The Legion of the Damned are HIDING something

in times of dire need Phantoms stalk the battlefields of the 40K Universe dealing death to the enemies of the emperor and carrying the day when all seems lost for the forces of the Imperium hidden away on the Warhammer community site lies a PDF data sheet for the Legion of the dam these rules never made the transition to 10th edition not even as part of the Legends data sheets and maybe they never will you could say that this faction exists in a state of undeath not quite alive but not quite dead ironically that would be a tragic and perfectly fitting end to the story of the Legion of the Damned however this isn't just any type of story it's a ghost story and today is the perfect day for it in the mornings I search through my wardrobe to find the least stained black shirt with red flames on why is this is it because I find that it really compliments my black cargo shorts socks and rubber sandals with skulls on them no it's because I'm a war gamer and that's our uniform however if I ever accidentally breach the terms of my house arrest and meet another person and that person also happens to share a love for obscure Warhammer 40,000 background they might ask why I'm dressed as one of the Legion of the Damned who are the Legion of the Damned you might ask that's easy what are they that's another story because the Legion of the Damned are hiding a big secret possibly the biggest secret in the Warhammer 40,000 universe and like a magic trick it's revealed while you're concentrating on something else entirely in white dwarf 195 in March 1996 there was an unusual sight this was in the middle of games workshop's massive UK expansion and they had just opened their 100th store where was this 100th store you might ask Warrington where is Warrington you might ask between Liverpool and Manchester although I do need Witnesses on the ground to confirm this or is it my sources seem to place it directly in the middle of Bley rectory could the most haunted place in England have one final secret to uncover oh no sorry I must have nudged the mouse while on Google Maps it is actually between Liverpool and Manchester anyway to celebrate this Milestone came a model that would fit into any army you guess it an ultramarines primaris leftenant only this one had a black color scheme covered with skulls and flames and was called Sergeant centurius the article made it clear that he was from a chapter known as the Legion of the Damned and it went on to explain that they were kind of phantoms that appeared to assist space Marines in situations of extreme importance in this article and in the previous year's codex ultramarines the Legion of the Damned had been presented as an unexplained mystery they would appear out of nowhere on the battlefield and deliver some critical Victory even if the results of their actions wouldn't become apparent for hundreds of years as if their hand was Guided by an unknown force it was stated that the origins of the Legion had been lost to the sands of time and in the mid90s you would be correct however a text box in the second edition codex Ultra Marine talks about the firehawks and their Disappearance in the year 963 in the 41st Millennium however back to the article that introduces sergeant centurius and there is a piece of law here that has lived in my head for a long time in it a tech adapt is summoned to a secret chamber in some kind of Imperial facility after doing a checkup he is stopped by a hooded Space Marine the tech adct responds that everything is in order and that there are no losses or perceptible mutations when the hooded figure asks for more information about the life cyle the adapt responds that they are stabilized at nil this appears to be the wrong answer as the hooded Space Marine slips a device into his Jill before reflecting that Tech adapts are always too clever for their own good always figuring it out but what's going on here figuring what out I thought that this article was supposed to be about the Legion of the Damned but this hooded figure doesn't resemble them at all is it a dark angel what is happening here pieces of fiction shouldn't encourage me to use my imagination I want my law served up for me on a silver platter ideally in ebook format for $10.99 a book well hold that thought because we'll get back to it as we've talked about before this was in the mid90s and the internet was not as freely available as it was going to be Steve Jobs was still building NXT computers rather than iPhones and most people would not have been able to easily check on who or what the Legion of the dam truly were also this was when the majority of people were being exposed to the Hobby in the large expansion back issues of white dwarf were not digitized Wikipedia didn't exist and Games Workshop didn't have a great web Presence at that time the only way to find out more was to talk to someone who remembered their original article from issue 99 of white dwarf magazine almost 100 issues and around 7 years prior issue 99 was released in March 1988 that's only 6 months after the launch of Rogue Trader this was way before the background of 40K crystallized into the universe we know about today so there was plenty of weird stuff in it it was a case of throwing things up against the wall and seeing what's stuck John blanch enjoyed riding a Vincent Black Shadow bike so they cast up a Vincent Black Shadow and side car and let Space Marines ride it into battle and like a butterfly flapping its wings on one side of the world and causing a devastating typhoon elsewhere the idea of a Space Marine attack bike directly led us to the release of the Invader ATV however this