Warhammer 40,000 10th Edition

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Announced on March 30, 2023, Warhammer 40,000 10th Edition is yet another revision to Games Workshop's big money-hog and it's promising to be even bigger than the transition from 7th to 8th.

The focus of this edition seems split between Imperium vs Chaos and Imperium vs Xenos, with the Arks of Omen saga's after-effects still lingering while Ultramar and the rest of the Imperium is being embroiled in the Fourth Tyrannic War (then again, 9th edition was supposed to be all about Necrons and they ended up barely doing anything, so time will tell if Xenos actually get focused on beyond the starter box for that one).

Major Updates

• Simplified Statlines. The promise here is that the unit stats are going to be so small they can fit on an index card so you can actually carry them around without needing to carry a whole goddamn book. More surprisingly, all units' statlines will be immediately available as free downloads at launch. Sounds awesome, but you can also recall that AoS also used to have free placeholder rules for all models... until they abandoned that model in 3E due to having enough army books updated at the time.
  • Taking a note from Kill-Team and Age of Sigmar, weapons now have their own statlines independent of each other. Saves an extra line of text for unwieldy weapons like the power fist by making its WS set at 4+ instead of 3+ like the rest of the squad's knives. This also gives you fixed weapon Strengths on your weapons so you don't need to fight about whether the +1 goes before or after the multiplier.
  • This has also resulted in negating the value of unit sergeants. With the exception of a few key units (e.g. Aspect Warrior Exarchs, Nobz in mobs of Boyz, Aspiring Sorcerers), there is nothing really differentiating these units aside from what weapons they can do thanks to Attacks being a stat tied to weapons. Hell, they don't even affect squad morale!
  • Objective Control. This new stat represents how many models a certain model counts as in terms of capping an objective. Battleline choices tend to have a high OC stat, as do vehicles and monsters to streamline the previous "Monsters/ Vehicles counts as X models when controlling objectives".
  • Leadership has been remapped to instead be something to roll over on a 2d6 instead of something to roll under.
• USRs Return. Turns out that there was no point in making up twenty different ways to explain "Feel No Pain" or "Deep Strike".
  • Weapons have their own special rules to account for. Assault Weapons can now be fired after advancing without penalty. Heavy Weapons add +1 to their BS if the user stands still before shooting. Additionally, weapons can have more than one type (e.g. Bolt Rifles are both Assault and Heavy weapons).
    • Unmodified 6s to hit or wound are now being called Critical Hits and Critical Wounds. Cool, that saves us some time in typing this shit down.
  • Twin-linked weapons work more like they did in the old days, granting a re-roll to wound. Melee weapons can also be twin-linked in some cases.
  • Concerning is the major consolidation of weapons. Similar to Kill Team, all power weapons now deal the same damage, as do all force weapons and all bolt rifle variants for example. After finally having the different weapon types somewhere where they all have some semblance of balance, they've now been stripped away. It remains to be seen how this will affect the balance of the game.
  • Despite USRs returning, Bulky seemingly isn't among them, as each transport still specifies that XYZ keywords take up more spaces. Why GW didn't carry over Bulky (X) from 30k or better yet make a specific stat for size is beyond everyone.
• Cut the Stratagem Bloat. There were too goddamn many of them, so a trimming of the very fringe ones is very welcome. A bunch of them now function as passive abilities inherent to the units they once enhanced, which was what everyone wanted back anyway.
  • GW is claiming to set a hard cap for available Stratagems, giving 12 universal ones that anyone can use and 6 strats exclusive to your detachment. Only time will tell how quickly this gets broken.
  • Keyword bloat has also taken a fair bit of trimming, and there's nobody arguing with that. 9E had a ton of keywords that were only relevant for certain strats and some only used to make exceptions - Not helping were the various Astartes keywords that only exist because loaner strats from the main SM/CSM codexes were added in as well as the intermingling of Chaos Marks between chaos marines and daemons that required the invention of yet another keyword to differentiate them.
• Characters can be attached to squads again. Some characters still have auras, but now you can have squads with characters leading them for special buffs as opposed to units being buffed into the stratosphere by overlapping auras.
  • Curious to note is that some characters can't attach to certain squads, and some characters called Lone Operatives can't attach to squads at all. The latter are protected from shooting attacks unless they're within 12" of the shooter. Not only is this applied to leaders who couldn't be attached to most units anyways like Guilliman and Cawl, but this also is seen on sneaky agents like the Officio Assassinorum.
• The psychic phase has been axed. Psychic attacks are now weapons with the proper statlines, psychic buffs/debuffs are now special rules. Just like the good ol' days.
  • An unfortunate development of this is that the lists of psychic powers seem to be gone. This is troubling considering that there were spells with all sorts of special uses that couldn't fit inside a single statline. Psychic powers like these have been reworked as abilities exclusive to certain types of psykers, so if you want certain powers, you need the psyker who has them.
  • Even though GW hyped up the lack of Psychic tests, there are still powers (Commentary describes these not!Spells as Psychic Abilities) that risk failure, though you only trigger that on a 1 on a 1d6 and all it deals is d3 MWs like in Horus Heresy 2.0. There are also some psychic powers that deal mortal wounds outright, but those are few and far between.
