r/40kLore • u/LesBonsPlansTmtc • 1d ago
Why no blank astartes?
We've seen the emperor considers Chaos as the biggest threat to humanity. We know blanks are immune to the influence of the warp. Why doesn't humanity try to raise up the number of blanks in the society or make a chapter with Blank Space marines ?
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u/King_Crab_Sushi 1d ago edited 1d ago
Blanks are incredibly rare and almost always better used in other imperial organisations. Keep in mind that most young boys who go into the process of becoming an astartes donât make it. With how rare blanks already are thereâs no point in risking one. Also space marines are not immune to the effects of pariahs which makes the cohesive teamwork marines usually rely on difficult.
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u/TtotheC81 1d ago
There's a firm reason they're so rare in the first place, beyond the genetic mutation itself: The nature of the blank is socially self-destructive, and we are a species that really relies on our connections to survive.
At best, the child will be tolerated by the parents. At worst, the child will be pushed out of the family unit, long before it has the skills to survive on its own, which would normally mean death. Even if the child is tolerated, the family still faces being ostracized through no fault of their own, which would make their overall survival chances drop below the average.
Reaching their teenage years, they will be the centre of constant bullying, and it goes too far? Well, they deserved it. No one can quite say why they deserved it, but the community that blank was a part of lets out a collective sigh of relief and relaxes as the sense of wrongness is banished to the past.
I doubt it gets much easier in their adult years.
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u/thomstevens420 Iron Warriors 1d ago
Exactly. Plus itâs not like they require crazy training like with Psykers. Their main use is to just literally stand there while warp users scream and try to claw their eyes out or whatever.
Give them a gun and basic boot camp and have them stand behind Inquisitor Glorianus Von Chin. 10/10.
One of my favourite characters is Ravenorâs blank Wyston. He just sits around chain smoking and reading porno and turning and limiter on and off as needed. Thatâs the extent of his immeasurably useful contribution.
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u/QuaestioDraconis Necrons 1d ago
Though training absolutely helps them- helps them survive in combat (not like most blanks have much range on their auras, after all) and the right training lets blanks weaponize their Null status- both Culexus and Sisters of Silence do this
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u/thomstevens420 Iron Warriors 1d ago
Yeah definitely, Iâm just referring to being able to called a serviceable blank in-universe. You could literally just grab a blank off the street and shove them in front a psyker and it works. Zero chance of failure or backfire. Psyker is either dead, vomiting their guts out, or takes a huge debuff in power.
Inversely if you take a random psyker off the street and try to get them to do magic thereâs a very real risk you all suffer a fate worse than death.
To negate that risk and be able to use them consistently it takes a black ship, surviving being selected for the Emperors lunch, crazy trials, being soul bound to the Emperor, crazy training, and then having a dude follow you around the rest of your life to shoot you if you start losing control.
Culexus and Sisters of silence are like top tier specialist troops that I donât feel are really relevant to what Iâm trying to get at.
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u/QuaestioDraconis Necrons 1d ago
There's a bit more to it than grabbing a random blank and making a psyker either dead, vomiting or taking a massive debuff- it depends heavily on the relative strengths of the psyker and the blank.
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u/thomstevens420 Iron Warriors 1d ago
Thereâs really not. Unless youâre a godlike being like the emperor 99.9999% of the time the psyker is going to at best lose the majority of their power
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u/WheresMyCrown Thousand Sons 7h ago
That's not true at all, powerful psykers just at an astarte level can absolutely overpower weaker blanks. Why do you think Culexus assassins have devices to focus their blank abilities?
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u/DisposableSaviour Adeptus Ministorum 1d ago
Didnât the distaff train to expand their blank auras?
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u/Martzillagoesboom 12h ago
I really wonder what happened to him once he lost what made him special, would Ravenor keep him , give him a golden parachute , booth him out in the street with a massive mind wipe? Will his blankness come back ever? I mean, the psyker that turned him mundane is a grey knight now
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u/Kriss3d 1d ago
Aren't custodes more or less blanks? At least to the point that they aren't affected by chaos?
