Renegade Space Marines = Chaos?

[IcemanUnlimited]

I suppose a band of Marines could take over an Ork raiding fleet but what would be their motivation? Not loot; they had the Imperium's best when they were loyal. Not glory; that's what Chaos offers. Not hoping for a better tomorrow where everybody plays nice, not with Ork allies. It's hard to imagine a group of Marines who hate the Imperium, hate Chaos, and hate humanity at the same time.

Actually, you could just use the Orks to fight other enemy armies. The Orks fighting for you would bring down their own numbers anyway, while serving you as well.

As for "loot" yes you could loot for supplies. Not all renegade chapters are renegade by choice.

[CaptainSarathai]

Going renegade typically leaves you with just two choices - you either die slow and bloody, or you side with Chaos. Check out the 'Souldrinkers' stories for a pretty good idea of how this happens.

As people have already pointed out, the first thing that you lose is the Warp-travel. Travelling through realspace requires an initial burst of thrust and the occasional spurt for direction changes. Travelling through the Warp is powered the whole way, plus the energy required for the Geller Fields. Once you can't maintain the fields, if you jump into the Warp, you're swarmed by Daemons and other gribblies. So there goes that option. Not to mention that if your Navigators (even the SM have to "borrow" navigators, their Librarians can do in a pinch, but not well) don't go rogue with you, and/or the Emperor doesn't vaporize their brains, you're stuck flying on blind guess work.

Secondly, the Marines maintain their own geneseed, which is all well and good. You can still bring in marines, provided you can maintain your weapons and armor indefinitely. Without AdMech support you might find your success rates dropping, and really, that's a huge blow. Already, very, very few candidates survive the implants to become a fully fledged Marine. Scouts and Neophytes die every day in their beds when their bodies reject the extra organs. Not to mention chapters who use death-matches or other lethal activities as part of their screening process. Marines are able to survive because they don't have to be particularly secretive about who they recruit, and where they recruit them from. If you're rogue, it's going to be hard to explain why you're rounding up every first-born son of planet such-and-such as per tradition, when you're supposed to be in hiding.
Add to this that each chapter is expected to send a selection of geneseed to the AdMech on Mars to make sure that it's not mutating. The AdMech screens the samples down to the molecular level, looking for genetic weakness that could be exploited by Chaos. At this scale, any type of genetic mutation would hardly be visible to the naked eye - the "mutant" would look just like every other marine. Think of medical conditions in the modern world - can you tell that someone is genetically predisposed to heart-failure just by looking at them? Probably not.
The best way to avoid this is to stop taking in new candidates. The problem with that is that you have now limited yourself to a maximum of 1000 casualties before you are exterminated, probably less because of the scale of violence that often precedes a chapter going rogue.

So you're floating around in space, knowing that soon your chapter will either be full of mutants, or dead, your supplies are dwindling by the day. What do you do? Raid an Imperial world and put yourself back on the radar until things cool down? The Imperium created a whole chapter of Marines specifically to deal with the Badab War. They have no problem commissioning a fresh chapter and sending them on a crusade to "prove themselves" by bringing back every one of your heads on a platter. Besides, marines who go rogue without joining Chaos generally feel that they are upholding the true and proper way of the Emperor - raiding other humans isn't really what the Emperor would want is it?
The Eldar won't take you in, the other races certainly won't either. Working with Orks (if they can get past looking at your chapter as prospects for an epic fight) is foolish because they kill each other to increase the species (they breed through spores - kill 1 and suddenly 3 more pop up), whereas we've already established that you can't afford to lose even a single marine. You can't tell me that Orks would side with Marines if the Marines couldn't offer all the cool gizmos that they get for being in the Imperium. You can't even tell me that Orks would be able to see Renegade Marines as anything more than a choice target cut-off from the Emperor's vast reserves.
All that's left to offer you some sort of survival is Chaos. And remember, Chaos isn't exactly a blunt object. They could appear as a group of benevolent monks, telling you that they will shelter and provide for your chapter with some strange resource or connection they have, and only reveal themselves as Chaos when the hook is set and it's too late to escape. That's what happens to the Soul Drinkers - they think that they've met a fire-and-brimstone Imperial Preacher, but he's really a pawn of Tzeentch.

