There’s a line in the 4th edition Codex: Chaos Space Marines about Chaos Terminators that I keep coming back to. Describing the warriors who end up inside the armour, it says that often the only way to acquire Terminator armour is to kill the previous owner.
Read it as a logistics statement and it goes somewhere odd. No quartermaster. No requisition form. There are only so many suits, they are all currently occupied, and the codex is quite relaxed about how that gets resolved.
For the loyalists the scarcity is at least on paper. Imperial Armour Volume 4, The Anphelion Project, notes that most Chapters retain only a handful of suits, and that even the Deathwing, the Dark Angels’ entire First Company, musters somewhere around a hundred functioning ones. The book calls each suit “a revered item with a long history of previous wearers.” Chapters keep them running because they have forges, artificers, and treaties with Mars.
Chaos runs on salvage.
Where Chaos Terminators Actually Come From
Imperial Armour Volume 13, War Machines of the Lost and Damned, has a section called The Tools of Damnation that spells out the traitors’ whole problem. Loyalist Chapters receive a continuous stream of weapons, ammunition and vehicles from their own Chapter forges or from Mechanicus forge worlds they hold reciprocal treaties with. Chaos warbands raid for theirs. They empty defence force arsenals, drag survivors off alongside the booty, and when raiding falls short they go to the Dark Mechanicum, whose city-sized soul-forges take payment in captives, in sanctified relics to be ritually defiled, or in whatever esoteric material the Dark Magi happen to want that century.
So the forges do exist. That’s the part that keeps snagging me, because a few pages later the same book describes the Land Raider Achilles and says something much more absolute. The rites that build an Achilles require the artificer to call upon the benevolence of the Machine God, and Warpsmiths and Dark Magi are, in Imperial Armour’s phrasing, entirely beyond the grace of the Omnissiah. Certain disciplines of machine lore are closed to them permanently. The consequence is stated outright: every Achilles in the service of Chaos is the same vehicle that fought for the Legiones Astartes during the Great Crusade and the Heresy. The book means it literally, and puts “without exception” in the sentence.
Nobody has written that exact sentence about Terminator armour, and I want to be careful, because it would be easy to assume it transfers. The Achilles gets singled out because it’s an extreme case. The Dark Mechanicum demonstrably turns out Rhinos, Land Raiders, and whole daemon engines. If a Warpsmith can bind a daemon into a Defiler, you’d think he could hammer out a suit of heavy plate…
Except nothing in the fiction ever behaves like new production. Terminator suits get inherited, looted, prised off corpses. The Vraks books are useful here. Imperial Armour Volume 7, The Siege of Vraks Part Three, says that for a Chaos Space Marine to earn the right to wear one of these rare pieces of wargear, he must have fought in hundreds of engagements if not thousands. Chaos Terminators turned up at Vraks in the Steel Brethren and in the Purge, but the largest concentration belonged to Lord Zhufor, whose Blood Cult Terminators were feared by their own side as much as by the enemy. Even across eighteen years of siege, with warbands arriving from across the sector, the Terminators on Vraks get described in cadres and personal retinues.
That 4th edition codex also notes that many Chaos Terminators are Aspiring Champions, which makes the arrangement worse the longer you look at it. The armour is the most valuable object a Legionary can own, it cannot be replaced, and the promotion path to wearing one is homicide. A squad of Chaos Terminators is a room full of warriors who all arrived by the same route, taking orders from a Lord who acquired his own suit by the identical method.
I genuinely don’t know whether GW has decided the Dark Mechanicum can’t make Terminator plate, or has just never bothered to say. Both readings fit everything I’ve read. The second one is more likely, honestly, and slightly less interesting.
Thirty Years of Chaos Terminators in Plastic and Metal
The model line goes back further than the lore justification. Bell of Lost Souls put out a retrospective this month that walks the whole thing backwards, and the dates are roughly these. Metal Chaos Terminators appear around 1989 for Rogue Trader and the first Space Hulk. A proper five-man metal boxed set arrives in August 1996 alongside a metal Abaddon and that edition’s Codex Chaos. The first multipart plastic kit lands with the 4th edition codex in September 2007. The sculpts we have now, the ones on the shelf today, are a 2022 release from the 9th edition Chaos Space Marines wave.
