...and they shall know no fear.
Astartes is a series of 3D animation short films of Warhammer 40,000, or more specifically, of the Adeptus Astartes Space Marines.
The first episode, over five parts, covers the Retributor chapter as they deploy an Impulsor kill-team to hunt down the fleeing leaders of the failed "Argosa Uprisings" rebellion, boarding one of their warships and engaging the desperate and competent crew. As they work their way deeper into the ship, however, the dangers steadily grow.
The series has a Patreon page to fund its work
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Games Workshop have reached out to Astartes creator, Syama Pedersen, and hired him as part of the Warhammer animation team to make his series official Warhammer content, both the released episode and all future ones. As such, Astartes has been removed from Its Youtube channel and can now only be exclusively found on the Warhammer Community Website. As of October 2021, the episode has been moved to Warhammer+, although it is still available for public viewing.
A sequel, titled "Astartes II", is currently in development and will be released on Warhammer+.
Astartes contains examples of:
- Action Film, Quiet Drama Scene: Part One shows quieter scenes of the Retributors going over pre-planning information on a 3D globe, sitting and waiting, performing a maintenance/activation ritual over a bolter interspersed with them loudly marching to get to a ship for takeoff while alarms blare around them.
- Alien Blood: The Astartes themselves. When Kohren vomits blood at the end, you can see it instantly coagulate as Astartes blood is designed to do so to seal wounds as quickly as possible.
- All in the Manual: A wiki page with the permission of the series creator gives the name of the chapter the titular Astartes, belong to. Specifically, they are marines of the "Retributors" chapter, a successor chapter of the Imperial Fists, defined by their no-nonsense approach to combat compared to other space marines and their use of small special-forces style groups called "Impulsors".
- Always a Bigger Fish: In Part 5, the entity within the Orb drags the Astartes into the Warp, only to be attacked and seemingly destroyed by a shadowy being before it can do anything more to them.
- Ambiguous Situation: A lot is told through the cinematics but without explicitly telling exactly what circumstances is happening in the story.
- And the Adventure Continues: Upon being pulled into the Orb, Kohren and his squad are deposited... somewhere else, at the bottom of a valley with sky-scraping walls that's flanked with mountain-sized corpses of presumably giant xenos. What happened next — whether or not they managed to escape back to the Imperium or perished to an Astarte — is left to the audience's imagination.
- An Arm and a Leg: Kohren loses his right hand near the end of episode 5 when he tries freeing himself from the Orb with a point-blank plasma blast that simply explodes the plasma pistol in his hand.
- Asteroid Thicket: The Retributors catch up to the rebel ship in one, though justified in that this is the ring of a planet, which feature denser thickets of floating rocks rather than the much more dispersed belts.
- Badass Cape: The Retributors Captain goes around in a cape that drapes over his right shoulder.
- Bad Boss: One of the psykers uses a shock baton against his own men before they've even encountered the enemy.
- Bash Brothers: The two psykers fight like this, watching each others' flanks and covering their backs. This allows them to last a little over a minute against the Astartes.
- Black Comedy: In the second episode's boarding by the Astartes, a man stepping forward out from cover to fire is bisected by a bolter round hits through his stomach and explodes...which almost comically leads to his upper body and head flipping forward entirely before they hit the ground.
- Boarding Pod: How the Astartes get aboard the rebel ship, through a Caestus Assault Ram.
- Body Horror: The psykers have an extra spinal column arching between the back of their head and their back. It appears to be a psychic device of some sort, that gets stabbed through with a combat knife/ripped out by an angry Astartes.
- Boring, but Practical: The Astartes aren't shown using any of the more fancy or iconic melee weapons from the setting such as chainswords and powerfists, sticking to their combat knives. They get the job done just as well.
- Break Out the Museum Piece: One of the Retributors guarding the Inquisitorial agent sports the Mark VI Corvus 'Beaky' helmet, a model of Power Armor designed back during the days of the Great Crusade but that is still used by some Astartes in the 41st millennium.
- Colour-Coded for Your Convenience: The psychic powers used by the heretics and their Orb masters are coloured bright blue, while the ones used by the Inquisitorial agent look like shadowy miasma.
