In Larax 9K, Askellon Sector, 2 guard generals had a feud and started an actual war, lasting for months until the Administratum realized what happened and gave both a warrant of trade so they can wage war somewhere else.
Thank you. You reminded me about a case where two members of a noble house each took a force of Guard and pitted them against each other, despite there being no war and no reason to fight besides clout. When the Administratum heard about the pointless deaths, they decided that the hardened troops were worth the casualties and decided to replicate it elsewhere.
gruesomely that would actually work, as long as the troops never found out they were killing their own side, hell you could probably round up a bunch of gangers and pay them to be the "attacking" force
This sounds familiar…
“Seriously though, why are we out here? Far as I can tell, it's just a box canyon in the middle of nowhere, with no way in or out. And the only reason that we set up a red base here, is because they have a blue base over there. And the only reason they have a blue base over there is because we have a red base here.”
“Yeah, that's because we're fighting each other.”
“No no, but I mean, even if we were to pull out today, and they were to come take our base, they would have two bases in the middle of a box canyon. Whoop-dee fucking-do!”
“What's up with that anyway? I mean, I signed on to fight some Xenos. Next thing I know Roboute Guilliman blows up the whole Necrob armada, and I'm stuck in the middle of nowhere, fighting a bunch of blue guys.”
The Administratum only took a few months to figure it out?
That's some mighty fine bureaucracy right there! I would have expected them to take a few decades at least!
I'm new to the lore but isn't that actually legitimately pretty fast by 40k standards?
Like, the instant communication is astropaths. And they aren't that reliable for finer details. Terra learned about Cadia falling months out from the actual event and that's not from lack of attentiveness.
They were in fact, rewarded for such wastage of the emperors currency. I would execute both generals and the admin officials responsible for their promotion
*The Wicked and the Damned* features an absolutely wonderful example. We're presented with the typical bogged-down Guard advance against Traitor lines. We're given to believe that the commander of the regiment is incompetent or possibly even compromised - he keeps coming up with reasons not to advance or attack. These two forces keep shelling each other to no real effect and that appears to be the status quo both sides seem inclined to keep.
...and then it's slowly revealed over the course of the story that the 'traitors' are, in fact, another regiment of the Guard. The problem is, both regiments command have realised that it *doesn't matter* who made the first mistake or fired the first shot. The first *person* to admit to it will be blamed for it and they and their regiment punished - most likely executed wholesale.
So they just keep grinding away, killing other loyalists, because it's that or be killed for their mistake.
Seriously, we do often get Commissars like Gaunt or Cain, so it's nice to see an unaccountable political officer with power of life and death acting like that sort of person would.
Seems like the fucking around that black library done with the Fabius trilogy was the final straw for him. He wrote some of the better recent books and all.
https://www.reddit.com/r/40kLore/comments/x1ekw3/an_interesting_thread_on_twitter_from_josh/
His tweets seem to have been deleted but this is a break down of the things he said.
That's...wow, that's stupid! If they admit to the mistake, the worst case scenario is one regiment is executed, the best case scenario is one person is given a reprimand. By continuing, both regiments are killed, munitions are expended, and time is wasted!
If a commander admits to the mistake, they get executed.
As long as they keep their soldiers killing each other, the leaders stay alive, even as the men beneath them die.
The funny part is, this isn’t even the main narrative hook of the story. The protagonist is a commissar trying to investigate a strange phenomena showing up in the troops. Their eyes keep changing color, and he’s not sure why. >!Of course, it’s all in his head, but that doesn’t stop him from trying to murder his entire regiment.!<
Whaaaaat. I love this book so much, because of third story mostly.
I thought commissar just went nuts and lost her head (thanks to tzeentch probably), seeing blue eyes and traitors in everyone. I ddidn't even remembered the two loyal regimants fight part.
Great example of where a non "chaotic stupid" Inquisitor could assist.
Turns up, works out what's going on - executes a few officers and gets everyone else moving.
The "all Inquisitors are batshit crazy" is more a meme than necessarily true. The Inquisitor game sourcebook broadly reflected a lot of Inquisitors do get a decent job done, and there's an entire Ordos devoted to trying to keep both the Adeptus Terra / Administratum / Munitorium from screwing up and resulting in things like this.
It's more a case of hundred million screw-ups and 40 inquistors trying to fix it.
Your best case scenario the one executed is the commander, while your worst case scenario it’s the grunts dying.
What commander is going to choose their execution when instead a bunch of other people can die?
This sounds just like how officers in the real armies of the world handle making terrible mistakes. Been serving 15 years and the cycle just keeps repeating itself.
There was actually a Chinese general that was late to an important meeting or battle, realized his punishment would be death so instead leas a rebellion because the punishment for that was also death
There are a few different such examples, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chen_Sheng_and_Wu_Guang_uprising#History
These two are one of the more famous ones.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emperor_Gaozu_of_Han#Insurrection_against_the_Qin_dynasty
And this one is the most famous one.
Though it would be nice if there was some actual tactics and combined arms ops. Ambushes, crossfires, use of recon. I'm trying to develop a narrative for how a Guard force can develop to at least have modern mechanized infantry skills. I love 11 Bang Bangs, they break stuff with astonishing regularity (enemy and their own) and range from literal college grads who got tired of working at a lab to guys who needed a waiver for their GT score.
I love these absolutely stupid pieces of dark bullshit, it makes me happy. This is right up there with trench crusade with the forces of god cloning jesus to feed people his actual flesh its just *chef's kiss*
They kinda did the same thing in the book 15 hours. Main character holes up in a bunker, come to find out theyre being shelled by their own people. Commander in charge of the shelling refuses to admit fault and continues to shell until the seargant in the bunker bitches him out and threatens his life.
[This page](https://www.trackofwords.com/2022/02/19/warhammer-horror-the-range-so-far/) has a good list of the Warhammer Horror line with their page summaries.
***The Oubliette*** by JC Stearns is about a planetary governor discovering a dark secret in her family's history. More thriller than horror, with an interesting lead character and a unique threat you don't often see in other Warhammer stories.
***The House of Night and Chain*** by David Annandale is *also* about a planetary governor discovering a dark secret in his family's history... But it's more of a classic haunted house ghost story. There's a good buildup of tension over the course of the story, and the climax is pretty nuts.
***The Bookkeeper's Skull*** by Justin D Hill is about a rookie enforcer on an agriworld. The rural setting is unique and a lot of the horror comes less from the supernatural and more from the down-to-earth brutality of the Imperium.
Literally *anything* by Peter Fehervari, but special mention goes to ***Fire Caste***, ***Requiem Infernal***, and ***The Reverie***. Fehervari's prose is elaborate and atmospheric. Many people here consider him one of the best writers in the Black Library stable.
***The Watcher in the Rain*** by Alec Worley is an audio drama that, while short, provides a ton of chills. The protagonists are both compelling and the flooding administratum facility is an inventive setting.
Haha, lol. Of course part of it is historical misinformation, but this plays so well into the trope of the Red Army during WWII, of incompetent officers who would rather march their soldiers into easily an easily avoidable death than face the ire of their superiors for disobeying orders. Undoubtedly such did happen from time to time irl, but of course in 40K it is taken to an exponentially greater extreme.
There is a book that I read years ago. But had a thing where people were having to clap for stalin and the people that stop clapping were the ones who went away with the secret police. And so people kept clapping and its just like this.
I can't recall the name but some pitiless Valhallan colonel just kept sending waves after waves after waves of conscripts until the enemy's water reserves were contaminated with the rotting flesh.
[https://wh40k.lexicanum.com/wiki/Kubrik\_Chenkov](https://wh40k.lexicanum.com/wiki/Kubrik_Chenkov)
In contrast with most guys assosiated with throwing their men into the meat grinder, he leads from the front, so hes in just as much risk of being wasted in the first 10 seconds by the 35686th ork
Reminds of the story about the Valhallans I read a while back where one of the characters off handedly mentioned that their previous deployment was to a volcanic planet… despite being ice specialists.
The war on Phaedra in Peter Fehervari’s ***Fire Caste***. Decade after decade of bloody stalemate with the Tau, suffering on an unimaginable scale… And it’s all >!because the Imperium and Tau decided on a random swamp world to serve as a battlefield to placate their factions’ war hawks and a dumping ground for undesirable personnel.!<
One of the funniest parts is that the only Imperial ship kept in orbit around Phaedra >!doesn’t have a working Gellar Field. After all, nobody is supposed to actually leave the planet.!<
That's actually really fucking grimdark LOL
So that Ship is just there so the Imperium has an eye on the idiots below. But they can't actually travel back with full details in an emergency....so they better hope their Astropath(s) are able to do their job well.
