Dark Heresy: Malice: Lore and NPC Profiles: Planet Cilleathe, The Decaps, and the Rook

Cilleathe

Cilleathe was a failed Imperial campaign upon an exodite Eldar world found between the Calixis and Askellon sectors. It left millions dead and the survivors mustered out to be stranded and forgotten on a world they did not know. This is the fallout that occurred from that campaign.

Cilleathe was found near the periphery of the Imperium's territory. A route to it through the warp had been found a few decades before the campaign began. The Rogue Trader, Yareth Kulvin, had struck a claim to it for the Imperium through his warrant. He spent years influencing lord-generals, sector governors, and the highest powers in nearby sectors and the local Spinward Front to forge a campaign on it with promises of riches, glory, and possible territory. Cilleathe held valuable resources and was one of the ancient garden worlds of the fallen Aeldari Empire. It was one of the few worlds unsullied by the Fall. A large population of Exodite Eldar lived on the planet. They knew the world and were armed with the ancient artisanal weaponry, had veterans with experience of centuries of war, the help of their craftworld brethren including corsairs and rangers, deadly beasts, and a deep familiarity with its terrain. The world was changed by the design of the ancient Aeldari and was optimized for Eldar life. Human adventurism upon the planet was a different story. For the regiments that stepped foot on that planet, they met dangerous mountains, treacherous rivers, labyrinthine jungles, open vulnerable plains, and deadly marshes for the unwary. Along with the pernicious terrain there were well-entrenched, well-hidden, and heavily fortified Exodite citadels that could not be easily reached by naval bombardment or terrestrial artillery without putting them in dangerous positions. The Eldar were not giving it up. Captain Yareth had named it "Kulvin Prime", but to its inhabitants, the guardsmen who fell, and those who live to tell the tale it is forever Cilleathe.

The Decaps

The Headless Legion is a Cadian detachment of twenty-thousand remaining guard and kasrkin that lost their leaders to the ending battle of the Kulvin campaign known as the "Harrowing". Generals, Imperial Officials, commissars, and any in a leading position were all assassinated in several fell swoops upon the overwhelmed Imperial forces. Of the regiments sent, only a fraction of the men and women of two Cadian divisions survived on the retreat from Cilleathe and the subsequent warp storm that closed off the planet from immaterial navigation routes. These survivors of the Cilleathian campaign are now called the "Decaps". They were sent to Desoleum and through various acts of negligence, carelessness, and callous disregard by the munitorum and administratum for what was seen as damaged and worthless resources they were stranded. The men and women of that campaign had no one to petition for them to be sent back to Cadia or merged with another regiment to fight on. They were abandoned and forced to integrate into Desoleum, travel by their own means, or become outcasts. Some have been forced into work they find beneath their dignity as warriors. Some have been able to integrate into Desoleum society without difficulty. A few have even gained oaths to the Cadres of the Bonds Involute, but most of that number are treated poorly out of their history as possible cowards and failures. Many took their military experience and joined mercenary companies and criminal outfits. A number of discontent Cadians have been turned to the service of the Tarot, a grand Chaotic conspiracy in Askellon. These Cadians joined a branch of the Tarot led by the Cadian traitor and ex-infantry NCO Finn Greely along with multiple groups of renegades, mercenaries, and cultists. They seek revenge for their mistreatment. They are known as the Decap Brigade for the name the survivors of Cilleathe were saddled with.

