Questoris Familia – Datasheets

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The Armiger Helverin is a fast-moving weapons platform hearing a pair of Phaeton autocannon designed to lay down blistering hails of heavy fire while running rings around the enemy’s forces. The pilots tasked with such protective duties are rarely drawn from a blousehold’s main lineages, and may be distant cousins of the Household nobility, warriors of proven valour selected at tourneys or from the battlefield, while some Houses will even sink to recruiting impressive prisoners of war or captured scions of rival Houses, each hoping to one day attain the rank of Scion Aspirant and join the Household proper.

The Knight Moirax was an Armiger variant which saw little use before the darkest hours of the Horus Heresy, most frequently sent to battle among those Knight Households indentured to the Mechanicum. 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, often considered lesser and expendable by their lords, and though every other courtesy was extended to these pilots, they would be excluded from both their place at Questor Court and their right to extend the reach of their bloodline.

The Armiger knight is a lighter, more agile cousin to the Questoris knight that often fought alongside its larger confederates during the Great Crusade, picking off threats which came from enemies beneath the notice of the larger knights, such as swarming throngs of infantry attempting to breach the protective barriers of their ion shields to clamp explosives directly upon their armoured frames. Armiger Warglaives are armed with menacing thermal lances and fearsome reaper chainblades, well suited to the belligerent and aggressive nature of their pilots.

The Knight Asterius is amongst the most massive and formidable engines of destruction available to Knight Houses, armed with heavy conversion beam weaponry able to reduce the mightiest edifices to ash and even threaten mighty titan engines. The secondary weapon systems of the Knight Asterius are deadly in their own right, a carapace mounted Karacnos mortar capable of annihilating entire phalanxes of troop formations alongside its torso mounted volkite culverins. Only the strongest of minds dare try to control the all-consuming fire raging within the Knight Asterius’ machine spirit and most are soon after engulfed by it.

One of the most heavily armed and armoured of all knight chassis in service, few Households were able to muster Acastus armours, even at the height of the Great Crusade. The Knight Porphyrion variant in particular served often as the supreme enforcer of the rule and dominion of a Household over its scions, though for some its bulk and the selection of a purely ranged armament - no matter its magnitude - was a drawback which could not be overlooked. Others stressed that the size and power of the Porphyrion, rivalling that of a scout-class titan, pushed the limits of what a single human mind could interface with.

The Cerastus Knight Acheron is a fearsome sight on the battlefield, a reaper of lives carefully designed not only to destroy but to inspire terror. The presence of an Acheron warns the foe to expect no mercy, for such weapons are only deployed for missions of extermination, to topple the works of the enemy and scour clean their lands with flame. Those few scions who prefer these grim mounts are either warriors of iron will, capable of suppressing the sinister whispers of the armour’s machine spirits, or tortured souls who relish the armour’s malicious impulses and the carnage it wreaks on the field of battle.

A Cerastus pattern of ancient provenance and staggering potency, it is a rare honour for a Household to count a Knight Atrapos among its ranks, whether a relic recovered from the vaults of a vanquished foe or a gift of exceptional favour from a Forge World. During the cataclysmic wars of the Horus Heresy, it was not uncommon for Knight Atrapos suits to be employed against enemy knights or as executioners for wayward scions who had strayed from the allegiance of their House, the cold hunger for destruction within the machine spirit of the Knight Atrapos sated only with the ruination of such great adversaries.

Armed with the fearsome castigator pattern bolt cannon, the Cerastus Knight Castigator is favoured by those Households faced with hordes of lesser foes that might otherwise overwhelm even a mighty knight through their sheer numbers. Capable of obliterating infantry formations in a thunderous rain of mass reactive explosions and whirling power blades, and carving apart light vehicles with ease, the Castigator is a formidable combatant. Notably amongst their ilk, the Castigator is also renowned for the stoic nature of the machine spirits within, whose vigour is difficult to rouse, but almost impossible to ignore.

The Lancer is the most famed of the Cerastus type knight armours, a highly sophisticated chassis whose speed and agility far exceed the clumsier Questoris class. The Cerastus type knights appear to have been designed solely for war, not as protectors but as bloody-handed conquerors and tools of destruction, a legacy of the violence that marked the beginning of the Age of Strife. The Lancer is held in high esteem by the more impetuous of a House’s scions, its potent ion gauntlet shield and shock lance perfectly suited to battling the foe face to face, where only a perfectly timed thrust of the lance stands between a scion and death.

The Knight Questoris was the most common suit of knight armour extant in the Imperium at the outbreak of the Horus Heresy. Such was its popularity amongst the noble scions of the Questoris Households that it was reconfigured in a myriad of ways with weapon options and hull augments, and given names such as Paladin, Errant, Warden, Gallant and Crusader in the fashion of their traditions, lineage and fighting styles. Little different from the ancient war machines carried to the stars by the first Long March colonists, the Knights Questoris are a very literal embodiment of the Knight Households’ storied legacy.

The Knight Magaera is a technological marvel rarely seen outside the vassal Houses of the Mechanicum, who jealously guard the secrets of its creation. Armed with a lightning cannon that blasts apart heavy infantry and vehicles alike and a siege claw which can breach even the strongest enemy fortifications, the Knight Magaera is often placed at the forefront of Household assaults. However, excessive levels of radiation seeping from the knight’s reactor core and the risk of catastrophic internal explosions in the event of heavy damage mean that to pilot a Knight Magaera is cause for equal celebration and lament.

Associated with the massacres of the Age of Strife and the Great Crusade that followed it, the Styrix stands as a stain of dishonour upon the reputation of any scion that bonds with it. In battle, its volkite chieorovile reduces swathes of infantry to ash, the immensely powerful hekaton siege claw smashing open bunkers and vehicles to loose yet more victims for its graviton gun to pulverise or its irad-scourer to boil alive. This grim efficiency in the wholesale slaughter of ground troops is considered beneath the honour of a true knight by some, but many Questoris Households hold no such reservations.