone he saw commit a crime. At first Curze's solution was simply to kill any and all offenders, a perfectly simple matter for him even as a child. As a Primarch, there was nobody on Nostramo who could come close to so much as seriously harming him despite his juvenile status. Other potential means of stopping crime besides execution were, for whatever reason, not considered by Curze. It is likely that killing the offenders would have been, for the child Curze, the simplest means by which he could both punish a criminal and ensure that the individual did not reoffend; there were no prisons on Nostramo and no other law enforcement besides himself. Additionally, he would often consume the brains of these criminals to gain access to their memories, whereby he could learn the names and locations of other criminals. Or, if the criminal was part of a gang, Curze could learn much about the gang's membership, various haunts, and potential defenses. As he killed more and more criminals, his reputation began to spread, and the syndicates began hunting him. However, the assassins were but ordinary humans, and they never really stood a chance. Curze developed a habit of killing all but one of any particular hunting party, then gouging out the survivors eyes and returning him to his comrades with the message of ''"I am coming for you"''.

But why bother doing any of this in the first place? It gained him nothing, and if anything it made him the enemy of essentially every single powerful person on the planet. Additionally, Curze never seemed to even consider the possibility of either allying with the corrupt nobles or forming a gang of his own, both of which would have made life significantly easier for him. Well, it was because each of the Primarchs had been created by the Emperor to serve a particular purpose, though there was significant overlap between many of them. For instance, Leman Russ had been designed to be the Emperor's executioner and IA guy, Dorn was the Emperor's architect, Guilliman was the Emperor's administrator, and Angron was... well he had undoubtedly been designed to be useful in ''some'' way (to this humble editor’s knowledge, he was an amazing healer with Jesus-type “cure the leper,” powers before the Nails). Anyway, Konrad Curze had been designed to be the Emperor's arbitrator, to be the ultimate judge. In fact one of the titles used to refer to him during the Great Crusade, and a pretty awesome one at that, was "The Last Judge". As such, he had a pre-programed knowledge of what justice was, and of what crime was (generally speaking). However, he had no understanding of why the concept of justice mattered, or any context by which to evaluate it. The child Curze simply had an instinctive desire to order his surroundings, rather like a giant grimdark sheepdog. All he knew was that crime was bad, and that justice involved punishing those who commited crime. So that was what he did. It is important to note that these "crimes" were not offenses under any sort of Nostramon law; the only law on Nostramo was the law of the jungle. It was all simply based on Curze's own innate understanding of what constituted a crime. Additionally, despite having been created with an innate sense of justice, Curze seemed not to possess any understanding of the concept that crime could have varying degrees of severity. As such, he also possessed no understanding that differing criminal offenses could have varying degrees of punishment. Curze's sole method of justice, execution on the spot, was parsed out to any criminal whether he be a serial murderer or a petty thief.

However as time went on, Curze began to notice something disheartening. Though his initial rampages were effective in terms of simply stacking bodies, no matter how many criminals he killed, the rate of crime seemed not to lessen. He'd hoped that his killings would have had a deterring effect on the remaining criminal populace of the city, but nothing seemed to have changed. At first he couldn't understand why this was, but after a time the answer dawned on him; most people committed crime on Nostramo simply to survive. He realized that people viewed him as simply one more murderer on a planet full of murderers; a more effective murderer than any to be sure, but nothing particularly out of the ordinary. It didn't really matter to the people of Nostramo if they met their end at the hands of an 8-foot tall monster child (Curze at the time), those of a couple of baseline human gangsters, or starvation. The choice for most of them was between committing crime, or dying, so ultimately there was nothing to lose by at least attempting to commit crime.

Unfortunately, instead of this realization sparking the aforementioned understanding in Curze that not all crime was the same, and thus not all crime should have the same punishment, he went in the exact opposite direction. He came to the conclusion that his murders were not having the desired effect because people weren't afraid enough of him. So Curze reasoned that if people were perfectly willing to commit crime to have a chance at survival, then all he had to do to stop them was to make the punishment for crime ''worse'' than death. He had to make the punishment for crime so terrible as to make survival itself not worth it; to become an object of such horror that people would rather see themselves and their loved ones starve than risk his wrath. There was also an element of simple practicality in this tactic, as Curze was keenly aware that he alone was never going to be able to kill enough criminals to have any real impact on crime rates on a planet populated almost entirely by "criminals". Nostramo was a Hive World, and such a world on average had a population of between 100 and 500 ''billion''. Even a Primarch would have needed something significantly deadlier than his own two hands to kill that many people before the heat death of the universe, and that's assuming they stopped breeding. If he wanted to bring order to Nostramo, the people would have to voluntarily abandon crime. Or at least, they would somehow need to be... convinced to.

===Terrorism against Crime===
As such, Curze began to commit utterly horrific acts of torture upon his victims before killing them and displaying their bodies in the most public of manners. Leaders of the corrupt administration disappeared, only to be found later hung from administration buildings and horribly mutilated, their faces often untouched so people could instantly identify them. Notorious criminals (as defined by Konrad) were found in the streets, eviscerated or impaled and left to die on the spires of manufactorum rooftops. The blood of those who had committed "crimes" flowed in the streets, with body parts stopping up storm drains. He apparently even saw suicide as a crime, and would sometimes show up at the potential perpetrator's residence before they could carry out the deed. [[Grimdark|Not to talk them out of it, but rather to torture the person to death in order to set an example.]] What the fuck. And as before, no matter the crime, the sentence was always the same; death. Only now it was via the most horrific means that could be dreamt up in the superhuman mind of a deranged Primarch, rather than simple execution. And to be completely fair to Curze, most of the Nostramon populace were not mere petty criminals. As previously mentioned, this was a world where activities like killing for the sake of cannibalism were commonplace. So even had he gradated his punishments, simple statistical chance would mean that the vast majority of his victims would have been guilty of some capital offense regardless of why he killed them. Of course this was not universally true, but could go some way in explaining why a superhumanly intelligent being would seemingly just not bother to apply ''any'' sort of nuance in dispensing his "justice".

The really scary part? ''It worked''. Within a year, Curze had terrified the people of his home hive city, Nostramo Quintus, to the point where the crime rate had reached damn-near zero. Where once the nighttime streets had bustled with activity, now everyone maintained a self-imposed curfew to minimize the casualties from [[Awesome|Space Marine Batman]]. Mothers began to threaten their kids that if they continued to misbehave, the Night Haunter would come for them. Additionally, absolutely nobody was safe. The planet's most powerful kingpins, crimelords, and political officials were killed just as regularly and barbarically as the lowliest of petty thieves. The criminal syndicates and planetary nobles (tautology) had continued their attempts to find and kill Curze, but after a number of years of him slaughtering their ever larger kill-teams with ever increasing barbarity, they essentially just gave up.

However, it is at this point that things started to unravel for Curze. Growing up on Nostramo had, just by itself, caused significant damage to Curze's psyche. Nostramo was a world that displayed an entire population full of the absolute worst humanity had to offer, even if the people themselves weren't entirely to blame. This left him with quite a dim view of human nature, and it would show in how he dealt with the planets he would go on to conquer. Curze had also never had anything approaching friends or family upon Nostramo, which might have allowed him to develop some understanding of comradery. All of this aside, Curze might have been able to shift his view of humanity once he got off of Nostramo but unfortunately, he had an even worse problem compounding his all-consuming pessimism. For as it turned out, Curze was a potent psyker, and his talents manifested largely in the form of visions of the future. These visions seemed unerringly accurate and were exacting in detail, but almost all of them depicted the most horrifically violent of all possible outcomes for any given situation. Curze conducted practically all of his actions around these visions, attempting as best he could to avoid, or at least mitigate, whatever terrible future he saw coming to pass. Sadly, he was almost never successful, and some brutal permutation of his visions would almost always come to pass. This left him with the hopeless view that life was both unspeakably awful ''and'' virtually impossible to change. However, sometimes Curze would have visions that presented outcomes that were not so terrible. One important example of this came when Curze stopped two boys from assaulting some random woman. He killed the first boy, than played cat-and-mouse with the other until eventually cornering him. As he prepared to kill the second boy, he had a vision. In this vision, he offered the boy a chance to live rather than killing him as per usual. This had two outcomes; the first being that the boy became a disciple of Curze's justice and helped him form a sort of vigilante group to enforce law and order upon Nostramo. In the second, the boy grabbed a knife laying on the ground, stabbed Curze, and escaped. This escape would hurt Curze's reputation, and force him to redouble his killings as the crime rate skyrocketed amongst the now less fearful populace.

Under better circumstances, these more optimistic visions might have provided Curze with an impetus for introducing some genuine positivity to Nostramo. As stated previously however, the nature of Nostramo's people had polluted Curze's outlook on life. The world was a place where practically nothing good ever happened and having experienced only this planet sized Sin City for his entire life, Curze was convinced that the most negative outcome of a situation was virtually guaranteed to occur. The fact that the vast, vast majority of his visions bore this out didn't help either. It follows then that Curze chose to kill the boy, believing the negligible possibility of a positive future to not be worth the risk. After killing the boy however, he noticed that the knife that he had seen the boy grabbing in his vision seemed too far away for the boy to have physically reached it. This confused and disquieted him, and he believed for a moment that he might have made a mistake. However, he ultimately dismissed his doubt and assumed that he must simply have missed something during his vision, for it was unthinkable that the vision could have been ''false''. It is thus heavily implied that Curze's [[noblebright]] vision had in fact been the real future, but his own biases caused him to disregard it. On that note, it it is highly likely that his ability to see the future was fucked with by the Chaos Gods while he was in the Warp, as Sanguinius had a similar ability which was not so grimdark. These visions also caused Curze to engage in the practice of punishing "pre-crime". That is, if he saw a vision of someone committing a crime, he would punish them as though they had successfully committed that crime, even if no actual crime had occurred. For instance, the two boys he had butchered in the above incident had not yet assaulted the woman, he had simply foreseen that they would (and to be fair to him they were about half a second away from doing so). It was also how he managed to find and kill those about to commit suicide, as obviously suicide is a rather unpunishable crime once it has been carried out. In reality of course, the entire concept of "pre-crime" is idiotic. If someone is prevented from committing a crime, even if they absolutely would have committed it if not stopped, then what that person is at worst guilty of is ''attempted'' whatever-the-crime-was. For instance, one definitionally cannot be guilty of murder if there is no murder victim. As has been noted however, Curze was not big on making distinctions when it came to his vigilantism.

The problems of Nostramo's environment, Curze's own vigilante butcherism (rip enough people's guts out with your bare hands and even the hardest motherfucker is gonna have some PTSD), and his horrific visions started to create an alternate personality within Curze's mind. As Curze continued to drown himself in blood and guts, this personality began to develop a taste for murder and torture that was independent of any greater goal. Curze managed initially to keep these dark impulses under control but as his killings continued to escalate in scope, scale, and creativity, these impulses would grow ever stronger. This additional personality would come to be known as the Night Haunter in order to distinguish it from Curze for posterity. This becomes slightly confusing however, as Night Haunter was initially just Curze's "nickname" on Nostramo, as obviously nobody knew his actual name. This confusion is then further amplified by the fact that Curze used the moniker to refer to himself long before his true descent into madness. The most simple (and least canon-breaking) way to view the situation is that Curze and the Night Haunter were essentially interchangeable for the majority of the Great Crusade, and the Night Haunter would not truly begin to manifest itself as a separate personality until the tail-end of the conflict. Basically, at any point before the destruction of Nostramo, the Night Haunter was just Curze having a particularly bad day. It should be noted however, that those bad days steadily increased in frequency and intensity as time went on. Interestingly enough, despite Curze's hatred of humanity and his growing appetite for death, he seemed to be aware that enjoying torture and murder were "wrong" in some fashion. Often when he enjoyed the suffering and fear he inflicted, as was the case during one of his twisted suicide preventions, his conscience would kick in and he would feel shame and guilt. So despite his actions being utterly monstrous, he was apparently not a sociopath. As with so many things, Curze did not seem to understand ''why'' it was wrong to enjoy his work, despite coming to firmly believe that the work itself was necessary.

===Reign of Terror===
[[Image:Warhammer-40000-фэндомы-Vulkan-Primarchs-7575420.jpeg|300px|thumb|The Night Haunter, enthroned and ready to dispense "justice" to the people of Nostramo Quintus.]]
In light of his progress in curtailing crime, Curze became ever more convinced that his way of order through terror had been the correct one. He deemed himself to have taken on the mantle of evil in order that his people might be spared it, and judged his work to have been an ugly but noble and more importantly, successful, pursuit. Seizing the moment, Curze appeared before the few remaining nobles that had survived his vigilante purges - the few who basically weren't complete assholes - and gave them a choice: Obey his rule, or die horribly. One or two protested that he had imposed an order based on fear, but it made no difference (and was kinda the point). Konrad Curze, the Night Haunter, was made the undisputed ruler of Hive Quintus. Shortly thereafter however, he came to rule the entire world by simply hinting to the nobles of the other hive cities that if they didn't fall in line with his laws, he would be paying them a visit. He was ''that'' scary. This makes him the only Primarch to have conquered his entire planet single handedly (not counting the Primarchs who were made rulers out of universal love and/or indisputable competence, like Magnus, Sanguinius or Fulgrim).

To the surprise of most, Curze proved to be quite a capable ruler and was surprisingly just and temperate. He made strong attempts to educate himself on absolutely everything he could learn, and his skill as an adjudicator would have made a [[Reasonable Marines|Reasonable Marine]] proud. This was, of course, until word of an injustice reached Curze's ears. At that point he would leave his palace to pursue the culprit himself, wearing down his prey until they could run no longer before gruesomely torturing the perpetrator to death. Curze had also made it mandatory by law that all citizens own a television, and would broadcast these torture sessions every time he conducted one in order to present everyone on the planet with examples of what happened to criminals. This unpredictable pattern of benevolent wisdom, contrasted by such jaw-droppingly savage violence that even an [[Eversor]] would look askance, ushered in a new era of efficiency and honesty across Nostramo. Exports of adamantium tripled and unlike previously, the prosperity caused by this economic boom was spread across all of Nostramon society. The general populace, once so destitute as to have regularly resorted to cannibalism to survive, now saw wealth the likes of which they had never conceived of.

However, peace and order came at a steep price. Though material quality of life had improved unimaginably for the majority of people on Nostramo, everyone lived in abject terror of the Night Haunter. People policed their every word and action religiously, as nobody could ever be completely sure if something they had said or done might be misconstrued as a crime. Prosperity had spread throughout Nostramo not out of generosity or selflessness, but rather because everyone was terrified that having more than their neighbor might draw the Night Haunter's attention. Furthermore despite the order and prosperity Curze had brought to Nostramo, he was hated by the vast majority of its populace. He was simply too fearsome to engender any other response in baseline humans, and this would have dire consequences in the future. Had Curze ever learned how to delegate to minions made up of the local populace, he might have been more effective but alas. Or if he had followed the occasional visions of noblebright he had and shown mercy to some of his victims. Sadly, this was never truly an option for Konrad; his opinion of humanity in general was too low to entrust anyone else with the execution of his justice. As would be seen later during a rather narrow minded "demonstration" to Dorn, Curze believed that humans could only be made to be orderly through fear of consequences. Without that fear, humans would behave as he had seen them behave on lawless Nostramo; doing whatever they could get away with to whomever they could overpower. Given this, his desire to be the planet's sole judicial arbitrator is understandable.

===The Great Crusade===
[[Image:The viii primarch by saint max-d424fmh.jpg|right|thumb|350px|[[Castlevania|I was called here by ''huuuuuumans''. Who wish to pay meeeee ''tribute''.]]]]
Soon after Curze took over and began ruling the planet, the [[Emperor]]'s Great Crusade reached Nostramo. The coming of the Emperor of Man was an event long prophesied in Nostramo's history, and an event which would eventually bring about the apocalypse of that world. The Emperor and his delegation, which consisted of [[Rogal Dorn]], [[Ferrus Manus]], [[Lorgar|Lorgar Aurelian]], [[Fulgrim]], and their respective Legiones Astartes. proceeded to the Palace on foot. The Emperor's radiance was said to be so great that, as the Nostromans were adapted to see in the dark, it blinded those who looked directly at him, but mesmerized those who did not. It was also noted that, having performed a cursory inspection of Nostramo, the Emperor was quite pleased with what Konrad had accomplished there. On the surface, Nostramo was a superb example of social order, economic efficiency, and industrial production; basically the foundation of everything the Emperor wanted to accomplish for mankind. Of course, everyone on the planet was pants-pissingly terrified at virtually all times, but the Emperor didn't stick around long enough to delve much into Curze's methods of achieving success. This opinion was also shared by Fulgrim, which Curze quite appreciated. At the end of the road leading to his Palace, Curze himself stood, waiting for the delegation, when he had one of his visions. This vision was the most violently powerful of any he had yet experienced, and consisted of the eventual fates of his present brothers and himself. The vision was so terrible that he fell to his knees screaming, and would have succeeded in clawing his own eyes out if the Emperor hadn't stopped him. The Emperor psychically soothed Curze and the vision subsided, allowing Curze to regain his composure. He and the Emperor then had this badass exchange:

''"Konrad Curze, be at peace, for I have arrived and intend to take you home."'' 
''"That is not my name, Father. I am Night Haunter, and I know full well what you [[Just as planned|intend for me]]."''

Awesome. Curze began training under [[Fulgrim]], who taught him the Adeptus Astartes combat doctrines and began molding him to be a suitable leader for his role as the leader of the Eighth Space Marine Legion - the Night Lords. Despite Fulgrim being one of the Primarchs least similar in both aspect and manner to Curze, he would ultimately be the only one of Curze's brothers who made any real effort to befriend him. Curze would remark on several occasion how much Fulgrim's efforts had meant to him, and noted that Fulgrim had been the only person in the Emperor's retinue upon Nostramo who had been willing to meet his gaze. Interestingly, another draw for Curze towards Fulgrim was the fact that during his awful vision upon meeting the Emperor, he had not seen anything violent happening to Fulgrim. Instead, his vision of Fulgrim was unusually devoid of detail; the scene was never entirely visible, and it was filled with the sounds of slithering and laughing. As such, Curze had not been able to discern Fulgrim suffering any one particular fate. This was contrasted to, for instance, his vision of Ferrus, who he saw quite clearly being beheaded, or Dorn, who he saw being torn to pieces. This was such a pleasant oddity for Curze that he immediately became more positively disposed towards Fulgrim than anyone else he had ever met. It would later become evident that this was because Fulgrim would essentially "cheat" death by becoming a Daemon Prince in the future, and so would become incapable of dying in any conventional sense. The aforementioned "slithering and laughing" sound made a lot more sense when we already knew [[Slaanesh|which Chaos Gods Fulgrim shall serve]]. It should be noted that while Lorgar also became a Daemon Prince and was in the Emperor's retinue on Nostramo, Curze's vision of him seemed to indicate a violent death was in store for him. This was either a misinterpretation by Curze of his vision, or else Lorgar's violent death has simply yet to occur (one can only hope Corax eventually gets ahold of him again). Either way however, Curze did not come to have any sort of relationship with Lorgar during the Crusade.

Though Curze and his Legion excelled in many different hot-zones throughout the Great Crusade, a disturbing tendency arose in short order; the Night Lords would never use anything other than total, decisive force to achieve their goals. Precision strikes, assassinations, and especially diplomacy were simply out of the question, as Curze's strategic doctrine ultimately involved terrifying a foe into such total compliance that the presence of enforcers would never be necessary. He also noted that the terror his legion inspired tended to make a complete mess out of any plans his enemies might have thought to employ. Lion El'Jonson was once known to have said "no plan survives contact with the enemy" but Curze was of the opinion that if you could scare an opponent badly enough, then that opponent's plans would not survive long enough to make contact in the first place.

The Night Lords legion had already been the Emperor's primary terror weapon even before the introduction of their Primarch. As such, they changed very little when Curze arrived, and quickly adopted their Primarch's combat and tactical ethos. Under Curze's guidance, they rapidly grew to become one of the most brutally efficient and effective of the Astartes legions. In one notorious example, one Night Lord recalled dealing with a non-compliant planetary governor; Curze murdered the man and then broadcast the screams of the man’s daughter across an entire city for 3 HOURS to frighten the remaining rebels into submission. The Night Lords decorated their armor with iconography designed to inspire terror in the enemy, a tactic that proved incredibly effective. Unsurprising, considering how terrifying Space Marines are without it. Where they struck, the Night Lords left examples such as those Curze would leave on Nostramo in days past, grim reminders of the price for disobeying the Imperium. Due to this effectiveness, the Emperor often used them not just as a compliance force, but as enforcers to ensure the loyalty of suspect areas of the Imperium. In time, it became so that even the mere ''mention'' of the Night Lords' approach would cause a system to pay all outstanding tithes, cease all illegal activities, stop downloading torrents of ''Blossom'', and put to death any [[Furry|mutants or heretics]]. In hindsight, though, we here on /tg/ can't really be all that surprised by their brutality when we remember it was Fulgrim who tutored the VIII Legion's primarch. How else would the Night Haunter interpret the Phoenician's excessive battlefield perfectionism than a need for excessive violence?

Despite the Legion's horrific brutality however, there was (at least initially) a method to their madness which was outlined best during a conversation that Konrad had with his First Captain, Jago Sevatarion. In response to a question from his Primarch as to why the Night Lords committed the horrors they were known for, the First Captain responded that the Legion's terrible butchery "spilled blood to save blood." Approving of this answer, Curze added that terror was a weapon which could subdue without violence, which ultimately seemed to be the goal of his strategic outlook. The Night Lords broad tactical doctrine would most often involve descending upon a segment of a world's population in overwhelming force, and so horrifically massacring that segment that the rest of the population would surrender. Not only would this serve to limit casualties to a fraction of what other legions, such as the Iron Warriors or Dark Angels, might cause or sustain, but it also kept the vast majority of a planet's infrastructure intact. This way, the Imperium would acquire a world that was not only fully functional in terms of industry, but with a readily compliant, and largely intact, populace. This doctrine was demonstrated on numerous occasions, such as the Devastation of Zoah. Here, Curze's assault on the planet killed roughly 10% of its population, but when Magnus accused him of committing a series of massacres, Curze pointed out that the remaining 90% had surrendered without further bloodshed due to the terror of his assault, and that planetary compliance was achieved in only half the time predicted by Guilliman. It was also a somewhat grimly hilarious thing for Magnus to say, as the incident in question saw him ignore Curze's "massacres", but later risk the lives of his own legionaries to save a library. Priorities.

