Editing Black Templars (section)

==Organization==
Since the Imperial Fists told [[Roboute_Guilliman|Papa Smurf]] to go fuck himself and his [[Codex Astartes|Codex]], the Black Templars have an organization different from Codex Chapters. They organize themselves into Fighting Companies, with much of it on the fly. Their ranks and positions include:

*'''[[High Marshal]]''': The Chapter Master of the Black Templars, who decides which Crusades the Black Templars will participate in, without bothering for an okay from the [[High Lords of Terra]]. [[Helbrecht]] serves as the current High Marshal. Interestingly enough, in their original Codex the High Marshal and regular Marshals typically do not go face to face with the enemy (to the point where Helbrecht never actually touched down in the Third War for Armageddon, he stayed in space dictating the orbital battle), [[Reasonable Marines|Marshals and High Marshals prefer to stay back assessing the battlefield]] and advising the various squads through their communicators about where they should strike and shoot to make the most out of their troops. The irony of such a rage-happy rip-and-tear Chapter having a reasonable and intelligent command style is not lost.
*'''[[Marshal]]''': The commander of a Crusade, a Marshal is equivalent to a Captain, they're the ones that lead the individual Crusades. When a Crusade is called and there is no Marshal to lead it a candidate is chosen from among the sword brethren and if the High Marshal thinks he is fit for the task appointed Marshal. There has only ever been one case of a candidate being rejected by the High Marshall. It is from the ranks of the Marshals that the new High Marshal is picked should he fall in battle.
*'''[[Emperor's Champion]]''': Before an undertaking usually during battle preparations, one of the Black Templars may have a vision granted by the Emperor. This knight will be declared by the [[Chaplain]]s to be the Emperor's Champion, as their founder Sigismund was ten millennia ago. He will be given the Black Sword and the Armour of Faith, and serve as an inspiration to the rest of the Crusading host. As with the first Emperor's Champion, Sigismund, it is the sole duty of those who bear the title to seek out and challenge any enemy champion the crusading force meets in battle. If he is killed before his mission is complete it is considered an ill omen indeed, though there is no requirement for ''every'' crusade to actually have one, the 8th edition codex says there is only ever one in the chapter at any given time. It is unknown what happens to the knight who is chosen after the completion of a Crusade as none have been shown to survive long enough for it to matter. Other chapters, most usually Imperial Fist's successors, occasionally have an Emperor's Champion who serves a similar purpose but without the artifacts.
*'''[[Castellan]]''': The lieutenants of the Marshal, a temporary position chosen by the Marshals (one guy cannot be everywhere) and who is a Castellan can vary depending on the current Crusade or even the current battle ([[Reasonable Marines|pick who's best to lead the current fight]]). The Castellans lead the Fighting Companies of a Crusade, and they're also chosen from the Sword Brethren.
*'''Sergeant''': The only Codex rank the Black Templars employ. Also from the Sword Brethren (notice a pattern, yet?).
*'''[[Sword Brethren]]''': Roughly analogous to Veterans in Codex Chapters, Sword Brethren are the senior battle brothers of the Marshal. They also get to use [[Terminator]] armour.
*'''[[Initiate]]s''': Rank and file battle-brothers. Marines (typically Neophytes) dying around them has a beneficial effect on Initiates, making them run harder into enemy gunfire for reasons unknown and oft-speculated upon.
*'''[[Black Templar Neophyte|Neophytes]]''': While most Chapters have their neophytes serve in some sort of recon force, the Black Templars have their new Space Marines join the Crusade at the front lines and hit the ground running. Given that this has worked for ten thousand years, they may be onto something. Every Neophyte is assigned to an Initiate who is to train and tutor them. The Neophyte serves as the apprentice to the Initiate, sort of like Jedi in [[Star Wars]] but the Neophyte gets smacked if they even dare bitch about sand. They are also quite useful to Initiates to use as shields (literally) in battle.

