Tallarn Desert Raiders - Tallarn Desert Raiders: The Tallarn Desert Raiders is the name of the Militarum Regimentum of the Astra Militarum raised from the Desert World of Tallarn whose soldiers are highly skilled at desert and mobile armoured warfare. They are primarily deployed in the Segmentum Tempestus and Segmentum Ultima and are particularly skilled at desert warfare and rapid armoured assaults.The Desert Raiders are mobile guerrilla fighters, evasive and opportunistic. They are especially known for their lightning-quick Sentinel and hard-hitting tank squadrons and are masters of hit-and-run mobile warfare. They love to strike a killing blow at the heart of an enemy formation before returning to their own lines, prepared to pounce once more.The people of Tallarn are extremely resourceful and pragmatic. They are patient, determined and utterly ferocious in pursuit of their enemies. Tallarn are all accomplished riders, and often will use riding mounts to move from battle to battle, dismounting only when they are close to the enemy and wish to employ stealth. Once the enemy is sighted, the Tallarn will stalk them closely, relying on their practiced marksmanship and lightning-quick curved combat knives to achieve victory.Once a fertile, verdant Agri-world, Tallarn was devastated early in the history of the Imperium. During the dark days of the Horus Heresy in the early 31st Millennium, the warriors of the Iron Warriors Traitor Legion unleashed powerful Virus Bombs upon the world's surface, scouring it of almost all life, and leaving only a few pockets of survivors in subterranean shelters. When the Iron Warriors descended from orbit to claim and fortify this poisoned world as one of their countless citadels, they faced immediate and savage resistance from those who had survived, braving the surface in armoured vehicles that would protect them from the virus-infested air.What followed, simply dubbed the Battle of Tallarn, remains to this day the single largest tank engagement in the history of the Imperium, with millions of vehicles clashing and withdrawing in brutal exchanges over the course of solar months. In spite of the sheer size of the conflict, the Tallarn people could not hope to face the Heretic Astartes in open battle, and instead quickly mastered guerrilla warfare strategies that allowed them to better elude the retaliation of the Iron Warriors forces, vanishing beneath the sands after each sortie, only to engage in another elsewhere. In time, the Iron Warriors withdrew from the world that had been so costly to them, and the people of Tallarn were given the opportunity to rebuild. To this day, the Tallarn have a particularly fearsome reputation for armoured warfare, and their tank crews are rightly feared.In the centuries following the Horus Heresy, the poisons and pathogens in the atmosphere diminished entirely, but the world was forever changed. In place of rolling hills, bountiful fields, and broad seas, were dunes of sulphurous sand, sun-scorched plains, and mesas of wind-scoured rock, with what little water remained lingering as vapour in the skies above. Constructing tall vapour traps that could gather this vital moisture, and expanding their subterranean homes with tunnels, caverns, and surface domes, the population was protected from the deadly sandstorms and extreme conditions. Tallarn has remained this way for millennia.Tallarn regiments have adapted to fight in this environment, where to become stranded is to die an excruciating and drawn out death. They commonly consist of mobile guerilla fighters, as evasive as they are opportunistic. Masters of hit-and-run warfare, they aim to strike a killing blow at the heart of the enemy before returning to their own lines and preparing to pounce once more. Tallarn infantry regiments are capable of fighting in incredibly loose formations, employing swift guerilla warfare to cripple isolated positions or lure enemy fighters away from the support of their allies.With so little to offer to the Imperium's tithe collectors, the Tallarn can reasonably give only soldiers, and they do this with pride. Owing to the subterranean tunnels they grow up in, and the barren deserts of their homeworld's surface, the Tallarn people are skilled in fighting across open ground and in narrow tunnels alike, and Tallarn regiments still favour the hit-and-run tactics mastered by their ancestors during the Horus Heresy, moving swiftly and striking with surprise and precision before retreating to regroup and stage the next attack.For this reason, the most common Tallarn regiments are infantry, Rough Rider cavalry mounted on horses or the reptilian Mukaali, or armoured regiments, all of which focus on some particular element of the favoured strategies of the Tallarn -- stealth, swiftness, and the killing blow.The forces of Tallarn have a long-held aptitude for mechanised warfare and field an abundance of armoured and mechanised infantry regiments. Rather than using their vehicles as a wall of steel, Tallarn Tank Commanders pride themselves on their ability to coordinate fast spearhead assaults, their squadrons weaving between allied formations to strike unexpectedly at the unprepared foe.Many Tallarn forces have also come to appreciate the utility of the Sentinel walker due to its effectiveness as a means of crossing even rough terrain swiftly without sacrificing firepower.Tallarn forces are often somewhat willful and independent, their traditional skills ill-suited to standing in static battle lines or holding fortifications, when they could instead be creeping up upon an enemy and executing them with the edge of a knife or a carefully-placed shot. As a result, they are often employed as vanguard and reconnaissance forces, or as the spearhead of a concerted attack, where their speed and stealth are of the greatest use.