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The Salamanders have a mutated melanochrome giving them coal black skin and glowing red eyes. My question is do we know when the mutation occurred? Did it happen almost immediately giving us demonic looking Salamanders during the Heresy or did it take hundreds or even thousands of years? Could there be successor chapters that do not have a mutated melanochrome?

That's really hard to answer but nice idea.Do succsesor chapters do have slower reflexes and black skin.

The Salamanders have a mutated melanochrome giving them coal black skin and glowing red eyes. Did it happen almost immediately giving us demonic looking Salamanders during the Heresy or did it take hundreds or even thousands of years?

It happened out of the blue about a year or two ago. Seriously this is a rather recent change to the salamander background (although Nick Kyme, BL writer of the Salamander books, states it is more of a clarification the studio hadn't made).

To your question though, what I have read I think points to this being an immediate thing since the Heresy. Vulkan was coal black and also the radiation of Nocture is said to be a culprit in causing the change.

Could their be successor chapters that do not have a mutated melanochrome?

There is no officially recognized Salamander successor Chapter (most certainly no 1st founding), although the Black Dragons, Dragon Warriors and perhaps others are rumored to share geneseed with the Salamanders. None are said to look coal black though and red eyes are not mentioned that I know of. The Black Dragons do have the notorious bony growth mutation.

winterman wrote:It happened out of the blue about a year or two ago. Seriously this is a rather recent change to the salamander background (although Nick Kyme, BL writer of the Salamander books, states it is more of a clarification the studio hadn't made).

As car as I'm aware of the original Sallys had the coal black skin and red eyes and then someone screwed up the paintjob for Armageddon and then GW had to come back with the clarification that Armageddon was wrong and they'd always been black and red.

To your question though, what I have read I think points to this being an immediate thing since the Heresy. Vulkan was coal black and also the radiation of Nocture is said to be a culprit in causing the change.

The radiation is the culprit but nothing says it was immediate. The mutation is a very impressive one that doesn't just render the implant non-functioning but actually keeps it functional but for a single, stable, cosmetic change. That's a highly specific mutation, something with incredibly low odds. There's no reason to assume the geneseed was warped instantly. Not to mention the original Sallys were created from Vulkan's geneseed that was taken prior to him being hurled to Nocturne and therefore is guaranteed, I think, to have a perfectly functioning melanochrome with no mutation.

I guess what I'm saying is that there's good reason to believe the original Sally's were perfectly normal space marines and there's no real reason to assume the mutation was instant.

There is no officially recognized Salamander successor Chapter (most certainly no 1st founding), although the Black Dragons, Dragon Warriors and perhaps others are rumored to share geneseed with the Salamanders. None are said to look coal black though and red eyes are not mentioned that I know of. The Black Dragons do have the notorious bony growth mutation.

That's something I'd been considering, quite a few potential successor chapters and the skin and eye issues seem to be a purely Salamander issue. We don't know of any certain successor chapters but then there are a lot of chapters out there that we don't know who they're descended from.

Tyyr wrote:

winterman wrote:It happened out of the blue about a year or two ago. Seriously this is a rather recent change to the salamander background (although Nick Kyme, BL writer of the Salamander books, states it is more of a clarification the studio hadn't made).

As car as I'm aware of the original Sallys had the coal black skin and red eyes and then someone screwed up the paintjob for Armageddon and then GW had to come back with the clarification that Armageddon was wrong and they'd always been black and red.

This.

I wish they didn't change it. I liked the idea of black Space Marines.

Led of course by Chapter Master Barakus.

Eh, the Grim Darkness of the Far Future belongs to whitey apparently. Personally I just say paint'em black if you want to, or any other skin tone. I've started to try and work in as many different ethnicities into my DH games as I can.

The root reason for this question is I'm creating a custom chapter for a DH Astartes campaign. I'd like to have them be a Salamander's descendant chapter but it not be immediately obvious the first time he takes off his helmet.

Well since were talking bout Salamanders I have question. I know they have slower reflexes then other Astartes but dont they have a Higher fortitude like there harder to kill then other Astartes?

Can I ask what you want a custom chapter for? Also, how freaking excited are you about Deathwatch?

Manchu wrote:Can I ask what you want a custom chapter for?

The hell of it mostly. And I am particularly fond of these two:



Who's chapter isn't in any way official. So I figured why the hell not.

Also, how freaking excited are you about Deathwatch?

