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Definately feeling aggressive tendencies sir!

BrianDavion wrote:
You might not like them but you aren';t everyone. the Ultramarine hating is old hat. it doesn't make you look "cool"

The goal is not to look cool. The goal is to purge the setting of the narcissistic heretics and their blasphemous abomination of a primarch.

 Peregrine wrote:

BrianDavion wrote:
You might not like them but you aren';t everyone. the Ultramarine hating is old hat. it doesn't make you look "cool"

The goal is not to look cool. The goal is to purge the setting of the narcissistic heretics and their blasphemous abomination of a primarch.

Hear, hear. What Bobby G is doing is blasphemy. Legions have been purged for less.

To the OP. Read the Taros Campaign. It's honestly the most well realised campaign book out there. Full of insight and actual strategy. It also shows how Marines really operate. Lightning strikes, followed by rapid extraction. Or overwhelming blitzkrieg but with no 'staying power'. It's sort of like an Anthony Beevor book in Spaaaaaaace.

 Peregrine wrote:

BrianDavion wrote:
You might not like them but you aren';t everyone. the Ultramarine hating is old hat. it doesn't make you look "cool"

The goal is not to look cool. The goal is to purge the setting of the narcissistic heretics and their blasphemous abomination of a primarch.

Sorry the Ultramarines are more successful than your unknown Founding special snowflake Chapter that nobody cares about.

 Peregrine wrote:

 EmpNortonII wrote:
Ultramarines

/thread

Nobody likes them. Kill them off and you'll be celebrated as a hero.

I like the Ultramarines. They are dependable, hardworking marines who show up and get the job done with the least dumbfethery of any Astartes chapter.

Just use one of these. http://wh40k.lexicanum.com/wiki/Loyal_Space_Marine_Chapters_(List)

I would recommend you to wipe out a Black Templar Crusade, because their are big as Chapters and dont have a Base on a Planet.
And they are fething frenzy psychotic murderer so they get what they deserve.

To sidestep a bit from just space marines, remember that Imperium isn't really nation state in a modern sense, more like a feudal empire, in the vain of the Holy Roman Empire, or a defence alliance like NATO. So, neighbouring imperial worlds can still engage in all kinds of internal tussels and wars, as long as they just keep paying their taxes no one really cares. Badab War didn't really start when Lught Huron started a military build up or when declared himself a tyrant, but when he refused to pay tithes.

Also, the old necron codex mentions that Imperiums explorators have protocols that emphasise making friendly contact with aliens, atleast at first.

Also also, just as a personal musing. In a certain sense its kinda a pity in that 30k(or 40k) we never really get to see stories from the "other side", you know, no refugees begging for help or beaten survivors vowing for revenge. Imperium could easily be shown as like the Huns, driving terrified peoples before them, causing far more damage they even think. Though, I guess it doesn't really fit the tone of the setting, it might get a bit too real, or grim. You know, if little timmys noble Spesh Muhriines are shown slaughtering their way through terrified, wailing refugees, with mothers clutching their children and people being trampled to death by their friends and family.

Slayer-Fan123 wrote:

 Peregrine wrote:

BrianDavion wrote:
You might not like them but you aren';t everyone. the Ultramarine hating is old hat. it doesn't make you look "cool"

The goal is not to look cool. The goal is to purge the setting of the narcissistic heretics and their blasphemous abomination of a primarch.

Sorry the Ultramarines are more successful than your unknown Founding special snowflake Chapter that nobody cares about.

Amen. which let's get down to the brass tacks here, that's ultimately why the rage over the Ultramarines, people where upset when the 5th edition codex came out that their special snowflake chapter was implied to be "n ot as good as the Ultramarines"

BrianDavion wrote:

Slayer-Fan123 wrote:

 Peregrine wrote:

BrianDavion wrote:
You might not like them but you aren';t everyone. the Ultramarine hating is old hat. it doesn't make you look "cool"

The goal is not to look cool. The goal is to purge the setting of the narcissistic heretics and their blasphemous abomination of a primarch.

Sorry the Ultramarines are more successful than your unknown Founding special snowflake Chapter that nobody cares about.

Amen. which let's get down to the brass tacks here, that's ultimately why the rage over the Ultramarines, people where upset when the 5th edition codex came out that their special snowflake chapter was implied to be "n ot as good as the Ultramarines"

The whole "Special Snowflake" garbage is childish and only serves to make your own argument weaker.

The bigger reason people dislike Ultramarines is because they are the poster child marine chapter for 40k (which is fine if they want to use them as the default color scheme for their products) but they take it a couple of steps further by making them the focus of a large portion of the fluff. There are many chapters out there and yet a large portion of the content in the codexs and books revolve around the Ultramarines. Same goes for a lot of the other factions (especially xenos) that get shoved into the background while the IoM (With the poster child Ultramarines taking the lead) hogs the limelight. Variety is the spice of life and all that but it gets a bit old when everything is Ultramarine flavored.

