Origins & Founding
The Black Templars trace their beginning to Sigismund, first and most devoted templar of the primarch Rogal Dorn and the greatest champion of the Imperial Fists. When the Legions were broken apart in the wake of the Horus Heresy, Sigismund led his followers away not to settle a fortress-world but to embark upon an eternal crusade, a war against the enemies of the Emperor that would never end while heresy endured. His warriors took his creed as their founding law, and ten thousand years later the Black Templars remain the truest inheritors of the crusading spirit that name implies.
Character & Culture
Theirs is a creed of absolute, uncompromising faith. Reason and doubt are the province of lesser men; a Black Templar meets the foe not with cold calculation but with righteous fury tempered by an oath. Before every battle a Templar swears a vow against a nominated target or task, and that oath becomes an unbreakable spiritual contract that will not be set aside until it is fulfilled or the swearer lies dead. This zealotry runs so deep that Chaplains hold unusually elevated authority within the Chapter, guiding not only its spiritual health but its very command. The Black Templars famously distrust the psyker's art, forgoing a Librarius entirely, for they hold that faith alone should shield a warrior from the perils of the warp. Their heraldry of stark black and bone, emblazoned with the cross that gives them their name, is a banner of dread across the galaxy.
A Chapter Without a Home
Alone among the great Chapters, the Black Templars maintain no single fortress-world. Their entire strength is dispersed across a scattering of colossal crusade fleets, each a mobile monastery-city bearing thousands of warriors, their arms, and the means to make more. Each fleet answers to its own Marshal and drifts wherever war, faith, or the perceived will of the Emperor seems to point. This structure lets the Chapter field a strength that some believe far exceeds the thousand warriors the Codex Astartes prescribes, though the Templars scatter their forces so widely that no outside authority can easily count them. Aspirants are recruited from the many worlds the crusades pass through, an ever-renewing tide of the faithful drawn into the endless war.
Notable Campaigns
The Black Templars have fought in nearly every major conflict of the Imperium's long twilight, their crusade fleets appearing wherever the fighting is fiercest and the enemies of the Emperor most defiant. They have hurled themselves against xenos empires, cleansed worlds sunk into heresy, and stood in the breach against the daemonic incursions unleashed by the Great Rift, which they take as proof that the galaxy has entered its final, decisive age of judgment. Wherever they go, they leave conquered worlds returned to the fold and heretics reduced to ash.
Combat Doctrine
The Black Templars fight to close the distance and end the matter face to face. They favor the headlong assault, the boarding action, and the crushing charge, delivering their zealous warriors into the enemy's heart by drop pod, gunship, and above all the relic-armored Land Raiders their crusade fleets field in unusual number. Once battle is joined, a Templar formation is nearly impossible to halt, each Battle-Brother driven by his oath to press forward through wounds and slaughter until his vow is fulfilled. Faith and the sword, held together, are the whole of their answer to the encroaching dark.
Order of battle
The Black Templars field the units of the Space Marines, a detachment from the roster:
Other Space Marines formations
Angels VermillionSecretive to the edge of paranoia, the Angels Vermillion are a Blood Angels successor who bear their bloodline's curse in bleak isolation, shunning their brother Chapters and guarding their darkest secrets with quiet menace.
Angels of AbsolutionThe Angels of Absolution are a Second Founding successor of the Dark Angels who wear their gene-sire's shame more lightly than any of their kin. Armoured in stark bone-white, they hold the singular conviction that their sins were washed clean in the fires of Caliban's fall, and so they have set aside the very name of the Unforgiven. Serene where other successors are haunted, they nonetheless ride to the secret war with undimmed resolve, hunting the Fallen not to purchase their own salvation but because justice demands the guilty answer for their crimes.
Angels of VengeanceThe Angels of Vengeance are among the grimmest of the Unforgiven, a Second Founding successor of the Dark Angels who wage the secret hunt for the Fallen with a cold, unrelenting fury. Clad in armour of funereal black, they are austere even by the standards of their tormented lineage, speaking little and forgiving nothing. Where their parent Chapter cloaks its shame in ritual, the Angels of Vengeance carry theirs like a drawn blade, and they will cross any gulf and shatter any oath of secrecy to see a single Fallen dragged before the Inner Circle.
Blood AngelsNoble and haunted, the Blood Angels wage constant war against the twin genetic curses of thirst and rage inherited from their martyred primarch Sanguinius. From the blasted world of Baal they answer the Imperium's darkest calls, warriors of aching beauty forever poised on the edge of the abyss within.
Carcharodons AstraGrey ghosts of the void, the Carcharodons emerge from the darkness between the stars to slaughter the enemies of Mankind, then vanish once more. Few know their origins, and fewer still survive their coming.
Crimson FistsBattered but unbroken, the Crimson Fists rose from the ashes of near-extinction to become a byword for defiance. Sons of Dorn, they fight on when all hope is spent.
Dark AngelsThe secretive First Legion, the Dark Angels wage two wars at once: one for the Imperium, and a hidden one to hunt down the traitors of their own broken past. Knightly, disciplined, and consumed by ancient guilt, they pursue the Fallen across ten thousand years, guarding a shame no outsider must ever learn.
Flesh TearersCursed with the worst of Sanguinius's flaws, the Flesh Tearers wage war on the knife's edge of madness. They are the most savage of the Blood Angels' sons, forever fighting their own extinction.
Discussion
- No comments yet. Be the first to reply.