Forces of the Omnissiah – Datasheets

[ No filterTaghmata OmnissiahDivisio TacticaQuestoris HouseholdThe Titan Legions ]

The history of Anacharis Scoria has been lost, but there exists fragmentary evidence that places him as a magos dominus in the service of Xana some thirty years before the outbreak of the Horus Heresy. It is believed he was gifted the rank of the Vodian Magister – the chief enforcer of cult doctrine on his secretive world, but some time after that he was cast down until the time of the Loyalist covert operation known as the Xana Incursion. In the aftermath of that disaster, Xana’s ruling Synod was destroyed in a bloody coup from which Scoria emerged far more powerful than before.

There is even tantalising evidence that Scoria had been kept captive in the depths of the prison-forge of Xana-Tisiphone, his dark genius put to use despite being caged by the very archmagos he once served. Furthermore, that his release was an unintended consequence of the Imperial raid and that it was he, unleashed from bondage, who took command and repelled the Loyalist invaders.

If this is true, it is a dark irony indeed as it would be under the mastery of Scoria that Xana would become the first of the so-called Hell Forges that would blight the centuries to come.

The archmagos prime is the commander of the Taghmata Omnissiah; a high adept of the Machine Cult armed and girded for war with the finest armaments and defences their arcane arts can provide. They are chosen from their peers to lead in battle. In most cases this will not merely mean the carrying of sophisticated weaponry but effectively a physical transformation, and they may elect to exchange or add to their augmetics with devices and exoskeletal armoured frames better suited to war than to artifice. In the most extreme cases, the magos will choose to have what remains of their organics re-housed in a purpose-built body more reminiscent in use and function to a Legiones Astartes Dreadnought than mere environmental and battlefield armour.

Each magos is a unique individual, possessed of their own mastery of the higher arts of the Machine Cult, and their own unique resources and secrets, meaning that no two magos prime are truly alike. Each is as formidable in their own way as the superhuman Legiones Astartes, and their inhuman intelligence and power spawned of arcane science is not to be underestimated.

Towering above the hosts of their Forge World in battle, the archmagos prime ensconced upon an abeyant embodies the ultimate vision of the Omnissiah’s dominance and glory. As much mobile command platform and symbol of status as opulent transport, an abeyant is a name given to a general class of hovering conveyance into which the rider’s augmetics and life support systems are directly connected through mind impulse linkage, so that it becomes an extension of their own body. The abeyant’s powerful anti-grav engines allow the archmagos to navigate the blasted ruin of devastated battlefields with ease while its armoured shell greatly enhances the endurance of its rider. Many abeyants are ancient wonders of the Dark Age of Technology and only the mightiest archimandrites know the full extent of their capabilities. Their advanced systems are utilised by archmagi on both sides of the civil war to channel their will to all forces under their command and through the enactment of the most intricate equations of war, achieve the complete and utter annihilation of their enemies.

The warlike and sinister Calleb Decima, emissary of the Ordo Reductor of the Mechanicum, was a late and unwelcome arrival to the 63rd Expeditionary Fleet as it marshalled its forces to attack Isstvan III. Outside the Traitors’ plans, he was distrusted and feared by those within the Mechanicum who would turn from the Emperor and so marked for death. His vessel shot down, he and a core of his Thallaxii bodyguard reached the ravaged surface of Isstvan III during its firestorm, and escaped into the blazing ruins of the Ariadne industrial zone to the south of the Choral City. From this lair of shattered steel and ash, he made the Traitors pay in blood for their underestimation of the Ordo Reductor.

A deadly thorn in the Traitors’ side, having rebuilt his body to account for the injuries Isstvan III had cost him, he turned to the acquisition of evergreater military forces under no authority but his own, his actions leading him to be denounced as a madman and a heretek even by many within the Machine Cult who remained loyal.

