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i was wondering if i could get any information on the recruitment process of space marines
i know they typically go for feral worlds and sometimes hive worlds but nothing really past that

thanks

Yes.

Go read the SM codex. Any of them really, but the core one (Codex: Space Marines) mostly.

They go in depth on this a thousand times over.

Or just read 'Creation of a Space Marine' on Lexicanum, if you can't find the codex.

Which is here.

It's from about 20 years ago IIRC, but is still pretty current. Newer codices have slightly modified versions of it, for example.

It's worth pointing out that, like everything else in 40k, the fluff doesn't always adhere to it. Sometimes applicants don't need to be young, for example (Space Wolf by Bill King, Damnation Crusade by Dan Abnett, Dawn of War by... Goto). So if it doesn't fit your custom chapter's fluff you can ignore parts of it. Call it a geneseed mutation or something.

Also - they recruit from all kinds of worlds. Certain chapters have preferences to some worlds, but other than that they don't have any restrictions. Hive worlds, Death worlds, Feral worlds, Forge worlds, Medieval worlds, Agri-worlds, etc.

The Blood Ravens occasionally recruit from a hive world, for instance. That's where Thaddeus came from.

MM... The Kid-Sarge Thaddeus wasn't before a hive ganger chief or something like that??? if i'm not wrong , how he was inducted to be a SM i probably was too older for the "treatment"

Black Corsair wrote:MM... The Kid-Sarge Thaddeus wasn't before a hive ganger chief or something like that??? if i'm not wrong , how he was inducted to be a SM i probably was too older for the "treatment"

Maybe a chief of Lost Boys hive gangs? (crazy Peter Pan stuff going down)

Anyways, depends on the chapter (I know that the BA codex goes more in-depth on how they chose Aspirants, but not the procedure of actually making the marines which is in the vanilla codex.)

Also, recruiting off of Meridian wasn't common for the Blood Ravens, according the the Lexicanum:

Lexicanum wrote:Thaddeus grew up a native of the Hive World Meridian, in Hab Spire Legis. He grew up to become the leader of an under city gang, and was involved in one of the world's many riots. During one of these disturbances, Davian Thule noticed the young boy holding off rioters. Inspired, the Captain put Thaddeus forward for the Blood Raven trials, the first Meridian to do so in 700 years.

The oldest you can join the Marines (also according to the Lexicanum) is at 14, when the implants may be....implanted. Apparently phases 1-3 is ideal between the ages of 10-14.

That's old enough to be a leader of a small gang no? For example, if the rest of the gang was also around that age.

Mid-puberty is about the limit.

Fluff doesn't contradict this.

Ragnar wasn't more then 14 when he got taken.

Thaddeus could have been 16 or under(Age isn't a prerequisite for being a Ganger leader. many 3rd world countries have similer gang situations with children in a survival situation)


on a Feral world, people would gain mental maturity at a far earlier age. you become a man at age 14ish and get married at the same time.

PLOT!!

It sucks you in.

Grey Templar wrote:Fluff doesn't contradict this.

Uh huh. These guys are all 14, for example.

Rube wrote:

Grey Templar wrote:Fluff doesn't contradict this.

Uh huh. These guys are all 14, for example.

14? what they gave them for breakfast????

Heck, some kids in 40k know how to shoot a gun before they can walk. 14 is definitely old enough for a hive-ganger.

Anybody know any chapters that recruit from famous IG worlds (Cadia, Catachan, Vostroya, Elysia, Krieg, Mordia, Tanith, Praetoria, etc.). SM chapters would be stupid to not do it.

Rube wrote:

Grey Templar wrote:Fluff doesn't contradict this.

Uh huh. These guys are all 14, for example.

Do you seriously think that GW would create a comic where 14 year old boys brained each other with swords in an arena to find out who's gonna be a super-warrior in Space? I imagine that such a comic would be short-lived indeed...

Rube wrote:

Grey Templar wrote:Fluff doesn't contradict this.

Uh huh. These guys are all 14, for example.

You know BL continiue pre-heresy practice of recruiting older candidates.

AlmightyWalrus wrote:

Rube wrote:

Grey Templar wrote:Fluff doesn't contradict this.

Uh huh. These guys are all 14, for example.

Do you seriously think that GW would create a comic where 14 year old boys brained each other with swords in an arena to find out who's gonna be a super-warrior in Space? I imagine that such a comic would be short-lived indeed...

And yet we have guns that blow off limbs in short order due to their rocket-like ammo, people getting decapitated, eviscerated, blown to shreds, turned into horrific half-daemon spawn, mutated horribly until they are just a mass of limbs, shot with plasma so that their component atoms are stripped from each other, flayed at a molecular level, skinned so that their hides can be worn as intimidation, turned into living flesh sculptures for fun, tortured in some other way for fun, rounded up and shot, eaten by alien beasties with swords for arms...
Yeah, 40K is that dark. I don't see 14-year old gangers being such a horrific thing compared to half of this.

AlmightyWalrus wrote:Do you seriously think that GW would create a comic where 14 year old boys brained each other with swords in an arena to find out who's gonna be a super-warrior in Space? I imagine that such a comic would be short-lived indeed...

