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This is the second book of three covering the Siege of Vraks. Links for all the books are:
Ten years into the bitter siege, Arkos of the Alpha Legion sent a psychic signal that called others in the Eye of Terror to join the plunder. The resulting fleet removed the Imperial Navy from around Vraks, severing supply lines for the loyalist planetside troops. Further, the Chaos ships then dropped reinforcements to the surface, including warbands of Chaos Space Marines, and Titans of the Legio Vulcanum.
Enemy Forces on Vraks - circa 841823.M41
Vraksian Renegades
- Disciples of Xaphan - 50,000 (estimated)
- Garrison Auxilia - 10,000 (estimated)
- Labour Corps - 1.5 million (estimated)
- Planetary Defence Force - 500,000 (estimated)
- Militia - 1.5 million (estimated)
- Frateris Militia - 250,000 (estimated)
- Other Vraksian Renegades - 1 million (estimated)
Legionii Excommunicate Traitoris
- Chaos Space Marine Warbands - 11 warbands identified (numbers unknown)
- World Eaters sub-factions
- Skulltakers
- The Sanctified
- Berserkers of Skallathrax
- Death Guard sub-factions
- Lords of Decay
- The Tainted
- Apostles of Contagion
- The Purge
- Iron Warriors sub-factions
- Steel Brotherhood
- Other non-aligned factions
- The Faithless - Alpha Legion warband of Arkos the Faithless
- Black Brethren of Eyreas - Possible Black Legion sub-faction
- Adharon's Reavers
Other Renegade Forces
- Other Heretical forces - 500,000 (estimated)
- Traitor Fleet Assets (identified in the Vraks system)
- Anarchy's Heart - Despoiler class
- Blood Dawn - Styx class
- Fallen Sun - Slaughter class
- Ferrum Invictus - Devastation class
- Gore Feasters - Iconoclast class
- Damnators - Infidel class
- Armed transports
- Aharon's Bane - Heavy transport
+++ Compiled by 88th Imperial Guard Siege Army HQ, Thracian-Prime: Thrace sub-sector: Scarus sector +++
+++ For transmission to: Segmentum Obscurus, Departmento Munitorum, Operational Command: Cadia +++
Malcador heavy tank bearing runes of Nurgle. This vehicle has taken (and survived) a direct hit from a meltagun. In this case it is likely that the running gear was destroyed by the impact and the immobilised vehicle has been recovered and the tracks and wheels repaired.
The Dark Tongue runes on this Malcador read as follows:
Dreadclaw assault pod of the Tainted warband
For speculation on the chemical compound used below, see: TP-III.
The phrase on the masking tape lost its oddness. Old4K New Full read less like nonsense and more like an incantation—a method for reckoning. It proposed a modest revolution: that memory need not be vaporized by entropy, nor fossilized into untouchable relic. It suggested a middle way, where the dead and the living meet in high definition but low judgment, where fullness is curated, not hoarded.
Years later, Mara would find herself in another attic, another house, another hard drive humming. Her hands would be steadier, her judgments sharper. The community that had grown around the practice had formed protocols: a slow intake process, consent forms, ethical redactions, and a promise to return originals. They had learned that technology is merely a tool, that the real work is the slow, relational labor of translation—translating grain into meaning, blur into decision, silence into story.
And then there was the surprise of strangeness. Sometimes, enhancing the image unearthed details that changed a memory's hue: a face in the background, an object that rewrote the geography of a story, a scarf whose pattern situated a shot in a season different from the one the family had always believed. Memory, it turned out, is not a single archive but a constellation. When resolution increases, the constellation rearranges itself—stars shift, new ones appear, some fall away.
Mara learned to listen as much as she learned to render. She called cousins and old neighbors. She learned who wanted a scene kept private and who wanted it polished and shared. In this careful choreography, something else emerged: the realization that the act of making old new didn't just refresh images; it reanimated relationships. A father saw his son's childhood with a new tenderness. A daughter watched her mother laugh in a way she had never quite remembered. The 4K didn't make their grief smaller, but it made their bonds more legible.
"Old4K New Full" had become a small movement: a phrase stitched onto T-shirts, whispered between archivists, inked in the margins of grants. But at its root it remained intimate and practical. It was two people sitting across a table deciding whether a laugh should be amplified. It was a daughter hearing, in pixels her eyes could finally resolve, the exact syllable of a father's last advice. It was an act of stewardship.