index aarti's article wasn't just a throwaway piece of fluff it was written by Rick Priestley so there is a reasonable amount of weight to its content in it the mystery is seemingly solved within the first paragraph the firehawks fleet of five ships over 8 100 Brethren and 2,000 other Personnel made a routine War jump that was expected to take 12 hours however they never made the final return to real space and the chapter was declared lost the bell of lost souls not that one told a thousand times and the emperor himself ordered a Black Candle to be lit in the chapel of fallen heroes okay that bit about the emperor personally ordering stuff to get done in the 41st Millennium has been rcon out of existence just like the great barking toad of katchan from the Rogue Trader compendium which when threatened emits a cloud of toxins that kills all life within a kilometer in every direction back to the issue soon after two coffins containing bodies were found and brought back to Earth for investigation they contained two marines in unusual colored armor however the serial numbers of equipment tallied with weapons and armor made by or issued to the fire Hawks chapter almost a year later during the siege of an imperial research station several hundred Orcs were killed by a mysterious power armored figures who left behind a banner the chapter flag of the fire horse inscribed with the motto for the emperor beyond the point of death further investigation revealed a recorder that documented the Fateful warp jump it told that their fleet was captured within a warp storm and attacked by powerful warp entities until only one craft remained it made a desperate jump eventually emerging from the warp in the galactic East beyond what would become later known as the light of the astronomicon soon it became obvious that the remaining 200 Marines had been exposed to some form of dangerous mutation a disease that slowly killed the them but gave them prodigious fighting ability their bodies began to Decay and rot however as they succumbed to it they gained enhanced strength and in their final moment they went through a berserk death spasm before perishing the remaining Marines used the Mystic Emperor's teror to direct their attacks and spend what was left of their lives in service of the Imperium so there we go the mystery appears solved the Legion of the Damned are the remains of the firehawks after the chapter was lost in the warp a couple of issues later came the index aarti's article on the badab war which again mentioned the firehawks in its brief overview of the conflict as well as showing their color scheme which matched up with their artwork in the previous issue now these articles have to be understood in the context that the 4K Universe at this time was just an early first draft and didn't properly form until the mid90s when the Space Marines the emperor the warp and the gods of chaos were properly fleshed out some of the ideas shown however would be reused later for instance in codex chaos published in 1996 another chapter gets lost in the war this seminal book goes into detail about the history of all of the chaos Legions in particular it mentions the creation of the death guard who are marooned in thep while attempting a long journey to Earth during the Horus heresy during their Journey a mysterious contagion began to spread from ship to ship rotting the victims from the inside eventually the legion's primarch morian became infected and in his delirium he called upon the powers of chaos to Aid him these prayers were answered by nurgle and the rest is history interestingly later in codex chaos there is an article about the badab war and the article straight up mentions the firehawks and Recaps the origin of the war almost verbatim Plus in a bold out of leftfield it even mentions that the badab system is right next to the home worlds of the squats in particular the squat worlds of the capellan league which itself is mentioned in the ninth Edition leagues of votan codex which is an impressive deep cut for the writers to call back to also in Forge world's Imperial Armor 9 badad War part 1 the firehawks are introduced to the story patrolling none other than the G Goan wastes I wonder if they are related to this gol gotha but maybe that's a tale for another day this brings us to the next publication to make their way to the witness panel it's the legendary Forge World badad War series written by the late great Alan Blye unlike the other Publications mentioned both volumes of these books can be found digitized almost in their entirety in the warmer Vault the war itself is huge and can be recapped elsewhere but volume 1 is important because it goes into detail about the modern interpretation of the firehawks the first thing to notice is that their logo has changed the nuclear bomb exposion of 1998 is now a stylish red Phoenix rising from the Flames this almost certainly refers to the chapter rising out of the ashes on more than one occasion including having the dishonor of losing two home Worlds the first one to a thermonuclear orbital bombardment Unleashed by a fleet of the ecclesiarchy freris Templar and the second in unknown circumstances and from then on things get deep I'm talking Iceberg deep the Imperial Armor books and the sisters of battle codex fills in a lot of interesting information for example the rapturous Rex the rapturous Rex was or is a pre-imperial star Fortress that was the only surviving capital ship of the firehawks at the end of the badab war in 913 Millennia 41 exactly 50 years later in 963 the fire Hawks would go missing taking the raptus five ships of the line 800 Marines and 2,000 other Personnel along with the