Another such example was a joint assault on the planet Kharaatan by the Night Lords and the Salamanders. The Salamanders had prepared for a standard assault upon Khar-tann City, but there was an unusual problem facing them. The humans of the world had been psychically manipulated into worshiping a coven of Eldar psykers, and would fight tooth and nail to protect their supposed saviors. This marshalling of the civilian populace put Vulkan in a significant quandary, as he would not countenance killing psychically coerced civilians, but subduing them without killing would mean that his Salamanders would take many unnecessary casualties. Being Vulkan, he chose to go with the latter option and the Salamanders gritted their teeth and prepared themselves. When they arrived at Khar-tann City however, they found the Night Lords winding down one of their typical terror campaigns. When Vulkan saw the unholy butchery that Curze had perpetrated he was so horrified that he nearly attacked his brother, especially after Curze sardonically told him that the ruined city was a gift to him. However, Curze had not simply been joking, as the planet surrendered without further conflict very shortly after Khar-taan City was destroyed. In the aftermath, even Vulkan was grudgingly forced to admit that Curze's terror assault had killed far fewer people than would have been lost to a conventional compliance action. Ultimately it didn't matter as the Imperium would end up killing all the human civilians anyway; too much xenos corruption. In fact, Vulkan himself would end up being in charge of the purge. Had Curze not been a Primarch, he likely would have laughed himself to death when he found out.

One other matter of importance with regard to Curze's overwhelming reliance on terror tactics was his outlook on humanity in general. Curze was noted on many, many occasions to have expressed how much he hated humanity as a species. This was not based on his own physical or mental superiority, but instead on the fact that virtually everything Curze had ever seen or experienced of humanity ranged from selfish at best to Silent Hill levels of horrific at worst. He believed humans to be weak, pathologically selfish, cruel, and devoid of intrinsic virtue. Furthermore, he believed that because humans were so terrible as a species, they did not deserve kindness or compassion; such consideration was wasted on them. In his mind, humans could only be made to be orderly through unremitting terror. Their own well-being had to be placed into constant doubt, illusory or otherwise, if they were to behave in a civilized manner.

Problems arose, however, as the Great Crusade dragged on - reinforcements to replace the Night Lords that fell in battle were, as was the case of the other Legions, selected from the population of Curze's homeworld, Nostramo. Unfortunately, in Curze's absence, the population collapsed into the same corruption, criminality, and despair that had ruled the roost before his arrival. Nostramo had no police force due to Curze insisting on being all of law enforcement by himself, which meant that nobody was particularly interested in enforcing the law once he left. As such, the most ruthless of the criminals were the strongest and healthiest people on the planet, and these were the most common replacement recruits for the Night Lords. Not only that, but the corrupt planetary government would deliberately give the worst of these criminals to the Night Lords in order to give these gangster underlings superhuman power and a presence within the legion. The criminal culture of Nostramo began to subsume the original ethos of the Night Lords, and with this culture the Night Lords devolved into a group of transhuman gangland monsters. Instances of legionaries committing acts of barbarism not for a greater goal but for their own amusement became increasingly commonplace. These acts of insubordination were dealt with by Curze the only way he knew how; the horrific murder of those responsible. Of course, none of this makes much sense, as the 8th Legion had been full of the absolute worst criminal scum of Terra before Curze's discovery. Why Nostramo's criminals in particular had such a negative impact on a Legion that was already filled to the brim with the worst humanity had to offer is difficult to parse out, but there we are. It also begs the question of why the Emperor would deliberately make an entire Astartes Legion out of the most legitimately evil people he could find but think it ''wouldn't'' blow up in his face. But then, Legions like the Dark Angels or Space Wolves were as bad or worse when it came to committing warcrimes so perhaps it ultimately just didn't matter.

Anyway, even Curze simply could not keep up with the ever increasing deterioration of his legion. He eventually realized that disobedience of his edicts regarding torture was running absolutely rampant throughout his legion, and launched his own investigation into the matter. To his horror, he found that the Night Lords were so corrupted that he essentially couldn't purge the criminal elements. There were simply so many perpetrators that to kill them all would render the legion non-functional, and he had no idea where to even begin. To make matters worse, his visions continued to increase in both frequency and graphic severity. One of these visions caused him to have a violent fit worse than any he had previously had, and he only barely managed to clear the room of occupants (or so he thought) before succumbing to the vision. When he came to, he realized to his horror that he'd done goofed. There on the floor was a clearly dead legion archivist, and Curze had been his killer. Due to the fact that Curze was totally nuts and evidently possessed no understanding of nuance, he considered this individual to have been the first "innocent" that he had ever killed. In his mind, he was now a criminal who deserved punishment no less than any of his own victims, which only served to further batter his crumbling psyche. Of course this was almost certainly ''not'' the first innocent Curze had killed, and it had been a complete accident to boot. But sadly Curze's idea of justice was zebra levels of black and white. At least he was consistent...

In the face of these ever escalating problems, Curze decided that the issue with the Night Lords recruits had to be dealt with at the source. He had been receiving reports that Nostramo had once again descended into a [[Star Wars D20|wretched hive of scum and villainy]], and he decided that he needed to do something about that if his legion was to remain true to its original ethos. Unfortunately the only Primarch Curze had any real connection to or trusted was Fulgrim, and circumstance had made him unavailable at the time. The other Primarchs, instead of listening to him and trying to help, bitched him out and said that it wasn't their problem. To be entirely fair to them however, Curze had always been rather cagey when it came to his visions, as he knew that openly announcing that the Emperor was going to kill him and that the Imperium would be torn apart by civil war would not be well received. In fact the only one of his brothers who knew about his visions was his buddy Fulgrim, and only then because Curze had had one of his vision induced seizures right in front of him. Once it ended, Fulgrim had naturally asked Curze why he had just violently spazzed out, and Curze broke down and told him everything. Fulgrim was aghast, and tried to comfort Curze by telling him that it was inconceivable that the Emperor could do such a thing, nor that the Imperium could fall prey to such an imperfection as civil war. Once Curze had regained his composure he essentially told Fulgrim that he was probably right and to just forget the whole incident; he didn't want knowledge of his visions spreading.

Unfortunately, Curze didn't count on Fulgrim being an incorrigible gossip and seemingly didn't make it clear enough that he wanted the incident kept private. This would come back to bite him later, but for the time being, Curze needed to salvage the situation with his legion. He decided that if he could provide irrefutable proof to his brothers that the Night Lords were irreparably corrupted, and that the Nostramon government had been deliberately sending him the planet's worst criminals as recruits, he might be able to rebuild his legion properly. He managed to gather the evidence he needed and prepared to present his findings to his brothers. Before he could however, disaster struck in the blunt, socially-retarded form of Rogal Dorn.

[[Rogal Dorn]] had confronted Curze while he was overseeing [[Grimdark|a long line of prisoners of war who were to be executed as a punitive action]]. Dorn had taken issue with Curze's way of doing things, saying that peace through fear was not what the Emperor of Mankind had intended, and that this was no way to build a stable Imperium. Konrad Curze decided to prove his point to Dorn that without the fear of consequences, people wouldn't stay loyal. To illustrate this, Curze gave one of the prisoners a gun and then ordered his men not to kill him, no matter what might happen. Curze pointed the gun in the prisoner's hand right under his chin, saying [[Troll|"Go ahead, kill me."]] The prisoner refused, to which Curze stated his Astartes would not kill him. The prisoner, now confident that the Night Lords wouldn't shoot him, raised the gun when Curze turned his back. The prisoner fired, but the bolter round bounced harmlessly off of Curze's armor. Curze of course immediately butchered the prisoner. Using intimidation and the predictable reaction to it, Curze "proved" his point: once the fear of consequence was removed, people would feel no loyalty. In reality of course, Curze had actually not proven anything at all. Not only had his test subject not been a loyal Imperial citizen to begin with (in fact his world had just been conquered by the ''Night Lords'' of all people), but the prisoners had all been about to be executed. So the man in question was a member of a newly (and undoubtedly horrifically) conquered world who had nothing to lose as he was about to die anyway. Curze would have been hard pressed to have found a ''worse'' test subject. That's not to say that Dorn's argument was any less stupid; that conquest through fear would necessarily result in rebellion, but ultimately neither was even remotely convinced of the other's arguments.

Now, if [[Rogal Dorn]] had been better with people, he might just have left well enough alone, or perhaps sensibly told Curze that while fear was capable of enforcing obedience it could never create loyalty, and that his inability to differentiate the two was causing him problems. But as established before, Dorn had all the tact and subtlety of a whoopie cushion, and despite his typically stolid nature, he had quite a temper when roused. So in an effort to win the argument, Rogal revealed that Fulgrim had told him all about Curze's visions. Due to the fact that the visions were of such things as Astartes killing Astartes and the Imperium falling apart, Dorn was personally insulted by the visions and berated him, accusing Curze of having lied about it all. Furious at Fulgrim's violation of trust and upset at Dorn for being a stupid asshole, Curze suddenly found himself in the grip of another of his visions. This vision was one of his worst yet, as was his accompanying psychic fit, and he attacked Dorn with his lightning claws. Despite not being conscious of his actions, he managed to maul Dorn so badly that if Dorn hadn't been a Primarch he would have died. Curze was found afterwards weeping over Dorn's broken body, as he had not meant to harm Dorn at all, and as with the murdered archivist, Curze hadn't even realized what he had been doing until after the vision subsided.

As it was, Curze was just put on house arrest/grounded until the matter of an unsanctioned attack ''(read two missing primarchs)'' by one Primarch on another could be resolved. Curze, however, after reading a special batch of Nostraman tarot cards, said "Screw you guys, we're going home". After killing the Imperial Fists and Emperor's Children who were guarding him grimdark Batman-style, he and the Night Lords set course towards Nostramo. Curze tried to salvage things while on his homeworld, but the Emperor's arrival had removed the one last barrier the people of Nostramo had between themselves and utter despair: ignorance.

Of course, as the "Prince of Crows" heavily hints at, Curze didn't ''do'' anything other than horrifically kill people and incite fear by doing so. No improving the infrastructure, setting up a police force, or anything. And Curze refused to see this as a problem. The knowledge of other worlds beyond Nostramo inflicted a hopelessness that guaranteed that nothing on Nostramo could ever change... which makes no sense given both the fact that many in the Imperium had massively improved their lives and that Nostramo had been trading its adamantium to several other human star systems long before the Imperium arrived (though "Prince of Crows" shows that this was because Curze made it so to ensure that there was nothing to do on Nostramo besides "behave and slowly die in an adamantium foundry" or "become a criminal and die either slowly or quickly (depending on Curze's mood)"), leaving the world to fester in corruption and depravity like a metastasized tumor. This was almost certainly due to Curze's belief that humans were essentially evil at their core, as Curze had never seen baseline humans display behavior that even resembled altruism without being terrified. This situation was made worse by the Imperial governor appointed to rule Nostramo in Curze's absence, whose corruption-heavy regime more-or-less plunged the entire planet into the same shit that had given birth to the Night Haunter in the first place. Without Curze there to personally scare everyone into behaving, his "compliance through terror" schtick was doomed to failure. The inevitability of this failure was driven further home by the level hatred Curze was held in by most of the populace. He had been so effective in terrorizing the people of Nostramo that nobody really cared all that much that their lives had seen astronomical levels of material improvement. To most, it wasn't worth the improved conditions to have to endure living under the rule of such an unpredictable monster as Curze. He had essentially done his job too well. Nobody on Nostramo ever really thought about there being any underlying goal in Curze's butchery; most were too afraid to ever think about much of anything. This was the consequence of never really having explained his goals to anyone on Nostramo, nor having delegated any of his work to anyone else.

It is worth noting however that the Imperial government that was initially in place on Nostramo had attempted to keep the world as Curze wished it. Curze's heavy-handedness had served its purpose and created order and with him gone, perhaps there would have been a chance for the people to keep his overarching legal system, but add some nuance (no death by torture for jaywalking). However Curze had evidently not killed enough of the old syndicates' power structures to keep them from coming back. Like a dead weed with still-viable roots, the syndicates quickly sprouted back into being and were largely responsible for the planet's decay, rather than the people themselves being at fault. These syndicates eventually gained back enough power to simply overrule the government and rule from behind the proverbial throne, and the hopeless, terrified and powerless population could do very little about it. They simply didn't have it in them. Unfortunately, Curze either didn't know or didn't care, and he was not in the mood to do much investigating when he returned.

Imperial pursuit craft, determined to stop Curze for abandoning the Great Crusade and checking on his homeworld, arrived just in time to see the lance batteries of Curze's fleet put an end to the nightmare that the planet's inhabitants had found themselves in - the only way he knew how: remorseless mass murder. Curze destroyed the planet with sustained orbital fire to the fissures his own arrival created.

According to Curze's recollection/opinion exterminating Nostramo was a test for the Night Lords themselves. Had they stopped Curze it would have proven that at least some of them were worth something to Curze's goal: to use fear to create a true order. But even Sevatar (whom Curze favored) simply followed orders. Ironically Curze's other equerry (who Curze thought was a kiss ass), begged Sevatar to talk Konrad out of it. There were some Night Lords who did refuse to aid in Nostramo's destruction, but they got put down pretty quickly.

Blowing up Nostramo was more or less the tipping point for Curze in terms of his sanity. The Night Haunter persona came stridently to the fore of Curze's personality after this, and the Legion more or less abandoned its original ethos of using terror to decrease a campaign's casualty numbers. The reason for this was that Curze believed that he had utterly failed in implementing his philosophies. Nostramo had been the greatest proof that his methods worked; an entire world of corruption and crime brought to heel by one individual wielding one instrument; terror. But the planet had fallen back into ruin, and if all his actions had been for naught, then all he really was was a monsterous mass murderer whose means had failed to even ''produce'' an end, let alone justify one. This allowed the Night Haunter persona to take advantage of his guilt and despair and strengthen itself in Curze's psyche to a point of ascendancy. Ultimately the Night Haunter, in conjunction with Curze's psychic visions, convinced Curze that he had always been doomed to be a monster. As such, there was no longer any point in attempting to resist the darker impulses of the Night Haunter.

Somewhat oddly, the whole incident appears ultimately to have been written off by the Imperium at large. Even Curze almost killing Dorn, which in all honesty was probably a lot more significant than him destroying Nostramo in the eyes of the Emperor, was seemingly just kinda forgotten about and the Night Lords went on their merry way. Considering that other Legions like the World Eaters, Death Guard, Dark Angels, and Iron Warriors were all still tearing their way through the galaxy with similar efficacy to the Night Lords, it may simply be that there wasn't enough distinction between one bunch of rampaging mass murderers and another for it to matter. As seen with the Word Bearers and their sanction by the Emperor, all he seemingly cared about was how quickly the Great Crusade could be brought to a conclusion. The World Eaters would never be sanctioned for any of their butchery, and Perturabo killed an entire ''tenth'' of his own Legion out of spite, yet the only sanctioned Legion was the 17th, for they had committed the unspeakable crime of... being slow. Given how the Imperium functioned at the time, it is also highly likely that nobody actually cared enough about Nostramo to kick up much fuss about it being destroyed. The place was admittedly an absolute garbage heap, and it was certainly nowhere near the first planet to be blown up by the Imperium. Adamantium was the only thing of any value to the Imperium on it, and who knows; turning the world into a debris field might have actually made the metal easier to get at.

The Night Lords spent the next 20-some odd years terrorizing any non-Imperial population they could find, honing their methods of psychological warfare on their helpless victims. They would deliberately target primitive or defenseless worlds so as simply to sate their sadism, and their campaigns would grow ever more butcherous and unjustifiable. Their previous strategic goal of using terror to limit casualties and quickly end compliances was abandoned, and instead the Night Lords began to conduct their terror campaigns on a planetary scale. They would descend upon the population of entire worlds and conduct their barbaric tortures upon the entire populace, rather than brutalizing a small segment of them as an example to the rest. Word of the Night Lords' increasing transgressions would make their way back to the Emperor, who would eventually decide to recall the legion to Terra for investigation, though apparently he did so largely because many in his inner circle were pleading with him to do so. Before the summons could occur however, word reached Terra that Horus had rebelled, and so everything else was essentially put on the back burner until he could be dealt with. The Night Lords were subsequently ordered to the Isstvan system to help destroy the traitor forces. It's a bit bizarre that the loyalists thought it was a good thing that the Night Lords showed up to support them at Isstvan and ''didn't'' see a double-cross coming considering how butcherous they had become. Then again, the Iron Warriors were sent to help as well, so they may have just been grateful for whatever support they could get. So the Night Lords having [[lulz|A talent for Murder]] was probably seen as helpful, at least in the short term.

===Horus Heresy===
[[File:NocturnusObsessoris-Final.jpg|300px|thumb|left|Konrad overlooking the spires of Nostramo. and looking badass while doing it.]]
Sadly for the Loyalists however, Curze had joined the Horus in advance of the Dropsite Massacre. The Night Lords landed the bulk of their ground forces in the midst of the Loyalist's center, interspersing them into the Iron Hands already present. When the signal came to attack, the ground forces immediately turned on the nearest Iron Hands and butchered them, while the Night Lords arial forces bombarded the Loyalists with Phosphex and other horrific chemical weapons. Curze himself ended up saving Lorgar from [[Corvus Corax]], who had bested the Word Bearers Primarch in single combat had was preparing to behead him. Curze simply caught Corax's lightning claw on his own and held fast, trapping Corax where he stood. As he looked Curze's eyes, Corax found himself shaken to his very soul, as he saw in Konrad the very thing he might have become had he fallen to [[Chaos]] and possibly adopted a different view on [[RIP AND TEAR|disemboweling innocent civilians]]. Using his last reserves of strength, and the last of his jetpack fuel, Corax managed to break himself free from Curze's grip and shot into the sky. Lorgar turned to thank Curze, but after seeing the Gal Vorbak, the very first squad of [[Possessed Marine]]s, Curze openly admitted that he had made a mistake in saving Lorgar. It says a lot about how horrific those things were that ''Konrad Curze'', a man who literally decked himself out in the rotting flesh of his enemies, would be so disgusted by them as to openly berate Lorgar for being awful.

Curze seemingly never had much of an ideological motivation for joining the rebellion, but why he joined is not hard to guess. The only three people who had ever given Curze the time of day had been Horus, Mortarion, and particularly Fulgrim. All three were amongst the initial Traitor Primarchs, while a number of Curze's loudest detractors were amongst the ranks of the Loyalists. It is also known that Curze deeply hated the Emperor. He believed that the Primarchs had all been designed with a purpose in mind, and believed that his purpose was to be the monster that he had become (which wasn't entirely false but more on that later). He believed that his various psychoses, horrific visions, and his landing upon Nostramo had all been engineered deliberately by the Emperor in order to turn him into a more perfect monster. Conversely he saw Primarchs like Sanguinius or Guilliman and hated the fact that they had seemingly been engineered to be noble, resplendent luminaries while he had been condemned to his twisted nightmare by design. He also believed both the Emperor and many of his brothers to be exceptionally hypocritical, as quite a few of them had complained about his methods when his ways achieved less overall bloodshed. Why were, say, the Iron Warriors or the Space Wolves not looked upon with disgust when they killed far more than the Night Lords did? Or particularly the Dark Angels, whose kill count undoubtedly ranged into the trillions at this point, yet who seemingly had the Emperor's complete trust? To Curze, the answer was simply that they killed cleanly. In his mind, they did not have the gumption to do what he did; to slaughter in a brutal and honorless way, but ultimately to kill far fewer for these methods. He also hated the Emperor for the fact that he knew the Emperor would one day kill him, which he had known since he was a child. The hatred and fear created by that knowledge festered within him, deepening his madness with the belief that he ultimately could not escape his future or change it for the better. In reality, it is very nearly impossible that the Emperor actually did orchestrate the scattering considering how significantly the event had stymied His plans. However Curze reasoned that if he and Sanguinius could see the future to the degree that they could, than the Emperor's ability to do so must have been incomprehensibly more potent. If that was in fact the case, how would it be possible to so thoroughly thwart such a being?

Of course, the lens through which Curze viewed both the Emperor and the Imperium at large ignored the reality that Curze was ultimately responsible for his own actions. As hinted at previously, he had almost certainly been cast in the mold of what he had been on Nostramo, but he chose to be a cruel, sadistic butcher rather than the reasonable and temperate (though still terrifying) arbitrator that the Emperor would most likely have wanted him to be. Essentially, he was always going to be some version of [[Batman]], but he chose to be the Batman Who Laughs instead of the mainline one. Additionally, after losing his inner battle to the Night Haunter, any claim he had to killing the few brutally to spare the many went right out the window because he simply stopped doing that. After Nostramo, the Night Lords instead killed the many, but they did not lessen their brutality; if anything they became worse over time. They became exterminators on the level of the Space Wolves, but their exterminations were as sadistically horrific as possible, rather than the straightforward massacres of the Space Wolves.

However, this does not absolve the Emperor of responsibility in the matter of Curze's descent. Though the Emperor almost certainly was not responsible for the scattering, nor was He seemingly malicious in his plans for His Primarchs, He did seem to be supremely apathetic towards quite a few of them. In Curze's case, the Emperor's failure in helping Curze with his visions absolutely doomed him. Curze himself was completely helpless when it came to both his visions and the fits he had during his most intense ones; he could neither avoid nor control any of it. However the Emperor clearly knew about the visions and the fits; Curze had one of his worst vision-induced meltdowns right in front of the Emperor when they first met. The Emperor even displayed the ability to bring Curze out of his fits as He did so during their first meeting. Yet that was seemingly the only time He ever did anything to address the visions. Not helping Curze at all with his visions is actually quite a gigantic oversight on Big E's part, as the visions were the primary motivator behind everything that ultimately went wrong with Curze.

Immediately after the Dropsite Massacre, the Night Lords were sent by Horus to the Eastern Fringes. Ostensibly, their goal was to secure a number of Forge Worlds and strategic systems for logistical purposes. However, Horus's actual plan was for the Night Lords presence in the area to draw the [[Dark Angels]] into a series of battles that would keep them as far away from Terra as possible. The Night Lords initially took a vast swathe of the Eastern Fringes, and established the largest Traitor stronghold in the entire Heresy. Once the Dark Angels showed up and started contesting the Night Lords, they broke into a number of raiding forces in order to counter the larger, more powerful Dark Angels fleet. Though the Dark Angels had a superior void force and the Lion was an exceptional tactician, Curze managed to keep the Dark Angels at bay by playing his own game rather than theirs. He refused to allow his forces to be drawn into protracted void engagements, and used every trick in the book to whittle away at the Dark Angels in a war of attrition. This went on for maybe a year or so before Curze seemingly got bored and decided to do something stupid. In the middle of dicking with the Angels, he invited [[Lion El'Jonson]] to a dead planet (future place of his new palace and his own death...) to deliver a message from Horus, which actually predicted the Dark Angels' fate of everyone hating their guts for not being on Terra because Curze had lead them all over the Eastern Fringe (HAR HAR HAR). He also basically gave the game away by telling the Lion that his whole job was to keep the Dark Angels stuck on the wrong side of the galaxy.

