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Or, it’s the ongoing hypnotic indoctrination doing that. Could be a bit of both, either or neither. Such are the mysteries of 40K.

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
Or, it’s the ongoing hypnotic indoctrination doing that. Could be a bit of both, either or neither. Such are the mysteries of 40K.

In the Fabius bile trilogy Bile himself struggles greatly around the presence of the Fabius clone. He feels compelled not just to be loyal to become a giggling fan boy. And it’s not just the astartes the humanoids and the mutants seem instantly ready to kneel to the clone and follow him into hell.

If I have to guess the astartes are immune to the hypnotic effect because you wouldn’t want them to be hypnotised by the wrong person but they are genetically coded to be loyal to their primarchs.

And non astartes are subject to the hypothesis.

Some people have greater resolve than other clearly and can withstand these effects if they try hard enough, have strong enough psychic powers or have enough strength of conviction

mrFickle wrote:

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
Or, it’s the ongoing hypnotic indoctrination doing that. Could be a bit of both, either or neither. Such are the mysteries of 40K.

In the Fabius bile trilogy Bile himself struggles greatly around the presence of the Fabius clone. He feels compelled not just to be loyal to become a giggling fan boy. And it’s not just the astartes the humanoids and the mutants seem instantly ready to kneel to the clone and follow him into hell.

If I have to guess the astartes are immune to the hypnotic effect because you wouldn’t want them to be hypnotised by the wrong person but they are genetically coded to be loyal to their primarchs.

And non astartes are subject to the hypothesis.

Some people have greater resolve than other clearly and can withstand these effects if they try hard enough, have strong enough psychic powers or have enough strength of conviction

Iirc his special mutants ("New Men") were directly stated to have received, among other stuff (e.g. Eldar and Barghesi genes) some "lesser form" of Emperor's Children geneseed, which Fabius speculates might be responsible for the obedience effect. On the other hand, no such thing is stated about his vatborn mutants, which fall to Clonegrim immediately, too.

the-gentleman-ranker wrote:

 Orkeosaurus wrote:
My understanding was always that they could remove one but had to hold off on the second until the marine died.

If they can remove both the whole idea of conserving geneseed becomes nonsense, they could just keep each marine training on their homeworld for the first 10 years and now their chapter is "immortal" and will never lose geneseed no matter how many are killed. In fact the more casualties they take the more geneseed they have since each new recruit doubles the supply. But the lore always describes the opposite.

I think that only works if one assumes a 100% viablity rate of the organs. Assuming we go by GW, gene-seed degredation has been known to occur, so even if both are removed, its entirely possible that at least one, possible both, are non-viable and cannot be used in future.

For example, there's a little sentence in the 4th edition SM rulebook saying that for the Ultramarines they only have "Neophyte survival at 54%." . And since their seed is noted as being 'not-awful', it would mean lineages with 'awful' seed could easily have a scenario where both seeds fail.

These considerations mean that only a small proportion of people can become Space Marines. They must be male because zygotes are keyed to male hormones and tissue types, hence the need for tissue compatibility tests and psychological screening. If these tests prove successful, a candidate becomes a neophyte. With the completion of organ implantation and attendant chemical and hypnotic training, the subject becomes an initiate. An initiate receives training before joining the ranks as a full brother. A Marine usually joins the ranks between the ages of 16-18, but such are the hormonal changes induced by the process of creating a Space Marine that recruits are physically fully grown before then. Pressures during wartime may accelerate the process.[---]Although the Chapters are careful to select only the most suitable candidates, not all neophytes survive to become initiates. This is due in part to the degeneration of knowledge amongst the individual Chapters that makes screening procedures less effective than they once were. Nor are operational methods entirely satisfactory in some cases. In many Chapters implant surgery is heavily ritualised, and is often accompanied by scarring, incantation, periods of prayer, fasting and all sorts of mystical practices which compromise medical efficiency


So what i took this to mean is that, even if both seeds are viable when harvested, there's no guarantee the person its implanted into survives. And if only one or none is viable, then things get even stickier for the Chapter

That wouldn't fundamentally change things though, in fact it would make it even more vital that they never allow a marine to go into battle until both glands are removed. And they would still get more geneseed with each generation of new recruits even if it was 1.1x instead of 2.0x, so it would still be the reverse of what's described in the fluff.

Let's say you have a marine. You wait 10 years and remove both glands. Each has a 45% chance of failure in implantation, destroying the gland. On average you get 1.1 new marines from that marine. The chapter can grow 1.1 times its size with each "generation". Casualties sustained in battle still have no effect on geneseed because combat troops have no glands left; all that matters is that the geneseed vault on their homeworld is intact and they have enough new humans to implant.

Alternatively space marines go into battle with both glands. Let's say an apothecary can save the glands 70% of the time (sounds generous to me). Still 45% failure at implantation. On average you get 0.77 marines from each dead marine, meaning the chapter shrinks with every generation and soon dies out.

