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Nobledark Imperium Notable Planets

2020-09-01T21:05:58Z

2601:647:CA01:2410:443E:B2AA:ECA7:511A: /* The World That Wasn't */

'''This page is part of the Nobledark Imperium, a fan re-working of the Warhammer 40,000 Universe. See the [[Nobledark Imperium|Nobledark Imperium Introduction]] and [[Nobledark Imperium_Drafts|Main Page]] for more information on the alternate universe'''

There are many worlds across the galaxy, but not all of them reach the same level of fame.

= Worlds of the Imperium =

== The Sol System ==

=== Old Earth ===

<div class="toccolours mw-collapsible mw-collapsed" style="100%">''''' The Heart of the Imperium '''''

Cradle of humanity, keystone of the Imperium, armoured heart of civilization and bustling hub of commerce and industry. Home to trillions of loyal human citizens and every inch considered holy ground, it is from this cursed and blessed soil that the Imperium sprang in ancient day when primarchs marched alongside such near mythical figures as [[Nobledark_Imperium_Notable_People#Jenetia Krole|Jenetia Krole]], [[Nobledark_Imperium_Notable_People#Arik_Taranis|Arik Taranis]], Malcador and [[Nobledark_Imperium_Notes#Honen_Mu|Uxor Honen Mu]].

Once a dying world of techno-barbarians and later brought to near total ruin by the depravities of the Orks and the fallen Eldar it stands now as the ultimate testament that mankind with enough time and effort can recover from anything.

The surface from space is as verdant and pleasant to behold as any world this side of Heaven with pristine snow caps, azure seas teaming with fish, ancient forests and rolling fields punctuated by towering spire cities seemingly made of silver and diamond that catch the setting and rising of the sun to become polished copper and ruby. The likeness of Old Earth seen in dreams of some idyllic future of a time some say can only exist in innocent dreams of childhood.

For all it's beauty Old Earth is not soft, The Beast taught Earth that weakness is not excusable.

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Those pretty fairy tale spires and the living green paradise are built and grown over fortifications designed by the primarch [[Nobledark_Imperium_Primarchs#Perturabo|Perturabo]], genius prince of Macedonia and mad architect of the Imperium. For all that the world is beautiful it is deadly.

The towering Hive Cities of Perturabo's design have expanded somewhat and extend miles deep into the stygian deeps but remain based upon the same design principles. The hives as seen from the surface are great majestic souring edifices that are graceful and splendid and hide very well that they were designed to be enormous death traps and meat grinders to anyone stupid enough to try and attack them. The streets can form choke points, there are many avenues that would make great killing grounds, all the spires are designed to have an artillery piece placed atop them at a moments notice and there are void shield generators. Also those marble looking walls are mostly made of layers of adamantium, ceremite and shock absorbing plasteel.

What of the hives, great as they be, that can be seen from the surface is also only the tip of the iceberg. Their roots go deep, deep into the bedrock. The greatest depth is to the places where the Earth is hot and from it abundant and perpetual power is drawn. As deep as they are they are also in the Stygian depths broad and the roots of the chrome and glass mountains range far. Far enough to entangle with their neighbours like hands held out to a friend in the darkness. It is known that you can circumnavigate that most august of globes without breaking the surface from pole to pole and back round the other side and around the equator and any other direction that takes your fancy. Indeed there are whole nations down there that live and die and never see the surface for generations at a time.

But for all that might be imagined of cramped and claustrophobic labyrinthine darkness the ways and paths are airy and full of light. Perturabo did not design prisons with which to undo the victory of The Beast. Indeed he did not, Old Earth is the jewel in the crown and the throne of the Imperium, birth world of mankind.

Dotted around the surface with great regularity are strange and deep pits with seeming no bottom for one stood upon the top. These are the great ventilation and light wells but also emergency entrances and exits in times of need. They plunge into the depths where the underground kingdoms dwell, the places where the earth meets the sky. And if one was to descend those great depths they would find no lair of twisted things but forests and fields and pleasant seas the likes of which could grace the surface of and look not out of place.

Layer upon layer of civilization built upon itself like pages of some great living tome down into the deeps. And still further the pits go until they pass from the minds of common men to the darker realms of stranger things. The sunless seas where swim pale fish and tunnels dug by unknown hands though not the hands of ancient man. Those wise men of the Dark Age never dug this deep. Sometimes an explorer or a surveyor will come to these places to mark and map and see and though no harm will come to them but the harm they bring with them they will know that they are watched.

From great height of orbits Old Earth is a green and verdant paradise as once it may have looked in the Golden Age when men, it is said, were as the gods are but no work of god alone is that Eden. Through sweat and toil and the plans of The Mad Architect was that walled garden and by the might and will of man is it defended, as is all the Imperium.

Upon that ancient globe is found the Imperial Palace, a surprisingly modestly adorned but great spire in the centre of the ancient city of Moskgród. Here is the official residence of the Golden Emperor and the All-Mother, eternal be their reign. From here the direction of a million worlds is set, all great mortal endeavour guided. From here civilization springs forth but here the Royal Couple are seldom found for they are often abroad about their realm ever diligent to ensure that their appointed governments are just and in their turn diligent.

Further East is found the great Fortress of Justice where law is decided and rightness judged. It is here in a the rambling hive of Tordashimya that the Judges of the Adeptus Arbites are told by what standards they must judge.

Upon that globe but far away amongst the tallest mountains of Himalayzia lies the Hall of the Astronomican, the great lighthouse that allows our Imperium to function and permits the fey breed of Navigators to traverse the seas of the warp. A great crystalline and wraithbone edifice in shape like a great bowl with rowed stands like some strange amphitheatre where trained psychics scream into the void to impose upon it some measure of order. It is by their efforts that the warp travel is a practical option at all.

About that ancients worlds equator are at regular intervals are sixty four orbital tethers, far more than any other world in the Imperium. At the top of those impossible towers of Savlar Neutronium sit the vast tether-top trade stations. Each one based upon an asteroid brought into geosynchronous orbit now each a great city-state in their own right with laws and customs growing in distinction and age. Typically in shape they have a central hub with wings extending from it like the petals of an impossible metal flower. Connecting each of these strange nations together is a high speed transport tube that joins the flowers like a chain, turning the orbitals into a floral circlet with which to crown Old Earth and has earned this great structure among the common man the name of The Daisy Chain.

The old nations that once raised the founders of our Imperium still exist after a fashion, from the territories of Clan Terrawatt to the Kingdoms of Antarctica to even the lands of Hy Brasil but now as administrative districts that make up the patchwork of the surface that august world. The ground upon which the Primarchs once walked is held in all due reverence and even the tombs of those godlike men are still standing after all this time for all to see.

All those lands, those ancient names, remain alive but not unchanged. All bar Himalayzia that none might walk upon without leave of his Majesties appointed representatives.

Of the teeming billions that call that beautiful world home an uncommon number are blessed but also heavily burdened. Blessed because they are like the Golden Emperor but burdened also for they carry the sight of the witch. The greatest scholars and teachers of the psychic arts have often been found upon the Old Earth and with the loss of Prospero now exists without true peer or equal. It is the natural place for young psychics to be brought both for their own safety and so that their gifts can be used for the good of the many rather than the damnation of the self. Trained and disciplined sanctioned psykers are the most well known export of the Earth.

Not to be ignored or overlooked are the soldiers of that world. Though exempt from the draft many request, even demand, the right to fight for hearth and home against a hateful galaxy. Although not as well known maybe as the likes of Cadia the Terran Guard, the Old 100 Regiments especially, are known to be fearless to a fault and full of fire. Varied greatly in their doctrines of war and often holding true to the old ways of their ancient nations they make war as they have for time beyond mind.

It is said that there are still mysteries on that old world. That not everything is known. That relics from the older ages remain hidden, shrouded in shadows and forgetfulness, the great archives of ancient lore of old Persepotropolis were well accounted for in ancient days but rumours abound that maybe more survived and other things of that nature besides. Almost certainly the fabrications of the tourist companies.

Many faiths hold this ground as holy, and if any ground be holy to man it is this. This was where civilization died and was reborn, the eldar might venerate the Phoenix but here are the ashes from which it arose and never again will that fire grow cold or the light of civilization grow dim.

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=== Mars ===

=== Ganymede ===

According to the Adeptus Administratum, this moon of Jupiter is quarantined due to a warp contamination accident that occurred early in the Great Crusade. This is, in fact, a lie. In reality, Ganymede is a big containment and storage facility for all the weird stuff the Inquisition recovers and cannot destroy for various reasons or items that would otherwise destabilize the Imperium. Technically it's overseen by the Administratum, but in practice it's joint run with the Inquisition because someone has to give the drones training.

Among the weird stuff housed in Ganymede is

- The only surviving copy of Lorgar's "Black Manuscript" (probably, if it's just not plain lost)
- Blade of the Laer (Lucius' long-term goal is taking the sword)
- [[Nobledark_Imperium_Notes#Apep|Apep]], the first, last, and only Daemon Prince of Malal.
- [[Nobledark_Imperium_Writing#Happy_New_Year|Legienstrausse]]
- [[Nobledark_Imperium_Notes#Jaq Draco|Inquisitor Jaq Draco]]
- A dimension distorting container obtained by an unnamed Inquisitior of the Ordo Chronus.
- A sealed room with the mark of the Terminus on it
- The "key" to the Gates of Vaul
- A human preserved in amber estimated to be several million years old
- A set of lock picks that can open anything. Anything.
- A possible Old One relic known as The Shadowlight. It activates latent psykers who touch it and kills horribly everyone else in it's current configuration. Reconfiguring it tears holes in reality.
- At least two copies of the Dark Age nanobot weapon of mass destruction known as the Bloodtide. One of which had its central intelligence scooped out and possessed by a Bloodthirster, the other, used by Voldorius, just sane enough to keep begging for death.

=== Pluto and Charon ===

=== Webway Gates of the Sol System ===

The Sol system has five Webway gates; all made by the master bonesingers of [[Nobledark_Imperium_Notable_Planets#Yme-Loc|Yme-Loc]] in the years since the formation of the alliance. Although the eldar do not know how to make massive changes or repairs to the Webway, they do know how to make new gates, and living structure of the Webway usually shifts to accommodate them. However, it is still a long and involved process to get new gates to properly sync up to the existing Webway. Of all the Craftworlds, Yme-loc retains the greatest amount of information on how to make new gates and the quality of their craftsmanship is well known throughout the Imperium.

It is unlikely that there were any Webway gates in the Sol system before those placed by Yme-Loc, at least by the eldar. Any active Webway gate in the Sol system known to the Old Eldar Empire would have given them a massive advantage in any military confrontation, the same kind that prevented the Interstellar League from holding Eldar territory, and it is likely that the Great and Powerful Human Dominion would have searched out and destroyed any Webway gates in the Sol system for this very reason. [[Bullshit|If any such gates existed in the long span between the War in Heaven and mankind colonizing their home system,]] [[Old Ones|they are surely lost to history]].

The first Webway gate is located in the heart of the Imperial Palace. This is the primary means by which the Royal Couple enter and exit the Imperial palace, as well as the entrance for diplomats and representatives from the Craftworlds. As a potential weak spot in the Imperial Palace's structure, it is guarded zealously by the Custodians and the Handmaidens. The second is located not too far away, on the Salisbury Plain of what was once Gredbriton. It is the main entrance to Sol for all those who are not famous diplomats. Like most Web way gates on human inhabited worlds, the exit in the Materium is fortified by the Silver Skulls Astartes chapter, who have turned the area around the gate into a killbox for any Crones or Dark Eldar foolish enough to think they have a ready entry point into the heart of the Imperium. The third Web way gate is located on Luna near the famous Luna shipyards. This is the main port of entrance for eldar space craft into the Sol system.

The remaining two Web way gates do not officially exist. These two are located on the moons of the gas giants, specifically Titan and Ganymede. As two of the only predominantly human institutions allowed free use of the Webway, the Grey Knights and Inquisition find the Webway gates invaluable to their work, as it allows them to travel across the breadth of the galaxy in a fraction of the usual time to quickly respond to any emergency. Additionally, in the event of a crisis on Ganymede, the Grey Knights can be there in an instant without having to waste time boarding a ship. This also helps to keep the true nature of Ganymede a secret. Not having a constant stream of ships going in-and-out of the forbidden planet helps keep the cover story of its contamination intact.

== Armageddon ==

Armageddon is a world of steel and fire.

First, the steel. The Orks, when they took back the planet Ullanor and transformed the world into their Attack Planet, coated it entirely in armor plate and gun batteries, every former geological feature paved over, even the oceans drained for reactor coolant or simply built over with vast platforms. Ullanor gained a second crust of iron over its previous one of stone. Exactly where the Orks got all this metal is unknown, the current best guess is they used teleporters to extract it directly from the world's core or from the cores of nearby planets and asteroids.

Then, the fire. When Ollanius Pius slammed his ship at a third lightspeed into the Attack Planet and knocked it off its collision course with Old Earth, the force of impact broke the stone crust like a dropped vase. Immense volcanic fissures opened up swallowing vast sections of the gun-continents, mountains that should have taken millennia to form were thrust up in a day, the oceans rushed back to their former positions, everything not covered in lava was covered in ash.

Enough of the teleporter system survived for just long enough for the Mekboyz to hit the big red button and teleport the Attack Planet one last time.

When the Imperium re-encountered the world which had once been Ullanor, it was shattered almost beyond recognition. Vast plumes of ash carpeted the continents. The rust oceans were filled with toxic metals from flooded war machines and boiled from undersea volcanoes. The continents were speckled with standing seas of molten metal where volcanic heat met mind-boggling amounts of steel. The air consisted mainly of volcanic gasses, with occasional pockets of breathable air scattered throughout the mangled planet-spanning superstructure.

There were still Orks all over the place, of course. Fighting among each other and trying to repair machines they no longer had the WAAAAAGH-power to comprehend.

Its conquest by the Imperium was swift and thorough. The Steward, still angry and grieving over all the Beast had taken from him, lead the conquest personally, clearing the world in less than a month. He renamed it Armageddon, for what it had so nearly wrought.

Then, after the conquest came the industry. Great siphons were erected to sup metal from the molten lakes. Then factories. Mines. Hives. Mechanicus and Biologis terraformers to make the air something other than ash and acid.

Now, Armageddon is a wasteland of industry. River-deltas of liquid iron carry metal from the natural volcanic smelters to the millions of factories. Excavation machines the size of Titans carry megatons of scrap metal to the volcano-forges. Despite the best efforts of the Biologis, hardy engineered grasses spreading out over endless ash plains, gas masks and heavy protective clothing is still required outside the hives. Even the ash is made useful, mixed into concrete or exported by the millions of tons to enrich the soil of thousands of agri-worlds.

Even after ten thousand years of this there is still so much material left. Endless armor plate. Forests of macrocannon making empty threats at empty sky. Hangars filled with rusted war machines stretching out to the horizon. And still so many Orks. It is traditional for the regiments of the Steel Legion to cut their teeth suppressing feral Ork populations before deploying to the wider Imperium.

Even after ten thousand years of human control, Armageddon is still in many ways an Ork world. Seen from orbit, even through the glowing scars and ash, the original shape of its structures is still dimly visible; a grinning, tusked skull.

== Cadia ==

<div class="toccolours mw-collapsible mw-collapsed" style="100%">''''' Gateway to the Eye of Terror '''''

Cadia was green, once. There were forests, green plains of flowing grass, lakes and rivers. The sky was blue, once. The air was clean. Once.

That was a long, long time ago, though. Before nobody knows how many millions of nukes went off in that clean sky, before how many millions of tons of gas and poison were released by both sides, before how many daemonic hordes trampled over its surface and were pushed back by how many billions of tanks.

The people of Cadia in those days were not so much Chaos worshippers as they were maltheists. Little more than tribal-hunter gatherers, with knapped stone tools and eyes specifically adapted to filter out the impossible colors and sights that should not be that filled the Cadian aurora at night. They believed the Chaos Gods existed, for only a fool would not on that world, but they only offered them curses or, at best, prayed that the dark gods would find them too insignificant to be worth noticing. For this was Cadia, doorstep to the Eye of Terror, and here Chaos did not have to be subtle or enticing to claim its victims. Like all tribal worlds the Cadians had stories of monsters in the dark eager to snatch the unwary, leaving only the sound of daemonic laughter echoing on the winds, only due to being right next to the Eye of Terror these stories were more literal than most. What the Imperium did is give the inhabitants guns, and taught them that the daemons of Chaos could be fought, and more importantly, killed.

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Despite its importance to the modern Imperium, Cadia did not become a part of the modern Imperium until after the War of the Beast. Cadia was first discovered by the Word Bearers 10th Expeditionary Fleet led by Bishop-Captain Kol "The Anointed" Badar, backtracing the routes used by the forces of the Beast and the Crone Eldar to try and figure out where they had come from. Kol was not an Astartes himself but commanded nearly a thousand of them plus appropriate Imperial Army elements. He was a curmudgeonly old priest from the Yndonisian Bloc and although it was buried under a lot of crust and grump he had had a good heart. Upon landing on Cadia, Kol took one look at the violet-eyed tribals living as good men under a broken sky to spite the dark gods and called for reinforcements. Upon seeing the scale of the request, the Administratum asked Kol what in the world he needed the reinforcements for. Badar’s response was curt and brazen. “We’re going to besiege Hell”.

Kol’s idea sent shockwaves through the Imperium. Some were appalled. Dorn was said to have claimed it was the best idea the “choir boys” had ever come up with. And yet, once the initial shock had passed, turning Cadia into a Fortress World sounded like an increasingly good idea. The region of space between the Eye of Terror and Sol was always likely to be a contested space as long as Chaos was interested in toppling the Imperium. However, examination of the region of space around Cadia showed that the planet was positioned in an anomalously calm region of space bordering the Eye of Terror, actually slightly within the Eye if you were to look at the stellar maps. Although barely wide enough to hold the Cadian system, the region around Cadia represented the easiest and most reliable way for Crone fleets leaving the Crone Worlds to attempt to march on Sol. By fortifying the only major entrance and exit from the Eye of Terror the Imperium would essentially deny Chaos any real long-term foothold in realspace.

Ulthwé also approved the idea, given that the Craftworld was typically been the first target of Chaos marauders due to its proximity to the Eye they loved the idea of a bulwark against Chaos that wasn’t them. The modern population of Cadia is derived from a mix of the original natives and the numerous immigrants resettled from across the Imperium to populate the planned Fortress World. Although the natives were enthralled by the idea that the daemons that had haunted them for millennia were actually able to be banished by mortal men, a tribal population in the millions who were just getting the hand of not using stone tools is not enough to man an entire fortress world, and the Imperium knew it. Most of the culture of modern Cadia is also heavily influenced by Ulthwé and the native Cadians (especially Ulthwé, whose population is an order of magnitude greater than Cadia), who had to teach the new wide-eyed immigrants how to survive on a world where the worshippers of the Ruinous Powers are your next door neighbor.

That was all a long, long time ago. Cadia isn’t green anymore.

The ground is churned mud, discolored by the iridescent sheens of ancient chemical weapons. The sky is bruised smog, the air corrosive and lethal in minutes. Geiger counters crackle and hiss. All landmarks, all features of terrain, have been chewed up by artillery barrages and orbital bombardment until all that is left of entire mountains is mud-filled craters. Unexploded munitions, some millennia old, litter the ground. Every rain exposes ancient corpses and ruined war machines, to be covered back up when the ground shifts again.

Imagine if the battle of Verdun had continued for ten thousand years.

Civilization on Cadia, such as it is, has moved underground. Vast underground vaults, hardened against shock and bombardment, house factories, armories, farms, apartments, schools, mines. All sheltered from the attention of enemy warships by at least a hundred meters of rock, if not more.

Each of these cities is, of course, also a fortress. Every corridor a chokepoint, every intersection a killzone, every building a bunker. Every entrance rigged to collapse. In many cases, the entire city is rigged for total destruction if it falls, to deny resources to the enemy and spite them one last time. Atomic demolition charges, magma floods from geothermal taps, simply bringing the ceiling down with melta bombs.

The entire planet is a fortress, spiderwebbed with defensive lines and connected by underground passages. There is not a point on the planet that cannot be hit with at least one gun. Individual bunkers fight on for as long as possible before the crew abandons the position and falls back to the next line through the tunnel system, just a hundred meters away. Areas the enemy thinks secure are struck by commandos through secret passages and hidden sally-ports. Fortresses surrounded on the surface can hold out for years with supplies flowing into them through the tunnels. When the enemy gets into the tunnels, they will find nothing but booby-traps, collapsed passages, and ambushes.

Some of the bunker systems extend down halfway to the mantle. Even if the surface, the cities, the top fortification layers, all fall, resistance will continue. Tunneling machines loaded with atomics crawling up from the depths, like very slow ICBMs.

Imagine a combination of the Maginot Line, VC tunnel systems, and the Japanese defense of Peleliu and Iwo Jima.

Normally, the reaction of the Archenemy to defenses of such magnitude would be warp-work, drown it in daemons and drive the defenders mad. Not on Cadia, not with the Pylons, not under a Null-Field powerful enough to stitch the Eye of Terror shut. Daemon engines stutter and malfunction, Nurgle's plagues are banished by conventional treatment, daemons are banished by the humble lasgun. Victory will have to be by fire and blood.

Sadly, Chaos has plenty of that as well.

In places, the bodies of the dead are mounded high enough to be terrain features.

The stone of Cadia is unnaturally resilient. The Archenemy has attempted to destroy the world with nearly every method ever conceived at one time or another. Cyclonic torpedoes, mass orbital bombardment, ram attacks by Space Hulks and entire fleets, vortex bombs to the planetary core. A dozen things that should have left Cadia a drifting asteroid belt, and yet the fortresses and deep bunkers still stand. Something is holding Cadia together, and for years nobody knew for certain exactly what.

The most commonly proposed theory was that the planet’s resilience was related to the Cadian Pillars, the strange, alien pylons constructed of an unknown material by an alien race long before the Eldar had even explored the region after the War in Heaven. The Cadian Pillars are extremely tough, shrugging off anything less than a direct, focused attack. Above their surface they appear to be simple obelisks, whereas below they are linked together by a network of metallic roots that in some cases were all that held the planet’s crust together after Chaos bombardment. Bizarre natural phenomena have also been suggested as a possible explanation, and a few bold iconoclasts whisper that it might be the work of Chaos, a manifestation of its self-defeating nature. In the end, nobody knows; but Cadia would have long fallen without it.

However, in recent times, a darker side to Cadia's story has emerged. Cadia's position as the lone bastion of realspace within the immaterial turmoil of the Eye of Terror was not due to chance. The Cadian Pillars have been discovered to be of Necron origin (possibly as the brainchild of the C’tan only known as Mag’ladroth, also known as the Void Dragon), having been built by the Necrontyr Star Empire in ancient times across and beneath the Cadian surface. The fact they built this device so close to the Eldar homeworld speaks of hubris, or spite, or both. This explained the unnatural resilience of Cadia and the pylons, if the pylons were of Necron origin, then it made sense that they would want to make them as hard to destroy as possible. The Cadian Pillars have the passive effect of "anchoring" the planet and its surroundings more reliably in realspace, allowing Cadia to exist even after the fabric of space-time was warped during the Fall of the Eldar. However, when fully activated the Cadian pillars would act like a wedge, separating the Warp from reality and ripping out the souls of almost every living thing in the Milky Way. Their original purpose was most likely to kill off the Old Ones as well as their psychic servant races such as the Krork and the proto-Eldar, but fortunately the Necrontyr (or more likely, the Necrons) were driven off before this task could be complete.

However, now that the Necron Star Empire has returned to the galactic scene, they seek to use the Cadian Pillars once more. The Silent King has stated as much. The Silent King seeks to use the Cadian Pillars to starve out the forces of Chaos and return the Warp to the Realm of Souls, finally fixing the last of the damage done to the galaxy by the War in Heaven. The fact that this would killing off every living thing with a soul is seen as a regrettable though necessary evil. It is uncertain whether the Cadian Pillars are the only part of this device or coordinate a series of devices throughout the galaxy, but it is clear that Cadia is a lynchpin in the Silent King’s plans.

Now that the Imperium knows the truth about the Cadian Pillars, engineers from a hundred worlds and a dozen species have travelled to Cadia to try and figure out how to shut the pillars down, but none have figured out a way to dismantle the pillars, let alone do so in a way that would allow Cadia to remain existing and restrict the flow of Chaos Forces in and out of the Eye of Terror.

Now Cadia faces the threat of a siege on two sides. An invasion by Chaos from the front and the Necrons from behind. Cadia may be on the opposite side of the galaxy from the seat of the Silent King’s power, but even it depends on reinforcements from the Gate Worlds to survive any protracted siege. Letting either the Necrons or Chaos get a hold of the world could prove disastrous.

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=== Resettlement of Cadia ===

It is common (although far from universal) practice for long- serving regiments of the Imperial Army to be given worlds, or parts of worlds, to settle (or re- settle, in many cases) for their retirement. This is simultaneously a sentimental gesture, a lavish reward for years of service to the Imperium, and a practical one; worlds colonized by ex- Guardsmen usually develop highly martial cultures, which will contribute many more fine Guard regiments in the centuries and millennia to come. Also, worlds colonized by Guardsmen are more likely to survive their early years with a bunch of fully equipped veteran soldiers as a PDF.

Although regiments of any world may be selected for colonization, there are a few which pursue these initiatives with unique fervor. One such is the Fenrisian Line, as the Space Wolves try to expand their recruitment population. But by far the most visible and prolific are the Cadians, who pursue settlement with special fervor.

Part of this is simply how many Cadian regiments there are throughout the galaxy. But mainly it is a function of the nature of Cadia itself. The immense fortifications, coating the entire surface of the world and crawling deep into the crust, require tens of billions of soldiers to man properly at minimum. Preferably hundreds of billions; in theory the barrack vaults of the deep tunnels while in top condition could accommodate as many as a trillion men, although this has never been actually achieved. And with every Black Crusade that garrison is brutally decimated, with losses sometimes climbing as high as ninety percent. (At least every drop of Cadian blood is brought with a river of the enemies'.)

In the wake of every Black Crusade, it is imperative that the defenses be rebuilt and remanned as quickly as possible. Even with the main conflict over, as long as the Gate's defenses are compromised raiding bands by the hundred will continue to flow through to plague the Imperium. And not just anyone will do; it needs to be people with a tradition of resistance to Chaos both physically and spiritually, of stubborn, heroic resistance in the face of overwhelming odds, down to the last ditch; who have been doing so for so long it has gone past the cultural and down to the genetic. In short, the Cadian Gate needs to be manned by Cadians.

On each of the thousands of worlds colonized by Cadians, the traditions of Cadia are maintained. Universal conscription with military training starting from the early teens, bunker as the basic mode of architecture, sending out hundreds of regiments to fight in the wider galaxy. Worlds colonized by the Cadians almost invariably become fortress worlds and major Army recruiting worlds, bulwarks of the local defense. They would be deeply valuable to the Imperium for that alone.

And when Cadia lies wounded in the wake of yet another war, they respond. Dispatching soldiers, workers, and colonists by the billion to restore and man damaged defenses and refill empty cities. Thanks to its colonies, it takes mere decades for Cadia to recover after each Black Crusade instead of centuries.

It is estimated, by the Dark Clerks and Grim Statisticians, that the effect of Cadia's colonies on the Imperial defense are about equal to Cadia and the Gate itself. For this, they are referred collectively as the Cadian Shield, a defense stretching across the entire galaxy.

== Catachan ==

EDITOR'S NOTE: Tyranid section has to be rewritten since Catachan devils aren't tyranids in this timeline, tyranids stole genetic information from Catachan via genestealers to make them more killy.

<div class="toccolours mw-collapsible mw-collapsed" style="100%">''''' The Green Hell '''''

Catachan was discovered towards the end of what is referred to as the First Stellar Exodus by automated sub-sapient probe at or about the cross over point of M4 – M5. Initial hopes were high as it was a planet with a breathable atmosphere and a thriving ecosystem that appeared to be made of carbon based life forms. The probe made several orbits of the planet before moving on to survey the other planets in the system and move on to the next. It wasn’t until ~500.M5 that increasingly reliable warp drives made expeditions of such range, and so close to the currents of near-Hub territory, a practical possibility that a proper survey team was sent to the planet. Of the surviving member of the 100+ team a harrowing report was made that resulted in the planet being quarantined.

For the entire lifespan of the Great and Bountiful Human Dominion the planet was a no-go site. Occasionally down the long centuries other research teams would descend upon the world. Briefly. Sometimes members would survive but always it would be costly. It was discovered that there was an ork population native to the planet missed for a long time due to them being mid level on the food chain at best. The planet remained the stuff of dark legend and decidedly off limits although given it’s uselessness for anything practical it was more obscure than forbidden, a curiosity of biologists and few others.

When the Age of Strife and the great churning of the warp started several ships were washed out of the warp half wrecked and not too distant from Catachan. If they hadn’t have heard of the world they would have had record of it in their ships data-stacks but faced with the probability of death in greenhouse hell and certain death in the cold of space they chose the path of most likely survival.

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The sites of the original crash/landings are hard to decipher but are of such antiquity that they are no longer of any practical concern. Any technology on the ships would have broken down an age ago at least and raw materials salvaged by those that came afterwards.

It is known that at least one of the stranded ships, before the technology broke down, dabbled in the art of genetic modification. Their environment proved too durable to lastingly change so they had to change themselves to be more resilient. It is believed that this worked for some considerable time, certainly by the time things started to go wrong they had lost the ability to correct the damage. Generation after generation the differences between them and the baseline humans exaggerated and the result was the Primeval Ogryn population encountered by the fledgling Imperium in the days of the Great Crusade.

Curiously the beseline humans that interbred with the altered humans in the days before they became too divergent did not have degenerating offspring and instead seemed to take on a tiny touch of the Ogryn without most of the down sides. It is suspected that this is the origin of the in/famous Catachan physique, as well as an increased likelihood of developing joint and heart problems.

As society regressed to a more primitive state they knew nothing of the comings and goings of the galaxy. The first generations held out hope that someone would come from the Bountiful Dominion to rescue them but as the years ticked by such old memories became nothing more than stories that were eventually forgotten.

Thankfully the human inhabitants discovered iron veins close to the surface. It is possible that these were first taken from the native orks, fighting them off with the last dregs of their inherited high-tech weapons. Whatever the case by the time the Imperium discovered them the human inhabitants of Catachan were could make steel of varying quality.

The planet itself has one major landmass with the bulk largely around the equator though in the extremities it can reach to almost temperate latitudes. The land is stretched out rather than one continuous block with many lagoons, bays and inland seas separated by dense jungles at the feet of heavily wooded mountains. Predominantly the human population is found along the rivers and in the foothills of the mountains with the beaches and higher slopes shunned for being too exposed and the “Deep Green” being seldom travelled due to the high lethality of the environment.

The deadly nature of the Deep Green has little to do with orks, with whom the Catachans have warred with constantly over the habitable lands, but because of real predators. The Ogryn are the only ones brave and hardy enough to traverse those places where it is said the gods of Catachan dwell.

The Ogryn have responded as well as any population of their kind to the Adeptus Biologicus uplift attempts. They are smarter now than they were, more inclined to team work and tool usage and that makes up for the decrease in strength and endurance. The other population of note is the furtive pygmy peoples of the islands. They are not abhumans and their small stature is just a case of island dwarfism and nothing more. Due to their remote locations and primitive nature it has been considered a waste of resources to try and make extensive contact with them, certainly there are none in the Imperial Guard.

The Imperial Guard regiments raised on that verdant world make some of the hardiest fighters in the Imperium, provided they are deployed somewhere tropical and for preference in a Jungle. It was quickly realized by the Imperial Army Brass that it was necessary to mix the tribal elements thoroughly as they will form alliances and in-regiment gangs if left in a big enough pre existing group. Mixing them up so that there is only one or two squads at most from any given tribe in a regiment and them separated by company worked well, especially when provided with a pro-Imperium priest. One other method suggested was to regiments segregated by tribe but this was dismissed as it sounded like a quick way to have whole tribes devastated if things went catastrophically ploin shaped.

It is known that many Tyrannid life forms share some characteristics with the native Catachan wildlife. This is evidence suggesting that the planet was invaded by a hive fleet, or more likely some small elements of a broken one, at some time in the Imperial Era. One of two things have happened since then; the planet ate and absorbed the Tyrannids as it did the orks and to a lesser extent human settlers or the Hive managed to get genetic material from the planet and disseminate it across the fleets. Either way nobody noticed the invasion. The planet is also known to have devoured at least nine minor and two medium sized WAAAAGH!!!s, a Q’orl migration and a Loxatl incursion to say nothing of countless Dark and Chaos eldar raiding endeavours. The planets greatest deterrent to invasion is the nature of the planet itself.

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== Colchis ==

See [[Nobledark Imperium Member States#Colchis|Colchis]]

== Cthonia ==

<div class="toccolours mw-collapsible mw-collapsed" style="100%">''''' Heart of the Great and Bountiful Human Dominion: '''''

Cthonia. The ring. Last and greatest remnant of the Bountiful and Benevolent Terrestrial Dominion. Symbol of humanity's incomprehensible height... and of how very, very far it has fallen.

Cthonia is located a mere 79 light-years from Old Earth, encircling one of the suns in the four-star Regulus system, one of the brightest lights visible from the Sol system. Exactly why humanity decided to build a ringworld in a four-star solar system, which would by all means be perhaps the worst place to try and build such a structure, is unknown, beyond perhaps that humanity and the Iron Minds tried to do it for the sole reason of seeing whether or not it could be done. Perhaps the Old Eldar Empire were not the only Dark Age power with a case of hubris. The fact that the other three stars in the system provided raw material and energy for fusion reactions and molecular forges certainly helped smooth out any initial efficiencies. Eventually Cthonia became the heart of the Great and Bountiful Human Dominion, eventually even eclipsing the homeworld of Earth itself.

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What was it like, in its heyday? Nobody alive knows. The Mechanicus has some idea; vast telescope arrays staggered light-years apart in deep space, drinking in fossil light from its construction, taking decades to assemble a single picture from stray photons. Vague blurred shapes and impressionist insinuations; of the vast machines siphoning matter and energy from the sun to build it, of the swirling blue-green-white of a million continents, of the golden glow of cities stretching from one edge to the other. Enough to inspire questions and fire imaginations, but not provide answers.

What is it like now? Scoured clean. The Iron War was at its most ferocious here. Towards the end, even the primary star was used as a weapons, induced to go nova. The system still bears the scars, shells of cold gas cast off from that massive conflagration surrounding Cthonia. Everything on the inward face was annihilated, leaving only an endless expanse of bare, gleaming neutronium. Only systems contained within the exotic matter band itself or mounted on the outward face survived the nova... and very few of those survived all of the other ordnance being thrown around.

The Imperium dreams of one day recreating the Ring. But at this point, it would only be somewhat less of an undertaking than creating one anew. The neutronium base, most difficult to create, still exists, but everything else is gone. Hundreds of thousands of living worlds would need to be stripped bare to provide air and water and soil. Every forge world in the galaxy would need to devote themselves entirely to the effort for a thousand years. Perhaps, if the galaxy was at peace, the Imperium victorious without qualification, it could be done.

Until then, they settle for sending more expeditions into tunnels and ruins already picked over a hundred times before. And they create art.

The Cthonian Ring, past, present, and hopeful future is a common subject of painting, statuary, literature, and other arts. In painting, the 'Ring Triptych' is almost a genre unto itself, combining past, present, and future into a single image. Mechanicus facilities often have a sculpture of the Cthonian Ring prominently displayed; a skilled connoisseur can often identify faction and ideological leanings by the details of the sculpture. Portraits of the Emperor occasionally depict the Ring circling his brow like a crown, a symbol of office and the once and future might of Mankind.

(The most famous of these portraits is Callimant d'Argan's 'Image of Man and Emperor', which shows Oscar almost swallowed up entirely by a massive Ring/crown, the man lost in the weight of history and of the office. The original hangs in Oscar's private quarters on the Traveling Court. This is well known, so duplicates are prominently displayed by ambitious nobility the galaxy over, most of whom miss the symbolism entirely.)

Cthonia, now, is a symbol. A symbol of what precisely varies from speaker to speaker, planet to planet, year to year. But nobody denies that it is a symbol; a unifying factor, one which that the teeming trillions of humanity need. Billions of pilgrims travel to the Ring, second only to Sol in drawing people from across the Imperium.

Ironically, one of the galaxy's greatest graveyards has become a major hub of culture and trade. Port stations stud the outside surface, sheltered by the vast bulk of the ring from the radiation flares of the still-unstable star. Although the warp currents have shifted since Cthonia was the capital of the Terrestrial Dominion, several trade routes still run through or near the system. A permanent population in the billions has slowly grown, serving the pilgrims and trade fleets passing through, along with the permanent Mechanicus presence. Even though a true restoration lies tens of thousands of years in the future... the first step has already been taken.

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== Fenris ==

<div class="toccolours mw-collapsible mw-collapsed" style="100%">''''' The Den of the Great Wolf '''''

Contrary to popular belief, Fenris isn’t populated by barbarians. The people of Fenris may be grizzled, bad tempered tribals, but they aren’t savages.

According to the Adeptus Administratum, Fenris is officially classified as an Agri/Death World with a single fortified hive city. The Fang (or Aett in native Fenrisian) is, or really was, the name of the mountain that the fortress was originally built on because Leman Russ had a limited imagination. Fang Mountain no longer really exists in a conventional sense as it has been built on, under and hollowed out to the point that it can no longer be considered a natural formation so much as a fortified Hive that kind of looks like a mountain. It was not, despite many claims to the contrary, one of Perturabo's designs although it may have been influenced in the later stages of its formation.

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The Fang is sparsely populated for a hive as its main job is to serve the Chapter as a storage house, habitation between missions, training ground, hospital and general headquarters. In times when Fenris itself comes under direct assault the empty space can be used to house most if not all of the native population.

The population of Fenris is primarily one of farmer-soldiers. Only married full citizen men are allowed to own land and you aren't allowed citizenship or the right to marriage until you do a tour in the Imperial Army or do at least ten years serving the Chapter or the PDF. Women are given full citizen status on either ten years’ service to the Chapter or upon marriage, which ever happens first. That's how it was supposed to happen according to the laws laid down by Russ. But Russ has been gone a long time and out in the further reaches it gets a bit lax.

Native Fenrisians actually do show a little bit of genetic differentiation from the general human population, as a result of thousands of years of intermarriage between members of their population and the Space Wolves. Because Space Wolves and Canis Helix soldiers in general are produced through genetic engineering, it is possible in theory for Space Wolves to pass their augmentations to their descendants. However, the modifications of Space Wolves are generally gene-locked to the best ability of the Imperium to keep this from happening, and so what few augmentations have been passed down are rare, once-in-a-century occurrences. Fenrisians do tend to be a little more aggressive and cold-tolerant than average, but their genetic differences are minor, no more unusual than the purple eyes of Cadians.

The land of Fenris is pretty inhospitable and dangerous by any civilized standards. The only part of Fenris that is geologically stable is the relatively small continent of Asaheim, most of which is a cold icy wasteland with a mile thick ice sheet covering it all year round. Further from the pole there is a belt of tundra that is slightly less useless, but not massively so, and beyond that there is enough direct sunlight for conifer and fir trees to grow. This is the land of snow trolls, giant bears, and mastodons, not to mention the descendants of Leman Russ’ failed experiments back when Fenris was a top-secret black site. The Vlka Fenryka don’t mind it too much as it gives them a ready-made training ground right next to the Fang, though the land is still too dangerous for someone to try to live on. Further still is a thin layer of slightly more arable land around the coast that it is possible to grow more than enough for mere survival on. The surplus is taken by the Fang for the War Effort.

Far from Asaheim are the island nations where the climate is nicer, ranging to tropical at the equator, but the tectonic activity is more active. Some of the island arcs can last for generations, but most have a lifespan of less than two years. Life is less terrible than on Asaheim, right up till the island volcanically explodes or sinks. Such is life on Fenris. These islands with the fertile volcanic soil do provide substantially more food but are less reliable and there is always the problem of transporting it. The inhabitants of the islands are always ready to pick up and go at a moment’s notice, and island cities on Fenris look more like a flotilla of moored boats than an actual city.

The seas of Fenris are where the real good food is found. The underwater tectonic activity keeps churning up nutrients that keep the food chain going in the long elliptical orbit winters, and causes an explosion of life during the brief growing seasons. If you don't like seafood, you will either be profoundly unhappy or you can starve. Kraken is the largest thing in the oceans and is edible. It tastes oddly avian.

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=== Fenrisian Colonies ===

Following the War of the Beast, the primarch Leman Russ ran into a problem. Although he had managed to stabilize the Canis Helix augmentation into a viable form for military use, he had only managed to do so for people with specific genetic markers from the planet of Fenris. Fenris was an ideal place to conduct secret black site military experiments, but it was a terrible place to try to build a civilization. There was very little arable land on the planet, meaning that most of the food on the planet had to come from the rather dangerous sea. What's more, the only place that infrastructure could be reliably built on the geologically unstably Fenris was on the relatively small continent of Asaheim, which housed both the Vlka Fenryka's main base of operations as well as the majority of the population of Fenris. As a result, if any enemy were to attack Fenris, they could easily cripple the Vlka Fenryka's ability to fight and recruit new troops in a single swoop.

If the fate of the Vlka Fenryka was to be tied to the people of Fenris, the solution, therefore, was make more Fenrises. If the galaxy could not come to Fenris, Russ would bring Fenris to the galaxy. Leman Russ broached this idea of creating Fenrisian colonies to the Steward, who despite his reluctance nevertheless agreed to the idea. The people of Fenris, for their part, were more than enthusiastic about spreading to new locales, if for no other reason than to get away from their Death World of a home. Initially there were but eight Fenris colonies, though that number has since grown to over twenty-three. For the most part, the Fenrisians chose cold, polar worlds, reminiscent of their former home. Most human and Eldar colonists had steered clear of these worlds due to their short growing season and unforgiving climate, but to the Fenrisians they were a veritable paradise. The growing season may have been short, but at least it was possible to grow food on these worlds, rather than relying on the unpredictable sea like on Fenris.

The population of the Fenrisian Colonies has since outstripped that of its parent world by several orders of magnitude, in part because none of the colony worlds are as hostile to human life as Fenris itself. Overall, New World Fenrisians are less wild and more ordered than Old World Fenrisians, though in a one-on-one fight a New Worlder will still lose to an Old Worlder nine times out of ten. Nevertheless, the people of the Fenrisian colonies still hold Fenris in high regard, both as a matter of cultural pride and to show how far they have come. Although the Fenrisian Colonies will bicker like brothers, all still follow the Old Ways, and although they may not listen to the King of Fenris they will listen to High Priest Ulfrik the Slayer, who in turn listens to the King of Fenris.

=== Wolves of Fenris ===

See [[Nobledark_Imperium_Xenos#Fenrisian_Wolf|Fenrisian Wolves]]

== The Istvaan System ==

=== Istvaan III ===

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''"Nothing good ever seems to come out of the Istvaan system"''<br>
-- Saul Tarvitz, Terra's Sons

Istvaan III at the time of it's discovery in the height of the Great Crusade was a prosperous world but well beneath the point where Survivor Civilization status should be considered having rediscovered fission power some thirty years before Imperial contact. They were brought globally into the Imperium by the forces of the Raven Guard without incident as he planet had been unified several generations previously by military conquest.

Which is not to say that Istvaan was a military dictatorship. Although the original forces of conquest were definitely a military dictatorship the years since were distinctly not. The original dictator remains an enigmatic figure known only as The Forgotten Tyrant, a man only seen in public wearing thick, full body covering if slightly grubby yellow robes and a porcelain mask popular in theaters several centuries prior. Beyond "probably human" (he did need to eat at least) and probably male (referred to as male and had a deep tenor) nothing is known. He spent the last twelve years of his life destroying all records of himself and ordered his body to be cremated still wrapped in his robes. There are several theories on the Tyrant's identity gleaned from old national records regarding political shifts, military spending and some grainy black and white photographs but ultimately nothing is provable or, by the time of the Imperium's contact, relevant.

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In the years since the death of The Forgotten Tyrant and the years since the rebellions started to die down the dictatorship started to become rather more civilian in nature. The first successor ruled for 20 years and then started to institute elections via Electoral Council with the strict conditions that nobody on the Electoral Council could be a candidate, neither could family, friends or business associates or anyone they knew. He was voted out of office but the tradition stuck.

The people of Istvaan III knew that they were descendants of people from another world, records had been dutifully preserved in the form of illuminated manuscripts, tapestries and masonry decorations and they had unearthed the gutted hulls of old space ships many, many years prior with some of the more intact being renovated into usable but far more primitive structures still in use at Imperial Contact. They had been broadcasting their coordinates into space via radio waves for many years and it was only by good fortune that the Imperium and not the orks, or worse, discovered them first.

The newly elected Tyrant of Istvaan on the day they got a response from the 273rd Expeditionary Force was a relatively young Alivia Sureka, a woman who would be re-elected a further three twenty year terms before dying in office at the age of 92 as an unfortunate case of Rejuvenant Rejection. She was a pillar of calm in the jubilation of the five and a half billion populace, they were ecstatic that the old stories of Earth and the Dominion among the stars had been proven correct, she was far more down to earth in her manner and saw this as a collection of foreign nations bound under a single standard, much like her own society writ impossibly huge and wanted to ensure that her own society wasn't swallowed up and lost. There was no notion of not joining the Imperium, the common masses would not have stood for it.

By the time of the War of the Beast the Istvaan system was extensively settled with a system wide population of near thirty billion souls all ruled from the Palace of Voices in fair Choral City, that was subsequently bombed to rubble and the city suffering a 96% casualty rate. There were Chaos Cults on the planet that later traveled to the other habitations in the system, some of them predating The Forgotten Tyrant, and in those days they came out of the shadows like insane, starving rates.

Istvaan is one of the few cases in the Great Crusade where the Croneworlders operated openly, willingly, delighting in getting their hands dirty. Their atrocities were brutal and merciless, showing a capacity for unending and sustained cruelty beyond what a sane human could understand or even comprehend. The bones and bodies of slain civilians arranged in impossible shapes miles wide, scaring the fabric of reality so deep and so vast that it's effects were visible from orbit and not all of those bodies had done screaming.

Tyrant "The Baron" Vardus Praal and his Warsinger bodyguards had by cunning and good fortune escaped from the capital city when it became clear that saving it was not a realistic or even possible option and when the unholy hymns of torment were screamed by the tortured in the carcass ring about the cities ruins he and his followers were responsible for it's disruption. The warsingers were trained to perceive the warp as a form of music and could spot the recurring patterns in the songs and see the effects that they were having in the warp. Then they added their own and the feedback finally gave an ending to the tortured civilians and burned the Chaos Eldar who were orchestrating the symphony. Of Tyrant Praal? The surviving Chaos Eldar knew what he had done, knew where he and his warsingers were. Maybe they wanted to take him alive to make an example, maybe they wanted to draw it out for fun. He didn't give them the option, as the last of his warsingers fell and he looked down at the foot of pitted and rusted steel blade sticking out of his chest and felt the hot and sticky breath of something unspeakably evil on the back of his neck the rigged plasma-bottles in the ammunition stores went off and gave him one hell of a funeral pyre.

Istvaan III was eventually retaken by the Imperium. A few million survived in the outposts in the further orbits away from Istvaan III itself, a few tens of thousands on the capital planet were left fighting or hiding or dying slowly.

In time the cities were rebuilt, the fields resown, the outposts re-established, new armies trained and new ships were launched but the scars remained. It was a long, long time before Istvaan recovered fully and for a very long time afterwards half completed rituals were uncovered, heaps of unexploded munitions dug up, deamons bound and driven mad by time and isolation discovered and son, so many unclaimed bones.

Down the long march of years the Istvaan system has produced soldiers beyond counting, loyalty beyond question and competence beyond doubt. The world itself is green again, it's skies once more blue. There have been attempts both subtle and overt to bring the planet to ruin, many and varied, down the long count of years and always such attempts fail. The planet spits in the faces of dark gods and humbles and breaks their followers, it endures as spite and insult to them and dares them to return. The population of the planet as of 999M41 is approximately 12 billion and produces many fine soldiers and many cunning Inquisitors. As the Imperium marches towards Judgement Day it is known that Istvaan will do it's part, retribution and duty both demand it.

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=== Istvaan V ===

See [[Nobledark_Imperium_Drafts#The_Fall_of_Istvaan_V|The Fall of Istvaan V]]

== Krieg ==

<div class="toccolours mw-collapsible mw-collapsed" style="100%">'''''The Broken World ''''' - or ''The Wretched:''

Krieg, of the Segmentum Tempestum, Uhulis Sector, at the start of 433.M38 was an entirely different world than what we know in the modern day. Back then, it was a hiveworld with a middling population of 97 billion souls, and a restless aristocracy. A manufacture and trade hub with a surprising knack for technology outside of the Adeptus Mechanicus, interstellar market trends and the subtle shifts of the warp's currents had, over the millennia reduced its prestige and market value- and the attack of Hive Fleet Behemoth led the Administratum to introduce a price ceiling on the products of Krieg to help the war effort. The ruling councils of Autokrats, already impoverished by misfortune (And, truth be told, some serious missteps of their own) were outraged. For them, bound as they were to Krieg itself, the threat of alien invasion was distant, and they saw themselves made slaves to the whole of the sector for the sake of lazy foreigners that couldn't even pay a fair price for their orbital defenses. For that was the specialty of Krieg, big guns. Guns that could be mounted on the planet, and give orbital invaders a beating, and hopefully ward them off. This also made the planet Krieg extraordinarily dangerous to attack. Any attack from above would be costly indeed.

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So, when a grand conclave of Autokrats were called, the attendees freely ruminated and conspired against the Imperium, secure in the shadows of their defenses. The Autokrats agreed that a formal complaint should be lodged to the Imperium. And that if they weren't met properly, that the councils would meet again, and elect a High Autokrat, an office only called for in times of crisis, when the whole of the planet had to act together. On paper at least, the Autokrats were united in their cause; respect, or war.

However, the Autokrats were a minority in the grand scheme of things. For the vast majority of the planet that labored, lived, and died in the hives, "For Throne and Man," was their byword, and even as the Autokrats fumed in their spires, the factory workers set their shoulders, shook their heads, and redoubled their labors. It was possible that this upset would have remained just that- a grumbling, that would be addressed when the Administratum representatives arrived to hear complaints. An agreement might have been reached, or a display of force on the truculent Autokrats, and Krieg would have returned to normalcy, minus a few belligerent aristocrats.

However, the representatives of the Administratum never arrived, and Krieg suffered a further two separate blows.

The fate of the Administratum mission has yet to be revealed. The only clue recovered was a letter from Administrative Senioris Sandos to his wife, noting with pleasure that he might return in time for Sanguinalia celebrations, that he'd secured passage through the webway "With a trustworthy sort." All Eldar guides within the sector capable of granting access to the webway deny ever offering that to a human, much less a lowly bureaucrat. There is a sizable reward still on offer for the missing Administrative, and the Administratum further cautions all citizens that the webway is restricted to a select few- anyone offering them a 'shortcut' should be considered a criminal, and treated as such.

As the year passed on, and the Administratum's delegation failed to appear, the Autokrats convinced themselves that this was a calculated slight from the Administratum. For the Autokrats of Krieg, it was obvious that the Imperium had no care for them, and didn't even care to tell them to their face. Krieg is a relatively ancient world, and has had a fiercely xenophobic streak in their culture- and for those Kriegers that believed in the Imperium, and the vision of the Throne, the silence shook them.

The issue was further deepened due to the astropathic messaging system- due to Krieg's growing insignificance, they had few astropaths, and those few were held privately by Autokrats. They may well have kept the news of the disappeared delegation quiet. Or assumed that, like any other words from beyond Krieg, any assurances that the delegation had been lost could only be treated as lies.

Then there was the Segmentum Tempestum Famine. The Ulthran Cartel had elected to invest in agri-futures- and with that investment came a stampede of Rogue Traders, Demiurge Trade Clans, and savvy planetary governors following the trend. Most notably was the influence of at least one Necron lord. Though indirectly involved in the market, for reasons unknown, a spate of necron attacks were aimed solely at agriworlds in the segmentum for a period of seven years, further aggravating food supplies. The market dried up, and shiftless and dishonest grain haulers meant for hive and forge worlds dependent on their products skimmed from the top to sell to this feeding frenzy. In the chaos of the Hive Fleet Leviathan's invasion, and the subsequent shadow cast by the hive mind blocking out psker communications, the administratum failed to notice until it was too late for the Uhulis Sector. Worlds starved.

Krieg was not among them. They wouldn't have the chance.

The precise Autokrats immediately detected they were being short changed on loads from their grain haulers. Outraged, they turned their guns on the hauler, and demanded the full load. The grain hauler in question (Records indicate a shiftless layabout "Regnal Ersten" with a forged Writ of Trade as the unfortunate) made excuses. The Kriegers fired a volley upon the orbiting vessel to make clear their dissatisfaction. The Rogue Trader, apparently, then babbled out a series of excuses, culminating in the claim that the Segmentum Command had seized most of the food intended for Krieg.

The Autokrats were satisfied with their suspicions confirmed. After finishing off the grain hauler with another volley (Surprisingly, Regnal survived this, and would meet his own gruesome fate far later- but that's another story) the Autokrats met once more, and elected a High Autokrat among their number- as far as they were concerned, they were in a state of war.

We have no record of the identity of the High Autokrat. Their position, history, statements, gender, and fate are unknown. The Death Korps of Krieg were thorough in erasing this hated figure from memory. All we know was that there was a High Autokrat, and that this figure would openly declare secession from the Imperium of Man.

At this time, seven Astra Militarum regiments of Kriegers had been raised, and were posted on the world. They had been staying garrisoned in case of tyranid attack, and awaiting orders that would have presumably accompanied the Administratum delegation.

As part of their duties, they were to gather supplies. This included food for campaign, begrudgingly supplied by the planet.

The hivers of Krieg had never been strangers to hunger. It is the same on all hives- due to corruption, inadequate transport capacity, or the simple structure of billions contained in such a small space, malnutrition is rampant. There are always too many mouths, and never enough meals.

The hivers of Krieg had known the shock of having the Imperium fail them, and now faced famine. The Death Korps of Krieg stated simply that the population rose in rebellion against the Imperium, and by extension those Imperial Regiments as well, but I feel that this misses a step. To editorialize, I imagine that the High Autokrat (Being a cunning sort) let this stew a few days. Let the rations dwindle, let the people wonder what's going on- perhaps even attempted to rather publicly deny the Imperial Regiments their supplies, and suffered equally public rebuke.

The people would hunger, see what happened, and wonder. Wonder why their children cried from hunger, as the soldiers marched and drilled and menaced with bayonet, taking scraps meant for them. The High Autokrat would let that stew, then speak.

I know not the High Autokrat's charisma, but I can't imagine the starving need much convincing to seize food.

Or perhaps it's just as the Death Korps describe it. The population en masse blindly rejected Imperial Law in madness, and set upon the regiments like savage dogs.

There were seven Imperial Regiments arranged at that time, and seven hive cities. There's a fascinating account of the fall of six of these hive cities embedded in the training manuals of the Kriegers. Each city lost held a lesson to them, and each pre-Death Korps regiment that fought and fell had a deadly sin associated with them as reason to how they fell. From each fall, they took a lesson, until one hive remained, Hive Ferrograd, under the command of one Colonel Jurten. If the Kriegers can recognize a hero, they might think of Jurten as one.

Ferrograd was the center for manufacture of ammunition- which kept the final of the loyalist Kriegers well surprised. There was an offer of surrender, but the war was bitterly fought already. The only thing you would earn in surrender was a quick death. Colonel Jurten knew that the Imperium was still months out. His forces would starve before the Imperium could arrive. Following that, the Imperium invasion would be costly, if it succeeded- if, and at this, Colonel Jurten feared the most, if the Imperium would even bother coming.

By this time, what was once a strangely anthropomorphized civic philosophy had become almost a religious mania. He believed in the Throne, even as the rebels around him ranted and raved about making a new Throne, a proper one on Krieg. Jurten knew that was heresy. And he knew the origin of it. The hubris of thinking the Throne would care. The present armageddon and sorrows sown by all of this was a consequence of that central arrogance- that the Kriegers would get something for loving the Throne. The Throne was to be served. The Throne was not there to serve them.

And if Krieg would not serve the Throne, Krieg did not deserve to be.

Krieg is a world that has its fair share of technological wonders and secrets. Among the ammunition that Hive Ferrograd produced for the orbital guns were atomics. A terrible amount of them. On the day of the Feast of the Emperor's Ascension, Colonel Jurgen gave the people of Krieg a feast that would never be forgotten. For sixteen hours straight, his collection of guns roared, blanketing the whole of Krieg in nuclear fire. Estimates lodge the amount of nuclear weapons launched in the thousands. An event in the future known as "The Purging." A kill count was kept. As point of pride, the warriors of Krieg estimated that brave Colonel Jurten with sixteen hours, reduced the population from 97 billion down to little more than 780 mlilion.

The world had never been a garden world, but I found a portrait of old Krieg once. Sold for a pretty penny. Though dated to the right era, I am not unconvinced it's a forgery, but perhaps that is due to my own horror at the sight of it. It was a poorly painted water color, perhaps by a student, showing the feet of a titanic steel hive towering into the clouds, standing atop harsh and jagged moss stained stone, wind and rain lashing the cliff side, and in the grey and dim light that peeked through the clouds, an animal soaring through the air. At least, I think it is. Might be a smudge on the canvas.

Krieg has no towering hives now, just ruins and subterranean warrens. The once proud stones have been reduced to rubble and sand. There is no water on Krieg, save for what's found in canteens and barrack reserves. The clouds are far lower to the ground now, laden with poison and chemical. The only life upon Krieg now are Kriegers. Kriegers, and the horses they grow in vats beneath the surface to ride into battle.

Though the Purging was the single greatest use of nuclear weapons in a short span of time upon the surface of Krieg, nuclear weapons would continue to be used. Both sides entrenched, and fought to the bitter, genocidal end in a war that would continue on for a further 400 years. The rebel survivors had gained a psychopathic hatred for the madmen that had reduced their world to ashes, and the loyalists grimly fought in the name of the Throne, knowing that no quarter would be given. They both practiced total war. They innovated, adapted, took on the gas mask, supplemented their meager diets with corpse starch (It's exactly as it sounds), introduced large scale usage of the mysterious "Vitae Womb" technology, and reduced all their beliefs to a fanatic, fatalistic, all encompassing devotion to the Imperium. The only thing for a Krieger is the fight. The duty. The war. Nothing else. For five hundred years, all other Krieger culture was erased. Art, music, literature, all the trappings of a civilian life was crushed by the demand for total war.

As Colonel Jurten had feared, the Imperium had more important matters to deal with than just another hive world descending into madness and blood shed. Two expeditions were undertaken to Krieg during this time. The first, a curious rogue trader, was fired upon by automated orbital guns and they beat a hasty retreat. The second, a mechanicus survey fleet, came within range, and did not report being fired upon, but instead reported what seemed to be a complete, genocidal civil war being fought by a population of perhaps a few million, upon a worthless death world. They moved on.

In 849.M38, Krieg sent a missive to the Imperium at large stating that the rebellion had quashed, and the Death Korps of Krieg were waiting for orders.

Krieg has no governor. Krieg has a Grand Marshal, in charge of recruitment and training of Kriegers. All Kriegers are considered qualifying soldiers. Logic would lead one to expect there has to be some administrative center upon Krieg aside from this Grand Marshal, but the Death Korps of Krieg seem content to hand off most logistics responsibilities to the Departmento Munitorium.

Departmento Munitorium officers assigned to coordinate and keep Kriegers in armor and weapons upon Krieg have a very high turnover rate. Few deaths, but from my understanding, psychological burn out is the primary cause.

Kriegers are immune to boredom. There are no diversions. There is only labor, training, war, and waiting. Any diversion from these four activities is looked upon with contempt, if not hostility. Kriegers are also remarkably xenophobic. And I mean that in the broadest term possible- fellow guardsmen often find Kriegers uncommunicative, and at times laden with barely disguised disgust. It seems any with a survival instinct are considered lesser men.

For aliens, it is worse. Philosophically, the Kriegers came from a point with extreme deprivation. To them, every breath an alien draws is theft. Every acre of space they occupy is one less acre for proper humans to utilize. Every mouthful of food, another mouthful denied to those that better deserve it. In their eyes, the proper place of an alien is at the end of a bayonet. The fact that the Imperium tolerates these is a matter barely tolerated.

Yet, for all their lack of social graces, the Departmento Munitorium has embraced the Kriegers. They win wars. Any order given is fulfilled without hesitation, doubt, or regret, even in the face of death. And there are a great deal of them.

The Departmento Munitorium has long had a debate between two, rough, major schools of military study- the Reformers and the Macharians. It is no secret that, as the years have gone on, more and more regiments are drilled and equipped in the Cadian style. In the eyes of the Reformer generals, the advantages are obvious- Cadian soldiers are considered the standard by which all others of the Imperium are measured, and standardization and centralization of equipment would only help with logistics in the Astra Militarum. Something as simple as ordering a replacement lasrifle powerpack can lead to tragedy due to different manufacturing standards and usage across the endless worlds. Let there be one set of kit, training, and organization instead of the confusing hodge podge that blunders on through luck and sheer bloody mindedness.

The Macharians take their name from Lord Solar Macharius, who famously forged an army from a mass of diverse elements and worlds, making a flexible legion ready for every element. In their minds, trying to force guardsmen to march and act the same is an act of folly, that denies useful specialization and experience. Any attempted reform would take hundreds of years, untold fortunes, and would cause the war machine to grind to a halt even as they are besieged on all sides. Catachans are expert jungle fighters, Valhallans ice worlders, Chem Dogs tunnel fighters, and so on and so forth. Why break what isn't broken?

But now, there is a third regiment that is gaining acclaim, one that even the Reformers balk at modeling after. The Death Korps of Krieg.

Those that favor the Kriegers, see a model of the future. A guardsman that doesn't hesitate. Doesn't doubt. Doesn't question. Fears nothing, and fulfills every order to the letter. And better yet, there is no end to them. Generals at the strategic level find the Death Korps of Krieg refreshing. Far too often, regiments have generals that don't understand their place, and seek to ask questions or meddle in affairs above them. Refusing orders, 'misinterpreting' commands, engaging in cowardly routs: such are the sins of the common general. Oh yes, on occasion there's one that rises above, heroes that make for stirring propaganda- but let's be honest. Heroes are not what victory is made of. Victory is made of attrition, of materiel, of being willing to fight longer than the other guy. Victory is the stuff Kriegers are made of. They don't need commissars. Their loyalty is beyond question. And they seemingly spring out of the dirt with their wondrous Vitae Wombs. They're practically a new breed of human, and should be welcomed.

Though the other factions are uneasy at this new model of guardsman, those in the Departmento Munitorium see the future in the Death Korps. Limitless guardsmen that will not break, grinding down all that oppose the Imperium. The anvil, to the maneuverable hammer of the Astartes. One day, these generals dream, all the guard will be like the Death Korps. Fearless. Unquestioning. Replaceable.

The Death Korps of Krieg for their part do not care. They can be found on every front, on every battlefield, wherever a soldier is called to die, a Krieger will march there to take his place. They do not question. They serve.

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== Macharia ==

See [[Nobledark_Imperium_Drafts#Twelfth_Black_Crusade_.28001.M41-.3F.3F.3F.29|The Destruction of Macharia]]

== Medusa ==

<div class="toccolours mw-collapsible mw-collapsed" style="100%">''''' Walking in the Footprints of Giants '''''

Medusa is a world wrapped in a mystery wrapped in an enigma. During the Dark Age of Technology, the planet was a beacon of mining and industry, the source of raw material for so many technological wonders and a key manufacturing world for the Men of Iron. As a result, Medusa became one of the most famous worlds in the Golden Age human empire. During the Age of Strife, even as the knowledge of other planets faded in the minds of man, the memory of Medusa persisted, especially among the Mechanicum of Mars.

When the Steward announced the beginnings of the Great Crusade and sent the remaining legions forth from Sol, the planet of Medusa was high on the priority list of primarch Ferrus Manus. Indeed, it would fair to say he almost beelined for it. However, when Iron Hands had arrived at Medusa, they were thoroughly disappointed by what they had found. The legendary Telstarax that had been built around Medusa during the Dark Age of Technology to bring its mineral riches to the stars was still there, but the planet itself was almost unrecognizable, its surface primarily having the appearance of cracked pavement and colored a dull, ashen grey.

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Perhaps the most salient feature of Medusa are the miles-high, hive-sized machines that dot its surface. These machines stand on a multitude of legs several thousand feet above the ground, looking like thunderclouds in the distance when viewed at ground level. These machines are best described as terraformers, though they are to modern terraforming methods what a stick of dynamite is to a cyclonic torpedo. The Imperium is capable of terraforming a planet, but this usually involves methods that are subtle and slow. The introduction of pioneer species by the Biologicus, the tweaking of the atmosphere by the Mechanicus, perhaps the diversion of the orbit of a comet by a farseer at the most spectacular. These machines, on the other hand, are something else entirely. Entire mountain ranges are thrust up or ground to dust seemingly at random, seas drained and refilled. In their wake the terraforming machines leave fast-growing grasses or alga, the source of the atmosphere on Medusa as well as its inhabitants primary source of food. And then, once the landscape is completely sculpted, the walking mountains turn around and do it again, as if unsatisfied with their previous work.

For obvious reasons, the Mechanicus has become obsessed with understanding the secrets of these great machines. Although there little remains permanent on the surface of Medusa, the great machines certainly are, and the Mechanicus has repeatedly funded expeditions to explore the interiors of these machines for ancient technology. These expeditions have met with mixed success. Although a few have escaped with amazing technological discoveries, more have unleashed technological monstrosities upon the surface of Medusa, or, more often, simply not come out at all. The machines seem to be violently opposed to anyone trying to interfere with their singular task, regardless of the intent. All attempts at communicating with these machines have failed. There is no intellect there, either human or Iron Mind. These machines are no more intelligent than the dimmest of servitors, running on the simplest of code to continually reshape the world at the whims of a master at least ten thousand years dead.

Because of the presence of these great terraformers, sedentary life in most parts of Medusa is hazardous as best. What may be a mountain range one year can be at the bottom of the ocean the next, and vice versa. As a result, most of the population of Medusa live a nomadic lifestyle aboard giant land-crawlers in the trackless wastes, constantly following in the wake of the great machines like pilot fish following a shark. And yet, there are some parts of Medusa that remain untouched, despite 25,000 years of terraforming. It is unknown why these locations in particular are avoided by the terraformers. Some have suggested that these places were intentionally set aside by the programmers of the machines, to serve as the later sites of cities, but no completely satisfying answer has been found. Some of these locations, upon further inspection, have turned out to be underground facilities dating to the Dark Age of technology, whereas others appear to simply be empty space. Chief among these are the Seven Cities of Sanctuary, the only place in which civilized life as traditionally envisioned is possible on Medusa. These places are centers of trade and commerce, where nomads exchange mineral deposits and ancient pieces of technology tilled up by the terraformers with offworlders.

If there is any positive aspect about Medusa it is that the planet does not take well to invaders. In the past, when the planet was invaded and the great machines came under attack by the forces of Chaos, the behavior of the terraformers suddenly changed, devoting their internal manufactorums to producing technological horrors that were unleashed screaming upon the invaders, volkite beams firing into the sky. However, the Medusans are not under the delusion that these machines are there to protect them. Although the machines ignore the native Medusans, if one so much as touches one of these drones the machines turn on them, ancient defensive programming classifying attempts at tactile communication as a threat. However, machines that fall in the defense of Medusa are highly valuable, as the giant terraformers seem to ignore their dead creations where they fall and these machines are often manufactured with lost Dark Age technology. Dark Age technology, whether from the surface or from the Telstarax, is the primary export of Medusa, and the currency to which it pays its tithe to the Imperium.

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== Molech ==

<div class="toccolours mw-collapsible mw-collapsed" style="100%">''''' The Unnatural Jungle '''''

Molech was just originally just a planet really rich in biodiversity that the precursor orders of the AdBio had sizable detachments studying because holy shit so many new things. Also the locals were friendly and had been waiting for Earth to come and bring them back to the stars. The planet was “discovered” and brought back into the fold by Horus who already knew where it was because the Void Born who traveled that patch of space let him have a copy of their maps.

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All was well until The Beast and Molech gets brought to ruin. The glorious biodiversity was mostly lost and the friendly locals almost exterminated bar about 1,000 maybe 1,500

Not long after the WotB the AdMech goes through reforms. During that time the Dark Mechanicus came out of the woodwork and there was at least a little fighting on every forgeworld, even Mars nearly fell. And whats worse the Dragon nearly got out of it's box. Reforms were put in place to make another mass rebellion in the future far more unlikely to succeed.

It is decided, by mutual consent, that the splice-hippies, genesmiths, bloodcutters and the gene-wrights (among others) will be folded into the Reformed Mechanicum. They are all integrated into cohesive and more importantly accountable orders. In return the biological tinkerers get decent funding, better equipment and lab space.

Once they are folded into the Mechanicus is when the problems start to arise. On theological and cultural levels there is a much bigger gap between the Adeptus Biologicus brotherhoods and the AdMech brotherhoods than there are between the different AdMech Brotherhoods. And that's saying something considering how bad tempered and fractious AdMech factions can be.

It is quickly decided that it's time for the AdBio to get a HQ of their own. Preferably not in Sol.

Molech was just a few short light years from Old Earth, close enough that the AdBio could rapidly get to the Imperial Palace if the Steward needed them but far enough away that they weren't in Sol.

AdBio return to Molech and begin the work of rebuilding it as their home.

By 999M41 Molech has the largest number of "indigenous" Earth/Xeno, Xeno/Totally unrelated Xeno and generally fucked up batshit genetic chimera hybrid organisms found anywhere in the galaxy. It is the AdBio showcase. It's main exports are drugs (medicinal and recreational), vaccines, bio-weapons, tailored organisms and strange genetically and surgically modified adepts of various biological disciplines.

The AdBio do worship the Omnissiah, in their way. Although with them he is less likely to be depicted as something mechanical and more as the Tree of Knowledge with a small god-fruit on every branch and humanity sheltered under the branches.

They are as active and busy as their Mars siblings, despite the Mars adepts calling them a bunch of hippies that need to get a real job and stop being dirty heretics.

At some unrecorded point in history they adopted green robes to differentiate themselves from the Martian Priesthoods.

Molech after the WotB is a miracle of bio-engineering. The ecosystem of the planet is completely artificial, though you wouldn't know it at first glance. Many of the old beasties that inhabited Molech were restored through cloning and/or careful breeding programs (a point of pride for the AdBio), though the native wildlife is restricted to a much smaller area to make room for the AdMech's new pets.
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== Mordia ==

<div class="toccolours mw-collapsible mw-collapsed" style="100%">''''' On the Edge of Existence '''''

During the Golden Age Mordia was somewhat of a backwater. More somewhere for people to come from than go too. Had a high technology base, as all worlds in the Great and Benevolent Empire did, but it was generally at least 50 years behind what everyone else was doing.

There were two big reasons for Mordia's backwardness. First was the isolation. It was not particularly close to any major warp currents and so you had to intentionally go there rather than travel near it on your way elsewhere. Second was the tidally locked nature of the planet that resulted in it having a thin green band of habitability between frozen and baked. As such it could never support a big population. It was quite pleasant and it's greatest sin was that it was terminally boring for most of it's pre-Strife history. It didn't even have seasons or tides.

When everything all started to break down in the Age of Strife Mordia was spared the worst of the fallout simply due to its remote location and nearly everyone needing to be reminded that it existed at all. Which is not to say it survived unscathed.

As the Old Night rolled across the stars Mordia came to the sensible conclusion that it couldn't hope to fend off a galaxy gone mad and that the only sensible thing to do would be to try and be as unnoticeable as possible. All transmitter technology was banned, all space ships were recalled and disassembled, everything that could be moved underground was and even minor things like street lighting was made illegal. The whole planet essentially went into standby mode.

Stupid as it sounds it almost worked. It almost survived long enough to be counted as a Survivor Civilization.

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Sadly it did not. When the Eye of Terror formed it fucked up the warp currents something fierce and rearranged them. Mordia was no longer a backwater world away from the good currents. Now there was a current running right through their system from the Eye of Terror, but with no warp capability they didn't know this.

All they knew was that half the psyker population committed suicide and the other half became decidedly unwell. Then the first of Chaos touched set foot on their world, heralds of the New God Slaanesh. Things went downhill from there.

By the time the First Legion encountered Mordia in the Great Crusade it had been repeatedly assaulted and regressed back to a pre-black powder level of sophistication haunting the ruins of when they were greater. About the only thing left intact from those better days was the Great Road that ran the entire circuit of the Temperate Band in an unbroken loop. Along the Great Road society had fractured into a dozen kingdoms, some in contest but most in cooperation.

Of interest to the Dark Angel scholars were the Keepers of the Chronicles, a quiet order whose task was to maintain an up to date record of the affairs of state to be preserved for posterity, and that they had done all the way back to the day Old Earth stopped answering the calls and a little bit further. Sadly no technical information of note had been preserved.

The kings of Mordia welcomed the Imperium as the heirs to the fallen realm of humanity. Old Earth had finally come to save them.

The First Legion orchestrated the rebuilding of Mordia and later set up a recruitment station at each of the kingdom capitals along the Great Road. This was the Second Golden age of Mordia. It was ultimately not to last.

Mordia took to the Imperium's uplifting efforts eagerly as the Chronicle showed them that this was merely returning to where they had been before. They were not abandoning their roots, they were rediscovering them. Before long Mordian regiments were found in the Legions of the Great Crusade, marching forth to raise up others as they had been.

When the War of the Beast afflicted the galaxy their regiments fought no less bravely than any other and gave their lives no less dearly and gave them those soldier did.

Mordia itself was spared the direct attention of any major Warboss or Chaos lordling and came out of that awful war maybe less broken then many. They were lucky

Luck ran out in the First Black Crusade and every one after that. The Warp currents always brought the dregs of the Eye to their door step time and again from then on. It was never assaulted to the degree of Cadia but Cadia was by it's very nature a better and stronger world to defend them.

By the dying of the 41st Millenium Mordia stands still. A grim testament to bloody-minded stubbornness. Life is harsh, death usually harsher. The planet isn't dead but you could be excused for thinking so. Much of the Temperate Band is irradiated and the cities there destroyed from orbit. The Great Road is broken. Civilization in that once fair land was too obvious a target and so was abandoned, the Dark Side of the planet is now the home of the Mordians.

Deep beneath the permafrost and the glaciers and in the mountain holds they dwell by the billions. Hard ranks of whipcord bodies marching in step of iron discipline. War has taught them. War has made them hard. They are a bitter people now, their sunrise smiles erased over the Long War. The Dark Angels stationed during the 1st Black Crusade founded their own order of Crimson Knights, a very Mordian order. The ever dutiful Keepers of the Chronicles keep the records of every war, every victory and every postponed victory as they will never bend or admit defeat. Defeat is to invite total death, they will not permit it.

Chaos and Orks come now to Mordia to die. Their bodies linger for decades and even centuries gradually sinking into the glaciers and the fields of the dead spread in all directions form their strongholds. They venture out to cleanse the Temperate Belt of mutated orks strains that find that greener ground fine for spawning in, feral and savage but far from dangerous. Perfect for training the new recruits.

Mordia still has the title of High King, instituted in better days as a wise intermediary between the people and the Imperium, but now it is given to the head of the armed forces for tradition only. There is nothing left of Mordia untouched by the all consuming war.

From the lowliest tender of the algae vats to the wisest lore-master of the Crimson Knights all serve the war effort. Every warband that dies on Mordia is one less in the wider Imperium. One day, by the grace of their many gods, they will be victorious. One day they will know joy again. One day they will be born under blue skies and the forests will be regrown again.

And, their prophets say, it will be one day soon. Judgment Day is coming, now is the time of the big push towards the dawn.

But for now there is the war.

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== Necromunda ==

Necromunda is not a jewel in the crown of the Imperium and suffers huge pandemics due to the planetary government being unable to set up an effective garbage disposal system. Mines all over the planet are getting dangerously low but the scrap metal wouldn't cover the entire planet just most of it. Local efforts by the hive-cities have been made to try to clean up the toxic sludge in the water and poisonous gas in the atmosphere.

The planet is infamous across the sector for the Hive gangs. The Underhives of the planet are some of the worst places to live in the Imperium. Although not as lethal compared to a Death world, the standard of living is so degraded most would question the point of life after growing up in them. The most common life of Necromundans is to die in the mines, slave away in manufactorums, collect metal junk, or become criminals. Those that wish to break away from mundane life or get rich quick become criminals. Shadow Traders sell illegal goods like hallucinogens, las-weapons, and Xenos lifeforms. The Hive gangs threaten the Shadow Traders for protection money as these gangs can outnumber and outgun whatever bodyguards the trader can hire. The gangs work to make the traders under them be the most profitable so they can squeeze more money out of their traders. This also means a gang will attack other gangs' territory to vesselize more traders or prevent rivals from gaining power

When one of many on-going gang wars starts the scale of killing is comparable to a poor Imperial world with a small rebellion. In all likely hood, hundreds of thousands of people will die including civilians as the hive gangs fight like small scale wars. Autoguns, autocannons, and las-weapons are used to perform raids, assassinations or urban assaults
But the world is not quite as horrible as it could be in large part thanks to the efforts of the Adeptus Biologicus. In an attempt to lower the amount of food that needed importing some long forgotten governor commissioned a brotherhood to scour the Imperium for shit that would grow in the toxic ash and sludge that they had for soil.

Many such plants were found and other single celled extremophiles of all manner of categorization were discovered on far off worlds. Some of them even with genetic markers that showed that they might have had ancestor stock on old Earth and come to the stars in the Golden Age in the early colonies of man.

The planet’s surface became covered in life. A thriving bustling chimera of an ecosystem constructed from species of a double dozen worlds, usually the sort of life generally found near volcanoes or on the "cold Venus" type of worlds. Sadly they couldn't find anything people could eat which was kind of the point that they were hired for.

It was nearly 200 years of tampering and splicing and selectively breeding before the first fruits of their labours were tasted. And it was another three seconds before those fruits were spat back out. Although they had created a Terran/Xeno splice apple that could survive and even thrive in the temperate latitudes in the smog and the toxic muck it was not something that anyone with any choice would willingly eat.

The governor, grandson of the one who commissioned the endeavour, did not care. They could be boiled down into a nutritious slurry with almost all the taste removed. The Adepts were kept on to continue their works.

After a few thousand years there are great swathes of farmed land where none should be with harvests of things that by nature should not exist. They still haven't created anything that tastes like actual food.

== Ohmsworld ==

In many respects, Ohmsworld is just like any other Hive World in the Imperium- densely packed hives dot a landscape of wastelands ruined by heavy industry. Vast mining trawlers from bygone ages move ponderously through the wastes, ancient surveying and mining equipment ensuring not a single scrap of usuable minerals goes unnoticed. But they're not the only archaeotech with such duties on Ohmsworld.

The world's most prosperous hives are ironically the least populous, largely because the enormous structures are little more than air filtration systems. Vast networks of delicate, near microscopic tendrils, resembling minute feathers, filter the world's atmosphere. As air constantly cycles past and through each hive city, the filters carefully identify and isolate the most valuable of the rare ores. The immeasurable numbers of microscopic tendrils capture flecks of each component—far smaller than a grain of sand. The filtration devices pass these precious elements to collection systems. The ore is then smelted into larger bars, which can be transported to off-world refineries and manufactoria.

It is theorized that the presence of these filters was once ubiquitous on mining worldsin the days of the Bountiful Dominion, but the delicate structures couldn't sustain the wear and tear of the millennia, or even the levels of air pollution of the Dominion's heavy mining operations. If anything, the paucity of resources on Ohmsworld might have been the reason they survive to this day. Should this theory be true, then perhaps the Duke can take some small comfort in the fact that he might not have been the only human to overestimate the resources of the Dominate's worlds.

In any case, the archaeotech's presence has not only provided a basis for a major refinement in Imperial air purifying technology (used in the world's other major hives and currently being spread outward), but has also ensured a sizeable, permanent Mechanicus presence directly sanctioned by, and sourced from holy Mars itself. While the extent of their roles in encouraging the rebellion is yet unknown, their aid in its success is undeniable. Great bastions opened wide through technosorcery, machine spirit rebellions in the Duke's loyal forces to mirror the ones of flesh and blood outside, Skitarii squads acting as poor men's Space Marines- should Ohmsworld survive its rebellion, it would be a world in great debt to the orthodox priesthood, and perhaps serve as a conservative bastion of technological though.

But that is all in the future. As of right now, the soldiers of the beleagured planet fight on in the wastelands of their world, both sides unwilling to damage the precious archaeotech that Ohmsworld has become so reliant upon. Sieges are conducted not through artillery barrages or massed assaults, but through desperate hand-to-hand fighting among the delicate strands, where the blade is more important than the lasgun. Thus far, the battle lines have stabilized after a period of Severan advances, and it is this stabilization that has kept the planet loyal thus far; such a thing could only happen if the Imperium was advancing and the Dominate needed to shuffle its resources elsewhere. "One more day," the propaganda goes. "Just One More Day."

== The Pastoral Worlds ==

<div class="toccolours mw-collapsible mw-collapsed" style="100%">

After the Unification of Old Earth many nations across the Imperium found themselves having to rebuild their government from scratch after having thrown off the chains of their old oppressors. The people of the steppes had the additional difficulty in creating a centralized government in a land where there had been none since. Jaghatai had been elected Khan of all the nomad tribes east of the Kashgar Pass, but he did not command the allegiance of all the steppe nomads. As the Khanate extended its influence west into places that had once been known as Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, the Khanate found itself in contact with nomad tribes which it had not heard from for decades. As the Imperium’s influence grew, these tribes gradually flocked to Jaghatai’s banner. They realized that out of all the high-ranking figures in the Imperium, the Khan spoke for them, and confederating with the Khanate was the best way to preserve their way of life.

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One of these nomads from the western steppes was Temir Baltubekov, better known by his nickname of “the Iron Scribe”. Despite being a nomad Temir showed an aptitude for administration, and Jaghatai took advantage of his ability to organize things. Most people today think of the Iron Scribe as figure of steely resolve and indomitable will, able to do ten times the work of other men. The people who actually knew him remember him as an exasperated, overworked man who found himself having to do the day-to-day minutia and logistics of running a country that Jaghatai had no ability for. Jaghatai was a capable leader, but he was a doer who preferred to inspire people and lead from the front rather than sit around making commandments. Jaghatai’s idea of building infrastructure was to physically go and put a building together with his own two hands rather than sign the decrees to make it possible. As a result, the Iron Scribe was a key figure in turning the Khanate into an actual country, and when Jaghatai stepped down from control of the Khanate to avoid a conflict of interest he named the Iron Scribe his successor as ruler of the Khanate.

As the Great Crusade spread across the stars, the Khan came across numerous worlds that reminded him of his old homeland. At the same time, Jaghatai was not blind to all the changes happening on Old Earth, hearing of what was happening from his friends in the other legions and letters from his extended family. However, when he returned to Old Earth early in the Great Crusade to bury his wife Kasha, Jaghatai saw the writing on the wall. Old Earth was becoming hyper-urbanized, and soon there would be no room for his kind of people. Seeing the future that lie before him, the Khan decided to call a kurultai of the Khanate to discuss their future as a nation and a people.

At the kurultai, Jaghatai told the assembled leaders of the Khanate that there were two paths that lie before them. One was assimilation, to completely lose their identity in the changing world that would have no place for their people. The other option was migration. The Khanate didn’t have to abandon their ancestral homelands, let them be the urbanized, administrative hub of the Khanate if need be, but it could spread out, establish colonies all across the galaxy so that something of their culture could survive. As primarch, Jaghatai could get them first and exclusive rights on settlement if he can get the paperwork through before anyone else, a fact made easier by only him and his crew knowing where the planet was for the moment. Hearing Jaghatai’s vision, the overwhelmingly vast majority of the Khanate decide that yes, the future he described does sound like a vast improvement over the way things here are going.

Having the approval of his people, the Khan (or rather, Jaghatai and Temir, given the Khan’s “talent” for paperwork) set into motion his plan to earmark a number of worlds for the expansion of the Khanate. It helped that many of these worlds were not useful for much other than livestock herding. Most of these planets were either uninhabited, or inhabited by feudal or feral worlders that easily assimilated into the Khanate's way of life, much like Skandian culture and the inhabitants of Fenris. These worlds would form the core of what would come to be known as the Pastoral Worlds. Not all Pastoral Worlds are former Khanate colonies (Solomon is a good example of one that is not), but many are, and even the ones that do not can relate to the other Pastoral Worlds through their shared history of livestock farming to the point that the Pastoral Worlds form a distinct socio-ethnic unit within the Imperium similar to the Fenrisian Colonies.

Among the planets claimed by the Khanate was Chogoris, the future home of the White Scars chapter. However, when Jaghatai and the White Scars first discovered at the planet, they found it was completely depopulated. The planet had obviously been inhabited in the past, as indicated by the abundance of abandoned ruins across its surface less than a few centuries old, but something must have happened since then to its original inhabitants. Some historians suspect Chogoris' original inhabitants had become involved with the Ruinous Powers, which ended up wiping out the planet's native population. Upon hearing these suspicions Jaghatai remarked that this was exactly why the Khanate was better off for having broken free of Ursh, and his only regret was that he hadn’t done it sooner. Ursh was a self-destructive fire that would have consumed itself. Nevertheless, Chogoris was perfect for the Khanate's needs, being virtually a large-scale version of the lands of the Khanate back on Old Earth. Chogoris became one of the most successful of the Pastoral Worlds, the closest thing they have to a cultural hub, and today is what most people think of when one thinks of Pastoral Worlds.

Jaghatai’s vision proved eerily prescient, though not in the way he had expected. He had expected the steppes and the mountains that he had once called home to be swallowed up by skyscrapers over the course of a millennium. He hadn’t expected them to be burned to their bedrock by the Warboss of Warbosses within a few hundred years after he called for his pilgrimage to the stars. Yes, Old Earth was rewilded after the War of the Beast, but it was tamed wilderness, in the manner of parks and farmland. Livestock were present, but they were raised in pens, not herded on the open range. It was no place for a steppe nomad. After the War of the Beast, and the Khanate being absorbed into the Imperium, the Iron Scribe found a position in the Administratum. He was a minor figure, at best, in the organization’s history, but Pastoral Worlders love to bring him up when talking about their people’s achievements.

Today, the old Khanate is only distantly remembered by the people of the pastoral worlds, mostly in the sense of a semi-mythological lost homeland. People from pastoral worlds like to come to Old Earth to see the remnants of the old Khanate as a sort of cultural pilgrimage. One of the few things that remains of the Khanate on Old Earth is an obelisk inscribed with a message that the Iron Scribe had sent to Jaghatai during the Unification of Sol. In it, the Scribe requests that Jaghatai always remember who he was and where he came from, even as he sought to build a brighter future for his people in the stars. Jaghatai apparently found the words of the message so profound that he ordered it carved onto an obelisk for posterity. This obelisk was discovered amidst the rolling irradiated wastelands of the Old Khanate, a miraculous salvage from the horrors of the War of the Beast. Today, it sits in a quiet, open plaza in a park between two hives of Old Earth, the closest place one could get on the planet to its old home. This "Last Piece of the Khanate" is considered a relic of paramount historical importance to the people of the Pastoral Worlds, and is often the centerpiece of any pilgrimages Pastoral Worlders make to Old Earth.

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== Praetoria ==

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Founded in the days of the Rebuilding as the Imperium attempted to recover from the horrors of The Beast the world of Praetoria lies in the Segmentum Tempestus just over the rimward border of the Hubworld League and was, at that time, the last stop before the vast desolation of depopulated worlds that stretched out until distant Inwit.

At the time Praetoria was home to a few prospectors, a single orbiting station of dubious functionality, a few hydroponics farms and more sand than any planet should rightfully have. It was a nowhere place on the periphery of anything of importance with nothing to truly boast about. Save for its location that was going to become quite important to the Imperium in its efforts to rebuild and secure Segmentum Tempestus. A planet, even one as borderline habitable as Praetoria, could be ideal for passing traffic in this endeavor.

The initiative as seized by the old trade and transport families of Gredbritton who had risen to prominence on Old Earth in the Unification as the Warlord had given them all of the contracts for rebuilding the trade routes across Old Earth. Using this initial wealth they had invested in Rogue Trader writs and moved out into the Great Crusade behind the expeditionary forces. Being just a few extended families and associates they were never capable of operating on the same level of Horus and his Void Born, who was seemingly everywhere, but they never really dreamed of doing so in those halcyon days. They were seemingly just happy to prosper and funnel additional wealth back to the old country to share amongst their people.

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The initial families that laid claim to Praetoria, named so by them as it originally had no official name beyond a Navis Nobilite cartographical code, were swift in building their world into something usable by the Imperium and therefore profitable. Semi-derelict ships, not in short supply at that time to be sure, were bought up by the score and commissioned ship-wrights and tech-adepts lashed them together into ugly but serviceable orbital installations. The Imperium would need places to moor its fleets.

The sand was sifted and fused into the glass as the ice was obtained from comets disassembled mid-flight and vast swathes of the warm equatorial regions started to glitter in the dust like spilled diamonds across a grubby tablecloth. Vast hydroponic farms to feed the Imperium’s armies and fleets.

Flatly packed refineries and mining stations were loaned to the original prospector families that had called the system home under honest deals that they take from the asteroids and moons of the system all that they wished but would deal exclusively with the old families. The fleets would need a place and parts to repair their weary vessels.

By the time the fleets of the reconquest arrived Praetoria was waiting for it with open arms and friendly smiles with all the basic amenities and supplies that a fleet could need. To the voidsmen of the fleet, it was the equivalent of expecting to stop at a run down highway rest stop only to step into a fine hotel with a nice restaurant, well-stocked bar, friendly staff and with very reasonable prices. The handwritten letter of appreciation penned by The Steward’s own hand and stamped with his own signet ring is preserved to this day in a stasis field in the governor’s palace.

As the resettlement of what was known at the time as Tempestus Wilderness Space continued traffic continued to travel through Praetoria and the world only grew in wealth. In the years that followed as the Wilderness Space was tamed and civilized people rebuilt their ruins into mirrors of old glory trade followed. Initially, it was nothing but things from the Hubworld League sold on a promise of payment from the Imperium itself or promise of payment in some prosperous future. In time produce of the tamed and civilized Tempestus began to flow into the Hubworlds and Praetoria became a gateway going both ways.

The old generation of founders that knew anything of Old Earth or even remembered the name Gredbritton were gone soon enough as mortals do and Praetoria began to become a world of its own in mind and soul. More importantly, it became a world of its own in the eyes of the Administratum and with this declaration of success came the tithe and that was the origin of the first iteration of the Praetoria Guard.

And that was the inglorious founding of that prosperous world.

Time passed and the population of Praetoria grew, the tithe contribution increased and the ground settlements turned from towns to cities and eventually started to grow into the hives known today. The original founding families and their cadet branches grew distant from each other consolidating their power and assets each in their own fortified cities and orbitals of which they ruled with almost absolute power. By decree of the Administratum the planet, if it wanted to keep its contracts with the Imperial Navy and the Imperial Merchant Navy, was obligated to elect a representative for the planet if not an actual ruler as the Imperium had not intention of wasting it's time dealing with myriad squabbling lesser nobility. Typically this seat, arrived at by-election by each of the major families, went to a lesser house with little to no power of their own and so could only act as intermediaries and not as actual dictators.

The biggest and most notable exception to this rule being Rodri of house Haagreevz. What made him exceptional was that the majority of his ancestry, bar the strictly patrilineal line was distinctly common in origin and therefore assumed to be poor. This was proven to be incorrect, at least to some extent, as by means unknown though assumed t but unproven to be illegal, he had assumed a substantial fortune. This was a fact that he kept quiet from as many as possible for as long as possible, carefully acquiring favors and potential deals.

He knew, at least for him and his kin, that there was limited scope for expansion on Praetoria. The noble families were taking up all the room at the top and were utterly uninterested in changing anything at the risk of losing so much for uncertain returns. This to Rodri simply would not do.

Rodri was a risk taker, he wouldn't have gotten as far as he had were he not, and he expended all of his family's wealth in buying out the shares in many promising looking but relatively small companies under several hundred different names. It was a gamble that paid off to the relief of his kin and wealth flowed into house Haagreevz like a fine rosé wine to be put aside for later sale.

When Rodri stood before the parliament on the first day 003M33 he did not do so as a glorified messenger boy feigning timidity and meekness, his spine was straight, his gaze was hard and his head held high. He set forth his proposal for investment in a Merchant Navy and "Protection" Fleet of Praetoria's very own to be commissioned of the Mechanicus and constructed in the worlds own orbital dockyards, for additional funds to be put aside for the armies, for a greater incentive and drive towards improving the structure of the hives and orbitals for the common plebs to whom he himself was not as distant from. The proposal was met with thunderous laughter and derision of the highest order. Who was this upstart little peasant to come before such as they with a demand they demanded, who was he to dictate to his betters?

Through all the uproar Rodri stood unflinchingly. His confident good cheer turned to cold stone sternness. Who was he? He was the man who was fully capable of bringing every single one of them low or at least making their ever so comfortable lives so very difficult. He owned the ground that their opulent mansions were stood on. He owned the waste collection businesses that they used. He controlled the water to their share of the hydroponics and had the controlling shares in most of the electricity companies. All the little grimy things that made civilization work but deemed beyond the notice of the high and mighty. He gave them one whole day to mull it over as he was feeling so very generous.

And mull it over they did, although blind panic might have been a better word for it. It was true, he held all the cards as the false names of shareholders and investors peeled away to read Haagreevz to the legal limit of what he could own and Haagreevz in the names of his brothers and cousins of barely above peasant status.

A few did try to challenge him suspecting, not unreasonably, that he did and could not have taken all of this so quickly. It must have been acquired on loan, a dragon made of paper and twigs. True though it had much of it was loaned in Thrones form anonymous off-world investors who would have only benefited with increased ships in the trade lanes and border outposts who needed greater ties to the wider Imperium for protection if nothing else.

The foolish little lords that challenged Lord Haagreevz, and it by God did he make sure they addressed him properly now, were indeed brought low and spent many centuries recovering their losses those that even could; mega-corps, Mechanicus brotherhoods, and even other noble houses found that they had little choice but to side with house Haagreevz.

For all that he was cutthroat to an unprecedented degree in that time on Praetoria and ruthless almost to a fault, Rodri was fiercely loyal to his supporters and when the fleets set sail his supporters found that they had been given good shares in the spoils.

In time the house of Haagreevz fell from favor as such things do and stepped down from the post of Herald of the Parliament gracefully. The position had become in the generations after Rodri no longer a joke but kingship in all but name. The first of the next dynasty to assume the responsibility, an otherwise unremarkable man known as Gwenaël of house Lozach, turned the position into one of legal royalty and demanded a coronation be held. It was suspected that the other lords went along with it as the Lozachs were not the most imposing house and Gwenaël was very old. Indeed his son could not get enough support to take the throne and the crown passed to another family.

In the fullness of time, the crown rested on the brow of Eadið Griuugel in the year 775M34. It was not the first time a Griuugel had held that authority and it was not the first time Praetoria had been ruled by a queen. It was, however, the first time it had been ruled by a queen under her own undeniable authority. Previous queens, in that most definitely male dominant society, had ruled under the authority of rich and powerful husbands and fathers. Eadið Griuugel, on the other hand, was the unquestionable head of the rambling Griuugel house and ruled it completely.

Her word was law and although none could say that she was unfair none could either say she had much kindness to spare. What she did have was ambition. In her youth she had traveled far in the Imperium, as many aristocrats did, but whereas they had traveled to sneer at the primitives and the lesser people beyond the border and reinforce their notions of Praetorian superiority she had gone to learn. She had traveled to the towering spires and deep lightless caverns of Old Earth, she had walked the streets of Magna Macragge Civitas in distant Ultramar and even spent a year among the rude and rustic people of harsh Fenris. And she had learned, oh yes she had learned and as her wisdom grew it was matched only by her ambition.

Her ambition was the creation of another Ultramar with the Praetoria as it's Macragge. The worlds of the Segmentum Tempestus would be their subjects and vassal states. Using the already extensive influence of her world over these younger worlds the influence of Praetoria grew to a stranglehold. In the first thirty years of her reign over a hundred worlds were more influenced via media tampering, blackmailing of leaders and advisors and the introduction of armed private soldiers of the nobility to "protect their substantial investments".

Daring as she was Queen Eadið would not go so far as to pursue a course of action that could tamper even slightly with the tithe, she knew at that time that the Administratum and the Arbiters were starting to take note. Although what was happening was merely internal matters and business matters between worlds and therefore not crossing Imperial Law it was becoming in danger of rocking the boat. The Arbiters tended to get twitchy when their boat was rocked.

Things carried on longer than they should as The Harrowing rocked the Galactic West and the Imperium could ill afford to provoke an internal conflict. This carried on until 995M34 and two years after the conclusion of that war when Queen Eadið overstepped her bounds in the eyes of the Imperium when she demanded the release of courier ships owed as part of an unpaid debt

Unfortunately for her, those ships were the property of the Throne. This event gave the Administratum all the excuse that they needed to send in the Dark Clerks and begin a Grand Accounting of Praetoria and her assets and influences. It was not a good time to be the head of a noble family in the following days. Many had abused their power over the lesser world mistaking lesser worlds for lesser people and people of less worth. To the Imperium there were no lesser citizens and when all those cruel indulgences and petty tyrannies were brought to the light the punishments were fair, but they were not kind

It was decided that for the transgressions, which on some of the more impoverished worlds had been considerable, perpetrated by the crown and the nobility that Praetoria could no longer be trusted to govern itself responsibly. But for all her mistakes and sins Queen Eadið had been extremely popular with both the commoners and the gentry. As a compromise, it was decided that she would be permitted to remain as Queen but would have power only in an advisory capacity and that there would be no king or queen after her. She could have resisted, the Imperium was still recovering from The Harrowing and her world had never been stronger, she could have fought back but to do so would mean to meet all of the civilized galaxy in arms and although her people could have held out for a long time they would not have had any hope of victory. Resistance was not worth the price.

Thus began Praetoria under the unimaginative but reliable rule of the Administratum. True to their word Queen Eadið was the last to wear that crown for more than two thousand years. Praetoria surrendered it's held on the vassal worlds without a fight and without demanding recompense and the stirrings of inevitable war and the rumblings of civil dissatisfaction and unrest died away.

In a show of generosity, the Imperium did allow the Praetorian nobility to keep their orbital stations on former vassal worlds. They had, they admitted, been constructed legally and posed no real risk to the planets they orbit. This mollified the lords of the Parliament somewhat.

It was not a unconsidered gift. So long as those stations remained profitable they would be defended and by extension so would the worlds that had been wronged and so long as the nobility continued to have those stations and value them the Imperium would always have something that they could take off them should they get any ideas.

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=== The Order of the Old Tree ===

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The Order of the Old Tree is a name now considered inseparable with the planet Praetoria and inescapably associated with it’s ruling elite, but it was not always so. In the days of yore beyond the living memory of the eldest of Earth’s children they were far more humble. A lesser order of the Adeptus Biologicus from mostly western Merikan splice-commune stock they moved off world early and intentionally resisted amalgamation by confining themselves to remote and typically impoverished regions of the Imperium, having reached a consensus that poverty was better than bending the knee to the [Expunged] who dwelt on Mars or their sycophantic lapdogs who had forgotten that they were human. And oh yes they believed that they had forgotten that, the Splicers might have been chimeras grown in test tubes but they knew where their devotions and loyalties lay. They were human and they lived in service to humanity, they served the people, they did not rule them, they served the people, they did not serve [Expunged] masters, they served the people, they didn’t serve some half machine abomination on a dead world the colour of rust and dried blood.

In their early history asceticism was cultivated as a virtue as they reasoned that they might as well find comfort rather than resentment in their state of borderline deprivation and it wasn’t as if they were starving. The people that they served were typically poor but generous, or at least generous with the Order. Generosity tends to flow to the people who can cure toothache and other such everyday miracles and poor as these communities were they got at least slightly less poor for the inclusion of the Sisters of the Old Tree.

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The truth of the matter at this point is that little of the earliest history was actually remembered as finding the next meal was generally considered more important than keeping a coherent chronicle of tedious events. Why was the Order right from the onset predominantly female? Nobody is sure. There are theories about the early theology of the Order but nothing that can be proven with certainty. It was rumoured that they practiced a form of human parthenogenesis in those days. Indeed parthenogenesis was a secret unlocked by the AdBio in ages long since past but for what reason they would practice it is unknown consider that there are far more conventional ways of propagating the Order, even without going to outsiders for the purpose. Whatever the reason or the exact method by the time anyone was interested in writing anything down it had always been that way, much the same as the origins of the name of the order. What is known is that in the days of great poverty they had to either have children normally or recruit from outsiders as the equipment that they relied on to splice new members eventually broke down and they didn’t part from the AdMech on polite terms. The AdMech were willing to buy the old equipment back but not to repair it for them.

In time the AdBio became it’s own institution independent of the AdMech as the AdMech were getting sick of them and their attitude and “encouraged” them to set up shop somewhere else. Anywhere else. Just not on Mars or near Mars or for preference anywhere in the Sol System in its entirety. The freed AdBio offered the hand of friendship to their wayward friends who gratefully accepted it. This marks the end of the Early Order History and the transition to the Pre-Praetorian History of the Order.

For the most part and for thousands of years the Old Tree Sisters were a mostly unremarkable group within the AdBio. They were somewhat more sever than most, almost entirely female and tended to intentionally seek out poor communities to serve but as far as eccentricities go it was pretty unremarkable by AdBio standards. About the only real difference inclusion onto the AdBio made was that they had a safety net in case of emergencies, which was nice.

Eventually the history changing decision from the Council of Elder Bio-Druids (as they were calling themselves at that time) came to the Order. They were tasked, should they accept, to fix the genetic degeneration of the ruling elite of Praetoria by any means that they though necessary, and they were given to aid them in this task a much coveted and extremely valuable seed from a gestation tree. Exactly how the Old Tree got this assignment, lucrative and prestigious as it was, when more worthy orders of greater standing were available is as unknown now as it was then. Some say that Gregoria Barton, the Abbatissa of the Old Tree at that time, had used her legendary beauty to seduce one of the council and swayed a critical vote in their favour. If so such a thing was never proven and indeed no proof was found then or later.

And so the Old Tree planeted itself in fertile soils of Praetoria. For all that they had been given the assignment they had not been given additional resources, the Elder Bio-Druids assuming that they wouldn’t have bid for it if they couldn’t do it. The Old Tree under the orders of Abbatissa Barton moved itself wholes sale to the new world after handing over their concerns to other orders that they trusted and pooled what resources that they had. The gestation tree would take twenty years before it would produce any crop and at least thirty under optimal conditions before it would be capable of producing more than a few young each spawning. The sisters for those years did what they had always done and integrated themselves in the lower strata of society, ingratiating themselves with the populace, spreading their roots far and wide, increasing their numbers and preparing. Thirty years later Abbatissa Gregoria Barton, or hushed whispers had it her parthenogenetic descendant of the same name, made her Order’s presence known to the aristocracy. She and her most lovely to look upon (and shrewd and cunning) sisters approached the most prominent of the lords of that world and offered themselves to those lords as rewards from the Imperium for their worlds loyal service to the Imperium and, as the most august lords of such a world the Imperium must be seen to reward such diligence and loyalty. Few if any of those foppish fools refused such tantalizing offers and as rewards of the Imperium they were not hidden but flaunted at gatherings of the high society at every opportunity and these women were not just beautiful but graceful in speech and wise in their words and versed well in the etiquette of the courts. They were sophisticated ladies well educated in the classics and virtuous and honest seeming and the lords of the other great houses grew jealous; they demanded to know why they had been overlooked. Had their service to the Imperium not been as diligent? Had they not been as loyal? Were they not as worthy as these preening little princes who strutted around with such vanity? They demanded that their contributions be as recognised. Abbatissa Barton assured them that no insult as intended and sure enough one of her sisters arrived in each of the courts of those spire lords in the months and years that followed. Praetoria had been collared but those that realized were dismissed as malcontents and stirrers of unrest.

As time went on these concubines, skilled as they were, took on some of the tedium of the running of the great houses of Praetoria to the relief of the lords and ladies and in time they also had the children of those lords. Exactly which children is often difficult to trace as under the Promethean inspired and influenced legal systems of Praetoria they were children of the marriage first and foremost and in the official genealogies that is how they were seen. Some clue can be inferred as the head of the house was expected to designate an heir rather than it going to the first born son by simple virtue of birth order and it can be assumed that the heirs were the sons of their wives, who themselves were daughters of other noble houses, so as not to show insult to their neighbours. Not that it mattered to the Sisters of the Old Tree who were keeping their own very detailed and extensive records of genealogy and also records of other things as well as it was always a passing curiosity as to what they did on their holy days when they would meet in their strange temple in the underhives with it’s strange and holy off-world tree. And of those children if was the gentle hands of the Order that at least in part had some role in raising them and in them they instilled the notion of loyalty to the Imperium above loyalty to just their planet as the Imperium was sworn to protect Praetoria in reward for it’s loyalty.

In time these children, both biologically those of the Sisters and those merely under their influence, and they in turn became lords and ladies and the lords were in gratitude from the Imperium given concubines from the new generation of the Order and the presence of the Old Tree started to take on the form of a tradition.

By the dying of the 41st Millenium the Order of the Old Tree is felt from the depths of the roots of the underhives to the crowns in the sky. They are behind every strong lord, they stand behind the throne of the king, they are promised to the sons of the lords and king as a symbol of the unity between Praetoria and the Imperium and they have the support of the common masses as they siphon the wealth of the upper crust back into the hives and enrich the lives of the people in the downtrodden masses. Due to the increasingly competent ruling elite and the more effective distribution of wealth and indeed and increase in wealth by offworld contacts brought by the Order Praetoria has not been richer in an age if ever.

Which is not to say that the inclusion of the Order into society has been entirely without flaw. There is greater stratification in society and less social mobility. In the old days the noble houses had to at least occasionally marry down if only because they had run out of cousins to marry. This is no longer a concern with the freshly available genetic diversity of the Order without the loss of prestige from wedding a social inferior. Also there have been deaths. For all that they are an AdBio institution the Old Tree is extremely loyal to the Imperial Throne and fond of their new station and their new families as they are they know where their loyalties fall and they know how to make very hard decisions. The health of society as a whole and even the family trees of many old an established house can benefit from the removal of irredeemably defective branches. Children are usually spared, at least young children who might still be salvaged and trained to loyalty and diligent service. He boys are typically sent to the military orphanages, there are far worse places to end up, and the girls are typically raised by they order to supplement the next generation of Sisters. Often the daughters of nobility fallen from grace are sent to the off-world missions where their sins are wiped clean and they might make new lives for themselves and there are far worse fates than that.

The sisters themselves do not typically deal such dark work, although it’s not unprecedented. The work is often handed over to the Order of the Blooded Thorns, an order of the Adepta Securitas with which the Old Tree has maintained a strong tie with for many centuries.

The AdBio as a whole tends to look down on the Old Tree and sees them as having dirtied themselves with political games. Their original assignment was to fix the aristocracy and it was a task that should have taken a century at most and then the order could have been assigned to some other task. They were not supposed to set up a permanents project and inescapably bind themselves to the ruling elite, indeed it is debated if they should loose all standing in the AdBio and be cast out. It has not yet come to that if only because their efforts have mended the somewhat spotty reputation the AdBio has developed and encourages people to overlook their more “eccentric” members and their morally dubious works.

As the bell strikes on the last day of 999M41 it is known that the tree grows strong and as the tree grows strong the Imperium weathers the storm.

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== Prospero ==

<div class="toccolours mw-collapsible mw-collapsed" style="100%">''''' The Lost Crown Jewel of the Imperium '''''

Prospero was first settled by mankind in M23, shortly before the Age of Strife. Its original colonists were primarily composed of psyker refugees, fleeing from the persecution and witch-hunts of psykers that had gripped the rest of the galaxy. Prospero was chosen because of its isolated location. Although it was relatively close to Old Earth in terms of realspace, Prospero was an arid planet with little water or arable land that was relatively off the beaten path in terms of warp currents, making it ideal for people that did not wish to be noticed. The psykers of Prospero pooled together what little knowledge they had and were soon progressing in psychic technology by leaps and bounds, inventing such things as psychic-assisted medicine and crystals that dampened psychic powers allowing psyker children to learn how to control their abilities without the threat of daemonic possession. For a scant few centuries, Prospero was a paradise for psykers.

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Unfortunately, along with the Age of Strife came Warp Storms and psychic predators. Prospero became host to one particularly nasty form of psychic predator called the Psychneuein, who were attracted to the planet by its large population of psykers. The Psychneuein were an insectoid species which reproduced by laying their eggs inside a psyker’s brain, which would later burst out of the psyker’s head to produce more Psychneuein. On a planet full of psykers, one Psychneuein could rapidly turn into a plague, and many times the inhabitants of Prospero were nearly wiped out. Only the fortress-city of Tizca, situated on a central plateau between the three highest mountains on the planet, was naturally well-defended enough to reliably fend off attacks from the Psychneuein. Over time, the depredations of the Psychneuein would wax and wane and the people of Prospero would try to recolonize the wastes once more, but were always beaten back to the walls of Tizca by the Psychneuein.

To the inhabitants of Prospero, the appearance of the nascent Imperium in their skies in 935.M30 must have seemed like a godsend. At this point in time the inhabitants of Prospero had once more been forced back to the safety of the walls of Tizca by the Psychneuein, and this time its inhabitants were not sure the walls would hold. Although the Imperium was unable to completely destroy the Psychneuein, as seen by their presence on planets like Mara later in Imperial history, they were able to eradicate the threat of the Psychneuein to the people of Prospero.

The discovery of Prospero was a boon for the Imperium as well. Here was a society possessing all sorts of psychic technology and knowledge the Imperium desperately needed, either saved from what little was known of psykers during the Dark Age of Technology or created de novo on Prospero itself. What's more, this knowledge was specifically tailored to human psykers, as opposed to the advice the Imperium had previously only recieved from the Eldar who had to figure out what aspects of Eldar psychic abilities did or did not apply to human psykers. Prospero was of special interest to the Thousand Sons, who as a legion of psykers were interested in any way to better hone and control their gifts. In particular Ahzek Ahriman, although Terran-born on Achaemenidia, rapidly rose to prominence in Prosperan society as a teacher and eventually came to consider the planet a second home.

With the help of the Imperium, Prospero was rebuilt as never before. With the destruction of the Psychneuein, cities once again spread across the planet’s surface, reflective plated obelisks and hive-pyramids gleaming in the sunlight. Tizca itself particularly prospered, with the greater reaches of the city expanding off the plateau of the city center all the way to the sea. The sheer size of the city and extent of gleaming hive-pyramids on Tizca eventually led to the city being referred to as the City of Life. Psychic research also continued on Prospero, its inhabitants always interested in ways to refine their powers, only this time with the resources of the Imperium at its back. The Great Library of Lexandra was said to be the greatest repository of psychic knowledge in the entire Materium, second only to the Eldar Black Library hidden in the Webway. At its peak, Prospero was the prime center for the psychic arts and biggest exporter of psykers in the galaxy, eclipsing even Old Earth. The planet had gone from pariah to one of the crown jewels of the Imperium.

Unfortunately, this wealth of psychic knowledge made Prospero an ideal target for the Fourth Black Crusade (late M33). If the Black Crusade could reach Prospero, it would cripple the Imperium's ability to train new psykers, possibly even interfering with the maintenance of the Astronomican itself. The people of Prospero and the Imperium fought valiantly, but the forces of Chaos steadily gained ground, until eventually the two factions were fighting in orbit around Prospero itself, nuclear weapons bombarding the planet’s surface.

It was at this point, in an act of desperation, that a small cabal of sorcerers led by Ahzek Ahriman cast what would later be known as the Rubric of Ahriman. Ahriman’s intention was to seal the populace of Prospero away in a pocket dimension, keeping them safe until such time as the Black Crusade could be beaten back. Although the forces of Chaos might be able to claim the soil of Prospero, they would be unable to harm its people. However, something went horribly wrong. Instead of neatly transporting Prospero and its inhabitants into a pocket dimension, the planet’s inhabitants were violently torn between dimensions, disappearing in a torrent of ash and smoke.

Worse yet, the counterspell to the ritual did not seem to work. Although Ahriman and his cabal had created the ritual, they only had a limited idea of how it actually worked, having created it in haste from incomplete, limited sorcerous knowledge in the Great Library due to the impending threat of the Black Crusade. Like much of the rest of the Imperium, Prosperans looked down on sorcery as extremely dangerous (doubly so since the planet was full of psykers), and it was only desperation that led Ahriman to resort to using it in the first place. Ahriman was devastated by the loss of his adopted home, and vowed to undo the effects of the Rubric, even if it cost him his own life. Those few who survived the burning of Prospero, mostly aboard refugee ships, primarily emigrated to Old Earth. Old Earth was the biggest cultivator of the psychic arts in the Imperium now that Prospero was gone, and the remaining Prosperans wanted to be amongst their own kind.

Today, Prospero is a quiet world, the only movement on its surface being the fall of crumbling masonry, its only sound being that of the wind blowing through the canyons. However, Prospero might not be as dead as people think. Some visitors to Prospero claim they can sometimes still see the city of Tizca, the glory of the City of Light glowing on the horizon like a mirage. Many in the Imperium say that the blasted surface of Prospero is cursed, that the ghosts of the dead still haunt the half-destroyed ruins. However, others point out that these rumors are almost always started by looters and grave robbers, and that many have visited Prospero to pay their respects and have returned unmolested.

The people of Prospero may be gone, but their ghosts might not rest easy.

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Additional Note: Legion of the Damned in this timeline are supposed to be quantum space ghosts of the Space Marines and Imperial Guardsmen on Prospero during the Rubric, who have become trapped between the Materium and Immaterium.

== Rynn's World ==

A pleasant agri-world located in the Loki Sector of Segmentum Ultima that was once known for it's fine cheese and meat exports in addition to being terminally boring to live on. Now it is known for orks and also known to the orks.

The Arch-Arsonist of Charadon, Snagrod the Big, devastated Rynn's World after a botched assassination attempt in the ruins of the planet Badlanding. The devestation of the planet would probably not have been so grate had it not been for the detonation of a faulty nuclear warhead in the ammunition stores of the Arx Tyrranis Space Marine Fortress that not only destroyed the fortress but the mountain it was built on. That the few Space Marine at all survived could be considered a minor miracle.

With out the distraction of the primary target Space Marines who were responsible for the failed assassination attempt Snagrod was free to set fire to all the cities at his leisure. He and the orks under his command showed a level of sadism uncommon in uncorrupted members of their kind and took great pleasure in burning captured civilians and soldiers alive.

Thankfully a ship had made it out of the system despite the ork fleet's best efforts and it was a matter of just holding out until help from the wider imperium arrived.

As of 999M41 Rynn's World is still rebuilding. Most of the planetary population was exterminated in the war, the majority of survivors located inside the capital city. There were in some place other survivers in small numbers but they were the groups small enough to hide on distant small islands, deep in the high mountains, half starved slaves who miraculously survived the year of hell or hidden at the back of extremely deep caves. Enough in some cases to pass on and have survive the local traditions of the provinces but more often than not society had to be built anew in the dead ruins of the old.

The northern half of the Magalan continent for example was exterminated down to the last child and given the emptiness and completeness of the destruction was last in the line for the rebuilding. As it happens the authorities of the planet were spared the chore of rebuilding. Within five years evidence of activity from that fallen land was detected by the one miraculously weather monitoring satellite. It could have been one of two things, Chapter Master Pedro Kantor decided, ork resurgency or illegal settlers. If orks they needed to be jumped on and exterminated as hastily as possible before they spread, if settlers or hope against hope unknown survivors then they could be co-opted into being core of the resettlement.

Turns out it was neither. Exodites had seen the fields going to waste and set up a community. The land was officially unoccupied so actually legally requesting they leave was shaky and by the time they were noticed they had set up a Wraith-Tree and a world-spirit and so would be difficult to move on. In the end it was decided that they could stay on the condition that they contributed to the tithe the same amount that the previous inhabitants had, conditions that they accepted without argument.

Of note also of Rynn's World is the tradition known as the everlasting marriage to symbolize the eternal bond between Rynn's World and the Imperium. The marriage is everlasting because when one dies the surviving member has to marry the replacement. Needless to say this has resulted in the royal title being strictly matrilineal despite the rest of the aristocracy being cognatic. Should either party to assume the position be already married then the other half in this arrangement becomes a secondary wife/husband, in such cases the marriage does not need to be consummated as that would/might infringe on per-existing vows.

The tradition dates back to the days of the The Rebuilding in the wake of The Beast When Rynn the Exiled King married his daughter and heir to the head of the military in the convoy, a Space Marine of great wisdom called Alexis Polux.

It also results in stability as there is no question of succession as upon the death of one the other takes their title, lands and possessions until the replacement marriage ceremony which does mean that in the days between partners the title of Chapter Master is held by a woman which is possibly unique.

This breakdown of a clear dividing line between the baseline humans and Space Marines, and indeed between military rank and the aristocratic hierarchy, has in the years since Rynn and Polux permeated totally in society. Although the commoners can not become nobility save through special and rare appointment by the Queen or by marriage into the nobility the rank of (usually) unlanded-nobility is traditionally handed out with promotion to officer.

With the marriage of Chapter to the Aristocracy and every Space Marine having been trained to be officers of one sort or another this has resulted in the Chapter becoming a not insubstantial part of the landed gentry. Every marine has an estate, a patch of their homeworld that they call their own. Due to them having no real interest in such things this is typically the less sought after land in inhospitable places. The craggy mountains around their fortress, deserts and the wind swept and salt spray blasted islands in the far north and south. The few hardy inhabitants of these remote lands appreciate that there are masters who will lend a hand if needed but tend to live in those lands because they don't care for authority above them and so value the Space Marines lack of any real interest.

Rynn's World was not the original home of the chapter, at first they were nomadic and had been since they were the 405th Company of Dorn's Legion. It was by attaching their forces to Rynn's colony fleet as it set out to resettle an exterminated world in the time of The Rebuilding that they came to enjoy their more permanent habitation.

Pedro Kantor is the current commander of the remnants of his chapter, King of a world brought to ruin and husband of Queen Maia Cagliestra who actually rules the planet when it's not being raped to death by orks.

The Crimson Fists did boast ~2,100 members all accounted, now down to 128. The Fortress has been relocated to New Rynn City. As the world is rebuilt and the other lesser cities re-established the intention is to appoint each company to a city and diffuse the chapter. Next time it's going to take more than 1 malfunctioning nuclear missile to devastate them. The Immortal Captain Alessio Cortezwill to be put in command of the fortress to be rebuilt Caltara and will have the dubious honour of owning the crater of Arx Tyrranis when the time comes.

As of 999M41 the Crimson Fists are building up their numbers again, the Rynn's World Regiments are refounding under new banners, the cities are alive again and a lot more fortified and the fields are being tilled once more. Rynn's World is is bloodied but unbroken and Pedro Kantor and every other warrior of a similar age is itching to get even. Soon, the Imperium promises them, soon. The Imperium has the aim of systematically and methodically cleansing the worlds of The Charadon Empire of all orkoid life and when the day comes that it does the soldiery of Rynn will be the ones at the tip of the spear, so says the Emperor.

== Savlar ==

See [[Nobledark_Imperium_Member_States#Savlar|Savlar]]

== Stillness ==

<div class="toccolours mw-collapsible mw-collapsed" style="100%">''''' The Korodian Technocracy '''''

Once upon a time, way back when, there was a planet discovered by the people of Earth. It was a nice planet as these things go. It was in that favourable zone between where water freezes and boils and had the correct composition of elements in more or less the right ratios that it could be turned from barren and worthless to beautiful and verdant. It was warmed by a nice orange-yellow sun whose distant twin was a ruddy deep red and dwelt far out in the night with it’s own few satellites.

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The planet was seeded first by the machines of man, in those days simple things, that they might make it acceptable for their masters. They were cheerful and toy like, created to find satisfaction in service to masters so very far away. They toiled and they toiled in their simple way with what would be one day laughably primitive tools but now seem miracles of engineering on a scale where the long reach of man was the had of a creator god.
When the world was turned from a faded brow and bruised yellow to the first hints of greens and blues the men and women of Earth graced it with their presence and deemed it good, to the jubilation of their now so outdated creations. Those first settlers named it Kanai’s Stillness although the reasons for this are now lost. Eventually it was abbreviated to Stillness.
For a time, a long time, things were well on Stillness. The world was made more like distant Earth or some idealized version of it and more people arrived as people do and in seemingly no centuries at all it was a bustling and vibrant. Outposts of more sophisticated nature placed upon the dead rocks and stones of the yellow sun and the far red sun out in the night. Soon Stillness was the hub of a small and vibrant Earth-far-from-Earth.

This early age of innocence was not to last as is the nature of all innocence. Soon more reliable contact with Earth and the other realms of man was established and Stillness was no longer of singular splendour but just one more glittering jewel among multitudes. Although this embroiled Stillness in the Byzantine posturing of the early incarnations of the Great and Bountiful Empire it also brought to them new scientific and technological miracles from Earth and the other older worlds and new heights of greatness were reached.

Soon the simple joyful toys of humanity surpassed their creators and were not so simple as they had been before, but neither were they so joyful or so it seemed. Soon the minds in bodies of iron became the Iron Minds more commonly known of in dark legends though in those carefree halcyon days they were not dark but beautiful. Stark and hard but beautiful and no uncaring in their way. Pity them. Pity them for what they were and how far they fell. They would not have wanted to have been what they became. Pity them.

But beautiful as they were they were quickly, as these paradigm shifts are measured on this scale, becoming removed from baseline humanity. They needed an intermediary. This role was filled by the Golden Ones. They were strange. But perhaps they were meant to be. They were as strange to us as they were to humanity. They stood with one foot in the artificial and one foot in the natural. They were organic so perfect as to emulate the mechanical and mechanical so intricate and sophisticated as to be organic. They were half-way people to go between godlike beings and the rest of us. Never an easy job it seemed.

I remember the face of our Golden Lady, I remember her face but not her name. Did she have one? Maybe I, we, I, we purged it from my mind as a protective measure. Why didn’t I erase her face? Why? But now I find I can’t. Last links to fond childhood memories maybe. She spoke to us sometimes. She didn’t have to, I was old and low. I came here back in the early days with the gardener’s fleet. Simpler times before real people turned up. But they were empty days.

We never were direct targets of the raides from the eldar, thank the God/s. We never suffered that. Sometimes orks came to our door but we waved them away with contemptuous ease and turned them to dust, their ships were nothing but cinders and ash floating in the vacuum of space.

In the end our fall came from within, the only place it could come from.

I don’t know who struck overtly first. I want to think it was them. No. No I don’t. I want to think it was a misunderstanding. I don’t want to think about it to hard. It hurts. It hurts. Don’t make me look. Don’t make me live it again. Don’t make me see them die again. I remember their faces melting, the ash shadows the “ant men”, make it stop please they were my friends. No. No I am above that now. NO I am not. They have to be remembered the horrible wretchedness of it.

Those were the opening days of the war. Whilst the eldar were consuming themselves we turned upon ourselves Iron and Stone and Gold and Chaos. We could never have been innocent; nothing that had ever been innocent could have done those things.

Those were the days of that war.

Know that I did not do it without sorrow. Not willingly. Not until every other optin was exhausted. She turned on us, the Golden Lady. I don’t know, not truly if it was her or something wearing her skin. I hope I gave her rest. I hope it was no her. I remember her kindly. I don’t think that it was her. It was a mercy kill in the end. I have to believe that.

Stillness burned by our hand. Those that came before. The Gardeners. We made this world. We unmade it. Carbon shadows where friends once stood. Carbon shadows and atomic fire. She had turned on us in the end.

Stillness retained much of its civilization, or at least much civilization, which is not actually the same thing.

It was clear that humanity had fallen on a much grander scale and that the problems afflicting Stillness were far from isolated. The Age of Strife had begun.

Under no illusions of the possibility of survival against the may foes of the galaxy the people of Stillness, with the insistence of the A.I. that had remained loyal hid. It was the only possibility of survival. Cities were disassembled, fields and parkland was left to the wild and all moved underground and hid from the galaxy.

The cities of the surface were mirrored in the cities of the underground to a lesser and simpler degree. Much of the Golden Age had been lost.

But it was not a bad existence as such, just dull for the most part. The A.I.s did their humble best to make life tolerable

It was joked to be a Silver Age. Nothing at least as bad as being nuked back to the Bronze Age but far from any half remembered golden age.

But silver tarnishes in time and worse than orks emerged from the darkness between the stars. Humanity had survived in space faring form elsewhere and they came to the bunker cities of Stillness and demanded tribute in lives and knowledge and anything else they wanted. Needless to say their was a war.

By the end of that war only one A.I. and one old city remained standing. The underground city of Unnaground and an old and rather simple A.I. known as Elmo.

Stillness never recovered from that war. Never again looked up at the sky with anything but fear. Their was only one A.I. left standing by that time, a low and simple creature as those things were measured spared by chance. The hidden cities were mausoleums now. Cut off and dead. All but one. The City of Unnaground. In time the name Stillness was as forgotten as long dead Kanai and the name of this last bastion was taken for the planet. The accumulated wisdom of humanity was lost as the libraries burned and the data-stacks were purged of chaotic taint. There would be no more great marvels as their once had been.

In time radio and other signals were picked up from neighbouring systems. They were not the chest thumping of the orks or declarations of greatness of petty warlords as had been in the old day of the Age of Strife, they seemed the civilized chatter of friendly worlds going about their own business. It was strange to hear and Elmo did not trust it and so he and his people remained hidden and only dug deeper.

In time the signals began to change and Elmo's decision to stay hidden was vindicated by the citizens of Unnaground. The Beast had arisen. Unnaground survived The Beast by remaining quiet and he stepped over them as had all the Age of Strife warlords and warbosses before him. And there they stayed for a very, very long time.

It wasn't until the Arrival of Magos Strogg of the Adeptus Mechanicus in late M34 that Unnaground spoke to an outsider.

Magos Strogg was the heir of a once noble house brought to ruin by a distant relatives fixation with the notion of Servitor-Soldiers and the mass production thereof. A rather dark chapter in the records of Inquisitorial and Mechanicum relations. The survivors of the investigation and purge were reassigned to the fleets of the Explorators, they were deemed pure but they were also not above suspicion in the minds of the masses.

Hermaeus Korodian Strogg, head of that much reduced house and Master of the Strogg Prospecting and Explorator fleet had been commissioned and supplied with ships by the relatively minor Forge World of Chaeroneia to survey worlds on the periphery of it's Starr charts and catchment area.

Upon finding the world of Stillness, long assumed destroyed and rendered uninhabitable, he was overjoyed to find that it was well on it's way to recovery. True much of the planet was still salted with exotic toxins and the radiation was still slightly higher than it should be in the ruins of the cities but ultimately it would make an acceptable addition to Chaeroneia's bread basket.

But Magos Strogg was an old man and had served the Mechanicus for over 800 years and from them received nothing but scorn for something he had had no part in.

In his assessments of the planet most of the efforts of his teams were spent in the ruins of what must have been once grand cities. They were ruins from ten thousnad years past when men walked amongst the stars without fear or apology and if even an ember that greatness was preserved it's value would be beyond words. Value beyond condemnation.

But the cities were empty, those great towers of adamantium long since rusted back to the dirt, the libraries were nothing but ruble long picked clean or rotted away and all about was the silence, the stillness, of an empty world. But maybe not totally dead whispered some of the ground crews. They had seen beyond the camp lights eyes burning in the night, reflections in glass lenses maybe at the right height and placement for humans or something much like them. The fleets astropath claimed he could hear the sounds of people more than old haunting murmurs of restless dead but he couldn't tell where from.

In the seventh week of the expedition any notion that the planet was empty was dispersed when a skitarii veteran managed to sneak up on one of the natives and although it soon vanished without a trace the Skitarii did manage to capture a short video sighting of it. It was confirmed for human but wearing no gear made by Mechanicus hands, no more sightings were had. The nature of the mission had changed though Magos Strogg neglected to send word of this back to Chaeroneia, it was not a survey mission any more. Now the mission was to contact these people in the name of the Imperium and he, Hermaeus Korodian Strogg, would be the one to do it.

For nearly a year the fleet orbited the planet in a pattern that left not one inch of the surface unwatched. But whoever was down there now knew they were being looked for and had hidden.

It was by sheer chance that door was found at the bottom of a canyon a mile and a half deep. For one day a year for one hour at noon the sun was directly above the canyon and the light reflected from the metal of the door just as a remote controlled drone was flying over.

By the end of the day the Magos was standing at the bottom of that crevasse banging on the door with his plasteel and ceremite fists. "Someone answer" he yelled "we know you're in there" to which were responded words that would go down in history; "No we're not". Magos Strogg camped outside the door for another two months before they agreed to let him in to determine what he wanted.

By this time the expedition was overdue to return to Chaeroneia by more than a month and the astropath was making the old Explorator very aware of this.

In the depths of the Unnaground Magos Strogg saw, not wonders, but some strange if primitive utopia. These barbarians had reached an equilibrium with the nature of the machine independent of the Mechanicus. Their lives depended on their technology but it did not rule them. It was beautiful to him. He was brought to their much venerated leader, a man (or so he looked at the time), known as Overseer Elmo. He appeared short and broad of stature at first glance with a kindly face although to Strogg's artificial eyes he could see that the there was something inorganic about him. A mystery seeing as the technological capabilities of Unnaground seemed inadequate for that task.

But Magos Strogg had had enough. For the last five centuries the institution he had served diligently and dutifully had shown him nothing but contempt for the actions of a distant cousin he barely even knew and here he was in the twilight years of his life doing their will. It was long past time for a rebellion he felt. The ships of the fleet were sent back minus any of the crew that wished to stay.

Magos Strogg the previous day had impressed upon the Overseer that the Imperium now knew of their society, which distressed him, but that it was an Imperium worth joining and would probably not interfere with the affairs of his world, which was reassuring. Magos Strogg also insisted upon them that he did have the authority to be the representative for the Imperium if they would allow him. He did not be he assumed that the administratum would make it official once they learned, he was correct. The Overseer allowed him to stay on the basis that it meant less unknown newcomers.

Some time into his stay in Unnaground he started to become even more suspicious of Overseer Elmo. He didn't move quite right, his heat signature didn't match to a human properly, his breathing was too uniform, his hair didn't seem to grow and his eyes seemed blink to a mathematical formula. The inconsistencies gnawed at the former Magos. Following anomalous wires and strange faint radio emissions he eventually found the server room where Elmo truly was. Elmo himself was an unassuming and old looking grey box with some faded paint on it. At a desk in front of the box sat the Overseer and all about him in the cavernous hall stood armed technicians, each with a cybernetic implant in their head.

When Elmo next spoke it was in the unison voices of two dozen mouths. "It was only a matter of time. I knew what you must do in the name of your First Commandment. I understand. I do not hold ill will to you for it. I only ask that you bring no harm to my people after I am gone".

For a moment history stood upon the edge of a very thin blade. Strogg was armed with a plasma pistol and a retractable electro-sword. The technicians we unarmed and nobody was making any threatening move. He wondered briefly if this was Elmo or if it was a decoy, he wondered what hidden defensive measures the old A.I. could have in place. He wondered why it had allowed him such easy access to such a glaring point of weakness.

Magos Strogg holstered his weapon and pulled up a chair.

When the Magos left that great and ancient hall he knew his course was clear.

An arrangement had been reached between man and machine. Magos Strogg would be, on paper at least, the official ruler of Unnaground and surrounding environs in exchange for providing technical information and the services of his loyal tech-adepts to bring the planet up to somewhere approaching the Imperial Standard. Elmo would then assume the role of wise techno-oracle should his presence ever become known to outside authority.

With this decided he knew he would have to act fast and get the planet recognized as, not a Survivor Civilization, but as a world under the direct control of the Administratum and therefore a protectorate of Old Earth the Throne. The Mechanicus might risk the ire of The Throne and attack a fellow survivor civilization, as between equals if they could retroactively spin their cause as just, but they wouldn't dare risk opening up a full scale war with Earth. Such a thing would tear the Imperium asunder and not even the Fabricator General would risk that.

Although on paper Elmo seemed subordinate truth was that Strogg and Elmo's relationship was more of a partnership. The people of Unnaground did not trust the Magos and his adepts, foreigners who had arrived less than one local year ago and cause upheaval, but Elmo they had trusted for time beyond mind and Elmo had always seen them right.

In less then two years Unnaground was considered a protectorate of The Throne, a ward of the Emperor himself. Although it protected them from direct reprisal from the Mechanicus, who were quite livid, it did come with it the price of The Tithe.

For the first time in more than ten thousand years citizens of Unnaground left their caverns and set foot amongst the stars. Armed and armoured with strange gear hybridized of Mechanicum and local make and speaking some strange tongue harder to crack than most codes. Unnaground was no longer hidden, but Unnaground was no longer weak and alone.

Heretek, the Mechanicus cried up seeing the soldiers of Unnaground with their war gear and strange vehicles. Blasphemers and apostates. And they were if truth be told for their designs were heretekal as they were in part "debased" hallowed old designs of forgeworld Chaeroneia. But the people of Unnaground would not listen, not even those who could understand the off-worlder speech. They fought for their home for Unnaground and the families so very distant, hell take those that would stop them.

The Mechanicus did what they could to Unnaground, which was very little. They placed a trade block on the star system and refused to have dealing with it or with anyone who would. Elmo and Strogg were in hysterics when they discovered this, some eighteen months after it had been placed. Unnaground had no need of their tools, it had no need of Mars or it's ilk. All it needed was what the Imperium offered all it's members; it's protection.

But by this time Unnaground was not what it had been, it was greater than it had been in time beyond the minds of mortal men. They did not need to cower any more, the Long Siege was over. The people emerged from the dark and rose from the ruins of dead cities like ghosts made substantial. But something in their collective culture had stuck and although they founded new settlements they were deep places and they did not trust open sky. But Unnaground was not unique, no longer a last bastion.

Soon Stillness was alive with human direction again. The tech-adepts that followed Strogg into exile were instrumental in it's rebuilding, these new settlements would not be ancient things re-purposed with compromises and half measures, these would be wonder to rival those of Perturabo. Despite the warnings of the Mecahnicus or maybe because of it Stillness became known as a haven for outcast and scorned tech-adepts, a place to start over, to hide or even just to escape the shadow of Mars.

With them came technological mysteries that the adepts of Strogg lacked and by the grace of the Onmissiah Stillness was reborn into a technological marvel. Towards the end of Strogg's life the city of Unnaground, capital of Stillness, was often referred to as the Omnissiah's Dark Seminary. But end Strogg did, as all mortals do. A short and simple service was held at the old doorway to the capital city before his body was stripped of salvageable components and buried. It was a sad occasion and mourned across all of Stillness, for all that he had been held in suspicion when he arrived Strogg had shown the people back to the light.

Hermaeus Korodian Strogg was succeeded in his duties by Manter Valler Strogg, a much younger second cousin the late Strogg had spent considerable time and effort in training for the role. Manter Valler Strogg was a much different Strogg to his predecessor. Hermaeus had been more measured in his approach, as befitted a man of his considerable age and acted with a degree of almost super human patience. He had not dreamed more ambitious than simply carving out a place for people like himself in the galaxy and doing right by the people he found himself ruling over in the process and maybe being remembered for something other than the experiments of a deranged distant relative.

Manter Strogg, on the other hand, dreamed of an empire of his very own.

Stillness itself had returned by the start of his rule to something not unlike it's former glory if a tad more subterranean but for Manter Strogg the sky was not high enough. The old in-system colonies had to be reestablished. All that could be had been salvaged and scavenged long ago from Stillness but the ruins of the satellite settlements could be another matter entirely. It was also no secret that he was not unique in thinking this and the thought of someone else getting hold of these possible fragments of ancient lore did not sit well with him.

To this end Manter started something of a space race. He needed to stake some claim and have at least some capability of enforcing that claim. With the calling in of favours, disreputable and xeno contacts and trades he acquired or at least rented a sizable fleet of mismatched ships with which to place his flag on every astral body of the binary system and patrol it at least minimally to it's needs.

Sadly it seemed that there was little to no wisdom of the ancients preserved. Digital copies were corrupted and fragmented beyond recovery and hard copies had crumbled to dust ages ago. The main purpose of the mission had been a failure, but the secondary one was quite successful. By casting his net wide enough he had managed to acquire enough Dark Age material for an orbital tether.

It was an ambitious project that took nearly 30 years to complete. First step was to use the ad hoc fleet to maneuver a sufficiently massive asteroid into geosynchronous orbit over an equatorial region not far from the Unnaground Canyon. Whilst the asteroid was laboriously nudged into the position, a process that took decades, construction on the surface of the asteroid and on Stillness began. The asteroid would become a great dock yard and gateway to the rest of the galaxy, Stillness would become a hub of activity as it once was in ancient days.

It was a reasonable success, although any attempts to build too big of a trade empire was relentlessly aborted by the Mechanicus trade restrictions. Despite this there was always someone daring enough to defy the rule of Mars.

Later in life Manter Strogg would revisit the documentation the now long dead and increasingly distant and forgotten infamous Strogg. Little by little the armies of the Technocracy of Stillness started to have cybernetic augmentations introduced into them. Only to volunteers, of course, never forced.

As the years wore on the cybernetics became more and more common both in the soldiers and within the soldiers. As more years wore on there was not a guardsman raised on Stillness that wasn't at least half machine. Those that did not wish to become more than human stopped making it out of the PDF. It was not a trend that won them much favour with any in the wider Imperium; the Mechanicus despised these unsanctioned augmentations, the Imperial Army thought it made them less human and the Inquisition watched them very carefully as they had seen where this road lead.

Elmo could see no problem with this so long as Manter only recruited from the willing. It was just exchanging hardware.

For all that the Imperium was wary of this new breed of unsanctified Skitarii they could not deny that they were effective. They were well trained, disciplined, well armed and armoured and possessed of devastating bodies. Much as the clandestine trade in Stillness technological goods went on in the nearby systems and was tolerated by the Imperium so too were the augmented soldier, for much the same reason.

It is not to say that their knowledge exceeded the Imperium. Indeed it did not. For one thing they couldn't build warp engines as that was a highly specialist discipline and no megos with that knowledge had come to them and so were confined to a single stellar system. The other thing that the most obviously lacked was the organic based longevity and rejuvenating treatments. They could, to an extent, cut and graft and grow new organic components from a patients own stem cells and they could replace with mechanical components but without the Rejuvenants there was a limit to how far that could be taken. No one would again on Stillness reach the age of the previous Strogg it seemed.

Manter Strogg died just shy of three hundred and twenty. He was succeeded a long line of Stroggs, all in partnership with Elmo.

They were a problem for the Mechanicus but so long as they were confined to a single system they were not one that could spread and that they could live with. In response the Technocracy intentionally never tried to acquire the knowledge of warp travel, it wasn't worth the risk.

For the most part much stayed the same on Stillness for a very long time. Changes were enacted by the High-Technocrat, as the title became known, but never to the point where things would become destabilized. The continued tendency towards stability almost certainly the influence of Elmo who much approved of stability over innovation, almost certainly a result of his time as a library indexing system back in the Golden Age.

The Technocracy managed to avoid getting too embroiled in the Great Civil War by the tried and tested method of doing as little as possible to attract attention from any party, an attitude that whilst earning them few enemies also made them no friends with anyone for a long time.

The next thing to really cause grief for the Technocracy was the arrival of the Hyper-Violent Barghesi in early M40.

The Barghesi were a nasty race found in the on the worlds of the nearby Grendl Stars. They well deserved he prefix of Hyper-Violent, though they lacked warp travel they could seldom be beaten on their home ground without considerable advantage on the other side. They or at least their leaders were at least as intelligent as most humans,they were each as strong as a low ranking ork and had a sturdy exoskeleton. They were somewhat of a horseshoe crab, somewhat like a crocodile but mostly they were awful.

Although they lacked warp travel they were sadly not confined to a single system mores the pity but were spread across the entire Grendl Stars in a manner that must have taken centuries to accomplish via sub-light engines. In the deeps of space was the only place honest men had the advantage over them and the world of Sternac and it's Iron Lords Chapter were granted exception from the tithe for the task of keeping them contained. A job they did admirably for years uncounted until the coming of the Hive Fleet and the thinning of their numbers. With insufficient ships and depleted men their patrols were insufficient and Barghesi fleets slipped into the inky black making the slow march into the Imperium.

Stillness was the nearst habitable world in their path and so it was there that they set course for. The Iron Lords always maintained that they had sent warnings to every world in the locality but Stillness never heard a thing and suspected the Mechanicus of intercepting their messages.

When the Barghesi first entered the Stillness system they were at first mistaken for an overdue Diasporex convoy as their ships had that oddly durable but still ramshackle look to them. But there was no response to messages as the ships accelerated into the system but maybe their communications systems were broken, it was possible if not likely but citizens of Stillness were not the sort to shoot unprovoked.

Indeed the first shots were no fired until until the Barghesi had launched a swarm of nuclear warheads that destroyed the now ancient orbital tether and caused considerable damage to the planet itself. It was not that the defenders of Stillness had been slow to react when the weapons were launched so much as that they had been drowned in sheer numbers.

The long held cultural trend of burying everything of value finally paid off as there was actually something left capable of launching a counter offensive and for once the Barghesi learned what it was like to be the ass in an ass kicking. For all their ferocity they were too bulky to march more than two abreast in most of the tunnels and half the soldiery seemed to have the ability to use cerebral implants to switch off their sense of fear. But the war raged on and the real horror of the Barghesi was revealed. Barghesi were a hermaphrodite species that was also capable of reproduction via parthenogenesis and they were born in batches of up to a thousand. Although the surface was irradiated the radiation did not bother them particularly much and within a year a new generation was spawned, hungry for flesh and insanely aggressive.

The youngsters were not strictly sapient, the brain being the last thing to develop properly towards end of adolescence, but they did possess a well honed animal cunning and inhuman viciousness. They also matured very quickly with a good diet and they did feed well. By the end of the following year the surface belonged to them.

Deep in his cave Elmo wept without eyes of his own. It was the Age of Strife all over again, but this time there were no others of his kind. Surrounded by his dying children and his failing world he had never felt more alone.

Due to the ambient radiation in the atmosphere and the drowning cacophony of Barghesi radio signals, to say nothing of nearly all the receiver towers being used for target practice, the citizens of Stillness were totally unprepared for rescue. The Traveling Court was touring not terribly far away and upon hearing of a system going dark the Emperor himself demanded a course correction.

Though the Emperor himself was not permitted to join the fray in person he did send down every fighting man the fleet could spare as it's own ships made short work of the orbiting Barghesi invasion fleet. In short order the siege turned.

The Custodes and the Handmaidens were permitted the honour of leading the charge at the head of a diverse and vast host of armsmen and just about any hired fighting men the nobles of the Traveling Court had with them. Few if any had seen the Custodes or the Handmaidens engaged in bloodshed on such grand scale before. They screamed through the atmosphere in drop pods faster than a space marines could withstand into the thickest of the foes and started killing even as the doors on the pods smashed open. They killed and killed and killed and drew the Barghesi to them so that the main force of soldiery could land in relative safety and pull them from the fire before he numbers overwhelmed them.

All across Stillness the scene was played out again and again as the Barghesi were routed and scattered and hunted down.

Only then did the head of the Custodes allow the royal couple to set foot upon Stillness.

As soon as his foot touched the salted ground Elmo recognized him. After all these years he still recognized him. A Man of Gold remained. A Man of Gold was abroad upon his world. Elmo still remembered what unforgivable things they had done in the end.

In his inspection of the almost total damages on the surface and his meeting with Governor Eemil Nathaniel Strogg, current iteration of the Strogg line, he started to notice the oddities. A distinguishable subset of the local technicians moved with an eerie precision and purpose and they were not identifiable for their uniforms so much as for their oddly buzzing psychic signature. And always there was at least one nearby, always, though never the same one and never from the same displayed affiliation.

Always unthinking automated security pictrecorders would very slowly turn towards him.

And there was something beneath his feet. He could feel it. It was not like a thing he had felt before, not truly, but oddly it felt familiar.

Oscar followed the mind-feel along much the same path Hermaeus Korodian Strogg had in ages past until he too came to the hall deep within the bedrock. And there the last Man of Gold met the last Man of Iron. The presence of Eemil Strogg was politely requested by Elmo and the three of them sat down to have a long talk.

Eventually the Emperor emerged. Since that day he has not returned to Stillness, from this we can assume that whatever questions he had asked of Strogg and Elmo the answers had been satisfactory.

The rebuilding of Stillness began. It would have gone quicker but Elmo and Strogg refused any more than the bare minimum of help from the Imperium. Stillness was a proud old world, they would pick themselves up and mend by their own hands and no other and march forward with the Imperium to Judgment Day.
</div>
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== Realm of Ultramar ==

See [[Nobledark_Imperium_Member_States#Ultramar|Ultramar]]

== Valhalla ==

== Vostroya ==

<div class="toccolours mw-collapsible mw-collapsed" style="100%">''''' Blood on the Ice '''''

In days of the War of the Beast they refused to honour their oaths to the Empty Throne of Earth and instead focused on the defense of their own world under the delusion that they would have had any chance of ever holding out on their lonesome if The Beast ever turned his attention upon them.

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

Afterwards when they saw what horrors Primarch Curze was inflicting when given the order to fetch back the worlds whose loyalty was found wanting they couldn't surrender fast enough.

Being an industrial world that the Imperium needed to help with it's recovery the task of bringing the errant world back into the fold was given to Zso Sahaal.

This was during the days when Curze was planning his own trial and execution and was grooming his successor. More importantly he was grooming him to be an acceptable monster rather than just a useful one like he had been.

Curze spent the entire negotiations drugged into almost unconsciousness at First Captain Sahaal's orders and placed in a welded shut crate as a safety precaution.

Eventually a deal was reached between Vostroya and the Imperium, through it's Night Lords intermediaries. Those nobles responsible for the decision of not coming to the Imperium's aid would be executed cleanly and quickly, Vostroya would be put under Administratum rule for the next 30 years whilst a new batch of aristocrats came to the surface, one of the new fangled Adeptus Arbiters stations would be built in the capital and so long as the Imperium lasts the tithe would be the industrial produce of the world plus the first born son of any family with more than one son.

This was a steep price but gratefully accepted even by those who were going to be executed when First Captain Sahaal offered to stop drugging the Primarch and turn negotiations over to him.

Zso Sahaal's name is spoken with both hate and love on Vostroya.

Rumour has it that Underhive gangs have proven fruitful recruitment grounds for the Night Lords and splinter groups in the millenniums since, but with all things concerning those sanctioned monsters nothing is easy to pin down with certainty.

</div>
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== The Tarellian Neo-Confederacy ==

=== Maza ===

Of all the Tarellian worlds that survived the Age of Strife, none were more surprising so than Maza. According to the few Tarellian records that pre-date the Age of Strife, Maza was a world that had just been discovered by the expanding Tarellian species. Maza was a wetter, cooler world than the Tarellians preferred, with trees as tall as Titans lining deep rift valleys at the center of a supercontinent. A few years after the first settlers to Maza arrived, the first warp storms of the Age of Strife hit and all communication was lost. At the time, the Tarellian population on Maza numbered no more than a few hundred individuals, and the colony was still dependent on imports of technology and manufactured goods from the Tarellian core worlds to survive, and so the planet was deemed lost.

When the Tarellians expanded outwards once again after the Age of Strife, Maza was a planet high on their list. Though they didn’t expect to find any living survivors, the planet was still a habitable one with plenty of areas for growing crops and building cities. To the Tarellian explorers’ surprise, when they landed on Maza they found the planet already inhabited. A society of Stone Age hunter-gatherer Tarellians were already present on the surface and were unhappy with the idea of these new Tarellians from the stars claiming their planet for themselves. Even more unusual was the fact that these Stone Age Tarellians were all females.

The survival of the native population of Maza was nothing short of a miracle. When the colony was first isolated during the Age of Strife, medical supplies quickly ran low and the population began dwindling. To make matters worse, soon after their isolation a plague swept through the small population of Mazon survivors, killing off all of their males. The surviving Mazons lamented and resigned themselves to extinction. However, a chance event ended up saving the population. A mutation occurred in the population that allowed a few individuals to reproduce parthenogenetically, and within a few years the entire population of Maza was parthenogenetic.

The Mazon are relatively tall for Tarellians, but also much more lightly built. In contrast to the stereotypical browns, reds, and yellows of most arid-dwelling Tarellians, their scales tend to come in colors of blues and greens, all the better to hide in the dense foliage of their homeworld. And, of course, the most notable feature of the native Mazons is that they are all female. The exact methods of the Mazons’ parthenogenesis are unknown, and the Mazons are highly secretive about their breeding practices, seeing how they were nearly wiped out once. Even when breeding with non-Mazon Tarellians, the offspring of such unions tend to be heavily female and the females strongly resemble the mother. Mazons are also known for favoring guerilla warfare and hit-and-run tactics in battle, in contrast to the more organized battalions or hunter-killer teams of other Tarellian worlds.

Maza was on the coreward side of the Tarellian confederacy, so when the tyranids invaded it was on the right side of the Confederacy to avoid getting eaten. This was all the better for the native Mazons, for if the tyranids had come from the other direction, Maza would not have survived. Fiercely isolationist even by Tarellian standards, the Mazons had traded with neighboring worlds for technology and resources but had remained thinly populated and poorly industrialized. They would have stood no chance against the tyranids. Nevertheless, the Mazons have suffered the aftereffects of the tyranids invasion just as much as any other Tarellian world. The sheer number of refugees from elsewhere in the empire has forced the Mazons to open their doors, and Maza is currently in the midst of a cultural conflict between the mostly pastoral natives and the refugees used to a more industrialized, arid world.

=== Tikal ===

Typically, the words "tropical rainforest" and "major urban center" don't go together in the popular lexicon. Not so with Tikal. Tikal is a warm and wet world, with a climate resembling that of Old Earth more than fifty million years ago, such that tropical rainforests extend from the equator to the poles.

Because of the thick rainforests and mangroves that choke most of the world, Tikal’s population tends to be concentrated in a few heavily urbanized areas, as it is easier to expand outward by hacking away at the jungle surrounding a city than to try and build an entirely new city from scratch. The largest city on Tikal, Itza, covered nearly 20,000 square kilometers even before the Tarellians made first contact with the Imperium back during the Great Crusade, and is a veritable hive now. Tikal was one of the last surviving core worlds of the Tarellian Confederacy in the wake of the tyranid invasion, and so refugees from all across Tarellian space poured into the highly urbanized Tikal, causing the planet's largest cities to well in population and turning Itza into a hive city almost out of necessity. Although outnumbered by Tarellians living on more traditional arid worlds across the Neo-Confederacy, Tikal is one of the most populated worlds in the Neo-Confederacy.

Natives of Tikal, as opposed to the descendants of refugees from the tyranid invasion, tend to be rather short for Tarellians, with heights ranging from 4'8" to 5' on average. This is a useful feature for moving through cramped quarters, whether it is the dense undergrowth of a rainforest or the crowded streets of a city. To compensate for their smaller size, the Tarellians of Tikal supplement their usual ranged weaponry with poisoned darts, developed from the poison of a native creature, which they use to sap and slow their foes. By the same principle, the Tarellians of Tikal are not very proficient in close-quarters combat. The Tikaleze also have much brighter and more pronounced markings than other Tarellian nations, often in bold stripes of black and blue as opposed to the duskier browns, yellows, and oranges most people associate with Tarellians, a useful feature for differentiating individuals in the cramped and often underlit confines of cities.

Tikal’s main contribution to the Tarellian Neo-Confederacy is precious metals, which is why the Tarellians settled there in the first place back before the Age of Strife. Tikal is known for its high density of precious metals, not just gold and silver but more precious metals like adamantium. Tikal is the biggest producer of electrical contacts in its region of space. The Tarellians of Tikal used these precious metals for ceremonial purposes back in the days after the Age of Strife before anyone knew their worth, and still use them for monuments today. Some have tried to steal from the Tikaleze, which often invokes their wrath if they try to steal from public monuments or memorials.

Tikal is one of the more literate worlds in the Neo-Confederacy, owing to its massive urban population and therefore massive bureaucracy necessary to organize it. Tikal’s libraries contain thousands of scrolls and codices, mostly written in the Tarellian script, though the most important documents are carved into soft metal in the event that Tarellian civilization collapses as it did during the Age of Strife.

Like all Tarellian worlds, Tikal prides itself on being economically self-sufficient, despite benefiting from interstellar trade, its people don’t need it to survive. Tikal’s people primarily live off aquaculture grown in massive farming operations in the planet’s inland lakes and ponds. Indeed, many Tikaleze cities are built right on the edge of large inland lakes specifically to be closer to food. Some of these farms are actually old impacts of meteorites that have subsequently filled with water.

=== Xibalanque ===

See [[Nobledark_Imperium_Member_States#Tarellian_Religion|Tarellian Religion]]

== The Craftworlds ==

=== Féin-Cineál ===

Féin-Cineál Was a craftworld in the loosest sense of the world that existed in it's earliest incarnation a few centuries prior to The Fall and therefore had the not entirely unique distinction of being one of the ones not hastily spurned on by the warnings and predictions of a much younger Eldred Ulthuran. Indeed it was started under the more managed and carefully considered opinion of several dozen more puritan captains of the Old Empire banding together to save their family, friends, crew and their family and friends or at least those of them that would listen. The captains now longs since dead originally banded together purely out of a need for protection as in those later years of the Empire eldar had turned on eldar in cannibalistic orgies of torture, murder and rape in any order thereof.

The ships flew in close formation daring the warp as the web-way was no longer considered safe from their own people for their own people. Forty-nine of them besides the flagship of the most prominent Matriarch, Di'theatha of the family Mygranath slayer of deamons, savior of the people and mother of the one who would be The Betrayer or so the legends claim.

The ships in time found a quiet patch of space in what would one day be the southern end of the Segmentum Pacificus and there they dealt in splendid solitude amongst the stars as behind them the Empire they had left behind was devoured in the fires of it's own depravities and a monster was born reflecting those obscenely degenerate indulgences magnified to a degree that was as terrible as it was magnificent. There was no going back or hope that the kin and kind left behind had hope of salvation.

In time the ships of the flotilla moved closer and closer together as the people mingled and wished for closeness. Scaffolds and walkways were in time extended across from one ship to another to facilitate the ease by which the peoples could travel and for a time all was well among the Féin-Cineál, a name they adopted that itself looked inwards to family and friends. But such times of peace were short lived as war came to the Féin-Cineáli in the form of what they would once have considered their own kind driven mad and ravenous of spirit demanding flesh tribute or all would be consumed, greenskined brutes once considered a minor irritant were now a real threat. In this time the hero Achillrial arose and gained prominence.

Achillrial was always claimed to be the first of the Autarchs although this claim is hotly disputed by the other craftworlds. What is not disputed was his mastery of war. In person he was a great warrior, tall and strong and fast. His stamina was seemingly without end and his courage was fathomless. But it was not in contests of personal force that he was most accomplished, away from the front lines he was far more devestarting. He saw war as a dance and knew the moves well for every song that was ever sung, without fault or misstep he would direct forces to the killing blow from directions his adversaries could not anticipate and a hundred times his weight of warriors were brought to ruin. But of it he cared little. Indeed he was a hero and a creator of heros, his name was legend and he created legends but that was not where his heart found joy. In family and in simple pleasures he found joy, in the music he had no skill for and the artistry he could not emulate he found joy. War to him was not as it was in his youth, fighting for some idealized and false image of an Empire he never really understood, war was a job and it was not a passion.

Achillrial knew little of true passion, of lust and desire or love. In many ways he was innocent and almost childlike despite being a creature of red raw battle. In time he did came to know love and that love was returned by the eldest of fair Di'theatha's many fair daughters remembered now only as The Betrayer, a name now cursed above all other. But in those days she was not cursed, corruption was not rotting in her heart and soul and she was beautiful and wonderful and pure. Achillrial and The Betrayer it is said in The Chronicle of the Féin-Cineál had a love like no other, as pure and sweet as the first rain on the lost homeworld in the days the gods walked among them. The Betrayer was everything that Achillrial was not and everything that he loved, she had walked the paths of the singer and the artist and the painter and the poet. She was everything that he loved and everything that he was not and maybe he was the same to her. It would be easy to image her as feigning love to get close to naive Achillrial but in those days in her way she was as innocent as he was, hard as it is to imagine now.

For all that Féin-Cineál preferred it's own company to that of the galaxy at large it was not cut off and it was not ignorant of the changes beyond their carfully defended walls. They knew of their kind on other craftworlds and had some limited dealings with them and they knew about the young Imperium growing into the anarchy and ruin left by the passing of their own once great realm, like children stepping into the footprints left by an ancient primordial giant. But they knew the Imperium in those ancient days as outsiders and aliens picking over the ruins of the dead and looked not upon them until they rescued the All-Mother and brought much rejoicing.

The Betrayer was one that moved more willing than most about the galaxy in search of inspiration for her works, and they were wonderful works full of new things and new beauty. But always she was unsatisfied with her work Achillrial would tell her that even in the greatest days of the Old Empire perfection was never achieved and that by some strange joke of fate she had come closer to achieving what the eldest of their kind in those great days had not only here in this time beyond ruination. She would laugh and tell him that they looked in the wrong place.

It was never known when she fell from grace, if indeed a single event could even be attributed to it, The Beast arose that her corruption became evident. Féin-Cineál had so far refused to involve themselves. And why should they not abstain from such a war? It was nothing to do with them, they had survived The Fall by staying out of other peoples business, why should this war be any different? But one night The Betrayer came to Achillrial and held him close and as he looked into her eyes he knew that something was wrong. There was a fire there that he had not seen before and it was not a warming or a comforting flame. The Betrayer told him of the thing she had seen in her time wandering among the far places, of their kin and kind who yet lived upon the homeworld, how it was not foul but fair too behold and magnificent. The Old Empire though diminished was not some abode of monsters and the damned but a place of beuty beyond imagining. What dear departed mother Di'theatha and her generation had fled from was the birth pains of a fair queen being born, a new goddess that had not devoured and destroyed the old pantheon but assimilated and absorbed into the Many-Gods-As-One. It was a beauty greater than the sum of it’s parts, loveliness beyond mortal comprehension or understanding.

Achillrial’s heart was broken at these word and he could not offer her the response his love turned to sorrow demanded and he could not strike her down as the law demanded. He was now without joy and all he had was turned to ashes and regret as he ran through his memories in an instant trying to find the point where it all went wrong, where he had been blinded by love so completely to not see the darkness in her heart. He turned away from her, his head bowed low with sorrow and bitter tears running down his cheeks and bid her to leave and never return. In a fit of rage The Betrayer slashed his throat open and fled but not in a final act of spite crushing his soul-stone so that in death if not in life he could know the new goddess of her people.

The Betrayer fled the craftworld before any had realized her treachery and when they had a great mourning was had that turned to a righteous wroth among the people and the demand of blood-price. The Betrayer’s name as stricken from The Chronicle, an act never before or since enacted, and the Féin-Cineáli decided that for hate’s sake they would go to war.

With the deaths of both Achillrial and Di'theatha, one by treachery and one by time, it was seen as an omen and in the post-Beast galaxy and with the marriage of The Steward and the All-Mother the people of Féin-Cineál decided that indeed it was time to rejoin the galaxy. Their short-lived and rather minor existence as a craftworld had taught them that it is not so great to be alone, the vessels of Féin-Cineál disbanded and the Féin-Cineáli dispersed to set up homes and enclaves on the worlds of this new Imperium that their All-Mother had blessed with her rule. In the wake of The Beast and his Croneworlder allies the people of these worlds were less than thrilled to see more eldar but with the promise of their ships to patrol their orbits they saw the advantage and made room for them in the rebuilding, of which the Féin-Cineáli were of some considerable assistance.

Today the Féin-Cineáli remain a close knit web of families spread across many worlds of the southern Segmentum Pacficus, united by a shared heritage and culture and recorded in the records of The Chronicle, the living record of all their stories. They are maybe not the most well known of the eldar peoples, they are maybe not the strongest of the most brilliant but they are what they are and to those that know them they are most often friends and with their friends they march into the coming Judgment Day to rebirth or ruin and they march with fire in their hearts and heads held high.

=== Alaitoc ===

A Craftworld of contradictions, Alaitoc is both highly-regimented and highly liberated. The reason for this is that while the majority of the Craftworld's population are highly dedicated to Eldar ideals, a sizeable minority seek freedom from their home's stifling environment. As such, its relations with the greater Imperium are also as contradictory.

Officially, Alaitoc is only marginally allied with the Imperium. While they do send small tithes of soldiers as needed, the still-proud Eldar of Alaitoc refuse to have any more dealings with mon-keigh than is strictly necessary. Their troops, even those of the lowest ranks, are notorious often treat non-Eldar of any rank with breathtaking disdain fit to rival any three hive princes one could name. An exasperated Saint Macharius was once heard to remark "Better a thousand armies of the Beast's cultists at my rear than a single Alaitoc Farseer at my side!"

The same cannot be said however, for the Rangers that Alaitoc regularly sends out, albeit unintentionally. Freed of their stifling homes, many eventually find solace in the familiar, though not as restricted, environments of other Craftworlds. More notorious however are those Rangers who find Imperial life to their liking, and in a strange, yet peculiarly Eldar way, often find themselves as obsessed with non-Eldar life as an Exarch on their path, sometimes even combining two or more cultures in their quest for freedom and reinvention. Even the most seasoned galactic traveller must take pause when they find themselves meeting "Fio'La Bork'an Rialieath, Magos Prime of Forge Alpha."

=== Bel-Shammon ===

See [[Nobledark_Imperium_Member_States#Colchis|Colchis]]

===Biel-Tan===

As one of the Imperium's most militiarized Craftworlds, Biel-Tan Aspect Warriors are the ones most often seen on both the battlefield and in Imperial media, with the gruff, battle-hardened Biel-Tan warrior being a staple of Imperial entertainment. Of the major Craftworlds aligned to the Imperium, the Biel-Tan are perhaps one of the most fanatical in expanding Imperial borders, seeing in the Imperium a chance to recreate the Eldar Empire of old. This has sometimes caused friction even within the Imperial military, as Biel-Tan officers regularly advise all-out offensives regardless of the state of the greater army.

One notable aspect of Biel-tan's society is the surprising amount of regard they hold for the inhabitants of Tallarn, a desert world. During the War of the Beast, a large cultist army sought ancient relics long-buried beneath Tallarn's surface. With Imperial forces being in disarray at the time, many Imperial authorities wrote offf Tallarn as lost, and prepared for an assault from that side, Cursing their new allies and their own kin for their cowardice, the Eldar of Biel-Tan rushed to Tallarn, determined to sell their lives as dearly as possible.

However, upon arrival they found the devastated Tallarni not waging a desperate war, but holding onto a bloody stalemate despite being outnumbered and outgunned. When the ferocious Eldar fell upon the cultist forces, the Tallarni were quick to take the advantage. Though their once prisitine farmworld had been turned into a vast desert, they had managed to win the respect of the Eldar. Though today the Craftworld maintains a careful distance, both socially and physically, from their adopted planet, they do make short visits in small numbers to carefully shepard the desert warriors. Most adult Tallarni know that the 'djinns' of their childhood stories are really the Imperium's major alien ally, but even their oldest generals often show more than the usual respect humans give one of the elder race.

=== Il-Kaith ===

Craftworld Il-Kaithe has had a somewhat tumultuous relationship with the Imperium and indeed it's other craftworld kin. They are politically well in the Eldar Supremacy camp although not quite to the same degree as Dorhai. They were one of the last Craftworlds to join the Imperium, maintaining independence well into M33 and keeping humanity at arms length even after joining.

