Site icon

GW Grognard: Retconned Marines

Hey everyone. Adam, from TFG Radio, here to once again talk about the misty days of the past of 40K.

Warhammer 40K has been around for a long time. In that time there have been many stories told and some of them remain in the current fiction today. In fact, many of the ideas and armies that were from the early days of the game that we thought would never come back are actually making a return. Even with that said, there is still a lot of information out there that we have not seen, and may never see. This week we will look at a few things that have changed since the Rogue Trader days, whether it is a slight change to a chapter or something is missing entirely.

Flesh Eaters Chapter

There hasn’t been a lot of mention of them until recently. We rarely, if ever, see painted models of them and they just get a passing mention a lot of the time. They are a Blood Angels successor chapter but they were one of the original chapters of space marines when the game was first released. Since those early days, their brother, the Flesh Tearers have gotten most of the press with the Flesh Eaters getting some token love once in a while. If you can get those Rogue Trader era books there are a few images of them but as the years progressed they got very little mention where I doubt the name registers with most players. I don’t know how an army with the name “Flesh Eaters” would be left by the wayside by Games Workshop?

Khorne Worshipping Night Lords

We all know the four traitor legions allied with the four main chaos gods. We also know that the World Eaters are the legion that follows the god Khorne. Did you know that in those early days Games Workshop also had another legion worshipping Khorne, the Night Lords. Nothing else is mentioned in the book Slaves to Darkness except that they, along with the World Eaters, worship Khorne. They show you their banner, which of course has bats on them, and should pad symbols and that’s about it. As far as I can tell they have no stories from the era to reinforce their dedication to Khorne. By the time of second edition they have a new nack story and don’t really worship any of the gods at all as a legion. So today we are left with just the World Eaters as the only legion dedicated to Khorne. Speaking of which…

World Eaters had Librarians

This seems like a no brainer but World Eaters, in the Rogue Trader days, still had librarians even after dedicating their legion to the chaos god Khorne, who dislikes sorcery and psychics. So what does a psycher that cannot use his powers do? They get to do what all love doing: counting. Much like the Tallyman for the Death Guard, the World Eaters librarians keep track of all the enemy killed by each individual soldiers and squads in the legion. They also apparently help with communications within the legion but it was never elaborated whether they used psychic powers or more conventional means for communication. New fluff I believe has them killing all their librarians but who knows, there could be some librarians hiding out among the scattered legion.

That’s all for this week. Hope you enjoyed the article. Let me know what you think, and what you remember from the early days of 40K, in the comments section below. Don’t forget to visit our Facebook, Twitch, and Patreon pages to stay up to date on what we’re up to and when episodes drop!

And remember boys and girls, Frontline Gaming sells gaming products at a discount, every day in their webcart

Exit mobile version