How do you guys adjudicate a stormtrooper among the regular ranks in your games?

Since the Stormtrooper regiment (is there only one?) only recruits from the Schola Progenium, how do you guys mix these into another regiment? Plus, what turn of events would result in a Stormtrooper being assigned to a squad of line soldiers?

Easy - use them as Grenadiers. That's what I've done in my games.

Thaddux said:

Some licensed publications pursue a different interpretation of the setting, as a lot of people don't like the idea of groups like Storm Troopers and Battle Sisters being "more rare" than Space Marines, and this includes some writers. I'm actually somewhat surprised that Only War seems to have adopted the "only one regiment" version now, considering earlier exchanges.

Anyways, Grenadiers are one possible solution - though even then I suppose you'd have to come up with an excuse as to why this Grenadier does not operate in a Grenadier squad. Can be justified by labeling it a local oddity, I guess.

For actual Storm Troopers, "Only War" already delivers an explanation by stating that they are attached to individual squads to strengthen them in combat and maybe even teach them a few tricks. Not how it works in the studio fluff, but a clever idea to allow such mixed parties.

To throw in a third option, you can justify just about any combination of characters by simply stating that they are leftovers from other platoons that were merged together to increase cohesion of the forces deployed in the warzone. If we go by Codex fluff, IG regiments often end up "adopting" stragglers and survivors from other regiments to replace their own casualties, which is why the longer a regiment is in service, the less uniform it will appear. So, simply state that this Storm Trooper is the only survivor of his squad, and since it'd be useless to send him off alone, he is transferred to the other players.

The same trick would work for Ogryns and Ratlings, too.

Problem emerges if Light Infantry Regiment has Grenadier among its ranks. That would be kinda unusual formation mix. IMHO Stormtroopers (or Grenadiers or Heavy Infantry) should be Regiment Type or even Combat Doctrine for all players to be issued Hot-shots and Carpace Armors.

Lynata said:

Sisters MIlitants are still vague though. They were specified at numbering at about 30-40,000 in 2nd edition (as far as I can remember), but now the way they are treated suggests they are now considered to be much bigger.

My other point would be: in a regiment that is from, say, a penal world background, how do you alter it for stormtroopers, or even commissar characters, who would be extremely unlikely to come from such a background?

The stormtrooper regiment is sometimes referred to as the "black regiment". Given that the purposes of these guys is to provide the inquisition with a morally pure core of soldiers, then the exact numbers that are included is probably wide open to speculation. equally, their origins could range from mindwied penal legionaires to tithed officer cadets from the schola progenium. I would think that guard stormtroopers are seconded to the high command of a given war zone and thus slightly outside the normal chain of command. However, i can see stormtroopers being almost conditioned to follow orders, so insuborination is probaly not much of a problem. the suggestions above (either grenadiers or simply there "to show them the ropes" would work with a group.

I suppose you could use commisars as "overseers" of their fellow troopers, who have gone a bit "native".

borithan said:

Thing is, the text on regiment size in the 2nd Edition Imperial Guard codex is contradictory.

In the entry on Storm Troopers, it mentions that The Storm Trooper Regiment is unusually large at 10,000 men… but the text on how a regiment is formed suggested that all the Guardsmen raised from a single world during a single muster are considered to be one regiment, and that each muster consisted of about 10% of the armed forces of that planet.

Assuming a Hive World of 100 billion people, if 0.1% of the population are serving PDF, then their military is 100 million men, so a single muster from that world would produce a single Imperial Guard regiment of 10 million soldiers.

So, either the information on mustering regiments is true, and regiments can contain tens of millions of men, or the Storm Trooper Regiment is true, and 10,000 men is a large regiment.

This is stuff I had to research for Only War, as it happened, so I made an effort to reconcile that older background, and newer background which tends to produce multiple regiments per world per muster.

From Only War Beta, page 16, under the heading 'Anatomy of a Regiment':

"Though regarded as such by many within the Departmento Munitorum, a regiment is not a uniform mass of warriors, equal in might and utility to every other regiment. On the contrary, regiments vary immensely in size, structure, and purpose, from small, deadly, armoured regiments, to bewilderingly
large regiments of siege infantry. In truth, the regiment is a difficult thing to define, but some might classify it thusly: a regiment is the operational unit of the Imperial Guard, a discrete formation of Imperial Guardsmen, all trained and equipped to operate in a single way, and all drawn from a single world. All other factors are subject to local variation and prevailing logistical doctrine—at times, all the fighting men taken from a single world at a single time have been classified as a single regiment, creating units of millions of men, while other periods and places have attempted to define a set number of warriors or an arbitrarily calculated fighting strength to determine a regiment."

