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They are such guys,

those renegade marines are the direct descendants of one of traitor legions,after the end of the siege of Terra,they are disillusioned and tired of everything, and hate Chaos more than the Imperium.

so theyare hated and hunted by both the Imperium and Chaos. but even so, they still survive in some remote corners or have been wandering for atonement or trying to find a way to save the galaxy.

they are renegades,so those marines don't obey any imperial doctrines and rules.they are not chaos marines because they hate chaos more than Imperium.They are a group of proud exiles or wanderers,don't bow down to anyone especially any kind of Gods.

for their minis,they based on the regular marines (not the chaos marines),but them also a lot of mortal warriors (who hope to prove their worthy to become Space Marines through fighting), like-minded or taken-in xenos (such as Eldar mercenaries or exiled Tau), and even descendants of men of iron, or Heretek engaged in non-chaos research. In short, they are a hodgepodge of all kinds of units except chaos————so they are crazy fluffed army.

Are there such renegade space marines in the novel or lore?

Yes. Some of the losers of Badab War went renegade (but most went to Chaos).

The novel Carcharodons: Outer Dark has the Ashen Claws in it, who are renegade.

Not really no.

That sort of idea falls into the "My guys are super special they hate the Imperium but don't fall to Chaos but also stay strong" thing which is beyond fanfiction levels of bad.
One of our group actually did this once and made their own Codex which was so shockingly overpowered we told him to bin it or stop coming to game days.

beast_gts is right that the Ashen Claws exist but they don't do anything. They hide in the edges of Imperial space, raiding targets that will never be reinforced and have become a shadow of their former might. The only reason they've managed to survive into M41 is that the Imperium has bigger problems to deal with and the Carcharadons have kept the Claw's location a secret. They don't hate Chaos, they don't care about it and it has no draw for them because they don't go around making grand displays of power.

For a non-Heresy example, there was the Soul Drinkers, but they were not renegade for that long in the scheme of things, and corruption was already seeping in.

The trouble is? Supply lines.

Where a squad or even a company goes rogue, they’re going to be cut off from their usual sources of resupply and rearming. Food, water, ammo, materiel, all that stuff needs to be sourced from somewhere.

Piracy itself can give them stuff to trade with. But who out there is making the stuff they actually need?

Now for a period, given the glacial state of the Imperium, one can probably go rogue and it not be noticed for a period. This can happen to entire worlds and it only really be picked up on when a Tithe isn’t provided. Add in the autonomous “you can ask us for help, but we’re not obliged to provide it” nature of Marines and I dare say the period of “rogue and nobody knows it” may be quite long.

But sooner or later it will be noticed. And that’s when they might fall into the influence of Chaos Renegades.

There are of course a lot of ifs, buts and maybes to consider in that, but being cut off from your regular support is going to see your ideals challenged and compromised at some point.

Sons of Malice might qualify but they're Chaos Marines. They have very little background, but if they actually follow Malal they'd hate other Chaos followers more than Imperium I guess.

Kinda, sorta, Night Lords? They're included in Chaos Marines, but typically eschew and scorn the worship of the chaos gods.

Some of them do, but there are enough examples of Night Lords who do worship the Dark Gods that I'm not even sure "typically" is the right word these days.

It's usually the smaller groups that tend not to be worshippers but even then they're often still corrupted by exposure to the Warp.

Those who align themselves with Abaddon are very common and tend to fall on the acceptance side if not explicitly performing rituals and reading from spooky books.

Yes, but such marines are inescapably lumped in with the traitor marines.

Even if you're just a renegade marine who survives by, idk, being a pirate or mercenary or something you are inevitably going to be sliding down towards chaos. Its just a question of how long you can tread water before it sucks you in.

For what its worth, Abaddon hates chaos too. He thinks Horus was a fool for what he did. but he is pragmatic and is using chaos for his own ends, destroying the Imperium. A goal which is actually at odds with what Chaos wants. Chaos wants an eternal endless stalemate, because that means eternal war, bloodshed, and torment for the mortal realm.

