So what happens when a relatively small amount of guardsmen manage to pull off a "saving private Ryan" for a chapter...

So what happens when a relatively small amount of guardsmen manage to pull off a "saving private Ryan" for a chapter master? In other words, a Chapter Master gets in a shitstorm, and while all the guardsmen sent to help him end up dying in glory the CM is fairly safe because of their sacrifice. How would the chapter remember them?

Depends on the chapter. Adding them to the Chapter's roll of honour would be very sweet. Space Wolves might remember them in a song.
Salamanders might make a nice little shrine to them on the homeworld, or ensure that their remains are returned to their families or something sweet like that.
Weirder chapters might cannibalize the bodies in some bizarre ritual, or take the bones and use them to decorate the Chapter Master's armor.
Iron Hands and Marines Malevolent would probably just shrug.

As an aside, I played as a Black Shield in Deathwatch who took the name of the Guardsman who saved his life as his alias when he joined the Deathwatch.

The owe them a favor. If the Chapter does not consist of assholes like the Marines Malovent they likely issue the regiment or the planet the guardsmen came from a very pretty document that's basically a IOU note and swear on their honor to aid them when they call on this document to read the debt but most likely only once. If the Guards were led by by an officer from a honored officer\noble line they might even temporarily grant his descendants a single Astartes as a bodyguard for a campaign.

I get the feeling if this happen to the Ultramar then you might get stationed on Macragge.
White Scars might write a poem about them or something.
I'm not sure about the Raven Guard, but as Shrike is their Chapter Master at the moment, I'd imagine he'd be pretty cool about the whole thing.
The Blood Ravens might just "gift" the Guardsmen some relics from another regiment

You mean the BR would gift themselves the regiment....

I don't know what Mary Sue bullshit you're thinking off, but anything that could threaten a CM would utterly fucking obliterate a squad of guardsmen.

Well he did say they all died. Sometimes a few seconds of forcing the enemy to mow through your comrades' corpses is all the time you need to win.

They couldn't add them to the roll of honour. There's a difference between Angels and Men. But they did honour them, just the same.

Four hundred soldiers marched into that canyon. Four hundred of the wounded, the retired, the discharged, and the discarded. Men and women the Imperium wouldn't miss, the ones that could be spared from the front lines of a vicious, hungry war. They'd volunteered.

None returned, but they accomplished their mission. If even one Astartes had retreated to save their fallen Captain, the front would have collapsed. If they had abandoned their duty to the Imperium to save their commander, the world would have burned.

But four hundred guardsmen marched into that canyon, and the Astartes Captain marched out.

When the war was done, there were medals cast and monuments raised and parades and celebrations, but the Astartes had other missions, other wars. But they stayed behind for one day, in entrance to that canyon. And the Astartes carried the four hundred out, one at a time, and laid them to rest in the earth. The dug their graves with spades and they carved the stone aquilas by hand. There are no names in that graveyard, no monuments, no medals.

But whenever the Astartes pass through, at least for a day, there is an Angel.

Fuck that's pretty good

The last line doesn't even make any sense but it gave me the feels regardless.

>anything that could threaten a CM would utterly fucking obliterate a squad of guardsmen
What about the Commissar? Guys like Gaunt & Yarrick are rare but existent.

Yarrick is only an unbeatable, angry badass because the Orcs' gestalt field create him to be so. Secret is his Baleful Eye ability predates his mplant by a day.

The Astartes are the Emperor's Angels. They show up in iconography and in temples as such. But they are His messengers of death, dispatched by His hand to carry out His will. To the masses, they are living holy relics. To look upon one is to look upon living scripture, the manifestation of humanity's collective will to endure.

And then, in this one cemetery, on a world that has almost forgotten the war, an Angel visits for a day, to remember, and to keep the story alive.

Having a member of the Astartes visiting the memorial is like the imperial equivalent of seeing the incarnation of a saint laying flowers on someones grave.

>but anything that could threaten a CM would utterly fucking obliterate a squad of guardsmen.

It's not the grot that kills you, it's the 300 grots you had to kill before that one that ends up killing you.

Chapter Masters aren't invincible. They can be broken through raw expenditure of energy, and sometimes be saved by something as small as a Guard squad (especially if it's a Special Weapons squad with Meltas or Plasma Guns) if they're overextended or exhausted to the point of collapse.

>It's not the grot that kills you, it's the 300 grots you had to kill before that one that ends up killing you.
>Chapter Masters aren't invincible.

Were you unaware Marneus Calgar held a gateway against an entire ork waaagh for an entire night and day alone? I'm not even kidding, that's straight from the vanilla codex.

Rules of grimdark dictate that their sacrifice is forgotten and the chapter master attributes his successful escape to himself.

this man has it right, marines are basically The terminator but made out of flesh, they don't need to sleep very often and can remain in fighting form even after loosing limbs or suffering some pretty hardcore damage. That said its not impossible for a chapter master to be saved by a guardsman squad, they could interupt a duel by stabbing a warboss in the back, granting the chapter master the second he needed to stab him in the front to death or whatever.

Sure, 999,999 times out of 1,000,000. But every once in awhile some guardsmen with the right mix of pluck, luck, reckless disregard for his own safety, gratuitous firepower, and the very-rare-but-sometimes-powerful factor of barely registering as a presence let alone a threat to that incredibly powerful enemy, can make a difference.

