A lost chapter of Warhammer 40,000 space marines has been found: 'A miracle!'

An Iron Hand marine duels a member of the Death Guard

(Image credit: Games Workshop)

Warhammer 40,000 is big. Really big. You may think Hitman 2 takes up a lot of space on your hard drive, but that's just peanuts compared to Warhammer 40,000. This is a setting where multiple entire chapters of space marines can be lost, whether they're deliberately expunged from all records like the second and eleventh legions were, or just go missing like the Crimson Axes.

The Steel Confessors are an interesting example, because they didn't vanish in the lore, but out here in the real world of primary sources. While references to them in White Dwarf magazine and the Index Astartes exist, the main source of detail about the Steel Confessors was a flimsy pamphlet handed out at the official Games Day & Golden Demon convention in 2005. Since nobody could source a copy of it, all the detail contained within was basically a big "citation needed" and has been a point of contention in the 40K fandom for 20 years.

Until a Discord user called Guy posted blurry photos of the official programme from Games Day & Golden Demon 2005, confirming the Steel Confessors were a legit chapter, that their homeworld really was named after the Finnish national epic Kalevala, and that planet had its own psychic choir and a vast manufactorum. What was previously thought fanon is now canon—as much as anything is in a setting as vast, apocryphal, and subject to change as 40K.

"A miracle! The lost wisdom of the ancients!" declared TheBladesAurus on the 40kLore subreddit. "More seriously, fantastic work. That's one of the things that we've had to take people's word on for years." "BROTHERS! REAL ANCIENT LORE HAS BEEN RECOVERED", added a scholar going by the name Doopapotamus. "TONIGHT, WE ~~PARTY~~ PRAISE THE EMPEROR LIKE IT'S 0.999.999.M29".

Jody's first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia's first radio show about videogames, Zed Games. He's written for Rock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue, GamesRadar, Zam, Glixel, Five Out of Ten Magazine, and Playboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody's first article for PC Gamer was about the audio of Alien Isolation, published in 2015, and since then he's written about why Silent Hill belongs on PC, why Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale is the best fantasy shopkeeper tycoon game, and how weird Lost Ark can get. Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame.

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