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Are there any, or is an all male group? Or in fact any female Commissars (Seeing as serving as a Stormtrooper is a prerequiset tp being a Commissar)

Sanctus-Malas wrote:Are there any, or is an all male group? Or in fact any female Commissars (Seeing as serving as a Stormtrooper is a prerequiset tp being a Commissar)

In the Warhammer 40k universe, if there is a position, there are always females in that position.


It's just that GW does not show them as much.

Unless, of course, we are talking about space marines

Palindrome wrote:Unless, of course, we are talking about space marines

Yes, and the Emprah of Mankind.

Really though the Imperium for as backwards and witch-burning it is gives less than a gak about gender.

Actually, whilst most organizations that recruit their members from the Schola Progenium (such as the Adeptus Terra or the Inquisition) indeed place little emphasis upon gender, the Storm Trooper regiment and the Orders of the Adepta Sororitas are the exception from this rule. Martially inclined male progena who are judged satisfactory in accordance to the highest requirements enter Storm Trooper training, just like female progena are enrolled by the Sisterhood. You could say that gender serves as the segregating trait which prevents both organizations from quarreling over the top performers under the orphans in Schola training.

5E Codex: IG wrote:Storm Troopers are recruited from the orphan sons of Imperial officials - such as planetary governors or high ranking members of the Imperial Guard or Navy - from all over the galaxy.

Of course, this separation does not exist for the other regiments of the Imperial Guard, meaning the countless Grenadier formations of the various worlds who do not draft their soldiers from the Schola, so you may well have female Grenadiers/Kasrkin/etc just like today's contemporary special forces also include female soldiers, depending on the country you are looking at.

PS: Commissars don't actually have to serve in the Storm Trooper regiment at some point in their career - it's just that they can. Even considering it's just a short tour of duty, the small number of ST companies would likely make it impossible for every Commissar in the galaxy to have seen action in them.

Disclaimer: The above is taking into consideration fluff from GW sources only. I'm quite sure there are numerous BL novels who may claim a different interpretation of the setting, so it'd be up to the reader to decide which one he likes more.

BL novels ARE canon GW sources.

Commissars are often recruited from storm trooper companies because they boast a durability and mental conditioning rarely found outside it.

There are still commissars recruited outside the schola, but almost all of them are from extremely harsh (read: orphan, lived in streets, fought guerrilla conflicts, psychological and physical conditions that break normal men) environments.

Alexzandvar wrote:

Sanctus-Malas wrote:Are there any, or is an all male group? Or in fact any female Commissars (Seeing as serving as a Stormtrooper is a prerequiset tp being a Commissar)

In the Warhammer 40k universe, if there is a position, there are always females in that position.

It's just that GW does not show them as much.

This x 10.000. Female Tau, Guard, Commissars, Governors, Inquisitors, Arbites... they all exist. They aren't just represented much because 40k is mostly male based game. If they had more female models the game would became some sort of fetish...and GW don't want that.

The only female that don'e exist are Astartes, Tyranids, Orks. For Vespid, Necrons I am not sure.

Brother Coa wrote:This x 10.000. Female Tau, Guard, Commissars, Governors, Inquisitors, Arbites... they all exist. They aren't just represented much because 40k is mostly male based game. If they had more female models the game would became some sort of fetish...and GW don't want that.

Inquisitors, Arbites and tau have obvious female models and tau are mostly sold as gender ambiguous models.

Brother Coa wrote:The only female that don'e exist are Astartes, Tyranids, Orks. For Vespid, Necrons I am not sure.

Tyranids are either genderless or female

Orks are genderless

Vespids (as an insectiod race) are very likely to be made up of neutral females ruled by dominant females

Necrons are living metal skelatons so are supplied gender ambiguous

BronzeJon wrote:BL novels ARE canon GW sources.

Nope. There is no such thing as a "canon source", and novels are about as valid as anything we as fans come up with ourselves. I dislike the non-existence of continuity as well, but this is just how the franchise is run. On the other hand, this also means you don't have to accept funny stuff like Goto's Lasermarines. Unless you want to.

BronzeJon wrote:There are still commissars recruited outside the schola [...]

I suppose that is one such idea from a novel?

BluntmanDC wrote:Inquisitors, Arbites and tau have obvious female models and tau are mostly sold as gender ambiguous models.

There's also a female Commissar and two female IG miniatures, but like the others they're the exception from the rule. For IG in particular it is somewhat weird that GW doesn't make more of them.

Lynata wrote:

BronzeJon wrote:BL novels ARE canon GW sources.

