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Warband History
At the end of their self-imposed isolation in 991.M41 the Rainbow Warriors, having replenished their Chapter to nearly full strength was the unknowing victim of political envy and spite on the part of the Adeptus Mechanicus. They were baselessly declared renegades and subject to a surprise Inquisitorial attack that devastated their Chapter. Prism was eventually occupied by Mechanicus forces from the Triplex Phall Forge World.

Re-emerging from their entombment underground over a hundred years afterwards, the Rainbow Warriors waged a short and brutal war to scour the planet of loyalist as well as Traitor Legion forces; for they were fighting an Emperor's Children warband as well as the Mechanicus and a force of Iron Hands Space Marines.

2nd Company Champion Zophiel led a coterie of various squads during the campaign to reclaim Prism and when their Chapter Master swore fealty to Chaos, Zophiel and his warriors followed him into damnation, with Zophiel quickly becoming an Exalted Champion. As members of the newly-named Lords of Prism warband they adopted the strict anti-Slaanesh stance prevalent in the Chapter. Like their brethren, Zophiel and his retinue venerated Chaos Undivided.

This would change, however, during the Somnian Dark Crusade; a campaign ordered by the Chapter's Sovereign Supreme, Ludas, to retrieve a powerful tome of dark lore called the Liber Chaotica. During this venture into the rift known as the Somnium Stars, the Lords of Prisms vessels were scattered by sudden & powerful warp storms created by the Chaos Gods; causing numerous vessels to come to rest in various places around the Realm of Chaos. The surviving ships from Zophiel's detachment found themselves in a lush, verdant paradise filled with androgynous ethereal creatures. This was the Realm of Slaanesh, and She had brought Zophiel's warriors here to make them Her own, and to take revenge on Ludas for the Lords of Prism refusing to worship Her. Slaanesh's beguiling servant, the Keeper of Secrets, N'Kari, appeared and told the assembled Space Marines that they had been chosen to receive enlightenment from the Dark Prince. They were shown a warped view of the galaxy; how the Aeldari had created Slaanesh then abandoned Him out of fear, how Slaanesh mourned for His lost children yet yearned to draw them to Her side; they felt a measure of the god's outrage when Ludas decided to honour all the Ruinous Powers except Slaanesh; saw how the other Chaos Gods only took from their followers and they were given glimpses of what they could achieve with the Dark Prince's blessing. Zophiel, in particular, was tempted. He had always felt that he should have been made Chapter Master, not Ludas. He knew he deserved to be where Ludas was, and to embrace the only one of the Ruinous Powers that actually gave something to its worshippers. Eventually the weight on his ego, pride and vanity proved too much and Zophiel knelt, openly pledged himself to the worship of Slaanesh along with most of the warriors who were with him. N'Kari exhaled and a pink foggy musk descended, wreathing the prostrate renegades who removed their helmets to inhale the vapour. They were gifted with indescribable pleasure as their reward for embracing She Who Thirsts; this was the first of many such blessings they would receive. Behind them were warriors who refused the temptations of Slaanesh, still adhering to Ludas' view of Chaos Undivided. They trained their guns on their errant brothers and were struck by waves of agony so potent their Astartes physiologies were overwhelmed. Zophiel turned and saw his would-be killers paralysed with pain; paralysed by their own unwillingness to experience the new at the expense of the old; refusing to embrace what could be! He saw all this with clarity and realised that Ludas nor the rest of the Lords of Prism would never accept him or his followers if they knew what had transpired here. Zophiel's retinue executed their helpless brothers, looted what they could and, with the aid of a complicit Apothecary, extracted their gene-seed.

His first command was to destroy that which the Lords of Prism had built up. Zophiel realised he could not just challenge Ludas to a duel and supplant him; the rank & file would never accept him when they found out he worshipped Slaanesh. Instead, he realised the best course would be to forge his own path, undermining the Lords of Prism over time and setting them up for a final betrayal.

Camulus would become a Chaos Lord in his own right following the betrayal of his Chapter by a secret Slaaneshi sect within their own ranks called the Enraptured. These traitors would wait until the majority of the Lords of Prism were away from their home planet, attacking the Chapter reserves and destroying their ships, leaving them trapped on Prism to be destroyed by Slaaneshi cults who were summoning daemons onto the world again. Camulus' small fleet arrived in orbit 2 days after the Enraptured revealed themselves to find Sovereign Ludas planetside leading an anti-Slaaneshi offensive. Ludas explained that his former company champion, Zophiel (of the 2nd Company) had become a Slaanesh worshipper and had led approximately 80 Astartes into betraying their brothers. They had stolen a sizeable amount of the captured Iron Hands gene-seed as well as the Eldar soul stones they had accumulated from the Chapter stronghold and had crippled or destroyed many of the loyal ships in orbit before escaping the system. Camulus would offer his warriors to support Ludas but the Sovereign Supreme charged Camulus with forming the vanguard to chase down Zophiel and his warriors, retrieving the gene-seed & soul stones and returning with the traitor's head. The rest of the Lords would follow with reinforcements as best they could when the homeworld was secure.

