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Was think of starting a new primaris army. It was going to be a chapter created from word bearer gene seed, they and everyone else think that guilliman is their gene sire.
One of the reason i had for them going all fanatically and religiousy is that they lost all the senior officers apart from a chaplin. Is that possible?

Why would they not have just promoted lesser officers to the ranks of Captain/Master?

It's possible, but would be a special snowflake kind of thing. The Blood Ravens & Soul Drinkers have had joint Chapter Master / Chief Librarian, and the Red Scorpions have their Master of the Apothecarion as second-in-command.

Chaplin has been both a King and a Great Dictator, so why not a Chapter Master?

Now if you are are wondering about promoting a Chaplain to the position of Chapter Master, that would be highly unusual though not impossible.

Nice


If the command structure were that thoroughly destroyed, they wouldn’t be able to fight independently. They’d either have to quit fighting until the junior officers were competent enough to be promoted, or they’d have to join a multi-chapter crusade and function as rearguard, backup, support kind of companies. Probably a combination of both. Chaplain might be more like a force commander, like one whom the coordination with other chapters could go through.

It makes sense just to have a chapter master and officers who are very devout.. They don’t have to be chaplains to be religious.

 Crimson wrote:
Chaplin has been both a King and a Great Dictator, so why not a Chapter Master?

Because of the mustache. Another guy with some background in the military made it really unpopular. Now, nobody can wear it.

A Chaplain is Chapter Master of my custom Blood Angels descended chapter!

I'm sure that a Chaplain could lead a Chapter on an interim basis, but the role is rather specialised, like the other non-command officers (Techmarines, Apothecaries, Librarians). It's not something that they're really trained for.

If you want to do it, go for it, but it'd rather unusual, like Commissar Gaunt also being a Regimental colonel.

If you can justify it on even a semi-plausible basis, give 'er.

I don't think so, they're different roles and get different training, focuses and experiences. Even the Word Bearers didn't do that, Chaplains are important and omnipresent, but the actual strategic command stuff is left to the people trained and equipped for it.

However, there's no reason why your chapter master isn't especially devout and is a true believer like a Chaplain, or even the guys working out the high level military planning defer to their oracle before working out a strategy inspired by his visions - and so the Chaplain is the warlord whilst the captain is just there to do his job.

So if the Chaplain's vision saved them, doesn't matter what the real command structure is - no one plans an op without getting the chaplain to consult the Tarot first and look for Omens. Not even that unusual in Imperial high commands (though maybe for space marines), so it might not even be noticed as strange if they primary work with local forces rather than other chapters.