Inquisitor Vanth and retinue – Gorgon Crystals warband

For the Gorgon Crystals Inquisitor campaign at Asgard Wargames, I’ve pulled together a few warbands from my own collection to count as ‘house’ warbands. These are for folks who want to play but don’t have the minis to dive straight in.

You can see all the house warbands here.

Warband overview

Inquisitor Vanth and his retinue have been skulking the sector for decades. He is one of the most influential Inquisitors in the Onus Region, despite having no seat on the Conclave there. He subscribes to the radical Xanthite ideology – that the best weapon against Chaos is Chaos itself – and seeks to gather resources and knowledge to harness Chaos to the best of his ability.

He surrounds himself with loyal Imperial soldiers, each hand picked for their unique abilities, before scrubbing their old identities and bolstering his ranks of anonymous soldiers. He watches individuals from afar, sometimes for years, before engineering accidents or shifts in administration that put these warriors under his employ with no trace of where they came from.

Vanth rarely deals with anything personally – his warband (lead by the fearsome Colonel Chase Vaux) are often the first and last thing his enemies see – but the Gorgon Crystals have piqued his curiosity too much. Xenos artefacts capable of manipulating the warp around them? Those sound too dangerous to be allowed in anyone’s hands but Vanth’s…

Leader – Inquisitor Tarik Vanth

Vanth rarely puts himself in harm’s way, preferring to send his loyal foot soldiers to deal with the hands-on elements of his operations. When Vanth deems it necessary to personally intervene however, he does so with many radical and dangerous tools at his disposal. As daemonic entities are his main concern, he has equipped himself with the finest daemon-slaying weapons he could lay his armoured hands on.

He has a hand-held scanner for rooting out warp taint, backed by his own considerable psychic powers to cloud, control and delude the minds of lesser mortals. On his shoulder is an MIU-linked psycannon for tearing up heretics while keeping his hands free for postulating and planning.

Finally, he wields a terrifying daemon weapon – the spirit of a hungering warp predator bound to a finely-balanced sword. Vanth spent decades hunting down the perfect daemonic entity to bind to his will – a creature of such malice and spite that it craves the flesh of daemons above all others – a perfect tool in the hands of a daemon hunter.

Colonel Chase Vaux

Vaux is Vanth’s right hand man (and not just because of his huge right hand). He was once a Cadian war hero who lead a beleaguered defense force and successfully repelled a daemonic incursion, but was considered “over exposed” to the daemonic taint by his superiors and sentenced to death. Vanth staged a dramatic intervention, saving Vaux’s life (and eskills) and earning his unswerving loyalty.

In battle, Vaux is a beacon of stoicism. He strides towards the foe, bolt pistol raised, placing his shots carefully and purposefully. He prides himself on his marksmanship, and believes that no foe is too large or too powerful to shrug off a Kraken Penetrator bolt round to a particularly sensitive spot. Go for the eyes!

Specialist Foric Scylan and Trooper michael grey

Vanth’s foes are legion and his problems are numerous. He needs suitably skilled warriors under his command to take full tactical advantage of any given situation.

Scylan is a demolitions specialist – he can take out anything with any amount of explosives, knowing exactly where to place his charges to wreak maximum carnage. He lost his leg to a Chaos spawn – he wore a brace of shaped charges around his ankle and fed himself to the monstrosity, destroying it from the inside out.

Trooper Grey is a psychic anomaly – a Pariah. Through a fluke of birth he was born with an anti-warp gene, and is a metaphysical black hole for psychic powers, daemonic entities and other warpcraft. He is practically invisible to creatures of the warp, and absorbs psychic attacks to those in his immediate radius – a powerful tool in the hands of a daemon hunter.

Unfortunately this power comes with the utter inexplicable revulsion his fellow man feels around him, and many Pariahs are killed early in their lives from the hatred and fear that people feel around them. Luckily for Grey, Vanth discovered his secret before his superiors did, and recruited him into his ranks to utilise his unique powers for the benefit of the Imperium.

Trooper Gene Ric and Sergeant Hugo Honeis

Every away team needs a medic, and Honeis fills that role in Vanth’s retinue. He was once a lowly militiaman conscripted to fight off a Chaos uprising on his homeworld, and Vanth was leading a retaliation force that ended in disaster for him. Vanth was wounded and dragged to a civilian triage, where Honeis treated him alongside other dead and dying citizens.

Most other physicians were dead or had fled the horrors the incursion brought, but Vanth was impressed at Honeis’ commitment to the wounded that Vanth brought him on board his escape shuttle before the city was purged with fire from orbit.

Trooper Gene Ric is unique in Vanth’s retinue in that he doesn’t possess any specialist skills, knowledge, or martial prowess, nor saved Vanth’s life in unlikely circumstances. He is, however, a statistical anomaly in so many Munitorum reports that he caught Vanth’s eye.

Trooper Ric is lucky – as in, really lucky. Lucky enough to escape certain death an implausible number of times and have even Inquisitors discussing his merits with increasing incredulity. An individual as lucky as him couldn’t be natural… could it?

Rather than have Trooper Ric captured and pulled apart by Magos Biologis for study, Vanth swooped in and added him to his retinue. It wasn’t hard to find him of course, Trooper Ric seemed to be in exactly the right place at exactly the right time…

Other warbands

You can see all the house warbands here.