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I have asked around and made a previous thread on the subject but every time I try and get advice on the subject everyone just starts arguing with one another because no one seems to be certain and everybody forgets the point that I am genuinely asking for advice..

I want to create a chapter, a chapter not a company but a chapter of "wolves" I have been told their geneseed resides only on fenris and this is impossible. But no one knows what happened to leman Russ..? So who is to say he couldn't have simply started another entire "wolve" type chapter somewhere else? I am in love with how the wolves play and want to run their codex but I don't want to use the same exact color scheme every other player does and I don't want to have the same exact characters and what have you the wolves of fenris do.
I think it would be awesome to use the same set up except make my own companies, my own great wolf etc.

SOMEONE WHO KNOWS THEIR 40K PLEASE GIVE ME A USABLE SCENARY OR ANY ADVICE PN THE SUBJECT.
Without killing the next person who mildly disagrees with you. Thank you

So make your own chapter using space wolves rules. The fluff is really irrelevant.

If you really need it to be a successor (of which there are none left), just retcon and say that it was a successful successor during the time of the wolf brothers.

Also, Russ is in the Warp.

Well everyone previously was saying if I just made my own gak up its kind of frowned upon in the bigger realm of gaming. (I'm fairly new if you can't tell) so I wasn't sure how big of a deal it was that my storyline actually goes hand in hand with 40K books etc.

SMMSjosh14 wrote:
Well everyone previously was saying if I just made my own gak up its kind of frowned upon in the bigger realm of gaming. (I'm fairly new if you can't tell) so I wasn't sure how big of a deal it was that my storyline actually goes hand in hand with 40K books etc.

It really doesn't matter if you make up your own stuff.

That being said, there are no successors or non-Space Wolf space wolves. So if you want something that isn't space wolves but looks like space wolves, acts like space wolves and is painted red, you have to squint past the fluff for a bit.

Alternatively, you could go into 'counts-as' land and play Space Wolves as another force entirely.

I don't think Russ had the know how to build another Chapter from scratch, unless him and Corax met up in the warp for a chin wag.

Make like Pretre's suggestion and create your own and use your own characters as counts as. Your Chapter might have fought along side the Space Wolves on planet Wolfespire against the Wolfghosts and admired their way of war so much they burnt the Codex , grew beards and dyed their hair red.

Hahaha. Ok I like it. Those are pretty great. Thanka a ton guys, really.

Use a 13th company, color them into silver, and paint their hands with chaos blood..../thread

From Lexicanum, which is drawn from a number of sources regarding the fate of Leman Russ:

Years passed after the Horus Heresy. Russ, at a great feast with his Legion in attendance, stood and said: "In the end I will return. For the final battle. For the Wolf Time." He then left the Fang and embarked into the Eye of Terror accompanied by his personal retinue bar one - Bjorn the Fell-Handed, who remained on Fenris in the role of Great Wolf. The tale of his disappearance is retold every thousand years by Bjorn, now the oldest dreadnought alive. Every once in a while, the Space Wolves embark on what is called the Great Hunt to search the galaxy for their missing leader. Though they have searched far and wide, they still haven't found any sign of their Primarch. Apparently The Wolf Primarch's Arch-nemesis Magnus knows the Wolf King's whereabouts, but keeps it secret.

It bears noting that the Primarchs were not responsible for the creation of their Legions. This was done by the Emperor and, later, the Magos Biologis of the Adeptus Mechanicus. The Space Marines are warriors, not genetic scientists.

Further, attempts have been made to create other Chapters from the geneseed of the Space Wolves. These have all ended in terrible failure. It is believed that there is something to the genetic code of native Fenrisians that allows only them to be viable candidates for the geneseed of Russ.

First, and most important: It's your army, they're your models. Do whatever the hell you want with 'em.

Second, there are no known official successor chapters to the Space Wolves.

That does, however, leave several options:

1) Unknown successors. A chapter is descended from SW genestock, but doesn't know about it. Although doctrinally this would most likely mean they'll follow the C:A rather than the SW combat style. Then again, blood will out, as they say.

2) Spiritual successor: A chapter not descended from SW genestock, but is heavily influenced by them, either because their homeworld is close to Fenris and hence there's a lot of contact, or during its founding years the Chapter was saved/managed to save/otherwise tutored by either a SW Great Hunt/ Great Company on the road/ renegade GC (though only from Fenris) passing by, or (somewhat controverisal, methinks) Russ on his wanderings after leaving the Fang. The latter should mean the Chapter is at least 8,000 old already, if not dating back to the 3rd or 4th Founding.