- Conservation of Ninjutsu: The Astartes go through masses of rebel troopers like a hot knife through butter but have to actually consider their fight against their two leaders. Justified, since the leaders are seemingly physically-modified psykers. And then all of the Astartes fall into a trap of a single Orb.
- Cosmic Horror Story: Granted, given that it's set in Warhammer 40,000, but Part 5 is a reminder to the audience that as powerful as the Adeptus Astartes are, they are still near the bottom of the totem pole when it comes to the actual eldritch powers within the ship's vault.
- Chiaroscuro: Utilized to great effect throughout most of the series.
- Competence Porn: Both sides display great competence; the traitor Guardsmen fight from cover and engage with a variety of heavy weapons, try to lure the Astartes into a killzone instead of simply using Zerg Rush, and crawl from vents to flank the Marines with what looks to be an anti-tank mine while their compatriots engage as a distraction. None of it helps against the well equipped and well trained Space Marines.
- Curb-Stomp Battle: The normal rebels through Part Two and Three are basically speedbumps to the Retributors that might as well be armed with butter knives for all the good their small arms, anti-materiel rifles, multilasers and rocket launchers do them. The most they get to do is pit one Marine's armour.
- Dark Is Not Evil: The Inquisitorial agent is seen surrounded by black shadowy miasma when he is using his psychic powers, but he's on the Astartes' side.
- Defensive Feint Trap: The rebels try one, setting up a multilaser overlooking a doorway several hundred meters away while infantrymen flee from the Marines through it. They open fire once they get a visual on a single Retributor, slaughtering the infantrymen in the way, and succeed in only scratching the Marine's power armor before he uses a Blind Grenade to stun them and destroy the gun with a plasma pistol while the smoke cloud is still obscuring him.
- Deflector Shields: The psykers guarding the vault door can project an energy shield around them capable of tanking entire magazines of bolter fire, forcing the Marines to engage in close combat.
- Disc-One Final Boss: The entity residing within the Orb appears to be the Big Bad the Retributors are after, but in the same moment the Astartes finally confront it, it's swiftly attacked, and seemingly killed, by an even larger shadowy creature.
- Double Tap: When the Inquisitorial agent gets possessed, not only does the Captain deliver a Megaton Punch to the normal human's face, the other Marine follows it up with four bolter shells (at minimum, since the scene cuts out immediately after the fourth shot). Given how bad daemonic possession can get in this setting, there's no such thing as overkill.
- Dramatic Unmask: One of the last things that happen in the series is Kohren throwing off his helmet, showing his face to the audience.
- Energy Weapon: Used by both sides together with more conventional ballistic weapons, which makes sense given how ubiquitous they are in the setting.
- The rebels used standard-issued Imperial Guardsmen Lasguns against the Astartes alongside Autoguns. None of them remotely scratched the Astartes' armour.
- In their Defensive Feint Trap, a rebel squad attempted to vaporize an Astartes with a dual Gatling-barreled Multilaser. The sheer volume of fire not only cut a retreating company of fellow rebel troopers to charred, smoking ribbons, but actually pitted the Astartes' armour and forced him briefly into cover.
- The Astartes also packed energy weapons of their own — said Astartes above responded to the Multilaser by activating and pulling out an Astartes Plasma Pistol, which blew away the Multilaser and its crew with one shot. It was later used to stagger one of the renegade Psykers as the Astartes closed in on him. Unfortunately, it blew up in his hand when he attempted to use it to escape the Orb pulling him and his Astartes brothers in.
- Eldritch Abomination: The Orbs, first seen in part 5. Nobody is certain just what they are, whether they are Xeno artifacts, Xenos themselves, some sort of Warp abominations or anything else. All that is known for sure is that they are sentient, psychic, malevolent towards humanity, and powerful enough to easily subdue the nigh-unstoppable Marines.
- Electronic Eye: Downplayed — Kohren has multiple red LEDs shining through his helmet after his fight with the psykers, but it's actually armour's exposed autosenses rather than his own eye..
- Elite Mooks: The two psykers guarding the vault are the first characters to provide legitimate resistance to the Retributors. Their psyker abilities and synchronization allows them to put up a better fight and even send a few of the Space Marines flying. They are also noticeably taller than the regular rebels, almost as tall as the 8ft Marines.