Allowing your marines to fight with glands unremoved in that context is just the chapter committing suicide for no reason. Not to mention the reduced combat effectiveness of needing to recover corpses in the middle of a mission, or having your only medic prioritize gland-removal over treating the wounded. And yet it's well-established that Apothecaries do remove the glands from corpses on the battlefield. The only explanation for it besides "lmao the Imperium is stoopid and losing on purpose" is that space marines can't function with both glands removed, so removing them both before risking them in combat isn't possible. And if that's the case then it does make sense that sustaining huge losses could wipe out a chapter (due to the inability to recover enough geneseed from corpses, which they are forced to do for at least half of it). And that matches the fluff.

 Orkeosaurus wrote:
My understanding was always that they could remove one but had to hold off on the second until the marine died.

If they can remove both the whole idea of conserving geneseed becomes nonsense, they could just keep each marine training on their homeworld for the first 10 years and now their chapter is "immortal" and will never lose geneseed no matter how many are killed. In fact the more casualties they take the more geneseed they have since each new recruit doubles the supply. But the lore always describes the opposite.

This was my understanding as well. That a lot of marines, by the time they reach a battle company, only have their chest progenoid,. Not as a guaranteed thing, plenty might still have two, but that there are no marines in battle companies running around with no progenoids.

That said, I'm more interested in the theories around marines that could have their progenoid removed, but don't, and why a chapter may do this. As mentioned, it might be because the longer a progenoid is implanted, even after date of maturity, it continued to absorb various intangible properties of the marine, honor, courage, valor, battle prowess, etc. This could be for superstitious reasons or perhaps it does lead to better performing organ zygotes. Or perhaps the length of time left in has some correlation with rejection rates. That a freshly removed 5 year set of cultured implants has a higher rejection rate than a set of 200 year old cultured implants. That there are ways to adjust for this, but only the AdMech really knows how, hence their speed in culturing progenoids as part of a Founding. Again, might be superstition, might be real. The point is that some chapters believe it and some don't

And before anyone mentions Legion of the Damned I'm aware that they removed the progenoids ahead of time. Laurie Goulding said that this was likely an editorially mistake but even if you don't care for editorial commentary, in the novel this was seen as a very taboo thing to do, so regardless of whether or not it's true that a marine can survive without both progenoids, chapters don't make a habit of doing it for one reason or another.

With Legion of the Damned, you could take the view that they all expected to die, if not be destroyed utterly, and that the side effects of geneseed removal would be minimal in the timeframe they had left alive.

We’d first have to demonstrate the Legion of the Damned are still alive, surely?

I think I already said this but when progeniod glands were invented as an idea pretty much all chapters were compliant with the codex astartes as far as the lore was concerned.

With 1000 marines max there wouldn’t need to be an intensive gene seed farming campaign and replenishing big losses would be a long term project. Finding suitable aspirants takes a long time so the number of subjects receiving gene seed is low.

Therefore the requirement to harvest progeniod glands as soon as possible wouldn’t have been a motivation for many legions and they certainly wouldn’t keep marines away from combat for it.

Most chapters would rather be wiped out in battle than take such precautions to preserve themselves. Infact I think such ideas of self preservation and longevity are the seeds of becoming renegades

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
We’d first have to demonstrate the Legion of the Damned are still alive, surely?

Sorry, confusing. It's the title of a novel set during a Chaos invasion of a Shrine World.

Before it becomes impossible to do so, the Excoriators Captain sends their ship away with all the intel they have, some local relics that can be moved, and all the geneseed of the Company to make sure they would live on in their descendants.

Basically, he admits that everyone on the world will die but not in vain.

Ahhh! Ok that’s kinda cool.

Also supports my initial “it depends” answer. Which to be honest does a lot of heavy lifting in 40K background stuff.

 Gert wrote:
With Legion of the Damned, you could take the view that they all expected to die, if not be destroyed utterly, and that the side effects of geneseed removal would be minimal in the timeframe they had left alive.

I'll admit that my vision of having both your progenoids removed was more like having your heart removed rather than your kidneys ie. more immediate death instead of death in 3-4 days. But your idea could certainly work.

The creation of a space marine WD article describes the removal of the progenoids and how the Ad Mech use them to vat grow enough implant stock to build new chapters. Even gives a rough time estimate on how long it takes to make enough for a new chapter iirc.

 Hellebore wrote:
Slightly off topic, but do the space wolves have a progenoid gland? They get transformed by drinking the canis helix which remoulds their body while they're dumped out in the ice.

So they seem to literally grow all those organs rather than get them implanted. Or have I forgotten the surgeries somewhere?

The transformation caused by the Cup of Wulfen is temporary. At that point the marine has only one implant, the Canis Helix. If they survive their icey ordeal, then they receive the other implants.

