Sigismund’s founding oath has a list in it. Take no homeworld, live and train and travel in crusading fleets, and go out to smite the witch, the alien and the heretic. That’s the wording White Dwarf #310 used in October 2005, in Graham McNeill’s preview of the 4th edition codex. Another page in the same issue, a piece called Crusaders of the Emperor, runs a longer version: the Crusades “show no tolerance for heretics, mutants, witches, aliens or other abominations against the Emperor.” Three categories in one, five in the other, same magazine, nobody’s ever reconciled them. High Marshal Helbrecht has enforced both versions since his election in 989.M41, and Helbrecht: Sin of Hope is the Black Library novel that puts him next to the Leagues of Votann.
That got announced on the 19th. Mike Vincent’s writing it, off the back of the Night Lords book The Remnant Blade, and the premise is that Helbrecht has to rally his Chapter and a body of Elysian Drop Troops against a Chaos incursion, and the help that turns up is the Kin.
The Kin were never actually filed
The Imperium has never decided what the Kin are, and it’s had ten thousand years.
The Administratum’s records classify them both ways. Sometimes a sanctioned Abhuman sub-species, in the same tolerated bracket as Ogryns and Ratlings. Sometimes flat xenos, kill on sight. It depends on which sector, which century, and presumably which clerk was on shift. The Kin’s own earliest records tie their Ancestors to the sublight generational mining fleets that pre-Imperial Old Earth flung at the galactic core on the Long March, which makes the Abhuman designation the technically correct one, and the Imperium has never gotten round to acting on that.
It gets worse when you look at how badly they’ve been identified by everyone else. The T’au and a fair number of humans have logged them as “Demiurg.” The Aeldari call them the Heliosi Ancients. Elsewhere in Imperial records they turn up as the Gnostari, the Grome, the Kreg. Nobody knows how many wandering trader outfits and abhuman settlements in the archive were Kin under a different name. Where they have been identified consistently, the label that stuck is Squat, which the Kin themselves are not fond of.
So when Vincent says the Kin “occupy a bit of a grey area between potential ally of convenience and all-out xenos society depending on the specific situation,” he’s describing something the codex set up in 2022. That grey area has been sitting in the source material the whole time.
Helbrecht is the worst possible man to hand this to
And that’s obviously the point. You hand this plot to the Chapter with the narrowest doctrine in the Imperium.
Look at the man’s record. He was elected High Marshal in 989.M41 on the back of finishing the subjugation of the Xenarchs of the Sigilare Nebula. His first act in office was to declare a crusade against the Cythor Fiends of the Ghoul Stars, a region no Imperial expedition had ever come back from, and eight years later the xenos population of the outlying systems was gone. He took the Templars to Armageddon and ran the combined Astartes fleet in orbit because he had more void experience than any other officer present, which is how Ghazghkull ended up with a Black Templar chasing him across the galaxy on a personal oath. Yarrick petitioned for the honour of coming along, and the sources record that Helbrecht granted it as a mark of respect for the old man.
Then there’s Schrödinger VII, which I think about more than the Armageddon stuff. In 930.M41, before he was High Marshal, Helbrecht fought Imotekh the Stormlord in single combat on an ice bridge and out-fenced him. Landed a dozen ruinous blows. Every one of them closed up, because that’s what necrodermis does. When Helbrecht finally went down, Imotekh left him alive. He cut off Helbrecht’s right hand as a keepsake and threw him off the bridge, and the surviving Templars dragged their Marshal out. Helbrecht swore an Oath of Vengeance on the spot, spent decades hunting the Inevitable Conqueror, finally cornered it at Davatas, boarded it, and Imotekh teleported off his own flagship rather than fight him. Helbrecht flew the empty hulk into a star.
His attributed line at the Battle of Fire and Blood is “the galaxy is the Emperor’s, and anyone or anything who challenges that claim is an enemy who must be destroyed.” Anyone or anything. There’s no clause after it.
Where the Abhuman defence lands them
If you’re the Kin diplomat in this scenario, the obvious play is to lead with the paperwork. We’re Abhumans. Sanctioned. Descended from Terran mining fleets. Check your own archive.
The problem is Crusaders of the Emperor, that second White Dwarf list, the one with five categories instead of three. Heretics, mutants, witches, aliens. Sanctioned Abhumans are stable mutants; that’s the entire legal definition of the category. Ogryns are mutants the Imperium decided it could use. So the successful defence gets the Kin out of “alien” and drops them straight into “mutant,” which is sitting right there on the same page, in the same sentence, in the same oath. There is no available filing that makes a Kindred acceptable to a Black Templar. The 4th edition codex that printed that line predates my involvement in this hobby by about three years, and it’s still the tidiest statement of the Chapter’s problem I’ve read.
