Space Wolf "Watchdog" Squads: Not a silly idea if done right

[Kol Saresk]

Supposedly it was the Curse that destroyed the Wolf Brothers, IIRC. Which is why there are no Space Wolf successors.

[Stonerhino]

The Wolf brothers in Battle of the Fang didn't sound like Wulfen.  Just mutated marines, so its possible that Magnus had something to do with their downfall.  And to back up Magnus.  I don't think having multiple Chapters of the most "Independant" Chapter is a good idea for anyone.

[b1soul]

If you put it into perspective, both the SW and TSons shrank to around the same size since the Razing of Prospero

 

The SW are currently one chapter strong and the TSons are few too (1,000 marines and a lot of those are Rubrics)

[daveNYC]

The Wolf Brothers were kind of vague, so I though they could have been Wulfen, or maybe just your standard mutant marine. 

The fact that they were all hanging out with Magnus on that planet just muddies things up further.  And then there was the whole project to tweak the geneseed, which wouldn't have been necessary if the whole thing had been stable enough for non-Fenrisians.

 

Overall, I'd say that the canis helix makes it impossible to easily create a successor chapter for the Space Wolves, but there's enough other stuff in the mix that you can't say for sure.  It still wouldn't prevent transplanting a colony of Fenrisians to some crappy ice cube of a planet and then setting up a SW successor chapter there a century or two later after the population has increased.

[SW1]

The Wolf Brothers were kind of vague, so I though they could have been Wulfen, or maybe just your standard mutant marine.

The fact that they were all hanging out with Magnus on that planet just muddies things up further. And then there was the whole project to tweak the geneseed, which wouldn't have been necessary if the whole thing had been stable enough for non-Fenrisians.

 

Overall, I'd say that the canis helix makes it impossible to easily create a successor chapter for the Space Wolves, but there's enough other stuff in the mix that you can't say for sure. It still wouldn't prevent transplanting a colony of Fenrisians to some crappy ice cube of a planet and then setting up a SW successor chapter there a century or two later after the population has increased.

Hmmm ... Why do you put these ideas in my head. :D

[Stonerhino]

The Wolf Brothers were kind of vague, so I though they could have been Wulfen, or maybe just your standard mutant marine. 

The fact that they were all hanging out with Magnus on that planet just muddies things up further.  And then there was the whole project to tweak the geneseed, which wouldn't have been necessary if the whole thing had been stable enough for non-Fenrisians.

 

Overall, I'd say that the canis helix makes it impossible to easily create a successor chapter for the Space Wolves, but there's enough other stuff in the mix that you can't say for sure.  It still wouldn't prevent transplanting a colony of Fenrisians to some crappy ice cube of a planet and then setting up a SW successor chapter there a century or two later after the population has increased.

I'll check the Battle of the Fang when I get a chance.  But I believe the SW did transplant fenrisians to an ice world to start the chapter. 

 

NM I have the ebook.  They where given an ice world but there is no mention of Fenrisians. The planet "Kaeriol".

 

They were Space Marine in profile, but horribly altered. Some had trailing tentacles in place of limbs, others had misshapen heads crowned with thorns. Their armour was warped and uprooted, the plate ripped by growths from below and fused with unholy flesh where it spilled into the open. Helm-lenses glowed with more sickly witchlight, piercing even the shifting miasma roiling from the vaults. They didn’t march cleanly, but limped, dragged or scuttled, hauling their broken bodies into the open, tottering on cloven hooves and clawed crow’s feet.

 

Not Wulfen for sure.

[Kol Saresk]

Question, where is all this stuff "Only Fenrisians can be Space Wolves" coming from? Is it part of the 40K Chapter's mythos? Because Scars explicitly points out that they chose to limit recruitment only to Fenris. Meaning they recruited from other places before Russ came along. No need to choose to limit recruitment to a single place if that place is the only one with viable recruits.

[Stonerhino]

It depends on how much weight you give the idea of "choice".  For example you can choose to drink either Coke or Pepsi.  If you are allergic to something in Coke.  Is it really a "Choice".  Sure you can choose to still drink it...  As long as it doesn't kill you.

[daveNYC]

Mostly it comes from the fact that the Wolf Brothers went completely off the rails combined with the project the Great Wolf was working on in Battle for the Fang.

 

Nothing official of course, but the upshot of the theory is that Fenrisian DNA combined with the Canis Helix to create changes in harvested geneseed such that using it on non-Fenrisian subjects led to crazy wolf fest.

 

It's basically a fan theory that attempts to explain why there have been no further attempts at Space Wolf successor chapters, while incorporating the Wulfen and the whole 'there are no wolves on Fenris' bit.

 

The fact that neither the Space Wolves nor the Salamanders have active successor chapters is a bit strange, especially since slightly more problematic chapters (Dark Angels) have managed to get additional chapters that weren't part of the second founding.

[Kol Saresk]

So in other words, a more logical answer like, for example, the Wolves chose Fenris as their only recruiting ground and then combined with the failure of the Wolf Brothers, the superstitious Wolves simply viewed non-Fenrisians as a stigma and refused to give their gene-seed to another Founding Chapter is discarded in favor of Fenrisians are special snowflakes who screwed up the gene-seed for everyone else? Uh-huh. Well, I guess that's the beautiful curse of fan-theories, everyone can have one. Although I have to admit being disturbed when they are portrayed as fact.

[Stonerhino]

The genetic instability goes back to 2nd Ed but the "Fenrisian only" is fan made.  There might be something in Battle of the Fang that implies "Fenrisian only" but I'm not going to reread it to find it.

[Scribe]

I'm almost certain there is, but yeah, my wife packed up my books...out of spite im sure.

[daveNYC]

 

Battle for the Fang is strange.  You've got this master plan to modify the geneseed in order to be able to create a heap of successor chapters that would then be used to patrol the edges of the Eye of Terror.  It also shows that some of what the modifications are doing are removing or reducing the more wolfish characteristics.  So you have to wonder, if the Space Wolf geneseed is so unstable, why does it work as well as it does on the population of Fenris?  If it's stable enough to work with Fenrisians, why does it need to be modified in order to take a second swing at creating successor chapters?  Battle for the Fang doesn't answer any of these questions, but the fact that the head honchos in the chapter think that they need to do this, and that Magnus threw his entire legion (minus team Ahriman) into the effort to stop the project, does make things interesting

 

 

I'm not sure that having Fenrisians being the only ones who can become Space Wolves makes them special snowflakes.  That would be balance by the fact that their (assumed) genetic modifications were what 'broke' the geneseed to stick them in this situation.  Also, Prospero Burns showed that Fenrisians were (and still are) a bunch of primitive screwheads, so it's not like they're these totally awesome people living large who also can become totally awesome space marines.

[Perrin]

There is definitely something in BotF that could be taken to imply that Space Wolf geneseed works better with Fenrisians. Possibly something to do with the "There are no Wolves on Fenris" thing?

 

A post by another user, apologies but I can't remember their name, gave a plausible theory. That whatever was done to the first settlers on Fenris to enable them to survive better on the planet, hinted at in the above quote maybe, also stabilises the SW geneseed enough to enable a viable Chapter base. The Legion was created from Terran stock, but found Russ very early in the Crusade, who immediately limited recruitment to Fenris. We know that SW geneseed is relatively unstable and has high rejection rates, so we could theorise that if the Legion had to continue for centuries without finding Russ or Fenris they would have been crippled.

 

Obviously a huge hole in the theory is how much of a coincidence is it that their Primarch lands on the one world they can safely recruit from. It is just a fan theory, with some nudges from BotF. Not sure how much weight it has behind it.