Editing Nobledark Imperium Forces of Chaos (section)

==Other Units==

===The Marionettes===
Marionettes are slaves- human, other Imperial, and badly disgraced Croneworlder, in descending order of commonality- who have been sealed inside suits of sensory-deprivation armor. As protection, the armor is... better than nothing. The true purpose of the ghastbone suits are to filter the wearer's perceptions of the outside world, rendering the wearer entirely dependent on the commands of their Master to function.

At the highest level, a Marionette's armor induces total sensory deprivation, even suppressing internal senses like proprioception and balance, with the commands of the Master- delivered direct to the nervous system- the only sensory input. This level is rare, as it requires the Master to manage each individual twitch of a muscle on top of whatever else they're doing. This highest grade of Marionette is therefore found mostly in the retinues of the highest and most perfect nobility, who can manage such complexity, moving in perfect concert with their master. 

The average soldier-Marionette, of necessity, operates at a lower level of filtering, the outside world heavily abstracted to a level where they can do simple tasks like walking and aiming independently, but anything more complex is virtually impossible without outside direction for simple lack of information. Thousands of such soldiers can be found marching in the battles of the Black Crusades under the command of a single Master, moving in perfect formation through even the heaviest defensive fire- which they may not even perceive, seeing nothing but the ground under their feet and abstract targets to be shot, everything else reduced to featureless void. 

Aesthetically, Marionettes (naturally) vary; the most common is blank, featureless white plating, reflecting the total suppression of independent will and inner life, but excessive riots of color and ornamentation are also popular. As with everything, infinite variety. 

The primary users of Marionettes are, naturally, Slaaneshi warbands. Tzeentchian forces are the second-most-common users, and have developed their own variations on the technique. Some of the more together Khornate warbands use Marionette armor to control their berserkers, herding them in consistent directions and preventing them from turning on each other by limiting their perception to the desired objective. Nurglite forces, hardly at all.

===Dragon's Teeth===
Dragon's Teeth are one of the many ways the Chaos Eldar have of making the Imperium's life miserable. Created by the forces of Nurgle from carefully-tended knots of filth, they resemble metallic seeds in their inert form- and in a sense, that is what they are. They are scattered about as a raiding force withdraws, dormant- until the conditions for their awakening are met. What those conditions are varies; it could be time elapsed, large numbers of people nearby, a snatch of birdsong, almost anything. Then it awakes, and starts to grow, sending tendrils through the ground. Then, once it has fully grown, it emerges. 

They are wireframe horrors, masses of rusty, filth-encrusted razor-wire in the vague outline of a living thing. They attack by entangling their prey, slicing them apart with a thousand cuts. They are very stealthy; having no skeleton of any kind, they can squeeze themselves through gaps an inch wide and flatten themselves against the ground to avoid detection, and they make excellent use of this ability. They have a natural grasp of terror tactics; sneaking into a tent of sleeping soldiers and killing every third of them without waking the rest, stringing up soldiers inside themselves without killing them and forcing the rest to shoot their comrade, more. They often prefer to maim rather than outright kill; wounds inflicted by them will invariably become infected, becoming new vectors for Nurgle's gifts. They also seem to take particular pleasure in blending their way through hospitals.

Despite their undeniable lethality, their true purpose is to tie up resources and degrade morale. Hunting down an infestation of Dragon's Teeth is long, tedious, stressful, and manpower-intensive. Tracking one down requires exhaustive search efforts involving thousands of people. The injured must be treated- and guarded. Maintaining quarantines becomes near impossible with their ability to worm through the tightest cracks. A world sown with Dragon's Teeth can continue having problems with them for centuries, as long-dormant seeds awaken. They just generally take a disproportionate amount of resources to deal with- and that is their true power. 

Fortunately, they have very little in the way of target discrimination. They (usually) don't attack other Dragon's Teeth, but that's as much as they can manage- on the open battlefield, they pose as much a threat to 'allies' as to enemies, and thus are not usually deployed in combat alongside other forces. It is a small comfort, especially since they make a perfectly adequate minefield.

===Qlippoth===

The Qlippoth began as something of a science project deep within the bowels of Shaa-Dome. An attempt at creating emotion and sensation unprecedented even to gods, creating zones of altered space equally foreign to both the Materium and Empyrean and minds to inhabit them - minds to be consumed. Born to die. 

It worked. Croneworld legend holds that everyone even tangentially involved with the project was immediately elevated to Daemon Princedom for creating sensations previously unknown to even the Prince of Excess, but the actual truth could be anything. 

Qlippoth intended for war use are transported within ghastbone containment/support wombs, which are in turn locked within stasis fields. Once on the battlefield, the stasis fields are deactivated and the contained micro-universe and inhabiting Qlippoth(s) begin eating their way out of the containment womb and leaking into the outside universe. 

It begins with a psychic howl, an utterly alien psyche pressing down on the mind and soul. Devastating and incapacitating. Permanent damage is likely. Closer to the epicenter, total mind erasure. 

Then, physical effects, as the containment womb starts to collapse entirely and the micro-universe within starts to force its way out, resulting in a zone of overlapping physics within both the Materium and Immaterium. The exact effects are never the same twice, each Qlippoth and its substrate being utterly unique, but they are invariably devastating. Not even daemons take well to the laws of physics changing underneath them. 

