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Hello there fellow 30k fans!

 

We all have concepts for Warhammer armies that are near and dear to us, and mine has always been the Loyal members of the Traitor legions. Ever since the very first HH Trilogy came out I have been in love with them and both of my 30k armies are Loyal members of the Luna Wolves and Thousand Sons.

 

Is anyone else here a fan of the whole traitor legion loyalist concept?

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I am a big fan, but in small numbers. I particularly love the idea of individuals breaking away and following their own code, like Dantioch or the Knights Errant. I don’t mind larger armies of them but they have less impact for me.

To me the most interesting aspect is not the decision whether someone believes in being "a loyalist" in a traitor army or "a traitor", but the reasoning behind it and the struggle within legions, companies, units maybe – with and against fellow astartes and therein mirroring the concept of brother against brother as it is among the primarchs (in the sense that they have one gene father and the primarchs have the emp).

 

Also I see two alternative ways to be "loyal" as a "traitor":

1. "Traitors" would not necessarily see themselves as being traitorous towards the imperium, because they followed orders by the Warmaster/traitor-primarch/daemon-possed crybaby. Consider the III. legion and their strong believe in perfection, but also strife, discipline, allegiance, hierarchy.

2. To stay with the example of the III. Do you follow Commander Eidolon's new ways or do you position yourself as a "loyal" Emperor's Child and decline to perfecting your abilities through the means of Fabius Bile's "genius"? Who is the traitor now?

 

This is the main reason I am interested in armies that are on the verge of "chaos" or are somehow it between, but already damned more or less from the beginning or by fate or unalterable conditions of their being (Thousand Sons, Emperor's Children, Word Bearers)

 

Similar for the loyal legions i am interested in: Parts of the White Scars side with Horus hoping to sway the Khan to declare against the Emperor. And the Dark Angels with Luther being an Antagonist purely by being loyal (to Caliban) is also a classical example.

 

So yes, it is more or less the tragic aspects in traitorous loyalists or loyal traitors that I am interested in. the inevitability, the good intentions and heartfelt motives that turn into lies even though they are true.

Oh indeed. I could not agree more with all of this.

 

My Thousand Sons are from the 6th Fellowship that was mostly stationed on Zhao-Arkkad when Prospero burned and had no idea what happened for most of the Heresy. I know they are probably dammed...or they will end up forming a certain chapter with a penchant for walking off with other Chapters relics :)

My Dusk Raiders 18th Assault Company are just this, they've been on the fringe edges of the imperium's bounds since before Mortarion came and after seeing their way of war changed by his arrival they avoided returning to the legion under the pretenses of continued conquest. When Mortarion ordered them back so they could be wiped out on Istvaan they intentionally lagged behind and avoided their fate. Fast forward to the Siege, the 18th fought alongside the Imperial Fists and drove back their traitors, proving their loyalty and they became a chapter under the Fists to avoid suspicion.

Hello there fellow 30k fans!

 

We all have concepts for Warhammer armies that are near and dear to us, and mine has always been the Loyal members of the Traitor legions. Ever since the very first HH Trilogy came out I have been in love with them and both of my 30k armies are Loyal members of the Luna Wolves and Thousand Sons.

 

Is anyone else here a fan of the whole traitor legion loyalist concept?

 

Yep.  My Dark Angels are Terran pseudo-traitors who responded to the outbreak of the Heresy by rejecting everything that had anything to do with any of the primarchs and are trying to make their way back to the Throne World, in hopes that they can circumvent the entire corrupted chain of command.

 

Mechanically, they're "Orphans of War" Blackshields.

Yeah, I love the idea of some loyalties or loves trumping others. I run my Dark Angels as Calibanites rebelling against the Imperium and the Lion. It both allows me to make jokes about traitor Dark Angels and represent a legitimate grievance against the Imperium.
If you look back around the time that HH6: Retribution came out, we had some amazing threads about the loyalties of Black Shields and other "hard to define" groups of astartes. We also had a great thread of people's examples for Black Shields which spanned every legion and loyalty type.

I've always loved this idea, and indeed the opposite. There's easily a HH anthology in a bunch of stories about bands of loyalists from traitor legions and traitors from loyalist legions. Thousand Sons and Iron Warriors interest me the most, especially with how you could tell stories and battles about how loyalist TS would likely operate (given that their "treachery" predates the heresy itself). I love the idea of them interfering in battles to make off with key items of power or lore that the TS knew existed and wished to recover*. I always imagined this being something various bands of TS from both sides of the line would be doing post-Prospero and how sneaky they would have to be even when fighting for the loyalists.



*I think my "If you could write one HH story" effort would be something about a band of TS and a band of Deathguard fighting for something in the ruins of one of the library worlds sponsored by Magnus/the TS. That or a spy-story set in the crusade explaining that one off mention about the fact that the TS and AL avoid each other.

Yup, definitely. My two Heresy-era forces [which, admittedly, between them number fewer than two-dozen miniatures :tongue.: - not least because of the effort involved in truescaling, and the fact we're running Inquisimunda-style narrative wargaming rather than 'proper' 40k] are both very much groups of Loyalists drawn from otherwise Traitor legions - the AyasaBhutaGana ['Battalion of Steel Ghosts']  of the IVth, and Pishachas from the VIIIth. 

