The Armies of Old Night and Blanche's Techno-barbarians

For whatever reason, I found myself going through the Horus Heresy black books again recently - not the novels but the books that were intended for gaming, written mostly by Alan Bligh. It really is a shame he passed away, he's responsible for some of my favorite material to come out of the Warhammer 40k universe, along with Warwick Kinrade over at Move to Contact who wrote some of the early Imperial Armour books. I tend to re-read RPG material when I am going to sleep the way some people watch TV.

Anyway, I found myself thinking about the Unification Wars, and about the possibility of a game set during the Age of Strife, and not for the first time. I can't recall when I first thought about this - probably shortly after I first heard about INQ28 / Inquisimunda, but it might have even been before that.

For the record, I came to 40k late. I remember seeing ads for Rogue Trader in Dragon Magazine when it was brand new (and I was like 13 or 14) and thinking "Fuck that looks awesome," and then, some years later, being in my FLGS and seeing models and books for Warhammer, though I cannot recall if it was 40k or Fantasy or both, and thinking that not only did you have to buy the minis, there were like 20 books you needed (I think I thought you needed ALL the codexes (codicies?) to play) and I sort of immediately went well, I'm never gonna play that shit, it's way too expensive.

And I forgot about Warhammer for a long time. But sometime in about 2013, I found an image of a Necron and out of a vague sense of familiarity and idle curiosity I did a couple of google searches, and the next thing I knew I was on a Warhammer wiki. This particular wiki basically ripped text wholesale from the books, especially the gaming books, and while I don't generally condone this, I think it was probably a net positive financially for the company that makes 40k as it had the same effect on me that bootleg cassette tapes of the Cramps and Crash Worship and the Dead Kennedys had on me when I was 14, and I was digging into the Siege of Vraks and the Badab War and lore on these weird mechs called Titans with something approaching glee. And the art, my god. The art was SO good. John Blanche's artwork in particular just left me kind of gobsmacked, but all of it was good.  I've included a bunch of examples of Blanche's work throughout and at the end of the post.

I had always enjoyed the mini aspect of D&D so I wasn't averse to trying that at a larger scale. I found that in particular I was really intrigued by the Skitarii. There were no models for the Mechanicus at the time, so right from the beginning, conversion was a thing I was considering. But I had no idea how to go about it, so I just sort of digested as much as I could of the lore and looked at models for a few years, trying to get a sense of what might work if I wanted to convert or scratch-build an army of Skitarii. GW came out with a line of plastic Mechanicus dudes in 2015, which was enough to get my to buy in, and I have a pretty decent sized Martian Mechanicus army. I should post pictures sometime.

So those first couple of years, before I knew about ForgeWorld and before there were any plastic AdMech dudes, when I was dreaming of how I might go about scratch building the little guys, left me with a love of conversion, and I am even more amazed when someone sculpts their own stuff, like some of the work on Le Blog des Kouzes (check out Maxime's Plaguebones stuff if you stop by there, it's amazing).

I didn't stop with the AdMech, and among other stuff, I have a Death Guard army where the goal was to ensure that no two models were the same. That was the first army where I started converting some of my own stuff. Again, one of these days, I'll throw some pictures up. I think right around this time period - 2017 or 18, not sure - is also when I found INQ28 and some of the sites kind of dedicated to Blanchitsu, to conversion, sculpting, and darker palettes then what you see in a typical paintjob from the GW professional team.

So the other day while I was going through the Horus Heresy books again, with all this stuff about conversion and whatnot swirling around in my head, I was reminded of the Unification Wars and the Armies of Old Night.

For those that don't know, the Age of Strife or Old Night is kind of a pre-historical era in the 30k/40k universe, the end of which was brought about by the Unification Wars. It's a time period when the Emps was not yet fully dominant, and was going from this power bloc to that and unifying everyone, by force if necessary - hence "The Unification Wars." We get little tidbits about it here and there, but they are very few and far between.  

But the tidbits we DO get are compelling in every sense of the word, at least, it has compelled me to consider creating armies for the various forces of the Unification Wars and Old Night. There's more about the Emperor's forces than anyone else - Thunder Warrior armies have been done, I think - but I'm more interested in the other rulers of the time period - the forces of the Unspeakable King or the Ethnarch of the Caucasus Wastes.