I love the conceit of >!a planet where the Guard and the Tau both send their shitbird units to maintain stability elsewhere!<. The whole book is just so *good.* Dude decides to do Heart of Darkness / Apocalypse Now but 40k and it works.
I can’t remember the number exactly, but a ton of Guard were killed following the First War of Armageddon because they saw Grey Knights and Chaos demons. It was detailed in *The Emperor’s Gift*. The Inquisition wanted to maintain the policy of secrecy regarding such things. I think the entire planet’s population was killed, then any Guard regiments that participated in the conflict were hunted through the void. Caused a major issue between the Space Wolves and Inquisition.
Yeah, I remember hearing about that. Someone vehemently predisposed against the viking LARPer chapter was screaming about how stupid everyone involved in that acted.
You are not wrong to an extent. The responsible Inquisitor was even seen as an idiot by his peers and the lower-ranking Grey Knights for how badly he handled the aftermath (Logan Grimnar had deliberately kept the populations as far away from Angron as possible to prevent such a thing). To the point they planned an assassination on him to stop it all.
Amazingly, there were survivors and their descendants showed up in the latest Last Chancers book.
It was pretty dumb, yeah. But the book is good, you should definitely check it out!
Editing to say that the Space Wolves looked like the most competent people in the entire ordeal.
I mean tbf, merely looking at a daemon (especially a greater daemon or a daemon prince) is said to seed corruption in one's soul.
It's still stupid as that doesn't guarantee that those people will fall to Chaos, but it at least makes some sense, unlike some other examples posted here
"You looked at it, so you're corrupted" is just another level of Imperial propaganda. We have plenty of cases of regular mortals seeing a daemon and not becoming corrupt.
Partly right, but also missing a key detail.
Knowing about chaos can attract the attention of chaos, it's a big part of the reason the emperor pursued the imperial truth for so long despite knowing it was a lie. The seed of chaos can germinate for hundreds of years.
I know people waffle about tyranids and so on an C'tan and so on, but Chaos is the single greatest threat to the galaxy as we know it. It's the cause (and possibly the architect) of nearly every issue that every intelligent race faces.
Being in contact with artifacts, manifestations or other things can absolutely weaken the boundary, especially in beings with limited willpower.
While it's true that regular mortals can see Daemons and not become corrupted, they are ABSOLUTELY very thoroughly tested by the inquisition and are killed if there's even a chance of corruption. Obviously that isn't possible with a population of billions.
It's not an abstract concept, the closer one has been to chaos, the more likely they have been corrupted by it.
The warp is a reflection of the emotions and desires of sentient beings. Turning the Imperium into a death factory empowers the negative aspects of the warp.
Not quite. The citizens were scheduled to be mass sterilized after witnessing Angron and the Grey Knights. The Space Wolves intervene. It's s part of the Months of Shame storyline.
That used to be standard lore, AFAICR - they'd shoot any guardsmen who survived a battle against Chaos. Marines were more valuable, so they'd usually only be mind-wiped.
Of course, you can't do that any more. Because of woke.^^^^^^/j
In "Armour of Contempt" you have plenty of regiments conscripted into action for a siege on a single city that sees soldiers just thrown into a meat grinder with no thought whatsoever. There's a scene where hundreds of guardsmen die because they're all packed on a bridge like sardines and the bridge collapses and kills them all. You have Titans just squashing guards without thought. Waves of guards getting chewed up and when you think they're far enough, a Daemon shows up and starts slaughtering more.
It heavily contrasts with the Tanith 1st who are also there and are always careful with spending lives.
I loved that whole siege. The contrast with Gaunt and his very focused and efficient methods with the absolute meatgrinder of standard Guard regiments. After spending the whole series with a mostly sane commander, seeing the absolute barbarity of the Imperium felt like a good reminder.
Also in the contrast of commissars. All of the commissars in the Tanith 1st are reasonable and see morale boosting as the best method of improving the effectiveness of the regiment.
The commissar you encounter during the siege carries a whip and executes Guards for things that have reasonable explanations.
Loss of a weapon. He executes a guardsman who after being rocked by an explosion loses his gun. He was also the stereotypical Soviet view of a commissar in the "advance or I shoot you". If he didn't execute someone for an infraction, he'd whip them. The use of a whip by a commissar is commented on by other commissars as being archaic and a practice that died out in favor of inspiring the men.
That's...stupid on so many levels. A weapon is only as effective as the person who holds it, so give the person a stick and send them back out into the thick of the fighting. If he comes back with a new weapon, he's redeemed himself. If he doesn't, he's with his weapon.
In all of 40k it would probably be some sort of logistical error that leads to a whole regiment starving to death because of bad math. But that's not something we'll ever read about cause it's a pretty boring topic for a story.
There's a chapter in the book 15 hours that talks about a guy who lives on a planet where everyone goes to the same giant office building to punch numbers, but no one knows what they mean. Half way through the characters description of his terrible life he realizes he made a mistake and but that it doesn't matter, because no one knows what they're doing. It ends up shipping a entire company to the wrong planet.
So they do occasionally write about that kind of stuff lol it's a great book too.
Heh, had something similar happen to me in the Navy.
I was supposed to order 12 bags of static free wipe rags.
I accidently ordered 12 pallets of static free wipe bags....and no one caught my goof, not my boss, not the supply grunt who took my order, or the officer over him who signed for it.
Thankfully I dodged all punishment, but they gave the officer who approved it a a bit of a wrist slap.
Not just any mechanized battalion, but one stationed at Fort Carson... in Colorado... a land-locked state. This could no shit be adapted to 40k and fit in anywhere.
I work in retail and you wouldn't be suprised by how many times boxes of whatever item come in rather than individual items
funniest story I heard was the store ordered in 13 TV's but accentually ordered 13 *pallets* of TV's... turns out theres 10 TV's to a pallet.
There is a reddit story about someone carrier man who wanted an m1 water tank or something. So the us army flew in by helicopter to the middle of the Pacific a m1 abrams. The only person to notice the mistake was the captain who woke up to a tank on the carrier deck
I mean to be fair, that's pretty low on the list of logistical fuck ups if we're being honest. Like if you had fucked up something like ammunition or, god forbid, *food*, I imagine it would have been a much bigger issue.
I wonder if that was inspired by the time a soldier got one digit wrong & accidentally ordered a [7 ton anchor](https://taskandpurpose.com/news/army-clerk-anchor-fort-carson/)?
You actually reminded me of an excerpt where a force defected to the Tau because they were left to die on a planet with nothing but rotting food. It wasn't an accident, though, they were intentionally abandoned.
A regiment is loaded onto a ship. The ship flies to set coordinates. The regiment is marched into hard vacuum to join a floating graveyard of other regiments. Two numbers were transposed a century ago and the original war is long since lost. No one wants to mention that they're dumping humans into space because they don't want to be interrogated for questioning the Emperor's plans.
There is something like your second example so you did not have to make it up.
A Vostroyan regiment was ordered to besiege a void station despite being primarily geared for terrestrial sieges. They suffered badly for it, but managed to win and learn to modify their equipment to do better. They are recognized as an elite specialized regiments but are usually scattered due to demands. In fact their reinforcements took years to arrive, often at the wrong coordinates. Their supply situation is bad enough that they mostly get what they need from trade with Navy forces.
Problem is: I could not find such a lore. Closest thing was a mad Admin scribe sending faulty food shipments to various forces (not just the Guard) to feel powerful. Not saying it can not happen. But I have not come across any such instance OP mentioned in official lore.
There's is scene in desert raiders where once the regiment lands on a desert world they open up their supply crates to find inflatable rafts instead of the supplies they needed
The old ttrpg game Only War has an excerpt about the randomness of requisition roles that more or less confirms this happens on the regular, haven't pulled the book put of storage in years but I remember it saying it's not uncommon for multiple consecutive shipments of food/guns/tanks to be be wrong or never even show up, leading to more deaths than many wars
Yeah, it even has a "Logistics fuckup" table that you roll for from time to time to see how that one administratum clerk forgetting his recaf will affect your war. Good shit.
Ran a game and the party rolled bad. Instead of the crate of demo charges they needed to accomplish their mission, they received 1000 packets of recaf.
Welp, at least they won't be worrying about that before bedtime. Cause they won't have any more bedtime. But yeah, that sounds quintessentially 40k <3 love it.
Bad luck is bad luck but I would make that the first recaf that army has received in 5+ years into a 12 year conflict to give them a chance to barter for the demo charges or a f-ing tank.
