Looking for novels, background and fluff involving Skitarii

[Ouroboros13]

Hey,

 

I'm trying assemble all the information I can concerning Skitarii. Apart from Mechanicum, Priests of Mars, Lords of Mars, Soul Hunter, Legacy and the sources cited in the Lexicanum article (that is, the 4th edition core, the Heraclitus Effect, Deus Ex Mechanicus, Titanicus, Collected Visions, Know No Fear and the infamous Citadel Journal 21) can anyone steer me towards any BL novels, short stories or codex background where Skitarii appear?

 

I'm particular interested in the inconsistency within the above sources as to whether or not Skitarii are the same thing as Tech-Guard, so sources where Skitarii are either called tech-guard or are demarcated as separate from tech-guard would be particularly useful.

 

Thanks.

[battle captain corpus]

The first Word Bearers book, Dark Acolyte I think, has a HUGE Admech army facing the WB's. :)

 

BCC

[CommodusXIII]

The eponymous first novel in the Soul Drinkers series involves Tech Guard.  I won't ruin it for anyone, but it was a decent look into the Skitarii at a time before the Horus Heresy series or Titanicus.  Another interesting resource would be the older Titan graphic novels, though it only offers rare glimpses and has not aged quite as well.

 

Regarding your other question, it's a matter of 40k's constantly-evolving backstory.  Tech Guard are slightly-augmented troops akin to the Imperial Guard that operate under the Adeptus Mechanicus rather than the Departmento Munitorum.  The Skitarri are heavily augmented elite units, somewhere between Space Marines and combat servitors.  Some sources blur the lines between the two, some separate them entirely.  The problem is that you generally only see one or the other, with few (if any) cases with both in the same story to compare side-by-side.

 

Similarly, some sources have Praetorians as being heavy combat servitors while others have them as being Skitarii elite.  When you start talking about that level of augmentation, it's really only a matter of semantics.  One is a mess of guns and claws with heavy programming, tempered with free will, and the other is a mess of guns and claws with free will, tempered with heavy programming.

[Ouroboros13]

The eponymous first novel in the Soul Drinkers series involves Tech Guard.  I won't ruin it for anyone, but it was a decent look into the Skitarii at a time before the Horus Heresy series or Titanicus.  Another interesting resource would be the older Titan graphic novels, though it only offers rare glimpses and has not aged quite as well.

 

Regarding your other question, it's a matter of 40k's constantly-evolving backstory.  Tech Guard are slightly-augmented troops akin to the Imperial Guard that operate under the Adeptus Mechanicus rather than the Departmento Munitorum.  The Skitarri are heavily augmented elite units, somewhere between Space Marines and combat servitors.  Some sources blur the lines between the two, some separate them entirely.  The problem is that you generally only see one or the other, with few (if any) cases with both in the same story to compare side-by-side.

 

Similarly, some sources have Praetorians as being heavy combat servitors while others have them as being Skitarii elite.  When you start talking about that level of augmentation, it's really only a matter of semantics.  One is a mess of guns and claws with heavy programming, tempered with free will, and the other is a mess of guns and claws with free will, tempered with heavy programming.

For what it's worth, Priests of Mars and Mechanicum both have tech-guard and skitarii appearing as seperate things, but Legacy has them as synonyms (during a tech-priest's POV, so it's not even possible to chalk it up to "POV-character-was-mistaken"). I'm aware that the fluff is not consistent on this point, but I'd like to be able to assemble a list of sources-that-have-them-as-different-things against a list of sources-that-have-them-as-synonymous.

 

As to the Praetorians being Servitors or not, it is kind of an important distinction; Servitors are lobotomized while Skitarii are sapient beings. As far as I can tell, more recent fluff has them as a kind of Skitarius, tending to use the phrase "weapon servitor" for the other, but like the tech-guard/Skitarii thing, I'd like to be able to assemble a list of sources on each side of the inconsistency.

[CommodusXIII]

When you get into the "personality" of individual Skitarii, the distinction loses some of its flavor.  For example, take the Skitarii in Titanicus.

 

The leader of the Legio Invictus Skitarii has what I would consider a normal personality - he interacts with other characters just as anyone else does, behaves similarly, expresses emotions similarly (for the Mechanicus, at least).

 

Compare this to the Skitarii assigned to protect the Famulous later in the book.  They behave like children, one proudly exclaiming "I have an automatic grenade launcher!" before being reminded that this fact is not terribly relevant to the conversation at hand.

 

Compare again to the Legio Tempestus Skitarii in the same scene, who act more like servitors than soldiers.  They take instructions and act on them unquestioningly, as if executing code like a machine, and can be fooled just as easily.  They have no personality and no recognizable thoughts.

