If you’re a Warhammer 40k player and even slightly observant, you’ll likely know that Games Workshop have pulled an absolute blinder on the 21st and released a new Super Heavy (walker) into the 40k universe – the Imperial Knight. This is a plastic kit, roughly 8 inches tall and probably one of the most imposing kits that GW has released to date. Although rumours kicked off at the beginning of the week, the fact they’d managed to keep it entirely under wrap for as long as they had is a testament to just how good GW have got at controlling their leaks.
If you’re not fully up with 40k lore, the Imperial Knights were released with the second wave of Adeptus Mechanicus and were basically a smaller cousin to a Titan. Now one thing that I will emphasise is that they are not Titans – in the same way as a Space Marine Dreadnought is not a Titan, in fact they have more in common with an Imperial Guard Sentinel as they’re controlled by a single person, however they do have a “mind impulse unit” (MIU) that allows the person in the Knight the ability to control the Knight without having to pull levers and press buttons. Knights generally belong to one of the Mechanium Houses and have varying levels of heraldry depending upon their rank (thus age).
The rules for the new Imperial Knight are in White Dwarf Weekly issue 4 and it’s rumoured that a full codex is incoming in a few weeks, they can ally to any Imperial based army and the new kit will make two (of the known six) variants – the Paladin and Errant. The kit comes in at a fairly pricey £85, however you should be able to source it for under the £70 mark.
As you can imagine this kit has really caused quite a stir and people are currently wondering what else GW have got up their sleeve. Today I read a rumour that Forge World will not only be including rules for these beasts in Horus Heresy Volume III, but also be producing resin kits for them. Personally I’d not be surprised to see more variants appear during the next month or so, I also have a sneaking suspicion that Skitari could make an appearance. If this happens then it certainly does back up the whisperings that Games Workshop is getting their company together a bit more and making kits that cross the bridge from 40k into 30k (Heresy era).
Although I’m up to my eyeballs in Rivets and Space Wolves, I may have popped one (technically two as I’m ordering one for my brother too) of these on pre-order this morning 😉 A bit of investigation shows that White Dwarf issue 126 had a double page spread when the original Knights were released…
