One of the big reasons Chaos Space Marines aspire to Daemonhood is immortality. After their death...

One of the big reasons Chaos Space Marines aspire to Daemonhood is immortality. After their death, their souls are put into new bodies by their gods so that they can continue to fight, the same as daemons. In the thousands of years since the Horus Heresy, how are there still Chaos Space Marines left? Surely those that survived the Heresy must have been killed in the many wars since. Were the legions really that big that even with the massive losses during the heresy and the thousands of battles since that there are still Chaos Space Marines alive?

They can still recruit from conquered planet, stealing other chapter's geneseed

Moreso, time is different in the warp. A chaos space marine might have run away from the Siege of Terra and hid in the eye of terror for what looked like a week to him, but when he steps out the eye of terror 10.000 years have passed

They made new marines.

Because miniature sales.

They recruit and, in that regard, aren't bound by the petty rules followed by loyalist Space Marines.

This means each legion can create as many new marines as it is capable of doing.

There were a few fluff bits where Abaddon says something along the line that, while 1 out of 100 aspirants can be made loyalist space marines, only 1 out of every 1000 candidats make it as a chaos space marines.
Such a low ratio is due only to the harsh pre-selection (as Abaddon claims) but also because of how heavily mutated the genetic material of the traitors is.

But yeah, there's also the fact that time works in weird ways in the Warp.
If you factor in the various blessings from chaos gods, possessions from demons and mad science from the Hereteks, you can have very very old marines, though not really sane.

CSM recruit pretty rapidly as they don't give a shit about losing 75% of their recruits to horrible mutations or geneseed rejection. Coupled with outright daemonic assistance, CSM numbers have significantly increased since the heresy.

1: Chaos marines still recruit and create marines from the population of different planets just like space marines. Their recruitment methods and criteria are generally pretty brutal.

2: Space marines of all kinds are very hard to kill. Getting downed does not mean dying. Double hearts, the ability to enter a sort of hibernation, massive pain resistance, an armour with built in medical functions etc, etc raises their survivability far above that of other equally tough or strong creatures.

3: Massive disconnect between the lore and what you get up to in the miniatures game.

Most of what chaos marines do, just like normal marines, does not involve squaring off on a flat battlefield against an evenly matched enemy and taking 50% casualties or more, and the original space marine legions that turned traitor had armies of "normal" human auxiliaries, fleets, tanks, the works. Modern day space marine chapters are incredibly gimped compared to the old legions, because of what a horrible situation it was when the original legions turned traitor and had such vast resources. A modern day chapter is meant to, and more often, act as special ops or shock troopers taking out high importance targets, surgical strike type stuff. The original legions were more or less self sufficient and capable of independently performing planetary assaults and full scale wars.

They are immortal in the Warp in the first place.

>Most of what chaos marines do, just like normal marines, does not involve squaring off on a flat battlefield against an evenly matched enemy and taking 50% casualties or more

Adding to this, the point in 40k history where this sort of marine on marine fighting happened regularly was the heresy itself and the Badab war, where almost all sides involved ended up taking nearly 80%+ casualties and individual battles were horrifying bloodbaths.

Suffice it to say that's not the normal day of most CSM or loyalist marines

There are more chaos marines than there are normie marines since most of them rebelled.

Also they are still marines even though they are batshit insane, they still die about as much as a eldar and thats rarely.

Read the CSM codex, it's explained quite clearly in there.

This.

IIRC, that weird guy with the human skin jacket even invented a method to turn babies into Space Marines - WHILE STILL IN THE WOMB.

Of course, it involves demons, and it is fatal to the mother.

People are also forgetting that new chapters fall to chaos at least semi-regularly. It's rare but not unheard of.

Yes, though I believe that was ended due to some sort of fuckery.

That Black Legion giant skull pauldron is tits.

Story time--a narrative regarding the creation of Chaos Space Marines. From the second 3rd Edition Chaos Space Marine codex.

"I was born the sixth son of Kaschada, hetman of the Tabor on the day that the Great Prophet came among us. The Tabor were the outcasts of the world, condemned because we were faithful to the Gods of the Four Winds: the Blood Wind that fired the warrior’s soul, the Plague Wind that purged the weak, the Wind of Change that brought the gifts of the Gods to men and the Scented Wind that roused the passions.

