Armageddon: The Embattled Hive World

Few worlds have drunk so deeply of blood as Armageddon. A choking industrial hive world wreathed in ash and smoke, it has been the stage for three of the most catastrophic wars the Imperium has ever endured, its name becoming a synonym for slaughter on a planetary scale. Orks, daemons, and the servants of the Dark Gods have all broken upon its hives, and each time Armageddon has burned.

Ash and Industry[edit]

Armageddon is a world poisoned by its own success. Countless millennia of unchecked industry have smothered the planet beneath vast ash wastes, deserts of grey powder so toxic that unprotected lungs rot and dissolve in the open air. Between these wastelands run great rivers and belts of jungle, the only places where the atmosphere can be breathed without a rebreather.

The planet's teeming billions are packed into towering hive cities, arcologies that rise for miles above the poison and house entire civilisations within their walls. Hives such as Infernus, Hades, Acheron, and the great port of Helsreach sprawl across two continents, Armageddon Prime and Armageddon Secundus, their forges labouring without cease to arm the Imperium's endless wars.

The Steel Legion[edit]

From these smog-choked hives comes one of the most respected regiments of the Astra Militarum, the Armageddon Steel Legion. Bred to a world where the very air is lethal, its soldiers fight sealed in rebreathers and heavy coats, masters of mechanised warfare who ride to battle in columns of armoured transports backed by rumbling battle tanks.

The Steel Legion's particular expertise is the killing of Orks, a foe they have faced across generations. Grim, methodical, and utterly unyielding, they embody the industrial character of their homeworld, grinding forward through ash and rubble with the patience of soldiers who know that the war will never truly end.

The First War[edit]

The first great cataclysm to strike Armageddon came not from the alien but from the warp. A daemonic invasion led by the fallen primarch Angron, twisted into a monstrous champion of the Blood God, descended upon the world at the head of a host of the Chaos Space Marines and their daemonic allies.

The slaughter was appalling, and the planet was saved only by the intervention of the Space Marines, including the secretive Grey Knights, who cast down the daemon-primarch and banished his host. The cost was so terrible, and the truth so dangerous, that many of the survivors had their very memories stripped away. For a time Armageddon knew an uneasy peace, but its bloodiest days were still to come.

The Second War[edit]

In the 941st year of the millennium a new horror arrived: the Ork Warlord Ghazghkull Mag Uruk Thraka, the most dangerous greenskin the galaxy had ever produced, who fell upon Armageddon at the head of a titanic WAAAGH!. His hordes swarmed the hives in numbers beyond counting, and the conflict became a desperate defence of one arcology after another.

The world was held, barely, through the genius and iron will of the Imperial hero who rallied its defenders and became a living legend in the process. Yet Ghazghkull was not destroyed. He withdrew into the ash wastes and the wilderness, biding his time, swearing that he would one day return to finish what he had begun.

The Third War[edit]

Return he did. Decades later Ghazghkull launched a second, far greater invasion, and the Third War for Armageddon became one of the largest ground conflicts in the Imperium's recent history. Millions of soldiers on either side clashed across every continent and through the ruins of every hive, the fighting so vast that whole cities were reduced to rubble in the exchanges.

Steel Legion regiments, Space Marine Chapters, towering war-engines, and the massed guns of the hives all threw themselves into the grinder. The war raged for months of unimaginable carnage, and though the Imperium claimed to have held the world, Ghazghkull escaped once more, his true purpose, some feared, being not conquest at all but the sheer joy of an endless war.

A Prize Soaked in Blood[edit]

Why does Armageddon draw such devastation? Its forges are prize enough, for a hive world's industry is worth an empire's ransom, but Imperial scholars whisper of an older secret. Some records suggest the planet was once a different world entirely, a place of terrible significance during the Great Crusade, quietly renamed and relocated in the archives to bury its past.

Whatever the truth, Armageddon endures as one of the Imperium's most fought-over worlds, a place where the promise of the grim future is written plainest of all. Its skies are ash and its soil is bone, and its people know that peace is only ever the pause between one war and the next. In the darkness of Armageddon, there is only war without end.