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I assume they are just regular SM's that are given the bad shot and become Chaos Marines, but is it possible to make new ones out of standard humans? Has it been done/tried/achieved?

What goes into making "new" chaos Marines?

Yes it has been done. There has been different mentions of different ways to make new Chaos Marines, from the relatively normal apothecary assisted plundering and implanting of loyalist geneseed (The Night Lords books go into this.), over the hidden infiltration of loyalist recruits by the Alpha Legion (Sadly can't remember the source for that one anymore.) to the literal daemon engine the Iron Warriors used in Dead Sky, Black Sun. Fabius Bile seems to sell Marines too both the standard variant as his more unique creations.

Yes. The main thing that makes Fabius Bile important is his skill at culturing gene-seed - unlike loyalist chapters not every marine's geneseed is viable because mutation.

Plenty of chaos marines are 'new', though they're looked down on by heresy veterans.

So why do Chaos still use Cultists if they can all be made into Space Marines? Surely a Chaos Space Marine is worth far more than a cultist in battle,

unless it's a logistics thing. They need special mcguffins to make Chaos Space Marines. In which case it's not possible to make standard base humans into chaos marines.

The vast majority of the 41st millenium's Chaos Marines are non-Heresy, non-turncoat Chaos followers. The making of a Chaos Marines is described as, if I remember correctly, "crude and bloody" procedure compared to the loyalist chapters in Codex Chaos Second Edition. Which probably simply means that there are lot more premature demises than the loyalist Marines' 1% or so initiation survivors.


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FezzikDaBullgryn wrote:
So why do Chaos still use Cultists if they can all be made into Space Marines? Surely a Chaos Space Marine is worth far more than a cultist in battle,

unless it's a logistics thing. They need special mcguffins to make Chaos Space Marines. In which case it's not possible to make standard base humans into chaos marines.

For the same reason the Imperium doesn't turn all Guardsmen into Space Marines.

Also most Chaos forces are sworn warrior brotherhoods to whom the lowly cultist masses mean less then nothing. Your average "mah spleen!" cultist has to demonstrate his worth before being considered for ascension.

FezzikDaBullgryn wrote:
So why do Chaos still use Cultists if they can all be made into Space Marines? Surely a Chaos Space Marine is worth far more than a cultist in battle,

unless it's a logistics thing. They need special mcguffins to make Chaos Space Marines. In which case it's not possible to make standard base humans into chaos marines.

they cant make them "all chaos marines" for pretty much the same reason the imperium cant make all its warriors loyalist marines: they just don't have the capacity to change that many, plus their is a large washout percentage for those that try, even with a stringent pre-induction testing regime. While they may be hundreds of thousands of chaos marines (i.e., they may be of a similar number to the loyalist their are uncounted millions of cultists working with and for them. the best are cherry picked for induction and implantation, the rest sent as fodder to further their masters goals.

locarno24 wrote:
Yes. The main thing that makes Fabius Bile important is his skill at culturing gene-seed - unlike loyalist chapters not every marine's geneseed is viable because mutation.

Plenty of chaos marines are 'new', though they're looked down on by heresy veterans.

Honestly, aside from the named characters and ascended Daemon Princes, there should hardly be any original Heresy Legionnaires left at this point.

 Esmer wrote:

locarno24 wrote:
Yes. The main thing that makes Fabius Bile important is his skill at culturing gene-seed - unlike loyalist chapters not every marine's geneseed is viable because mutation.

Plenty of chaos marines are 'new', though they're looked down on by heresy veterans.

Honestly, aside from the named characters and ascended Daemon Princes, there should hardly be any original Heresy Legionnaires left at this point.

You're not really wrong, but also they've gone out of their way to provide some handy excuses for Heresy-era marines to still be around. Escapes into warp portals. Chaos deciding to cash in a dude's brownie points for a ressurrection. Clones. Time warp shenanigans.

Also, marines die a lot faster and in greater numbers on the tabletop than they tend to in the fluff. In the heresy novels, they're frequently like, "Good news! We took over this entire planet in three days, and we only took ten casualties!" And in the 40k stories, it seems like an entire warband might only include a handful (like, less than a maxed out patrol detachment's worth) of actual chaos marines. So I get the impression that, narratively, it's sort of rare for enough chaos marines to be on one battlefield at once to lose more than a few dozen at a time.

FezzikDaBullgryn wrote:
So why do Chaos still use Cultists if they can all be made into Space Marines? Surely a Chaos Space Marine is worth far more than a cultist in battle,

unless it's a logistics thing. They need special mcguffins to make Chaos Space Marines. In which case it's not possible to make standard base humans into chaos marines.

Fabius bile had a cache of in-tainted gene seed from before the heresy. He keeps his head by providing materials and training to allow the chaos legions to create new warriors and fix the current ones.

However CSM are incredibly precious about their superiority over loyalist marines and so trials to win the right to be a new member of the traitor legions would be harder than those to become a loyalist marine neophyte.

