I'm curious to know what regiment you're all playing with your groups. If it's a custom one, please share that as well. A list of your squad's battle honours too would be interesting to read about too.

My group is playing a squad from the Luggnum XIVth penal legion.

We were all prisoners incarcerated and subsequently recruited from a munitorum prison that uses convict labour to mine tungsten on the moon Lugg and on gravity captures from the nearby asteroid field.

Due to an ancient pact between the luggite governors and the munitorum many of the prison`s inmates were used to fulfil Luggnum`s tithe requirement to the imperial guard.

On route to deployment our ships were becalmed and forced to drop out of the warp for resupply, during this stop over we pilfered a vast quantity of gear from a detatchment of the Mordian 12th on route back to their regiment by setting fire to their barracks and appropriating their gear while they were fighting the fires.

We have just arrived on Kuluoth wherethe Imperium has lost paitience with the grinding civil war and sent in a taskforce to pacify both sides while protecting the manufactories for recovery pending the full repopulation at a later time.

81st Ladrian Paratroops "Drop Bears"

Bullpup usin', sky droppin', explosive setting, longlas shootin', render wieldin', lady lovin' mates from Landunder!

Maverick Commander (Major Sydney Wallace)

Our platoon is the 44th, under Lt. Sydney Foster (he hasn't named us yet, the git)

Our honors thus far consist of:

The Obscura Honorifica Imperialis for conspicuous gallantry in the face of the enemies of the God-Emperor and His Imperium. (We killed the religious leader of a world that was inciting chaos uprisings, our heavy took him out with a crak missile)

The ensuing death of the enemy leader gained us a "casket-nod" from a Black Templar Castellan Chaplain Dreadnought (he had a cape...a CAPE, and his chapter serfs held it for him...the guy was so cool he makes me shed tears of awesome)

We've also been given Honors from the Adepta Sororitas (Hospitallers are now our support medics) and the Battle Sisters themselves took our unit's rocket launcher and declared it a holy relic (the guy who fired it died in that fight, and he's being beautified...one set closer to sainthood!)

Anyway, there's probably thing's i'm forgetting, but that's pretty much it.

Interesting last rites, if he's being bea u tified

Indeed!

I also forgot that we recieved the Drusian Laurel for our action against the Ruinous Powers.

Not to quibble, but why on earth did you you choose to make drop troops from a world with undewater cities locked under ice sheets where everyone who values their continued existance lives their whole life without seeing the sky?

The guard doesn`t just shove grav chutes on people who haven`t seen them before, it takes specialist regiments from worlds that supply this gear to their PDF forces for practical reasons.

Playing Valhallan 597th, transferred to 13th Penal Legion

Not to quibble, but why on earth did you you choose to make drop troops from a world with undewater cities locked under ice sheets where everyone who values their continued existance lives their whole life without seeing the sky?

The guard doesn`t just shove grav chutes on people who haven`t seen them before, it takes specialist regiments from worlds that supply this gear to their PDF forces for practical reasons.

I didn't make the regiment, the guard did. THIS IS THE IMPERIUM OF MAN! Ignorance is strength, and we are very strong.

Though really, the Landrian 202 were the original Drop Bears, but they weren't paratroopers, they were light infantry and they joined our old DH crew on a mission. We liked them so much we'd bring them up like once a session pretty much, even though they all died. When we got Only War our GM asked us what we wanted to play and we told him we wanted to be from Landunder and be paratroopers, so the Drop Bear name would make great comical sense.

Still don`t think you grasp the in-world realities of guard regiment specialisations but fair enough I like the story.

Even if dropping (ie sinking into th endless blackness of the subterrainian oceans of their home) would be a subject that evokes terror in a Landrians heart and bears are at best a distant racial memory from a Terra splashed on heraldic devices like unicorns and dragons.

Still I like it, in jokes are strength and I am COVERED IN KILL-WEASELS!

Pretty much. We didn't make the regiment anyway, our GM came up with all the ideas. He's pretty knowledgable about 40k, but he isn't perfect.

Not to quibble, but why on earth did you you choose to make drop troops from a world with undewater cities locked under ice sheets where everyone who values their continued existance lives their whole life without seeing the skyy

HI! I'm the aformentioned Gm. While i understand your concern about shoving grav-shutes in peoples hands that have barely seen the sky and training them to jump out of valkries, perhaps you've read the DH supplement "The Book of judgement"? It Details the last great draft The Departmento Munitorum visited on the world of Landunder.

"The deal Zanatov had negotiated was that, instead of eighty-eight out of every thousand citizens from each hive, the Departmento Munitorum could claim seven hundred ninety-two for every thousand from Subrique, alone The other hive-cities would remain untouched"

When Calculating the potential population of even a small scale hive to be in the millions, thats alot of guys just to shove into Line Infantry Regiments. Therefore, I surmised that since the Departmento Munitorum has no problem shoving High Tech las weapons in the hands of feral world barbarians that have barely mastered the art of Metallurgy, then they wouldnt have any qualms against dropping boys out of planes that have never seen the sky to fill the demand for specialist divisions.

That makes sense. The Munitorum simply has to make do sometimes, and it is appropriately grimdark.