For instance, just after its founding, a bunch of freak warp storms closed off Chapter *insert name* and their subsector from the rest of the Imperium. They managed to stay true to the Emperor though, and at least kept their homeworld safe from the heresies and rebellions that plagued the rest of the subsector during this period. However, a freak accident (Tzeentch did it!) during the inception of the warp storms laid low nearly all of the Chapter's repository of knowledge and history (including its chaplains!), and so, although they kept fighting the good fight, they slowly (or quickly) forgot why they fought, eventually almost succumbing to the Chaos forces when the warp storm suddenly abated and a space wolf battle force happened to be nearby and went to investigate. Being proper space vikings, they loved a good fight on the losing side, and jumped right into the fray just as Chapter *insert name*'s homeworld was about to fall, and being proper badass space vikings, saved the day.
Having lost all knowledge of other Space Marines, Chapter *insert name*, quickly decided that this must be what they were intended to be and over the course of the campaign to bring the subsector back into the Light of the Emperor took over not only many of the SW mannerisms, but most of their organisational and battle doctrine as well.

3) The original 13th Company has been trolling Chaos Space marines in the Eye of Terror since the Horus Heresy and have scavenged for armour parts for about as long. A heavily WG themed SW army with lots of Mark of the Wulfen models and preheresy colour scheme combined with lots of chaos bits (an arm here, a leg there, a bolter there, etc)

4) Another Great Company who disagreed with the current (or a past) Great Wolf decided to head out on its own, and eventually found a suitably barbaric planet to their liking and made themselves nicely comfortable and homely and stuff, eventually being acknowledged (perhaps after being lost and "rediscovered" by other Imperial forces) as a Chapter in its own right. This could actually fall under 1) unknown successors. Perhaps the Chapter itself knows of the deception and acts to keep Imperial busybodies from finding out, or perhaps the Inquisition knows? (Screw TS plans to keep the SW from having successors, freak genetics in a random one of the billion planets can always trump that!)

Dude^.... thanks haha. That was great

You said earlier that you were worried making your own back story is frowned upon. This is actually far from the truth. If you put thought and effort into a good background people will appreciate it. What may irk many people is if you fly in the face of convention (which a space wolves successor chapter would be.) The most important thing, as said earlier, is that it is your army. Do what thou wilt.

5) During the heresy a group of SW ships crash landed on a feral world and the human population of the ships interbred with the local populous. As SW use fenrisians instead of serfs they eventually passed on their DNA across the planet. With warp storms cutting them off from the imperium the surviving wolf priests implanting the geneseeds of the fallen into either the young fenrisians or the children of the crossbred people.
After 10,000 years most, if not all, of the people have the required code in their genes so that their fate isn't that of the wolf brothers. With no access to their primarch or brothers they changed their names and color scheme.

The 4th option which Bran Dawi gave is pretty much what my Space Wolves Successor Chapter is. They go by the name of the Shadow Wolves and they egenrally end up "silencing" any inquisitors who find out that they are actually a chapter. My chapter colour scheme wise is going for celestra grey armour with Khorne Red Shoulder pads.

We've almost reached the second page of this thread and Lynata hasn't made a long post about how everything is canon and nothing is canon and fluff is how you interpret it etc.

He's slackin'.

Anyway, the responses made above are spot on. If you care about your chapter being consistent with the majority of the other fluff, then you're SOL in regards to making a Space Wolves chapter that isn't from Fenris. That said, Pretre's suggestion is what I think makes the most sense. Make a chapter who really admires the Wolves for whatever reason, to the point where they've gone out of their way to emulate them. They can be the Space Wolves equivalent of Codex Adhering chapters. "The _____ can never be Space Wolves, for they lack the geneseed of Russ, but they ever aspire to follow in his example", etc etc.

BlaxicanX wrote:We've almost reached the second page of this thread and Lynata hasn't made a long post about how everything is canon and nothing is canon and fluff is how you interpret it etc. He's slackin'.

Bah, I thought pretre already kinda covered that.

Also, don't dismiss Bran's suggestion regarding the "missing Great Company" - that's a fairly clever loophole!

You guys are awesome, great suggestions I'm getting to work now using the tips you've all given. Keep em coming if anyone has anything else to say, or anything cool on the subject.

