Discussion Literature / ImperialGuard

Unless anyone has any objections, in the next couple of days I will be moving this page to Literature.Astra Miliatrum as that is the name the series is under now.

Okay, I'm moving every general Guard trope here so they can be rewritten with instances from the novels, if they apply:

• Armchair Military: Many commanders, especially those part of a 'high command', are armchair generals. The 'garden variety' commonly resides within command vehicles such as a Leviathan. Alternatively they will command an HQ far behind the front.
• Artistic License – Military: Depending on the Writer, the Guard may behave more or less realistically. A common problem is that the scale of the Guard's undertakings doesn't fit with the amount of people used. In a fluff blurb, a warmaster boasts that his crusade has half a million men and women under arms. Crusades usually encompass entire sectors of space, with at least a dozen earth-like worlds to be conquered. For reference, the axis powers in WW 2 had about 35 million soldiers to conquer one planet and we all know how that one turned out.
• Awesome Personnel Carrier: The Chimera or the larger Gorgon.
• Badass Army: Most regiments that last more than one theatre. And some that don't, too.
• Bad Ass Normal: Guardsmen as depicted especially in the 5th edition.
• Base On Tracks: Leviathan Command Vehicles and Capitol Imperialis.
• Battle in the Center of the Mind: Mental battles with psykers/daemons or the simple mind scrubbing that war manages to do, usually to characters that have been in field longer than their psyches can handle.
  • A Tanith trooper, in the first few pages of First and Only, flips out and begins to shoot at vermin in his own trench. He is dealt with accordingly.
    • To elaborate: he is slated to be shot, but a Chaos attack interrupts the procedure, sparing him. He later display's cowardice during an action on Caligula, but ends up shot anyway.
• Beam Spam: What Imperial Guard infantry generally seek to achieve.
• Boxed Crook: Penal legions, but Savlar Chem Dogs especially. Criminals imprisoned in a toxic world, sent to fight in the poisonous undersides of hive cities.
• Brass Balls: One common saying (in fanon) about the Imperial Guard (the Redshirt Army) is that on the first day, each recruit is handed a T-shirt (flak jacket^note Which is better, lighter, and more durable than anything we can dare hope to produce in the near future, fully capable of blocking (minus broken ribs) the damage from a direct hit from the equivalent of a modern heavy machinegun!), flashlight (a lasgun, one of the weakest possible weapons^note in 40k, that means can "only" dismember an unarmored target on hit), and a wheelbarrow for their pair of giant steel balls.
• Cannon Fodder: Quite obviously Penal Legionnaires and Conscripts.
• Cloning Blues: The Death Korps of Krieg are all clones of the exact same guy.
• Conscription: Patently Conscripts ^note  The unit in the tabletop game, not the concept.. What else?
  • Well, there is mandatory service on worlds like Cadia.
• Crew of One: Sentinels, every last one.
• Death from Above: They do love their artillery.
• Demihuman: The Ratlings, Ogryns and, in older editions, Beastmen. Technically these examples are 'stable' mutations, much like the Navis Nobilite.
• Drill Tank: The Hades Breach Drill, used by the Death Korps of Krieg.
• Drop Ship: Mentioned in the fluff (often in Gaunts Ghosts) but yet to recieve a dedicated model representation. Until then the Arvus Lighter and Valkyries are many players substitutes.
• Due to the Dead: The Black Bell of Terra is said to ring whenever a true hero of the Imperium is martyred. It is, of course, tolling constantly.
• Elite Mooks: Stormtroopers (Inquisitorial or otherwise), veteran squads and pretty much any carapace armoured guardsman.
• Field Promotion: Happens in Gaunt's Ghosts a fair bit, due to attrition.
• General Failure: The inexperienced/impatient/incompetent generals often are, although Cadian Generals are suprisingly skilled General Rippers.
• General Ripper: Case in point Captain Kubrick Chenkov. Has expended the lives of millions of Valhallans in the name of victory.
  • Then again, so did the successive commanders of the Vraks campaign. Only this time with German inspired troops (rather than Russian) - Kriegers.
  • However they only killed 16 million over seventeen years, Chenkov killed ten million in one battle
  • Stalin would be proud.
• Highly-Conspicuous Uniform: Mordians, Praetorians... pretty much anyone who has a uniform that doesn't blend in.
• Humongous Mecha: Titans, although strictly they are not part of the Imperial Guard, they are allies.
• Interservice Rivalry: Most regiments hate the regiments from other planets. Particularly those from opposing class spectrums. Some veteran units invert this though and instead respect each other as competent warriors.
• It's Raining Men: Elysians. Enough said.
  • Storm Troopers typically are deployed this way; in the latest codex Valkyries can deploy their passengers this way if they've moved flat out.
