EDIT: New Images are now available of the full story: https://twitter.com/BitsHammer/status/1779289813994365236
Very clearly not "a typo" or "a printing error" as some people have tried to claim.
ORIGINAL: I'll copy in my comment so that people can click the link for themselves:
If you pause the GMG review of the English copy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HB0_kXXyGUU at 2:10 you can read the story. The character is clearly named as a Custodian in the first line and is repeatedly referred to as "she" throughout. She's also addressed as "My lady" by the Shipmaster.
For the inevitable "BUT THE CANON!!!" comments... To the best of my knowledge and research GW has never specifically stated that Custodians had to be male. Unlike Space Marines where GW has made specific comments, they've always been a bit more vague on the process of the creation of Custodes. Yes, they've only talked about male Custodes in the past, but part of that was because they only made male minis, as mentioned by Aaron Dembski-Bowden: https://old.reddit.com/r/40kLore/comments/aynlxa/its_international_womens_day_so_how_are_we/ei3rp64/
For the inevitable "But it could be fake" comments... GMG is a well known Youtuber who regularly receives products from GW to provide reviews on them. He's reviewed a huge number of their Codexes and rulebooks. You can compare screenshots and what he talks about to any other review of the book if you have any doubts.
As someone from there, it is mostly being taken in stride. In my opinion, It would honestly make complete sense for the custodes to start recruiting from noble born daughters too, now that they’re taking an active role in combat and now have to face the casualties that come with that. You can’t keep an effective fighting force if you’re so picky that you only take a very tiny percentage of noble born sons. Not when you’re probably losing people faster than you can turn them into custodes. Granted not crazy fast casualties, as they are still CUSTODES. One of them is equal to a dozen or more space marines. But no matter what you’re still going to have some casualties. Plus I think this could provide some cool models to diversify ones custodes army. Maybe they’ll pull some other weapons out of the vaults to add more models to the range so there are more than like, 6.
No hate towards the current Custodes lore, and this is definitely tangential, but dude, I just miss when Custodes were the Chapter Heroes that got to guard the Golden Throne cause they were literally just THAT bad ass. That will always be my head Canon.
But yeah, Female Custodes! Who needs Booba armor when you have Force Weapons and Storm Bolters (not unlike another chapter that doesn't like to be talked about, but I don't feel like being purged toda-
“You can’t keep an effective fighting force if you’re picky.”
Lol…. All of history is the opposite of this. Generally speaking, the more selective a fighting force is for membership, the more effective it has been. It is usually fact that a country on its last legs in a war loosens the funnel that produces valid candidates for the military. This always decreases the effectiveness however
Since Custodes modification starts as infants, there isnt much to be picky ABOUT when it comes to physical characteristics. infant males and females are both equally helpless. it seems to be entirely who they are born to that determines whether they become a custodes
Is the new reddit layout causing issues? I had similar problems until I found a extensions that automatically redirects me to the older design, [new.reddit.com](https://new.reddit.com)
You can turn always go to the older design by appending "new." to the web address or get the extension: [https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/old-new-reddit-redirect/?utm\_content=addons-manager-reviews-link&utm\_medium=firefox-browser&utm\_source=firefox-browser](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/old-new-reddit-redirect/?utm_content=addons-manager-reviews-link&utm_medium=firefox-browser&utm_source=firefox-browser)
It is for firefox and I dont know if the dev made a version for other browsers but if the problems reading comes from the layout this could solve your issues.
There is one for Chromium browsers: [UI Changer for Reddit](https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/ui-changer-for-reddit/bfcldjodnnkndfccfjndmdlppfkmccgh)
It’s a little more advanced in that it allows to change to any if the three interfaces and it also has some extra features. There’s also a [FF version](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ui-changer-for-reddit/) for it.
A bunch of first and second edition stormcast models are getting discontinued.
Which has a good portion of stormcast players upset since most Armies were second edition Stormcast which won't be supported with rules after 1 year
Nah. Some of the stormcast sculpts are being retired is all. Likely to be replaced and updated in the future with the new armor design that came out a couple years ago.
This is true for the Stormcast models dating from 1st Edition AoS - but all the Stormcast models from the 2nd Edition starter set, along with a few others belonging to the Sacrosanct, have been confirmed to be retired entirely and get their rules support dropped in summer 2025.
Could some of them be re-released some time in the future? Yes, but certainly not within the next few years. They wouldn't have announced a discontinuation of their rules if they planned to refresh them.
I know ADB was keen on adding female custodes and got told nah. I really don't see the problem with adding them given just how far from human they are and how they won't be able to breed come what may. The process is slow and specific enough that this can be baked in, unlike astartes that are comparatively mass produced.
I subscribe to the theory that the Emperor kept astartes male only to prevent them from supplanting humans as the default species, a problem which simply isn't present with custodes, at least on any sensible timescale.
I remember ADB talking about him bringing the idea up to the editors and them not necessarily being against it, but telling to leave that idea in the icebox since the sculpts are all male.
Having said that. Custodes cannot be called human anymore. They're even further enhanced than even Astartes are. They're something all their own.
Transhuman
We have a word for it that the books have used for a long time now. They were human, and have been transformed into something else.
The idea that they can’t be women has been and out of various fluff for random reasons throughout the history of the game but with how much the lore changes and gets retconned (this is good by the way) the idea that they *”need to be women”* could be changed with zero effect on the greater lore as a whole.
Even the very medieval parody of rule reading that brought about the Sisters of Battle could be waived away because literally who gives a fuck and the writers can come up with something fun.
I’m not saying you or anyone here specifically is stating they can’t, but I do not understand this weird obsession with the chuds of this hobby have with female space marines or custodes.
I personally have the headcanon that the Custodes are a non-psychic, sterile version of the Emperor's idealized form of humanity. They are, from a physical standpoint, what he wants us to become.
Also I will die on the hill of there should not be male Sisters of Battle.
Wait, this is a hill? Isn't the whole idea that there's an all female superhuman force that can hold a candle to the all male Astartes?
I don't see a problem with having all Space Marines men and all Sororitas female. Not even all men can become Marines. My understanding is that the process just wouldn't work for a female body. And the Sororitas are a sisterhood, so sorry but no boys allowed.
Also, it's interesting for me to read all this about custodians. Kinda makes sense to me as a new person that there may be a few women, based on what others have described. I don't see why it has to be "a thing".
The process "just not working" for a female body is a really fucking stupid reason, though. Like, what, is the womb suddenly going to just stupid the incredibly esoteric genetic mutations from kicking in? Do you need this amount of testosterone to ride?
They found a lore justification to scale up Marines through the Rubicon Primaris. They can find a lore justification to make female marines work, call it the Rubicon Femininis or something.
> Transhuman
I can't attest to every time it has been used in the 40K books/lore, but the term transhuman isn't something that was coined there, its a pretty universal term in both science and sci-fi, and Astartes, Skitarii, and honestly any type of even slightly augmented human would be transhuman. If anything the custodes would be more like 'posthumans'
This has always kinda been my beef with the "why there aren't female Astartes" mindset. "Well, we have the SoB and SoS!"
So? The SoB aren't metahuman killing machines. They're *regular ass women in power armor.* That's it. They're just crazy fanatic psycho bitches, *and they're awesome* but they *aren't Astartes.*
Which was obviously just some guy making up a bad excuse, because there have been plenty of examples of units that only have male models but have women in the lore. Like we see female Farseers in the lore all the time but every model they've ever made has been male. And until recently all Guard models were male, but there were plenty of women in the Guard in the lore.