Nope. There is no such thing as a "canon source", and novels are about as valid as anything we as fans come up with ourselves. I dislike the non-existence of continuity as well, but this is just how the franchise is run. On the other hand, this also means you don't have to accept funny stuff like Goto's Lasermarines. Unless you want to.

Reading that link from Gav Thorpe, It of course also means If I want to say there are female Stormtroopers in my version of 40K, you can personally object but you can't say I'm wrong. You just have to elect if you are happy to play against that idea of not.

Brother Coa wrote:They aren't just represented much because 40k is mostly male based game. If they had more female models the game would became some sort of fetish...and GW don't want that.

There's also quite a few fluff reasons why, even in the Imperium, there are many more male soldiers than female. The world that the Guard are recruited from vary massively in culture - many of which are reminiscent of historical cultures. While there will be many worlds 'advanced' enough to have sexual equality and to send both men and women to do all jobs, there are arguably LOTS more worlds that exist at a medaeval or feral level of culture - cultures where fighting is still seen as a mainly 'male' game.

Even on, say, Vostroya, which has a rather advanced tech-level, it's the firstborn SONS who get sent to war.

So, even in an Imperium where anything is possible, given the sort of cultures that exist, it's not surprising that the majority of Guard are male...

There's that Colonel-Commander (or it might've been general-commisar, can't remember) from the Gaunt's Ghost novels. Only female Commi that comes to mind, tbh.

I believe there were several female storm troopers that were part of redemption corp from the novel of the same name (http://www.blacklibrary.com/all-products/Redemption-Corps.html)

According to the Ciaphas Cain novels, Lynata's interpretation is essentially correct-- female Schola students are nudged towards the Sisters of Battle (which makes one wonder why there's so few of Sisters, but then again, given that GW is stupid and doesn't know what the feth it's doing in regards to the number of Sisters in the galaxy and varies the number more than anything else about Sisters to the point where their lazy rulebook authors can't even keep the number of major orders straight, this is hardly surprising), although not every female student ends up as a sister.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

BlaxicanX wrote:There's that Colonel-Commander (or it might've been general-commisar, can't remember) from the Gaunt's Ghost novels. Only female Commi that comes to mind, tbh.

Also a female commissar-cadet in Cain's Last Stand.

Redemption Corps has a female storm trooper that is actually fairly useufl and competent through the entire story as a main member of part of the team

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Redemption-Corps-Imperial-Guard-Sanders/dp/1844163601


(edit: Damn beat me to it from above lol)

Ohh, Redemption Corps - the book that ... Well, if that isn't a reliable source...

Melissia wrote:[...] given that GW is stupid and doesn't know what the feth it's doing in regards to the number of Sisters in the galaxy [...]

Mh, to be fair, they only released a very rough estimate of their numbers once, somewhat backed up by various Force Organization Charts from important Imperial campaigns later on. The only thing that makes one wonder is why the SoB still show up all across the galaxy, but (to me) it actually fits the idea that the Major Orders are highly mobile, whereas the Minor ones remain stationed and focused on a single location/duty.

Melissia wrote:[...] although not every female student ends up as a sister.

Aye - the vast majority of all progena, regardless of gender, seem to end up in the Adeptus Terra, anyways. The ones who get military training are the top performers, and of those top performers, the Storm Trooper regiment and the SoB only get the top of the top, the crème de la crème, whereas the remainder are assigned to the Commissariat, the Guard/Navy (as staff and petty officers), the Arbites, the Assassinorum and the Inquisition. There is certainly sufficient demand for able-bodied and spiritually tempered warriors throughout the Imperium.

Interestingly, the total number of Imperial Guard Storm Troopers would seem to be roughly on a similar scale to that of the Sisters of Battle (in my interpretation between 10 and 100 thousand, with the ST regiment said to have 20k), with the difference easily explainable by a slightly higher attrition rate amongst the Storm Troopers than the Sisters Militant - or by the remainder becoming Inquisitorial Storm Troopers. It does add up ... if you want it to.

Whoa, whoa, whoa.

First off, while I dislike Redemption Corps--it had nothing to do with what you're referring to.

The Orks were being used as "tools" for the Order to--in their words--"cleanse worlds to purify the Imperium".

The Order was very much Horusian in its beliefs.
The "teenage Chief Celestian" was also not human. It was a Genestealer Hybrid.

Which if she was "infiltrating" a convent she would be found out immediately. Sisters do purity checks with more regularity than any other imperial organization... failing to take one is cause for suspicion in and of itself.

