Astartes bionics are Mars-pattern augmetics — steel and servo grafted where flesh was ruined, serving as well as the limb they replace, or better. A brother fitted with them shrugs off the mark of a lasting injury and returns to the line as whole in function as he was before the wound. For warriors who fight across centuries, such augmetics are common. Unremarkable, even. The body remade around its own scars.
The auspex is a hand-held scanner. It reads heat, motion and disturbance across the battlefield, stripping away the concealment an ambusher relies on. A brother sweeping it denies a nearby foe the advantage of a hidden setup or a stealthy infiltration — the unseen dragged into the open before it can strike. This is the strike force's answer to an enemy who would fight from the shadows: sight, where the foe counted on blindness.
The Chapter banner is the standard of a strike force — a hallowed icon of battle honours, borne aloft where every brother can see it. It marks the heart of the force. It steadies the warriors who fight in its shadow, a rallying point that stiffens resolve when the fighting turns grim. To lose it is a dishonour. To hold it high is to remind every brother whose colours he wears, and what is owed to them.
A Chapter relic is a treasure of the brotherhood — an ancient blade, a hallowed weapon, a suit of war-plate carried by heroes long dead. Each Chapter guards its own. What one relic does bears no resemblance to another's, and so these named treasures are set out in each Chapter's own entries rather than shared across the Adeptus Astartes. The relic a hero bears is a piece of his Chapter's history made manifest, entrusted to him for the battle to come.
Combat stimms are a one-shot chemical surge, a jolt of battlefield pharmaceuticals that drives a fighter past the limits of even his transhuman frame for a moment of desperate effort. A brother triggers them when the fight hangs on a single burst of speed or fury. The superhuman rarely need such crutches, and few carry them — but in the crisis where flesh alone is not enough, the surge can be the margin between the objective taken and the objective lost.
The grav-chute and grapnel are the Reiver's tools for fighting in three dimensions. The grapnel hauls a brother swiftly up a sheer face, and the grav-chute lets him drop from any height and land ready to kill rather than broken at the foot of the fall. Together they turn walls, towers and the ruined heights of a battlefield into open roads, letting the Chapter's stealth brethren strike from angles the foe never thought to guard.
The iron halo, and the rosarius its chaplains bear, is a badge of honour that is also a life-saver — a compact generator throwing a protective energy field about its wearer. It grants a 4+ field save, a ward that has turned aside killing blows aimed at a Chapter's commanders time and again. Reserved for characters of standing, it is as much a mark of the Emperor's favour as a piece of war-gear.
The jump pack is a back-mounted cluster of turbines that hurls a battle-brother into the air on a controlled arc of flame. It grants the Fly keyword and a powerful jump move. Walls, chasms, the enemy line — its wearer clears them all to fall upon a target from above. This is the tool of the assault brethren: verticality turned into a weapon, closing a distance that would leave a foot-brother still trudging forward.
Scout carapace is the neophyte's armour — a suit of hardened plates, lighter than the full power plate of a made brother. It turns aside small-arms fire well enough, a solid 4+ save, but it leaves its wearer far more exposed than the line Marine at his shoulder. This is the harness of a warrior still earning his place. He wears it for the speed and the stealth a Scout's way of war depends on.
The Centurion warsuit is not armour worn over a brother. It is a war-machine sealed around him — a man-portable siege frame that is one and the same as the Centurion himself. Its layered plating grants a 2+ save and lends its occupant the mass and endurance of a walker, and its hardpoints mount twin heavy weapons or siege drills. Where a mark is a suit a brother chooses, the warsuit is the fighter. Armour, frame and firepower, fused into a single advancing bastion.
Gravis armour is a heavier grade of power plate — a bulky suit that trades mobility for sheer resilience. Its wearer moves a touch slower but carries an extra measure of endurance, and the reinforced frame can bear the weight of gravis-pattern and heavy weapons that lighter plate cannot. This is the harness of a brother who means to stand and hold. An advancing bulwark, shrugging off fire while it brings the heavier guns to bear.
Power armour is the birthright plate of a battle-brother, a suit of ceramite fused to fibre-bundle musculature that moves as the wearer wills. It grants a dependable 3+ save and bears the weight of war without slowing the Marine within. It is not a super-heavy shell but a good, honest suit of armour — the standard against which every heavier mark is set, and the plate every made brother wears as a matter of course.
Terminator plate is the finest armour a Chapter fields — a colossal suit of layered ceramite and adamantine that only the veteran elite are permitted to wear. It grants an unmatched 2+ save and a field save besides. It adds to its wearer's endurance and slows his stride. Sealed within it, a brother may teleport into the fray by Deep Strike and wield the heaviest terminator arms: storm bolter, power fist, thunder hammer. This is the panoply of the first company, worn where the fighting is deadliest.
Melta bombs are shaped thermal charges — planted, not thrown, releasing a burst of atomic heat fierce enough to gut a war-engine from within. A brother sets one against a hull, a hatch, a monster's flank, and withdraws. What the charge touches is reduced to slag. They are cumbersome, and they are close work. But against a vehicle or a walker that no bolt could scratch, few things a brother carries are so surely lethal.
