Retroconvergence - an Ordo Chronos INQ28 project

[CommodusXIII]

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...The Archenemy fleet, including one of the Blackstone Fortresses – ancient engines of destruction built aeons past by unknown xenos – gathered above Cadia.  The Blackstone's weaponry beat down on Kasr Partox, remorselessly slaughtering the warriors of both sides.
 
The forces of the Imperium finally regained cohesion and started fighting back more effectively. Whereas many of the Imperium’s victories had been used to maintain their superiority on a sector and system level, they were getting murdered planetside. With a united command structure they managed to pull back from the brink and stop the continual erosion of their positions they had suffered for so long.
 
Victorious Imperial ships from other sectors were even now converging on Cadia, forcing the Blackstone to disengage – though the damage it had inflicted before departing was incalculable.  One by one the screening Chaos vessels were peeled away from the Blackstone until eventually it was forced to cease its attack and concentrate upon its own defence.
 
The first salvo cracked the Fortress's gleaming armour. The eleventh pounded it to dust.  Concentrated main battery fire gnawed at the Blackstone’s obdurate hide, battering ever closer to its heart, inch by unforgiving inch.
 
Another salvo, and something inside the Blackstone Fortress shattered. A crack split its core, brilliant purple light bleeding across the stars.  The rupture spread, swallowing those vessels nearest to it. With a silent scream that echoed through the minds of every living soul across the Cadian Gate, the Blackstone Fortress broke apart, its arcane engines dissipating in dazzling aurorae across the outer atmosphere. By the time the glow faded, a third of the Archenemy fleet was gone, snatched into the Immaterium. Yet more ships lay strewn across Cadia’s southern pole, their blackened carcasses smoking. By some fluke of fate, the empty and cracked husk of the Blackstone Fortress remained in orbit, a dark and lifeless moon staring blindly down at its former prey.
 
All across the largest fragment of debris, banks of plasma drives roared into life. The Blackstone’s corpse shuddered as the engines fought to overcome the inertia of orbit. Then, slowly at first, but with ever-increasing velocity, the Blackstone Fortress broke orbit, and roared voidwards.  
 
Or, at least, that is the way I remember it.

 
I recently tackled a small INQ28 project for AdeptiCon, crafting a small Navigator Household contingent that I've been meaning to flesh out for quite some time.  Unfortunately, instead of scratching that itch, this project only made it worse.  I've since moved on, and have seized the motivation to explore a concept that's been rattling around in my head for many years.
 
Third Edition will always be home for me.  My friends and I fell into 40K not long after the Big Black Book was published, and I held onto that live wire through the pre-4th Edition playtesting.  The culmination of this was our participation in the Eye of Terror campaign.  Afterwards, I got rid of most of my collection and took about a decade-long hiatus from the hobby.  Though, I still have a few terrible models bearing the B&C badge of that last campaign.
 

Goblin Green bases for life.

 

Oathbreaker that I am, I couldn't resist the siren song of the hobby forever.  I eventually got back into kitbashing, and then playing, near the end of 6th Edition and found that the world had moved on quite dramatically.  Things changed even more in the lead-up to Gathering Storm and then 8th Edition.  The return to Cadia felt a bit like a return to that earlier, nostalgic era, but the new narrative just felt... wrong.
 

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Then, slowly at first, but with ever-increasing velocity, the Blackstone Fortress broke orbit, and roared planetwards.
 
Down the Blackstone wreckage plunged, its outer edge blazing red with atmospheric friction. But the Fortress had been forged to withstand fiercer fires than any that nature could provide. The main body plunged on, a bolt of flaming brimstone cast from the Despoiler’s dark hand.
 
Winds howling about it, the artificial meteor impacted Cadia.  The Blackstone remnant struck, gouging a crater hundreds of miles in breadth. Mountains crumbled to dust. Seas vanished into plumes of scalding steam. Crustal platelets shattered and split, the furious life-blood of the world boiling forth.

 
I've wanted to build an Inquisition warband since, well, the release of Inquisitor, and certainly since the Daemonhunters and Witch Hunters Codices.  I just could never quite find a theme that spoke to me.  All of this recent activity with INQ28 got me thinking again, and the pieces finally fell into place.  40K has always been overtly self-aware.  What if these plot holes and retcons exist in-universe as well?  Sounds like a job for Ordo Chronos.
 
This project not only allows me to pry into the maddening evolution of the lore, but also to bring some closure to a number of other stalled projects.  The first member of my warband is Corporal Jeromy Girad, an Inquisitorial Stormtrooper formerly of the Cadian 8th.  He's simply a Forge World Cadian Veteran with a shotgun, completed with legs and a head sourced from somewhere in the plastic GW line.  He was originally intended for another Inquisition-themed project that never got off the ground, and has languished in a drawer in my bits box ever since.
 

 

I managed to track down an old 3rd Edition Witch Hunters transfer sheet to yield a symbol small enough to fit his left shoulder pad.

 

 

In violation of standard Inquisition dress code, he still bears the markings of the Cadian 8th on his right shoulder pad.  This is the first hint that this warband is not exactly playing by the rules.  Most members of this warband will also have a chronometer of some kind, in this case taken from the Van Saar Gang kit.

 

 

As I sketched my rough ideas for this warband, I kept returning to Corporal Girad as my main perspective.  Returning from a mission in the aftermath of the 13th Black Crusade, the team found that things weren't quite as they left them.  It's no surprise that this affected Corporal Girad most of all...

Edited March 3, 2020 by CommodusXIII

[Ryltar Thamior]

Excellent enthusiasm, idea, and project. I got into the hobby about the same time; and similarly wound up being left rather cold by the manner in which the 13th Black Crusade got handled in the New Fluff. 

