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 posermcbogus wrote:

I probably have more Templars headcannon, but I'll keep it to myself in case I get overexcited and start chaining things to my wrist while wearing a bedsheet tabard again.

Don't want that brush out of hand when the your eyes burn with a mixture of primer, sweat, and tears, at the eleventh consecutive hour of painting and there's still two dozen unpainted figures coming at you from across the table...

 posermcbogus wrote:
Oooh, I've got a few because of my rampant Black Templars fanboyism, but my fave has to be one I first heard here, though I don't remember where.

The Dark Angels deep unforgivable secret isn't that some of them have become heretics. Not only have marines from every chapter bar the Grey Knights fallen to chaos, but also half of the legions. Just the existence of the fallen isn't the secret. The real terrible secret is that at the end of the heresy, Lion El Johnson threw his lot in with Horus, without outwardly declaring for the arch-traitor. By the time he got to the sol system, the heresy had ended with Horus's defeat. So they just kept quiet, and returned to the imperial fold. This is the secret that the Dark Angels defend so dearly, and why they hunt those who know it so fervently. The existence of a single fallen endangers the very survival of the Dark Angels..

I thought this was canon?

I want to be wrong.

It is possible to fly a ship into the Realm of Chaos if one simply veers off the Astronomican and flies towards certain zones reflecting different emotions. Pits of rage and fire will lead to Khorne's kingdom, entropic, diseased holes will lead to the Mansion of Nurgle, fluctuating pools of magic will lead to Tzeentch, and areas filled with feelings of unbridled desire and obsession will lead to Slaanesh. Of course, any navigator who attempts this will almost certainly be reduced to goo and the crew of the ship will die or suffer a fate worse than death.

Dark Eldar never fight fair. All my battles of 2k vs 2k are not actually battles, they are distractions so that the real raiding force can go pick up the meat-bags that are now unprotected beyond the front line.

So even when I loose the match, the DE still win

Kayback wrote:

 posermcbogus wrote:
Oooh, I've got a few because of my rampant Black Templars fanboyism, but my fave has to be one I first heard here, though I don't remember where.

The Dark Angels deep unforgivable secret isn't that some of them have become heretics. Not only have marines from every chapter bar the Grey Knights fallen to chaos, but also half of the legions. Just the existence of the fallen isn't the secret. The real terrible secret is that at the end of the heresy, Lion El Johnson threw his lot in with Horus, without outwardly declaring for the arch-traitor. By the time he got to the sol system, the heresy had ended with Horus's defeat. So they just kept quiet, and returned to the imperial fold. This is the secret that the Dark Angels defend so dearly, and why they hunt those who know it so fervently. The existence of a single fallen endangers the very survival of the Dark Angels..

I thought this was canon?

Old lore left it ambiguous enough that it might be true but the HH novels make it clear the Lion was loyal to the Emperor.

OldMate wrote:

 Sgt_Smudge wrote:
My headcanon is that female Marines exist.

Female aspirants who pass all the same trials as male ones are given gender-conversion therapy/hormone injections to allow their bodies to accept Space Marine organs. They look functionally identical to their fellow Astartes, in that Space Marines are supposed to be noticeably *beyond* human.

I have to agree, I would not look as Astartes as being neither female nor male, because being male and female are markers for reproduction, which is not something Astartes do. They are the emperor's greatest killers. Angels of death. Really nothing more.

That's largely how I view it - Space Marines are are "male" as a car. They're essentially all trans, with their gender as "Astartes", using traditionally masculine pronouns. They're not an all-boys club, they're an all-transhuman club.

Kayback wrote:

 posermcbogus wrote:
Oooh, I've got a few because of my rampant Black Templars fanboyism, but my fave has to be one I first heard here, though I don't remember where.