The magos dominus is a master of the arts of the Legio Cybernetica, a sect of the priesthood of Mars granted the dread right to create and control the cortex-automata built for war and based upon the terrible secrets of the Dark Age of Technology. Such strange and threatening powers are not without price, and by doctrinal tradition such individuals forgo an easy route to power within the Mechanicum, so dangerous do their fellows consider the secrets they wield. Instead, magi dominus and their acolytes form but one of the many factions and sects within the Mechanicum, divided both by technological specialisation as well as rivalry and ancient feud. Less human than even their peers, and often skirting the edge of tech-heresy with the modifications they subject themselves to, they are renowned as much for their insane obsessions and eccentricities as for their skills in the arcana of the cybernetica.

The magi dominus found within the ranks of the Taghmata fulfil a vital but subordinate role beneath the archmagos prime. They serve the Taghmata either under terms of personal fealty or in fulfilment of binding pacts between their Legio Cybernetica cohort and the archimandrite who stands as the power behind the Taghmata.

The abeyant is a heavily armoured repulsorthrone, the preferred conveyance of many high ranked dominus of the Mechanicum. Taking the form of a stylised pulpit or scarab-like framework, the principal advantage of these armoured platforms is that their mag-suspensor fields allow the most war-torn battlefield to be traversed with ease, and their enhanced life-support chassis greatly improves their user’s survivability. In such a manner the magos dominus joins the battle at the head of their cohorts, closely observing the fluid arithmetic of war and affects the battle’s course in the most direct manner by employing some of the most deadly weapons to be found in the arsenals of the Mechanicum. The mere sight of a magos dominus astride an abeyant directing phalanxes of Cybernetica automata is enough to break entire formations of lesser troops, and even the mighty warriors of the Legiones Astartes take pause when faced with such opposition.

The arcuitor magisterium are accusers and judges of tech-heresy, and the executioners of heretek magi. They are usually magi themselves, of high rank and noble standing, tempered by the wisdom of frequent conclave with the forge-fane and the will of the Omnissiah; their belief is utterly devout, reinforced and become rigid with zealotry. These venerable figures are known as the fathers of the Malagra, for they are often ancient beyond belief, and are heavily augmented in attaining closeness to their Machine God.

The arcuitors do not officially lead or guide the Prefecture Magisterium, but through their actions are the agendas of that pious organisation shaped, for a senior arcuitor can call upon great resources – enough to instigate independent crusades against those they deem worthy of deconstruction, most often of the Ossifram Majority and the Dark Mechanicum.

Accorded by most observers to be the last class of battle-automata to enter mass production before the outbreak of the civil war, the Domitar was a sophisticated variant of the ancient Conqueror pattern. Larger than the more common Castellax, it was also swifter, designed to cross the open battlefield at speed and built expressly to crash into the enemy with shattering force.

To this end, the Domitar’s armoured frame was itself a weapon, while its blows were amplified by the battle-automata’s inbuilt gravitational hammers, allowing it to pulverise battle tanks and, as it would later prove, even Legiones Astartes Dreadnoughts in combat. As a line-breaker, the Domitar was unparalleled in the Mechanicum’s arsenal, and its tactical flexibility was further augmented with a missile launcher armed with a variety of munitions.

The introduction of the Domitar was part of the Mechanicum’s growing power by the late 900s.M30 and the source of much disquiet in certain circles of the Imperium’s hierarchy, but like other weapons of its era, it would burn in the fires of heresy, the apotheosis of power it represented all but lost to history…

The hulking, heavily augmented Myrmidon Secutors are ordained priests of the Cult Mechanicus in their own right, but are a breed apart from their fellow Tech- Priests and magi. Their sole concentration is the art of destruction and the embodiment of that power within their own vastly augmented bodies, in which little organic remains. The Myrmidons form their own sub-sects within the Mechanicum, and to them war is a matter of cold logic and murderous equation.

Before the Horus Heresy, the Myrmidons kept no single master long, but instead were drawn to battle as a vulture was drawn to carrion, seeking fresh challenges to defeat and the revelations of the Omnissiah unveiled to them in the mysteries of shot and shell. As the war of the Horus Heresy set the galaxy to burn, the Myrmidon faction grew to both increased importance and increased numbers on both sides of the warring divide; their invaluable arts and expertise forming a cornerstone of many newly formed and expanded Taghmata, but to whom their loyalty truly lay, remained often in question.

