Soldiers of a Burning World
Every war has its true believers. In Trench Crusade, the Heretic Legions are the true believers of the other side: humans who looked at the open Gates of Hell, the brimstone pouring into the world, the arch-devils walking the earth, and said yes. This is what I choose. They are not mindless monsters or unwilling slaves. They are soldiers who made a choice, swore a vow, and accepted what that vow means for their eternal soul. They are, in their own way, as devoted as any Trench Pilgrim. Just in a very different direction.
One Third of the World, Gone
The first thing to understand about the Heretic Legions is the sheer scale of what they represent. This isn’t a cult, a rogue nation, or a fringe movement. Since the Gates of Hell were opened in Jerusalem 800 years ago, the forces of the Inferno have been steadily consuming human civilization. By the time the game takes place, roughly a third of all humanity lives under the dominion of Hell. Entire nations. Whole cities. Generations of people born into a world where Devil Lords are the ones in charge.
Out of those populations, the Heretic Legions are drawn. They are Satan’s armies on earth: organized, equipped, and backed by infernal power in ways that make them genuinely terrifying on a battlefield. Where the Church fields crusaders and the Pilgrims bring faith and desperation, the Heretic Legions bring something older and colder. They bring the promise of power, and the willingness to pay whatever price Hell demands for it.
Who Are They, Really?
Here’s the thing that makes the Heretic Legions interesting as a faction: they’re not demons. The vast bulk of the Legions are mortal humans. They have priests. They have infantry. They have specialists. They have politics and hierarchy and internal squabbling, just like any other army. The arch-devils command from above, but the day-to-day fighting is done by men and women who chose this.
And some of them push even further. The worst of the worst, the ones whose devotion to Hell runs so deep that it physically transforms them, march all the way to Hell’s Gate itself. Their flesh ignites. It never fully heals. But those with the blackest souls can walk through the Gate and return from the other side, remade into something that no longer needs to fear much of anything the faithful can throw at them.
How You Become a Legionnaire
Joining the Heretic Legions isn’t as simple as signing up. There’s a process, and it’s brutal by design. Anyone who wants to fight in the Legions must first make an unholy pilgrimage to the bronze gates of Hell itself. The heat from those gates is so intense that it sears flesh and spirit from leagues away, long before you can even see the entrance clearly. The walk toward it is agony.
Those who make it within sight of Hell’s Maw are considered worthy. They’re initiated into the Legions, take unbreakable vows that bind them to darkness for all eternity, and their bodies are branded with the mark of whichever Devil Lord has claimed them. Hell’s armories equip them for war. The Heretic Priests whisper their patron arch-devil’s name into the ranks of new recruits, and just like that, a Legionnaire is born.
How They Fight
The Pilgrims’ battlefield strategy, if you can call it that, is about as subtle as a Molotov cocktail to the face (which, incidentally, is a weapon they invented). They arm themselves with whatever they can get their hands on, from centuries-old muskets to scourges, warcrosses, and improvised explosives. In regions of the Holy Roman Empire where peasants aren’t allowed to carry normal weapons, they’ve developed metal projectiles shaped like crucifixes. Whatever works.
Their charges across No Man’s Land are legendary and terrifying to witness. They don’t advance carefully. They rush. They scream. They go.
Leading the Charge
Heretic Priests
The leaders of every warband. These fallen priests perform unholy magic, summoning creatures using Goetic spells and pledging themselves to specific demon lords. When they recite their Profane Gospels on the battlefield, the words alone can cause ears to bleed and eyes to burst in the sockets of nearby Church forces.
The Anointed
The paragons of the Legions. These are the soldiers who walked all the way through Hell's Gate and back out again. Their skin is burned and blistered permanently from the passage, but what they gained in return is worth it: colossal strength, unyielding endurance, and a devotion to the infernal so deep it borders on religious ecstasy.
Choristers
Some Legionnaires commit suicide as an act of devotion, hoping Hell will notice. Most are ignored. But those with truly depraved souls are resurrected as something horrible: their severed heads reanimated, singing unholy hymns that cause enemies' ears to bleed. They walk the battlefield holding their own heads, and the sound that comes from those heads is a weapon in itself.
