Well I am back from my holiday and preparing for another round of interviews at work but have been thinking about the alternative Empire I have been footling around with on my blog and decided it was high time to take a peek at the Emperors finest, the mighty Space Marines!
Now for many folks my age, their first experience of the Space Marine was with MBs Space Crusade:
I fondly remember buying it along with Mission Dreadnaught one summer holiday and loving the artwork from the box and the big pile of figures that came with it. Soon I bought the mighty Rogue Trader book but at the age of 13 found it rather heavy going!
Still the artwork in the book was fantastic and as I went through High School 2nd edition was released and many a game was played but something always nagged me about the Marines. In much of the early artwork they are a lot more interesting than in the stuff that was produced later (you know the stuff with the pin heads and festooned with ribbons!)
Now coming back to the subject, I find myself heretically thinking that the old designs could do with a revamp for a more high tech and sleek design and the very Marine itself needs a bit of revision to live in my revised setting.
The original Space Marine was often from a savage society and taken off to the Space Marines fortress and indoctrinated in the Imperial cult and operated on to alter his skeletal structure, muscles and what not but he retained a sort of techno savagery that appealed. What didn't appeal was the whole warrior monk thing.
In my setting why couldn't they be a more satisfactorily higher tech type of trooper, genetically engineered for the Imperium and fanatically loyal to the Emperor, much like the Sardaukar in Dune? This approach rather appeals to me as it allows me to incorporate all manner of interesting legion specific rules and quirks that the Imperium techs and geneticists have worked into their super soldier programme to produce superior troops for any eventuality.
It also gives me an interesting idea for the Renegade Legions but more on that in a later post!
At the same time, the Marine is a hated and feared oppressor for many while the paragon of the Imperium to others and I kind of want to keep this idea going and have the rebellion especially resentful of their heavy handed approach to quelling opposition to the Emperors will.
One of the settings I really like is that of Kryomek, a teched up version of Aliens but some of the images of the elite SWAT troops from the book itself are far more evocative to me of what I want the Space Marine to be:
Loyalty to the Emperor and his family is coded into their DNA but there is an equally strong warrior code that ties the Marine legions too. In some cases this can mean they are capable of great and terrible deeds and I like the idea of small bands to occasionally abandon the life of serving the Imperium and striking off on their own, be it as mercenaries, freebooters or even members of the Rebellion!
You will note I have discarded the Chapter concept and gone back to the Legion, the reason for this is that I can't be bothered with the 1000 marines per Chapter and instead like the idea of there being a dozen or so legions, each numbering into the thousands of Marines, each engineered to excel in combat and that somewhere there is a factory churning out more of them to replace losses and experimenting with new Gene codes and combinations.
While this is great fun to write about, there's another possibility, that instead of being the result of a genetic experiment, the Marine could simply be a human, recruited from the best of the Imperial Guard and given better gear and training. This gives them a far more human and understandable outlook, which is very tempting! They become the Imperial version of the special forces and are brought in to deal with the more difficult of situations. It also allows for far more human motivations and will result in Space Marines being a more mixed bunch who can be far more intuitive as they have learned their martial skills the hard way rather than it being programmed into them!
Needless to say the options are endless and I suspect its going to be some time before I settle on any particular approach but I have my suspicions it will probably involve some sort of combination of the two with the bulk of the Marines being purely human but veterans and an elite cadre, loyal only to the Emperor being fielded in smaller numbers but with skills that far surpass any mere mortal!
Hopefully my jabberings will inspire folks to look at their settings and forces again and see if they can't mix things up a bit or look at unpopular forces in a new light but for the most part, its just fun to write and make up my own sort of hodge podge setting that will appeal to me and allow me to employ the Budgethammer pledge and use whatever I like!
All the best!