Probably the only way a marine might avoid chaos corruption is if they settle down somewhere and try to live as much of a normal human life as possible. Away from everything, perhaps just protecting some small village or planet as its ruler and hoping the Imperium never shows up. But such an individual is probably not what the OP is thinking about.


If you are talking a chapter or company sized group which has gone renegade, but hasn't joined Chaos, that is possible. but its going to draw a lot of heat from the Imperium. A company of marines who have their own geneseed stocks and are basically founding a rogue chapter would be enemy number 1 for any local Imperial forces. Their old chapter would likely ask the Inquisition for help and they are inevitably going to be labeled as traitor marines, so no different from actual Chaos marines from the loyalist viewpoint.

Now an easier thing might be some Marines who decide to do their own thing, but try and maintain the appearance of loyalty to the Imperium. Marines are very independent to being with, so they'd have an easy time of concealing some selfish activities from the rest of the Imperium as long as they tried to cover it up a bit. Taking extra supplies? Just say you need them, not like a local Munitorum official is going to say no to the Adeptus Astartes. Raising up an army of regular humans to prosecute your own wars would be tough, but if you are careful about when and where they deploy you could get away with it.

 Grey Templar wrote:

If you are talking a chapter or company sized group which has gone renegade, but hasn't joined Chaos, that is possible. but its going to draw a lot of heat from the Imperium. A company of marines who have their own geneseed stocks and are basically founding a rogue chapter would be enemy number 1 for any local Imperial forces. Their old chapter would likely ask the Inquisition for help and they are inevitably going to be labeled as traitor marines, so no different from actual Chaos marines from the loyalist viewpoint.

Now an easier thing might be some Marines who decide to do their own thing, but try and maintain the appearance of loyalty to the Imperium. Marines are very independent to being with, so they'd have an easy time of concealing some selfish activities from the rest of the Imperium as long as they tried to cover it up a bit. Taking extra supplies? Just say you need them, not like a local Munitorum official is going to say no to the Adeptus Astartes. Raising up an army of regular humans to prosecute your own wars would be tough, but if you are careful about when and where they deploy you could get away with it.

The most likely option is a group of marines that's out on the fringes of the Imperium, and thus less likely to catch the eye of the officials. Hang out in an area that has minimal competition, and stick to raiding "safe" targets, and you'll likely last for a while. Mind you, your better equipment will start to fall apart due to lack of spares to maintain everything. But you'll be able to continue to exist as an organized unit. In fact, I vaguely remember reading about one actual chapter that more or less ended up in that situation. They'd been assigned to a distant fringe area, and then effectively forgotten. And thousands of years later, they were still hanging around in the same area, eking out an existence by raiding the locals.

IIRC, Huron lasted as long as he did because he pretended to be loyal. Other space marine chapters came to his defense when the Imperium initially moved against him, because the other chapters initially saw the Badab War as elements of the Imperium attempting to inappropriately impose their will on a Space Marine Chapter. It wasn't until his forces attacked shipping belonging to another chapter (presumably by mistake) that the other space marines realized what was really going on.

I find it so sad that in several of the posts above the once incomprehensibly vast imaginary canvas of 40k, where almost anything could (or did) exist, is now being reduced to red Vs blue. And the concept of a group of marines not wanting to follow either the Imperium or Chaos is somehow completely off piste.

I find this similar to the limitations applied around Xenos, where every alien has to be related to Tyranids in some way (the Catachan devil for example, as we are now told dangerous alien life can only come from the hive mind). It just sucks the magic and imagination out of all of it.

I can absolutely imagine what Rick Priestley would think on this topic, given his interviews on 40k, but fear it would be a minority viewpoint.

I'd say post-rift within Imperium Nihilus this is quite easy to pull off without reaching Mary Sue territory.
Pre-Rift I'd say Grey Templar laid it out nicely.

 Pacific wrote:
I find it so sad that in several of the posts above the once incomprehensibly vast imaginary canvas of 40k, where almost anything could (or did) exist, is now being reduced to red Vs blue. And the concept of a group of marines not wanting to follow either the Imperium or Chaos is somehow completely off piste.