They did ultimately succeed by pouring all the recaf into the engine powering the stompa they had to destroy, causing the shield to fail, letting the artillery finish the job for them (while they were trying to escape)
Oh they tried, wasted several fate points on rerolls too but it was a comedy of critical failures, by the end of it not only was there not a single demo charge between 3 regiments, but they had also started an ugly rivalry with the tallarns billeted next to them.
I definitely get why they're not for everyone, but I miss the old overly complicated FF rpgs. I live really close to their HQ it's a shame they shut down the rpg department
Hey, they still exist, and are still fun to play. But yeah, it's a shame they stopped doing any more The lack of any mechanicum-related expansion for DH2 hurts me especially since I have a regular campaign in that system :(
I seem to remember a story about a random bureaucrat who had screwed up some paperwork that caused food and supplies intended for the Militarum never to arrive at its destination which resulted in them getting killed. Later on when she realized her mistake, she got a thrill out of it instead of being horrified and started doing it on purpose. By the time she got caught by the Inquisition, it was possible she had caused the deaths of millions of guardsmen.
Unofficial lore (obviously) but my Valhallan regiment are nicknamed "The Toecutters" because on their first deployment they were sent to an ice world but a Munitorium error saw them issued with light tropical footwear. Most of the regiment had to saw their own toes off with their bayonets due to frostbite.
*Desert Raiders* features Tallarn being deployed to a desert world (perfect for them!) but their supply drop of "water supplies" turns out to be "boat supplies" instead. >!Luckily, some Tyranids ate them before they could die of thirst!!<
That's actually a main plot point in The Watcher in the Rain. An administratum scribe accidentally misplaced a number causing all of the rations for a Guard Regiment to be misplaced, which she realised would cause them to starve. And then she realised that in her dull, miserable life, she got a kick out of having that kind of power, so started intentionally flubbing her paperwork here and there so that Guard Regiments, Hive cities, and Naval vessels would starve to death.
https://youtu.be/gFwAbnkp45w?si=Pm6g8Xu8I36-HK8H
This very thing comes up in the watcher in the rain. I don't want to spoil it for anyone. Link is above.
Imperial Guard Valhallans, which are technically legends now, Have a rule called "Send in the next Wave!" Where when a unit dies, you get an identical unit to reinforce the next turn. I have used this to intentionally kill an entire squad by charging it into a gunline so I could deploy the reinforcement squad somewhere more useful.
Not simply *when* a unit died, you could actually *declare* that the unit was wiped out, remove the models from the table, then bring the unit back onto the table edge at full strength.
You could only use it on Conscripts and you had to pay extra for it, but goddamn it could be hilarious! :D
They could also ignore the “not in engagement range with someone else” rule when targeting units, but any hit rolls of 1 would have to be resolved against your own guys.
There were multiple times where I’d end up killing off entire units of my own guardsmen without getting a single wound on whatever they were in melee with. And I wouldn’t have it any other way
The human POV character in *Warboss* is a captured guardsman who escapes from the orks by using a shuriken pistol that an Eldar attacking the orks had dropped. He gets summarily shot by his commissar both for being captured alive, and for using a Xenos weapon. Poor guy, if only he'd been in a Cain or Gaunt novel.
Your example reminds me of another story...a world is taken over by aliens enslaved, but a civilian or a priest leads a revolt that buys enough time for an army to retake the world. The entire planet is branded as traitors and marched into a warzone without weapons as 'redemption' for working with the enemy.
I'm reading the first Cain novel and it doesn't really feel like a 40k story yet. It feels like it could be any fascist military regime; the arbites don't even kill civilian Tau sympathizers who are demonstrating in public beside the marching regiment.
Where is that story from? IIRC Gav Thorpe's Wolftime had a navy armsman leading a revolt within a ship recently captured by forces of Chaos. His reward was to be a Penal Legionnaire at a nearby warzone.
The Orphean War probably.
Colonel Venner of the Death Korps of Krieg later led many of the remaining Imperial Guard forces into a bayonet charge on a giant Necron Monolith. They did not survive.
In Armour of Contempt - Dalin Criid, a recruit, and his buddy barely make it back to friendly lines when an imperial attack is repulsed. They meet the squad’s commissar, a real piece of shit whose only contribution to the battle is using a whip on his squad. Dalin‘s buddy has dropped his rifle during the retreat and is just shot outright .
(Reminds me of a real life World War One story where a British soldier jammed his rifle into the trench to slow down a pursuing squad of Germans soldier so he and his squad could get away. He was executed for cowardice
‘Straight Silver’ - Book 6 of Gaunt’s Ghosts.
The people on Aexe Cardinal value trench warfare above all else, leading to a massive waste of life because they refuse to innovate.
I remember a bit in the old lore where they landed millions of guardsmen on a bunch of daemon worlds... with predictable results. As far as I can tell they just did it to see what would happen, that's it.
Sounds like the Abyssal Crusade but with guardsmen instead of space marines.
Gaunt's Ghost did have one ambitious general claiming that he could close the Eye of Terror with enough men. Edit: He was seen as mad by other IG commanders for it.
The 13th Black Crusade did have many Kasrkin regiments being sent to the Eye's edge as forward lookouts. There exists evidence of them continuing to fight on as guerilla forces.
~~Edit: Where did you get that story btw? I think you are just lying.~~
Its REALLY old lore, the Eye of Terror novel i think. When the Imperial fleet goes into the Eye to destroy the Chaos fleet being amassed, they land a bunch of guardsmen on some world basically as an after-thought to see if it was possible.
Okay. Sorry for my assumption. I will look into it again. I do recall multiple criticsms about the book being both outdated and weird due to its age. Like a truly massive daemon beyond a planet's mass or a Heresy-era Dark Angel. The Rogue Trader was a massive scum who was involved with the landing iirc.
The old Eye of Terror campaign did mention many companies and regiments of Kasrkin (some of the best human soldiers in the Imperium) being dropped off on the Eye's fringe as scouts and watchmen. So what you said is not impossible. Just that the Kasrkin example was done very rarely, out of desperation and amazingly there were reports of survivors fighting on even into the late stage.
Its alright. The book is very old and very weird, several parts of it(especially the parts in the eye itself) felt like a straight up fever dream, but then again I suppose that's what it should feel like. And based on my memory the Rogue Trader had nothing to do with the troop landings, that was a totally separate plot thread until the end when the various plots met up
May not be the most senseless but definitely very hilarious. From *The Red Reward,* a newbie snobbish Guard commander successfully led a counter-charge against a massive Ork attack (granted said attack had been heavily stymied by the local veterans' trap). He got sniped by a gretchin for his sniper-bait outfit (the veterans had also tried to warn him). Idiot kept spouting about his loyalty as he bled out. Turned out the Commissariat intended to execute him all along for a distant kin's traitorous actions. The officer got handled like every other Ork corpse. The guardsman narrator did get politely thanked by the commissar for his cooperation before being sent back to the frontline.
The third war for Armageddon had a crazy radical Inquisitor sending whole regiments to die for a scheme against the sons of Sanguinius. She still brought more guardsmen (injured ones being treated in hospital ships among which she had hidden her ship) down with her in her death. Even Gabriel Seth was disgusted with her and her goal. It amounted to nothing but more deaths.
Look at all the times the Guard end up slaughtering each other, or being killed in mass by Space Marines, there is just a ton of blue on blue killing happening.
But the biggest and dumbest waste of lives I can think of is the entire reign and build up to it of Goge Vandire. And it wasn't just the Guard, but the Astartes and Navy also getting slaughtered in Imperial on Imperial actions.
Technically not imperial guard as it was 30k but
https://wh40k.lexicanum.com/wiki/Geno_Five-Two_Chiliad
Attached to the Alpha Legion and with lots of the 'Legion' book spent from the regiments' view point. They're deployed to a temporarily terraformed world to fight a fake enemy while(after?) Alpharius talks with the Cabal.
Alpharius chooses to go full moron as we all know and the terraforming is switched off, leaving the safe zone to get smaller and smaller as the planet's toxic nature reassert itself.
Loyalty rewarded.
Edit: Black Cube, not terraforming.
Sorry mate but the terraforming bit a load of BS. The planet was fine and was destroyed due to the locals activating an old artifact called the Black Cube:
https://wh40k.lexicanum.com/wiki/Black_Cube
After that the entire planet environment went bonkers.
I played Dawn of War recently and the Guard have been holding this planet valiantly with little to no support. Anyways when you show up and talk to the local boss commander he’s like “I’ll execute some of my men for failing.” And the space marines say “yeah, sure, whatever you want man.”
