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.

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.
  • 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.
  • Objective Control. This new stat represents how many models a certain model counts as in terms of capping an objective. Likely to make ObSec more valuable.
• 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).
  • 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.
• Cut the Stratagem Bloat. There are too goddamn many of them, so a trimming to the very fringe ones is very welcome. A bunch of them now function as passive abilities inherent to the units they once enhanced.
• Heroes can be attached to squads again. Some characters still have auras, but now you can have squads with heroes leading them for special buffs as opposed to them being buffed into the stratosphere by overlapping auras.
  • Curious to note is that some heroes can't attach to certain squads. Heroes that can't attach to squads at all are protected from shooting attacks unless they're within 12" of the shooter.
• 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.
• 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 affective 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, and it can't be boosted with Stratagems.
• The Death of the FOC. Just like Warhammer Fantasy 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, everything else.
  • 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.
  • 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. The most you might need there is a revision for units that might have been taken despite not being Troops/Elites choices.
• 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. Expect it to be much harder to kill off tanks and the like with infantry-portable weapons.

New Models

• Space Marines are getting new models for the Termie Librarian, Phobos Lieutenant and base Terminators.
• Tyranids are getting new models for the Tyranid Prime (with wings) and Termagants. Brand new to the line are the Von Ryan's Leapers, smaller pack hunter Lictor-likes.

Lore Updates

Imperium

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.
  • Similar to that, it seems like a lot of Space Marine transports are being upsized to fit the Primaris strain...or perhaps their increased height was overexaggerated.

Xenos

• Hive Fleet Leviathan has made its big revenge and is swarming the Imperium from the galactic west, right when the Imperium's forces are still concentrated in the Imperium Nihilus and unable to get back in a remotely reasonable time.