How Many GK's Can You Fit in 1 Chapter?

Interesting. I would tend to agree that being non-standard in all other respects, they wouldn't follow the codex astartes.


I'd also venture to state that there is more than one grandmaster as stated on page 6 of the codex.

Here's what we know.

1 of the grandmasters gets a seat on the Inner Conclave of the Inquisition.

All grey knights start as battle brothers, move up the ranks to justicars, to brother captains and then finally to grand master.

Thats about it I think for definate knowledge. Now we get into conjecture. How many battle brothers are there for each Justicar? I'm going to say aproximately 10. What the hell it seems fair. So how many Justicars are there for a Brother Captain? Again, I'm going to guess, but say 10. Ditto for Brother Captains to Grand Masters.

So....We've got 1 Grandmaster, 10 Brother Captains, 100 Justicars, 1000 Battle Brothers. Seems pretty solid to me. And to keep things symetrical, I'm going to say that there are 10 Grandmasters to the 1 on the Inner Conclave. Giving us...


1 Inner Conclave Grand Master
10 Grand Masters
100 Brother Captains
1000 Justicars
10000 Battle Brothers

So, around 11111 Grey Knights scattered around the galaxy in small groups.

Well. Thats my guess. .

I suppose if I went 1 in 10 instead of 1 to 10, it would be:


1 Inner Conclave Grand Master
9 Grand Masters
81 Brother Captains
729 Justicars
6561 Battle Brothers


7381 Grey Knights. Bleah. I like my first answer better.

Well, at the risk of starting an argument, I have to say, that since the GK are typically split up into squads of 10, 10,000 spread out that way over the entire galaxy IS but a drop in the ocean.

When the Ultramarines show up to fight, they announce their presence by appearing in much larger groups than a squad, with heraldry and banners flying, and typically they leave survivors(at least on the imperial side. ) I mean, one of their old pieces of wargear was the Company Banner which caused fear in the enemy because they knew the entire Ultra marine chapter was there to stomp them.

I was always my impression that when the GKs show up, they either:

1. Leave none to minimal survivors to prevent contamination and heresy spreading.

2. Are fighting a daemonic/chaos incursion that has already left no survivors that aren't already chaotic, forcing the GKs to leave...

3. No, to minimal survivors.

4. Deployed in an area where the only ones that would see them would be their foes. Who they would attack leaving...

5. None, to minimal survivors.

Shrug. Just my two cents, although I take it to heart what you are saying about the difficulty of finding that many potential recruits that are SM worthy and potentially powerful psykers as well. All I can say, is that in the GKs case, they have potentially the entire resources of the entire Imperium to draw upon, while a typical SM chapter has usually only one or a group of planets. (In the case of a crusading chapter like the BTs, they draw upon a larger population base, but are again, larger than standard.) It makes me wonder how/WHO does the GKs recruiting, as secrecy is so important. Maybe a branch of the same part of the Inquisition that mans the Black ships?

Either way, I don't want to fight too much about this, as there IS no real documentation either way, and indeed, your guess is as good as mine. We're just going off what make sense to any of us. Once again, as you say, in the fluff, SMs are quite a bit:

1. Rarer.

2. More powerful.

From that perspective, yeah. You perhaps don't need 10,000 GKs for them to have an effect. But considering how many armies are played with them now, or who have at least a squad of them along for the ride. Heh. 10,000 might be too few.


This is probably going to remain an unaswerable question but I doubt that will stop a lot of folks from responding to it. . Hell, I did. Twice even.

I think that 10,000 is a reasonable number. Think about it, there are several million people living in America alone right now. In 38,000 years, the galactic population will have exploded to hundreds of trillions of people spread over distances so vast that it takes light itself many years to go from one end to the other. If anything, I think that 10,000 might be on the small side to have a force of Grey Knights within striking distance of almost everywhere in the known galaxy in a force big enough to contend with a standard demonic infestation. Add in things like the eye of terror and you can begin to see how much manpower it takes keeping the Imperium free of incursions.

