# The Cult of the Bladed Cog: A Starforged Port tags: #articles #game/rpg/starforged ![[Genestealer Assault (banner).jpg]] Have I mentioned that I love **[[Warhammer 40k]]**? The mechanics of the game are, of course, execrable, but the concepts are great, and a few of the games are pretty solid. Sometimes I just get an itch to twist a thing from setting to mechanics. Wholly different ones if I can find them. It's just strange. I can't explain where it comes from, I can't explain where it goes. But there it is. So let's do something a little odd, just on a whim. Direct port. No re-skin. The **Cult of the Bladed Cog** — the mechanized genestealer cult of **Warhammer 40k** that burrowed into the **Adeptus Mechanicus** — run straight through the **[[Starforged - Sundered Isles|Sundered Isles]]** faction tables, which share the **[[Ironsworn - Starforged|Starforged]]** engine. Same cult, same names, same horrors; we just get to use the far superior SI faction system to build something that can be dropped in wherever we want. The tables land on it like the lore was written for them. Forgeborn machinists. A religious leader. Industry and commerce. A crippling bureaucracy. All of it already sitting there, waiting for a sheet to scribble it down on. ## Turn the Wheel The Cult of the Bladed Cog began on **Feinminster Gamma**, an Imperial world whose people called themselves *"a cog in the great machine."* When the Adeptus Mechanicus arrived to bleed the planet dry — Tech-Priest Dominus **Ovid Thrensiom**, the "Great Miser," his macroclade army and Questor Knights harvesting bio-electricity from the living[^1] — the old mantra curdled. The **Cog Mechanicum**, the sacred wheel of the machine-faith, was corrupted into the **Bladed Cog**: the alien tooth in the machine. The cog became a blade. The spark was the freighter ***Redspark***, which unwittingly carried a Purestrain Genestealer to the surface. From that one xeno bloomed a "New Deliverance" cult, and from that cult spread the doctrine that would define the faction: the Mechanicum's mantra — *the flesh is weak* — is a lie. Flesh isn't to be replaced; it's clay to be hardened in the kiln of war. Man, machine, and alien, in glorious unity.^[The cult's creed, from the codex: *"Man, machine, and alien in glorious unity."*] The theology centers on the **Clawed Omnissiah** — the Hive Mind worshipped as a cyborg Patriarch, robotic pincers crossed through primary talon-limbs. The forgeborn Oil-Claw broods blend alien chitin with engineered metal into bionic horrors. They subverted the Mechanicum from within: Skitarii converted into Nexos, Servitors turned by a Magus's gaze or the Patriarch's, corrupted cyborg clades eating their own brotherhoods from the inside while a Skitarii-Alpha-turned-Nexos ran exhaustive ascension simulations to time the rising to the hour. When it came, Thrensiom's electrophagic regime fell and the Great Miser himself was slain by a Sanctus' bio-mutative bullet. That's the faction, whole and recognizable. Now let the tables talk. ## Running the Bits > [!abstract] The Cult of the Bladed Cog > *Forgeborn Machinists — the alien tooth in the machine* > > - **Faction Type:** Organization > - **Influence:** Notable — dispersed influence across a moderate area > - **Identity:** Forgeborn Machinists > - **Symbol:** the Bladed Cog (the Cog Mechanicum corrupted) > - **Leadership:** Religious leader (the Clawed Omnissiah / the Magus) > - **Tactics:** Industry and commerce > - **Vulnerability:** Crippling bureaucracy > - **Visible face:** Couriers > - **Methods:** Uses specialized equipment or weapons > - **Secret:** Supported by a mysterious benefactor > - **Curse:** Cursed by a spiteful god or entity > - **Nature:** Shape changers > - **Relationship:** Apathetic or unaware of (everything outside the machine) > [!info] **Faction Type** > - 🎲 **64** / 100 → **>Organization** An Organization, and the least surprising result on the sheet. The Bladed Cog isn't a state with borders and a flag — it lurks inside the Adeptus Mechanicus like a second skin, wearing red robes and signing the same requisitions. It's an order nested inside an order, which is exactly how a genestealer cult works: the host has to stay alive and useful, because that's the body you're colonizing. > [!info] **Faction Theme (Craft)** > - 🎲 **57** / 100 → **Forgeborn Machinists** Forgeborn Machinists — that's the identity, not a coincidence. This is a forge-cult that subverted the forge-faith of the Imperium. Every tank, every Servitor-pattern transport, every engine produced in Feinminster's forge-temples was theirs to take and slather with the bladed cog. They aren't refugees from the machine; they *are* the machine, with big pointy teeth. > [!info] **Faction Influence** > - 🎲 **74** / 100 → **Notable - dispersed influence across a moderate area** The cult spread off-world — via Munitorum freight crates, stowaways, and the transport network that Primus **Fender Threnn** runs; there's a nest of the cult in the long-forsaken Yimbo System. The Bladed Cog isn't one world's problem you can excise. It's threaded through the shipping lanes. That's the dispersed part, and it's the part that lets it survive losing its homeworld's first masters. While it's not quite *everywhere*, do even a moderate amount of poking in its sector and you're going to turn up someone with an unusual number of arms in an awkward place. > [!info] **Faction Leadership** > - 🎲 **61** / 100 → **Religious leader** The Magus at the head of the cult is serving a god that is also its Patriarch. Not a general, not a king; a high priest and a deity fused into one figure, the way the whole cult fuses flesh and machine. Every soul in the faction is aimed at the same devotional target: the coming of *the thing in the machine*. > [!info] **Faction Tactics** > - 