Chaos Space Marines

The eternal war rages on.

Chaos Space Marines (along with the Lost and the Damned and the Chaos Daemons) are arguably the main antagonists in the Warhammer 40K universe. Basically Space Marines who have channeled their Faith in the Emperor to something more worthy of worship, like say, a Chaos God. The majority of them are the 10,000+ year old Veterans who stood by the Emperor during the formation of the Imperium. Now, they want nothing more than to tear it down. Why? For the lulz, of course, particularly due to the fact that a great deal of them can't even remember why they rebelled in the first place.

Seeing as how they're basically very experienced and potent Veteran marines further enhanced by the Powers of Chaos, Chaos Space Marines are generally stronger combatants than their loyalist brethren. Basically they exist to show that Space Marines aren't complete Mary Sues. They come in 7 exciting flavors;

• Khorne - Close quarters badasses full of RAAAAAAAAAGGGEEEE!. Best dedicated melee fighters in the setting, second to NONE (except Genestealers). Insane, ruthless, barbaric and continually lusting after BLOOD FOR THE BLOOD GOD and SKULLS FOR THE SKULL THRONE. Khorne's dedicated marines are known as Berzerkers and are famed for their revolutionary use of the Chainaxe, which is basically a eviscerator chainsword on steroids and reforged into an axe, and fucktastically fearless charges. Kharn is a fine example of a Khornate Marine and the World Eaters legion is the most famous Chaos legion dedicated to Khorne. They also get the best speeches. "Blood for the blood god!!!! Skulls for the skull throne!!!!!! LET THE GALAXY BURNNNNNN!!!!!"

• Tzeentch - Tricky, conniving psykers. Unlike Khorne, who hates magic users 'cause they're un-manly skirt wearers who can't take a punch' (though it should be noted that Khorne has no problem with using magic to summon Daemons, do rituals, or enhance weapons, armor, and physical abilities; it's hurling fire balls and doombolts that pisses him off), Tzeentch is something of an equal opportunity employer among the Great Gods though he has a noted preference for ranged combat and majyyk. And has no qualms with physical brutality and tremendous strength and combat skill when it can suit him. So his warriors, though not nearly the equals of Khornate Berzerkers, are quite fine in a good 'ol scrap. Although in setting, warriors under Tzeentch tend to rape anything in ranged combat with either enhanced weapons or magyycks that would turn heroes into Chaos Spawns, squa-GRAABBRLBLLRBLRLRBLR
  • Ahem. To continue where the previous writer left off... squads of infantry into ash, and vehicles into a puddle of molten goo, that or basically they screw their brains so bad that the poor sap is mindfucked in 5 whole different levels. The Thousand Sons is the most famous Chaos legion dedicated to Tzeentch.

• Slaanesh - What you get when Space Marines start going after hookers and blow, they wanna get higher than high while banging an absurd amount of chicks... while being high. Slaaneshi marines are looking for the next high and have more drugs in their system than... pretty much every junkie in the world. Combined. With that, they get penis fingers to give them the extra edge and guy-on-speedballx20-like awareness, which is kinda like being able to see bullets flying at you and actually evade them. Doomrider is one of the most famous Slaaneshi champions and the Emperor's Children is the best known Slaanesh-following legion.

• Nurgle - Rotting, diseased, decaying racks of flesh who can take hits that would kill a squad of Terminators. Something of a meat shield as far as Chaos is concerned. They've contracted every disease in creation and then some. Despite them looking like a bag of things best not described, Nurgle's followers won't hesitate to give you a big, long, family hug. D'awww. The Death Guard is the most famous legion dedicated to Nurgle.

• Undivided - Marines who worship Chaos as either a combined entity or as a pantheon, the latter is especially true for the majority of Undivided Legions, such as the Black Legion or the Word Bearers. But in reality, they're just asshats who lack the balls to commit themselves to a Chaos God. Such undivided legions include the Iron Warriors, Night Lords they hate Chaos, Alpha Legion no such legion exists they're actually closet loyalists, the Black Legion, and the Word Bearers.

• Unaligned - Not really undivided, this is for those who aren't really supporting Chaos and are only really lumped in with the Chaos Space Marines because they still oppose the Emperor. Most of the Night Lords fall into this group due to their intense loathing of Chaos and the Daemonic, which is so strong that they choose to stay in the materium instead of the eye of terror despite the fact that this makes them a thousand times more vulnerable to imperial attack and allows them to age normally. The idiots.