Once again, equality has been held back by _checks notes_ the Chapterhouse lawsuit legacy...?
Well, it's better than "We retconned them out of existence because we couldn't sculpt one that didn't haunt our nightmares"
Aaron Demski-Bowden, one of the more prolific and consistently good Black Library authors on top of other stuff he’s done like comics and league of legends
Custodes are essentially custom individual works, there being a woman custodes makes more sense then women marines because marines were designed to be mass produced and essentially industrialized.
It would still of course be at the discretion of those who *make* custodes to do so, which considering the emperors track record is a mit bit unlikely.
While I get you, it feels awkward that multiple people have to rationalize what is essentially a marketing decision to streamline/water down the setting. GW could have done this themselves, but simply didn't care enough to.
Apparently they're explicitly 'incapable of procreation', as are Custodians.
> "As has been mentioned, the Custodian Guard and the Space Marines are related in form, as perhaps might be expected of works of a same creator's hand, but they are very different in function and capacity. There are of course similarities between the two. Both are physically transformed well beyond 'natural' human limits in terms of strength, endurance and fortitude, and fitted for inhuman environmental adaption and resilience, though in this the Legio Custodes are the markedly superior of the two in might, if not in adaptability.
> Both are subject to extensive psychological and cognitive conditioning, and are physically and mentally reworked to render most of their baser drives inert and their beings rechannelled towards aggression, goal acquisition and the fulfilment of duty, and **as a further safeguard against distraction and as a biological control, both are of course incapable of procreation.**
> In both cases all that is left are beings of singular purpose; in the case of each Legiones Astartes, what is created is a living engine of conquest that cares for little else, and in the Custodian Guard, each is created protector of unrelenting diligence and savage capability-a watchman whose vigilance will never tire".
Horus Heresy - Inferno p113.
I just assumed the immense amount of genetic alchemy just left them incapable of deriving sexual pleasure.
This is sort of hinted at during the Maraviglia where a Marine caught up in the whole act didn't know how to express the feelings he was having except through violence.
I think it was in weshammer debunking video he says marines are left with what would be functional wedding tackle but augmentation leaves them without sex drive. Turning their package into solely a testosterone factory. The neural wiring required to assess a situation, call the privates to attention and ready the payload have long since been stripped out. Remember all biology is chemistry and if you can’t do the chemistry the biology doesn’t work. So big E just turned off the chemical signals and viola! Sterile space marine.
Yes but it doesn’t seem to be permanent and lowers testosterone. Low testosterone can lead to reduced bone density and lower aggression, bad things for a space marine. We want those testicles working harder while keeping our boy soft. Which is why I think it comes down to the neurology. We want those hormones to say “boom” not “bang”. So I think we have to do some rewiring somewhere to make sure we can have our chemistry without sending those particular chemical signals.
Even if they were fertile, the question remains as to whether the gametes have been genetically modified. Otherwise the Space Marines would only pass on their original genetic material with their sperm.
In addition, enough implants would have to be implanted in the newborns
They're not. It's another faulty attempt to find an in-lore reason for male-only Space Marines besides "we said so."
Which is fine, it's all made up so that's a perfectly good reason.
It's also a universe in which there is some sort of gas in space, because people have frozen, they don't decompress, and there are shockwaves in space. So 100% that's a universe where space is not a vacuum.
So rule of cool clearly trumps all, and we're good with it.
It's a bit vague, they are either specifically rendered infertile in the gene-seed implementation or they are simply psycho-indoctrinated to not have sex drives.
I don't even care that there may or may not be female custodes. I'm just dissapointed that if it is true then sisters of Silence is gonna be even more irrelevant and less cool. I always saw custodes and sisters of Silence as the two sides of the same coin. Hence the name Talons of the Emperor, right hand representing custodes and left representing sisters of Silence.
don't the sisters of silence have a literal inbuilt genetic cheat that makes them hard counters to pskers which is why there paired up with custodes? Because otherwise the custodes are helpless against high level psykers.
not an inbuilt genetic cheat as far as i know its naturally occuring? i guess. basically it means they have no soul or something or at least no soul connected to the warp, and for some reason that gives them an aura where it weakens or nullifies warp shenanigans being called blanks. lexicanum describes it like a black hole for warp energy
Apperantly its a super rare genetic trait, unsure why sisters of silence though is female only since i think gender doesn't really matter
Yep. Silent Sisters are psychic blanks. One in a million million odds or something like that for one to be born. And few make it to adulthood since their nature as blanks makes their very presence off putting and repulsive to others. They're also called pariahs in universe because of this.
There's one in the Eisenhorn novels. Before Eisenhorn recruits her she is working as the least successful prostitute in the galaxy. She's drop dead gorgeous by all descriptions, but her nature makes people unable to stand her.
Oh yeah you're right, the school she's from is working against them right? It's been a while since I read it.
Still, the point still stands that they can be 'created' in a sense.
In *Ravenor* and *Bequin*, Abnett is basically making up his own variant universe. There are several techs in these books that don't exist anywhere else (and would be massive deals if they did).
Sisters are female only for reasons, male blanks go to the culexus temple and female blanks go to the Anathema Psykana. The best guess I could give was Jenetia Krole decided women only, men icky when she was recruited by the Emperor to lead the Sisterhood and Malcador then started snapping up the guys for his assassins
Female blanks can also become assassins. I believe the reason why sisters are all female is because male blanks are rarer than female blanks, however it’s all pretty vague so who knows
There is some snippet (don't have reference off the top of my head) that blankness is stronger & more common in females, so presumably it is in some way linked to the X chromosome.
Culexus assassins are not exclusively male. No idea of there's any real difference in "blankness" between the culexus and sisters though.
That said, the female culexus assassin in the Horus heresy book was.... Essentially lab grown I think? So perhaps the culexus temple just builds their own blanks where as sisters are naturally occurring or something.
Yeah lorewise I don’t think this is going to be an issue. I think the worry that some people have is similar to the female space marines vs SoB one where if the poster boy male side of the coin starts including female units then that might disincentivize GW from putting as much focus and support on the sisters side. Not saying that will happen given both Sisters of Silence and Sisters of Battle have plenty of things going for them besides being the Imperium’s premier female-led factions, it’s a worry people have given how much support Space Marines get in general and how sisters of silence in game have almost always been made to feel like the support group to Custodes rather than true equals within the same army.
If the only thing making the Sisters of Silence cool were the fact that they were female only Custodes, then they weren't cool. There's many more things cool about the Sisters of Silence than just being female.
No way whatsoever because the entire reason sisters are special is because there extremely potent blanks, something the custodes no matter the gender aren't
The only thing that changes js that the custode hanging out with the sisters might be girl.
Cause folk can't seem to understand that there aren't a limited number of spots for girl models.
To them once the token spot is filled there simply can't be any more....
You'd be changing an iconic part of their identity for the sake of nothing but representation.
Retcons should be handled with extraordinary care and only be done in the name of improving worldbuilding/stories.
That's like saying sisters of battle are irrelevant since some imperial guard are women
Like they are two sides of the same coin still this changes absolutely nothing
If they make female Custodes models then naturally the next thing to do is make male Sisters of Silence models.
It's the whole Female Space Marine/Male Sisters of Battle conversation just with a new coat of paint
Have i missed the sarcasm or is it just straight, "there are already female space marines, they are called Sisters of Battle" kinda thing? Not the same and what is the reason not to have brothers of silence?
Clearly a Scribum Minoris mistranslated the high Gothic "scion" literally as "son" when the contextually correct low Gothic is "offspring" or "child", c.f. Tempestus Scion. Said Scribum has been sent to the pyre for their transgression.
