Let’s get the elephant out of the room: yes, the Leagues of Votann are space dwarves. GW killed the original Squats back in the 90s (infamously, by having them eaten by Tyranids), and for decades the community treated “Squats” as a punchline. Then GW brought them back, renamed them, gave them a completely reworked aesthetic and lore, and suddenly we have one of the most interesting new factions in the game.
I was skeptical when the Votann were announced. I’m not anymore. The lore they’ve built for these guys is genuinely clever, and it does something the setting needed: it shows what humanity could have become if the Emperor hadn’t imposed his version of civilization on everyone.
Not Squats. Kin.
The Leagues of Votann are descended from human colonists who were sent to the galactic core during the Dark Age of Technology, long before the Imperium existed. Isolation plus millennia of cloning (they reproduce through cloning, not natural birth) plus genetic engineering turned them into something distinct from baseline humanity. Shorter, stockier, tougher. Adapted for high-gravity environments and the hellish conditions of the galactic core.
They’re technically Abhumans, which means the Imperium considers them “tolerated,” like Ogryns and Ratlings. The Kin don’t particularly care what the Imperium considers them.
The cloning aspect is more interesting than it sounds at first. The Kin don’t reproduce naturally. New Kin are grown in crucibles, essentially advanced cloning vats that the Votann manage. Each new Kin is genetically tailored for their intended role in society, but they’re not identical copies. The crucibles introduce enough variation that every Kin is an individual, and they’re raised communally by the entire Kindred rather than by parents in the traditional sense. There’s no concept of bloodline inheritance or family dynasty the way the Imperium understands it. Your value comes from what you contribute, not who spawned you. It’s a fundamentally different approach to building a civilization, and it means the Kin don’t have the population pressures or genetic drift that plague other human offshoots. Every new generation is deliberately chosen.
What makes them genuinely different from other human factions is their relationship with technology. The Imperium treats technology as sacred and inscrutable, maintains it through ritual, and is terrified of innovation. The Votann do the opposite. They understand their technology. They improve it. They have functional AI.
The Votann (Ancestor Cores)
This is the part that should make every Tech-Priest break out in hives. The Votann are ancient machine intelligences, massive AI cores that serve as repositories of knowledge, cultural memory, and practical guidance for Kin society. Each League has its own Votann, and the Kin consult them on everything from military strategy to resource allocation to historical records.
In a galaxy where the Adeptus Mechanicus will execute you for building a thinking machine, the Kin have been casually relying on AI for their entire existence. And it works. The Votann haven’t rebelled. They haven’t been corrupted by Chaos (the Kin have almost no psychic presence, which makes them naturally resistant to Warp influence). They just… function.
There is a catch, though. The Votann are old. Really old. And they’re degrading. Their processing speeds are slowing down. Queries that used to take seconds now take years. Some Votann have become erratic, giving contradictory advice or falling into extended periods of silence. The Kin treat this with the kind of quiet dread that the Imperium reserves for the Golden Throne’s deterioration. Their civilization depends on these machines, and the machines are failing.
This is a great parallel to the Imperium’s relationship with the Golden Throne, and I think it’s intentional. Both civilizations are built on irreplaceable ancient technology that nobody fully understands anymore and nobody can fix.
Then there are the Ironkin, and this is where I think the Votann lore gets genuinely subversive. Ironkin are fully sentient robotic beings. Not servitors, not automatons, not lobotomized cyborgs. Actual artificial intelligences housed in mechanical bodies, treated as full members of Kin society with rights, opinions, and social standing. In an Imperium where the Adeptus Mechanicus will burn you alive for building a thinking machine, the Kin have robot friends who attend council meetings and crack jokes. The Ironkin aren’t servants. They’re people, at least by Kin standards, and they’ve been integrated into Votann civilization without any of the catastrophic AI rebellions that haunt Imperial history. It’s either proof that the Imperium’s terror of artificial intelligence is overblown, or proof that the Kin got very lucky, depending on who you ask.
Different Leagues have their own distinct cultures, too, which is something I wish GW would explore more. The Greater Thurian League is the largest and most politically influential, with a sprawling network of holds and a reputation for calculated pragmatism. The Trans-Hyperian Alliance is more militaristic and expansionist, constantly pushing into new territory and clashing with whatever they find there. The Kronus Hegemony is secretive and isolationist, hoarding their resources and viewing outsiders with suspicion that makes even the Dark Angels look trusting. Each League has its own relationship with its Votann, its own traditions around warfare and resource acquisition, and its own opinion about how much interaction with the Imperium is acceptable. The Kin aren’t a monolith. They argue amongst themselves constantly, they just do it more quietly than humans usually manage.
How They Fight
The Kin approach warfare the way they approach everything: pragmatically. They don’t fight for glory or faith or ideological purity. They fight to protect their people, secure resources, and eliminate threats. And they do it efficiently.
Their tech is superior to Imperial standard in most categories. Better plasma weapons, better shields, better vehicles. The Hekaton Land Fortress is one of the toughest vehicles in the game for its points cost. The Sagitaur is a transport that can actually shoot things. Their infantry, the Hearthkyn Warriors, come with gear that an Astra Militarum regiment would kill for.
