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My homegrown chapter. English is not my first language, and I'm trying to imitate the pedantic imperial style, so I apologies for every mistake, I did my best. Enjoy, if the text deserves it The Headsman Guard "No foes. Only prey". Staring at the abyss for thousands of years, the Headsman Guard forged itself in isolation, protecting the Imperium from the things that dwell in the Ghoul Stars, a region that challenges the sanity of men. Since the mythical days of the Harbinger, the Headsmen have lived in the margins of History, performing their duty to Emperor and Primarch as envoys of their lineage to the darkest deeps. Following the visions of the Silversmiths, they keep the ever shrinking hope that their efforts will not be in vain, when Jaghatai returns to bring vitality to a dying humanity. Founding chapter: Storm Lords (White Scars). Founding: 3rd founding (M32). Known descendants: None. Chapter Symbol: Axe and crossed lightning bolts. Colors: Grey, black and bone white. Homeworld: Germinal – Sundered Belt. Recruitment World: Khumran IV - Ultima Segmentum. Battle Cry: Several bellicose extracts from the Pact of Khumran. History: “The Void is ours. Its emptiness. Its madness. We own it. For Man, we deny it to the Beast. Flay the Beast! Cull the vermin! We are the Khan’s Headsmen, emissaries of our fathers’ wrath. There will be no reward for the worthy until he returns and Humanity is unleashed anew. For the Emperor! For the Khan! – Last lines from the Pact of Khumran. Following the Horus Heresy, the damage that was done to the Imperium was slowly repaired and its military forces reformed. Among the 3rd founding chapters created for that purpose, was the Headsman Guard. A fleet based chapter, destined to be at the forefront of imperial expeditions, its infrastructure following conquests as they were achieved. As a symbol of the reigning optimism and the value placed on their descendants, the Storm Lords offered one battle-brother to lead their successors and ensure continuity among the sons of Jaghatai. His name is recorded in the chapter’s chronicles as Pkharmat, Harbinger of the Storm. Details about their first actions have been lost among their chronicles’ metaphors. What they do tell is that Pkharmat led the chapter from the front, teaching his new brothers to bleed the galaxy when it refused to submit to them. The Harbinger was a commander and venerable father who build a chapter to his image, ingraining in them a dynamic, vital warfare, and the knowledge that the Primarch would soon return to lead his sons again. For almost 400 years, the Guard liberated and purged worlds in close alliance with the Imperial Guard. They hunted and killed and roared their praises to Jaghatai, without knowing this era will one day be remembered as the last bright light before decrepitude settled in the domain of man. Battling with the remnants of the Heresy ever deeper into the reaches of the galactic northeast, the expedition found the Khumran system, where two worlds teemed with unwelcomed life. Lost to Horus Lupercal during the Heresy, the system was still ruled by traitors, fanatically loyal to the memory of the Warmaster. Despite its best efforts and its Dark Mechanicum allies, the petty kingdom of Khumran was shattered in what became Pkharmat’s most vaunted victory. After the corrupt adepts were properly excruciated, the Mechanicum reclaimed Khumran III. Khumran IV was stripped clean of traitorous life and offered to veteran imperial regiments as a reward for decades of service. By 544.M32, the Headsmen were resupplying, preparing for the next objective in sight: the remote portion of galaxy known as the Ghoul Stars, a desolate region of space lit by the cold rays of dying suns. That next push would never come. In 544.M32, a mysterious ork warlord known as the Beast united much of the Ork race. His Waaagh!, the largest the Galaxy had ever seen, rampaged across entire sectors, even laying siege to Terra. The Imperium only halted his advance at great cost and desperate measures, devastating the Adeptus Astartes in the process and revealing weakness behind appearances of solidity. Although the Headsman Guard never found itself in the main campaign theaters, the Beast plunged the entire galaxy into turmoil, and minor ork invasions followed wherever they could. Expansion plans were ruined, as Pkharmat was forced to turn back on his tracks to defend previously conquered systems from the green tide. There is no full record of those days but by the time the Beast was killed, the Headsmen had been reduced to half