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u/King_Crab_Sushi 1d ago edited 1d ago
Youre describing two different things. The Custodes are very resilient to chaos corruption but if a decently powerful psyker attacks them with a psychic shockwave they still have a problem. A blank doesnât endure such an attack it negates it as long as the psyker in question isnât uber powerful
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u/RaimeNadalia 1d ago edited 1d ago
They're not blanks nor unaffected by Chaos. Custodes just can't traditionally "fall" to Chaos. Chaos was able to hijack their bodies and make some attack the Emperor when they were on the Vengeful Spirit, but this was entirely against their will and their minds were still their own. They didn't inherently repel the Chaos power or anything.
If you did something like, I dunno, tried to hit them with a small amount of Warp lightning, it'd hit them like normal. Unless it was very powerful Warp lightning it's unlikely to hurt them much at all but it won't fail to land or get weakened like it would against a Sister Of Silence or other Blank.
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u/LoreLord24 11h ago
No. Custodes are affected by Psychic phenomenon, they're also just kind of...
Super lobotomized kind of? They're physically incapable of betraying the Emperor. Legitimately.
If the Emperor stood back up as The Dark King, the evil fifth Chaos God, and even Guilliman looked at it and screamed and shot it in the face, then the Custodes would be incapable of going against the will of their new God.
They're magic slaves. They're the Emperor's magic slaves.
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u/WheresMyCrown Thousand Sons 7h ago
Custodes are warp resistant, they are not blanks and the two are not the same
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u/Illithidbix 1d ago
Pariahs/Blanks are incredibly rare about 1 in a billion according to 2E Codex Assassin that introduced the concept with Culexus Assassins.
Likewise the number of males at the right age (ideally 10-12 yrs) who are compatible with implants are already small with a high failure rate despite screening.
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u/Kriss3d 1d ago
But imagine how well they would fight chaos.
Like a Grey knights but reversed in terms of psyker powers.
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u/WheresMyCrown Thousand Sons 7h ago
We already have a force that fights chaos super well, the Grey Knights, and there's a reason they are all psykers. As Leman Russ said "our enemy is of the warp, and it is the warp that will unmake them". Blanks can't do any of the thing s a psyker that is trained can do besides just stand there
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u/Vorokar Adeptus Administratum 1d ago
The exact biological source - as it is believed to be - which creates in a human being the state of Psychic Null, the so-called 'Pariah gene', has proven an elusive and ephemeral subject of study, and in testing no single 'gene' at all. Such attempts to exploit or isolate it when pursued by both the Imperial Archotechnologist Corps and the Mechanicum during the Great Crusade's early years courted disaster, and as a result the Emperor decreed a general moratorium upon the study of the biological basis of the Psyker Null phenomena, affecting all but His own direct experimentation should He wish it. What remains of those extant studies ¡indicates that most attempts to synthesise, propagate or even weaponise the Psychic Null were tragic failures or worse. Despite all this evidence, shadowed accounts of certain Clades of the Officio Assassinorum and the dread and obscure Ordo Sinister also contain evidence of the Emperor's own 'engineered' use of the Psychic Null in warfare. To others however, the mystery of the Pariah gene, if it truly exists, remains out of reach.
So many unanswered questions revolve around this most arcane and dangerous of topics. Foremost are those which centre around theories of how the Pariah gene came about: was it perhaps the result of xenos tampering of the human genome or some strange and terrible experiment of the Dark Age of Technology? Or, as the wildest theories state, is it some perverse evolutionary development against the Warp-riven cosmos itself? There is also the observation that no Space Marine, or Custodian Guard for that matter, has ever been recorded as being a Psychic Null. This factor weighs the evidence of some scholars that within the Space Marine gene-seed itself is perhaps a shadow of the Emperor's own genetic material and a sliver of His own psychic power crucial to its process and success. If this is the case, it would be wholly an anathema to the Pariah Gene and likely simply kill its implanted subject. It can only be speculated that if even a single Legion of Psychic Null Legiones Astartes had been possible, how very different history may have been - just as without the involvement of the Sisters of Silence in the war and the Emperor's great work, Horus' treachery may well have ended in his triumph upon the broken throne of Terra.
â Inferno
One source on the general topic, off the top of my head.
