Terror Squad

"Show your enemy mercy and he shall one day seek vengeance upon you for every petty, imaginable slight. Mercy is therefore a weakness; a crime waiting to be born. Mercy I have long since expunged, both from myself and my Legion."

— Attributed to Konrad Curze, The Night Haunter, Primarch of the Night Lords Legion

A member of a Night Lords Terror Squad

Terror Squads were specialist squads of Space Marines utilised exclusively by the Night Lords Legion during the Great Crusade and the Horus Heresy in the late 30th and early 31st Millennia. No Legion of the Legiones Astartes ever elevated the use of fear itself as a weapon to the extent that the Night Lords did. Through their fearful and bloody acts entire star systems were cowed into submission, often occasioning far less ultimate loss of life than a conventional war might have brought. The midnight and storm-clad VIII Legion served also as dark judges and executioners; they enacted the Emperor's retribution on Planetary Governors, recidivist cults and rebels alike, where their crimes proved severe enough to have called down the Imperium's wrath so utterly upon them.

When such punishments were intended to be at their most visceral and personal, the Terror Squads of the VIII Legion were unleashed. Head hunters and torturers, flayers and mutilators; within the ranks of the Terror Squads were found both the most coldly dispassionate and darkly imaginative of the Night Lords brethren, and where once the terrifying arts of murder and mayhem they perpetrated were a coldly calculated means to an end, as the decades of the Great Crusade progressed, the Terror Squads became a sink-hole for the most unstable and unsubtle elements within their Legion, many within them standing under their own sentences of death -- commuted so long as they proved useful to their macabre master, the Night Haunter himself.

Squad Organisation

• 4-9 Executioners (Night Lords Legionaries)
• 1 Headsman (Sergeant)

Dedicated Transport

• 1 Dreadclaw Drop Pod (Optional)

Wargear

• Power Armour
• Bolt Pistol
• Chainsword or Combat Blade
• Frag Grenades
• Krak Grenades

Optional Wargear

• Boltgun
• Heavy Chainblade
• Volkite Charger
• Rotor Cannon
• Flamer

Optional Wargear (Headsman Only)

• Power Weapon (of any type)
• Nostraman Chainglaive
• Power Fist
• 1 Lightning Claw
• Hand Flamer
• Plasma Pistol
• Melta Bombs
• Artificer Armour

Sources

• The Horus Heresy - Book Two: Massacre by Alan Bligh, pp. 99, 238-240
• Forge World - Terror Squad Upgrade Pack Heads
• Forge World - Terror Squad Upgrade Pack Torsos