I happily got home from work yesterday to find a jiffy pad containing a (slightly bent) Space Wolves Codex. Though £15 is a tad steep for a book, the codex is actually very good. As with most codices it’s laid out in the familiar format of Background Fluff > Troop Fluff > Coloured Section > Army Selection. I’ve only flicked through it and so far it seems pretty cool. They’ve added lots of elements that have in my opinion been missing, such as some of the Rhino varients and Land Raider varients. Jump pack Blood Claws are now an option which is pretty cool. One complaint I have is that although there is a great variety of HQ choices, the rest of the army choices seem quite limited, which will mean that most Space Wolf armies are going to look pretty similar in build – especially larger armies. That said I suppose that the same could be said of many armies.
Another thing that I think is really weird is that they appear to have changed the basic background of Leman Russ. For those that don’t know, when the Primarchs were scattered amongst the stars, Russ got dropped onto Fenris where he was found by a pack of fenrisian wolves and raised by the she-mother of the pack. During the time he was growing (Primarchs grew at a rate far in excess of mortals) the pack was attacked by humans who slew the she-mother and another wolf. Cutting a long story short this same group of humans ended up capturing and ultimately teaching Russ that he was more human than wolf – and naming him Leman of the Russ. What the new codex implies is that Russ was found by humans and just raised.
The new codex does expand a little on the background of some of the Wolf Lords, with more fluff and background imagry. There’s actually a banner for Egil Ironwolf’s company 🙂 For me it’s fantastic, I’m personally not a big fan of using special characters from codices and would rather just use the generic character’s, so having more background on the other Wolf Lords opens itself up to creating an army founded on a nice bit of background fluff. This biggest downside to this, is that many of the new plastic’s have Ragnar’s company emblem on them.
All told however I’m quite excited about the prospect of getting a small army put together. The modelling oportunities are plentyful and being able to mix and match existing space marine boxed sets with the new Space Wolf ones should mean that armies should look varied in style (if not in composition). However I do need to keep in mind that I want to do something for next years Golden Demon as well 🙂