And if there's one thing the guard has, it's enough men where throwing a million of them at a problem willy nilly is a viable option.

Completely depends on the chapter. Some would give them the highest honors for their bravery and skill. Some would consider it nothing less than their duty to die for a space Marines 5second benefit

>Stationed on Macragge

Honestly this is the best reward out of any of them. Macragge is pretty much a utopia, and the presence of the Ultramarines means the local PDF or IG garrisons can really take it easy.

It's also Maccrage, so they probably drill and train relentlessly

IG are the best of the best, drills and training come naturally to them.

Besides, training hard in Pleasantville beats kicking back on a Crapsack world.

>Were you unaware Marneus Calgar held a gateway against an entire ork waaagh for an entire night and day alone? I'm not even kidding, that's straight from the vanilla codex.

True, but you're kind of missing the point (especially given how Calgar is THE ULTIMATE LIFE FORM and is plot-wise unkillable). What I'm saying is that just because a Chapter Master can kick a shit ton of ass doesn't mean that he won't eventually run out of juice. His candle burns far brighter and far longer than any regular mortal, but even Space Marines break down eventually. It's not infeasible that a Space Marine is weakened by constant exertion to the point of needing rescue from a threat a group of well-armed Guardsmen can handle (Plasma Guns can make short work of a shit-ton of things, for example).

If a group of well-armed guardsman could handle a threat, the chapter master wouldn't be needed for it, much less in danger of dying. This is why Avatars and Swarmlords don't just keep over to a couple faggots with plasma guns. Even space marine veterans with plasma cannons don't cut the mustard, how is some guardsman gonna do it?

Every bolt that kills a guardsman is a bolt that can't be fired at the chapter master.

But if it's a threat that the Chapter Master can *almost* handle on his own, the guardsmen could be enough to finish the enemy.

Or it could be a matter of tactics. The Chapter Master can only kill the enemy horde so quickly. But the guardsmen bring artillery which can kill them faster, but also dies faster when the horde turns on them.

Or maybe it's a rebel uprising. The Chapter Master can't steal rebel artillery, but the guardsmen can.

Obviously these guardsmen are Marbo's younger brothers.

Are we seriously arguing over the fact that guardsmen are incapable of saving SMs? Uriel Ventris got saved by a guardsman, and he personally visited him in after battle to thank him.

Its not the fact that guardsmen dispatched threat themselves : it can be something as little as parking thunderhawk nearby for extraction. In "Flight of Eisenstein" a simple serf saved marine's life by firing at renegade's arm while he was aiming with bolt pistol. Renegade flinched and missed a shot, thus marine survived.

Also Ollanius Pius said hello.

Plus, aren't Baneblade crewmen technically Guardsmen?

>Also Ollanius Pius said hello.

This exactly. Isn't Pius' sacrifice our collective fetish? I fail to see how it's unbelievable that a bunch of guardsmen dying could be the deciding factor in the life of a chapter master.

Tell that to ollanius pius

As I understand it, Ollanius Pius death was the moment Emperor realised how big of unredeemble shithead Horus really was, as Pius didn't have change of hurting Horus but still Horus took the time to kill him just for the kicks. Before that Emperor had been holding back because it was his son he was fighting and tried to reason with him and sway him back to his side.

After Ollarius death Emp just went "Ok we are done talking. Let's fight" and then he beat the snot out of Horus and the Chaos Gods helping him.

So?
Were you unaware that Wolf Guard Ranulf (so not even a Chapter Master), was "larger in girth and mightier of arm than even Leman Russ", but when he had to fight endless Orks, "even the giant Space Wolves warrior could not hold out forever"? tl;dr He died.

Source: Codex Space Wolves (2nd edition)

Just because Calgar is Untouchable to the cowardly GW writers doesn't mean that all Chapter Masters are. Heck, for some chapters, being a Captain or Chapter Master may imply not so much superlative combat prowess even for a space marine; it could be rare skills in negotiation or diplomacy that allow the chapter to fight with the support of other imperial forces in a way that makes them much more successful, or could even simply be artistic skill or craftsmanship, or a predilection for self-sacrifice or some other nobility, which impresses the rest of the chapter (in those chapters which value such things highly) enough that no other candidate is considered more worthy.

Also, you might have missed the part where Calgar got roflstomped by a Swarmlord once, saved from annihilation at the last possible moment by dozens of others giving their lives to hold the Tyranids off long enough for him to be extracted by a Thunderhawk. They were other Ultramarines in this case, but it's not implausible that a sufficient number of guardsmen couldn't have done the same job (they'd have died just as surely, but that still fulfills the parameters of this exercise.)

Kek, no, he'll just shrug and sight. Marines live for centuries, IG live for decades, it's like remembering one of your ants in your ant farm.

What if one of the ants is Sly Marbo?

Then you would never again know the blissful oblivion of ignorance that comes with the succor of sleep, user.

For you would see Sly Ant-bo in the shadows of every corner, in the darkness of every room. As inevitable as your guilty conscience.

>If a group of well-armed guardsman could handle a threat, the chapter master wouldn't be needed for it, much less in danger of dying.

They might be able to handle a small part of that threat, thereby allowing the Chapter Master to handle a situation he would otherwise be unable to handle completely on his own.

Combat isn't a zero-sum game user. Sometimes something as simple as the right man at the right place at the right time is all it takes to completely change the outcome of a battle.