Colonel Schaeffer

Colonel Schaeffer is a Commissariat officer of the Astra Militarum who commands the 13th Penal Legion, the Last Chancers, a formation of condemned troops. The legion is not a regiment in the ordinary sense but a method of employing prisoners on missions with little expectation of survival, and Schaeffer is its principal embodiment. He holds that such service is a lighter sentence than execution by firing squad, and he recruits from among murderers, thieves and persons wrongly condemned. His origins, home world and earlier career are not recorded, so he is known chiefly through his command and the conduct of the legion’s missions.

The terms of service are simple. Those offered the choice between the firing squad and the Last Chancers most often elect the firing squad; those who accept are committed to the most dangerous tasks the Imperium can assign until their debt to the Emperor is considered discharged. Schaeffer is recorded as never having failed a mission, and a trooper who dies in the performance of the assigned task is pardoned posthumously. Discharge for the living is rare, which gives the promise of pardon more weight as a means of discipline than as a likely outcome. Schaeffer is described as appearing older than he looks, having been rebuilt by priests of the Adeptus Mechanicus, and he leads from the front of a unit designed to be expended. On the Orrery map his place is anchored to the Armageddon theatre, and his timeline hook is the wider history of the Astra Militarum in the 41st Millennium. Accounts of individual missions differ in detail, and this dossier does not fix them to a single campaign date.

Among the condemned, the soldier Kage is the best-recorded companion. Kage survived Schaeffer’s command on more than one occasion, though this reflected the legion’s need for capable personnel rather than any clemency on the colonel’s part. Schaeffer’s standing rests on his authority as a Commissariat officer and on the wider institution of Imperial penal legions, which draw on the same reservoir of convicted personnel as the regular regiments of the Astra Militarum. Contemporaries in the Armageddon theatre include other Imperial commanders and commissars, but no direct meeting between Schaeffer and any of them is attested here. His status in the current era is active: the Last Chancers remain in service, and the Imperium’s continuing need for expendable, disciplined troops sustains both the legion and the officer who commands it.