The 2022 Kasrkin kit has a melta mine in it. The kit has a meltagun as well, but the melta mine is its own separate build, carried by a trooper with a hot-shot laspistol in his other hand, one of a dozen or so optional configurations jammed onto those three sprues. There’s a hot-shot marksman rifle in there too, which nothing else in the Astra Militarum plastic range carries. And two Kill Team operative builds that Games Workshop named the demo-trooper and the sharpshooter.
Here’s the Castellan’s Creed contents list, announced by Arrowhead on the 30th of July, out on the 12th of August. R/40-K Hot-Shot Marksman Rifle. P/40-K Bolt Pistol. 40-K Meltagun. G/40-K Meltamine. TG-8 Sharpshooter armour, medium. TG-122 Demo-Trooper armour, heavy.
That’s the sprue. Item for item, that’s the back of the Kasrkin box. Somebody built a Helldivers 2 Legendary Warbond by reading the optional-parts list off one plastic kit, the way you’d order off a laminated takeaway menu.
Most of the coverage this week has been about whether two meltaguns can drop a Factory Strider. Community testing says yes, apparently. I don’t play Helldivers 2 and have no opinion on that, but I have built the Kasrkin box, and I recognised the shopping list immediately.
What a Kasrkin actually is
Kasr is the Cadian word for a fortress city, and it means the entire city was the fortification. Walls, hab-blocks, manufactora, all of it built as one continuous defensive work, of which Cadia had dozens. Kasrkin means, roughly, people of the kasr.
They’re the elite of the Cadian Shock Troops, and the Departmento Munitorum files them under Tempestus Scions as the “Grenadier” type. Scions are taken as orphans and raised by the Schola Progenium, and their files record no home world at all. Kasrkin came up entirely through one planet’s own institutions, and Munitorum paperwork has no field for that, so Grenadier is what the forms say.
The pipeline goes like this. Cadian children entered the Youth Armies. The best of those became Whiteshields, the unblooded teenage auxiliaries thrown at the front line to see who survived. Survivors went into the Shock Troops proper. Shock Troopers who kept surviving, who showed a bent for infiltration and heavy weapons and staying calm when things were coming apart, got pulled out and sent somewhere much worse for further training. Come out the other end and you get carapace armour, a hot-shot lasgun with a backpack power supply, minor biological modification, and the brand of the Caducades sea eagle burned into your neck so that people know what you are even when you’re out of your kit.
Every step of that runs through Cadia. The Youth Armies were Cadian institutions. The Whiteshield corps was a Cadian institution. The kasrs the whole thing is named after were on Cadia, and Cadia was blown apart in 999.M41 when Abaddon dropped the Blackstone Fortress Will of Eternity into it. The pylons that went up with it were the only things in the galaxy reliably holding the Warp back, so that was a bad day generally.
The Kasrkin that exist now are survivors, and survivors of survivors, running the training on other people’s worlds for the children of refugees. GW’s line is that they’re passing on Cadian standards to a new generation. So the qualification is now a curriculum somebody carries around in their head, taught to recruits who have never stood inside a kasr.
The metal ones are still in a drawer
I met the Kasrkin in Dawn of War: Winter Assault, years before I knew they were a tabletop unit. General Sturnn’s campaign, the ice world, the fallen Titan everybody’s fighting over. You get Kasrkin squads and they just do not die. I was maybe fifteen and I thought they were the best thing in the game, mostly because everything else I could build was a conscript with a flashlight.
So when I started Guard properly in 5th edition I went looking, and there wasn’t a plastic kit. There wasn’t a plastic kit because there had never been one. The originals were metal, from 2003’s Codex: Eye of Terror, and by 2011 they were an eBay proposition. I bought a squad of five off a seller in Sheffield for what I remember as an insulting amount of money, and they arrived as a bag of parts with the arms detached and about forty years of somebody else’s black undercoat on them. Metal Guard arms and metal Guard torsos meet at a contact point roughly the size of a grain of rice. I superglued one trooper’s plasma gun arm on nine or ten times over about two evenings. It fell off in the box on the way to Pete’s garage anyway. They’re in a drawer under my desk, still black, still armless, and I have moved house twice with them.
The plastic kit finally turned up in October 2022, in the Kill Team: Gallowdark box, which is a very GW way to release a unit people had been asking about for nineteen years. Ten troopers across three sprues, two of every special weapon, and all those Kill Team operative options that Arrowhead has now turned into a battle pass.