- Elites Are More Glamorous: The two Astartes accompanying the Inquisitorial agent and commanding the Retributors forces have their armour visibly more decorated, with their regalia indicating them as Retributors' First Company Veterans.
- Even the regular Marines are more elite; rather than being a Tactical Squad (the standard line troops) background information provided by the creator says that these Marines belong to an Impulsor squad, a 'tip of the spear' formation for a chapter that specializes in rapid, precision deep strikes even by Astartes standards.
- Evil Is Deathly Cold: As the Astartes enter the vault holding the Orb, their boots are shown cracking through the ice layer on the floor.
- Evil Is Not Well-Lit: The inside of the rebels's ship is very dark with almost no lights. Compare the insides of the Retributors' strike cruiser, which appears clear and well-lit.
- Evil Sounds Deep: The speech of the Orbs is this in addition to being heavily distorted.
- Extra-Long Episode: Most episodes in the series are very short, being around one or two minutes in length. The final episode clocks in at more than seven minutes long, making it longer than the rest of the series combined.
- Face Framed in Shadow: Used to great effect with the one-eyed psyker. Every shot that focuses on him has his face partially or fully obscured by shadows with only his glowing eye clearly visible. It makes him look that much more sinister.
- Faceless Mooks: Pretty much everyone, aside from maybe the psykers in Part Four who still don’t show their faces, they’re just wearing detailed human-like masks. The Astartes themselves are always wearing their signature Rage Helms, but are more of Mook Horror Shows. Then Kohren removes his helmet at the end of Episode 5.
- Freeze-Frame Bonus: The videos are meticulously detailed, full of sharp nuances that remain on the screen only for a split second. Examples include:
- Some of the titular Astartes' names can be seen etched on their left pauldron when you can manage to read it through all the movement and Chiaroscuro (those named this way are Monos and Bassic, random marines, Kohren, the marines' squad leader with the plasma pistol and the closest we get to a protagonist, and Hakanael, the commanding officer with the cape, revealed in a split-second when he reaches for the psyker's head).
- When the Astartes shoots the anti-material snipers, the light of his Bolter firing shows the blood splatter on his armour in-between shots.
- The bolters have ammo counters that count down as the Astartes expend their ammo.
- Kohren's service studs are not all the same color. Two are silver and one is gold.
- As Kohren's hand starts sinking into the sphere, for a brief moment alien script can be seen appearing on the previously smooth surface of his gauntlet.
- In the very final scene, the rest of Kohren's squad can be seen teleporting in on the other platforms in the distance.
- Gainax Ending: Episode 5 (And part 1 as a whole) ends with Kohren and his squad absorbed by an object of unknown origin, and dumped on a different planet with dozens of mountain-sized skeletal statues in thrones.
- Gas Mask Mooks: Most rebel troopers seem to be wearing gas masks for some reason, even though neither they nor Astartes use chemical weapons nor the ship's atmosphere is shown to be hazardous. Most likely done to, along with Putting on the Reich below, to make them look eviler (and to avoid having to do facial animations).
- Half the Man He Used to Be: Part Two has a rebel bisected around the middle, with his lower body falling backwards while his upper body falls forward in a nearly comical manner. Part Three sees the top half of a dead rebel falling forward onto the floor with his guts hanging out as the rebels retreat from the Marines prior to leading them toward the multilaser. His lower half not being seen also helps gives the scene a particular Ludicrous Gibs feel.
- Handicapped Badass:
- One of the two psyker leaders appears to have only one functional eye. He also seems to be the more powerful one.
- Kohren, by the end of the series. Everyone who is familiar with what an Astartes is capable of will know that missing a hand will barely slow one down.
- Helmets Are Hardly Heroic: Subverted: The only Marine who goes helmetless is Kohren, and even then only at the end so he doesn't throw up in it.
- Implacable Man: Battleship hulls, lasfire, multilasers, and anti-materiel rifles do nothing but slow the Space Marines down for maybe a few seconds. Psychic powers are a bit more trouble, but still does not stop them from slaughtering their foes like the rest. It took the Orbs they were sent to destroy to finally put them on the ropes.
