REVIEW: Codex Black Legion a Second Look
Tyler M. here with a second look at Chaos’ first codex supplement, the Black Legion.
I know when this first came out everyone was clamoring over what rules were included. How is this going to improve your army and where’s my win button?! For months this is all I heard and all I knew about the book since I was waiting for the print version to come out before buying it. Since I love all things Chaos though I was going to buy this regardless and I wasn’t disappointed.
A little bit of a disclaimer here, I am definitely more of a hobbyist then a gamer and when I do game it is with a narrative theme in mind. I build my army lists to fit the fluff of the army, and play the game to win but will also lead my champion on a near suicidal charge against an enemy leader because, well, thats just the kind of guy my champion is.
With that in mind when I finally cracked open the book the first thing I read was all of the new background lore and artwork. Man oh man, what a lore treasure trove! Was this really the same book I heard everyone complaining and whining about? Right away you can tell that this was heavily influenced if not co-written by Aaron Dembski-Bowden to make sure it gels with his upcoming Abaddon book series. Have you ever wanted to know exactly what happened to old top knot after his daddy died, or how he came into the position of Warmaster and birthed a new legion from the ashes of the Sons of Horus? Well you’re in luck because it goes into great detail about just this thing for at least several pages. We get to hear all about Fulgrim’s lot stealing and cloning Horus’ body and the almost assuredly epic siege between the two legions and showdown between “father” and son. Parts of this are left genuinely vague so at leaves AD-B plenty of room to go into detail in his novels, but its not anymore vague then what we normally see in Codexes.
All of those Black Crusades that have only had 5 word sentences describing them before now get fully fleshed out with the Gothic War and the 13th Black Crusade getting a full 2 page spread apiece. Did you think the Black Legion was a fully cohesive army with no variation within it ranks, well you were wrong. We get to see several different warbands and their color schemes. One particularly interesting one was a warband of Sons of Horus who refused to change their colors and allegiance and in fact decided to emulate their Luna Wolves identity with a chaos twist.
After all of this we finally get to the rules, while not hugely important to me they can still add something interesting to the game. I think everyone knew going into this that there wasn’t going to be a huge divergence from the standard codex since they are basically the poster boys. What we get are some new warlord traits, artifacts, the ability to take chosen as troops and an upgrade for a unit of terminators to Abaddon’s personal retinue if you take the big guy himself. All in all I was pretty happy with it. You are encouraged to take more actual Chaos Marines over the cultist spam you normally see while not giving you a win button. It would have been nice to get 1 or 2 new characters, maybe Ygethmor the Deciever or Devram Korda, 2 of the chosen of Abaddon that we have heard about for around a decade now.
The missions all add an interesting new element to the game with the first few letting you play the Black Legion in their element while the latter few are historical. Its unlikely many people will play many of the historical missions more then once or twice if at all but it still adds another layer of depth to the narrative and fleshes out a few of these events a bit more.
The photography in this is top notch, again trending in GW’s new style of adding dramatic lighting and cinematic framing. Its somewhere between the standard photography they use to do and the completely cinematic/photoshopped style that FW does. We also get to see a few new artwork pieces one of which seems to show the Sons of Horus post Chaos, fighting in the Eye. The hardcover also comes with a high quality dust jacket.
All in all I think it is very much worth the $49.50 price tag. It doesn’t have nearly the same amount of new rules that a normal codex has but if you like lore it goes into much more extensive detail then normal. If you are looking for the next thing to supercharge your Chaos army this isn’t for you (unless you are one of those people who just wants to find a way to cram an extra Heldrake into your force, but thats a whole other story) but if you’re like me and you play your army because you love the lore and the narrative and want to get as much out of it as you can then I highly recommend this supplement.
I give this codex supplement 4/5 chaos stars.
Have any of you gotten this book? Do you agree with me or not? I personally am hoping to see a Death Guard supplement next and maybe a Red Corsair one, space pirate themed chaos marines could always be cool.