Operating in a support role, Covenants and Maniples of Tech-Priest adepts and lesser magi also form a key part of the Taghmata Omnissiah. Of those whose firepower and expertise is called to the Taghmata by feudal obligation, enginseers are perhaps the most common.

These often accompany their masters and the mighty war machines they administer onto the battlefield, enabling the Taghmata to make field repairs, assuage fevered machine spirits and perform the required microcalibrations to arms and systems to ensure the holy engines of battle perform to their optimal efficiency.

Less common are representatives of militant orders such as the reductor and lachrimallus. The former are siege warfare specialists whose arts are used to either lay low fortifications or defend them as they are called on by their masters. The latter, whose flesh-craft and alchemistry mercilessly drives on the half-living tech-thralls employed by the Taghmata, are masters of teeming hordes of resilient, if expendable, troops.

Tech-thralls are created by the Mechanicum through basic augmetics and cranial surgery as the need for them arises. They are not servitors, which often use formerly human biological matter as a component system, but rather can be considered cyborgs as consciousness is not extinguished before they are reprocessed into their new forms, merely mutilated and overridden. The conversion process commonly awaits the laity of a Forge World’s population should it commit some transgression against their masters, for few other punishments exist in the Omnissiah’s domains.

Tech-thralls serve many purposes, principally that of a flexible pool of expendable labour. In times of war, this same fate befalls many to create a quickly produced and ultimately expendable military resource known as the adsecularis. In these cases, the organic human bodies of the tech-thralls, already altered to lift heavy loads and function in hostile environments, are fitted with basic weapons systems and bodily protection. On the battlefield they serve as expendable troops, unskilled but relentless and indefatigable; an army of the alive-yet-dead, puppeted by the magi who command them.

The most common Castellan-type battleautomata in service, the Castellax is a general battle unit developed during the Great Crusade from its ancient forebear. Primarily intended for siege work and shock assaults, it is a terrifying, humanoid machine thrice the height of a man, with a notoriously aggressive and responsive machine spirit. Its armoured endoskeleton is proof against small arms fire and highly resistant to damage thanks to its durable design and the presence of the same atomantic shielding technology that features on the Legiones Astartes Contemptor class Dreadnought.

The Castellax class was a mainstay of both the Legio Cybernetica and the elite defensive formations of many Forge Worlds, who relied on its formidable power for their protection. Some in the Imperial hierarchy saw the steady increase in the number of these war machines as a sleeping threat should the Mechanicum ever default on its treaty with the Emperor. History was to take a different course, and thousands of these war engines would be broken on the wheel of war, and the Castellax was never to be seen again in such numbers.

Not all of the most potent creations of the Mechanicum are hulking war machines and towering battle-automata. Some, such as the Scyllax guardian-automata, demonstrate formidable power in a more compact frame scarcely larger than an armoured man. These sophisticated machinecreatures are neither a true battle-automata, lacking a cybernetica-cortex, nor are they a true servitor class as their organic component is almost negligible, reduced to the ossuary skulls and human neural tissue harvested from sources best left unknown. Their armoured carapaces house powerful electro-thermic reactors and banks of lucid cogitator-stacks that process a storm of battlefield analysis engrams and protective tech-incantations, a system so potent some claim it borders on the blasphemy of the silica animus.

Scyllax are found in the retinues of only the highest ranking magi, where they serve as bodyguards and elite shock troops. There are some factions within the Mechanicum who will have no truck with the Scyllax though, claiming sinister provenance for its design, and that the automata gain a subtle and dangerous selfawareness over time.

The hulking, heavily augmented cyborg shocktroops originating within the Ordo Reductor faction of the Mechanicum, the Thallax differ from the Martian Skitarii regiments both in their purpose and the unique degree of their augmetics. The Lorica Thallax which encases their major organs, nervous system and cerebrum also replaces the skeleton and limbs entirely with armoured mechanical systems powered by an internal reactor core.