The Lion, who has [[Serious Business|zero tolerance]] for insults, proceeded to attack Curze and managed to sucker-stab him straight through the torso. The fight then descended into a brawl in which Curze nearly strangled the Lion despite his giant stab wound, but Corswain jumped onto Curze's back and ran him through the spine. The two Primarchs were then dragged back to their respective fleets, with Curze's strangling of the Lion [[what|somehow leaving him as incapable of fighting as two crippling stab wounds]].

After this engagement, the Lion, now understanding that Curze had simply been baiting him for the last year and change, attempted to draw the Night Lords into a single mass engagement. After about another year, he eventually succeeded, presumably because Curze was partly pre-occupied by his "guest" (see below) and because the Lion managed to find [[Heresy|powerful and sentient warp engine]] that allowed him to break all the normal rules of Imperial Warp drives. The subsequent void battle broke the back of the Night Lords as a Legion, as the casualties combined with the Legion essentially splintering due to lack of central leadership removed them from the Heresy as a unified fighting force. Strangely enough, the most (or second most) brilliant tactician of the entire universe couldn't crack a thing or two when dealing with this one-trick <s>pony</s> batman psychopath, but had to rely on plot-device to bend his brother over (the Lion may be a good tactician but he's not clairvoyant, and Curze is still a Primarch). Anyway, with Curze out of the picture [[Sevatar]] ''took over'' the Legion. Read that as murderfucked most of the leading captains and told the fleet to disperse and do [[Rip and Tear|whatever it was they wanted]].

Despite the tactical defeat of the Night Lords, Curze had succeeded in the Traitors strategic objective of taking the Dark Angels out of play for the upcoming Siege of Terra. By the time the Lion managed to defeat the Night Lords, Lorgar had summoned up the [[Ruinstorm]] and cut the Eastern Fringes off from the rest of the galaxy. This left the Dark Angels, Blood Angels, Ultramarines, and most of the remaining Iron Hands and Salamanders, stranded at the ass-end of nowhere with nothing to do but try to consolidate. Only one of these Legions, the Blood Angels, would manage to make it to Terra in time to be of any use during the Siege.

====Vulkan====
[[Vulkan]] became Konrad's prisoner after Isstvan V. Unfortunately, Vulkan is [[Perpetual|immortal or some shit]], so he kept coming back from the dead. For some odd reason, this infuriated Curze rather than delighting him; one would think that an undying victim would be a dream come true for a sadistic master torturer. Vulkan had to do all kinds of shit, including being forced to kill his own [[Salamanders]], watch prisoners starve themselves, and fight [[Corax]] in a dream. In the end, though, Curze couldn't bring Vulkan down to his level, causing massive amounts of [[rage]].

{{spoilers}}

Vulkan ended up in a maze built by [[Perturabo]], with his hammer at the end of it. Vulkan had a teleporter in his hammer which he figured Curze didn't know about, and resolved to get to it and teleport out of the Nightfall. He couldn't navigate the maze worth shit though, and he was pretty much fucked, but after a couple of days, he pissed off Curze to the point where Curze just dropped the maze and let Vulkan into the center so they could fight. Vulkan revealed that Curze had just given him a teleporter and Curze was all "fuck you, teleporters don't work here", to which Vulkan replied, "[[Lulz|It's also a hammer]]". Vulkan then proceeded to beat the shit out of Curze, but didn't kill him [[Batman|(because that would be stooping to his level, apparently).]] For whatever reason, Curze's precognitive abilities didn't warn him about any of this. Or maybe they did; it seemed like Curze really wanted Vulkan to kill him during the fight, so maybe he did in fact foresee some of it. Doesn't make much sense either way though.

When he was done, Vulkan said (essentially) "Fuck you Curze, ''I'M'' VULKAN! So MY teleporters work here. I just wanted to beat the shit out of you." He then escaped, leaving Curze more emo, depressed, and filled with more [[RAGE]] than ever before. After this came his second confrontation with the Lion, and he was defeated and temporarily rendered comatose. He recovered in time for the final void engagement against the Dark Angels, and boarded the ''Invincible Reason'' with a number of Night Lords. But the battle went against them and Curze escaped into the bowels of the gigantic ''Gloriana-class'' cruiser. From there, he spent a few weeks playing hide and seek with the Dark Angels aboard the ''Invincible Reason'', until the Lion tried his hand at personally hunting Curze down. Before he could find Curze however, the Dark Angels fleet reached Macragge, and the Lion decided to abandon his search and go down to the planet's surface for a heart-to-heart with Guilliman. A heart-to-heart which did ''not'' include the fact that the galaxy's most deranged murder machine was currently up in orbit and unattended. These two monumentally terrible decisions by the Lion enabled Curze to escape the ''Invincible Reason'' by launching a massive Drop Pod Assault from the ship onto Macragge. Needless to say, this nearly caused a complete catastrophe for the Dark Angels. The Ultramarines had obviously not been aware that an orbital assault by another Legion was about to take place, and Curze launching the ''Invincible Reason's'' entire complement of Drop Pods caused the Ultramarines to flip their shit; they'd just been betrayed at Calth by another [[Word Bearers|ostensibly loyal Legion]] after all. The Lion managed to smooth things over with Guilliman before anybody could be shot out of the sky (though the incident stretched Guilliman's tolerance near to breaking point), but Curze, lost amongst the mess of Drop Pods, escaped onto Macragge and vanished. He then decided to go on a rampage upon the surface of Macragge, butchering Ultramarines and civies, flipping Land Raiders, and making a general nuisance of himself. Due to his supreme sneakiness, and despite the presence of ''three Legions'' on the planet, nobody so much as caught sight of him as he went about his merry business.

That is, until he went after big Bobby G's mother. He tried his usual shtick of freaking her out with how much of a creepy bastard he was, but it only worked for about five seconds before she told him to sit and spin. He then got into a duel with both the Lion and Guilliman and managed to effectively fight both. He even skewered the Lion right through the throat with his lightning claws at one point. However, it turned out that the duel was just a distraction; Curze had set the entire chapel of Hera to explode. Curze managed to trap his brothers in the doomed chapel, who only escaped due to the power of friendship. Seriously...[[My Little Pony|friendship truly is magi-]]{{BLAM}}.

After his escape, he was set upon by Vulkan, who by sheer coincidence had teleported right to Macragge after escaping the Nightfall. Unfortunately for Vulkan, he had teleported several miles up in Macragge's atmosphere, and he burned to a crisp before reaching the ground. This final incineration was seemingly the last straw for poor Vulkan's mind, and he'd gone completely, ferally insane by the time he hit the ground. The Ultramarines had found his body, and had taken it to a medical center, only to see it regenerate from an unrecognizable husk into Vulkan. When he regained consciousness, he broke out of the medical facility and started hunting for Curze. So Curze encountered the berserk Vulkan and had a running battle with him through the streets of Macragge. He ultimately killed Vulkan a few more times, and had seemingly gotten over his assmadery in not being able to kill his brother. Instead, he took a grim delight in seeing how long it took Vulkan to regenerate from each of his deaths, which is much more in character for him. He ended up being jumped by a bottled demon and briefly being dragged into the warp. Curze managed to kill (as in completely, not just banishing) the demon, and was dumped back onto Macragge. He had yet to reappear but had the entire planet on curfew while he was still (theoretically) around.

After spending a bit more time terrifying the locals, he eventually snuck into Sanguinius’s throne room. Here, Curze took Azkaelion hostage in order to entice Sanguinius into having a chat with him. Before the chat could occur however, the two of them proceeded to have an extremely cool but totally pointless duel. For despite Curze being fully armed and armored while Sanguinius was not, they both not only had constant visions of what would happen during the fight (ie, this fight had more slow motion action visions than a Zhang Yimou film), but they each already knew how both themselves and the other was going to die, and each knew it wouldn't be during the duel. Despite this, and despite Curze even humorously pointing out how silly the two of them fighting would be, Sanguinius seemingly couldn't help himself and attacked Curze anyway. True to form, the entire thing played out in their heads à la the Sherlock/Moriarty brain fight in the A Game of Shadows movie, only in real time. After a long stalemate Curze got bored, backed off, and began to expound on his theory that the scattering had been a deliberate ploy by the Emperor, and that the circumstances of where and how each Primarch had been raised had likewise been the Emperor's doing. To Curze's brief delight, Sanguinius was actually somewhat receptive to his brother's theorizing, but it didn't change his outlook on the Emperor or the Imperium. Curze then gave Sanguinius the chance to kill him and thereby prove that the future could be changed, but Sanguinius stopped the blow in mid-air out of pity. Curze, ''royally'' pissed at Sanguinius's mercy, proceeded to mutilate [[Sanguinary_Guard#Azkaellon|Azkaellon]] and blow up a whole lot of Sanguinary Guard, before he threw what remained of Azkaellon off a cliff and disappeared. Almost miraculously, Azkaellion actually managed to survive.

Despite having the resources of almost 3 full legions, the rulers of Imperium Secundus had great difficulty tracking Curze down. When it was revealed that Curze had never ever even left Macragge once in the years since his arrival, the Lion put the planet under almost total martial law and brought in his official [[Dreadwing|overkill brigade]] to deal with him. Curze had been fomenting rebellion amongst the Illyrians, a part of Macragge that had never really accepted the civilisation of Konor and Guilliman. After the Dark Angels massacred an entire nation in response, Curze laid his final endgame in a mountain fortress. The Lion, in response, broke his word to Guilliman, and contrived a devastating (and forbidden) orbital bombardment using drop pods and assault rams converted into barrage bombs and torpedoes. When the smoke cleared, the Lion went solo hunting again. He had decided that he was simply going to walk into the rather obvious trap Curze had set for him, as there was simply no other way the Lion could find Curze; despite having Dreadwing men and vehicles crawling all over the mountain, the Lion knew that if Curze wanted to slip away, he easily could. So he took Curze's bait, hoping to draw Curze into the open and trap Curze between himself and the Dreadwing's heavy support. Unfortunately, for a precog, Curze hadn't anticipated that the Lion had already cleared all the traps set for him and he was captured after a duel (the Lion cheated by calling in Fire Raptors to prevent Curze from escaping, but that was also kinda the point).

Despite being finally caught, Curze had both the penultimate and last laugh. He managed to do what the Word Bearers, World Eaters, and Night Lords legion had not managed to do with soldiers and fleets, and broke the Imperium Secundus. His official court trial had barely started when he told Guilliman that that the Lion had broken his word by staging an ersatz orbital bombardment. Guilliman, having finally lost his patience with the Lion's ends justify the means crap, snapped the Lion's sword in two and Sanguinius told him and his legion to GTFO of Imperium Secundus (because sending a legion into what he thinks is certain death by Warpstorm for the crime of shooting the bad guy and not even hurting anything but the damn fortress is a brilliant decision). However, just as the Lion was about to leave the system, he remembered Curze's words of prophecy, that his back, the Lion's sword, and word would be broken (as well as Curze's proclamation that he would be killed by an assassin sent by the Emperor). The Lion teleported back to Macragge, just as Curze was about to be executed and explained the situation. Guilliman had a mini breakdown over everything he had done on the premise the greater Imperium had fallen and Curze laughed himself into an aneurysm at the whole situation.

He would remain in custody throughout the journey back to Terra, initially kept under lock and key by the [[Dark Angels]], but was later "broken free" by Sanguinius, who dragged him down to '''Davin''' so that they could possibly change their destinies together. This frightened the absolute crap out of Curze, not least because of the potential fact that if Sanguinius could change his destiny to die by Horus' hands, then that would mean that Curze could avoid his own assassination later on, which in turn would make all of his life meaningless because he was such an evil bastard based on his absolute certainty of how events would unfold.

However, this would not be, as Sanguinius realised that to make the change in his fate, he would need to become something worse than even Horus, so he allowed fate to continue on course. What's worse is that although Sanguinius accepted his own fate, he threatened Curze with the possibility that the Emperor could even ''forgive'' him for all of his crimes, pushing Curze into silent horror at the thought that his universe was not what he thought it was. But in a cruel twist, Sanguinius decided to leave his brother to his destiny, while also pointing out that while he could pin down the actual time and location of his death to the bridge of the ''Vengeful Spirit'' at the [[Siege of Terra]]; Curze's assassination might not actually occur for millennia, and thus he promptly jettisoned his brother's stasis coffin into space.

These interactions firmly establish Sanguinius as a foil to ol' Konrad, in the sense that both were cursed from birth with precognitive abilities that would shape their personalities and ultimately their fates. Sanguinius believed it possible to avert and alter the path of his future, but accepted it instead upon realizing that doing so would entail becoming something even worse in the progress; Konrad actively rejected even the possibility of doing so, as he considered his fate to be set in stone, to the point he'd lived his whole life based on that notion. And as he had just discovered, Sanguinius was also a scary motherfucker in his own way.

===Death===
{{Topquote|The horror, The horror...|[[Konrad Curze|Konrad]]'s real last words after probably describing to M'Shen [[40k|what he really saw in his visions]]}}

After being jettisoned into space, Curze's stasis coffin was picked up by a freighter. The future victims were eager to sell his coffin for a big payday instead of being smart and chucking it into a sun, so naturally Konrad escaped. When Curze got out Horus was long dead and took a moment to ask a crew member the date. [[Grimdark|Guess what Curze did to the crew.]] [[Rip and Tear|Please, fucking guess.]]

After the battle was lost, they fled back to Tsagualsa with what was left of the Legion. The Emperor, however, wishing to stop the Night Lords forevermore, dispatched an [[Officio Assassinorum]] operative from the [[Callidus|Callidus Temple]] to kill him. He presumably did this at some point before the Siege of Terra, though why the Emperor Himself would have thought that a lone Callidus assassin could do anything to a Primarch is a bit odd. Perhaps Big E himself had heard about Curze's visions and what Curze himself thought would happen to him?

Curze spent his last hours crafting a statue of Big E to whine about how daddy never loved him, and how his ways were necessary. [[Grimdark|By the way the statue was made of human flesh.]] He was, by this time, taking insane to whole new levels, and now had the added issues of talking to himself and having severe, second-to-second mood changes. He would rage uncontrollably one second and in the next, start apologizing to the corpses that comprised his Emperor statue and thanking them genuinely for their pain and sacrifice. During this few final hours, he argued with the statue that everything he had done was necessary and just due to the inevitability of the future, but heard a voice gainsay this, which told him that it was his own choices that had led to this future. It is interesting to note that it is impossible to tell if it was in fact the Emperor speaking, or Curze hallucinating, as it is well known that Curze had always had doubts about the true inevitability of the future, buried as deeply as possible in order to keep the remaining shreds of his mind functional.

When his confession was done, he burned the corpse-statue of the Corpse-Emperor and walked in his corpse-fortress and put on his armor, told his Legion to fuck off his damn corpse-lawn, and sat down to wait for his corpse-mama to come.

Curze had foreseen everything, or had chosen a fate believing the future was set, just as Sanguinius had. With his final prediction coming true, Curze waited for his just punishment.

Confronted with the Callidus Assassin M'Shen, it is believed that Curze proceeded to make jokes about how she had [[Pretend|butt-sex]] with [[Macha]] before getting down to brass tacks and explaining why he'd allowed her in so easily:

<blockquote>''"Your presence does not surprise me, Assassin. I have known of you ever since your craft entered the Eastern Fringes. Why did I not have you killed? Because your mission and the act you are about to commit proves the truth of all I have ever said or done. I merely punished those who had wronged, just as your false Emperor now seeks to punish me. Death is nothing compared to vindication."''</blockquote>

Whilst it's never been confirmed who [[rape|came out on top]] (or whether or not the Callidus and he engaged in [[Heresy|hardcore ball-busting sex]]), it is believed by many that Curze allowed himself to be killed, having given explicit orders to the Night Lords to allow M'Shen to escape. Only one Night Lord, Apothecary Talos Valcoran of the 10th Company, pursued her out of vengeance (the Night Lords did eventually join in pursuit, but that was only after the senior Captains realized that M'Shen (no connection to Martin Sheen, none at all) had [[Ork|looted]] Curze of all his bling, which they wanted for themselves). It is believed that Curze had come to see himself as a murderous and corrupt villain - the very thing he had sought out to destroy (or perhaps he wished to prove that his decision to destroy Nostramo and join Horus was justified, as the Emperor had become one more tyrant who had to be slain). Maybe he was a heroic [[Awesome|Space Marine Batman]] who lived long enough to become the villain.

==Abilities==

Although knowledge of his gifts apparently were not widespread amongst the ranks of his brother Primarchs, Curze was capable of mild feats of psychic display (when compared to someone like Magnus at any rate, as he was never trained in their use). The first and most impactful of these traits were his visions of the future. Likened to waking nightmares, these visions most often were of how people would die, or some calamity involving mass death and destruction (such as the Heresy, which he had known would happen long before it did). He was no exception; as stated above, the Night Haunter had foreseen his own death from the moment he awoke on Nostramo. These visions also often extended to those he would lay eyes upon. Oftentimes the worst of these visions would cause Curze to have violent, blackout seizures during which he could become violent enough to almost kill a fellow Primarch without even being conscious of what was going on. These visions could also be applied in battle, allowing Curze to see what his opponents would do before they did it. This made him borderline broken in terms of melee combat, and the only times he was ever bested involved him essentially forgetting to use this power. While using it, he was capable of entering into a protracted stalemate with Sanguinius, who was arguably the most martially powerful of all the Primarchs, and who had similar but (ordinarily) less frequently active ability. Though Sanguinius was not armored at the time, it ultimately didn't make a difference as the future-seeing abilities of both combatants kept either from ever landing a hit. Just to put things in perspective, Sanguinius's final duel with Daemon Angron saw Sanguinius land at least 6 different wounds that would each have crippled or killed Angron had he not been a Daemon, and he ultimately won the engagement by just straight up ripping Angron's brain out of his skull with his bare hands. And that was with Sanguinius already being wounded and tired. As a random aside, Curze was also one of the tallest of the Primarchs, as in ''Unremembered Empire'', he is noted as being taller than both the Lion and Guilliman, and the Lion is known to have also been one of the tallest Primarchs.

The Night Haunter also displayed a few other feats of psychic development, such as [[Psychic Disciplines|telekinetically]] destroying a series of lights to aid in his escape from a VII Legion detention chamber. The fashion in which he did this was described as being akin to "the blast wave of an explosion, with Curze at its epicenter." He was also capable of telepathically conversing with Jago "Sevatar" Sevatarion. [[Sevatar]], a latent psyker, was exploring Konrad's psyche during the latter's unconsciousness resulting from wounds inflicted by the [[Lion El'Jonson]] during the [[Thramas Crusade]]. Apparently the Night Haunter had a role in helping to suppress Sevatar's psychic potential, as revealed in the conversation between them - and that, because Sevatar was not trained in their use, those psychic abilities would be increasingly [[Chaos|self-destructive.]] Why he simply did not start training him will probably forever remain a mystery. He must have been the legion's only psyker or there is no rationale explaining why Sevatar was not just passed over to the Night Lord's Librarius for training his abilities. (The ''Night Lords'' Trilogy explains this by an incompatibility between the gene-seed and the host, the visions being a 'side-effect' of that struggle as it grows worse over time.) He also seems to have some sort of odd and presumably psychic ability to transform briefly into a shadowy/smoky cloud thing, which he did a few times during his 2v1 duel against the Lion and Guilliman to evade attacks, and also when a Perpetual called Damon attempted to kill him on Macragge after the duel. This could also have been the writer simply taking descriptive liberties while describing Curze's super speed, but it's written in such a way as to be reeeeaaaally hard to tell. Some of the passages of this fight include

<blockquote>''The blade scythed at Curze’s head. He did not move. Then he was smoke.''</blockquote>

or

<blockquote> ''Guilliman struck again, driven by fury, and cut through something. It was only shadow. Only the tatter of a cloak. Talons snapped back at him. He raised his shield. Razored claws ripped sparks off its surface and shredded its edges. Guilliman hacked again. Nothing. Shadow. Shadow!''</blockquote>

He's also seemingly able to slip away into shadows that are way, way too small to hide something of his size and literally just be gone, as he did when infiltrating Sanguinius's throne room on Macragge. So he does seem to have some sort of psychic affinity for darkness and shadows, but how this ability functions exactly is very difficult to parse out.

He also has the ability to hide his mind from other psykers, as seen, once again on Macragge, when John Grammaticus states that he can seemingly only find Curze when he wants to be found. Another example occurred when Curze ambushed an Ultramarines squad with a Librarian, named Prayto. Prayto was unable to sense Curze until Curze attacked, when he stunned the Librarian by allowing him to sense, at the last second, just how horrible Curze's mind really was.

As the Primarch of the VIII Legion, Konrad had a servant throughout the Great Crusade named Ekra Trez (who bore the title of "Sin-Eater"). Trez was tasked with keeping a record of the Night Haunter's pre-cognitive visions in a massive tome, and would often make note of which ones had been proven correct or false. Trez was also more than aware of Sevatar's psychic ability, leaving some readers of the Black Library's Horus Heresy novels curious as to what role Trez may have played in the Primarch's psychic development - if any.

Physically speaking, his primary domains were speed and stealth. His speed was such that, during his duels with the Lion, the latter was on several occasions only able to block strikes from the comparatively unskilled Curze by way of what was essentially a "Spider Sense"; a presumably psychic, extrasensory danger sense. Similarly, his stealth capabilities were great enough as to require the Lion to employ the same danger sense to stay alive a few times when Curze ambushed him. Additionally, at the start of his confrontation with Sanguinius, Sanguinius looked directly at his empty throne within a shaft of light, and then turned around for a few seconds to examine a decoy set up by Curze. When he turned back around, Curze was sitting in the throne with Azkellion's body under his foot. Curze was not particularly known for his strength, and was noted as being so thin during the Heresy as to appear ghoulish. However, he was still able to flip Land Raider tanks and punch through the re enforced armor ceramite of Terminator armor with his bare hands. He was also noted as being having become increasingly averse to personal hygiene as the heresy ground on, to the point where his body odor was nearly a match for Mortarion's. He was similarly unconcerned with it during his initial stay on Nostramo, but was introduced to the concept of bathing during the Crusade, and made an effort not to look and smell like an average college student at that time.

