As with many worlds that share its nature, the early history of Vultis is shrouded in myth, mystery and uncertain theories. However, what is clear is that the world has seen better days, its ashen wastelands covered in husks of old fortifications of various factions, craters that sink several miles into the ground, patches of fire which even to this day refuse to be put out, Vultis is the definition of a "wasteland world". Its entire population is forced to either live in one of the few fortress hive-cities that rivaled Cadia or vast, sprawling underground strongholds and cities.

The first definite mention of Vultis's past in Imperial Record begins in early M39 when heretical influence began to grow from the underhive of Hive City Tarkis. Many an attempts had been made by the local police forces and PDF but had failed to penetrate deep into the underhive. Eventually, after mounting casualties and great amounts of resources wasted, the local Hive Governmener had decided that it wasn't worth his time hunting down the heretics and had lied to the Planetary Governer saying that all remnants of the influence had been erased. The man in charge of Tarkis at the time thought that it would be isolated to the underhive and would either be contained their or the gangs would eventually snuff them all out.

He was wrong.

In early M40, the entirely of Tarkis had collapsed, swallowed up by a giant hole which heretics poured out from. It would seem that instead of being smothered by the underhive gangs, the heretics had unified them under the flag of the "Iron Banner", claiming to be the "true cult mechanicus". Their support was astoundingly wide spread as hives all across the world suddenly were faced with the threat of revolt and rebellion. Some hives announced their loyalty to the Iron Banner while others had been crushed and utterly destroyed in the face of massive tides of soldiers of unknown origins. It would eventually be discovered that the Iron Banner had unearthed some type of cloning or rapid-growth machine to mass produce soldiers whose details remains unclear and shadowy to this day.

Despite their best efforts, the PDF and other loyalist forces where quickly overwhelmed by the mass number of cloned soldiers forcing the Planetary Governor to call for aid from the wider Imperium. Dozens if not hundreds of regiments of Guard had been called in to quell the Iron Banner Revolts hailing from numerous worlds. After about a century of civil war, the First Vultis Uprising had been quelled, the Iron Banner now broken and its forces presumed dead or destroyed with little chance of coming back. It would seem that the world would return to peace and begin the slow and painful task of reconstruction.

Then chaos came.

It turns out that with its dying breath, the remnants of the Iron Banner had pledged their souls to Chaos. Reborn the Black Iron Banner, the Second Vultis Uprising began less than fifty years after the end of the first and lasted over twice as long. Again, regiments were called too the world but with the arrival of warp-entities, Space Marine chapters had been called in as well. Fighting was hellish as the grounds of the world would be covered in bodies and metal husks. The war once again tore apart the battered planet which would last until 957.M40 when the last of the Chaos-taint and all remains of the Black Iron Banner had been personally been hunted down and executed.

Forces would trickle out slowly but of the regiments that remained on the wasteland planet the longest, it was the recently formed Death Corps of Kreig that was assigned some form of garrison duty. It would be the Kriegers who would later inspired the planets levied regiments and PDF who at the time was still being rebuilt and rearmed after back to back wars which had greatly diminished its standing in the eyes of Imperial officials. However, Vultis was far from seeing the end to its wars.

In 959.M40, Blood Axe Ork Warboss Orkthumba Gutznacha's fleet made an arrival into the system with a special creation he had brought from a previously failed incursion of Catachan nearly a century ago, the Planta Bomma. A bio weapons of sorts, the Planta Bomma was a great bomb full of Catachanian wildlife which the Warboss had given daily tributes of grots and squigs to "keep 'em foisty 'n meen 'n green". Launching his Planta Bommas onto the barren wasteland of Vultis, the foreign wildlife flourished after being so well-cared for by Orkthumba and with no predators at all.

Now faced with both the deadliest wildlife in the galaxy and an upstart Warboss bent on making a name for himself from the ashes of Vultis. This time however, the Imperium failed to answer the planet's heed for help, leaving the planet to its own fate. Perhaps Vultis would have been overtaken by the Catachanian fauna and flora or maybe the relentless Waagghhhh, but the few depleted regiment of die-hard Death Corps that were left had bought the planet time.

Force with no other option to create an army, the remains of the broken planetary and hive governments decided to use the same machines which the Iron Banner once used to field its own armies. As the Kriegsmen died above on the hostile wasteland above, hundreds of tech-priests who had a special disregard for the nature of creating human organisms and desperate men labored to repair, purify and jump start the machines. However, their own stocks of incenses and oils where unable to appease the machine spirits.

Luckily for them, it seemed that the God-Emperor had sent them a blessing. A small Imperial Navy fleet had miscalculated their Warp jumps and landed in the system. After communicating with the desperate populace of Vultis, the fleet gave its own stocks of holy mechanicus ritual items as well as skirmishing with the Ork fleet after sending out a signal to the sector fleet command.

