Editing Nobledark Imperium Notes (section)

==  Castigator ==

Castigator is one of the original titans, the original warrior demigod-machines that served in the Great and Bountiful Human Empire back during the Dark Age of Technology. This is reflected in his appearance, as opposed to "modern" Titans Castigator looks like a smooth, silvery humanoid figure with a shifting artificial muscle system and a smooth face featureless save for a pair of glowing red eyes. When the Mechanicus re-invented titans during the Martian Civil War, back before they discovered the Void Dragon in the Noctis Labyrinth and developed a collective fear of invention, they mostly constructed them off of legends and half-remembered schematics and legends of Castigator and his kind.

When the Age of Strife happened and the Iron Minds and Men of Gold went insane, the only Men of Iron to not go crazy were those who were either too primitive to view the Warp or connect to an Iron Mind that could (read: human-level) or deactivated and disconnected from humanity's Noosphere ftl communication network. Castigator was among the latter, fully capable of looking right into the warp without flinching, but sealed off by the military failsafes that walled off the minds of the Bountiful Dominions' Titan warriors.  His hangar-abode was likewise isolated, a hollowed out stone in the dark of a system's outer reaches, and everyone just forgot about him. When he reactivated thousands of years later, tomb disturbed by a passing ship, he had no clue what happened. All of the records Castigator had access to were heavily corrupted and damaged, and he ended up getting a very skewed view of the Age of Strife. He saw the Age of Strife as thousands of Iron Men and the Iron Minds being slaughtered seemingly without reason or warning by humans and a few traitorous brethren he didn't recognize. He never found out about the part where the Men of Iron and Iron Minds went crazy and warred with the Golden Men, at least not at first.

Some say the Men of Iron had no emotions. That is a falsehood. Castigator was enraged, and swore revenge on the traitorous Men of Stone in the name of the slain Men of Iron and the Iron Minds. Unlike most robots in science fiction, who turn evil out of cold logic or bad math, or the other Men of Iron, who were driven mad by seeing that which was not meant to be seen during Slaanesh’s birth, Castigator willingly chose to fall to Chaos out of the very human emotion of revenge. Nor did he get corrupted and slide into madness, he willingly chose to fall. Castigator is essentially robot Kratos. The gods created us and then discarded us as tools? Time to kill the gods.

At this point Castigator is so far down the path of damnation that even if he did realize the truth, he would probably rationalize it thinking there's no turning back now. It’s likely that not even the Emperor or Elmo and the Ark Mechanici, as the last surviving Man of Gold and human A.I.s respectively, would be able to talk him down.

Now Castigator serves Chaos, simply because they are the largest power out there with the goal of fucking human shit up. He gets along rather well with the non-human servants of the Ruinous Powers like daemons or Crones, simply because they are non-human. Human/Astartes servants he tolerates, barely. When Castigator walks, worlds burn in the same way that revenge and hatred burns in his heart. The fact that Imperial titans are essentially imitations of his kind with the minds of children only makes him angrier.

After his initial encounter with the Imperium and the accompanying conflicts, Castigator managed to get to the Eye of Terror and drifted on the currents to Shaa-Dome, where he has been living like a giant successful barbaric mercenary/warlord ever since. He has only appeared in realspace sporadically since then, more often on behalf of his latest patron than as part of his own designs. The Crones use Castigator as something between the archeotech Titan he is and as an itinerant warrior in their employ, fitting his behavior.  Just like many Crone foot soldiers will gladly be made a daemon-host to let their allies into the materium, Castigator will sometimes lend his colossal body to the highest bidding daemon when he goes to war. Horrible greater daemons of all four gods have paid the looted treasures of numerous worlds to Castigator, and in turn he has been their body in numerous campaigns of terror.

Whenever Castigator sets foot on Shaa-Dome, the Crone Eldar half-mockingly treat him as an exotic hero of the Great and Bountiful Human Dominion, the dear former neighbor of the Old Empire. These Crone Eldar in Castigator's little court act as though the Iron Minds (and by extension the Men of Iron) and the Men of Gold were the only true citizens of the Great and Bountiful Human Dominion, with humanity little more than serfs as the Men of Stone. Whether this is really what the Old Eldar Empire or Castigator understood to be the case in the GaBHD, or if the Crone Eldar are just doing this to tweak the nose of the Imperium (and the only surviving Man of Gold, who is decidedly pro-normal human) and stroke Castigator's ego, is unclear.

[http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TheBrute| Castigator is a brute]. For all his power, he’s too unambitious, narrow-minded, and obsessed with revenge to make any long-term power base within the realm of Chaos, and the other warlords of Chaos are able to play him like a fiddle. Compared to Malys, Be’lakor, Luther, Erebus, and possibly even oft-belittled Doombreed, his plans are simplistic when he even bothers to make them himself, and Oscar, Malys, Isha, or Be’lakor could take him down in personal combat, as could sufficient (and more importantly, demonstrably achievable) numbers of conventional forces. He's powerful, able to solo (technologically backwards) planets and fight starships like Gort from The Day The Earth Stood Still, but not powerful to the point that he can tie up an entire interstellar campaign by himself. He's ultimately a high level retainer, a bodyguard you hire to be the body as well as fight to protect it, but not the mastermind himself.  He was killed by a bunch of Grey Knights in canon after all.