Warhammer 40k Space Marine Co Op
Piedad Coughlin
"They shall be my finest warriors, these men who give of themselves to me. Like clay I shall mould them and in the furnace of war I shall forge them. They shall be of iron will and steely sinew. In great armour I shall clad them and with the mightiest weapons shall they be armed. They will be untouched by plague or disease; no sickness shall blight them. They shall have such tactics, strategies and machines that no foe will best them in battle. They are my bulwark against the Terror. They are the Defenders of Humanity. They are my Space Marines...and they shall know no fear."
Adeptus Astartes
(Space Marines)RaceMankindHeadquartersSpace Marine Chapter Homeworlds across the Milky Way GalaxyGovernmentImperium of ManLeaderChapter Masters of individual ChaptersMilitary ForcesChapters of the Adeptus AstartesEstablishmentFirst Founding (30th Millennium)
The Space Marines or Adeptus Astartes are foremost amongst the defenders of Humanity, the greatest of the Emperor of Mankind's warriors. They are barely Human at all, but superhuman; having been made superior in all respects to a normal man by a harsh regime of genetic modification, psycho-conditioning and rigorous training.
Space Marines are untouched by plague or any natural disease and can suffer wounds that would kill a lesser being several times over, and live to fight again. Clad in ancient power armour and wielding the most potent weapons known to man, the Space Marines are terrifying foes and their devotion to the Emperor and the Imperium of Man is unyielding. They are the God-Emperor's Angels of Death, and they know no fear.
The Astartes are physically stronger, far more resilient and often mentally far removed from the lot of most normal Human beings. In the presence of the Astartes, most people feel a combination of awe and fear, and many cultures on the more primitive worlds simply worship them outright as demigods or angels of the God-Emperor made flesh.
They should feel so, for many Space Marines feel little compassion for those they have sometimes termed "mortals" in comparison to themselves, seeing the very people they were created to protect as little more than obstacles to a more efficient eradication of the Imperium's enemies.
This is an attitude sometimes taken by whole Chapters. They see normal Humans as frail, weak creatures given to the follies of temptation, avarice, greed, lust and cowardice -- all emotions they rarely feel, if ever.
Yet there are some Astartes who remember why they were created by the Emperor, who avoid the trap of hubris which the Space Marines are so prone to and which has seduced so many of their number to serve the Ruinous Powers of Chaos. They are the final guardians of Mankind, the saviours of last resort.
They were intended not to lead Humanity, but to defend it, sometimes even from itself. At the heart of that mission lies the limitless compassion the Emperor extended to every man and woman in the galaxy when He willingly chose to condemn Himself to more than 10,000 years of imprisonment within a dying prison of flesh for their sake.
Some Astartes sneer at compassion, seeing it as one more Human weakness that has been purged from their superior transhuman bodies and minds. But the wisest of the Space Marines know that in the end, compassion is their only salvation.
Potential Space Marines are usually, but not always, recruited from the worlds where a Chapter has established its fortress-monastery, although some Chapters are known to recruit from a collection of different worlds in an area of space that they protect or frequent.
Recruiting methods vary from Chapter to Chapter. Some select their neophytes from feral tribes roaming the surface of inhospitable worlds, while others draw upon eager volunteers who have been groomed from birth to become an Astartes.
Still others watch and kidnap potential warriors, turning them into Astartes whether they will it or not. Whatever the method, all Space Marine Chapters will only accept those who successfully pass the grueling initiation trials and prove themselves worthy of becoming a Space Marine.
However a man becomes a Space Marine does not matter: once his body has been forged into that of a transhuman Astartes, he must forever stand apart from the people to whom he was once kin and who he is now sworn to protect. Once a man becomes a Space Marine, he is no longer mortal; his genetic heritage is now that of the Emperor Himself, and a spark of the same divine majesty flows in his veins.
There are approximately 1,000 Space Marine Chapters active in the Imperium of Man at any one time. Since the opening of the Great Rift in the Era Indomitus, these Chapters have been comprised of a mixture of traditional Firstborn Space Marines and the even more enhanced Primaris Space Marines, or may contain only Primaris Marines.