- Improbable Aiming Skills: Throughout Part Two and Three, basically every time the Retributors fire, someone (or likely many someones) dies with one shot. Part Three shows a Retributor shooting at a multilaser emplacement at least several hundred meters away, but his bolt pistol's shots are stopped by the gun shield, so he instead uses a Blind Grenade (a flashbang-smoke-grenade) to stun the gun crew before drawing a plasma pistol to destroy the multilaser while the smoke cloud is still obscuring the doorway. Justified by Part 2, which shows us the Space Marine's point of view for a split second where the rebels appear as red blotches in the smoke.
- Instant Death Bullet: Justified Trope in here, because getting shot by a .75 caliber armor-piercing exploding rocket in the head or chest would kill you quite immediately.
- Kubrick Stare: Masterfully executed by the one-eyed psyker.
- Large and in Charge: The two psyker leaders tower over their human mooks, and match Astartes in height.
- Lightning Bruiser: Part Three shows a Marine dodging a rocket, and later shows one suddenly slipping right next to two rebel ambushers trying to attack a Retributor squad by firing an anti-materiel rifle from vents in a wall. Only the light of their gunfire from two of their shots shows him getting next to them, verging on a Freeze-Frame Bonus compared to the Retributor's subsequent two shots killing the ambushers. The Marines' bolters disintegrate everything they aim at, and their accuracy is pretty much flawless.
- During the battle against the two psykers, the Marines are shown to be able to sprint extremely fast, despite their size and heavy armor.
- Made of Iron: The rebels might as well be throwing spitballs against the Astartes' armor; the only visible damage that they've taken by the end of Part Four is a large scorch mark on one pauldron (thanks to an anti-tank rifle), and a half-dozen dents from standing in the middle of a multi-laser barrage. Even the psykers can only hold the Marines and lightly damage the helmets' lens, but not the armor itself.
- The Man Behind the Man: The Orbs seem to be the real masterminds behind the Argosa Uprisings, with human minions under their command. Whether those minions are willing or not is not revealed.
- Malevolent Masked Men: The metallic "skin" of psyker leaders is actually masks they wear.
- Megaton Punch: A Retributors' commander pulverizes the Inquisitorial agent's with a single lightning-fast punch; that punches through the man's head. It makes the bolter four-tap from the Beaky Astartes look more like a precaution than an absolute necessity. Note that the victim's visor cracked as soon as it was grabbed.
- Mind over Matter: The psykers' specialty is telekinesis. They use it to halt and explode the Astartes' bolts, send out waves of physical blasts as well as seize and crush the marines that try to charge them.
- Mind Probe: An interesting case where it's inflicted by humans on other species. The Retributors' strike cruiser has a chamber with a seemingly captured and subjugated Orb. The Inquisitorial agent uses it and his own psychic ability to tap in and listen in on the Orb's telepathic communication with its kin. They're not taking chances though, given we see it absolutely covered in melta charges. It ends badly for him when he momentarily breaks his concentration to warn the Retributors' commander of the Orbs' trap, which causes the Orbs to notice him and overwhelm him.
- Mook Horror Show: Part Two, Three, and Four portray the Retributors in battle. Only Part Four, which has two psykers for their enemies, has the Retributors face any sort of meaningful resistance - everyone else is just a trigger pull from losing chunks of their bodies. This is further compounded by the rebels performing a variety of legitimate tactics against the Retributors which nonetheless does nothing more than dent up their armor.
- Shown vividly during the one bit of incompetence from the rebels in the first episode, though that's not saying much since it's an understandable mistake. In part 3 we see the rebels set up an improvised double multi-laser mobile turret with a ceremite shield welded onto it. Upon setting it up, the gunner sees an Astartes round a corner only seconds later. The gunner clearly panics, opens fire, kills his own men, and acomplishes very little. The Marine had just stepped into the hallway and easily just stepped right back out. If the gunner waited for the Marine to get halfway down the hall, the rebels might have managed a kill on an Astartes sergeant, evening the odds for the psykers.
- More Dakka: The traitor guardsmen throw as much ordinance as they can against the Astartes, even bringing out autocannons and multilasers, to little effect.
- The Marines themselves downplay this trope when fighting the traitor guardsmen; even though they pour on the fire, they're actually firing accurate, single shots against each guardsman. Since a single bolter round is enough to reduce a human to Ludicrous Gibs, one round per enemy is all they need. The Marines then play this trope straight against the twin psykers, with the switch in tactics subtly underlining how much of a threat they are.
