Space Marine (Warhammer 40,000)

Space Marines were first introduced in Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader (1987) by Rick Priestley, which was the first edition of the tabletop game.

The book Realm of Chaos: The Lost and the Damned (Rick Priestley and Bryan Ansell, 1990) was the first book from Games Workshop to give a backstory for the Space Marines. It introduced the original 20 Space Marine Legions as well as their Primarchs. It also first described the Horus Heresy, the civil war of the 30th millennium in which nine of the Legions converted to the worship of the Chaos Gods and rebelled against the Emperor.

Two of the original 20 Legions and their respective Primarchs are not named and are described as "redacted" from the records of the Imperium. Rick Priestley explained that this was to illustrate the Imperium's practice of erasing embarrassing or incriminating events and figures from Imperial records (damnatio memoriae).

To me the background to 40K was always intended to be ironic. [...] The fact that the Space Marines were lauded as heroes within Games Workshop always amused me, because they’re brutal, but they’re also completely self-deceiving. The whole idea of the Emperor is that you don’t know whether he’s alive or dead. The whole Imperium might be running on superstition. There’s no guarantee that the Emperor is anything other than a corpse with a residual mental ability to direct spacecraft. It’s got some parallels with religious beliefs and principles, and I think a lot of that got missed and overwritten.

— Rick Priestley in an interview with Unplugged Games, December 2015[1]

The following tabletop games from Games Workshop use miniature models of Space Marines:

• Warhammer 40,000
• Kill Team
• Space Hulk (discontinued)
• Space Crusade (discontinued)
• Epic: Armageddon (discontinued)

Miniature design

A limited edition model from 1991, based on Bob Naismith's early concept. Note the air tube connected to the underside of the helmet.

A Space Marine Terminator (Blood Angels chapter). This particular one was made for Space Hulk.

Concept art for a 2nd edition Chaos Space Marine of the Emperor's Children Legion (Jes Goodwin, 1990).

Bob Naismith created the initial design for the Space Marines. The first edition's Space Marines had helmets with prominent conical snouts. This design is popularly known as the "beaky" helmet. The design of the helmet initially had a gas mask, with an airtube connected to the snout, and this concept is apparent in a 1991 limited edition model that is based on this initial design. The designers at Games Workshop felt that this concept was too banal and derivative, and they made a conscious decision to give the Space Marine, and Warhammer 40,000 in general, a "medieval-in-space" aesthetic. The helmet was modified to resemble a medieval hounskull helmet. Likewise, the Space Marine's armour was redesigned to resemble medieval plate armour. Jes Goodwin redesigned the armour for the second edition (1993), where the helmet's beak was replaced by a flat grill, and the chestplate features a winged skull. With the eighth edition (2017), Games Workshop introduced the Primaris Space Marine models which are slightly taller and have a new helmet design.

Space Marine Terminators first appeared in 1989 for the spin-off board game Space Hulk and were eventually incorporated into the principal Warhammer 40,000 game.[2] They wear a bulkier kind of armour and carry heavier weapons.

Simplified miniatures of Space Marines in Power Armour, Space Marine Scouts, and Space Marine Terminators are found in the board games Space Crusade and Tyranid Attack.[3][4][5]

A Space Marine is stronger, tougher, heavier and taller than a normal human due to genetic augmentation. Space Marines wear suits of mechanized armour which have a medieval aesthetic, and they are often brightly painted and ornately decorated (camouflage is mostly redundant in the warfare of the far future). The classic weapon of the Space Marine is the boltgun, a form of gyrojet weapon with a recoil strong enough that normal humans cannot wield it without risking serious injury. Space Marines can live for centuries, and can thereby develop vast combat experience.

Those Space Marines who are loyal to the Imperium are organized into various "Chapters", each usually containing about a thousand Space Marines, and led by a Chapter Master. Each Chapter is an autonomous organization in and of itself, and controls a small to medium sized fiefdom from which it raises funds and recruits. Each Space Marine Chapter is a fully integrated military force, possessing both naval ships and ground forces. The Space Marines themselves are dedicated shock troops, while ordinary human serfs serve in support roles such as crewing their ships and maintaining their equipment. A Chapter's headquarters are known as "fortress-monasteries". Each Chapter bears a unique name, such as "the Iron Hands" and "the Dark Angels", and a distinctive paint scheme for their armour (e.g. the White Scars paint their armour white). A Space Marine's commitment to his Chapter is lifelong and they rarely have any kind of personal life outside the Chapter (with the exception of the Salamanders chapter). Space Marines are conditioned to have a fanatical reverence for the Emperor of Mankind, though most continue to view Him merely as a man rather than a god.

Chaos Space Marines are organised into large "Legions" and smaller warbands that likewise have colourful names (e.g. "the Thousand Sons" and "the Night Lords"). Some Chaos Space Marines dedicate themselves to a specific Chaos God, which affects their personalities and physiologies in specific ways. For instance, Chaos Space Marines devoted to the chaosbl god Nurgle have grotesque, bloated bodies riddled with disease, yet are paradoxically very resilient in battle; while Chaos Space Marines devoted to Slaanesh tend to be hedonistic. Chaos Space Marines tend to be even more brutal than their Loyalist counterparts, often killing and torturing people for the mere sake of it.

A Space Marine is created by implanting "gene-seed" in a human recruit, which transforms them into superhumans. Gene-seed cannot be mass-produced in factories. New gene-seed grows within the bodies of the Space Marines themselves and are periodically harvested by surgery to implant in new recruits. Space Marines also cannot procreate sexually as humans normally do as their genetic modifications make them sterile. Because their production cannot be scaled up, Space Marines are few in number. The vast majority of the Imperium's armed forces are regular humans.

Space Marines are always male, as gene-seed will kill a woman if implanted. Most chapters prefer to recruit boys in early adolescence, as younger recruits suffer fewer complications in the transformation process; but adults can be recruited up to middle age.

The Emperor of Mankind created the Space Marines around the time he founded the Imperium and used them to spearhead his conquest of the galaxy. A few centuries into this campaign, known as the "Great Crusade", about half of the Space Marine legions converted to the worship of the Chaos Gods and rebelled against the Emperor in what became known as the "Horus Heresy". The insurrection was eventually defeated and the survivors fled Imperial space. Because Space Marines age at a much slower rate than normal humans, and most of the rebels dwell in realms of Chaos that are outside the normal flow of time, many of the Chaos Space Marines that fled during after the Heresy are alive and continue to wage war against the Imperium over ten thousand years later.

• Ultramarines: A Warhammer 40,000 Movie (2010).
• Astartes

Space Marines are featured in numerous Science-fantasy novels, predominantly published by Black Library, a division of Games Workshop.

In December 2012, Games Workshop claimed that any use of the phrase "Space Marine" on content other than their own infringed on their trademark of the term and requested that online retailer Amazon remove the e-book Spots the Space Marine by M.C.A. Hogarth.[9] The row received a lot of publicity during February 2013, with authors such as Cory Doctorow, Charles Stross, and John Scalzi supporting Hogarth. Amazon restored the e-book for sale.[10][11]

• Supersoldier
• Space marine