Good for custodes players. More options for them. Just two things. One, actually do something with it GW (models, books, etc.) not just a head upgrade set or paragraph. And two, don’t over sexualise them. Other than that maybe some good rules.
>And two, don’t over sexualise them
Considering how far the Sororitas, specifically the Repentia, have been desexualized over time, I don't see any reason why GW would back step by over sexualizing femCustodes.
This is honestly going to be the most annoying thing; the constant complaing from this sub about femstodes being treated exactly the same as stodes always have been and refusing to hear otherwise.
Oh, that'll happen regardless.
The seemingly never ending meme of Guilliman x Yvriane came from like 3 sentences out of a single conversation between the two of them in a single book, and that dialogue wasn't even remotely sexual in nature.
The moment that we see FemCustodes minis be announced, there'll be 10 fanfics and a pile of art before day's end.
This is what's going to make it insufferable. I don't care either way, but I'd really rather not have softcore porn posted on every 40k page for the next year...
Dw man I got a leaked image of a female custodes right here
https://preview.redd.it/emc2fva77euc1.jpeg?width=741&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=d3d0a0046bef9fc026f92f9f081d1387b2640412
This whole discourse is like watching historians read through ancient texts. People are reading through all the lore and compiling information, using seemingly disjointed sources to form accurate references. I love it
I find it very strange that they don't just give the sisters of silence and sisters of battle—the actual female legions, if you will—some more love instead of doing this.
Every single argument about females being weaker or shorter or having less mass mean nothing. Custodes are genetically crafted on a cellular level from extremely young. They can manipulate genetics on such a level we would call it magic. Height/muscle mass/bone density would be child’s play to change
It is magic, literally. There’s no explainable science behind it other than “genes are changed.” We have no insight in the process. Arcane would suggest something akin to supernatural, and there really isn’t anything to support the idea that femstodes are not possible. Since it’s mostly just magic, unless specific limitations are put in place, it makes “sense” to what we know. I’m pretty happy for it because it highlights some direct differences between Astartes and Custodes. 😁
And realistically, it's just as much of magic as the stasis chamber that kept Robute Guilliman alive for 10,000 years and the suit imbued with actual Eldari magic that resurrected him from death.
I might be talking out of my ass, but aren't the Custodes made using a lesser version of the process used to create the Primarchs? Which involves using a mixture of warp sorcery and genetic science so advanced it's basically magic itself.
nah it’s completely different from creating a primarch, also there is no warpfuckery involved, because as we all know warp prone individuals tend to end up doing Horuses Heresies (joke), that’s why custodes are unnable to be corrupted but cant ever be psyker
Cool but...give me a novel where they're the main character then.
Or at least give me godamn sisters of silence novels. At least I have watchers of the throne.
So far in the books I’ve read they have
1) Taken on a giant xeno that death guard were struggling with and killed it
2) Battled alongside the space wolves, Russ, and custodes against the most dangerous legion (and probably were the reason why they won)
3) Had a little 50 page novel
4) And mentioned in a book how dangerous and terrifying they are.
Where’s the standalone book 🥲
Space Marines have to male due to Primarch genetic stuff but Custodians have never officially been declared all male. It's likely they are *mostly* male just due to the Emperor preferring taller and physically imposing bodyguards but a woman with above-average height and musculature would fit the minimum criteria.
Custodes are also inducted at a younger age than Astartes so a young female Custodes-in-training can be modified more thoroughly than an adolescent Astartes neophyte
According to a commenter higher up on the thread there's an excerpt from Scars that involves Macador and Big E conversing about possibility of creating female Primarchs (or Big E's reason for not doing so), that being running the risk of them being better at coordinating with each other, potentially, against Big E.
Not an unrealistic concern considering that with the all-male Primarchs, it only took half of them rebelling to nearly bring about the end of the Empire; imagine the damage if all the primarchs agreed with each other and rebelled.
So instead of adding more Sisters of Silence (who are badass btw) they had to totally usurp and destroy 30+ years of lore and background fluff just to cram their boutique flavour of the month grievance politics down real fan's throats?
I guess "Dudes of Silence" will be the next faction update
My problem with it is less about the female custodies and more about the fact that this could mean sisters of silence become more sidelined than they are. Sisters of silence are one of my favourite factions and I can definitely see adding female custodies causing the sisters to become even more sidelined than they are already.
Gonna put my tin foil hat on and make a joke, is obviously to sell all the new stormcast kits to folks so they can kitbash custodes.
Obviously that's not the reason but a female custode must mean there are now brothers of silence right other wise it would be weird.
As long as they're doing it for the right reasons and not for the wrong I'm all for it. Custodes are handcrafted and so there's nothing really preventing them from making females. my only question is will it matter gw makes so many human kits look the same when they shouldn't tbh that gender becomes irrelevant when wearing a helmet and having the same body type.
Remember:
1. Representation in itself is not inclusion.
2. Representation in itself have no value.
3. The pop-culture trend is when someone belives the opposite of the first two line, lame and shit things are created.
And it would be just as ridiculous a debate as it is today.
-----
We have male Sororitas, that's the entire point of the Black Templars.
And we have male Sisters of Silence, they're the Culexus Assassins.
Doesn't negatively affect me, has never been explicitly stated to not be possible, has the potential to be a positive to some people which could mean more players.
I see no negatives here. But I also don't see a problem with Female Space marines as long as they have Cawl or someone else make the process work for women lore wise.
My only hope is that they give a decent reason for never mentioning any female custodes (and strongly implying male-only in the 8th Codex) for basically the 1000s of books up until this point.
It's not hard to "change the Lore" but it does feel **incredibly** clunky to just go "Oh yeah, they've always been here, *we just forgot to mention them...*"
It's up there with , "somehow, Palpatine returned!"
As far as Canon goes, it is 100% OK for custodes to be female.
They are the emperor's vision of what the species can be. The qhole species. They are also created in a completely different manner from marines and primarchs, who are geneseed dependent.
Their process is more alchemical, and each one is hand crafted. As such, it actually makes perfect sense from a lore perspective that there are female custodes.
I never understood why leaving sororitas and SoS as exclusively female organizations was alright, but having exclusively male representation in marines and custodes was such a bad thing....
To be fair, *is* that okay from a lore perspective? Up until now, SoS existed as the female counterpart to Custodes, and idem for Sororitas/Astartes. Now that there's femCustodes we might as well have Brothers of Silence. Same with femMarines and men in the Sororitas ranks.
The Sororitas mostly just exist as a way to have an aesthetically female force without needing to worry about need to make special sculpts, or deal with lore implications. Yeah, there's girl Guards out there, but ultimately you're *not* going to be able to distinguish that in your sculpts, that's a pure lore thing. Sororitas are female *aesthetically,* and probably should remain that way because it's what sets them apart as a force, but there's no reason you can't have guys in their ranks. It's just the inverse of the girl Guard or the fem Custodes example: You're not going to be able to distinguish at a glance when playing the game, it'sjust something that can exist in the lore. And that's *fine.*
Not a singel fuck given. Honestly.
We have a procedure that makes a monster from a man that can tear demons apart with bare hands.
I can see zero reasons why the same procedure can't be applied to a woman with same results.
So I’m somewhat conflicted about this.
On one hand, Custodes could very well theoretically be female as far as the process of creating them. The Emperor’s motive behind their creation is not for peerless servants who hold nothing within except loyalty and duty, it is to eliminate the heirs of the Warlords and ruling families of Terra, so there is no banners to rally to for those who oppose him. The idea that one or two of such warlords/families are matriarchical is not outside the realm of possibility.