Decap Brigadier Profile:

(The different designations and colors are the different classes of the same profile that carry particular weapons. That was done to help me differentiate them and it helps them to not be just one npc type with hot-shots)

Finn Greely Profile:

Unbeknownst to all, there was another power around at the time of the Decap legion's mustering out. Inquisitor Encenzo Fidele, a puritan inquisitor of the Ordo Hereticus operating out of Juno, came forward with a secret offer for a selective number of Decaps. He wanted them to join his warband as his personal stormtroopers. With what they lacked with the training of Inquisitorially raised stormtroopers he saw they made up with pure raw experience. The selection process was done secretively and selectively due to rumors of taint about a few of the surviving Cadians. The first Cadians that Fidele's acolytes approached said one of their numbers was touched by Chaos, a constant presence they knew living under the Eye of Terror. Fidele gathered his selected into the Purple Iris Corps, named for the Cadian true-blood's common characteristic of having purple eyes with their lifelong exposure to the Eye of Terror. He did not help the other Cadians he had not chosen due to this suspicion of heresy. No one but the ones he had reached out to knew he existed. The corpsmen simply had their oaths require them to be moved or other such obfuscating excuses to hide their joining.

Rosco "Oz" Tyruss was a veteran of the 211^th Kasrkin division. He fought in three campaigns with the third being the failed invasion of Cilleathe, an Exodite Eldar world. He was of the 3% that survived the war that were unceremoniously mustered out on Desoleum.

The Rook

The Rook Profile

Official release: Terrorist. Bomber. Leaves an odd white mark that looks like a crow's foot painted on places he has been. Wears heavy armour and a bird shaped helmet with the mark painted upon the armour. 50 known medicae victims. Heavily armed. Special forces weaponry. Demolitions training.

Name: Rosco "Oz" Tyruss, Age 41

Wife: Lilly Swain, Deceased

Daughter: Miranda Tyruss, Deceased

Son: Tom Tyruss, Deceased

Served on Kulth, Kalf, and finally Cilleathe. He was promoted to Major on Kalf, and led a battalion on Cilleathe. In the Guard, his specialties were recon, stealth, and demolitions.

The 211th had R&R on the world of Adderoth, where Rosco found the inspiration for the Rook's equipment and the symbol he uses. It was the last world his division was hosted upon before the 211th was deployed to Cilleathe

Captain-Major Roscoe Tyruss was deployed with a combined detachment including a portion of Battlefleet Calixis, a mix of Calixian regiments, and those that could be spared from the Spinward Front including the 301st Cadian Shock Trooper Infantry Division and the 211th Kasrkin division to Cilleathe. The war lasted for six years. Tyruss was one of the most efficient Kasrkin commanding officers on the front and often led attacks, ambushes, and raids into the heart of the Cilleatheian Eldar's lands. He had rumors about him throughout the war. It was said he tried to understand the Eldar, figured out how they thought in order to fight them. He was seen as unlucky to some. Extremely few that were privy to forbidden information thought he must have been touched by Khorne.

