Achilus Crusade

"I will see the God-Emperor's domain extended to the farthest reaches. To the places where the light of stars and moons shines on ruin and casts only shadows, and the unclean walk unpunished. I will see those that have turned away at the tip of the sword, and the defilers beneath the hammer. I will see my own blood run out before I turn from this path."

- From the oath of Tiber Achilus, taken at the commencement of the Achilus Crusade into the Jericho Reach

The Achilus Crusade is an ongoing Imperial Crusade that began in 777.M41 to bring the Jericho Reach in the Eastern Fringe of the galaxy back into the dominion of the God-Emperor of Mankind. It has been waged for over four solar decades, and in that time, it has consumed millions of lives and seen the destruction of dozens of worlds. Its possible end is lost in a blood-soaked future that none now living may see.

The crusade began because of the discovery of a stable Warp Gate linking the Jericho Reach and the eastern Halo Stars to the far-off Calixis Sector of the Segmentum Obscurus half a galaxy away. The first stage of the crusade was launched through the Warp Gate within only years of its discovery.

The Achilus Crusade represented a bold attempt to retake the Jericho Reach quickly and use it as a staging point from which a greater re-conquest of lost areas of the Eastern Fringe could begin. From there, the Imperium could start a second front against the encroaching designs of the expanding T'au Empire.

At first, the forces of Lord Militant Tiber Achilus enjoyed rapid success, taking several worlds and establishing a core of star systems to act as the basis for further conquests. Since these early victories, however, the crusade has seen the death of its leader and his replacement by Solomon Tetrarchus, the division of its armies to fight wars on many fronts, and the bleeding dry of its forces by attrition and the onslaught of deadly enemies with unexpected numbers and strength.

In the heart of the Jericho Reach, the forces of Chaos -- entrenched in the millennia-long dark ages since the ancient Jericho Sector fell -- have battled the crusade to a corpse-choked standstill. Here, amid these worlds of horror, death, and iron, the slaves of the Dark Gods have drowned entire armies in their own blood.

Yet this has not been the extent of the crusade's woes. The expansionist forces of the T'au have also made inroads into parts of the region and clashed head-on with the crusade's outer edges in a war for control of inhabitable planets and the resources needed to fuel their war effort.

Pirates, raiders, and hostile aliens have proven far more numerous and troublesome than many of the crusade's high command had believed possible.

So the situation has stood for several solar decades, but worse was to come. A new threat, perhaps greater than any other, now casts its long shadow from the lifeless voids towards the galactic rim, and this war teeters on the edge of disaster.

In that rising tide brought by the Tyranids of Hive Fleet Dagon, whole worlds have died, naval battlegroups have been lost to the howling dark, and a smothering cloud has spread across the Warp.

It is a war begun in secret, waged in darkness, and without mercy or quarter. Yet the truth is that the carnage seen so far is only the beginning.

The Warp Gate
The catalyst for the launching of the Achilus Crusade was the unexpected discovery of an active Warp Gate in the turbulent margins of the Halos Stars close to the border of the Calixis Sector in the Segmentum Obscurus.

This ancient and vastly cyclopean alien device of unknown age proved to be both active and stable, with a corresponding gate-aperture into realspace on the other side of the galactic core at the edge of the Jericho Reach.

Though the Jericho Reach had at one time been under Imperial control, the existence of this gate within its boundaries had never been discovered; a further mystery that has never been solved. The Warp Gate and the possibilities it offered only came to light in 755.M41, when the Navigator of the Imperial flag-frigate Spear of Tarsus sensed something causing a localised area of calm in the great Warp Storm border through which she was steering passage.

Dropping out of the Warp close to the source of this tranquil sea, the frigate found itself in the presence of a vast Warp Gate of xenos design, placed in the cold blackness of interstellar space far from the orbit of any star; a gate that, though undoubtedly ancient, had been activated (or re-activated at any rate) in the recent past.

With this discovery, a chain of events were set in motion that would cause the Achilus Cursade to be launched across the stars.

Once the Spear of Tarsus had returned to Imperial space bearing news of its discovery, it was not long until a secret expedition was launched to discover the nature of the gate and where it led. Ships serving the Adeptus Mechanicus Explorators and the Ordo Xenos sent scouting ships through, crewed with their most able agents and experienced Navigators.

