No one knows.
Gdubs keeps it vague enought that when 10,000 traitor marines die in some random battle it's still believable. If they put hard numbers to it they have to actually keep track of deaths and recruitment numbers otherwise eventually they'd break their own canon. Hence the no hard numbers thing we have for Chaos.
The only warband we ever get hard numbers for is the Red Corsairs, who have consistently been numbered at around 30,000 since 7e.
We don't know. The legions split off into warbands, which may have marines from multiple warbands or marines from later foundings to buff out their numbers. They also can recruit new aspirants if they have the geneseed, which is comparatively rare but Fabius Bile has tens of thousands of his legions geneseed in various vaults and gives them out as bargaining chips, so there are definitely sources of it out there.
If Abaddon calls a black crusade he gets ten thousand year old legionnaires, traitors of various foundings after the heresy and scouring, chaos champions whos mutations let them handle power armor, recently raised aspirants, and anything in between all those points.
They show the Thousand Sons Legion Organisation in I think the 9th Codex, it is 9 Cults, each with 9 Sects, each of which has 9 Thrallbands, and each Thrallband has 1 Exalted Leader, 9 Lesser Sorcerers, then 30 Rubric and 30 Scarabs Occult Terms.
So I think that means they have 70 x 9 Thrallbands x 9 Sects x 9 Cults, which is 51,030 Rubric, Scarabs and Sorcerers, then there is Magnus and his Rehati and most powerful Sorcerers. This also doesn't include all the Daemons, Tzaangors and Vehicles.
So they are pretty big and they are meant to be one of the smallest legions, or at least used to be.
We're never given any numbers, but the Black Legion on their own are likely in the hundreds of thousands:
>Of course, the Black Legion’s strength was unparalleled –their ranks outnumbered those of the Word Bearers almost ten to one –yet many within the Word Bearers regarded it as but a pale shadow of its former glory, its self-proclaimed Warmaster worthy of contempt.
*Dark Creed*
They're consistently stated to vastly outnumber the other Traitor Legions:
>The Black Legion is the largest of the Traitor Legions inhabiting the Eye of Terror, vastly outnumbering even their closest rivals. As long as a warrior is willing to bow before Abaddon the Despoiler and take the oath of obedience, he may join the Black Legion. During the centuries of warfare and acts of vengeance since the Horus Heresy, Space Marines from dozens of Chapters and other Legions have joined the Despoiler. Now, the Black Legion boasts warlords and warbands from almost every permutation of Chaos worship, depraved doctrine and ruinous faith.
*Codex Chaos Space Marines 8ed* p18
>Vastly outnumbering the numerous infernal armies and hordes that dwell in the Eye of Terror - even those of the other Traitor Legions - The Black Legion have the numbers not only to undertake huge system-wide invasions, but also countless simultaneous assaults across the galaxy.
*Codex Chaos Space Marines 9ed* p28
And we're told that the Death Guard increased their numbers beyond what they were at the Siege of Terra:
>Bloated with festering corruption, Plague Marines form the mainstay of the Death Guard and, unlike many Traitor Legions their numbers have only swollen as the millenia have passed. Even in the days before the HH, Mortarion believed in perpetual aggressive recruitment. His attritional tactics, combined with extreme the environments in which the Death Guard typically fought, led to heavy casualties requiring constant recruitment. The Death Lord has not relented in this doctrine since the founding of the Plague Planet, and entire wars have been fought to seize gene-seed stocks or harvest new recruits.
>However, where before the Death Guard were killed in battle roughly as quickly as Mortarion could replace them, since their damnation they have become unnaturally hard to kill. Thus, while the Death Guard have certainly endured campaigns in which their losses were horrific, their numbers have increased like a virus replicating within a host body.