His demeanor did not help. Tyruss is a cold, calculating, and stoic man. He could smile at his billet mates crass jokes but never cracked any himself. There was warmth within, but on campaign, it was hidden. He did not begin this way. Out of the testing fields of Cadia, he was enthusiastic as a soldier, a boyish romantic, full of macho bravado along with pride in his service, and full of gusto to prove himself. He was chosen for the Kasrkin after impressing an officer of the celebrated grenadier group as a whiteshield on an offensive action on a nearby settlement menaced by orks in the Cadian system. His attitude was gradually tightened to the current demeanour he has today over the course of three campaigns and military actions. To his squadmates and later the platoon he led, it always seemed that Tyruss was most at peace walking into hell. The mind space a man has while enjoying a lho-stick and ruminating around a comforting fire was the attitude Tyruss had blazing a path through heretics, orks, and eldar. Whether firing a Volleygun from a Valkyrie, stalking through the Cilleatheian jungle or in caught the middle of the largest and final siege defense of the war he seemed to shine brightly through conflict.
He had a knack for brutality. In the second to fifth years of his deployment of Cilleathe he was entrusted with carrying out a campaign of total war and terror behind the Exodites' lines. In that time he learned newer and more terrible ways to terrify a foe that thought they were far above the petty fears of a lesser race. It started with purges and burnings of settlements. It expanded to displaying and degrading mutilated bodies trapped with explosives for their friends to find along with using symbols the Eldar found repulsive among the body parts of their kin. It progressed to using live dying bait, mass executions, performing blasphemous actions upon their places of worship, destruction of soul stones of their allies and the nodes of the world spirit denying them even peace in death. It was here that rumors of him being touched by something otherworldly began, and it wasn't the Emperor.
His campaign ended with a preventative counterstrike carried out by the elite of the Exodites. They used divination to find the valkyrie that would be carrying him along with a squadron of four others that were used to ferry kasrkin around. The valkyries were shot down over deep brush and jungle around seventy kilometers past the front. In the crash his legs had been broken along with his right arm, four broken ribs, and one gone (not broken, gone). He suffered a massive concussion from being thrown from the valkyrie. Two-thirds of his kasrkin platoon had been killed in the crash. One pilot of his valkyrie, a Seargent Colastia Myri, had survived along with ten others that could be found. Much of their equipment had been damaged including the glowglobes needed to navigate a dense dark xenos jungle. Hidden combatants littered the trees a well. They had predicted the route the humans would take. By the light of a flamer's igniter, the group had to run through the jungle while fighting Eldar warriors in their natural environment. All fell but Tyruss, Sgt. Myri, and a corporal by the name of Lorenz. Tyruss was useless in the fighting. They found their way back to refuge over the course of six days. Tyruss was stopped from deploying again. He would be allowed time to heal and act in the reserve. Thus his last year was spent a quarter of the year in a medicae cot, and the rest on the backlines. This is where he began to think over his actions and what the point of all of this was. He would not have an extended amount of time to ponder.
He was of the 3% of humans that made it off of Cilleathe. The millions-strong Cilleathe detachment became the shell-shocked 20,000 that left. The death-knell of the campaign was definitively sounded when a warp storm had disrupted the route through the warp that lead to Cilleathe after the remaining survivors had retreated onto the remaining ships that battlefleet Calixis held after being stormed by the ships of corsairs and a craftworld now hidden in the Askellon sector.

Captain Tyruss survived the event that gave the Headless Legion their name, known as the Harrowing. He was one of the very few truly content to be done with that war when the Imperium withdrew from that campaign in failure. The Headless Legion was mustered out on Desoleum and through a series of events that had left the survivors forsaken. A mixture of the Administratum's Byzantine workings, munitorum mistakes, and the lack of men of a high and noble class to speak for them left the Headless Legion stranded and forced to integrate into Desoleum or become outcasts and mercenaries. Rosco was given an oath that had him working in a large scale slaughterhouse of a manufactorum.

Roscoe was tired of it all. He became disillusioned with the pompous, self-righteous speeches of the pulpits and generals. He became resentful of the nobles and generals and everyone else who caused millions to die for naught. He fully engaged in heresy and while never outright decrying the machinery of war that kills so many like him in fear of the people he cared about being hurt he always kept doubt in his mind about the whole idea of the Imperium. The war machine created does seem to be necessary. The various terrors of the universe will not stop coming, but the value of that machine is wasted on campaigns like Cilleathe where the impetus was not out of a need to defend humanity but of simple greed. The constant thrust of war for the majority of his adult life wore him down. Not just the physical damage he suffered in more than a decade's personal experience of war but mentally and emotionally. He still exudes a stony focused demeanour but it is a mask he wears to hide himself in.

He Lilly Swain through his work. She was a frank, sincere, and pragmatic person. The boyish man Tyruss had been as a whiteshield came out in an awkward romance. She was one of the few found out he was well-read, having kept a small and ever-changing private book collection amongst his deployments, and could hold a conversation with a universitariate scholar for hours. She could match him with a sharp wit from growing up with a constantly bickering family from an infamous section of Hive Desoleum Primus known as the "Roost" where she personally had to haggle and barter with bazaar merchants for her family from a young age. She challenged him. They both held a love for sappy stories and poetry. They argued all the time. He was stubborn. She would take none of his shit. He valued silence and privacy. She always wanted the air brimming with noise. Lilly would often drag Rosco to community events, saints day festivals, and to watch and listen to performancers on the streets. Sometimes they found a happy medium in a darkly lit smokey tavern, listening to some dirge by a traveling hive troubadour. In those moments were soft and concealing surroundings where a language was shared that Rosco could barely speak but understood completely. Lilly beside him focused on the sound of the artist and the slow subtle movements of his breathing like a metronome. They married after two years and had two children, Miranda and Thomas.

