Regiment Creation

Looks like we're
>Urban: Good soldiers, once you get the cityboy out of the city.

So far, so generic, but urban worlds can have pretty ruthless gang life, and sending them on warrior pilgrimages is a good way to turn them into a valuable export.

Let's have a d100 for our core unit doctrine.

Rolled 22 (1d100)

Rolled 74 (1d100)

Damn so close

>tfw we were four seconds off being a drop regiment
Well lads, looks like we're the backbone of Him on Terra's forces: a sturdy, reliable
>Infantry Regiment!

Let's get a d10 in for Specialization.

Rolled 2 (1d10)

Hey man, standard infantry gets shit done. Be it elite tactical operators or human wave fanatics.

I know mate, I've just got major wank fantasies for ODSTs and Harakoni Warhawks. Still, in any event, a 2 sets us up as

>Counter specialists!

What the fuck does that even mean? Are we specifically trained to fuck up a certain type of enemy that we'll roll for later? Guess we'll find out.

Gimme a d10 for Loyalty, my lads.

Rolled 7 (1d10)

That gives us
>Undisciplined: Will follow the Emperor but don't expect them to bow to authority figures.

If we're scumbags and criminals conscripted into religious orders and sent to war, then this actually makes a great deal of sense.

Give us a d100 for our special gear.

Rolled 93 (1d100)

>Modified Weaponry
Lots of directions we could take this -- either we personalise our shit because we're an undisciplined rabble or we adjust it to deal with whichever our preferred foe is. Of course, the powers that be might not take kindly to any of this . . .

Let's get a d100 for some friends.

Rolled 79 (1d100)

Looks like we've got some support from the
>Imperial Navy!

Roll again for primary enemies.

Rolled 92 (1d100)

Looks like we've got some serious beef with everyone's least favourite piratical rape machines, the
>Dark Eldar.

Roll for minor/secondary enemies and we can start consolidating this shit.

...

Rolled 5 (1d10)

Fuck.

Sorry bud, should've specified the 1d4chan tables ask for a d100 for minor enemies.

Rolled 86 (1d100)

Saharduin, apparently! Which are . . . squatted Rogue Trader-era anthropomorphic shark pirate people. Cool! Gimme a few minutes and I'll draw up a list of our results and we can start fluffing.

Alright, you miserable lot, this is our regiment!
Recruitment Criteria:
>Priesthood: They venerate the God-Emperor in his soldier's aspect.
Nature of Recruitment:
>Punishment/Redemption/Recycling: Recruits are gathered from the dregs of society.
Homeworld:
>Civilized World: Soft as clay before the firing of the kiln; war is their crucible.
Homeworld terrain type:
>Urban: Good soldiers, once you get the cityboy out of the city.
Core unit doctrine:
>Infantry Regiment
Specialisation:
>Counter
Special equipment:
>Modified Weaponry
Allies:
>Imperial Navy
Enemies:
>Dark Eldar, Saharduin

What saharduin lore there is probably places our homeworld somewhere in the Ultima Segmentum, which doesn't narrow it down very much. It's a heavily urbanised civilised world that has a problem with its gangsters, and so chooses to export them on penitential crusades against xenos pirates and raiders.

What sort of weapon modifications would be useful against deldar?

Dark eldar focus on hit and run so anything that can get them pinned down or force them into a prolonged fight. Perhaps a special ammunition or piece equipment that can disable there stuff.

Stubbers and autoguns with some sort of specialised ammunition? Alternatively some sort of EMP grenade to fuck with their skimmers but iirc that's tau or eldar tech.

>city boiz
>dregs of society
>intensely religious

We b Nation of Islam lads

6/10 Guard regiment threads always comes down to "Hurr duhr space Islam :D:D:D"

Why not take a different approach?

Do they? I've not actually seen it before but then I don't follow these threads particularly hawkishly.

Nation of Islam =/= anything resembling actual Islam though. Their theology is whack.

>he doesn't want to play Irish mob guardsmen

I kinda like this idea.

An army of Irish Catholic Priests who shoots down deldar while chanting in Latin and finishing off the survivors with big sticks.

Without, you know, the need for choir boys.

If it aint got choir boys its hardly Irish Catholicism, is it?

>Latin
HIGH GOTHIC, HERETIC

Hmm well we did not roll the Tau or proper Eldar as enemies. We could be on the border of Tau space and our home planet has a agreement with them so they can supply us with that equipment or a Harlequin trope took pity, or thought it would be funny, if we were supplied with some EMP equipment.

We've got something to work with here though kek. I'd think rather than them all being priests maybe the regiment just has a high incidency of chaplains? Or they're all initiated as lay members of an ecclesiarchal order during the course of their training.

