Nobody can agree on where the Raptors live. Their home world is called Numina in one source, Ra in another, Badwater in a third, and Cortiz-Pol somewhere else again. White Dwarf 494 went with Tarrengast, and that’s the most recent word on it, so that’s probably the one that sticks. Their fortress-monastery gets called Prime in the Imperial Armour material. Except White Dwarf says the fortress-monastery is a battle barge, the Accipiter, and recruits get taken aboard it rather than to any planet at all.
Some of that is just forty years of different writers going in different directions. The in-fiction version of the same fact is that the Raptors Chapter refuses to tell the Administratum where its home world is, and has refused for a very long time, and the Administratum has apparently decided not to push it.
I’ve been reading about this Chapter on and off for a couple of weeks and what keeps snagging me is how much of their identity is absence. They don’t display honours. Their Chapter Master doesn’t carry a signature weapon. There’s a stretch of two thousand years where the Imperium had them filed as dead.
Black Library announced a Raptors novel on the 9th. Raptors: War and Shadow, by William Crowe, who wrote the Astra Militarum book Veterans of the Fall. A demi-company under Lieutenant Chandrel Voise gets sent to kill a tendril of Hive Fleet Leviathan on an isolated world, with, in GW’s own phrasing, “no hope of reinforcements or resupply.” I can’t find earlier Raptors fiction of any length, though I’d be unsurprised to learn there’s a short story I’ve missed.
The Raptors have been in that exact situation before, in the 39th Millennium, and it lasted thirty years.
Sancta Angelis made them
In 339.M39 a Raptors taskforce got cut off by warp storms while operating against Waaagh! Irongol in the Sancta Angelis Cluster. The isolation lasted thirty years. They had no way home and no prospect of supply, and the Ork empire around them was spread across scores of worlds.
They adapted by foraging Ork camps for supplies and salvage, because there was nothing else to eat from. They infiltrated greenskin settlements and killed targets of opportunity without leaving evidence they’d been there, deliberately stoking the rivalries between clans until the whole Waaagh! started eating itself. And they began field-modifying their power armour with improvised camouflage, which is the detail everybody remembers, because painting your armour a different colour to hide is about as un-Astartes a thing as I can imagine.
Thirty years. That’s longer than I’ve been in the hobby by a decent margin, and it’s roughly the span between me getting my first Space Marine and my kid being old enough to ask what I’m painting. A Raptors battle-brother who went into Sancta Angelis as a newly-promoted sergeant came out of it middle-aged in career terms, having spent that whole stretch foraging and hiding on worlds nobody had briefed him on.
It ended with a six-hour pitched battle on the sulphur-oxide deserts of Bantax, where they killed Irongol and his hundred-strong mega-armoured bodyguard. Then the Orks fell on each other, and the Raptors sat and waited for the storms to lift.
Every doctrinal quirk the Chapter is known for traces back to that campaign. The camouflage. The ad-hoc scratch units. The willingness to take direct command of Astra Militarum forces, which other Chapters find deeply suspicious and which the Codex Astartes doesn’t really allow for. The marksmanship obsession, and the contempt for the glory of close combat, which is the sort of conclusion you reach after thirty years of being outnumbered a thousand to one.
Although. Imperial Armour 9 is careful to say the Raptors were already well-versed in ambush and hit-and-fade before any of this, being scions of Corax, and that Sancta Angelis forced them to perfect it rather than invent it. Which is a fair correction and I sat with it for a while, because it does undercut the neat version of the story. Raven Guard successors were always going to be sneaky. Maybe all Sancta Angelis did was boil off everything that wasn’t. I keep coming down on the same side anyway, though I’d struggle to defend it hard against someone holding the Imperial Armour book.
The Chapter that keeps getting deleted
The first home world was somewhere near the Eye of Terror, and it was destroyed during either the 4th or 5th Black Crusade. Its name is gone. So are the Chapter’s early trophies, records, and most of its ancient wargear. Ten thousand years of Astartes history and the Raptors can’t tell you what their founding Chapter Master was called.
Then it gets worse. In M37 the Imperium listed the entire Chapter as missing or presumed destroyed, and it stayed that way for over two thousand years, until they turned up again in the order of battle for the Caberiad Wars at full strength. Nobody knows what they were doing. The Chapter may have been rebuilding somewhere. It may have been lost in the warp and clawing its way back out. There’s no record, and the Raptors have never volunteered one. It’s a two-thousand-year hole in the CV and the interviewer just moved on to the next question.
The gene-seed carries its own version of this. The Raptors inherited the Raven Guard’s flaws, so they pale as they age, some of them almost translucent after a few centuries, while their hair darkens. And they have a genetic curse the Deathwatch RPG material calls Grim Determination, which is fatalism, essentially, dressed up as a mutation.
