Can a space marine chapter consist of marines from other chapters?

Question

I'm new to warhammer so I wanted to know if I could run a custom space marine chapter and then use soldiers from other factions

For example could I run a space marines chapter that included soldiers from the grey knight or space wolves faction?

Answer 1

Yes.

The requirement is that your army all share a keyword, for space marines that could be simply Adeptus Astartes, but you could go further than that to use any Imperal troop or vehicle. You cannot mix beyond that, no adding Eldar to your imperial force, they do not share any keywords.

There are downsides to this. As more chapter specific codices are released, you could find some of the choices only really benefit your say Space Wolves, but not your Ultramarines. You could have options that only benefit your Adeptus Astartes, but not your Imperial Guard.

Answer 2

Yes and no.

On the tabletop, you can play an army consisting of several different factions as long as they have a common keyword (eg Imperial) but you will lose some of the specialised detachment rules (as explained in the relevant codex(.

Fluff wise - not really. A Space Marine Chapter is a stand-alone organisation of singular allegiance and, generally, singular iconography, that more or less follows the structure described in the codex Astartes.

There are several notable chapters who deviate somewhat:

The Dark Angels largely follow the codex with the exception of the first and second companies, known as the Deathwing and Ravenwing. The deathwing are a company made up entirely of terminators, while the ravenwing are traditionally bikes, speeders and the likes.

The Space Wolves know of the codex astartes as something that other space marines talk about, and that's about it.

The Black Templars are spread out over the galaxy crusading and no one knows just how many there are, except it's well over the nominal figure of 1000 marines dictated by the codex.

As to whether or not marines from different chapters have made another one, the answer is kind of, yes.

Two notable examples are given in the fluff. The most famous is the Last Wall protocol of the Imperial Fists and their successors. Basically the fists were utterly destroyed and were rebuilt from space marines from their successor chapters (black Templars, crimson fists, exorxiators etc) and has happened a couple of times.

The other is the Blood Angels. They've also been decimated before and have rebuilt using space marines and neophytes from their successor chapters.

That said, it's not uncommon in the fluff for multiple forces to fight alongside each other. Armageddon had hundreds of space marine chapters and every facet of the imperial war machine barring the newly released custodes present

Answer 3

Yes and no. There are records of armies being "built" from other chapters such as The Deathwatch. The only problem is that as the rest say, you lose a lot of special rules and you have to try and make your army's different components work together, which can be tough.