“Absolute devotion to liberty” is an alarming thing to ask of somebody. I’d want a few follow-up questions before signing. Kaelen Voss apparently considers it a reasonable demand to make of an entire planet, whose inhabitants are offering him worship and taxes after he helped overthrow their rulers. He’s refusing both, according to his new biography. I keep wondering what happens to those taxes after he turns them down.
GW introduced Voss in its 15 October Grand Narrative character feature. He’s an Executioners deserter who followed Huron Blackheart, became disgusted with the Red Corsairs’ growing hierarchies and daemonic dependencies, and left with a core of longstanding comrades aboard his renamed strike cruiser, Unbound Horizon. His subsequent arrival at Ferrum’s Wake helped turn the world into this year’s narrative-event battlefield.
I like him already, which is probably going to get embarrassing. A Space Marine trying to invent a civilian life after military service would have my attention. Voss has gone considerably further and armed an underhive. His idea of personal emancipation now has billions of other people caught up in it, and the biography gives us enough of their circumstances to start asking about the consequences.
Header image: Huron’s Red Corsairs, the force Voss abandoned; the miniatures aren’t representations of Voss and his followers.
Kaelen Voss came from a Chapter with a very long memory
The Executioners connection deserves some care. Imperial Armour Volume 10: The Badab War, Part Two, in “The Executioners,” describes a Chapter whose recruits must build reputations worth preserving in its chronicles. Their Chaplains, called Death-Speakers, recite the dead’s slaughter tallies at ceremonies inside the Darkenvault. Each company traditionally has three Chaplains, with responsibility for keeping order among warriors who can be fractious even by Astartes standards.
That’s quite an upbringing for someone who eventually starts questioning the price of obedience. Voss would’ve belonged to a culture where remembrance, personal honour, and the judgement of armed religious officers filled a great deal of everyday life. I’m inferring the pressure that might have put on him; the new biography gives us his grievances about service without describing his years inside the Chapter. We don’t have a company, a recruitment world, or a named Death-Speaker attached to his story.
The same volume’s “Addendum: The Executioners’ Debt” attributes the Chapter’s involvement in the Badab War to a blood debt more than a thousand years old. It specifically warns that accounts of their role are often misleading. That makes me cautious about casually folding Voss into a general story of the Executioners embracing Huron’s ambitions. His personal reasons for following the Tyrant are given separately in the WarCom biography, which emphasises his desire to choose his own fate.
There’s an especially nasty precedent in the Badab narrative. In the sequence commonly called the Red Hour, Thulsa Kane accepted the surrender of Pellas Mir’san’s Salamanders under a promise of safe passage. Astral Claws boarding parties then attacked the prisoners and tried to seize their gene-seed. The surviving Apothecaries resisted. Mir’san confronted Kane with the breach of his sworn protection while reports from the Executioners confirmed the killings elsewhere aboard the ship.
The account in Imperial Armour Volume 10, printed alongside “Augmented 4th Company,” has Kane declare the oath to Huron broken. The Executioners slaughtered the Astral Claws aboard the ships involved. Kane eventually brought Mir’san the severed head of Arch-Centurion Commodus, who had ordered the massacre. The Chapter subsequently hunted its former allies while continuing to fight Loyalist forces that challenged it. There’s more of that wider war in the piece on Imperial rebellions.
I don’t know where Voss was during any of this. WarCom hasn’t supplied the dates needed to place him in the Red Hour, and assigning him a position in Kane’s boarding party would be making up a much more detailed biography. The useful connection is the Chapter’s published history of an obligation becoming intolerable. Voss’s own grievance develops further, reaching the sorcerers and bargains he encounters in Huron’s empire.
Huron still expects your name on the form
In Gathering Storm III: Rise of the Primarch, “The Red Corsairs” makes entry into Huron’s forces conditional on swearing allegiance to his banner. Turncoat Marines are welcome; they’re joining a structure with a lord at its head. The same account describes Corsair bases scattered through the Maelstrom, sustained through conquest and pillage. Anyone arriving with a ship and a grievance needs somewhere to repair it and people willing to supply it.
Voss seems to have initially enjoyed the possibilities. His new biography has him talking philosophy among pirates, treating obedience as a failure of courage, and regarding himself as a noble presence in thoroughly disreputable company. I can imagine how exhausting he’d be over dinner. You ask him to pass something and twenty minutes later he’s still explaining the moral implications of the request. That’s my imagined Voss, admittedly. I’d like to hear him talking to a civilian who needs something from him.