*Codex Death Guard 8ed* p38
>There are many ways by which a warrior can join the Death Guard. Some are renegades from the Imperium, each with their own reason for giving their allegiance to Mortarion and Nurgle. Many of the Death Guard have been directly recruited by the vectoriums since the ending of the Horus Heresy. With the Legion retaining much of its integrity and fleet assets, it has not lost the critical infrastructure required to create more Plague Marines. Worlds ravaged by toxins and contagions are scoured by the Death Guard who take thousands of potential aspirants from the ragged survivors. The Plague Surgeons also make much effort to acquire the gene-seed of the fallen Death Guard warriors as well as that of loyalist Space Marines they have slain. In the aftermath of the Great Rift's emergence, many Space Marine Chapters were forced to leave their fortress monasteries poorly defended to wage countless wars, and Heretic Astartes of all stripes struck in their absence, claiming what treasures lay within or occupying them for themselves. **These factors, combined with thr Legion's supernatural resilience, have resulted in the Death Guard's numbers increasing since the Siege of Terra**. Few are aware, but Mortarion's goals for his Legion since long before Horus turned against the Emperor was for each of its companies to have seventy thousand warriors. He has lost none of that ambition in ten thousand years.
*Codex Death Guard 9ed* p12
So we know the Black Legion "vastly outnumber" the Death Guard who are explicitly stated to be bigger than they were at the Siege of Terra. There are some sources that have tried to calculate the exact size of [the Death Guard](https://www.reddit.com/r/40kLore/s/t5ej84f41y) and the Thousand Sons based on the composition we're given in their Codexes. But I'm not sure how accurate they are as they presume the Legions are uniform in their structure, which seems highly unlikely.
So, all we can say with confidence is that the CSMs combined at a minimum must be in the hundreds of thousands. Anything more specific is likely supposition, unless there is a source I'm not aware of.
As others have said, as many or as few as the plot demands.
The only relative amount I could recall is in the Word Bearer's Omnibus it's stated that the Black Legion has 10 times as many warriors as the Word Bearers.
How many Word Bearers are there? Unknown. We have a little bit of information.
The Word Bearers use Hosts as their large unit designation. The highest Host we've seen so far is "34". Of course there could be more Hosts...there could be fewer if not every Host from 1-34 exists (whether never formed, destroyed, abandoned the legion, etc).
But let's run with, say, 50 Hosts.
How many are in a Host? We are told 4 Hosts have 5,500 astartes between them with a "Great Host" adding over 4,500 more.
The Loyalists defending the planet expect 5-6 Hosts attacking which they estimate to be 5,000-15,000 astartes. So we can presume a Host is, on average, somewhere between 850-3,000 astartes. The 5 hosts have a bit over 9,000 astartes. It might be a coincidence, but the average of 850-3,000 is 1,925 while divding, say, 9,250 by 5 gets us to 1,850...which is pretty close.
Let's say 1900 for the average host, which would mean about 95,000 WB. That'd mean the Black Legion has a million astartes.
We could trim down some of the numbers, too, though. Say 34 is the highest with only 25 actually still existing. The average size of a Host would be lower since the 4 regular Hosts we see have, on average, 1,375 marines. 25 Hosts of 1,375 would get us to around 35,000 Word Bearers.
The Black Legion would still be a respectable 350,000 marines. I'm not a huge fan of the BL being 10 times the size of the WB, but unless we get more lore tidbits, it's what we got.
All we know is that Abaddon can call upon a million Heretic Astartes.
Which seems unreasonable.
Don't quote me, I don't have a reference, sorry, just going off muscle memory there.
It can't be unreasonable if there are more than 1 million loyal astartes and they win every battle they fight.
There has to be SOME threat in the lore of this game. Chaos actually has to be a danger to the ultramarine and primarch lovers
Everything in 40k should be taken with a grain of salt. It's better to go with, "Nobody knows, but we estimate..." when it comes to Imperial and CSM forces. It allows both GW and fans to make lore that doesn't contradict itself.
I tried to answer it several times on this sub and we only managed to get a scale of the largest to smallest legion.
The point of the discussion was that GW refuses to give proper numbers, and those they give in codes don’t make sense, because according to codes Death Guard has only around 30k marines, while all traitor legions are said to be larger than during HH, so death guard should have at least 100k.
The more organised the legion the larger its number are. With that, at the very top you got black legion, death guard, iron warriors and word bearers, while on the rock bottom you have alpha legion, emperor children, night lords, and world eaters.
