Remove ads

In The Grimdark of Fanfiction -40k

Reader mode
Currently in the writing process. I intend to make a thread where I post whatever stories i can come up with. Some may be one-shots, others may be multi-parters. Does "Tales from the 41st Millennium read like a good title? It may be a bit of a misnomer as I intend to set some stories in earlier eras as well.

Note that that massive block of text I posted last page will be true for all stories, though its facts may not all be immediately relevant to any given story. The average Guardsmen are unlikely to know or even care about the historical facts of the Horus Heresy (assuming they were even taught the mythologized version of it in whatever schooling their home world has), how the Realm of Chaos actually functions or the timeline and impacts of the Black Crusades.
 
Alright, update from me.

On consideration, I have decided to switch over to writing Warhammer Fantasy instead. On contemplation I find that the setting agrees with me better creatively.

I will carry with the ideas I put forth for Chaos and demons in my writings.
When the first story is done I will post a link on this page.

No, I did not create a whole thread just for self promotion. Promise. You can self-indulgently promote yourself to.
 
Last edited:
Hi! I have a lore question.

Basically I was wondering; which imperial worlds provide the most guard regiments?

Like, Cadia of course, and I think Krieg; pseudo-cloning will do that - but who else? Vostroya maybe? She sends every firstborn son to war, which is a lot of people.

I only ask because it can't be just "the most famous" - Catachans can't be that common given Catachan is a death world, and like, the Armageddon Steel Legion is mostly on Armageddon, et cetera.

So I thought I'd ask.

its for a quest, which is about a girl from Vostroya - the link is in my signature.
 
veteranMortal said:
Hi! I have a lore question.

Basically I was wondering; which imperial worlds provide the most guard regiments?

Like, Cadia of course, and I think Krieg; pseudo-cloning will do that - but who else? Vostroya maybe? She sends every firstborn son to war, which is a lot of people.

I only ask because it can't be just "the most famous" - Catachans can't be that common given Catachan is a death world, and like, the Armageddon Steel Legion is mostly on Armageddon, et cetera.

So I thought I'd ask.

its for a quest, which is about a girl from Vostroya - the link is in my signature.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

For the shortest useful answer. Every single Hive World effectively has Guardsmen as one of their primary exports. (And there are approximately 32'000 Hive Worlds in the Imperium.)
 
Brontian Longknives are noted to be recruited in large amounts, that sort of clarification usually reasonably meaningful when it comes to describing regiments.

Tahnelian Airborne Regiments are dropped on and overwhelm enemy position with their numbers or die trying, the word 'saturate' being the operative word when describing said procedures. Surviving five of said 'drops' gets you a snazzy hat.

Mordian Iron Guard have a planet which is pretty crappy, requiring part of their Tithe to be given out in the form of Guard Regiments. Possibly amongst the best dressed of all Imperial Guard, often underestimated for it to the detriment of their enemies.

If you're looking for more than just Cadia or Kreig, they're kinda neat, I think. Tahnelian's are the least developed in terms of lore compared to the Longknives and the Iron Guard.
 
Last edited:
veteranMortal said:
Hi! I have a lore question.

Basically I was wondering; which imperial worlds provide the most guard regiments?

Like, Cadia of course, and I think Krieg; pseudo-cloning will do that - but who else? Vostroya maybe? She sends every firstborn son to war, which is a lot of people.

I only ask because it can't be just "the most famous" - Catachans can't be that common given Catachan is a death world, and like, the Armageddon Steel Legion is mostly on Armageddon, et cetera.

So I thought I'd ask.

its for a quest, which is about a girl from Vostroya - the link is in my signature.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
Valhallan Ice Warriors are based on pop culture perception of WW2 Soviet soldiers, with their most infamous commander being Chenkov who earned his infamy for sending wave after wave of infantry to accomplish goals instead of more valuable armor or artillery. Like how a lot of people envision Soviet Human Wave attacks in the Eastern front regardless of accuracy.

As such, the Valhallan Ice Warriors may be a very common sight.
 
veteranMortal said:
I only ask because it can't be just "the most famous" - Catachans can't be that common given Catachan is a death world, and like, the Armageddon Steel Legion is mostly on Armageddon, et cetera.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
Mental thought, high demand for Catachan Jungle Fighters has lead to the settlement of several offbrand Jungle death Worlds named things like 'Catachen' or 'Catchan'. With multiple species of dangerous life forms being introduced to make these knock off colonies more authentic, it's gotten to the point where even many of these Cogchun Jungle Warriors don't realize they're not the originals.
 
tankdrop24 said:
Mental thought, high demand for Catachan Jungle Fighters has lead to the settlement of several offbrand Jungle death Worlds named things like 'Catachen' or 'Catchan'. With multiple species of dangerous life forms being introduced to make these knock off colonies more authentic, it's gotten to the point where even many of these Cogchun Jungle Warriors don't realize they're not the originals.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
That's actually canon that they use death worlds to make knockoff Catachan fighters.
 
veteranMortal said:
Hi! I have a lore question.

