Codex: Space Marines

Warhammer 40,000 4th Edition

by Pete Haines, Graham McNeill, Steve Cominskey

Publication 2004 In the fictional Warhammer 40,000 setting created by Games Workshop, the Space Marines (or Adeptus Astartes) are elite human soldiers enhanced to superhuman levels through genetic therapy, surgical modifications, and hypnotic indoctrination. The standard Space Marine is the Imperial Space Marine, but several variations exist, such as corrupted Chaos Space Marines and the elite Grey Knights. Space Marines feature in the table-top wargame, its spin-off games such as Epic and Inquisitor, the computer games including Dawn of War and Fire Warrior, and the novels based on the setting produced by Black Library. Over the years the Space Marine has become an iconic image of the Warhammer 40,000 universe.

Genres: 40k, Science Fiction, Fiction, Games

80 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2004

Reviews

[Taddow · Rating 3 out of 5]

Basically a lot of repeating information from the previous codex. The main addition in this Space Marine codex was the introduction for rules to customize your Space Marine army by selecting "Advantages" and "Drawbacks" to provide rules to legally field an army that could better match a particular theme or tactic (prior to this you basically either had to play the stock Space Marine army list or select one of the few Chapters that actually had their own codices). While I think this was a great idea, I felt (based on my experiences playing in tournaments and pick up games against opponent using these rules) that it was subject to abuse, mainly because the Advantages and Drawbacks did not seemed weighed fairly, you could just take a pretty good Advantage and select a weak Drawback. Still, it was a good start for players to start customizing their own Chapters.

[Mikael · Rating 3 out of 5]

As I remember this was a rather poor attempt at a codex as many had expected some kind of update to their specific chapter codexes like Blood Angels or Dark Angels but they got a lot of Ultramarine specific rules instead.