Event · M36
Twenty-First Founding
The Twenty-First Founding, known as the Cursed Founding, was a creation of Space Marine Chapters recorded in the 36th Millennium. It belongs to the sequence of Foundings carried out under the Codex Astartes, the doctrine that divided the Legiones Astartes into Chapters of roughly one thousand battle-brothers after the Horus Heresy. Terra is the Imperium’s seat of authority, and the administrative and genetic apparatus that authorised each Founding is associated with it. The Founding is remembered chiefly because of the difficulties attached to it rather than for a single named campaign. Accounts of its causes and course differ, and the surviving record is sparse. Later tradition holds that the Chapters raised at this time were affected by flawed or unstable gene-seed, and that the resulting mutations, instability and losses gave the Founding its name. It is best understood as a demand for new Chapters, met with the Imperium’s existing stock of gene-seed, whose consequences fell on the Chapters themselves. The participants were the High Lords of Terra, the Adeptus Mechanicus and the Apothecarium, together with the Chapters created and their progenitor lines. Orrery does not attribute specific battles or named commanders to the Founding itself. Its aftermath is the more visible part of the record. Chapters of the Cursed Founding are treated as a separate category within the wider Space Marine timeline. Some are recorded as lost, while others survive under close watch as unusual or problematic foundations, and Orrery’s Dark Crusaders entry is one such obscure Chapter listed among these origins. Read on the timeline, the Twenty-First Founding sits after the Second Founding and well before the crises of the 41st Millennium. It shows how the Imperium’s method for replenishing its armies could carry long-term hereditary risk.
See where Twenty-First Founding occurred on the galactic map in the 41st Millennium.