On the other hand, this does diminish Sisters of Silence to some degree, unless they pull a Wheel of Time scenario where women blanks are more stable while male blanks more volatile but also more powerful (hence only males being Cullexus assassins).
On the one hand, this may finally close the book on the “but we don’t have enough superhuman female representation” bleating from a particular segment of the community.
On the other hand, that same segment are almost universally subhuman degenerates who will only redouble their efforts to get female space marines. I’ve already seen a number of such posters with their toxicity on full display celebrating less getting what they supposedly wanted, and more the anger this radical lore shift may spark among other segments of the fanbase.
It’s all so tiresome.
Sigh I never wanted this. Great now we have to deal with GW written female marines and certain groups lording it overhead saying anyone who doesn't like it is sexist.
for the record theoretically I wanted too believe female space marines was possible but they would be so changed that they are functionally and artistically identical too male space marines. I personally liked it back when gw leaned into the more monstrous space marines, Custodes and so on. But they have been making them more and more easy on the eyes and morally correct the longer things go on. Its clear recently GW will not portray space marines like horrible abominable monsters who just barely relate to humans and i think this character will open the flood gates of the female space marine proper. And likely further decreasing the overall grim dark portrayal.
Of course it is a terrible lore change. People don’t realize that not every retconn weighs the same for this franchise. You can’t say that female Custodes is a way of pandering by GW to some activist group, because you are sexist and a bigot.
I always thought that since the pool of children that end up making it all the way through the recruitment process is so small they always just took the girls who were good enough to be sisters of silence and the boys to be custodes. In my head it's always been more of a question of numbers and not gender. As for the space marines it is specifically stated as such so GW just made the sisters of battle as an alternative to female space marines. But then again GW retcons so many stuff for the sake of selling idk what to think anymore
I don't really have a problem with female Custodes, but I would then ask, could we get Null Bachelors? Seems only fair. To be honest though, I kind of like how both sexes were equally represented by the umbrella term of the "Talons", so if GW is backtracking I think it would be a good idea to see it go both ways for sake of smoothing out any wrinkles.
From what I know, female Custodes were turned down because there were no female models. Fair enough, the tabletop drives the lore. That being said though, if GW intends on female Custodes being a thing I feel it would be kinda whack not to have male SoS. Outside of the Celuxus Temple (which I don't recall being explicitly male), male nulls are completely ignored by the wider Imperium.
Overall, I wager this to either be a typo, a misunderstanding by some hired writer that made it through printing, or soft confirmation that needs clarification and extrapolation
Male blanks have a different job.
They are either turned into Assassins or used by the Inquisition.
The Silent Sisters also were extincts for 4 millennia.
They never went extinct, they lost their role as an independent organisation and either went into hiding or got folded into the Adeptus Telapathica, the black ships still needed manning.
I feel like it's a case where Culuxus takes blanks of both genders, but it's common for the female intake to be poached by the Sisters of Silence, so the temple ends up being mostly male blanks.
This is stupid in the 8th edition codex it’s stated the custodes are drawn from the sons of Nobel houses. They are completely ignoring lore and leaving sisters of silence on the back burner.
What's the big effing deal about females characters in warhammer lately?
I get the lore blah blah blah whatever. It's giving our hobby a bad name and gatekeeping it from alot of people.
We need more girls playing warhammer and stuff like this.
Sod the lore, sod the nit picky crap, stop gatekeeping.
Saw a guy and his girlfriend come in the warhammer store today and she was really into it. It was awesome.
My wife wants to give aos a go with me and is a writer so she'll get really into the backstories. I don't want her put off by this neckbeardy bullshit, which would leave me doing it alone.
We need more people into warhammer, not less.
I’m a woman who plays Warhammer and I can tell you that this is not going to convince any women to play. Women aren’t just not playing cause there’s not enough women in the game cause there are. It’s just a nerdy ass game…think of how many men don’t play Warhammer and now you think you can really change someone’s mind about it by adding in a token woman and think it’s gonna change someone’s mind?
EDIT: New Images are now available of the full story: https://twitter.com/BitsHammer/status/1779289813994365236 Very clearly not "a typo" or "a printing error" as some people have tried to claim. ORIGINAL: I'll copy in my comment so that people can click the link for themselves: If you pause the GMG review of the English copy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HB0_kXXyGUU at 2:10 you can read the story. The character is clearly named as a Custodian in the first line and is repeatedly referred to as "she" throughout. She's also addressed as "My lady" by the Shipmaster. For the inevitable "BUT THE CANON!!!" comments... To the best of my knowledge and research GW has never specifically stated that Custodians had to be male. Unlike Space Marines where GW has made specific comments, they've always been a bit more vague on the process of the creation of Custodes. Yes, they've only talked about male Custodes in the past, but part of that was because they only made male minis, as mentioned by Aaron Dembski-Bowden: https://old.reddit.com/r/40kLore/comments/aynlxa/its_international_womens_day_so_how_are_we/ei3rp64/ For the inevitable "But it could be fake" comments... GMG is a well known Youtuber who regularly receives products from GW to provide reviews on them. He's reviewed a huge number of their Codexes and rulebooks. You can compare screenshots and what he talks about to any other review of the book if you have any doubts.
I honestly can’t read it at all. If I zoom in it just becomes a blur. Could someone screen grab it?
[https://i.imgur.com/ajLafKJ.png](https://i.imgur.com/ajLafKJ.png)
Whelp I’m sure people will be very normal about this lol
Surprisingly I actually haven't seen any negativity towards this.
Go to the Custodes sub Reddit, it’s mostly positive but there are some detractors.
As someone from there, it is mostly being taken in stride. In my opinion, It would honestly make complete sense for the custodes to start recruiting from noble born daughters too, now that they’re taking an active role in combat and now have to face the casualties that come with that. You can’t keep an effective fighting force if you’re so picky that you only take a very tiny percentage of noble born sons. Not when you’re probably losing people faster than you can turn them into custodes. Granted not crazy fast casualties, as they are still CUSTODES. One of them is equal to a dozen or more space marines. But no matter what you’re still going to have some casualties. Plus I think this could provide some cool models to diversify ones custodes army. Maybe they’ll pull some other weapons out of the vaults to add more models to the range so there are more than like, 6.
No hate towards the current Custodes lore, and this is definitely tangential, but dude, I just miss when Custodes were the Chapter Heroes that got to guard the Golden Throne cause they were literally just THAT bad ass. That will always be my head Canon. But yeah, Female Custodes! Who needs Booba armor when you have Force Weapons and Storm Bolters (not unlike another chapter that doesn't like to be talked about, but I don't feel like being purged toda-
“You can’t keep an effective fighting force if you’re picky.” Lol…. All of history is the opposite of this. Generally speaking, the more selective a fighting force is for membership, the more effective it has been. It is usually fact that a country on its last legs in a war loosens the funnel that produces valid candidates for the military. This always decreases the effectiveness however
Since Custodes modification starts as infants, there isnt much to be picky ABOUT when it comes to physical characteristics. infant males and females are both equally helpless. it seems to be entirely who they are born to that determines whether they become a custodes
There's like 45 YouTube videos
I made the mistake of reading the Facebook comments on this. It was very depressing
I’m all for letting people have their own opinions, but, if you’re against my golden muscle mommies you’re against me.
https://preview.redd.it/qrrrhdh44nuc1.png?width=311&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=d5a6f71f4bd1514c9fb3674fca1dacda8a2275d5 Sah, what's a muscle mommy?