Their swift return not only told of another gate, also hanging in the empty void far from any star, but also of the certain truth that this other gate lay in the Eastern Fringe of the Segmentum Ultima, near the Jericho Reach all the way on the other side of the galaxy.

With this realisation, a plan was born within the minds of the great lords of the Imperium: the possibility of using the gate to launch a crusade into the Jericho Reach and reclaim it for the Imperium as a stepping stone to other conquests. The idea found favour with the High Lords of Terra, who gave it their blessing, and so the idea of a most singular crusade grew in possibility in the minds of the great until Lord Militant Tiber Achilus was given mandate to make it a reality.

The High Lords were mindful, however, that the existence of the gate and what it portended offered dire peril as well as possibility, and decreed that the crusade was to be launched from a staging point far from the territory it intended to conquer under a shroud of deepest secrecy.

But, like so many other great campaigns launched in the millennia that the Imperium has stood, it was intended to bring swift victory and to use the light of the God-Emperor to drive back the darkness.

On the eave of the Feast of the Emperor's Ascension in 777.M41, countless millions of Astra Militarum, thousands of Adepta Sororitas, and as many as a dozen Space Marine Chapters advanced to conquer the worlds of the Jericho Reach in the shadow of Battle Titans and to the thunder of the guns of the Imperial Navy. It was a bold and fiery beginning.

The Death of Achilus
Lord Militant Tiber Achilus was a war-forged veteran of many campaigns before the Aquila, primarily against Orks and other alien threats such as the Khrave and the Ylarian Collective in the Formorian Sector wars where he had earned his fame. He was also stubborn, blunt, and somewhat cautious in nature, favouring a tried and tested strategy of 'attack, pacify and fortify' over great sweeping advances.

Acting on the best intelligence he possessed, he had also badly underestimated just how entrenched or dangerous "native" resistance to the crusade was as a whole.

His core belief was that the crusade had been launched primarily to open a new front against the alien T'au, and laid his plans to this long term goal, perhaps to the detriment of the crusade as a whole. Whether or not he was correct in his assumptions, he would not live long enough to know, as Achilus did not survive to see the end of the first solar decade of his crusade.

While travelling to review the progress of the primary forward battlegroups aboard the grand cruiser Proclamation of Wrath in 786.M41, the ship suffered a catastrophic Gellar Field failure and was lost with all hands. The Lord Militant and his command staff were among those drowned in the raw energies of the Warp.

Until his death, Achilus had pursued a strategy that focused on securing a stable, fortified base of operations near the Warp Gate; a careful campaign to bring the Reach under his heel, followed by a drive by the crusade directly against the T'au expansion and perhaps beyond.

His hope was to swiftly secure the coreward swathe of the Reach and continue to press mercilessly on, but aside from an initial string of successes, the Crusade forces (often parcelled out piecemeal) met with repeated delays and, in some theatres, outright defeat at the hands of the vile and heretical inhabitants of the Reach's core worlds.

Meanwhile, the T'au appeared to press the matter by their incursions into the region. The crusade had begun to stall dangerously, its forces slowly declining from hundreds of minor engagements, while Achilus' intransigence caused discontent with his Space Marine and Mechanicus allies who pressed for more decisive action.

His successor to the mantle of Lord Militant was a very different man. Solomon Tetrarchus was also an Astra Militarum veteran, but one with a reputation for bold strategy, charismatic leadership and a practice of delegating many strategic decisions to the commanders beneath him.

Within a Terran year of his ascension to the Lord Militancy, Tetrarchus had replaced or sidelined most of the "old guard" generals who had served Achilus. In their stead, he brought up new officers who possessed the independent dynamism he valued.

He then commanded that the crusade forces be split into three army groups, committed most of the reserves his predecessor had hoarded to the front, and pressed the attack, predicting the fall of the Reach within a solar decade.

The largest of these newly created crusade forces would drive towards the core of the Jericho Reach and crush the native resistance, while the other two would move swiftly through the sparsely inhabited rimward worlds, encircling the former Imperial sector's core.

The existing slow drive towards the worlds disputed by the T'au expansion would become but one barb of the trident that would drive through the corrupted flesh of the Jericho Reach and make it once more the dominion of the God-Emperor of Mankind.