Oh yeah, I agree. I know why they didn't have 14 year olds brutally murdering one another. But at the end of the day, it was still written by Dan Abnett, it still had the Games Workshop logo on it. It's still canon.

Saying "the fluff never contradicts this" is blantantly false. If you feel the need to reconcile the contradictory canon you could say Damnation Crusade and other stories like it are embellished Imperial retellings, where they altered the facts because a story where they forced children to fight to the death was bad PR.

In 40k, something being canon doesn't mean it actually happened as told (or happened at all).

ugggg, that comic ALWAYS pops up whenever this topic comes up.


the rule is that initiates can't have finished puberty. those guys in the comic MIGHT be 16. a bit of a stretch, but it's possable.

They are TEMPLARS and they are BLACK.

Who needs to adhere to this tome of gullyman?

1hadhq wrote:They are TEMPLARS and they are BLACK.

Who needs to adhere to this tome of gullyman?

It's less adhering to the Codex Astartes, and more the implants that make you a Space Marine need to use the hormones and bodily changes occuring during puberty, or they don't work as well as they should. So, it's more pracitcality than anything else, taking Space Marine initiates at the age when they're beginning puberty.

Well in the SW codex on the page about lucas the trickster it talks says.

He was famous for sharing a dozen beds in one night

10-14 seems a bit early for this- even for vikings.

4M2A wrote:Well in the SW codex on the page about lucas the trickster it talks says.

He was famous for sharing a dozen beds in one night

10-14 seems a bit early for this- even for vikings.

The SW are kinda notorious for this kind of thing in their codex - even I'm not quite sure what the hell's going on, and I'm a committed SW nut. Having said that, a 15-year-old could reasonably be seen as getting up to all sorts of hijinks on a Norse-themed world, so perhaps Lukas is one of the older recruits.

ChrisWWII wrote:

1hadhq wrote:They are TEMPLARS and they are BLACK.

Who needs to adhere to this tome of gullyman?

It's less adhering to the Codex Astartes, and more the implants that make you a Space Marine need to use the hormones and bodily changes occuring during puberty, or they don't work as well as they should. So, it's more pracitcality than anything else, taking Space Marine initiates at the age when they're beginning puberty.

It may be the best time to implant the geneseed. Still practicality has a restricted grip at 40k-verse decisions, the range of recruts would be closer to 12-18 years.
Ragnar Blackmane joined the marines just before he was old enough to change from boy to man. I doubt he was less than 16...

There are examples of humans too old to be a space marine ( HH, DA ), should look them up.

what i want in specificity is what happens between selection and implants
because all i can gather right now is "Congratulations, you're going to be a Space Marine! Here's some nifty organs"
and the process after the implantations (or between, assuming that they take breaks)
that bit of fan-fic i wrote a while ago is going to be expanded

Read some Space Marine novels.

Sons of Dorn and the Space Wolf omnibusses both take an initiate from his life before being selected, through training, and finally becoming a Space Marine.


Lexicanum.com will have the different organs and procedures in a order of appearences if you want the specific details.

Most initiates go for months before they recieve their first implant. the chapter doesn't want to waste it's time and resources giving just anyone implants and will make absolutly sure, as far as they can do, to make sure that everything works. Initiate action's aside(a new blood claw in the SW omnibus blows his face off because he was cleaning a loaded bolt pistol and looked down the barrel )

The older a recruit is the lees chance of the implants and surgeries being effective. They have to be more or less pre-pubesant and still "growing". However in a place where war is the only thing most folks know it's not surprising that most kiddies are exceptional fighters.

Older men can become semi-marines. Luther from the Dark Angels was still gene-bulked to near space-marine levels and he is not the only one mentioned in the Horus Heresy alone.

yes, but those techniques may be lost and those guys were never full on marines.

Luther was noticibly smaller in physical bulk and still had human proportions.

Draglide12 wrote:Older men can become semi-marines. Luther from the Dark Angels was still gene-bulked to near space-marine levels and he is not the only one mentioned in the Horus Heresy alone.

but they can't become actual marines,

i don't get why its so hard for people to believe that boys at the age of 14 don't know how to fight in the 40k universe, alot of space marines recruit from feral worlds where normal social patterns don't exist.

and to be honest you might wanna read up on places like Sierra Leone, on this planet there is child soldiers as young as 12 and we don't even have dinosaurs, chaos marines or aliens trying to kill us.

BluntmanDC wrote:and to be honest you might wanna read up on places like Sierra Leone, on this planet there is child soldiers as young as 12 and we don't even have dinosaurs, chaos marines or aliens trying to kill us.

Spot on.

Just type Boy Soldier into Google and you can see plenty of examples which doesn't even begin to cover the boy soldiers of the various European nations over the last few centuries or even such things as the disastrous Children's Crusade or such figures as Horatio Nelson who started his naval career at only thirteen. Obviously Space Marine recruitment takes a lot from the agoge where boys would train from the age of twelve so in the context of the Imperium the age at which the various Chapters recruit seems entirely plausible.