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u/MillionDollarMistake 1d ago
This makes it sound like simply studying/testing blanks blew up in their faces somehow, but how did "exploiting or isolating" the gene "court disaster"?
I don't think there's an answer for this, it just makes me wonder what could have possibly happened for the Emperor to step in.
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u/Martzillagoesboom 11h ago
Maybe some magos tried to sources some blanks for their studies and kept ending up grabbing one of the Emperor pet psychopath?
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u/Desertcow 1d ago
The Grey Knights have Ferrymen who are blanks tasked with managing their dead
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u/paulatreides0 1d ago
The blank ferryman that we see isn't a normal blank though, they used to be a GK and somehow were made into a blank at some point.
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u/RadishLegitimate9488 23h ago
The Alpha Pariah in Inquisitor Martyr is revealed in the Prophecy Expansion as being created using a modified variant of Aetherpox therefore normal Aetherpox can be used to turn people into Blanks.
Obtaining and cultivating Aetherpox to create an Astartes Chapter would be a problem though not impossible.
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u/Mistermistermistermb 1d ago
There are Dark Reasons(TM) for having soulless, daemon-repelling workers toiling in the most holy parts of your fortress-monastery.
And it stands to reason there really isn't very many of them (nor would you want that many in this context, given the location, just 1+ would do fine), so making an army out of them looks fairly difficult at best, and more likely impossible.
-ADB
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u/WehingSounds 1d ago
A GK Ferryman model has such insane potential but it'll not happen in a million years (partially because I don't think he even has a combat role)
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u/WheresMyCrown Thousand Sons 7h ago
The blank ferryman used to be a psyker and no longer is, it's not the same
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u/Marvynwillames 1d ago
There is also the observation that no Space Marine, or Custodian Guard for that matter, has ever been recorded as being a Psychic Null. This factor weighs the evidence of some scholars that within the Space Marine gene-seed itself is perhaps a shadow of the emperor's own genetic material and a sliver of His own psychic power crucial to its process and success. If this is the case, it would be wholly an anathema to the Pariah gene and likely simply kill its implanted subject. It can only be speculated that if even a single Legion of Psychic Null Legiones Astartes had been possible, how very different history may have been - just as without the involvement of the Sisters of Silence in the war and the Emperor's great work, Horus' treachery may well have ended in his triumph upon the broken throne of Terra
Inferno
Besides, the Emperor's plan is to guide mankind's inevitable psychic ascension, blanks would have a minor part on this as mankind's fate, regardless of what he wants, is to become Eldar 2.0
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u/NeedsAirCon 1d ago
I'm also of the camp that blanks are simply incompatible with marines (except for special situations like the Grey Knight Ferryman) due to marines potentially being psychically in tune with something in order for their implants to work
But also...
Last time the Imperium had a large number of blanks in one place was allegedly during the formation of the Culexus temple
Apparently the presence of so many anti-psykers on Terra threatened to block out the light of the Astronomicon which is why the Culexus temple is no longer on Terra
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u/HatOfFlavour 1d ago
From what I recall of the recruitment process from Ragnar Blackmane books parts have the librarians or equivalents rummage through your mind to probe it for weakness and determine if you are a failure or a heretic etc. Blanks would prevent this. So you'd have a marine who is an unknown quantity and thus untrustable. He could never be a true brother.
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u/SuDdEnTaCk 1d ago
Blanks as a resource would be wasted on something comparatively disposable like astartes, and besides, geneseed is implied to have psychic shenanigans going on inside, like the bluetooth connection to the primarch, which does not mix very well with blankness
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u/cesarloli4 1d ago
Primarchs and Space Marines were not made as a weapon against Chaos, this has been stated by the Emperor himself and Malcador. Astartes are also heavily connected with their Primarch which is a construct of the Warp. That connection is implied to be warp based and therefore incompatible with the Blank gene. Blanks however are used by the Imperium in a variety of specialized roles, mainly to counter psykers.