I find this similar to the limitations applied around Xenos, where every alien has to be related to Tyranids in some way (the Catachan devil for example, as we are now told dangerous alien life can only come from the hive mind). It just sucks the magic and imagination out of all of it.

I can absolutely imagine what Rick Priestley would think on this topic, given his interviews on 40k, but fear it would be a minority viewpoint.

I'm with you on this in general. I think with renegade Marines in particular though, they are stuck between a rock and a hard place. They essentially are stuck between to logistic networks (Imperial and Chaos) and use specialised gear that can be hard to source on the fringes of those two networks. In addition, they are a priority target for the Imperium as traitors.

So non-Chaotic renegades can absolutely exist, but the Imperium makes it so hard for them to survive that they are encouraged to move into the Chaos sphere of influence to gain support and keep operating. The very nature of Chaos means that once you start on that path, it is corrupting and draws you in. So unaligned forces will be hard pressed to last more than a few decades without any Chaos trade in most circumstances.

More technically-gifted Chapters will have an easier time of it, because they can maintain and fabricate equipment that other forces cannot. Renegade successors of the Iron Hands and Salamanders, for example.

 Grey Templar wrote:
Probably the only way a marine might avoid chaos corruption is if they settle down somewhere and try to live as much of a normal human life as possible. Away from everything, perhaps just protecting some small village or planet as its ruler and hoping the Imperium never shows up. But such an individual is probably not what the OP is thinking about.

Isn't this what the non-Chaos Fallen do?

beast_gts wrote:

 Grey Templar wrote:
Probably the only way a marine might avoid chaos corruption is if they settle down somewhere and try to live as much of a normal human life as possible. Away from everything, perhaps just protecting some small village or planet as its ruler and hoping the Imperium never shows up. But such an individual is probably not what the OP is thinking about.

Isn't this what the non-Chaos Fallen do?

Beat me to it, but yeah. This is essentially the followers of Cypher.

At least in the Alan Bligh version, the first combat in the war involved an anti-Huron chapter master named Stibor Lazaerek. He resented that Huron had been picked over him to be the leader of all the chapters fighting in a previous campaign, and was resentful that again someone else had been picked to lead the anti Huron forces at Badab.


Outside of the forge world book, his chapter were later cursed into agonizing slavery as the legion of the damned for being bad servants to the emperor, but not specifically for their involvement in Badab.

 Pacific wrote:
I find it so sad that in several of the posts above the once incomprehensibly vast imaginary canvas of 40k, where almost anything could (or did) exist, is now being reduced to red Vs blue. And the concept of a group of marines not wanting to follow either the Imperium or Chaos is somehow completely off piste.

I can absolutely imagine what Rick Priestley would think on this topic, given his interviews on 40k, but fear it would be a minority viewpoint.

I think it'd be artistically a mistake if it were possible to start some kind of green force.

If you and I are Ultramarines, and we realize that our company is doing atrocities to help a greedy aristocrat, the honest story is not for us to somehow form a band of freedom fighters who still wear our old uniforms.

If 40k had a stories about a hundred different Hugh Thompsons, that would be very good. If our pair of Ultramarines stand up and stop the specific crime that's happening right in front of them, and then they either get court martialed or have to escape as individual characters, that's artistically honest.

But the idea that an entire battalion of British soldiers who don't like what they're doing in the Mau Mau uprising or Malaya Emergency are going to steal planes, fly to Christmas Island, and remain a battalion of soldiers who keep recruiting new soldiers is not only dramatically bankrupt, it's seems like government propaganda. It smells like "neither Washington nor Moscow," and I think that's a framework that really messes people up

Whilst that logic applies in a known, mapped and geopolitically mature modern world, I see the 40k galaxy as more akin to earlier stages of history. Even if there were empires and leaders butting heads (for example the Romans and Carthaginians or the Japanese pre-Tokugawa era) the edges of the maps were blurry and there was room people to carve out their own niches. Sure, their little pocket empires and petty fiefdoms might be short-lived as the larger foces gobbled them up or came to deliver retribution, but such groups could exist, at least for short periods.

