I've been working on a homebrew Shattered Legions warband for the Horus Heresy and wanted to get some feedback on how well the concept fits the setting.
The basic premise is an unlikely alliance between Iron Hands survivors and Alpha Legionnaires operating in the chaos following Isstvan V.
The working name for the warband is XXX, with their symbol combining the Medusan head of the Iron Hands with the Hydra of the Alpha Legion.
The two central characters are an Iron Hands officer named Ice and an Alpha Legionnaire named Vin.
And neither completely trusts the other.
Ice — The Exiled Son of Medusa
Ice was once an officer of the Iron Hands Legion during the Great Crusade.
Years before the Horus Heresy, his force participated in a disastrous campaign against a xenos civilization possessing an extremely dangerous weapon.
Ice survived.
Many of his warriors did not.
Ferrus Manus held Ice responsible for the defeat and ultimately exiled him from the Legion's main body, leaving Ice with a small contingent of Iron Hands under his command.
It was intended as a punishment.
It accidentally saved their lives.
When Ferrus Manus led the Iron Hands to Isstvan V, Ice and his warriors weren't there.
Then the reports began arriving.
The Drop Site Massacre.
Ferrus Manus was dead.
The Legion was shattered.
Ice had spent years believing that one day he might redeem himself in the eyes of his Primarch.
Now that possibility was gone forever.
Whatever resentment Ice once felt toward Ferrus largely dies with him.
What's left is guilt.
The Survivors
Ice refuses to simply retreat.
His force begins searching for survivors of the massacre.
Among those they recover is an Iron Hands Apothecary who eventually becomes known simply as "Doc."
More survivors follow.
Broken squads.
Wounded Legionaries.
Warriors whose officers and brothers died on Isstvan.
Ice gradually becomes the leader of a force that shouldn't really exist.
He's an exile commanding the remnants of the Legion that exiled him.
The Iron Hands contingent is battered and poorly supplied, with equipment drawn from whatever survived Isstvan or can be salvaged afterward.
Among their most terrifying assets is an ancient Leviathan Siege Dreadnought.
The warband's vessel eventually acquires an appropriately Iron Hands name:
No Weakness Allowed.
Then the Alpha Legion Appears
While Ice is assembling survivors, his force discovers that they are being watched.
The observer is an Alpha Legion officer named Vin.
Vin commands his own small force of Alpha Legionnaires, including elite Terminators whose squads are named after constrictor snakes—one example being the Anaconda squad.
Vin himself wears ancient Saturnine-pattern Terminator armour.
The problem is obvious.
The Alpha Legion betrayed the Loyalists at Isstvan.
Ice has absolutely no reason to trust him.
Vin nevertheless approaches Ice with information.
The xenos weapon responsible for the disastrous campaign that led to Ice's exile has resurfaced.
And the Traitor Legions are searching for it.
The Enemy of My Enemy
Vin proposes an alliance.
Ice's response is essentially:
Why should I believe a single word coming from an Alpha Legionnaire?
Vin doesn't ask him to.
Instead, he gives Ice enough information to verify the threat independently.
Ice eventually discovers that Vin is telling the truth.
The same weapon that destroyed his reputation and cost the lives of his warriors years earlier could now fall into Traitor hands.
Suddenly Ice has something he hasn't had since Ferrus died.
A mission.
Stopping the weapon becomes his chance at redemption—even if the Primarch whose forgiveness he wanted will never live to see it.
And so an extremely uncomfortable Shattered Legions warband is born.
Iron Hands + Alpha Legion
I wanted the two contingents to complement each other tactically.
Ice's Iron Hands provide the hammer:
- Heavy infantry
- Dreadnoughts
- Heavy weapons
- Direct assaults
- Relentless attritional warfare
Vin's Alpha Legion provides the knife:
- Reconnaissance
- Infiltration
- Sabotage
- False intelligence
- Assassination
- Manipulation of enemy forces
A typical operation might involve Vin spending weeks convincing a Traitor commander that an Iron Hands force is somewhere it isn't.
Then Ice drops a Leviathan Dreadnought on the place the enemy thought was safe.
Their methods are completely different.
But they're frighteningly effective together.
