The Iron Warriors were shaped by their primarch Perturabo into a Legion of unmatched siege engineers, tasked again and again with the thankless work of cracking impregnable strongholds. They watched their brothers claim honour and worlds while they bled in the trenches, and the injustice festered until they turned upon the Imperium with the same relentless precision they once served it with.
Their way of war is methodical and merciless. Where other Chaos hosts trust to fury and daemonic frenzy, the Iron Warriors trust to overwhelming firepower, massed armour, entrenchments and the patient grinding down of any defence. They are as adept at raising fortifications as demolishing them, and their strongholds within the Eye of Terror are legendarily unassailable.
Stern, embittered and contemptuous of showy fervour, the Iron Warriors regard the other legions with disdain and are in turn respected as the finest destroyers of walls and worlds that Chaos can field. To face them in a siege is to face a slow, mathematical certainty of doom.
Order of battle
The Iron Warriors field the units of the Chaos Space Marines, a detachment from the roster:
Other Chaos Space Marines formations
Alpha LegionThe Twentieth Legion are the great deceivers of the Long War, a serpentine brotherhood that fights not with open battle-lines but with lies, infiltration, and a thousand hidden hands. Where other Traitor Legions announce themselves in fire, the Alpha Legion unravels worlds from within, working through sedition, sabotage, and mortal proxies long before a single bolter is raised. Their warriors share a single defiant claim, that any one of them may be the primarch Alpharius, and so no enemy can ever be certain whom they truly face.
Black LegionThe Black Legion is the largest and most feared of all the Traitor Legions, forged from the ashes of Horus's own Sons of Horus after their primarch's death. Under the iron will of Abaddon the Despoiler, they cast aside their old colours and old shame, taking black armour to mark a new beginning. Where other legions cling to isolation and old grudges, the Black Legion draws in renegades of every stripe, uniting the fractured hosts of Chaos into a single crusading war-engine bent on the Imperium's utter destruction.
Crimson SlaughterThe Crimson Slaughter were once the Crimson Sabres, a rigidly disciplined Space Marine Chapter whose savagery on the world of Umidia drew the curse of Khorne upon them. Ever since, they have been haunted by the spectral voices of those they slew, a chorus of the murdered that no prayer can silence. Only in ceaseless bloodletting do the ghosts recede, and so the warband slaughters without end, dragging its damnation across the stars in a futile search for a moment's peace.
Night LordsThe Night Lords are the terror-mongers of the Traitor Legions, waging psychological warfare with the same ruthlessness other legions bring to open battle. They strike from darkness in screaming lightning-marked craft, mutilating captives, broadcasting the screams of the dying, and leaving atrocities designed to shatter the courage of the living. To the Night Lords, fear is a weapon sharper than any blade, and a world paralysed by dread is a world already conquered. They fight not for the Dark Gods but for spite, survival and the sheer pleasure of the hunt.
Red CorsairsThe Red Corsairs are the largest renegade warband in the galaxy, a pirate empire that rules the warp-torn depths of the Maelstrom under the iron hand of Huron Blackheart. They are no ancient Traitor Legion but a wound torn open within living memory, born from the ruin of the Astral Claws Chapter after the fratricidal Badab War. Where insular Legions dwindle with the centuries, the Corsairs only grow, swelling their host with every raid, every renegade, and every captive broken and remade in Chaos.
The PurgeThe Purge are nihilist worshippers of Nurgle who cleave to only the darkest facet of the Plague God, despising life in all its forms and seeking not rebirth but annihilation. First appearing in the closing centuries of the 36th Millennium, they became convinced that the galaxy is beyond all saving and that purity can be found only in the sterile silence of death. Wielding poisons and engineered contagions, they wage genocidal war on human and xenos alike, praying for a plague that will scour every living thing from creation.
Word BearersThe Word Bearers are the zealots and prophets of Chaos, the first Legion to bend the knee to the Ruinous Powers and the architects of the entire Horus Heresy. Where other traitors war for vengeance or plunder, the Word Bearers war for faith, spreading the gospel of the Dark Gods across the galaxy with fire, scripture and sacrifice. Their Dark Apostles preach damnation to the masses and summon daemons to fight at their side, and they regard the destruction of the Emperor's atheist Imperium not merely as war but as a holy crusade of conversion.
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