professor_kylan said:

That's pretty funny. Do they play the opposite gender stereotypically at all, or really get into deep characters? I have a similar experience…in one game I'm playing, we all decided to genderswap our characters…leading to a party of 4 female characters and one male. And a couple of the guys consistently roll female characters as well.

As to the sexuality thing…yeah I'd think straight guys would be less likely to play girls, but I doubt that gay man are more likely to play them.

Varies from person to person. One guy who only plays female characters plays some of the most nuanced characters I've seen in any game out there. Another tends to play skanky lesbians a lot. The ladies who roll male characters tend to do a better job overall, but it's hard to say what that's due to - whether they're just better gamers, or whether it's easier to play a male role in a lot of games due to the sheer number of male influences in video games, action movies and the like.

I'm a straight guy who's played straight guys, straight girls, gay guys, a hemaphrodite on one occasion, even a Rogue Trader who was straight but had a harem of studly guys cause he was terrified of accidently knocking up a concubine and having the resulting offspring being the heir to his empire. Honestly, I think people who let in game sexuality threaten their out of game sexuality have deeper problems than just having a limited palette of characters to play.

In my regular group there is a male player who generally plays female characters (it isn't a hard and fast rule, he just prefers it). However I don't think it actually makes any difference to how he plays it (sex and sexuality doesn't come much into our games).

Personally I prefer playing men, but then I don't feel I have enough experience to play women properly, and frankly the way I would play them would make no difference (I often play female characters in computer RPGs). However, I personally would have no problem playing a Sister of Battle in a Sister's Militant campaign, as, like Space Marines, they would be the same whether they were male or female (ie intensely pious ragers).

Gaire said:

I agree entirely - it's absurd to suggest that one of them to be composed of female marines because it's so much better if both of them are composed of female marines!

HappyDaze said:

That's right out. It's like Kierkegaard got his hands on a keyboard. The primarchs are always referred to as the Emperor's sons, and the Legions were entirely based on their Primarchs, to the point that many Astartes during the Great Crusade and the Heresy that followed are notable for being so very similar to their genetic progenitor in appearance and attitude. If there were a female legion, there would have to be a female Primarch, and a female Primarch wouldn't be a son. So we're clear here, I'm okay with the concept of a female chapter in homebrew headcanon stuff. But a female legion? Truly absurd.

Also, apologies for the typo in the post you quoted. Lost Legions, not lost chapters.

Gaire said:

The female chapter/legion thing just wouldn't work. Rivalries between men are bad enough, but women are way worse. Add in a primarch with PMS and nobody survives. The emperor may not have thought everything through, but I'm pretty sure he would have seen this one coming and planned otherwise. ;p

HappyDaze said:

Personally, I prefer the daughters of the Emperor to be the Sisters of Silence, but that's cause the Sisters of Silence are arguably cooler even than Astartes. Maybe that's just me though.

professor_kylan said:

THANK YOU. I love the Sisters of Silence. Very cool idea.

so in my group we finally decided to throw her into being a inquisitor with slightly higher psy rating and she doesn't get +2 strength and toughness bonus from suit. She also has 1 armor on head since inquisitors normally don't wear helms to show who they are and for respect. I gave her +30 fellowship, +10 to all the rest of her stats except strength and toughness. She draws from psyker tree. I gave her an ability that if she disagrees on what to do, such as the team leader (tactical marine) saying go right, and she wants to go left she rolls a fellowship test to overpower any ruling she wants with in reason (saying jump off a cliff isn't reasonable) and team leader does an opossed fellowship test to see if he is overuled. If she gets overuled then she gets -20 willpower for 1d5 hours. Not the best ability but something.

I tried the missing chapter thing but that didn't work lol

In the end with that one we found out Bill (the guy who refuses to let the there be female space marines) is the emperor and the missing chapters were Female chapters. The reason they were expulged was because they were women and nothing, even being a heritic, is worse than being a women. Found out the whole mystery of missing chapters right there. lol

Gaire said:

Gaire said:

I know, right?! One of the changes I make in the 40k canon each time I run a game is that the Sisters are the chamber militant of the Ordo Hereticus. And I don't care.

HappyDaze said:

Still doesn't work. More than once in the Horus Heresy novels, the lost Primarchs are referred to as the Emperor's lost sons. So yeah, they were dudes.

Kylan, I am totally okay with the Sisters of Silence superseding the Sororitas as Chamber Militant of the Ordo Hereticus and just leaving the Sisters of Battle as the Ecclesiarchy's personal army.

Gaire said:

In some cultures, when having a child and really wanting a boy, some girls are seen as 'lost sons' and thus the lost primarchs being girls works perfectly, from a certain point of view.

OOh, OOh, OOh, I KNOW! Maybe the lost primarchs were…. Get this….

