The Steel Confessors are one of the many Space Marine Chapters descended from the eighteen recorded First Founding chapters who took part in the Horus Heresy.
The Steel Confessors chapter gained notoriety at the Gamesday & Golden Daemon event at the NEC, Birmingham, England, in 2005, when they were featured in the Warhammer 40,000 mega-battle, "The Battle of Kalevala"; also displayed were a life-sized statue of a Steel Confessor Tactical Marine, a Terminator's helmet and a Bolter.
The Battle of Kalevala
The Battle of Kalevala is summarised here, as fought at Gamesday 2005. The world of Kalevala was home to the Steel Confessors' Fortress Monastery, as well as a large manufactorum complex, and as such, was deemed important enough to defend in open battle against the Tyranid Hive Fleet which landed ground forces on the planet (as opposed to Exterminatus from orbit). The battle was colossal and brutally straightforward, each of the ten companies of the Steel Confessors taking up defensive positions around the manufactorum and fortress monastery while the Tyranid horde attacked unrelentingly in an attempt to overwhelm the firing lines.
Despite the incalculable number of Tyranids present on Kalevala, the disciplined regimen of volley fire from the Tactical Marines and Devastators, combined with surgical counterattacks by Veteran Squads, Assault Squads and officers, with Land Speeder Squadrons flying between battlefield locations to lend their firepower to struggling companies thinned the Tyranid horde while minimising Space Marine casualties, and the Tyranids literally exhausted their own numbers throwing themselves into the teeth of the imperial guns.
At the end of the battle, the eighth and tenth companies of the Steel Confessors had been destroyed to a man, the First company was a 40% operational strength, the third and sixth companies remained at 60%, while the rest of the companies were between 40 and 20% operational strength.
The Steel Confessors in game terms
The Steel Confessors could be represented after the battle of Kalevala by a Space Marine army with a combination of the following codex divergences:
The Steel Confessors (Stern): Advantages: -Cleanse and Purify -Suffer not the alien to live (Tyranids) -No mercy, no respite- Minor drawback: -Faithful unto death- Major drawback: -Aspire to glory
Chapter Colours
The Steel Confessors wear silver power armour with bone shoulderpads featuring their motif; a black cross surmounted in the middle by a lightning bolt in a red circle.