• Closet Loyalists - Marines who pretend to be with the forces of Chaos but are in reality working to help the Emperor. Due to the highly corrupting nature of chaos this is rare in every legion except one; the Alpha Legion; who are made up of nothing but closet loyalists. Though they were amongst the legions that turned against the Imperium in the Horus Heresy, this is really just a front for their other activities which are ultimately meant to harm Chaos in the long run. The faggots.

Overview

Basically SPESS MEHREENS who, for whatever non-reason, decided they were too cool and edgy for the Imperium of Man, so they redirected their homolust for the Emprah to something else...like a Chaos god. During the height of the Horus Heresy, they went all evil and did a lot of nasty on their former comrades until they were forced to retreat to the Eye of Terror due to Smurfs. Who were not on the other side of the galaxy when this occurs. disregard that, the Smurfs didn't even participate in the defense of Terra.

Naturally, they fight just like Space Marines, except on average they are stronger, more experienced and older, given that the majority stood with their Primarchs during the Great Crusade. They keep using shit they were equipped with prior to the Horus Heresy such as bolters and the ever useful Space Marine plot armor, which would explain why they didn't fist fuck each other to death before reaching the Eye of Terror or why they would follow the lead of a particular Saturday morning cartoon villain. Chaos Marines are also commonly known to compensate their aging weapons (which didn't really age much considering how fucktarded Imperium tech support is) by using demon magic, giving themselves penis fingers for that extra edge in combat. (Daemon steroids for Khorne's followers, for example.)

For all their powers from Chaos, however, they are nowhere nearly as organized as their loyalist counterparts. Turning to Chaos tends drive marines insane, causing them to usually lose much of the useful tactics they had when they were loyalists. Different warbands of Chaos Space Marines are every bit as prone to fighting each other as they are anything else for any number of reasons; evil doesn't get along with evil, they're all nuts and just want to fight something, other warband worships a different Chaos god. Yeah, these guys are nuts, infighting inside individual warbands is not unheard off, and their leaders always have to watch their back because every single marine has hopes of killing their superiors and taking over. So yeah, if they didn't have the Eye of Terror to hid in and the Imperium was so idiot ball prone it probably would have killed them by now. However, when they DO get their shit together, they fuck up the Imperium on a scale undreamed of by every other race in Warhammer. See the Dominion of Fire or the Cholercaust Blood Crusade. GODDAMN IT, KHORNATE BERZERKERS ARE AWESOME.

They're the oldest fogies (or at least the ones from traitor legions are anyway) in the setting, barring the homosexual faggots, That one angry viking dreadnought, who's about their age, the Emo Tomb King expys and maybe a few of the Omnivorous Space Bug Lizards. Because of this, they irritably refer to the Loyalists as 'Pups', 'An army of Children' and 'little brothers'. Frequently mocking their methods of Warfare as un-manly, and shouting such phrases as "PUPS! YOU CALL THIS WAR?!" and "WAR WAS BETTER IN MY DAY!". Except when they meet Bjorn the Fell Handed, then they just crap themselves, or in the case of Khornates, they scream, "TEAR THE LOYALIST FROM HIS SHELL!" Of course, even the Khornates still get their shit fucked up by Bjorn, who slaughtered a shit ton of them in the first War for Armageddon.

As of 6th edition, they'll be getting a giant dragon that's designed to troll a Dread Knight. Praise the Gods.

The Traitor Legions

A Word Bearer marine.

When the Horus Heresy struck, nine, ten, or eleven (we don't know about two of them) of the original twenty legions turned against the Emprah and most of them devoted themselves to a particular Chaos God or Chaos itself. Space Marine legions amounted to around 10,000 marines each when they were founded but most swelled to around 50-100,000 marines by the time of the Horus Heresy. (The Raven Guard, for example, numbered 80,000 marines before they got their shit fucked up at Istvaan, but the Thousand Sons Legion was noted to be rather undermanned, even before the whole "Rubric of Ahriman" incident.) This means that a fuckload of the traitor marines were able to make it into the Eye of Terror. Along with that, several loyalist marine Chapters have also defected are still defecting to Chaos after the second and third founding. So there are still a lot of Chaos marines serving Chaos, though not enough to outnumber all of the Space Marines under the Imperium. They are mostly widely scattered, acting as warbands though there are a number under the original Primarch's rule (if they're still alive anyway). It's very rare to see more than a grand company (equal in size to a chapter) of them at a time at any one battle unless it's an organized invasion (The Black Crusades for example) led by an relatively competent champion armless failure, the Legion's primarch himself calls them to fuck some shit up, or you're dealing with the Word Bearers or Iron Warriors. The list of the 9 traitor legions and their primarchs:

• Emperor's Children: Fulgrim - dissolved after Kharn fucked their shit up. Now they act as roaming warbands and mercenaries, though non-Slaanesh serving warbands generally prefer the World Eaters' berserkers to their Noise Marines, something that you can't blame said warbands for because Berserkers are a far better unit (their statline is generally better, Chaos is more of a close-combat army any way, and Havocs kind of render Noise Marines redundant) and they are even more awesome than the Noise Marines (which is saying something because the Noise Marines kill people with heavy metal and/or dubstep). THIS IS WHY BERSERKERS ARE BETTER THAN NOISE MARINES!!!