The agony of this process, along with the replacement of the usual human sensory apparatus, proves so traumatic as to require the surgical excision of the pain centres and emotions. The Thallax, however, retains a degree of independent human thought; this individuality and self-determination is greater by far than that enjoyed by tech-thralls, whose cranial-surgery implants are often crude at best, damaging as much as they control.

The Triaros is the primary armoured battlefield transport of the Mechanicum Taghmata during the era of the Great Crusade and the Horus Heresy. Eschewing the more commonplace STC designs, it relies on a number of unique technologies held as arcana by the magos autokrator and never divulged for wider Imperial use, even by the Legiones Astartes.

Designed for use in hostile environments, it incorporates multiple galvanic traction drives and its defences are comprised not merely of brute armour, but layered techno-cant wardings and interlocking energy shields, particularly around its seemingly exposed control dais, as well as independently animated weapons servitors.

Its capacious storage bay can be hermetically sealed if needed, allowing the Triaros to be used in hard vacuum and on the surfaces of lifeless worlds. Its internal bay is outfitted with numerous specialised couplings for the recharging, cold-sleep storage and the servicing of tech-thralls and light automata as needed. Its most remarkable feature, however, is a powerful reactor-fed shock ram mounted to its fore, which can be used to shatter and incinerate anything it contacts.

A variant of the ancient and versatile Conqueror automata STC, the Arlatax’s development, which was the work of the magos-wrights of Xana, would do much to influence the later design of the Domitar. Beyond the Taghmata and skitarii forces of that Forge World the pattern never gained wide acceptance, despite its excellent performance as a rapid-moving shock assault unit. The idiosyncratic choice of certain components in the battle-automata’s designs were not approved by the remit of Mars, making refit and repair difficult for those without a direct line to Xana’s resources. Despite this, outlying Forge Worlds such as Atar-Median and Incaladion were known to have obtained full templates to produce their own independently. Darker suspicions blamed the lack of widespread use on their machine spirits, which were particularly prone to greater than tolerable incidences of Malifica. As the Horus Heresy ground on, however, it became clear that Xana had produced the Arlatax in unsuspected numbers, and in increasingly baroque and sinister sub-patterns. Meanwhile, Atar-Median maintained a smaller stream that saw more heavily-sanctified variants take their own place on the Loyalist battlelines.

A development of the later Great Crusade, the Ursarax tech-thralls were first designed by Explorator Magos Enabrin Falkan as a heavy, rapid-moving close combat unit for use by the notoriously independent magos’ forces. Using a fusion of existing technologies sacred to the Mechanicum, materials and patterns taken from the Thallax of the Ordo Reductor (much to their displeasure) and the fruits of Falkan’s own discoveries, they are formidable, even monstrous, killing engines.

Like the Thallax, Ursarax are thralls rather than servitors. Selected from suitable human candidates for conversion, their living components retain a consciousness and dim recollection of their former humanity, providing them with superior tactical abilities and the instincts to kill. Neural anaesthesia is automatically administered for the successful fulfilment of their orders, providing them with relief, albeit temporarily, from their tortured existences. After Falkan’s mysterious disappearance his warring acolytes dispersed to many different masters, taking the secret of the Ursarax’s creation with them.

Vorax are hunter-killer units, battle-automata created from the ancient and revered Crusader template pattern said to date back to the Dark Age of Technology and which may be found on every major Forge World in the Imperium.

Created on pre-Imperial Mars to fulfil the role of search and destroy weapon against rogue machines and mutant vermin, their Cybernetica cortex engrams are known to be particularly predatory and vicious. Such are the bestial instincts that sleep within their blast-steel and ceramite bodies, that numerous cut-outs and override cantos are hardwired into their control programming to prevent these tireless hunting machines from devolving into the renegades they prey upon.

At times they are also dispatched by their masters to conduct a cull of surplus population during a time of famine or plague, their hunts only ending when some unknown tally of slaughter has been reached. It is little wonder then that the Vorax are held in superstitious dread by the indentured human labourers of the Mechanicum’s farflung domains and by the neophyte adepts of the Omnissiah’s priesthood alike.