Their message was received by another upstart in her own chain of command, eager to prove herself much in the same way that the Ork Warboss Orkthumba was. It sounded mighty heroic for a battlefleet to come in and rescue a hapless planet besieged by foul xenos. And thus, she made her own call of sending additional ships and supplies to Vultis, going as far as ordering some of her captains or send down armsmen to defend help defend the hives for some extra glory.

With the remains of the Death Corps and the Imperial Navy's help from orbit, Vultis had been bought enough time to bring their machine to working order after an endless amount of prayers, oils, incenses and hymns. Then came the cloning, the creation of what would be known as the Vultis Bloodborn Regiments. Using the cells of both the Krieg Death Corps and the men and women deemed the "best" for cell cloning, the machines began to churn out artificial humans, the coffins of life drenched in reproduced blood before humans began to walk out; from the blood of the dying came the hunters of the Orks and ferocious wildlife, the Bloodborn was born.

As the last Kriegs men fell, the first of the Bloodborn was sent into battle. Initially very young, barely reaching teenaged years even with their accelerated growth, what they lacked in age an experience, they made up in hardwired skills and fanatic bravery. Sniping the Ork Wagghhh from afar from the old Krieg positions that the fallen Death Corps had made, they quickly reduced down the Ork's numbers. The new vat-born guardsmen even ventured into the neo-Catachanian jungles that had sprung up across vast distance of the planet with flamers to try and clear them.

Enraged that his Orks were being killed so quickly before they even had a change to fight, on land and in space, the enraged Orkthumba Gutznacha decided to plow his ships into both the ground and the battlefleet that opposed them. In a final, deranged assault, the Ork Warboss plowed his ships into the Imperial forces, guns blazing. As his ships rammed into ship and soil, the last of his might Waaggghhh was destroyed by his own hand.

And from the wreckage of his ships on Vultis, drifted out a miasma which slowly blanketed the sky and a viscous ichor that seeped into the soil. It turned out that the Warboss had been blessed with intelligence far greater than a normal ork (offset by an even more insane rage and thought process) and had been experimenting with the organisms from Catachan from his Planta Bommas. What exactly came out of his ships is unknown but what it has done is clouded the atmosphere and altered the soil composition in such a way that the Catachan jungles had been "tamed" to a degree, not nearly as hostile as it once was. Any attempts at recreating such a substance has been met with failure or tampering by the higher ups.

Finally at peace after countless years of unending war, Vultis was finally at peace. Although the admiral who had sent in the battlefleet received much praise and many honors, the planet itself had comparaetilvy little fanfare, being dragged around like a third wheel in the celebrations. However, the planet did surprise Imperial officials by "pulling a Krieg"; upon readmittance, the planet offered up 8 battle-ready regiments of Vultis Bloodborn, all trained, equipped and supplied to peak performance levels, with a promise that up to four more regiments would be available soon enough. The officers, no doubt taking cues from their Krieg blood heritage, half offered half demanded to be sent the most dangerous battlefronts, preferring jungle or forest worlds or places where active Krieg regiments were serving, sometimes even sent there by ships under the same officer who once hounded for glory during their time of need, establishing a strange relationship.

With almost a millennia of none-stop war, the hundreds of thousands of miles of tunnels, factories, hive levels and underground clearings, the people of Vultis have long since gotten used to war as a way of life. Everyday, soldiers, guns, armor, wargear, vehicles come flooding out of the facotry to feed its regiments who zealously serve the emperor and his Imperium, proving not only to the Imperium but themselves that their endless wars have not made them weaker, but stronger.

The Bloodborn's standard outfit comes in two layers, the first being a black synthweave undersuit and white flak plating above it. The undersuit is designed to keep the wearer comfortable in as many types of different temperatures and environments as possible as well as dispersing the energy from a laser or kinetic weaponry to some degree.. Woven from synthetic material, the undersuit's synthweave is fairly cheap for Vultis to give to all of its soldiers. The flak plating above it which acts as a Bloodborn's primary armor covers important points on the body such as the upper chest and various joints. The lower chest is special as its construction is akin to splinted armor, having small flak plates interwoven with synthweave to allow for greater mobility while also granting some protection.

Accessories for the Bloodborn also include synthetic rubber boots and gloves as well as their helmets. Given their role primary as light infantry, their helmets are fully enclosed and designed to help them at range, also in a manner similar to the helmets of the Tau. They also have built-in rebreathers and filters, vox-casters and various vision settings such as thermal and night. Each soldier also carries on them a backpack and utility belt that holds ammunition, field dressings, nutrient paste and water rations, the Imperial Infantryman's Uplifting Primer, batteries, compass, grenades and combat blade. Flake plates are also often colored to camouflage with the setting of their surroundings however the strong carapace armor of Veteran Squads are always colored a chrome black.

