Rogue Trader: the Ignatian Rebellion

One thing I quite liked in Rogue Trader was its origin path system for character generation. Each character selected background options from a series of choices, which then formed a path from their planet of birth to their character class. Where different characters' paths intersected, you were encouraged to come up with an event that they had all participated in. We didn't exactly do this, but since several of our characters did have some war experience, it seemed like a good idea - and one very much in keeping with the Warhammer 40,000 universe - to have a fairly recent conflict in the campaign background. That conflict is the Ignatian Rebellion.

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The rebellion was started by and therefore named after Ignatius Virius, governor of the agri-world of Derbe in Tertia Pars of the Acheron sector. A scion of one of the most powerful noble houses in the sector, House Virius, Ignatius had ruled Derbe effectively for years without any untoward incident. Derbe is just off the main trade route between Ultra and Tertia Pars, and House Virius did lucrative business feeding the hive worlds and mining colonies producing materiel for the Imperium's endless wars - until Ignatius Virius declared independence from the Imperium.

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The Children's Crusade

Several regiments of the Imperial Guard were raised to suppress the Ignatian Rebellion. The 76th Rad-Guards were raised on the death world of Chirikov, blasted by atomic warfare in the distant past and now home to tenacious tribes of survivalists. The garden world of Boye contributed the mechanised 41st Dragoon Guards, and the 113th Acheron Repentants were recruited from the penal world of Ministerium Veri. These new regiments were bolstered by the veterans of the long-serving 328th Kurchatov Jaegers, who would settle in the Anastasian Traverse after the rebellion was put down. But the regiment that features in the most stories about the rebellion was the 165th Ophir Highlanders.

Ophir is a hive world not far from Derbe, which was accustomed to providing its tithe of war materiel and regiments for the Imperial Guard. When the rebellion broke out, however, the 164th Highlanders had only recently been sent south to join the garrisons around the Eye of Terror, and recruitment for the next regiment was barely getting underway. Because more troops were urgently needed, the recruitment process was accelerated and the newly inducted troopers sent to the war zone after only a bare minimum of training. To compensate for this, a call went out to nearby monastic orders of the Adeptus Ministorum to send preachers to motivate the green troops, and many orders responded.

While the rest of the regiment was being mobilized and the Ministorum priests were arriving, the first battalion of the Highlanders was thrown into battle on the desert world of Athir. An insurrection against governor Flaccus Rufius had broken out, and had to be suppressed before the fire of rebellion spread any further.

The first troops on the ground were the green conscripts from Ophir, who were dropped onto a spaceport near the capital of Athir. Not only had most of the population joined the rebellion, but also the local planetary defence force, so the Highlanders had a stiff fight on their hands. Their initial casualties were terrible, but reinforcements were dropped in, and once the first of the preachers arrived, the first battalion developed the fighting style that would become iconic to the campaign: the bayonet charge inspired by the preaching of the Ministorum priests. With fanatical determination and huge losses, the Highlander battalion cleared the rebels from the spaceport.

Their first forays into desert warfare beyond the spaceport's perimeter were a complete disaster. The rebels knew how to survive in the death world's hostile deserts, and how to fight in them. They lured columns of Ophir troops into the desert with skillful raids, and destroyed them in ambushes. The tide only began to turn when the 76th Chirikov Rad-Guards were deployed; they had grown up on a desert death world even less forgiving than Athir, and could fight the rebels at their own game. The mechanised Boye Dragoon Guards defeated the minimal armored corps of the planetary defence force, but the rebels fought on as guerrillas. Eventually the Punishers Space Marines, held in reserve for the assault on Derbe, had to be deployed to Athir. Punishers kill teams took out the rebel leaders, and eventully the uprising was put down. Governor Rufius, who had fled the planet at the outbreak of the insurrection and was considered by many to have brought it on by his misrule, was quietly deposed.