The Vultarax was the most common stratosautomata in widespread use by the Mechanicum Taghmata at the time of the Horus Heresy. A robust, multi-role war engine, heavily armed and fitted with sophisticated sensory gear and able to operate in diverse and hostile environments, it proved itself a keystone of both Mechanicum Explorator Expeditionary forces as an armed, high-mobility scout and as a hunter-killer and rapid response unit in open battle.

Unlike the more common automata of the Taghmata, which were designed along primarily humanoid or animal forms, its design owed little to nature. Instead, it was based on patterns for autonomous aerial machines found within ancient pre-Imperium STC templates, and constructed around a powerful variant of the cybernetica cortex. A creation of the Forge World of Anetarbraxus during the Age of Strife, it was later given up as tribute to Mars. From there it spread rapidly to other Forge Worlds in the decades after Anetarbraxus’ reunification and, by the Horus Heresy, it stood as a memorial of sorts to that Forge World, shattered as it was to molten fragments during the Great Mandragoran Incursion.

A variant of the Triaros Armoured Conveyor common within the Mechanicum Taghmata, the Karacnos is a dedicated assault tank, its armoured chassis and copious transport compartment devoted to the mounting and munitions store of a single heavy weapon system—a mortar battery of ‘Karacnos’ radiological warheads, designed to sweep an area clear of organic life for later acquisition by the forces of the Machine God.

The warheads are themselves somewhat volatile and the launcher battery is protected by armoured shutters when not in firing mode. The vehicle itself is heavily protected by armour plate, radiological barriers and a thermogalvanic flare shield. An additional armament of entirely self-contained and selftargeting lightning-blaster weaponry, coupled with its considerable armour protection, and the infamous shock ram of its forebear, transform the Karacnos from a mobile artillery platform to a true assault tank, able to close with the enemy battle line and weather shock assault conditions to deliver its deadly cargo.

The Knight Moirax was a variant of the Armiger chassis which saw little use before the darkest hours of the Horus Heresy as it was considered to be an unseemly tool with which to build a pristine Imperium. However, as a blunt and dirty weapon the Moirax was capable of mounting the most lethal weaponry available to its class of Scout Knights and was undeniably effective in wars which required the utter eradication of an enemy and the salting of the earth of their worlds. Talons of Knight Moirax are most frequently sent to battle among those Knight Households indentured to the Mechanicum, and those few Questor Masters who made use of them ensured that only their weakest noble lines and latter sons were expended in the radioactive prison of a Moirax cockpit. The rad furnace ticking at the heart of the machine and the resultant reactor leaks and critical anbaric malfunctions often led to the tainting of both a Moirax’s machine spirit and its pilot. Those unfortunate pilots ordered to mount such a frame were considered lesser and expendable by their lords, and though every other courtesy was extended to them, they would be excluded from both their place at Questor Court and their right to extend the reach of their bloodline.

A pattern originating on Mars whose genesis is lost to the earliest days of the Mechanicum, the Krios uses numerous arcane integrated systems well outside the purview of most STC construction facilities to build or maintain, so despite its age and proven record in the Mechanicum’s arsenals, it has never seen service outside the Taghmata and Skitarius. Comparable in many ways in function and tactical role to the Predator tank more widely used by Imperial forces, it lacks a flexible turret mount for its main armament, but makes up for this disadvantage with its greater speed and manoeuvrability.

In marked contrast to more conventional armoured vehicles, its durability is provided by interlocking defensive energy fields, (and in some cases potent flare shield generators) rather than physical armour, lending it a deceptively skeletal appearance. Unsurprisingly, given its long service history, many armament patterns and hull variants of the Krios exist but the most common mount a variety of heavy energy weapons unique to the Mechanicum, such as the lightning cannon and pulsar-fusil.