their numbers and their resupplying lines were shattered. This will be only the first in a long string of calamities. In 546.M32, Drakan Vangorich, Grand Master of Assassins, launched a coup against the High Lords of Terra, slaying them to a man in an event known as The Beheading. Afterwards, the Imperium, wracked with a colossal butcher’s bill, collapsed authorities, and rebellions, descended into anarchy. And in the galactic northeast, the Ghoul Stars suddenly stirred. Creatures of primal nightmares extended their shadow into imperial territory, as if inhuman minds had suddenly awakened, reacting to the weakness perceived beyond their borders. Cut off from the Imperium at large and with a Chapter in need of rebuilding, Pkharmat made the decision that would define the Guard for ages to come. He led the chapter back to Khumran IV, site of their greatest victory, and named himself Protector of Khumran, vowing that the Chapter would be reborn, or die defending its highest mark. The local tech-adepts and imperial commanders were eager to accept the protection Pkharmat offered them in exchange for resources and recruits. So the Pact of Khumran was signed and the wars of reclamation began. Battling the Ghoul Stars creatures for years, the Guard slowly rebuild its numbers and battle after battle pushed the xenos back into the darkness. Chasing them, the Headsmen entered the Sundered Belt, a series of desolated planets and asteroids marking the Imperium’s borders. There, they would claim their homeworld and several outposts. One hundred years after the Beheading, Pkharmat led his last hunt into the Ghoul Stars. Species and planets vanished beneath cyclonic torpedoes, and the Hunter’s Moon’s trophy room was filled with hides and exoskeletons. It seemed for a while conquest would begin anew. Then, the Harbinger was captured under mysterious circumstances by the vicious creatures known as Cythor Fiends, who for years had evaded every confrontation. Adding injury to the shame, the xenos proceed to torture the Harbinger for a full year, in a futile attempt to break him into submission. His transhuman nature kept him alive, healing every night the damage done to him every day. By the time the Headsmen broke into the creature’s lair, laying waste to everything they saw, the Chapter Master, now a shell of himself had broken free and was carving his way through xenos with his bare hands. The expedition returned to the Sundered Belt. Unable to keep the Harbinger alive, the captains and silversmiths decided for the first and only time to ask a particular favor from their Mechanicum allies. They asked for a dreadnaught. Pkharmat became the Forever Khan, eternal Vicar of the Primarch. The string of catastrophes started by the Beast, and the prolonged period of isolation facing the supernatural threats that would periodically crawl from the Ghoul Stars, brought gradual changes to the chapter, changes that would solidify after Pkharmat’s death. The chapter began to lose its ruthless joy and the optimism regarding the future of mankind. Now the thrill of the hunt coexists with a somber fatalism, and a superstitious need to find meaning among the randomness of the Universe. Under the increased influence of the silversmiths, the Guard now worships the days of conquest of the Forever Khan. Pkharmat has become an icon, awakened a reckless amount of times in the following millennia to provide guidance. As the Headsmen rejoice in the vision of their first Chapter Master laying waste to their enemies, they do not know the constant awakenings are irremediably damaging his sanity. Homeworld: "Brothers, you have not reached this place by chance. You have come to face the unthinking madness crawling through the Void, your domain. You have come to break it, to regain the strength the Emperor demands of you. His people are in need of light. But I shall only return to them to bring back Fire!" – Pkharmat. When the Headsmen set their eyes for the first time on an unassuming planetoid sluggishly circling a cold sun in the Sundered Belt, they thought nothing will come from that particular expedition. The moment they set foot on it, the planetoid reacted to their presence with unnatural catastrophes and creatures that no probe or auspex had detected crawling from every crevasse. They called it Germinal, an ancient terran word to signify rebirth and resurgence; a term meant to convey optimism, but that since those days has become a dark joke layered with irony. Germinal is a rock riddled with hatred for those who interrupted its lonely existence, a rock with freezing conditions, erratic volcanoes