Basically I was wondering; which imperial worlds provide the most guard regiments?

Like, Cadia of course, and I think Krieg; pseudo-cloning will do that - but who else? Vostroya maybe? She sends every firstborn son to war, which is a lot of people.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

It seems to depend on the region which are going to be more common; Cadian regiments tend to be notable because they get all over the place, similarly with Krieg units. For example, particularly common in the Sabbat Worlds region of Segmentum Pacificus are Roane Deepers, Hyrkan and Urdeshi regiments, and the Keyzon warhost units from the Khulan Sector. And, on the Eastern Fringe, Ultramar regiments embodied for Astra Militarum service, and Brimlock units, are common. So, I guess the main question would be: where are you looking at?
 
Captain Orsai said:
It seems to depend on the region which are going to be more common; Cadian regiments tend to be notable because they get all over the place, similarly with Krieg units. For example, particularly common in the Sabbat Worlds region of Segmentum Pacificus are Roane Deepers, Hyrkan and Urdeshi regiments, and the Keyzon warhost units from the Khulan Sector. And, on the Eastern Fringe, Ultramar regiments embodied for Astra Militarum service, and Brimlock units, are common. So, I guess the main question would be: where are you looking at?
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

Currently the Eastern Fringe, but shortly somewhere else - its a quest, my control over that is slightly limited, but probably either Pacificus, Obscurus or Tempestus.
 
veteranMortal said:
Currently the Eastern Fringe, but shortly somewhere else - its a quest, my control over that is slightly limited, but probably either Pacificus, Obscurus or Tempestus.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

Okay. Obscuras or Tempestus I honestly don't know, but the Sabbat Worlds are in Segmentum Pacificus, so they're a good baseline. So, most common regiments would be Roane Deepers, Royal Volpone, Urdeshi and Hyrkan units, Pardus and Narmenian tank rgts., the Keyzon warhost, etc. Like, this is just the ones that have some kind of detail on them; there's a bunch of others namedropped in various sources, maybe given a bit of detail but not much actual information.
 
veteranMortal said:
There's a lot more than this, but like... The Rangdan fully were not an aggressor, lol.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
I looked these guys up, and found some internet posters discussing them being described as "lithe" and "vulpine." Apparently, people interpret that to mean they were literally fox furries with energy shields. Some fans seemed pretty salty about it.

So anyway, I drew that:



It's official fanon now. You're welcome.
 
Alright, so, a wonderful idea was gifted to me when the forums died and we all migrated to Discord to have our withdrawls together.

Girl Genius/Warhammer 40k Crossover. A Heterodyne (possibly some kind of OC or SI, possibly Agatha, possibly one of the Boys or an Old Heterodyne, not sure which yet), through various Sparky shenanigans, finds themselves stranded in some manner of Hive World, and, by virtue of being a Spark, ends up making an immense amount of trouble for both themselves and everyone around them. Antics proposed include, in no particular order;
  1. Fixing the damaged or just plain absent pieces of environmental control in the underhive and turning it into basically an independent settlement a la Mechanicsburg.
  2. Dealing with Psykers in extremely ill advised ways involving experimentation instead of blamming.
  3. Dealing with Daemons in similarly ill advised ways.
  4. Nobody believing they aren't a Psyker despite the fact that they really, really aren't.
  5. Their subjects not caring that the boss is a Psyker because Sparky charisma is bullshit.
  6. The Inquisition biting off a huge chunk of proto-Mechanicsburg defenses and not being prepared to chew at all.
  7. Creating an AI a la Castle Heterodyne to manage claimed parts of the city.
  8. Losing control of at least one major creation, clank, or construct, causing mass chaos for the entire city.
  9. Taking over the entire city, almost entirely against their will just because that's the only way to get everyone to just shut up and let them tinker in peace dammit
  10. Drawing attention from offworld because in the aftermath of 9 the goods exported as part of the tithe have suddenly experienced a massive uptick in lethality (to both enemies and the end user) thanks to the subsequent Sparky improvement spree.
Thoughts? Suggestions?