The Dark Angels deep unforgivable secret isn't that some of them have become heretics. Not only have marines from every chapter bar the Grey Knights fallen to chaos, but also half of the legions. Just the existence of the fallen isn't the secret. The real terrible secret is that at the end of the heresy, Lion El Johnson threw his lot in with Horus, without outwardly declaring for the arch-traitor. By the time he got to the sol system, the heresy had ended with Horus's defeat. So they just kept quiet, and returned to the imperial fold. This is the secret that the Dark Angels defend so dearly, and why they hunt those who know it so fervently. The existence of a single fallen endangers the very survival of the Dark Angels..

I thought this was canon?

Current lore seems to make it pretty clear that the Lion is 100% loyal, if inflexible and distrustful. If there was any Primarch who would have turned traitor under current lore, it's the Khan.

 CatachanDevil wrote:


Old lore left it ambiguous enough that it might be true but the HH novels make it clear the Lion was loyal to the Emperor.

Time to brush off my HH novels again I guess.

That the Terminus Decree is an order to release all the undead Grey Knights. I think an army of Nighthaunt-looking Grey Knights would be killer.

Not sure if these qualify as head cannon, but I've got a couple thoughts on Nids/GSC and a few other thoughts on Sisters and the Ecclesiarchy/ Inquisition.

I don't think all Nid fleets devalue the Cult organisms the way most fleets do, and I don't think all cults go gently into that good night. I want ways to reflect this on the battlefield, so I build cults and fleets with these ideas in mind.

My fleet uses genestealers who have led cults as veterans; I didn't bother to make house rules, but I do represent it on the table by using one Spacehulk Stealer per brood as a leader beast; all the other stealers in the brood are young enough that they've never been a part of the genestealer breeding cycle- they've merely been manufactured by the nid.

Patriarchs become broodlords when they return to the fleet rather than being reabsorbed. Metamorphs, Acolytes and Aberrants are all respected as worthy. Human cultists are still typically reabsorbed, and Neophytes are a 50/50 shot.

GSC characters don't fight with the fleet, but are allowed to survive; they travel the galaxy, hoping to find other fledgling cults that may benefit from their experience, often with the Neophytes who were rejected by the fleet.

Similarly, the cults I run tend to place a higher value on their human operatives. I once had a campaign/ short story where a Commissar's daughter, trained since birth to join the SoB, was implanted just before shipping out to the convent. Her deal was that she was absolutely devoted to her cult, but because of her training, she thought she was better suited to be a fighter than a breeder. When the magus objected, and insisted that she supply the cult with hybrids as all other human cultists do, she challenge and ancient genestealer named Ch'Trl to a fight. She lost horribly, of course, but the stealer was so impressed with her tenacity and ferocity that it took her under it's claw as a human pet and trained her to run and fight like a stealer.

And yes, in my world, these aliens do have names/ identities/ personalities. The hive mind can and does suppress those personalities when necessary, but it doesn't mean they aren't there. I don't really like the idea of attaching human names to my Nids, so their names tend to sound like clicks and hisses without a whole lot of vowels.

Because of these preferences, I like nid armies with lots of broodlords, stealers and lictors and GSC armies that load up on metamorphs and aberrants and of course, purestrains.

I like escalation style play, and I always grow my armies according to the GSC breeding cycle. Inconvenient if you want to actually play GSC as they appear in the dex; the patriarch isn't fully grown until the end of the first breeding cycle, the magus doesn't show up until the fourth generation of the first cycle; aberrants aren't available til second cycle and metamorphs aren't available til the third.

The second bit involves the Sororitas and the forces that they tend to fight beside. In my headcannon, the pure and miraculous sisters are kept apart from the penitent in order to maintain their spiritual purity. In 3rd, I had a 1500 point army of pure holy sisters and a 1500 point army that represented a penitent legion led by an Inquisitor and a priest.

It got even easier in 8th because of the detachment system, but now that extra detachments COST CP rather than grant CP, I probably won't organize them in separates. Kind of a shame, really, but I don't want to put myself at a disadvantage for the sake of the story.

