I had a question about Chaos Marines regarding how they gather new recruits. Since the Astartes loyal to the Imperium have a gene seed program which uses advanced technology and can produce new marines and chapters over time, do the Chaos Marines have a similar program? Or... are most of the Chaos Marines which exist leftovers from the Horus Heresy and are new recruits traitors who defect from the Imperium piecemeal and then drift to the Eye of Terror to join the other renegades?

peterstepon said:

They´ve the same program Chaosmodified, they recruit and program traitors and they´re the same who fought with Horus.

Abbaddon was Horus First Captain and right Hand Man.

peterstepon said:

Chaos Marines replenish their numbers in a few ways:

1) Keeping and maintaining their geneseed much like loyalist Marines, though likely not as successfully due to geneseed mutations and lack of proper AdMech support.

2) Theft of loyalist geneseed. In those cases where a loyalist Chapter is defeated there are opportunities to acquire fresh geneseed.

3) Various heretical techniques practiced by the Dark Mechanicus (or Fabius Bile) can potentially clone, or even create tainted geneseed.

Beyond that, anything cool you can think of is probably okay. The lore on this topic is intentionally vague and mysterious.

Officially there are two ways:

1) They are First Founding Veterans and those SM that defected later, their life-span has been changed by chaos influence of the Eye of Terror..

2) Alpha Marines still recruit normally since they work outside the Eye of Terror and in fact a whole cell structure of cultists.

Arag said:

Technically, not all of them have lived for the full ten millennia since the war; some of them entered the Warp shortly after the Siege of Terra, and only emerged a few centuries ago.

Thanks for the information. The reason I ask is that I just recently read "Thousand Sons" from the Horus Heresy series (a really good book by the way), and it seemed that, by the end of the book the Thousand Sons had been decimated as a legion and their numbers were very few ( 1242 troops, then reduced to 1170, notice the use of the number 9 in both numbers). This was also before Arihman cocked up the whole legion with his Rubric (which effectively destroyed the legion for good).

Now...maybe the Thousand Sons were an exception. They had a really bad gene-seed and prone to huge mutations. I reckon that there were about 8 tomb marines for every 1 sorcerer left in the Thousand Sons (again, the use of the number 9, the book used numerology to a large degree). So...that would be, by my estimate, 130 sorcerers left with a squad of 8 Rubric marines each.

However, if the geneseed was bad for the Thousand Sons, I could not imagine it being better for the other traitor marines after they came to the Eye of Terror. Sure they could create warriors which were a parody of Astartes, but would these be as effective or just a bunch of super-powered freaks. In addition, I do recall reading about Fabius Bile creating clones, but I was under the impression that these were (increasingly) unstable abominations.

The Codex Space Marines suggested that 50 Chapters have been corrupted since the Horus Heresy (allowing fresh numbers to join the chaos marines). In addition, some Marines join on an individual basis or a squad basis.

In the case of the Emperor's Children, they "reproduce" in all manner of interesting ways...

You don't say "they do that in a way of interesting things" without at least pointing the curious people to sites where to find answers... XD

If you take the Dawn of War games to a degree of canon, then we have quite an intriguing situation, by the name of Eliphas the Inheritor. In the DoW canon, Chaos was defeated in kronus, and Eliphas was... grotesquely killed by a daemon prince. But in DoW2: Chaos Rising he appears again (as a lieutenant of sorts), and he seems to have gone from the World Eaters to work for Abbaddon... I think I readed somewhere that souls are like coins in the warp, traded and all...

So my idea is quite more insidious: a chaos marine can't be really killed, just expulsed back to the warp, and then he might possess a body and transform it into its own... So that geneseed would be more spiritual than the loyalist marines...

Honsu's raided geanseed.

peterstepon said:

Sorta similar, but they also include stealing Astartes gene-seed and corrupting those too.

The possesion to replace losses is indeed supported through lore, infact that is the only way 1000 sons replace numbers. With that chapter there are no new recruits they just possess a body and return the the material universe. The Space wolf chacter Ragnar has a 1000 son nemesis who he has killed more than a few times.

Storm of Iron by Graham McNeil and Angels of Darkness by Gav Thorpe have some answers to this question... I don't want to say too much for fear of Spoilers. Chaos snags new recruits from traitor marines (whole chapters don't have to turn, you can get squads or singles as the case may be, as in the Chaos Codex and the Wolf of Fenris or in Blood Quest where a single member falls to the powers of darkness). And, as has been said, there's always genetically engineering more bad guys (Fabulous Billy style).

Another note, Daemon Princes don't "die". Think old style D&D, unless you beat a daemon on its home plane, it's just banished back to the warp, and good luck besting some of the bigger baddies on their home turf where they can control the very world you're fighting them on. As a GM, it's pretty much up to you just how far over the corruption line a CSM is and whether or not they'll come back to haunt your party over and over again (like the T-Son in the Ragnar books earlier pointed out). Though, thankfully, there are a few ways to completely erase someone in the Warhammer 40k line... like Holocaust, no coming back from that heh.

The Slaanesh Chaos Space Marines probably try a lot to reproduce the old-fashioned way

peterstepon said:

Actually, the Rubric destroyed the flesh of most of the Thousand Sons, but not their souls. Each Thousand Son is an animated suit of Astartes power armor, driven by the soul of the Marine who inhabited it. Thus far, no known way to truly destroy one has been evidenced; as in the Space Wolves novels Ragnar has "killed" the Chaos Sorcerer Madox on 4 separate occasions, and Madox recalls each battle. They're more ghosts being banished back into the warp when defeated, then a living entity being killed. The Thousand Sons do not "recruit" so much, more like "possess and transform" links into material space.

-=Brother Praetus=-

Argus Van Het said:

Well they are Slaanesh cultists.....

I'd also imagine in a few rare cases really successful, useful, and devoted cultists becoming full-blown Chaos Marines by getting 'blessed' with mutations and the like from the Chaos Gods, making up for the normal Space Marine organs and the like until they are strong enough and capable of interfacing with Power Armour even though they lack a Black Carapace (or they might be blessed with a Black Carapace of sorts).

I'm thinking in terms of Warhammer Fantasy here too, afterall many of the most well-known Chaos champions of Fantasy were originally men of the Empire granted strength greater than even the Kurgan and Hung Northern tribes (considered some of the strongest humanoids alive), and fusing with their armour just as well as any Chaos Waste-born warrior.

This has been answered pretty well by the above posters. However, I'd suggest picking up a copy of Soul Hunter and give it a read. It does an excellent job of describing post-Heresy traitor legion whatnots. It specifically talks about repairing equipment, recruitment, wargear, etc. Granted, not all legions will be the same, but it does give a pretty good showcase.

everything can be explained by "the power of chaos"

The corruption of the space marines is a risk that is now as real as it was during the Horus Heresy. The novels tell stories of corruption of space marines from the Dark Angels, Blood Angels, and so on. In the Eye of Terror novel, they even describe the whole ritual for this corruption. Clonning space marines is also an myth usually told. It is even said that Abaddon the Despoiler, form the Dark Legion, is a clone from Horus himself.

Have fun and keep rolling!!!