    • Needless to say, the implementation of this has been awkward. Many of the factions that had abilities to negate Psychic damage received either invuln saves or Feel No Pains against attacks made with [Psychic] weapons; not only does this affect spells, but also Force Weapons and Daemon Princes. What it doesn't do is affect the totally-not-spells on a Psyker's list of abilities, or the Doombolt Ritual from the Thousand Sons.
• Morale phase has been merged with the Command phase. Not like there was anything more that the phase did.
  • Battle-Shock changes. Instead of just causing extra casualties, Battle-Shock now inflicts penalties for the rest of the turn - the affected unit has its OC stat set to 0 so it can't hold objectives, it has to take a Desperate Escape test when falling back (Roll for each model falling back, lose a model for each 1), and it can't be boosted with Stratagems. This has the consequence of Tarpits being more effective, as without the additional casualties from morale, the only way to take them out is slaughtering them to the last. If the tarpitted unit can't do that quickly, tough titties. On the other hand, morale can cripple those tarpits' ability to actually hold objectives since 30-50 multiplied by zero is still zero.
• The Death of the FOC. Just like Warhammer Fantasy/AoS before it, 40k will no longer sport that old chestnut called the Force Organization Chart. Now there are only five real slots to contend with: Character, Epic Hero, Battleline, Dedicated Transport, and everything else.
  • The organisation instead will revolve around detachments exclusive to each faction, which defines what's Battleline, special rules, enhancements (the relics and Warlord Traits, now treated as a single category) available and stratagems; all based on the army's fluff.
  • Being the central units to your army, the Battleline and Dedicated Transport units can be taken up to six times in an army. Epic Heroes (your named characters) can only be taken once, and everything else can be taken up to three times. You need at least one Character in the army to act as a Warlord, though.
  • Curiously, the Boarding Action play mode seems to be the least affected by this due to dropping a lot of the older additions for its own fixed rules; according to the website it was specifically designed with 10th edition in mind. The most you might need there is a revision for units that might have been taken despite not being Troops/Elites choices.
  • With the release of the first Munitorum Field Guide, we have confirmation that points now work like in Age of Sigmar: you pay only for a block of models and the points don't change with equipment. Units whose kits include characters (like most Custodes units) have their point costs modeled so that you can build the character and the remainder of the set can be still played even if the "whole unit" is missing a model.
• Tough units are tougher. Most Vehicles and Monsters have received a noticeable bump to their Toughness and Wounds, and several weapons have lower AP than they used to have, while dedicated AT weapons are upgraded (The Hunter-Killer Missile is now Strength 12). Expect it to be much harder to kill off tanks and the like without dedicated anti-tank weaponry.
  • Speaking of monsters and vehicles, damage tracks seem to be much more simplified. Rather than copypasta the same statline multiple times with smaller numbers, there's now a "Damaged" section that just states what penalties to impose on an unit when its wounds go below the threshold. The new Ballistus Dreadnought, for instance, only has -1 To Hit when at 4 Wounds or less. Bigger units like Knights also see their OC stat drop.
• Subfaction Gutting? Seeing how the World Eaters and Imperial Guard codices turned out, there is a very real concern that the subfactions that they've built up since 6th Edition are going to be extinct. At the very least, we might just see them reduced to a single rule like AoS has for their subfaction rules.
  • The detachments that have come with each army pretty much act like the Armies of Renown. Though Space Marines, the corporate favorites they are, got detachments for each major chapter with a divergent roster, we've yet to see if this is a kindness that'll be shared with other armies.
• Combat Patrol becoming a modified form of gameplay for new players. To start, GW has (allegedly) playtested Combat Patrol boxes for each faction in 10th edition to guarantee that all are balanced against each other so two players can take one and proceed to play the game. The datasheets of the units are modified to reflect this new mode. It also adds enhancements to give your Warlord and unique secondary missions.
• Mission Changes On top of the standard Only War format, missions can be generated via the Chapter Approved system, which acts like a combination of Tempest of War cards and the Grand Tournament mission packs. After selecting the deployment, mission rules, and Primary Mission, each player chooses and reveals their Secondary Missions, which grant bonus VP. Secondary Missions can either be fixed (remaining in place the whole battle) or tactical (replaced with a new Secondary Mission upon completion but offering more VP). Additionally, at the start of the third round either player may play a Gambit that replaces the Primary Mission, giving up their ability to score from the Primary Mission but earning 30 VP should they fulfill the Gambit's requirements.
• Power Levels Are Dead, Long Live Power Levels. Despite there being much rejoicing over the announcement that Power Levels were being removed after they failed to work in the previous two editions of the game, GW has decided to rework points to be functionally identical to power levels meaning wargear is free, certain options are now mandatory, and unit sizes are in fixed increments which are usually equal to the amount of models sold in a box.
  • In a strange blast from the past, the only gear that costs anything are the detachment-exclusive Enhancements.

