Editing Konrad Curze (section)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[[Rogal Dorn]] had confronted Curze while he was overseeing [[Grimdark|a long line of prisoners of war who were to be executed as a punitive action]]. Dorn had taken issue with Curze's way of doing things, saying that peace through fear was not what the Emperor of Mankind had intended, and that a stable Imperium could not be founded on such actions. Konrad Curze decided to prove his point to Dorn that without the fear of consequences, people wouldn't stay loyal. To illustrate this, Curze gave one of the prisoners a gun and then ordered his men not to kill him, no matter what might happen. Curze pointed the gun in the prisoner's hand right under his chin, saying [[Troll|"Go ahead, kill me."]] The prisoner refused, to which Curze stated his Astartes would not kill him. The prisoner, now confident that the Night Lords wouldn't shoot him, raised the gun when Curze turned his back. The prisoner fired, but the bolter round bounced harmlessly off of Curze's armor. Curze of course immediately butchered the prisoner. Using intimidation and the predictable reaction to it, Curze "proved" his point: once the fear of consequence was removed, people would feel no loyalty. In reality of course, Curze had actually not proven anything at all. Not only had his test subject not been a loyal Imperial citizen to begin with (in fact his world had just been conquered by the ''Night Lords'' of all people), but the prisoners had all been about to be executed. So the man in question was a member of a newly (and undoubtedly horrifically) conquered world who had nothing to lose as he was about to die anyway. Curze would have been hard pressed to have found a ''worse'' test subject. That's not to say that Dorn's argument was any less stupid; the Emperor had literally designed Curze and the Night Lords to be a terror force, and while some populations could be brought to heel with more conventional methods like those of the Fists or Ultramarines, others could not. Ultimately, the whole thing boiled down to two asshat brothers each being unwilling to concede so much as a single point to the other, and it was just as productive as you'd expect.

Now, if [[Rogal Dorn|Dorn]] had been better with people, he might just have left well enough alone. He might have even done the sensible thing and explained to Curze that while fear was capable of enforcing obedience, it could never create loyalty, and that his inability to differentiate the two was causing him problems. Sadly, Dorn had all the tact and subtlety of a whoopie cushion, and despite his typically stolid nature, he had quite a temper when roused (read that time he almost beat Nathaniel Garro to death for telling him that Horus had rebelled). So in an effort to win the argument, Rogal revealed that Fulgrim had told him all about Curze's visions. Due to the fact that the visions were of such things as Astartes killing Astartes and the Imperium falling apart, Dorn was personally insulted by the visions and berated Curze, accusing him of having lied about it all. The whole situation becomes doubly retarded when one recalls that Dorn was one of the four Primarchs present at Curze's finding. As such, Dorn would have seen Curze's Emperor-induced meltdown upon Nostramo, and while Dorn most likely would not have known the reason for the breakdown, one must also remember that ''Fulgrim'' too was present at Curze's finding. Which meant that Fulgrim somehow managed to convey the content of Curze's vision without Dorn picking up on the connection between Curze's visions and the psychotic break he'd seen Curze suffer on Nostramo. Either Fulgrim had poorer communication skills than the Lion, or Dorn's skull was as thick as one of his fortifications.

Furious at Fulgrim's violation of trust and upset at Dorn for being a stupid asshole, Curze suddenly found himself in the grip of another of his visions. This vision was one of his worst yet, as was his accompanying psychic fit, and he attacked Dorn with his lightning claws. Despite not being conscious of his actions, he managed to maul Dorn so badly that if Dorn hadn't been a Primarch he would have died. Curze was found afterwards weeping over Dorn's broken body, as he had not meant to harm Dorn at all, and as with the murdered archivist, Curze hadn't even realized what he had been doing until after the vision subsided. As it was, Curze was put on house arrest/grounded until the matter of an unsanctioned attack ''(read two missing primarchs)'' by one Primarch on another could be resolved. Curze, however, after reading a special batch of Nostraman tarot cards, said "Screw you guys, we're going home". He broke out of his quarters/cell, and ripped the Imperial Fists and Emperor's Children terminators set to guard him apart with his bare hands. He then gathered his Night Lords, went back to his fleet, and set course for Nostramo.

