Patriarchs of Ulixis

[soddinnutter]

Patriarchs of Ulixis

Ulixis

When the Patriarchs first happened upon that most insignificant of worlds in the murky depths of the thirty-third millennia it was nothing like hub of civilisation that it is at present.

The one massive super-continent is in possession of a massively impressive, and impressively massive, mountain range that runs down its entire length on the western coast. As this is the direction from which the winds come most of the rain is deposited on the western side of the mountains. The result is a massive arid, near uninhabitable wasteland that covered most of the planets land. And a thin ribbon of vivid green on the other side of the mountains.

The vast majority of the planetary population, such as it was, made its home on the rainward side and existed in state of near constant tribal war over the limited farming land. The hardy few that lived in the waste did not have the energy to spare in petty wars against their fellow man as they were too busy existing in a state of constant trial against their land and the things that dwelt in it.

The technological level of the farming settlements of the west coast, when the Patriarchs first encountered them, was about early Iron Age. The Wastelanders were incapable of reaching this level of sophistication through lack of recourses, most notably food and water.

The Patriarchs first started harvesting recruits from the world in the mid M33, at the time one recruitment world among many. Ulixis was placed in further and further preference over the other harvesting worlds as the people were proved to be hardy and possess a greater predisposition towards tissue compatibility with the gene-seed.

As the planet stands now it bears little resemblance to the backwater it once was. In the wake of The Burning of early M37 the Patriarchs vowed never to leave their own Homeworld so defenceless again.

The majority of the population can be found now in the great Spire Cities that reach towards the sky. Each one is a vast edifice designed to hold out against just about anything short of full Exterminatus. Each Spire can house nearly a million people for an extended amount of time, each contains its own fusion reactor and backup reactor, its own water reclamation system, nutrient-synthesis systems, storage of ordinance and just about everything else that could ever be needed. In theory each Spire could hold out in a siege for decades.

As now the Patriarchs actually care for the people under their jurisdiction great channels have been carved through the West Coast Mountains and rivers are now flowing into the desert. Little by little the wastelands are disappearing and Ulixis is becoming a world worth calling home.

Belief

The Patriarchs do not worship the Emperor anymore. If he is still alive then he is a monster for standing by so idly whilst their world was burned and if he is dead then he was just a man with many tall tales told about him. They no longer venerate Lord Gulliman. Mostly because they believe strict and unquestioning adherence to the Codex was a major contributing factor to their near annihilation at the hands of the orks.

What they do believe in is the Omnissiah as the personification of the underlying mechanisms of reality. Oddly enough they have started to praise the Omnissiah in its feminine aspect as opposed to the mainstream masculine aspect as seen in many other institutions. This has not led to much tension or derision with the Mechanicus as it’s no more incorrect than the Omnissiah being referred to as male, the children of Mars traditionally using a gender-neutral descriptive word.

The Primarchs they venerate are Vulkan and Ferrus Mannus and although through an accident of fate they will never be either Salamanders or Iron Hands they have accepted the two as their spiritual lieges.

They follow a hybridised belief system based upon Vulkans ideals of self-reliance and self-sacrifice and Ferrus Mannus’ ideals of constantly overcoming any and all encountered weaknesses. This can most obviously be seen on the worlds they conquer. In their former incarnation as scions of Gulliman they would descend upon a world, sweep away any and all defences, kill the designated targets and leave. Often causing much misery, pain and suffering as they were indifferent to. Now their faith compels them to leave their Agents and Specialists to stay behind and aid in the rebuilding. Resources are brought in form offworld and the Agents of the Patriarchs share their massive experience and wisdom in how to use them. It is not enough to simply succeed, success must be lasting.

Recruitment

The recruitment process is inherently linked to the planetary education system. At the age of four formal education starts. At age eight aptitudes are discovered and built upon. At age twelve the best career to take advantage of these aptitudes is chosen and further education in this direction is taken. At age fifteen compulsory military service starts. At age twenty the acceptably good are given the option of joining the Home Guard. The very best of these are then weeded out and placed in the Ulixis Legions. The very, very best of these are then given the chance of applying for membership to the Patriarchs.

Because of the relatively advanced age of the Applicants there is a higher amount of failures and dropouts but given that the entire planetary population is just under nine billion its not something that puts the chapters survival in any sort of danger.