The II and XI legions were wiped out in battle by some backwater rabble (think Ewoks) so the Imperium expunged all records of their existence to prevent the worst PR disaster in the history of mankind. Imagine the blow to morale if that ever got leaked...

I like to think there's a ship's hold or two out there, full of War Griffons that were away on decades-long campaigns (give or take a wonky warp voyage) when Gryphonne IV was eaten. They're hanging there somehow, like... ronin titans, or something.

They're like Bixby/Ferrigno Hulk. They get by in a new place, stacking boxes of fruit for a week, until the local orks or Inquisitor Decker turn up and then AAAARGH.

OldMate wrote:Adults can be made into Astartes without issue. Most chapters choose to use child soldiers because they are much easier to teach that chapter's customs and ways of war, because children's brains are geared towards learning. The added utter conviction of someone who does not and will know better than they are told is also another reason why you'd use adolescent soldiers.

Literary influences on Warhammer 40K:

Dune
Starship Troopers
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory

leerm02 wrote:

Okay I got one for you:

The Warp is actually finite and bound to either the 40k galaxy, or the galaxy and its surrounding environs.

The idea is that, in the vastness of space, weird things can happen. Ours, for whatever reason, just got all mucked up with demons and magic and whatnot. If you go to another Galaxy, or simply far enough from ours, you can actually "see" the end of the warp.

Trans-galactic civilizations and such steer clear of our area, thinking its the space equivalent of a dangerous swamp or something similar. No one seriously expects anyone to be able to SURVIVE in such a place...

I find this kinda funny because this just relegates Tyranids from Devouring super Swarm from beyond the galaxy to just a hyper adaptive cleanup crew that were engineered by another galaxy to make sure everything dies.

Tristanleo wrote:

leerm02 wrote:

Okay I got one for you:

The Warp is actually finite and bound to either the 40k galaxy, or the galaxy and its surrounding environs.

The idea is that, in the vastness of space, weird things can happen. Ours, for whatever reason, just got all mucked up with demons and magic and whatnot. If you go to another Galaxy, or simply far enough from ours, you can actually "see" the end of the warp.

Trans-galactic civilizations and such steer clear of our area, thinking its the space equivalent of a dangerous swamp or something similar. No one seriously expects anyone to be able to SURVIVE in such a place...

I find this kinda funny because this just relegates Tyranids from Devouring super Swarm from beyond the galaxy to just a hyper adaptive cleanup crew that were engineered by another galaxy to make sure everything dies.

We can mesh a few of these ideas.

When a galactic population reaches a certain point a fall to psychic chaos is inevitable. The Milky Way passed that point 10,000 years ago when the Eldar created Slaanesh.

Tyranids are the Lords of Order sent to our diseased galaxy to cleanse it and preserve its genetic and psychic information for eternity and prevent the infection from spreading.

I headcanon the SM Legion size to roughly hundred times the stated sizes.

Each legion fleet would be able to carry that number with the number of ships and what should realitically fit on them.

So for instance Death Guard would have 9.5 million Astartes.

This would leave the Emperor with a quarter billion Astartes which in turn would be a far more realistic and appropriate number. In HH books it often takes a hundred thousand Astartes (an entire legion) to take over a world unlike in 40k where a pesky chapter of a thousand can make a world surrender. This would mean that each SM Legion could be carrying out several tens to a bit over couple of hundred planetary takeovers simultaneously and in 200 years they realistically could have made it to millions of assimilated worlds.

And also given the scale of a single planet, I'd say it's far more realistic to have the minimum needed strength of 100000 Astartes. In fact I would have grown the Chapter size eventually to one million, so in 40k timeline there would be a billion Astartes. When you look at rl militaty campaigns, even just a million strong Astartes chapter taking over a single star system would be amazing and a showing of excellent soldiery. It took US 700000 to just beat Iraq in the 90s, and over 200000 to beat it in 2000s once again. Even at the height of its WW2 strength, it took Germany millions to just conquer and hold a chunk of Europe. Same for the Soviets.

