| rdfs:comment | - The Vile Savants are a Warp-spawned disease made flesh, sent to wrack worlds with suffering and drag them into festering ruin. There are no followers to their cause, no fanatics, and no deluded fools worshipping a false god, only the restless dead claimed by their plagues marching to the will of the daemon. Legend among the worshipers of the Ruinous Powers has it that they were born of an unholy union of contagions unleashed centuries ago in a forgotten war. It said that in the distant past a great hospital voidship was sent to tend the outbreaks of sickness and plague occurring as a result of the constant wars around the Eye of Terror. However, as well as alms and healers, it secretly carried another deadly cargo, an arsenal of dreadful weapons -- biological agents, necrotic poisons, and
|
| abstract | - The Vile Savants are a Warp-spawned disease made flesh, sent to wrack worlds with suffering and drag them into festering ruin. There are no followers to their cause, no fanatics, and no deluded fools worshipping a false god, only the restless dead claimed by their plagues marching to the will of the daemon. Legend among the worshipers of the Ruinous Powers has it that they were born of an unholy union of contagions unleashed centuries ago in a forgotten war. It said that in the distant past a great hospital voidship was sent to tend the outbreaks of sickness and plague occurring as a result of the constant wars around the Eye of Terror. However, as well as alms and healers, it secretly carried another deadly cargo, an arsenal of dreadful weapons -- biological agents, necrotic poisons, and alien fevers collected from a hundred worlds. Legend has it that this great ark of salvation, whose name has been lost to myth, suffered a breach in its Geller Field while traversing the Warp close to the Eye of Terror. In the moments that followed, the powers of the Warp shattered the protective stasis of the deathly vault and sank into the viral samples aboard, filling them with unholy life and consciousness. The horrors that were unleashed quickly overwhelmed most onboard and sent a thousand screaming souls into oblivion. The medicae personnel trapped aboard faced a far darker fate indeed, as a daemon virus possessed them and made them its own flesh. With this, the Vile Savants were born, embodiments of unfeeling, indiscriminate death unleashed by the Warp to wage a silent, implacable war against all life. The Savants themselves are hideous to behold, reeking and defiled bio-containment suits filled with bubbling rot that stumble on, boneless and implacable, silent as death itself. These foul entities are possessed of the skills and knowledge of their long dead occupants coupled with a malign Warp-intelligence and the occult might of the daemons of rot and pestilence. They are consumed by hatred for all that live and breathe and have the most horrific means of enacting their war of annihilation. The contagion that animates them is their dark harbinger, spilling out through the Warp and infecting a single individual whose despair and morbidity attracts it from worlds away. From there, it spreads as plague, the infection running rampant and preparing the way for the Vile Savants to emerge, wreaking their vengeance and showering Mankind with the gifts bestowed on them by Nurgle, the Lord of Decay.
|