==Lasting Legacy==
{{Topquote|You think it's over just because I am dead, but the games have just begun.|Jigsaw}}
The Night Haunter, in his death, may have continued to leave a lasting impression upon the Imperium as inspiration for one of its many institutions. Although his legion continues to sow fear and discord amongst the stars, Konrad Curze's legacy of weaponized fear lives on within the Imperium through the Emperor's Holy Ordos of the [[Inquisition]]. Like the inquisitors of the 41st Millennium, Konrad brought loyal citizens into compliance through fear and threats of death/torture beyond imagining to those who weren't sure where their allegiances lay. Those who failed to comply were guaranteed either a swift death at the hands of his legion, or a slow death at the tender mercies of his legion's most depraved souls. Lastly, if those comparisons weren't enough, look at the fate of Nostramo - Konrad essentially carried out an act of Exterminatus. Just as Lorgar's teachings on the Emperor's divinity would later lay the foundation for the Imperial Creed of the [[Ecclesiarchy]], the Night Haunter could effectively be treated as the first author of the Inquisition's playbook. Not that they wouldn't BLAM you for heresy if you said that to their faces though.

Within the Night Lords, Curze and the Night Haunter each left their own legacy, which caused no small amount of schism. Officially, Curze appointed Zso Sahaal as his successor and Talonmaster, because Sahaal understood that a true warrior is more than just a murder machine. A true warrior has ''focus'', and wields fear as a tool to fulfill a purpose. As you can probably predict, every other Night Lord captain decided that ''they'' were more deserving of being Curze's successor and tried to get Sahaal dethroned for being "weak" or whatever. Their logic was that Curze wasn't in charge, the Night Haunter was, and the Night Haunter was supposed to choose the ''true'' successor. After Sahaal became lost in the Warp, captain Krieg Acerbus "the Axemaster" slowly but surely took over huge swathes of the Night Lords and led them to become [[Chaos Undivided]] followers. Ironically, the Night Haunter had no intention of ever choosing a successor as he would have preferred that his legion die out completely for becoming everything he personally despised.

Even after Curze caused so much carnage, particularly to Ultramar and Macragge, it's interesting to note that Guilliman seems to still pity him. During the Plague Wars, Guilliman admits to an associate that, out of the whole fucked up Primarch family, only "poor Konrad" truly saw the Heresy coming, and that if he hadn't been insane, it all might've been avoided.

==Multiple Personality Disorder?==
Now, we all know the [[Black Library]] can range from the [[Dan Abnett|godly]] to the [[C.S.Goto|Goto]]. So this must be taken with a grain of salt. But ''Lord of the Night'' implies that Curze suffered from Dissociative Identity Disorder, such that he and the Night Haunter were two different people: Konrad, the just leader of men, and the Night Haunter, the murderous vigilante. ''Blood Reaver'' also implies it (a Night Lords sorcerer talking about how at one moment he was trying to teach his long-dead father some idealistic lesson, while at another he was only concerned about eating some slave's heart) and shows signs of other mental instability, such as when he has a bit of a manic episode and forgets that his First Captain died several years ago, indicating dementia or schizophrenia; ''Blood Reaver'' also suggests that the Emprah's DNA may not have entirely settled in Curze's body, explaining why he was so batshit crazy by the time of his death, not to mention the corpse-like appearance he was sporting near the end. The upshot of this is that ''only the Night Haunter'' fell to Chaos, while Curze remained clean. Which one got the other killed is unknown. Other books have inverted the relationship, suggesting that the Night Haunter was the "honest" monster that was needed to do the terrible things required, whilst Curze was the fallible human who fell to his own weaknesses. Or perhaps the Chaos taint was the only constant, corrupting whatever personality was currently dominating, with all the idiosynchrasies implied.

Another thing perhaps tied with his Multiple Personality Disorder is that Konrad Curze towards the end had ended up hating his own legion. In a conversation with First Captain Sevatar, Konrad mentioned that he had spoken with Angron and Lorgar following the Istvaan III purge. Cleansing the untrustworthy elements of the World Eaters and the Word Bearers. The sheer absurdity of the idea was laughable to the Night Haunter, for his brothers knew exactly when to stop the killing of the weak, the treacherous and the corrupt within their bloodlines. He had no idea where to begin culling the Night Lords' ranks. His sons were no longer cast in his image. Less than a decade after he had departed Nostramo that world had sent him nothing but filth to integrate into the VIII Legion as Neophytes; the disgusting dregs of humanity his own Apothecaries had infused with his genetic material and reforged into transhumans. The VIII Legion had become poisoned by their presence. The VIII Legion was now composed of warriors who were murderers in the Primarch's own image, yet devoid of his conviction (which does not make any sense at all because, see above: <s>Every Space Marine is massively brain-washed during their ascension, and in the 41st millenium chapters even preferentially recruit from either backwater worlds - where killing someone because he has more shiny bling than you is still acceptable - or hive gangers over aristocrats on more developed worlds, simply because they are more likely to survive the transformation process.. Just think of the "blood games" many chapters perform to determine the most fitting candidates "hey, lets see who can work together and kill as many of the other aspirants as possible"</s> Extensive hypno-indoctrination only really became a thing AFTER the Heresy, specifically as a reaction to it to help ensure the loyalty of future marines, it's also why 40k marines have "And they Shall Know no Fear" on the table top. How much good it's done is debatable. During the Great Crusade and Heresy, they were churning out marines at a breakneck pace to keep up all those fuckhueg legion numbers, so a marine's personality remained much intact.). The Night Lords had become nothing more than killers and abusers, bleeding the weak for their own amusements because they enjoyed it as good sport. Fear became an end unto itself, and its propagation was all the Night Lords desired as they fed upon it.

According to his novel Curze was tremendously crazy by the time of his death. He crafted a flesh golem of the Emperor to state his case to it. Soon after Curze heard a voice in his head that Curze might have thought was his statue. He thought Sevatar was still alive at the time, though Sevatar's death hasn't been confirmed yet. An important detail no one mentioned is that the Night Lords are the Eighth Legion. Section Eight is a military discharge for basically being crazy.

This was made even more clear by what Curze told Talos before he and the Assassin gotten it on: 

* ''"Many will claim to lead our Legion in the years after I am gone. Many will claim that they - and they alone - are my appointed successor. I hate this Legion, Talos. I destroyed its world to stem the flow of poison. I will be vindicated soon, and the truest lesson of the Night Lords will be taught. Do you truly believe I care what happens to any of you after my death?"''

Now some might say he was overreacting a bit, but still, given how the criminal overlords he had spent most of his life on Nostramo eradicating, took over again as soon as he had left the planet and started sending their henchmen to be turned into Space Marines, it might be understandable. It was not for nothing that Horus had cause to [[Perturabo|muse that]] [[Angron|his generals]] [[Fulgrim|were psychopaths]] while the Emperor's were noble, statuesque leaders of men.

=== The Final Battle between Curze and the Night Haunter? ===
On his way to the chamber where he will meet the assassin, this happens:

* ''"I am free. I am not free. I am free. I am not free." ‘Stop it!’ he hissed to himself, losing for a moment his regal posture and becoming again the hunched beast. His warriors looked silently at him, and what had been a feeling of delicious vindication turned sour.''

Was the Night Haunter trying to stop Curze? The description of him briefly becoming the "beast" instead of the regal primarch, before forcing himself back under control makes it seem so.

* ''He rallied himself, and began again his slow progress. Very well: if fate were not locked in iron, he willingly chose this death. Let this act be his and his alone, when so much of his life had been beyond his control.''
Did his decision to willingly go to his death, not because "fate demanded it", but of his own volition allow him the strength to finally force the beast back into it's cage?

* ''In pride of place, at a table by his side, sat the battered deck of cards he had consulted so many times. He meant their presence to be his last comment on fortune’s cruel grip. But the cards dragged at his attention, forcing him to reappraise them as a tool of his delusion.''
The real Konrad Curze finally regained his sanity?

What sort of seals it is Konrad Curze's final words to M'shen, the assassin who came to end him.:

* '''Your presence does not surprise me, Assassin. I have known of you ever since your craft entered the Eastern Fringes. Why did I not have you killed? Because your mission and the act you are about to commit proves the truth of all I have ever said or done. I merely punished those who had wronged, just as your false Emperor now seeks to punish me. Death is nothing compared to vindication.'''

His statement as only "punishing those who had wronged" simply isn't true, if it was really Curze who had willingly killed so many innocent people just for the fun of it. However, if you read it as Curze and the Night Haunter as separate people, it makes perfect sense. Curze had only ever punished those who had wronged, but the Night Haunter killed for fun. And by forcing himself to hold still, so that the assassin could kill him, Curze was finally punishing the Night Haunter. Curze was finally taking control back from ''whatever'' the Night Haunter was. The vindication wasn't for his actions (or the Night Haunter's actions). The vindication is that even the Night Haunter is not beyond his judgement.

For so long, people feared that the Night Haunter would come for them, but now [[Awesome|'''Konrad Curze had come for the Night Haunter''']].

==Tabletop==
[[Image:Konrad-Curze-1.jpg|thumb|right|Dual wristblades? Check. Stealth capabilities? Check. Skinning prey and taking trophies? Check. Now he just needs a shoulder mounted plasma gun and mandibles and he'll be able to pass himself off as the Predator.]]

{| class=wikitable
! || WS || BS || S || T || W || I || A || Ld || Sv
|-
| '''Konrad Curze:''' || 8 || 6 || 6 || 6 || 6 || 7 || 5+1 || 10 || 2+/4++
|}

On the tabletop, Curze has the basic Primarch statline plus Shrouded and Stealth. He has several fear based abilities, such as granting fear to all Night Lords (those who already have Fear impose a -1 on the leadership test), fear tests when in combat with him are taken at -3LD, and if he kills a unit in close combat any unit subject to fear within 12' and line of sight must take a leadership test or fall back. Sire of the Night Lords also grants him the Acute Senses and Night Vision USR, and he may elect to have the first turn of any game have the Night Fighting rule, giving his sons 4+ cover in the open. His weapons are 2 Lightning Claws called Mercy and Forgiveness which have AP 2, the Murderous Strike rule and grants +1 attack (Paired) and his armour, the Nightmare Mantle, provides 2+ armour save and 4+ invulnerable save (like most Primarch Armour), plus when he charges, it grants him hit and run and Hammer of Wrath special rules (inflicting d3 HoW hits instead of the usual one).

Due to the combination of being Jump Infantry and his variety of Fear-based shenanigans, Curze is one of the easier Primarchs to use. The ability to ensure Night Fighting helps your force close to melee where it belongs, and Fear makes it more effective once you get there. He can Hit and Run, butchering high-value targets and [[Awesome|making enemies who see piss themselves in terror and flee.]] The real genius of his rules is that, like Mortarion, he's primed to annihilate a certain kind of unit and has the mobility to chase it down, while also making your legion better at what it already does well. That said, he doesn't provide any sort of morale bonus to the Night Lords, who desperately need one, and it's fucking embarassing that he can't even hurt AV13.

Best of all, his ranged weapon proves definitely that Konrad Curze is Batman. He figuratively uses Batarangs during the shooting phase. His ranged attack is called a "Widowmaker Volley", which is essentially 3 bolt pistol shots with a special rules that makes 4+ to hit precision shots: 6s to wound ignore both armor AND invulnerable saves. You can't save against the God-Damned Bat Man. The best part is the actual description of the weapons in the Horus Heresy rulebook: "The Widowmakers: Based on the micro-serrated throwing knives utilized for signature-kills by Nostraman assassin-cults, Curze favored the use of these vicious, yet highly precise weapons over more conventional firearms in battle, using them to disable and maim as he wished."

===Konrad Curze VS other Primarchs:===
<div class="toccolours mw-collapsible mw-collapsed" style="100%">
Primarch fighting, while fun to see, isn't a very competitive thing to do as it'll usually tie up both Primarchs for the entire game without either of them dying. With that in mind this section is about how Konrad Curze fares against other Primarchs Mathhammer wise. Please note that all the various abilities are taken into accounts when possible and the match-ups assume the Primarchs are the only ones involved in the fighting, so various abilities like Angron's "The Butcher's Nails" and Rampage do not provide any bonuses. In essence, the fights are supposed to happen in a "Vacuum" for simplicity, but notes are added to make things clearer in particular instances. Also all of the Primarch use their most powerful weapons (because why have a contest if you don't do your best?).
<div class="mw-collapsible-content">

* Konrad Curze VS Horus
**Horus hits 3 times (Talon), wounds 2.667 times, 1.333 after saves and IWND will take that down to 1 wounds at the start of the next turn.
**Konrad hits 3 times, wounds 2.25 times, 0.75 wounds after saves and IWND will take that down to 0.417.
**Konrad loses (not a big surprise) and as always Horus uses his Talons 'cause, even though he would do more damage with Worldbreaker, the Talon allows him to make his opponent basically harmless after a couple of wounds.

* Konrad Curze VS Angron
**Angron Round 1: hits 5.333 times, wounds 4.444 times, 2.222 after saves, and IWND take it down to 1.889.
**Angron Round 2 and thereafter: hits 4 times, wounds 3.333 times, 1.667 times after saves and IWND will take that down to 1.333 wounds at the start of the next turn.
**Curze hits 3 times, wounds 2.25 times (0.75 of which causes ID), 1 wounds after saves and FNP and IWND will take that down to 0.667 wounds at the start of the next turn.
**Angron easily wins, doing a lot more damage and receiving less in turn.
**Note: Curze can Hit & Run, but by doing so he would only gain one more attack, while allowing Angron to reset his Hatred, thus actually making himself die even faster. However he would be a much better fight: Konrad on the Charge would do 2.625 wounds (0.875 with ID) which become 1.168, plus 0.1389 for HoW and 0,359 for the Widowmakers, for a total of 1,666 wounds, or 1.333 after IWND. This, thanks to the -1 wound of Angron, actually means that they would kill each other on the fifth assault, at the same initiative step. Provided that Konrad always succeed in his escape, that is.

* Konrad Curze vs Mortarion
**Mortarion hits 2.5 times, wounds 1.667 times, 0.833 wounds after saves and 0.5 wounds after IWND.
**Curze hits 4 times, wounds 2.222 times, 1.11 wounds after saves and IWND will take that down to 0.555 wounds at the start of the next turn.
**Curze loses as even though he does more damage, Mortarion has 1 more wound that will make him outlast the Night Haunter.
**Note: with the Hit & Run tactics Konrad would actually win, thanks to the +1 attack on the charge, HoW and the knives, butchering Mortarion in 9 rounds while Mortarion would need 11 (counting Overwatch).

* Konrad Curze vs Fulgrim
**Fulgrim hits 3.5 times, wounds 2.333 times, 1.167 times after saves and IWND will take that down to 0.833 wounds at the start of the next turn.
**Curze hits 3 times, wounds 2.25 times, 0.75 wounds after saves and IWND will take that down to 0.417 wounds at the start of the next turn.
**Easy win for Fulgrim. Even with Hit & Run, Konrad would not win this fight. Still, he would outdamage Fulgrim on the charge (1.472 wounds after all saves, 1.139 after IWND) and he would lose only thanks to the superior initiative of the Phoenician, coming extremely close to claiming a surprising draw.

* Konrad Curze vs Ferrus Manus
**Ferrus hits 2.5 times, wounds 2.083 times, 1.042 times after saves and IWND will take that down to 0.709 wounds at the start of the next turn.
**Curze hits 4 times, wounds 2.222 times, 0.741 wounds after saves and IWND will take that down to 0.407 wounds at the start of the next turn.
**Ferrus win.
**Note: Even though with Hit & Run Konrad could close the gap and do almost the same exact damage as Ferrus over the course of the fight, mathematically winning thanks to his superior initiative, this tactics is not reliable against the Gorgon thanks to the Concussive & Strikedown of Forgebreaker.

* Konrad Curze VS Vulkan
**Vulkan hits 2 times, wounds 1.666 times, 0.833 wounds after saves and IWND will take that down to 0.5 wounds at the start of the next turn.
**Curze hits 4 times, wounds 2.222 times, 0.741 wounds after saves and IWND will take that down to 0.185 wounds at the start of the next turn.
**Vulkan is just too tanky for Konrad.
**Note: with the usual tactic of Hit & Run Curze would outdamage Vulkan, but this is hindered by the fact that Dawnbringer has Concussive, making it difficult to foresee: it could go either way. (Because it's also a Hammer.)

* Konrad Curze VS Lorgar
**Lorgar hits 2.5 times, wounds 2.0833 times,1.042 after saves and IWND will take that to 0.708 wounds at the start of the next turn.
**Curze Round 1: hits 3.555 times, wounds 2.369 times, 1.184 times after saves and IWND will take that down to 0.851 wounds at the start of the next turn.
**Curze Round 2: hits 4 times, wounds 3 times, 1.5 times after saves and IWND will take that down to 1.167 wounds at the start of the next turn.
**Konrad wins.
**Note: as always, psychic powers not included. You know how it would end anyway...

*Konrad Curze VS Perturabo
**Perturabo hits 2 times, wounds 1.667, 0.833 wounds after saves and IWND will take that down to 0.5 wounds at the start of the next turn.
**Curze hits 3 times, wounds 2.25 times, 0.75 wounds after saves and IWND will take that down to 0.417 wounds at the start of the next turn.
**Konrad loses as Perturabo does marginally more damage.
**Note: With Hit & Run Konrad would win, but the chance he is not concussed in the round he wants to escape are pretty slim, meaning that Perturabo has still the edge in this fight.

* Konrad Curze VS Alpharius
**Alpharius hits 2.92 times and wounds 1.701 times, 0.851 wounds after saves and IWND will take that down to 0.517 wounds at the start of the next turn.
**Curze hits 4 times, wounds 3 times, 1.5 wounds after saves and IWND will take that down to 1.167 wounds at the start of the next turn.
**Konrad wins.

* Konrad Curze VS Rogal Dorn
**Dorn hits 2 times, wounds 1.5 times, 0.75 wounds after saves and IWND will take that down to 0.417 wounds at the start of the next turn.
**Curze hits 3 times, wounds 2.25 times, 1.125 times after saves and IWND will take that down to 0.792 wounds at the start of the next turn.
**Konrad wins thanks to his superior number of attacks.

* Konrad Curze VS Corvus Corax
**Corvus hits 4 times (Scourge)/3 times (Shadow-walk), wounds 3 times (Scourge)/2.25 times (Shadow-walk), 1.5 wounds (Scourge)/1.125 wounds (Shadow-walk) after saves and IWND will take that down to 1.167/0.792 wounds at the start of the next turn.
**Curze hits 4 times/3 times, wounds 3 times/2.25 times, 2 wounds/1.5 after saves and IWND will take that down to 1.667/1.167 wounds at the start of the next turn.
**Konrad wins.
**Note: even though they both got Hit & Run, Konrad doesn't get +1 attack to charge Corax, 'cause he has Shroud Bombs, and also doesn't get +1 S and I, making Corax considerably stronger when he charge all things considered. All in all, a pretty balanced fight, even if the stats don't say so. Corax doesn't have Widowmakers, though...

* Roboute Guilliman (with the Hand of Domination) VS Konrad Curze
**Curze Round 1: hits 4 times, wounds 3 times, 1.5 times after the Invuln, 1.286 times after the re-roll and IWND will take that down to 0.953 at the start of the next turn.
**Curze Round 2 and thereafter: hits 3 times, wounds 2.25 times, 1.125 times after the Invuln, 0.911 times after the re-roll and IWND will take that down to 0.578 at the start of the next turn
**Guilliman Round 1/2: hits 2.5 times, wounds 2.083 times, 1.0416 times after saves and IWND will take that down to 0.7083 wounds at the start of the next turn.
**Guilliman Round 3 and thereafter: hits 3.333 times, wounds 2.778 times, 1.339 times after saves and IWND will take that down to 1.055 wounds at the start of the next turn.
**Guilliman easily wins this fight... theoritically
**Note: As usual, Konrad should attempt to even the odds with Hit and Run, negating Preternatural Strategy while gaining the +1 attack for the charge (and sniping some wounds with his knives). Even with Guilliman using the Hand of Domination, there is a chance Curze doesn't suffer any damage from it (31% when Guilliman is WS7/8 and 20% when he is WS9) so he will actually negate Preternatural Strategy between 37% and 31% of the time, which is enough to give Rob a run for his money or even kill him if the Widowmakers score more than a single wound.

* Konrad Curze VS Leman Russ
**Russ hits 4 times, wounds 3 times, 1.5 time after saves, plus 0.583 wounds from Sever Life for a whole 2.083 wounds and IWND will take that down to 1.75 wounds at the start of the next turn.
**Konrad Round 1: hits 2 times, wounds 1.5 times, 0.75 times after saves and IWND will take that down to 0.427.
**Konrad Round 2 and thereafter: hits 1 times, wounds 0.75 times, 0.375 times after saves and IWND will take that down to 0.042.
**Konrad gets wrecked.
**Note : Nothing will save Konrad from the Wolf King, but as always the Widowmakers can prove themselves a tricky surprise and Hit & Run mitigates the impact of the exothermic bullshit, making Curze one of the few primarchs who can die to Russ with a bit of dignity.

* Konrad Curze VS Jaghatai Khan
**Jaghatai hits 4 times, wounds 2 times, 1 wound after saves and IWND will take that down to 0.666
**Curze hits 4 times, wounds 2.222 times, 0.740 wounds after saves and IWND will take that down to 0.407 wounds at the start of the next turn.
**Jaghatai wins, thanks to his high number of attacks. Curze could use Hit-and-Run to try to even the odds and give himself charge bonuses, but the Khan could do the same.

*Konrad Curze VS Sanguinius
**Curze hits 3 times, wounds 2.25 times, 1.125 wounds after saves and IWND will take that down to 0.792 wounds at the start of the next turn.
**Sanguinius Round 1: hits 4.667 times (Blade), wounds 4.148 times, 2.074 wounds after saves and IWND will take that down to 1.741 wounds at the start of the next turn.
**Sanguinius on the charge: hits 5.333 times, wounds 5.574 times (including HoW), 2.787 wounds after saves and IWND will take that down to 2.454 wounds at the start of the next turn.
**Sanguinius Round 2+: hits 4 times, wounds 3.556 times, 1.778 wound after saves and IWND will take that down to 1.444 wounds at the start of the next turn.
**Konrad loses.
**Note: With the first turn charge, Widowmakers and H&R Curze can achieve a mutual kill in Round 4, however Sanguinius regaining +1I and +1A in Round 3 lets him do 5.89 wounds average before Curze attacks, so things could go badly for the Batman.