Our enemies were the Otman, men of the cities who served the Sky God. For centuries they had scoured the grasslands, hunting us down, but with the coming of the Prophet that all changed.

In my fourteenth year, I was part of the horde that swept into the city of Jaghann and put the inhabitants to the slaughter. Those were the great days; the Tabor were masters of the wide grasslands, raiding and plundering at our pleasure. I owned four gold-chased pistols and a fine Qaseen sabre. I flew my hawks, wore robes of silk and accepted no insult from any man. One by one the cities of the Otman fell before us and great caravans of slaves stretched across the plains to the mountain of the Prophet, for sacrifice to the winds."

"The Prophet was a man like no other; taller than any of the Tabor, he wore armour of jet and gold, his great gauntlet could shatter any barred gate and his blade could cut even Qaseen steel. No man could meet his burning gaze and the hetman of the clans learned from him of the true nature of the Gods and how to bring death to our enemies.

Finally, our host men with the Otman army on the Red Grass. Standing with the enemy were twenty Storm Giants, heroes of the Otman who it was said had travelled beyond the winds to the citadel of the Sky God and had now returned to save their people from our wrath. The Prophet told us that immortality would be the reward for those who bested them.

My soul called for the blood of these warriors and I charged gladly into battle. Over that long day I charged five times, each time I fired every pistol but to no effect—the Storm Giants’ armour was proof against my bullets. In each charge I saw their guns cut through our squadrons, piling great heaps of men and horses before their lines. The evening sky turned blood red and the air stank of death. The great horde of the Tabor, the sons of the Prophet, was all but destroyed, my father was dead, my brothers were dead. I was wounded and my fine sabre broken yet my hatred for my enemies was greater than ever. We prepared for one more charge, no longer in squadrons but a scattering of bloodied individuals, awaiting a sign from the Prophet."

"Instead of raising the banner to signal another charge he pointed to the crest of the hill at his back as the moon rose behind it. Over the ridge came daemons with blood-soaked skin bearing huge axes and swords. They rushed at the Storm Giants and we followed them. The Warriors of the Gods clashed and normal men were hurled about by the power they unleashed. I staggered into the press clutching a broken lance. Flaming winds case me down but I pressed on and thrust my lance into the first of the Storm Giants I could reach. I struck him where his armour was twisted and melted. He fell and as he did the Prophet leapt upon him and with glowing blade cut him open and pulled the organs from his body. He held his bloody prizes aloft and told me that immortality beckoned me.

Scarcely a hundred Tabor had survived the battle. The Prophet asked me what I felt. I told him that I wanted vengeance, vengeance against the giants who had killed my father and brothers, against those who had shattered my clan, vengeance against their kin and their young, that I wanted to tear down their God and make them regret raising arms against the Tabor. The Prophet was pleased with my answer and said that I would travel beyond the winds with him and that I would also be a warrior of the Gods."

tl; dr: One way the Black Legion creates new marines is by stealing the gene seed of Loyalists and having potential recruits kill a space marine to prove their worth.

...

>chaos marines
>stopping doing a thing because of some manner of fuckery

That's like the opposite of what they would do

It was Honsou.

Well I can't recall if it was a rival faction of chaos marines or some other thing that stopped them. Hence the "some sort of fuckery".

Isn't that in "Dead Sky, Black Sun?"
I thiiiink it's some Ultramarines teleported to Medrengard who destroy the wombs.

Time is very very different in the Warp. Some places it flows faster, some slower, some at "normal" pace.

A Chaos Marine could conceivably duck into the Warp to hide from the Imperials for three months, emerge for a brief peek, and realize that it has been 10,000 years.

...Now that would make some great writefaggotry.

I think there is a Dark Angels novel (Angels of Darkness, I think) where something like that happens--a fallen angel is blasted through time and lands on a planet in the 41st Millennium. I remember the novel being a Primarch-esque rise with the Fallen Angel taking over the planet and turning its army into a really powerful fighting force, but then they get smashed by some new Dark Angels who track down their fallen brother.