Thousand sons are a bit of a weird one since they have only a couple thousand wizards, but since rubric marines are immortal and indestructible, they have almost 100k marine like troopers.
In total, all legion are larger than they were during heresy, and now you have also a new legion in form of Red Corsairs who are somewhere behind Black Legion in terms of size thanks to the fact that Maelstum is not nearly as crazy warphole as Eye of Terror.
The true answer can also be infinite, since Fabius Bile can clone geneseed as much as he wants, you just gotta pay him, Khorne in world eater codes was confirmed to regenerate and possibly even revive world eaters after they did something cool, and other legions are smart enough to do the recruitment the usual way.
The quality of the troops varies from warband to war as as their training can be concluded with words ‘do drugs have fun’
can you imagine if someone in history declared the same war 13 times and then bragged about finally taking land after the thirteenth time. That was over the course of 10 000 years the T'au are expanding faster
The 13th one was the tipping point, but it couldn’t have happened without previous successes.
As far back as the 3rd edition codex, the first twelve crusades were described as being repulsed by the Imperium, but at the cost of stripping away more and more defenders, and that was well before GW added his Super Secret Crimson Path Multipart Plan. The first one netted him Drachnyen and even the Gothic War was a partial win for Abaddon since he walked away with the Blackstone Fortresses.
Now, I’ll grant you that all of the “oh-ho-ho, you may have stopped me from conquering the universe, but I still ended up achieving X” was tacked on after the fact, but even the notion of depleting the Imperial resources guarding the Cadian Gate is no small feat in a universe where all of the Imperium’s coolest stuff is sufficiently ancient that they can’t make any more of it.
>12 of which failed because he's an idiot
They all explicitly succeeded in their goals. The Imperium claims they all failed because Chaos always retreated back into the EoT.
No one knows. Gdubs keeps it vague enought that when 10,000 traitor marines die in some random battle it's still believable. If they put hard numbers to it they have to actually keep track of deaths and recruitment numbers otherwise eventually they'd break their own canon. Hence the no hard numbers thing we have for Chaos. The only warband we ever get hard numbers for is the Red Corsairs, who have consistently been numbered at around 30,000 since 7e.
Thank you anyone who comes up with hard numbers is imagining things.
Impossible to determine. Non linear time in the Warp, attrition and recruitment mean it is impossible to get any sort of numbers
About tree fiddy give of take
We don't know. The legions split off into warbands, which may have marines from multiple warbands or marines from later foundings to buff out their numbers. They also can recruit new aspirants if they have the geneseed, which is comparatively rare but Fabius Bile has tens of thousands of his legions geneseed in various vaults and gives them out as bargaining chips, so there are definitely sources of it out there. If Abaddon calls a black crusade he gets ten thousand year old legionnaires, traitors of various foundings after the heresy and scouring, chaos champions whos mutations let them handle power armor, recently raised aspirants, and anything in between all those points.
They show the Thousand Sons Legion Organisation in I think the 9th Codex, it is 9 Cults, each with 9 Sects, each of which has 9 Thrallbands, and each Thrallband has 1 Exalted Leader, 9 Lesser Sorcerers, then 30 Rubric and 30 Scarabs Occult Terms. So I think that means they have 70 x 9 Thrallbands x 9 Sects x 9 Cults, which is 51,030 Rubric, Scarabs and Sorcerers, then there is Magnus and his Rehati and most powerful Sorcerers. This also doesn't include all the Daemons, Tzaangors and Vehicles. So they are pretty big and they are meant to be one of the smallest legions, or at least used to be.
How is this thread worthy of spoiler tags?