The three salients were designated Canis, Acheros and Orpheus respectively, and regardless of the relative wisdom of his strategy, the war still continues three solar decades later in the early decades of the ninth century of the 41st Millennium. The Jericho Reach and the fate of the crusade now hang in the balance.

The Orpheus Salient
"In ancient times it is said that men prayed to keep the monsters of the seas from rising from the black depths. Now I look out at the darkness between these stars and I feel the same prayers coming unbidden to my lips."

- Captain Ahabron to his first officer on the Deep Range Crusier Admiral Ishmael, missing in Action 814.M41

The Orpheus Salient is the rimward-most advanced of the Achilus Crusade's penetration into the Jericho Reach. Intended by Lord Militant Tetrarchus to advance swiftly through what were largely uncontested and barren star systems, the Orpheus Salient was once the most successful of the Achilus Crusade, gaining ground rapidly ahead of the others and bringing more than sixty systems under the crusade's control.

These successes are no more, and its forces are now shattered and scattered, while the majority of its commanders are lost and likely dead.

The doom that came upon the Orpheus Salient very recently has come out of the distant void like a surging tide sweeping away all past gains in a welter of confusion and death. In four standard years, the all-devouring xenos-horror known as the Tyranids has come to besiege and consume all before it.

Unprepared for its fury, the salient's crusade forces have crumbled into bloody shambles. Only a few worlds are known to be holding out for certain against the onslaught of the Great Devourer, and dozens are believed to have perished.

Others yet may be desperately fighting the enemy, their plight unknown, or huddling ignorant and fearful in the silent dark, not knowing that the jaws of a monstrous enemy are fastening around them.

The possibility of complete disaster now looms, as only one thing is certain: what has happened so far is only the beginning.

Victory and Disaster
The Orpheus Salient was launched a Terran year after Solomon Tetrarchus ascended to the position of Lord Militant commanding the crusade into the Jericho Reach. At that time, intelligence possessed by the crusade's high command strongly suggested that the systems running to the rimward of the Reach were made up of sparsely populated Frontier Worlds and a few formally Imperial worlds.

These planets, while much regressed, had kept faith with the Imperial Creed and carried on in much the same way as they had before the loss of the Jericho Reach to its millennia old era its people called the "Age of Shadow." Some had even maintained very haphazard contact with the Imperium and provided the crusade's scouting forces with aid and intelligence.

It was felt that if these and other nearby worlds could be quickly brought back into Imperial control, they could both provide valuable resources to the crusade and act as the staging point to open a second front against the forces of the Archenemy that were already exacting a heavy toll on the forces of the Acheros Salient.

Command of the Orpheus Salient was given to General Mikal Curas, the youngest and most dynamic of Tetrarchus' senior command, seen by many as his favoured protegee. Some privately doubted that the young Curas had the experience to drive the swift advance demanded by his commander.

Their doubts proved to be in error, however, as the Orpheus Salient swiftly went forward, destroying the petty empires of secessionists and bringing loyal worlds back into the light of the Emperor.

As Curas' forces progressed, they maintained a steady stream of intelligence and assistance to the allied Space Marine and Deathwatch forces, identifying suitable targets for attack. In a solar decade and a half, the lead elements of the Orpheus Salient had penetrated further into the Jericho Reach than any of the crusade's other forces.

The progress of the Orpheus Salient was so successful that Lord Militant Tetrarchus began to peel elements away from it, increasing the stream of reinforcements to the cauldron of death around the Cellebos Warzone.

Then on 999.812.M41, astropathic communications between the various worlds and battlegroups of the Orpheus Salient began to blink out, and what limited messages did get through were sporadic, sinister, and barely intelligible.

Astropaths and other Sanctioned Psykers across the length of the Salient awoke screaming from dreams filled with an endless darkness and a thousand rustling whispers. Some took their own lives and many others were reduced to babbling phrases about "the rising tide," the "hungering depths," or similarly doom-laden ravings.

Thanks to the communications blackout, no one in the high command knew the disposition or activity of forces along the salient, nor could they exert any cohesive control over them, while the Adeptus Astartes grew withdrawn, keeping their own grim counsel on the matter.