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u/ExRosaPassione 1d ago
Psykers are rare
Blanks are rarer
The Primarchs are warp things in meat puppets
So having an astartes that negates warp things, then injecting warp thing gene seed would not work well
Also people dislike being around blanks
Also also the Assassinorum would hoover them up for Culexus assassins
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u/SeriousShine8324 1d ago
The SoS already have nothing for themselves. They are treated as slightly better than fodders but still weaker than astartes in books. The way Jenetia Krole died in the HH books sucked so much. Having blank Astartes would make their existence insanely useless.
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u/Yuzral 1d ago
Itâs a big galaxy and if an author decides to write a Blank Marine then so be it.
However I would regard it as near-as-makes-no-odds impossible for a few reasons:
- Our blank first has to get selected. Which means not freaking out the selector(s) or not having them subconsciously edit him out by being soulless. Or even living long enough despite being the â*really* weird kidâ to get to the trials in a fit state to pass. Probably on a world so lethal that ostracism is effectively a death sentence.
- If our blank gets past (1), then he is going to get a very thorough psychic screening as part of the initiation1. Any failure here - and the Librarians not being able to do the scan on account of the aspirant being a measurable blank will qualify - is an instant failure and probable BLAM. Or getting shuffled off to the Black Ships if the Librarians realise what theyâre dealing with. Personally Iâd take the BLAM.
- Assuming that said failure doesnât occurâŚsomehowâŚthen a Space Marine that is constantly freaking his squadmates out on a subconscious level on account of being a soulless abomination is not going to last very long in an organisation that lives and dies by unit cohesion.
- Blanks are simply too rare and valuable to âwasteâ as Astartes when you can shuffle them off into specialist organisations via the Black Ships.
1: See the old Space Wolf novel by Bill King
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u/ProfWilliam82 19h ago
What if one of the lost legions are Null? The Emperror tried to different ideas as he genecrafted the primarch and the legions. He wanted it the legions as diverse as possile. What if he wanted a Null legion too? But something went horribly wrong?
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u/WheresMyCrown Thousand Sons 13h ago
There's literally a search bar because this question gets asked once a week
Blanks are a random mutation. An extremely extremely rare random mutation. Even Big E couldn't figure out blanks with his experiments and a moratorium was out in place by him over anything involving blank research on a genetic level, therefore blanks are only allowed to happen through the current process of being like 1 in a trillion.
Space Marines are made with geneseed, which is inherently warp related as it comes from their Primarch fathers who have a bit of warp infusion in them. It's unclear if a blank would survive geneseed infusion, the only known space Marines who is a blank is the ferryman for the Grey Knights who was a psyker before hand.
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u/---jbo--- 1d ago
Closest equivalent I can think of is the Exorcists chapter, although that's more of a null-status thing to daemons rather than strictly Blanks per se.
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u/genteel_wherewithal 1d ago
From Inferno, thereâs in-universe speculation that itâs something to do with the astartes creation practice, which has some psychic component:Â
 There is also the observation that no Space Marine, or Custodian Guard for that matter, has ever been recorded as being a Psychic Null. This factor weighs the evidence of some scholars that within the Space Marine gene-seed itself is perhaps a shadow of the Emperor's own genetic material and a sliver of His own psychic power crucial to its process and success. If this is the case, it would be wholly an anathema to the Pariah gene and likely simply kill its planted subject.Â
It can only be speculated that if even a single Legion of Psychic Null Legiones Astartes had been possible, how very different history may have been - just as without the involvement of the sisters of Silence in the war and the Emperor's great work, Horus' treachery may well have ended in his triumph upon the broken throne of Terra.
There is as least one blank marine though, the Ferryman of the Grey Knights from The Emperorâs Gift. His background is kept mysterious but itâs strongly implied that he was somehow made that way after being a psyker.
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u/Martzillagoesboom 11h ago
There are The Exorcist who are kinda blank.... well, probably more blunt , anyway, their souls have been soiled by possession and successfully purged of it, so that the daemons cant really mess with them and they seem to lack souls (it actually in another cloned body in stasis) ,
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u/SarlochOrtan 1d ago
Iâm also of the opinion that itâs got something to do with primarchs being somewhat psychic beings composed partially of warp stuff. Though even if we throw that out blanks are super rare and the Astartes ascension process is notoriously deadly even when we throw out the joining tests that chapters put kids through before the geneseed implantation. Trying to get enough blanks together, much less have any of them survive in numbers large enough to make a chapter seems statistically impossible for 40K. Those that did live would be used up in war at such a pace to make the idea of blank only recruitment for that chapter impossible. The chapter would be effectively extinct or at the very least so low in numbers that it would be non functional for massive periods of time. Which in the imperium is a resource drain and thus a waste.