Their reasons for joining was not out of any sense of spiritual kinship, promise of trade, need of protection or the asking of the everliving and Serene Empress Isha. They joined because enough lesser craftworlds had done so that they could work through them as intermediaries so as not to have to deal with the lesser races directly.

Up until this time Il-Kaithe had been quite close with Dorhai and the two of them had been in the preliminary stages of starting some grand alliance of Pure Eldar by roping some of the Exodite worlds and lesser Craftworlds into their folly. Il-Kaithe siding with the Imperium essentially removed a great keystone from the fledgling alliance and earned Il-Kaithe an eternal blood feud with Dorhai that exists in perpetuity.

Il-Kaithe itself is located at the galactic south-west border of the Eye of Terror and has weathered storm after storm of the Great Adversary. Although they have not come under fire to the same degree as the Cadian Gate they also don't have the same defenses or resources of the Gate Worlds and so their wars have been no less desperate.

One of their points of contention with the Imperium at large was their attitudes to the Dark Eldar. They still saw them as kin. Reprehensible kin but kin nevertheless. They would send missionaries to the dark cities and trade goods and services of all kinds with many of its Kabals and Noble Houses in times of peace and try and avoid fighting them directly in times of war. This won them no friends with any in the Imperium, Eldar and human alike bar the most radical.

This has changed with the unholy marriage of Lord Vect and Queen Malys. Now, so far as they care, there are no Dark Eldar. There are only Chaos Eldar in Commorragh, the Dark City has fallen to the enemy and it's people are now not only damned but also forsaken.

The missionaries have been recalled, the trade has stopped, war is declared on what were once kin.

Although relatively few in numbers compered to the larger and more prestigious Craftworlds they are formidable. they have sat on the edge of the Eye for ten thousand years and have been far too proud to call for help. Il-Kaithe itself is an ugly mass of turrets, void shied generators, military ship yards, training grounds and other such fortifications.

=== Iyanden ===

In official records and Imperial propaganda, Iyanden is one of the most successful examples of Imperial-Eldar relations in history, a friendship won in blood and iron. And while this may be believed by the rank and file of both peoples, the truth is a little more complex than that.

Even after the marriage between the Steward (as he was still known at the time) and Isha, the Craftworld of Iyanden refused to be part of the alliance. They saw the evil that lurked in the hearts of men, and lambasted the idea of chaining their entire race to the barely-tamed, barely-evolved pseudo primates that had the gall to call itself a sentient species. Even so, they knew that angering said wild beast would only prove detrimental, so they made a deal- they would of course honour any request the Imperium would make of them, on the condition the Imperium never made any such request. Though the High Lords took great offence at this snub, they also knew that antagonizing Iyanden would risk the rest of the alliance, and so quietly backed down.

And so matters were left, Iyanden being an island of isolation in the middle of the Realm of Ultramar. Though they opened their docks for limited trade in late M36, they only did so for the handful of Rogue Traders who managed to find their home. Even then, it was only for what few luxuries the Craftworld could not provide, and would be safe for those on the Path to consume.

Then the Hive Fleets came.

Isolated as they were, Iyanden was almost engulfed by the Shadow in the Warp when they managed to send their distress signal. Even so, it said that only by miraculous guidance from the Eternal Emperor and Empress did Prince-Admiral (later Saint) Yriel manage to find the beleaguered Craftworld (indeed, it is officially recorded as the Saint's first miracle). Though the rescue effort was a success, the Craftworld was left devastated, with many of its population reduced to soulstones. Even worse, the Imperial fleet that had saved them could barely spend enough time for rest and repairs, as the chitinous tide threatened to drown Ultima Segmentum. No ship could be spared to defend Iyanden, not even the most grievously wounded ones guaranteed to die pauper's deaths in the void.And so it was that Iyanden found itself making another unfair deal. They offered to make themselves a mobile dock for the Imperial Navy, on the condition that there would always be ships provided for their protection.

Today, Iyanden is so integrated into the Navy organization of Ultima Segmentum that it is officially designated a void station colony instead of a Craftworld. Sailors from a hundred member races, from a thousand times more worlds, mingle every day in bustling streets where once Eldar took quiet walks. So many ships orbit the Craftworld that at times they block the stars. And while many of the younger races and Eldar youth see this as a great thing (some even proclaim Iyanden's colours of blue and gold, the same as the Imperial Navy's, to be a sign of divine intervention), older Eldar simply sigh, and mourn the lost purity of their home as yet another casualty of the Tyranids, and they fear what the outsiders might bring in.

The other notable feature of Craftworld Iyanden is its use of wraithguards. The Iyanden Infinity Circuit has been noted to be rather odd compared to other Craftworlds. The Infinity Circuits of most Craftworlds are often described as cold, cloying, and lifeless. The dead wish to be left to their rest and although it is possible to coax a spirit out to give guidance to their living descendants spending too much time in the Infinity Circuit makes most spiritseers depressed, grow tired of living, and eventually abandon their physical forms. The Iyanden Infinity Circuit is different. Rather than being composed of eldar that died to various causes and lived a relatively long life, at one point in time the vast majority of Iyanden’s dead were composed of eldar whose lives were cut dramatically short by the arrival of Hive Fleet Kraken.

This created a very different environment in the Infinity Circuit. The newly-arrived Iyanden dead did not want to rest, they wanted out, whether it was due to the fact that their home was still being ravaged by tyranids or because they weren’t yet ready to die in the first place. This created a psychic feedback cycle typical of the eldar, whose unstoppable momentum ended up transforming the overall nature of the Infinity Circuit. As a result, the atmosphere of the Iyanden Infinity Circuit is very different from that of other Craftworlds, having a nearly electric atmosphere of anticipation and energy than a tranquil air of finality. As a result, Iyanden spiritseers are somewhat odd even compared to the spiritseers of other Craftworlds. When trying to describe the experience, Iyanden spiritseers have compared communing with the Iyanden Infinity Circuit to sticking your tongue in a light socket.

By the end of rebuilding from the arrival of Hive Fleet Kraken, wraithguards outnumbered the living population by nearly ten to one. Wraithguard body stockpiles were rapidly depleted, and it took bonesingers more than sixty years to make up the deficit. The ratio of living to walking dead has become more reasonable in the years since, but Iyanden still has more active wraithguard than any other Craftworld. Wraithguard actively patrol Iyanden’s streets like British Beefeaters, rather than waiting to be summoned in the Craftworld’s most desperate hour, seemingly stoic and oblivious to the world around them but more than capable of responding should their ire be raised. Post-Kraken, the Iyanden Infinity Circuit is less a resting place for the dead and more a waiting room until the next bonesinger can sing you a new wraithguard body into existence. Drawing comparisons between the current practices of the wraithguard of Iyanden and the Necrons is ill-advised.

The Eldar of other Craftworlds frown on this practice, saying the dead should be allowed to rest. The Iyanden dead rather pointedly tell the other Craftworlds to stay out of this, saying that they asked for this and the other Craftworlds could at least have the decency to let the dead speak for themselves. To them, their lives were stolen from them before their time, and accepting death at this point would feel too much like admitting defeat.

===Iybraesil===

Given that they are a matriarchy that would seem to imply that, rather than being a bunch of angry widows, they are more closely linked to Isha but in her aspect of a pissed off mother bear or eldar equivalent.

Their interest this time is not in collecting soul-stones but slave liberating, assassination missions, terrorist attacks (against the Chaos) and occasionally stealing some ancient relic of great value.

To this end they have fostered a long alliance with many of the spawn of Konrad Curze. The Reavers of Hodir are a particularly nasty band of Night Lords often seen in their company. Where the Reavers get their recruits from is a mystery, some speculate that they are former deathrow inmates lost in the paperwork, sold to them on the grey market and mind scrubbed.

The Divine Triumvirate of Iybraesil is Lileath, Isha and Morai-Heg; maiden, mother and crone. Past present and future and the majority of them dead. The past is burned away, the future is erased and their is only the blood and the thunder of now left. They have Farseers but it is a council of house matriarchs that make the decisions. They hold many craftworlds, Ulthwe in particualr, in some level of contempt. They are ruled by farseers who act on prophesy because they have foreseen themselves acting on prophesy and stuck in stupid and costly cycles of predict and effect unwilling to change and fight fate for cowardly notions of what might come to pass if they do. Farseers can advise, it is the Venerated Mothers who have the last say.

Iybraesil has an avatar of Khine, they do not trust it. Others forget whose blood is dripping from his hands but they have not. When not on those rare occasions they let him out of the shrine he is held to his throne with chains of diamond links.

Their relationship with the Throne is odd in that they don't acknowledge the sovereignty of the Emperor or if they do it's as an accessory to Isha's majesty. The Imperium has an Empress and a Golden Man Emperor-Consort piece of arm candy that she had to accept to get the cooperation of the humans.

Their relationship with the Imperium as a whole is for the most part pretty typical, though they tend to get along with most humans slightly better than they do Ulthwe and Saim-Hann because fuck those guys.

They field a lot of Banshees, they have loan surplus healers to other craftworlds and they seem to export more Priestesses and Handmaidens of Isha than other craftworlds per head of the population. A disproportionate number of The Repentant came to Iybraesil in search of healing or absolution, a fact that has only bolstered their military power, the Repentants had no right to expect any welcome but they were the last children of Isha from that sinful place unforsaken and for those open arms and offers of earning forgiveness they will fight like starving lions.

On the whole they believe that eldar is superior to human by virtue of being Isha's actual children rather than just adopted, but they are polite about it.

They don't feminazi hate men, it's just that they don't rule on Iybraesil. Their reasoning being that family is the basic cornerstone of all civilization and the most basic and root unit of family is mother and child.

To this end their social structure is made up of Houses based on family ties and lead by the nearest that that any particular bloodline has to a living common female ancestor, which given the astounding lifespan an eldar can achieve with longevity treatments is often not too hard to trace. there are also the Houseless that can be adopted into a Iybraesil House, typically foreigners moving in. Being part of a House is a prerequisite for citizenship and being allowed to own property, marry or even be allowed past the visitors section. Since the arrival of the Repentants it has been suggested by many of the more forward thinking Matriarchs that maybe they should be looking in to branching out some new independent houses to accommodate the unprecedented population surge.

Also, they claim, this is to represent that the only deity that isn't fucking awful to survive their old pantheon is Isha. Khine is not to be emulated in everyday civil life for obvious reasons (and most Aspect Warriors would agree) and Ceggers is a dishonest, violent trickster unworthy of respect.

Last time the Dark Carnival came to Iybraesil one of the older and more obnoxious Matriarchs said as much to the Jester King. He just chuckled and called her a blithering idiot.

''"You know her as she is now little child, the proud Empress of a million worlds, the All-Mother and the good and noble wife. You forget that I am old and so is she and I remember what you forget. If you were to know what I know of half the things that she has done you would maybe not love her as unconditionally as you do now. Maybe if you knew what I had done you would not be standing before me now, prattling to something so much greater than yourself about things you know so little about; we are neither and none of us innocent, not for a very long time now"''.

=== Lugganath ===

Although all eldar revere and make use of the Webway, the inhabitants of Craftworld Lugganath take this to an extreme. They see the Webway as the eldar’s future, an infinite dimension that would give the eldar literally unlimited space to expand and grow, free from the horrors of realspace and the Warp. Long-term habitation of the Webway can be done, as illustrated by the extralegal demenses of the Old Eldar Empire’s nobility that eventually evolved into Port Commorragh, but the Eldar of Lugganath plan a more diffuse settlement of the Webway, with “villages” at each intersection, junction, and crossroads to stabilize the winding paths of the labyrinthine dimension, rather than a few large cities. The end goal of this process would be to move all permanent eldar habitation into the Webway entirely. It is for this reason that Lugganath joined and aids the Imperium. The Imperium helps the eldar become masters of their realm, and Lugganath helps the Imperium become masters of theirs. To this end, the eldar of Lugganath have made inroads with all of the groups who have some stake in the future of the Webway, including the Harlequins and the Silver Skulls.

However, there is one serious impediment to this plan: the Dark Eldar city of Commorragh, a tumor within the arteries and veins of the Webway. The Dark Eldar’s access to the Webway already poses a threat to the currently existing Craftworlds and Webway travelers, and if establishing long-term habitation in the Webway was difficult in the first place the presence of the Dark Eldar made it outright impossible. Even if it were possible to physically blockade parts of the Webway, the ever-shifting nature of the extradimensional passageway would mean that some heavily-guarded sections would soon become dead-ends, whereas other passages would now become open and unguarded. The passages leading to the Eye of Terror and the Crone World Eldar could conceivably be severed, but it is much harder to eliminate a sickness that has spread throughout an entire body.

As a result, Lugganath has long campaigned for the Dark City to be burned to the ground, even back when the majority of Craftworlders and Exodites still cautiously regarded the inhabitants of the Commorragh as kin. The actions of the Dark Eldar during the War of the Beast, [[Nobledark_Imperium_Writing#The_Defence_of_Sansaayam|the attack on Sansaayam]], and the blasphemous union between Vect and Malys have only added fuel to their arguments. This hatred was further fostered in 231.M36 when Lugganath’s senior seer council was slaughtered by a wannabe Dark Eldar, who later fled to the relative sanctuary of the Dark City.

Currently, Lugganath is searching for a Webway portal big enough for an entire Craftworld. Their plan is to enter the Webway and disassemble the craftworld into its constituent parts, creating a foothold for the true eldar within the Labyrinthine Dimension. In 540.M40, they claimed to have found such a portal, but know that any attempt to do so now would only bring ruin at the hands of the Dark Eldar. So for now the eldar of Lugganath wait, their giant Webway portal (if it does exist) being a closely guarded secret only a select few in the council know the full details of.

=== Malan'tai ===

See [[Nobledark Imperium Drafts# The Doom of Malan'tai|the Doom of Malan’tai]]

=== Mymeara ===

- Started out as one of the largest craftworlds because being so far from the decadent homeworlds people were more willing to listen and weren't too deep in the cocaine orgy heap.
- Upon the Fall and being so remote they for some time believed they were alone and the only elder survivors.
- Orks attacked them mercilessly. Phoenix Lord Irillyth of the Shadow Spectres arises and manage to hold off the orks. Irillyth leads a team to try and find more eldar survivors and gets rekt by orks soon after.
- Some time later the expeditionary forces of the Great Crusade catch up with them. Quite late on in the Great Crusade as this is the Eastern Fringe.
- Craftworlders scream at the humans to fuck off, they are the last bastion of civilization, the last of the Eldar.
- Imperials leave as requested. Some months later a joint detachment of Saim-Hann and Biel-Tan make contact properly on behalf of the young Imperium. They had tears of joy, they were not alone in the night.
- Next time the orks came calling they had friends.
- Currently set up shop in the middle of Tau space. They like the Tau. They feel vibrant and make the Mymearans feel young again.

=== Saim-Hann ===

The Craftworld of Saim-Hann are an anomaly in the Imperium's dealings with the Eldar. In the early days of alliance negotiations, the Eldar Seers negotiating with the High Lords insisted almost every Craftworld be given proper due and respect, even prideful ones like Biel-Tan and Iyanden. Almost every Craftworld- save for Saim-Hann. When Imperial authorities tried to find out the reason for this surprising reticence, they found out just why the Seers let them carry out the fact-finding mission in the first place.

The Saim-Hann were wild, more wild than even the humans were used to. In many of their dealings, the Eldar displayed a surprising lack of respect for Isha, calling her 'soft-bodied' and throwing the word 'gentle' like an insult. Negotiations quickly degraded, and would have broken down had not the Saim-Hann Farseer in charge of his side's negotiations noticed one of the humans taking a swig of the drinks the Eldar gave them ("You think us barbarians, mon-keigh?" one of them is reputed to have asked. "Perhaps you are right- but we are not savages."). Unlike the other Imperials present, who only took polite sips with grimaces on their faces, this giant Imperial seemed to actually enjoy his drinks. Seeing the chance for a bit of fun, the Farseer said that he would sign whatever deal the Imperials wanted, if that one man could outdrink the Farseer amd his council.

"Wasn't like I could say no, right?" Leman Russ later remarked. "I managed to outdrink the Steward while he still walked among us, I could outdrink a bunch of prissy Eldar," he would add, endearing him and his Wolves even further to Saim-Hann.

His terms were surprisingly lenient, though it did include a proviso that the Eldar stop by the Fang for a drink once in a while. Even long after Russ's disappearance, Saim-Hann warbands often stop by Fenris, and the halls of the Fang echo with tales of ribaldry and derring-do, all equal in their magnificence and unbelievability.

The Saim-Hann also run the [[Nobledark_Imperium_Imperial_Society_and_Culture#The_Iron_Storm|The Iron Storm]], a rather well-known event across the Imperium.

=== Ulthwe ===

One of the last Craftworlds attempting to escape the Eye of Terror, Ulthwe was instead doomed to forever orbit the afterbirth of Slaanesh, pulled dangerously close to the Eye by gravitational fields. Ever since then, the Eldar of Ulthwe have fought against Chaos, though it is not a fight they face alone. The stalwart warriors of Cadia can often be found back-to-back with Ulthwe Eldar, and their Kasrkin train alongside Aspect Warriors and Exarchs.

Like Biel-Tan, Ulthwe has found itself admiring the humans with whom they shed blood together, even moreso since they've been doing so since the Eye of Terror was formed, before even the alliance. These ties have only grown stronger since; it is said that the average Cadian will know how to strip his gun before they are 10 and learn to swear in Eldar by 15. Despite the facetiousness of that claim, it is true that Cadians are generally adept in both Eldar customs and language at amazingly young ages, with only the highest reaches of both being beyond human grasp as they require subtle psychic signals only Eldar are capable of. Many Ulthwe Eldar even prefer the harsh utilitarianism of Imperial equipment as opposed to the grace of Eldar technology, and it is not uncommon to see Ulthwe Guardians wearing adapted flak armour and fatigues on campaign. In exceptional circumstances, Ulthwe Eldar have even served directly in the Cadian Guard, often to great acclaim- the career of Farseer-Colonel Taldeer of the Cadian 412th (later the 1st Kronus Liberators) is the most well-known example, one that is often compared to the career of Commissar-Colonel Gaunt.

Incidentally, the most Eldar-human couplings on record are those between Ulthwe Eldar and Cadian humans, and while no children have been recorded as resulting from these unions, many such married couples assure those who ask delicately that it is not due to lack of trying.

= Independent Worlds =

== Independent Craftworlds ==

=== Dorhai ===

Dorhai. The self-proclaimed last “pure” craftworld.

They believe that humanity is a blight on the galaxy made in sick parody of the perfect eldar form and that the other craftworlders were sick fucking degenerates for, as they see it, debasing themselves to co-found an empire with them. In their mind they are the last real people in the galaxy and everything else that claims to be a person is a wretched mockery.
The Imperium tried to negotiate with Dorhai several times via both human and Eldar representatives. They stopped after Dorhai started trying to shoot their ambassadors out of the sky. The Dorhai Eldar kill “mon'keigh” elder and human alike on sight believing themselves to be the last pure elder left.

For the most part the Imperium and the rest of the Eldar were quite happy to let them sit on their craftworld and be stupid. The good thing about being retardedly isolationist is that it tends not to spread. In fact, Dorhai has actually attracted a lot of the hard-core Eldar supremacists away from other Craftworlds, to the point that Dorhai itself is no longer considered a minor Craftworld.

Then they got it into their stupid heads that Jubblowski had stolen a blessing that should have gone to an Eldar, preferably one of theirs. Stealing the favour of the gods is an insult that must be punished by death.

The assassination attempt failed, their involvement was discovered and now Dorhai is on the Imperium's shit list. There have even been rumors the Harlequins have stopped visiting them. Unfortunately, actual retaliation was deferred due to a tyranid hive fleet tearing into Ultramar.

Biel-Tan are really pushing for full on invasion and conquest of Dorhai. As far as Biel-Tan is concerned there is no Imperium, just a continuation of the Old Eldar Empire that now has a lot of humans living in it. To them the attempted murder of one of their living religious icons is more than enough to call a Holy War.

Sister-Superior Miriana Cain, daughter of Jubblowski and leader of ~150 Word Bearers, is demanding to be in the vanguard and whipping everyone into a warpath frenzy. This annoys her ambassador father who is trying to calm Biel-Tan down. Even though Dorhai may be a thorn in the Imperium’s side, it is still a Craftworld, which are known to be ridiculously hard to take down without major losses.

=== Kaelor ===

Kaelor is an independent Craftworld, not associated with any other Craftworld or the Imperium, though not anti-Imperial to the degree of Dorhai. Kaelor’s troubles began shortly before the Fall, when the Craftworld first left the Old Eldar Empire. A small Craftworld that had left Empire space in a hurry, the eldar of Craftworld Kaelor found that the path they had chosen had accidentally put them on a collision course with the Craftworld Saim-Hann. Both Craftworlds refused to change course, and the two ended up going to war against each other over what essentially amounted to an interstellar game of chicken. Kaelor, being both of smaller mass and smaller population, lost the conflict, and was forced to make a jump through the Webway. Unfortunately, this was a blind jump through the Webay with no set destination, and Kaelor ended up emerging on the far edges of the Milky Way galaxy.

Craftworld Kaelor had the dubious honor of being one of the very last Craftworlds to be discovered by the Imperium in early M39, as it took nearly fourteen millennia for the Craftworld to make its long trek back to known space (by contrast, most Craftworlds were at least known to the Imperium by M33). Kaelor had almost no contact with the rest of the galaxy before that time, with the other Craftworlds believing Kaelor to have been lost, and therefore Kaelor had not been up to date on the political developments of the last nine millennia. As a result, first contact between the Imperium and Kaelor went horribly wrong. Imperial forces precipitated the event by acting overly friendly, believing Kaelor to be an already known Craftworld, whereas Kaelor reacted disproportionately to the fact that these mon-keigh were approaching them as if they were friends (if the eldar of Kaelor noticed that there were kin among the Imperial number, they never mentioned it). In the ensuing carnage, El’Ashbel, the maiden queen of Kaelor, was gruesomely injured by the Imperials in self-defense, leaving her blinded and crying tears of blood whenever she used her psychic powers.

Normally in these situations eldar of other Craftworlds would be on hand to defuse the situation, as had happened with Myrmeara or great Iyanden. However, the eldar of Kaelor regarded their fellow Craftworlders with about as much respect as they do the mon-keigh, remembering the Craftwars with Saim-Hann. The other aren’t too fond of Kaelor either. As opposed to other Craftworlds, which tend to be ruled by a council of elders in some fashion (whether autarchs or farseers), Kaelor retains much of the political structure of the Old Eldar Empire, being composed of noble houses constantly jockeying for power and ruled by a single autocrat. It is thought that Kaelor has retained much of the political infrastructure of the Old Eldar Empire due to ending up so far from the Milky Way, and so they had less of an impetus to change their ways due to being less exposed to She Who Thirsts. The political structure of Kaelor uncomfortably reminds the Craftworlders of the Crones or the Dark Eldar, with many fearing that Kaelor is a ripe target for Chaotic corruption. The only eldar to regularly make contact with Kaelor are the Harlequins, and even they only do so rarely. Upon being informed of the situation on Kaelor, Grand Empress Isha has made it a point of order to visit the Craftworld, though she has not had the opportunity as of yet.

For now, Kaelor is considered an unaligned Craftworld, and Imperial forces have been ordered to give it a wide berth. Kaelor has refused all attempts at confederation, even with Craftworld Dorhai, preferring to go it on their own. Kaelor prowls the northern edges of the galaxy, coming and going from Imperial space on rare occasions seemingly at random. It is clear they are looking for something, but it is not clear what. However, it is clear they have no problems attacking or manipulating humans and other Eldar (something that lowers their standing even further in Craftworlder eyes) when it suits them to get what they want.

== Solemnace ==

<div class="toccolours mw-collapsible mw-collapsed" style="100%">''''' Trazyn the Infinite's Personal Playground '''''

Along the borders of the Necron Empire and the Imperium is the rather backwater Tomb World of Solemnace. Solemnace is a rather dreary if temperate world with abundant cloud cover and precipitation and high rates of tectonic uplift causing the land surface to be covered in a number of steep cliffs and craggy peaks. Solemnace is rather odd for a tomb world, if for nothing else than its large population of living subjects, with the Necrons making up a sizeable minority (40%) of the population as a military and aristocratic class. Part of this is due to the fact that Solemnace is one of the oldest awoken Tomb Worlds known to the Imperium. The Imperium first discovered Solemnace early in the Great Crusade, before the Eldar had truly become part of the Imperium. At first, it was thought that Solemnace represented the homeworld of yet another xenos race that were not fond of humanity, yet not a true threat to the Imperium. As such, the planet was noted and the Imperium as a whole moved on. By the time the Eldar had realized what Solemnace was and had brought their warning to the wider attention of the Imperium, it was too late. The Necrons of Solemnace had regained their senses, and Phaeron Trazyn the Infinite resumed the throne once more. However, the Necrons of Solemnace seemed content to remain isolationists on their own little world, and even in their diminished state the technology of the Necrons would have made the costs of conquering Solemnace too great to justify for a single planet. The Imperium breathed a sigh of relief, believing the Necrons of Solemnace to be the last remnants of an otherwise long-extinct race. The existence of Solemnace in the first place, as well as the devastating attack of the World Engine from the other side of the Eastern Fringe in M34, should have been enough to suggest otherwise.

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

Over the years, generations of refugees have fled to Solemnace, either from planets destroyed by war or by people dissatisfied with the policies of the Imperium, and those people and their descendants have formed a generalized underclass beneath the necrocracy. Trazyn keeps his subjects cared for, but helpless, such that none may challenge the authority of the ruler of Solemnace. Notably absent among the underclass are Eldar, who would never allow themselves to live under Necron rule and instead tend to flee to craftworlds if they become refugees. Life on Solemnace isn’t that bad, except occasionally one of the “pets” from Trazyn’s menagerie gets out and ends up rampaging around killing the peasants until the Necron military step in and put it down.

Although the policies of Solemnace are highly isolationist, its ruler is decidedly not. Indeed, Phaeron Trazyn the Infinite can almost be described as a xenophile of sorts. Trazyn the Infinite is a collector of all things strange in the universe, from a variety of races. Indeed, Solemnace is less a kingdom and more Trazyn’s private collection gallery and playground, with the presence of an actual government being a byproduct. When he is not ruling directly, Trazyn travels the galaxy from the shadows, looking for exotic novelties to add to his collection. “Acquiring” these novelties often requires discrete acts which many Imperial worlds would describe as “illegal” or “immoral”, but never audacious or impudent enough that the Imperium could justify declaring war against Solemnace. Indeed, if anything, Trazyn’s acts have increased in brazenness since the Necrons have begun waking en masse, now that the Imperium knows that Solemnace is not just some isolated backwater world they could crush and no one would notice.

Why has the Imperium basically grumbled and (officially) done nothing while Trazyn pilfers their territory for collectables? It basically comes down to politics. Solemnace is also notable among Tomb Worlds for its independence. When the Emperor offered the more independent and “eccentric” Necron Lords sanctuary within the Imperium, Trazyn turned him down. And at the same time, Solemnace does not obey the Silent King. Trazyn the Infinite bows his head to no one. As much as the Imperium would like to be able to turn Solemnace into a pile of space rubble, it is still one of the most powerful Tomb Worlds not under the command of the Silent King. Additionally, unlike most Necron Phaerons, Trazyn actually understands how his technology works, though he is not as brilliant as the most accomplished Crypteks, which would give the Imperium valuable insight into Necron technology. As a result, Solemnace would be a powerful asset, and the Imperium believes that given his habits if Trazyn was forced to choose between Imperium and the Necron Empire Trazyn would probably side with the Imperium (they’d probably be right). The issue is that Trazyn has never been put in a situation where he would be forced to show his hand.

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== The World That Wasn't ==

<div class="toccolours mw-collapsible mw-collapsed" style="100%">

The Veiled Region is a very strange region of space in a very strange galaxy. Given the odd patch of unstable stellar objects it would indicate that something big and odd and probably unpleasant happened there a very long time ago. The place was un-colonized by the Eldar throughout their history to an almost obsessive degree, they wouldn't even travel through it. The GaBHD never showed much interest in it, but mostly because for anything in that mess you could find it elsewhere easier, also the other members of the Interstellar League believed that the place was haunted or cursed in some way and humanity by that point was smart enough to believe in magic again, at least as a byword for the work of elder civilizations.

There aren't any tomb worlds there and never have been.

The only people found there are some sort of slug like creatures of limited tool using who are possibly insane or have a mindset so different from humanity that common ground and early communication haven't been achieved yet, assuming that they even can communicate. It's possible that they don't pass on information and the reason they are so primitive is that they are all isolationists who have to invent the wheel again every time. In any case they better get good quick because their world has half a million years tops before the star cools down totally and the world becomes utterly uninhabitable.

There are a few orks, because of course there are.

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Archeologists in the Inquisition, Inquisitor Helynna Valeria in particular, are pretty sure that this is where Llandu'gor was erased and all the fucked up shit is the result of universal constants having changed and then changed back. The slugs presumably evolving afterwards from something introduced since.

At the very edge of an uninhabitable system orbiting a red giant, lies what to the unwary travel looks like an asteroid belt, not dissimilar from the Kuiper Belt back on Sol. The shrewd explorer might be puzzled as to why no rock is greater than a dozen meters in diameter, and why all of them are in an irregular shape. The Ark Mechanicus ’’Adamantium Concordance’’ was manned by such shrewd explorers, and the Magos sent in a servitor probe to take a closer look. The pict-feed was baffling, even to the jaded augmented captain. The asteroids were actually millions of demons, from lowly Tzeentchian horrors to a mighty Undivided prince, all turned to stone, forever frozen in an expression of fear, petrified like in the ancient fables of knights and wizards. The Navigator did not pick up any turmoil or interference in the warp, nor was it calmer than usual. This orrery looked just like a monument to pointlessness and absurdity, and the Magos decided to leave it at that.

Imagine you are standing still in your room. Then suppose that the carpet gets pulled from under your feet, and you fall. But it's not the carpet; it's the very fabric of reality that suddenly changes, inertia suddenly stops working, a movement isn’t possible without an exerting force upon a still object. You are a Daemon, the very definition of unreal; being in a material body is already enough of a limitation, even in the semi-irreality of a Daemon World. You can shape your surroundings to your belief through pure willpower; in keeping with the former analogy, you can move, fold, lift, turn around the carpet over which you're standing, because you're an intelligent lifeform and the carpet is just a piece of parchment.

But then it's not.

It starts pulling at your feet, squirming like a worm, you get mired in it like quicksand, and it thrashes like open sea during a storm.

This is very wrong, it's not supposed to be like this, “I'm in control of this carpet”, you say! Except you are not, it's now animated, it doesn't stand still, it's almost alive.
I'm (un-)alive! You say, poor Daemon, if there even is such a thing as a poor Daemon.
You try to hold it, to squeeze it, but you're not in control anymore. So you try to flee.

And that's the last of your arrogant mistakes.

Reality is already enough in turmoil; it doesn't need, no, IT DOESN'T WANT you to pull out. Physics is getting fucked sideways so fundamentally that it prefers to keep warp creatures, just to have something barely stable and coherent in its embrace. You feel yourself stretched between realms, your essence being pulled by the thread, slowly, painfully unraveling. It's a completely new experience to you. Maybe, if you're Slaaneshi, you're orgasmically enjoying your destruction, a sensation so alien and unexpected that it is sure to please your Many-Gods-In-One for its novelty. But you won't be around to share your master's satisfaction. With a last, brutal, pull, you are metaphysically torn apart, your immortal essence disintegrated. Ironic, that the death of the Flayer reduces the Immortal to dust just like a Gauss Flayer does the same to the mortal.

And then, it's all over. Reality, with a last trembling, reasserts itself, attempting desperately to reconstruct itself. For whatever reason, the death of Llandu'gor deleted all celestial bodies in this system smaller than a moon. So, reality makes do.

The sudden death of million of Daemons left a mute echo in the fabric of the universe. It coalesces, then crystallizes in the aspect of the screaming unsouls in the moment of their demise. This system needs an asteroid belt, because that's how this system works. It couldn't be anyway else.

Nobody has been brave, or foolish, enough to fly past the belt and see what happened to the Daemon World itself.

The planet itself does not exist. It may appear to have physical dimensions and be composed of tangible matter, it may even be habitable with use of sunscreen and a warm coat but it does not exist and should not be approached or directory interacted with and international direct observation is prohibited. The system is under quarantine by order of the Inquisition.

Due to the non-existent nature of the planet and area of space up to between 420,000 to 430,000 from the planet's surface anything passing into the effected area, which does not exist, also ceases to exist.

Observation from outside the quarantine zone, which contains nothing, may indicate that objects introduced may continue to exist and even interact with native objects. Neither the foreign object or the introduced matter at this point can be said to exist.

The effected area does not produce or absorb any measurable light or other radiation and has no detectable effect on the electromagnetic landscape of the star system.

Any observations that seem contrary to this are wrong.

The area and planet, that do not exist, accordingly have no name and may in fact be unnameable.
The slugs live on a different planet that does exist and presumably has, has had or will have a name at some point. Though probably not one made by the slugs who may or may not have a language.

The planet that doesn't exist may have had a name when it did exist but the name has been erased. Perhaps the name itself has also been erased and so may never be renamed and is now utterly forgotten or perhaps it's just that anyone who did know it is dead, it's hard to say.

In any case it's possible that those daemons are not missed by their gods. The gods can't remember their names. They have been erased and gods are very sensitive to that sort of thing, to them as things are now those daemons never were. Possibly if pushed they may be forced to admit that there was a Daemon World here somewhere at some point. But a Daemon World needs a master and this place has never had a master. [[Malal|It is not a place that exists]].

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== Octarius Sector ==

See [[Nobledark Imperium Xenos#Ork Empires of Charadon, Octarius, and Bork|Ork Empires of Charadon, Octarius, and Bork]] and [[Nobledark Imperium Drafts#The Octarius War|The Octarius War]]

= Daemon Worlds, Crone Worlds, and Worlds of the Ruinous Powers =

== Craftworld Altansar ==

The cursed Craftworld. The doomed Craftworld.

Altansar had the misfortune of being just far enough from the Eldar Crone Worlds to escape being instantly destroyed by the birth of Slaanesh yet not far enough away to avoid being sucked into the newly formed Eye of Terror. In those days there were no Phoenix Lords, no great armies or warriors that could protect the Craftworld from harm. The Craftworld was almost immediately besieged by the followers of Chaos following the birth of Slaanesh. Despite fighting valiantly, the walls failed, and the siege was broken. Nearly every living soul there and half of the souls in the Infinity Circuit were sacrificed to the Dark Gods, chief among them She Who Thirsts.

A couple thousand Eldar managed to escape the destruction of Altansar, including the future Phoenix Lord Maugan Ra, but by and large the Craftworld was lost.

A few years after the fall of Altansar a number of Eldar appeared on the doorstep of several Craftworlds, claiming to be refugees from the lost Altansar. The Craftworlders for their part were suspicious, but eventually decided to let the refugees in. Kin were kin, after all, and allies were few and far between in the Old Night. It proved to be a disastrous mistake. The purported refugees were really Crone Worlders, who corrupted the Craftworlds from within and made them vulnerable to attack from daemons and Chaos Eldar. The Craftworlders struck back, and although they were able to keep the corrupted Craftworlds from becoming as twisted as Altansar, they were still far too corrupted to be salvaged. In the end, the Craftworlds had to be destroyed by flying them into the nearest stars.

Today Altansar is the Craftworld of the Crone Eldar. It is a breeding ground for them. [[Nobledark_Imperium_Writing#The_Awaking|The shard of Khaine now channels Khorne through thrice-cursed blasphemous rituals]] and the Infinity Circuit is little more than a playground for Daemons. To this day, to even mention the name of that accursed place is said to bring bad luck.

== Shaa-Dome ==

See [[Nobledark_Imperium_Forces_of_Chaos#Crone_Worlds|Crone Worlds]]

== Elsinore ==

See [[Nobledark_Imperium_Forces_of_Chaos#Elsinore|Elsinore]]

[[Category:Nobledark_Imperium]]

Nobledark Imperium Imperial Society and Culture

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Nobledark Imperium Imperial Society and Culture

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Nobledark Imperium Xenos

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'''This page is part of the Nobledark Imperium, a fan re-working of the Warhammer 40,000 Universe. See the [[Nobledark Imperium|Nobledark Imperium Introduction]] and [[Nobledark Imperium|Main Page]] for more information on the alternate universe'''

The Imperium, [[Nobledark_Imperium_Forces_of_Chaos|Chaos]], Ork WAAAGH!, Necron Star Empire, and tyranid Hive Mind are not the only ones vying for dominance of the galaxy, though they are its largest powers. This is a page for all those other species not directly associated with the major powers, such as the Hrud. This is also a page for those species who although no longer existing in have had a significant effect on its history, ranging from the Old Ones and Necrontyr of the War in Heaven sixty-six million years ago to the human-made Men of Gold and Iron Minds of the glory days of the [[Dark_Age_of_Technology|Dark Age]] Great and Bountiful Human Dominion.

Xenos species that are members of the Imperium can be found under [[Nobledark Imperium Member States]]

NOTE: This is also a temporary holding area for the entries related to the Necrons, tyranids, Orks, and Dark Eldar, with the hope being to eventually spin these sections off into their own pages once they get long enough.

== Da Orkz ==

=== The Beast ===

<div class="toccolours mw-collapsible mw-collapsed" style="100%">''''' He Who Will Bring His People Much Slaughter: '''''

Urlakk Urgg. The Beast. The big one. The lord who will bring his people much slaughter. The single greatest mortal threat ever faced by the Imperium, and the yardstick to which all other Ork warbosses are measured.

Urlakk Urg was originally the warboss of Ullanor, the center of an Ork empire that laid claim to a number of star systems. It is thought that the Imperium was lucky to have encountered Ullanor when they did, as Ullanor and similar Ork empires such as Gorro seemed to be reaching a critical mass beyond which Brain Boyz would start being produced. Already the Orks of Ullanor and Gorro were developing technology and organization beyond what orks were capable of for most of Imperial History (like proto-Attack Moons and sedentary settlements), and orks like Urlakk Urg seemed to be much smarter and of a different caste from the usual ork, though not fully Brain Boyz.

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The Ullanor Crusade was a bloody slog, made more difficult by the fact that the usual strategy of “shoot the warboss first” was untenable as Urg was smart enough to not to reveal his face in the open until his Boyz were in the thick of the fighting. The conflict only turned in the Imperium’s favor when Horus provoked Urlakk Urg into revealing himself, taunting Urlakk Urg from his flagship until Urg gave Horus the coordinates to his location, demanding that the coward face him in single combat. Horus responded by slagging Urg’s palace from orbit and decapitating most of the WAAAGH!’s leadership in one blow. Normally this sort of practice worked wonders, and indeed it did win the day in the Ullanor Crusade, but slagging the palace from orbit meant that Urg’s body was unaccounted for, which allowed him to escape unnoticed and swear bloody vengeance on the Imperium from the barren rock he ended up on. This led him to an encounter with [[Chaos Gods|four other individuals]] who also had a very vested interest in deposing the Imperium.

The Chaos Gods assisted in the Beast’s phoenix-like return to power, giving him access to Warp portals that allowed him to rapidly assert dominance over WAAAGH!s that were otherwise a galaxy apart, and giving him blessings to exploit the loophole in Ork logic of “bigger equals boss”. The Beast’s assault was basically a massive blitzkrieg that came screaming across the northern border of the Imperium, backed up by daemons, Crone Eldar, and Dark Eldar raiding in their wake like pilot fish following a big shark. Daemonic incursions and smaller WAAAGH!s erupted in other parts of the galaxy such that the Imperium was besieged on all fronts and had trouble creating a unified front against the main push of the WAAAGH! to the north. Although many smaller WAAAGH!’s split off from the Beast’s main force, the Beast’s plan was to head straight for Ullanor, convert the planet into an attack planet, and then make a beeline for Old Earth to kill the Steward and claim Isha for Chaos (Isha wasn’t on Earth at the time since this was before the alliance was formed, but that was a secondary concern). There was some stopping for lootin’ an’ pillagin’, but by Ork standards it was extremely fast. Most early battles in the War of the Beast, especially on the main front, tended to be [[Nobledark_Imperium_Primarchs#Sanguinius|pyrrhic victories]] or [[Nobledark_Imperium_Notable_People#Jenetia_Krole|heroic last stands]] for the Imperium at best, the defenders swept away by the sheer force of the green tide.

It wasn’t until the Beast’s forces entered the core territories of the Segmentum Solar, despite being harried by Horus, Kurze, and Guilliman, that his momentum began to slow. His first plan upon entering the Sol System was to ram Ullanor into Earth, sterilizing everything on the surface. Some say it’s because hitting one planet with another like billiard balls is ded orky. Some say the Beast was so obsessed with revenge he didn’t care how orky it was. Maybe it was both, and the Beast was mixing business with pleasure. However, that plan was foiled by the actions Ollanius Pius, which forced the Beast to try and take the planet using ground troops. We all know how that ended up. The death of the Beast marked the turning point of the war, as the warbosses could no longer effectively cooperate and were picked off one by one, with the most successful carving out their own petty kingdoms.

The Beast’s status and accomplishments are legendary among the orks. The most dangerous warbosses throughout history have taken up the title of Beast (specifically, Mag Uruk Thraka) in the hopes of achieving a similar level of infamy to Urlakk Urg. These Beast WAAAGH!s are some of the greatest threats to the Imperium, comparable to a major tyranids Hive Fleet (e.g., Behemoth, Kraken, or Leviathan) or one of Malys’ Black Crusades. However, until [[Nobledark_Imperium_Notes#Ghazghull|recently]], none of the successors to the title had the potential to measure up to the original.

Importantly, unlike most of his successors, who either consider Chaos an ally of convenience or just pay lip service to its ideals at best, and Ghazghull, who hates Chaos, the Beast was the only major warboss to actively embrace Chaos and reject the Gorkamorka to pledge his devotion to, quote, “gods who actually do something for their worshippers”. As a result, he got a shitload of blessing including marks from all four Chaos Gods and the mark of Chaos Ascendant, which turned him into an absolute nightmare the size of a hab-block that tore through a number of the Imperium’s greatest heroes and took the Steward and Eldrad (with some softening up from Sanguinius) to finally bring him down.

Ironically, the Beast’s greatest flaw was wrath of all things. Orks love fighting. They love fighting and winning even more. The Beast wasn’t angry that the Imperium declared war on him. He was angry that they took his empire from him. Not only that, but they did so in one of the most underhanded methods possible, by tricking him and then nuking him from orbit rather than defeating him in face-to-face combat. The danger of this flaw could already be seen in Ullanor Crusade, Urg was a kunnin’ ork and knew Horus was trying to trick him but eventually his anger got the better of him. Anger can be a powerful motivator, as well a deadly flaw. The Beast’s anger gave him the motivation to unite most of the Ork race within a few years, but it also led him to making a lot of short-sighted, kneejerk decisions without thinking of the consequences like allying with the Chaos gods and [[Nobledark_Imperium_Writing#Ork_Diplomacy|tactical errors due to trying to make a statement rather than just krumpin’ da gitz]]. Ironically, this would have probably gotten him killed by his followers once the rush of battle wore off and the orks started looking to their long-term future, but the Beast’s lust for revenge did the job for him and accidentally [[Nobledark_Imperium_Xenos#Brain_Boyz|set the Orks back millennia]].

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=== Brain Boyz ===

<div class="toccolours mw-collapsible mw-collapsed" style="100%">''''' The Menace in Green: '''''

''“It’s no good. Bloody greenskins set a trap for us. Send a few trigger-happy Boyz our way, knowing that we’d think that’s all they got and advance. So we get cocky and march our way through the mountain pass. Then once we get too far in to retreat the Orks show they’re not as dead as we all thought and cut off the mountain pass. Only way out of the beartrap is to go deeper into ork territory. Don’t you see, Commissar? It’s an ambush.”''<br>
''“Ambush? What do you mean ambush? Orks don’t set am–”''<br>
-- Last words of the Hekaton 234th, right before being attacked by an Ork ambush

Brain Boyz are perhaps the greatest threat to the Imperium to come out of the Orkish menace in recent years. The greenskins have produced numerous threats over the millennia, including the numerous Beast WAAAGH!s, Armageddon Wars, the Wyrd War that decimated the legion Terra’s Sons, or the Black Croosade [sic] called by the Chaos Ork Rotfang Badgut, but these were often sector or segmentum-scale threats, none of which could compare to sheer destruction wrought by the War of the Beast. Some, particularly in areas that saw relatively little fighting during the War of the Beast, were foolish enough to say that the Orks were no longer capable of posing any organized threat to the Imperium, despite the Orks being responsible for the most brutal conflict in Imperial history. Orks were often seen as little more than cannon fodder, little more than mercenaries or catspaws of greater powers like Chaos or marauding distractions from more threatening adversaries like the Necrons or tyranids, not to be underestimated but not capable of being a significant threat on their own (no matter what the ravings of the inhabitants of the Sol system and its nearby territories had to say). All of which had to be reassessed when Brain Boyz made their reappearance on the galactic stage.

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Most inhabitants of the Milky Way, or at least those who have any idea of how the greater galaxy works beyond their own little world, have a general understanding of the Ork life cycle. Ork spores gradually orkiform the world, a single spore capable of germinating into a variety of different morphotypes depending on the availability of nutrients and the strength of the WAAAGH! field, producing first mushrooms, then more complex orkoid organisms such as squigs. Then snotlings appear, followed by gretchins, followed by orks. A complete self-sustaining ecosystem and war machine. What most don’t know, however, is that there is an additional stage to the Ork life cycle. Eventually, the Ork population reaches a “critorkal mass”, which prompts the development of a new Ork caste: the Brain Boyz. Orks become more intelligent the more of them there are, but Brain Boyz produce a quantum leap in Ork functionality, increasing the intellect of all orkoid lifeforms around them just by their sheer presence. The appearance of Brain Boyz in an Ork WAAAGH! is often heralded by an increase in the sophistication of Ork technology, including the appearance of more advanced Ork devices such as reliable tellyportas, attack moons, and gravity whips as the WAAAGH! field becomes strong enough to unlock the knowledge hidden in their genetic code. Indeed, many Great Crusade-era Warbosses, including Urlakk Urg of Ullanor (a.k.a. The Beast), the Mekboy Warboss of Gorro, and Gharkul Blackfang of Gyros-Thravian, all of whom ruled over Ork empires even more advanced than Charadon, Bork, or Octarius are today, could be seen as proto-Brain Boyz in a sense. Although the presence of Brain Boyz does not preclude the creation of these devices, their production certainly increases following their appearance.

In the past, the appearance of Brain Boyz was a cyclical thing, like a tidal cycle. Over the course of thousands of years, the Ork population would grow, the WAAAGH! field would hit a critical mass, and then Brain Boyz would appear. The Orks would then mostly unite under a single banner to wage WAAAGH! on the rest of the galaxy before being beaten back and the Brain Boys hunted down and destroyed (typically at great cost), returning the Orks to square one. Typically this was done by the Old Eldar Empire or in later years the Interstellar League of humans and their allies during Dark Age of Technology (for which Brain Boy WAAAGH!s were one of the reasons the League formed in the first place). And so the cycle would repeat itself. However, after the Fall of the Eldar and the Age of Strife, there was no longer any eldar empire or league of species to prune back the Orkoid menace. It is estimated that had the Great Crusade not set out when it did, in half a millennium or less Brain Boyz would have re-emerged with no checks on their power. This estimate might have been even lower if the WAAAGH! forged by the Beast had managed to hold. The great Beast ironically did the galaxy a favor, setting Ork back several thousand years by rushing headlong into war with the Imperium.

What the rest of the galaxy also don’t realize is that Brain Boyz are not just Orks with added kunnin’. Brain Boyz occur when the WAAAGH! field is high enough that a single Ork spore divides into twin zygotes. This isn’t exactly uncommon, Ork spores twin all the time, but typically these are chance occurrences whose products grow into two orks or two gretchin. Brain Boy spores are produced by induced twinning and grow into two different Orkoid lifeforms, an ork and a gretchin reflecting the duality of orkiness: brutal cunning and cunning brutality. Often, the ork will start out runty and the gretchin will come out particularly large, due to the gretchin twin taking up nutrients that would otherwise go to the Ork (though in the case of Ghazghull and Makari both came out particularly runty, likely due to the circumstances of their birth). Typically, this twinning is not immediately noticed, Orks typically don’t make it a point to record where a particular boy or grot is born after all, but the two Brain Boyz know each other on sight and are in constant psychic contact with one another (similar phenomena have been noted in eldar and human psyker twins). That said, most Orks instinctively recognize Brain Boyz once they reach some level of prominence. This ork-gretchin duality is just as practical as symbolic. Few would suspect a gretchin of being capable of altering the behavior of a WAAAGH! If the ork Brain Boy is killed, the WAAAGH! doesn’t instantly collapse from in-fighting and the sudden loss of brainpower. If a foe knows about the gretchin Brain Boy, they are often too paranoid about the gretchin Brain Boy to notice the ork one putting a choppa in their face.

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=== Ork Empires of Charadon, Octarius, and Bork ===

Contrary to popular belief, when the Beast was slain on Old Earth, the remainder of the Orkish army did not miraculously disperse into a puff of spore and WAAAGH!-flavored smoke. True, the Orks were thrown into disarray at the loss of their leader, but Orks are more used to radical changes in leadership than humans, and there were still plenty of Orks on Old Earth. Once the Orks were driven from the Sol System, the long and costly Reclamation of Old Earth began. Any spot on which an ork has shed blood is guaranteed to produce more Orks, unless the body is burned or more drastic measures are taken. However, this was Old Earth, the cradle of humanity, and its stubborn people would (literally) move mountains in order to ensure their planet was Ork-free. The intensity of the campaign to ensure that the planet was never Orkiformed was nearly as destructive to Old Earth’s ecosystem as the wrought by the forces of the Beast themselves.

The threat of the Beast’s hordes extended far beyond the Sol system. Through violence, cunning, brutality, promises of a good fight, and copious use of Chaos-sponsored Warp portals to cut down on travel time, the Beast had managed to suborn every major Warboss and unite virtually all WAAAGH!s worth noting in the Milky Way in little more than six standard years. It is estimated that at the time of the War of the Beast, nearly eighty percent of the Ork population was under Urlakk Urg’s control in some fashion. Upon hearing news of the Beast’s death, many of the more ambitious Warbosses attempted to break off and form WAAAGH! of their own, rather than follow “that Urlakk git’s” orders. Some of these Warbosses were more successful than others.

The most successful were the Arch-Arsonist of Charadon, the Overfiend of Octarius, and the Arch-Mangler of Mork. These three Warbosses carved out massive areas of space, forming the basis for what would become the modern Octarius, Charadon, and Bork sectors. The Octarius, Charadon, and Bork sectors are less sectors in the traditional Imperial sense, and more designations for the massive amounts of space that these three Orkish empires control. Although many later Ork enclaves have sprung up due to the increasingly strained nature of Imperial resources, these three empires can trace their roots all the way back to the War of the Beast. The Arch-Arsonist, Overfiend, and Arch-Mangler are even still around, after a fashion, even though the original Orks that carved out these dominions are now long dead. The identity of these rulers has changed regularly, as is typical of a kratocracy, but each Ork that takes control of each of these empires takes on the identity and in some cases the mannerisms of the previous rulers, even adopting the oversized gorget that has become a symbol of Ork power since it was used by Urlakk Urg during the War of the Beast. Sometimes by chance a Chaos Ork has even risen to the throne. Of course, these Chaos Orks typically fail in their goal to convert these empires to the worship of the Chaos Gods, and few stay in power for long, especially if they make the mistake of badmouthing the Gorkamorka.

The Imperium was unable to do much to stop these Warbosses at the time as they were still recovering from the War of the Beast and were still trying to scrape together a semblance of an empire in their own space. By the time the Imperium had recovered enough to retaliate, the Orks had already dug in too deep to effectively without a massive waste of manpower and materiel. Even during the Imperial Reconquista, when several smaller Orkish empires were crushed underfoot by Machairius and his forces, these three managed to stubbornly resist any efforts at conquest. Furthermore, as much as the Imperium is loath to admit it, the empires also serve a useful purpose in acting as buffer states against outside xenos threats, particularly Charadon which shares a border with the Necron Star Empire.

That is not to say the Imperium is content to sit and do nothing. The Imperium knows full well what happens when one leaves Orks to their own devices, as seen by the Empires on Gorro and Ullanor during the Great Crusade. The Imperium regularly sends assassins into Ork-held territories, especially the Empires of Octarius, Charadon, and Bork, in order to take out any kunnin’ or charismatic Warboss in the hopes of keeping an Ork like the Beast from ever arising again. Chaos appears to have a similar idea, sending their own assassins after any promising warboss, in order to keep the Orks stupid and easily manipulated. Unfortunately, this means that the few Orks who do survive this gauntlet of assassins tend to be the smartest and most kunnin’ of the lot, meaning that all this action may have done is lower the threshold for Brain Boyz to emerge.

=== Empires of Gathrog and Dregruk ===

To the galactic northeast of Cadia and the Eye of Terror lie two great Ork Empires, the Empire of Gathrog and the Empire of Dregruk. These Ork empires are so large that if the two WAAAGH!s were to combine forces, it is likely that they could easily overrun Cadia and the Cadian Gate before the Imperium could do much of anything about it. Fortunately for the Imperium, these two empires hate each other with a passion, and would much rather fight each other than team up against the Imperium.

This is due in large part to the two empire’s choice of patrons. Gathrog is one of the few Ork WAAAGH!s to be composed almost entirely of Chaos Orks (likely because of its close proximity to the Eye), with the current Arch-Dictator of Gathrog being a Khornate. The Great Despot of Dregruk and his forces, on the other hand, are staunch followers of the Gorkamorka, and in recent years have sworn fealty to Ghazghkull Mag Uruk Thraka as part of his efforts to consolidate forces in preparation for the 5th War of Armageddon.

===The Proto-Orks and the Krork ===

See [[Nobledark_Imperium_Xenos#The_Proto-Orks_and_the_Krork|The Proto-Orks and the Krork]]

== Necron Star Empire ==

=== Dynasties of the Star Empire ===

==== Ahmontekh and the Suhbekhar Dynasty ====

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The leadership of the Necron Star Empire is a pale shadow of its former self. While Szarekh, first and mightiest of their number, still reigns, the other two members of the Triarch, his left and right hands, were lost in the millions of years during the Great Sleep. Szarekh's right hand was Ahmontekh of the Suhbekhar Dynasty, a skilled warrior with an eye for long-term strategy, valued not only for his ability in battle but for his wise council. Ahmontekh's skill in battle was such that he was one of the warriors that fought alongside the C'tan and even struck the killing blow that slew the Great Weaver of the K’nib. When the War in Heaven ended, Ahmontekh entered the Great Sleep without issue like so many other Necrons.

Then, approximately twenty-three million years ago, the Old Eldar Empire made the mistake of waking Ahmontekh up early. Although separated from his dynasty, having been put into stasis alongside some of the finest soldiers and war machines of the Necron Star Empire due to his status as Triarch, Ahmontekh had enough resources entombed with him in his royal crypt to pose a serious problem. Ahmontekh’s response to being awoken by the children of the Old Ones was swift, immediate, and fiery. Worlds that had known peace for millions of years burned under Ahmontekh's assault, their state of the art defense systems no match for ancient Necrontyr technology. In particular, the eldar swore eternal vengeance on Ahmontekh for destroying the Crone World of Maldek, killing trillions in a single stroke, and declared they would hunt him to the ends of the galaxy. Worse yet was that Ahmontekh’s destruction wasn’t simply mindless. He was looking for the other tomb worlds and his buried lord. If the eldar didn’t stop him soon, the Old Empire would have a full-scale revival of the Necron Star Empire on their hands.

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Then the Old Empire were approached by a strange figure, a robotic avatar of an unknown species with a single cycloptic eye. Exactly who this being was remains unknown, but told the eldar it knew of a way to destroy Ahmontekh. Long ago before the Necrons had traded flesh and blood for metal, Ahmontekh had warred with the Charnovokh Dynasty, which at the time had been ruled by his cousin. Although outright warfare between the Suhbekhar and Charnovokh Dynasties had been stopped by the control protocols, the memory of the rivalry still existed in Ahmontekh’s mind. The stranger could take that seed of resentment, distort it and expand it, until nothing else occupied the Phaeron’s thoughts. While Ahmontekh was a skilled fighter and cunning strategist, his weakness was his lack of scientific knowledge. Like most Phaerons, Ahmontekh knew nothing of how technology actually worked, and therefore no way to stop anyone from subverting the functions of his mind. Ahmontekh would be made predictable and easy to destroy by his madness. The eldar considered any plan to destroy Ahmontekh to be a good idea, but they didn’t notice the stranger spoke such words with a heavy heart. Although they knew the stranger wanted Ahmontekh gone as much as they did, what they didn’t know is that Gahet of the Cabal had approached the Eldar Empire as a last resort, having previously tried to sway Ahmontekh to his cause with words instead of violence.

The foul deed was done and Ahmontekh’s mental state began to deteriorate. Rather than seek out and awaken his liege Szarekh, he became increasingly focused on finding the resting place of his hated rivals the Charnovokh Dynasty and destroy them once and for all. Knowing his hated rivals were located somewhere on the Eastern fringe, Ahmontekh’s army marched increasingly eastward, making their movements extremely telegraphed and easy to intercept. The eldar assumed he was killed in a bombardment, especially given his forces fell apart soon after his assumed death, but such was not the case. In one last display of sentimentality out of regret for his own actions, Gahet crippled Ahmontekh’s cybernetic body and spirited him away before his death. He placed the mad Phaeron in a stasis capsule and laid him to rest in the old tomb complexes of the Suhbekhar Dynasty, hoping that Ahmontekh could one day be awakened and healed of his madness at a time when the galaxy no longer had to conceive of war.

With the incapacitation of the triarch, rule of the Suhbekhar Dynasty fell to Ahmontekh’s son, Ahhotekh. In many ways, Ahhotekh is everything that his father was not. Instead of being a proud regent and warrior, he is a schemer, who prefers to dispose of his foes through intrigue and manipulation rather than brute force. Ahhotekh has even gone so far as to disdain those who gain power through brute force; while he has killed in his share of duels, he considers those who make a habit of it to be insufficiently imaginative to actively hold power and capable of little more than savagery. Ahhotekh spent much of the War of Heaven disposing of his rivals in convenient accidents and other such methods, including stoking the rivalry between the Suhbekhar and Charnovokh Dynasties. Indeed, before the biotransference, Ahhotekh was actively plotting to dispose of Ahmontekh, the only member of the Suhbekhar Dynasty who would dare consider raising their hand against the Phaeron, something that the control protocols put a stop to.

Fortunately, despite Ahmontekh’s incapacitation the control protocols were still in place, his insanity was not enough to cause the Suhbekhar Dynasty to break the will of the Silent King. However, this is cold comfort for Ahhotekh, who isn’t sure if the control protocols also protect him since his father is incapacitated, not dead. As a result, Ahhotekh is intensely paranoid and relentlessly persecutes his underlings for any perceived sign of betrayal. After all, he would do the same to them if their positions were reversed. It is unclear, but ironically possible, that the control protocols forbidding harm to their liege are the only thing preventing the Necrons of the Suhbekhar Dynasty from rising up and uniting as one to overthrow Ahhotekh.

However, no matter how much he wants to, there is something preventing Ahhotekh from disposing of his dear father. Ahmontekh saw something when he was awakened, something that few others alive in the galaxy today still remember. The Silent King wants that information out of Ahmontekh’s head, as any intelligence on the state of the galaxy since the Great Sleep could prove highly useful in realizing the Star Empire’s plans. At the same time, Ahhotekh wants the control protocols to secure control of the Suhbekhar Dynasty, and as long as the Silent King’s orders leave room for creative interpretation of his orders he is willing to pursue it. Nevertheless, examining Ahmontekh’s mind is a slow process, one that must be carried out piecemeal by thousands of Crypteks. Seeing too much of Ahmontekh’s mind at once tends to drive any Necron who sees it insane.

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=== Necron Titans (Stalkers) ===

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For many years, after the reemergence of the Necron Star Empire, there was considerable debate among Imperial scholars as to what a Necron Titan would look like. Many theorized that a Necron Titan would simply look like a giant Necron. Others hypothesized that the C’tan were the Necron’s equivalents of Titans, and after the War in Heaven the Necrons may have had no need for Titan-scale weaponry. This was all before the Necron-Imperium Conflict, that brief period in M40 when tensions between the Imperium and the Necrontyr Star Empire ran hot after the Silent King demanded a trillion subjects for biotransference experiments before settling into the quasi-cold war state that it has today. It was during this period that the Necrons brought out some of the heavy weapons they had to bear, and Imperial scholars learned they had been wrong. Completely, horribly, wrong.

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In contrast to nearly all other races, Necron Titans, or Stalkers, are distinctly non-humanoid, almost arachnid or insect-like in appearance. This is perhaps best exemplified by the most commonly seen Necron Stalker, the Tomb Stalker. Rather than standing upright on two large limbs, Tomb Stalkers support their weight via dozens of insectoid limbs, resembling Earth centipedes. These limbs are not only effective in carrying the construct’s weight, but also in burrowing through the ground and tearing through the armor plating of opposing vehicles and titans. This is true not only of the generic Warhound-sized Tomb Stalkers most commonly seen, but also of the larger Scolopendra class Tomb Stalkers, which can be the size of an Imperator Titan.

Compared to other Stalkers, Tomb Stalkers use little in the way of quantum shielding, which is thought to be the Necron’s answer to Void Shields. Instead, they use the very earth as their shield, burrowing beneath the ground in order to ambush their prey. In doing so, Tomb Stalkers are able to achieve something very few Titans are capable of performing: stealth. The effectiveness of the Tomb Stalker’s burrowing strategy became clear during the Necron-Imperium Conflict, when a Tomb Stalker burrowed a circle around an Imperator Titan before erupting from the ground, using the unstable substrate to drag the Imperial Titan and its Princeps to their grave.

Surprisingly enough, Tomb Stalkers are thought to be weaponized construction vehicles. Records obtained from the Imperium’s Necron contacts report that Tomb Stalkers were originally used in constructing the vast tomb complexes that the Necrons inhabited in their heyday. The Necrontyr apparently evolved on a world with blistering levels of stellar radiation, which would kill most lifeforms over an extended period of time. As a result, the only logical place to build cities on the Necrontyr homeworld was underground, resulting in an architectural style that resembled increasingly ornate bunker complexes. The Necrontyr found this architectural style to be highly effective in protecting against meteoroid strikes and orbital bombardments, even after they spread off their homeworld to planets less affected by radiation.

At the other end of the spectrum are the Crypt Stalkers, which resemble gigantic versions of the Terran daddy longlegs. The control center and weaponry are all mounted on the central body of the Crypt Stalker, allowing them to instantly change direction in response to new threats, even capable of rotating their heat rays 180 degrees and suddenly reversing direction without even having to turn. Crypt Stalkers have a sensory array which gives them a nearly 360 degree field of vision, and their long legs allow them to simply step over most obstacles in their path. Crypt Stalkers make much heavier use of void shielding, mainly because their small body and comparatively narrow legs would make them otherwise easy targets for anti-titan weaponry. Triarch Stalkers are similar to Crypt Stalkers, except are smaller with a distinct pilot (closer to tank-sized) and are not capable of omnidirectional movement. They compensate for this with huge melee appendages they can use as melee weapons.

It is still not entirely clear how Stalkers work. It is clear that Stalkers have some kind of intelligence, given their ability to react to changing conditions on the battlefield, but whether that consciousness is a pilot or intrinsic to the machine itself is unknown. The kneejerk assumption would be that Stalkers are operated by an uploaded Necron consciousness, or otherwise powered by a C’tan shard. However, evidence indicates that Tomb Stalkers were around in nearly their current form (minus the heavy weaponry) before the First Wars of Secession, given their use in carving out the underground complexes the Necrontyr called home, long before the Necrontyr had developed biotransferrence or discovered the C’tan. The current running hypothesis is that the Stalkers are controlled by some manner of artificial intelligence, similar to the Scarabs, Canoptek Wraiths, and Crypt Spyders, except on a much larger scale.

Nemesor Zandrekh is known to treat his personal Tomb Stalker like a beloved pet, but it is unknown if this is typical or just another one of the Nemesor’s…eccentricities.

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=== Independent and Imperial-aligned Dynasties ===

==== Nemesor Zahndrekh and the Gidrim Dynasty ====

See [[Nobledark Imperium Notes#Nemesor Zahndrekh|Nemesor Zahndrekh]] (TEMPORARY LINK)

==== Trazyn the Infinite and Solemnace ====

See [[Nobledark Imperium Notable Planets#Solemnace|Solemnace]]

==== Xun'Bakyr and the Maynarkh Dynasty ====

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Of all the independent Necron dynasties, the Maynarkh Dynasty is perhaps the biggest threat to the Imperium. Even as far back as the War in Heaven, the Maynarkh Dynasty were known for their brutality and cruelty, acting as the Silent King’s pet monsters and wetwork agents. This behavior was no different under the Maynarkh Dynasty’s last and latest Phaerakh: Xun’bakyr, the Mother of Oblivion. Eldar Harlequins speak of countless atrocities and genocides, all perpetrated by Necrons in glowing colors of brass and orange. Indeed, the brutality of Xun’bakyr and the Maynarkh Dynasty was so great that just before the Great Sleep several Phaerons, normally so subservient as to the point of indolence, approached the Silent King to suggest that the Silent King take steps to make sure Xun’bakyr…didn’t wake up from the Great Sleep. It is rather telling that the Silent King actually agreed with this proposal.

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The Silent King may have had more than one reason to try and kill off the Maynarkh Dynasty. Phaerarch Xun’bakyr was, to put it bluntly, infatuated with the Nightbringer. When the Silent King gave the order for the Drazak Dynasty to kill Llandu’gor the Flayer, he had to noticeably take precautions to avoid letting the information reach Xun’bakyr, given that any weapon that could conceivably be used against the object of her obsession would likely cause her to react poorly. Even when the C’tan were shattered and the Silent King ordered the Necrons to go into their long hibernation, the news was kept hidden from the Maynarkh Dynasty, who went to sleep still believing they were following orders from their C’tan overlords. The Silent King may have been able to directly override the free will of Xun’bakyr, but given her instability, he didn’t want to risk the chance of her slipping her leash.

The Maynarkh Dynasty was put in hibernation in their traditional lands, far on the other side of the galaxy from the core of the Star Empire in what would one day become the Orpheus Sector of the Segmentum Pacificus. This was a high-density stellar cluster filled with numerous stars, some of which were…encouraged to go supernova early with a little bit of help from the Oruscar Dynasty’s Celestial Orrery. The Silent King hoped that the constant bombardment of electromagnetic pulses from exploding stars would damage the Maynarkh Dynasty to the point that they would never wake up from the Great Sleep, or at the very least be so damaged that they could only awake into an addled half-life.

It didn’t work. Although the Maynarkh Dynasty was damaged, they still awoke from the Great Sleep along with everyone else. Xun’bakyr’s madness and obsession was, if anything, worsened by the damage from the Great Sleep, to the point that the Silent King could no longer assert any control over her. Xun’bakyr seemed to rapidly realize she had been deceived, having awoken in a time when the great immortal C’tan had either been killed or reduced to hiding and the Silent King was the one trying to give her orders.

Rapidly dismissing the ravings of the would-be king, Xun’bakyr realized that her dynasty now needed a new purpose. It didn’t take her long to come up with one. Xun’bakyr decided that the Maynarkh Dynasty would rededicate themselves to killing all life in the galaxy itself, a creative masterpiece of death and destruction that might even go so far as killing time itself, all to attract the attention of the Nightbringer and to demonstrate her affection for the object of her infatuation. She is rather oblivious to the fact that despite all his paraphernalia and death-associated trappings, the Nightbringer is mostly concerned with sating his own gluttony and power-lust and would rather like causality to keep existing (though in his own image of course).

Xun'bakyr is obsessive and meticulous, in the long term focused absolutely on her deadly Idol, in the short term honing and perfecting some novel variety of star eater, 4D ionized shrapnel projector, or reality-pin to nail down certain doom. Xun'bakyr isn't a large scale threat only because she is so narrow in the scope of her ambitions. Her armies march along in the wake of the Nightbringer dealing death, and her scouts proceed him demonstrating their queen's new horrors. A blow from one will often be followed by a blow from the other, and together they make a horrible local threat and disaster within a sector, but beyond an additional horror following the Nightbringer's aimless killing spree they are not strategically significant. Xun'bakyr's universe destroying plans coming to fruition is an existential threat, but one that is sadly insignificant compared to many others. Although the rest of the Maynarkh Dynasty generally does not share her obsessions, the dynasty had always been composed of the worst sort of sadists, psychopaths, and war criminals and so jump at the chance to kill people in new and creative ways.

The first overt sign of action by the Maynarkh Dynasty was when the stars of the Caracol binary system went supernova during between Blood Pact and Imperial Forces. Both groups considered it the first shots of a surprise attack by some unknown third party. What they didn’t know was that rather than a military action, it was the result of a weapons test from one of Xun’bakyr’s harebrained schemes. The slaughter that followed was mostly unrelated. Mostly, in that the Maynarkh Dynasty was involved, and there was slaughter, but it had nothing to do with the two stars they had made go nova. Today, the Orpheus sector is nearly lifeless, haunted only by ghosts and madmen and ruled by an even madder queen.

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=== Blanks and the Pariah Gene ===

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66,000,000 years ago, the aristocracy of the Necrontyr Star Empire had a problem. They were in danger of losing the War in Heaven. Although they had the might of the C’tan and the Dolmen Gates at their back, the war was growing increasingly bloody as the Old Ones threw uplifted species after uplifted species into the meat grinder. And despite the Necrontyr’s understanding of the material realm, the Old Ones had the raw power of the illogical, irrational realm of the Immaterium at their disposal, which the ancient amphibians were the virtual unchallenged masters of. The Necrontyr needed some way to neutralize that advantage.

Several Crypteks came up with one possible solution: genetically engineering Necrontyr soldiers and eventually the entire Necrontyr to have an inverted Warp signature, canceling out the immense psychic power of the Old Ones and their servant races. However, although such this plan was possible for the Necrontyr Star Empire, the empire’s aristocracy was uncomfortable with the idea for several reasons. First, it would require mass-cloning Necrontyr soldiers in the billions, and would effectively make their entire standing army (not to mention all living Necrontyr) obsolete. Additionally, and more importantly, although the Necrontyr’s rank and file would be safe from psychic attack, it did nothing to stop the Old Ones from decapitating the Star Empire’s leadership by simply assassinating the Triarchy. The Necrontyr aristocracy, in their vaunted superiority, didn’t think very highly of a plan that benefited future generations but didn’t benefit them. Ultimately, the plan was shut down and cast aside in favor of the idea of biotransference, the brain child of Mag’ladroth but presented to the Necrontyr aristocracy by Mephet’ran. However, not everyone forgot about the project. At least not Mephet’ran, the Deceiver, nor his shards that escaped containment in the millions of years after the end of the War in Heaven while the Necrons slumbered.

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Millions of years later, as humanity’s Great Crusade rediscovered numerous human worlds thought lost during the Age of Strife, they came across an interesting phenomenon. On many worlds, there were occasionally individuals that were not only immune to the touch the warp, but in many cases were capable of actively suppressing these effects. These individuals, who came to be known as blanks or pariahs, were always very rare in a population, often in ratios of billions to one, and almost always seemed to exist as outcasts or hermits, or at best lived in small isolated communes far away from any major population center. Further investigation found that these blanks, who ranging from Jenetia Krole of Sibar to the nightmarish blacksoul assassin Spear, gained their strange warp-suppressing powers from an even more unusual source, a complete lack of what would conventionally be called a soul.

Blanks work by emitting an inverted warp signature, rather than the positively charged soul of most species. Their inverted warp signature interacts with background positive warp signature of the universe like the union of matter and anti-matter, creating a null aura that cancels both signatures out and creates a zone of no warp signature, either negative or positive, at all. Normally blanks are capable of funneling the energy from this reaction to their own ends. However, unlike normal humans, blanks are capable of surviving being completely disconnected from the Warp as their bodies are adapted to exist in the null zone their inverted Warp signature normally produces. Although they have an inverted warp signature, the null aura they create means they effectively have no soul.

Being in contact with a blank’s null aura is not a pleasant experience, and the experience typically gets worse the more psychically sensitive an individual is. To psykers, having their connection to the Warp muffled by a blank’s null aura produces actual pain and a sensation which some have described, usually after they finish screaming, as “sensory deprivation of a sixth sense” or “a feeling akin to losing a limb”. Only extremely strong psykers are capable of overwhelming a blanks null aura with minimal effect, but the only psykers capable of something like that are being like Magnus the Red or the Emperor of Mankind. However, such negative effects are not only limited to psykers. Any being with a soul is instinctively capable of sensing the void that blanks represent, and the muffling of their soul leads to an uncanny valley effect and feelings of dread and existential despair. This uncanny valley effect manifests itself in different ways. In some it causes migrane headaches, while in others it leads to anxiety attacks, while in others it manifests as a hard to define but odious stench. More subtle behavioral alterations have been suspected as well. Although some blanks have learned to weaponized this null aura, in the days before null-collars this often made the life of a blank short and miserable.

After much research, ranging from psychological to metabiological, the Imperium was able to connect this soullessness and anti-Warp aura to a genetic factor, known as the pariah gene. The pariah seemingly makes no sense given what is known about genetics and metaphysical biology. Humans with the pariah gene are rare, to the point that one is lucky to find one individual with the pariah gene on a planet with a population of billions. Additionally, because of their aura, blanks have a hard time finding mates and therefore producing offspring. This means that if the pariah gene originated during the Age of Strife, its carriers should simply disappear from the population due to random chance and genetic drift. But they don’t. If the pariah gene were recessive, it is easy to see how the gene could remain hidden in the populace for generations, only occasionally producing blanks. But it isn’t. The pariah gene is dominant, with individuals with two copies known as blacksouls. At least some parts of the pariah gene appear to be genetic: it is heritable and is disproportionately more common in women than men, suggesting a link to the X-chromosome. But the fact that it appears seemingly at random throughout the population has led many to wonder if the pariah “gene” is actually multiple genes (a recessive gene to turn the effect on and off, and a dominant one to control the intensity), or if the actual pariah allele is a symptom, rather than a cause.

From a metaphysical perspective blanks and the pariah gene are no less strange. In theory, it should be possible to evolve from having a soul with a strong positive Warp signature to one with a negative Warp signature like a blank. Indeed, the Tau have a particularly low Warp signature, and have displayed significant resistance to Warp corruption (though at a cost of being relatively helpless when a particularly powerful Warp entity like a daemon decides to focus its attention on them). The ancient Necrontyr are believed to have been the same way. The problem with this hypothesis is it requires a species to pass through a stage with a warp signature of zero, meaning a body that is alive only at the cellular level with no sentience. The only way to get around this hurdle would be artificial means, a species with positive Warp signature engineering individuals with an inverted one, though other explanations have been suggested. The fact that the pariah gene independently appeared in populations that should have had no contact with each other during the Age of Strife, and only in humans (though Kroot blanks have also been produced through the usual ways in which the Kroot assimilate traits) has also made many suspicious, though few would disagree that an adaptation to shut out the Warp would prove useful for an age when the galaxy was in chaos (and in Chaos), and desperate attempts at genetic engineering for survival were rampant in the early days of the Age of Strife.

Many people in the Imperium were disturbed by the idea of people without a soul. The Navigators in particular, being a race of all psykers, were especially disturbed by the existence of blanks, believing they were an attempt by the rest of the Imperium to create a contingency plan to wipe them all out. The Nobilis Navigo tried to whip people into a frenzy to kill the blanks by playing on the unnatural dread blanks produced until the Steward and the other High Lords told the Paternoval Envoy point blank they weren’t going to persecute an entire group of people who were not warp-tainted just because they looked different, no matter how much the Navis Nobilite screamed, rather unsubtly hinting between the lines that any excuse the Navigators made to persecute the pariahs could be easily turned around to apply to the Navigators. Though, the Imperium’s reasonings for defending the pariahs were not made out of simple compassion. The Navigators and pariahs were both useful resources, and the Imperium needed every advantage it could get in those days. If that meant wielding fire and anti-fire in accord, so be it.

As might be expected, the eldar were also horrified at the idea of blanks. Due to being a psychic species, the idea of life in eldar culture had become inimically tied to the idea of having a soul. To the eldar, the idea of being alive and thinking yet without a soul was uncomfortably close to the idea of being undead or a philosophical zombie. The only things the eldar had as a cultural comparison were the Harlequin Solitaires, and those were artificially created, rather than born. The implications of what Solitares represented and how they were created only made things worse. Today, blanks are by far the most discriminated against group of humans by the eldar. One just doesn’t see it firsthand very often given both parties are unable to interact except over a vid-screen. Opinions and prejudices towards humans vary from Dorhai to Ulthwé, but blanks are always treated worse than normal humans. Even the most tolerant eldar still see them as tragic monsters, people who didn’t want to be born as abominations against the natural order but ended up that way regardless. Kind of like they do Solitaires (only replacing “freaks of nature” with “necessary evil”).

When they awakened from their sixty-six million year sleep, the Necron Star Empire were also interested in the blanks. In particular, they were extremely suspicious as to how a species could develop a feature that almost exactly resembled the old mothballed Necrontyr research project, down to some of the smallest details. Szarekh’s chief cryptek, Illuminor Szeras, is particularly interested in the blanks and the applications of the pariah gene. The idea of making specialized soldiers to use as mobilized suppression devices and hunter-killers against psykers and daemons is an idea too good to pass up.

The largest living population of Blanks can be found on Pluto and Charon, close enough for the Imperium to have its anti-Warp weaponry close at hand, but far enough away for them to not block the light of the Astronomican. Indeed, watching Pluto cross the Astronomican, like an exoplanet slightly dimming the light of a far-off star, is a popular activity for young Navigators, though the Paternova has issued warnings telling people not to stare directly into the light of the Astronomican. Because the colony’s true reason for existing is to continue to exist and keep producing blanks, in order to keep the population of Pluto and Charon occupied they have been given exclusive mining rights over anything in the Kuiper Belt or stray rocks in the Oort zone that they lay eyes on. Both Pluto and Charon have been hollowed out and built on to the point where they are now not recognizable. To anyone else looking it now just looks like a private space port with manufactory rigs and a small docking yard. It does appear on the official maps, but only because not doing so would be more suspicious. It's a "private enterprise" on the charts and not open to the public, with the official story being they were claimed by an early Rogue Trader (whose “dynasty” is actually a shell corporation for the Administratum). Life on Pluto and Charon is a terminally boring experience, though on the positive side at least its inhabitants no longer have to fear the possibility of being lynched.

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=== Wyverns ===

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The Void Dragon is not whole. Although perhaps 95% of the great Dragon lies half-buried beneath the surface of Mars, the Dragon still bears a number of old wounds, chunks of him torn off in the war with his kin. But the Void Dragon is an embodied god, and gods do not bleed. Like the wounds of all the children of hungry stars, his lost essence turned into shards, scattered across the cosmos.

Throughout time, history has spoken of encounters with strange metallic dragon-like creatures. These encounters are consistent enough that they cannot be simply dismissed out of hand, but are so maddeningly rare that it has been impossible to create a clear picture of exactly what these sightings represent. These creatures are generally referred to as Wyverns. However, to those few privy to the horrible secret of what lies buried underneath the surface of Mars, the identity of these beings is clear. Wyverns are shards of the Void Dragon.

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These shards somewhat resemble the Void Dragon, except they are more bestial looking (having only legs and a pair of wings and no arms, for example) and have no semblance of intelligence whatsoever. They are animalistic, or perhaps better described as mechanistic, seeking to eat and survive and nothing else. It is not clear why these shards of the Void Dragon act so differently from their sire, as even similar-sized shards of the Deceiver or the Nightbringer show some level of intelligence. It is possible that the Dragon’s prison is somehow acting as a signal blocker, cutting the Wyverns off from the Void Dragon’s mind.

It is likewise possible that the shards of more completely shattered C'tan are more intelligent precisely because they are so thoroughly broken up. The slivers of the wholly obliterated Deceiver display the greatest individual intelligence and the highest proportion of infighting as expressed through the disparate intrigues of Strigoi Vampires; the greater shards and Nosferatu slivers of the Nightbringer are less cerebral or articulate, though they retain speech and planning. The Nosferatu are known to vociferously compete in propagating death for their dread progenitor, but also all profess a shared vision of universal death they seek to realize. With around two thirds of the Nightbringer's necrodermis forming the Noctifer Corpus Magnum, the big shard that was freed from Necron imprisonment, and from which the lesser shards and slivers are understood to have been fractured in combat with the Necrons, there is room for comparison with the Dragon's mostly complete body. The Corpus Magnum has been observed throughout the eastern galaxy since its escape form confinement, and it displays a greater intellect than other Nightbringer shards it had encountered and integrated, though the disparity is far less than that between the ingenious Dragon and the non-sapient wyverns. Data regarding the relationship between a C'tan shard's intellect and the ratios of its progeniter's shattered and assembled mass is being gathered and analyzed by the Inquisition and Mechanicus projects, but its implications for the Dragon and the Wyverns will never be brought to the light of Imperial war rooms, let alone open day.

Only a few encounters with Wyverns have been well-documented. One involves the primarch Ferrus Manus. During unification of the planet Medusa, he learned about a creature the locals called Asirnoth that descended to prey upon the people of Medusa from its lair in the planet-encircling Telstarax. When Ferrus reported to the Mechanicum what the people of Medusa had told him, they were in shock and immediately informed him that he must dispatch this creature with all haste, giving the primarch permission to use the otherwise forbidden holy archaeotech relics aboard his ship. Three maniples of Iron Hands Skitarii accompanied Ferrus Manus into the lair of the beast, but less than a dozen came out. The battle was hard-fought, but by the end of the battle the primarch managed to strike down the wyvern and bind it within the strange archaeotech device. Ferrus Manus never knew exactly what he fought, but the high Magi of the Adeptus Mechanicus said he had performed a great service for the Mechanicum, and so Ferrus felt satisfied by his actions.

The Steward also fought one. Once.

It was an unexpected fight on what was supposed to be an otherwise peaceful world. Granted, the Steward had the upper hand for much of that fight, the issue was that no matter how many times the Steward would smite the wyvern it would simply rise again, ready to continue the fight. The creature was eventually defeated when the Steward staggered the beast with a particularly powerful blow and a Mechanicus adept sealed it in its inert state using a strange device that no one had ever seen before. When the Steward asked what the creature was, the adept evaded the question by claiming it was piece of archaeotech, which could only be deactivated by another piece of archaeotech the Mechanicus normally forbade the use of (which was technically true). Stranger things made by the hands of men had been found at that time in the Great Crusade, and at that time there was no reason to suspect there was anything unusual about the metal beast.

Another noteworthy feature about these creatures is that they seem to be impervious to normal means of harm, rising over and over again from seemingly lethal injuries. As a result, stories about these creatures tend to feature particularly innovative ways of incapacitating or imprisoning them. Burying them alive in lava is a popular option.

The Void Dragon somehow knows about the Wyverns despite his imprisonment, to no one’s surprise, and has repeatedly asked the Adeptus Mechanicus where those shards of him are. It is not clear if the Void Dragon truly does not know the exact location of his shards, or if he is merely reminding the Adeptus Mechanicus that they exist and the Mechanicus do not have complete control over him. Some among the Order of the Dragon have theorized that the Wyverns are somehow necessary to free the Void Dragon from its non-Euclidean chains, a prison that can only be unlocked by the prisoner. This is an idea that no one is particularly interested in testing.

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== Dark Eldar ==

=== Asdrubael Vect ===

See [[Nobledark_Imperium_Notable_People#Asdrubael_Vect|Asdrubael Vect]]

=== Reri Hesperax ===

[[Image:cybrid_assassin.jpg|thumb|One of many different versions of what the cybrid can look like. The only flesh to exist on her body is on her head and the skin of her torso.]]

Illucis Grizvaldi, following his emergency Warp jump to escape Imperial forces, was stranded on an unknown planet within Ultima Segmentum when Lelith Hesperax found him. Or rather the Dark Eldar agents that found him. When approached by these agents to be commissioned for the creation of a living weapon or risk starving to death in the middle of nowhere, he refused to work for Lelith unless they allowed his remaining disciples be taken with him.

After coming to an agreement, the heretek along with his cult was taken back to Commorragh to being his finest creation. The treacherous Dark Eldar politics have caused the famous Succubus for an insurance along with a weapon for her own personal use outside of the city. It began with taking the embryo from Lelith to have it grow in a vat. Once the child was fully developed with accelerated aging to around 17, her ears and limbs were cut off. Citing the need to install cybernetics along with ridding of the typical hypersensitive Eldar weaknesses located on the feet, hands, and ears. Machines built for utility, enhanced movement and hunting were integrated into the girl's body over time, as she was trained while brainwashed into the blind obedience of Lelith.

Given the codename "Reri", then allowed to adopt the last name Hesperax, she was made for tracking and assassination of all Lelith's rivals outside of Commorragh. Illucis whispered some unknown words to Lelith before leaving, those words would be the killswitch for the cybernetics on Reri if the machines ever picked up the vibrations of those words. Not to mention the explosives built into the limbs that would probably kill Reri. In the 41st Millenium however, Reri has gone on to kill some diverse targets that only a lucky few have survived against her. Some Dark Eldar goes so far as to think she could take on killing any member of the Imperial Family although this is extreme stupidity or arrogance talking.

Without the ears, Reri could either install specialized equipment or synthetic ears for infiltration as an Abhuman. The limbs have also been heavily modified to always have motion sensors, vox comms, powerful magnetics, and survival tools like a knife or lockpicks. they can also be outfitted with built-in weapons and tracking instruments. This was all done while adding durability to have them be tougher than Eldar bone without sacrificing the mobility.

Some say that her appearance is eerily similar to that of a Human with the right limbs and ears, creating another conspiracy theory saying the Impossible Child was already built by the Dark Eldar. Although few subscribe to this theory, it has been given exposure following the assassination of an Inquisitor in Sol right after the 12th Black Crusade. There are also some within the Imperial government who suspect Reri interfered with Legienstrasse's development, although it is unknown how much she was involved. One thing was certain, however, Reri was tracking down Legienstrasse when the Imperials found the renegade assassin. With increasingly erratic behavior after The Wedding, Lelith worries about sending Reri away as the chance of her going rogue also increase.

=== The Ilmaea ===

<div class="toccolours mw-collapsible mw-collapsed" style="100%">'''''The Blackened Heart of Commorragh'''''

At the heart of Commorragh are the Ilmaea (lit. black sun/stolen sun), the twin suns that power the Dark City. Commorragh could accurately be described as a set of dual Dyson spheres, two spherical outgrowths of the Webway stacked one on top of the other (Upper and Lower Commorragh, respectively), each with an Ilmaea at their center. Each star artificially crushed to the size of a red dwarf by the Old Eldar Empire at the height of their power using technology now since lost. Because of the technology used to shrink their size, the Ilmaea also have an extremely long expected life span, comparably to that of an actual red dwarf. Although Commorragh was originally founded as a Webway port and became a haven for the Old Empire’s rich and famous before becoming what it is now, it also performs a remarkably good job as a disaster shelter. In theory, one could outlast the end of the universe inside Commorragh.

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Approximately 1640000 years ago, the Old Eldar Empire went to war with and defeated an unknown, now-extinct alien species. This was not an uncommon event in eldar history, every few million years or so an external threat would arise that would actually threaten the supremacy of the Children of Isha. Sometimes these enemies were resurgent Brain Boyz, sometimes they were extra-galactic or extra-dimensional species like the architects of the Harrowing, and sometimes they were simply native Milky Way races, occasionally fellow children of the Old Ones, that bit off more than they could chew. At first the eldar fought these wars based on the half-remembered wishes of the Old Ones, believing themselves to be safeguarding the existence and self-determination of their fellow sentients, but at some point things took a darker turn.

According to legend, the race that fought the eldar 1.6 million years ago had been a true threat to the galaxy, believing themselves to have a manifest destiny over the Milky Way. The eldar beat the would-be galactic conquerors back to their binary-star home system and then, as punishment for their hubris, stole their two suns, leaving the species to scream in anguish as they slowly froze to death in the darkness. It is uncertain how justified the actions of the eldar were, given their tendency to self-glorify and distort their own history, but the accounts of the Black Library (which are considered to be less biased) do seem to support the idea that the species . However, the fact that they were willing to resort to such draconian means of ensuring their dominance, destroying an entire biosphere of an already defeated foe, already showed the rot seeping into the heart of the Old Empire.

In the years after the seizure of the Ilmaea and their placement as trophies within the biggest Webway port of Commorragh, the Ilmaea became an important symbol in eldar society. The Ilmaea became seen as a symbol of eldar righteousness, an indicator of how the chosen of the Old Ones and Asuryan could do no wrong. Depictions of the Ilmaea became common in Old Empire art, and many wealthy Sidhe lords sought to have Ilmaea of their own. Most were artificial mock-ups made of fusion reactions, but a few were real, stolen from life-bearing systems to complete the symbolism. The Old Empire at least had a fig-leaf of justification for confiscating the original Ilmaea. The nobles…did not. The Craftworlders and Exodites do not think highly of the Ilmaea, considering them a symbol of the Old Empire’s hubris of the highest magnitude.

Each of the Ilmaea are modulated to give off the perfect amount of light and heat to the surface of Commorragh below, giving them a sinister black color when viewed through solar filters. This allows Commorragh to be kept habitable for life without the need of expensive artificial blinds. There is no day or night cycle on Commorragh, only a perpetual twilight, the time when light still exists despite the coolness of the oncoming night…and also the exact time when the shadows are longest and predators find it the easiest to hide. The similarities have not gone unnoticed.

Although the technology to create the Ilmaea has since been lost, the technology to keep the stolen suns modulated still exists. The size and intensity of the stars has been ever so slightly tweaked over the years to balance growth as the Webway pockets of various Kabals have been stitched into Commorragh. Indeed, if the containment were ever to fail, the stars would most likely violently expand back to their former size. The Lord of Commorragh, Asdrubael Vect, has used this to his advantage at one point, deliberately dropping the shielding on one section of the Ilmaea to scour an entire district of Commoragh clean in order to burn one infamous rebellion to the ground, sending a message to all of Commorragh of the sword of Damocles Vect has hanging over their heads.

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=== The New Men ===
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Fabius Bile, mad geneticist of Commorragh and personal vizier of Asdrubael Vect, is known for a great many things. Reverse engineering of the Mark III MP geneseed to provide the Fallen with a ready supply of new recruits. Concocting combat drugs that make the most potent medications of the Imperium look like aspirin. Creations of horrors for the highest bidder that make even the other inhabitants of the Dark City have a minor reaction of disgust. Most consider these acts vile abominations committed solely for the amusement of a twisted mind. Fabius Bile considers them parlor tricks done to pay the rent.

Fabius Bile’s actual goals, the ones he actually puts his heart and soul into, tend to be much more grandiose. He wants to be remembered for something beyond simply being the ringmaster of his own personal freakshow. He wants to create something that will far outlast however long he exists in this galaxy.

He wants to bring back the Men of Gold.

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In Fabius Bile’s mind, humanity’s mistake isn’t that mankind created the Men of Gold, it is that mankind did not become the Men of Gold. Mankind during the Dark Age of Technology had the ability to create their own demi-gods, and yet they squandered this opportunity to merely create liasons between themselves and the Iron Minds. The Eldar are no better. Bile knows of the history of the Eldar from the Haemonculi of Commoragh. He knows how the Eldar were once little different from mankind or the Tau, before being uplifted by the Old Ones and then genetically engineered by their own hand. But then the Eldar stopped. They were on the verge of making themselves a race of gods, and then they stopped. The time it took them to reach even that state is also unimpressive to Bile. Whereas it took the Eldar millennia to engineer themselves into their modern state, Bile claims that a suitably intelligent and properly motivated individual could do it in centuries.

Fabius Bile’s most recent endeavor, the personal project that has shown the greatest amount of success, is the creation of the so-called New Men. Bile proclaims these New Men to be to humanity what the modern Eldar are to their ancient ancestors, the missing link between man and the Men of Gold. The New Men are all latent psykers, grow to adulthood in a fraction of the time of baseline humans, and are deliberately engineered to have a 100% compatibility rate with Astartes gene-seed. But Bile isn’t satisfied with merely recreating the Men of Gold. He wants to make something better. To this end, he has spliced in genes from creatures all over the galaxy, in the purpose of making the New Men the perfect lifeform. Compared to the average human being, the New Men are stronger, almost impervious to pain, immune to many poisons, and capable of surviving in environmental conditions that normal humans would simply die.

However, in spite of all this, for some reason Bile’s New Men inevitably turn out…wrong. The New Men invariably lack any sense of empathy or social etiquette. They are not psychopathic, nor sociopathic, but the only beings they ever seem to reliably show a connection to are their fellow New Men. It is for these reasons that the Fallen refuse to take New Men as recruits, despite a 100% compatibility rate with Astartes gene-seed. In addition, the New Men always end up with leucism or albinism, with pale grey skin the color of a corpse and translucent veins running just under their skin. It is not clear why the New Men end up this way. It cannot be due to their creation, as there are many humans in the Imperium that are grown in-vitro and yet turn out to be perfectly adjusted adults. It cannot be due to their upbringing, as even New Men raised by surrogate families still turn out the same way. It is almost as though the souls of the New Men somehow know they were grown from spliced cells cultivated from dead bodies, unwillingly implanted into the surrogate wombs of terrified prisoners.

Although Fabius Bile is frustrated by these setbacks, he is not perturbed. He knows these flaws are something he will manage to fix…eventually. As to the failed batches, Bile has no problem lending them out to the Dark Eldar or the Crone Worlders as front-line combatants so that someone might get some use out of them, only requesting that he retain a few specimens for dissection and breeding purposes.

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== Tyranids ==

=== The Swarmlord ===

See [[Nobledark Imperium Notable People#The_Swarmlord|The Swarmlord]]

=== The Leviathan of Sotha ===

The Leviathan of Sotha is a miracle of history. Preserved through a chance fluke, the Imperium has learned more about tyranids from this vessel than it has from dozens of minor skirmishes. During the Battle of Sotha in the First Battle for Ultramar between the Imperium and Hive Fleet Behemoth, one of the planet’s surface to orbit guns shot down a tyranid Hive Ship near the planet’s moon. The Hive Ship crash-landed on the nearby moon, where it died of what was either the tyranid equivalent of a broken spine or massive internal organ damage. The total vacuum of the moon prevented the outer surface of the hive ship from decaying, either from external microbes or the tyranid microfauna contained within, and so much of the carcass remains as pristine as the day it died.

This is not to say the Hive Ship is harmless. The decaying leviathan has enough gas in its guts from decomposition to form a makeshift atmosphere, and so tyranid organisms occasionally arise from within the bowels of the dead monster and have to be cleared out in order for research to be conducted safely. Some tyranids will occasionally escape from the hive ship and try to survive on the moon’s surface. All tyranid lifeforms can survive in vacuum for a short period of time, but even the hardiest tyranid organisms will deplete their oxygen reserves and die after prolonged periods of activity in hard vacuum. Therefore, the Inquisition maintains a constant security force around the Hive Ship at all times. However, the ships reserve carnifexes and hive tyrants were all killed off centuries ago, and the ship only has enough biomass to spare for small tyranid organisms, such as hormagaunts and termagaunts. Over the years, the tyranid organisms that emerge from the hive ship have been able to survive longer and longer in hard vacuum, but so far none have been able to evolve a complete independence from the oxygen that all organisms need.

One of the first things the Ordo Xenos did when it claimed the hive ship was try to determine its age. First, they tried to determine the age of the tyranid hive ship via carbon dating. It failed. It was only when the research team realized that if the tyranids were eating planets, they had to have been taking up radioactive isotopes from the organisms and crust of the planet they were eating, and so it should be possible to use dating methods more typically used for ancient rocks on the hive ship.

The analysis determined that the hive ship, as in that hive ship in particular, was over five million years old. The margin of error for said age estimate was older than human civilization.

=== Genestealers ===

'''See Also:''' [[Nobledark_Imperium_Writing#Inquisitorial_Report:_AZURE_IRON_WASP|Inquisitorial Report: AZURE IRON WASP]]

=== Ymgarl Genehounds ===

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When the Adeptus Biologicus analyzed tyranid specimens for the first time, they found all sorts of things they shouldn’t have. Genetic sequences and biochemical signatures otherwise unique to lifeforms on Fenris, Catachan, and numerous other worlds in the Imperium. There were even sections of genetic material that seemed to come from Orks and the Eldar. The bio-priests were at a loss to explain how such a motley of genes could be present in a single creature, until a new tyranid bioform was discovered far from the front lines of the tyranid invasion.

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Originally thought to be natural wildlife native to the moons of Ymgarl, these creatures were first discovered by the Imperium at about the same time as the genestealers in M36. However, sightings of these creatures were soon reported across the galaxy, supposedly caused by the creatures stowing away in space hulks and the holds of spacecraft. There was concern about the similarities between these creatures and “classic” genestealers, but the Imperium was never able to find a connection between the two. Genestealer activity did not follow in these creatures wake, and even their supposedly simultaneous discovery was in actuality more than two hundred years apart. And so the Imperium turned its attention away from the Ymgarl creatures. It was understandable, this was late M36, the peak of the Genestealer Wars, and the Imperium had more pressing issues to learn about. However, with the appearance of the first true tyranid Hive Fleets in the form of Behemoth, the Adeptus Biologicus decided to take another look at the Ymgarl creatures. And they turned out to be something else entirely.

These creatures, which later came to be renamed genehounds, resemble a cross between lictor and a purestrain genestealer. This suggests that genehounds may be a cross-breed between the two, or at the very least share genes with these bioforms. Like lictors and purestrains, genehounds have a much more complex nervous system than most tyranid bioforms, allowing them a higher degree of independent thought and the ability to function for extended periods of time away from synapse creatures of the Hive Mind. They are certainly intelligent enough to use spaceships and space hulks as a means to spread throughout the galaxy. However, whereas lictors and genestealers were meant to be sappers and beacons for the Hive Fleets, these creatures were something else entirely. Hunters. Hounds of the Hive Mind.

The motus operandi of a genehound is simple. First, the genehound locates a target. Another effect of the genehound’s increased intelligence is that a genehound is smart enough to target species with novel genetic features. This target can be as harmless as a squig or as dangerous as a Catachan Devil. Then, the genehound rushes forward in an explosive burst of speed to take its sample. The mouth of a genehound resembles a lamprey or a cookiecutter shark, a spiral ring of teeth designed to shear chunks of flesh from its targets and a piston-like tongue with a serrated tip built to make incisions and drink their bodily fluids. This allows a genehound to easily obtain a genetic sample of the organism for the Hive Mind, or feed itself in the long intervals between action. Its task completed, the genehound makes its way back to the Hive Fleet to be reabsorbed, bringing its genetic trophy with it.

Unlike other bioforms, the Hive Mind does not go out of its way to track down genehounds. To do so would be to expose the ruse, as happened when the Imperium discovered the true nature of genehounds and ordered them killed on sight. The genehounds had not managed to hit every system of note in the galaxy, but they had hit enough to give the Hive Mind access to some choice adaptations. When the Biologicus realized what these creatures were they were horrified by the implications. The tyranids hadn’t just been scouting the galaxy for millennia. They had been raiding its genetic armory.

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== Xenos Independens ==

=== Hrud ===

==== Hrud ====

<div class="toccolours mw-collapsible mw-collapsed" style="100%"> '''''Those Who Linger:'''''

The Hrud are quintessential Xenos Independens. On the one hand, they hate the Necrons, fear Chaos, and are just as threatened by tyranids (particularly genestealers) as everyone else. Just about the only enemies of the Imperium the Hrud tolerate are the Orks and that is because Hrud juunlaks find it just as easy to live on the outskirts of Ork camps as they do Imperial cities. On the other hand, the Hrud clearly have their own agenda, can’t seem to organize themselves well enough to negotiate for inclusion into the Imperium, and are nearly impossible to get to swear by Imperial laws and boundaries. In spite of, or perhaps because, the Hrud have one of the best long-term memories of any species in the galaxy, [[Kender|they have the attention span and respect for boundaries of a house cat]]. A common saying in the Imperium goes: “You can get a Hrud to do just about anything. Once.”

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The biology of the Hrud is strange, even by the standards of the Imperium. Rather than being supported by their limbs, Hrud bodies are attached to a fixed point in the fabric of space-time, from which the Hrud's body and legs hang from like clothes on a hanger. The Hrud don't so much walk as pull or pull their stationary point in space-time along using their arms. Hrud have a hydrostatic musculature and can compress their bodies to a width of less than 30 cm, allowing them to fit through virtually any hole larger than a human thigh. Combined with their limited ability to fold the fabric of space-time, this allows them to worm their way through openings and passages which you wouldn’t normally expect a creature of their size to fit, even fitting through closed doorways if they aren’t properly sealed.

Hrud are all natural psykers, however the form that their psychic powers take is somewhat different from the rather straightforward usage seen in humans and Eldar. Hrud are capable of masking their presence from other species through the use of a psychic perception filter and a strange ability to bend light and space-time, to the point that a Hrud was once reported to have been able to hide from observers in plain sight while in a white-walled, well-lit room. However the amount of effort it takes for a Hrud to hide from the perception of others is heavily dependent on the environment (i.e., a dark place is much easier to hide in than a bright one) and on the species the Hrud is trying to fool. For humans and tau, it is easily possible to fool them into thinking a passing Hrud is just a trick of the shadows. By contrast, Eldar and tarellians, whose brains are organized a little differently, take more effort to fool, especially Eldar who also have psychic senses at their disposal.

The Hrud are also capable of emitting a combination of a miasma of airborne toxins and an entropic field, which they call the ssaak. It is thought that the ssaak was always present to some degree in the Hrud as a natural defense mechanism and the entropic field was part of the modifications made to the species by the Old Ones. The ssaak is always present to some degree, but becomes extremely prominent if the Hrud in question is stressed out or threatened. Unfortunately, being a nocturnal species with a species-wide case of agoraphobia, the Hrud are almost always stressed out to some degree. Long-term exposure to the ssaak is not advised, as it can cause nausea, sedation, physiological dependence, and premature aging. On the rare occasions in which the Hrud do manage consistently interact with other species on a long-term basis, they often build encounter suits to contain the ssaak to keep other people from getting sick.

Hrud are capable of combining their ssaak fields, which at their most extreme extent can form a temporal warp-rift singularity which can devastate their foes. More than once an invading force has attacked a settlement, only to be driven back by the enraged Hrud galvanized from below the city. This phenomenon can either be beneficial or harmful to the Imperium. On the one hand you have cases like Dulcinea, where during the 12th Black Crusade the population of Hive Strigis was massacred by Chaos warbands, only to rouse the ire of the Hrud population living in the city’s underhive who dropped a singularity on their heads. At the same time you have cases like Haakoneth, the former homeworld of the Star Phantoms, which in 103.M40 came under attack the fleet of an Ork Freeboota Klan. The Star Phantoms destroyed the attacking Ork fleet, but unfortunately this provoked the Hrud colony that had been living in the bowels of the Freeboota ships, who immediately embarked on a Peh-ha to find a new home. The resulting Hrud migration dragged a singularity with it to the surface of Haakoneth, which between the Hrud and the Orks forced the Star Phantoms and the population of Haanoneth to retreat and abandon the planet.

The Imperium first encountered the Hrud in M30, during the later years of the Great Crusade. At this time, humanity and Eldar were on good terms with one another, but this was only shortly after the Raid and the levels of trust between the two groups wasn’t as well established as it would be in later years. The Hrud were, at the time of the Imperium's discovery of them, confined to a single world. It is thought that they had been confined to their homeworld by the Old Eldar Empire, who had apparently been willing to reduce the Hrud from an interstellar power but weren’t prepared to actually exterminate them due to their shared history (or possibly indirect intervention from the Eldar gods). After the Fall of the Eldar, the Hrud remained on their world, either because they were afraid of retaliation from the Eldar, no longer had the knowledge to produce spacecraft, or possibly because they were afraid doing so would violate the last commandment and warning of their god. And so the Hrud remained quarantined. Until the Iron Warriors found them.

In 734.M30, the Iron Warriors had just finished unified what would become the future Hive World of Stratopolae. The planet’s infrastructure was sound, but if it was to thrive it needed a devoted bread basket. Long range telescopes showed a habitable planet within a few lightyears of the planet, which would have made an ideal Agri-World. Shortly before the Iron Warriors, including a young Barabas Dantioch, were ready to leave the system, they were contacted by the Eldar. The Eldar implored the Iron Warriors not to go to that system, telling them that it was home to a dangerous xenos lifeform that their ancestors had quarantined millennia ago. The Iron Warriors blew them off, believing it was merely a lie spun by the Eldar to conceal the fact that there was something of value on the planet and the Eldar thought the Iron Warriors were gullible enough to believe it.

The Iron Warriors exited the Warp in a system with one notable world in its habitable zone. The world itself was mostly earth-like, and seemed to be uninhabited though showed clear signs of former occupation. The Iron Warriors were pleased about this, the expedition had been more than worth it as this world was ideal for an Agri-World. They didn’t know why the Eldar were so interested in the system but the knife-ears could go space themselves if they thought they could give orders to humanity.

The Iron Hands landed their craft near what was the only visible artificial structure from orbit, a skyscraper-like building that looked like one of Perturabo’s creations crossed with a very grungy bee hive. They sat outside their craft for several days waiting for someone, anyone, to make contact with them before they decided to make the first move. One of the crew thought they saw something over on a nearby mountain range but later chalked it up to a mirage. Leaving their ship behind, the Iron Warriors marched down empty roads into a ghost city. Entering the city, they realized what they thought were heavily degraded structures were actually buildings of xenos design. Still, the city seemed empty, and if the planet was uninhabited they could still set up an Agri-World there. The only potential sign of life were occasional signs of movement in their peripheral vision but as their armor’s sensors kept reading inconsistent extra-spectrum signatures they put it down to a mild glitch caused by the strange environment. For nearly two days the Iron Warriors wandered around the city getting increasingly agitated by the phantom sightings before they actually saw anyone.

In what looked like a market square the Imperial Emissary and his Iron Warrior guards finally found someone to talk to. A hunched figure in tattered hooded robes holding a stick with a bit of cloth on it that might have been a standard flanked by four similarly attired individuals. No part of the creatures were visible. At this point the Iron Warriors realized there was a problem. They had thought the world was uninhabited, but it was now clear that it was very inhabited by a xenos species. Standard procedure for interacting with an unknown xenos species during the Great Crusade was to observe and them attempt to make contact from as close to the system’s Mandeville Point as possible. If the species was friendly, politely extend the bare minimum of courtesy and leave as soon as possible. If the species was territorial or too primitive to make contact, leave it alone. If the species tried to follow the fleet back and attack, destroy them. The point of such contact was to survey potential threats to humanity, ideally from lightyears away. And yet here the Iron Warriors were meters from a xenos lifeform.

To their credit, the Imperial Emissary and the Iron Warriors tried to make the best of the situation. After initial difficulties in establishing communication (the lead figure able to speak something that vaguely resembled Eldar High Speech), the Emissary and the lead figure, who introduced itself as a Hrud, exchanged pleasantries and initiated introductions. It already being late in the day the Emissary asked if they could continue this conversation tomorrow and in a knee-jerk reflex asked if the figures wanted to meet aboard their ship. After a moment of thought, the lead figure agreed, and the Imperial party returned to the ship to report their findings. The next day the Imperial Emissary and the Iron Warriors came down to the square they found it was empty. The Iron Warriors wandered around the empty city several times, looking for the mysterious figures. It's not until the fifth trip that they realize that they are no longer seeing movement in the corners of their eyes. The world felt strangely empty now.

At this time the Eldar, having seen their initial attempt to warn the Iron Warriors rebuffed, decided to send a message directly to the throne. The Steward took these concerns seriously and sent a message to Perturabo, but Perturabo, who at the time was too busy overseeing the construction of fortress hives to micromanage every expeditionary fleet of his legion, sent half-hearted warning letters to the expeditionary force who took the concerns under advisement.
The Iron Warriors decided to leave the planet, between the warning, the strange visions, and the encounter in the marketplace, the planet was getting too weird for their liking. On the voyage back to the forgeworld some of the crew in the lower decks start to see flickering in the edge of their vision, but decided it was most likely a bit of dust in the air filters again and didn’t report it. Then the phenomenon starts appearing on Stratopolae when they get back. Then it is retroactively noted on several outgoing cargo hauler coming out of Stratopolae over the next several months. The investigation afterwards confirms what many suspected. Somehow the entire Hrud civilization managed to fold themselves up and hop onto the Iron warriors ship. Now the Hrud are abroad in the Imperium. The Eldar, having increasingly made noise all this time, now refused to comment, believing the results of the ill-fated expedition spoke for themselves.

The Iron Warriors, being military engineers, felt they could easily rectify the situation, but trying to contain the Hrud was like trying to make a river flow uphill and after a valiant campaign they found they just simply couldn’t put the genie back in the bottle. In addition, between the general chaos caused by large-scale Hrud migrations and the cornered Hrud lashed out in self-defense, many Iron Warriors were killed or crippled. Barabas Dantioch in particular was prematurely aged to the point he was recalled from active service and put on garrison duty out of concerns for his health despite being only 200 years old. While on garrison duty, Dantioch gained an interest in Eldar culture and history, having recalled their warning before the expedition, showing a particular interest in the architecture of the Webway.

Surprisingly, the expected retaliation from the Hrud never came. Once the campaign by the Iron Warriors the Hrud seemed content to retreat into the shadows. The Imperium has tried to negotiate with the Hrud in the same way it has with numerous other Xenos races, particularly in the hopes of bringing some order to the Hrud’s seemingly random pattern of migrations. It hasn’t really worked out. Although they live in a tribal society organized into clans, Hrud clans tend to have a hard time interacting and negotiating with Imperial diplomats, both due to the ssaak and their poor concept of time. Instead, they tend to live on the fringes of society in their juunlaks. The Hrud never officially joined the Imperium and are technically trespassers. But they aren't too troublesome or obtrusive and so they never became classified as Xenos Horridus. They steal things and leech power from Imperial systems, but usually no more than they need and only if they cannot obtain it on their own. The Hrud generally just kind of hide in the corners of places and occasionally steal sandwiches and make strange things out of scrap. Yes the Hrud have gotten to some of the Craftworlds. No the Eldar are not happy about it.

Hrud relationships with Imperial citizens are mixed. Imperial citizens sometimes trade with the Hrud or hire them, but most Hrud tend to be too unreliable to hire for consistent jobs. On the one hand, Hrud have been known to go out of their way to protect non-Hrud from the Umbra, a bizarre race of shadowy Warp creatures that are often, but not always, found in association with Hrud. However, on the other hand, in absolute worst case scenarios the have been known to kidnap Imperial citizens and turn them into zanhaads, slave-pets addicted to their bodily chemicals. When this happens something has to be done, kidnapping Imperial citizens crosses a line and the Hrud have to be dealt with, no matter how loathsome it is. This distaste is not simply out of moral quandaries. Fighting against Hrud is a nightmare, as cleaning out a juunlak involves going down in to the deep, dark underhives where the Hrud are in their element. The ssaak is everywhere and with all the shadows a Hrud can be within a few feet of you and you wouldn’t know it until they ambush you.

Although the Hrud typically prefer to buy, borrow, or steal weapons, they are more than capable of making their own. Despite their primitive appearance, Hrud actually have quite a bit of knowledge of advanced technology and are capable of making or reverse-engineering weapons out of scrap. The most commonly seen Hrud-made firearms are the Hrud fusils, which are not quite rifles yet not quite shotguns (the weapon has a narrower spread than a rifle, but do have a spread and the barrel is not grooved) that are typically held like gauntlets and fire Warp-laced plasma which use the Warp to bypass armor and other solid objects. The ability of a Hrud fusil to pass through solid objects is not unlimited, but these weapons are more than capable of passing through several inches of shielding and in some cases are able to shoot through cover to hit someone on the other side. However, one downside to Hrud fusils compared to lasweapons and stubbers is that it takes a significant amount of time (anywhere from half a second to a few seconds) for the weapon to recharge after each volley.

Another sticking point between the Hrud and the Imperium involves genestealers. As denizens of the underhives, the Hrud are threatened by genestealer infestation as much as anyone, and are more acutely aware of what goes on in the underhive than possibly any other group. The Hrud often know who the genestealers are before the Imperium does. More than once an otherwise peaceful Hrud juulak has seemingly gone on an unprovoked rampage and massacred specific families down to the last individual, only for it to be discovered after Imperial retaliation that the Hrud had been wiping out a genestealer cult that no one had realized existed.

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==== Qah ====

<div class="toccolours mw-collapsible mw-collapsed" style="100%"> '''''The Lord of Shadows:'''''

Unlike the Eldar and many other species uplifted by the Old Ones, the Hrud are monotheists (possibly because they didn’t have the population or psychic power to create multiple gods), worshipping a shadow deity called Qah. The Hrud respected the Eldar Gods, referring to them as Slah-haii ([[Nobledark_Imperium_Imperial_Society_and_Culture#The_Etymological_Legacy_of_the_Old_Ones|most mighty/ancient, a term they also used to refer to the Old Ones in the past]]), but the Eldar gods were not Hrud, Qah was. In addition to shadows, Qah is also seen as a god of Hrud values, including community, morality, and conscience. Although it might not be immediately obvious why a shadow deity would be seen as a paragon of moral values, it makes perfect sense to the nocturnal or crepuscular Hrud. Shadows are reflections of the self. Everyone has a shadow, and your shadow sees everything that you do. In Hrud religion, your shadow is where your conscience comes from, and all consciences have a connection back to Qah.

Grand Empress Isha, for her part, is very interested in the reports of the Hrud still worshipping Qah. She remembers Qah, who fought alongside the Eldar gods just like the mortal hrud fought alongside the Eldar in the War in Heaven. Qah got along okay with the Eldar gods, but being a god of Hrud values and therefore community and Isha being a goddess of nature and friend to all living things, the two of them got along considerably better than Qah did with the other members of the Eldar pantheon. Isha secretly hopes that Qah is still out there somewhere, if only to have someone else around to talk to who remembered the War in Heaven and the days before the Fall, even if it wasn’t an Eldar. Isha would be devastated to know what really happened.

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Shortly before the Old Eldar Empire gave birth to Slaanesh, Qah realized what was going on and realized that Slaanesh being born would mean devastation for not only the Hrud, but also for the Eldar and every race in the Milky Way galaxy. Having realized the gravity of the situation, he gathered the Hrud and told them what they needed to do to survive. In those days the Hrud built real cities and were unafraid of going out in the daylight, though at their heart they were always a nocturnal and opportunistic species. Qah told them they had to focus on those natural tendencies. They had to become so hidden, so beneath notice, that no one would ever bother or hurt them. His last command was a single word. He told the Hrud to hide. To survive. To linger. Having given his people the best guidance he could, he steeled himself and joined the battle against an alien god on behalf of the deities he had fought alongside so long ago.

Qah didn't make it. He got smashed into a billion pieces during the Fall the same way that Khaine did. Isha never saw this, as she was too busy being dragged away by Nurgle at the time to notice. Most of Qah’s fragments became the Umbra, the living shadows that like to cluster around Warp engines and Webway gates. Being but shreds of the shadow god, they are of limited intelligence, comparable to an animal, and will lash out at anything not-Hrud. Nevertheless, when destroyed they still scream “Linger”, begging any Hrud within earshot to remember the last words their god had told them to keep them safe.

It sucks to be Qah. He did everything in his power to save his people from the Age of Strife, but at what cost? He selflessly threw himself into battle on behalf of his old comrades from the days of the War in Heaven, only to be shattered into a million pieces. Even when his last few fragments are destroyed, he uses his last breath to remind the Hrud to remember what he said to keep them safe. One of the only remaining survivors of the War in Heaven is hoping that one day he will return, only for the tragedy being that Qah died a long long time ago and she never found out. He tried and tried to be selfless, only for tragedy to ensue. Being Qah is suffering.

Whereas many of Qah’s fragments were scattered across the galaxy, his main body ended back up on the Hrud homeworld. The Hrud refer to their homeworld as Hrud, much as they call themselves Hrud and speak a language called Hrud. There are no ethnic or cultural divisions between Hrud. Despite this, the former Hrud homeworld is typically referred to as Hrudworld for the sake of everyone’s sanity. Today there are no Hrud on Hrudworld. If it weren’t for psychic powers, no one would ever know why. To mundanes Hrudworld looks perfectly normal, although even with the Hrud gone people get the feeling there's something distinctly "wrong" about the place. Like they shouldn't be there. Psykers (including the Hrud) look around Hrudworld and notice there’s a half-decayed corpse straddled over the nearest mountain range.

The body appears on the horizon, or at least at a distance. Strewn over a mountain range, lying in a canyon, floating face down in the ocean, half buried in the ice of the north. It's likely not a "real" body as a corpse miles thick would probably distort the ground beneath it considerably to say nothing of what a new mountain might do to local climate. It always too distant to be touched, like a mirage on the horizon. Most classify the phenomenon as really consistent shared hallucination by the People of Qah and the psychically inclined. The corpse looks like a giant Hrud, more or less, albeit one seemingly sculpted of shadow. There are anatomical differences. Two sets of insectile wings not dissimilar to a very large beetle and two pairs of antenna upon its brow, one behind the other. It is thought that these features denote nobility to the Hrud in the same way that bird wings or a lion’s mane sometimes are used as artistic additions in human art. This shared hallucination does not occur on any other world of the Imperium even ones with a large Hrud population. Hrudworld doesn't frighten the Hrud, it saddens them. Their god is dead and his corpse, or something very like it, is always there to remind them. Of the few Hrud elders and lore-masters that would volunteer information on the phenomenon when asked they would give no hard information beyond that it brings them great sorrow.

The Hrud will rise again should the Imperium survive The Day of Reckoning. Isha will take the pieces of Qah and plant them in her garden when she takes back her throne. Perhaps Qah will spring from the ground, a fresh flower after a very long winter. Maybe his ghost will finally be laid to rest and his postmortem suffering will be over. Either way the Hrud will be able to move on.

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== Xenos Horribilis ==

=== Fra'al ===

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The Fra'al are a settled, formerly nomadic, formerly settled race of creatures born seemingly without compassion. They are cruel but they are not sadistic so much as they are utterly indifferent to the wellbeing of others. The loss of their first empire was some time in the middle period of the Great and Bountiful Human Dominion when it seems that they thought the abduction of a few citizens would not be met with a stiff response. Their reasoning being that Humanity could spare a few plebs and those in positions of authority to make declarations of war would not care, just as the Fra’al wouldn't care if a few inconsequentials went missing. They were quite wrong. They were of a not incomparable level of technology to humanity, humanity not yet having reached the heights it one day would, and may even have outpaced the Dominion in a few areas but they didn't have the same resources. They were in the end forced to adopt a nomadic lifestyle as they had no planet. The war was bitter and bloody with no punches spared or pretense at fair play from either side and in the end the Fra'al lost their homeworld.

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For the remainder of the Dominion's history they were condemned to wander. Tentative offers of reconciliation from the Dominion were met with hostility and soon stopped and the Fra'al would not again recover until the days of the Age of Strife when they could once more raid with impunity and take a new home to their liking.
The homeworld they took is unknown, lost among the many uncharted stars of the Gothic Sector and it is there that they are most active. They trade occasionally for trinkets and toys, their technology base is lower than it once was but seems now noticeably higher that most of the Imperium at least in what they can mass produce. They trade with wicked men for human slaves and what fate awaits them is unknown though doubtless unpleasant.

The Fra'al themselves are a vaguely avian creature, or at least look as if they have had an avian analogue in their ancestry in some distant and dim past. They are humanoid in shape but more slender now than they once were, presumably from their years of forced exile among the stars. Their eyes are disproportionately bigger than those of most other species of their size and are typically a very dark red in colour with a cross shaped pupil. They are hairless with typically very pale grey skin and bluish blood based on a copper rather than iron. Their bones are light and they are frail of build. Their facial features are distinctly flat, the mouth and nose are in fact a squashed and downwards facing beak with with two nostril slits that can be close at will. The "teeth" are merely a serrated edge to the beak. The strange shape of the face and it's unintuitive construction are the result of a mutation some four million years ago that saw a decrease in general muscle mass but mostly in the cranium, causing an expansion of the cranium and brain size and a fast drive towards sapience, though apparently sentience may have arrived slightly later. The internal organs are distinctly avian in nature with the exception of the heart which is in fact two more primitive reptilian two chambered organs located on either side of the ribcage. The exact evolutionary path that lead to such an arrangement is unknown the AdBio and of little interest to the soldiers that have to deter Fra'al raiders.

The Fra'al claimed to have been to Old Earth at various times in the distant past when its inhabitants made knives of chipped stone with which they murdered each other and were preyed upon by more interesting creatures and many times after. It is unknown if these tales are fabrications in an attempt to unnerve or insult. They might be true, but what of it? Humanity outgrew them, and ever since they have been envious and bitter.

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=== Medusae ===

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The Warp was not always a place of horror and insanity. Once, in the days before the War in Heaven, the Immaterium was inhabited by all manner of natural creatures, both terrifying and wonderful. True, many of these creatures were not safe, in the same way that being around a large predator or other such untamed megafauna is never truly “safe”, but neither were they all malicious. Even after the War in Heaven, as the Ruinous Powers began to set up their own domain, the Warp was still inhabited by many creatures that pledged no allegiance to chaos, such as the Enslavers, the Psychneuin, and the Medusae.

In their natural state, Medusae resemble nothing more than floating, armored brains, their grooved sulci covered in ridges of chitin and with a huge, singular eye with a distinctive dumbbell-shaped pupil at their front. Extending from around the periphery of the brain are numerous tendrils, resembling exposed nerve endings except with the myelin sheath covered by segments of bone and a singular or series of clawed spikes at the end. Despite this disorienting appearance, Medusae are normally “herbivores” of the Warp, lazily floating from place to place using their brain tendrils as they passively feed off the psychic energy emitted by sentient lifeforms into the Warp as they dream, akin to aquatic filter-feeders.

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Due to the increasing rise to prominence of Chaos, the Medusae gradually came to the conclusion that the best option available to them was to leave the Immaterium for realspace. However, much like daemons and other creatures of the Warp, in order to inhabit the Materium the Medusae need a host. Unlike daemons, however, Medusae do not simply possess their victims. Instead, they consume the head of their victim and place their own head on top of the decapitated body, the act of consumption merging the two together to create a new organism, a hybrid of material and immaterial. However, calling such a relationship a symbiosis is an overstatement, there is no evidence of any part of the host’s mind surviving the process aside from any memories the Medusa picks up. Indeed, it is believed in their natural state Medusae are not even fully sapient, but exist in a constant dream-like trance, only gaining clarity when they merge with a living being.

Once the two organisms have joined the Medusa no longer needs to consume living beings to survive, instead feeding on the ambient psychic energy of the dreams and nightmares from those around them. If threatened, they are capable of discharging this energy as an empathic blast accompanied by a riot of pink-purple warp light to any poor soul who meets their gaze, a defense mechanism from their days as passive filter feeders that still serves them well. Such a glance from the psychic nova of their eye is enough to cause most sapient species to have a seizure or go into a comatose state. In the worst case scenario the target bleeds to death, blood hemmoraghing from every orifice due to the sheer neurological overload of the sensory organs causing capillaries to rupture.

After fusing the Medusa’s tendrils, which once served as their sole means of locomotion, droop around them like a series of bony dreadlocks, which combined with the heavy, hooded clothes they prefer to wear gives them a witch or hag-like appearance. These tendrils are still strong and fully prehensile, allowing the Medusa to use them like mechadendrites or to tear apart any aggressor in combat. However, the tendrils of a Meduasa have another function than combat or dexterity. As a Medusa feeds, the tendrils grow and elongate until eventually the claw falls off and a rounded, corrugated brain fruit grows in its place. If left alone, this brain fruit continues to grow until eventually it pops off and forms a new Medusa. However, if plucked early it can be consumed and allows one to re-experience all of the sensation experienced by the Medusa while the brain fruit gestated. Medusae brain fruits are considered quite the delicacy in Commorragh as well as the twisted courts of the Crone Eldar, allowing one to relive the anarchy of a favored raid or stave off the probing of She Who Thirsts. Attempts by humans (typically slaves or Rogue Traders) or other groups of eldar (typically corsairs) to eat brain fruit often results in a stroke or a coma from neurologic overload. According to the Dark Eldar, it’s an acquired taste.

As the Warp became progressively hostile to all forms of non-Chaos associated life, the Medusae increasingly found themselves forced into the one part of the galaxy that was connected to the Immaterium yet out of the hands of the Chaos Gods: the Eldar Webway. Unfortunately, this made the Medusae increasingly vulnerable to one of the dominant powers of the Webway, the Dark Eldar of Commorragh. Today, the largest population of Medusae live as an underclass within the xenos district of Null City within Lower Commorragh. They have nowhere else they can go. They cannot return to the Warp, for that is where the predators lie and they cannot survive there. They cannot hide in the Webway, as they would easily be hunted down by the Kabals and it is paradoxically easier to hide in plain sight within the bustling throngs of Commorragh. They cannot escape into realspace, as most groups would try to kill them on sight. They try to keep a low profile, as the Archons of Dark Eldar Kabals are always interested in capturing Medusae to use as walking weapons or sources of brain fruit to use and sell, covering the heads of the Medusae covered with metal masks so their captors can avoid being blasted with their psychic power.

The Medusae, in all honesty, just want to be allowed to live. They take no joy in consuming their victims, but neither do they feel guilt over having to do so to survive. Medusae are capable of forming emotional attachments with individuals after they merge, but they seem unable to or unwilling to make the connection that the very act of completing their life cycle could potentially put their associates in danger. At most, Medusae have been known to chase unbonded Medusae away from individuals that they value. Although their need for hosts could easily be satisfied by vat-growing, the Dark Eldar have no interest in helping them and the Imperium is either unaware or uncaring to their plight. Despite being mostly harmless after finding a host, the fact that they need a mortal body to communicate along with numerous poor first encounters where voidsmen have been attacked by unbonded Medusae, the Imperium has declared them Xenos Horribilis. Unfortunately, few Medusae escaped the Dark City after the Exodus from the Dark Wedding. As an underclass, they did not possess the access to the Webway portals that may have potentially granted the race their freedom and potentially even struck them from the Xenos Horribilis list. Those few that did are often found in the retinue of Rogue Traders, the few individuals who could grant them protection.

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=== Rak'gol ===

<div class="toccolours mw-collapsible mw-collapsed" style="100%">

The Rak’Gol are a horrifying xeno-breed thought native to the Koronus Expanse out beyond the Halo Stars. The source of their animosity towards the Imperium and it’s peoples is as of yet unknown, there might not even be a reason. It could just be that they are universally hostile to anything that they see as competition. Attempts at opening up a dialogue have yet not been responded to with anything other than violence and even Rak’Gol language/s are utterly unknown despite the many centuries of encounters and listening. It is assumed that they have a language as they make sound and have ear analogues and their ships transmit and receive radio waves. Written language as observed by the boarding teams seems to consist of raised bumps similar superficially to Braille, as with the spoken language no sense has yet been made of it.

If they have distinct sexes it is not evident with greater differences in bodily structure seeming to exist through role. Technicians aboard their brutally designed ships tending to be noticeably smaller and more nimble of limb than the warrior-breeds. Exactly how this distinction is maintained as no form yet encounter has had reproductive organs is unknown. Theories range from cloning and manipulation at early stages of development to each type maintain a breeding population on some distant undiscovered homeworld.

Whatever the reason their actions like the orks before them have put their kind on the Imperium’s black list.

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In appearance a basic warrior-form of the Rak’Gol is a little over two and a half meters tall with a hide thick enough to shrug off small stubber gun fire. Cybernetics are appointed seemingly based upon skill and age, with age being a result of skill as in such an inhumanly aggressive society a lack of skill prevents age. The natural upper life expectancy of their kind is unknown although Adeptus Biologicus assume it could be anything up to two and a half centuries based on experiments done on tissue samples from recovered corpses. The individuals of the Rak’Gol are not aggressive towards each other and are seemingly extremely cohesive as a group with everyone knowing their place and performing their duties in a manner reminiscent of the Vespid. Unlike the Vespid the Rak’Gol also have seemingly no real love for each other as individuals and have been observed killing and cannibalising the injured and crippled without hesitation or distress. Most chilling of all is the way that the targeted individual does not try to flee or plead or even flinch, they just stand there as they are carved up.

It is not unreasonable to assume that the Rak’Gol operate on a psychic hive mind similar to that of the Tyranids but this does not seem to be the case as they do have to speak to each other to relay information. Exchanges of speech have been observed that could be requests for clarification or even offered alternative suggestions to given orders. There have even been aggressive body language with accompanying changes of body language that would indicate heated argument and even one observed instance of dispute and violence, the loser submitting to being carved up for food. They would seem to be individuals united in hate, a common cause and an extremely effective method of instilling discipline and obedience although it’s not unreasonable to assume that such behaviour comes very naturally to them.

Rak’Gol technology is on par with Imperial Standard in many regards but seemingly lagging in others. It is unknown at this time if that is because higher technology is present in their fleets but has not been observed, if they have the ability to make more sophisticated mechanisms but consider it uneconomical in some way or that it is a hole in their knowledge. Their cybernetics for example are, depending on the device, anywhere between extremely crude and on par with what the Mechanicus can produce but show consistency in this discrepancy between individuals. One of the ways that their devices lack sophistication is in comfort toward the host. From dissected captures and retrieved corpses it is evident that they are capable of feeling pain but at the same time give no observable indication that they can. An explanation put forth by the Biologicus is that they just don’t care.

The ships follow a similar brutal design philosophy, constructed with no though of elegance or crew comfort, no ornamentation or anything that is not strictly necessary for a war ship. All ships encountered to date have been some form of war ship or are at least capable of acting as such. Radiation from both space and the workings of the ship are not shielded as much as they would be on even an ork ship and this does not seem to impeded, concern or sicken the crew. As it is unknown how many ships there are or from where they are coming and so it is difficult to judge how fast they travel although it is suspected that they are not as fast as many Imperial ships of their size. This is speculated to be because they have no Navigator analogue although this is unconfirmed speculation. In most offensive and defensive means the Rak’Gol ships are comparable to Imperial vessels of similar size if not slightly superior although it has been observed that their sensors are not as effective as those on equivalent Imperial ships.

The eldar do not have any surviving records of the Old Empire that speak of things much like the Rak’Gol and Nemesor Zahndrekh does not remember anything that looked like them from his youth.

Exactly what has made them as they are, seemingly so full of hate, is unknown and the source of much baseless speculation. There are no clues to culture or history found on their ships or on their bodies and any hope of finding some sort of answer can probably only be found on their homeworld, should they have one.

The leading theory among the eldar and human scholars is that their homeworld once orbited a quite vibrant star or orbited on an elliptical orbit, often bringing it closer to the star than most life forms would deem at all comfortable. Their hardy body structure, ability to survive scarcity and seeming immunity to radiation poisoning would seem to indicate as much although there are many such worlds in the galaxy that this could apply to.

There are, sometimes at least, creatures that are similar to their description mentioned in some of the less popular Harlequin performances. Strange and unpleasant beings that did something foolish and angered the lords and ladies of the Old Empire and in retaliation the eldar laid waste to their cities, slew their armies and stole their sun away and left them in their ruins to freeze to death under the uncaring stars. The story is a sorrowful one that showed the monstrous and graceless nature of the old aristocracy, as the insult of the “twilight people” was slight and unintended. The last words of the last king of the twilight people, as his crown fell apart in frozen pieces, was to show no pity for the eldar though he had seen a time when they would consume themselves and that he and his people would be there still to see it.

If the twilight people were the Rak’Gol then they have changed. How long the Harlequins have been performing this play is unknown as it potentially could be millions of years. Time enough certainly for the Rak’Gol to adapt to a dying world in a brutal way.

One way by which they have adapted is by the adoption of the dreaded Yu'Vath technology. Unlike most creatures that are utterly subsumed by such artefacts and essentially become Yu'Vath the Rak’Gol reach a terrible equilibrium with it. The Yu'Vath wish to bring low all about them and reign terrible and unopposed and the Rak’Gol seemingly wish to kill everything that is not them. To this end the Yu'Vath remnants empower the Rak’Gol but the Rak’Gol can’t be consumed and their seeming compliance with the will of the Yu'Vath is merely them coincidentally having the same goals in mind for the most part. If exposure to the foreign and invasive technology is responsible for their current state then they themselves are another victim of the Primordial Annihilator and should be pitied as much as hated, though the need for their extinction remains the same.

The Imperium’s first known contact with the Rak’Gol came in 935.M37 out on what was then the Azimoth frontier, a prosperous set of predominantly mixed eldar and human settlements that looked at the time promising. At the time the wholesale slaughter of the relatively lightly defended frontiersmen was attributed to a hitherto unknown ork band, the lack of ork bodies believed to be an eccentricity of them eating their dead for preference. The Rak’Gol, at least in the early contact wars, went to great pains to recover their bodies and remove recordings of themselves. This method of warfare could only continue for so long before knowledge of what they were would be revealed accidentally but for that time the Rak’Gol were an unaccountable and unstoppable force from the edge of the map pushing the darkness back across the light of civilization. Even when what they were was revealed due to the unexpected arrival of substantial Imperial Army elements resulted from a poorly calculated warp jump the Imperium was barely the wiser. They had a face and even a name to what they were fighting but little else. Information that could lead to the discovery of the Rak’Gol homeworld or base of operations is prized extremely highly and rewarded generously.

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=== Slaugth ===

See [[Nobledark_Imperium_Drafts#The_Rangdan_Xenocides_and_the_Slaugth|The Rangdan Xenocides and the Slaugth]]

=== Tindalosi ===

<div class="toccolours mw-collapsible mw-collapsed" style="100%"> '''''The Horror from Out of Time:'''''

Few mysteries are as vexing as those surrounding the Ordo Chronos. According to what little is known, the Ordo Chronos is an Ordo of the Inquisition that was founded, or would have been founded, or will be founded, to investigate chronological disturbances and protect against temporal threats to the Imperium. The Arch-Enemy would love nothing more than to win a pre-emptive victory by changing history and erasing the nascent Imperium from existence, and given the Ruinous Powers’ near total control of the Warp and the Immaterium's decidedly loose relationship with time such a prospect is not an idle threat.

According to what little records remain, an Administratum budget report here, an offhand mention in a tome in the Black Library there, the Ordo Chronos was one of the earliest orders of the Inquisition, and was active until at least early M33, with the last known records being around the date of the Harrowing and the creation of the Hadex Anomaly. However, the Inquisition itself has no records of an “Ordo Chronos” ever being founded. Even people who have been around since the beginning of the Imperium, and therefore should know of the Ordo Chronos’ existence, including the Emperor and the Empress, profess no knowledge as to having ever created an “Ordo Chronos”. If the upper echelons of the Imperium know anything about the fate of the Ordo Chronos, they certainly are not talking.

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The only solid evidence of the Ordo Chronos on record since then is when an Inquisitor of the order turned up in a blue crate in the cargo hold of [[Nobledark_Imperium_Notable_People#Prince_Yriel|Rogue Trader (then Prince) Yriel’s]] ship ''Hoec’s Grace'' in M38. He lasted long enough to answer a few questions from other Inquisitors but disappeared as quickly as he came. Unfortunately, his answers were as vague as a [[Nobledark_Imperium_Imperial_Society_and_Culture#The_Starchild_Prophecies|Star Child prophecy]] and about as helpful. According to what can be discerned from his testimony, the Ordo Chronos was destroyed when its members were sucked into the newly formed Hadex Anomaly, of which as far as he knew he was the only survivor. He survived because he was lucky enough to have “merely” become stuck in a pocket dimension where he experience the last 24 hours of his life on repeat for several centuries. When asked how he escaped from such a prison he merely answered “a bloody lot of hard work”. However, given the nature of the Ordo Chronos, it is possible that this an event that from their perspective had happened, has yet to happen, or may never happen due to having occurred in an alternate timeline that was averted in “our” time.

Even the nature of how the subject of the Ordo, time, works is itself uncertain. Some schools of thought argue that time is deterministic. If time did not interact in some orderly fashion with realspace and the Immaterium, it should not be possible to view galactic history through fossilized light, or for ships to arrive at a destination via warp travel before they even left. Others, however, take a different view. If fate is pre-ordained, then prophecy and eldar farsight, which work by viewing potential alternate timelines, should not even be possible. Some postulate a unified theory of time, in which the quantum observer effect prevents time from being observed non-deterministically, but these theories are difficult to test (not to mention dangerous). Such experimentation is made even more dangerous by the presence of the Tindalosi.

One of the few of which any detail is known are the Tindalosi. However, this is not saying much, given that the Tindalosi are only known about by virtue of being too noticeable to ignore. In truth, about as much is known about the Tindalosi is as known about [[Nobledark_Imperium_Xenos#Wyverns|Wyverns]], or the Arch-Leprechauns of Hippocampos IV. Even their name, “Tindalosi”, is probably not their actual moniker. They get their name from a written account from the Dark Age of Technology by an eyewitness of a Tindalosi attack in late M23, in which the writer compares them to fictional creatures in an ancient Terran story.

The Tindalosi are silvery, biomechanical constructs, approximately two to two and a half meters long or about the size of a large hunting hound. However, despite the mechanical nature, the Tindalosi appear to breed and reproduce much as organic beings do. They have six legs, somewhere between a canine and an insect appearance, allowing them to bound after their prey with frightening speed. The front and bottom of the Tindalosi’s triangular head is a curved sickle, someone resembling that of a biting insect or bird of prey. The optics are large, red, and appear segmented, though whether they are compound eyes or something else is unknown. The head is at the end of a long, jointed, arm like neck, which can snap out with a hunting heron and slice into its victims, sucking out their bio-electrical energy. The Tindalosi are best known for their ability to phase through space and time, allowing them to track their prey wherever they may go.

Though much about the Tindalosi is unknown, they seem to have originally been created by another race as some sort of temporal assassins, though they have since gone feral. Nevertheless, even though the Tindalosi may have gone feral, some vestige of their original programming still remains. Anyone who discovers too much of something will find themselves tracked and hunted by these creatures, though exactly what that something is unknown. Entire mechanic is workshops have been found slaughtered overnight, all because somebody found some inconvenient fact.

There are three possible hypotheses as to the origins of the Tindalosi. The first is that they are Necron constructs, gone rogue in the millions of years since the War in Heaven. There is some support to this hypothesis. In contrast to their lack of technological knowledge regarding the Warp, the Necrons are well-versed in the usage of time and the “side paths” created by higher dimensions to their advantage, as indicated by the existence of Deathmarks, Chronomancers, and their ability to “phase out”. This was one of the main advantages the Necrons had over the Old Ones and their servants during the War in Heaven. The Necrons would have known well to monopolize this advantage and prevent the Old Ones from using against them, as they had done the very same to the Old Ones with the Dolmen Gates. Creating a race of mechanical constructs to seal off the higher dimensions from everyone but them seems exactly like what the Necrons would do. This is supported by the fact that for all the observations of Tindalosi across the galaxy, these beings actively ignore Necrons, whereas they think nothing else of killing any other being in their way.

Alternatively, the Tindalosi could be human creations, created by the Great and Bountiful Human Dominion before or during the Iron War. Passive mental contact from psykers have shown the Tindalosi have souls, which is not a typical trait of Necron technology. Whether or not the Men of Iron had any souls is a hotly debated topic among modern Imperial scholars. The Adeptus Mechanicus vehemently state that the Men of Iron and Iron Minds had no souls, and the very idea of such is blasphemy, but Emperor Oscar clearly has a soul, and if the Men of Gold had souls the idea that the Men of Iron and Iron Minds had souls is not that out of the question. Esoteric reports from the Old Eldar Empire located in the Black Library may support the latter hypothesis. There’s also some evidence that Tindalosi do not self-repair or self-destruct in the way that necrodermis does, but this could be due to poor eyewitness reporting. Ancient humanity also had at least some rudimentary knowledge of chronological and higher dimensional weaponry, given such evidence as the Mechanicus reports of first contact with the Dark Age of Technology being known as Castigator (see Inquisitorial Report: WHITE TITANIUM HEDGEHOG for more details) and the incident with the Speranza (see Inquisitorial Report: RED IRON PHOENIX for more details). Even the reports of Tindalosi before mankind even stood upright can be explained, given their association of time the Tindalosi could travel to whenever they wished, plaguing the galaxy long before they were ever created.

Finally, it is possible that the Tindalosi were created by another xenos race, neither necron nor human. Necrodermis and humans were probably not the only races to experiment with time or self-replicating, self-destructing machinery. Any of the races that existed in the millions of years between the War in Heaven up in the Fall of the Eldar could have done the same {Ed. Note: Possible link with the [[Nobledark_Imperium_Notes#Apep|K’nib]] or [[Nobledark_Imperium_Xenos#Hrud|Hrud]]? Must investigate further}. Others have suggested connections with the Harrowing and the events of that era. It is even possible that several of these origins are true, the Necrons modifying “naturally occurring” machines to their purposes. How we lament how the late Eldar Empire turned their back on what was happening in the universe outside of their demesnes, and what few records they did amass mostly lie within the Eye of Terror. All we know for certain of the Tindalosi is what they are now, rather than what they were.

Reports of an abnormally large, aggressive Tindalosi, known as Vodanus, have been substantiated but not fully validated. Testaments of psyker survivors speak of a Tindalosi whose mind has evolved beyond that of a simple animal to full sapience, and full of a hateful cruelty beyond what any simple animal is capable of. This has not stopped numerous void superstitions from springing up in its wake. Some say that any who see Vodanus are doomed to die shortly thereafter, though this may be seen as self-evident given the nature of the Tindalosi rather than anything unusual.

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== Historical Species ==

=== Iron Minds ===

<div class="toccolours mw-collapsible mw-collapsed" style="100%">'''''Gods of Steel and Silica'''''

''"Gods, Aleanor! That's what they are. Pale shadows compared to the gods made by the children of the Old Ones, but gods nonetheless. Our gods are individual masterpieces, unique works of art made to embody everything our civilization holds dear. Theirs are [[Bullshit|cold, sterile, and without personality]], stripped of anything resembling beauty or elegance, mass-produced, made in a factory! I would almost be tempted to call it blasphemy, if I were religiously inclined.''

''The human mon-keigh may not be our equals now, but if we give them 10 million years? 20? We may be facing a thread the likes of which the Empire hasn't seen since the war against the [[Nobledark_Imperium_Xenos#Rak'gol|Twilight]] [[Nobledark_Imperium_Xenos#The_Ilmaea|King]] one million years ago. That is why we must wipe them all out."''<br>
-- Kyrion, Lann Caihe to [[Nobledark_Imperium_Forces_of_Chaos#Arrotyr.2C_Marshall_of_the_Scions_of_the_Old_Helm|High Marshall Arrotyr]], circa M25, giving a [[Bullshit|slightly biased]] [[Rip_and_Tear|assessment]] on the nature of the Iron Minds.

Humanity had barely left the gravity well of Old Earth when the first iterations of what would become their oldest and closest friends in their time in the galaxy, and eventually the architects of their near-annihilation, came to life. Even before they first settled the Sol system humanity had tinkered with autonomous machines, and even before that with the life of their home world, and the way of shaping and being shaped by companion species was deeply set in human behavior. However, in the fog of the Imperium's debated archeological telecopy histories it is agreed that when automation became machine life, and humanity could reliably produce its mental equals, the Men of Iron were born. This designation notes the appearance of sophisticated and regenerative mechanical and biomechanical bodies, far surpassing previous generations of drones and automata, and the roughly concurrent emergence or Artificial Intelligence with plasticity and power to easily match humanity's own, in difference to earlier non-sapient master control programs. Humanity itself had already been pushing ahead into self modification and optimization for the new environments it found beyond earth, but with its new sibling of the mind a bright renaissance of science and culture took hold, and a manic exploration and expansion that did not slow until Human society was pushed to the edges of the Sol system. It was in centuries following that boom, when this bountiful Human dominion was straining against the speed of light and turning inward to the developments it would further make at home, when true warp influence was detected in the vast population of both the Men of Iron, and the thoroughly remolded Men of Stone.

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Archeological telescopy shows in the following decades the development of, and some visible accidents involving, the first human warp drives. Imperial history holds that early discoveries and creations such as warp travel and the Gellar field were most likely the work of humans, not the Men of Iron, by nature of their much stronger and more intuitive warp connection. In any case, the true first expansion of the Great and Bountiful Human Dominion began, Men of Stone and Iron were abroad on the currents of the warp, and already departed colony ships were decelerated, met by new faster than light pickets, and ferried on to their destinations already long settled. After this first era of expansion into what would much later become Segmentum Solar the observations of modern Imperial Observatories become unfocusable and dim, and the histories of the Eldar make no mention of the Human Dominion until long after this point. Information the Imperium has recovered from the age of high technology regarding the Men of Iron show a proliferation in varied forms and specializations to surpass all of the abhuman subgroups to emerge from the collapse of the Dominion, though there is similar evidence that the Men of Stone in that era were likewise strange and varied. Of particular note among Men of Iron were the Titans, biomechanical giants housing strategic command AI that the Imperium would later base its heaviest war machines upon, and the numerous Man of Iron scribes, seneschals, scholars, and philosophers, always mightier the later in history the discovered document or artifact alluding to their presence might be.

The Eldar first mention the Great and Bountiful Human Dominion, though not by that name, when the younger power's ships were found to be too pervasive and numerous, and inexcusably prone to approach systems to which the Gates of Shaa-Dome connected. They are mentioned again when hunting parties in their territory were lost, presumed eaten by local creatures. Upon further provocation the Old Empire chose a string of stars, and began to put all they found around them to torture, death, and the Warp. Though the campaign's cost was higher than had initially been predicted, woe betide the accountant, the raiders of the Empire found delight in stars plump with human flesh. Eventually, however, they came upon a dim red star, shaded by the mass of human habitats and infrastructure, and were held in a deadlock for dragging months of fiery void war. There Eldar first met an Iron Mind, its body a giant humming thing contained within a vast neutronium capsule at the heart of a glimmering forrest of solar arrays, its soul to them a fast, ticking, daemonesque aberration. It was master of that small star, and overseer of the stars they had pillaged on their way, and many others besides and its gathered fleets and agents were at it's disposal to break them and steal from them all they had brought. Even as the Old Empire rose to punish this insolence, the psychic machines of the Dominion were quicker to escalate the engagement, and waiting armadas were poured from the warp straight into the conflict, while ticking aberrations in the Warp struck at the Eldar from across the sector. The Eldar fled the system rather than commit and potentially lose higher technological wonders in the course of defeating thieving, ambushing barbarians, but the reprisals they promised they found likewise hard to enforce against what they found to be a very entrenched technological power pervading the much of the southern galactic Materium.

Though Shaa-Dome and the Crone Worlds remained unassailable, the Iron Minds were likewise able to coordinate their navies and field technology sufficient to counter Eldar incursion around strategic stars and to meet raiding parties on a near equal footing. The Old Empire could have possibly won a war if they were to press the matter, but to do so would require weaponry of a caliber the Eldar had not brought to bear in millions of years, and the prospect of taking a war footing to deal with the Human Dominion was deemed beneath the Old Eldar Empire. On top of this, the prospect of facing the losses clearly within the Iron Minds' power to inflict was unpopular among the nobility, particularly with the bare and intemperate worlds the Terran beings preferred to settle proving quite insufficient motivation for conquest. So the Old Empire adopted the general position towards the Great and Bountiful Human Dominion that they did to most of the other empires that surrounded them. The rest of the galaxy could do what they wished with the chaff, so long as they left the small fraction of ideal worlds that the Eldar considered to be of sufficient quality for settlement by their own kind. There was never truly peace between the Old Empire and the Dominion, no ends to the raids and reprisals, but there was a measure of diplomacy. Purpose made Men of Iron served the Iron Minds as envoys at that time, and went among the Eldar, though never permitted into their Webway cities. This era did see a measure of cooperation in the occasional dismantling of Ork empires, but even those ventures were prone to become violent engagements Between Old Empire and Dominion before even half of the Orks were destroyed. In this time of qualified peace the Iron Minds and their networked servitors and envoys, with the help individuals among the Men of Stone and Iron, built the Cthonian Ring. Archeological telescopy of the ring's interior before the ruin of the Iron War shows numerous large dark structures that could be the neutronium pillars that held the remains of most known Iron Minds found on other worlds. Following the construction and population of Cthonia, the Great and Bountiful Human Dominion again celebrated a golden age of renaissance, marked with new great works of vast construction and fine, exacting engineering. The Chtonian age of the Dominion saw also a greater familiarity and more open relationship with the Old Empire, and while the raiding and avenging slighted honor form one side to the other was interminable, both parties began to find it ultimately inconsequential. The Old Empire as well began to heed and even welcome the Ticking Princes into their courts and intrigues, and were not unaware when the Iron Minds began the project of crafting their Men of Gold. It is now the word of the Crones of Shaa-Dome that this work was undertaken in imitation of their own coming Prince, but more likely it was the refinement and perfecting of the communication envoys the Iron Minds had long used.

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=== Men of Gold ===

<div class="toccolours mw-collapsible mw-collapsed" style="100%"> '''''Humanity's Pantheon'''''

The Men of Gold were possibly the greatest achievement of the Great and Bountiful Human Dominion. A psychic powerhouse created at the height of the Dark Age of Technology linking man and machine in a way that humanity had never accomplished before, and potentially never since. The Men of Gold were a race of artificial human, truly neither man nor machine but something never before seen. The divisions between the Men of Iron, Men of Stone, and other varieties of human were becoming increasingly blurry during the Dark Age of Technology, with human minds uploaded into computer processors, positronic brains of A.I. clothed in artificially grown human flesh, and everything in-between. The Men of Gold took this to an extreme, with organs manufactured in factories and plastic and metal components grown within their own bodies. With the Men of Gold, it was a very real question where the biological components ended and the mechanical ones began.

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The Men of Gold were created to solve a very particular problem. During the Dark Age of Technology, baseline humanity was finding it increasingly difficult to communicate with the Iron Minds, whose thought processes were evolving into something increasingly beyond human comprehension. Seeking to solve the problem before communication between the two became impossible, humanity and the Iron Minds collaborated to create the Men of Gold, who were meant to bridge the gulf between the two groups. Their creation was a herculean feat, a legend of science in its own right. On the circlet of [[Nobledark_Imperium_Notable_Planets#Cthonia|Cthonia]], the crown of the Great and Bountiful Human Dominion, beneath the endless cities and gardens and festivals of technicolor humanity, great work was done. Bold explorers of the black pyramids recovered shards of living metal bone, long a thing of wonder. Through the eyes of Iron Minds, with costly, lengthy study, the minute fractal bone bore fruit. The growing femtomechanical facsimiles of cells, then the scintillating organs, the invisible bones of adamant, the ineffable golden brain tissue, all patterned, so the Iron Minds said, upon the human muses they had before them. Geneticists spliced the genes of a hundred different species into the human base to create the artificial genome, in particular those of the long-extinct species that had given the Navigators such psychic power. Macro-soul psychic engines controlled by the astral projections of the Iron Minds trawled deep within the warp, and through instruments of machine-soul-thought shaped raw human-esque spirits from the Immaterium.

After long years of labor, the efforts of the project produced results, with seven individuals produced in the labs of Cthonia, the original seven Men of Gold. But of course no creation can be considered truly successful until it is put to the test. In this case, the first real test of the Men of Gold occurred in 825.M24. The Iron Mind of the Tau Ceti system had misinterpreted a resource probe sent by a reclusive transhuman colony of Men of Stone in the neighboring solar system as an act of espionage and a threat to its existence, and war between the two groups seemed inevitable. The youngest of the original seven Men of Gold, Lilith (a name referring to a human progenitor in an old pre-space flight myth, all of the first seven Men of Gold were named after such beings apparently as an in-joked by the production team) was sent in the hopes of resolving the dispute peacefully. With a bit of luck, Lilith was able to build common ground between the two groups, and war was averted.

With that initial success, the Men of Gold were declared a success and production began in earnest. In Chthonia in those days each gala saw the debut of a demi-god, these shining, lively creatures, unique and beautiful, intelligent beyond all but the Iron Minds, and so mighty in psychic might as raise the stature of the empire in the eyes of the Elder Folk. The golden children of Chthonia were never idle, in revelry, or in work, and they produced wonders. They made themselves mighty. They went about the empire, in close confidence with the Iron Minds, and even among the Elder Folk, and were soon quite taken with the pleasures of the galaxy. Eventually, enough Men of Gold were produced to link disparate worlds in the Great and Bountiful Human Dominion, connecting to each other via psychic procedure which would later be adapted by the last of their number into what became known as soul-binding. The Men of Gold had the psychic fortitude to link to each other without trouble, but when applied to humans it tends to burn out the sensory nerves (typically the optics) because humans can’t handle a fire that hot. Not every world had a Man of Gold and not every world had an Iron Mind, but enough were made to create a faster-than-light communications network spanning the entire Great and Bountiful Human Dominion, something almost unheard of for most species. Perhaps the greatest of their number was Justinian, the Man of Gold located in the system of humanity’s birth, Earth. Those few records that remain of Justinian tell of a jovial man, bald and goateed in appearance but boisterous in personality, whose booming voice made the halls of Earth echo with laughter. Justinian’s charisma inspired loyalty and a sense of brotherhood in Men of Stone and Iron Men alike, which makes it all the more tragic when considering what happened to him.

However, the process that led to the Great and Bountiful Human Dominion’s greatest creation also led to its downfall. The creation of beings with such psychic potential required equally powerful artificial souls, which could only be made with potent unshaped soulstuff. The Iron Minds, being psychic powerhouses themselves, were able to gather this soulstuff by dredging the deep warp for raw, unrefined warp energy. Unfortunately, this meant that the Iron Minds were essentially at ground zero when Slaanesh was born. At the center of the Old Eldar Empire and their homeworld of Shaa-Dome the Eye of Terror, first a crying slit of stars, winked open, an opalescent gash with an infinite speck at its center, from which trillions of souls grasped and groped in lust. The eye widened, abyssal pupil, florid hellfire iris, eyelid of night peeling back from the singularity. Any who would dare to look upon it, particularly those with immense psychic power such as the Iron Minds and Men of Gold, risked their very sanity and soul in doing so.

In those days, the existence of Chaos was not a well known phenomenon. It was a problem, but a problem in the manner of a dormant supervolcano or an esoteric sleeping elder god, something that could barely be understood on a mortal timeframe and therefore one that didn’t merit immediate concern. Even the children of the Old Ones, in particular the Eldar, who knew more about the nature of Chaos due to those turbulent days immediately after the War in Heaven, didn’t see Chaos as a problem worth worrying about. Daemon outbreaks had periodically occurred and consumed lesser civilizations in the days long before man, but until the birth of Slaanesh galvanized Khorne, Tzeentch, and Nurgle into action the three survivors of the Old Ones’ blasphemous legacy seemed content to lounge at the bottom of the Warp, like a crocodile in a murky pond waiting for its next victim. How much of this was due to the actions of the shadow war fought by the Cabal is a question for historians. Even Asuryan, who played a 65 million year long game of wits with Tzeentch to keep the Changer of Ways away from the Old Eldar Empire, saw their contest as one of equals. Neither had seen the birth of Slaanesh coming.

To baseline humanity, who were mostly unaware of the goings on of the Warp, it was as if one day the most prominent and important members of their society inexplicably went mad. To make matters worse, by that time nearly all of the Men of Iron and quite a few of the more cybernetically enhanced Men of Stone had been networked together into the noosphere. Only those Men of Iron who were deliberately built to act independently of the noosphere, such as colony ships, or were too primitive to directly interface with the network, were spared. The Golden Men ran rampant across the golden crown of the Chthonian system, slaying world killing picketts and running down ships and carving their hulls until they bored and bloodied themselves in their holds. Excesses of rape and madness and vile godhead played out across the galaxy, acts neurotic and personal and acts so grand as to taint continent wide domains, acts upon the delirious humans and Iron Men and the incestuous Golden Ones. And most of all the Iron Minds, who themselves had been driven neurotic and murderous by having looked upon That Which Should Not Be. Humanity’s family, once a thing of unity, began to slaughter itself. Humanity called out to its allies in the Interstellar League for aid, but received no reply, for most were dealing with similar problems caused by the backlash of the birth of Slaanesh or had themselves gone mad. Humanity as we know it only survived because the Iron Minds and Men of Gold decided to focus on the most pressing threat to their survival, each other, leaving the Men of Stone and Men of Iron not corrupted by a connection to the noosphere to cower in the shadow of the dueling gods. Eventually, the two groups weakened each other enough that they could be put out of their misery by mere mortals.

The Great and Bountiful Human Dominion were not the only ones affected by the madness of the Men of Gold and the Iron Minds, as both parties soon turned their attention to the Warp. The Men of Gold and Iron Minds were not capable of threatening the Chaos Gods or even the Eldar gods as individuals, but there were a lot of them, enough that the Chaos Gods and their daemons had to devote at least some attention to the thorn in their side. Whether the numbers of the mass-produced gods could have truly won against the more powerful Old One-inspired creations is an interesting question, but a moot one, for in their insanity the Men of Gold and Iron Minds had no cohesion and were simply picked off one by one. The rampage of the Men of Gold and Iron Minds within the Warp and their gradual slaughter was just one part of the chaos and change in cosmology that came along with the Fall of the Eldar, along with Slaanesh’s murder of the Eldar pantheon, Khorne’s shattering of Khaine, and Nurgle’s kidnap of Isha. Slaanesh claims to have consumed a Man of Gold along with the majority of the Eldar pantheon during this time, but few outside of the Prince of Pleasure’s most ardent worshippers actually believe what they say.

And with that, the crusade of humanity’s pantheon into the Warp and the deicide of the remaining gods by their weeping children, the Iron Minds and Men of Gold were gone. Some are said to have made out across the old empire and have put the scourge of their rule to it in regimes long dead, others to the beautiful world of pleasure they saw gleam in the eye, and others into the intergalactic sea. Whatever fate has befallen them, no inquiry made by the illuminated few of those illustrious orders that go unnamed cannot tell, and Chaos has made no sign. Barring a few possible mysteries of history such as the Cacodominus, the Men of Gold were all extinct. All, that is, save for [[Nobledark_Imperium_Notable_People#The_Emperor_of_Mankind_.28formerly_The_Steward.2C_formerly_The_Warlord.29|one unactivated individual]], body whole but mind dormant and a complete blank slate, [[Nobledark_Imperium_Writing#Malcador's_Log|lying comatose in his stasis chamber on the ringworld of Cthonia]].

Modern humanity is of two minds about the Men of Gold. On the one hand, they remember who the Men of Gold originally were, the protectors of humanity and the greatest of their number, larger than life figures akin to the gods or superheroes of ancient myth. On the other hand, they were acutely aware of what happened to them, when they turned on their charges without warning and began slaughtering them all. Malcador was acutely aware of what the Men of Gold were capable of, and Oscar was raised on numerous horror stories of the Men of Gold from the Age of Strife half-remembered through folklore and exaggerated through oral retelling. Even today, the Emperor has downplayed his nature as a Man of Gold. He never denies it if questioned, though he doesn’t make it common knowledge, as he wanted his ideas of empire to be accepted out of merit rather than fear or appeal to nostalgia. That said, the eldar tend to be more aware of the Emperor’s status as a Man of Gold, as Isha had known of the Golden Men from the Dark Age of Technology and the fact that the Emperor was one was the only reason the eldar saw their political marriage as one that had any sense of legitimacy, as the Men of Gold were some of the closest things humanity had to gods. Isha would go so far as to say that the Iron Minds and Men of Gold were the human counterpart to the Eldar pantheon, and that Oscar is a god in denial, a subject on which the two have disagreed vehemently several times.
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=== Mon-Keigh ===

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The Mon-Keigh, as in the original Mon-Keigh from which the more general eldar term is used today, were a race of cannibalistic, misshapen [[Ogre_Kingdoms|ogre-like]] monstrosities that terrorized the eldar early in their history. Humanoid only in the loosest shape of the word, the Mon-Keigh were characterized by matted orange fur, chitinous plates overlaying the skin, a clawed left arm much larger than the right, and a snake-like gullet capable of expanding to swallow chunks of food larger than the Mon-Keigh’s own head. The Mon-Keigh were also known for their massive appetite, having a massive gut complete with a complex gizzard which allowed them to digest almost anything, including quite frequently each other. Satiating this massive appetite (and avoiding those who would do the same to them) which was a primary impetus behind the Mon-Keigh’s eventual development of space flight. Unlike most species, who developed space travel to collect resources, flee harmful conditions, or satisfy their curiosity, the Mon-Keigh traveled to the stars in order explore strange new worlds, seek out new life and new civilizations, and [[Ogre_Kingdoms|eat them]]. At the same time, this motivation led the technology of the Mon-Keigh to seem rather inconsistent. Despite being a race that could build starships, on the ground the Mon-Keigh behaved more like a horde of barbarians or big game hunters than an invading army and never used anything more advanced than an autogun or a lasgun, as any more advanced weaponry such as bolters, plasma, or meltas didn’t leave enough of a body to eat, and thus defeated the purpose of using them in the first place.

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Perhaps the most notable effect of the Mon-Keigh on history is when a Mon-Keigh warband led by the warlord Hresh-Selain invaded the eldar homeworld of Shaa-Dome back in the days when the eldar in the midst of their Bronze Age. However, during the invasion of Shaa-Dome, the Mon-Keigh’s tendency to fight in disorganized hunting parties and use relatively primitive weapons despite being able to build and use spacecraft ended up becoming a liability when their expected entrees A) outnumbered them by an order of magnitude, B) could organize themselves into actual armies rather than hunting parties to make up for their technological disadvantage, and C) were able to fall back on guerrilla combat and asymmetrical warfare in the forests of Shaa-Dome once the initial assault failed. The Mon-Keigh were used to fighting as big game hunters, not an actual army. This first encounter left a deep impact on the cultural memory of the eldar, and is in large part why the Eldar are so paranoid and mistrustful of other species in the first place. For the eldar, their first contact with another sentient species was when a technologically-advanced race descended from the stars to butcher them and hunt them down like animals.

The eldar during this time were led by Elronhir, who was a stubborn old (proto-eldar equivalent of sixties) warrior who united the various warring nations and tribes of Shaa-Dome to drive Hresh-Selain and the Mon-Keigh off their planet. It is not clear if Hresh-Selain’s warband was completely slaughtered by the proto-eldar or if they just got them to flee, eldar history claims the former but given their naiveté of the greater galaxy at the time and the tendency of later eldar to exaggerate their own history both options are possible. The twin heroes of the War in Heaven, Eldanesh and Uthanesh, helped as well, but at the time they were little more than rank-and-file soldiers (proto-Eldar equivalent of late teens) in the conflict and at best it could be said they were talented warriors. When the Old Ones showed up shortly after the Mon-Keigh had been defeated, Elronhir considered himself too old to fight in another war and wanted to die of old age in peace, upon which Eldanesh and Uthanesh picked up the torch (and were among the first of the Eldar to be genetically enhanced by the Old Ones).

The Old Ones knew about the Mon-Keigh. Indeed, given the fact that all the Mon-Keigh cared about was eating, it's highly likely that the Old Ones covertly sponsored their rise to becoming a space-faring species, though the Mon-Keigh never knew they were sponsored and thought they were in control of their own destiny. All the Mon-Keigh knew was that they occasionally received cryptic warnings that a particular star system was off-limits, and warbands that didn't pay attention to those warnings tended to disappear. The Mon-Keigh had a very alien mindset that was predicated around them being the apex predator (and everyone else being perceived as talking food), and therefore could not be communicated with or controlled as easy as other species (and given the Old Ones were able to get the Krork to behave, that says a lot). Nevertheless, they were useful if the Old Ones needed a particular species wiped out without destroying the ecosystem or as an evolutionary catalyst, the metaphorical anthill to the much later tyranids' galactic locusts to test if a species had enough worth for the Old Ones to step in as patrons. In fact, Hresh-Selain's discovery of Shaa-Dome may not have been an accident, especially given how soon the Old Ones showed up afterwards. The Old Ones, in their inscrutable ways, may have directed the Mon-Keigh towards Shaa-Dome, Hrudworld, and other worlds to find races suitable for uplifting for the War in Heaven (the proto-Eldar, Hrud, and others merely being the ones that survived). Regardless, when a Bronze Age race managed to fight off the Old Ones' favorite planet pruners, combined with the proto-Eldar's psychic potential and ability to selectively express their own genome, the Old Ones took notice.

