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Just looking for a location for my space marines to call home, it doesn't even have to be a planet, i'm open to all ideas.

That seems a bit expensive. Why not just clear a shelf space?

Nor a planet, amoon or creusader ship, lie on the moce

Epsilon 3. I hear it has good defences.

This is impossibly vague and wide.

What are your dudesmen doing? Why do we care about them; what's their story? What are they into?

WHEN are they?

IMO, pick a significant/funny/interesting piece of real history and abstract it into the 41st Millenium. It'll inform a lot of the rest of the details.

Take a map of the Imperium, close your eyes, & touch the map. That's where your guys are from. If what you touched is named, great. If not, make up a name.

 Excommunicatus wrote:
This is impossibly vague and wide.

What are your dudesmen doing? Why do we care about them; what's their story? What are they into?

WHEN are they?

IMO, pick a significant/funny/interesting piece of real history and abstract it into the 41st Millenium. It'll inform a lot of the rest of the details.

My marines are part of a chapter called the forsaken legion and part of a larger faction called the imperial bovark confederacy, they are not affiliated with the imperium and are considered renegades and traitors by the rest of the imperium. That is pretty much all of the information i could give you on my chapter.

Fleet Based makes sense then, you're much more vulnerable to being blasted off the face of the Galaxy if you're all cooped up in one place and recruiting from one world.

 BaconCatBug wrote:
Fleet Based makes sense then, you're much more vulnerable to being blasted off the face of the Galaxy if you're all cooped up in one place and recruiting from one world.

when you say fleet based, do you mean a ton of battle barges or various types of ships?

Almost no chapters have more than two battle barges.

 JonathanCadbury wrote:

 BaconCatBug wrote:
Fleet Based makes sense then, you're much more vulnerable to being blasted off the face of the Galaxy if you're all cooped up in one place and recruiting from one world.

when you say fleet based, do you mean a ton of battle barges or various types of ships?

Something like the Dark Angels or the Black Templars. They operate out of their fleet (of which only a few would be battle barges, it would mostly be support ships around a flagship fortress-monastery) and recruit from whatever worlds happen to have suitable genetic stock (afaik they favour feral worlds).

Would it be a good idea to say my marines possess a sizable fleet, considering they are supplied by a larger faction and scavenge ships from other groups?

 JonathanCadbury wrote:
Would it be a good idea to say my marines possess a sizable fleet, considering they are supplied by a larger faction and scavenge ships from other groups?

Renegades with a pressganged fleet of serfs? There are crazier things that have been proposed.

What variations of ships do the Imperium have? Considering they don't like xenos tech.

Would it be reasonable to say they have a massive ship/fortress that the leadership lives on and goes along with their main fleet

 JonathanCadbury wrote:
What variations of ships do the Imperium have? Considering they don't like xenos tech.

Would it be reasonable to say they have a massive ship/fortress that the leadership lives on and goes along with their main fleet

It would be reasonable to assume they've stolen an Emperor-Class battleship at some point.

Space Marine ships and Imperial Navy ships.

If you want an example of the type of fluff you seem to be going for, I would look up The Badab War, which is the tale of a Space Marine chapter trying to carve out their own little empire in the Badab sector. It may not have ended too well for them, but who is to say that has to happen to your chapter? I would just be careful not to make your fluff too extreme. It is easy to believe that a chapter could create a little place of their own, but if you go too big then it may seem a bit silly.

As for a fleet, it really depends. If Space Marines took over an area of space, they would probably take control of a lot of the local Guard and Navy forces. That would give you a mix of the chapter's ships and whatever the Navy had. I would guess that the rebels would not have access to as many of the very large ships that loyalists have. For example, the in the Battlefleet Gothic rules for the Badab war, the secessionist forces didn't have access to Navy battleships, instead relying on their battlebarges. They relied far more on cruiser and escort class vessels, which are far easier to acquire and maintain.

You don't have to go fleet based though. Just pick somewhere out of the way and you can do whatever you like. With the speed that the Imperium moves at, your little fiefdom could go unmolested for hundreds of years, whilst the reports and paperwork are moving through the various levels of Imperial bureaucracy. You could say that your chapter was out in the Halo Stars, or one of the other extreme regions. Who knows what goes on out there?

I am liking the idea of my little confederacy having a sizable naval force, but i do think it would be appropriate to have a home world of some kind, and maybe they did create a safe haven away from the prying eyes of imperial bureaucrats.