Grubisha said:

It's a matter of preferences, plain and simple.

borithan said:

It comes down to how you, as an individual, interpret the fluff. Is anything "invalid" just because it's old, or would you only consider it as such if it is actively "overwritten" by a newer source? And which source does it have to be - GW, or anything published under the label? Or a fan's work? For good or for bad, the setting does not have a canon policy, which means that there is no such thing as "the one truth". Took me a while to accept this.

borithan said:

It's a fact that the portrayal of the Sisters Militant in particular simply varies immensely depending on the source you're looking at. But I have complained about that more than enough in the past.

Thaddux said:

trentmorten said:

trentmorten said:

Here's a bit from GW's old Armageddon 3 website, perhaps someone finds it interesting:
http://web.archive.org/web/20070604193401/http://www.armageddon3.com/English/Campaign/Troops/storm.html

N0-1_H3r3 said:

It is true, however, that the 10% bit has been changed in later Codices, in that the Munitorum (in the GW vision) now attempts to keep the various regiments it recruits roughly equal in power, and that it uses the number of soldiers it would consist of to balance any lack of training or equipment. For example, a Cadian regiment would thus be much smaller than a regiment from Necromunda, simply because Cadian Shock Troops sport much better weapons and armour as well as superior discipline compared to a bunch of gangers conscripted into the army.

This new recruitment scheme fits much better to the number of Storm Troopers we were given by the studio - now depending on what you think is the standard of "quality" for a Planetary Defence Force, though, so again there is quite some room for interpretation.

Storm troopers are most likely assigned to a regiment at the command level. The commander then decides how they are deployed from there. Either as a single squad for special missions or as single specialists depending on mission requirements. The latter seems the most likely choice for an only war game. If you don't like the storm trooper title simply name them something else.

As for the side discussion on storm troopers you can't just include information from the codex's. GW cannon also includes anything produced by the black library and forge world authors. According to the guard codex storm troopers are raised from the schola progenium and are a single galaxy wide regiment. That regiment never operates as a single entity though. Rather they are requested by people like lord generals, marshals, warmasters, etc for a specific war zone. Whichever ones are assigned to the war zone are then further broken up by the needs of the commanders in charge of the war zone either deploying them at the command level for special missions or diving them up among regiments to bolster their forces on the ground or however else the commanders see fit.

As for inquisition storm troopers the most information for these that I can think of come from the Ciaphas Cain novel caves of ice in one of the side bars from inquisitor Amerely Vail in which she states that inquisition takes the best of the storm troopers trained by the schola progenium and pawns the rest on the guard.

i always kinda figured that the 1 stormtrooper regiment was an effective thing. there was only one to each sector or segmentum. this would give you atleast 5 but since they are all trained the same, in theory, they just get transfered if they leave their original area. can't really do that with regular guard.

as for attaching them to a squad. they are a expert attached to the mission. either explosives, heavy weps, sniper, ect.

N0-1_H3r3 said:

While Hive worlds create an obvious problem, aside from them I don't see the "Storm Troopers being unusually large" and "everything from one being irreconcilable (at least at the time it was written), as while Hive Worlds attract a lot of the background attention, as far as I can work out from the 1st and 2nd edition fluff, most planets were actually meant to be quite sparsely populated. Not so sure that explanation holds so well now though.

And sounds like that summation you have covers the contradictory information quite well.

Of course, Storm Troopers apparently small numbers can be covered partially by using units like "Grenadiers", who have similar equipment and an elite status (even if they presumably lack the more "special forces" training that Storm Troopers themselves have and operate purely as heavy infantry).

Thaddux said:

Well I'm not going to discuss the 'actual' Stormtrooper regiments because I don't know enough about it. What I will add though is that it is your game, to do with as you wish. While it wouldn't be 40k without the fluff, an rpg is a bit of a special case and special considerations (exceptions?) need to be made. The stormtrooper is just as 'out of place' in the squad as an ogryn, ratling or tech priest, and they get together in the 'party' just like the fighter, wizard, thief, dwarf and elf.

How would I do it? With a flimsy veneer of backstory, a sprinkle of handwavium, and a mind to have some fun. (e.g. a good old massacre, "oh look, when the smoke clears, it's just the five of you left alive").