The sickness began five years later. It started as a simple fever. They visited a clinic called Candlepath and received medicine meant to lessen the disease by a Doctor Ani Calth. Roscoe never took it. He had a stubbornness to him that would not shake his resolve. Perhaps from bad experiences on Adderoth and Cilleathe. The sickness grew worse and progressively his family became more diseased over the course of three months. Their lives were continuous and pure agony and Rosco could only watch and try in vain to find someone that could help or at least attempt to give them miniscule momentsof peace. His grief and despair built to a terrible crescendo one horrid night. When all he could hear of his daughter, Miranda, was the choking gasp borne of blood and lesions grown inward. When his son moaned until his voice became hoarse and broken and fell from consciousness to begin his wail again seemingly with no other feeling but pain. When his love's eyes, that held him dearly could no longer recognize nor fathom the world around him and knew only suffering. He did what he was taught. He gave them the Emperor's Peace. He then turned the gun on himself. The Emperor, perhaps fate, had the last laugh. He survived.

He woke up handcuffed to a medicae temple bed. Equipment was inserted with him. When he felt his head, a scar remained of the blast that blew through his brain. He begged for death. He passed out from shock. Before he did, he recognized a face.

He awoke again with the ground shifting beneath him. He saw only black plastic. He was in a body bag. He was being moved somewhere. He found a tag on his foot. Rosco Tyruss was declared dead. He was manacled to a steel bed inside a sizeable autocarriage. He escaped. The driver was the medicae who he had seen before. Who had treated his family. He grabbed a scalpel from a bag of tools she had left in the back. He forced her to drive to her home.

Tyruss barely knew what he was doing. He felt something went wrong when he put that muzzle under his chin and pulled the trigger. He could not turn off a constant feeling of awareness, paranoia, and adrenaline. He remembered the seven shots of that night. Two for each of the wounded. One for him. He kept her chained in the basement of a hab. He thought he was going crazy. He was close to calling the sanctionaries on himself. Then they came. Three men wearing the uniform of the Sanctionaries of the Bonds Involute burst into where he was keeping her. He surrendered. He allowed himself to be manacled. When they seemed to know the medicae and mentioned that he was to be sent downhive, he freed himself. He killed the "sanctionaries" with the weapons he could steal from them and his bare hands and feet. She finally spoke.

Rosco, his wife, and their children were experiments. They were a failed batch. They did not matter, it was what they were given when they visited Candlepath that was tested. It was a shame they could not get a prime specimen such as Rosco with his biological conditioning. Rosco had cut the experiment short. There was no way of knowing if the Nephilim serum would have been successful or not. Nor if the children were received by the Grandfather. Rosco would have been easy to make disappear. Another crazed Cadian vet. Prone to drink. Another statistic.

She told him of her group. He found a pict of what looked like a graduating class of a universitariate in the bag she had carried. She showed him a symbol on the back of her hand. Three circles. Others had that symbol in various places in the pict. The last thing she spoke of was her "kin's" plan to cure this diseased and palsied hive. It was her job as a physician. They would sound the call of sorrow. All pain would cease and man would be reborn. They would heal the chained spirit of man from the festering corpse of their uncaring carrion lord and this fetid dying planet and its cities.