Fleet based ornolanet based, somewhere in the North of the Galaxy (Imperium Nilhilus) makes the most sense un terms of general location. That whole portion of the Galaxy is bow beyond easy control from Terra, and is the perfect place for warlords rising to replace Imperial rule with their own.

Are there any notable locations or events going on currently in Imperium Nilhilus?

You have to be very careful with how many battleships you decide to give the faction. Those things are some of the most valuable objects that the Imperium has. More than one or two and the Segmentum Naval command would become very interested, very quickly. You could say that they got their hands on a sizable amount of ships through other means though. Perhaps they had access to a mothballed fleet. So you could have a decent number of things like Grand Cruisers, large ships that have generally fallen out of use.

Would it be at all possible for my faction to make their own ships?

 JonathanCadbury wrote:
Would it be at all possible for my faction to make their own ships?

Honestly, it is a bit of a headache. If you are talking about small ships, that is probably fine. Things like escorts, transports, system ships and suchlike are comparatively easy to make. Once you get up to proper ships of the line, you would have to start thinking about rebel Mechanicus, large scale ship yards and things like that. Also, ships that size take a lot of resources and time to build.

I suppose it would also be a little out of scope for a small empire to be building ships that the massive galaxy spanning Imperium can't

 JonathanCadbury wrote:
I suppose it would also be a little out of scope for a small empire to be building ships that the massive galaxy spanning Imperium can't

Not necessarily. A Forge World is one world that can build some pretty big stuff if they get supplied with the right raw materials; give your small empire a Mechanicum vassal and while you might not be churning battleships off the production line you might have shipbuilding capabilities out of proportion to the number of worlds involved.

I think a daring raid on a mothball yard to "liberate" a few unused ships is a better idea. Gives the fleet it's own special feel. I'm not biased because I like Vengeance class grand cruisers or anything...

Although most fleets in the Imperium are mainly Cruiser class and escort class vessels. Larger than that are generally super valuable and powerful. You also have Space Marine vessels, which are not bad. The idea was that space marine ships would focus on planetary invasions, whilst the Navy had the ships for space battles. However, battlebarges and strike cruisers are no joke.

Wouldn't it be a little alarming if someone who wasn't inside imperial jurisdiction got a hold of a forge world though?



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 Trickstick wrote:
I think a daring raid on a mothball yard to "liberate" a few unused ships is a better idea. Gives the fleet it's own special feel. I'm not biased because I like Vengeance class grand cruisers or anything...

Although most fleets in the Imperium are mainly Cruiser class and escort class vessels. Larger than that are generally super valuable and powerful. You also have Space Marine vessels, which are not bad. The idea was that space marine ships would focus on planetary invasions, whilst the Navy had the ships for space battles. However, battlebarges and strike cruisers are no joke.

I am planning a large scale campaign with a few buddies, and taking a world to "liberate" a few ships doesn't sound that bad.

There's such a thing as "renegade Forge Worlds"/"hereteks", that's where the Traitor Legions' arsenal gets built. Just set one up as a renegade rather than going full Chaos and you're good to go.

 AnomanderRake wrote:
There's such a thing as "renegade Forge Worlds"/"hereteks", that's where the Traitor Legions' arsenal gets built. Just set one up as a renegade rather than going full Chaos and you're good to go.

I imagine that the reason these worlds are taken is either because the techs there went full chaos, or traitors used the help of chaos warpy stuff to take over.

The Adeptus Mechanicus is an incomprehensible pseudo-feudal structure in which all Forge Worlds 'theoretically' owe allegiance to Mars and to the pact between Mars and Terra, but in practice the Fabricator-General of a given Forge World has no superiors and nobody can give him orders unless they're prepared to send a fleet to enforce them. There were Forge Worlds who were subverted, certainly, but it doesn't take Chaos magic to make a Fabricator-General tell Mars exactly where it can shove its gilded smokestacks if the political conditions around that Forge World happen to make seceding advantageous.

Though note that the nature of the pact between Mars and Terra is such that a Forge World that actually does this has seceded from the Adeptus Mechanicus, so your little empire is going to be facing down orthodox Mechanicum fleets sent to bring the Forge World back into the fold along with the Imperial Navy.

I do like the idea of large scale conflict with imperial forces as it will feed into a campaign game, and convincing a fabricator general to begin producing armaments for my forces does sound appealing.