Iron Warriors
| Iron Warriors | ||
|---|---|---|
 |
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| Battle Cry | "Iron Within, Iron Without!" | |
| Number | IV | |
| Original Homeworld | Olympia | |
| Current Homeworld | Medrengard | |
| Primarch | Perturabo | |
| Champion | Possibly Honsou But most likely Shon'tu | |
| Specialty | Artillery and offensive siege warfare | |
| Allegiance | Chaos Undivided | |
| Colours | Black, gold, silver | |
The Iron Warriors are a bunch of badass pricks, who are also robotic. They enjoy torturing, maiming, and burning down their old shit. Nobody at GW can decide on how they want to portray the Legion, like we care what they think anyway. They also have a fetish for hazard stripes, which they make liberal use of in their colour scheme. It is as though they wish to say "do not use the side of my bolter as a step" or "touching my pauldron may result in crushed fingers." Then again, considering who these guys are, these would actually be good warnings to heed.
Combat Tactics
A Chaos Legion specializing in breaking sieges (as in, taking a fortified location, though logically this should mean that they can do this and break out of a siege) which is shown in their love of artillery and greater focus on ranged combat, which stands in contrast to the other Chaos Space Marine legions who are far more disposed to melee combat (that doesn't mean that Iron Warriors won't punch a few skulls out, though!). Their troops are excellent close-range fighters and close-quarters combatants, and they often make use of special weaponry.
Iron Warriors are also fond of using hordes of human conscripts as cannon fodder, no doubt recruited from conquered worlds and slave populations on Medrengard. The conscripts are described as wearing red uniforms and bits of black armor, and armed with assorted bolt action rifles, lasguns, and autoguns. The Iron Warriors basically zerg-rush thousands of them at enemy strongholds to play fun games such as "find the minefield", "absorb the gunfire" and "reveal the artillery emplacements". They are one of the few Chaos legions that do take prisoners, but only to send then in the first wave instead of their conscripted slaves, who are considered to be slightly more valuable due to their ability to dig decent trenches and mines.
They also have a lot of Obliterators, which are a bunch of muscle blobs armed to the teeth on top of their heads (being Chaos guys, they have shit like that). Literally. They themselves are a walking arsenal, because they can MAKE WEAPONS OUT OF THEIR BODIES!
Iron Warriors are also the batshit insane sickfucks behind the Daemonculaba. They're the only Chaos Space Marines who don't break down in maniacal laughter constantly, as they see this as a sign of weakness. They're not terribly fond of Daemons (like the Word Bearers or the Black Legion are), though they will make use of them (unlike the Night Lords who don't even like Chaos), and they aren't closet loyalists like the Alpha Legion.
History
Back in the old pre-Heresy days, no legion ever got shit on more than them. It started promising for a tiny bit at the start when Emps led them, but when Horus took over they got assigned all the dirty, exhausting trench and ditch fighting, and got no respect for it. There is a passage when, whilst shoveling up earthworks in preparation for the Drop Site Massacre, one of the Sons of Horus literally turns to one of the Emperor's Children and asks, "Hey, why aren't the Iron Warriors doing this."
Even when they were rejoined by their Primarch, it didn't get any better. In fact, it was that moment things started going downhill. When united with his legion for the first time, he looked upon them and saw that they were not all they could be and so he decided that they needed a bout of decimation to motivate them properly. So he had 10% of his entire legion beaten to death without honour.
This actually worked and changed the character of the legion from "work-horse" legion to "meat grinder" legion; Perturabo's trick taught them that casualties do not matter, only victory does. They became a legion of mathematicians, where battle strategies could be determined using formula based on available weaponry and expected attrition rates. Fortunately for them, Perturabo was expertly skilled with numbers and logistics and organised his legion extremely efficiently, therefore his legion was able to absorb such losses due to maintaining very high numbers, second only to the XIIIth Legion. In fact they could have possibly overtaken any other legion in numbers if they did not continually suffer such high casualty rates.
This casual attitude towards attrition unfortunately created an atmosphere of paranoia amongst the officer cadre, where the only way to guarantee survival is to get promoted into a position of usefulness. Therefore their officers suffered incredible Nerdrage whenever things did not go according to plan and scrambled over each other attempting to gain the attention of their superiors.
Also, their reputation suffered amongst the allied Imperial Army auxilia, who gave the Iron Warriors the nickname Corpse Grinders, as units that were assigned to them tended to get used as cannon fodder for softening up the enemy. This tendency eventually led to the Council of Terra to only assign the Iron Warriors support from penal brigades of poor quality expendable troops, causing the reputation of the Legion to spiral further downwards.
This new-and-improved attitude still didn't endear them to their brother legions, it was this complete lack of anything remotely resembling respect from anyone at all that was the final factor in their primarch flipping his lid.