So I am collecting all the details I can about these forces. There are many more than these mentioned on the various wiki pages etc, but for now I am only including those where I have been able to find a bit of additional detail, enough that I could root an army in canonical lore rather than spin it from whole cloth. Most of this can be found on various sites like Lexicanum, but some of it comes from bits of the Horus Heresy gaming books and I've re-organized it to focus mostly on the military tidbits. There's some confusing information (for example, there are two Ethnarchs, and the "Unspeakable King" ruled both Albia and Panpacifica but was then succeeded by Narthan Dune, the Tupelov Lancers served Sheng Kal but then later served the Emperor), but I think I've gotten it mostly right.  

If you have any additional details about any of the states below (the info is pretty well scattered through lots of different books) or enough detail on a state I didn't include to warrant it's inclusion here, please please let me know! 

Akkad

Summary: Akkad was a techno-barbarian state in the Upper Asiatic Basin who fought against the forces of the Emperor.

Leaders: a monarch known as the Great King of Akkad

Troops: genetically-engineered slave soldiers known as the Udug Hul. The Udug Hul's bodies possessed poisoned blood and had a physical strength greater than 10 un-enhanced human warriors. Akkad had approx 200,000 of these gene-forged warriors.

Albia

Summary: Albia, sometimes called "Old Albia," was a techno-barbarian state which bordered Northern Atlan (probably the North Atlantic Basin) and was known for its ancient warlike clans. Albia consisted of towering, soot-blackened castram-cities. Albia is probably located in the area of the British Isles and was also called Britonnica and likely Albyon as well. Albia engaged in frequent wars with the Pan-Pacific Empire.

Leaders: Uilleam the Red (If Albyon is indeed the same region), as well as, at one point, the Unspeakable King of the Pan-Pacific Empire.

Troops: Armored Ironside Clan soldiers and proto-Dreadnoughts

Ethnarchy of the Caucasus Wastes

Summary: The Ethnarchy of the Caucasus Wastes was a techno-barbarian state located in the Caucasus Peninsula of Europa. The Ethnarchy's strongholds were hidden deep beneath the hollowed-out mountains of the Wastes and shielded from attack from above by near-impregnable power-filed webs

Leaders: The Ethnarch of the Caucasus Wastes, “mutated eugenicist-oligarchs”

Troops: many, from "armored, gene-augmented "Ur-Khasis" troops, roughly analogous to the Emperor's Thunder Warriors, to narcotically-enslaved covens of psykers."

Franc

Summary: The lands of Franc were based in the territory of Western Europa, largely in the region of the ancient nation-state once called France. The people of Franc were known as the Frank, a fractious people before the Unification that did not take kindly to invaders.

Leaders: Havuleq D'agross

Troops: a force of 50,000 rebels, which was largely composed of unskilled militia.

Himalazia

Summary: Himalazia was the name given to the mountains of what had been known as the Himalayan-Tibetan Plateau, the greatest mountain range on Old Earth. Located well above twenty-thousand feet, the air was too thin to breathe without mechanical aid. The mountains of Himalazia served as the Emperor's original base on Terra. Deep beneath these mountains, the Emperor established a vast number of gene-laboratories and other areas for research. Late in the Unification Wars, the entire chain of great peaks was transformed into the massive fortress and capital city known as the Imperial Palace.

Leaders: The Emperor

Troops: too many to list, but obviously the Thunder Warriors and the Custodes; also the Old One Hundred - a series of one hundred Imperial Army regiments, mostly unaugmented humans, who fought for the Emperor (and apparently pre-unification some of these fought against the Emps as well). This list is not exhaustive but: the Geno Chilliads (Geno Five Two Chilliad being one specific regiment), Geno Spartocid, the Angkorian Dragoons, the Antioch Miles Vesperi, the Catharti Arraigners, the Cordesh Cavalry, the Golden Hegera, the Inferallti Hussars, the Kimmerine Corps Bellum, the Kushtun Naganda, the Lucifer Blacks, the Qui-Helic Guard, and the Tupelov Lancers. Also - the ConFed Gun Brotherhoods, the Thorosian Voltigeurs, Ouranti Drakes, the Lombardi Hort and Zanzibari Hort, and the Outremar (led by a Grand Khedive).  Also the G9k Division Kill.

