Clown looking Marines

[soddinnutter]

Any pointers from anyone would be welcome at this or any point.

Clowns (AKA Chaos Clown, Psychotic Jesters, Insane Pranksters, Unholy Tricksters and a dozen other names not least of which is Wanted: Reward upon delivery)

Origins:

From where these creatures originate is as of yet a mystery to the Imperium and just about anyone else who might be curious. The Archivists of the Clowns can find no record of their own existence before late M33, they do not know who their genetic heritage is descended from. Some within their brotherhood believe they are of Gulliman’s stock, others feel that they have more in common with the children of Konrad Curze and others feel that they are of the lineage of Alpharious. On the whole it’s not something they loose much sleep over.

Beliefs

The Clowns do not worship the Ruinous Powers and have declared war upon them. This would seem to put them on the same side as the Imperium were it not for the fact that they have declared war upon the Unworthy Emperor as well.

Oddly enough they do not have much hostility, by marine standards, with the followers of either. They tend to take every sentient creature they meet upon its own merits and judge if it is worthy of life on a much more individual level. Of course the moment that anyone makes a hostile move towards them or anyone that they consider ‘theirs’ or anything that belongs to them without extremely unambiguous permission they can expect to be torn limb from limb.

Recruitment

“Oh, God! I’VE CREATED A MONSTER!!!”

Just about everything has been attempted by someone at one point or another.

There is a liking among some of the Warbands for cloning new recruits from the genetic samples the Apothecaries took before they began the transformations. Making a copy of a marine who is still alive is considered the very height of tastelessness.

Many Warbands take in foundlings as an act of pity, charity and responsibility. The males are trained to become Marines and females are trained to run the Battle Barge. The surviving failures are also trained to run the ship.

One company only trains those who are born on the Battle Barge because they believe they are more dependable and loyal to the Chapter. This is the main contributing factor to this Warbands diminished numbers.

Another way that is coming back into fashion among some of the Warbands is the practice of recruiting the orphans found in the picking over the rubble of cities that have been torn down by conflict. An indication of a predisposition towards luck is always welcome.

Wargear

They have no suits of Terminator Armour, they have no Dreadnaughts and they have no access to telleyporter technology. This does not bother them so much as their long-term association with a travelling band of Insane Mechanicus has given them access to much technology that no other this side of madness has access to.

The Land Raiders are about an eighth the size of a regular Land raider and yet can hold twenty Marines, their equipment, enough food for a week and enough beer to drown an elephant.

The Chainswords appear to be made out of a flexible material that flails around and often wraps around the weapons of their adversaries. And yet they also seem to work in much the same manner as their mundane counterparts and can tear through limbs as they should do.

Time Traveling Underpants, although by no means standard issue, have been found in the armoires and on the bodies of the Clowns. There is a very fine line between Genius and Madness and the inventor of these strange creations crossed it so often it became all but worn away. The Chapter Master of the time commissioned the construction of the first pair with the word 'Create for me a device so that I may travel back to Ancient Earth and kill the False Emperor before he ruins all of creation with his faggatory'. Needless to say they did not work quite right. They merely distort the correct flow of time and space over a small area causing blades to close on nothing but air and lasers to go off at odd angles. The downside is that they make life just as difficult for the person wearing them.

The Swirly Thing Generator. One day a Taskmaster of the Insane Mechanicus unearthed a D-Cannon from the ruins of a Crone World deep in the Eye of Terror. For a week afterwards trivial parts of relatively unimportant machines went missing all over the Battle Barge. Cackling and gibbering the Taskmaster presented his latest invention to the Master of the Forge. It was found to be acceptable in the art of generating swirly things and killing most who stood before it. Very occasionally it will go a bit peculiar and pies to rain down upon the foe.

Insane Mechanicus

“Brothers and sisters, it’s time to do something of questionable reason and unpredictable outcome. Oi, you, get your damned hands of the ‘We Belong Dead’ switch and pass me my respectable spectacles.”

Like the Dark Mechanicus but with less malice. To them there are no boundaries of knowledge that should be honoured, boundaries exist to be violated, pushed back and often removed utterly. Including the boundaries of conventional thought process. They themselves are craftsmen without peer and the Lords of Mars may have endured their extreme idiosyncrasies if they could have been coherent enough to obey orders.

As it is they can’t. They start with only the very best of intentions but end up getting board quickly and start to get creative. One example of this was Brother Beano sent his Melta Rifle to be repaired. Adept Zeebit returned the device several days later with the words “Yo Dawg, so we heard you like Plasmas and Meltas, so we put a Melta on your Plasma and a Plasma on your Melta so you can Plas while you Melt and Melt while you Plas!” The weapon now appears to be a melta-plasma combination weapon. This was much to the dislike of Brother Beano who does not trust Plasma Weapons.

On another occasion they converted all the War-Bikes into Battle-Segways and Attack-Unicycles.

