Twenty-three Space Marines. Thirty-eight Orks. That’s the model count in the new Armageddon box, and I’ve added it up twice because it bothers me. The Marines drop in from orbit to save the day. The Orks come boiling up out of the ash wastes to burn everything down. And the people who were actually born on Armageddon, who breathe its poisoned air and die in the hive they grew up in, the Armageddon Steel Legion, aren’t in the box. Not one of them.
They weren’t in the box for the Third War either. Or the big 3rd edition campaign that introduced half of us to the planet in the first place.
I want to talk about the Steel Legion, partly because they’re my favourite Guard regiment I’ve never properly owned, and partly because the way GW treats them says something slightly uncomfortable about how this hobby actually works. The Orks get a god-tier warlord and a relaunch every edition. Yarrick gets an animated short and a fresh look every decade. The regiment that does the actual dying gets the same metal models it had when I started playing.
A world that makes soldiers like it makes tanks
Armageddon sits about 10,000 light years galactic north-east of Terra, out where the Segmentum Solar rubs up against the Ultima Segmentum. According to White Dwarf 431’s “A World of Industry,” it’s a factory world of incredible size and output, billions of people scraping a living out of “infected grease and rotting steel,” all of them fighting to breathe the same toxic air. Whole sectors for light years around depend on what its hives churn out. The cost is a planet strip-mined into a poisoned wasteland. Lovely place. You’d hate it.
Armageddon doesn’t just export goods, it exports soldiers, millions a year into the Astra Militarum, and the famous ones are the Steel Legion. They fight mechanised, riding to war in Chimeras built in the same factories that built them. That’s the whole trick of the name. Most Guard regiments can’t field mechanised companies because a planetary governor can’t get his hands on enough transports. Armageddon builds several hundred Chimeras a day. So their infantry just ride. White Dwarf 287 reckoned it wasn’t unusual for over 90% of an Armageddon regiment to be mechanised, which for the Imperial Guard is borderline obscene. That’s why they’re the Steel Legion.
Where do the troopers come from? The hive gangs, mostly. WD431 is blunt about it: a lot of them “fought for survival in the gang wars that dominate the hive cities” before they joined or got conscripted. So the recruitment pipeline runs roughly: survive a knife fight over turf in a poisoned megacity as a teenager, get handed a lasgun and a rebreather, get told the green tide coming over the horizon is worse than anything you grew up with. Which, fair.
And here’s a number that always stops me. By the Third War for Armageddon, WD431’s order of battle lists 25 Steel Legion regiments against something like 300 regiments total fighting on the planet. The world’s own signature soldiers are a minority of its defence, swamped by Cadians and Mordians and Krieg shipped in from off-world. Even on Armageddon, the Steel Legion are outnumbered by other people’s regiments.
The most Second World War thing GW has ever made
The look, though. God, the look. Long coats, sealed rebreather masks, domed helmets, the whole regiment styled like the Eastern Front got relocated to a chemical refinery and then handed lasguns. So yeah, the Steel Legion. Gas masks. Greatcoats. They look like they ought to be defending Stalingrad, except Stalingrad is a hive the size of a country and the Germans are eight feet tall and think the war is a laugh. That’s it. That’s the pitch. I’m amazed it took GW until 1999 to draw it.
The mask does a lot of quiet work. You never see their faces, which makes a Steel Legion trooper feel like a number on a casualty list, and for the Guard that’s exactly right. I read somewhere, possibly an old codex, possibly someone on a forum I’ve long since lost the link to, that the rebreathers exist because the air out on the ash wastes will kill an unprotected man over a long enough deployment. Industrial poison, basically, hanging over everything outside the hive walls. I’ve never actually confirmed that’s hard canon rather than a thing the models implied to me, so take it with a pinch of salt.
Why they’ve never had a plastic kit
The Steel Legion has never had a plastic kit. Not once. The range you can buy, the range that has existed for my entire time in this hobby, is metal, sculpted by the Perry twins for Codex Armageddon back at the tail end of the 90s. A hobby blogger I read while digging into this called that release “a last gasp of the metals,” which is precisely it. The models came out right as 3rd edition was shoving everything towards plastic, and the Steel Legion got stranded on the wrong side of the transition. The range was always thin. A few infantry poses, a command set, the mounted stuff for the special army list. Then nothing, for twenty-six years. That’s longer than I’ve been in the hobby by a decade.
I bought a couple of the metal blisters around 2010, during one of my periodic “this time I’ll actually finish a Guard army” phases while I was building my Cadians up. The plan was to fold a Steel Legion squad in as veterans, because the gas masks looked cooler than anything on the Cadian sprue. They are still in a drawer. Unbuilt. I tried painting the rebreather lenses on a test model once and they came out looking like googly eyes, so I stripped it, tried again, got googly eyes in a slightly different colour, and gave up. Pete offered to do them for me. I said no, out of pride. They remain googly-eyed in spirit.
So GW will resculpt the Ork Boyz twice and give the Space Marines five flavours of the same Captain before the Steel Legion sees a single new sprue. The new Armageddon launch even has a gorgeous Guard diorama, except look closely and the defenders are Cadians painted up in Steel Legion green. GW reaches for Cadians as the default Guardsman the way I reach for the same mug every morning without thinking about it. And honestly? Part of me gets it. The metal Steel Legion are niche, they sell to grognards like me, and grognards like me leave them in a drawer for fifteen years. As a customer I am genuinely terrible. Maybe the kit just doesn’t make business sense.
No. They should make the kit. The planet is called Armageddon, the entire new edition of the game is built on its back, and its signature regiment is a 1999 metal blister you have to hunt down secondhand at a markup, like a band that refuses to reissue the one album everybody actually wants. Come on.
Colonel Kerschlact and the corridor
I’ll leave you with the story that made me love them in the first place, because it’s the most Steel Legion thing in any White Dwarf I own.
Second War for Armageddon. Ghazghkull’s invasion. The planetary overlord, Von Strabb, was an incompetent, and early in the war he flung a string of badly conceived counter-attacks at an Ork horde that hugely outnumbered the defenders. The 9th Armageddon Steel Legion, under Colonel Kerschlact, was ordered to cut off an Ork spearhead. They did the job. Punched a corridor clean through the Ork lines along the highway between Infernus and Acheron hives, driving deep into the enemy flank.
Then the Orks sealed the corridor behind them, and the 9th was on its own.
Von Strabb had promised three regiments to hold the gap open. They turned up late, got thrown piecemeal at the Ork lines, and achieved nothing. Kerschlact lost most of his artillery and his supply train the moment the corridor shut. He had hundreds of wounded and hundreds more down with Armageddon lung rot from the bad air. He drew up a breakout plan, a good one by all accounts, concentrating his assault companies to link with the 50th Regiment, then sat waiting for permission while Von Strabb dithered for hours over whether to allow it.
By the time the yes arrived, the Orks had brought up reinforcements. The northern breakout still worked, smashing through to the 50th along the motor road. The southern half came apart. Kerschlact led a fighting withdrawal himself, his companies leapfrogging their Chimeras backward, falling to a fresh firing position every time the Orks closed in, buying time with their own lives so the rest of the regiment could escape. Then the Ork fighta-bommerz caught the rearguard in the open and flayed it. Kerschlact was hit when his command position was overrun. Dying, half a mile short of friendly lines, unwilling to be taken alive by Orks, he told his men “Boys, this is the end for me, but you go on fighting,” and shot himself in the temple.
Most of the 9th got out, because of him. Much later in the war, when the tide finally turned and the Orks were driven back across the wastes, the regiment went into the attack screaming his name.