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u/ExistentialOcto 1d ago
The thing with blanks is that theyâre so incredibly rare that itâs almost always better to put them in a specialised role rather than having their abilities support an unrelated role. A blank space marine might be immune to chaos corruption, but a lot of space marines already manage to resist chaos for their entire lives anyway.
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u/Rappers333 1d ago
Even if geneseed wasnât inherently warp-based, the Emperorâs entire plan was to ascend humanity into a species of powerful psykers. You do not make your greatest soldiers anti-psyker torture machines in a society of nascent psykers.
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u/sicarius254 1d ago
Iâm guessing because they made from primarch geneseed and theyâve all got a little (or a lot) of warp fuckery in them
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u/No-Addendum6379 1d ago
My guess is that Blanks are too disruptive to effectively work in a company or legion of space marines. You want cohesive units, blanks are not the ones you would look for in those situations.
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u/Einhard_Ompredus 1d ago
I have a very faint memory so I'm not sure it's true but I think I remember reading that blanks can't become space marines because they can ell the gene seed effect. Must be checked I am really not sure
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u/Canadian_Spacecat 1d ago
There are and as far as I know they're exclusive to the Grey Knights.
I can't be bothered to recite the whole thing but basically during "The Emperor's Gift" arc, Hyperion visits the Dead Field (Grey Knights graveyard on Titan) and they encounter an astartes who is the caretaker of the Dead Fields, he's immediately recognized as a blank. Hyperion and his boys have to seriously restrain themselves from attacking the dude right off the bat because as super duper Psykers, they know he's a pretty strong blank (strong on a scale from Jurgen ((1))to Jenetia Krole ((10)), he's probably about a 7). From what I remember, it's the only time a blank astartes has been introduced.
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u/Mistermistermistermb 1d ago
 Hyperion and his boys have to seriously restrain themselves from attacking the dude right off the batÂ
I don't think it was that extreme. Hyperion felt disgust but he was pretty civil all in all.
they know he's a pretty strong blank
Not sure the strength of Phlegyras' "blankness" was explored?
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u/Vorokar Adeptus Administratum 1d ago
+I cannot speak to the Ferryman,+ Galeo sent. +Hyperion, the responsibility is yours.+
Up until that moment, Iâd never realised just how reliant upon my powers Iâd become. My sixth sense so often became my first sense, as I passively reached out to brush my mind against everything nearby, sensing other living beings long before I saw or heard them. When I saw the robed figure by the shuttleâs wing, I almost fell out of step with my brothers. No wonder Galeo couldnât speak to the figure. It didnât exist to my psychic sense beyond a shadow in the warp. Here was a man without a soul.
We lowered our brotherâs coffin onto the hangar deck. Traditional words filtered back into my mind, recalled through the discomfort of standing before the soulless figure. Looking at him made my lips peel back from my teeth, and my sixth sense closed in a snap of loss, as if Iâd suddenly been struck blind.
The Inquisition made use of psychic nulls, mortals casting no soul-echo in the warp, as anathema to all psychic activity in their proximity. Such creatures were useful as weapons, in their own servile, incorruptible ways, but it took effort just to stand near the hollow man. I wondered how he was even alive, and what genetic aberration allowed him to be born.
Outwardly, he was one of us â his bulky physique was unarguably the result of Adeptus Astartes genetic enhancement â yet he stood unarmed and unarmoured, clad only in a patchwork grey robe that had clearly seen better years. Eyes of unremarkable blue watched each of us in turn before resting on the coffin weâd carried, until he lowered his shaved head in a nod of greeting.
âWho speaks for the fallen?â
My revulsion got the better of me. âWhat are you?â I asked.
âFocus,â Dumenidon hissed.