As to the OP: I would recommend not "wiping out a chapter" but instead having your minor xenos empire rout an Imperial Expeditionary Fleet that was sent to eradicate the xenos (and probably underestimated them or had some weak intel on their tactics, tech, and/or numbers). The xenos could of inflicted heavy casualties on the Fleet and heavily depleted the numbers of some attached (make up your own chapter) Space Marine force. With this change you could develop some grudges and bad blood between the xenos and the IoM forces that where apart of the fleet (maybe have a chapter master slain or grievously wounded). The xenos should of had to pay its own cost for this victory with maybe some of their important worlds ruined and thus avoiding the boredom of a one sided stomp and gives the xenos something to rally behind or grow some hatred for the forces involved.

 Vankraken wrote:

BrianDavion wrote:

Slayer-Fan123 wrote:

 Peregrine wrote:

BrianDavion wrote:
You might not like them but you aren';t everyone. the Ultramarine hating is old hat. it doesn't make you look "cool"

The goal is not to look cool. The goal is to purge the setting of the narcissistic heretics and their blasphemous abomination of a primarch.

Sorry the Ultramarines are more successful than your unknown Founding special snowflake Chapter that nobody cares about.

Amen. which let's get down to the brass tacks here, that's ultimately why the rage over the Ultramarines, people where upset when the 5th edition codex came out that their special snowflake chapter was implied to be "n ot as good as the Ultramarines"

The whole "Special Snowflake" garbage is childish and only serves to make your own argument weaker.

The bigger reason people dislike Ultramarines is because they are the poster child marine chapter for 40k (which is fine if they want to use them as the default color scheme for their products) but they take it a couple of steps further by making them the focus of a large portion of the fluff. There are many chapters out there and yet a large portion of the content in the codexs and books revolve around the Ultramarines. Same goes for a lot of the other factions (especially xenos) that get shoved into the background while the IoM (With the poster child Ultramarines taking the lead) hogs the limelight. Variety is the spice of life and all that but it gets a bit old when everything is Ultramarine flavored.

As to the OP: I would recommend not "wiping out a chapter" but instead having your minor xenos empire rout an Imperial Expeditionary Fleet that was sent to eradicate the xenos (and probably underestimated them or had some weak intel on their tactics, tech, and/or numbers). The xenos could of inflicted heavy casualties on the Fleet and heavily depleted the numbers of some attached (make up your own chapter) Space Marine force. With this change you could develop some grudges and bad blood between the xenos and the IoM forces that where apart of the fleet (maybe have a chapter master slain or grievously wounded). The xenos should of had to pay its own cost for this victory with maybe some of their important worlds ruined and thus avoiding the boredom of a one sided stomp and gives the xenos something to rally behind or grow some hatred for the forces involved.

Gee imagine that. Aliens, whose line of thinking typically can't be related to, get less fluff than frickin humans from the Imperium. Shocking.

If it weren't Ultramarines it would've been Blood Angels, Space Wolves, or Dark Angels. This has been discussed before. It's literally being a hipster and hating something JUST BECAUSE OF POPULARITY.

Agreed with Slayer, people can dress it up all they want but it;s literally just "THIS IS POPULAR SO I'M GONNA HATE IT" or "HOW DARE WHAT I LIKE ISN'T MORE POPULAR!"

Pick one of the chapters sent on a Penitence Crusade.

The thing is that you have to remember the audience you're writing for. Most people who are into 40K won't accept a story where a chapter of SM getting butchered, even if you give good reasons for them making tactical mistakes that leads to it. Most people will just call your Xenos Mary Sues. Unless you right the Chapter loss as some heroic sacrifice or give them a ridiculously good accounting, many people won't accept it.

That's not to say that you can't get around this or that there isn't stories where the IoM gets wrecked by a minor Xenos species. One of my favorite bits of fluff from the 3rd Ed BRB was a page detailing several worlds an Imperial fleet encountered. One was a Xenos world they quickly decided to exterminate. This unknown species proved to be too advanced and too well defended and forced the fleet to retreat and set up warning beacons near the planet. In this case the story included a mysterious peril of space that the IoM faced.

If you want to show your guys as being cool, you might want to frame your story in a way that is different than my guys fight SM and win, in order to find approval. You could try writing the story from the point of view of a SM whose chapter was sent into a virtual hornets nest and was getting slaughtered. This way you could write a slaughter but still give the 40K fans their SM doing super heroics in the face of a fight they can't win. Another might be to make a brutal chapter that launched some terrible attacks against your empire, detailing the shock and horror your heroes felt. Make the story about a dedicated mission of vengeance at no matter what the cost. The goal here would be to give the chapter at least the air of having kicked a lot of butt before and that your heroes haven't just randomly encountered the chapter but have been plotting their murder. You still probably want a good showing from the chapter to satisfy though.

