Codex: Thousand Sons is coming this weekend and as part of our review we’re also taking a look at the book’s Crusade rules. In this article we’ll be looking at the new rules, what’s changed from ninth edition, and what you need to know about running your own sorcerous cabals in Crusade with the tenth edition Codex.

The Thousand Sons had a interesting set of Crusade rules in ninth edition, spread out over two books – first their Codex and then later the Rift War Campaign book supplement, which added to those initial rules with more doodads you could collect to weave your own custom spells and rituals. In both cases, those rules tended to revolve around collecting arcane components for spells and rituals to further your studies of the heretical sorcerous arts.

So how does this new book handle things? In this review we’ll take a look at the Crusade rules for Thousand Sons in the new Codex, how they stack up, and what you need to know about playing them. As always, we’d like to thank Games Workshop for providing us with a preview copy of this book for review purposes.

A Note on Daemons

As we’ve seen from the Emperor’s Children, World Eaters and Death Guard codexes, you can choose to run around with Daemons (Scintillating Legions in this case) in your Crusade Force, but don’t expect them to gain any XP, battle honors or spark joy for your opponent when you’re fielding Magnus, his buddy Kairos and 3 Big Birds and a Daemon Prince. Summoned Daemons don’t collect rewards. And while you could put Index Daemons in your Order of Battle, you can’t run those in your combined Changehost of Deceit lists, though you could run Tzeentch Daemons as a separate standalone army if you wanted to trade them out for the occasional game.

Brotherhood of Sorcerers

Beanith: The rules here are surprisingly straightforward. You just roll a bucket of oddly-shaped dice, shout “just as planned” no matter the results, and then do whatever you want with your roster while painting more gold trim on your models. It’s genius, really.

Now that I’ve covered that without editors noticing, I can just go back to–

TheChirurgeon: Ahem.

Beanith. Right. Sure. Fine. The Sorcerers of the Thousand Sons are all on a quest for knowledge, power and the ultimate comfy chair and reading lamp for their book nooks. When you’re adding Thousand Sons characters to your Crusade roster, each of them must be assigned to one of the nine Great Cults. This lets them earn Lore and Arcana points during battles, mostly from Agendas or using one of the Coward’s Requisitions. These points can then be used to upgrade the character’s standing within the Great Cult, which then unlocks powerful upgrades and abilities.

Of course Tzeentch has to stick his beak in and muddy up the water for all involved. Each of the Great Cults are rivals to the others and tend to work at cross-purposes to each other all in an effort to achieve their part in the Great Plan. This is represented in part by a roll done at the end of each battle called the Plots and Schemes Test. This is a Leadership test for your Warlord with specific modifiers applied based on how many representatives you had from each Great Cult on the table during the battle:

• -1 if there were 2-3 different Great Cult reps running about during the battle.
• -2 if there were 4-6 different Great Cult reps running about during the battle.
• -3 for those playing on Hard mode with 7+ Great Cult reps.
• +1 if the Warlord has fellow reps from the same Great Cult.
• +1 if you were the victor. You were winning, right son?

Passing the test lets you then nominate a character from that battle and they can earn either a Lore point or an Arcana point, though if choose your Warlord they get one of each. Failing the test has no real downside beyond making the Diabolic Rituals Requisition slightly more expensive until the next battle.

While we’re on that note, Diabolic Ritual is your 1 RP Requisition to raise the standing of your Thousand Sons character in their Greater Cult. Your characters start out as an Aelementus before moving onto Esoterist and ending up with the title of Magister Templi. Each rank will require you to spend a certain number of the character’s Lore and Arcana points, meaning you will be in for a long haul during your campaign. The rewards at each rank come in two flavours:

• Instant, which are applied immediately (typically extra XP, Req, etc)
• Great Cult Battle Honours. These are the same as normal Battle Honours and so still increase your Crusade points and you’re still limited by how many you can have. The only difference is when you’ve reached the maximum limit, new Great Cult Honours can only replace non-Great Cult Battle Honours.