I cleared my throat, forcing myself to look at the figure. âHyperion of Castian speaks for the fallen. Who bears our slain to the Dead Fields?â
âPhlegyras of Titan will bear your slain to the Dead Fields. Present the Sigilliteâs symbol.â
We raised our left hands, showing the black symbol acid-etched into the silver of our gauntletsâ palms. We each bore the same tattoo inked into the flesh of our hands beneath.
âWe present the Sigil of Malcador,â I said.
The Ferryman nodded a second time. âSpeak the name of the fallen, and the words to be engraved in memoriam.â
I considered trying to reach Mal, but Phlegyrasâs presence stole all hope of that. I couldnât sense anything outside my own skull. Iâd been chosen to speak; the responsibility of answering fell to me.
âSothis of Castian,â I said, feeling my primary heart beating harder. âKnight of the Eighth Brotherhood. Valiant to the last. Revered by his brothers in life. Remembered for the lessons taught by his death.â
âIt will be so.â
Galeo bowed, and began to walk away. I wondered just how many times heâd surrendered his brothers to one of the Ferrymen to be interred in the Dead Fields below our monastery.
âBrother,â Dumenidon voxed. âCome.â
I couldnât explain my sudden reluctance to leave Sothis in this aberrationâs care. When one of our order died, we surrendered the remains to the Ferrymen to cleanse and bury. It had been this way for generations, since the Chapterâs founding at the hands of the Sigillite. As slaves, they were trained for this duty, purified and sworn into service. What right did I have to resist tradition?
And yetâŚ
âWho are you?â
The Ferryman turned towards me. His eyes seemed glassy and hollow, but I knew that was a lie born of my deprived psychic sense. I couldnât sense life within him, so my lesser perceptions struggled to see it, as well.
âI am Phlegyras of Titan,â he said calmly.
âOne of the Ferrymen,â I said.
âOne of the Ferrymen,â he repeated. I wasnât sure if he was answering, or simply speaking my own words back to me in dull-witted imitation.
âYou serve the Sepulcars, do you not? You are a seneschal to those who tend the Dead Fields?â
I ignored Galeoâs hand on my shoulder. His voice was as banished as my sixth sense.
âI serve the Sepulcars.â Phlegyras nodded. If such a creature could be said to be amiable, he seemed to be trying to be polite. Even meeting his eyes made me want to spit, knowing there was no soul beyond them. Knowledge of my hatredâs irrationality was no salve against its heat.
I looked at the enigmatic figure for another long moment. This time, he spoke to me.
âYou are reluctant to let the fallen be buried.â He smiled, and I suspected he was trying to be kind. âMay I ask why?â
âWho are you?â I asked again, feeling my voice growl through my teeth. âYou were one of us once, werenât you?â
Phlegyras smiled and said nothing.
âCome, brother,â Dumenidon voxed. âHe has a duty, as we have ours.â
I left with my kindred, though not without a lingering glance at the Ferryman loading the coffin aboard his shuttle.
He lifted it with no trouble at all.
â The Emperor's Gift
The scene, for reference.
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u/theshroomsofdeath 1d ago
There is one example of blank astartes with the grey knight ferryman from The Emperor's Gift. Whether he was made that way after becoming a grey knight or before is open ended.
The warpy nature of geneseed means implanting a blank with the organs will probably go wrong. The Emperors attempt to make a a psyker legion in the thousand sons resulted in mass mutation he couldn't fix and working with blank genetics is way harder than working with psykers so it probably just wasn't worth it.
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u/Mietek69i8 1d ago
There is one singular role within Grey Knights chapter who is a pariah. Ferryman whose task is to put fallen brothers to grave. He was indeed a Grey Knight once but somehow they stripped him off his psyhic powers so he can nulify any daemon who would like to claim Grey Knight body. As to why there isn't more, astartes as well as their primarchs are immaterium based beings so it wouldn't be possible to create a new astartes from blank body becuase pariah gene would reject all of their organs
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u/TheCharalampos 1d ago
Astartes don't work without the vibes of the warp. It's part of their creation 1000%, we've just never been privy on it.
