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Fluff question: House Taranis armour colour


koran

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Ive been looking for what Knight House to go for and I have a question about House Taranis.  In the Codex it has their armour being red, but in Mechanicus during the Horus Heresy their armour is described as being blue.

 

Is this an oversight on the part of someone on GW's end or is there some fluff about them changing the color of the armour?

 

Any help would be really appreciated.

There's no lore as far as I can find regarding the change, but it's not unrealistic for heraldry to change with such a watershed event as the Heresy. I'm just guessing, but maybe several Households changed colors to show their unity/loyalty.

 

Mechanicum was also written in advance of the 6th Edition introduction of Knights to 40K, so it could also be an oversight or retcon by the 40K lore team. GW and FW have a tendency to write independently of each other at times.


Pretty sure each House on Mars had their own distinctive heraldry up until Mars sided with Horus during the Heresy. After Mars was re-conquered, the Houses of Mars changed their colors to align with the Adeptus Mechanicus.

I believe this was mention in the first Knight Codex, back in 6th edition.

SJ

Cheers guys, both points make sense. Now I just need to decide if I want to go 30k or 40k color scheme then.

Go 30k, it shows your allegiance to the Omnissiah without actually showing alignment to the AdMech. It’s a tongue in cheek way of being uniquely yourself.

 

SJ

Pretty sure each House on Mars had their own distinctive heraldry up until Mars sided with Horus during the Heresy. After Mars was re-conquered, the Houses of Mars changed their colors to align with the Adeptus Mechanicus.

 

I believe this was mention in the first Knight Codex, back in 6th edition.

SJ

 

I've been doing more research.  Here's the excerpt from the 6th Edition Codex: Imperial Knights:

 

The name of House Taranis is heavy with the weight of deeds performed in an ancient time steeped in infamy. Yet even before the dark days of the Horus Heresy, House Taranis bore the honour of being the first knightly house. Indeed, the crest of House Taranis bears the stylised cog of Mars at its centre, for the red planet of the Adeptus Mechanicus is its home world – a fact that grants it peerless status amongst the other knightly houses of the Imperium. House Taranis has ever proudly borne the red of Mars as its livery, though this symbolic field has since been adopted by many of the other knightly houses that are directly aligned to the Adeptus Mechanicus. The sword that divides the crest of House Taranis from the demi-cog symbol of the newly founded Adeptus Mechanicus was added in the wake of the Horus Heresy. Raf Maven, a valiant Knight who not only survived, but went on to rebuild and rule House Taranis after the disastrous civil war on Mars, insisted on adding the emblem in honour of his kinsmen who died in the bitter fighting. This legacy combined with its illustrious home world ensures that Taranis is the foremost knightly house.

 

 

Emphasis added in bold.  It looks like jeffersonian000 was partially correct - after the Heresy, a lot of Mechanicus-aligned Knights did change their color schemes to red as a sign of loyalty.  However, according to GW, House Taranis was always red and was the originator of this trend.  This looks like a lore conflict between Mechanicum and the later fluff, which as I said previously isn't uncommon.

 

The 7th Edition Codex leaves out the description of its color scheme, but goes into slightly greater detail on the history of its crest.

 

The Imperial Knight Companion has a very large and very interesting chapter on House Taranis - including references to the as-yet-unreleased Crusader and Castellan designs, and some descriptions of their traditions that actually align very closely with the homebrew fluff I wrote up for my own Household.  Anyway, nothing about the color scheme, though.

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