Maybe their homeworld plays host to a particular monastic order under the Ecclesiarchy that does a lot of almswork and civic charity in the impoverished cityscapes. Perhaps one sect of the order spends a great deal of time trying to corral gangers (reformed or otherwise) by appealing to their faith and fulfilling the twofold social good of getting these predatory criminals offworld and away from the people they'd prey on and also saving their souls through service to the Emperor.

Maybe chaplains from said order could be roughly as common as NCOs and have the appearance of frocked and collared priests.

Frocked and collared priests loaded to bear with His holy ammunition.

This. The key to dealing with hit-and-run tactics is to force them to be predictable. Well-prepared defenses followed by organized counter-offensives are the guerilla's bane.

You just made solid projectile weapons sound even more appealing. Even if they're not badass warriors in their own right, just the idea of priests doling out ammo, blessings and blessed ammo throughout an ongoing firefight is really neat.

Alright, so do you suppose they do a lot of defensive garrison work as well, given that dark eldar disproportionately target civilian settlements looking for slaves? Can't help but wonder how that jives with our criminal background.

My first instinct is that being shady crooks ourselves was that we could try and beat the xenos at their own game, but you can't out-deldar the deldar. Maybe we could have a specialist guerrilla unit, though, to support the line infantry's counterinsurgency ops?

"May the holy shells of the Emperor pierce the skulls of his foes by our hands! Ave Imperiator!"

Protection rackets, but sanctioned by the authorities?

Wait a minute, now. These guys are mostly reformed criminals. The divine light of The Emperor has shown them the error of their ways, and they now ply their...particular craft in His service for the betterment of His people.

>Protection rackets, but sanctioned by the authorities?
That's how all governments work

this is deep
Well, I suppose they're better off getting taken advantage of by not!Irish mobsters than they are by the children of Comorragh. More likely to keep hold of their skins/souls.

Of course! Just as our holy father shepherds us from damnation, so do we stand watch over his flock, keeping the wolves at bay. Of course, if His pious subjects see fit to furnish us with alms or charitable contributions, who are we to refuse?

As a side-note, this would also explain their undisciplined nature. The only people the boys respect are those who follow their not!Irish Catholic flavor of the Imperial Cult. Anyone else can, at best, be seen as misguided. At worst, they're faithless heretics.

So the general staff of whatever Astra Militarum battlegroup they're on probably needs to stay in the good books of strange, severe clerics in order to get these regiments to cooperate with their orders. Brilliant.

That's another thought, though: how do you think their officers are recruited? From the local aristocracy (might not work)? From the ranks? Hell, maybe from the priesthood itself?

Same way it sorta happened in the British Empire, noncoms are rough and ready lads from the Tenements, upperclass in the fancy homes in the glens get the rest. I'd keep clergy separate, as the only way a young lad from the bad side of town can make a good name for himself.

I have an idea for the planet. What if the urban civilized planet was only rediscovered by the Imperium in the last few 100 years? And that the Imperial Cult spread like a wildfire among the native humans?

Part of the reason so many of the boys respect the clergy so much is that they are, more often than not, pictures of what they could be, given sufficient devotion to the Emperor. Regardless, since the local priests are almost invariably successfully reformed criminals, those who do not love them will at least respect them.

I like it. Maybe it becoming heavily urbanised is a direct result of the recent Imperial recolonisation? Hell, maybe it was initially classified as an Agri-World until a series of devastating potato famines wracked the planet, forcing the local colonial lords to industrialise and urbanise rapidly acros the once-fertile countrysides so it could still meet its tithe quotas?

Maybe the ruling elite the other user mentioned the officers being drawn from are descended from the associates of the rogue trader who rediscovered it and generally practice a separate, 'purer' form of the Imperial Cult than the one that's caught on amongst the locals. Got a real Protestant ascendancy/planters vibes a la historical Ireland.

Cool. And if the officers are drawn from a separate ruling class and there's not much opportunity to rise vertically through the ranks after a certain point, maybe the most pious and dutiful of the boys can aspire to become fully initiated members of this priestly order and replace the chaplains that've been lost by attrition?

Sounds like an awesome idea!

So if we're going ham for the Ireland thing, maybe we can tie our enemy into our world's backstory a bit? I would suggest that before we were rediscovered by the Imperium, the planet was intermittently haunted by roving bands of Dark Eldar who razed villages, abducted children and left strange homunculi in their place, and generally treated the population like playthings. Perhaps after the planet was reconquered, they slipped into local legend as unseelie, sidhe or fair folk analogues, used as boogeymen to scare kids?

Maybe the legend about the Emperor's angels driving off the devils in the night could be literal if some passing Astartes helped cleanse the planet of xenos. That could certainly be one reason why the Imperial Cult caught on so strongly.

Maybe after the rediscorvery the local religion got reformed?

