Tuesday night, kid finally down, tea going cold next to the keyboard, and a scan of White Dwarf 99 open on my second monitor because I went looking for one paragraph about the Legion of the Damned and ended up reading the whole thing. March 1988. Two years before I was born, which is a slightly humbling way to spend an evening.
It’s the one where Rick Priestley tells you flat out who’s inside the black armour: the Fire Hawks, a Space Marine Chapter lost in the warp in 963.M41, come back wrong. A warp-borne wasting disease took them most of the way to madness and handed them something in exchange. It’s written as settled background, in the same register as everything else in the issue.
Every version GW has printed since has said a little bit less.
The chapter that was already suspicious
If you want the Fire Hawks at full length you go to Imperial Armour 9, the first of the two Badab War books, and what’s in there does a lot of work. They’re listed in classified sources as a 21st Founding chapter, which is the Cursed Founding, M36. They’ve always claimed Ultramarines gene-seed. Macragge has never agreed. The book is blunt about why: “certain defects and variations in the samples held in the archives of the Adeptus Terra speak against this, and the Lords of Macragge have never publicly acknowledged kinship.”
Other chapters thought they were bad news, and the complaint was specific. Imperial Armour says some went as far as suggesting they were “tainted by some flaw in the Chapter’s soul or gene-seed,” and that reputation came partly from a habit of withdrawing from fights they’d decided were lost, whoever they left behind. There was a three-century feud with the Iron Hands about exactly that, settled by a duel.
Their Chapter Master during the Badab War was Stibor Lazaerek, and the quote Imperial Armour hangs on him is “Burn them all; the God-Emperor will know his own.” That line is attached to the firebombing of Sacristan, a reprisal raid on one of the Mantis Warriors’ worlds during that same war.
They came into the Badab War at 86% strength with a fleet that included the star fortress Raptorus Rex, two battle barges and seven cruisers, which is silly money for one chapter. By year three they were down to about 22% and Lazaerek was pushed into pulling them off the front line. They came back at the end, and the Raptorus Rex anchored the Angstrom blockade because by then it was the single most powerful warship in the Maelstrom Zone. That’s the same war that made Huron Blackheart into the Tyrant of Badab, and it chewed up an extraordinary number of chapters along the way.
So the 1988 version had a shape to it. A chapter already under suspicion, already associated with burning things, already carrying gene-seed that nobody on Macragge would vouch for, and then a warp accident with the biggest ship in the sector aboard.
Then the hedging started
By January 2010 the story reads completely differently. White Dwarf 361, a piece called “Mysteries of the Legion,” which ran alongside the new metal models. Here’s the middle of it:
“Some believe the Legion to be the survivors of the lost Fire Hawks Chapter, transmuted into a new and terrible form by the Warpstorm that claimed their vessel. Others consider the Legion to be an extension of the Emperor’s superhuman will, time-lost saviours or even the vengeful and immortal spirits of Space Marines slain in the Imperium’s many wars.”
That’s four possibilities, listed in a row, with the Fire Hawks at the front of the queue.
I’ve gone back and forth on whether that’s a loss. The obvious take is that GW blunted a good story by turning an answer into a menu. Then again, the 2010 version spends a whole paragraph making the Inquisition look stupid, and it’s very funny about it. Several Inquisitors have tried to intercept the Legion. All of them failed. Some were standing on the same battlefield and still couldn’t get near, because “events always inexplicably conspire to prevent the Inquisitors getting close to their quarry, leaving them nothing more than frustrated witnesses to the event.”
Actually, no, I’ll hold my ground. You can have the frustrated Inquisitors and still know the answer yourself. The reader knowing something the Inquisition doesn’t is better than nobody knowing anything.
The same article gives the Keyan battlezone, which is the detail I always come back to. Half a dozen Legionnaires walked out of a volcano cannon blast that had just killed four Predators and two-score Space Marines. A volcano cannon is Titan-scale ordnance.
The blister in my drawer
I bought the metal Legion of the Damned squad in 2011, mid-5th edition, off the shelf at my local store, on no plan whatsoever. Built the sergeant, primed him black, got about as far as the flames.
Which is where it fell apart. I tried to do the ghostly fire coming off the shoulder pads and what I got was orange snot. Stripped him, did it again, got slightly shinier orange snot. Stripped him a second time and put him back in the drawer, where the other four are still on their sprue with the packing card. Pete has been painting Salamanders for well over a decade and does flame effects that look like actual heat, and I’ve watched him do it twice and learned nothing.
The sensible thing would have been to leave them on the shelf until I could actually paint fire. I didn’t, and I’ve still got the metal ones, and I’d still rather have those than a nicer version of something I didn’t buy in 2011.
