Legio Venator - Origins: Like the Forge World of Arachnus, upon which the Legio Venator was founded, the title of "Iron Spiders," the more common appellation given to this Titan Legion, originates from the gargantuan arachnid-like xenos species that once populated the world. It was as opposition to these creatures that the Legio Venator was originally created, and the earliest records of the Titan Legion detail at length the protracted campaign of extermination the Iron Spiders embarked upon.The motive behind such an effort lay largely with the planet of Arachnus, for geological and mineral analysis revealed the abundant ore veins that promised lucrative industry for the Human settlers who had discovered the planet.The prevalence and deadliness of the arachnoid mega-fauna once native to Arachnus prevented the Explorator arks dispatched from Mars from establishing a colony directly on the world and thus it was to be the planet's two moons, named Iktomia and Nizkara, that would see civilisation brought to them first. It was upon these two celestial bodies that the Legio Venator would be founded and set loose upon Arachnus, armed and armoured by the extensive array of manufactoria dedicated to war that soon sprang up across both moons.The growth of Arachnus as a prominent Forge World of the ancient Mechanicum did not begin quickly, for the world was thrice larger in size than Terra and rife with dangers. The records of Arachnus note that it took nearly a standard century of protracted extermination, led by the god-engines of the Legio Venator, before a safe zone upon Arachnus could be established.Even with such a gain, the Arachnian Mechanicum sent forth to colonise Arachnus proper found itself beset on all sides with only the guns of the Iron Spiders to protect them.The loss of life amongst the ranks of the Arachnian Mechanicum is not noted within its own records, yet by extrapolating the annals of fallen god-engines dutifully recorded by the scribes of the Legio Venator, which report the crippling of nearly 100 Titans during the six-centuries long campaign to secure the surface of Arachnus, it stands to reason that vast numbers were lost to such harsh conditions.Nevertheless, the Iron Spiders emerged victorious with their foe driven to extinction, leaving the world of Arachnus open to exploitation and full colonisation. What is more, the princeps and moderati of the Legio Venator had proved themselves within the fires of war and stood ready to expand the influence of Arachnus far beyond that of the world they had conquered.So it was that when the Imperium expanded across the Segmentum Tempestus during the Great Crusade, its fleets came across Arachnus not as a singular planet, but as the centre of a robust and well-developed Forge Empire protected by the seasoned might of a Titan Legion of considerable skill and numbers.It is perhaps unsurprising that, after millennia of struggles to establish itself as an independent entity, the Forge Empire of Arachnus proved unwilling to bow before the Imperium. Resistant as they were to the prospect of serving both the Emperor and their cousins among the Tech-priests of Mars, conflict between the two Human civilisations proved inevitable.At the onset of this conflict the Iron Spiders stood, based upon their own records, as a Secundus-grade Titan Legion, presenting a significant obstacle to Imperial forces. In opposition, the newly recruited might of both the Legio Astraman and Legio Laniaskara were brought to battle, bringing devastation to over a dozen worlds in the half-decade-long war between Arachnus and the forces of the Great Crusade.As the conflict drew to a close, over three-quarters of Arachnus' Forge Empire lay in the hands of the Imperium and with Imperial fleets rapidly closing on Arachnus itself the Forge World surrendered, swearing allegiance to Mars, accepting Imperial Compliance and the orthodoxies of the Martian Mechanicum, and rebuilding that which they had lost.