When an Exodite dies, their kin carry the body down into a barrow dug under the earth, and there they break the spirit stone the dead one wore in life against a crystal altar. The soul pours out into the rock. It runs into the standing stones, the stone circles, the menhirs strung across the whole planet, and joins something the Aeldari call the World Spirit, a psychic engine that’s basically made of dead grandparents. Every Exodite who’s ever died on that world is still in there, awake in some fashion, part of the ground their descendants walk on.
That’s the part that grabbed me. Not the dinosaurs. Everyone gets to the dinosaurs eventually, and we will, but the death rite is the thing that tells you who these people are before any of the riding-lizards-into-battle stuff does.
The Aeldari Exodites just got revealed at GW’s Big Summer Preview, and they’re arriving as a Kill Team box: three Dragon Masters on reptile-back, a couple of smaller beasts called Drakolithes, and a pack of Beast Snagga Orks for them to fight. The first plastic Exodite models GW has ever made. These guys have been in the codex since the 2nd edition Eldar book, which came out before I was born, and in all that time the official tabletop got nothing. Some artwork. A few paragraphs of background. A running joke about elves on dinosaurs. So this is a big deal for a particular kind of Aeldari fan, and I want to explain why.
The Aeldari Exodites who saw it coming
The Exodites have one thing no other Aeldari faction can claim: they were right about the Fall, and they were right early. Go back before it happened, back when the Aeldari empire spanned the galaxy and had basically beaten survival itself. No labour, no want, no death they couldn’t push away. And a slice of that civilisation looked at where the pleasure cults were heading and said, out loud, this ends in catastrophe. They warned people. They got called puritans, killjoys, miserable fanatics obsessed with self-denial. You can imagine how popular that made them. Nobody likes the guy at the party warning everyone the party’s going to summon a Chaos God.
So they left. Packed into whatever ships they could get and ran for the galactic east, as far from the rotten core worlds as they could reach, and settled raw new planets that hadn’t been touched by the corruption. Maiden Worlds, the lore calls them. They gave up the automated everything and the soul-free comfort and went back to growing crops by hand and following herds across open plains. On purpose. Because they’d done the maths on where the comfortable version was heading.
Then Slaanesh was born, the psychic shockwave tore a hole in the galaxy that we now call the Eye of Terror, and most of the Aeldari species died screaming. The craftworlds survived by being far enough from the blast when it went off. The Exodites had already been gone for thousands of years by then, sitting out on their frontier worlds, too distant to feel the worst of it.
I keep wanting to call that vindication. Smartest people in the room, saw the asteroid coming, got out. And then I sit with it for a second and it gets murkier, because being right didn’t actually save most of them. Plenty of Exodite ships never made it. Plenty landed and got eaten by Orks or by their new planet’s native predators before they could build anything. Distance from the Eye is what kept their souls intact, more than wisdom did. They got far enough away, in the right direction, early enough. The far-sighted-prophet stuff is real, but it’s wrapped around a lot of ordinary people who just didn’t fancy the apocalypse and moved house early.
What’s actually in those stones
The World Spirit is the bit I think gets undersold whenever people talk about this faction.
The craftworld Aeldari you might know already. Their dead go into the Infinity Circuit, the wraithbone skeleton of the ship, and get pulled out to power Wraithguard and Wraithlords when the situation gets desperate. The Exodites do the same trick, except their version is a whole planet. The standing stones aren’t decoration and they aren’t a religion exactly. They’re enormous spirit stones, anchoring the souls of the dead into the land so She Who Thirsts can’t drag them off and devour them. Live psykers can stand at a stone circle and talk to their ancestors. Not metaphorically. The dead are in the menhirs, and a planet that’s been settled for tens of thousands of years has a lot of them.
Which reframes everything about how they fight. When an Exodite tribe defends its world, it isn’t defending real estate. Abandon a settled planet and you abandon every soul in the ground to the Warp, because the World Spirit needs the living nearby to keep replenishing it. Walk away and your great-great-grandmother gets eaten by a Chaos God. So they don’t walk away. They’ll throw everything they have at an invader rather than let the herds and the barrows fall, and that stubbornness is the whole reason a tiny, primitive, scattered population has held onto these worlds for tens of thousands of years.