spewing ice or boiling ash into orbit, and unpredictable seasons of storms and earthquakes. Its only living creatures are the ice sphinxes, although the fact they are alive has never been proven with any certainty. Not even the marines know how to classify the grotesque megafauna, what they are made of, if they reproduce, or if they are even sentient. Rarely seen on the surface, when the sphinxes rise from their lairs it is to fight those who trespass, including each other. Since nothing resembling an ice sphinx has been reported anywhere else, it is believed that Germinal is their birthworld and that perhaps they are nothing more than the planet’s antibodies. To the Headsmen, there is nothing to study or understand. It was a place that defied mankind’s presence and therefore a place to be broken into submission. For years, Pkharmat waged war on Germinal for the purpose of building a fortress-monastery; an endeavor the planetoid resisted every step of the way, killing thousands of the Mechanicum teams that violated its original form. On the surface, a small bastion has been erected, a proclamation of intent, a challenge spit at the planetoid itself. Protected by void shields and massive gun emplacements, the real fortress-monastery is a subterranean labyrinth carved beneath the bastion. Build vast enough to accommodate the entire chapter, traditionally a single company keeps watch over it. Most is populated by servitors and entire linages of serfs tending to halls left in darkness for years or decades. Recruits train in subterranean fields of battle against each other and the many lifeforms brought for that purpose. From time to time, veteran hunters lead them to the surface, where they learn to stay alive, then to kill the sphinxes under their elders’ gaze. Silversmiths and apothecaries monitor them constantly, looking for signs of the madness that plagues an unusually high number of recruits, another weapon they say, used by Germinal against the invaders. The Charnel is the place where the Headsmen first set foot on Germinal, located in a deep valley battered by galls and blinding blizzard. If a traveler should find his way to the center of the valley, he would eventually see an ominous silhouette, like an island lost in the storm. Then he would stand in front of Jaghatai himself, his gaze piercing through the newcomer. A statue of grey stone has been erected to consecrate the breaking of Germinal to the Khan. Since those days, no sphinx has ever attacked the statue; no earthquake has ever caused a chink to the stone. This is where newly ascended recruits travel to bow before their father and ascend to the stars, and the travel itself is dangerous enough to be considered their last test. It is the domain of the Silversmiths, where they seek to pierce the veil between realities and understand the will of their father. It is where enemies are dragged to be offered to the Khan, abandoned at the feet of the statue among older bones and mummified carcasses. If one would explore the caves and walls of the valley, one would find the skeletons of former battle brothers dressed in ragged funeral shrouds, their empty sockets staring at the center of the valley, where their father stands. Beliefs: “A hunter does not hate his quarry. Find clarity in that knowledge. As long as there is prey, we will thrive through its extermination”. – Silversmith Garsevan. Like most Space Marine Chapters, the Headsman Guard does not see the Emperor as a god but rather as the greatest human who ever lived. He is a distant figure to the point of abstraction, a symbol of humanity’s potential. The Guard do not pray to him; Silversmiths teach that no one has the right to ask anything to the Emperor, because he has already given. Battle-brothers are taught to show gratitude through bloodshed, every enemy dispatched a way of thanking him for his sacrifice. Jaghatai Khan on the other side is omnipresent in the chapter’s rites of war. Like other Vth legion successors, they claim their Primarch disappeared in the aftermaths of the Horus Heresy, and they wait for his return. The Guard waits for him still, but centuries of isolation and, some fear, the effects of their hunting grounds on their minds, have twisted their original vision. To the increasingly bleak Guard, the Vth Primarch is an ominous judge who watches humanity from afar. The idea that the Khan could be killed or delayed is inconceivable, the Khan hasn’t returned because he does not wish to, and according to the Silversmiths, he may never do. Since the Heresy, humans have constantly proven their willingness to follow into