The Great Cults

TheChirurgeon: As mentioned, there are nine great cults – as befits a faction dedicated to Tzeentch. These will be familiar to anyone who played with Thousand Sons in eighth or ninth edition, and there are some cool callbacks here.

Cult of Mutation

The one about creating twisting, writhing flesh monsters. At first level you can pick some extra Boons of Tzeentch, while higher levels will buff your character’s melee attacks (and their unit’s), and at the highest level you can use it to curse a terrain feature and do mortal wounds to everything around it.

Cult of Prophecy

TheChirurgeon: This one is my favorite.

This cult is about seeing the future. At first level you’ll get to choose who the Attacker and Defender are instead of rolling off, which is pretty neat. At level 2 you get a new ritual to give you 1 CP, which is absolutely massive for Thousand Sons, an army which otherwise does not get CP generation. And at the final level you’ll get to roll for extra Crusade Blessings before each battle for each model at the Magister rank.

Cult of Time

The Cult of Time is all about time-based shenanigans, which often amounts to healing and movement buffs.

• Aelementus – 1 Lore 2 Arcana – Time Flux (Instant) Removes two Battle Scars from this model or one from a different unit.
• Esoterist – 1 Lore 3 Arcana – Psynopation (Battle Honour) Reroll Advance and Charge rolls for this unit.
• Magister Templi – 3 Lore 5 Arcana – Immaterial Echo (Battle Honour) A Psychic test result of 12+ when manifesting the Temporal Surge Ritual lets you select two friendly units to make a Normal move up to 6”. All the usual restrictions like Line of Sight and No Charging still apply of course.

Cult of Scheming

These guys are always up to something. At the first level you can immediately generate some extra RP. At level 2 you can gain CP each time your opponent uses a Stratagem – again, good for an army that struggles in that area, and at the highest level you can generate additional Thousand Sons Agendas for your army before a battle. That’s a cool way to get more XP and also thematically appropriate.

Cult of Magic

The Cult that’s all about casting big spells and blowing things up with their minds. These are unique in that they only cost Arcana, and no Lore.

• Aelementus – 3 Arcana – Opus Arcana (Instant) You can deduct 1 or 2 Lore points from this model and gain either D3 or 3 Arcana points.
• Esoterist – 4 Arcana – Occult Fixation (Battle Honour) Add 1 to Psychic tests whenever they Channel the Warp.
• Magister Templi – 8 Arcana – Kaleidoscopic Blast (Battle Honour) or Super smite for those that remember the good ol’ days lets you deal D3+3 mortal wounds to two enemy units within 24” when resolving a 14+ on the Doombolt Ritual instead of one. You basically need Magnus around to do this with any level of consistency.

Cult of Knowledge

This Cult is all about accumulating knowledge and knowing all of the secrets. Similar to Cult of Magic, everything here only costs Lore, with no Arcana costs – another cool touch. At the first level you’ll get a battle honour that generates extra Lore points when your units is marked for Greatness. At level 2 you’ll have the opportunity to trade in Arcana points for Lore points on that model, and at Magister level you get an upgraded version of Destiny’s Ruin that lets you pick two units instead of one on a 13+. This is even nastier and one of the most powerful effects in the book.

Cult of Change

This cult is just dedicated to shaking things up, really.

• Aelementus – 1 Lore 2 Arcana – Destiny’s Aberration lets you remove a Battle Honour from any of your units and replace it with a new one from this book.
• Esoterist – 3 Lore 1 Arcana – Arch Instigator (Battle Honour) adds 2 to the models Wound characteristic.
• Magister Templi – 4 Lore 4 Arcana – Fickle Revelation (Battle Honour) lets you share a unit’s Battle Trait with another unit for that battle.

Cult of Duplicity

These guys are just really good at lying. But like my dad used to say: If you’re good at lying, you’re good at everything. At first level your character can use Renowned Heroes for 0 RP even if it hasn’t gained a Crusade Rank, or it can just snag a free Crusade Relic. At the Esoterist level you can redeploy one unit after deployment. And at Magister level you can a new ritual called Sorcerous Facade that lets you pull a unit back up on a 6+ and on a 10+ they can just immediately deep strike back down. This is incredibly good and something competitive players would kill to have.

