Subject: The Plague

From the trial of the House Grace Executive Rulership. Prosecution notes courtesy of Lu Fan Conglomerate, presented to the Council of Seven.

The Plague is without doubt the greatest threat that mankind has faced in its long history of space exploration. Despite its designation, the Plague is not really a disease at all, but an alien mutagen that spreads like an infection, wiping out populations like the most virulent of biohazards. Whether it was originally intended as a weapon, or some form of alien pest control, is unknown at this time. Ongoing research still struggles with both the identity of the aliens responsible as well as their purpose.

What is known is that certain areas of space have been seeded with a series of alien artefacts, which contain pure strains of this mutagen. If opened, these devices unleash a plague so virulent it kills almost everyone who comes into contact with it. These are the lucky ones. The survivors are altered forever, becoming something both more and less than human – becoming an enemy of their own race. It was one such artefact that was discovered in the Death Arc by the renegades of House Grace.

Defying a Corporation Central quarantine order, and evading the Enforcers of the Long Patrol, deployed specifically to ensure the safety of humanity from unknown alien threats, a small fleet of House Grace research vessels entered the Death Arc with the intention of unlawfully harvesting structural assets from long-dead alien worlds. The fleet allegedly lost contact with House Grace and the GCPS shortly after entering the Death Arc. Five years later, those same ships emerged from prohibited space and attacked an Enforcer Patrol.

Images captured by the Long Patrol showed the hostiles to be people of extremely savage appearance, dressed in the skins of their fellow men, and accompanied by gigantic, mutant creatures. As soon as the infected entered the GCPS, everything changed. Frontier colonies reported outbreaks of contagion; some citizens fell sick, many died, but others became ravening creatures whose only urge was to bite and tear at those they had once loved. Soon large packs of those who had fallen ill roamed the streets, ripping all they found into pieces. And then the Plague moved on, spreading from world to world, just as it had millennia ago in the Death Arc.

What we now know is that the scientists discovered an alien artefact, or Plague Device, containing a payload that we still do not fully understand. Upon opening it, they unleashed the Plague in its purest form. Three scientists were transformed into the abominations known as Plaguelords. The others were killed or transformed by secondary infections, until all that remained of the House Grace fleet was a crew of monsters seeking ingress into the GCPS.

To this day, an entire colony of Lu Fan scientists exists in total quarantine on the world of New Czechia, providing our best hope of studying and defeating this alien mutagen. Whenever a world falls to the Plague, or whenever a new artefact is unearthed, the safest course of action is to initiate Containment Protocols, diverting precious Enforcer fleets to quarantine a world, creating a Deadzone and all but consigning the inhabitants to death.

The advent of the Plague is the greatest crisis to hit the Co-Prosperity Sphere in three hundred years. Armies sent to fight it find themselves torn apart by contagion. Well-armed soldiers fall sick and die, or are driven insane and join with those they are supposed to be fighting. Only the deployment of the Enforcers, whose enhanced physiology and superior battle gear appear to protect them from the pathogen, has proven efficacious in halting the spread, and even then their only recourse is often to bombard infected worlds with atomic weapons. What House Grace unleashed on the Co-Prosperity Sphere is an abomination with a malign intelligence, and the extinction of intelligent life appears to be its only goal.

Warpath Kickstarter – The Plague

The Plague are the next faction to get the hard plastic treatment for Warpath, and we’re currently hunting down new 3rd Gen troopers.

When the Plague attacks a corporate outpost or installation, the most fortunate victims are the ones killed outright in the assault. Those that are not, that are instead infected by the Plague, find themselves transformed and remade. Their souls and personalities are lost, subsumed to the aims and ambitions of the Plague itself. These are its foot soldiers, numerous and cheap, doomed but expendable. Whether or not this is truly a deterioration from their previous existence as corporate drones is debatable.

See more pictures of the new Plague 3rd Gen Troopers here, and please pledge your support to help fund the new sprue.

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