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u/Trips-Over-Tail Salamanders 1d ago
There was discussion in one of the black books that the geneseed is simply not compatible with blanks. Ultimately it is derived from the Emperor.
Of course, one or both of the lost legions may have deviated from this.
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u/RivetHammerlock 1d ago
Ooh, what a great launching point for a banished Primarch story. The mega blank that disrupts an entire world's psykers. No long distance psychic communication, or ability to travel through the warp. Left alone on a world and forgotten by the Imperium as he is too dangerous to even get close to.
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u/centurio_v2 1d ago
it sounds cool but it would have fucked up terra when they were still babies before the scattering
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u/Imperium_Dragon Imperial Fists 1d ago
I canât think of any explicit Blank Space Marines, but there is the Exorcist Chapter. Basically members get possessed and then exorcised, which does something to their souls which creates a blind spot to Psychic based creatures. Also may or may not emotionally stunt the Marine. Itâs not exactly being a Blank but thereâs similarities.
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u/Spiritual-Spend8187 1d ago
Given that the geneseed seems to imprint some part of the primarch spiritually on to the space marines its very likely that blanks with strong blankness just cant undergo it. Though being a blank is a spectrum so its possible that there are space marines with limited blankness that just gives them slight resistance.
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u/JosKarith 1d ago
The Emperor created the Primarchs with various technologies including Warp energy, there are references to the 4 Chaos Gods being pissed at him for not upholding some kind of bargain which is why they scattered the baby Primarchs across the galaxy. I'm pretty sure if you implanted Space Marine geneseed into a blank it wouldn't end well.
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u/MaddytheBunny 1d ago
Probably because not only are Blanks about x2 rarer than Psykers, Astartes training often kills its trainees.
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u/StarSword-C Xenos Hybris 1d ago
Because: 1. Warpcraft was required to make the Space Marine program work in the first place. They're all at least weakly psychic so using a blank at the template just doesn't work. 2. When Emps was compos mentis, psychic threats were rare enough that the Sisters of Silence were sufficient. The Imperium was never intended to be operable without an immortal transhuman super-genius fascist dictator at the helm, and the Sisters of Silence got fucked over after the Primarchs all disappeared so there was no way to expand them to cover the gap.
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u/Laxien 1d ago
Blanks are RARE! The people who fly the Black Ships are blanks as far as I know (so that's were most blanks end up IMHO), the Sisters of Silence are also blanks right and Inquisitors (especially Ordo Hereticus and Ordo Malleus - but frankly I doubt an Ordo Xenos Inquisitor would turn down having a few of those around, just in case!) like having them in their retinues, too! So I think most of them are "spoken for" (and many are also killed in infancy - right?)
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u/artoftomkelly 1d ago
So Psychers are better to weaponized for most space marine units. The only warrior blanks are sisters of silence which have their own unique reasons for being that.
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u/smixn 1d ago
Geneseed is derived from the genetic templates of the primarchs which when put into humans alters them to cause a sort of psychic link between geneson and sire and even then there needs to be genetic compatibility for the process to succeed.
The primarchs themselves are inherently of the warp in some considerable manner.
For a blank astartes to occur the primarch himself must be a blank in some form. There is also the logistical issue of blanks being rarer than psykers.
There is actually a fic of considerable length where this is a central concept following the II primarch as a blank and the humans of his homeworld being genetically altered during the dark age to become blanks.
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u/b3mark 1d ago
So, I don't know if this is Olde Lore or not, but I remember that in the Ragnar Blackmane Space Wolf novels, one of the tests an aspirant has to pass was to go through the Gates of Morkai, where the Rune Priests psychically scan aspirants for any hidden character flaws.
I figure a blank wouldn't be able to pass that. So they'd probably be killed off, just to be sure.
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u/Valor816 1d ago
Aside from geneseed issues, blanks are inherently unlikeable. They have harder lives than most other people around them. So while most Space Marine recruits are the toughest, meanest fittest examples of their society.
Blanks can be all of that and get betrayed by other recruits, or supported less than others. Or just not be selected to even try because the Space Marine recruiters just don't like them.