Boxed Sets

• Leviathan is the box that's going to be launching 10th Edition, pitting Space Marines against who else but the Tyranids. Its contents are new models for Space Marines and Tyranids, the rulebook with a Crusade expansion for the new narrative of the 4th Tyrannic War, a deck to play the game and a Space Marine transfer sheet.

Combat Patrol

• Strike Force Octavius: It has part of the new Space Marines of the edition. A Terminator Captain, Terminator Librarian, 5 Terminators and 5 Infernus.
• The Vardenghast Swarm: It has part of the new Tyranids of the edition. Termagants, the Winged Tyranid Prime, Barbgaunts, Von Ryan's Leapers, and the Psychophage. Might also include Rippers, but they're just cosmetic.

New Models

• Space Marines are getting new models for the Termie Captain, Termie Librarian, Phobos Lieutenant, Primaris Sternguard Veterans to replace the old Firstborn models, and base Terminators. Being introduced to the line are the Apothecary Biologis (a Primaris Apothecary in Gravis armor who remembered Apothecaries are scientists as well as medics), and the Ballistus Dreadnought (a Redemptor Dreadnought offshoot that leans more towards the old Hellfire Dreads by having a missile launcher and lascannon), the Infernus Squad (A squad of marines toting Pyreblasters that used to just belong to Black Templars) .
• Tyranids:
  • With the launch of the Leviathan boxset, they are getting new or updated models inside for: the Tyranid Prime (Being the first time the unit has ever gotten a unique model instead of just being a warrior and being the first time a warrior ever got wings after FW discontinued them), Termagants, Rippers, and the Screamer-Killer carnifex variant branching off its own miniature. Brand new to the line are the Neurotyrant (A super-sized Zoanthrope with smaller floating attendants, the psychic alternative to a Hive Tyrant), Neurogaunts (New gaunt variants that are led by a bigger gaunt that acts as a Synapse beacon), Barbgaunts (Essentially Gaunt Mortar Teams, fulfilling someone's wish for a heavy-weapons gaunt), Von Ryan's Leapers (smaller pack hunter Lictor-likes), and the Psychophage (a giant psyker-eating beast with a maw that puts the Haruspex to shame).
  • Revealed once the Instagram page of Games Workshop reached 500.000 followers, a new sculpt for the Deathleaper was shown the twelve of June of 2023.
• After GW showed in Warhammer Fest 2023 and its stream the roadmap of faction Codex for the rest of 2023 and Spring of 2024, they confirmed all the factions in it would get new models. They didn't say the exact number, so expect most of them to be one or two character/units.