As discussed previously, Nostramo's entire system of law and order had been based on the physical presence of Curze himself. Though he'd reduced crime rates to practically zero, he hadn't taken any steps to restructure Nostramo into a functional society after his purges. The planet's infrastructure, educational systems, healthcare, and civil services all remained as sub-par as they had before Curze's arrival, and Curze refused to see this as a problem. While people weren't eating each other anymore, Curze's method of law enforcement on what was still a Hive World ensured that there was nothing to do on Nostramo besides "behave and slowly die in an adamantium foundry" or "become a criminal and die either slowly or quickly (depending on Curze's mood)"). Without any hope that life could actually get better, the people of Nostramo only behaved well out of terror. Once that fear was gone, there was nothing to prevent a backslide into total corruption. The inevitability of this failure was driven further home by the level hatred Curze was held in by most of the populace. He had been so effective in terrorizing the people of Nostramo that nobody really cared all that much that their lives had seen astronomical levels of material improvement. To most, it wasn't worth the improved conditions to have to endure living under the rule of such an unpredictable monster as Curze. He had essentially done his job too well. Nobody on Nostramo ever really thought about there being any underlying goal in Curze's butchery; most were too afraid to ever think about much of anything. This was the consequence of never really having explained his goals to anyone on Nostramo, nor having delegated any of his work to anyone else.

It is worth noting however that the Imperial government that was initially in place on Nostramo had attempted to keep the world as Curze wished it. Curze's heavy-handedness had served its purpose and created order and with him gone, perhaps there would have been a chance for the people to keep his overarching legal system, but add some nuance (no death by torture for jaywalking). However Curze had evidently not killed enough of the old syndicates' power structures to keep them from coming back. Like a dead weed with still-viable roots, the syndicates quickly sprouted back into being and were largely responsible for the planet's decay, rather than the general population being at fault. These syndicates eventually gained back enough power to simply overrule the government and rule from behind the proverbial throne, and the hopeless, terrified and powerless populace could do very little about it. Utterly despondent and broken, with seemingly only the choice between barbaric anarchy and horrific, brutal order, they simply didn't have it in them. Eventually, the syndicate would place a genuine puppet of theirs as the Imperial governor, which was when the pollution of the Night Lords with the dregs of Nostramo really kicked into gear. Unfortunately, by the time he got back, Curze had simply had enough of the place. He didn't care whose fault it was or why it had happened. He just wanted the place gone.

Imperial pursuit craft, determined to stop Curze for abandoning the Great Crusade and checking on his homeworld, arrived just in time to see the lance batteries of Curze's fleet put an end to the nightmare that the planet's inhabitants had found themselves in. Seeing Nostramo and its people as an irredeemable blot on the galaxy, Curze destroyed the planet with sustained orbital fire to the fissures his own arrival created.

According to Curze's recollection/opinion, exterminating Nostramo was in part a test for the Night Lords. Had they stopped Curze, or even spoken out against him, it would have proven that at least some of them were worth understood Curze's philosophies. But even Sevatar, Curze's favorite legionary, simply followed orders. Curze's other equerry Sheng (who Curze thought was a kiss-ass), actually begged Sevatar to talk Curze out of it, but Curze never heard from him personally. He was, ironically, to afraid to voice his opinion to the Primarch. There were some Night Lords who did refuse to aid in Nostramo's destruction, but they got put down pretty quickly. The vast majority of the legionaries were either totally apathetic, or more than happy to watch the shitpit that had spawned them burn.

Blowing up Nostramo was more or less the tipping point for Curze in terms of his sanity. The Night Haunter persona came stridently to the fore of Curze's personality after this, and the Legion more or less abandoned its original ethos of using terror to decrease a campaign's casualty numbers. The reason for this was that Curze believed that he had utterly failed in implementing his philosophies. Nostramo had been the greatest proof that his methods worked; an entire world of unspeakable corruption and crime brought to heel by one individual wielding one instrument; terror. But the planet had fallen back into ruin, and if all his actions had been for naught, then all he really was was a monsterous mass murderer whose means had failed to even ''produce'' an end, let alone justify one. This allowed the Night Haunter persona to take advantage of his guilt and despair and strengthen itself in Curze's psyche to a point of ascendancy. Ultimately the Night Haunter, in conjunction with Curze's psychic visions, convinced Curze that he had always been doomed to be a monster. After all, argued the Night Haunter, had not the Emperor in His wisdom designed Curze to be just so? As such, there was no longer any point in attempting to resist the darker impulses of the Night Haunter.

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

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