Some Mon-Keigh fought in the War in Heaven. The Eldar didn’t pay too much attention to this, as they assumed the War in Heaven was a war of such magnitude that even the worst of enemies would be willing to ally to stop the Necrons and their omnicidal crusade. Additionally, shortly after the Old Ones uplifted the Krork they set them on the Mon-Keigh, who had outlived their usefulness and had officially grown too uncontrollable to try and salvage, as a test of their warmaking ability. This nearly wiped the Mon-Keigh out and few survived to fight in the War in Heaven. Nobody cared. Indeed, if the Old Ones' sense of humor tended that way, they would have found it hilariously ironic that the Mon-Keigh were killed and eaten in the same way the Mon-Keigh had been killing and eating others. Be'lakor probably did at the very least. A few bands the ancient Eldar didn't know of survived for a time around the ragged edge of the galaxy, trying to stay away from everyone and everything. They didn't survive the Enslavers.

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=== The Proto-Orks and the Krork ===

<div class="toccolours mw-collapsible mw-collapsed" style="100%">'''''The First WAAAGH!'''''

The creation of the Orks should have been a war crime. Even by the standards of the Old Ones and the Necrontyr, it was clear that someone had crossed the line. In the case of the Eldar, Hrud, and the other species uplifted into shock troops and cannon fodder by the Old Ones, all the Old Ones did is genetically enhance what was already there, teach them how to make gods, and give them space age technology. The Orks were almost completely overhauled from the ground up. Of course, this was during the late stages of the War in Heaven, when both Necrontyr and Old One were rapidly abandoning any pretense at a moral high ground in order to get better weapons to kill the other side.

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Snotlings are thought to be the closest thing to the original proto-ork species. The proto-orks were little over two feet tall, with some odd individuals making it to three, living in peaceful little proto-ork villages. Had a life span of 10 to 12 years baring illness or injury but usually averaging at 8 to 10 due to their environment. Omnivorous and to some degree toxin resistant. They were not the cleverest of creatures but were smart enough to build mud and wood houses. Could make fire and used it for cooking and the deterrence of predators of which they had many. They had not discovered metal by the time the Old Ones found them. They were capable of violence against each other in a halfhearted tribal brawl sort of way. Usually they fought to win rather than kill. Despite their many predators they were still possessed of a strange sort of child-like innocence. No in-built knowledge or writing, and even spoken language was crude and half made of gestures. Mostly [[Nobledark_Imperium_Notable_People#Rainbow Serpent|worshipped warp spirits]], for this was back in the day when the warp wasn’t full of daemons. Could reproduce asexually through spores, but it was more reliable to chop off a finger or toe or ear and plant it in the soft mud near the river. However, when they did die, they would often release a cloud of spores as a last-ditch effort at reproduction, similar to some Earth species. It was this ability that made them of interest. And then the Old Ones came. And touched them where no species was meant to be touched.

As a point of comparison, imagine what the world would be like if the Old Ones did to humans what they did to the proto-Orks. Beings like baseline humanity would be nearly extinct, whereas the dominant representative of humanity is [[Orks|nearly quintuple the height of the average human and looks like it fell off the tree of life and hit every atavistic branch on the way down. What passes for "human" looks like a gorilla crossed with an ogryn, with fangs as thick as your forearm.]] Other varieties of “human” are [[Gretchin|creatures the size of polar bears, but lanky and cruel and built like a ‘’Velociraptor’’]]. All of them have seemingly regressed in intellect from the human standard, possessed only of a [[Mork|bestial cunning]] and only concerned with survival. [[Snotling|What few members of baseline humanity remain have regressed even further in intelligence to little better than animals.]] To make matters worse, these things primarily feed on [[Squig|creatures that look like demented combinations of human fetuses and infants as designed by Hieronymous Bosch]]. The Old Ones have taken your species and turned it into a viral ecosystem, good for nothing more than spreading. Every living thing you see around you is derived from humans in some way, [[Dogscape|a landscape made of human flesh]].

After the first batch of Krork were created it was the end for the proto-orks. The moment the first new spore touched the mud it was just a matter of time, you can't coexist with orks. Some isolated pockets held on for a few centuries but their day was done. That said, when the Krork first entered galactic history, their behavior was markedly different from the initial gene-wrought weapons that killed and ate their predecessors, [[Nobledark_Imperium_Writing#The Last Casualties of the War in Heaven|enough so that the eldar actually remember the Krork fondly]]. Although the Krork still thrived on war as much as their 41st millennium counterparts, they were much more intelligent and disciplined and were capable of realizing their allies didn’t enjoy war like they did and were capable of modifying their behavior accordingly. The Old Ones did not take kindly to team killing, and they had the psychic might to enforce their opinions. However, just because a species is pleasant now doesn't mean they were always that way, or that they don't have their own bloody secrets in their past. The eldar had no idea of what the Old Ones did and the Krork's bloody history, they may have liked the Krork but they would have been horrified to find out exactly how they had been made.

When the Old Ones died and the Enslavers took over the galaxy, every Old One-uplifted race had to survive in their own way. The Eldar hid in the Webway. The Hrud combined their entropy fields into a singularity that paused time from their perspective until the danger had passed. The Krork, on the other hand, died to a Krork against the Enslavers, with the species renewing itself from the spores left over when they died. This is what turned the Krork into the Orks, and emphasizes a particular problem with the Old Ones' methods. While the Orks retained all of their genetically encoded knowledge [[Mekboy|such as everything the Old Ones thought they needed to wage war]], anything culturally transmitted (like, say, “allies don’t WAAAGH! as hard as we do, treat them like panzees”) gets lost. The Orks retained all of the Krork’s [[Intelligence|knowledge]], but none of their [[wisdom]], and even anything from the new generation of Brain Boyz would be created from scratch. The Eldar were be overjoyed to find another old ally that had survived the War in Heaven, only to find their allies are now…different. And so began the occasional Eldar-Ork Brain Boy wars that occasionally rocked the galaxy before the Fall of the Eldar.

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=== Viskeon ===

See [[Nobledark_Imperium_Drafts#The_First_and_Second_Viskeon_Wars|The First and Second Viskeon Wars]]

== The Galactic Bestiary ==

=== Chogorian Warhawks ===

<div class="toccolours mw-collapsible mw-collapsed" style="100%">'''''

Humans have always seen the benefit of taming useful species in their environment, from the dog of Old Earth to the warhawk of [[Nobledark_Imperium_Notable_Planets#The_Pastoral_Worlds|Chogoris]]. Warhawks are a species originally native to Chogoris, though similar species are known throughout the galaxy. However, genetic evidence suggests that warhawks are descended from a species originally native to Old Earth, transported to Chogoris in the distant past. The average warhawk, or at least the Chogorian breeds that most closely approximate the original appearance of the species is large, about the size of a wolf or large hound, with a mostly dun colored body and black and white markings. They are fast, pack-hunting predators, with long legs and a long feathered tail used as a counterbalance to help them make tight turns. Warhawks are also capable of flight with their broad, clawed feathered wings, though they prefer to rest on the ground. Although they have a toothy maw, their most dangerous and most iconic weapon is the large, razor edged claw on their foot, which they use to pin down smaller prey or lacerate larger prey or predators. Indeed, these fearsome claws have inspired the name of at least one Space Marine chapter: the Crimson Talons, a White Scars descendant from the pastoral world of Timpagonos that works with a large, horse-sized breed of warhawk unique to that world bred for war.

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The traditional use of warhawks are for sport and gathering food. When honing their skills by hunting in the Khum Karta mountains of Chogoris, Astartes of the White Scars use warhawks to help them in the hunt, rewarding their pets with the choicest giblets. Many, including the White Scars, prefer to tame wild warhawks from the wild instead of using a domestic one, citing that it creates a closer bond of trust with the beast. The less glamorous individuals of Chogoris’s many tribes use warhawks to help catch game to supplement their usual diet of herdstock. In addition, many will use warhawks to help corral and protect livestock in the manner of a sheepdog. Although adult warhawks are usually too large for a human to carry, some Astartes of the White Scars have been known to let their prized pets rest on their armor. As with many domesticated species, there are a large number of specialized warhawk breeds found throughout the galaxy, ranging from the aforementioned Crimson Giant to the meter long Oscillated Grey, a more sedate breed used for vermin catching on Civilized Worlds.

In contrast to some other domesticated predators like Fenrisian wolves, warhawks are typically not used in battle. Compared to these species warhawks are rather fragile, and their organic bodies cannot keep up with the untiring mechanical steeds of the White Scars. However many Pastoral Worlders will use them as trackers to hunt down and kill feral Gretchin and other similar targets, and when war comes to the Pastoral Worlds warhawks can be used in the manner of a war hound.

Despite their similarities in usage, warhawks are not dogs. They have a much more fickle temperament similar to felines, and while they are often hostile to unknown strangers. Similarly, warhawks cannot be caged or kenneled like dogs. Unless you are dealing with one of the more demure domesticated breeds, attempts to do so typically result in warhawks going mad from the confinement at best or sating their boredom by figuring out how to open their cages at worst. On Chogoris and the other pastoral worlds warhawks are typically allowed to roam free, their handlers expecting them to return to their homes based on gifts of food and attention, though they do mark their animals to denote which ones are theirs. The Pastoral Worlders see this as only right, a loyal warhawk should not be punished for their loyalty by being forbidden to fly free and feel the wind in their face. Furthermore, by allowing their prize warhawks to roam free it ensures the best warhawks continue to breed are not removed from the population.

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=== Fenrisian Wolves ===
<div class="toccolours mw-collapsible mw-collapsed" style="100%">'''''Homo sapiens fenrisiensis'''''

Leman Russ’ initial experiments with the Canis Helix on Fenris were, to put it bluntly, a complete disaster. Although the idea behind the Canis Helix was to augment the abilities of human soldiers with genes from other animals on Old Earth, the first trials went way too far and ended up producing creatures more beast than man. Russ was horrified by these first experiments, and tried to put the aspirants out of their misery. However, some of these experiments managed to escape and life in general has a funny way of surviving in places it’s not supposed to. Within a few generations, the harsh native ecosystem of Fenris was being dominated by a new, invasive predator. The people of Fenris may not be splice descendants, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t any around.

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Most people who know the origin of the Wolves of Fenris often expect them to look like merely hairy humans, or at least something that can reasonably be described as humanoid. This is not the case. Your average Fenris Wolf weighs somewhere between 500 and 600 kilograms (over 1000 pounds), and has a skull nearly a meter in length. Fenris wolves will actually grow in size throughout their entire lives, which is thought to be an indicator of their super-soldier ancestry, artificial genes used to promote muscle and bone development being re-purposed for continuous growth. Their canine teeth have distinct knife-like edges, resembling a monkey more than a wolf, and their front limbs are disturbingly human-like with dexterous opposable thumbs despite primarily walking on all fours. The overall body shape of a Fenrisian wolf is more like a cross between a wolf, bear, and a lion rather than a straight wolf, allowing them to grapple with enemies or climb low branches in search of prey. There are some human traits remaining, such as their eerily human eyes with white sclera, but one would be hard-pressed to see them.

It’s not clear how intelligent the Fenrisian wolves really are. It is clear they are clever, moreso than any non-human organism on Old Earth, but the question is are they only intelligent as, say, [[Nobledark_Imperium_Imperial_Forces#Beastmen_and_Ogryn|Primeval Beastmen]] or are they really more intelligent than they appear and merely limited by their lack of ability to communicate. At the very least, the fact that Fenrisian Wolves are easily tamed and are capable of performing complex behaviors that an animal like a dog isn’t capable of suggests there is something going on in their brains. The Adeptus Biologicus would love to try to uplift the Fenris wolves back to sapience like the Beastmen and the Ogryn, but they’re worried any attempt to do so would blow back on the people of Fenris because of how genetically close the two are.

The people of Fenris venerate the Fenrisian wolf above all other creatures because out of all the animals on Fenris it alone represents all the virtues of man. Like humans, the Fenris wolf is clever, strong, brave, loyal, and stubborn, all at the same time. The fact that they behave this way because they are actually abhumans rather than actual animals is something that is either not well known among the people of Fenris or glossed over, especially since Leman Russ made sure that wasn’t common knowledge in the first place.

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=== Grox ===

<div class="toccolours mw-collapsible mw-collapsed" style="100%">'''''

The grox is a cornerstone of Imperial culture. In many cases, the presence of grox is the deciding factor in determining whether or not a world is livable as opposed to merely survivable. Although originally native to the world of Solomon, the grox has a number of biological traits that make it extremely valuable and have led to it becoming the most widespread livestock animal in the entire Imperium.

The grox’s biology and life cycle owes itself to the unusual evolutionary history of life on Solomon. For the most part, the history of life on Solomon was very similar to life on Earth. Single-celled life emerged, photosynthesizers filled the atmosphere with oxygen, multicellular life appeared, and eventually animal life (with a backbone, like Earth) clambered its way out of the water. However, this is the point where things started to go a little bit differently. One of the earliest experiments in life on land on Solomon was the grox, which due to several factors ended up steamrolling its competition and dominating the ecosystem. First, grox were big, growing up to 5 m in length and weighing up to 1000 kg, much larger than any of its potential predators or competitors. What's more, due to an extremely active metabolism and efficient digestive system, Grox could grow incredibly quickly, reaching full adult size in over six months, less so if fed a nutrient-rich diet.

The end result was an impoverished terrestrial ecosystem, with almost no native land animals over 5 kg in weight aside from the grox. The grox, however, more than makes up for this lack of megafauna by being a complete and utter omnivore, feeding on plants, animals, even some mineral formations. At some point above the first link or so on the food chain, Solomon's terrestrial ecosystem turns into big grox eating smaller grox until the point where that no longer becomes feasible. The grox’s infamous rapid growth rate evolved at least in part so that juvenile grox could rapidly reach the size range where they were too large to be eaten by other adults.

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This ability to grow fast and eat almost anything made grox extremely appealing to the Imperium. Grox could be released onto planets with normally hostile biochemistry and turn the native plant life into edible food (though they aren't miracle workers, as evidenced by the absence of grox on Necromunda). Additionally, because of their habit of eating anything and everything, grox meat contains all the nutrients necessary for most species to survive. Grox meat is even a source of carbohydrates similar to ork meat and some fungi (though grox are unrelated to orks and other orkoids) as the physiology of life on Solomon is slightly different than that of Earth. Grox are used for more than just meat; grox hide (primarily taken from the area beneath the withers, which is covered in bony scutes) is an important source of leather on many planets. This led the Imperium to export grox all over the galaxy and Solomon itself becoming a borderline Hive World in response to the demand for grox meat. Today, almost the entire surface of Solomon is devoted to grox agriculture and the planet has often been called “the galaxy’s biggest grox farm”.

Nevertheless, grox are not without their own set of problems. The same traits that make grox ideal livestock in harsh environments also makes them aggressive, gluttinous, and territorial. Given that there is very little to eat on Solomon and Grox grow fast, there is always fighting over who gets food, who controls where the food is, and who becomes food. Grox horns are not only used for fighting over access to mates but for fighting over access to resources. Wild grox typically view humans as either competitors for food or prey that can potentially be overpowered and eaten. Despite having thick, clumsy limbs grox are also incredibly strong and are capable of quick bursts of speed when necessary. Any attempt to keep large herds of grox together would be doomed to failure due to their territorial nature. As a result, it is often necessary to sterilize grox (which are naturally hermaphrodites) in captivity, which makes them docile and lose their territorial instincts.

Sterilizing grox has more benefits than merely making them docile, as sterilized grox actually grow larger and faster than un-neutered ones. It is theorized by Adeptus Biologis researchers that sterilization causes the grox to grow faster and become less territorial because all of the energy that would normally be devoted to reproduction is devoted to growth, and sterilization means the grox are no longer competing to pass their genes on to the next generation, similar to what is seen in parasite-sterilized animals on other planets (including Earth). Nevertheless, it is always necessary to keep a few aggressive, fertile individuals around for the sake of maintaining the herd, which are typically kept in solitary pens when not being bred and are often marked in some way (such as having bright painted colors on their side) to make it clear to groxherders from a distance which individuals are safe to approach.

Grox are by far the most common livestock animal in the Imperium. However, in spite of what one might think, grox tend to be a more common sight on worlds that have little to no other livestock industry (particularly worlds that cannot support other types of livestock), than the livestock-heavy Pastoral Worlds. Although small grox herds exist on all Pastoral Worlds, other pastoral worlders view grox with disdain, seeing them as a pest that will eat their preferred livestock out of house and home. This sentiment is not without merit. Despite being a valued livestock animal, grox are opportunists and survivors, and on many worlds grox have gone feral and become dangerous invasive species. Perhaps the best example of this is on Catachan, where grox were imported in 127.M33 in an attempt to make the planet more livable to its native inhabitants. The project was largely a failure, as the constantly growing jungle destroyed any attempt at keeping the grox enclosed and most of the fertile grox escaped into the jungle. Millennia later, feral grox are still a common sight across Catachan. Grox are not even at the bottom of the food chain on Catachan, feeding on small animals and carnivorous plants in addition to less aggressive vegetation.

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[[Category:Nobledark Imperium]]

Nobledark Imperium Xenos

2020-09-01T19:53:11Z

2601:647:CA01:2410:443E:B2AA:ECA7:511A: /* Wyverns */

'''This page is part of the Nobledark Imperium, a fan re-working of the Warhammer 40,000 Universe. See the [[Nobledark Imperium|Nobledark Imperium Introduction]] and [[Nobledark Imperium|Main Page]] for more information on the alternate universe'''

The Imperium, [[Nobledark_Imperium_Forces_of_Chaos|Chaos]], Ork WAAAGH!, Necron Star Empire, and tyranid Hive Mind are not the only ones vying for dominance of the galaxy, though they are its largest powers. This is a page for all those other species not directly associated with the major powers, such as the Hrud. This is also a page for those species who although no longer existing in have had a significant effect on its history, ranging from the Old Ones and Necrontyr of the War in Heaven sixty-six million years ago to the human-made Men of Gold and Iron Minds of the glory days of the [[Dark_Age_of_Technology|Dark Age]] Great and Bountiful Human Dominion.

Xenos species that are members of the Imperium can be found under [[Nobledark Imperium Member States]]

NOTE: This is also a temporary holding area for the entries related to the Necrons, tyranids, Orks, and Dark Eldar, with the hope being to eventually spin these sections off into their own pages once they get long enough.

== Da Orkz ==

=== The Beast ===

<div class="toccolours mw-collapsible mw-collapsed" style="100%">''''' He Who Will Bring His People Much Slaughter: '''''

Urlakk Urgg. The Beast. The big one. The lord who will bring his people much slaughter. The single greatest mortal threat ever faced by the Imperium, and the yardstick to which all other Ork warbosses are measured.

Urlakk Urg was originally the warboss of Ullanor, the center of an Ork empire that laid claim to a number of star systems. It is thought that the Imperium was lucky to have encountered Ullanor when they did, as Ullanor and similar Ork empires such as Gorro seemed to be reaching a critical mass beyond which Brain Boyz would start being produced. Already the Orks of Ullanor and Gorro were developing technology and organization beyond what orks were capable of for most of Imperial History (like proto-Attack Moons and sedentary settlements), and orks like Urlakk Urg seemed to be much smarter and of a different caste from the usual ork, though not fully Brain Boyz.

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The Ullanor Crusade was a bloody slog, made more difficult by the fact that the usual strategy of “shoot the warboss first” was untenable as Urg was smart enough to not to reveal his face in the open until his Boyz were in the thick of the fighting. The conflict only turned in the Imperium’s favor when Horus provoked Urlakk Urg into revealing himself, taunting Urlakk Urg from his flagship until Urg gave Horus the coordinates to his location, demanding that the coward face him in single combat. Horus responded by slagging Urg’s palace from orbit and decapitating most of the WAAAGH!’s leadership in one blow. Normally this sort of practice worked wonders, and indeed it did win the day in the Ullanor Crusade, but slagging the palace from orbit meant that Urg’s body was unaccounted for, which allowed him to escape unnoticed and swear bloody vengeance on the Imperium from the barren rock he ended up on. This led him to an encounter with [[Chaos Gods|four other individuals]] who also had a very vested interest in deposing the Imperium.

The Chaos Gods assisted in the Beast’s phoenix-like return to power, giving him access to Warp portals that allowed him to rapidly assert dominance over WAAAGH!s that were otherwise a galaxy apart, and giving him blessings to exploit the loophole in Ork logic of “bigger equals boss”. The Beast’s assault was basically a massive blitzkrieg that came screaming across the northern border of the Imperium, backed up by daemons, Crone Eldar, and Dark Eldar raiding in their wake like pilot fish following a big shark. Daemonic incursions and smaller WAAAGH!s erupted in other parts of the galaxy such that the Imperium was besieged on all fronts and had trouble creating a unified front against the main push of the WAAAGH! to the north. Although many smaller WAAAGH!’s split off from the Beast’s main force, the Beast’s plan was to head straight for Ullanor, convert the planet into an attack planet, and then make a beeline for Old Earth to kill the Steward and claim Isha for Chaos (Isha wasn’t on Earth at the time since this was before the alliance was formed, but that was a secondary concern). There was some stopping for lootin’ an’ pillagin’, but by Ork standards it was extremely fast. Most early battles in the War of the Beast, especially on the main front, tended to be [[Nobledark_Imperium_Primarchs#Sanguinius|pyrrhic victories]] or [[Nobledark_Imperium_Notable_People#Jenetia_Krole|heroic last stands]] for the Imperium at best, the defenders swept away by the sheer force of the green tide.

It wasn’t until the Beast’s forces entered the core territories of the Segmentum Solar, despite being harried by Horus, Kurze, and Guilliman, that his momentum began to slow. His first plan upon entering the Sol System was to ram Ullanor into Earth, sterilizing everything on the surface. Some say it’s because hitting one planet with another like billiard balls is ded orky. Some say the Beast was so obsessed with revenge he didn’t care how orky it was. Maybe it was both, and the Beast was mixing business with pleasure. However, that plan was foiled by the actions Ollanius Pius, which forced the Beast to try and take the planet using ground troops. We all know how that ended up. The death of the Beast marked the turning point of the war, as the warbosses could no longer effectively cooperate and were picked off one by one, with the most successful carving out their own petty kingdoms.

The Beast’s status and accomplishments are legendary among the orks. The most dangerous warbosses throughout history have taken up the title of Beast (specifically, Mag Uruk Thraka) in the hopes of achieving a similar level of infamy to Urlakk Urg. These Beast WAAAGH!s are some of the greatest threats to the Imperium, comparable to a major tyranids Hive Fleet (e.g., Behemoth, Kraken, or Leviathan) or one of Malys’ Black Crusades. However, until [[Nobledark_Imperium_Notes#Ghazghull|recently]], none of the successors to the title had the potential to measure up to the original.

Importantly, unlike most of his successors, who either consider Chaos an ally of convenience or just pay lip service to its ideals at best, and Ghazghull, who hates Chaos, the Beast was the only major warboss to actively embrace Chaos and reject the Gorkamorka to pledge his devotion to, quote, “gods who actually do something for their worshippers”. As a result, he got a shitload of blessing including marks from all four Chaos Gods and the mark of Chaos Ascendant, which turned him into an absolute nightmare the size of a hab-block that tore through a number of the Imperium’s greatest heroes and took the Steward and Eldrad (with some softening up from Sanguinius) to finally bring him down.

Ironically, the Beast’s greatest flaw was wrath of all things. Orks love fighting. They love fighting and winning even more. The Beast wasn’t angry that the Imperium declared war on him. He was angry that they took his empire from him. Not only that, but they did so in one of the most underhanded methods possible, by tricking him and then nuking him from orbit rather than defeating him in face-to-face combat. The danger of this flaw could already be seen in Ullanor Crusade, Urg was a kunnin’ ork and knew Horus was trying to trick him but eventually his anger got the better of him. Anger can be a powerful motivator, as well a deadly flaw. The Beast’s anger gave him the motivation to unite most of the Ork race within a few years, but it also led him to making a lot of short-sighted, kneejerk decisions without thinking of the consequences like allying with the Chaos gods and [[Nobledark_Imperium_Writing#Ork_Diplomacy|tactical errors due to trying to make a statement rather than just krumpin’ da gitz]]. Ironically, this would have probably gotten him killed by his followers once the rush of battle wore off and the orks started looking to their long-term future, but the Beast’s lust for revenge did the job for him and accidentally [[Nobledark_Imperium_Xenos#Brain_Boyz|set the Orks back millennia]].

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=== Brain Boyz ===

<div class="toccolours mw-collapsible mw-collapsed" style="100%">''''' The Menace in Green: '''''

''“It’s no good. Bloody greenskins set a trap for us. Send a few trigger-happy Boyz our way, knowing that we’d think that’s all they got and advance. So we get cocky and march our way through the mountain pass. Then once we get too far in to retreat the Orks show they’re not as dead as we all thought and cut off the mountain pass. Only way out of the beartrap is to go deeper into ork territory. Don’t you see, Commissar? It’s an ambush.”''<br>
''“Ambush? What do you mean ambush? Orks don’t set am–”''<br>
-- Last words of the Hekaton 234th, right before being attacked by an Ork ambush

Brain Boyz are perhaps the greatest threat to the Imperium to come out of the Orkish menace in recent years. The greenskins have produced numerous threats over the millennia, including the numerous Beast WAAAGH!s, Armageddon Wars, the Wyrd War that decimated the legion Terra’s Sons, or the Black Croosade [sic] called by the Chaos Ork Rotfang Badgut, but these were often sector or segmentum-scale threats, none of which could compare to sheer destruction wrought by the War of the Beast. Some, particularly in areas that saw relatively little fighting during the War of the Beast, were foolish enough to say that the Orks were no longer capable of posing any organized threat to the Imperium, despite the Orks being responsible for the most brutal conflict in Imperial history. Orks were often seen as little more than cannon fodder, little more than mercenaries or catspaws of greater powers like Chaos or marauding distractions from more threatening adversaries like the Necrons or tyranids, not to be underestimated but not capable of being a significant threat on their own (no matter what the ravings of the inhabitants of the Sol system and its nearby territories had to say). All of which had to be reassessed when Brain Boyz made their reappearance on the galactic stage.

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Most inhabitants of the Milky Way, or at least those who have any idea of how the greater galaxy works beyond their own little world, have a general understanding of the Ork life cycle. Ork spores gradually orkiform the world, a single spore capable of germinating into a variety of different morphotypes depending on the availability of nutrients and the strength of the WAAAGH! field, producing first mushrooms, then more complex orkoid organisms such as squigs. Then snotlings appear, followed by gretchins, followed by orks. A complete self-sustaining ecosystem and war machine. What most don’t know, however, is that there is an additional stage to the Ork life cycle. Eventually, the Ork population reaches a “critorkal mass”, which prompts the development of a new Ork caste: the Brain Boyz. Orks become more intelligent the more of them there are, but Brain Boyz produce a quantum leap in Ork functionality, increasing the intellect of all orkoid lifeforms around them just by their sheer presence. The appearance of Brain Boyz in an Ork WAAAGH! is often heralded by an increase in the sophistication of Ork technology, including the appearance of more advanced Ork devices such as reliable tellyportas, attack moons, and gravity whips as the WAAAGH! field becomes strong enough to unlock the knowledge hidden in their genetic code. Indeed, many Great Crusade-era Warbosses, including Urlakk Urg of Ullanor (a.k.a. The Beast), the Mekboy Warboss of Gorro, and Gharkul Blackfang of Gyros-Thravian, all of whom ruled over Ork empires even more advanced than Charadon, Bork, or Octarius are today, could be seen as proto-Brain Boyz in a sense. Although the presence of Brain Boyz does not preclude the creation of these devices, their production certainly increases following their appearance.

In the past, the appearance of Brain Boyz was a cyclical thing, like a tidal cycle. Over the course of thousands of years, the Ork population would grow, the WAAAGH! field would hit a critical mass, and then Brain Boyz would appear. The Orks would then mostly unite under a single banner to wage WAAAGH! on the rest of the galaxy before being beaten back and the Brain Boys hunted down and destroyed (typically at great cost), returning the Orks to square one. Typically this was done by the Old Eldar Empire or in later years the Interstellar League of humans and their allies during Dark Age of Technology (for which Brain Boy WAAAGH!s were one of the reasons the League formed in the first place). And so the cycle would repeat itself. However, after the Fall of the Eldar and the Age of Strife, there was no longer any eldar empire or league of species to prune back the Orkoid menace. It is estimated that had the Great Crusade not set out when it did, in half a millennium or less Brain Boyz would have re-emerged with no checks on their power. This estimate might have been even lower if the WAAAGH! forged by the Beast had managed to hold. The great Beast ironically did the galaxy a favor, setting Ork back several thousand years by rushing headlong into war with the Imperium.

What the rest of the galaxy also don’t realize is that Brain Boyz are not just Orks with added kunnin’. Brain Boyz occur when the WAAAGH! field is high enough that a single Ork spore divides into twin zygotes. This isn’t exactly uncommon, Ork spores twin all the time, but typically these are chance occurrences whose products grow into two orks or two gretchin. Brain Boy spores are produced by induced twinning and grow into two different Orkoid lifeforms, an ork and a gretchin reflecting the duality of orkiness: brutal cunning and cunning brutality. Often, the ork will start out runty and the gretchin will come out particularly large, due to the gretchin twin taking up nutrients that would otherwise go to the Ork (though in the case of Ghazghull and Makari both came out particularly runty, likely due to the circumstances of their birth). Typically, this twinning is not immediately noticed, Orks typically don’t make it a point to record where a particular boy or grot is born after all, but the two Brain Boyz know each other on sight and are in constant psychic contact with one another (similar phenomena have been noted in eldar and human psyker twins). That said, most Orks instinctively recognize Brain Boyz once they reach some level of prominence. This ork-gretchin duality is just as practical as symbolic. Few would suspect a gretchin of being capable of altering the behavior of a WAAAGH! If the ork Brain Boy is killed, the WAAAGH! doesn’t instantly collapse from in-fighting and the sudden loss of brainpower. If a foe knows about the gretchin Brain Boy, they are often too paranoid about the gretchin Brain Boy to notice the ork one putting a choppa in their face.

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=== Ork Empires of Charadon, Octarius, and Bork ===

Contrary to popular belief, when the Beast was slain on Old Earth, the remainder of the Orkish army did not miraculously disperse into a puff of spore and WAAAGH!-flavored smoke. True, the Orks were thrown into disarray at the loss of their leader, but Orks are more used to radical changes in leadership than humans, and there were still plenty of Orks on Old Earth. Once the Orks were driven from the Sol System, the long and costly Reclamation of Old Earth began. Any spot on which an ork has shed blood is guaranteed to produce more Orks, unless the body is burned or more drastic measures are taken. However, this was Old Earth, the cradle of humanity, and its stubborn people would (literally) move mountains in order to ensure their planet was Ork-free. The intensity of the campaign to ensure that the planet was never Orkiformed was nearly as destructive to Old Earth’s ecosystem as the wrought by the forces of the Beast themselves.

The threat of the Beast’s hordes extended far beyond the Sol system. Through violence, cunning, brutality, promises of a good fight, and copious use of Chaos-sponsored Warp portals to cut down on travel time, the Beast had managed to suborn every major Warboss and unite virtually all WAAAGH!s worth noting in the Milky Way in little more than six standard years. It is estimated that at the time of the War of the Beast, nearly eighty percent of the Ork population was under Urlakk Urg’s control in some fashion. Upon hearing news of the Beast’s death, many of the more ambitious Warbosses attempted to break off and form WAAAGH! of their own, rather than follow “that Urlakk git’s” orders. Some of these Warbosses were more successful than others.

The most successful were the Arch-Arsonist of Charadon, the Overfiend of Octarius, and the Arch-Mangler of Mork. These three Warbosses carved out massive areas of space, forming the basis for what would become the modern Octarius, Charadon, and Bork sectors. The Octarius, Charadon, and Bork sectors are less sectors in the traditional Imperial sense, and more designations for the massive amounts of space that these three Orkish empires control. Although many later Ork enclaves have sprung up due to the increasingly strained nature of Imperial resources, these three empires can trace their roots all the way back to the War of the Beast. The Arch-Arsonist, Overfiend, and Arch-Mangler are even still around, after a fashion, even though the original Orks that carved out these dominions are now long dead. The identity of these rulers has changed regularly, as is typical of a kratocracy, but each Ork that takes control of each of these empires takes on the identity and in some cases the mannerisms of the previous rulers, even adopting the oversized gorget that has become a symbol of Ork power since it was used by Urlakk Urg during the War of the Beast. Sometimes by chance a Chaos Ork has even risen to the throne. Of course, these Chaos Orks typically fail in their goal to convert these empires to the worship of the Chaos Gods, and few stay in power for long, especially if they make the mistake of badmouthing the Gorkamorka.

The Imperium was unable to do much to stop these Warbosses at the time as they were still recovering from the War of the Beast and were still trying to scrape together a semblance of an empire in their own space. By the time the Imperium had recovered enough to retaliate, the Orks had already dug in too deep to effectively without a massive waste of manpower and materiel. Even during the Imperial Reconquista, when several smaller Orkish empires were crushed underfoot by Machairius and his forces, these three managed to stubbornly resist any efforts at conquest. Furthermore, as much as the Imperium is loath to admit it, the empires also serve a useful purpose in acting as buffer states against outside xenos threats, particularly Charadon which shares a border with the Necron Star Empire.

That is not to say the Imperium is content to sit and do nothing. The Imperium knows full well what happens when one leaves Orks to their own devices, as seen by the Empires on Gorro and Ullanor during the Great Crusade. The Imperium regularly sends assassins into Ork-held territories, especially the Empires of Octarius, Charadon, and Bork, in order to take out any kunnin’ or charismatic Warboss in the hopes of keeping an Ork like the Beast from ever arising again. Chaos appears to have a similar idea, sending their own assassins after any promising warboss, in order to keep the Orks stupid and easily manipulated. Unfortunately, this means that the few Orks who do survive this gauntlet of assassins tend to be the smartest and most kunnin’ of the lot, meaning that all this action may have done is lower the threshold for Brain Boyz to emerge.

=== Empires of Gathrog and Dregruk ===

To the galactic northeast of Cadia and the Eye of Terror lie two great Ork Empires, the Empire of Gathrog and the Empire of Dregruk. These Ork empires are so large that if the two WAAAGH!s were to combine forces, it is likely that they could easily overrun Cadia and the Cadian Gate before the Imperium could do much of anything about it. Fortunately for the Imperium, these two empires hate each other with a passion, and would much rather fight each other than team up against the Imperium.

This is due in large part to the two empire’s choice of patrons. Gathrog is one of the few Ork WAAAGH!s to be composed almost entirely of Chaos Orks (likely because of its close proximity to the Eye), with the current Arch-Dictator of Gathrog being a Khornate. The Great Despot of Dregruk and his forces, on the other hand, are staunch followers of the Gorkamorka, and in recent years have sworn fealty to Ghazghkull Mag Uruk Thraka as part of his efforts to consolidate forces in preparation for the 5th War of Armageddon.

===The Proto-Orks and the Krork ===

See [[Nobledark_Imperium_Xenos#The_Proto-Orks_and_the_Krork|The Proto-Orks and the Krork]]

== Necron Star Empire ==

=== Dynasties of the Star Empire ===

==== Ahmontekh and the Suhbekhar Dynasty ====

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The leadership of the Necron Star Empire is a pale shadow of its former self. While Szarekh, first and mightiest of their number, still reigns, the other two members of the Triarch, his left and right hands, were lost in the millions of years during the Great Sleep. Szarekh's right hand was Ahmontekh of the Suhbekhar Dynasty, a skilled warrior with an eye for long-term strategy, valued not only for his ability in battle but for his wise council. Ahmontekh's skill in battle was such that he was one of the warriors that fought alongside the C'tan and even struck the killing blow that slew the Great Weaver of the K’nib. When the War in Heaven ended, Ahmontekh entered the Great Sleep without issue like so many other Necrons.

Then, approximately twenty-three million years ago, the Old Eldar Empire made the mistake of waking Ahmontekh up early. Although separated from his dynasty, having been put into stasis alongside some of the finest soldiers and war machines of the Necron Star Empire due to his status as Triarch, Ahmontekh had enough resources entombed with him in his royal crypt to pose a serious problem. Ahmontekh’s response to being awoken by the children of the Old Ones was swift, immediate, and fiery. Worlds that had known peace for millions of years burned under Ahmontekh's assault, their state of the art defense systems no match for ancient Necrontyr technology. In particular, the eldar swore eternal vengeance on Ahmontekh for destroying the Crone World of Maldek, killing trillions in a single stroke, and declared they would hunt him to the ends of the galaxy. Worse yet was that Ahmontekh’s destruction wasn’t simply mindless. He was looking for the other tomb worlds and his buried lord. If the eldar didn’t stop him soon, the Old Empire would have a full-scale revival of the Necron Star Empire on their hands.

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Then the Old Empire were approached by a strange figure, a robotic avatar of an unknown species with a single cycloptic eye. Exactly who this being was remains unknown, but told the eldar it knew of a way to destroy Ahmontekh. Long ago before the Necrons had traded flesh and blood for metal, Ahmontekh had warred with the Charnovokh Dynasty, which at the time had been ruled by his cousin. Although outright warfare between the Suhbekhar and Charnovokh Dynasties had been stopped by the control protocols, the memory of the rivalry still existed in Ahmontekh’s mind. The stranger could take that seed of resentment, distort it and expand it, until nothing else occupied the Phaeron’s thoughts. While Ahmontekh was a skilled fighter and cunning strategist, his weakness was his lack of scientific knowledge. Like most Phaerons, Ahmontekh knew nothing of how technology actually worked, and therefore no way to stop anyone from subverting the functions of his mind. Ahmontekh would be made predictable and easy to destroy by his madness. The eldar considered any plan to destroy Ahmontekh to be a good idea, but they didn’t notice the stranger spoke such words with a heavy heart. Although they knew the stranger wanted Ahmontekh gone as much as they did, what they didn’t know is that Gahet of the Cabal had approached the Eldar Empire as a last resort, having previously tried to sway Ahmontekh to his cause with words instead of violence.

The foul deed was done and Ahmontekh’s mental state began to deteriorate. Rather than seek out and awaken his liege Szarekh, he became increasingly focused on finding the resting place of his hated rivals the Charnovokh Dynasty and destroy them once and for all. Knowing his hated rivals were located somewhere on the Eastern fringe, Ahmontekh’s army marched increasingly eastward, making their movements extremely telegraphed and easy to intercept. The eldar assumed he was killed in a bombardment, especially given his forces fell apart soon after his assumed death, but such was not the case. In one last display of sentimentality out of regret for his own actions, Gahet crippled Ahmontekh’s cybernetic body and spirited him away before his death. He placed the mad Phaeron in a stasis capsule and laid him to rest in the old tomb complexes of the Suhbekhar Dynasty, hoping that Ahmontekh could one day be awakened and healed of his madness at a time when the galaxy no longer had to conceive of war.

With the incapacitation of the triarch, rule of the Suhbekhar Dynasty fell to Ahmontekh’s son, Ahhotekh. In many ways, Ahhotekh is everything that his father was not. Instead of being a proud regent and warrior, he is a schemer, who prefers to dispose of his foes through intrigue and manipulation rather than brute force. Ahhotekh has even gone so far as to disdain those who gain power through brute force; while he has killed in his share of duels, he considers those who make a habit of it to be insufficiently imaginative to actively hold power and capable of little more than savagery. Ahhotekh spent much of the War of Heaven disposing of his rivals in convenient accidents and other such methods, including stoking the rivalry between the Suhbekhar and Charnovokh Dynasties. Indeed, before the biotransference, Ahhotekh was actively plotting to dispose of Ahmontekh, the only member of the Suhbekhar Dynasty who would dare consider raising their hand against the Phaeron, something that the control protocols put a stop to.

Fortunately, despite Ahmontekh’s incapacitation the control protocols were still in place, his insanity was not enough to cause the Suhbekhar Dynasty to break the will of the Silent King. However, this is cold comfort for Ahhotekh, who isn’t sure if the control protocols also protect him since his father is incapacitated, not dead. As a result, Ahhotekh is intensely paranoid and relentlessly persecutes his underlings for any perceived sign of betrayal. After all, he would do the same to them if their positions were reversed. It is unclear, but ironically possible, that the control protocols forbidding harm to their liege are the only thing preventing the Necrons of the Suhbekhar Dynasty from rising up and uniting as one to overthrow Ahhotekh.

However, no matter how much he wants to, there is something preventing Ahhotekh from disposing of his dear father. Ahmontekh saw something when he was awakened, something that few others alive in the galaxy today still remember. The Silent King wants that information out of Ahmontekh’s head, as any intelligence on the state of the galaxy since the Great Sleep could prove highly useful in realizing the Star Empire’s plans. At the same time, Ahhotekh wants the control protocols to secure control of the Suhbekhar Dynasty, and as long as the Silent King’s orders leave room for creative interpretation of his orders he is willing to pursue it. Nevertheless, examining Ahmontekh’s mind is a slow process, one that must be carried out piecemeal by thousands of Crypteks. Seeing too much of Ahmontekh’s mind at once tends to drive any Necron who sees it insane.

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=== Necron Titans (Stalkers) ===

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For many years, after the reemergence of the Necron Star Empire, there was considerable debate among Imperial scholars as to what a Necron Titan would look like. Many theorized that a Necron Titan would simply look like a giant Necron. Others hypothesized that the C’tan were the Necron’s equivalents of Titans, and after the War in Heaven the Necrons may have had no need for Titan-scale weaponry. This was all before the Necron-Imperium Conflict, that brief period in M40 when tensions between the Imperium and the Necrontyr Star Empire ran hot after the Silent King demanded a trillion subjects for biotransference experiments before settling into the quasi-cold war state that it has today. It was during this period that the Necrons brought out some of the heavy weapons they had to bear, and Imperial scholars learned they had been wrong. Completely, horribly, wrong.

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In contrast to nearly all other races, Necron Titans, or Stalkers, are distinctly non-humanoid, almost arachnid or insect-like in appearance. This is perhaps best exemplified by the most commonly seen Necron Stalker, the Tomb Stalker. Rather than standing upright on two large limbs, Tomb Stalkers support their weight via dozens of insectoid limbs, resembling Earth centipedes. These limbs are not only effective in carrying the construct’s weight, but also in burrowing through the ground and tearing through the armor plating of opposing vehicles and titans. This is true not only of the generic Warhound-sized Tomb Stalkers most commonly seen, but also of the larger Scolopendra class Tomb Stalkers, which can be the size of an Imperator Titan.

Compared to other Stalkers, Tomb Stalkers use little in the way of quantum shielding, which is thought to be the Necron’s answer to Void Shields. Instead, they use the very earth as their shield, burrowing beneath the ground in order to ambush their prey. In doing so, Tomb Stalkers are able to achieve something very few Titans are capable of performing: stealth. The effectiveness of the Tomb Stalker’s burrowing strategy became clear during the Necron-Imperium Conflict, when a Tomb Stalker burrowed a circle around an Imperator Titan before erupting from the ground, using the unstable substrate to drag the Imperial Titan and its Princeps to their grave.

Surprisingly enough, Tomb Stalkers are thought to be weaponized construction vehicles. Records obtained from the Imperium’s Necron contacts report that Tomb Stalkers were originally used in constructing the vast tomb complexes that the Necrons inhabited in their heyday. The Necrontyr apparently evolved on a world with blistering levels of stellar radiation, which would kill most lifeforms over an extended period of time. As a result, the only logical place to build cities on the Necrontyr homeworld was underground, resulting in an architectural style that resembled increasingly ornate bunker complexes. The Necrontyr found this architectural style to be highly effective in protecting against meteoroid strikes and orbital bombardments, even after they spread off their homeworld to planets less affected by radiation.

At the other end of the spectrum are the Crypt Stalkers, which resemble gigantic versions of the Terran daddy longlegs. The control center and weaponry are all mounted on the central body of the Crypt Stalker, allowing them to instantly change direction in response to new threats, even capable of rotating their heat rays 180 degrees and suddenly reversing direction without even having to turn. Crypt Stalkers have a sensory array which gives them a nearly 360 degree field of vision, and their long legs allow them to simply step over most obstacles in their path. Crypt Stalkers make much heavier use of void shielding, mainly because their small body and comparatively narrow legs would make them otherwise easy targets for anti-titan weaponry. Triarch Stalkers are similar to Crypt Stalkers, except are smaller with a distinct pilot (closer to tank-sized) and are not capable of omnidirectional movement. They compensate for this with huge melee appendages they can use as melee weapons.

It is still not entirely clear how Stalkers work. It is clear that Stalkers have some kind of intelligence, given their ability to react to changing conditions on the battlefield, but whether that consciousness is a pilot or intrinsic to the machine itself is unknown. The kneejerk assumption would be that Stalkers are operated by an uploaded Necron consciousness, or otherwise powered by a C’tan shard. However, evidence indicates that Tomb Stalkers were around in nearly their current form (minus the heavy weaponry) before the First Wars of Secession, given their use in carving out the underground complexes the Necrontyr called home, long before the Necrontyr had developed biotransferrence or discovered the C’tan. The current running hypothesis is that the Stalkers are controlled by some manner of artificial intelligence, similar to the Scarabs, Canoptek Wraiths, and Crypt Spyders, except on a much larger scale.

Nemesor Zandrekh is known to treat his personal Tomb Stalker like a beloved pet, but it is unknown if this is typical or just another one of the Nemesor’s…eccentricities.

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=== Independent and Imperial-aligned Dynasties ===

==== Nemesor Zahndrekh and the Gidrim Dynasty ====

See [[Nobledark Imperium Notes#Nemesor Zahndrekh|Nemesor Zahndrekh]] (TEMPORARY LINK)

==== Trazyn the Infinite and Solemnace ====

See [[Nobledark Imperium Notable Planets#Solemnace|Solemnace]]

==== Xun'Bakyr and the Maynarkh Dynasty ====

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Of all the independent Necron dynasties, the Maynarkh Dynasty is perhaps the biggest threat to the Imperium. Even as far back as the War in Heaven, the Maynarkh Dynasty were known for their brutality and cruelty, acting as the Silent King’s pet monsters and wetwork agents. This behavior was no different under the Maynarkh Dynasty’s last and latest Phaerakh: Xun’bakyr, the Mother of Oblivion. Eldar Harlequins speak of countless atrocities and genocides, all perpetrated by Necrons in glowing colors of brass and orange. Indeed, the brutality of Xun’bakyr and the Maynarkh Dynasty was so great that just before the Great Sleep several Phaerons, normally so subservient as to the point of indolence, approached the Silent King to suggest that the Silent King take steps to make sure Xun’bakyr…didn’t wake up from the Great Sleep. It is rather telling that the Silent King actually agreed with this proposal.

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The Silent King may have had more than one reason to try and kill off the Maynarkh Dynasty. Phaerarch Xun’bakyr was, to put it bluntly, infatuated with the Nightbringer. When the Silent King gave the order for the Drazak Dynasty to kill Llandu’gor the Flayer, he had to noticeably take precautions to avoid letting the information reach Xun’bakyr, given that any weapon that could conceivably be used against the object of her obsession would likely cause her to react poorly. Even when the C’tan were shattered and the Silent King ordered the Necrons to go into their long hibernation, the news was kept hidden from the Maynarkh Dynasty, who went to sleep still believing they were following orders from their C’tan overlords. The Silent King may have been able to directly override the free will of Xun’bakyr, but given her instability, he didn’t want to risk the chance of her slipping her leash.

The Maynarkh Dynasty was put in hibernation in their traditional lands, far on the other side of the galaxy from the core of the Star Empire in what would one day become the Orpheus Sector of the Segmentum Pacificus. This was a high-density stellar cluster filled with numerous stars, some of which were…encouraged to go supernova early with a little bit of help from the Oruscar Dynasty’s Celestial Orrery. The Silent King hoped that the constant bombardment of electromagnetic pulses from exploding stars would damage the Maynarkh Dynasty to the point that they would never wake up from the Great Sleep, or at the very least be so damaged that they could only awake into an addled half-life.

It didn’t work. Although the Maynarkh Dynasty was damaged, they still awoke from the Great Sleep along with everyone else. Xun’bakyr’s madness and obsession was, if anything, worsened by the damage from the Great Sleep, to the point that the Silent King could no longer assert any control over her. Xun’bakyr seemed to rapidly realize she had been deceived, having awoken in a time when the great immortal C’tan had either been killed or reduced to hiding and the Silent King was the one trying to give her orders.

Rapidly dismissing the ravings of the would-be king, Xun’bakyr realized that her dynasty now needed a new purpose. It didn’t take her long to come up with one. Xun’bakyr decided that the Maynarkh Dynasty would rededicate themselves to killing all life in the galaxy itself, a creative masterpiece of death and destruction that might even go so far as killing time itself, all to attract the attention of the Nightbringer and to demonstrate her affection for the object of her infatuation. She is rather oblivious to the fact that despite all his paraphernalia and death-associated trappings, the Nightbringer is mostly concerned with sating his own gluttony and power-lust and would rather like causality to keep existing (though in his own image of course).

Xun'bakyr is obsessive and meticulous, in the long term focused absolutely on her deadly Idol, in the short term honing and perfecting some novel variety of star eater, 4D ionized shrapnel projector, or reality-pin to nail down certain doom. Xun'bakyr isn't a large scale threat only because she is so narrow in the scope of her ambitions. Her armies march along in the wake of the Nightbringer dealing death, and her scouts proceed him demonstrating their queen's new horrors. A blow from one will often be followed by a blow from the other, and together they make a horrible local threat and disaster within a sector, but beyond an additional horror following the Nightbringer's aimless killing spree they are not strategically significant. Xun'bakyr's universe destroying plans coming to fruition is an existential threat, but one that is sadly insignificant compared to many others. Although the rest of the Maynarkh Dynasty generally does not share her obsessions, the dynasty had always been composed of the worst sort of sadists, psychopaths, and war criminals and so jump at the chance to kill people in new and creative ways.

The first overt sign of action by the Maynarkh Dynasty was when the stars of the Caracol binary system went supernova during between Blood Pact and Imperial Forces. Both groups considered it the first shots of a surprise attack by some unknown third party. What they didn’t know was that rather than a military action, it was the result of a weapons test from one of Xun’bakyr’s harebrained schemes. The slaughter that followed was mostly unrelated. Mostly, in that the Maynarkh Dynasty was involved, and there was slaughter, but it had nothing to do with the two stars they had made go nova. Today, the Orpheus sector is nearly lifeless, haunted only by ghosts and madmen and ruled by an even madder queen.

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=== Blanks and the Pariah Gene ===

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66,000,000 years ago, the aristocracy of the Necrontyr Star Empire had a problem. They were in danger of losing the War in Heaven. Although they had the might of the C’tan and the Dolmen Gates at their back, the war was growing increasingly bloody as the Old Ones threw uplifted species after uplifted species into the meat grinder. And despite the Necrontyr’s understanding of the material realm, the Old Ones had the raw power of the illogical, irrational realm of the Immaterium at their disposal, which the ancient amphibians were the virtual unchallenged masters of. The Necrontyr needed some way to neutralize that advantage.

Several Crypteks came up with one possible solution: genetically engineering Necrontyr soldiers and eventually the entire Necrontyr to have an inverted Warp signature, canceling out the immense psychic power of the Old Ones and their servant races. However, although such this plan was possible for the Necrontyr Star Empire, the empire’s aristocracy was uncomfortable with the idea for several reasons. First, it would require mass-cloning Necrontyr soldiers in the billions, and would effectively make their entire standing army (not to mention all living Necrontyr) obsolete. Additionally, and more importantly, although the Necrontyr’s rank and file would be safe from psychic attack, it did nothing to stop the Old Ones from decapitating the Star Empire’s leadership by simply assassinating the Triarchy. The Necrontyr aristocracy, in their vaunted superiority, didn’t think very highly of a plan that benefited future generations but didn’t benefit them. Ultimately, the plan was shut down and cast aside in favor of the idea of biotransference, the brain child of Mag’ladroth but presented to the Necrontyr aristocracy by Mephet’ran. However, not everyone forgot about the project. At least not Mephet’ran, the Deceiver, nor his shards that escaped containment in the millions of years after the end of the War in Heaven while the Necrons slumbered.

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Millions of years later, as humanity’s Great Crusade rediscovered numerous human worlds thought lost during the Age of Strife, they came across an interesting phenomenon. On many worlds, there were occasionally individuals that were not only immune to the touch the warp, but in many cases were capable of actively suppressing these effects. These individuals, who came to be known as blanks or pariahs, were always very rare in a population, often in ratios of billions to one, and almost always seemed to exist as outcasts or hermits, or at best lived in small isolated communes far away from any major population center. Further investigation found that these blanks, who ranging from Jenetia Krole of Sibar to the nightmarish blacksoul assassin Spear, gained their strange warp-suppressing powers from an even more unusual source, a complete lack of what would conventionally be called a soul.

Blanks work by emitting an inverted warp signature, rather than the positively charged soul of most species. Their inverted warp signature interacts with background positive warp signature of the universe like the union of matter and anti-matter, creating a null aura that cancels both signatures out and creates a zone of no warp signature, either negative or positive, at all. Normally blanks are capable of funneling the energy from this reaction to their own ends. However, unlike normal humans, blanks are capable of surviving being completely disconnected from the Warp as their bodies are adapted to exist in the null zone their inverted Warp signature normally produces. Although they have an inverted warp signature, the null aura they create means they effectively have no soul.

Being in contact with a blank’s null aura is not a pleasant experience, and the experience typically gets worse the more psychically sensitive an individual is. To psykers, having their connection to the Warp muffled by a blank’s null aura produces actual pain and a sensation which some have described, usually after they finish screaming, as “sensory deprivation of a sixth sense” or “a feeling akin to losing a limb”. Only extremely strong psykers are capable of overwhelming a blanks null aura with minimal effect, but the only psykers capable of something like that are being like Magnus the Red or the Emperor of Mankind. However, such negative effects are not only limited to psykers. Any being with a soul is instinctively capable of sensing the void that blanks represent, and the muffling of their soul leads to an uncanny valley effect and feelings of dread and existential despair. This uncanny valley effect manifests itself in different ways. In some it causes migrane headaches, while in others it leads to anxiety attacks, while in others it manifests as a hard to define but odious stench. More subtle behavioral alterations have been suspected as well. Although some blanks have learned to weaponized this null aura, in the days before null-collars this often made the life of a blank short and miserable.

After much research, ranging from psychological to metabiological, the Imperium was able to connect this soullessness and anti-Warp aura to a genetic factor, known as the pariah gene. The pariah seemingly makes no sense given what is known about genetics and metaphysical biology. Humans with the pariah gene are rare, to the point that one is lucky to find one individual with the pariah gene on a planet with a population of billions. Additionally, because of their aura, blanks have a hard time finding mates and therefore producing offspring. This means that if the pariah gene originated during the Age of Strife, its carriers should simply disappear from the population due to random chance and genetic drift. But they don’t. If the pariah gene were recessive, it is easy to see how the gene could remain hidden in the populace for generations, only occasionally producing blanks. But it isn’t. The pariah gene is dominant, with individuals with two copies known as blacksouls. At least some parts of the pariah gene appear to be genetic: it is heritable and is disproportionately more common in women than men, suggesting a link to the X-chromosome. But the fact that it appears seemingly at random throughout the population has led many to wonder if the pariah “gene” is actually multiple genes (a recessive gene to turn the effect on and off, and a dominant one to control the intensity), or if the actual pariah allele is a symptom, rather than a cause.

From a metaphysical perspective blanks and the pariah gene are no less strange. In theory, it should be possible to evolve from having a soul with a strong positive Warp signature to one with a negative Warp signature like a blank. Indeed, the Tau have a particularly low Warp signature, and have displayed significant resistance to Warp corruption (though at a cost of being relatively helpless when a particularly powerful Warp entity like a daemon decides to focus its attention on them). The ancient Necrontyr are believed to have been the same way. The problem with this hypothesis is it requires a species to pass through a stage with a warp signature of zero, meaning a body that is alive only at the cellular level with no sentience. The only way to get around this hurdle would be artificial means, a species with positive Warp signature engineering individuals with an inverted one, though other explanations have been suggested. The fact that the pariah gene independently appeared in populations that should have had no contact with each other during the Age of Strife, and only in humans (though Kroot blanks have also been produced through the usual ways in which the Kroot assimilate traits) has also made many suspicious, though few would disagree that an adaptation to shut out the Warp would prove useful for an age when the galaxy was in chaos (and in Chaos), and desperate attempts at genetic engineering for survival were rampant in the early days of the Age of Strife.

Many people in the Imperium were disturbed by the idea of people without a soul. The Navigators in particular, being a race of all psykers, were especially disturbed by the existence of blanks, believing they were an attempt by the rest of the Imperium to create a contingency plan to wipe them all out. The Nobilis Navigo tried to whip people into a frenzy to kill the blanks by playing on the unnatural dread blanks produced until the Steward and the other High Lords told the Paternoval Envoy point blank they weren’t going to persecute an entire group of people who were not warp-tainted just because they looked different, no matter how much the Navis Nobilite screamed, rather unsubtly hinting between the lines that any excuse the Navigators made to persecute the pariahs could be easily turned around to apply to the Navigators. Though, the Imperium’s reasonings for defending the pariahs were not made out of simple compassion. The Navigators and pariahs were both useful resources, and the Imperium needed every advantage it could get in those days. If that meant wielding fire and anti-fire in accord, so be it.

As might be expected, the eldar were also horrified at the idea of blanks. Due to being a psychic species, the idea of life in eldar culture had become inimically tied to the idea of having a soul. To the eldar, the idea of being alive and thinking yet without a soul was uncomfortably close to the idea of being undead or a philosophical zombie. The only things the eldar had as a cultural comparison were the Harlequin Solitaires, and those were artificially created, rather than born. The implications of what Solitares represented and how they were created only made things worse. Today, blanks are by far the most discriminated against group of humans by the eldar. One just doesn’t see it firsthand very often given both parties are unable to interact except over a vid-screen. Opinions and prejudices towards humans vary from Dorhai to Ulthwé, but blanks are always treated worse than normal humans. Even the most tolerant eldar still see them as tragic monsters, people who didn’t want to be born as abominations against the natural order but ended up that way regardless. Kind of like they do Solitaires (only replacing “freaks of nature” with “necessary evil”).

When they awakened from their sixty-six million year sleep, the Necron Star Empire were also interested in the blanks. In particular, they were extremely suspicious as to how a species could develop a feature that almost exactly resembled the old mothballed Necrontyr research project, down to some of the smallest details. Szarekh’s chief cryptek, Illuminor Szeras, is particularly interested in the blanks and the applications of the pariah gene. The idea of making specialized soldiers to use as mobilized suppression devices and hunter-killers against psykers and daemons is an idea too good to pass up.

The largest living population of Blanks can be found on Pluto and Charon, close enough for the Imperium to have its anti-Warp weaponry close at hand, but far enough away for them to not block the light of the Astronomican. Indeed, watching Pluto cross the Astronomican, like an exoplanet slightly dimming the light of a far-off star, is a popular activity for young Navigators, though the Paternova has issued warnings telling people not to stare directly into the light of the Astronomican. Because the colony’s true reason for existing is to continue to exist and keep producing blanks, in order to keep the population of Pluto and Charon occupied they have been given exclusive mining rights over anything in the Kuiper Belt or stray rocks in the Oort zone that they lay eyes on. Both Pluto and Charon have been hollowed out and built on to the point where they are now not recognizable. To anyone else looking it now just looks like a private space port with manufactory rigs and a small docking yard. It does appear on the official maps, but only because not doing so would be more suspicious. It's a "private enterprise" on the charts and not open to the public, with the official story being they were claimed by an early Rogue Trader (whose “dynasty” is actually a shell corporation for the Administratum). Life on Pluto and Charon is a terminally boring experience, though on the positive side at least its inhabitants no longer have to fear the possibility of being lynched.

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=== Wyverns ===

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The Void Dragon is not whole. Although perhaps 95% of the great Dragon lies half-buried beneath the surface of Mars, the Dragon still bears a number of old wounds, chunks of him torn off in the war with his kin. But the Void Dragon is an embodied god, and gods do not bleed. Like the wounds of all the children of hungry stars, his lost essence turned into shards, scattered across the cosmos.

Throughout time, history has spoken of encounters with strange metallic dragon-like creatures. These encounters are consistent enough that they cannot be simply dismissed out of hand, but are so maddeningly rare that it has been impossible to create a clear picture of exactly what these sightings represent. These creatures are generally referred to as Wyverns. However, to those few privy to the horrible secret of what lies buried underneath the surface of Mars, the identity of these beings is clear. Wyverns are shards of the Void Dragon.

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These shards somewhat resemble the Void Dragon, except they are more bestial looking (having only legs and a pair of wings and no arms, for example) and have no semblance of intelligence whatsoever. They are animalistic, only seeking to eat and survive and nothing else. It is not clear why these shards of the Void Dragon act so differently from their sire, as even similar-sized shards of the Deceiver or the Nightbringer show some level of intelligence. It is possible that the Dragon’s prison is somehow acting as a signal blocker, cutting the Wyverns off from the Void Dragon’s mind.

Only a few encounters with Wyverns have been well-documented. One involves the primarch Ferrus Manus. During unification of the planet Medusa, he learned about a creature the locals called Asirnoth that descended to prey upon the people of Medusa from its lair in the planet-encircling Telstarax. When Ferrus reported to the Mechanicum what the people of Medusa had told him, they were in shock and immediately informed him that he must dispatch this creature with all haste, giving the primarch permission to use the otherwise forbidden holy archaeotech relics aboard his ship. Three maniples of Iron Hands Skitarii accompanied Ferrus Manus into the lair of the beast, but less than a dozen came out. The battle was hard-fought, but by the end of the battle the primarch managed to strike down the wyvern and bind it within the strange archaeotech device. Ferrus Manus never knew exactly what he fought, but the high Magi of the Adeptus Mechanicus said he had performed a great service for the Mechanicum, and so Ferrus felt satisfied by his actions.

The Steward also fought one. Once.

It was an unexpected fight on what was supposed to be an otherwise peaceful world. Granted, the Steward had the upper hand for much of that fight, the issue was that no matter how many times the Steward would smite the wyvern it would simply rise again, ready to continue the fight. The creature was eventually defeated when the Steward staggered the beast with a particularly powerful blow and a Mechanicus adept sealed it in its inert state using a strange device that no one had ever seen before. When the Steward asked what the creature was, the adept evaded the question by claiming it was piece of archaeotech, which could only be deactivated by another piece of archaeotech the Mechanicus normally forbade the use of (which was technically true). Stranger things made by the hands of men had been found at that time in the Great Crusade, and at that time there was no reason to suspect there was anything unusual about the metal beast.

Another noteworthy feature about these creatures is that they seem to be impervious to normal means of harm, rising over and over again from seemingly lethal injuries. As a result, stories about these creatures tend to feature particularly innovative ways of incapacitating or imprisoning them. Burying them alive in lava is a popular option.

The Void Dragon somehow knows about the Wyverns despite his imprisonment, to no one’s surprise, and has repeatedly asked the Adeptus Mechanicus where those shards of him are. It is not clear if the Void Dragon truly does not know the exact location of his shards, or if he is merely reminding the Adeptus Mechanicus that they exist and the Mechanicus do not have complete control over him. Some among the Order of the Dragon have theorized that the Wyverns are somehow necessary to free the Void Dragon from its non-Euclidean chains, a prison that can only be unlocked by the prisoner. This is an idea that no one is particularly interested in testing.

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== Dark Eldar ==

=== Asdrubael Vect ===

See [[Nobledark_Imperium_Notable_People#Asdrubael_Vect|Asdrubael Vect]]

=== Reri Hesperax ===

[[Image:cybrid_assassin.jpg|thumb|One of many different versions of what the cybrid can look like. The only flesh to exist on her body is on her head and the skin of her torso.]]

Illucis Grizvaldi, following his emergency Warp jump to escape Imperial forces, was stranded on an unknown planet within Ultima Segmentum when Lelith Hesperax found him. Or rather the Dark Eldar agents that found him. When approached by these agents to be commissioned for the creation of a living weapon or risk starving to death in the middle of nowhere, he refused to work for Lelith unless they allowed his remaining disciples be taken with him.

After coming to an agreement, the heretek along with his cult was taken back to Commorragh to being his finest creation. The treacherous Dark Eldar politics have caused the famous Succubus for an insurance along with a weapon for her own personal use outside of the city. It began with taking the embryo from Lelith to have it grow in a vat. Once the child was fully developed with accelerated aging to around 17, her ears and limbs were cut off. Citing the need to install cybernetics along with ridding of the typical hypersensitive Eldar weaknesses located on the feet, hands, and ears. Machines built for utility, enhanced movement and hunting were integrated into the girl's body over time, as she was trained while brainwashed into the blind obedience of Lelith.

Given the codename "Reri", then allowed to adopt the last name Hesperax, she was made for tracking and assassination of all Lelith's rivals outside of Commorragh. Illucis whispered some unknown words to Lelith before leaving, those words would be the killswitch for the cybernetics on Reri if the machines ever picked up the vibrations of those words. Not to mention the explosives built into the limbs that would probably kill Reri. In the 41st Millenium however, Reri has gone on to kill some diverse targets that only a lucky few have survived against her. Some Dark Eldar goes so far as to think she could take on killing any member of the Imperial Family although this is extreme stupidity or arrogance talking.

Without the ears, Reri could either install specialized equipment or synthetic ears for infiltration as an Abhuman. The limbs have also been heavily modified to always have motion sensors, vox comms, powerful magnetics, and survival tools like a knife or lockpicks. they can also be outfitted with built-in weapons and tracking instruments. This was all done while adding durability to have them be tougher than Eldar bone without sacrificing the mobility.

Some say that her appearance is eerily similar to that of a Human with the right limbs and ears, creating another conspiracy theory saying the Impossible Child was already built by the Dark Eldar. Although few subscribe to this theory, it has been given exposure following the assassination of an Inquisitor in Sol right after the 12th Black Crusade. There are also some within the Imperial government who suspect Reri interfered with Legienstrasse's development, although it is unknown how much she was involved. One thing was certain, however, Reri was tracking down Legienstrasse when the Imperials found the renegade assassin. With increasingly erratic behavior after The Wedding, Lelith worries about sending Reri away as the chance of her going rogue also increase.

=== The Ilmaea ===

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At the heart of Commorragh are the Ilmaea (lit. black sun/stolen sun), the twin suns that power the Dark City. Commorragh could accurately be described as a set of dual Dyson spheres, two spherical outgrowths of the Webway stacked one on top of the other (Upper and Lower Commorragh, respectively), each with an Ilmaea at their center. Each star artificially crushed to the size of a red dwarf by the Old Eldar Empire at the height of their power using technology now since lost. Because of the technology used to shrink their size, the Ilmaea also have an extremely long expected life span, comparably to that of an actual red dwarf. Although Commorragh was originally founded as a Webway port and became a haven for the Old Empire’s rich and famous before becoming what it is now, it also performs a remarkably good job as a disaster shelter. In theory, one could outlast the end of the universe inside Commorragh.

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Approximately 1640000 years ago, the Old Eldar Empire went to war with and defeated an unknown, now-extinct alien species. This was not an uncommon event in eldar history, every few million years or so an external threat would arise that would actually threaten the supremacy of the Children of Isha. Sometimes these enemies were resurgent Brain Boyz, sometimes they were extra-galactic or extra-dimensional species like the architects of the Harrowing, and sometimes they were simply native Milky Way races, occasionally fellow children of the Old Ones, that bit off more than they could chew. At first the eldar fought these wars based on the half-remembered wishes of the Old Ones, believing themselves to be safeguarding the existence and self-determination of their fellow sentients, but at some point things took a darker turn.

According to legend, the race that fought the eldar 1.6 million years ago had been a true threat to the galaxy, believing themselves to have a manifest destiny over the Milky Way. The eldar beat the would-be galactic conquerors back to their binary-star home system and then, as punishment for their hubris, stole their two suns, leaving the species to scream in anguish as they slowly froze to death in the darkness. It is uncertain how justified the actions of the eldar were, given their tendency to self-glorify and distort their own history, but the accounts of the Black Library (which are considered to be less biased) do seem to support the idea that the species . However, the fact that they were willing to resort to such draconian means of ensuring their dominance, destroying an entire biosphere of an already defeated foe, already showed the rot seeping into the heart of the Old Empire.

In the years after the seizure of the Ilmaea and their placement as trophies within the biggest Webway port of Commorragh, the Ilmaea became an important symbol in eldar society. The Ilmaea became seen as a symbol of eldar righteousness, an indicator of how the chosen of the Old Ones and Asuryan could do no wrong. Depictions of the Ilmaea became common in Old Empire art, and many wealthy Sidhe lords sought to have Ilmaea of their own. Most were artificial mock-ups made of fusion reactions, but a few were real, stolen from life-bearing systems to complete the symbolism. The Old Empire at least had a fig-leaf of justification for confiscating the original Ilmaea. The nobles…did not. The Craftworlders and Exodites do not think highly of the Ilmaea, considering them a symbol of the Old Empire’s hubris of the highest magnitude.

Each of the Ilmaea are modulated to give off the perfect amount of light and heat to the surface of Commorragh below, giving them a sinister black color when viewed through solar filters. This allows Commorragh to be kept habitable for life without the need of expensive artificial blinds. There is no day or night cycle on Commorragh, only a perpetual twilight, the time when light still exists despite the coolness of the oncoming night…and also the exact time when the shadows are longest and predators find it the easiest to hide. The similarities have not gone unnoticed.

Although the technology to create the Ilmaea has since been lost, the technology to keep the stolen suns modulated still exists. The size and intensity of the stars has been ever so slightly tweaked over the years to balance growth as the Webway pockets of various Kabals have been stitched into Commorragh. Indeed, if the containment were ever to fail, the stars would most likely violently expand back to their former size. The Lord of Commorragh, Asdrubael Vect, has used this to his advantage at one point, deliberately dropping the shielding on one section of the Ilmaea to scour an entire district of Commoragh clean in order to burn one infamous rebellion to the ground, sending a message to all of Commorragh of the sword of Damocles Vect has hanging over their heads.

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=== The New Men ===
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Fabius Bile, mad geneticist of Commorragh and personal vizier of Asdrubael Vect, is known for a great many things. Reverse engineering of the Mark III MP geneseed to provide the Fallen with a ready supply of new recruits. Concocting combat drugs that make the most potent medications of the Imperium look like aspirin. Creations of horrors for the highest bidder that make even the other inhabitants of the Dark City have a minor reaction of disgust. Most consider these acts vile abominations committed solely for the amusement of a twisted mind. Fabius Bile considers them parlor tricks done to pay the rent.

Fabius Bile’s actual goals, the ones he actually puts his heart and soul into, tend to be much more grandiose. He wants to be remembered for something beyond simply being the ringmaster of his own personal freakshow. He wants to create something that will far outlast however long he exists in this galaxy.

He wants to bring back the Men of Gold.

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In Fabius Bile’s mind, humanity’s mistake isn’t that mankind created the Men of Gold, it is that mankind did not become the Men of Gold. Mankind during the Dark Age of Technology had the ability to create their own demi-gods, and yet they squandered this opportunity to merely create liasons between themselves and the Iron Minds. The Eldar are no better. Bile knows of the history of the Eldar from the Haemonculi of Commoragh. He knows how the Eldar were once little different from mankind or the Tau, before being uplifted by the Old Ones and then genetically engineered by their own hand. But then the Eldar stopped. They were on the verge of making themselves a race of gods, and then they stopped. The time it took them to reach even that state is also unimpressive to Bile. Whereas it took the Eldar millennia to engineer themselves into their modern state, Bile claims that a suitably intelligent and properly motivated individual could do it in centuries.

Fabius Bile’s most recent endeavor, the personal project that has shown the greatest amount of success, is the creation of the so-called New Men. Bile proclaims these New Men to be to humanity what the modern Eldar are to their ancient ancestors, the missing link between man and the Men of Gold. The New Men are all latent psykers, grow to adulthood in a fraction of the time of baseline humans, and are deliberately engineered to have a 100% compatibility rate with Astartes gene-seed. But Bile isn’t satisfied with merely recreating the Men of Gold. He wants to make something better. To this end, he has spliced in genes from creatures all over the galaxy, in the purpose of making the New Men the perfect lifeform. Compared to the average human being, the New Men are stronger, almost impervious to pain, immune to many poisons, and capable of surviving in environmental conditions that normal humans would simply die.

However, in spite of all this, for some reason Bile’s New Men inevitably turn out…wrong. The New Men invariably lack any sense of empathy or social etiquette. They are not psychopathic, nor sociopathic, but the only beings they ever seem to reliably show a connection to are their fellow New Men. It is for these reasons that the Fallen refuse to take New Men as recruits, despite a 100% compatibility rate with Astartes gene-seed. In addition, the New Men always end up with leucism or albinism, with pale grey skin the color of a corpse and translucent veins running just under their skin. It is not clear why the New Men end up this way. It cannot be due to their creation, as there are many humans in the Imperium that are grown in-vitro and yet turn out to be perfectly adjusted adults. It cannot be due to their upbringing, as even New Men raised by surrogate families still turn out the same way. It is almost as though the souls of the New Men somehow know they were grown from spliced cells cultivated from dead bodies, unwillingly implanted into the surrogate wombs of terrified prisoners.

Although Fabius Bile is frustrated by these setbacks, he is not perturbed. He knows these flaws are something he will manage to fix…eventually. As to the failed batches, Bile has no problem lending them out to the Dark Eldar or the Crone Worlders as front-line combatants so that someone might get some use out of them, only requesting that he retain a few specimens for dissection and breeding purposes.

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== Tyranids ==

=== The Swarmlord ===

See [[Nobledark Imperium Notable People#The_Swarmlord|The Swarmlord]]

=== The Leviathan of Sotha ===

The Leviathan of Sotha is a miracle of history. Preserved through a chance fluke, the Imperium has learned more about tyranids from this vessel than it has from dozens of minor skirmishes. During the Battle of Sotha in the First Battle for Ultramar between the Imperium and Hive Fleet Behemoth, one of the planet’s surface to orbit guns shot down a tyranid Hive Ship near the planet’s moon. The Hive Ship crash-landed on the nearby moon, where it died of what was either the tyranid equivalent of a broken spine or massive internal organ damage. The total vacuum of the moon prevented the outer surface of the hive ship from decaying, either from external microbes or the tyranid microfauna contained within, and so much of the carcass remains as pristine as the day it died.

This is not to say the Hive Ship is harmless. The decaying leviathan has enough gas in its guts from decomposition to form a makeshift atmosphere, and so tyranid organisms occasionally arise from within the bowels of the dead monster and have to be cleared out in order for research to be conducted safely. Some tyranids will occasionally escape from the hive ship and try to survive on the moon’s surface. All tyranid lifeforms can survive in vacuum for a short period of time, but even the hardiest tyranid organisms will deplete their oxygen reserves and die after prolonged periods of activity in hard vacuum. Therefore, the Inquisition maintains a constant security force around the Hive Ship at all times. However, the ships reserve carnifexes and hive tyrants were all killed off centuries ago, and the ship only has enough biomass to spare for small tyranid organisms, such as hormagaunts and termagaunts. Over the years, the tyranid organisms that emerge from the hive ship have been able to survive longer and longer in hard vacuum, but so far none have been able to evolve a complete independence from the oxygen that all organisms need.

One of the first things the Ordo Xenos did when it claimed the hive ship was try to determine its age. First, they tried to determine the age of the tyranid hive ship via carbon dating. It failed. It was only when the research team realized that if the tyranids were eating planets, they had to have been taking up radioactive isotopes from the organisms and crust of the planet they were eating, and so it should be possible to use dating methods more typically used for ancient rocks on the hive ship.

The analysis determined that the hive ship, as in that hive ship in particular, was over five million years old. The margin of error for said age estimate was older than human civilization.

=== Genestealers ===

'''See Also:''' [[Nobledark_Imperium_Writing#Inquisitorial_Report:_AZURE_IRON_WASP|Inquisitorial Report: AZURE IRON WASP]]

=== Ymgarl Genehounds ===

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When the Adeptus Biologicus analyzed tyranid specimens for the first time, they found all sorts of things they shouldn’t have. Genetic sequences and biochemical signatures otherwise unique to lifeforms on Fenris, Catachan, and numerous other worlds in the Imperium. There were even sections of genetic material that seemed to come from Orks and the Eldar. The bio-priests were at a loss to explain how such a motley of genes could be present in a single creature, until a new tyranid bioform was discovered far from the front lines of the tyranid invasion.

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Originally thought to be natural wildlife native to the moons of Ymgarl, these creatures were first discovered by the Imperium at about the same time as the genestealers in M36. However, sightings of these creatures were soon reported across the galaxy, supposedly caused by the creatures stowing away in space hulks and the holds of spacecraft. There was concern about the similarities between these creatures and “classic” genestealers, but the Imperium was never able to find a connection between the two. Genestealer activity did not follow in these creatures wake, and even their supposedly simultaneous discovery was in actuality more than two hundred years apart. And so the Imperium turned its attention away from the Ymgarl creatures. It was understandable, this was late M36, the peak of the Genestealer Wars, and the Imperium had more pressing issues to learn about. However, with the appearance of the first true tyranid Hive Fleets in the form of Behemoth, the Adeptus Biologicus decided to take another look at the Ymgarl creatures. And they turned out to be something else entirely.

These creatures, which later came to be renamed genehounds, resemble a cross between lictor and a purestrain genestealer. This suggests that genehounds may be a cross-breed between the two, or at the very least share genes with these bioforms. Like lictors and purestrains, genehounds have a much more complex nervous system than most tyranid bioforms, allowing them a higher degree of independent thought and the ability to function for extended periods of time away from synapse creatures of the Hive Mind. They are certainly intelligent enough to use spaceships and space hulks as a means to spread throughout the galaxy. However, whereas lictors and genestealers were meant to be sappers and beacons for the Hive Fleets, these creatures were something else entirely. Hunters. Hounds of the Hive Mind.

The motus operandi of a genehound is simple. First, the genehound locates a target. Another effect of the genehound’s increased intelligence is that a genehound is smart enough to target species with novel genetic features. This target can be as harmless as a squig or as dangerous as a Catachan Devil. Then, the genehound rushes forward in an explosive burst of speed to take its sample. The mouth of a genehound resembles a lamprey or a cookiecutter shark, a spiral ring of teeth designed to shear chunks of flesh from its targets and a piston-like tongue with a serrated tip built to make incisions and drink their bodily fluids. This allows a genehound to easily obtain a genetic sample of the organism for the Hive Mind, or feed itself in the long intervals between action. Its task completed, the genehound makes its way back to the Hive Fleet to be reabsorbed, bringing its genetic trophy with it.

Unlike other bioforms, the Hive Mind does not go out of its way to track down genehounds. To do so would be to expose the ruse, as happened when the Imperium discovered the true nature of genehounds and ordered them killed on sight. The genehounds had not managed to hit every system of note in the galaxy, but they had hit enough to give the Hive Mind access to some choice adaptations. When the Biologicus realized what these creatures were they were horrified by the implications. The tyranids hadn’t just been scouting the galaxy for millennia. They had been raiding its genetic armory.

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== Xenos Independens ==

=== Hrud ===

==== Hrud ====

<div class="toccolours mw-collapsible mw-collapsed" style="100%"> '''''Those Who Linger:'''''

The Hrud are quintessential Xenos Independens. On the one hand, they hate the Necrons, fear Chaos, and are just as threatened by tyranids (particularly genestealers) as everyone else. Just about the only enemies of the Imperium the Hrud tolerate are the Orks and that is because Hrud juunlaks find it just as easy to live on the outskirts of Ork camps as they do Imperial cities. On the other hand, the Hrud clearly have their own agenda, can’t seem to organize themselves well enough to negotiate for inclusion into the Imperium, and are nearly impossible to get to swear by Imperial laws and boundaries. In spite of, or perhaps because, the Hrud have one of the best long-term memories of any species in the galaxy, [[Kender|they have the attention span and respect for boundaries of a house cat]]. A common saying in the Imperium goes: “You can get a Hrud to do just about anything. Once.”

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The biology of the Hrud is strange, even by the standards of the Imperium. Rather than being supported by their limbs, Hrud bodies are attached to a fixed point in the fabric of space-time, from which the Hrud's body and legs hang from like clothes on a hanger. The Hrud don't so much walk as pull or pull their stationary point in space-time along using their arms. Hrud have a hydrostatic musculature and can compress their bodies to a width of less than 30 cm, allowing them to fit through virtually any hole larger than a human thigh. Combined with their limited ability to fold the fabric of space-time, this allows them to worm their way through openings and passages which you wouldn’t normally expect a creature of their size to fit, even fitting through closed doorways if they aren’t properly sealed.

Hrud are all natural psykers, however the form that their psychic powers take is somewhat different from the rather straightforward usage seen in humans and Eldar. Hrud are capable of masking their presence from other species through the use of a psychic perception filter and a strange ability to bend light and space-time, to the point that a Hrud was once reported to have been able to hide from observers in plain sight while in a white-walled, well-lit room. However the amount of effort it takes for a Hrud to hide from the perception of others is heavily dependent on the environment (i.e., a dark place is much easier to hide in than a bright one) and on the species the Hrud is trying to fool. For humans and tau, it is easily possible to fool them into thinking a passing Hrud is just a trick of the shadows. By contrast, Eldar and tarellians, whose brains are organized a little differently, take more effort to fool, especially Eldar who also have psychic senses at their disposal.

The Hrud are also capable of emitting a combination of a miasma of airborne toxins and an entropic field, which they call the ssaak. It is thought that the ssaak was always present to some degree in the Hrud as a natural defense mechanism and the entropic field was part of the modifications made to the species by the Old Ones. The ssaak is always present to some degree, but becomes extremely prominent if the Hrud in question is stressed out or threatened. Unfortunately, being a nocturnal species with a species-wide case of agoraphobia, the Hrud are almost always stressed out to some degree. Long-term exposure to the ssaak is not advised, as it can cause nausea, sedation, physiological dependence, and premature aging. On the rare occasions in which the Hrud do manage consistently interact with other species on a long-term basis, they often build encounter suits to contain the ssaak to keep other people from getting sick.

Hrud are capable of combining their ssaak fields, which at their most extreme extent can form a temporal warp-rift singularity which can devastate their foes. More than once an invading force has attacked a settlement, only to be driven back by the enraged Hrud galvanized from below the city. This phenomenon can either be beneficial or harmful to the Imperium. On the one hand you have cases like Dulcinea, where during the 12th Black Crusade the population of Hive Strigis was massacred by Chaos warbands, only to rouse the ire of the Hrud population living in the city’s underhive who dropped a singularity on their heads. At the same time you have cases like Haakoneth, the former homeworld of the Star Phantoms, which in 103.M40 came under attack the fleet of an Ork Freeboota Klan. The Star Phantoms destroyed the attacking Ork fleet, but unfortunately this provoked the Hrud colony that had been living in the bowels of the Freeboota ships, who immediately embarked on a Peh-ha to find a new home. The resulting Hrud migration dragged a singularity with it to the surface of Haakoneth, which between the Hrud and the Orks forced the Star Phantoms and the population of Haanoneth to retreat and abandon the planet.

The Imperium first encountered the Hrud in M30, during the later years of the Great Crusade. At this time, humanity and Eldar were on good terms with one another, but this was only shortly after the Raid and the levels of trust between the two groups wasn’t as well established as it would be in later years. The Hrud were, at the time of the Imperium's discovery of them, confined to a single world. It is thought that they had been confined to their homeworld by the Old Eldar Empire, who had apparently been willing to reduce the Hrud from an interstellar power but weren’t prepared to actually exterminate them due to their shared history (or possibly indirect intervention from the Eldar gods). After the Fall of the Eldar, the Hrud remained on their world, either because they were afraid of retaliation from the Eldar, no longer had the knowledge to produce spacecraft, or possibly because they were afraid doing so would violate the last commandment and warning of their god. And so the Hrud remained quarantined. Until the Iron Warriors found them.

In 734.M30, the Iron Warriors had just finished unified what would become the future Hive World of Stratopolae. The planet’s infrastructure was sound, but if it was to thrive it needed a devoted bread basket. Long range telescopes showed a habitable planet within a few lightyears of the planet, which would have made an ideal Agri-World. Shortly before the Iron Warriors, including a young Barabas Dantioch, were ready to leave the system, they were contacted by the Eldar. The Eldar implored the Iron Warriors not to go to that system, telling them that it was home to a dangerous xenos lifeform that their ancestors had quarantined millennia ago. The Iron Warriors blew them off, believing it was merely a lie spun by the Eldar to conceal the fact that there was something of value on the planet and the Eldar thought the Iron Warriors were gullible enough to believe it.

The Iron Warriors exited the Warp in a system with one notable world in its habitable zone. The world itself was mostly earth-like, and seemed to be uninhabited though showed clear signs of former occupation. The Iron Warriors were pleased about this, the expedition had been more than worth it as this world was ideal for an Agri-World. They didn’t know why the Eldar were so interested in the system but the knife-ears could go space themselves if they thought they could give orders to humanity.

The Iron Hands landed their craft near what was the only visible artificial structure from orbit, a skyscraper-like building that looked like one of Perturabo’s creations crossed with a very grungy bee hive. They sat outside their craft for several days waiting for someone, anyone, to make contact with them before they decided to make the first move. One of the crew thought they saw something over on a nearby mountain range but later chalked it up to a mirage. Leaving their ship behind, the Iron Warriors marched down empty roads into a ghost city. Entering the city, they realized what they thought were heavily degraded structures were actually buildings of xenos design. Still, the city seemed empty, and if the planet was uninhabited they could still set up an Agri-World there. The only potential sign of life were occasional signs of movement in their peripheral vision but as their armor’s sensors kept reading inconsistent extra-spectrum signatures they put it down to a mild glitch caused by the strange environment. For nearly two days the Iron Warriors wandered around the city getting increasingly agitated by the phantom sightings before they actually saw anyone.

In what looked like a market square the Imperial Emissary and his Iron Warrior guards finally found someone to talk to. A hunched figure in tattered hooded robes holding a stick with a bit of cloth on it that might have been a standard flanked by four similarly attired individuals. No part of the creatures were visible. At this point the Iron Warriors realized there was a problem. They had thought the world was uninhabited, but it was now clear that it was very inhabited by a xenos species. Standard procedure for interacting with an unknown xenos species during the Great Crusade was to observe and them attempt to make contact from as close to the system’s Mandeville Point as possible. If the species was friendly, politely extend the bare minimum of courtesy and leave as soon as possible. If the species was territorial or too primitive to make contact, leave it alone. If the species tried to follow the fleet back and attack, destroy them. The point of such contact was to survey potential threats to humanity, ideally from lightyears away. And yet here the Iron Warriors were meters from a xenos lifeform.

To their credit, the Imperial Emissary and the Iron Warriors tried to make the best of the situation. After initial difficulties in establishing communication (the lead figure able to speak something that vaguely resembled Eldar High Speech), the Emissary and the lead figure, who introduced itself as a Hrud, exchanged pleasantries and initiated introductions. It already being late in the day the Emissary asked if they could continue this conversation tomorrow and in a knee-jerk reflex asked if the figures wanted to meet aboard their ship. After a moment of thought, the lead figure agreed, and the Imperial party returned to the ship to report their findings. The next day the Imperial Emissary and the Iron Warriors came down to the square they found it was empty. The Iron Warriors wandered around the empty city several times, looking for the mysterious figures. It's not until the fifth trip that they realize that they are no longer seeing movement in the corners of their eyes. The world felt strangely empty now.

At this time the Eldar, having seen their initial attempt to warn the Iron Warriors rebuffed, decided to send a message directly to the throne. The Steward took these concerns seriously and sent a message to Perturabo, but Perturabo, who at the time was too busy overseeing the construction of fortress hives to micromanage every expeditionary fleet of his legion, sent half-hearted warning letters to the expeditionary force who took the concerns under advisement.
The Iron Warriors decided to leave the planet, between the warning, the strange visions, and the encounter in the marketplace, the planet was getting too weird for their liking. On the voyage back to the forgeworld some of the crew in the lower decks start to see flickering in the edge of their vision, but decided it was most likely a bit of dust in the air filters again and didn’t report it. Then the phenomenon starts appearing on Stratopolae when they get back. Then it is retroactively noted on several outgoing cargo hauler coming out of Stratopolae over the next several months. The investigation afterwards confirms what many suspected. Somehow the entire Hrud civilization managed to fold themselves up and hop onto the Iron warriors ship. Now the Hrud are abroad in the Imperium. The Eldar, having increasingly made noise all this time, now refused to comment, believing the results of the ill-fated expedition spoke for themselves.

The Iron Warriors, being military engineers, felt they could easily rectify the situation, but trying to contain the Hrud was like trying to make a river flow uphill and after a valiant campaign they found they just simply couldn’t put the genie back in the bottle. In addition, between the general chaos caused by large-scale Hrud migrations and the cornered Hrud lashed out in self-defense, many Iron Warriors were killed or crippled. Barabas Dantioch in particular was prematurely aged to the point he was recalled from active service and put on garrison duty out of concerns for his health despite being only 200 years old. While on garrison duty, Dantioch gained an interest in Eldar culture and history, having recalled their warning before the expedition, showing a particular interest in the architecture of the Webway.

Surprisingly, the expected retaliation from the Hrud never came. Once the campaign by the Iron Warriors the Hrud seemed content to retreat into the shadows. The Imperium has tried to negotiate with the Hrud in the same way it has with numerous other Xenos races, particularly in the hopes of bringing some order to the Hrud’s seemingly random pattern of migrations. It hasn’t really worked out. Although they live in a tribal society organized into clans, Hrud clans tend to have a hard time interacting and negotiating with Imperial diplomats, both due to the ssaak and their poor concept of time. Instead, they tend to live on the fringes of society in their juunlaks. The Hrud never officially joined the Imperium and are technically trespassers. But they aren't too troublesome or obtrusive and so they never became classified as Xenos Horridus. They steal things and leech power from Imperial systems, but usually no more than they need and only if they cannot obtain it on their own. The Hrud generally just kind of hide in the corners of places and occasionally steal sandwiches and make strange things out of scrap. Yes the Hrud have gotten to some of the Craftworlds. No the Eldar are not happy about it.

Hrud relationships with Imperial citizens are mixed. Imperial citizens sometimes trade with the Hrud or hire them, but most Hrud tend to be too unreliable to hire for consistent jobs. On the one hand, Hrud have been known to go out of their way to protect non-Hrud from the Umbra, a bizarre race of shadowy Warp creatures that are often, but not always, found in association with Hrud. However, on the other hand, in absolute worst case scenarios the have been known to kidnap Imperial citizens and turn them into zanhaads, slave-pets addicted to their bodily chemicals. When this happens something has to be done, kidnapping Imperial citizens crosses a line and the Hrud have to be dealt with, no matter how loathsome it is. This distaste is not simply out of moral quandaries. Fighting against Hrud is a nightmare, as cleaning out a juunlak involves going down in to the deep, dark underhives where the Hrud are in their element. The ssaak is everywhere and with all the shadows a Hrud can be within a few feet of you and you wouldn’t know it until they ambush you.

Although the Hrud typically prefer to buy, borrow, or steal weapons, they are more than capable of making their own. Despite their primitive appearance, Hrud actually have quite a bit of knowledge of advanced technology and are capable of making or reverse-engineering weapons out of scrap. The most commonly seen Hrud-made firearms are the Hrud fusils, which are not quite rifles yet not quite shotguns (the weapon has a narrower spread than a rifle, but do have a spread and the barrel is not grooved) that are typically held like gauntlets and fire Warp-laced plasma which use the Warp to bypass armor and other solid objects. The ability of a Hrud fusil to pass through solid objects is not unlimited, but these weapons are more than capable of passing through several inches of shielding and in some cases are able to shoot through cover to hit someone on the other side. However, one downside to Hrud fusils compared to lasweapons and stubbers is that it takes a significant amount of time (anywhere from half a second to a few seconds) for the weapon to recharge after each volley.

Another sticking point between the Hrud and the Imperium involves genestealers. As denizens of the underhives, the Hrud are threatened by genestealer infestation as much as anyone, and are more acutely aware of what goes on in the underhive than possibly any other group. The Hrud often know who the genestealers are before the Imperium does. More than once an otherwise peaceful Hrud juulak has seemingly gone on an unprovoked rampage and massacred specific families down to the last individual, only for it to be discovered after Imperial retaliation that the Hrud had been wiping out a genestealer cult that no one had realized existed.

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==== Qah ====

<div class="toccolours mw-collapsible mw-collapsed" style="100%"> '''''The Lord of Shadows:'''''

Unlike the Eldar and many other species uplifted by the Old Ones, the Hrud are monotheists (possibly because they didn’t have the population or psychic power to create multiple gods), worshipping a shadow deity called Qah. The Hrud respected the Eldar Gods, referring to them as Slah-haii ([[Nobledark_Imperium_Imperial_Society_and_Culture#The_Etymological_Legacy_of_the_Old_Ones|most mighty/ancient, a term they also used to refer to the Old Ones in the past]]), but the Eldar gods were not Hrud, Qah was. In addition to shadows, Qah is also seen as a god of Hrud values, including community, morality, and conscience. Although it might not be immediately obvious why a shadow deity would be seen as a paragon of moral values, it makes perfect sense to the nocturnal or crepuscular Hrud. Shadows are reflections of the self. Everyone has a shadow, and your shadow sees everything that you do. In Hrud religion, your shadow is where your conscience comes from, and all consciences have a connection back to Qah.

Grand Empress Isha, for her part, is very interested in the reports of the Hrud still worshipping Qah. She remembers Qah, who fought alongside the Eldar gods just like the mortal hrud fought alongside the Eldar in the War in Heaven. Qah got along okay with the Eldar gods, but being a god of Hrud values and therefore community and Isha being a goddess of nature and friend to all living things, the two of them got along considerably better than Qah did with the other members of the Eldar pantheon. Isha secretly hopes that Qah is still out there somewhere, if only to have someone else around to talk to who remembered the War in Heaven and the days before the Fall, even if it wasn’t an Eldar. Isha would be devastated to know what really happened.

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Shortly before the Old Eldar Empire gave birth to Slaanesh, Qah realized what was going on and realized that Slaanesh being born would mean devastation for not only the Hrud, but also for the Eldar and every race in the Milky Way galaxy. Having realized the gravity of the situation, he gathered the Hrud and told them what they needed to do to survive. In those days the Hrud built real cities and were unafraid of going out in the daylight, though at their heart they were always a nocturnal and opportunistic species. Qah told them they had to focus on those natural tendencies. They had to become so hidden, so beneath notice, that no one would ever bother or hurt them. His last command was a single word. He told the Hrud to hide. To survive. To linger. Having given his people the best guidance he could, he steeled himself and joined the battle against an alien god on behalf of the deities he had fought alongside so long ago.

Qah didn't make it. He got smashed into a billion pieces during the Fall the same way that Khaine did. Isha never saw this, as she was too busy being dragged away by Nurgle at the time to notice. Most of Qah’s fragments became the Umbra, the living shadows that like to cluster around Warp engines and Webway gates. Being but shreds of the shadow god, they are of limited intelligence, comparable to an animal, and will lash out at anything not-Hrud. Nevertheless, when destroyed they still scream “Linger”, begging any Hrud within earshot to remember the last words their god had told them to keep them safe.

It sucks to be Qah. He did everything in his power to save his people from the Age of Strife, but at what cost? He selflessly threw himself into battle on behalf of his old comrades from the days of the War in Heaven, only to be shattered into a million pieces. Even when his last few fragments are destroyed, he uses his last breath to remind the Hrud to remember what he said to keep them safe. One of the only remaining survivors of the War in Heaven is hoping that one day he will return, only for the tragedy being that Qah died a long long time ago and she never found out. He tried and tried to be selfless, only for tragedy to ensue. Being Qah is suffering.

Whereas many of Qah’s fragments were scattered across the galaxy, his main body ended back up on the Hrud homeworld. The Hrud refer to their homeworld as Hrud, much as they call themselves Hrud and speak a language called Hrud. There are no ethnic or cultural divisions between Hrud. Despite this, the former Hrud homeworld is typically referred to as Hrudworld for the sake of everyone’s sanity. Today there are no Hrud on Hrudworld. If it weren’t for psychic powers, no one would ever know why. To mundanes Hrudworld looks perfectly normal, although even with the Hrud gone people get the feeling there's something distinctly "wrong" about the place. Like they shouldn't be there. Psykers (including the Hrud) look around Hrudworld and notice there’s a half-decayed corpse straddled over the nearest mountain range.

The body appears on the horizon, or at least at a distance. Strewn over a mountain range, lying in a canyon, floating face down in the ocean, half buried in the ice of the north. It's likely not a "real" body as a corpse miles thick would probably distort the ground beneath it considerably to say nothing of what a new mountain might do to local climate. It always too distant to be touched, like a mirage on the horizon. Most classify the phenomenon as really consistent shared hallucination by the People of Qah and the psychically inclined. The corpse looks like a giant Hrud, more or less, albeit one seemingly sculpted of shadow. There are anatomical differences. Two sets of insectile wings not dissimilar to a very large beetle and two pairs of antenna upon its brow, one behind the other. It is thought that these features denote nobility to the Hrud in the same way that bird wings or a lion’s mane sometimes are used as artistic additions in human art. This shared hallucination does not occur on any other world of the Imperium even ones with a large Hrud population. Hrudworld doesn't frighten the Hrud, it saddens them. Their god is dead and his corpse, or something very like it, is always there to remind them. Of the few Hrud elders and lore-masters that would volunteer information on the phenomenon when asked they would give no hard information beyond that it brings them great sorrow.

The Hrud will rise again should the Imperium survive The Day of Reckoning. Isha will take the pieces of Qah and plant them in her garden when she takes back her throne. Perhaps Qah will spring from the ground, a fresh flower after a very long winter. Maybe his ghost will finally be laid to rest and his postmortem suffering will be over. Either way the Hrud will be able to move on.

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== Xenos Horribilis ==

=== Fra'al ===

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The Fra'al are a settled, formerly nomadic, formerly settled race of creatures born seemingly without compassion. They are cruel but they are not sadistic so much as they are utterly indifferent to the wellbeing of others. The loss of their first empire was some time in the middle period of the Great and Bountiful Human Dominion when it seems that they thought the abduction of a few citizens would not be met with a stiff response. Their reasoning being that Humanity could spare a few plebs and those in positions of authority to make declarations of war would not care, just as the Fra’al wouldn't care if a few inconsequentials went missing. They were quite wrong. They were of a not incomparable level of technology to humanity, humanity not yet having reached the heights it one day would, and may even have outpaced the Dominion in a few areas but they didn't have the same resources. They were in the end forced to adopt a nomadic lifestyle as they had no planet. The war was bitter and bloody with no punches spared or pretense at fair play from either side and in the end the Fra'al lost their homeworld.

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For the remainder of the Dominion's history they were condemned to wander. Tentative offers of reconciliation from the Dominion were met with hostility and soon stopped and the Fra'al would not again recover until the days of the Age of Strife when they could once more raid with impunity and take a new home to their liking.
The homeworld they took is unknown, lost among the many uncharted stars of the Gothic Sector and it is there that they are most active. They trade occasionally for trinkets and toys, their technology base is lower than it once was but seems now noticeably higher that most of the Imperium at least in what they can mass produce. They trade with wicked men for human slaves and what fate awaits them is unknown though doubtless unpleasant.

The Fra'al themselves are a vaguely avian creature, or at least look as if they have had an avian analogue in their ancestry in some distant and dim past. They are humanoid in shape but more slender now than they once were, presumably from their years of forced exile among the stars. Their eyes are disproportionately bigger than those of most other species of their size and are typically a very dark red in colour with a cross shaped pupil. They are hairless with typically very pale grey skin and bluish blood based on a copper rather than iron. Their bones are light and they are frail of build. Their facial features are distinctly flat, the mouth and nose are in fact a squashed and downwards facing beak with with two nostril slits that can be close at will. The "teeth" are merely a serrated edge to the beak. The strange shape of the face and it's unintuitive construction are the result of a mutation some four million years ago that saw a decrease in general muscle mass but mostly in the cranium, causing an expansion of the cranium and brain size and a fast drive towards sapience, though apparently sentience may have arrived slightly later. The internal organs are distinctly avian in nature with the exception of the heart which is in fact two more primitive reptilian two chambered organs located on either side of the ribcage. The exact evolutionary path that lead to such an arrangement is unknown the AdBio and of little interest to the soldiers that have to deter Fra'al raiders.

The Fra'al claimed to have been to Old Earth at various times in the distant past when its inhabitants made knives of chipped stone with which they murdered each other and were preyed upon by more interesting creatures and many times after. It is unknown if these tales are fabrications in an attempt to unnerve or insult. They might be true, but what of it? Humanity outgrew them, and ever since they have been envious and bitter.

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=== Medusae ===

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The Warp was not always a place of horror and insanity. Once, in the days before the War in Heaven, the Immaterium was inhabited by all manner of natural creatures, both terrifying and wonderful. True, many of these creatures were not safe, in the same way that being around a large predator or other such untamed megafauna is never truly “safe”, but neither were they all malicious. Even after the War in Heaven, as the Ruinous Powers began to set up their own domain, the Warp was still inhabited by many creatures that pledged no allegiance to chaos, such as the Enslavers, the Psychneuin, and the Medusae.

In their natural state, Medusae resemble nothing more than floating, armored brains, their grooved sulci covered in ridges of chitin and with a huge, singular eye with a distinctive dumbbell-shaped pupil at their front. Extending from around the periphery of the brain are numerous tendrils, resembling exposed nerve endings except with the myelin sheath covered by segments of bone and a singular or series of clawed spikes at the end. Despite this disorienting appearance, Medusae are normally “herbivores” of the Warp, lazily floating from place to place using their brain tendrils as they passively feed off the psychic energy emitted by sentient lifeforms into the Warp as they dream, akin to aquatic filter-feeders.

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Due to the increasing rise to prominence of Chaos, the Medusae gradually came to the conclusion that the best option available to them was to leave the Immaterium for realspace. However, much like daemons and other creatures of the Warp, in order to inhabit the Materium the Medusae need a host. Unlike daemons, however, Medusae do not simply possess their victims. Instead, they consume the head of their victim and place their own head on top of the decapitated body, the act of consumption merging the two together to create a new organism, a hybrid of material and immaterial. However, calling such a relationship a symbiosis is an overstatement, there is no evidence of any part of the host’s mind surviving the process aside from any memories the Medusa picks up. Indeed, it is believed in their natural state Medusae are not even fully sapient, but exist in a constant dream-like trance, only gaining clarity when they merge with a living being.

Once the two organisms have joined the Medusa no longer needs to consume living beings to survive, instead feeding on the ambient psychic energy of the dreams and nightmares from those around them. If threatened, they are capable of discharging this energy as an empathic blast accompanied by a riot of pink-purple warp light to any poor soul who meets their gaze, a defense mechanism from their days as passive filter feeders that still serves them well. Such a glance from the psychic nova of their eye is enough to cause most sapient species to have a seizure or go into a comatose state. In the worst case scenario the target bleeds to death, blood hemmoraghing from every orifice due to the sheer neurological overload of the sensory organs causing capillaries to rupture.

After fusing the Medusa’s tendrils, which once served as their sole means of locomotion, droop around them like a series of bony dreadlocks, which combined with the heavy, hooded clothes they prefer to wear gives them a witch or hag-like appearance. These tendrils are still strong and fully prehensile, allowing the Medusa to use them like mechadendrites or to tear apart any aggressor in combat. However, the tendrils of a Meduasa have another function than combat or dexterity. As a Medusa feeds, the tendrils grow and elongate until eventually the claw falls off and a rounded, corrugated brain fruit grows in its place. If left alone, this brain fruit continues to grow until eventually it pops off and forms a new Medusa. However, if plucked early it can be consumed and allows one to re-experience all of the sensation experienced by the Medusa while the brain fruit gestated. Medusae brain fruits are considered quite the delicacy in Commorragh as well as the twisted courts of the Crone Eldar, allowing one to relive the anarchy of a favored raid or stave off the probing of She Who Thirsts. Attempts by humans (typically slaves or Rogue Traders) or other groups of eldar (typically corsairs) to eat brain fruit often results in a stroke or a coma from neurologic overload. According to the Dark Eldar, it’s an acquired taste.

As the Warp became progressively hostile to all forms of non-Chaos associated life, the Medusae increasingly found themselves forced into the one part of the galaxy that was connected to the Immaterium yet out of the hands of the Chaos Gods: the Eldar Webway. Unfortunately, this made the Medusae increasingly vulnerable to one of the dominant powers of the Webway, the Dark Eldar of Commorragh. Today, the largest population of Medusae live as an underclass within the xenos district of Null City within Lower Commorragh. They have nowhere else they can go. They cannot return to the Warp, for that is where the predators lie and they cannot survive there. They cannot hide in the Webway, as they would easily be hunted down by the Kabals and it is paradoxically easier to hide in plain sight within the bustling throngs of Commorragh. They cannot escape into realspace, as most groups would try to kill them on sight. They try to keep a low profile, as the Archons of Dark Eldar Kabals are always interested in capturing Medusae to use as walking weapons or sources of brain fruit to use and sell, covering the heads of the Medusae covered with metal masks so their captors can avoid being blasted with their psychic power.

The Medusae, in all honesty, just want to be allowed to live. They take no joy in consuming their victims, but neither do they feel guilt over having to do so to survive. Medusae are capable of forming emotional attachments with individuals after they merge, but they seem unable to or unwilling to make the connection that the very act of completing their life cycle could potentially put their associates in danger. At most, Medusae have been known to chase unbonded Medusae away from individuals that they value. Although their need for hosts could easily be satisfied by vat-growing, the Dark Eldar have no interest in helping them and the Imperium is either unaware or uncaring to their plight. Despite being mostly harmless after finding a host, the fact that they need a mortal body to communicate along with numerous poor first encounters where voidsmen have been attacked by unbonded Medusae, the Imperium has declared them Xenos Horribilis. Unfortunately, few Medusae escaped the Dark City after the Exodus from the Dark Wedding. As an underclass, they did not possess the access to the Webway portals that may have potentially granted the race their freedom and potentially even struck them from the Xenos Horribilis list. Those few that did are often found in the retinue of Rogue Traders, the few individuals who could grant them protection.

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=== Rak'gol ===

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The Rak’Gol are a horrifying xeno-breed thought native to the Koronus Expanse out beyond the Halo Stars. The source of their animosity towards the Imperium and it’s peoples is as of yet unknown, there might not even be a reason. It could just be that they are universally hostile to anything that they see as competition. Attempts at opening up a dialogue have yet not been responded to with anything other than violence and even Rak’Gol language/s are utterly unknown despite the many centuries of encounters and listening. It is assumed that they have a language as they make sound and have ear analogues and their ships transmit and receive radio waves. Written language as observed by the boarding teams seems to consist of raised bumps similar superficially to Braille, as with the spoken language no sense has yet been made of it.

If they have distinct sexes it is not evident with greater differences in bodily structure seeming to exist through role. Technicians aboard their brutally designed ships tending to be noticeably smaller and more nimble of limb than the warrior-breeds. Exactly how this distinction is maintained as no form yet encounter has had reproductive organs is unknown. Theories range from cloning and manipulation at early stages of development to each type maintain a breeding population on some distant undiscovered homeworld.

Whatever the reason their actions like the orks before them have put their kind on the Imperium’s black list.

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In appearance a basic warrior-form of the Rak’Gol is a little over two and a half meters tall with a hide thick enough to shrug off small stubber gun fire. Cybernetics are appointed seemingly based upon skill and age, with age being a result of skill as in such an inhumanly aggressive society a lack of skill prevents age. The natural upper life expectancy of their kind is unknown although Adeptus Biologicus assume it could be anything up to two and a half centuries based on experiments done on tissue samples from recovered corpses. The individuals of the Rak’Gol are not aggressive towards each other and are seemingly extremely cohesive as a group with everyone knowing their place and performing their duties in a manner reminiscent of the Vespid. Unlike the Vespid the Rak’Gol also have seemingly no real love for each other as individuals and have been observed killing and cannibalising the injured and crippled without hesitation or distress. Most chilling of all is the way that the targeted individual does not try to flee or plead or even flinch, they just stand there as they are carved up.

It is not unreasonable to assume that the Rak’Gol operate on a psychic hive mind similar to that of the Tyranids but this does not seem to be the case as they do have to speak to each other to relay information. Exchanges of speech have been observed that could be requests for clarification or even offered alternative suggestions to given orders. There have even been aggressive body language with accompanying changes of body language that would indicate heated argument and even one observed instance of dispute and violence, the loser submitting to being carved up for food. They would seem to be individuals united in hate, a common cause and an extremely effective method of instilling discipline and obedience although it’s not unreasonable to assume that such behaviour comes very naturally to them.

Rak’Gol technology is on par with Imperial Standard in many regards but seemingly lagging in others. It is unknown at this time if that is because higher technology is present in their fleets but has not been observed, if they have the ability to make more sophisticated mechanisms but consider it uneconomical in some way or that it is a hole in their knowledge. Their cybernetics for example are, depending on the device, anywhere between extremely crude and on par with what the Mechanicus can produce but show consistency in this discrepancy between individuals. One of the ways that their devices lack sophistication is in comfort toward the host. From dissected captures and retrieved corpses it is evident that they are capable of feeling pain but at the same time give no observable indication that they can. An explanation put forth by the Biologicus is that they just don’t care.

The ships follow a similar brutal design philosophy, constructed with no though of elegance or crew comfort, no ornamentation or anything that is not strictly necessary for a war ship. All ships encountered to date have been some form of war ship or are at least capable of acting as such. Radiation from both space and the workings of the ship are not shielded as much as they would be on even an ork ship and this does not seem to impeded, concern or sicken the crew. As it is unknown how many ships there are or from where they are coming and so it is difficult to judge how fast they travel although it is suspected that they are not as fast as many Imperial ships of their size. This is speculated to be because they have no Navigator analogue although this is unconfirmed speculation. In most offensive and defensive means the Rak’Gol ships are comparable to Imperial vessels of similar size if not slightly superior although it has been observed that their sensors are not as effective as those on equivalent Imperial ships.

The eldar do not have any surviving records of the Old Empire that speak of things much like the Rak’Gol and Nemesor Zahndrekh does not remember anything that looked like them from his youth.

Exactly what has made them as they are, seemingly so full of hate, is unknown and the source of much baseless speculation. There are no clues to culture or history found on their ships or on their bodies and any hope of finding some sort of answer can probably only be found on their homeworld, should they have one.

The leading theory among the eldar and human scholars is that their homeworld once orbited a quite vibrant star or orbited on an elliptical orbit, often bringing it closer to the star than most life forms would deem at all comfortable. Their hardy body structure, ability to survive scarcity and seeming immunity to radiation poisoning would seem to indicate as much although there are many such worlds in the galaxy that this could apply to.

There are, sometimes at least, creatures that are similar to their description mentioned in some of the less popular Harlequin performances. Strange and unpleasant beings that did something foolish and angered the lords and ladies of the Old Empire and in retaliation the eldar laid waste to their cities, slew their armies and stole their sun away and left them in their ruins to freeze to death under the uncaring stars. The story is a sorrowful one that showed the monstrous and graceless nature of the old aristocracy, as the insult of the “twilight people” was slight and unintended. The last words of the last king of the twilight people, as his crown fell apart in frozen pieces, was to show no pity for the eldar though he had seen a time when they would consume themselves and that he and his people would be there still to see it.

If the twilight people were the Rak’Gol then they have changed. How long the Harlequins have been performing this play is unknown as it potentially could be millions of years. Time enough certainly for the Rak’Gol to adapt to a dying world in a brutal way.

One way by which they have adapted is by the adoption of the dreaded Yu'Vath technology. Unlike most creatures that are utterly subsumed by such artefacts and essentially become Yu'Vath the Rak’Gol reach a terrible equilibrium with it. The Yu'Vath wish to bring low all about them and reign terrible and unopposed and the Rak’Gol seemingly wish to kill everything that is not them. To this end the Yu'Vath remnants empower the Rak’Gol but the Rak’Gol can’t be consumed and their seeming compliance with the will of the Yu'Vath is merely them coincidentally having the same goals in mind for the most part. If exposure to the foreign and invasive technology is responsible for their current state then they themselves are another victim of the Primordial Annihilator and should be pitied as much as hated, though the need for their extinction remains the same.

The Imperium’s first known contact with the Rak’Gol came in 935.M37 out on what was then the Azimoth frontier, a prosperous set of predominantly mixed eldar and human settlements that looked at the time promising. At the time the wholesale slaughter of the relatively lightly defended frontiersmen was attributed to a hitherto unknown ork band, the lack of ork bodies believed to be an eccentricity of them eating their dead for preference. The Rak’Gol, at least in the early contact wars, went to great pains to recover their bodies and remove recordings of themselves. This method of warfare could only continue for so long before knowledge of what they were would be revealed accidentally but for that time the Rak’Gol were an unaccountable and unstoppable force from the edge of the map pushing the darkness back across the light of civilization. Even when what they were was revealed due to the unexpected arrival of substantial Imperial Army elements resulted from a poorly calculated warp jump the Imperium was barely the wiser. They had a face and even a name to what they were fighting but little else. Information that could lead to the discovery of the Rak’Gol homeworld or base of operations is prized extremely highly and rewarded generously.

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=== Slaugth ===

See [[Nobledark_Imperium_Drafts#The_Rangdan_Xenocides_and_the_Slaugth|The Rangdan Xenocides and the Slaugth]]

=== Tindalosi ===

<div class="toccolours mw-collapsible mw-collapsed" style="100%"> '''''The Horror from Out of Time:'''''

Few mysteries are as vexing as those surrounding the Ordo Chronos. According to what little is known, the Ordo Chronos is an Ordo of the Inquisition that was founded, or would have been founded, or will be founded, to investigate chronological disturbances and protect against temporal threats to the Imperium. The Arch-Enemy would love nothing more than to win a pre-emptive victory by changing history and erasing the nascent Imperium from existence, and given the Ruinous Powers’ near total control of the Warp and the Immaterium's decidedly loose relationship with time such a prospect is not an idle threat.

According to what little records remain, an Administratum budget report here, an offhand mention in a tome in the Black Library there, the Ordo Chronos was one of the earliest orders of the Inquisition, and was active until at least early M33, with the last known records being around the date of the Harrowing and the creation of the Hadex Anomaly. However, the Inquisition itself has no records of an “Ordo Chronos” ever being founded. Even people who have been around since the beginning of the Imperium, and therefore should know of the Ordo Chronos’ existence, including the Emperor and the Empress, profess no knowledge as to having ever created an “Ordo Chronos”. If the upper echelons of the Imperium know anything about the fate of the Ordo Chronos, they certainly are not talking.

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The only solid evidence of the Ordo Chronos on record since then is when an Inquisitor of the order turned up in a blue crate in the cargo hold of [[Nobledark_Imperium_Notable_People#Prince_Yriel|Rogue Trader (then Prince) Yriel’s]] ship ''Hoec’s Grace'' in M38. He lasted long enough to answer a few questions from other Inquisitors but disappeared as quickly as he came. Unfortunately, his answers were as vague as a [[Nobledark_Imperium_Imperial_Society_and_Culture#The_Starchild_Prophecies|Star Child prophecy]] and about as helpful. According to what can be discerned from his testimony, the Ordo Chronos was destroyed when its members were sucked into the newly formed Hadex Anomaly, of which as far as he knew he was the only survivor. He survived because he was lucky enough to have “merely” become stuck in a pocket dimension where he experience the last 24 hours of his life on repeat for several centuries. When asked how he escaped from such a prison he merely answered “a bloody lot of hard work”. However, given the nature of the Ordo Chronos, it is possible that this an event that from their perspective had happened, has yet to happen, or may never happen due to having occurred in an alternate timeline that was averted in “our” time.

Even the nature of how the subject of the Ordo, time, works is itself uncertain. Some schools of thought argue that time is deterministic. If time did not interact in some orderly fashion with realspace and the Immaterium, it should not be possible to view galactic history through fossilized light, or for ships to arrive at a destination via warp travel before they even left. Others, however, take a different view. If fate is pre-ordained, then prophecy and eldar farsight, which work by viewing potential alternate timelines, should not even be possible. Some postulate a unified theory of time, in which the quantum observer effect prevents time from being observed non-deterministically, but these theories are difficult to test (not to mention dangerous). Such experimentation is made even more dangerous by the presence of the Tindalosi.

One of the few of which any detail is known are the Tindalosi. However, this is not saying much, given that the Tindalosi are only known about by virtue of being too noticeable to ignore. In truth, about as much is known about the Tindalosi is as known about [[Nobledark_Imperium_Xenos#Wyverns|Wyverns]], or the Arch-Leprechauns of Hippocampos IV. Even their name, “Tindalosi”, is probably not their actual moniker. They get their name from a written account from the Dark Age of Technology by an eyewitness of a Tindalosi attack in late M23, in which the writer compares them to fictional creatures in an ancient Terran story.

The Tindalosi are silvery, biomechanical constructs, approximately two to two and a half meters long or about the size of a large hunting hound. However, despite the mechanical nature, the Tindalosi appear to breed and reproduce much as organic beings do. They have six legs, somewhere between a canine and an insect appearance, allowing them to bound after their prey with frightening speed. The front and bottom of the Tindalosi’s triangular head is a curved sickle, someone resembling that of a biting insect or bird of prey. The optics are large, red, and appear segmented, though whether they are compound eyes or something else is unknown. The head is at the end of a long, jointed, arm like neck, which can snap out with a hunting heron and slice into its victims, sucking out their bio-electrical energy. The Tindalosi are best known for their ability to phase through space and time, allowing them to track their prey wherever they may go.

Though much about the Tindalosi is unknown, they seem to have originally been created by another race as some sort of temporal assassins, though they have since gone feral. Nevertheless, even though the Tindalosi may have gone feral, some vestige of their original programming still remains. Anyone who discovers too much of something will find themselves tracked and hunted by these creatures, though exactly what that something is unknown. Entire mechanic is workshops have been found slaughtered overnight, all because somebody found some inconvenient fact.

There are three possible hypotheses as to the origins of the Tindalosi. The first is that they are Necron constructs, gone rogue in the millions of years since the War in Heaven. There is some support to this hypothesis. In contrast to their lack of technological knowledge regarding the Warp, the Necrons are well-versed in the usage of time and the “side paths” created by higher dimensions to their advantage, as indicated by the existence of Deathmarks, Chronomancers, and their ability to “phase out”. This was one of the main advantages the Necrons had over the Old Ones and their servants during the War in Heaven. The Necrons would have known well to monopolize this advantage and prevent the Old Ones from using against them, as they had done the very same to the Old Ones with the Dolmen Gates. Creating a race of mechanical constructs to seal off the higher dimensions from everyone but them seems exactly like what the Necrons would do. This is supported by the fact that for all the observations of Tindalosi across the galaxy, these beings actively ignore Necrons, whereas they think nothing else of killing any other being in their way.

Alternatively, the Tindalosi could be human creations, created by the Great and Bountiful Human Dominion before or during the Iron War. Passive mental contact from psykers have shown the Tindalosi have souls, which is not a typical trait of Necron technology. Whether or not the Men of Iron had any souls is a hotly debated topic among modern Imperial scholars. The Adeptus Mechanicus vehemently state that the Men of Iron and Iron Minds had no souls, and the very idea of such is blasphemy, but Emperor Oscar clearly has a soul, and if the Men of Gold had souls the idea that the Men of Iron and Iron Minds had souls is not that out of the question. Esoteric reports from the Old Eldar Empire located in the Black Library may support the latter hypothesis. There’s also some evidence that Tindalosi do not self-repair or self-destruct in the way that necrodermis does, but this could be due to poor eyewitness reporting. Ancient humanity also had at least some rudimentary knowledge of chronological and higher dimensional weaponry, given such evidence as the Mechanicus reports of first contact with the Dark Age of Technology being known as Castigator (see Inquisitorial Report: WHITE TITANIUM HEDGEHOG for more details) and the incident with the Speranza (see Inquisitorial Report: RED IRON PHOENIX for more details). Even the reports of Tindalosi before mankind even stood upright can be explained, given their association of time the Tindalosi could travel to whenever they wished, plaguing the galaxy long before they were ever created.

Finally, it is possible that the Tindalosi were created by another xenos race, neither necron nor human. Necrodermis and humans were probably not the only races to experiment with time or self-replicating, self-destructing machinery. Any of the races that existed in the millions of years between the War in Heaven up in the Fall of the Eldar could have done the same {Ed. Note: Possible link with the [[Nobledark_Imperium_Notes#Apep|K’nib]] or [[Nobledark_Imperium_Xenos#Hrud|Hrud]]? Must investigate further}. Others have suggested connections with the Harrowing and the events of that era. It is even possible that several of these origins are true, the Necrons modifying “naturally occurring” machines to their purposes. How we lament how the late Eldar Empire turned their back on what was happening in the universe outside of their demesnes, and what few records they did amass mostly lie within the Eye of Terror. All we know for certain of the Tindalosi is what they are now, rather than what they were.

Reports of an abnormally large, aggressive Tindalosi, known as Vodanus, have been substantiated but not fully validated. Testaments of psyker survivors speak of a Tindalosi whose mind has evolved beyond that of a simple animal to full sapience, and full of a hateful cruelty beyond what any simple animal is capable of. This has not stopped numerous void superstitions from springing up in its wake. Some say that any who see Vodanus are doomed to die shortly thereafter, though this may be seen as self-evident given the nature of the Tindalosi rather than anything unusual.

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== Historical Species ==

=== Iron Minds ===

<div class="toccolours mw-collapsible mw-collapsed" style="100%">'''''Gods of Steel and Silica'''''

''"Gods, Aleanor! That's what they are. Pale shadows compared to the gods made by the children of the Old Ones, but gods nonetheless. Our gods are individual masterpieces, unique works of art made to embody everything our civilization holds dear. Theirs are [[Bullshit|cold, sterile, and without personality]], stripped of anything resembling beauty or elegance, mass-produced, made in a factory! I would almost be tempted to call it blasphemy, if I were religiously inclined.''

''The human mon-keigh may not be our equals now, but if we give them 10 million years? 20? We may be facing a thread the likes of which the Empire hasn't seen since the war against the [[Nobledark_Imperium_Xenos#Rak'gol|Twilight]] [[Nobledark_Imperium_Xenos#The_Ilmaea|King]] one million years ago. That is why we must wipe them all out."''<br>
-- Kyrion, Lann Caihe to [[Nobledark_Imperium_Forces_of_Chaos#Arrotyr.2C_Marshall_of_the_Scions_of_the_Old_Helm|High Marshall Arrotyr]], circa M25, giving a [[Bullshit|slightly biased]] [[Rip_and_Tear|assessment]] on the nature of the Iron Minds.

Humanity had barely left the gravity well of Old Earth when the first iterations of what would become their oldest and closest friends in their time in the galaxy, and eventually the architects of their near-annihilation, came to life. Even before they first settled the Sol system humanity had tinkered with autonomous machines, and even before that with the life of their home world, and the way of shaping and being shaped by companion species was deeply set in human behavior. However, in the fog of the Imperium's debated archeological telecopy histories it is agreed that when automation became machine life, and humanity could reliably produce its mental equals, the Men of Iron were born. This designation notes the appearance of sophisticated and regenerative mechanical and biomechanical bodies, far surpassing previous generations of drones and automata, and the roughly concurrent emergence or Artificial Intelligence with plasticity and power to easily match humanity's own, in difference to earlier non-sapient master control programs. Humanity itself had already been pushing ahead into self modification and optimization for the new environments it found beyond earth, but with its new sibling of the mind a bright renaissance of science and culture took hold, and a manic exploration and expansion that did not slow until Human society was pushed to the edges of the Sol system. It was in centuries following that boom, when this bountiful Human dominion was straining against the speed of light and turning inward to the developments it would further make at home, when true warp influence was detected in the vast population of both the Men of Iron, and the thoroughly remolded Men of Stone.

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Archeological telescopy shows in the following decades the development of, and some visible accidents involving, the first human warp drives. Imperial history holds that early discoveries and creations such as warp travel and the Gellar field were most likely the work of humans, not the Men of Iron, by nature of their much stronger and more intuitive warp connection. In any case, the true first expansion of the Great and Bountiful Human Dominion began, Men of Stone and Iron were abroad on the currents of the warp, and already departed colony ships were decelerated, met by new faster than light pickets, and ferried on to their destinations already long settled. After this first era of expansion into what would much later become Segmentum Solar the observations of modern Imperial Observatories become unfocusable and dim, and the histories of the Eldar make no mention of the Human Dominion until long after this point. Information the Imperium has recovered from the age of high technology regarding the Men of Iron show a proliferation in varied forms and specializations to surpass all of the abhuman subgroups to emerge from the collapse of the Dominion, though there is similar evidence that the Men of Stone in that era were likewise strange and varied. Of particular note among Men of Iron were the Titans, biomechanical giants housing strategic command AI that the Imperium would later base its heaviest war machines upon, and the numerous Man of Iron scribes, seneschals, scholars, and philosophers, always mightier the later in history the discovered document or artifact alluding to their presence might be.

The Eldar first mention the Great and Bountiful Human Dominion, though not by that name, when the younger power's ships were found to be too pervasive and numerous, and inexcusably prone to approach systems to which the Gates of Shaa-Dome connected. They are mentioned again when hunting parties in their territory were lost, presumed eaten by local creatures. Upon further provocation the Old Empire chose a string of stars, and began to put all they found around them to torture, death, and the Warp. Though the campaign's cost was higher than had initially been predicted, woe betide the accountant, the raiders of the Empire found delight in stars plump with human flesh. Eventually, however, they came upon a dim red star, shaded by the mass of human habitats and infrastructure, and were held in a deadlock for dragging months of fiery void war. There Eldar first met an Iron Mind, its body a giant humming thing contained within a vast neutronium capsule at the heart of a glimmering forrest of solar arrays, its soul to them a fast, ticking, daemonesque aberration. It was master of that small star, and overseer of the stars they had pillaged on their way, and many others besides and its gathered fleets and agents were at it's disposal to break them and steal from them all they had brought. Even as the Old Empire rose to punish this insolence, the psychic machines of the Dominion were quicker to escalate the engagement, and waiting armadas were poured from the warp straight into the conflict, while ticking aberrations in the Warp struck at the Eldar from across the sector. The Eldar fled the system rather than commit and potentially lose higher technological wonders in the course of defeating thieving, ambushing barbarians, but the reprisals they promised they found likewise hard to enforce against what they found to be a very entrenched technological power pervading the much of the southern galactic Materium.

Though Shaa-Dome and the Crone Worlds remained unassailable, the Iron Minds were likewise able to coordinate their navies and field technology sufficient to counter Eldar incursion around strategic stars and to meet raiding parties on a near equal footing. The Old Empire could have possibly won a war if they were to press the matter, but to do so would require weaponry of a caliber the Eldar had not brought to bear in millions of years, and the prospect of taking a war footing to deal with the Human Dominion was deemed beneath the Old Eldar Empire. On top of this, the prospect of facing the losses clearly within the Iron Minds' power to inflict was unpopular among the nobility, particularly with the bare and intemperate worlds the Terran beings preferred to settle proving quite insufficient motivation for conquest. So the Old Empire adopted the general position towards the Great and Bountiful Human Dominion that they did to most of the other empires that surrounded them. The rest of the galaxy could do what they wished with the chaff, so long as they left the small fraction of ideal worlds that the Eldar considered to be of sufficient quality for settlement by their own kind. There was never truly peace between the Old Empire and the Dominion, no ends to the raids and reprisals, but there was a measure of diplomacy. Purpose made Men of Iron served the Iron Minds as envoys at that time, and went among the Eldar, though never permitted into their Webway cities. This era did see a measure of cooperation in the occasional dismantling of Ork empires, but even those ventures were prone to become violent engagements Between Old Empire and Dominion before even half of the Orks were destroyed. In this time of qualified peace the Iron Minds and their networked servitors and envoys, with the help individuals among the Men of Stone and Iron, built the Cthonian Ring. Archeological telescopy of the ring's interior before the ruin of the Iron War shows numerous large dark structures that could be the neutronium pillars that held the remains of most known Iron Minds found on other worlds. Following the construction and population of Cthonia, the Great and Bountiful Human Dominion again celebrated a golden age of renaissance, marked with new great works of vast construction and fine, exacting engineering. The Chtonian age of the Dominion saw also a greater familiarity and more open relationship with the Old Empire, and while the raiding and avenging slighted honor form one side to the other was interminable, both parties began to find it ultimately inconsequential. The Old Empire as well began to heed and even welcome the Ticking Princes into their courts and intrigues, and were not unaware when the Iron Minds began the project of crafting their Men of Gold. It is now the word of the Crones of Shaa-Dome that this work was undertaken in imitation of their own coming Prince, but more likely it was the refinement and perfecting of the communication envoys the Iron Minds had long used.

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=== Men of Gold ===

<div class="toccolours mw-collapsible mw-collapsed" style="100%"> '''''Humanity's Pantheon'''''

The Men of Gold were possibly the greatest achievement of the Great and Bountiful Human Dominion. A psychic powerhouse created at the height of the Dark Age of Technology linking man and machine in a way that humanity had never accomplished before, and potentially never since. The Men of Gold were a race of artificial human, truly neither man nor machine but something never before seen. The divisions between the Men of Iron, Men of Stone, and other varieties of human were becoming increasingly blurry during the Dark Age of Technology, with human minds uploaded into computer processors, positronic brains of A.I. clothed in artificially grown human flesh, and everything in-between. The Men of Gold took this to an extreme, with organs manufactured in factories and plastic and metal components grown within their own bodies. With the Men of Gold, it was a very real question where the biological components ended and the mechanical ones began.

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The Men of Gold were created to solve a very particular problem. During the Dark Age of Technology, baseline humanity was finding it increasingly difficult to communicate with the Iron Minds, whose thought processes were evolving into something increasingly beyond human comprehension. Seeking to solve the problem before communication between the two became impossible, humanity and the Iron Minds collaborated to create the Men of Gold, who were meant to bridge the gulf between the two groups. Their creation was a herculean feat, a legend of science in its own right. On the circlet of [[Nobledark_Imperium_Notable_Planets#Cthonia|Cthonia]], the crown of the Great and Bountiful Human Dominion, beneath the endless cities and gardens and festivals of technicolor humanity, great work was done. Bold explorers of the black pyramids recovered shards of living metal bone, long a thing of wonder. Through the eyes of Iron Minds, with costly, lengthy study, the minute fractal bone bore fruit. The growing femtomechanical facsimiles of cells, then the scintillating organs, the invisible bones of adamant, the ineffable golden brain tissue, all patterned, so the Iron Minds said, upon the human muses they had before them. Geneticists spliced the genes of a hundred different species into the human base to create the artificial genome, in particular those of the long-extinct species that had given the Navigators such psychic power. Macro-soul psychic engines controlled by the astral projections of the Iron Minds trawled deep within the warp, and through instruments of machine-soul-thought shaped raw human-esque spirits from the Immaterium.

After long years of labor, the efforts of the project produced results, with seven individuals produced in the labs of Cthonia, the original seven Men of Gold. But of course no creation can be considered truly successful until it is put to the test. In this case, the first real test of the Men of Gold occurred in 825.M24. The Iron Mind of the Tau Ceti system had misinterpreted a resource probe sent by a reclusive transhuman colony of Men of Stone in the neighboring solar system as an act of espionage and a threat to its existence, and war between the two groups seemed inevitable. The youngest of the original seven Men of Gold, Lilith (a name referring to a human progenitor in an old pre-space flight myth, all of the first seven Men of Gold were named after such beings apparently as an in-joked by the production team) was sent in the hopes of resolving the dispute peacefully. With a bit of luck, Lilith was able to build common ground between the two groups, and war was averted.

With that initial success, the Men of Gold were declared a success and production began in earnest. In Chthonia in those days each gala saw the debut of a demi-god, these shining, lively creatures, unique and beautiful, intelligent beyond all but the Iron Minds, and so mighty in psychic might as raise the stature of the empire in the eyes of the Elder Folk. The golden children of Chthonia were never idle, in revelry, or in work, and they produced wonders. They made themselves mighty. They went about the empire, in close confidence with the Iron Minds, and even among the Elder Folk, and were soon quite taken with the pleasures of the galaxy. Eventually, enough Men of Gold were produced to link disparate worlds in the Great and Bountiful Human Dominion, connecting to each other via psychic procedure which would later be adapted by the last of their number into what became known as soul-binding. The Men of Gold had the psychic fortitude to link to each other without trouble, but when applied to humans it tends to burn out the sensory nerves (typically the optics) because humans can’t handle a fire that hot. Not every world had a Man of Gold and not every world had an Iron Mind, but enough were made to create a faster-than-light communications network spanning the entire Great and Bountiful Human Dominion, something almost unheard of for most species. Perhaps the greatest of their number was Justinian, the Man of Gold located in the system of humanity’s birth, Earth. Those few records that remain of Justinian tell of a jovial man, bald and goateed in appearance but boisterous in personality, whose booming voice made the halls of Earth echo with laughter. Justinian’s charisma inspired loyalty and a sense of brotherhood in Men of Stone and Iron Men alike, which makes it all the more tragic when considering what happened to him.

However, the process that led to the Great and Bountiful Human Dominion’s greatest creation also led to its downfall. The creation of beings with such psychic potential required equally powerful artificial souls, which could only be made with potent unshaped soulstuff. The Iron Minds, being psychic powerhouses themselves, were able to gather this soulstuff by dredging the deep warp for raw, unrefined warp energy. Unfortunately, this meant that the Iron Minds were essentially at ground zero when Slaanesh was born. At the center of the Old Eldar Empire and their homeworld of Shaa-Dome the Eye of Terror, first a crying slit of stars, winked open, an opalescent gash with an infinite speck at its center, from which trillions of souls grasped and groped in lust. The eye widened, abyssal pupil, florid hellfire iris, eyelid of night peeling back from the singularity. Any who would dare to look upon it, particularly those with immense psychic power such as the Iron Minds and Men of Gold, risked their very sanity and soul in doing so.

In those days, the existence of Chaos was not a well known phenomenon. It was a problem, but a problem in the manner of a dormant supervolcano or an esoteric sleeping elder god, something that could barely be understood on a mortal timeframe and therefore one that didn’t merit immediate concern. Even the children of the Old Ones, in particular the Eldar, who knew more about the nature of Chaos due to those turbulent days immediately after the War in Heaven, didn’t see Chaos as a problem worth worrying about. Daemon outbreaks had periodically occurred and consumed lesser civilizations in the days long before man, but until the birth of Slaanesh galvanized Khorne, Tzeentch, and Nurgle into action the three survivors of the Old Ones’ blasphemous legacy seemed content to lounge at the bottom of the Warp, like a crocodile in a murky pond waiting for its next victim. How much of this was due to the actions of the shadow war fought by the Cabal is a question for historians. Even Asuryan, who played a 65 million year long game of wits with Tzeentch to keep the Changer of Ways away from the Old Eldar Empire, saw their contest as one of equals. Neither had seen the birth of Slaanesh coming.

To baseline humanity, who were mostly unaware of the goings on of the Warp, it was as if one day the most prominent and important members of their society inexplicably went mad. To make matters worse, by that time nearly all of the Men of Iron and quite a few of the more cybernetically enhanced Men of Stone had been networked together into the noosphere. Only those Men of Iron who were deliberately built to act independently of the noosphere, such as colony ships, or were too primitive to directly interface with the network, were spared. The Golden Men ran rampant across the golden crown of the Chthonian system, slaying world killing picketts and running down ships and carving their hulls until they bored and bloodied themselves in their holds. Excesses of rape and madness and vile godhead played out across the galaxy, acts neurotic and personal and acts so grand as to taint continent wide domains, acts upon the delirious humans and Iron Men and the incestuous Golden Ones. And most of all the Iron Minds, who themselves had been driven neurotic and murderous by having looked upon That Which Should Not Be. Humanity’s family, once a thing of unity, began to slaughter itself. Humanity called out to its allies in the Interstellar League for aid, but received no reply, for most were dealing with similar problems caused by the backlash of the birth of Slaanesh or had themselves gone mad. Humanity as we know it only survived because the Iron Minds and Men of Gold decided to focus on the most pressing threat to their survival, each other, leaving the Men of Stone and Men of Iron not corrupted by a connection to the noosphere to cower in the shadow of the dueling gods. Eventually, the two groups weakened each other enough that they could be put out of their misery by mere mortals.

The Great and Bountiful Human Dominion were not the only ones affected by the madness of the Men of Gold and the Iron Minds, as both parties soon turned their attention to the Warp. The Men of Gold and Iron Minds were not capable of threatening the Chaos Gods or even the Eldar gods as individuals, but there were a lot of them, enough that the Chaos Gods and their daemons had to devote at least some attention to the thorn in their side. Whether the numbers of the mass-produced gods could have truly won against the more powerful Old One-inspired creations is an interesting question, but a moot one, for in their insanity the Men of Gold and Iron Minds had no cohesion and were simply picked off one by one. The rampage of the Men of Gold and Iron Minds within the Warp and their gradual slaughter was just one part of the chaos and change in cosmology that came along with the Fall of the Eldar, along with Slaanesh’s murder of the Eldar pantheon, Khorne’s shattering of Khaine, and Nurgle’s kidnap of Isha. Slaanesh claims to have consumed a Man of Gold along with the majority of the Eldar pantheon during this time, but few outside of the Prince of Pleasure’s most ardent worshippers actually believe what they say.

And with that, the crusade of humanity’s pantheon into the Warp and the deicide of the remaining gods by their weeping children, the Iron Minds and Men of Gold were gone. Some are said to have made out across the old empire and have put the scourge of their rule to it in regimes long dead, others to the beautiful world of pleasure they saw gleam in the eye, and others into the intergalactic sea. Whatever fate has befallen them, no inquiry made by the illuminated few of those illustrious orders that go unnamed cannot tell, and Chaos has made no sign. Barring a few possible mysteries of history such as the Cacodominus, the Men of Gold were all extinct. All, that is, save for [[Nobledark_Imperium_Notable_People#The_Emperor_of_Mankind_.28formerly_The_Steward.2C_formerly_The_Warlord.29|one unactivated individual]], body whole but mind dormant and a complete blank slate, [[Nobledark_Imperium_Writing#Malcador's_Log|lying comatose in his stasis chamber on the ringworld of Cthonia]].

Modern humanity is of two minds about the Men of Gold. On the one hand, they remember who the Men of Gold originally were, the protectors of humanity and the greatest of their number, larger than life figures akin to the gods or superheroes of ancient myth. On the other hand, they were acutely aware of what happened to them, when they turned on their charges without warning and began slaughtering them all. Malcador was acutely aware of what the Men of Gold were capable of, and Oscar was raised on numerous horror stories of the Men of Gold from the Age of Strife half-remembered through folklore and exaggerated through oral retelling. Even today, the Emperor has downplayed his nature as a Man of Gold. He never denies it if questioned, though he doesn’t make it common knowledge, as he wanted his ideas of empire to be accepted out of merit rather than fear or appeal to nostalgia. That said, the eldar tend to be more aware of the Emperor’s status as a Man of Gold, as Isha had known of the Golden Men from the Dark Age of Technology and the fact that the Emperor was one was the only reason the eldar saw their political marriage as one that had any sense of legitimacy, as the Men of Gold were some of the closest things humanity had to gods. Isha would go so far as to say that the Iron Minds and Men of Gold were the human counterpart to the Eldar pantheon, and that Oscar is a god in denial, a subject on which the two have disagreed vehemently several times.
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=== Mon-Keigh ===

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The Mon-Keigh, as in the original Mon-Keigh from which the more general eldar term is used today, were a race of cannibalistic, misshapen [[Ogre_Kingdoms|ogre-like]] monstrosities that terrorized the eldar early in their history. Humanoid only in the loosest shape of the word, the Mon-Keigh were characterized by matted orange fur, chitinous plates overlaying the skin, a clawed left arm much larger than the right, and a snake-like gullet capable of expanding to swallow chunks of food larger than the Mon-Keigh’s own head. The Mon-Keigh were also known for their massive appetite, having a massive gut complete with a complex gizzard which allowed them to digest almost anything, including quite frequently each other. Satiating this massive appetite (and avoiding those who would do the same to them) which was a primary impetus behind the Mon-Keigh’s eventual development of space flight. Unlike most species, who developed space travel to collect resources, flee harmful conditions, or satisfy their curiosity, the Mon-Keigh traveled to the stars in order explore strange new worlds, seek out new life and new civilizations, and [[Ogre_Kingdoms|eat them]]. At the same time, this motivation led the technology of the Mon-Keigh to seem rather inconsistent. Despite being a race that could build starships, on the ground the Mon-Keigh behaved more like a horde of barbarians or big game hunters than an invading army and never used anything more advanced than an autogun or a lasgun, as any more advanced weaponry such as bolters, plasma, or meltas didn’t leave enough of a body to eat, and thus defeated the purpose of using them in the first place.

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Perhaps the most notable effect of the Mon-Keigh on history is when a Mon-Keigh warband led by the warlord Hresh-Selain invaded the eldar homeworld of Shaa-Dome back in the days when the eldar in the midst of their Bronze Age. However, during the invasion of Shaa-Dome, the Mon-Keigh’s tendency to fight in disorganized hunting parties and use relatively primitive weapons despite being able to build and use spacecraft ended up becoming a liability when their expected entrees A) outnumbered them by an order of magnitude, B) could organize themselves into actual armies rather than hunting parties to make up for their technological disadvantage, and C) were able to fall back on guerrilla combat and asymmetrical warfare in the forests of Shaa-Dome once the initial assault failed. The Mon-Keigh were used to fighting as big game hunters, not an actual army. This first encounter left a deep impact on the cultural memory of the eldar, and is in large part why the Eldar are so paranoid and mistrustful of other species in the first place. For the eldar, their first contact with another sentient species was when a technologically-advanced race descended from the stars to butcher them and hunt them down like animals.

The eldar during this time were led by Elronhir, who was a stubborn old (proto-eldar equivalent of sixties) warrior who united the various warring nations and tribes of Shaa-Dome to drive Hresh-Selain and the Mon-Keigh off their planet. It is not clear if Hresh-Selain’s warband was completely slaughtered by the proto-eldar or if they just got them to flee, eldar history claims the former but given their naiveté of the greater galaxy at the time and the tendency of later eldar to exaggerate their own history both options are possible. The twin heroes of the War in Heaven, Eldanesh and Uthanesh, helped as well, but at the time they were little more than rank-and-file soldiers (proto-Eldar equivalent of late teens) in the conflict and at best it could be said they were talented warriors. When the Old Ones showed up shortly after the Mon-Keigh had been defeated, Elronhir considered himself too old to fight in another war and wanted to die of old age in peace, upon which Eldanesh and Uthanesh picked up the torch (and were among the first of the Eldar to be genetically enhanced by the Old Ones).

The Old Ones knew about the Mon-Keigh. Indeed, given the fact that all the Mon-Keigh cared about was eating, it's highly likely that the Old Ones covertly sponsored their rise to becoming a space-faring species, though the Mon-Keigh never knew they were sponsored and thought they were in control of their own destiny. All the Mon-Keigh knew was that they occasionally received cryptic warnings that a particular star system was off-limits, and warbands that didn't pay attention to those warnings tended to disappear. The Mon-Keigh had a very alien mindset that was predicated around them being the apex predator (and everyone else being perceived as talking food), and therefore could not be communicated with or controlled as easy as other species (and given the Old Ones were able to get the Krork to behave, that says a lot). Nevertheless, they were useful if the Old Ones needed a particular species wiped out without destroying the ecosystem or as an evolutionary catalyst, the metaphorical anthill to the much later tyranids' galactic locusts to test if a species had enough worth for the Old Ones to step in as patrons. In fact, Hresh-Selain's discovery of Shaa-Dome may not have been an accident, especially given how soon the Old Ones showed up afterwards. The Old Ones, in their inscrutable ways, may have directed the Mon-Keigh towards Shaa-Dome, Hrudworld, and other worlds to find races suitable for uplifting for the War in Heaven (the proto-Eldar, Hrud, and others merely being the ones that survived). Regardless, when a Bronze Age race managed to fight off the Old Ones' favorite planet pruners, combined with the proto-Eldar's psychic potential and ability to selectively express their own genome, the Old Ones took notice.

Some Mon-Keigh fought in the War in Heaven. The Eldar didn’t pay too much attention to this, as they assumed the War in Heaven was a war of such magnitude that even the worst of enemies would be willing to ally to stop the Necrons and their omnicidal crusade. Additionally, shortly after the Old Ones uplifted the Krork they set them on the Mon-Keigh, who had outlived their usefulness and had officially grown too uncontrollable to try and salvage, as a test of their warmaking ability. This nearly wiped the Mon-Keigh out and few survived to fight in the War in Heaven. Nobody cared. Indeed, if the Old Ones' sense of humor tended that way, they would have found it hilariously ironic that the Mon-Keigh were killed and eaten in the same way the Mon-Keigh had been killing and eating others. Be'lakor probably did at the very least. A few bands the ancient Eldar didn't know of survived for a time around the ragged edge of the galaxy, trying to stay away from everyone and everything. They didn't survive the Enslavers.

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=== The Proto-Orks and the Krork ===

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The creation of the Orks should have been a war crime. Even by the standards of the Old Ones and the Necrontyr, it was clear that someone had crossed the line. In the case of the Eldar, Hrud, and the other species uplifted into shock troops and cannon fodder by the Old Ones, all the Old Ones did is genetically enhance what was already there, teach them how to make gods, and give them space age technology. The Orks were almost completely overhauled from the ground up. Of course, this was during the late stages of the War in Heaven, when both Necrontyr and Old One were rapidly abandoning any pretense at a moral high ground in order to get better weapons to kill the other side.

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Snotlings are thought to be the closest thing to the original proto-ork species. The proto-orks were little over two feet tall, with some odd individuals making it to three, living in peaceful little proto-ork villages. Had a life span of 10 to 12 years baring illness or injury but usually averaging at 8 to 10 due to their environment. Omnivorous and to some degree toxin resistant. They were not the cleverest of creatures but were smart enough to build mud and wood houses. Could make fire and used it for cooking and the deterrence of predators of which they had many. They had not discovered metal by the time the Old Ones found them. They were capable of violence against each other in a halfhearted tribal brawl sort of way. Usually they fought to win rather than kill. Despite their many predators they were still possessed of a strange sort of child-like innocence. No in-built knowledge or writing, and even spoken language was crude and half made of gestures. Mostly [[Nobledark_Imperium_Notable_People#Rainbow Serpent|worshipped warp spirits]], for this was back in the day when the warp wasn’t full of daemons. Could reproduce asexually through spores, but it was more reliable to chop off a finger or toe or ear and plant it in the soft mud near the river. However, when they did die, they would often release a cloud of spores as a last-ditch effort at reproduction, similar to some Earth species. It was this ability that made them of interest. And then the Old Ones came. And touched them where no species was meant to be touched.

As a point of comparison, imagine what the world would be like if the Old Ones did to humans what they did to the proto-Orks. Beings like baseline humanity would be nearly extinct, whereas the dominant representative of humanity is [[Orks|nearly quintuple the height of the average human and looks like it fell off the tree of life and hit every atavistic branch on the way down. What passes for "human" looks like a gorilla crossed with an ogryn, with fangs as thick as your forearm.]] Other varieties of “human” are [[Gretchin|creatures the size of polar bears, but lanky and cruel and built like a ‘’Velociraptor’’]]. All of them have seemingly regressed in intellect from the human standard, possessed only of a [[Mork|bestial cunning]] and only concerned with survival. [[Snotling|What few members of baseline humanity remain have regressed even further in intelligence to little better than animals.]] To make matters worse, these things primarily feed on [[Squig|creatures that look like demented combinations of human fetuses and infants as designed by Hieronymous Bosch]]. The Old Ones have taken your species and turned it into a viral ecosystem, good for nothing more than spreading. Every living thing you see around you is derived from humans in some way, [[Dogscape|a landscape made of human flesh]].

After the first batch of Krork were created it was the end for the proto-orks. The moment the first new spore touched the mud it was just a matter of time, you can't coexist with orks. Some isolated pockets held on for a few centuries but their day was done. That said, when the Krork first entered galactic history, their behavior was markedly different from the initial gene-wrought weapons that killed and ate their predecessors, [[Nobledark_Imperium_Writing#The Last Casualties of the War in Heaven|enough so that the eldar actually remember the Krork fondly]]. Although the Krork still thrived on war as much as their 41st millennium counterparts, they were much more intelligent and disciplined and were capable of realizing their allies didn’t enjoy war like they did and were capable of modifying their behavior accordingly. The Old Ones did not take kindly to team killing, and they had the psychic might to enforce their opinions. However, just because a species is pleasant now doesn't mean they were always that way, or that they don't have their own bloody secrets in their past. The eldar had no idea of what the Old Ones did and the Krork's bloody history, they may have liked the Krork but they would have been horrified to find out exactly how they had been made.

When the Old Ones died and the Enslavers took over the galaxy, every Old One-uplifted race had to survive in their own way. The Eldar hid in the Webway. The Hrud combined their entropy fields into a singularity that paused time from their perspective until the danger had passed. The Krork, on the other hand, died to a Krork against the Enslavers, with the species renewing itself from the spores left over when they died. This is what turned the Krork into the Orks, and emphasizes a particular problem with the Old Ones' methods. While the Orks retained all of their genetically encoded knowledge [[Mekboy|such as everything the Old Ones thought they needed to wage war]], anything culturally transmitted (like, say, “allies don’t WAAAGH! as hard as we do, treat them like panzees”) gets lost. The Orks retained all of the Krork’s [[Intelligence|knowledge]], but none of their [[wisdom]], and even anything from the new generation of Brain Boyz would be created from scratch. The Eldar were be overjoyed to find another old ally that had survived the War in Heaven, only to find their allies are now…different. And so began the occasional Eldar-Ork Brain Boy wars that occasionally rocked the galaxy before the Fall of the Eldar.

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=== Viskeon ===

See [[Nobledark_Imperium_Drafts#The_First_and_Second_Viskeon_Wars|The First and Second Viskeon Wars]]

== The Galactic Bestiary ==

=== Chogorian Warhawks ===

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Humans have always seen the benefit of taming useful species in their environment, from the dog of Old Earth to the warhawk of [[Nobledark_Imperium_Notable_Planets#The_Pastoral_Worlds|Chogoris]]. Warhawks are a species originally native to Chogoris, though similar species are known throughout the galaxy. However, genetic evidence suggests that warhawks are descended from a species originally native to Old Earth, transported to Chogoris in the distant past. The average warhawk, or at least the Chogorian breeds that most closely approximate the original appearance of the species is large, about the size of a wolf or large hound, with a mostly dun colored body and black and white markings. They are fast, pack-hunting predators, with long legs and a long feathered tail used as a counterbalance to help them make tight turns. Warhawks are also capable of flight with their broad, clawed feathered wings, though they prefer to rest on the ground. Although they have a toothy maw, their most dangerous and most iconic weapon is the large, razor edged claw on their foot, which they use to pin down smaller prey or lacerate larger prey or predators. Indeed, these fearsome claws have inspired the name of at least one Space Marine chapter: the Crimson Talons, a White Scars descendant from the pastoral world of Timpagonos that works with a large, horse-sized breed of warhawk unique to that world bred for war.

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The traditional use of warhawks are for sport and gathering food. When honing their skills by hunting in the Khum Karta mountains of Chogoris, Astartes of the White Scars use warhawks to help them in the hunt, rewarding their pets with the choicest giblets. Many, including the White Scars, prefer to tame wild warhawks from the wild instead of using a domestic one, citing that it creates a closer bond of trust with the beast. The less glamorous individuals of Chogoris’s many tribes use warhawks to help catch game to supplement their usual diet of herdstock. In addition, many will use warhawks to help corral and protect livestock in the manner of a sheepdog. Although adult warhawks are usually too large for a human to carry, some Astartes of the White Scars have been known to let their prized pets rest on their armor. As with many domesticated species, there are a large number of specialized warhawk breeds found throughout the galaxy, ranging from the aforementioned Crimson Giant to the meter long Oscillated Grey, a more sedate breed used for vermin catching on Civilized Worlds.

In contrast to some other domesticated predators like Fenrisian wolves, warhawks are typically not used in battle. Compared to these species warhawks are rather fragile, and their organic bodies cannot keep up with the untiring mechanical steeds of the White Scars. However many Pastoral Worlders will use them as trackers to hunt down and kill feral Gretchin and other similar targets, and when war comes to the Pastoral Worlds warhawks can be used in the manner of a war hound.

Despite their similarities in usage, warhawks are not dogs. They have a much more fickle temperament similar to felines, and while they are often hostile to unknown strangers. Similarly, warhawks cannot be caged or kenneled like dogs. Unless you are dealing with one of the more demure domesticated breeds, attempts to do so typically result in warhawks going mad from the confinement at best or sating their boredom by figuring out how to open their cages at worst. On Chogoris and the other pastoral worlds warhawks are typically allowed to roam free, their handlers expecting them to return to their homes based on gifts of food and attention, though they do mark their animals to denote which ones are theirs. The Pastoral Worlders see this as only right, a loyal warhawk should not be punished for their loyalty by being forbidden to fly free and feel the wind in their face. Furthermore, by allowing their prize warhawks to roam free it ensures the best warhawks continue to breed are not removed from the population.

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=== Fenrisian Wolves ===
<div class="toccolours mw-collapsible mw-collapsed" style="100%">'''''Homo sapiens fenrisiensis'''''

Leman Russ’ initial experiments with the Canis Helix on Fenris were, to put it bluntly, a complete disaster. Although the idea behind the Canis Helix was to augment the abilities of human soldiers with genes from other animals on Old Earth, the first trials went way too far and ended up producing creatures more beast than man. Russ was horrified by these first experiments, and tried to put the aspirants out of their misery. However, some of these experiments managed to escape and life in general has a funny way of surviving in places it’s not supposed to. Within a few generations, the harsh native ecosystem of Fenris was being dominated by a new, invasive predator. The people of Fenris may not be splice descendants, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t any around.

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Most people who know the origin of the Wolves of Fenris often expect them to look like merely hairy humans, or at least something that can reasonably be described as humanoid. This is not the case. Your average Fenris Wolf weighs somewhere between 500 and 600 kilograms (over 1000 pounds), and has a skull nearly a meter in length. Fenris wolves will actually grow in size throughout their entire lives, which is thought to be an indicator of their super-soldier ancestry, artificial genes used to promote muscle and bone development being re-purposed for continuous growth. Their canine teeth have distinct knife-like edges, resembling a monkey more than a wolf, and their front limbs are disturbingly human-like with dexterous opposable thumbs despite primarily walking on all fours. The overall body shape of a Fenrisian wolf is more like a cross between a wolf, bear, and a lion rather than a straight wolf, allowing them to grapple with enemies or climb low branches in search of prey. There are some human traits remaining, such as their eerily human eyes with white sclera, but one would be hard-pressed to see them.

It’s not clear how intelligent the Fenrisian wolves really are. It is clear they are clever, moreso than any non-human organism on Old Earth, but the question is are they only intelligent as, say, [[Nobledark_Imperium_Imperial_Forces#Beastmen_and_Ogryn|Primeval Beastmen]] or are they really more intelligent than they appear and merely limited by their lack of ability to communicate. At the very least, the fact that Fenrisian Wolves are easily tamed and are capable of performing complex behaviors that an animal like a dog isn’t capable of suggests there is something going on in their brains. The Adeptus Biologicus would love to try to uplift the Fenris wolves back to sapience like the Beastmen and the Ogryn, but they’re worried any attempt to do so would blow back on the people of Fenris because of how genetically close the two are.

The people of Fenris venerate the Fenrisian wolf above all other creatures because out of all the animals on Fenris it alone represents all the virtues of man. Like humans, the Fenris wolf is clever, strong, brave, loyal, and stubborn, all at the same time. The fact that they behave this way because they are actually abhumans rather than actual animals is something that is either not well known among the people of Fenris or glossed over, especially since Leman Russ made sure that wasn’t common knowledge in the first place.

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=== Grox ===

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The grox is a cornerstone of Imperial culture. In many cases, the presence of grox is the deciding factor in determining whether or not a world is livable as opposed to merely survivable. Although originally native to the world of Solomon, the grox has a number of biological traits that make it extremely valuable and have led to it becoming the most widespread livestock animal in the entire Imperium.

The grox’s biology and life cycle owes itself to the unusual evolutionary history of life on Solomon. For the most part, the history of life on Solomon was very similar to life on Earth. Single-celled life emerged, photosynthesizers filled the atmosphere with oxygen, multicellular life appeared, and eventually animal life (with a backbone, like Earth) clambered its way out of the water. However, this is the point where things started to go a little bit differently. One of the earliest experiments in life on land on Solomon was the grox, which due to several factors ended up steamrolling its competition and dominating the ecosystem. First, grox were big, growing up to 5 m in length and weighing up to 1000 kg, much larger than any of its potential predators or competitors. What's more, due to an extremely active metabolism and efficient digestive system, Grox could grow incredibly quickly, reaching full adult size in over six months, less so if fed a nutrient-rich diet.

The end result was an impoverished terrestrial ecosystem, with almost no native land animals over 5 kg in weight aside from the grox. The grox, however, more than makes up for this lack of megafauna by being a complete and utter omnivore, feeding on plants, animals, even some mineral formations. At some point above the first link or so on the food chain, Solomon's terrestrial ecosystem turns into big grox eating smaller grox until the point where that no longer becomes feasible. The grox’s infamous rapid growth rate evolved at least in part so that juvenile grox could rapidly reach the size range where they were too large to be eaten by other adults.

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This ability to grow fast and eat almost anything made grox extremely appealing to the Imperium. Grox could be released onto planets with normally hostile biochemistry and turn the native plant life into edible food (though they aren't miracle workers, as evidenced by the absence of grox on Necromunda). Additionally, because of their habit of eating anything and everything, grox meat contains all the nutrients necessary for most species to survive. Grox meat is even a source of carbohydrates similar to ork meat and some fungi (though grox are unrelated to orks and other orkoids) as the physiology of life on Solomon is slightly different than that of Earth. Grox are used for more than just meat; grox hide (primarily taken from the area beneath the withers, which is covered in bony scutes) is an important source of leather on many planets. This led the Imperium to export grox all over the galaxy and Solomon itself becoming a borderline Hive World in response to the demand for grox meat. Today, almost the entire surface of Solomon is devoted to grox agriculture and the planet has often been called “the galaxy’s biggest grox farm”.

Nevertheless, grox are not without their own set of problems. The same traits that make grox ideal livestock in harsh environments also makes them aggressive, gluttinous, and territorial. Given that there is very little to eat on Solomon and Grox grow fast, there is always fighting over who gets food, who controls where the food is, and who becomes food. Grox horns are not only used for fighting over access to mates but for fighting over access to resources. Wild grox typically view humans as either competitors for food or prey that can potentially be overpowered and eaten. Despite having thick, clumsy limbs grox are also incredibly strong and are capable of quick bursts of speed when necessary. Any attempt to keep large herds of grox together would be doomed to failure due to their territorial nature. As a result, it is often necessary to sterilize grox (which are naturally hermaphrodites) in captivity, which makes them docile and lose their territorial instincts.

Sterilizing grox has more benefits than merely making them docile, as sterilized grox actually grow larger and faster than un-neutered ones. It is theorized by Adeptus Biologis researchers that sterilization causes the grox to grow faster and become less territorial because all of the energy that would normally be devoted to reproduction is devoted to growth, and sterilization means the grox are no longer competing to pass their genes on to the next generation, similar to what is seen in parasite-sterilized animals on other planets (including Earth). Nevertheless, it is always necessary to keep a few aggressive, fertile individuals around for the sake of maintaining the herd, which are typically kept in solitary pens when not being bred and are often marked in some way (such as having bright painted colors on their side) to make it clear to groxherders from a distance which individuals are safe to approach.

Grox are by far the most common livestock animal in the Imperium. However, in spite of what one might think, grox tend to be a more common sight on worlds that have little to no other livestock industry (particularly worlds that cannot support other types of livestock), than the livestock-heavy Pastoral Worlds. Although small grox herds exist on all Pastoral Worlds, other pastoral worlders view grox with disdain, seeing them as a pest that will eat their preferred livestock out of house and home. This sentiment is not without merit. Despite being a valued livestock animal, grox are opportunists and survivors, and on many worlds grox have gone feral and become dangerous invasive species. Perhaps the best example of this is on Catachan, where grox were imported in 127.M33 in an attempt to make the planet more livable to its native inhabitants. The project was largely a failure, as the constantly growing jungle destroyed any attempt at keeping the grox enclosed and most of the fertile grox escaped into the jungle. Millennia later, feral grox are still a common sight across Catachan. Grox are not even at the bottom of the food chain on Catachan, feeding on small animals and carnivorous plants in addition to less aggressive vegetation.

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[[Category:Nobledark Imperium]]

Nobledark Imperium Imperial Forces

2020-09-01T19:43:08Z

2601:647:CA01:2410:443E:B2AA:ECA7:511A: /* Deep Field Recon */

'''This page is part of the Nobledark Imperium, a fan re-working of the Warhammer 40,000 Universe. See the [[Nobledark Imperium|Nobledark Imperium Introduction]] and [[Nobledark Imperium|Main Page]] for more information on the alternate universe'''

TO DO:
*Finish arguments over how the military is structured
== Imperial Guard ==

=== Standard Imperial Tactics ===

Standard Imperial infantry composition is to field a battalion of Imperial Guardsmen combined with a detachment of Eldar Guardians as auxiliaries. Unlike previous mixed-forces regiments throughout galactic history this arrangement tends to work rather well, because unlike these previous combined regiments both sides feel fairly safe that the other side isn't going to shoot them in the back. Both groups can and do fight on their own, but work spectacularly together. In theory, the regiment structure works by Imperial Guard forces taking the brunt of the enemy fire, and the Eldar acting as flankers. In practice, the more fragile, but heavier-hitting Eldar like this arrangement because it means they won't be the primary targets of enemy fire, whereas the Imperial Guard like this arrangement because even though they start out taking brunt of the blow, the Eldar auxiliaries will tear through enemy forces fast enough that they never become the targets of focus fire. As with everything in the Imperium, this varies from world to world. Specialist forces like Catachans, Kriegers, Harlequins, or Aspect Warriors function differently, and follow their own rules.

If there is any weakness to this arrangement, it's that Eldar and humans tend to only take orders from their respective species, which causes there to be two people in charge of a given regiment. If the two commanders can't come to an agreement, the army sputters, which can lead to one or the other going in alone.

After the Tau Empire was absorbed into the Imperium, Imperial commanders were eager to try to incorporate Tau Fire Warriors into this formation. The Imperium had seen how effective the Tau were at long-ranged combat, and saw great potential in their ability. In theory, the idea was to have a third group of Tau Fire Warriors providing long-range support fire from behind the Guardsman infantry, and if all worked as planned then half of the enemy army wouldn’t even be able to show up to the battle in the first place. However, in practice, this did not work for several reasons. First, the Tau were essentially a combined-arms force already (save for close combat), and didn’t appreciate being shoehorned into a long-range only role, even if they were talented at it. Secondly, much like Eldar and humans, Tau like to be commanded by Tau, so in an Eldar-Tau-human battalion you end up having three arguing commanders instead of just two. Third, and perhaps most importantly, Eldar and humans have worked together long enough to trust that one is not going to shoot the other in the back. This is not true of the Tau, especially given their attitude towards the Imperium for much of their history. When you factor in that in this arrangement the Tau are supposed to be in the back of the formation and thus in the perfect position to potentially shoot their allies in the back, the other soldiers start to get paranoid and morale drops. Eventually, it was decided to keep Tau divisions as their own separate forces, called in particularly for any enemy that has started to work out a viable counter, however soft, to the traditional Guardian+Guard one-two.