 

And that's just the standard Skitarii troops from this novel.  Praetorians are supposed to be even higher up the augmentation scale.  In Soul Drinker they're high-level Skitarii/combat tech-priests that are so augmented that they don't even posses a humanoid form, nor any form of recognizable intellect.  In most other novels (the Ciaphas Caine series, for example) they're heavy weapon servitors.  What I'm saying is that the notions of free will versus programming is a sliding scale, with no consistent standard across the various books.

 

At that high level of mechanical replacement, it's not really relevant anyway.  They're not exactly robots, but neither are they exactly free-thinking soldiers.  They may be smart, to varying levels, but intelligent is another matter.  What portion of their brain is biologic, and what is mechanic, is something of a moot point.

[Yodhrin]

Where are people getting this idea of "normal" Mechanicus troops being Tech Guard while Skitarii are elites? Everything I've read suggests that "tech guard" is just a non-Mechanicus term that refers to the military forces of the Mechanicus, that's certainly the case in the more recent I can remember. Skitarii just seems to mean something akin to "soldier" or "army/military"(or all of those, depending on whether it's being used in a singular or plural context), it's the role-defining qualifier that's important - a Skitarii Hyspasist is an infantry soldier, a Skitarii Praetorian is a heavily augmented guardian of important people and places, the Cataphractii are armoured vehicles and their crews etc.

 

The Mechanicus military is far more feudal than the Imperial Guard, think of it more in terms of a medieval Lord raising an army of peasant bowmen, spear-armed militia, squire/sergeant light cavalry, plate-armoured Knights, and siege engines. The individual elements have defined names and roles, but any particular force raised by any particular Lord will vary in composition or even omit some options entirely, and similarly even within each defined unit type the level of skill and equipment will change from one force to the next due to their Lord's preferences or resources - one unit of bowmen might be highly skilled and armed with longbows, another might be shortbow-armed poachers offered a pardon if they fight, another might be barely-trained and armed with whatever crappy old bows could be scrounged up.

 

So in the context of the Mechanicus, "Skitarii" could equally refer to any individual from any of the non-ordained, non-Titan elements of the Mechanicus' armed forces, or to any force composed of any combination of such individuals. While "tech guard" is just what your average outsider would use to refer to Mechanicus military forces. Similarly a Skitarii Hyspasist is a Skitarii Hyspasist, whether they're a heavily-augmented vat-grown clone soldier, a highly trained human with basic but quality equipment, or some poor bugger Menial that's been handed a rusty old Laslock and been shoved out the front gates of their hive into the path of a tide of greenskins.

 

As for further reading, try and lay hands on the Dark Heresy/Rogue Trader RPG sourcebooks, "The Lathe Worlds" in particular, but there are nuggets of mechanical goodness spread throughout.

[Ouroboros13]

Where are people getting this idea of "normal" Mechanicus troops being Tech Guard while Skitarii are elites? Everything I've read suggests that "tech guard" is just a non-Mechanicus term that refers to the military forces of the Mechanicus, that's certainly the case in the more recent I can remember. Skitarii just seems to mean something akin to "soldier" or "army/military"(or all of those, depending on whether it's being used in a singular or plural context), it's the role-defining qualifier that's important - a Skitarii Hyspasist is an infantry soldier, a Skitarii Praetorian is a heavily augmented guardian of important people and places, the Cataphractii are armoured vehicles and their crews etc.

 

That is certainly the impression given by, for example, Legacy and Citadel Journal 21. However, other sources demarcate Tech-Guard and Skitarii as seperate; Mechanicum talks about a Titan killing "Protectors, skitarii and tech-guard", Priests of Mars has a bit where it's mentioned "Tech-Guard did X, while the skitarii did Y" and Horus Heresy: Extermination shows a chart of the Mechanicum's military forces where tech-guard and skitarii are mentioned separately. Further, the idea that skitarii are an elite and terrifying group is pretty heavily emphasized in Mechanicum, Titanicus and Priests of Mars.

 

The fluff is contradictory on this point. I'm trying to get together a decent list of the different sources and where they contradict each other. I've noticed already that sources that depict skitarii as extremely elite and as separate from the tech-guard have quite a close relationship to each other (Graham McNeill wrote both Mechanicum and Priests of Mars/Lords of Mars, Titanicus features one of the same Titan Legions that appeared in Mechanicum and Forgeworld Horus Heresy series of books is drawing heavily on the Black Library Horus Heresy series, of which Mechanicum is one).

[CommodusXIII]

When you think about it, this just demonstrates how confusing and complicated the Cult Mechanicus appears to be to outsiders.  This probably would make perfect sense to them!