Snatches of information that emerged over the coming solar months seemed to indicate that some elements of the salient's forces had been lost, and that previously secure worlds had come under siege. It was as if a creeping shadow had enveloped the salient, within which terrible events had begun to unfold.

The doom of the Orpheus Salient -- and perhaps the entire Achilus Crusade -- was given a name only from a rare open communication from the mysterious Deathwatch. The Tyranids had come to the Jericho Reach.

Since that time, the crusade forces along the Orpheus Salient have been brutally hammered and now are estimated to muster at less than fifty percent of their prior effective combat strength.

Their leadership is fractured and their morale severely, perhaps fatally, compromised, while the vital Fortress World of Hethgard has now come under siege from a massive Tyranid assault.

The Deathwatch estimates that at least nine formerly inhabited worlds have already been completely overrun by the Tyranids of Hive Fleet Dagon. Six more are under immediate threat or are already engaged in fighting, while the fate of at least twenty other systems, lost under the umbra of the Great Devourer's Shadow in the Warp, remains unknown.

Notable Orpheus Salient Worlds

 * Atonement
 * Beseritor
 * Castobel
 * Cocijo
 * Eleusis
 * Freya
 * Hethgard
 * Manuxet
 * Vanir
 * Xyan
 * Zanatov's Harbour

Notable Orpheus Space Stations

 * Research Station Epsilon
 * Watch Station Tryphon

The Acheros Salient
"In war, nothing is certain save that the price of victory is always paid in blood, both yours and your enemies."

- The Tactica Imperialis

The Acheros Salient is the central arm of the advancing Achilus Crusade. Ever since the launch of the three salients by the Lord Militant Tetrarchus, it has been bogged down in blood and infamy.

It has shown the least progress in terms of worlds captured and, even given the recent massive losses suffered by the Orpheus Salient, has consumed the greatest amount of Imperial lives and war materiel on the pyre of battle.

Assigned the majority of the crusade's heavy line regiments, the Acheros Salient was given the task of driving directly into the heart of the inhabited core of the Jericho Reach.

This area was known to be plagued by Warp-worshipping human Renegades and xenos slavers. It was home to several petty stellar empires, and dominated astrographically by the Hadex Anomaly, a Warp-realspace distortion known to have swallowed the former sector capital within its vortex a thousand standard years previously.

From the beginning, the crusade's assault into the region that had once been the Cellebos Sub-sector of the Jericho Reach ran into trouble. Tetrarchus' plan disregarded intelligence dossiers -- in part based on data provided by the Deathwatch -- compiled by former adjutants of Lord Militant Achilus as "exaggerated and over-cautious."

The Lord Militant called for a dispersed assault on several fronts. He believed this plan would allow the crusade to make steady progress and "flush out" serious resistance. The new Lord Militant was soon proved correct in this assessment, but the scale of that resistance was far greater than anything the most pessimistic projections had warned of.

The crusade was confronted by a massive, well-organised enemy counterattack. Although the crusade was expecting smaller, Warp-capable raider vessels, this new foe also possessed deadly space hulks and several cruiser-class capital ships, some of which were known to be in the hands of the dread Chaos Space Marines of the Traitor Legions.

The Acheros Salient's Imperial Navy fleet assets operated in a dispersed formation across more than twenty sub-battlegroups. Faced with such opposition, the result was an unmitigated disaster. Dozens of naval ships were isolated and destroyed, while troop convoys with woefully inadequate escorts were hunted down and systematically ravaged. In these assaults, thousands of Imperial Guardsmen, who would not live long enough to fire a shot in the crusade's service, were slain in the cold vacuum of space.

Only the bravery and skill of the Acheros Salient fleet's naval commanders and the resolute skill of the Space Marine contingent assigned to the crusade forces prevented the sudden, savage losses from turning the salient into a disorganized rout.

These determined survivors organised a fighting withdrawal back to the security of Karlack and the Iron Collar. Losses were heavy, rated afterward at over 160,000 troops and ancillary personnel in less than six weeks Terran standard.

The majority of these casualties were killed either inside their transport ships or cut off on the world of Khazant, itself a former crusade conquest when it was overrun by the forces of the enemy in an orgy of slaughter.