Eldar opinions on human weapons, like just about everything else in the Imperium, vary from Craftworld to Craftworld. Craftworlds like Alaitoc would sneer if offered human weapon as a sidearm, whereas Ulthwé Eldar would take two in addition to their own weapon and then ask if you have any more. Most Eldar see human weapons like modern soldiers do knives. Crude, simple, and inelegant compared to their primary weapon, but if you're stuck in the trenches in a do or die moment, it's better to have the other guy get shot than you. Therefore, Eldar that use human weapons use them as a sidearm or last resort weapon, if at all. It helps that many human-made weapons are based on STC designs and therefore easily replaceable and about as fragile as a brick (being designed for maximum durability), in contrast to the more delicate, precision-made (though still pretty tough) weapons of the Eldar. Therefore, an Eldar can be less careful with their sidearm and make sure their primary weapon is at maximum efficiency.

=== Imperial Infantry Command Structure ===

Due to the fact the Imperial Guard does not enforce specific organization for anything below battalion level, the vast different cultures and traditions that exist in the Imperium changes the size of the smaller units as they see fit. Terra did set minimum sizes on how large units must be before it could be recognized as said self-declared units by the wider Imperial Guard.

The lowest level of the Imperial Guard is the squad size. Guardsmen often operate in pairs for specialized tasks to keep confusion as low as possible between other in the same squad. The smallest recognized size for these squads is 10 soldiers per squad further broken into 5 pairs, although a command squad might only have 6 men. At least 4 squads form into a platoon with one of the squads being a command squad bringing the total amount of men in platoon to at least 36 Guardsmen. Examples like the Kriegers use 7 squads in a platoon bring their size to 76 Guardsmen.

Eldar squads attached to Guardsman platoons come in the smallest size of 5 Eldar per squad but their size can be bigger depending on their world of origin. Notably the Maiden world Eldar tends to be organized into larger sizes as they experience more attacks on their homes compared to the Craftworlds.

For the platoons to form into a company there must be at least 4 platoons with a company command squad, thus bringing the number to at least 150 men. The Cadian Shock Troops often deploy around 300 per company. The Kriegers use 10 platoons per company then adding the Company HQ with at least 1 Grenadier squad totaling in at least 704 Guardsmen, not counting transports which they are often deployed with.

The smallest size battalion uses at least 2 companies and battalion HQ before being deployed, bringing the numbers to 306 Guardsmen per battalion. The expected regiment holds at least 3 battalions and 1 support platoon which have 7 squads and 1 HQ totaling to 1.000 men. More often than not regiments like the Vostroyans use 3 infantry battalions and 2 standardized (organized not by 7 squad and HQ but like the infantry 3 squad with 1 HQ) support battalions coming up to 1.536 men. The Krieger regiments far pass these expectations by using 4 standardized support battalions and 6 infantry battalions jumping their numbers to 14.146 men including the regimental HQ.

The Corps used to garrison a world often use the smallest size with only 5 regiments totaling to at least 5.000 Guardsmen and these troops are used to raise PDF than to actually keep the peace. If there are still insurgents who disrupt the peace and not accept the Imperial Truth, these garrison corps can double or triple in regiments. This puts the tripled Corp to at least a small 15.000 to a gigantic 200.000 Guardsmen. The PDF used to aid the garrison Corp would be raised to around a low 400.000 and up to millions at a time like on hive worlds.

On the more peaceful systems the lax Guardsmen army deployed to ‘guard’ the place would only be using the tinniest size, thus only have 20.000 at any one time if a majority of it on reserve. At the more active systems the numbers would go up to around 40.000 to 60.000 troops in garrisoning systems not too far from a front. When the Imperial Guard does deploy an army to the frontline the commanders always request at least 100.000 for the more daring but normally uses 180.000 if they are luck.

- Additional info in thread XI, including number of troops in each Segmentum. Actual number of troops never agreed upon, left here as placeholder.

=== Forces of the Imperial Guard ===

==== Cadian Shock Troopers ====

[[File:Cadian.jpg|300px|thumb|right|Typical Cadian combat uniform.]]

Most “Cadian” Regiments are in fact not from Cadia or even have a drop of Cadian blood in them. “So why name them Cadian?” I hear you say. The Cadians were one of the few who proved themselves in the Great Crusade as the most versatile and adaptable troops the Imperial Army can deploy on most fronts. The organizational structure and equipment used by the Cadians were introduced to many different worlds as the original Cadian regiments toured the modern Imperium and beyond in the Crusade Era. The 200 year expansion period saw diverse traditions of regiments being used all over the galaxy as newly integrated worlds threw their armed forces to join the Imperial Army, and be sent to the far-flung reaches of the Imperium. The War of the Beast saw almost all Cadian regiments be recalled to the defense of Cadia or Terra if they were close enough. With the absence of many regiments from Ultima Segmentum and Segmentum Tempestus the worlds in these places were forced to raise totally new regiments from scratch for self-defense or as requisition to be deployed to the fronts.

Many of the Forge, Argi, and Feudal worlds used traditional local organization and equipment for planetary elite troops to form their own Guardsmen regiment at that time. Imperial, Hive and Fortress worlds on the other hand, saw the effectiveness in Cadian regiments as they fought against or with the Cadians during the Great Crusade. The industrial capability to manufacture standard Cadian equipment was already present on many Imperial worlds, but the Forge worlds refused to form Cadian regiments as these worlds dismiss the lack of artillery and armored vehicles and rather form the Skitarii armies. Argi and Feudal worlds lack the industry to produce and equip a Cadian regiment.

The adoption of Cadian regiments on so many different worlds shows the versatility and efficiency of the Cadian doctrine. After the War of the Beast, the original Cadian regiments would be sent to refortify the Cadian Gate. Many of the displaced Cadian civilian people would be reorganized to colonist groups leaving their homeworld. The same adaptable traditions carried over to colonize and frontier worlds when they raised their own Cadian regiments.

Cadian infantry regiments from Cadia are known as “Cadian Shock Troops” while off world or imitation regiments are known as “Cadian Foot Troops.” These Cadian Shock Troops would often have at least two detachments from other branches of the Imperial Guard, for example the 203rd Cadian Shock Troop has self-propelled heavy artillery and armored detachments. The Cadian Foot Troops often don’t follow this rule and only deploy with one detachment.

In a Cadian infantry regiment, a squad is made of 10 people that operate in 5 pairs. The Sergeant keeps up moral and plans out tactics with the Lieutenant who can operate as a vox-caster; they can also be equipped with melee weapons. The heavy weapon team is included to allow long range suppressive fire on the battlefield usually with a heavy stubber. The Medic works to keep the soldiers in fighting condition with the help of their underling that tags along into battles. The rest of the squad is made up of two pairs of weapon specialists normally being Lasgunners.

The Sargent is equipped with a chainsword and las-pistol for leading charges or CQC. Alternatively the Sargent can be armed like the Lieutenant who is given a las-carbine for self-defense. The heavy weapon team normally uses an offensive heavy stubber that fires 12.7mm rounds or a lighter defensive stubber firing 7.92 rounds. In the heavy weapons team the first member carries and fire the weapon while the other member feeds ammo, spots targets, guards the gunner, and act as a makeshift bipod. Both members are also equipped with a Lasgun and a las-pistol. The medic fights with a Lasgun and heals with the medikit which comes with medical drugs, chemicals, surgical tools, sedatives, injectors, bandages and a medical cogitator which can detect almost every known aliments. To help the Medic is the underling who carries extra supplies, guard the Medic, or help in surgery depending on the conditions. The weapon specialists mostly carry Lasguns although one or two of the four might have flamers instead. These specialists can really be armed with any weapon that can be held by two regular human arms, some can also serve the dual role of vox-caster as well. The specialist act as either a flanking force while the heavy weapon team suppressed the enemy or the center line that lay down fire.

==== Fenrisian Line Regiments ====

Seeing the effectiveness of Cadian troops after encountering them in battle during the Great Crusade, Fenris adopted the Cadian Doctrine and deployed Cadian Foot Troops to the front. Yet the War of the Beast changed the outlook of the Fenrisians on the Cadian Doctrine with the lack of mortal manpower when faced with the Ork threat. During the war, several Cadian Foot Troops were entirely wiped out within the first week. The Death world breed heroes for the Space Wolves, not infinite manpower for many Foot Troops. Fenrisians abandoned the Cadian Doctrine after the war and switched to the Fusilier Doctrine that the famous Mordian, Praetorian, and Scintillan use. Sacrificing quantity for quality, the Fenrisians can always request Space Wolves regiments to merge with a Line Regiment. The Flak Armor for the Fenrisian Line Guardsmen uses extra metal plates compared to Cadians. The infantry under the Fusilier Doctrine would stand shoulder to shoulder forming into lines facing the enemy before firing. The Fenrisian Line Regiments took this tactic and expand it with the introduction of self-propelled artillery to provide mobile defense and keep up with infantry on attacks. In these regiments the Fenrisians officers are encouraged to outgun the enemy via volley fire and if that fails just charge them. Fenrisian line infantry are better trained than Cadians in melee combat with some even wielding swords into charges.

Fenrisian Line Regiments often differ in tactics depending on whether they come from one of the Fenrisian colony worlds or Fenris itself. Old World Fenrisians are more wild and less coordinated in their approach, and typically operate in 5-10 man squads for the best kill-to-loss ratio. New World Fenrisians are more ordered and coordinated though they are still wilder than anyone outside your average Death Worlder. The two groups work best together, with New Worlder regiments holding the line and securing targets and Old Worlders scouting ahead and harrying supply lines.

==== Armageddon Outriders ====

[[File:Rock_rider.png|300px|thumb|left|Common 'uniform' of a biker scout for the Outriders.]]

Everybody knows the Steel Legion. Reflections of their world in microcosm. Steel and fire and ash; unstoppable waves of armor, Basilisk barrages like monsoon rains, choking clouds of lung-burning gas.

Less well-known is the fact that there are two parts to the Steel Legion. The first and largest are the heavy mechanized infantry they are famous for. The second is the Outriders.

The Outriders are all crazy. The infantry regiments of the Steel Legion recruit from inside the hives, the factory and forge workers, but the Outriders recruit from outside the hives, and there are only two ways to make a living out there.

The first is prospecting and wildcat mining. Delving deep into ancient and much-abused Ork-built structures with jury-rigged and second-hand equipment in search of veins of valuable materials. Everything from gold electrical circuits to adamantine armor plate. Most valuable of all is components of the old teleporter system. The Mechanicus has decided it wants planetary teleporters more than it hates Ork 'technology', and pays staggering sums for the smallest scraps. The description alone should tell you everything you need to know about how hard and dangerous the job is.

The second is Ork hunting. The Administratum and PDF will pay good thrones for Ork skulls. Two for a squig, five for a grot, and starting at forty for an Ork, more for larger or special types like Weirdboys and Brainboys. Reimbursement is included for promethium spent burning the bodies, and the PDF doesn't check too hard to make sure you're not claiming driving-around promethium as Ork-burning expense.

Outrider legend tells of Billy-Joe Hammerlord, who drove through an entire warband on his bike to take the head of the Warboss and earned enough to retire. The story grows every time in the retelling, so by now the old stories claim the warband stretched from one horizon to the other, the Warboss carved paths through the rubble for his army to march through just by dragging his axe along the ground behind him, and Billy-Joe earned enough to buy himself a fleet and became a Rogue Trader and went on adventures with Prince Yriel.

Officially, all the Orks on Armageddon are Feral. Most places, that means stone axes and weird squigs. But this is Armageddon. The world still remembers in her bones when she strode among the stars and slapped aside Battlefleet Solar like so many children's toys. A lot of the Orks are just waving around scrap-metal axes. Depending on what armories they've broken into, they might be tossing around vortex bombs.

The point is that Outriders are all crazy. In some ways they sort of resemble Orks themselves. They move around in a wide assortment of walkers, fat-tired buggies, and motorbikes, made of scrap metal and spare parts. Most of these vehicles started life in a Mechanicus factory but after generations of repairs and modifications nothing of the original vehicle is to be found. And most of them are that old- a good vehicle is a heirloom, passed down from father to son, each generation adding a bit more to it. They stick spikes on the vehicles and stick Ork skulls on the spikes, and judge each other by how skull-laden their bosspoles are. When an Ork warband and an Outrider clan are fighting it sometimes gets hard to tell which is which.

Outriders prefer las-weapons over slug, so there is that.

A common rite of passage among the Outriders is for the father to cripple an Ork with shots to its limbs, then for son finish it off with a knife. This marks the transition from childhood into adolescence. True manhood is often not considered to begin until the son repeats the ritual, as the father. It is important not just to kill Orks, but to ensure that Ork-killing will continue into the far future.

The point is that Outriders are all crazy, but they are Ork-killing crazy so they make excellent candidates for the Imperial Guard. Sometimes entire clans get recruited into their own regiments. Sometimes restless young men come in on their own to the recruiting office and get incorporated into the regular Steel Legions as scouts and cavalry. Most of the time they insist on bringing their own vehicles and most of the time the Munitorum lets them. It just insists that they repair their vehicles with standard issue parts. Since most of the time their vehicles are kitbashes of Sentinels and Chimeras this is usually not hard.

For all their skill and lunatic courage the Outriders are not famous, for the good and simple reason that there simply aren't as many of them as the normal Steel Legions. Armageddon outside the hive walls does not support high population densities. They just fade into the background as 'specialized auxiliaries' of the Steel Legion. But those who have met them have given rise to a proverb- “Armageddon has many faces, and all of them are lethal."

==== Elysian Drop Troopers ====

Elysium does, in fact, produce forces for the Guard beyond its famous Drop Regiments. There are Elysian tank regiments, Elysian artillery regiments, Elysian footslogger regiments. They are all, universally, nursing a mild grudge against the universe in general and the Drop Regiments in particular for the way everyone is continually surprised by their existence. "I thought Elysium did, you know, drop troops." "FUCK YOU."

But nobody cares about them. [muffled FUCK YOU in the distance] Let's talk about the Drop Regiments.

The Elysian Drop Regiments are somewhat unique in the Imperial Guard for being descended from a naval boarding force. Elysium was and is a major trade hub in a sector unfortunately plagued with human pirates, Ork Freebootas, and a superfluity of places for them to hide. As a result, Elysium committed much of its PDF force to anti-piracy operations, stationing regiments on board merchant vessels and escort ships for boarding and counter-boarding operations.

However, no war can be won with defense alone, and the Elysian PDF regiments assigned to anti-pirate duty began experimenting with methods of striking at the pirates in their lairs. Thus, the modern Drop Regiments began to take shape. The first attempts were amateurish and improvised, in some cases using civilian shuttles and Void Maneuvering Packs instead of proper assault ships and grav-chutes. Still, a couple of victories proved the concept worthy of further development, and Elysian high command invested in additional training and equipment.

The first battles of the Drop Regiments were void-borne affairs, fought in microgravity in and around hidden asteroid bases. As more and more pirate bases were expunged, however, they were forced to track down their opponents in ever more diverse locales, from fairly conventional planets to burning Mercurial environments to floating gas-giant bases. But, in the end, it was mostly done. The pirates would never be fully expunged from the sector- fucking Orks- but it was safer than it had ever been before. Trade was flourishing, new worlds were being colonized, and the Elysian PDF found itself somewhat underemployed. So, when the next Founding came around, the course of action was obvious.

The modern Elysian Drop Regiments distinguish themselves from the usual run of air cavalry in three ways.

First, they continue to train for operation in a very wide variety of environments. Zero-g and vacuum, high gravity, extreme temperatures, toxic atmospheres, they have the tools and training to operate in them all. Most drop regiments only train to operate within the usual 'human-habitable' range of environments, giving the Elysians a distinct niche and edge.

Second, they have very good relations with the Imperial Navy due to their past as, essentially, naval armsmen hunting pirates. Thus, they have an easier time securing air and orbital support, and have the doctrine and training to make the maximum use of it. They are comfortable with inter-service cooperation in a way few regiments are. This includes good relationships with the Void Wolves, with joint training exercises being commonplace.

Third, general superiority of training and equipment. The Drop Regiments have become a point of planetary pride, and as a prosperous trading hub Elysium can afford to ensure they are equipped and trained to the highest standards. And with far more volunteers than they can accept, the training academies can accept only the best recruits.

Combined, this results in the Drop Regiments being frequently deployed to the stranger battlefields of the Imperium, executing their distinctive lightning strikes in environments an unprepared human could not even hope to survive in, much less fight in.

==== Lucifer Blacks ====

Humans in general have a tendency to survive in places where they aren’t intended to go. Such is the case of the Lucifer Blacks, one of the original regiments of the Old Hundred, the original one hundred regiments that were not disbanded at the end of the Unification Wars and would serve as the basis for the Imperial Army. The Lucifer Blacks were one of the last people on Old Earth to be discovered by the outside world, living deep underwater in pre-Strife underwater habitats at the bottom of Old Earth’s Great Ocean (also known as the Pacific) in a region controlled by the Pan-Pacific Empire. It is thought that these habitats were originally meant as simple habitats or research stations during the Dark Age of Technology. However, by the time of the Age of Strife the Lucifer Blacks were cut off from the rest of the world until their rediscovery by the horrendous contraptions of the Pan-Pacific Empire. This lifestyle in the inky darkness, surviving off of mesopelagic fish and geothermal power from hydrothermal vents, is what gave the regiment their name.

Living underwater in an environment where literally one wrong seal could mean the difference between life and death tended to foster an extremely calm and measured attitude in people. To the Lucifer Blacks, a crisis was the absolute worst time to panic, panic is what led to rash decisions and rash decisions are what got you killed. This led the regiment to be infamously known for their ability to be calm and think clearly under fire, as well as a very dark and (ironically) dry sense of humor. Additionally, living nearly 4000 meters below sea level in conditions where most light was artificial tended to make one very good at fighting in the dark. The Lucifer Blacks often used this to their advantage in battle, using smoke grenades and other implements to approximate the low-light conditions in which they had the advantage over their foes.

However, at the same time the Lucifer Blacks were not the most numerous people. When one lives in such a hostile, enclosed environment, the primary constraint on population size was not food or materials, but simply living space due to the number of habs present. When the Lucifer Blacks were first discovered and subjugated by Narthan Dume, Dume decided that one of the best ways to use the highly disciplined, but not very numerous Lucifer Blacks were as elite shock troops. The calm, detached nature of the Lucifer Blacks in high-stress combat situations made them especially hard to break. The fact that the Lucifer Blacks preferred to fight in the hermetically sealed all-black bodysuits they typically wore for extra-habitat activities only added to their intimidation factor.

When the Pan-Pacific Empire fell and the tyranny of Narthan Dume finally toppled, the Lucifer Blacks were one of the first regiments of the Pan-Pacific Empire to pledge their loyalty to the Warlord. The Warlord was somewhat suspicious of the Lucifer Blacks at first, but as with the Assassins of the Salt Wastes he wasn’t fool enough to deny himself potentially useful resources. And the Lucifer Blacks more than delivered on their promises of loyalty, even serving in a secondary role alongside the Night Lords during the Vhnori Resurgence as the two fought against the attempted resurgence of the Pan-Pacific Empire.

Eventually, in return for their exemplary service, the Warlord, now the Steward, granted the Lucifer Blacks settlement rights on extrasolar worlds. The Lucifer Blacks mostly chose to settle on Ocean Worlds that approximated their old home. Even today many people on Ocean Worlds have distant Lucifer Black Ancestry. As part of the Old Hundred, the Lucifer Blacks also still exist on Earth, living in the same oceanic trenches as their forefathers, though ten thousand years of gentrification and integration into Old Earth’s infrastructure mean that the modern Lucifer Blacks have lost a lot of their original culture and aren’t as incredibly stoic and tough-as-nails as their forefathers. Imperial nobles often like to have Lucifer Black bodyguards when they can’t get someone like a member of Terra’s Children, though in reality having a Lucifer Black bodyguard usually amounts to little more than a display of prestige.

==== Ohmsworld Regiments ====

===== The 12th Ohmsworld Armored Regiment =====

When the insurrection began, the 12th Ohmsworld was in the final stages of being reconstituted, with veterans of previous Ohmsworld regiments and even a junior Ulthwe Farseer combining their efforts to ready the troops. As such, it was not only at full strength when the Duke announced his secession, it also had expert, if not exceptional, leadership. With aid from the Skitarii, the 12th led the charge into Ohmsworld's primary hive and quickly overwhelmed the Ducal Guards, many of whom were Ohmsworld veterans themselves who themselves defected to Imperial forces. More importantly, they managed to seize the Guards' stock of Chimeras, giving Ohmsworld a powerful mobile army. With the easing of pressure on Ohmsworld as the Imperium advances, the 12th has even begun contemplating direct offensive actions as opposed to the firefighting they had done before. Whether this leads them to glorious victory or fatally overextends their already undersupplied lines, only time will tell.

Home World: Hive World <br>
Commanding Officer: [[Nobledark_Imperium_Notes#Tabletop_Crunch|Psyker]] (Farseer Eldian Sylandriel, provisional/brevet Colonel) <br>
Regiment Type: Mechanised Infantry <br>
Doctrines: Survivalists: Ash Wastes, Scavengers* <br>
Regimental Drawbacks: Poorly Provisioned <br>

Characteristic Modifiers: <br>
Starting Aptitudes: +6 Agility <br>
Starting Talents: Warp Sense, Paranoia, Rapid Reload <br>
Starting Skills: Common Lore: Imperium, Deceive, Linguistics: Low Gothic, Psyniscience, Forbidden Lore: Psykers, Operate: Surface <br>
Starting Aptitude: Agility <br>
Tutelage of Mars (replaces Accustomed to Crowds): The Mechanicus has taken a great deal of interest in Ohmsworld's archaeotech, so while Mars would never officially sanction it, the local techpriests have given the people of Ohmsworld some basic training in technological mysteries to aid them in maintenance. Ohmsworld troopers may offer Aid in Tech-Use tests as if they were trained in Tech-Use, though this bonus goes away if they actually become Trained in Tech-Use. Those who ARE trained in Tech-Use gain +10 to all Tech-Use tests that involve respiratory or air filtration equipment... <br>
Hivebound: Hive worlders seldom endure the horrors of the open sky or suffer the indignities of the great outdoors. Whilst outside of an enclosed or artificial environment (such as a hive city, voidship or similar), they suffer a –10 penalty to all Survival Tests, due to their continued unfamiliarity with such places.
Wounds: Characters from this regiment reduce their starting Wounds by 1. <br>
Standard Kit: Universal Standard Kit, one M36 Lasgun and four charge packs per PC, one suit of flak armour per PC, two frag and two krak grenades per PC, 1 Chimera Transport per Squad, one respirator per PC, one micro-bead per PC, one survival suit per PC, one auspex per Squad <br>
Favoured Weapons: Autocannon, grenade launcher <br>

*Special note: Everyone on Ohmsworld knows that scavenging is necessary; as such, scavenging is explicitly allowed by Guard and Munitorum authorities. However, regiments are also under orders to deposit all scavenged materiel into a collective equipment pool; hoarding is very much frowned upon. This doesn't mechanically alter the Scavengers Doctrine, just modify its ingame usage.

===== The 3rd Special Defence Regiment =====

As with all things on Ohmsworld, the archaeotech comes first, and even the most vicious assaults often degrade into hand-to-hand combat as all sides struggle desperately to avoid damaging the precious filtration systems. As such, most close-combat specialists present during the rebellion had been consolidated into solely defensive forces. These specialists ranged from press-ganged hivers, to the few Arbites who'd survived the Duke's initial purge, to any and all Ogryn on the planet and in the case of the 3rd Special Defence Regiment, even maintenance workers skilled at handling heavy tools. Indeed, the leader of the increasingly regiment is herself an Ogryn Bone'ead. 'Boss Foreman' Mogda Gruk took to her implants exceptionally well, with her intelligence even rating slightly above Imperial average. Though astoundingly ugly even by Ogryn standards, is well-loved by the troopers under her command, especially since she seems little changed from her days as foreman for her hive's Ogryn workforce.

Home World: Hive World <br>
Commanding Officer: Maverick (Brevet Colonel Mogda Gruk) <br>
Regiment Type: Siege Regiment <br>
Doctrines: Hardened Fighters, Close Order Drill <br>
Regimental Drawbacks: Poorly Provisioned <br>

Characteristic Modifiers: <br>
Starting Aptitudes: +3 Agility, +3 Perception, +3 Toughness, +2 Weapon Skill, -3 Intelligence <br>
Starting Talents: Paranoia, Resistance: Fear, Street Fighting, Combat Formation, Nerves of Steel <br>
Starting Skills: Common Lore: Imperium, Deceive, Linguistics: Low Gothic, Tech-Use <br>
Starting Aptitude: None <br>
Tutelage of Mars (replaces Accustomed to Crowds): The Maechanicus has taken a great deal of interest in Ohmsworld's archaeotech, and while Mars would never officially sanction it, the local techpriests have given the people of Ohmsworld some basic training in technological mysteries to aid them in maintenance. Ohmsworld troopers may offer Aid in Tech-Use tests as if they were trained in Tech-Use, though this bonus goes away if they actually become Trained in Tech-Use. However, those who ARE trained in Tech-Use gain a +10 bonus to all Tech-Use tests that involve respiratory or air filtration equipment... <br>
Hivebound: Hive worlders seldom endure the horrors of the open sky or suffer the indignities of the great outdoors. Whilst outside of an enclosed or artificial environment (such as a hive city, voidship or similar), they suffer a –10 penalty to all Survival Tests, due to their continued unfamiliarity with such places. <br>
Wounds: Characters from this regiment reduce their starting Wounds by 1. <br>
Standard Kit: Universal Standard Kit, one combat shotgun with a mono bayonet and 8 shotgun magazines per PC, one suit of flak armour per PC, one respirator per PC, four empty sandbags and one entrenching tool per PC, two frag grenades and two photon flash grenades per PC, one auspex per Squad, one micro bead per PC <br>
Favoured Weapons: Heavy flamer, flamer (as delicate as the filters are, they are surprisingly heat-resistant)

===== Century Omega 7-13 =====

When the Duke announced his secession, the Mechanicus authorities on Ohmsworld immediately decided to move in support of the Imperium- not out of any real love for the Imperium proper, but out of fear that the resources they needed for further research would be cut off. Under most circumstancers, they wouldn't even have gone that far- after all, no sane man would cross the Mechanicus. Problem was, the Duke was anything but sane; during secret negotiations between Mars's representatives and the Duke, the latter made it clear that he would brook no opposition nor equal (that Mars would be his superior never seemed to cross his mind). The fact that many hereteks had thrown in their lot with the Duke in exchange for independence and freedom of work only hardened the opinions of Ohmsworld's Mechanicus against them.

Even so, their insurrection was costly, with the already small Skitarii centuries being further depleted to the point where they were eventually consolidated into a single unit. Century Omega 7-13 now functions as a semi-independent organization within Ohmsworld's military; in general, the Magi's goals tend to align with Ohsmworld's, but sometimes they send Omega 7-13 detachments on missions, their actual agenda known only to the senior adepts of Mars.

Home World: Lathe Worlds <br>
Commanding Officer: Phlegmatic (Centurion/Magos Rho-1) <br>
Regiment Type: Grenadiers <br>
Doctrines: Cyber-Enhanced, Iron Discipline <br>
Regimental Drawbacks: The Few <br>

Characteristic Modifiers: +3 Intelligence, +3 Ballistic Skill, +3 Toughness <br>
Starting Talents: Bombardier <br>
Starting Skills: Tech-use (Trained), Common Lore: AdMech, Common Lore: Tech, Linguistics: Low Gothic, Linguistics: Techno-Lingua, Logic, Common Lore: Imperial Guard, Common Lore: War <br>
Starting Aptitudes: Willpower <br>
Tutelage of Mars (replaces Isolated by Machines): Gain a +10 bonus to all Tech-Use tests that involve respiratory or air filtration equipment...<br>
The True Flesh: Lathe World characters possess the Mechanicus Implants Trait. In addition, the potentia coil is specifically enhanced to meet the needs of integrated weapons.<br>
Soldiers of the Omnissiah: This regiment cannot include Support Specialists used in other Guard regiments; the Mixed Regiment rules must be used in those cases. Guardsmen from these regiments always count as Techpriests for purposes of prerequisites, regardless of current Speciality or Advanced Speciality.
Wounds: Characters from this regiment generate Wounds normally.<br>
Standard Kit: Universal Standard Kit, one Lathe lasrifle with an attached auxiliary grenade launcher weapon upgrade per PC, three krak and two frag grenades per PC, one suit of light carapace armour per Player Character, one deadspace earpiece per PC, one combi-tool per PC, two grenade launchers per Squad, Common bionic respiratory system, bionic heart<br>
Favoured Weapons: Integrated Weapons<br>

===Doctrines of the Imperial Guard===
In addition to the famed Cadian Doctrine, many regiments have also developed their own unique methods of fighting which have then spread throughout the Imperium. While this is hardly an exhaustive list, it provides a decent look into the sheer diversity of the Guard.

====Infiltration Doctrine====

Infiltration doctrine is a light infantry doctrine focused on stealth and mobility. It omits vehicles and heavy artillery from the TO&E almost entirely, relying on crew-served weapons that can be dismantled and carried by an infantry squad for heavy firepower. On the offence, infiltration regiments use their stealth and lightweight equipment to close with enemy formations undetected and from unexpected directions; once all elements are in position, they launch an overwhelming surprise attack from close range, using their crew-served weapons and snipers to suppress the enemy and ensure they cannot mount an organized defence. On the defense, they use the same qualities for hit-and-run raids, whittling down the enemy and melting away into the night when the enemy tries to bring their firepower to bear.

Infiltration regiments are usually equipped with specialized equipment such as camo-cloaks and night-vision goggles, but these are less important than how the regiment is trained. The nature of their operation requires that officers and NCOs be trained to a higher standard of independence than normal, as units as small as squads will often be trusted to maneuver individually in support of the overall objective. This usually cultivates a sense of being elite; combined with the looser chains of command infiltration regiments usually operate with, other regiments usually consider them insubordinate and undisciplined.

In combat, infiltration regiments are used to secure and move through terrain that mechanized regiments cannot. They are also used in combined-arms strategies to scout out enemy positions, assassinate officers, and destroy enemy strongpoints in advance of the main armored thrust. Infiltration regiments also maintain their effectiveness easier in the face of enemy air and orbital superiority thanks to their ability to fight while remaining hidden and dispersed. Finally, infiltration doctrines are popular among PDF forces incapable of maintaining large mechanized armies.
However, as powerful as they are within their specialty, their lack of vehicles and artillery makes them perform poorly outside of it.

====Armageddon Doctrine====

Armageddon doctrine is a maneuver- and terrain-focused mechanized infantry doctrine. Developed by the Steel Legion in their endless battles against the Orks, Armageddon doctrine TO&E is extremely vehicle-heavy, with sufficient Chimeras to carry the entire regiment, strong organic artillery support, and at least a modest tank detachment. Mechanized scout detachments- Salamanders, Sentinels, and bikes (preferably jet-) are common, but can also be delegated to other specialized regiments. (The Steel Legion itself uses the Outriders for this purpose, but other regiments have other solutions.) Likewise, organic combat engineering support is common, as are air defense vehicles; Hydras in particular are valued for their ability to sweep aside Ork hordes in addition to aircraft. Soldiers are heavily armored in carapace.

In combat, Armageddon doctrine is often described as 'operationally offensive, tactically defensive'. Using the scout detachment to scout out the terrain and enemy dispositions, the regiment seeks to seize vital terrain features before the enemy and fortify it, forcing the enemy to assault a fortified position on terrain of the Imperium's choosing. To this end, Amageddon-style regiments usually carry copious amounts of barbed wire, mines, and other defensive implements; vehicles are equipped with dozer blades to dig out entrenchments. This is where the engineering detachment comes in. The scout detachment, if present, harasses the enemy on its approach, although this is not a vital component of the doctrine.

At the level of individual squads, Armageddon doctrine emphasizes close cooperation between infantry and armor; full mechanization means each squad has a Chimera, which they are responsible for defending from threats and vice versa.

Few worlds adopt the Armageddon doctrine in full. Although many other mechanized infantry forces adopt its emphasis on mobility, terrain, and forcing the enemy to attack fortified positions, few worlds can afford to equip their regiments with the same weight of metal as Armageddon, and thus do not adopt the full TO&E. In addition, the emergence of the Brain Boy caste has thrown the doctrine into flux; with the Orks no longer throwing themselves as eagerly into near-suicidal charges, the strategy has lost some of its effectiveness. Although the core of the strategy remains sound, the arguments at Steel Legion HQ about how to adapt to a changing galaxy continue long into the night.

====Fast Attack Doctrine====

A light-armor and occasionally bio-cavalry doctrine focusing on the use of speed and maneuverability as weapons.

There is no standard TO&E for Fast Attack regiments, due to the wide variance in equipment used. Salamander scout tanks, Sentinels, motor- and jet-bikes, a thousand varieties of armored car and riding beasts. A very few forge-worlds even have super-heavy fast-attack companies, equipping tanks as heavy as Baneblades with antigrav units to allow them to keep up with lighter forces.

Whatever the equipment, all Fast Attack units operate similarly, using overwhelming speed to strike at an enemy's weak points before an effective response can be mustered. The 'classic' pattern of attack is to punch straight through the enemy line and rampage through the rear areas, but that is hardly the only tactical possibility. Outflanking maneuvers, hit-and-run raids- speed opens many possibilities.

Fast Attack regiments are usually deployed as part of combined arms strategies, scouting for slower units or exploiting breakthroughs created by heavier ones. On their own, while fast and generally well-armed, they are also more fragile than a true tank unit and lack staying power. This varies, of course; the dynamics of a horse cavalry unit differ from Sentinels and Salamanders which differ from jetbikes. But the general principle holds; as with so many other things in the Imperium, there is strength in diversity.

Fast Attack units, like Infiltration units, are often popular among PDF forces which cannot sustain heavy tank formations but can build light tanks and armored cars or breed horses, which contributes to the wide variance of regiments following the doctrine.

=== Scion Tempestus ===

==== Difference between Stormtroopers and Scions ====

The Tempestus Scion or also known as Stormtroopers are the specialized heavy infantry regiments that are always broken down into smaller units. Once divided into battalions or companies they are attached to other units within the Imperial Army but can also serve under the Inquisition or Sororitas. The Scions are known for their high dropout rates in the intense training but prove in combat at being the best CQC non-melee soldiers in the Imperial Army. Scions and Stormtroopers differ in their training and equipment as they are given different tasks. Veteran Guardsmen or raw volunteers are first trained then deployed as Stormtroopers in the Imperial Guard. The Stormtroopers are only trained to fight in ground wars and are equipped as such. Stormtroopers are often given the task of assaulting fortifications and clearing buildings. Scions are volunteer veteran Stormtroopers who are retrained to fight inside void ships and infiltrate behind enemy lines. Their weapons are unchanged for the most part but the armor is a lighter version that can withstand the vacuum of the void.

==== Equipment ====

The Stormtroopers are sent to the frontlines as the first ones to clear out bunkers, trenches, and building. Missions of that nature mean the Stormtroopers are given the deadly ‘Hellgun’ Lasgun to one-shot enemies at point blank range. The Carapace Armor worn by Stormtroopers is the innermost armor worn by Diffusion squads, thus can prevent shrapnel or shots from less than 50m from disabling the Stormtrooper. The Stormtrooper armor allows them to clear tight places with relative safety from explosives and suppressive fire. Other than that they hold the same basic kit as a Guardsman but with more explosives. The Scions when first founded noted that the Carapace Armor accelerated exhaustion while hindering movement for the user. These two factors played an important role in crippling operators on independent infiltration missions. The Tempestus Scion developed the ‘Cephalon Armor’ which was a lighter version of Carapace Armor but still covering the same body parts while being stronger than Flak Armor. Cephalon Armor also comes along with a built-in antenna and shoulder mounted pic recorder that a commanding officer can use. The Scion’s basic kits are almost the same as the Stormtrooper’s but have an additional void survival kit.

==== Standardization ====

In terms of equipment, the Scions would all carry the same Scion basic kit and standard CQC weapons but they can always have extra things with them or swap out weapons because their armor is lighter. It keeps all Scion companies mostly the same while having enough changes to complete very specific missions. All Scion squads are at least expected to take on CQC & infiltration missions. The Stormtroopers on the other hand, just like their Guardsmen regiments, vary greatly from the world to world. All Stormtroopers are expected to be assigned the task of clearing cramp locations and fortifications. Now, how they are trained and equipped to do that changes from regiment to regiment. The Cadian Karskins are made for storming buildings in urban combat while the Cadian Guardsmen maneuver quickly in city street fighting. Kreiger Grenadiers, on the other hand, would charge at fortifications and trenches before everybody throwing a grenade then jumping inside.

Stormtroopers from Feudal worlds might only have a Lasgun and a single grenade while carrying a shield with several melee weapons. Kreiger Grenadiers would hold even more extra grenades than Karskins. Hive world Stormtroopers might always carry Meltaguns or Flamers due to the importance of high damage in fast reaction time weapons in urban warfare. The only thing standard is that they all wear some variation of Carapace Armor.

==== Notable Regiments ====

See [[Nobledark Imperium Scion Regiments| Scion Regiments]]

== Abhuman Subspecies ==

=== Beastmen and Ogryn ===

<div class="toccolours mw-collapsible mw-collapsed" style="100%"> '''''The Ogryn Project:'''''

As the Imperium spread its borders past the boundaries of Sol, it rapidly began to encounter new strains of abhumans. Some of these strains were familiar, including Navigators and additional tribes of Void Born. Others such as the Ratlings, Felinids, and Nightsiders were novel, but genetically stable, having evolved through Dark Age of Technology genetic engineering and natural evolution, a testament to humanity's hardiness and ability to survive on almost any world.

For the most part, the Steward was unconcerned with admitting these abhuman variants into the Imperium. He already had one abhuman primarch, another nearly so, and he himself was only human in the loosest sense of the word. To him the abhumans were just one more drop of variation in the great sea of humanity.

However, then the Imperium discovered the Ogryn. And the Beastmen.

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

Each race presented its own problems for the Imperium. The previous abhuman species were all genetically stable and essentially comparable to baseline humans in intelligence. The Ogryn were clearly of subhuman intelligence, being comparable to a mentally handicapped human at best, and behaved and looked like shaved apes more than people, fighting each other with their enlarged canine tusks.

The Beastmen were slightly more intelligent, but more in the manner of an extremely cunning predator than a civilized being, completely ruled by their instincts, and prone to additional mutations. When the Beastmen were discovered by the Imperium, their lives were brutish, nasty, and short.

Such was the Steward’s concern that he brought in his highest ranked geneticists and gene-wrights to consult on this matter. At this point in time the Steward’s various groups of genetic engineers had been merged into Adeptus Biologis, but had not yet adopted the trappings of the Mechanicum of Mars. The nominal head of the Biologis, a former genesmith, suggested the Ogryn and Beastmen were so unsalvageable that the Steward’s best options were either to wipe them out immediately and resettle the planet with humans of other stock or to sterilize them and then resettle the planets in 60 years or so after they had all died out, something that caused considerable consternation among other schools of thought in the Biologis.

The Steward made it abundantly clear that the suggestion of summary genocide on a world under the Imperium’s protection would not be tolerated and anyone found doing so without the Steward’s knowledge is grounds for immediate execution without appeal. The Steward argued the Ogryn and Beastmen were humans. Afflicted humans, but humans all the same. Their ancestors were no different than any other group that Earth but were merely dealt a bad hand by the universe through no fault of their own. Eventually, the Steward and the various factions of the Adeptus Biologis released an agreement. The Biologis would release carefully tailored mutations into the genepools of the Ogryn and Beastmen over thousands of years until the devolution in intelligence and sanity caused by the Age of Strife could be undone.

As of M41 Ogryn and Beastmen can be split into two broad categories: Primeval and Nova. Primeval Ogryn and Beastmen are rare, existing only on planets that have been just recently rediscovered by the Imperium. They are little different from the Ogryn and Beastmen first encountered by the Imperium in M30. Nova Ogryn and Beastmen vary in intelligence from little better than their Primeval ancestors to levels deemed acceptable to the Imperium (generally human intelligence or close to it).

Nova Ogryn have lost some of the strength and durability of their ancestors, but in general are much more intelligent (though less so than human on average). Combined with external artificial augmentations such as Biochemical Ogryn Neural Enhancement or “Bonehead Procedure”, some Ogryn officers are actually comparable to humans in intelligence.

Nova Beastmen are one of the greatest success stories of the Biologis, along with the Astartes and Necromundan eco-engineering. Out of all the strains of abhuman, the Beastmen benefited the most from genetic engineering, mostly because of how bad they had it to begin with. Some have theorized that the Beastmen were created via crude methods of genetic engineering by splicing in large amounts of non-human DNA (even moreso than other abhumans) during the Dark Age of Technology. When society collapsed during the Age of Strife, there was no way to correct the myriad mutations and glitches that cropped up over the following 10,000 years. Indeed, when the Beastmen were first discovered by the Imperium they were not even recognized as human-descended at first.

Although the Beastmen started off much worse than the Ogryn, their uplifting progressed much faster. The same shoddy genetic engineering that made the Beastmen prone to mutation in the first place meant that the new, stabler genes introduced by the Adeptus Biologis became established across the population very quickly. All Nova Beastmen as of M41 are essentially if human intelligence. Any Primeval Beastmen in M41 are all from very recently discovered worlds. Nevertheless, despite their dramatically more stable genome, Beastmen still suffer a slightly higher rate of mutation than the rest of the Imperium. No one is sure if the tendency towards mutations is due to the Biologis trying a little too hard to correct the flaws in the Beastmen genome or the Ruinous Powers trying to taint any long-term victory on the part of the Imperium.

The Adeptus Biologicus might have gone a little overboard in trying to keep the instincts of the Beastmen in check. As opposed to their Primeval brethren, Nova Beastmen tend to be rather solemn and dour, though this may be because they know how far they have climbed and how deep the pit they were lifted out of was. Their sense of duty and debt is second only to that of Krieg, but thankfully for the Imperium’s sake the Beastmen are much less suicidal. Promethean beliefs tend to be widespread among the Beastmen. However, the Nova Beastmen have not lost all of the bestial instincts of their kin. Beastmen often speak of a “Weakness of the Beast” to refer to any behavior that seems to be driven by instinct or base desire, one of the few societal ideas they may have picked up from the Adeptus Biologicus. Nova Beastmen in general also tend to have much sharper senses than baseline humans, and are valued even in otherwise all-baseline regiments as scouts and trackers.

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</div>

==== Beastmen and Ogryn Society ====

<div class="toccolours mw-collapsible mw-collapsed" style="100%">

Nova Ogryn tend to live under a tribal or clannish structure of government. There are perhaps dozens of worlds whose inhabitants come under the broad category of Ogryn and each world can have a thousand different tribal groups with their own set of traditions. However, most common are a leading Patriarch, some paternal ancestor of a large proportion of the tribe. Usually then there is the Wise Woman. Sometimes it's the chief’s mother, sometimes his wife, sometimes it's not a woman but just someone with good judgement. A priest/shaman for matters of spiritual significance and dealing with supernatural phenomena (which usually boils down to “leave it alone and tell the nearest adept”). Sometimes the tribe might be blessed/cursed with a Witch/Warlock who has psychic powers. Psychic Ogryn exist. They used to be rarer than in the baseline gene pool but now exist in the same proportion as baseline humanity. This may be a side effect of the increase in power or by using baseline human genes to uplift the Ogryn.

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

Although Ogryns are not as smart as baseline humans, they are generally smarter than people expect. The officers with BONE implants can fluently converse in High Gothic about all manner of matters both practical and philosophical and are invariably literate. But that's because they were already the brightest of the bright even before the biocrystalline Cortex Technology was inserted into their brain. The average Ogyrn can learn to maintain an extra-large laser rifle by route, can understand contractual obligations (although they will sign said contract with an X) and has enough brains to follow orders and even understand quite complex strategy provided it's explained slowly with small words and you get them to repeat it back to you just to make sure. Ogryn are also known to be fiercely loyal and honorable. It's a bloody strange day when an Ogryn breaks their word.

Nova Beastmen, on the other hand, tend to form rigid military hierarchies when left to form their own societies. This is not due to any intrinsic inclination to do so as opposed to baseline humanity, but more because any governmental structure that doesn’t encourage iron-hard discipline tends to implode within a few years. Their inner animal is still very close to the surface, and their increased cognitive faculties haven’t tamed it in the slightest. Beastmen societies are ruled by philosopher-kings called Brahmins, who tend to exemplify everything that the Beast is not. More of a high judge than a war chief, seemingly at odds with the otherwise militarized nature of Beastmen society, but a wise and solemn individual that will not give in to base desires and passions.

Another notable feature of Beastman society are Aurochs, the warrior-champions of Beastman society. These huge warriors are about the size and strength of Astartes, but overall tend to be much less effective for several reasons. First, Aurochs make up a vanishingly small proportion of the Beastmen population and cannot reliably be mass produced. Secondly, Aurochs lack all of the advantages beyond sheer strength that make Space Marines so lethal. Finally, Aurochs cannot use standardized equipment. Because of their rarity, armor and weaponry often have to be individually crafted, most Imperial helmets being unable to fit over their horns and even normal Beastmen helmets being too small for them.

</div>
</div>

=== Nightsiders ===

<div class="toccolours mw-collapsible mw-collapsed" style="100%"> '''''A Brief Elucidation of the Nightsider:'''''

The Nightsider is a catchall term for a grouping of sub-species adapted for a specific type of environment without any common origin beyond that of any other human group. They are native to many worlds of the Imperium such as Praetoria, Calth from the transplanted population of dead Posul, Equixus, at least one world in the Carcharodon recruitment area and many others. Typically they are a pale breed adapted to living on worlds either with no light or additional environmental conditions that make dwelling in the light substantially detrimental. Such reasons can include but is not limited to the planet having unusually harmful sunlight, extreme daytime predation or population pressure or isolation in the dark lands of tidally-locked worlds. Worlds populated entirely by Nightsiders are rare (but not unprecedented) as they would require an environment where regular humans could not survive and such worlds typically can't maintain global environmental conditions that would allow a population of humans or near-humans to survive at all.

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

Although disparate in origin the Nightsiders of the Imperium share common features in part necessitated by their environment and in part derived from a standardized Dominion era gene-template; Large dark eyes, a lack of pigmentation in skin, hair and nails, the ability to synthesize vitamin D in the liver and a very slightly lower optimal body temperature. Due to their native environments often being lower in available energy they often form smaller social structures based on extended family bonds numbering no more than twenty or thirty individuals operating over a wide area dictated by availability of resources. To this end the Nightsiders are also often fiercely territorial by nature. This borderline anti-social nature is assumed to be cultural more than biological as they have been integrated into the Imperial Army with little additional problems after the first few moths when they realize that the meals are regular and predictable, although even then they form groups among themselves and disperse evenly within the regiment.

Nightsiders are as intelligent as baseline humanity and so have never qualified for AdBio uplifting like the beastmen and ogryn strains. Although they were often found in primitive conditions by the Imperium this is typically a result of finding a long term equilibrium with direct environmental needs, usually a lack of available food preventing work specialization and the larger social projects that result. In all cases efforts of the Missionarius Galaxia, especially the Orders Sabine, have resulted in varying degrees of successful pacification and introduction to true civilization.

The introduction to the civilization of the Imperium's light has gone smoothest in places where the local populations could be persuaded to accept the tithe willingly. The Nightsiders are human, they do not gladly eat slain of their own kind or kill off excess population in times of greatest need, but they did so in the name of survival. The tithe offers a way out, excess population is sent out into the galaxy and send their pay home in the form of nutri-paste and tinned foods and when they return they have had the habits of good order trained into them and they spread this to the rest of their kindred. This cultural influence over the generations has them adopting Imperial technology willingly, as barter and trade for their services rather than as the recipients of charity. Charity they would not tolerate, they seldom care for the pity of outsiders (a term typically used to mean any that is not part of their family group). By this helping hand the Imperium reaches out to them rather than reaching down to them and in doing so all may rise up high as allies and friends.

In the Imperial guard they typically make very good target spotters for artillery and patrol squad removers. The ways of hunting are often a second nature to them and all good commanders know how best to take advantage of this.

Despite long term introduction into the wider Imperium the various Nightsider cultures have retained many of the more "primitive" seeming rituals and customs of their ancestors in part at least becasue, like all ab-humans, they maintain a "them and us" mentality based on the very obvous and noticeable difference between themselves and the teeming masses of other humanitys. For the most part this is encouraged as it bind their social order and so long as they retain pride in their social identity and understand that the Imperium places due worth in them based on their skills and contributions they are less tested by the whispers of more terrible things. Due to their extremely family based social structures the prevailing religious trends tend towards the worship of ancestors and ancestor spirits, although due to their disparate nature this is not always the case and great variation has been noted.

Many human strains both baseline and abhuman express apprehension towards Nightsiders, often because their strange habits and dark sclera give them an uncanny valley effect. Ironically, many xenos species find Nightsiders to be appear more personable than regular humans (at least in appearance, their behavior often having the same offputting effect), white sclera being virtually unique among humanity and its component subspecies in the galaxy, with some xenos even admitting that the white sclera of human eyes can be creepy.
</div>
</div>

=== Ratlings ===

<div class="toccolours mw-collapsible mw-collapsed" style="100%"> '''''Of the Ratlings:'''''

The Ratling strain of humanity, or Ornsworlder as many of them prefer to be called, is a variety of abhuman but unlike many other abhuman strains is native to only one world; Ornsworld. The planet Ornsworld was founded sometime between the later years of M6 and the early days of M7 according to the radioactive decay in a can of irradiated waste on the largest moon and by the mighty hero Orn of Many Tales according to the locals. Orn was a mighty warrior and fearless explorer of the First Stellar Exodus, so the tales tell, who headed a colony fleet and braved the uncharted deeps of space in early ships of imperfect design. Many places on the surface of the planet hold the name of Orn; the great mesa of Orn's Table, the immense cavern system of Orn's Burrow, the ancient water filled impact crater of Orn's Bath and the escarpment of Orn's Headstone at the foot of which is reputedly the sight of Orn's Grave. due to the rarity of surviving records of this era independent proof of Orn existing is undiscovered. All Ratlings claim descent from Orn, if he ever did exist then it is inevitable that they are right due to the passage of time and isolation during the Age of Strife. From this stage of development up until the Age of Strife it is believed that the Ornsworlders did not deviate noticeably from the baseline human form, the role of Ornsworld in the days of and days prior to the Great and Bountiful Human Dominion is unknown as records of that era of Ornsworld have not survived.

At the onset of the Age of Strife, in the first days of the Iron War of which dark legends tell the fell deeds of, Ornsworld fared better than most. Some have suggested that the locals had slightly Luddite tendencies and did not trust thinking machines that thought as men thought. Others have pointed out rusted remains in the mountains of the south above where glaciers once roamed of Iron Folk sitting in the caves, their alloy shells still sitting where they died though their hearts have long since decayed beyond possibility of reanimation. Others again point out that human bones were found alongside them and that there is no evidence that they died in violence. Whatever the cause or evidence of it seems that the most sophisticated Men of Iron never made it to Ornsworld and Ornsworld had neither and Iron Mind or a Man of Gold. There is also no isotope residue in the soil layers for this time to indicate that the sudden Ice Age was anything but either a natural occurrence or a long delayed hiccup of the original terraforming efforts.

The Ice Age would have been correctable with the subtle application of solar reflectors and atmospheric tweaking that was common enough practice for Dominion era habitation but although Ornsworld had been spared the worst of the Iron War it did not come out untouched, the planet's industry was in ruins and beyond a few weather monitoring and communication satellites had no space presence. The world slipped into the cold and the inhabitants could do nothing to stop it.

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There is debate in the leafy halls of the AdBio if the changes that started in this dwindling age of isolation were the result of intentional engineering to better survive the new and sorrowful age or were a result of natural adaptation to the condition of that age. Some point out that the alterations couldn't have occurred that fast across the entire global population, especially when considering the alterations to the digestive system and the bones in the hands and feet. Others point out that by the time that the Iron War started genetic tempering was already present in the population of the entire species bar a few puritan holdouts and that with a broader pallet available the beneficial structures could have stabilized in a mere handful of generations (natural process built from semi-artificial components). Whatever the cause the result was a deviation that was sufficient to have them declared beyond the normal levels of variation found in the baseline population. Such changes include a hand with three fingers and two thumbs and a similarly structured foot, unusual neural architecture in the parietal lobe resulting in a high tolerance for physical pain and the stomach being divided into two separate organs as well as a proportionally larger and more functional appendix. The short and slightly broader on average stature would not be enough on it's own to have them classed as abhuman as many pygmy populations are not classed as such. It is said that ratlings have a better sense of smell but this is proven incorrect beyond normal human variation. They do posses better hand to eye coordination slightly but measurably surpassing the human norm when the whole population is taken into account.

The deviations were ideal for them to have at least a little bit of an edge in the food scarce and cold environment that their world had become. As a society they could have gone two ways, increased competition or greater cooperation. In the case of the Children of Orn they would not forsake bonds of common humanity and kinship and did not turn on each other, preferring to ration carefully what they had and huddle together in the dark for warmth; they would die as people rather than live as beasts. In time what few technological artifacts they had preserved failed and they had not the skills or tools to repair or replace them and they became a rustic and simpler people.

No cold spell can endure forever, even one as soul crushing and lingering as that great winter and spring came at last in the late part of the twenty-ninth millennium. By the time that the fledgling Imperium found them the glaciers were retreating miles at a time each summer and regaining no ground in milder winters. The people of Ornsworld long since accustomed to making do with little were in an age of plenty and underwent a golden age of rapid expansion in those fresh green years as miles of new farmland opened before them year after year and greater joy was had that their old fairy stories had come true; the people Orn was born to had come at last again to their world, the Tall Folk of Earth. No age of expansion can continue indefinitely and the ratlings made an equilibrium in time with their new and verdant world and tended it's great green glacial valleys lovingly, they knew the value of what they by the grace of their gods had. By the time such stability was reached they had already managed to acquire a little bit of a reputation with the Imperium at large on their first impressions of being fond of food and drink and prone to large families.

In the years after the Ornsworlders served the Imperium dutifully and provided many fine marksmen and regimental cooks as well as food stuffs. They were a well loved people, gentle and kind and full of good sense and down to earth wisdom. Their friends were many as they tended to be generous and infectious laughs. The Imperium was their golden age.

The golden age did not last. Dominion records were found in the 12th Black Crusade by a the Chaos Lordling Eidolon Ever-Burning of an artifact of on Ornsworld known as the Eye of Night. It was not an artifact of Dominion make but something far more ancient that they had unearthed that was said to be able to destroy complex mortal technology great and small, fragile or robust. He descended upon peaceful Ornsworld like a great dragon made of fire and inferno and reduced all he touched to cinders and ash as he took the Eye from it's hiding place in a deep and flooded cave and hideous as his presence was he vanished soon enough with his prize but stiffer than expected had been the resistance and weakened now the Children of Orn were. Like sharks to spilled blood other creatures came to that weakened world as the Imperium was hamstrung and distracted by the rest of that great war.

When the Imperium managed to scrape the resources to send a force to Ornsworld it was far too late. Gone were the songs in the halls of the thanes, the laughter was silent and all that was to be found were the bodies arranged in great patterns of offering, lying where they had fallen in the hunts or mutilated and thrown on sacrificial heaps and those joyful smiles were twisted into expressions of fear and pain. Only Chaos Spawn moved on the blighted and tainted land, the ratlings had been exterminated to the last child.

There were Ornsworlders in the forces that landed in the fresh ashes. Their tears were bitter and sorrowful beyond words and that sorrow was turned to a cold and terrible wroth. It might seem amusing that a branch humanity that seems built for peace could be so angry and maintain an anger colder than the deeps of space for so long, but they can and it seems like it should be an impotent rage but it is not. A call was put out by the head chef of one of the regiments that landed, a dreadful and terrible message whispered from astropath to scribe and passed on across the Imperium. All the sons and daughters of Orn were to come home.

The fields were made green again, trees grew again from the ashes on the mass graves and from a distance maybe it would look like all was how it was. But those happy songs are now songs of war and retribution, sons and daughters of that world look to the stars no longer in hope but in hate, the law of conscription has been restricted as were it not too many would heed the war drums that beat in their hearts. People look at ratlings and are unimpressed and remain unimpressed until they start racking up a body count. Spider silk they once sold to off world merchants in bolts and in dresses for princesses, now every soldier carries a length of it and can cut a neck all the way to the bone. Those clever hands and keen eyes once carved and painted things of beauty now put those skills to greater bloody work than ever before in their service to the Guard and Ornsworld Marksmen are famed and feared across half the galaxy. They move swiftly and quietly and kill without hesitation or remorse. They are owed a blood-price that could only be measured in the ocean depths of their shed tears.

The world of Orn and it's inhabitants are a very unexpected terror that stalks the stars on the dying of the forty-first millennium, their anger roused is more terrible for how unexpected it was and although the Eye of Night was undoubtedly a great boon to the forces of Chaos it might not be worth what has risen against them.

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== Weapons of the Imperium ==

=== Lasguns ===

The first instances of las-weapon technology came from Terra itself. It is thought to be a recreational weapon used in mock battles during the Dark Age of Technology. At that time these las-weapons beams had the power of 4mm stubber pellets where even thick cloth was effective armor against it. These relics were present on Terra and other worlds during the Warlord Era but it was the Emperor who reshaped it to become a lethal weapon. The Emperor’s scouts had presented him with some prototype weapons when preparing for the unification with Mars. One such weapon was the proto-Lascarbine that was superior to stubber carbines in all but firepower. The Las beams still had the power of a 4mm stubber pallet thus the Emperor in his intelligence recrafted the weapon so that it fired with the power of an 8mm stubber round. The Lascarbine first saw service as the replacement for the Autorifles which was the standard weapon for the Imperial Army in the unification of the Sol system. Next was the Laspistols which were design to replace the stubber pistols. The mass use of Las-weapons saw that the Lascarbine barrels started to warp after 5.000 shots and the Laspistol barrels warped after 2.000 shots. When these barrels warped, what would have been unmodified hitscan fire devolved to lose of accuracy where Guardsmen had to fire two or more times in the same place to get a hit. Even worst, when the Laspistol barrels warped soldiers had to fire at point-blank range to get hits.

The Imperial Army Handheld Weapons Development Bureau would develop the Lasgun which had a longer barrel and limited the power to 7.9mm stubber round strength. Then changed the iron sights of the weapon to allow attachable optics and added a stock for increase accuracy. The first Lasguns were deployed to the front during the Hunting Era where it was noted that these weapons had effectively the firepower as the Lascarbines but the barrels didn’t warp until after 10.000 shots. When the Apostasy Era started Guardsmen on both sides reported the Lascarbines and Lasguns in night-time fighting left noticeable muzzle flashes thus making the shooter an easy target. The Weapons Development Bureau would again work on the Lasgun and Lascarbine just after the Apostasy Era, to create the attachable flash suppressor for better night-time combat. Then they also created the light attachable stock for the Lascarbine.

=== Flak Armor ===

There was no such thing as a standardized armor used by the Imperial Army during the Great Crusade. The closes thing to such a concept came in the form of the Solar Pattern Void Armor used widely by the Solar Auxilia but that was a carapace-reinforced void suite rather than Flak Armor as we know it today. The first documented instances of what could be considered Flak Armor was when Cadian Shock Troops started equipping troopers en masse with light anti-shrapnel armor near the end of the Great Crusade. Cadian officers found out on the battlefield when Cadian Guardsmen attacked entrenched positions most of their losses sustained were from artillery or random bits of debris thrown into the air by artillery. The different regiments from Cadia phased out the traditional metal plate armor for Flak Armor, all future campaigns used Flak Armor once manufactorums switched production lines right before the War of the Beast.

The breastplate, shoulder pauldrons, knee plates, and greaves all used the same material and layering as each other. The helmet has considerable more armor and the fabric connecting the armor is much weaker or lacks any sort of plating. Most of the actual armor in Flak Armor uses an inner layer of shock absorbent gel with metal plating between the gal and outer ceramic layer. All three of these layers are connected and interwoven with carbon-fiber, metal-fabric, and nylon strings forcing the layers to stay together under most conditions. The ceramic plate was designed to deflect shrapnel or at least cause it to be stuck in the plate. The metal layer was placed to stop lasbolts or stubber rounds from fully penetrating through the armor in case if the shot passed the ceramic plate. The gal is there as either the last ditch effort to stop shrapnel from fully penetrating the armor or prevent internal bleeding from receiving a direct hit. Flak Armor fabric is made from different carbon-fiber, metal fabrics, and thick cloths to prevent shrapnel from cutting through or a blade from ripping it. Flak Armor helmet tend to have extra metal plating to ensure that not all shots to the head are fatal or random falling debris didn’t kill the Guardsman.

The first major combat test of Flak Armor was seen in the War of the Beast. On the frontlines Flak Armor proved to be basically ineffective in protecting against Ork weaponry. The Orks had used unusually large stubber rounds up to but not limited to 10 or 12mm that would slice right through Flak plating. What would be considered dangerous Ork rockets would often miss even with flam ammo, Flak armor was more than enough protection against most Ork rocketry short of city block leveling size. Crone Eldar and Dark Eldar weapons of both Saw and Splinter ammo had difficult times penetrating Flak plating unless there was concentrated fire where even the Flak plating can only protect against so much. When the Fallen first turned on Imperial Army elements, blosters were used for the first time against Flak Armor. The bolter rounds would often penetrate Flak plating to only cleanly exit out on the other side then explode, if the Guardsman was lucky they would still be alive. When a Guardsman was even luckier the bolter shell would be deflected off of Flak plating and explodes prematurely in mid-air, unless the explosion was in their face the shrapnel would be mostly harmless. The flexibility, simplicity, and cheapness to produce Flak Armor instead of Void suits led to many Imperial worlds adopting the Flak Armor, quotas and resources were limited in the total economic mobilization that happened in the War of the Beast made Flak Armor even more popular.

During the Apostasy, Imperial Guard regiments openly fought against one another and this saw the first use of Flak Armor against massed artillery. Regiments would launch massive formations to charge at entrenched Guardsmen who were well prepared for such an attack. The defenders would fire blinding volleys of artillery shells to delay the charge. Flak Armor proved a Guardsman could survive an artillery barrage short of a direct hit right next to their feet they would be fine, if the shockwave from the explosion didn’t destroy the body’s organs that is. Artillery barrages could now only slow down attacks from Guardsmen thanks to Flak Armor. Field modifications noted to be used by regiments during the Apostasy was extra cloth being to prevent shrapnel from easily slicing the joints. Thicker ceramic plates are used by veteran Guardsmen against Orks to at least survive glancing shots from Ork stubbers. Regiments constantly facing Crone or Dark Eldar is deployed with extra metal layered Flak Armor to prevent enemy fire from penetrating Flak plating.

=== Bolters ===

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All modern varieties of bolter, from the humble workhorse that is the mainstay of the Space Marine legions to the bolt pistol used by baseline humans, are all at least in part influenced by a design created by the Emperor of Mankind himself. Believe it or not, bolters were originally not that important a part of ancient humanity’s arsenal. This can be seen in the nature of warfare in the 41st millennium. Warfare in the 41st millennium almost resembles that of pre-gunpowder humanity, with a heavy focus on armor and the viability of melee combat. Humanity’s weapons of choice during the Dark Age of Technology were Volkite guns and Adrathic disintegrators, neither of which armor offered much protection against. Military tactics during this period would have been more familiar to older groups of humans (potentially as far back as M2) than their descendants, with a greater emphasis on utilizing cover and avoiding fire than melee combat. Knowledge of how to make advanced armor survived the Age of Strife better than similar knowledge of weaponry, shifting the advantage to armor over arms and making melee combat viable again. Bolters only entered into the military sphere much later in the Dark Age of Technology, having believed to have been a weaponized version of a power tool, after it was noticed how well they performed against Orks, other high-durability xenos, and rogue Men of Iron and other Silica Animus.

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The Emperor contributed to the reinvention of the bolter back before he was the Emperor, before he was the Steward, before he was the Warlord, when he was merely Oscar of the Terrawatt Clan. The Terrawatt Clan was a technocracy, with societal standing and authority being based on one’s inventiveness and research productivity, and if one could not prove their mental ability there was no way for them to advance in status. Embarking on a project that advanced Terrawatt’s sum of knowledge in some way was a common coming of age ritual in the country, and although he saw himself as artificial and a shadow of humanity Oscar wanted to be viewed slightly less as a of Malcador's trophy taken from the ruins of Chthonia and slightly more as a person.

Oscar chose as his project reverse-engineering an old ballistics weapon that had uncovered some centuries before by expeditions from Terrawatt from the deserts of the former Tharkian Empire (specifically the province of Anatolia). The weapon’s systems had been fouled by sand and half of its components were missing, but Oscar managed to piece together enough of its workings to construct a working replica sized to his frame, or at least fill in enough of the missing pieces to construct a model that actually worked. This would be the precursor of the Astartes pattern boltgun and explains, among other things, why the prototype bolter was already built for someone of an Astartes’ size.

The Theologiteks were impressed and Oscar was proud of his creation (not to mention happy to have a weapon that didn’t feel like a child’s toy in his hands), eventually taking the prototype as his sidearm when he embarked to reunify Old Earth. The gun faithfully served as his sidearm for many years, before finally failing some two hundred years after the Battle of Terra in about 700.M31. Oscar was saddened by the loss, seemingly one more aspect of his life that seemed to be eroding away, but the remains of the so-called ‘father of bolters’ survived and remains enshrined to this day in the museum in the Imperial Palace.

Originally, the Warlord’s armies of Thunder Warriors were armed with Volkite weaponry and autoguns, but as the numbers of augmented warriors grew and Volkite weapons were gradually lost due to attrition, three-fourths of the Warlord’s soldiers were armed with bolters about the time the Thunder Legions were being phased out in favor of the Legio Astartes. Volkite weaponry may have been more powerful and autoguns were cheap, but bolters were reliable, relatively powerful (unlike autoguns), and more importantly their workings were well-understood and could be easily replicated (unlike Volkite weapons).

The Warlord was not the only individual to reverse engineer the secrets of the bolter. Other human nations during the Age of Strife had come to the same conclusion regarding the bolter’s reliability and ease of production, and the Imperium encountered other models of bolters on places like Mars, the Hubworld League, and the Auretian Technocracy, several of which were based on actual STC designs. Information from these designs was assimilated by the Imperium to create a syncretic design that improved upon the initial Astartes pattern (Oscar, to his embarrassment, [[fail|had gotten some of his assumptions wrong and had replaced several missing systems with slightly more inefficient versions he had created wholecloth]]). However, not all bolter designs were equally optimal in all situations, with some performing better at certain tasks than others. Eventually, a wide array of bolter types proliferated in the Imperium ranging from the numerous variants of the Astartes pattern, in which the initial kick from the propellant recoil is enough to break an unaugmented human’s arm, to the smaller bolt pistol commonly used by commissars, which trades caliber size and rate of fire for recoil to the point that it can be used by normal humans.

By approximately early M34, enough principles of miniaturization had been rediscovered to downsize the traditional full-size Astartes bolter to the Godwin-De’az Pattern. Nevertheless, despite this miniaturization the recoil still made it almost impossible for normal humans to use unless you were genetically enhanced, were wearing powered armor, or from Catachan or the Hubworld League. For many years the Godwin-De’az pattern occupied an awkward position for many years, being too large to be used by most Guardsmen yet too small in caliber to be an efficient weapon for Astartes. However, this all changed after the founding of the Adeptus Securitas and the Sisters of Battle in M36, who with their enhanced strength found this intermediate-sized bolter almost perfect for their needs. Indeed, name Godwin-De'az came about as a reference to Sister De'az, the Nocturnean Sister who was the first successful recipient of the augmentations used by the Sisters of Battle. Before that, they were merely referred to as "miniaturized Bolters" due to their scarcity. Godwin-De'az bolters are much more common in the Imperium now, mostly due to their use by the Securitas.

The invention of the precursor to the modern bolter is perhaps one of the achievements the Emperor is most proud of. It was not something created by Oscar, the Man of Gold, nor Oscar, the Warlord of Earth, but by Oscar, the person, in the name of the betterment of his species.

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=== Leman Russ Tank ===

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''“We should've waited for the Fenrisian ale before rushing here just to find half a tractor. At least we'd've something that would lift the mens' spirits after such a disappointment.”''<br>
- Primarch Leman Russ, post-Imperial Compliance of Nova Borilia.

THE REGIMENTAL STANDARD: A HISTORY OF THE LEMAN RUSS TANK

In today's battlefield, almost all of the armed forces flying Imperial banners have either used or fought alongside the Leman Russ Battle Tank. Many view it with great relief, no longer having to be at the forefront of an advance on fortified positions, others call it their “ride,” and some view the Leman Russ as an inelegant and ugly hunk of metal that conceals brutal effectiveness and resilience worthy of the name. Its treads have rolled over thousands of battlegrounds, and its guns have shot down many foes... yet one wonders where the seeds for this venerable war machine were sown. If you have had the same question that we at the Regimental Standard did, read on to find out.

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The Leman Russ Battle Tank and its numerous variants has its origins early in the Great Crusades, and is not to be confused with Primarch Leman, who discovered it on Nova Borilia. Rumors of an STC for a tank dating from the Dark Age of Technology drew his attention to the campaign against the Noman xenos' planetary empire, already marked for destruction as Xenos Horrificus due to its brutal enslavement of the local human population and violent refusal of all diplomacy attempts. Fortunately, resistance was broken after a series of engagements that saw the Nomans and a disobedient slave army reeling from the hard hitting tactics of the Space Wolves and Solar Auxilia attachments. For the expeditionaries, what they salvaged from the last Noman stronghold was an immense let down.

The STC was, in fact, the fragments of a blueprint for an all-terrain tractor that started production sometime before the Age Of Strife, not the weapon the intel had suggested. Presumably it had been mistaken for a valuable human relic, and so it was situated in the most secure collection in the Noman fortress.

But the Imperial Army would not be denied their tank, and in the span of a decade several components of the discovery were incorporated into a new design, christened the Leman Russ Battle Tank, Mark I. It set a gyrostabilized Battle Cannon turret on top of a ceramite and plasteel hull with a steel-sprung suspension, while a complex transmission mated to an enormous twin-turbocharged V12 multi-fuel HL230 engine gave it a top speed of 80 km/h and 40 km/h offroad (widely considered ludicrous for a tracked vehicle twice as tall as a Space Marine). This ability was used to great effect, as commanders swung behind enemy positions and unloaded rounds into petty tyrants and slavers.

However, as the Imperium expanded further and encountered tougher opposition, the Leman Russ proved inadequate. Its main gun struggled to defeat more heavily-armored horrors and what was left often outmaneuvered the Leman Russ, and breakdowns ranging from burnt out turbocharger components to transmission failures intensified a growing logistics headache. This led to the replacement of the Mk. I with the Mk. II-V, similar variants that traded mobility for protection and ease of maintenance by bolting on armor, dropping the forced-induction chargers, and in the case of the Mk. IV and V, switching to a simpler transmission. This was deemed acceptable, as the Imperium couldn't afford the best equipment possible for all its soldiers in the immediate aftermath of the War of the Beast.

That is not to say desperation did not proliferate the loaded idea of 'innovation.' During and after the War of the Beast, new variants were hurriedly fitted with crew-operated sponsons to add anti-infantry firepower, and while still inferior to the Land Raider-killing Vanquisher Cannon, a long-barreled Battle Cannon increased muzzle velocity and was easier to mass-produce. Later, more improvements filtered through, like a hydropneumatic suspension and lifted armor skirts that allowed the road wheels freedom of movement and together provided better acceleration and a more stable firing platform. Other changes included light, replaceable composite rectangles attached to the sides (sanctioned for Chimera variants and Salamanders after APC crew entrepreneurs decided they too wanted more armor) and a set of wide-angle optics that replaced the glass visor slit in the driver's hatch and made it possible to drive the tank and fire the hull weapon without switching seats or controls.

The Mk. XVII, created in the late 36th millennium, was supposed to use a scaled-down version of the Malcador Heavy Tank's electric drive system. You will never see this outside the Mechanicus' basements.

[[File:NobledarkLemanRussMarkXXIV.jpg|200px|thumb|left|Mk. XXIV Leman Russ with Imperial Guardsman and eldar Guardian for scale]]

The Mk. XXIV Leman Russ Battle Tank is the most recent variant (see Remembrancer's sketch at left), created in response to reports of a spike in Leman Russ losses due to an increased prevalence of Crone Eldar and Necron tank analogues. The Imperial Couple had put pressure on Mars and the Fabricator-General to either keep the venerable tank a viable part of the Imperial Guard armory, or risk losing further contracts to Forge Worlds unaligned with Mars' branch of the Adeptus Mechanicus, many of whom were experimenting with unsanctioned tank designs. This was enough incentive to finally push the program into its final field tests and evaluation stage.

It carries over the extremely sloped frontal turret and glacis present since the Mk. XX, but replaces the original hull weapon's swivel mount with a ball mount in a smaller housing. To address the vulnerability of the Leman Russ to being flanked, particularly in urban warfare, the tank hull went from being 4.42 meters tall to a flatter profile 3.3 meters high. The front-facing plates of the widened and extended turret are angled to better resist side shots, and the Battle Cannon magazines were relocated to the back of the turret, so an ammo cook-off wouldn't be surrounded by critical systems and the crew. Blow-off vents further increase the chances a disabled Mk. XXIV can escape without Atlas recovery vehicles being put at risk, and two sponsons utilizing cogitators based off the Predator's and Tarantula Sentry Turret's are managed by a remote gunner seated by the driver. Lastly, a refined version of the Great Crusade's forced-induction setup and a weight reduction of 5 tons have allowed the Leman Russ to regain the nimbleness of the Mk. I, without the original's notorious mechanical problems.

While the newest Leman Russ might still be recognizable to an Imperial officer of the 30th millennium, it is not the same war machine your great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandparents used. Keep an eye out for those shiny new Mk. XXIVs, and remember to report any issues to your commanding officer or a Commissar!
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=== Psycannons and the Psi-Disruptor ===

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[[Nobledark_Imperium_Xenos#Men_of_Gold|Justinian]] and Theodora, the Man of Gold and Iron Mind of the Sol System, were based out of Earth and Mars, respectively. When the Age of Strife happened and the Men of Gold and Iron Minds were driven mad by seeing that which was not meant to be seen, Justinian and Theodora went after each other first in the grips of their madness. Ironically, the fact that the two of them killed each other off so early in the Iron War meant that the Sol System was spared from the worst excesses of the Age of Strife and had more working Dark Age technology lying around, compared to a place like [[Nobledark_Imperium_Notable_Planets#Cthonia|Cthonia]] whose inner face was sterilized when someone induced the star it orbited to go nova. Of course this doesn't mean that either Justinian or Theodora were in a healthy state of mind at the time. Justinian may have gone for Theodora first but he was still psychotically insane and trashed everything and everyone in his way to get to his goal, while at the same time Theodora is target Earth with orbital bombardments and scrapcode. The descendants of the technicians to Justinian and Theodora, in a very roundabout way, became the ancestors of the Terrawatt Clan and the Martian Mechanicum, though the Mechanicum took a more indirect fashion as the technicians of the Iron Mind integrated into the general population and Mars in general devolved into technology worshipping cults (of which the future Mechanicum was but one of many) after the destruction of Mars' terraformed biosphere.

In order to kill Theodora, Justinian built a device known as the psi-disruptor. The device would later be taken out of the doomsday vaults of the Mechanicum and used by the Steward to strike down the [[Nobledark_Imperium_Drafts#The_Rangdan_Xenocides_and_the_Slaugth|Rangda Abomination]] when it became clear that conventional options were just not enough. It is a device optimized and designed to kill Iron Minds, you can point it at a lesser mortal and pull the trigger but the effects vary from anywhere from a headache all the way up to total bodily disruption. It also draws on the psychic potential of the wielder and so can only be used by an active psyker and the one made and used by Justinian was built on a scale that was only usable by Men of Gold. Presumably other more baseline high end psykers could wield it to an extent but the list of candidates is very short and they only had one such weapon they weren't willing to risk the destruction of so speculation in this direction was fruitless.

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The original psi-disruptor gun is in the low-risk section on Ganymede. Psycannons are thought to be in some way derived from the study of the original device, a much cruder weapon but one that can be made using currently available technology. Creation of the Psycannon is attributed to the founding of the Grey Knights although by one of Magnus' students rather than the Primarch himself. Magnus was without peer amongst humanity in terms of deamon-lore and warp studies but neither he nor Russ were very good with machinery.

The downside to Justinian’s psi-disruptor are that it takes a huge amount of time to charge up and is very easy to dodge, but if you’re fighting an Iron Mind, whose physical forms and central processing units are building complexes, both of those deficiencies are a non-issue. The psi-disruptor also has quite a large “splash zone”. When Justinian fired the weapon at Theodora it didn’t just kill the Iron Mind but also killed every sapient creature within a few kilometers in a horrific manner.

When Oscar fired the weapon at the Rangda Abomination the only things in the blast radius were the abomination itself, some Slaugth and their bio-constructs, and members of various sapient species the Slaugth had taken as livestock and slaves. The latter of which nobody wanted to hit but reasoned that a quick death was better than spending years living in the Slaugth’s feedlots. They still made sure all of their forces and their allies stood way back when the disruptor was fired. The eldar threw a fit over the possibility of eldar chattel being in the blast zone, especially given those eldar had no soul stones and would go straight to She Who Thirsts, but backed down when even they had to admit there wasn’t a better option. The best they could come up with was pulling one of their own doomsday devices out of Yme-Loc, which would probably blow up the planet and wouldn’t be much better. At least using the mon-keigh device the eldar slaves outside of the blast zone would survive.

The Steward also seriously considered using Justinian’s psi-disruptor on the corrupted Man of Gold back in M34, given how it was so insane that its path was easily predictable, before the Grey Knights managed to resolve that problem on their own. It is a horrible weapon built by a madman to kill a god with a terrible history on top of whatever reality scaring power it might already direct, and tends to rack up a massive body count in collateral damaged when it is fired. It is little wonder the Steward is so reluctant to use it.

After striking the killing blow on Theodora with the psi-disruptor in the initial days of the Iron War, Justinian just kind of wandered off. The members of the resistance found him in the sands of Mars, sitting in a fetal position staring at something no one can see off in the distance, tears streaming down his cheeks. Mars’ carefully constructed biosphere had been stripped away by the Iron War, and the fourth planet of Sol had returned to the red wasteland humanity had first set foot on almost twelve millennia previously. Justinian knows why they are there. He can see their minds, but one doesn’t have to be a Man of Gold to figure it out.

Everyone knows they need to fire. Justinian is calm now, but who knows how long this bout of stability will last, it wasn’t long ago that he was throwing around ships in Martian orbit like they were children’s toys to get to Theodora. At the same time his executioners can’t bring themselves to do it. Everyone there knew Justinian, possibly personally if someone like Tiberius was there, Justinian had been there for almost every human on Earth since before they were born. The Justinian they knew didn’t deserve to die. And if he did die he deserved to go out in a blaze of glory. Demigods shouldn’t die like this.

There are no kine shields, no nuclear eruptions, none of the cosmic temper tantrums that characterized the death of his kin across the galaxy. Just a simple question.

“Do you think...do you think she will be waiting for me on the other side?”

Weapons are raised.

[[*BLAM*|“Yes…she is…”]]

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=== Kinebrach Blades ===

See [[Nobledark_Imperium_Member_States#Kinebrach_Blades|Kinebrach Blades]]

== Adeptus Astartes (Space Marines) ==

''“A Space Marine chapter conquering a planet? Have you been watching the damn holovids again, boy? Let me be clear so I never hear this foolishness again. Could we glass a continent given space superiority and a Battle Barge? Yes. Could we decapitate a planet’s leadership and destroy their infrastructure, leaving them to wither on the vine? Yes, within an hour. [[Nobledark_Imperium_Notable_People#Kharn_the_Oathsworn|Could we shock and awe them into surrender if they are sufficiently cowardly or primitive? Perhaps.]] But make no mistake, if a planet has advanced to the nuclear age and the populace is intent on resistance there is no way 2,500 men can hold it alone, I don’t care if you’re the damn Custodes or Grey Knights. You simply cannot be everywhere at once; gather your strength, and they will simply rise up where you are not. Spread out, and they will overwhelm you with their numbers. Sometimes, quantity has a quality all its own.''

''Subjugation and garrison duty is not our purpose. We are Astartes, Space Marines. We were made to tread the stars and go where others cannot. We are the tip of the Imperium’s spear, striking swiftly and mercilessly at the enemy’s heart. We are the Emperor’s Angels of Death, descending from the sky to slay nightmares so that others may dream peacefully in their beds. Leave the business of conquest and subjugation to the Guard. They have their duty, and we have our own.”''<br>
- Scout-Sergeant Kohl Leibhen of the Raptors, addressing a group of Aspirants

The ideal age for Astartes augmentation is somewhere between 19 and 25 years of age. At this point, the individual is young enough that their body can recover from the trauma of the procedure, but old enough that it is clear that it is worth giving them the enhancements. In theory, older individuals could undergo Astartes augmentation, but the risk of complication is so high that it is essentially not worth it. By the same token, younger individuals might be able to handle the stress of Astartes augmentations better than older individuals, but at this age the augmentations might affect their mental development. Ironically, earlier, less stable versions of super soldier augmentation, such as Thunder Warrior, Canis Helix, and Astartes Mark I augmentations, have a much higher compatibility rate and are are viable for a much wider range of ages than standard Mark III Astartes augmentations, in part because they are less invasive.

It should be noted that for all their similarities the Space Wolves, Iron Hands, and their descendant chapters are not Astartes, and therefore are both created differently and have their own strengths and weaknesses relative to Astartes. Canis Helix chapters (e.g., Space Wolves) are created by splicing large amounts of non-human DNA into the human genome (and therefore have no gene-seed), whereas Astartes are created by implanting artificially grown organs and glands into the human body. This means that despite being gene-locked to the Imperium's best efforts, a Canis Helix supersoldier could theoretically pass down some of their modifications to their descendants, which is something the Imperium did not want and one of the reasons the Astartes won out over the Canis Helix design. The probability of such an event is miniscule, but in a galaxy of scale such events cannot be taken for granted, as the inhabitants of the Fenrisian worlds show. Canis Helix soldiers are also noteworthy in lacking the Black Carapace augmentation, which was one of the key features that led to the Astartes winning out over the Thunder Warriors and other super soldier designs. Instead, Space Wolves use a complex mind-to-machine interface designed by the Iron Priests. It is expensive and not cost-effective on a galactic scale, but it has allowed the Space Wolves to perform just as well as Astartes.

Iron Hands and their descendants are modified Adeptus Mechanicus Skitarii, many of which are possibly even augmented to the level of [[Thallax|Thallaxi]]. As a result, there are [[Female_Space_Marines|no real restrictions]] to who can join the Iron Hands or their descendants beyond the ability to survive the augmentation procedure and being a part of the Adeptus Mechanicus. Skitarii also use a much wider range of augmentations and are often specialized for particular tasks, which means that the members of the Iron Hands and their descendants can be much more physically variable than the standardized augmentations of Astartes. Iron Hands and their descendants do not have to worry about the Black Carapace issue, because their armor essentially is their body, making a better connection between soldier and armor a moot point.

===The Breaking of the Legions===

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During the Great Crusade, the Adeptus Astartes were organized into twenty distinct legions each composed of thousands of Space Marines. However, by M41, the Adeptus Astartes have been divided into many distinct chapters about 1000-1200 strong, each descended at least in part from one of the eighteen legions that survived the War of the Beast. The reason for this change in organization is complicated. Many lay students of history often claim that the impetus for this change was Roboute Guilliman's Codex Astartes, published in 243.M31. However, like much of Guilliman's work, the Codex Astartes was meant to be a thought exercise in how the Adeptus Astartes could be more efficiently organized in a post-Great Crusade environment, and Guilliman would never have tried to shove his ideas down his fellow primarch's throats.

In truth, all of the legions split up for different reasons, and at different times.

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Several of the legions survived virtually as is for a little while longer under new leaders, who would have probably been considered primarchs in their own right if they hadn't had to stand in their predecessor's shadow. Kharn found himself essentially taking over more and more of his legions duties as Angron's health deteriorated. Abbadon was ambitious and charismatic enough to keep the Void Wolves in one piece for at least another generation. Leman Russ told Bjorn during a moment of mutual drunkenness to "look after the place while I step out for a minute". The next morning they realized Russ was gone and to make matters worse everyone had been just sober enough to remember what Russ had said the night before.

Other legions split up following the death of their primarch, or for simple matters of practicality. Old Man Khan called a meeting of the yabgu, despite not being dead yet, to make sure that whoever succeeded him would be competent enough not to run the legion into the ground. In a rare moment of humility, the yabgu compared themselves to Khan and realized that none of them could claim to have accomplished what Khan had accomplished by their age, and so the legion was split up. The descendants of the Thousand Sons such as the Grey Knights were already split up before their primarch's death (with the exception of the Blood Ravens), given that all were created to perform quite different, specialized tasks. The Imperial Fists found themselves splitting apart to fortify and garrison agri-worlds after the War of the Beast, on the basis that you cannot rebuild an empire if everyone is starving, and gradually drifted apart over the centuries. The same is true with the Iron Warriors and hive worlds and Iron Hands and forgeworlds. In these cases, Guilliman's Codex Astartes was seen as a natural framework for how to rework the legions into more autonomous units (though each legion implemented the Codex in their own way).

The Dark Angels are rather infamous for having split up before Guilliman ever wrote the Codex Astartes, after two-thirds of their number turned traitor during the War of the Beast. The Lion split the remaining loyalists into knightly orders and instituted the rank of Watcher to ensure that no one individual could ever subvert the entire legion. Guilliman may have actually been thinking of the Dark Angels when he wrote some parts of the Codex.

The Death Guard never really split up, even with the death of their primarch. Unlike the other legions they have never truly stopped marching to war.

There were two real deathknells for the concepts of a legion as a whole. The first was when Belarius the Abdicator refused to take up command of the full host of the Blood Angels after the death of Sanguinus, knowing full well that his entire reign would be spent in the shadow of the Martyr Angel. Instead he took command of a much more reasonable sized contingent of Blood Angels, nearly all survivors of the War of the Beast, with Belarius giving the most competent of the remaining Blood Angels command of their own groups. This set the precedent for most legions of breaking up into chapters after the death of their Primarch.

The other was the “Iron Cage” incident that happened to Fulgrim sometime in early M31. Fulgrim had always been a micro-manager, and was one of the strongest opponents of breaking the legions into chapters. However, after the War of the Beast, the sheer number of small-scale conflicts across the rebuilding Imperium and lack of local autonomy meant that the Empire’s Sons were ground down to about half the size of their prime merely by attrition alone despite being one of the biggest recruiters of new Astartes. The breaking point for the legion was when the Empire’s Sons got caught in a trap set up by a Tzeentch-worshipping Big Wyrd. The Wyrdboy was never caught, and by the end of it Fulgrim was left with enough marines to scrape into a little less than three chapters. After that point, even the strongest detractors of the Codex Astartes (with the exception of some particularly stubborn cases like the Death Guard) had to admit that Guilliman had a point.

However, despite this, successor chapters have not completely caught all ties with one another. Many chapters still retain close ties with their former brethren in other chapters, and many chapters have programs of officer exchange to encourage loyalty to the Imperium as a whole rather than a particular world or individual. Nevertheless, chapters are expected to be open about all inter-chapter interactions and unofficial brotherhoods are officially banned by explicit decree of the Emperor, in order to prevent the rise of another individual like Luther fostering ties of soft power beneath the nose of the Imperium. One of the jobs of the Inquisition’s Ordo Militarum is to make sure the Adeptus Astartes keep to this decree.

Additionally, by his own admission, Guilliman’s organizational suggestions were designed for times of relative peace, rather than all-out galactic war. In times of great crisis, the First Founding chapters (who are considered first among equals among successor chapters and whose original members were often some of the best soldiers in each legion) have the right to call for a Reformation of the Legion, where the successor chapters temporarily unite to lock arms and march under the united banner of the old legion once more. This policy is sometimes called the Last Wall policy, as Guilliman reputedly got this idea based on suggestions by the consummate soldier Rogal Dorn, who understood that the War of the Beast was not going to be the last major war the Imperium would face.

Responding to this call is completely voluntary, but many chapters consider it shameful for a successor chapter to refuse to answer the call, particularly since a call for a Reformation of the Legion is reserved for only the direst of emergencies that threaten the entire Imperium. The only time a refusal of the call is ever considered acceptable is if a chapter is severely undermanned or if they are physically unable to respond due to being directly under attack themselves. For example, the Lamenters were unable to respond to a call for the temporary reformation of the Blood Angels during the 12th Black Crusade, due to suffering from severe manpower losses beforehand. The Lamenters still blame themselves for not being able to respond to the call, even if the rest of the Imperium doesn’t.

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===Current Chapters===
====The Minotaurs====
The Minotaurs are something of a boogeyman among Space Marines. A group that make even battle-hardened Astartes quiver and speak of in hushed tones. The reason for this fear and paranoia are rather simple: The Minotaurs are Space Marines that hunt Space Marines.

The first recorded instance of a Space Marine considering tactics against other Space Marines was the Ultramarine Aeonid Thiel. During the Great Crusade, Thiel was dragged before Guilliman by his fellow Ultramarines for teaching the marines under his command tactics for fighting other Space Marines, which they saw as a sign of treachery. Guilliman asked whether this was true, and upon being told it was, asked Thiel to explain himself. Thiel said as Ultramarines it was their duty for the legionaires to be prepared for any possible eventuality. Although the idea of Astartes becoming traitors to the Imperium was an uncomfortable idea, that does not mean it was impossible or that Astartes could be unwillingly brainwashed into turning on their battle brothers like they had during the Rangdan Xenocides. After hearing Thiel’s explanation, Guilliman asked the two Ultramarines who had brought Thiel to him to leave the room, and then congratulated Thiel for his ingenuity. He was willing to entertain possibilities no one else could or wanted to consider, and just because people didn't like the implications of such a scenario did not invalidate the utility of any such contingency plans. The Space Marines were created by the Imperium to be their finest warriors in the reconquest of the stars, and who is to say another, more hostile human empire could not have had a similar idea. Thiel would be rewarded for his ingenuity, though for obvious reasons not at that very moment. Thiel would finally be validated and his actions recognized during the War of the Beast, where the actions of Luther and his Fallen showed the idea that a Space Marine could turn traitor to be a frightening reality.

The Minotaurs were originally founded by a War Hound named Leon Kravidos shortly after the Age of Apostasy as a chapter dedicated to fighting against the Fallen. Kravidos knew that in order to fight other Space Marines his men would have to be at the very peak of their potential. Therefore, he created a downright grueling training regimen by Space Marine standards, designed to make his men prepared for anything. Despite his job, Kravidos was actually well respected among Astartes, and was deeply mourned when he died in battle. For thousands of years after that, the Minotaurs were rather unnotable among Space Marine chapters. Their job of hunting down Fallen space marines was well known, but they were seen as people just doing their job as opposed to someone to be feared. That is, until the latest Chapter Master of the Minotaurs, Asterion Moloc, took control of the chapter in 200.M41, after the death of his predecessor in the Badab War.

In contrast to many in the Imperium who spend much of their time in pursuit of a particular foe, such as Inquisitor Boaz Kryptman and the tyranids, Asterion Moloc does not feel a festering hatred for his enemy. Instead, he seems to take the attitude of a big game hunter hunting the most dangerous game. He seems to take a perverse joy in hounding his targets to the ends of their endurance, before delivering the final blow. He spends hours reviewing all known records and tactics of his quarry, so that he know every possible move his prey can make before they do. He does this even for chapters that have not been assigned his target yet.

For obvious reasons, most space marines are uncomfortable with the Minotaurs, considering them, in the words of one Astartes scout who wished to remain anonymous, to be “team-killing frag-heads”. Indeed, the Minotaurs in recent years have been known to be a bit too eager in their desire to fight Space Marines, sometimes flying off the handle at an innocent chapter at the urging of some particularly radical or puritan Inquisitor. About the only people who feel comfortable around the Minotaurs are the Sisters of Battle, who often cooperate with the Minotaurs in operations involving the Fallen.

==== The Dragon Lords ====

The involvement of the Dragon Lords dates back to the founding of Praetoria in the days of the post-Beast rebuilding. It was deemed that the military side of the endeavour would require the substantial presence and use of Space Marines to remove some of the more fearsome and prepared horrors that had moved in during the intervening years. As Primarch Vulkan was the overall commander in bringing the worlds of Wilderness Space back to the light of civilization it was understandable one of his newly minted chapters that set up a way station alongside the more entrepreneurial efforts of the Gredbrittonic founding families.

The head of the space marines in this endeavour was the former Chaplain Commander Xiaphas Jurr of the Afrique League.

Commander Jurr never let the change in position from preacher of the Promethean faith to overall commander interfere with his missionary work and vice versa and it is largely his doing that Praetoria grew into a mostly Promethean world. It was not without practical merit as the forces raised from that world as the years went on all held a faith in common and were all the closer for it. The noble feuds in later years it has been speculated without this vague sense of brotherhood would undoubtedly have bloomed into minor wars.

As Praetoria grew from a minor service stop into a nation the waystation he commanded grew likewise so that in time it was declared a Chapter in its own right with himself as it's commander, a rank he wore well. He and his newly designated Dragon Lords were now distinct from the rest of the Prometheans as whilst he had been influencing the world he commanded from it had been influencing him.

As the population of Praetoria grew the Dragon Lords soon found that they could recruit from there exclusively even with the introduction of the Tithe.

Before the tithe the military of that world was predominantly the house militias and private military companies with only the Red Shirts, the mostly ceremonial soldiers of the Parliamentary Herald, representing the planet as a whole. At the time the Red Shirts were seen as a token force of no real concern and the butt of many jokes due to their lack of real experience and that they were attached to a figurehead rather than anyone with any real power.

This changed when the Imperial Army demanded it's due. They didn't want soldiers loyal to one city, one lord, in contest with their comrades of the same world. They wanted soldiers loyal to the Imperium representing their world as a unified whole. The imposing of a standard uniform was seen as one way to gently erode mental barriers, they were one and all Praetorian.

The distinctive green and black colour scheme of the Dragon Lords was surrendered not long after, coincidentally a few days after the death of Xiaphas Jurr, to their red and ivory as a show of solidarity with the common soldier.

In this time native born Gernebern of Auchmouth, a progeny who rose fast but died a mere few centuries later, took command of the space marines and was the source of much reform within the chapter. It was deemed prudent to have the chapter integrate ever more closely with the common soldiery, slitting the companies up into squads and placing them on long term loan to, at the time, 90 regiments of the Praetorian Guard as specialist squads.

All but one company that was demanded to remain to guard the homeworld at all times.

Despite all the upheavals and political manoeuvrings that could fill a very dry library in their own right it is often over looked the contributions that Praetoria made to the conquest, rebuilding and protection of the wilderness worlds and beyond. Indeed it was in this noble endeavour that Commander Jurr had sacrificed himself.

Were it not for the Red Coat diligence, vigilance and sacrifices the orks, marauders and worse would have just swept right back in and the fate of those that called that place home would have been, at best, pitiable.

==== The Mortifactors ====
The Mortificators are a brother chapter to the Ultramarines, both being founded by veterans of the War of The Beast from Legion XIII in the days of The Rebuilding. The head of the force sent out that formed the core of the original Mortificators was commanded by the esteemed but eccentric, some would say slightly bonkers, Sasebo Tezuka. Sasebo Tezuka was originally a child of the strange land of Strayllya on Old Earth and had begun his military career in the earliest days of the Great Crusade. He was a man of accomplishment who commanded the respect of his men despite his oddness. One of these oddities was a seeming over reliance on signs and portents that he used to make his decisions. He himself was no psyker and although he did employ them he didn’t use them for divination, and although he relied on what was essentially random chance he seldom went irretrievably astray and more often than not followed a correct path. In more recent times people have wondered if the King of Clowns had anything to do with the roll of those bones but no answer that any could understand has been forthcoming.

With the breakup of the XIII Legion Captain, now Chapter Master, Tezuka was free to follow such omens as his cards and bones would show him and by a roundabout means and thirty years of wandering brought him to the world of Posul. If Posul was meant to be some sort of Promised Land it was not a one given from any god that cared for its followers. It was dreary and dark and by some fluke of topography and atmospheric composition it was eternally shrouded in a permanent and extremely heavy overcast with two small dim suns. It was a world of extremely dark nights and extremely dim days and it was not unclaimed.

A hardy breed of man survived on that world. Pale and slight of build with big dark eyes. They were primitive in those days having in the time since man’s apex devolved to something that resembled Mesolithic era humanity. It was assumed at the time that their fall from grace, so complete as it was, was solely a result of their environment that was best and most politely described as very bleak. The plant life was typically sparse with dark purple leaves to maximize the available energy from the dim suns and the whole world had the general feeling of a deep-sea vent ecosystem on dry land.

Although that was almost certainly a contributing factor it was not the whole story. The Posuli could fairly be described as the Death Cult of the Death Cults. They followed the faiths of the Deorum Mortuus Est or at least they adhered to the teachings of those who had slain their gods. Master Tezuka and his followers, dictated by omens to settle on this world, learned from the stories of the eldest of the eldest priests and backed up by their own findings in the Verboten Lands held by all tribes in inviolate sacrosanctity for time beyond mind; the natives though not now had been worshipers of Chaos.

Their gods had been very real and walked among them awful and powerful, demanding great temples be built to them and demanding holocaust and sacrifice to feed them. Over the long years they had brought the Posuli low to the point of being naught but cattle to the slaughter of unworthy butcher gods until one day men lead by the “dream-walkers” rose up and were not struck down but did strike back with a righteous fire. Estimates by the off-worlders put the date of the uprising at approximately two centuries prior. The locals had no calendars and so none could know for sure but it seemed that the gods of Posul were overthrown on the day of The Raid of the Mansion or near to it.

But the locals were by then a thoroughly broken people. Presumably their ancestors had been of the Great and Bountiful Human Dominion and presumably they had been stranded here in the early days of the Age of Strife and presumably they did retain some measure of civility for some time but if it was so none of that survived. The locals had nothing that they remembered of greatness, nothing to aspire to and no notion of lasting joy. They carried on much as they had with cannibalistic rituals and constant wars of tribal slaughter. Tribal warriors would war and the victors would kill all of the men-folk and the children and take the women as their own and try to hold what land they could claim of the fallen’s holdings until displaced or the tribe in time split through internal unrest and warred upon once-kin.

And into this Chapter Master Sasebo Tezuka of Legion XIII descended. His first interaction with a local was when a boy barely old enough to grow his first chin hairs stabbed him in the gut with a stone tipped spear. Sasebo had approached the nearest tribe unarmoured and unarmed, wearing a simple course jute robe with only a brother-psyker at his side to show peaceful intent and appear as unthreatening as an Astartes can. The spear tip cut into his skin and stopped at the black carapace. The lad received a backhander that knocked several of his teeth out; it was extremely easy to follow him back to his tribe.

Some worlds react poorly to Imperial attempts to uplift them, this is true. Some worlds welcome the Imperium as returning brothers from the stars. Few were as reluctant as the Posuli who had no notion by then of anything greater than a tribe and no understanding of any social order more complex than the weak are food, the strong rule. Generally the Imperium tries to keep as much of the substance of a culture as possible in its uplifting. Master Sasebo couldn’t really see much worth keeping and as the days passed the other teams that investigated the other tribes reported much of the same. It was a long and bloody road to remake the Posuli into any sort of real society and Master Tezuka had fallen to the unknowable things of The Harrowing long before then.

In the end the people of Posul were brought, reluctant every step of the way, into the light of civilization and although their world could never be tamed it was made better than awful. It was possible in the end to live there rather than just be sentenced. In the end they were taken to the stars again and they did become part of the Imperium, if only a minor part. The people of that world were found, despite being classed as abhuman Nightsiders, to be compatible with the Astartes Mk3 MP gene-seed and in time were made worthy of it. In time they raised regiments to aid the Imperium that had taken then from the dirt. But it could not be said that they did not affect the chapter as it uplifted them, especially once they started to recruit from them.

The cannibalistic rituals were replaced with haemovorous rituals and human sacrifice with deep drug induced comatose vision seeking. The chapter adopted both of these and whilst down the long march of years the chapter amended the beliefs of the locals for their own betterment it was also the chapter that ended up adopting these beliefs and took up the scriptures of the Dead Gods.

The Mortificators were never seen as desirable allies. They were unpleasantly weird and typically possessed of a grim disposition. But they were valued and so were their people. It was not to last.

In the year 997M39 the Leviathan fell upon Posul, there was no hope of saving the world. All those dusty temples where man had slain their gods, all those strange tribes and wandering soothsayers, all the victories of the Imperium to make men out of monsters, all of those works of art carved in pale stone and lit pink and deep red by the dim red suns were washed away in a tide of chitin that were in turn washed away in nuclear fire. Basilica Mortis, the great star fort of the Mortificators had managed to remain hidden by strange eldar trickery and in its vaulted halls were held the last of that world, as many of the keepers of the stories and the children to tell them to as could be and on the surface of that world the men and women of the world and it’s chapter gave their lives to draw the Hive to them, to make the Hive believe that it was winning. Lord Magyar ordered the atomics released at the last possible moment, at the time when hope should have been turned to despair but was instead turned to righteous wroth and retribution and for a moment he beheld his home in sunlight before the fire consumed him and it was beautiful.

Posul now is a dead world, as maybe is fitting. It is unlikely that the Adeptus Biologicus will agree to terraform it in this age as it was never even in the old days a partially worthy candidate for such an endeavour. And as for the remnants of the Posuli and the Mortificators? They endure, barely. Hearing of their plight their distant kin in the Ultramarines petitioned their government to grant them refuge and they were granted a place on the principle that so few were unlikely to cause undue disruption. The Mortificators requested long ruined Calth to settle upon and try and make a home. The government of Calth were less than enthusiastic to say the least as their caverns were precious to them until they learned that the Posuli wished to live in the wastelands of the surface where none had dwelt since the devastation ten thousand years past. The Posuli said that they could cover their eyes in the day and sleep and in the night they could pretend that they were home once more.

The Mortificators will rebuild. Death has not claimed them yet.

==== The Black Legion ====

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(Void Wolves) - Primarily Astartes used as boarding/anti-boarding specialists throughout the Great Crusade and 1st Black Crusade. Majority of pre-split Void Wolves Astartes ended up here. They call the worlds of the Cadian Gate their home and recruit from there and nearby systems. Still operate much as a Legion of old in that they are massively represented in the boarding parties of the Navy assets in the Cadian sector but with the emphasis put more on garrison duty.

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'''Lord Commander Corpulax was previous Lord Commander of Black Legion.'''

He was born on Cadia in the year 446M41 and like all Cadians was inducted into the military and raised to be a good little soldier. It wasn't long into his adolescence that his physical prowess was recognized he was genetically screened and earmarked for the Black Legion. He trained well and hard as a Neophyte and learned deep of the chapters long lore. In his 15th year he started to undergo the surgical alterations and augmentations that would turn him from human to super human.

His career as a Space Marine was noteworthy in his reliability. He was a very by the book soldier who would have been overlooked for any measure of excellence were it not for his ability to exemplify everything the chapters battle doctrines exalted. He was in every way the very model of a Cadian Space Marine. By age 176 he was a sergeant, by 239 he was a Marshal and by 301 he was Lord Commander and it was a role he excelled at. For the brief time that he held that rank at least. In the year 775M41, a mere 28 years into his command, the Apostles of Contagion launched a sustained attack on the agri-world of Phagir. Phagir was one of the worlds that supplied the Cadian Gate with food and presumably their goal, or at least the goal of their masters, was to inconvenience the Gate Worlds as they would have to import all food.

The Apostles of Corruption launched a sustained campaign of mostly biological warfare in addition to their defensive style of land holding and attrition. In the end it was deemed by the Adeptus Biologicus order stationed on the planet an untenable theater. They couldn't make cures as fast as they could make ails. The Cadian forces were instrumental in the evacuation of Phagir as the Zombie Virus finally took hold and the dead shambled across the blighted fields to add the living to their ranks.

The Black Legion held the line at the cpaital's space port until the last moment to get one more shuttle off of the planet. In the final stages of the withdrawal it became clear that Lord Commander Corpulax was infected with the Zombie Virus to which there was no cure save a clean death. Wracked with pain and burning with wroth Copulax spent his last moments sprinting towards a techno abomination of rust and rotted flesh merged together into what might once have been a Baneblade. It's burning wreckage was his funeral pyre as the IEDs he was strapped with detonated.

By his sacrifice one more shuttle containing, among near 2,000 civilians, the last of his brothers on the surface made it safely off the launch pad. Then the planet was bathed in nuclear fire, it was lost but it would not be damned.

'''Lord Commander Zagthean the Broken.'''

Zagthean was the son of a long term "soup stirrer" of the algae vats and a sister of the Convent of Alabaster Maidens. Civilian jobs on Cadia are typically though not always given to individuals disqualified from front line service for reasons of either health or competence. As good 'ol Zaganath had been doing that job from age 12 to age 62 it can be safely assumed that he was given the job for being pretty useless at proper soldiering, not to say that he was not a dutiful man. He was and he died in a Chaos raid and he died with a weapon in his hand and he didn't go down quietly or alone.

Matylda was sister of the Alabaster Maidens, a wide spread order with convents on several dozen worlds in the Cadian Sector. They specialized in offering healthcare to the underclasses. On Cadia they offered healthcare to the more broken veterans.

Despite his humble start Zagthean has proven a savage warrior, more of Angron's ilk than Horus. He has charged into battles no man or superman should hope to walk out of and has not only done so but done so victorious. Even in his earliest days he was dauntless and every task and training exercise put before him set into with an almost alarming ferocity. After his genetic screening there was no question of him being looked over for Space Marine augmentation and the fire in his heart was not diminished even slightly by the alterations, if anything with fewer physical constraints he approached the status of truly unstoppable.

His will is adamanitum and among his chapter his word is law. To the Lord Castellan's annoyance he insists on leading from the front, in the thick of the carnage, the blood and the thunder. Roaring with laughter and wroth and all mortals who have stood before him have known one simple truth; they have come here to die, their gods have abandoned them from the greatest to the least.

He is relatively young for a man of his rank but he has lived hard and built up an impressive record. But the price of living that hard is that he has seen Death many times and they have danced. He has been broken down and rebuilt, torn apart and stitched back whole, burned and healed and cut and stitched and glued and grafted and lahsed back together and whats left almost poured around increasing numbers of cybernetics. He has fallen many times but he is still alive, he does not march, he charges, he wills Death to find him, to hold him one last time so that he may beseech her "let me take these bastards out with me". And always Death has returned him.

As the 13th Black Crusade descends upon Cadia it may be that his wish could be granted. He may die, but he will take whole armies down with him.

'''Ygethmor the Trickster, Head of the Black Legion Battle Psykers.'''

Of Old Earth stock and a resilient psychic of pristine physique Ygethmor was destined for the Grey Knights and though the tests of genetic compatibility showed positive the artificial organs of the MK3S gene-seed would not take root in his flesh. Unwilling to just toss such a promising neophyte aside for reasons of a biological fluke the Grey Knights ordered him to be tested with the MK3MP variant of the gene-seed. The MP variant did take. Ygethmor was posted to the Cadian Gate, typically they would have sent him to the Exorcists but he lacked their "straight forward" attitude to problem solving. Steeped in ancient deamon lore learned in the halls of Titan and with a Nemesis Blade as a parting gift he has proven to be a boon to the Black Legion like no other.

He is fond of ambushes, illusions, misdirection and what he likes to refer to as "pranks". He is formidable in a straight up and honest fight if he has no option to make a dishonest one. He has no notions of fair play and considers the idea of "fair play" synonyms with "not trying". It is this underhanded attitude towards war that has won him the approval of the Lord Castellan (and few others), that and a well refined caustic sense of humour.

Despite his detractors, of which he has cultivate a great many of, his effectiveness can not be denied. He is not the most powerful psychic among the astartes, not by a long way, but like his martial strength he makes the most of what he has. As he would say "a stiletto atwix the ribs is as good as a broadsword to the bonce".

'''Devram Korda Marshal of the 1st Cohort'''

At approximately 230 years of age he is on the younger end of the Marshals but is not unaccomplished. His rank was obtained in the Liberation of Sarora. An intense war on the hiveworld Sarora to depose the warband known as the Children of Torment; a nasty group of Crone Worlders with faux marine stitched together from the bodies of their victims and animated with small deamons. As the most senior surviving officer left after a particularly nasty assault he was given temporary command over his brothers. This was made permanent at the conclusion of the campaign when contact with Castellan Jakren Stein and the rest of the Cadian 509th.

The things he saw on Sarora, the things he had to do for the sake of pity, still haunt him. He is a grim figure with no sense of humour or good cheer, just seething well controlled and bottomless grudge.

'''Marshal Araghast the Pillar, Marshal of the 2nd Cohort'''

Abnormally large for a Space Marine and phenomenally strong he lugs around a lascannon with the same ease as an experienced guardsman lugs around a lasrifle. His aim is exemplary and for a creature so big he can move surprisingly fast. In his oversized suit of armour he can withstand a punishing degree of fire and remains standing, carefully and calmly placing laser beams in the most inconvenient places. He rose to prominence in the Aurelia debacle that almost saw a world lost to the warp. He was the pillar of certainty around which the rescue forces rallied.

He has a calm and measured manner and an unflappable temperament and can at least give the impression of remaining relaxed in even the most bizarre and awful circumstances.

'''Xorphas Firestarter, Marshal of the 3rd Cohort'''

Xorphas is very good at pyrotechnics and incendiaries of all kinds and has a fascination with fire that borders on the unhealthy. This has though made him and his Cohort extremely good at dealing with orks and nurglites in particular and anything else that resents being set on fire in general. He is also a low level psychic, despite rumours he is not a pyrokine. His "gifts", if such they be, manifested only after he attained the position of Marshal and by then he was too far along the chain of command for it to be worth the effort and disruption of reassigning him to be with the other Battle Psykers. He was given instruction and extensive by the head librarian so that he would be considered safe but little in how to hone what he actually does have. Which is not very much if truth be told. He has very good gut instincts that can be mistaken for inhuman (even by astartes standards) reflexes, an uncanny ability to determine if someone is lying and some modest telekinesis.

He is a reserved and calm individual, meticulous and methodical in his approach to all things be it war or mundane chores. Until you give him a box of matches and you can see the lights reflecting in his eyes.

'''Drecarth the Sightless, Marshal of the 4th Cohort'''

A veteran of the 12the Black Crusade who spent half the invasion stranded in the lower tunnels and hunted by Crone Worlders with knives for fingers. Those knives had cost him his eyes but he cost them much more. Those tunnels were pitch black, but he was blind and although they could see to some degree in total darkness he could hear. Also those tunnels had been his playground as a child. They weren't just tunnels, they were home. The hunt quickly turned inside out and the Chaos Eldar came to the realization that he wasn't trapped with them, they were trapped with him. When he returned to the light he was reborn and his star was in ascendancy.

With two black orbs of technology replacing his ruined eyes and an unhealthily pale visage he looks like a specter from old stories, some unhappy dead come back to get even. His company he has molded into one of quiet killers, stalkers and hunters as he had been in the time of his epiphany. It is suspected that he is part of the secretive Cadian Death Faith, it was prevalent in his patch of tunnels when he was young, but nothing can be proven. All that is known is that he is sober, diligent, humble and quiet. All traits he tries to instill in his brothers.

'''Amalaxis Deamonslayer. Marshal of the 5th Cohort.'''

Amalaxis is as close to a Chaplain as you can get without actually being one. He is a strong, almost fanatical, believer in the old Cadian tree gods. He offers prayers and devotion to them on the eve of battle, before setting forth on campaign, when another invasion is expected and when it is peaceful because on Cadia you have to be thankful for respite. Most of his Cohort are also adherents of his faith, the reason he was chosen to Marshal that Cohort, and to them he is a figure of great reverence. Some say he was a tree spirit in a stillborn child like in the old stories of before war.

His method of warfare is very much in favour of the aggressive advance. Ideally after the first attack there should be no possibility of a retaliation. There must be something to his faith as the hymns he roars as he charges into battle have deamons clutching their bleeding ears.

'''Valicar "the Graven" Hyne. Marshal of the 6th Cohort'''

Unlike Marshal Drecarth Valicar makes no secret of his adherence to the Death Faith. Why should he? Why should he have to skulk in the dark and hide? This has not won him many friends in the faith who all agree that discretion has served them well since the Age of Strife. The rest of the Chapter just think he's a bit eccentric and the baseline Cadians just assume all augmented are like that assuming they haven't actually met a space marine before.

Despite the implications of his religion he is bombastic who loves the simple pleasures in life; pretty women, good food and fine ale also jetpacks and air assaults. If the battle can be met hurling out of a speeding aircraft it is a good day for Marshal Valicar. It is suspected that most of the 6th Cohort follow him out of morbid fascination.

'''Verzekh the Siege Engine. Marshal of the 7th Cohort'''

Thge only member of the Marshals to retain rank whilst interred in a Dreadnaught. Most Dreadnaughts become sleepy as a result of the pain killers and the mechanisms that keep them in half-life and this is not a good trait in a leader. Not so with old Verzekh. Whether by some incorrect implementation of his sarcophagus or a deviation in his brain Verzekh has not slept in over 1,800 years and so far seems to be suffering no ill effects. Attempts to duplicate this in others has had no notable effect.

He is armed with two power claws with under-slung meltas with which he has obliterated the defenses of hundreds of bunkers and fortifications and uncountable tanks. His personality since his internment has actually improved, if t he historical records are anything to go off of, Verzekh puts this down to the painkillers. Whatever the cause he has a very cheerful disposition. Favored method of warfare is the slow and unstoppable advance.

'''Kor Megron "Corpsemaker", Marshal of the 8th Cohort'''

Much repaired and cybernetically patched up, though not the extent of the Lord Commander, Marshal of the 8th. A fan of going fast and going hard. Bikes, land speeders, jet packs and anything else that can deliver high velocity death are his bread and butter. Standing still, he claims, makes you a target in a way that no additional fire power will compensate for. The rest of the chapter call him slightly manic, he calls them worse. In war as in life there is target, you get target fast, find another target, get other target, continue until target exhaustion or death. There is no stop, there is not slow until the job is done, to stop invites death.

The Cohort that he has assembled are all, like himself, lay-technicians. They need to be able to perform basic rituals of repair to their vehicles at a moments notice. To loose the momentum is to invite failure. Possibly exacerbating these traits is his knowledge that he is indeed dying, some poison of Dark Eldar design half real and half not flickering through his veins. He has maybe a few years at most left. Possibly this was supposed to debilitate him with despair or make him fearful, it has not. If anything it's made him far more dangerous in the time he has left.

'''Troskzer The Elder, Marshal of the 9th Cohort.'''

Old by the standards of near-immortals. Older than some of the younger dreadnaughts. Given the time distorting effects of warp travel and the amount of time he has traveled he isn't sure exactly how old he is. He was born in the year 998M40 but he could be as "young" as 850. Space Marine biology and rejuvenant treatments can only take you so far and he is approaching exactly as far as they can take him. What he has lost in strength and speed he has made up for in experience and animal cunning. He is without peer when it comes to the use of landscape and natural resources as a means of gaining an advantage. He can plan ambushes almost as well as the Lord Castellan and his ability to smell weakness is bordering on the unnatural. If you have a place where you are vulnerable he will find it and he will hurt you. He is patient and will fuck up your day at the most inopportune time. This combined with an inhuman ability to comprehend not just his battlefield but an entire planetary campaign makes him far more dangerous off the field of battle than on it. But he is a Space Marine, he will not be shamed by staying where it is safe.

Despite his seniority to his relief he was never considered for the job of Lord Commander. A Lord Commander has to have a sense of diplomacy and people skills. Troskzer has neither. He's a cantankerous, introverted, belligerent arsehole overly fond of sarcasm and seems to be staying alive just because it pisses people off.

'''Starkzahn, Marshal of the 10th Cohort.'''

Saviour of Darristen and ███████ █████████ ██████ ███ ██████ ██ ████████ ████ ███ █████████ ██████ ████████████ █████ ████. Know to have spent near thirty years in the Deathwatch and a further twenty five in the personal employ of a particular Inquisitor neither of which he will talk about. It is suspected that he has traveled and fought as far as the Eastern Fringe or at the very least near it as he is well versed in the teaching of Aun'Da, though it is unlikely that he will be able to convince his countrymen of the virtues of the Greater Good.

His method of waging war is a combination of movement and fire be it in the form of artillery or tactical squads that looks oddly familiar to anyone who has seen warfare in the Damocles Gulf.

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== Oficios and Adepta ==

=== The Assassins ===

<div class="toccolours mw-collapsible mw-collapsed" style="100%"> '''''Monsters Of Our Own Making:'''''

The Officio Assassinorum was one of the oldest arms of the Imperial Government, and its roots date back to the barbarity and cruelty of the Old Night. Perhaps it was fitting that, as the Warlord became the Steward and the Unification became the Great Crusade, the ancient orders of assassins were finally brought to heel and integrated into the Imperium proper.

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The Rebuke at Mount Vengeance is the common story of the Officio Assassinorum's founding. In those days, the young Imperium was mired in battles far and wide, but one particular front was facing opposition that none seemed able to counter. Here, commanding officers and vital figures were dying at an alarming rate, even in the safety of their rear areas; and although they were suspected to be the work of the enemy all of the deaths seemed to be of natural causes. The Warlord simply appointed new generals and ordered veteran bodyguards for the ones already in theatre, but in response his loathsome foes only grew bolder. Ever-more evidence of their activities was left behind, seemingly taunting the Imperium for their inability to protect their own; clean killings becoming vicious slaughters of officers and civilians alike. Commanders were found butchered in their headquarters with a single bodyguard left alive, usually little more than traumatised wrecks stammering about technological sorcery beyond that of the Warlord's Mechanicus allies.

Incensed at the atrocities inflicted upon his people, the Warlord made war on the Assassin Temples of the Salt Spires. Little is known about the Spires or mercenary, heartless Masters, for many archives of their history were lost in the anarchy of the War of the Beast (although this may well have been Vangorich's objective all along). The Warlord did the best to spread his own view - that the assassins were little but cowardly shadows who though they could behead the Imperium - but even his presence and words did little to bolster armies so plagued by fear and paranoia, and so he began using the antithesis of their own doctrine to plot their downfall. There were no grand offensives, no bold strikes, nothing that seemed major enough to warrant the assassins moving against it; yet suddenly they found their supplies of everything from ammunition to promethium - and most importantly, water - were perilously low. In their weakened state, the Temples knew they could not face the Warlord's forces, and so they came before him to seek treaty.

At Mount Vengeance, the Temple Masters met to offer peace to the Warlord.
At Mount Vengeance, they received his full scorn.
The Warlord was not content with their mere offer of fealty. For the atrocities the Masters inflicted on his people, for the lives they had taken, the Warlord would not be content with a glorified armistice. He gave them an offer of his own: total surrender, or total annihilation. That was their only choice.

Some of the Temple Masters, emboldened by hubris, unwisely struck the Warlord. They died. Some fled. They died, later. But on the mountain and around it - for many assassins had followed their Masters, perhaps out of loyalty or some morbid curiosity - others remained, bowing in total capitulation to the Warlord and the futility of resisting this god amongst men. For his part, the Warlord acted rather appropriately in that role, passing judgement on each Master and their assassins. Some were found guilty of crimes beyond forgiveness and were slain, often by their peers as a test of loyalty; others were granted the "clemency" of banishment into the salt wastes. Only one was judged pure enough to be worthy of leadership - and, as the new Grandmaster of Assassins, he was assured that the temples that surrendered would remain intact, albeit in service of the Imperium under the watchful eye of Malcador.

Thus was formed the Officio Assassinorum. Malcador was pleased with the Warlord's mercy; for it showed no amount of fury would blind him to true talent. A few thousand years later, the assassins proved that such talent brought risk, especially from those as secretive as the assassins.

In 546.M32, the Grandmaster of the Officio Assassinorum attempted to assassinate the High Lords of Terra. The Beheading, as it has since come to be know, was shrouded in mystery; with events restricted to the Imperial Palace, motive, means, and for some figures even identity have been lost to the shrouds of time. All that has survived to this day is that the Inquisitorial Representative, the Master of the Astronomicon, the Paternal Envoy of the Navigators, and the Fabricator-General of the Adeptus Mechanicus were all killed before the Steward was able to stop Grandmaster Vangorich's terror.

Naturally, many asked how Vangorich was able to get as far as he did. Perhaps the sheer scale of the events already taking place at the time (especially the rising threat of the Beast) was responsible, since it was the few periods in Imperial history where the High Lords were forced to abandon their usual backstabbing and power plays - that kept the Officios and Adepta in check - in favour of (relative) unity. However, others believe planning and preparation had taken decades, the timing an unfortunate consequence of Vangorich demanding so much care be taken to make the deaths of his fellow High Lords look like accidents.

All sources agree, however, that once his treachery was revealed Vangorich unleashed the assassins on the entire palace. The halls ran with blood of the highest Lords and the most lowly of servitors alike, yet there was one figure the assassins would not touch, ''could'' not touch, out of fear of what he had done to their forefathers: the Steward, who had vowed to personally put a stop to the killing spree desecrating the home of the Golden Throne. Vangorich, infuriated at the apparent incompetence of his underlings, took it upon himself to do the job they would not, attempting to slay the Steward with a vortex grenade as he emerged from his personal transport.

This went about as well as one would expect.

Even less is known about the outcome. Historians have waxed poetically about the Grandmaster facing an agonizing death, eternal torture, exile into the depths of the Webway with nothing but the clothes on his back, or any other number of tall tales. The most reliable account , however - attributed to the Captain-General of the Adeptus Custodes - states that the Steward simply broke Vangorich's neck as comfortably as one would a twig mere moments after his ill-advised attempt on the Steward's life.

For their part, the assassins were right to be fearful; for unlike their predecessors on Mount Vengeance the Steward gazed upon them with ''disappointment'' as well as fury. The Beheading had been undertaken by Vangorich, but the Steward noted with no small distaste that his orders had not been questioned by any under him. Malcador had managed to maintain the delicate balancing act between accountability and unflinching loyalty necessary in an organisation such as the Assassinorum, and without him it seemed the assassins were falling back on their bad habits.

Any other time he would have dismantled the Assassinorum's there and then, but the Steward was more concerned with reinforcing the wider Imperium against the coming onslaught of the Beast. In a time when every second was precious, the Steward could only set aside a day to scour the assassins' much-reduced ranks. Those found wanting of moral character were incinerated where they stood if they had acted on Vangorich's orders or pressed into a penal legion if they had not. One assassin that the Steward found was of solid loyalty and aided him in his purge of the temples, and they were declared new Grandmaster. The first decree they were to issue, however, was a warning - a warning to be spread through every temple, to every assassin from the depths of the Imperial Palace to frontline fighting against the Orks. A warning that, if the Steward was ever forced to intervene again, he would simply dissolve the Assassinorum instead of wasting more time on leniency.

Four thousand years later, the Steward was once again forced to intervene - although this time it was because of a crisis of his own making.

To her credit, the Grandmaster the Steward had put in place had served honorably, loyally, and carefully. Within the temples, long overdue reforms were undertaken, training formalised, and generations of assassins raised to revere the Imperium as a whole more than their temple. The Grandmaster, when she felt her time came, passed the title on to one she felt she could trust; and he continued her work, standardising material provisions and improving survivability. When he was lost in a warpstorm, his successor was well chosen, and worked to streamline chain of command and requisition. This continued, the Officio slowly evolving into an organisation capable of keeping up with the rapid changes of the galaxy, until the reign of Goge Vandire. Emperor Goge Vandire.

Goge Vandire was, initially, the ideal servant of the Imperium. Intelligent yet humble, decisive yet wise, he was familiar with all the intricacies of every part of the imperial government - save the assassins. Naturally, he was curious. At his first meeting with the High Lords of Terra, they each took their own oaths of loyalty and explained their roles. The, on the other hand, explained the history of the Beheading to the new Emperor, and explained why since then the Assassinorum always chose to swear loyalty to the wider Imperium instead of a particular individual. An explanation that would end up nearly tearing it apart.

"...hence, our loyalty is to the Golden Throne and its guardians rather than the one sitting upon it. A mere technicality, of course-" The Grandmaster offering a thin smile at this point, "-since I personally doubt we will ever receive liquidation orders from the archaeotech itself... but still."

The other High Lords had long ago learned not to question inner workings of the Assassinorum, while Emperor Vandire merely gave a hearty chuckle. They moved onto other, more pressing matters, and it appeared that that was the end of that. And it was, for the most part, but there was a small corner of Emperor Vandire's mind where those words echoed endlessly. "The Golden Throne and ''its guardians''," the Grandmaster had said, but it seemed clear to him that there was only one guardian that mattered; the one who had appointed him to the position in the first place. Over the years of Emperor Vandire's reign - too many hard decisions, too many threats to the Imperium from within and without, perhaps too many treatments of juvenat - the echo rose in his mind until it was deafening, a mild irritation over semantics growing into full-blown paranoia.

Of course they were faithful to the Imperium, but the hypocrites chose the Steward to venerate as a figurehead! Even in the Palace, his own home, all the oaths in the galaxy would not change the fact that each soul's allegiance lay with the Steward rather than himself. They only trusted him because the Steward trusted him, had appointed him. Oh, yes, his reign and countless years of selfless service were all very good and well appreciated, but they were all nought against those of that living god. Everything he did was overshadowed by that ''guardian;'' his words judged against the Steward's, his actions compared to those of the Steward, the ''Steward'', the '''''Steward''''', who was never more than a moment away from the lips of Vandire's own people; as if he had been usurped before he was ever appointed to the throne.

Still, Vandire was still as talented as he always was, and soon managed to find an assassin willing to aid him; a callidus by the name of Tziz Jarek. By that point he was in direct control of every aspect of the Imperium thanks to a thousand emergency powers and Imperial edicts; yet frustratingly, the Grandmaster remained steadfastly insistent on the stance that had tormented Vandire since their first meeting. Jarek, on the other hand, was simply angry with the Assassinorum's reforms, and made sure to stay well out of range of Vandire's spittle and foam when he began to rant - although over time she found herself believing in more and more of his firey rhetoric.

The assassination was textbook perfection; the Grandmaster's long list of security measures outdone by Jarek's longer-still list of fallbacks and contingencies. However, the lifeless corpse that was quietly fed into a plasma generator was only a body double of the Grandmaster - even as Jarek disguised herself with polymorphine and assumed the seat of Grandmaster of Assassins - had already made her getaway, rallying those loyal to her from Terra and beyond. With the Assassinorum now firmly under his thumb, Vandire used the shadowy assassins as another weapon with which to prosecute what was rapidly becoming a reign of terror; opponents political and military alike disappearing or found butchered in cruel and unusual manners.

When the reign of Emperor Vandire was coming to an end, he began to use his assassins more openly against rebel forces - and it was at that moment, when they emerged from the shadows, that the true Grandmaster struck. Jarek had used the forces of the Assassinorum masterfully, always knowing which figures to ''liquidate'' to maximise disorder and panic - yet she had no experience of the same tactics being used against her, and could do little but order her own assassins to focus on the new threat.

The resulting battles were devastating. Assassins loyal to Vandire and to the Grandmaster both used long-forgotten, forbidden technologies on the other side, for each was (rightly) convinced that the victory of the other would see them exterminated to the last. Gene-sympathetic nerve gases, neutronic warheads, entropic broadcasters, pan-chronal disruptors, and other terrors were all used; some dating back to the nightmare of the Old Night. These were the Wars of Vindication, and they would be repeated again and again from Terra to the furthest reaches of the Imperium as assassin turned against assassin to purge the ones they saw as traitors.

When the Steward finally returned to Terra from his self-imposted exile, the Temples were little more than smoking, hellish ruin. The palace, too, was scarred by battle; and there he found the Grandmaster - who pointed to her lifeless doppelganger and declared that the traitor was dead.

The Steward was unamused.

The Grandmaster offered her life by way of apology, and begged the Officio Assassinorum be spared. She knew all too well of the warning passed down from each Grandmaster to the next, and of the possibility of her and her own suddenly being abandoned by an Imperium that had no other place for them. For his part, the Steward was bitterly disappointed with Emperor Vandire's descent into madness - yet this time he could not truly fault what had historically been the most troublesome of the High Lords' domains. One Grandmaster had fought with unwavering loyalty for the Imperium, while the other had done so in the name of the Emperor. Perhaps he was a little ashamed of his own poor judgement, for he was merciful; the Grandmaster was allowed to disappear into exile, and the remnants of the Assassinorum were to return to Terra for their final judgment.

The Steward of the Golden Throne retreated into the Imperial Palace for the last time, and when the Emperor of Mankind emerged, first and final orders to the ancient Officio Assassinorum were as follows:

*All assassins were to be granted a window of clemency, where an amnesty would be offered regardless of allegiance. They were misled, but had still fought with ferocious loyalty to their superiors - against some of the best in the Imperium, no less. Any who ignored this opportunity would be declared outlaws of the Imperium of the Golden Throne, for both the Grandmaster and her doppelganger had kept close eyes on their respective assassins (lest they defect). Huge bounties were offered, of course, but the most sought-after reward was the opportunity for the hunter to take the place of the assassin they defeated, becoming one of the Imperium's shadowy elite.

*After the grace period, the Officio Assassinorum would be completely and utterly dissolved. The Temples would remain, but only as individual institutions with no power and little role; all masters would stripped of formal office and all survivors either absorbed into the reborn order: the Officio Tactitum. No more secret handshakes or shadowy meetings lit by incense, no unaccountable Grandmasters operating without question. Civilian control would slow the Tactitum, perhaps even hamstring it, but this was the price to be paid to avoid the mistakes of the past.

*Perhaps most importantly, the Ordo Securitas of the Inquisition would be formed to monitor not only the assassins but the other highest echelons of the Imperium. These Inquisitors would be the guardians of the guardians, watching each Officio and Adeptus for corruption and abuse, wary of another Vangorich or Vandire emerging.

*However, due to their power to render judgment of even the highest figures of the Imperium, the Sicarius were only permitted to advise and regulate, never taking direction - at least, in theory. In reality, many Securitas Inquisitors found rather...creative ways to circumvent the decree that they may not maintain "men under arms".

The Emperor had spoken, and these were his commands.

The Officio Tacitum is a far more modern organization nowadays. Though it primarily is still famed for its assassins, it also produces operatives specialised in sabotage and covert warfare far from home. They are often assigned to the command of the Astra Militarum or individual Inquisitors; and each lone assassin is still a finely honed killing machine, but they now serve as spectacular force multipliers rather as ends in themselves. The Ordo Sicarius is satisfied with this arrangement, as it avoids the high risk and cost of the traditional lone wolf operations, and allows them to keep an eye on any assassins deployed.

The Temples? They are far less superstitious and shadowy than they once were, although the name of "Temple" has stuck in defiance of every reform that has been attempted. Each of them has diversified yet maintained their core roots in their quest to perfect the art of murder.

Temple Vindicare, who reach out far longer than all but the highest of psykers to deliver their kiss of death.

Temple Venenum, who can find a thousand toxins to kill a man from the gentlest of paradise worlds, each one exquisite to the palette in their own unique way.

Temple Eversor, who can scythe through men, orks, eldar and even Astartes with the horrifying ease of a power sword through flak armour.

Temples Culexus - who hunt down their prey with soulless eyes - and Callidus, who have no face to call their own.

Temple Vanus, which according to popular belief ha[EXPUNGED]oes not exist. The Ordo Sicarius has confirmed this, and will not allow any dispute.

The primary headquarters of the Tacticum, including the Temples, lie on Terra, although across each segmentum there are localised, lesser temples that train assassins, liason with other Imperial Forces, and seek recruits from outside the Schola the Temples traditionally draw from. The Ordo Sicarius also work closely with segmentum command to permit proper coordination if Tacitum assets are needed, although on a smaller level they are surprisingly good at scouting talented assassin candidates. With proper Inquisitorial oversight, the assassins are kept well in check, and well out of politics.

The High Lords of Terra still has a seat for the Grandmaster of Assassins, but it has been left vacant ever since the reign of Emperor Vandire. Few imagine it will ever be filled again.

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=== Adeptus Astronomica ===

“''We are the ones who give of ourselves so that others may walk in the light''”<br>
-- Motto of the Adeptus Astronomica

Of all the professions available to psykers of the Imperial Schola, perhaps none is more honored than those of the Adeptus Astronomica. These are the people who make daily life in the Imperium possible with literally nothing more than their sheer force of will. The Astronomican represents one of the first major cooperative efforts between humanity and the Eldar. Although originally of human creation, its design was improved by the Eldar as a gift of gratitude for humanity’s participation in the raid on Nurgle’s mansion, greatly improving the efficiency of the Astronomican and strength of its beacon. Although original estimates based on the average ability of a human psyker suggested that twelve thousand people at once would be needed to power the beacon, Eldar modifications decreased the actual number of psykers needed by an order of magnitude, while drastically reducing the amount of stress on an individual psyker.

However, at the same time, no profession is more tragic than that of the Adeptus Astronomica. Creating a psychic “bonfire” that can be seen by the entire Imperium is taxing on the individual, even with twelve hundred other psykers to share the burden. As a result, the psykers of the Adeptus Astronomica are rotated out in shifts in an attempt to maximize their health, with a third of the choir being rotated out every four months. However, even this is not enough to prevent long-term damage. Few psykers live more than a year, and almost none have survived more than eighteen months. In the Halls of the Astronomican, right before one enters the Chambers of the Astronomican itself, there is a small, grassy courtyard, nearly empty save for a stele made of the hardest adamantium. On it is inscribed the names of every psyker who has died in the course of powering the Astronomican, a testament to their bravery so that the Imperium will never forget their sacrifice.

==== Origin of the Astronomican ====

''"Only humanity would think to solve the complex and intricate issue of interstellar travel by building a giant psychic bonfire"''<br>
-- Finarion, specialist bonesinger from Biel-Tan sent to examine the Astronomican, circa M31.

When the Great Crusade started, there wasn’t any need for an Astronomican. The Steward was a Man of Gold, originally designed to link human worlds together during the days of the Great and Bountiful Empire, and as a result was a fairly effective psychic landmark in his own right. Combined with the fact that the Imperium had access to the Void Borns’ maps and the knowledge of the relatively safe Warp currents, it was possible to reach many of the nearby systems using short (but very slow) warp jumps.

Having delegated most of the Legion running and Great Crusading to the primarchs, the Steward was free to try and figure out a long-term solution to the navigation issue. The Steward made no secret of this fact, and the primarchs didn’t complain about it because they themselves were starting to notice as they were getting further and further from Earth it was getting harder and harder to navigate. Indeed, some of the primarchs were actually trying to convince the Steward to stay on Earth, because if the Steward got killed it meant no Astropaths and the nascent Imperium would likely tear itself apart over succession crises. Especially after the Steward was taken by surprise and nearly killed by a super-Ork on the nascent Attack Moon of Gorro.

The Steward hit upon the idea of the Astronomican when the Imperium had at least several hundred worlds under its belt. He found that if he got the beacon started other psychics can maintain the “fire” but it would take a lot of them working together and they have to rotate in shifts. Thankfully the Imperium is big enough now to provide those numbers. Unfortunately while it wasn’t as dangerous at first as the Astronomican grew in response to the need from the Crusade it becomes increasingly lethal and difficult to handle. The warp-flow goes "lumpy" and the lumps are dangerous proportional to the size of the ‘flame” you are trying to generate. Given that the flame is bright enough to see across light years the lumps are pretty lethal.

When the alliance with the eldar happened the eldar sent their specialists to Old Earth as part of the deal with humanity to look at the thing. Then they back out of the hall slowly at the sheer insanity of what these mon-keigh were trying to do? The eldar started absorbing shock absorbers and buffering jars and shit to it, and the life span of resident psychics jumps dramatically. Nowadays maintaining the Astronomican is considered an actual job rather than a death sentence, albeit one with a greatly reduced quality and length of life even compared to baseline humanity. Eldar and human technicians continued to tinker with the Astronomican, adding more devices to it like lenses and spectrum filters. And that's where the Astronomican is at now. It can't be tweaked any more, having hit the hard upper limit on what is possible with a single, giant psychic lighthouse.

Theoretically and in hindsight it would have been easier to just make [[Imperium_Secundus#Mustering_Forces_to_Himself|a bunch of small lighthouses]] instead of one big one, similar to what the Great and Bountiful Human Empire did with the Men of Gold and likely what many other races did back during the Dark Age of Technology. Such devices would not only be more efficient but would greatly, though not entirely, reduce the issues with the potential lethality of the job. Unfortunately doing so would require resources that the Imperium doesn’t have, either in the form of Iron Minds/Men of Gold or psykers that are desperately needed by the big Astronomican on Old Earth. And it it not possible to simply put out the Astronomican and start over because the loss of the Astronomican, even temporarily, would be catastrophic for the Imperium.

=== Adeptus Sororitas ===

==== Rough Notes from the Threads ====
*Formed in the aftermath of the reign of Vandire and the Civil War along with the Ordo Securitas
*They receive some cybernetic and biological enhancements, putting them roughly on par with a Spartan from Halo
**A group of 3 Sisters is roughly equal to 1 Space Marine, winning about 5 times out of 10. However, the Marine has a significant advantage in melee due to much better physical attributes and the Sisters are encumbered by their Power Armor due to lack of a Black Carapace. To win, the Sisters would need to leverage numbers and teamwork.
*I believe we said they mostly operate with the Inquisition, though their organization and exact scope of duties is unclear/undiscussed at the moment.

==== Daughters of Russ ====

The Daughters of Russ, better known as the Valkyries, are a organization similar to the Adeptas Sororitas unique for only recruiting from Fenris and the Fenrisian colonies. The Daughters claim to be matrilineal descendants of Leman Russ via his many daughters, but given the size of Leman Russ' family and the amount of time that has passed since Russ came to Fenris, it is likely that everyone on the Fenrisian Worlds can trace their ancestry back to Leman Russ in some way.

The Daughters of Russ are best known for their ferocity. Although the Sororitas are well known for their aggression and their single-mindedness, the Valkyries fight with a viciousness that seems almost inhuman. In addition, the Valkyries also exhibit senses and other abilities that seem beyond standard Sororitas-level augmentation, leading some to suspect that the Sororitas enhancements either enhance the effect of the Canis Helix genes present in the general Fenrisian population or reawaken Canis Helix genes that were formerly dormant. Surprisingly, the Daughters are otherwise rather conservative for Sororitas, looking down on the sisterhoods who add additional augmentations like kill-glands. To the Valkyries, such additions mock and taint the skill of an individual in battle.

However, at the same time the Daughters are also well-known for their talents in medicine. The Valkyries have close ties with the Sisters Hospitalier, and often find themselves being sent to reinforce flagging battalions and save as many of the wounded as they can. It is these practices that led the first leader of the Daughters of Russ to say “it is our job to look Morkai in the eye and tell him, ‘you will not touch them today’”, which eventually became shortened into the motto of the order.

Editor's Note: Needs to be seen how they relate to Sororitas. Are they actual Sororitas, the female equivalent of Space Wolves, or what? It was pointed out that the concept is good, but they don't seem to function like the Sisters (as internal police).

=== Navis Nobilite ===

See [[Nobledark Imperium Writing#The Saga of Fedor Jiao|The Saga of Fedor Jiao]]

== Adeptus Mechanicus and its branches ==

=== Adeptus Biologis ===

<div class="toccolours mw-collapsible mw-collapsed" style="100%"> '''''Gene-wrights of M41:'''''

''Without metal man is a beast. Without flesh man is a tool.''<br>
-- Motto of the Adeptus Biologis

Despite being seen as just another branch of the Adeptus Mechanicus, the Adeptus Biologis actually has very different origins from the rest of the Mechanicus. Instead of being derived from the Martian Mechanicum, the Biologis were originally formed from the various geneticists and biotechnologists living in the territories that the Warlord conquered, including the gene-hippie conclaves of western Merika, the genesmiths of Ducht Jemanic, and the genewrights of Luna. The Biologis were eventually folded into the Mechanicus proper, and centuries of cultural and philosophical exchange have greatly reduced the differences between the two, but the group still retains its own unique quirks.

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

Today, the Adeptus Biologis performs a multitude of services throughout the Imperium. They travel to newly pacified worlds to make catalogs and studies of native flora and fauna. They study diseases and synthesize new medications to constantly try to beat back the plagues of Nurgle. They try to engineer more efficient versions of crops to feed the burgeoning Imperium. They often oversee augmentations of Space Marines and Sisters of Battle.

Perhaps the biggest difference between the Adeptus Biologis and most other divisions of the Adeptus Mechanicus is their stance on innovation. According to the Biologis, the Mechanicus’ prohibition on invention and innovation only applies to technology, not nature, a loophole the Biologis are happy to exploit. As a result, the Adeptus Biologis are much more willing to try new techniques than the Mechanicus proper, which is one reason why things like rejuvenant drugs and augmentation have improved over the centuries, even if it is only at a glacial pace. Of course, given that all of their equipment comes from the Mechanicus proper, the Biologis are often unable to build the kind of equipment they would like to use.

Another major difference between the Biologis and the rest of the Mechanicus involve physical augmentations. The Biologis are just as augment-happy as their brethren within the AdMech, but tend to prefer artificially engineered organs and genetically modified tissues over cybernetic implants. Even those Magos Biologis who do have mechanical implants often strive for a balance between flesh and metal, seeking to perfect the flesh before they involve the machine.

Like virtually every organization in the Imperium, the Adeptus Biologis can be broken up into a number of factions. The old rivalry between the gene-hippies and genesmiths is still there, only under different names. The Emergentists believe that artificial biological designs must be “balanced” as part of an integrated whole much like natural designs, and that the greatest parts of a design often emerge via interactions that are not forseen. By contrast, the Utilitarians believe the body is analogous to a machine, and must be treated as such. Any deviation from the perceived purity of a design is something not to be tolerated.

The Mechanicum, that is, the actual Mars-based organization who make up the majority of the Adeptus Mechanicus and primarily work with technology, do not like the Adeptus Biologis very much. They see the Adeptus Biologis as pretenders whose accouterments are little more than aping the Mechanicum of Mars. They see the aversion of the Biologis to cybernetic augmentations as an affront to the Credo Omnissiah. Nevertheless, they begrudgingly the Biologicus despite seeing them as lesser, much in the way scholars of the “hard sciences” looked down on biology prior to the Age of Strife. Perhaps this is one reason why, at some point in history, the Biologicus changed their apparel from dressing in robes of red to robes of dark green.

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=== 'Tech-Heresy' and its definition ===

See [[Nobledark_Imperium_Imperial_Society_and_Culture#Hereteks_and_the_nature_of_.22Tech-Heresy.22|Hereteks and the nature of "Tech-Heresy"]]

=== The Last Ditch ===

On Mars, there is a series of missile silos. They appear on no map, save in the personal files of the Fabricator General and his inner circle. Hardcopy, not digital. Nothing about them has ever been committed to cogitator. Their locations are concealed beneath layers of bureaucratic subterfuge; declared off- limits zones, patrolled by guards unaware of what they protect. Onion layers of lies await the curious; the suspicious might continue digging past the first lie, but the second? The third, the fourth?

The bunkers themselves are manned by unaugmented humans; none possess even the simplest augmetic. Perhaps the only such in the whole of the regular armed forces of the Mechanicus. Everything is done with the simplest possible technology; even electricity is used sparingly. Steam engines drive complex mechanical assemblies. Everything is designed with physical, manually- operated lockouts. Everything requires human action to operate. From the air or orbit they blend in perfectly with the environment.

Inside the silos, the crews are terribly isolated. Their only contact with the outside world is a single cable, through which the fire order will come. If it ever comes. None of them know of the purpose of their silo, or of the existence of the others. Each shift lasts a year at least. They play endless hands of cards, read books, and bullshit continuously. And wait for the order to come down. In ten thousand years it has not.

As for the missiles themselves? Vortex warheads. The largest concentration of vortex weaponry in the entire Imperium currently. Over a thousand of the weapons, each capable of felling cities and Titans. Enough firepower to scour a continent clean, to say nothing of the possibility of daemonic incursion.

Arranged in a loose ring around the Noctis Labyrinth.

This is but one of the contingency plans the Guardians of the Dragon have prepared.

==The Inquisition==

===The Ark Ship===

As part of their duty to keep the Imperium safe, members of the Inquisition are often forced to consider possibilities that would be unthinkable to the rest of the Imperium. Contingency plans for disasters on the scale of which most people would be unable to imagine. The Ark Ship is one such contingency.

The Ark Ship is one of the biggest secrets of the Inquisition and Mechanicus. What little information that has leaked out to the public has been hilariously exaggerated.

It is the final contingency plan. The ultimate Plan B. Activated only in the unthinkable event that the Imperium falls and the galaxy becomes uninhabitable by sentient life. Due to its nature and the implications of its construction, even as a contingency plan, knowledge of the actual ship has been suppressed for fear of causing a panic.

It's a highly modified Omnissiah class ship, modified to survive for thousands upon thousands of years at minimal power and activity. The captain is the one Inquisitor of Ordo Desolatus, held in stasis. It's cargo is rack upon rack of genetic samples and frozen embryos from every sapient species in the Imperium, from humans to Tau.

The crew are mechanically augmented up to the very edge of what is legally allowed before you start treading into A.I. territory. Metal can shut down cleanly and is far more efficient than flesh. The crew, like the captain, are in stasis.

If the Imperium falls it's orders are to take one of countless planned FTL escape-routes to the galaxy's edge, and burn hard into the intergalactic blackness, in hope of eventually rendezvousing with the escaping craftworlds at an outlying star-cluster to resupply and begin the longest journey.

==Imperial Navy==

===The Five Flagships===

''Phalanx''. ''Nicor''. ''Mirabilis''. ''The Rock''. ''Terminus Est''. These are names that are instantly recognized by any scholar of Imperial history, as well as feared throughout history by those who sought to do the Imperium harm.

The Five, often colloquially referred to as the “Five Big Bastards” after a comment made by primarch Rogal Dorn, were a series of massive super-dreadnoughts commissioned by the Imperium in the last days of the Unification of Sol and the early years of the Great Crusade. Each of these ships were roughly 25 kilometers long and bristled with conventional weaponry. The five ships were roughly comparable in size and shape, though the ''Phalanx'' was perhaps a little larger and a little more heavily-armed than her sisters. In addition to newly constructed material mined from the Sol system, the Five were also constructed from the recycled remains of the numerous scattered shipwrecks throughout the Sol system (many of which came to the attention of the Imperium at the suggestion of the primarch Horus), making them packed full of whatever Dark Age-era technology could be salvaged from the wreckage.

The original construction of the Five was intended to be a show of solidarity between the newly unified nations of Sol. The ships were to be commissioned by the newly named Steward of Earth, constructed by the Mechanicum of Mars in the shipyards of Luna, and would be crewed by the Void Born of the Sol migrant fleet. However, become of the time and resource-intensive nature of their construction, only two of these ships, the ''Rock'' and the ''Phalanx'', were ready by the beginning of the Great Crusade. The ''Rock'' was sent out as the flagship of the Imperium's first expeditionary fleet helmed by the Dark Angels, whereas the ''Phalanx'' remained in the Sol system to act as a deterrent to any potential force that would threaten Mars and Old Earth. Construction of the remaining three, the ''Nicor'', ''Mirabilis'', and ''Terminus Est'', was not completed until much later in the Great Crusade, when the resources of additional systems could be brought to bear on their completion.

The Five were intended to be a long-term investment. In addition to building ties of unity between the major factions of Sol, the Five were meant to be a show of strength on the part of the nascent Imperium to the greater galaxy. The huge size of the Five meant that their internal workings could support much larger than average hydroponic bays, which meant they could function away from the Imperium for long periods of time without resupplying and be largely self-sufficient if they were ever cut off from Imperial supply chains. This made the ''Rock'' the ideal flagship to send out with the expeditionary fleet. Eventually, the plan was for the Five to be sent to the far corners of the galaxy, one for each major Segmentum, to act as flagships and command centers for the Imperial Navy. The ''Phalanx'', ''Rock'', ''Terminus Est'', ''Nicor'', and ''Mirabilis'' were to be sent to Segmenta Solar, Obscurus, Pacificus, Tempestus, and Ultima, respectively. Unfortunately, random chance and the whims of history ended up scuttling this plan. Although originally constructed as part of a set, each of the Five suffered dramatically different fates.

The ''Rock'' was infamously stolen by the arch-traitor Luther during the Chaos of the War of the Beast, only to be reclaimed by the loyalist Dark Angels after the Lion's final battle with his brother. Luther had not had his hands on the ''Rock'' long enough for it to be irrevocably tainted by Chaos, and the Dark Angels were able to repurpose the battleship for their own uses. To this day, the ''Rock'' remains the mobile headquarters of the Dark Angels chapter.

The ''Phalanx'', although heavily damaged in the War of the Beast, remains as it always has in the Sol System, an old guard dog ever-ready to fight those that would threaten the capital of the Imperium. Its [[Nobledark_Imperium_Writing#Ork_Diplomacy|legendary ramming action]] that repelled the Beast's attack planet Ullanor during the War of The Beast obliterated much of the original ship, as the relativistic impact vaporized almost all of the Phalanx, with only relatively small parts of the drive superstructure remaining attached to the ship's neutronium ramming prow and keel, which was later recovered from a highly elliptical orbit around Sol. Any conventional matter, including the body of Pius, would have been vaporized on impact, but neutronium is made of tougher stuff. The Phalanx was rebuilt from around this neutronium keel, missing many of the archaeotech systems originally contained within its frame but [[The_War_of_The_Beast#The_Fist_of_the_Imperium|the keel was enough of a plank in the ship of Theseus to claim continuity with the original ship]]. The Imperium doesn't like to take defeat lying down.

The ''Mirabilis'' remains active in the galactic East, still acting as a flagship of the Imperial Navy rather than commanded by any chapter of the Adeptus Astartes, perhaps the only one of the Five along with the Phalanx that is still performing the job the Imperium intended for it. However, the Ultima Segmentum is nearly an order of magnitude larger than any other part of the galaxy, and there is little the ''Mirabilis'' can do beyond putting out fires.

The ''Nicor'' fought valiantly for many years, but was presumed lost in the aftermath of the [[Nobledark_Imperium_Drafts#Second_Black_Crusade|Second Black Crusade]]. In late M40, the Carcharodons found the carcass of the ''Nicor'' floating out in the middle of the Segmentum Tempestus, and after much friction with the rest of the Imperium refurbished it into their new headquarters. Although the ''Nicor'' is probably capable of void combat once more, the Carcharodons prefer to keep it in a strategic location in the galactic South to act as a central base from which they can coordinate their attacks. Ironically, the ''Nicor'' in some ways is performing the job it had always been intended to do in the first place, striking fear in the hearts of any who would threaten the Imperium in the Segmentum Tempestus.

The ''Terminus Est'' served the Imperium through more military campaigns than any other member of the Five. After being sent to take back the Segmentum Pacificum when the Imperium set out to reclaim the Segmentum, the ship was commandeered in the aftermath of the war by Typhus the Pilgrim, who made it into the mobile headquarters of his breakaway chapter the Black Templars. For six millennia, the ''Terminus Est'' was a constant presence on the western front of the Imperium. Much like the Black Templars themselves, the ''Terminus Est'' was forever marching to war, never resting, never stopping, almost seeming to have an indefatigable personality of its own. If there is any truth to the Mechanicus' claim that ships have machine spirits, there is perhaps no better argument in support of this idea than the ''Terminus Est''.

However, no ship can fight forever. In late M38, the ''Terminus Est'' finally broke down after back-to-back fighting in an Armageddon War and putting down an assault on Necromunda. The ''Terminus Est'' managed to limp its mass to high Necromundan orbit before tidal forces tore the ship apart. Today, the ''Terminus Est'' is the closest thing the Black Templars have to a static headquarters. Like the ''Nicor'', the Templars claim the ''Terminus Est'' might have a few more battles in her, but so far none have been willing to put that claim to the test.

===Blade of Luna===

The Blade Of Luna is one of the first in a series of modified Mars-class battlecruisers equipped with oversized engines, the sensor networks of an Emperor-class battleship, and cutting edge vox warfare systems. Recently built by the shipyards based around Luna, not the orthodox masters of Mars, it is designed to serve as a support ship maintaining inter-fleet communications and tracking enemies for improved battlefield awareness.

This description vastly oversimplifies their role. While rebels and pirates who barely know how to keep a stolen ship's anti-gravity working are little threat to the pirate-extermination forces that a ship of this type would lead, the Crone Eldar, Necrons, Olamic Quietude, and Dark Mechanicus, to name the most infamous, all have their own foul brand of technosorcery.

Daemonic scrap-code can cut power to point defense arrays just long enough to let a barrage of boarding pods bite into the hull, secure encryptions can be cracked in milliseconds by machinery powered by broken star gods, crucial orders can be lost under a tidal wave of jamming signals, augurs that previously tracked micrometeorites from one end of the solar system to the other suddenly lose their visuals; the list goes on. The Imperial Navy has learned its bloody lessons over ten thousand years of war, and its more technically-minded factions are the inheritors of practices fine-tuned prior to the Dark Age of Technology.

Hence the limited production run of ships like the Blade Of Luna, testbeds for the latest electronic warfare systems to serve as sword and shield against the Imperium's enemies. Her higher decks are packed with banks of compartmentalized, EMP-shielded cogitators and consoles, each linked to a backup battery in the event the redundant power couplings to the Generatorium fail in battle. Augur arrays normally found only on the Emperor-class battleship cover the Blade Of Luna in a thin forest of sensor spars and domes, and in concert with the cogitators enable the ship's Techpriests to tune out false positives and home in on elusive cloaked enemies. Gellar fields, hexagrammatic wards, and crude automations of machine exorcism are present to fend off the more daemonic varieties of scrap-code. There are other technologies that are not so enthusiastically discussed by the rather open-minded Mechanicus builders, but they have risen to meet the monumental challenges of those who would challenge the Omnissiah's vessels of war.

===Deep Field Recon===

Knowledge of its many enemies is vital to the Imperium's survival, and quite hard to come by. Oh, you can learn some things on the battlefield. Weapons and tactics. But this is far, far from a complete picture. It tells you nothing of their logistics, of their politics, of their inner minds, of the deep knowledge needed to strike at the heart of an entire civilization. Fighting on the battlefield tells you how to fight on the battlefield, but not how to craft grand strategy.

Channels for gaining this deep knowledge are few. It is impossible to infiltrate the Silent Court, and there is no gossip there; likewise a tyranid cannot be bribed to turn against the Swarm and even the smallest bribes in Shaa-Dome are far too horrible to pay. There is no trade with the Orks, and an embassy in Commorragh would be nothing but a buffet table. Intercepting the communications of Chaos is actively hazardous to the health of the reader's mind and soul, and any wire tapping the thoughts of a dark God is wont to become a conduit for them into reality. All the tricks human nations have used to spy on each other since time immemorial are useless against the vast majority of the Imperium's foes. But ignorance is not an option.

Thus, the Deep Field Recon squadrons.

The Deep Field Recon squadrons are one of the few methods the Imperium has for investigating the inner reaches of enemy territory. Deep Field Recon ships are made to be as stealthy as possible, typically mounting multiple forms of concealment. Reflex shields and eldar holo-fields are standard, as are various forms of passive stealth such as low-signature engines and auspex- baffling plating. Some are equipped with more exotic devices still, archeotech and xenotech cloaking devices salvaged from the far corners of the galaxy. An (un)lucky few bear psychic choirs on board, actively diverting the attention of possible searchers away.

The design of any two ships are often dissimilar; due to the incorporation of xenotech in the design, the main body of the Mechanicum refuses to construct them. Thus, their creation is left to the heterodox and other member states; the Hubworld League, the Eldar, the Interex, and increasingly the Tau.

With these techniques, they dive deep into the sanctums of the enemy, gathering information, inserting and extracting commando teams, and striking targets of opportunity. The Deep Field Recon squadrons are a vital part of anti-Ork efforts, providing forewarning of rising WAAAGGHHs and delivering kill- teams to eliminate rising Warbosses. Others ghost through the Silent Empire, mapping tombworlds, counting World Engines, and watching for any preparations for an attack. (This is one of the highest- mortality duties among in Deep Field Recon; the Silent Empire guards its borders jealously, and its reserves of techno- sorcery are vast and deep.) There are even rumors of ships covered in hexagrammatic wards operating under the auspices of the Alpha Legion, plunging into the Eye of Terror itself to strike at the Great Enemy in its lair.

Life in the Silent Service is frequently nerve- wracking. By the nature of their missions, they sped their time deep in enemy territory far away from any possible reinforcements. Often for years on end, as they slowly assemble a complete picture of enemy numbers and capabilities from telescope pictures and stray vox- chatter. At the same time, it is often quite boring, drifting through space with everything but stealth systems and passive sensors powered down, watching an enemy with no idea of their presence. When hunting, the nature of the wait and tension changes as they slowly glide towards their targets, moving into position for a single kill- shot and hoping their exit route remains clear.

Deep Field Recon squadrons usually operate under the auspices of the Inquisition. Typically, they are attached to various Watch Fortresses keeping an eye on specific threats or regions of space. Most Recon ships operate with an Inquisitor, or at least an Interrogator, on board, specializing in the specific threat the ship is operating against. Many Inquisitors use vessels of similar design as their personal vehicles, even if not specifically on Deep Field Recon duties; the class is well- suited to Inquisition duties generally.

There are few Deep Field Recon vessels. Due to the exotic equipment and demanding tolerances of the class, they are difficult to build; only a few thousands exist at any given time. But, in enemies of the Imperium ambushed and destroyed, and even more in vital knowledge gathered, each is worth ten times its number in conventional vessels.

== Eldar-Only Forces ==

=== Handmaidens of Isha ===

Just as it is the job of the Adeptus Custodes to protect the Emperor of Mankind and his wife, it is the job of the Handmaidens of Isha to protect the Grand Empress Isha and her husband. The Handmaidens of Isha are the Eldar side of the Imperium's praetorian guard, drawn from the ranks of her most devout followers in the cults that sprung up in her wake following her rescue from Nurgle's mansion. Compared to many other followers of Isha, the blessings of the Handmaidens are rather subtle. Little more than an immunity to virtually all diseases and a seeming inability to sustain permanent damage from scaring or age. This allows the Handmaidens to perfect their physical training in a way that only one who does not have to worry about wear and tear on their body can. The Handmaidens are no pushovers, being armed with swords known as "the Thorns of Isha" that can inflict wounds that do not heal. The Handmaidens are also noted to have a connection to Isha that borders on the preternatural, able to sense if their charge is in direct danger even if they are unable to see her directly.

However, the Handmaidens of Isha have an another job in addition to protecting their Empress. As the Imperial Couple travels from world to world, the Empress often sends her handmaidens to inspect the world beforehand to ensure that the world is as upstanding as it often claims to be. Although many worlds have their own dirty little secrets that they have managed to keep secret from the Administratum, few can hide from the gaze of the All-Mother. Although the Adeptus Custodes are also often posted in Imperial society to keep watch for potential threats against the Emperor and Imperium, most of them are incapable of doing so without drawing attention to themselves. The Handmaidens of Isha, on the other hand, are capable of passing themselves off as just another Eldar or even avoiding notice altogether. Because the two groups have essentially the same job, they often end up directly cooperating with one another.

=== The Avatar of Khaine ===

See [[Nobledark_Imperium_Notable_People#Khaine|Khaine]]

==== The Avatar of Biel-Tan ====

Biel-Tan hasn't deployed an Avatar of Khaine for nearly one hundred years. This wouldn't be surprising for a lesser craftworld, or a craftworld that is peaceable, but this is Biel-Tan. The most well known, influential, and martially famous craftworld. That Khaela Mensha Khaine hasn't made an appearance in a year, much less a near century would provoke suspicion.

However, among the eldar, it's considered a bit of a faux pas to ask about this. The Inquisition is another matter entirely though, and they already know the answer.

Biel-Tan's avatar has been awake this entire time. Biel-Tan summoned the avatar for the Ghoul Campaign, to help a desperate sword wind against a siege of orks with daemon support. The avatar of war led the survivors, many wounded, to victory against the orks, culminating in the avatar decapitating the bloodthirster Yel'Grazruk shattering the spirit of the enemy. The sword wind rejoiced.

Then they noticed the avatar wasn't gone. It had followed the fleeing enemy, and was killing as many as it could reach. The next day, the avatar was still killing. On the fifteenth day, it ran out of enemies to kill, and came back, planted its sword at the center of the biel tan fortification, and waited.

After the twentieth day, the Biel-Tan forces found themselves very worried indeed. The burning avatar still smoldered, glaring out at the horizon. In the face of their persistent god, finally they attempted to psychically contact the avatar, a hazardous venture for even the most skilled warlock.

After the warlock stopped chanting in a dead language, she managed to sputter out "Khaine waits for his chariot." No one knew what that referred to. But when the autarch ordered the sword wind back to Biel-Tan, the avatar followed, marched through the craftworld, and returned to his temple, still burning.

The avatar has sat there since, waiting for his chariot.

===Craftworld Armor===
The Craftworld Eldar military forces are descended from, essentially, civic militia. Thus, their war machines were optimized for ease of construction, ease of maintenance, and ease of piloting; war machines a part-time non-professional volunteer force could use and maintain. The aftermath of the Fall, when the survivors were thrown back onto highly limited resources and the whole population had to be mobilized to survive, only reinforced this paradigm. 10,000 years of Imperium have loosened it; the number of super-heavy vehicles in the Craftworld arsenal has increased both in absolute number and proportion as more resources become available. Likewise, more specialist designs for specific battlefield roles have become commonplace as the need for every tank to potentially fill every role lessens. Still the typical Craftworld grav-tank remains a stripped-down (in terms of mechanical complexity, not necessarily weight) generalist.

== Tau Empire ==

=== Mont'Kau Battlesuits ===

<div class="toccolours mw-collapsible mw-collapsed" style="100%"> '''''Front-Line Defenders of the Greater Good:'''''

[[Image:Mont%27kau_Battlesuit.png|thumb|]]

As the Tau first expanded from their cradle of civilization on T’au into the greater galaxy, they began to realize that many of their opponents, including orks, tyranids, Space Marines, and more, were devastatingly effective in close-quarters combat. Although the Tau personally avoided melee combat whenever possible, they realized that many of their opponents were not going to do them a favor and do the same. The Tau would have loved to use their auxillaries to make up for this deficiency, but among their close allies only the kroot were well-suited for close combat and there were far more Tau regiments than there were kroot to go around.

As a result, at the behest of O’Shovah (Commander Farsight) back before the Schism, the Tau Empire decided to solve this problem by building bigger, more durable versions of the Crisis battlesuit specifically designed for melee combat. It has been suggested that O’Shovah was inspired to pitch his idea when he realized that battlesuits could be used to compensate for the Tau’s smaller physical stature and reluctance to engage in melee combat against foes such as Orks and Space Marines, but the Tau vehemently deny this is the case. Unlike most battlesuits, which were designed as mobile platforms for heavy ranged weaponry, these suits were designed for close quarters combat. These suits often carry guns, like all Tau battlesuits, but more often than not these tend to be close-range weapons like shotguns or tend to be a melee weapon first and foremost like a giant bayonet to which attaching an actual gun is an afterthought. The Tau called them Mont’kau Battlesuits, named after a particularly terrifying species of predator from their homeworld of T’au. To the rest of the Imperium, who lacked the appreciation for the intricacies of the Tau language, these suits simply became known as Predator Battlesuits.

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

Compared to a Space Marine or an Aspect Warrior, Mont’kau battlesuits aren’t as particularly agile in close-quarters combat (lacking the Black Carapace of a Space Marine or the flesh and blood agility of an Eldar), but like all Tau battlesuits they are lightweight for their size and, more importantly, easily replaceable. The purpose of the Mont’kau battlesuits is not to serve as shock troops, but to act as a bulwark to keep the close combat forces of the enemy away from the firing line. Mont’kau battlesuits are typically piloted by battlefield veterans, ones who are used to the chaos of battle and have fast enough reflexes to fight on the front lines. As a result, although melee combat is still the Tau’s biggest weakness, at least the Tau now have an answer to the numerous close-combat specialists that dominate the galactic landscape, and are not a complete joke about it. Nevertheless, the Tau claim that they are continually improving on the Mont’kau design, and that one day the Mont’kau battlesuits will be the equal of the front line combatants of the other major races.

