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Hi Dakka,
I hear about how orphans of Imperial officers are taken in by the Schola Progenia, but how does the Ecclesiarchy know the officers are killed? Or find the children?
When an Imperial Guard captain is blown up by an Ork, is word sent back to his homeworld, via Astropath or something? I am not sure of the level of communication regiments have with their homeworld, though I suspect its extremely limited. And if his child is somewhere in a hive (like Cain was) how does the Eccliarchy find them among the teeming billions?
I guess a possible explanation would be that since the average Guardsman is (in the fluff I've read) statistically likely to die within 6 months, they just assume they are going to die and induct them into the Schola during the founding. Even if their father survives (and I learnt in history classes that junior officers generally had a higher casualty rate than the rank and file) he is unlikely to ever return and the child is effectively an orphan. And here I'm going by the UNICEF definition of orphan, where only one parent needs to die. I imagine it would not only be twice as hard to keep track of 'double orphans,' but it would reduce the numbers of recruits drastically, not to mention making recruitment transportation uneconomical. What do you guys think?


Man, I can't believe I mentioned UNICEF in a post about 40k.

Propaganda...its all propaganda.....

In many regiments, officers are taken solely from the ruling classes of the planet. Therefore they will be rich and influential enough to maintain contact with the officer in question. In the Gaunt books it even nites that Gaunt's father and "uncle" are able to come home on leave occasionally, but then they are high level commanders, rather than simple lieutenants.

 Flinty wrote:
In many regiments, officers are taken solely from the ruling classes of the planet. Therefore they will be rich and influential enough to maintain contact with the officer in question. In the Gaunt books it even nites that Gaunt's father and "uncle" are able to come home on leave occasionally, but then they are high level commanders, rather than simple lieutenants.

Yep. This right here. Ciaphas Cain's background cannot be taken at face value, by the way. He deliberately obfuscates much of it, and even the Inquisition has been unable to sort it out completely. My personal opinion is that Cain was a street urchin who successfully passed himself off as an orphan of some officers (probably by assuming the identity of some rich kid who died while slumming it in the underhive) and wound up being taken to the Schola and selected for the Commissariat. (Which would fit with his story, I think!) Just my own guess, of course.

I know in the Gaunt books a large “gypsy” camp of family and other types follow the guard regiments around. Offering services like food and “company” to the guardsmen while not on duty. I would assume at least some of the families would be of officers. it would be easy to find these orphans.

Simple really, they find the most talented kids, and then send their parents on suicide missions - thus creating orphans with the required skillset.

Grimdark, but logical.

When it comes to Cain he doesn't know, the most favorable theory is that his parents were cowards, who died maybe for their baby looking heroic, and that's as good a guess as any as far as I'm concerned.

Plus the communications can be kept open with most planets, only the true backwaters lack Astropaths and even there they are keen to get offspring from an Imperial hero into the ranks.

 Devoted-to-the-machine wrote:
I know in the Gaunt books a large “gypsy” camp of family and other types follow the guard regiments around. Offering services like food and “company” to the guardsmen while not on duty. I would assume at least some of the families would be of officers. it would be easy to find these orphans.

Yup, this is exactly what happens. Although these camp followers usually remain on the ship transporting the regiment.

Plus the guardsmen families are often other guardsmen, regiments are usually coed after all.

 Grey Templar wrote:

 Devoted-to-the-machine wrote:
I know in the Gaunt books a large “gypsy” camp of family and other types follow the guard regiments around. Offering services like food and “company” to the guardsmen while not on duty. I would assume at least some of the families would be of officers. it would be easy to find these orphans.

Yup, this is exactly what happens. Although these camp followers usually remain on the ship transporting the regiment.

Plus the guardsmen families are often other guardsmen, regiments are usually coed after all.

Regiments are not generally mixed sex. This is noted in various places in the fluff and supported by the fact that there have only ever been 2 or 3 female IG models. Its just that the more prolofic authors prefer to write about mixed sex regiments as it gives them more scope to write relationship stories that typical readers can relate to.

Of the millions, possibly billions, of IG regiments, we're given concrete details on, what, twenty of them?

It's impossible to say what the "norm" is with such a small sample size.

TheMacharianCandidate wrote:
Hi Dakka,
I hear about how orphans of Imperial officers are taken in by the Schola Progenia, but how does the Ecclesiarchy know the officers are killed? Or find the children?

I doubt very much that it works that way round, more likely its a case of an orphan being brought to planetary social services (if they exist) or the church (I imagine they would handle such things if the planet lacks the former), first step (or possibly second after genetic testing) would be to find the child's identity, if the planets military records turn up a listing of KIA then off to the Schola Progenium he/she goes (or possibly even if the result is MIA, or maybe even alive and well depending on how full the local Schola is or the childs circumstances)

According to Dark Heresy, there's a number of backgrounds for the Progena student's parents. Assume that here's no official categories of this kind of thing, these are just concepts used in the RPG itself:

"Warrior Martyr" (parents died heroic deaths)
"Slaughtered by Rebels" (Parents were loyalists killed in a rebelion)
"Distant Outpost" (Parents may or may not be alive, but are deployed so far away that they will never see you again)
"Lost to the Void" (Parents were on a ship that vanished)
"Without a Trace" (No record of what happened to the parents)
"Never to Return" (Parents were depoyed on an Imperial crusade or rogue trader expedition, not expected to return)
"Not Spoken Of" (The records are sealed)

Just ideas on it. Not all parents of Progenium students are dead, nor are all of them necessarily heroes, striclty speaking-- they could just be victims martyred by rebels, for example.