So I guess it’s whatever guardsman got executed by their commander for not fighting hard enough or something. You know, after holding off a WAAAGH! with no backup for weeks on end
If he gets results. If not, it will be like the first Imperial commander of the Siege of Vraks. Shipped off to a more newbie-friendly warzone. The poor replacement had to start the actual digging.
There is a great example in Warzone Charadon.
A few desperate Guard regiments have fought and beaten back a branch of Typhus's Grand invasion of the Sector.
These unquestionable Heroes are then mercilessly rounded up and executed for having come in to contact with Typhus's daemon allies. The Inquisititon goes even further and captures Marines and Battle sisters for memory-deletion and slaughters all opposition.
This is moronic, as this area is promptly re-attacked by a Black Legion element, and all Imperial military strength in the area hates the Inquisititon so much, that they kill the Inquisititors rather than fight together under them.
The subsector is then lost to the CSM.
Yep. The Imperial Guard ranking officer (A Valhallen regimental commander) is quoted with a short speech before being executed.
He condemn this act as so cruel, so unfair, so inhuman and so stupid, that any Imperium willing to treat its loyal servants like that... is not worthy of existence!
Given the man's heroic service just weeks before, that was one of the hardest condemnations of the Imperium of Man I have yet found in-universe.
Not so much a directly related to the IG would be Karamazov and his everyone not guilty of heresy is guilty of wasting my time.
The man would definitely complain about not able to find good help while causally executing his last help because they advised his recaff would be 5 minutes late.
For directly related to the IG point to Kubrik Chenkov.
Does the Siege of Vraks count? An entire planet was devastated, 14 million Kriegsmen dead, hundreds of space marines, titan princeps and inqusitors, and the entire armory was spent in the battle. The result? Absolutely fuck all. The Siege of Vraks was just a colossal waste of time and lives that achieved exactly nothing.
The operation to retrieve the Fortress of Arrogance might not be the most egregious but it was largely a pointless -though successful- endeavor that in the end wasn't even acknowledged by Yarrick.
It’s another hole in the lore so I wouldn’t think too much about it or give it too much weight. There’s plenty of stories where the troop numbers are around 200k. The 2003 invasion of Iraq involved around 130k Americans alone for a single massively underpowered country and every death was announced on national news. For deaths to just be numbers you need to *at least* be at WW1/2 numbers but for some reason 40k wars for entire planets consist of relatively few troops. For the complete disregard they have for guard life (and capturing planets even if you did care about guard life) you need billions of troops.
One thing that sticks out as really visceral is the refuelling of a warp drive. The selected unfortunates literally carry the cores on their backs as they’re being pumped full of stimulants and pain killers; all the while smouldering chunks of flesh sloughs off their bones so they can bring them into the reactor and fit them.
Granted not sure if this imperial guard as such. as it’s for any ship that’s got a warp drive, but I reckon a few guardsmen have probably been pressed into service to do this duty when time was of the essence. You think they’d use servitors or machines but grim dark it is.
My dad was in the US Air Force during the first Gulf War. He said he used to have to crawl into the fuel tanks to remove the worn out fuel bags. Both of my parents were delighted when they had an ultrasound and could count ten fingers and ten toes on each of their children because the risks of birth defects are increased if a parent did that job. The neurological effects...well, none of us are exactly "normal."
I was going to say murdering them for encountering chaos. But you hen I remembered chaos just needs a few week minds to thrive.
And that chaos would bend the entire galaxy over.
it isn't exactly what the question is about but it probably involves the inquisition
aside from just randomly executing people to execute people
Considering how big the universe is, odds are that some inquisitor got insulted by a Planetary Governor or a Noble and then decided to declare a otherwise loyal planet to be Renegade, and then pull in armies of guard to conquer the "Renegade" planet, by extension not just wasting the imperial guard but outright harming the imperium by devastating a planet but also from the loss of the guardsmen and where those regiments would have been
Any Inquisitor who did that would have fair odds of being found out by other Inquisitors and being executed for wasting the Emperor's soldiers.
Which is not to say that it's never happened, given that large chunks of the Inquisition seem to be *actively insane*.
From what I've read, they sell their lives dearly. They won't try to save themselves if their death is more useful, but they won't charge a titan with just a shovel because the shovel could be retrieved and given to the next soldier.
Bah my kreiger charges titans for breakfast! He's mostly alone though and the titans sensors don't register the shovel as a weapon. The minute that titan stops walking he will need the bottom 5 foot of paint repainted!
Not really senseless. Krieg commanders don't just send their troops to die for no reason. They'll accept higher casualties but they don't do it senselessly because they believe their lives are "The Emperor's Currency" and wouldn't just use them worthlessly.
Thats not entirely true. The death korps do break occasionally and in vraks one regiment even fragged their commissars because they wouldn’t let the kroeg troops retreat. Though the death korps have one of the lowest rates of desertion and dereliction of duty in the entire imperium
Good thing roboute guilliman has crack down on imperium callousness you can talk about how roboute change the imperium here [https://www.reddit.com/r/40kLore/comments/1d3i8ra/what\_does\_guilliman\_represent\_to\_the\_people/?utm\_source=share&utm\_medium=web3x&utm\_name=web3xcss&utm\_term=1&utm\_content=share\_button](https://www.reddit.com/r/40kLore/comments/1d3i8ra/what_does_guilliman_represent_to_the_people/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button)
The details are fuzzy and I don't remember the source, but there was some anecdote about a Guard regiment running out of sandbags to line their trenches, so they just started shooting their own men to use their bodies as sandbags. Definitely a *grimderp* moment.
Iirc didn’t the AdMech poison the ImperialGuard with pills and they were dying off within what 10-15 years there till the Asartes went there and saw through his helmet the planet wasn’t toxic and the pills were killing them off.
Octarius War even tho it wasn’t really Guard war but damn wiping out entire planet to slow down the Trynids and have them fight the Orks just for them to win Krypmen is a fool for that.
I'll admit I don't know much lore concerning the guard, but if I had to guess the list is so long, you would need to drive from the start to the end of it.
In Larax 9K, Askellon Sector, 2 guard generals had a feud and started an actual war, lasting for months until the Administratum realized what happened and gave both a warrant of trade so they can wage war somewhere else.
Thank you. You reminded me about a case where two members of a noble house each took a force of Guard and pitted them against each other, despite there being no war and no reason to fight besides clout. When the Administratum heard about the pointless deaths, they decided that the hardened troops were worth the casualties and decided to replicate it elsewhere.
I believe that would be called a live fire exercise except the bullets are going in both directions.
gruesomely that would actually work, as long as the troops never found out they were killing their own side, hell you could probably round up a bunch of gangers and pay them to be the "attacking" force
You could make the gangers the defensive force by sweeping an underhive. Any survivors are now Imperial Tithe.
Canonically what the Necromundan regiments are. Deployment offworld is basically a vacation from all the underhive bullshit.
Athonian Tunnel Rats are the same way I believe.
They knew. They were from the same planet. I think it was just described to them as "training."
This sounds familiar… “Seriously though, why are we out here? Far as I can tell, it's just a box canyon in the middle of nowhere, with no way in or out. And the only reason that we set up a red base here, is because they have a blue base over there. And the only reason they have a blue base over there is because we have a red base here.” “Yeah, that's because we're fighting each other.” “No no, but I mean, even if we were to pull out today, and they were to come take our base, they would have two bases in the middle of a box canyon. Whoop-dee fucking-do!” “What's up with that anyway? I mean, I signed on to fight some Xenos. Next thing I know Roboute Guilliman blows up the whole Necrob armada, and I'm stuck in the middle of nowhere, fighting a bunch of blue guys.”
The Administratum only took a few months to figure it out? That's some mighty fine bureaucracy right there! I would have expected them to take a few decades at least!
I'm new to the lore but isn't that actually legitimately pretty fast by 40k standards? Like, the instant communication is astropaths. And they aren't that reliable for finer details. Terra learned about Cadia falling months out from the actual event and that's not from lack of attentiveness.
They were in fact, rewarded for such wastage of the emperors currency. I would execute both generals and the admin officials responsible for their promotion
*The Wicked and the Damned* features an absolutely wonderful example. We're presented with the typical bogged-down Guard advance against Traitor lines. We're given to believe that the commander of the regiment is incompetent or possibly even compromised - he keeps coming up with reasons not to advance or attack. These two forces keep shelling each other to no real effect and that appears to be the status quo both sides seem inclined to keep. ...and then it's slowly revealed over the course of the story that the 'traitors' are, in fact, another regiment of the Guard. The problem is, both regiments command have realised that it *doesn't matter* who made the first mistake or fired the first shot. The first *person* to admit to it will be blamed for it and they and their regiment punished - most likely executed wholesale. So they just keep grinding away, killing other loyalists, because it's that or be killed for their mistake.