But they’re not invincible. Their biggest limitation is numbers. The Kin are a small civilization compared to the Imperium or the Orks. They can’t afford grinding attrition wars. Every Kin soldier is a trained, equipped, and genetically valuable member of their society. Losing them hurts in ways that the Imperium (which treats Guardsmen as expendable) doesn’t experience.
This is reflected on the tabletop too. Votann armies are elite and tough but small. You feel every casualty. On the table, they play like a gunline faction that actually survives getting charged. Hearthkyn Warriors are your bread and butter, tough infantry with solid ranged output and access to special weapons that let you tailor each squad to a role. Einhyr Hearthguard are the elite heavy infantry, decked out in exo-armor that makes Terminator plate look underdressed, and they hit like a freight train in melee. The Hekaton Land Fortress is the centerpiece model for most lists, a transport that doubles as a battle tank and refuses to die. The army rewards a methodical playstyle where you advance under covering fire, use your superior toughness to absorb the initial exchange, and then grind your opponent out through efficiency. It’s not flashy, but it’s satisfying in the way that watching a well-oiled machine work is satisfying.
The Grimnyr and Psychic Weirdness
One of the weirder aspects of Votann lore is the Grimnyr, their equivalent of psykers. Except the Kin don’t really have psykers in the normal sense. Their psychic presence is so faint that the Warp barely notices them, which is why they’ve avoided the daemon problems and Chaos corruption that plague the Imperium.
The Grimnyr tap into a subtle form of psychic ability that’s closer to the Warp’s geological strata than its turbulent surface. They can manipulate gravity, barriers, and energy fields without attracting the kind of daemonic attention that a Space Marine Librarian generates every time they sneeze. It’s a completely different approach to psychic power, and it’s another area where the Votann represent the road not taken.
Each Grimnyr is accompanied by two CORVs, small hovering companion drones that help focus and channel their abilities. The whole setup feels more like precision engineering than the raw psychic brute force the Imperium relies on. The Kin don’t treat psychic ability as a gift or a curse. They treat it as a tool, like anything else, to be understood, refined, and deployed where it’s useful. The contrast with the Imperium’s approach, where psykers are feared, shackled, and fed into the Astronomican as fuel, could not be sharper.
Where They Fit
The Leagues of Votann are the faction for people who want to play a non-Imperial human faction that isn’t Chaos. That’s a niche nobody was filling before they arrived.
Lore-wise, they raise uncomfortable questions for the Imperium. Here’s a human civilization that uses AI, doesn’t worship the Emperor, reproduces through cloning, and is doing fine. Better than fine. The Kin are more technologically advanced, more culturally stable, and arguably more humane than the Imperium in almost every measurable way. If the Imperium ever seriously engaged with what the Votann represent, it would be an existential crisis for Imperial ideology.
Of course, the Imperium is too busy fighting everything else to worry about that right now. And the Kin are too pragmatic to pick a fight with the Imperium when there are Orks and Tyranids to deal with. So the two civilizations maintain an uneasy, mostly-ignoring-each-other relationship, trading occasionally and fighting occasionally and both pretending the other one isn’t a direct challenge to their worldview.
The Kin also have a concept called “the Ancestors’ debt” that drives a lot of their military behavior. Resources taken from the Kin must be repaid, and the Votann keep meticulous records of every grudge. If an Ork Waaagh loots a Kin mining operation, that debt goes into the Votann’s memory, and the Kin will pursue repayment with a patience that makes the dwarven grudge-book from fantasy settings look casual. They’re not vengeful in a hot-blooded way. They’re vengeful in an accountant way, which is honestly more frightening. Every offense is catalogued, quantified, and scheduled for repayment when the strategic situation allows. It gives their warfare a cold, calculated quality that sets them apart from every other faction in 40K.
On the tabletop, this grudge system manifests through the Ancestors’ Wrath mechanic, and it’s one of the more interesting faction rules in the game. As your units take casualties, the army builds up a resource that makes your remaining forces hit harder and fight more desperately. It’s a rubber-band mechanic that keeps you competitive even when you’re losing models, which fits the lore perfectly. The Kin don’t break when they take losses. They get colder, more focused, more determined to make the enemy pay for every fallen Kin. Mechanically, it means your opponent has to think carefully about how much damage they deal and where they deal it, because leaving a wounded Votann unit on the table is often worse than not shooting it at all. A Hearthkyn squad that’s lost half its members and has full Ancestors’ Wrath stacked up will punch well above its weight class for the rest of the game. It also creates interesting decisions for the Votann player: do you spread your forces to minimize the impact of enemy shooting, or do you accept losses in one area to build up Wrath faster for a devastating counterpunch somewhere else? The best Votann players I’ve seen treat their casualty economy as a resource to be managed rather than a problem to be avoided, and that calculated approach to loss is the most Kin thing imaginable.
On the tabletop, the Votann have had a rough competitive journey (massively overtuned at launch, then nerfed hard, now finding their footing), but the model range is beautiful. The chunky, industrial aesthetic is distinctive and fun to paint. If you like elite armies with great guns and vehicles that actually survive getting shot, they’re worth a look.
