#mordianae

[katesfoxhole]

Anyone in your tank ever have a close call with a Commissar?

Not to the point of a pistol coming out, but we've had our share of being called out. When we first landed the whole company froze up at our first sight of sunlight. Offworlders have been making fun of us for it ever since, but in our defense, for our whole lives sunlight has meant instant burning death, so… yeah. Commissar Almouk had to yell at Captain Oslina to get the company moving, but then, in a dropship hold with 60 idling engines she had to yell just to be heard.

That first night, when we were digging in on the perimeter, our track got dinged for not packing the sandbags full enough (btw if the groundstuff is called dirt, why are the bags called sandbags and not dirtbags?) She kicked them over and made us redo all of them from scratch. She said "I make allowance for your origin world, but by the same token you should have no trouble working through the night". Which, yeah, but we do sleep on Mordian. Sometimes anyway.

The sky leaked that night. That's when I discovered MUD.

Do not like.

Now, this I only heard secondhand, and it may not be true, but rumor is during our first real battle at the bridge, when the damned Pramar were dropping their arty short and blowing off our vox corrections, rumor is one of their commissars had to threaten to shoot an officer - I've heard versions where it's the battery CO or even a company captain - to get them to adjust their aim and shell the enemy instead of us. Heck, one of the Velani claims they actually did shoot the guy, and promoted a sergeant on the spot. But that's probably an exaggeration.

I hope it's not, though. Fucking Pramar.

(OOC note: I'm a bit of a doctrine purist when it comes to what counts as a tank, which is why I refer to the Salamander scout vehicle as a 'track' instead. Although that is an English distinction that might very well not exist in Gothic.)

[katesfoxhole]

Most recent thing I worked on--today!--is my Mordian fic.

Pros:

get to ride in a Salamander and fire the autocannon

hospitaller gf

Cons:

demons are real and on the same planet and they can eat your soul

it's an agriworld. there's dirt.

You get isekai'ed into the last fanfiction you WROTE

Reblog for sample size or perish

[katesfoxhole]

What's been your worst experience(s) having to deal with nature away from the hive?

Mud. Definitely mud. Dirt is bad enough but then you add water and it's DIRT but WET.

Actually, you know what? I'm going to take that back. The real pain in the ass is having to learn all these new words that are all, "[THING] but natural". Like,

ground (floor but natural)

dirt (grime but natural)

mud (grime but natural and also wet)

river (canal or viaduct but natural)

meadow (stockyard but natural)

...etc. There's like a million of them! How do you offworlders keep them all straight?

[katesfoxhole]

Favorite Guardsmen regiment?

You have probably been asked this before, but it’s always a good question

My own, of course! The mighty Mordian CXII Armoured. Nine companies of longbody Leman Russ battle tanks, plus a bevy of specialist support companies, including my own 10th Recon.

(I got the best of both worlds, I'm surrounded by tanks but I don't have to hump battle cannon shells myself.)

(Also Salamanders don't throw a track as often. That extra 30 tons is hell on the track pins.)

[katesfoxhole]

Opinions on the Armageddon Steel Legion

There is only one correct answer

Bold way to talk to someone who does recce for a tank regiment. What are your coordinates again? ;)

I've never fought beside them, but I'm always in favor of more tracks. Those enclosed-cab Basilisks, I bet they have great air-conditioning. Don't get me wrong, I love my Salamander to pieces, but a roof would be nice. The sky leaks on this planet.

[katesfoxhole]

Trooper Katsya Uward, 2nd Squadron, 10th Company (Reconnaisance), Mordian CXII Armoured.

…feelin' a little outgunned here. =P

Reblog and tell me about your Warhammer OCs!!!

(seriously, I see so many cool fanart and fanfiction, I want to learn about everyone!!)

[katesfoxhole]

What does your Salamander crew think of Sentinel pilots?

Kinship with fellow scout/light armour? Professional rivalry with walkers vs. tracks? Secret third option?