Organisation

Does actually exist.

There is one Chapter Master. His rule is absolute.

There have been anywhere between 23 and 4 Warbands that serve under the Chapter Master. They can comprise of anywhere between 20 and about 120 marines. They are commanded by whatever title the Captain of that Warband has decided to start calling himself.

Every other Marine is under the Captain. The composition and organisation within the Warband is decided by the Captain.

There are exceptions. Tech-Marines are all but a part of the Insane Mechanicus, they never officially attain anything above the rank of Adept in that insular institution, but do become quite apt at directing their attention, as they are the only members of that institution that can think in a straight line. They are responsible for keeping track of what the Insane Mechanicus are doing, but never interfering with them doing it, as much as the more traditional jobs of the Tech-Marine. Generally get referred to as Cog-Brothers.

The Apothecaries. They answer directly to the Chapter Master. They are responsible for cataloguing and determining the purity of the captured gene-seed taken from any other Marines, Imperial or otherwise, that the chapter might come to blows with. They are responsible for implementing the transformations upon the Aspirants for the Captains of the Warbands, assuming it gests cleared by the Chapter Master first.

The Chaplains. Not an official title anymore. Many take that title and start their own little cults amongst their brothers. The Chapter Master usually encourages this as the constant in fighting this generates between the Warbands, and often within Warbands, keeps everyone from getting board. Competition between the Warbands is seen as a way to drive people to excel. The moment they start to praise the Ruinous Powers, however, they can expect to die in very, very short order.

Sorcerer has replaced the title of Librarian. This is because they seldom spend time tending to the library. That’s what the Archivists and Rememberancers are for. Sorcerer is simply the title given to a Brother-Psyker. If at anytime they try to summon anything Deamonic for purposes other than interrogation they are executed without chance to explain.

This is not to say that there have not been schisms, rebellions, sect wars, mutinies, uprisings and all manner of little civil wars that lacked all civility. Indeed there have and most were considered the very height of entertainment. The job of Chapter Master in that situation is to stay well out of it, turn a blind eye, deaf ear and award points at the end.

Civil unrest is loosely regulated by the Insane Mechanicus, at the unified pleading of the Tech-Marines. None of the Sister and Brotherhoods want to see too much of the Shenanigans damaged by any unrestrained joviality and jubilation and will limit what sort of weapons are available for the deadly high jinks. No one wants a mutiny to escalate to the point of nuclear war, its bad for business.

The job of Chapter Master is one both desired and dreaded by all. On one hand there is the whole unlimited power thing that many Clowns would trade their oversized shoes for but not when its weighed against the prospect of having to manage the visitors, civilians, Insane Mechanicus, relations with foreign stellar states, traders, be giving the royal finger to the Gods of Chaos with one hand whilst bitch-slapping the Imperium with the other and not letting the infighting reach the point where the long term survival of the Clowns is put in danger whilst keeping everyone overtly hostile enough to each other not to get board because God alone knows what the Clowns would get it into their twisted minds to do if they ever got board.

Fleet

They have one warp capable vessel, the Shenanigans. It started out its life as a standard Battle Barge. Or so it is assumed. By the closing of the 41st millennia it’s not evident. Thousands of years of being inhabited by the Insane Mechanicus has caused all sorts of non-standard augmentation to occur.

First it was realised that raw materials were getting harder to get hold of since their excommunicate status started to become spread across the galaxy. So the Insane Mechanicus, after a few false starts, three instances where they forgot what they were doing, two drastic changes in planned design part way through the project and one successful rebellion within their ranks, constructed a refinery towards the prow of the ship and converted many of the chapters Space to Land craft into rock-breakers to delicately break asteroids into manageable pieces.

One day sometime in the summer of 002M34 the damaged and ailing warpdrive was getting beyond a joke and a new one needed to be constructed. The brother and sisterhoods within the Insane Mechanicus vied for the honour of this grandest of projects most fiercely and eventually the Sisterhood of the Frictionless Ball-bearing won. The new warpdrive resembles a big cube thirty paces long across all sides with many handles sticking out of one side of it, after walkways were installed along the side of the box it became clear that they had constructed the very first clockwork powered warpdrive. After its first successful use the Chaptermaster, and everyone else on the Shenanigans demanded an explanation of how it worked. They could not give one, as none of them would admit to drawing the original blueprints.

The only problem, if such it could be called, is that the Umbra really like it as well. They seem harmless enough and just seem to be using it to surf the interface between Warp and Real. Sometimes they start singing.

After that it sort of went critical. There is now always at least one major ‘Upgrade’ going on somewhere and the Insane Mechanicus now feud with each other more than the Warbands of the Chapter when their plans inevitably come into conflict with each other.