About keepng them secret, again, in any one place, there will probably be only a small number, probably equaling something on the order of 50-75 at the maximum. If they used the Inquisition "black ships," which aren't secret, to move around, then none would be the wiser, especially as they strike hard and fast, leaving only their dead enemies behind on the battlefield. The codex says that Imperial armies often arrive at the battlefield with the war already won and they have no idea why. It also says that all of the IG that they induct are killed and the marines get mind-scrubbed.

Just for the sake of recruitment 10000 would be unbelieveable, That means that they had to find that many people who were not only space marine quality but space marine HQ quilaity (libriarian).

Click to expand...

Valid point, but the daemonhunters have had thousands of years and millions of worlds from which to recruit. The Black Templars have a similar organization and they have around the same number as well probably. The Grey Knights have the full use of Imperial resources at their disposal and they probably look at all of the psychic kids that the Inquisition hauls in to see if they can be turned into Grey Knights.

I somewhat remember reading that there are 3,000 Grey Knights in an old WD. It's actually quite believable because there are approximately 1,000 Chapters of 1,000 Space Marines (that's one million superhuman mega toopers). I seriousely doubt that in addition to the (Guessing here...) 10 Librarians in each chapter? If there are 10,000 Librarians for some 1,000,000 Marines, I don't think they'd find another 10,000 Libraian potentials to train into elite daemon-killers. 3,000 sounds roughly correct if you think about it; there are about 13,000 Psyker marines meaning about 3/4 would go with the Marines and another 1/4 are left hidden to kill daemons and stop chaos cultists.

It was mentioned there were 200 Marines who attacked a planet by GrandMaster Salem.

I finished the book last night at 3am and I remember there were 300 Knights led by 3 grand masters to kill a daemon prince and hold off nearly a million daemons of Tzeentch (there were at least a few hundred Greater Daemons. Only one of the Grand Masters were recovered and no one else was found after the battle. If there are only 3 Grand Masters, then the entire infrastructure of the Grey Knights Command would have been shattered for a few years. I think there would be about 6 Grand Masters for whenever they need to be called on, and a Lord Grand Master in the conclave seat.

But hey, I am kind of new to fluffing, so feel free to ignore my rantings

As far as the novel, Grey Knights, is concerned, it was not a million daemons that made three hundred grey knights come out. It was locating the threat of a greater daemon of tzeentch, who was so powerful it transformed an entire world into a daemon world int he material plane, that brought out three hundred grey knights, including three grand masters.

SWAT72, If an entire system fell to the influence of chaos then the inquisition would not send three thousand grey knights to take those worlds back and destroy the daemonic influence simply because at least one of those worlds would have called in aid from other imperial organisations. (How would the inquisition know about the infestations unless they intercepted or discovered the messages sent from those worlds?)

I would think one hundred grey knights would be enough to reclaim those worlds because they would strike at the leading daemon, rather than go after each world one by one or at the same time. They may be daemon and chaos fighters, but they are still space marines following at least some of the space marine tactics. (Such as strike at the heart or head of the enemy to stop them in their tracks.)

Since they are scattered in groups or moninstaries around the galaxy and are known to work in smaller groups more often than not, I would venture to say there are probably only two or three thousand of them.

I would have to throw my hat in with the ~10,000 total GK. First, consider how incredibly small 10,000 people would be in a galaxy of untold trillions of beings. It would not be hard to be unheard of in the galaxy even with 10K GK around. Heck, there are whole cities on this planet with populations more than 10,000 that few people know about, so why is it hard to believe that a similar size group may be hidden in the known universe. As fluff states, they GK are rarely all assembled in one place anyway, so it would be easy to hide if spread out throughout the stars.

As to the monastery holding all 10,000, again I say big deal. Many public universities have student body populations of 30,000 or more, many of whom live on campus. Again, not hard to buy that 10,000 GK live on one moon in a giant fortress monastery.

Finally, the GK clearly don't follow the Codex Astartes, and thus don't follow the 1,000 man limit. Incidentally, the "1000 chapters of 1000 men" has been distanced a bit in more recent GW fluff, as I recall (it actually originated in old Rogue Trader fluff). I think they have been saying that that figure is a bit of an exaggeration and that there may be, in fact, more than 1000 chapters.