[Yodhrin]

 

Where are people getting this idea of "normal" Mechanicus troops being Tech Guard while Skitarii are elites? Everything I've read suggests that "tech guard" is just a non-Mechanicus term that refers to the military forces of the Mechanicus, that's certainly the case in the more recent I can remember. Skitarii just seems to mean something akin to "soldier" or "army/military"(or all of those, depending on whether it's being used in a singular or plural context), it's the role-defining qualifier that's important - a Skitarii Hyspasist is an infantry soldier, a Skitarii Praetorian is a heavily augmented guardian of important people and places, the Cataphractii are armoured vehicles and their crews etc.

 

That is certainly the impression given by, for example, Legacy and Citadel Journal 21. However, other sources demarcate Tech-Guard and Skitarii as seperate; Mechanicum talks about a Titan killing "Protectors, skitarii and tech-guard", Priests of Mars has a bit where it's mentioned "Tech-Guard did X, while the skitarii did Y" and Horus Heresy: Extermination shows a chart of the Mechanicum's military forces where tech-guard and skitarii are mentioned separately. Further, the idea that skitarii are an elite and terrifying group is pretty heavily emphasized in Mechanicum, Titanicus and Priests of Mars.

 

The fluff is contradictory on this point. I'm trying to get together a decent list of the different sources and where they contradict each other. I've noticed already that sources that depict skitarii as extremely elite and as separate from the tech-guard have quite a close relationship to each other (Graham McNeill wrote both Mechanicum and Priests of Mars/Lords of Mars, Titanicus features one of the same Titan Legions that appeared in Mechanicum and Forgeworld Horus Heresy series of books is drawing heavily on the Black Library Horus Heresy series, of which Mechanicum is one).

 

 

Ah, aye I just put that down to Graham's....interesting take on the Mechanicus. Don't get me wrong, I like the stories he tells, but a lot of the details seem fairly incongruous with core aspects of the Mechanicus' character - there's a bit too much "scientist" and not quite enough "elderly priest that doesn't know how these damnable world wide intertubes work and thinks 'percussive maintenance' is the height of sophistication" for my taste.

 

While Titanicus does focus on how elite the Invicta Skitarii are, I don't recall it making a specific point of demarcating a difference between "tech guard" and "Skitarii", I think it's "safer" to consider that as evidence that perhaps Skitarii bonded to Titan Legios are one of the more elite types, rather than that Skitarii are elite troops in an absolute sense.

 

Still, it could just be that FW and BL have decided to codify the fluff and retcon out the elements they don't like, although I wish FW would do a 40K-era Imperial Armour book featuring the Mechanicus, since they keep making a big deal out of the idea that the pre-Heresy Mechanicum was different to the 40K-era Mechanicus, which makes applying their "rulings" from 30K just as nebulous as all the other contradictory fluff.

 

I think you've ferreted out pretty much every mention of the Mechanicus' military in GW fiction, except perhaps Dark Adeptus by Ben Counter, which has a squad of Skitarii, although they exist pretty much as a plot device that are killed off to show how AWSUYMZ the Grey Knights are by comparison. The only place left is, as I suggested, the Fantasy Flight RPG material.

[SFH]

When you think about it, this just demonstrates how confusing and complicated the Cult Mechanicus appears to be to outsiders.  This probably would make perfect sense to them!

The terminology probably loses something when translating from binaric, or you may need noospheric upgrades to understand it.

 

With regards to the original post, I really can't think of any other source that delves into the Skitarii that wasn't already mentioned. Do the Horus Heresy army books give any clarifications?

[Yodhrin]

 

When you think about it, this just demonstrates how confusing and complicated the Cult Mechanicus appears to be to outsiders.  This probably would make perfect sense to them!

The terminology probably loses something when translating from binaric, or you may need noospheric upgrades to understand it.

 

With regards to the original post, I really can't think of any other source that delves into the Skitarii that wasn't already mentioned. Do the Horus Heresy army books give any clarifications?

 

HH3 does indeed distinguish between the Tech Guard(part of the Autokrator, ie the infantry, tanks, and artillery units which fight in a Taghmata or are bonded to a Titan Legio), while the Skitarius are a specific force of elite troops that originated on Mars and are primarily loyal to the Fabricator General. However, one of the reasons FW give for them not making Skitarii models(certainly not quickly, perhaps not at all) is that their conception of the Mechanicum is of an organisation even more feudal and dislocated than the Mechanicus, relying almost entirely on the Taghmata system(temporary army created from levies on a Forgeworld's magi) and filled with loads of "weird&wonderful" stuff, whereas in the 40K era, while there's still a distinctly feudal character to the whole thing, the military is much more dependent on the Skitarii. Hence why the 30K fluff can't be used to infer too much about 40K fluff.