One common addition to Mont’kau battlesuits is an outer layer of explosive reactive armor, made of an alloy similar to but more brittle than the traditional fio’tak, which is designed to fragment into a spray of ceramite-like shrapnel. This reactive armor can either be used to provide additional protection against anti-personnel ranged attacks or be command-detonated to act like a makeshift claymore mine. These reactive armor plates are actually capable of being added to a wide-variety of battlesuits, but are most often associated with the Mont’kau battlesuits due to their role in close combat. These additions, along with the directed flechette grenades that are now a common component of Tau infantry gear, were largely devised as contingencies against the Dark Eldar, whom the Tau held a particular hatred for after their repeated raids of the Tau Empire in the wake of the A.I. rebellion, the Tau Reformation, and the vanguard Hive Fleets. To the Dark Eldar, for whom speed was their primary protection, such devices would prove lethal.

</div>
</div>

== Interex ==

=== Sagittars ===

<div class="toccolours mw-collapsible mw-collapsed" style="100%"> '''''A Fusion of Man and Machine:'''''

Although mankind had experimented with quadrupedal walking machines as early as M3, the use of these machines in warfare would not come into their own until much later, reaching their peak just before and during the Age of Strife. The separation of the myriad worlds of the Great and Bountiful Human Empire during the Age of Strife resulted in each human world developing its own unique way of coping with the adverse conditions of the period, leading to an explosion of new technologies and new adaptations of old ones. Among these new weapons were the sagittars, a term used to both refer to the quadrupedal walking and the people who rode them, developed by the Interex of the Segmentum Pacificus. Although originally designed as scouts and heavy cavalry, sagittars would quickly become the backbone of Interex ground warfare.

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Sagittars are primarily controlled by their rider, who neutrally link to their mount in order to operate their mechanical limbs and onboard armory as if the machine was an extension of themself. Because of this, it often takes several years for a sagittar rider to fully learn how to control their machine’s limbs as if they were their own. When riderless, the robotic portion of the sagittar is controlled by an extremely simple artificial intelligence (about as simple, if not moreso, than those seen in Legio Cybernetica constructs), capable of standing still, returned to the rider’s side when commanded, or seeking cover in case of a firefight, and not much else. It is only when linked to their rider that a sagittar is capable of more complex action.

In addition to serving as a mobile mount, sagittars also function as a mobile armory for their rider. The rear portion of the mount contains a number of weapons, which can be switched between as needed. The most common weapon used by the Interex is the magnetic bow, which consists of a magazine of two foot long spikes attached to a pair of arms, each of which contained a pair of electromagnets. When the weapon is fired, a current is sent through the bow accelerating the projectile to velocities sufficient enough to penetrate ceramite armor. Adjusting the arms of the bow to be closer or further from the main barrel increases or decreases the power, accuracy, and recoil of the shot. Skilled riders can even turn their bodies around 180 degrees while retreating to fire parting shots while their mount runs away from the battle. The armory will also contain lances, swords, or electrified throwing lances for other tasks. If an enemy attacks too fast for the rider to grab a weapon, the sagittar can strike out at its foe by kicking with its hydraulic legs.

In some ways, Interex sagittars act as highly mobile infantry as opposed to cavalry. Sagittars are stronger than a baseline human footsoldier, but their primary advantage over other elite troops such as Astartes and Aspect Warriors is their extreme mobility. Although sagittars can fight in traditional cavalry charges, the near ubiquitous presence of ranged weapons in the galaxy makes this a near-suicidal endeavor. Instead, the Interex use the superior mobility of their sagittars to outflank and outmaneuver slower opponents. This fit well with the general Interex policy of war, which was to dictate where and when a battle would occur under conditions that favored the Interex in order to minimize casualties on both sides. Although not as fast as an assault bike, under good conditions a sagittar can travel at speeds of up to 60 kilometers per hour, and unlike flesh-and-blood mounts, sagittars do not get tired. Sagittar legs are also well-built to traveling over uneven terrain, as opposed to horses.

Because the sagittar’s mounts are an extension of themselves, rather than a separate animal, sagittars do not suffer from many of the typical weaknesses of biological cavalry. A sagittar cannot be startled as easily as a horse can, because the only way to startle a sagittar is to startle the rider. However, sagittars do have some weaknesses. Because the rider of a sagittar has to be able to turn around to access the onboard armory, the armor has to be relatively light and flexible around the waist, making it a weak point. Since contact with the Imperium, the Interex have created models with heavier armor and more powerful weapons, but have never been able to fully eliminate this weakness. Additionally, because the rider sits above the fray of the battle, in close-combat conditions where the sagittar is unable to exploit its greater mobility, the same height that allows the sagittar to pick and choose its targets on the battlefield makes them an easy target for snipers or other high-powered ranged weaponry. If the legs are damaged, it is often possible to kill the rider before they can eject from their sagittar. Finally, and most importantly, although sagittars are good at offensive actions and hit-and-run attacks, they are not as effective when they are forced to stand and fight, whether they are forced into a position in which they cannot retreat or need to fortify and protect an objective. In the past, this is often when the Interex would call in the Kinebrach to supplement their sagittars as shock troopers. Today this role is generally filled by other forces.

However, sagittar usage has never really caught on outside of the Interex and a few associated territories for a variety of reasons. First, sagittars occupy a rather awkward place in Imperial Tactics, being more expensive and more difficult to replace than flesh-and-blood cavalry such as horses, yet too slow for tactics used by heavy cavalry such as assault bikes and jetbikes. In some parts of the Imperium highly orthodox Mechanicus adepts will refuse to construct parts for sagittars, considering their machine spirits too close to A.I. for comfort (as they do the Legio Cybernetica), and since this simple intelligence is required for sagittar function sagittars are not made. Finally, sagittar fighting involves mastering an unusual set of tactics, including the ability to rapidly retreat and regroup from the battlefield when it becomes necessary. This is very different from typical Imperial tactics, particularly the Cadian doctrine, the most commonly followed military doctrine in the Imperium, which primarily focuses on the defense and holding of territory, with aggressive action being taken primarily through artillery barrages. Sagittar fighting thus requires a very different mindset than is typically found among Imperial forces, one that is found only in groups such as the Armageddon Outriders or the inhabitants of the Pastoral Worlds. Nevertheless, a well-trained sagittar battalion is still a welcome sight for an Imperial commander on any battlefield.

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== Hubworld League (Squats) ==

=== Destroyermen ===

<div class="toccolours mw-collapsible mw-collapsed" style="100%"> '''''Heavy Infantry of the Hubworld League:'''''

Destroyermen are the heavy infantry of any squat army. The concept of Destroyermen originally derived from the squat custom of having people who would risk their lives as the first ones to enter an unexplored cavern or mine shaft to see if it was safe to enter. Despite being clad in the best protective gear available, this work was extremely dangerous, as evidenced by the casualty rate, but at the same time it paid extremely well. However, being mostly socialists, a squat clan would often not waste all of the earnings on themselves. Instead, they would put into upgrading and improving the protective suit, making it more likely that the individual performing this job would keep coming back intact. This bizarre method of technological natural selection went on for millennia, until eventually most squat colonies had numerous sets of masterwork craft powered armor scattered among various clans. From there it was a simple leap to go from using this armor for checking for gas pockets and occasional hostile xenos to using them in open warfare against threats like Orks. Destroyermen are often the “tip of the spear” in squat armies, fighting in areas where casualties are likely to be high. Destroyerman armors have often been in squat families for generations, and the living clan members are fiercely protective of them, seeing them as emblems of their clan’s glory and heritage.

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

Like most squat technology, the concept of Destroyermen and Destroyermen suits was developed during the Age of Isolation, the period in which the Hubworld League was cut off from contact with the majority of humanity. Destroyerman armor is often referred to as the little brother of Space Marine terminator armor, and there is a grain of truth to that statement. Destroyerman armor and Terminator armor actually spring from a common source, the environmental hazard suits used for working in hard vacuum or mining in inhospitable conditions during the Dark Age of Technology. However, whereas Terminator armor was retrofitted for military usage and has been increasingly refined for combat over millennia, Destroyerman armor is much more sedate. This is in part because Destroyermen were never expected to see combat on the level that most Space Marine do, and in part because the ability to efficiently manufacture some of the higher end devices for the armors (like teleporters) was lost during the Age of Strife. In general, Destroyerman armor is more geared towards making sure the wearer and the armor survives rather than making a more efficient killing machine like Terminator armor. There is also the issue of the armor wearer. Although the armor may be high quality, the person inside the armor is still only human, lacking the genetic modifications typical of Space Marines or Sisters of Battle (particularly the Black Carapace of the former) and limited what a Destroyerman is capable of.

</div>
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=== Desperados ===

Desperados are the scouts of the Hubworld’s military. Typically drawing their ranks from the young and impetuous members of Hubworld society, desperados are typically hotheaded and eager to make their name. When on duty, desperados spend most of their time on the outskirts of Hubworld society, traversing the planet in search of undiscovered mineral lodes, making sure the machinery that keeps the hold functioning is still intact, and even acting as ranchhands on the few worlds in the Hubworld league capable of supporting grox herds. Desperados most typically ride jet bikes, which have the easiest time traveling over the geologically unstable surface of many worlds of the Hubworld League, but wheeled vehicles are not uncommon. The Hubworld League has the largest collection of human made jet bikes in the Imperium, lovingly passed down family lines for generations. However in times of war desperados find themselves conscripted into Hubworld military actions, acting as raiding parties, scouts, and light skirmishers. Other, better-trained forces serve as more dedicated mechanized cavalry combatants.

=== Hubworlder Land Trains ===

Not all planets are so lucky as to have a breathable atmosphere, tolerable levels of radiation, and stable tectonic activity. The people of the Hubworld League near the galactic core know that better than most, many of their worlds being near the galactic core and therefore under constant upheaval from tidal flexing in the gravitational pull of a gas giant, pulsar, or the core of the Milky Way itself. On many worlds, it is not even possible to build the traditional bunker-like fortresses favored by Hubworld architects. Instead, the primary form of squat habitation is in the form of Land Trains.

Land trains were originally developed on less hostile worlds, designed as caravans to bring raw ore and other goods between major settlements. However, on less stable worlds, land trains have been refitted to become settlements in and of themselves, ballooning in size to encompass populations of entire cities. These types of trains are typically found on less tectonically stable worlds and often contain large amounts of mining equipment, allowing Hubworlders to mine the ores that drive their civilization while still being able to move out of the way of newly formed fissures and tectonic rifts

Many who see Hubworlder land trains draw parallels with trains on other worlds. The comparison is better in some ways than others. A better comparison might be an armored trade caravan, albeit one with treads and an ability to mine its own raw materials. Hubworlder land trains are formed by linked cars, but they do not follow tracks. After all, on these worlds sedentary or semi-permanent structures are a death sentence. Instead, land trains have treads, allowing them to climb even on highly angled surfaces.

As with almost every piece of technology they developed, the Hubworlders soon found that it was easy to repurpose their caravans for war. Armored sides designed to shrug off micrometeorite impacts and stellar radiation are equally well suited to deflect enemy fire. And the large size of the trains makes them ideal not only for troop housing and transport, but supporting truly massive weaponry, potentially making them armored juggernauts when used correctly.

[[category:Nobledark Imperium]]

Nobledark Imperium Imperial Forces

2020-09-01T19:38:29Z

2601:647:CA01:2410:443E:B2AA:ECA7:511A: /* Deep Field Recon */

'''This page is part of the Nobledark Imperium, a fan re-working of the Warhammer 40,000 Universe. See the [[Nobledark Imperium|Nobledark Imperium Introduction]] and [[Nobledark Imperium|Main Page]] for more information on the alternate universe'''

TO DO:
*Finish arguments over how the military is structured
== Imperial Guard ==

=== Standard Imperial Tactics ===

Standard Imperial infantry composition is to field a battalion of Imperial Guardsmen combined with a detachment of Eldar Guardians as auxiliaries. Unlike previous mixed-forces regiments throughout galactic history this arrangement tends to work rather well, because unlike these previous combined regiments both sides feel fairly safe that the other side isn't going to shoot them in the back. Both groups can and do fight on their own, but work spectacularly together. In theory, the regiment structure works by Imperial Guard forces taking the brunt of the enemy fire, and the Eldar acting as flankers. In practice, the more fragile, but heavier-hitting Eldar like this arrangement because it means they won't be the primary targets of enemy fire, whereas the Imperial Guard like this arrangement because even though they start out taking brunt of the blow, the Eldar auxiliaries will tear through enemy forces fast enough that they never become the targets of focus fire. As with everything in the Imperium, this varies from world to world. Specialist forces like Catachans, Kriegers, Harlequins, or Aspect Warriors function differently, and follow their own rules.

If there is any weakness to this arrangement, it's that Eldar and humans tend to only take orders from their respective species, which causes there to be two people in charge of a given regiment. If the two commanders can't come to an agreement, the army sputters, which can lead to one or the other going in alone.

After the Tau Empire was absorbed into the Imperium, Imperial commanders were eager to try to incorporate Tau Fire Warriors into this formation. The Imperium had seen how effective the Tau were at long-ranged combat, and saw great potential in their ability. In theory, the idea was to have a third group of Tau Fire Warriors providing long-range support fire from behind the Guardsman infantry, and if all worked as planned then half of the enemy army wouldn’t even be able to show up to the battle in the first place. However, in practice, this did not work for several reasons. First, the Tau were essentially a combined-arms force already (save for close combat), and didn’t appreciate being shoehorned into a long-range only role, even if they were talented at it. Secondly, much like Eldar and humans, Tau like to be commanded by Tau, so in an Eldar-Tau-human battalion you end up having three arguing commanders instead of just two. Third, and perhaps most importantly, Eldar and humans have worked together long enough to trust that one is not going to shoot the other in the back. This is not true of the Tau, especially given their attitude towards the Imperium for much of their history. When you factor in that in this arrangement the Tau are supposed to be in the back of the formation and thus in the perfect position to potentially shoot their allies in the back, the other soldiers start to get paranoid and morale drops. Eventually, it was decided to keep Tau divisions as their own separate forces, called in particularly for any enemy that has started to work out a viable counter, however soft, to the traditional Guardian+Guard one-two.

Eldar opinions on human weapons, like just about everything else in the Imperium, vary from Craftworld to Craftworld. Craftworlds like Alaitoc would sneer if offered human weapon as a sidearm, whereas Ulthwé Eldar would take two in addition to their own weapon and then ask if you have any more. Most Eldar see human weapons like modern soldiers do knives. Crude, simple, and inelegant compared to their primary weapon, but if you're stuck in the trenches in a do or die moment, it's better to have the other guy get shot than you. Therefore, Eldar that use human weapons use them as a sidearm or last resort weapon, if at all. It helps that many human-made weapons are based on STC designs and therefore easily replaceable and about as fragile as a brick (being designed for maximum durability), in contrast to the more delicate, precision-made (though still pretty tough) weapons of the Eldar. Therefore, an Eldar can be less careful with their sidearm and make sure their primary weapon is at maximum efficiency.

=== Imperial Infantry Command Structure ===

Due to the fact the Imperial Guard does not enforce specific organization for anything below battalion level, the vast different cultures and traditions that exist in the Imperium changes the size of the smaller units as they see fit. Terra did set minimum sizes on how large units must be before it could be recognized as said self-declared units by the wider Imperial Guard.

The lowest level of the Imperial Guard is the squad size. Guardsmen often operate in pairs for specialized tasks to keep confusion as low as possible between other in the same squad. The smallest recognized size for these squads is 10 soldiers per squad further broken into 5 pairs, although a command squad might only have 6 men. At least 4 squads form into a platoon with one of the squads being a command squad bringing the total amount of men in platoon to at least 36 Guardsmen. Examples like the Kriegers use 7 squads in a platoon bring their size to 76 Guardsmen.

Eldar squads attached to Guardsman platoons come in the smallest size of 5 Eldar per squad but their size can be bigger depending on their world of origin. Notably the Maiden world Eldar tends to be organized into larger sizes as they experience more attacks on their homes compared to the Craftworlds.

For the platoons to form into a company there must be at least 4 platoons with a company command squad, thus bringing the number to at least 150 men. The Cadian Shock Troops often deploy around 300 per company. The Kriegers use 10 platoons per company then adding the Company HQ with at least 1 Grenadier squad totaling in at least 704 Guardsmen, not counting transports which they are often deployed with.

The smallest size battalion uses at least 2 companies and battalion HQ before being deployed, bringing the numbers to 306 Guardsmen per battalion. The expected regiment holds at least 3 battalions and 1 support platoon which have 7 squads and 1 HQ totaling to 1.000 men. More often than not regiments like the Vostroyans use 3 infantry battalions and 2 standardized (organized not by 7 squad and HQ but like the infantry 3 squad with 1 HQ) support battalions coming up to 1.536 men. The Krieger regiments far pass these expectations by using 4 standardized support battalions and 6 infantry battalions jumping their numbers to 14.146 men including the regimental HQ.

The Corps used to garrison a world often use the smallest size with only 5 regiments totaling to at least 5.000 Guardsmen and these troops are used to raise PDF than to actually keep the peace. If there are still insurgents who disrupt the peace and not accept the Imperial Truth, these garrison corps can double or triple in regiments. This puts the tripled Corp to at least a small 15.000 to a gigantic 200.000 Guardsmen. The PDF used to aid the garrison Corp would be raised to around a low 400.000 and up to millions at a time like on hive worlds.

On the more peaceful systems the lax Guardsmen army deployed to ‘guard’ the place would only be using the tinniest size, thus only have 20.000 at any one time if a majority of it on reserve. At the more active systems the numbers would go up to around 40.000 to 60.000 troops in garrisoning systems not too far from a front. When the Imperial Guard does deploy an army to the frontline the commanders always request at least 100.000 for the more daring but normally uses 180.000 if they are luck.

- Additional info in thread XI, including number of troops in each Segmentum. Actual number of troops never agreed upon, left here as placeholder.

=== Forces of the Imperial Guard ===

==== Cadian Shock Troopers ====

[[File:Cadian.jpg|300px|thumb|right|Typical Cadian combat uniform.]]

Most “Cadian” Regiments are in fact not from Cadia or even have a drop of Cadian blood in them. “So why name them Cadian?” I hear you say. The Cadians were one of the few who proved themselves in the Great Crusade as the most versatile and adaptable troops the Imperial Army can deploy on most fronts. The organizational structure and equipment used by the Cadians were introduced to many different worlds as the original Cadian regiments toured the modern Imperium and beyond in the Crusade Era. The 200 year expansion period saw diverse traditions of regiments being used all over the galaxy as newly integrated worlds threw their armed forces to join the Imperial Army, and be sent to the far-flung reaches of the Imperium. The War of the Beast saw almost all Cadian regiments be recalled to the defense of Cadia or Terra if they were close enough. With the absence of many regiments from Ultima Segmentum and Segmentum Tempestus the worlds in these places were forced to raise totally new regiments from scratch for self-defense or as requisition to be deployed to the fronts.

Many of the Forge, Argi, and Feudal worlds used traditional local organization and equipment for planetary elite troops to form their own Guardsmen regiment at that time. Imperial, Hive and Fortress worlds on the other hand, saw the effectiveness in Cadian regiments as they fought against or with the Cadians during the Great Crusade. The industrial capability to manufacture standard Cadian equipment was already present on many Imperial worlds, but the Forge worlds refused to form Cadian regiments as these worlds dismiss the lack of artillery and armored vehicles and rather form the Skitarii armies. Argi and Feudal worlds lack the industry to produce and equip a Cadian regiment.

The adoption of Cadian regiments on so many different worlds shows the versatility and efficiency of the Cadian doctrine. After the War of the Beast, the original Cadian regiments would be sent to refortify the Cadian Gate. Many of the displaced Cadian civilian people would be reorganized to colonist groups leaving their homeworld. The same adaptable traditions carried over to colonize and frontier worlds when they raised their own Cadian regiments.

Cadian infantry regiments from Cadia are known as “Cadian Shock Troops” while off world or imitation regiments are known as “Cadian Foot Troops.” These Cadian Shock Troops would often have at least two detachments from other branches of the Imperial Guard, for example the 203rd Cadian Shock Troop has self-propelled heavy artillery and armored detachments. The Cadian Foot Troops often don’t follow this rule and only deploy with one detachment.

In a Cadian infantry regiment, a squad is made of 10 people that operate in 5 pairs. The Sergeant keeps up moral and plans out tactics with the Lieutenant who can operate as a vox-caster; they can also be equipped with melee weapons. The heavy weapon team is included to allow long range suppressive fire on the battlefield usually with a heavy stubber. The Medic works to keep the soldiers in fighting condition with the help of their underling that tags along into battles. The rest of the squad is made up of two pairs of weapon specialists normally being Lasgunners.

The Sargent is equipped with a chainsword and las-pistol for leading charges or CQC. Alternatively the Sargent can be armed like the Lieutenant who is given a las-carbine for self-defense. The heavy weapon team normally uses an offensive heavy stubber that fires 12.7mm rounds or a lighter defensive stubber firing 7.92 rounds. In the heavy weapons team the first member carries and fire the weapon while the other member feeds ammo, spots targets, guards the gunner, and act as a makeshift bipod. Both members are also equipped with a Lasgun and a las-pistol. The medic fights with a Lasgun and heals with the medikit which comes with medical drugs, chemicals, surgical tools, sedatives, injectors, bandages and a medical cogitator which can detect almost every known aliments. To help the Medic is the underling who carries extra supplies, guard the Medic, or help in surgery depending on the conditions. The weapon specialists mostly carry Lasguns although one or two of the four might have flamers instead. These specialists can really be armed with any weapon that can be held by two regular human arms, some can also serve the dual role of vox-caster as well. The specialist act as either a flanking force while the heavy weapon team suppressed the enemy or the center line that lay down fire.

==== Fenrisian Line Regiments ====

Seeing the effectiveness of Cadian troops after encountering them in battle during the Great Crusade, Fenris adopted the Cadian Doctrine and deployed Cadian Foot Troops to the front. Yet the War of the Beast changed the outlook of the Fenrisians on the Cadian Doctrine with the lack of mortal manpower when faced with the Ork threat. During the war, several Cadian Foot Troops were entirely wiped out within the first week. The Death world breed heroes for the Space Wolves, not infinite manpower for many Foot Troops. Fenrisians abandoned the Cadian Doctrine after the war and switched to the Fusilier Doctrine that the famous Mordian, Praetorian, and Scintillan use. Sacrificing quantity for quality, the Fenrisians can always request Space Wolves regiments to merge with a Line Regiment. The Flak Armor for the Fenrisian Line Guardsmen uses extra metal plates compared to Cadians. The infantry under the Fusilier Doctrine would stand shoulder to shoulder forming into lines facing the enemy before firing. The Fenrisian Line Regiments took this tactic and expand it with the introduction of self-propelled artillery to provide mobile defense and keep up with infantry on attacks. In these regiments the Fenrisians officers are encouraged to outgun the enemy via volley fire and if that fails just charge them. Fenrisian line infantry are better trained than Cadians in melee combat with some even wielding swords into charges.

Fenrisian Line Regiments often differ in tactics depending on whether they come from one of the Fenrisian colony worlds or Fenris itself. Old World Fenrisians are more wild and less coordinated in their approach, and typically operate in 5-10 man squads for the best kill-to-loss ratio. New World Fenrisians are more ordered and coordinated though they are still wilder than anyone outside your average Death Worlder. The two groups work best together, with New Worlder regiments holding the line and securing targets and Old Worlders scouting ahead and harrying supply lines.

==== Armageddon Outriders ====

[[File:Rock_rider.png|300px|thumb|left|Common 'uniform' of a biker scout for the Outriders.]]

Everybody knows the Steel Legion. Reflections of their world in microcosm. Steel and fire and ash; unstoppable waves of armor, Basilisk barrages like monsoon rains, choking clouds of lung-burning gas.

Less well-known is the fact that there are two parts to the Steel Legion. The first and largest are the heavy mechanized infantry they are famous for. The second is the Outriders.

The Outriders are all crazy. The infantry regiments of the Steel Legion recruit from inside the hives, the factory and forge workers, but the Outriders recruit from outside the hives, and there are only two ways to make a living out there.

The first is prospecting and wildcat mining. Delving deep into ancient and much-abused Ork-built structures with jury-rigged and second-hand equipment in search of veins of valuable materials. Everything from gold electrical circuits to adamantine armor plate. Most valuable of all is components of the old teleporter system. The Mechanicus has decided it wants planetary teleporters more than it hates Ork 'technology', and pays staggering sums for the smallest scraps. The description alone should tell you everything you need to know about how hard and dangerous the job is.

The second is Ork hunting. The Administratum and PDF will pay good thrones for Ork skulls. Two for a squig, five for a grot, and starting at forty for an Ork, more for larger or special types like Weirdboys and Brainboys. Reimbursement is included for promethium spent burning the bodies, and the PDF doesn't check too hard to make sure you're not claiming driving-around promethium as Ork-burning expense.

Outrider legend tells of Billy-Joe Hammerlord, who drove through an entire warband on his bike to take the head of the Warboss and earned enough to retire. The story grows every time in the retelling, so by now the old stories claim the warband stretched from one horizon to the other, the Warboss carved paths through the rubble for his army to march through just by dragging his axe along the ground behind him, and Billy-Joe earned enough to buy himself a fleet and became a Rogue Trader and went on adventures with Prince Yriel.

Officially, all the Orks on Armageddon are Feral. Most places, that means stone axes and weird squigs. But this is Armageddon. The world still remembers in her bones when she strode among the stars and slapped aside Battlefleet Solar like so many children's toys. A lot of the Orks are just waving around scrap-metal axes. Depending on what armories they've broken into, they might be tossing around vortex bombs.

The point is that Outriders are all crazy. In some ways they sort of resemble Orks themselves. They move around in a wide assortment of walkers, fat-tired buggies, and motorbikes, made of scrap metal and spare parts. Most of these vehicles started life in a Mechanicus factory but after generations of repairs and modifications nothing of the original vehicle is to be found. And most of them are that old- a good vehicle is a heirloom, passed down from father to son, each generation adding a bit more to it. They stick spikes on the vehicles and stick Ork skulls on the spikes, and judge each other by how skull-laden their bosspoles are. When an Ork warband and an Outrider clan are fighting it sometimes gets hard to tell which is which.

Outriders prefer las-weapons over slug, so there is that.

A common rite of passage among the Outriders is for the father to cripple an Ork with shots to its limbs, then for son finish it off with a knife. This marks the transition from childhood into adolescence. True manhood is often not considered to begin until the son repeats the ritual, as the father. It is important not just to kill Orks, but to ensure that Ork-killing will continue into the far future.

The point is that Outriders are all crazy, but they are Ork-killing crazy so they make excellent candidates for the Imperial Guard. Sometimes entire clans get recruited into their own regiments. Sometimes restless young men come in on their own to the recruiting office and get incorporated into the regular Steel Legions as scouts and cavalry. Most of the time they insist on bringing their own vehicles and most of the time the Munitorum lets them. It just insists that they repair their vehicles with standard issue parts. Since most of the time their vehicles are kitbashes of Sentinels and Chimeras this is usually not hard.

For all their skill and lunatic courage the Outriders are not famous, for the good and simple reason that there simply aren't as many of them as the normal Steel Legions. Armageddon outside the hive walls does not support high population densities. They just fade into the background as 'specialized auxiliaries' of the Steel Legion. But those who have met them have given rise to a proverb- “Armageddon has many faces, and all of them are lethal."

==== Elysian Drop Troopers ====

Elysium does, in fact, produce forces for the Guard beyond its famous Drop Regiments. There are Elysian tank regiments, Elysian artillery regiments, Elysian footslogger regiments. They are all, universally, nursing a mild grudge against the universe in general and the Drop Regiments in particular for the way everyone is continually surprised by their existence. "I thought Elysium did, you know, drop troops." "FUCK YOU."

But nobody cares about them. [muffled FUCK YOU in the distance] Let's talk about the Drop Regiments.

The Elysian Drop Regiments are somewhat unique in the Imperial Guard for being descended from a naval boarding force. Elysium was and is a major trade hub in a sector unfortunately plagued with human pirates, Ork Freebootas, and a superfluity of places for them to hide. As a result, Elysium committed much of its PDF force to anti-piracy operations, stationing regiments on board merchant vessels and escort ships for boarding and counter-boarding operations.

However, no war can be won with defense alone, and the Elysian PDF regiments assigned to anti-pirate duty began experimenting with methods of striking at the pirates in their lairs. Thus, the modern Drop Regiments began to take shape. The first attempts were amateurish and improvised, in some cases using civilian shuttles and Void Maneuvering Packs instead of proper assault ships and grav-chutes. Still, a couple of victories proved the concept worthy of further development, and Elysian high command invested in additional training and equipment.

The first battles of the Drop Regiments were void-borne affairs, fought in microgravity in and around hidden asteroid bases. As more and more pirate bases were expunged, however, they were forced to track down their opponents in ever more diverse locales, from fairly conventional planets to burning Mercurial environments to floating gas-giant bases. But, in the end, it was mostly done. The pirates would never be fully expunged from the sector- fucking Orks- but it was safer than it had ever been before. Trade was flourishing, new worlds were being colonized, and the Elysian PDF found itself somewhat underemployed. So, when the next Founding came around, the course of action was obvious.

The modern Elysian Drop Regiments distinguish themselves from the usual run of air cavalry in three ways.

First, they continue to train for operation in a very wide variety of environments. Zero-g and vacuum, high gravity, extreme temperatures, toxic atmospheres, they have the tools and training to operate in them all. Most drop regiments only train to operate within the usual 'human-habitable' range of environments, giving the Elysians a distinct niche and edge.

Second, they have very good relations with the Imperial Navy due to their past as, essentially, naval armsmen hunting pirates. Thus, they have an easier time securing air and orbital support, and have the doctrine and training to make the maximum use of it. They are comfortable with inter-service cooperation in a way few regiments are. This includes good relationships with the Void Wolves, with joint training exercises being commonplace.

Third, general superiority of training and equipment. The Drop Regiments have become a point of planetary pride, and as a prosperous trading hub Elysium can afford to ensure they are equipped and trained to the highest standards. And with far more volunteers than they can accept, the training academies can accept only the best recruits.

Combined, this results in the Drop Regiments being frequently deployed to the stranger battlefields of the Imperium, executing their distinctive lightning strikes in environments an unprepared human could not even hope to survive in, much less fight in.

==== Lucifer Blacks ====

Humans in general have a tendency to survive in places where they aren’t intended to go. Such is the case of the Lucifer Blacks, one of the original regiments of the Old Hundred, the original one hundred regiments that were not disbanded at the end of the Unification Wars and would serve as the basis for the Imperial Army. The Lucifer Blacks were one of the last people on Old Earth to be discovered by the outside world, living deep underwater in pre-Strife underwater habitats at the bottom of Old Earth’s Great Ocean (also known as the Pacific) in a region controlled by the Pan-Pacific Empire. It is thought that these habitats were originally meant as simple habitats or research stations during the Dark Age of Technology. However, by the time of the Age of Strife the Lucifer Blacks were cut off from the rest of the world until their rediscovery by the horrendous contraptions of the Pan-Pacific Empire. This lifestyle in the inky darkness, surviving off of mesopelagic fish and geothermal power from hydrothermal vents, is what gave the regiment their name.

Living underwater in an environment where literally one wrong seal could mean the difference between life and death tended to foster an extremely calm and measured attitude in people. To the Lucifer Blacks, a crisis was the absolute worst time to panic, panic is what led to rash decisions and rash decisions are what got you killed. This led the regiment to be infamously known for their ability to be calm and think clearly under fire, as well as a very dark and (ironically) dry sense of humor. Additionally, living nearly 4000 meters below sea level in conditions where most light was artificial tended to make one very good at fighting in the dark. The Lucifer Blacks often used this to their advantage in battle, using smoke grenades and other implements to approximate the low-light conditions in which they had the advantage over their foes.

However, at the same time the Lucifer Blacks were not the most numerous people. When one lives in such a hostile, enclosed environment, the primary constraint on population size was not food or materials, but simply living space due to the number of habs present. When the Lucifer Blacks were first discovered and subjugated by Narthan Dume, Dume decided that one of the best ways to use the highly disciplined, but not very numerous Lucifer Blacks were as elite shock troops. The calm, detached nature of the Lucifer Blacks in high-stress combat situations made them especially hard to break. The fact that the Lucifer Blacks preferred to fight in the hermetically sealed all-black bodysuits they typically wore for extra-habitat activities only added to their intimidation factor.

When the Pan-Pacific Empire fell and the tyranny of Narthan Dume finally toppled, the Lucifer Blacks were one of the first regiments of the Pan-Pacific Empire to pledge their loyalty to the Warlord. The Warlord was somewhat suspicious of the Lucifer Blacks at first, but as with the Assassins of the Salt Wastes he wasn’t fool enough to deny himself potentially useful resources. And the Lucifer Blacks more than delivered on their promises of loyalty, even serving in a secondary role alongside the Night Lords during the Vhnori Resurgence as the two fought against the attempted resurgence of the Pan-Pacific Empire.

Eventually, in return for their exemplary service, the Warlord, now the Steward, granted the Lucifer Blacks settlement rights on extrasolar worlds. The Lucifer Blacks mostly chose to settle on Ocean Worlds that approximated their old home. Even today many people on Ocean Worlds have distant Lucifer Black Ancestry. As part of the Old Hundred, the Lucifer Blacks also still exist on Earth, living in the same oceanic trenches as their forefathers, though ten thousand years of gentrification and integration into Old Earth’s infrastructure mean that the modern Lucifer Blacks have lost a lot of their original culture and aren’t as incredibly stoic and tough-as-nails as their forefathers. Imperial nobles often like to have Lucifer Black bodyguards when they can’t get someone like a member of Terra’s Children, though in reality having a Lucifer Black bodyguard usually amounts to little more than a display of prestige.

==== Ohmsworld Regiments ====

===== The 12th Ohmsworld Armored Regiment =====

When the insurrection began, the 12th Ohmsworld was in the final stages of being reconstituted, with veterans of previous Ohmsworld regiments and even a junior Ulthwe Farseer combining their efforts to ready the troops. As such, it was not only at full strength when the Duke announced his secession, it also had expert, if not exceptional, leadership. With aid from the Skitarii, the 12th led the charge into Ohmsworld's primary hive and quickly overwhelmed the Ducal Guards, many of whom were Ohmsworld veterans themselves who themselves defected to Imperial forces. More importantly, they managed to seize the Guards' stock of Chimeras, giving Ohmsworld a powerful mobile army. With the easing of pressure on Ohmsworld as the Imperium advances, the 12th has even begun contemplating direct offensive actions as opposed to the firefighting they had done before. Whether this leads them to glorious victory or fatally overextends their already undersupplied lines, only time will tell.

Home World: Hive World <br>
Commanding Officer: [[Nobledark_Imperium_Notes#Tabletop_Crunch|Psyker]] (Farseer Eldian Sylandriel, provisional/brevet Colonel) <br>
Regiment Type: Mechanised Infantry <br>
Doctrines: Survivalists: Ash Wastes, Scavengers* <br>
Regimental Drawbacks: Poorly Provisioned <br>

Characteristic Modifiers: <br>
Starting Aptitudes: +6 Agility <br>
Starting Talents: Warp Sense, Paranoia, Rapid Reload <br>
Starting Skills: Common Lore: Imperium, Deceive, Linguistics: Low Gothic, Psyniscience, Forbidden Lore: Psykers, Operate: Surface <br>
Starting Aptitude: Agility <br>
Tutelage of Mars (replaces Accustomed to Crowds): The Mechanicus has taken a great deal of interest in Ohmsworld's archaeotech, so while Mars would never officially sanction it, the local techpriests have given the people of Ohmsworld some basic training in technological mysteries to aid them in maintenance. Ohmsworld troopers may offer Aid in Tech-Use tests as if they were trained in Tech-Use, though this bonus goes away if they actually become Trained in Tech-Use. Those who ARE trained in Tech-Use gain +10 to all Tech-Use tests that involve respiratory or air filtration equipment... <br>
Hivebound: Hive worlders seldom endure the horrors of the open sky or suffer the indignities of the great outdoors. Whilst outside of an enclosed or artificial environment (such as a hive city, voidship or similar), they suffer a –10 penalty to all Survival Tests, due to their continued unfamiliarity with such places.
Wounds: Characters from this regiment reduce their starting Wounds by 1. <br>
Standard Kit: Universal Standard Kit, one M36 Lasgun and four charge packs per PC, one suit of flak armour per PC, two frag and two krak grenades per PC, 1 Chimera Transport per Squad, one respirator per PC, one micro-bead per PC, one survival suit per PC, one auspex per Squad <br>
Favoured Weapons: Autocannon, grenade launcher <br>

*Special note: Everyone on Ohmsworld knows that scavenging is necessary; as such, scavenging is explicitly allowed by Guard and Munitorum authorities. However, regiments are also under orders to deposit all scavenged materiel into a collective equipment pool; hoarding is very much frowned upon. This doesn't mechanically alter the Scavengers Doctrine, just modify its ingame usage.

===== The 3rd Special Defence Regiment =====

As with all things on Ohmsworld, the archaeotech comes first, and even the most vicious assaults often degrade into hand-to-hand combat as all sides struggle desperately to avoid damaging the precious filtration systems. As such, most close-combat specialists present during the rebellion had been consolidated into solely defensive forces. These specialists ranged from press-ganged hivers, to the few Arbites who'd survived the Duke's initial purge, to any and all Ogryn on the planet and in the case of the 3rd Special Defence Regiment, even maintenance workers skilled at handling heavy tools. Indeed, the leader of the increasingly regiment is herself an Ogryn Bone'ead. 'Boss Foreman' Mogda Gruk took to her implants exceptionally well, with her intelligence even rating slightly above Imperial average. Though astoundingly ugly even by Ogryn standards, is well-loved by the troopers under her command, especially since she seems little changed from her days as foreman for her hive's Ogryn workforce.

Home World: Hive World <br>
Commanding Officer: Maverick (Brevet Colonel Mogda Gruk) <br>
Regiment Type: Siege Regiment <br>
Doctrines: Hardened Fighters, Close Order Drill <br>
Regimental Drawbacks: Poorly Provisioned <br>

Characteristic Modifiers: <br>
Starting Aptitudes: +3 Agility, +3 Perception, +3 Toughness, +2 Weapon Skill, -3 Intelligence <br>
Starting Talents: Paranoia, Resistance: Fear, Street Fighting, Combat Formation, Nerves of Steel <br>
Starting Skills: Common Lore: Imperium, Deceive, Linguistics: Low Gothic, Tech-Use <br>
Starting Aptitude: None <br>
Tutelage of Mars (replaces Accustomed to Crowds): The Maechanicus has taken a great deal of interest in Ohmsworld's archaeotech, and while Mars would never officially sanction it, the local techpriests have given the people of Ohmsworld some basic training in technological mysteries to aid them in maintenance. Ohmsworld troopers may offer Aid in Tech-Use tests as if they were trained in Tech-Use, though this bonus goes away if they actually become Trained in Tech-Use. However, those who ARE trained in Tech-Use gain a +10 bonus to all Tech-Use tests that involve respiratory or air filtration equipment... <br>
Hivebound: Hive worlders seldom endure the horrors of the open sky or suffer the indignities of the great outdoors. Whilst outside of an enclosed or artificial environment (such as a hive city, voidship or similar), they suffer a –10 penalty to all Survival Tests, due to their continued unfamiliarity with such places. <br>
Wounds: Characters from this regiment reduce their starting Wounds by 1. <br>
Standard Kit: Universal Standard Kit, one combat shotgun with a mono bayonet and 8 shotgun magazines per PC, one suit of flak armour per PC, one respirator per PC, four empty sandbags and one entrenching tool per PC, two frag grenades and two photon flash grenades per PC, one auspex per Squad, one micro bead per PC <br>
Favoured Weapons: Heavy flamer, flamer (as delicate as the filters are, they are surprisingly heat-resistant)

===== Century Omega 7-13 =====

When the Duke announced his secession, the Mechanicus authorities on Ohmsworld immediately decided to move in support of the Imperium- not out of any real love for the Imperium proper, but out of fear that the resources they needed for further research would be cut off. Under most circumstancers, they wouldn't even have gone that far- after all, no sane man would cross the Mechanicus. Problem was, the Duke was anything but sane; during secret negotiations between Mars's representatives and the Duke, the latter made it clear that he would brook no opposition nor equal (that Mars would be his superior never seemed to cross his mind). The fact that many hereteks had thrown in their lot with the Duke in exchange for independence and freedom of work only hardened the opinions of Ohmsworld's Mechanicus against them.

Even so, their insurrection was costly, with the already small Skitarii centuries being further depleted to the point where they were eventually consolidated into a single unit. Century Omega 7-13 now functions as a semi-independent organization within Ohmsworld's military; in general, the Magi's goals tend to align with Ohsmworld's, but sometimes they send Omega 7-13 detachments on missions, their actual agenda known only to the senior adepts of Mars.

Home World: Lathe Worlds <br>
Commanding Officer: Phlegmatic (Centurion/Magos Rho-1) <br>
Regiment Type: Grenadiers <br>
Doctrines: Cyber-Enhanced, Iron Discipline <br>
Regimental Drawbacks: The Few <br>

Characteristic Modifiers: +3 Intelligence, +3 Ballistic Skill, +3 Toughness <br>
Starting Talents: Bombardier <br>
Starting Skills: Tech-use (Trained), Common Lore: AdMech, Common Lore: Tech, Linguistics: Low Gothic, Linguistics: Techno-Lingua, Logic, Common Lore: Imperial Guard, Common Lore: War <br>
Starting Aptitudes: Willpower <br>
Tutelage of Mars (replaces Isolated by Machines): Gain a +10 bonus to all Tech-Use tests that involve respiratory or air filtration equipment...<br>
The True Flesh: Lathe World characters possess the Mechanicus Implants Trait. In addition, the potentia coil is specifically enhanced to meet the needs of integrated weapons.<br>
Soldiers of the Omnissiah: This regiment cannot include Support Specialists used in other Guard regiments; the Mixed Regiment rules must be used in those cases. Guardsmen from these regiments always count as Techpriests for purposes of prerequisites, regardless of current Speciality or Advanced Speciality.
Wounds: Characters from this regiment generate Wounds normally.<br>
Standard Kit: Universal Standard Kit, one Lathe lasrifle with an attached auxiliary grenade launcher weapon upgrade per PC, three krak and two frag grenades per PC, one suit of light carapace armour per Player Character, one deadspace earpiece per PC, one combi-tool per PC, two grenade launchers per Squad, Common bionic respiratory system, bionic heart<br>
Favoured Weapons: Integrated Weapons<br>

===Doctrines of the Imperial Guard===
In addition to the famed Cadian Doctrine, many regiments have also developed their own unique methods of fighting which have then spread throughout the Imperium. While this is hardly an exhaustive list, it provides a decent look into the sheer diversity of the Guard.

====Infiltration Doctrine====

Infiltration doctrine is a light infantry doctrine focused on stealth and mobility. It omits vehicles and heavy artillery from the TO&E almost entirely, relying on crew-served weapons that can be dismantled and carried by an infantry squad for heavy firepower. On the offence, infiltration regiments use their stealth and lightweight equipment to close with enemy formations undetected and from unexpected directions; once all elements are in position, they launch an overwhelming surprise attack from close range, using their crew-served weapons and snipers to suppress the enemy and ensure they cannot mount an organized defence. On the defense, they use the same qualities for hit-and-run raids, whittling down the enemy and melting away into the night when the enemy tries to bring their firepower to bear.

Infiltration regiments are usually equipped with specialized equipment such as camo-cloaks and night-vision goggles, but these are less important than how the regiment is trained. The nature of their operation requires that officers and NCOs be trained to a higher standard of independence than normal, as units as small as squads will often be trusted to maneuver individually in support of the overall objective. This usually cultivates a sense of being elite; combined with the looser chains of command infiltration regiments usually operate with, other regiments usually consider them insubordinate and undisciplined.

In combat, infiltration regiments are used to secure and move through terrain that mechanized regiments cannot. They are also used in combined-arms strategies to scout out enemy positions, assassinate officers, and destroy enemy strongpoints in advance of the main armored thrust. Infiltration regiments also maintain their effectiveness easier in the face of enemy air and orbital superiority thanks to their ability to fight while remaining hidden and dispersed. Finally, infiltration doctrines are popular among PDF forces incapable of maintaining large mechanized armies.
However, as powerful as they are within their specialty, their lack of vehicles and artillery makes them perform poorly outside of it.

====Armageddon Doctrine====

Armageddon doctrine is a maneuver- and terrain-focused mechanized infantry doctrine. Developed by the Steel Legion in their endless battles against the Orks, Armageddon doctrine TO&E is extremely vehicle-heavy, with sufficient Chimeras to carry the entire regiment, strong organic artillery support, and at least a modest tank detachment. Mechanized scout detachments- Salamanders, Sentinels, and bikes (preferably jet-) are common, but can also be delegated to other specialized regiments. (The Steel Legion itself uses the Outriders for this purpose, but other regiments have other solutions.) Likewise, organic combat engineering support is common, as are air defense vehicles; Hydras in particular are valued for their ability to sweep aside Ork hordes in addition to aircraft. Soldiers are heavily armored in carapace.

In combat, Armageddon doctrine is often described as 'operationally offensive, tactically defensive'. Using the scout detachment to scout out the terrain and enemy dispositions, the regiment seeks to seize vital terrain features before the enemy and fortify it, forcing the enemy to assault a fortified position on terrain of the Imperium's choosing. To this end, Amageddon-style regiments usually carry copious amounts of barbed wire, mines, and other defensive implements; vehicles are equipped with dozer blades to dig out entrenchments. This is where the engineering detachment comes in. The scout detachment, if present, harasses the enemy on its approach, although this is not a vital component of the doctrine.

At the level of individual squads, Armageddon doctrine emphasizes close cooperation between infantry and armor; full mechanization means each squad has a Chimera, which they are responsible for defending from threats and vice versa.

Few worlds adopt the Armageddon doctrine in full. Although many other mechanized infantry forces adopt its emphasis on mobility, terrain, and forcing the enemy to attack fortified positions, few worlds can afford to equip their regiments with the same weight of metal as Armageddon, and thus do not adopt the full TO&E. In addition, the emergence of the Brain Boy caste has thrown the doctrine into flux; with the Orks no longer throwing themselves as eagerly into near-suicidal charges, the strategy has lost some of its effectiveness. Although the core of the strategy remains sound, the arguments at Steel Legion HQ about how to adapt to a changing galaxy continue long into the night.

====Fast Attack Doctrine====

A light-armor and occasionally bio-cavalry doctrine focusing on the use of speed and maneuverability as weapons.

There is no standard TO&E for Fast Attack regiments, due to the wide variance in equipment used. Salamander scout tanks, Sentinels, motor- and jet-bikes, a thousand varieties of armored car and riding beasts. A very few forge-worlds even have super-heavy fast-attack companies, equipping tanks as heavy as Baneblades with antigrav units to allow them to keep up with lighter forces.

Whatever the equipment, all Fast Attack units operate similarly, using overwhelming speed to strike at an enemy's weak points before an effective response can be mustered. The 'classic' pattern of attack is to punch straight through the enemy line and rampage through the rear areas, but that is hardly the only tactical possibility. Outflanking maneuvers, hit-and-run raids- speed opens many possibilities.

Fast Attack regiments are usually deployed as part of combined arms strategies, scouting for slower units or exploiting breakthroughs created by heavier ones. On their own, while fast and generally well-armed, they are also more fragile than a true tank unit and lack staying power. This varies, of course; the dynamics of a horse cavalry unit differ from Sentinels and Salamanders which differ from jetbikes. But the general principle holds; as with so many other things in the Imperium, there is strength in diversity.

Fast Attack units, like Infiltration units, are often popular among PDF forces which cannot sustain heavy tank formations but can build light tanks and armored cars or breed horses, which contributes to the wide variance of regiments following the doctrine.

=== Scion Tempestus ===

==== Difference between Stormtroopers and Scions ====

The Tempestus Scion or also known as Stormtroopers are the specialized heavy infantry regiments that are always broken down into smaller units. Once divided into battalions or companies they are attached to other units within the Imperial Army but can also serve under the Inquisition or Sororitas. The Scions are known for their high dropout rates in the intense training but prove in combat at being the best CQC non-melee soldiers in the Imperial Army. Scions and Stormtroopers differ in their training and equipment as they are given different tasks. Veteran Guardsmen or raw volunteers are first trained then deployed as Stormtroopers in the Imperial Guard. The Stormtroopers are only trained to fight in ground wars and are equipped as such. Stormtroopers are often given the task of assaulting fortifications and clearing buildings. Scions are volunteer veteran Stormtroopers who are retrained to fight inside void ships and infiltrate behind enemy lines. Their weapons are unchanged for the most part but the armor is a lighter version that can withstand the vacuum of the void.

==== Equipment ====

The Stormtroopers are sent to the frontlines as the first ones to clear out bunkers, trenches, and building. Missions of that nature mean the Stormtroopers are given the deadly ‘Hellgun’ Lasgun to one-shot enemies at point blank range. The Carapace Armor worn by Stormtroopers is the innermost armor worn by Diffusion squads, thus can prevent shrapnel or shots from less than 50m from disabling the Stormtrooper. The Stormtrooper armor allows them to clear tight places with relative safety from explosives and suppressive fire. Other than that they hold the same basic kit as a Guardsman but with more explosives. The Scions when first founded noted that the Carapace Armor accelerated exhaustion while hindering movement for the user. These two factors played an important role in crippling operators on independent infiltration missions. The Tempestus Scion developed the ‘Cephalon Armor’ which was a lighter version of Carapace Armor but still covering the same body parts while being stronger than Flak Armor. Cephalon Armor also comes along with a built-in antenna and shoulder mounted pic recorder that a commanding officer can use. The Scion’s basic kits are almost the same as the Stormtrooper’s but have an additional void survival kit.

==== Standardization ====

In terms of equipment, the Scions would all carry the same Scion basic kit and standard CQC weapons but they can always have extra things with them or swap out weapons because their armor is lighter. It keeps all Scion companies mostly the same while having enough changes to complete very specific missions. All Scion squads are at least expected to take on CQC & infiltration missions. The Stormtroopers on the other hand, just like their Guardsmen regiments, vary greatly from the world to world. All Stormtroopers are expected to be assigned the task of clearing cramp locations and fortifications. Now, how they are trained and equipped to do that changes from regiment to regiment. The Cadian Karskins are made for storming buildings in urban combat while the Cadian Guardsmen maneuver quickly in city street fighting. Kreiger Grenadiers, on the other hand, would charge at fortifications and trenches before everybody throwing a grenade then jumping inside.

Stormtroopers from Feudal worlds might only have a Lasgun and a single grenade while carrying a shield with several melee weapons. Kreiger Grenadiers would hold even more extra grenades than Karskins. Hive world Stormtroopers might always carry Meltaguns or Flamers due to the importance of high damage in fast reaction time weapons in urban warfare. The only thing standard is that they all wear some variation of Carapace Armor.

==== Notable Regiments ====

See [[Nobledark Imperium Scion Regiments| Scion Regiments]]

== Abhuman Subspecies ==

=== Beastmen and Ogryn ===

<div class="toccolours mw-collapsible mw-collapsed" style="100%"> '''''The Ogryn Project:'''''

As the Imperium spread its borders past the boundaries of Sol, it rapidly began to encounter new strains of abhumans. Some of these strains were familiar, including Navigators and additional tribes of Void Born. Others such as the Ratlings, Felinids, and Nightsiders were novel, but genetically stable, having evolved through Dark Age of Technology genetic engineering and natural evolution, a testament to humanity's hardiness and ability to survive on almost any world.

For the most part, the Steward was unconcerned with admitting these abhuman variants into the Imperium. He already had one abhuman primarch, another nearly so, and he himself was only human in the loosest sense of the word. To him the abhumans were just one more drop of variation in the great sea of humanity.

However, then the Imperium discovered the Ogryn. And the Beastmen.

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

Each race presented its own problems for the Imperium. The previous abhuman species were all genetically stable and essentially comparable to baseline humans in intelligence. The Ogryn were clearly of subhuman intelligence, being comparable to a mentally handicapped human at best, and behaved and looked like shaved apes more than people, fighting each other with their enlarged canine tusks.

The Beastmen were slightly more intelligent, but more in the manner of an extremely cunning predator than a civilized being, completely ruled by their instincts, and prone to additional mutations. When the Beastmen were discovered by the Imperium, their lives were brutish, nasty, and short.

Such was the Steward’s concern that he brought in his highest ranked geneticists and gene-wrights to consult on this matter. At this point in time the Steward’s various groups of genetic engineers had been merged into Adeptus Biologis, but had not yet adopted the trappings of the Mechanicum of Mars. The nominal head of the Biologis, a former genesmith, suggested the Ogryn and Beastmen were so unsalvageable that the Steward’s best options were either to wipe them out immediately and resettle the planet with humans of other stock or to sterilize them and then resettle the planets in 60 years or so after they had all died out, something that caused considerable consternation among other schools of thought in the Biologis.

The Steward made it abundantly clear that the suggestion of summary genocide on a world under the Imperium’s protection would not be tolerated and anyone found doing so without the Steward’s knowledge is grounds for immediate execution without appeal. The Steward argued the Ogryn and Beastmen were humans. Afflicted humans, but humans all the same. Their ancestors were no different than any other group that Earth but were merely dealt a bad hand by the universe through no fault of their own. Eventually, the Steward and the various factions of the Adeptus Biologis released an agreement. The Biologis would release carefully tailored mutations into the genepools of the Ogryn and Beastmen over thousands of years until the devolution in intelligence and sanity caused by the Age of Strife could be undone.

As of M41 Ogryn and Beastmen can be split into two broad categories: Primeval and Nova. Primeval Ogryn and Beastmen are rare, existing only on planets that have been just recently rediscovered by the Imperium. They are little different from the Ogryn and Beastmen first encountered by the Imperium in M30. Nova Ogryn and Beastmen vary in intelligence from little better than their Primeval ancestors to levels deemed acceptable to the Imperium (generally human intelligence or close to it).

Nova Ogryn have lost some of the strength and durability of their ancestors, but in general are much more intelligent (though less so than human on average). Combined with external artificial augmentations such as Biochemical Ogryn Neural Enhancement or “Bonehead Procedure”, some Ogryn officers are actually comparable to humans in intelligence.

Nova Beastmen are one of the greatest success stories of the Biologis, along with the Astartes and Necromundan eco-engineering. Out of all the strains of abhuman, the Beastmen benefited the most from genetic engineering, mostly because of how bad they had it to begin with. Some have theorized that the Beastmen were created via crude methods of genetic engineering by splicing in large amounts of non-human DNA (even moreso than other abhumans) during the Dark Age of Technology. When society collapsed during the Age of Strife, there was no way to correct the myriad mutations and glitches that cropped up over the following 10,000 years. Indeed, when the Beastmen were first discovered by the Imperium they were not even recognized as human-descended at first.

Although the Beastmen started off much worse than the Ogryn, their uplifting progressed much faster. The same shoddy genetic engineering that made the Beastmen prone to mutation in the first place meant that the new, stabler genes introduced by the Adeptus Biologis became established across the population very quickly. All Nova Beastmen as of M41 are essentially if human intelligence. Any Primeval Beastmen in M41 are all from very recently discovered worlds. Nevertheless, despite their dramatically more stable genome, Beastmen still suffer a slightly higher rate of mutation than the rest of the Imperium. No one is sure if the tendency towards mutations is due to the Biologis trying a little too hard to correct the flaws in the Beastmen genome or the Ruinous Powers trying to taint any long-term victory on the part of the Imperium.

The Adeptus Biologicus might have gone a little overboard in trying to keep the instincts of the Beastmen in check. As opposed to their Primeval brethren, Nova Beastmen tend to be rather solemn and dour, though this may be because they know how far they have climbed and how deep the pit they were lifted out of was. Their sense of duty and debt is second only to that of Krieg, but thankfully for the Imperium’s sake the Beastmen are much less suicidal. Promethean beliefs tend to be widespread among the Beastmen. However, the Nova Beastmen have not lost all of the bestial instincts of their kin. Beastmen often speak of a “Weakness of the Beast” to refer to any behavior that seems to be driven by instinct or base desire, one of the few societal ideas they may have picked up from the Adeptus Biologicus. Nova Beastmen in general also tend to have much sharper senses than baseline humans, and are valued even in otherwise all-baseline regiments as scouts and trackers.

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==== Beastmen and Ogryn Society ====

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Nova Ogryn tend to live under a tribal or clannish structure of government. There are perhaps dozens of worlds whose inhabitants come under the broad category of Ogryn and each world can have a thousand different tribal groups with their own set of traditions. However, most common are a leading Patriarch, some paternal ancestor of a large proportion of the tribe. Usually then there is the Wise Woman. Sometimes it's the chief’s mother, sometimes his wife, sometimes it's not a woman but just someone with good judgement. A priest/shaman for matters of spiritual significance and dealing with supernatural phenomena (which usually boils down to “leave it alone and tell the nearest adept”). Sometimes the tribe might be blessed/cursed with a Witch/Warlock who has psychic powers. Psychic Ogryn exist. They used to be rarer than in the baseline gene pool but now exist in the same proportion as baseline humanity. This may be a side effect of the increase in power or by using baseline human genes to uplift the Ogryn.

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Although Ogryns are not as smart as baseline humans, they are generally smarter than people expect. The officers with BONE implants can fluently converse in High Gothic about all manner of matters both practical and philosophical and are invariably literate. But that's because they were already the brightest of the bright even before the biocrystalline Cortex Technology was inserted into their brain. The average Ogyrn can learn to maintain an extra-large laser rifle by route, can understand contractual obligations (although they will sign said contract with an X) and has enough brains to follow orders and even understand quite complex strategy provided it's explained slowly with small words and you get them to repeat it back to you just to make sure. Ogryn are also known to be fiercely loyal and honorable. It's a bloody strange day when an Ogryn breaks their word.

Nova Beastmen, on the other hand, tend to form rigid military hierarchies when left to form their own societies. This is not due to any intrinsic inclination to do so as opposed to baseline humanity, but more because any governmental structure that doesn’t encourage iron-hard discipline tends to implode within a few years. Their inner animal is still very close to the surface, and their increased cognitive faculties haven’t tamed it in the slightest. Beastmen societies are ruled by philosopher-kings called Brahmins, who tend to exemplify everything that the Beast is not. More of a high judge than a war chief, seemingly at odds with the otherwise militarized nature of Beastmen society, but a wise and solemn individual that will not give in to base desires and passions.

Another notable feature of Beastman society are Aurochs, the warrior-champions of Beastman society. These huge warriors are about the size and strength of Astartes, but overall tend to be much less effective for several reasons. First, Aurochs make up a vanishingly small proportion of the Beastmen population and cannot reliably be mass produced. Secondly, Aurochs lack all of the advantages beyond sheer strength that make Space Marines so lethal. Finally, Aurochs cannot use standardized equipment. Because of their rarity, armor and weaponry often have to be individually crafted, most Imperial helmets being unable to fit over their horns and even normal Beastmen helmets being too small for them.

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=== Nightsiders ===

<div class="toccolours mw-collapsible mw-collapsed" style="100%"> '''''A Brief Elucidation of the Nightsider:'''''

The Nightsider is a catchall term for a grouping of sub-species adapted for a specific type of environment without any common origin beyond that of any other human group. They are native to many worlds of the Imperium such as Praetoria, Calth from the transplanted population of dead Posul, Equixus, at least one world in the Carcharodon recruitment area and many others. Typically they are a pale breed adapted to living on worlds either with no light or additional environmental conditions that make dwelling in the light substantially detrimental. Such reasons can include but is not limited to the planet having unusually harmful sunlight, extreme daytime predation or population pressure or isolation in the dark lands of tidally-locked worlds. Worlds populated entirely by Nightsiders are rare (but not unprecedented) as they would require an environment where regular humans could not survive and such worlds typically can't maintain global environmental conditions that would allow a population of humans or near-humans to survive at all.

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Although disparate in origin the Nightsiders of the Imperium share common features in part necessitated by their environment and in part derived from a standardized Dominion era gene-template; Large dark eyes, a lack of pigmentation in skin, hair and nails, the ability to synthesize vitamin D in the liver and a very slightly lower optimal body temperature. Due to their native environments often being lower in available energy they often form smaller social structures based on extended family bonds numbering no more than twenty or thirty individuals operating over a wide area dictated by availability of resources. To this end the Nightsiders are also often fiercely territorial by nature. This borderline anti-social nature is assumed to be cultural more than biological as they have been integrated into the Imperial Army with little additional problems after the first few moths when they realize that the meals are regular and predictable, although even then they form groups among themselves and disperse evenly within the regiment.

Nightsiders are as intelligent as baseline humanity and so have never qualified for AdBio uplifting like the beastmen and ogryn strains. Although they were often found in primitive conditions by the Imperium this is typically a result of finding a long term equilibrium with direct environmental needs, usually a lack of available food preventing work specialization and the larger social projects that result. In all cases efforts of the Missionarius Galaxia, especially the Orders Sabine, have resulted in varying degrees of successful pacification and introduction to true civilization.

The introduction to the civilization of the Imperium's light has gone smoothest in places where the local populations could be persuaded to accept the tithe willingly. The Nightsiders are human, they do not gladly eat slain of their own kind or kill off excess population in times of greatest need, but they did so in the name of survival. The tithe offers a way out, excess population is sent out into the galaxy and send their pay home in the form of nutri-paste and tinned foods and when they return they have had the habits of good order trained into them and they spread this to the rest of their kindred. This cultural influence over the generations has them adopting Imperial technology willingly, as barter and trade for their services rather than as the recipients of charity. Charity they would not tolerate, they seldom care for the pity of outsiders (a term typically used to mean any that is not part of their family group). By this helping hand the Imperium reaches out to them rather than reaching down to them and in doing so all may rise up high as allies and friends.

In the Imperial guard they typically make very good target spotters for artillery and patrol squad removers. The ways of hunting are often a second nature to them and all good commanders know how best to take advantage of this.

Despite long term introduction into the wider Imperium the various Nightsider cultures have retained many of the more "primitive" seeming rituals and customs of their ancestors in part at least becasue, like all ab-humans, they maintain a "them and us" mentality based on the very obvous and noticeable difference between themselves and the teeming masses of other humanitys. For the most part this is encouraged as it bind their social order and so long as they retain pride in their social identity and understand that the Imperium places due worth in them based on their skills and contributions they are less tested by the whispers of more terrible things. Due to their extremely family based social structures the prevailing religious trends tend towards the worship of ancestors and ancestor spirits, although due to their disparate nature this is not always the case and great variation has been noted.

Many human strains both baseline and abhuman express apprehension towards Nightsiders, often because their strange habits and dark sclera give them an uncanny valley effect. Ironically, many xenos species find Nightsiders to be appear more personable than regular humans (at least in appearance, their behavior often having the same offputting effect), white sclera being virtually unique among humanity and its component subspecies in the galaxy, with some xenos even admitting that the white sclera of human eyes can be creepy.
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=== Ratlings ===

<div class="toccolours mw-collapsible mw-collapsed" style="100%"> '''''Of the Ratlings:'''''

The Ratling strain of humanity, or Ornsworlder as many of them prefer to be called, is a variety of abhuman but unlike many other abhuman strains is native to only one world; Ornsworld. The planet Ornsworld was founded sometime between the later years of M6 and the early days of M7 according to the radioactive decay in a can of irradiated waste on the largest moon and by the mighty hero Orn of Many Tales according to the locals. Orn was a mighty warrior and fearless explorer of the First Stellar Exodus, so the tales tell, who headed a colony fleet and braved the uncharted deeps of space in early ships of imperfect design. Many places on the surface of the planet hold the name of Orn; the great mesa of Orn's Table, the immense cavern system of Orn's Burrow, the ancient water filled impact crater of Orn's Bath and the escarpment of Orn's Headstone at the foot of which is reputedly the sight of Orn's Grave. due to the rarity of surviving records of this era independent proof of Orn existing is undiscovered. All Ratlings claim descent from Orn, if he ever did exist then it is inevitable that they are right due to the passage of time and isolation during the Age of Strife. From this stage of development up until the Age of Strife it is believed that the Ornsworlders did not deviate noticeably from the baseline human form, the role of Ornsworld in the days of and days prior to the Great and Bountiful Human Dominion is unknown as records of that era of Ornsworld have not survived.

At the onset of the Age of Strife, in the first days of the Iron War of which dark legends tell the fell deeds of, Ornsworld fared better than most. Some have suggested that the locals had slightly Luddite tendencies and did not trust thinking machines that thought as men thought. Others have pointed out rusted remains in the mountains of the south above where glaciers once roamed of Iron Folk sitting in the caves, their alloy shells still sitting where they died though their hearts have long since decayed beyond possibility of reanimation. Others again point out that human bones were found alongside them and that there is no evidence that they died in violence. Whatever the cause or evidence of it seems that the most sophisticated Men of Iron never made it to Ornsworld and Ornsworld had neither and Iron Mind or a Man of Gold. There is also no isotope residue in the soil layers for this time to indicate that the sudden Ice Age was anything but either a natural occurrence or a long delayed hiccup of the original terraforming efforts.

The Ice Age would have been correctable with the subtle application of solar reflectors and atmospheric tweaking that was common enough practice for Dominion era habitation but although Ornsworld had been spared the worst of the Iron War it did not come out untouched, the planet's industry was in ruins and beyond a few weather monitoring and communication satellites had no space presence. The world slipped into the cold and the inhabitants could do nothing to stop it.

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There is debate in the leafy halls of the AdBio if the changes that started in this dwindling age of isolation were the result of intentional engineering to better survive the new and sorrowful age or were a result of natural adaptation to the condition of that age. Some point out that the alterations couldn't have occurred that fast across the entire global population, especially when considering the alterations to the digestive system and the bones in the hands and feet. Others point out that by the time that the Iron War started genetic tempering was already present in the population of the entire species bar a few puritan holdouts and that with a broader pallet available the beneficial structures could have stabilized in a mere handful of generations (natural process built from semi-artificial components). Whatever the cause the result was a deviation that was sufficient to have them declared beyond the normal levels of variation found in the baseline population. Such changes include a hand with three fingers and two thumbs and a similarly structured foot, unusual neural architecture in the parietal lobe resulting in a high tolerance for physical pain and the stomach being divided into two separate organs as well as a proportionally larger and more functional appendix. The short and slightly broader on average stature would not be enough on it's own to have them classed as abhuman as many pygmy populations are not classed as such. It is said that ratlings have a better sense of smell but this is proven incorrect beyond normal human variation. They do posses better hand to eye coordination slightly but measurably surpassing the human norm when the whole population is taken into account.

The deviations were ideal for them to have at least a little bit of an edge in the food scarce and cold environment that their world had become. As a society they could have gone two ways, increased competition or greater cooperation. In the case of the Children of Orn they would not forsake bonds of common humanity and kinship and did not turn on each other, preferring to ration carefully what they had and huddle together in the dark for warmth; they would die as people rather than live as beasts. In time what few technological artifacts they had preserved failed and they had not the skills or tools to repair or replace them and they became a rustic and simpler people.

No cold spell can endure forever, even one as soul crushing and lingering as that great winter and spring came at last in the late part of the twenty-ninth millennium. By the time that the fledgling Imperium found them the glaciers were retreating miles at a time each summer and regaining no ground in milder winters. The people of Ornsworld long since accustomed to making do with little were in an age of plenty and underwent a golden age of rapid expansion in those fresh green years as miles of new farmland opened before them year after year and greater joy was had that their old fairy stories had come true; the people Orn was born to had come at last again to their world, the Tall Folk of Earth. No age of expansion can continue indefinitely and the ratlings made an equilibrium in time with their new and verdant world and tended it's great green glacial valleys lovingly, they knew the value of what they by the grace of their gods had. By the time such stability was reached they had already managed to acquire a little bit of a reputation with the Imperium at large on their first impressions of being fond of food and drink and prone to large families.

In the years after the Ornsworlders served the Imperium dutifully and provided many fine marksmen and regimental cooks as well as food stuffs. They were a well loved people, gentle and kind and full of good sense and down to earth wisdom. Their friends were many as they tended to be generous and infectious laughs. The Imperium was their golden age.

The golden age did not last. Dominion records were found in the 12th Black Crusade by a the Chaos Lordling Eidolon Ever-Burning of an artifact of on Ornsworld known as the Eye of Night. It was not an artifact of Dominion make but something far more ancient that they had unearthed that was said to be able to destroy complex mortal technology great and small, fragile or robust. He descended upon peaceful Ornsworld like a great dragon made of fire and inferno and reduced all he touched to cinders and ash as he took the Eye from it's hiding place in a deep and flooded cave and hideous as his presence was he vanished soon enough with his prize but stiffer than expected had been the resistance and weakened now the Children of Orn were. Like sharks to spilled blood other creatures came to that weakened world as the Imperium was hamstrung and distracted by the rest of that great war.

When the Imperium managed to scrape the resources to send a force to Ornsworld it was far too late. Gone were the songs in the halls of the thanes, the laughter was silent and all that was to be found were the bodies arranged in great patterns of offering, lying where they had fallen in the hunts or mutilated and thrown on sacrificial heaps and those joyful smiles were twisted into expressions of fear and pain. Only Chaos Spawn moved on the blighted and tainted land, the ratlings had been exterminated to the last child.

There were Ornsworlders in the forces that landed in the fresh ashes. Their tears were bitter and sorrowful beyond words and that sorrow was turned to a cold and terrible wroth. It might seem amusing that a branch humanity that seems built for peace could be so angry and maintain an anger colder than the deeps of space for so long, but they can and it seems like it should be an impotent rage but it is not. A call was put out by the head chef of one of the regiments that landed, a dreadful and terrible message whispered from astropath to scribe and passed on across the Imperium. All the sons and daughters of Orn were to come home.

The fields were made green again, trees grew again from the ashes on the mass graves and from a distance maybe it would look like all was how it was. But those happy songs are now songs of war and retribution, sons and daughters of that world look to the stars no longer in hope but in hate, the law of conscription has been restricted as were it not too many would heed the war drums that beat in their hearts. People look at ratlings and are unimpressed and remain unimpressed until they start racking up a body count. Spider silk they once sold to off world merchants in bolts and in dresses for princesses, now every soldier carries a length of it and can cut a neck all the way to the bone. Those clever hands and keen eyes once carved and painted things of beauty now put those skills to greater bloody work than ever before in their service to the Guard and Ornsworld Marksmen are famed and feared across half the galaxy. They move swiftly and quietly and kill without hesitation or remorse. They are owed a blood-price that could only be measured in the ocean depths of their shed tears.

The world of Orn and it's inhabitants are a very unexpected terror that stalks the stars on the dying of the forty-first millennium, their anger roused is more terrible for how unexpected it was and although the Eye of Night was undoubtedly a great boon to the forces of Chaos it might not be worth what has risen against them.

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== Weapons of the Imperium ==

=== Lasguns ===

The first instances of las-weapon technology came from Terra itself. It is thought to be a recreational weapon used in mock battles during the Dark Age of Technology. At that time these las-weapons beams had the power of 4mm stubber pellets where even thick cloth was effective armor against it. These relics were present on Terra and other worlds during the Warlord Era but it was the Emperor who reshaped it to become a lethal weapon. The Emperor’s scouts had presented him with some prototype weapons when preparing for the unification with Mars. One such weapon was the proto-Lascarbine that was superior to stubber carbines in all but firepower. The Las beams still had the power of a 4mm stubber pallet thus the Emperor in his intelligence recrafted the weapon so that it fired with the power of an 8mm stubber round. The Lascarbine first saw service as the replacement for the Autorifles which was the standard weapon for the Imperial Army in the unification of the Sol system. Next was the Laspistols which were design to replace the stubber pistols. The mass use of Las-weapons saw that the Lascarbine barrels started to warp after 5.000 shots and the Laspistol barrels warped after 2.000 shots. When these barrels warped, what would have been unmodified hitscan fire devolved to lose of accuracy where Guardsmen had to fire two or more times in the same place to get a hit. Even worst, when the Laspistol barrels warped soldiers had to fire at point-blank range to get hits.

The Imperial Army Handheld Weapons Development Bureau would develop the Lasgun which had a longer barrel and limited the power to 7.9mm stubber round strength. Then changed the iron sights of the weapon to allow attachable optics and added a stock for increase accuracy. The first Lasguns were deployed to the front during the Hunting Era where it was noted that these weapons had effectively the firepower as the Lascarbines but the barrels didn’t warp until after 10.000 shots. When the Apostasy Era started Guardsmen on both sides reported the Lascarbines and Lasguns in night-time fighting left noticeable muzzle flashes thus making the shooter an easy target. The Weapons Development Bureau would again work on the Lasgun and Lascarbine just after the Apostasy Era, to create the attachable flash suppressor for better night-time combat. Then they also created the light attachable stock for the Lascarbine.

=== Flak Armor ===

There was no such thing as a standardized armor used by the Imperial Army during the Great Crusade. The closes thing to such a concept came in the form of the Solar Pattern Void Armor used widely by the Solar Auxilia but that was a carapace-reinforced void suite rather than Flak Armor as we know it today. The first documented instances of what could be considered Flak Armor was when Cadian Shock Troops started equipping troopers en masse with light anti-shrapnel armor near the end of the Great Crusade. Cadian officers found out on the battlefield when Cadian Guardsmen attacked entrenched positions most of their losses sustained were from artillery or random bits of debris thrown into the air by artillery. The different regiments from Cadia phased out the traditional metal plate armor for Flak Armor, all future campaigns used Flak Armor once manufactorums switched production lines right before the War of the Beast.

The breastplate, shoulder pauldrons, knee plates, and greaves all used the same material and layering as each other. The helmet has considerable more armor and the fabric connecting the armor is much weaker or lacks any sort of plating. Most of the actual armor in Flak Armor uses an inner layer of shock absorbent gel with metal plating between the gal and outer ceramic layer. All three of these layers are connected and interwoven with carbon-fiber, metal-fabric, and nylon strings forcing the layers to stay together under most conditions. The ceramic plate was designed to deflect shrapnel or at least cause it to be stuck in the plate. The metal layer was placed to stop lasbolts or stubber rounds from fully penetrating through the armor in case if the shot passed the ceramic plate. The gal is there as either the last ditch effort to stop shrapnel from fully penetrating the armor or prevent internal bleeding from receiving a direct hit. Flak Armor fabric is made from different carbon-fiber, metal fabrics, and thick cloths to prevent shrapnel from cutting through or a blade from ripping it. Flak Armor helmet tend to have extra metal plating to ensure that not all shots to the head are fatal or random falling debris didn’t kill the Guardsman.

The first major combat test of Flak Armor was seen in the War of the Beast. On the frontlines Flak Armor proved to be basically ineffective in protecting against Ork weaponry. The Orks had used unusually large stubber rounds up to but not limited to 10 or 12mm that would slice right through Flak plating. What would be considered dangerous Ork rockets would often miss even with flam ammo, Flak armor was more than enough protection against most Ork rocketry short of city block leveling size. Crone Eldar and Dark Eldar weapons of both Saw and Splinter ammo had difficult times penetrating Flak plating unless there was concentrated fire where even the Flak plating can only protect against so much. When the Fallen first turned on Imperial Army elements, blosters were used for the first time against Flak Armor. The bolter rounds would often penetrate Flak plating to only cleanly exit out on the other side then explode, if the Guardsman was lucky they would still be alive. When a Guardsman was even luckier the bolter shell would be deflected off of Flak plating and explodes prematurely in mid-air, unless the explosion was in their face the shrapnel would be mostly harmless. The flexibility, simplicity, and cheapness to produce Flak Armor instead of Void suits led to many Imperial worlds adopting the Flak Armor, quotas and resources were limited in the total economic mobilization that happened in the War of the Beast made Flak Armor even more popular.

During the Apostasy, Imperial Guard regiments openly fought against one another and this saw the first use of Flak Armor against massed artillery. Regiments would launch massive formations to charge at entrenched Guardsmen who were well prepared for such an attack. The defenders would fire blinding volleys of artillery shells to delay the charge. Flak Armor proved a Guardsman could survive an artillery barrage short of a direct hit right next to their feet they would be fine, if the shockwave from the explosion didn’t destroy the body’s organs that is. Artillery barrages could now only slow down attacks from Guardsmen thanks to Flak Armor. Field modifications noted to be used by regiments during the Apostasy was extra cloth being to prevent shrapnel from easily slicing the joints. Thicker ceramic plates are used by veteran Guardsmen against Orks to at least survive glancing shots from Ork stubbers. Regiments constantly facing Crone or Dark Eldar is deployed with extra metal layered Flak Armor to prevent enemy fire from penetrating Flak plating.

=== Bolters ===

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All modern varieties of bolter, from the humble workhorse that is the mainstay of the Space Marine legions to the bolt pistol used by baseline humans, are all at least in part influenced by a design created by the Emperor of Mankind himself. Believe it or not, bolters were originally not that important a part of ancient humanity’s arsenal. This can be seen in the nature of warfare in the 41st millennium. Warfare in the 41st millennium almost resembles that of pre-gunpowder humanity, with a heavy focus on armor and the viability of melee combat. Humanity’s weapons of choice during the Dark Age of Technology were Volkite guns and Adrathic disintegrators, neither of which armor offered much protection against. Military tactics during this period would have been more familiar to older groups of humans (potentially as far back as M2) than their descendants, with a greater emphasis on utilizing cover and avoiding fire than melee combat. Knowledge of how to make advanced armor survived the Age of Strife better than similar knowledge of weaponry, shifting the advantage to armor over arms and making melee combat viable again. Bolters only entered into the military sphere much later in the Dark Age of Technology, having believed to have been a weaponized version of a power tool, after it was noticed how well they performed against Orks, other high-durability xenos, and rogue Men of Iron and other Silica Animus.

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The Emperor contributed to the reinvention of the bolter back before he was the Emperor, before he was the Steward, before he was the Warlord, when he was merely Oscar of the Terrawatt Clan. The Terrawatt Clan was a technocracy, with societal standing and authority being based on one’s inventiveness and research productivity, and if one could not prove their mental ability there was no way for them to advance in status. Embarking on a project that advanced Terrawatt’s sum of knowledge in some way was a common coming of age ritual in the country, and although he saw himself as artificial and a shadow of humanity Oscar wanted to be viewed slightly less as a of Malcador's trophy taken from the ruins of Chthonia and slightly more as a person.

Oscar chose as his project reverse-engineering an old ballistics weapon that had uncovered some centuries before by expeditions from Terrawatt from the deserts of the former Tharkian Empire (specifically the province of Anatolia). The weapon’s systems had been fouled by sand and half of its components were missing, but Oscar managed to piece together enough of its workings to construct a working replica sized to his frame, or at least fill in enough of the missing pieces to construct a model that actually worked. This would be the precursor of the Astartes pattern boltgun and explains, among other things, why the prototype bolter was already built for someone of an Astartes’ size.

The Theologiteks were impressed and Oscar was proud of his creation (not to mention happy to have a weapon that didn’t feel like a child’s toy in his hands), eventually taking the prototype as his sidearm when he embarked to reunify Old Earth. The gun faithfully served as his sidearm for many years, before finally failing some two hundred years after the Battle of Terra in about 700.M31. Oscar was saddened by the loss, seemingly one more aspect of his life that seemed to be eroding away, but the remains of the so-called ‘father of bolters’ survived and remains enshrined to this day in the museum in the Imperial Palace.

Originally, the Warlord’s armies of Thunder Warriors were armed with Volkite weaponry and autoguns, but as the numbers of augmented warriors grew and Volkite weapons were gradually lost due to attrition, three-fourths of the Warlord’s soldiers were armed with bolters about the time the Thunder Legions were being phased out in favor of the Legio Astartes. Volkite weaponry may have been more powerful and autoguns were cheap, but bolters were reliable, relatively powerful (unlike autoguns), and more importantly their workings were well-understood and could be easily replicated (unlike Volkite weapons).

The Warlord was not the only individual to reverse engineer the secrets of the bolter. Other human nations during the Age of Strife had come to the same conclusion regarding the bolter’s reliability and ease of production, and the Imperium encountered other models of bolters on places like Mars, the Hubworld League, and the Auretian Technocracy, several of which were based on actual STC designs. Information from these designs was assimilated by the Imperium to create a syncretic design that improved upon the initial Astartes pattern (Oscar, to his embarrassment, [[fail|had gotten some of his assumptions wrong and had replaced several missing systems with slightly more inefficient versions he had created wholecloth]]). However, not all bolter designs were equally optimal in all situations, with some performing better at certain tasks than others. Eventually, a wide array of bolter types proliferated in the Imperium ranging from the numerous variants of the Astartes pattern, in which the initial kick from the propellant recoil is enough to break an unaugmented human’s arm, to the smaller bolt pistol commonly used by commissars, which trades caliber size and rate of fire for recoil to the point that it can be used by normal humans.

By approximately early M34, enough principles of miniaturization had been rediscovered to downsize the traditional full-size Astartes bolter to the Godwin-De’az Pattern. Nevertheless, despite this miniaturization the recoil still made it almost impossible for normal humans to use unless you were genetically enhanced, were wearing powered armor, or from Catachan or the Hubworld League. For many years the Godwin-De’az pattern occupied an awkward position for many years, being too large to be used by most Guardsmen yet too small in caliber to be an efficient weapon for Astartes. However, this all changed after the founding of the Adeptus Securitas and the Sisters of Battle in M36, who with their enhanced strength found this intermediate-sized bolter almost perfect for their needs. Indeed, name Godwin-De'az came about as a reference to Sister De'az, the Nocturnean Sister who was the first successful recipient of the augmentations used by the Sisters of Battle. Before that, they were merely referred to as "miniaturized Bolters" due to their scarcity. Godwin-De'az bolters are much more common in the Imperium now, mostly due to their use by the Securitas.

The invention of the precursor to the modern bolter is perhaps one of the achievements the Emperor is most proud of. It was not something created by Oscar, the Man of Gold, nor Oscar, the Warlord of Earth, but by Oscar, the person, in the name of the betterment of his species.

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=== Leman Russ Tank ===

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''“We should've waited for the Fenrisian ale before rushing here just to find half a tractor. At least we'd've something that would lift the mens' spirits after such a disappointment.”''<br>
- Primarch Leman Russ, post-Imperial Compliance of Nova Borilia.

THE REGIMENTAL STANDARD: A HISTORY OF THE LEMAN RUSS TANK

In today's battlefield, almost all of the armed forces flying Imperial banners have either used or fought alongside the Leman Russ Battle Tank. Many view it with great relief, no longer having to be at the forefront of an advance on fortified positions, others call it their “ride,” and some view the Leman Russ as an inelegant and ugly hunk of metal that conceals brutal effectiveness and resilience worthy of the name. Its treads have rolled over thousands of battlegrounds, and its guns have shot down many foes... yet one wonders where the seeds for this venerable war machine were sown. If you have had the same question that we at the Regimental Standard did, read on to find out.

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The Leman Russ Battle Tank and its numerous variants has its origins early in the Great Crusades, and is not to be confused with Primarch Leman, who discovered it on Nova Borilia. Rumors of an STC for a tank dating from the Dark Age of Technology drew his attention to the campaign against the Noman xenos' planetary empire, already marked for destruction as Xenos Horrificus due to its brutal enslavement of the local human population and violent refusal of all diplomacy attempts. Fortunately, resistance was broken after a series of engagements that saw the Nomans and a disobedient slave army reeling from the hard hitting tactics of the Space Wolves and Solar Auxilia attachments. For the expeditionaries, what they salvaged from the last Noman stronghold was an immense let down.

The STC was, in fact, the fragments of a blueprint for an all-terrain tractor that started production sometime before the Age Of Strife, not the weapon the intel had suggested. Presumably it had been mistaken for a valuable human relic, and so it was situated in the most secure collection in the Noman fortress.

But the Imperial Army would not be denied their tank, and in the span of a decade several components of the discovery were incorporated into a new design, christened the Leman Russ Battle Tank, Mark I. It set a gyrostabilized Battle Cannon turret on top of a ceramite and plasteel hull with a steel-sprung suspension, while a complex transmission mated to an enormous twin-turbocharged V12 multi-fuel HL230 engine gave it a top speed of 80 km/h and 40 km/h offroad (widely considered ludicrous for a tracked vehicle twice as tall as a Space Marine). This ability was used to great effect, as commanders swung behind enemy positions and unloaded rounds into petty tyrants and slavers.

However, as the Imperium expanded further and encountered tougher opposition, the Leman Russ proved inadequate. Its main gun struggled to defeat more heavily-armored horrors and what was left often outmaneuvered the Leman Russ, and breakdowns ranging from burnt out turbocharger components to transmission failures intensified a growing logistics headache. This led to the replacement of the Mk. I with the Mk. II-V, similar variants that traded mobility for protection and ease of maintenance by bolting on armor, dropping the forced-induction chargers, and in the case of the Mk. IV and V, switching to a simpler transmission. This was deemed acceptable, as the Imperium couldn't afford the best equipment possible for all its soldiers in the immediate aftermath of the War of the Beast.

That is not to say desperation did not proliferate the loaded idea of 'innovation.' During and after the War of the Beast, new variants were hurriedly fitted with crew-operated sponsons to add anti-infantry firepower, and while still inferior to the Land Raider-killing Vanquisher Cannon, a long-barreled Battle Cannon increased muzzle velocity and was easier to mass-produce. Later, more improvements filtered through, like a hydropneumatic suspension and lifted armor skirts that allowed the road wheels freedom of movement and together provided better acceleration and a more stable firing platform. Other changes included light, replaceable composite rectangles attached to the sides (sanctioned for Chimera variants and Salamanders after APC crew entrepreneurs decided they too wanted more armor) and a set of wide-angle optics that replaced the glass visor slit in the driver's hatch and made it possible to drive the tank and fire the hull weapon without switching seats or controls.

The Mk. XVII, created in the late 36th millennium, was supposed to use a scaled-down version of the Malcador Heavy Tank's electric drive system. You will never see this outside the Mechanicus' basements.

[[File:NobledarkLemanRussMarkXXIV.jpg|200px|thumb|left|Mk. XXIV Leman Russ with Imperial Guardsman and eldar Guardian for scale]]

The Mk. XXIV Leman Russ Battle Tank is the most recent variant (see Remembrancer's sketch at left), created in response to reports of a spike in Leman Russ losses due to an increased prevalence of Crone Eldar and Necron tank analogues. The Imperial Couple had put pressure on Mars and the Fabricator-General to either keep the venerable tank a viable part of the Imperial Guard armory, or risk losing further contracts to Forge Worlds unaligned with Mars' branch of the Adeptus Mechanicus, many of whom were experimenting with unsanctioned tank designs. This was enough incentive to finally push the program into its final field tests and evaluation stage.

It carries over the extremely sloped frontal turret and glacis present since the Mk. XX, but replaces the original hull weapon's swivel mount with a ball mount in a smaller housing. To address the vulnerability of the Leman Russ to being flanked, particularly in urban warfare, the tank hull went from being 4.42 meters tall to a flatter profile 3.3 meters high. The front-facing plates of the widened and extended turret are angled to better resist side shots, and the Battle Cannon magazines were relocated to the back of the turret, so an ammo cook-off wouldn't be surrounded by critical systems and the crew. Blow-off vents further increase the chances a disabled Mk. XXIV can escape without Atlas recovery vehicles being put at risk, and two sponsons utilizing cogitators based off the Predator's and Tarantula Sentry Turret's are managed by a remote gunner seated by the driver. Lastly, a refined version of the Great Crusade's forced-induction setup and a weight reduction of 5 tons have allowed the Leman Russ to regain the nimbleness of the Mk. I, without the original's notorious mechanical problems.

While the newest Leman Russ might still be recognizable to an Imperial officer of the 30th millennium, it is not the same war machine your great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandparents used. Keep an eye out for those shiny new Mk. XXIVs, and remember to report any issues to your commanding officer or a Commissar!
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=== Psycannons and the Psi-Disruptor ===

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[[Nobledark_Imperium_Xenos#Men_of_Gold|Justinian]] and Theodora, the Man of Gold and Iron Mind of the Sol System, were based out of Earth and Mars, respectively. When the Age of Strife happened and the Men of Gold and Iron Minds were driven mad by seeing that which was not meant to be seen, Justinian and Theodora went after each other first in the grips of their madness. Ironically, the fact that the two of them killed each other off so early in the Iron War meant that the Sol System was spared from the worst excesses of the Age of Strife and had more working Dark Age technology lying around, compared to a place like [[Nobledark_Imperium_Notable_Planets#Cthonia|Cthonia]] whose inner face was sterilized when someone induced the star it orbited to go nova. Of course this doesn't mean that either Justinian or Theodora were in a healthy state of mind at the time. Justinian may have gone for Theodora first but he was still psychotically insane and trashed everything and everyone in his way to get to his goal, while at the same time Theodora is target Earth with orbital bombardments and scrapcode. The descendants of the technicians to Justinian and Theodora, in a very roundabout way, became the ancestors of the Terrawatt Clan and the Martian Mechanicum, though the Mechanicum took a more indirect fashion as the technicians of the Iron Mind integrated into the general population and Mars in general devolved into technology worshipping cults (of which the future Mechanicum was but one of many) after the destruction of Mars' terraformed biosphere.

In order to kill Theodora, Justinian built a device known as the psi-disruptor. The device would later be taken out of the doomsday vaults of the Mechanicum and used by the Steward to strike down the [[Nobledark_Imperium_Drafts#The_Rangdan_Xenocides_and_the_Slaugth|Rangda Abomination]] when it became clear that conventional options were just not enough. It is a device optimized and designed to kill Iron Minds, you can point it at a lesser mortal and pull the trigger but the effects vary from anywhere from a headache all the way up to total bodily disruption. It also draws on the psychic potential of the wielder and so can only be used by an active psyker and the one made and used by Justinian was built on a scale that was only usable by Men of Gold. Presumably other more baseline high end psykers could wield it to an extent but the list of candidates is very short and they only had one such weapon they weren't willing to risk the destruction of so speculation in this direction was fruitless.

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The original psi-disruptor gun is in the low-risk section on Ganymede. Psycannons are thought to be in some way derived from the study of the original device, a much cruder weapon but one that can be made using currently available technology. Creation of the Psycannon is attributed to the founding of the Grey Knights although by one of Magnus' students rather than the Primarch himself. Magnus was without peer amongst humanity in terms of deamon-lore and warp studies but neither he nor Russ were very good with machinery.

The downside to Justinian’s psi-disruptor are that it takes a huge amount of time to charge up and is very easy to dodge, but if you’re fighting an Iron Mind, whose physical forms and central processing units are building complexes, both of those deficiencies are a non-issue. The psi-disruptor also has quite a large “splash zone”. When Justinian fired the weapon at Theodora it didn’t just kill the Iron Mind but also killed every sapient creature within a few kilometers in a horrific manner.

When Oscar fired the weapon at the Rangda Abomination the only things in the blast radius were the abomination itself, some Slaugth and their bio-constructs, and members of various sapient species the Slaugth had taken as livestock and slaves. The latter of which nobody wanted to hit but reasoned that a quick death was better than spending years living in the Slaugth’s feedlots. They still made sure all of their forces and their allies stood way back when the disruptor was fired. The eldar threw a fit over the possibility of eldar chattel being in the blast zone, especially given those eldar had no soul stones and would go straight to She Who Thirsts, but backed down when even they had to admit there wasn’t a better option. The best they could come up with was pulling one of their own doomsday devices out of Yme-Loc, which would probably blow up the planet and wouldn’t be much better. At least using the mon-keigh device the eldar slaves outside of the blast zone would survive.

The Steward also seriously considered using Justinian’s psi-disruptor on the corrupted Man of Gold back in M34, given how it was so insane that its path was easily predictable, before the Grey Knights managed to resolve that problem on their own. It is a horrible weapon built by a madman to kill a god with a terrible history on top of whatever reality scaring power it might already direct, and tends to rack up a massive body count in collateral damaged when it is fired. It is little wonder the Steward is so reluctant to use it.

After striking the killing blow on Theodora with the psi-disruptor in the initial days of the Iron War, Justinian just kind of wandered off. The members of the resistance found him in the sands of Mars, sitting in a fetal position staring at something no one can see off in the distance, tears streaming down his cheeks. Mars’ carefully constructed biosphere had been stripped away by the Iron War, and the fourth planet of Sol had returned to the red wasteland humanity had first set foot on almost twelve millennia previously. Justinian knows why they are there. He can see their minds, but one doesn’t have to be a Man of Gold to figure it out.

Everyone knows they need to fire. Justinian is calm now, but who knows how long this bout of stability will last, it wasn’t long ago that he was throwing around ships in Martian orbit like they were children’s toys to get to Theodora. At the same time his executioners can’t bring themselves to do it. Everyone there knew Justinian, possibly personally if someone like Tiberius was there, Justinian had been there for almost every human on Earth since before they were born. The Justinian they knew didn’t deserve to die. And if he did die he deserved to go out in a blaze of glory. Demigods shouldn’t die like this.

There are no kine shields, no nuclear eruptions, none of the cosmic temper tantrums that characterized the death of his kin across the galaxy. Just a simple question.

“Do you think...do you think she will be waiting for me on the other side?”

Weapons are raised.

[[*BLAM*|“Yes…she is…”]]

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=== Kinebrach Blades ===

See [[Nobledark_Imperium_Member_States#Kinebrach_Blades|Kinebrach Blades]]

== Adeptus Astartes (Space Marines) ==

''“A Space Marine chapter conquering a planet? Have you been watching the damn holovids again, boy? Let me be clear so I never hear this foolishness again. Could we glass a continent given space superiority and a Battle Barge? Yes. Could we decapitate a planet’s leadership and destroy their infrastructure, leaving them to wither on the vine? Yes, within an hour. [[Nobledark_Imperium_Notable_People#Kharn_the_Oathsworn|Could we shock and awe them into surrender if they are sufficiently cowardly or primitive? Perhaps.]] But make no mistake, if a planet has advanced to the nuclear age and the populace is intent on resistance there is no way 2,500 men can hold it alone, I don’t care if you’re the damn Custodes or Grey Knights. You simply cannot be everywhere at once; gather your strength, and they will simply rise up where you are not. Spread out, and they will overwhelm you with their numbers. Sometimes, quantity has a quality all its own.''

''Subjugation and garrison duty is not our purpose. We are Astartes, Space Marines. We were made to tread the stars and go where others cannot. We are the tip of the Imperium’s spear, striking swiftly and mercilessly at the enemy’s heart. We are the Emperor’s Angels of Death, descending from the sky to slay nightmares so that others may dream peacefully in their beds. Leave the business of conquest and subjugation to the Guard. They have their duty, and we have our own.”''<br>
- Scout-Sergeant Kohl Leibhen of the Raptors, addressing a group of Aspirants

The ideal age for Astartes augmentation is somewhere between 19 and 25 years of age. At this point, the individual is young enough that their body can recover from the trauma of the procedure, but old enough that it is clear that it is worth giving them the enhancements. In theory, older individuals could undergo Astartes augmentation, but the risk of complication is so high that it is essentially not worth it. By the same token, younger individuals might be able to handle the stress of Astartes augmentations better than older individuals, but at this age the augmentations might affect their mental development. Ironically, earlier, less stable versions of super soldier augmentation, such as Thunder Warrior, Canis Helix, and Astartes Mark I augmentations, have a much higher compatibility rate and are are viable for a much wider range of ages than standard Mark III Astartes augmentations, in part because they are less invasive.

It should be noted that for all their similarities the Space Wolves, Iron Hands, and their descendant chapters are not Astartes, and therefore are both created differently and have their own strengths and weaknesses relative to Astartes. Canis Helix chapters (e.g., Space Wolves) are created by splicing large amounts of non-human DNA into the human genome (and therefore have no gene-seed), whereas Astartes are created by implanting artificially grown organs and glands into the human body. This means that despite being gene-locked to the Imperium's best efforts, a Canis Helix supersoldier could theoretically pass down some of their modifications to their descendants, which is something the Imperium did not want and one of the reasons the Astartes won out over the Canis Helix design. The probability of such an event is miniscule, but in a galaxy of scale such events cannot be taken for granted, as the inhabitants of the Fenrisian worlds show. Canis Helix soldiers are also noteworthy in lacking the Black Carapace augmentation, which was one of the key features that led to the Astartes winning out over the Thunder Warriors and other super soldier designs. Instead, Space Wolves use a complex mind-to-machine interface designed by the Iron Priests. It is expensive and not cost-effective on a galactic scale, but it has allowed the Space Wolves to perform just as well as Astartes.

Iron Hands and their descendants are modified Adeptus Mechanicus Skitarii, many of which are possibly even augmented to the level of [[Thallax|Thallaxi]]. As a result, there are [[Female_Space_Marines|no real restrictions]] to who can join the Iron Hands or their descendants beyond the ability to survive the augmentation procedure and being a part of the Adeptus Mechanicus. Skitarii also use a much wider range of augmentations and are often specialized for particular tasks, which means that the members of the Iron Hands and their descendants can be much more physically variable than the standardized augmentations of Astartes. Iron Hands and their descendants do not have to worry about the Black Carapace issue, because their armor essentially is their body, making a better connection between soldier and armor a moot point.

===The Breaking of the Legions===

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During the Great Crusade, the Adeptus Astartes were organized into twenty distinct legions each composed of thousands of Space Marines. However, by M41, the Adeptus Astartes have been divided into many distinct chapters about 1000-1200 strong, each descended at least in part from one of the eighteen legions that survived the War of the Beast. The reason for this change in organization is complicated. Many lay students of history often claim that the impetus for this change was Roboute Guilliman's Codex Astartes, published in 243.M31. However, like much of Guilliman's work, the Codex Astartes was meant to be a thought exercise in how the Adeptus Astartes could be more efficiently organized in a post-Great Crusade environment, and Guilliman would never have tried to shove his ideas down his fellow primarch's throats.

In truth, all of the legions split up for different reasons, and at different times.

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Several of the legions survived virtually as is for a little while longer under new leaders, who would have probably been considered primarchs in their own right if they hadn't had to stand in their predecessor's shadow. Kharn found himself essentially taking over more and more of his legions duties as Angron's health deteriorated. Abbadon was ambitious and charismatic enough to keep the Void Wolves in one piece for at least another generation. Leman Russ told Bjorn during a moment of mutual drunkenness to "look after the place while I step out for a minute". The next morning they realized Russ was gone and to make matters worse everyone had been just sober enough to remember what Russ had said the night before.

Other legions split up following the death of their primarch, or for simple matters of practicality. Old Man Khan called a meeting of the yabgu, despite not being dead yet, to make sure that whoever succeeded him would be competent enough not to run the legion into the ground. In a rare moment of humility, the yabgu compared themselves to Khan and realized that none of them could claim to have accomplished what Khan had accomplished by their age, and so the legion was split up. The descendants of the Thousand Sons such as the Grey Knights were already split up before their primarch's death (with the exception of the Blood Ravens), given that all were created to perform quite different, specialized tasks. The Imperial Fists found themselves splitting apart to fortify and garrison agri-worlds after the War of the Beast, on the basis that you cannot rebuild an empire if everyone is starving, and gradually drifted apart over the centuries. The same is true with the Iron Warriors and hive worlds and Iron Hands and forgeworlds. In these cases, Guilliman's Codex Astartes was seen as a natural framework for how to rework the legions into more autonomous units (though each legion implemented the Codex in their own way).

The Dark Angels are rather infamous for having split up before Guilliman ever wrote the Codex Astartes, after two-thirds of their number turned traitor during the War of the Beast. The Lion split the remaining loyalists into knightly orders and instituted the rank of Watcher to ensure that no one individual could ever subvert the entire legion. Guilliman may have actually been thinking of the Dark Angels when he wrote some parts of the Codex.

The Death Guard never really split up, even with the death of their primarch. Unlike the other legions they have never truly stopped marching to war.

There were two real deathknells for the concepts of a legion as a whole. The first was when Belarius the Abdicator refused to take up command of the full host of the Blood Angels after the death of Sanguinus, knowing full well that his entire reign would be spent in the shadow of the Martyr Angel. Instead he took command of a much more reasonable sized contingent of Blood Angels, nearly all survivors of the War of the Beast, with Belarius giving the most competent of the remaining Blood Angels command of their own groups. This set the precedent for most legions of breaking up into chapters after the death of their Primarch.

The other was the “Iron Cage” incident that happened to Fulgrim sometime in early M31. Fulgrim had always been a micro-manager, and was one of the strongest opponents of breaking the legions into chapters. However, after the War of the Beast, the sheer number of small-scale conflicts across the rebuilding Imperium and lack of local autonomy meant that the Empire’s Sons were ground down to about half the size of their prime merely by attrition alone despite being one of the biggest recruiters of new Astartes. The breaking point for the legion was when the Empire’s Sons got caught in a trap set up by a Tzeentch-worshipping Big Wyrd. The Wyrdboy was never caught, and by the end of it Fulgrim was left with enough marines to scrape into a little less than three chapters. After that point, even the strongest detractors of the Codex Astartes (with the exception of some particularly stubborn cases like the Death Guard) had to admit that Guilliman had a point.

However, despite this, successor chapters have not completely caught all ties with one another. Many chapters still retain close ties with their former brethren in other chapters, and many chapters have programs of officer exchange to encourage loyalty to the Imperium as a whole rather than a particular world or individual. Nevertheless, chapters are expected to be open about all inter-chapter interactions and unofficial brotherhoods are officially banned by explicit decree of the Emperor, in order to prevent the rise of another individual like Luther fostering ties of soft power beneath the nose of the Imperium. One of the jobs of the Inquisition’s Ordo Militarum is to make sure the Adeptus Astartes keep to this decree.

Additionally, by his own admission, Guilliman’s organizational suggestions were designed for times of relative peace, rather than all-out galactic war. In times of great crisis, the First Founding chapters (who are considered first among equals among successor chapters and whose original members were often some of the best soldiers in each legion) have the right to call for a Reformation of the Legion, where the successor chapters temporarily unite to lock arms and march under the united banner of the old legion once more. This policy is sometimes called the Last Wall policy, as Guilliman reputedly got this idea based on suggestions by the consummate soldier Rogal Dorn, who understood that the War of the Beast was not going to be the last major war the Imperium would face.

Responding to this call is completely voluntary, but many chapters consider it shameful for a successor chapter to refuse to answer the call, particularly since a call for a Reformation of the Legion is reserved for only the direst of emergencies that threaten the entire Imperium. The only time a refusal of the call is ever considered acceptable is if a chapter is severely undermanned or if they are physically unable to respond due to being directly under attack themselves. For example, the Lamenters were unable to respond to a call for the temporary reformation of the Blood Angels during the 12th Black Crusade, due to suffering from severe manpower losses beforehand. The Lamenters still blame themselves for not being able to respond to the call, even if the rest of the Imperium doesn’t.

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===Current Chapters===
====The Minotaurs====
The Minotaurs are something of a boogeyman among Space Marines. A group that make even battle-hardened Astartes quiver and speak of in hushed tones. The reason for this fear and paranoia are rather simple: The Minotaurs are Space Marines that hunt Space Marines.

The first recorded instance of a Space Marine considering tactics against other Space Marines was the Ultramarine Aeonid Thiel. During the Great Crusade, Thiel was dragged before Guilliman by his fellow Ultramarines for teaching the marines under his command tactics for fighting other Space Marines, which they saw as a sign of treachery. Guilliman asked whether this was true, and upon being told it was, asked Thiel to explain himself. Thiel said as Ultramarines it was their duty for the legionaires to be prepared for any possible eventuality. Although the idea of Astartes becoming traitors to the Imperium was an uncomfortable idea, that does not mean it was impossible or that Astartes could be unwillingly brainwashed into turning on their battle brothers like they had during the Rangdan Xenocides. After hearing Thiel’s explanation, Guilliman asked the two Ultramarines who had brought Thiel to him to leave the room, and then congratulated Thiel for his ingenuity. He was willing to entertain possibilities no one else could or wanted to consider, and just because people didn't like the implications of such a scenario did not invalidate the utility of any such contingency plans. The Space Marines were created by the Imperium to be their finest warriors in the reconquest of the stars, and who is to say another, more hostile human empire could not have had a similar idea. Thiel would be rewarded for his ingenuity, though for obvious reasons not at that very moment. Thiel would finally be validated and his actions recognized during the War of the Beast, where the actions of Luther and his Fallen showed the idea that a Space Marine could turn traitor to be a frightening reality.

The Minotaurs were originally founded by a War Hound named Leon Kravidos shortly after the Age of Apostasy as a chapter dedicated to fighting against the Fallen. Kravidos knew that in order to fight other Space Marines his men would have to be at the very peak of their potential. Therefore, he created a downright grueling training regimen by Space Marine standards, designed to make his men prepared for anything. Despite his job, Kravidos was actually well respected among Astartes, and was deeply mourned when he died in battle. For thousands of years after that, the Minotaurs were rather unnotable among Space Marine chapters. Their job of hunting down Fallen space marines was well known, but they were seen as people just doing their job as opposed to someone to be feared. That is, until the latest Chapter Master of the Minotaurs, Asterion Moloc, took control of the chapter in 200.M41, after the death of his predecessor in the Badab War.

In contrast to many in the Imperium who spend much of their time in pursuit of a particular foe, such as Inquisitor Boaz Kryptman and the tyranids, Asterion Moloc does not feel a festering hatred for his enemy. Instead, he seems to take the attitude of a big game hunter hunting the most dangerous game. He seems to take a perverse joy in hounding his targets to the ends of their endurance, before delivering the final blow. He spends hours reviewing all known records and tactics of his quarry, so that he know every possible move his prey can make before they do. He does this even for chapters that have not been assigned his target yet.

For obvious reasons, most space marines are uncomfortable with the Minotaurs, considering them, in the words of one Astartes scout who wished to remain anonymous, to be “team-killing frag-heads”. Indeed, the Minotaurs in recent years have been known to be a bit too eager in their desire to fight Space Marines, sometimes flying off the handle at an innocent chapter at the urging of some particularly radical or puritan Inquisitor. About the only people who feel comfortable around the Minotaurs are the Sisters of Battle, who often cooperate with the Minotaurs in operations involving the Fallen.

==== The Dragon Lords ====

The involvement of the Dragon Lords dates back to the founding of Praetoria in the days of the post-Beast rebuilding. It was deemed that the military side of the endeavour would require the substantial presence and use of Space Marines to remove some of the more fearsome and prepared horrors that had moved in during the intervening years. As Primarch Vulkan was the overall commander in bringing the worlds of Wilderness Space back to the light of civilization it was understandable one of his newly minted chapters that set up a way station alongside the more entrepreneurial efforts of the Gredbrittonic founding families.

The head of the space marines in this endeavour was the former Chaplain Commander Xiaphas Jurr of the Afrique League.

Commander Jurr never let the change in position from preacher of the Promethean faith to overall commander interfere with his missionary work and vice versa and it is largely his doing that Praetoria grew into a mostly Promethean world. It was not without practical merit as the forces raised from that world as the years went on all held a faith in common and were all the closer for it. The noble feuds in later years it has been speculated without this vague sense of brotherhood would undoubtedly have bloomed into minor wars.

As Praetoria grew from a minor service stop into a nation the waystation he commanded grew likewise so that in time it was declared a Chapter in its own right with himself as it's commander, a rank he wore well. He and his newly designated Dragon Lords were now distinct from the rest of the Prometheans as whilst he had been influencing the world he commanded from it had been influencing him.

As the population of Praetoria grew the Dragon Lords soon found that they could recruit from there exclusively even with the introduction of the Tithe.

Before the tithe the military of that world was predominantly the house militias and private military companies with only the Red Shirts, the mostly ceremonial soldiers of the Parliamentary Herald, representing the planet as a whole. At the time the Red Shirts were seen as a token force of no real concern and the butt of many jokes due to their lack of real experience and that they were attached to a figurehead rather than anyone with any real power.

This changed when the Imperial Army demanded it's due. They didn't want soldiers loyal to one city, one lord, in contest with their comrades of the same world. They wanted soldiers loyal to the Imperium representing their world as a unified whole. The imposing of a standard uniform was seen as one way to gently erode mental barriers, they were one and all Praetorian.

The distinctive green and black colour scheme of the Dragon Lords was surrendered not long after, coincidentally a few days after the death of Xiaphas Jurr, to their red and ivory as a show of solidarity with the common soldier.

In this time native born Gernebern of Auchmouth, a progeny who rose fast but died a mere few centuries later, took command of the space marines and was the source of much reform within the chapter. It was deemed prudent to have the chapter integrate ever more closely with the common soldiery, slitting the companies up into squads and placing them on long term loan to, at the time, 90 regiments of the Praetorian Guard as specialist squads.

All but one company that was demanded to remain to guard the homeworld at all times.

Despite all the upheavals and political manoeuvrings that could fill a very dry library in their own right it is often over looked the contributions that Praetoria made to the conquest, rebuilding and protection of the wilderness worlds and beyond. Indeed it was in this noble endeavour that Commander Jurr had sacrificed himself.

Were it not for the Red Coat diligence, vigilance and sacrifices the orks, marauders and worse would have just swept right back in and the fate of those that called that place home would have been, at best, pitiable.

==== The Mortifactors ====
The Mortificators are a brother chapter to the Ultramarines, both being founded by veterans of the War of The Beast from Legion XIII in the days of The Rebuilding. The head of the force sent out that formed the core of the original Mortificators was commanded by the esteemed but eccentric, some would say slightly bonkers, Sasebo Tezuka. Sasebo Tezuka was originally a child of the strange land of Strayllya on Old Earth and had begun his military career in the earliest days of the Great Crusade. He was a man of accomplishment who commanded the respect of his men despite his oddness. One of these oddities was a seeming over reliance on signs and portents that he used to make his decisions. He himself was no psyker and although he did employ them he didn’t use them for divination, and although he relied on what was essentially random chance he seldom went irretrievably astray and more often than not followed a correct path. In more recent times people have wondered if the King of Clowns had anything to do with the roll of those bones but no answer that any could understand has been forthcoming.

With the breakup of the XIII Legion Captain, now Chapter Master, Tezuka was free to follow such omens as his cards and bones would show him and by a roundabout means and thirty years of wandering brought him to the world of Posul. If Posul was meant to be some sort of Promised Land it was not a one given from any god that cared for its followers. It was dreary and dark and by some fluke of topography and atmospheric composition it was eternally shrouded in a permanent and extremely heavy overcast with two small dim suns. It was a world of extremely dark nights and extremely dim days and it was not unclaimed.

A hardy breed of man survived on that world. Pale and slight of build with big dark eyes. They were primitive in those days having in the time since man’s apex devolved to something that resembled Mesolithic era humanity. It was assumed at the time that their fall from grace, so complete as it was, was solely a result of their environment that was best and most politely described as very bleak. The plant life was typically sparse with dark purple leaves to maximize the available energy from the dim suns and the whole world had the general feeling of a deep-sea vent ecosystem on dry land.

Although that was almost certainly a contributing factor it was not the whole story. The Posuli could fairly be described as the Death Cult of the Death Cults. They followed the faiths of the Deorum Mortuus Est or at least they adhered to the teachings of those who had slain their gods. Master Tezuka and his followers, dictated by omens to settle on this world, learned from the stories of the eldest of the eldest priests and backed up by their own findings in the Verboten Lands held by all tribes in inviolate sacrosanctity for time beyond mind; the natives though not now had been worshipers of Chaos.

Their gods had been very real and walked among them awful and powerful, demanding great temples be built to them and demanding holocaust and sacrifice to feed them. Over the long years they had brought the Posuli low to the point of being naught but cattle to the slaughter of unworthy butcher gods until one day men lead by the “dream-walkers” rose up and were not struck down but did strike back with a righteous fire. Estimates by the off-worlders put the date of the uprising at approximately two centuries prior. The locals had no calendars and so none could know for sure but it seemed that the gods of Posul were overthrown on the day of The Raid of the Mansion or near to it.

But the locals were by then a thoroughly broken people. Presumably their ancestors had been of the Great and Bountiful Human Dominion and presumably they had been stranded here in the early days of the Age of Strife and presumably they did retain some measure of civility for some time but if it was so none of that survived. The locals had nothing that they remembered of greatness, nothing to aspire to and no notion of lasting joy. They carried on much as they had with cannibalistic rituals and constant wars of tribal slaughter. Tribal warriors would war and the victors would kill all of the men-folk and the children and take the women as their own and try to hold what land they could claim of the fallen’s holdings until displaced or the tribe in time split through internal unrest and warred upon once-kin.

And into this Chapter Master Sasebo Tezuka of Legion XIII descended. His first interaction with a local was when a boy barely old enough to grow his first chin hairs stabbed him in the gut with a stone tipped spear. Sasebo had approached the nearest tribe unarmoured and unarmed, wearing a simple course jute robe with only a brother-psyker at his side to show peaceful intent and appear as unthreatening as an Astartes can. The spear tip cut into his skin and stopped at the black carapace. The lad received a backhander that knocked several of his teeth out; it was extremely easy to follow him back to his tribe.

Some worlds react poorly to Imperial attempts to uplift them, this is true. Some worlds welcome the Imperium as returning brothers from the stars. Few were as reluctant as the Posuli who had no notion by then of anything greater than a tribe and no understanding of any social order more complex than the weak are food, the strong rule. Generally the Imperium tries to keep as much of the substance of a culture as possible in its uplifting. Master Sasebo couldn’t really see much worth keeping and as the days passed the other teams that investigated the other tribes reported much of the same. It was a long and bloody road to remake the Posuli into any sort of real society and Master Tezuka had fallen to the unknowable things of The Harrowing long before then.

In the end the people of Posul were brought, reluctant every step of the way, into the light of civilization and although their world could never be tamed it was made better than awful. It was possible in the end to live there rather than just be sentenced. In the end they were taken to the stars again and they did become part of the Imperium, if only a minor part. The people of that world were found, despite being classed as abhuman Nightsiders, to be compatible with the Astartes Mk3 MP gene-seed and in time were made worthy of it. In time they raised regiments to aid the Imperium that had taken then from the dirt. But it could not be said that they did not affect the chapter as it uplifted them, especially once they started to recruit from them.

The cannibalistic rituals were replaced with haemovorous rituals and human sacrifice with deep drug induced comatose vision seeking. The chapter adopted both of these and whilst down the long march of years the chapter amended the beliefs of the locals for their own betterment it was also the chapter that ended up adopting these beliefs and took up the scriptures of the Dead Gods.

The Mortificators were never seen as desirable allies. They were unpleasantly weird and typically possessed of a grim disposition. But they were valued and so were their people. It was not to last.

In the year 997M39 the Leviathan fell upon Posul, there was no hope of saving the world. All those dusty temples where man had slain their gods, all those strange tribes and wandering soothsayers, all the victories of the Imperium to make men out of monsters, all of those works of art carved in pale stone and lit pink and deep red by the dim red suns were washed away in a tide of chitin that were in turn washed away in nuclear fire. Basilica Mortis, the great star fort of the Mortificators had managed to remain hidden by strange eldar trickery and in its vaulted halls were held the last of that world, as many of the keepers of the stories and the children to tell them to as could be and on the surface of that world the men and women of the world and it’s chapter gave their lives to draw the Hive to them, to make the Hive believe that it was winning. Lord Magyar ordered the atomics released at the last possible moment, at the time when hope should have been turned to despair but was instead turned to righteous wroth and retribution and for a moment he beheld his home in sunlight before the fire consumed him and it was beautiful.

Posul now is a dead world, as maybe is fitting. It is unlikely that the Adeptus Biologicus will agree to terraform it in this age as it was never even in the old days a partially worthy candidate for such an endeavour. And as for the remnants of the Posuli and the Mortificators? They endure, barely. Hearing of their plight their distant kin in the Ultramarines petitioned their government to grant them refuge and they were granted a place on the principle that so few were unlikely to cause undue disruption. The Mortificators requested long ruined Calth to settle upon and try and make a home. The government of Calth were less than enthusiastic to say the least as their caverns were precious to them until they learned that the Posuli wished to live in the wastelands of the surface where none had dwelt since the devastation ten thousand years past. The Posuli said that they could cover their eyes in the day and sleep and in the night they could pretend that they were home once more.

The Mortificators will rebuild. Death has not claimed them yet.

==== The Black Legion ====

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(Void Wolves) - Primarily Astartes used as boarding/anti-boarding specialists throughout the Great Crusade and 1st Black Crusade. Majority of pre-split Void Wolves Astartes ended up here. They call the worlds of the Cadian Gate their home and recruit from there and nearby systems. Still operate much as a Legion of old in that they are massively represented in the boarding parties of the Navy assets in the Cadian sector but with the emphasis put more on garrison duty.

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'''Lord Commander Corpulax was previous Lord Commander of Black Legion.'''

He was born on Cadia in the year 446M41 and like all Cadians was inducted into the military and raised to be a good little soldier. It wasn't long into his adolescence that his physical prowess was recognized he was genetically screened and earmarked for the Black Legion. He trained well and hard as a Neophyte and learned deep of the chapters long lore. In his 15th year he started to undergo the surgical alterations and augmentations that would turn him from human to super human.

His career as a Space Marine was noteworthy in his reliability. He was a very by the book soldier who would have been overlooked for any measure of excellence were it not for his ability to exemplify everything the chapters battle doctrines exalted. He was in every way the very model of a Cadian Space Marine. By age 176 he was a sergeant, by 239 he was a Marshal and by 301 he was Lord Commander and it was a role he excelled at. For the brief time that he held that rank at least. In the year 775M41, a mere 28 years into his command, the Apostles of Contagion launched a sustained attack on the agri-world of Phagir. Phagir was one of the worlds that supplied the Cadian Gate with food and presumably their goal, or at least the goal of their masters, was to inconvenience the Gate Worlds as they would have to import all food.

The Apostles of Corruption launched a sustained campaign of mostly biological warfare in addition to their defensive style of land holding and attrition. In the end it was deemed by the Adeptus Biologicus order stationed on the planet an untenable theater. They couldn't make cures as fast as they could make ails. The Cadian forces were instrumental in the evacuation of Phagir as the Zombie Virus finally took hold and the dead shambled across the blighted fields to add the living to their ranks.

The Black Legion held the line at the cpaital's space port until the last moment to get one more shuttle off of the planet. In the final stages of the withdrawal it became clear that Lord Commander Corpulax was infected with the Zombie Virus to which there was no cure save a clean death. Wracked with pain and burning with wroth Copulax spent his last moments sprinting towards a techno abomination of rust and rotted flesh merged together into what might once have been a Baneblade. It's burning wreckage was his funeral pyre as the IEDs he was strapped with detonated.

By his sacrifice one more shuttle containing, among near 2,000 civilians, the last of his brothers on the surface made it safely off the launch pad. Then the planet was bathed in nuclear fire, it was lost but it would not be damned.

'''Lord Commander Zagthean the Broken.'''

Zagthean was the son of a long term "soup stirrer" of the algae vats and a sister of the Convent of Alabaster Maidens. Civilian jobs on Cadia are typically though not always given to individuals disqualified from front line service for reasons of either health or competence. As good 'ol Zaganath had been doing that job from age 12 to age 62 it can be safely assumed that he was given the job for being pretty useless at proper soldiering, not to say that he was not a dutiful man. He was and he died in a Chaos raid and he died with a weapon in his hand and he didn't go down quietly or alone.

Matylda was sister of the Alabaster Maidens, a wide spread order with convents on several dozen worlds in the Cadian Sector. They specialized in offering healthcare to the underclasses. On Cadia they offered healthcare to the more broken veterans.

Despite his humble start Zagthean has proven a savage warrior, more of Angron's ilk than Horus. He has charged into battles no man or superman should hope to walk out of and has not only done so but done so victorious. Even in his earliest days he was dauntless and every task and training exercise put before him set into with an almost alarming ferocity. After his genetic screening there was no question of him being looked over for Space Marine augmentation and the fire in his heart was not diminished even slightly by the alterations, if anything with fewer physical constraints he approached the status of truly unstoppable.

His will is adamanitum and among his chapter his word is law. To the Lord Castellan's annoyance he insists on leading from the front, in the thick of the carnage, the blood and the thunder. Roaring with laughter and wroth and all mortals who have stood before him have known one simple truth; they have come here to die, their gods have abandoned them from the greatest to the least.

He is relatively young for a man of his rank but he has lived hard and built up an impressive record. But the price of living that hard is that he has seen Death many times and they have danced. He has been broken down and rebuilt, torn apart and stitched back whole, burned and healed and cut and stitched and glued and grafted and lahsed back together and whats left almost poured around increasing numbers of cybernetics. He has fallen many times but he is still alive, he does not march, he charges, he wills Death to find him, to hold him one last time so that he may beseech her "let me take these bastards out with me". And always Death has returned him.

As the 13th Black Crusade descends upon Cadia it may be that his wish could be granted. He may die, but he will take whole armies down with him.

'''Ygethmor the Trickster, Head of the Black Legion Battle Psykers.'''

Of Old Earth stock and a resilient psychic of pristine physique Ygethmor was destined for the Grey Knights and though the tests of genetic compatibility showed positive the artificial organs of the MK3S gene-seed would not take root in his flesh. Unwilling to just toss such a promising neophyte aside for reasons of a biological fluke the Grey Knights ordered him to be tested with the MK3MP variant of the gene-seed. The MP variant did take. Ygethmor was posted to the Cadian Gate, typically they would have sent him to the Exorcists but he lacked their "straight forward" attitude to problem solving. Steeped in ancient deamon lore learned in the halls of Titan and with a Nemesis Blade as a parting gift he has proven to be a boon to the Black Legion like no other.

He is fond of ambushes, illusions, misdirection and what he likes to refer to as "pranks". He is formidable in a straight up and honest fight if he has no option to make a dishonest one. He has no notions of fair play and considers the idea of "fair play" synonyms with "not trying". It is this underhanded attitude towards war that has won him the approval of the Lord Castellan (and few others), that and a well refined caustic sense of humour.

Despite his detractors, of which he has cultivate a great many of, his effectiveness can not be denied. He is not the most powerful psychic among the astartes, not by a long way, but like his martial strength he makes the most of what he has. As he would say "a stiletto atwix the ribs is as good as a broadsword to the bonce".

'''Devram Korda Marshal of the 1st Cohort'''

At approximately 230 years of age he is on the younger end of the Marshals but is not unaccomplished. His rank was obtained in the Liberation of Sarora. An intense war on the hiveworld Sarora to depose the warband known as the Children of Torment; a nasty group of Crone Worlders with faux marine stitched together from the bodies of their victims and animated with small deamons. As the most senior surviving officer left after a particularly nasty assault he was given temporary command over his brothers. This was made permanent at the conclusion of the campaign when contact with Castellan Jakren Stein and the rest of the Cadian 509th.

The things he saw on Sarora, the things he had to do for the sake of pity, still haunt him. He is a grim figure with no sense of humour or good cheer, just seething well controlled and bottomless grudge.

'''Marshal Araghast the Pillar, Marshal of the 2nd Cohort'''

Abnormally large for a Space Marine and phenomenally strong he lugs around a lascannon with the same ease as an experienced guardsman lugs around a lasrifle. His aim is exemplary and for a creature so big he can move surprisingly fast. In his oversized suit of armour he can withstand a punishing degree of fire and remains standing, carefully and calmly placing laser beams in the most inconvenient places. He rose to prominence in the Aurelia debacle that almost saw a world lost to the warp. He was the pillar of certainty around which the rescue forces rallied.

He has a calm and measured manner and an unflappable temperament and can at least give the impression of remaining relaxed in even the most bizarre and awful circumstances.

'''Xorphas Firestarter, Marshal of the 3rd Cohort'''

Xorphas is very good at pyrotechnics and incendiaries of all kinds and has a fascination with fire that borders on the unhealthy. This has though made him and his Cohort extremely good at dealing with orks and nurglites in particular and anything else that resents being set on fire in general. He is also a low level psychic, despite rumours he is not a pyrokine. His "gifts", if such they be, manifested only after he attained the position of Marshal and by then he was too far along the chain of command for it to be worth the effort and disruption of reassigning him to be with the other Battle Psykers. He was given instruction and extensive by the head librarian so that he would be considered safe but little in how to hone what he actually does have. Which is not very much if truth be told. He has very good gut instincts that can be mistaken for inhuman (even by astartes standards) reflexes, an uncanny ability to determine if someone is lying and some modest telekinesis.

He is a reserved and calm individual, meticulous and methodical in his approach to all things be it war or mundane chores. Until you give him a box of matches and you can see the lights reflecting in his eyes.

'''Drecarth the Sightless, Marshal of the 4th Cohort'''

A veteran of the 12the Black Crusade who spent half the invasion stranded in the lower tunnels and hunted by Crone Worlders with knives for fingers. Those knives had cost him his eyes but he cost them much more. Those tunnels were pitch black, but he was blind and although they could see to some degree in total darkness he could hear. Also those tunnels had been his playground as a child. They weren't just tunnels, they were home. The hunt quickly turned inside out and the Chaos Eldar came to the realization that he wasn't trapped with them, they were trapped with him. When he returned to the light he was reborn and his star was in ascendancy.

With two black orbs of technology replacing his ruined eyes and an unhealthily pale visage he looks like a specter from old stories, some unhappy dead come back to get even. His company he has molded into one of quiet killers, stalkers and hunters as he had been in the time of his epiphany. It is suspected that he is part of the secretive Cadian Death Faith, it was prevalent in his patch of tunnels when he was young, but nothing can be proven. All that is known is that he is sober, diligent, humble and quiet. All traits he tries to instill in his brothers.

'''Amalaxis Deamonslayer. Marshal of the 5th Cohort.'''

Amalaxis is as close to a Chaplain as you can get without actually being one. He is a strong, almost fanatical, believer in the old Cadian tree gods. He offers prayers and devotion to them on the eve of battle, before setting forth on campaign, when another invasion is expected and when it is peaceful because on Cadia you have to be thankful for respite. Most of his Cohort are also adherents of his faith, the reason he was chosen to Marshal that Cohort, and to them he is a figure of great reverence. Some say he was a tree spirit in a stillborn child like in the old stories of before war.

His method of warfare is very much in favour of the aggressive advance. Ideally after the first attack there should be no possibility of a retaliation. There must be something to his faith as the hymns he roars as he charges into battle have deamons clutching their bleeding ears.

'''Valicar "the Graven" Hyne. Marshal of the 6th Cohort'''

Unlike Marshal Drecarth Valicar makes no secret of his adherence to the Death Faith. Why should he? Why should he have to skulk in the dark and hide? This has not won him many friends in the faith who all agree that discretion has served them well since the Age of Strife. The rest of the Chapter just think he's a bit eccentric and the baseline Cadians just assume all augmented are like that assuming they haven't actually met a space marine before.

Despite the implications of his religion he is bombastic who loves the simple pleasures in life; pretty women, good food and fine ale also jetpacks and air assaults. If the battle can be met hurling out of a speeding aircraft it is a good day for Marshal Valicar. It is suspected that most of the 6th Cohort follow him out of morbid fascination.

'''Verzekh the Siege Engine. Marshal of the 7th Cohort'''

Thge only member of the Marshals to retain rank whilst interred in a Dreadnaught. Most Dreadnaughts become sleepy as a result of the pain killers and the mechanisms that keep them in half-life and this is not a good trait in a leader. Not so with old Verzekh. Whether by some incorrect implementation of his sarcophagus or a deviation in his brain Verzekh has not slept in over 1,800 years and so far seems to be suffering no ill effects. Attempts to duplicate this in others has had no notable effect.

He is armed with two power claws with under-slung meltas with which he has obliterated the defenses of hundreds of bunkers and fortifications and uncountable tanks. His personality since his internment has actually improved, if t he historical records are anything to go off of, Verzekh puts this down to the painkillers. Whatever the cause he has a very cheerful disposition. Favored method of warfare is the slow and unstoppable advance.

'''Kor Megron "Corpsemaker", Marshal of the 8th Cohort'''

Much repaired and cybernetically patched up, though not the extent of the Lord Commander, Marshal of the 8th. A fan of going fast and going hard. Bikes, land speeders, jet packs and anything else that can deliver high velocity death are his bread and butter. Standing still, he claims, makes you a target in a way that no additional fire power will compensate for. The rest of the chapter call him slightly manic, he calls them worse. In war as in life there is target, you get target fast, find another target, get other target, continue until target exhaustion or death. There is no stop, there is not slow until the job is done, to stop invites death.

The Cohort that he has assembled are all, like himself, lay-technicians. They need to be able to perform basic rituals of repair to their vehicles at a moments notice. To loose the momentum is to invite failure. Possibly exacerbating these traits is his knowledge that he is indeed dying, some poison of Dark Eldar design half real and half not flickering through his veins. He has maybe a few years at most left. Possibly this was supposed to debilitate him with despair or make him fearful, it has not. If anything it's made him far more dangerous in the time he has left.

'''Troskzer The Elder, Marshal of the 9th Cohort.'''

Old by the standards of near-immortals. Older than some of the younger dreadnaughts. Given the time distorting effects of warp travel and the amount of time he has traveled he isn't sure exactly how old he is. He was born in the year 998M40 but he could be as "young" as 850. Space Marine biology and rejuvenant treatments can only take you so far and he is approaching exactly as far as they can take him. What he has lost in strength and speed he has made up for in experience and animal cunning. He is without peer when it comes to the use of landscape and natural resources as a means of gaining an advantage. He can plan ambushes almost as well as the Lord Castellan and his ability to smell weakness is bordering on the unnatural. If you have a place where you are vulnerable he will find it and he will hurt you. He is patient and will fuck up your day at the most inopportune time. This combined with an inhuman ability to comprehend not just his battlefield but an entire planetary campaign makes him far more dangerous off the field of battle than on it. But he is a Space Marine, he will not be shamed by staying where it is safe.

Despite his seniority to his relief he was never considered for the job of Lord Commander. A Lord Commander has to have a sense of diplomacy and people skills. Troskzer has neither. He's a cantankerous, introverted, belligerent arsehole overly fond of sarcasm and seems to be staying alive just because it pisses people off.

'''Starkzahn, Marshal of the 10th Cohort.'''

Saviour of Darristen and ███████ █████████ ██████ ███ ██████ ██ ████████ ████ ███ █████████ ██████ ████████████ █████ ████. Know to have spent near thirty years in the Deathwatch and a further twenty five in the personal employ of a particular Inquisitor neither of which he will talk about. It is suspected that he has traveled and fought as far as the Eastern Fringe or at the very least near it as he is well versed in the teaching of Aun'Da, though it is unlikely that he will be able to convince his countrymen of the virtues of the Greater Good.

His method of waging war is a combination of movement and fire be it in the form of artillery or tactical squads that looks oddly familiar to anyone who has seen warfare in the Damocles Gulf.

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== Oficios and Adepta ==

=== The Assassins ===

<div class="toccolours mw-collapsible mw-collapsed" style="100%"> '''''Monsters Of Our Own Making:'''''

The Officio Assassinorum was one of the oldest arms of the Imperial Government, and its roots date back to the barbarity and cruelty of the Old Night. Perhaps it was fitting that, as the Warlord became the Steward and the Unification became the Great Crusade, the ancient orders of assassins were finally brought to heel and integrated into the Imperium proper.

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The Rebuke at Mount Vengeance is the common story of the Officio Assassinorum's founding. In those days, the young Imperium was mired in battles far and wide, but one particular front was facing opposition that none seemed able to counter. Here, commanding officers and vital figures were dying at an alarming rate, even in the safety of their rear areas; and although they were suspected to be the work of the enemy all of the deaths seemed to be of natural causes. The Warlord simply appointed new generals and ordered veteran bodyguards for the ones already in theatre, but in response his loathsome foes only grew bolder. Ever-more evidence of their activities was left behind, seemingly taunting the Imperium for their inability to protect their own; clean killings becoming vicious slaughters of officers and civilians alike. Commanders were found butchered in their headquarters with a single bodyguard left alive, usually little more than traumatised wrecks stammering about technological sorcery beyond that of the Warlord's Mechanicus allies.

Incensed at the atrocities inflicted upon his people, the Warlord made war on the Assassin Temples of the Salt Spires. Little is known about the Spires or mercenary, heartless Masters, for many archives of their history were lost in the anarchy of the War of the Beast (although this may well have been Vangorich's objective all along). The Warlord did the best to spread his own view - that the assassins were little but cowardly shadows who though they could behead the Imperium - but even his presence and words did little to bolster armies so plagued by fear and paranoia, and so he began using the antithesis of their own doctrine to plot their downfall. There were no grand offensives, no bold strikes, nothing that seemed major enough to warrant the assassins moving against it; yet suddenly they found their supplies of everything from ammunition to promethium - and most importantly, water - were perilously low. In their weakened state, the Temples knew they could not face the Warlord's forces, and so they came before him to seek treaty.

At Mount Vengeance, the Temple Masters met to offer peace to the Warlord.
At Mount Vengeance, they received his full scorn.
The Warlord was not content with their mere offer of fealty. For the atrocities the Masters inflicted on his people, for the lives they had taken, the Warlord would not be content with a glorified armistice. He gave them an offer of his own: total surrender, or total annihilation. That was their only choice.

Some of the Temple Masters, emboldened by hubris, unwisely struck the Warlord. They died. Some fled. They died, later. But on the mountain and around it - for many assassins had followed their Masters, perhaps out of loyalty or some morbid curiosity - others remained, bowing in total capitulation to the Warlord and the futility of resisting this god amongst men. For his part, the Warlord acted rather appropriately in that role, passing judgement on each Master and their assassins. Some were found guilty of crimes beyond forgiveness and were slain, often by their peers as a test of loyalty; others were granted the "clemency" of banishment into the salt wastes. Only one was judged pure enough to be worthy of leadership - and, as the new Grandmaster of Assassins, he was assured that the temples that surrendered would remain intact, albeit in service of the Imperium under the watchful eye of Malcador.

Thus was formed the Officio Assassinorum. Malcador was pleased with the Warlord's mercy; for it showed no amount of fury would blind him to true talent. A few thousand years later, the assassins proved that such talent brought risk, especially from those as secretive as the assassins.

In 546.M32, the Grandmaster of the Officio Assassinorum attempted to assassinate the High Lords of Terra. The Beheading, as it has since come to be know, was shrouded in mystery; with events restricted to the Imperial Palace, motive, means, and for some figures even identity have been lost to the shrouds of time. All that has survived to this day is that the Inquisitorial Representative, the Master of the Astronomicon, the Paternal Envoy of the Navigators, and the Fabricator-General of the Adeptus Mechanicus were all killed before the Steward was able to stop Grandmaster Vangorich's terror.

Naturally, many asked how Vangorich was able to get as far as he did. Perhaps the sheer scale of the events already taking place at the time (especially the rising threat of the Beast) was responsible, since it was the few periods in Imperial history where the High Lords were forced to abandon their usual backstabbing and power plays - that kept the Officios and Adepta in check - in favour of (relative) unity. However, others believe planning and preparation had taken decades, the timing an unfortunate consequence of Vangorich demanding so much care be taken to make the deaths of his fellow High Lords look like accidents.

All sources agree, however, that once his treachery was revealed Vangorich unleashed the assassins on the entire palace. The halls ran with blood of the highest Lords and the most lowly of servitors alike, yet there was one figure the assassins would not touch, ''could'' not touch, out of fear of what he had done to their forefathers: the Steward, who had vowed to personally put a stop to the killing spree desecrating the home of the Golden Throne. Vangorich, infuriated at the apparent incompetence of his underlings, took it upon himself to do the job they would not, attempting to slay the Steward with a vortex grenade as he emerged from his personal transport.

This went about as well as one would expect.

Even less is known about the outcome. Historians have waxed poetically about the Grandmaster facing an agonizing death, eternal torture, exile into the depths of the Webway with nothing but the clothes on his back, or any other number of tall tales. The most reliable account , however - attributed to the Captain-General of the Adeptus Custodes - states that the Steward simply broke Vangorich's neck as comfortably as one would a twig mere moments after his ill-advised attempt on the Steward's life.

For their part, the assassins were right to be fearful; for unlike their predecessors on Mount Vengeance the Steward gazed upon them with ''disappointment'' as well as fury. The Beheading had been undertaken by Vangorich, but the Steward noted with no small distaste that his orders had not been questioned by any under him. Malcador had managed to maintain the delicate balancing act between accountability and unflinching loyalty necessary in an organisation such as the Assassinorum, and without him it seemed the assassins were falling back on their bad habits.

Any other time he would have dismantled the Assassinorum's there and then, but the Steward was more concerned with reinforcing the wider Imperium against the coming onslaught of the Beast. In a time when every second was precious, the Steward could only set aside a day to scour the assassins' much-reduced ranks. Those found wanting of moral character were incinerated where they stood if they had acted on Vangorich's orders or pressed into a penal legion if they had not. One assassin that the Steward found was of solid loyalty and aided him in his purge of the temples, and they were declared new Grandmaster. The first decree they were to issue, however, was a warning - a warning to be spread through every temple, to every assassin from the depths of the Imperial Palace to frontline fighting against the Orks. A warning that, if the Steward was ever forced to intervene again, he would simply dissolve the Assassinorum instead of wasting more time on leniency.

Four thousand years later, the Steward was once again forced to intervene - although this time it was because of a crisis of his own making.

To her credit, the Grandmaster the Steward had put in place had served honorably, loyally, and carefully. Within the temples, long overdue reforms were undertaken, training formalised, and generations of assassins raised to revere the Imperium as a whole more than their temple. The Grandmaster, when she felt her time came, passed the title on to one she felt she could trust; and he continued her work, standardising material provisions and improving survivability. When he was lost in a warpstorm, his successor was well chosen, and worked to streamline chain of command and requisition. This continued, the Officio slowly evolving into an organisation capable of keeping up with the rapid changes of the galaxy, until the reign of Goge Vandire. Emperor Goge Vandire.

Goge Vandire was, initially, the ideal servant of the Imperium. Intelligent yet humble, decisive yet wise, he was familiar with all the intricacies of every part of the imperial government - save the assassins. Naturally, he was curious. At his first meeting with the High Lords of Terra, they each took their own oaths of loyalty and explained their roles. The, on the other hand, explained the history of the Beheading to the new Emperor, and explained why since then the Assassinorum always chose to swear loyalty to the wider Imperium instead of a particular individual. An explanation that would end up nearly tearing it apart.

"...hence, our loyalty is to the Golden Throne and its guardians rather than the one sitting upon it. A mere technicality, of course-" The Grandmaster offering a thin smile at this point, "-since I personally doubt we will ever receive liquidation orders from the archaeotech itself... but still."

The other High Lords had long ago learned not to question inner workings of the Assassinorum, while Emperor Vandire merely gave a hearty chuckle. They moved onto other, more pressing matters, and it appeared that that was the end of that. And it was, for the most part, but there was a small corner of Emperor Vandire's mind where those words echoed endlessly. "The Golden Throne and ''its guardians''," the Grandmaster had said, but it seemed clear to him that there was only one guardian that mattered; the one who had appointed him to the position in the first place. Over the years of Emperor Vandire's reign - too many hard decisions, too many threats to the Imperium from within and without, perhaps too many treatments of juvenat - the echo rose in his mind until it was deafening, a mild irritation over semantics growing into full-blown paranoia.

Of course they were faithful to the Imperium, but the hypocrites chose the Steward to venerate as a figurehead! Even in the Palace, his own home, all the oaths in the galaxy would not change the fact that each soul's allegiance lay with the Steward rather than himself. They only trusted him because the Steward trusted him, had appointed him. Oh, yes, his reign and countless years of selfless service were all very good and well appreciated, but they were all nought against those of that living god. Everything he did was overshadowed by that ''guardian;'' his words judged against the Steward's, his actions compared to those of the Steward, the ''Steward'', the '''''Steward''''', who was never more than a moment away from the lips of Vandire's own people; as if he had been usurped before he was ever appointed to the throne.

Still, Vandire was still as talented as he always was, and soon managed to find an assassin willing to aid him; a callidus by the name of Tziz Jarek. By that point he was in direct control of every aspect of the Imperium thanks to a thousand emergency powers and Imperial edicts; yet frustratingly, the Grandmaster remained steadfastly insistent on the stance that had tormented Vandire since their first meeting. Jarek, on the other hand, was simply angry with the Assassinorum's reforms, and made sure to stay well out of range of Vandire's spittle and foam when he began to rant - although over time she found herself believing in more and more of his firey rhetoric.

The assassination was textbook perfection; the Grandmaster's long list of security measures outdone by Jarek's longer-still list of fallbacks and contingencies. However, the lifeless corpse that was quietly fed into a plasma generator was only a body double of the Grandmaster - even as Jarek disguised herself with polymorphine and assumed the seat of Grandmaster of Assassins - had already made her getaway, rallying those loyal to her from Terra and beyond. With the Assassinorum now firmly under his thumb, Vandire used the shadowy assassins as another weapon with which to prosecute what was rapidly becoming a reign of terror; opponents political and military alike disappearing or found butchered in cruel and unusual manners.

When the reign of Emperor Vandire was coming to an end, he began to use his assassins more openly against rebel forces - and it was at that moment, when they emerged from the shadows, that the true Grandmaster struck. Jarek had used the forces of the Assassinorum masterfully, always knowing which figures to ''liquidate'' to maximise disorder and panic - yet she had no experience of the same tactics being used against her, and could do little but order her own assassins to focus on the new threat.

The resulting battles were devastating. Assassins loyal to Vandire and to the Grandmaster both used long-forgotten, forbidden technologies on the other side, for each was (rightly) convinced that the victory of the other would see them exterminated to the last. Gene-sympathetic nerve gases, neutronic warheads, entropic broadcasters, pan-chronal disruptors, and other terrors were all used; some dating back to the nightmare of the Old Night. These were the Wars of Vindication, and they would be repeated again and again from Terra to the furthest reaches of the Imperium as assassin turned against assassin to purge the ones they saw as traitors.

When the Steward finally returned to Terra from his self-imposted exile, the Temples were little more than smoking, hellish ruin. The palace, too, was scarred by battle; and there he found the Grandmaster - who pointed to her lifeless doppelganger and declared that the traitor was dead.

The Steward was unamused.

The Grandmaster offered her life by way of apology, and begged the Officio Assassinorum be spared. She knew all too well of the warning passed down from each Grandmaster to the next, and of the possibility of her and her own suddenly being abandoned by an Imperium that had no other place for them. For his part, the Steward was bitterly disappointed with Emperor Vandire's descent into madness - yet this time he could not truly fault what had historically been the most troublesome of the High Lords' domains. One Grandmaster had fought with unwavering loyalty for the Imperium, while the other had done so in the name of the Emperor. Perhaps he was a little ashamed of his own poor judgement, for he was merciful; the Grandmaster was allowed to disappear into exile, and the remnants of the Assassinorum were to return to Terra for their final judgment.

The Steward of the Golden Throne retreated into the Imperial Palace for the last time, and when the Emperor of Mankind emerged, first and final orders to the ancient Officio Assassinorum were as follows:

*All assassins were to be granted a window of clemency, where an amnesty would be offered regardless of allegiance. They were misled, but had still fought with ferocious loyalty to their superiors - against some of the best in the Imperium, no less. Any who ignored this opportunity would be declared outlaws of the Imperium of the Golden Throne, for both the Grandmaster and her doppelganger had kept close eyes on their respective assassins (lest they defect). Huge bounties were offered, of course, but the most sought-after reward was the opportunity for the hunter to take the place of the assassin they defeated, becoming one of the Imperium's shadowy elite.

*After the grace period, the Officio Assassinorum would be completely and utterly dissolved. The Temples would remain, but only as individual institutions with no power and little role; all masters would stripped of formal office and all survivors either absorbed into the reborn order: the Officio Tactitum. No more secret handshakes or shadowy meetings lit by incense, no unaccountable Grandmasters operating without question. Civilian control would slow the Tactitum, perhaps even hamstring it, but this was the price to be paid to avoid the mistakes of the past.

*Perhaps most importantly, the Ordo Securitas of the Inquisition would be formed to monitor not only the assassins but the other highest echelons of the Imperium. These Inquisitors would be the guardians of the guardians, watching each Officio and Adeptus for corruption and abuse, wary of another Vangorich or Vandire emerging.

*However, due to their power to render judgment of even the highest figures of the Imperium, the Sicarius were only permitted to advise and regulate, never taking direction - at least, in theory. In reality, many Securitas Inquisitors found rather...creative ways to circumvent the decree that they may not maintain "men under arms".

The Emperor had spoken, and these were his commands.

The Officio Tacitum is a far more modern organization nowadays. Though it primarily is still famed for its assassins, it also produces operatives specialised in sabotage and covert warfare far from home. They are often assigned to the command of the Astra Militarum or individual Inquisitors; and each lone assassin is still a finely honed killing machine, but they now serve as spectacular force multipliers rather as ends in themselves. The Ordo Sicarius is satisfied with this arrangement, as it avoids the high risk and cost of the traditional lone wolf operations, and allows them to keep an eye on any assassins deployed.

The Temples? They are far less superstitious and shadowy than they once were, although the name of "Temple" has stuck in defiance of every reform that has been attempted. Each of them has diversified yet maintained their core roots in their quest to perfect the art of murder.

Temple Vindicare, who reach out far longer than all but the highest of psykers to deliver their kiss of death.

Temple Venenum, who can find a thousand toxins to kill a man from the gentlest of paradise worlds, each one exquisite to the palette in their own unique way.

Temple Eversor, who can scythe through men, orks, eldar and even Astartes with the horrifying ease of a power sword through flak armour.

Temples Culexus - who hunt down their prey with soulless eyes - and Callidus, who have no face to call their own.

Temple Vanus, which according to popular belief ha[EXPUNGED]oes not exist. The Ordo Sicarius has confirmed this, and will not allow any dispute.

The primary headquarters of the Tacticum, including the Temples, lie on Terra, although across each segmentum there are localised, lesser temples that train assassins, liason with other Imperial Forces, and seek recruits from outside the Schola the Temples traditionally draw from. The Ordo Sicarius also work closely with segmentum command to permit proper coordination if Tacitum assets are needed, although on a smaller level they are surprisingly good at scouting talented assassin candidates. With proper Inquisitorial oversight, the assassins are kept well in check, and well out of politics.

The High Lords of Terra still has a seat for the Grandmaster of Assassins, but it has been left vacant ever since the reign of Emperor Vandire. Few imagine it will ever be filled again.

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=== Adeptus Astronomica ===

“''We are the ones who give of ourselves so that others may walk in the light''”<br>
-- Motto of the Adeptus Astronomica

Of all the professions available to psykers of the Imperial Schola, perhaps none is more honored than those of the Adeptus Astronomica. These are the people who make daily life in the Imperium possible with literally nothing more than their sheer force of will. The Astronomican represents one of the first major cooperative efforts between humanity and the Eldar. Although originally of human creation, its design was improved by the Eldar as a gift of gratitude for humanity’s participation in the raid on Nurgle’s mansion, greatly improving the efficiency of the Astronomican and strength of its beacon. Although original estimates based on the average ability of a human psyker suggested that twelve thousand people at once would be needed to power the beacon, Eldar modifications decreased the actual number of psykers needed by an order of magnitude, while drastically reducing the amount of stress on an individual psyker.

However, at the same time, no profession is more tragic than that of the Adeptus Astronomica. Creating a psychic “bonfire” that can be seen by the entire Imperium is taxing on the individual, even with twelve hundred other psykers to share the burden. As a result, the psykers of the Adeptus Astronomica are rotated out in shifts in an attempt to maximize their health, with a third of the choir being rotated out every four months. However, even this is not enough to prevent long-term damage. Few psykers live more than a year, and almost none have survived more than eighteen months. In the Halls of the Astronomican, right before one enters the Chambers of the Astronomican itself, there is a small, grassy courtyard, nearly empty save for a stele made of the hardest adamantium. On it is inscribed the names of every psyker who has died in the course of powering the Astronomican, a testament to their bravery so that the Imperium will never forget their sacrifice.

==== Origin of the Astronomican ====

''"Only humanity would think to solve the complex and intricate issue of interstellar travel by building a giant psychic bonfire"''<br>
-- Finarion, specialist bonesinger from Biel-Tan sent to examine the Astronomican, circa M31.

When the Great Crusade started, there wasn’t any need for an Astronomican. The Steward was a Man of Gold, originally designed to link human worlds together during the days of the Great and Bountiful Empire, and as a result was a fairly effective psychic landmark in his own right. Combined with the fact that the Imperium had access to the Void Borns’ maps and the knowledge of the relatively safe Warp currents, it was possible to reach many of the nearby systems using short (but very slow) warp jumps.

Having delegated most of the Legion running and Great Crusading to the primarchs, the Steward was free to try and figure out a long-term solution to the navigation issue. The Steward made no secret of this fact, and the primarchs didn’t complain about it because they themselves were starting to notice as they were getting further and further from Earth it was getting harder and harder to navigate. Indeed, some of the primarchs were actually trying to convince the Steward to stay on Earth, because if the Steward got killed it meant no Astropaths and the nascent Imperium would likely tear itself apart over succession crises. Especially after the Steward was taken by surprise and nearly killed by a super-Ork on the nascent Attack Moon of Gorro.

The Steward hit upon the idea of the Astronomican when the Imperium had at least several hundred worlds under its belt. He found that if he got the beacon started other psychics can maintain the “fire” but it would take a lot of them working together and they have to rotate in shifts. Thankfully the Imperium is big enough now to provide those numbers. Unfortunately while it wasn’t as dangerous at first as the Astronomican grew in response to the need from the Crusade it becomes increasingly lethal and difficult to handle. The warp-flow goes "lumpy" and the lumps are dangerous proportional to the size of the ‘flame” you are trying to generate. Given that the flame is bright enough to see across light years the lumps are pretty lethal.

When the alliance with the eldar happened the eldar sent their specialists to Old Earth as part of the deal with humanity to look at the thing. Then they back out of the hall slowly at the sheer insanity of what these mon-keigh were trying to do? The eldar started absorbing shock absorbers and buffering jars and shit to it, and the life span of resident psychics jumps dramatically. Nowadays maintaining the Astronomican is considered an actual job rather than a death sentence, albeit one with a greatly reduced quality and length of life even compared to baseline humanity. Eldar and human technicians continued to tinker with the Astronomican, adding more devices to it like lenses and spectrum filters. And that's where the Astronomican is at now. It can't be tweaked any more, having hit the hard upper limit on what is possible with a single, giant psychic lighthouse.

Theoretically and in hindsight it would have been easier to just make [[Imperium_Secundus#Mustering_Forces_to_Himself|a bunch of small lighthouses]] instead of one big one, similar to what the Great and Bountiful Human Empire did with the Men of Gold and likely what many other races did back during the Dark Age of Technology. Such devices would not only be more efficient but would greatly, though not entirely, reduce the issues with the potential lethality of the job. Unfortunately doing so would require resources that the Imperium doesn’t have, either in the form of Iron Minds/Men of Gold or psykers that are desperately needed by the big Astronomican on Old Earth. And it it not possible to simply put out the Astronomican and start over because the loss of the Astronomican, even temporarily, would be catastrophic for the Imperium.

=== Adeptus Sororitas ===

==== Rough Notes from the Threads ====
*Formed in the aftermath of the reign of Vandire and the Civil War along with the Ordo Securitas
*They receive some cybernetic and biological enhancements, putting them roughly on par with a Spartan from Halo
**A group of 3 Sisters is roughly equal to 1 Space Marine, winning about 5 times out of 10. However, the Marine has a significant advantage in melee due to much better physical attributes and the Sisters are encumbered by their Power Armor due to lack of a Black Carapace. To win, the Sisters would need to leverage numbers and teamwork.
*I believe we said they mostly operate with the Inquisition, though their organization and exact scope of duties is unclear/undiscussed at the moment.

==== Daughters of Russ ====

The Daughters of Russ, better known as the Valkyries, are a organization similar to the Adeptas Sororitas unique for only recruiting from Fenris and the Fenrisian colonies. The Daughters claim to be matrilineal descendants of Leman Russ via his many daughters, but given the size of Leman Russ' family and the amount of time that has passed since Russ came to Fenris, it is likely that everyone on the Fenrisian Worlds can trace their ancestry back to Leman Russ in some way.

The Daughters of Russ are best known for their ferocity. Although the Sororitas are well known for their aggression and their single-mindedness, the Valkyries fight with a viciousness that seems almost inhuman. In addition, the Valkyries also exhibit senses and other abilities that seem beyond standard Sororitas-level augmentation, leading some to suspect that the Sororitas enhancements either enhance the effect of the Canis Helix genes present in the general Fenrisian population or reawaken Canis Helix genes that were formerly dormant. Surprisingly, the Daughters are otherwise rather conservative for Sororitas, looking down on the sisterhoods who add additional augmentations like kill-glands. To the Valkyries, such additions mock and taint the skill of an individual in battle.

However, at the same time the Daughters are also well-known for their talents in medicine. The Valkyries have close ties with the Sisters Hospitalier, and often find themselves being sent to reinforce flagging battalions and save as many of the wounded as they can. It is these practices that led the first leader of the Daughters of Russ to say “it is our job to look Morkai in the eye and tell him, ‘you will not touch them today’”, which eventually became shortened into the motto of the order.

Editor's Note: Needs to be seen how they relate to Sororitas. Are they actual Sororitas, the female equivalent of Space Wolves, or what? It was pointed out that the concept is good, but they don't seem to function like the Sisters (as internal police).

=== Navis Nobilite ===

See [[Nobledark Imperium Writing#The Saga of Fedor Jiao|The Saga of Fedor Jiao]]

== Adeptus Mechanicus and its branches ==

=== Adeptus Biologis ===

<div class="toccolours mw-collapsible mw-collapsed" style="100%"> '''''Gene-wrights of M41:'''''

''Without metal man is a beast. Without flesh man is a tool.''<br>
-- Motto of the Adeptus Biologis

Despite being seen as just another branch of the Adeptus Mechanicus, the Adeptus Biologis actually has very different origins from the rest of the Mechanicus. Instead of being derived from the Martian Mechanicum, the Biologis were originally formed from the various geneticists and biotechnologists living in the territories that the Warlord conquered, including the gene-hippie conclaves of western Merika, the genesmiths of Ducht Jemanic, and the genewrights of Luna. The Biologis were eventually folded into the Mechanicus proper, and centuries of cultural and philosophical exchange have greatly reduced the differences between the two, but the group still retains its own unique quirks.

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

Today, the Adeptus Biologis performs a multitude of services throughout the Imperium. They travel to newly pacified worlds to make catalogs and studies of native flora and fauna. They study diseases and synthesize new medications to constantly try to beat back the plagues of Nurgle. They try to engineer more efficient versions of crops to feed the burgeoning Imperium. They often oversee augmentations of Space Marines and Sisters of Battle.

Perhaps the biggest difference between the Adeptus Biologis and most other divisions of the Adeptus Mechanicus is their stance on innovation. According to the Biologis, the Mechanicus’ prohibition on invention and innovation only applies to technology, not nature, a loophole the Biologis are happy to exploit. As a result, the Adeptus Biologis are much more willing to try new techniques than the Mechanicus proper, which is one reason why things like rejuvenant drugs and augmentation have improved over the centuries, even if it is only at a glacial pace. Of course, given that all of their equipment comes from the Mechanicus proper, the Biologis are often unable to build the kind of equipment they would like to use.

Another major difference between the Biologis and the rest of the Mechanicus involve physical augmentations. The Biologis are just as augment-happy as their brethren within the AdMech, but tend to prefer artificially engineered organs and genetically modified tissues over cybernetic implants. Even those Magos Biologis who do have mechanical implants often strive for a balance between flesh and metal, seeking to perfect the flesh before they involve the machine.

Like virtually every organization in the Imperium, the Adeptus Biologis can be broken up into a number of factions. The old rivalry between the gene-hippies and genesmiths is still there, only under different names. The Emergentists believe that artificial biological designs must be “balanced” as part of an integrated whole much like natural designs, and that the greatest parts of a design often emerge via interactions that are not forseen. By contrast, the Utilitarians believe the body is analogous to a machine, and must be treated as such. Any deviation from the perceived purity of a design is something not to be tolerated.

The Mechanicum, that is, the actual Mars-based organization who make up the majority of the Adeptus Mechanicus and primarily work with technology, do not like the Adeptus Biologis very much. They see the Adeptus Biologis as pretenders whose accouterments are little more than aping the Mechanicum of Mars. They see the aversion of the Biologis to cybernetic augmentations as an affront to the Credo Omnissiah. Nevertheless, they begrudgingly the Biologicus despite seeing them as lesser, much in the way scholars of the “hard sciences” looked down on biology prior to the Age of Strife. Perhaps this is one reason why, at some point in history, the Biologicus changed their apparel from dressing in robes of red to robes of dark green.

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=== 'Tech-Heresy' and its definition ===

See [[Nobledark_Imperium_Imperial_Society_and_Culture#Hereteks_and_the_nature_of_.22Tech-Heresy.22|Hereteks and the nature of "Tech-Heresy"]]

=== The Last Ditch ===

On Mars, there is a series of missile silos. They appear on no map, save in the personal files of the Fabricator General and his inner circle. Hardcopy, not digital. Nothing about them has ever been committed to cogitator. Their locations are concealed beneath layers of bureaucratic subterfuge; declared off- limits zones, patrolled by guards unaware of what they protect. Onion layers of lies await the curious; the suspicious might continue digging past the first lie, but the second? The third, the fourth?

The bunkers themselves are manned by unaugmented humans; none possess even the simplest augmetic. Perhaps the only such in the whole of the regular armed forces of the Mechanicus. Everything is done with the simplest possible technology; even electricity is used sparingly. Steam engines drive complex mechanical assemblies. Everything is designed with physical, manually- operated lockouts. Everything requires human action to operate. From the air or orbit they blend in perfectly with the environment.

Inside the silos, the crews are terribly isolated. Their only contact with the outside world is a single cable, through which the fire order will come. If it ever comes. None of them know of the purpose of their silo, or of the existence of the others. Each shift lasts a year at least. They play endless hands of cards, read books, and bullshit continuously. And wait for the order to come down. In ten thousand years it has not.

As for the missiles themselves? Vortex warheads. The largest concentration of vortex weaponry in the entire Imperium currently. Over a thousand of the weapons, each capable of felling cities and Titans. Enough firepower to scour a continent clean, to say nothing of the possibility of daemonic incursion.

Arranged in a loose ring around the Noctis Labyrinth.

This is but one of the contingency plans the Guardians of the Dragon have prepared.

==The Inquisition==

===The Ark Ship===

As part of their duty to keep the Imperium safe, members of the Inquisition are often forced to consider possibilities that would be unthinkable to the rest of the Imperium. Contingency plans for disasters on the scale of which most people would be unable to imagine. The Ark Ship is one such contingency.

The Ark Ship is one of the biggest secrets of the Inquisition and Mechanicus. What little information that has leaked out to the public has been hilariously exaggerated.

It is the final contingency plan. The ultimate Plan B. Activated only in the unthinkable event that the Imperium falls and the galaxy becomes uninhabitable by sentient life. Due to its nature and the implications of its construction, even as a contingency plan, knowledge of the actual ship has been suppressed for fear of causing a panic.

It's a highly modified Omnissiah class ship, modified to survive for thousands upon thousands of years at minimal power and activity. The captain is the one Inquisitor of Ordo Desolatus, held in stasis. It's cargo is rack upon rack of genetic samples and frozen embryos from every sapient species in the Imperium, from humans to Tau.

The crew are mechanically augmented up to the very edge of what is legally allowed before you start treading into A.I. territory. Metal can shut down cleanly and is far more efficient than flesh. The crew, like the captain, are in stasis.

If the Imperium falls it's orders are to take one of countless planned FTL escape-routes to the galaxy's edge, and burn hard into the intergalactic blackness, in hope of eventually rendezvousing with the escaping craftworlds at an outlying star-cluster to resupply and begin the longest journey.

==Imperial Navy==

===The Five Flagships===

''Phalanx''. ''Nicor''. ''Mirabilis''. ''The Rock''. ''Terminus Est''. These are names that are instantly recognized by any scholar of Imperial history, as well as feared throughout history by those who sought to do the Imperium harm.

The Five, often colloquially referred to as the “Five Big Bastards” after a comment made by primarch Rogal Dorn, were a series of massive super-dreadnoughts commissioned by the Imperium in the last days of the Unification of Sol and the early years of the Great Crusade. Each of these ships were roughly 25 kilometers long and bristled with conventional weaponry. The five ships were roughly comparable in size and shape, though the ''Phalanx'' was perhaps a little larger and a little more heavily-armed than her sisters. In addition to newly constructed material mined from the Sol system, the Five were also constructed from the recycled remains of the numerous scattered shipwrecks throughout the Sol system (many of which came to the attention of the Imperium at the suggestion of the primarch Horus), making them packed full of whatever Dark Age-era technology could be salvaged from the wreckage.

The original construction of the Five was intended to be a show of solidarity between the newly unified nations of Sol. The ships were to be commissioned by the newly named Steward of Earth, constructed by the Mechanicum of Mars in the shipyards of Luna, and would be crewed by the Void Born of the Sol migrant fleet. However, become of the time and resource-intensive nature of their construction, only two of these ships, the ''Rock'' and the ''Phalanx'', were ready by the beginning of the Great Crusade. The ''Rock'' was sent out as the flagship of the Imperium's first expeditionary fleet helmed by the Dark Angels, whereas the ''Phalanx'' remained in the Sol system to act as a deterrent to any potential force that would threaten Mars and Old Earth. Construction of the remaining three, the ''Nicor'', ''Mirabilis'', and ''Terminus Est'', was not completed until much later in the Great Crusade, when the resources of additional systems could be brought to bear on their completion.

The Five were intended to be a long-term investment. In addition to building ties of unity between the major factions of Sol, the Five were meant to be a show of strength on the part of the nascent Imperium to the greater galaxy. The huge size of the Five meant that their internal workings could support much larger than average hydroponic bays, which meant they could function away from the Imperium for long periods of time without resupplying and be largely self-sufficient if they were ever cut off from Imperial supply chains. This made the ''Rock'' the ideal flagship to send out with the expeditionary fleet. Eventually, the plan was for the Five to be sent to the far corners of the galaxy, one for each major Segmentum, to act as flagships and command centers for the Imperial Navy. The ''Phalanx'', ''Rock'', ''Terminus Est'', ''Nicor'', and ''Mirabilis'' were to be sent to Segmenta Solar, Obscurus, Pacificus, Tempestus, and Ultima, respectively. Unfortunately, random chance and the whims of history ended up scuttling this plan. Although originally constructed as part of a set, each of the Five suffered dramatically different fates.

The ''Rock'' was infamously stolen by the arch-traitor Luther during the Chaos of the War of the Beast, only to be reclaimed by the loyalist Dark Angels after the Lion's final battle with his brother. Luther had not had his hands on the ''Rock'' long enough for it to be irrevocably tainted by Chaos, and the Dark Angels were able to repurpose the battleship for their own uses. To this day, the ''Rock'' remains the mobile headquarters of the Dark Angels chapter.

The ''Phalanx'', although heavily damaged in the War of the Beast, remains as it always has in the Sol System, an old guard dog ever-ready to fight those that would threaten the capital of the Imperium. Its [[Nobledark_Imperium_Writing#Ork_Diplomacy|legendary ramming action]] that repelled the Beast's attack planet Ullanor during the War of The Beast obliterated much of the original ship, as the relativistic impact vaporized almost all of the Phalanx, with only relatively small parts of the drive superstructure remaining attached to the ship's neutronium ramming prow and keel, which was later recovered from a highly elliptical orbit around Sol. Any conventional matter, including the body of Pius, would have been vaporized on impact, but neutronium is made of tougher stuff. The Phalanx was rebuilt from around this neutronium keel, missing many of the archaeotech systems originally contained within its frame but [[The_War_of_The_Beast#The_Fist_of_the_Imperium|the keel was enough of a plank in the ship of Theseus to claim continuity with the original ship]]. The Imperium doesn't like to take defeat lying down.