Inq28 is definitely a grand way to get back into that glorious fluff-space of 3rd-4th wherein =][= was a thing, Necrons were Lovecraftian, and Index Astartes articles were doing a pretty bang-up job at providing us with our first 'proper' glimpse at a lot of history. Etc. 

There's an Ordo Chronos warband or three over on the Ammobunker Inq28 forum from awhile back if you're looking for further inqspiration ; and it's an interesting psychological process , putting yourself into a warband's conceptualization like you have here - as you put it, coming to terms with coming back and finding things *not* comfortably as you left it. 

Either way, keep it up. The first miniature [the Cadian, not the terminator :P ] is a solid start, the vehicle crewman helmet is a nice touch for spec-ops'ing the miniature, and the van saar gadget works well for what you've utilized it for [there's some other possibilities on the Primaris sprues as well ]; looking forward to seeing what you come up with next! 

[CommodusXIII]

Thank you very much!  I did a little research, and there is a pocketwatch on the Iron Hands Primaris upgrade sprue that is absolutely perfect for this project.  Now I just have to track it down in bulk!

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At the last the combined efforts of the forces of the Imperium kept the Despoiler from his ultimate goal of controlling the Cadian system but, in the process, the Cadian Gate has been ravaged. Many bastions have fallen to the forces of Chaos and may never be recovered, and the warp storms surrounding the Eye have expanded to engulf whole systems. The fighting on others could continue for decades to come. With the worlds captured the forces of the Despoiler are now positioned to launch attacks into more Imperial worlds. The Cadian Gate may not be open to the forces of Chaos, but their minions are over the walls in unprecedented numbers.

The Despoiler’s conquest of the worlds outlying the Eye of Terror may be almost complete, but by the grace of the Imperial Navy, few reinforcements were able to bolster his forces toward the end of the Thirteenth Black Crusade. Some have said that it is for this reason alone Cadia still belongs in the material realm.

The next member of the warband is Dyne Erlang, recruited from the cybermilitia of the Araneus Continuity. His suit is augmented with a very advanced machine spirit, which assists him with threat detection, navigation, and hacking through security systems. He appears to be extremely unnerved by servitors, and in particular he exhibits a pathological fear of cybercherubs. I can't say that I blame him.

 

 

I thought long and hard about what weapons and armour from the Dark Age of Technology would look like. In the end, I simply cobbled together a figure from the Van Saar Gang kit that I'd previously pillaged to build some Titan crewmembers. House Van Saar have one of the few functioning STCs, so I imagine that their equipment is about as close to Dark Age tech as you can get.

 

 

The suppression laser was a must-have, even if it is not as efficient as a shotgun. I've always put fluff first, and there will be enough crunch (literally) later on in this project. The cyber-ponytail, however, had to go.

 

 

This warband is made up of characters from very diverse... backgrounds. I wanted to maintain a good amount of individuality, while still having some common themes. Black and dark greys, with clotted red details, make for a good Inquisitorial palette. Corporal Girad had a splash of olive green, while I was pleasantly surprised with how piercing I managed to get the yellow of Dyne's power cables. I also gave Dyne's armour a heavy gloss wash to enhance its sleekness, in contrast to the more utilitarian matte finish of Corporal Girad's.

So far, none of the models have been based. I haven't quite made up my mind on what to do about that. I based my Navigator Household to match the table of the AdeptiCon event that I created them for. Perhaps I'll leave these unbased until another such opportunity presents itself.

[CommodusXIII]

Hidden Content

But even then, there was worse to come.  A new sound pealed through the howling winds – the dark laughter of gods too long denied their prize. The crimson maelstrom of the Eye of Terror pulsed anew, and reached out to embrace sundered Cadia.  The tendrils of the Warp laid their first loving caress upon Cadian realspace, and the Daemons of the Dark Gods spilled forth.

 

The third member of the warband is Eriso Cobol, a Magos Organos formerly of the Forge World of Firmamentum.  His experimentations on the Sicarian augmentation pathway bordered on the heretekal, and many wondered if his voluntary self-termination was to escape punishment for these crimes or the possibility of being forced to repeat them.  Death means little to the Inquisition, and even less to Ordo Chronos.  Thus, he found himself in service as the warband's doting, if not absolutely terrifying, medic.

 

 

This model started life as Blight Wheel Miniatures' "Crazy" Ivan.  I scrapped the original backpack and substituted one from an Electropriest, with servo-arms from Fabius Bile.

 

 

This is another miniature that I'd started and then abandoned to gather dust in my WIP cabinet.  It was too interesting to pass up, but in the end it was also too menacing to fit into my relatively-orthodox Adeptus Mechanicus army.  Those same characteristics make it perfect to serve an Inquisitor who may not be entirely above-board himself.  It's also a good way to introduce this warband as an opportunity to explore characters that should never have interacted otherwise.

 

As a bonus, here's a sneak peek at a future henchman:  Lothar Hiltbrand, Neutralizer.

 

[Lucerne]

Ordo Chronos is the perfect way to explore the retcons with the Gathering Storm/13th Black Crusade. I've been toying with similar ideas.

 

It's not bad and unfluffy lore, it's an aberrant timeline.

 

Similarly, they have an obvious set up for "Puritans" and "Radicals"- how many times has someone suggested "Let's kill Horus?"

 

Similiarly, which xeno faction has functional time travel, has had its lore extensively rewritten and might function as the predestined 'doom' of the Ordo Chronos in a time war?

 

I'm overly attached to the idea of the Newcrons being the result of some grand experiment in them rewriting their own timelines, bringing the Terminator joke full circle- and similarly, think they make a great BBEG for the Ordos Chronos.

 

 

Edited March 10, 2020 by Lucerne

[noigrim]

Looks like the heresy art for lukas krom (?)