Editing Nobledark Imperium Drafts (section)

=== The Great Crusade ===

==== The Fable of Djerba ====

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Today the world of Djerba in the Segmentum Solar is not particularly notable. But it’s Crusade-era history is well-known. Like many worlds during the Age of Strife, the original population included a significant number of people who were touched by the Warp, which increasing manifested itself as the Age of Strife went on. Unfortunately, like many worlds during the Age of Strife, including Barbarus, the psykers on Djerba went mad with power and set themselves up as god-kings over the common people. On Djerba, these psykers called themselves Cognoscynths.

The psychic abilities of the people of Djerba primarily manifested as a form of mind control. Cognoscynths could invade and control the mind of an ordinary person on a whim, rewriting memories, suppressing morality and self-preservation, and forcing any who could not surpass their willpower and psychic might to be their slaves. Before long, although the surface of Djerba was nominally made up of numerous warring nation-states, the leadership of these nations were little more than puppets to the Cognoscynths. The Cognoscynths erected their City of Sight above Djerba, from which they controlled the people below like marionettes on strings. They forced the people below them to go to war for their amusement, laughing as man slaughtered man at their whim.

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According to legend, the Imperium sent three emissaries to the Cognoscynths. The first was the [[Nobledark_Imperium_Primarchs#Magnus_the_Red|Scholar]], a giant clad in red, who came bearing words of warning. He had come to Djerba hearing rumors of a society where outcasts such as he could co-exist in peace with normal men without fear of persecution. What he saw disheartened him. Here was a society which embodies the worst nightmare of the most closed-minded and hateful of mankind, who feared the witch and hated the psyker.

The Cognoscynths psychically commanded him to bow. The Scholar said no. In that moment, the Cognoscynths realized that they were to the man before them as hills were before a mountain. With rage burning in his one eye, the Scholar said he would give the Cognoscynths one warning. Dismantle their oppressive society and free the ordinary men and women they had enslaved, or face the consequences. For if they did not he would to return with his liege, and his liege was not as forgiving as he.

The second was the Shepherd, clad in gold, who brought words of doom. The Cognoscynths had ignored the warning of the Scholar, and had not changed their ways since he had left. The Shepherd was the Scholar’s liege, and came before the Cognoscynths much as the Scholar had. He said that he had seen the world the Cognoscynths had wrought. The Cognoscynths had been judged, and found wanting. Once more, the Cognoscynths were enraged at being judged by an outsider, and attempted to psychically compel him to bow. They failed. Whereas the Scholar had been a mountain, the Shepherd was like a monolith of adamantium, only gold instead of grey.

Their prodigious psychic powers failing them, the Cognoscynths turned to words. They scoffed at the idea of the Shepherd bringing judgement upon them. For all of his power, the Shepherd was just one man. Even if he brought the Scholar, the two did not have the power to command them on their own. The Cognoscynths were each powerful psykers, who could command armies of their own. Whereas any army the Shepard could bring would fall under the control of their powers and turn on their fellows. What could the Shepard do to them?

“I will bring your empire down with a single soldier,” said the Shepherd, then left.

The third Emissary was the [[Nobledark_Imperium_Notable_People#Jenetia_Krole|Slayer]], clad only in black. She brought no words, only death. Where she walked, men went mad, the witch-touched tearing their eyes out and clawing at their skin whereas the mundane became ill and collapsed from severe vertigo. None could seemingly touch her. Even the Cognoscynths were not immune. The Slayer only killed two-thirds of the Cognoscynths, by the time she turned her attention to the remainder they were already dead, the last choking on his own blood.

The people of Djerba were freed both in body and mind, and with freed fists celebrated their liberators. But to this day, the Imperium still remembers the lesson of the Cognoscynths, even if only as a cautionary tale, as best exemplified by the colors of Djerba. Red, gold, and black.

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==== The Rangdan Xenocides and the Slaugth ====

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The Rangdan Xenocides were by far the most costly conflict ever fought during the Great Crusade. The campaign included the involvement of three Space Marine legions (the Dark Angels, Space Wolves, and the Ultramarines), several Titan legions, and significant numbers of the Solar Auxilla; needed the assistance of the Eldar to gain a foothold; and required the direct intervention of the Steward himself to finally turn the tide.