- Muzzle Flashlight: As most of the ship is in perpetual gloom, most illumination comes from weapons fire. Particularly effective when one Marine is only revealed to have flanked an autocannon when he double-taps the gunner.
- No-Sell:
- The Astartes dodge rockets, resist anti-materiel rifle fire, and walk through multilaser volleys with nothing but scratched armor.
- Part Three and Four shows a gun shield and the psykers' shields resisting bolter fire. The Retributors counter those with a plasma pistol (which has armor-piercing attributes in accordance with the game rules) on the gun shield, and slipping a bolter into a psyker's shield and then trying to stab them while they wounded by the bolt shot. Unfortunately in the latter case, the second psyker covers for the first psyker and stops the knife in time.
- Part 5 sees the Astartes just walking though the Orb's attempt to telekinetically repel them with barely a reaction.
- The Orb in return takes a point blank plasma pistol shot (that blows off its wielder's arm), and is completely unharmed.
- Occult Blue Eyes: The psykers' eyes shine bright blue when they're channeling their powers.
- Offhand Backhand: One of the Astartes casually draws his combat knife and stabs a rebel running up to him with an explosive charge while at the same time shooting at another group of retreating rebels with his bolt pistol. He turns his head toward the sound of the rebel running over, but not enough to actually look.
- Old Soldier: Judging by three (two silver, one gold) service studs on Kohren's forehead he's served in the Chapter for at minimum many decades, if not centuries. In many chapters, a steel stud in the forehead is an honor mark for a century in service to the chapter, so depending on Retributor tradition, Kohren may have served over three hundred years.
- O.O.C. Is Serious Business: Whatever the Retributor Captain heard from the Inquisitorial agent mind-probing the Orb* made him hurriedly give an instruction to a junior Marine, who goes off running. If you've watched this series up to this point, Marines hurrying can only mean something real bad is about to happen. Likewise, the Inquisitorial agent not only Suddenly Shouting but breaking his concentration from the ritual to address the Captain, despite likely knowing this would cost him his life by alerting the Orb to his presence makes it clear that the situation was dire indeed.
- Original Character: The Astartes are all members of the Retributors Chapter, an original Imperial Fist Successor Chapter of Astartes made specifically for the shorts.
- As the 40k universe has a lot of (possibly) extinct and unknown ancient races, the orbs might be this, or from some obscure part of the canon lore. The creator has spoken of it briefly in his Patreon, but only to discount a few possibilities, confirming nothing positively.
- Overshadowed by Awesome: The rebels are shown to be quite tactically competent and disciplined, setting up barricades, ambushes, using cover, snipers, machine gun emplacements and whatnot. Were they facing normal Guardsmen or even another race, they would have stood a chance. However, their enemies happen to be genetically enhanced holy warriors with decades or even centuries of experience under their belts, and field equipment that make anything the Guardsmen have at their disposal look like water pistols. The rebels are far from incompetent, they're just way out of their depth against the Astartes.
- Psychic Link: The two psykers appear to be sharing one, allowing them to act with perfect efficiency without exchanging a single word. This works against them when one of them is killed, and the feedback from his death sends a shock through the other.
- Putting on the Reich: Helmets worn by rebel troopers greatly resemble those used by German army in World War II.
- Red Right Hand: In a Rewatch Bonus, if you look closely at the two psykers, you can see despite their full-body cloaks that they each appear to be missing an arm; one missing their left, the other their right.
- Shoot the Dog: In episode 5, the marines with the Inquisitorial agent immediately execute him when it looks like he's getting possessed by the Orbs. They do this by punching his head off and perforating the remains with a bolter. On the other hand, in the 41st millennium this is at worst Properly Paranoid and at best sparing him from a fate far worse than death.
- Shown Their Work:
- Every detail of this entire series is incredibly faithful to the source material, from the livery of the marines and guardsmen, to the actual mechanics in which the weapons function, all are based on the mechanics of the original tabletop games.
- When Kohren vomits at the end of part 5, his bloody puke has a large amount of black spots in it, likely the Larraman cells that help Astartes blood to clot faster than a normal human's.
- Silence Is Golden: For most of the series explosions and gunfire are abundantly portrayed in the animation, yet anyone saying anything at all is entirely absent. This goes along well with the many poor faceless Mooks getting slaughtered by the resident Mook Horror Show, the titular Astartes.
