Fluff

Every converted Guard army needs some nauseatingly awful fan-fiction to back it up, and I am no stranger to the fluffwright's art.


The army's fluff has gone through several incarnations which I won't bore you with here, but here's the gist of what I've settled on in order to explain the rather odd styling of this motley bunch:


The 'Wolfsheads'


Somewhere in the Ultima Segmentum, bordering on the Dominion of Storms, lies a small planetary system that once held a minor Naval refuelling station. Due to sabotage or an administrative error, the station was listed as 'Destroyed' in the Administratum's records during the Heresy, ending the Navy's interest - and permanent presence - to this day.

The system quickly sank into a new age of darkness, and as even the robust technologies of the Great Crusade slowly fell victim to neglect or incomprehension as the generations passed and knowledge bled away, travel - and, finally, communications - between the Naval station and the small lunar agri-world that fed it ceased. The last ship left the station in 009.M31, leaving the fertile moon and its inhabitants to their own devices. 


Being a relatively sparsely populated world and already geared towards agriculture, the planet did not suffer the slow, starving fate of many hive-worlds or other industrial planets isolated by the Heresy and its aftermath. However, deprived of the industries and technology of the Naval station the inhabitants of this small moon slowly reverted to a simple, pastoral life - though not, it should be observed, one devoid of danger. The moon had been colonised partly as a private enterprise by a Rogue Trader called Ephemerus Castille (presumed to be the Eph.s Cast. (Rg.Tr) who appears in the mortuary lists of the powerful industrial guilds on nearby Vadarast, having been executed for siding against them in one of the endless localised conflicts that plagued the galaxy during the Age of Strife), who used it to rear exotic animals for the playboy elites of the sub-sector capital of the Castinus system. His untimely death is considered by contemporary scholars to have been a major factor in the moon's continued isolation, and with no Naval officers on ground leave, or shipping magnates to entertain, the sprawling hunting estates maintained for wealthy visitors were neglected, sabotaged or proved impossible to maintain. Ornamental fowl quickly fell prey to the teeth and claws of escaped carnosaurs, hunter-felids, and other exotic predators bred for off-planet hunting parties as their pens decayed and powered fences fell silent, roaming abroad in the night to find the flocks and herds watched by sharp-eyed shepherds alert to stealthy predators and raiding rivals alike.


The disparate population centres lost their metropolitan air and became increasingly introspective and insular as motorised transport became a thing of the past, and the fine equestrian mounts, meat-kine or guard-dogs bred for off-world dealers or holidaying bigwigs became important family assets rather than a luxury export. Inevitably, diseases, harvest failures or predator infestations pushed some groups to raiding; others - often the dynasties of the former PDF - quite ignorant of the arcane mysteries of farming, transformed very quickly from the world's protectors to its scourge, selling their services for food and lodging. What little contact there was largely took the form of vast annual meetings at a distinctive river confluence in the shadow of the sharply ascending mountain range that bisects the moon's primary continent, calculated from bastardised and much-altered records of the system's orbital cycles from millennia ago. At these meetings animals are bought and sold in their thousands, sleek shallow-bottomed wooden ships hewn from the moon's abundant forests find new owners, marriages are arranged, scores are settled and the delicate metalwork of the moon's small and exclusive fraternities of smiths haggled over.


The psyk-signature of so many minds in one small area attracted the attention of an astropath on an outward-questing Ecclesiarchy missionary-ship scanning the darkness between worlds for just such a long-lost world to bring into the Emperor's light, and it was over just one such meet that the Limitless Benificence settled in 838.M39, disgorging a (well-armed) cutter to make contact with the benighted hordes beneath.


And the rest, as they say, is history....