Warp Hornets Background

The Warp Hornets renegade chapter were first introduced to this blog whilst talking of the problems that I had had with bright yellow in the FtW weekly round table discussion. In this posting, I'm going to outline some thoughts I had as to their background.

Firstly and foremost, I wanted a infantry-heavy chaos space marine force to game with (GT2007 and earlier games). Large squads already provide a deviation from standard codex space marines. So, I imagined that the transition from loyalist chapter to renegades happened over an extended time period during which the chapter regularly fielded larger troop squads.

Why would they do that? Well, the idea is that they got stuck. Isolated. Cut-off from the astronomican and the imperium at large. The cause? A warp storm on a remote planetary system.

Why were they there? Their purpose was to suppress an insurrection by a significant part of the populace across multiple planets and small moons and artificial satellites against imperial rule. Answering the call from the local imperial governor, the entire chapter re-deployed to orbit the planetary system and set about returning the system to imperial rule. Although it went well at first, the warp storm came along soon after arrival.

Trapped without reinforcements, their positions were compromised through attrition, and their librarians corrupted by the local populace's machinations. Whilst it took years, the warp hornets turned to chaos fully as a means of bringing the populace under control. As much of the populace were already chaos worshipping, it didn't take a lot for the locals to then accept them.

When the warp storms broke, the hornets set forth once more aboard captured hulks to spread the word of chaos. I still field squads of warp hornets from time to time as I still like the idea of a zero-vehicles force. In the next posting, I'll talk about a Warp Hornet Terminator Champion that regularly comes out of the woodwork.