The ''Mirabilis'' remains active in the galactic East, still acting as a flagship of the Imperial Navy rather than commanded by any chapter of the Adeptus Astartes, perhaps the only one of the Five along with the Phalanx that is still performing the job the Imperium intended for it. However, the Ultima Segmentum is nearly an order of magnitude larger than any other part of the galaxy, and there is little the ''Mirabilis'' can do beyond putting out fires.

The ''Nicor'' fought valiantly for many years, but was presumed lost in the aftermath of the [[Nobledark_Imperium_Drafts#Second_Black_Crusade|Second Black Crusade]]. In late M40, the Carcharodons found the carcass of the ''Nicor'' floating out in the middle of the Segmentum Tempestus, and after much friction with the rest of the Imperium refurbished it into their new headquarters. Although the ''Nicor'' is probably capable of void combat once more, the Carcharodons prefer to keep it in a strategic location in the galactic South to act as a central base from which they can coordinate their attacks. Ironically, the ''Nicor'' in some ways is performing the job it had always been intended to do in the first place, striking fear in the hearts of any who would threaten the Imperium in the Segmentum Tempestus.

The ''Terminus Est'' served the Imperium through more military campaigns than any other member of the Five. After being sent to take back the Segmentum Pacificum when the Imperium set out to reclaim the Segmentum, the ship was commandeered in the aftermath of the war by Typhus the Pilgrim, who made it into the mobile headquarters of his breakaway chapter the Black Templars. For six millennia, the ''Terminus Est'' was a constant presence on the western front of the Imperium. Much like the Black Templars themselves, the ''Terminus Est'' was forever marching to war, never resting, never stopping, almost seeming to have an indefatigable personality of its own. If there is any truth to the Mechanicus' claim that ships have machine spirits, there is perhaps no better argument in support of this idea than the ''Terminus Est''.

However, no ship can fight forever. In late M38, the ''Terminus Est'' finally broke down after back-to-back fighting in an Armageddon War and putting down an assault on Necromunda. The ''Terminus Est'' managed to limp its mass to high Necromundan orbit before tidal forces tore the ship apart. Today, the ''Terminus Est'' is the closest thing the Black Templars have to a static headquarters. Like the ''Nicor'', the Templars claim the ''Terminus Est'' might have a few more battles in her, but so far none have been willing to put that claim to the test.

===Blade of Luna===

The Blade Of Luna is one of the first in a series of modified Mars-class battlecruisers equipped with oversized engines, the sensor networks of an Emperor-class battleship, and cutting edge vox warfare systems. Recently built by the shipyards based around Luna, not the orthodox masters of Mars, it is designed to serve as a support ship maintaining inter-fleet communications and tracking enemies for improved battlefield awareness.

This description vastly oversimplifies their role. While rebels and pirates who barely know how to keep a stolen ship's anti-gravity working are little threat to the pirate-extermination forces that a ship of this type would lead, the Crone Eldar, Necrons, Olamic Quietude, and Dark Mechanicus, to name the most infamous, all have their own foul brand of technosorcery.

Daemonic scrap-code can cut power to point defense arrays just long enough to let a barrage of boarding pods bite into the hull, secure encryptions can be cracked in milliseconds by machinery powered by broken star gods, crucial orders can be lost under a tidal wave of jamming signals, augurs that previously tracked micrometeorites from one end of the solar system to the other suddenly lose their visuals; the list goes on. The Imperial Navy has learned its bloody lessons over ten thousand years of war, and its more technically-minded factions are the inheritors of practices fine-tuned prior to the Dark Age of Technology.

Hence the limited production run of ships like the Blade Of Luna, testbeds for the latest electronic warfare systems to serve as sword and shield against the Imperium's enemies. Her higher decks are packed with banks of compartmentalized, EMP-shielded cogitators and consoles, each linked to a backup battery in the event the redundant power couplings to the Generatorium fail in battle. Augur arrays normally found only on the Emperor-class battleship cover the Blade Of Luna in a thin forest of sensor spars and domes, and in concert with the cogitators enable the ship's Techpriests to tune out false positives and home in on elusive cloaked enemies. Gellar fields, hexagrammatic wards, and crude automations of machine exorcism are present to fend off the more daemonic varieties of scrap-code. There are other technologies that are not so enthusiastically discussed by the rather open-minded Mechanicus builders, but they have risen to meet the monumental challenges of those who would challenge the Omnissiah's vessels of war.

===Deep Field Recon===

Knowledge of its many enemies is vital to the Imperium's survival, and quite hard to come by. Oh, you can learn some things on the battlefield. Weapons and tactics. But this is far, far from a complete picture. It tells you nothing of their logistics, of their politics, of their inner minds, of the deep knowledge needed to strike at the heart of an entire civilization. Fighting on the battlefield tells you how to fight on the battlefield, but not how to craft grand strategy.

Channels for gaining this deep knowledge are few. It is impossible to infiltrate the Silent Court, and there is no gossip there; likewise a tyranid cannot be bribed to turn against the Swarm, and even the smallest bribes in Shaa-Dome are far too horrible to pay. There is no trade with the Orks, and an embassy in Commorragh would be nothing but a buffet table. Listening in on the psychic conversations of the Crones is actively hazardous to the listener's health, and no bug could tap into the inner thoughts of gods. All the tricks human nations have used to spy on each other since time immemorial are useless against the vast majority of the Imperium's foes. But ignorance is not an option.

Thus, the Deep Field Recon squadrons.

The Deep Field Recon squadrons are one of the few methods the Imperium has for investigating the inner reaches of enemy territory. Deep Field Recon ships are made to be as stealthy as possible, typically mounting multiple forms of concealment. Reflex shields and eldar holo-fields are standard, as are various forms of passive stealth such as low-signature engines and auspex- baffling plating. Some are equipped with more exotic devices still, archeotech and xenotech cloaking devices salvaged from the far corners of the galaxy. An (un)lucky few bear psychic choirs on board, actively diverting the attention of possible searchers away.

The design of any two ships are often dissimilar; due to the incorporation of xenotech in the design, the main body of the Mechanicum refuses to construct them. Thus, their creation is left to the heterodox and other member states; the Hubworld League, the Eldar, the Interex, and increasingly the Tau.

With these techniques, they dive deep into the sanctums of the enemy, gathering information, inserting and extracting commando teams, and striking targets of opportunity. The Deep Field Recon squadrons are a vital part of anti-Ork efforts, providing forewarning of rising WAAAGGHHs and delivering kill- teams to eliminate rising Warbosses. Others ghost through the Silent Empire, mapping tombworlds, counting World Engines, and watching for any preparations for an attack. (This is one of the highest- mortality duties among in Deep Field Recon; the Silent Empire guards its borders jealously, and its reserves of techno- sorcery are vast and deep.) There are even rumors of ships covered in hexagrammatic wards operating under the auspices of the Alpha Legion, plunging into the Eye of Terror itself to strike at the Great Enemy in its lair.

Life in the Silent Service is frequently nerve- wracking. By the nature of their missions, they sped their time deep in enemy territory far away from any possible reinforcements. Often for years on end, as they slowly assemble a complete picture of enemy numbers and capabilities from telescope pictures and stray vox- chatter. At the same time, it is often quite boring, drifting through space with everything but stealth systems and passive sensors powered down, watching an enemy with no idea of their presence. When hunting, the nature of the wait and tension changes as they slowly glide towards their targets, moving into position for a single kill- shot and hoping their exit route remains clear.

Deep Field Recon squadrons usually operate under the auspices of the Inquisition. Typically, they are attached to various Watch Fortresses keeping an eye on specific threats or regions of space. Most Recon ships operate with an Inquisitor, or at least an Interrogator, on board, specializing in the specific threat the ship is operating against. Many Inquisitors use vessels of similar design as their personal vehicles, even if not specifically on Deep Field Recon duties; the class is well- suited to Inquisition duties generally.

There are few Deep Field Recon vessels. Due to the exotic equipment and demanding tolerances of the class, they are difficult to build; only a few thousands exist at any given time. But, in enemies of the Imperium ambushed and destroyed, and even more in vital knowledge gathered, each is worth ten times its number in conventional vessels.

== Eldar-Only Forces ==

=== Handmaidens of Isha ===

Just as it is the job of the Adeptus Custodes to protect the Emperor of Mankind and his wife, it is the job of the Handmaidens of Isha to protect the Grand Empress Isha and her husband. The Handmaidens of Isha are the Eldar side of the Imperium's praetorian guard, drawn from the ranks of her most devout followers in the cults that sprung up in her wake following her rescue from Nurgle's mansion. Compared to many other followers of Isha, the blessings of the Handmaidens are rather subtle. Little more than an immunity to virtually all diseases and a seeming inability to sustain permanent damage from scaring or age. This allows the Handmaidens to perfect their physical training in a way that only one who does not have to worry about wear and tear on their body can. The Handmaidens are no pushovers, being armed with swords known as "the Thorns of Isha" that can inflict wounds that do not heal. The Handmaidens are also noted to have a connection to Isha that borders on the preternatural, able to sense if their charge is in direct danger even if they are unable to see her directly.

However, the Handmaidens of Isha have an another job in addition to protecting their Empress. As the Imperial Couple travels from world to world, the Empress often sends her handmaidens to inspect the world beforehand to ensure that the world is as upstanding as it often claims to be. Although many worlds have their own dirty little secrets that they have managed to keep secret from the Administratum, few can hide from the gaze of the All-Mother. Although the Adeptus Custodes are also often posted in Imperial society to keep watch for potential threats against the Emperor and Imperium, most of them are incapable of doing so without drawing attention to themselves. The Handmaidens of Isha, on the other hand, are capable of passing themselves off as just another Eldar or even avoiding notice altogether. Because the two groups have essentially the same job, they often end up directly cooperating with one another.

=== The Avatar of Khaine ===

See [[Nobledark_Imperium_Notable_People#Khaine|Khaine]]

==== The Avatar of Biel-Tan ====

Biel-Tan hasn't deployed an Avatar of Khaine for nearly one hundred years. This wouldn't be surprising for a lesser craftworld, or a craftworld that is peaceable, but this is Biel-Tan. The most well known, influential, and martially famous craftworld. That Khaela Mensha Khaine hasn't made an appearance in a year, much less a near century would provoke suspicion.

However, among the eldar, it's considered a bit of a faux pas to ask about this. The Inquisition is another matter entirely though, and they already know the answer.

Biel-Tan's avatar has been awake this entire time. Biel-Tan summoned the avatar for the Ghoul Campaign, to help a desperate sword wind against a siege of orks with daemon support. The avatar of war led the survivors, many wounded, to victory against the orks, culminating in the avatar decapitating the bloodthirster Yel'Grazruk shattering the spirit of the enemy. The sword wind rejoiced.

Then they noticed the avatar wasn't gone. It had followed the fleeing enemy, and was killing as many as it could reach. The next day, the avatar was still killing. On the fifteenth day, it ran out of enemies to kill, and came back, planted its sword at the center of the biel tan fortification, and waited.

After the twentieth day, the Biel-Tan forces found themselves very worried indeed. The burning avatar still smoldered, glaring out at the horizon. In the face of their persistent god, finally they attempted to psychically contact the avatar, a hazardous venture for even the most skilled warlock.

After the warlock stopped chanting in a dead language, she managed to sputter out "Khaine waits for his chariot." No one knew what that referred to. But when the autarch ordered the sword wind back to Biel-Tan, the avatar followed, marched through the craftworld, and returned to his temple, still burning.

The avatar has sat there since, waiting for his chariot.

===Craftworld Armor===
The Craftworld Eldar military forces are descended from, essentially, civic militia. Thus, their war machines were optimized for ease of construction, ease of maintenance, and ease of piloting; war machines a part-time non-professional volunteer force could use and maintain. The aftermath of the Fall, when the survivors were thrown back onto highly limited resources and the whole population had to be mobilized to survive, only reinforced this paradigm. 10,000 years of Imperium have loosened it; the number of super-heavy vehicles in the Craftworld arsenal has increased both in absolute number and proportion as more resources become available. Likewise, more specialist designs for specific battlefield roles have become commonplace as the need for every tank to potentially fill every role lessens. Still the typical Craftworld grav-tank remains a stripped-down (in terms of mechanical complexity, not necessarily weight) generalist.

== Tau Empire ==

=== Mont'Kau Battlesuits ===

<div class="toccolours mw-collapsible mw-collapsed" style="100%"> '''''Front-Line Defenders of the Greater Good:'''''

[[Image:Mont%27kau_Battlesuit.png|thumb|]]

As the Tau first expanded from their cradle of civilization on T’au into the greater galaxy, they began to realize that many of their opponents, including orks, tyranids, Space Marines, and more, were devastatingly effective in close-quarters combat. Although the Tau personally avoided melee combat whenever possible, they realized that many of their opponents were not going to do them a favor and do the same. The Tau would have loved to use their auxillaries to make up for this deficiency, but among their close allies only the kroot were well-suited for close combat and there were far more Tau regiments than there were kroot to go around.

As a result, at the behest of O’Shovah (Commander Farsight) back before the Schism, the Tau Empire decided to solve this problem by building bigger, more durable versions of the Crisis battlesuit specifically designed for melee combat. It has been suggested that O’Shovah was inspired to pitch his idea when he realized that battlesuits could be used to compensate for the Tau’s smaller physical stature and reluctance to engage in melee combat against foes such as Orks and Space Marines, but the Tau vehemently deny this is the case. Unlike most battlesuits, which were designed as mobile platforms for heavy ranged weaponry, these suits were designed for close quarters combat. These suits often carry guns, like all Tau battlesuits, but more often than not these tend to be close-range weapons like shotguns or tend to be a melee weapon first and foremost like a giant bayonet to which attaching an actual gun is an afterthought. The Tau called them Mont’kau Battlesuits, named after a particularly terrifying species of predator from their homeworld of T’au. To the rest of the Imperium, who lacked the appreciation for the intricacies of the Tau language, these suits simply became known as Predator Battlesuits.

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Compared to a Space Marine or an Aspect Warrior, Mont’kau battlesuits aren’t as particularly agile in close-quarters combat (lacking the Black Carapace of a Space Marine or the flesh and blood agility of an Eldar), but like all Tau battlesuits they are lightweight for their size and, more importantly, easily replaceable. The purpose of the Mont’kau battlesuits is not to serve as shock troops, but to act as a bulwark to keep the close combat forces of the enemy away from the firing line. Mont’kau battlesuits are typically piloted by battlefield veterans, ones who are used to the chaos of battle and have fast enough reflexes to fight on the front lines. As a result, although melee combat is still the Tau’s biggest weakness, at least the Tau now have an answer to the numerous close-combat specialists that dominate the galactic landscape, and are not a complete joke about it. Nevertheless, the Tau claim that they are continually improving on the Mont’kau design, and that one day the Mont’kau battlesuits will be the equal of the front line combatants of the other major races.

One common addition to Mont’kau battlesuits is an outer layer of explosive reactive armor, made of an alloy similar to but more brittle than the traditional fio’tak, which is designed to fragment into a spray of ceramite-like shrapnel. This reactive armor can either be used to provide additional protection against anti-personnel ranged attacks or be command-detonated to act like a makeshift claymore mine. These reactive armor plates are actually capable of being added to a wide-variety of battlesuits, but are most often associated with the Mont’kau battlesuits due to their role in close combat. These additions, along with the directed flechette grenades that are now a common component of Tau infantry gear, were largely devised as contingencies against the Dark Eldar, whom the Tau held a particular hatred for after their repeated raids of the Tau Empire in the wake of the A.I. rebellion, the Tau Reformation, and the vanguard Hive Fleets. To the Dark Eldar, for whom speed was their primary protection, such devices would prove lethal.

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== Interex ==

=== Sagittars ===

<div class="toccolours mw-collapsible mw-collapsed" style="100%"> '''''A Fusion of Man and Machine:'''''

Although mankind had experimented with quadrupedal walking machines as early as M3, the use of these machines in warfare would not come into their own until much later, reaching their peak just before and during the Age of Strife. The separation of the myriad worlds of the Great and Bountiful Human Empire during the Age of Strife resulted in each human world developing its own unique way of coping with the adverse conditions of the period, leading to an explosion of new technologies and new adaptations of old ones. Among these new weapons were the sagittars, a term used to both refer to the quadrupedal walking and the people who rode them, developed by the Interex of the Segmentum Pacificus. Although originally designed as scouts and heavy cavalry, sagittars would quickly become the backbone of Interex ground warfare.

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Sagittars are primarily controlled by their rider, who neutrally link to their mount in order to operate their mechanical limbs and onboard armory as if the machine was an extension of themself. Because of this, it often takes several years for a sagittar rider to fully learn how to control their machine’s limbs as if they were their own. When riderless, the robotic portion of the sagittar is controlled by an extremely simple artificial intelligence (about as simple, if not moreso, than those seen in Legio Cybernetica constructs), capable of standing still, returned to the rider’s side when commanded, or seeking cover in case of a firefight, and not much else. It is only when linked to their rider that a sagittar is capable of more complex action.

In addition to serving as a mobile mount, sagittars also function as a mobile armory for their rider. The rear portion of the mount contains a number of weapons, which can be switched between as needed. The most common weapon used by the Interex is the magnetic bow, which consists of a magazine of two foot long spikes attached to a pair of arms, each of which contained a pair of electromagnets. When the weapon is fired, a current is sent through the bow accelerating the projectile to velocities sufficient enough to penetrate ceramite armor. Adjusting the arms of the bow to be closer or further from the main barrel increases or decreases the power, accuracy, and recoil of the shot. Skilled riders can even turn their bodies around 180 degrees while retreating to fire parting shots while their mount runs away from the battle. The armory will also contain lances, swords, or electrified throwing lances for other tasks. If an enemy attacks too fast for the rider to grab a weapon, the sagittar can strike out at its foe by kicking with its hydraulic legs.

In some ways, Interex sagittars act as highly mobile infantry as opposed to cavalry. Sagittars are stronger than a baseline human footsoldier, but their primary advantage over other elite troops such as Astartes and Aspect Warriors is their extreme mobility. Although sagittars can fight in traditional cavalry charges, the near ubiquitous presence of ranged weapons in the galaxy makes this a near-suicidal endeavor. Instead, the Interex use the superior mobility of their sagittars to outflank and outmaneuver slower opponents. This fit well with the general Interex policy of war, which was to dictate where and when a battle would occur under conditions that favored the Interex in order to minimize casualties on both sides. Although not as fast as an assault bike, under good conditions a sagittar can travel at speeds of up to 60 kilometers per hour, and unlike flesh-and-blood mounts, sagittars do not get tired. Sagittar legs are also well-built to traveling over uneven terrain, as opposed to horses.

Because the sagittar’s mounts are an extension of themselves, rather than a separate animal, sagittars do not suffer from many of the typical weaknesses of biological cavalry. A sagittar cannot be startled as easily as a horse can, because the only way to startle a sagittar is to startle the rider. However, sagittars do have some weaknesses. Because the rider of a sagittar has to be able to turn around to access the onboard armory, the armor has to be relatively light and flexible around the waist, making it a weak point. Since contact with the Imperium, the Interex have created models with heavier armor and more powerful weapons, but have never been able to fully eliminate this weakness. Additionally, because the rider sits above the fray of the battle, in close-combat conditions where the sagittar is unable to exploit its greater mobility, the same height that allows the sagittar to pick and choose its targets on the battlefield makes them an easy target for snipers or other high-powered ranged weaponry. If the legs are damaged, it is often possible to kill the rider before they can eject from their sagittar. Finally, and most importantly, although sagittars are good at offensive actions and hit-and-run attacks, they are not as effective when they are forced to stand and fight, whether they are forced into a position in which they cannot retreat or need to fortify and protect an objective. In the past, this is often when the Interex would call in the Kinebrach to supplement their sagittars as shock troopers. Today this role is generally filled by other forces.

However, sagittar usage has never really caught on outside of the Interex and a few associated territories for a variety of reasons. First, sagittars occupy a rather awkward place in Imperial Tactics, being more expensive and more difficult to replace than flesh-and-blood cavalry such as horses, yet too slow for tactics used by heavy cavalry such as assault bikes and jetbikes. In some parts of the Imperium highly orthodox Mechanicus adepts will refuse to construct parts for sagittars, considering their machine spirits too close to A.I. for comfort (as they do the Legio Cybernetica), and since this simple intelligence is required for sagittar function sagittars are not made. Finally, sagittar fighting involves mastering an unusual set of tactics, including the ability to rapidly retreat and regroup from the battlefield when it becomes necessary. This is very different from typical Imperial tactics, particularly the Cadian doctrine, the most commonly followed military doctrine in the Imperium, which primarily focuses on the defense and holding of territory, with aggressive action being taken primarily through artillery barrages. Sagittar fighting thus requires a very different mindset than is typically found among Imperial forces, one that is found only in groups such as the Armageddon Outriders or the inhabitants of the Pastoral Worlds. Nevertheless, a well-trained sagittar battalion is still a welcome sight for an Imperial commander on any battlefield.

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== Hubworld League (Squats) ==

=== Destroyermen ===

<div class="toccolours mw-collapsible mw-collapsed" style="100%"> '''''Heavy Infantry of the Hubworld League:'''''

Destroyermen are the heavy infantry of any squat army. The concept of Destroyermen originally derived from the squat custom of having people who would risk their lives as the first ones to enter an unexplored cavern or mine shaft to see if it was safe to enter. Despite being clad in the best protective gear available, this work was extremely dangerous, as evidenced by the casualty rate, but at the same time it paid extremely well. However, being mostly socialists, a squat clan would often not waste all of the earnings on themselves. Instead, they would put into upgrading and improving the protective suit, making it more likely that the individual performing this job would keep coming back intact. This bizarre method of technological natural selection went on for millennia, until eventually most squat colonies had numerous sets of masterwork craft powered armor scattered among various clans. From there it was a simple leap to go from using this armor for checking for gas pockets and occasional hostile xenos to using them in open warfare against threats like Orks. Destroyermen are often the “tip of the spear” in squat armies, fighting in areas where casualties are likely to be high. Destroyerman armors have often been in squat families for generations, and the living clan members are fiercely protective of them, seeing them as emblems of their clan’s glory and heritage.

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

Like most squat technology, the concept of Destroyermen and Destroyermen suits was developed during the Age of Isolation, the period in which the Hubworld League was cut off from contact with the majority of humanity. Destroyerman armor is often referred to as the little brother of Space Marine terminator armor, and there is a grain of truth to that statement. Destroyerman armor and Terminator armor actually spring from a common source, the environmental hazard suits used for working in hard vacuum or mining in inhospitable conditions during the Dark Age of Technology. However, whereas Terminator armor was retrofitted for military usage and has been increasingly refined for combat over millennia, Destroyerman armor is much more sedate. This is in part because Destroyermen were never expected to see combat on the level that most Space Marine do, and in part because the ability to efficiently manufacture some of the higher end devices for the armors (like teleporters) was lost during the Age of Strife. In general, Destroyerman armor is more geared towards making sure the wearer and the armor survives rather than making a more efficient killing machine like Terminator armor. There is also the issue of the armor wearer. Although the armor may be high quality, the person inside the armor is still only human, lacking the genetic modifications typical of Space Marines or Sisters of Battle (particularly the Black Carapace of the former) and limited what a Destroyerman is capable of.

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=== Desperados ===

Desperados are the scouts of the Hubworld’s military. Typically drawing their ranks from the young and impetuous members of Hubworld society, desperados are typically hotheaded and eager to make their name. When on duty, desperados spend most of their time on the outskirts of Hubworld society, traversing the planet in search of undiscovered mineral lodes, making sure the machinery that keeps the hold functioning is still intact, and even acting as ranchhands on the few worlds in the Hubworld league capable of supporting grox herds. Desperados most typically ride jet bikes, which have the easiest time traveling over the geologically unstable surface of many worlds of the Hubworld League, but wheeled vehicles are not uncommon. The Hubworld League has the largest collection of human made jet bikes in the Imperium, lovingly passed down family lines for generations. However in times of war desperados find themselves conscripted into Hubworld military actions, acting as raiding parties, scouts, and light skirmishers. Other, better-trained forces serve as more dedicated mechanized cavalry combatants.

=== Hubworlder Land Trains ===

Not all planets are so lucky as to have a breathable atmosphere, tolerable levels of radiation, and stable tectonic activity. The people of the Hubworld League near the galactic core know that better than most, many of their worlds being near the galactic core and therefore under constant upheaval from tidal flexing in the gravitational pull of a gas giant, pulsar, or the core of the Milky Way itself. On many worlds, it is not even possible to build the traditional bunker-like fortresses favored by Hubworld architects. Instead, the primary form of squat habitation is in the form of Land Trains.

Land trains were originally developed on less hostile worlds, designed as caravans to bring raw ore and other goods between major settlements. However, on less stable worlds, land trains have been refitted to become settlements in and of themselves, ballooning in size to encompass populations of entire cities. These types of trains are typically found on less tectonically stable worlds and often contain large amounts of mining equipment, allowing Hubworlders to mine the ores that drive their civilization while still being able to move out of the way of newly formed fissures and tectonic rifts

Many who see Hubworlder land trains draw parallels with trains on other worlds. The comparison is better in some ways than others. A better comparison might be an armored trade caravan, albeit one with treads and an ability to mine its own raw materials. Hubworlder land trains are formed by linked cars, but they do not follow tracks. After all, on these worlds sedentary or semi-permanent structures are a death sentence. Instead, land trains have treads, allowing them to climb even on highly angled surfaces.

As with almost every piece of technology they developed, the Hubworlders soon found that it was easy to repurpose their caravans for war. Armored sides designed to shrug off micrometeorite impacts and stellar radiation are equally well suited to deflect enemy fire. And the large size of the trains makes them ideal not only for troop housing and transport, but supporting truly massive weaponry, potentially making them armored juggernauts when used correctly.

[[category:Nobledark Imperium]]

Nobledark Imperium Imperial Forces

2020-09-01T19:21:39Z

2601:647:CA01:2410:443E:B2AA:ECA7:511A: /* The Ark Ship */

'''This page is part of the Nobledark Imperium, a fan re-working of the Warhammer 40,000 Universe. See the [[Nobledark Imperium|Nobledark Imperium Introduction]] and [[Nobledark Imperium|Main Page]] for more information on the alternate universe'''

TO DO:
*Finish arguments over how the military is structured
== Imperial Guard ==

=== Standard Imperial Tactics ===

Standard Imperial infantry composition is to field a battalion of Imperial Guardsmen combined with a detachment of Eldar Guardians as auxiliaries. Unlike previous mixed-forces regiments throughout galactic history this arrangement tends to work rather well, because unlike these previous combined regiments both sides feel fairly safe that the other side isn't going to shoot them in the back. Both groups can and do fight on their own, but work spectacularly together. In theory, the regiment structure works by Imperial Guard forces taking the brunt of the enemy fire, and the Eldar acting as flankers. In practice, the more fragile, but heavier-hitting Eldar like this arrangement because it means they won't be the primary targets of enemy fire, whereas the Imperial Guard like this arrangement because even though they start out taking brunt of the blow, the Eldar auxiliaries will tear through enemy forces fast enough that they never become the targets of focus fire. As with everything in the Imperium, this varies from world to world. Specialist forces like Catachans, Kriegers, Harlequins, or Aspect Warriors function differently, and follow their own rules.

If there is any weakness to this arrangement, it's that Eldar and humans tend to only take orders from their respective species, which causes there to be two people in charge of a given regiment. If the two commanders can't come to an agreement, the army sputters, which can lead to one or the other going in alone.

After the Tau Empire was absorbed into the Imperium, Imperial commanders were eager to try to incorporate Tau Fire Warriors into this formation. The Imperium had seen how effective the Tau were at long-ranged combat, and saw great potential in their ability. In theory, the idea was to have a third group of Tau Fire Warriors providing long-range support fire from behind the Guardsman infantry, and if all worked as planned then half of the enemy army wouldn’t even be able to show up to the battle in the first place. However, in practice, this did not work for several reasons. First, the Tau were essentially a combined-arms force already (save for close combat), and didn’t appreciate being shoehorned into a long-range only role, even if they were talented at it. Secondly, much like Eldar and humans, Tau like to be commanded by Tau, so in an Eldar-Tau-human battalion you end up having three arguing commanders instead of just two. Third, and perhaps most importantly, Eldar and humans have worked together long enough to trust that one is not going to shoot the other in the back. This is not true of the Tau, especially given their attitude towards the Imperium for much of their history. When you factor in that in this arrangement the Tau are supposed to be in the back of the formation and thus in the perfect position to potentially shoot their allies in the back, the other soldiers start to get paranoid and morale drops. Eventually, it was decided to keep Tau divisions as their own separate forces, called in particularly for any enemy that has started to work out a viable counter, however soft, to the traditional Guardian+Guard one-two.

Eldar opinions on human weapons, like just about everything else in the Imperium, vary from Craftworld to Craftworld. Craftworlds like Alaitoc would sneer if offered human weapon as a sidearm, whereas Ulthwé Eldar would take two in addition to their own weapon and then ask if you have any more. Most Eldar see human weapons like modern soldiers do knives. Crude, simple, and inelegant compared to their primary weapon, but if you're stuck in the trenches in a do or die moment, it's better to have the other guy get shot than you. Therefore, Eldar that use human weapons use them as a sidearm or last resort weapon, if at all. It helps that many human-made weapons are based on STC designs and therefore easily replaceable and about as fragile as a brick (being designed for maximum durability), in contrast to the more delicate, precision-made (though still pretty tough) weapons of the Eldar. Therefore, an Eldar can be less careful with their sidearm and make sure their primary weapon is at maximum efficiency.

=== Imperial Infantry Command Structure ===

Due to the fact the Imperial Guard does not enforce specific organization for anything below battalion level, the vast different cultures and traditions that exist in the Imperium changes the size of the smaller units as they see fit. Terra did set minimum sizes on how large units must be before it could be recognized as said self-declared units by the wider Imperial Guard.

The lowest level of the Imperial Guard is the squad size. Guardsmen often operate in pairs for specialized tasks to keep confusion as low as possible between other in the same squad. The smallest recognized size for these squads is 10 soldiers per squad further broken into 5 pairs, although a command squad might only have 6 men. At least 4 squads form into a platoon with one of the squads being a command squad bringing the total amount of men in platoon to at least 36 Guardsmen. Examples like the Kriegers use 7 squads in a platoon bring their size to 76 Guardsmen.

Eldar squads attached to Guardsman platoons come in the smallest size of 5 Eldar per squad but their size can be bigger depending on their world of origin. Notably the Maiden world Eldar tends to be organized into larger sizes as they experience more attacks on their homes compared to the Craftworlds.

For the platoons to form into a company there must be at least 4 platoons with a company command squad, thus bringing the number to at least 150 men. The Cadian Shock Troops often deploy around 300 per company. The Kriegers use 10 platoons per company then adding the Company HQ with at least 1 Grenadier squad totaling in at least 704 Guardsmen, not counting transports which they are often deployed with.

The smallest size battalion uses at least 2 companies and battalion HQ before being deployed, bringing the numbers to 306 Guardsmen per battalion. The expected regiment holds at least 3 battalions and 1 support platoon which have 7 squads and 1 HQ totaling to 1.000 men. More often than not regiments like the Vostroyans use 3 infantry battalions and 2 standardized (organized not by 7 squad and HQ but like the infantry 3 squad with 1 HQ) support battalions coming up to 1.536 men. The Krieger regiments far pass these expectations by using 4 standardized support battalions and 6 infantry battalions jumping their numbers to 14.146 men including the regimental HQ.

The Corps used to garrison a world often use the smallest size with only 5 regiments totaling to at least 5.000 Guardsmen and these troops are used to raise PDF than to actually keep the peace. If there are still insurgents who disrupt the peace and not accept the Imperial Truth, these garrison corps can double or triple in regiments. This puts the tripled Corp to at least a small 15.000 to a gigantic 200.000 Guardsmen. The PDF used to aid the garrison Corp would be raised to around a low 400.000 and up to millions at a time like on hive worlds.

On the more peaceful systems the lax Guardsmen army deployed to ‘guard’ the place would only be using the tinniest size, thus only have 20.000 at any one time if a majority of it on reserve. At the more active systems the numbers would go up to around 40.000 to 60.000 troops in garrisoning systems not too far from a front. When the Imperial Guard does deploy an army to the frontline the commanders always request at least 100.000 for the more daring but normally uses 180.000 if they are luck.

- Additional info in thread XI, including number of troops in each Segmentum. Actual number of troops never agreed upon, left here as placeholder.

=== Forces of the Imperial Guard ===

==== Cadian Shock Troopers ====

[[File:Cadian.jpg|300px|thumb|right|Typical Cadian combat uniform.]]

Most “Cadian” Regiments are in fact not from Cadia or even have a drop of Cadian blood in them. “So why name them Cadian?” I hear you say. The Cadians were one of the few who proved themselves in the Great Crusade as the most versatile and adaptable troops the Imperial Army can deploy on most fronts. The organizational structure and equipment used by the Cadians were introduced to many different worlds as the original Cadian regiments toured the modern Imperium and beyond in the Crusade Era. The 200 year expansion period saw diverse traditions of regiments being used all over the galaxy as newly integrated worlds threw their armed forces to join the Imperial Army, and be sent to the far-flung reaches of the Imperium. The War of the Beast saw almost all Cadian regiments be recalled to the defense of Cadia or Terra if they were close enough. With the absence of many regiments from Ultima Segmentum and Segmentum Tempestus the worlds in these places were forced to raise totally new regiments from scratch for self-defense or as requisition to be deployed to the fronts.

Many of the Forge, Argi, and Feudal worlds used traditional local organization and equipment for planetary elite troops to form their own Guardsmen regiment at that time. Imperial, Hive and Fortress worlds on the other hand, saw the effectiveness in Cadian regiments as they fought against or with the Cadians during the Great Crusade. The industrial capability to manufacture standard Cadian equipment was already present on many Imperial worlds, but the Forge worlds refused to form Cadian regiments as these worlds dismiss the lack of artillery and armored vehicles and rather form the Skitarii armies. Argi and Feudal worlds lack the industry to produce and equip a Cadian regiment.

The adoption of Cadian regiments on so many different worlds shows the versatility and efficiency of the Cadian doctrine. After the War of the Beast, the original Cadian regiments would be sent to refortify the Cadian Gate. Many of the displaced Cadian civilian people would be reorganized to colonist groups leaving their homeworld. The same adaptable traditions carried over to colonize and frontier worlds when they raised their own Cadian regiments.

Cadian infantry regiments from Cadia are known as “Cadian Shock Troops” while off world or imitation regiments are known as “Cadian Foot Troops.” These Cadian Shock Troops would often have at least two detachments from other branches of the Imperial Guard, for example the 203rd Cadian Shock Troop has self-propelled heavy artillery and armored detachments. The Cadian Foot Troops often don’t follow this rule and only deploy with one detachment.

In a Cadian infantry regiment, a squad is made of 10 people that operate in 5 pairs. The Sergeant keeps up moral and plans out tactics with the Lieutenant who can operate as a vox-caster; they can also be equipped with melee weapons. The heavy weapon team is included to allow long range suppressive fire on the battlefield usually with a heavy stubber. The Medic works to keep the soldiers in fighting condition with the help of their underling that tags along into battles. The rest of the squad is made up of two pairs of weapon specialists normally being Lasgunners.

The Sargent is equipped with a chainsword and las-pistol for leading charges or CQC. Alternatively the Sargent can be armed like the Lieutenant who is given a las-carbine for self-defense. The heavy weapon team normally uses an offensive heavy stubber that fires 12.7mm rounds or a lighter defensive stubber firing 7.92 rounds. In the heavy weapons team the first member carries and fire the weapon while the other member feeds ammo, spots targets, guards the gunner, and act as a makeshift bipod. Both members are also equipped with a Lasgun and a las-pistol. The medic fights with a Lasgun and heals with the medikit which comes with medical drugs, chemicals, surgical tools, sedatives, injectors, bandages and a medical cogitator which can detect almost every known aliments. To help the Medic is the underling who carries extra supplies, guard the Medic, or help in surgery depending on the conditions. The weapon specialists mostly carry Lasguns although one or two of the four might have flamers instead. These specialists can really be armed with any weapon that can be held by two regular human arms, some can also serve the dual role of vox-caster as well. The specialist act as either a flanking force while the heavy weapon team suppressed the enemy or the center line that lay down fire.

==== Fenrisian Line Regiments ====

Seeing the effectiveness of Cadian troops after encountering them in battle during the Great Crusade, Fenris adopted the Cadian Doctrine and deployed Cadian Foot Troops to the front. Yet the War of the Beast changed the outlook of the Fenrisians on the Cadian Doctrine with the lack of mortal manpower when faced with the Ork threat. During the war, several Cadian Foot Troops were entirely wiped out within the first week. The Death world breed heroes for the Space Wolves, not infinite manpower for many Foot Troops. Fenrisians abandoned the Cadian Doctrine after the war and switched to the Fusilier Doctrine that the famous Mordian, Praetorian, and Scintillan use. Sacrificing quantity for quality, the Fenrisians can always request Space Wolves regiments to merge with a Line Regiment. The Flak Armor for the Fenrisian Line Guardsmen uses extra metal plates compared to Cadians. The infantry under the Fusilier Doctrine would stand shoulder to shoulder forming into lines facing the enemy before firing. The Fenrisian Line Regiments took this tactic and expand it with the introduction of self-propelled artillery to provide mobile defense and keep up with infantry on attacks. In these regiments the Fenrisians officers are encouraged to outgun the enemy via volley fire and if that fails just charge them. Fenrisian line infantry are better trained than Cadians in melee combat with some even wielding swords into charges.

Fenrisian Line Regiments often differ in tactics depending on whether they come from one of the Fenrisian colony worlds or Fenris itself. Old World Fenrisians are more wild and less coordinated in their approach, and typically operate in 5-10 man squads for the best kill-to-loss ratio. New World Fenrisians are more ordered and coordinated though they are still wilder than anyone outside your average Death Worlder. The two groups work best together, with New Worlder regiments holding the line and securing targets and Old Worlders scouting ahead and harrying supply lines.

==== Armageddon Outriders ====

[[File:Rock_rider.png|300px|thumb|left|Common 'uniform' of a biker scout for the Outriders.]]

Everybody knows the Steel Legion. Reflections of their world in microcosm. Steel and fire and ash; unstoppable waves of armor, Basilisk barrages like monsoon rains, choking clouds of lung-burning gas.

Less well-known is the fact that there are two parts to the Steel Legion. The first and largest are the heavy mechanized infantry they are famous for. The second is the Outriders.

The Outriders are all crazy. The infantry regiments of the Steel Legion recruit from inside the hives, the factory and forge workers, but the Outriders recruit from outside the hives, and there are only two ways to make a living out there.

The first is prospecting and wildcat mining. Delving deep into ancient and much-abused Ork-built structures with jury-rigged and second-hand equipment in search of veins of valuable materials. Everything from gold electrical circuits to adamantine armor plate. Most valuable of all is components of the old teleporter system. The Mechanicus has decided it wants planetary teleporters more than it hates Ork 'technology', and pays staggering sums for the smallest scraps. The description alone should tell you everything you need to know about how hard and dangerous the job is.

The second is Ork hunting. The Administratum and PDF will pay good thrones for Ork skulls. Two for a squig, five for a grot, and starting at forty for an Ork, more for larger or special types like Weirdboys and Brainboys. Reimbursement is included for promethium spent burning the bodies, and the PDF doesn't check too hard to make sure you're not claiming driving-around promethium as Ork-burning expense.

Outrider legend tells of Billy-Joe Hammerlord, who drove through an entire warband on his bike to take the head of the Warboss and earned enough to retire. The story grows every time in the retelling, so by now the old stories claim the warband stretched from one horizon to the other, the Warboss carved paths through the rubble for his army to march through just by dragging his axe along the ground behind him, and Billy-Joe earned enough to buy himself a fleet and became a Rogue Trader and went on adventures with Prince Yriel.

Officially, all the Orks on Armageddon are Feral. Most places, that means stone axes and weird squigs. But this is Armageddon. The world still remembers in her bones when she strode among the stars and slapped aside Battlefleet Solar like so many children's toys. A lot of the Orks are just waving around scrap-metal axes. Depending on what armories they've broken into, they might be tossing around vortex bombs.

The point is that Outriders are all crazy. In some ways they sort of resemble Orks themselves. They move around in a wide assortment of walkers, fat-tired buggies, and motorbikes, made of scrap metal and spare parts. Most of these vehicles started life in a Mechanicus factory but after generations of repairs and modifications nothing of the original vehicle is to be found. And most of them are that old- a good vehicle is a heirloom, passed down from father to son, each generation adding a bit more to it. They stick spikes on the vehicles and stick Ork skulls on the spikes, and judge each other by how skull-laden their bosspoles are. When an Ork warband and an Outrider clan are fighting it sometimes gets hard to tell which is which.

Outriders prefer las-weapons over slug, so there is that.

A common rite of passage among the Outriders is for the father to cripple an Ork with shots to its limbs, then for son finish it off with a knife. This marks the transition from childhood into adolescence. True manhood is often not considered to begin until the son repeats the ritual, as the father. It is important not just to kill Orks, but to ensure that Ork-killing will continue into the far future.

The point is that Outriders are all crazy, but they are Ork-killing crazy so they make excellent candidates for the Imperial Guard. Sometimes entire clans get recruited into their own regiments. Sometimes restless young men come in on their own to the recruiting office and get incorporated into the regular Steel Legions as scouts and cavalry. Most of the time they insist on bringing their own vehicles and most of the time the Munitorum lets them. It just insists that they repair their vehicles with standard issue parts. Since most of the time their vehicles are kitbashes of Sentinels and Chimeras this is usually not hard.

For all their skill and lunatic courage the Outriders are not famous, for the good and simple reason that there simply aren't as many of them as the normal Steel Legions. Armageddon outside the hive walls does not support high population densities. They just fade into the background as 'specialized auxiliaries' of the Steel Legion. But those who have met them have given rise to a proverb- “Armageddon has many faces, and all of them are lethal."

==== Elysian Drop Troopers ====

Elysium does, in fact, produce forces for the Guard beyond its famous Drop Regiments. There are Elysian tank regiments, Elysian artillery regiments, Elysian footslogger regiments. They are all, universally, nursing a mild grudge against the universe in general and the Drop Regiments in particular for the way everyone is continually surprised by their existence. "I thought Elysium did, you know, drop troops." "FUCK YOU."

But nobody cares about them. [muffled FUCK YOU in the distance] Let's talk about the Drop Regiments.

The Elysian Drop Regiments are somewhat unique in the Imperial Guard for being descended from a naval boarding force. Elysium was and is a major trade hub in a sector unfortunately plagued with human pirates, Ork Freebootas, and a superfluity of places for them to hide. As a result, Elysium committed much of its PDF force to anti-piracy operations, stationing regiments on board merchant vessels and escort ships for boarding and counter-boarding operations.

However, no war can be won with defense alone, and the Elysian PDF regiments assigned to anti-pirate duty began experimenting with methods of striking at the pirates in their lairs. Thus, the modern Drop Regiments began to take shape. The first attempts were amateurish and improvised, in some cases using civilian shuttles and Void Maneuvering Packs instead of proper assault ships and grav-chutes. Still, a couple of victories proved the concept worthy of further development, and Elysian high command invested in additional training and equipment.

The first battles of the Drop Regiments were void-borne affairs, fought in microgravity in and around hidden asteroid bases. As more and more pirate bases were expunged, however, they were forced to track down their opponents in ever more diverse locales, from fairly conventional planets to burning Mercurial environments to floating gas-giant bases. But, in the end, it was mostly done. The pirates would never be fully expunged from the sector- fucking Orks- but it was safer than it had ever been before. Trade was flourishing, new worlds were being colonized, and the Elysian PDF found itself somewhat underemployed. So, when the next Founding came around, the course of action was obvious.

The modern Elysian Drop Regiments distinguish themselves from the usual run of air cavalry in three ways.

First, they continue to train for operation in a very wide variety of environments. Zero-g and vacuum, high gravity, extreme temperatures, toxic atmospheres, they have the tools and training to operate in them all. Most drop regiments only train to operate within the usual 'human-habitable' range of environments, giving the Elysians a distinct niche and edge.

Second, they have very good relations with the Imperial Navy due to their past as, essentially, naval armsmen hunting pirates. Thus, they have an easier time securing air and orbital support, and have the doctrine and training to make the maximum use of it. They are comfortable with inter-service cooperation in a way few regiments are. This includes good relationships with the Void Wolves, with joint training exercises being commonplace.

Third, general superiority of training and equipment. The Drop Regiments have become a point of planetary pride, and as a prosperous trading hub Elysium can afford to ensure they are equipped and trained to the highest standards. And with far more volunteers than they can accept, the training academies can accept only the best recruits.

Combined, this results in the Drop Regiments being frequently deployed to the stranger battlefields of the Imperium, executing their distinctive lightning strikes in environments an unprepared human could not even hope to survive in, much less fight in.

==== Lucifer Blacks ====

Humans in general have a tendency to survive in places where they aren’t intended to go. Such is the case of the Lucifer Blacks, one of the original regiments of the Old Hundred, the original one hundred regiments that were not disbanded at the end of the Unification Wars and would serve as the basis for the Imperial Army. The Lucifer Blacks were one of the last people on Old Earth to be discovered by the outside world, living deep underwater in pre-Strife underwater habitats at the bottom of Old Earth’s Great Ocean (also known as the Pacific) in a region controlled by the Pan-Pacific Empire. It is thought that these habitats were originally meant as simple habitats or research stations during the Dark Age of Technology. However, by the time of the Age of Strife the Lucifer Blacks were cut off from the rest of the world until their rediscovery by the horrendous contraptions of the Pan-Pacific Empire. This lifestyle in the inky darkness, surviving off of mesopelagic fish and geothermal power from hydrothermal vents, is what gave the regiment their name.

Living underwater in an environment where literally one wrong seal could mean the difference between life and death tended to foster an extremely calm and measured attitude in people. To the Lucifer Blacks, a crisis was the absolute worst time to panic, panic is what led to rash decisions and rash decisions are what got you killed. This led the regiment to be infamously known for their ability to be calm and think clearly under fire, as well as a very dark and (ironically) dry sense of humor. Additionally, living nearly 4000 meters below sea level in conditions where most light was artificial tended to make one very good at fighting in the dark. The Lucifer Blacks often used this to their advantage in battle, using smoke grenades and other implements to approximate the low-light conditions in which they had the advantage over their foes.

However, at the same time the Lucifer Blacks were not the most numerous people. When one lives in such a hostile, enclosed environment, the primary constraint on population size was not food or materials, but simply living space due to the number of habs present. When the Lucifer Blacks were first discovered and subjugated by Narthan Dume, Dume decided that one of the best ways to use the highly disciplined, but not very numerous Lucifer Blacks were as elite shock troops. The calm, detached nature of the Lucifer Blacks in high-stress combat situations made them especially hard to break. The fact that the Lucifer Blacks preferred to fight in the hermetically sealed all-black bodysuits they typically wore for extra-habitat activities only added to their intimidation factor.

When the Pan-Pacific Empire fell and the tyranny of Narthan Dume finally toppled, the Lucifer Blacks were one of the first regiments of the Pan-Pacific Empire to pledge their loyalty to the Warlord. The Warlord was somewhat suspicious of the Lucifer Blacks at first, but as with the Assassins of the Salt Wastes he wasn’t fool enough to deny himself potentially useful resources. And the Lucifer Blacks more than delivered on their promises of loyalty, even serving in a secondary role alongside the Night Lords during the Vhnori Resurgence as the two fought against the attempted resurgence of the Pan-Pacific Empire.

Eventually, in return for their exemplary service, the Warlord, now the Steward, granted the Lucifer Blacks settlement rights on extrasolar worlds. The Lucifer Blacks mostly chose to settle on Ocean Worlds that approximated their old home. Even today many people on Ocean Worlds have distant Lucifer Black Ancestry. As part of the Old Hundred, the Lucifer Blacks also still exist on Earth, living in the same oceanic trenches as their forefathers, though ten thousand years of gentrification and integration into Old Earth’s infrastructure mean that the modern Lucifer Blacks have lost a lot of their original culture and aren’t as incredibly stoic and tough-as-nails as their forefathers. Imperial nobles often like to have Lucifer Black bodyguards when they can’t get someone like a member of Terra’s Children, though in reality having a Lucifer Black bodyguard usually amounts to little more than a display of prestige.

==== Ohmsworld Regiments ====

===== The 12th Ohmsworld Armored Regiment =====

When the insurrection began, the 12th Ohmsworld was in the final stages of being reconstituted, with veterans of previous Ohmsworld regiments and even a junior Ulthwe Farseer combining their efforts to ready the troops. As such, it was not only at full strength when the Duke announced his secession, it also had expert, if not exceptional, leadership. With aid from the Skitarii, the 12th led the charge into Ohmsworld's primary hive and quickly overwhelmed the Ducal Guards, many of whom were Ohmsworld veterans themselves who themselves defected to Imperial forces. More importantly, they managed to seize the Guards' stock of Chimeras, giving Ohmsworld a powerful mobile army. With the easing of pressure on Ohmsworld as the Imperium advances, the 12th has even begun contemplating direct offensive actions as opposed to the firefighting they had done before. Whether this leads them to glorious victory or fatally overextends their already undersupplied lines, only time will tell.

Home World: Hive World <br>
Commanding Officer: [[Nobledark_Imperium_Notes#Tabletop_Crunch|Psyker]] (Farseer Eldian Sylandriel, provisional/brevet Colonel) <br>
Regiment Type: Mechanised Infantry <br>
Doctrines: Survivalists: Ash Wastes, Scavengers* <br>
Regimental Drawbacks: Poorly Provisioned <br>

Characteristic Modifiers: <br>
Starting Aptitudes: +6 Agility <br>
Starting Talents: Warp Sense, Paranoia, Rapid Reload <br>
Starting Skills: Common Lore: Imperium, Deceive, Linguistics: Low Gothic, Psyniscience, Forbidden Lore: Psykers, Operate: Surface <br>
Starting Aptitude: Agility <br>
Tutelage of Mars (replaces Accustomed to Crowds): The Mechanicus has taken a great deal of interest in Ohmsworld's archaeotech, so while Mars would never officially sanction it, the local techpriests have given the people of Ohmsworld some basic training in technological mysteries to aid them in maintenance. Ohmsworld troopers may offer Aid in Tech-Use tests as if they were trained in Tech-Use, though this bonus goes away if they actually become Trained in Tech-Use. Those who ARE trained in Tech-Use gain +10 to all Tech-Use tests that involve respiratory or air filtration equipment... <br>
Hivebound: Hive worlders seldom endure the horrors of the open sky or suffer the indignities of the great outdoors. Whilst outside of an enclosed or artificial environment (such as a hive city, voidship or similar), they suffer a –10 penalty to all Survival Tests, due to their continued unfamiliarity with such places.
Wounds: Characters from this regiment reduce their starting Wounds by 1. <br>
Standard Kit: Universal Standard Kit, one M36 Lasgun and four charge packs per PC, one suit of flak armour per PC, two frag and two krak grenades per PC, 1 Chimera Transport per Squad, one respirator per PC, one micro-bead per PC, one survival suit per PC, one auspex per Squad <br>
Favoured Weapons: Autocannon, grenade launcher <br>

*Special note: Everyone on Ohmsworld knows that scavenging is necessary; as such, scavenging is explicitly allowed by Guard and Munitorum authorities. However, regiments are also under orders to deposit all scavenged materiel into a collective equipment pool; hoarding is very much frowned upon. This doesn't mechanically alter the Scavengers Doctrine, just modify its ingame usage.

===== The 3rd Special Defence Regiment =====

As with all things on Ohmsworld, the archaeotech comes first, and even the most vicious assaults often degrade into hand-to-hand combat as all sides struggle desperately to avoid damaging the precious filtration systems. As such, most close-combat specialists present during the rebellion had been consolidated into solely defensive forces. These specialists ranged from press-ganged hivers, to the few Arbites who'd survived the Duke's initial purge, to any and all Ogryn on the planet and in the case of the 3rd Special Defence Regiment, even maintenance workers skilled at handling heavy tools. Indeed, the leader of the increasingly regiment is herself an Ogryn Bone'ead. 'Boss Foreman' Mogda Gruk took to her implants exceptionally well, with her intelligence even rating slightly above Imperial average. Though astoundingly ugly even by Ogryn standards, is well-loved by the troopers under her command, especially since she seems little changed from her days as foreman for her hive's Ogryn workforce.

Home World: Hive World <br>
Commanding Officer: Maverick (Brevet Colonel Mogda Gruk) <br>
Regiment Type: Siege Regiment <br>
Doctrines: Hardened Fighters, Close Order Drill <br>
Regimental Drawbacks: Poorly Provisioned <br>

Characteristic Modifiers: <br>
Starting Aptitudes: +3 Agility, +3 Perception, +3 Toughness, +2 Weapon Skill, -3 Intelligence <br>
Starting Talents: Paranoia, Resistance: Fear, Street Fighting, Combat Formation, Nerves of Steel <br>
Starting Skills: Common Lore: Imperium, Deceive, Linguistics: Low Gothic, Tech-Use <br>
Starting Aptitude: None <br>
Tutelage of Mars (replaces Accustomed to Crowds): The Maechanicus has taken a great deal of interest in Ohmsworld's archaeotech, and while Mars would never officially sanction it, the local techpriests have given the people of Ohmsworld some basic training in technological mysteries to aid them in maintenance. Ohmsworld troopers may offer Aid in Tech-Use tests as if they were trained in Tech-Use, though this bonus goes away if they actually become Trained in Tech-Use. However, those who ARE trained in Tech-Use gain a +10 bonus to all Tech-Use tests that involve respiratory or air filtration equipment... <br>
Hivebound: Hive worlders seldom endure the horrors of the open sky or suffer the indignities of the great outdoors. Whilst outside of an enclosed or artificial environment (such as a hive city, voidship or similar), they suffer a –10 penalty to all Survival Tests, due to their continued unfamiliarity with such places. <br>
Wounds: Characters from this regiment reduce their starting Wounds by 1. <br>
Standard Kit: Universal Standard Kit, one combat shotgun with a mono bayonet and 8 shotgun magazines per PC, one suit of flak armour per PC, one respirator per PC, four empty sandbags and one entrenching tool per PC, two frag grenades and two photon flash grenades per PC, one auspex per Squad, one micro bead per PC <br>
Favoured Weapons: Heavy flamer, flamer (as delicate as the filters are, they are surprisingly heat-resistant)

===== Century Omega 7-13 =====

When the Duke announced his secession, the Mechanicus authorities on Ohmsworld immediately decided to move in support of the Imperium- not out of any real love for the Imperium proper, but out of fear that the resources they needed for further research would be cut off. Under most circumstancers, they wouldn't even have gone that far- after all, no sane man would cross the Mechanicus. Problem was, the Duke was anything but sane; during secret negotiations between Mars's representatives and the Duke, the latter made it clear that he would brook no opposition nor equal (that Mars would be his superior never seemed to cross his mind). The fact that many hereteks had thrown in their lot with the Duke in exchange for independence and freedom of work only hardened the opinions of Ohmsworld's Mechanicus against them.

Even so, their insurrection was costly, with the already small Skitarii centuries being further depleted to the point where they were eventually consolidated into a single unit. Century Omega 7-13 now functions as a semi-independent organization within Ohmsworld's military; in general, the Magi's goals tend to align with Ohsmworld's, but sometimes they send Omega 7-13 detachments on missions, their actual agenda known only to the senior adepts of Mars.

Home World: Lathe Worlds <br>
Commanding Officer: Phlegmatic (Centurion/Magos Rho-1) <br>
Regiment Type: Grenadiers <br>
Doctrines: Cyber-Enhanced, Iron Discipline <br>
Regimental Drawbacks: The Few <br>

Characteristic Modifiers: +3 Intelligence, +3 Ballistic Skill, +3 Toughness <br>
Starting Talents: Bombardier <br>
Starting Skills: Tech-use (Trained), Common Lore: AdMech, Common Lore: Tech, Linguistics: Low Gothic, Linguistics: Techno-Lingua, Logic, Common Lore: Imperial Guard, Common Lore: War <br>
Starting Aptitudes: Willpower <br>
Tutelage of Mars (replaces Isolated by Machines): Gain a +10 bonus to all Tech-Use tests that involve respiratory or air filtration equipment...<br>
The True Flesh: Lathe World characters possess the Mechanicus Implants Trait. In addition, the potentia coil is specifically enhanced to meet the needs of integrated weapons.<br>
Soldiers of the Omnissiah: This regiment cannot include Support Specialists used in other Guard regiments; the Mixed Regiment rules must be used in those cases. Guardsmen from these regiments always count as Techpriests for purposes of prerequisites, regardless of current Speciality or Advanced Speciality.
Wounds: Characters from this regiment generate Wounds normally.<br>
Standard Kit: Universal Standard Kit, one Lathe lasrifle with an attached auxiliary grenade launcher weapon upgrade per PC, three krak and two frag grenades per PC, one suit of light carapace armour per Player Character, one deadspace earpiece per PC, one combi-tool per PC, two grenade launchers per Squad, Common bionic respiratory system, bionic heart<br>
Favoured Weapons: Integrated Weapons<br>

===Doctrines of the Imperial Guard===
In addition to the famed Cadian Doctrine, many regiments have also developed their own unique methods of fighting which have then spread throughout the Imperium. While this is hardly an exhaustive list, it provides a decent look into the sheer diversity of the Guard.

====Infiltration Doctrine====

Infiltration doctrine is a light infantry doctrine focused on stealth and mobility. It omits vehicles and heavy artillery from the TO&E almost entirely, relying on crew-served weapons that can be dismantled and carried by an infantry squad for heavy firepower. On the offence, infiltration regiments use their stealth and lightweight equipment to close with enemy formations undetected and from unexpected directions; once all elements are in position, they launch an overwhelming surprise attack from close range, using their crew-served weapons and snipers to suppress the enemy and ensure they cannot mount an organized defence. On the defense, they use the same qualities for hit-and-run raids, whittling down the enemy and melting away into the night when the enemy tries to bring their firepower to bear.

Infiltration regiments are usually equipped with specialized equipment such as camo-cloaks and night-vision goggles, but these are less important than how the regiment is trained. The nature of their operation requires that officers and NCOs be trained to a higher standard of independence than normal, as units as small as squads will often be trusted to maneuver individually in support of the overall objective. This usually cultivates a sense of being elite; combined with the looser chains of command infiltration regiments usually operate with, other regiments usually consider them insubordinate and undisciplined.

In combat, infiltration regiments are used to secure and move through terrain that mechanized regiments cannot. They are also used in combined-arms strategies to scout out enemy positions, assassinate officers, and destroy enemy strongpoints in advance of the main armored thrust. Infiltration regiments also maintain their effectiveness easier in the face of enemy air and orbital superiority thanks to their ability to fight while remaining hidden and dispersed. Finally, infiltration doctrines are popular among PDF forces incapable of maintaining large mechanized armies.
However, as powerful as they are within their specialty, their lack of vehicles and artillery makes them perform poorly outside of it.

====Armageddon Doctrine====

Armageddon doctrine is a maneuver- and terrain-focused mechanized infantry doctrine. Developed by the Steel Legion in their endless battles against the Orks, Armageddon doctrine TO&E is extremely vehicle-heavy, with sufficient Chimeras to carry the entire regiment, strong organic artillery support, and at least a modest tank detachment. Mechanized scout detachments- Salamanders, Sentinels, and bikes (preferably jet-) are common, but can also be delegated to other specialized regiments. (The Steel Legion itself uses the Outriders for this purpose, but other regiments have other solutions.) Likewise, organic combat engineering support is common, as are air defense vehicles; Hydras in particular are valued for their ability to sweep aside Ork hordes in addition to aircraft. Soldiers are heavily armored in carapace.

In combat, Armageddon doctrine is often described as 'operationally offensive, tactically defensive'. Using the scout detachment to scout out the terrain and enemy dispositions, the regiment seeks to seize vital terrain features before the enemy and fortify it, forcing the enemy to assault a fortified position on terrain of the Imperium's choosing. To this end, Amageddon-style regiments usually carry copious amounts of barbed wire, mines, and other defensive implements; vehicles are equipped with dozer blades to dig out entrenchments. This is where the engineering detachment comes in. The scout detachment, if present, harasses the enemy on its approach, although this is not a vital component of the doctrine.

At the level of individual squads, Armageddon doctrine emphasizes close cooperation between infantry and armor; full mechanization means each squad has a Chimera, which they are responsible for defending from threats and vice versa.

Few worlds adopt the Armageddon doctrine in full. Although many other mechanized infantry forces adopt its emphasis on mobility, terrain, and forcing the enemy to attack fortified positions, few worlds can afford to equip their regiments with the same weight of metal as Armageddon, and thus do not adopt the full TO&E. In addition, the emergence of the Brain Boy caste has thrown the doctrine into flux; with the Orks no longer throwing themselves as eagerly into near-suicidal charges, the strategy has lost some of its effectiveness. Although the core of the strategy remains sound, the arguments at Steel Legion HQ about how to adapt to a changing galaxy continue long into the night.

====Fast Attack Doctrine====

A light-armor and occasionally bio-cavalry doctrine focusing on the use of speed and maneuverability as weapons.

There is no standard TO&E for Fast Attack regiments, due to the wide variance in equipment used. Salamander scout tanks, Sentinels, motor- and jet-bikes, a thousand varieties of armored car and riding beasts. A very few forge-worlds even have super-heavy fast-attack companies, equipping tanks as heavy as Baneblades with antigrav units to allow them to keep up with lighter forces.

Whatever the equipment, all Fast Attack units operate similarly, using overwhelming speed to strike at an enemy's weak points before an effective response can be mustered. The 'classic' pattern of attack is to punch straight through the enemy line and rampage through the rear areas, but that is hardly the only tactical possibility. Outflanking maneuvers, hit-and-run raids- speed opens many possibilities.

Fast Attack regiments are usually deployed as part of combined arms strategies, scouting for slower units or exploiting breakthroughs created by heavier ones. On their own, while fast and generally well-armed, they are also more fragile than a true tank unit and lack staying power. This varies, of course; the dynamics of a horse cavalry unit differ from Sentinels and Salamanders which differ from jetbikes. But the general principle holds; as with so many other things in the Imperium, there is strength in diversity.

Fast Attack units, like Infiltration units, are often popular among PDF forces which cannot sustain heavy tank formations but can build light tanks and armored cars or breed horses, which contributes to the wide variance of regiments following the doctrine.

=== Scion Tempestus ===

==== Difference between Stormtroopers and Scions ====

The Tempestus Scion or also known as Stormtroopers are the specialized heavy infantry regiments that are always broken down into smaller units. Once divided into battalions or companies they are attached to other units within the Imperial Army but can also serve under the Inquisition or Sororitas. The Scions are known for their high dropout rates in the intense training but prove in combat at being the best CQC non-melee soldiers in the Imperial Army. Scions and Stormtroopers differ in their training and equipment as they are given different tasks. Veteran Guardsmen or raw volunteers are first trained then deployed as Stormtroopers in the Imperial Guard. The Stormtroopers are only trained to fight in ground wars and are equipped as such. Stormtroopers are often given the task of assaulting fortifications and clearing buildings. Scions are volunteer veteran Stormtroopers who are retrained to fight inside void ships and infiltrate behind enemy lines. Their weapons are unchanged for the most part but the armor is a lighter version that can withstand the vacuum of the void.

==== Equipment ====

The Stormtroopers are sent to the frontlines as the first ones to clear out bunkers, trenches, and building. Missions of that nature mean the Stormtroopers are given the deadly ‘Hellgun’ Lasgun to one-shot enemies at point blank range. The Carapace Armor worn by Stormtroopers is the innermost armor worn by Diffusion squads, thus can prevent shrapnel or shots from less than 50m from disabling the Stormtrooper. The Stormtrooper armor allows them to clear tight places with relative safety from explosives and suppressive fire. Other than that they hold the same basic kit as a Guardsman but with more explosives. The Scions when first founded noted that the Carapace Armor accelerated exhaustion while hindering movement for the user. These two factors played an important role in crippling operators on independent infiltration missions. The Tempestus Scion developed the ‘Cephalon Armor’ which was a lighter version of Carapace Armor but still covering the same body parts while being stronger than Flak Armor. Cephalon Armor also comes along with a built-in antenna and shoulder mounted pic recorder that a commanding officer can use. The Scion’s basic kits are almost the same as the Stormtrooper’s but have an additional void survival kit.

==== Standardization ====

In terms of equipment, the Scions would all carry the same Scion basic kit and standard CQC weapons but they can always have extra things with them or swap out weapons because their armor is lighter. It keeps all Scion companies mostly the same while having enough changes to complete very specific missions. All Scion squads are at least expected to take on CQC & infiltration missions. The Stormtroopers on the other hand, just like their Guardsmen regiments, vary greatly from the world to world. All Stormtroopers are expected to be assigned the task of clearing cramp locations and fortifications. Now, how they are trained and equipped to do that changes from regiment to regiment. The Cadian Karskins are made for storming buildings in urban combat while the Cadian Guardsmen maneuver quickly in city street fighting. Kreiger Grenadiers, on the other hand, would charge at fortifications and trenches before everybody throwing a grenade then jumping inside.

Stormtroopers from Feudal worlds might only have a Lasgun and a single grenade while carrying a shield with several melee weapons. Kreiger Grenadiers would hold even more extra grenades than Karskins. Hive world Stormtroopers might always carry Meltaguns or Flamers due to the importance of high damage in fast reaction time weapons in urban warfare. The only thing standard is that they all wear some variation of Carapace Armor.

==== Notable Regiments ====

See [[Nobledark Imperium Scion Regiments| Scion Regiments]]

== Abhuman Subspecies ==

=== Beastmen and Ogryn ===

<div class="toccolours mw-collapsible mw-collapsed" style="100%"> '''''The Ogryn Project:'''''

As the Imperium spread its borders past the boundaries of Sol, it rapidly began to encounter new strains of abhumans. Some of these strains were familiar, including Navigators and additional tribes of Void Born. Others such as the Ratlings, Felinids, and Nightsiders were novel, but genetically stable, having evolved through Dark Age of Technology genetic engineering and natural evolution, a testament to humanity's hardiness and ability to survive on almost any world.

For the most part, the Steward was unconcerned with admitting these abhuman variants into the Imperium. He already had one abhuman primarch, another nearly so, and he himself was only human in the loosest sense of the word. To him the abhumans were just one more drop of variation in the great sea of humanity.

However, then the Imperium discovered the Ogryn. And the Beastmen.

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Each race presented its own problems for the Imperium. The previous abhuman species were all genetically stable and essentially comparable to baseline humans in intelligence. The Ogryn were clearly of subhuman intelligence, being comparable to a mentally handicapped human at best, and behaved and looked like shaved apes more than people, fighting each other with their enlarged canine tusks.

The Beastmen were slightly more intelligent, but more in the manner of an extremely cunning predator than a civilized being, completely ruled by their instincts, and prone to additional mutations. When the Beastmen were discovered by the Imperium, their lives were brutish, nasty, and short.

Such was the Steward’s concern that he brought in his highest ranked geneticists and gene-wrights to consult on this matter. At this point in time the Steward’s various groups of genetic engineers had been merged into Adeptus Biologis, but had not yet adopted the trappings of the Mechanicum of Mars. The nominal head of the Biologis, a former genesmith, suggested the Ogryn and Beastmen were so unsalvageable that the Steward’s best options were either to wipe them out immediately and resettle the planet with humans of other stock or to sterilize them and then resettle the planets in 60 years or so after they had all died out, something that caused considerable consternation among other schools of thought in the Biologis.

The Steward made it abundantly clear that the suggestion of summary genocide on a world under the Imperium’s protection would not be tolerated and anyone found doing so without the Steward’s knowledge is grounds for immediate execution without appeal. The Steward argued the Ogryn and Beastmen were humans. Afflicted humans, but humans all the same. Their ancestors were no different than any other group that Earth but were merely dealt a bad hand by the universe through no fault of their own. Eventually, the Steward and the various factions of the Adeptus Biologis released an agreement. The Biologis would release carefully tailored mutations into the genepools of the Ogryn and Beastmen over thousands of years until the devolution in intelligence and sanity caused by the Age of Strife could be undone.

As of M41 Ogryn and Beastmen can be split into two broad categories: Primeval and Nova. Primeval Ogryn and Beastmen are rare, existing only on planets that have been just recently rediscovered by the Imperium. They are little different from the Ogryn and Beastmen first encountered by the Imperium in M30. Nova Ogryn and Beastmen vary in intelligence from little better than their Primeval ancestors to levels deemed acceptable to the Imperium (generally human intelligence or close to it).

Nova Ogryn have lost some of the strength and durability of their ancestors, but in general are much more intelligent (though less so than human on average). Combined with external artificial augmentations such as Biochemical Ogryn Neural Enhancement or “Bonehead Procedure”, some Ogryn officers are actually comparable to humans in intelligence.

Nova Beastmen are one of the greatest success stories of the Biologis, along with the Astartes and Necromundan eco-engineering. Out of all the strains of abhuman, the Beastmen benefited the most from genetic engineering, mostly because of how bad they had it to begin with. Some have theorized that the Beastmen were created via crude methods of genetic engineering by splicing in large amounts of non-human DNA (even moreso than other abhumans) during the Dark Age of Technology. When society collapsed during the Age of Strife, there was no way to correct the myriad mutations and glitches that cropped up over the following 10,000 years. Indeed, when the Beastmen were first discovered by the Imperium they were not even recognized as human-descended at first.

Although the Beastmen started off much worse than the Ogryn, their uplifting progressed much faster. The same shoddy genetic engineering that made the Beastmen prone to mutation in the first place meant that the new, stabler genes introduced by the Adeptus Biologis became established across the population very quickly. All Nova Beastmen as of M41 are essentially if human intelligence. Any Primeval Beastmen in M41 are all from very recently discovered worlds. Nevertheless, despite their dramatically more stable genome, Beastmen still suffer a slightly higher rate of mutation than the rest of the Imperium. No one is sure if the tendency towards mutations is due to the Biologis trying a little too hard to correct the flaws in the Beastmen genome or the Ruinous Powers trying to taint any long-term victory on the part of the Imperium.

The Adeptus Biologicus might have gone a little overboard in trying to keep the instincts of the Beastmen in check. As opposed to their Primeval brethren, Nova Beastmen tend to be rather solemn and dour, though this may be because they know how far they have climbed and how deep the pit they were lifted out of was. Their sense of duty and debt is second only to that of Krieg, but thankfully for the Imperium’s sake the Beastmen are much less suicidal. Promethean beliefs tend to be widespread among the Beastmen. However, the Nova Beastmen have not lost all of the bestial instincts of their kin. Beastmen often speak of a “Weakness of the Beast” to refer to any behavior that seems to be driven by instinct or base desire, one of the few societal ideas they may have picked up from the Adeptus Biologicus. Nova Beastmen in general also tend to have much sharper senses than baseline humans, and are valued even in otherwise all-baseline regiments as scouts and trackers.

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==== Beastmen and Ogryn Society ====

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Nova Ogryn tend to live under a tribal or clannish structure of government. There are perhaps dozens of worlds whose inhabitants come under the broad category of Ogryn and each world can have a thousand different tribal groups with their own set of traditions. However, most common are a leading Patriarch, some paternal ancestor of a large proportion of the tribe. Usually then there is the Wise Woman. Sometimes it's the chief’s mother, sometimes his wife, sometimes it's not a woman but just someone with good judgement. A priest/shaman for matters of spiritual significance and dealing with supernatural phenomena (which usually boils down to “leave it alone and tell the nearest adept”). Sometimes the tribe might be blessed/cursed with a Witch/Warlock who has psychic powers. Psychic Ogryn exist. They used to be rarer than in the baseline gene pool but now exist in the same proportion as baseline humanity. This may be a side effect of the increase in power or by using baseline human genes to uplift the Ogryn.

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Although Ogryns are not as smart as baseline humans, they are generally smarter than people expect. The officers with BONE implants can fluently converse in High Gothic about all manner of matters both practical and philosophical and are invariably literate. But that's because they were already the brightest of the bright even before the biocrystalline Cortex Technology was inserted into their brain. The average Ogyrn can learn to maintain an extra-large laser rifle by route, can understand contractual obligations (although they will sign said contract with an X) and has enough brains to follow orders and even understand quite complex strategy provided it's explained slowly with small words and you get them to repeat it back to you just to make sure. Ogryn are also known to be fiercely loyal and honorable. It's a bloody strange day when an Ogryn breaks their word.

Nova Beastmen, on the other hand, tend to form rigid military hierarchies when left to form their own societies. This is not due to any intrinsic inclination to do so as opposed to baseline humanity, but more because any governmental structure that doesn’t encourage iron-hard discipline tends to implode within a few years. Their inner animal is still very close to the surface, and their increased cognitive faculties haven’t tamed it in the slightest. Beastmen societies are ruled by philosopher-kings called Brahmins, who tend to exemplify everything that the Beast is not. More of a high judge than a war chief, seemingly at odds with the otherwise militarized nature of Beastmen society, but a wise and solemn individual that will not give in to base desires and passions.

Another notable feature of Beastman society are Aurochs, the warrior-champions of Beastman society. These huge warriors are about the size and strength of Astartes, but overall tend to be much less effective for several reasons. First, Aurochs make up a vanishingly small proportion of the Beastmen population and cannot reliably be mass produced. Secondly, Aurochs lack all of the advantages beyond sheer strength that make Space Marines so lethal. Finally, Aurochs cannot use standardized equipment. Because of their rarity, armor and weaponry often have to be individually crafted, most Imperial helmets being unable to fit over their horns and even normal Beastmen helmets being too small for them.

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=== Nightsiders ===

<div class="toccolours mw-collapsible mw-collapsed" style="100%"> '''''A Brief Elucidation of the Nightsider:'''''

The Nightsider is a catchall term for a grouping of sub-species adapted for a specific type of environment without any common origin beyond that of any other human group. They are native to many worlds of the Imperium such as Praetoria, Calth from the transplanted population of dead Posul, Equixus, at least one world in the Carcharodon recruitment area and many others. Typically they are a pale breed adapted to living on worlds either with no light or additional environmental conditions that make dwelling in the light substantially detrimental. Such reasons can include but is not limited to the planet having unusually harmful sunlight, extreme daytime predation or population pressure or isolation in the dark lands of tidally-locked worlds. Worlds populated entirely by Nightsiders are rare (but not unprecedented) as they would require an environment where regular humans could not survive and such worlds typically can't maintain global environmental conditions that would allow a population of humans or near-humans to survive at all.

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Although disparate in origin the Nightsiders of the Imperium share common features in part necessitated by their environment and in part derived from a standardized Dominion era gene-template; Large dark eyes, a lack of pigmentation in skin, hair and nails, the ability to synthesize vitamin D in the liver and a very slightly lower optimal body temperature. Due to their native environments often being lower in available energy they often form smaller social structures based on extended family bonds numbering no more than twenty or thirty individuals operating over a wide area dictated by availability of resources. To this end the Nightsiders are also often fiercely territorial by nature. This borderline anti-social nature is assumed to be cultural more than biological as they have been integrated into the Imperial Army with little additional problems after the first few moths when they realize that the meals are regular and predictable, although even then they form groups among themselves and disperse evenly within the regiment.

Nightsiders are as intelligent as baseline humanity and so have never qualified for AdBio uplifting like the beastmen and ogryn strains. Although they were often found in primitive conditions by the Imperium this is typically a result of finding a long term equilibrium with direct environmental needs, usually a lack of available food preventing work specialization and the larger social projects that result. In all cases efforts of the Missionarius Galaxia, especially the Orders Sabine, have resulted in varying degrees of successful pacification and introduction to true civilization.

The introduction to the civilization of the Imperium's light has gone smoothest in places where the local populations could be persuaded to accept the tithe willingly. The Nightsiders are human, they do not gladly eat slain of their own kind or kill off excess population in times of greatest need, but they did so in the name of survival. The tithe offers a way out, excess population is sent out into the galaxy and send their pay home in the form of nutri-paste and tinned foods and when they return they have had the habits of good order trained into them and they spread this to the rest of their kindred. This cultural influence over the generations has them adopting Imperial technology willingly, as barter and trade for their services rather than as the recipients of charity. Charity they would not tolerate, they seldom care for the pity of outsiders (a term typically used to mean any that is not part of their family group). By this helping hand the Imperium reaches out to them rather than reaching down to them and in doing so all may rise up high as allies and friends.

In the Imperial guard they typically make very good target spotters for artillery and patrol squad removers. The ways of hunting are often a second nature to them and all good commanders know how best to take advantage of this.

Despite long term introduction into the wider Imperium the various Nightsider cultures have retained many of the more "primitive" seeming rituals and customs of their ancestors in part at least becasue, like all ab-humans, they maintain a "them and us" mentality based on the very obvous and noticeable difference between themselves and the teeming masses of other humanitys. For the most part this is encouraged as it bind their social order and so long as they retain pride in their social identity and understand that the Imperium places due worth in them based on their skills and contributions they are less tested by the whispers of more terrible things. Due to their extremely family based social structures the prevailing religious trends tend towards the worship of ancestors and ancestor spirits, although due to their disparate nature this is not always the case and great variation has been noted.

Many human strains both baseline and abhuman express apprehension towards Nightsiders, often because their strange habits and dark sclera give them an uncanny valley effect. Ironically, many xenos species find Nightsiders to be appear more personable than regular humans (at least in appearance, their behavior often having the same offputting effect), white sclera being virtually unique among humanity and its component subspecies in the galaxy, with some xenos even admitting that the white sclera of human eyes can be creepy.
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=== Ratlings ===

<div class="toccolours mw-collapsible mw-collapsed" style="100%"> '''''Of the Ratlings:'''''

The Ratling strain of humanity, or Ornsworlder as many of them prefer to be called, is a variety of abhuman but unlike many other abhuman strains is native to only one world; Ornsworld. The planet Ornsworld was founded sometime between the later years of M6 and the early days of M7 according to the radioactive decay in a can of irradiated waste on the largest moon and by the mighty hero Orn of Many Tales according to the locals. Orn was a mighty warrior and fearless explorer of the First Stellar Exodus, so the tales tell, who headed a colony fleet and braved the uncharted deeps of space in early ships of imperfect design. Many places on the surface of the planet hold the name of Orn; the great mesa of Orn's Table, the immense cavern system of Orn's Burrow, the ancient water filled impact crater of Orn's Bath and the escarpment of Orn's Headstone at the foot of which is reputedly the sight of Orn's Grave. due to the rarity of surviving records of this era independent proof of Orn existing is undiscovered. All Ratlings claim descent from Orn, if he ever did exist then it is inevitable that they are right due to the passage of time and isolation during the Age of Strife. From this stage of development up until the Age of Strife it is believed that the Ornsworlders did not deviate noticeably from the baseline human form, the role of Ornsworld in the days of and days prior to the Great and Bountiful Human Dominion is unknown as records of that era of Ornsworld have not survived.

At the onset of the Age of Strife, in the first days of the Iron War of which dark legends tell the fell deeds of, Ornsworld fared better than most. Some have suggested that the locals had slightly Luddite tendencies and did not trust thinking machines that thought as men thought. Others have pointed out rusted remains in the mountains of the south above where glaciers once roamed of Iron Folk sitting in the caves, their alloy shells still sitting where they died though their hearts have long since decayed beyond possibility of reanimation. Others again point out that human bones were found alongside them and that there is no evidence that they died in violence. Whatever the cause or evidence of it seems that the most sophisticated Men of Iron never made it to Ornsworld and Ornsworld had neither and Iron Mind or a Man of Gold. There is also no isotope residue in the soil layers for this time to indicate that the sudden Ice Age was anything but either a natural occurrence or a long delayed hiccup of the original terraforming efforts.

The Ice Age would have been correctable with the subtle application of solar reflectors and atmospheric tweaking that was common enough practice for Dominion era habitation but although Ornsworld had been spared the worst of the Iron War it did not come out untouched, the planet's industry was in ruins and beyond a few weather monitoring and communication satellites had no space presence. The world slipped into the cold and the inhabitants could do nothing to stop it.

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There is debate in the leafy halls of the AdBio if the changes that started in this dwindling age of isolation were the result of intentional engineering to better survive the new and sorrowful age or were a result of natural adaptation to the condition of that age. Some point out that the alterations couldn't have occurred that fast across the entire global population, especially when considering the alterations to the digestive system and the bones in the hands and feet. Others point out that by the time that the Iron War started genetic tempering was already present in the population of the entire species bar a few puritan holdouts and that with a broader pallet available the beneficial structures could have stabilized in a mere handful of generations (natural process built from semi-artificial components). Whatever the cause the result was a deviation that was sufficient to have them declared beyond the normal levels of variation found in the baseline population. Such changes include a hand with three fingers and two thumbs and a similarly structured foot, unusual neural architecture in the parietal lobe resulting in a high tolerance for physical pain and the stomach being divided into two separate organs as well as a proportionally larger and more functional appendix. The short and slightly broader on average stature would not be enough on it's own to have them classed as abhuman as many pygmy populations are not classed as such. It is said that ratlings have a better sense of smell but this is proven incorrect beyond normal human variation. They do posses better hand to eye coordination slightly but measurably surpassing the human norm when the whole population is taken into account.

The deviations were ideal for them to have at least a little bit of an edge in the food scarce and cold environment that their world had become. As a society they could have gone two ways, increased competition or greater cooperation. In the case of the Children of Orn they would not forsake bonds of common humanity and kinship and did not turn on each other, preferring to ration carefully what they had and huddle together in the dark for warmth; they would die as people rather than live as beasts. In time what few technological artifacts they had preserved failed and they had not the skills or tools to repair or replace them and they became a rustic and simpler people.

No cold spell can endure forever, even one as soul crushing and lingering as that great winter and spring came at last in the late part of the twenty-ninth millennium. By the time that the fledgling Imperium found them the glaciers were retreating miles at a time each summer and regaining no ground in milder winters. The people of Ornsworld long since accustomed to making do with little were in an age of plenty and underwent a golden age of rapid expansion in those fresh green years as miles of new farmland opened before them year after year and greater joy was had that their old fairy stories had come true; the people Orn was born to had come at last again to their world, the Tall Folk of Earth. No age of expansion can continue indefinitely and the ratlings made an equilibrium in time with their new and verdant world and tended it's great green glacial valleys lovingly, they knew the value of what they by the grace of their gods had. By the time such stability was reached they had already managed to acquire a little bit of a reputation with the Imperium at large on their first impressions of being fond of food and drink and prone to large families.

In the years after the Ornsworlders served the Imperium dutifully and provided many fine marksmen and regimental cooks as well as food stuffs. They were a well loved people, gentle and kind and full of good sense and down to earth wisdom. Their friends were many as they tended to be generous and infectious laughs. The Imperium was their golden age.

The golden age did not last. Dominion records were found in the 12th Black Crusade by a the Chaos Lordling Eidolon Ever-Burning of an artifact of on Ornsworld known as the Eye of Night. It was not an artifact of Dominion make but something far more ancient that they had unearthed that was said to be able to destroy complex mortal technology great and small, fragile or robust. He descended upon peaceful Ornsworld like a great dragon made of fire and inferno and reduced all he touched to cinders and ash as he took the Eye from it's hiding place in a deep and flooded cave and hideous as his presence was he vanished soon enough with his prize but stiffer than expected had been the resistance and weakened now the Children of Orn were. Like sharks to spilled blood other creatures came to that weakened world as the Imperium was hamstrung and distracted by the rest of that great war.

When the Imperium managed to scrape the resources to send a force to Ornsworld it was far too late. Gone were the songs in the halls of the thanes, the laughter was silent and all that was to be found were the bodies arranged in great patterns of offering, lying where they had fallen in the hunts or mutilated and thrown on sacrificial heaps and those joyful smiles were twisted into expressions of fear and pain. Only Chaos Spawn moved on the blighted and tainted land, the ratlings had been exterminated to the last child.

There were Ornsworlders in the forces that landed in the fresh ashes. Their tears were bitter and sorrowful beyond words and that sorrow was turned to a cold and terrible wroth. It might seem amusing that a branch humanity that seems built for peace could be so angry and maintain an anger colder than the deeps of space for so long, but they can and it seems like it should be an impotent rage but it is not. A call was put out by the head chef of one of the regiments that landed, a dreadful and terrible message whispered from astropath to scribe and passed on across the Imperium. All the sons and daughters of Orn were to come home.

The fields were made green again, trees grew again from the ashes on the mass graves and from a distance maybe it would look like all was how it was. But those happy songs are now songs of war and retribution, sons and daughters of that world look to the stars no longer in hope but in hate, the law of conscription has been restricted as were it not too many would heed the war drums that beat in their hearts. People look at ratlings and are unimpressed and remain unimpressed until they start racking up a body count. Spider silk they once sold to off world merchants in bolts and in dresses for princesses, now every soldier carries a length of it and can cut a neck all the way to the bone. Those clever hands and keen eyes once carved and painted things of beauty now put those skills to greater bloody work than ever before in their service to the Guard and Ornsworld Marksmen are famed and feared across half the galaxy. They move swiftly and quietly and kill without hesitation or remorse. They are owed a blood-price that could only be measured in the ocean depths of their shed tears.

The world of Orn and it's inhabitants are a very unexpected terror that stalks the stars on the dying of the forty-first millennium, their anger roused is more terrible for how unexpected it was and although the Eye of Night was undoubtedly a great boon to the forces of Chaos it might not be worth what has risen against them.

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== Weapons of the Imperium ==

=== Lasguns ===

The first instances of las-weapon technology came from Terra itself. It is thought to be a recreational weapon used in mock battles during the Dark Age of Technology. At that time these las-weapons beams had the power of 4mm stubber pellets where even thick cloth was effective armor against it. These relics were present on Terra and other worlds during the Warlord Era but it was the Emperor who reshaped it to become a lethal weapon. The Emperor’s scouts had presented him with some prototype weapons when preparing for the unification with Mars. One such weapon was the proto-Lascarbine that was superior to stubber carbines in all but firepower. The Las beams still had the power of a 4mm stubber pallet thus the Emperor in his intelligence recrafted the weapon so that it fired with the power of an 8mm stubber round. The Lascarbine first saw service as the replacement for the Autorifles which was the standard weapon for the Imperial Army in the unification of the Sol system. Next was the Laspistols which were design to replace the stubber pistols. The mass use of Las-weapons saw that the Lascarbine barrels started to warp after 5.000 shots and the Laspistol barrels warped after 2.000 shots. When these barrels warped, what would have been unmodified hitscan fire devolved to lose of accuracy where Guardsmen had to fire two or more times in the same place to get a hit. Even worst, when the Laspistol barrels warped soldiers had to fire at point-blank range to get hits.

The Imperial Army Handheld Weapons Development Bureau would develop the Lasgun which had a longer barrel and limited the power to 7.9mm stubber round strength. Then changed the iron sights of the weapon to allow attachable optics and added a stock for increase accuracy. The first Lasguns were deployed to the front during the Hunting Era where it was noted that these weapons had effectively the firepower as the Lascarbines but the barrels didn’t warp until after 10.000 shots. When the Apostasy Era started Guardsmen on both sides reported the Lascarbines and Lasguns in night-time fighting left noticeable muzzle flashes thus making the shooter an easy target. The Weapons Development Bureau would again work on the Lasgun and Lascarbine just after the Apostasy Era, to create the attachable flash suppressor for better night-time combat. Then they also created the light attachable stock for the Lascarbine.

=== Flak Armor ===

There was no such thing as a standardized armor used by the Imperial Army during the Great Crusade. The closes thing to such a concept came in the form of the Solar Pattern Void Armor used widely by the Solar Auxilia but that was a carapace-reinforced void suite rather than Flak Armor as we know it today. The first documented instances of what could be considered Flak Armor was when Cadian Shock Troops started equipping troopers en masse with light anti-shrapnel armor near the end of the Great Crusade. Cadian officers found out on the battlefield when Cadian Guardsmen attacked entrenched positions most of their losses sustained were from artillery or random bits of debris thrown into the air by artillery. The different regiments from Cadia phased out the traditional metal plate armor for Flak Armor, all future campaigns used Flak Armor once manufactorums switched production lines right before the War of the Beast.

The breastplate, shoulder pauldrons, knee plates, and greaves all used the same material and layering as each other. The helmet has considerable more armor and the fabric connecting the armor is much weaker or lacks any sort of plating. Most of the actual armor in Flak Armor uses an inner layer of shock absorbent gel with metal plating between the gal and outer ceramic layer. All three of these layers are connected and interwoven with carbon-fiber, metal-fabric, and nylon strings forcing the layers to stay together under most conditions. The ceramic plate was designed to deflect shrapnel or at least cause it to be stuck in the plate. The metal layer was placed to stop lasbolts or stubber rounds from fully penetrating through the armor in case if the shot passed the ceramic plate. The gal is there as either the last ditch effort to stop shrapnel from fully penetrating the armor or prevent internal bleeding from receiving a direct hit. Flak Armor fabric is made from different carbon-fiber, metal fabrics, and thick cloths to prevent shrapnel from cutting through or a blade from ripping it. Flak Armor helmet tend to have extra metal plating to ensure that not all shots to the head are fatal or random falling debris didn’t kill the Guardsman.

The first major combat test of Flak Armor was seen in the War of the Beast. On the frontlines Flak Armor proved to be basically ineffective in protecting against Ork weaponry. The Orks had used unusually large stubber rounds up to but not limited to 10 or 12mm that would slice right through Flak plating. What would be considered dangerous Ork rockets would often miss even with flam ammo, Flak armor was more than enough protection against most Ork rocketry short of city block leveling size. Crone Eldar and Dark Eldar weapons of both Saw and Splinter ammo had difficult times penetrating Flak plating unless there was concentrated fire where even the Flak plating can only protect against so much. When the Fallen first turned on Imperial Army elements, blosters were used for the first time against Flak Armor. The bolter rounds would often penetrate Flak plating to only cleanly exit out on the other side then explode, if the Guardsman was lucky they would still be alive. When a Guardsman was even luckier the bolter shell would be deflected off of Flak plating and explodes prematurely in mid-air, unless the explosion was in their face the shrapnel would be mostly harmless. The flexibility, simplicity, and cheapness to produce Flak Armor instead of Void suits led to many Imperial worlds adopting the Flak Armor, quotas and resources were limited in the total economic mobilization that happened in the War of the Beast made Flak Armor even more popular.

During the Apostasy, Imperial Guard regiments openly fought against one another and this saw the first use of Flak Armor against massed artillery. Regiments would launch massive formations to charge at entrenched Guardsmen who were well prepared for such an attack. The defenders would fire blinding volleys of artillery shells to delay the charge. Flak Armor proved a Guardsman could survive an artillery barrage short of a direct hit right next to their feet they would be fine, if the shockwave from the explosion didn’t destroy the body’s organs that is. Artillery barrages could now only slow down attacks from Guardsmen thanks to Flak Armor. Field modifications noted to be used by regiments during the Apostasy was extra cloth being to prevent shrapnel from easily slicing the joints. Thicker ceramic plates are used by veteran Guardsmen against Orks to at least survive glancing shots from Ork stubbers. Regiments constantly facing Crone or Dark Eldar is deployed with extra metal layered Flak Armor to prevent enemy fire from penetrating Flak plating.

=== Bolters ===

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All modern varieties of bolter, from the humble workhorse that is the mainstay of the Space Marine legions to the bolt pistol used by baseline humans, are all at least in part influenced by a design created by the Emperor of Mankind himself. Believe it or not, bolters were originally not that important a part of ancient humanity’s arsenal. This can be seen in the nature of warfare in the 41st millennium. Warfare in the 41st millennium almost resembles that of pre-gunpowder humanity, with a heavy focus on armor and the viability of melee combat. Humanity’s weapons of choice during the Dark Age of Technology were Volkite guns and Adrathic disintegrators, neither of which armor offered much protection against. Military tactics during this period would have been more familiar to older groups of humans (potentially as far back as M2) than their descendants, with a greater emphasis on utilizing cover and avoiding fire than melee combat. Knowledge of how to make advanced armor survived the Age of Strife better than similar knowledge of weaponry, shifting the advantage to armor over arms and making melee combat viable again. Bolters only entered into the military sphere much later in the Dark Age of Technology, having believed to have been a weaponized version of a power tool, after it was noticed how well they performed against Orks, other high-durability xenos, and rogue Men of Iron and other Silica Animus.

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The Emperor contributed to the reinvention of the bolter back before he was the Emperor, before he was the Steward, before he was the Warlord, when he was merely Oscar of the Terrawatt Clan. The Terrawatt Clan was a technocracy, with societal standing and authority being based on one’s inventiveness and research productivity, and if one could not prove their mental ability there was no way for them to advance in status. Embarking on a project that advanced Terrawatt’s sum of knowledge in some way was a common coming of age ritual in the country, and although he saw himself as artificial and a shadow of humanity Oscar wanted to be viewed slightly less as a of Malcador's trophy taken from the ruins of Chthonia and slightly more as a person.

Oscar chose as his project reverse-engineering an old ballistics weapon that had uncovered some centuries before by expeditions from Terrawatt from the deserts of the former Tharkian Empire (specifically the province of Anatolia). The weapon’s systems had been fouled by sand and half of its components were missing, but Oscar managed to piece together enough of its workings to construct a working replica sized to his frame, or at least fill in enough of the missing pieces to construct a model that actually worked. This would be the precursor of the Astartes pattern boltgun and explains, among other things, why the prototype bolter was already built for someone of an Astartes’ size.

The Theologiteks were impressed and Oscar was proud of his creation (not to mention happy to have a weapon that didn’t feel like a child’s toy in his hands), eventually taking the prototype as his sidearm when he embarked to reunify Old Earth. The gun faithfully served as his sidearm for many years, before finally failing some two hundred years after the Battle of Terra in about 700.M31. Oscar was saddened by the loss, seemingly one more aspect of his life that seemed to be eroding away, but the remains of the so-called ‘father of bolters’ survived and remains enshrined to this day in the museum in the Imperial Palace.

Originally, the Warlord’s armies of Thunder Warriors were armed with Volkite weaponry and autoguns, but as the numbers of augmented warriors grew and Volkite weapons were gradually lost due to attrition, three-fourths of the Warlord’s soldiers were armed with bolters about the time the Thunder Legions were being phased out in favor of the Legio Astartes. Volkite weaponry may have been more powerful and autoguns were cheap, but bolters were reliable, relatively powerful (unlike autoguns), and more importantly their workings were well-understood and could be easily replicated (unlike Volkite weapons).

The Warlord was not the only individual to reverse engineer the secrets of the bolter. Other human nations during the Age of Strife had come to the same conclusion regarding the bolter’s reliability and ease of production, and the Imperium encountered other models of bolters on places like Mars, the Hubworld League, and the Auretian Technocracy, several of which were based on actual STC designs. Information from these designs was assimilated by the Imperium to create a syncretic design that improved upon the initial Astartes pattern (Oscar, to his embarrassment, [[fail|had gotten some of his assumptions wrong and had replaced several missing systems with slightly more inefficient versions he had created wholecloth]]). However, not all bolter designs were equally optimal in all situations, with some performing better at certain tasks than others. Eventually, a wide array of bolter types proliferated in the Imperium ranging from the numerous variants of the Astartes pattern, in which the initial kick from the propellant recoil is enough to break an unaugmented human’s arm, to the smaller bolt pistol commonly used by commissars, which trades caliber size and rate of fire for recoil to the point that it can be used by normal humans.

By approximately early M34, enough principles of miniaturization had been rediscovered to downsize the traditional full-size Astartes bolter to the Godwin-De’az Pattern. Nevertheless, despite this miniaturization the recoil still made it almost impossible for normal humans to use unless you were genetically enhanced, were wearing powered armor, or from Catachan or the Hubworld League. For many years the Godwin-De’az pattern occupied an awkward position for many years, being too large to be used by most Guardsmen yet too small in caliber to be an efficient weapon for Astartes. However, this all changed after the founding of the Adeptus Securitas and the Sisters of Battle in M36, who with their enhanced strength found this intermediate-sized bolter almost perfect for their needs. Indeed, name Godwin-De'az came about as a reference to Sister De'az, the Nocturnean Sister who was the first successful recipient of the augmentations used by the Sisters of Battle. Before that, they were merely referred to as "miniaturized Bolters" due to their scarcity. Godwin-De'az bolters are much more common in the Imperium now, mostly due to their use by the Securitas.

The invention of the precursor to the modern bolter is perhaps one of the achievements the Emperor is most proud of. It was not something created by Oscar, the Man of Gold, nor Oscar, the Warlord of Earth, but by Oscar, the person, in the name of the betterment of his species.

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=== Leman Russ Tank ===

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''“We should've waited for the Fenrisian ale before rushing here just to find half a tractor. At least we'd've something that would lift the mens' spirits after such a disappointment.”''<br>
- Primarch Leman Russ, post-Imperial Compliance of Nova Borilia.

THE REGIMENTAL STANDARD: A HISTORY OF THE LEMAN RUSS TANK

In today's battlefield, almost all of the armed forces flying Imperial banners have either used or fought alongside the Leman Russ Battle Tank. Many view it with great relief, no longer having to be at the forefront of an advance on fortified positions, others call it their “ride,” and some view the Leman Russ as an inelegant and ugly hunk of metal that conceals brutal effectiveness and resilience worthy of the name. Its treads have rolled over thousands of battlegrounds, and its guns have shot down many foes... yet one wonders where the seeds for this venerable war machine were sown. If you have had the same question that we at the Regimental Standard did, read on to find out.

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The Leman Russ Battle Tank and its numerous variants has its origins early in the Great Crusades, and is not to be confused with Primarch Leman, who discovered it on Nova Borilia. Rumors of an STC for a tank dating from the Dark Age of Technology drew his attention to the campaign against the Noman xenos' planetary empire, already marked for destruction as Xenos Horrificus due to its brutal enslavement of the local human population and violent refusal of all diplomacy attempts. Fortunately, resistance was broken after a series of engagements that saw the Nomans and a disobedient slave army reeling from the hard hitting tactics of the Space Wolves and Solar Auxilia attachments. For the expeditionaries, what they salvaged from the last Noman stronghold was an immense let down.

The STC was, in fact, the fragments of a blueprint for an all-terrain tractor that started production sometime before the Age Of Strife, not the weapon the intel had suggested. Presumably it had been mistaken for a valuable human relic, and so it was situated in the most secure collection in the Noman fortress.

But the Imperial Army would not be denied their tank, and in the span of a decade several components of the discovery were incorporated into a new design, christened the Leman Russ Battle Tank, Mark I. It set a gyrostabilized Battle Cannon turret on top of a ceramite and plasteel hull with a steel-sprung suspension, while a complex transmission mated to an enormous twin-turbocharged V12 multi-fuel HL230 engine gave it a top speed of 80 km/h and 40 km/h offroad (widely considered ludicrous for a tracked vehicle twice as tall as a Space Marine). This ability was used to great effect, as commanders swung behind enemy positions and unloaded rounds into petty tyrants and slavers.

However, as the Imperium expanded further and encountered tougher opposition, the Leman Russ proved inadequate. Its main gun struggled to defeat more heavily-armored horrors and what was left often outmaneuvered the Leman Russ, and breakdowns ranging from burnt out turbocharger components to transmission failures intensified a growing logistics headache. This led to the replacement of the Mk. I with the Mk. II-V, similar variants that traded mobility for protection and ease of maintenance by bolting on armor, dropping the forced-induction chargers, and in the case of the Mk. IV and V, switching to a simpler transmission. This was deemed acceptable, as the Imperium couldn't afford the best equipment possible for all its soldiers in the immediate aftermath of the War of the Beast.

That is not to say desperation did not proliferate the loaded idea of 'innovation.' During and after the War of the Beast, new variants were hurriedly fitted with crew-operated sponsons to add anti-infantry firepower, and while still inferior to the Land Raider-killing Vanquisher Cannon, a long-barreled Battle Cannon increased muzzle velocity and was easier to mass-produce. Later, more improvements filtered through, like a hydropneumatic suspension and lifted armor skirts that allowed the road wheels freedom of movement and together provided better acceleration and a more stable firing platform. Other changes included light, replaceable composite rectangles attached to the sides (sanctioned for Chimera variants and Salamanders after APC crew entrepreneurs decided they too wanted more armor) and a set of wide-angle optics that replaced the glass visor slit in the driver's hatch and made it possible to drive the tank and fire the hull weapon without switching seats or controls.

The Mk. XVII, created in the late 36th millennium, was supposed to use a scaled-down version of the Malcador Heavy Tank's electric drive system. You will never see this outside the Mechanicus' basements.

[[File:NobledarkLemanRussMarkXXIV.jpg|200px|thumb|left|Mk. XXIV Leman Russ with Imperial Guardsman and eldar Guardian for scale]]

The Mk. XXIV Leman Russ Battle Tank is the most recent variant (see Remembrancer's sketch at left), created in response to reports of a spike in Leman Russ losses due to an increased prevalence of Crone Eldar and Necron tank analogues. The Imperial Couple had put pressure on Mars and the Fabricator-General to either keep the venerable tank a viable part of the Imperial Guard armory, or risk losing further contracts to Forge Worlds unaligned with Mars' branch of the Adeptus Mechanicus, many of whom were experimenting with unsanctioned tank designs. This was enough incentive to finally push the program into its final field tests and evaluation stage.

It carries over the extremely sloped frontal turret and glacis present since the Mk. XX, but replaces the original hull weapon's swivel mount with a ball mount in a smaller housing. To address the vulnerability of the Leman Russ to being flanked, particularly in urban warfare, the tank hull went from being 4.42 meters tall to a flatter profile 3.3 meters high. The front-facing plates of the widened and extended turret are angled to better resist side shots, and the Battle Cannon magazines were relocated to the back of the turret, so an ammo cook-off wouldn't be surrounded by critical systems and the crew. Blow-off vents further increase the chances a disabled Mk. XXIV can escape without Atlas recovery vehicles being put at risk, and two sponsons utilizing cogitators based off the Predator's and Tarantula Sentry Turret's are managed by a remote gunner seated by the driver. Lastly, a refined version of the Great Crusade's forced-induction setup and a weight reduction of 5 tons have allowed the Leman Russ to regain the nimbleness of the Mk. I, without the original's notorious mechanical problems.

While the newest Leman Russ might still be recognizable to an Imperial officer of the 30th millennium, it is not the same war machine your great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandparents used. Keep an eye out for those shiny new Mk. XXIVs, and remember to report any issues to your commanding officer or a Commissar!
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=== Psycannons and the Psi-Disruptor ===

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[[Nobledark_Imperium_Xenos#Men_of_Gold|Justinian]] and Theodora, the Man of Gold and Iron Mind of the Sol System, were based out of Earth and Mars, respectively. When the Age of Strife happened and the Men of Gold and Iron Minds were driven mad by seeing that which was not meant to be seen, Justinian and Theodora went after each other first in the grips of their madness. Ironically, the fact that the two of them killed each other off so early in the Iron War meant that the Sol System was spared from the worst excesses of the Age of Strife and had more working Dark Age technology lying around, compared to a place like [[Nobledark_Imperium_Notable_Planets#Cthonia|Cthonia]] whose inner face was sterilized when someone induced the star it orbited to go nova. Of course this doesn't mean that either Justinian or Theodora were in a healthy state of mind at the time. Justinian may have gone for Theodora first but he was still psychotically insane and trashed everything and everyone in his way to get to his goal, while at the same time Theodora is target Earth with orbital bombardments and scrapcode. The descendants of the technicians to Justinian and Theodora, in a very roundabout way, became the ancestors of the Terrawatt Clan and the Martian Mechanicum, though the Mechanicum took a more indirect fashion as the technicians of the Iron Mind integrated into the general population and Mars in general devolved into technology worshipping cults (of which the future Mechanicum was but one of many) after the destruction of Mars' terraformed biosphere.

In order to kill Theodora, Justinian built a device known as the psi-disruptor. The device would later be taken out of the doomsday vaults of the Mechanicum and used by the Steward to strike down the [[Nobledark_Imperium_Drafts#The_Rangdan_Xenocides_and_the_Slaugth|Rangda Abomination]] when it became clear that conventional options were just not enough. It is a device optimized and designed to kill Iron Minds, you can point it at a lesser mortal and pull the trigger but the effects vary from anywhere from a headache all the way up to total bodily disruption. It also draws on the psychic potential of the wielder and so can only be used by an active psyker and the one made and used by Justinian was built on a scale that was only usable by Men of Gold. Presumably other more baseline high end psykers could wield it to an extent but the list of candidates is very short and they only had one such weapon they weren't willing to risk the destruction of so speculation in this direction was fruitless.

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The original psi-disruptor gun is in the low-risk section on Ganymede. Psycannons are thought to be in some way derived from the study of the original device, a much cruder weapon but one that can be made using currently available technology. Creation of the Psycannon is attributed to the founding of the Grey Knights although by one of Magnus' students rather than the Primarch himself. Magnus was without peer amongst humanity in terms of deamon-lore and warp studies but neither he nor Russ were very good with machinery.

The downside to Justinian’s psi-disruptor are that it takes a huge amount of time to charge up and is very easy to dodge, but if you’re fighting an Iron Mind, whose physical forms and central processing units are building complexes, both of those deficiencies are a non-issue. The psi-disruptor also has quite a large “splash zone”. When Justinian fired the weapon at Theodora it didn’t just kill the Iron Mind but also killed every sapient creature within a few kilometers in a horrific manner.

When Oscar fired the weapon at the Rangda Abomination the only things in the blast radius were the abomination itself, some Slaugth and their bio-constructs, and members of various sapient species the Slaugth had taken as livestock and slaves. The latter of which nobody wanted to hit but reasoned that a quick death was better than spending years living in the Slaugth’s feedlots. They still made sure all of their forces and their allies stood way back when the disruptor was fired. The eldar threw a fit over the possibility of eldar chattel being in the blast zone, especially given those eldar had no soul stones and would go straight to She Who Thirsts, but backed down when even they had to admit there wasn’t a better option. The best they could come up with was pulling one of their own doomsday devices out of Yme-Loc, which would probably blow up the planet and wouldn’t be much better. At least using the mon-keigh device the eldar slaves outside of the blast zone would survive.

The Steward also seriously considered using Justinian’s psi-disruptor on the corrupted Man of Gold back in M34, given how it was so insane that its path was easily predictable, before the Grey Knights managed to resolve that problem on their own. It is a horrible weapon built by a madman to kill a god with a terrible history on top of whatever reality scaring power it might already direct, and tends to rack up a massive body count in collateral damaged when it is fired. It is little wonder the Steward is so reluctant to use it.

After striking the killing blow on Theodora with the psi-disruptor in the initial days of the Iron War, Justinian just kind of wandered off. The members of the resistance found him in the sands of Mars, sitting in a fetal position staring at something no one can see off in the distance, tears streaming down his cheeks. Mars’ carefully constructed biosphere had been stripped away by the Iron War, and the fourth planet of Sol had returned to the red wasteland humanity had first set foot on almost twelve millennia previously. Justinian knows why they are there. He can see their minds, but one doesn’t have to be a Man of Gold to figure it out.

Everyone knows they need to fire. Justinian is calm now, but who knows how long this bout of stability will last, it wasn’t long ago that he was throwing around ships in Martian orbit like they were children’s toys to get to Theodora. At the same time his executioners can’t bring themselves to do it. Everyone there knew Justinian, possibly personally if someone like Tiberius was there, Justinian had been there for almost every human on Earth since before they were born. The Justinian they knew didn’t deserve to die. And if he did die he deserved to go out in a blaze of glory. Demigods shouldn’t die like this.

There are no kine shields, no nuclear eruptions, none of the cosmic temper tantrums that characterized the death of his kin across the galaxy. Just a simple question.

“Do you think...do you think she will be waiting for me on the other side?”

Weapons are raised.

[[*BLAM*|“Yes…she is…”]]

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=== Kinebrach Blades ===

See [[Nobledark_Imperium_Member_States#Kinebrach_Blades|Kinebrach Blades]]

== Adeptus Astartes (Space Marines) ==

''“A Space Marine chapter conquering a planet? Have you been watching the damn holovids again, boy? Let me be clear so I never hear this foolishness again. Could we glass a continent given space superiority and a Battle Barge? Yes. Could we decapitate a planet’s leadership and destroy their infrastructure, leaving them to wither on the vine? Yes, within an hour. [[Nobledark_Imperium_Notable_People#Kharn_the_Oathsworn|Could we shock and awe them into surrender if they are sufficiently cowardly or primitive? Perhaps.]] But make no mistake, if a planet has advanced to the nuclear age and the populace is intent on resistance there is no way 2,500 men can hold it alone, I don’t care if you’re the damn Custodes or Grey Knights. You simply cannot be everywhere at once; gather your strength, and they will simply rise up where you are not. Spread out, and they will overwhelm you with their numbers. Sometimes, quantity has a quality all its own.''

''Subjugation and garrison duty is not our purpose. We are Astartes, Space Marines. We were made to tread the stars and go where others cannot. We are the tip of the Imperium’s spear, striking swiftly and mercilessly at the enemy’s heart. We are the Emperor’s Angels of Death, descending from the sky to slay nightmares so that others may dream peacefully in their beds. Leave the business of conquest and subjugation to the Guard. They have their duty, and we have our own.”''<br>
- Scout-Sergeant Kohl Leibhen of the Raptors, addressing a group of Aspirants

The ideal age for Astartes augmentation is somewhere between 19 and 25 years of age. At this point, the individual is young enough that their body can recover from the trauma of the procedure, but old enough that it is clear that it is worth giving them the enhancements. In theory, older individuals could undergo Astartes augmentation, but the risk of complication is so high that it is essentially not worth it. By the same token, younger individuals might be able to handle the stress of Astartes augmentations better than older individuals, but at this age the augmentations might affect their mental development. Ironically, earlier, less stable versions of super soldier augmentation, such as Thunder Warrior, Canis Helix, and Astartes Mark I augmentations, have a much higher compatibility rate and are are viable for a much wider range of ages than standard Mark III Astartes augmentations, in part because they are less invasive.

It should be noted that for all their similarities the Space Wolves, Iron Hands, and their descendant chapters are not Astartes, and therefore are both created differently and have their own strengths and weaknesses relative to Astartes. Canis Helix chapters (e.g., Space Wolves) are created by splicing large amounts of non-human DNA into the human genome (and therefore have no gene-seed), whereas Astartes are created by implanting artificially grown organs and glands into the human body. This means that despite being gene-locked to the Imperium's best efforts, a Canis Helix supersoldier could theoretically pass down some of their modifications to their descendants, which is something the Imperium did not want and one of the reasons the Astartes won out over the Canis Helix design. The probability of such an event is miniscule, but in a galaxy of scale such events cannot be taken for granted, as the inhabitants of the Fenrisian worlds show. Canis Helix soldiers are also noteworthy in lacking the Black Carapace augmentation, which was one of the key features that led to the Astartes winning out over the Thunder Warriors and other super soldier designs. Instead, Space Wolves use a complex mind-to-machine interface designed by the Iron Priests. It is expensive and not cost-effective on a galactic scale, but it has allowed the Space Wolves to perform just as well as Astartes.

Iron Hands and their descendants are modified Adeptus Mechanicus Skitarii, many of which are possibly even augmented to the level of [[Thallax|Thallaxi]]. As a result, there are [[Female_Space_Marines|no real restrictions]] to who can join the Iron Hands or their descendants beyond the ability to survive the augmentation procedure and being a part of the Adeptus Mechanicus. Skitarii also use a much wider range of augmentations and are often specialized for particular tasks, which means that the members of the Iron Hands and their descendants can be much more physically variable than the standardized augmentations of Astartes. Iron Hands and their descendants do not have to worry about the Black Carapace issue, because their armor essentially is their body, making a better connection between soldier and armor a moot point.

===The Breaking of the Legions===

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During the Great Crusade, the Adeptus Astartes were organized into twenty distinct legions each composed of thousands of Space Marines. However, by M41, the Adeptus Astartes have been divided into many distinct chapters about 1000-1200 strong, each descended at least in part from one of the eighteen legions that survived the War of the Beast. The reason for this change in organization is complicated. Many lay students of history often claim that the impetus for this change was Roboute Guilliman's Codex Astartes, published in 243.M31. However, like much of Guilliman's work, the Codex Astartes was meant to be a thought exercise in how the Adeptus Astartes could be more efficiently organized in a post-Great Crusade environment, and Guilliman would never have tried to shove his ideas down his fellow primarch's throats.

In truth, all of the legions split up for different reasons, and at different times.

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Several of the legions survived virtually as is for a little while longer under new leaders, who would have probably been considered primarchs in their own right if they hadn't had to stand in their predecessor's shadow. Kharn found himself essentially taking over more and more of his legions duties as Angron's health deteriorated. Abbadon was ambitious and charismatic enough to keep the Void Wolves in one piece for at least another generation. Leman Russ told Bjorn during a moment of mutual drunkenness to "look after the place while I step out for a minute". The next morning they realized Russ was gone and to make matters worse everyone had been just sober enough to remember what Russ had said the night before.

Other legions split up following the death of their primarch, or for simple matters of practicality. Old Man Khan called a meeting of the yabgu, despite not being dead yet, to make sure that whoever succeeded him would be competent enough not to run the legion into the ground. In a rare moment of humility, the yabgu compared themselves to Khan and realized that none of them could claim to have accomplished what Khan had accomplished by their age, and so the legion was split up. The descendants of the Thousand Sons such as the Grey Knights were already split up before their primarch's death (with the exception of the Blood Ravens), given that all were created to perform quite different, specialized tasks. The Imperial Fists found themselves splitting apart to fortify and garrison agri-worlds after the War of the Beast, on the basis that you cannot rebuild an empire if everyone is starving, and gradually drifted apart over the centuries. The same is true with the Iron Warriors and hive worlds and Iron Hands and forgeworlds. In these cases, Guilliman's Codex Astartes was seen as a natural framework for how to rework the legions into more autonomous units (though each legion implemented the Codex in their own way).

The Dark Angels are rather infamous for having split up before Guilliman ever wrote the Codex Astartes, after two-thirds of their number turned traitor during the War of the Beast. The Lion split the remaining loyalists into knightly orders and instituted the rank of Watcher to ensure that no one individual could ever subvert the entire legion. Guilliman may have actually been thinking of the Dark Angels when he wrote some parts of the Codex.

The Death Guard never really split up, even with the death of their primarch. Unlike the other legions they have never truly stopped marching to war.

There were two real deathknells for the concepts of a legion as a whole. The first was when Belarius the Abdicator refused to take up command of the full host of the Blood Angels after the death of Sanguinus, knowing full well that his entire reign would be spent in the shadow of the Martyr Angel. Instead he took command of a much more reasonable sized contingent of Blood Angels, nearly all survivors of the War of the Beast, with Belarius giving the most competent of the remaining Blood Angels command of their own groups. This set the precedent for most legions of breaking up into chapters after the death of their Primarch.

The other was the “Iron Cage” incident that happened to Fulgrim sometime in early M31. Fulgrim had always been a micro-manager, and was one of the strongest opponents of breaking the legions into chapters. However, after the War of the Beast, the sheer number of small-scale conflicts across the rebuilding Imperium and lack of local autonomy meant that the Empire’s Sons were ground down to about half the size of their prime merely by attrition alone despite being one of the biggest recruiters of new Astartes. The breaking point for the legion was when the Empire’s Sons got caught in a trap set up by a Tzeentch-worshipping Big Wyrd. The Wyrdboy was never caught, and by the end of it Fulgrim was left with enough marines to scrape into a little less than three chapters. After that point, even the strongest detractors of the Codex Astartes (with the exception of some particularly stubborn cases like the Death Guard) had to admit that Guilliman had a point.

However, despite this, successor chapters have not completely caught all ties with one another. Many chapters still retain close ties with their former brethren in other chapters, and many chapters have programs of officer exchange to encourage loyalty to the Imperium as a whole rather than a particular world or individual. Nevertheless, chapters are expected to be open about all inter-chapter interactions and unofficial brotherhoods are officially banned by explicit decree of the Emperor, in order to prevent the rise of another individual like Luther fostering ties of soft power beneath the nose of the Imperium. One of the jobs of the Inquisition’s Ordo Militarum is to make sure the Adeptus Astartes keep to this decree.

Additionally, by his own admission, Guilliman’s organizational suggestions were designed for times of relative peace, rather than all-out galactic war. In times of great crisis, the First Founding chapters (who are considered first among equals among successor chapters and whose original members were often some of the best soldiers in each legion) have the right to call for a Reformation of the Legion, where the successor chapters temporarily unite to lock arms and march under the united banner of the old legion once more. This policy is sometimes called the Last Wall policy, as Guilliman reputedly got this idea based on suggestions by the consummate soldier Rogal Dorn, who understood that the War of the Beast was not going to be the last major war the Imperium would face.

Responding to this call is completely voluntary, but many chapters consider it shameful for a successor chapter to refuse to answer the call, particularly since a call for a Reformation of the Legion is reserved for only the direst of emergencies that threaten the entire Imperium. The only time a refusal of the call is ever considered acceptable is if a chapter is severely undermanned or if they are physically unable to respond due to being directly under attack themselves. For example, the Lamenters were unable to respond to a call for the temporary reformation of the Blood Angels during the 12th Black Crusade, due to suffering from severe manpower losses beforehand. The Lamenters still blame themselves for not being able to respond to the call, even if the rest of the Imperium doesn’t.

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===Current Chapters===
====The Minotaurs====
The Minotaurs are something of a boogeyman among Space Marines. A group that make even battle-hardened Astartes quiver and speak of in hushed tones. The reason for this fear and paranoia are rather simple: The Minotaurs are Space Marines that hunt Space Marines.

The first recorded instance of a Space Marine considering tactics against other Space Marines was the Ultramarine Aeonid Thiel. During the Great Crusade, Thiel was dragged before Guilliman by his fellow Ultramarines for teaching the marines under his command tactics for fighting other Space Marines, which they saw as a sign of treachery. Guilliman asked whether this was true, and upon being told it was, asked Thiel to explain himself. Thiel said as Ultramarines it was their duty for the legionaires to be prepared for any possible eventuality. Although the idea of Astartes becoming traitors to the Imperium was an uncomfortable idea, that does not mean it was impossible or that Astartes could be unwillingly brainwashed into turning on their battle brothers like they had during the Rangdan Xenocides. After hearing Thiel’s explanation, Guilliman asked the two Ultramarines who had brought Thiel to him to leave the room, and then congratulated Thiel for his ingenuity. He was willing to entertain possibilities no one else could or wanted to consider, and just because people didn't like the implications of such a scenario did not invalidate the utility of any such contingency plans. The Space Marines were created by the Imperium to be their finest warriors in the reconquest of the stars, and who is to say another, more hostile human empire could not have had a similar idea. Thiel would be rewarded for his ingenuity, though for obvious reasons not at that very moment. Thiel would finally be validated and his actions recognized during the War of the Beast, where the actions of Luther and his Fallen showed the idea that a Space Marine could turn traitor to be a frightening reality.

The Minotaurs were originally founded by a War Hound named Leon Kravidos shortly after the Age of Apostasy as a chapter dedicated to fighting against the Fallen. Kravidos knew that in order to fight other Space Marines his men would have to be at the very peak of their potential. Therefore, he created a downright grueling training regimen by Space Marine standards, designed to make his men prepared for anything. Despite his job, Kravidos was actually well respected among Astartes, and was deeply mourned when he died in battle. For thousands of years after that, the Minotaurs were rather unnotable among Space Marine chapters. Their job of hunting down Fallen space marines was well known, but they were seen as people just doing their job as opposed to someone to be feared. That is, until the latest Chapter Master of the Minotaurs, Asterion Moloc, took control of the chapter in 200.M41, after the death of his predecessor in the Badab War.

In contrast to many in the Imperium who spend much of their time in pursuit of a particular foe, such as Inquisitor Boaz Kryptman and the tyranids, Asterion Moloc does not feel a festering hatred for his enemy. Instead, he seems to take the attitude of a big game hunter hunting the most dangerous game. He seems to take a perverse joy in hounding his targets to the ends of their endurance, before delivering the final blow. He spends hours reviewing all known records and tactics of his quarry, so that he know every possible move his prey can make before they do. He does this even for chapters that have not been assigned his target yet.

For obvious reasons, most space marines are uncomfortable with the Minotaurs, considering them, in the words of one Astartes scout who wished to remain anonymous, to be “team-killing frag-heads”. Indeed, the Minotaurs in recent years have been known to be a bit too eager in their desire to fight Space Marines, sometimes flying off the handle at an innocent chapter at the urging of some particularly radical or puritan Inquisitor. About the only people who feel comfortable around the Minotaurs are the Sisters of Battle, who often cooperate with the Minotaurs in operations involving the Fallen.

==== The Dragon Lords ====

The involvement of the Dragon Lords dates back to the founding of Praetoria in the days of the post-Beast rebuilding. It was deemed that the military side of the endeavour would require the substantial presence and use of Space Marines to remove some of the more fearsome and prepared horrors that had moved in during the intervening years. As Primarch Vulkan was the overall commander in bringing the worlds of Wilderness Space back to the light of civilization it was understandable one of his newly minted chapters that set up a way station alongside the more entrepreneurial efforts of the Gredbrittonic founding families.

The head of the space marines in this endeavour was the former Chaplain Commander Xiaphas Jurr of the Afrique League.

Commander Jurr never let the change in position from preacher of the Promethean faith to overall commander interfere with his missionary work and vice versa and it is largely his doing that Praetoria grew into a mostly Promethean world. It was not without practical merit as the forces raised from that world as the years went on all held a faith in common and were all the closer for it. The noble feuds in later years it has been speculated without this vague sense of brotherhood would undoubtedly have bloomed into minor wars.

As Praetoria grew from a minor service stop into a nation the waystation he commanded grew likewise so that in time it was declared a Chapter in its own right with himself as it's commander, a rank he wore well. He and his newly designated Dragon Lords were now distinct from the rest of the Prometheans as whilst he had been influencing the world he commanded from it had been influencing him.

As the population of Praetoria grew the Dragon Lords soon found that they could recruit from there exclusively even with the introduction of the Tithe.

Before the tithe the military of that world was predominantly the house militias and private military companies with only the Red Shirts, the mostly ceremonial soldiers of the Parliamentary Herald, representing the planet as a whole. At the time the Red Shirts were seen as a token force of no real concern and the butt of many jokes due to their lack of real experience and that they were attached to a figurehead rather than anyone with any real power.

This changed when the Imperial Army demanded it's due. They didn't want soldiers loyal to one city, one lord, in contest with their comrades of the same world. They wanted soldiers loyal to the Imperium representing their world as a unified whole. The imposing of a standard uniform was seen as one way to gently erode mental barriers, they were one and all Praetorian.

The distinctive green and black colour scheme of the Dragon Lords was surrendered not long after, coincidentally a few days after the death of Xiaphas Jurr, to their red and ivory as a show of solidarity with the common soldier.

In this time native born Gernebern of Auchmouth, a progeny who rose fast but died a mere few centuries later, took command of the space marines and was the source of much reform within the chapter. It was deemed prudent to have the chapter integrate ever more closely with the common soldiery, slitting the companies up into squads and placing them on long term loan to, at the time, 90 regiments of the Praetorian Guard as specialist squads.

All but one company that was demanded to remain to guard the homeworld at all times.

Despite all the upheavals and political manoeuvrings that could fill a very dry library in their own right it is often over looked the contributions that Praetoria made to the conquest, rebuilding and protection of the wilderness worlds and beyond. Indeed it was in this noble endeavour that Commander Jurr had sacrificed himself.

Were it not for the Red Coat diligence, vigilance and sacrifices the orks, marauders and worse would have just swept right back in and the fate of those that called that place home would have been, at best, pitiable.

==== The Mortifactors ====
The Mortificators are a brother chapter to the Ultramarines, both being founded by veterans of the War of The Beast from Legion XIII in the days of The Rebuilding. The head of the force sent out that formed the core of the original Mortificators was commanded by the esteemed but eccentric, some would say slightly bonkers, Sasebo Tezuka. Sasebo Tezuka was originally a child of the strange land of Strayllya on Old Earth and had begun his military career in the earliest days of the Great Crusade. He was a man of accomplishment who commanded the respect of his men despite his oddness. One of these oddities was a seeming over reliance on signs and portents that he used to make his decisions. He himself was no psyker and although he did employ them he didn’t use them for divination, and although he relied on what was essentially random chance he seldom went irretrievably astray and more often than not followed a correct path. In more recent times people have wondered if the King of Clowns had anything to do with the roll of those bones but no answer that any could understand has been forthcoming.

With the breakup of the XIII Legion Captain, now Chapter Master, Tezuka was free to follow such omens as his cards and bones would show him and by a roundabout means and thirty years of wandering brought him to the world of Posul. If Posul was meant to be some sort of Promised Land it was not a one given from any god that cared for its followers. It was dreary and dark and by some fluke of topography and atmospheric composition it was eternally shrouded in a permanent and extremely heavy overcast with two small dim suns. It was a world of extremely dark nights and extremely dim days and it was not unclaimed.

A hardy breed of man survived on that world. Pale and slight of build with big dark eyes. They were primitive in those days having in the time since man’s apex devolved to something that resembled Mesolithic era humanity. It was assumed at the time that their fall from grace, so complete as it was, was solely a result of their environment that was best and most politely described as very bleak. The plant life was typically sparse with dark purple leaves to maximize the available energy from the dim suns and the whole world had the general feeling of a deep-sea vent ecosystem on dry land.

Although that was almost certainly a contributing factor it was not the whole story. The Posuli could fairly be described as the Death Cult of the Death Cults. They followed the faiths of the Deorum Mortuus Est or at least they adhered to the teachings of those who had slain their gods. Master Tezuka and his followers, dictated by omens to settle on this world, learned from the stories of the eldest of the eldest priests and backed up by their own findings in the Verboten Lands held by all tribes in inviolate sacrosanctity for time beyond mind; the natives though not now had been worshipers of Chaos.

Their gods had been very real and walked among them awful and powerful, demanding great temples be built to them and demanding holocaust and sacrifice to feed them. Over the long years they had brought the Posuli low to the point of being naught but cattle to the slaughter of unworthy butcher gods until one day men lead by the “dream-walkers” rose up and were not struck down but did strike back with a righteous fire. Estimates by the off-worlders put the date of the uprising at approximately two centuries prior. The locals had no calendars and so none could know for sure but it seemed that the gods of Posul were overthrown on the day of The Raid of the Mansion or near to it.

But the locals were by then a thoroughly broken people. Presumably their ancestors had been of the Great and Bountiful Human Dominion and presumably they had been stranded here in the early days of the Age of Strife and presumably they did retain some measure of civility for some time but if it was so none of that survived. The locals had nothing that they remembered of greatness, nothing to aspire to and no notion of lasting joy. They carried on much as they had with cannibalistic rituals and constant wars of tribal slaughter. Tribal warriors would war and the victors would kill all of the men-folk and the children and take the women as their own and try to hold what land they could claim of the fallen’s holdings until displaced or the tribe in time split through internal unrest and warred upon once-kin.

And into this Chapter Master Sasebo Tezuka of Legion XIII descended. His first interaction with a local was when a boy barely old enough to grow his first chin hairs stabbed him in the gut with a stone tipped spear. Sasebo had approached the nearest tribe unarmoured and unarmed, wearing a simple course jute robe with only a brother-psyker at his side to show peaceful intent and appear as unthreatening as an Astartes can. The spear tip cut into his skin and stopped at the black carapace. The lad received a backhander that knocked several of his teeth out; it was extremely easy to follow him back to his tribe.

Some worlds react poorly to Imperial attempts to uplift them, this is true. Some worlds welcome the Imperium as returning brothers from the stars. Few were as reluctant as the Posuli who had no notion by then of anything greater than a tribe and no understanding of any social order more complex than the weak are food, the strong rule. Generally the Imperium tries to keep as much of the substance of a culture as possible in its uplifting. Master Sasebo couldn’t really see much worth keeping and as the days passed the other teams that investigated the other tribes reported much of the same. It was a long and bloody road to remake the Posuli into any sort of real society and Master Tezuka had fallen to the unknowable things of The Harrowing long before then.

In the end the people of Posul were brought, reluctant every step of the way, into the light of civilization and although their world could never be tamed it was made better than awful. It was possible in the end to live there rather than just be sentenced. In the end they were taken to the stars again and they did become part of the Imperium, if only a minor part. The people of that world were found, despite being classed as abhuman Nightsiders, to be compatible with the Astartes Mk3 MP gene-seed and in time were made worthy of it. In time they raised regiments to aid the Imperium that had taken then from the dirt. But it could not be said that they did not affect the chapter as it uplifted them, especially once they started to recruit from them.

The cannibalistic rituals were replaced with haemovorous rituals and human sacrifice with deep drug induced comatose vision seeking. The chapter adopted both of these and whilst down the long march of years the chapter amended the beliefs of the locals for their own betterment it was also the chapter that ended up adopting these beliefs and took up the scriptures of the Dead Gods.

The Mortificators were never seen as desirable allies. They were unpleasantly weird and typically possessed of a grim disposition. But they were valued and so were their people. It was not to last.

In the year 997M39 the Leviathan fell upon Posul, there was no hope of saving the world. All those dusty temples where man had slain their gods, all those strange tribes and wandering soothsayers, all the victories of the Imperium to make men out of monsters, all of those works of art carved in pale stone and lit pink and deep red by the dim red suns were washed away in a tide of chitin that were in turn washed away in nuclear fire. Basilica Mortis, the great star fort of the Mortificators had managed to remain hidden by strange eldar trickery and in its vaulted halls were held the last of that world, as many of the keepers of the stories and the children to tell them to as could be and on the surface of that world the men and women of the world and it’s chapter gave their lives to draw the Hive to them, to make the Hive believe that it was winning. Lord Magyar ordered the atomics released at the last possible moment, at the time when hope should have been turned to despair but was instead turned to righteous wroth and retribution and for a moment he beheld his home in sunlight before the fire consumed him and it was beautiful.

Posul now is a dead world, as maybe is fitting. It is unlikely that the Adeptus Biologicus will agree to terraform it in this age as it was never even in the old days a partially worthy candidate for such an endeavour. And as for the remnants of the Posuli and the Mortificators? They endure, barely. Hearing of their plight their distant kin in the Ultramarines petitioned their government to grant them refuge and they were granted a place on the principle that so few were unlikely to cause undue disruption. The Mortificators requested long ruined Calth to settle upon and try and make a home. The government of Calth were less than enthusiastic to say the least as their caverns were precious to them until they learned that the Posuli wished to live in the wastelands of the surface where none had dwelt since the devastation ten thousand years past. The Posuli said that they could cover their eyes in the day and sleep and in the night they could pretend that they were home once more.

The Mortificators will rebuild. Death has not claimed them yet.

==== The Black Legion ====

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(Void Wolves) - Primarily Astartes used as boarding/anti-boarding specialists throughout the Great Crusade and 1st Black Crusade. Majority of pre-split Void Wolves Astartes ended up here. They call the worlds of the Cadian Gate their home and recruit from there and nearby systems. Still operate much as a Legion of old in that they are massively represented in the boarding parties of the Navy assets in the Cadian sector but with the emphasis put more on garrison duty.

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'''Lord Commander Corpulax was previous Lord Commander of Black Legion.'''

He was born on Cadia in the year 446M41 and like all Cadians was inducted into the military and raised to be a good little soldier. It wasn't long into his adolescence that his physical prowess was recognized he was genetically screened and earmarked for the Black Legion. He trained well and hard as a Neophyte and learned deep of the chapters long lore. In his 15th year he started to undergo the surgical alterations and augmentations that would turn him from human to super human.

His career as a Space Marine was noteworthy in his reliability. He was a very by the book soldier who would have been overlooked for any measure of excellence were it not for his ability to exemplify everything the chapters battle doctrines exalted. He was in every way the very model of a Cadian Space Marine. By age 176 he was a sergeant, by 239 he was a Marshal and by 301 he was Lord Commander and it was a role he excelled at. For the brief time that he held that rank at least. In the year 775M41, a mere 28 years into his command, the Apostles of Contagion launched a sustained attack on the agri-world of Phagir. Phagir was one of the worlds that supplied the Cadian Gate with food and presumably their goal, or at least the goal of their masters, was to inconvenience the Gate Worlds as they would have to import all food.

The Apostles of Corruption launched a sustained campaign of mostly biological warfare in addition to their defensive style of land holding and attrition. In the end it was deemed by the Adeptus Biologicus order stationed on the planet an untenable theater. They couldn't make cures as fast as they could make ails. The Cadian forces were instrumental in the evacuation of Phagir as the Zombie Virus finally took hold and the dead shambled across the blighted fields to add the living to their ranks.

The Black Legion held the line at the cpaital's space port until the last moment to get one more shuttle off of the planet. In the final stages of the withdrawal it became clear that Lord Commander Corpulax was infected with the Zombie Virus to which there was no cure save a clean death. Wracked with pain and burning with wroth Copulax spent his last moments sprinting towards a techno abomination of rust and rotted flesh merged together into what might once have been a Baneblade. It's burning wreckage was his funeral pyre as the IEDs he was strapped with detonated.

By his sacrifice one more shuttle containing, among near 2,000 civilians, the last of his brothers on the surface made it safely off the launch pad. Then the planet was bathed in nuclear fire, it was lost but it would not be damned.

'''Lord Commander Zagthean the Broken.'''

Zagthean was the son of a long term "soup stirrer" of the algae vats and a sister of the Convent of Alabaster Maidens. Civilian jobs on Cadia are typically though not always given to individuals disqualified from front line service for reasons of either health or competence. As good 'ol Zaganath had been doing that job from age 12 to age 62 it can be safely assumed that he was given the job for being pretty useless at proper soldiering, not to say that he was not a dutiful man. He was and he died in a Chaos raid and he died with a weapon in his hand and he didn't go down quietly or alone.

Matylda was sister of the Alabaster Maidens, a wide spread order with convents on several dozen worlds in the Cadian Sector. They specialized in offering healthcare to the underclasses. On Cadia they offered healthcare to the more broken veterans.

Despite his humble start Zagthean has proven a savage warrior, more of Angron's ilk than Horus. He has charged into battles no man or superman should hope to walk out of and has not only done so but done so victorious. Even in his earliest days he was dauntless and every task and training exercise put before him set into with an almost alarming ferocity. After his genetic screening there was no question of him being looked over for Space Marine augmentation and the fire in his heart was not diminished even slightly by the alterations, if anything with fewer physical constraints he approached the status of truly unstoppable.

His will is adamanitum and among his chapter his word is law. To the Lord Castellan's annoyance he insists on leading from the front, in the thick of the carnage, the blood and the thunder. Roaring with laughter and wroth and all mortals who have stood before him have known one simple truth; they have come here to die, their gods have abandoned them from the greatest to the least.

He is relatively young for a man of his rank but he has lived hard and built up an impressive record. But the price of living that hard is that he has seen Death many times and they have danced. He has been broken down and rebuilt, torn apart and stitched back whole, burned and healed and cut and stitched and glued and grafted and lahsed back together and whats left almost poured around increasing numbers of cybernetics. He has fallen many times but he is still alive, he does not march, he charges, he wills Death to find him, to hold him one last time so that he may beseech her "let me take these bastards out with me". And always Death has returned him.

As the 13th Black Crusade descends upon Cadia it may be that his wish could be granted. He may die, but he will take whole armies down with him.

'''Ygethmor the Trickster, Head of the Black Legion Battle Psykers.'''

Of Old Earth stock and a resilient psychic of pristine physique Ygethmor was destined for the Grey Knights and though the tests of genetic compatibility showed positive the artificial organs of the MK3S gene-seed would not take root in his flesh. Unwilling to just toss such a promising neophyte aside for reasons of a biological fluke the Grey Knights ordered him to be tested with the MK3MP variant of the gene-seed. The MP variant did take. Ygethmor was posted to the Cadian Gate, typically they would have sent him to the Exorcists but he lacked their "straight forward" attitude to problem solving. Steeped in ancient deamon lore learned in the halls of Titan and with a Nemesis Blade as a parting gift he has proven to be a boon to the Black Legion like no other.

He is fond of ambushes, illusions, misdirection and what he likes to refer to as "pranks". He is formidable in a straight up and honest fight if he has no option to make a dishonest one. He has no notions of fair play and considers the idea of "fair play" synonyms with "not trying". It is this underhanded attitude towards war that has won him the approval of the Lord Castellan (and few others), that and a well refined caustic sense of humour.

Despite his detractors, of which he has cultivate a great many of, his effectiveness can not be denied. He is not the most powerful psychic among the astartes, not by a long way, but like his martial strength he makes the most of what he has. As he would say "a stiletto atwix the ribs is as good as a broadsword to the bonce".

'''Devram Korda Marshal of the 1st Cohort'''

At approximately 230 years of age he is on the younger end of the Marshals but is not unaccomplished. His rank was obtained in the Liberation of Sarora. An intense war on the hiveworld Sarora to depose the warband known as the Children of Torment; a nasty group of Crone Worlders with faux marine stitched together from the bodies of their victims and animated with small deamons. As the most senior surviving officer left after a particularly nasty assault he was given temporary command over his brothers. This was made permanent at the conclusion of the campaign when contact with Castellan Jakren Stein and the rest of the Cadian 509th.

The things he saw on Sarora, the things he had to do for the sake of pity, still haunt him. He is a grim figure with no sense of humour or good cheer, just seething well controlled and bottomless grudge.

'''Marshal Araghast the Pillar, Marshal of the 2nd Cohort'''

Abnormally large for a Space Marine and phenomenally strong he lugs around a lascannon with the same ease as an experienced guardsman lugs around a lasrifle. His aim is exemplary and for a creature so big he can move surprisingly fast. In his oversized suit of armour he can withstand a punishing degree of fire and remains standing, carefully and calmly placing laser beams in the most inconvenient places. He rose to prominence in the Aurelia debacle that almost saw a world lost to the warp. He was the pillar of certainty around which the rescue forces rallied.

He has a calm and measured manner and an unflappable temperament and can at least give the impression of remaining relaxed in even the most bizarre and awful circumstances.

'''Xorphas Firestarter, Marshal of the 3rd Cohort'''

Xorphas is very good at pyrotechnics and incendiaries of all kinds and has a fascination with fire that borders on the unhealthy. This has though made him and his Cohort extremely good at dealing with orks and nurglites in particular and anything else that resents being set on fire in general. He is also a low level psychic, despite rumours he is not a pyrokine. His "gifts", if such they be, manifested only after he attained the position of Marshal and by then he was too far along the chain of command for it to be worth the effort and disruption of reassigning him to be with the other Battle Psykers. He was given instruction and extensive by the head librarian so that he would be considered safe but little in how to hone what he actually does have. Which is not very much if truth be told. He has very good gut instincts that can be mistaken for inhuman (even by astartes standards) reflexes, an uncanny ability to determine if someone is lying and some modest telekinesis.

He is a reserved and calm individual, meticulous and methodical in his approach to all things be it war or mundane chores. Until you give him a box of matches and you can see the lights reflecting in his eyes.

'''Drecarth the Sightless, Marshal of the 4th Cohort'''

A veteran of the 12the Black Crusade who spent half the invasion stranded in the lower tunnels and hunted by Crone Worlders with knives for fingers. Those knives had cost him his eyes but he cost them much more. Those tunnels were pitch black, but he was blind and although they could see to some degree in total darkness he could hear. Also those tunnels had been his playground as a child. They weren't just tunnels, they were home. The hunt quickly turned inside out and the Chaos Eldar came to the realization that he wasn't trapped with them, they were trapped with him. When he returned to the light he was reborn and his star was in ascendancy.

With two black orbs of technology replacing his ruined eyes and an unhealthily pale visage he looks like a specter from old stories, some unhappy dead come back to get even. His company he has molded into one of quiet killers, stalkers and hunters as he had been in the time of his epiphany. It is suspected that he is part of the secretive Cadian Death Faith, it was prevalent in his patch of tunnels when he was young, but nothing can be proven. All that is known is that he is sober, diligent, humble and quiet. All traits he tries to instill in his brothers.

'''Amalaxis Deamonslayer. Marshal of the 5th Cohort.'''

Amalaxis is as close to a Chaplain as you can get without actually being one. He is a strong, almost fanatical, believer in the old Cadian tree gods. He offers prayers and devotion to them on the eve of battle, before setting forth on campaign, when another invasion is expected and when it is peaceful because on Cadia you have to be thankful for respite. Most of his Cohort are also adherents of his faith, the reason he was chosen to Marshal that Cohort, and to them he is a figure of great reverence. Some say he was a tree spirit in a stillborn child like in the old stories of before war.

His method of warfare is very much in favour of the aggressive advance. Ideally after the first attack there should be no possibility of a retaliation. There must be something to his faith as the hymns he roars as he charges into battle have deamons clutching their bleeding ears.

'''Valicar "the Graven" Hyne. Marshal of the 6th Cohort'''

Unlike Marshal Drecarth Valicar makes no secret of his adherence to the Death Faith. Why should he? Why should he have to skulk in the dark and hide? This has not won him many friends in the faith who all agree that discretion has served them well since the Age of Strife. The rest of the Chapter just think he's a bit eccentric and the baseline Cadians just assume all augmented are like that assuming they haven't actually met a space marine before.

Despite the implications of his religion he is bombastic who loves the simple pleasures in life; pretty women, good food and fine ale also jetpacks and air assaults. If the battle can be met hurling out of a speeding aircraft it is a good day for Marshal Valicar. It is suspected that most of the 6th Cohort follow him out of morbid fascination.

'''Verzekh the Siege Engine. Marshal of the 7th Cohort'''

Thge only member of the Marshals to retain rank whilst interred in a Dreadnaught. Most Dreadnaughts become sleepy as a result of the pain killers and the mechanisms that keep them in half-life and this is not a good trait in a leader. Not so with old Verzekh. Whether by some incorrect implementation of his sarcophagus or a deviation in his brain Verzekh has not slept in over 1,800 years and so far seems to be suffering no ill effects. Attempts to duplicate this in others has had no notable effect.

He is armed with two power claws with under-slung meltas with which he has obliterated the defenses of hundreds of bunkers and fortifications and uncountable tanks. His personality since his internment has actually improved, if t he historical records are anything to go off of, Verzekh puts this down to the painkillers. Whatever the cause he has a very cheerful disposition. Favored method of warfare is the slow and unstoppable advance.

'''Kor Megron "Corpsemaker", Marshal of the 8th Cohort'''

Much repaired and cybernetically patched up, though not the extent of the Lord Commander, Marshal of the 8th. A fan of going fast and going hard. Bikes, land speeders, jet packs and anything else that can deliver high velocity death are his bread and butter. Standing still, he claims, makes you a target in a way that no additional fire power will compensate for. The rest of the chapter call him slightly manic, he calls them worse. In war as in life there is target, you get target fast, find another target, get other target, continue until target exhaustion or death. There is no stop, there is not slow until the job is done, to stop invites death.

The Cohort that he has assembled are all, like himself, lay-technicians. They need to be able to perform basic rituals of repair to their vehicles at a moments notice. To loose the momentum is to invite failure. Possibly exacerbating these traits is his knowledge that he is indeed dying, some poison of Dark Eldar design half real and half not flickering through his veins. He has maybe a few years at most left. Possibly this was supposed to debilitate him with despair or make him fearful, it has not. If anything it's made him far more dangerous in the time he has left.

'''Troskzer The Elder, Marshal of the 9th Cohort.'''

Old by the standards of near-immortals. Older than some of the younger dreadnaughts. Given the time distorting effects of warp travel and the amount of time he has traveled he isn't sure exactly how old he is. He was born in the year 998M40 but he could be as "young" as 850. Space Marine biology and rejuvenant treatments can only take you so far and he is approaching exactly as far as they can take him. What he has lost in strength and speed he has made up for in experience and animal cunning. He is without peer when it comes to the use of landscape and natural resources as a means of gaining an advantage. He can plan ambushes almost as well as the Lord Castellan and his ability to smell weakness is bordering on the unnatural. If you have a place where you are vulnerable he will find it and he will hurt you. He is patient and will fuck up your day at the most inopportune time. This combined with an inhuman ability to comprehend not just his battlefield but an entire planetary campaign makes him far more dangerous off the field of battle than on it. But he is a Space Marine, he will not be shamed by staying where it is safe.

Despite his seniority to his relief he was never considered for the job of Lord Commander. A Lord Commander has to have a sense of diplomacy and people skills. Troskzer has neither. He's a cantankerous, introverted, belligerent arsehole overly fond of sarcasm and seems to be staying alive just because it pisses people off.

'''Starkzahn, Marshal of the 10th Cohort.'''

Saviour of Darristen and ███████ █████████ ██████ ███ ██████ ██ ████████ ████ ███ █████████ ██████ ████████████ █████ ████. Know to have spent near thirty years in the Deathwatch and a further twenty five in the personal employ of a particular Inquisitor neither of which he will talk about. It is suspected that he has traveled and fought as far as the Eastern Fringe or at the very least near it as he is well versed in the teaching of Aun'Da, though it is unlikely that he will be able to convince his countrymen of the virtues of the Greater Good.

His method of waging war is a combination of movement and fire be it in the form of artillery or tactical squads that looks oddly familiar to anyone who has seen warfare in the Damocles Gulf.

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== Oficios and Adepta ==

=== The Assassins ===

<div class="toccolours mw-collapsible mw-collapsed" style="100%"> '''''Monsters Of Our Own Making:'''''

The Officio Assassinorum was one of the oldest arms of the Imperial Government, and its roots date back to the barbarity and cruelty of the Old Night. Perhaps it was fitting that, as the Warlord became the Steward and the Unification became the Great Crusade, the ancient orders of assassins were finally brought to heel and integrated into the Imperium proper.

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

The Rebuke at Mount Vengeance is the common story of the Officio Assassinorum's founding. In those days, the young Imperium was mired in battles far and wide, but one particular front was facing opposition that none seemed able to counter. Here, commanding officers and vital figures were dying at an alarming rate, even in the safety of their rear areas; and although they were suspected to be the work of the enemy all of the deaths seemed to be of natural causes. The Warlord simply appointed new generals and ordered veteran bodyguards for the ones already in theatre, but in response his loathsome foes only grew bolder. Ever-more evidence of their activities was left behind, seemingly taunting the Imperium for their inability to protect their own; clean killings becoming vicious slaughters of officers and civilians alike. Commanders were found butchered in their headquarters with a single bodyguard left alive, usually little more than traumatised wrecks stammering about technological sorcery beyond that of the Warlord's Mechanicus allies.

Incensed at the atrocities inflicted upon his people, the Warlord made war on the Assassin Temples of the Salt Spires. Little is known about the Spires or mercenary, heartless Masters, for many archives of their history were lost in the anarchy of the War of the Beast (although this may well have been Vangorich's objective all along). The Warlord did the best to spread his own view - that the assassins were little but cowardly shadows who though they could behead the Imperium - but even his presence and words did little to bolster armies so plagued by fear and paranoia, and so he began using the antithesis of their own doctrine to plot their downfall. There were no grand offensives, no bold strikes, nothing that seemed major enough to warrant the assassins moving against it; yet suddenly they found their supplies of everything from ammunition to promethium - and most importantly, water - were perilously low. In their weakened state, the Temples knew they could not face the Warlord's forces, and so they came before him to seek treaty.

At Mount Vengeance, the Temple Masters met to offer peace to the Warlord.
At Mount Vengeance, they received his full scorn.
The Warlord was not content with their mere offer of fealty. For the atrocities the Masters inflicted on his people, for the lives they had taken, the Warlord would not be content with a glorified armistice. He gave them an offer of his own: total surrender, or total annihilation. That was their only choice.

Some of the Temple Masters, emboldened by hubris, unwisely struck the Warlord. They died. Some fled. They died, later. But on the mountain and around it - for many assassins had followed their Masters, perhaps out of loyalty or some morbid curiosity - others remained, bowing in total capitulation to the Warlord and the futility of resisting this god amongst men. For his part, the Warlord acted rather appropriately in that role, passing judgement on each Master and their assassins. Some were found guilty of crimes beyond forgiveness and were slain, often by their peers as a test of loyalty; others were granted the "clemency" of banishment into the salt wastes. Only one was judged pure enough to be worthy of leadership - and, as the new Grandmaster of Assassins, he was assured that the temples that surrendered would remain intact, albeit in service of the Imperium under the watchful eye of Malcador.

Thus was formed the Officio Assassinorum. Malcador was pleased with the Warlord's mercy; for it showed no amount of fury would blind him to true talent. A few thousand years later, the assassins proved that such talent brought risk, especially from those as secretive as the assassins.

In 546.M32, the Grandmaster of the Officio Assassinorum attempted to assassinate the High Lords of Terra. The Beheading, as it has since come to be know, was shrouded in mystery; with events restricted to the Imperial Palace, motive, means, and for some figures even identity have been lost to the shrouds of time. All that has survived to this day is that the Inquisitorial Representative, the Master of the Astronomicon, the Paternal Envoy of the Navigators, and the Fabricator-General of the Adeptus Mechanicus were all killed before the Steward was able to stop Grandmaster Vangorich's terror.

Naturally, many asked how Vangorich was able to get as far as he did. Perhaps the sheer scale of the events already taking place at the time (especially the rising threat of the Beast) was responsible, since it was the few periods in Imperial history where the High Lords were forced to abandon their usual backstabbing and power plays - that kept the Officios and Adepta in check - in favour of (relative) unity. However, others believe planning and preparation had taken decades, the timing an unfortunate consequence of Vangorich demanding so much care be taken to make the deaths of his fellow High Lords look like accidents.

All sources agree, however, that once his treachery was revealed Vangorich unleashed the assassins on the entire palace. The halls ran with blood of the highest Lords and the most lowly of servitors alike, yet there was one figure the assassins would not touch, ''could'' not touch, out of fear of what he had done to their forefathers: the Steward, who had vowed to personally put a stop to the killing spree desecrating the home of the Golden Throne. Vangorich, infuriated at the apparent incompetence of his underlings, took it upon himself to do the job they would not, attempting to slay the Steward with a vortex grenade as he emerged from his personal transport.

This went about as well as one would expect.

Even less is known about the outcome. Historians have waxed poetically about the Grandmaster facing an agonizing death, eternal torture, exile into the depths of the Webway with nothing but the clothes on his back, or any other number of tall tales. The most reliable account , however - attributed to the Captain-General of the Adeptus Custodes - states that the Steward simply broke Vangorich's neck as comfortably as one would a twig mere moments after his ill-advised attempt on the Steward's life.

For their part, the assassins were right to be fearful; for unlike their predecessors on Mount Vengeance the Steward gazed upon them with ''disappointment'' as well as fury. The Beheading had been undertaken by Vangorich, but the Steward noted with no small distaste that his orders had not been questioned by any under him. Malcador had managed to maintain the delicate balancing act between accountability and unflinching loyalty necessary in an organisation such as the Assassinorum, and without him it seemed the assassins were falling back on their bad habits.

Any other time he would have dismantled the Assassinorum's there and then, but the Steward was more concerned with reinforcing the wider Imperium against the coming onslaught of the Beast. In a time when every second was precious, the Steward could only set aside a day to scour the assassins' much-reduced ranks. Those found wanting of moral character were incinerated where they stood if they had acted on Vangorich's orders or pressed into a penal legion if they had not. One assassin that the Steward found was of solid loyalty and aided him in his purge of the temples, and they were declared new Grandmaster. The first decree they were to issue, however, was a warning - a warning to be spread through every temple, to every assassin from the depths of the Imperial Palace to frontline fighting against the Orks. A warning that, if the Steward was ever forced to intervene again, he would simply dissolve the Assassinorum instead of wasting more time on leniency.

Four thousand years later, the Steward was once again forced to intervene - although this time it was because of a crisis of his own making.

To her credit, the Grandmaster the Steward had put in place had served honorably, loyally, and carefully. Within the temples, long overdue reforms were undertaken, training formalised, and generations of assassins raised to revere the Imperium as a whole more than their temple. The Grandmaster, when she felt her time came, passed the title on to one she felt she could trust; and he continued her work, standardising material provisions and improving survivability. When he was lost in a warpstorm, his successor was well chosen, and worked to streamline chain of command and requisition. This continued, the Officio slowly evolving into an organisation capable of keeping up with the rapid changes of the galaxy, until the reign of Goge Vandire. Emperor Goge Vandire.

Goge Vandire was, initially, the ideal servant of the Imperium. Intelligent yet humble, decisive yet wise, he was familiar with all the intricacies of every part of the imperial government - save the assassins. Naturally, he was curious. At his first meeting with the High Lords of Terra, they each took their own oaths of loyalty and explained their roles. The, on the other hand, explained the history of the Beheading to the new Emperor, and explained why since then the Assassinorum always chose to swear loyalty to the wider Imperium instead of a particular individual. An explanation that would end up nearly tearing it apart.

"...hence, our loyalty is to the Golden Throne and its guardians rather than the one sitting upon it. A mere technicality, of course-" The Grandmaster offering a thin smile at this point, "-since I personally doubt we will ever receive liquidation orders from the archaeotech itself... but still."

The other High Lords had long ago learned not to question inner workings of the Assassinorum, while Emperor Vandire merely gave a hearty chuckle. They moved onto other, more pressing matters, and it appeared that that was the end of that. And it was, for the most part, but there was a small corner of Emperor Vandire's mind where those words echoed endlessly. "The Golden Throne and ''its guardians''," the Grandmaster had said, but it seemed clear to him that there was only one guardian that mattered; the one who had appointed him to the position in the first place. Over the years of Emperor Vandire's reign - too many hard decisions, too many threats to the Imperium from within and without, perhaps too many treatments of juvenat - the echo rose in his mind until it was deafening, a mild irritation over semantics growing into full-blown paranoia.

Of course they were faithful to the Imperium, but the hypocrites chose the Steward to venerate as a figurehead! Even in the Palace, his own home, all the oaths in the galaxy would not change the fact that each soul's allegiance lay with the Steward rather than himself. They only trusted him because the Steward trusted him, had appointed him. Oh, yes, his reign and countless years of selfless service were all very good and well appreciated, but they were all nought against those of that living god. Everything he did was overshadowed by that ''guardian;'' his words judged against the Steward's, his actions compared to those of the Steward, the ''Steward'', the '''''Steward''''', who was never more than a moment away from the lips of Vandire's own people; as if he had been usurped before he was ever appointed to the throne.

Still, Vandire was still as talented as he always was, and soon managed to find an assassin willing to aid him; a callidus by the name of Tziz Jarek. By that point he was in direct control of every aspect of the Imperium thanks to a thousand emergency powers and Imperial edicts; yet frustratingly, the Grandmaster remained steadfastly insistent on the stance that had tormented Vandire since their first meeting. Jarek, on the other hand, was simply angry with the Assassinorum's reforms, and made sure to stay well out of range of Vandire's spittle and foam when he began to rant - although over time she found herself believing in more and more of his firey rhetoric.

The assassination was textbook perfection; the Grandmaster's long list of security measures outdone by Jarek's longer-still list of fallbacks and contingencies. However, the lifeless corpse that was quietly fed into a plasma generator was only a body double of the Grandmaster - even as Jarek disguised herself with polymorphine and assumed the seat of Grandmaster of Assassins - had already made her getaway, rallying those loyal to her from Terra and beyond. With the Assassinorum now firmly under his thumb, Vandire used the shadowy assassins as another weapon with which to prosecute what was rapidly becoming a reign of terror; opponents political and military alike disappearing or found butchered in cruel and unusual manners.

When the reign of Emperor Vandire was coming to an end, he began to use his assassins more openly against rebel forces - and it was at that moment, when they emerged from the shadows, that the true Grandmaster struck. Jarek had used the forces of the Assassinorum masterfully, always knowing which figures to ''liquidate'' to maximise disorder and panic - yet she had no experience of the same tactics being used against her, and could do little but order her own assassins to focus on the new threat.

The resulting battles were devastating. Assassins loyal to Vandire and to the Grandmaster both used long-forgotten, forbidden technologies on the other side, for each was (rightly) convinced that the victory of the other would see them exterminated to the last. Gene-sympathetic nerve gases, neutronic warheads, entropic broadcasters, pan-chronal disruptors, and other terrors were all used; some dating back to the nightmare of the Old Night. These were the Wars of Vindication, and they would be repeated again and again from Terra to the furthest reaches of the Imperium as assassin turned against assassin to purge the ones they saw as traitors.

When the Steward finally returned to Terra from his self-imposted exile, the Temples were little more than smoking, hellish ruin. The palace, too, was scarred by battle; and there he found the Grandmaster - who pointed to her lifeless doppelganger and declared that the traitor was dead.

The Steward was unamused.

The Grandmaster offered her life by way of apology, and begged the Officio Assassinorum be spared. She knew all too well of the warning passed down from each Grandmaster to the next, and of the possibility of her and her own suddenly being abandoned by an Imperium that had no other place for them. For his part, the Steward was bitterly disappointed with Emperor Vandire's descent into madness - yet this time he could not truly fault what had historically been the most troublesome of the High Lords' domains. One Grandmaster had fought with unwavering loyalty for the Imperium, while the other had done so in the name of the Emperor. Perhaps he was a little ashamed of his own poor judgement, for he was merciful; the Grandmaster was allowed to disappear into exile, and the remnants of the Assassinorum were to return to Terra for their final judgment.

The Steward of the Golden Throne retreated into the Imperial Palace for the last time, and when the Emperor of Mankind emerged, first and final orders to the ancient Officio Assassinorum were as follows:

*All assassins were to be granted a window of clemency, where an amnesty would be offered regardless of allegiance. They were misled, but had still fought with ferocious loyalty to their superiors - against some of the best in the Imperium, no less. Any who ignored this opportunity would be declared outlaws of the Imperium of the Golden Throne, for both the Grandmaster and her doppelganger had kept close eyes on their respective assassins (lest they defect). Huge bounties were offered, of course, but the most sought-after reward was the opportunity for the hunter to take the place of the assassin they defeated, becoming one of the Imperium's shadowy elite.

*After the grace period, the Officio Assassinorum would be completely and utterly dissolved. The Temples would remain, but only as individual institutions with no power and little role; all masters would stripped of formal office and all survivors either absorbed into the reborn order: the Officio Tactitum. No more secret handshakes or shadowy meetings lit by incense, no unaccountable Grandmasters operating without question. Civilian control would slow the Tactitum, perhaps even hamstring it, but this was the price to be paid to avoid the mistakes of the past.

*Perhaps most importantly, the Ordo Securitas of the Inquisition would be formed to monitor not only the assassins but the other highest echelons of the Imperium. These Inquisitors would be the guardians of the guardians, watching each Officio and Adeptus for corruption and abuse, wary of another Vangorich or Vandire emerging.

*However, due to their power to render judgment of even the highest figures of the Imperium, the Sicarius were only permitted to advise and regulate, never taking direction - at least, in theory. In reality, many Securitas Inquisitors found rather...creative ways to circumvent the decree that they may not maintain "men under arms".

The Emperor had spoken, and these were his commands.

The Officio Tacitum is a far more modern organization nowadays. Though it primarily is still famed for its assassins, it also produces operatives specialised in sabotage and covert warfare far from home. They are often assigned to the command of the Astra Militarum or individual Inquisitors; and each lone assassin is still a finely honed killing machine, but they now serve as spectacular force multipliers rather as ends in themselves. The Ordo Sicarius is satisfied with this arrangement, as it avoids the high risk and cost of the traditional lone wolf operations, and allows them to keep an eye on any assassins deployed.

The Temples? They are far less superstitious and shadowy than they once were, although the name of "Temple" has stuck in defiance of every reform that has been attempted. Each of them has diversified yet maintained their core roots in their quest to perfect the art of murder.

Temple Vindicare, who reach out far longer than all but the highest of psykers to deliver their kiss of death.

Temple Venenum, who can find a thousand toxins to kill a man from the gentlest of paradise worlds, each one exquisite to the palette in their own unique way.

Temple Eversor, who can scythe through men, orks, eldar and even Astartes with the horrifying ease of a power sword through flak armour.

Temples Culexus - who hunt down their prey with soulless eyes - and Callidus, who have no face to call their own.

Temple Vanus, which according to popular belief ha[EXPUNGED]oes not exist. The Ordo Sicarius has confirmed this, and will not allow any dispute.

The primary headquarters of the Tacticum, including the Temples, lie on Terra, although across each segmentum there are localised, lesser temples that train assassins, liason with other Imperial Forces, and seek recruits from outside the Schola the Temples traditionally draw from. The Ordo Sicarius also work closely with segmentum command to permit proper coordination if Tacitum assets are needed, although on a smaller level they are surprisingly good at scouting talented assassin candidates. With proper Inquisitorial oversight, the assassins are kept well in check, and well out of politics.

The High Lords of Terra still has a seat for the Grandmaster of Assassins, but it has been left vacant ever since the reign of Emperor Vandire. Few imagine it will ever be filled again.

</div>
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=== Adeptus Astronomica ===

“''We are the ones who give of ourselves so that others may walk in the light''”<br>
-- Motto of the Adeptus Astronomica

Of all the professions available to psykers of the Imperial Schola, perhaps none is more honored than those of the Adeptus Astronomica. These are the people who make daily life in the Imperium possible with literally nothing more than their sheer force of will. The Astronomican represents one of the first major cooperative efforts between humanity and the Eldar. Although originally of human creation, its design was improved by the Eldar as a gift of gratitude for humanity’s participation in the raid on Nurgle’s mansion, greatly improving the efficiency of the Astronomican and strength of its beacon. Although original estimates based on the average ability of a human psyker suggested that twelve thousand people at once would be needed to power the beacon, Eldar modifications decreased the actual number of psykers needed by an order of magnitude, while drastically reducing the amount of stress on an individual psyker.

However, at the same time, no profession is more tragic than that of the Adeptus Astronomica. Creating a psychic “bonfire” that can be seen by the entire Imperium is taxing on the individual, even with twelve hundred other psykers to share the burden. As a result, the psykers of the Adeptus Astronomica are rotated out in shifts in an attempt to maximize their health, with a third of the choir being rotated out every four months. However, even this is not enough to prevent long-term damage. Few psykers live more than a year, and almost none have survived more than eighteen months. In the Halls of the Astronomican, right before one enters the Chambers of the Astronomican itself, there is a small, grassy courtyard, nearly empty save for a stele made of the hardest adamantium. On it is inscribed the names of every psyker who has died in the course of powering the Astronomican, a testament to their bravery so that the Imperium will never forget their sacrifice.

==== Origin of the Astronomican ====

''"Only humanity would think to solve the complex and intricate issue of interstellar travel by building a giant psychic bonfire"''<br>
-- Finarion, specialist bonesinger from Biel-Tan sent to examine the Astronomican, circa M31.

When the Great Crusade started, there wasn’t any need for an Astronomican. The Steward was a Man of Gold, originally designed to link human worlds together during the days of the Great and Bountiful Empire, and as a result was a fairly effective psychic landmark in his own right. Combined with the fact that the Imperium had access to the Void Borns’ maps and the knowledge of the relatively safe Warp currents, it was possible to reach many of the nearby systems using short (but very slow) warp jumps.

Having delegated most of the Legion running and Great Crusading to the primarchs, the Steward was free to try and figure out a long-term solution to the navigation issue. The Steward made no secret of this fact, and the primarchs didn’t complain about it because they themselves were starting to notice as they were getting further and further from Earth it was getting harder and harder to navigate. Indeed, some of the primarchs were actually trying to convince the Steward to stay on Earth, because if the Steward got killed it meant no Astropaths and the nascent Imperium would likely tear itself apart over succession crises. Especially after the Steward was taken by surprise and nearly killed by a super-Ork on the nascent Attack Moon of Gorro.

The Steward hit upon the idea of the Astronomican when the Imperium had at least several hundred worlds under its belt. He found that if he got the beacon started other psychics can maintain the “fire” but it would take a lot of them working together and they have to rotate in shifts. Thankfully the Imperium is big enough now to provide those numbers. Unfortunately while it wasn’t as dangerous at first as the Astronomican grew in response to the need from the Crusade it becomes increasingly lethal and difficult to handle. The warp-flow goes "lumpy" and the lumps are dangerous proportional to the size of the ‘flame” you are trying to generate. Given that the flame is bright enough to see across light years the lumps are pretty lethal.