The opposing forces of the Rangdan Xenocides were the Slaugth. The Slaugth were colonial organisms resembling masses of maggots (though pedantic AdBio members would point out they also showed similarities to Terran leeches and earthworms) linked together in a mucosal sheath into a humanoid shape. The constant psychic contact between the individual worms in the colony, combined with the completely horrific and alien mindset of the Slaugth by the standards of nearly every other race in the galaxy, made them revolting to directly touch with psychic powers. Psychic contact with a Slaugth was not like the mental communion of matter and anti-matter of a blank, but described more like sticking one’s arms up to the shoulder in maggots. “Only a daemon would want a Slaugth’s soul”, an old Crusade-era saying goes.

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The Slaugth themselves had an entirely self-centered mindset and only cared about themselves and their individual desires, lacking even the empathy requisite for sadism, they would with great and terrible apathy degrade and consume the whole of the universe. Although they were able to scrape together some semblance of social order, the Slaugth saw everyone and everything, even members of their own kind, as little more than tools or philosophical zombies set in the universe to fulfill their whims. For the most part, the most prominent of those was hunger. Although the Slaugth were naturally detritivores and could survive on any flesh, they most preferred to feed on brains (the larger and more complex, the better), and had developed a system to feed this gluttony. Humans, eldar, and other sapients were farmed like cattle, their brains extracted, and the waste meats fed back to the livestock and Slaugth bio-constructs like Osseivores. The Slaugth did not eat the brains of other sapients solely for their nutritional value. Absorbing nutriends from a brain would cause an individual Slaugth worm to be overwhelmed by neurotransmitters, producing a euphoric effect similar to a chemical high.

Indeed, just about the only reason the Slaugth didn’t readily turn on each other is that Slaugth couldn’t really eat other Slaugth. If one Slaugth colony tried to eat another Slaugth, the two would simply merge into a single giant Slaugth colony twice as large and twice as hungry as its constituents. Even if a Slaugth did manage to completely kill all the component individuals of a fellow Slaugth colony before eating it, Slaugth flesh simply tasted foul to their own kind. And this is assuming that a Slaugth could kill another Slaugth in the first place. Being composed of hundreds if not thousands of individual organisms, Slaugth lacked vital organs or a centralized nervous system and were notably hard to kill. For this reason, Slaugth tended to prefer necrotic weaponry, which rotted the tissues of their foes from the inside-out and was one of the few ways (aside from fire, plasma, or radiation) to make sure another Slaugth was reliably dead. The fact that it also worked well on the bio-constructs that Slaugth technology was largely based around just made it even more attractive.

Given this entirely self-centered mindset, it is difficult to imagine how a species like the Slaugth could have ever developed a civilization, let alone space travel. However, what little historical records remain show the Slaugth arose long after the end of the Old Ones in the War in Heaven and long before humanity developed widespread genetic engineering or spread out into the stars. Current hypotheses suggest that the Old Eldar Empire, or at least someone like them, was responsible for the uplift of the Slaugth from what were essentially fire and tool-using ant colonies into a starfaring species, as well as their adoption of a humanoid form.


By the time the Imperium encountered the Rangda, the Slaugth were being ruled by an [[Nobledark_Imperium_Xenos#Iron_Minds|Iron Mind]]. A minor Iron Mind, to be sure, but even a minor Iron Mind was still dangerous. The Slaugth and the Iron Mind had formed a kind of symbiosis, or as close to one as the Slaugth were capable of. The Iron Mind handled the long term planning of the Rangdan Empire, which the Slaugth naturally didn’t have the wherewithal or inclination to run, and the Slaugth indulged it in its god complex and protected its physical body while its artificial soul ran with daemons in the Warp. When the Imperium fought the Slaugth the Iron Mind was able to coordinate the movement of its forces with uncanny accuracy. Companies would advance only to be met with forces that already predicted their arrival. However, when the Imperium finally made a beachhead on Rangda, the Steward took to the field and struck down the Iron Mind with an ancient archaeotech device of unknown purpose from the vaults of Ganymede. With the Iron Mind destroyed, the cohesion of the Slaugth was broken, and the remaining factions were run down and killed by the Imperium and Eldar.