A list of the most notable and well-known Chapters in the Imperium can be found here. This number has stayed relatively constant since the Second Founding in the 31st Millennium following the Horus Heresy when the First Founding Space Marine Legions were broken up.
The Space Marines are the Imperium of Man's supreme, transhuman warriors. Genetically-enhanced to be the ultimate soldiers of Mankind, they are far stronger and more resilient than ordinary Human beings. Space Marines are organised into roughly a thousand Chapters, with each Chapter numbering approximately 1000 warriors organised into ten companies of 100 troops each.
Each Chapter is a self-sufficient Imperial army, equipped with its own spacecraft and capable of responding at a moment's notice to any threat to the security of the Imperium. Every Chapter is fiercely proud of its history and achievements, and each one has its own distinctive colours and heraldic markings. These were established at the Chapter's Founding and are displayed with pride upon all of its armour and vehicles.
All of the wargear of the Space Marines is painstakingly maintained, and many items are covered in lines of intricately rendered devotional script in High Gothic, each line detailing a battle honour won in a glorious campaign.
A Space Marine is a towering, transhuman warrior, his brute strength tempered by inhuman skill. He is armed with the fearsome Bolter, a blessed weapon that fires devastating, mass-reactive shells that explode within the flesh of the target.
He is the product of intensive training and genetic manipulation, which transforms mortal men selected from the deadliest warrior races in the known galaxy into the most lethal of superhuman killing machines in Mankind's arsenal.
The Space Marines can trace their origins back to the Unification Wars on Terra in the late 30th Millennium, when the Emperor of Mankind first revealed His existence and led regiments of deadly genetically-engineered soldiers known as Thunder Warriors in a great campaign to unite all of the myriad techno-barbarian tribes and nation-states of Old Earth under his rule.
From the outset of his retaking of Terra, the Emperor employed genetically modified warriors within His forces and in these early enhanced troops lay the origins of what would later become the Space Marine Legions. During the Age of Strife, known as "Old Night" on Terra, the cradle of Mankind had seen more than its fair share of augments and "super" soldiers created both from the bio-alchemy of genetic engineering and cybernetic augmentation.
But it was the Emperor's own Thunder Warriors, named for the early thunderbolt and raptor's head heraldry used by their master in the Imperium's earliest days, that were to prove superior to all of them.
These superhuman warriors were a gestalt mix of unprecedented superhuman physical power, gene-programmed resistance to environmental and even psychic attack, a warlike spirit and the Emperor's own strategic genius. The Thunder Regiments were an army unlike any that had come before them, and the forces of the powerful tyrants of Old Earth had nothing to match them.
This quest was intended to prevent His species' extinction from the growing threats which confronted the Human-settled galaxy in the wake of the Age of Strife. But despite their many early victories in the Unification Wars, the Thunder Warriors were far from perfect.
It seems obvious in retrospect that the Emperor knew early on that a more permanent and stable force of genetically enhanced warriors was needed, so even while the Thunder Warriors waged war in their early days the Emperor gathered about Him a team of savants and gene-wrights, some willing and others as captives taken from His foes, and constructed new genetics laboratories deep in the vast dungeons of the former Sigillite fortress He had taken on His own beneath the Himalazian (Himalayan) Mountains.
Labour there went on for solar decades in absolute secrecy and resulted in the creation of the primarchs and other wonders of gene-craft known and unknown. Foremost amongst these were the Space Marine Legions, the Legiones Astartes.
Into their creation went all the secret history and genetic lore of the Age of Strife, hard wisdom gained through the success and failure of the Thunder Warriors and the Emperor's own unparalleled genius.
"Before this Age, it was said of heroes that they were not born, but created, forged in the fires of adversity and war. In these days in which we now live, however, heroes are indeed born, in the gene-forges of the Emperor's genius. To be a hero amongst such warriors as these is true achievement, and one even the most elevated of our forebears could never have dreamed of."
With rigorous training and appropriate mental conditioning they became not only immensely strong and tough, but iron-willed and disciplined, no longer prone to the psychological damage that normally affected Humans facing the stress of constant combat.
They were an unstoppable force whose loyalty to the Emperor was unflinching. Quickly the process was refined and systematised, and the numbers of the new enhanced warriors, at first armed and armoured as the Thunder Warriors had been, grew swiftly.
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