The Geno Chilliads, or at least Geno 52 Chilliad, was composed of soldiers that were produced via genetic selection to be at the absolute peak of unaltered human performance, while the officer class (called Uxors) was exclusively female, with junior officers being in their teenage years. These officers had a weak psychic power they called Cept that manifested as a "felt" connection to the troops under their command and a higher than normal grasp of the operational situation. This power burnt out usually before the age of thirty. Loss of Cept usually meant removal from command position.

The Geno Seven-Sixty Spartocid, when we see them in Legion, seem somewhat run down from a long war against abhumans on Dycenae and their neglect has led to mismatched plate and carapace armour with threadbare cloaks over them (but we could probably assume that duirng the Unification War era they were well supplied). The crests on their helms seem to indicate rank. They are armed with broadburn lascarbines. Their ranks include a Subalterix officer rank and a Strategarch command rank.

Hy Brasil

Summary: Hy Brasil was a powerful techno-barbarian state centered in the former territory of ancient Brazil on the continent of Sud Merica. Hy Brasil was considered the most powerful of all the Sud Merican cantons.

Leaders: Dalmoth Kyn

Troops: "the Dracos,” who were allowed to maintain their existence even after the establishment of the Imperial government. They wore green, scaled armor. They were exclusively recruited from the desiccated jungle regions of Sud Merica and apparently had scaled cloaks and reptilian-styled helmets.

Maulland Sen Confederacy

Summary: The Maulland Sen Confederacy was a techno-barbarian state based in Nordyc (Scandinavia) that unwittingly served the Dark Gods of Chaos by engaging in cannibalistic Human sacrifice and forbidden genetic manipulation.

Leader: the Tyrant-Prophet of Maulland Sen (also called the Priest King of Mauland Sen)

Troops: A horde of genetically-altered warriors, witch-marked men, and zealots.

Pan-Pacific Empire

Summary: The Pan-Pacific Empire was a techno-barbarian state composed of the Pacific Islands and what had once been the territories of parts of East Asia, Australia and the Japanese islands that flourished during the Age of Strife. Eventually, the empire became one of the most powerful techno-barbarian realms on Pre-Unification Terra.

Leaders: A warlord remembered in legend only as the "Unspeakable King," who is said to have ruled both Albia and the Panpacific Empire at one point.  Later, Narthan Dume, the Tyrant of the Pan-Pacific Empire, “half-mad, half-genius.” The Crimson Walkers in Vhnori, who are likely old generals of Dume and are described as “psykers, gene-splicers, and warlords.”

Troops: Under the Crimson Walkers, the troops are described as “mutant monstrosities,” and “stich-golems who scampered on dozens of hands, ranks of braindead slaves, and demented Psykers.”  The Unspeakable King had the Hollow Ones, an order of pariahs like the the Silent Sisterhood, and was probably a powerful psychic null himself. 

Ursh

Summary: Ursh was a techno-barbarian state that was located in the steppes of what had once been Russia and Central Asia. Ursh was the mightiest of the techno-barbarian empires on Terra before the Unification Wars. It was not as technologically advanced as several of the other techno-barbarian states. For example, the acquisition of superior military machines from the Nordafrik Conclaves was the main reason cited in the Chronicles of Ursh for Ursh's decision to launch that infamous ancient war against its southern neighbor. The Chronicles of Ursh mentions the influence of "primordial gods" upon Kalagann and the Ursh. Also, the sorcerous powers of Kalagann mentioned in the Chronicles of Ursh formed the main part of Ursh's military power.

Leaders: Ursh was ruled by the despot and warlord named Kalagann at the time of the Unification Wars. Kalagann was described as being of cruel character, and commanding vast armies of techno-barbarians. Other high positions within the government of Ursh were all filled by military warlords including Lurtois, Sheng Khal (also known as Shang Khal) and Quallodon.