Adventure seeds:

Hrud have apparently killed more than a few Chapters, since Star Phantoms are noted as being one of the few Chapters who have survived a Hrud migration alone.

Some rulebooks mention Zygo-Cambians...Zygo-Camgians… Zygo...whatevers, who have managed to beat back continious imperial invasions for 500 years and counting.

Hyper-violent Barghesi need an entire Chapter dedicated to just containing them.

Ultramarines

 EmpNortonII wrote:
Ultramarines

Ultramarines.

If you don't want to do Ultramarine, then do Space Wolves. Or Grey Knight maybe?

If it has to be a first founding chapter then it has to Blood Angels.

BrianDavion wrote:

chimera0205 wrote:
I never said they were weaker than the tau. overall they actual control more territory due to them being around far more and being made up of several already established empires that merged into a federation the tau control 20 major systems (or septs) the xenos federation controls about a 150. 20 for each of the 6 major species, a dozen or so that are controlled by the federation itself, and a handful of miscelanious planets that dont fit in any category. such as a couple frontier human words that joined them. they would fight just as hard as the tau would to protect one of their homeworlds and thus earn the respect of the crusaders just like the tau did. also while your right that traveling great distances can take weeks but as I just said they only have to traverse a distance of a hundred and half systems at the most. aslo remember that one advantage of pinpoint FTL is that you can actually pop out in syatem instead of having to pop out outside the syatme and speand a couple days traveling at sub light to actually get to the planet like the imperium does. so for short distances the xenos drives might actually be technically faster cause they can appear right next to the planet they want to go to. so I dont think that assembling thier fleet would be as diffucult as your making it out to be.

So.... how come nobodies ever heard of them before?

That's a really bizarre question. Who said nobody's ever heard of them before? I mean, WE haven't, sure, but just because we don't focus on something doesn't mean it's not there. The Q'Orl were mentioned out of nowhere as a massive race, the fact WE hadn't heard of them before doesn't mean they weren't real.

Never the less, despite what people are saying, yeah, killing off a space marine chapter is absolutely fine. There's a thousand of them, and they get wiped out a fair bit in the lore. I definitely wouldn't wipe out a canonical chapter, but if you want to make your own and wipe them out, that's fine. It seems ridiculous people are fine with "Yeah, just wipe out an Orc WAAAGH! or a Tyranid hive fleet, which tend to be really powerful. Space Marine chapters, as long as they're not being backed up by some large Imperial force, is perfectly reasonable. It's a thousand men who are super hard to kill, but only a thousand, when you can have many, many times that many's soldiers.

In regards to whether there's enough space in the galaxy or you should put them in a sub-galaxy, obviously this galaxy's fine and makes more sense. There are 200 billions stars. 150 systems is NOTHING and you could fit them in wherever you want.

Seriously, everything in your lore seems fine IF it's done well. Obviously, it could be terrible, with your super space soldiers kliling space marines easily, but given how reasonable you seem to be with criticism, this seems to be fine.

I'd say you'd be better off with them having a severe conflict with a chapter with the chapter being heavily bloodied and having to retreat and your empire winning but being surprised at the strength of the marines. It let's your guys win without making the other side feel sand bagged, gives your empire a hook for old enemies that could reappear along with the threat of the empire finding out about them as hooks.

I know someone earlier said you don't have to right about adversity, but you do need to have conflict in a story. Would you want to just read about the day Bilbo ate a pie and took a nap and nothing eventful happened? You can have your guys come out on top, but they should feel like they have to try or it's going to feel Mary Sueish.

Now if you don't have a conflict your characters are going through you're really just righting background material leading to a story. That has merit in it's own, but it's usually a means to an end to flesh out characterization for a story.

 Corennus wrote:
If it has to be a first founding chapter then it has to Blood Angels.

hoinestly any story about your pet xenos race that consists of "and then they killed *famous SM chapter here*" is going to be, rightly, accused of being a mary sue fan spank piece of fiction.

Your best bet is to create your own chapter so you can tailor them into the villians you want them to be. It might be useful to go at it from an angle like if you were trying to create a chapter you actually wanted to play. You don't have to get super detailed but giving them a point of origin, strengths, flaws, fighting style, maybe a paragraph or two descriptor of the chapter, and a sentence or two about important people like the chapter master and chief librarian. This info doesn't need to be in your story, it's just good to have to figure out how they might go about attacking city X in your story.

I'd probably do something like this for Orks, if I was writing a story with them, as I don't really like them. Investing some in my villian so I don't turn them into bumbling idiots who are just there to get gunned down.

Blood Angels are always being wiped out and reformed.

Coming back from the dead is just what space vampires love to do.