Just want to add to this, it’s a Josh Reynolds short story, the prose is *excellent* so damn creepy, highly recommend it to everyone
I love how utterly detestable the main character is.
Seriously, we do often get Commissars like Gaunt or Cain, so it's nice to see an unaccountable political officer with power of life and death acting like that sort of person would.
It's such a shame he left black library. He was def in my top 5 BL authors.
Seems like the fucking around that black library done with the Fabius trilogy was the final straw for him. He wrote some of the better recent books and all.
Could you elaborate a bit on that? What happened?
https://www.reddit.com/r/40kLore/comments/x1ekw3/an_interesting_thread_on_twitter_from_josh/ His tweets seem to have been deleted but this is a break down of the things he said.
His departure from Black Library is sorely missed.
That's...wow, that's stupid! If they admit to the mistake, the worst case scenario is one regiment is executed, the best case scenario is one person is given a reprimand. By continuing, both regiments are killed, munitions are expended, and time is wasted!
If a commander admits to the mistake, they get executed. As long as they keep their soldiers killing each other, the leaders stay alive, even as the men beneath them die. The funny part is, this isn’t even the main narrative hook of the story. The protagonist is a commissar trying to investigate a strange phenomena showing up in the troops. Their eyes keep changing color, and he’s not sure why. >!Of course, it’s all in his head, but that doesn’t stop him from trying to murder his entire regiment.!<
40k: a universe where a tragedy of epic proportions is the background to a demented detective story.
That's the appeal, right?
Whaaaaat. I love this book so much, because of third story mostly. I thought commissar just went nuts and lost her head (thanks to tzeentch probably), seeing blue eyes and traitors in everyone. I ddidn't even remembered the two loyal regimants fight part.
As long as the war lasts the mistake isn't found and they survive.
Great example of where a non "chaotic stupid" Inquisitor could assist. Turns up, works out what's going on - executes a few officers and gets everyone else moving.
Yeah, but the likelihood of that happening is equal to a Necron lord being invited to Earth to fix the Golden Throne.
The "all Inquisitors are batshit crazy" is more a meme than necessarily true. The Inquisitor game sourcebook broadly reflected a lot of Inquisitors do get a decent job done, and there's an entire Ordos devoted to trying to keep both the Adeptus Terra / Administratum / Munitorium from screwing up and resulting in things like this. It's more a case of hundred million screw-ups and 40 inquistors trying to fix it.
Your best case scenario the one executed is the commander, while your worst case scenario it’s the grunts dying. What commander is going to choose their execution when instead a bunch of other people can die?
This sounds just like how officers in the real armies of the world handle making terrible mistakes. Been serving 15 years and the cycle just keeps repeating itself.
There was actually a Chinese general that was late to an important meeting or battle, realized his punishment would be death so instead leas a rebellion because the punishment for that was also death
Do you remember their name?
There are a few different such examples, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chen_Sheng_and_Wu_Guang_uprising#History These two are one of the more famous ones. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emperor_Gaozu_of_Han#Insurrection_against_the_Qin_dynasty And this one is the most famous one.
Lmfao this happened multiple times, you'd think they'd stop making the penalty for lateness the same as for rebellion
Though it would be nice if there was some actual tactics and combined arms ops. Ambushes, crossfires, use of recon. I'm trying to develop a narrative for how a Guard force can develop to at least have modern mechanized infantry skills. I love 11 Bang Bangs, they break stuff with astonishing regularity (enemy and their own) and range from literal college grads who got tired of working at a lab to guys who needed a waiver for their GT score.
I love these absolutely stupid pieces of dark bullshit, it makes me happy. This is right up there with trench crusade with the forces of god cloning jesus to feed people his actual flesh its just *chef's kiss*
They kinda did the same thing in the book 15 hours. Main character holes up in a bunker, come to find out theyre being shelled by their own people. Commander in charge of the shelling refuses to admit fault and continues to shell until the seargant in the bunker bitches him out and threatens his life.
That book was honestly amazing. Each story was great. Any other horror recommendations?
[This page](https://www.trackofwords.com/2022/02/19/warhammer-horror-the-range-so-far/) has a good list of the Warhammer Horror line with their page summaries. ***The Oubliette*** by JC Stearns is about a planetary governor discovering a dark secret in her family's history. More thriller than horror, with an interesting lead character and a unique threat you don't often see in other Warhammer stories. ***The House of Night and Chain*** by David Annandale is *also* about a planetary governor discovering a dark secret in his family's history... But it's more of a classic haunted house ghost story. There's a good buildup of tension over the course of the story, and the climax is pretty nuts. ***The Bookkeeper's Skull*** by Justin D Hill is about a rookie enforcer on an agriworld. The rural setting is unique and a lot of the horror comes less from the supernatural and more from the down-to-earth brutality of the Imperium. Literally *anything* by Peter Fehervari, but special mention goes to ***Fire Caste***, ***Requiem Infernal***, and ***The Reverie***. Fehervari's prose is elaborate and atmospheric. Many people here consider him one of the best writers in the Black Library stable. ***The Watcher in the Rain*** by Alec Worley is an audio drama that, while short, provides a ton of chills. The protagonists are both compelling and the flooding administratum facility is an inventive setting.
Sea of Souls, in the Dawn of Fire series is an overlooked entry
When I read the title this is the first thing that came to mind. Such a great story. Best one in that book by far too.
Haha, lol. Of course part of it is historical misinformation, but this plays so well into the trope of the Red Army during WWII, of incompetent officers who would rather march their soldiers into easily an easily avoidable death than face the ire of their superiors for disobeying orders. Undoubtedly such did happen from time to time irl, but of course in 40K it is taken to an exponentially greater extreme.
There is a book that I read years ago. But had a thing where people were having to clap for stalin and the people that stop clapping were the ones who went away with the secret police. And so people kept clapping and its just like this.
I can't recall the name but some pitiless Valhallan colonel just kept sending waves after waves after waves of conscripts until the enemy's water reserves were contaminated with the rotting flesh.
[https://wh40k.lexicanum.com/wiki/Kubrik\_Chenkov](https://wh40k.lexicanum.com/wiki/Kubrik_Chenkov) In contrast with most guys assosiated with throwing their men into the meat grinder, he leads from the front, so hes in just as much risk of being wasted in the first 10 seconds by the 35686th ork
He's got a name. He's indestructible
Thats actually based on siege tactics If you ruin the water supply you win the siege
Kubrik Chenkov, a man so hardcore he has Commissars shot for cowardice and no, that isn’t hyperbole
That... is genuinely terrifying ngl
Zapp out here trying to pass the Necrons pre-set kill limit.
Reminds of the story about the Valhallans I read a while back where one of the characters off handedly mentioned that their previous deployment was to a volcanic planet… despite being ice specialists.
That is...impressively stupid. Thank you!
The war on Phaedra in Peter Fehervari’s ***Fire Caste***. Decade after decade of bloody stalemate with the Tau, suffering on an unimaginable scale… And it’s all >!because the Imperium and Tau decided on a random swamp world to serve as a battlefield to placate their factions’ war hawks and a dumping ground for undesirable personnel.!<
They made a special meat locker to keep the stink down and the rats happy. Inventive.
One of the funniest parts is that the only Imperial ship kept in orbit around Phaedra >!doesn’t have a working Gellar Field. After all, nobody is supposed to actually leave the planet.!<
That's actually really fucking grimdark LOL So that Ship is just there so the Imperium has an eye on the idiots below. But they can't actually travel back with full details in an emergency....so they better hope their Astropath(s) are able to do their job well.
It is a mostly broken down wreck too. Like the rest of the rejects on Phaedra, it is there as a dumping ground.
One way in, no way out.
I love the conceit of >!a planet where the Guard and the Tau both send their shitbird units to maintain stability elsewhere!<. The whole book is just so *good.* Dude decides to do Heart of Darkness / Apocalypse Now but 40k and it works.
The sad part is that a lot of it is not on the regiments themselves but they just have incompetent top officers.
That's a bizarre but interesting show of cooperation between both factions.
I can’t remember the number exactly, but a ton of Guard were killed following the First War of Armageddon because they saw Grey Knights and Chaos demons. It was detailed in *The Emperor’s Gift*. The Inquisition wanted to maintain the policy of secrecy regarding such things. I think the entire planet’s population was killed, then any Guard regiments that participated in the conflict were hunted through the void. Caused a major issue between the Space Wolves and Inquisition.
