Last night, about twenty minutes after my kid finally went down, I was standing on the battle barge in Space Marine 2 talking to the Company Chaplain, scrolling a list of things I could do to make my own life worse. The new anniversary update had gone live that afternoon. My Tactical was level 25, which is the bar for the new Crucible mode, and the game wanted me to pick at least two Penances before it would let me queue. I picked the one that nerfs the Auspex Scan because I never remember to use it anyway. That feels like cheating, and I knew it while I was doing it.
The reward for all this self-punishment is a set of Lamenters armour. I don’t think anyone at Saber had to work very hard to come up with that pairing, but I’m still delighted by it.
What the Crucible actually asks of you
For anyone who hasn’t patched yet, Patch 15 landed on 1 October as the second anniversary update. Crucible is an endgame PvE mode with its own matchmaking pool. You go to the Chaplain, choose Penances (personal debuffs, tied to whichever class you’re playing), and run normal Operations with them active to earn Crucible XP. There are six tiers. Tier 1 wants a minimum of two Penances, Tier 3 wants at least six, and you’re allowed to stack as many as you like on top. Progress is per class, so grinding the Lamenters set on Tactical gets you the Tactical set and nothing else. Focus says the rewards will be expanded over time.
The same patch adds a one-handed thunder hammer, a Space Wolves Champion pack, an Exorcists cosmetic pack, Chaos Space Marines in Siege mode, and a third wargear slot for capes, tabards and iron halos. Remember that last one, because I’ll come back to it.
The render Focus put out is great, honestly. Yellow plate absolutely shredded with claw marks, chains looped round the waist and the right forearm, a skull hanging off the belt, one chequered pauldron. Somebody at Saber clearly sat down with the Lexicanum page before they started scratching the paint off.
A Chapter that sent itself away
The Lamenters are Blood Angels successors from the 21st Founding, the one everyone calls the Cursed Founding because so many of its Chapters went wrong in horrible ways. The Lamenters came out with no mutations and no madness, perfectly good Space Marines by every test anyone ran. Other Chapters shunned them anyway, purely by association. According to Forge World’s Imperial Armour Volume 9, when the purges of the Cursed Founding Chapters started turning violent in early M37, the Lamenters quietly left. They went out to the western fringes and crusaded against Orks and Eldar and the Fra’al for something like a millennium and a half while the purges carried on back home without them.
So their first penance was one nobody asked them to do. IA9 doesn’t give it a neat end date, just that the High Lords eventually called them back in M39.
Then the High Lords recalled them to help with Eye of Terror incursions, and at Corilia during the 9th Black Crusade the Mortifactors refused to fight next to them and simply left the planet. The Lamenters stayed. Six weeks alone against the Black Legion, defending a hive world full of people who weren’t theirs. By the time the Ultramarines and White Scars broke through to relieve them, there were barely two hundred Lamenters left, and then the survivors’ fleet vanished into a warp storm and the Chapter was declared lost. They came back eventually, rebuilt, and went crusading round the galactic core for a while.
The thing about the Iron Halo
This is the story I actually wanted to write about, and it’s from the Corinth Crusade in 701.M41.
The Lamenters joined Marneus Calgar’s crusade against the Ork empires of Charadon, partly because they felt they owed the Ultramarines for Corilia. They volunteered for what everyone assumed was a one-way job: hitting Slaughterhouse III, an Ork slave-mining world deep behind the lines. The raid worked perfectly. Total surprise, gun stations flattened, garrison swept away, and over three million human prisoners suddenly freed and looking up at the yellow-armoured giants as the Emperor’s answer to their prayers.
And there was no way to get them out. The few captured ships couldn’t be fixed in time, the Chapter’s own vessels couldn’t carry them, and more Ork fleets were coming. Fewer than two hundred Lamenters held the system while their Techmarines tried to get the slave ships flying, and IA9 says unprecedented numbers of them fell to the Black Rage during the fighting. In the end it was the prisoners who decided. They sent a last prayer of thanks to the battle barge Daughter of Tempests and asked for a merciful death. The Lamenters set off the charges they’d planted and collapsed the mines. Less than a tenth of the prisoners got out, mostly women and children, handed over to the Orders Hospitaller.
Operationally it was a complete success. Calgar offered them an Iron Halo for it, and they refused it, which the book calls an almost unprecedented step.
Forge World notes that a lot of people took the refusal as a deliberate insult to the Ultramarines, which tells you how little the rest of the Imperium understood these guys. I’ve read it maybe a dozen times now and it still gets me, mostly because the book gives it one sentence and moves on to the next battle honour. You can absolutely equip the new Iron Halo on your Crucible-earned Lamenters set this week, by the way. Patch 15 gives it its own wargear slot. I did it immediately and then felt a bit weird about it.