In terms of background, both forces are basically Terran veterans [including some old enough to have fought in the Wars of Unification] [and hence the Sanskrit names and Hindu influences for the formations, on grounds that there's reasonable evidence to suggest the early center of the Imperial regime on Terra was in north-west India/Pakistan - with this carrying over to the Thunder Warrior ranks and names we see in The Outcast Dead]; and the duality between the 'older' martial traditions and ethoi of the forces of Unity on Earth and in the early Great Crusade, as juxtaposed with how the Legions changed rather considerably once reintroduced to their Primarchs, forms the basis for the narrative conflict in their backstory and the inception of these as 'separate' fighting forces from their 'parent' legions.

Now obviously, there's quite some precedence for this in established fluff, particularly from the novels and what not. We've already met Fel Zharost of the Night Lords, for instance, with his brooding meditations upon the ways in which the VIIIth have fundamentally lost sight of their original purpose as 'terror-as-a-means' in favour of the sheer reckless abandon of terror-for-terror's sake and such [and booted out of his legion in partial consequence]. Most of the loyalist IVth Legion that we've seen so far in the novels and Black Books have been a bit different, in that they simply wound up eitiher directly and consciously prioritizing loyalty to the Emperor over that to their traitorous Primarch [Dantioch], or were almost inadvertently swept up on the 'wrong' side of events [c.f what happened with Kyr Vhalen] . 

Although one thing I think does need to be emphasized if you're going to go down te route of running Loyalists from a traitor legion, is the modelling side of it. You really should strive to make it visually apparent rather than simply something in your head imo that these aren't 'standard' members of whatever legion. Whether that means having prominent Imperial Aquilas [not hte Palatine ones before somebody calls me up on that :P ] and such, or defaced legion symbols [particularly places where teh Eye of Horus might previously have been worn when they were under his nominal authority], or Marines repainting their panoply to an earlier set of colours [think Sons of Horus deciding they're going to go back to being Luna Wolves, for instance; or the aforementioned Death Guard returning to Dusk Raiders; Night Lords into ... was it 'Crimson Sons'? World Eaters into Warhounds, and so on and so forth] . This would also potentially serve a practical function on the battlefield -minimizing friendly fire incidences from Imperial-loyalist forces mistakenly targeting what they *think* are Traitor vehicles and personnel due to colour-scheme. 

Now in terms of how I've put this into practice with my own forces ... I did things a liiiitle bit differently. It's well-known that the Iron Warriors have a particular preferred way of war, and thus a rather strong association with Mk.III power armour [hence, in part, why it's called 'Iron' armour, I presume]; and as one of the less-frequently cited incidences from fluff, Perturabo appears to have had an especial loathing for what would become Mk.VI armour [the IVth, along with the XVIIIth, got evaluation/prototype suits with the former attempting to get it scrapped in favour of a heavier assault armour or something and raging hard when this didn't work out quite as intended thanks to the XIXth's positive employment of same]. So one very logical way to show that this particular force *really didn't get on with their Primarch* and had in fact been cast out into ignominious exile some time *before* the Heresy ... is modelling them up entirely in Mk.VI armour as a rather obvious mark of 'censure' and being sent out on a redemption-through-death style effort [since practicing the Iron Warriors' preferred modus operandi in what's effectively prototype lighter recon armour is ... not ideal]. 

An additional potential way to show Loyalists from unlikely sources on the tabletop [which I've also done for the aforementioned Iron Warriors ... sort-of], is to potentially have some 'scrutineers' from a 'trusted' Imperial arm attached to make sure they *stay* loyal - or, if this doesn't pan out, hopefully take them down before they can do *too* much damage. To that end, I've got a few VIth Legion attached to my Iron Warriors, acting as an extension of the "Watch Pack" concept; while my VIIIth Legion have Agents of the Sigillite alongside them for ... reasons. 

Further, dependent upon the circumstances surrounding any given Loyalist force, they may find htemselves with much more pressing needs to loot, reappropriate, or otherwise acquire arms and armour and other equipment from outside of their conventional supply-chain. This could lead to a situation analogous to the old 13th Company Space Wolves , with a mish-mash of armour patch-jobs repairs drawn from various forces they've fought; perhaps weapons that're a hodge-podge of different patterns in the same unit or otherwise adapted [belt-ammunition being something i'm pretty keen on for a less 'orderly' look], and other such things.

You could also have some rather unsubtle [and brutally so] trophy-pieces like a drawn-and-quartered figure spread-eagled on a vehicle or something bearing a big sign saying "TRAITOR" to really drive home just how vitriolic these Loyalists feel about the side most people would probably have expected them to take. 

Personally, I feel that the greaet big moral ambiguity tar-pit of the Heresy has as some of its most interesting element, those bits wherein particular elements wind up making individual choices - granularity, i suppose one might call it - that lead to them being in different and difficult places. The Outcast Dead is a pretty interesting look at a motley crew of exactly these sorts of Legionaries; and the Knights Errant also add another potential vector for this kind of thing. 

Edited by Ryltar Thamior

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