Vastarian: the Church of the Gyro Choir

The Disintegration Loops.

Arrogant clankers. Do they really think I’d keep working with them and not get noospheric and binaric implants at some point? The clergy of Mars sure pays well, but that doesn’t mean I trust them. Would they use so many layers of firewalls and data encryptions if they didn’t have anything to hide?

I’ve been their pilot for a while, but paying well isn’t always enough. The information I've scraped for now goes a long way to settle my debt. I’m sure others will like what I've heard on this journey to Vastarian. A decade doing this job, and I've never seen any of them so.. Nervous? I mean maybe at least something can wake up their dormant human emotions?

I’ve known for a while that the Adeptus Mechanicus was not a unified dogma. They have internal sects, with specific systems of beliefs, with the Omnissiah and all always at the center. These ones though, they call themselves the Church of the Gyro Choir. I think they came from a lost underhive city. Something must have happened there, some kind of fringe event. And they keep mentioning a Servo Prophet. They make all kinds of horrible noises when they are not exchanging data. I wonder if it’s some kind of prayer? I can recognise patterns, but my implants don’t seem to have the correct plugins. I’ll have to get on that.

I wonder why an obscure sect of the Mechanicum is so anxious to get to Vastarian? They talk about an awakening that happened there, but it’s the first time I’ve heard about it.

I need to be careful because I think they know I'm listening, even if I doubt they know I understand. Or maybe I don't, it doesn’t make any sense to me.

The frequency of a psychic scream matching the words of the prophet? The holoprints for a lighthouse? The raw wisdom of the Omnissiah? And all this noise. This horrible noise.

We’ll soon arrive at Vastarian. I can’t wait for them to leave my ship.

- Last entry of the logbook of Captain Hainbach of the Erebus’ Pendulum, found dead in a local tavern after his audio implant overheated.

The Church of the Red Athenæum: Aseneth Levedescu, (3rd) Cardinal

And I feel so proud when the reckoning arrives.

With the blog recently turning 10 years old, it is hard not to reflect back on what we have done in that time. One of our favorite creations is the Church of the Red Athenæum. Designed for Iron Sleet’s Pilgrym event, the Church is a radical splinter of the Imperial Cult that believes suffering is the highest form of veneration of the God-Emperor. In 2021 we began to revisit the Church, creating a host of new models, including a Gunfighter, a heavy weapons specialist, a Halfling, and a new Bibliognost of the Church of the Red Athenæum. In 2023, we hope to continue developing and expanding the Red Church. And while we created a host of different characters from the Church, one of the most iconic is the current Cardinal, Aseneth Levedescu, and her mobile throne. We wanted to celebrate the character and showcase her again on the blog, seven years after her initial creation. To do this, we knew we could take better photos of the model and share the lore we wrote pertaining to her, but we wanted to do something more special. For this purpose, we commissioned the amazingly talented and visionary Nicky Grillet to illustrate and paint Aseneth!

Mordheim 2019: Undead games

Church of the Ever Burning Saint attempt to banish a vampire twisted and warped by wyrdstone.

My brothers and I played a multitude of games of Mordheim during the Mordheim 2019 event, all of them unique and filled with surprises. With this post, I wanted to describe the two games played with my undead warband, the first against Nicky Grillet‘s Sisters of Sigmar and Alexander Lunde’s Witch Hunters, and the second against Erik Blomqvist’s Sisters of Sigmar.