Cult of Manipulation

This cult is all about getting people to do what they want. At the first level you’ll gain extra XP, Lore, and Arcana for your opponent’s Agendas. At the Esoterist level is my favorite individual ability – if you lose the game, you roll a D6 for each Cult of Manipulation Esoterist on the table and if any are a 4+ you get the Victor Bonus anyways. And at the Magister Level you get a new ritual that give an enemy unit -1 to hit on an 8+ and an extra -1 to wound on a 12+.

Agendas

There are only four Agendas for the Nerd Lords and their Sandy minions but each one is mostly straightforward and easy to achieve depending on your play style and mission type.

• Pursuit of Knowledge wants you at the end of the battle in the opponent’s deployment zone and your opponent ideally not, rewarding up to three of your units 2XP each. And if any of those units were Thousand Sons characters, they’ll also gain 1 Lore point on a 2+.
• Malefic Sigils would have been the dreaded battlefield quarters Agenda but this time you’re earning XP by manifesting Rituals in each quarter per turn which is something you were almost certainly doing anyway. At the end of the turn, if you managed to do it for three quarters, each of the three units that the three Psyker models are a part of each gained 1XP. Do all four quarters, the four units still gain 1XP and your Warlord also gets 1XP for supervising. At the end of the battle, if the Warlord gained 2+XP, they may re-roll the Plots and Schemes test.
• Arcana Long Buried is your typical Objective Action Agenda. At the start of your Shooting Phase you may select one of your units within range of an objective, they give up the opportunity to shoot or charge for that turn, and instead break out the shovels and start digging for artefacts. If they’re still within range of the objective at the end of the turn they earn 2XP (or 3XP if it’s an objective in the opponent’s deployment zone). That and the unit can pick up 1 Arcana point on a 3+ if there was a Character also on the shovel with them.
• Sorcerous Prowess is a nice and simple destroy everything Agenda with bonus points for using your head to make other peoples heads pop off with Psychic Attacks. If one of your Character units gained 2XP this way during the battle, they may use the Diabolic Ritual for 0RP assuming they have the required Lore and Arcana to spend.

Requisitions

We’ve got four Requisitions in this section plus Destined Ascension which is your 2RP bog standard turn a character with 3 boons into a Daemon Prince, enough said about that because I really want to rave about Flesh-change instead. For 1 Req, you can take a character that already has one or more Boons, generate another Boon for them and then watch as they turn into a Chaos Spawn with the usual number of Battle Honors and XP… plus they also get to keep their Boons as well as gain Lone Operative on top of all that. Who wouldn’t want a cheap ex-Sorceror running around out in the open in their backline objective flipping a tentacle V at the enemy hopefully not packing a Precision weapon.

I thought Invoke the Architect of Fate was the slightly Coward-ish Requisition at first glance but is actually you just gambling with Tzeentch and hoping they won’t interfere with the dice gods. For 1 Req, you nominate a character with either 3 Lore or 3 Arcana points, you then spend those 3 points and roll a D6; on a 1 you will gain a Battle Scar and 3XP; 2-3 D3 Arcana points and D3XP; 4-5 D3 Lore points and D3XP; and on a 6 you’ll gain one Boon and 1XP

Ruthless Politicking is the Coward’s Path but with a speed bump. For 1 Req, you purchase this after a battle and select one character with the Blooded or higher rank that survived the battle. This one is the Schemer. You will then select another character with the Blooded or higher rank that did not survive the battle. This one is the Puppet. The Schemer gets to be also Marked for Greatness and gains 1 Lore or Arcana point. The Puppet on the other hand automatically fails their Out of Action test and either gains a Battle Scar or loses a Battle Honour and probably a tempting target for the Flesh-change Req.

Tacked onto the end is the Path to Enlightenment for those that are sick to death of edge highlighting gold trim and shifted focus to painting and playing with goat-bird hybrid Tzaangors instead. Assuming you’ve purchased both the old and new Thousand Sons Combat Patrol boxes, you can select one unit of Tzaangors from your Crusade force and yeet those suckers back into the cupboard. You will then be replacing them with a new squad of Tzaangor Enlightened with the same number of Battle Honours, Battle Scars and XP. Plus every time you use Mark for Greatness on this unit, they will gain 5XP instead of 3XP.