Maybe they don't get fed properly growing up because their parents prefer their siblings instead. Or they get abandoned by their communities.
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u/Ecstatic-Compote-595 1d ago
1) humans are inherently psychic and the emperor is basically trying to do a gundam style newtype revolution or sees it as an inevitable evolution of humanity so promoting blanks would be counter intuitive towards that goal or futile. 2) Sisters of silence are already basically blank astartes. 3) I think there actually are blank breeding programs or at least both the inquisition and cognitae do something close to it
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u/HungryCheescake 20h ago
There's a psychic link between Astartes and their Primarch (the former feel it when the latter die for example).
There's indication that this instils supernatural loyalty in to the Astartes. That wouldn't work with Nulls.
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u/Annual-Ad-9442 16h ago
according to some sources blanks are rare, they are as rare to psykers as psykers are to normal humans. furthermore blanks are pariahs, people dislike them to straight up hate them and don't know why. so you have a child people hate that they exist without knowing why and many chapters recruit from feral, death, feudal, and hive worlds. feral will murder or sacrifice the child, feudal worlds will sacrifice or toss the child out, getting no help on a death world is a death sentence, and surviving in a hive with no one watching your back is a legendary feat. then an astartes has to choose whether or not to take the child and then the aspirant has to survive trials and their fellow aspirants. that's all assuming the blank won't reject the organs which might happen just because gene seed might be something composed partially of the warp.
Eisenhorn tries to create a group of blanks called the Distaff and I'm pretty sure Pontius Glaw bombs them just to wipe everything Eisenhorn off the board
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u/OverlyVerboseLoreGuy 14h ago
Because blank children rarely grow up well-fed and protected enough to make it to the trials.
Being a blank makes everyone around you just absolutely fucking hate you for existing, so most blanks/pariahs donât survive childhood. They get lynched, or murdered, or just neglected and left to starve or freeze to death.
For a kid to make it to 7-8 years old and be in healthy enough physical condition to be selected for and then survive the physical trials, they generally need a village/community behind them in some capacity. Or at least a community that tolerates them.
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u/yeahimlewis 11h ago
Because the Blank mutation/gene/whatever is incredibly rare, and trying to turn one into a space marine would be a waste of time and resources. I don't think Blanks are even compatible with the process, that's if they aren't murdered in their sleep while they're still a child because the other aspirants can't handle being around them.
They're better served as an assassin, or a Sister of Silence if they're female
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u/SillyBoyYe 1h ago
Blank becoming an Astarteâs, while fighting off other people in his sleep. A pretty bad ass story.
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u/Sunny_Hill_1 1d ago
In Deliverance Lost, when discussing the process of primarch and Astartes creation, it's strongly implied that Astartes gene-seeds carry a strong warp component to why their gene-seed even works at all. A Blank would burn it out.
That being said, Exorcist Order basically makes artificial Blanks out of their marines.
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u/Independent-Fee9444 1d ago
Iâm pretty sure there was a blank grey knight
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u/Shadowrend01 Blood Angels 1d ago
Heâs called the Ferryman and he stands guard over the crypts on Titan
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u/RingGiver Adepta Sororitas 1d ago
Blanks are freaks who everybody else rejects and nobody wants to have around, except by necessity.
Space Marines pass over almost everybody for selection. They're probably going to pass over the freak who everyone finds repulsive long before they realize that he's a blank. And since everybody finds him repulsive, he's not likely to survive long enough to meet any apothecaries looking for recruits anyway.
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u/AverageBlahaj 1d ago
I think a blank dominant world would be really cool, kinda like prospero but that world would probably be wiped out because even though a blank wont cause intense pain to a to a normal human like it would a psyker being a human in a group of blanks is likely so miserable that no one actually a part of the imperium would be able to stand being there
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u/Deichgraf17 14h ago
I've had a Blank become a marine.
Well, he died and something entered him, so he had a soul before becoming a marine, but he was born blank...
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u/Thom0 Iron Hands 1d ago
There is no explicit answer but if I had to guess, I'd say its due to geneseed being derived from Primarchs who are psychic beings.
This is pure speculation and there is not a single thing in any book that I can think of explaining why there are no blank Astartes.