Those 2007 plastics had a long run. Fifteen years on the shelf, which in Games Workshop terms is geological. They were the kit that taught a generation what a Chaos Terminator was meant to look like: hunched, spiky, faintly goblin-faced under the helm, horns glued on at angles that suggest the sculptor was paid by the horn. Bell of Lost Souls is fond of them. I find them hard to look at now.
I own exactly one of the 1996 metal ones. Bought it on eBay about four years ago for thirty-four quid, which was too much, from a seller who described it as “vintage” and photographed it on a kitchen worktop. It arrived with the power fist bent about fifteen degrees off true and a previous owner’s paint on it in at least three layers, one of which I’m fairly sure was household gloss. I have never stripped it. It sits in a drawer with the bits I mean to get to, and it is a year or two older than I am, which I found out while writing this and have been quietly unhappy about since.
The thing about that metal model is how small it is. Stand it next to the 2022 kit and it barely reaches the shoulder. Across four generations of sculpt the Chaos Terminator has grown taller, broader, and vastly more ornate, piling on horns and cloth and trophy racks, while the fiction has spent the same three decades insisting these are scarce heirlooms that nobody can replace. The current box is five miniatures and eighty-two components.
Small correction to that BoLS piece, incidentally, because it tripped me up for twenty minutes. It dates the current Terminators to 2019 and says the 2007 plastics “lasted 11 years.” The 2019 date belongs to the wider Chaos Space Marine aesthetic reboot and to Abaddon’s re-sculpt. The Terminators themselves are 2022. Easy to conflate, and I only caught it because the part count didn’t match what’s on the box.
The Pattern Problem
Terminator armour comes in patterns, and the traitors kept whatever they were wearing when they turned. The mainline plastic Chaos Terminators are Indomitus pattern, the common workhorse. Cataphractii is the heavy, slow, overlapping-plate design: Mortarion’s Deathshroud wear it, the Justaerin wore it under Horus, and Kravek Morne, the Iron Warriors Warsmith who showed up in this year’s Eye of Terror wave, stomps around in a suit of it. Cataphractii turns up all over the traitor side, which tracks, given how much of it was in circulation when the Legions split.
Then there’s Tartaros. White Dwarf #416 describes it as offering as much protection as Indomitus while being far nimbler, developed in the closing years of the Great Crusade, and says the suits that survive into the 41st Millennium are honoured relics that only a Chapter’s worthiest heroes may bear. The Thousand Sons have a full squad of it, because of course they do. Scarab Occult Terminators, Tartaros pattern, released in Wrath of Magnus at the end of 2016.
I ran my Scarab Occult for about three years telling anyone who’d listen that they were Cataphractii. Said it to Kiran across a table at my local store, with total confidence, while he was deploying his Deathshroud. He looked it up on his phone between turns and read the product description out loud to me. Tartaros pattern, says the box, and has done since 2016.
I keep running them anyway, and not because they’re good. Ten Rubricae would do more work for the points. But my big blue lads have been in every list I’ve written since 8th edition and I’m not benching them now for the sake of a couple of extra wounds on the table.
Kiran’s lot are the real hoarders, mind. Death Guard field Deathshroud, Blightlord Terminators, a Lord of Contagion, and Typhus, all of them in Terminator plate, which is a suspicious quantity of heavy armour for a Legion that supposedly cannot manufacture anything. The in-fiction explanation is that Mortarion’s bodyguards were always Terminators and the Legion carried them into the Eye more or less intact. I suspect the real explanation is that the Death Guard got a full range refresh in 2017 and somebody at Nottingham enjoyed sculpting Terminators. Those two answers don’t sit together neatly and I’m not going to pretend otherwise.
So yeah. Terminator armour. Old suits, worn by whoever killed the last bloke wearing them, patched up by a Warpsmith who charges the warband in slaves and can’t do half the rites the job originally called for. It’s a bit like running a car from a manufacturer that went under thirty years ago. Everything still works, mostly, and every part that fails has to come off somebody else’s.
The loyalists have the same problem, which people forget. Their Saturnine suits died with the tech-enclaves that made them, and no Chapter has managed to reproduce one since. Rarity is baked into the whole idea of the armour, on both sides of the Heresy, and has been since Imperial Armour started writing the stuff down.
Eleventh edition launched on the 20th of June with the Armageddon box, Space Marines and Orks, and no new Chaos Terminator kit has been announced for it. The 2022 box is still the current box. Eighty-two components, five models, forty-millimetre bases, and if you want the Sorcerer variant you need the separate character kit.