In addition, more than a dozen ships of the line were either lost outright or captured by the enemy. The most grievous loss was that of the Storm Wardens Chapter's Battle Barge Warchilde, whose lifeless hulk was left drifting in orbit amid the radiation-swept storm zone of the Magog binary pulsar.

Notable Acheros Salient Worlds

 * Karlack

The Canis Salient
"Don't tell me we don’t have the manpower! Don't tell me it can't be done! Tell me how many heads are spiked on our battlements! Tell me how deep the mass graves must now be dug!"

- Lord Commander Sebiascor Ebongrave

The Canis Salient is the largest and oldest warzone in the Jericho Reach. Lying on the coreward side of the Reach, its first battles were fought in a crusade to liberate dozens of human-inhabited worlds from T'au expansion.

All did not go well, however, for the Imperial Crusade became the target of a very different, but equally malevolent, xenos species: the Tyranids. A splinter of Hive Fleet Dagon slammed into the Imperial line of advance and only terrible sacrifices stopped the aliens from invading and stripping life from every world in the salient and beyond.

Under Lord Commander Sebiascor Ebongrave, Imperial forces in the Canis Salient fight a war on two fronts. Regiments of the Astra Militarum fight endless conventional battles against the T'au and their auxiliaries, hoping for the foothold that will let them push on to the Sept capital.

The second front is a bloody defensive action to stem the Tyranid tide. Imperial forces are stretched thin, fighting both wars at once, and few truly believe that the Tyranids can be held at bay forever.

With the T'au fomenting rebellion and desertion on Imperial worlds and in Imperial forces through their Water Caste ambassadors, it is surely only a matter of time before the Imperial lines break and an alien tide pours over Fortress Spite and into Imperial space.

Without some master plan to break the stalemate, the millions of Imperial lives sacrificed in the Canis Salient will be for nought.

Notable Canis Salient Worlds

 * Black Zone
 * Fortress Spite
 * Sepulchre Sigma
 * The Sorrow

Quarantined Worlds
Lord Commander Ebongrave is aggressive, some say fanatical, in rooting out the T'au influence on the Imperial worlds of the Canis Salient. Three such worlds -- Argoth, Kaggeran and Rheelas -- were deemed by Ebongrave so riddled with T'au emissaries and sympathisers that they were beyond hope.

He ordered them quarantined, meaning that no voidcraft were allowed in or out. Fragmented Vox and astropathic transmissions from these planets, which are clustered close to Fortress Spite, paint a picture of mass starvation, riots and apocalyptic cult activity.

Ebongrave has not permitted any cargo to reach the planets, fearing that moral threats will escape on returning transports, and has said on many occasions that he would call down the fleet to bomb their cities into oblivion if he could. To many, the horrible fates of the quarantined worlds are the starkest evidence of Ebongrave's madness.


 * Argoth
 * Bellom System
 * Carmyn
 * Kaggeran
 * Krrk'Tikit
 * Iphigenia
 * Meskaile
 * Rheelas
 * Scansion Beta
 * Themiskon Point
 * Tsua'Malor
 * Velk'Han Sept
 * Wrath

Watch Station Skapula
"By your will, Fio'Ui. The relief seems to depict iconography relating to the gue'la religion. I shall remove the panel for further study. Work-brother, pass me the fusion cutter… there, that should… [sound of rapid laser fire, then static]."

- Intercepted Earth Caste communication

Watch Station Skapula is a Deathwatch space station, abandoned long ago, that orbits a barren world in T'au space. While deactivated, the station is protected by automated defences that are still operational in spite of the time the watch station has spent empty.

The T'au are interested in the station, believing it to have some religious purpose that could be significant to understanding the Gue'la 's mindset.

Human pioneers led by Earth Caste archaeologists have tried to examine and enter the watch station, but the automated defences have held them off in spite of spirited attempts to understand and deactivate them.

Skapula could prove a hugely valuable asset for the Imperium. It possesses highly advanced technology and is even capable of short Warp jumps, making it extremely useful as a jumping-off point for Deathwatch operations against the Velk'Han Sept.

A mission to capture the station from the T'au and reactivate it is surely on the Deathwatch's agenda for operations in the Jericho Reach.