I also like the idea, which I totally bullshitted on my own (with a heavy dose of Michael Moorcock's Eternal Champion) of the warp dividing apart reality and creating multiple versions of a single traitor marine. I think there are a couple of cool things that can happen here:

1. Chaos marines trying to team up with their alternative selves,
2. Marines deliberately creating more to make a force of identical brother-selves (especially Tzeentch or Slaanesh devotees)
3. Marines hunting down their alter-egoes to prove who has the right to be the best/only/original (Khorne and Slaanesh come to mind here
4. Marines seeking out alter egos as part of some twisted chaos-god-given quest (here I like the idea of a Word Bearer or Black Legionaire divided into 4 selves, each of whom worship a different god, and who are all tasked by their patron with killing the others to prove that god's superiority).

I remember that story. Its cool, but chaos has no logical reason to have many marines left other than time fuckery.

When the space sharks recruit on the mantis warriors homeworld, they stole a whole generation, pitted them against each other and the survivors deemed worthy were recruited. A whole planet.

The prophet wipes out a whole tribe of people for one applicant. Who is quite likely to die with the prophets shitty ability to make a marine. The scale of chaos is shit. They are barbarians and don't work together due to the fact they have no loyalty at all.

Chaos marines remaining is bullshit. Time fuckery is the only way to explain their numbers. That or they just respawn on daemon worlds. Which is my personal headcanon for how there are any khorne berzerkers remaining. Also explains how Angron can summon 50k berzerkers for the first war of armageddon.

I disagree with you on the idea that time fuckery is necessary (but I really like the idea of summoning marines from daemon worlds--resurrecting legions of long-dead marines would seem to be pretty easy for chaos gods, if not daemon primarchs, too).

Chaos Marines have both imperial worlds and their own holdings to recruit from. As I read the Prophet story, that's an Imperial world were a Black Legion operative is recruiting more marines. True, these things must be near warp rifts or traitor sectors for them to work, but I think you underestimate the scale of worlds that traitor marines can draw on. I could be wrong, but I think that most loyalist marine chapters draw on a couple of worlds, plus ad hoc replacements while fighting, to replenish and maintain their numbers. I think that since new chapters have been created, there are more loyalist marines now than there were during the great crusade. So what this means is that a few planets can support a space marine chapter. I believe that most eye of terror worlds will be harsher than imperial worlds (thus yielding a larger potential pool of recruits), and I assume that most human-inhabited Eye of Terror worlds will be under marine control, further increasing the recruit pool comparative to the Imperium (because loyalists don't recruit from every planet close to them).

In addition to this greater density in the Eye of Terror, the Prophet story shows that any chaos cult uprising yields potential recruits.

Of course, this assumes--a HUGE assumption on my part--that the life of a chaos space marine isn't endless combat. If it almost-nonstop fighting, then you are definitely right, and time fuckery is required for traitors to maintain their numbers.

I mean, you don't have to ascend to daemonhood to be immortal. The chaos gods resurrect minions that please or entertain them all the time, so you just have to be good enough to qualify for that. I mean, Khorne even keeps a planet where he revives an ork warboss and his waaagh every day to fight daemons for eternity because heikes to watch.

>After their death, their souls are put into new bodies by their gods so that they can continue to fight, the same as daemons
Wrong, their body become warp-stuff as it fuses with their soul and they dematerialize. They become tangible when they're summoned back into reality. Same as demons.

I would agree with you except

>the life of a chaos space marine isn't endless combat

This is most likely true of berzerkers. Also true of normal marines duelling to the death/backstabbing for rank/insults/boredom. CSM are cunts, and are only united by hatred. Without a hate wizard to direct them they just cannibalise their own ranks.

CSM only have loyalty until weakness is shown, you can't be strong all the time unless plot demands it. cough abaddon.

Before the tuska story, only the equivalent of chaos celebrities were revived. Back then I just assumed time fuckery. Berzerkers will literally an hero when they run out of enemies. They are retarded. Like lemmings. How can there be any left except Kharn and daemon princes. Respawning them on planet blood is the only solution.

1. Base numbers were much higher then you may think.The legion was a shell of its former self at MERELY 60,000 strong after getting to the eye of terror.
2. Time dilation.
3. They made new marines.