The Skolarii Sector

I've had a good weekend. Two full days off without a massive to do list of 'drudge' housework, I felt like a schoolkid again. Newcastle United beat Tottenham Hotspur 3-2 away, with Obafemi Martins scoring an absolute screamer. And I transferred him into my fantasy football team just before the match! I'm really looking forward to the next three games, which are all at home.

Gaming-wise, I should have been painting my Chaos Warriors but I just couldn't be arsed, so I got out one of my old 'background' books and leafed through it.

I've got about a dozen of these A4 pads crammed full of my gaming ideas. Everything from campaign systems to new rules to sketches to short stories is in them. The particular one I grabbed was my scribblings on the Skolarii Sector. I began writing about this little corner of space, far away on the Eastern rim, as a setting for my games. Of course, from a fairly modest beginning things spiralled out of control and the sector became more and more detailed. I drew a map showing all of the main planetary systems and the warp routes that connected them. I created the populations of each planet and subjected them to alien invasions, natural disasters and sector-wide wars as I wrote up their histories. I began to scour my old collection of rulebooks and Black Library novels, trying to piece together such esoteric information as the structure of the Inquisition in a sector to the hierarchy of the Ecclesiarchy.

As I played games, especially with my Imperial Guard and Exigators, I fleshed out more and more of the sector and this soon spilled out onto my website. I built a page for each Imperial planet and detailed it's tithes, it's population, it's stable warp routes and it's history. My lofty ambitions came crashing down to earth when my hard drive crashed and I lost a lot of information as well as my web building software. My site is back up, after a fashion, but the the Skolarii sector stuff hasn't made it yet. Reading through my notes and ideas really inspired me to start over again, so I spent most of Sunday getting my writing into some sort of order.

My plan is to post articles on this blog and then transfer them to my 'proper' website following any comments. Anyway, without further ado, here is my first article; on the Titans in the Skolarii Sector.


Titans in the Skolarii Sector

The Legio Avernus are the only Titan Legion present in the sector. They operate out of the Forgeworld of Manil in sub sector two. When the Adeptus Mechanicus came to the sector in M.29 they used the Titans to conquer the planet. Many of those same Titans still defend Manil today. The current leader of the Legio Avernus is Grand Master Sayyam.

As of 950.M41 the Legio consists of 46 Titans. There are two Emperor class titans, 1 Imperator and 1 Warmonger, and they are usually deployed singly. There are 24 Warlord class titans, deployed in 8 groups of 3 titans. Next come the 12 Reaver class titans, generally found in 4 groups of 3. Finally there are 8 Warhound class titans, arrayed in 4 groups of 2.

The tactical deployment of the Legio Avernus is based upon the Legio, Demi Legio and Quarto Legio.

The Quarto Legio consists of six Warlord titans, three Reavers, a pair of Warhounds and possibly an Emperor titan. These twelve titans would be the typical detachment for large campaigns.

The Demi Legio would include 23 titans, fully half of the Legio. The deployment of a Demi Legio is a very rare occurrence and has only ever happened twice in the Skolarii sector.

The Legio is largely a notional deployment as it would consist of all 46 titans in the sector. This has never yet occurred.

My (crazy) plan is to build the entire Legio if and when I get into Epic 40k. Gulp. Given the list of unpainted models I've already listed on this blog, and the cost of buying the models, I might get round to this project when I'm 70. Hey ho, you have to dream. Just look at what happened to Newcastle yesterday...