* TL;DR version: Even though he does a lot of damage, Konrad is not really suited for Primarch vs Primarch fights. Do not misunderstand: he is a real beast when he can make use of Hit & Run and the Widowmakers are extremely good, especially against Primarchs with strong invulnerable saves. Still, you have to consider that all of his special rules are primary designed to scare his opponents and make them flee, but since all Primarchs are Fearless he can't use them. Despite this, he can win some fights and, when he struggles, he can still significantly cripple even some of the strongest Primarchs, leaving them weak and vulnerable. But you are arguably best served to employ his mobility to evade them (instead of fighting) and charge something he could actually butcher in a single round, to make the most of his King of Terror special rule. Make their allies flee in panic and then destroy them when they are alone and surrounded...

</div></div>

==Heresy 2.0==

{| class=wikitable
! || Pts || M || WS || BS || S || T || W || I || A || Ld || Sv
|-
| '''Konrad Curze:''' || 450 || 8 || 8 || 6 || 6 || 6 || 6 || 7 || 7 || 10 || 2+/4++
|}

Our poor, sad, psycho murder-Batman makes his return and he's in a very good, if un-fluffy, place. 450 points nets you a statline of M8, WS8, BS7, I7 and 7A with a 2+/4++, so he's already above-average for a Primarch. However, Curze's real power is in his support for his Legion, which is somewhat counter-intiutive considering how much he hated them. He has Hit & Run, Bloody Murder, Night Vision and Fear (3), as well as a number of unique special rules.

*'''The King of Terrors:''' When Curze and any unit he has joined wipe an enemy squad in combat or by sweeping advance, all enemies that are not currently locked in combat and have LoS to Curze must take a Pinning test. You were Fear (3) to begin with, so that's a lot of Pinning for your army to trigger Bloody Murder and the Legion trait.
*'''A Death Long Foreseen:''' Grants Curze access to the Glimpse of Death psychic power.
**'''Glimpse of Death:''' At the start of the assault phase, Curze may make a psychic check against Ld 7. If passed, Curze gains the Feel No Pain (4+) special rule and +1 attacks during that assault phase. If failed, Curze suffers Perils of the Warp. You're pretty likely to fail the test (50% +/- 5%), but considering your 4++ and It Will Not Die, Perils are not as big a danger as it is on Sevatar. That said, you don't need it against anyone who isn't a Primarch, while fighting a Primarch is the exact time you don't want to blow yourself up. Further, some Primarchs have innate Instant Death and deny Feel No Pain anyway, as do tough guys with S12, in which case the prospect of +1 attack is not worth the risk of Perils. However, if you really think you need it and you've got a retinue, you can always have them tank the D3 wounds Perils causes.
*'''Sire of the Night Lords:''' When Curze is your Warlord, he grants all Night Lords Infantry, Dreadnought and Cavalry in the same army Night Vision, Bloody Murder, and immunity to Fear (X). You also get an additional movement phase reaction if Curze has not died.
**Bloody Murder stacks with Spite of the Legion, meaning your 20-strong Despoilers get 101 attacks on the charge against Pinned enemies, which is pretty good for Compulsory Troops. The whole army getting the rule also means you can attach Techmarines/Apothecaries to Terror/Night Raptor Squads without losing it.
***A Terror Assault formation with Curze in it allows for an automatic -1Ld on most of your opponent's units for at least 2 turns without suffering it yourself, while ignoring the shooting limitations of Night Fighting. Additionally, you can essentially knock off +15pts from Curze's price tag for every appropriate unit he gives Night Vision to in such a force.

*'''Mercy and Forgiveness:''' Curze's twinned Lightning Claws, S:U, AP2, Shred, Murderous Strike (4+). Curze also gets the +1 attack for having two melee weapons, bringing him up to a whopping 8 at baseline. It's hard to overstate just how good this is, on the charge you have 10-11 attacks that hit WS5-7 on 3s and anything below that on 2s with S6 AP2 attacks that re-roll to wound and will very likely be Instant Death. Anything without Eternal Warrior, lots of 3++ wounds or Fearless/Stubborn chaff blobs is lunch.
**Additionally, while S6 may not look that impressive (and it's not frankly), due to being Bulky (4) he automatically gets A Talent for Murder against Contemptors, giving ID to basically all of his wounds against them. Even standard TEQs can be mopped up fairly easily; you may not kill them all in one round of combat, but his Fear (3) makes Sweeping the survivors extremely likely. Just watch out for anything with that aforementioned Fear resistance. Try to trigger the Legion trait on Curze if at all possible; that +1 to wound really helps him out due to his low strength.
**That being said, his primary function is to zip in, wipe a squad, and then let you sit back and laugh hysterically as half your opponent's army takes Pinning checks at Ld -3.
*'''The Widowmakers:''' S4, AP5 (Rending 4+), Assault 3, 12" range. Rending (4+) makes them pretty good at killing a squad sergeant in artificer armour since Primarchs have precision shots.
*'''The Nightmare Mantle:''' Armour gives a 2+/4++ and allows Curze to ignore movement modifiers from any source, as well as auto-pass dangerous terrain tests. When running, Curze adds +12 to his movement instead of his initiative. This puts him in a weird place in terms of movement, as he's faster than nearly every other unit in the Night Lords, but not quite fast enough to keep up with Night Raptors. You also don't want to stick him in a typical deathstar unit due to him having completely average Primarch defenses; Curze stays alive by staying mobile. He either has to go it alone or run into a unit that's already somewhere else on the table. It does however, mean that you don't need to buy a transport for him, as he is one of very few Primarchs who are fast enough to sally up the table on his own without getting shot to pieces. This is complemented by the Night Lord options for Night Fighting, which will protect him even more.
*'''Frag Grenades:''' Important, since he's striking at I7, which he really wants.

====30k Konrad Curze Vs other Primarchs: Heresy 2.0====

<div class="toccolours mw-collapsible mw-collapsed" style="100%">
Primarch fighting has significantly changed in the new edition. The sweeping changes to the Weapon Skill system really put those with lower scores at a huge disadvantage. While the changes to universal special rules mean that characters can often bring more attacks (like with Rage and Rampage) or newer tricks (Brutal) to the table that they never could before.

This means that Primarch vs Primarch fighting is more likely to actually resolve itself within the duration of the game, rather than taking turns whittling off small numbers from each other.

Also, because Overwatch Reactions are now done at full ballistic skill, shooting will likely play a more significant role. However, for the sake of brevity, there should be no need to include them unless they make a meaningful difference to the outcome.

<div class="mw-collapsible-content">

'''Curze vs. The Lion'''
*Lion with the Lion Sword & Deathwing subtype ''(hits on MC3+)'': 4.88 hits, 4.07 wounds, '''2.03 unsaved wounds''', which is reduced to 1.70 at the end of the turn thanks to IWND
**Lions Choler +1 attack ''(hits on MC3+)'': 5.55 hits, 4.62 wounds, '''2.31 unsaved wounds''', which is reduced to 1.98 at the end of the turn thanks to IWND.
*Curze ''(hits on 4+)'': 4 hits, 3 wounds, '''1.25 unsaved wounds''', which is reduced to 0.92 at the end of the turn thanks to IWND.
**Curze charging with Bloody Murder ''(10 attacks, hits on 4+)'': 5 hits, 3.75 wounds, '''1.63 unsaved wounds''', which is reduced to 1.29 at the end of the turn thanks to IWND.
**Curze using Glimpse of Death ''(+1 attack, hits on 4+)'': 4.5 hits, 3.37 wounds, '''1.43 unsaved wounds''', which is reduced to 1.10 at the end of the turn thanks to IWND.

:Lion wins- even though they have the same WS and Initiative, and Curze has an extra attack for two close combat weapons; without any rerolls to hit, half of them are missed, and only wounding on rerollable 4+. By contrast the Lion remains more likely to hit and wound.
::Curze does get better charge bonuses, but still never really overtakes the Lion at any point. If he Hit and Runs each turn, he's only getting shot in the face each turn too.
::If Curze uses the Glimpse of Death, his output does increase, but not by much. Feel No Pain doesn't work against the Lion Sword either. Risking about 41% chance Perils of the Warp for an extra 0.21 wounds hardly seems worth it.
:::If Curze can outnumber the Lion's unit to gain a +1 to-Wound, it increases his base output by 0.27 wounds per turn, without factoring extra attacks.

'''Curze vs. Fulgrim'''
*Fulgrim with the Laer Blade ''(Initiative 9, +2 attacks, hits on MC 4+)'' 4.75 hits, 3.98 wounds, '''1.99 unsaved wounds,''' which is reduced to 1.65 at the end of the turn thanks to IWND.
**Fulgrim, charging with the Laer Blade ''(Initiative 10, +3 attacks, hits on MC 4+)'': 5.25 hits, 4.38 wounds, '''2.19 unsaved wounds,''' which is reduced to 1.85 at the end of the turn thanks to IWND.
**Fulgrim with the Laer Blade vs. Glimpse of Death: 4.75 hits, 3.98 wounds, '''1.0 unsaved wound,''' which is reduced to 0.67 at the end of the turn thanks to IWND.
*Konrad Curze with Mercy and Forgiveness (Hits on 4+): 4 hits, 3 wounds, '''1 unsaved wound,''' which is reduced to 0.67 at the end of the turn thanks to IWND.
**Konrad Curze with Glimpse of Death: 4.5 hits, 3.38 wounds, '''1.13 unsaved wounds,''' which is reduced to 0.80 at the end of the turn thanks to IWND.

:Fulgrim wins. If Curze uses Glimpse of Death, Curze outdamages Fulgrim, though Curze is on average taking 0.5 wounds per turn from Perils.

'''Curze vs. Perturabo'''
*Konrad Curze with Mercy and Forgiveness ''(Glimpse of Death, Hits on 3+):'' 6 hits, 3.33 wounds, 1.11 unsaved wounds, which is reduced to 0.78 at the end of the turn thanks to IWND.
*Perturabo with Forgebreaker Desecrated ''(Hits on MC 5+):'' 2.22 hits, 1.85 wounds, '''1.85 unsaved wounds,''' which is reduced to 1.52 at the end of the turn thanks to IWND.

:Perturabo wins, even if Curze decides to use Hit & Run to get to 10 attacks-- Despite having shred, Mercy and Forgiveness just aren't enough to damage Perturabo with his T7 and 3++ Invulnerable Save.

'''Curze vs. The Khan'''
*Jaghatai Khan with the White Tiger Dao ''(Hits on MC 5+)'': 2.56 hits, 1.71 wounds, '''0.86 unsaved wounds,''' which is reduced to 0.53 at the end of the turn thanks to IWND.
**Jaghatai Khan charging with the White Tiger Dao ''(Hits on MC 5+):'' 2.89 hits, 2.41 wounds, '''1.21 unsaved wounds,''' which is reduced to 0.88 at the end of the turn thanks to IWND.
*Curze with Mercy and Forgiveness ''(Hits on 3+):'' 5.33 hits, 4 wounds, '''1.33 unsaved wounds,''' which is reduced to 1.0 at the end of the turn thanks to IWND.
**Curze charging with Mercy and Forgiveness ''(Hits on 3+):'' 6 hits, 4.5 wounds, '''1.5 unsaved wounds,''' which is reduced to 1.17 at the end of the turn thanks to IWND.

:It's even. Whoever passes the most Hit & Run checks wins-- and that's ''slightly'' more likely to be the Khan. Curze outdamages the Khan, but his extra wound helps him out in the end.

'''Curze vs. Leman Russ'''
*Konrad Curze with Mercy and Forgiveness ''(Hits on 4+):'' 4 hits, 3 wounds, '''1.5 unsaved wounds,''' which is reduced to 1.17 at the end of the turn thanks to IWND.
**Konrad Curze charging with Mercy and Forgiveness ''(Hits on 4+):'' 4.5 hits, 3.38 wounds, '''1.69 unsaved wounds,''' which is reduced to 1.36 at the end of the turn thanks to IWND.
*Leman Russ with the Sword of Balenight ''(Hits on MC 4+):'' 4.25 hits, 3.54 wounds, '''3.54 unsaved wounds,''' which is reduced to 3.21 at the end of the turn thanks to IWND.
**Leman Russ using Counter-Attack with the Sword of Balenight ''(Hits on MC 4+):'' 5.25 hits, 4.38 wounds, '''4.38 unsaved wounds,''' which is reduced to 4.05 at the end of the turn thanks to IWND.

:Russ wins. Even with Curze's psychic power, Russ negates the majority of Curze's FNPs with his Murderous Strike (4+).

'''Curze vs. Rogal Dorn'''
*Rogal Dorn with Storm’s Teeth ''(Hits on 4+)'': 3 hits, 2.91 wounds, '''1.45 unsaved wounds,''' which is reduced to 1.11 at the end of the turn thanks to IWND.
**Reaping Blow (+2 attacks): 4 hits, 3.89 wounds, '''1.95 unsaved wounds,''' which is reduced to 1.62 at the end of the turn thanks to IWND.
*Curze with Mercy and Forgiveness ''(Hits on 4+)'': 4 hits, 3 wounds, '''1.5 unsaved wounds,''' which is reduced to 1.16 wounds at the end of the turn thanks to IWND.

:Dorn wins. While Glimpse of Death is powerful, Perils of the Warp on average deals 0.5 wounds to Curze each turn if he uses the power every turn. Hit & Run doesn't work, since Dorn counts all charges against him as disordered.

'''Curze vs. Sanguinius'''
*Curze with Mercy and Forgiveness ''(Hits on 4+)'': 4 hits, 3 wounds, '''1.5 unsaved wounds,''' which is reduced to 1.16 wounds at the end of the turn thanks to IWND.
**Curze charging: 4.5 hits, 3.38 wounds, '''1.69 unsaved wounds,''' which is reduced to 1.36 at the end of the turn due to IWND.
**Curze vs. Sanguinius charging: 4 hits, 3 wounds, '''0.75 unsaved wounds,''' which is reduced to 0.42 at the end of the turn thanks to IWND.
*Sanguinius with the Blade Encarmine ''(Hits on MC 4+):'' 3.25 hits, 2.89 wounds, '''1.45 unsaved wounds,''' which is reduced to 1.12 at the end of the turn thanks to IWND.
**Sanguinius charging with the Blade Encarmine ''(Hits on MC 4+):'' 4.25 hits, 3.78 wounds, '''1.89 unsaved wounds,''' which is reduced to 1.56 at the end of the turn due to IWND.

:Curze wins with Hit & Run.

'''Curze vs. Ferrus Manus'''
*Curze with Mercy and Forgiveness ''(Hits on 3+):'' 5.33 hits, 2.96 wounds, '''0.99 unsaved wounds,''' which is reduced to 0.66 at the end of the turn due to IWND.
**Curze charging with Mercy and Forgiveness ''(Hits on 3+):'' 6 hits, 3.33 wounds, '''1.11 unsaved wounds,''' which is reduced to 0.78 at the end of the turn due to IWND.
*Ferrus Manus with Forgebreaker ''(Hits on MC 5+):'' 2.22 hits, 1.85 wounds, '''2.78 unsaved wounds,''' which is reduced to 2.45 at the end of the turn due to IWND.

:Once again, Brutal (3) manages to take Ferrus Manus to victory.

'''Curze vs. Angron'''
*Curze with Mercy and Forgiveness ''(Hits on 2+):'' 6.67 hits, 5 wounds, '''2.5 unsaved wounds,''' which is reduced to 2.17 at the end of the turn due to IWND.
**Curze charging with Mercy and Forgiveness ''(Hits on 2+):'' 7.5 hits, 5.63 wounds, '''2.82 unsaved wounds,''' which is reduced to 2.49 at the end of the turn due to IWND.
*Angron with Gorefather and Gorechild ''(Turn 3, +3 Attacks, Hits on re-rollable 4+): 7.5 hits, 6.67 wounds, '''3.33 unsaved wounds,''' which is reduced to 3 at the end of the turn thanks to IWND.
:Angron wins. Even if Curze uses Glimpse of Death, Angron's chainaxes deal Murderous Strike (3+), negating Curze's FNP.
:S7 on Gorefather and Gorechild as well as Hatred (Everything) manage to win this one for Angron. Curze just doesn't have the defense required to survive Angron's onslaught.

'''Curze vs. Guilliman'''
*Curze with Mercy and Forgiveness ''(Hits on 3+):'' 5.33 hits, 4 wounds, '''1.75 unsaved wounds,''' which is reduced to 1.42 at the end of the turn due to IWND.
**Curze charging with Mercy and Forgiveness ''(Hits on 3+):'' 6 hits, 4.5 wounds, '''2 unsaved wounds,''' which is reduced to 1.67 at the end of the turn due to IWND.
*Guilliman with the Hand of Dominion ''(Hits on MC 5+):'' 2.56 hits, 2.13 wounds, '''2.13 unsaved wounds,''' which is reduced to 1.80 at the end of the turn thanks to IWND.
**Guilliman with the Hand of Dominion ''(Glimpse of Death, Hits on MC 5+):'' 2.56 hits, 2.13 wounds, '''1.07 unsaved wounds,''' which is reduced to 0.74 at the end of the turn due to IWND.

:Curze wins with Glimpse of Death, due to conferring Feel No Pain (4+).

'''Curze vs. Mortarion'''
*Curze with Mercy and Forgiveness ''(Hits on 3+):'' 5.33 hits, 2.96 wounds, '''1.48 unsaved wounds,''' which is reduced to 0.98 at the end of the turn due to IWND.
**Curze charging with Mercy and Forgiveness ''(Hits on 3+):'' 6 hits, 3.33 wounds, '''1.67 unsaved wounds,''' which is reduced to 1.17 at the end of the turn due to IWND.
*Mortarion with Silence ''(Hits on 5+):'' 2 hits, 1.67 wounds, '''0.83 unsaved wounds,''' which is reduced to 0.5 at the end of the turn thanks to IWND.
**Reaping Blow (+2 Attacks): 2.67 hits, 2.23 wounds, '''1.12 unsaved wounds,''' which is reduced to 0.79 at the end of the turn thanks to IWND.

:Curze wins.
:Mortarion's damage output against Primarchs is so painfully low, it hurts me to do the math for his Primarch duels.

'''Curze vs. Magnus'''
*Curze with Mercy and Forgiveness ''(Hits on 3+):'' 5.33 hits, 4 wounds, '''2 unsaved wounds,''' which is reduced to 1.67 at the end of the turn due to IWND.
**Curze charging with Mercy and Forgiveness ''(Hits on 3+):'' 6 hits, 4.5 wounds, '''2.25 unsaved wounds,''' which is reduced to 1.92 at the end of the turn due to IWND.
*Magnus with Ahn-Nunurta ''(Hits on 5+):'' 2 hits, 1.67 wounds, '''0.83 unsaved wounds,''' which is reduced to 0.5 at the end of the turn thanks to IWND.

:Curze wins.
:Same as Mortarion, [[Fail|just keep Magnus out of melee. please.]]

'''Curze vs. Horus'''
*Curze with Mercy and Forgiveness ''(Hits on 4+):'' 4 hits, 2.22 wounds, '''0.74 wounds,''' which is reduced to 0.41 at the end of the turn thanks to IWND.
**Curze charging with Mercy and Forgiveness: 4.5 hits, 2.5 wounds, '''0.83 unsaved wounds,''' which is reduced to 0.5 at the end of the turn thanks to IWND.
*Horus with Worldbreaker ''(Hits on MC 4+):'' 3.75 hits, 3.13 wounds, '''3.13 unsaved wounds,''' which is reduced to 2.80 at the end of the turn thanks to IWND.

:Horus wins. Even with Shred, Curze struggles to get through Horus's toughness of 7 and 3++ save. Glimpse of Death can keep Curze somewhat safe, but even with Feel No Pain (4+) he takes too much damage to get through the Serpent's Scales.

'''Curze vs. Lorgar'''
*Curze with Mercy and Forgiveness ''(Hits on 3+):'' 5.33 hits, 4 wounds, '''2 unsaved wounds,''' which is reduced to 1.50 at the end of the turn due to IWND.
**Curze charging with Mercy and Forgiveness ''(Hits on 3+):'' 6 hits, 4.5 wounds, '''2.25 unsaved wounds,''' which is reduced to 1.75 at the end of the turn due to IWND.
*Lorgar with Illuminarum ''(Hits on MC 5+):'' 2.22 hits, 1.85 wounds, '''1.85 unsaved wounds,''' which is reduced to 1.52 at the end of the turn thanks to IWND.

:Curze wins, but somehow it's close. Illuminarum is a surprisingly powerful melee weapon.

'''Curze vs. Vulkan'''
*Curze with Mercy and Forgiveness ''(Hits on 3+):'' 5.33 hits, 2.96 wounds, '''0.99 unsaved wounds,''' which is reduced to 0.49 at the end of the turn thanks to IWND.
**Curze charging with Mercy and Forgiveness ''(Hits on 3+):'' 6 hits, 3.33 wounds, '''1.11 unsaved wounds,''' which is reduced to 0.61 at the end of the turn due to IWND.
*Vulkan with Dawnbringer ''(Hits on MC 5+):'' 2.22 hits, 1.85 wounds, '''0.93 unsaved wounds,''' which is reduced to 0.60 at the end of the turn thanks to IWND.

:Vulkan wins, though with Hit and Run it's basically dead even. Curze's offense just isn't enough to get through the Drakescale plate, and with Dawnbringer dealing Instant Death, Glimpse of Death can't save Curze here.

'''Curze vs. Corax'''
*Curze with Mercy and Forgiveness ''(Hits on 3+):'' 5.33 hits, 4 wounds, '''2 unsaved wounds,''' which is reduced to 1.67 at the end of the turn thanks to IWND.
**Curze charging with Mercy and Forgiveness ''(Hits on 3+):'' 6 hits, 4.5 wounds, '''2.25 unsaved wounds,''' which is reduced to 1.92 at the end of the turn thanks to IWND.
*Corax with the Panoply of the Raven Lord ''(Hits on 5+):'' 2.33 hits, 1.75 wounds, '''0.88 unsaved wounds,''' which is reduced to 0.55 at the end of the turn thanks to IWND.
**Corax charging with the Panoply of the Raven Lord ''(Rage (4), Hits on 5+):'' 3.67 hits, 2.75 wounds, '''1.38 unsaved wounds,''' which is reduced to 1.05 at the end of the turn thanks to IWND.

