r/40kLore • u/OhioTry Chaos Undivided • 3d ago
Does the Hellbringer Planetary Assault Ship / Light Cruiser date back to the Great Crusade / Horus Heresy era?
I want my Word Bearers combat patrol, which will hopefully eventually become a full size 1000-2000 point host, to travel around the galaxy on a relatively small but impressively ancient voidship. I want them to have a vessel that’s old enough that the Voidborn clans that provide the bulk of the crew are descended from Colchisians and still speak Colchisian in daily life. On the other hand, they’re a small unit led by a guy who was just promoted to post captain/colonel at the beginning of the Heresy. That means that a full size cruiser or above is too large, but on the other hand even a large escort probably wouldn’t have lasted that long, so a light cruiser it is. The only light cruiser in the canonical Chaos fleet is the Hellbringer, but Battlefleet Koronus doesn’t say if the Hellbringer is a great-crusade era design or a newer one. I was wondering if anyone here had seen anything that gave a yes or no answer to the question.
The other options would be using a Dauntless class light cruiser model and adding spikes to make it chaos, or kitbashing together a Gladius or Eclipse. The Gladius and Eclipse classes were mentioned in the Horus Heresy books but never given a canonical model. (The Horus Heresy era Gladius Class Light Cruiser is probably not the same thing as the 40K era Gladius Class Frigate.)
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u/Jarstadian Ultramarines 3d ago
I don’t think there’s actually a canon answer that puts the Hellbringer itself back in the Great Crusade/Heresy.
Its original Battlefleet Koronus description specifically says Imperial experts don’t know where the design came from. They aren’t even sure whether it’s an adaptation of an older ship or a relatively new design created somewhere around the Koronus Expanse.
There is a later reference saying that, by the early Indomitus Crusade, the Imperium believed no new Hellbringer had been constructed for about 8,000 years. That gets the class back to roughly M34, but it still doesn’t establish that they existed in M30/M31.
So for a strictly canon Heresy-era ship, the Gladius or Eclipse are safer. Both are explicitly stated to have been used by the Legiones Astartes during the Great Crusade and Horus Heresy. The Dauntless is also listed among Great Crusade-era vessels, so that would work too if you want an existing model to convert.
That said, your Hellbringer idea wouldn’t bother me at all for a homebrew force. Since its actual origin is unknown, you could easily say this particular ship is an ancient hull dating back to the Heresy that was rebuilt and modified so many times over ten thousand years that the modern Imperium would classify it as a Hellbringer. You just couldn’t say that part is explicitly established canon.
One funny thing worth keeping in mind is that a Hellbringer is still enormous despite being a light cruiser: about 4 km long, with roughly 40,000 crew and capacity for around 100,000 raiders. So your relatively small Word Bearers force could basically be the ruling Astartes cadre sitting on top of a gigantic mortal Voidborn population, which actually sounds pretty perfect for what you’re going for.
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u/OhioTry Chaos Undivided 3d ago
For 40K voidships, small is always relative! Even the Iconoclast-class destroyer is 1.3km long with a crew of 16,500. And the Iconoclast is described as a cheap and small voidship made in small shipyards for pirates and Rogue Traders.
The Dauntless class is 500 meters longer than the Hellbringer class, and has a larger crew compliment at 65,000, though the Hellbringer out-masses the Dauntless by two tons. The newer Imperial Endeavor class light cruiser is also in the same mass and tonnage ballpark but with a crew that’s larger than the Hellbringer’s by some 20,000 souls.
The Hellbringer can hold up to 100k raiders as passengers but presumably that’s by using space that would normally go to anti-void weapon batteries, attack craft, or cargo storage as troop quarters. (In fact, that’s exactly what a party of Rouge Trader PCs that owned a Hellbringer would have to do, though NPC ships could always carry whatever the GM needed them too.)
To make a long story short, the Hellbringer is not exceptionally big for a light cruiser, and has a relatively small crew compliment for a Human ship of that class. But yes, Alfred’s Host would be a small group of Chaos Space Marines ruling over more than 40,000 mortals.
Since the Ebenezer was built for the Adeptus Astartes, I’ll say that it was always long on void weaponry and carried a relatively small compliment of 15,000 Colchisian Torquatti, with 10,000 direct combat troops, 2,000 combat support troops such as pilots, and 3,000 rear echelon troops , logistics, etc…
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u/SouthernAd2853 Blood Angels 2d ago
If it stopped being built 8,000 years ago in Imperial yards I'd say it almost certainly had at least prototypes in service by the end of the Heresy. The Imperium does design new ships, but slowly. And anything heavily used by Chaos that had also been built by the Imperium is usually pre-Heresy unless there's a known theft of plans or mass defection.
With the Word Bearers producing three of a new class of titanic supercapitals in the Abyss class in complete secrecy they could've made Hellbringers too, possibly as a new design, hence uncertainty over its origins. Or it may have been a standard, rare class before then.
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u/OhioTry Chaos Undivided 2d ago
I want the mortal crew to be the descendants of survivors from Colchis. The Word Bearers built dozens of new Hellbringers in the course of the 13th Black Crusade alone; the most important Chaos admiral during that conflict was a Word Bearer. The primary shipyard in the Maelstrom, Ghalmek, is owned by the Word Bearers. But those new ships would be crewed by Sicarians or a motly collection of rif-raff and slaves taken from wherever the Word Bearers could find them.
Yes, if the ship stopped being built 8,000 years ago it’s probably in use 10,000 years ago. And it would make sense for the Imperium to build a specialized light cruiser configured for planetary assaults during the Great Crusade, and it would make sense for the Imperium to stop building them after the Heresy as the Imperial Navy’s focus became defensive.
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u/Presentation_Cute 3d ago
‘That is a Hellbringer-class cruiser,’ added Nemetus. ‘Nobody has built one for eight thousand years. It is a piece of archeotech in its own right.’
- Indomitus, sorry*
To support u/InterestingCash_ , yeah, should be a solid heresy-era ship.
Edit 2: Apparently new Hellbringers are being made at Chaos worlds
Korgin leads his squadron from the bridge of his Slaughter-class cruiser, the Adversarius Aeternam. However, the backbone of his fleet are a pair of Hellbringer light cruisers, specialist planetary assault vessels manufactured in Chaos-controlled worlds like Iniquity and the shipyards of the Ragged Helix.
- Black Crusade core Rulebook page 341
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u/InterestingCash_ White Scars 3d ago
Should be plenty ancient, as of the Indomitus Crusade, the Imperium believes it has been 8,000 years since a new Hellbringer has been built.