A Bad Taste bit of Lore: the Stryxis and the trading of flesh...

And now for something a bit more fun. Though, obviously, still macabre...

In a supplement for the FFG Rogue Trader RPG, we get this interesting morsel of information:

Though many of their charters allow activities that might be considered treasonous (such as dealing with xenos races), there are plenty of zealous Imperial agents who have attempted to hold them accountable nonetheless. One notable instance was when the Rogue Trader Vorix Malcord was arrested in Port Wander for treason, because his grandfather had traded shipments of corpse-starch with the Stryxis.

Rogue Trader: Hostile Acquisitions, p. 8.

That is all the information we are given about the matter, and it serves as just a brief, interesting bit of flavour text to illustrate some key themes of the supplement, namely the ways in which Rogue Traders may have to navigate local or wider Imperial policing and laws, and how they may come into conflict with actors with other interests and mindsets.

Perhaps, in this instance, their specific Charter didn't allow for goods of this nature to be traded? Or could the Charter be read in a way that made such dealings seem illegal - especially if a hardliner was doing the reading? Or perhaps some Puritan zealot just didn't care about the Charter and wanted an excuse to get somebody they saw as a traitorous criminal?

As is often the case with the Imperium, while there are laws, customs, rights and traditions, might makes right remains a central fact of how the empire operates, and dictates the interactions of the many competing and often violently opposed factions of which it is composed. It's a dog-eat-dog galaxy.

The Stryxis themselves are also very interesting. They are one of the many fascinating Xenos races fleshed out in the FFG RPGs. Mysterious nomadic traders, they are active in the Koronus Expanse, and deal in all manner of goods, from the mundane to the highly esoteric and dangerous. Stryxis are also notorious for being slavers, dealing in or capturing populations to be sold on to customers. They are also known as expert flesh-crafters, using genetic engineering to create all manner of servant and warrior organisms, or altering some of their slaves to serve as slave-mercenaries which they sell or loan out to customers.

Why would the Stryxis want shipments of corpse-starch? The lore provides little clue. They are noted to often act in ways which seem to lack logic, at least from a human point of view. Perhaps it was just another resource they thought they could flog, one product among many others. Perhaps they have a market for human-based foods… (more on this at the end of the post). Perhaps they wanted it to help their flesh-crafting in some way? Perhaps even for more nefarious purposes?

In Nightbleed, it might be implied that corpse-starch still somehow contains the residue of human souls: https://www.reddit.com/r/40kLore/comments/12jkqx6/corpsestarch_is_still_full_of_souls/. Though this could also of course just be the fevered imagination of the horrified PoV character, or a metaphor for the ghastly enterprise. The fact that concentrated corpse-starch reserves can lead to fungi which grows on it producing drugs such as Spook and Ghast which awaken psychic powers does suggest that there is something strange going on with corpse-starch though, and maybe the Stryxis or their customers are interested in these effects.

Aside from flagging this nugget of lore due to it shedding light on an interesting Xenos race and some aspects of how the Imperium functions and how Rogue Traders operate within and beyond it, I also want to use this extract a way to offer some headcanon.

The film Event Horizon is often thought of as an official prequel to 40k, showcasing man’s first encounter with Warp travel.

I am making the completely robust and not at all tenuous case that we can do the same for another scifi “classic” (in a sense…): Peter Jackson’s Bad Taste (1987).

In Bad Taste, aliens visit Earth and kidnap people to use them as an ingredient for their intergalactic fast-food business. Well, I propose that they are still repurposing human flesh into tasty meals in the 41st millennium. They have just outsourced the procurement of the ingredient, and in this particular case were using the Stryxis as an intermediary. That way, the aliens don’t have to risk getting killed by their free-range livestock, as happened in the movie. And I’m sure the humans of 40k would be a tougher proposition than some Kiwis from 1987 were... There is also now the added benefit that the humans have very generously processed their own dead into a handy product, cutting down on the overheads for the fast-food business!

So, there you go. I hope you found this strange digression palatable and satiating.