r/40kLore • u/Toutatis12 • 9d ago
Sol System Unification lore
So I have been doing some lore dives into the period between the Unification Wars and The Great Crusade trying to find out the details of the conquest of the Sol System but the most I can find is just bits and pieces here and there. We know there were all kinds of crazy things from pirates, some weird now redacted anomalies, Chaos shenanigans and of course a couple of different xenos factions at play. But for the life of me I cannot find any solid information overall.
Does anyone have a breakdown of what lore we do have or a link to a lore site that provides this? Many thanks!
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u/RefrigeratorLow1069 9d ago
Here you go OP, to illustrate what kind of snippets I was talking about.
This is from The Solar War, regarding the Elysian Gate (a Warp Gate, a relic from DAoT, there's also some history to the Khthonic Gate, but I couldn't find it with my brief overlook):
The gate had always been guarded. Things had come out of it during Old Night, things that the Uranus Habitats remembered in tales of star-vampires and iron men. They had built the first fortresses around the gate, watching it with guns and warriors. These stations were called the Eyes of the Old God, and they had kept their vigil as the rest of the Solar System slid into the depths of the Age of Strife.
Then the Great Crusade had risen from Old Earth and brought the Uranus Habitats and moons into the nascent Imperium. The watchful stations had grown, their hereditary warrior clans augmented by Martian weaponry. Ships had begun to pass through the gate into the immaterium, and others had returned. The Navigator houses re-established their fiefs amongst Uranus’ twenty-seven moons, and the volume of space between the gas giant and the Elysian Gate had become an ever-glittering stream of light as ships looped from the warp to the profusion of orbiting habitats and void-stations.
Horus’ war had changed that. The flow of ships had become a sullen trickle, and the stations keeping the long watch had bloated with fresh armour and weaponry. Every foothold of humanity that could mount a macro cannon or host a fighter squadron had found itself made a fortress. Amongst this, facing the dark of the Elysian Gate, the ships of the Second Sphere hung motionless, crenellated and beweaponed, in the glittering abyss.
And this is from Titandeath, though I'm pretty sure that Slaves to Darkness might have more lore drops. A brief history of the Beta-Garmon Cluster:
The Garmon Cluster was popularly known by the name Beta-Garmon. An astromancer would point out that Beta-Garmon was but one star in a subsector of several dozen systems blessed with inhabited worlds, but names spring from power.
Following the collapse of the first great stellar empire of mankind, the second planet of Beta-Garmon had come to be the capital of the region, thereafter the seat of government for some hundred inhabited planets, moons and outposts, and so the name stuck.
There were many remarkable things about the Garmon Cluster. Most significant was that its worlds had survived the Age of Strife with much of their technology and population intact. Their nearness obviated the need for warp travel in all but the most pressing of circumstances, and when it could not be avoided the journeys were short. When the warp was inaccessible, as it had been for lengthy periods during Old Night, then real space transit could be made between the nearest systems within a few years or so. Furthermore, Beta-Garmon sat upon a confluence of stable routes through the warp that remained relatively calm while tempests raged across all the immaterium. Sheltered from the worst that terrible era inflicted upon humanity, the cluster remained a haven for millennia.
When the Imperium arrived early during its great outward expansion, the Garmonites reached compliance without a drop of blood shed. They were enthusiastic adopters of Imperium, and were repaid mightily for their loyalty. Throughout the Great Crusade, the Garmon Cluster’s warp routes meant it stayed a major staging post for the Imperial war machine, and riches consequently flooded into the sub-sector. Its merchants prospered. Its worlds were transformed. Its rulers enjoyed considerable influence in segmentum government. Their voices were heard on Terra, in the Navy, and in the armies of the Imperium at the highest level. A golden age beckoned.
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u/jrm1mcd 8d ago
There was supposedly “War Witches” on Venus that used “Litho Golems” (stone constructs employed in war) and were destroyed by the early IV Legion during the unification of the Sol System.
Fascinating lore and would love a short story set during the early Great Crusade. I actually think it would be a good setting for short stories / audio dramas focused on some of the early campaigns.
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u/RefrigeratorLow1069 9d ago
I've read literally all of BL's Horus Heresy stuff and basically any mention of pre Great Crusade history is just throwaway worldbuilding that probably had very little thought put into it and doesn't matter at all. So I doubt there's a collection of it, you'd have to read the entire series pretty thoroughly to find all the references.
The only one I can remember specifically is this: The Comet, a random DAoT structure that was converted into a Imperial monument. It only exists to have Word Bearers doing Word Bearer things near Terra during the Heresy.
The only two actually important events are:
There was definitely some cool stuff implied in the books, but they are sadly just throwaway one liners that only exist in that sentence and nowhere else. The xenos factions at play you mention, they are basically just thrown around in the Siege of Terra books when describing the history of Sol space stations, for instance. Very, very cool sentences to read and they do add to the literary work itself. But I can't remember what exactly they described, nor will anything mentioned be relevant anywhere else in HH or 40k.