Volunteers to beta read because I need someone to keep my ass on task or I'll never finish anything and I only have so much time to research Warhammer even though almost everything I know has been obtained secondhand from other people talking about Warhammer?

I plan on trying to use the collaboration station forum to keep my notes on this so I can just throw my partner in crime collaborator status and keep everything in one place that's easy to access.
 
Last edited:
veteranMortal said:
There's a lot more than this, but like... The Rangdan fully were not an aggressor, lol.

There were multiple primarchs - including Guilliman's whole ass Ultramar - in the Galactic East where the Evil Rangdan Empire(tm) was based and yet deadass none of them had any negative interactions with the Rangdan until big Daddy E burst in with his genocide army and then suddenly whoops the Rangdan are implacably hostile. Why its almost like the Great Crusade was inherently an existential threat to any xenos in the galaxy.

wild!
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

I know this person is suspended but I find it worth the time to correct this particular misconception. The Rangdan were not nice people (tm), which is born out in the names of the units, Cerbevores and Osseiovores (hint: they fucking eat people).

Book nine of the Horus Heresy series describes their warrior elites as "Overlords" commanding hordes of enslaved sapients with neural collars to use as cannon fodder and describes the battlestations they used as capital ships as filled with slaves. Preferred weaponry consisted of radioactive EM blasters.

Book one of the Horus Heresy indicates that they were almost certainly the masters or creators of the Slaugth which are fungal creatures that feast on the flesh and brains of other sapients. Indeed, one of the plot points of Dark Heresy RPG series is the Slaugth survivors of the Rangdan xenocides literally cruising around kidnapping humans and random xenos to eat.

At bare minimum the Rangdan were a slaver civilization that had other sapients eaten.

Now the Imperium is definitely not a morally pure regime but pretty much most human polities would probably escalate to xenocidal total war with the Rangdan pretty much immediately once their nature became apparent, if only because they don't want to get eaten.
 
Last edited:
Deadguy2001 said:
I know this person is suspended but I find it worth the time to correct this particular misconception. The Rangdan were not nice people (tm), which is born out in the names of the units, Cerbevores and Osseiovores (hint: they fucking eat people).

Book nine of the Horus Heresy series describes their warrior elites as "Overlords" commanding hordes of enslaved sapients with neural collars to use as cannon fodder and describes the battlestations they used as capital ships as filled with slaves. Preferred weaponry consisted of radioactive EM blasters.

Book one of the Horus Heresy indicates that they were almost certainly the masters or creators of the Slaugth which are fungal creatures that feast on the flesh and brains of other sapients. Indeed, one of the plot points of Dark Heresy RPG series is the Slaugth survivors of the Rangdan xenocides literally cruising around kidnapping humans and random xenos to eat.

At bare minimum the Rangdan were a slaver civilization that had other sapients eaten.

Now the Imperium is definitely not a morally pure regime but pretty much most human polities would probably escalate to xenocidal total war with the Rangdan pretty much immediately once their nature became apparent, if only because they don't want to get eaten.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

That's nice. Thank you for responding to this post coming up on 6 months old, but there's a minor point that you've ignored; I said they weren't the aggressor. This is a materially distinct claim from "they were morally upstanding" and you haven't really disputed it. The Imperium commits sweeping genocide of most every xeno species they find, they can hardly throw stones on the moral front.

We know that various pre-imperial polities were able to coexist with the Rangdan in the galactic east. Ergo, the Rangdan - whilst potentially being evil, though everything we know about them is from an Imperial Source - was not mindlessly aggressive.

Unlike, say, an explicitly genocidal Crusade waging a war of extermination against the xeno species of the galaxy, headed by a militaristic strongman.
 
veteranMortal said:
That's nice. Thank you for responding to this post coming up on 6 months old, but there's a minor point that you've ignored; I said they weren't the aggressor. This is a materially distinct claim from "they were morally upstanding" and you haven't really disputed it. The Imperium commits sweeping genocide of most every xeno species they find, they can hardly throw stones on the moral front.

We know that various pre-imperial polities were able to coexist with the Rangdan in the galactic east. Ergo, the Rangdan - whilst potentially being evil, though everything we know about them is from an Imperial Source - was not mindlessly aggressive.

