What happened to the Thunder Warrior Blueprints?

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**Adeptekon**

I wonder how many became blackshields.

**Gert**

Blackshields were Astartes who cast off their Legion colours and abandoned their oaths to their Primarch. Some would serve the Imperium, some the Warmaster but most would carve out petty kingdoms.
Blackshield warbands didn't even exist prior to the Heresy long after the Thunder Warriors were dead.

**Adeptekon**

Right, but didn't someone just say blacksheild earlier? I thought I heard that somewhere else too. That some survived and became blackshields (just didn't recall where)

**Tsagualsa**

Adeptekon wrote:
Right, but didn't someone just say blacksheild earlier? I thought I heard that somewhere else too. That some survived and became blackshields (just didn't recall where)

There's one World Eater that is strongly implied to have been a Thunder Warrior, but that's your typical GW one in a million case.

https://wh40k.lexicanum.com/wiki/Endryd_Haar

**Gert**

It's a theory that a prominent Blackshield, Endryd Haar, was a Thunder Warrior who had been advanced into an Astartes.
He was noticeably large for an Astartes, remembered the Thunder Warrior inmates from the Cerberus Insurrection as "brothers", has a Raptor Imperialis tattoo which is only allowed to be borne by those who fought on Terra during the Unification Wars, and is noted for having "dreams of thunder".
The fact that there were Thunder Warriors leading the rebelling prisoners on Cerberus was a shock to the Imperial forces who believed them to all be dead by this point.

**Adeptekon**

Would be interesting for someone to pick up that part of the lore and make something out of it.

**darknation**

Cawl has access to it, used some of it for the primaris IMHO. As was rightly pointed out, only the upper half of thunder armour was powered, leaving those poor little biological thunder-leggies to do all the running work.

The legs of the Cataegis would *have* to be surgically enhanced to cope with this. And it would explain where that stupid Cawlisian Leg Spring tendons came from in primaris biology.

Of course, maybe I'm just overthinking the god-awful primaris lore, and digging the Black Libary out of a pit of their own creation (Using my Patent Pending Thunder Thighs tm oc do not steal)

**Adeptekon**

They would have made great American football players.

**mrFickle**

Burn after reading

**Mad Doc Grotsnik**

darknation wrote:
Cawl has access to it, used some of it for the primaris IMHO. As was rightly pointed out, only the upper half of thunder armour was powered, leaving those poor little biological thunder-leggies to do all the running work.

The legs of the Cataegis would *have* to be surgically enhanced to cope with this. And it would explain where that stupid Cawlisian Leg Spring tendons came from in primaris biology.

Of course, maybe I'm just overthinking the god-awful primaris lore, and digging the Black Libary out of a pit of their own creation (Using my Patent Pending Thunder Thighs tm oc do not steal)

Not necessarily overthinking.

Whilst I don’t agree the Sinew Coils are a relic from the Thunder Warriors, that doesn’t mean Thunder Warriors didn’t have something similar.

We know The Emperor himself wasn’t solely responsible for the Thunder Warriors. Other Warlords had similar, if not identical, warriors at their disposal.

We also know the original Astartes were a bodge job. The Emperor making the most out of the disaster of the abduction of the Primarchs. Biology aside, the main difference between an Astartes and a Thunder Warrior is of course Astartes have, and have pretty much always had, fully powered armour.

So I posit the Sinew Coils were a refinement of something used to create Thunder Warriors, left on the shelf as a low priority due to the new fully Power Armour being a “good enough” answer to overall mobility and agility. But like seemingly every Astartes Organs, whether original or Cawl’s additions will have some technological ancestry found in the Thunder Warriors, or at least came about to correct a given deficiency in Thunder Warriors (such as perhaps the Sus-an Membrane, or Oolitic Kidney).

**NinthMusketeer**

You know that pile of old sprues you've been meaning to go through for years but haven't, and nows it's underneath a decade of sprue buildup, which is under sprue buildup from two other armies, which is under that box of spare frames your friend gave you, which is behind the stack of obsolete rulebooks, which is buried under a solid centimeter of dust, which is located in the back corner of some room which a human could barely enter without crawling? It's there.

**Adeptekon**

I would think Ogryns would be better Thunder Warriors.

**cody.d.**

Adeptekon wrote:
I would think Ogryns would be better Thunder Warriors.