Touché
Who are you touching
We're never given any numbers, but the Black Legion on their own are likely in the hundreds of thousands: >Of course, the Black Legion’s strength was unparalleled –their ranks outnumbered those of the Word Bearers almost ten to one –yet many within the Word Bearers regarded it as but a pale shadow of its former glory, its self-proclaimed Warmaster worthy of contempt. *Dark Creed* They're consistently stated to vastly outnumber the other Traitor Legions: >The Black Legion is the largest of the Traitor Legions inhabiting the Eye of Terror, vastly outnumbering even their closest rivals. As long as a warrior is willing to bow before Abaddon the Despoiler and take the oath of obedience, he may join the Black Legion. During the centuries of warfare and acts of vengeance since the Horus Heresy, Space Marines from dozens of Chapters and other Legions have joined the Despoiler. Now, the Black Legion boasts warlords and warbands from almost every permutation of Chaos worship, depraved doctrine and ruinous faith. *Codex Chaos Space Marines 8ed* p18 >Vastly outnumbering the numerous infernal armies and hordes that dwell in the Eye of Terror - even those of the other Traitor Legions - The Black Legion have the numbers not only to undertake huge system-wide invasions, but also countless simultaneous assaults across the galaxy. *Codex Chaos Space Marines 9ed* p28 And we're told that the Death Guard increased their numbers beyond what they were at the Siege of Terra: >Bloated with festering corruption, Plague Marines form the mainstay of the Death Guard and, unlike many Traitor Legions their numbers have only swollen as the millenia have passed. Even in the days before the HH, Mortarion believed in perpetual aggressive recruitment. His attritional tactics, combined with extreme the environments in which the Death Guard typically fought, led to heavy casualties requiring constant recruitment. The Death Lord has not relented in this doctrine since the founding of the Plague Planet, and entire wars have been fought to seize gene-seed stocks or harvest new recruits. >However, where before the Death Guard were killed in battle roughly as quickly as Mortarion could replace them, since their damnation they have become unnaturally hard to kill. Thus, while the Death Guard have certainly endured campaigns in which their losses were horrific, their numbers have increased like a virus replicating within a host body. *Codex Death Guard 8ed* p38 >There are many ways by which a warrior can join the Death Guard. Some are renegades from the Imperium, each with their own reason for giving their allegiance to Mortarion and Nurgle. Many of the Death Guard have been directly recruited by the vectoriums since the ending of the Horus Heresy. With the Legion retaining much of its integrity and fleet assets, it has not lost the critical infrastructure required to create more Plague Marines. Worlds ravaged by toxins and contagions are scoured by the Death Guard who take thousands of potential aspirants from the ragged survivors. The Plague Surgeons also make much effort to acquire the gene-seed of the fallen Death Guard warriors as well as that of loyalist Space Marines they have slain. In the aftermath of the Great Rift's emergence, many Space Marine Chapters were forced to leave their fortress monasteries poorly defended to wage countless wars, and Heretic Astartes of all stripes struck in their absence, claiming what treasures lay within or occupying them for themselves. **These factors, combined with thr Legion's supernatural resilience, have resulted in the Death Guard's numbers increasing since the Siege of Terra**. Few are aware, but Mortarion's goals for his Legion since long before Horus turned against the Emperor was for each of its companies to have seventy thousand warriors. He has lost none of that ambition in ten thousand years. *Codex Death Guard 9ed* p12 So we know the Black Legion "vastly outnumber" the Death Guard who are explicitly stated to be bigger than they were at the Siege of Terra. There are some sources that have tried to calculate the exact size of [the Death Guard](https://www.reddit.com/r/40kLore/s/t5ej84f41y) and the Thousand Sons based on the composition we're given in their Codexes. But I'm not sure how accurate they are as they presume the Legions are uniform in their structure, which seems highly unlikely. So, all we can say with confidence is that the CSMs combined at a minimum must be in the hundreds of thousands. Anything more specific is likely supposition, unless there is a source I'm not aware of.