- Eventually broken by the 5th part, with distorted speech of the Orbs and muffled voice of the Inquisitorial agent. Astartes remain as silent as ever though.
- Space Marine: Warhammer 40,000's own, shown in all of their bloody glory.
- Stealthy Colossus: One of the 8ft tall, heavy armor-clad Astartes manages to sneak up on an anti-materiel gun emplacement and slaughter the gunners without them (or possibly even the audience with how he can only be seen from the light thrown out from two shots from the gunners) noticing him in the shadows.
- In the fight against the twin psykers, the charging Astartes have surprisingly silent footfalls, much quieter than a sprinting supersoldier encased in power armor is expected to be.
- Smoke Shield: A variation: The rebels try to gun down a Retributor with a multilaser, so he quickly tosses a Blind grenade, obscuring a corridor... and then shoots a plasma bolt straight through the smoke cloud and into the multilaser's crew.
- Super-Soldier: The Astartes shoot men dead moments after they show themselves to fire. Even without cover, their armor resists multilaser fire aside from some dents, they have some ability to even force past psychic powers holding them still. No, you do not want to fight them. The "soldier" part is also displayed well in Part Four, with the Retributors attacking the two psykers from multiple angles and coordinating an attempt to distract them via suppressive fire while other Marines close in to close-combat to get past the psykers’ shields resisting their bolter fire.
- Taking You with Me: One rebel trooper attempts to charge an Astartes with a melta bomb. It does not work.
- There Is No Kill Like Overkill: As soon as whatever ritual the Inquisitorial agent is going through goes wrong, the Captain punches his head off and the other Marine with him starts shooting the corpse four times (that we see), when it had been shown that most other humans needed only one bolter blast to turn into fine mist. If you know anything about the 40k universe, this is a bare minimum precaution at best, and also the most efficient Mercy Kill that they could have given.
- The Stinger: The first series ends with a brief glimpse of other Chapters' Marine helms, (in order: the Angels Sanguine, the Dragons of the Void, and the Death Hands, all but the first being homebrew Chapters from the creator's Patreon poll) in an open battle large enough to include tanks (possibly against Dark Eldar).
- Throat Light/Glowing Eyes of Doom: Displayed by the psyker as a sign that Orbs are taking over his body. It does not last long.
- Throw-Away Guns: Kohren drops his plasma pistol on the ground after firing two shots at one of the rebel leaders and has a bolt pistol in his hand to replace it. Considering plasma weapons in Warhammer 40,000 tend to overheat and usually explode though, it might have been legitimately unsafe to continue holding it any longer anyway; given that Kohren loses his arm up to a few inches below his elbow from the plasma pistol detonating in his hand in Part 5, it's entirely justified.
- Title Drop: In episode 5, when the space marines were approaching the Orb, it spoke the first line of dialogue in the whole series.Orb: Astartes.
- Unusually Uninteresting Sight: In part 5, Kohren and his squad pass by a construct resembling a giant golden human body filled with wires, surrounded by rows of skulls with spines looking like replacements for those seen on the two psykers. This does not elicit even a turned head from the Astartes.
- Voice of the Legion: The Orbs "speak" with a noticeable reverb. So does the Inquisitorial agent when the Orbs overwhelm him.
- Vomit Indiscretion Shot: In part 5 we see Kohren vomit blood when he emerges wherever the Orb put him. Also serves as a handy justification for his Dramatic Unmask (as it spared him the indignity of puking into his own helmet).
- We Have Reserves: The rebels are so desperate to get a single good shot on the Space Marines that they're willing to mow down dozens of their own men in their Defensive Feint Trap with a multilaser. This strategy manages to slow down a single Marine for about 10 seconds.
- The Worf Effect: Justified, in that while the Adeptus Astartes are meant to fight threats beyond what mere humans are capable of, thus effortlessly dealing with most of the ship and only facing minor resistance from the Psykers in Part 4... once they get to the Orb, which holds powers beyond their imagination, it effortlessly humiliates the Astartes in a mere moment, subduing them once it flexes its true power on them, reminding the audience that the Astartes are still at the end of the day limited in their abilities to the true horrors they are meant to face in defense of the Imperium.
