5 thousand years long enough to be fully corrupted?

[Lord Kallozar]

hi all,

take the abyssal crusade for example, the traitor chapters there have now been waging war against their once beloved imperium for 5k years now. but what I want to know is, is that long enough to be fully corrupt in terms of having raptors and oblitorators among them, or would they still have very loyalist units such as assault squads and scouts which are now just traitors?

[Wulfkry]

i dont think there is a set time its really up to the individual being corrupted.  If a SM lost in the warp and starts to give other to chaos and starts shows obliterator tendencies i guess and does the correct obliteraty things then im assuming the change takes place rather fast.. but then again what is time in the warp anyway???

[Lay]

The Red Corsairs and our current poster boys, the Crimson Slaughter have spent even less time in the warp and are pretty much fully corrupted. Mostly, because time is meaningless in the warp.

 

Now back in 2nd edition you could get access to loyalist equipment if you fielded Huron, but ever since the 4th edition Codex came out, the gap between Legions and Renegade Chapters has become much smaller.

[Phantomzero17]

Crimson Sabers to Crimson Slaughter took 71 years, right?

 

The warp influences everything and everyone differently.  So 5,000 years can be more then enough for some, less for others.  Your army, your way.

[the jeske]

unless your a SW then even 10k years isn't enough.

[Leonaides]

but for them has it been that long?

[markham82]

Correct me if I'm wrong but isn't there some Night Lords guys who haven't gone given their souls to chaos. I'm thinking Soul Hunter.

[incinerator950]

Yes, there are still Chaos Undecided Astartes still. Generally it's those who skirt Chaos or who merely don't devote anything for it.

[the jeske]

but for them has it been that long?

yes. Because the fluff doesn't say that time goes onl faster in the warp. It goes slower too .

[JeffJedi]

The Death Guard went full Nurgle in one trip to Terra, didn't they?

[incinerator950]

Yes. That was because Nurgle deliberately sought them. From the Eisenstein to the Destroyer Virus.

[Lord Asvaldir]

Time flows differently depending on where you are in the Eye of Terror or Maelstrom, and a chaos space marine's mutations vary far more greatly depending on how devoted they are to the chaos gods, so the amount of mutation an abyssal crusader renegade chapter is going to have can vary greatly from chapter to chapter and even from individual marine to marine within the chapter. 

 

Chaos is random, it's expected that something like mutation is going to be variable. 

[daboarder]

Sorry but chaos by definition is not random. Its just unpredictable

[Xenith]

unless your a SW then even 10k years isn't enough.

They are corrupt mutants already.

[Lord Asvaldir]

Sorry but chaos by definition is not random. Its just unpredictable

I'd say it's both. Maybe not by definition but certainly to mortals it can appear random.

[daboarder]

I was more talking about the theory.

[Forté]

5 hours, days, weeks, months, years, lifetimes. Who's really counting.

[Lord Asvaldir]

I was more talking about the theory.

 

Aa in that case yes you are correct. 

[Iron_Within]

In the warp, time is completely meaningless, there was even a little bit in one of the Iron Warrior novels when one character was thinking that the HH felt about a century or so to him and yesterday at once where everyone else it was 10k years ago.

 

Frankly one could go into the warp and emerge before they left ancient men

[Sception]

Correct me if I'm wrong but isn't there some Night Lords guys who haven't gone given their souls to chaos. I'm thinking Soul Hunter.

Yeah, but Talos the rest of the Exalted's war band have only seen about 100 years subjective time at the start of that Soul Hunter, and he's already in the minority among that warband in his relative lack of chaos taint. The Night Lords as a whole aren't really any less corrupt than any of the other Legion factions. I'm still only half way through the second book, but so far the trilogy really seems to be emphasizing the idea that Talos is basically fooling himself if he thinks the modern Night Lords owe more in terms of influence or loyalty to their deceased primarch than they do to the chaos powers.

 

Anyway, There's little connection between subjective time and objective time for chaos forces that live in the Eye, Maelstrom, or other major warp events. Marines who fell 5,000 years ago might have experienced 5, 50, 500, or 500,000 years of subjective time. Further, how long total corruption takes also varies on the warriors themselves, the degree of warp exposure, and the level of attention they have attracted from the greater powers of the warp. Draigo has stalked the warp for lifetimes, sustained by his faith in the Emperor and untouched by any corruption. Of course, traitor marines of any stripe lack the protective aegis of the Imperial Creed, and, as the state of the modern Night Lords and Iron Warriors legions attests, stubborn pride and simple disgust are poor substitutes at best. On the other end of the spectrum, you have war bands like the Crimson Sabers, which fell to severe possession and mutation practically overnight thanks to a single curse, or the Death Guard which experienced a similarly sudden corruption thanks to Typhus's Destroyer Virus.

 

On average, I'd guess that total corruption will have set in after about 200 to 300 years of subjective time for most traitor war bands that attempt to resist the influence of the warp. Much less for those who do not resist. On the other end of the spectrum, 1,000 to 3,000 subjective years of constant warfare cut off from Imperial resources is probably enough to see a war band that began it's life with anywhere between a company's and a chapter's strength completely eaten away by attrition and mutation, unless they've managed to attach themselves to one of the more coherent and established modern traitor legions, such as the Black, the Bearers, the Guard, the Warriors, or the Corsairs. Most of the other legions aren't still organized and established enough to replenish numbers and replace warships.

 

They don't really have to be, though, for the less centralized legions to still be significant threats, collectively, as few Legion battlefleets have experienced so much subjective time that they would need to fully replace themselves or their ships to keep functioning, anyway. Again, the Exalted's heresy vet Night Lords had only experienced 100 years of subjective time since the scouring at the start of ADB's trilogy, and that had to be pretty current in the setting timeline, because Huron is already well established. The short story between the first and the second books in the omnibus also do a good job of portraying the modern Night Lords legion as a collective threat when they get worked up about something, even if they typically function as disparate war bands or scattered independent companies otherwise, which is most likely how the Emperor's Children and World Eaters function as well.

 

So you've got coherent legions (including the tyrant's), scattered legions (which are still largely think of themselves as legions, and are still capable of gathering together temporarily if given good enough cause), and then the Alpha Legion and Thousand Sons, both of which are kind of their own thing, the former largely operating as independent cells, many of which likely unaware that they even are Alpha Legion, and the latter being split between Ahriman's scattered coven - more akin to the scattered legions, though smaller in scale, and Magnus's rebuilt legion, which most likely operates as more of a cohesive force, though I'm not aware of much, if any, fluff detailing Magnus's strength, resources, or organizational methods in the modern 40k era.

 

An independent, non-legion war band, without the Emperor's light, is doomed to corruption, and without the Imperium's resources is likely also fated to be worn away by attrition - both to corruption and to combat losses - until they are eventually lost to predation by one of the scattered Legions or larger pirate fleets, or forced to bend knee to one of the more coherent legions. And this if they aren't just cornered and crushed by imperial forces.

 

 

... but yeah, though, 5000 years of real time is more than enough to see a force of traitor astartes fully corrupted. It's also enough to justify giving them 'veterans of the long war' if you wish. The real question in either case, though, is how much time they themselves have actually experienced, and whether they were ever trying to resist corruption in the first place.