:Curze wins. Corax's lower WS really hurts him here.

'''Curze vs. Alpharius'''
*Curze with Mercy and Forgiveness ''(Hits on 3+):'' 5.33 hits, 4 wounds, '''2 unsaved wounds,''' which is reduced to 1.67 at the end of the turn thanks to IWND.
**Curze charging with Mercy and Forgiveness ''(Hits on 3+):'' 6 hits, 4.5 wounds, '''2.25 unsaved wounds,''' which is reduced to 1.92 at the end of the turn thanks to IWND.
*Alpharius with the Pale Spear ''(Hits on 5+):'' 2 hits, 1 wound, '''0.5 unsaved wounds,''' which is reduced to 0.17 at the end of the turn thanks to IWND.

:Curze wins.

</div></div>

==Gallery==
<gallery>
File:Night haunter by cabal art.png|Isn't he the cutest murderous psychopath vigilante ever?
File:Konrad.jpg
File:BigKurze.jpg|[[Emperor|Christ]] that looks epic. Even if it's on graph paper.
File:Konspire.png|Do not get on his bad side.
File:Spess Punisher.jpg|Two merry psycho vigilantes. Glorious coincidence or awesome tribute ?
File:KonradOnMacragge.jpg|Too bad he didn't get Matt Ward while hunting the Big Blue.
</gallery>

{{Primarchs}}

[[Category:Chaos]]

Team Fortress 2

2023-02-24T06:25:50Z

2601:1C0:5000:CFF0:19D8:F2DB:C571:BE6B: /* Relevance to /tg/ */

{{/vg/}}
{{Awesome}}
{{topquote|Welcome to [[Hats|Team Fortress 2]]. After 9 years in development, hopefully it will have been worth the wait. Please let me know what you think after you have a chance to play. I can be reached at gaben@valvesoftware.com, and my favorite class is the Spy|Gabe Newell, back when he was cool}}
{{topquote|Basically, I'm kind of a big deal.|Scout}}

'''Team Fortress 2''' (abbreviated '''TF2''', not to be confused with Titanfall 2 (T''f''2)) is a class-based team shooter & self-contained economy. It is considered a pillar of [[Video game|video gaming]] and internet culture in general, and its influence over [[meme]]s and multiplayer culture can be felt over dozens upon dozens of games.

It's also, as the title suggests, the sequel to a beloved [[Quake]] mod, Team Fortress (which is called Team Fortress Classic these days).

[[File:4B8AF982-AFE4-40FC-8668-3CB77B13A571.jpeg|thumb|right|An Average Payload match.]]

==Relevance to /tg/==
So why is this here? TF2 has certainly left its mark on video game culture, but this is a wiki for everything related about traditional games. What does TF2 have to do with that?

Simple answer: '''TF2 is Fucking Awesome.'''

A longer answer would be that TF2 is the pinnacle of the class-based shooter genre. It was released in 2007, almost two decades ago, and we are still talking about it, It's still a widely played game, still seeing new fan content and still has hype and buzz around it. Forget 'game in it's genre', almost no game has left the sheer footprint in popular culture that TF2 has. [[Blizzard|Every single time a company tries to make a name game in it's genre]] they have to first clear the hurtle of being able to attract players away '''from a nearly 20 year old game''', and that is a difficult bar to clear. TF2 characters are unique, varied and so customizable that it's hard to find two players playing the exact same way in a match. The characters themselves are extremely memorable in both design and personality. Their voicelines and models have transcended the game they originate from and continue to gather an audience to this very day, even on /tg/.

So yeah, it deserves a page.

Also this.

[[File:Teams and fortresses.jpg|frame|center|Still better than [[Ameritrash]].]]

And this.

[[File:Gargoylesandgravel.jpeg|frame|center]]

Yeah, Heavy is a [[Neckbeard]].

==Gameplay==
The game is a class-based multiplayer first person shooter. The core objective varies a whole lot depending on what mode you're playing, but ultimately, it's always about BLU team attacking RED team, or both attacking each other to get the upperhand over something. Originally, each player used a different class to occupy a different role, but with balance changes and the addition of new weapons, each class ended fitting a specific niche or get specific utilities depending on the scenarios. TF2 isn't a game of rock-paper-scissors [[Blizzard|unlike another certain game]], but it's mostly a game where some classes can do anything with different loadouts and gameplay styles (like fighting games, somewhat), and some others are stronger in specific modes.

There are nine classes in total. Each of them having their own strengths and weaknesses. Or rather, some excel at certain tasks, some specialize in specific playstyles and strategies, and others shine in specific scenarios and some need team support to be effective. TF2's balance is all over the place, so much so that the very weapons you choose will define whether or not you'll play a certain class in a precise manner. Because of the sheer potential of each class to absolutely end up ball-bustingly busted, TF2 ends up becoming a very, very, very chaotic game. How so? For one thing, '''casual matches''' are set as 12v12 battles over an objective, with no class-limit and access to a plethora of game-changing or very gimmicky weapons. For a second thing, the TF2 Community has grown very attached to their game, so much so that some may say it's also symbiotic, and the sheer skill and memery they put into their playstyle will surprise the newest of players. TF2 is unlike any other FPS. That is because of it's design and it's community.

Chaos aside, classes are divided in two different categories;
* '''Generalists''' are considered the best all-rounders of the game. Or they are a necessary asset to their team. They usually have a very consistent arsenal, have some very good support options, and have access to excellent movement options. They're great at both attacking AND defending. Such classes are the ''Medic'', who can heal everyone and turn someone invincible for a short duration of time, ''Scout'', who's speed and damage-dealing is yet unmatched, ''Soldier'', who can rocket-jump and deal a lot of hefty damage, and ''Demoman'', who's just good at dishing out damage and moving around the map.
* '''Specialists''', on the other hand, are ''not'' all-rounders at all. They usually lack one if not all of the elements that make a Generalist a generalist, or they're so strange in their design that they can't really be compared to any of the Generalists. Although all of them can deal quite a lot of damage and adequately support their team, the determining factor that makes them Specialists might as well be their lack of movement options. Some can argue that it might because of their unreliability in a competitive scenario, but that's debatable. Classes counting as specialists are ''Heavy'', the best defender in the game but a massive slow tank who eats rockets constantly, ''Sniper'', who's the very concept of glass-cannon incarnate, ''Pyro'', the Jack-of-all-trades who's range falls quite short, ''Engineer'', who's such an oddball of a class in an FPS, he has no know equal, and ''Spy'', [[Meme|the class nobody likes, but everyone wants to play]].

==Main Classes==

===Scout===
{{topquote|Grass grows, birds fly, sun shines, and brother? I hurt people.|Scout, about what he does best.}}

'''Scout''', also known as '''Jeremy''', '''The Prison dodger''', '''"Hitting your balls" Jeremiah''', '''That damn fucking fly''' or '''Scunt''', is a fast and unapologetically annoying courier who's the fastest dude of the bunch. He hits on women all the time, but he's far from being a womanizer, unlike his father. He's also the most athletic person of the bunch, having the innate ability to ''double-jump'' on top of being the fastest class.

Scout was named and designed off of one of Team Fortress Quakes developers and Internet personality Jerma.

Scout, as a class, specializes in massive close-ranged damage-dealing, capping, movement, and fight-picking. Meaning he's not only getting into fights, he chooses whether or not he duels you. Scout, with his poor health-pool, relies on his speed to dodge projectiles, enemy fire, and corner his adversaries. However, should he get face-to-face with a Heavy who's good at aiming, a Soldier who gives him a faceful of rockets or a Demoman who knew he was gonna pass-by, Scout is ultimately gonna get himself krump'd.

Scout is considered to be a '''generalist'''. His excellent speed and double-jump allows him to travel maps faster than any other class, and he has tools to greatly enhance his movement. With his ability to pick fights, he can quickly dispose of a distracted enemy with ease, and make the job of his teammates easier. A perfectly balanced class. Except in community maps with all crits and low grav, then he's just pure cancer.

Pros:
* Fast movement speed and double jumping result in some serious mobility. Daring Scouts can even circle-strafe fully-upgraded sentries.
* Dangerous at close range; your scattergun packs a fairly strong punch here, while the Force-A-Nature's extreme knockback at close range makes a clever Scout utterly horrific to face near steep drops.
* Captures points and payloads at twice the speed of other classes, meaning that well-played Scouts can easily take territory if its poorly-defended.

Cons:
* You're tied with the Engineer, Sniper, and Spy as having the lowest health of all the classes. All it takes is two good hits and you're mulch.
* Your arsenal is only good for close to medium-range combat. At long range? I hope you enjoy pecking at that sentry with that dinky pistol of yours. Coupled with his low health this means that any firefight can easily leave him dead or close to it.
* Hard to master. Bad Scouts drop like flies. Good Scouts are a menace to deal with. The path to a being a good Scout is a hard one. As a corollary;
** '''Annoying as shit'''. No matter how skilled you are, the Scout's voice lines will drive you up the wall. Some players will deliberately invoke this with [[Slaanesh|garish clothes and colors]] and spam as many voice commands as they can, specifically to [[Distraction Carnifex|draw attention away from their more durable allies]]. This particular clique of neon-colored spastics are designated colloquially by the community as the "'''Scunt'''" or more politely, the "'''Lime Scout'''".

===Soldier===
{{topquote|If God had wanted you to live, he would not have created ME!|Soldier, being objective}}

'''Soldier''', also known as '''Jane Doe''' (yes, he gave himself a female name), '''Merasmus' roommate''', '''The Real American Psycho''', '''Trolldier''', '''Mr. USA''' or '''Solly''' is a psychotic, dumb and bazooka-loving flanderized version of an American soldier. He specializes in rocket-jumping, team-boosting, "moral support" via his backpacks, and air-shotting, and is such a patriot that he went to Europe to kill some anti-American Nazis, continuing his then-uninterrupted slaughter until someone pointed out to him that the current year was 1949. Soldier is delusional and a very sloppy and unreliable narrator. Whether or not he even had comrades helping him during his massive shootout with the Wehrmacht is debatable, and whether or not he knows WHY he's fighting in the Badlands is an overall different question.

As a class, Soldier is a very versatile character with a huge emphasis on damage-dealing, mild-crowd control, rocket-jumping movement, and team-boosting banners. Needless to say, he's one of the handiest classes in the entire game and can deal hefty amounts of damage to the enemy team. He's considered to be a '''''generalist''''' by the competitive community. Being both good at defense and offense makes Soldier an ideal class for the veterans AND the noobs.

His voice actor passed away during the COVID-19 Pandemic. Godspeed, you magnificent bastard

Pros:
* Soldier's rocket-launcher allows him to deal a very decent amount of damage and maneuver himself around the map easily. His wide selection of primary weaponry gives him a variety of tools at your disposal.
* Rocket-jumping isn't easy, but with enough practice, it becomes your greatest advantage against anyone.
* You can take a lot of damage before succumbing. Black Box loadouts (even post-nerf) can extend this durability even further.
* Your banners make you a valuable asset for your whole team. The Buff Bannner will give Minicrits, the Battalion’s Backup will provide a solid defense boost, and the Concheror will provide healing on damage.

Cons:
* You're slow. If it weren't for your rocket-jumping, you'd only naturally outspeed Heavy.
* You are prone to get yourself cornered easily if your team does not support you.
* Because you’re in the frontline the most often, this also means you’ll be facing the enemy’s strongest defenses or accidentally walking into an Engineer’s nest.

====Trolldier====
A fairly popular nonserious subclass, the [[Troll]]dier exists for one thing and one thing only: Market Gardner crits. This Soldier playstyle is wholly devoted to landing shovel-first onto an enemy from above, and as such revolves around that single weapon. You want to rocket jump across the map just to cave that Scunt's skull in with your trusty spade? This is how.

The stereotypical Trolldier goes all-in, taking the Rocket Jumper and Manntreads in order to focus solely on dealing damage by landing on the enemy. The Manntreads also provide more air control, which experienced Trolldiers use to deadly effect. Other Trolldiers take a shotgun as a backup or even take a rocket launcher that does damage at the cost of weakening their health every time they attempt a Garden. It's only considered good form to use the B.A.S.E. Jumper if you're a newfag that's either inconsistent with timing swings or still learning how to rocket jump.

Pros:
*A Market Gardener crit can one-shot a ''lot'' of classes or pick off any that have taken sufficient damage to have the same or less health than the damage a Garden puts out.
*As with regular Soldier, you can move quickly around the battlefield with your rocket jumps.
*If using the Manntreads, a missed Garden can become a source of [[lulz]] instead if you manage to [[Mario|Goomba stomp]] your target despite missing the swing.
*If you become a B-hopping god, you can extend the time you have to land that crit by virtue of [[Derp|the game not realizing you've touched the ground]].
Cons:
* Trolldier actually requires a good amount of skill, because you a) need to know how to rocket jump onto foes effectively and b) need to know how to time your Market Gardner swings to land the crit.
*If you take the stereotypical loadout, you're foregoing any means of ranged defense. This makes failed 'Gardens extremely punishable since your only option is to try and jump away without dying.
*Noobs using the B.A.S.E. Jumper are very much at risk of being shot down while trying to line up that shovel hit.
*While less consistent to achieve, a Soldier getting a crocket will always outdamage you.

===Pyro===
{{topquote|Hmmhmmphfff hmmppphfff hmmmppph!|Pyro}}

'''Pyro''', also known as '''Pybro''', is a maniacal, psychotic, axe-crazy, flame-loving, man-melting menace who loves everything that burns or can make things burn. He... She... IT probably isn't even a man at all and most likely a monster that uses a fire-hazard suit to guise itself as a man. I mean, one quick look at its cosmetic should tell you everything about Pyro. It has a very specific vision of the world, or well, ITS world, cutely named ''Pyroland''. Some have taken advantaged of their child-like sense of "wonder" (read; morbid curiosity) to employ them into doing various unethical jobs. So far, they're considered to be a wild card by everyone, including their own team. The only three who really appreciate them being Soldier, Engineer and Miss Pauling.

In game, Pyro is a jack of all trades. They specialize in close-range combat, crowd-control, fending off enemies, front-line defense, spy-checking, general assistance and decent damage-dealing. The flamethrower allows them to not only put their opponents aflame, but also to reflect the projectiles of both Soldiers and Demoman, making them a serious menace for the two of them. On top of that, they can undo any sticky-trap, push enemies away or prevent them from progressing, or make Spy's life a living-hell. They're often considered to be Engie's best friend, due to the fact that they possess weapons and tools to help him around with his buildings, most notably the homewrecker which allows them to un-sap buildings. Because of this, they're considered to be a '''specialist'''.

With all of that said however, Pyro is also one of the most polarizing classes in the game, sharing that reputation with Sniper. This is because of their flamethrower being able to hold ground as long the fire button is held, thus most strategies that worked involved literally holding W and Mouse1 and walking into enemies, seemingly without thought. Good players can counter this playstyle with distance and engineer sentries, and certain classes like Heavy and Soldier are effective at tanking the flamethrower enough to kill their opponent; should the latter use a shotgun to avoid potential bursts.

Pros:
* Jack-of-all-trades class with the basic loadout, so they're not pigeonholed into one duty or another - some loadouts can be more specialized for certain tasks, like ambushing enemies from behind or babysitting sentry nests.
* You're a menace to Soldiers and Demomen once you get a handle on airblasting, as this lets you redirect projectiles right back at them or off to the side. Also '''the''' worst nightmare of a Spy, since your flames will set a disguised or cloaked one alight. Remember: your teammates are immune to friendly fire, so hitting them with a 2-3 second flamethrower stream will quickly suss out any impostors.
* Very reliable source of afterburn for the rest of your team, letting you soften up heavier targets and DoT-kill lower health threats. Particularly dangerous if you can get the drop on an opponent, since your constant DPS can chew through their healthbar before they can react. Alas, the meta has ''not'' been kind and afterburn is not as reliable as it was before.
** Your afterburn will linger on even after you die, so seeing the your victims on the kill feed during respawning is always a satisfying moment. It won’t happen a lot as told below, but you will cherish every posthumous point when it does.
* One of the more forgiving classes in the game when it comes to mistakes -- you need to reload only on your secondary, you've got decent speed, the third-highest base healthpool, and your weapons are easy to aim and fire.
* The simple act of afterburn can scare an enemy from pushing their offense even if they have the health to tank it. Having a longterm source of damage can pressure enemies into pulling back to remove the affliction with a healing source, making flare guns like the Scorch Shot useful for defense or Sniper-harassment.
Cons:
* Very much a short-range class; wide open areas or long corridors are the bane of your existence due to your flamethrower's person-length range (which becomes even shorter when moving forward due to the flames' behaviour), particularly if there are Snipers in the area. While this issue can be mitigated by replacing the shotgun with a flare gun, this will only provide a weakness against other Pyros (With a natural immunity to afterburn).
* Engineer's sentries and Heavy's massive healthpool are both hard counters to Pyro, as they can either tank damage long enough to kill them or beat them in the damage race. The former is best left to your teammates, while the latter should be avoided or ambushed then circle-strafed if possible. Soldiers and Demos can also pose a threat thanks to explosive splash damage or ill-timed airblasts.
* Something of a skill gated character. Mitigating your weaknesses needs a lot of work-arounds, wisdom, and experience as opposed to swapping to a different class when the going gets tough, and airblasting (your biggest hard counter to Demos, Soldiers, and anyone near hazardous terrain) is difficult to get a hang of.
* Afterburn damage is only ''really'' effective against low to mid-health targets, since the flames can be easily extinguished by (among other things) health packs, Medics, or a friendly Pyro's airblast. It can be useful for weakening and scaring the enemy, but don't count on it to score many kills.
* Expect to see a lot of people yelling "W+M1!" at you, with or without justification.
* Using the Gas Passer in MVM ''will'' make someone start calling you racial slurs in voice, as [[Powergaming|its main upgrade is both cheap and OP enough to render half the team obsolete]] [[FAIL|while requiring no actual skill]]. Keep using it after people ask you not to, and you'll deserve whatever happens next.

===Demoman===
{{topquote|Oh, they gon' tuh have to glue yue back togetha', IN HELL!|Demoman, after he gibs (You).}}

Hailing from Ullapool, Scotland, '''Demoman''', also known as '''Tavish Degroot''', '''Captain KABEWM''', '''Demopan''', '''Delak's favourite''', '''Average Scrumpy Appreciator''' or simply '''Demo''' is a [[What|Black Scottish Cyclops]]. [[Meme|They got more feckin’ monsters in the Great Loch Ness than they got the likes of him]]. Working four different jobs to support his financially stable and blind mother and treat the many acres of land he owns, Demoman finds joy in pure slaughter, demolition, and demolition accessories. If it wasn't for his raging obession with alcohol, he'd be considered one of the ''"sanest"'' member of Team Fortress. Well, he's a massive workaholic on top of an alcoholic, and he's such of an addict that he turned his whole body into a distillery.

Don't ask him about his haunted eye-socket…

Demoman, as a class, is '''the apex predator of TF2'''. No, this article was not written by a Demomain. We're just not joking. Demoman's role in the team revolves around ''hefty'' damage-dealing, crowd-control and movement. And he's good at all of that. No kidding. He's insanely powerful, and for that reason he's considered to be a '''generalist'''. All of his grenade launches deal massive damage on a direct hit, more than the soldier’s rocket-launcher. His stickies, when stacked, deal such damage that no one in a 2 meter radius survives.

Well, okay, we're exaggerating a little… In truth, he is a very good trap artist that can control territory better than a Pyro or potentially an Engie by using his stickies to hide secret explosives for enemy trespassers. Not just that, but his grenade launcher’s timed explosives can be used to toss your projectiles with the source engine, potentially [[awesome|killing targets with physics, allowing your grenade to roll under them and explode before they can get out]]. Of course, his explosives are just as deadly to him as they are to the enemy, so try to keep track of your grenades before setting them off.

Pros:
* You're insanely powerful and can insta-kill people with a well placed sticky-trap.
* You're a very versatile class with a wide selection of sticky traps and grenade launchers to fit any type of demolition combat.
* You're able to maneuver yourself around the map very easily with a well placed sticky bomb.
* Insane crowd-control can halt an entire offensive push with the click of the mouse.
* Can get busted with the right combinations.

Cons:
* All of your weapons, to the exception of your melees (except one), damage you. Thus, you're effective only at mid-range beyond.
* Grenades and sticky bombs can be destroyed with a shot, reflected or pushed back by Pyros and Soldiers.
**Pushed back stickies can easily result in [[Not as planned|a clever trap backfiring]] if they specifically get pushed towards you.
* Grenades are affected by gravity and bounce off objects, so mid to long-range combat can be a pain in the ass.
* Sticky Jumping can be very damaging should you put an extra bomb or land a little lower than usual. Similarly to Soldier, there are some items to mitigate this issue to a degree so players can at least get the hang of the explosive physics.
* Like Soldier, you're not immune to your own bombs. You can and most likely will blow yourself up along with your enemies if you're not careful.

====Demoknight====
{{topquote|There can be only oooooooone...! eye...|Should you hear this in a match, RUN.}}

Should you decide to drop your your stickybomb launcher for a shield (and optionally drop your grenade launcher a pair of boots), you become the '''Demoknight''', arguably the most accomplished of all the sub-classes in this game.

The Demoknight's role revolves around unconventional combat to gain a killstreak through a style of fighting many wouldn’t expect. Using a trusty shield to charge quickly into an enemy while charging your sword for a guaranteed krit, you take the heads of your victims to strengthen you with quick movement and higher hp. Other swords will either heal you, recharge the targe, deal massive damage, or increase the duration of your charge. The catch? You’ll be playing a First Person Shooter ''without a gun'', so expect to die. [[rage|A lot.]]

Nothing stops you from using the "Hybrid Knight" sub-sub-class, where usage of the grenade launcher is permitted, but you'll be using the sweet, sweet advantages of the booties. But at least you'll have a ranged weapon in hand just in case things go south.

Pros:
* Chaining kills will make you more durable, either by increasing your maximum health (almost to the Heavy's HP) or healing you up.
* You'll be a little faster than a Scout, and that's without taking into account the charges. Complex techniques like trimping can let you get into places most people wouldn't expect.
* 90% of casual players tend to shit themselves in shock when a psychotic, drunk Scotsman suddenly drops onto their head and starts swinging a sword at them.
* A very versatile subclass with a plethora of options to choose from for variety of melee playstyles.
* They are the top dog in Medieval Mode because of their expansive range of melee weaponry and ability to trimp straight over the battlements.

