Warhammer 40K: The 7 Imperial Assassin Temples (Plus 1 Extinct)
We’ve all heard of the big four – but did you know there were MORE Imperial Assassin Temples – including one purged for it’s own good.
The Officio Assassinorum is much larger than folks might think. Most 40k players are familiar with your four tabletop assassin options but there are a few more Assassin Temples that also work in the shadows, especually back in the days of te Horus Heresy. Today, we’re going to check out all seven temples with a quick overview.
Known Operators
Vindicare Temple – Sharpshooters, specialists in sniping and marksmanship
Famed for their long-distance shooting and powerful Exitus Rifle, the Vindicare Assassins specialize in vengeance and revenge killings. The Vindicare Temple extols the virtues of patience and focuses on the craft of marksmanship. They are the ultimate snipers from the shadows in the Grimdark.
Callidus Temple – Chameleons, specialists in infiltration and impersonation
The Callidus Temple uses a specialized shape-changing drug: Polymorphine. With the training provided and the application of this drug, the user can literally change their shape and appearance to impersonate anyone – including members of the opposite sex and even other humanoid xenos – Orks and Eldar included! Due to their nature to get in close, the Temple also teaches mastery of martial arts and the use of C’tan Phase Swords (don’t ask), Poison Blades and the deadly Neural Shredder.
Eversor Temple – berserkers, drug-fuelled killing machines
Eversor Assassins are not exactly subtle. They are considered berserk killing machines and are juiced up with a cocktail of combat stims, bio-engineering, and experimental surgery. They are typically placed in cryo-suspension between missions for various reasons. Firstly, the mix of combat drugs is highly addictive, and without it, the assassins would die. Secondly, for safety! They are awoken from their cryo-crypt and dropped on their target location inside of a specialized drop pod. When they come crashing down on the party they bring death with them.
Culexus Temple – Pariahs, psykers are their exclusive targets
The Culexus Assassins are considered to be the most sinister and feared assassins of all the Temples. For starters, they are all null-entities in the warp a.k.a. they have the Pariah gene. This makes them cause an aura of unease when they are around non-psykers. For Psykers, their presence is terrifying – making the Culexus, the perfect weapon against those who can harness the power of the warp.
Noted for their strange headgear, the device is known as an Animus Speculum. The technology behind this device is not fully understood, but it gets the job done. That job being eliminating Psykers! It is believed to focus the agent’s negative psychic energy and actually becomes more effective the more psykers are in the vicinity.
The Lesser Temples
While the above four templse are the most commonly known and appear on the battlefields of the Grimdark, they are not alone. The Officio Assassinorum has multitudes of minor clades who ply their lethal trades in a myriad of ways. Many of these were in common use in the days of the Great Crusade and Horus Heresy and have diminished in numbers since, for unknown reasons.
Venenum Temple – Specialists in poisoning their targets
Experts and subtlety and poison, its members wield toxins potent enough to quickly dispatch even the toughest of prey. Their rigorously trained and genetically-enhanced Assassins were selected from the finest alchemists who could create exotic concoctions that could cause death without leaving any metabolic trace. Its members were said to have had the greatest level of success during the Horus Heresy.
Venenum Assassins wield Toxin Injectors, Poison Globes, and poisoned Hookfang blades.
Vanus Temple – Intelligence-gatherers
Agents of the Vanus Clade are known as infocytes and also make use of predictive engines in order to base their calculations on all available data as well as prognostic simulations in order to determine the success rate of the operations. The infocytes are essentially human computing engines that are far different from mindless automata such as servitors as their skills were unparalleled in matters of strategy and tactics. Their presence cemented their Clade’s role as being the intelligence-gathering arm of the Officio Assassinorum and it has been said that they have never been known to make an error in judgement – though some considered this disinformation. They, along with cryptocrats, take part in operations through telepresent means that are conducted from their sanctum or from an Officio Assassinorum-sponsored starship, which makes clade agents physically deploying in the field a rare occurrence.
In terms of equipment, Clade Vanus are known to possess cogitator gauntlets that projected hololithic panes that floated in the air for them to access data. They can also send small swarms of organic-metal netfly automata that can tap into opti-cables and parse through the rich data which they fed back to the operative. Each of these netflies was by itself a relatively unsophisticated piece of technology but, en masse, their networking skills allowed the information they transfered to be condensed into a coherent picture of what occured in the immediate surroundings of the Vanus Assassin. When entering into a information system, Clade Vanus assassins are able to unleash data phages and blackouts designed to subvert the enemy.
Adamus Temple – The First Blades, Masters of the Decapitation Strike
The Adamus Temple is believed to be the oldest of the formal orders of the Imperium’s Officio Assassinorum and its operatives are experts in the art of the decapitation strike. The Clade is said to have its roots in the forbidden blade-master traditions of the Panpacific region of Terra. The history of the Clade goes back to the Dark Age of Technology, with some postulating that the very name of the order is drawn from an ancient theologic provenance meaning “the first blades”. Adamus assassins ensure their kills by studying how their enemies fight, noting their strengths and learning their weaknesses, which they then ruthlessly exploit.
In battle, they wield a Nemesii Blade and a Needlespine Blaster Combi-Weapon.
The Extinct Temple
The Maerorus Temple is an extinct Temple of the Officio Assassinorum. Known at “The Seventh Temple”, it was created to deal with multiple targets simultaneously, such as the command hierarchy of an enemy army, or the members of a particularly widespread Chaos cult.
The Maerorus adepts recognized that, no matter how skilled the assassin, it becomes exponentially harder to kill subsequent targets, who have been alerted by the initial kill. To that end, Maerorus assassins were designed to be living weapons, able to kill masses of people with no weapon except their own bodies. As even the finest and most carefully maintained weaponry was subject to failure, their modus operandi was to enter into a target-rich area, typically a meeting or gathering and kill every sub-target present as quickly as possible.
Clade Maerorus Assassins functioned in a highly untraditional manner. They would kill targets and absorb the biomass of their victims to rapidly evolve new weapons. Their agent’s physical enhancements made them unstable bio-weapons themselves. In the end, the Maerorus Temple was considered to dangerous for further missions, and disbanded by the Ordo Assassinorum.
