Sidon Protocols - Gilded Fetters of Blood and Iron: Only a few Knight Households maintained contact with the domains of the Mechanicum during the Age of Strife. Undoubtedly many of those that did not have long since perished, overwhelmed by the terrors of Old Night, or have lost the last of the Knight armours that marked them out, devolving into simple Feral Worlds that maintain only the neo-feudal traditions of their origins. Those few that did survive the trials of the Age of Strife, prevailing alone and unaided, were much sought-after prizes for the expanding armies of Mankind.The Expeditionary Fleets of the Great Crusade went to great lengths to secure such worlds, prizing the skills of a Household's warriors and the power of their Knight armours. However it has long been the Imperium's policy to secure the loyalty of these rediscovered Households directly to the Emperor and for Imperial factotums to represent the Household in all dealings with the Mechanicum. For, while a common citizen may see the Imperium of Mankind as one realm, it is more of a loose alliance of competing human political powers that ever seek to outdo each other. Yet, despite the efforts of the Emperor's servants, some few Knight Households escaped the Great Crusade's attention only to be chanced upon by Mechanicum Explorator vessels alone or ceded to the control of a Forge World in exchange for some portion of its industrial output or the service of its assembled Taghmata.Such rediscovered Knight Worlds, often sorely in need of new armours and lacking any long association with their new patron Forge, found themselves caught in something of a devil's bargain. The dire need for technological expertise and replacement armours serve as a simple leash for the coldly logical Archmagi of a Forge World to wield in order to seal a Knight Household in to its services, and one that is applied with chilling efficiency. Where in some cases the Sidon Protocols serve to bind together House and Forge in amicable alliance, in such instances the complex terms of debt and duty were manipulated to strangle the political independence of the Household. This was itself a pale reflection of the worst excesses of the Mechanicum in this regard during the anarchy and desperation of the Age of Strife, when Households bound to such a fate could expect little courtesy from their new masters, and inevitably functioned as the vanguard of any military operation conducted by their patron Forge's Taghmata, serving ultimately as an expendable shock assault force. Nor did they expect to receive the resources the Mechanicum granted to those Households able to leverage either long-standing alliances, or an established force of arms, and were purposefully kept short of fully functional armours and often only supplied with older patterns and less powerful configurations of arms. The least fortunate of such Households are rumoured to have been forcibly "enhanced" by the shunned Adepts of the Lachrimallus on particularly wayward Forge Worlds, leaving them literal slaves to the will of their Archmagos Prelate; unsleeping, fearless warriors whose only desire is the final escape of death. Although not quite so extreme, the fall of House Atrax under the sway of the Cyclothrathe Mechanicum serves as a dark exemplar of what could become of such Houses. It is believed that during the horrors of the Horus Heresy and the Great Scouring, this practice, suppressed during the Great Crusade, saw a hidden revival, though if this was the case on the Loyalist side, such Thrall-Houses have long since been destroyed or hidden from the sight of the Emperor's servants.