A sub-faction of the Myrmidon sect of the cult of the Machine God, the Destructors craft their augmetics to carry the heaviest of weapons, often only rendered portable owing to their reinforced endoskeletons and implanted power systems. These augmentations enable them to maintain a furious barrage on the battlefield and to do so with a precision and skill unequalled. They specialise particularly in the destruction of enemy armoured and fortified emplacements, and wield all manner of esoteric and arcane weapons, against which conventional defences offer little protection.

As with the rest of their Myrmidon brethren, the Destructors became an increasingly important faction on many Forge Worlds on both sides of the civil war, particularly for those Forge Worlds which became isolated and forced to rely on their own defences, and on those, such as the worlds of the Anvilus system, where war was all but constant throughout the Horus Heresy. Here the Ur-Nomus faction, which advocated the complete armed secession from either side in the war had the feared Myrmidon Destructor Lord Ymiros Cyrovile, as their leader.

A heavy siege-automata, designed as a mobile artillery platform rather than a general battle unit, the Thanatar frame, built to accommodate the huge weapon and the power systems and fuel reserves required to supply it, is considerably larger than even the hulking Castellax. The baseline pattern, sometimes referred to as the Thanatar-Cavas, is armed with a Hellex pattern plasma mortar, a terrifying weapon able to launch spheres of plasma into the heart of enemy fortifications. The origins of the Thanatar-Cavas remains uncertain, save that its armament is known to be the product of the Forge World of Ryza, the sole locale where the Hellex pattern weaponry is produced.

A variant developed during the latter part of the Great Crusade, rumours persist that the Thanatar- Calix was the work of the combined efforts of the Sollex Myrmidon and Omega-Shevar Covenant of the Ordo Reductor, alongside unknown representatives of the Legio Cybernetica. The Thanatar-Calix combines the deadly tech-arcana of these secretive factions into a single devastating weapons platform, able to sunder the strongest fortifications with the lethal fire of its Sollex heavy lascannon.

Of the gigantic Acastus pattern Knights, some of the largest such war machines still in existence, the Asterius is among the most rare. Like its more common cousin, the Porphyrion, it boasts an armoured hide near impervious to weapons fire, striding across the battlefield like an angry giant beset by insects, and also wields a pair of twin ancient conversion beam cannons. These weapons are irreplaceable relics of a lost technology, each capable of sundering the walls of mighty fortresses and laying low powerful foes in a single blast.

One of the rarest and most potent Knights, created solely under the direct auspices of the lords magos of the Mechanicum, the Atrapos is a unique variant of the Cerastus. The Atrapos was created, it is said, during the early Great Crusade to carry particularly rare and powerful weaponry and with a single goal in mind – the destruction of heretek engines and xenos war machines whose very existence was considered a blasphemy to the Omnissiah.

Use of the Atropos was normally confined to the authority of the Synod of Magos of a given Forge World, a power unleashed both against the enemies of the Omnissiah and held as an ultimate sanction against any wayward magos or forge-fane that had committed heresy against the edicts of the Machine Cult. It is rare, but not unknown, for a Knight Atrapos to be gifted into the charge of a Knight House outside the direct influence of a Forge World, marking payment of some great service or blood-debt between the two.

In the legends of the Knight Houses, the machine spirits of the Knight Atrapos are said to possess an all-destroying hunger; for the scion who bonds with them, madness is said to be a constant risk.

Amongst the rarest examples of Knight Armour currently produced in any numbers by the forge-fanes of the Mechanicum, the Magaera is a marvel of lost technology. Within its armoured frame are housed relic devices understood by only the most learned tech-savants in the Mechanicum, from dedicated repair autosimulacra to the nighimpregnable ionic flare shield. However, the strain placed on the Armour’s atomantic reactors leads to dangerous levels of radiation seeping past the containment shields and in the event of heavy damage, potentially catastrophic internal explosions.

Magaera type Knights are most often used as shock assault units, breaching the most heavily defended enemy positions, while shrugging off heavy weapons fire and selfrepairing even devastating weapon strikes in a few minutes. To aid in this role, it is armed with a complex lightning cannon, using focussed electro-magnetic beams to vaporise infantry and blast apart armour.