The Fulguris Task Force lets you make an ingress move on turn one with all your Land Speeders.
That’s the line that stopped me when I read the WarCom Space Marines Faction Focus on Tuesday. Not the Black Templars getting an Emperor’s Champion buff. Not the Death Company throwing themselves into walls and taking D3 mortal wounds for the privilege. The Land Speeders. The unit I have owned three of since 5th edition and have never used well.
GW dropped the Space Marines Faction Focus on 5 May, four days after the Armageddon launch box went up for pre-order, and right after the Orks got their preview the day before. The pattern is becoming clear. Each major faction gets one of these articles in the run-up to 11th, with three brand-new detachments shown off for the vanilla version of the army and the chapter-specific stuff held back. For Loyalist Marines that’s Fulguris Task Force (speeders), Librarius Conclave (psykers), and Subversion Assets (Phobos and Scout Squads). And then, separately, three new detachments each for Black Templars, Blood Angels, Dark Angels, and Space Wolves. Seven detachments dropping at once just for the Loyalist side, before any of the other Chapters’ codexes are previewed.
Fulguris Task Force: Land Speeders Finally Got a Job
The detachment rule is called Skystrike. It applies to Land Speeders, Storm Speeders Hailstrike, Storm Speeders Hammerstrike, and Storm Speeders Thunderstrike. Tag those units with SPEEDER. In your first Movement phase, friendly SPEEDER units can make an ingress move.
Ingress is the new word for arriving from strategic reserves. Deep strike, teleport homer, drop pod, all the same word now. The Skystrike rule lets your Speeders ingress without first being put into reserves, which is the actually useful part. Strategic reserves cost you a turn of doing nothing while your unit waits to come on. Skystrike just lets the Speeder show up where you want it on turn one, with its guns already on the firing solution you picked.
Land Speeders have always had the same problem. Fast, packing heavy weapons, and made of paper. Pushing them up the table gets them shot off in turn two. Sitting them in the back of the deployment zone does nothing because their guns aren’t long enough to threaten anything that matters. The unit has been a sentimental pick for the entire decade and a half I’ve been playing this game. Two of mine are still grey plastic. The Hammerstrike I assembled five years ago has been used in maybe four games, and in three of them it was wrecked by turn two.
The Reactive Evasion stratagem is what makes the detachment actually work. When an enemy unit ends a move within 8” of an unengaged friendly Speeder, you spend 1 CP and the Speeder makes a normal move of D3+3”. Your fragile little gunboat shoots, gets shot at, and then pings backwards before the next enemy charge. The Bellicose Weapon Spirits enhancement lets a non-character Speeder unit re-roll damage rolls and the rolls that decide a weapon’s number of attacks. On a Hailstrike turning twin-linked autocannon fire into something genuinely ugly, that’s a real upgrade.
I’ve gone back and forth on whether this detachment is actually strong or whether I’m just impressed because GW finally wrote a rule that makes me want to paint my Speeders. Probably the second one. Two re-rollable D6 multilaser shots on a unit that costs a hundred-something points still won’t win you tournaments, and a smart opponent will charge the Speeder rather than shoot it because Reactive Evasion only triggers on movement. I keep talking myself into it and back out. The detachment rule is exciting, the stratagem and enhancement are decent, and the rest of the army still has to do the heavy lifting like always.
Black Templars, Blood Angels, Dark Angels, and Space Wolves Got Their Codex Back
The bigger shift in the article is in the chapter restrictions. Black Templars, Blood Angels, Dark Angels, and Space Wolves are getting three new detachments each, every one of them locked behind a line that reads “your army can include [Chapter] units, but it cannot include any ADEPTUS ASTARTES units drawn from any other Chapter.”
That’s a swing in design philosophy. For most of 10th, the non-Codex Chapters had their own datasheets and characters but largely shared the wider Adeptus Astartes detachment pool. You could mix Death Company with vanilla Marines if you really wanted to. The Templars had their own thing going but it lived next to the standard Marine detachments. 11th is moving back toward “if you want the cool toys, you commit to the Chapter.” That’s how it was for big chunks of 5th, 6th, and 7th, when the chapter-specific codex was the army’s identity full stop.
For Black Templars, the headline detachment is Living Miracle. The Anointed Champion rule lets your Emperor’s Champion re-roll one hit and one wound roll in melee, which is already very nice on a model with 4+ damage. The Guiding Omens enhancement lets you pick three of six abilities at the start of each battle. Devastating Wounds against characters, +2 attacks, mortal wounds when an enemy tries to fall back, hazardous on melee attacks targeting your unit. Most Templars players will take the +2 attacks every game and pick the rest based on the matchup. There’s also an Omen of Sacred Intervention that drops the CP cost of a Heroic Intervention on the Champion to free.