chapter master stebor larak and his presumed hair the captain of the eighth company Alam cor who are both said to have survived the conflict I'm not sure if a chapter could rebuild that quickly after taking the kind of losses to firehawks took in the conflict but regardless these are almost the exact numbers from the original article in 1988 now the rapturous Rex was given to the chapter as a gift from none other than Sebastian Thor after the chapter fought for him during the reign of blood but who is he I hear you ask Sebastian Thor Sebastian Thor was a curious individual he was a preacher who United the world's around segmentum obscurus to try and overthrow gorg vanti during one of the many civil wars fought after the emperor was interred on The Golden Throne now apart from Sebastian rolling high on his natural Charisma and claiming to have visions of the emperor he doesn't appear to have any special powers apart from being able to quill the warp storms that were engulfing the Imperium during the early 36th Millennium once gorg was unseated Sebastian was instated in the uring power vacuum and he handed the fire Hawks their Flagship the rapturous Rex th had such a meteoric rise there is a subaction of the Inquisition named after him these inquisitors call themselves thoran and they believe that the emperor has manifested his Spirit through his chosen vessels many times but that these bodies were only able to contain the barest fraction of his power and soon withered and died of course the sisters of battle codex states that Thor died at 112 so not really sure how to take that last bit another curious phenomenon about Thor is that when vandire sent a fleet to destroy him it was swallowed up by the the sudden appearance of a warp storm called the storm of the emperor's wrath and this was taken as a sign of The Emperor's will now we're really deep and we have to talk about something I'm going to call the dead Emperor Theory here's a few things you might have missed from the mouths of the designers themselves the first is from Rick Priestley in a December 2015 interview with Unplugged Games I quote the whole idea of the emperor is that you don't know whether he's alive or dead the whole Imperium might be running on Superstition there's no guarantee that the emperor is anything other than a corpse with a residual mental ability to direct spacecraft it's got some parallels with religious beliefs and principles and I think a lot of that got missed and overwritten end quote interesting the next is more direct and comes from an interview with John blanch uploaded by film deeg Miniatures on YouTube about 9 minutes into the interview he drops an absolute bomb this image was never meant to be the real emperor the real emperor is a corpse in a big glass jar kept Alive by machines in the background ground end quote so now we know that it puts the article from white dwarf 195 into a completely different context I believe that this piece of text appears to be showing a member of the adeptus custodes euth anazing a tech adapt after carrying out some maintenance on The Golden Throne and realizing that the body held within was dead Yep this means that the emperor is dead and this was hinted at back in the 9s of course in the 40K Universe being dead isn't the kind of problem that it is these days especially if if you happen to be an exceptionally powerful almost Godlike being it also leads to another question the emperor was worshiped as a god almost immediately upon being placed on the Golden Throne however if the emperor was mortally wounded but still alive at the end of the Horus heresy in the year 14 of Millennia 31 and dead in the current time period of the 41st or 42nd Millennium when exactly did he die I'm going to point to when I think this was and give some ideas why the 36th Millennia in the 36th Millennium there was a a massive increase in warp storms all around the Galaxy this was also the start of the civil war known as the age of aposte under gorg van this was also the rise of Sebastian Thor it was also when people started to believe that the emperor's Spirit was directing people to achieve some important goal I.E the start of the thoran belief system this was also when the custodes who guarded The Golden Throne let the brides of the emperor the precursor to the Adept of seratus see the emperor himself something that hadn't been done since the end of the heres also guess what else happened in the 36th Millennium the cursed 21st founding now foundings for those who don't know are the creation of the new Space Marine chapters the ultimar founding that created the primaris legions being the 27th founding but guess what chapter was part of this cursed 21st founding that's right it's the fire Hawks now these facts could all be coincidences however if I had to bet I'd say that what caused all of these events was the final death of the emperor and his spirits ascendants into the warp the golden Throne that we know of in the 41st Millennium is just some bones and degrading flesh with residual psychic energy that powers the astronomicon along with the psychers sacrifice to it to keep the Imperium running also I'm going to take a guess here and say that the chapter mentioned in the law box the flame Falcons are a call back to the original Rogue Trader version of the firehawks they have a similar name and they seem to share the spontaneous and extreme physical corruption however if the flame Falcons have the warp contagion then what exactly happened to to the modern day fire Hawks that turned them into the Legion of the Damned the iceberg goes deeper stor Lazar Sor Lazar was the night commander of the fire Hawks during the badab war