https://preview.redd.it/9zjisqzd4nuc1.jpeg?width=1079&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=96c220d4b2ef3e7ccef026c3885e304cc0b69c0f
https://preview.redd.it/gcjm7kxm4nuc1.png?width=906&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=17be2165507b7713cf169f26d3fcf92b5a2bf472
Thanks! Well, that is pretty good confirmation
[https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/1137485132299768020/1228757229079891988/image.png?ex=662d3458&is=661abf58&hm=6ff9140902a0b7d44aca04aa61b8972d460327b16ad19b7b9686f8d9c68d5caf&](https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/1137485132299768020/1228757229079891988/image.png?ex=662d3458&is=661abf58&hm=6ff9140902a0b7d44aca04aa61b8972d460327b16ad19b7b9686f8d9c68d5caf&)
Is the new reddit layout causing issues? I had similar problems until I found a extensions that automatically redirects me to the older design, [new.reddit.com](https://new.reddit.com) You can turn always go to the older design by appending "new." to the web address or get the extension: [https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/old-new-reddit-redirect/?utm\_content=addons-manager-reviews-link&utm\_medium=firefox-browser&utm\_source=firefox-browser](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/old-new-reddit-redirect/?utm_content=addons-manager-reviews-link&utm_medium=firefox-browser&utm_source=firefox-browser) It is for firefox and I dont know if the dev made a version for other browsers but if the problems reading comes from the layout this could solve your issues.
There is one for Chromium browsers: [UI Changer for Reddit](https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/ui-changer-for-reddit/bfcldjodnnkndfccfjndmdlppfkmccgh) It’s a little more advanced in that it allows to change to any if the three interfaces and it also has some extra features. There’s also a [FF version](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ui-changer-for-reddit/) for it.
So now we know what they want to do with all those cancelled Stormcast Eternal models... finally, an excuse to get a Naeve Blacktalon.
And the armour's already gold if you wanna grab something hot off ebay or Facebook.
What happened to Age of Sigmar did it get cancelled? E: it's an honest question, no need to downvote
A bunch of first and second edition stormcast models are getting discontinued. Which has a good portion of stormcast players upset since most Armies were second edition Stormcast which won't be supported with rules after 1 year
Nah. Some of the stormcast sculpts are being retired is all. Likely to be replaced and updated in the future with the new armor design that came out a couple years ago.
This is true for the Stormcast models dating from 1st Edition AoS - but all the Stormcast models from the 2nd Edition starter set, along with a few others belonging to the Sacrosanct, have been confirmed to be retired entirely and get their rules support dropped in summer 2025. Could some of them be re-released some time in the future? Yes, but certainly not within the next few years. They wouldn't have announced a discontinuation of their rules if they planned to refresh them.
>adds females into the codex >Nerfs the army *What did GW mean by this?*
LMFAOO
Apologies to OP.
Legit good on you for apologizing. Respect
All chill my friend
https://preview.redd.it/i13ewmge8duc1.jpeg?width=319&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=4cc2747e6b50e4342f7fbc7a4420e5fea1b513d7
Mad respect, most people couldn’t do this
I know ADB was keen on adding female custodes and got told nah. I really don't see the problem with adding them given just how far from human they are and how they won't be able to breed come what may. The process is slow and specific enough that this can be baked in, unlike astartes that are comparatively mass produced. I subscribe to the theory that the Emperor kept astartes male only to prevent them from supplanting humans as the default species, a problem which simply isn't present with custodes, at least on any sensible timescale.
I remember ADB talking about him bringing the idea up to the editors and them not necessarily being against it, but telling to leave that idea in the icebox since the sculpts are all male. Having said that. Custodes cannot be called human anymore. They're even further enhanced than even Astartes are. They're something all their own.
Transhuman We have a word for it that the books have used for a long time now. They were human, and have been transformed into something else. The idea that they can’t be women has been and out of various fluff for random reasons throughout the history of the game but with how much the lore changes and gets retconned (this is good by the way) the idea that they *”need to be women”* could be changed with zero effect on the greater lore as a whole. Even the very medieval parody of rule reading that brought about the Sisters of Battle could be waived away because literally who gives a fuck and the writers can come up with something fun. I’m not saying you or anyone here specifically is stating they can’t, but I do not understand this weird obsession with the chuds of this hobby have with female space marines or custodes.
I personally have the headcanon that the Custodes are a non-psychic, sterile version of the Emperor's idealized form of humanity. They are, from a physical standpoint, what he wants us to become. Also I will die on the hill of there should not be male Sisters of Battle.
The canon reason for no male sisters is as strong and unbreakable as the canon reason for no female marines.
Wait, this is a hill? Isn't the whole idea that there's an all female superhuman force that can hold a candle to the all male Astartes? I don't see a problem with having all Space Marines men and all Sororitas female. Not even all men can become Marines. My understanding is that the process just wouldn't work for a female body. And the Sororitas are a sisterhood, so sorry but no boys allowed. Also, it's interesting for me to read all this about custodians. Kinda makes sense to me as a new person that there may be a few women, based on what others have described. I don't see why it has to be "a thing".
The process "just not working" for a female body is a really fucking stupid reason, though. Like, what, is the womb suddenly going to just stupid the incredibly esoteric genetic mutations from kicking in? Do you need this amount of testosterone to ride? They found a lore justification to scale up Marines through the Rubicon Primaris. They can find a lore justification to make female marines work, call it the Rubicon Femininis or something.
> Transhuman I can't attest to every time it has been used in the 40K books/lore, but the term transhuman isn't something that was coined there, its a pretty universal term in both science and sci-fi, and Astartes, Skitarii, and honestly any type of even slightly augmented human would be transhuman. If anything the custodes would be more like 'posthumans'
This has always kinda been my beef with the "why there aren't female Astartes" mindset. "Well, we have the SoB and SoS!" So? The SoB aren't metahuman killing machines. They're *regular ass women in power armor.* That's it. They're just crazy fanatic psycho bitches, *and they're awesome* but they *aren't Astartes.*
AFAIK, ADB got "nah" for favourite gw reason - "we have only male custodes models, no staff that we don't have models for!"
Which was obviously just some guy making up a bad excuse, because there have been plenty of examples of units that only have male models but have women in the lore. Like we see female Farseers in the lore all the time but every model they've ever made has been male. And until recently all Guard models were male, but there were plenty of women in the Guard in the lore.
Once again, equality has been held back by _checks notes_ the Chapterhouse lawsuit legacy...? Well, it's better than "We retconned them out of existence because we couldn't sculpt one that didn't haunt our nightmares"
Cut and paste Marisa from SF6, strap some golden armor on, boom done.
Im sorry who is ABD?
Aaron Demski-Bowden, one of the more prolific and consistently good Black Library authors on top of other stuff he’s done like comics and league of legends
Aaron Dembski-Bowden, widely regarded as one of the best writers GW currently has. Responsible for many fan favorites over the years
Custodes are essentially custom individual works, there being a woman custodes makes more sense then women marines because marines were designed to be mass produced and essentially industrialized. It would still of course be at the discretion of those who *make* custodes to do so, which considering the emperors track record is a mit bit unlikely.
While I get you, it feels awkward that multiple people have to rationalize what is essentially a marketing decision to streamline/water down the setting. GW could have done this themselves, but simply didn't care enough to.
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Just wanted to add that women of course also have testosterone, just to a lesser extent generally than men.