Camulus accepted this quest with an oath to the Sovereign and ordered his ships to set off in pursuit along the betrayers' last known course out of the system. Addressing his warriors, he called them his Skullsworn and pledged with them to take the heads of the Slaaneshi cowards who had betrayed the Chapter for the glory of the Blood God.

Notable Campaigns

 * Scouring of Prism (~154.M42) - Having contrived the destruction of the Rainbow Warriors Chapter at the hands of the Inquisition 150 years prior, the adepts of Triplex Phall sent an explorator fleet to Prism in the wake of its victory over Hive Fleet Kraken in 995.M41. This fleet was tasked with exploiting Prism's natural resources to aid in the reconstruction of their Forge World. The Mechanicus fleet lost a sizeable portion of its strength during its years in the warp but made it to the Prism system through luck after the formation of the Great Rift. They received unexpected reinforcements in the form of an Iron Hands battle group which had suffered spatial & temporal displacement by a warp-storm that followed the formation of the Great Rift. It was part of a battle group dispatched from Medusa to Vigilus approximately fifty Terran years in the future. The Mechanicus' past sins would come back to haunt them as the Rainbow Warriors were not destroyed as previously thought. They re-emerged to retake their former homeworld after vying for control of it with both Imperial forces and also a reaving Slaaneshi warband of Traitor Marines called the Disciples of Excess. In exchange for the Rainbow Warriors accepting Chaos, Khorne, Tzeentch and Nurgle banished the Daemonettes already summoned & running amok on the planet. Furious yet not powerful enough to prevent this, Slaanesh ordered the Disciples of Excess to withdraw immediately or suffer His displeasure. In the aftermath of this victory, the Rainbow Warriors became the Lords of Prism; their loyalty to the Dark Gods cemented through their salvation. The Eighth Company under Camulus turned with the rest of their Chapter to Chaos; eventually becoming aligned to the Blood God above all others.


 *  Somnian Dark Crusade (162. M42) - After undertaking a vision quest to divine the will of the Chaos Gods, Sovereign Supreme Ludas mobilised the Lords of Prism to undertake a dark crusade into the Somnnium Stars warp rift. His soul had been guided by Kairos Fateweaver to a Daemon World deep within the immaterium. There he had been shown a powerful tome called the Liber Chaotica; a text said to have been penned by an insane scribe from another universe. Fateweaver decreed that if Ludas could recover the book then he would receive the Pantheon's blessing, as well as knowledge & insight into Chaos itself. He also advised the Chaos Lord that he would need all his warriors to achieve his goal. Ludas left none of his Astartes behind; leading the warband's entire fleet of captured ships into the warp rift. Not long after arriving, the fleet was sundered by powerful warp storms. The disparate ships would eventually find themselves at different locations in the Realm of Chaos; the Astartes would be subjected to different tests by the Chaos god whose domain they had ended up in. Camulus' brotherhood found itself stranded in the Blood God's domain. The Astartes were forced to prove themselves as masters of the battlefield. They fought great waves of Bloodletters, chain blades roaring to match the wielders' war cries; Tactical squads spread covering fire to allow the Skullsworn to retreat tactically and maintain control of the battle; Havoc squads brought mighty Daemon engines low, and carved great holes in the daemonic horde with salvoes of heavy weapons fire.


 * Second Scouring of Prism (175.M42) - This campaign followed in the wake of the betrayal of the Lords of Prism by some of their Astartes. These renegades revealed themselves to be a secret Slaaneshi cult which had taken root after the scattering of the Chapter during the Somnian Dark Crusade. Elements of multiple companies constituting approximately 8 squads of warriors pillaged as much gene-seed and Eldar soul stones as they could from their Chapter stronghold before scuttling the ships of those not in their cult. With the bulk of their Chapter off-planet and their Sovereign Supreme trapped on the surface of Prism to deal with the fall-out for the time being, it fell to Camulus to chase down the Never-Slaked and take revenge.

Homeworld
Prism is located in the Ultima Segmentum on the eastern side of the galaxy. As a result of the Great Rift forming, it now resides in the Dark Imperium.

Prism was a lush, verdant jungle world when the Rainbow Warriors arrived. They were struck by the natural beauty of it and, being descended from the Ultramarines and the Primarch Roboute Guilliman, decided to interfere with the world as little as possible. They constructed their fortress-monastery on the largest continent and aside from clearing an area of 15 kilometres around the perimeter, did not do anything to otherwise damage the ecosystem.