SMMSjosh14 wrote:
I have asked around and made a previous thread on the subject but every time I try and get advice on the subject everyone just starts arguing with one another because no one seems to be certain and everybody forgets the point that I am genuinely asking for advice..

I want to create a chapter, a chapter not a company but a chapter of "wolves" I have been told their geneseed resides only on fenris and this is impossible. But no one knows what happened to leman Russ..? So who is to say he couldn't have simply started another entire "wolve" type chapter somewhere else? I am in love with how the wolves play and want to run their codex but I don't want to use the same exact color scheme every other player does and I don't want to have the same exact characters and what have you the wolves of fenris do.
I think it would be awesome to use the same set up except make my own companies, my own great wolf etc.

SOMEONE WHO KNOWS THEIR 40K PLEASE GIVE ME A USABLE SCENARY OR ANY ADVICE PN THE SUBJECT.
Without killing the next person who mildly disagrees with you. Thank you

A couple of questions and suggestions:

First, you want to create an entire Chapter? The Space Wolves Chapter is made up of 12 Great Companies, of about 100 Space Wolves. What do you need to create an entire Chapter for? Are you really going to model 600-1000+ Marines?

What consideration do you want to pay to the 'official' background? I mean, if you want to ignore it entirely, do whatever you want. If you want to respect it and not produce something that contradicts it, then Leman Russ didn't create the Legion, and wouldn't have created another Chapter. He told his Wolves when he left that he would return at the Wolftime. It does a great deal of violence to the background to assume that Russ went off and secretly created another Chapter, without telling his loyal marines. There's also no indication that any of the Primarchs had the knowledge to create a new Chapter. Even the Primarch of the Raven Guard needed the Emperor's 'notes' to speed up the process, and it didn't work right. Finally, the Space Wolves novels hint (but do not outright say) that the Space Wolves geneseed has a unique interaction with the colonists of Fenris.

Given that it's an established part of the background that Great Companies can, and do, break with the Chapter and function independently, you could easily and totally within the established background have Space Wolves who aren't part of the Chapter, and have a totally different paint scheme. Even within that company, you could have characters who have the 'statline' of established Space Wolf characters, but are actually 'some other guy'. If you want to have a Space Wolf who fights like Ragnar Blackmane in your company, paint him up the way you want and call him whatever.

Of course, you can go even further and have an entire "counts as' Space Wolf army, founded from some other geneseed with some other primarch. There are a great deal of Chapters who don't know the provenance of their geneseed at all. There's nothing to prevent you from having an army that uses the Space Wolf rules, but looks entirely different.


On the other hand, if you are determined to have an entirely separate, distinct full Chapter of Marines founded from Leman Russ geneseed, and constituted around the Space Wolf organizational system, then you are contradicting well-established background. Just acknowledge it and do what you want. People have done Simpsons Marines, or Hello Kitty Marines. You own your models and you can paint them and play with them however you want. I think a lot of people (myself included) just get really, really frustrated with people who want to do something that is totally contradicted by the fluff, and want people to stretch, gloss over, rewrite, or ignore the fluff and accept their army background as 'fluffy'.

I'm totally fine with someone creating an army that doesn't fit into the established 40K backstory. If you want to do US armed forces marines, or loyalist (post heresy) Death Guard, or heretic Ultramarines, or whatever cool idea you have, I'm good with it. However, don't try to hammer them into the fluff. GW established tons of loopholes in the fluff (lost primarchs, unknown geneseed, uncounted Chapters, etc.) If you can't get an army concept to fit into any of those wide open holes, just accept the fact and play a 'non-canon' army. It is a game. My orks aren't REALLY invading your home world. Your Captain didn't REALLY die in this fight.

No I'm not going to paint up 1000 models. So I suppose it could be the same company every time I play. But I wanted to basically create a chapter of "wolves" meaning we use the space wolve codex. The MOTW wolves will have wolve heads while the rest have the normal stuff. If create my own great wolf just using their guidelines obviously just like making a SM chapter master. And just basically be exactly like the space wolves only our own color scheme and not use their characters. But I want it to be respectable from the fluff stand point so if that is absolutely impossible than like you said towards the end I just won't worry about it to much.

Bran Dawri wrote:
...
4) Another Great Company who disagreed with the current (or a past) Great Wolf decided to head out on its own, and eventually found a suitably barbaric planet to their liking and made themselves nicely comfortable and homely and stuff, eventually being acknowledged (perhaps after being lost and "rediscovered" by other Imperial forces) as a Chapter in its own right. This could actually fall under 1) unknown successors. Perhaps the Chapter itself knows of the deception and acts to keep Imperial busybodies from finding out, or perhaps the Inquisition knows? (Screw TS plans to keep the SW from having successors, freak genetics in a random one of the billion planets can always trump that!)

