A Mentor Legion missile launcher came with two vortex missiles on it. As standard. Squad kit, printed in the rules, two per launcher. And if you’ve never played Rogue Trader, a vortex weapon in 1988 tore a hole through reality, and then that hole stayed on the table and drifted a few inches each turn, and it ate models on both sides.
That’s the Mentor Legion. Chapter 888. Bell of Lost Souls ran a retro piece on them yesterday and I’ve been reading old scans ever since, which is not how I planned to spend a Tuesday evening.
The write-up ran in White Dwarf 98, February 1988. Two years before I existed. It was the second Space Marine chapter in the entire history of the game to get dedicated background and rules of its own, one month after the Ultramarines got theirs. The Dark Angels, the Blood Angels and the Space Wolves all queued up behind Chapter 888.
Knowledge Is Power
The spread is a David Gallagher illustration and it’s genuinely lovely. Nisk Ran-Thawll standing in a stone hall, half out of his armour, being talked through an activation sequence by a hooded Mechanicus adept with a beak. There’s a stained glass window behind him with green and white marines fighting in it. Above a doorway on the right, carved into the stone, the words KNOWLEDGE IS POWER.
Their badge was an owl. An actual owl face, yellow eyes, on white. In a game that would spend the next four decades putting skulls on everything including the skulls, somebody in 1988 looked at a Space Marine chapter and thought: owl.
The concept underneath the owl is where it gets strange. The Mentors don’t have a homeworld you can look up. The location of the fortress-monastery is classified, and the lore says only the most senior tech-priests in the Mechanicus know where it is. Most of the chapter never leaves it. They sit in there training, running war games, and grinding every scrap of military knowledge they’ve collected down into something they can archive.
Squads get sent out. Ten-man squads, all veterans, and there’s no sergeant. Every one of the ten holds the same rank. They’re called Tutors, any of them can be nominated to lead, and when the squad splits into two fives it just picks two. No sergeants anywhere in the structure, which the Codex Astartes has a fair amount to say about.
The Deathwatch Before the Deathwatch
Then there’s the Elite Cadre, which is the part that made me sit up. These are 1st Company veterans. Sometimes they go in as a small special operations team handling things a normal chapter wouldn’t touch, counter-terror work, demolitions, deep infiltration and recon. Other times they break the squad apart entirely and each individual Marine gets attached to a completely different Imperial unit as its commanding officer, so one Astartes ends up running an Astra Militarum regiment, a planetary defence force, a naval crew.
They also get seconded to other Space Marine chapters as instructors, they work with the Inquisition regularly, and the whole chapter functions as a live test bed for whatever the Mechanicus has just cooked up. Which is where the vortex missiles come from, along with a targeting web that stacks bonuses when multiple bearers shoot the same thing, a shift field that made them harder to hit, and something called a Timewarper that let you trade shooting for a burst of movement in an edition where nothing moved fast.
Small teams, secret base, no fixed home, weird experimental wargear, drawn from a chapter that specialises in fighting things other chapters aren’t equipped for. That’s a job description the Imperium would eventually hand to somebody else. The original Deathwatch write-up didn’t turn up until 2003 and when it did, it took the whole idea and gave it a black paint job, a xenos remit and about fifteen years of development. The Mentors had the same concept in 1988 with an owl on the shoulder pad.
I don’t want to overstate this. Nobody at Games Workshop in 2003 was sitting there thinking about a 1988 White Dwarf article. Ideas come back round. But the shape is identical and it’s hard to unsee once you’ve seen the spread.
I Tried to Paint Them Once
Around 2016 I decided I was going to do a five-man squad in Mentors colours. Not for any tactical reason, I just liked the scheme. Dark green over white, red squad marking on the right pauldron, helmet colour for company. Looked clean in the codex spread.
White legs. White legs are a curse. I have never once, in fifteen years of this hobby, managed a white leg that didn’t end up either chalky or streaked or both, and I have tried every method the internet has offered me. I got three of them to a state I’d call finished if you squinted, then got fed up and shelved it. Pete came round, picked one up, turned it over, and asked if they were meant to be dirty. They were not meant to be dirty.