Prism was home to a number of warring Bronze/Iron Age human societies who worshipped a small pantheon of Imperial Saints ruled by a deity called the Great Father who they believed would descend from the sky one day to destroy the darkness living beneath the ground. The Rainbow Warriors kept an eye on these societies for signs of Chaotic corruption. Other than this they left them alone most of the time, drawing on the populations occasionally as a source of neophytes.

When the forces of Triplex Phall arrived to take control of Prism following the Rainbow Warriors' fall from grace, they claimed they were servants of the tribes' Great Father and effectively enslaved them to work in the Mechanicus' various facilities, as test subjects for experimentation, or for indoctrination into the Cult Mechanicus.

Now, after decades of Mechanicus rule, the once-vibrant planet is heavily polluted with run-off from factorums and open cast mines. Most of the mortal population was enslaved to work in these facilities and their homes were largely destroyed to showcase the Machine-God's dominance, and to convince the humans to relocate to appropriate workcamps.

With the coming of the Disciples of Excess and the recent turning of the Rainbow Warriors to Chaos, the planet has also been exposed to the taint of the Warp. What effects this will have on the world remain to be seen...

Following the Scouring of Prism, the planet is now a polluted Feudal world. This has meant the natives have an immensely difficult time restoring any sorted of settled society. The soil is so toxic in many places not even grass will grow. There are several landmasses untouched by the Adeptus Mechanicus that are now inhabited by newly-built proto-city-states but many of Prism's mortals chose to remain on the main continent; they view it as sacred, being the place where their masters led them to freedom from not only the machine-men but from the shackles of the False Emperor. It was there that the Lords of Prism received enlightenment and passed it on to those they liberated. The humans on the main continent have been forced into a nomadic tribal existence which will inevitably lead to skirmishes and wars as the population grows over time.

With an influx of slaves from their first raids, the Lords of Prism have started to rebuild their fortress-monastery as a Chaos stronghold in the mountains above the site of their final victory.

Warband Culture
The Skullsworn respect strength of both sinew and will. They are not yet so degraded as to have become Berzerkers mindlessly questing for blood to spill. The warband does not often simply descend on a planet merely to shed blood and gather skulls. They commonly attack a target in pursuit of a tangible objective such as obtain resources or weakening a foe.

Warband Beliefs
The Skullsworn is a warrior cult-brotherhood that focuses its worship & veneration upon Khorne and some of his more powerful daemons. As such, they view the battlefield as the true temple to Khorne. Their warband's champions always lead from the front - no follower of Khorne would respect someone who did not.

They view Khorne as a god of war generally; not just as a god of bloody slaughter. This means that, unlike many other Khornate warbands, members are honoured for their ability to shed blood no matter the weapon used (so long as it is not psychic); ranged or melee. Because of their warrior pride they value the skulls and trophies taken from strong enemies on the battlefield far more than those taken from unarmed prisoners or civilians butchered in cold blood. Indeed, they will mock a warrior who presents or claims a trophy from a victim who could not fight back.

Warband Gene-Seed
The gene-seed of the Skullsworn originates mostly from Roboute Guilliman thanks to their descent from the Ultramarines. However much of this was lost due to the destruction of their fortress-monastery by the Inquisition. All remaining Ultramarine gene-seed associated with the warband now resides in its active members. Due to the conclusion of the Scouring of Prism campaign, these renegades have come into possession of a sizeable amount of Iron Hands gene-seed.

Warband Fleet

 * Primarch's Fury (Capital ship, unknown class; destroyed) - This was the flagship of the Rainbow Warriors Chapter Fleet before their expulsion from the Imperium. It was the only vessel which put up any decent resistance during the Inquisitorial attack and was able to destroy several hostile ships before the Sisters of Battle crippled it with boarding actions. They then withdrew in stolen Thunderhawks, allowing their Inquisitorial master to destroy the ship.
 * Enlightenment (Battle Barge) - Formerly the Iron Hands vessel Eye of the Gorgon which reached the Prism system in a state of disrepair. It provided ground-based reinforcements to the Adeptus Mechanicus as well as aiding in the construction of an orbital spire leading to a space dock just above the atmosphere but would take no further part in the subsequent conflict. The ship was boarded and captured by the Lords of Prism using a stolen teleport homer and a false signal to arrange the teleport. It now serves as the warband's main (only) vessel, allowing them to become a space-faring force once more. The orbital dock was also captured by the Heretic Astartes and the few Techpriests & servitors engaged in its construction were captured and re-purposed for the warband's uses. The Techpriests were tortured by the vindictive Astartes until their resistance broke. They have sworn allegiance to Chaos and become Hereteks. They serve the Lords of Prism in the same capacity normal Techpriests do. But they have an additional responsibility of corrupting the resistant Machine-spirit of the Enlightenment.

Enemies

 * The Inquisition
 * Adepta Sororitas
 * Adeptus Mechanicus
 * Zophiel's Enraptured (Slaaneshi splinter warband)