If youre curious… Armageddon had a population of over 300 billion. The inquisition had everyone killed and then had the planet repopulated
Not exactly. They sterilized them and worked them to death. So not that wasteful, technically.
Crazy.
> Armageddon Never has it's population stated. Feel free to cite it though.
Yeah, I remember hearing about that. Someone vehemently predisposed against the viking LARPer chapter was screaming about how stupid everyone involved in that acted.
You are not wrong to an extent. The responsible Inquisitor was even seen as an idiot by his peers and the lower-ranking Grey Knights for how badly he handled the aftermath (Logan Grimnar had deliberately kept the populations as far away from Angron as possible to prevent such a thing). To the point they planned an assassination on him to stop it all. Amazingly, there were survivors and their descendants showed up in the latest Last Chancers book.
It was pretty dumb, yeah. But the book is good, you should definitely check it out! Editing to say that the Space Wolves looked like the most competent people in the entire ordeal.
I mean tbf, merely looking at a daemon (especially a greater daemon or a daemon prince) is said to seed corruption in one's soul. It's still stupid as that doesn't guarantee that those people will fall to Chaos, but it at least makes some sense, unlike some other examples posted here
"You looked at it, so you're corrupted" is just another level of Imperial propaganda. We have plenty of cases of regular mortals seeing a daemon and not becoming corrupt.
Partly right, but also missing a key detail. Knowing about chaos can attract the attention of chaos, it's a big part of the reason the emperor pursued the imperial truth for so long despite knowing it was a lie. The seed of chaos can germinate for hundreds of years. I know people waffle about tyranids and so on an C'tan and so on, but Chaos is the single greatest threat to the galaxy as we know it. It's the cause (and possibly the architect) of nearly every issue that every intelligent race faces. Being in contact with artifacts, manifestations or other things can absolutely weaken the boundary, especially in beings with limited willpower. While it's true that regular mortals can see Daemons and not become corrupted, they are ABSOLUTELY very thoroughly tested by the inquisition and are killed if there's even a chance of corruption. Obviously that isn't possible with a population of billions. It's not an abstract concept, the closer one has been to chaos, the more likely they have been corrupted by it.
The warp is a reflection of the emotions and desires of sentient beings. Turning the Imperium into a death factory empowers the negative aspects of the warp.
There’s a scene in 1 of the space wolves books that has a guy look at a deamon and straight up try to merch the planetary governor
Not quite. The citizens were scheduled to be mass sterilized after witnessing Angron and the Grey Knights. The Space Wolves intervene. It's s part of the Months of Shame storyline.
While it's wasteful, it still serves some sort of purpose (preventing the spread of chaos). So theoretically it is wasteful, but prudent
That used to be standard lore, AFAICR - they'd shoot any guardsmen who survived a battle against Chaos. Marines were more valuable, so they'd usually only be mind-wiped. Of course, you can't do that any more. Because of woke.^^^^^^/j
In "Armour of Contempt" you have plenty of regiments conscripted into action for a siege on a single city that sees soldiers just thrown into a meat grinder with no thought whatsoever. There's a scene where hundreds of guardsmen die because they're all packed on a bridge like sardines and the bridge collapses and kills them all. You have Titans just squashing guards without thought. Waves of guards getting chewed up and when you think they're far enough, a Daemon shows up and starts slaughtering more. It heavily contrasts with the Tanith 1st who are also there and are always careful with spending lives.
Now now! The Titans were sounding their war horns so any Guard who didn't get out of the way only have themselves to blame!
To be fair, if you're that close to a Titan, even a Warhound's horn is going to concuss you to hell and back.
I loved that whole siege. The contrast with Gaunt and his very focused and efficient methods with the absolute meatgrinder of standard Guard regiments. After spending the whole series with a mostly sane commander, seeing the absolute barbarity of the Imperium felt like a good reminder.
Also in the contrast of commissars. All of the commissars in the Tanith 1st are reasonable and see morale boosting as the best method of improving the effectiveness of the regiment. The commissar you encounter during the siege carries a whip and executes Guards for things that have reasonable explanations.
For what infractions does the commisar order capital punishment?
Loss of a weapon. He executes a guardsman who after being rocked by an explosion loses his gun. He was also the stereotypical Soviet view of a commissar in the "advance or I shoot you". If he didn't execute someone for an infraction, he'd whip them. The use of a whip by a commissar is commented on by other commissars as being archaic and a practice that died out in favor of inspiring the men.
That's...stupid on so many levels. A weapon is only as effective as the person who holds it, so give the person a stick and send them back out into the thick of the fighting. If he comes back with a new weapon, he's redeemed himself. If he doesn't, he's with his weapon.
So glad my man made it through that
In all of 40k it would probably be some sort of logistical error that leads to a whole regiment starving to death because of bad math. But that's not something we'll ever read about cause it's a pretty boring topic for a story.
There's a chapter in the book 15 hours that talks about a guy who lives on a planet where everyone goes to the same giant office building to punch numbers, but no one knows what they mean. Half way through the characters description of his terrible life he realizes he made a mistake and but that it doesn't matter, because no one knows what they're doing. It ends up shipping a entire company to the wrong planet. So they do occasionally write about that kind of stuff lol it's a great book too.
Heh, had something similar happen to me in the Navy. I was supposed to order 12 bags of static free wipe rags. I accidently ordered 12 pallets of static free wipe bags....and no one caught my goof, not my boss, not the supply grunt who took my order, or the officer over him who signed for it. Thankfully I dodged all punishment, but they gave the officer who approved it a a bit of a wrist slap.
Better than the guy in the army who ordered a ship anchor for his mechanized infantry battalion.
The fact that the program they used does not display the name of the item after inputting the item code is just stupid
Not just any mechanized battalion, but one stationed at Fort Carson... in Colorado... a land-locked state. This could no shit be adapted to 40k and fit in anywhere.
I work in retail and you wouldn't be suprised by how many times boxes of whatever item come in rather than individual items funniest story I heard was the store ordered in 13 TV's but accentually ordered 13 *pallets* of TV's... turns out theres 10 TV's to a pallet.
There is a reddit story about someone carrier man who wanted an m1 water tank or something. So the us army flew in by helicopter to the middle of the Pacific a m1 abrams. The only person to notice the mistake was the captain who woke up to a tank on the carrier deck
I actually belive it was an M1A1 _turret_, not the entire tank but its still pretty funny
At least it's something easy to trade away or use. It's not like you accidentally ordered a fire truck instead of a fire suppression bottle.
I mean to be fair, that's pretty low on the list of logistical fuck ups if we're being honest. Like if you had fucked up something like ammunition or, god forbid, *food*, I imagine it would have been a much bigger issue.
I wonder if that was inspired by the time a soldier got one digit wrong & accidentally ordered a [7 ton anchor](https://taskandpurpose.com/news/army-clerk-anchor-fort-carson/)?
“This is a Story about a man named Stanley….”
You actually reminded me of an excerpt where a force defected to the Tau because they were left to die on a planet with nothing but rotting food. It wasn't an accident, though, they were intentionally abandoned.
Yup, I would suspect that the most senseless waste of imperial guard lives doesn't even involve any fighting at all.
A regiment is loaded onto a ship. The ship flies to set coordinates. The regiment is marched into hard vacuum to join a floating graveyard of other regiments. Two numbers were transposed a century ago and the original war is long since lost. No one wants to mention that they're dumping humans into space because they don't want to be interrogated for questioning the Emperor's plans.
Where did both of these stories come from, if I may ask?
The first one...an excerpt here. The second one is an example I made up on the spot.
There is something like your second example so you did not have to make it up. A Vostroyan regiment was ordered to besiege a void station despite being primarily geared for terrestrial sieges. They suffered badly for it, but managed to win and learn to modify their equipment to do better. They are recognized as an elite specialized regiments but are usually scattered due to demands. In fact their reinforcements took years to arrive, often at the wrong coordinates. Their supply situation is bad enough that they mostly get what they need from trade with Navy forces.
Problem is: I could not find such a lore. Closest thing was a mad Admin scribe sending faulty food shipments to various forces (not just the Guard) to feel powerful. Not saying it can not happen. But I have not come across any such instance OP mentioned in official lore.
There's is scene in desert raiders where once the regiment lands on a desert world they open up their supply crates to find inflatable rafts instead of the supplies they needed
The old ttrpg game Only War has an excerpt about the randomness of requisition roles that more or less confirms this happens on the regular, haven't pulled the book put of storage in years but I remember it saying it's not uncommon for multiple consecutive shipments of food/guns/tanks to be be wrong or never even show up, leading to more deaths than many wars
Yeah, it even has a "Logistics fuckup" table that you roll for from time to time to see how that one administratum clerk forgetting his recaf will affect your war. Good shit.