The failures of the transformation process are given the opportunities to either continue to serve the chapter in a non-militant way, rejoin their old legion or pursue a more civilian career.

The Neophytes are not placed into a scout company as other chapters would. They are taken to the Deep Forge at the bottom of the ocean. The ruins of the Ork Hulk that brought the Burning to their world also was the fire in which their order and world were reforged. It is only fitting, it is felt, that each marine makes his own suit of carapace and in so doing reforges themselves.

Once this task is completed they are given the title of Lawbringer and would traditionally be sent into the subterranean labyrinths below the spires to impose order for the next ten years. Unfortunately the Ulixis Underhives are becoming too law abiding and any sort of challenge died out centuries ago forcing the chapter to reluctantly export their Lawbringers offworld. This is seen as something of an answered prayer by the Adeptus Arbiters of the worlds they get sent to as the Lawbringers are quite happy to take any mission no matter how suicidal it may seem.

An interesting point is that once their decade of being a Lawbringer is over and they return to the chapter all but one in five disappear. There has been much speculation on what happens to the other four. Some say that upon their return they are locked in a room and only one is allowed out when the others are dead. Some say that the records of their time offworld is examined in the most minute of details and any found even slightly wanting are executed. Others claim that they are given in blood sacrifice to the Lady of the Machine. And some say that they are put on ice, suspended in cryo-coffins on an ancient warship handing in the interstellar void awaiting a time when they will be needed again.

Battle Doctrine

As they are space marines they favour the fast and precise means of making war over the meat-grinder. Much use is made of Drop Coffins, Land Speeders and Thunderhawks over slower vehicles like the Land Raider and the Predator. As a rule civilian casualties are kept to an absolute minimum, as they recognise that they are meant to be the protectors of humanity and not just killing machines.

There are no berserkers or rage fuelled lunatics in the ranks of the Patriarchs.

Each marine must be able to think clearly at all times. Great emphasis is placed upon discipline and order. The bloodlust and the joy of slaughter is not encouraged. They should not be needed. An Astartes should be enthusiastic about their duties because it is their sacred duty and not to sate some sort of base need of their own.

Tech-marines

There is significant and sufficient Mechanicus presence in the Ulixis Commonwealth to allow marines with a mechanical aptitude to forgo the years, sometimes decades, long trek from the Eastern Fringe to Holy Mars.

The Tech-marines are the only members of the chapter to have adopted the tradition of replacing the right hand with a mechanical replacement, as is prevalent among the children of Mannus.

Librarians

Are absent. The chapter sees no real reason to bring psykers into their order. This is not because they have any real hatred of the psykers, quite the contrary, most within the chapter respect the trained and awakened psykers for the sheer magnitude of burden they must carry.

But when a psyker does go bad, they go very bad. A regular psyker becoming deamonically possessed is a horrendous thing but the deamon will always have some limitation on what it can do imposed by the frailties of the flesh it chooses to inhabit. A deamon in the body of an Astartes is too horrific to contemplate given how the physical restrictions would be not so stringent.

What they have in their place are the Archivists. Their numbers are for the most part made up of old Marines who have suffered massive and crippling injuries and cannot anymore be allowed on missions and failed Applicants.

When the chapter requires any psychic talent it is generally hired from the local branch of the Adeptus Telepathica.

The Ulixis Commonwealth

Found on the Eastern Fringe, centred on the planet of Ulixis and encompasses the two nearest stellar systems. Between them they have ten worlds where the population exceeds ten million and three that exceed one billion. There are a total of twenty-seven inhabited worlds although on many the population is negligible.

The Commonwealth came about when the Elder Patriarchs began to see that the Imperium was in decline upon the Eastern Fringe. With the belief that the Imperium was a dying empire they did not give into despair and madness as many would but, with what they believed to be Vulkanite doggedness, set about crating their own stronghold from which to rebuild from.

The two neighbouring systems of Infernos and Crumpfrak were taken from chaos worshipers and orks respectively.

Infernos was once a world where each Chaos Sorcerer and apostate psyker raised their own religious order in the praise of dark gods and fought each other and everyone else relentlessly for the adoration of their patrons.