Those three sad green boys got stripped and folded into my Imperial Fists about a year later, which if you know anything about painting yellow was not the lesson I should have taken from the experience…
Chapter 888 Belonged to Somebody Else First
The bit I didn’t know until this week is better than the vortex missiles. The Mentors were raised in the 26th Founding, 738.M41, which makes them one of the newest chapters in the Imperium. They didn’t get a fresh number. They were given 888, and the colours that went with it, both of which had belonged to the Star Scorpions.
The Star Scorpions were a 25th Founding chapter with two problems. Their gene-seed mutated badly enough to be useless for making more of them, and their fleet got trapped in the warp and torn apart by whatever lives there. Nobody knows what actually happened to them. The High Lords declared them dead, the Mechanicus spent years trying to reconstitute the chapter from surviving gene-stock and eventually admitted they couldn’t, and 888 went into the archives as a closed file.
Then a new Founding came up, somebody went back through the retired regalia, and the Mentors were born wearing a dead chapter’s livery with entirely new genetic material pulled from Terran storage banks. It’s the 41st millennium equivalent of moving into a flat where the previous tenant’s name is still on the buzzer and deciding it’s easier to just answer to it.
White Dwarf 460 back in 2021 quietly turned that into a grudge. The Star Scorpions, it turns out, had a proper name, the Androctonus Astra, and they weren’t operating alone. They were one third of the Adeptus Vaelarii, three chapters sworn together to hold the Elara’s Veil sub-sector: the Celestial Lions, the Emperor’s Spears, and the Scorpions. When the Scorpions were lost, the other two kept holding the line short-handed. And then, per that article, the heraldry and the number were handed to the Mentor Legion, which is described as “a gift that did not sit well with the remaining Adeptus Vaelarii.”
Aaron Dembski-Bowden’s Spear of the Emperor pays that off. A Mentors lieutenant, Amadeus Kalus Incarius, gets sent into the Veil to establish whether the Spears and the Lions are still loyal. He ends up fighting alongside them, gets wounded badly enough that crossing the Rubicon Primaris is the only thing that saves him, and eventually joins the Emperor’s Spears outright. They give him a name in the local dialect: Vadhán. It means False Scorpion. They called him that because of the colours he arrived in.
And the Star Scorpions weren’t dead. After the Great Rift opened, some of them came back as a Heretic Astartes warband called The Pure. The chapter whose colours the Mentors inherited is still out there and it’s fighting for the other side.
What Happened After 1988
Not much, honestly. No chapter rules again, ever. They show up in colour scheme spreads in the 5th, 6th and 8th edition Space Marine codices with a deliberately hazy history. The owl became a red raptor’s head at some point, which is a downgrade and I’ll fight about it. Codex: Necrons in 8th mentions Illuminor Szeras cracking open a Mentors fortress on Gorszt and walking off with the chapter’s entire gene-seed reserve, which for a chapter with their particular history reads as very pointed.
Their geneline is a mess in the sources too. Dembski-Bowden’s novel says Ultramarines successors. The revised 8th edition codex says unknown Founding. Both are in print. Take your pick.
I keep saying GW buried them and I’m not sure that’s fair. They’ve never actually been deleted. They’re in the codices, they got a Primaris illustration in 2019, they’re canonically fighting Biel-Tan and a Waaagh in the Charadon system right now, and they get name-checked as one of the chapters whose origins don’t resolve cleanly whenever GW wants that flavour. That’s more continuity than a lot of second-tier chapters get.
Thirty-eight years is still a long time to be a colour swatch. An Astartes chapter built around learning, with a flat command structure and a doctrine of embedding with mortals, is one of the more interesting things anybody proposed in the first decade of this game, and it’s been sat in a drawer since the Berlin Wall came down. The move from Legions to Chapters gave us a thousand variations on “these ones are angry in a specific way,” and 888 sits outside that entirely, unused since Bryan Ansell’s name was on the byline.
If you do want to paint some, the scheme is dark green over white with the squad specialty symbol in red on the right pauldron and the squad number stencilled on it in black High Gothic. Helmet colour is standard Codex company marking. The badge is the raptor now, but nobody at your club is going to check, and the owl was better.