Blood Angels get Wrath of the Doomed, which centres entirely on the Death Company. Fanatical Celerity lets a Death Company unit advance and still charge, at the cost of D3+1 mortal wounds to the squad. The detachment carries a DOOMED tag, meaning it can’t be combined with anything else carrying the same tag. I’m guessing that’s a placeholder for future Cursed Founding rules but I genuinely don’t know yet. The Rage-Fuelled Response stratagem lets a Death Company unit make a D6” surge move at whoever just shot at them, on the opponent’s turn. The whole detachment is doing the Black Rage as a mechanical loop.
Dark Angels get Dark Age Arsenal. The plasma detachment. Plasma weapons get +1 S army-wide, and the No Sacrifice Too Great stratagem stacks another +1 S onto a hazardous plasma profile, which means a supercharged plasma incinerator becomes S10. The Petition of Stability enhancement adds 6” to plasma range, a whopping 25% on a baseline 24” plasma incinerator. Hellblasters can sit in mid-board and threaten anything in the enemy deployment zone. I haven’t played Dark Angels since 7th, and reading this makes me want to.
Space Wolves get Champions of Fenris, built around heroes and characters specifically. The detachment rule, The Great Wolf Watches, gives infantry character units a once-per-round Heroic Intervention that doesn’t lock the rest of your army out of the stratagem. A Giant Amongst Giants makes a Wolf Guard Battle Leader 8 wounds and S9 in melee. With a thunder hammer and storm shield, that’s a brick of a fighter who can countercharge an enemy who thought they were tying down a Captain. Most of the rules don’t do anything mechanically wild. They reward a Space Wolves player who was already running five heroes and a wolf.
A Tangent on the Other Two Detachments
Look, I read the Librarius Conclave rules twice and I still don’t have strong feelings about them. Psychic Disciplines are back, which is a 6th edition mechanic I haven’t missed but also haven’t actively disliked. You pick a discipline at the start of each battle round and your Librarians plus the units they’ve joined get a benefit. Telekinesis Discipline gives -1 S to ranged attacks targeting the unit, Pyromancy gives +1 AP within 12”, that kind of thing. Plus each discipline unlocks a specific psychic power. Temporal Corridor lets a Telekinesis-flagged unit drop into strategic reserves and Deep Strike back. Fine detachment for a Librarian-heavy list. I am not a Librarian-heavy list person.
Subversion Assets is the Phobos and Scout detachment. Transhuman Perception lets you mark an enemy unit as detected, which means the rest of your army knows where it is even when it should be hidden. There’s a footnote in the WarCom article that just says “We’re sure that Raven Guard fans will love this one,” which is exactly the energy this detachment has. I’m not a Phobos player. Moving on.
The Codex Pile Is Going to Be Enormous
GW has been showing off the 11th edition Space Marine kit faction by faction now for a couple of months and the pattern is clear. Speeders, psykers, scouts. Templars, Blood Angels, Dark Angels, Space Wolves. The army is launching with seven detachment options on the Loyalist side alone, plus whatever comes in the Iron Hands, Salamanders, Raven Guard, White Scars, and Ultramarines books that haven’t been previewed. That’s a lot. And it’s going to live on top of the existing 10th edition detachments, which the 11th Edition Codex Release Schedule says are getting reprinted in a new format rather than discarded.
Detachment churn has been the loudest complaint of the 10th edition era. Every two months a new one drops, half the playerbase rebuilds their list, and Pete from my garage group is one of the rare painters who finishes armies fast enough to notice. He’s been saying for the better part of a year that he’s done buying detachment-specific kits because GW will rotate them out before the paint is dry. His Salamanders are sitting in their own little detachment-orphans pile. The whole pitch of modular detachments only works if the old ones still feel useful after the new ones land. Pete doesn’t think they will.
The Faction Focus is reading well precisely because the detachments are flavour-first. Fulguris Task Force is “speeders are good now.” Wrath of the Doomed is “go full Black Rage.” Dark Age Arsenal is “plasma everything.” Champions of Fenris is “heroes only.” Each one is aimed at the player who already paints that kit.
Whether the meta sees it that way is a different question. I keep waiting for the 11th edition fight phase and the new terrain rules to settle into something coherent before I commit to a list. The new terrain stuff alone is going to change which detachments are usable. Subversion Assets gets more interesting when ruins block detection by default. Fulguris gets less interesting if your ingress moves keep getting blocked by 6” sight lines.
Anyway. I’m not going to build a list this week. I might prime the Hammerstrike though. Five years is long enough to leave a kit grey.
