The Wrath of the Damned comes to Kill Team
Of all the factions Games Workshop could have pulled out of the vault for Kill Team, we were not expecting this one.
The Legion of the Damned are officially returning to Warhammer 40,000 in Kill Team: Armageddon, emerging from the flames to take on a mob of heavily armed Ork Boss Nobz on one of the Imperium's most famous war worlds.
And these are not simply Space Marines painted black with some flames added.
Games Workshop appears to be leaning completely into what makes the Legion strange, both in the miniatures and in how they actually play.
The Legion of the Damned Finally Return
The Legion of the Damned have spent years existing mostly as legends within the setting.
They appear when Imperial forces are on the verge of disaster, emerge seemingly from nowhere, annihilate whatever happens to be causing the problem, and then disappear again before anyone gets a satisfying answer about who or what they actually are.
GW has wisely decided not to answer that mystery here.
Instead, the new miniatures double down on it.
The Legionnaires wear black power armor covered in skeletal decorations, skull motifs, bones, and supernatural flames. Even by Space Marine standards, they look immediately different from almost anything else currently in the range.
The Legionnaire Sergeant and Ancient are particularly good examples. The Sergeant looks like somebody took the old flaming Legion aesthetic and rebuilt it with modern Space Marine proportions, while the Ancient carries what is essentially a funeral monument into battle.
This is exactly what a Legion of the Damned refresh needed to look like.
Their Rules Actually Represent the Ghost Story
The more interesting part may be how they play.
The Legion does not begin a Kill Team battle operating at full Space Marine efficiency. According to GW, their connection to the material world has to strengthen as the game progresses.
During the early Turning Points, the Legionnaires move and fight more slowly than normal Space Marines.
Then they begin to solidify.
As the battle continues, the team becomes progressively more dangerous until these spectral Marines have fully materialized and are operating at the height of their power.
That is a really clever way to handle them.
Rather than giving the Legion a generic durability bonus and calling them ghosts, the rules appear to make their supernatural nature part of the pacing of the entire game.
Your opponent has an incentive to pressure them early.
The Legion player has an incentive to survive long enough for things to become considerably worse.
We still need the actual rules before judging how well that balance works, but conceptually this may be one of the more interesting Space Marine Kill Teams GW has designed.
The Orks Brought the Bosses
Standing opposite the Legion are the new Ork Boss Nobz.
We have already seen these models previewed as part of the current Ork wave and Codex: Orks, but Kill Team: Armageddon will be their first actual release.
These are not ordinary Boyz.
The Boss Nobz are enormous veteran Orks covered in thick armor and carrying the sort of equipment you would expect from warriors who have survived long enough to take whatever weapons they wanted from everyone else.
GW has shown specialists dual-wielding kustom shootas, a Skorcha Boss carrying an enormous flamethrower, and a Hacka Boss armed for a much more personal approach.
That gives the box a nice contrast.
The Legion of the Damned are a small force of supernatural warriors gradually becoming more dangerous as the battle progresses.
The Boss Nobz appear to be starting the game with the much simpler philosophy of being enormous Orks with enormous weapons.
Sometimes that is enough.
Armageddon Gets a Proper Killzone
The terrain may be one of the sleeper hits of this box.
Killzone: Armageddon is designed to work visually alongside the existing Battlezone Fronteris terrain, but with significantly more battlefield damage.
The set includes two large bunkers with their own rules for fighting inside them, ruined structures, scatter terrain, and some excellent wreckage pieces.
Those wrecks include a destroyed Redemptor Dreadnought and Rogal Dorn Battle Tank.
That is fantastic terrain design.
A battlefield called Armageddon should not look like everyone arrived five minutes before the game started and politely assembled some barricades. It should look like entire armored formations have already been destroyed before your Kill Team even gets there.
The damaged vehicles immediately communicate that scale.
And because the terrain is designed to sit alongside Battlezone Fronteris, players with existing Imperial terrain should be able to expand the battlefield without the new pieces looking completely unrelated.
The Box Includes the Full Armageddon Dossier
Kill Team: Armageddon also comes with datacards for both teams and the Armageddon Dossier, which contains their rules alongside background covering the Legion of the Damned, Boss Nobz, and the conflict that brings them together.
GW has not yet revealed the full contents or detailed rules for either team, so there is still quite a bit left to learn before release.
There is one other confirmation worth paying attention to, though.
The Legion of the Damned are not staying confined to Kill Team.
Games Workshop has explicitly confirmed that it will reveal rules for them in both Kill Team and Warhammer 40,000 closer to release.
That potentially makes this reveal considerably more important than a normal Kill Team box.
Our Take
This might be our favorite reveal from the Big Autumn Preview so far.
Not because it is necessarily the biggest release, but because the Legion of the Damned are exactly the kind of faction Kill Team is good at bringing back.
They are mysterious. They operate in small numbers. They do not need an entire 40-model army range to feel complete, and their supernatural nature gives the designers room to make them play completely differently from ordinary Space Marines.
The models also look like the Legion of the Damned.
GW did not smooth away the ridiculous skulls, flames, bones, and heavy-metal album-cover aesthetic that made the originals memorable. They took that identity and rebuilt it with modern miniatures.
Then you put them against enormous Ork veterans on a battlefield littered with destroyed tanks and Dreadnoughts.
That sounds like Armageddon to us.
There are still plenty of questions about the actual rules, team composition, and how the Legion will function in full Warhammer 40,000.
But as a return?
This is a very good way to bring the damned back from the dead.