Kinda what Charonite ogryns from HH are. Take an ogryn, give them cybenetic weapons and a bit of a labotomy, pump them full of combat drugs and off to the races you go. They either die of enemy fire or from burning themselves out. Recover the expensive gubbins rinse and repeat. Pretty much what Thunder Warriors were meant to do.

**Mad Doc Grotsnik**

On Ogryns?

Given the Kin of the Leagues of Votann are essentially designer Abhumans, tweaked to best fit by STC? There’s a tacit implication that other, if not all, Abhumans are the result of already extensive genetic tinkering.

So it could be that outside of the Charanite process (basically grafting bionics onto the existing flesh and pumping them full of combat drugs), the baseline Ogryn is already so genhanced there’s not much more you can do, especially as a major part of why Ogryns are so tolerated is their exceptional loyalty.

As a Magos Biologist or other suitably knowledgable Imperial? I’m not sure I’d want to risk whatever adaptation I’m attempting reducing or outright removing that loyalty.

There’s a whole thread of potential on how I could argue Ogryns must the result of genetic tinkering, but that’s another thread entirely.

**Tsagualsa**

Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:

Given the Kin of the Leagues of Votann are essentially designer Abhumans, tweaked to best fit by STC? There’s a tacit implication that other, if not all, Abhumans are the result of already extensive genetic tinkering.

I'm personally a fan of the kind-of-supported theory that DAoT humans did something to their genetics that made them much more adaptable to the various environments that they were encountering on purpose, which now leads to the variant strains of stable Abhumans, but also explains why mutation, both chaotic and mundane, is so rampant all over the Imperium. Humanity dialed their mutability to 11 on purpose, some got trapped in evolutionary/mutagenic niches, some had to learn the hard way that not all mutations are beneficial adaptations.

**Mad Doc Grotsnik**

That’s a new one on me, but I kind of like it!

Spesh if, post Great Crusade, previously semi-isolated adapted strains of humans who didn’t look different began to mingle and reproduce. I could see two descendants of highly adapted sub-spices birthing something Proper Wonky when their recessive genes had an awful party in the womb, and things never intended to mix…mixed. And the nascent body just did what it could.

**Tsagualsa**

Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
That’s a new one on me, but I kind of like it!

Spesh if, post Great Crusade, previously semi-isolated adapted strains of humans who didn’t look different began to mingle and reproduce. I could see two descendants of highly adapted sub-spices birthing something Proper Wonky when their recessive genes had an awful party in the womb, and things never intended to mix…mixed. And the nascent body just did what it could.

There are some throwaway lines in Master of Mankind and Valdor about the Emperor struggling to reconstruct the baseline human genome, because baseline humans practically did not exist anymore in the Age of Strife, and at least three other Heresy novels have instances of the Crusade wiping out humans that were genetically just too far gone, even though they were willing to join the Imperium. One strain is noted to look like basic humans, but scans revealed that they did so much messing under the hood that they're a genetic risk to all humanity if they were allowed to mix back in. IIRC the Imperial Fists get all teary-eyed about needing to exterminate them because they were die-hard holdovers from long wars against Xenos and were practically euphoric to get back in contact with an organized Imperium that proved their endurance was worth it.

**Mad Doc Grotsnik**

For the best of my experience, there was a short story published in Inferno!, of a random Imperial survivor being nursed backed to health by what he originally believed to be Xenos.

If memory serves, the saviour species were essentially centaurs (as in, four legs, two arms, but not equine) with blue skin. The story has the survivor find out that species are Adapted Humans (so Abhumans, if the Kin are the benchmark I consider), but so deviant from the norm, the survivor knew they’d be wiped out on sight,

**Tsagualsa**

Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
For the best of my experience, there was a short story published in Inferno!, of a random Imperial survivor being nursed backed to health by what he originally believed to be Xenos.

If memory serves, the saviour species were essentially centaurs (as in, four legs, two arms, but not equine) with blue skin. The story has the survivor find out that species are Adapted Humans (so Abhumans, if the Kin are the benchmark I consider), but so deviant from the norm, the survivor knew they’d be wiped out on sight,

I dimly remember that - doesn't it end with the survivor deciding to abandon the Imperium and becoming Dances-with-~~Wolves~~-Horsemen?

**Mad Doc Grotsnik**

Your recollection is not better than mine, I’m afraid!

**Tsagualsa**

Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
Your recollection is not better than mine, I’m afraid!

My recollection may be weak, but my google-fu is strong!