===Chapter Strength===
[[Image:Praykillburn.jpg|400px|thumb|right|It's a lot like this, really.]]
Despite being a Codex Chapter (well, they're a Codex Chapter as of the newest Codex), they basically just cherry pick whatever they want from it. In particular, they're doing what most overstrength chapters do which is not flaunting their numbers. The Adeptus Terra lacks the ability to enforce the number limit on every Chapter, and instead just makes examples out of those who go too far. Because the Templars are doing so much and avoid concentrating their numbers, the Adeptus Terra is willing to look the other way because honestly they can't afford to fight the Templars and honestly kind of need them. But [[That Guy|Ordo Astartes Inquisitor Yetzmov]] thinks otherwise and has spent 100 years trying to proof their rule breaking and punish accordingly. Even though they usually have multiple Crusades going on at once, they must be the best Marines around, seeing as every other Crusading Chapter has roughly a thousand Marines (usually less). Guess that's what happens when you genuinely embrace righteous fury and unleash it upon the alien, the mutant, and the heretic.

However, it's not actually clear how many Marines they actually ''have.'' Some [[neckbeards]] (both fanboys and bitter opponents) exaggerate the actual numbers, referring to them as [[First Founding#Legions in 40k|legion strength]] and/or believing that their numbers are figuratively ''without limit'' and end up with ridiculously high guesses. Given the vagaries of in-universe time due to warp phenomena and the inevitable depletion of assets due to the nature of their work, as well as the fact that they have shit record keeping due to a complete lack of [[Librarian]]s, the actual number of active Templars would be in constant flux.

In ''Blood and Fire,'' Grimaldus mentions that they typically have dozens of Crusades going on at any point in time; [[Deathwatch (RPG)|other sources]] tell us that the Black Templars as an entire Chapter actually consist of a total of three '''"primary"''' Crusade fleets from which all other fighting companies are split from and deployed on their own '''"secondary"''' Crusades when necessary. This coincides with the original codex, which said that there were usually no more than three Crusades at any given time but that they can stretch themselves according to necessity, and states that in one exceptional case there were up to fourteen Crusades operating in the Segmentum Solar during the Treachery of Dalmark.

If we were to base the numbers off the estimate in the back of the 4th edition Codex: Black Templars, the deployment map totals greater than 6000 marines, with several of those Crusades routinely exceeding 500 marines. But when you factor in normal redeployment over the years that number isn't very helpful as many of those Crusades were finished by the time others arose. When you consider it like that, [[Blood Angels|many]] [[Minotaurs|other]] [[Dark Angels|chapters]] have deployed en masse over the years and would also generate a similar deployment map. Furthermore, only a handful of Crusades numbered relatively close to one thousand, with only Armageddon passing it, with 1,232 Marines total and even that number was questioned (?) by the author; for this campaign, High Marshal [[Helbrecht]] was said to have mustered three crusades.

So we can either take it as written in the Order of Battle that the three crusades represent the "normal" three crusades and hence the entire chapter, giving us an absolute ''minimum'' of over 1000 marines, or we can assume that the three crusades are not the primary crusades at all, which still doesn't give us much of an indication of the chapter size, leaving us at square one.

To make things even more confusing, each Crusade will be accompanied by a '''Black Sword''' and a set of the Armour of Faith, to be used by the Emperor's Champion. The 4E codex said that every Crusade and fighting company would have its own Champion, but the 6E Codex and the newer novels changed this older fluff and said that there could only be a ''single'' Champion in the entire Chapter at any given time, and that only a handful arise every century. Plus, there are only ten Black Swords in the Chapter and they are held by the Chaplains, just in case they find the Champion within their Crusade. This implies that there can only be ten Crusades active at any one time; hence, if the three Crusades at Armageddon, taken to be around 1,232, are three-tenths of the Chapter's overall size, the Black Templars have around 4,000 marines.

However, the novel ''Eternal Crusader'' flat-out says that the whole Chapter could gather together on the [[Battle-barge|Eternal Crusader]] itself and barely tax the capabilities of the vessel, and that ''"the mere'"'' 200 marines of Helbrecht's Crusade, which constituted one fifth of the Black Templars' total forces, meant that the vessel was mostly empty, making them far more Chapter sized. The book also shows High Marshal Helbrecht purposefully exaggerating the size of his contingent at Armageddon from 400 marines to 900 in order to gain overall command of the Astartes forces that had arrived ''(many Chapters had brought a lot more men than the Templars, and would have had more right to overall command)''. Helbrecht would later leave Armageddon briefly to muster [[A Game of Pretend|"more"]] Black Templars ''(but only bringing the number up to what he promised)'', so it is easy to see how the size of his contingent would be misleading to an outside observer.

