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I'm a bit baffled with bl books. In Hayley books regiments who see actual demons we wiped bu inquisition. In Gaunt's series it's ok, keep fighting. What the current position in Imperium?

It…depends.

Mind wiping a regiment or just…wiping it out is an Option. Not a set policy.

Where that line is drawn isn’t necessarily clear cut, and it may be down solely to the overseeing Inquisitor(s).

The idea is to stop any lingering taint continuing and spreading the danger where the Regiment goes. And given battling against Daemons can leave literal mental scars, wiping them out could be argued to be a kindness.

But at the same time, there’s a lot to be said for Experience. You’ve Regiments and Worlds which specialise in say, fighting Orks (Valhalla for one) or on Death Worlds (Catachan), or indeed Chaos (hi, Cadia!)

And so simply “one and done” deployments with the combatants all dying one way or another aren’t always going to be desirable. Yes you prevent the taint going any further, but at the cost of denuding yourself of suitably experienced Regiments, which when next deployed could get the job done more efficiently.

Then there’s the outlier occasions, like Space Wolves asking “Oh Effing Really?” and preventing their allies being executed just for doing the job asked of them.

And I’m not even sure it’s necessarily “Puritan Does X, Radical Does Y” type stuff, as there are pros and cons to it. A Puritan Inquisitor may see such mass execution as an inexcusable waste of His Forces. A Radical may want to keep an experienced body of Guardsmen on a short leash.

The Sabbat Worlds Crusade is all about fighting Chaos and only Chaos.

If they wiped out every Regiment that had one battle with something vaguely daemonic in that campaign they wouldn't have any Regiments left.

There's a huge Inquisitoral presence in the Crusade and the influence of the Living Saint Sabbat will also do a whack to ease fears.

On a regimental scale, I don't see it necessarily as 1 battle vs daemons (as opposed to merely against mortal followers of Chaos) and then execution. I see the Inquisition more likely to do things like skim off the most experienced or useful veterans for retinues and special ops work, and the remainder keeps getting assigned to more Chaos related warzones until they are expended. So for an extended campaign against Chaos, the regiments can prove useful as their experience does not go to waste, and if they should turn like the Volscani Cataphracts did, then they are still in the same warzone so they are not seeding heresy into the wider Imperium.

You’ve also got to consider that even upper echelon guard don’t know about chaos and demons as we do. So a regiment of unit or whatever could fight traitors and contact demons etc and not really know what they’d dealt with. Could be ages before anyone who knows about such things, like inquisitors would find out and take action if ever.

The people in setting do not have the same knowledge we have of chaos.

Don't forget many demons will be as fearsome as xenos to Guardsmen. For them they basically are vile xenos/otherworldly creatures that they have to fight against.


The deeper understanding that demons are creatures from the warp and that simple belief in them and allowing them in can corrupt a regular person to turn to chaos - that's what they don't fully understand.




So they can easily fight them and experience the horrors and for them its the "same" horror as many other xenos races in the galaxy. It's the wider understanding that the Imperium really keeps under wraps.
After that you've got to consider how vast the Imperium is - there are Guard companies that will never see a demon; never fight a Tyranid; never encounter a Necron.
For them those creatures might be tall tales that they heard of form the far flung reaches of the Imperium.

 Overread wrote:
Don't forget many demons will be as fearsome as xenos to Guardsmen. For them they basically are vile xenos/otherworldly creatures that they have to fight against.


The deeper understanding that demons are creatures from the warp and that simple belief in them and allowing them in can corrupt a regular person to turn to chaos - that's what they don't fully understand.




So they can easily fight them and experience the horrors and for them its the "same" horror as many other xenos races in the galaxy. It's the wider understanding that the Imperium really keeps under wraps.
After that you've got to consider how vast the Imperium is - there are Guard companies that will never see a demon; never fight a Tyranid; never encounter a Necron.
For them those creatures might be tall tales that they heard of form the far flung reaches of the Imperium.

And maybe the commanders are perhaps lying a bit in their reports.

'Yes, those were definitely mutants that were fighting! Nothing else!'

It should be noted that the characters in the Gaunt's Ghosts series are weirdly well informed. Everyone knows what demons are, a well ranked commissar knew what the men of iron were and everyone knows about the primarchs without religious allegory coating everything. I find it's one of the things in those books that hasn't aged well and throws off a lot story points in other BL books.

On the other hand, 40K doesn’t require an internally consistent level of understanding and knowledge.

For instance, Cain is notably pretty well informed, and passes at least some of that down to his troops. A chunk of that comes from Commisarial training, and a chunk from being Vale’s asset/squeeze.

Your average Imperial Citizen is kept in the dark. And the Uplifiting Primer certainly tells its fair share of comforting Porky Pies.

But once you’ve boots on the ground and a veteran regiment? Some of those lies must surely fall away? You can’t convince a Guardsman that’s fought against Tyranids they’re inefficient and easily tackled now, can you?

And so the same may be true of Daemons, with a shifting level of understanding based on Need To Know. Pre-deployment there may be “but seriously” briefings and drills. And there’s no reason for those to be consistent.