The societal structure of Infernos has remained largely unchanged after its inclusion into the Commonwealth. The entire planetary population still belongs and swears loyalty to a religious order but it is no longer any dedicated to the Ruinous Ones. There are Death Cult Orders, Mechanicus Orders, Cults of adoration to the Priamrchs and even Orders who venerate the Emperor. There is still and probably always will be a problem with Chaos Worship arising and so will always be a place to send the Lawbringers.

The surface of the planet is dry and on average noticeably hotter than con be considered pleasant. The world is all but dead. The only places that can support life are the Wells. Their origin and purpose is one of the many, many unexplained mysteries of an ancient galaxy. The most probable means of their creation was a high-powered laser from low orbit. In appearance they are just deep, deep pits with glassy polished walls. Their exact depth is usually unknown as many have been filled with the detritus of millennia and their exact width varies.

It is in the bottom of these deep, cool Wells that water gathers. The inhabitants of the wells live in caverns excavated from the polished sides of the Well walls.

The other great mystery of Infernos is where the oxygen in the atmosphere comes from. There is certainly not sufficient vegetation on the surface to generate the amount needed by the 1.2 billion inhabitants. Perhaps there is some sort of geological chemical exchange at work, some arcane atmospheric exchange systems left active from a forgotten age or in the bad old days the dark gods were doing something blasphemous to the atmosphere and the current dwellers of the Wells are living of the atmospheric leftovers.

Crumpfrak was a world once lost to the orks in the turmoil of the Horus Heresy, the surviving human population made as slaves to the xenos. Crumpfrak is a tide-locked world in the orbit of a small red dwarf sun. Most of the orks, and subsequently their human slaves, living in constant conflict in the temperate twilight lands between eternal night and day. There were tribes of feral, stocky, pale, abhuamn, nightsider humans living in the dark of the world around the warm springs and fault-lines heated by geological movement. They were safe from the orks, as the orks despised the bitter cold but there were worse things than orks to fear in the eternal night. The Legions raised from this world tend to be some of the most honourable warriors found amongst the Eastern Fringe, also they tend to be the most brutal.

Equipment

The Patriarchs started out with two Battle-barges and a moderately sized host of lesser support vessels. These were given to them as the Ultramarines split up their Legion and distributed their wealth amongst the fractured remnants. The Battle-barges were called Pilgrim Star and Clockwork Tempest.

Over time the host of lesser support craft has gradually increased to the point of being a small fleet in its own right, however the Tenacity seems to have vanished without a trace and the Patriarchs refuse to tell, or possibly don’t know, where it has gone.

There are no suits of Terminator Armour that survived The Burning, just as there are no Dreadnaughts.

They have no access to Telleporter technomancy and would not trust it if they did.

The Drop Pods have been all but replaced by the one man Drop Coffins that the chapter seems to prefer.

The local Mechanicus does not know how to make plasma weaponry and as such it is absent from the armoury of the chapter and the Ulixis Legion. They are, however, phenomenally good at making las-cannons and other laser weaponry and power weapons and so both are in relative abundance. The local brotherhoods of the Mechanicus are also incapable of constructing Terminator Armour or Dreadnaughts, but they do know how to make Land Speeders or exceptional quality.

The chapter has not yet managed to obtain of any suits of Mk VIII armour.

Chaplains

The battle preachers of the Patriarchs are responsible for ensuring the moral purity, honourable conduct and devotion to duty of those in their care. They are also responsible for handing out punishments on brothers who are found wanting. They are paragons of their faith and lead by example, they are warriors first and foremost and preachers second. An additional duty they have become responsible for is acting as the Watcher of the Captains.

This title combines the duties of the captains bodyguard, advisor and executioner should the need ever arise. For this reason they are always found at their side, inspiring them to acts of ever greater heroism.

Aside from their duties on the field of battle they are also responsible for preaching the faith of the Lady of the Machine. This has become the most popular religion on the planet of Ulixis thanks in no small way to the Chaplains of the Patriarchs and the priests and priestesses trained under them to go forth as missionaries.

They have surrendered the practice of wearing skull-shaped helmets as theirs is not a faith that dwells in death but a faith that promises a brighter tomorrow.

Lawbringer Crusader

There are those among the ranks of the Patriarchs who feel that their place is not among the stars but to dwell in the dark. They are the rare ones who, even after they acquired the right to don the power armour, refuse to be promoted. They dwell in the underhives of distant worlds and bring law to lawlessness for the rest of their lives, which is usually no longer than the rest of their brethren. It is all they know how to do and all they can think of doing.

