The Inquisition: Know your Ordos

I guess most 40K fans could name the three main Ordos on the Officio Inquistoria, but they are not by any means the only ordos. Let's look at the main ordos:

Ordo Malleus: The oldest of the Ordos, they are charged with combatting the daemon without, the manifestation of Chaos in real space. They are also charged with hunting down rouge inquisitors (the daemon within).

Ordo Xenos: The Ordo Xenos is charged with the investigation, and if necessary, destruction of alien species. Both Inquisitor Gregor Eisenhorn and Gideon Ravenor are members of the Ordo Xenos.

Ordo Hereticus: The Ordo Hereticus hunt down the enemy within, the unsanctioned psyker, the mutant and the heretic.


Though these are the main ordos, the members of each Ordo have pretty wide ranging remits of investigation. If we take Eisenhorn as an example, we see him investigating trade in forbidden artifacts with aliens, a Dark Eldar cult (at the start of Malleus I think), hunting down a rogue inquisitor, chaining a daemon, breaking open a heretical Chaos cult, amongst other things.

Besides the main Ordos, there are numerous unanmed Ordo Minoris which have other, more specialized, tasks. For example:

Ordo Sicarius: This Ordo is concerned the watching over and monitoring the Officio Assassinorium to ensure it is not corrupted again, as occured during the Wars of Vindication.

Ordo Sepulturum: A small Ordo based close to the Eye of Terror, they investigate the source and combat the effects of the warp-spawned diseases, in particular the Zombie Plague which struck voraciously during the 13t Black Crusade. You can read more about this in Inquisitor's Thorian Sourcebook which is a great resource for those of us who are interested in the Inquisition. Sepulturum is latin for burial, presumably chosen as the zombie hunting Inquisitor's a responsible for returning zombies to the grave.

Addendum:

Marshal Argos has commented with a couple of other Ordos I wasn't aware of, so here's some more detail.

Ordos Helican: These are well covered in the Eisenhorn trilogy, the Ordos Helican was the ruling body of the Inquisitorial Ordos in the Helican subsector.

Ordo Obsuletus: Ordo charged with investigating paranormal phenomena such as the Legion of the Damned.

Ordo Hydra: A branch of the secret Illuminati faction covered in the Inquisition War trilogy (I haven't read this myself). Many of its members are Inquisitor's.

I've also found the Ordo Militum, charged with monitoring the Imperial Guard and other Imperial military forces.

Imperial Name Generator

Jabberjabber over at Warpstoneflux posted earlier this week about Daemon name generators, used to help you with ideas for naming your daemon's to fluff up your army. Pretty cool, and like he says there used to be one on the GW website that I can't find either.

But, what if you're not a servant of the Ruinous Powers, and what some ideas for naming your Space Marine captain, your Cannoness, your Comissar or your Inquisitor? Well, over on the Dark Heresy website, there's a name generator for generating Imperial Gothic names for either gender, in different formats. Try it if you need some inspiration for naming your Imperial characters.

The Purge of 56-Izar: Fluff as inspiration

**This post may contain spoilers for the Eisenhorn novels!**

The background story of 40K is one of the things I like most about the game, and for me, it is what keeps me painting and modelling. Fluff can also be used to drive you tabletop games as well, adding some more interest to your battles.

One of my favourite pieces of background is the Eisenhorn trilogy by Dan Abnett which follows the career of the Ordo Xenos Inquisitor Gregor Eisenhorn.

I've been re-reading the first book this last week, and one of the things I thought would fun would be to see if I could make a legal army list to represent one of the incidents in the book. At the end of the first story, there is a full scale Inquisitorial incursion on to a xenos held world the Imperials have designated 56-Izar. Heretics have landed there to seize a rare and powerful Chaos artefact from the aliens who reside on the planet, and the Inquisition intends to stop them. The Inquisition launches a attack to prevent this with 150,000 elite Imperial Guard drop troops and 60 Deathwatch marines. This is a great part of the story, so I've put together an army list which represents (in small scale of course), the forces present.

I've used Codex:Daemonhunters for this, as the list required a Daemonhost which you can't take with the Witch Hunters list. Without the Daemonhost, you could represent this host with the Witch Hunters list.

HQ:
Inquisitor Lord Phlebas Alessandro Rorken, Bolt Pistol, Power Sword, 3 Crusaders, 3 Cherub Familiars.

Elites:
Inquisitor Gregor Eisenhorn, Bolt Pistol, Power Sword, Word of the Emporer (represents his will). Eisenhorn is accompanied by his retinue:
Sergeant Jeruss of the 50th Gudrun Rifles (Veteran Guardsman)
2 Veteran Guardsman
Alizebeth Bequin (Acolyte with hellgun (represents her las-carbine))
Midas Betancore (Acolyte with bolter (represents his needle rifle))

Inquisitor Konrad Molitor, Bolt Pistol, Power Sword, with his retinue of 2 Acolytes both armed with las-carbines (shotguns)

Cherubael, Daemonhost

Troops:
Mirepoix Elite Drop Troops:
3 Squads of 10 Drop Troops (Inquisitorial Storm Troopers) with Veteran Sergeant and 2 flamers
2 Squads of 10 Drop Troops (Inquisitorial Storm Troopers) with Veteran Sergeant and 2 plasma guns

10 Tactical Space Marines of the Deathwatch Chapter, lead by Brother Cynewolf (Veteran Sergeant) armed with a storm bolter, a flamer and heavy bolter.


This comes out at roughly 1500 points or so, depending on what extra tricks you put on the Inquisitors. I think this would be a pretty cool battle to re-enact and interesting to model and paint.

For the heretic forces led by Dazzo and Gorgone Locke on 56-Izar, these could be done from the Lost and the Damned list from Codex: Eye of Terror (Arch-heretic for Dazzo, Locke as an aspiring champion, traitors for the Naval Security detail).

To re-enact the battle to capture the Necroteuch, you could simply do this using the capture and control mission from the rule book. One objective (traitor side) represents the Necroteuch, the Imperial side objective represents the primer to translate the text. Or to add flavour, have Eisenhorn who is carrying the primer have to get to a certain point on the table and the other side have to stop him.

So there we are, a legal (I think) army list inspired by a background story. There are many others to inspire you in the rich canon of the 40k background. Perhaps the Mechanicum army of Adept Zeth at the fall of the Magma City, or Commissar Yarrick's forces on Golgotha, there are many great possibilties. I'd love to hear suggestions for other armies based on events in the 40K background.