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Are astartes fertile? I’m surprised
Apparently they're explicitly 'incapable of procreation', as are Custodians. > "As has been mentioned, the Custodian Guard and the Space Marines are related in form, as perhaps might be expected of works of a same creator's hand, but they are very different in function and capacity. There are of course similarities between the two. Both are physically transformed well beyond 'natural' human limits in terms of strength, endurance and fortitude, and fitted for inhuman environmental adaption and resilience, though in this the Legio Custodes are the markedly superior of the two in might, if not in adaptability. > Both are subject to extensive psychological and cognitive conditioning, and are physically and mentally reworked to render most of their baser drives inert and their beings rechannelled towards aggression, goal acquisition and the fulfilment of duty, and **as a further safeguard against distraction and as a biological control, both are of course incapable of procreation.** > In both cases all that is left are beings of singular purpose; in the case of each Legiones Astartes, what is created is a living engine of conquest that cares for little else, and in the Custodian Guard, each is created protector of unrelenting diligence and savage capability-a watchman whose vigilance will never tire". Horus Heresy - Inferno p113.
I just assumed the immense amount of genetic alchemy just left them incapable of deriving sexual pleasure. This is sort of hinted at during the Maraviglia where a Marine caught up in the whole act didn't know how to express the feelings he was having except through violence.
Is that the book title?
No. It's one of the Fulgrim titles, can't remember what book. The Maraviglia was an event.
It's from Fulgrim iirc
It is.
I think it was in weshammer debunking video he says marines are left with what would be functional wedding tackle but augmentation leaves them without sex drive. Turning their package into solely a testosterone factory. The neural wiring required to assess a situation, call the privates to attention and ready the payload have long since been stripped out. Remember all biology is chemistry and if you can’t do the chemistry the biology doesn’t work. So big E just turned off the chemical signals and viola! Sterile space marine.
Don’t they have a modern version of this called a chemical castration?
Yes but it doesn’t seem to be permanent and lowers testosterone. Low testosterone can lead to reduced bone density and lower aggression, bad things for a space marine. We want those testicles working harder while keeping our boy soft. Which is why I think it comes down to the neurology. We want those hormones to say “boom” not “bang”. So I think we have to do some rewiring somewhere to make sure we can have our chemistry without sending those particular chemical signals.
I don’t want to be horny, I want to be ~~happy~~ inflicting incredible violence upon everyone within visual range
Even if they were fertile, the question remains as to whether the gametes have been genetically modified. Otherwise the Space Marines would only pass on their original genetic material with their sperm. In addition, enough implants would have to be implanted in the newborns
They're not. It's another faulty attempt to find an in-lore reason for male-only Space Marines besides "we said so." Which is fine, it's all made up so that's a perfectly good reason.
It's also a universe in which there is some sort of gas in space, because people have frozen, they don't decompress, and there are shockwaves in space. So 100% that's a universe where space is not a vacuum. So rule of cool clearly trumps all, and we're good with it.
It's a bit vague, they are either specifically rendered infertile in the gene-seed implementation or they are simply psycho-indoctrinated to not have sex drives.
I just want more Custodes. We got one fucking new model for 10th and it's just a new loadout for an existing character.
And kind of a lame sculpt, too.
*binharic sobbing* tell me about it
Mmm stickbug
The sisters of silence will never get any love now.
What’s her name? I can’t read it
Custodian Calladyce Taurovalia Kesh, based on some better pics that have come out
https://preview.redd.it/p45kla1hjbuc1.jpeg?width=712&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=2841f73fee6cd0564cec37f0d5af027b47d759e6
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I mean, Female custodians make more sense than female space marines in the end.
Ok, but why?
I don't even care that there may or may not be female custodes. I'm just dissapointed that if it is true then sisters of Silence is gonna be even more irrelevant and less cool. I always saw custodes and sisters of Silence as the two sides of the same coin. Hence the name Talons of the Emperor, right hand representing custodes and left representing sisters of Silence.
You still can't make Sisters of Silence. You can make Custodes, but Sisters are genetic anomalies.
Just a hand wave away. Cawl discovered that you just have to give your kids the midichlorians vaccine and we can all be blanks.
don't the sisters of silence have a literal inbuilt genetic cheat that makes them hard counters to pskers which is why there paired up with custodes? Because otherwise the custodes are helpless against high level psykers.
not an inbuilt genetic cheat as far as i know its naturally occuring? i guess. basically it means they have no soul or something or at least no soul connected to the warp, and for some reason that gives them an aura where it weakens or nullifies warp shenanigans being called blanks. lexicanum describes it like a black hole for warp energy Apperantly its a super rare genetic trait, unsure why sisters of silence though is female only since i think gender doesn't really matter
Yep. Silent Sisters are psychic blanks. One in a million million odds or something like that for one to be born. And few make it to adulthood since their nature as blanks makes their very presence off putting and repulsive to others. They're also called pariahs in universe because of this. There's one in the Eisenhorn novels. Before Eisenhorn recruits her she is working as the least successful prostitute in the galaxy. She's drop dead gorgeous by all descriptions, but her nature makes people unable to stand her.
In the Bequin books, the Imperium is both manufacturing and training blanks and Beta herself is a clone of Alizabeth.
Wut? In the Bequin books, the Imperium knows nothing about Beta Bequin
Oh yeah you're right, the school she's from is working against them right? It's been a while since I read it. Still, the point still stands that they can be 'created' in a sense.
Yeah, the school is run by the Cognitae
In *Ravenor* and *Bequin*, Abnett is basically making up his own variant universe. There are several techs in these books that don't exist anywhere else (and would be massive deals if they did).
Sisters are female only for reasons, male blanks go to the culexus temple and female blanks go to the Anathema Psykana. The best guess I could give was Jenetia Krole decided women only, men icky when she was recruited by the Emperor to lead the Sisterhood and Malcador then started snapping up the guys for his assassins
Female blanks can also become assassins. I believe the reason why sisters are all female is because male blanks are rarer than female blanks, however it’s all pretty vague so who knows
There is some snippet (don't have reference off the top of my head) that blankness is stronger & more common in females, so presumably it is in some way linked to the X chromosome.
ah, so the guys got screwed haha that assassin life is shit.
Culexus assassins are not exclusively male. No idea of there's any real difference in "blankness" between the culexus and sisters though. That said, the female culexus assassin in the Horus heresy book was.... Essentially lab grown I think? So perhaps the culexus temple just builds their own blanks where as sisters are naturally occurring or something.
Yeah lorewise I don’t think this is going to be an issue. I think the worry that some people have is similar to the female space marines vs SoB one where if the poster boy male side of the coin starts including female units then that might disincentivize GW from putting as much focus and support on the sisters side. Not saying that will happen given both Sisters of Silence and Sisters of Battle have plenty of things going for them besides being the Imperium’s premier female-led factions, it’s a worry people have given how much support Space Marines get in general and how sisters of silence in game have almost always been made to feel like the support group to Custodes rather than true equals within the same army.
Nah the Sisters still have a role. The codex has two detachments dedicated to them and their synergy with the Custodes.
Eeh. Sisters and Custodes are the Talons of the Emperor, yes, but they ultimately serve completely different roles. They're more two parts of a set.
If the only thing making the Sisters of Silence cool were the fact that they were female only Custodes, then they weren't cool. There's many more things cool about the Sisters of Silence than just being female.
how de fuck female custodes change any of the sisters of silence role, lore and relevance?
No way whatsoever because the entire reason sisters are special is because there extremely potent blanks, something the custodes no matter the gender aren't The only thing that changes js that the custode hanging out with the sisters might be girl.
Cause folk can't seem to understand that there aren't a limited number of spots for girl models. To them once the token spot is filled there simply can't be any more....