Alright, I'll scratch the Celestian's age from my list of points then - I will admit this was only described to me. You'll understand my unwillingness to actually read this stuff myself, even if this makes me a bad critic for relying too much on the words of others.

I guess I could replace the age with "how in the warp did a Genestealer Hybrid get past the Schola's screening process" then, though. This is just ridiculous - the one organization that feeds half the Imperial Adepta with high quality employees and prides itself on corporeal and spiritual purity ... and they don't manage to locate a Genestealer infestation whilst testing for psykers and other mutations? That's about as ridiculous as if suddenly Marneus Calgar was a Genestealer... I should write a BL novel about this.

And the Ork idea is still a load of BS.

Feel free to prove me wrong. But arent stoem troopers trained in the same school(whatever its called) as SOB. So wouldnt females at that school go straight to the SOB caniidates?

The entirety of the Order was apparently corrupted from fighting against Tyranids.

The how and why is left unknown.

Redemption Corps isn't a really good book though. I was kinda disappointed.

Kanluwen wrote:Redemption Corps isn't a really good book though

On that we agree. It's pretty crappy in so many different ways that every time I read it it finds a new way to suck...

Kanluwen wrote:The entirety of the Order was apparently corrupted from fighting against Tyranids.
The how and why is left unknown.

But aren't hybrids not the ones infected by Tyranids, but the children of the infected? There is so much wrong with this.

Lynata wrote:

Kanluwen wrote:The entirety of the Order was apparently corrupted from fighting against Tyranids.
The how and why is left unknown.

But aren't hybrids not the ones infected by Tyranids, but the children of the infected? There is so much wrong with this.

Not really. The jist of it, from what I can recall, is that the initial infection occurred several generations prior. The Order is relatively isolated and not given to doing much of the "standard" Sisters of Battle stuff which might give the hybrids away.

There was also only just the one hybrid, excluding some very dodgy Orkanids.

"Isolated" as in "not even getting their recruits from the Schola"? Eh ... well, it's not quite as awful as the alternative, I guess.

Thanks for the update on the contents on this book.

[edit] "Orkanids"... oO

The birth rate on Cadia is exactly the same as the Guard's recruitment figures. So unless Cadia gets its girls shipped from off-world, there will be female Kasrkin.

Funnily enough, here in the UK, women still aren't allowed to serve in front-line infantry regiments. Which means you'll see no women in the special forces, Paras, Royal Marines, etc.

Kanluwen wrote:
The Orks were being used as "tools" for the Order to--in their words--"cleanse worlds to purify the Imperium".

So.............
Imperium is using Orks to cleanse the galaxy and purify the Imeprium?
Canonical as Bible all right.

Was there not a female stormtrooper in the black templar book about grimaldus?

Sturmtruppen wrote:The birth rate on Cadia is exactly the same as the Guard's recruitment figures. So unless Cadia gets its girls shipped from off-world, there will be female Kasrkin.

Funnily enough, here in the UK, women still aren't allowed to serve in front-line infantry regiments. Which means you'll see no women in the special forces, Paras, Royal Marines, etc.

Cadians are different, I had a thread about that: http://www.dakkadakka.com/dakkaforum/posts/list/368429.page
The final point is that most of Cadian females serve in Cadian Home Guard while males serve across the galaxy as Shock Troops.
In that case females are preserved to give birth to future generations of solders ( for a planet whose troops fights in the entire galaxy your losses mush be very, very high ).
But that was state before Abbadon's attack and overrunning 3/4 of the planet. I don't know what 's the situation now.

Also, Celestian Genestealer? That must be one of the most stupid things I heard in 40k. aren't Celestians elite infantry with years of combat experience? And how could Genestealer get pass trough Schoola's scanning and Sister's checking. They can detect psykers, I beat that genetic flaws would be even less difficult to discover.

Sorry, not arguing it's a good book, but have any of you actually read redemption corps?

The celestains/SOB are not infected the cannoness just belongs to a whacked out cult that believe that humanities greatness/the emperors glory is released through suffering/great catastrophe.

The sisters are responsible for the orks/nids (the orks are the ones who are infected) attacking the system. The main character is basically Bruce Willis from Unbreakable and the sisters are Sammuel L Jackson. They blew up a planet and the result was mortenson, the storm trooper badass, and thought if we blow up a system we'll get some one even better.

The teenage chief celestian is actually a crusader not a celestian, and is the canoness' bodyguard.

The book is dodgy as hell, ork stealers, a unarmed priest crushing a sister in power armor and a whole list of other flaws including that it is pretty much black hawk down for the first third and unbreakable for the final third and just plain rubbish in the middle.