It was during the Rangdan Xenocides that the Dark Angels, who were previously tied for the status of “most numerous legion” with the Ultramarines, became the largest standing legion by a wide margin. Although the Ultramarines were well-trained and highly-skilled, the Slaugth were an outside context problem for them and they suffered grievous casualties. Still others became infested through some unknown means and had to be mercy killed, their eyes begging for death and their limbs moved to butcher their comrades in the name of their xenos master. By contrast, the Dark Angels had been traveling the void and dealing with anomalous phenomena for far longer, and knew how to deal with the unexpected. While the Ultramarines immediately moved to free the Slaugth chattel, the Dark Angels held back and waited. Although this seemed callous at the time, the Dark Angels knew that the Slaugth would use the prisoners as bait for an ambush, and that by focusing their efforts on the Slaugth or restricting any rescue operations to the cover of darkness they could save a lot more prisoners than otherwise possible. The rise of the Dark Angels as the undisputable largest legion set the stage for Luther’s actions during the War of the Beast, and made the betrayal of the Fallen that much more devastating.

Imperial and Eldar forces rescued numerous humans and Eldar from Rangda and the surrounding worlds of the Slaugth Empire. Eldar rescuees, due to the longer generational gaps, were not as mentally damaged and were herded off to the nearest Craftworlds where they could be given some semblance of a normal life. Although these slaves were physically normal, mentally, it would be more accurate to describe them as livestock than anything else. They had spent at least a few thousand years being bred for servile, docile natures and to be just strong enough to not need looking after much but too weak to pose any sort of threat. The Imperium tried to uplift them in a similar manner to the ogryn, but had variable success. In the end, the human survivors of Rangda were largely adopted by the various Legions. They were docile but they were dutiful, they also had inhuman patience and didn't get bored by repetitive tasks. Their tainted bloodline has by 999.M41 faded away though many in the Imperium, even some Space Marines, could claim to have at least one ancestor in the "serf families" as they became known.


Today across most of the galaxy the Slaugth are considered to be harmless boogeymen, an extinct xenos species whose only modern function is to scare children into eating their vegetables. There are others who know better. Not every Slaugth was killed in the aftermath of the Rangdan Xenocides. Some escaped the destruction of their species, hiding amongst the flesh of the dead in places beneath notice. Today the Slaugth exist in the shadows, multiplying in the places out of sight ready to emerge wherever weakness or rot presents itself. Slaugth have been sighted in the xenos districts of Low Commorragh, trading technological abominations to the Dark Eldar in exchange for slaves. Some have even suggested that the abundance of Slaugth in the Calixis Sector is not a coincidence, speaking in hushed tones of bargains struck between the maggot men and the separatist Emperor Severan of the Severan Dominate.

The surviving Slaugth seem surprisingly unconcerned with the loss of their empire. They resent it, but they are not devastated by it in the way that a human, eldar, or tau would be. Indeed, the Slaugth seem to see the destruction of their empire and near-extinction of their species as “not their problem”. And given that the Slaugth are colonial organisms, who can reproduce asexually or with minor contact with other colonies, it could be argued that the death of the rest of their race really was “not their problem”. Indeed, the empire at Rangda was in effect the normal Slaugth modus operandi on a large scale. The similarities are evident; a large number of thralls and bio-constructs lorded over by a Slaugth elite, resembling a feedlot or a parasitic infestation more than what one would think of as civilization. It’s possible that while the Slaugth might on some level desire retribution for the destruction of their empire, given their mindset they might just consider vengeance another flavor of eating.

