#mordianae

[katesfoxhole]

As far as I've been able to determine, Mordian and the Mordian Iron Guard first appeared in the 2e Codex: Imperial Guard (or possibly White Dwarf 184 but they came out around the same time). And then nothing happened for 17 years. No new lore was added until Mark Clapham's novel Iron Guard came out in 2012, and even he only added one little tidbit--that people living on the dark side of a tidally locked planet tended to like bright colors.

I am writing some fanfic featuring a Mordian regiment, and I've made up a few headcanons or my own.

One is that, reflecting their tidally locked world, they tend toward a kind of binary thinking. Both men and women can serve in the Iron Guard, but regiments are segregated by sex (the Cain novels outright state this is the norm for the Imperial Guard anyway. And of course, nothing's stopping the Munitorum from pulling a 597th if you want a mixed regiment; the Adeptus Terra don't giveadam about some silly local custom). It's fine to be gay, but not bi or pan--pick a side, fence-sitter. Same with gender--being trans is okay as long as you cross over completely; no boymoding, no being genderqueer or agender.

(In case it needs to be said, these are not supposed to be good things btw, this is a flaw, a cultural blind spot.)

Presumably nothing naturally grows on Mordian--the day side is blasted by instantly-lethal amounts of solar radiation and the night side is, well, always nighttime. The only place on Mordian where you see plant life is in manmade gardens and greenhouses. So I've written my Mordians to be weirded out by nature. Their dialect of Low Gothic doesn't even have words for things that are not manmade--that isn't a forest up ahead, it's a very tangled and untidy orchard. How dare the trees grow wherever they want to instead of in neat rows?

I have an unwritten scene where some HQ POGs are making fun of a Mordian recon report: "Are they still calling the river a canal?" "Give 'em a break, they've never SEEN a river before."

They are also--at first--absolutely terrified of sunlight. After all, on their homeworld, dayside = instant radioactive death. The first time they land on an earthlike world, a commissar has to almost shoot someone to get them off the dropship.

Canon Mordian names tend to sound Germanic. I've expanded that to include names from other mid-European sources, particularly Estonian, Lithuanian, and Ukranian. Presumably a lot of the original settlers came from that part of Earth.

It's not as hard as it sounds to keep those fancy uniforms clean. Mordian has an STC for high-tech, moisture- and dirt-repelling fabrics. Textiles are one of the planet's chief trade goods. Mordian Iron Guard are positively horrified by soldiers from other worlds who show up in grubby cotton twill. Yeah, it's hard to stay clean while soldiering in the field, which is why you don't want your uniform making it worse by ABSORBING sweat and dirt omg.

Iron Guard officers wear gold gorgets similar to the ones popular in 18th-19th century European armies. Senior noncoms and NCO vehicle commanders wear silver ones. I'm not the only one who's had this idea.

As a joke, I've named one of the hives on Mordian--not the capital--Dsenta Vitta. I bent it out of a mishmash of Latin and Estonian and it means, roughly, "where those cunts landed". This is an ancient name, going back to first settlement, and to the Mordians its meaning has of course long since been lost to antiquity.

Anyway, those are my Mordian headcanons. I would definitely be insterested in anyone else's, if you have them.

"Why is the sky leaking!?" "It's called rain. We were briefed on this."