Twelve units leave Codex: Space Marines when the 11th edition book turns up in October. Centurion Assault Squad, Centurion Devastator Squad, Razorback, Predator Destructor, Predator Annihilator, Vindicator, Whirlwind, Dreadnought, Stormhawk Interceptor, Stormtalon Gunship, Stormraven Gunship, Hammerfall Bunker. They get Legends rules in the app at launch, which is fine for a garage game and not legal at an event unless the organiser says so. Five more become Legendary Proxies, meaning the model stays on the table using a newer datasheet: Tactical Squad, Devastator Squad, Suppressor Squad, Pedro Kantor, Uriel Ventris.
Then GW ran their Space Marines Q&A on the 4th, somebody asked about the Grey Knights, and the answer was that the Grey Knights keep their Stormraven, their Venerable Dreadnought, their Razorback and their Rhino. Current profiles, plus the Strength and Toughness bumps everyone else is getting. Anything larger waits for their own codex.
So the Razorback is a Legends unit and also a legal Grey Knights unit at the same time. The Stormraven too. I saw about four people mention this and then go straight back to arguing about Tactical Marines, which is fair enough, because that’s the fight everyone actually cares about. But there’s an in-universe answer to the Grey Knights thing, and it’s been sitting in a Forge World book since 2012.
The Grey Knights have their own Forge World
Deimos, which most people know as a pattern name printed on Heresy-era Rhino sprues, is a moon.
Imperial Armour Volume 2 (Second Edition)’s The Steel Forge lays it out: Deimos was once one of the twin moons of Mars, and it was moved, by processes the book declines to describe, into orbit around Titan. It now sits above the Grey Knights fortress-monastery and produces “any and all engines of war the Grey Knights might demand, serving them and them alone.” The same section says the finished matériel gets handed over by mind-scrubbed servitors, so that neither the Chapter’s secrets nor the Mechanicus’s leak in the exchange.
Read that back. The Adeptus Mechanicus moved a moon out of Mars orbit and into Saturn’s so that one Chapter of roughly a thousand men would have a dedicated supplier, and the book gives it about forty words before moving on to armour ratings.
Imperial Armour Volume 1 (Second Edition)’s Adeptus Astartes Chapter Forges explains why nobody can do anything about it. Every Chapter builds its own vehicles in its own forges under its own Master of the Forge, and many Chapter forges can turn out the STC codex vehicles directly: Rhinos, Land Raiders, Predators. The book notes that a Chapter forge can also knock up one-off vehicles for a specific siege or a specific hostile environment, “a prospect that would appal any Tech-Priest,” and then adds the line that does all the work. The Adeptus Mechanicus have no power to intervene or dictate what happens inside a fortress-monastery’s walls.
So nobody audits them. That’s technically true of every Chapter, and for the Chapter whose existence is itself classified there isn’t a department that would file the request in the first place.
What’s in the arsenal on Titan
War Machines of the Grey Knights & the Inquisition, same book, goes further than I remembered. The Chapter’s arsenal on Titan is described as vast stasis-locked battery chambers holding “probably examples of almost every war machine ever wrought by the Imperium.” Deimos itself holds the STC imprints for the entire canon of Adeptus Mechanicus lore, plus, and this is the phrasing, weapons undreamed of, all of it reserved for the Chapter’s exclusive use.
Stasis-locked, which takes care of the wear question as well. A Brotherhood that loses a Razorback draws another one out of a chamber where time isn’t running, and the book never says how many are in there.
The Dreadnoughts get their own note in the Doomglaive entry: the Grey Knights maintain more Dreadnoughts than most Chapters, because an entire Forge World feeding them means there’s never a shortage of hulls, and a Chapter of that quality never runs short of brothers worth interring in one. Their Thunderhawks, per Imperial Armour Aeronautica, come out of the hidden vaults under the fortress-monastery with psycannon where the heavy bolters go and Mindstrike missiles alongside the Hellstrikes.
And the bit I’d forgotten completely until I went looking this week: Grey Knights vehicle commanders are psykers like everyone else in the Chapter, and there’s a practice where the commander links his own spirit to the one in the hull through psycho-reactive elements built into the plating, so the machine spirit and the man fight as one thing. I’ve read a lot of Grey Knights material and that had gone straight out of my head.
There’s a joke buried in the pattern names too. Mars developed the Mk Ic Deimos pattern Rhino for the Great Crusade, and The Steel Forge is clear that Deimos supplied the Expeditionary Fleets long before it was signed over to the Grey Knights, which is why so many vehicles across the Imperium are still built to a Deimos pattern today. So the pattern name on a Heresy Rhino sprue is the same forge that, ten thousand years further down the timeline, takes orders from one customer. I doubt that’s deliberate on GW’s part. It’s a nice accident.