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The siege of Derbe

While Athir was being pacified, the Imperial Navy turned their attention to the rebel fleet. Acting on good intelligence, a naval squadron surprised the rebels at Anceli Aurieli and defeated them thoroughly. Some pirate ships escaped, most prominent among them the frigate Flammis Acribus Addictis, which would trouble the trade routes of the Acheron sector for years to come.

With the fleet beaten, the Imperial Navy was free to invest Derbe. With complete control of the space around the planet, there was no way for the rebellion to spread any further. However, the Imperium is not content to contain those who challenge the authority of the Emperor. Governor Virius would be made an example, and so the order came to invade Derbe, subjugate the planet and capture the renegade governor.

The resistance was centered around the Governor's massive palace and the capital city surrounding it, so that was where the Imperial assault would be concentrated. After a massive bombardment by the orbiting naval squadron, the first wave of penal legion dropships was deployed right in the teeth of rebel defenses. Casualties were considerable, but for a penal legionnaire, dying in the service of the Emperor is a blessing. After the penal legion neutralized the air defences around the capital, the 113th Acheron Repentants were dropped in to secure a landing site for the regular troops, and the bulk of the Imperial army began to deploy.

Yana Vash, dropship pilot and survivor of the Derbe drop
Governor Virius sent his planetary defence troops to attack the Imperial forces, and ferocious battles raged in the city. Virius had openly declared his allegiance to Khorne, the Chaos god of battle, and his rebel forces were joined by warbands of Chaos Space Marines, eager to slaughter in the name of the Blood God.

It was here that the bulk of the 165th Ophir Highlanders received their baptism of fire, and made their name as a regiment. By their standards, the troopers of the first battalion who had survived Athir were practically veterans; on Derbe they formed a core for the regiment that could almost be regarded Imperial Guard regulars. The rest of the regiment, fresh from what little training they had had time for, was thrown directly into combat against the rebels. Hordes of Ophirian conscripts, bayonets fixed and urged on by their preachers, charged rebel positions with a fanaticism that outdid the heretical followers of Khorne. Bloody battles raged throughout the city, and little by little, the bayonets of the Highlanders cleared the rebels from an ever larger part of the city, allowing the regular regiments to deploy. More and more artillery was sent in, and the guns of the Imperial Guard and the orbital bombardments of the Navy reduced the capital of Derbe to a dust-choked ruin. Rebel casualties were massive, and superior Imperial firepower gradually forced them back to the heavily fortified gubernatorial palace.

The Imperial army methodically laid siege to the palace, completing an elaborate network of fortifications and entrenchments to cut it off from the rest of the planet. While Guardsmen manned trenches in the ruins of the planetary capital, penal troops and Space Marines of the Punishers chapter fought crack rebel troops in desperate close-quarters battles in the sewers and tunnels below. Recon teams of the Kurchatov Jaegers probed the palace's defences, capturing prisoners and scouting out its weaknesses. Their snipers took a steady toll on the rebel garrison.

Once the palace was fully invested, the remaining rebels could have been starved into submission, but again the order came: the palace must be taken and every single rebel exterminated. The assault was preceded by a gigantic bombardment, and led by the Acheron Repentants, who breached the first line of fortifications. The main assault on the very doors of Ignatius Virius's palace was carried out by the Sisters of Battle, their battle-hymns echoing as loudly as the roar of their flamers and melta-weapons in the close confines of the palace. Simultaneously, the Punishers Space Marines attacked through the tunnels below the palace and even mounted an aerial assault on its highest levels. Behind the power-armored vanguard, the Imperial Guardsmen poured in, scouring every nook and cranny of the palace and executing every heretic inside.

Only one man could not be found: Governor Ignatius Virius. How he could have escaped is unknown. Some say that Khorne appreciated his massive blood sacrifice so much that the Blood God himself somehow spirited Virius away, but such talk is heresy and invites swift and terminal punishment. Nonetheless, the Ignatian Rebellion was over. The governor's palace was thoroughly dismantled, and the planet placed under military rule, the horrible casualties a grim reminder of the price the Imperium will extract of anyone who defies it.