Interrogator Z

Droma said:

In case you're interested, I have compiled the most obvious "proof" for this claim here , complete with links to the various sources of these comments. Remember how upset I was about this RPG not conforming to certain details I had picked up elsewhere, I feel that a lot of confusion could be avoided if more people would know that in 40k, there is no consistency between sources. Otherwise, expectations are bound to be disappointed.

Zakalwe has it right. Actually … even beyond the whole "it's your game" approach, the very same artistic license that allows authors of officially licensed products to deviate from what somebody else wrote before them applies to material cooked up by the fans as well. The way this franchise works - at least as explained by Gav Thorpe - simply means that your RPGs are just as "canon" as the books from Black Library or FFG, which in turn are just as "canon" as GW codices. They simply exist, and it's up to you as the individual reader to cherrypick what best suits your interpretation of the 'verse.

Of course, common ground may remain an issue. Deviate too far from what the community considers to be a standard and you're bound to catch flak (see reviews and opinions on the novels by C.S. Goto). This goes doubly so for an RPG group, where (ideally) all participants should be happy with the version of the setting they play in, so perhaps it's worth discussing people's opinions on certain key things beforehand. It shouldn't be too difficult to guess whether a player is a fluff-nut and what his or her interests focus on. Most of the time, a compromise should be easy to find, at least if you employ a minimum of the three elements Zakalwe has mentioned.

@Lynata

You're correct that GW "cannon" is strange. Everything is cannon but everything can also contradict itself and still be correct.

The best way to apply any of it to an only war game is that if something fits your game use it and if it doesn't just make something up to where it works differently in that particular sector, regiment, warzone, etc. Don't feel that you need to be tied to what any particular piece of writing says on a subject.

Also stormtroopers in Only War is more like a generic shock infantry with good armor (or best armor in game?) and a hotshot lasgun, this could be any regiment's elite assault team. GW's canon stormtroopers surely have more skills than these boys (the ability to airborne to the least)…

You can play them as any. The fluff in the book describes them as hailing from the Storm Trooper regiment, but it doesn't take much to play such a character as a Cadian Kasrkin, or as a Grenadier.

GW fluff aside, I thought it was a rather clever way of offering the usual increase in player freedom. You can do an all-ST squad and make a Drop Troop unit with the regiment creation rules (personal recommendation: Schola Progenium, Drop Troops, Iron Discipline, Well-Provisioned … no CO bonus), or you can use them like it says in FFG's fluff (individual ST attached to and moving with a normal squad), or you can play them as one of the many "local variants". It really comes down to what the group prefers.

Don't forget the term 'regiment' isn't entirely consistent in our own world, let alone in 40k! I think of it like the British Army's 'Royal Regiment of Artillery' which is made up of other regiments and isn't a literal, tactical unit as the term is used in other armies, but more like a corps (though again, not a corps as in two or three divisions, but a corps as in the US Marine Corps).

Hope that helps

Stormtroopers aren't exclusively from the Schola Progenium, some regiments train their own soldiers as Stormtroopers, such as the Death Korps of Krieg Grenadiers. Wearing heavy carapace armour and wielding Hellguns/Hot-shot Lasguns, they're stormtroopers in all but name.

"Grenadiers are chosen from the ranks of infantry squads, usually by their Watchmasters and recommended for appointment as a grenadier. This is not a promotion, as grenadiers still carry the same rank, but they are regarded as having a seniority over rank and file guardsmen by dint of their experience and veteran status."

Imperial Armour Volume 5 - The Siege of Vraks, page 88

"The Krieg reminets maintain and train a strong and sizable force of grenadiers, forming an elite force withing the Death Korps. They are drawn from veterans and survivors of decimated squads and platoons. An officer Watchmaster or Commissar selects each grenadier for service."

Imperial Armour Volume 5 - The Siege of Vraks, page 91

Emperor Castaigne said:

Elysians and Harakoni field integral Stormtrooper Company among their ranks. But most other regiments don't have integral Stormtroopers.

Emperor Castaigne said:

If one were to go by GW's material, anyways.

As already mentioned, one could easily just take the existing Storm Trooper career and play it as a Grenadier hailing from that regiment - such a character just would not be a "real" Storm Trooper, but some few regiments do approach the STt's level of quality and equipment … most notably the Cadian Kasrkin (on the tabletop, the only Grenadier type that actually uses the same rules as "true" Storm Troopers, and is specifically noted for being their equals in the Codex: Eye of Terror).