🎲 **54** / 100 → **Industry and commerce** The Mechanicum runs the Imperium's war-industry, and the cult subverts it rather than fights it — perverting the technological marvels of the Omnissiah to get both a ready flow of esoteric weapons and, more importantly, the industrial engine to hunt its real quarry. The Bladed Cog doesn't want treasure. It wants to weaponize every component of the greater machine, one world at a time, until the whole edifice comes down. That's *"industry and commerce"* with its foot to the floor. > [!info] **Faction Vulnerability** > - 🎲 **10** / 100 → **Crippling bureaucracy** Crippling bureaucracy. And this is the delicious one, because it cuts both ways. The cult hides *behind* the Mechanicum's red tape — the endless requisition, the audits, the doctrine — and it's strangled by it too. It can't move openly; every hour of concealment is paid in paperwork nobody's allowed to question. The faction that worships the machine is bound by the machine's worst habit: too much is written down, and too many people can count. The crack looming is always an audit that doesn't balance. > [!info] **Organization Type** > - 🎲 **10** / 100 → **Couriers** > [!info] **Organization Methods** > - 🎲 **95** / 100 → **Uses specialized equipment or weapons** Its visible face: **couriers**. The cult's reach is built on transport and trade — the *Redspark* was a freighter, Fender Threnn moves his broods in Munitorum crates, the war-leaders travel from planet to planet in cargo holds. The most innocent, most indispensable trades in the Imperium,[^2] and the perfect cover for moving infected stock and command. And its methods are the giveaway if you know to look: **specialized equipment or weapons** — the bladed-cog war-machines, the corrupted battle tanks, the bionic hybrid vanguards that stop a Tech-Adept cold in their tracks.[^3] > [!info] **Organization Secret** > - 🎲 **88** / 100 → **Supported by a mysterious benefactor** Who funds the whole edifice? No one can say. The answer, every time it's pried out of a dying magus, is the same: the thing that came off the *Redspark* and went down into the forges. The Patriarch and the Hive Mind behind it — the *Great Devourer*, the distant intelligence the faithful call their god. That's the benefactor. It's also their scythe rushing to harvest. > [!info] **Cursed Aspects** > - 🎲 **16** / 100 → **Cursed by a spiteful god or entity** > [!info] **The Cursed** > - 🎲 **42** / 100 → **Lycanthropes or shape changers** The god they worship and the curse that owns them are the same thing — the Great Devourer is a spiteful, uncaring cosmic entity using the faithful as a component to be consumed. The deeper their devotion, the juicier their flavor when they are eventually consumed. They think they've found salvation; they've found a predator. Shape changers, though not by the change of a day, and the curve runs the other way from what you'd guess. The genestealer curse works in generations: the firstborn come out closest to the monster — the extra arms, the talons, the face you'd cross the street to avoid — and then, brood by brood, the bloodline smooths itself toward humanity. By the fourth generation the hybrids can pass for fully human, unremarkable, almost charming, the ideal faces for walking into the Adeptus Mechanicus' forges, offices and, above all, its trust. That's the trick: the cult is least recognizable where the bloodline runs deepest, not most. It's why the Bladed Cog could colonize the Mechanicum's own clades without raising a[^4] hand — by the time anyone learned to look for a monster, the monster had been standing at the forge for three generations, smiling through human teeth. And once the line has wound all the way back to something that looks like you'd trust it with your life, the firstborn of that generation are purestrain genestealers again, ready to begin the whole terrible cycle somewhere new. > [!info] **Faction Relationship** > - 🎲 **10** / 100 → **Apathetic or unaware of** They are uninterested in everything outside the machine. For most of its history the Bladed Cog doesn't register the rest of the Imperium — the enemy cults, the navies, the wars between worlds — because there's exactly one thing it serves and one arrival it is building toward. It's the patient phase, the unaware phase. That's the phase that ends the moment the ascension simulations come back positive and the crusade begins. ## Combinatorics I ran the real Cult of the Bladed Cog through the **Sundered Isles** tables and didn't need to invent a thing. The faction system handed back a forgeborn organization, hidden inside a machine-faith, led by a god-priest, winning through industry while strangling on its own paperwork — which is a one-line description of the actual codex. If you're putting this on the table — **Starforged** or **Sundered Isles**, sci-fi or nautical, it runs the same either way — the crack to fight is the crippling bureaucracy. The Bladed Cog is already the machine; it just can't afford for anyone to stop and count what the machine has been making. Find the requisition that doesn't balance, and you can pull the whole congregation out through the eye of a needle. And then you've got its god to deal with. Good luck with that. That's the fun part. [^1]: Insert your favorite scene from **The Matrix** here. Okay, it might not be your favorite scene, but it's a damn good one.  [^2]: You know you live in a crapsack world when moving weapons from planet to planet is one of the most innocent trade goods you can haul. [^3]: Though you'd probably think that the Adepts Biologis would catch on to this sort of thing, apparently they just don't get enough funding to be on top of it. I wouldn't be surprised if they formed a strong backbone of the Cult of the Bladed Cog. [^4]: ... one of their three ...