My accidental Lamenters
Bit of a tangent. Back in 2013, maybe early 2014, I bought a job lot of “Imperial Fists” off eBay to bulk out my tactical squads. Twenty-odd Marines, cheap, photos taken on a carpet. When they turned up, about half of them had little red hearts painted on the right pauldron with a drip of blood coming off the bottom. I genuinely didn’t know what they were. I thought the previous owner had just been doing something creative. Pete took one look at them at the garage table and said “those are Lamenters, mate” in a tone that suggested I should’ve known, and I should have, because I’d owned the Badab books for a year by then and had mostly looked at the pictures.
I painted over the hearts with Imperial Fist chequers. Seven of them are still in my army. Two of them, I’ve noticed recently, have the hearts showing through where the yellow has worn thin on the shoulder rims, which I’m choosing to read as the Chapter’s bad luck following them into my display cabinet.
The court in the wreckage of Badab
I keep wanting to say the Crucible is a neat summary of the Lamenters, and I keep running into the Badab War.
The Lamenters sided with Lufgt Huron when he seceded, out of loyalty to the Astral Claws, who’d been the first Chapter in centuries to treat them like brothers. That went exactly as badly as you’d expect. The Minotaurs caught them at Optera in 908.M41, and I’ve already written about that seventeen-hour mauling in the Minotaurs piece, so I won’t do it again. Three hundred and eleven survivors went into a prison hulk over Sagan for the rest of the war.
Afterwards, Imperial Armour Volume 10 has a Consistorial Court of five neutral Chapter Masters judging the losers. The Astral Claws prisoners got executed. The Lamenters, Executioners and Mantis Warriors each got a hundred-year penitent crusade, with one condition attached that I always forget until I reread it: no right to recruit new brethren for the whole hundred years. On top of that, the court rubber-stamped the Minotaurs keeping the Lamenters’ ships and wargear as reparations. So they were sent out short of men, short of ships, with no way to replace losses. The Minotaurs had already taken most of it at Optera anyway.
The obvious objection is that the game version is a menu. You choose your Penances. You can stack two and stop. The Lamenters didn’t get to pick their sentence, and a debuff you can turn off by quitting to the barge isn’t remotely the same thing as being told you can’t recruit for a century while Huron’s leftovers are still out there.
Then again. Their first exile was self-chosen, the Iron Halo refusal was self-chosen, holding at Corilia after the Mortifactors left was self-chosen. Most of the Lamenters’ history is them volunteering for the worse job. So a menu where the minimum is two and nobody stops you at nine is, if anything, the more accurate part. I think I’ve talked myself back round.
What they did with the hundred years
They flew straight into the path of Hive Fleet Kraken, and I couldn’t find a clear account of how many years into the sentence that was.
So yeah, Kraken. Malvolion, Devlan, a bunch of hopeless planetary defences, and by the last census Lexicanum cites there were three companies left. Three. Out of a Chapter that was over eight hundred battle-brothers at the start of Badab. When the Tyranids hit Baal during the Devastation, the Blood Angels sent for their successors and the Lamenters said no, they weren’t in any state to help. Which, fair. They were maybe a few years out of Kraken and still nowhere near the end of their sentence.
The newer material moves them into the 42nd Millennium with the crusade done and Primaris reinforcements filling the ranks, fighting Tyranids again on a world called Raphaela alongside the Blood Angels and White Panthers. Lexicanum’s summary says the Primaris seem to have inherited the bad luck along with the gene-seed, and that the Chapter took heavy casualties there too. It also mentions Guilliman giving formal absolution to the three surviving Badab Chapters at some point, which I haven’t been able to trace to the original book yet, so take that one with some salt until I do.
There’s an odd little Psychic Awakening-era story on there as well about yellow-armoured Marines with bleeding-heart badges turning up at a gaol station and taking away every prisoner who’d started behaving strangely, with the governor not arguing. No explanation. I’d love to know what that was about.
The Badab trial was 913.M41. Do the maths on a hundred years and you land a decade or so into the Indomitus era, after Primaris had started turning up on everyone’s doorstep. Their penance ran close to three times as long as I’ve been alive, and most of it went on Tyranids, who had nothing to do with Badab.
Running it tonight
For what it’s worth, the Tactical Penance I picked punishes the Auspex, which matters a lot more after the rework, since the new Mandate perks hang extra damage off enemies you’ve marked. So my cheeky “I never use it anyway” pick is about to stop being free. I’ll probably try Tier 2 on Inferno tonight with a random lobby and see how quickly it goes sideways. If anyone’s already unlocked the full Lamenters set on Bulwark, I’d like to know how long it took, because I’m doing it on one class at a time and my backlog of actual grey plastic is not getting any smaller while I do.