So a million strong Astartes chapter being able to take over an entire star system with many planets, several tens to hundreds of moons, potential space stations, etc... would be damn efficient.

Add billions of solar auxilia and other human forces to that number of Astartes and yeah, you actually have 'galaxy spanning empire' building material.

The “more guardsmen than atoms” thing is true.

 DalekCheese wrote:
The “more guardsmen than atoms” thing is true.

Isn't it more graves than stars in the sky?

Traitor General is by far my favorite 40k piece of fluff/novel

 Kid_Kyoto wrote:

 DalekCheese wrote:
The “more guardsmen than atoms” thing is true.

Isn't it more graves than stars in the sky?

Really depends on what these atoms that you are counting make up and the how large the section of sky too.
But yeah, dang lot of guardsmen, and dang more lot of imperial citizens.

 Kid_Kyoto wrote:

 DalekCheese wrote:
The “more guardsmen than atoms” thing is true.

Isn't it more graves than stars in the sky?

Possibly- I remember a /tg/ thread where somebody quoted a number of guardsmen that was given in a book.... and it was significantly larger than the estimated number of atoms in the universe.

 OldMate wrote:
Add billions of solar auxilia and other human forces to that number of Astartes and yeah, you actually have 'galaxy spanning empire' building material.

Generally the concept of the Imperium is each world is responsible for its own defense with the IG and Marines (et al) acting to expand the Imperium or in emergency support the existing self defense forces.

So the pyramid in a typical world/province/city I imagine would be something like:

Millions of potential militia/reservists who can be called up
Tens of thousands of standing PDF troopers
Thousands of Imperial Guard
Dozens of other Imperial forces

Maybe add a line for hundreds of Skitarii and Battle Sisters as well.

The Imperium only moves thousands of troops across the galaxy when it needs to, the governor has two jobs, protect his holdings and pay his tithes. If he can't do that, the Imperium doesn't need him. A powerful incentive for keeping his forces strong.

Similarly Space Marine numbers CAN work, if you assume they're only fighting the most critical engagements of the most critical battles. So while 100s of thousands of troops are hitting the beaches on D-Day, a few dozen Marines are literally dropping from orbit on top of Hitler's bunker. The Marines are not there to defeat his armies, secure the cities, feed the refugees, or fight a massive tank battle on the plains. They are there to kill one dude (and whoever is in the building with him) jump back in the Thunder Hawks and take off for the next world. They're SAS, SEALs, Spetnaz, etc, not an occupying force.

The Ork psychic gestalt field doesn't exist. Most Orks have no psychic ability whatsoever, and the entire combined race is barely a blip in the Warp (which is how they can travel through the Warp, without Gellar Fields, safely).

What they do have is a genetically-encoded affinity for advanced nanotechnology pioneered by the Old Ones, and this is the 'special sauce' that makes all their technology work.

When an Imperial enginseer takes a captured Ork slugga, can't shoot it because integral DNA sensors register a non-Ork wielder and refuse to fire, and then disassembles it to find no obvious working components (because they're microscopic nano-factories integrated directly into the metal), he declares that it must be magic, and invents the (totally bogus) Ork psychic gestalt theory to explain it.

But the Orks themselves don't understand how it works, either. They build crude approximations of the machinery of other races in order to cargo-cult the effects they want, subconsciously invoking Old Ones super-tech to make it work. Occasionally a particularly talented Madboy can see through the veil and build something ex nihilo, and that's where the really crazy inventions come from.

 catbarf wrote:
The Ork psychic gestalt field doesn't exist. Most Orks have no psychic ability whatsoever, and the entire combined race is barely a blip in the Warp (which is how they can travel through the Warp, without Gellar Fields, safely).

What they do have is a genetically-encoded affinity for advanced nanotechnology pioneered by the Old Ones, and this is the 'special sauce' that makes all their technology work.