The narthecium is the Apothecary's gauntlet of surgical tools — worn to keep the Chapter's brothers in the fight and their gene-seed out of the enemy's hands. Nearby brethren draw a Feel No Pain 6+ from his presence, shrugging off wounds that would fell them, and those who do fall recover the faster for his care once the battle ends. It works no miracle revival mid-fight. But the brother it steadies now, and the one it returns to muster later — that is its worth made plain.
Purity seals are strips of blessed parchment, each an oath or a benediction pressed to a brother's armour in wax and ribbon. They are worn as a covenant made visible, and in the moment a warrior's nerve might waver they steady him — letting a brother re-roll a failed Nerve or Cool test, faith answering fear. A brother wreathed in seals carries the weight of his vows where all can see them, and fights the surer for it.
The reductor is the grim heart of the Apothecary's craft — an extraction tool for recovering the progenoid gene-seed from a fallen brother before it is lost. In the heat of the fight it changes nothing. Its work comes after, when the Apothecary kneels by the dead and secures the seed of future battle-brothers. To a Chapter that measures its strength in a slow harvest of such seed, no tool is more quietly vital.
The servo-skull is a relic of the honoured dead pressed into service — a real skull, sanctified and set with anti-grav motors and a bound machine-spirit, drifting at its master's side. It scouts ahead, relays what it sees and carries the auspex-cant of the strike force, a silent companion that extends a brother's awareness beyond his own eyes. Part reliquary, part instrument, it is the Chapter's reverence for its fallen turned to practical use.
The signum is a targeting relay slaved to a Techmarine's servo-harness, feeding firing solutions and range-data to the brethren around him. With it he grants a nearby brother a free Aim — a comrade's next shot sharpened into a certain one. This is the Techmarine's gift to a firing line: the machine-spirit's cold precision, lent to a brother's eye, turning good marksmanship into unerring aim.
Smoke grenades throw up a dense, drifting bank of concealment rather than a killing blast. A brother pitches one to raise a screen that blocks line of sight, covering an advance across open ground or breaking the aim of an enemy gunline. It kills nothing on its own, but the ground it lets the strike force cross unseen — and the shots it spoils — can decide a fight as surely as any weapon.
Special-issue bolt ammunition is the veteran's edge — a selection of specialised rounds a brother may load in place of standard shells. Kraken rounds bite deeper into armour. Hellfire rounds carry a killing venom against massed flesh. Dragonfire rounds seek out a foe hiding in cover; Vengeance rounds are cut to tear and rend. A brother chooses the round the battle calls for, and a single bolt weapon becomes the answer to many different foes.
The storm shield is a slab of armour crowned with a projected energy field, carried into the press of melee by brothers who mean to hold the line. It grants a 4+ field save against the blows of close combat — strikes that would punch clean through plate, turned aside. The brother who bears one gives up a hand that might have held a second weapon. He chooses instead to become an immovable point, the place the enemy breaks upon.
A sidecar frame bolted to a war-bike: that is the Attack-Bike, the heavy end of the Cavalry line. In the sidecar rides a crew-served gun — a heavy bolter or a multi-melta — brought whole into the running fight. It carries that weight and loses nothing. The mount still moves at Cavalry speed, still fires after a full Move, so the host trades none of its pace for the extra firepower. The frame rides a shade tougher, too; the first blow that would unhorse a lighter rider, the sidecar soaks and shrugs off.
The hunt-trophy standard is a Chogorian battle-banner hung with the trophies of run-down quarry — the flayed marks of leaders and monsters the host has ridden to ground across a hundred campaigns. Planted at the heart of the wheel, it is the proof of every hunt the gang has closed, and the sight of it steadies the riders around it: brothers within its shadow keep their nerve where others would break, riding on for the trophy that will one day hang beside the rest. It is not a relic of the Chapter but a record of the Hunt itself, added to with every quarry the host runs down.
Two wheels become four. The Invader ATV is a heavier gun-platform mount, a twin heavy weapon slung on a broad four-wheeled frame that still runs at Cavalry speed and still fires after a full Move. That broad frame buys it something the bikes lack — an extra Wound, and a point of Toughness over a standard mount. It is the anvil of the mounted host. It rides into the firefight, trades, and wheels out again where a lighter mount would already lie shot from under its rider.
Nothing in the host runs faster. The master-crafted bike is a relic mount, a war-bike worked over by generations of the Chapter's artificers until it will outpace anything on the field. Its rider gains a full inch of Move on a standard mount and re-rolls a failed charge distance — first to contact, first away again. Such a mount is not handed out lightly. A Leader, a Champion, or a veteran trusted to ride at the very tip of the wheel: that is who draws it.
The Storm's Eye is a relic helm of the Stormseers of Chogoris, worn by a Leader or veteran at the head of the host. Through it the wearer reads the flow of the battle a beat ahead, and the riders around him wheel clean on his word: friendly Cavalry fighters within 6" re-roll a failed Hit-and-Run move, breaking away as one. It is the sight that keeps the whole wing moving where a lesser host would foul its own retreat.