Quite possibly. That's how Ecclesiarchal missionaries tend to work, right? They incorporate elements of extant mythology into the Imperial Cult? Maybe they coopted local deities and mythical heroes as saints and gave indigenous rituals an Imperial polish, which is why the ruling class looks down on them as idolatrous and primitive.

Maybe this monastic order we're talking about are descendants of the original missionaries who went a bit native, or were the first locally trained priests a la St. Patrick bringing Christianity to Ireland?

No reason we can't go a bit Catholic in our uniforms regardless. The [something] Whitecollars would be a good name for a regiment imo.

>we work with the Navy

>Dark Eldar (corsairs?)and Shark-alien Pirates are our enemies

Are we some kind of boarding-army?

This might work with the improvised weapon thing.

I thought the Navy had its own designated troopers for that sort of thing? Although I have to admit I'm quite taken by the idea.

At the very least, we could have a very close relationship with the Imperial Navy battlegroup who patrols the voidways in our sector and cooperate with them for fending off deldar and sharkmens.

>Navy

It'd make sense there was a lot of ship traffic coming through our system if
we were originally an agri-world. Maybe we started exporting soldiers to make up for the loss of our blessed potatoes and shipping them out was how we got so buddy-buddy with the Navy?

40k religious fanatics without flame weapons?
Modified weapons probably feature exterminator cartridges, maybe chain bayonets...

I see your point, but would they be much use against dark eldar?

It wouldn't kill the universe to have some variety, you know. It'd be so much more interesting if we could create a novel flavor of the Imperial cult, instead of falling back on the boring flaming-fanatic cliche.

Yeah, which is why I thought previous anons' suggestions regarding an emphasis on solid projectile weapons might be cool (to say nothing of how gangsters would probably be handy with them before they even joined the Guard). Maybe the process of 'blessing' the ammo could be as simple as carving holy symbols into bullets? I'm aware that this tends to just fuck up a bullet irl, but ballistics technology might well have changed in 39000 years, so eh, handwave.

Also -- bolters as a specialist weapon/preferred heavy weapon? If we go with the suggestion that marines helped clear the dark eldar from our world, then the blessed boltshell could have some religious significance in our local religion. There's also a bunch of different custom types of bolter ammo we could use, some of which might be useful in fighting deldar. I'll look into it now.

Also the idea of bolt shells as keepsakes or sacred relics from DH is just really cool.

Do you know who else really revered the bolter almost to the point of worship?

The Death Guard.

...how close are we to Barbarus?

A Segmentum away, unfortunately. They're in Tempestus, but rolling Saharduin as our enemy probably puts us in Ultima. What were you gonna suggest though?

Just that there could be a link between their world's reverence of the boltgun, and possible proximity to the homeworld of the legion that equally loved bolt weaponry.

Having perused such super-reliable sources as lexicanum and the wikia wiki, I can also confirm that a kind of haywire missile (and presumably grenades, by extension) are available to Imperial arsenals for man-portable missile launchers.

Maybe our heavy weapons squads could consist of pairs with seeker launchers loaded with haywire munitions to disable vehicles and heavy bolter crews to deal with the pissed-off crews before they get to close combat? Maybe with a few metalstorm shells mixed in to shred the lightly armoured xenos faster.

The "Fightin' Whitecollars", a regiment infamous for its tendency to extort ammo, thrones, medical equipment and armor, favors the use of haywire explosives in order to disorient the enemy before closing in close-quarters combat, often using shivs or even unarmed combat to finish their foes.

Famous, or infamous (depending on who you ask) on their homeworld for successfully making off with one of another regiment's sentinels loaded down with as much ammo and rations as it could carry. These men have earned such nicknames as "Crooked Clergy", "Holy Highwaymen", "Pious Pickpockets", and "Blessed Burglars"

While most guardsmen are known to loot as much ammo as they can, these sticky-fingered louts are well known for nickin anything that ain't nailed down, though they have been noted to have a preference for haywire missiles and grenades.

On top of their extortion, theft and blatant disregard for superiors outside of their regiment or the Ecclesiarchy, the Fightin' Whitecollars often set up illegal fighting rings among each other and other regiments, as well as the gambling rackets that go along with the fighting rings.

The regiment's kleptomania and practice of less than legal operations leaves them often oversupplied with an abundance of gear and money, which they then either feed back into their own illegal operations, or donate en masse to whatever church of the Emperor is closest to their current deployment

As such, the Fightin' Whitecollars find themselves in a fascinating position. On the one hand, they are generally beloved by the Ecclesiarchy, who tolerate their eccentricities in exchange for their utter devotion to the God-Emperor. On the other, they're generally despised by the Commissariat, who see them as undisciplined thugs who hide behind a religious facade. Rare is the Priest who receives a cold welcome among the "Collars". Rare is the Commissar who receives a warm one.