Not all CSM have relationships with cultist planets and armies. But cultists are just independent groups of warriors devoted to chaos’s there are whole planet of humans that worship chaos gods and have fully fledged armies that have nothing to do with the veterans of the long war. Just not on the table top

Further you don't NEED to be an CSM to become ascended.

The path to glory stands open for anyone, hence why champions of R&H could be marked just aswell as CSM could.

Is it easier to walk that path as a CSM, hell yeah, certainly a lower chance of getting chaos spawned through the inevitable gifts you collect.


Further there are multiple ways to create CSM:
Bile got mentioned, he more or less runs a whole planet of nutjob crazies at this point.
then there's stuff like this:
https://wh40k.lexicanum.com/wiki/Daemonculaba
Which goes to show that chaos is anything if not bonkers.

Others have mentioned the various means by which the various Chaos factions generate Marines. Something that should be kept in mind however is that regardless of where the gene-seed stock may come from, finding suitable recruits is another one.

When you live anywhere susceptible to the influence of Chaos, huge numbers of the population are born mutated. If you keep the geneseed anywhere like that, it tends to mutate. A+B might well make a marine, but when A transforms into Z and B into G, there's not guarantee anything will work right. Science (aka geneseed implantation along with the other organs) relies on predictibility, on careful calculations and tried and tested procedure generating the same results. Chaos tends to undermine such things.

Even if you do a bargain with one of the great powers to try and guarantee things either don't mutate (ala Thousand Sons) or work against physics or even just try and do it in a more neutral setting, the result is....inconsistent. And not necessarily superior or even equal to what gets churned out by the Loyalist Chapters.

Case in point, in the Night Lords trilogy, they've tried to make new marines either out of Nostroman stock amongst the ship crews or from people out of planets they raided. But the quality of the recruit is low and the ship crew themselves have been increasingly rendered infertile by Chaos. You consequently have a sharp skill/physical power divide, The older marines were made from uncorrupted stock, selected from the best possible recruits, and fought intensively throughout the Great Crusades. And then you have the new blood, who were raised in the lower decks of a spaceship and were merely the ones who survived an implantation. The latter, naturally, are inferior specimens and viewed as such by the older marines.

Bile likely manufactures better specimens than this sort of ad hoc recruitment/elevation, so his product is more highly valued. Likewise, uncorrupted gene seed is more likely to turn out a good quality marine than something that's been imbued with the warp. It's why Abbadon went out of his way to seize uncorrupted geneseed. Long story short, it's not so much about how many people or geneseed you have, it's about the quality and condition of both. And Chaos tends to degrade them.

Not all marines that you might call CSM value the changes that the warp can impose on you. Power is welcome but corruption not necessarily and some CSM resent the corruption that their primarchs led them into.

FezzikDaBullgryn wrote:
So why do Chaos still use Cultists if they can all be made into Space Marines? Surely a Chaos Space Marine is worth far more than a cultist in battle,

unless it's a logistics thing. They need special mcguffins to make Chaos Space Marines. In which case it's not possible to make standard base humans into chaos marines.

For the same reason the Imperium doesn't turn all Guardsmen into Space Marines.

Also most Chaos forces are sworn warrior brotherhoods to whom the lowly cultist masses mean less then nothing. Your average "mah spleen!" cultist has to demonstrate his worth before being considered for ascension.

Right, so if the lore is to be believed, there are only a few tens of thousand Loyalist SMs accounting for the remaining factions. However there are over tens of thousands of CSM according to the Cadia books/Abbadon lore. Where is Chaos making thousands of CSM if each one requires Gene Seed? I thought they were beyond gene science and were just pumping pure warp energy into a human and bam, CSM. (I admit that is an oversimplification) but where are the hordes of CSM coming from?

Bile provided cloning technology to the Crimson Slaughter, which has been instrumental in being able to field large numbers of Marines.

FezzikDaBullgryn wrote:
Right, so if the lore is to be believed, there are only a few tens of thousand Loyalist SMs accounting for the remaining factions. However there are over tens of thousands of CSM according to the Cadia books/Abbadon lore. Where is Chaos making thousands of CSM if each one requires Gene Seed? I thought they were beyond gene science and were just pumping pure warp energy into a human and bam, CSM. (I admit that is an oversimplification) but where are the hordes of CSM coming from?

If you read the recent Fabius bile trilogy you will get your answer, but in short bile keeps on the good side of abbadon and the gods by supplying new CSM for the long war, amongst other services. And gene seed implantation is still the same process for CSM as it is for SM although Fabius may have improved it but basically same thing.

Loyalist chapters would probably have better retention too if they weren't held back by pitiful mortal concepts such as 'aging' and 'linear time' and 'unwillingness to trade souls for power'

More seriously I would say that CSM are more able to pick their battles and join only those fights which favor them. Loyalists are a bit stuck in the frantic defense of a crumbling Imperium.

I'd say a better question is how Khornate CSM are keeping up. Who among them is even going to be interested in making new recruits in the first place?

