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So when creating/painting an army, do you have to stick to the conventional established chapters of space marines or can you make up your own? When you play in tournaments are you fighting a chapter-specific campaign or are you just fighting for fighting's sake?

You can Create your own.. Modeling is so much more fulfilling that way (its what fuels some Dakka users to play if you look in the Painting and Modeling section) Tournaments are just blood for the blood god (fighting for fighting's sake in 40k lingo)

You're allowed to make your own, in fact it's pretty much encouraged. You can even take a pre-established Chapter and add your own twist to it.

As for tournaments, then it's just fighting for fighting's sake. Narrative campaigns are probably the only times chapters actually matter, and not even then as the story of the campaigns are usually based around the armies participating, not the other way around. Except maybe for the Horus Heresy.

Awesome, thanks. Do they ever do campaigns that affect the story of 40k though?

No never.... GW will never do anything that will change anything in 40k in order to not offend people

Bummer. Thanks for the help Somedude & Ronin

I'm not sure if they've done any in recent years, but I remember that GW used to do massive campaigns like that. The two for 40k that stick out in my mind were the Fall of Medusa V (done about the time cities of death was released) and the Eye of Terror Campaign back in 2003. While the Medusa V one was fairly unimportant (largely because the good guys won, if Chaos had won we may have seen something come out of it), but if I recall correctly the Eye of Terror campaign did have some impact on the current story, such as Eldrad dying in a failed attempt to take a Blackstone Fortress.

 Somedude593 wrote:
No never.... GW will never do anything that will change anything in 40k in order to not offend people

not completely true actually, 40k does have stories which progress the universe by establishing battles like Armageddon and Eye of Terror but since then GW has decided to create codex battle rather than allow players to influence the stories. That being said, the universe is designed to be pretty even on all sides and they try to keep these battles in such a way it will never be a real blow to any faction for long.