The Vultis Bloodborn makes great use of their own models and patterns of weapons, tailored to their fighting style. Such weapons typically focus on being light and accurate and are pumped out of the Hive City's factories and workshops almost endlessly to arm the Bloodborn's ever growing ranks.

Despite being trained as Light Infantry, the Vultis Bloodborn can fill several different roles if not through sheer manpower alone. Each soldier is trained to be as accurate as possible with the philosophy that a single well placed shot is worth more than a dozen randomly fired blasts; the unit's lack of fear help with this ideology but its not to say that soldiers will spray-and-pray if the enemy gets too close. Ideally they are used as a screening force ahead of larger infantry assault, charging with unwavering devotion and fearlessness, back line sharpshooters or supporting sniper teams.

Due to their large size and their vat-grown origins, they also can fulfill the role of a siege regiment should they be given the proper equipment. Their homeworld also provides them with amble opportunity to also train as hive warfare units and jungle/forest stealth specialists, spending their first years training in the hostile jungles of Vultis.

The Vultis Bloodborn heavily favor picking the enemy off from range with a storm of precise lasgun fire that's supported by portable heavy support weapons and hidden snipers. They've also gained a slight affinity towards trenches and setting up dug in defenses with a flavor of hidden positions, possibly from their presumed Kreig origins.

Karis has always been a "model" commissar, ever since his days as the star student of the Schola Progenium. With unquestioning faith and undoubtable efficiency, Karis has made a small name for himself across all of the regiments he's been commissioned into. Famed for his unrelenting, cold-hearted pragmatism, he spreads effective moral boosting and a sense of brave courage in his wake as he leads from the front.

Orphaned like many, Karis had been dredged up into the Schola Progenium once his parents who he never knew were said to have died in battle. However, this barely stopped the determined lad as he quickly distinguished himself in all of his classes, displaying the right amount of cold hearted pragmatism and fiery bravery in order to become hailed as the "model student" of his class. The young cadet impressed his teachers and tutors, outstripping most of his peers.

Upon graduation, there had been a slight debate within the Schola Progenium on where to send their talented little prodigy. Some wanted him to serve at an easier post with men already well drilled and disciplined as a sort of "reward" for being such a good student. Others wanted him to serve in more rowdy, disorganized units to make sure his talent wasn't wasted on some agri-world post. Ultimately, Karis himself chose to serve in a unit closer to the latter; the Rivita 98th Infantry regiment would become his first post as he trained under veteran Commissar Krell Hadamas.

Preforming just as well as he did in class on the feild, Hadamas was easily impressed with Karis's willingness to preform summary executions and give great, rousing speeches to keep up moral. His presence actually caused a small schism in the Rivita 98th as some hated his brutal methods while others thought of his tendency to lead from the front made him much better than some of their previous commissars, Hadamas included.

However, Karis would soon loose his commissar tutor and much of the 98th after they were sent headlong into a Tau gunline by incompetent command. Despite this however, the Schola Progenium had long decided that their star student would pass. Having been moved around several units in need of disciplining, Karis's ability to instantly raise moral was only matched by his ability not to die to the enemy or "battlefield accidents".

Once again reassigned in the face of a new campaign against some upstart empire lead by rouge Astartes, now Commissar Karis expected to be once again reassigned to some rowdy unit who would have been indistinguishable from a Chaos warband had it not been for their Imperial symbolisms. Much to his confusion however, he ended up with what's otherwise a commissar's wet dream, the Vultis Bloodborn 14th Light Infantry Regiment.

Troops, 12,000

Battlesuits: 400 total

Vehicles and Air Support, 200 (Any vehicle can take a number of upgrades from the Tau Vehicle Upgrade list).

Miscellaneous: Various numbers of Water Caste diplomats, Earth Caste workers for repair and construction of fortifications, and Air Caste Pilots.

Dismounted: Standard Tau Combat armor, Pulse Carbine with Markerlight and Photon Grenade Launcher. Pulse Pistol as sidearm.

XV86 Coldstar Battlesuit: Based on the Enforcer Battlesuit chassis, which is a larger and taller version of the standard Crisis pattern. The Coldstar differs from the Enforcer suit in that it is equipped with aerodynamic fins along the Jetpack to enable quicker movement and mobility in combat. Unlike the other members of his army that bear the dark red and black coloration of the Enclave, Warstrider has fashioned his suit to be an inverse. The armor of his Battlesuit is primarily black, with dark red highlights along its surface. The “head” is bone white, with red markings signifying him as the Commander.

Battlesuit Gear: Cyclic Ion Blaster (right arm), Smart Missile Pod (left shoulder), Air Burst Fragmentation Projector (left arm), Holophoton Countermeasures, Drone Controller (two Shield Drones), Command and Control Node.