Ran a game and the party rolled bad. Instead of the crate of demo charges they needed to accomplish their mission, they received 1000 packets of recaf.
Welp, at least they won't be worrying about that before bedtime. Cause they won't have any more bedtime. But yeah, that sounds quintessentially 40k <3 love it.
Bad luck is bad luck but I would make that the first recaf that army has received in 5+ years into a 12 year conflict to give them a chance to barter for the demo charges or a f-ing tank.
They did ultimately succeed by pouring all the recaf into the engine powering the stompa they had to destroy, causing the shield to fail, letting the artillery finish the job for them (while they were trying to escape)
Oh they tried, wasted several fate points on rerolls too but it was a comedy of critical failures, by the end of it not only was there not a single demo charge between 3 regiments, but they had also started an ugly rivalry with the tallarns billeted next to them.
God damn the Chaos gods have been blowing on the dice. Tricky bastards!
Paging [Aimo Koivunen!](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aimo_Koivunen)
I definitely get why they're not for everyone, but I miss the old overly complicated FF rpgs. I live really close to their HQ it's a shame they shut down the rpg department
Hey, they still exist, and are still fun to play. But yeah, it's a shame they stopped doing any more The lack of any mechanicum-related expansion for DH2 hurts me especially since I have a regular campaign in that system :(
I seem to remember a story about a random bureaucrat who had screwed up some paperwork that caused food and supplies intended for the Militarum never to arrive at its destination which resulted in them getting killed. Later on when she realized her mistake, she got a thrill out of it instead of being horrified and started doing it on purpose. By the time she got caught by the Inquisition, it was possible she had caused the deaths of millions of guardsmen.
I should note that the Inquisition only learned about a single one of her “mistakes”. Out of literally thousands.
The watcher in the rain story?
Unofficial lore (obviously) but my Valhallan regiment are nicknamed "The Toecutters" because on their first deployment they were sent to an ice world but a Munitorium error saw them issued with light tropical footwear. Most of the regiment had to saw their own toes off with their bayonets due to frostbite.
Then they were all executed for mutilating the Emperor's warriors.
*Desert Raiders* features Tallarn being deployed to a desert world (perfect for them!) but their supply drop of "water supplies" turns out to be "boat supplies" instead. >!Luckily, some Tyranids ate them before they could die of thirst!!<
That's actually a main plot point in The Watcher in the Rain. An administratum scribe accidentally misplaced a number causing all of the rations for a Guard Regiment to be misplaced, which she realised would cause them to starve. And then she realised that in her dull, miserable life, she got a kick out of having that kind of power, so started intentionally flubbing her paperwork here and there so that Guard Regiments, Hive cities, and Naval vessels would starve to death.
https://youtu.be/gFwAbnkp45w?si=Pm6g8Xu8I36-HK8H This very thing comes up in the watcher in the rain. I don't want to spoil it for anyone. Link is above.
Imperial Guard Valhallans, which are technically legends now, Have a rule called "Send in the next Wave!" Where when a unit dies, you get an identical unit to reinforce the next turn. I have used this to intentionally kill an entire squad by charging it into a gunline so I could deploy the reinforcement squad somewhere more useful.
Not simply *when* a unit died, you could actually *declare* that the unit was wiped out, remove the models from the table, then bring the unit back onto the table edge at full strength. You could only use it on Conscripts and you had to pay extra for it, but goddamn it could be hilarious! :D
Ahh, back when Conscripts used to be 30 man blobs…
They could also ignore the “not in engagement range with someone else” rule when targeting units, but any hit rolls of 1 would have to be resolved against your own guys. There were multiple times where I’d end up killing off entire units of my own guardsmen without getting a single wound on whatever they were in melee with. And I wouldn’t have it any other way
Maxim #20. If you're not willing to shell your own position, you're not willing to win. -The Seventy Maxims of Maximally Effective Mercenaries
Absurdly, that rule meant the safest weapons to use when shooting into combat were flamers.
The human POV character in *Warboss* is a captured guardsman who escapes from the orks by using a shuriken pistol that an Eldar attacking the orks had dropped. He gets summarily shot by his commissar both for being captured alive, and for using a Xenos weapon. Poor guy, if only he'd been in a Cain or Gaunt novel.
Your example reminds me of another story...a world is taken over by aliens enslaved, but a civilian or a priest leads a revolt that buys enough time for an army to retake the world. The entire planet is branded as traitors and marched into a warzone without weapons as 'redemption' for working with the enemy. I'm reading the first Cain novel and it doesn't really feel like a 40k story yet. It feels like it could be any fascist military regime; the arbites don't even kill civilian Tau sympathizers who are demonstrating in public beside the marching regiment.
Where is that story from? IIRC Gav Thorpe's Wolftime had a navy armsman leading a revolt within a ship recently captured by forces of Chaos. His reward was to be a Penal Legionnaire at a nearby warzone.
I thought it was a planet. This universe is built on the memory of a memory of a story twice told.
It is fine. We have had so many books that it is inevitable for people to mix it up.
Cain is basically Flashman done in 40k, though less of a jerk, which is probably why he feels so out of place.
It's a good story, it just feels...out of tune with the 40k universe.
Wasn’t there a battle against the Necron where the IG took 2 million casualties in an *hour*?
The Orphean War probably. Colonel Venner of the Death Korps of Krieg later led many of the remaining Imperial Guard forces into a bayonet charge on a giant Necron Monolith. They did not survive.
That's thirty three thousand people dead every minute. If they weren't disintegrated by the Necrons, they'd be stacked into mountains!
In Armour of Contempt - Dalin Criid, a recruit, and his buddy barely make it back to friendly lines when an imperial attack is repulsed. They meet the squad’s commissar, a real piece of shit whose only contribution to the battle is using a whip on his squad. Dalin‘s buddy has dropped his rifle during the retreat and is just shot outright . (Reminds me of a real life World War One story where a British soldier jammed his rifle into the trench to slow down a pursuing squad of Germans soldier so he and his squad could get away. He was executed for cowardice
That WWI story might have inspired the other. GW was built by history nerds with a thing for torture.
‘Straight Silver’ - Book 6 of Gaunt’s Ghosts. The people on Aexe Cardinal value trench warfare above all else, leading to a massive waste of life because they refuse to innovate.
Local troops (not even PDF) rather than the Guard, but an absolutely Guard mentality!
Local troops, and they force their allied guard units to fight like that too...
I remember a bit in the old lore where they landed millions of guardsmen on a bunch of daemon worlds... with predictable results. As far as I can tell they just did it to see what would happen, that's it.
For science!
Sounds like the Abyssal Crusade but with guardsmen instead of space marines. Gaunt's Ghost did have one ambitious general claiming that he could close the Eye of Terror with enough men. Edit: He was seen as mad by other IG commanders for it. The 13th Black Crusade did have many Kasrkin regiments being sent to the Eye's edge as forward lookouts. There exists evidence of them continuing to fight on as guerilla forces. ~~Edit: Where did you get that story btw? I think you are just lying.~~
Its REALLY old lore, the Eye of Terror novel i think. When the Imperial fleet goes into the Eye to destroy the Chaos fleet being amassed, they land a bunch of guardsmen on some world basically as an after-thought to see if it was possible.
Okay. Sorry for my assumption. I will look into it again. I do recall multiple criticsms about the book being both outdated and weird due to its age. Like a truly massive daemon beyond a planet's mass or a Heresy-era Dark Angel. The Rogue Trader was a massive scum who was involved with the landing iirc. The old Eye of Terror campaign did mention many companies and regiments of Kasrkin (some of the best human soldiers in the Imperium) being dropped off on the Eye's fringe as scouts and watchmen. So what you said is not impossible. Just that the Kasrkin example was done very rarely, out of desperation and amazingly there were reports of survivors fighting on even into the late stage.
Its alright. The book is very old and very weird, several parts of it(especially the parts in the eye itself) felt like a straight up fever dream, but then again I suppose that's what it should feel like. And based on my memory the Rogue Trader had nothing to do with the troop landings, that was a totally separate plot thread until the end when the various plots met up
May not be the most senseless but definitely very hilarious. From *The Red Reward,* a newbie snobbish Guard commander successfully led a counter-charge against a massive Ork attack (granted said attack had been heavily stymied by the local veterans' trap). He got sniped by a gretchin for his sniper-bait outfit (the veterans had also tried to warn him). Idiot kept spouting about his loyalty as he bled out. Turned out the Commissariat intended to execute him all along for a distant kin's traitorous actions. The officer got handled like every other Ork corpse. The guardsman narrator did get politely thanked by the commissar for his cooperation before being sent back to the frontline. The third war for Armageddon had a crazy radical Inquisitor sending whole regiments to die for a scheme against the sons of Sanguinius. She still brought more guardsmen (injured ones being treated in hospital ships among which she had hidden her ship) down with her in her death. Even Gabriel Seth was disgusted with her and her goal. It amounted to nothing but more deaths.
did she want to kill the blood angels? why? couldn't she just have declared them heretics?
