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The Apothecary is the Chapter's battlefield healer and the keeper of its gene-seed, a Champion who walks the line with narthecium ready. His arts steady wounded brothers and speed their recovery once the guns fall silent, and from the fallen he harvests the precious gene-seed that is a Chapter's future. One serves a strike force at a time. He is no less a warrior for his calling, but his true worth is measured in the brothers who march again because he was near when they fell.

The Captain is the Chapter's chosen commander, a master of war fielded as the gang's single Leader. Centuries of battle have honed him past even his brethren: his blade-work and marksmanship are all but flawless, his frame carries wounds that would end another Marine outright, and his presence steadies every warrior in sight of him. A named Chapter Master takes the field on this same body. He fights at the heart of the strike force, where his command turns a good position into a decisive one and his own hand ends whatever the line cannot.

The Centurion is a battle-brother sealed into a man-portable siege warsuit, a walking wall of armour that sits between the heavy-plated Marine and the interred Dreadnought. The warsuit adds mass, protection and firepower at the cost of speed, turning its wearer into a slow, unstoppable advance. It fields in two liveries: an Assault frame built to breach walls and crush what shelters behind them, and a Devastator frame bristling with twin heavy weapons. Any Chapter with the stomach for siege-work may field one, and the stubbornest field two.

The Chaplain is the keeper of the Chapter's soul, a Champion who fights with crozius in hand and litany on his lips. He is the spiritual anchor of the strike force: brethren who fight in his shadow are hardened against fear and driven to greater fury, their faith made armour by his presence. One walks with a strike force at a time, and where the fighting is thickest and the cause most desperate, it is the Chaplain who holds the line together by will alone.

The Dreadnought is a fallen hero who fights on. A brother too grievously wounded to live and too honoured to lose is interred within the sarcophagus of a walker of war, waking only to fight and then returning to his long sleep. Towering over the line, armoured like a fortress and armed to shatter tanks, he is the strike force's Brute — a single interred ancient whose centuries of remembered battle make him as much a weapon of the mind as of the body. Few things a Chapter fields are so hard to bring down.

The Librarian is the Chapter's sanctioned psyker, a Champion whose mind is a weapon as keenly honed as any blade. Trained to master the warp rather than be devoured by it, he turns that forbidden power on the foe — and his psychic disciplines are drawn from their own table, kept apart from the martial skills the rest of the brethren learn. He stands among the specialist brethren, one to a strike force, a rare and dangerous asset the Chapter commits where sorcery or the unseen must be met in kind.

Second command tier. Where the Captain's will cannot reach, the Lieutenant carries it — into the far end of the line, the flank, the ragged place where the fighting has outrun its orders. He is a Champion, swift and sure with the blade, and he leads from the front rank because a Lieutenant who leads from anywhere else is no Lieutenant at all. His authority splits the strike force into two coordinated blades instead of one. The Captain holds the centre. He drives the flank. A Chapter may field as many as two of them to hold a front too wide for one.

The battle-brother Marine is the spine of every Chapter, the measure the rest are set against. Two hearts. A fused ribcage. A lifetime of hypno-doctrine layered into muscle and memory — and out of it comes a warrior no mortal soldier can match. He shrugs off wounds that would drop a lesser man. He holds when others rout. Incoming fire cannot pin him. In the gang's terms he is a Ganger, but a Ganger who is a transhuman killer: bolt discipline in his hands, a blade at his side, the unbending nerve of the Adeptus Astartes in his breast. He is few, and he is dear. A Chapter fields him knowing each one is worth a squad of the enemy.

The Mounted Marine rides to war — a snarling war-bike, a great beast of the Chapter's home world, whatever mount its traditions favour. Speed is the whole of his purpose. He outpaces the foot line, strikes where the enemy is thinnest, and looses his guns at full gallop before wheeling away. He sits between the line Marine and the Brute: tougher than a foot-brother, faster than anything else in the strike force. A Chapter built for the charge fields many. A strict foot-Chapter fields none. And the mount's shape shifts with every brotherhood's tradition.

The Redemptor is the greatest of the interred, a Dreadnought of the newest and most massive pattern. Where an elder walker is a fortress, the Redemptor is a bastion in motion: taller, heavier, and carrying weapons that can level a strongpoint in a single volley. It is the peak of what a strike force can bring to bear, a Brute reserved for the direst battles, and a foe that meets one commits everything it has or dies where it stands. A Chapter fields but one, and only when the war deserves it.

The Scout is the neophyte, a battle-brother not yet fully made. His body carries the first of the transhuman implants but not all of them, so he is lighter, quicker to fall, and clad only in carapace rather than full plate. What he lacks in resilience he answers with stealth and cunning, striking from cover and range before the foe knows the Chapter is upon them. In the gang he is the Juve tier — cheap enough to field in numbers, the one place a Chapter fights with bodies to spare — and every Scout who survives his trials will one day stand in the line as a full brother.

The Techmarine is the strike force's master of the machine — schooled by the Cult Mechanicus in the mysteries of wargear and war-engine, a Champion who speaks to metal as readily as to men. He tends the Chapter's weapons. He tends its interred Brutes. He coaxes ruined mechanisms back to function, and through the sensor-cant of his servo-harness he directs the fire of his brethren. One serves a strike force at a time. Wherever the heavy machines take the field, the Chapter cannot do without him.