Wait, if the Inquisition's propaganda is to be believed, they ARE the imperium. And the Space Wolves are, to put it charitably, not fans. So one could argue they hate the imperium. Obviously this is the swiss cheese of arguments, but still, I could see an Inquisitorial agent making the case that members of the Fenris Legion fit this description.

Yeah but the OP isn't talking about a small band of renegades clinging to scraps, they're talking about a powerful group with Xenos alliances and access to Dark Age tech without having any sort of corruption.
No current or previous Marine faction, Loyal or Traitor, has ever managed that in the background.

The Red Corsairs ally with Xenos but they fell to Chaos almost immediately after they fled the Badab War and even when they were the Astral Claws they worked with Hereteks to get the upper hand in technology.

The Ashen Claws have a lot of their Great Crusade-era gear but only because they literally never fight any meaningful foes until the coming of the Tyranids.

Renegades can and do exist, just not in the way the OP is describing unless we're having a "My dad could beat up your dad" contest.

It definitely begs the question, "what is the Imperium?" Is it the Lords of Terra? Is it ever man/woman/them in human existence? Is it just Terra?

Also, define "Hate". 99% of Space Marines view base humans are chattel or dross, unbefitting. The Knights of Blood view humans as food. The Marines Malevolent view them as "in the way". The Minotaur's view them as fodder. To the person whos home just got tageted by a lance strike of Minotaur Terminators, I'm sure feel pretty "hated". Point is, the answer is 42.

Just finished reading the Fabius Bile omnibus, and you could argue that the core followers of Bile are sort-of what you're describing here. Bile himself 'doesn't believe' in demons; nor does he believe in the chaos gods, despite his many interactions with them. However, as some other posters have already suggested, a large portion of his warband(s) at various points are made up of Chaos-worshipping followers -- mainly because only Chaos followers would follow someone like him. So even while he himself isn't quite 'classic' Chaos as such, he is still very much aligned with Chaos in so far as being anti-Imperium.

The thing to remember with Bile is that he is also a massive hypocrite and uses Chaosy stuff in his own experiments when it suits him. It's part of his massive ego trip where he's better than everyone but also gets to use sorcery and warp powers when it suits him because he's better than everyone.
He just suffers consequences for it like being killed all the time.

Oh yeah, I'm not denying that he's a massive hypocrite.

 Gert wrote:
The thing to remember with Bile is that he is also a massive hypocrite and uses Chaosy stuff in his own experiments when it suits him. It's part of his massive ego trip where he's better than everyone but also gets to use sorcery and warp powers when it suits him because he's better than everyone.
He just suffers consequences for it like being killed all the time.

Takes after his grandad in that respect!

Unless of course Bile figured out Gramps must’ve used some kind of warp based shenanigans in creating the Primarchs, and outside of cloning existing Primarchs, he’s still trying to figure out exactly what.

this is what a renegade marines warband I alway want to hombrew:

They originated from like-minded individuals from multiple rebel legions.they had seen enough horror, madness and brutality in the war, whether it was Chaos or the Imperium. when that terrible war ended, they were forced to flee to the Eye of Terror with their legions, and things became worse and worser. Many bretherns even began to worship those terrible and disgusting creatures of the warp.

finally one day, a leader among them suddenly shouted: "Enough! We have had enough! We must leave here. Even if we are hunted from both sides, it is better than living in madness and waiting for death!"
They then began their own exodus, using the few warships they could control to leave the Eye of Terror and seek possible shelter in the outlying regions of the Imperium.They are hated and hunted by both Imperium and Chaos, and even they themselves do not think they can live long——————until they stumbled upon of a wrecked strange mechanical creature on a remote agricultural world, and barely repaired it with the remains of a Cerastus Knight they had as spare parts - or more appropriately, awakened it.

