Overview
Krieg is a death world of the man-made kind: its surface is poisoned, blasted, and unfit for ordinary human hope. The visible planet is ruin. The living Krieg is below it, a vast subterranean hive-society of drills, manufactoria, sealed habitats, birth quotas, chapel-barracks, and rationed identity.
Its people inherit not prosperity but sentence. The world understands itself as guilty, and that belief has been engineered into civic structure. Population, industry, worship, and recruitment serve the same arithmetic: repay what cannot be repaid.
History
Krieg's defining wound was an atomic civil war between Imperial loyalists and rebels. The loyalist counterstroke did not preserve the planet so much as kill it in the name of preserving obedience, leaving a dead surface and a surviving culture of penance below.
That loyalist reconquest ground on for roughly five centuries of nuclear civil war across M40, hive contesting hive, and the penance culture it forged outlasted the fighting to become Krieg's founding sacrament. Generations were raised to believe that the only adequate answer to treachery was service without limit, complaint, or expectation of return.
Military significance
The Death Korps of Krieg practice attrition as doctrine and atonement as morale. Their regiments specialize in siege warfare, trench assault, methodical bombardment, hazardous environments, and the patient reduction of positions whose capture is measured in graves.
Krieg also preserves cavalry traditions, not as romance but as another tool for reconnaissance, pursuit, and shock under conditions where machines fail or command requires men to ride into fire. The world's recruitment economics are grimly efficient: lives are cultivated in bulk, disciplined early, equipped for expendability, and tithed to wars where casualty projections would shame softer planets into hesitation.
M41 and M42 status
Death world producing siege regiments.
M41 status: Krieg remains one of the Imperium's most reliable sources of siege formations. The Administratum values its regiments because they make despair administratively convenient.
Death world whose tithe remains brutally prized.
M42 status: In Era Indomitus, Krieg's tithe is more prized and more terrible. Broken routes increase demand for forces that can fight without comfort, reinforcement, or reassurance.
Timeline
Archive traditions place Krieg's atomic civil war at the root of its penitential order.
Subterranean hive quotas are reviewed against projected siege regiment demand.
Siege regiment allotments are entered into Tempestus mustering rolls.
Cavalry remount and gasmask supply contracts are renewed under Departmento audit.
Krieg quartermasters expand equipment reserves for long attrition campaigns.
Recruitment economics are judged acceptable despite severe wastage forecasts.
Emergency tithe requests increase before Rift-era mobilizations.
Indomitus planners keep Krieg formations in high demand.
Cartographic positions and several administrative details are intentionally approximate where published Warhammer sources conflict or provide no canonical coordinate system.