Cons:
* Again, you have no guns in a first-person shooter. Forgoing the boots in favor of your grenade launcher can help, but you lose the ability to fight from a distance and your burst damage potential ''will'' take a hit.
* Sentry nests are now the bane of your existence, as are Pyros. You just can't match them in terms of damage output or maneuvering even without the rest of the enemy team being on your ass, so trying to attack one ''will'' make a well done burger out of your corpse.
* Easily the single most skill-reliant class in the game. Learning when to GTFO, who to avoid, how to trimp, and the terrain of each map (particularly ''where'' to trimp) is essential to using this subclass ''at all'', because you '''will''' die without being able to use these skills.

====Demotroll====
The humble Demotroll is the Scottish cyclops' version of the Trolldier, though unlike the Trolldier he doesn't have a reliable mid-blast jump crit option and therefore [[Fail|can't use the Sticky Jumper like the Trolldier can the Rocket Jumper]]. Nevertheless, people found a way using the fact that shield charges both allow trimping (aka physics abuse) and getting reliable crits if the charge lasts long enough. This is combined with the Ulapool Caber for maximum [[lulz]] from the inevitable times that the Demoman turns himself into a gib pile from the crit explosion (hence why it's called the Demo Suicide Bomber by [[Edgy|edgelords]]).

Pros:
*A critical Caber explosion is nothing to sneeze at.
*Trimping is extremely strong as a movement option, meaning you can troll people that are in places they wouldn't expect you to normally reach.
*Has one advantage over the Trolldier in that its explosion can hit multiple people.

Cons:
*You'll kill yourself half of the time if you get a hit, and might fuck yourself over if you don't.
*If you survive getting a hit, the Caber can't explode again until you haul ass back to resupply, so you better have a getaway plan for after getting your funny frag.
*You're basically forced to take the Tide Turner if you want to get the most out of trimming.
*Like its more serious brother the Demoknight, to Demotroll effectively you're gonna need good map sense (i.e. knowing where to trimp) and a decent amount of skill.

===Heavy===
{{topquote|Some people think they can outsmart me. Maybe… Maybe… I've yet to meet one who can outsmart '''bullet'''.|Heavy reflecting on his percieved lack of brains. Which he doesn't lack at all.}}

'''Heavy''', also known as '''Misha''', '''The Pootis Man''', '''The Baby-Fighter''', '''Mr. "I give my weapons names"''', '''Hoovy''' or '''The entire Russian block''' is a large, built-like-a-bear, living weapon of mass destruction and an avid sandvich(sic) connoisseur. Hailing from an unknown part of Russia, he at some point earned a PHD in Russian literature, before he got a job as an artillery man to get enough money to feed his family, who were stuck in the mountains chasing bears. GIANT bears. That's the wholesome part of Heavy. The psychotic part of him comes in the form of his ''genuine'' love and care for his guns, which thankfully comes only second to his family. Him and Sasha are considered the face/mascot of TF2 as whole, the two being promoted a lot in ads and official art.

Heavy in game is a slowpoke. He's a ''Tank'' and excels in Defense, mild-support, halting the enemy team, and considerable damage-dealing. With Pyro and Sniper’s Uzi, he shares one of the only automatic weapons in the game, which is the most powerful: The Minigun. A god-send for anyone who knows how to properly rev it up and time his shots. While Heavy uses a shotgun as a secondary, he's also gifted with the third most practical source of health in the entire game: ''The Almighty Sandvich''. He has the most health of the entire bunch, and serves as a literal wall of flesh and guns for anyone who crosses his path.

He has one small issue, though…
He is
Way.
Too.
'''Fat.'''

Heavy is HUGE. Meaning in a game that rewards good aim, he's massive, moving, shouting target. If a Heavy shows up on his own in the middle of a battle without proper support, he becomes everyone's main priority and dies appropriately seconds later. He's oftentimes the victim of Sniper's headshots, Spy's backstabs, Engie's sentry, Pyro's fire and airblasting, Demo's explosives, Soldier's Direct Hit, and Scout's general mosquito-like attitude. Heavy NEEDS team support to be effective. He can only take care of a target at a time, and requires that the enemy team is distracted enough for them not to take him together. So, ironically, Heavy is arguably one of the most experience reliant classes, despite initially seeming to be a good beginner class. Playing as Heavy really requires you to understand the layout of maps and how to maximize every drop of survivability from pickups. Due to this, a good Heavy can pubstomp casual servers, but he struggles hard in competitive due to him being considered a '''Specialist''', built for long defenses but not as good at pushing.

Pros:
* Fuckhuge health pool, easily the highest of the playable classes when overhealed.
* Strong damage output on the minigun, particularly if you know when to rev it up. If ubercharged, you're a poorly-coordinated enemy team's worst nightmare, as you can easily rip through sentry nests and enemy teams for the duration of the uber.
* The Sandvich lets you take a bit of heat off the Medic or keep yourself alive in a pinch.
* Your presence in a fight can take the heat away from other friendly combat classes; since Heavy's a massive damage sponge even without a Medic, people will tend to shoot at you over your allies.

Cons:
* You're a big target, so expect everyone to be gunning for you when you show up. You ''will'' need a Medic at your back and maybe a couple others flanking you if you don't want to be shanked, sniped, or shoved via explosion/airblast to your doom.
* You're slow, so expect to lag behind the team on assaults.
* Your main gun needs to rev up before firing, so sudden enemy ambushes can tear through your health before you can react. God help you if a Backburner Pyro or regular Spy gets the drop on your ass.
* You're not immune to airblasts, and your lack of mobility means you're much more likely to suffer or outright die if a Pyro airblasts you away from a point.

====Fat Scout/Shotgun Heavy====
{{topquote|I have seen other team, he is us! But itty bitty.|Red Fat Scout talking about Blu Scout}}

What happens when a Heavy trades his sandwich for a shotgun? Well you get the Fat Scout. The Fat Scout is actually surprisingly powerful (in casual mode, don't get any ideas competitive players) because most enemies when they see a Heavy they expect a slow lumbering target they can easily avoid, but now Fat Scout, free from the constraints of his minigun slowing him down is a fast (for a Heavy) offensive fighter who can chase down Soldiers, Demomen and those pesky Spies. It's still kind of a meme subclass though since you're still a relatively easy target to hit compared to an actual Scout.

Pros:
* No (or less) minigun use means that you can move without it's rev speed penalty.
* Enemies will underestimate how fast a heavy can be, especially with the Gloves of Running Urgently.
* Shotguns are still powerful, ask the Engineer mains, you can still point blank kill most classes quickly.

Cons:
*Requires good single target aim with the shotgun, which if you spend most of your time playing as standard Heavy you'll have developed less since Heavies require tracking skill instead.
* Minigun damage is still way higher.
* Reloading time can be your downfall.
* No sandwich.

===Engineer===
{{topquote|Don't worry boys, the Engineer is engihere!|Engineer, being Engineer.}}

'''The Engineer''', also known as '''Dell Conagher''', '''Sentry Man''', '''Mr. Brains over Brawns''', '''Engie''', or [[Meme|'''Engineer Gaming''']] is a formidable technician hailing from Texas, and descendant of long running line of inventors and craftmen. Matter of fact, if it weren't for his ancestors, nothing of what happens in TF2 would have happened at all! With twelves P.H.Ds under his belt, Engineer created three of the most practical things a human could possibly dream of; a teleporting device, an ammo and health dispenser, but most importantly, the man-shredding sentry. Thankfully he’s also a very stable individual, the sanest of all 9 classes in fact, with a ”Go Get ‘Em” attitude that you can’t help but smile at.

As a class, Engineer is... Well...''stange''.. His role is fairly unique. Unlike his peers, Engineers mostly focuses around creating a solid front-line and install Areas of Denial anywhere he goes! His "versatility" as a class comes to how you decide to use his tools. Engie's role practically revolves around creating spaces for his teammates to restock and re-engage, provide a way to reach the ever-moving frontline quickly, or halt the progression of the enemy team. Because of this, he's considered to be a '''specialist'''.

In the community, Engineer is seen as a fantastic dwarf. Let's just say that he's so bizarre as a class in an FPS that pretty much everyone agrees he's good in Casual or Highlander. Engimains get absolutely demolished in competitive. This is because the he's so dependent on his buildings that it becomes harder for him to be of any use without them. On top of that, most of his buildings take time to... Well, build. And in many cases, they won't serve a useful purpose to your team at all. With half of the cast being able to zoom to the other end of the map hastily and ammo being more bountiful with more players, Engie's buildings aren't as necessary before. In a casual try-hard setting however, they are ''kings''... Or so some would let you think. Engie depends a lot on the very people he supports, with a solid team, good resource management, great positioning and excellent decision making; Engineer makes for a powerful ally.

Pros:
* Your buildings can solidify the frontline.
* With good management, Engineer becomes better.
* You have decent offensive options.
* THE WRANGLER; you protect your sentry with a defensive bubble and allows you to control the sentry’s aim with manual control.
* You get the most out of any support you get ''and'' provide.
* Your Sentry at level 3 can be a mighty force of reckoning for most classes. Dedication is needed to take one out, as well as exploitation.

Cons:
* Two classes are designed specifically to hunt you down. That won’t stop everyone else from trying to destroy your sentry nest, particularly Ubered Heavies.
* Not for the faint of heart. Prepare to panic a whole lot when '''ANYTHING''' happens to your buildings.
** Related to this: Positioning is utterly critical to your buildings and their survival. Learning the best places to stick your sentries is a huge part of Engie-ing effectively, because they ''will'' get wiped otherwise.
* You don't have a lot of movement options except for the Eureka Effect (leaves you vulnerable in a taunt) and Wrangler-Jumping (which takes a lot of practice to use effectively.)
* You're often very vulnerable without your sentry -- none of your weapons match its damage output outright, and you lack the defences to go blow-for-blow against most of the classes.
* You're not very likely to fit in competitive.
* '''NEED A DISPENSER HERE!'''

====Battle-Engie====
{{topquote|Sometimes, you just need a little less gun.|[[Orks|'''DATS A ZOGGIN' LIE''']]}}

So what happens when someone decides that it’s not worth defending their team? What if you want to say “Fuck it. I have a shotgun!”? Well, enter the '''Battle Engineer.''' By trading your right arm for a robotic Gunslinger, you turn your previously upgradeable sentry into a quickly-deployable mini sentry with enough metal to create a second one immediately after the first one is destroyed. With your plethora of shotguns that can either promote sentry kills like the Frontier Justice, or good aim like the WidowMaker, you can deal a surprising amount of damage. In addition, you get an additional +25 health for some added tankiness.

Pros:
* You can be very annoying like a Scout with your mini sentry shooting in conjunction with you.
* The Shotgun is a very powerful weapon in the right hands, with the burst fire dealing good damage up close to an enemy and a plethora of options to choose from.
* Engineer still has access to his Dispenser and Teleporter, all of which are still very valued to the team.
* Engineer becomes much more mobile and aggressive, as they're no longer reliant on babysitting a level 3 sentry for their primary damage output.

Cons:
* You do not have a lot of health, even with the Gunslinger’s 25+.
* The minisentry isn’t as strong as a level 1; maybe more fragile. It will break a lot.
* You give up a lot of defensive capability and territory control to play like a slower, less agile Scout.
* Sometimes, less gun will get you killed.

===Medic===
{{topquote|That... was doctor-assisted homicide!|Medic, recommending you to play Battle-Medic, which you shouldn't do.}}
'''The Medic''', also known as '''Dr. Ludwig''' or '''DOKTOR''', is a medical student from Stuttgart, Germany during a period when the Hippocratic Oath was more of a "Hippocratic Suggestion". Considering the setting, it's been heavily implied that he might have been an actual [[Nazi]] (though officially he has never associated with them, partly because it was too easy of a joke). In any case, a doctor with a callous disregard of life is exactly what you'll be wanting as the Medic will often be tagging alongside other characters, dispensing healing when needed like the [[Healslut|healbot]] he is.

Mechanically, there's likely one thing the Medic will be stuck on more than anything else: The Medigun. A singular beam of continuous healing energy, this not only helps restore health to wounded allies, but also provides a temporary measure of overhealing for a buffer of protection from more serious attacks. Healing also gives charge to a secondary feature to the Medigun called the Ubercharge. The original Medigun's Ubercharge gives both the Medic and his patient temporary invincibility, but there are alternatives that provide different boosts. As for the other guns, the Syringe Gun and the Bonesaw, don't focus on them unless you're planning on using them to supplement the Ubercharge

Of course, Medics are a necessary fixture in the game's meta as he is the most reliable means of healing in a game made well before automatic healing was even considered mandatory. Because of this, Medic is seen as ''the'' '''generalist''' class because of how much a team needs him to win. Your healing will be in such high demand that you'll find yourself needing to prioritize who should be healed more and especially who's more deserving of the Ubercharge. This is also the ultimate weakness of the Medic, as he is a dedicated healer and won't be of much use without someone to fight for him. Sure, there's other guns and a natural healing factor because healer, but that won't stop a Sniper from turning that head into a pulpy red mess.

Pros:
*Mediguns give your team the single most consistent source of healing in the game, so you can keep people alive on maps/modes with 20-second respawn times.
*Can be the deciding factor in whether your side wins or loses a match, since you can keep great players alive or pop an ubercharge to help your team break through a particularly strong defence.
*Grab an Ubersaw and a Crusader's Crossbow, and become God. The former gives you 25% Uber on hit while the latter extends Medic's healing range greatly and lets you punch back surprisingly hard, at the cost of having to deal with ammo and arcing projectiles.

Cons:
*Being a high value target with useful support abilities, Medics will always be a priority target for the opposing team, especially Spies. Entire matches can be decided on a well-timed Ubercharge, and a single Medic can mean the difference between surviving for the next push or waiting 20 seconds to respawn.
*<s>Medics are not built for fighting.</s> Ubersaw: <big>'''CRIT 195'''</big>. In all seriousness, while the Medic ''can'' dish out a surprising amount of damage, he is '''not''' meant to go in guns blazing.
*Expect to get sick of people screaming <big>'''"MEDIC!"'''</big> after the first few games.
*Playing Medic is a thankless job. No one really looks out for you, but they expect you to keep them alive through anything and everything, and then blame you for their death because they fucked up when you ubered them or because they left you high and dry then got killed the moment you weren't healing them.
:*This is the main reason why medic mains are rare: it isn't rewarding to play unless you can consistently do effective Ubers (and stay alive long enough to even have ubers, for that matter).

==== Battle-Medic ====
Mainly a joke subclass, but the Ubersaw can make Medics slightly less of a joke in close combat situations. It's also what a Medic must default to in a pinch - just don't go thinking you can cap the point using it.

===Sniper===
{{topquote|Sniping’s a good job mate. It's challengin' work, outta doors, and a guarantee you won't go hungry.|Sniper, on his job.}}

Hailing from the mythic land of New Zealand before being sent to Australia to be raised by farmers, '''Mr Mundy''' fancies himself a professional assassin and a polite bloke you can have a cold one with. His job ensures a meal and a gun, as he travels alone in his camper van to his next destination. This makes him somewhat less of a team member in this game as most Snipers players will be on their own, picking targets off the enemy team while avoiding the same fate themselves. Their trusty Sniper Rifle gives the player the ability to automatically Krit upon a headshot; dealing 3x the damage. Combine this with the fact that your rifle charges its shot while scoped in, means you can deal 450 damage to anyone on a Headshot! No Medic is going to save you from that!

Not only is our ol’ sniper equipped with his trusty gun, but he has several pitch weapons to deal with anyone cocky enough to take you on. Your trusty kukri knife will make sliced beef out of any spy while the [[/d/|Jarate covers your foes in your piss, dealing minikrits on all damage for a limited time.]] You can even give up your gun/jar for a little shield that can protect you from Spies(Razorback), Pyros(Darwin’s Danger Shield), or all-around damage(Cozy Camper).
In competitive play Sniper is considered a '''Specialist''' due to his fragile nature, but he still sees some plays as a quick switch to kill a Medic.

Pros:
* With good skill, you can pinpoint kill any threat to your team from a distance. The enemy has to respect YOUR line of sight, lest they are forced to wait another 20 seconds. This includes overhealed Heavies, Rocket-Jumping Soldiers, Medics ready to charge, and even catch Demomen or Engineers off guard with a good angle.
* Your plethora of options means you can play with or without headshotting style. The Huntsman gets rid of the long range in favor of a more combative playstyle!
* As long as you can get a headshot from a scope, you can do it in close range as well!
* The Huntsman has some [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jvOaUF1Sl5c bullshit hit detection logic], meaning it's actually easier to get a headshot with it than with stock. [[Rage|Fun!]] It used to be ''even worse'' if you dared to stand near a building (closest hitbox to where it hit your collider is the Dispenser's single slab? [[Bullshit|Guess who just got headshot!]]), but that was too much even for Valve and got patched when the community realized this shit was happening.
:*This is part of where the "Lucksman" moniker of the weapon comes from, since you can get a headshot by hitting empty air if the arrow's lined up just right.

Cons:
* You have low HP like the Scout and the Engineer. You will get killed if a soldier or Demoman decide to take their battle up close and personal.
* You are a magnet to every sniper and spy in the game. All Snipers are your rival, and never forget that; also remember to watch your back, as Spies love delivering a dose of surprise buttsecks into your vulnerable rear.
* Tunnel vision. Focusing on nailing priority targets over your own survival means that anyone can get the drop on you. Spies have it easier because of their tools, but even a crafty Heavy can sneak up on you and POW HAHA!
* Sometimes hits just won’t register right, or register in your favor. This is an old game, so expect some hitboxes to weirdly work or not.
* Expect to be spammed by bot snipers spinning out of control more often than not.
:*Related: If you get even ''remotely'' good at clicking heads, prepare for hackusations and such. This is what happens when your class is the preferred one of cheaters.

===Spy===
{{topquote|Well? Off to visit your mother!|Spy, being French.}}
'''The Spy'''; also known as '''Frenchie''', '''Turncoat''', an '''Alley-Skulkin’ Backstabber''', '''SPAH''', a '''Shape-Shiftin’ Rat''', a '''''Handsome Rogue''''' or '''Spycrab''', is a French enigma, constantly hiding behind a suit and balaclava. Nobody knows what he is or who he is loyal to, as he is trained to play both sides of any conflict at a moment's notice. Even worse is that he has a special disguise kit in the form of a cigarette case, equipped with masks that let him [[The Changeling|shapeshift into the form of anyone else,]] [[Callidus|be they friend or foe]], nurturing very (un)healthy bouts of paranoia.

As a class, the Spy is very dependent on execution, needing to get in close for the kill. The only gun he has is a revolver, while perfectly accurate, is slow to fire accurately. Similarly, his butterfly knife isn't very strong but it has the unique trait of backstabbing, allowing a spy to instantly kill anyone he hits from behind. To actually get within killing range, you'll need the tools: The aforementioned disguise kit allows a Spy to transform into anyone else he can wish, as the watch can render the Spy invisible for a moment of time but runs on a limited battery, and the sapper gives a way to automatically sabotage and destroy an enemy Engineer's contraptions.

Among all the classes, the Spy is considered divisive depending on how good one can get playing him. On one hand, he's very flimsy and not very capable at fighting with only a revolver and knife, and those who know about what a Spy can do will know how to spot one and will punish him once spotted. On the other hand, those abovementioned tools give him plenty of ways to harass and distract an enemy in unexpected ways, perhaps playing in ways that leave one to ask if he was actually taken out.
Most people consider Spy to be a '''Specialist''', but Sniper is believed to be the better choice for a pick class and in competitive Scout is the go to flanker-pick class, but he still sees use for checking the enemy teams Über. Whether the spy is good or bad, you’ll always be watching your back once you know he’s around…

Pros:
* When a Spy scores a backstab, <s>most</s> '''all''' things don't get back up from it. Unless you don't have a back or have some means to negate one (looking at you, Sniper).
* Disguises and invisibility are perfect for playing mind games with the enemy.
* Spies are a hard counter to undefended engineer devices, which generally forces engineers to work from a fort mentality instead building and then shifting to mobile support.
* You're the only class that can (technically) cheat death using the Dead Ringer. It's had to be nerfed several times due to how powerful this can be, though there's always been a downside of the post-"mortem" decloak being loud as fuck.
* By exploiting an extension of a player model’s back, you can perform “Trickstabs” to kill opponents through your agility and cunning.
** Occasionally you can get a moment where [[WTF|you get a "facestab"]], which is confusing for all parties involved.
* Ultimately, playing a Spy perfectly makes you look like a goddamn master chess player.
* Similarly (But better at this) to Sniper and Heavy (With a Medic), a good Spy rules the game by his presence alone, making sure that his enemies are always on the lookout.

Cons
* Spies' health is shit and their direct damage dealing capabilities are only slightly better than a [[meme|literal butter knife]]. If you're caught, you'd better have a good plan.
* Your many tools can be easily foiled by a few easy ways that most people can tell and prepare for. Pyros in particular are good at this, as their anti-sapper melee choices and flamethrowers make them your worst fucking nightmare.
* While Spies do have plenty of gear slots, only two of them are actual weapons.
* The learning curve between understanding the tools and the enemy team will mean that bad plays will reward you with frequent deaths.
* You're hard-countered by the playerbase learning how to deal with Spy. Let that sink in: Spy will become ''worse'' as the game gets older and the playerbase gets more experienced.
:* Related: Disguises will generally only fool newer players since anyone with a brain will question [[FAIL|why you aren't shooting at their enemies]].

==== Gun Spy ====
Being a Spy was hard. They share the least amount of health with Scout without his speed, and he needs to get up close to very scary mercs who can easily murder him should they find out. His knife might as well be made of plastic with how much damage it does to their face, and good luck when the Pyros are nearby. With so much working against the Spy, what truly made his Mains tick? Was it the brutal torture of a Pyro’s backburner that broke their minds and reduced their faces into joker-esque edgelords? Did every second respawning feel like an eternity of regret, hindsight, and opportunity to grow for the next life? No… It all happened with an epiphany; a single idea incepted amongst the players by the devs to change their lives forever. A moment in time in which the gods of every pantheon known to both human and elves weeped as Scout’s mother moaned in pleasure: [[Firearm|The Spy has a gun.]] And way back in the day, when Valve first started adding new weapons to TF2, the Spy got an especially sick revolver known as The Ambassador. With its superior distance and aim, Spy players could "snipe" their opponents with headshots from quite a distance away. This gave rise to a new subclass of Spy which relied more on the power of his gun than his metaphorical butterknife. Alas, The Ambassador was eventually nerfed several times to make the game more fairly balanced; as such, this subclass became critically endangered. However, given the distance of time since the nerf, the value was found again in the guns Spy had, and the population of Gun Spies flourished once more. Nowadays, Gun Spies tend to use just about any revolver, most likely Stock, Enforcer, Ambassador or the Diamondback (if they so choose to backstab too).