The Wretched
The lowest rung of the Legions. The Wretched are the desperate, the broken, and the barely-human, people so ground down by life in Hell's domain that fighting and dying is the only path left. Cheap, numerous, and expendable. Every Legion keeps them around to soak up bullets and clog up objectives.
Heretic Troopers
The backbone of any Legion. Ordinary men and women who survived the pilgrimage to Hell's Gate and came back changed. They're not elite, but there are a lot of them, and they fight with the particular kind of calm that comes from having already given up everything that matters.
Death Commandos
Silent killers equipped with stealth generators that hide them from the eyes of God. These infiltrators can vanish into the battlefield entirely, hunting targets with silenced pistols and gas grenades before finishing the job with their Tartarus Claws. They have been known to wipe out entire squads alone.
Artillery Witches
Hell's answer to field artillery, but wearing a ballgown. Artillery Witches stalk the battlefield hurling ordnance assembled in the death factories of Inferno, providing fire support for the advancing Legions. Do not let the attire fool you. They are among the most feared units in the game.
War Wolf Assault Beasts
What happens when infernal alchemists and flesh-crafters get bored. The War Wolf is a genetically altered nightmare that charges directly into enemy lines at terrifying speed, leaping barricades, tearing through barbed wire with its chainsaw-fitted mouth, and shredding whatever is on the other side. Hell's answer to the question: what if a dog had a chainsaw for a face?
The Variants: Three Different Flavors of Damned
Just like the Trench Pilgrims, the Heretic Legions aren’t a single unified army. There are distinct variants, each with their own twisted identity and way of fighting the war.
Trench Ghosts
Heretic soldiers who die on holy ground face a unique problem: their souls are too wicked for Heaven, but the sacred ground prevents Hell from claiming them. They're stuck. They become Trench Ghosts, semi-corporeal beings who drift across No Man's Land, unable to feel anything, still gripping weapons they no longer technically need. Their greed for worldly possessions never fades, which makes them useful soldiers in a grim sort of way. They're incredibly hard to destroy, move through obstacles without slowing down, and are led by a Priest who goes into battle riding a tank. On the downside, they move slowly and can't bring in certain artificial units, making them a grinding, methodical force rather than a fast-striking one.
Knights of Avarice
The Mammonite home team. The Knights of Avarice are the Heretic Legions filtered through pure, uncomplicated greed. Their Priests audit their own warband, demanding a minimum asset value from every soldier. They refuse to use fire or shrapnel weapons because that kind of destruction wastes good equipment, including the gilded armor the faithful tend to wear. Instead, they favor gas, which kills cleanly and leaves the loot intact. They're a more elite, top-heavy force: fewer bodies, more expensive units, and a lineup of upgraded Anointed who hit hard enough to matter.
Naval Raiding Party
Hell has a navy, and it raids. The Naval Raiding Party represents the Heretic Legion's amphibious assault forces, cramped ship quarters making it impractical to bring the massive Anointed along. Instead, they lean into speed and volume, outfitting their troops with submachine guns at a fraction of the normal cost and moving fast enough to hit targets before defensive lines can fully form. If the Trench Ghosts are a slow wall and the Knights of Avarice are an elite hammer, the Naval Raiders are a swarm that hits the beach at full sprint and doesn't stop.
What Makes Them Different
The Heretic Legions occupy a fascinating space in Trench Crusade’s world. They’re not the mindless monsters of most fantasy settings. They have their own ideology, their own internal hierarchy, and their own reasons for fighting. The quote from Ramman says it plainly: they see the God of the faithful as a tyrant, and Hell as a kind of liberation. Power on your own terms, even if those terms cost you everything after death.
There’s something quietly unnerving about that. It’s not that they don’t believe in God. They clearly do, the whole setting makes that clear. They just decided the other side made a better offer. And now they’re armed, organized, and marching into No Man’s Land to prove it.
On the tabletop, they play like a faction with genuine range. You can run a fast, mobile raiding force, a slow and nearly indestructible ghost army, a greedy elite squad, or a standard Legion loaded with specialist units and backed by a walking nightmare in a ballgown. Whatever version you pick, the Heretic Legions reward players who like having tools for every situation and aren’t afraid to use the dark stuff.
Just remember: when you build a warband, you’re not playing soldiers who stumbled into a war. You’re playing people who walked toward Hell, felt the heat stripping the skin from their faces, and kept walking anyway.
That’s who the Heretic Legions are.
