This Saturday, a new chapter in the ongoing saga of the Age of Darkness begins as the tech-magi of Mars take up arms for Loyalist and Traitor causes in a new campaign book for Warhammer: The Horus Heresy. Terrible technologies and legions of automata will be unleashed when The Martian Civil War goes up for pre-order this week. We’ve briefly covered the contents of this book before, but who better to tell us about its genesis and unique appeal than the team who wrote it?
Andy from the Warhammer: The Horus Heresy studio has kindly taken a moment away from the red sands of Mars to chat all about the book.
Andy: Campaigns of the Age of Darkness – The Martian Civil War started life way back in the closing days of the 1st edition of the Age of Darkness game, and it was originally intended to be the last of that edition’s black books. Then came the pandemic, and then the start of our massive and ongoing Horus Heresy plasticification (which is totally a word) project, and the idea of a campaign book covering Mars was set aside for a while to be revisited at a later date.
Some of the contents of that book were in fact used elsewhere – while other parts will still have to wait for new models – but with the release of the core of the Mechanicum range in plastic the idea was revisited, and so here we finally are!
Previous descriptions of the Martian Schism have tended to focus on the opening battles right at the start of the Horus Heresy. Even in the massive corpus of fiction from Black Library there are few mentions of other happenings throughout the Age of Darkness. We decided that our book should present a range of events between the Death of Innocence (as the Mechanicum call the fall of Mars) and the eve of the Siege of Terra, dipping into a range of battles in a variety of locations that players can take inspiration from for their own gaming and collecting.
The narrative opens with a description of the coming of heresy to Mars in 005.M31, culminating in the battles at Mondus Gamma and Mondus Occulum. We see the desperate mission to retrieve priceless stocks of the newest patterns of Astartes power armour by Captains Sigismund and Camba Diaz of the Imperial Fists, an iconic moment in the Heresy that’s been a part of the setting for many years.
Next we fast-forward to 007.M31 and a dark period for Mars, a time when the Loyalists were reduced to a desperate underground resistance fighting a guerilla war against the Traitors. But we learn that the Loyalists weren’t entirely alone, for the Sigilite plotted to aid their cause and so during his brief return to the Sol System, the Primarch Corax and a Decapitation Force of his XIXth Legion are despatched to wreak bloody vengeance upon the Traitors during the so-called ‘Perditum Incursion’.
The third chunk of story comes towards the end of the Horus Heresy, in 013.M31, and features two separate, yet coordinated operations launched by Dorn in response to Terra being attacked by an a sensor-baffling scrap-code transmission even as the Warmaster’s advance guard approached. One was an attack on Mars itself led by Aster Crohne of the Blood Angels and the 94th Company, bolstered by a cohort of the Legio Cybernetica. The other occurred way out in the Sol System’s Oort cloud, where a force of the Legio Custodes seek out an ancient evil in the darkness.
So that’s an overview of the three main narratives presented in Campaigns of the Age of Darkness – The Martian Civil War. There’s plenty more in the book to inspire, including a set of Relic Hunter missions and a comprehensive campaign system, all of which drives home the focus of the Age of Darkness game – it’s a thoroughly immersive and endlessly engrossing story.
Thanks for the rundown, Andy! Pick your side and unleash the technological wonders of Mars when The Martian Civil War goes up for pre-order this Saturday, alongside standalone releases for all of the miniatures first seen in the Mechanicum Battle Group box and two new plastic kits – the Archmagos Prime and the Thanatar Cavas Siege-automata.