Children of the Emperor

by Barrington J. Bayley

Guardsman Floscan Hartoum of the Aurelian 9th Regiment is aboard the troopship Emperor's Vengenace when it breaks through a warp gate and is ambushed along with its escort the Glorious Redeemer by an Ork fleet. Hartoum is able to launch a escape pod, after escaping the wrath of a Commissar Leminkanen before the ship is destroyed and guides the rudimentary pod down to an unknown planet's surface. Surviving the entry into orbit and the landing, hartoum finds himself on a bizarre planet with a relatively high gravity, barely able to stand without tedious effort. He then encounters a pack of strange alien centaurs who attack a large scorpion like creature and kill it. They then pick him up and take him back to their camp with no explanation whatsoever where he meets Ochtar, the Elder and Remembering One. He tells Hartoum that they are the descendants of an explorator fleet which crashlanded on the planet in ancient times. Their descendants found that they needed to bio-engineer their people to give them the extra legs to stand and the strength to fight the bizzare monsters on the planet. Ochtar then explains that he learnt Imperial Gothic from a free trader who came and collected gemstones before leaving behind a heavy gravity suit which Ochtar then gives to Hartoum. Ochtar then takes Hartoum to a sacred site to prove their stories and descent, however they must pass through the territory of those who follow the Blood God. Once at the sacred site, Hartoum witnesses ancient cogitators of the Cult Mechanicus, possibly from the time of the Dark Age of Technology. This proves that Ochtar is descended from humans, not of some alien race> Hartoum is excited by the fact that some Standard Template Construct data may be present within the machinery. However the warriors of the Blood God discover their presence, destroying the machinery and slaughtering Ochtar whilst taking Hartoum back to their camp. Thrown into a hut, Hartoum discovers that Commissar Leminkanen has survived and is being held prisoner by the Blood God centaurs. Hartoum tries to explain to Leminkanen that the centaurs are descended from humans, which he firmly disbelieves. Hartoum dismays and rubs through his bindings, making an escape from the camp, whereupon he is discovered in the morning by Ochtar's warriors. Hartoum directs them to the Blood God centaurs camp where a messenger of the Emperor is prisoner (Leminkanen). Whilst the two forces battle, Hartoum releases Leminkanen and asks him to witness the good work of Ochtar's centaurs. however all that he sees is a giant millipede creature which has surrounded the village and is consuming the warriors. The Commissar states that this is all an afront to the Emperor and starts to detail a report for exterminatus, however mid report he is devoured by the millipede creature. The two forces of the centaurs kill the creature by stting it alight and escape, drawing up across from each other, ready to battle once more. However a Imperial shuttle craft descends and interupts them.

Back aboard the Imperial battleship Ravenger, the Commissar's report is being filed with the Captain, stating that the planet is worthless and inhabited by ferocious creatures and a primitive semi-intelligent alien species unlikely to progress any further. The report then drops off midsentence on explaining that no further action should be taken. The Captain accepts this and forwards it to the Adeptus Terra. Hartoum, sitting in his cell reflects on his actions, altering the Commissar's already open report to protect the centaurs from exterminatus, as well as philosphizing on whether the Emperor would abhor or agree with his actions.

https://wh40k.lexicanum.com/wiki/Into_the_Maelstrom_(Anthology)#Children_of_the_Emperor

Into the Maelstrom, one of the first books little wee me bought at horrendous and inefficient effort via mail order all the way from good old blighty

There's an audio reading of it, if anyone is interested: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lRmoljDGSQI&feature=youtu.be

**Adeptekon**

Does anyone possess Thunder Warrior DNA?

**Tsagualsa**

Adeptekon wrote:
Does anyone possess Thunder Warrior DNA?

Fabius Bile definitely does. He has a lot of things that are more esoteric like that, like for example Barghesi DNA (there's a whole SM chapter dedicated to preventing any of that leaving their homeworld due to their unspecified, but extremely dangerous 'hyperviolent' nature).

**Adeptekon**

So would you say Bile is the most skilled at genetics, more than Cawl?

**Gert**

Tsagualsa wrote:
Fabius Bile definitely does. He has a lot of things that are more esoteric like that, like for example Barghesi DNA (there's a whole SM chapter dedicated to preventing any of that leaving their homeworld due to their unspecified, but extremely dangerous 'hyperviolent' nature).

