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Okay, this is probably full of holes but it just came to me as a concept just now:

Imagine if, back in the days of the Great Crusade, word had come to Terra about one of the Forgotten Primach's locations; a rumour perhaps... And his legion (still waiting for him) was despatched to go and find him but got lost in a great warp storm. (When I originally thought of this; I thought perhaps a legion in stasis... but it makes more sense to say they got lost in a warp storm).

This Warp Storm was unique; a ferocious one, its severity so terrible that the ship was lost in it for 10 millenia, but due to the nature of the warp, the trip seemed completely normal in duration to the occupants...

So the legion and their fleet emerge from the warp in the 41st Millenium: To discover the Primarch gone, the Emperor's Dream in ruins... and learn, to their horror, that their former Battle-Brothers went over to Chaos in their thousands.

Imagine a legion, amongst whom every man had walked beside the Emperor, a legion still clad in Heresy-Era equipment; and every man familiar and fanatically dedicated to the Emperor's Dream; a dream stolen from them just as their leader was.

It's perhaps a bit too imaginative with the lore; but it'd be quite cool to see a legion not broken into chapters, familiar with their opponents (they once walked together as brothers), and filled with a hatred for chaos even more intense than your average marine; for every man in this legion had, to them only a year ago, been a proud part of the Great Crusade...

Any thoughts?

A legion is to big to be carried on one ship, so you'll need a fleet.
Most expeditions at the crusade were led by the emperor himself or at least consisted of a mix of legions.
I doubt the loss of a whole legion in a lonely ship ( no matter the size of it) in a warpstorm.

The concept is sound in theory. I remember reading something similar, only it was a single marine that came from pre-heresy land. He got into a spot of bother with the inquisition.

But, as stated above, losing an entire legion in such a method does strain the bounds of credibility somewhat.

I like the idea very much, Ive long been tempted to do a pre heresy marine army with a similar plot.

Small force from given legion sent away on mission, lost in warp, exit warp ten millenia later to much grimdark.

As others have pointed out, there are a couple of flaws, but I like the actual concept.

1hadhq wrote:A legion is to big to be carried on one ship, so you'll need a fleet.
Most expeditions at the crusade were led by the emperor himself or at least consisted of a mix of legions.
I doubt the loss of a whole legion in a lonely ship ( no matter the size of it) in a warpstorm.

Doesn't have to be a whole legion, true... but even if a whole one did get transported in a fleet; if that fleet used the same warp jump there is a chance they could get lost as a group

But they could be more like the Fire Hawks... who also got lost in a warp storm but emerged as the Legion of the Damned we know and love <3

It could certainly be part of a legion consisting of several chapters worth of marines and their equipment and probably a few regiments of the Imperial Army and maybe even a Titan or two and some Knights.

Thing is though they'd be a new race/faction. Having come straight from the Crusades where they were fighting against religion, including the false worship of the Emperor as a god, they'd probably view the Imperium as being corrupted by the Ecclesiarchy and declare war.
It could make for an interesting story arc to see how they would cope with the changes to the direction of the Imperium; would they attack the new order; would they attempt to understand why things had changed; would they have retreated to the edge of Imperial space and maybe beyond to start their own version of the Imperium of Man; would they split up as each faction within the fleet decided to choose a seperate path; perhaps they'd even succumb to chaos as chances are they're ignorant of the threat of chaos. Lots of possibilities.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
Perhaps it is the remnants of one of the two lost legions. It couldn't be any part of the core of the legion though as those two legions did something pretty bad to be struck out of Imperial records. It could be a fleet from one of the lost legions that was caught in a warp storm long before the legion did whatever it was that caused it to be expunged from the records.

I see two holes in this. #1: Legion is too big to go on one ship. Unless it's like a ten trillion foot flagship from star wars. #2 How would the soldiers go over to chaos? Is it like the death guard, where they were so frightened of death that they prayed to chaos? Or was from Tzeentch's twised plotting that sent the soldiers to chaos, like the thousand sons? Or did they become perverted freaks of slaanesh all because of experiencing great pleasure like the emperor's children?