  • Harakonis, too.
• Kinetic Weapons Are Just Better: Bolt weapons (reserved for officers, usually), Ogryn Ripper Guns and most vehicle mounted weaponry.
• Land Battleship: Super heavy tanks and other vehicles such as the massive Capitol Imperialis, the huge Leviathan Command Vehicle and the staggering Ordinatus.
• The Men First: Most good commanders have this attitude. Commissars - not so much.
  • It is noted as unusual, in universe, that Colonel-Commissar Gaunt and Commissar Cain are (relatively) humane commissars. In some cases the attitude is looked down upon by peers and superiors alike.
  • Commissar Viktor Hark, who joins up with Colonel-Commissar Gaunt's regiment, has an interesting moment when chastising another Guard unit that retreated in battle at a critical moment. He executes their commander rather than any of the men who followed him in retreat, saying that if their commander had held the line, his men would have done so as well.
• Mildly Military: Depends on what planet you're from. Soldiers from Cadia or Mordia outright avert this, with strict adherence to rules and regulations. Catachans embody American GI's from the Vietnam War and have looser rules. Other regiments use this trop out of necessity, such as the Tanith First and Only, or come from their leader's tendencies, like Ciaphas Cain's regiment.
• Mini-Mecha: Sentinels.
• Mounted Combat: Attilans and some Kriegers.
• Mutants: Plenty of these in the Imperium of Man, plenty enough to be used as cannon-fodder or low grade troops. For more stable mutants look further up to Demihuman.
• Rank Up: Tona Criid, Ceglan Varl or Flyn Meryn in Gaunt's Ghosts for example.
• Rare Vehicles: Super-heavy class vehicles and Titans, but not quite so much a heavy emphasis on rarity in later editions.
• Redshirt Army: A highly capable one, usually (at least in 5th edition).
• Shoot the Fuel Tank: A distinct problem that Hellhounds used to have, what with the rear compartment housing some or all the fuel for its weapon and the sheer variety of weapons that can ignite fuel on contact.
• Space Romans: Many unique Guard units are modelled after various real armies from different countries and time periods: Valhallans are Reds With Rockets, Steel Legionnaires are Nazis With Gnarly Weapons, Tallarn Desert Raiders are Warriors Of Desert Winds, and so on.
• Tanks, but No Tanks: The Leman Russ battle tank and its derivatives are the only true tanks available to the Guard, superheavies notwithstanding. The rest, primarily based on the Chimera chassis, are a mixture of APCs, IFVs, self-propelled guns and other assorted support vehicles.
• Tank Goodness: The Imperial Guard takes this trope Up To Eleven, starting with the humble Chimera IFV, the Hellhound Flame Tank, and the ever-reliable Leman Russ Main Battle Tank, all the way up to the massive superheavy Baneblade. Just check out what Forgeworld cranks out. They had tanks coming out of every orifice for a year or two before slowing down again.
• Took a Level in Badass: The Imperial Guard has been Flanderized as full of General Ripper type leaders who do nothing but human wave attacks against enemies, but recently, a number of novel series, particularly the Ciaphas Cain series and Gaunt's Ghosts series, have portrayed the Guard has a highly trained and sophisticated modern fighting force combining mechanized warfare, air support, and artillery strikes. Nevertheless, considering all the horrible stuff out there in the 40k universe, it's not always enough.
• Urban Warfare: A common setting for the Imperial Guard, especially on (ex)Imperial worlds.
• Walkie-Talkie Static: Happens on and off in the literature and now happens in the 5th edition if you botch an Order roll.
• We Have Reserves: An attitude held by many Guard generals. Usually (but not necessarily) the incompetent ones.
• Zerg Rush: "Space Marines are the sword of the Emperor, making precision cuts and and stabs in the holes of the enemy's armor. The Imperial Guard are the sledgehammer." Like the above analogy, this explains probably the most common Imperial Guard tactic, in which you try to break the enemy by rushing them with overwhelming men, tanks, and artillery strikes in an attempt to flatten the entire area.
  • A good example of this, from The Armour of Contempt, is a mass charge, as in dozens of thousands of men, by Imperial Guard forces is seen from the ground, inside the rush, including supporting Titan firepower and Titans themselves.
  • There's also the Penal Legions. As punishment for sins against the Emperor, they are deployed with even less armor and weaker weaponry than the standard Guardsman to swamp the enemy with bodies, to clear minefields, and as a screen for tanks.

Why is the IG getting it's own separate page, when it is just a copy of the same that that they have in the Warhammer 40k character page?

Is there anything I shouldn't have added? I think I may have added too much... I don't quite know where the line is with this article.