Tallarn regiments are known to be especially pious. So their faith may be seen as shield enough for a level of truth higher than 2847th Smelly Socks of Arseendofnowhere, a planet and regiment of no renown who are frankly just there to make up the numbers and serve some use catching bullets.

Primarily it's also the disconnect between writing a background book and a novel.

If Gaunt and Ghosts were all executed after mission two or whatever of their campaign, no more novel series.

Another factor is dominance of extremes. The Imperium is 100% capable of insane extreme reactions to situations and this can kind of bleed into the idea that those extremes are done all the time.

That whole systems are struck by Exterminatus to starve Tyranids; that anyone who sees a demon is executed; that any breach of order results in a headshot from a pistol.

Because we often focus on extremes in the stories, people can fixate on them and suddenly those actions are expected all the time; whilst in reality once you dig further into the lore you realise that they aren't. The Imperium doesn't "have" to do those things and doesn't do them every time. Running Exterminatus on even one world can have huge political implications after.


The Imperium and setting is 100% brutalist; but its not brutal dark all the time. It's dialled up to 11 not 20.

The opening of the Great Rift was supposed to have resulted in daemonic incursions on most Imperial worlds.

On such a scale, it would be simply impossible to mind wipe everyone who was exposed.

But then GW did nothing with that background, because Forge The Narrative - just don't think about the narrative.

Gaunt's Ghosts early novels were written nearly 30 years ago now as well, and that has an impact.

But I think the answer is that sometimes inquisition factions will purge everyone because they have a puritan in charge or for some more sinister reasons, and sometimes they don't because the Inquisitors in charge are more moderate, pragmatic or radical. The Ordos also don't functionally have unlimited power - on paper they might but in practice the galaxy is a big place and you will not be missed, so Inquisitors who push their luck too far might end up tragically disappearing on a dangerous mission.

The Inquisition Polices The Inquisition. And they by no means have to identify to one another when in the same locale.

Ultimately? A given Inquisitor does have ultimate authority, from Doing Nothing But Observing, right up to Exterminatus of an entire system.

But, they’ll still need to be able to justify their actions to their peers. Usually, but not always, within their own Ordo.

The loss of life is regrettable. The needless loss of life is still squandering His resources. Sure, that probably doesn’t extend to having to justify the murder or assassination of a Mere Pleb. But the higher the numbers, and the more important the victims? The stronger the justification demanded.

Let’s consider one at the top of the local tree, a Planetary Governor.

Necromunda shows us that, provide your tithe is met, nobody really cares to peak beneath the blanket too deeply. And so unless you’ve robust evidence that a Planetary Governor is consorting with Daemons/Mutants/Xenos? The Tithe comes first, and removing an outwardly successful Governor carries risk to said tithe at least in the short term, as any replacement Governor has to see off rivals, and such internal conflict can have ripples down through the society he or she is meant to be ruling over.

And that can depend on where the world sits, politically and geographically. If its tithe isn’t central to a given warzone? Probably less concern than if it’s a lynchpin world.

So…yeah. Inquisitors can get away with pretty much whatever - but there can be consequences, especially for reckless or feckless actions which might endanger the wider Imperium’s survival.

Back when I started playing, there was a unit called Inquisitorial Stormtroopers. I don't know if those are still a thing in the lore (nowadays I think they'd just be Militarum Tempestus), but it sounds like the sort of unit that a guardsman with experience against daemons might be assigned to. He gets to live, but his home is now an Inquisition spaceship, and the only people he will ever rub shoulders with for the rest of his life are other Inquisition personnel.

Iracundus wrote:
On a regimental scale, I don't see it necessarily as 1 battle vs daemons (as opposed to merely against mortal followers of Chaos) and then execution. I see the Inquisition more likely to do things like skim off the most experienced or useful veterans for retinues and special ops work, and the remainder keeps getting assigned to more Chaos related warzones until they are expended. So for an extended campaign against Chaos, the regiments can prove useful as their experience does not go to waste, and if they should turn like the Volscani Cataphracts did, then they are still in the same warzone so they are not seeding heresy into the wider Imperium.

Pretty much how I see it as well.

Most guardsmen will take part in only one campaign, due to both the casualty rate and the kind of protracted conflict that calls for sending in the Guard. Once a guardsman is deployed to a certain planet, there's likely a >90% chance he'll die there. It could be less than a day after touching down, during the opening battle. It could be months later, in some muddy trench, after the conflict has devolved into attrition warfare. It could be 10 years later, during a routine counter-insurgency operation to root out the last pockets of enemy resistance. Or it could be 60 years later, enjoying a well-earned retirement but not being high-ranking or wealthy enough to hitch a ride to his home planet.

Daemons can only exist in realspace for a short time and are pretty much always part of a larger conflict; either as the spearhead of a Black Crusade or the culmination of an ongoing Chaos uprising. Most guardsmen who face daemons already have combat experience against daemon-adjacent threats (such as psykers or mutants), and if not... well, they're already on the ground, so if they survived first contact with the daemons, you'd be a fool to have them shot immediately when there are still battles to be fought.

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