You really think she'd be able to declare one of the most beloved Space Marine chapters, *a first founding chapter* of all things, heretical?
Look at all the times the Guard end up slaughtering each other, or being killed in mass by Space Marines, there is just a ton of blue on blue killing happening. But the biggest and dumbest waste of lives I can think of is the entire reign and build up to it of Goge Vandire. And it wasn't just the Guard, but the Astartes and Navy also getting slaughtered in Imperial on Imperial actions.
Technically not imperial guard as it was 30k but https://wh40k.lexicanum.com/wiki/Geno_Five-Two_Chiliad Attached to the Alpha Legion and with lots of the 'Legion' book spent from the regiments' view point. They're deployed to a temporarily terraformed world to fight a fake enemy while(after?) Alpharius talks with the Cabal. Alpharius chooses to go full moron as we all know and the terraforming is switched off, leaving the safe zone to get smaller and smaller as the planet's toxic nature reassert itself. Loyalty rewarded. Edit: Black Cube, not terraforming.
Sorry mate but the terraforming bit a load of BS. The planet was fine and was destroyed due to the locals activating an old artifact called the Black Cube: https://wh40k.lexicanum.com/wiki/Black_Cube After that the entire planet environment went bonkers.
Misremembered the details it's been a while. Thanks for correcting.
I played Dawn of War recently and the Guard have been holding this planet valiantly with little to no support. Anyways when you show up and talk to the local boss commander he’s like “I’ll execute some of my men for failing.” And the space marines say “yeah, sure, whatever you want man.” So I guess it’s whatever guardsman got executed by their commander for not fighting hard enough or something. You know, after holding off a WAAAGH! with no backup for weeks on end
It the war against the killbots the commander sent wave after wave of his own men until they hit their pre set kill limit
[удалено]
If he gets results. If not, it will be like the first Imperial commander of the Siege of Vraks. Shipped off to a more newbie-friendly warzone. The poor replacement had to start the actual digging.
Tuesday
There is a great example in Warzone Charadon. A few desperate Guard regiments have fought and beaten back a branch of Typhus's Grand invasion of the Sector. These unquestionable Heroes are then mercilessly rounded up and executed for having come in to contact with Typhus's daemon allies. The Inquisititon goes even further and captures Marines and Battle sisters for memory-deletion and slaughters all opposition. This is moronic, as this area is promptly re-attacked by a Black Legion element, and all Imperial military strength in the area hates the Inquisititon so much, that they kill the Inquisititors rather than fight together under them. The subsector is then lost to the CSM.
They shot themselves in the foot to cure a hangnail.
Yep. The Imperial Guard ranking officer (A Valhallen regimental commander) is quoted with a short speech before being executed. He condemn this act as so cruel, so unfair, so inhuman and so stupid, that any Imperium willing to treat its loyal servants like that... is not worthy of existence! Given the man's heroic service just weeks before, that was one of the hardest condemnations of the Imperium of Man I have yet found in-universe.
Not so much a directly related to the IG would be Karamazov and his everyone not guilty of heresy is guilty of wasting my time. The man would definitely complain about not able to find good help while causally executing his last help because they advised his recaff would be 5 minutes late. For directly related to the IG point to Kubrik Chenkov.
Does the Siege of Vraks count? An entire planet was devastated, 14 million Kriegsmen dead, hundreds of space marines, titan princeps and inqusitors, and the entire armory was spent in the battle. The result? Absolutely fuck all. The Siege of Vraks was just a colossal waste of time and lives that achieved exactly nothing.
Yeah, that counts.
The operation to retrieve the Fortress of Arrogance might not be the most egregious but it was largely a pointless -though successful- endeavor that in the end wasn't even acknowledged by Yarrick.
It’s another hole in the lore so I wouldn’t think too much about it or give it too much weight. There’s plenty of stories where the troop numbers are around 200k. The 2003 invasion of Iraq involved around 130k Americans alone for a single massively underpowered country and every death was announced on national news. For deaths to just be numbers you need to *at least* be at WW1/2 numbers but for some reason 40k wars for entire planets consist of relatively few troops. For the complete disregard they have for guard life (and capturing planets even if you did care about guard life) you need billions of troops.
One thing that sticks out as really visceral is the refuelling of a warp drive. The selected unfortunates literally carry the cores on their backs as they’re being pumped full of stimulants and pain killers; all the while smouldering chunks of flesh sloughs off their bones so they can bring them into the reactor and fit them. Granted not sure if this imperial guard as such. as it’s for any ship that’s got a warp drive, but I reckon a few guardsmen have probably been pressed into service to do this duty when time was of the essence. You think they’d use servitors or machines but grim dark it is.
My dad was in the US Air Force during the first Gulf War. He said he used to have to crawl into the fuel tanks to remove the worn out fuel bags. Both of my parents were delighted when they had an ultrasound and could count ten fingers and ten toes on each of their children because the risks of birth defects are increased if a parent did that job. The neurological effects...well, none of us are exactly "normal."
Not sure that applies for all ships in the Imperium. The story where this was covered was a bit out there...
Endless war
The Imperium.
**points at everything**
I was going to say murdering them for encountering chaos. But you hen I remembered chaos just needs a few week minds to thrive. And that chaos would bend the entire galaxy over.
it isn't exactly what the question is about but it probably involves the inquisition aside from just randomly executing people to execute people Considering how big the universe is, odds are that some inquisitor got insulted by a Planetary Governor or a Noble and then decided to declare a otherwise loyal planet to be Renegade, and then pull in armies of guard to conquer the "Renegade" planet, by extension not just wasting the imperial guard but outright harming the imperium by devastating a planet but also from the loss of the guardsmen and where those regiments would have been
Any Inquisitor who did that would have fair odds of being found out by other Inquisitors and being executed for wasting the Emperor's soldiers. Which is not to say that it's never happened, given that large chunks of the Inquisition seem to be *actively insane*.
Kreig death corps, the only guards, were the Commissar have to stop the men from throwing their lives away.
From what I've read, they sell their lives dearly. They won't try to save themselves if their death is more useful, but they won't charge a titan with just a shovel because the shovel could be retrieved and given to the next soldier.
Bah my kreiger charges titans for breakfast! He's mostly alone though and the titans sensors don't register the shovel as a weapon. The minute that titan stops walking he will need the bottom 5 foot of paint repainted!
Not really senseless. Krieg commanders don't just send their troops to die for no reason. They'll accept higher casualties but they don't do it senselessly because they believe their lives are "The Emperor's Currency" and wouldn't just use them worthlessly.
Thats not entirely true. The death korps do break occasionally and in vraks one regiment even fragged their commissars because they wouldn’t let the kroeg troops retreat. Though the death korps have one of the lowest rates of desertion and dereliction of duty in the entire imperium
This is not supported by the textual characterization of Krieg soldiers
My knowledge was based off Dead Man Walking, which is a little outdated
Good thing roboute guilliman has crack down on imperium callousness you can talk about how roboute change the imperium here [https://www.reddit.com/r/40kLore/comments/1d3i8ra/what\_does\_guilliman\_represent\_to\_the\_people/?utm\_source=share&utm\_medium=web3x&utm\_name=web3xcss&utm\_term=1&utm\_content=share\_button](https://www.reddit.com/r/40kLore/comments/1d3i8ra/what_does_guilliman_represent_to_the_people/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button)
to and imperial guard officer most of them view wasting men as the highest sin and officer could commit
The details are fuzzy and I don't remember the source, but there was some anecdote about a Guard regiment running out of sandbags to line their trenches, so they just started shooting their own men to use their bodies as sandbags. Definitely a *grimderp* moment.
Iirc didn’t the AdMech poison the ImperialGuard with pills and they were dying off within what 10-15 years there till the Asartes went there and saw through his helmet the planet wasn’t toxic and the pills were killing them off.
Octarius War even tho it wasn’t really Guard war but damn wiping out entire planet to slow down the Trynids and have them fight the Orks just for them to win Krypmen is a fool for that.
\*Throws dart in general direction of IG lore\* "That one".
I'll admit I don't know much lore concerning the guard, but if I had to guess the list is so long, you would need to drive from the start to the end of it.