Event ยท M36
Cursed Founding
The Cursed Founding is the name given to the Twenty-First Founding, whose newly raised Chapters suffered unusually heavy losses. The Founding itself was authorised in the ordinary course of Imperial administration, sanctioned from Terra by the offices that oversee the creation of new Space Marine Chapters from proven gene-seed stock. Nothing in its origin distinguished it from the Foundings that preceded it; the epithet was earned afterward, by outcome rather than intent, as successive reports of Chapters lost, shattered, or unaccounted for accumulated far faster than Munitorum record-keepers expected. Accounts differ on the cause. Some attribute the losses to flawed gene-seed lines carried into the new Chapters at their creation, producing instability that later Apothecaries could not fully correct. Others hold that the Chapters raised in this Founding were dispersed to garrison postings of exceptional danger, placing untested companies against threats that even veteran Chapters would have found taxing. A minority tradition within the Adeptus Terra suggests concealed heresy or corrupted recruitment stock, though no formal inquiry is recorded as having confirmed this. What is generally agreed is that within a comparatively short span, several Chapters of the Twenty-First Founding were destroyed outright, quietly disbanded, or folded into other formations, their gene-seed and battle-honours absorbed and their separate identities lost. In the current era, few if any Chapters are confidently traced to the Twenty-First Founding, and the affair is remembered chiefly as a cautionary precedent. Adepts weighing the merits of a new Founding are said to cite the Cursed Founding when arguing for caution in gene-seed selection and deployment planning, treating it as the counter-example to Foundings that produced stable, enduring Chapters. Terra remains the fixed point against which the episode is measured, both as the seat of the authority that sanctioned it and as the archive, however incomplete, in which its scattered record survives.
See where Cursed Founding occurred on the galactic map in the 41st Millennium.