Rosco became enraged. He went through the bag Dr. Calth had with her. He found the scalpel again. He remembered a time on Adderoth. A man in black robes and a mask in the visage of a bird with tools, bottles, syringes, and roots in a belt was traveling past his squad one day. His division was staying in one of the high walled cities of that frozen world. A local, once the figure walked past, took a knife and struck a peculiar symbol on a sign. A three-pronged symbol in the shape of possibly a pyre or a crow's foot. Rosco asked what it meant. "It's harvesting season," the man chuckled. The man traveling past was a plague doctor travelling to a part of the city beset by plague. The doctor meant no harm, but superstition had Adderothians mark that peculiar symbol where they walked. He had thought nothing of it when he heard it.

Rosco's rage ebbed. Clarity of purpose took hold of him. He felt peace for the first time in months. He took the scalpel. He rent the symbol in bloody detail on her face and left her to bleed. Later, her pale corpse would be found in her home. The symbol was painted on the wall in blood along with a message. "Physician, heal thyself".

The peace waned. He doubted himself again. He attempted to talk to the planetary enforcers to investigate his family. He could never fully show himself. He was a child-murderer. A wife-murderer. He could never approach the sanctionaries in full honesty. Rosco Tyruss was dead. He could not even hope to reach someone with a true reach of Imperial law or power like an Arbitrator or even an Inquisitor.

He felt despair. He then became curious. He looked at the pict once again. A graduating class of hundreds. A fifth of them had the three circle marks that Calth did. He held the pict in one hand. He picked up one of the guns the false enforcers had carried. He began planning. Once again he found purpose.

His new war had begun.

The Rook fights a bloody crusade on the streets of Desoleum Primus. The cultists he hunts and anyone supporting them he punishes. Using his Kasrkin training and his experience of multiple campaigns along with his cold, calculating mind he dispatches his targets with extreme efficiency. Along with his conventional training, he uses his experience in causing terror among resilient Eldar against the vermin he exterminates.

He supplements the gear he stole or purchased with specialized equipment given to him by a radical inquisitor known as Eldrus Ivo. When working, he is almost always in a black trenchcoat, carapace, fatigues, a hood, a carapace helmet in the shape of a Feudal World plague doctor with built-in photo visors and a microbead. Adorned on his armor is the symbol of a white crow’s foot. It is the same symbol he leaves at all the places he has visited with an autocarriage spray paint device.

The Rook's modus operandi is the use of surprise, overwhelming firepower, specialized equipment, the fearful reputation he has garnered, and his training from his military career to wage his war. The Rook does not carry much melee weaponry aside from a combat knife he keeps on him at all times and a shock maul for when he needs to disable someone for interrogation or someone he doesn't deem guilty. If someone is too close to shoot, they're to close at all. Pragmatism, his unarmed training, and healthy uses of backup small arms is what he uses against anyone menacing him up close. It puts him at a disadvantage when dealing with foes dedicated to melee or in extremely close combat. Tyruss has to plan ahead to prevent that (with liberal use of explosives) or keep on his feet and make sure to keep those types away.

The Rook's common loadout is a hot-shot lasgun like he was trained with with an auxiliary grenade launcher attachment, a combat knife, a customized stub automatic, a compact pistol and compact revolver for hiding as a last resort, and a customized combat shotgun. He is a pragmatic killer and will use weapons from fallen enemies or what he can find around. He switches from being more lightly armed and armored with reinforced flak and the above loadout and being more highly armed and armored with the equipment Inquisitor Ivo gave him. He uses carapace armour, a full Rook helmet, a hot-shot volley gun, a grenade launcher, and for long range fights the Leviathan Heavy Sniper Rifle given to him by Ivo. He always carries a versatile loadout of grenades including frag, krak, smoke, stun, and photon-flash. For extremely tough enemies he also carries a missile launcher in his black van autocarriage that gets used rarely. As a joke, Ivo also outfitted him with two needle pistols to reference his plague doctor-like visage. No matter the loadout, Tyruss always has the crow's foot symbol painted on his chest.