Part of me would like to mock them viciously. They look ridiculous and brew up if you look at them funny. But I gotta admit, it takes guts to be a sentinel driver. The job of reconnaissance is basically to go out and get shot at so we know where the bad guys are. That's not a job I would want to do in a glorified forklift.

As for my crewmates… Tandiy, our driver, is crazy enough to be one, but I think she'd miss crushing heretics with 33 tonnes of scout track.

Rhionna, our bow gunner, I'ma hafta get back to you on that one. She's having hysterics because of this skin rash she's developed. The medicae says it's called "freckles" and it's harmless, but she's convinced she's dying. This daylight shit takes some getting used to.

The Sarge, if I asked her, I'm sure she'd say something pious about cooperating with the other regiments' recon units, and then something corny like "teamwork makes the dream work". She tries so hard to be a good sergeant. Throne, don't tell her I said that.

[katesfoxhole]

Oi. Where do I get me some o' dem Mordy-Ann uniforms for meself? You'z got da Flash Gitz beat for style.

Well, you know, I wasn't the most attentive juve in schola, but I seem to recall there are some rules about commerce with xenos. So I guess you'll just have to take them from our cold, dead--wait, no don't do that either.

I guess just envy us from afar?

[katesfoxhole]

You're given a choice between scouting out a heavily shelled city with lots of blind corners and ambush points or a deep wilderness like jungle or swamp. Which are you picking?

I don't know what a "jungle" or a "swamp" is but if they're anything like the wild orchards on this planet I'm picking the city.

[katesfoxhole]

I choose to take that as a compliment.

All my haters keep dropping heavy artillery on my position and it's starting to really piss me off

[katesfoxhole]

What's a misconception about Mordians everyone makes that you want to set the record straight on?

That we can fight well. It seems to be a common assumption - I've encountered it from people of three different worlds now - that fancy, ornate uniforms mean ceremonial guard troops who are useless in a real battle. In fairness to them, that does seem to be case on the worlds they come from. And Mordian's Tetrarchs have their ornamental bling-troopers too, to be sure. But we don't tithe those cretins to the Imperial Guard, we send our best, as any world loyal to the Golden Throne should.

It was a shock to me in turn to see how GRUBBY troopers from other worlds are. They cross the void on great starships but can't do better than clothes made from woven plant fiber? Or even animal hair, some of them! Tandiy's Velani girlfriend, she grew up on something called a farm where she actually shaved animals of their hair to make cloth from. It's called wool. Their uniforms are made from it. The very idea makes my skin crawl.

[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."

[katesfoxhole]

Huh, that's not too far away from where my Mordian OC and her regiment are getting into Shenanigans™. Want to join the crusade? We're liberating a subsector that's fallen to the Ruinous Powers. No xenos involved, though--at least not yet.

Hey, where is your forge world in the galaxy? Which segmentum, what are the things around it, what kinds of problems does it have to deal with, does it answer to Guilliman or Dante (which side of the rift is it on)

Where one here

Are your little mechs?

Also *when* are they? M30-41, M42, another option

They're in the Segmentum Obscuris! I still haven't nailed down an Absolute location just yet, but they're far out enough that most ships are gonna make a stop at Fenris for resupply before heading for Sanctum Novis proper. If I wanted to make a Lore Reason for me not having an exact location, it's that the gas giant they orbit has enough radioactive gasses that locating them is a bit Fucky and/or Verthandi is intentionally obscuring their location as best she can because she's so sucks.

They're post-horsery, getting into the mainline time stream of 40k! They do have some horsery relics (because I wanted horus heresy kits) and those are treated with the reverence expected of a bunch of hereteks.

[katesfoxhole]

Have you always crewed Salamanders or did you spend any time in Leman Russ tanks?

I had a little time back in Fund & Prep, before we deployed. Most of us got our assignments worked out before our training reached the point of climbing into real live vehicles, but everybody gets cross-trained on the standard Leman Russ, in case we have to get moved around to replace casualties.