Mara closed the attic door with a careful hand. The house sighed around her—pipes settling, summer air cooling. On the kitchen table the hard drive blinked its small green light, as if still alive. She thought of the lives contained inside its spinning heart and, with the sort of small ferocity that keeps people rebuilding libraries after fires, she began labeling the next strip of masking tape.
New. That sliver of future that requires action. New was the decision to restore, to reframe. It was Mara’s late-night emails arranging a lab in another city, the courier who answered at three in the morning, the editor who spoke in terse reassurances and then, two weeks later, sent a raw file that shimmered on her screen like a newly minted coin. New meant collaboration between hands and machines, between those who remember and those who learn.
The project grew beyond an attic experiment. Friends, then strangers, then archivists and filmmakers heard about the little resurrection. They brought their own boxes—8mm reels, Betamax tapes, burned discs—with labels like "wedding1991" and "vacation_paris" and "last_year_mom." Old4k New Full became a communal verb: to render, to restore, to refuse to let memory be dictated by decay. Each reel had its grammar of light and error. Each repair was a negotiation: how much to clean, how much to leave, how to honor the blur that carried the truth of a moment.
And like any good stewardship, it demanded humility. You cannot make back what time has taken. You can, at best, render the remaining pieces with clarity and fairness. You can give elders the dignity of being seen; you can let absence be a frame rather than a void. You can present the full archive, not as an omniscient truth, but as an invitation: look closely, remember sometimes differently, decide together what to carry forward.
The hard drives multiplied, letters were transcribed, tapes digitized. People mailed in boxes from cities and islands the size of a postmark. The project made a quiet map of a generation—scratches and smiles, arguments half-heard, dances that never made it into family albums. In the end, the slogan stuck not because it promised perfection but because it promised intention: old, honored; 4K, clarified; new, chosen; full, respected.
"The Apostles of Contagion sweep forward through the sickly green light of their chemical weapons attack"
It was another year before a relief Imperial fleet arrived to secure the system, successfully landing more men, supplies, and 22 Titans of the Legio Astorum. This allowed the breaching of the third defence line, and two further battle fronts were opened: aircraft duelling in the skies, and engineers mining underground. After a year of tunnelling operations, the curtain wall was finally breached using underground explosives, but fighting continued without abating.
"Shrouded in acidic smog, as well as destroying the enemy, Nurgle's forces were also poisoning Vraks' surface"
Chaos Dreadnought of the Deathguard. Like all those who have aligned themselves with the power of the Plague Lord and received his favour, disease and decay have covered the hull. This decay seems to have no effect of the Dreadnought's operations.
Captured Land Raider in the early stages of decay. So far this vehicle has only become heavily rusted.
Nurgle Predator of the Apostles of Contagion warband.
Nurgle Rhino of the Purge warband, destroyed during fighting against the 19th Siege regiment.
The Dark Tongue runes on the Rhino read "Aarh'nurgh'lem".
"With every death on Vraks our victory comes closer. There is no army in the galaxy that can stop the forces we began to invoke so many years ago. Soon they shall be unleashed at our bidding!"
— Deacon Mamon - declared Extremis Diabolus by the Conclave of Scarus 2059826.M41
After a full fourteen years of warfare without success, the Departmento Munitorum downgraded the importance of the campaign, limiting the available future reinforcements. A Space Marine strike force of Red Scorpions agreed to aid the effort, which was enough for the Imperial army to finally breach the curtain wall, leaving just the central fortress to conquer.
Then Lord Inquisitor Hector Rex of the Ordo Malleus arrived and indentured the Imperial Guard army due to portents that pointed to an imminent breach in the warp, leaving all the men in danger from a new enemy.
Renegade Chimera encountered during the fighting at the curtain wall breach.
Malcador Defender with its original markings over-painted with Chaos runes.
The Dark Tongue runes on the turret of the Chimera are the number 139, and the runes on the hull read "Bomchiquar'waa'waa" (boomchickawawa). And on the turret of this Malcador Defender are the number 6 and the word "Nurgle".
Chaos Defiler encountered by the 19th Siege regiment.
Chaos Defiler of the Apostles of Contagion warband.
This book's Servants of Slaughter version of the Renegades and Heretics army list covers the Khorne-worshipping sections of the Chaos forces.
Perhaps the most singular and most disturbing Chaos Dreadnoughts belong however to the Death Guard Legion. These monstrous creations are alive with organic corruption, their hulls blistered with oozing sores and weeping, filth encrusted wounds and other stigmata of the Plague God Nurgle. What living nightmare is experienced by the occupant of such a vile and horrific machine is best left unimagined.