When in disguise, he will be dressed in a navy blue jacket and hat with a white shirt and navy blue pants and dark brown shoes when unmasked. He has a forged card he wears on his lapel which says his name is Tom Swain and that he is a messenger for Aegis Courier services. He is a man of 41 years with short black hair, an aquiline nose, slightly sunken purple eyes common to Cadian true-born, and is square-faced with a strong chin. He has a strong, athletic build and stands at 6'3". He speaks in a near-monotone and is surprisingly eloquent. There is something slightly stilted to his words. It has to do with the way the damage he caused himself. The laspistol he put under his chin damaged part of his frontal lobe. In his grief, he could not steady the pistol and thus missed a part of his brain that would have ended him. It may also explain part of his behavior and his relatively extreme reactions after his hospitalization. By his words, "he can't turn it off." He is always in a fight or flight mindset. His stoic demeanour is him putting on a mask and forcing himself to stay calm.
Tyruss is suicidal. He is filled with self-loathing for letting his despair color his actions. He is not justified in what he did. He had a choice. He knows this. He knows they had the potential to recover due to the presence of other survivors of the plague, although he did not know this until after the deed was done. He hunts those who poisoned his family and their ilk because he believes that they are equally harmful beings to him and worthy of death. He will not take the easy way out because he already tried before. He feels a quick clean death is too good for him. That is why he dresses up in dramatic pict-serialesque plague doctor gear and leaves his mark. He is carrion and a carrion feeder. He picks through the dead. He wants the people he hunts to know he is coming for them. Their gods cannot save them. Death comes by the mark.
The Rook is not a good person. He is a monster that happens to hunt other monsters. What happens to him after his mission is done is up to the GM and the players. You do not need him to complete the adventure. He helps lead the acolytes around.

The Raven's Chosen

Strange occult phenomena are occurring around the Rook. The Rook's marks will sometimes have candles and feathers placed under them. There may be even messages left petitioning the marked of Saint Corax to perform some deed for them. There are two black garbed men with missions in Desoleum. The first is the Rook himself on his suicide mission to hunt down those who poisoned his family and the ones that help them. The second is Togo Katoichi, an astartes of the Deathwatch acting as a kill-marine while under the supervision of Inquisitor Korudon Rondos to hunt down the traitor of his now dead chapter, the sorcerer Yoshihiro Takane with the pseudonym Oniboshi. Unfortunately for both, hivers can be a superstitious lot and have formed a small impromptu cult around them. They may not know that the Rook has been murdering medicae but they do know he has been exterminating gangers and smugglers associated with the Nurglites. They may not know that Katoichi is not the same person but they know an angel of death stalks the streets at night wearing the black-clad armour of the Deathwatch with only a symbol very few people know to differentiate him from other space marines. In this hive, extremely few have never seen Astartes before. To them, the Space Marines are theological figures of their god to aspire to. When a symbol of the Emperor's fury walks the streets then the faithful feel vindicated and give offerings and prayers. The Chosen followers believe that the one that leaves the mark is an avenging angel in the vein of Saint Corvus Corax, primarch of the Raven Guard and that they have been blessed by him to carry out work in the night against those that perform malevolent acts. An agent of the Emperor's light that dwells in darkness. Katoichi finds this to both be a boon in that the normal citizens of the hive show him respect, but also a possibly dangerous irritation that leads to crowds of the faithful and great proselytizing in the streets as he continues from place to place.
Rosco loathes the cult. He doesn't want to be worshipped. He doesn't want a death cult to spring up in his name. The symbols were left to spark fear into his targets and not to garner support to a broken man who would rather a bullet to the brain than his killings uplifted. If he sees these makeshift shrines, he will become irate and stomp out the candles and scatter the ashes. If any worshippers are there, he will try to tell them to stop and may become desperate enough to threaten them or fire his weapon in the air to scare them off and make them think twice about worshipping his acts.

(Also yes he and his backstory is heavily inspired by the Punisher)
Rook Profile: