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Rough outline for a short story I'm working on for a warlord titan I just finished building.



Hey guys! So I just finished building a massive scratch built Lucius pattern warlord titan and along the way, ended up creating quite the diorama around the base including dead Sisters and Custodes, mutilated Guard and a few Death Korps. If you wanna check out the build thread it's over in P&M Shocase under the thread Pandemic Class Nurgle Warlord Titan.

So with all the action going on around the base, I decided I'd like to whip up a short story and reason as to why these high level imperial forces are fighting this thing, but mostly it's about where it came from and why it's designed the way it is. The rough outline I have is as follows.
It all kind of centers around this dude I have at the top of the titan bound by a cerebral cable to a blackstone core from a Necron doomsday ark which then goes to a spine going down the back of the titan. I originally thought maybe he could be an imprisoned C'tan shard, but then someone mentioned it could be a daemonhost and after some research on their process I came up with this:
Nurgle daemon prince Offalrott is banished back to the Warp after fighting Grey Knight brotherhood champion Feydor Ankhalas.
Death Guard Chaos Lord Pestiferus Ichor later has an altercation with Ankhalas on an Eldar phoenix ship secretly transporting a package containing a path into the Black Library that both parties were after.
At one point in the battle for the info, there was a breach in the ship and both characters were sucked into the vacuum of space. It somehow came to a choice of destroy the package or let it fall into the hands of Chaos so Feydor remotely detonated a melta bomb he had attached to one of the ship's vortex torpedoes, obliterating the ship and any contents within. The explosion nearly dragged them both into the Warp with the ship, but instead scattered them across the local space and they lost track of each other to resume their fight another day. Thinking maybe Ankhalas gets picked up by a small transport leaving Ichor floating out in space for days or weeks or months until he finds a way back to his home on Plague Planet in the Warp. Just to make him extra salty.
So now we have the established vendetta between Ankhalas and Offalrott and Ankhalas and Ichor.
Pestiferus Ichor devises a plan of vengeance on Ankhalas where he will use his cultist in the Cult of the Rotting Stag to summon Offalrott into a daemonhost. Unlike most daemonhost bindings, this ritual only involved temporary wards and little to nothing else because he and the cult made an offer to Offalrott. To bind him to this host and use it as a conduit for him to then pilot a corrupted Lucius warlord titan. The power and endurance of a war machine the size of a mountain combined with the ruinous powers of a daemon prince. And together, they would carry forth a campaign of vengeance on Ankhalas and the rest of his shiny brothers on Titan. Yeah, maybe not that bit. While a massive titan, a single warlord probably isn't enough to go up against the Grey Knights homeworld.
A daemonhost however is no princeps so there are some prerequisites to get this plan to work. They would need the unique qualities of the solar metals from Forgeworld Lucius and the conductivity of blackstone from the Necron. So Pestiferus sent forth emissaries to Stygies VIII to seed the creation of the Cult of the Rotting Stag.
The cult also sent a deceptive message to Forgeworld Lucius requesting the manufacture of one of their Lucius patter warlord titans to be shipped to an imperial world that would require travel through the Warp.
Typhus and the Terminus Est intercept this shipment and according to imperial records, destroy every trace of the vessel and the titan within. In actuality, he recovered the titan because this was of course the plan all along and delivered it.. in... secret... to Stygies VIII. ... Yeah, how does one deliver a battlebot the size of a skyscraper in secret? This is why this is a rough draft and I'm bringing it here for help and discussion!
So with the titan in place on Stygies VIII, the cult began the process of modifying it so that a daemonhost could be connected through blackstone to the internal systems thus allowing it to be a conduit or passthrough for the daemon possessing the host, Offalrott.and with the Lucius solar metal, he could even more so pilot the titan as if it were his own flesh and blood.
The binding went as planned. Offalrott was successfully integrated with the titan. However, while he did agree to the terms, the newfound surge of power of being in control of a god machine was too much and upon full activation, he burst forth from the forge where he was being constructed and left a path of ruin, destruction, and cursed earth across Stygies VIII which got the attention of the Custodes and Sisters. Krieg came along for fun and shovel whackin.
Oh yeah, and the banner. Well that's simple. I figure he's a member of Legio Mortis by default now cuz he serves the Death Guard and well, he can't very well be Legio Astorum now can he?

So yeah. That's what I got so far. Please do pick it apart and let me know where the plot holes and problems are cuz I'm sure there are a few.
Oh, and that bisected Yarrick corpse in the P&M Blogs post was just for fun. While I do contest that it wasn't Angron cuz that skull has both a servo eye and service studs and last time I checked, commissars don't get service studs, no WAY am I up to writing some fanfic for how Yarrick really died. ... For now anyway.

Edit: Redoing the whole Ankhalas vs Ichor battle. Not Eldar but a Drukari ship apprehended by Ankhalas under the pretense of capturing the xenos but really to get the info on the Black Library. All Drukari are executed. Ichor also knows about this ship carrying the Intel on the Black Library and shows up unannounced. They have a battle, still end up sucked into space where Ichor sprouts feotid wings and flies back to the ship. Yeah, in a vacuum, Chaos magic whatever. He starts flying the ship away, leaving Ankhalas in the void when Ankhalas remotely detonates a melta attached to a vortex missile on the ship, obliterating the ship and Ichor into the Warp. Ichor and the Intel are destroyed, but Ichor is reborn in the Warp as spores.on the wind that are caught by a special tree that bears fruit of a fresh rebuilt coporeal form of him, slightly mutated by Nurgle. He made a pact with the Plague God to have 7 lives, being reborn slightly more mutated each time. So now he's pissed at Ankhalas cuz he took 1 if his 7 lives, plus that whole process hurt like hell!


Thanks!

Well, I saw your Titan and it's a tremendous project you should be proud of.

However when it comes to lore, and I hate to say this, almost all fan lore is just...bad. Even my army fluff, avoiding cringe, is still bad. I don't read anyone's fanlore, including what you posted, because it's never good. That's the nature of homebrew lore.

So all that matters in this case is how you feel about it. If you don't think it has a lot of plot holes to be concerned about and you think it's cohesive, that's all that matters.

Fair point. Tis a lot of words.

You've used an actual skull and spine to make a scratch-built titan mate, you can write whatever the hell you want and it's fine by me...

Crispy78 wrote:
You've used an actual skull and spine to make a scratch-built titan mate, you can write whatever the hell you want and it's fine by me...

Thanks Crispy!