When the alliance with the eldar happened the eldar sent their specialists to Old Earth as part of the deal with humanity to look at the thing. Then they back out of the hall slowly at the sheer insanity of what these mon-keigh were trying to do? The eldar started absorbing shock absorbers and buffering jars and shit to it, and the life span of resident psychics jumps dramatically. Nowadays maintaining the Astronomican is considered an actual job rather than a death sentence, albeit one with a greatly reduced quality and length of life even compared to baseline humanity. Eldar and human technicians continued to tinker with the Astronomican, adding more devices to it like lenses and spectrum filters. And that's where the Astronomican is at now. It can't be tweaked any more, having hit the hard upper limit on what is possible with a single, giant psychic lighthouse.

Theoretically and in hindsight it would have been easier to just make [[Imperium_Secundus#Mustering_Forces_to_Himself|a bunch of small lighthouses]] instead of one big one, similar to what the Great and Bountiful Human Empire did with the Men of Gold and likely what many other races did back during the Dark Age of Technology. Such devices would not only be more efficient but would greatly, though not entirely, reduce the issues with the potential lethality of the job. Unfortunately doing so would require resources that the Imperium doesn’t have, either in the form of Iron Minds/Men of Gold or psykers that are desperately needed by the big Astronomican on Old Earth. And it it not possible to simply put out the Astronomican and start over because the loss of the Astronomican, even temporarily, would be catastrophic for the Imperium.

=== Adeptus Sororitas ===

==== Rough Notes from the Threads ====
*Formed in the aftermath of the reign of Vandire and the Civil War along with the Ordo Securitas
*They receive some cybernetic and biological enhancements, putting them roughly on par with a Spartan from Halo
**A group of 3 Sisters is roughly equal to 1 Space Marine, winning about 5 times out of 10. However, the Marine has a significant advantage in melee due to much better physical attributes and the Sisters are encumbered by their Power Armor due to lack of a Black Carapace. To win, the Sisters would need to leverage numbers and teamwork.
*I believe we said they mostly operate with the Inquisition, though their organization and exact scope of duties is unclear/undiscussed at the moment.

==== Daughters of Russ ====

The Daughters of Russ, better known as the Valkyries, are a organization similar to the Adeptas Sororitas unique for only recruiting from Fenris and the Fenrisian colonies. The Daughters claim to be matrilineal descendants of Leman Russ via his many daughters, but given the size of Leman Russ' family and the amount of time that has passed since Russ came to Fenris, it is likely that everyone on the Fenrisian Worlds can trace their ancestry back to Leman Russ in some way.

The Daughters of Russ are best known for their ferocity. Although the Sororitas are well known for their aggression and their single-mindedness, the Valkyries fight with a viciousness that seems almost inhuman. In addition, the Valkyries also exhibit senses and other abilities that seem beyond standard Sororitas-level augmentation, leading some to suspect that the Sororitas enhancements either enhance the effect of the Canis Helix genes present in the general Fenrisian population or reawaken Canis Helix genes that were formerly dormant. Surprisingly, the Daughters are otherwise rather conservative for Sororitas, looking down on the sisterhoods who add additional augmentations like kill-glands. To the Valkyries, such additions mock and taint the skill of an individual in battle.

However, at the same time the Daughters are also well-known for their talents in medicine. The Valkyries have close ties with the Sisters Hospitalier, and often find themselves being sent to reinforce flagging battalions and save as many of the wounded as they can. It is these practices that led the first leader of the Daughters of Russ to say “it is our job to look Morkai in the eye and tell him, ‘you will not touch them today’”, which eventually became shortened into the motto of the order.

Editor's Note: Needs to be seen how they relate to Sororitas. Are they actual Sororitas, the female equivalent of Space Wolves, or what? It was pointed out that the concept is good, but they don't seem to function like the Sisters (as internal police).

=== Navis Nobilite ===

See [[Nobledark Imperium Writing#The Saga of Fedor Jiao|The Saga of Fedor Jiao]]

== Adeptus Mechanicus and its branches ==

=== Adeptus Biologis ===

<div class="toccolours mw-collapsible mw-collapsed" style="100%"> '''''Gene-wrights of M41:'''''

''Without metal man is a beast. Without flesh man is a tool.''<br>
-- Motto of the Adeptus Biologis

Despite being seen as just another branch of the Adeptus Mechanicus, the Adeptus Biologis actually has very different origins from the rest of the Mechanicus. Instead of being derived from the Martian Mechanicum, the Biologis were originally formed from the various geneticists and biotechnologists living in the territories that the Warlord conquered, including the gene-hippie conclaves of western Merika, the genesmiths of Ducht Jemanic, and the genewrights of Luna. The Biologis were eventually folded into the Mechanicus proper, and centuries of cultural and philosophical exchange have greatly reduced the differences between the two, but the group still retains its own unique quirks.

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Today, the Adeptus Biologis performs a multitude of services throughout the Imperium. They travel to newly pacified worlds to make catalogs and studies of native flora and fauna. They study diseases and synthesize new medications to constantly try to beat back the plagues of Nurgle. They try to engineer more efficient versions of crops to feed the burgeoning Imperium. They often oversee augmentations of Space Marines and Sisters of Battle.

Perhaps the biggest difference between the Adeptus Biologis and most other divisions of the Adeptus Mechanicus is their stance on innovation. According to the Biologis, the Mechanicus’ prohibition on invention and innovation only applies to technology, not nature, a loophole the Biologis are happy to exploit. As a result, the Adeptus Biologis are much more willing to try new techniques than the Mechanicus proper, which is one reason why things like rejuvenant drugs and augmentation have improved over the centuries, even if it is only at a glacial pace. Of course, given that all of their equipment comes from the Mechanicus proper, the Biologis are often unable to build the kind of equipment they would like to use.

Another major difference between the Biologis and the rest of the Mechanicus involve physical augmentations. The Biologis are just as augment-happy as their brethren within the AdMech, but tend to prefer artificially engineered organs and genetically modified tissues over cybernetic implants. Even those Magos Biologis who do have mechanical implants often strive for a balance between flesh and metal, seeking to perfect the flesh before they involve the machine.

Like virtually every organization in the Imperium, the Adeptus Biologis can be broken up into a number of factions. The old rivalry between the gene-hippies and genesmiths is still there, only under different names. The Emergentists believe that artificial biological designs must be “balanced” as part of an integrated whole much like natural designs, and that the greatest parts of a design often emerge via interactions that are not forseen. By contrast, the Utilitarians believe the body is analogous to a machine, and must be treated as such. Any deviation from the perceived purity of a design is something not to be tolerated.

The Mechanicum, that is, the actual Mars-based organization who make up the majority of the Adeptus Mechanicus and primarily work with technology, do not like the Adeptus Biologis very much. They see the Adeptus Biologis as pretenders whose accouterments are little more than aping the Mechanicum of Mars. They see the aversion of the Biologis to cybernetic augmentations as an affront to the Credo Omnissiah. Nevertheless, they begrudgingly the Biologicus despite seeing them as lesser, much in the way scholars of the “hard sciences” looked down on biology prior to the Age of Strife. Perhaps this is one reason why, at some point in history, the Biologicus changed their apparel from dressing in robes of red to robes of dark green.

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=== 'Tech-Heresy' and its definition ===

See [[Nobledark_Imperium_Imperial_Society_and_Culture#Hereteks_and_the_nature_of_.22Tech-Heresy.22|Hereteks and the nature of "Tech-Heresy"]]

=== The Last Ditch ===

On Mars, there is a series of missile silos. They appear on no map, save in the personal files of the Fabricator General and his inner circle. Hardcopy, not digital. Nothing about them has ever been committed to cogitator. Their locations are concealed beneath layers of bureaucratic subterfuge; declared off- limits zones, patrolled by guards unaware of what they protect. Onion layers of lies await the curious; the suspicious might continue digging past the first lie, but the second? The third, the fourth?

The bunkers themselves are manned by unaugmented humans; none possess even the simplest augmetic. Perhaps the only such in the whole of the regular armed forces of the Mechanicus. Everything is done with the simplest possible technology; even electricity is used sparingly. Steam engines drive complex mechanical assemblies. Everything is designed with physical, manually- operated lockouts. Everything requires human action to operate. From the air or orbit they blend in perfectly with the environment.

Inside the silos, the crews are terribly isolated. Their only contact with the outside world is a single cable, through which the fire order will come. If it ever comes. None of them know of the purpose of their silo, or of the existence of the others. Each shift lasts a year at least. They play endless hands of cards, read books, and bullshit continuously. And wait for the order to come down. In ten thousand years it has not.

As for the missiles themselves? Vortex warheads. The largest concentration of vortex weaponry in the entire Imperium currently. Over a thousand of the weapons, each capable of felling cities and Titans. Enough firepower to scour a continent clean, to say nothing of the possibility of daemonic incursion.

Arranged in a loose ring around the Noctis Labyrinth.

This is but one of the contingency plans the Guardians of the Dragon have prepared.

==The Inquisition==

===The Ark Ship===

As part of their duty to keep the Imperium safe, members of the Inquisition are often forced to consider possibilities that would be unthinkable to the rest of the Imperium. Contingency plans for disasters on the scale of which most people would be unable to imagine. The Ark Ship is one such contingency.

The Ark Ship is one of the biggest secrets of the Inquisition and Mechanicus. What little information that has leaked out to the public has been hilariously exaggerated.

It is the final contingency plan. The ultimate Plan B. Activated only in the unthinkable event that the Imperium falls and the galaxy becomes uninhabitable by sentient life. Due to its nature and the implications of its construction, even as a contingency plan, knowledge of the actual ship has been suppressed for fear of causing a panic.

It's a highly modified Omnissiah class ship, modified to survive for thousands upon thousands of years at minimal power and activity. The captain is the one Inquisitor of Ordo Desolatus, held in stasis. It's cargo is rack upon rack of genetic samples and frozen embryos from every sapient species in the Imperium, from humans to Tau.

The crew are mechanically augmented up to the very edge of what is legally allowed before you start treading into A.I. territory. Metal can shut down cleanly and is far more efficient than flesh. The crew, like the captain, are in stasis.

If the Imperium falls it's orders are to take one of countless planned FTL escape-routes to the galaxy's edge, and burn hard into the intergalactic blackness, in hope of eventually rendezvousing with the escaping craftworlds at an outlying star-cluster to resupply and begin the longest journey.

==Imperial Navy==

===The Five Flagships===

''Phalanx''. ''Nicor''. ''Mirabilis''. ''The Rock''. ''Terminus Est''. These are names that are instantly recognized by any scholar of Imperial history, as well as feared throughout history by those who sought to do the Imperium harm.

The Five, often colloquially referred to as the “Five Big Bastards” after a comment made by primarch Rogal Dorn, were a series of massive super-dreadnoughts commissioned by the Imperium in the last days of the Unification of Sol and the early years of the Great Crusade. Each of these ships were roughly 25 kilometers long and bristled with conventional weaponry. The five ships were roughly comparable in size and shape, though the ''Phalanx'' was perhaps a little larger and a little more heavily-armed than her sisters. In addition to newly constructed material mined from the Sol system, the Five were also constructed from the recycled remains of the numerous scattered shipwrecks throughout the Sol system (many of which came to the attention of the Imperium at the suggestion of the primarch Horus), making them packed full of whatever Dark Age-era technology could be salvaged from the wreckage.

The original construction of the Five was intended to be a show of solidarity between the newly unified nations of Sol. The ships were to be commissioned by the newly named Steward of Earth, constructed by the Mechanicum of Mars in the shipyards of Luna, and would be crewed by the Void Born of the Sol migrant fleet. However, become of the time and resource-intensive nature of their construction, only two of these ships, the ''Rock'' and the ''Phalanx'', were ready by the beginning of the Great Crusade. The ''Rock'' was sent out as the flagship of the Imperium's first expeditionary fleet helmed by the Dark Angels, whereas the ''Phalanx'' remained in the Sol system to act as a deterrent to any potential force that would threaten Mars and Old Earth. Construction of the remaining three, the ''Nicor'', ''Mirabilis'', and ''Terminus Est'', was not completed until much later in the Great Crusade, when the resources of additional systems could be brought to bear on their completion.

The Five were intended to be a long-term investment. In addition to building ties of unity between the major factions of Sol, the Five were meant to be a show of strength on the part of the nascent Imperium to the greater galaxy. The huge size of the Five meant that their internal workings could support much larger than average hydroponic bays, which meant they could function away from the Imperium for long periods of time without resupplying and be largely self-sufficient if they were ever cut off from Imperial supply chains. This made the ''Rock'' the ideal flagship to send out with the expeditionary fleet. Eventually, the plan was for the Five to be sent to the far corners of the galaxy, one for each major Segmentum, to act as flagships and command centers for the Imperial Navy. The ''Phalanx'', ''Rock'', ''Terminus Est'', ''Nicor'', and ''Mirabilis'' were to be sent to Segmenta Solar, Obscurus, Pacificus, Tempestus, and Ultima, respectively. Unfortunately, random chance and the whims of history ended up scuttling this plan. Although originally constructed as part of a set, each of the Five suffered dramatically different fates.

The ''Rock'' was infamously stolen by the arch-traitor Luther during the Chaos of the War of the Beast, only to be reclaimed by the loyalist Dark Angels after the Lion's final battle with his brother. Luther had not had his hands on the ''Rock'' long enough for it to be irrevocably tainted by Chaos, and the Dark Angels were able to repurpose the battleship for their own uses. To this day, the ''Rock'' remains the mobile headquarters of the Dark Angels chapter.

The ''Phalanx'', although heavily damaged in the War of the Beast, remains as it always has in the Sol System, an old guard dog ever-ready to fight those that would threaten the capital of the Imperium. Its [[Nobledark_Imperium_Writing#Ork_Diplomacy|legendary ramming action]] that repelled the Beast's attack planet Ullanor during the War of The Beast obliterated much of the original ship, as the relativistic impact vaporized almost all of the Phalanx, with only relatively small parts of the drive superstructure remaining attached to the ship's neutronium ramming prow and keel, which was later recovered from a highly elliptical orbit around Sol. Any conventional matter, including the body of Pius, would have been vaporized on impact, but neutronium is made of tougher stuff. The Phalanx was rebuilt from around this neutronium keel, missing many of the archaeotech systems originally contained within its frame but [[The_War_of_The_Beast#The_Fist_of_the_Imperium|the keel was enough of a plank in the ship of Theseus to claim continuity with the original ship]]. The Imperium doesn't like to take defeat lying down.

The ''Mirabilis'' remains active in the galactic East, still acting as a flagship of the Imperial Navy rather than commanded by any chapter of the Adeptus Astartes, perhaps the only one of the Five along with the Phalanx that is still performing the job the Imperium intended for it. However, the Ultima Segmentum is nearly an order of magnitude larger than any other part of the galaxy, and there is little the ''Mirabilis'' can do beyond putting out fires.

The ''Nicor'' fought valiantly for many years, but was presumed lost in the aftermath of the [[Nobledark_Imperium_Drafts#Second_Black_Crusade|Second Black Crusade]]. In late M40, the Carcharodons found the carcass of the ''Nicor'' floating out in the middle of the Segmentum Tempestus, and after much friction with the rest of the Imperium refurbished it into their new headquarters. Although the ''Nicor'' is probably capable of void combat once more, the Carcharodons prefer to keep it in a strategic location in the galactic South to act as a central base from which they can coordinate their attacks. Ironically, the ''Nicor'' in some ways is performing the job it had always been intended to do in the first place, striking fear in the hearts of any who would threaten the Imperium in the Segmentum Tempestus.

The ''Terminus Est'' served the Imperium through more military campaigns than any other member of the Five. After being sent to take back the Segmentum Pacificum when the Imperium set out to reclaim the Segmentum, the ship was commandeered in the aftermath of the war by Typhus the Pilgrim, who made it into the mobile headquarters of his breakaway chapter the Black Templars. For six millennia, the ''Terminus Est'' was a constant presence on the western front of the Imperium. Much like the Black Templars themselves, the ''Terminus Est'' was forever marching to war, never resting, never stopping, almost seeming to have an indefatigable personality of its own. If there is any truth to the Mechanicus' claim that ships have machine spirits, there is perhaps no better argument in support of this idea than the ''Terminus Est''.

However, no ship can fight forever. In late M38, the ''Terminus Est'' finally broke down after back-to-back fighting in an Armageddon War and putting down an assault on Necromunda. The ''Terminus Est'' managed to limp its mass to high Necromundan orbit before tidal forces tore the ship apart. Today, the ''Terminus Est'' is the closest thing the Black Templars have to a static headquarters. Like the ''Nicor'', the Templars claim the ''Terminus Est'' might have a few more battles in her, but so far none have been willing to put that claim to the test.

===Blade of Luna===

The Blade Of Luna is one of the first in a series of modified Mars-class battlecruisers equipped with oversized engines, the sensor networks of an Emperor-class battleship, and cutting edge vox warfare systems. Recently built by the shipyards based around Luna, not the orthodox masters of Mars, it is designed to serve as a support ship maintaining inter-fleet communications and tracking enemies for improved battlefield awareness.

This description vastly oversimplifies their role. While rebels and pirates who barely know how to keep a stolen ship's anti-gravity working are little threat to the pirate-extermination forces that a ship of this type would lead, the Crone Eldar, Necrons, Olamic Quietude, and Dark Mechanicus, to name the most infamous, all have their own foul brand of technosorcery.

Daemonic scrap-code can cut power to point defense arrays just long enough to let a barrage of boarding pods bite into the hull, secure encryptions can be cracked in milliseconds by machinery powered by broken star gods, crucial orders can be lost under a tidal wave of jamming signals, augurs that previously tracked micrometeorites from one end of the solar system to the other suddenly lose their visuals; the list goes on. The Imperial Navy has learned its bloody lessons over ten thousand years of war, and its more technically-minded factions are the inheritors of practices fine-tuned prior to the Dark Age of Technology.

Hence the limited production run of ships like the Blade Of Luna, testbeds for the latest electronic warfare systems to serve as sword and shield against the Imperium's enemies. Her higher decks are packed with banks of compartmentalized, EMP-shielded cogitators and consoles, each linked to a backup battery in the event the redundant power couplings to the Generatorium fail in battle. Augur arrays normally found only on the Emperor-class battleship cover the Blade Of Luna in a thin forest of sensor spars and domes, and in concert with the cogitators enable the ship's Techpriests to tune out false positives and home in on elusive cloaked enemies. Gellar fields, hexagrammatic wards, and crude automations of machine exorcism are present to fend off the more daemonic varieties of scrap-code. There are other technologies that are not so enthusiastically discussed by the rather open-minded Mechanicus builders, but they have risen to meet the monumental challenges of those who would challenge the Omnissiah's vessels of war.

===Deep Field Recon===

Knowledge of its many enemies is vital to the Imperium's survival, and quite hard to come by. Oh, you can learn some things on the battlefield. Weapons and tactics. But this is far, far from a complete picture. It tells you nothing of their logistics, of their politics, of their inner minds, of the deep knowledge needed to strike at the heart of an entire civilization. Fighting on the battlefield tells you how to fight on the battlefield, but not how to craft grand strategy.

Channels for gaining this deep knowledge are few. It is impossible to infiltrate the Silent Court; a tyranid cannot be bribed to turn against the Swarm. There is no trade with the Orks, and an embassy in Commorragh would be nothing but a buffet table. Listening in on the psychic conversations of the Crones is actively hazardous to the listener's health, and no bug could tap into the inner thoughts of gods. All the tricks human nations have used to spy on each other since time immemorial are useless against the vast majority of the Imperium's foes. But ignorance is not an option.

Thus, the Deep Field Recon squadrons.

The Deep Field Recon squadrons are one of the few methods the Imperium has for investigating the inner reaches of enemy territory. Deep Field Recon ships are made to be as stealthy as possible, typically mounting multiple forms of concealment. Reflex shields and eldar holo-fields are standard, as are various forms of passive stealth such as low-signature engines and auspex- baffling plating. Some are equipped with more exotic devices still, archeotech and xenotech cloaking devices salvaged from the far corners of the galaxy. An (un)lucky few bear psychic choirs on board, actively diverting the attention of possible searchers away.

The design of any two ships are often dissimilar; due to the incorporation of xenotech in the design, the main body of the Mechanicum refuses to construct them. Thus, their creation is left to the heterodox and other member states; the Hubworld League, the Eldar, the Interex, and increasingly the Tau.

With these techniques, they dive deep into the sanctums of the enemy, gathering information, inserting and extracting commando teams, and striking targets of opportunity. The Deep Field Recon squadrons are a vital part of anti-Ork efforts, providing forewarning of rising WAAAGGHHs and delivering kill- teams to eliminate rising Warbosses. Others ghost through the Silent Empire, mapping tombworlds, counting World Engines, and watching for any preparations for an attack. (This is one of the highest- mortality duties among in Deep Field Recon; the Silent Empire guards its borders jealously, and its reserves of techno- sorcery are vast and deep.) There are even rumors of ships covered in hexagrammatic wards operating under the auspices of the Alpha Legion, plunging into the Eye of Terror itself to strike at the Great Enemy in its lair.

Life in the Silent Service is frequently nerve- wracking. By the nature of their missions, they sped their time deep in enemy territory far away from any possible reinforcements. Often for years on end, as they slowly assemble a complete picture of enemy numbers and capabilities from telescope pictures and stray vox- chatter. At the same time, it is often quite boring, drifting through space with everything but stealth systems and passive sensors powered down, watching an enemy with no idea of their presence. When hunting, the nature of the wait and tension changes as they slowly glide towards their targets, moving into position for a single kill- shot and hoping their exit route remains clear.

Deep Field Recon squadrons usually operate under the auspices of the Inquisition. Typically, they are attached to various Watch Fortresses keeping an eye on specific threats or regions of space. Most Recon ships operate with an Inquisitor, or at least an Interrogator, on board, specializing in the specific threat the ship is operating against. Many Inquisitors use vessels of similar design as their personal vehicles, even if not specifically on Deep Field Recon duties; the class is well- suited to Inquisition duties generally.

There are few Deep Field Recon vessels. Due to the exotic equipment and demanding tolerances of the class, they are difficult to build; only a few thousands exist at any given time. But, in enemies of the Imperium ambushed and destroyed, and even more in vital knowledge gathered, each is worth ten times its number in conventional vessels.

== Eldar-Only Forces ==

=== Handmaidens of Isha ===

Just as it is the job of the Adeptus Custodes to protect the Emperor of Mankind and his wife, it is the job of the Handmaidens of Isha to protect the Grand Empress Isha and her husband. The Handmaidens of Isha are the Eldar side of the Imperium's praetorian guard, drawn from the ranks of her most devout followers in the cults that sprung up in her wake following her rescue from Nurgle's mansion. Compared to many other followers of Isha, the blessings of the Handmaidens are rather subtle. Little more than an immunity to virtually all diseases and a seeming inability to sustain permanent damage from scaring or age. This allows the Handmaidens to perfect their physical training in a way that only one who does not have to worry about wear and tear on their body can. The Handmaidens are no pushovers, being armed with swords known as "the Thorns of Isha" that can inflict wounds that do not heal. The Handmaidens are also noted to have a connection to Isha that borders on the preternatural, able to sense if their charge is in direct danger even if they are unable to see her directly.

However, the Handmaidens of Isha have an another job in addition to protecting their Empress. As the Imperial Couple travels from world to world, the Empress often sends her handmaidens to inspect the world beforehand to ensure that the world is as upstanding as it often claims to be. Although many worlds have their own dirty little secrets that they have managed to keep secret from the Administratum, few can hide from the gaze of the All-Mother. Although the Adeptus Custodes are also often posted in Imperial society to keep watch for potential threats against the Emperor and Imperium, most of them are incapable of doing so without drawing attention to themselves. The Handmaidens of Isha, on the other hand, are capable of passing themselves off as just another Eldar or even avoiding notice altogether. Because the two groups have essentially the same job, they often end up directly cooperating with one another.

=== The Avatar of Khaine ===

See [[Nobledark_Imperium_Notable_People#Khaine|Khaine]]

==== The Avatar of Biel-Tan ====

Biel-Tan hasn't deployed an Avatar of Khaine for nearly one hundred years. This wouldn't be surprising for a lesser craftworld, or a craftworld that is peaceable, but this is Biel-Tan. The most well known, influential, and martially famous craftworld. That Khaela Mensha Khaine hasn't made an appearance in a year, much less a near century would provoke suspicion.

However, among the eldar, it's considered a bit of a faux pas to ask about this. The Inquisition is another matter entirely though, and they already know the answer.

Biel-Tan's avatar has been awake this entire time. Biel-Tan summoned the avatar for the Ghoul Campaign, to help a desperate sword wind against a siege of orks with daemon support. The avatar of war led the survivors, many wounded, to victory against the orks, culminating in the avatar decapitating the bloodthirster Yel'Grazruk shattering the spirit of the enemy. The sword wind rejoiced.

Then they noticed the avatar wasn't gone. It had followed the fleeing enemy, and was killing as many as it could reach. The next day, the avatar was still killing. On the fifteenth day, it ran out of enemies to kill, and came back, planted its sword at the center of the biel tan fortification, and waited.

After the twentieth day, the Biel-Tan forces found themselves very worried indeed. The burning avatar still smoldered, glaring out at the horizon. In the face of their persistent god, finally they attempted to psychically contact the avatar, a hazardous venture for even the most skilled warlock.

After the warlock stopped chanting in a dead language, she managed to sputter out "Khaine waits for his chariot." No one knew what that referred to. But when the autarch ordered the sword wind back to Biel-Tan, the avatar followed, marched through the craftworld, and returned to his temple, still burning.

The avatar has sat there since, waiting for his chariot.

===Craftworld Armor===
The Craftworld Eldar military forces are descended from, essentially, civic militia. Thus, their war machines were optimized for ease of construction, ease of maintenance, and ease of piloting; war machines a part-time non-professional volunteer force could use and maintain. The aftermath of the Fall, when the survivors were thrown back onto highly limited resources and the whole population had to be mobilized to survive, only reinforced this paradigm. 10,000 years of Imperium have loosened it; the number of super-heavy vehicles in the Craftworld arsenal has increased both in absolute number and proportion as more resources become available. Likewise, more specialist designs for specific battlefield roles have become commonplace as the need for every tank to potentially fill every role lessens. Still the typical Craftworld grav-tank remains a stripped-down (in terms of mechanical complexity, not necessarily weight) generalist.

== Tau Empire ==

=== Mont'Kau Battlesuits ===

<div class="toccolours mw-collapsible mw-collapsed" style="100%"> '''''Front-Line Defenders of the Greater Good:'''''

[[Image:Mont%27kau_Battlesuit.png|thumb|]]

As the Tau first expanded from their cradle of civilization on T’au into the greater galaxy, they began to realize that many of their opponents, including orks, tyranids, Space Marines, and more, were devastatingly effective in close-quarters combat. Although the Tau personally avoided melee combat whenever possible, they realized that many of their opponents were not going to do them a favor and do the same. The Tau would have loved to use their auxillaries to make up for this deficiency, but among their close allies only the kroot were well-suited for close combat and there were far more Tau regiments than there were kroot to go around.

As a result, at the behest of O’Shovah (Commander Farsight) back before the Schism, the Tau Empire decided to solve this problem by building bigger, more durable versions of the Crisis battlesuit specifically designed for melee combat. It has been suggested that O’Shovah was inspired to pitch his idea when he realized that battlesuits could be used to compensate for the Tau’s smaller physical stature and reluctance to engage in melee combat against foes such as Orks and Space Marines, but the Tau vehemently deny this is the case. Unlike most battlesuits, which were designed as mobile platforms for heavy ranged weaponry, these suits were designed for close quarters combat. These suits often carry guns, like all Tau battlesuits, but more often than not these tend to be close-range weapons like shotguns or tend to be a melee weapon first and foremost like a giant bayonet to which attaching an actual gun is an afterthought. The Tau called them Mont’kau Battlesuits, named after a particularly terrifying species of predator from their homeworld of T’au. To the rest of the Imperium, who lacked the appreciation for the intricacies of the Tau language, these suits simply became known as Predator Battlesuits.

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Compared to a Space Marine or an Aspect Warrior, Mont’kau battlesuits aren’t as particularly agile in close-quarters combat (lacking the Black Carapace of a Space Marine or the flesh and blood agility of an Eldar), but like all Tau battlesuits they are lightweight for their size and, more importantly, easily replaceable. The purpose of the Mont’kau battlesuits is not to serve as shock troops, but to act as a bulwark to keep the close combat forces of the enemy away from the firing line. Mont’kau battlesuits are typically piloted by battlefield veterans, ones who are used to the chaos of battle and have fast enough reflexes to fight on the front lines. As a result, although melee combat is still the Tau’s biggest weakness, at least the Tau now have an answer to the numerous close-combat specialists that dominate the galactic landscape, and are not a complete joke about it. Nevertheless, the Tau claim that they are continually improving on the Mont’kau design, and that one day the Mont’kau battlesuits will be the equal of the front line combatants of the other major races.

One common addition to Mont’kau battlesuits is an outer layer of explosive reactive armor, made of an alloy similar to but more brittle than the traditional fio’tak, which is designed to fragment into a spray of ceramite-like shrapnel. This reactive armor can either be used to provide additional protection against anti-personnel ranged attacks or be command-detonated to act like a makeshift claymore mine. These reactive armor plates are actually capable of being added to a wide-variety of battlesuits, but are most often associated with the Mont’kau battlesuits due to their role in close combat. These additions, along with the directed flechette grenades that are now a common component of Tau infantry gear, were largely devised as contingencies against the Dark Eldar, whom the Tau held a particular hatred for after their repeated raids of the Tau Empire in the wake of the A.I. rebellion, the Tau Reformation, and the vanguard Hive Fleets. To the Dark Eldar, for whom speed was their primary protection, such devices would prove lethal.

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== Interex ==

=== Sagittars ===

<div class="toccolours mw-collapsible mw-collapsed" style="100%"> '''''A Fusion of Man and Machine:'''''

Although mankind had experimented with quadrupedal walking machines as early as M3, the use of these machines in warfare would not come into their own until much later, reaching their peak just before and during the Age of Strife. The separation of the myriad worlds of the Great and Bountiful Human Empire during the Age of Strife resulted in each human world developing its own unique way of coping with the adverse conditions of the period, leading to an explosion of new technologies and new adaptations of old ones. Among these new weapons were the sagittars, a term used to both refer to the quadrupedal walking and the people who rode them, developed by the Interex of the Segmentum Pacificus. Although originally designed as scouts and heavy cavalry, sagittars would quickly become the backbone of Interex ground warfare.

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Sagittars are primarily controlled by their rider, who neutrally link to their mount in order to operate their mechanical limbs and onboard armory as if the machine was an extension of themself. Because of this, it often takes several years for a sagittar rider to fully learn how to control their machine’s limbs as if they were their own. When riderless, the robotic portion of the sagittar is controlled by an extremely simple artificial intelligence (about as simple, if not moreso, than those seen in Legio Cybernetica constructs), capable of standing still, returned to the rider’s side when commanded, or seeking cover in case of a firefight, and not much else. It is only when linked to their rider that a sagittar is capable of more complex action.

In addition to serving as a mobile mount, sagittars also function as a mobile armory for their rider. The rear portion of the mount contains a number of weapons, which can be switched between as needed. The most common weapon used by the Interex is the magnetic bow, which consists of a magazine of two foot long spikes attached to a pair of arms, each of which contained a pair of electromagnets. When the weapon is fired, a current is sent through the bow accelerating the projectile to velocities sufficient enough to penetrate ceramite armor. Adjusting the arms of the bow to be closer or further from the main barrel increases or decreases the power, accuracy, and recoil of the shot. Skilled riders can even turn their bodies around 180 degrees while retreating to fire parting shots while their mount runs away from the battle. The armory will also contain lances, swords, or electrified throwing lances for other tasks. If an enemy attacks too fast for the rider to grab a weapon, the sagittar can strike out at its foe by kicking with its hydraulic legs.

In some ways, Interex sagittars act as highly mobile infantry as opposed to cavalry. Sagittars are stronger than a baseline human footsoldier, but their primary advantage over other elite troops such as Astartes and Aspect Warriors is their extreme mobility. Although sagittars can fight in traditional cavalry charges, the near ubiquitous presence of ranged weapons in the galaxy makes this a near-suicidal endeavor. Instead, the Interex use the superior mobility of their sagittars to outflank and outmaneuver slower opponents. This fit well with the general Interex policy of war, which was to dictate where and when a battle would occur under conditions that favored the Interex in order to minimize casualties on both sides. Although not as fast as an assault bike, under good conditions a sagittar can travel at speeds of up to 60 kilometers per hour, and unlike flesh-and-blood mounts, sagittars do not get tired. Sagittar legs are also well-built to traveling over uneven terrain, as opposed to horses.

Because the sagittar’s mounts are an extension of themselves, rather than a separate animal, sagittars do not suffer from many of the typical weaknesses of biological cavalry. A sagittar cannot be startled as easily as a horse can, because the only way to startle a sagittar is to startle the rider. However, sagittars do have some weaknesses. Because the rider of a sagittar has to be able to turn around to access the onboard armory, the armor has to be relatively light and flexible around the waist, making it a weak point. Since contact with the Imperium, the Interex have created models with heavier armor and more powerful weapons, but have never been able to fully eliminate this weakness. Additionally, because the rider sits above the fray of the battle, in close-combat conditions where the sagittar is unable to exploit its greater mobility, the same height that allows the sagittar to pick and choose its targets on the battlefield makes them an easy target for snipers or other high-powered ranged weaponry. If the legs are damaged, it is often possible to kill the rider before they can eject from their sagittar. Finally, and most importantly, although sagittars are good at offensive actions and hit-and-run attacks, they are not as effective when they are forced to stand and fight, whether they are forced into a position in which they cannot retreat or need to fortify and protect an objective. In the past, this is often when the Interex would call in the Kinebrach to supplement their sagittars as shock troopers. Today this role is generally filled by other forces.

However, sagittar usage has never really caught on outside of the Interex and a few associated territories for a variety of reasons. First, sagittars occupy a rather awkward place in Imperial Tactics, being more expensive and more difficult to replace than flesh-and-blood cavalry such as horses, yet too slow for tactics used by heavy cavalry such as assault bikes and jetbikes. In some parts of the Imperium highly orthodox Mechanicus adepts will refuse to construct parts for sagittars, considering their machine spirits too close to A.I. for comfort (as they do the Legio Cybernetica), and since this simple intelligence is required for sagittar function sagittars are not made. Finally, sagittar fighting involves mastering an unusual set of tactics, including the ability to rapidly retreat and regroup from the battlefield when it becomes necessary. This is very different from typical Imperial tactics, particularly the Cadian doctrine, the most commonly followed military doctrine in the Imperium, which primarily focuses on the defense and holding of territory, with aggressive action being taken primarily through artillery barrages. Sagittar fighting thus requires a very different mindset than is typically found among Imperial forces, one that is found only in groups such as the Armageddon Outriders or the inhabitants of the Pastoral Worlds. Nevertheless, a well-trained sagittar battalion is still a welcome sight for an Imperial commander on any battlefield.

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== Hubworld League (Squats) ==

=== Destroyermen ===

<div class="toccolours mw-collapsible mw-collapsed" style="100%"> '''''Heavy Infantry of the Hubworld League:'''''

Destroyermen are the heavy infantry of any squat army. The concept of Destroyermen originally derived from the squat custom of having people who would risk their lives as the first ones to enter an unexplored cavern or mine shaft to see if it was safe to enter. Despite being clad in the best protective gear available, this work was extremely dangerous, as evidenced by the casualty rate, but at the same time it paid extremely well. However, being mostly socialists, a squat clan would often not waste all of the earnings on themselves. Instead, they would put into upgrading and improving the protective suit, making it more likely that the individual performing this job would keep coming back intact. This bizarre method of technological natural selection went on for millennia, until eventually most squat colonies had numerous sets of masterwork craft powered armor scattered among various clans. From there it was a simple leap to go from using this armor for checking for gas pockets and occasional hostile xenos to using them in open warfare against threats like Orks. Destroyermen are often the “tip of the spear” in squat armies, fighting in areas where casualties are likely to be high. Destroyerman armors have often been in squat families for generations, and the living clan members are fiercely protective of them, seeing them as emblems of their clan’s glory and heritage.

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Like most squat technology, the concept of Destroyermen and Destroyermen suits was developed during the Age of Isolation, the period in which the Hubworld League was cut off from contact with the majority of humanity. Destroyerman armor is often referred to as the little brother of Space Marine terminator armor, and there is a grain of truth to that statement. Destroyerman armor and Terminator armor actually spring from a common source, the environmental hazard suits used for working in hard vacuum or mining in inhospitable conditions during the Dark Age of Technology. However, whereas Terminator armor was retrofitted for military usage and has been increasingly refined for combat over millennia, Destroyerman armor is much more sedate. This is in part because Destroyermen were never expected to see combat on the level that most Space Marine do, and in part because the ability to efficiently manufacture some of the higher end devices for the armors (like teleporters) was lost during the Age of Strife. In general, Destroyerman armor is more geared towards making sure the wearer and the armor survives rather than making a more efficient killing machine like Terminator armor. There is also the issue of the armor wearer. Although the armor may be high quality, the person inside the armor is still only human, lacking the genetic modifications typical of Space Marines or Sisters of Battle (particularly the Black Carapace of the former) and limited what a Destroyerman is capable of.

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=== Desperados ===

Desperados are the scouts of the Hubworld’s military. Typically drawing their ranks from the young and impetuous members of Hubworld society, desperados are typically hotheaded and eager to make their name. When on duty, desperados spend most of their time on the outskirts of Hubworld society, traversing the planet in search of undiscovered mineral lodes, making sure the machinery that keeps the hold functioning is still intact, and even acting as ranchhands on the few worlds in the Hubworld league capable of supporting grox herds. Desperados most typically ride jet bikes, which have the easiest time traveling over the geologically unstable surface of many worlds of the Hubworld League, but wheeled vehicles are not uncommon. The Hubworld League has the largest collection of human made jet bikes in the Imperium, lovingly passed down family lines for generations. However in times of war desperados find themselves conscripted into Hubworld military actions, acting as raiding parties, scouts, and light skirmishers. Other, better-trained forces serve as more dedicated mechanized cavalry combatants.

=== Hubworlder Land Trains ===

Not all planets are so lucky as to have a breathable atmosphere, tolerable levels of radiation, and stable tectonic activity. The people of the Hubworld League near the galactic core know that better than most, many of their worlds being near the galactic core and therefore under constant upheaval from tidal flexing in the gravitational pull of a gas giant, pulsar, or the core of the Milky Way itself. On many worlds, it is not even possible to build the traditional bunker-like fortresses favored by Hubworld architects. Instead, the primary form of squat habitation is in the form of Land Trains.

Land trains were originally developed on less hostile worlds, designed as caravans to bring raw ore and other goods between major settlements. However, on less stable worlds, land trains have been refitted to become settlements in and of themselves, ballooning in size to encompass populations of entire cities. These types of trains are typically found on less tectonically stable worlds and often contain large amounts of mining equipment, allowing Hubworlders to mine the ores that drive their civilization while still being able to move out of the way of newly formed fissures and tectonic rifts

Many who see Hubworlder land trains draw parallels with trains on other worlds. The comparison is better in some ways than others. A better comparison might be an armored trade caravan, albeit one with treads and an ability to mine its own raw materials. Hubworlder land trains are formed by linked cars, but they do not follow tracks. After all, on these worlds sedentary or semi-permanent structures are a death sentence. Instead, land trains have treads, allowing them to climb even on highly angled surfaces.

As with almost every piece of technology they developed, the Hubworlders soon found that it was easy to repurpose their caravans for war. Armored sides designed to shrug off micrometeorite impacts and stellar radiation are equally well suited to deflect enemy fire. And the large size of the trains makes them ideal not only for troop housing and transport, but supporting truly massive weaponry, potentially making them armored juggernauts when used correctly.

[[category:Nobledark Imperium]]

Nobledark Imperium Xenos

2020-09-01T18:09:42Z

2601:647:CA01:2410:443E:B2AA:ECA7:511A: /* Rak'gol */

'''This page is part of the Nobledark Imperium, a fan re-working of the Warhammer 40,000 Universe. See the [[Nobledark Imperium|Nobledark Imperium Introduction]] and [[Nobledark Imperium|Main Page]] for more information on the alternate universe'''

The Imperium, [[Nobledark_Imperium_Forces_of_Chaos|Chaos]], Ork WAAAGH!, Necron Star Empire, and tyranid Hive Mind are not the only ones vying for dominance of the galaxy, though they are its largest powers. This is a page for all those other species not directly associated with the major powers, such as the Hrud. This is also a page for those species who although no longer existing in have had a significant effect on its history, ranging from the Old Ones and Necrontyr of the War in Heaven sixty-six million years ago to the human-made Men of Gold and Iron Minds of the glory days of the [[Dark_Age_of_Technology|Dark Age]] Great and Bountiful Human Dominion.

Xenos species that are members of the Imperium can be found under [[Nobledark Imperium Member States]]

NOTE: This is also a temporary holding area for the entries related to the Necrons, tyranids, Orks, and Dark Eldar, with the hope being to eventually spin these sections off into their own pages once they get long enough.

== Da Orkz ==

=== The Beast ===

<div class="toccolours mw-collapsible mw-collapsed" style="100%">''''' He Who Will Bring His People Much Slaughter: '''''

Urlakk Urgg. The Beast. The big one. The lord who will bring his people much slaughter. The single greatest mortal threat ever faced by the Imperium, and the yardstick to which all other Ork warbosses are measured.

Urlakk Urg was originally the warboss of Ullanor, the center of an Ork empire that laid claim to a number of star systems. It is thought that the Imperium was lucky to have encountered Ullanor when they did, as Ullanor and similar Ork empires such as Gorro seemed to be reaching a critical mass beyond which Brain Boyz would start being produced. Already the Orks of Ullanor and Gorro were developing technology and organization beyond what orks were capable of for most of Imperial History (like proto-Attack Moons and sedentary settlements), and orks like Urlakk Urg seemed to be much smarter and of a different caste from the usual ork, though not fully Brain Boyz.

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The Ullanor Crusade was a bloody slog, made more difficult by the fact that the usual strategy of “shoot the warboss first” was untenable as Urg was smart enough to not to reveal his face in the open until his Boyz were in the thick of the fighting. The conflict only turned in the Imperium’s favor when Horus provoked Urlakk Urg into revealing himself, taunting Urlakk Urg from his flagship until Urg gave Horus the coordinates to his location, demanding that the coward face him in single combat. Horus responded by slagging Urg’s palace from orbit and decapitating most of the WAAAGH!’s leadership in one blow. Normally this sort of practice worked wonders, and indeed it did win the day in the Ullanor Crusade, but slagging the palace from orbit meant that Urg’s body was unaccounted for, which allowed him to escape unnoticed and swear bloody vengeance on the Imperium from the barren rock he ended up on. This led him to an encounter with [[Chaos Gods|four other individuals]] who also had a very vested interest in deposing the Imperium.

The Chaos Gods assisted in the Beast’s phoenix-like return to power, giving him access to Warp portals that allowed him to rapidly assert dominance over WAAAGH!s that were otherwise a galaxy apart, and giving him blessings to exploit the loophole in Ork logic of “bigger equals boss”. The Beast’s assault was basically a massive blitzkrieg that came screaming across the northern border of the Imperium, backed up by daemons, Crone Eldar, and Dark Eldar raiding in their wake like pilot fish following a big shark. Daemonic incursions and smaller WAAAGH!s erupted in other parts of the galaxy such that the Imperium was besieged on all fronts and had trouble creating a unified front against the main push of the WAAAGH! to the north. Although many smaller WAAAGH!’s split off from the Beast’s main force, the Beast’s plan was to head straight for Ullanor, convert the planet into an attack planet, and then make a beeline for Old Earth to kill the Steward and claim Isha for Chaos (Isha wasn’t on Earth at the time since this was before the alliance was formed, but that was a secondary concern). There was some stopping for lootin’ an’ pillagin’, but by Ork standards it was extremely fast. Most early battles in the War of the Beast, especially on the main front, tended to be [[Nobledark_Imperium_Primarchs#Sanguinius|pyrrhic victories]] or [[Nobledark_Imperium_Notable_People#Jenetia_Krole|heroic last stands]] for the Imperium at best, the defenders swept away by the sheer force of the green tide.

It wasn’t until the Beast’s forces entered the core territories of the Segmentum Solar, despite being harried by Horus, Kurze, and Guilliman, that his momentum began to slow. His first plan upon entering the Sol System was to ram Ullanor into Earth, sterilizing everything on the surface. Some say it’s because hitting one planet with another like billiard balls is ded orky. Some say the Beast was so obsessed with revenge he didn’t care how orky it was. Maybe it was both, and the Beast was mixing business with pleasure. However, that plan was foiled by the actions Ollanius Pius, which forced the Beast to try and take the planet using ground troops. We all know how that ended up. The death of the Beast marked the turning point of the war, as the warbosses could no longer effectively cooperate and were picked off one by one, with the most successful carving out their own petty kingdoms.

The Beast’s status and accomplishments are legendary among the orks. The most dangerous warbosses throughout history have taken up the title of Beast (specifically, Mag Uruk Thraka) in the hopes of achieving a similar level of infamy to Urlakk Urg. These Beast WAAAGH!s are some of the greatest threats to the Imperium, comparable to a major tyranids Hive Fleet (e.g., Behemoth, Kraken, or Leviathan) or one of Malys’ Black Crusades. However, until [[Nobledark_Imperium_Notes#Ghazghull|recently]], none of the successors to the title had the potential to measure up to the original.

Importantly, unlike most of his successors, who either consider Chaos an ally of convenience or just pay lip service to its ideals at best, and Ghazghull, who hates Chaos, the Beast was the only major warboss to actively embrace Chaos and reject the Gorkamorka to pledge his devotion to, quote, “gods who actually do something for their worshippers”. As a result, he got a shitload of blessing including marks from all four Chaos Gods and the mark of Chaos Ascendant, which turned him into an absolute nightmare the size of a hab-block that tore through a number of the Imperium’s greatest heroes and took the Steward and Eldrad (with some softening up from Sanguinius) to finally bring him down.

Ironically, the Beast’s greatest flaw was wrath of all things. Orks love fighting. They love fighting and winning even more. The Beast wasn’t angry that the Imperium declared war on him. He was angry that they took his empire from him. Not only that, but they did so in one of the most underhanded methods possible, by tricking him and then nuking him from orbit rather than defeating him in face-to-face combat. The danger of this flaw could already be seen in Ullanor Crusade, Urg was a kunnin’ ork and knew Horus was trying to trick him but eventually his anger got the better of him. Anger can be a powerful motivator, as well a deadly flaw. The Beast’s anger gave him the motivation to unite most of the Ork race within a few years, but it also led him to making a lot of short-sighted, kneejerk decisions without thinking of the consequences like allying with the Chaos gods and [[Nobledark_Imperium_Writing#Ork_Diplomacy|tactical errors due to trying to make a statement rather than just krumpin’ da gitz]]. Ironically, this would have probably gotten him killed by his followers once the rush of battle wore off and the orks started looking to their long-term future, but the Beast’s lust for revenge did the job for him and accidentally [[Nobledark_Imperium_Xenos#Brain_Boyz|set the Orks back millennia]].

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=== Brain Boyz ===

<div class="toccolours mw-collapsible mw-collapsed" style="100%">''''' The Menace in Green: '''''

''“It’s no good. Bloody greenskins set a trap for us. Send a few trigger-happy Boyz our way, knowing that we’d think that’s all they got and advance. So we get cocky and march our way through the mountain pass. Then once we get too far in to retreat the Orks show they’re not as dead as we all thought and cut off the mountain pass. Only way out of the beartrap is to go deeper into ork territory. Don’t you see, Commissar? It’s an ambush.”''<br>
''“Ambush? What do you mean ambush? Orks don’t set am–”''<br>
-- Last words of the Hekaton 234th, right before being attacked by an Ork ambush

Brain Boyz are perhaps the greatest threat to the Imperium to come out of the Orkish menace in recent years. The greenskins have produced numerous threats over the millennia, including the numerous Beast WAAAGH!s, Armageddon Wars, the Wyrd War that decimated the legion Terra’s Sons, or the Black Croosade [sic] called by the Chaos Ork Rotfang Badgut, but these were often sector or segmentum-scale threats, none of which could compare to sheer destruction wrought by the War of the Beast. Some, particularly in areas that saw relatively little fighting during the War of the Beast, were foolish enough to say that the Orks were no longer capable of posing any organized threat to the Imperium, despite the Orks being responsible for the most brutal conflict in Imperial history. Orks were often seen as little more than cannon fodder, little more than mercenaries or catspaws of greater powers like Chaos or marauding distractions from more threatening adversaries like the Necrons or tyranids, not to be underestimated but not capable of being a significant threat on their own (no matter what the ravings of the inhabitants of the Sol system and its nearby territories had to say). All of which had to be reassessed when Brain Boyz made their reappearance on the galactic stage.

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Most inhabitants of the Milky Way, or at least those who have any idea of how the greater galaxy works beyond their own little world, have a general understanding of the Ork life cycle. Ork spores gradually orkiform the world, a single spore capable of germinating into a variety of different morphotypes depending on the availability of nutrients and the strength of the WAAAGH! field, producing first mushrooms, then more complex orkoid organisms such as squigs. Then snotlings appear, followed by gretchins, followed by orks. A complete self-sustaining ecosystem and war machine. What most don’t know, however, is that there is an additional stage to the Ork life cycle. Eventually, the Ork population reaches a “critorkal mass”, which prompts the development of a new Ork caste: the Brain Boyz. Orks become more intelligent the more of them there are, but Brain Boyz produce a quantum leap in Ork functionality, increasing the intellect of all orkoid lifeforms around them just by their sheer presence. The appearance of Brain Boyz in an Ork WAAAGH! is often heralded by an increase in the sophistication of Ork technology, including the appearance of more advanced Ork devices such as reliable tellyportas, attack moons, and gravity whips as the WAAAGH! field becomes strong enough to unlock the knowledge hidden in their genetic code. Indeed, many Great Crusade-era Warbosses, including Urlakk Urg of Ullanor (a.k.a. The Beast), the Mekboy Warboss of Gorro, and Gharkul Blackfang of Gyros-Thravian, all of whom ruled over Ork empires even more advanced than Charadon, Bork, or Octarius are today, could be seen as proto-Brain Boyz in a sense. Although the presence of Brain Boyz does not preclude the creation of these devices, their production certainly increases following their appearance.

In the past, the appearance of Brain Boyz was a cyclical thing, like a tidal cycle. Over the course of thousands of years, the Ork population would grow, the WAAAGH! field would hit a critical mass, and then Brain Boyz would appear. The Orks would then mostly unite under a single banner to wage WAAAGH! on the rest of the galaxy before being beaten back and the Brain Boys hunted down and destroyed (typically at great cost), returning the Orks to square one. Typically this was done by the Old Eldar Empire or in later years the Interstellar League of humans and their allies during Dark Age of Technology (for which Brain Boy WAAAGH!s were one of the reasons the League formed in the first place). And so the cycle would repeat itself. However, after the Fall of the Eldar and the Age of Strife, there was no longer any eldar empire or league of species to prune back the Orkoid menace. It is estimated that had the Great Crusade not set out when it did, in half a millennium or less Brain Boyz would have re-emerged with no checks on their power. This estimate might have been even lower if the WAAAGH! forged by the Beast had managed to hold. The great Beast ironically did the galaxy a favor, setting Ork back several thousand years by rushing headlong into war with the Imperium.

What the rest of the galaxy also don’t realize is that Brain Boyz are not just Orks with added kunnin’. Brain Boyz occur when the WAAAGH! field is high enough that a single Ork spore divides into twin zygotes. This isn’t exactly uncommon, Ork spores twin all the time, but typically these are chance occurrences whose products grow into two orks or two gretchin. Brain Boy spores are produced by induced twinning and grow into two different Orkoid lifeforms, an ork and a gretchin reflecting the duality of orkiness: brutal cunning and cunning brutality. Often, the ork will start out runty and the gretchin will come out particularly large, due to the gretchin twin taking up nutrients that would otherwise go to the Ork (though in the case of Ghazghull and Makari both came out particularly runty, likely due to the circumstances of their birth). Typically, this twinning is not immediately noticed, Orks typically don’t make it a point to record where a particular boy or grot is born after all, but the two Brain Boyz know each other on sight and are in constant psychic contact with one another (similar phenomena have been noted in eldar and human psyker twins). That said, most Orks instinctively recognize Brain Boyz once they reach some level of prominence. This ork-gretchin duality is just as practical as symbolic. Few would suspect a gretchin of being capable of altering the behavior of a WAAAGH! If the ork Brain Boy is killed, the WAAAGH! doesn’t instantly collapse from in-fighting and the sudden loss of brainpower. If a foe knows about the gretchin Brain Boy, they are often too paranoid about the gretchin Brain Boy to notice the ork one putting a choppa in their face.

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=== Ork Empires of Charadon, Octarius, and Bork ===

Contrary to popular belief, when the Beast was slain on Old Earth, the remainder of the Orkish army did not miraculously disperse into a puff of spore and WAAAGH!-flavored smoke. True, the Orks were thrown into disarray at the loss of their leader, but Orks are more used to radical changes in leadership than humans, and there were still plenty of Orks on Old Earth. Once the Orks were driven from the Sol System, the long and costly Reclamation of Old Earth began. Any spot on which an ork has shed blood is guaranteed to produce more Orks, unless the body is burned or more drastic measures are taken. However, this was Old Earth, the cradle of humanity, and its stubborn people would (literally) move mountains in order to ensure their planet was Ork-free. The intensity of the campaign to ensure that the planet was never Orkiformed was nearly as destructive to Old Earth’s ecosystem as the wrought by the forces of the Beast themselves.

The threat of the Beast’s hordes extended far beyond the Sol system. Through violence, cunning, brutality, promises of a good fight, and copious use of Chaos-sponsored Warp portals to cut down on travel time, the Beast had managed to suborn every major Warboss and unite virtually all WAAAGH!s worth noting in the Milky Way in little more than six standard years. It is estimated that at the time of the War of the Beast, nearly eighty percent of the Ork population was under Urlakk Urg’s control in some fashion. Upon hearing news of the Beast’s death, many of the more ambitious Warbosses attempted to break off and form WAAAGH! of their own, rather than follow “that Urlakk git’s” orders. Some of these Warbosses were more successful than others.

The most successful were the Arch-Arsonist of Charadon, the Overfiend of Octarius, and the Arch-Mangler of Mork. These three Warbosses carved out massive areas of space, forming the basis for what would become the modern Octarius, Charadon, and Bork sectors. The Octarius, Charadon, and Bork sectors are less sectors in the traditional Imperial sense, and more designations for the massive amounts of space that these three Orkish empires control. Although many later Ork enclaves have sprung up due to the increasingly strained nature of Imperial resources, these three empires can trace their roots all the way back to the War of the Beast. The Arch-Arsonist, Overfiend, and Arch-Mangler are even still around, after a fashion, even though the original Orks that carved out these dominions are now long dead. The identity of these rulers has changed regularly, as is typical of a kratocracy, but each Ork that takes control of each of these empires takes on the identity and in some cases the mannerisms of the previous rulers, even adopting the oversized gorget that has become a symbol of Ork power since it was used by Urlakk Urg during the War of the Beast. Sometimes by chance a Chaos Ork has even risen to the throne. Of course, these Chaos Orks typically fail in their goal to convert these empires to the worship of the Chaos Gods, and few stay in power for long, especially if they make the mistake of badmouthing the Gorkamorka.

The Imperium was unable to do much to stop these Warbosses at the time as they were still recovering from the War of the Beast and were still trying to scrape together a semblance of an empire in their own space. By the time the Imperium had recovered enough to retaliate, the Orks had already dug in too deep to effectively without a massive waste of manpower and materiel. Even during the Imperial Reconquista, when several smaller Orkish empires were crushed underfoot by Machairius and his forces, these three managed to stubbornly resist any efforts at conquest. Furthermore, as much as the Imperium is loath to admit it, the empires also serve a useful purpose in acting as buffer states against outside xenos threats, particularly Charadon which shares a border with the Necron Star Empire.

That is not to say the Imperium is content to sit and do nothing. The Imperium knows full well what happens when one leaves Orks to their own devices, as seen by the Empires on Gorro and Ullanor during the Great Crusade. The Imperium regularly sends assassins into Ork-held territories, especially the Empires of Octarius, Charadon, and Bork, in order to take out any kunnin’ or charismatic Warboss in the hopes of keeping an Ork like the Beast from ever arising again. Chaos appears to have a similar idea, sending their own assassins after any promising warboss, in order to keep the Orks stupid and easily manipulated. Unfortunately, this means that the few Orks who do survive this gauntlet of assassins tend to be the smartest and most kunnin’ of the lot, meaning that all this action may have done is lower the threshold for Brain Boyz to emerge.

=== Empires of Gathrog and Dregruk ===

To the galactic northeast of Cadia and the Eye of Terror lie two great Ork Empires, the Empire of Gathrog and the Empire of Dregruk. These Ork empires are so large that if the two WAAAGH!s were to combine forces, it is likely that they could easily overrun Cadia and the Cadian Gate before the Imperium could do much of anything about it. Fortunately for the Imperium, these two empires hate each other with a passion, and would much rather fight each other than team up against the Imperium.

This is due in large part to the two empire’s choice of patrons. Gathrog is one of the few Ork WAAAGH!s to be composed almost entirely of Chaos Orks (likely because of its close proximity to the Eye), with the current Arch-Dictator of Gathrog being a Khornate. The Great Despot of Dregruk and his forces, on the other hand, are staunch followers of the Gorkamorka, and in recent years have sworn fealty to Ghazghkull Mag Uruk Thraka as part of his efforts to consolidate forces in preparation for the 5th War of Armageddon.

===The Proto-Orks and the Krork ===

See [[Nobledark_Imperium_Xenos#The_Proto-Orks_and_the_Krork|The Proto-Orks and the Krork]]

== Necron Star Empire ==

=== Dynasties of the Star Empire ===

==== Ahmontekh and the Suhbekhar Dynasty ====

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The leadership of the Necron Star Empire is a pale shadow of its former self. While Szarekh, first and mightiest of their number, still reigns, the other two members of the Triarch, his left and right hands, were lost in the millions of years during the Great Sleep. Szarekh's right hand was Ahmontekh of the Suhbekhar Dynasty, a skilled warrior with an eye for long-term strategy, valued not only for his ability in battle but for his wise council. Ahmontekh's skill in battle was such that he was one of the warriors that fought alongside the C'tan and even struck the killing blow that slew the Great Weaver of the K’nib. When the War in Heaven ended, Ahmontekh entered the Great Sleep without issue like so many other Necrons.

Then, approximately twenty-three million years ago, the Old Eldar Empire made the mistake of waking Ahmontekh up early. Although separated from his dynasty, having been put into stasis alongside some of the finest soldiers and war machines of the Necron Star Empire due to his status as Triarch, Ahmontekh had enough resources entombed with him in his royal crypt to pose a serious problem. Ahmontekh’s response to being awoken by the children of the Old Ones was swift, immediate, and fiery. Worlds that had known peace for millions of years burned under Ahmontekh's assault, their state of the art defense systems no match for ancient Necrontyr technology. In particular, the eldar swore eternal vengeance on Ahmontekh for destroying the Crone World of Maldek, killing trillions in a single stroke, and declared they would hunt him to the ends of the galaxy. Worse yet was that Ahmontekh’s destruction wasn’t simply mindless. He was looking for the other tomb worlds and his buried lord. If the eldar didn’t stop him soon, the Old Empire would have a full-scale revival of the Necron Star Empire on their hands.

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Then the Old Empire were approached by a strange figure, a robotic avatar of an unknown species with a single cycloptic eye. Exactly who this being was remains unknown, but told the eldar it knew of a way to destroy Ahmontekh. Long ago before the Necrons had traded flesh and blood for metal, Ahmontekh had warred with the Charnovokh Dynasty, which at the time had been ruled by his cousin. Although outright warfare between the Suhbekhar and Charnovokh Dynasties had been stopped by the control protocols, the memory of the rivalry still existed in Ahmontekh’s mind. The stranger could take that seed of resentment, distort it and expand it, until nothing else occupied the Phaeron’s thoughts. While Ahmontekh was a skilled fighter and cunning strategist, his weakness was his lack of scientific knowledge. Like most Phaerons, Ahmontekh knew nothing of how technology actually worked, and therefore no way to stop anyone from subverting the functions of his mind. Ahmontekh would be made predictable and easy to destroy by his madness. The eldar considered any plan to destroy Ahmontekh to be a good idea, but they didn’t notice the stranger spoke such words with a heavy heart. Although they knew the stranger wanted Ahmontekh gone as much as they did, what they didn’t know is that Gahet of the Cabal had approached the Eldar Empire as a last resort, having previously tried to sway Ahmontekh to his cause with words instead of violence.

The foul deed was done and Ahmontekh’s mental state began to deteriorate. Rather than seek out and awaken his liege Szarekh, he became increasingly focused on finding the resting place of his hated rivals the Charnovokh Dynasty and destroy them once and for all. Knowing his hated rivals were located somewhere on the Eastern fringe, Ahmontekh’s army marched increasingly eastward, making their movements extremely telegraphed and easy to intercept. The eldar assumed he was killed in a bombardment, especially given his forces fell apart soon after his assumed death, but such was not the case. In one last display of sentimentality out of regret for his own actions, Gahet crippled Ahmontekh’s cybernetic body and spirited him away before his death. He placed the mad Phaeron in a stasis capsule and laid him to rest in the old tomb complexes of the Suhbekhar Dynasty, hoping that Ahmontekh could one day be awakened and healed of his madness at a time when the galaxy no longer had to conceive of war.

With the incapacitation of the triarch, rule of the Suhbekhar Dynasty fell to Ahmontekh’s son, Ahhotekh. In many ways, Ahhotekh is everything that his father was not. Instead of being a proud regent and warrior, he is a schemer, who prefers to dispose of his foes through intrigue and manipulation rather than brute force. Ahhotekh has even gone so far as to disdain those who gain power through brute force; while he has killed in his share of duels, he considers those who make a habit of it to be insufficiently imaginative to actively hold power and capable of little more than savagery. Ahhotekh spent much of the War of Heaven disposing of his rivals in convenient accidents and other such methods, including stoking the rivalry between the Suhbekhar and Charnovokh Dynasties. Indeed, before the biotransference, Ahhotekh was actively plotting to dispose of Ahmontekh, the only member of the Suhbekhar Dynasty who would dare consider raising their hand against the Phaeron, something that the control protocols put a stop to.

Fortunately, despite Ahmontekh’s incapacitation the control protocols were still in place, his insanity was not enough to cause the Suhbekhar Dynasty to break the will of the Silent King. However, this is cold comfort for Ahhotekh, who isn’t sure if the control protocols also protect him since his father is incapacitated, not dead. As a result, Ahhotekh is intensely paranoid and relentlessly persecutes his underlings for any perceived sign of betrayal. After all, he would do the same to them if their positions were reversed. It is unclear, but ironically possible, that the control protocols forbidding harm to their liege are the only thing preventing the Necrons of the Suhbekhar Dynasty from rising up and uniting as one to overthrow Ahhotekh.

However, no matter how much he wants to, there is something preventing Ahhotekh from disposing of his dear father. Ahmontekh saw something when he was awakened, something that few others alive in the galaxy today still remember. The Silent King wants that information out of Ahmontekh’s head, as any intelligence on the state of the galaxy since the Great Sleep could prove highly useful in realizing the Star Empire’s plans. At the same time, Ahhotekh wants the control protocols to secure control of the Suhbekhar Dynasty, and as long as the Silent King’s orders leave room for creative interpretation of his orders he is willing to pursue it. Nevertheless, examining Ahmontekh’s mind is a slow process, one that must be carried out piecemeal by thousands of Crypteks. Seeing too much of Ahmontekh’s mind at once tends to drive any Necron who sees it insane.

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=== Necron Titans (Stalkers) ===

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For many years, after the reemergence of the Necron Star Empire, there was considerable debate among Imperial scholars as to what a Necron Titan would look like. Many theorized that a Necron Titan would simply look like a giant Necron. Others hypothesized that the C’tan were the Necron’s equivalents of Titans, and after the War in Heaven the Necrons may have had no need for Titan-scale weaponry. This was all before the Necron-Imperium Conflict, that brief period in M40 when tensions between the Imperium and the Necrontyr Star Empire ran hot after the Silent King demanded a trillion subjects for biotransference experiments before settling into the quasi-cold war state that it has today. It was during this period that the Necrons brought out some of the heavy weapons they had to bear, and Imperial scholars learned they had been wrong. Completely, horribly, wrong.

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In contrast to nearly all other races, Necron Titans, or Stalkers, are distinctly non-humanoid, almost arachnid or insect-like in appearance. This is perhaps best exemplified by the most commonly seen Necron Stalker, the Tomb Stalker. Rather than standing upright on two large limbs, Tomb Stalkers support their weight via dozens of insectoid limbs, resembling Earth centipedes. These limbs are not only effective in carrying the construct’s weight, but also in burrowing through the ground and tearing through the armor plating of opposing vehicles and titans. This is true not only of the generic Warhound-sized Tomb Stalkers most commonly seen, but also of the larger Scolopendra class Tomb Stalkers, which can be the size of an Imperator Titan.

Compared to other Stalkers, Tomb Stalkers use little in the way of quantum shielding, which is thought to be the Necron’s answer to Void Shields. Instead, they use the very earth as their shield, burrowing beneath the ground in order to ambush their prey. In doing so, Tomb Stalkers are able to achieve something very few Titans are capable of performing: stealth. The effectiveness of the Tomb Stalker’s burrowing strategy became clear during the Necron-Imperium Conflict, when a Tomb Stalker burrowed a circle around an Imperator Titan before erupting from the ground, using the unstable substrate to drag the Imperial Titan and its Princeps to their grave.

Surprisingly enough, Tomb Stalkers are thought to be weaponized construction vehicles. Records obtained from the Imperium’s Necron contacts report that Tomb Stalkers were originally used in constructing the vast tomb complexes that the Necrons inhabited in their heyday. The Necrontyr apparently evolved on a world with blistering levels of stellar radiation, which would kill most lifeforms over an extended period of time. As a result, the only logical place to build cities on the Necrontyr homeworld was underground, resulting in an architectural style that resembled increasingly ornate bunker complexes. The Necrontyr found this architectural style to be highly effective in protecting against meteoroid strikes and orbital bombardments, even after they spread off their homeworld to planets less affected by radiation.

At the other end of the spectrum are the Crypt Stalkers, which resemble gigantic versions of the Terran daddy longlegs. The control center and weaponry are all mounted on the central body of the Crypt Stalker, allowing them to instantly change direction in response to new threats, even capable of rotating their heat rays 180 degrees and suddenly reversing direction without even having to turn. Crypt Stalkers have a sensory array which gives them a nearly 360 degree field of vision, and their long legs allow them to simply step over most obstacles in their path. Crypt Stalkers make much heavier use of void shielding, mainly because their small body and comparatively narrow legs would make them otherwise easy targets for anti-titan weaponry. Triarch Stalkers are similar to Crypt Stalkers, except are smaller with a distinct pilot (closer to tank-sized) and are not capable of omnidirectional movement. They compensate for this with huge melee appendages they can use as melee weapons.

It is still not entirely clear how Stalkers work. It is clear that Stalkers have some kind of intelligence, given their ability to react to changing conditions on the battlefield, but whether that consciousness is a pilot or intrinsic to the machine itself is unknown. The kneejerk assumption would be that Stalkers are operated by an uploaded Necron consciousness, or otherwise powered by a C’tan shard. However, evidence indicates that Tomb Stalkers were around in nearly their current form (minus the heavy weaponry) before the First Wars of Secession, given their use in carving out the underground complexes the Necrontyr called home, long before the Necrontyr had developed biotransferrence or discovered the C’tan. The current running hypothesis is that the Stalkers are controlled by some manner of artificial intelligence, similar to the Scarabs, Canoptek Wraiths, and Crypt Spyders, except on a much larger scale.

Nemesor Zandrekh is known to treat his personal Tomb Stalker like a beloved pet, but it is unknown if this is typical or just another one of the Nemesor’s…eccentricities.

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=== Independent and Imperial-aligned Dynasties ===

==== Nemesor Zahndrekh and the Gidrim Dynasty ====

See [[Nobledark Imperium Notes#Nemesor Zahndrekh|Nemesor Zahndrekh]] (TEMPORARY LINK)

==== Trazyn the Infinite and Solemnace ====

See [[Nobledark Imperium Notable Planets#Solemnace|Solemnace]]

==== Xun'Bakyr and the Maynarkh Dynasty ====

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Of all the independent Necron dynasties, the Maynarkh Dynasty is perhaps the biggest threat to the Imperium. Even as far back as the War in Heaven, the Maynarkh Dynasty were known for their brutality and cruelty, acting as the Silent King’s pet monsters and wetwork agents. This behavior was no different under the Maynarkh Dynasty’s last and latest Phaerakh: Xun’bakyr, the Mother of Oblivion. Eldar Harlequins speak of countless atrocities and genocides, all perpetrated by Necrons in glowing colors of brass and orange. Indeed, the brutality of Xun’bakyr and the Maynarkh Dynasty was so great that just before the Great Sleep several Phaerons, normally so subservient as to the point of indolence, approached the Silent King to suggest that the Silent King take steps to make sure Xun’bakyr…didn’t wake up from the Great Sleep. It is rather telling that the Silent King actually agreed with this proposal.

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The Silent King may have had more than one reason to try and kill off the Maynarkh Dynasty. Phaerarch Xun’bakyr was, to put it bluntly, infatuated with the Nightbringer. When the Silent King gave the order for the Drazak Dynasty to kill Llandu’gor the Flayer, he had to noticeably take precautions to avoid letting the information reach Xun’bakyr, given that any weapon that could conceivably be used against the object of her obsession would likely cause her to react poorly. Even when the C’tan were shattered and the Silent King ordered the Necrons to go into their long hibernation, the news was kept hidden from the Maynarkh Dynasty, who went to sleep still believing they were following orders from their C’tan overlords. The Silent King may have been able to directly override the free will of Xun’bakyr, but given her instability, he didn’t want to risk the chance of her slipping her leash.

The Maynarkh Dynasty was put in hibernation in their traditional lands, far on the other side of the galaxy from the core of the Star Empire in what would one day become the Orpheus Sector of the Segmentum Pacificus. This was a high-density stellar cluster filled with numerous stars, some of which were…encouraged to go supernova early with a little bit of help from the Oruscar Dynasty’s Celestial Orrery. The Silent King hoped that the constant bombardment of electromagnetic pulses from exploding stars would damage the Maynarkh Dynasty to the point that they would never wake up from the Great Sleep, or at the very least be so damaged that they could only awake into an addled half-life.

It didn’t work. Although the Maynarkh Dynasty was damaged, they still awoke from the Great Sleep along with everyone else. Xun’bakyr’s madness and obsession was, if anything, worsened by the damage from the Great Sleep, to the point that the Silent King could no longer assert any control over her. Xun’bakyr seemed to rapidly realize she had been deceived, having awoken in a time when the great immortal C’tan had either been killed or reduced to hiding and the Silent King was the one trying to give her orders.

Rapidly dismissing the ravings of the would-be king, Xun’bakyr realized that her dynasty now needed a new purpose. It didn’t take her long to come up with one. Xun’bakyr decided that the Maynarkh Dynasty would rededicate themselves to killing all life in the galaxy itself, a creative masterpiece of death and destruction that might even go so far as killing time itself, all to attract the attention of the Nightbringer and to demonstrate her affection for the object of her infatuation. She is rather oblivious to the fact that despite all his paraphernalia and death-associated trappings, the Nightbringer is mostly concerned with sating his own gluttony and power-lust and would rather like causality to keep existing (though in his own image of course).

Xun'bakyr is obsessive and meticulous, in the long term focused absolutely on her deadly Idol, in the short term honing and perfecting some novel variety of star eater, 4D ionized shrapnel projector, or reality-pin to nail down certain doom. Xun'bakyr isn't a large scale threat only because she is so narrow in the scope of her ambitions. Her armies march along in the wake of the Nightbringer dealing death, and her scouts proceed him demonstrating their queen's new horrors. A blow from one will often be followed by a blow from the other, and together they make a horrible local threat and disaster within a sector, but beyond an additional horror following the Nightbringer's aimless killing spree they are not strategically significant. Xun'bakyr's universe destroying plans coming to fruition is an existential threat, but one that is sadly insignificant compared to many others. Although the rest of the Maynarkh Dynasty generally does not share her obsessions, the dynasty had always been composed of the worst sort of sadists, psychopaths, and war criminals and so jump at the chance to kill people in new and creative ways.

The first overt sign of action by the Maynarkh Dynasty was when the stars of the Caracol binary system went supernova during between Blood Pact and Imperial Forces. Both groups considered it the first shots of a surprise attack by some unknown third party. What they didn’t know was that rather than a military action, it was the result of a weapons test from one of Xun’bakyr’s harebrained schemes. The slaughter that followed was mostly unrelated. Mostly, in that the Maynarkh Dynasty was involved, and there was slaughter, but it had nothing to do with the two stars they had made go nova. Today, the Orpheus sector is nearly lifeless, haunted only by ghosts and madmen and ruled by an even madder queen.

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=== Blanks and the Pariah Gene ===

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66,000,000 years ago, the aristocracy of the Necrontyr Star Empire had a problem. They were in danger of losing the War in Heaven. Although they had the might of the C’tan and the Dolmen Gates at their back, the war was growing increasingly bloody as the Old Ones threw uplifted species after uplifted species into the meat grinder. And despite the Necrontyr’s understanding of the material realm, the Old Ones had the raw power of the illogical, irrational realm of the Immaterium at their disposal, which the ancient amphibians were the virtual unchallenged masters of. The Necrontyr needed some way to neutralize that advantage.

Several Crypteks came up with one possible solution: genetically engineering Necrontyr soldiers and eventually the entire Necrontyr to have an inverted Warp signature, canceling out the immense psychic power of the Old Ones and their servant races. However, although such this plan was possible for the Necrontyr Star Empire, the empire’s aristocracy was uncomfortable with the idea for several reasons. First, it would require mass-cloning Necrontyr soldiers in the billions, and would effectively make their entire standing army (not to mention all living Necrontyr) obsolete. Additionally, and more importantly, although the Necrontyr’s rank and file would be safe from psychic attack, it did nothing to stop the Old Ones from decapitating the Star Empire’s leadership by simply assassinating the Triarchy. The Necrontyr aristocracy, in their vaunted superiority, didn’t think very highly of a plan that benefited future generations but didn’t benefit them. Ultimately, the plan was shut down and cast aside in favor of the idea of biotransference, the brain child of Mag’ladroth but presented to the Necrontyr aristocracy by Mephet’ran. However, not everyone forgot about the project. At least not Mephet’ran, the Deceiver, nor his shards that escaped containment in the millions of years after the end of the War in Heaven while the Necrons slumbered.

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Millions of years later, as humanity’s Great Crusade rediscovered numerous human worlds thought lost during the Age of Strife, they came across an interesting phenomenon. On many worlds, there were occasionally individuals that were not only immune to the touch the warp, but in many cases were capable of actively suppressing these effects. These individuals, who came to be known as blanks or pariahs, were always very rare in a population, often in ratios of billions to one, and almost always seemed to exist as outcasts or hermits, or at best lived in small isolated communes far away from any major population center. Further investigation found that these blanks, who ranging from Jenetia Krole of Sibar to the nightmarish blacksoul assassin Spear, gained their strange warp-suppressing powers from an even more unusual source, a complete lack of what would conventionally be called a soul.

Blanks work by emitting an inverted warp signature, rather than the positively charged soul of most species. Their inverted warp signature interacts with background positive warp signature of the universe like the union of matter and anti-matter, creating a null aura that cancels both signatures out and creates a zone of no warp signature, either negative or positive, at all. Normally blanks are capable of funneling the energy from this reaction to their own ends. However, unlike normal humans, blanks are capable of surviving being completely disconnected from the Warp as their bodies are adapted to exist in the null zone their inverted Warp signature normally produces. Although they have an inverted warp signature, the null aura they create means they effectively have no soul.

Being in contact with a blank’s null aura is not a pleasant experience, and the experience typically gets worse the more psychically sensitive an individual is. To psykers, having their connection to the Warp muffled by a blank’s null aura produces actual pain and a sensation which some have described, usually after they finish screaming, as “sensory deprivation of a sixth sense” or “a feeling akin to losing a limb”. Only extremely strong psykers are capable of overwhelming a blanks null aura with minimal effect, but the only psykers capable of something like that are being like Magnus the Red or the Emperor of Mankind. However, such negative effects are not only limited to psykers. Any being with a soul is instinctively capable of sensing the void that blanks represent, and the muffling of their soul leads to an uncanny valley effect and feelings of dread and existential despair. This uncanny valley effect manifests itself in different ways. In some it causes migrane headaches, while in others it leads to anxiety attacks, while in others it manifests as a hard to define but odious stench. More subtle behavioral alterations have been suspected as well. Although some blanks have learned to weaponized this null aura, in the days before null-collars this often made the life of a blank short and miserable.

After much research, ranging from psychological to metabiological, the Imperium was able to connect this soullessness and anti-Warp aura to a genetic factor, known as the pariah gene. The pariah seemingly makes no sense given what is known about genetics and metaphysical biology. Humans with the pariah gene are rare, to the point that one is lucky to find one individual with the pariah gene on a planet with a population of billions. Additionally, because of their aura, blanks have a hard time finding mates and therefore producing offspring. This means that if the pariah gene originated during the Age of Strife, its carriers should simply disappear from the population due to random chance and genetic drift. But they don’t. If the pariah gene were recessive, it is easy to see how the gene could remain hidden in the populace for generations, only occasionally producing blanks. But it isn’t. The pariah gene is dominant, with individuals with two copies known as blacksouls. At least some parts of the pariah gene appear to be genetic: it is heritable and is disproportionately more common in women than men, suggesting a link to the X-chromosome. But the fact that it appears seemingly at random throughout the population has led many to wonder if the pariah “gene” is actually multiple genes (a recessive gene to turn the effect on and off, and a dominant one to control the intensity), or if the actual pariah allele is a symptom, rather than a cause.

From a metaphysical perspective blanks and the pariah gene are no less strange. In theory, it should be possible to evolve from having a soul with a strong positive Warp signature to one with a negative Warp signature like a blank. Indeed, the Tau have a particularly low Warp signature, and have displayed significant resistance to Warp corruption (though at a cost of being relatively helpless when a particularly powerful Warp entity like a daemon decides to focus its attention on them). The ancient Necrontyr are believed to have been the same way. The problem with this hypothesis is it requires a species to pass through a stage with a warp signature of zero, meaning a body that is alive only at the cellular level with no sentience. The only way to get around this hurdle would be artificial means, a species with positive Warp signature engineering individuals with an inverted one, though other explanations have been suggested. The fact that the pariah gene independently appeared in populations that should have had no contact with each other during the Age of Strife, and only in humans (though Kroot blanks have also been produced through the usual ways in which the Kroot assimilate traits) has also made many suspicious, though few would disagree that an adaptation to shut out the Warp would prove useful for an age when the galaxy was in chaos (and in Chaos), and desperate attempts at genetic engineering for survival were rampant in the early days of the Age of Strife.

Many people in the Imperium were disturbed by the idea of people without a soul. The Navigators in particular, being a race of all psykers, were especially disturbed by the existence of blanks, believing they were an attempt by the rest of the Imperium to create a contingency plan to wipe them all out. The Nobilis Navigo tried to whip people into a frenzy to kill the blanks by playing on the unnatural dread blanks produced until the Steward and the other High Lords told the Paternoval Envoy point blank they weren’t going to persecute an entire group of people who were not warp-tainted just because they looked different, no matter how much the Navis Nobilite screamed, rather unsubtly hinting between the lines that any excuse the Navigators made to persecute the pariahs could be easily turned around to apply to the Navigators. Though, the Imperium’s reasonings for defending the pariahs were not made out of simple compassion. The Navigators and pariahs were both useful resources, and the Imperium needed every advantage it could get in those days. If that meant wielding fire and anti-fire in accord, so be it.

As might be expected, the eldar were also horrified at the idea of blanks. Due to being a psychic species, the idea of life in eldar culture had become inimically tied to the idea of having a soul. To the eldar, the idea of being alive and thinking yet without a soul was uncomfortably close to the idea of being undead or a philosophical zombie. The only things the eldar had as a cultural comparison were the Harlequin Solitaires, and those were artificially created, rather than born. The implications of what Solitares represented and how they were created only made things worse. Today, blanks are by far the most discriminated against group of humans by the eldar. One just doesn’t see it firsthand very often given both parties are unable to interact except over a vid-screen. Opinions and prejudices towards humans vary from Dorhai to Ulthwé, but blanks are always treated worse than normal humans. Even the most tolerant eldar still see them as tragic monsters, people who didn’t want to be born as abominations against the natural order but ended up that way regardless. Kind of like they do Solitaires (only replacing “freaks of nature” with “necessary evil”).

When they awakened from their sixty-six million year sleep, the Necron Star Empire were also interested in the blanks. In particular, they were extremely suspicious as to how a species could develop a feature that almost exactly resembled the old mothballed Necrontyr research project, down to some of the smallest details. Szarekh’s chief cryptek, Illuminor Szeras, is particularly interested in the blanks and the applications of the pariah gene. The idea of making specialized soldiers to use as mobilized suppression devices and hunter-killers against psykers and daemons is an idea too good to pass up.

The largest living population of Blanks can be found on Pluto and Charon, close enough for the Imperium to have its anti-Warp weaponry close at hand, but far enough away for them to not block the light of the Astronomican. Indeed, watching Pluto cross the Astronomican, like an exoplanet slightly dimming the light of a far-off star, is a popular activity for young Navigators, though the Paternova has issued warnings telling people not to stare directly into the light of the Astronomican. Because the colony’s true reason for existing is to continue to exist and keep producing blanks, in order to keep the population of Pluto and Charon occupied they have been given exclusive mining rights over anything in the Kuiper Belt or stray rocks in the Oort zone that they lay eyes on. Both Pluto and Charon have been hollowed out and built on to the point where they are now not recognizable. To anyone else looking it now just looks like a private space port with manufactory rigs and a small docking yard. It does appear on the official maps, but only because not doing so would be more suspicious. It's a "private enterprise" on the charts and not open to the public, with the official story being they were claimed by an early Rogue Trader (whose “dynasty” is actually a shell corporation for the Administratum). Life on Pluto and Charon is a terminally boring experience, though on the positive side at least its inhabitants no longer have to fear the possibility of being lynched.

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=== Wyverns ===

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The Void Dragon is not whole. Although perhaps 95% of the great Dragon lies half-buried beneath the surface of Mars, the Dragon still bears a number of old wounds, chunks of him torn off in the war with his kin. But the Void Dragon is a god, and gods do not bleed. Like all powerful entities in the universe, his lost essence was turned into shards, scattered across the cosmos.

Throughout time, history has spoken of encounters with strange metallic dragon-like creatures. These encounters are consistent enough that they cannot be simply dismissed out of hand, but are so maddeningly rare that it has been impossible to create a clear picture of exactly what these sightings represent. These creatures are generally referred to as Wyverns. However, to those few privy to the horrible secret of what lies buried underneath the surface of Mars, the identity of these beings is clear. Wyverns are shards of the Void Dragon.

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These shards somewhat resemble the Void Dragon, except they are more bestial looking (having only legs and a pair of wings and no arms, for example) and have no semblance of intelligence whatsoever. They are animalistic, only seeking to eat and survive and nothing else. It is not clear why these shards of the Void Dragon act so differently from their sire, as even similar-sized shards of the Deceiver or the Nightbringer show some level of intelligence. It is possible that the Dragon’s prison is somehow acting as a signal blocker, cutting the Wyverns off from the Void Dragon’s mind.

Only a few encounters with Wyverns have been well-documented. One involves the primarch Ferrus Manus. During unification of the planet Medusa, he learned about a creature the locals called Asirnoth that descended to prey upon the people of Medusa from its lair in the planet-encircling Telstarax. When Ferrus reported to the Mechanicum what the people of Medusa had told him, they were in shock and immediately informed him that he must dispatch this creature with all haste, giving the primarch permission to use the otherwise forbidden holy archaeotech relics aboard his ship. Three maniples of Iron Hands Skitarii accompanied Ferrus Manus into the lair of the beast, but less than a dozen came out. The battle was hard-fought, but by the end of the battle the primarch managed to strike down the wyvern and bind it within the strange archaeotech device. Ferrus Manus never knew exactly what he fought, but the high Magi of the Adeptus Mechanicus said he had performed a great service for the Mechanicum, and so Ferrus felt satisfied by his actions.

The Steward also fought one. Once.

It was an unexpected fight on what was supposed to be an otherwise peaceful world. Granted, the Steward had the upper hand for much of that fight, the issue was that no matter how many times the Steward would smite the wyvern it would simply rise again, ready to continue the fight. The creature was eventually defeated when the Steward staggered the beast with a particularly powerful blow and a Mechanicus adept sealed it in its inert state using a strange device that no one had ever seen before. When the Steward asked what the creature was, the adept evaded the question by claiming it was piece of archaeotech, which could only be deactivated by another piece of archaeotech the Mechanicus normally forbade the use of (which was technically true). Stranger things made by the hands of men had been found at that time in the Great Crusade, and at that time there was no reason to suspect there was anything unusual about the metal beast.

Another noteworthy feature about these creatures is that they seem to be impervious to normal means of harm, rising over and over again from seemingly lethal injuries. As a result, stories about these creatures tend to feature particularly innovative ways of incapacitating or imprisoning them. Burying them alive in lava is a popular option.

The Void Dragon somehow knows about the Wyverns despite his imprisonment, to no one’s surprise, and has repeatedly asked the Adeptus Mechanicus where those shards of him are. It is not clear if the Void Dragon truly does not know the exact location of his shards, or if he is merely reminding the Adeptus Mechanicus that they exist and the Mechanicus do not have complete control over him. Some among the Order of the Dragon have theorized that the Wyverns are somehow necessary to free the Void Dragon from its non-Euclidean chains, a prison that can only be unlocked by the prisoner. This is an idea that no one is particularly interested in testing.

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== Dark Eldar ==

=== Asdrubael Vect ===

See [[Nobledark_Imperium_Notable_People#Asdrubael_Vect|Asdrubael Vect]]

=== Reri Hesperax ===

[[Image:cybrid_assassin.jpg|thumb|One of many different versions of what the cybrid can look like. The only flesh to exist on her body is on her head and the skin of her torso.]]

Illucis Grizvaldi, following his emergency Warp jump to escape Imperial forces, was stranded on an unknown planet within Ultima Segmentum when Lelith Hesperax found him. Or rather the Dark Eldar agents that found him. When approached by these agents to be commissioned for the creation of a living weapon or risk starving to death in the middle of nowhere, he refused to work for Lelith unless they allowed his remaining disciples be taken with him.

After coming to an agreement, the heretek along with his cult was taken back to Commorragh to being his finest creation. The treacherous Dark Eldar politics have caused the famous Succubus for an insurance along with a weapon for her own personal use outside of the city. It began with taking the embryo from Lelith to have it grow in a vat. Once the child was fully developed with accelerated aging to around 17, her ears and limbs were cut off. Citing the need to install cybernetics along with ridding of the typical hypersensitive Eldar weaknesses located on the feet, hands, and ears. Machines built for utility, enhanced movement and hunting were integrated into the girl's body over time, as she was trained while brainwashed into the blind obedience of Lelith.

Given the codename "Reri", then allowed to adopt the last name Hesperax, she was made for tracking and assassination of all Lelith's rivals outside of Commorragh. Illucis whispered some unknown words to Lelith before leaving, those words would be the killswitch for the cybernetics on Reri if the machines ever picked up the vibrations of those words. Not to mention the explosives built into the limbs that would probably kill Reri. In the 41st Millenium however, Reri has gone on to kill some diverse targets that only a lucky few have survived against her. Some Dark Eldar goes so far as to think she could take on killing any member of the Imperial Family although this is extreme stupidity or arrogance talking.

Without the ears, Reri could either install specialized equipment or synthetic ears for infiltration as an Abhuman. The limbs have also been heavily modified to always have motion sensors, vox comms, powerful magnetics, and survival tools like a knife or lockpicks. they can also be outfitted with built-in weapons and tracking instruments. This was all done while adding durability to have them be tougher than Eldar bone without sacrificing the mobility.

Some say that her appearance is eerily similar to that of a Human with the right limbs and ears, creating another conspiracy theory saying the Impossible Child was already built by the Dark Eldar. Although few subscribe to this theory, it has been given exposure following the assassination of an Inquisitor in Sol right after the 12th Black Crusade. There are also some within the Imperial government who suspect Reri interfered with Legienstrasse's development, although it is unknown how much she was involved. One thing was certain, however, Reri was tracking down Legienstrasse when the Imperials found the renegade assassin. With increasingly erratic behavior after The Wedding, Lelith worries about sending Reri away as the chance of her going rogue also increase.

=== The Ilmaea ===

<div class="toccolours mw-collapsible mw-collapsed" style="100%">'''''The Blackened Heart of Commorragh'''''

At the heart of Commorragh are the Ilmaea (lit. black sun/stolen sun), the twin suns that power the Dark City. Commorragh could accurately be described as a set of dual Dyson spheres, two spherical outgrowths of the Webway stacked one on top of the other (Upper and Lower Commorragh, respectively), each with an Ilmaea at their center. Each star artificially crushed to the size of a red dwarf by the Old Eldar Empire at the height of their power using technology now since lost. Because of the technology used to shrink their size, the Ilmaea also have an extremely long expected life span, comparably to that of an actual red dwarf. Although Commorragh was originally founded as a Webway port and became a haven for the Old Empire’s rich and famous before becoming what it is now, it also performs a remarkably good job as a disaster shelter. In theory, one could outlast the end of the universe inside Commorragh.

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Approximately 1640000 years ago, the Old Eldar Empire went to war with and defeated an unknown, now-extinct alien species. This was not an uncommon event in eldar history, every few million years or so an external threat would arise that would actually threaten the supremacy of the Children of Isha. Sometimes these enemies were resurgent Brain Boyz, sometimes they were extra-galactic or extra-dimensional species like the architects of the Harrowing, and sometimes they were simply native Milky Way races, occasionally fellow children of the Old Ones, that bit off more than they could chew. At first the eldar fought these wars based on the half-remembered wishes of the Old Ones, believing themselves to be safeguarding the existence and self-determination of their fellow sentients, but at some point things took a darker turn.

According to legend, the race that fought the eldar 1.6 million years ago had been a true threat to the galaxy, believing themselves to have a manifest destiny over the Milky Way. The eldar beat the would-be galactic conquerors back to their binary-star home system and then, as punishment for their hubris, stole their two suns, leaving the species to scream in anguish as they slowly froze to death in the darkness. It is uncertain how justified the actions of the eldar were, given their tendency to self-glorify and distort their own history, but the accounts of the Black Library (which are considered to be less biased) do seem to support the idea that the species . However, the fact that they were willing to resort to such draconian means of ensuring their dominance, destroying an entire biosphere of an already defeated foe, already showed the rot seeping into the heart of the Old Empire.

In the years after the seizure of the Ilmaea and their placement as trophies within the biggest Webway port of Commorragh, the Ilmaea became an important symbol in eldar society. The Ilmaea became seen as a symbol of eldar righteousness, an indicator of how the chosen of the Old Ones and Asuryan could do no wrong. Depictions of the Ilmaea became common in Old Empire art, and many wealthy Sidhe lords sought to have Ilmaea of their own. Most were artificial mock-ups made of fusion reactions, but a few were real, stolen from life-bearing systems to complete the symbolism. The Old Empire at least had a fig-leaf of justification for confiscating the original Ilmaea. The nobles…did not. The Craftworlders and Exodites do not think highly of the Ilmaea, considering them a symbol of the Old Empire’s hubris of the highest magnitude.

Each of the Ilmaea are modulated to give off the perfect amount of light and heat to the surface of Commorragh below, giving them a sinister black color when viewed through solar filters. This allows Commorragh to be kept habitable for life without the need of expensive artificial blinds. There is no day or night cycle on Commorragh, only a perpetual twilight, the time when light still exists despite the coolness of the oncoming night…and also the exact time when the shadows are longest and predators find it the easiest to hide. The similarities have not gone unnoticed.

Although the technology to create the Ilmaea has since been lost, the technology to keep the stolen suns modulated still exists. The size and intensity of the stars has been ever so slightly tweaked over the years to balance growth as the Webway pockets of various Kabals have been stitched into Commorragh. Indeed, if the containment were ever to fail, the stars would most likely violently expand back to their former size. The Lord of Commorragh, Asdrubael Vect, has used this to his advantage at one point, deliberately dropping the shielding on one section of the Ilmaea to scour an entire district of Commoragh clean in order to burn one infamous rebellion to the ground, sending a message to all of Commorragh of the sword of Damocles Vect has hanging over their heads.

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=== The New Men ===
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Fabius Bile, mad geneticist of Commorragh and personal vizier of Asdrubael Vect, is known for a great many things. Reverse engineering of the Mark III MP geneseed to provide the Fallen with a ready supply of new recruits. Concocting combat drugs that make the most potent medications of the Imperium look like aspirin. Creations of horrors for the highest bidder that make even the other inhabitants of the Dark City have a minor reaction of disgust. Most consider these acts vile abominations committed solely for the amusement of a twisted mind. Fabius Bile considers them parlor tricks done to pay the rent.

Fabius Bile’s actual goals, the ones he actually puts his heart and soul into, tend to be much more grandiose. He wants to be remembered for something beyond simply being the ringmaster of his own personal freakshow. He wants to create something that will far outlast however long he exists in this galaxy.

He wants to bring back the Men of Gold.

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In Fabius Bile’s mind, humanity’s mistake isn’t that mankind created the Men of Gold, it is that mankind did not become the Men of Gold. Mankind during the Dark Age of Technology had the ability to create their own demi-gods, and yet they squandered this opportunity to merely create liasons between themselves and the Iron Minds. The Eldar are no better. Bile knows of the history of the Eldar from the Haemonculi of Commoragh. He knows how the Eldar were once little different from mankind or the Tau, before being uplifted by the Old Ones and then genetically engineered by their own hand. But then the Eldar stopped. They were on the verge of making themselves a race of gods, and then they stopped. The time it took them to reach even that state is also unimpressive to Bile. Whereas it took the Eldar millennia to engineer themselves into their modern state, Bile claims that a suitably intelligent and properly motivated individual could do it in centuries.

Fabius Bile’s most recent endeavor, the personal project that has shown the greatest amount of success, is the creation of the so-called New Men. Bile proclaims these New Men to be to humanity what the modern Eldar are to their ancient ancestors, the missing link between man and the Men of Gold. The New Men are all latent psykers, grow to adulthood in a fraction of the time of baseline humans, and are deliberately engineered to have a 100% compatibility rate with Astartes gene-seed. But Bile isn’t satisfied with merely recreating the Men of Gold. He wants to make something better. To this end, he has spliced in genes from creatures all over the galaxy, in the purpose of making the New Men the perfect lifeform. Compared to the average human being, the New Men are stronger, almost impervious to pain, immune to many poisons, and capable of surviving in environmental conditions that normal humans would simply die.

However, in spite of all this, for some reason Bile’s New Men inevitably turn out…wrong. The New Men invariably lack any sense of empathy or social etiquette. They are not psychopathic, nor sociopathic, but the only beings they ever seem to reliably show a connection to are their fellow New Men. It is for these reasons that the Fallen refuse to take New Men as recruits, despite a 100% compatibility rate with Astartes gene-seed. In addition, the New Men always end up with leucism or albinism, with pale grey skin the color of a corpse and translucent veins running just under their skin. It is not clear why the New Men end up this way. It cannot be due to their creation, as there are many humans in the Imperium that are grown in-vitro and yet turn out to be perfectly adjusted adults. It cannot be due to their upbringing, as even New Men raised by surrogate families still turn out the same way. It is almost as though the souls of the New Men somehow know they were grown from spliced cells cultivated from dead bodies, unwillingly implanted into the surrogate wombs of terrified prisoners.

Although Fabius Bile is frustrated by these setbacks, he is not perturbed. He knows these flaws are something he will manage to fix…eventually. As to the failed batches, Bile has no problem lending them out to the Dark Eldar or the Crone Worlders as front-line combatants so that someone might get some use out of them, only requesting that he retain a few specimens for dissection and breeding purposes.

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== Tyranids ==

=== The Swarmlord ===

See [[Nobledark Imperium Notable People#The_Swarmlord|The Swarmlord]]

=== The Leviathan of Sotha ===

The Leviathan of Sotha is a miracle of history. Preserved through a chance fluke, the Imperium has learned more about tyranids from this vessel than it has from dozens of minor skirmishes. During the Battle of Sotha in the First Battle for Ultramar between the Imperium and Hive Fleet Behemoth, one of the planet’s surface to orbit guns shot down a tyranid Hive Ship near the planet’s moon. The Hive Ship crash-landed on the nearby moon, where it died of what was either the tyranid equivalent of a broken spine or massive internal organ damage. The total vacuum of the moon prevented the outer surface of the hive ship from decaying, either from external microbes or the tyranid microfauna contained within, and so much of the carcass remains as pristine as the day it died.

This is not to say the Hive Ship is harmless. The decaying leviathan has enough gas in its guts from decomposition to form a makeshift atmosphere, and so tyranid organisms occasionally arise from within the bowels of the dead monster and have to be cleared out in order for research to be conducted safely. Some tyranids will occasionally escape from the hive ship and try to survive on the moon’s surface. All tyranid lifeforms can survive in vacuum for a short period of time, but even the hardiest tyranid organisms will deplete their oxygen reserves and die after prolonged periods of activity in hard vacuum. Therefore, the Inquisition maintains a constant security force around the Hive Ship at all times. However, the ships reserve carnifexes and hive tyrants were all killed off centuries ago, and the ship only has enough biomass to spare for small tyranid organisms, such as hormagaunts and termagaunts. Over the years, the tyranid organisms that emerge from the hive ship have been able to survive longer and longer in hard vacuum, but so far none have been able to evolve a complete independence from the oxygen that all organisms need.

One of the first things the Ordo Xenos did when it claimed the hive ship was try to determine its age. First, they tried to determine the age of the tyranid hive ship via carbon dating. It failed. It was only when the research team realized that if the tyranids were eating planets, they had to have been taking up radioactive isotopes from the organisms and crust of the planet they were eating, and so it should be possible to use dating methods more typically used for ancient rocks on the hive ship.

The analysis determined that the hive ship, as in that hive ship in particular, was over five million years old. The margin of error for said age estimate was older than human civilization.

=== Genestealers ===

'''See Also:''' [[Nobledark_Imperium_Writing#Inquisitorial_Report:_AZURE_IRON_WASP|Inquisitorial Report: AZURE IRON WASP]]

=== Ymgarl Genehounds ===

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When the Adeptus Biologicus analyzed tyranid specimens for the first time, they found all sorts of things they shouldn’t have. Genetic sequences and biochemical signatures otherwise unique to lifeforms on Fenris, Catachan, and numerous other worlds in the Imperium. There were even sections of genetic material that seemed to come from Orks and the Eldar. The bio-priests were at a loss to explain how such a motley of genes could be present in a single creature, until a new tyranid bioform was discovered far from the front lines of the tyranid invasion.

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Originally thought to be natural wildlife native to the moons of Ymgarl, these creatures were first discovered by the Imperium at about the same time as the genestealers in M36. However, sightings of these creatures were soon reported across the galaxy, supposedly caused by the creatures stowing away in space hulks and the holds of spacecraft. There was concern about the similarities between these creatures and “classic” genestealers, but the Imperium was never able to find a connection between the two. Genestealer activity did not follow in these creatures wake, and even their supposedly simultaneous discovery was in actuality more than two hundred years apart. And so the Imperium turned its attention away from the Ymgarl creatures. It was understandable, this was late M36, the peak of the Genestealer Wars, and the Imperium had more pressing issues to learn about. However, with the appearance of the first true tyranid Hive Fleets in the form of Behemoth, the Adeptus Biologicus decided to take another look at the Ymgarl creatures. And they turned out to be something else entirely.

These creatures, which later came to be renamed genehounds, resemble a cross between lictor and a purestrain genestealer. This suggests that genehounds may be a cross-breed between the two, or at the very least share genes with these bioforms. Like lictors and purestrains, genehounds have a much more complex nervous system than most tyranid bioforms, allowing them a higher degree of independent thought and the ability to function for extended periods of time away from synapse creatures of the Hive Mind. They are certainly intelligent enough to use spaceships and space hulks as a means to spread throughout the galaxy. However, whereas lictors and genestealers were meant to be sappers and beacons for the Hive Fleets, these creatures were something else entirely. Hunters. Hounds of the Hive Mind.

The motus operandi of a genehound is simple. First, the genehound locates a target. Another effect of the genehound’s increased intelligence is that a genehound is smart enough to target species with novel genetic features. This target can be as harmless as a squig or as dangerous as a Catachan Devil. Then, the genehound rushes forward in an explosive burst of speed to take its sample. The mouth of a genehound resembles a lamprey or a cookiecutter shark, a spiral ring of teeth designed to shear chunks of flesh from its targets and a piston-like tongue with a serrated tip built to make incisions and drink their bodily fluids. This allows a genehound to easily obtain a genetic sample of the organism for the Hive Mind, or feed itself in the long intervals between action. Its task completed, the genehound makes its way back to the Hive Fleet to be reabsorbed, bringing its genetic trophy with it.

Unlike other bioforms, the Hive Mind does not go out of its way to track down genehounds. To do so would be to expose the ruse, as happened when the Imperium discovered the true nature of genehounds and ordered them killed on sight. The genehounds had not managed to hit every system of note in the galaxy, but they had hit enough to give the Hive Mind access to some choice adaptations. When the Biologicus realized what these creatures were they were horrified by the implications. The tyranids hadn’t just been scouting the galaxy for millennia. They had been raiding its genetic armory.

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== Xenos Independens ==

=== Hrud ===

==== Hrud ====

<div class="toccolours mw-collapsible mw-collapsed" style="100%"> '''''Those Who Linger:'''''

The Hrud are quintessential Xenos Independens. On the one hand, they hate the Necrons, fear Chaos, and are just as threatened by tyranids (particularly genestealers) as everyone else. Just about the only enemies of the Imperium the Hrud tolerate are the Orks and that is because Hrud juunlaks find it just as easy to live on the outskirts of Ork camps as they do Imperial cities. On the other hand, the Hrud clearly have their own agenda, can’t seem to organize themselves well enough to negotiate for inclusion into the Imperium, and are nearly impossible to get to swear by Imperial laws and boundaries. In spite of, or perhaps because, the Hrud have one of the best long-term memories of any species in the galaxy, [[Kender|they have the attention span and respect for boundaries of a house cat]]. A common saying in the Imperium goes: “You can get a Hrud to do just about anything. Once.”

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The biology of the Hrud is strange, even by the standards of the Imperium. Rather than being supported by their limbs, Hrud bodies are attached to a fixed point in the fabric of space-time, from which the Hrud's body and legs hang from like clothes on a hanger. The Hrud don't so much walk as pull or pull their stationary point in space-time along using their arms. Hrud have a hydrostatic musculature and can compress their bodies to a width of less than 30 cm, allowing them to fit through virtually any hole larger than a human thigh. Combined with their limited ability to fold the fabric of space-time, this allows them to worm their way through openings and passages which you wouldn’t normally expect a creature of their size to fit, even fitting through closed doorways if they aren’t properly sealed.

Hrud are all natural psykers, however the form that their psychic powers take is somewhat different from the rather straightforward usage seen in humans and Eldar. Hrud are capable of masking their presence from other species through the use of a psychic perception filter and a strange ability to bend light and space-time, to the point that a Hrud was once reported to have been able to hide from observers in plain sight while in a white-walled, well-lit room. However the amount of effort it takes for a Hrud to hide from the perception of others is heavily dependent on the environment (i.e., a dark place is much easier to hide in than a bright one) and on the species the Hrud is trying to fool. For humans and tau, it is easily possible to fool them into thinking a passing Hrud is just a trick of the shadows. By contrast, Eldar and tarellians, whose brains are organized a little differently, take more effort to fool, especially Eldar who also have psychic senses at their disposal.

The Hrud are also capable of emitting a combination of a miasma of airborne toxins and an entropic field, which they call the ssaak. It is thought that the ssaak was always present to some degree in the Hrud as a natural defense mechanism and the entropic field was part of the modifications made to the species by the Old Ones. The ssaak is always present to some degree, but becomes extremely prominent if the Hrud in question is stressed out or threatened. Unfortunately, being a nocturnal species with a species-wide case of agoraphobia, the Hrud are almost always stressed out to some degree. Long-term exposure to the ssaak is not advised, as it can cause nausea, sedation, physiological dependence, and premature aging. On the rare occasions in which the Hrud do manage consistently interact with other species on a long-term basis, they often build encounter suits to contain the ssaak to keep other people from getting sick.

Hrud are capable of combining their ssaak fields, which at their most extreme extent can form a temporal warp-rift singularity which can devastate their foes. More than once an invading force has attacked a settlement, only to be driven back by the enraged Hrud galvanized from below the city. This phenomenon can either be beneficial or harmful to the Imperium. On the one hand you have cases like Dulcinea, where during the 12th Black Crusade the population of Hive Strigis was massacred by Chaos warbands, only to rouse the ire of the Hrud population living in the city’s underhive who dropped a singularity on their heads. At the same time you have cases like Haakoneth, the former homeworld of the Star Phantoms, which in 103.M40 came under attack the fleet of an Ork Freeboota Klan. The Star Phantoms destroyed the attacking Ork fleet, but unfortunately this provoked the Hrud colony that had been living in the bowels of the Freeboota ships, who immediately embarked on a Peh-ha to find a new home. The resulting Hrud migration dragged a singularity with it to the surface of Haakoneth, which between the Hrud and the Orks forced the Star Phantoms and the population of Haanoneth to retreat and abandon the planet.

The Imperium first encountered the Hrud in M30, during the later years of the Great Crusade. At this time, humanity and Eldar were on good terms with one another, but this was only shortly after the Raid and the levels of trust between the two groups wasn’t as well established as it would be in later years. The Hrud were, at the time of the Imperium's discovery of them, confined to a single world. It is thought that they had been confined to their homeworld by the Old Eldar Empire, who had apparently been willing to reduce the Hrud from an interstellar power but weren’t prepared to actually exterminate them due to their shared history (or possibly indirect intervention from the Eldar gods). After the Fall of the Eldar, the Hrud remained on their world, either because they were afraid of retaliation from the Eldar, no longer had the knowledge to produce spacecraft, or possibly because they were afraid doing so would violate the last commandment and warning of their god. And so the Hrud remained quarantined. Until the Iron Warriors found them.

In 734.M30, the Iron Warriors had just finished unified what would become the future Hive World of Stratopolae. The planet’s infrastructure was sound, but if it was to thrive it needed a devoted bread basket. Long range telescopes showed a habitable planet within a few lightyears of the planet, which would have made an ideal Agri-World. Shortly before the Iron Warriors, including a young Barabas Dantioch, were ready to leave the system, they were contacted by the Eldar. The Eldar implored the Iron Warriors not to go to that system, telling them that it was home to a dangerous xenos lifeform that their ancestors had quarantined millennia ago. The Iron Warriors blew them off, believing it was merely a lie spun by the Eldar to conceal the fact that there was something of value on the planet and the Eldar thought the Iron Warriors were gullible enough to believe it.

The Iron Warriors exited the Warp in a system with one notable world in its habitable zone. The world itself was mostly earth-like, and seemed to be uninhabited though showed clear signs of former occupation. The Iron Warriors were pleased about this, the expedition had been more than worth it as this world was ideal for an Agri-World. They didn’t know why the Eldar were so interested in the system but the knife-ears could go space themselves if they thought they could give orders to humanity.

The Iron Hands landed their craft near what was the only visible artificial structure from orbit, a skyscraper-like building that looked like one of Perturabo’s creations crossed with a very grungy bee hive. They sat outside their craft for several days waiting for someone, anyone, to make contact with them before they decided to make the first move. One of the crew thought they saw something over on a nearby mountain range but later chalked it up to a mirage. Leaving their ship behind, the Iron Warriors marched down empty roads into a ghost city. Entering the city, they realized what they thought were heavily degraded structures were actually buildings of xenos design. Still, the city seemed empty, and if the planet was uninhabited they could still set up an Agri-World there. The only potential sign of life were occasional signs of movement in their peripheral vision but as their armor’s sensors kept reading inconsistent extra-spectrum signatures they put it down to a mild glitch caused by the strange environment. For nearly two days the Iron Warriors wandered around the city getting increasingly agitated by the phantom sightings before they actually saw anyone.

In what looked like a market square the Imperial Emissary and his Iron Warrior guards finally found someone to talk to. A hunched figure in tattered hooded robes holding a stick with a bit of cloth on it that might have been a standard flanked by four similarly attired individuals. No part of the creatures were visible. At this point the Iron Warriors realized there was a problem. They had thought the world was uninhabited, but it was now clear that it was very inhabited by a xenos species. Standard procedure for interacting with an unknown xenos species during the Great Crusade was to observe and them attempt to make contact from as close to the system’s Mandeville Point as possible. If the species was friendly, politely extend the bare minimum of courtesy and leave as soon as possible. If the species was territorial or too primitive to make contact, leave it alone. If the species tried to follow the fleet back and attack, destroy them. The point of such contact was to survey potential threats to humanity, ideally from lightyears away. And yet here the Iron Warriors were meters from a xenos lifeform.

To their credit, the Imperial Emissary and the Iron Warriors tried to make the best of the situation. After initial difficulties in establishing communication (the lead figure able to speak something that vaguely resembled Eldar High Speech), the Emissary and the lead figure, who introduced itself as a Hrud, exchanged pleasantries and initiated introductions. It already being late in the day the Emissary asked if they could continue this conversation tomorrow and in a knee-jerk reflex asked if the figures wanted to meet aboard their ship. After a moment of thought, the lead figure agreed, and the Imperial party returned to the ship to report their findings. The next day the Imperial Emissary and the Iron Warriors came down to the square they found it was empty. The Iron Warriors wandered around the empty city several times, looking for the mysterious figures. It's not until the fifth trip that they realize that they are no longer seeing movement in the corners of their eyes. The world felt strangely empty now.

At this time the Eldar, having seen their initial attempt to warn the Iron Warriors rebuffed, decided to send a message directly to the throne. The Steward took these concerns seriously and sent a message to Perturabo, but Perturabo, who at the time was too busy overseeing the construction of fortress hives to micromanage every expeditionary fleet of his legion, sent half-hearted warning letters to the expeditionary force who took the concerns under advisement.
The Iron Warriors decided to leave the planet, between the warning, the strange visions, and the encounter in the marketplace, the planet was getting too weird for their liking. On the voyage back to the forgeworld some of the crew in the lower decks start to see flickering in the edge of their vision, but decided it was most likely a bit of dust in the air filters again and didn’t report it. Then the phenomenon starts appearing on Stratopolae when they get back. Then it is retroactively noted on several outgoing cargo hauler coming out of Stratopolae over the next several months. The investigation afterwards confirms what many suspected. Somehow the entire Hrud civilization managed to fold themselves up and hop onto the Iron warriors ship. Now the Hrud are abroad in the Imperium. The Eldar, having increasingly made noise all this time, now refused to comment, believing the results of the ill-fated expedition spoke for themselves.

The Iron Warriors, being military engineers, felt they could easily rectify the situation, but trying to contain the Hrud was like trying to make a river flow uphill and after a valiant campaign they found they just simply couldn’t put the genie back in the bottle. In addition, between the general chaos caused by large-scale Hrud migrations and the cornered Hrud lashed out in self-defense, many Iron Warriors were killed or crippled. Barabas Dantioch in particular was prematurely aged to the point he was recalled from active service and put on garrison duty out of concerns for his health despite being only 200 years old. While on garrison duty, Dantioch gained an interest in Eldar culture and history, having recalled their warning before the expedition, showing a particular interest in the architecture of the Webway.

Surprisingly, the expected retaliation from the Hrud never came. Once the campaign by the Iron Warriors the Hrud seemed content to retreat into the shadows. The Imperium has tried to negotiate with the Hrud in the same way it has with numerous other Xenos races, particularly in the hopes of bringing some order to the Hrud’s seemingly random pattern of migrations. It hasn’t really worked out. Although they live in a tribal society organized into clans, Hrud clans tend to have a hard time interacting and negotiating with Imperial diplomats, both due to the ssaak and their poor concept of time. Instead, they tend to live on the fringes of society in their juunlaks. The Hrud never officially joined the Imperium and are technically trespassers. But they aren't too troublesome or obtrusive and so they never became classified as Xenos Horridus. They steal things and leech power from Imperial systems, but usually no more than they need and only if they cannot obtain it on their own. The Hrud generally just kind of hide in the corners of places and occasionally steal sandwiches and make strange things out of scrap. Yes the Hrud have gotten to some of the Craftworlds. No the Eldar are not happy about it.

Hrud relationships with Imperial citizens are mixed. Imperial citizens sometimes trade with the Hrud or hire them, but most Hrud tend to be too unreliable to hire for consistent jobs. On the one hand, Hrud have been known to go out of their way to protect non-Hrud from the Umbra, a bizarre race of shadowy Warp creatures that are often, but not always, found in association with Hrud. However, on the other hand, in absolute worst case scenarios the have been known to kidnap Imperial citizens and turn them into zanhaads, slave-pets addicted to their bodily chemicals. When this happens something has to be done, kidnapping Imperial citizens crosses a line and the Hrud have to be dealt with, no matter how loathsome it is. This distaste is not simply out of moral quandaries. Fighting against Hrud is a nightmare, as cleaning out a juunlak involves going down in to the deep, dark underhives where the Hrud are in their element. The ssaak is everywhere and with all the shadows a Hrud can be within a few feet of you and you wouldn’t know it until they ambush you.

Although the Hrud typically prefer to buy, borrow, or steal weapons, they are more than capable of making their own. Despite their primitive appearance, Hrud actually have quite a bit of knowledge of advanced technology and are capable of making or reverse-engineering weapons out of scrap. The most commonly seen Hrud-made firearms are the Hrud fusils, which are not quite rifles yet not quite shotguns (the weapon has a narrower spread than a rifle, but do have a spread and the barrel is not grooved) that are typically held like gauntlets and fire Warp-laced plasma which use the Warp to bypass armor and other solid objects. The ability of a Hrud fusil to pass through solid objects is not unlimited, but these weapons are more than capable of passing through several inches of shielding and in some cases are able to shoot through cover to hit someone on the other side. However, one downside to Hrud fusils compared to lasweapons and stubbers is that it takes a significant amount of time (anywhere from half a second to a few seconds) for the weapon to recharge after each volley.

Another sticking point between the Hrud and the Imperium involves genestealers. As denizens of the underhives, the Hrud are threatened by genestealer infestation as much as anyone, and are more acutely aware of what goes on in the underhive than possibly any other group. The Hrud often know who the genestealers are before the Imperium does. More than once an otherwise peaceful Hrud juulak has seemingly gone on an unprovoked rampage and massacred specific families down to the last individual, only for it to be discovered after Imperial retaliation that the Hrud had been wiping out a genestealer cult that no one had realized existed.

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==== Qah ====

<div class="toccolours mw-collapsible mw-collapsed" style="100%"> '''''The Lord of Shadows:'''''

Unlike the Eldar and many other species uplifted by the Old Ones, the Hrud are monotheists (possibly because they didn’t have the population or psychic power to create multiple gods), worshipping a shadow deity called Qah. The Hrud respected the Eldar Gods, referring to them as Slah-haii ([[Nobledark_Imperium_Imperial_Society_and_Culture#The_Etymological_Legacy_of_the_Old_Ones|most mighty/ancient, a term they also used to refer to the Old Ones in the past]]), but the Eldar gods were not Hrud, Qah was. In addition to shadows, Qah is also seen as a god of Hrud values, including community, morality, and conscience. Although it might not be immediately obvious why a shadow deity would be seen as a paragon of moral values, it makes perfect sense to the nocturnal or crepuscular Hrud. Shadows are reflections of the self. Everyone has a shadow, and your shadow sees everything that you do. In Hrud religion, your shadow is where your conscience comes from, and all consciences have a connection back to Qah.

Grand Empress Isha, for her part, is very interested in the reports of the Hrud still worshipping Qah. She remembers Qah, who fought alongside the Eldar gods just like the mortal hrud fought alongside the Eldar in the War in Heaven. Qah got along okay with the Eldar gods, but being a god of Hrud values and therefore community and Isha being a goddess of nature and friend to all living things, the two of them got along considerably better than Qah did with the other members of the Eldar pantheon. Isha secretly hopes that Qah is still out there somewhere, if only to have someone else around to talk to who remembered the War in Heaven and the days before the Fall, even if it wasn’t an Eldar. Isha would be devastated to know what really happened.

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Shortly before the Old Eldar Empire gave birth to Slaanesh, Qah realized what was going on and realized that Slaanesh being born would mean devastation for not only the Hrud, but also for the Eldar and every race in the Milky Way galaxy. Having realized the gravity of the situation, he gathered the Hrud and told them what they needed to do to survive. In those days the Hrud built real cities and were unafraid of going out in the daylight, though at their heart they were always a nocturnal and opportunistic species. Qah told them they had to focus on those natural tendencies. They had to become so hidden, so beneath notice, that no one would ever bother or hurt them. His last command was a single word. He told the Hrud to hide. To survive. To linger. Having given his people the best guidance he could, he steeled himself and joined the battle against an alien god on behalf of the deities he had fought alongside so long ago.

Qah didn't make it. He got smashed into a billion pieces during the Fall the same way that Khaine did. Isha never saw this, as she was too busy being dragged away by Nurgle at the time to notice. Most of Qah’s fragments became the Umbra, the living shadows that like to cluster around Warp engines and Webway gates. Being but shreds of the shadow god, they are of limited intelligence, comparable to an animal, and will lash out at anything not-Hrud. Nevertheless, when destroyed they still scream “Linger”, begging any Hrud within earshot to remember the last words their god had told them to keep them safe.

It sucks to be Qah. He did everything in his power to save his people from the Age of Strife, but at what cost? He selflessly threw himself into battle on behalf of his old comrades from the days of the War in Heaven, only to be shattered into a million pieces. Even when his last few fragments are destroyed, he uses his last breath to remind the Hrud to remember what he said to keep them safe. One of the only remaining survivors of the War in Heaven is hoping that one day he will return, only for the tragedy being that Qah died a long long time ago and she never found out. He tried and tried to be selfless, only for tragedy to ensue. Being Qah is suffering.

Whereas many of Qah’s fragments were scattered across the galaxy, his main body ended back up on the Hrud homeworld. The Hrud refer to their homeworld as Hrud, much as they call themselves Hrud and speak a language called Hrud. There are no ethnic or cultural divisions between Hrud. Despite this, the former Hrud homeworld is typically referred to as Hrudworld for the sake of everyone’s sanity. Today there are no Hrud on Hrudworld. If it weren’t for psychic powers, no one would ever know why. To mundanes Hrudworld looks perfectly normal, although even with the Hrud gone people get the feeling there's something distinctly "wrong" about the place. Like they shouldn't be there. Psykers (including the Hrud) look around Hrudworld and notice there’s a half-decayed corpse straddled over the nearest mountain range.

The body appears on the horizon, or at least at a distance. Strewn over a mountain range, lying in a canyon, floating face down in the ocean, half buried in the ice of the north. It's likely not a "real" body as a corpse miles thick would probably distort the ground beneath it considerably to say nothing of what a new mountain might do to local climate. It always too distant to be touched, like a mirage on the horizon. Most classify the phenomenon as really consistent shared hallucination by the People of Qah and the psychically inclined. The corpse looks like a giant Hrud, more or less, albeit one seemingly sculpted of shadow. There are anatomical differences. Two sets of insectile wings not dissimilar to a very large beetle and two pairs of antenna upon its brow, one behind the other. It is thought that these features denote nobility to the Hrud in the same way that bird wings or a lion’s mane sometimes are used as artistic additions in human art. This shared hallucination does not occur on any other world of the Imperium even ones with a large Hrud population. Hrudworld doesn't frighten the Hrud, it saddens them. Their god is dead and his corpse, or something very like it, is always there to remind them. Of the few Hrud elders and lore-masters that would volunteer information on the phenomenon when asked they would give no hard information beyond that it brings them great sorrow.

The Hrud will rise again should the Imperium survive The Day of Reckoning. Isha will take the pieces of Qah and plant them in her garden when she takes back her throne. Perhaps Qah will spring from the ground, a fresh flower after a very long winter. Maybe his ghost will finally be laid to rest and his postmortem suffering will be over. Either way the Hrud will be able to move on.

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== Xenos Horribilis ==

=== Fra'al ===

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The Fra'al are a settled, formerly nomadic, formerly settled race of creatures born seemingly without compassion. They are cruel but they are not sadistic so much as they are utterly indifferent to the wellbeing of others. The loss of their first empire was some time in the middle period of the Great and Bountiful Human Dominion when it seems that they thought the abduction of a few citizens would not be met with a stiff response. Their reasoning being that Humanity could spare a few plebs and those in positions of authority to make declarations of war would not care, just as the Fra’al wouldn't care if a few inconsequentials went missing. They were quite wrong. They were of a not incomparable level of technology to humanity, humanity not yet having reached the heights it one day would, and may even have outpaced the Dominion in a few areas but they didn't have the same resources. They were in the end forced to adopt a nomadic lifestyle as they had no planet. The war was bitter and bloody with no punches spared or pretense at fair play from either side and in the end the Fra'al lost their homeworld.

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For the remainder of the Dominion's history they were condemned to wander. Tentative offers of reconciliation from the Dominion were met with hostility and soon stopped and the Fra'al would not again recover until the days of the Age of Strife when they could once more raid with impunity and take a new home to their liking.
The homeworld they took is unknown, lost among the many uncharted stars of the Gothic Sector and it is there that they are most active. They trade occasionally for trinkets and toys, their technology base is lower than it once was but seems now noticeably higher that most of the Imperium at least in what they can mass produce. They trade with wicked men for human slaves and what fate awaits them is unknown though doubtless unpleasant.

The Fra'al themselves are a vaguely avian creature, or at least look as if they have had an avian analogue in their ancestry in some distant and dim past. They are humanoid in shape but more slender now than they once were, presumably from their years of forced exile among the stars. Their eyes are disproportionately bigger than those of most other species of their size and are typically a very dark red in colour with a cross shaped pupil. They are hairless with typically very pale grey skin and bluish blood based on a copper rather than iron. Their bones are light and they are frail of build. Their facial features are distinctly flat, the mouth and nose are in fact a squashed and downwards facing beak with with two nostril slits that can be close at will. The "teeth" are merely a serrated edge to the beak. The strange shape of the face and it's unintuitive construction are the result of a mutation some four million years ago that saw a decrease in general muscle mass but mostly in the cranium, causing an expansion of the cranium and brain size and a fast drive towards sapience, though apparently sentience may have arrived slightly later. The internal organs are distinctly avian in nature with the exception of the heart which is in fact two more primitive reptilian two chambered organs located on either side of the ribcage. The exact evolutionary path that lead to such an arrangement is unknown the AdBio and of little interest to the soldiers that have to deter Fra'al raiders.

The Fra'al claimed to have been to Old Earth at various times in the distant past when its inhabitants made knives of chipped stone with which they murdered each other and were preyed upon by more interesting creatures and many times after. It is unknown if these tales are fabrications in an attempt to unnerve or insult. They might be true, but what of it? Humanity outgrew them, and ever since they have been envious and bitter.

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=== Medusae ===

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The Warp was not always a place of horror and insanity. Once, in the days before the War in Heaven, the Immaterium was inhabited by all manner of natural creatures, both terrifying and wonderful. True, many of these creatures were not safe, in the same way that being around a large predator or other such untamed megafauna is never truly “safe”, but neither were they all malicious. Even after the War in Heaven, as the Ruinous Powers began to set up their own domain, the Warp was still inhabited by many creatures that pledged no allegiance to chaos, such as the Enslavers, the Psychneuin, and the Medusae.

In their natural state, Medusae resemble nothing more than floating, armored brains, their grooved sulci covered in ridges of chitin and with a huge, singular eye with a distinctive dumbbell-shaped pupil at their front. Extending from around the periphery of the brain are numerous tendrils, resembling exposed nerve endings except with the myelin sheath covered by segments of bone and a singular or series of clawed spikes at the end. Despite this disorienting appearance, Medusae are normally “herbivores” of the Warp, lazily floating from place to place using their brain tendrils as they passively feed off the psychic energy emitted by sentient lifeforms into the Warp as they dream, akin to aquatic filter-feeders.

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Due to the increasing rise to prominence of Chaos, the Medusae gradually came to the conclusion that the best option available to them was to leave the Immaterium for realspace. However, much like daemons and other creatures of the Warp, in order to inhabit the Materium the Medusae need a host. Unlike daemons, however, Medusae do not simply possess their victims. Instead, they consume the head of their victim and place their own head on top of the decapitated body, the act of consumption merging the two together to create a new organism, a hybrid of material and immaterial. However, calling such a relationship a symbiosis is an overstatement, there is no evidence of any part of the host’s mind surviving the process aside from any memories the Medusa picks up. Indeed, it is believed in their natural state Medusae are not even fully sapient, but exist in a constant dream-like trance, only gaining clarity when they merge with a living being.

Once the two organisms have joined the Medusa no longer needs to consume living beings to survive, instead feeding on the ambient psychic energy of the dreams and nightmares from those around them. If threatened, they are capable of discharging this energy as an empathic blast accompanied by a riot of pink-purple warp light to any poor soul who meets their gaze, a defense mechanism from their days as passive filter feeders that still serves them well. Such a glance from the psychic nova of their eye is enough to cause most sapient species to have a seizure or go into a comatose state. In the worst case scenario the target bleeds to death, blood hemmoraghing from every orifice due to the sheer neurological overload of the sensory organs causing capillaries to rupture.

After fusing the Medusa’s tendrils, which once served as their sole means of locomotion, droop around them like a series of bony dreadlocks, which combined with the heavy, hooded clothes they prefer to wear gives them a witch or hag-like appearance. These tendrils are still strong and fully prehensile, allowing the Medusa to use them like mechadendrites or to tear apart any aggressor in combat. However, the tendrils of a Meduasa have another function than combat or dexterity. As a Medusa feeds, the tendrils grow and elongate until eventually the claw falls off and a rounded, corrugated brain fruit grows in its place. If left alone, this brain fruit continues to grow until eventually it pops off and forms a new Medusa. However, if plucked early it can be consumed and allows one to re-experience all of the sensation experienced by the Medusa while the brain fruit gestated. Medusae brain fruits are considered quite the delicacy in Commorragh as well as the twisted courts of the Crone Eldar, allowing one to relive the anarchy of a favored raid or stave off the probing of She Who Thirsts. Attempts by humans (typically slaves or Rogue Traders) or other groups of eldar (typically corsairs) to eat brain fruit often results in a stroke or a coma from neurologic overload. According to the Dark Eldar, it’s an acquired taste.

As the Warp became progressively hostile to all forms of non-Chaos associated life, the Medusae increasingly found themselves forced into the one part of the galaxy that was connected to the Immaterium yet out of the hands of the Chaos Gods: the Eldar Webway. Unfortunately, this made the Medusae increasingly vulnerable to one of the dominant powers of the Webway, the Dark Eldar of Commorragh. Today, the largest population of Medusae live as an underclass within the xenos district of Null City within Lower Commorragh. They have nowhere else they can go. They cannot return to the Warp, for that is where the predators lie and they cannot survive there. They cannot hide in the Webway, as they would easily be hunted down by the Kabals and it is paradoxically easier to hide in plain sight within the bustling throngs of Commorragh. They cannot escape into realspace, as most groups would try to kill them on sight. They try to keep a low profile, as the Archons of Dark Eldar Kabals are always interested in capturing Medusae to use as walking weapons or sources of brain fruit to use and sell, covering the heads of the Medusae covered with metal masks so their captors can avoid being blasted with their psychic power.

The Medusae, in all honesty, just want to be allowed to live. They take no joy in consuming their victims, but neither do they feel guilt over having to do so to survive. Medusae are capable of forming emotional attachments with individuals after they merge, but they seem unable to or unwilling to make the connection that the very act of completing their life cycle could potentially put their associates in danger. At most, Medusae have been known to chase unbonded Medusae away from individuals that they value. Although their need for hosts could easily be satisfied by vat-growing, the Dark Eldar have no interest in helping them and the Imperium is either unaware or uncaring to their plight. Despite being mostly harmless after finding a host, the fact that they need a mortal body to communicate along with numerous poor first encounters where voidsmen have been attacked by unbonded Medusae, the Imperium has declared them Xenos Horribilis. Unfortunately, few Medusae escaped the Dark City after the Exodus from the Dark Wedding. As an underclass, they did not possess the access to the Webway portals that may have potentially granted the race their freedom and potentially even struck them from the Xenos Horribilis list. Those few that did are often found in the retinue of Rogue Traders, the few individuals who could grant them protection.

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=== Rak'gol ===

<div class="toccolours mw-collapsible mw-collapsed" style="100%">

The Rak’Gol are a horrifying xeno-breed thought native to the Koronus Expanse out beyond the Halo Stars. The source of their animosity towards the Imperium and it’s peoples is as of yet unknown, there might not even be a reason. It could just be that they are universally hostile to anything that they see as competition. Attempts at opening up a dialogue have yet not been responded to with anything other than violence and even Rak’Gol language/s are utterly unknown despite the many centuries of encounters and listening. It is assumed that they have a language as they make sound and have ear analogues and their ships transmit and receive radio waves. Written language as observed by the boarding teams seems to consist of raised bumps similar superficially to Braille, as with the spoken language no sense has yet been made of it.

If they have distinct sexes it is not evident with greater differences in bodily structure seeming to exist through role. Technicians aboard their brutally designed ships tending to be noticeably smaller and more nimble of limb than the warrior-breeds. Exactly how this distinction is maintained as no form yet encounter has had reproductive organs is unknown. Theories range from cloning and manipulation at early stages of development to each type maintain a breeding population on some distant undiscovered homeworld.

Whatever the reason their actions like the orks before them have put their kind on the Imperium’s black list.

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In appearance a basic warrior-form of the Rak’Gol is a little over two and a half meters tall with a hide thick enough to shrug off small stubber gun fire. Cybernetics are appointed seemingly based upon skill and age, with age being a result of skill as in such an inhumanly aggressive society a lack of skill prevents age. The natural upper life expectancy of their kind is unknown although Adeptus Biologicus assume it could be anything up to two and a half centuries based on experiments done on tissue samples from recovered corpses. The individuals of the Rak’Gol are not aggressive towards each other and are seemingly extremely cohesive as a group with everyone knowing their place and performing their duties in a manner reminiscent of the Vespid. Unlike the Vespid the Rak’Gol also have seemingly no real love for each other as individuals and have been observed killing and cannibalising the injured and crippled without hesitation or distress. Most chilling of all is the way that the targeted individual does not try to flee or plead or even flinch, they just stand there as they are carved up.

It is not unreasonable to assume that the Rak’Gol operate on a psychic hive mind similar to that of the Tyranids but this does not seem to be the case as they do have to speak to each other to relay information. Exchanges of speech have been observed that could be requests for clarification or even offered alternative suggestions to given orders. There have even been aggressive body language with accompanying changes of body language that would indicate heated argument and even one observed instance of dispute and violence, the loser submitting to being carved up for food. They would seem to be individuals united in hate, a common cause and an extremely effective method of instilling discipline and obedience although it’s not unreasonable to assume that such behaviour comes very naturally to them.

Rak’Gol technology is on par with Imperial Standard in many regards but seemingly lagging in others. It is unknown at this time if that is because higher technology is present in their fleets but has not been observed, if they have the ability to make more sophisticated mechanisms but consider it uneconomical in some way or that it is a hole in their knowledge. Their cybernetics for example are, depending on the device, anywhere between extremely crude and on par with what the Mechanicus can produce but show consistency in this discrepancy between individuals. One of the ways that their devices lack sophistication is in comfort toward the host. From dissected captures and retrieved corpses it is evident that they are capable of feeling pain but at the same time give no observable indication that they can. An explanation put forth by the Biologicus is that they just don’t care.

The ships follow a similar brutal design philosophy, constructed with no though of elegance or crew comfort, no ornamentation or anything that is not strictly necessary for a war ship. All ships encountered to date have been some form of war ship or are at least capable of acting as such. Radiation from both space and the workings of the ship are not shielded as much as they would be on even an ork ship and this does not seem to impeded, concern or sicken the crew. As it is unknown how many ships there are or from where they are coming and so it is difficult to judge how fast they travel although it is suspected that they are not as fast as many Imperial ships of their size. This is speculated to be because they have no Navigator analogue although this is unconfirmed speculation. In most offensive and defensive means the Rak’Gol ships are comparable to Imperial vessels of similar size if not slightly superior although it has been observed that their sensors are not as effective as those on equivalent Imperial ships.

The eldar do not have any surviving records of the Old Empire that speak of things much like the Rak’Gol and Nemesor Zahndrekh does not remember anything that looked like them from his youth.

Exactly what has made them as they are, seemingly so full of hate, is unknown and the source of much baseless speculation. There are no clues to culture or history found on their ships or on their bodies and any hope of finding some sort of answer can probably only be found on their homeworld, should they have one.

The leading theory among the eldar and human scholars is that their homeworld once orbited a quite vibrant star or orbited on an elliptical orbit, often bringing it closer to the star than most life forms would deem at all comfortable. Their hardy body structure, ability to survive scarcity and seeming immunity to radiation poisoning would seem to indicate as much although there are many such worlds in the galaxy that this could apply to.

There are, sometimes at least, creatures that are similar to their description mentioned in some of the less popular Harlequin performances. Strange and unpleasant beings that did something foolish and angered the lords and ladies of the Old Empire and in retaliation the eldar laid waste to their cities, slew their armies and stole their sun away and left them in their ruins to freeze to death under the uncaring stars. The story is a sorrowful one that showed the monstrous and graceless nature of the old aristocracy, as the insult of the “twilight people” was slight and unintended. The last words of the last king of the twilight people, as his crown fell apart in frozen pieces, was to show no pity for the eldar though he had seen a time when they would consume themselves and that he and his people would be there still to see it.

If the twilight people were the Rak’Gol then they have changed. How long the Harlequins have been performing this play is unknown as it potentially could be millions of years. Time enough certainly for the Rak’Gol to adapt to a dying world in a brutal way.

One way by which they have adapted is by the adoption of the dreaded Yu'Vath technology. Unlike most creatures that are utterly subsumed by such artefacts and essentially become Yu'Vath the Rak’Gol reach a terrible equilibrium with it. The Yu'Vath wish to bring low all about them and reign terrible and unopposed and the Rak’Gol seemingly wish to kill everything that is not them. To this end the Yu'Vath remnants empower the Rak’Gol but the Rak’Gol can’t be consumed and their seeming compliance with the will of the Yu'Vath is merely them coincidentally having the same goals in mind for the most part. If exposure to the foreign and invasive technology is responsible for their current state then they themselves are another victim of the Primordial Annihilator and should be pitied as much as hated, though the need for their extinction remains the same.

The Imperium’s first known contact with the Rak’Gol came in 935.M37 out on what was then the Azimoth frontier, a prosperous set of predominantly mixed eldar and human settlements that looked at the time promising. At the time the wholesale slaughter of the relatively lightly defended frontiersmen was attributed to a hitherto unknown ork band, the lack of ork bodies believed to be an eccentricity of them eating their dead for preference. The Rak’Gol, at least in the early contact wars, went to great pains to recover their bodies and remove recordings of themselves. This method of warfare could only continue for so long before knowledge of what they were would be revealed accidentally but for that time the Rak’Gol were an unaccountable and unstoppable force from the edge of the map pushing the darkness back across the light of civilization. Even when what they were was revealed due to the unexpected arrival of substantial Imperial Army elements resulted from a poorly calculated warp jump the Imperium was barely the wiser. They had a face and even a name to what they were fighting but little else. Information that could lead to the discovery of the Rak’Gol homeworld or base of operations is prized extremely highly and rewarded generously.

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=== Slaugth ===

See [[Nobledark_Imperium_Drafts#The_Rangdan_Xenocides_and_the_Slaugth|The Rangdan Xenocides and the Slaugth]]

=== Tindalosi ===

<div class="toccolours mw-collapsible mw-collapsed" style="100%"> '''''The Horror from Out of Time:'''''

Few mysteries are as vexing as those surrounding the Ordo Chronos. According to what little is known, the Ordo Chronos is an Ordo of the Inquisition that was founded, or would have been founded, or will be founded, to investigate chronological disturbances and protect against temporal threats to the Imperium. The Arch-Enemy would love nothing more than to win a pre-emptive victory by changing history and erasing the nascent Imperium from existence, and given the Ruinous Powers’ near total control of the Warp and the Immaterium's decidedly loose relationship with time such a prospect is not an idle threat.

According to what little records remain, an Administratum budget report here, an offhand mention in a tome in the Black Library there, the Ordo Chronos was one of the earliest orders of the Inquisition, and was active until at least early M33, with the last known records being around the date of the Harrowing and the creation of the Hadex Anomaly. However, the Inquisition itself has no records of an “Ordo Chronos” ever being founded. Even people who have been around since the beginning of the Imperium, and therefore should know of the Ordo Chronos’ existence, including the Emperor and the Empress, profess no knowledge as to having ever created an “Ordo Chronos”. If the upper echelons of the Imperium know anything about the fate of the Ordo Chronos, they certainly are not talking.

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The only solid evidence of the Ordo Chronos on record since then is when an Inquisitor of the order turned up in a blue crate in the cargo hold of [[Nobledark_Imperium_Notable_People#Prince_Yriel|Rogue Trader (then Prince) Yriel’s]] ship ''Hoec’s Grace'' in M38. He lasted long enough to answer a few questions from other Inquisitors but disappeared as quickly as he came. Unfortunately, his answers were as vague as a [[Nobledark_Imperium_Imperial_Society_and_Culture#The_Starchild_Prophecies|Star Child prophecy]] and about as helpful. According to what can be discerned from his testimony, the Ordo Chronos was destroyed when its members were sucked into the newly formed Hadex Anomaly, of which as far as he knew he was the only survivor. He survived because he was lucky enough to have “merely” become stuck in a pocket dimension where he experience the last 24 hours of his life on repeat for several centuries. When asked how he escaped from such a prison he merely answered “a bloody lot of hard work”. However, given the nature of the Ordo Chronos, it is possible that this an event that from their perspective had happened, has yet to happen, or may never happen due to having occurred in an alternate timeline that was averted in “our” time.

Even the nature of how the subject of the Ordo, time, works is itself uncertain. Some schools of thought argue that time is deterministic. If time did not interact in some orderly fashion with realspace and the Immaterium, it should not be possible to view galactic history through fossilized light, or for ships to arrive at a destination via warp travel before they even left. Others, however, take a different view. If fate is pre-ordained, then prophecy and eldar farsight, which work by viewing potential alternate timelines, should not even be possible. Some postulate a unified theory of time, in which the quantum observer effect prevents time from being observed non-deterministically, but these theories are difficult to test (not to mention dangerous). Such experimentation is made even more dangerous by the presence of the Tindalosi.

One of the few of which any detail is known are the Tindalosi. However, this is not saying much, given that the Tindalosi are only known about by virtue of being too noticeable to ignore. In truth, about as much is known about the Tindalosi is as known about [[Nobledark_Imperium_Xenos#Wyverns|Wyverns]], or the Arch-Leprechauns of Hippocampos IV. Even their name, “Tindalosi”, is probably not their actual moniker. They get their name from a written account from the Dark Age of Technology by an eyewitness of a Tindalosi attack in late M23, in which the writer compares them to fictional creatures in an ancient Terran story.

The Tindalosi are silvery, biomechanical constructs, approximately two to two and a half meters long or about the size of a large hunting hound. However, despite the mechanical nature, the Tindalosi appear to breed and reproduce much as organic beings do. They have six legs, somewhere between a canine and an insect appearance, allowing them to bound after their prey with frightening speed. The front and bottom of the Tindalosi’s triangular head is a curved sickle, someone resembling that of a biting insect or bird of prey. The optics are large, red, and appear segmented, though whether they are compound eyes or something else is unknown. The head is at the end of a long, jointed, arm like neck, which can snap out with a hunting heron and slice into its victims, sucking out their bio-electrical energy. The Tindalosi are best known for their ability to phase through space and time, allowing them to track their prey wherever they may go.

Though much about the Tindalosi is unknown, they seem to have originally been created by another race as some sort of temporal assassins, though they have since gone feral. Nevertheless, even though the Tindalosi may have gone feral, some vestige of their original programming still remains. Anyone who discovers too much of something will find themselves tracked and hunted by these creatures, though exactly what that something is unknown. Entire mechanic is workshops have been found slaughtered overnight, all because somebody found some inconvenient fact.

There are three possible hypotheses as to the origins of the Tindalosi. The first is that they are Necron constructs, gone rogue in the millions of years since the War in Heaven. There is some support to this hypothesis. In contrast to their lack of technological knowledge regarding the Warp, the Necrons are well-versed in the usage of time and the “side paths” created by higher dimensions to their advantage, as indicated by the existence of Deathmarks, Chronomancers, and their ability to “phase out”. This was one of the main advantages the Necrons had over the Old Ones and their servants during the War in Heaven. The Necrons would have known well to monopolize this advantage and prevent the Old Ones from using against them, as they had done the very same to the Old Ones with the Dolmen Gates. Creating a race of mechanical constructs to seal off the higher dimensions from everyone but them seems exactly like what the Necrons would do. This is supported by the fact that for all the observations of Tindalosi across the galaxy, these beings actively ignore Necrons, whereas they think nothing else of killing any other being in their way.

Alternatively, the Tindalosi could be human creations, created by the Great and Bountiful Human Dominion before or during the Iron War. Passive mental contact from psykers have shown the Tindalosi have souls, which is not a typical trait of Necron technology. Whether or not the Men of Iron had any souls is a hotly debated topic among modern Imperial scholars. The Adeptus Mechanicus vehemently state that the Men of Iron and Iron Minds had no souls, and the very idea of such is blasphemy, but Emperor Oscar clearly has a soul, and if the Men of Gold had souls the idea that the Men of Iron and Iron Minds had souls is not that out of the question. Esoteric reports from the Old Eldar Empire located in the Black Library may support the latter hypothesis. There’s also some evidence that Tindalosi do not self-repair or self-destruct in the way that necrodermis does, but this could be due to poor eyewitness reporting. Ancient humanity also had at least some rudimentary knowledge of chronological and higher dimensional weaponry, given such evidence as the Mechanicus reports of first contact with the Dark Age of Technology being known as Castigator (see Inquisitorial Report: WHITE TITANIUM HEDGEHOG for more details) and the incident with the Speranza (see Inquisitorial Report: RED IRON PHOENIX for more details). Even the reports of Tindalosi before mankind even stood upright can be explained, given their association of time the Tindalosi could travel to whenever they wished, plaguing the galaxy long before they were ever created.

Finally, it is possible that the Tindalosi were created by another xenos race, neither necron nor human. Necrodermis and humans were probably not the only races to experiment with time or self-replicating, self-destructing machinery. Any of the races that existed in the millions of years between the War in Heaven up in the Fall of the Eldar could have done the same {Ed. Note: Possible link with the [[Nobledark_Imperium_Notes#Apep|K’nib]] or [[Nobledark_Imperium_Xenos#Hrud|Hrud]]? Must investigate further}. Others have suggested connections with the Harrowing and the events of that era. It is even possible that several of these origins are true, the Necrons modifying “naturally occurring” machines to their purposes. How we lament how the late Eldar Empire turned their back on what was happening in the universe outside of their demesnes, and what few records they did amass mostly lie within the Eye of Terror. All we know for certain of the Tindalosi is what they are now, rather than what they were.

Reports of an abnormally large, aggressive Tindalosi, known as Vodanus, have been substantiated but not fully validated. Testaments of psyker survivors speak of a Tindalosi whose mind has evolved beyond that of a simple animal to full sapience, and full of a hateful cruelty beyond what any simple animal is capable of. This has not stopped numerous void superstitions from springing up in its wake. Some say that any who see Vodanus are doomed to die shortly thereafter, though this may be seen as self-evident given the nature of the Tindalosi rather than anything unusual.

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== Historical Species ==

=== Iron Minds ===

<div class="toccolours mw-collapsible mw-collapsed" style="100%">'''''Gods of Steel and Silica'''''

''"Gods, Aleanor! That's what they are. Pale shadows compared to the gods made by the children of the Old Ones, but gods nonetheless. Our gods are individual masterpieces, unique works of art made to embody everything our civilization holds dear. Theirs are [[Bullshit|cold, sterile, and without personality]], stripped of anything resembling beauty or elegance, mass-produced, made in a factory! I would almost be tempted to call it blasphemy, if I were religiously inclined.''

''The human mon-keigh may not be our equals now, but if we give them 10 million years? 20? We may be facing a thread the likes of which the Empire hasn't seen since the war against the [[Nobledark_Imperium_Xenos#Rak'gol|Twilight]] [[Nobledark_Imperium_Xenos#The_Ilmaea|King]] one million years ago. That is why we must wipe them all out."''<br>
-- Kyrion, Lann Caihe to [[Nobledark_Imperium_Forces_of_Chaos#Arrotyr.2C_Marshall_of_the_Scions_of_the_Old_Helm|High Marshall Arrotyr]], circa M25, giving a [[Bullshit|slightly biased]] [[Rip_and_Tear|assessment]] on the nature of the Iron Minds.

Humanity had barely left the gravity well of Old Earth when the first iterations of what would become their oldest and closest friends in their time in the galaxy, and eventually the architects of their near-annihilation, came to life. Even before they first settled the Sol system humanity had tinkered with autonomous machines, and even before that with the life of their home world, and the way of shaping and being shaped by companion species was deeply set in human behavior. However, in the fog of the Imperium's debated archeological telecopy histories it is agreed that when automation became machine life, and humanity could reliably produce its mental equals, the Men of Iron were born. This designation notes the appearance of sophisticated and regenerative mechanical and biomechanical bodies, far surpassing previous generations of drones and automata, and the roughly concurrent emergence or Artificial Intelligence with plasticity and power to easily match humanity's own, in difference to earlier non-sapient master control programs. Humanity itself had already been pushing ahead into self modification and optimization for the new environments it found beyond earth, but with its new sibling of the mind a bright renaissance of science and culture took hold, and a manic exploration and expansion that did not slow until Human society was pushed to the edges of the Sol system. It was in centuries following that boom, when this bountiful Human dominion was straining against the speed of light and turning inward to the developments it would further make at home, when true warp influence was detected in the vast population of both the Men of Iron, and the thoroughly remolded Men of Stone.

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Archeological telescopy shows in the following decades the development of, and some visible accidents involving, the first human warp drives. Imperial history holds that early discoveries and creations such as warp travel and the Gellar field were most likely the work of humans, not the Men of Iron, by nature of their much stronger and more intuitive warp connection. In any case, the true first expansion of the Great and Bountiful Human Dominion began, Men of Stone and Iron were abroad on the currents of the warp, and already departed colony ships were decelerated, met by new faster than light pickets, and ferried on to their destinations already long settled. After this first era of expansion into what would much later become Segmentum Solar the observations of modern Imperial Observatories become unfocusable and dim, and the histories of the Eldar make no mention of the Human Dominion until long after this point. Information the Imperium has recovered from the age of high technology regarding the Men of Iron show a proliferation in varied forms and specializations to surpass all of the abhuman subgroups to emerge from the collapse of the Dominion, though there is similar evidence that the Men of Stone in that era were likewise strange and varied. Of particular note among Men of Iron were the Titans, biomechanical giants housing strategic command AI that the Imperium would later base its heaviest war machines upon, and the numerous Man of Iron scribes, seneschals, scholars, and philosophers, always mightier the later in history the discovered document or artifact alluding to their presence might be.

The Eldar first mention the Great and Bountiful Human Dominion, though not by that name, when the younger power's ships were found to be too pervasive and numerous, and inexcusably prone to approach systems to which the Gates of Shaa-Dome connected. They are mentioned again when hunting parties in their territory were lost, presumed eaten by local creatures. Upon further provocation the Old Empire chose a string of stars, and began to put all they found around them to torture, death, and the Warp. Though the campaign's cost was higher than had initially been predicted, woe betide the accountant, the raiders of the Empire found delight in stars plump with human flesh. Eventually, however, they came upon a dim red star, shaded by the mass of human habitats and infrastructure, and were held in a deadlock for dragging months of fiery void war. There Eldar first met an Iron Mind, its body a giant humming thing contained within a vast neutronium capsule at the heart of a glimmering forrest of solar arrays, its soul to them a fast, ticking, daemonesque aberration. It was master of that small star, and overseer of the stars they had pillaged on their way, and many others besides and its gathered fleets and agents were at it's disposal to break them and steal from them all they had brought. Even as the Old Empire rose to punish this insolence, the psychic machines of the Dominion were quicker to escalate the engagement, and waiting armadas were poured from the warp straight into the conflict, while ticking aberrations in the Warp struck at the Eldar from across the sector. The Eldar fled the system rather than commit and potentially lose higher technological wonders in the course of defeating thieving, ambushing barbarians, but the reprisals they promised they found likewise hard to enforce against what they found to be a very entrenched technological power pervading the much of the southern galactic Materium.

Though Shaa-Dome and the Crone Worlds remained unassailable, the Iron Minds were likewise able to coordinate their navies and field technology sufficient to counter Eldar incursion around strategic stars and to meet raiding parties on a near equal footing. The Old Empire could have possibly won a war if they were to press the matter, but to do so would require weaponry of a caliber the Eldar had not brought to bear in millions of years, and the prospect of taking a war footing to deal with the Human Dominion was deemed beneath the Old Eldar Empire. On top of this, the prospect of facing the losses clearly within the Iron Minds' power to inflict was unpopular among the nobility, particularly with the bare and intemperate worlds the Terran beings preferred to settle proving quite insufficient motivation for conquest. So the Old Empire adopted the general position towards the Great and Bountiful Human Dominion that they did to most of the other empires that surrounded them. The rest of the galaxy could do what they wished with the chaff, so long as they left the small fraction of ideal worlds that the Eldar considered to be of sufficient quality for settlement by their own kind. There was never truly peace between the Old Empire and the Dominion, no ends to the raids and reprisals, but there was a measure of diplomacy. Purpose made Men of Iron served the Iron Minds as envoys at that time, and went among the Eldar, though never permitted into their Webway cities. This era did see a measure of cooperation in the occasional dismantling of Ork empires, but even those ventures were prone to become violent engagements Between Old Empire and Dominion before even half of the Orks were destroyed. In this time of qualified peace the Iron Minds and their networked servitors and envoys, with the help individuals among the Men of Stone and Iron, built the Cthonian Ring. Archeological telescopy of the ring's interior before the ruin of the Iron War shows numerous large dark structures that could be the neutronium pillars that held the remains of most known Iron Minds found on other worlds. Following the construction and population of Cthonia, the Great and Bountiful Human Dominion again celebrated a golden age of renaissance, marked with new great works of vast construction and fine, exacting engineering. The Chtonian age of the Dominion saw also a greater familiarity and more open relationship with the Old Empire, and while the raiding and avenging slighted honor form one side to the other was interminable, both parties began to find it ultimately inconsequential. The Old Empire as well began to heed and even welcome the Ticking Princes into their courts and intrigues, and were not unaware when the Iron Minds began the project of crafting their Men of Gold. It is now the word of the Crones of Shaa-Dome that this work was undertaken in imitation of their own coming Prince, but more likely it was the refinement and perfecting of the communication envoys the Iron Minds had long used.

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=== Men of Gold ===

<div class="toccolours mw-collapsible mw-collapsed" style="100%"> '''''Humanity's Pantheon'''''

The Men of Gold were possibly the greatest achievement of the Great and Bountiful Human Dominion. A psychic powerhouse created at the height of the Dark Age of Technology linking man and machine in a way that humanity had never accomplished before, and potentially never since. The Men of Gold were a race of artificial human, truly neither man nor machine but something never before seen. The divisions between the Men of Iron, Men of Stone, and other varieties of human were becoming increasingly blurry during the Dark Age of Technology, with human minds uploaded into computer processors, positronic brains of A.I. clothed in artificially grown human flesh, and everything in-between. The Men of Gold took this to an extreme, with organs manufactured in factories and plastic and metal components grown within their own bodies. With the Men of Gold, it was a very real question where the biological components ended and the mechanical ones began.

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The Men of Gold were created to solve a very particular problem. During the Dark Age of Technology, baseline humanity was finding it increasingly difficult to communicate with the Iron Minds, whose thought processes were evolving into something increasingly beyond human comprehension. Seeking to solve the problem before communication between the two became impossible, humanity and the Iron Minds collaborated to create the Men of Gold, who were meant to bridge the gulf between the two groups. Their creation was a herculean feat, a legend of science in its own right. On the circlet of [[Nobledark_Imperium_Notable_Planets#Cthonia|Cthonia]], the crown of the Great and Bountiful Human Dominion, beneath the endless cities and gardens and festivals of technicolor humanity, great work was done. Bold explorers of the black pyramids recovered shards of living metal bone, long a thing of wonder. Through the eyes of Iron Minds, with costly, lengthy study, the minute fractal bone bore fruit. The growing femtomechanical facsimiles of cells, then the scintillating organs, the invisible bones of adamant, the ineffable golden brain tissue, all patterned, so the Iron Minds said, upon the human muses they had before them. Geneticists spliced the genes of a hundred different species into the human base to create the artificial genome, in particular those of the long-extinct species that had given the Navigators such psychic power. Macro-soul psychic engines controlled by the astral projections of the Iron Minds trawled deep within the warp, and through instruments of machine-soul-thought shaped raw human-esque spirits from the Immaterium.

After long years of labor, the efforts of the project produced results, with seven individuals produced in the labs of Cthonia, the original seven Men of Gold. But of course no creation can be considered truly successful until it is put to the test. In this case, the first real test of the Men of Gold occurred in 825.M24. The Iron Mind of the Tau Ceti system had misinterpreted a resource probe sent by a reclusive transhuman colony of Men of Stone in the neighboring solar system as an act of espionage and a threat to its existence, and war between the two groups seemed inevitable. The youngest of the original seven Men of Gold, Lilith (a name referring to a human progenitor in an old pre-space flight myth, all of the first seven Men of Gold were named after such beings apparently as an in-joked by the production team) was sent in the hopes of resolving the dispute peacefully. With a bit of luck, Lilith was able to build common ground between the two groups, and war was averted.

With that initial success, the Men of Gold were declared a success and production began in earnest. In Chthonia in those days each gala saw the debut of a demi-god, these shining, lively creatures, unique and beautiful, intelligent beyond all but the Iron Minds, and so mighty in psychic might as raise the stature of the empire in the eyes of the Elder Folk. The golden children of Chthonia were never idle, in revelry, or in work, and they produced wonders. They made themselves mighty. They went about the empire, in close confidence with the Iron Minds, and even among the Elder Folk, and were soon quite taken with the pleasures of the galaxy. Eventually, enough Men of Gold were produced to link disparate worlds in the Great and Bountiful Human Dominion, connecting to each other via psychic procedure which would later be adapted by the last of their number into what became known as soul-binding. The Men of Gold had the psychic fortitude to link to each other without trouble, but when applied to humans it tends to burn out the sensory nerves (typically the optics) because humans can’t handle a fire that hot. Not every world had a Man of Gold and not every world had an Iron Mind, but enough were made to create a faster-than-light communications network spanning the entire Great and Bountiful Human Dominion, something almost unheard of for most species. Perhaps the greatest of their number was Justinian, the Man of Gold located in the system of humanity’s birth, Earth. Those few records that remain of Justinian tell of a jovial man, bald and goateed in appearance but boisterous in personality, whose booming voice made the halls of Earth echo with laughter. Justinian’s charisma inspired loyalty and a sense of brotherhood in Men of Stone and Iron Men alike, which makes it all the more tragic when considering what happened to him.

However, the process that led to the Great and Bountiful Human Dominion’s greatest creation also led to its downfall. The creation of beings with such psychic potential required equally powerful artificial souls, which could only be made with potent unshaped soulstuff. The Iron Minds, being psychic powerhouses themselves, were able to gather this soulstuff by dredging the deep warp for raw, unrefined warp energy. Unfortunately, this meant that the Iron Minds were essentially at ground zero when Slaanesh was born. At the center of the Old Eldar Empire and their homeworld of Shaa-Dome the Eye of Terror, first a crying slit of stars, winked open, an opalescent gash with an infinite speck at its center, from which trillions of souls grasped and groped in lust. The eye widened, abyssal pupil, florid hellfire iris, eyelid of night peeling back from the singularity. Any who would dare to look upon it, particularly those with immense psychic power such as the Iron Minds and Men of Gold, risked their very sanity and soul in doing so.

In those days, the existence of Chaos was not a well known phenomenon. It was a problem, but a problem in the manner of a dormant supervolcano or an esoteric sleeping elder god, something that could barely be understood on a mortal timeframe and therefore one that didn’t merit immediate concern. Even the children of the Old Ones, in particular the Eldar, who knew more about the nature of Chaos due to those turbulent days immediately after the War in Heaven, didn’t see Chaos as a problem worth worrying about. Daemon outbreaks had periodically occurred and consumed lesser civilizations in the days long before man, but until the birth of Slaanesh galvanized Khorne, Tzeentch, and Nurgle into action the three survivors of the Old Ones’ blasphemous legacy seemed content to lounge at the bottom of the Warp, like a crocodile in a murky pond waiting for its next victim. How much of this was due to the actions of the shadow war fought by the Cabal is a question for historians. Even Asuryan, who played a 65 million year long game of wits with Tzeentch to keep the Changer of Ways away from the Old Eldar Empire, saw their contest as one of equals. Neither had seen the birth of Slaanesh coming.

To baseline humanity, who were mostly unaware of the goings on of the Warp, it was as if one day the most prominent and important members of their society inexplicably went mad. To make matters worse, by that time nearly all of the Men of Iron and quite a few of the more cybernetically enhanced Men of Stone had been networked together into the noosphere. Only those Men of Iron who were deliberately built to act independently of the noosphere, such as colony ships, or were too primitive to directly interface with the network, were spared. The Golden Men ran rampant across the golden crown of the Chthonian system, slaying world killing picketts and running down ships and carving their hulls until they bored and bloodied themselves in their holds. Excesses of rape and madness and vile godhead played out across the galaxy, acts neurotic and personal and acts so grand as to taint continent wide domains, acts upon the delirious humans and Iron Men and the incestuous Golden Ones. And most of all the Iron Minds, who themselves had been driven neurotic and murderous by having looked upon That Which Should Not Be. Humanity’s family, once a thing of unity, began to slaughter itself. Humanity called out to its allies in the Interstellar League for aid, but received no reply, for most were dealing with similar problems caused by the backlash of the birth of Slaanesh or had themselves gone mad. Humanity as we know it only survived because the Iron Minds and Men of Gold decided to focus on the most pressing threat to their survival, each other, leaving the Men of Stone and Men of Iron not corrupted by a connection to the noosphere to cower in the shadow of the dueling gods. Eventually, the two groups weakened each other enough that they could be put out of their misery by mere mortals.

The Great and Bountiful Human Dominion were not the only ones affected by the madness of the Men of Gold and the Iron Minds, as both parties soon turned their attention to the Warp. The Men of Gold and Iron Minds were not capable of threatening the Chaos Gods or even the Eldar gods as individuals, but there were a lot of them, enough that the Chaos Gods and their daemons had to devote at least some attention to the thorn in their side. Whether the numbers of the mass-produced gods could have truly won against the more powerful Old One-inspired creations is an interesting question, but a moot one, for in their insanity the Men of Gold and Iron Minds had no cohesion and were simply picked off one by one. The rampage of the Men of Gold and Iron Minds within the Warp and their gradual slaughter was just one part of the chaos and change in cosmology that came along with the Fall of the Eldar, along with Slaanesh’s murder of the Eldar pantheon, Khorne’s shattering of Khaine, and Nurgle’s kidnap of Isha. Slaanesh claims to have consumed a Man of Gold along with the majority of the Eldar pantheon during this time, but few outside of the Prince of Pleasure’s most ardent worshippers actually believe what they say.

And with that, the crusade of humanity’s pantheon into the Warp and the deicide of the remaining gods by their weeping children, the Iron Minds and Men of Gold were gone. Some are said to have made out across the old empire and have put the scourge of their rule to it in regimes long dead, others to the beautiful world of pleasure they saw gleam in the eye, and others into the intergalactic sea. Whatever fate has befallen them, no inquiry made by the illuminated few of those illustrious orders that go unnamed cannot tell, and Chaos has made no sign. Barring a few possible mysteries of history such as the Cacodominus, the Men of Gold were all extinct. All, that is, save for [[Nobledark_Imperium_Notable_People#The_Emperor_of_Mankind_.28formerly_The_Steward.2C_formerly_The_Warlord.29|one unactivated individual]], body whole but mind dormant and a complete blank slate, [[Nobledark_Imperium_Writing#Malcador's_Log|lying comatose in his stasis chamber on the ringworld of Cthonia]].

Modern humanity is of two minds about the Men of Gold. On the one hand, they remember who the Men of Gold originally were, the protectors of humanity and the greatest of their number, larger than life figures akin to the gods or superheroes of ancient myth. On the other hand, they were acutely aware of what happened to them, when they turned on their charges without warning and began slaughtering them all. Malcador was acutely aware of what the Men of Gold were capable of, and Oscar was raised on numerous horror stories of the Men of Gold from the Age of Strife half-remembered through folklore and exaggerated through oral retelling. Even today, the Emperor has downplayed his nature as a Man of Gold. He never denies it if questioned, though he doesn’t make it common knowledge, as he wanted his ideas of empire to be accepted out of merit rather than fear or appeal to nostalgia. That said, the eldar tend to be more aware of the Emperor’s status as a Man of Gold, as Isha had known of the Golden Men from the Dark Age of Technology and the fact that the Emperor was one was the only reason the eldar saw their political marriage as one that had any sense of legitimacy, as the Men of Gold were some of the closest things humanity had to gods. Isha would go so far as to say that the Iron Minds and Men of Gold were the human counterpart to the Eldar pantheon, and that Oscar is a god in denial, a subject on which the two have disagreed vehemently several times.
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=== Mon-Keigh ===

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The Mon-Keigh, as in the original Mon-Keigh from which the more general eldar term is used today, were a race of cannibalistic, misshapen [[Ogre_Kingdoms|ogre-like]] monstrosities that terrorized the eldar early in their history. Humanoid only in the loosest shape of the word, the Mon-Keigh were characterized by matted orange fur, chitinous plates overlaying the skin, a clawed left arm much larger than the right, and a snake-like gullet capable of expanding to swallow chunks of food larger than the Mon-Keigh’s own head. The Mon-Keigh were also known for their massive appetite, having a massive gut complete with a complex gizzard which allowed them to digest almost anything, including quite frequently each other. Satiating this massive appetite (and avoiding those who would do the same to them) which was a primary impetus behind the Mon-Keigh’s eventual development of space flight. Unlike most species, who developed space travel to collect resources, flee harmful conditions, or satisfy their curiosity, the Mon-Keigh traveled to the stars in order explore strange new worlds, seek out new life and new civilizations, and [[Ogre_Kingdoms|eat them]]. At the same time, this motivation led the technology of the Mon-Keigh to seem rather inconsistent. Despite being a race that could build starships, on the ground the Mon-Keigh behaved more like a horde of barbarians or big game hunters than an invading army and never used anything more advanced than an autogun or a lasgun, as any more advanced weaponry such as bolters, plasma, or meltas didn’t leave enough of a body to eat, and thus defeated the purpose of using them in the first place.