The Black Reef
Much of Tsua'Malor's suitability as the Sept capital comes from the Black Reef, a stellar phenomenon that protects it from most angles of approach. The reef is a series of gravitational anomalies that few but the bravest human pilots and the fastest ships could hope to navigate.

Hundreds of planets and millions of asteroids are caught in the Black Reef, endlessly dancing through the contorted orbits as the fluctuating gravities pull them apart. Some of these planets were once inhabited, long before the age of Imperium, and the tormented ruins of ancient cities can just be glimpsed on slabs of planetary crust as they float through the reef's currents.

The Black Reef's reflection in the Warp is an impassable mass of positive and negative energies constantly colliding and annihilating one another, in a dance of destruction that no Navigator would conscience sailing through.

The presence of the Black Reef makes it much easier for the T'au fleets to watch over the approaches to Tsua'Malor. This does not satisfy the Mal'caor Shi, however, and several cadres of auxiliary species well suited to space exploration have been dispatched to explore the Black Reef and chart any possible routes through it.

These xenos suffer a high attrition rate, even though they can survive conditions that would will a T'au or human. The information they are bringing back is worth their sacrifice, however, for along with charts of the reef they are bringing back glimpses of a catastrophe that created the reef and the beings that once inhabited it before the cataclysm.

The Cellebos Warzone
"These stars and planets have been the sights of battles such as I had never dreamed of in my darkest nightmares. Yet I fear for all the nightmares that have passed, there is worse to come."

- From the private Journals of Colonel Havius Blan, Landrian 202nd Light Infantry, Officer Commanding, Cellebos Warzone, 443817.M41

Since the Acheros Salient's appalling reversal of fortune, Lord Militant Tetrarchus has resumed his assault on the region, pouring all the reinforcements he can muster into what has become a war of bloody grinding attrition spanning over fifty star systems and twenty-five Terran years of struggle.

The war has focused around the control of key systems in what is now referred to as the Cellebos Warzone, most notably Khazant, Vanity, and the Blood Trinity. Solid Imperial gains have been few and hard-fought, with the Heretic forces giving ground in some areas, but control of others remaining elusive or outright impossible.

Meanwhile, the baleful influence of whatever unnatural powers reside in the Charon Stars and the Hadex Anomaly have become ever more apparent as time progresses.

Despite these difficulties, the Acheros Salient was at last beginning to show slow signs of progress, with fresh Imperial reinforcements, channeled in from the Calixis Sector and stripped from the other crusade salients, adding to its power.

However, all this ended thanks to the recent disasters on the Orpheus Salient and the coming of the Tyranid menace. This has led to a re-entrenchment in the face of a possible onslaught on a second front and could cause the collapse of the entire Orpheus arm, threatening the very existence of the Achilus Crusade.

In these last years of tribulation, the character of Solomon Tetrarchus himself has changed, and while he remains a charismatic leader, he has become subject to paranoia about "traitors" in the ranks, a paranoia perhaps well justified, given the nature of the enemies he faces, but a very dangerous behaviour for a man with a Lord Militant's unbridled authority.

Notable Cellebos Warzone Worlds

 * Blood Trinity
 * Khazant
 * Vanity

The Greyhell Front
One of the two main battlezones where Imperial forces are concentrated, the Greyhell Front is a belt of worlds where the Imperial Guard and Navy are struggling to establish footholds closer to T'au space.

They are opposed in this by some T'au auxiliaries, but most of all by Fire Warrior cadres. Chief among the auxiliaries is are armies of Kroot, who are well suited to the lush jungle worlds especially common along the front. The Kroot's capacity to rapidly evolve according to the genetic material they absorb has led many new strains of Kroot along the Greyhell front.

Human armies are also fighting here under orders from the T'au, leading to a paranoid atmosphere where any soldier's squadmate could be an infiltrator sent by the other side. Ebongrave's purges are most frequent on the Greyhell Front and an Imperial guardsman is almost as likely to be executed by his own side as he is to be killed by the xenos.

Life is no better for the gue'la auxiliaries, who are wont to be abandoned by their T'au overlords or betrayed by Imperial Intelligence officers who have worked their way into their ranks.

The Greyhell Front is regarded as a meat grinder by the troops serving there, but Lord Commander Ebongrave is adamant that only by forcing through the front and reaching T'au space can the crusade push on into a direct assault on the Velk'Han Sept.