Nobody at the Chapter asked for Guilliman’s opinion
The reason this holds together as an explanation, rather than being a coincidence I’m dressing up, is that the Grey Knights sit outside the Codex Astartes chain of decision-making entirely. They don’t answer to a Chapter Master answering to a wider Founding. They answer to the Ordo Malleus and the Grand Masters on Titan. When the rest of the Adeptus Astartes gets reorganised, restructured, resupplied or, in this case, told which vehicles it may no longer field, there’s no route by which that instruction reaches Titan. The Ordo Malleus and the Grand Masters are the whole chain.
They also never got Primaris, and the fiction got there before the release schedule did. The Chapter’s existence is a secret of a kind Cawl was not read into during the two centuries he spent building the new Marines for Guilliman, and Grey Knights gene-seed has its own separate lineage and its own separate problems. In-universe, the reason the Grey Knights are still fielding a Firstborn armoury is the same reason nobody culled it. Nobody with the authority to change their equipment has the clearance to know what their equipment is.
I went in expecting to have to stretch this and I didn’t have to. The Forge World text predates the rules decision by fourteen years and lines up with it by accident, which doesn’t happen often enough for me to be blase about it.
The version of this that isn’t flattering
Right, so. Deimos. Great story, love it, genuinely one of my favourite pieces of logistics lore in 40K. It is also true that the reason the Grey Knights range survived the cull is that GW hasn’t touched it in fifteen years and there’s nothing in it new enough to replace the old stuff with. The Strike Squad kit is from the 2011 codex. Same plastic that was on the shelf when I was still buying Imperial Fists in my early twenties, which is longer than I’ve owned my car and roughly as long as I’ve been going to the same FLGS.
Being exempt from a cull and being ignored are, from a distance, the same event. It’s the energy of a landlord who never once inspects the flat.
I go back and forth on whether that’s actually a problem. Part of me wants the range refreshed, because a 2011 Terminator next to a 2026 one is not a fair fight visually and the Grey Knights deserve better. Part of me has watched what “refreshed” has meant for every other Marine Chapter this month and thinks the Grey Knights might have got the better deal by accident. Their players open the app in October, find their four vehicles still legal, and get on with it. Nobody’s Razorback becomes a paperweight. Nobody has to re-read a FAQ to find out whether the thing they painted in 2019 is a proxy for something else now. Then again, the same logic says the best outcome for any collection is GW ignoring it forever, and that can’t be right either.
The one I was jealous of
Warhammer Open, Liverpool-ish end of the calendar, two or three years back now, and there was a bloke two tables down running the full silver at a standard well past what a tournament asks for. Land Raider Crusader, two Razorbacks, hand-painted heraldry on red and black bands the way the Grey Knights actually do it in the lore, a personal sigil for each vehicle commander instead of the same Chapter icon stamped across six hulls. I stood there long enough that it got awkward.
The bit that annoyed me was his transport case. He’d cut the foam himself for the Land Raider, one big block, sized so the sponsons didn’t have to come off. I’ve been carrying my Imperial Fists around in a case where my big yellow brick of a Land Raider goes in sideways and sheds a sponson roughly every fourth trip, and I’ve known for years that the fix is forty minutes with a bread knife, and I have never once done it. Pete has offered to do it for me twice. I said I’d sort it. That was 2023…
Anyway. I asked him about the heraldry and he said he’d got it out of the Forge World book, which is presumably the same section I’ve been quoting all the way down this page. He’d been reading it for painting reference, which had genuinely never occurred to me as a use for it.
What actually changes in October
Practically, almost nothing changes for Grey Knights players, which puts them in a small minority this month. Four vehicles stay legal. The infantry gets the same Strength and Toughness increases as everyone else, applied automatically in the app when the codex drops. Points will rise accordingly, so armies shrink, which for a Chapter that already turns up with 25 to 30 models is going to be felt more than it will be by an Ultramarines player dropping from 60 to 50. The full roster shake-up waits for a Grey Knights codex GW hasn’t dated.
The Razorback situation is the one I’d keep an eye on. It’s a Legends unit in the mainline book and a live unit in the Grey Knights list, and those two facts are held together by GW maintaining a datasheet for a kit they’ve stopped supporting in its main army. That works right up until the kit goes out of production. The Rhino’s safe, since it survived the general cull on its own merits, and the Razorback is the same box with a different top plate, so probably fine. Probably.
If you’ve got a Grey Knights army in a drawer, now’s the moment to count your Razorbacks and decide whether you want a spare while the box is still on the shelf. That’s the entire practical takeaway and it took me two thousand words to get here.