the steps of those who ruined the Emperor’s dream; their weakness an insult to the Primarch. There is a growing fear, rarely voiced among the Headsmen, that as the 41st millennium draws to a close and humanity suffers an onslaught like never before, the Khan may have already judged the Imperium to be unworthy of its founders’ sacrifice and therefore, unworthy of salvation. “No foes, only prey” is the central tenet of Pkharmat’s teachings: all enemies are beneath contempt, undeserving even of hatred. The Headsmen see themselves as cast in the role of the falconers of old Chogoris, charged with hunting dangerous game. To them, traitors, xenos and daemons are nothing but vermin to be culled when it encroaches on mankind’s domain. However, this cold outlook on their duty is constantly challenged by the natural ferocity shared by all scions of Jaghatai. All battle-brothers are expected to rein in their ferocity, but some take the lesson to its logical conclusion, striving to cast it away entirely. It can take a lifetime for a battle-brother to get rid of the hereditary savagery ingrained in his genes, but those who achieve it will make war with renewed focus and self-control. They will join the hunter assault squads, teams of like-minded brothers who will find joy in the thrill of the hunt, but none in the killing stroke. The Order of Silversmiths, those who harness the silver veins from heaven, is made of the spiritual guides of the chapter. Both chaplains and librarians, they join companies to provide a unifying vision to very independent captains. Among superstitious battle-brothers, the Silversmiths are universally honored, as they look for clues of their Khan’s will and for reasons to hope for his return. For all practical purpose, the Chapter has become a diarchy, with the Chief Silversmith sharing equal power and authority with the Chapter Master. Gene-seed: “Our genes make us feral. Our teachings demand temperance. Our hunting grounds fill us with bleakness. Many of your battle brothers will surrender to one of those and thrive. Not you. You will listen to each when necessary. That is the battle at the core of your duty, and it is eternal”. – Chapter Master Ashirvan, to captain Sandorf upon his ascension. Less than a tenth of all space marine chapters owe their origins to the White Scars, due to certain genetic instabilities that have prevented them from competing with more populous bloodlines. Like all sons of Jaghatai, the Headsmen have inherited a feral streak and a tendency for ferocious displays of violence. The teachings of Pkharmat were devised to harness this savagery through discipline. The more a battle-brother rejects this genetic heritage, the more likely he is to join the hunter squads. As centuries passed, certain kinds of degenerations became increasingly noticeable among new inductees. It is unknown if this defect was caused by the nature of the stock recruited on Khumran IV, or if it was already present at the time of their creation, but by space marine standards, the Headsmen look old and grey, as if the unending hunts had taken a toll on them before time. Starting after their first century of service, this accelerated physical change is considered with pride, like a second ascension into the chapter. Veterans and captains are known to forge open-faced helmets of archaic design in order to expose their grizzled features to the enemy. Combat doctrine & organization: “You are Hunters. If you still need my orders, your lives were wasted”. - Master Zaroff, to the Hunter Assault Squads. The Headsmen followed the tenets of the Codex Astartes until the days of isolation. Since then, they have slowly altered them as their circumstances changed. Every company is self-sufficient, each with its tactical, devastator, assault and scout squads, its tanks, speeders, and techmarines, and a personal strike cruiser, allowing them to hunt on their own for extended periods of time. The Guard’s preferred style of warfare is to overwhelm their enemies with massive ambushes, using their speed, aggression and firepower to break, isolate, and crush them at leisure before they can react. They have acquired a reputation for methodical patience, followed by brutally quick attacks intent to make short work of the enemy at the precise moment. In cases of prolonged warfare, they remain loyal to the Khan’s virtues of speed, outmaneuvering and seizing the initiative. Bikes, speeders, thunderhawks, and armored companies work in unison, with commanders leading from the top of tanks swarming with battle-brothers eager to get into striking distance. The most important