Traitor or Treacher Legions ?

[modelwarrior]

Found this on another site and makes some interesting reading. Its taken from an early White Dwarf.

[JollyBob]

An interesting read, thank you.

It's not hugely different, Treacher being an old fashioned version of Traitor, (as in Treacherous).. but it has a pleasing archaic quality that sits really well with the Heresy (or Inter-Legionary War) being a tale from myth.

I imagine it fell out of use because of the endless arguments about pronouncing it "tretcher" or "treecher".

Interesting wee detail there that the chaos marines aren't immortal/time-lost corrupted veterans of the Long War, but their weird, mad and mutated descendants...

[anevilgiraffe]

or it was all the fault of Arthur Fowler...

[Ragsta]

Also interesting that it states the original traitors to be extinct now. Thank you for sharing, it's great fodder for narrative building.

[modelwarrior]

Interesting wee detail there that the chaos marines aren't immortal/time-lost corrupted veterans of the Long War, but their weird, mad and mutated descendants...

 I wonder if this detail was dropped deliberately over time as dead Chaos characters dont sell to well ? Saying that mutated descendants leaves plenty of possability for new models.

[Khusru2]

Yes, an interesting article. I remember a book where the Imperium fleet attempted a preemptive strike against a fleet under construction in the EofT. Foolishly they landed troops on the planets and it went as well as you would expect with none surviving the madness and evilness of the very ground they walked on. The remaining ships abandoned the ground troops and retreated. They had destroyed many vessels but it was a trap they took hook, line and sinker

[area23]

Excellent! Love the take of them being the mutant descendents. I always thought they were mutated for their exposure to the warp while being still alive in the 40th millennium because time drifts differently in the Eye of Terror and the Warp.
I'll have to re-read Slaves to Darkness and the Renegade army list in white dwarf this weekend.

I didn't like the traitor miniatures at all at the time but I really like the Giger-ish bio mech look now, especially in dark Aliens/Species colours.

[Daeothar]

A cool piece of early 40K fluff 

I take it this was from before the release of Rogue Trader?

[modelwarrior]

A cool piece of early 40K fluff 

I take it this was from before the release of Rogue Trader?

1988 White Dwarf edition 99 and I think Rogue Trader was about the same time ?

[area23]

A cool piece of early 40K fluff 

I take it this was from before the release of Rogue Trader?

In Rogue Trader there was no talk about Chaos at all. I think this is from after the Book of the Astronomican and before Realms of Chaos.

Edit: from the publishing of Rogue Trader in'87 until RoC in '88 a lot of books and articles were published. Chaos and renegades were introduced in the 40K universe with Adeptus Titanicus and Space Marine. The same year also Siege and Astronomican were published but there was no mention of Chaos yet.
We need a timeline of exact months from 1987 to 1990.

[Daeothar]

There wasn't? Wow; my memory must really be starting to fail me

I have all the old books and now I'm intrigued, so I will spend a (significant?) portion of this weekend to read through them again

[Belligerentparrot]

One other bit of fluff that has changed is that in the 1980s/early 90s, Space Marines themselves were just particularly psychotic humans (helloooo, Frank Herbert), usually recruited from savage barbarian worlds. Like a whole army of Conans (there's a great short sequence of b/w pictures in the RT rulebook illustrating it) indoctrinated into Imperial dogma. That's why the original Marine Scout sculpts have all sorts of little tribal details like primitive axes and amulets and stuff.

I mention it because I think it complements the thought that the original traitors are long dead. If the original traitors are just Conans of negotiable allegiance, then their numbers can be straightforwardly maintained by later humans fleeing to the EoT. It is only if space marines are bio-engineered supermen created in imperial labs that the current "chaos space marines" need to be the still-alive originals.

[area23]

Good point!