The old Codex also suggested somewhere between 5000-6000 ''"if certain accounts are to be believed"'' which places a level of uncertainty on the number, and if you consider the above statement would sound reasonable if you took Helbrecht at his word about the availability to Black Templar soldiers and could easily show how the Administratum has been misled into thinking the Templars are much larger than they actually are. [[Aaron Dembski-Bowden|A-D-B]] also suggested about 6000 in an offhand comment; therefore, it is currently our highest reasonable upper limit without resorting to guesses.

Also, Chapters in general have a habit of seconding Marines to "Honor Companies" which are basically autonomous companies or ones dedicated to certain tasks or seconded to other forces. The Codex allows for an infinite number of honor companies as they aren't within the Chapter's chain of command and are essentially their own miniature Chapter (though probably cannot get their own recruits). Chapters commonly use this to totally circumvent the recruitment restrictions. Which of course means the number of Astartes actually in the galaxy is impossible to know even if every Chapter had exactly a thousand Marines and there were exactly a thousand Chapters there could actually be a quadrillion fuck tons of Marines for all we know.

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[https://guyhaley.wordpress.com/2014/07/11/im-baaaacccckkk/#comment-5779 The author of ''Eternal Crusader'' later acknowledged on his blog that the Black Templars could have maintained extreme numbers in the past, but that the overall strength of the Chapter was reduced to a thousand (more or less) as result of a corporate decision by GW, not just of the codex authors.] Heresy!

It is perhaps best to repeat the Black Library's own take on the fluff: 40k is in the fucking dark ages and everything written down could be a legend, propaganda, an event that happened, or a rumor based on a real event. Any guess as to the number of Marines in the Black Templars is just that, a guess, and a book offers only the author's point of view, or what he wants you to think, or he himself is a fabrications.

8th Edition still maintains the information confusion over the Black Templar's actual numbers, just like before. While the Imperial Index states that ''"each Black Templars battle-fleet contains thousands of warriors."'' The actual Space Marine Codex states that "''the size of each can vary from several battle-brothers to several hundred"'' and though it also says there is no fixed number of Crusades.

The latest fluff from ''Psychic Awakening: Faith and Fury'' gives the throwaway line that ''"each of the crusades is comprised of thousands of space marines"'' without substantiating how many crusades there actually are. There are are still only nine Black Swords in existence ''(Guilliman destroyed one to defeat Skarbrand during the events of Rise of the Primarch)''. So one could infer that there are anywhere between two and nine crusades at most, and their arrangement can change fluidly, just as mentioned above. Of course, since "thousands" of Astartes per crusade would still mean that at minimum there are four thousand Black Templars in the Chapter as that is the only way for the bare minimum of "crusades" plural and "thousands" for each.

...Not much seems to have changed, fanboys and opponents can believe what they want.

Apparently, the book "Throne of Light," states that the Black Templars number somewhere around '''25,000 ASTARTES''' , spread across a myriad of crusades which all have their own cultural quirks about them. This is a stupidly high number of marines, and it can be presumed the only reason the Inquisition hasn't done anything about this is because the Templars are faithful, zealous, and really good at turning heretics into a grimy brown paste. That and the few inquisitors stupid enough to question the Black Templars openly have a nasty habit of walking face-first into bolt pistols. Or that they're so spread out that they are functionally totally separate Chapters anyway and so worrying about it is basically pointless. This number actually does fit with the above fluff, though. All the Templars would have to do is just not reduce the number of crusades from the loss of a black sword. And, let's face it, do you honestly believe they'd have fewer crusades for ''any'' reason? The remaining five thousand is very easily explained as each Crusade not having exactly one thousand Marines because, duh, they're dying and reinforcing constantly. As "thousands" was used in the Psychic Awakening and would mean at least two thousand as it is plural, that would mean nine swords and one crusade they'd never dream of removing makes twenty thousand Space Marines. Five thousand more spread among the ten Crusades due to attrition and reinforcement could certainly amount to roughly twenty five thousand Black Templars.

Oh, also they have apparently stolen gene seed from other Imperial Fists successors in the past which is kind of fucked.