• Iron Warriors: Perturabo - This legion is generally the most coherent of the traitor legions and retains most of it's pre-heresy organization and numbers. Iron Warriors are the masters of siege warfare (basically, rooting out cover-camping bitches) and sworn enemies of the Imperial Fists (who are said cover-camping bitches). One of their noted leaders is Honsou, the Iron Warriors Warsmith whose in the running for 'galaxy's evilest'.

• Night Lords: Konrad Curze/Night Haunter - Famous for being the origin of the Chaos Raptor, which is Chaos's answer to the Loyalist Assault marines. Doesn't appear an awful lot these days (dying tends to do that to people). They prefer ambush tactics (which is surprising since it's nearly impossible to remain subtle when you're walking around in a huge power-armor suit) and screaming like a maniac to cause terror. They are one of the few legions who refuse to employ daemons. One of the two traitor legions to not have it's primarch still walking around on account of Konrad Curze's desire to go down like an emo to rebel against daddy.

• World Eaters: Angron- Dissolved after Kharn turned the legion against themselves, what a guy. Now acting as roaming warbands and mercenaries. They still unite every now and then when Angron wants to fuck something's shit up, such as Cadia. The only legion known to get shit done when called up to do so.

• Death Guard: Mortarion - Don't show up much in the fluff, though plague marines and champions can be found in many other warbands and, next to world-eater berserkers, are the most common of the one-deity dedicated units.

• Thousand Sons: Magnus the Red - Another legion that doesn't show up much at all in fluff after the Horus Heresy and rubric marines don't show up much in other legions' warbands and most warbands use their own sorcerers. Except for Ahriman, Ahriman goes out trolling the Harlequins and those few Inquisitors who think that not killing the Harlequins who guard the Labyrinth that contains all the secrets of the universe is a good thing. Ahriman also does this because Tzeentch likes dicking Magnus over in his passive-aggressive way. 6th Edition will probably break the ice and have someone other than Ahriman interact with other characters, its also expected that 6th edition will finally make a definitive distinction between Rubric Marines that soulless, fleshless shells and Chaos Marines devoted Tzeentch that aren't dead, soulraped and sealed in their armor.

• Black Legion: Horus - Originally called the Luna Wolves and then the Sons of Horus. Unites every now and then when Failbaddon wants to launch another black crusade. It's a miracle they're still surviving with Abaddon's incompetent leadership and numerous failed black crusades, which should have probably left them extremely undermanned. However, their ranks are quickly filled by the millions of volunteers who sign up because god damn that paint job looks cool. They are the largest legion by far, stated to outnumber the Word Bearers ten to one. They have no real central command structure outside of a Black Crusade, and even then Abaddon, being the failure that he is, can't keep the Legion's shit together for very long before they start breaking off every which way in search of a fight, usually getting slaughtered not long afterwards.

• Word Bearers: Lorgar - The Only Legion to have retained it's Chaplains in the form of Dark Apostles, who can often lead a Word Bearer's Warband in the place of a Chaos Lord or Champion. They're one of the more organized and complete legions as they have a central daemon world of their own named "Sicarus". Sicarus is covered in dozens of temples and cathedrals devoted to Chaos. The Word Bearers are still united under the banner of their Primarch: Lorgar (even if the lazy bastard never does anything these days but sit around doing nothing). Second most coherent after the Iron Warriors.

• Alpha Legion: Alpharius/Omegon- No such legion or primarchs exists, further speculation on this issue is heresy and will result in execution. Said non-existent Legion has never trolled the Imperium for the last 10,000 years by faking the death of every member, any idea to the contrary is HERESY. Also masters of sneaking around undetected. Bonus points for doing it while 8 feet tall and wearing 500 pounds of armor.

See Also

• Warriors of Chaos
• Tactics/Chaos Space Marines

Gallery

<gallery> File:1227181112539.jpg|The Typical Chaos Space Marine File:1174923365695wq1vj1.png|The dreaded Night Lords preparing an ambush File:Emperor s Children by megalaros.jpg|Slaaneshi noise marine.