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As the FW books are gradually revealing, each Legion used their own unique set of markings only fully understood by themselves to indicate formations and units. By the end of the HH, Guilliman would produce a new set of markings to be used by all chapters and aid in external identification of chapter units - the Codex markings. However, did Guilliman in fact base these markings off an already existent, albeit uncodified, set of generic Legion markings. I've noticed, flicking through the FW HH books, that a number of the Legionaries are using marks that are clearly later included as 'Codex' marks - Arrows for Tactical, Inverted V (Lambda) for Devastators and so on.

Is it reasonable to say then, that Codex Markings can in fact accurately be used to represent both 30k and 40k Legionaries? Did Guilliman just take an already existing system and clean it up a bit?

For the most part he just kept the same system, while trimming the fat or altering things slightly to make it more uniform.

The legions were all initially organised based on the dictates of the Principia Bellicosa, I believe the 'generic' markings were all codified therein, it was only the legion specific variants that were uncodified.

@ VictorVonTzeentch - I kind of assumed that might be the case.

@Gashrog - I was about to ask you where you'd got that from as I half remembered something like that, but then quite by chance I stumbled upon it whilst reading through HH Book One: Betrayal. It also mentions that the Legions were based of Krom's (Cromwell's) New Model Army. It also mentions that standard insignia were developed and later discarded by many Legions. If only I'd read that bit earlier I'd not have needed this thread. Anyway, thanks for jogging my memory.