Castellan’s Creed is named after a man in a display case
The pun in the warbond’s name is doing two jobs. “Creed” as in a set of beliefs, obviously, because Helldivers 2 is a game about propaganda and everything in it has to sound like a recruitment poster. And Creed as in Ursarkar E. Creed, Lord Castellan of Cadia.
Soldiers of the 8th Cadian found him as a small boy in the burning ruins of Kasr Gallan, holding a service pistol and a battered copy of De Gloria Macharius. He never talked about what he’d seen there. The regiment raised him. He went through the Whiteshields like everybody else, met Jarran Kell there, and the two of them stayed together for the next thirty-odd years, which is longer than I’ve held any job. He was made Lord Castellan in 999.M41 after traitors decapitated Cadian High Command at Tyrok Fields, and he was offered the governorship and turned it down, asking instead for a wartime rank that gave him command of every soldier on the planet and no civil authority whatsoever. Lord Castellan is a rank Cadia only issued in emergencies, and it runs until the emergency does.
Then Cadia fell. Creed and Kell made their stand on the Elysion Fields and Abaddon came for them personally with the Bringers of Despair. Kell shoved Creed onto a Valkyrie and got picked up by the throat for it, and spat blood at the Despoiler, and said “Cadia stands,” and had his spine crushed.
Creed is not dead. He was lifted off the planet during the last of the evacuation by Trazyn the Infinite and is currently a specimen in a Tesseract Labyrinth on Solemnace, filed somewhere between a perfect clone of Fulgrim and whatever else the magpie has decided is historically significant. His daughter Ursula runs the Cadians now, and wears his greatcoat, which appeared in her sealed private chambers some months after he vanished with dried blood still in the fabric and no explanation attached. She’s decided that means he’s alive. It probably does.
So the Helldivers title you unlock is “Still Standing.” Cute.
Chara, which is Cadia
Arrowhead’s in-fiction framing is that the warbond honours the Helldivers who died in a last stand defending “the peaceful world of Chara during the First Galactic War.” It’s Cadia. The armour is Kasrkin carapace, the rifle is a hot-shot lasgun, the title is Creed’s mantra with the serial numbers filed off, and the paint scheme is called Castellan’s Green.
I keep going back and forth on whether the sprue thing is actually a finding. Maybe the list matches because that list is what a Kasrkin is. If you’re licensing the unit you’re licensing the hot-shot weapons and the carapace and the melta, because there isn’t anything else to licence. In which case the kit is just an accurate inventory, and I’ve talked myself into a coincidence.
Except the demo-trooper and the sharpshooter aren’t Kasrkin lore. They’re Kill Team operative slots, invented in 2022 so that a squad box could double as a skirmish warband, and they only exist because GW needed ten distinguishable specialists rather than ten identical elite troopers. Those two names being the names of the two armour sets is not a lore fact travelling from the archive into a video game. It’s a parts list travelling from a sprue into a video game. Nobody at Arrowhead read the Eye of Terror codex. Somebody at Arrowhead read a box.
Since GW has spent a decade putting Space Marines in everything, choosing the Guard here was the right call. Helldivers are conscripts in cheap armour who die in enormous numbers for a state that regards them as a renewable resource, which is the Astra Militarum with a laugh track over it. Dressing a Helldiver as a Kasrkin needs better trousers and a bigger gun, and nothing else about the game has to move.
The one thing I’d push back on is the Kasrkin novel, if anybody’s tempted to go read it off the back of this. Edoardo Albert’s Kasrkin came out alongside the plastic kit in 2022 and it’s a desert-planet story with some genuinely good Necron material in it and a Kroot hunting pack, and the squad at the centre of it could be any Guard regiment in the Imperium with about six words changed. It reads like a Dune homage with lasguns bolted on, and the black-ops Cadian material comes to maybe forty pages of it. There’s a lot in there I liked and I still finished it slightly annoyed…
The Kasrkin box was on the shelf at my local store on Saturday, £37.50, next to a Cadian Shock Troops box and a stack of the Recon Squad kits that came out in May. It’ll still be there in August. I’d give it until about the third week of September, once a few hundred thousand Helldivers players have spent a month in carapace armour reading the word Cadia off their loading screens. If you want one at that price, buy it before the 12th.