When an Imperial enginseer takes a captured Ork slugga, can't shoot it because integral DNA sensors register a non-Ork wielder and refuse to fire, and then disassembles it to find no obvious working components (because they're microscopic nano-factories integrated directly into the metal), he declares that it must be magic, and invents the (totally bogus) Ork psychic gestalt theory to explain it.

But the Orks themselves don't understand how it works, either. They build crude approximations of the machinery of other races in order to cargo-cult the effects they want, subconsciously invoking Old Ones super-tech to make it work. Occasionally a particularly talented Madboy can see through the veil and build something ex nihilo, and that's where the really crazy inventions come from.

I really like that idea. Asimov's Orks or something.

Before the Eyes of the Emperor were introduced, custodes were always said to be unaging and biologically immortal. I don't believe that the EoE has retconned that, but rather that custodes who become bored or otherwise dissolution with their position go off and become EoE. Saying that they are too old or injured is just a convenient excuse that no one dares question.

The same is also true for Primarchs. They were said and shown to be eternally young, such as when Petrurbo is attacked by some time-based weapon and doesn't change one bit while his marines turn to dust. But more recently, Dorn is described as having aged significantly over the 7 years of the heresy. I think that is is just stress-induced aging, the kind that happens to presidents and the like, and that there is nothing chronological about it; perhaps it is even recoverable with a bit of R&R. Perty didn't age because he was just standing still for all the thousands of years he was trapped, while Dorn aged by orders of magnitude because he was leading the imperial defense.

On a slightly related note, I would also imagine custodes can regrow limbs. I suspect lost limbs are pretty common in 40k, what with power weapons and all that. Would that common an injury be such an immediate handicap to one of the ten thousand? I doubt it. But while marines have a physiology that is quite amenable to bionic limbs, no active custodian is described as having a bionic limb. So I believe the only remaining possibility is that they can regrow their limbs... somehow. That or a lost limb is responsible for 80+% of all EoE.

Kayback wrote:

 posermcbogus wrote:
Oooh, I've got a few because of my rampant Black Templars fanboyism, but my fave has to be one I first heard here, though I don't remember where.

The Dark Angels deep unforgivable secret isn't that some of them have become heretics. Not only have marines from every chapter bar the Grey Knights fallen to chaos, but also half of the legions. Just the existence of the fallen isn't the secret. The real terrible secret is that at the end of the heresy, Lion El Johnson threw his lot in with Horus, without outwardly declaring for the arch-traitor. By the time he got to the sol system, the heresy had ended with Horus's defeat. So they just kept quiet, and returned to the imperial fold. This is the secret that the Dark Angels defend so dearly, and why they hunt those who know it so fervently. The existence of a single fallen endangers the very survival of the Dark Angels..

I thought this was canon?

No, it's 1d4chan meme bull-pucky.

 Dysartes wrote:


No, it's 1d4chan meme bull-pucky.

I always thought the Fallen were something more sinister than just some wayward warriors. Maybe it was my own headcannon that drummed them up into something bigger. There was that one novel about finding a Fallen and torturing him until he confessed which shed some doubt on the loyalty of the whole DA, and the HH novels (I thought) were also more ambiguous with their overall loyalty.

I'm usually pretty good with random esoteric information, if I'm slipping in my dotage my brushing off the BL as "space mind candy" must be true. Like I said earlier, time to reread the HH.

Are the Fallen exclusively 30k characters or do more DA fall all the time?

Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Eipi10 wrote:

On a slightly related note, I would also imagine custodes can regrow limbs. I suspect lost limbs are pretty common in 40k, what with power weapons and all that. Would that common an injury be such an immediate handicap to one of the ten thousand? I doubt it. But while marines have a physiology that is quite amenable to bionic limbs, no active custodian is described as having a bionic limb. So I believe the only remaining possibility is that they can regrow their limbs... somehow. That or a lost limb is responsible for 80+% of all EoE.