So the curse has three stages. Stage one, you start seeing death in everything, stop bothering to learn new squadmates’ names because they’ll be dead soon. Stage two, you can’t look at any good news without finding the rot in it. Stage three is called, and I promise I’m not making this up, “Game Over.” At that point the battle-brother is convinced he’s already a corpse and starts standing up in cover because what’s the point. Some Fantasy Flight designer typed “Game Over” into a Warhammer 40,000 supplement in about 2010 and it went to print, and honestly it’s the most 40K thing in the whole entry.
They didn’t always look like this, by the way. When they first appeared in White Dwarf 101 in May 1988 they were the “Raptor Legion” and they wore blue and yellow, which is about as loud as a Chapter can get. The dull green came later. What’s funny is that the 1988 artwork already includes a camouflaged variant, the “Blizzard Suit,” white and grey for arctic work, sitting right next to the bright blue version. So the camouflage was there from the very first appearance, and the Sancta Angelis lore that explains it turned up decades afterwards.
I tried to do Raptors-style camouflage once, in about 2010, on a squad of Scouts I had no use for. Catachan Green, Graveyard Earth, a bit of Bestial Brown, freehanded disruptive blobs, the works. They looked like wet cardboard. Then I hit them with Devlan Mud hoping it would tie the mess together and instead it turned the whole squad into one undifferentiated brown smear, and I stripped them, and repainted them in flat Imperial Fists yellow like a coward. Pete finished an entire Salamanders tactical squad in the time I spent ruining five Scouts. He still brings it up.
Endikon IX, and what it costs to be right
There’s one story that captures the Chapter better than any amount of doctrine summary, and it’s from the early 40th Millennium at Endikon IX. Aeldari Corsairs had held the hive world for nearly eighty years. A joint Raptors and Red Scorpions force arrived to break the occupation, and the void battle went badly enough that the Astra Militarum transports took heavy losses before anyone reached the ground.
The Raptors’ commander, Captain Kel Vamar, proposed doing what Raptors do: ambush, harry, wear the Corsairs down, then land the support troops once the enemy was thinned out. Commander Oren Saker of the Red Scorpions 5th Company called that cowardice in the face of the enemy and dropped his company in unsupported.
Eighty-three Red Scorpions went down. Sixteen came back. The assault did break the Aeldari ground forces, so it worked, in the sense that word is doing a lot of labour. The Apothecaries then spent days walking the drifts of Aeldari dead recovering gene-seed. The Raptors finished the campaign afterwards in a harrying action and lost a handful of brothers doing it.
You’d think that would settle the argument permanently. It didn’t. The Raptors have been carrying that reputation for a very long time, and they carried it into the Badab War too, where Lias Issodon offered himself for overall command of the loyalist Astartes and was passed over for Carab Culln of those same Red Scorpions. Issodon took it without complaint and served under him for two years.
Issodon is worth a paragraph on his own. He barely speaks, even to his own Chapter. He carries no signature melee weapon and picks his loadout per battle, which is a small thing that tells you the whole philosophy. He does have a boltgun called Malice, Omen-pattern, higher rate of fire and much longer range than standard. He’s carried it since his days in the 10th Company, which is a long time to keep the same gun.
They’re on Armageddon right now
Here’s the part I didn’t expect to find. Back in June, GW put out a “Chapters of Armageddon” PDF through the newsletter, and it includes the Operation Imperator order of battle: every Chapter committed to the initial thrust, with strength and naval assets listed. I went through that document when it landed and wrote about who actually shows up when Armageddon screams.
Line item, alphabetically between Penumbral Talons and Red Talons:
RAPTORS — 3 COMPANIES. Battle Barge: War Talon.
The War Talon is the same battle barge that carried Issodon’s taskforce into the Badab War in 906.M41, where it took severe damage during Operation Sedna at Surngraad and stayed in the fight anyway. It’s still in service under the same name.
And this isn’t the Chapter’s first go at Armageddon either. They committed five companies to the Third War, deployed through the equatorial jungles and vapour woods alongside the Ork Hunters and the Catachans, which is exactly the terrain and exactly the company you’d expect. Those are the same jungles Boss Snikrot has been haunting for decades, and the idea of Snikrot’s Kommandos and a Raptors strike force hunting each other through the vapour woods is a novel I’d read immediately.
Meanwhile the Chapter also makes heavier use of Phobos armour than perhaps anyone else, which I have complicated feelings about, since I’ve been fairly rude about Phobos in the past. Entire Raptors task forces built from Infiltrators, Reivers and Invictor warsuits. If any Chapter makes that gear look like a deliberate choice, it’s these lads.
The novel puts a demi-company on an isolated world against Hive Fleet Leviathan with no resupply, and, per the blurb, leaves Voise with a stark choice: save the world, or save the warriors under his command. Given that the Chapter’s own doctrine says there’s no glory in death and no such thing as an honourable defeat, and that they’ve lost their home world, their records and two thousand years of their own history already, I don’t think Voise is going to pick the world.
Three companies on Armageddon. Battle barge War Talon. That’s all the document says about them.