Finally, the utter collapse of the containment womb and the release of the Qlippoth itself. Without the womb maintaining its form and feeding it energy, it will only live for a handful of minutes, but will cause enormous destruction in those few minutes before the laws of nature finally reassert themselves. Even so, the scars on both Materium and Immaterium will linger indefinitely.

Qlippoth vary in yield based on their size. Most Qlippoth "only" have a blast yields comparable to a [[Deathstrike Missile Launcher]]. The largest and rarest ones are essentially a Crone Eldar form of [[Exterminatus]].

===Nightmares===

Nightmares are some of the most depraved of all Crone Eldar creations, living siege engines that lay waste to anything in their path. Nightmares are in effect perversions of spirit stone technology, the same technology that keeps the souls of Craftworlders from being eaten by She Who Thirsts upon their demise. Crone Eldar normally hate spirit stones, calling them “soul traps” and seeing them as barriers that keep eldar from being closer to their gods, but they are more than creative enough to turn this technology to their own needs. Although spirit stones are normally used to protect the recently dead, they can also be used as holding vessels for souls forcibly ripped out of their host bodies. Dark Eldar have used this to forcibly swap the souls of different races as part of their sick pleasures. Crone Eldar have taken this concept and weaponized it. And being on the Crone Worlds, the developed worlds of the Old Eldar Empire, the Crone Eldar have a lot of spirit stones to work with.

Nightmares are massive goliaths, made of hundreds of stolen souls linked together into wraithbone lattices and clothed in warp-tainted flesh often stolen from the bodies of slaves. The souls that compose a Nightmare are all aware of their situation and feel the sensation of their entire body, but are typically only able to control a small portion of their form. This decentralization makes Nightmares incredibly hard to kill, as they are able to ignore most forms of pain not specifically tailored to harm them by their masters and will keep fighting until they are too damaged to move. In order to impose some degree of control over the Nightmare, all of the souls composing the abomination are linked to a single empty spirit stone, which is able to coordinate the movements of the entire monstrosity despite each individual soul only able to control a small portion of the beast. Typically, the only way is to destroy this linking spirit stone, and sets the component souls of the Nighmare free (to where is unknown, but it is arguable that even oblivion is preferable to life as a component of a Nightmare).

Being living macabre works of “art”, no two Nightmares are the same, whether in the number of eyes, number of arms, number of heads, even the very souls that make up their being are often taken from a multitude of species. The only similarity is that all Nightmares fear the lashes of the Flesh Wardens that drive them into battle. The only pleasure they ever receive is the flood of endorphins released into them by remote control at the end of each successful battle, which coincidentally sedate a Nightmare and make it possible for other Crone Eldar to wrangle it back into containment. On rare occasion, a particularly brave or foolish Crone Eldar will actually be able to break an abomination and ride it into battle, typically those Eldar devoted to courting the favor of all four Chaos Gods simultaneously, seeing as they tend to not have much of a survival reflex in the first place.

===Faehounds===

The Crone World eldar are nothing if not an ingenious people. Consider the humble [[Chaos Spawn]]. It its natural state, it is a pitiable thing. Barely able to move, barely able to breathe, in most cases good for relatively little except as component materia for a [[Mutalith Vortex Beast]]. However, take that Chaos Spawn, prune away the unusable limbs, induce further mutations, and replace the parts that don’t work with prosthetics, and you get a creature that is actually worth something. Crone eldar are masters at this process, their fleshsculptors carefully and artistically trimming chaos spawn like bonsai to create the creatures that they call faehounds.

Like other flesh-sculpted abominations, it does not matter what faehounds were before they were blessed with their mutations. Even Chaos Spawn that used to be Crones receive no special treatment, Crones generally considering being turned into a Chaos Spawn as voiding one’s claim to belonging to the chosen race of the gods. Faehounds come in a vast array of shapes and forms, and it can be quite accurately said that no two look alike. As with anything Chaotic, there are innumerable variants of faehounds, their numbers limited solely by the whims of their creators and the mutating eddies of the Warp. However, most show echoes of a common design, a general hound-like form, typically quadrupedal, though bipedal, six-legged, and even centipede-like forms are known. Manipulatory appendages are rare, but most have some kind of mouthparts with which they can savage their enemy. Faehounds are generally smaller than most Chaos Spawn due to the careful grooming of their flesh, but they trade this for much more coherence in their body plan.

Faehounds have many uses in war. Perhaps their most common use is as cannon fodder. Faehounds, with their unnatural speed, can rapidly outpace Crone Eldar, and can charge enemy lines absorbing enemy fire while more valuable forces advance. Whether or not they survive is irrelevant, faehounds are easily replaceable, and each shot fired at them is one less shot fired at more valuable eldar lives. Although Perhaps one of the most common variants of faehounds are forms modified as suicide attackers, exploding in a burst of corrosive digestive juices once their purpose is finished or they are too damaged to fight any longer. After all, it is not as though they were expected to survive in the first place.

Faehounds are also useful trackers. Many varieties have some form of highly acute senses, whether it be smell, sight, or even the ability to see the raw currents of the Warp. Therefore, many Crones include faehounds in their hunting parties, these mutated beasts tracking their quarry at the side of their masters. Although the actual battle is important, the Crones find hunting down and killing the fleeing survivors to be just as much if nor more enjoyable.