Pros:
* You use your gun. Maybe you'll finally get to understand how powerful it can actually be.
* The Revolver is surprisingly accurate if you wait between shots. The Ambassador rewards accuracy the most, but other revolvers will benefit well with this knowledge.
* You can still be a sneaky bitch with revolvers like the Diamondhead that rewards backstabs & building saps, while the L’Etranger gives extra cloak for getaways & works well with the Dead Ringers
* You don't have to rely on backstabs, making you not need to put yourself in dangerous situations.

Cons:
* You're still a fragile class in the game. Your more upfront approach is only going to get you killed more often than when you play Spy as he was intended to be played.
* Knowing how to aim becomes crucial to your performance. If using the Ambassador, you'll also have to learn how to click heads like Sniper.

==Legacy/Mod-only Classes==

===Civilian===
{{topquote|If you win this match, I'll give you a share in my oil company! A small one, mind you.|John D. Rockefel- Civilian.}}

Well okay, he's isn't "canon" to TF2. But if Valve finally decided to do something about '''TF2 Classic''', he might as well be! The '''Civilian''' is a british V.I.P. and a very wealthy C.E.O. of a multitude of companies across the globe. Unlike many of his peers (or, maybe just like his peers), he absolutely adores bloodsports, oftentimes commenting matches of mercenaries and other assassins killing each other for money. He's also fat, weak and defenseless, only being able to give "moral boosting" to those around him.

The Civilian is the star of the scrapped VIP mode (originally present in the first Team Fortress, but ultimately mothballed in the sequel), rendered only playable by the mega-project that is TF2 Classic. As a class he can't do much but give a small mini-crit and speed boost to those he points at. He can also defend himself with his umbrella, but he's as effective in melee-combat as a T'au. His role essentially boils down to being a living, breathing and intelligent payload controlled by a player. He's the only capable of capping certain points and he does so at a relatively fast pace. However, the entire team must baby-sit him into not getting killed.

Pros:
* You're rich.
* The boosts. They will grant mini-crits to your teammates and give them some more swiftness on the battlefield. Think of it as a Buff Banner that only affects one person at a time.
* You're quite fast. Given that you must cap in order to win, and escape when things go [[Not As Planned|not as planned]], you will rely on your agility to get out fast.
* You're good at capping. Five times the capping rate!

Cons:
* The entire team must carry you to victory.
* You're extremely vulnerable.
* Your death will either end the match or seriously handicap your team. If you're on a timer, your death will result in a loss of time.

===Mercenary===
{{topquote|Alright, who's the wise guy who just signed his own death warrant!?|The man born to be wild.}}

Although primarily featured in the fan-game of the fan-game of the game, the '''Mercenary''', also known as '''Merc''', is the star of '''Open Fortress''' and could very well be featured in '''TF2 Classic'''. The Merc is as much of a mystery as spy, as neither his name, age, origin or even motive is known. What we do know of him is that he's a massive movie nerd, oftentimes quoting his favorite films when fragging people, and usually likes acting like hot shit. He's also the only class you can play (usually) in the Quake-style deathmatch mode of the game.

As a class, the Mercenary would be considered to be a '''generalist'''. Having access to tons of different guns and having the innate ability to naturally bunny-hop throughout the map without having to deal with TF2's inner code "preventing" such exploits. In Classic Mode, the Merc is either equipped with a tommy-gun or a shotgun. He uses a revolver for a secondary, and a crowbar for a melee. He's... Very average. As in, he doesn't strike as a unique class among the others. With that being said however, his b-hopping abilities make him a very viable asset to his team. The only thing preventing him from dominating the other enemy team being the map he's on, or sentry nests.

Of course, him being the sole character playable in regular deathmatch, he's just average. He can gather "pills" that greatly enhance his healthpool and his overheal takes more time to drain. He isn't great or bad in this mode, he's just what everyone uses. All of his weapons are especially busted, and some are variations of existing ones used by other classes. For example, he can use a rocket-launcher with enhanced practically in regards to rocket-jumping, a railgun that doubles itself as either a sniper rifle or a regular one-shotting railgun, a minigun that takes less time to rev up, a SUPER SHOTGUN, a double-barreled with a hook to catch other players, etc. etc.

Pros:
* You're average in every concievable way, but you're very versatile.
* ''BUILT-IN'', '''ENHANCED''', '''SUPPORTED''' B-HOPPING. This will allow you to speedrun your way throughout entire maps without the use of any weapons, making you just as fast (if not faster) than a Scout.
* Your overheal drains out slower than normal.
* You have access to a plethora of weapons, some of which are overhauled weapons of other classes specifically redesigned for you...

Cons:
*... but they're only available in Deathmatch.
* Well, in general, Deathmatch is the only mode in which the Merc truly shines. Mostly because he's the only one featured.

==Gamemodes==
Team Fortress 2 has four main gamemodes (Payload, King of the Hill, Control Points, Capture the Flag), each of which is a team-based objective centered around capturing points or advancing through a map. This also applies to the alternate gamemodes, of which there are several.

===Payload===

There's a big fucking bomb on rails and a big fucking bomb slot in the middle of RED's base. BLU wants to get the bomb there and shove it into their hole, RED wants to avoid getting that bomb jammed up their ass. The attacking team has to cluster around the bomb to 'push' it forward and capture multiple control points, with the exact speed at which it moves varying depending on the number of people riding the cart. If the cart isn’t pushed for a while, it will move backwards to the last captured point. If it’s on a slope when it’s not being pushed, then gravity does it for you.

Some maps like Goldrush, Hoodoo, or Thunder Mountain will span 3 stages across a single large map, while others like Badwater Basin, Frontier, or Upward will be one long map with multiple points. Frontier gets a special mention because its payload is a train with a set of teeth at the front called Lil' Chew Chew that you send to blow up in RED’s Base, and as long as anyone on BLU is on the payload while it moves, those teeth ''will'' kill anyone in the way.

====Payload Race====
Payload, but there's two holes and RED also has a payload to push. The first one to get their payload to its detonation point wins the game, so expect to see everyone running off to impede their enemy's payload while the cart sits on its own. Most games played will take place in '''High Tower,''' which is considered one of the more fun maps by the community’s standpoint.

===King of the Hill===
There's a single control point in the middle of the map. Both teams have a 3:00 minute timer that only decreases when they own the point; whoever holds the point when their clock hits zero wins.

===Control Point (A.K.A.: 5CP) ===
Both teams fight over the same 5 control points in a single map, with the victor being declared by who captured all of them in a game. 2 points will lead to each team’s base while the final one is dead center for everyone to fight over. Typically these games are symmetrical for both sides as players need to know when to start grabbing points, or defending a contested one. The more captured points a team has, the faster they can take the next one. Playing a Scout or a soldier/demoman with a Pain Train equipped will count as 2 players capturing, allowing for quicker captures and risky plays. While most games have 5 control points, Powerhouse may be the only map to have 3 points instead.

====Attack/Defend====
Both teams take turns playing the role of Attacker (BLU) and Defender (RED). The objective of the game is to defend all of the Control Points from BLU before they can occupy the point long enough to declare their capture. Once both teams have taken their turn, the winner is declared based on the points you captured before loading into a similar map to do it again.

The first and final control point will always be near the spawn of the BLU and RED teams, respectively. The reason behind this is pretty simple: the terrain initially plays heavily to RED's advantage by giving them all of the strong defensive positions to camp their sentries, high ground for mid-long range classes to exploit, and few to no barriers into essentially spawncamping BLU's base. BLU players must fight back against all odds before they gain the upper hand, with the final point almost always being RED's last stand.

(For example, Dustbowl's third section features a pre-built bunker for RED's sentries and no barriers on the way into BLU's starting area, meaning that a powerful assault can [[Anal Circumference|drive BLU all the way back to their spawn and keep them locked in there]] if there's good coordination between the RED members. By contrast, the final point has very little cover for RED to hide behind and a set of buildings around a blind bend which BLU can set up sentries and teleporters in, along with an ambush route that lets the BLU team bypass the only bridge across to the point.)

Some games will have just one set of points in a large map to capture (Steel, Gravel Pit, Gorge, etc.) while others take place over a set of 3 parts (Egypt, Dustbowl, Erebus, etc). There is also a medieval version that removes most guns (spare the primitive ranged weaponry like crossbows or bows and arrows) in favour of storming a castle with your melee.

====Arena====

Arena is a combat-oriented gamemode where both teams fight to the death, with a single capture point that has to be taken to also win the game. The catch is that it only unlocks after one minute and anyone dead is left to spectate until the game ends. This is for the players who want a more tactical, teamwork-focused version of KOTH/CP with rules similar to Counter Strike, another game by Valve. Coincidentally, when CSGO was released, Arena servers slowly evaporated...

...but unlike Territory Control, the community was able to salvage this game mode with various community mods; like one where Blu team is a single player controlling a powerful opponent like Saxton Hale, and the Red team has to work together to defeat him before they’re all killed. There is also one where everyone is a spy looking for a murderer in the midst, or the mod where one team is a bunch of harmless props that have to hide from a team of hunters in a version of hide and seek.

===Capture the Flag===

The enemy team has a briefcase full of intel in their base. Your job is to get that fucking briefcase, then haul it back to your base and deposit it in your intel room while the other team simultaneously tries to take yours. If you can't get it back in time, it returns to the original base. First team to three captures wins.

While it's a good gamemode overall, the most popular of the maps (2Fort) is also kinda notorious among hardcore players for hours-long, bloody stalemates and causing new players to embrace the worst parts of their class (Snipers camping battlements, Engineers setting up nests and never moving from them, etc.) There's also no protection against outright spawncamping of the "Station a Heavy and three sentry guns outside the only door" kind on many of the CtF maps, so you'd better hope [[That Guy]] isn't on your enemies' side.

===PASS Time===

[[What|Football, hockey, and basketball meet bloodsports.]] You're meant to carry a ball known as the JACK across the map and score at the opposing goal, but barely anyone plays this fucking thing.

===Medieval Mode===
You ever wanted to know what it'd be like if TF2 was a medieval fantasy rather than a hat collection simulator? If you do, welcome to Medieval Mode and its attendant map, Degroot Keep. The basic gimmick is that the classes aren't allowed any 'modern' tech, only 'medieval' stuff like melee weapons, crossbows, or shields; the attackers also have near-instant respawn to compensate for the defenders' heavy terrain advantage. One side has to attack and capture two control points to the side of the big ol' castle, then get past the main gate to capture the last central control point in the castle's keep itself. If they can take this last point within 60 seconds, the attackers win; if not, the gate closes and they have to recapture the other two points before trying again.

Thanks to the above restrictions, this means it's an absolute paradise for Demoknights, Spies, and Huntsman-equipped Snipers, with plenty of [[Rip and Tear]] to go around on all fronts; it's also probably where you'll pull off your first trimp-jump, thanks to the rocks there being designed specifically to facilitate long charge-jumps up onto the walls. The final control point in particular is a great place to experience what being a [[Khorne Berzerkers|Khornate Berserker]] is like up close and personal, as it inevitably devolves into a mosh pit whenever the gate opens up.

===Mann vs. Machine===

The only proper "Cooperative" mode, in which a team of six players is pitted against several waves of AI-controlled robots. The bots want to try and bring a bomb across the map to the Control Point you're defending; defeating them makes them drop cash, which can then be used to upgrade your abilities and weapons. You also have to fight powerful "Boss" robots with unique gimmicks at the end of each level as well as facing mid-wave minibosses like Tanks (durable but slow bombs on tracks,) meaning that team cohesion and good loadouts are crucial to this mode.

This mode also has a rather different meta to the main game due to the upgrades system and enemies, with otherwise mediocre weapons becoming robot-mulching superweapons and the potential for every class to play its part. (That said, Wrangler-Frontier Justice Engineers and Mad Milk/Fan-o-War/Force-A-Nature Scouts are pretty much auto-includes for MvM competitive courtesy of their sheer utility to the team in taking out/slowing down bomb carriers.) Completing Tours of Duty by spending RL money on one-use tickets also ensure you get a random Strange-quality "Botkiller" stock weapon, with a very small chance for the coveted Australium weapons to drop from the highest-difficulty campaigns.

Unfortunately, like any game of TF2, there are [[That Guy|tryhards]] that will ruin your day if you even slightly deviate from meta. Though those tryhards have a point with their aversion to people using the Gas Passer, given how braindead OP it is in this mode.

===Miscellaneous===
These poor bastards are the game modes that never really got out of beta or just aren't popular enough to justify their own options on the gamemode choice menu.

====Special Delivery====

Capture the Flag meets Payload. BLU needs to capture a neutral briefcase and drag it to a control point on a platform, which will slowly rise to the top of a rocket. If it reaches the top and the rocket launches, BLU win; if the timer runs out without the platform reaching the rocket's top, RED wins.

====Territorial Control====

The much-maligned meeting of Control Point, Attack/Defend, and KOTH, Territory Control's gimmick is that the game takes place in several different "territories" of a map known as Hydro. Each territory has only one control point, and capturing it captures the territory. Once a territory is capped, the map's layout is changed slightly (so unlike Dustbowl, you won't be fighting in the same order of environments every match) and the fight moves on to the next territory. Rinse and repeat until the final point is captured by BLU or a successful defence is made by RED.

Despite being a pretty cool concept and one of the first six maps ''ever'', a mixture of badly-explained rules, confusing layouts that led to rounds becoming steamrolls or stalemates (seriously, people got lost here even after the devs put in labelled signs; it was entirely possible to find and cap the point ''by accident'' within seconds of the round start), and the Control Points gamemode being "Territory Control, but without the flaws and more maps to play" pretty much resulted in Hydro being abandoned by developer and player alike mere months into TF2's launch, beyond the occasional achievement hunter or curious player. An ironic fate, for a gamemode intended to be infinitely replayable by the devs.

====Player Destruction====

Kill people and pick up the gubbinz they drop, then drop these gubbinz in a central collection point. Which the other side also uses, so be ready to get killed mid-deposit and have your points stolen.

====Robot Destruction====

Basically Player Destruction, but with NPC robots and the chance to steal briefcases containing enemy points. Can you tell why these never really caught on yet?

===Fanmade Modes===
These are the gamemodes cooked up by the community. While they're limited to unofficial community servers and the like, they're still pretty damned cool and are definitely worth a try.

====Zombie Fortress====
A zombie-survival fan mode where players try to run away through a map whilst other players are zombies and try to kill them. Those killed join the Zombie team and try to kill their former teammates. Many maps also include bossfights since just getting chased by zombies can get stale.

==== Zombie Escape ====
Similar to Zombie Fortress, only you can't fight back, so it's more like a combination of Zombie Fortress and Deathrun, trying to escape across platforming obstacle filled maps from Zombie players, with everyone killed joining the fast-approaching horde.

====Balloon Race====
A fan variation map for capture the flag featuring two flying ships with hot air balloons, similar to the ones the Horde used between Orgrimmar and Undercity in World of Warcraft. The players shoot at each other whilst riding the balloons, and try to capture the flag at specific stops. Recent leaks reveal that Valve was considering making an official map version.

====Deathrun====
A fan gamemode where players try to rush through a death course with only one life, while a single member of the opposite team controls traps throughout the course.

====Slender Fortress====
A fan gamemode where the living team is in a Multi-player version of Slender, with multiple monsters from either other franchises or tailor-made for Slender Fortress controlled by AI hunts them. Those who are killed can watch as ghosts to try and help the living, or go to the opposite team in a separate area that's supposed to be a safe place near where the monster lurks. One map is based off of Brutal [[Doom]], and features the Icon of Sin with a cyborg body as the end boss, which summons skeletons from the TF2 Halloween maps as minions.

====VS Saxton Hale/Freak Fortress====
A fan gamemode where an entire team of mercs goes against one player granted a super-powerful boss form, usually inspired by recurring GMod or Source Filmmaker TF2 characters, with the mercs given balance changes so they aren't hopelessly outmatched. The game ends when all the mercs are dead (no respawning in this mode, good luck) or when the boss is killed. The original boss was Saxton Hale, hence the name for the original version of this gamemode - Freak Fortress is a fork with different balance changes. Expect some weird and wacky big foes if you go on a random VSH/FF server.

Some notable protips:
*Bosses will (usually) oneshot you if they get a melee in. Keep your distance if possible, otherwise weave like your life depends on it (since it does).
*Spy's backstabs are even more risk-and-reward than normal gameplay - they deal massive damage to the boss, but put you in a position where the boss can easily kill you. Only go for them if the boss is distracted, or low enough a backstab would kill.
**This also applies to Soldier getting a Market Garden crit.
*Every boss has special abilities, though most of them share a super jump. [[Star Wars|The high ground will not save you]].
**Try to memorize what abilities do for common bosses (or if you're frequenting one specific VSH/FF server, all the bosses on that server).
*Doing a full taunt without Hale or whoever [[Anal circumference|shoving their fist up your ass]] gives you free minicrits. Useful for attacking at a distance while the boss is distracted.

==Grieviances==

Still, for all the good TF2 brought to the table, it is still a very skubby game to talk about today. For a variety of reasons:
* '''Valve's absolute disinterest''' : After holding the helm for many years, the TF2 Dev Team seemed to have abandoned ship a long time ago after the ''Jungle Inferno'' update. Ever since, the game's been invaded by cheaters, bots, scammers and other sorts of rats without end. No matter what the community did to give the game attention, Valve would just shrug off a few items and a few fixes and call it a day. Even though most of the bots are gone, there are still many, and Valve still hasn't committed to getting rid of the last of them. Due to the way the entire company functions, nobody really is entitled to work on it anymore. This, of course, enrages a lot of very loyal players, due to the fact that there are a lot of things worth addressing, especially hackers, but also that they promised to come back with the Heavy Update.
**Related to that, Valve has been accused of favoring both CS:GO and DOTA2 far more than TF2. While the two former fanbases actually claim that Valves also does not care about their game, they at least have the privilege of recieving frequent patchnotes and balance changes related to the reactions of the community... [[Skub|Sort of]]. What's for sure however is that both CS:GO and DotA have much larger playerbases, and that is mostly due to one game being very similar to COWADUTY in terms of aesthetics and having an insanely active streamer base, and the other being constantly patched and having very dedicated players. Moreso than TF2 some say.
* '''Valve's weird decision making''' : Some players have a tough time understanding the decisions made by the TF2 Team, especially regarding balance changes. This isn't new, for [[Skub|there always were massive, heated arguments about weapon stats in general]]. However, Valve's very own ideas regarding this are... [[RAGE|Questionable at best]]. Some of this is partially due to the fact that the devs always want to see specific usage of the weapon they design and nothing else, but also because of their...
* '''Archaic vision of the game''' : Granted, there are massive differences between the ''casual'' and ''competitive'' scenes of TF2. Neither propose the same experience and each's public can never be really satisfied. However, to say that Valve's vision of the game is quite ancient would be an understatement. Even if the meta is what guides the choices of many players in regards to their arsenal or their strategies, Valve just never takes those into considerations, sometimes ruining entire loadouts over just one "wrong" usage of a class. In short, Valve sees in sub-classes and experimentation failure in designing weapons and items.
* '''[[Hats]]''' : To some, Hats are a necessary evil since they keep the game alive, to others, they serve as an excuse for [[EA|other]] [[Blizzard|shady]] [[GW|businesses]] to push out microtransactions and lootboxes into their games. It doesn't help that Valve's crates were the blueprint that almost all lootboxes in other games would follow for the next decade. In TF2's defense, they had to compensate for the fact that the game is Free-to-play. But a lot of people nowadays complain that Valve now would rather spew a few cosmetic cases every year to make sure that they still make money out of the crates they sell instead of actually creating legitimate updates. This in turn causes the Workshop to be flooded with Hats, because they are more likely to be added in the game. The same goes for anything related to Smissmas or Halloween. Another complaint is that some players claim that a lot of people are mostly interested into trading only and wish to make money out of a pseudo-stock market. Which is funny, because when the day finally shuts down, all of their investments would have meant nothing.
**Weapons are included in this, but to a lesser extent. Cosmetic modifiers, reskins, warpaints, and more will drive up the price of a gun or bashing stick to expensive levels, but not to the degree that hats experience.
**All this economy and trading bullshit has contributed to the "[[Bullshit|it's not gambling]]" excuse for paid lootboxes dying since [[what|gambling on TF2 items on third party sites can actually be profitable]] (and if you think that's not bad, [[BLAM|the Commissar has one in the chamber with your name on it]] for obvious reasons), a problem it shares with fellow Valve micro-economy CS:GO. You read that right: people legitimately bet on virtual hats. This feels like a warning sign of what the NFT hellscape would be...
* '''[[That Guy|Those Guys]]''' : Some people just have a [[Khorne|massive hate-boner]] for the game. Either because of the sheer autism of the fanbase (in the case of the haters on 4chan, pot calling the kettle black), or because it just ''refuses to die''. You can see these [[Genestealers|literal bug-men]] yelling at clouds on boards like /v/ or /vg/. Their reasons are varied, but they all just wish people could just shut up about TF2. Some say it is because since Valve is disinterested into continuing the game, people should drop it too. Some other just think the community is just too cringe. In any case, a lot of these... Erm... "people" [[Extra Heresy|turn to cheating and bot-farming]], because they see this as a genuinely good way to chase players off of TF2. Ironically, [[Not as planned|this has caused many players to invest their time and efforts on creating fan games, modes, servers and content to compensate for Valve's lack of efforts against the bot-crisis]]. Much to their chagrin... But who the fuck actually cares about their chagrin, really?

==Wargame/RPG Ideas==
While no such Team Fortress RPG or Wargame exists, there have been many unfinished fan attempts and ideas, and generally the idea of a 9v9 TF2 skirmish game in the vein of [[Kill Team (Specialist Game)|Kill Team ]] would certainly be fun.

==Gallery==
<gallery>
File:C6840E80-86EA-484C-8F33-31E93737FC74.jpg|Ork Kill Team discovers and copies ancient Terran wargame
File:TF2 DnD.jpg|Now you too can be a batshit-insane mercenary, for only 20 keys!
</gallery>