Everyone’s ignoring the new Drukhari Mandrakes. It’s understandable, seeing as Space Marines and their Chaotic counterparts are the most popular Warhammer army, and the Night Lords have a special brand of emo vampire death that screams cool. They paint lightning bolts on their armour, for goodness sake, they’re the glam rock theatre kids of the Warhammer 40,000 universe – of course they’re going to get all the attention.

But I thought I should mention the Mandrakes before I get carried away with all the bat helmets and flayed skin cloaks. They’re really nice models. Easy to put together. Dynamic. Drukhari players will be very happy.

Anyway, Night Lords.

Kill Team: Nightmare comes with a regular Chaos Space Marine sprue and an additional Night Lords upgrade sprue. The Chaos Space Marine sprue is fine; it’s five years old now, but feels about twice that age if I’m being completely honest. However, the addition of some delicious 8th Legion snazziness rolls the years back and brings the 8th edition kit back to life.

The Kill Team kit lets you build a number of special characters, including a Visionary, Fearmonger, Skinthief, Screecher, Ventrilokar, and a variety of special and heavy weapon specialists. These all have unique rules, but most importantly, they look really cool and utilise the best parts of the kit.

The Ventrilokar is a fancy banner bearer, but his banner isn’t a beautiful tapestry of the Night Lords’ famous victories or a portrait of their progenitor, Konrad Curze. It instead features an actual rotting corpse hanging off meat hooks. From poisoned knives to a chainsword encased in a ribcage, the weapons are incredibly eye-catching and suitably metal. But the best part of the kit is the simplest.

Night Lords aren’t Night Lords without their helmets. Adorned with iconic bat wings, this is what sells this Kill Team as Night Lords rather than generic (if cool) Chaos marines. Sure, the cloak made of stitched-together human skin is a gruesome, awesome addition, but winged helms and iconic shoulder pads bring the Night Lords to life. And Games Workshop should take this approach to all Space Marines going forwards.

Space Marine armies can feel a bit samey. I tried to do something different with my Iron Hands, adding in technological doodads and robotic appendages, but they still look like, well, generic Space Marines. The Kill Team: Nightmare Night Lords demonstrably do not.

If Games Workshop could make upgrade sprues of this quality for every first founding Chapter, Space Marine players would be thriving. Dark Angels could have their hoods and wings, Iron Hands their technological upgrades, and Ultramarines… Well, I’m sure they could think of something better than a little wreath for the poster boys of the Imperium.

I understand that 18 of these is a lot of work, but it’s also a lot of money. While the Night Lords sprue is packaged in with the latest Kill Team box, which is up for pre-order today, I imagine it’ll retail for around £15-20 when released separately. Considering you need one for each squad in your army, that gets expensive fast. But it might be worth it to create such a personalised force. After that – and we’re really wishlisting now – select second founding Chapters could have their upgrades. Black Templars immediately come to mind.

This seems excessive, but it makes sense from both a business and customer standpoint. It means everyone buys the same box of Primaris Marines (or Chaos Space Marines), and then staff can upsell them on an upgrade sprue. If the quality is as high as in the Kill Team box, everyone is happy. And if the Night Lords are anything to go by, upgrade sprues might just stop Space Marines from being boring.

Drukhari are cool too, though.

Games Workshop provided the models featured in this article.

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