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When did the Wb go full chaos?


GrandMagnus

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Sorry for the title, it might be misleading, but I wasnt sure how to put it.

 

My question is, when did the word bearers start to adorn their armour with chaotic symbols, stuff such as the 8-pointed star, horns, arrow-heads and the like? If I recall correctly in Know No Fear they mention some WB with horns made out of brass or some other material i cant recall (ebony maybe?). I personally think that chaos marines didnt go full chaotic until they entered the Eye of Terror, which is to say they where still human and their armour was still "normal", but to what extend?

 

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Well you did have the Gal Vorbak before the Heresy even broke out, so I'd say most of the legion was still un-warped aside from them until the scouring. This isn't to say that they weren't performing rituals and using chaos before then however. Most of the HH novels that deal with them talk about their use of ritual, sacrifice, and daemonic symbology.

Know no Fear describes Calth Word Bearers as having horns, mutations and arrows on their armour. By this stage they looked a LOT like your 40k chaos space marines.

 

The actual turning to Chaos started pretty soon after the Emperor rebuked the legion at Khur. Erebus and Kor Phaeron had always been Chaos.

The Word Bearers began their transition 40 years before the Heresy began. Technically speaking, the Legion as a whole became fully devoted to Chaos whenever the Legion was purged of all resisting elements. But it wouldn't be until Calth and the Shadow Crusade, one year after Istvaan V, that they would actually reveal the totality of their corruption as they mass-produced the Gal Vorbak and orchestrate planet-wide sacrifices across one hundred worlds just to create the Ruinstorm and fuel Angron's ascension. And it only gets worse from there.

HOLY :CUSS ! Sorry, that guy just so... so awesome. Okay, so as far as I can see it would be acceptable to make a late-heresy (terra) or scouring force using and adding bits of daemonic imagery to the word bearers. Also, if its late-heresy/scouring how acceptable would it be to include a few bits from the MK VI and VII to an army? As far as I know the renegades got the MKVI patter from Mars right before the siege of Terra.

The only forces that have been seen with the Mk VI currently are the Raven Guard and the Alpha Legion. The Raven Guard were the ones who tested the original prototype as well being the Legion that Imperial Fists gave all of the Mk VI they had seized from Mars(up to that point) following Istvaan V. The Alpha Legion had at some point prior obtained the designs for the prototype and then began designing their own unique variant in parallel to the mainstream Corvus Pattern Armor.

 

So, strictly background wise, Mk VI wouldn't begin to filter in amongst the Traitors until mid to late Heresy when the Legions began to start salvaging power armor due to lack of resources. So a mid/late Heresy force would reasonably have some Mk VI scattered about, especially if they have had conflicts with the Raven Guard. As for the Mk VII, that wouldn't start popping up until around the time of the Siege of Terra. Reason being is that work and development on the Mk VII only began after the Heresy began and Mars had been cut off. The Mk VII began as a result by the Defenders of Terra to try and defend themselves better against the inevitable Siege. As a result, it was limited only to the defenders of the Imperial Palace until after the Siege.

 

That said, Forgeworld has provided pictures of Mk IV variant helms, such as the infamous Sarum-pattern in Betrayal, which bear a very strong resemblance to the Mk VII type. So theoretically, in a pre-Siege army, a Mk VII helm could simply be a Mk IV variant.

That charming gentleman pictured above (who I suspect is an apostle) could well be from Calth. It was important for the legion to maintain a facade of normality in their initial deployment there (what with pulling a fast one on the Ultramarines and all) but the gloves came off entirely after the backstab. The guys who would have ruined the illusion would have been carefully kept out of sight during the first phase, but they were around.

 

Once you hit the shadow crusade, there's no illusion to break.

After Calth, I think, but we'll have that answered definitively in the upcoming FW books (which have art for WB with daemon skulls)

 

There was no mention of it in Know No Fear, and the Ultramarines sure as hell would have noticed a change of legion symbol - they were shocked enough as it was by the colour change. My guess is they adopted it for the shadow crusade. I hope we get left wiggle room for hosts keeping the book, personally, because I've never liked the fiery daemonface, but I'll work with what we get.

It was a gradual process which took around 50 years to come to fruition. As the legion went deeper and deeper in Chaos lore and rituals, as it elaborated a form of worship of the Chaos Gods it slowly become immersed in the iconography of the "traitor". Remember, any Word Bearer worth his salt is a walking shrine to the Dark Gods. Imagine that it begun with a trophy, with some ritual scarification and acid etching or inscription and slowly, and gradually became an elaborate and visual form of worship. By Calth we have effectively the look of the Chaos Space Marine spread across the traitor legions and already the first forms of mutation are apparent. 

 

 

Consider a Word Bearer 40 years before the Horus Heresy the "Alpha" stage on their process to become a Chaos Space Marine. By the time of Calth and the Shadow Crusade the Word Bearer in question is in the "Beta" stage on his path to become a CSM. A Word Bearer after Terra is a Chaos Space Marine version 1.0, a Word Bearer in M41 is a Chaos Space Marine version 2.8 with three DLC and several official and unofficial patches as well as community mods...

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