In spite of the thinly stretched nature of Imperial forces in the Canis Salient, Ebongrave refuses any suggestion that Imperial forces should withdraw from the Greyhell Front.

Notable Greyhell Front Worlds

 * Baraban
 * Belkrin
 * Ravacene
 * Veren

Imperial Order of Battle
Previously all Imperial forces were commanded by Lord Militant Tiber Achilus (KIA). Following his death, the crusade is currently commanded by Lord Militant Solomon Tetrarchus.

Adepta Sororitas

 * Order of the Argent Shroud: 1 Perceptory
 * Order of the Bloody Rose: 4 Commanderies
 * Order of the Crimson Oath: 2 Missions
 * Order of the Fiery Tear: 1 Mission
 * Order of the Valorous Heart: 1 Commandery

Adeptus Astartes

 * A Crusader Company containing elements of the Death Spectres, Subjugators, Disciples of Caliban, and Iron Snakes
 * Angels Vermillion: 1 Company
 * Blood Swords: 2 Companies
 * Dark Sons: 3 Companies
 * Deathwatch: Classified
 * Genesis Chapter
 * Grey Knights: Classified
 * Relictors: 1 Special Detachment
 * Space Wolves: 1 Company
 * Storm Wardens: 7 Companies
 * Templars of Blood
 * White Consuls: 2 Companies

Adeptus Mechanicus

 * Centurio Ordinatus: 1 Ordinatus
 * Korvat Knight House: 2 Formations
 * Legio Cybernetica: 1 Division
 * Legio Venator: 3 Maniples, 2 Scout Maniples
 * Ordo Reductor: 2 Siege Regiments
 * Skitarii: 4 Regiments

Astra Militarum

 * Cadian Shock Troopers: 2 Regiments
 * Descaal Lancers: 1 Regiment
 * Gathalamor Heavy Grenadiers: 8 Battalions
 * Gunmetalican Armoured: 1 Regiment
 * Harakoni Warhawks: 1 Regiment
 * Iaxian Tithe Guard: 2 Regiments
 * Maccabian Guard: 2 Regiments
 * Merov Penitentiary Indenture: 4 Penal Legions
 * Monrass Scythewind Reconnaissance: 1 Regiment
 * Mordian Iron Guard: 1 Regiment
 * Mortessan Highlanders: 1 Regiment
 * Scintillan Guard: 5 Regiments
 * Tekarn Armoured: 1 Regiment
 * Terrax Guard: 3 Regiments
 * Volg 3rd: 1 Regiment

Departmento Munitorum

 * Administratum Assay Corps: 1 Corps
 * Field Enforcement Corps: 2 Regiments
 * Labour Corps: 4 Battalions
 * Pioneer Corps: 3 Regiments

Imperial Navy
Vessels of Note:
 * Belial (Emperor-class Battleship)
 * Caelestis Dictatio (Mars-class Battlecruiser)
 * Eternal Requiem (Exorcist-class Grand Cruiser)
 * Execution (Oberon-class Battleship)
 * Ferrum Aeterna (Dominator-class Cruiser)
 * Proclamation of Wrath (Vengeance-class Grand Cruiser)

Inquisition
---Classified---

Officio Assassinorum
---Classified---

Miscellaneous
The Vassals of Rogue Trader Kazandus Lan:
 * 5 Ships of the Line, equivalent to 3 Regiments Militant

Chaos Space Marines

 * Alpha Legion
 * Berserkers of Skallathrax
 * Death Guard
 * Word Bearers
 * The Pyre

Chaos Cults and Renegades

 * Hordes of Renegades, deviants, mutants, and daemons
 * The Blood Trinity
 * The Stigmartus

Known T'au Order of Battle
Led by Aun'El Basel'kyth, members of the Mal'caor Shi High Command -- collectively called "the Transcendence" -- are as follows: Aun'O Tsualal, Shas'O M'yen, Aun'Ui Kol'denh, and Kor'O Volescur.
 * Forces from the Sept of Velk'Han
 * The Mal'caor Fleet under the command of High Admiral Kor'o Y'eldi

Known Tyranid Order of Battle

 * Hive Fleet Dagon