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==== The Ullanor Crusade ====

Editor's Note: Needs to be edited with changes discussed in Thread 62, put here to avoid it getting lost since it is mostly done

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Imperial historians generally consider the Ullanor campaign to be the last major military action of the Great Crusade and a harbinger that set the stage for of the War of the Beast shortly thereafter. However, to those who participated in the crusade itself, there was little to suggest the Ullanor campaign would be of such significance. Ullanor was seen as one of the last major pockets of significant military resistance in the galaxy, but at the time of the Ullanor crusade peoples’ minds were beginning to shift away from exploration, warfare, and conquest and more towards consolidation and rebuilding. Most of the major threats to the Imperium during the Great Crusade were seen as dealt with. The [[Nobledark_Imperium_Drafts#The_Rangdan_Xenocides_and_the_Slaugth|Slaugth]] were believed to be extinct. The [[Nobledark_Imperium_Notes#Yu'Vath|Yu’Vath]] were seen as crippled, though not completely eliminated. [[Nobledark_Imperium_Notes#the_Realm_of_Ultramar_and_the_Imperium_Secundus_Plan|Guilliman’s fear of a “counter-Imperium”]] located somewhere in the galaxy seemed to have never been realized. The map of the Milky Way had not been completely been filled in, but there was less and less of an area for any such an empire to hide. However, few would claim the Great Crusade was nearly over. Many planets were still in the process of reconstruction, a process that was expected to take several centuries given the extent of the damage from the Old Night.

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The empire at Ullanor was discovered quite unexpectedly by the Imperial Fists as part of their unification of the neighboring Osroene Sector near the border between the Segmentum Obscurus and the Segmentum Ultima. The people of the sector had reported numerous Ork raids over the years, most of which had been beaten back at great cost. They said the raids had become more intense over time, but had little more information on where the Orks were coming from or why the raids were so frequent beyond their general direction of attack. Similar sectors had reported the same thing, to the point that one Imperial map made shortly before the Ullanor Crusade has the Ullanor Sector rather cheekily labelled in High Gothic as “Hic Sunt Orcorum”. The Imperial Fists made a short Warp jump, expecting to find little more than a pirate base formed by a particularly successful Freebooter. When they saw the actual source of the raids, they immediately turned around and sent an astropathic message to Old Earth for backup.

What the Imperial Fists reported from Ullanor was shocking. Normally Ork camps resembled nothing more than the camps of a simple warband writ large. Nothing more advanced than a series of tents and ramshackle huts, and nothing more permanent than some Mekboy quarters and da Drops. Not Ullanor. Ullanor had been united by a rather ambitious warboss, who had decided to build his influence over the sector slowly than let his reign be a simple flash in the pan. Instead of a simple scrap-ridden wasteland and encampment, the planet had been criss-crossed by a series of Ork-made bunkers, crude and spartan but nevertheless planned in terms of their placement. These buildings were but crude fortifications compared to the permanent structures erected by the Orks at places like Gorkograd on Prax. However, at the time of the Ullanor Crusade, it was an unpleasant surprise.

The increasing Freeboota attacks on the neighboring systems weren’t simply raiding parties. They were the signs of an empire ready to expand.


The threat posed by Ullanor was clear, even to the Steward. Having nearly been choked to death by a similar Warboss after a hasty and ill-advised personal assault on the hollowed-out world of Gorro, the Steward knew full well of what a Warboss of that caliber was capable of. Such was the threat posed by the empire at Ullanor that five primarchs and their respective Space Marine legions were called in to deal with the threat: Rogal Dorn and the Imperial Fists, Fulgrim and Terra’s Sons, Mortarion and the Death Guard, Jaghatai Khan and the White Scars, and Horus Lupercal and the Void Wolves. Each had their own role in the campaign. Mortarion’s troops were to form the backbone of the army, a fighting force of such fortitude that they could weather anything the Orks could throw at them. Terra’s Sons were to act as shock troops, striking at points of particularly hard resistance and cutting down the ‘ardest Boyz. Rogal Dorn’s job was to tear down any Ork fortifications and prevent the Orks from using the terrain against them. Jaghatai was to chase down any survivors to prevent them from regrouping, as well as contest the mechanized cavalry game with any Ork bikers. Horus was to hold the orbital high ground and use the Void Wolves to board and clear out any ork ships in orbit.

