224th Grendhol
“We forget no shaft, we need no more than arrives, we let no one speak below, and we stand where we are put.”
Core Data
| Regiment type | Siege Infantry (six charge packs, respirators, entrenching tools, blind grenades) |
|---|---|
| Munitorum designation | MUN.REG.GRE-224.SI.7b |
| Homeworld | Grendhol |
| Tithe grade | Exactis Extremis – the single most demanding tithe grade |
| Establishment strength | 3,800 men |
| Current strength | 640 men |
| Allegiance | Loyal |
| Origin | Original regiment |
The pillars
The Rock Does Not Forget
Grendhol teaches that no shaft is ever truly abandoned so long as someone remembers its measurements. The Pit Watch extends this belief to every position: a trench once occupied belongs to it, even if the garrison changes, even if none of the original men still lives. The name of an annihilated platoon is not struck off but passed on like a tool. Whoever bears a dead number also bears its debts.
What Arrives Is Enough
Resupply comes late, comes wrong or does not come at all—on Grendhol that is normal operating condition, not news. The Pit Watch makes a virtue of this shortage: whoever complains about missing charge packs wastes time, not right. Men who ask too loudly for resupply are not punished—people simply stop listening to them.
Below There Are No Prisoners
In narrow galleries a prisoner costs air, water and a guard—three things the regiment never has in abundance. So below ground a silent rule applies that no manual has ever sanctioned: whoever surrenders there is not led away but finished off, quietly, without witnesses above ground. The men call it thrift.
Orders Are Bedrock
A colonel who does not obey is as useless as an Overman who ignores the instructions—in the end the roof collapses on everyone. The Pit Watch does not debate orders; it carries them out, even when civilians stand in the way. They are proud of it and rarely speak of what that meant in 179.M41 in the galleries of Tharsis-Kolonie.
Further core facts
| Fact | Value |
|---|---|
| Militarum Regimentum | Grubenkorps Grendhol |
| Common name | The Grubenwacht |
| Origin of this name | Inherited tradition: the pre-Imperial shaft militias of Grendhol already called themselves this; the regiment adopted the name at its founding, unasked and unchanged. |
| Regiment type | Siege infantry |
| Founding | 156.M41 |
| Tithe grade | Exactis Extremis |
| Founding strength | 3,800 men |
| Current strength | 640 men |
| Battle cry | "The rock holds, we hold!" |
Raising, Homeworld & Culture
Raising & Tithe
The Pit Watch arose from the regular tithe, tightened to Exactis Extremis after the Departmento Munitorum reassessed Grendhol's ore deposits and demanded a correspondingly higher share of troops in addition to the ore quota. Recruitment is by shift lottery: entire pit crews are counted together, and if a shift is drawn, all go, from apprentice to Overman, regardless of age or family. This tears apart established teams who have trusted one another in the dark for years and sends them as strangers into a new regiment. For the Planetary Governor, every gap in the required number, every incomplete genetic purity test, every missing piece of equipment is a capital crime—so he sends his best shifts not out of a sense of duty, but out of naked fear for his own neck.
What the Homeworld Lost
The Knockers' Guild—blind listeners who recognise the danger of collapse by the sound of the rock before instruments could—once numbered thirty squads of three listeners each. After the last Exactis Extremis levy, nine remained. The remaining guildsmen refuse to train apprentices under thirty standard years of age, for fear of losing them too; the guild dies out more slowly than the regiment dies in the field, but it dies.
The Homeworld
Grendhol is a mining world with no appreciable surface atmosphere outside the shaft cities: icy winds over barren rock, cities that dig hundreds of metres into the crust, where warmth and air must be produced artificially. Socially, the world organises itself into guilds by shaft and depth, with the Overman as the natural figure of authority—someone who knows the structure and whose instructions decide between life and suffocation. This culture yields born siege soldiers: people who do not fear confined spaces, who can reckon with explosives as others do with coins, and who have learned to wait in the dark for days without losing their nerve. Handling rebreathers is as familiar to them as handling a spoon is to others.
The Disadvantage They Carry
Grendhol's miners react instinctively to a particular crackling of the rock, a particular whine in load-bearing walls—signs that on Grendhol herald an imminent collapse. On foreign worlds these signs simply do not exist, or they mean something else. At the Siege of Kesh Barrikade in 169.M41 an entire platoon evacuated an intact bunker line because a vibrating conveyor system in the foundations produced exactly the crackling that on Grendhol means "withdraw now". The position was overrun by Orks within the hour; eighteen men died in the open ground they had abandoned for no reason.