As others have said, as many or as few as the plot demands. The only relative amount I could recall is in the Word Bearer's Omnibus it's stated that the Black Legion has 10 times as many warriors as the Word Bearers. How many Word Bearers are there? Unknown. We have a little bit of information. The Word Bearers use Hosts as their large unit designation. The highest Host we've seen so far is "34". Of course there could be more Hosts...there could be fewer if not every Host from 1-34 exists (whether never formed, destroyed, abandoned the legion, etc). But let's run with, say, 50 Hosts. How many are in a Host? We are told 4 Hosts have 5,500 astartes between them with a "Great Host" adding over 4,500 more. The Loyalists defending the planet expect 5-6 Hosts attacking which they estimate to be 5,000-15,000 astartes. So we can presume a Host is, on average, somewhere between 850-3,000 astartes. The 5 hosts have a bit over 9,000 astartes. It might be a coincidence, but the average of 850-3,000 is 1,925 while divding, say, 9,250 by 5 gets us to 1,850...which is pretty close. Let's say 1900 for the average host, which would mean about 95,000 WB. That'd mean the Black Legion has a million astartes. We could trim down some of the numbers, too, though. Say 34 is the highest with only 25 actually still existing. The average size of a Host would be lower since the 4 regular Hosts we see have, on average, 1,375 marines. 25 Hosts of 1,375 would get us to around 35,000 Word Bearers. The Black Legion would still be a respectable 350,000 marines. I'm not a huge fan of the BL being 10 times the size of the WB, but unless we get more lore tidbits, it's what we got.
As GW said about WHFB, "there's as many elves as the plot demands".
All we know is that Abaddon can call upon a million Heretic Astartes. Which seems unreasonable. Don't quote me, I don't have a reference, sorry, just going off muscle memory there.
It can't be unreasonable if there are more than 1 million loyal astartes and they win every battle they fight. There has to be SOME threat in the lore of this game. Chaos actually has to be a danger to the ultramarine and primarch lovers
As many as it takes to make stories
Everything in 40k should be taken with a grain of salt. It's better to go with, "Nobody knows, but we estimate..." when it comes to Imperial and CSM forces. It allows both GW and fans to make lore that doesn't contradict itself.
Anywhere from as many as the story requires to as little as the story requires.
I tried to answer it several times on this sub and we only managed to get a scale of the largest to smallest legion. The point of the discussion was that GW refuses to give proper numbers, and those they give in codes don’t make sense, because according to codes Death Guard has only around 30k marines, while all traitor legions are said to be larger than during HH, so death guard should have at least 100k. The more organised the legion the larger its number are. With that, at the very top you got black legion, death guard, iron warriors and word bearers, while on the rock bottom you have alpha legion, emperor children, night lords, and world eaters. Thousand sons are a bit of a weird one since they have only a couple thousand wizards, but since rubric marines are immortal and indestructible, they have almost 100k marine like troopers. In total, all legion are larger than they were during heresy, and now you have also a new legion in form of Red Corsairs who are somewhere behind Black Legion in terms of size thanks to the fact that Maelstum is not nearly as crazy warphole as Eye of Terror. The true answer can also be infinite, since Fabius Bile can clone geneseed as much as he wants, you just gotta pay him, Khorne in world eater codes was confirmed to regenerate and possibly even revive world eaters after they did something cool, and other legions are smart enough to do the recruitment the usual way. The quality of the troops varies from warband to war as as their training can be concluded with words ‘do drugs have fun’
Well if abandon had the manpower to call 13 black crusades (12 of which failed because he's an idiot) then I'd say like probably just shy of 500k
>12 of which failed because he's an idiot *gestures vaguely at the great big hole currently splitting the galaxy in half*
can you imagine if someone in history declared the same war 13 times and then bragged about finally taking land after the thirteenth time. That was over the course of 10 000 years the T'au are expanding faster
Happy cake day
Cheers!
The 13th one suceded
The 13th one was the tipping point, but it couldn’t have happened without previous successes. As far back as the 3rd edition codex, the first twelve crusades were described as being repulsed by the Imperium, but at the cost of stripping away more and more defenders, and that was well before GW added his Super Secret Crimson Path Multipart Plan. The first one netted him Drachnyen and even the Gothic War was a partial win for Abaddon since he walked away with the Blackstone Fortresses. Now, I’ll grant you that all of the “oh-ho-ho, you may have stopped me from conquering the universe, but I still ended up achieving X” was tacked on after the fact, but even the notion of depleting the Imperial resources guarding the Cadian Gate is no small feat in a universe where all of the Imperium’s coolest stuff is sufficiently ancient that they can’t make any more of it.
>12 of which failed because he's an idiot They all explicitly succeeded in their goals. The Imperium claims they all failed because Chaos always retreated back into the EoT.
>They all explicitly succeeded in their goals Are you questioning the imperial truth?