Bit of a bold statement to make with no evidence beyond "he has other stuff". Barghesi still exist, while the Thunder Warriors have been extinct for almost 10k years as of current events.

Adeptekon wrote:
So would you say Bile is the most skilled at genetics, more than Cawl?

Eh, different things.

Bile was good at genetic manipulation and surgery and did manage to create a species of genetically superior humans with relatively limited resources.

Cawl is a difficult one to put in one box because Cawl isn't just one person. He is essentially a gestalt mind combined with many different scientists and engineers including the likes of Ezekiel Sedayne (one of the original Astartes Project leads). He sort of cheats the system because he merges his being with others (literal soul merging) and in turn, gains their knowledge. He has extensive knowledge on Astartes physiology and biology, loads of different technologies, and even cloning.

They're about equal.

**Adeptekon**

That sure does make for a plethora of possibilities when it comes to homebrew it would seem.

**Tsagualsa**

Gert wrote:
Tsagualsa wrote:
Fabius Bile definitely does. He has a lot of things that are more esoteric like that, like for example Barghesi DNA (there's a whole SM chapter dedicated to preventing any of that leaving their homeworld due to their unspecified, but extremely dangerous 'hyperviolent' nature).

Bit of a bold statement to make with no evidence beyond "he has other stuff". Barghesi still exist, while the Thunder Warriors have been extinct for almost 10k years as of current events.
.

Well, Bile was born on Terra, in Bavaria (in the town Frankenstein was ~~from~~ working, wink wink, nudge nudge) and could have been contemporary to the Thunder Warriors, and he started his fleshcrafting hobby before even becoming a marine. I also think there's a throwaway line somewhere about him having TW samples, but i might be misremembering end there's a lot of Bile monologues about his creations - so i'd like to grade my 'definitely' down to 'likely'. Dude cloned Primarchs and does crazy stuff all the time, he seems like someone who would acquire TW samples for completion's sake

**Adeptekon**

Tsagualsa wrote:
Dude cloned Primarchs and does crazy stuff all the time, he seems like someone who would acquire TW samples for completion's sake

I would think the Thunder Warriors would still be valuable to whomever for facing off Orks which tend to kill a lot of space marines it seems.

**Mad Doc Grotsnik**

Whilst I need to read his novels to be more familiar, Bile’s drawback strikes me as being a relentless tinkerer. That if he could just commit to a single project as Cawl did, then he could quite possibly exceed Cawl’s outcome.

But….he won’t, perhaps can’t. He’s flitting from one to the next, always trying something new, never truly standardising. And that’s his EC heritage at play. Where The Emperor and Cawl both got to different degrees of “good enough”, Bile remains obsessed with perfection. Not just perfecting the existing gubbins that makes a Marine, but pushing each constituent part. Relentlessly improving, refining. Tinker tinker tinker tinker tinker. And in doing so, one could argue he fails to keep his eye on the prize?

**Tsagualsa**

Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
Whilst I need to read his novels to be more familiar, Bile’s drawback strikes me as being a relentless tinkerer. That if he could just commit to a single project as Cawl did, then he could quite possibly exceed Cawl’s outcome.

But….he won’t, perhaps can’t. He’s flitting from one to the next, always trying something new, never truly standardising. And that’s his EC heritage at play. Where The Emperor and Cawl both got to different degrees of “good enough”, Bile remains obsessed with perfection. Not just perfecting the existing gubbins that makes a Marine, but pushing each constituent part. Relentlessly improving, refining. Tinker tinker tinker tinker tinker. And in doing so, one could argue he fails to keep his eye on the prize?

Bile's stated, and revealed, goal is explicitly the creation of his 'New Men' - while it is true that he is endlessly tinkering around, his goal is to replace humanity, by a new race that is able to reproduce and eventually crowd the normal humans out of the galaxy. That's why he is not interested anymore in making superhumans that need to be produced with implantations, surgery and vat-grown organs: he wants his creations to run independently, forever, as master of their own destiny. That's also why his work is like, super-heretic for the Imperium: one of the big and inviolable prohibitions the Emperor was adamant on was no self-replicating supermen, because he feared they'd want to replace humanity, and were in danger to actually do so during the DAoT. Bile has the diametrically opposite view: he's some sort of universal darwinist, if his creations have the mettle to come out on top, the universe rightfully belongs to them in his view. And he's putting both tumbs on the scales by giving them abilities like the aforementioned hyper-violence and other boons.