I think this is a great idea. It allows you to keep as much of the Space Wolf fluff as you want, and change the rest, including colors, heraldry, heroes, etc.

I recall there being a known successor Chapter called the Wolf Brothers, but that'd date back to 2nd ed and may well have been retconned since. Can anyone shed any light?

Storm father, I think that is what I'm going with its at least the best idea thus far I think.

SMMSjosh14 wrote:
No I'm not going to paint up 1000 models. So I suppose it could be the same company every time I play. But I wanted to basically create a chapter of "wolves" meaning we use the space wolve codex. The MOTW wolves will have wolve heads while the rest have the normal stuff. If create my own great wolf just using their guidelines obviously just like making a SM chapter master. And just basically be exactly like the space wolves only our own color scheme and not use their characters. But I want it to be respectable from the fluff stand point so if that is absolutely impossible than like you said towards the end I just won't worry about it to much.

I think you would really be fine just having a 'Great Company' of Space Wolves ('Chapter' has a really specific meaning, but numerically, a Great Company is about the same size).

If your Wolf Lord felt the need to do so, he can part company--on good terms, even---with Logan Grimnar and his entire Great Company can function outside the organization of the Space Wolves chapter. I can't find the specific fluff right now, but at one point, the Space Wolves point out that they have only sworn two oaths, one to Leman Russ, and the other to the Emperor. They don't recognize an oath to the Emperor as being transferred to the high lords of Terra, nor do they view the Great Wolf as speaking for Leman Russ.

Given that each Great Company presumably has hundreds, if not thousands, of Fenrisian thralls, or bondsmen, who can be of both sexes, the Great Company could even have sufficient breeding stock for producing at least some new aspirants from Fenrisian DNA. Heck, they might have good relations with Fenris and even bring more Fenrisians to their headquarters. Also, it's been well established that the Wolves have long-standing oaths and alliances with certain Navigator houses and Martian adepts, so it's not implausible that even a 'rogue' Great Company could still be supplied by the Adeptus Mechanicus.

Going with that option, you could have a full 'Great Company' of Space Wolves, all independent of the Chapter, and numbering as much, or more, than a Codex Chapter in marines. Their heraldry and trappings would be up to their own Wolf Lord, and wouldn't have to have anything to do with the Space Wolves chapter unless you wanted it to.

If you did go with that option, I think it would be interesting to figure out why your Wolf Lord and his Company broke with the Great Wolf, and how to reflect it in the modeling. This isn't going 'rogue', like some traitors, or being disobedient. You could have a Great Company that decided to stay in the Eastern Fringe and fight some threat on a long term basis, or garrison some crucial world, or even go on some big crusade/honor quest/hunt for some enemy. For instance, if you decided that your Great Company was called up to quell some war of Apostasy, and discovered a long-standing demonic cult infiltrating some system, your Wolves might decide to take over the main planet of the system, purge the cultists, and stay there to cleanse the outlying planets of long-festering daemonic influence. In that case, you might have a lot of severed daemon heads/trophies/etc on the bases. A good story behind your marines can lead to a lot of interesting modeling.

Good luck, and let us know how you get on!

I think I am going to go with the breaking away due to disagreeing with the great wolf. And yes I was unaware companies could be that numerous.
I thought the space wolf chapter was 1000 or so just like an average SM chapter? So my point was I didn't simply want my army to be like.. 100 men deep. Haha that would mean I could fight like 2 battles realistically unless we recruited like Alabama hah. But those are great ideas man really I appreciate it.

I will just point that I took the hobby into my own hands and painted my space wolves purple @£%$-come all. It is your hobby, make it your own. Just because something is printed in books and people recognise the space wolves for their grey just paint them in another colour. While I could make up a lot of different bacround stories as to why they would be purple (Bran the Redmaw lost a bet to dark angels/got rethoricaly cornered by lucas the trickster while drunk one time/tseech changed their armour paint with a colour changing spell during a warp travel/they are space wolves from an alternative universe/they are actualy another medium range space marine chapter who looks very simular to the space wolves and use their codex) but making up an exuse just does not pay respect enough to the fact that picking another colour scheme is just not a big deal.