Emperor's Children - Pre-Heresy: The Emperor's Children were organised in a manner that suited the ideals of Fulgrim and their own exacting and perfectionist nature. As with every other aspect of the IIIrd Legion nothing was left to whim or chance; every action within the Legion's purview was deliberate and assessed for its aesthetic and functional value.Fulgrim was fond of remarking that if one was to excel then no detail was too small to consider, and that the quality of the whole lay in the quality of its constituents. In ordering his Legion it is not surprising then that Fulgrim favoured formality, conformity and order. The Emperor's Children took much from the structures of the other Legions when they were first created, though it also added its own layers of terminology, emphasis and balance while remaining largely true to the long-established Terran patterns for the Legiones Astartes.A hierarchy of authority and ability existed in every part of the Emperor's Children. Every warrior, piece of equipment or officer was placed in the function best suited to their strengths and proven ability, and in that sphere they were expected to excel. Fulgrim also maintained rigid order amongst the divisions of his Legion and command hierarchy. The fluid variations in size and nature common in certain other Legions like the Luna Wolves played no part in the Emperor's Children's way of war.Any change or variation was deliberate and the outcome of careful consideration. Likewise, the appointment and rank of every warrior of the Emperor's Children was carefully delineated. Honours, symbolic representations of achievements and marks of renown abounded, but were solely gifted by a superior rather than assumed by an individual, with those honours granted by the hand of the primarch held in higher esteem.Every warrior of the Legion knew his place and value in the sight of the Primarch and the Emperor, and this translated into a level of personal commitment and bravery that was the equal of any found among the ranks of the Space Marines, fuelled in no small part by an unshakable faith in their own superiority.The Emperor's Children were ordered and precise; formation sizes and structure were largely uniform and where they were not it was either a temporary aberration or a deliberate variation for a particular purpose. Within this careful order the squad was the base unit that showed most variations in both size and function.Comprising a handful of Emperor's Children each squad had a particular purpose and specialisation. Squad members were expected to excel in their allotted roles and would train exhaustively to achieve the pinnacle of efficiency and unit cohesion. Notably all of the variations in squad type and equipment found in other Legions were present within the Emperor's Children, as they believed there was no sphere of warfare they could not or should not excel in.There were, however, certain beliefs held within the Legion's culture about the superiority of certain martial virtues over others. These were beliefs that had originated as the opinions and inclinations of Fulgrim and had filtered down through the ranks as ironclad doctrine that was not to be questioned.One such virtue was the importance of speed, whether in manoeuvre, action or attack, as being of cardinal importance over strength, endurance or even firepower. The Emperor's Children believed that the decisive warrior who struck first was the most likely to be victorious, just as the moving target was harder to strike. This doctrine was made manifest on many levels, from the selection of battle plans to the choice of wargear the Legion favoured.This factor was made evident in the large numbers of Jump Pack-equipped assault units and Land Speeders, grav-attacks and Sky Hunter Squads present amongst the IIIrd Legion. In particular, Jetbike-equipped Sky Hunter Squads dominated the ranks of a number of the Emperor's Children's companies. One often quoted reason for the favour given to these units seems to be that their mode of warfare appealed to Fulgrim's nature by his own admission: swift and elegant, they captured much of the old Terran legends of noble knights and mythic champions riding to battle, their banners streaming behind them and their armour glittering in the sun.Further practical considerations for the extensive use of high speed vehicles and a reliance on manoeuvre can be seen in the fact that the Emperor's Children Legion never possessed the active numbers let alone the collective psychology required to engage in brute attrition warfare as the Iron Warriors or Death Guard did. For Fulgrim, keeping his Legion as intact as possible while achieving victory was perhaps always a consideration, albeit one seldom admitted to.The IIIrd Legion relied greatly on thorough and detailed strategic planning and the flawless execution of its battle plans by the individual warriors of the Legion. Every aspect of battle was analysed and turned to their advantage, from terrain and weather to the availability of logistical support and reinforcement; nothing was ever left to chance.Each component of the Legion's forces as well as any allies or ancillary forces under their command was taken into account and utilised accordingly. This forethought and almost mechanistic approach to warfare had its dangers as well as its strengths however; and should an entirely unforeseen contingency occur (as unlikely as this was in most cases), or some crucial element or strategic asset be unexpectedly removed, the Legion could be wrong-footed, thrown into confusion and suffer the consequences.The strength of the Emperor's Children prior to the Isstvan III Atrocity was approximately 110,000 Space Marines arranged into roughly thirty "Millennials," as the Legion referred to the larger units that were commonly called Chapters in other Legions. Of these forces, perhaps a quarter to a third were marked for death on Isstvan III as Imperial Loyalists unlikely to stand with the IIIrd Legion when it joined the Warmaster Horus in his rebellion against the Emperor.The losses incurred there by the traitorous portion of the Emperor's Children in the battle to eradicate the Loyalists also seemed to have been high. Fulgrim may have lost as many as 20,000 warriors in the process of eliminating the survivors of the initial virus-bombing. This would place the strength of the Emperor's Children Traitor Legion after Isstvan III in the region of perhaps 50,000 combat-capable Space Marines: a substantial loss of fighting strength by any measure and a fact that anecdotally is said to have enraged Horus in the extreme.No reliable account exists of the fatalities suffered by the IIIrd Legion during the excision of the Loyalist elements, but it is believed to have been proportionately very high. To make matters worse, Fulgrim had returned from his confrontation with Ferrus Manus, primarch of the Iron Hands Legion, having failed to sway the Gorgon to side with the Warmaster, further provoking Horus' ire.The Emperor's Children also lost an enormous number of armoured vehicles in the protracted intra-Legion battles which followed the Isstvan III Atrocity. Due to the losses, the Legion had need of every asset it could field at Isstvan V and so deployed a wide variety of types, classes and patterns of vehicle to the defence of the Urgall Depression.Given the favoured rites of war of the Emperor's Children, the most demand was placed on transport vehicles, with which the Legion could launch rapid counter-strikes and encirclements, engaging cornered Loyalists where and when they least expected it. Other types of vehicle, in particular super-heavy tanks and mobile artillery, were assigned at battalion or Millennial level to be utilised by each commander as he saw fit, given the quickly evolving nature of the battle.The growing strength of the Emperor's Children in later phases of the war, and the increasing instability and undisciplined nature of its warriors during the subsequent course of the Heresy, may be linked to the gene-seed experiments and flesh abominations of its Renegade Apothecaries like Fabius Bile and their haste to replace these losses and bolster the Legion's strength as the war continued. Unfettered by the restraints of secrecy or fear of discovery, they would physically change the bodies of the Emperor's Children to reflect their inner, spiritual corruption by the Prince of Pleasure.The Emperor's Children had almost no psykers in their midst and never maintained a powerful Librarium before the Edicts of Nikaea banned the use of psychic powers amongst the Legiones Astartes. This was because the development of psychic powers were the result of a mutation or a series of mutations within the Human genome. A mutation, a random change in the genetic sequence, implied imperfection, and no imperfection could be tolerated by the Astartes of the IIIrd Legion.Like many of the other Astartes Legions of the Great Crusade, the Emperor's Children operated a warrior lodge system known as the Brotherhood of the Phoenix. They had learned about the existence of warrior lodges within the other Legions from their time fighting alongside the Luna Wolves, although given the Emperor's Children's love of formal hierarchy, the Brotherhood of the Phoenix was much more formal in structure and behaviour than their brethren Legions' warrior lodges and was open for membership only to the primarch, the lord commanders, and the company captains to maintain the Legion's strict hierarchical leadership structure.