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I'm looking through some older white dwarfs (WD#251), and there is a quotation that goes

The Flesh Tearers dropped the Blood Angels' practice of blood transfusions to new recruits when they split from the Legion after the Heresy, but by this time Sanguinius' pain had already become so bound within the Chapter's geneseed itself that they could not escape the effects of the Black Rage. Indeed, the Black Rage seems to have become more uncontrollable, perhaps because of their isolation or a change in their gene-replication practices. It has now become apparent that the Flesh Tearers' geneseed has mutated a great deal over the past ten thousand years and degenerated vastly.

Now my question is since the Flesh Tearers are known to be exceptionally more belligerent than their colleagues in other Chapters, does it necessarily follow that any other Blood Angels descended Chapter would suffer the same kind of geneseed degredation if they too chose to NOT follow the Blood Angel's practice of blood transfusions?

Ie; if my homebrew Blood Angels descended Chapter followed in the Flesh Tearers footsteps by NOT doing blood transfusions as per Blood Angels standard, will they too start to go a bit mental like the Flesh Tearers?

There's no logical reason that a 2nd founding chapter has worse geneseeed. They all use the same replication processes and all started with the same level of geneseed.

No one has 'fresher' geneseed, each replication is a new potential for degradation. It wasn't until Cawl's magic gene bank of pure first gen geneseed that new geneseed appeared.


Every chapter's geneseed has been replicated for as long as every others. They all started during the crusade and have been replicated ever since.

the only time a modern chapter has younger geneseed is if they had a bank stored from a previous harvest a long time ago and decided to use it to build a new chapter. So it would be younger, but still however many thousands of years of replicating since the heresy.

If the geneseed came from a marine, then it almost certainly has replicated down the millennia all the way back to the heresy.

Geneseed degeneration will be down to random mutations, or external damage to it. But its age won't factor in. Being a non first founding chapter doesn't change the geneseed.