Their hand crafted heavy carapace armour is painted black and their helmets are worked into a form reminiscent of a skull.

Traditionally they are armed with whatever armaments the local world provides.

This role in life is seen as a noble sacrifice by the rest of their brethren.

The Burning

The Space Hulk known as Cataclysm emerged from the warp a mere fourteen-hundred miles above the atmosphere on the far side of the planet to the Fortress-monastery. The Hulk impacted the planet in the depths of the ocean. With the exception of a quite sizable wave killing off many of the coastal dwellers the Patriarchs believed that that was an end to the whole event, and continued to believe this right up till the first wave of orks emerged onto the shore in makeshift submarines and snorkels.

The first wave was exterminated with contemptuous ease and was considered little more than a training exercise. The second wave struck the shore less than a week later and when it struck it was like a hammer blow to an unsuspecting skull. The orks were a green tide that would not go out. They just came and came and came until the land was swarming with brutal xenos. The Tribes of Ulixis that tried to fight back with their primitive weapons were slaughtered and the survivors made sport of. Those that fled across the mountains from the ork horde fared little better as they died of dehydration in the arid wastes. The chapter issued a las-rifle to ever man woman and child they could find and taught them the rudiments of how to use them and still it was not enough. The orks marched inexorably across their world and hours before the Fortress was burned to the bedrock with unholy fusion flames the Chapter Master committed the unthinkable crime. He sent a plea for help.

Aid arrived in the form of elements from the Storm Giants and Iron Fists chapter whose patrol route often took them not too far from the Ulixis system.

With cunning strategies and devious ambushes the horde was ground into the dirt and made a feast for the vultures. But the Patriarchs were all but spent. On the surface of their world only a mere fifty-seven of their brethren survived the invasion. Were it not for a company on permanent loan to the Mechanicus Explorator Fleet and samples of the gene-seed kept in cryo, suspended in the far obits, this would have meant the chapter’s extinction.

[Felwether]

Nice write up, lots of quirks and differences from other chapters. The idea of a split down the middle of Ulixis is interesting and all the speculation about the majority of the Lawbringers never returning is cool.

 

I do have a few issues though, you mention 'The Burning' quite a lot throughout the article without ever really explaining it in detail. If it is such an important event in the chapter's history I think it should have a section dedicated to it (you could even add in an entire 'Notable Battles' section).

 

Also, I feel that the age of twenty for recruitment is too old, but that's just me.

 

It might be worth mentioning their relationship with other Ultramarines descendants too. I doubt they'd be particularly popular amongst the Scions of Guilliman!. I'd imagine they may have had run-ins with the Inquisition as well, due to their unconventional beliefs.

 

One last thing: in the Ulixis Commonwealth, the planet Chtonia sounds much too close to Cthonia for my liking... :whistling:

[soddinnutter]

Any better? Had not realised that Chtonia sounded so much like Cthonia.

 

Will get to their less than friendly relationship with the other children of Gulliman next

[Welcheren]

Love your ideas, and the way the Patriarchs have become a very unique and idiosyncratic chapter.

[Brother Tyler]

What is that color scheme?

 

The official color scheme can be seen at: http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-25r1qniAelE/UlH7YPckitI/AAAAAAAAzy0/ef2aZc4f_kA/s1600/ulixis.JPG

 

Two speculative versions of that (each has a different color for the chest eagle) can be seen at: http://www.bolterandchainsword.com/topic/279658-libators-and-other-easter-eggs/

 

There's really nothing wrong with using your own unique color scheme, but if you're going to use a unique scheme for a Chapter that doesn't really have a strongly developed background, why even use that Chapter? You could simply use a different Chapter name.

[Heru]

What is that color scheme?

 

The official color scheme can be seen at: http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-25r1qniAelE/UlH7YPckitI/AAAAAAAAzy0/ef2aZc4f_kA/s1600/ulixis.JPG

 

Two speculative versions of that (each has a different color for the chest eagle) can be seen at: http://www.bolterandchainsword.com/topic/279658-libators-and-other-easter-eggs/

 

There's really nothing wrong with using your own unique color scheme, but if you're going to use a unique scheme for a Chapter that doesn't really have a strongly developed background, why even use that Chapter? You could simply use a different Chapter name.

BT check the OPs posting date, you are responding to a necroed thread.