*sees Mal's post* Oh @#(% the Commissar's in town!. *ducks*

As previously stated the munitorum doesn't issue specialist gear it takes specialist regiments from worlds that train regiments of specialists.

e.g.

Recruit amphibious combat engineers from ocean worlds.

Recruiting Imperial guard pilots (yes they do exist, read Double Eagle or Gaunts Ghosts) from a world where people live stranded in a sea of corosive smog on the peaks of mountains.

Except when the regiment is being raised from a local area and strategically, droptroopers are needed. Instead of shipping a regiment in front further out, they'd probably just train locally and use whatever soldiers they could get from the tithe.

Saying "doesn't" means "never" and absolutes in the kind of logistical fiasco that is M41 just doesn't work.

Except when the regiment is being raised from a local area and strategically, droptroopers are needed. Instead of shipping a regiment in front further out, they'd probably just train locally and use whatever soldiers they could get from the tithe.

Saying "doesn't" means "never" and absolutes in the kind of logistical fiasco that is M41 just doesn't work.

The munitorum supplies replacement gear to every guard and naval unit in the imperium, they simply don`t waste time lugging about specialist supplies just in case.

The kind of gear you are talking about (grav chutes in particular) are supplied with recruits by their homeworld`s governor as part of their tithe, not issued by the guard subsequently.

Any case where a unit has been unexpectedly "given" speciality equipment rather than just resupplied the specialist gear they were recruited with is a noteworthy exception rather than an accepted practice.

Also, there are precious few occaisions when an imperial commander would accept he "needed" any particular type of troops to proceed with a campaign, specialists are a convenient solution to situations that would bog down conventional warfare but the tactical mindset of the imperium is that such shortcuts are not nessecary and sheer meat grinder tactics will always win the day.

For there are more guardsmen in the Imperium than bullets on this world.

It's a sound argument, but the fact remains the munitorum is far from perfect. There's a reason we get 20 las carbines by accident when we requested entrenching tools...

Yes indeed there is, laser spades!

well, I'll just throw our Regiment into the MIx(er)

23. Hecate Spec-Ops

Hailing from the deadly swamp-world Hecate, these guys are the best of the best (or... claim to be at least). Riding on the nimble and quick Boserox, the Regiment conducts Special Operations behind enemy lines, sabotaging his equipment and stealing their food.

So, yeah, mounted Guerilla-Regiment from a Swamp-World... the mount we created is a beast, run-move of 104 Meters (Agi Maxed, Unnatural Agility, Quadruped, Terrain Master, Athletics, Stealth... perfect for blowing stuff up and getting away. REALLY fast)

And the Inquisition has an eye on us, y'know, "behind enemy lines, what might happen there?" and our favoured weapons are a needle rifle and the good ol' versatile missile launcher. Squad's still green, so we don't have any honours yet, and munitiorium kinda love-hates us, got 100 Primers and 100 or so rations of caffeine instead of explosive stuff we had to blow a bridge up with, but hell, at least we won't run out of primers and caffein is pretty awesome as well

Except when the regiment is being raised from a local area and strategically, droptroopers are needed. Instead of shipping a regiment in front further out, they'd probably just train locally and use whatever soldiers they could get from the tithe.

Saying "doesn't" means "never" and absolutes in the kind of logistical fiasco that is M41 just doesn't work.

The kind of gear you are talking about (grav chutes in particular) are supplied with recruits by their homeworld`s governor as part of their tithe, not issued by the guard subsequently.

Ah! i think theres been a misunderstanding, The regiment my characters play is a Drop trooper regiment, using a tiny portion of the mass tithe from the Zanatov agreement. These arent just random Line Infantry from Landunder that got a drop chute stuffed in their hands and pushed out of a plane. THese guys recieved specialist training and the whole nine yards prior to entering a warzone

Ah! i think theres been a misunderstanding, The regiment my characters play is a Drop trooper regiment, using a tiny portion of the mass tithe from the Zanatov agreement. These arent just random Line Infantry from Landunder that got a drop chute stuffed in their hands and pushed out of a plane. THese guys recieved specialist training and the whole nine yards prior to entering a warzoneThe kind of gear you are talking about (grav chutes in particular) are supplied with recruits by their homeworld`s governor as part of their tithe, not issued by the guard subsequently.

The misunderstanding here is the assertion that the munitorum trains and equips specialist regiments.

It doesn`t, it recruits existing ones and expects their homeworld to supply the specialist gear as part of their tithe.

In short a PDF droptrooper regiment gets tithed to the Imperial guard, brings it`s own gear and then the munitorum issues standard issue kit to cover any gaps in the homeworld`s loadout.

This is why uniforms, gear and weaponry are not universally identical, they are supplied by the world raising the regiment.

There is, apparently, no manner of discussing that will sway this one way or the other. So let's talk about someone else's regiment now.

Truly so!

As part of the battle group I assembled for my characters to interact with, I have malfian heavy Grenadiers drawn from the ranks of the expansive noble houses of malfi as well as a line infantry regiment from gundrun - inspired by British colonial forces in India. And the ousivian riverine light infantry - inspired by the Henry Zhou novel blood & iron.