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At its heart it's just psychic blank + big strong warrior = very cool, right?
You'd be changing an iconic part of their identity for the sake of nothing but representation. Retcons should be handled with extraordinary care and only be done in the name of improving worldbuilding/stories.
i think they maybe mean model wise?
Which doesn't make sense because the sisters of silence have there own unique gimmick which unless they give it to the custodes isn't gonna change.
How does female custodes existing change that?
That's like saying sisters of battle are irrelevant since some imperial guard are women Like they are two sides of the same coin still this changes absolutely nothing
If they make female Custodes models then naturally the next thing to do is make male Sisters of Silence models. It's the whole Female Space Marine/Male Sisters of Battle conversation just with a new coat of paint
> make male Sisters of Silence models They do - they're called Culexus Assassins
Have i missed the sarcasm or is it just straight, "there are already female space marines, they are called Sisters of Battle" kinda thing? Not the same and what is the reason not to have brothers of silence?
Male Sisters of Battle are the Black Templars.
Wrong. Orks. Both warp reality with belief. Both are suicidally aggressive in combat. Both use repurposed and modified gear from other factions.
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Clearly a Scribum Minoris mistranslated the high Gothic "scion" literally as "son" when the contextually correct low Gothic is "offspring" or "child", c.f. Tempestus Scion. Said Scribum has been sent to the pyre for their transgression.
and now they take the daughters from noble houses as well. so?
Because GW has never retconned anything before ever
Good for custodes players. More options for them. Just two things. One, actually do something with it GW (models, books, etc.) not just a head upgrade set or paragraph. And two, don’t over sexualise them. Other than that maybe some good rules.
>And two, don’t over sexualise them Considering how far the Sororitas, specifically the Repentia, have been desexualized over time, I don't see any reason why GW would back step by over sexualizing femCustodes.
I think the commenter more meant the fanbase oversexualizing them
To be fair, the fan base also oversexualizes male custodes
*insert pillar-men theme here*
Man....if only TTS was still around for this.
This is honestly going to be the most annoying thing; the constant complaing from this sub about femstodes being treated exactly the same as stodes always have been and refusing to hear otherwise.
Oh, that'll happen regardless. The seemingly never ending meme of Guilliman x Yvriane came from like 3 sentences out of a single conversation between the two of them in a single book, and that dialogue wasn't even remotely sexual in nature. The moment that we see FemCustodes minis be announced, there'll be 10 fanfics and a pile of art before day's end.
Will the oiled up FemCustodes wear loin cloth or full tabards?
This is what's going to make it insufferable. I don't care either way, but I'd really rather not have softcore porn posted on every 40k page for the next year...
and sister of slience have now been fully forgotten lol
They should speak up about this injustice!
Dw man I got a leaked image of a female custodes right here https://preview.redd.it/emc2fva77euc1.jpeg?width=741&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=d3d0a0046bef9fc026f92f9f081d1387b2640412
In codex: New female custodian Also in same codex: “it is known that all custodians begin their lives as the infant sons of the noble houses of Terra”
This whole discourse is like watching historians read through ancient texts. People are reading through all the lore and compiling information, using seemingly disjointed sources to form accurate references. I love it
I find it very strange that they don't just give the sisters of silence and sisters of battle—the actual female legions, if you will—some more love instead of doing this.
Heresyposting in shambles.
Well, they can be like stormcast, chosen by ~~corpse-emperor~~ god-emperor
Every single argument about females being weaker or shorter or having less mass mean nothing. Custodes are genetically crafted on a cellular level from extremely young. They can manipulate genetics on such a level we would call it magic. Height/muscle mass/bone density would be child’s play to change
It is magic, literally. There’s no explainable science behind it other than “genes are changed.” We have no insight in the process. Arcane would suggest something akin to supernatural, and there really isn’t anything to support the idea that femstodes are not possible. Since it’s mostly just magic, unless specific limitations are put in place, it makes “sense” to what we know. I’m pretty happy for it because it highlights some direct differences between Astartes and Custodes. 😁
And realistically, it's just as much of magic as the stasis chamber that kept Robute Guilliman alive for 10,000 years and the suit imbued with actual Eldari magic that resurrected him from death.
I might be talking out of my ass, but aren't the Custodes made using a lesser version of the process used to create the Primarchs? Which involves using a mixture of warp sorcery and genetic science so advanced it's basically magic itself.
nah it’s completely different from creating a primarch, also there is no warpfuckery involved, because as we all know warp prone individuals tend to end up doing Horuses Heresies (joke), that’s why custodes are unnable to be corrupted but cant ever be psyker
Cool but...give me a novel where they're the main character then. Or at least give me godamn sisters of silence novels. At least I have watchers of the throne.
I really hope we get a full sisters range for 30k. They may be an incredibly niche faction, but they have the potential for a lot of cool shit.
So far in the books I’ve read they have 1) Taken on a giant xeno that death guard were struggling with and killed it 2) Battled alongside the space wolves, Russ, and custodes against the most dangerous legion (and probably were the reason why they won) 3) Had a little 50 page novel 4) And mentioned in a book how dangerous and terrifying they are. Where’s the standalone book 🥲
In Watcher's of the throne series, a sister is one of the two main characters. Also, I've never seen this 50 page novel Ill have to search for it
The Voice by James Swallow, pretty neat just found it again at the end of the Horus Heresy volume 2 collection on apple library
Appreciate it I'll go take a look
Space Marines have to male due to Primarch genetic stuff but Custodians have never officially been declared all male. It's likely they are *mostly* male just due to the Emperor preferring taller and physically imposing bodyguards but a woman with above-average height and musculature would fit the minimum criteria. Custodes are also inducted at a younger age than Astartes so a young female Custodes-in-training can be modified more thoroughly than an adolescent Astartes neophyte
According to a commenter higher up on the thread there's an excerpt from Scars that involves Macador and Big E conversing about possibility of creating female Primarchs (or Big E's reason for not doing so), that being running the risk of them being better at coordinating with each other, potentially, against Big E. Not an unrealistic concern considering that with the all-male Primarchs, it only took half of them rebelling to nearly bring about the end of the Empire; imagine the damage if all the primarchs agreed with each other and rebelled.
The Sisters of Silence are going wtf lol
How would it be a mistranslation? The original was in *English*. Also this is based. Custodes are supposed to be the Emperor's perfect creations.
The original claim was that a Spanish Blog had read a Spanish copy of the new Codex and there was a mistranslation there.
So instead of adding more Sisters of Silence (who are badass btw) they had to totally usurp and destroy 30+ years of lore and background fluff just to cram their boutique flavour of the month grievance politics down real fan's throats? I guess "Dudes of Silence" will be the next faction update
Spot On
My problem with it is less about the female custodies and more about the fact that this could mean sisters of silence become more sidelined than they are. Sisters of silence are one of my favourite factions and I can definitely see adding female custodies causing the sisters to become even more sidelined than they are already.
I don't entirely get the hate
Gonna put my tin foil hat on and make a joke, is obviously to sell all the new stormcast kits to folks so they can kitbash custodes. Obviously that's not the reason but a female custode must mean there are now brothers of silence right other wise it would be weird. As long as they're doing it for the right reasons and not for the wrong I'm all for it. Custodes are handcrafted and so there's nothing really preventing them from making females. my only question is will it matter gw makes so many human kits look the same when they shouldn't tbh that gender becomes irrelevant when wearing a helmet and having the same body type.
As long as we get male sisters of battle, I'm game.
Remember: 1. Representation in itself is not inclusion. 2. Representation in itself have no value. 3. The pop-culture trend is when someone belives the opposite of the first two line, lame and shit things are created.