Troops: The armies of Ursh consisted mostly of unaltered Human soldiers. Kalagann also employed powerful psykers within his armies, using their arcane abilities to unleash the foul powers of the Warp upon his enemies.

Some of Ursh's troops are known by name and include the following units:

The Roma were organized mercenary fliers who fought for the forces of Ursh. Highly-skilled pilots, they were said to never touch the earth beneath them. They were trained to carry out pinpoint aerial attacks, and were therefore of great value to the generals of Ursh.

Both the Red Engines and the Tupelov Lancers followed the command of the Urshian warlord Sheng Khal. The Red Engines were masters of the siege, and possessed siege engines able to raze whole fortresses or hive cities to the ground. The Tupelov Lancers are described as screaming berserkers. These Urshian warriors were trained for close-combat action, and proved ruthless and deadly. They were known also for their use of cybernetic steeds.  They later became one of the "Old One Hundred."

The Oneirocriticks were the personal counsellors of the Ursh warlord Sheng Khal. Their name means "interpreters of dreams," in the ancient Urshian dialect of Low Gothic, but it is likely that they used some kind of Warp sorcery to guide Shang Khal in his actions.

The Wrathsingers were a specialized Urshian military unit that was likely comprised of practitioners of sorcery that bent the powers of the Warp to their will. They were able to use their "magic" as the Chronicles of Ursh names their abilities, to change the environment to their advantage or to kill men from afar with their "spells."

Yndonesic Bloc

Summary: The Yndonesic Bloc was a techno-barbarian state located in what was once Southeast Asia. As late as the time of the Horus Heresy in the early 31st Millennium, the Yndonesic Bloc, though an integral part of the Imperium, still retained a distinct regional identity and culture on Terra. Their ruler, Cardinal Tang, imposed a genocidal policy that consisted of forced breeding between only "genetically compatible" citizens of the Bloc, combined with a eugenics program that aimed for the pursuit of racial hygiene through the use of compulsory sterilization and the genocidal extermination of "undesirables."

Those that defied these enforced edicts were punished brutally. Imperial history would later characterize Tang's rule as one of "bloody pogroms, death camps and genocides."

Leaders: The Yndonesic Bloc was ruled by a man named Cardinal Tang, the tyrannical "Ethnarch," during the closing years of the Age of Strife before the Unification. He wished to "return the world to a pre-technological age," burning "scientists, mathematicians and philosophers" who opposed his church's views.

Troops: The military unit known as the Stormbird was developed by the Yndonesic Bloc and used against the Pan-Pacific tribes during the Unification Wars. The Stormbird was developed from Warhawk and Nephoros class assault craft.

So there's obviously not very much here, but what IS here, especially when combined with Blanche's art, is enough to work with.  A while back I started messing with some bits I had to create a couple of units of chaos cultists, and I think they could work, but when I did that, the parts were taken mainly from a unit of genestealer cultists, a unit of skitarii vanguard, a set of Cadians, the old chaos cultists from Dark Heresy, and the Vraksian militia bits FW used to make.  There are SO many more choices at this stage with the advent of Kill Team, Necromunda, and Warcry, that I am tempted to just start again.

At any rate, I think I may have found my next modeling project - though it's certain I could get pulled back into the world of Titans pretty easily, I'd kind of like to give this a go.  Though, man, it has been so hard to find time to do this stuff recently.  That's not a bad thing, it's mainly just that most of my free time is being eaten up with music. I'm actually getting close to where I was when I stopped playing all those years ago.  And when I am not doing that, I'm trying to sneak in a little writing or work on the not-yet-abandoned dungeon23 project that has spilled over in to 2024 (there's about 160 character sketches and I'd like to get it to 200 before I let it go).  I'm still sort of undecided on wether I want to do Albia, with the proto-dreadnoughts, the Panpacific Empire (the stitch golem might be a lot of fun to make) or Ursh (there's quite a bit to work with there). But I've been itching to paint a bit again, and one of these seems like it might be a worthy project!

Bonus happy factoid, if you made it this far: the band I've been working with got signed and we're in the process of releasing about six - seven hours worth of material on eight albums (nearly a hundred songs) on Spotify.  So that's coming soon!