Event · M30
Rangdan Xenocides
The Rangdan Xenocides were a Great Crusade campaign fought against the Rangda, a xenos empire of the northern Imperium whose true nature is poorly recorded. The war fell chiefly to the Word Bearers Legion under Primarch Lorgar Aurelian, with the Ultramarines under Roboute Guilliman drawn into the later fighting; its scale and duration mark it among the costliest actions of the Imperium’s expansion, and its near-total silence on the enemy’s civilization makes it unusual even among Great Crusade campaigns. The conflict began when Crusade fleets advancing through the northern Imperium theatres encountered the Rangda and found them unwilling to submit to Imperial compliance. What followed was not a swift subjugation but a grinding, decades-long war of attrition, fought world by world against an enemy whose biology, culture, and true extent Imperial commanders struggled to establish even as the campaign wore on. Losses among the Word Bearers are recorded as severe, and the fighting is held to have shaped Lorgar’s growing doubts about the Emperor’s purely secular vision for the galaxy. The Rangda were eventually annihilated so thoroughly that scarcely any record of their empire survived the war that destroyed it, giving the campaign its name. In the Great Crusade’s chronology, the Rangdan Xenocides sit alongside the other trials that hardened the Word Bearers before Lorgar’s later turn towards faith at Monarchia, and they stand as a companion episode to the Ultramarines’ own crusading record under Guilliman. Because so little of the Rangda themselves is attested, later accounts treat the xenocide chiefly as a measure of the war’s cost rather than a window onto the enemy it destroyed; it is remembered on Terra’s crusade rolls as one of the harder-won compliances of the era.
See where Rangdan Xenocides occurred on the galactic map during the Horus Heresy.