Then they knew that this was an man of iron that was severely damaged in a war thousands of years ago and was in a dormant state——————and it was a very powerful individual even among its own kind.
how powerful it is? It's only the size of a Cerastus Knight, but its various strange and terrifying armaments are enough to rival even a mighty Warlord-class Battle Titans, and it can fly.furthermore,it even comes with very advanced STC and nano-fabrication technology, which can easily manufacture almost any the equipment that these wanderers urgently need, although it is quite different from the standard version. In the eyes of this man of Iron, those things are very crude and easy to manufacture.


Surprisingly, this man of Iron was very friendly, and it politely thanked the humans for repairing it, and offered to help them survive in the treacherous and cruel galaxy. And it did so.

This man of Iron never used a brutal iron fist to force these wanderers to obey, and never act itself as a leader, because there was no need. it always let these renegade space marines do what it wanted them to do and let them think that it was their own decision and for them own benefit.

While its motives remain a mystery, with the help of the man of Iron, those outcasts have managed to survive and gather a group of humans eager to prove themselves in battle to join them, as well as various Xenos allies, mercenaries, and Hereteks who have come to their aid.

they are completely free to build and full of fluffy.and as for that man of iron, in my imagination, it is a tall, thin, scrawny, strange humanoid machine.it just big as a Cerastus knight,but incredible powerful——————it counts as a warlord titan in the table.and it be like this one:

This reminds me more than a little of the first draft for my custom space marine chapter over 20 years ago.

I've refined it a lot over the years to fit in a lot more cleanly with a lot of the lore that's come out since then, but the core of it's soul remans the same.

They are now a second founding chapter forged from the surviving loyalists of the traitor legions, however the rebuilding Imperium didn't really want to keep them around, so they were sent to the farthest fringes of space where they disappeared and were forgotten by Imperial history.

In actuality, they were trapped in an isolated subsector that was a calm eye in the center of a raging warp storm in the far galactic south. Within they found a struggling human empire that had never been discovered by the Great Crusade and that was in the midst of a massive war with an Ork army. After saving the subsector and discovering that there was no way to pierce the warp storms and return to the greater Imperium. the became the guardians and protectors of the subsector for the next 10,000 years, incorporating any Imperial forces that were also stranded while defeating any foe that wandered into their region including many chaos and Ork incursions, and awakening Tomb World, and barely surviving a massive invasion from Hive Fleet Hydra in late M41.

While there was still much war to be had over the millennia, there were also prolonged periods of piece, where the more scholarly and inquisitive members of the chapter took much more active roles in the politics and governance of the subsector. After 10,000 years of independence, their society had become, in general, a reasonably decent place to live. Propagated by the former Thousand Sons in their company, their society values the scholarly arts and worked to improve and innovate over the years.

Nothing lasts forever though, and with the advent of the Cicatrix Maladictum, the warp storm keeping them in exile finally abated, and allowed them free access back into the wider Imperium. Their reaction to the empire they found there was much like Guilliman's, though rather than taking to the forefront of the Crusades, they offer their assistance to mankind cautiously, not wanting to risk their society catching the eye of any of the larger powers.

The Alpha Legion members of the chapter had never lost their roots though, and immediately began working behind the scenes to develop contingencies to protect their empire. One of which was making contact with Belisarius Cawl who was able to provide them with Primaris Marines in exchange for the research they'd done on their own geneseed in their time apart from the Imperium. They've also had sporadic, but productive, dealings with the Tau, Kroot, Leagues of Votann, and some Craftworlds, hoping to indebt allies to their banner should the need ever arise to stand against a power far greater than they.

And that's where they stand at this point in the lore, fighting on behalf of humanity, but not the Imperium itself, though they do often find themselves on the same side of the battlefield against greater foes like Chaos, Tyranids, Necrons, or Orks.

While the Imperium appears, in maps, to cover most of the galaxy, the reality is that it only actually controls a thin web of planets. Many planets are unknown or, at the very least, not under Imperial control. A renegade chapter could presumably conquer one of these planets and set up the logistical infrastructure needed there. It could take a very long time for the Imperium (or Chaos Marine) forces to figure out where their base world is.