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soo been reading unremembered empire and in there i noticed it says that the Tetrarchs were second only to Guilliman.

where are they now? and why is calgar the boss? surely the 4 Tets would have inherited ultramar?

unless im missing something

They were most likely given control of chapters when the legions were broken down and/or died sometime in the last 10000 years.

Guilliman chose to break up the Legion before he was killed. He purposely wanted a uniform military structure where each Chapter had autonomous command because he saw the folly of putting the power of a Legion in the hands of one man.

The tetrachs were ultramarines overseeing the realm of Ultramar. They were not assigned to military positions.

They are "powerful" since any other, normal marine officer is essentially just a soldier: he leads men because he is useful to someone else, he goes where someone else tells him, and the only way he can become more "powerful" is someone else noticing him and promoting him to a different job. It doesn't matter if you're captain of the first company, you still do not get to do whatever you want and can be demoted or have your ships reassigned at about any time.


Tetrarchs are different. They do not have a military unit. They can build things. They have military units assigned to do their bidding, they are the agents of state who employ military units to protect the enormous industrial base and billions of citizens in ultramar.

Tetrarchs don't run the ultramarines because they have better things to do. That said, Calgar is effectively the remaining tetrarch in church of the eight systems.

i understood this much but i thought seeing as guillimen and the 4 tetrarchs were 5 princes of ultramar they would be suceeded, Guilliman is still alive so he remains but the other four (they cant have kids agreed so it isnt inherited) but couldnt there be some sort of succession right or something? i dunno.

the tetrachs were astartes and they fought commanding ultramarines throughout the five hundred worlds.

so why not carry on that legacy?

They probably changed the tetrarch thing while they re-organized the legions into chapters. After all, the tetrarchs did have a hell load of power

Real answer is because the idea had not been thought of yet when the constantly rehashed codex fluff was written, remember almost every codex is just previous fluff that has been written almost unchanged for 15 years odd, the better question is why the codex writers and rules makers don't take the clearly better ideas that have been thrown out by black library and forge world over the years, legion centurions and all there types, eldar from mymeara, tau etc.

Fluff answer, those 4 world's the tetrachs were going to rule most likely do not exist as either part of the ultramarines anymore, or have been destroyed during or since the hh, another reason could be that a chapter master from one of the ultras many offshoots could be called a tetrach as that was who started then off, like castellan and the black Templars.