exception is the role given to the Hunter Assault Squads. Equipped with modified armors and jump packs, the Hunters are the elite of each company, brothers who have cast their innate savagery away and make war with detached patience. They hunt down commanders and the most dangerous foes, harrying them to the place where the chapter will sprung the trap. The Master of the Hunt is the epitome of this mentality, and centuries can pass before choosing a new one. Once chosen, he will abandon his company and work outside the chapter’s hierarchy, chasing down the most elusive enemies with a few handpicked followers. When working alongside the chapter, he will lead all the hunters available and will be allowed to do as he pleases; a strategy that has prevented entire wars of attrition. As an embodiment of his chapter’s teachings, the Master of the Hunt looks at the Universe and everything in it with indifference, finding contentment only in the chase. Foes find their hubris sorely tested when they meet the eyes of the Master and see nothing but complete disinterest, for the hunt is now over. To these somber, impassive battle-brothers, they are nothing but meat, and some take that definition quite literally. Khumran IV: "We bring you light! Multiply and become a great tribe! Warm yourselves! Illuminate your homes and rejoice! For soon, you will march to war at our calling!” – From the Pact of Khumran. Located in a remote corner of Ultima Segmentum, the Khumran system is one of the last imperial outposts before the Ghoul Stars. Four planets orbit the star Khumran, of which two boast imperial presence, among them Khumran III, a forge world under the rule of the tech-priests of Mars. Khumran IV is a γ-class civilized world subclassed as a mining world, a place of mountains, ravines and gorges separated from each other by precious fertile valleys and inland seas, well protected by several moons heavily armed by the Mechanicum. Most khumrans work as miners and farmers for the amir commanders and magnates that form the planetary council. Their main purpose is to exploit the mines, fabrics and collective farms niched in the valleys, and periodically raise regiments from their most ruthless human and ogryn laborers to be sent to the Emperor’s wars. As one leaves the settlements, the land becomes increasingly cold, something not improved by the many predators and massive carrion birds large enough to pick up a human and drop it down a cliff to get access to his marrow. This does not mean the land is empty; mining expeditions constantly create pockets of civilization, looking for travel routes and resources to exploit. Well-armed expeditions, for the many “empty quarters” are the domain of mountain tribes. Descendants of criminals and workers fleeing service, they make a living by protecting expeditions in exchange for payment, and by attacking settlements when their neighbors are not forthcoming. Khumran IV lives in a state of endemic conflict, with tribes raiding enclaves and militias burning down their bastions in retaliation. No amir has ever attempted to put an end to this state of things, because it has been forbidden to them. Since the Days of Isolation, the Pact sealed by Khumran IV and the Headsman Guard included the right for those tribes to exist, to keep the future recruits strong, and so it has been ever since. Every time new imperial regiments are drafted, mountaineers walk into urban areas, carrying imperial icons proclaiming truce and common devotion, and enlist shoulder to shoulder with miners. And every time, the Guard picks its share of the youngest. Many lineages, tribes and settlements remember that at some point one of them was taken away by the Chapter, and entire regiments pray for a chance to fight side by side with the Headsmen, whom they see as their living ancestors. The Eyes and Ears are a select group of chapter serfs, singled out for their devotion, charged by the Silversmith with the duty of spreading the chapter’s creed. Silversmiths and their Eyes and Ears roam the planet, preaching the wisdom of the Primarch. Far from ending conflict, they ensure it will never stop, in an attempt to recreate what Chogoris was in the days of Jaghatai. The Khan is worshipped almost as much as the Emperor; and the khumrans have adopted Guard ceremonies like ritual sacrifice of quarry, prayer trough collective ecstatic song, and other idiosyncrasies. This position puts the Chapter at odds with the imperial clergy, who consider they infringe on their prerogatives, but usually they all turn a blind eye to each other as long as orthodoxy his not challenged.