This is different from the Blood Angels who receive all of their implants at once, drink from the Red Grail and then get locked in a sarcophagus

Well if we go by the Red Corsair piece they were curious as to what would happen to the marine without glands, which would to me imply that it can cause a whole host of maladies rather than always causing one specific problem.

So I would imagine it as something that hormonally regulates all the other implants. They could probably live for months without it but would have an ever-increasing chance of having their other organs fail as time goes on.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Hellebore wrote:
The creation of a space marine WD article describes the removal of the progenoids and how the Ad Mech use them to vat grow enough implant stock to build new chapters. Even gives a rough time estimate on how long it takes to make enough for a new chapter iirc.

Yeah in theory anyone could still grind out a bunch of geneseed by just implanting it in clone-bodies who never see combat, then scrapping them every 10 years. I mean a chapter would probably have a hard time getting away with it but the Imperial government could do it easily.

The whole AdMech speed growing never sat right with me. Especially by M41, chapters spend years finding genetically compatible kids to resist rejection. Selective breeding has been shown to not lead to better results either. I don't accept that it's just as simple as waiting ten years and popping them into new hosts like it's something any chapter could be doing.

But for every space marine who does recruiting part-time the Imperium could have 100 full-time child-grabbers, and they wouldn't need to pick kids who are skilled or smart or brave, just kids who fit genetically to put in the glass tube.

That's not a particular problem when a space marine is only 2-3x as good as a stormtrooper, but when people say a marine should be 100x as good as a stormtrooper it stretches believability that the Imperium doesn't just create 1 billion space marines and then effortlessly defeat every enemy and save humanity.

We know why there aren't a billion space marines. Because the High Lords refuse to let that happen. They control when foundings happen and when the AdMech is going to open the geneseed vaults. But that doesn't explain why the chapters themselves don't do that unless there were a reason they couldn't. And I don't just mean, "Because the codex tells them they shouldn't."

The 40K lore has moved away from focus on the religious and ritualised element of space marines. These days we get a lot of “for the emperor” and “filthy xenos” but I remember around 2nd and 3rd edition reading a lot of things about how space marines treated each of their weapons like a holy relic and cared for it and passed it down through generations of warriors. And the creation of a suit of power armour was an individual and highly ritualised event.

This also applies to finding aspirants. Genetic compatibility was a mere functional requirement. Finding suitable aspirants took time, many chapters on recruiting from specific planets or family’s, and then 100s of youths would be whittled down to a mere handful.

It’s not really practical in the modern setting which is why I don’t think they focus on it much anymore.

And didn’t Cawl clone the initial tranche of primaris marines which suggests that geneseed can be manufactured and doesn’t need to be sourced from living or fallen marines

Cawl has access to toys and data nobody else was privy to though.

Regardless of what the fluff actually says, to me it makes more sense if one of the glands cannot for some reason to be removed while the marine is a live. It is a big part of the Apothecary's role to recover the geneseed from slain marines, but if both glands could be removed after ten years, they would rarely need to do this combat recovery. Given the resilience and long lifespan of marines I'd wager most marines have been in service far more than a decade, and indeed like some people have said, it would not even make sense to send a geneseed carrier into a dangerous situation if you could just wait a few years and recover it safely instead.

jareddm wrote:
The whole AdMech speed growing never sat right with me. Especially by M41, chapters spend years finding genetically compatible kids to resist rejection. Selective breeding has been shown to not lead to better results either. I don't accept that it's just as simple as waiting ten years and popping them into new hosts like it's something any chapter could be doing.

The Magos Biologis know how to clone and do it to make servitors and all sorts of half human robot monstrosities. They simply take a known compatible genotype and clone husks in tanks. They are never really conscious people, but their genetics are compatible. This is how foundings happen and how they've always happened. A founding doesn't happen by the will of a marine chapter, it happens from a decree by the High Lords and the Tech Priests then take their geneseed stock and tech and go and build a new chapter. The imperium controls geneseed and controls chapter creation, so they need excess stocks of it when they want to build new chapters.

The Marine recruitment process is highly inefficient, as is all imperial traditions. They don't have cloning tech, and/or would refuse to use it because the importance of a warrior proving himself worthy and going through the brotherhood trials are far more important cultural selections than a genetic one.

The imperium is buried beneath layers of cultural tradition and behaviour that makes everything inefficient and more complicated. You might as well say that the ridiculous armouring rituals of marines doesn't sit right and they should just put it on. 40k is built on the spectacle of those cultural inefficiencies.

 Nevelon wrote:
There is the superstition that the longer the chest one stays in the marine the more it absorbs of their glory and skill. And this will pass on to the new recruits.

Yes, although every chapter is different I think this is basically the default. I think they take the neck one out since its ready before the Marine is even fully trained and then they take the chest one out on death. Taking it out when they are alive is probably possible but major surgery since marines have fused rib cages. However, there are times where chapters get devastated and so really have to dip into their geneseed reserves. In those desperate situations it makes sense to get the extra geneseed out of the living marines.