I'd imagine if there was any place with the technology to grow back limbs/organs it'd be earth and if any warriors had access to it, they'd be the custodes, I'd not take much notice of the EoE being crippled Custodes, because literally everyone else just gets a prosthetic limb or two and is told to get back out there, I can't imagine the Custodes being so precious as to not want to fight after losing a limb. It's kind of a weak excuse. Unless they just wear their prosthesis under their armour. That's what I'd do, and that's how I imagine the Iron hands to do, because it might be a robotic limb, and not a weak fleshy one, but it's going to benefit from armour plating and further servo enhancement for extra power.

 Kid_Kyoto wrote:

Similarly Space Marine numbers CAN work, if you assume they're only fighting the most critical engagements of the most critical battles. So while 100s of thousands of troops are hitting the beaches on D-Day, a few dozen Marines are literally dropping from orbit on top of Hitler's bunker. The Marines are not there to defeat his armies, secure the cities, feed the refugees, or fight a massive tank battle on the plains. They are there to kill one dude (and whoever is in the building with him) jump back in the Thunder Hawks and take off for the next world. They're SAS, SEALs, Spetnaz, etc, not an occupying force.

I can see astartes working like that, but that's not how they're commonly portrayed. I see them working quite well in their given numbers in universe, becasue when examined the battles are actually generally really small. Look at the Tauros campaign, 8 Imperial Guard regiments were deployed there, sounds serious right? Numbers given for Tau forces are approx 14000 Tau and Kroot, with 160 aircraft supporting them and around 8000 Tauros PDF plus gangs of miners that joined in. The imperial regiments are, I assume pretty much the size of modern or World War army regiments(40 000-48 000 soldiers). Either way the Chinese mustered more troops in North Korea, they had like 6 army groups... Damn I'm talking history again aren't I? I digress; My point is this is not a planetary war, this is like a dust up in a single region. Yeah, a 100 or 1000 Astartes is actually going to make a big difference, and you'd seriously consider deploying your 1000 Astartes as assault troops as they are quite often portrayed as. Therefore in regard to attempting to give reasonable numbers to represent the scale of planetary warfare I'd have to think an Astartes chapter would have to also scale to many times it's size.

Personally I like the idea that the Imperium is a devastated society that is still very much in the grips of a dark age, that every world has small populations of thousands of people, spread thin across space (for some reason? I don't have all the answers ), and that something like a baneblade takes years to make then to fit together. That the battles of the HH are looked back in awe becasue they involved hundreds of thousands of combatants.That 48 000 soldiers, much like during the historic dark ages was a massive and rarely raised army which was pushing the bounds of being supportable with the logistics, and hygene systems in place.

 DalekCheese wrote:

 Kid_Kyoto wrote:

 DalekCheese wrote:
The “more guardsmen than atoms” thing is true.

Isn't it more graves than stars in the sky?

Possibly- I remember a /tg/ thread where somebody quoted a number of guardsmen that was given in a book.... and it was significantly larger than the estimated number of atoms in the universe.

It could never be true anyway, each guardsman is made up of more atoms than there ever could be guardsmen, with all their atoms too.

Kayback wrote:

 Dysartes wrote:


No, it's 1d4chan meme bull-pucky.

I always thought the Fallen were something more sinister than just some wayward warriors. Maybe it was my own headcannon that drummed them up into something bigger. There was that one novel about finding a Fallen and torturing him until he confessed which shed some doubt on the loyalty of the whole DA, and the HH novels (I thought) were also more ambiguous with their overall loyalty.

I'm usually pretty good with random esoteric information, if I'm slipping in my dotage my brushing off the BL as "space mind candy" must be true. Like I said earlier, time to reread the HH.

Are the Fallen exclusively 30k characters or do more DA fall all the time?

Fallen are exclusively the DA who were on Caliban and went traitor with Luther. There's so many because Luther was making far more Marines than he should have.

Although modern DA can still go traitor but they wouldn't be Fallen.