Iron Cage
Taking inspiration from their primarch, they display great facility in setting traps. The most notable of which was the "Iron Cage incident" where the Iron Warriors built a twenty square kilometer fortress on Sebastus IV at the close of the Horus Heresy, with a massive fortified bunker at the center. They leaked information that allowed the Imperial Fists to track them there and Rogal Dorn himself promised to bring back Perturabo in "an iron cage". The Fists assaulted the fortress, taking huge casualties in doing so as the Iron Warriors fell back to split their advance and draw them into kill zones. Eventually the Fists expended all their ammunition and resorted to knife-fighting. When the Fists finally broke through to the central bunker, they discovered it empty save for the numerous inward-pointing guns designed to kill anyone who breached it. The entire purpose of the fortress was just to bait and exhaust the Imperial Fists' forces, turning their own legendary determination into a liability that lead to their own deaths and the humiliation of their legion (albeit one that would have required the death of Perturabo to completely wipe them out, if you believe those corpsefuckers' propaganda). Just As Planned. While the Iron Cage incident was the most notable, the Iron Warriors do plenty of other things like that, but on a smaller scale, such as firing fixed position guns into civilian habitation blocks to bait the enemy into counter-attacking, then evacuating through underground trenches and detonating pre-rigged explosives when the opposing forces reach the fixed gun emplacements.
The War of the Beast
This little incident that made the Ullanor Crusade look like a skirmish brought out some unusual behavior from the Iron Warriors. First of all, the threat posed by the orks against the galaxy was so great, that the Iron Warriors allied with the Imperial Fists, of all people. If that weren't out of character enough for them, they also found the orks' use of humans as literal cattle disgusting. Maybe the whole Daemonculaba thing was also too disgusting for them since Honsou hadn't been around at the time, maybe even the Iron Warriors have standards when it comes to human experimentation...or maybe the writer just didn't know jack shit about the Iron Warrior's character. It's probably that last one.
Iron Warriors Today
They used to be incredibly badass with special rules for having more heavy weapon options including tanks and artillery but Gav Thorpe (who's basically Matt Ward's husband) decided that spikey marines should be inferior to loyalists in every way possible.
The Iron Warriors have been one of the more popular legions in fluff over the past few years. While some have put this down to them being 'grittier' or more realistic than the others, the truth is probably more functional then fanciful: The Iron Warriors are for the most part not gibbering madmen. This might seem a dumb reason but it's actually important. To write a good character they need to make sense to the reader, even when we don't agree with them we need to understand why they want to do it. The other legions kinda lack that. Why did you attack that planet? 'Because it turns me on' doesn't really make for an interesting character, nor does being told to by demons, wanting to kill everything all the time or just really digging dead stuff. So that leaves the Iron Warriors as being just about the only generally sane legion who do things for reasons normal people can understand.
Graham McNeill wrote a book that was mostly about them. Called 'Storm of Iron', surprisingly, and it featured a boatload of Imperial Fists, Iron Warriors (surprisingly) and a whole load of dickery, including traitorous techpriests, countless rows of geneseed (not being used to make more Speehs Mehreens, unsurprisingly. <--- Why WH40K's so Grimdark), and a daemon prince. To cap it all off, this is where Honsou gets his start. Last but not least, countless Imperial Guard and Titans. ...Tell me again why the Imperials lost? There was a traitor on the inside, and about fifty thousand tons of badass at the gates. Baaaad combination. (McNeill then wrote a Horus Heresy prequel called 'Angel Exterminatus', featuring Fulgrim being an even bigger dick than usual and an Iron Hands Professor Farnsworth.)
Even Ward seems to think they're cool, as he has Warsmith Shon'tu one-up both Honsou and Abaddon. How? He Invades Terra! He teams up with Be’lakor (yeah, the same guy from Fantasy battles) and use Phalanx's warp door (yeah remember that from the Soul Drinkers book) to invade it hoping to take it over and bomb the Emperor's palaces. Even the combined plot armor of the Imperial Fists AND the Legion of the Damned is still just barely enough to force a stalemate.
John French, on the other hand, doesn't seem to like them much at all. This is a shame since they tend to be his go-to antagonists.
Anyway, here is their theme, done by HMKids, which includes in the lyrics quotes from Dawn of War Chaos Space Marines for extra-flavour! They are METAL indeed!
The German Death Metal band "Debauchery" also wrote a song and video here [1], and it is badass.
Iron Warriors Character
Personality-wise, the Iron Warriors are one of the most…unpleasant Traitor Legions. When the Iron Warriors go to war, everyone is expendable. Eve-ry-one. Back in the days of the Great Crusade they spent Astartes lives like bolter rounds, human lives like lasbolts autogun bullets, and they haven’t got better with time. Their pure, unadulterated contempt for life is such that, in the Siege of Castellax, they refer to their mortal servants simply as “flesh,” and place orders for more like fast food (battalions 3-5 were wiped out today. I’ll have four more, to go, and hold the pickles). Speaking of food, when rations started to get low, the Iron Warriors started feeding their people the rendered down remains of the dead. Yeah. Unpleasant.
The Iron Warriors are basically the very epitome of the bad boss trope. The Night Lords may send the populations of entire worlds to the skinning pits just for shits and giggles (and record it all for future shits and giggles), but even they usually respect their valuable servants, enough to even sometimes exchange friendly banter with them.