Remember - during the Heresy most of the Chapters thought that Horus was right, and that he would be a better ruler for mankind than the Emperor. They never suspected that they were selling their souls in the process. Even Horus was fairly blind to that little bit of fine print. That's what I love about Chaos - it's subtle. There's no contract, no treaty, no waking up one day and saying "hey, lets worship Tzeentch today!" -no, it's slow, creeping, and almost a natural progression for anyone who isn't cautious.

[IcemanUnlimited]

This thread is very demoralizing considering I was really wanting a fluff Renegade Chapter. lol

Edit: What if you managed to take some Imperial Guardsmen renegade with you?

[CaptainSarathai]

They fall to Chaos faster than you do, because they aren't indoctrinated the way that you are. Their moral plummets, mutiny and anarchy reigns as the idea of be subservient to the all-encompassing Empire breaks down. Furthermore, it actually makes things harder - a sizeable enough army of Guardsmen is going to eat a LOT more than what the Marines are (can't go for weeks on end without food or eat anything), they don't recover their gear in the field quite the same way that Marines do, and you still don't have any sort of fleet - Imperial Guard is separate from the Imperial Navy, something that was put into place after the Heresy to prevent the exact scenario that you're talking about.
Basically, if you go renegade, your fluff takes a very dark turn - your Marines are fully expecting to be wiped out. Either they're martyrs for the "truth" of the Imperial cause, or they're just being hunted to extinction. That, or you're slipping steadily towards Chaos. Remember - just because you are eventually going to end up Chaos or dead doesn't mean that you have to start your story at that point. Few people realize that the Crimson Fists hardly manage to field 500 marines at any given time after the fall of Rynn's World, because nobody ever sees more than 80 or so Marines on the table at any one time. Perhaps the Marines in your collection are the last ones in their whole chapter. "Hey- here's 10 Terminators, that's all that's left of my chapter." Maybe your fluff has a few instances of foreshadowing about a particular guy who might fall to Chaos and possibly drag the rest of the chapter with him - a Chaplain, Librarian, Company Master? Could be anyone, even just a well-liked Marine.
The thing about Marines is that morale never really sinks. They just get all somber and brooding like the Dark Angels. They're not going to sit around weeping over their fate and they're certainly not going to stop fighting. Whole chapters of marines have been wiped out in the past because of this exact mentality- they don't slow down to lick their wounds, they keep doing their duty until the last man falls. They might change pace a bit, the scale of the Crimson Fists' operations went down a tad after they got their butts whooped, but they didn't stop, and almost pushed themselves to the brink of extinction just fighting to save their homeworld. The Ultramarines were even almost wiped out once, during the Tyranid invasion. Granted, the Blue Boys don't know how to be edgy, so there's no mention of the fact that nearly 25% of their entire chapter was killed off or how they replaced it so quickly, but hey - it happened.

[Marius the Possessed]

I'm not really surprised that the Smurfs repopulate so quickly; they have an empire to draw from, not just a single planet, and one of their best qualities is the effeciency of their operations, so I would believe that they have streamlined the Marine implantation problems as much as transhumanly possible. They've been shown to have entire academies dedicated to producing the best and strongest candidates, so they actively cultivate their flock, rather than simply let nature create the strongest and then claim the best.

[Sanctus]

I must point out that you could run a chapter that functions like the Charcharadons. I think I spelled that wrong, it's the space shark chapter that forgeworld made for the siege of vraks. They supposedly spent their time fighting outside of the galaxy and came back using really old imperial codes and fought against the astral claws and their allies. After the war was over, they stripped one of the local planets of all young males and jumped back into the warp and disappeared. Granted this is a whole chapter that would have all the support that they need in their fleet, but the concept could work. I will agree that eventually renegade marines either turn to chaos or die but that is not reason you can't have a renegade chapter army that represents them before they fall/get hunted down and killed.

[Intrepid]

This thread is very demoralizing considering I was really wanting a fluff Renegade Chapter. lol

Not to worry. Loyal Marines are given nigh-unprecedented liberty by the High Lords. So long as they succeed at the purpose for which the High Lords created them, and don't poach on the territory of other Adeptus, they can mostly do as they please. Think about Dark Angels pursuing those hidden agendas, or Space Wolves acting like Chaos mutants while toeing the Imperial line, or Iron Hands being so friendly with the AdMech that they sometimes do political infighting on their behalf.

