Event · M39
Twenty-Fourth Founding
The Twenty-Fourth Founding is a numbered wave of Adeptus Astartes Chapter creation sanctioned by the High Lords of Terra in the thirty-ninth millennium. It belongs to the long sequence of Foundings by which the Imperium replenished and expanded the Space Marine Chapters after the Second Founding fixed the Codex Astartes model of a thousand warriors organised in ten companies. Like other Foundings of its era, it drew on gene-seed stocks held in trust by the Adeptus Terra and its allied Chapters, and was ordered in response to the unrelenting pressure of war on the Imperium’s frontiers rather than any single crisis. Accounts of the Founding’s course are incomplete, and later Administratum record-keepers themselves note gaps and contradictions in the surviving Departmento Munitorum archives on Terra. Tradition holds that new Chapters were raised as Successors to older Astartes lineages, their gene-seed apportioned and their first companies mustered before being despatched to garrison contested sectors of the Imperium against xenos raiders and internal unrest. Which Chapter Masters oversaw the distribution, and which parent Chapters donated the seed stock for this particular Founding, are questions on which chroniclers differ, and the Orrery records the Founding here as an attested administrative event rather than a fully reconstructed campaign. In the millennia since, the Chapters attributed to the Twenty-Fourth Founding have followed the same divided fate as their contemporaries: some names persist in the Imperium’s current order of battle, while others are recorded as destroyed, excommunicated, or simply lost to the fog of incomplete record-keeping that afflicts all but the most storied Foundings. The event nonetheless remains a fixed point of reference for genealogists of the Adeptus Astartes tracing Chapter lineages back through Terra’s archives, and it sits within the same institutional history as the Cursed Founding and the other numbered waves that shaped the Imperium’s military strength across the thirty-ninth millennium and beyond.
See where Twenty-Fourth Founding occurred on the galactic map in the 41st Millennium.