Regimental Culture
Drill in the Pit Watch is terse and repetitive: set charge pack, check fuse, count withdrawal route, start again, until the movement no longer requires a thought. On the march they sing the "Shaft Song", a monotonous counting chant that properly accompanies conveyor cycles on Grendhol and in the field simply keeps the sequence of steps in the dark. Officers have given up suppressing the superstition that a pit lamp blown out before an assault brings misfortune—men would rather not light it at all than extinguish it. The transport decks smell of machine oil, cold metal and the filter cylinders of the rebreathers, which never get quite clean. The alcohol portion of the ration is seldom drunk, but traded for spare parts, tinned food or news from home. If there is time, the dead are buried in excavated niches with a knock on the wall—three times, like a miner's greeting. If there is no time, they are left lying and only the coordinate is remembered.
The Commissariat
The Pit Watch no longer fears its commissars; it has come to an arrangement with them. A phlegmatic regiment that carries out orders without objection anyway rarely gives cause for execution, and the commissars in turn have learned that below ground their authority ends at the wall of the gallery, where only the Overman has any say. They are treated as a second kind of superior—not loved, but useful, so long as they keep to the rules of the dark.
Ranks & Organisation
Ranks
Rank Pit Lord
Description
Munitorum rank: General · Form of address: Pit Lord
Rank Shaftmaster
Description
Munitorum rank: Colonel · Form of address: Shaftmaster
Rank Chief Overman
Description
Munitorum rank: Major · Form of address: Chief Overman
Rank Overman
Description
Munitorum rank: Captain · Form of address: Overman
Rank Deputy Overman
Description
Munitorum rank: Lieutenant · Form of address: Deputy Overman
Rank Hewer
Description
Munitorum rank: Non-commissioned Officer · Form of address: Hewer
Structure
At its founding, the Pit Watch was designed for six Companies of four platoons each, every platoon with three squads of ten men along with attached special and heavy weapons squads. After Kruzhak Delta and the incorporation of the survivors of the Dross-Varn 6th, the regiment consists in practice of only two full Companies and the remnants of a third; several platoons are led by Hewers instead of Lieutenants, because no replacements arrived for the fallen officers. Heavy weapons have shrunk to a single consolidated squad of pit mortars, where the establishment strength called for five.
Constituent regiments
Name 224th Grendhol "The Pit Watch"
Role / notes
Siege infantry under Shaftmaster Dravin Holk; currently dug in in the Kesh Sector, severely understrength, and has been waiting four months for promised replacements.
Name Grendhol 187th "The Lightless"
Role / notes
Siege infantry under Shaftmaster Yulen Korsk, recognisable by the black lens over his destroyed left eye; currently holds a border fortress in the Segmentum Obscurus.
Name Grendhol 301st "The Anvil"
Role / notes
completely annihilated at the Folding of Ostwerft and re-raised from replacement conscripts; the new men inherited the salvaged tally notches of the dead and the old troop number, but none of the faces that went with them. Command: Shaftmistress Petra Vann.
Command Staff
Command staff
Name Shaftmaster Dravin Holk
Beschreibung
Shaftmaster Dravin Holk is a broad, slow man with coal dust that never quite washes out of the creases of his face. He carries an old Knocker's Guild lamp on his belt, although it has not burned in decades. At Tharsis Colony he held a collapsing gallery under fire rather than abandon it, because a withdrawal would have cost more explosives than the regiment possessed—the position held, forty men did not. Afterwards he spoke to no one for three days.
Zitat
"We go when the order comes. Not when it hurts."
Name Senior Commissar Yelena Kordt
Beschreibung
Senior Commissar Yelena Kordt wears a prosthetic hand of coarse Grendhol steel, a replacement for the one severed by one of her own recruits in a dispute over a food ration—the man was not shot, but transferred to pit mortar duty, which Kordt considers the crueller punishment.
Zitat
"I rarely shoot. I transfer."
Name Quartermaster Orsa Bekk
Beschreibung
Quartermaster Orsa Bekk is missing two fingers of her left hand, lost to frostbite because her own regiment once received desert equipment while she stood in the frost. Since then she has kept a private spare-parts store, the existence of which she denies to every inspection.
Zitat
"What the Munitorum promises feeds no one. What I have does."
Attached Personnel
| Personnel | Number |
|---|---|
| Commissars under a Senior Commissar | 5 |
| Ogryn squads | 1 |
| Preachers of the Ecclesiarchy | 9 |
| Lay assistants of the Ecclesiarchy | 14 |
| Psykers of the Scholastica Psykana | 1 |
The preachers maintain their own supply store, independent of the regiment—of all things, in a regiment that is constantly hungry. This regularly causes disputes at the ration issue.