What the Templars can’t do, and this is the part the Emperor’s Champion piece gets at from another direction, is convene a body to think about it. This is the Chapter with no Librarians, by doctrine, no exceptions. No psykers, no scholars in the Ultramarines sense, no institutional habit of sitting down with a difficult question and coming out the other side with a ruling. They have Chaplains, vows, and a very sharp sword. There’s no office anywhere in the Chapter whose job is working out what a species counts as.
The Helbrecht in my bits tub
I’ve owned a Helbrecht since about 2011 and he has never been painted. The old metal one, bought off a bring-and-buy table at a tournament I wasn’t playing in, for something like eight quid because the seller had lost the shield arm. I wasn’t even collecting Templars. The plan, and I was completely serious about this at the time, was to file the cross off the tabard and turn him into an Imperial Fists captain, because my Fists needed a character and I was too tight to buy the actual kit. I stripped him twice. Dettol, toothbrush, the whole miserable ritual, and both times I put him back in the tub because the second I got the paint off I could see how much detail was in that tabard and how badly I’d wreck it. Pete looked at him in my garage about a year ago, turned him over, said “he’s got no arm,” and put him back down. He’s still in the tub. Somewhere under a sprue of Cadian legs…
That’s the Helbrecht I’ve actually got. My favourite awful boy, one-armed, permanently grey, fifteen years on the to-do list.
Guilliman already did this, and Helbrecht knows it
Their boss did this already, on a much larger scale.
Roboute Guilliman is only walking around because Belisarius Cawl cut a deal with Yvraine and the power of an Aeldari death god got applied to a corpse in the Fortress of Hera. The Lord Commander of the Imperium, who reissues the standing order that every xenos is to be exterminated, is alive because of an Aeldari priestess. The Ynnari went on fighting alongside Imperial forces afterwards.
Helbrecht has met him. When the Great Rift opened and the Templar fleets were scattered, Guilliman turned up mid-muster and told Helbrecht to stop chasing Ghazghkull and go relieve the Ecclesiarchy worlds instead. Helbrecht didn’t want to. Guilliman reminded him what the Sword of the High Marshals is made of, which is shards of Rogal Dorn’s own blade, the one Dorn broke over his knee after carrying the Emperor’s ruined body back to the Palace. Helbrecht sent the crusades where he was told. He also, at some point after that, crossed the Rubicon Primaris, which is a Chapter Master pushing two centuries in service voluntarily getting his chest opened up by a Mechanicus surgeon on the say-so of a primarch he’d never met before.
So the “Black Templars struggle with grey areas” framing is true of the Chapter and slightly unfair to Helbrecht specifically. He bends. He bent for Guilliman, he bent to accept Primaris reinforcements into a Chapter that had spent ten thousand years doing things its own way, he bent far enough to let a mortal commissar ride on a Templar warship. Every one of those was an Imperial ask, though. Nobody’s ever handed him an ally whose species is a filing dispute. I keep going back and forth on whether that’s a difference in kind or just in degree, and I genuinely don’t know which way Vincent’s going to play it.
The one bloke at my store with a Votann army
There’s a Votann player at my local store. One. He’s had the army since a few months after release, it’s beautifully done, brass and off-white, and I have watched him spend the better part of two years explaining what the faction is to people who ask if they’re Age of Sigmar dwarfs. Meanwhile a Hekaton Land Fortress has been sitting in the same spot in the cabinet since at least last summer, price sticker slightly curled at the corner.
Which is why this novel is, cynically, quite a good idea. The Kin are the hardest faction GW has released in a decade to explain in one sentence, and the fastest way to explain them is to stick them next to somebody the audience already understands completely. Everyone knows what a Black Templar does. Put the two in the same trench and you learn what the Kin are by watching what makes Helbrecht’s jaw tighten. The Leagues of Votann have needed a book like this since 2022.
So yeah. Helbrecht. Big lad, one bionic hand, sword made of his grandad’s broken sword, spent forty years of in-universe time chasing an Ork and a Necron who both keep escaping. Never lost an argument he couldn’t settle with the argument-settler. Now he’s got dwarfs in the foxhole with him and the dwarfs have working artificial intelligence, which is the other thing nobody in this article has had the nerve to bring up.
Because there’s a bigger thing sitting under this alliance than the taxonomy. The Kin bring Ironkin with them, fully sentient machine minds who sit in council and are treated as people, and every Kindred takes its direction from a Votann, an ancestor core, an AI. The Mechanicus would burn a world over one of those. Nobody in the WarCom interview mentioned it. I want to know whether anyone tells Helbrecht, and what goes in the crusade records afterwards.