His departure follows the spread of ritual, court politics, and bargains with daemons through the Corsairs. He takes his ship out of the Maelstrom with some of his oldest brothers. There’s a longer account of Huron and the Red Corsairs elsewhere on the site; Voss’s biography catches a deserter deciding that he’s had enough of belonging to that particular organisation.
I have some sympathy for the impulse to take your little group and leave. During an eighth-edition narrative league at my local store in 2018, I spent an evening writing an elaborate motive for my Thousand Sons Sorcerer, my favourite overdressed idiot, to recover an archive. Then I lost the game and spent the next week arguing that we’d misunderstood the campaign objective. Kiran eventually found my own handwritten mission sheet. I’d underlined the relevant sentence. I still kept the Sorcerer’s increasingly implausible account of his victory in the campaign notes.
Voss could easily become a character I excuse in much the same way. I want the refusal of tithe and worship to mean he’s thought seriously about what comes after conquest. He might have. Refusing those offerings costs him resources and authority that most warlords would happily collect. I’ve probably been too quick to assume his rhetoric covers vanity. The account leaves room for conviction, and I’d like to see him tested by an actual request from somebody whose idea of freedom inconveniences him.
Like, can you leave? Just leave his movement. Take your family, get on a ship, go somewhere with fewer speeches. Who owns the ship? Has somebody kept the port working? Hang on, now I’m asking about docking permissions in a story with a faceless executioner coming towards the planet. I’d probably spend my turn trying to find whoever was handling departures.
The people who have to keep breathing
Voss’s uprising involved destroying command spires, cutting noospheric networks, and arming districts beneath the industrial surface. Those are the actions WarCom describes. We covered Ferrum’s Wake as a setting before the commanders were introduced; this newer feature supplies somebody who helped produce its present predicament. His followers are preparing the world and its fleets for retaliation.
Mara Venn’s biography on the same page takes us into the underhive. Her childhood was governed by unsafe water, machinery, and the need to keep quiet. She’s able to find forgotten routes, bargain with gangs, restart lighting, and move frightened people through dangerous places. After the uprising, survival still depends on control of oxygen shrines and weapons. I read those details and immediately start worrying about whichever systems were connected to the networks Voss cut. I haven’t found a description of which services survived.
Mara also has apparent miracles accumulating around her. A collapsing building misses her refugee column; a corrupted servitor pack stops when she sings; a shot strikes the aquila at her throat and leaves a burn. People begin treating her as a saint. Her own response includes pointing to the ugly things she’s done while trying to keep people alive. WarCom leaves the precise nature of the phenomena open, so I’m happy to keep the uncertainty while following the refugee story.
The personal scale gets to me. Mara knows routes through ducts. She has people to move, medicine to obtain, and frightened followers looking for a sign. Getting those people to safety requires somebody with supplies and a working transport schedule. I’d love a scene where Mara gets Voss alone long enough to ask how many passengers his shuttles can carry.
His enemies are already arriving in the campaign premise. The Warrant leads a heretic fleet towards him, claiming to embody Huron’s punishment. Its identity and mandate are deliberately uncertain: WarCom says nobody has seen Huron acknowledge it, and even its supposed connection to him is doubted. Old Corsair markings survive beneath ritual damage on its armour. The description has it taking heads as offerings while seeking approval from Huron, Khorne, or the powers of the Maelstrom.
Commander Orestes Morn brings an Imperial reclamation force with soldiers, priests, Mechanicus representatives, and the administrative machinery required to restore allegiance. His ships also carry more than a million devout citizens ready to replace the planet’s rebellious population. The feature puts them aboard hundreds of ships in his reclamation fleet.
There’s an entire civilian catastrophe sitting inside this event briefing. Mara’s followers include isolated Loyalists and repentant rebels, which should make any attempt at processing the population appalling. Who vouches for whom? How does a frightened family demonstrate adequate loyalty to a commander arriving with replacement colonists? People here are caught in the sort of loyalty dispute that can keep Imperial investigators occupied for years. I’d want to hear the testimony of somebody who kept the shrine working through the uprising.
I hope the games give those people room to complicate Voss’s plans. An evacuation objective would do it: a finite number of shuttles, industrial workers bringing dependants, armed factions insisting that their wounded go first. Let Mara choose a route through the table while Voss’s warriors argue about committing their transport. I’d happily spend a campaign evening trying to get a few dozen civilians aboard a departing ship, especially if the next game’s ammunition supply depended on which workers we’d managed to evacuate.