Unlike, say, an explicitly genocidal Crusade waging a war of extermination against the xeno species of the galaxy, headed by a militaristic strongman.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

... uh, Just War Theory wasn't really designed for these kinds of situations. It was kind of designed to regulate state interactions between groups of regular dudes. Not extraspecies interactions between cannibal-slaver-mind-conqueror dudes and regular dudes. The moral dimensions of ancipatory force between the former are not the same as between the latter. So I'm not convinced we should hyperfixate on Just War Theory and its inherent moral weighting against the aggressor. It was an ethical framework intentionally designed to minimize conflict between likeminded communities of Christians and/or modern economies, not an ethical framework for "how do you redress injuries with a civilization built around enslaving and eating your children."

I mean, we live in a world populated solely by regular dudes who can be reasoned with and get along pretty well with each other. And Just War Theory has serious adoption/implementation issues here. So how useful is that ethical framework going to be in a galaxy where literal barbarian rape goblin people aren't just hypotheticals?

PS: reaping neighboring regions for slaves 100% qualified you as an aggressor in periods of human history where that was common. Wars waged to stop the practice was 100% an accepted casus belli, and "protecting members of the community from kidnapping or worse" has always been the foremost raison de'etre for a human nation state. Your perspective in this regard is pretty skewed.
 
Last edited:
peachesandcream said:
... uh, Just War Theory wasn't really designed for these kinds of situations. It was kind of designed to regulate state interactions between groups of regular dudes. Not extraspecies interactions between cannibal-slaver-mind-conqueror dudes and regular dudes. The moral dimensions of ancipatory force between the former are not the same as between the latter. So I'm not convinced we should hyperfixate on Just War Theory and its inherent moral weighting against the aggressor. It was an ethical framework intentionally designed to minimize conflict between likeminded communities of Christians and/or modern economies, not an ethical framework for "how do you redress injuries with a civilization built around enslaving and eating your children."

Again, it's not even the unanimously accepted ethical standard in our own world full of regular dudes. I think it'd be even less unanimous and applicable in a galaxy where literal barbarian rape goblin people aren't hypotheticals. :)
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

I don't understand what relevance you are ascribing to this sentiment.

The Rangdan can be evil, and you can notionally proclaim that the Rangdan needed to be wiped out - I think this is a dramatic overreach of "the Emperor and his gang of emotionally stunted murder children decided they were mind-controlling slavers" but it can be argued, certainly - but you cannot proclaim that the Great Crusade can be justified on the grounds that without it, the Rangdan would have proactively wiped out humanity. Because they wouldn't. There is no evidence that they were expansionist, and significant circumstantial evidence that they were not.

That was the original context in which I made the post deadguy objected to.
 
peachesandcream said:
... uh, Just War Theory wasn't really designed for these kinds of situations. It was kind of designed to regulate state interactions between groups of regular dudes. Not extraspecies interactions between cannibal-slaver-mind-conqueror dudes and regular dudes.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
This is a false dicotomy. Cannibal-slaver-mind-conqueror dudes describes the Imperium just as well, if not better, then the Rangdan. They are both as "regular" as each other. Cannibal-slaver-mind-conqueror dudes also describes a non-zero number of irl civilisations who where capable of co-existance with other civilisations. Something the Rangdan are explicitly able to do in the text and which the Great Crusade Era Imperium of Man was noticably not able to do.
 
So... killing people who make a habit of raiding your planets, abducting your people, and enslaving/eating them isn't justified.

The more you know, I guess.
 
You are making stuff up.

veteranMortal said:
That's nice. Thank you for responding to this post coming up on 6 months old, but there's a minor point that you've ignored; I said they weren't the aggressor. This is a materially distinct claim from "they were morally upstanding" and you haven't really disputed it. The Imperium commits sweeping genocide of most every xeno species they find, they can hardly throw stones on the moral front.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

That's completely wrong. The Rangdan were the aggressors. As per Horus Herey Book Nine page 120, first contact between humanity and the Rangdan was at the Advex Mors system where the Rangdan invaded and enslaved the human populace without warning or provocation.

We know that various pre-imperial polities were able to coexist with the Rangdan in the galactic east. Ergo, the Rangdan - whilst potentially being evil, though everything we know about them is from an Imperial Source - was not mindlessly aggressive.

Unlike, say, an explicitly genocidal Crusade waging a war of extermination against the xeno species of the galaxy, headed by a militaristic strongman.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

That is also wrong. There is no evidence for other polities in their segment of the Halo stars coexisting with the Rangdan unless you count slavery via neuro-collar as coexistence.
 
Last edited:
Reader mode
You must login or register to reply here.
Remove ads
Back
Top