Given that the Shenanigans has been used as a mobile trading platform for many, many centuries there have been docking scaffolds, construction nets, contact bridges, gravity pointers, extra weapons, different weapons, weapon upgrades, new armour, better armour, shield emitters, shield manipulators, boarding craft lancers, shuttle bays, new cargo caverns added, removed, replaced, moved, reattached and altered that the Shenanigans is no longer recognisable as it’s old self anymore. And that’s not even including the battle damage or the things that the Insane Mechanicus did that seemed like a good idea at the time but no one can quite figure the exact reason for. Many of the latter alterations have been of a terrible symbiosis of altered STC parts and reverse engineered xeno-tech.

Current location: About 7/10 the way along the Edgeward side of the Crux-Scutum Arm and about ninety light years below the mean of the galactic disc. Far enough away from the Tau Empire so as not to be overly bothered for a long time by its expansion, also far enough away from Iyanden to not be the victim of a pre-emptive retaliation but close enough to trade with both. Trade happens with a thousand little galactic civilisations, to use that term in its loosest possible sense, so the Clowns would feel like fools not to get a slice of it.

Deamonic Summoning

“Where is that two-faced, snivelling, idiot Ezekyle Abaddon. No lying or we will send you back to your patron in a variety of colourful plastic bags.”

The summoning of Deamonic entities is one of the quickest ways to get executed that the Clowns know of.

There are exceptions. Occasionally the Chapter Master will order a Summoning to take place. Where most Warbands, Cultists and Legions would dream of a Horde of rampaging other worldly abominations against nature to call their very own the Clowns are not that foolish.

When the Sorcerers eventually manage to capture a Deamon it is bound within a Magic Circle. It is then asked some questions. If it refuses to answer or the Sorcerer detects a lie it is hit with an object blessed by a rival god until a truthful answer is forthcoming.

The Sorcerers were stumped for a very long time when they inadvertently captured an entity of Chaos Undivided. For centuries they had been using the Crozius Arcanum given to the Chaplains back at the time of founding. But they had all stopped working the moment they had become officially excommunicated. Eventually they were given, by the Eldar Harlequins as part of a non-aggression pact, objects blessed by the Laughing One. They work very well.

Gene-seed

“MAD THEY CALLED ME!! MAD!!!! But I ask you; Could a mad man have created this?!? They said it was hopeless, that degenerative mutation of the Progenoids could not be cured by gene-splicing from a different Primarch-strain! But I showed them, I showed them all!!! MWHAHAHAHAHAHA”. – Apothecary Victor Demikhov

Completely free of all mutation save the normal variations found in all chapters. They have also ‘acquired’ a not entirely negligible amount of gene-matter from many other Warbands and Chapters. It is rumoured that the Apothecarium has the lineage of all the Primarchs on record.

Relics

Monasteriense Iocus Libri. A huge and terrible tome written in the blood of a Simulacra that ate the brain of one of the chapters sorcerers and tried to infiltrate the Chapter. This dreaded tome is said to contain the last few original jokes left in the entire universe.

Filiolus A Maculosus Rector. Another huge books. It contains all the notes that the Chapter has been able to compile about the Ruinous Powers.

[Ecritter]

The Land Raiders are about an eighth the size of a regular Land raider and yet can hold twenty Marines

 

Not clown cars. :D

[Consul of Scorpions]

This: more amusing than Reasonable Marines.

[Hubernator]

I think this would be more... fitting, if they were more devotees to Slaanesh. Striving for excess in the form of being really silly while killing everybody. Similar can go for the mechanicus group - could be a cult from the Dark Mechanicus that strive to build something awesome but somewhat make odd contraptions in the process.

[Consul of Scorpions]

wait, wouldn't that be more Tzeentch's thing?

[Hubernator]

wait, wouldn't that be more Tzeentch's thing?

...could be a mix of both. But ideally leaving the sorcery bit out and heading more for "changing things".

[elohimalpha]

I'm thinking of the Eldar Harlequins - maybe the Clowns (Klowns?) tapped in to the same forces. Would make for interesting models

[hazardousZERO]

Just make sure all the marones in beekie helmets have there "noses" painted red

[soddinnutter]

More stuff added.

[Grey Hunter Ydalir]

If you took a more "Insane Clown Posse" (It's a band if you haven't heard of them. Bunch of nutty, meth head white rappers) route you could pull it off with a bit more seriousness I think. That is, if you take the silliness of most of the groups songs with a pinch of salt.

 

What I mean to say is that clowns can work well with a darker feel. For instance the meta-prophesy behind the groups earlier work that involved a coming apocalypse, the Dark Carnival to which they belonged and the road to Shangri-La.

 

Though, I'd like to write that as an IT now that I think about it..... ah so sue me. B)

 

But there are many facets of the Dark Carnival! ;)

[soddinnutter]

Some of the stupider stuff taken away, some less stupid stuff added.

 

What does anyone think?

[soddinnutter]

More Stuff added.

 

Amidoinitrite.jpg ;)

 

or should i do something else?