There’s a webway angle too, which the new reveal leans into. Those World Spirit stone networks tie into the Aeldari webway, with hidden, heavily guarded paths leading in. It’s how craftworld Aeldari and Exodites can reach each other, and it’s why a Stonesinger, the new psyker model in the box, is described as contacting the souls in the world spirit directly. The model is a guy talking to a haunted planet. I love that.
The dinosaurs, yeah, fine
Okay. The dinosaurs.
The whole reason “Exodites” has been a meme for decades is the image: elegant space elves with lances, riding scaly reptilian mounts, herding enormous dinosaur-things across alien grasslands. The Exodites brought big reptilian beasts to their Maiden Worlds and spread them deliberately, and over thousands of years built an entire pastoral economy around them. The huge slow herbivores, the megadons, give them meat, leather, bone, even a substitute for wraithbone. The smaller carnivorous ones get ridden. Their word for all of these animals translates, loosely, as “dragons,” which is how you end up with Dragon Knights and the new Dragon Masters.
The new kit gives the riders proper names and roles. Clanblades are the close-combat ones on redmaw drakesteeds, swinging power swords and axes. Leystalkers are snipers on darkscale mounts. Stonesingers are the psykers. The Dragon Masters work as a ritual triad, which is a nicely Aeldari touch, three of them hunting together as one unit. And the box lets you build them instead as lance-armed Dragon Knights with rules for full Warhammer 40,000, which is GW quietly telling you these things are coming to the big game too.
I have to come clean about something. Years ago, deep in 8th edition, I wanted Exodites so badly that I tried to make my own. Drukhari were my Kill Team army anyway, so I had a box of Reavers, and I figured I’d put Aeldari riders on some old AoS Saurus cavalry and call it Dragon Knights. Mate, it was bad. The proportions were all wrong, the elf legs wouldn’t sit on the lizard saddles, the greenstuff looked like chewing gum. The one I actually finished looked like a warning to others. Kiran still brings it up. I stripped the test model twice and then put the whole project in a drawer where it remains to this day. So when I say I’m glad GW finally did these in plastic, understand it’s partly because they’ve saved me from ever trying again.
That’s been the situation forever, though. Exodites are the faction people convert, proxy, kitbash, beg for on forums, and never actually get to buy. They turn up in third-party ranges and in the back of people’s display cabinets as labours of love. The demand has been there since the Aeldari were still called Eldar, and GW just never pulled the trigger.
So why a Kill Team box?
This is the part I’m chewing on.
The Exodites are not getting a codex. They’re not getting an army. They’re getting a three-model elite Kill Team, dropped into a boxed set against a warband of Beast Snagga Orks, with a campaign dossier and some terrain rules for building a Maiden World. That’s the entire release, at least for now.
And I genuinely don’t know how to feel about it. Part of me thinks it’s perfect. Kill Team is where GW tries weird, small, characterful ideas without committing to a 40-page codex and a full plastic range, and a faction whose entire vibe is “tiny isolated tribes, a handful of warriors, ritual hunts” suits a skirmish game. Three Dragon Masters as a ritual triad is a Kill Team in a way that forty dinosaur knights never quite would be. I’ve been playing Kill Team since the 2018 box and the teams it does best have always been the ones that didn’t make sense as a full army.
The other part of me has watched GW do this before and knows the catch. A Kill Team box gives you the models. It doesn’t give you a future. The Dragon Knight rules for full 40K hint at more, sure, but plenty of factions have arrived this way and just sort of stopped. You get your three lovely models and a campaign book and then you wait another decade to find out whether anything else is coming. After thirty-odd years of waiting, getting handed a starter portion and a “stay tuned” is a slightly nervy kind of win.
Still. They exist now. Plastic Exodites, with their lances and their drakesteeds and their barrows full of ancestors, on a shelf you can actually buy them off. Kiran’s already said he’ll take the Orks if I take the elves, which means the kitbash drawer might finally get some company it isn’t ashamed of.