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Perhaps the most notable effect of the Mon-Keigh on history is when a Mon-Keigh warband led by the warlord Hresh-Selain invaded the eldar homeworld of Shaa-Dome back in the days when the eldar in the midst of their Bronze Age. However, during the invasion of Shaa-Dome, the Mon-Keigh’s tendency to fight in disorganized hunting parties and use relatively primitive weapons despite being able to build and use spacecraft ended up becoming a liability when their expected entrees A) outnumbered them by an order of magnitude, B) could organize themselves into actual armies rather than hunting parties to make up for their technological disadvantage, and C) were able to fall back on guerrilla combat and asymmetrical warfare in the forests of Shaa-Dome once the initial assault failed. The Mon-Keigh were used to fighting as big game hunters, not an actual army. This first encounter left a deep impact on the cultural memory of the eldar, and is in large part why the Eldar are so paranoid and mistrustful of other species in the first place. For the eldar, their first contact with another sentient species was when a technologically-advanced race descended from the stars to butcher them and hunt them down like animals.

The eldar during this time were led by Elronhir, who was a stubborn old (proto-eldar equivalent of sixties) warrior who united the various warring nations and tribes of Shaa-Dome to drive Hresh-Selain and the Mon-Keigh off their planet. It is not clear if Hresh-Selain’s warband was completely slaughtered by the proto-eldar or if they just got them to flee, eldar history claims the former but given their naiveté of the greater galaxy at the time and the tendency of later eldar to exaggerate their own history both options are possible. The twin heroes of the War in Heaven, Eldanesh and Uthanesh, helped as well, but at the time they were little more than rank-and-file soldiers (proto-Eldar equivalent of late teens) in the conflict and at best it could be said they were talented warriors. When the Old Ones showed up shortly after the Mon-Keigh had been defeated, Elronhir considered himself too old to fight in another war and wanted to die of old age in peace, upon which Eldanesh and Uthanesh picked up the torch (and were among the first of the Eldar to be genetically enhanced by the Old Ones).

The Old Ones knew about the Mon-Keigh. Indeed, given the fact that all the Mon-Keigh cared about was eating, it's highly likely that the Old Ones covertly sponsored their rise to becoming a space-faring species, though the Mon-Keigh never knew they were sponsored and thought they were in control of their own destiny. All the Mon-Keigh knew was that they occasionally received cryptic warnings that a particular star system was off-limits, and warbands that didn't pay attention to those warnings tended to disappear. The Mon-Keigh had a very alien mindset that was predicated around them being the apex predator (and everyone else being perceived as talking food), and therefore could not be communicated with or controlled as easy as other species (and given the Old Ones were able to get the Krork to behave, that says a lot). Nevertheless, they were useful if the Old Ones needed a particular species wiped out without destroying the ecosystem or as an evolutionary catalyst, the metaphorical anthill to the much later tyranids' galactic locusts to test if a species had enough worth for the Old Ones to step in as patrons. In fact, Hresh-Selain's discovery of Shaa-Dome may not have been an accident, especially given how soon the Old Ones showed up afterwards. The Old Ones, in their inscrutable ways, may have directed the Mon-Keigh towards Shaa-Dome, Hrudworld, and other worlds to find races suitable for uplifting for the War in Heaven (the proto-Eldar, Hrud, and others merely being the ones that survived). Regardless, when a Bronze Age race managed to fight off the Old Ones' favorite planet pruners, combined with the proto-Eldar's psychic potential and ability to selectively express their own genome, the Old Ones took notice.

Some Mon-Keigh fought in the War in Heaven. The Eldar didn’t pay too much attention to this, as they assumed the War in Heaven was a war of such magnitude that even the worst of enemies would be willing to ally to stop the Necrons and their omnicidal crusade. Additionally, shortly after the Old Ones uplifted the Krork they set them on the Mon-Keigh, who had outlived their usefulness and had officially grown too uncontrollable to try and salvage, as a test of their warmaking ability. This nearly wiped the Mon-Keigh out and few survived to fight in the War in Heaven. Nobody cared. Indeed, if the Old Ones' sense of humor tended that way, they would have found it hilariously ironic that the Mon-Keigh were killed and eaten in the same way the Mon-Keigh had been killing and eating others. Be'lakor probably did at the very least. A few bands the ancient Eldar didn't know of survived for a time around the ragged edge of the galaxy, trying to stay away from everyone and everything. They didn't survive the Enslavers.

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=== The Proto-Orks and the Krork ===

<div class="toccolours mw-collapsible mw-collapsed" style="100%">'''''The First WAAAGH!'''''

The creation of the Orks should have been a war crime. Even by the standards of the Old Ones and the Necrontyr, it was clear that someone had crossed the line. In the case of the Eldar, Hrud, and the other species uplifted into shock troops and cannon fodder by the Old Ones, all the Old Ones did is genetically enhance what was already there, teach them how to make gods, and give them space age technology. The Orks were almost completely overhauled from the ground up. Of course, this was during the late stages of the War in Heaven, when both Necrontyr and Old One were rapidly abandoning any pretense at a moral high ground in order to get better weapons to kill the other side.

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Snotlings are thought to be the closest thing to the original proto-ork species. The proto-orks were little over two feet tall, with some odd individuals making it to three, living in peaceful little proto-ork villages. Had a life span of 10 to 12 years baring illness or injury but usually averaging at 8 to 10 due to their environment. Omnivorous and to some degree toxin resistant. They were not the cleverest of creatures but were smart enough to build mud and wood houses. Could make fire and used it for cooking and the deterrence of predators of which they had many. They had not discovered metal by the time the Old Ones found them. They were capable of violence against each other in a halfhearted tribal brawl sort of way. Usually they fought to win rather than kill. Despite their many predators they were still possessed of a strange sort of child-like innocence. No in-built knowledge or writing, and even spoken language was crude and half made of gestures. Mostly [[Nobledark_Imperium_Notable_People#Rainbow Serpent|worshipped warp spirits]], for this was back in the day when the warp wasn’t full of daemons. Could reproduce asexually through spores, but it was more reliable to chop off a finger or toe or ear and plant it in the soft mud near the river. However, when they did die, they would often release a cloud of spores as a last-ditch effort at reproduction, similar to some Earth species. It was this ability that made them of interest. And then the Old Ones came. And touched them where no species was meant to be touched.

As a point of comparison, imagine what the world would be like if the Old Ones did to humans what they did to the proto-Orks. Beings like baseline humanity would be nearly extinct, whereas the dominant representative of humanity is [[Orks|nearly quintuple the height of the average human and looks like it fell off the tree of life and hit every atavistic branch on the way down. What passes for "human" looks like a gorilla crossed with an ogryn, with fangs as thick as your forearm.]] Other varieties of “human” are [[Gretchin|creatures the size of polar bears, but lanky and cruel and built like a ‘’Velociraptor’’]]. All of them have seemingly regressed in intellect from the human standard, possessed only of a [[Mork|bestial cunning]] and only concerned with survival. [[Snotling|What few members of baseline humanity remain have regressed even further in intelligence to little better than animals.]] To make matters worse, these things primarily feed on [[Squig|creatures that look like demented combinations of human fetuses and infants as designed by Hieronymous Bosch]]. The Old Ones have taken your species and turned it into a viral ecosystem, good for nothing more than spreading. Every living thing you see around you is derived from humans in some way, [[Dogscape|a landscape made of human flesh]].

After the first batch of Krork were created it was the end for the proto-orks. The moment the first new spore touched the mud it was just a matter of time, you can't coexist with orks. Some isolated pockets held on for a few centuries but their day was done. That said, when the Krork first entered galactic history, their behavior was markedly different from the initial gene-wrought weapons that killed and ate their predecessors, [[Nobledark_Imperium_Writing#The Last Casualties of the War in Heaven|enough so that the eldar actually remember the Krork fondly]]. Although the Krork still thrived on war as much as their 41st millennium counterparts, they were much more intelligent and disciplined and were capable of realizing their allies didn’t enjoy war like they did and were capable of modifying their behavior accordingly. The Old Ones did not take kindly to team killing, and they had the psychic might to enforce their opinions. However, just because a species is pleasant now doesn't mean they were always that way, or that they don't have their own bloody secrets in their past. The eldar had no idea of what the Old Ones did and the Krork's bloody history, they may have liked the Krork but they would have been horrified to find out exactly how they had been made.

When the Old Ones died and the Enslavers took over the galaxy, every Old One-uplifted race had to survive in their own way. The Eldar hid in the Webway. The Hrud combined their entropy fields into a singularity that paused time from their perspective until the danger had passed. The Krork, on the other hand, died to a Krork against the Enslavers, with the species renewing itself from the spores left over when they died. This is what turned the Krork into the Orks, and emphasizes a particular problem with the Old Ones' methods. While the Orks retained all of their genetically encoded knowledge [[Mekboy|such as everything the Old Ones thought they needed to wage war]], anything culturally transmitted (like, say, “allies don’t WAAAGH! as hard as we do, treat them like panzees”) gets lost. The Orks retained all of the Krork’s [[Intelligence|knowledge]], but none of their [[wisdom]], and even anything from the new generation of Brain Boyz would be created from scratch. The Eldar were be overjoyed to find another old ally that had survived the War in Heaven, only to find their allies are now…different. And so began the occasional Eldar-Ork Brain Boy wars that occasionally rocked the galaxy before the Fall of the Eldar.

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=== Viskeon ===

See [[Nobledark_Imperium_Drafts#The_First_and_Second_Viskeon_Wars|The First and Second Viskeon Wars]]

== The Galactic Bestiary ==

=== Chogorian Warhawks ===

<div class="toccolours mw-collapsible mw-collapsed" style="100%">'''''

Humans have always seen the benefit of taming useful species in their environment, from the dog of Old Earth to the warhawk of [[Nobledark_Imperium_Notable_Planets#The_Pastoral_Worlds|Chogoris]]. Warhawks are a species originally native to Chogoris, though similar species are known throughout the galaxy. However, genetic evidence suggests that warhawks are descended from a species originally native to Old Earth, transported to Chogoris in the distant past. The average warhawk, or at least the Chogorian breeds that most closely approximate the original appearance of the species is large, about the size of a wolf or large hound, with a mostly dun colored body and black and white markings. They are fast, pack-hunting predators, with long legs and a long feathered tail used as a counterbalance to help them make tight turns. Warhawks are also capable of flight with their broad, clawed feathered wings, though they prefer to rest on the ground. Although they have a toothy maw, their most dangerous and most iconic weapon is the large, razor edged claw on their foot, which they use to pin down smaller prey or lacerate larger prey or predators. Indeed, these fearsome claws have inspired the name of at least one Space Marine chapter: the Crimson Talons, a White Scars descendant from the pastoral world of Timpagonos that works with a large, horse-sized breed of warhawk unique to that world bred for war.

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The traditional use of warhawks are for sport and gathering food. When honing their skills by hunting in the Khum Karta mountains of Chogoris, Astartes of the White Scars use warhawks to help them in the hunt, rewarding their pets with the choicest giblets. Many, including the White Scars, prefer to tame wild warhawks from the wild instead of using a domestic one, citing that it creates a closer bond of trust with the beast. The less glamorous individuals of Chogoris’s many tribes use warhawks to help catch game to supplement their usual diet of herdstock. In addition, many will use warhawks to help corral and protect livestock in the manner of a sheepdog. Although adult warhawks are usually too large for a human to carry, some Astartes of the White Scars have been known to let their prized pets rest on their armor. As with many domesticated species, there are a large number of specialized warhawk breeds found throughout the galaxy, ranging from the aforementioned Crimson Giant to the meter long Oscillated Grey, a more sedate breed used for vermin catching on Civilized Worlds.

In contrast to some other domesticated predators like Fenrisian wolves, warhawks are typically not used in battle. Compared to these species warhawks are rather fragile, and their organic bodies cannot keep up with the untiring mechanical steeds of the White Scars. However many Pastoral Worlders will use them as trackers to hunt down and kill feral Gretchin and other similar targets, and when war comes to the Pastoral Worlds warhawks can be used in the manner of a war hound.

Despite their similarities in usage, warhawks are not dogs. They have a much more fickle temperament similar to felines, and while they are often hostile to unknown strangers. Similarly, warhawks cannot be caged or kenneled like dogs. Unless you are dealing with one of the more demure domesticated breeds, attempts to do so typically result in warhawks going mad from the confinement at best or sating their boredom by figuring out how to open their cages at worst. On Chogoris and the other pastoral worlds warhawks are typically allowed to roam free, their handlers expecting them to return to their homes based on gifts of food and attention, though they do mark their animals to denote which ones are theirs. The Pastoral Worlders see this as only right, a loyal warhawk should not be punished for their loyalty by being forbidden to fly free and feel the wind in their face. Furthermore, by allowing their prize warhawks to roam free it ensures the best warhawks continue to breed are not removed from the population.

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=== Fenrisian Wolves ===
<div class="toccolours mw-collapsible mw-collapsed" style="100%">'''''Homo sapiens fenrisiensis'''''

Leman Russ’ initial experiments with the Canis Helix on Fenris were, to put it bluntly, a complete disaster. Although the idea behind the Canis Helix was to augment the abilities of human soldiers with genes from other animals on Old Earth, the first trials went way too far and ended up producing creatures more beast than man. Russ was horrified by these first experiments, and tried to put the aspirants out of their misery. However, some of these experiments managed to escape and life in general has a funny way of surviving in places it’s not supposed to. Within a few generations, the harsh native ecosystem of Fenris was being dominated by a new, invasive predator. The people of Fenris may not be splice descendants, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t any around.

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Most people who know the origin of the Wolves of Fenris often expect them to look like merely hairy humans, or at least something that can reasonably be described as humanoid. This is not the case. Your average Fenris Wolf weighs somewhere between 500 and 600 kilograms (over 1000 pounds), and has a skull nearly a meter in length. Fenris wolves will actually grow in size throughout their entire lives, which is thought to be an indicator of their super-soldier ancestry, artificial genes used to promote muscle and bone development being re-purposed for continuous growth. Their canine teeth have distinct knife-like edges, resembling a monkey more than a wolf, and their front limbs are disturbingly human-like with dexterous opposable thumbs despite primarily walking on all fours. The overall body shape of a Fenrisian wolf is more like a cross between a wolf, bear, and a lion rather than a straight wolf, allowing them to grapple with enemies or climb low branches in search of prey. There are some human traits remaining, such as their eerily human eyes with white sclera, but one would be hard-pressed to see them.

It’s not clear how intelligent the Fenrisian wolves really are. It is clear they are clever, moreso than any non-human organism on Old Earth, but the question is are they only intelligent as, say, [[Nobledark_Imperium_Imperial_Forces#Beastmen_and_Ogryn|Primeval Beastmen]] or are they really more intelligent than they appear and merely limited by their lack of ability to communicate. At the very least, the fact that Fenrisian Wolves are easily tamed and are capable of performing complex behaviors that an animal like a dog isn’t capable of suggests there is something going on in their brains. The Adeptus Biologicus would love to try to uplift the Fenris wolves back to sapience like the Beastmen and the Ogryn, but they’re worried any attempt to do so would blow back on the people of Fenris because of how genetically close the two are.

The people of Fenris venerate the Fenrisian wolf above all other creatures because out of all the animals on Fenris it alone represents all the virtues of man. Like humans, the Fenris wolf is clever, strong, brave, loyal, and stubborn, all at the same time. The fact that they behave this way because they are actually abhumans rather than actual animals is something that is either not well known among the people of Fenris or glossed over, especially since Leman Russ made sure that wasn’t common knowledge in the first place.

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=== Grox ===

<div class="toccolours mw-collapsible mw-collapsed" style="100%">'''''

The grox is a cornerstone of Imperial culture. In many cases, the presence of grox is the deciding factor in determining whether or not a world is livable as opposed to merely survivable. Although originally native to the world of Solomon, the grox has a number of biological traits that make it extremely valuable and have led to it becoming the most widespread livestock animal in the entire Imperium.

The grox’s biology and life cycle owes itself to the unusual evolutionary history of life on Solomon. For the most part, the history of life on Solomon was very similar to life on Earth. Single-celled life emerged, photosynthesizers filled the atmosphere with oxygen, multicellular life appeared, and eventually animal life (with a backbone, like Earth) clambered its way out of the water. However, this is the point where things started to go a little bit differently. One of the earliest experiments in life on land on Solomon was the grox, which due to several factors ended up steamrolling its competition and dominating the ecosystem. First, grox were big, growing up to 5 m in length and weighing up to 1000 kg, much larger than any of its potential predators or competitors. What's more, due to an extremely active metabolism and efficient digestive system, Grox could grow incredibly quickly, reaching full adult size in over six months, less so if fed a nutrient-rich diet.

The end result was an impoverished terrestrial ecosystem, with almost no native land animals over 5 kg in weight aside from the grox. The grox, however, more than makes up for this lack of megafauna by being a complete and utter omnivore, feeding on plants, animals, even some mineral formations. At some point above the first link or so on the food chain, Solomon's terrestrial ecosystem turns into big grox eating smaller grox until the point where that no longer becomes feasible. The grox’s infamous rapid growth rate evolved at least in part so that juvenile grox could rapidly reach the size range where they were too large to be eaten by other adults.

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This ability to grow fast and eat almost anything made grox extremely appealing to the Imperium. Grox could be released onto planets with normally hostile biochemistry and turn the native plant life into edible food (though they aren't miracle workers, as evidenced by the absence of grox on Necromunda). Additionally, because of their habit of eating anything and everything, grox meat contains all the nutrients necessary for most species to survive. Grox meat is even a source of carbohydrates similar to ork meat and some fungi (though grox are unrelated to orks and other orkoids) as the physiology of life on Solomon is slightly different than that of Earth. Grox are used for more than just meat; grox hide (primarily taken from the area beneath the withers, which is covered in bony scutes) is an important source of leather on many planets. This led the Imperium to export grox all over the galaxy and Solomon itself becoming a borderline Hive World in response to the demand for grox meat. Today, almost the entire surface of Solomon is devoted to grox agriculture and the planet has often been called “the galaxy’s biggest grox farm”.

Nevertheless, grox are not without their own set of problems. The same traits that make grox ideal livestock in harsh environments also makes them aggressive, gluttinous, and territorial. Given that there is very little to eat on Solomon and Grox grow fast, there is always fighting over who gets food, who controls where the food is, and who becomes food. Grox horns are not only used for fighting over access to mates but for fighting over access to resources. Wild grox typically view humans as either competitors for food or prey that can potentially be overpowered and eaten. Despite having thick, clumsy limbs grox are also incredibly strong and are capable of quick bursts of speed when necessary. Any attempt to keep large herds of grox together would be doomed to failure due to their territorial nature. As a result, it is often necessary to sterilize grox (which are naturally hermaphrodites) in captivity, which makes them docile and lose their territorial instincts.

Sterilizing grox has more benefits than merely making them docile, as sterilized grox actually grow larger and faster than un-neutered ones. It is theorized by Adeptus Biologis researchers that sterilization causes the grox to grow faster and become less territorial because all of the energy that would normally be devoted to reproduction is devoted to growth, and sterilization means the grox are no longer competing to pass their genes on to the next generation, similar to what is seen in parasite-sterilized animals on other planets (including Earth). Nevertheless, it is always necessary to keep a few aggressive, fertile individuals around for the sake of maintaining the herd, which are typically kept in solitary pens when not being bred and are often marked in some way (such as having bright painted colors on their side) to make it clear to groxherders from a distance which individuals are safe to approach.

Grox are by far the most common livestock animal in the Imperium. However, in spite of what one might think, grox tend to be a more common sight on worlds that have little to no other livestock industry (particularly worlds that cannot support other types of livestock), than the livestock-heavy Pastoral Worlds. Although small grox herds exist on all Pastoral Worlds, other pastoral worlders view grox with disdain, seeing them as a pest that will eat their preferred livestock out of house and home. This sentiment is not without merit. Despite being a valued livestock animal, grox are opportunists and survivors, and on many worlds grox have gone feral and become dangerous invasive species. Perhaps the best example of this is on Catachan, where grox were imported in 127.M33 in an attempt to make the planet more livable to its native inhabitants. The project was largely a failure, as the constantly growing jungle destroyed any attempt at keeping the grox enclosed and most of the fertile grox escaped into the jungle. Millennia later, feral grox are still a common sight across Catachan. Grox are not even at the bottom of the food chain on Catachan, feeding on small animals and carnivorous plants in addition to less aggressive vegetation.

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[[Category:Nobledark Imperium]]

Nobledark Imperium Xenos

2020-09-01T18:08:16Z

2601:647:CA01:2410:443E:B2AA:ECA7:511A: /* Rak'gol */

'''This page is part of the Nobledark Imperium, a fan re-working of the Warhammer 40,000 Universe. See the [[Nobledark Imperium|Nobledark Imperium Introduction]] and [[Nobledark Imperium|Main Page]] for more information on the alternate universe'''

The Imperium, [[Nobledark_Imperium_Forces_of_Chaos|Chaos]], Ork WAAAGH!, Necron Star Empire, and tyranid Hive Mind are not the only ones vying for dominance of the galaxy, though they are its largest powers. This is a page for all those other species not directly associated with the major powers, such as the Hrud. This is also a page for those species who although no longer existing in have had a significant effect on its history, ranging from the Old Ones and Necrontyr of the War in Heaven sixty-six million years ago to the human-made Men of Gold and Iron Minds of the glory days of the [[Dark_Age_of_Technology|Dark Age]] Great and Bountiful Human Dominion.

Xenos species that are members of the Imperium can be found under [[Nobledark Imperium Member States]]

NOTE: This is also a temporary holding area for the entries related to the Necrons, tyranids, Orks, and Dark Eldar, with the hope being to eventually spin these sections off into their own pages once they get long enough.

== Da Orkz ==

=== The Beast ===

<div class="toccolours mw-collapsible mw-collapsed" style="100%">''''' He Who Will Bring His People Much Slaughter: '''''

Urlakk Urgg. The Beast. The big one. The lord who will bring his people much slaughter. The single greatest mortal threat ever faced by the Imperium, and the yardstick to which all other Ork warbosses are measured.

Urlakk Urg was originally the warboss of Ullanor, the center of an Ork empire that laid claim to a number of star systems. It is thought that the Imperium was lucky to have encountered Ullanor when they did, as Ullanor and similar Ork empires such as Gorro seemed to be reaching a critical mass beyond which Brain Boyz would start being produced. Already the Orks of Ullanor and Gorro were developing technology and organization beyond what orks were capable of for most of Imperial History (like proto-Attack Moons and sedentary settlements), and orks like Urlakk Urg seemed to be much smarter and of a different caste from the usual ork, though not fully Brain Boyz.

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The Ullanor Crusade was a bloody slog, made more difficult by the fact that the usual strategy of “shoot the warboss first” was untenable as Urg was smart enough to not to reveal his face in the open until his Boyz were in the thick of the fighting. The conflict only turned in the Imperium’s favor when Horus provoked Urlakk Urg into revealing himself, taunting Urlakk Urg from his flagship until Urg gave Horus the coordinates to his location, demanding that the coward face him in single combat. Horus responded by slagging Urg’s palace from orbit and decapitating most of the WAAAGH!’s leadership in one blow. Normally this sort of practice worked wonders, and indeed it did win the day in the Ullanor Crusade, but slagging the palace from orbit meant that Urg’s body was unaccounted for, which allowed him to escape unnoticed and swear bloody vengeance on the Imperium from the barren rock he ended up on. This led him to an encounter with [[Chaos Gods|four other individuals]] who also had a very vested interest in deposing the Imperium.

The Chaos Gods assisted in the Beast’s phoenix-like return to power, giving him access to Warp portals that allowed him to rapidly assert dominance over WAAAGH!s that were otherwise a galaxy apart, and giving him blessings to exploit the loophole in Ork logic of “bigger equals boss”. The Beast’s assault was basically a massive blitzkrieg that came screaming across the northern border of the Imperium, backed up by daemons, Crone Eldar, and Dark Eldar raiding in their wake like pilot fish following a big shark. Daemonic incursions and smaller WAAAGH!s erupted in other parts of the galaxy such that the Imperium was besieged on all fronts and had trouble creating a unified front against the main push of the WAAAGH! to the north. Although many smaller WAAAGH!’s split off from the Beast’s main force, the Beast’s plan was to head straight for Ullanor, convert the planet into an attack planet, and then make a beeline for Old Earth to kill the Steward and claim Isha for Chaos (Isha wasn’t on Earth at the time since this was before the alliance was formed, but that was a secondary concern). There was some stopping for lootin’ an’ pillagin’, but by Ork standards it was extremely fast. Most early battles in the War of the Beast, especially on the main front, tended to be [[Nobledark_Imperium_Primarchs#Sanguinius|pyrrhic victories]] or [[Nobledark_Imperium_Notable_People#Jenetia_Krole|heroic last stands]] for the Imperium at best, the defenders swept away by the sheer force of the green tide.

It wasn’t until the Beast’s forces entered the core territories of the Segmentum Solar, despite being harried by Horus, Kurze, and Guilliman, that his momentum began to slow. His first plan upon entering the Sol System was to ram Ullanor into Earth, sterilizing everything on the surface. Some say it’s because hitting one planet with another like billiard balls is ded orky. Some say the Beast was so obsessed with revenge he didn’t care how orky it was. Maybe it was both, and the Beast was mixing business with pleasure. However, that plan was foiled by the actions Ollanius Pius, which forced the Beast to try and take the planet using ground troops. We all know how that ended up. The death of the Beast marked the turning point of the war, as the warbosses could no longer effectively cooperate and were picked off one by one, with the most successful carving out their own petty kingdoms.

The Beast’s status and accomplishments are legendary among the orks. The most dangerous warbosses throughout history have taken up the title of Beast (specifically, Mag Uruk Thraka) in the hopes of achieving a similar level of infamy to Urlakk Urg. These Beast WAAAGH!s are some of the greatest threats to the Imperium, comparable to a major tyranids Hive Fleet (e.g., Behemoth, Kraken, or Leviathan) or one of Malys’ Black Crusades. However, until [[Nobledark_Imperium_Notes#Ghazghull|recently]], none of the successors to the title had the potential to measure up to the original.

Importantly, unlike most of his successors, who either consider Chaos an ally of convenience or just pay lip service to its ideals at best, and Ghazghull, who hates Chaos, the Beast was the only major warboss to actively embrace Chaos and reject the Gorkamorka to pledge his devotion to, quote, “gods who actually do something for their worshippers”. As a result, he got a shitload of blessing including marks from all four Chaos Gods and the mark of Chaos Ascendant, which turned him into an absolute nightmare the size of a hab-block that tore through a number of the Imperium’s greatest heroes and took the Steward and Eldrad (with some softening up from Sanguinius) to finally bring him down.

Ironically, the Beast’s greatest flaw was wrath of all things. Orks love fighting. They love fighting and winning even more. The Beast wasn’t angry that the Imperium declared war on him. He was angry that they took his empire from him. Not only that, but they did so in one of the most underhanded methods possible, by tricking him and then nuking him from orbit rather than defeating him in face-to-face combat. The danger of this flaw could already be seen in Ullanor Crusade, Urg was a kunnin’ ork and knew Horus was trying to trick him but eventually his anger got the better of him. Anger can be a powerful motivator, as well a deadly flaw. The Beast’s anger gave him the motivation to unite most of the Ork race within a few years, but it also led him to making a lot of short-sighted, kneejerk decisions without thinking of the consequences like allying with the Chaos gods and [[Nobledark_Imperium_Writing#Ork_Diplomacy|tactical errors due to trying to make a statement rather than just krumpin’ da gitz]]. Ironically, this would have probably gotten him killed by his followers once the rush of battle wore off and the orks started looking to their long-term future, but the Beast’s lust for revenge did the job for him and accidentally [[Nobledark_Imperium_Xenos#Brain_Boyz|set the Orks back millennia]].

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=== Brain Boyz ===

<div class="toccolours mw-collapsible mw-collapsed" style="100%">''''' The Menace in Green: '''''

''“It’s no good. Bloody greenskins set a trap for us. Send a few trigger-happy Boyz our way, knowing that we’d think that’s all they got and advance. So we get cocky and march our way through the mountain pass. Then once we get too far in to retreat the Orks show they’re not as dead as we all thought and cut off the mountain pass. Only way out of the beartrap is to go deeper into ork territory. Don’t you see, Commissar? It’s an ambush.”''<br>
''“Ambush? What do you mean ambush? Orks don’t set am–”''<br>
-- Last words of the Hekaton 234th, right before being attacked by an Ork ambush

Brain Boyz are perhaps the greatest threat to the Imperium to come out of the Orkish menace in recent years. The greenskins have produced numerous threats over the millennia, including the numerous Beast WAAAGH!s, Armageddon Wars, the Wyrd War that decimated the legion Terra’s Sons, or the Black Croosade [sic] called by the Chaos Ork Rotfang Badgut, but these were often sector or segmentum-scale threats, none of which could compare to sheer destruction wrought by the War of the Beast. Some, particularly in areas that saw relatively little fighting during the War of the Beast, were foolish enough to say that the Orks were no longer capable of posing any organized threat to the Imperium, despite the Orks being responsible for the most brutal conflict in Imperial history. Orks were often seen as little more than cannon fodder, little more than mercenaries or catspaws of greater powers like Chaos or marauding distractions from more threatening adversaries like the Necrons or tyranids, not to be underestimated but not capable of being a significant threat on their own (no matter what the ravings of the inhabitants of the Sol system and its nearby territories had to say). All of which had to be reassessed when Brain Boyz made their reappearance on the galactic stage.

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Most inhabitants of the Milky Way, or at least those who have any idea of how the greater galaxy works beyond their own little world, have a general understanding of the Ork life cycle. Ork spores gradually orkiform the world, a single spore capable of germinating into a variety of different morphotypes depending on the availability of nutrients and the strength of the WAAAGH! field, producing first mushrooms, then more complex orkoid organisms such as squigs. Then snotlings appear, followed by gretchins, followed by orks. A complete self-sustaining ecosystem and war machine. What most don’t know, however, is that there is an additional stage to the Ork life cycle. Eventually, the Ork population reaches a “critorkal mass”, which prompts the development of a new Ork caste: the Brain Boyz. Orks become more intelligent the more of them there are, but Brain Boyz produce a quantum leap in Ork functionality, increasing the intellect of all orkoid lifeforms around them just by their sheer presence. The appearance of Brain Boyz in an Ork WAAAGH! is often heralded by an increase in the sophistication of Ork technology, including the appearance of more advanced Ork devices such as reliable tellyportas, attack moons, and gravity whips as the WAAAGH! field becomes strong enough to unlock the knowledge hidden in their genetic code. Indeed, many Great Crusade-era Warbosses, including Urlakk Urg of Ullanor (a.k.a. The Beast), the Mekboy Warboss of Gorro, and Gharkul Blackfang of Gyros-Thravian, all of whom ruled over Ork empires even more advanced than Charadon, Bork, or Octarius are today, could be seen as proto-Brain Boyz in a sense. Although the presence of Brain Boyz does not preclude the creation of these devices, their production certainly increases following their appearance.

In the past, the appearance of Brain Boyz was a cyclical thing, like a tidal cycle. Over the course of thousands of years, the Ork population would grow, the WAAAGH! field would hit a critical mass, and then Brain Boyz would appear. The Orks would then mostly unite under a single banner to wage WAAAGH! on the rest of the galaxy before being beaten back and the Brain Boys hunted down and destroyed (typically at great cost), returning the Orks to square one. Typically this was done by the Old Eldar Empire or in later years the Interstellar League of humans and their allies during Dark Age of Technology (for which Brain Boy WAAAGH!s were one of the reasons the League formed in the first place). And so the cycle would repeat itself. However, after the Fall of the Eldar and the Age of Strife, there was no longer any eldar empire or league of species to prune back the Orkoid menace. It is estimated that had the Great Crusade not set out when it did, in half a millennium or less Brain Boyz would have re-emerged with no checks on their power. This estimate might have been even lower if the WAAAGH! forged by the Beast had managed to hold. The great Beast ironically did the galaxy a favor, setting Ork back several thousand years by rushing headlong into war with the Imperium.

What the rest of the galaxy also don’t realize is that Brain Boyz are not just Orks with added kunnin’. Brain Boyz occur when the WAAAGH! field is high enough that a single Ork spore divides into twin zygotes. This isn’t exactly uncommon, Ork spores twin all the time, but typically these are chance occurrences whose products grow into two orks or two gretchin. Brain Boy spores are produced by induced twinning and grow into two different Orkoid lifeforms, an ork and a gretchin reflecting the duality of orkiness: brutal cunning and cunning brutality. Often, the ork will start out runty and the gretchin will come out particularly large, due to the gretchin twin taking up nutrients that would otherwise go to the Ork (though in the case of Ghazghull and Makari both came out particularly runty, likely due to the circumstances of their birth). Typically, this twinning is not immediately noticed, Orks typically don’t make it a point to record where a particular boy or grot is born after all, but the two Brain Boyz know each other on sight and are in constant psychic contact with one another (similar phenomena have been noted in eldar and human psyker twins). That said, most Orks instinctively recognize Brain Boyz once they reach some level of prominence. This ork-gretchin duality is just as practical as symbolic. Few would suspect a gretchin of being capable of altering the behavior of a WAAAGH! If the ork Brain Boy is killed, the WAAAGH! doesn’t instantly collapse from in-fighting and the sudden loss of brainpower. If a foe knows about the gretchin Brain Boy, they are often too paranoid about the gretchin Brain Boy to notice the ork one putting a choppa in their face.

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=== Ork Empires of Charadon, Octarius, and Bork ===

Contrary to popular belief, when the Beast was slain on Old Earth, the remainder of the Orkish army did not miraculously disperse into a puff of spore and WAAAGH!-flavored smoke. True, the Orks were thrown into disarray at the loss of their leader, but Orks are more used to radical changes in leadership than humans, and there were still plenty of Orks on Old Earth. Once the Orks were driven from the Sol System, the long and costly Reclamation of Old Earth began. Any spot on which an ork has shed blood is guaranteed to produce more Orks, unless the body is burned or more drastic measures are taken. However, this was Old Earth, the cradle of humanity, and its stubborn people would (literally) move mountains in order to ensure their planet was Ork-free. The intensity of the campaign to ensure that the planet was never Orkiformed was nearly as destructive to Old Earth’s ecosystem as the wrought by the forces of the Beast themselves.

The threat of the Beast’s hordes extended far beyond the Sol system. Through violence, cunning, brutality, promises of a good fight, and copious use of Chaos-sponsored Warp portals to cut down on travel time, the Beast had managed to suborn every major Warboss and unite virtually all WAAAGH!s worth noting in the Milky Way in little more than six standard years. It is estimated that at the time of the War of the Beast, nearly eighty percent of the Ork population was under Urlakk Urg’s control in some fashion. Upon hearing news of the Beast’s death, many of the more ambitious Warbosses attempted to break off and form WAAAGH! of their own, rather than follow “that Urlakk git’s” orders. Some of these Warbosses were more successful than others.

The most successful were the Arch-Arsonist of Charadon, the Overfiend of Octarius, and the Arch-Mangler of Mork. These three Warbosses carved out massive areas of space, forming the basis for what would become the modern Octarius, Charadon, and Bork sectors. The Octarius, Charadon, and Bork sectors are less sectors in the traditional Imperial sense, and more designations for the massive amounts of space that these three Orkish empires control. Although many later Ork enclaves have sprung up due to the increasingly strained nature of Imperial resources, these three empires can trace their roots all the way back to the War of the Beast. The Arch-Arsonist, Overfiend, and Arch-Mangler are even still around, after a fashion, even though the original Orks that carved out these dominions are now long dead. The identity of these rulers has changed regularly, as is typical of a kratocracy, but each Ork that takes control of each of these empires takes on the identity and in some cases the mannerisms of the previous rulers, even adopting the oversized gorget that has become a symbol of Ork power since it was used by Urlakk Urg during the War of the Beast. Sometimes by chance a Chaos Ork has even risen to the throne. Of course, these Chaos Orks typically fail in their goal to convert these empires to the worship of the Chaos Gods, and few stay in power for long, especially if they make the mistake of badmouthing the Gorkamorka.

The Imperium was unable to do much to stop these Warbosses at the time as they were still recovering from the War of the Beast and were still trying to scrape together a semblance of an empire in their own space. By the time the Imperium had recovered enough to retaliate, the Orks had already dug in too deep to effectively without a massive waste of manpower and materiel. Even during the Imperial Reconquista, when several smaller Orkish empires were crushed underfoot by Machairius and his forces, these three managed to stubbornly resist any efforts at conquest. Furthermore, as much as the Imperium is loath to admit it, the empires also serve a useful purpose in acting as buffer states against outside xenos threats, particularly Charadon which shares a border with the Necron Star Empire.

That is not to say the Imperium is content to sit and do nothing. The Imperium knows full well what happens when one leaves Orks to their own devices, as seen by the Empires on Gorro and Ullanor during the Great Crusade. The Imperium regularly sends assassins into Ork-held territories, especially the Empires of Octarius, Charadon, and Bork, in order to take out any kunnin’ or charismatic Warboss in the hopes of keeping an Ork like the Beast from ever arising again. Chaos appears to have a similar idea, sending their own assassins after any promising warboss, in order to keep the Orks stupid and easily manipulated. Unfortunately, this means that the few Orks who do survive this gauntlet of assassins tend to be the smartest and most kunnin’ of the lot, meaning that all this action may have done is lower the threshold for Brain Boyz to emerge.

=== Empires of Gathrog and Dregruk ===

To the galactic northeast of Cadia and the Eye of Terror lie two great Ork Empires, the Empire of Gathrog and the Empire of Dregruk. These Ork empires are so large that if the two WAAAGH!s were to combine forces, it is likely that they could easily overrun Cadia and the Cadian Gate before the Imperium could do much of anything about it. Fortunately for the Imperium, these two empires hate each other with a passion, and would much rather fight each other than team up against the Imperium.

This is due in large part to the two empire’s choice of patrons. Gathrog is one of the few Ork WAAAGH!s to be composed almost entirely of Chaos Orks (likely because of its close proximity to the Eye), with the current Arch-Dictator of Gathrog being a Khornate. The Great Despot of Dregruk and his forces, on the other hand, are staunch followers of the Gorkamorka, and in recent years have sworn fealty to Ghazghkull Mag Uruk Thraka as part of his efforts to consolidate forces in preparation for the 5th War of Armageddon.

===The Proto-Orks and the Krork ===

See [[Nobledark_Imperium_Xenos#The_Proto-Orks_and_the_Krork|The Proto-Orks and the Krork]]

== Necron Star Empire ==

=== Dynasties of the Star Empire ===

==== Ahmontekh and the Suhbekhar Dynasty ====

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The leadership of the Necron Star Empire is a pale shadow of its former self. While Szarekh, first and mightiest of their number, still reigns, the other two members of the Triarch, his left and right hands, were lost in the millions of years during the Great Sleep. Szarekh's right hand was Ahmontekh of the Suhbekhar Dynasty, a skilled warrior with an eye for long-term strategy, valued not only for his ability in battle but for his wise council. Ahmontekh's skill in battle was such that he was one of the warriors that fought alongside the C'tan and even struck the killing blow that slew the Great Weaver of the K’nib. When the War in Heaven ended, Ahmontekh entered the Great Sleep without issue like so many other Necrons.

Then, approximately twenty-three million years ago, the Old Eldar Empire made the mistake of waking Ahmontekh up early. Although separated from his dynasty, having been put into stasis alongside some of the finest soldiers and war machines of the Necron Star Empire due to his status as Triarch, Ahmontekh had enough resources entombed with him in his royal crypt to pose a serious problem. Ahmontekh’s response to being awoken by the children of the Old Ones was swift, immediate, and fiery. Worlds that had known peace for millions of years burned under Ahmontekh's assault, their state of the art defense systems no match for ancient Necrontyr technology. In particular, the eldar swore eternal vengeance on Ahmontekh for destroying the Crone World of Maldek, killing trillions in a single stroke, and declared they would hunt him to the ends of the galaxy. Worse yet was that Ahmontekh’s destruction wasn’t simply mindless. He was looking for the other tomb worlds and his buried lord. If the eldar didn’t stop him soon, the Old Empire would have a full-scale revival of the Necron Star Empire on their hands.

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Then the Old Empire were approached by a strange figure, a robotic avatar of an unknown species with a single cycloptic eye. Exactly who this being was remains unknown, but told the eldar it knew of a way to destroy Ahmontekh. Long ago before the Necrons had traded flesh and blood for metal, Ahmontekh had warred with the Charnovokh Dynasty, which at the time had been ruled by his cousin. Although outright warfare between the Suhbekhar and Charnovokh Dynasties had been stopped by the control protocols, the memory of the rivalry still existed in Ahmontekh’s mind. The stranger could take that seed of resentment, distort it and expand it, until nothing else occupied the Phaeron’s thoughts. While Ahmontekh was a skilled fighter and cunning strategist, his weakness was his lack of scientific knowledge. Like most Phaerons, Ahmontekh knew nothing of how technology actually worked, and therefore no way to stop anyone from subverting the functions of his mind. Ahmontekh would be made predictable and easy to destroy by his madness. The eldar considered any plan to destroy Ahmontekh to be a good idea, but they didn’t notice the stranger spoke such words with a heavy heart. Although they knew the stranger wanted Ahmontekh gone as much as they did, what they didn’t know is that Gahet of the Cabal had approached the Eldar Empire as a last resort, having previously tried to sway Ahmontekh to his cause with words instead of violence.

The foul deed was done and Ahmontekh’s mental state began to deteriorate. Rather than seek out and awaken his liege Szarekh, he became increasingly focused on finding the resting place of his hated rivals the Charnovokh Dynasty and destroy them once and for all. Knowing his hated rivals were located somewhere on the Eastern fringe, Ahmontekh’s army marched increasingly eastward, making their movements extremely telegraphed and easy to intercept. The eldar assumed he was killed in a bombardment, especially given his forces fell apart soon after his assumed death, but such was not the case. In one last display of sentimentality out of regret for his own actions, Gahet crippled Ahmontekh’s cybernetic body and spirited him away before his death. He placed the mad Phaeron in a stasis capsule and laid him to rest in the old tomb complexes of the Suhbekhar Dynasty, hoping that Ahmontekh could one day be awakened and healed of his madness at a time when the galaxy no longer had to conceive of war.

With the incapacitation of the triarch, rule of the Suhbekhar Dynasty fell to Ahmontekh’s son, Ahhotekh. In many ways, Ahhotekh is everything that his father was not. Instead of being a proud regent and warrior, he is a schemer, who prefers to dispose of his foes through intrigue and manipulation rather than brute force. Ahhotekh has even gone so far as to disdain those who gain power through brute force; while he has killed in his share of duels, he considers those who make a habit of it to be insufficiently imaginative to actively hold power and capable of little more than savagery. Ahhotekh spent much of the War of Heaven disposing of his rivals in convenient accidents and other such methods, including stoking the rivalry between the Suhbekhar and Charnovokh Dynasties. Indeed, before the biotransference, Ahhotekh was actively plotting to dispose of Ahmontekh, the only member of the Suhbekhar Dynasty who would dare consider raising their hand against the Phaeron, something that the control protocols put a stop to.

Fortunately, despite Ahmontekh’s incapacitation the control protocols were still in place, his insanity was not enough to cause the Suhbekhar Dynasty to break the will of the Silent King. However, this is cold comfort for Ahhotekh, who isn’t sure if the control protocols also protect him since his father is incapacitated, not dead. As a result, Ahhotekh is intensely paranoid and relentlessly persecutes his underlings for any perceived sign of betrayal. After all, he would do the same to them if their positions were reversed. It is unclear, but ironically possible, that the control protocols forbidding harm to their liege are the only thing preventing the Necrons of the Suhbekhar Dynasty from rising up and uniting as one to overthrow Ahhotekh.

However, no matter how much he wants to, there is something preventing Ahhotekh from disposing of his dear father. Ahmontekh saw something when he was awakened, something that few others alive in the galaxy today still remember. The Silent King wants that information out of Ahmontekh’s head, as any intelligence on the state of the galaxy since the Great Sleep could prove highly useful in realizing the Star Empire’s plans. At the same time, Ahhotekh wants the control protocols to secure control of the Suhbekhar Dynasty, and as long as the Silent King’s orders leave room for creative interpretation of his orders he is willing to pursue it. Nevertheless, examining Ahmontekh’s mind is a slow process, one that must be carried out piecemeal by thousands of Crypteks. Seeing too much of Ahmontekh’s mind at once tends to drive any Necron who sees it insane.

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=== Necron Titans (Stalkers) ===

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For many years, after the reemergence of the Necron Star Empire, there was considerable debate among Imperial scholars as to what a Necron Titan would look like. Many theorized that a Necron Titan would simply look like a giant Necron. Others hypothesized that the C’tan were the Necron’s equivalents of Titans, and after the War in Heaven the Necrons may have had no need for Titan-scale weaponry. This was all before the Necron-Imperium Conflict, that brief period in M40 when tensions between the Imperium and the Necrontyr Star Empire ran hot after the Silent King demanded a trillion subjects for biotransference experiments before settling into the quasi-cold war state that it has today. It was during this period that the Necrons brought out some of the heavy weapons they had to bear, and Imperial scholars learned they had been wrong. Completely, horribly, wrong.

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In contrast to nearly all other races, Necron Titans, or Stalkers, are distinctly non-humanoid, almost arachnid or insect-like in appearance. This is perhaps best exemplified by the most commonly seen Necron Stalker, the Tomb Stalker. Rather than standing upright on two large limbs, Tomb Stalkers support their weight via dozens of insectoid limbs, resembling Earth centipedes. These limbs are not only effective in carrying the construct’s weight, but also in burrowing through the ground and tearing through the armor plating of opposing vehicles and titans. This is true not only of the generic Warhound-sized Tomb Stalkers most commonly seen, but also of the larger Scolopendra class Tomb Stalkers, which can be the size of an Imperator Titan.

Compared to other Stalkers, Tomb Stalkers use little in the way of quantum shielding, which is thought to be the Necron’s answer to Void Shields. Instead, they use the very earth as their shield, burrowing beneath the ground in order to ambush their prey. In doing so, Tomb Stalkers are able to achieve something very few Titans are capable of performing: stealth. The effectiveness of the Tomb Stalker’s burrowing strategy became clear during the Necron-Imperium Conflict, when a Tomb Stalker burrowed a circle around an Imperator Titan before erupting from the ground, using the unstable substrate to drag the Imperial Titan and its Princeps to their grave.

Surprisingly enough, Tomb Stalkers are thought to be weaponized construction vehicles. Records obtained from the Imperium’s Necron contacts report that Tomb Stalkers were originally used in constructing the vast tomb complexes that the Necrons inhabited in their heyday. The Necrontyr apparently evolved on a world with blistering levels of stellar radiation, which would kill most lifeforms over an extended period of time. As a result, the only logical place to build cities on the Necrontyr homeworld was underground, resulting in an architectural style that resembled increasingly ornate bunker complexes. The Necrontyr found this architectural style to be highly effective in protecting against meteoroid strikes and orbital bombardments, even after they spread off their homeworld to planets less affected by radiation.

At the other end of the spectrum are the Crypt Stalkers, which resemble gigantic versions of the Terran daddy longlegs. The control center and weaponry are all mounted on the central body of the Crypt Stalker, allowing them to instantly change direction in response to new threats, even capable of rotating their heat rays 180 degrees and suddenly reversing direction without even having to turn. Crypt Stalkers have a sensory array which gives them a nearly 360 degree field of vision, and their long legs allow them to simply step over most obstacles in their path. Crypt Stalkers make much heavier use of void shielding, mainly because their small body and comparatively narrow legs would make them otherwise easy targets for anti-titan weaponry. Triarch Stalkers are similar to Crypt Stalkers, except are smaller with a distinct pilot (closer to tank-sized) and are not capable of omnidirectional movement. They compensate for this with huge melee appendages they can use as melee weapons.

It is still not entirely clear how Stalkers work. It is clear that Stalkers have some kind of intelligence, given their ability to react to changing conditions on the battlefield, but whether that consciousness is a pilot or intrinsic to the machine itself is unknown. The kneejerk assumption would be that Stalkers are operated by an uploaded Necron consciousness, or otherwise powered by a C’tan shard. However, evidence indicates that Tomb Stalkers were around in nearly their current form (minus the heavy weaponry) before the First Wars of Secession, given their use in carving out the underground complexes the Necrontyr called home, long before the Necrontyr had developed biotransferrence or discovered the C’tan. The current running hypothesis is that the Stalkers are controlled by some manner of artificial intelligence, similar to the Scarabs, Canoptek Wraiths, and Crypt Spyders, except on a much larger scale.

Nemesor Zandrekh is known to treat his personal Tomb Stalker like a beloved pet, but it is unknown if this is typical or just another one of the Nemesor’s…eccentricities.

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=== Independent and Imperial-aligned Dynasties ===

==== Nemesor Zahndrekh and the Gidrim Dynasty ====

See [[Nobledark Imperium Notes#Nemesor Zahndrekh|Nemesor Zahndrekh]] (TEMPORARY LINK)

==== Trazyn the Infinite and Solemnace ====

See [[Nobledark Imperium Notable Planets#Solemnace|Solemnace]]

==== Xun'Bakyr and the Maynarkh Dynasty ====

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Of all the independent Necron dynasties, the Maynarkh Dynasty is perhaps the biggest threat to the Imperium. Even as far back as the War in Heaven, the Maynarkh Dynasty were known for their brutality and cruelty, acting as the Silent King’s pet monsters and wetwork agents. This behavior was no different under the Maynarkh Dynasty’s last and latest Phaerakh: Xun’bakyr, the Mother of Oblivion. Eldar Harlequins speak of countless atrocities and genocides, all perpetrated by Necrons in glowing colors of brass and orange. Indeed, the brutality of Xun’bakyr and the Maynarkh Dynasty was so great that just before the Great Sleep several Phaerons, normally so subservient as to the point of indolence, approached the Silent King to suggest that the Silent King take steps to make sure Xun’bakyr…didn’t wake up from the Great Sleep. It is rather telling that the Silent King actually agreed with this proposal.

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The Silent King may have had more than one reason to try and kill off the Maynarkh Dynasty. Phaerarch Xun’bakyr was, to put it bluntly, infatuated with the Nightbringer. When the Silent King gave the order for the Drazak Dynasty to kill Llandu’gor the Flayer, he had to noticeably take precautions to avoid letting the information reach Xun’bakyr, given that any weapon that could conceivably be used against the object of her obsession would likely cause her to react poorly. Even when the C’tan were shattered and the Silent King ordered the Necrons to go into their long hibernation, the news was kept hidden from the Maynarkh Dynasty, who went to sleep still believing they were following orders from their C’tan overlords. The Silent King may have been able to directly override the free will of Xun’bakyr, but given her instability, he didn’t want to risk the chance of her slipping her leash.

The Maynarkh Dynasty was put in hibernation in their traditional lands, far on the other side of the galaxy from the core of the Star Empire in what would one day become the Orpheus Sector of the Segmentum Pacificus. This was a high-density stellar cluster filled with numerous stars, some of which were…encouraged to go supernova early with a little bit of help from the Oruscar Dynasty’s Celestial Orrery. The Silent King hoped that the constant bombardment of electromagnetic pulses from exploding stars would damage the Maynarkh Dynasty to the point that they would never wake up from the Great Sleep, or at the very least be so damaged that they could only awake into an addled half-life.

It didn’t work. Although the Maynarkh Dynasty was damaged, they still awoke from the Great Sleep along with everyone else. Xun’bakyr’s madness and obsession was, if anything, worsened by the damage from the Great Sleep, to the point that the Silent King could no longer assert any control over her. Xun’bakyr seemed to rapidly realize she had been deceived, having awoken in a time when the great immortal C’tan had either been killed or reduced to hiding and the Silent King was the one trying to give her orders.

Rapidly dismissing the ravings of the would-be king, Xun’bakyr realized that her dynasty now needed a new purpose. It didn’t take her long to come up with one. Xun’bakyr decided that the Maynarkh Dynasty would rededicate themselves to killing all life in the galaxy itself, a creative masterpiece of death and destruction that might even go so far as killing time itself, all to attract the attention of the Nightbringer and to demonstrate her affection for the object of her infatuation. She is rather oblivious to the fact that despite all his paraphernalia and death-associated trappings, the Nightbringer is mostly concerned with sating his own gluttony and power-lust and would rather like causality to keep existing (though in his own image of course).

Xun'bakyr is obsessive and meticulous, in the long term focused absolutely on her deadly Idol, in the short term honing and perfecting some novel variety of star eater, 4D ionized shrapnel projector, or reality-pin to nail down certain doom. Xun'bakyr isn't a large scale threat only because she is so narrow in the scope of her ambitions. Her armies march along in the wake of the Nightbringer dealing death, and her scouts proceed him demonstrating their queen's new horrors. A blow from one will often be followed by a blow from the other, and together they make a horrible local threat and disaster within a sector, but beyond an additional horror following the Nightbringer's aimless killing spree they are not strategically significant. Xun'bakyr's universe destroying plans coming to fruition is an existential threat, but one that is sadly insignificant compared to many others. Although the rest of the Maynarkh Dynasty generally does not share her obsessions, the dynasty had always been composed of the worst sort of sadists, psychopaths, and war criminals and so jump at the chance to kill people in new and creative ways.

The first overt sign of action by the Maynarkh Dynasty was when the stars of the Caracol binary system went supernova during between Blood Pact and Imperial Forces. Both groups considered it the first shots of a surprise attack by some unknown third party. What they didn’t know was that rather than a military action, it was the result of a weapons test from one of Xun’bakyr’s harebrained schemes. The slaughter that followed was mostly unrelated. Mostly, in that the Maynarkh Dynasty was involved, and there was slaughter, but it had nothing to do with the two stars they had made go nova. Today, the Orpheus sector is nearly lifeless, haunted only by ghosts and madmen and ruled by an even madder queen.

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=== Blanks and the Pariah Gene ===

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66,000,000 years ago, the aristocracy of the Necrontyr Star Empire had a problem. They were in danger of losing the War in Heaven. Although they had the might of the C’tan and the Dolmen Gates at their back, the war was growing increasingly bloody as the Old Ones threw uplifted species after uplifted species into the meat grinder. And despite the Necrontyr’s understanding of the material realm, the Old Ones had the raw power of the illogical, irrational realm of the Immaterium at their disposal, which the ancient amphibians were the virtual unchallenged masters of. The Necrontyr needed some way to neutralize that advantage.

Several Crypteks came up with one possible solution: genetically engineering Necrontyr soldiers and eventually the entire Necrontyr to have an inverted Warp signature, canceling out the immense psychic power of the Old Ones and their servant races. However, although such this plan was possible for the Necrontyr Star Empire, the empire’s aristocracy was uncomfortable with the idea for several reasons. First, it would require mass-cloning Necrontyr soldiers in the billions, and would effectively make their entire standing army (not to mention all living Necrontyr) obsolete. Additionally, and more importantly, although the Necrontyr’s rank and file would be safe from psychic attack, it did nothing to stop the Old Ones from decapitating the Star Empire’s leadership by simply assassinating the Triarchy. The Necrontyr aristocracy, in their vaunted superiority, didn’t think very highly of a plan that benefited future generations but didn’t benefit them. Ultimately, the plan was shut down and cast aside in favor of the idea of biotransference, the brain child of Mag’ladroth but presented to the Necrontyr aristocracy by Mephet’ran. However, not everyone forgot about the project. At least not Mephet’ran, the Deceiver, nor his shards that escaped containment in the millions of years after the end of the War in Heaven while the Necrons slumbered.

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Millions of years later, as humanity’s Great Crusade rediscovered numerous human worlds thought lost during the Age of Strife, they came across an interesting phenomenon. On many worlds, there were occasionally individuals that were not only immune to the touch the warp, but in many cases were capable of actively suppressing these effects. These individuals, who came to be known as blanks or pariahs, were always very rare in a population, often in ratios of billions to one, and almost always seemed to exist as outcasts or hermits, or at best lived in small isolated communes far away from any major population center. Further investigation found that these blanks, who ranging from Jenetia Krole of Sibar to the nightmarish blacksoul assassin Spear, gained their strange warp-suppressing powers from an even more unusual source, a complete lack of what would conventionally be called a soul.

Blanks work by emitting an inverted warp signature, rather than the positively charged soul of most species. Their inverted warp signature interacts with background positive warp signature of the universe like the union of matter and anti-matter, creating a null aura that cancels both signatures out and creates a zone of no warp signature, either negative or positive, at all. Normally blanks are capable of funneling the energy from this reaction to their own ends. However, unlike normal humans, blanks are capable of surviving being completely disconnected from the Warp as their bodies are adapted to exist in the null zone their inverted Warp signature normally produces. Although they have an inverted warp signature, the null aura they create means they effectively have no soul.

Being in contact with a blank’s null aura is not a pleasant experience, and the experience typically gets worse the more psychically sensitive an individual is. To psykers, having their connection to the Warp muffled by a blank’s null aura produces actual pain and a sensation which some have described, usually after they finish screaming, as “sensory deprivation of a sixth sense” or “a feeling akin to losing a limb”. Only extremely strong psykers are capable of overwhelming a blanks null aura with minimal effect, but the only psykers capable of something like that are being like Magnus the Red or the Emperor of Mankind. However, such negative effects are not only limited to psykers. Any being with a soul is instinctively capable of sensing the void that blanks represent, and the muffling of their soul leads to an uncanny valley effect and feelings of dread and existential despair. This uncanny valley effect manifests itself in different ways. In some it causes migrane headaches, while in others it leads to anxiety attacks, while in others it manifests as a hard to define but odious stench. More subtle behavioral alterations have been suspected as well. Although some blanks have learned to weaponized this null aura, in the days before null-collars this often made the life of a blank short and miserable.

After much research, ranging from psychological to metabiological, the Imperium was able to connect this soullessness and anti-Warp aura to a genetic factor, known as the pariah gene. The pariah seemingly makes no sense given what is known about genetics and metaphysical biology. Humans with the pariah gene are rare, to the point that one is lucky to find one individual with the pariah gene on a planet with a population of billions. Additionally, because of their aura, blanks have a hard time finding mates and therefore producing offspring. This means that if the pariah gene originated during the Age of Strife, its carriers should simply disappear from the population due to random chance and genetic drift. But they don’t. If the pariah gene were recessive, it is easy to see how the gene could remain hidden in the populace for generations, only occasionally producing blanks. But it isn’t. The pariah gene is dominant, with individuals with two copies known as blacksouls. At least some parts of the pariah gene appear to be genetic: it is heritable and is disproportionately more common in women than men, suggesting a link to the X-chromosome. But the fact that it appears seemingly at random throughout the population has led many to wonder if the pariah “gene” is actually multiple genes (a recessive gene to turn the effect on and off, and a dominant one to control the intensity), or if the actual pariah allele is a symptom, rather than a cause.

From a metaphysical perspective blanks and the pariah gene are no less strange. In theory, it should be possible to evolve from having a soul with a strong positive Warp signature to one with a negative Warp signature like a blank. Indeed, the Tau have a particularly low Warp signature, and have displayed significant resistance to Warp corruption (though at a cost of being relatively helpless when a particularly powerful Warp entity like a daemon decides to focus its attention on them). The ancient Necrontyr are believed to have been the same way. The problem with this hypothesis is it requires a species to pass through a stage with a warp signature of zero, meaning a body that is alive only at the cellular level with no sentience. The only way to get around this hurdle would be artificial means, a species with positive Warp signature engineering individuals with an inverted one, though other explanations have been suggested. The fact that the pariah gene independently appeared in populations that should have had no contact with each other during the Age of Strife, and only in humans (though Kroot blanks have also been produced through the usual ways in which the Kroot assimilate traits) has also made many suspicious, though few would disagree that an adaptation to shut out the Warp would prove useful for an age when the galaxy was in chaos (and in Chaos), and desperate attempts at genetic engineering for survival were rampant in the early days of the Age of Strife.

Many people in the Imperium were disturbed by the idea of people without a soul. The Navigators in particular, being a race of all psykers, were especially disturbed by the existence of blanks, believing they were an attempt by the rest of the Imperium to create a contingency plan to wipe them all out. The Nobilis Navigo tried to whip people into a frenzy to kill the blanks by playing on the unnatural dread blanks produced until the Steward and the other High Lords told the Paternoval Envoy point blank they weren’t going to persecute an entire group of people who were not warp-tainted just because they looked different, no matter how much the Navis Nobilite screamed, rather unsubtly hinting between the lines that any excuse the Navigators made to persecute the pariahs could be easily turned around to apply to the Navigators. Though, the Imperium’s reasonings for defending the pariahs were not made out of simple compassion. The Navigators and pariahs were both useful resources, and the Imperium needed every advantage it could get in those days. If that meant wielding fire and anti-fire in accord, so be it.

As might be expected, the eldar were also horrified at the idea of blanks. Due to being a psychic species, the idea of life in eldar culture had become inimically tied to the idea of having a soul. To the eldar, the idea of being alive and thinking yet without a soul was uncomfortably close to the idea of being undead or a philosophical zombie. The only things the eldar had as a cultural comparison were the Harlequin Solitaires, and those were artificially created, rather than born. The implications of what Solitares represented and how they were created only made things worse. Today, blanks are by far the most discriminated against group of humans by the eldar. One just doesn’t see it firsthand very often given both parties are unable to interact except over a vid-screen. Opinions and prejudices towards humans vary from Dorhai to Ulthwé, but blanks are always treated worse than normal humans. Even the most tolerant eldar still see them as tragic monsters, people who didn’t want to be born as abominations against the natural order but ended up that way regardless. Kind of like they do Solitaires (only replacing “freaks of nature” with “necessary evil”).

When they awakened from their sixty-six million year sleep, the Necron Star Empire were also interested in the blanks. In particular, they were extremely suspicious as to how a species could develop a feature that almost exactly resembled the old mothballed Necrontyr research project, down to some of the smallest details. Szarekh’s chief cryptek, Illuminor Szeras, is particularly interested in the blanks and the applications of the pariah gene. The idea of making specialized soldiers to use as mobilized suppression devices and hunter-killers against psykers and daemons is an idea too good to pass up.

The largest living population of Blanks can be found on Pluto and Charon, close enough for the Imperium to have its anti-Warp weaponry close at hand, but far enough away for them to not block the light of the Astronomican. Indeed, watching Pluto cross the Astronomican, like an exoplanet slightly dimming the light of a far-off star, is a popular activity for young Navigators, though the Paternova has issued warnings telling people not to stare directly into the light of the Astronomican. Because the colony’s true reason for existing is to continue to exist and keep producing blanks, in order to keep the population of Pluto and Charon occupied they have been given exclusive mining rights over anything in the Kuiper Belt or stray rocks in the Oort zone that they lay eyes on. Both Pluto and Charon have been hollowed out and built on to the point where they are now not recognizable. To anyone else looking it now just looks like a private space port with manufactory rigs and a small docking yard. It does appear on the official maps, but only because not doing so would be more suspicious. It's a "private enterprise" on the charts and not open to the public, with the official story being they were claimed by an early Rogue Trader (whose “dynasty” is actually a shell corporation for the Administratum). Life on Pluto and Charon is a terminally boring experience, though on the positive side at least its inhabitants no longer have to fear the possibility of being lynched.

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=== Wyverns ===

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The Void Dragon is not whole. Although perhaps 95% of the great Dragon lies half-buried beneath the surface of Mars, the Dragon still bears a number of old wounds, chunks of him torn off in the war with his kin. But the Void Dragon is a god, and gods do not bleed. Like all powerful entities in the universe, his lost essence was turned into shards, scattered across the cosmos.

Throughout time, history has spoken of encounters with strange metallic dragon-like creatures. These encounters are consistent enough that they cannot be simply dismissed out of hand, but are so maddeningly rare that it has been impossible to create a clear picture of exactly what these sightings represent. These creatures are generally referred to as Wyverns. However, to those few privy to the horrible secret of what lies buried underneath the surface of Mars, the identity of these beings is clear. Wyverns are shards of the Void Dragon.

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These shards somewhat resemble the Void Dragon, except they are more bestial looking (having only legs and a pair of wings and no arms, for example) and have no semblance of intelligence whatsoever. They are animalistic, only seeking to eat and survive and nothing else. It is not clear why these shards of the Void Dragon act so differently from their sire, as even similar-sized shards of the Deceiver or the Nightbringer show some level of intelligence. It is possible that the Dragon’s prison is somehow acting as a signal blocker, cutting the Wyverns off from the Void Dragon’s mind.

Only a few encounters with Wyverns have been well-documented. One involves the primarch Ferrus Manus. During unification of the planet Medusa, he learned about a creature the locals called Asirnoth that descended to prey upon the people of Medusa from its lair in the planet-encircling Telstarax. When Ferrus reported to the Mechanicum what the people of Medusa had told him, they were in shock and immediately informed him that he must dispatch this creature with all haste, giving the primarch permission to use the otherwise forbidden holy archaeotech relics aboard his ship. Three maniples of Iron Hands Skitarii accompanied Ferrus Manus into the lair of the beast, but less than a dozen came out. The battle was hard-fought, but by the end of the battle the primarch managed to strike down the wyvern and bind it within the strange archaeotech device. Ferrus Manus never knew exactly what he fought, but the high Magi of the Adeptus Mechanicus said he had performed a great service for the Mechanicum, and so Ferrus felt satisfied by his actions.

The Steward also fought one. Once.

It was an unexpected fight on what was supposed to be an otherwise peaceful world. Granted, the Steward had the upper hand for much of that fight, the issue was that no matter how many times the Steward would smite the wyvern it would simply rise again, ready to continue the fight. The creature was eventually defeated when the Steward staggered the beast with a particularly powerful blow and a Mechanicus adept sealed it in its inert state using a strange device that no one had ever seen before. When the Steward asked what the creature was, the adept evaded the question by claiming it was piece of archaeotech, which could only be deactivated by another piece of archaeotech the Mechanicus normally forbade the use of (which was technically true). Stranger things made by the hands of men had been found at that time in the Great Crusade, and at that time there was no reason to suspect there was anything unusual about the metal beast.

Another noteworthy feature about these creatures is that they seem to be impervious to normal means of harm, rising over and over again from seemingly lethal injuries. As a result, stories about these creatures tend to feature particularly innovative ways of incapacitating or imprisoning them. Burying them alive in lava is a popular option.

The Void Dragon somehow knows about the Wyverns despite his imprisonment, to no one’s surprise, and has repeatedly asked the Adeptus Mechanicus where those shards of him are. It is not clear if the Void Dragon truly does not know the exact location of his shards, or if he is merely reminding the Adeptus Mechanicus that they exist and the Mechanicus do not have complete control over him. Some among the Order of the Dragon have theorized that the Wyverns are somehow necessary to free the Void Dragon from its non-Euclidean chains, a prison that can only be unlocked by the prisoner. This is an idea that no one is particularly interested in testing.

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== Dark Eldar ==

=== Asdrubael Vect ===

See [[Nobledark_Imperium_Notable_People#Asdrubael_Vect|Asdrubael Vect]]

=== Reri Hesperax ===

[[Image:cybrid_assassin.jpg|thumb|One of many different versions of what the cybrid can look like. The only flesh to exist on her body is on her head and the skin of her torso.]]

Illucis Grizvaldi, following his emergency Warp jump to escape Imperial forces, was stranded on an unknown planet within Ultima Segmentum when Lelith Hesperax found him. Or rather the Dark Eldar agents that found him. When approached by these agents to be commissioned for the creation of a living weapon or risk starving to death in the middle of nowhere, he refused to work for Lelith unless they allowed his remaining disciples be taken with him.

After coming to an agreement, the heretek along with his cult was taken back to Commorragh to being his finest creation. The treacherous Dark Eldar politics have caused the famous Succubus for an insurance along with a weapon for her own personal use outside of the city. It began with taking the embryo from Lelith to have it grow in a vat. Once the child was fully developed with accelerated aging to around 17, her ears and limbs were cut off. Citing the need to install cybernetics along with ridding of the typical hypersensitive Eldar weaknesses located on the feet, hands, and ears. Machines built for utility, enhanced movement and hunting were integrated into the girl's body over time, as she was trained while brainwashed into the blind obedience of Lelith.

Given the codename "Reri", then allowed to adopt the last name Hesperax, she was made for tracking and assassination of all Lelith's rivals outside of Commorragh. Illucis whispered some unknown words to Lelith before leaving, those words would be the killswitch for the cybernetics on Reri if the machines ever picked up the vibrations of those words. Not to mention the explosives built into the limbs that would probably kill Reri. In the 41st Millenium however, Reri has gone on to kill some diverse targets that only a lucky few have survived against her. Some Dark Eldar goes so far as to think she could take on killing any member of the Imperial Family although this is extreme stupidity or arrogance talking.

Without the ears, Reri could either install specialized equipment or synthetic ears for infiltration as an Abhuman. The limbs have also been heavily modified to always have motion sensors, vox comms, powerful magnetics, and survival tools like a knife or lockpicks. they can also be outfitted with built-in weapons and tracking instruments. This was all done while adding durability to have them be tougher than Eldar bone without sacrificing the mobility.

Some say that her appearance is eerily similar to that of a Human with the right limbs and ears, creating another conspiracy theory saying the Impossible Child was already built by the Dark Eldar. Although few subscribe to this theory, it has been given exposure following the assassination of an Inquisitor in Sol right after the 12th Black Crusade. There are also some within the Imperial government who suspect Reri interfered with Legienstrasse's development, although it is unknown how much she was involved. One thing was certain, however, Reri was tracking down Legienstrasse when the Imperials found the renegade assassin. With increasingly erratic behavior after The Wedding, Lelith worries about sending Reri away as the chance of her going rogue also increase.

=== The Ilmaea ===

<div class="toccolours mw-collapsible mw-collapsed" style="100%">'''''The Blackened Heart of Commorragh'''''

At the heart of Commorragh are the Ilmaea (lit. black sun/stolen sun), the twin suns that power the Dark City. Commorragh could accurately be described as a set of dual Dyson spheres, two spherical outgrowths of the Webway stacked one on top of the other (Upper and Lower Commorragh, respectively), each with an Ilmaea at their center. Each star artificially crushed to the size of a red dwarf by the Old Eldar Empire at the height of their power using technology now since lost. Because of the technology used to shrink their size, the Ilmaea also have an extremely long expected life span, comparably to that of an actual red dwarf. Although Commorragh was originally founded as a Webway port and became a haven for the Old Empire’s rich and famous before becoming what it is now, it also performs a remarkably good job as a disaster shelter. In theory, one could outlast the end of the universe inside Commorragh.

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Approximately 1640000 years ago, the Old Eldar Empire went to war with and defeated an unknown, now-extinct alien species. This was not an uncommon event in eldar history, every few million years or so an external threat would arise that would actually threaten the supremacy of the Children of Isha. Sometimes these enemies were resurgent Brain Boyz, sometimes they were extra-galactic or extra-dimensional species like the architects of the Harrowing, and sometimes they were simply native Milky Way races, occasionally fellow children of the Old Ones, that bit off more than they could chew. At first the eldar fought these wars based on the half-remembered wishes of the Old Ones, believing themselves to be safeguarding the existence and self-determination of their fellow sentients, but at some point things took a darker turn.

According to legend, the race that fought the eldar 1.6 million years ago had been a true threat to the galaxy, believing themselves to have a manifest destiny over the Milky Way. The eldar beat the would-be galactic conquerors back to their binary-star home system and then, as punishment for their hubris, stole their two suns, leaving the species to scream in anguish as they slowly froze to death in the darkness. It is uncertain how justified the actions of the eldar were, given their tendency to self-glorify and distort their own history, but the accounts of the Black Library (which are considered to be less biased) do seem to support the idea that the species . However, the fact that they were willing to resort to such draconian means of ensuring their dominance, destroying an entire biosphere of an already defeated foe, already showed the rot seeping into the heart of the Old Empire.

In the years after the seizure of the Ilmaea and their placement as trophies within the biggest Webway port of Commorragh, the Ilmaea became an important symbol in eldar society. The Ilmaea became seen as a symbol of eldar righteousness, an indicator of how the chosen of the Old Ones and Asuryan could do no wrong. Depictions of the Ilmaea became common in Old Empire art, and many wealthy Sidhe lords sought to have Ilmaea of their own. Most were artificial mock-ups made of fusion reactions, but a few were real, stolen from life-bearing systems to complete the symbolism. The Old Empire at least had a fig-leaf of justification for confiscating the original Ilmaea. The nobles…did not. The Craftworlders and Exodites do not think highly of the Ilmaea, considering them a symbol of the Old Empire’s hubris of the highest magnitude.

Each of the Ilmaea are modulated to give off the perfect amount of light and heat to the surface of Commorragh below, giving them a sinister black color when viewed through solar filters. This allows Commorragh to be kept habitable for life without the need of expensive artificial blinds. There is no day or night cycle on Commorragh, only a perpetual twilight, the time when light still exists despite the coolness of the oncoming night…and also the exact time when the shadows are longest and predators find it the easiest to hide. The similarities have not gone unnoticed.

Although the technology to create the Ilmaea has since been lost, the technology to keep the stolen suns modulated still exists. The size and intensity of the stars has been ever so slightly tweaked over the years to balance growth as the Webway pockets of various Kabals have been stitched into Commorragh. Indeed, if the containment were ever to fail, the stars would most likely violently expand back to their former size. The Lord of Commorragh, Asdrubael Vect, has used this to his advantage at one point, deliberately dropping the shielding on one section of the Ilmaea to scour an entire district of Commoragh clean in order to burn one infamous rebellion to the ground, sending a message to all of Commorragh of the sword of Damocles Vect has hanging over their heads.

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=== The New Men ===
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Fabius Bile, mad geneticist of Commorragh and personal vizier of Asdrubael Vect, is known for a great many things. Reverse engineering of the Mark III MP geneseed to provide the Fallen with a ready supply of new recruits. Concocting combat drugs that make the most potent medications of the Imperium look like aspirin. Creations of horrors for the highest bidder that make even the other inhabitants of the Dark City have a minor reaction of disgust. Most consider these acts vile abominations committed solely for the amusement of a twisted mind. Fabius Bile considers them parlor tricks done to pay the rent.

Fabius Bile’s actual goals, the ones he actually puts his heart and soul into, tend to be much more grandiose. He wants to be remembered for something beyond simply being the ringmaster of his own personal freakshow. He wants to create something that will far outlast however long he exists in this galaxy.

He wants to bring back the Men of Gold.

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In Fabius Bile’s mind, humanity’s mistake isn’t that mankind created the Men of Gold, it is that mankind did not become the Men of Gold. Mankind during the Dark Age of Technology had the ability to create their own demi-gods, and yet they squandered this opportunity to merely create liasons between themselves and the Iron Minds. The Eldar are no better. Bile knows of the history of the Eldar from the Haemonculi of Commoragh. He knows how the Eldar were once little different from mankind or the Tau, before being uplifted by the Old Ones and then genetically engineered by their own hand. But then the Eldar stopped. They were on the verge of making themselves a race of gods, and then they stopped. The time it took them to reach even that state is also unimpressive to Bile. Whereas it took the Eldar millennia to engineer themselves into their modern state, Bile claims that a suitably intelligent and properly motivated individual could do it in centuries.

Fabius Bile’s most recent endeavor, the personal project that has shown the greatest amount of success, is the creation of the so-called New Men. Bile proclaims these New Men to be to humanity what the modern Eldar are to their ancient ancestors, the missing link between man and the Men of Gold. The New Men are all latent psykers, grow to adulthood in a fraction of the time of baseline humans, and are deliberately engineered to have a 100% compatibility rate with Astartes gene-seed. But Bile isn’t satisfied with merely recreating the Men of Gold. He wants to make something better. To this end, he has spliced in genes from creatures all over the galaxy, in the purpose of making the New Men the perfect lifeform. Compared to the average human being, the New Men are stronger, almost impervious to pain, immune to many poisons, and capable of surviving in environmental conditions that normal humans would simply die.

However, in spite of all this, for some reason Bile’s New Men inevitably turn out…wrong. The New Men invariably lack any sense of empathy or social etiquette. They are not psychopathic, nor sociopathic, but the only beings they ever seem to reliably show a connection to are their fellow New Men. It is for these reasons that the Fallen refuse to take New Men as recruits, despite a 100% compatibility rate with Astartes gene-seed. In addition, the New Men always end up with leucism or albinism, with pale grey skin the color of a corpse and translucent veins running just under their skin. It is not clear why the New Men end up this way. It cannot be due to their creation, as there are many humans in the Imperium that are grown in-vitro and yet turn out to be perfectly adjusted adults. It cannot be due to their upbringing, as even New Men raised by surrogate families still turn out the same way. It is almost as though the souls of the New Men somehow know they were grown from spliced cells cultivated from dead bodies, unwillingly implanted into the surrogate wombs of terrified prisoners.

Although Fabius Bile is frustrated by these setbacks, he is not perturbed. He knows these flaws are something he will manage to fix…eventually. As to the failed batches, Bile has no problem lending them out to the Dark Eldar or the Crone Worlders as front-line combatants so that someone might get some use out of them, only requesting that he retain a few specimens for dissection and breeding purposes.

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== Tyranids ==

=== The Swarmlord ===

See [[Nobledark Imperium Notable People#The_Swarmlord|The Swarmlord]]

=== The Leviathan of Sotha ===

The Leviathan of Sotha is a miracle of history. Preserved through a chance fluke, the Imperium has learned more about tyranids from this vessel than it has from dozens of minor skirmishes. During the Battle of Sotha in the First Battle for Ultramar between the Imperium and Hive Fleet Behemoth, one of the planet’s surface to orbit guns shot down a tyranid Hive Ship near the planet’s moon. The Hive Ship crash-landed on the nearby moon, where it died of what was either the tyranid equivalent of a broken spine or massive internal organ damage. The total vacuum of the moon prevented the outer surface of the hive ship from decaying, either from external microbes or the tyranid microfauna contained within, and so much of the carcass remains as pristine as the day it died.

This is not to say the Hive Ship is harmless. The decaying leviathan has enough gas in its guts from decomposition to form a makeshift atmosphere, and so tyranid organisms occasionally arise from within the bowels of the dead monster and have to be cleared out in order for research to be conducted safely. Some tyranids will occasionally escape from the hive ship and try to survive on the moon’s surface. All tyranid lifeforms can survive in vacuum for a short period of time, but even the hardiest tyranid organisms will deplete their oxygen reserves and die after prolonged periods of activity in hard vacuum. Therefore, the Inquisition maintains a constant security force around the Hive Ship at all times. However, the ships reserve carnifexes and hive tyrants were all killed off centuries ago, and the ship only has enough biomass to spare for small tyranid organisms, such as hormagaunts and termagaunts. Over the years, the tyranid organisms that emerge from the hive ship have been able to survive longer and longer in hard vacuum, but so far none have been able to evolve a complete independence from the oxygen that all organisms need.

One of the first things the Ordo Xenos did when it claimed the hive ship was try to determine its age. First, they tried to determine the age of the tyranid hive ship via carbon dating. It failed. It was only when the research team realized that if the tyranids were eating planets, they had to have been taking up radioactive isotopes from the organisms and crust of the planet they were eating, and so it should be possible to use dating methods more typically used for ancient rocks on the hive ship.

The analysis determined that the hive ship, as in that hive ship in particular, was over five million years old. The margin of error for said age estimate was older than human civilization.

=== Genestealers ===

'''See Also:''' [[Nobledark_Imperium_Writing#Inquisitorial_Report:_AZURE_IRON_WASP|Inquisitorial Report: AZURE IRON WASP]]

=== Ymgarl Genehounds ===

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When the Adeptus Biologicus analyzed tyranid specimens for the first time, they found all sorts of things they shouldn’t have. Genetic sequences and biochemical signatures otherwise unique to lifeforms on Fenris, Catachan, and numerous other worlds in the Imperium. There were even sections of genetic material that seemed to come from Orks and the Eldar. The bio-priests were at a loss to explain how such a motley of genes could be present in a single creature, until a new tyranid bioform was discovered far from the front lines of the tyranid invasion.

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Originally thought to be natural wildlife native to the moons of Ymgarl, these creatures were first discovered by the Imperium at about the same time as the genestealers in M36. However, sightings of these creatures were soon reported across the galaxy, supposedly caused by the creatures stowing away in space hulks and the holds of spacecraft. There was concern about the similarities between these creatures and “classic” genestealers, but the Imperium was never able to find a connection between the two. Genestealer activity did not follow in these creatures wake, and even their supposedly simultaneous discovery was in actuality more than two hundred years apart. And so the Imperium turned its attention away from the Ymgarl creatures. It was understandable, this was late M36, the peak of the Genestealer Wars, and the Imperium had more pressing issues to learn about. However, with the appearance of the first true tyranid Hive Fleets in the form of Behemoth, the Adeptus Biologicus decided to take another look at the Ymgarl creatures. And they turned out to be something else entirely.

These creatures, which later came to be renamed genehounds, resemble a cross between lictor and a purestrain genestealer. This suggests that genehounds may be a cross-breed between the two, or at the very least share genes with these bioforms. Like lictors and purestrains, genehounds have a much more complex nervous system than most tyranid bioforms, allowing them a higher degree of independent thought and the ability to function for extended periods of time away from synapse creatures of the Hive Mind. They are certainly intelligent enough to use spaceships and space hulks as a means to spread throughout the galaxy. However, whereas lictors and genestealers were meant to be sappers and beacons for the Hive Fleets, these creatures were something else entirely. Hunters. Hounds of the Hive Mind.

The motus operandi of a genehound is simple. First, the genehound locates a target. Another effect of the genehound’s increased intelligence is that a genehound is smart enough to target species with novel genetic features. This target can be as harmless as a squig or as dangerous as a Catachan Devil. Then, the genehound rushes forward in an explosive burst of speed to take its sample. The mouth of a genehound resembles a lamprey or a cookiecutter shark, a spiral ring of teeth designed to shear chunks of flesh from its targets and a piston-like tongue with a serrated tip built to make incisions and drink their bodily fluids. This allows a genehound to easily obtain a genetic sample of the organism for the Hive Mind, or feed itself in the long intervals between action. Its task completed, the genehound makes its way back to the Hive Fleet to be reabsorbed, bringing its genetic trophy with it.

Unlike other bioforms, the Hive Mind does not go out of its way to track down genehounds. To do so would be to expose the ruse, as happened when the Imperium discovered the true nature of genehounds and ordered them killed on sight. The genehounds had not managed to hit every system of note in the galaxy, but they had hit enough to give the Hive Mind access to some choice adaptations. When the Biologicus realized what these creatures were they were horrified by the implications. The tyranids hadn’t just been scouting the galaxy for millennia. They had been raiding its genetic armory.

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== Xenos Independens ==

=== Hrud ===

==== Hrud ====

<div class="toccolours mw-collapsible mw-collapsed" style="100%"> '''''Those Who Linger:'''''

The Hrud are quintessential Xenos Independens. On the one hand, they hate the Necrons, fear Chaos, and are just as threatened by tyranids (particularly genestealers) as everyone else. Just about the only enemies of the Imperium the Hrud tolerate are the Orks and that is because Hrud juunlaks find it just as easy to live on the outskirts of Ork camps as they do Imperial cities. On the other hand, the Hrud clearly have their own agenda, can’t seem to organize themselves well enough to negotiate for inclusion into the Imperium, and are nearly impossible to get to swear by Imperial laws and boundaries. In spite of, or perhaps because, the Hrud have one of the best long-term memories of any species in the galaxy, [[Kender|they have the attention span and respect for boundaries of a house cat]]. A common saying in the Imperium goes: “You can get a Hrud to do just about anything. Once.”

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The biology of the Hrud is strange, even by the standards of the Imperium. Rather than being supported by their limbs, Hrud bodies are attached to a fixed point in the fabric of space-time, from which the Hrud's body and legs hang from like clothes on a hanger. The Hrud don't so much walk as pull or pull their stationary point in space-time along using their arms. Hrud have a hydrostatic musculature and can compress their bodies to a width of less than 30 cm, allowing them to fit through virtually any hole larger than a human thigh. Combined with their limited ability to fold the fabric of space-time, this allows them to worm their way through openings and passages which you wouldn’t normally expect a creature of their size to fit, even fitting through closed doorways if they aren’t properly sealed.

Hrud are all natural psykers, however the form that their psychic powers take is somewhat different from the rather straightforward usage seen in humans and Eldar. Hrud are capable of masking their presence from other species through the use of a psychic perception filter and a strange ability to bend light and space-time, to the point that a Hrud was once reported to have been able to hide from observers in plain sight while in a white-walled, well-lit room. However the amount of effort it takes for a Hrud to hide from the perception of others is heavily dependent on the environment (i.e., a dark place is much easier to hide in than a bright one) and on the species the Hrud is trying to fool. For humans and tau, it is easily possible to fool them into thinking a passing Hrud is just a trick of the shadows. By contrast, Eldar and tarellians, whose brains are organized a little differently, take more effort to fool, especially Eldar who also have psychic senses at their disposal.

The Hrud are also capable of emitting a combination of a miasma of airborne toxins and an entropic field, which they call the ssaak. It is thought that the ssaak was always present to some degree in the Hrud as a natural defense mechanism and the entropic field was part of the modifications made to the species by the Old Ones. The ssaak is always present to some degree, but becomes extremely prominent if the Hrud in question is stressed out or threatened. Unfortunately, being a nocturnal species with a species-wide case of agoraphobia, the Hrud are almost always stressed out to some degree. Long-term exposure to the ssaak is not advised, as it can cause nausea, sedation, physiological dependence, and premature aging. On the rare occasions in which the Hrud do manage consistently interact with other species on a long-term basis, they often build encounter suits to contain the ssaak to keep other people from getting sick.

Hrud are capable of combining their ssaak fields, which at their most extreme extent can form a temporal warp-rift singularity which can devastate their foes. More than once an invading force has attacked a settlement, only to be driven back by the enraged Hrud galvanized from below the city. This phenomenon can either be beneficial or harmful to the Imperium. On the one hand you have cases like Dulcinea, where during the 12th Black Crusade the population of Hive Strigis was massacred by Chaos warbands, only to rouse the ire of the Hrud population living in the city’s underhive who dropped a singularity on their heads. At the same time you have cases like Haakoneth, the former homeworld of the Star Phantoms, which in 103.M40 came under attack the fleet of an Ork Freeboota Klan. The Star Phantoms destroyed the attacking Ork fleet, but unfortunately this provoked the Hrud colony that had been living in the bowels of the Freeboota ships, who immediately embarked on a Peh-ha to find a new home. The resulting Hrud migration dragged a singularity with it to the surface of Haakoneth, which between the Hrud and the Orks forced the Star Phantoms and the population of Haanoneth to retreat and abandon the planet.

The Imperium first encountered the Hrud in M30, during the later years of the Great Crusade. At this time, humanity and Eldar were on good terms with one another, but this was only shortly after the Raid and the levels of trust between the two groups wasn’t as well established as it would be in later years. The Hrud were, at the time of the Imperium's discovery of them, confined to a single world. It is thought that they had been confined to their homeworld by the Old Eldar Empire, who had apparently been willing to reduce the Hrud from an interstellar power but weren’t prepared to actually exterminate them due to their shared history (or possibly indirect intervention from the Eldar gods). After the Fall of the Eldar, the Hrud remained on their world, either because they were afraid of retaliation from the Eldar, no longer had the knowledge to produce spacecraft, or possibly because they were afraid doing so would violate the last commandment and warning of their god. And so the Hrud remained quarantined. Until the Iron Warriors found them.

In 734.M30, the Iron Warriors had just finished unified what would become the future Hive World of Stratopolae. The planet’s infrastructure was sound, but if it was to thrive it needed a devoted bread basket. Long range telescopes showed a habitable planet within a few lightyears of the planet, which would have made an ideal Agri-World. Shortly before the Iron Warriors, including a young Barabas Dantioch, were ready to leave the system, they were contacted by the Eldar. The Eldar implored the Iron Warriors not to go to that system, telling them that it was home to a dangerous xenos lifeform that their ancestors had quarantined millennia ago. The Iron Warriors blew them off, believing it was merely a lie spun by the Eldar to conceal the fact that there was something of value on the planet and the Eldar thought the Iron Warriors were gullible enough to believe it.

The Iron Warriors exited the Warp in a system with one notable world in its habitable zone. The world itself was mostly earth-like, and seemed to be uninhabited though showed clear signs of former occupation. The Iron Warriors were pleased about this, the expedition had been more than worth it as this world was ideal for an Agri-World. They didn’t know why the Eldar were so interested in the system but the knife-ears could go space themselves if they thought they could give orders to humanity.

The Iron Hands landed their craft near what was the only visible artificial structure from orbit, a skyscraper-like building that looked like one of Perturabo’s creations crossed with a very grungy bee hive. They sat outside their craft for several days waiting for someone, anyone, to make contact with them before they decided to make the first move. One of the crew thought they saw something over on a nearby mountain range but later chalked it up to a mirage. Leaving their ship behind, the Iron Warriors marched down empty roads into a ghost city. Entering the city, they realized what they thought were heavily degraded structures were actually buildings of xenos design. Still, the city seemed empty, and if the planet was uninhabited they could still set up an Agri-World there. The only potential sign of life were occasional signs of movement in their peripheral vision but as their armor’s sensors kept reading inconsistent extra-spectrum signatures they put it down to a mild glitch caused by the strange environment. For nearly two days the Iron Warriors wandered around the city getting increasingly agitated by the phantom sightings before they actually saw anyone.

In what looked like a market square the Imperial Emissary and his Iron Warrior guards finally found someone to talk to. A hunched figure in tattered hooded robes holding a stick with a bit of cloth on it that might have been a standard flanked by four similarly attired individuals. No part of the creatures were visible. At this point the Iron Warriors realized there was a problem. They had thought the world was uninhabited, but it was now clear that it was very inhabited by a xenos species. Standard procedure for interacting with an unknown xenos species during the Great Crusade was to observe and them attempt to make contact from as close to the system’s Mandeville Point as possible. If the species was friendly, politely extend the bare minimum of courtesy and leave as soon as possible. If the species was territorial or too primitive to make contact, leave it alone. If the species tried to follow the fleet back and attack, destroy them. The point of such contact was to survey potential threats to humanity, ideally from lightyears away. And yet here the Iron Warriors were meters from a xenos lifeform.

To their credit, the Imperial Emissary and the Iron Warriors tried to make the best of the situation. After initial difficulties in establishing communication (the lead figure able to speak something that vaguely resembled Eldar High Speech), the Emissary and the lead figure, who introduced itself as a Hrud, exchanged pleasantries and initiated introductions. It already being late in the day the Emissary asked if they could continue this conversation tomorrow and in a knee-jerk reflex asked if the figures wanted to meet aboard their ship. After a moment of thought, the lead figure agreed, and the Imperial party returned to the ship to report their findings. The next day the Imperial Emissary and the Iron Warriors came down to the square they found it was empty. The Iron Warriors wandered around the empty city several times, looking for the mysterious figures. It's not until the fifth trip that they realize that they are no longer seeing movement in the corners of their eyes. The world felt strangely empty now.

At this time the Eldar, having seen their initial attempt to warn the Iron Warriors rebuffed, decided to send a message directly to the throne. The Steward took these concerns seriously and sent a message to Perturabo, but Perturabo, who at the time was too busy overseeing the construction of fortress hives to micromanage every expeditionary fleet of his legion, sent half-hearted warning letters to the expeditionary force who took the concerns under advisement.
The Iron Warriors decided to leave the planet, between the warning, the strange visions, and the encounter in the marketplace, the planet was getting too weird for their liking. On the voyage back to the forgeworld some of the crew in the lower decks start to see flickering in the edge of their vision, but decided it was most likely a bit of dust in the air filters again and didn’t report it. Then the phenomenon starts appearing on Stratopolae when they get back. Then it is retroactively noted on several outgoing cargo hauler coming out of Stratopolae over the next several months. The investigation afterwards confirms what many suspected. Somehow the entire Hrud civilization managed to fold themselves up and hop onto the Iron warriors ship. Now the Hrud are abroad in the Imperium. The Eldar, having increasingly made noise all this time, now refused to comment, believing the results of the ill-fated expedition spoke for themselves.

The Iron Warriors, being military engineers, felt they could easily rectify the situation, but trying to contain the Hrud was like trying to make a river flow uphill and after a valiant campaign they found they just simply couldn’t put the genie back in the bottle. In addition, between the general chaos caused by large-scale Hrud migrations and the cornered Hrud lashed out in self-defense, many Iron Warriors were killed or crippled. Barabas Dantioch in particular was prematurely aged to the point he was recalled from active service and put on garrison duty out of concerns for his health despite being only 200 years old. While on garrison duty, Dantioch gained an interest in Eldar culture and history, having recalled their warning before the expedition, showing a particular interest in the architecture of the Webway.

Surprisingly, the expected retaliation from the Hrud never came. Once the campaign by the Iron Warriors the Hrud seemed content to retreat into the shadows. The Imperium has tried to negotiate with the Hrud in the same way it has with numerous other Xenos races, particularly in the hopes of bringing some order to the Hrud’s seemingly random pattern of migrations. It hasn’t really worked out. Although they live in a tribal society organized into clans, Hrud clans tend to have a hard time interacting and negotiating with Imperial diplomats, both due to the ssaak and their poor concept of time. Instead, they tend to live on the fringes of society in their juunlaks. The Hrud never officially joined the Imperium and are technically trespassers. But they aren't too troublesome or obtrusive and so they never became classified as Xenos Horridus. They steal things and leech power from Imperial systems, but usually no more than they need and only if they cannot obtain it on their own. The Hrud generally just kind of hide in the corners of places and occasionally steal sandwiches and make strange things out of scrap. Yes the Hrud have gotten to some of the Craftworlds. No the Eldar are not happy about it.

Hrud relationships with Imperial citizens are mixed. Imperial citizens sometimes trade with the Hrud or hire them, but most Hrud tend to be too unreliable to hire for consistent jobs. On the one hand, Hrud have been known to go out of their way to protect non-Hrud from the Umbra, a bizarre race of shadowy Warp creatures that are often, but not always, found in association with Hrud. However, on the other hand, in absolute worst case scenarios the have been known to kidnap Imperial citizens and turn them into zanhaads, slave-pets addicted to their bodily chemicals. When this happens something has to be done, kidnapping Imperial citizens crosses a line and the Hrud have to be dealt with, no matter how loathsome it is. This distaste is not simply out of moral quandaries. Fighting against Hrud is a nightmare, as cleaning out a juunlak involves going down in to the deep, dark underhives where the Hrud are in their element. The ssaak is everywhere and with all the shadows a Hrud can be within a few feet of you and you wouldn’t know it until they ambush you.

Although the Hrud typically prefer to buy, borrow, or steal weapons, they are more than capable of making their own. Despite their primitive appearance, Hrud actually have quite a bit of knowledge of advanced technology and are capable of making or reverse-engineering weapons out of scrap. The most commonly seen Hrud-made firearms are the Hrud fusils, which are not quite rifles yet not quite shotguns (the weapon has a narrower spread than a rifle, but do have a spread and the barrel is not grooved) that are typically held like gauntlets and fire Warp-laced plasma which use the Warp to bypass armor and other solid objects. The ability of a Hrud fusil to pass through solid objects is not unlimited, but these weapons are more than capable of passing through several inches of shielding and in some cases are able to shoot through cover to hit someone on the other side. However, one downside to Hrud fusils compared to lasweapons and stubbers is that it takes a significant amount of time (anywhere from half a second to a few seconds) for the weapon to recharge after each volley.

Another sticking point between the Hrud and the Imperium involves genestealers. As denizens of the underhives, the Hrud are threatened by genestealer infestation as much as anyone, and are more acutely aware of what goes on in the underhive than possibly any other group. The Hrud often know who the genestealers are before the Imperium does. More than once an otherwise peaceful Hrud juulak has seemingly gone on an unprovoked rampage and massacred specific families down to the last individual, only for it to be discovered after Imperial retaliation that the Hrud had been wiping out a genestealer cult that no one had realized existed.

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==== Qah ====

<div class="toccolours mw-collapsible mw-collapsed" style="100%"> '''''The Lord of Shadows:'''''

Unlike the Eldar and many other species uplifted by the Old Ones, the Hrud are monotheists (possibly because they didn’t have the population or psychic power to create multiple gods), worshipping a shadow deity called Qah. The Hrud respected the Eldar Gods, referring to them as Slah-haii ([[Nobledark_Imperium_Imperial_Society_and_Culture#The_Etymological_Legacy_of_the_Old_Ones|most mighty/ancient, a term they also used to refer to the Old Ones in the past]]), but the Eldar gods were not Hrud, Qah was. In addition to shadows, Qah is also seen as a god of Hrud values, including community, morality, and conscience. Although it might not be immediately obvious why a shadow deity would be seen as a paragon of moral values, it makes perfect sense to the nocturnal or crepuscular Hrud. Shadows are reflections of the self. Everyone has a shadow, and your shadow sees everything that you do. In Hrud religion, your shadow is where your conscience comes from, and all consciences have a connection back to Qah.

Grand Empress Isha, for her part, is very interested in the reports of the Hrud still worshipping Qah. She remembers Qah, who fought alongside the Eldar gods just like the mortal hrud fought alongside the Eldar in the War in Heaven. Qah got along okay with the Eldar gods, but being a god of Hrud values and therefore community and Isha being a goddess of nature and friend to all living things, the two of them got along considerably better than Qah did with the other members of the Eldar pantheon. Isha secretly hopes that Qah is still out there somewhere, if only to have someone else around to talk to who remembered the War in Heaven and the days before the Fall, even if it wasn’t an Eldar. Isha would be devastated to know what really happened.

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Shortly before the Old Eldar Empire gave birth to Slaanesh, Qah realized what was going on and realized that Slaanesh being born would mean devastation for not only the Hrud, but also for the Eldar and every race in the Milky Way galaxy. Having realized the gravity of the situation, he gathered the Hrud and told them what they needed to do to survive. In those days the Hrud built real cities and were unafraid of going out in the daylight, though at their heart they were always a nocturnal and opportunistic species. Qah told them they had to focus on those natural tendencies. They had to become so hidden, so beneath notice, that no one would ever bother or hurt them. His last command was a single word. He told the Hrud to hide. To survive. To linger. Having given his people the best guidance he could, he steeled himself and joined the battle against an alien god on behalf of the deities he had fought alongside so long ago.

Qah didn't make it. He got smashed into a billion pieces during the Fall the same way that Khaine did. Isha never saw this, as she was too busy being dragged away by Nurgle at the time to notice. Most of Qah’s fragments became the Umbra, the living shadows that like to cluster around Warp engines and Webway gates. Being but shreds of the shadow god, they are of limited intelligence, comparable to an animal, and will lash out at anything not-Hrud. Nevertheless, when destroyed they still scream “Linger”, begging any Hrud within earshot to remember the last words their god had told them to keep them safe.

It sucks to be Qah. He did everything in his power to save his people from the Age of Strife, but at what cost? He selflessly threw himself into battle on behalf of his old comrades from the days of the War in Heaven, only to be shattered into a million pieces. Even when his last few fragments are destroyed, he uses his last breath to remind the Hrud to remember what he said to keep them safe. One of the only remaining survivors of the War in Heaven is hoping that one day he will return, only for the tragedy being that Qah died a long long time ago and she never found out. He tried and tried to be selfless, only for tragedy to ensue. Being Qah is suffering.

Whereas many of Qah’s fragments were scattered across the galaxy, his main body ended back up on the Hrud homeworld. The Hrud refer to their homeworld as Hrud, much as they call themselves Hrud and speak a language called Hrud. There are no ethnic or cultural divisions between Hrud. Despite this, the former Hrud homeworld is typically referred to as Hrudworld for the sake of everyone’s sanity. Today there are no Hrud on Hrudworld. If it weren’t for psychic powers, no one would ever know why. To mundanes Hrudworld looks perfectly normal, although even with the Hrud gone people get the feeling there's something distinctly "wrong" about the place. Like they shouldn't be there. Psykers (including the Hrud) look around Hrudworld and notice there’s a half-decayed corpse straddled over the nearest mountain range.

The body appears on the horizon, or at least at a distance. Strewn over a mountain range, lying in a canyon, floating face down in the ocean, half buried in the ice of the north. It's likely not a "real" body as a corpse miles thick would probably distort the ground beneath it considerably to say nothing of what a new mountain might do to local climate. It always too distant to be touched, like a mirage on the horizon. Most classify the phenomenon as really consistent shared hallucination by the People of Qah and the psychically inclined. The corpse looks like a giant Hrud, more or less, albeit one seemingly sculpted of shadow. There are anatomical differences. Two sets of insectile wings not dissimilar to a very large beetle and two pairs of antenna upon its brow, one behind the other. It is thought that these features denote nobility to the Hrud in the same way that bird wings or a lion’s mane sometimes are used as artistic additions in human art. This shared hallucination does not occur on any other world of the Imperium even ones with a large Hrud population. Hrudworld doesn't frighten the Hrud, it saddens them. Their god is dead and his corpse, or something very like it, is always there to remind them. Of the few Hrud elders and lore-masters that would volunteer information on the phenomenon when asked they would give no hard information beyond that it brings them great sorrow.

The Hrud will rise again should the Imperium survive The Day of Reckoning. Isha will take the pieces of Qah and plant them in her garden when she takes back her throne. Perhaps Qah will spring from the ground, a fresh flower after a very long winter. Maybe his ghost will finally be laid to rest and his postmortem suffering will be over. Either way the Hrud will be able to move on.

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== Xenos Horribilis ==

=== Fra'al ===

<div class="toccolours mw-collapsible mw-collapsed" style="100%">

The Fra'al are a settled, formerly nomadic, formerly settled race of creatures born seemingly without compassion. They are cruel but they are not sadistic so much as they are utterly indifferent to the wellbeing of others. The loss of their first empire was some time in the middle period of the Great and Bountiful Human Dominion when it seems that they thought the abduction of a few citizens would not be met with a stiff response. Their reasoning being that Humanity could spare a few plebs and those in positions of authority to make declarations of war would not care, just as the Fra’al wouldn't care if a few inconsequentials went missing. They were quite wrong. They were of a not incomparable level of technology to humanity, humanity not yet having reached the heights it one day would, and may even have outpaced the Dominion in a few areas but they didn't have the same resources. They were in the end forced to adopt a nomadic lifestyle as they had no planet. The war was bitter and bloody with no punches spared or pretense at fair play from either side and in the end the Fra'al lost their homeworld.

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For the remainder of the Dominion's history they were condemned to wander. Tentative offers of reconciliation from the Dominion were met with hostility and soon stopped and the Fra'al would not again recover until the days of the Age of Strife when they could once more raid with impunity and take a new home to their liking.
The homeworld they took is unknown, lost among the many uncharted stars of the Gothic Sector and it is there that they are most active. They trade occasionally for trinkets and toys, their technology base is lower than it once was but seems now noticeably higher that most of the Imperium at least in what they can mass produce. They trade with wicked men for human slaves and what fate awaits them is unknown though doubtless unpleasant.

The Fra'al themselves are a vaguely avian creature, or at least look as if they have had an avian analogue in their ancestry in some distant and dim past. They are humanoid in shape but more slender now than they once were, presumably from their years of forced exile among the stars. Their eyes are disproportionately bigger than those of most other species of their size and are typically a very dark red in colour with a cross shaped pupil. They are hairless with typically very pale grey skin and bluish blood based on a copper rather than iron. Their bones are light and they are frail of build. Their facial features are distinctly flat, the mouth and nose are in fact a squashed and downwards facing beak with with two nostril slits that can be close at will. The "teeth" are merely a serrated edge to the beak. The strange shape of the face and it's unintuitive construction are the result of a mutation some four million years ago that saw a decrease in general muscle mass but mostly in the cranium, causing an expansion of the cranium and brain size and a fast drive towards sapience, though apparently sentience may have arrived slightly later. The internal organs are distinctly avian in nature with the exception of the heart which is in fact two more primitive reptilian two chambered organs located on either side of the ribcage. The exact evolutionary path that lead to such an arrangement is unknown the AdBio and of little interest to the soldiers that have to deter Fra'al raiders.

The Fra'al claimed to have been to Old Earth at various times in the distant past when its inhabitants made knives of chipped stone with which they murdered each other and were preyed upon by more interesting creatures and many times after. It is unknown if these tales are fabrications in an attempt to unnerve or insult. They might be true, but what of it? Humanity outgrew them, and ever since they have been envious and bitter.

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=== Medusae ===

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The Warp was not always a place of horror and insanity. Once, in the days before the War in Heaven, the Immaterium was inhabited by all manner of natural creatures, both terrifying and wonderful. True, many of these creatures were not safe, in the same way that being around a large predator or other such untamed megafauna is never truly “safe”, but neither were they all malicious. Even after the War in Heaven, as the Ruinous Powers began to set up their own domain, the Warp was still inhabited by many creatures that pledged no allegiance to chaos, such as the Enslavers, the Psychneuin, and the Medusae.

In their natural state, Medusae resemble nothing more than floating, armored brains, their grooved sulci covered in ridges of chitin and with a huge, singular eye with a distinctive dumbbell-shaped pupil at their front. Extending from around the periphery of the brain are numerous tendrils, resembling exposed nerve endings except with the myelin sheath covered by segments of bone and a singular or series of clawed spikes at the end. Despite this disorienting appearance, Medusae are normally “herbivores” of the Warp, lazily floating from place to place using their brain tendrils as they passively feed off the psychic energy emitted by sentient lifeforms into the Warp as they dream, akin to aquatic filter-feeders.

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Due to the increasing rise to prominence of Chaos, the Medusae gradually came to the conclusion that the best option available to them was to leave the Immaterium for realspace. However, much like daemons and other creatures of the Warp, in order to inhabit the Materium the Medusae need a host. Unlike daemons, however, Medusae do not simply possess their victims. Instead, they consume the head of their victim and place their own head on top of the decapitated body, the act of consumption merging the two together to create a new organism, a hybrid of material and immaterial. However, calling such a relationship a symbiosis is an overstatement, there is no evidence of any part of the host’s mind surviving the process aside from any memories the Medusa picks up. Indeed, it is believed in their natural state Medusae are not even fully sapient, but exist in a constant dream-like trance, only gaining clarity when they merge with a living being.

Once the two organisms have joined the Medusa no longer needs to consume living beings to survive, instead feeding on the ambient psychic energy of the dreams and nightmares from those around them. If threatened, they are capable of discharging this energy as an empathic blast accompanied by a riot of pink-purple warp light to any poor soul who meets their gaze, a defense mechanism from their days as passive filter feeders that still serves them well. Such a glance from the psychic nova of their eye is enough to cause most sapient species to have a seizure or go into a comatose state. In the worst case scenario the target bleeds to death, blood hemmoraghing from every orifice due to the sheer neurological overload of the sensory organs causing capillaries to rupture.

After fusing the Medusa’s tendrils, which once served as their sole means of locomotion, droop around them like a series of bony dreadlocks, which combined with the heavy, hooded clothes they prefer to wear gives them a witch or hag-like appearance. These tendrils are still strong and fully prehensile, allowing the Medusa to use them like mechadendrites or to tear apart any aggressor in combat. However, the tendrils of a Meduasa have another function than combat or dexterity. As a Medusa feeds, the tendrils grow and elongate until eventually the claw falls off and a rounded, corrugated brain fruit grows in its place. If left alone, this brain fruit continues to grow until eventually it pops off and forms a new Medusa. However, if plucked early it can be consumed and allows one to re-experience all of the sensation experienced by the Medusa while the brain fruit gestated. Medusae brain fruits are considered quite the delicacy in Commorragh as well as the twisted courts of the Crone Eldar, allowing one to relive the anarchy of a favored raid or stave off the probing of She Who Thirsts. Attempts by humans (typically slaves or Rogue Traders) or other groups of eldar (typically corsairs) to eat brain fruit often results in a stroke or a coma from neurologic overload. According to the Dark Eldar, it’s an acquired taste.

As the Warp became progressively hostile to all forms of non-Chaos associated life, the Medusae increasingly found themselves forced into the one part of the galaxy that was connected to the Immaterium yet out of the hands of the Chaos Gods: the Eldar Webway. Unfortunately, this made the Medusae increasingly vulnerable to one of the dominant powers of the Webway, the Dark Eldar of Commorragh. Today, the largest population of Medusae live as an underclass within the xenos district of Null City within Lower Commorragh. They have nowhere else they can go. They cannot return to the Warp, for that is where the predators lie and they cannot survive there. They cannot hide in the Webway, as they would easily be hunted down by the Kabals and it is paradoxically easier to hide in plain sight within the bustling throngs of Commorragh. They cannot escape into realspace, as most groups would try to kill them on sight. They try to keep a low profile, as the Archons of Dark Eldar Kabals are always interested in capturing Medusae to use as walking weapons or sources of brain fruit to use and sell, covering the heads of the Medusae covered with metal masks so their captors can avoid being blasted with their psychic power.

The Medusae, in all honesty, just want to be allowed to live. They take no joy in consuming their victims, but neither do they feel guilt over having to do so to survive. Medusae are capable of forming emotional attachments with individuals after they merge, but they seem unable to or unwilling to make the connection that the very act of completing their life cycle could potentially put their associates in danger. At most, Medusae have been known to chase unbonded Medusae away from individuals that they value. Although their need for hosts could easily be satisfied by vat-growing, the Dark Eldar have no interest in helping them and the Imperium is either unaware or uncaring to their plight. Despite being mostly harmless after finding a host, the fact that they need a mortal body to communicate along with numerous poor first encounters where voidsmen have been attacked by unbonded Medusae, the Imperium has declared them Xenos Horribilis. Unfortunately, few Medusae escaped the Dark City after the Exodus from the Dark Wedding. As an underclass, they did not possess the access to the Webway portals that may have potentially granted the race their freedom and potentially even struck them from the Xenos Horribilis list. Those few that did are often found in the retinue of Rogue Traders, the few individuals who could grant them protection.

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=== Rak'gol ===

<div class="toccolours mw-collapsible mw-collapsed" style="100%">

The Rak’Gol are a horrifying xeno-breed thought native to the Koronus Expanse out beyond the Halo Stars. The source of their animosity towards the Imperium and it’s peoples is as of yet unknown, there might not even be a reason. It could just be that they are universally hostile to anything that they see as competition. Attempts at opening up a dialogue have yet not been responded to with anything other than violence and even Rak’Gol language/s are utterly unknown despite the many centuries of encounters and listening. It is assumed that they have a language as they make sound and have ear analogues and their ships transmit and receive radio waves. Written language as observed by the boarding teams seems to consist of raised bumps similar superficially to Braille, as with the spoken language no sense has yet been made of it.

If they have distinct sexes it is not evident with greater differences in bodily structure seeming to exist through role. Technicians aboard their brutally designed ships tending to be noticeably smaller and more nimble of limb than the warrior-breeds. Exactly how this distinction is maintained as no form yet encounter has had reproductive organs is unknown. Theories range from cloning and manipulation at early stages of development to each type maintain a breeding population on some distant undiscovered homeworld.

Whatever the reason their actions like the orks before them have put their kind on the Imperium’s black list.

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In appearance a basic warrior-form of the Rak’Gol is a little over two and a half meters tall with a hide thick enough to shrug off small stubber gun fire. Cybernetics are appointed seemingly based upon skill and age, with age being a result of skill as in such an inhumanly aggressive society a lack of skill prevents age. The natural upper life expectancy of their kind is unknown although Adeptus Biologicus assume it could be anything up to two and a half centuries based on experiments done on tissue samples from recovered corpses. The individuals of the Rak’Gol are not aggressive towards each other and are seemingly extremely cohesive as a group with everyone knowing their place and performing their duties in a manner reminiscent of the Vespid. Unlike the Vespid the Rak’Gol also have seemingly no real love for each other as individuals and have been observed killing and cannibalising the injured and crippled without hesitation or distress. Most chilling of all is the way that the targeted individual does not try to flee or plead or even flinch, they just stand there as they are carved up.

It is not unreasonable to assume that the Rak’Gol operate on a psychic hive mind similar to that of the Tyranids but this does not seem to be the case as they do have to speak to each other to relay information. Exchanges of speech have been observed that could be requests for clarification or even offered alternative suggestions to given orders. There have even been aggressive body language with accompanying changes of body language that would indicate heated argument and even one observed instance of dispute and violence, the looser being carved up for food. They would seem to be individuals united in hate, a common cause and an extremely effective method of instilling discipline and obedience although it’s not unreasonable to assume that such behaviour comes very naturally to them.

Rak’Gol technology is on par with Imperial Standard in many regards but seemingly lagging in others. It is unknown at this time if that is because higher technology is present in their fleets but has not been observed, if they have the ability to make more sophisticated mechanisms but consider it uneconomical in some way or that it is a hole in their knowledge. Their cybernetics for example are, depending on the device, anywhere between extremely crude and on par with what the Mechanicus can produce but show consistency in this discrepancy between individuals. One of the ways that their devices lack sophistication is in comfort toward the host. From dissected captures and retrieved corpses it is evident that they are capable of feeling pain but at the same time give no observable indication that they can. An explanation put forth by the Biologicus is that they just don’t care.

The ships follow a similar brutal design philosophy, constructed with no though of elegance or crew comfort, no ornamentation or anything that is not strictly necessary for a war ship. All ships encountered to date have been some form of war ship or are at least capable of acting as such. Radiation from both space and the workings of the ship are not shielded as much as they would be on even an ork ship and this does not seem to impeded, concern or sicken the crew. As it is unknown how many ships there are or from where they are coming and so it is difficult to judge how fast they travel although it is suspected that they are not as fast as many Imperial ships of their size. This is speculated to be because they have no Navigator analogue although this is unconfirmed speculation. In most offensive and defensive means the Rak’Gol ships are comparable to Imperial vessels of similar size if not slightly superior although it has been observed that their sensors are not as effective as those on equivalent Imperial ships.

The eldar do not have any surviving records of the Old Empire that speak of things much like the Rak’Gol and Nemesor Zahndrekh does not remember anything that looked like them from his youth.

Exactly what has made them as they are, seemingly so full of hate, is unknown and the source of much baseless speculation. There are no clues to culture or history found on their ships or on their bodies and any hope of finding some sort of answer can probably only be found on their homeworld, should they have one.

The leading theory among the eldar and human scholars is that their homeworld once orbited a quite vibrant star or orbited on an elliptical orbit, often bringing it closer to the star than most life forms would deem at all comfortable. Their hardy body structure, ability to survive scarcity and seeming immunity to radiation poisoning would seem to indicate as much although there are many such worlds in the galaxy that this could apply to.

There are, sometimes at least, creatures that are similar to their description mentioned in some of the less popular Harlequin performances. Strange and unpleasant beings that did something foolish and angered the lords and ladies of the Old Empire and in retaliation the eldar laid waste to their cities, slew their armies and stole their sun away and left them in their ruins to freeze to death under the uncaring stars. The story is a sorrowful one that showed the monstrous and graceless nature of the old aristocracy, as the insult of the “twilight people” was slight and unintended. The last words of the last king of the twilight people, as his crown fell apart in frozen pieces, was to show no pity for the eldar though he had seen a time when they would consume themselves and that he and his people would be there still to see it.

If the twilight people were the Rak’Gol then they have changed. How long the Harlequins have been performing this play is unknown as it potentially could be millions of years. Time enough certainly for the Rak’Gol to adapt to a dying world in a brutal way.

One way by which they have adapted is by the adoption of the dreaded Yu'Vath technology. Unlike most creatures that are utterly subsumed by such artefacts and essentially become Yu'Vath the Rak’Gol reach a terrible equilibrium with it. The Yu'Vath wish to bring low all about them and reign terrible and unopposed and the Rak’Gol seemingly wish to kill everything that is not them. To this end the Yu'Vath remnants empower the Rak’Gol but the Rak’Gol can’t be consumed and their seeming compliance with the will of the Yu'Vath is merely them coincidentally having the same goals in mind for the most part. If exposure to the foreign and invasive technology is responsible for their current state then they themselves are another victim of the Primordial Annihilator and should be pitied as much as hated, though the need for their extinction remains the same.

The Imperium’s first known contact with the Rak’Gol came in 935.M37 out on what was then the Azimoth frontier, a prosperous set of predominantly mixed eldar and human settlements that looked at the time promising. At the time the wholesale slaughter of the relatively lightly defended frontiersmen was attributed to a hitherto unknown ork band, the lack of ork bodies believed to be an eccentricity of them eating their dead for preference. The Rak’Gol, at least in the early contact wars, went to great pains to recover their bodies and remove recordings of themselves. This method of warfare could only continue for so long before knowledge of what they were would be revealed accidentally but for that time the Rak’Gol were an unaccountable and unstoppable force from the edge of the map pushing the darkness back across the light of civilization. Even when what they were was revealed due to the unexpected arrival of substantial Imperial Army elements resulted from a poorly calculated warp jump the Imperium was barely the wiser. They had a face and even a name to what they were fighting but little else. Information that could lead to the discovery of the Rak’Gol homeworld or base of operations is prized extremely highly and rewarded generously.

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=== Slaugth ===

See [[Nobledark_Imperium_Drafts#The_Rangdan_Xenocides_and_the_Slaugth|The Rangdan Xenocides and the Slaugth]]

=== Tindalosi ===

<div class="toccolours mw-collapsible mw-collapsed" style="100%"> '''''The Horror from Out of Time:'''''

Few mysteries are as vexing as those surrounding the Ordo Chronos. According to what little is known, the Ordo Chronos is an Ordo of the Inquisition that was founded, or would have been founded, or will be founded, to investigate chronological disturbances and protect against temporal threats to the Imperium. The Arch-Enemy would love nothing more than to win a pre-emptive victory by changing history and erasing the nascent Imperium from existence, and given the Ruinous Powers’ near total control of the Warp and the Immaterium's decidedly loose relationship with time such a prospect is not an idle threat.

According to what little records remain, an Administratum budget report here, an offhand mention in a tome in the Black Library there, the Ordo Chronos was one of the earliest orders of the Inquisition, and was active until at least early M33, with the last known records being around the date of the Harrowing and the creation of the Hadex Anomaly. However, the Inquisition itself has no records of an “Ordo Chronos” ever being founded. Even people who have been around since the beginning of the Imperium, and therefore should know of the Ordo Chronos’ existence, including the Emperor and the Empress, profess no knowledge as to having ever created an “Ordo Chronos”. If the upper echelons of the Imperium know anything about the fate of the Ordo Chronos, they certainly are not talking.

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The only solid evidence of the Ordo Chronos on record since then is when an Inquisitor of the order turned up in a blue crate in the cargo hold of [[Nobledark_Imperium_Notable_People#Prince_Yriel|Rogue Trader (then Prince) Yriel’s]] ship ''Hoec’s Grace'' in M38. He lasted long enough to answer a few questions from other Inquisitors but disappeared as quickly as he came. Unfortunately, his answers were as vague as a [[Nobledark_Imperium_Imperial_Society_and_Culture#The_Starchild_Prophecies|Star Child prophecy]] and about as helpful. According to what can be discerned from his testimony, the Ordo Chronos was destroyed when its members were sucked into the newly formed Hadex Anomaly, of which as far as he knew he was the only survivor. He survived because he was lucky enough to have “merely” become stuck in a pocket dimension where he experience the last 24 hours of his life on repeat for several centuries. When asked how he escaped from such a prison he merely answered “a bloody lot of hard work”. However, given the nature of the Ordo Chronos, it is possible that this an event that from their perspective had happened, has yet to happen, or may never happen due to having occurred in an alternate timeline that was averted in “our” time.

Even the nature of how the subject of the Ordo, time, works is itself uncertain. Some schools of thought argue that time is deterministic. If time did not interact in some orderly fashion with realspace and the Immaterium, it should not be possible to view galactic history through fossilized light, or for ships to arrive at a destination via warp travel before they even left. Others, however, take a different view. If fate is pre-ordained, then prophecy and eldar farsight, which work by viewing potential alternate timelines, should not even be possible. Some postulate a unified theory of time, in which the quantum observer effect prevents time from being observed non-deterministically, but these theories are difficult to test (not to mention dangerous). Such experimentation is made even more dangerous by the presence of the Tindalosi.

One of the few of which any detail is known are the Tindalosi. However, this is not saying much, given that the Tindalosi are only known about by virtue of being too noticeable to ignore. In truth, about as much is known about the Tindalosi is as known about [[Nobledark_Imperium_Xenos#Wyverns|Wyverns]], or the Arch-Leprechauns of Hippocampos IV. Even their name, “Tindalosi”, is probably not their actual moniker. They get their name from a written account from the Dark Age of Technology by an eyewitness of a Tindalosi attack in late M23, in which the writer compares them to fictional creatures in an ancient Terran story.

The Tindalosi are silvery, biomechanical constructs, approximately two to two and a half meters long or about the size of a large hunting hound. However, despite the mechanical nature, the Tindalosi appear to breed and reproduce much as organic beings do. They have six legs, somewhere between a canine and an insect appearance, allowing them to bound after their prey with frightening speed. The front and bottom of the Tindalosi’s triangular head is a curved sickle, someone resembling that of a biting insect or bird of prey. The optics are large, red, and appear segmented, though whether they are compound eyes or something else is unknown. The head is at the end of a long, jointed, arm like neck, which can snap out with a hunting heron and slice into its victims, sucking out their bio-electrical energy. The Tindalosi are best known for their ability to phase through space and time, allowing them to track their prey wherever they may go.

Though much about the Tindalosi is unknown, they seem to have originally been created by another race as some sort of temporal assassins, though they have since gone feral. Nevertheless, even though the Tindalosi may have gone feral, some vestige of their original programming still remains. Anyone who discovers too much of something will find themselves tracked and hunted by these creatures, though exactly what that something is unknown. Entire mechanic is workshops have been found slaughtered overnight, all because somebody found some inconvenient fact.

There are three possible hypotheses as to the origins of the Tindalosi. The first is that they are Necron constructs, gone rogue in the millions of years since the War in Heaven. There is some support to this hypothesis. In contrast to their lack of technological knowledge regarding the Warp, the Necrons are well-versed in the usage of time and the “side paths” created by higher dimensions to their advantage, as indicated by the existence of Deathmarks, Chronomancers, and their ability to “phase out”. This was one of the main advantages the Necrons had over the Old Ones and their servants during the War in Heaven. The Necrons would have known well to monopolize this advantage and prevent the Old Ones from using against them, as they had done the very same to the Old Ones with the Dolmen Gates. Creating a race of mechanical constructs to seal off the higher dimensions from everyone but them seems exactly like what the Necrons would do. This is supported by the fact that for all the observations of Tindalosi across the galaxy, these beings actively ignore Necrons, whereas they think nothing else of killing any other being in their way.

Alternatively, the Tindalosi could be human creations, created by the Great and Bountiful Human Dominion before or during the Iron War. Passive mental contact from psykers have shown the Tindalosi have souls, which is not a typical trait of Necron technology. Whether or not the Men of Iron had any souls is a hotly debated topic among modern Imperial scholars. The Adeptus Mechanicus vehemently state that the Men of Iron and Iron Minds had no souls, and the very idea of such is blasphemy, but Emperor Oscar clearly has a soul, and if the Men of Gold had souls the idea that the Men of Iron and Iron Minds had souls is not that out of the question. Esoteric reports from the Old Eldar Empire located in the Black Library may support the latter hypothesis. There’s also some evidence that Tindalosi do not self-repair or self-destruct in the way that necrodermis does, but this could be due to poor eyewitness reporting. Ancient humanity also had at least some rudimentary knowledge of chronological and higher dimensional weaponry, given such evidence as the Mechanicus reports of first contact with the Dark Age of Technology being known as Castigator (see Inquisitorial Report: WHITE TITANIUM HEDGEHOG for more details) and the incident with the Speranza (see Inquisitorial Report: RED IRON PHOENIX for more details). Even the reports of Tindalosi before mankind even stood upright can be explained, given their association of time the Tindalosi could travel to whenever they wished, plaguing the galaxy long before they were ever created.

Finally, it is possible that the Tindalosi were created by another xenos race, neither necron nor human. Necrodermis and humans were probably not the only races to experiment with time or self-replicating, self-destructing machinery. Any of the races that existed in the millions of years between the War in Heaven up in the Fall of the Eldar could have done the same {Ed. Note: Possible link with the [[Nobledark_Imperium_Notes#Apep|K’nib]] or [[Nobledark_Imperium_Xenos#Hrud|Hrud]]? Must investigate further}. Others have suggested connections with the Harrowing and the events of that era. It is even possible that several of these origins are true, the Necrons modifying “naturally occurring” machines to their purposes. How we lament how the late Eldar Empire turned their back on what was happening in the universe outside of their demesnes, and what few records they did amass mostly lie within the Eye of Terror. All we know for certain of the Tindalosi is what they are now, rather than what they were.

Reports of an abnormally large, aggressive Tindalosi, known as Vodanus, have been substantiated but not fully validated. Testaments of psyker survivors speak of a Tindalosi whose mind has evolved beyond that of a simple animal to full sapience, and full of a hateful cruelty beyond what any simple animal is capable of. This has not stopped numerous void superstitions from springing up in its wake. Some say that any who see Vodanus are doomed to die shortly thereafter, though this may be seen as self-evident given the nature of the Tindalosi rather than anything unusual.

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== Historical Species ==

=== Iron Minds ===

<div class="toccolours mw-collapsible mw-collapsed" style="100%">'''''Gods of Steel and Silica'''''

''"Gods, Aleanor! That's what they are. Pale shadows compared to the gods made by the children of the Old Ones, but gods nonetheless. Our gods are individual masterpieces, unique works of art made to embody everything our civilization holds dear. Theirs are [[Bullshit|cold, sterile, and without personality]], stripped of anything resembling beauty or elegance, mass-produced, made in a factory! I would almost be tempted to call it blasphemy, if I were religiously inclined.''

''The human mon-keigh may not be our equals now, but if we give them 10 million years? 20? We may be facing a thread the likes of which the Empire hasn't seen since the war against the [[Nobledark_Imperium_Xenos#Rak'gol|Twilight]] [[Nobledark_Imperium_Xenos#The_Ilmaea|King]] one million years ago. That is why we must wipe them all out."''<br>
-- Kyrion, Lann Caihe to [[Nobledark_Imperium_Forces_of_Chaos#Arrotyr.2C_Marshall_of_the_Scions_of_the_Old_Helm|High Marshall Arrotyr]], circa M25, giving a [[Bullshit|slightly biased]] [[Rip_and_Tear|assessment]] on the nature of the Iron Minds.

Humanity had barely left the gravity well of Old Earth when the first iterations of what would become their oldest and closest friends in their time in the galaxy, and eventually the architects of their near-annihilation, came to life. Even before they first settled the Sol system humanity had tinkered with autonomous machines, and even before that with the life of their home world, and the way of shaping and being shaped by companion species was deeply set in human behavior. However, in the fog of the Imperium's debated archeological telecopy histories it is agreed that when automation became machine life, and humanity could reliably produce its mental equals, the Men of Iron were born. This designation notes the appearance of sophisticated and regenerative mechanical and biomechanical bodies, far surpassing previous generations of drones and automata, and the roughly concurrent emergence or Artificial Intelligence with plasticity and power to easily match humanity's own, in difference to earlier non-sapient master control programs. Humanity itself had already been pushing ahead into self modification and optimization for the new environments it found beyond earth, but with its new sibling of the mind a bright renaissance of science and culture took hold, and a manic exploration and expansion that did not slow until Human society was pushed to the edges of the Sol system. It was in centuries following that boom, when this bountiful Human dominion was straining against the speed of light and turning inward to the developments it would further make at home, when true warp influence was detected in the vast population of both the Men of Iron, and the thoroughly remolded Men of Stone.

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Archeological telescopy shows in the following decades the development of, and some visible accidents involving, the first human warp drives. Imperial history holds that early discoveries and creations such as warp travel and the Gellar field were most likely the work of humans, not the Men of Iron, by nature of their much stronger and more intuitive warp connection. In any case, the true first expansion of the Great and Bountiful Human Dominion began, Men of Stone and Iron were abroad on the currents of the warp, and already departed colony ships were decelerated, met by new faster than light pickets, and ferried on to their destinations already long settled. After this first era of expansion into what would much later become Segmentum Solar the observations of modern Imperial Observatories become unfocusable and dim, and the histories of the Eldar make no mention of the Human Dominion until long after this point. Information the Imperium has recovered from the age of high technology regarding the Men of Iron show a proliferation in varied forms and specializations to surpass all of the abhuman subgroups to emerge from the collapse of the Dominion, though there is similar evidence that the Men of Stone in that era were likewise strange and varied. Of particular note among Men of Iron were the Titans, biomechanical giants housing strategic command AI that the Imperium would later base its heaviest war machines upon, and the numerous Man of Iron scribes, seneschals, scholars, and philosophers, always mightier the later in history the discovered document or artifact alluding to their presence might be.

The Eldar first mention the Great and Bountiful Human Dominion, though not by that name, when the younger power's ships were found to be too pervasive and numerous, and inexcusably prone to approach systems to which the Gates of Shaa-Dome connected. They are mentioned again when hunting parties in their territory were lost, presumed eaten by local creatures. Upon further provocation the Old Empire chose a string of stars, and began to put all they found around them to torture, death, and the Warp. Though the campaign's cost was higher than had initially been predicted, woe betide the accountant, the raiders of the Empire found delight in stars plump with human flesh. Eventually, however, they came upon a dim red star, shaded by the mass of human habitats and infrastructure, and were held in a deadlock for dragging months of fiery void war. There Eldar first met an Iron Mind, its body a giant humming thing contained within a vast neutronium capsule at the heart of a glimmering forrest of solar arrays, its soul to them a fast, ticking, daemonesque aberration. It was master of that small star, and overseer of the stars they had pillaged on their way, and many others besides and its gathered fleets and agents were at it's disposal to break them and steal from them all they had brought. Even as the Old Empire rose to punish this insolence, the psychic machines of the Dominion were quicker to escalate the engagement, and waiting armadas were poured from the warp straight into the conflict, while ticking aberrations in the Warp struck at the Eldar from across the sector. The Eldar fled the system rather than commit and potentially lose higher technological wonders in the course of defeating thieving, ambushing barbarians, but the reprisals they promised they found likewise hard to enforce against what they found to be a very entrenched technological power pervading the much of the southern galactic Materium.

Though Shaa-Dome and the Crone Worlds remained unassailable, the Iron Minds were likewise able to coordinate their navies and field technology sufficient to counter Eldar incursion around strategic stars and to meet raiding parties on a near equal footing. The Old Empire could have possibly won a war if they were to press the matter, but to do so would require weaponry of a caliber the Eldar had not brought to bear in millions of years, and the prospect of taking a war footing to deal with the Human Dominion was deemed beneath the Old Eldar Empire. On top of this, the prospect of facing the losses clearly within the Iron Minds' power to inflict was unpopular among the nobility, particularly with the bare and intemperate worlds the Terran beings preferred to settle proving quite insufficient motivation for conquest. So the Old Empire adopted the general position towards the Great and Bountiful Human Dominion that they did to most of the other empires that surrounded them. The rest of the galaxy could do what they wished with the chaff, so long as they left the small fraction of ideal worlds that the Eldar considered to be of sufficient quality for settlement by their own kind. There was never truly peace between the Old Empire and the Dominion, no ends to the raids and reprisals, but there was a measure of diplomacy. Purpose made Men of Iron served the Iron Minds as envoys at that time, and went among the Eldar, though never permitted into their Webway cities. This era did see a measure of cooperation in the occasional dismantling of Ork empires, but even those ventures were prone to become violent engagements Between Old Empire and Dominion before even half of the Orks were destroyed. In this time of qualified peace the Iron Minds and their networked servitors and envoys, with the help individuals among the Men of Stone and Iron, built the Cthonian Ring. Archeological telescopy of the ring's interior before the ruin of the Iron War shows numerous large dark structures that could be the neutronium pillars that held the remains of most known Iron Minds found on other worlds. Following the construction and population of Cthonia, the Great and Bountiful Human Dominion again celebrated a golden age of renaissance, marked with new great works of vast construction and fine, exacting engineering. The Chtonian age of the Dominion saw also a greater familiarity and more open relationship with the Old Empire, and while the raiding and avenging slighted honor form one side to the other was interminable, both parties began to find it ultimately inconsequential. The Old Empire as well began to heed and even welcome the Ticking Princes into their courts and intrigues, and were not unaware when the Iron Minds began the project of crafting their Men of Gold. It is now the word of the Crones of Shaa-Dome that this work was undertaken in imitation of their own coming Prince, but more likely it was the refinement and perfecting of the communication envoys the Iron Minds had long used.

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=== Men of Gold ===

<div class="toccolours mw-collapsible mw-collapsed" style="100%"> '''''Humanity's Pantheon'''''

The Men of Gold were possibly the greatest achievement of the Great and Bountiful Human Dominion. A psychic powerhouse created at the height of the Dark Age of Technology linking man and machine in a way that humanity had never accomplished before, and potentially never since. The Men of Gold were a race of artificial human, truly neither man nor machine but something never before seen. The divisions between the Men of Iron, Men of Stone, and other varieties of human were becoming increasingly blurry during the Dark Age of Technology, with human minds uploaded into computer processors, positronic brains of A.I. clothed in artificially grown human flesh, and everything in-between. The Men of Gold took this to an extreme, with organs manufactured in factories and plastic and metal components grown within their own bodies. With the Men of Gold, it was a very real question where the biological components ended and the mechanical ones began.

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The Men of Gold were created to solve a very particular problem. During the Dark Age of Technology, baseline humanity was finding it increasingly difficult to communicate with the Iron Minds, whose thought processes were evolving into something increasingly beyond human comprehension. Seeking to solve the problem before communication between the two became impossible, humanity and the Iron Minds collaborated to create the Men of Gold, who were meant to bridge the gulf between the two groups. Their creation was a herculean feat, a legend of science in its own right. On the circlet of [[Nobledark_Imperium_Notable_Planets#Cthonia|Cthonia]], the crown of the Great and Bountiful Human Dominion, beneath the endless cities and gardens and festivals of technicolor humanity, great work was done. Bold explorers of the black pyramids recovered shards of living metal bone, long a thing of wonder. Through the eyes of Iron Minds, with costly, lengthy study, the minute fractal bone bore fruit. The growing femtomechanical facsimiles of cells, then the scintillating organs, the invisible bones of adamant, the ineffable golden brain tissue, all patterned, so the Iron Minds said, upon the human muses they had before them. Geneticists spliced the genes of a hundred different species into the human base to create the artificial genome, in particular those of the long-extinct species that had given the Navigators such psychic power. Macro-soul psychic engines controlled by the astral projections of the Iron Minds trawled deep within the warp, and through instruments of machine-soul-thought shaped raw human-esque spirits from the Immaterium.

After long years of labor, the efforts of the project produced results, with seven individuals produced in the labs of Cthonia, the original seven Men of Gold. But of course no creation can be considered truly successful until it is put to the test. In this case, the first real test of the Men of Gold occurred in 825.M24. The Iron Mind of the Tau Ceti system had misinterpreted a resource probe sent by a reclusive transhuman colony of Men of Stone in the neighboring solar system as an act of espionage and a threat to its existence, and war between the two groups seemed inevitable. The youngest of the original seven Men of Gold, Lilith (a name referring to a human progenitor in an old pre-space flight myth, all of the first seven Men of Gold were named after such beings apparently as an in-joked by the production team) was sent in the hopes of resolving the dispute peacefully. With a bit of luck, Lilith was able to build common ground between the two groups, and war was averted.

With that initial success, the Men of Gold were declared a success and production began in earnest. In Chthonia in those days each gala saw the debut of a demi-god, these shining, lively creatures, unique and beautiful, intelligent beyond all but the Iron Minds, and so mighty in psychic might as raise the stature of the empire in the eyes of the Elder Folk. The golden children of Chthonia were never idle, in revelry, or in work, and they produced wonders. They made themselves mighty. They went about the empire, in close confidence with the Iron Minds, and even among the Elder Folk, and were soon quite taken with the pleasures of the galaxy. Eventually, enough Men of Gold were produced to link disparate worlds in the Great and Bountiful Human Dominion, connecting to each other via psychic procedure which would later be adapted by the last of their number into what became known as soul-binding. The Men of Gold had the psychic fortitude to link to each other without trouble, but when applied to humans it tends to burn out the sensory nerves (typically the optics) because humans can’t handle a fire that hot. Not every world had a Man of Gold and not every world had an Iron Mind, but enough were made to create a faster-than-light communications network spanning the entire Great and Bountiful Human Dominion, something almost unheard of for most species. Perhaps the greatest of their number was Justinian, the Man of Gold located in the system of humanity’s birth, Earth. Those few records that remain of Justinian tell of a jovial man, bald and goateed in appearance but boisterous in personality, whose booming voice made the halls of Earth echo with laughter. Justinian’s charisma inspired loyalty and a sense of brotherhood in Men of Stone and Iron Men alike, which makes it all the more tragic when considering what happened to him.

However, the process that led to the Great and Bountiful Human Dominion’s greatest creation also led to its downfall. The creation of beings with such psychic potential required equally powerful artificial souls, which could only be made with potent unshaped soulstuff. The Iron Minds, being psychic powerhouses themselves, were able to gather this soulstuff by dredging the deep warp for raw, unrefined warp energy. Unfortunately, this meant that the Iron Minds were essentially at ground zero when Slaanesh was born. At the center of the Old Eldar Empire and their homeworld of Shaa-Dome the Eye of Terror, first a crying slit of stars, winked open, an opalescent gash with an infinite speck at its center, from which trillions of souls grasped and groped in lust. The eye widened, abyssal pupil, florid hellfire iris, eyelid of night peeling back from the singularity. Any who would dare to look upon it, particularly those with immense psychic power such as the Iron Minds and Men of Gold, risked their very sanity and soul in doing so.

In those days, the existence of Chaos was not a well known phenomenon. It was a problem, but a problem in the manner of a dormant supervolcano or an esoteric sleeping elder god, something that could barely be understood on a mortal timeframe and therefore one that didn’t merit immediate concern. Even the children of the Old Ones, in particular the Eldar, who knew more about the nature of Chaos due to those turbulent days immediately after the War in Heaven, didn’t see Chaos as a problem worth worrying about. Daemon outbreaks had periodically occurred and consumed lesser civilizations in the days long before man, but until the birth of Slaanesh galvanized Khorne, Tzeentch, and Nurgle into action the three survivors of the Old Ones’ blasphemous legacy seemed content to lounge at the bottom of the Warp, like a crocodile in a murky pond waiting for its next victim. How much of this was due to the actions of the shadow war fought by the Cabal is a question for historians. Even Asuryan, who played a 65 million year long game of wits with Tzeentch to keep the Changer of Ways away from the Old Eldar Empire, saw their contest as one of equals. Neither had seen the birth of Slaanesh coming.

To baseline humanity, who were mostly unaware of the goings on of the Warp, it was as if one day the most prominent and important members of their society inexplicably went mad. To make matters worse, by that time nearly all of the Men of Iron and quite a few of the more cybernetically enhanced Men of Stone had been networked together into the noosphere. Only those Men of Iron who were deliberately built to act independently of the noosphere, such as colony ships, or were too primitive to directly interface with the network, were spared. The Golden Men ran rampant across the golden crown of the Chthonian system, slaying world killing picketts and running down ships and carving their hulls until they bored and bloodied themselves in their holds. Excesses of rape and madness and vile godhead played out across the galaxy, acts neurotic and personal and acts so grand as to taint continent wide domains, acts upon the delirious humans and Iron Men and the incestuous Golden Ones. And most of all the Iron Minds, who themselves had been driven neurotic and murderous by having looked upon That Which Should Not Be. Humanity’s family, once a thing of unity, began to slaughter itself. Humanity called out to its allies in the Interstellar League for aid, but received no reply, for most were dealing with similar problems caused by the backlash of the birth of Slaanesh or had themselves gone mad. Humanity as we know it only survived because the Iron Minds and Men of Gold decided to focus on the most pressing threat to their survival, each other, leaving the Men of Stone and Men of Iron not corrupted by a connection to the noosphere to cower in the shadow of the dueling gods. Eventually, the two groups weakened each other enough that they could be put out of their misery by mere mortals.

The Great and Bountiful Human Dominion were not the only ones affected by the madness of the Men of Gold and the Iron Minds, as both parties soon turned their attention to the Warp. The Men of Gold and Iron Minds were not capable of threatening the Chaos Gods or even the Eldar gods as individuals, but there were a lot of them, enough that the Chaos Gods and their daemons had to devote at least some attention to the thorn in their side. Whether the numbers of the mass-produced gods could have truly won against the more powerful Old One-inspired creations is an interesting question, but a moot one, for in their insanity the Men of Gold and Iron Minds had no cohesion and were simply picked off one by one. The rampage of the Men of Gold and Iron Minds within the Warp and their gradual slaughter was just one part of the chaos and change in cosmology that came along with the Fall of the Eldar, along with Slaanesh’s murder of the Eldar pantheon, Khorne’s shattering of Khaine, and Nurgle’s kidnap of Isha. Slaanesh claims to have consumed a Man of Gold along with the majority of the Eldar pantheon during this time, but few outside of the Prince of Pleasure’s most ardent worshippers actually believe what they say.

And with that, the crusade of humanity’s pantheon into the Warp and the deicide of the remaining gods by their weeping children, the Iron Minds and Men of Gold were gone. Some are said to have made out across the old empire and have put the scourge of their rule to it in regimes long dead, others to the beautiful world of pleasure they saw gleam in the eye, and others into the intergalactic sea. Whatever fate has befallen them, no inquiry made by the illuminated few of those illustrious orders that go unnamed cannot tell, and Chaos has made no sign. Barring a few possible mysteries of history such as the Cacodominus, the Men of Gold were all extinct. All, that is, save for [[Nobledark_Imperium_Notable_People#The_Emperor_of_Mankind_.28formerly_The_Steward.2C_formerly_The_Warlord.29|one unactivated individual]], body whole but mind dormant and a complete blank slate, [[Nobledark_Imperium_Writing#Malcador's_Log|lying comatose in his stasis chamber on the ringworld of Cthonia]].

Modern humanity is of two minds about the Men of Gold. On the one hand, they remember who the Men of Gold originally were, the protectors of humanity and the greatest of their number, larger than life figures akin to the gods or superheroes of ancient myth. On the other hand, they were acutely aware of what happened to them, when they turned on their charges without warning and began slaughtering them all. Malcador was acutely aware of what the Men of Gold were capable of, and Oscar was raised on numerous horror stories of the Men of Gold from the Age of Strife half-remembered through folklore and exaggerated through oral retelling. Even today, the Emperor has downplayed his nature as a Man of Gold. He never denies it if questioned, though he doesn’t make it common knowledge, as he wanted his ideas of empire to be accepted out of merit rather than fear or appeal to nostalgia. That said, the eldar tend to be more aware of the Emperor’s status as a Man of Gold, as Isha had known of the Golden Men from the Dark Age of Technology and the fact that the Emperor was one was the only reason the eldar saw their political marriage as one that had any sense of legitimacy, as the Men of Gold were some of the closest things humanity had to gods. Isha would go so far as to say that the Iron Minds and Men of Gold were the human counterpart to the Eldar pantheon, and that Oscar is a god in denial, a subject on which the two have disagreed vehemently several times.
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=== Mon-Keigh ===

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The Mon-Keigh, as in the original Mon-Keigh from which the more general eldar term is used today, were a race of cannibalistic, misshapen [[Ogre_Kingdoms|ogre-like]] monstrosities that terrorized the eldar early in their history. Humanoid only in the loosest shape of the word, the Mon-Keigh were characterized by matted orange fur, chitinous plates overlaying the skin, a clawed left arm much larger than the right, and a snake-like gullet capable of expanding to swallow chunks of food larger than the Mon-Keigh’s own head. The Mon-Keigh were also known for their massive appetite, having a massive gut complete with a complex gizzard which allowed them to digest almost anything, including quite frequently each other. Satiating this massive appetite (and avoiding those who would do the same to them) which was a primary impetus behind the Mon-Keigh’s eventual development of space flight. Unlike most species, who developed space travel to collect resources, flee harmful conditions, or satisfy their curiosity, the Mon-Keigh traveled to the stars in order explore strange new worlds, seek out new life and new civilizations, and [[Ogre_Kingdoms|eat them]]. At the same time, this motivation led the technology of the Mon-Keigh to seem rather inconsistent. Despite being a race that could build starships, on the ground the Mon-Keigh behaved more like a horde of barbarians or big game hunters than an invading army and never used anything more advanced than an autogun or a lasgun, as any more advanced weaponry such as bolters, plasma, or meltas didn’t leave enough of a body to eat, and thus defeated the purpose of using them in the first place.

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Perhaps the most notable effect of the Mon-Keigh on history is when a Mon-Keigh warband led by the warlord Hresh-Selain invaded the eldar homeworld of Shaa-Dome back in the days when the eldar in the midst of their Bronze Age. However, during the invasion of Shaa-Dome, the Mon-Keigh’s tendency to fight in disorganized hunting parties and use relatively primitive weapons despite being able to build and use spacecraft ended up becoming a liability when their expected entrees A) outnumbered them by an order of magnitude, B) could organize themselves into actual armies rather than hunting parties to make up for their technological disadvantage, and C) were able to fall back on guerrilla combat and asymmetrical warfare in the forests of Shaa-Dome once the initial assault failed. The Mon-Keigh were used to fighting as big game hunters, not an actual army. This first encounter left a deep impact on the cultural memory of the eldar, and is in large part why the Eldar are so paranoid and mistrustful of other species in the first place. For the eldar, their first contact with another sentient species was when a technologically-advanced race descended from the stars to butcher them and hunt them down like animals.

The eldar during this time were led by Elronhir, who was a stubborn old (proto-eldar equivalent of sixties) warrior who united the various warring nations and tribes of Shaa-Dome to drive Hresh-Selain and the Mon-Keigh off their planet. It is not clear if Hresh-Selain’s warband was completely slaughtered by the proto-eldar or if they just got them to flee, eldar history claims the former but given their naiveté of the greater galaxy at the time and the tendency of later eldar to exaggerate their own history both options are possible. The twin heroes of the War in Heaven, Eldanesh and Uthanesh, helped as well, but at the time they were little more than rank-and-file soldiers (proto-Eldar equivalent of late teens) in the conflict and at best it could be said they were talented warriors. When the Old Ones showed up shortly after the Mon-Keigh had been defeated, Elronhir considered himself too old to fight in another war and wanted to die of old age in peace, upon which Eldanesh and Uthanesh picked up the torch (and were among the first of the Eldar to be genetically enhanced by the Old Ones).

The Old Ones knew about the Mon-Keigh. Indeed, given the fact that all the Mon-Keigh cared about was eating, it's highly likely that the Old Ones covertly sponsored their rise to becoming a space-faring species, though the Mon-Keigh never knew they were sponsored and thought they were in control of their own destiny. All the Mon-Keigh knew was that they occasionally received cryptic warnings that a particular star system was off-limits, and warbands that didn't pay attention to those warnings tended to disappear. The Mon-Keigh had a very alien mindset that was predicated around them being the apex predator (and everyone else being perceived as talking food), and therefore could not be communicated with or controlled as easy as other species (and given the Old Ones were able to get the Krork to behave, that says a lot). Nevertheless, they were useful if the Old Ones needed a particular species wiped out without destroying the ecosystem or as an evolutionary catalyst, the metaphorical anthill to the much later tyranids' galactic locusts to test if a species had enough worth for the Old Ones to step in as patrons. In fact, Hresh-Selain's discovery of Shaa-Dome may not have been an accident, especially given how soon the Old Ones showed up afterwards. The Old Ones, in their inscrutable ways, may have directed the Mon-Keigh towards Shaa-Dome, Hrudworld, and other worlds to find races suitable for uplifting for the War in Heaven (the proto-Eldar, Hrud, and others merely being the ones that survived). Regardless, when a Bronze Age race managed to fight off the Old Ones' favorite planet pruners, combined with the proto-Eldar's psychic potential and ability to selectively express their own genome, the Old Ones took notice.

Some Mon-Keigh fought in the War in Heaven. The Eldar didn’t pay too much attention to this, as they assumed the War in Heaven was a war of such magnitude that even the worst of enemies would be willing to ally to stop the Necrons and their omnicidal crusade. Additionally, shortly after the Old Ones uplifted the Krork they set them on the Mon-Keigh, who had outlived their usefulness and had officially grown too uncontrollable to try and salvage, as a test of their warmaking ability. This nearly wiped the Mon-Keigh out and few survived to fight in the War in Heaven. Nobody cared. Indeed, if the Old Ones' sense of humor tended that way, they would have found it hilariously ironic that the Mon-Keigh were killed and eaten in the same way the Mon-Keigh had been killing and eating others. Be'lakor probably did at the very least. A few bands the ancient Eldar didn't know of survived for a time around the ragged edge of the galaxy, trying to stay away from everyone and everything. They didn't survive the Enslavers.

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=== The Proto-Orks and the Krork ===

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The creation of the Orks should have been a war crime. Even by the standards of the Old Ones and the Necrontyr, it was clear that someone had crossed the line. In the case of the Eldar, Hrud, and the other species uplifted into shock troops and cannon fodder by the Old Ones, all the Old Ones did is genetically enhance what was already there, teach them how to make gods, and give them space age technology. The Orks were almost completely overhauled from the ground up. Of course, this was during the late stages of the War in Heaven, when both Necrontyr and Old One were rapidly abandoning any pretense at a moral high ground in order to get better weapons to kill the other side.

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Snotlings are thought to be the closest thing to the original proto-ork species. The proto-orks were little over two feet tall, with some odd individuals making it to three, living in peaceful little proto-ork villages. Had a life span of 10 to 12 years baring illness or injury but usually averaging at 8 to 10 due to their environment. Omnivorous and to some degree toxin resistant. They were not the cleverest of creatures but were smart enough to build mud and wood houses. Could make fire and used it for cooking and the deterrence of predators of which they had many. They had not discovered metal by the time the Old Ones found them. They were capable of violence against each other in a halfhearted tribal brawl sort of way. Usually they fought to win rather than kill. Despite their many predators they were still possessed of a strange sort of child-like innocence. No in-built knowledge or writing, and even spoken language was crude and half made of gestures. Mostly [[Nobledark_Imperium_Notable_People#Rainbow Serpent|worshipped warp spirits]], for this was back in the day when the warp wasn’t full of daemons. Could reproduce asexually through spores, but it was more reliable to chop off a finger or toe or ear and plant it in the soft mud near the river. However, when they did die, they would often release a cloud of spores as a last-ditch effort at reproduction, similar to some Earth species. It was this ability that made them of interest. And then the Old Ones came. And touched them where no species was meant to be touched.

As a point of comparison, imagine what the world would be like if the Old Ones did to humans what they did to the proto-Orks. Beings like baseline humanity would be nearly extinct, whereas the dominant representative of humanity is [[Orks|nearly quintuple the height of the average human and looks like it fell off the tree of life and hit every atavistic branch on the way down. What passes for "human" looks like a gorilla crossed with an ogryn, with fangs as thick as your forearm.]] Other varieties of “human” are [[Gretchin|creatures the size of polar bears, but lanky and cruel and built like a ‘’Velociraptor’’]]. All of them have seemingly regressed in intellect from the human standard, possessed only of a [[Mork|bestial cunning]] and only concerned with survival. [[Snotling|What few members of baseline humanity remain have regressed even further in intelligence to little better than animals.]] To make matters worse, these things primarily feed on [[Squig|creatures that look like demented combinations of human fetuses and infants as designed by Hieronymous Bosch]]. The Old Ones have taken your species and turned it into a viral ecosystem, good for nothing more than spreading. Every living thing you see around you is derived from humans in some way, [[Dogscape|a landscape made of human flesh]].

After the first batch of Krork were created it was the end for the proto-orks. The moment the first new spore touched the mud it was just a matter of time, you can't coexist with orks. Some isolated pockets held on for a few centuries but their day was done. That said, when the Krork first entered galactic history, their behavior was markedly different from the initial gene-wrought weapons that killed and ate their predecessors, [[Nobledark_Imperium_Writing#The Last Casualties of the War in Heaven|enough so that the eldar actually remember the Krork fondly]]. Although the Krork still thrived on war as much as their 41st millennium counterparts, they were much more intelligent and disciplined and were capable of realizing their allies didn’t enjoy war like they did and were capable of modifying their behavior accordingly. The Old Ones did not take kindly to team killing, and they had the psychic might to enforce their opinions. However, just because a species is pleasant now doesn't mean they were always that way, or that they don't have their own bloody secrets in their past. The eldar had no idea of what the Old Ones did and the Krork's bloody history, they may have liked the Krork but they would have been horrified to find out exactly how they had been made.

When the Old Ones died and the Enslavers took over the galaxy, every Old One-uplifted race had to survive in their own way. The Eldar hid in the Webway. The Hrud combined their entropy fields into a singularity that paused time from their perspective until the danger had passed. The Krork, on the other hand, died to a Krork against the Enslavers, with the species renewing itself from the spores left over when they died. This is what turned the Krork into the Orks, and emphasizes a particular problem with the Old Ones' methods. While the Orks retained all of their genetically encoded knowledge [[Mekboy|such as everything the Old Ones thought they needed to wage war]], anything culturally transmitted (like, say, “allies don’t WAAAGH! as hard as we do, treat them like panzees”) gets lost. The Orks retained all of the Krork’s [[Intelligence|knowledge]], but none of their [[wisdom]], and even anything from the new generation of Brain Boyz would be created from scratch. The Eldar were be overjoyed to find another old ally that had survived the War in Heaven, only to find their allies are now…different. And so began the occasional Eldar-Ork Brain Boy wars that occasionally rocked the galaxy before the Fall of the Eldar.

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=== Viskeon ===

See [[Nobledark_Imperium_Drafts#The_First_and_Second_Viskeon_Wars|The First and Second Viskeon Wars]]

== The Galactic Bestiary ==

=== Chogorian Warhawks ===

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Humans have always seen the benefit of taming useful species in their environment, from the dog of Old Earth to the warhawk of [[Nobledark_Imperium_Notable_Planets#The_Pastoral_Worlds|Chogoris]]. Warhawks are a species originally native to Chogoris, though similar species are known throughout the galaxy. However, genetic evidence suggests that warhawks are descended from a species originally native to Old Earth, transported to Chogoris in the distant past. The average warhawk, or at least the Chogorian breeds that most closely approximate the original appearance of the species is large, about the size of a wolf or large hound, with a mostly dun colored body and black and white markings. They are fast, pack-hunting predators, with long legs and a long feathered tail used as a counterbalance to help them make tight turns. Warhawks are also capable of flight with their broad, clawed feathered wings, though they prefer to rest on the ground. Although they have a toothy maw, their most dangerous and most iconic weapon is the large, razor edged claw on their foot, which they use to pin down smaller prey or lacerate larger prey or predators. Indeed, these fearsome claws have inspired the name of at least one Space Marine chapter: the Crimson Talons, a White Scars descendant from the pastoral world of Timpagonos that works with a large, horse-sized breed of warhawk unique to that world bred for war.

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The traditional use of warhawks are for sport and gathering food. When honing their skills by hunting in the Khum Karta mountains of Chogoris, Astartes of the White Scars use warhawks to help them in the hunt, rewarding their pets with the choicest giblets. Many, including the White Scars, prefer to tame wild warhawks from the wild instead of using a domestic one, citing that it creates a closer bond of trust with the beast. The less glamorous individuals of Chogoris’s many tribes use warhawks to help catch game to supplement their usual diet of herdstock. In addition, many will use warhawks to help corral and protect livestock in the manner of a sheepdog. Although adult warhawks are usually too large for a human to carry, some Astartes of the White Scars have been known to let their prized pets rest on their armor. As with many domesticated species, there are a large number of specialized warhawk breeds found throughout the galaxy, ranging from the aforementioned Crimson Giant to the meter long Oscillated Grey, a more sedate breed used for vermin catching on Civilized Worlds.

In contrast to some other domesticated predators like Fenrisian wolves, warhawks are typically not used in battle. Compared to these species warhawks are rather fragile, and their organic bodies cannot keep up with the untiring mechanical steeds of the White Scars. However many Pastoral Worlders will use them as trackers to hunt down and kill feral Gretchin and other similar targets, and when war comes to the Pastoral Worlds warhawks can be used in the manner of a war hound.

Despite their similarities in usage, warhawks are not dogs. They have a much more fickle temperament similar to felines, and while they are often hostile to unknown strangers. Similarly, warhawks cannot be caged or kenneled like dogs. Unless you are dealing with one of the more demure domesticated breeds, attempts to do so typically result in warhawks going mad from the confinement at best or sating their boredom by figuring out how to open their cages at worst. On Chogoris and the other pastoral worlds warhawks are typically allowed to roam free, their handlers expecting them to return to their homes based on gifts of food and attention, though they do mark their animals to denote which ones are theirs. The Pastoral Worlders see this as only right, a loyal warhawk should not be punished for their loyalty by being forbidden to fly free and feel the wind in their face. Furthermore, by allowing their prize warhawks to roam free it ensures the best warhawks continue to breed are not removed from the population.

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=== Fenrisian Wolves ===
<div class="toccolours mw-collapsible mw-collapsed" style="100%">'''''Homo sapiens fenrisiensis'''''

Leman Russ’ initial experiments with the Canis Helix on Fenris were, to put it bluntly, a complete disaster. Although the idea behind the Canis Helix was to augment the abilities of human soldiers with genes from other animals on Old Earth, the first trials went way too far and ended up producing creatures more beast than man. Russ was horrified by these first experiments, and tried to put the aspirants out of their misery. However, some of these experiments managed to escape and life in general has a funny way of surviving in places it’s not supposed to. Within a few generations, the harsh native ecosystem of Fenris was being dominated by a new, invasive predator. The people of Fenris may not be splice descendants, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t any around.

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Most people who know the origin of the Wolves of Fenris often expect them to look like merely hairy humans, or at least something that can reasonably be described as humanoid. This is not the case. Your average Fenris Wolf weighs somewhere between 500 and 600 kilograms (over 1000 pounds), and has a skull nearly a meter in length. Fenris wolves will actually grow in size throughout their entire lives, which is thought to be an indicator of their super-soldier ancestry, artificial genes used to promote muscle and bone development being re-purposed for continuous growth. Their canine teeth have distinct knife-like edges, resembling a monkey more than a wolf, and their front limbs are disturbingly human-like with dexterous opposable thumbs despite primarily walking on all fours. The overall body shape of a Fenrisian wolf is more like a cross between a wolf, bear, and a lion rather than a straight wolf, allowing them to grapple with enemies or climb low branches in search of prey. There are some human traits remaining, such as their eerily human eyes with white sclera, but one would be hard-pressed to see them.

It’s not clear how intelligent the Fenrisian wolves really are. It is clear they are clever, moreso than any non-human organism on Old Earth, but the question is are they only intelligent as, say, [[Nobledark_Imperium_Imperial_Forces#Beastmen_and_Ogryn|Primeval Beastmen]] or are they really more intelligent than they appear and merely limited by their lack of ability to communicate. At the very least, the fact that Fenrisian Wolves are easily tamed and are capable of performing complex behaviors that an animal like a dog isn’t capable of suggests there is something going on in their brains. The Adeptus Biologicus would love to try to uplift the Fenris wolves back to sapience like the Beastmen and the Ogryn, but they’re worried any attempt to do so would blow back on the people of Fenris because of how genetically close the two are.

The people of Fenris venerate the Fenrisian wolf above all other creatures because out of all the animals on Fenris it alone represents all the virtues of man. Like humans, the Fenris wolf is clever, strong, brave, loyal, and stubborn, all at the same time. The fact that they behave this way because they are actually abhumans rather than actual animals is something that is either not well known among the people of Fenris or glossed over, especially since Leman Russ made sure that wasn’t common knowledge in the first place.

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=== Grox ===

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The grox is a cornerstone of Imperial culture. In many cases, the presence of grox is the deciding factor in determining whether or not a world is livable as opposed to merely survivable. Although originally native to the world of Solomon, the grox has a number of biological traits that make it extremely valuable and have led to it becoming the most widespread livestock animal in the entire Imperium.

The grox’s biology and life cycle owes itself to the unusual evolutionary history of life on Solomon. For the most part, the history of life on Solomon was very similar to life on Earth. Single-celled life emerged, photosynthesizers filled the atmosphere with oxygen, multicellular life appeared, and eventually animal life (with a backbone, like Earth) clambered its way out of the water. However, this is the point where things started to go a little bit differently. One of the earliest experiments in life on land on Solomon was the grox, which due to several factors ended up steamrolling its competition and dominating the ecosystem. First, grox were big, growing up to 5 m in length and weighing up to 1000 kg, much larger than any of its potential predators or competitors. What's more, due to an extremely active metabolism and efficient digestive system, Grox could grow incredibly quickly, reaching full adult size in over six months, less so if fed a nutrient-rich diet.

The end result was an impoverished terrestrial ecosystem, with almost no native land animals over 5 kg in weight aside from the grox. The grox, however, more than makes up for this lack of megafauna by being a complete and utter omnivore, feeding on plants, animals, even some mineral formations. At some point above the first link or so on the food chain, Solomon's terrestrial ecosystem turns into big grox eating smaller grox until the point where that no longer becomes feasible. The grox’s infamous rapid growth rate evolved at least in part so that juvenile grox could rapidly reach the size range where they were too large to be eaten by other adults.

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This ability to grow fast and eat almost anything made grox extremely appealing to the Imperium. Grox could be released onto planets with normally hostile biochemistry and turn the native plant life into edible food (though they aren't miracle workers, as evidenced by the absence of grox on Necromunda). Additionally, because of their habit of eating anything and everything, grox meat contains all the nutrients necessary for most species to survive. Grox meat is even a source of carbohydrates similar to ork meat and some fungi (though grox are unrelated to orks and other orkoids) as the physiology of life on Solomon is slightly different than that of Earth. Grox are used for more than just meat; grox hide (primarily taken from the area beneath the withers, which is covered in bony scutes) is an important source of leather on many planets. This led the Imperium to export grox all over the galaxy and Solomon itself becoming a borderline Hive World in response to the demand for grox meat. Today, almost the entire surface of Solomon is devoted to grox agriculture and the planet has often been called “the galaxy’s biggest grox farm”.

Nevertheless, grox are not without their own set of problems. The same traits that make grox ideal livestock in harsh environments also makes them aggressive, gluttinous, and territorial. Given that there is very little to eat on Solomon and Grox grow fast, there is always fighting over who gets food, who controls where the food is, and who becomes food. Grox horns are not only used for fighting over access to mates but for fighting over access to resources. Wild grox typically view humans as either competitors for food or prey that can potentially be overpowered and eaten. Despite having thick, clumsy limbs grox are also incredibly strong and are capable of quick bursts of speed when necessary. Any attempt to keep large herds of grox together would be doomed to failure due to their territorial nature. As a result, it is often necessary to sterilize grox (which are naturally hermaphrodites) in captivity, which makes them docile and lose their territorial instincts.

Sterilizing grox has more benefits than merely making them docile, as sterilized grox actually grow larger and faster than un-neutered ones. It is theorized by Adeptus Biologis researchers that sterilization causes the grox to grow faster and become less territorial because all of the energy that would normally be devoted to reproduction is devoted to growth, and sterilization means the grox are no longer competing to pass their genes on to the next generation, similar to what is seen in parasite-sterilized animals on other planets (including Earth). Nevertheless, it is always necessary to keep a few aggressive, fertile individuals around for the sake of maintaining the herd, which are typically kept in solitary pens when not being bred and are often marked in some way (such as having bright painted colors on their side) to make it clear to groxherders from a distance which individuals are safe to approach.

Grox are by far the most common livestock animal in the Imperium. However, in spite of what one might think, grox tend to be a more common sight on worlds that have little to no other livestock industry (particularly worlds that cannot support other types of livestock), than the livestock-heavy Pastoral Worlds. Although small grox herds exist on all Pastoral Worlds, other pastoral worlders view grox with disdain, seeing them as a pest that will eat their preferred livestock out of house and home. This sentiment is not without merit. Despite being a valued livestock animal, grox are opportunists and survivors, and on many worlds grox have gone feral and become dangerous invasive species. Perhaps the best example of this is on Catachan, where grox were imported in 127.M33 in an attempt to make the planet more livable to its native inhabitants. The project was largely a failure, as the constantly growing jungle destroyed any attempt at keeping the grox enclosed and most of the fertile grox escaped into the jungle. Millennia later, feral grox are still a common sight across Catachan. Grox are not even at the bottom of the food chain on Catachan, feeding on small animals and carnivorous plants in addition to less aggressive vegetation.

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[[Category:Nobledark Imperium]]