After a great intro game from Neil, I have thoroughly bought in to Adeptus Titanicus, a really lovingly crafted game system that won over my initial skepticism and will gel really well with any linked Age of Darkness campaign our group undertakes.
I've made a start on my titans as a result - see below for pictures of the work in progress. And I've also written out the background material for my legion and their knightly retainers. I present you with the Legio Sagittar and House Ferax...
The Legio Sagittar - The Weeping Hunters
My forces are the Legio Sagittar, a veteran legion embittered by their deployments to bring human cultures to brutal Compliance. Hailing from a forge world of Sullaat Prime in the eastern borders of the Segmentum Solar, their campaigns saw them serve repeatedly alongside the Luna Wolves and, subsequently, the Alpha Legion and the Iron Hands.
Their titans were renowned for their machine spirits' and crews' mercurial natures and controlled savagery in battle, but also for the cool discipline and fluid adaptive tactics with which they curbed the excesses of wrath and bitterness and exploited the chances of war.
Sadly, whether by some dark destiny or only cruel chance, the legion saw repeated deployments against splinter cultures of humanity spread across the galactic diaspora, as well as against alien but often peaceable planet-dwelling Aeldari upon Exodite worlds. The Legio Sagittar saw these verdant paradises and flourishing civilisations reduced, predictably, repeatedly, to ash - and the taste stuck in their mouths.
Worse still, the Legio Sagittar's own tendency to ferocious aggression in the cause of victory caused devastation and disaster that might otherwise have been avoided. They judged themselves guilty in a just cause, and lamented the necessary costs of Unity. They were ashamed of their excesses, and it is said that the princeps domina spoke several times of her concerns to the Warmaster under whom she served, seeking solace and absolution from him. This mixture of ruthless fury and bitter regret earned them the epithet of the Weeping Hunters.
The Legio Sagittar were not at the Warmaster's side at the time of his betrayal, having been sent back by the Gorgon on a tour among the Ghoul Stars in a display of might. The reasons for this deployment from the front lines are unclear, but Ferrus Manus may have hoped that the deployment of such God Engines would overawe unruly subject populations and convince them to pay the Imperial Tithe being slowly rolled out across compliant systems.
However, the legion saw it as a dishonour as well as telling evidence of the oppression inherent in the Imperial regime they had enforced. It also put them dangerously distant from events, so that they only heard of the betrayal once the crushing blow at Istvaan V had annihilated the Loyalist response and killed Ferrus Manus.
It is said that when the Weeping Hunters' princeps domina, Kera Eleisa, received the news she swiftly suppressed its spread, and retreated for a Terran week to brood over the legion's conflicting duties and debts. At last she acted, summoning the assembled princeps at the core of the legion into urgent conclave and swiftly executing those she deemed Loyalist.
Some of the scattered legion outside her immediate reach kept their Loyalist sympathies, or turned as disillusioned Blackshields to carve out their own small stellar principates. But the cold heart of the Legio Sagittar would always belong with Horus, the charismatic Warmaster who had helped them justify their actions to themselves. The majority gathered to his banner, subjugating the systems they had been sent to intimidate and joining the march on Terra.
In bitter, saturnine humour the Legio Sagittar embraced their dark reputation with a new motto and battle cry: "Weep for Us".
House Ferax - The Burnt Hounds
Legio Sagittar came to Horus and their place as oppressors through embittered regret. Their closest allied knight household, House Ferax, embraced it.
House Ferax hails from the feral moon of Torxa Theta in the Dominion of Storms. Torxa Theta was a knight world which had long since devolved to feudal brutality and whose houses had split and split again into ruthless fiefs, sparring for the tech and thrall-specialists who would maintain their knightly engines.
A sizeable contingent of the Legio Sagittar, including their newly appointed princeps domina Kora Eleisa, formed part of the 182nd Expedition which discovered this fierce culture and brought them to brutal compliance. However, the princeps of the Legio Sagittar were impressed by the House's ambush tactics and fierce savagery, which had achieved the rare loss of a Weeping Hunters titan during Compliance, the toppled Reaver Argent Stalker.
The Legio Sagittar further perceived both the power and the wild brutality of the household's forces in initial joint actions under the 182nd, and after initially calling for their dismantlement for perceived crimes of war - a request overruled by no less than First Captain Ezekyle Abaddon himself - they settled for brutal subjugation to the status of a Vassal House. The Weeping Hunters took it upon themselves to exploit their knightly retainers' savagert - to "leash the dogs and keep them from the fire", as princeps Eleisa acidly commented.
It is characteristic that Horza Gol, the High Castellan of House Ferax and a survivor from the initial wars of compliance, heard of the insult and embraced it as a compliment - giving House Ferax a new and notorious title as the "Burnt Hounds". Horza Gol is also said to have commented - though not to Kera's face - that a leash pulls both ways, and a strong hound can drag the master along.
The Torxa savages chafed under the status of a Vassal House, but ultimately submitted to the will of their Legio masters. Legio Sagittar and House Ferax had an unusually strained and combative relationship. Troops fighting alongside them were shocked when Ferax knights rushed ahead of their battlefield brief, or turned in fierce packs on exposed civilian targets. Yet the same troops would be stunned or terrified at the Legio's response - Weeping Hunters Warhounds or Reavers might openly threaten or in cases kick down unruly knight forces in a brutal chastisement.
Still, the Weeping Hunters' tactical flexibility and focused rage made them highly effective alongside their vassals the Burnt Hounds. The Legio Sagittar and House Ferax were an effective pairing - as a huntsman with a wild dog.
As a result, when Heresy struck the Burnt Hounds were not in doubt as to their path. Barely restrained, they had never cared much for the ideology of the Imperial Truth. They went where honour or blood was to be had, at their master's side - although with more scope than ever for their baronial factions, always seething under the surface of Torxa's unification and their reduction to a Vassal House, to go rogue and carve out their small stellar empires.
And however Kera Eleisa may have understood her betrayal, perhaps Horza Gol was right when he took it as a sign for savage battlejoy and not lament. The leash, after all, pulled both ways.
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