White Scars

The White Scars are a First Founding Space Marine Chapter descended from the V Legion and Primarch Jaghatai Khan, loyal to the Imperium of Man. Within the Chapter, Jaghatai’s successors as leader bear the title of Great Khan, and the White Scars are counted among the most mobile and self-reliant of the Emperor’s forces, masters of the rapid strike and of sustained operations far from support.

The Chapter’s homeworld is Chogoris, also called Mundus Planus, a feral world of steppe and mountain whose warrior tribes lived by hunting, horsemanship and oral poetry before the Great Crusade reached it. Jaghatai’s palace at Quan Zhou, in the remote Khum Karta mountains, became the Chapter’s fortress-monastery. Calling themselves the Ordu of Jaghatai, White Scars battle-brothers are drawn largely from Chogoris’s nomadic peoples, mark their faces with ritual scars, and field an unusually high proportion of Assault Bikes and other fast vehicles.

Jaghatai Khan rose among the tribes of Chogoris as a warlord in his own right, uniting the steppe clans against the city-dwelling empire that had long oppressed them and bringing the world under a single banner shortly before the Great Crusade arrived. Before this discovery, the V Legion had existed only as scattered pioneer companies, first employed on Terra during the Unification Wars to root out warlords in its most hostile regions, then dispersed across the Great Crusade as scouts for the Expeditionary Fleets; one such company located Cthonia, homeworld of Horus. On meeting the Emperor, Jaghatai recognised in him the embodiment of his own ideal of unity and took command of the Legion. In 875.M30, a decade later, the Khan gathered its scattered companies in the unification remembered as the Blooding, binding them into a single force. The Legion fought on through costly campaigns such as those of the Kolarne Circle against orkish foes, and by 884.M30, following a war against the Nephilim on Hoadh, the Star Hunters had become known as the White Scars.

When Horus turned against the Emperor, the White Scars remained loyal, and Jaghatai Khan led his Legion back to Terra to stand in the Siege of Terra, where his riders harried the traitor forces through the palace’s ruined thoroughfares in punishing hit-and-run strikes rather than meeting them in open battle. Officers of later generations, such as Kor’sarro Khan, carried forward the same doctrine of speed and the hunt.

In the reorganisation that followed the Heresy, the White Scars gave rise to several successor Chapters, extending Jaghatai’s traditions beyond Chogoris. The Chapter remains active in the present era under its Great Khan, answering the Imperium’s call as one of the swiftest and most independent of the Space Marine Chapters.