Anyway. Where was I. So this is how a lot of the old background has gone, is the thing. Retcon’s the wrong word for it, too deliberate. It’s more like a family story that loses a detail every Christmas until nobody’s quite sure any more which uncle it happened to. The Crux Terminatus is going the same way right now, quietly, in the new codex.
What the Legion of the Damned sculptors wouldn’t do
The bit of White Dwarf 361 I’d actually keep is the interview with the sculptors. Juan Diaz did the bulk of the work on the new Legionnaires from Barcelona, with Neil Langdown and Matt Holland posing and detailing them. And they were explicit about a line they refused to cross:
“We did think about having exposed hands and even cracked or open helmets, but realised that would undermine the sense of mystery; we didn’t want to reveal who or what is actually under the armour if there is anything at all!”
That’s Matt Holland, in a hobby magazine, in 2010. Langdown’s bit is about restraint in the other direction, worrying that piling bones onto the arms and legs risks making “your sinister spectral Space Marine look like he’s wearing a skeleton suit from a fancy dress shop.” Which is a real danger and I think about it every time I see someone’s Legion of the Damned conversion with a bit too much going on.
The rules writer in the same issue put it in one line: they’ve turned up and saved the Imperium from catastrophe over and over, and they still “can’t be controlled. Therefore they must be feared.”
There’s a battle report later in that issue where a Legion of the Damned squad drops in between a Tyranid swarm and a bastion wall. They put a lot of wounds into a Carnifex. Then a Tyranid Warrior brood fires a venom cannon at them and vanquishes five Legionnaires in one go, and hormagaunts and a venomthrope swarm the position and bring down a sixth.
The flaming skull on Friday’s preview page
GW put the Big Autumn Warhammer Preview up on Warhammer Community on 14 September. It goes out this Friday, the 18th, at 7pm UK time on Twitch and YouTube. The things GW has actually named are the next Warhammer 40,000 codex, a long-awaited Age of Sigmar reveal, a new Kill Team, Old World miniatures, a Blood Bowl team, and content for Horus Heresy, Necromunda, Warhammer+ and Warhammer Quest. The one faction it spells out is the Khazalite Holds, a new duardin army, with a Gholem of Gazul in the teaser art.
Alongside that there’s a row of unlabelled faction symbols, and one of them is a flaming skull. Spikey Bits ran a piece on the 15th working through the icons and put “Legion of the Damned Kill Team” against that one at very high confidence, noting a competing Word Bearers reading and preferring the Legion because the emblem fits them better. I pulled the Warhammer Community page myself to see whether the icons carried any alt text that would settle it. Every one of them is an image with an empty alt attribute.
Wargamer looked at the same skull and came to a different answer: House Cawdor, from Necromunda, on the grounds that the Legion of the Damned’s chapter badge is a plain skull with no flames around it. Necromunda is on GW’s confirmed list for the show, so that reading needs no special pleading. It’s also the more falsifiable of the two, because you can go and look at the badge. And the same writer had already talked themselves out of an Alpha Legion reading of a different icon after a Redditor pointed out it was the dwarven Master Rune of Valaya, which is the kind of track record that makes me take the Cawdor call seriously.
Which is funny in a way I didn’t expect when I started writing this. A fandom squinting at a gang badge and seeing the ghosts come back is doing roughly what one of the 6th edition theories says the Imperium does, which is conjure the Legion out of the massed latent psychic power of a species that badly wants saving. I don’t know whether that theory is still current or whether a later book has quietly dropped it as well.
Where the unit actually sits now is worth knowing, because it’s strange. They fell out of Codex: Space Marines at the start of 8th in 2017. Bell of Lost Souls clocked it at the time: present in Index: Imperium 1, missing from the codex. The datasheet turned up somewhere else. It’s a Legends entry now, filed under Agents of the Imperium rather than Space Marines, which is why it doesn’t appear in GW’s Legends: Space Marines index at all. You can use it in a casual game, it’s out of official tournaments, and it’ll never be points-balanced again. I can’t find a GW product page for the models either, and everything I can see is secondhand.
A Kill Team box would be a genuinely awkward product for them though. Kill Team books don’t do anonymous squads. They give you named operatives, individual specialisms, and a page of background each, which is how the Aeldari Exodites finally got models and a backstory after thirty-odd years of being a footnote, and how a whole new Aeldari goddess turned up on page 15 of a Kill Team book with nobody expecting her. Point that format at a unit whose entire deal is that you don’t know if there’s anything inside the armour, and something has to give. Either you get operatives with names, which answers the question by accident, or you get a book that works very hard to avoid saying anything, which readers will notice.
My guess is they’d go with the second one and it’d be fine. GW’s been protecting this particular not-knowing since before I could read, and the sculptors were policing it in 2010 when nobody was making them.
Friday, 7pm. If the flaming skull turns out to be a Necromunda gang badge I’ll have spent the week writing about a chapter that isn’t in the show.