he was over 600 years old at the beginning of the conflict in 901 Millennia 41 which could put him as old as 700 when the fleet went missing in 963 the Imperial Armor book doesn't have any pictures of sore and no model exists however he is described as having numerous War wounds also due to his age age it's assumed he must have at least have a few service studs a kind of battle honor for length of service Sall brought the entire chapter into the war when the fire hawk strike Cruiser the red Harbinger was captured by the Mantis Warriors this was a costly action by the Mantis Warriors as stor is to put it mildly a salty old dog he was in failing health and did not take slights to his honor well he already held a grudge against the astral claws when their chapter master was given the honor of leading the lanth campaign over him and given that the Commander in question was was l l given that the Commander in question would become hon blackard an Infamous Renegade chaos warlord that's a pretty damning indictment the fireh Hawks already had a reputation that included excessive use of force against civilian targets desertion when the losses became extreme regardless of the cost to their allies and in one case a three Century long Feud with the iron hands that ended with the death of a fire Hawk's Commander this isn't exactly the kind of attitude that gets you promoted at work except in the public sector and when he wasn't given full command of the Loyalists after the death of the loyalist Commander during the badab war he went on what is described as a ranting tirade again this is all extremely common in the public sector also of interest is that Sor was a devout thorian there's that word again and he believes that the emperor is a God who can project his will into other people in conclusion exactly what happened next is Up For Debate however I could imagine something like this after rebuilding the chapter the fire Hawks made the jump to the Crow's World system and immediately something went wrong exactly how this happened is unknown but given the scale of the Civil War that had just been fought Inquisitor johnine FR might have decided to sabotage their warp jump and rid the Imperium of another potentially Troublesome chapter rather than risk the huge amount of damage the firehawks and their unstable leader could cause of course it could just be divine fate or a mixture of the two the failed warp jump smashed to park the fire Hawks Fleet and soon it was reduced to a single ship the rapturous Rex their Master stor Lazar had finally been pushed to his Breaking Point his chatter had been muled during the badab war and he had been slighted by once again being overlooked for direct command as he rented and raved from the deck of his Flagship he called out to the emperor for Aid if the emperor truly was a God then how could he let this happen then in his hour of need the emperor spoke back however store wasn't the most tactful of men and it's highly possible that the conversation took a turn for the worst the emperor might be a God but he almost certainly isn't benevolent and if he could put down a rebellion by working through Sebastian Thor a simple preacher imagine what he could do with a giant star Fortress and a force of Space Marines soon after the black armored Legion of the Damned began appearing in times of need to assist the Imperial forces and turn the tide of battle when all seemed lost the Inquisition who looked into these events the amusingly titled Oro obsoletus have identified one individual in particular to them he is known by the name as sergeant centurius but this individual might be none other than night Captain elim cor and cor carries an ancient skull into battle this skull known as the Animus mum sucks the souls out of enemies leaving only emancipated corpses on the battlefield after the legion has passed if you are ever unlucky enough to get close to it and live you might make out that this skull is covered in Space Marine Service studs maybe Sor got EXA ly what he wanted when he demanded to serve the emperor one last time or maybe I'm just looking into it too deeply after all rout Gillman came back to life because a Space robot we only met yesterday built him a special suit of armor while an Exel Elder pyer who was just standing next to the shrine housing his body called in an elder god to flat out heal him up as good as new that's the writing I like nice and easy to understand well not that easy I think I've given myself a migraine thinking about it route Gillman is back that's all that matters sorry I'm not sure what came over me there maybe it's because I promised my Kofi subscribers a lot of short videos and I ended up writing over 4,000 words on the Legion of the damned if you like being Hoodwinked by deranged conmen sign up and you could see your name in the credits here the link is in the description below if you like this video try out this one about becoming a Space Marine scout it has loads more jokes in it and I'll see you next time

Channel: Olden Demon

Views: 64,402

Keywords: #legionofthedamned, #Warhammer40k, #GamesWorkshop, #iceberg, #icebergtheory, #OldenDemon, #RetroGaming, #VintageGaming, #Nostalgia, #Retro, #GamingThrowback, #Vintage, #WarhammerFantasy, #WH40k, #40kCommunity, #Wargaming, #TabletopGaming, #MiniaturePainting, #Grimdark, #CitadelMiniatures, #Oldhammer, #SpaceMarines, #WFB, #WarhammerCommunity, #MiniatureWargaming, #gw, #warhammer, #citadelcolour, #imperialguard, #horusheresy, #eavymetal, #oldhammer, #middlehammer, #blanchitsu, #whitedwarf, #spacehulk, #darkmillenium

Id: z5Rfo-fiMpY

Length: 20min 25sec (1225 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 23 2023