 NinthMusketeer wrote:
Loyalist chapters would probably have better retention too if they weren't held back by pitiful mortal concepts such as 'aging' and 'linear time' and 'unwillingness to trade souls for power'

More seriously I would say that CSM are more able to pick their battles and join only those fights which favor them. Loyalists are a bit stuck in the frantic defense of a crumbling Imperium.

I'd say a better question is how Khornate CSM are keeping up. Who among them is even going to be interested in making new recruits in the first place?

Worlds under the control of Khornate forces like the Blood Pact might well put forward candidates. There are planets outside of the reach of the Imperium where Chaos is just the normal belief system, so being recruited into something like the World Eaters might be considered a great honor. Even if they don't worship Chaos, if you have a feral world where different groups are constantly fighting each other, someone like Kossolax the Foresworn would be considered a god and I imagine many would desire to be like him.

Not getting the recruits, doing the recruiting. Who among the WE is actually going to bother with the logistics and process of upgrading candidates to marines? Though I suppose that goes for a lot of roles. Hopefully the eventual WE codex will provide answers.

 NinthMusketeer wrote:
Not getting the recruits, doing the recruiting. Who among the WE is actually going to bother with the logistics and process of upgrading candidates to marines? Though I suppose that goes for a lot of roles. Hopefully the eventual WE codex will provide answers.

WE might be blood lust psychos but the must have the ability to think straight some times and probably the warbands or someone working for khorne than wants to see the long war continue will make a deal with Fabius for new soldiers. I find it quite easy to imagine someone from the WE going to the blood pact and taking a selection of their best warriors, through trial.

Find to harder to imagine how you would convince people to join the death guard.

I suppose we also have to remember that the ranks of renegades and heretics will be filled by loyalists turning traitor.

CSM primaris can’t be far away

Berzerkers aren't actually berzerk all of the time, you know? Lheor Ukris in the Black Legion novels was quite capable of carrying on a rational conversation when off the battlefield. There's no reason the World Eaters can't still have apothecaries.

Re. 'Chaos Primaris'... have you looked at the plastic Havoc models? They're blatantly wearing Chaosified Mk X armour.

Khorne just needs more fluff than rage kill rage all the time. Thin slivers of positive characteristics in each Chaos God and their servants makes them so much more engaging. Imagine how bland Nurgle would be if they didn't have the cheerful, generous aspect.

 NinthMusketeer wrote:
Khorne just needs more fluff than rage kill rage all the time. Thin slivers of positive characteristics in each Chaos God and their servants makes them so much more engaging. Imagine how bland Nurgle would be if they didn't have the cheerful, generous aspect.

Yhea, Khorne has suffered the most from the loss of positive values, namely a whole "honour, pride and fair play" thing (so that you might better prove your strength), in favour of mindless bloodlust. It makes it harder to understand why a rational, uncorrupted human would choose to worship him, instead of one of the others that can actually offer something enticing.

 NinthMusketeer wrote:
Loyalist chapters would probably have better retention too if they weren't held back by pitiful mortal concepts such as 'aging' and 'linear time' and 'unwillingness to trade souls for power'

More seriously I would say that CSM are more able to pick their battles and join only those fights which favor them. Loyalists are a bit stuck in the frantic defense of a crumbling Imperium.

I'd say a better question is how Khornate CSM are keeping up. Who among them is even going to be interested in making new recruits in the first place?

Presumably, they have serfs who are in responsible for logistics and recruitment.

Honestly, I never liked the "honour, pride, fair play" aspect of Khorne, because it made him seem like fundamentally a god of war, when he's supposed to be an embodiment of rage. War is only the most 'obvious' aspect of Khorne (as with Slaanesh and sex, or Nurgle and disease), but still secondary to the emotional energy he is literally made of.

I always felt Khorne's 'good' aspects should be keyed to 'good' manifestations of anger, rather than to stereotypical 'warrior' virtues like martial pride. What I'd like to see are champions of Khorne who hate the Imperium because they see the Imperium as unjust and bad for humanity, or who turned to Khorne because the Imperium killed their family, or started out as an especially puritanical priest of the Ecclesiarchy and just took the Imperial Creed's hatred of the 'impure' to its logical conclusion (everything is impure, therefore everything is hateful and deserves to be destroyed).

But what GW gives us instead is crazy cannibal cults and manbaby warriors whose martial pride has been bruised. Yawn...

Khorne has always been the god of many things including martial skill.

A general that executed a perfect engagement and won a battle would make khorne happy as much as if they just went head to head and chopped each other to pieces.

But if there are running stories about people getting their ego hurt then I agree that’s not very interesting

The idea of breaking chains and fighting injustice with entirely justified anger is a compelling narrative. It would also tie very well in with marines, considering how tyrannical and generally dickish the Emperor was.

I been to enough clubs in Boston to know that Nurgle and Slanesh are both the same god, or intrinsically linked. One always seeming leads to the other.

In the Ultramarines books, they go into pretty mind-fething detail about a practice that is used to create new Chaos Marines by Honsou. Daemonculablas, anyone?

Do elaborate!