Incredibly. Ironically I'm running an Deathwatch game in DH right now. Sadly neither of the two fan rules sets for Space Marines in DH really work so great. One is just meh. The other is pretty decent but suffered from a distinct lack of play testing in the character creation department. And it keeps DH's woefully underpowered weapons and gives them to Space Marines. I had to throw out the weapons tables wholesale and make my own.

Cool drawings! There's certainly nothing wrong with homebrew chapters, I just like the "official" ones because they bring their own fluff to the table and, if you're playing with 40k nutters, peoples' longstanding loyalties/hatred along with that. This is especially useful for RPing a Deathwatch squad. Where else are an Ultramarine, Space Wolf, Dark Angel, and Black Templar going to have to get along? (There could be a 40k sitcom about Deathwatch, now that I think of it.)

Have you tried using RT stats for weapons? The official Deathwatch rules are a long ways off, I guess.

Manchu wrote:(There could be a 40k sitcom about Deathwatch, now that I think of it.)

There was a short-lived webcomic about it, actually.

About two years off give or take a few months. I haven't seen the RT weapons yet. I just went ahead and made my own weapons and tried to stick to the fiction as much as possible. I REALLY don't like the DH weapons, even in a regular DH game. They're just way too blah and too uniform.

Well we've got a Smurf, a Sally, two Puppies, and a Raven Guard. I wanted something different and frankly none of the major chapters ever really spoke to me so I figured why the hell not, I like those images so I'll use them to found a chapter with. I wanted to use the Salamanders as their parent chapter but not have the obvious looks of the Sallys. I wanted their origins to not be immediately obvious and a mutated melanochrome would be a dead give away for the Salamanders. That's what really prompted the question.

At this point I think we're kinda OT but what the hell, its my thread.

My take is this: you may never determine the answer to this thread's question so just homebrew fluff around it. Just as a Chapter can become zygote-deficient so, too, can a successor chapter shed some of its parent's traits. IMO the blackness (or "darkness," as Rich James might say) was a result of being on Nocturne. Since all the origial legions are from Terra, the first sallys were as lilly white as every other human in the 40k universe. When they started going around with their Primarch is when the "darkness was spreading."

Well I was wondering if any of the fluff gurus might know and answer to the question. I was thinking of the Iron Dragons being from somewhere between the 5th and 7th founding. Late enough for the Sallys to have recovered but early enough to maybe not have mutated yet.

Yeah I'm kinda heard broken about them not being black marines either. Those guys had John henry written all over them. Thinking about that I have never seen a salamander painted without a helm on.

Any marine not recruited from Nocturne should be white (there being no black people and only a few asian chicks in the Emperor's galaxy) so you shouldn't have to worry overmuch about timelines.

Manchu wrote:(there being no black people and only a few asian chicks in the Emperor's galaxy)

Which is why my Deathwatch Team's Inquisitor is black and the next character I roll up will be Asian. I'm sick of all the white people.

As a white person myself, I shy away from RPing other ethnicities because (1) they don't have the same cultural backgrounds as IRL in the fantasy/scifi setting so I have no idea how they would act based on being non-white, (2) you can't actually see them so who really cares, and (3) I don't want to . . . er, slip into some unintentional racism while trying to get across the point to my PCs that the NPC is back, asian, etc.

Manchu wrote:As a white person myself, I shy away from RPing other ethnicities because (1) they don't have the same cultural backgrounds as IRL in the fantasy/scifi setting so I have no idea how they would act based on being non-white, (2) you can't actually see them so who really cares, and (3) I don't want to . . . er, slip into some unintentional racism while trying to get across the point to my PCs that the NPC is back, asian, etc.

I can sympathize. However

1) I just portray everyone the same. Yeah, kind of a cop out but in most settings like the the dividing line tends to be human vs. nonhuman. Tracing your lineage back to earth is the important thing, not which part of the planet. In this case given 38,000 years of distance I wouldn't bat an eye at black character named Miruku O'Malley. With that much time any race/culture combination you can think of would be popular.
2) I can see that, but in my head I can see what's going on so to me it matters. Maybe it's just me but I like to be able to see the character in my head, otherwise it just gets boring.
3) That's one benefit of playing on-line. You can review your words a couple times before they come out. And really aside from the Inquisitor's description in the opening of the RP it's unlikely to come up ever again.

Tyyr wrote:In this case given 38,000 years of distance I wouldn't bat an eye at black character named Miruku O'Malley.

I wouldn't if you made one in a near future or modern setting considering how many black families there are with the last name Coleman.