The Regimental Standard
A piece of reinforced pit tarpaulin on an old drill shaft, embroidered with the tally notches of every annihilated Company and a sewn-on metal fragment of the guild bell of Grendhol. At Kruzhak Delta the bearer fell, and a wounded Hewer wrapped it around an open belly wound to stop the bleeding before he dragged it, half soaked, back to camp. The stain has never been removed.
The Flaw
The flaw
After the first campaign, Logistics Adjutant Harn Ольде reported in a much-quoted account that the 224th Grendhol was chronically undersupplied "through isolation, route position and continued confusion with the old Grendhol 22nd"—the report was archived, not acted upon. To this day, resupply arrives weeks late, often in the wrong calibre or intended for a different climate. On ordinary days this means barter, improvisation and a supply store whose true extent no one knows. In battle it means that charge packs run out in the middle of an assault and men must fight on with entrenching tools. The regiment tells itself that this makes it more resilient than others; other regiments simply call the Grubenwacht "the Beggars" and refuse to pitch camp beside it, for fear of being relieved of their own supplies.
A Munitorum Failure
After the first reconstitution, the 224th Grendhol was mistakenly listed in the records as "disbanded, strength absorbed by Grendhol 22nd"—a single erroneous digit slip in the designation. For fourteen standard years the regiment officially received no resupply whatsoever, because on paper it no longer existed. During this time, by its own estimate, more than two hundred men died of shortages that a single correct entry would have prevented.
Known Campaigns
Campaigns
Name Siege of Kesh Barricade
Epoche 168–171.M41
Erzählung
168–171.M41, Kesh Sector, against the Ork Waaagh Zodgrub. Three years of trench warfare over a chain of bunkers, alongside the Ostillian 9th Jäger Regiment and the Karvossa 41st Siege Artillery. In the end the Grubenwacht held the line, but only because reinforcements arrived, not through its own strength. After the victory all three regiments were redeployed separately; they never saw one another again. Losses: 1,200 of 3,800.
Name Tharsis Colony
Epoche 179–181.M41
Erzählung
179–181.M41, against the Aschbrüder, a heretic cult. On higher orders, the Grubenwacht sealed and gassed a tunnel system in which trapped mineworkers were suspected, but not confirmed, to be present alongside the cultists. They obeyed. The Voth-Karn 12th Armoured Regiment discovered the civilians' bodies and concealed the incident from the Commissariat to protect the Grubenwacht—a debt that was never repaid, as both regiments were afterwards assigned to separate theatres of war. Losses: 900 of 2,600.
Name Kruzhak Delta
Epoche 198.M41
Erzählung
198.M41, against a major Aschbrüder offensive. Almost wiped out within weeks, fighting alongside the Dross-Varn 6th, which was utterly destroyed. The 340 survivors of Dross-Varn were incorporated into the Grubenwacht—a merger that still causes tension today, as the newcomers keep different burial rites and each side calls the other "the Strangers". Losses: 1,400 of 1,700, followed by merger to the current strength of 640.
Vehicle livery
How the regiment’s vehicles are painted: base colour, camouflage for the theatre, turret band and markings, derived from the regimental colours.
| Theatre | Ice and snow · Winter blotches |
|---|---|
| Base colour | #264715 · Castellan Green (Field uniform) |
| Camouflage | #CACCBB · Pallid Wych Flesh (Standard lettering (bone colour))#B8BEBE · Grey Seer (theatre standard) |
| Turret band | #A77353 · Balthasar Gold (Brass filters and badges) |
| Markings | #CACCBB · Pallid Wych Flesh (Standard lettering (bone colour)) |
| Hull recipe | Castellan Green (Base) · Athonian Camoshade (Shade) · Loren Forest (Layer) · Elysian Green (Edge) |
Company bands on the turret
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- 9.
Derived from the regimental colours; the silhouettes are our own sketches, not copies of any Games Workshop model.
On the core data
The high ordinal number 224 betrays no great age, but the opposite: Grendhol supplies so many regiments that the count has long since reached three digits, and the Grubenwacht is a comparatively young levy from a world that has been bleeding itself dry for the Munitorum for centuries. Once, after the catastrophe of Kruzhak Delta, the regiment was formally re-founded—not with fresh recruits from Grendhol, but with the survivors of a foreign, utterly destroyed regiment. Today's men and women bear honours for battles in which none of them personally took part, and for comrades whose names they know only from the tally notches on the standard. Whether this is just is seldom spoken of. The number is carried on regardless.