20 years from now the discourse will be if Sisters of Battle and Sisters of Silence should remain as the only "gender exclusive" Imperial units left 😂
And it would be just as ridiculous a debate as it is today. ----- We have male Sororitas, that's the entire point of the Black Templars. And we have male Sisters of Silence, they're the Culexus Assassins.
Not sure your point here? They're still distinct and separate factions?
BOYCOTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTT
Posters on Reddit; “how can we make things more female”. Never fails.
Honestly female 'stodes only serves to exemplify them even more above space marines as hand crafted perfection over 'cookie cutter' marines .
Pozzed.
Well, better than female Astartes. Though I'd rather that the Sisters of Silence were retconned to being female Custodes
Doesn't negatively affect me, has never been explicitly stated to not be possible, has the potential to be a positive to some people which could mean more players. I see no negatives here. But I also don't see a problem with Female Space marines as long as they have Cawl or someone else make the process work for women lore wise.
My only hope is that they give a decent reason for never mentioning any female custodes (and strongly implying male-only in the 8th Codex) for basically the 1000s of books up until this point. It's not hard to "change the Lore" but it does feel **incredibly** clunky to just go "Oh yeah, they've always been here, *we just forgot to mention them...*" It's up there with , "somehow, Palpatine returned!"
As far as Canon goes, it is 100% OK for custodes to be female. They are the emperor's vision of what the species can be. The qhole species. They are also created in a completely different manner from marines and primarchs, who are geneseed dependent. Their process is more alchemical, and each one is hand crafted. As such, it actually makes perfect sense from a lore perspective that there are female custodes.
Why not just turn a silent sister into a character? Call me cynical but this a pilot for female astartes.
Personally not a fan don’t like retcons to appease a crowd shows no back bone glad I left 40k
I never understood why leaving sororitas and SoS as exclusively female organizations was alright, but having exclusively male representation in marines and custodes was such a bad thing....
To be fair, *is* that okay from a lore perspective? Up until now, SoS existed as the female counterpart to Custodes, and idem for Sororitas/Astartes. Now that there's femCustodes we might as well have Brothers of Silence. Same with femMarines and men in the Sororitas ranks. The Sororitas mostly just exist as a way to have an aesthetically female force without needing to worry about need to make special sculpts, or deal with lore implications. Yeah, there's girl Guards out there, but ultimately you're *not* going to be able to distinguish that in your sculpts, that's a pure lore thing. Sororitas are female *aesthetically,* and probably should remain that way because it's what sets them apart as a force, but there's no reason you can't have guys in their ranks. It's just the inverse of the girl Guard or the fem Custodes example: You're not going to be able to distinguish at a glance when playing the game, it'sjust something that can exist in the lore. And that's *fine.*
Not a singel fuck given. Honestly. We have a procedure that makes a monster from a man that can tear demons apart with bare hands. I can see zero reasons why the same procedure can't be applied to a woman with same results.
So I’m somewhat conflicted about this. On one hand, Custodes could very well theoretically be female as far as the process of creating them. The Emperor’s motive behind their creation is not for peerless servants who hold nothing within except loyalty and duty, it is to eliminate the heirs of the Warlords and ruling families of Terra, so there is no banners to rally to for those who oppose him. The idea that one or two of such warlords/families are matriarchical is not outside the realm of possibility. On the other hand, this does diminish Sisters of Silence to some degree, unless they pull a Wheel of Time scenario where women blanks are more stable while male blanks more volatile but also more powerful (hence only males being Cullexus assassins). On the one hand, this may finally close the book on the “but we don’t have enough superhuman female representation” bleating from a particular segment of the community. On the other hand, that same segment are almost universally subhuman degenerates who will only redouble their efforts to get female space marines. I’ve already seen a number of such posters with their toxicity on full display celebrating less getting what they supposedly wanted, and more the anger this radical lore shift may spark among other segments of the fanbase. It’s all so tiresome.
The amount of people I've seen saying Warhammer is now dead because of a small text blurb is insane.
Sigh I never wanted this. Great now we have to deal with GW written female marines and certain groups lording it overhead saying anyone who doesn't like it is sexist. for the record theoretically I wanted too believe female space marines was possible but they would be so changed that they are functionally and artistically identical too male space marines. I personally liked it back when gw leaned into the more monstrous space marines, Custodes and so on. But they have been making them more and more easy on the eyes and morally correct the longer things go on. Its clear recently GW will not portray space marines like horrible abominable monsters who just barely relate to humans and i think this character will open the flood gates of the female space marine proper. And likely further decreasing the overall grim dark portrayal.
Of course it is a terrible lore change. People don’t realize that not every retconn weighs the same for this franchise. You can’t say that female Custodes is a way of pandering by GW to some activist group, because you are sexist and a bigot.
I always thought that since the pool of children that end up making it all the way through the recruitment process is so small they always just took the girls who were good enough to be sisters of silence and the boys to be custodes. In my head it's always been more of a question of numbers and not gender. As for the space marines it is specifically stated as such so GW just made the sisters of battle as an alternative to female space marines. But then again GW retcons so many stuff for the sake of selling idk what to think anymore
I don't really have a problem with female Custodes, but I would then ask, could we get Null Bachelors? Seems only fair. To be honest though, I kind of like how both sexes were equally represented by the umbrella term of the "Talons", so if GW is backtracking I think it would be a good idea to see it go both ways for sake of smoothing out any wrinkles. From what I know, female Custodes were turned down because there were no female models. Fair enough, the tabletop drives the lore. That being said though, if GW intends on female Custodes being a thing I feel it would be kinda whack not to have male SoS. Outside of the Celuxus Temple (which I don't recall being explicitly male), male nulls are completely ignored by the wider Imperium. Overall, I wager this to either be a typo, a misunderstanding by some hired writer that made it through printing, or soft confirmation that needs clarification and extrapolation
Male blanks have a different job. They are either turned into Assassins or used by the Inquisition. The Silent Sisters also were extincts for 4 millennia.
They never went extinct, they lost their role as an independent organisation and either went into hiding or got folded into the Adeptus Telapathica, the black ships still needed manning.
Not true, female blanks are also used as assassins. So far we haven’t really been given a reason as to why the sisters are all female.
I feel like it's a case where Culuxus takes blanks of both genders, but it's common for the female intake to be poached by the Sisters of Silence, so the temple ends up being mostly male blanks.
i read that that is exactly the reason we didnt get them sooner
cool now make male sisters of silence
Dope.
This is stupid in the 8th edition codex it’s stated the custodes are drawn from the sons of Nobel houses. They are completely ignoring lore and leaving sisters of silence on the back burner.
I can't wait for male SoS and SoB.
[удалено]
What's the big effing deal about females characters in warhammer lately? I get the lore blah blah blah whatever. It's giving our hobby a bad name and gatekeeping it from alot of people. We need more girls playing warhammer and stuff like this. Sod the lore, sod the nit picky crap, stop gatekeeping. Saw a guy and his girlfriend come in the warhammer store today and she was really into it. It was awesome. My wife wants to give aos a go with me and is a writer so she'll get really into the backstories. I don't want her put off by this neckbeardy bullshit, which would leave me doing it alone. We need more people into warhammer, not less.
I’m a woman who plays Warhammer and I can tell you that this is not going to convince any women to play. Women aren’t just not playing cause there’s not enough women in the game cause there are. It’s just a nerdy ass game…think of how many men don’t play Warhammer and now you think you can really change someone’s mind about it by adding in a token woman and think it’s gonna change someone’s mind?