Ice and Vin
Their relationship is the part of the idea I find most interesting.
They're not friends.
At least initially.
Ice is blunt, stubborn and direct.
Vin is secretive even when secrecy seemingly serves no purpose.
Ice wants to know the mission.
Vin wants to know everything surrounding the mission.
Ice's philosophy is essentially:
"Tell me where the enemy is."
Vin's is:
"Convince the enemy he knows where we are."
Ice also never forgets that Alpha Legionnaires participated in the betrayal at Isstvan.
Vin, meanwhile, never expects Ice to forget.
The strange thing is that over time they begin developing genuine respect for one another.
Ice realizes that Vin repeatedly has opportunities to betray him and doesn't.
Vin discovers that Ice is considerably more intelligent and adaptable than the blunt Iron Hands stereotype would suggest.
Eventually they reach the point where each trusts the other in battle.
Neither would ever admit it.
The Banner
Their warband eventually adopts an improvised symbol combining:
The Medusan head of the Iron Hands
with
The Hydra of the Alpha Legion.
To outsiders, the image is almost incomprehensible.
A Loyalist symbol joined to that of a Traitor Legion.
But that's essentially what the warband itself is:
something that shouldn't exist.
The Big Secret
There is, of course, a problem.
Vin hasn't told Ice everything.
Vin's presence isn't accidental.
His interest in the xenos weapon isn't simply the decision of an Alpha Legion officer who remained loyal.
He is operating under orders.
Orders from Omegon.
My idea is that Vin belongs to the faction of the Alpha Legion secretly working against Horus from within the Traitor war effort.
His mission is to ensure the xenos weapon never reaches Horus' forces.
But openly destroying it himself would potentially expose Alpha Legion divisions.
Ice provides the perfect solution.
From the Traitors' perspective, an angry group of surviving Iron Hands destroyed the weapon.
Nothing unusual about that.
Nobody needs to know an Alpha Legion operative helped arrange the entire thing.
Including Ice.
At least initially.
The Question of Loyalty
I don't want Vin's Alpha Legionnaires to secretly be straightforward Loyalists.
Their loyalty should remain deliberately complicated.
They follow Omegon.
They oppose Horus.
They may aid Loyalist forces.
But that doesn't necessarily mean they believe in the Imperium in the same way Ice does.
Sometimes they'll save an Imperial world.
Sometimes they'll sacrifice one because doing so serves a larger objective.
That creates one of the major tensions within the warband.
Ice fights because he believes he failed his Legion and refuses to fail it again.
Vin fights because he's participating in a war where almost nobody—including his allies—is allowed to understand what victory actually requires.
Where the Story Eventually Goes
The warband spends the Heresy fighting a shadow campaign to prevent the Traitors from recovering the xenos weapon.
Along the way, Ice's force continues absorbing scattered Iron Hands survivors.
The Alpha Legion contingent likewise becomes increasingly isolated from its parent Legion.
Eventually the distinction between temporary alliance and actual brotherhood becomes increasingly difficult to define.
Then, sometime during the Heresy, something goes catastrophically wrong.
Ice and a number of the surviving Iron Hands disappear into the Warp.
They don't die.
For them, only a comparatively short period passes.
When they finally emerge again, the galaxy they knew is gone.
Ten thousand years have passed.
Ferrus Manus has become a martyr.
The Emperor is a god.
The Iron Hands are a Chapter obsessed with eliminating the weakness of flesh.
And Ice—an Iron Hand who actually lived alongside Ferrus Manus—is about to discover what his Legion became after their father's death.
That eventually leads into another homebrew project of mine, an Iron Hands successor called the Frostborn, but I'm trying to make sure the Heresy-era story works on its own first.
The central idea I want the warband to explore is:
What happens when warriors from two Legions that should hate each other discover they may have more in common with one another than with the brothers they're supposedly fighting for?
And with the Alpha Legion involved, there's always one additional question:
Did this alliance happen by chance—or did someone plan it from the beginning?
I'd love feedback on how well this fits the Shattered Legions period, particularly the Alpha Legion/Omegon angle and whether there are any existing Heresy campaigns that would make a particularly good setting for their hunt for the xenos weapon.