Codex Updates

While there will be free rules released when the edition launches in the Summer, they will at best be placeholders like the Indexes of 8E, soon to be replaced by full Codexes. Fortunately, these new indexes are promised to be free for all like AoS' initial ruleset. Unfortunately, the common reception of these rules has been extraordinarily skubby thanks to some very weirdly-described rules, some armies getting some extremely favorable buffs and others being given rules so utterly trash that one has to wonder if they literally wrote all of these rules in a month and skimped out on QC just to get them out the door.

Of course, Warhammer Legends still assures that out-of-production or obsolete builds can have some sort of relevance. Shocking among the promised additions is the beloved boxnoughts, those sturdy bastions of the chapters for many decades. Less shocking but still damning is the inclusion of the various vehicles from the HH wargame, which used to be within the purview of a Forge World book - which is a bit problematic since these are models that GW is taking increasing amounts of control over producing those models and yet are arbitrarily just restricting from competitive play. Alongside these are the Imperial Armour indexes, which add in the FW models that GW still deems "fit for competitive play" and thus given points values.

• Space Marines: Because of course they'd be first in line for a new book. It's uncertain how things will fare for the chapters that only got a codex supplement in 8E (which includes the White Scars, Ultramarines, Iron Hands, Salamanders, and Raven Guard) and whether they'll get their own supplements or just get mothballed into the core codex because of how limited their rulesets were. Judging by the Dark Angels' upcoming codex and also the fact that ones with 9E Codices (Black Templars, Blood Angels, Dark Angels, Deathwatch and Space Wolves) got previewed together, it's very likely that only the more divergent chapters will get a full codex.
  • Dark Angels: Confirmed for Spring 2024.
• Tyranids: Comes first as they're the opposition from the Leviathan boxset and the other poster boy for 10th edition.
• Adeptus Mechanicus: Confirmed for Winter 2023.
• Necrons: Confirmed for Winter 2023.
• Orks: Confirmed for Spring 2024.
• Adeptus Custodes: Confirmed for Spring 2024; maybe they'll get proper Sisters of Silence support.
• T'au Empire: Confirmed for Spring 2024.
• Chaos Space Marines: Confirmed for Spring 2024. Hopes are high that the Emperor's Children might finally divorce themselves from the main roster and finish the foursome of god-aligned traitor legion codices.
• Imperial Agents: The oft-forgotten Agents of the Imperium, this will compile all those loose Inquisitors, Rogue Traders, Assassins and other associated squads.
• Knightly Households: Combines the Imperial and Chaos Knights into one codex (this is only confirmed via a presentation). The individual units and armies seem to be remaining distinct though.
• Adeptus Titanicus: At long last, the mighty god-machines of the Imperium will make their debuts in 40K proper instead of needing to wait for a Forge World book.

Lore Updates

Imperium

• In order to counter Hive Fleet Leviathan's sudden push, Roboute Guilliman has commissioned the Solblade Fleets - small but elite strike forces led by the Imperium's greatest heroes, tasked with killing its synapse creatures and buying the Imperium enough time to get their defenses ready for the Tyranid onslaught.

Space Marines

• Belisarius Cawl has finally found something he couldn't improve upon: Terminator Armor. Apparently the design for it is so perfect that he couldn't find any way to improve it. Instead, he managed to find a way to retrofit it (read: scale up) to fit Primaris marines.
  • In a more meta sense, it's looking like the gaps between Primaris and Firstborn has been growing ever slimmer, especially in terms of gameplay. The Primaris keyword no longer exists. That said, the armor marks (Tacticus, Gravis, Phobos) do still exist as keywords. Similarly, some Space Marine transports are being upsized to fit the Primaris strain...or perhaps their increased height was overexaggerated all along.

Xenos

Tyranids

• Hive Fleet Leviathan has made its big revenge and is swarming the Imperium from the galactic west in a path that would take them straight to Terra, right when the Imperium's forces are still concentrated in the Imperium Nihilus and unable to get back in a remotely reasonable time. It's uncertain how much their victory in Octarius helped with this.