The phrase on the masking tape lost its oddness. Old4K New Full read less like nonsense and more like an incantation—a method for reckoning. It proposed a modest revolution: that memory need not be vaporized by entropy, nor fossilized into untouchable relic. It suggested a middle way, where the dead and the living meet in high definition but low judgment, where fullness is curated, not hoarded.
Years later, Mara would find herself in another attic, another house, another hard drive humming. Her hands would be steadier, her judgments sharper. The community that had grown around the practice had formed protocols: a slow intake process, consent forms, ethical redactions, and a promise to return originals. They had learned that technology is merely a tool, that the real work is the slow, relational labor of translation—translating grain into meaning, blur into decision, silence into story.
And then there was the surprise of strangeness. Sometimes, enhancing the image unearthed details that changed a memory's hue: a face in the background, an object that rewrote the geography of a story, a scarf whose pattern situated a shot in a season different from the one the family had always believed. Memory, it turned out, is not a single archive but a constellation. When resolution increases, the constellation rearranges itself—stars shift, new ones appear, some fall away. old4k new full
Mara learned to listen as much as she learned to render. She called cousins and old neighbors. She learned who wanted a scene kept private and who wanted it polished and shared. In this careful choreography, something else emerged: the realization that the act of making old new didn't just refresh images; it reanimated relationships. A father saw his son's childhood with a new tenderness. A daughter watched her mother laugh in a way she had never quite remembered. The 4K didn't make their grief smaller, but it made their bonds more legible.
"Old4K New Full" had become a small movement: a phrase stitched onto T-shirts, whispered between archivists, inked in the margins of grants. But at its root it remained intimate and practical. It was two people sitting across a table deciding whether a laugh should be amplified. It was a daughter hearing, in pixels her eyes could finally resolve, the exact syllable of a father's last advice. It was an act of stewardship. The phrase on the masking tape lost its oddness
Mara closed the attic door with a careful hand. The house sighed around her—pipes settling, summer air cooling. On the kitchen table the hard drive blinked its small green light, as if still alive. She thought of the lives contained inside its spinning heart and, with the sort of small ferocity that keeps people rebuilding libraries after fires, she began labeling the next strip of masking tape.
New. That sliver of future that requires action. New was the decision to restore, to reframe. It was Mara’s late-night emails arranging a lab in another city, the courier who answered at three in the morning, the editor who spoke in terse reassurances and then, two weeks later, sent a raw file that shimmered on her screen like a newly minted coin. New meant collaboration between hands and machines, between those who remember and those who learn. It suggested a middle way, where the dead
The project grew beyond an attic experiment. Friends, then strangers, then archivists and filmmakers heard about the little resurrection. They brought their own boxes—8mm reels, Betamax tapes, burned discs—with labels like "wedding1991" and "vacation_paris" and "last_year_mom." Old4k New Full became a communal verb: to render, to restore, to refuse to let memory be dictated by decay. Each reel had its grammar of light and error. Each repair was a negotiation: how much to clean, how much to leave, how to honor the blur that carried the truth of a moment.
And like any good stewardship, it demanded humility. You cannot make back what time has taken. You can, at best, render the remaining pieces with clarity and fairness. You can give elders the dignity of being seen; you can let absence be a frame rather than a void. You can present the full archive, not as an omniscient truth, but as an invitation: look closely, remember sometimes differently, decide together what to carry forward.
The hard drives multiplied, letters were transcribed, tapes digitized. People mailed in boxes from cities and islands the size of a postmark. The project made a quiet map of a generation—scratches and smiles, arguments half-heard, dances that never made it into family albums. In the end, the slogan stuck not because it promised perfection but because it promised intention: old, honored; 4K, clarified; new, chosen; full, respected.
Imperial Armour 6 was published in July 2008, the same month as the 5th edition Warhammer 40,000 rules. But the forces listed above refer to earlier publications using 4th edition rules. Specifically, the 2007 Codex: Chaos Space Marines for the main attacking force (excluding the reserves), 2003's Imperial Armour 1 (a 3rd edition book) for the defending Leman Russ, and 2007's Imperial Armour 5 for all other units.
The forces are deliberately out of balance in terms of points values, in favour of Chaos:
And that doesn't take into account the imbalance in the special rules: the attacker's Preliminary Chemical Attack and additional opportunity to gain Victory points, and the asymmetrical terms of deployment. Note that using the Apostate Preacher profile in IA6 (Apostate Preacher of Khorne) rather than IA5, the plasma pistol costs 15 points rather than 10 points.
dedicated to the Master of Plague 