The Imperial Crusade had hoped to simply pick off the warboss and see his nascent empire implode. However, the Warboss at Ullanor, Urlakk Urg, was clever. Instead of exposing himself to danger by leading his army from the front, he kept himself hidden, where Imperial assets could not simply pick him off. In order to keep morale up, he used the bunker system spanning Ullanor to appear where he needed to be in the thick of the fighting to show his Nobz he hadn’t lost his stomach, then taking advantage of the chaos of battle to avoid being sniped. Further complicating the matter was the fact that Urlakk Urg didn’t always give his orders in person, instead creating a system of messengers to carry his orders for him when he had to be elsewhere.

In the end, it fell to the primarch Horus to end the threat of Urlakk Urg. Taking his flagship, the Vengeful Spirit, Horus opened a channel to recievers on all frequencies and began insulting the Warlord. For two hours Horus taunted Urlakk Urg, claiming he was cowering in his bunker like a pansy instead of fighting where everyone could see him and suggesting that rather than an ork perhaps he was merely a particularly overweight and foul-tempered gretchin. Urg tried to resist for as long as he could, recognizing correctly that it was a trap, but eventually his temper got the better of him. Eventually, Urg broke down, sending a message back to Horus incensed that he would say such things from behind the safety of a starship and claiming he wouldn’t be so glib if the two were meeting face to face. Horus, having finally figured out which bunker Urlakk Urg was hiding in, responded by slagging Urg’s bunker from orbit with a Rok-Buster torpedo.

''“And that, gentlemen, is how you do it. Now, let’s go apply some fungicide.”''<br>
-- Primarch Horus Lupercal, after hearing Urg’s response to his message


At the apparent death of their Warlord, the Orks began to lose morale and the tide began to turn in favor of the Imperium. On a local scale the Orks recovered quickly from the loss, with the various lesser Warbosses taking over where Urg had left off, but without Urg to hold them together the different Warbosses could no longer act as one, and as a result were picked apart piecemeal by the Imperium. Many Warbosses spent their last moments engaged in a war on two fronts, both fighting the advancing forces of the Imperium as well as their fellow orks for control over the WAAAGH!

The Imperium celebrated at the destruction of Ullanor. Some rumors say that Ullanor was turned into a world dedicated to the Imperial triumph there, though the Steward would be quick to point out that this was not the case, as removing the Orkish spores from Ullanor alone would have taken more time than elapsed between the Triumph at Ullanor and the War of the Beast. Ullanor was worth more as a productive world than a self-congratulatory glory shrine anyway. Nevertheless, a celebration was held on Ullanor the likes of which had not been seen before. Eleven of the nineteen primarchs showed up, the five who had served at Ullanor who were awarded additional honors in recognition of their service as well as Lorgar, Magnus the Red, Angron, Sanguinius, Guilliman, and Perturabo, as well as numerous chapters of their various legions, regiments of the Imperial Army, representatives of the Titan legions and the Adeptus Mechanicus, and more. An invitation was even extended to the eldar, though only the inscrutable Eldrad showed up, and much of what he did on that day was unknown.

Unfortunately, their celebration proved premature. Although Horus’ patented strategy of sniping the enemy leadership with extreme prejudice and cleaning up whatever disorganized remnants were left after the chain of command was disrupted had worked numerous times before on the battlefield, here it had failed. After Horus’ bombardment Urg was still alive, though wounded, beneath the rubble. Blood dripping from his wounds, Urg made his way to a device in his chambers, a Mekboy contraption the Orks had taken to call a tellyporta, which transported him to a nearly airless rock in the middle of nowhere before the Imperials began sorting through the rubble. This world had been Urg’s backup plan in case the Orks at Ullanor were defeated and had to come around for another go, but it had now become his place of exile. Urg bellowed in rage, furious at the Imperium for taking his empire, furious at the git that defeated him through such deceptive and underhanded means, and furious at Gork and Mork for allowing such a thing to ever happen. This rage brought Urg to the attention of [[Chaos_Gods|four other beings]] who shared Urg’s hatred of the Imperium and had a very vested interest in seeing it destroyed.

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