As the Horus Heresy ground onwards, many of the traitors who had initially resisted the allure of Chaos began to be changed by the power of the Dark Gods. Even the massive Questoris Knights, veterans of combat since before the birth of the Imperium, were not immune to the pull of the empyrean, and began to change under its malignant influence.
These Corrupted Knights are the focus of the latest Exemplary Battles download for Warhammer: The Horus Heresy, with free rules giving you more ways to customise your turncoat behemoths. So how do these Knights differ from their later Chaos counterparts? Andy and Tom from the Horus Heresy team lay it all out for us.
Andy: Corrupted Knights (and indeed Titans) are a phenomenon fans of the Horus Heresy will be familiar with from such novels as Titandeath and several of the Siege of Terra stories. Inspired by these sources, we introduced rules for fielding Corrupted Titans in the game of Adeptus Titanicus in the Traitor Legios supplement, and the Exemplary Battles series affords us a chance to explore a similar theme – using Knights instead of Titans – in Warhammer: The Horus Heresy.
I should make it clear that these are Knights tainted by the powers of the Warp rather than fully mutated into something else. For much of the Horus Heresy, what will later become known as ‘Chaos’ remains an unknown and unknowable force. It certainly touches those who take arms against the Emperor, to various degrees, but slowly and by increments.
In fact, it doesn't even begin to become fully manifest until well into the Siege of Terra – a period of the civil war described in great detail in the Black Library novels, but not yet explored in the game.* It's for that reason that the example Knights we show in the article aren't the Chaos Knights you see in Warhammer 40,000, as they wouldn't be displaying anything like that level of mutation for many years (in most cases millennia) to come.
Tom: Fielding a Corrupted Knight can be done in a variety of ways. The first is by selecting a single Lords of War unit from the Questoris Household list in Liber Mechanicum to fill a Lords of War Optional Detachment, and then choosing one of the upgrades from this list.
Another way is using the Questoris Household Force Organisation chart from Liber Mechanicum as a Primary Detachment, allowing all-Knight armies (as long as you take at least a few Armigers). Lastly, the same Force Organisation Chart can be taken as an extra Optional Detachment within an army using the Crusade Force Organisation chart. In this case, it is in addition to other Optional Detachments (such as Allied Detachment) and must obey the Lords of War points limit.
With corrupted Primarchs and plastic Cerastus Knights on the way, it’s a great time to pledge your Knight Household to the Ruinous Powers and corrupt those noble machine spirits. Download the Exemplary Battles document below, and make sure to check out previous articles for more warp-tainted war engines, daemonic hordes, and traitorous militia mobs.
* We'll get there eventually!