The Conclave's Fall

Lore & Background

Neocadia is a city of staggering verticality, a needle of hab-blocks and transit shafts piercing the clouds of its world. At its apex sits the Conclave, the governing council that allocates resources, enforces the Inquisition's edicts, and keeps the billions of souls below from tearing the city apart in their hunger. For generations, the Conclave has been the face of order in a place where order is a luxury few can afford. But the Imperium's long war against Chaos and the endless grind of survival have left scars even in the highest chambers. The Conclave's Fall campaign reveals a body that has been compromised—not by a single dramatic act of betrayal, but by the slow, grinding corrosion of ambition, desperation, and the terrible pragmatism of a city that cannot feed all its people. The agents who walk its halls find that the line between protector and predator has blurred beyond recognition, and that the Inquisition's own authority is entangled in the web of corruption they are sent to untangle. What makes the Conclave's Fall resonate with players is its sense of institutional dread. The enemy is not a lone warlord or a daemonic incursion; it is the system itself, the very architecture of governance in a hive city, turned against the people it was sworn to shepherd. The agents are not liberators so much as surgeons, cutting out the rot in a body that will keep bleeding long after the knife is withdrawn.

In Their Own Story

The elevator shaft groaned like a dying thing as it climbed through the mid-levels of Neocadia, the agents pressed against the walls, their gear slick with condensation and the faint copper tang of old blood. Below them, the warrens churned—millions of lives stacked in hab-blocks, the hum of industry never ceasing, the ever-present smell of recycled air and machine oil. Above them: the Conclave. The spires caught the light of the hive's artificial sun and threw it back in prismatic shards, beautiful and cold. Commander Voss checked her sidearm for the third time. The Inquisition's orders were clear: investigate, contain, eliminate. But the reports from the lower levels told a different story. The Conclave had not merely failed. It had *chosen* to fail. It had let the rot spread because the rot was useful. "They're waiting for us up there," she said, not looking at her squad. "And they're not going to be polite about it."

The elevator shuddered. The doors opened onto a corridor of white marble veined with gold, and the silence that greeted them was worse than any alarm.

Reader's Guide

⚠️ SPOILER WARNING: The following recap covers the full narrative arc of The Conclave's Fall. Read at your own risk. The campaign opened with agents receiving Inquisition orders to investigate anomalies in Neocadia's mid-levels—disruptions in supply lines, unexplained casualties, and a growing sense that the Conclave's oversight had gone dark. Early missions were straightforward: secure a location, eliminate hostiles, gather intelligence. The tone was procedural, almost bureaucratic, as if the agents were simply doing paperwork with guns. The first major escalation came when the agents discovered that the disruptions were not random. The Conclave had been deliberately allowing certain sectors to deteriorate, using the resulting chaos to consolidate power and eliminate rivals. The Inquisition's own agents were being used as disposable tools. This revelation shifted the campaign from "clear the room" to "the room is the enemy."

Mid-campaign missions pushed the agents deeper into the Conclave's inner workings. They found evidence of a faction within the council that had grown so entangled in the hive's suffering that the distinction between governance and predation had dissolved. Boss encounters in this stretch featured Conclave enforcers and corrupted officials, each fight punctuated by environmental storytelling—files, logs, and the remnants of those the Conclave had quietly removed. The final act of the campaign brought the agents face-to-face with the Conclave's leadership in the upper spires. The confrontation was not a simple kill order; it was a reckoning. The agents had to navigate a gauntlet of the Conclave's defenses, confront the source of the corruption, and make a choice about what remained of the institution. The campaign closed with the Conclave's authority shattered, Neocadia's power vacuum wide open, and the agents left to wonder who would fill the silence. The hive did not become safer. It simply became *less* controlled, which in the Imperium is its own kind of danger.

Did You Know?

• The Conclave's Fall campaign is set entirely within Neocadia, the same hive city that anchors all of Darktide's narrative, making the political corruption feel intimate rather than abstract.
• The campaign's tone deliberately contrasts with more action-focused content in the game, leaning into institutional dread and bureaucratic horror as a uniquely 40K flavor of villainy.
• Agents in Darktide operate under the Inquisition's authority, and The Conclave's Fall highlights the tension between the Inquisition's mandate to protect and its willingness to sacrifice populations for the greater good.
• The campaign's setting in the upper spires of Neocadia provides a stark visual and thematic contrast to the lower warrens, emphasizing the gulf between those who govern and those who are governed in the Imperium.