THE FURRY PRIMARCHS!

That could be where all thse dang furry Space Marines keep coming from. It works perfectly… from a certain point of view.

Fenrisnorth said:

I swear to god, Fenris, this thread has already turned into a female space marine thread. If you turn it into a furry thread I will track you down and beat you solidly.

Besides, it's a well known fact that the lost Primarchs were ponies.

professor_kylan said:

They could have been pink and purple teddy bears. You can never know.

On a more serious note. The lost Primarchs were male. It has been alluded to, heavily alluded to, that the Legions of the lost Primarchs were incorporated into the Ultramarines. Which also happen to be all male.

I don't see why this is such a huge deal. The last Deathwatch game I ran, I had a female player. She is well aquainted with the fluff. She knows Space Marines are males. She rolled up a Space Wolf Assault Marine named Erik. Didn't give it a second thought.

DJSunhammer, I got the impression from "Prospero Burns" that the Space Wolves schwacked the lost legions.

Baradiel, similar thing in my game. Female player who is familiar with the tabletop game (has a Sisters of Battle army, the poor dear) and knows a decent amount about the fluff. Without skipping a beat she rolled up a Space Wolves Rune Priest named Alistair and hasn't turned back. She didn't raise a stink about gender, didn't even consider for a second not playing a marine or asking to play a female marine. Now, her boyfriend who joined as a guest player for a few sessions is a different story, but that cheesetastic pyromancer of a psychic Inquisitor really didn't last long.

Baradiel said:

They did, but you have to remember that each legion had to find it's father. Those legions were 100% composed of Terran born Space Marines before their Primarch was recovered. There would be no reason to get rid of a bunch of marines that were already loyal to the Emperor and are battle proven. Thus the 'rumor' that they were folded into the Ultramarines.

DJSunhammer said:

Where is that rumor from though? Is that in any of the books, or just a fan rumor?

Gaire said:

Hey, at least he was a guest player, right?

Here are some other issues regarding the idea of female Space Marines.

1. Space Marines have to be recruited on the onset of puberty. Females start puberty earlier than males.

2. Many of these worlds they recruit from are rather primitive. Women don't tend to become warriors in these cultures. This is partially due to sexism, but mainly due to simple logic. These societies don't have much in the way of medicine, people die early. The little clans/tribes fight for survival every day. Breading is part of survival. Men are simply, from a biological standpoint, more expendible than women. A woman is limited to creating one offspring a year. Men are only limited to how many women they can impregnate. Couple this with the fact that man women will die in childbirth, and many children will die, groups of people simply can't risk their women.

Baradiel said:

Re: #1 - That really doesn't matter if you go with something along the lines of the original RT Space Marines. I prefer this origin since it means that SMs come from veteran warriors not kids.

Re: #2 - That's not the case in much of the Imperium. On Death Worlds and Hive Worlds you find many examples of warrior women, and they are in the novels too (look at Gaunt's Ghosts where a sizable minority of the troops from later additions are female). It's not necessarily realistic, but then again, neither is much of WH40K.

HappyDaze said:

Not to mention worlds with a reversed gender dimorphism; worlds where the ruling caste is surgically, cybernetically and genetically converted into alpha-females because the catechisms of faith on that world dictate that women are closes to the emperor because they are capable of bringing life into this world as the God-Emperor brings light to the galaxy; ecclesiarchal worlds that have taken the "no man to take up arms" clause of the Thorian rebuilding of the church as an absolute, so only women are drafted into the Imperial Guard and PDF; and so on.

If you really, REALLY want to have female marines, the only canonical way I can get it to work is having a chapter created during the Cursed Founding, where the High Lords and the Mecanicus tried to improve upon the astartes frame. After all, if they could crack the secret of doubling the potential number of initiates, that couldn't be a bad thing. The problem with the cursed founding though is that it all went horribly, horribly wrong.

I'm still of the belief that if you have someone insisting on playing a female character, there are so many better options.

* Sister of Silence

* Inquisitor

* Chapter serf piloting a Stormtalon

* Soriatas loaded down with the Pure Faith talents

* Hell, your game is big enough and everyone else is running with terminator armour or the like, Knight Paladin pilot.

* Imperial Navy pilot of something nasty (Vulture for preference)

* Tech-priest Magos (Xenotech expert)

* Rogue Trader "mission specialist" - (their ship has been inducted into the Deathwatch due to the numerous dealing s they've had with Xenos, the RT agreed on the condition that they were allowed to go along on missions if they felt like it. The Inquisitoion agreed due to the RTs large knowledge of Xenos races and their promising to bring their own guns)

* Inducted Xenos (Let's face it, there are probably instances of it around the place)

If the forum couldn't think of a dozen more interesting, canonical roles for female characters, I'd be personally shocked.