A few Chapters have also been declared Rogue, not Renegade. The Imperium withdraws support from them but doesn't actively hunt them down, either. This is typically done to Chapters that go insane/unstable in "natural" ways. The Knights of Blood are one example; they're unquestionably loyal yet so crazed with Red Thirst that they've become a liability. Rather than denounce and purge them, they were declared "Rogue" in order to quietly pass into the history books. (I suspect the Blood Angels secretly provide them with the support they need but there's no supporting fluff.)


The big question is why your Chapter wants to go renegade. If it's just because the Imperium is too mean then they should work within the system for change. (There's a faction inside the Inquisition which thinks this way, too. Allies!) If it's because they like xenos then they might reach a "mutual understanding" with them, not unlike what the Blood Ravens did with Eldar. If it's because they want to turn Chaos against itself then, well... they'll eventually be found out and forced to become Chaos Marines.

[IcemanUnlimited]

Aren't xeno sympathizers declared renegade in the imperium?

I personally believe it wouldn't be possible to "change the imperium" from within.

[DonkeyKONG922]

I was doing more thinking about the possibilities of a custom space marine chapter. I was considering them being renegade until I read somewhere in the Lexicanum something like "eventually all renegade chapters turn chaos". I'm paraphrasing but you get the point.

Is this true? I don't see why it must be, one could simply be an enemy of the Imperium but not be Chaos.

Well the thing about the Imperium is that if you defect from the Empire, you're immediately seen as associating with Chaos. Put simply.
Whatever the "actual" reason may be, it doesn't really matter, it can be interpreted as "selfish" or w/e, and hence an attribute of one of the Chaos gods. The group in question would be seen as "corrupted".

For all intents and purposes though, you could make an army from the remnants of an original chapter that was either falsely led to believe they were fighting for the Emperor, when really they had joined a rebellion; or it could be a chapter that was lost in the Warp, remained loyal to the Emperor the whole time fighting true renegades inside the warp itself, and when they came back into contact with the Imperium, were seen as tainted by chaos so they had to escape being exterminated. Because they are so honorable though, they go back to doing what they now know best, fighting a "counter-insurgency" against the enemies of the God Emperor, efficiently^ inside the warp. All that experience serving them best now in their silent honor and sullied reputation, but they know what's up, they're loyal.

Aren't xeno sympathizers declared renegade in the imperium?

IIRC, the Imperium has always been incredibly Xenophobic. Maybe in the new "fluff", universe rule breakers, there are "now" Xeno sympathizers, but in the original fluff you would be completely correct. They would have been declared renegade, no questions asked.

[CaptainSarathai]

Being a Xenos sympathizer is enough to get you kicked out, but you can toe over the line pretty far, and that's actually been in the fluff for decades. The Crimson Fists supposedly received help from a band of Eldar Rangers who sniped at Ork command during the battle. The Empire allows the Tau to survive and during the Damocles Campaign the Imp. Commander went against orders, negotiated a cease-fire with the Tau, and withdrew from the sector and established something of a Demilitarized Zone out of the gulf.
The Battlefleet Gothic rulebook states that the Solar Admiral during the Gothic Campaign was quoted saying that "he would give those Eldar a medal if he could" after a band of Eldar pirates swept in and attacked the Chaos fleet from the rear. In many cases the Eldar help the Empire just by being around - the Empire doesn't invade their Craftworlds (partly because they tried once, and it's freakin' hard) and in several cases the Eldar have helped out Imperial forces indirectly.
The Blood Angels have supposedly shaken hands with the Necrons, but nobody wants to ever call that official. There are rumors that in the next edition, the Ultramarines might be forming an alliance with the Tau.

You might not be able to run around screaming that the "Alien is our friend, not food," but your chapter doesn't always have to kill on sight. In fact, that might make them unique in a way, and would provide friction with the Empire without necessarily breaking with it. Remember - Marines have great deal of autonomy, and if anyone is going to keep a secret from an Inquisitor, it's the Marines. Just look at the Dark Angels and their big secret. The Blood Angels, Space Wolves, even the Salamders are all mutants to some degree - from vampirism, to furries, to a malfunctioning melanin gland which causes their skin to be pitch black. Other chapters are just as crazy - the Mortifactors eat flesh as part of a ritual, the Black Dragons have mutated ridges of bone growing from their skulls and forearms which they coat in adamantine and use in battle, I believe that the Scythes of the Emperor is entirely albino, and part of the Exorcists' initiation involves willingly allowing for Daemonic possession. There's all sorts of wild-and-crazy out there, it's a bit unimaginative to just slap "Renegade" on your chapter in an attempt to make them cool.