Battle Traits

There are four separate tables in this book for you to roll on and oddly enough, there’s not a lot of overlap like other Codexes where some units can cherry pick between most of the tables thanks to shared keywords. That said, we have a Mutant table for those Thousand Son players who don’t immediately throw a fit when reminded of the existence of Tzaangors (or the cool Mutalith), another for the Vehicles and two more for the Characters and other Dust Bunnies (Rubricae).

For the adorably fuzzy little goat-bird hybrids and the big lad, the Mutant table has three possible upgrades in their future.

• Enthralling Soul-mark lets you nominate an enemy unit and then for the entire battle when this unit attacks them, they get to tack on Sustained Hits 1 and Precision. Plus if they murk the unit in melee, they earn you an Arcana point for your Crusade.
• Inhuman Savagery adds 1 to Attacks and Strength when charging.
• Mutated Beyond Reason is one of the those boring yet decent abilities to forces your opponents within engagement range to talk Battle-shock tests at the start of every Fight phase

The Thousand Sons don’t seem to care for Warpsmiths, instead they roll up the sleeves on their ridiculous diamante bathrobes and improve their Vehicles with some awesome upgrades. These tasty upgrades are bonkers and some may even struggle to decide which one to pass up in order to squeeze in the Weapon Modification battle honor (unless of course you’ve got the Req to burn on Legendary Veterans).

• Dark Runes gives your boxy lads a 5+ Invul save. For those of a Daemonic persuasion or those Kastelan knock-offs that already have a 5+ Invul save, theirs are improved to a 4+.
• Mutated Hull lets them regain D3 wounds at the start of your Command Phase. Who needs Warpsmiths?
• Spirit of Change lets you re-roll one Hit, Wound or Damage roll per phase. Take your tendrils and get knotted you jumped up spikey Techmarines.

The Rubricae units – Rubric Marines and Scarabs – also get some love and as much as I wanted it to be six different types of duct tape to keep the sand inside the armour and stop the cats getting in, the Thousand Sons instead cooked up six excellent Battle Honours to roll for.

• Recurrent Rebinding gives the unit a 6+ Feel No Pain against Damage 1 attacks. This can be increased to a 5+ if they are acting as a dustshields for a Character.
• Wrath of the Wronged increases the unit’s effectiveness in battle so long as there’s a Psyker in with them. You can add 1 to the Hit roll when the unit is below its Starting Strength and 1 to the Wound rolls once the unit is Below Half-strength.
• Relentless Purpose adds the Assault keyword to the ranged weapons in the unit. Handy for when their rhino transport got shot off the board turn 1 and they’re forced to tumbleweed up the board on foot.
• Occult Apparitions lets the unit shoot and declare charges if it Fell Back that turn assuming the Psyker is still alive and kicking.
• Loyalty of Ambition gives the Aspiring/Scarab Sorcerer a bit of a glowup with an extra Wound along with improving the Attack, Ballistic and Weapon skill characteristics on their Psychic weapons by 1.
• Fated Emergence slaps the Deep Strike ability onto the unit unless they’re already rocking the Terminator armour. They instead get to use the Rapid Ingress Stratagem for free.

Lastly a very short table with only three possible results for the Characters cluttering up your Roster. This may seem odd for a fairly character heavy army until you remember you can go ham on the Boon table as well to end up with some truly twisted OP characters or angry squid people.

• Malefic Surge adds 1 to the Wound roll for all of their Psychic Attacks.
• Eye of Tzeentch increases the Marked for Greatness bonus from 3XP to 5XP and acts as a get out of jail free card by also letting you reroll the result on the Boon of Tzeentch table.
• Aspiring Magister is a bit boring, increasing the Leadership and Objective Control characteristics by 1. There’s a bonus however if it’s on the Warlord, rewarding you with an additional Lore point if the pass the Plots and Schemes test after the battle.

Boons of Tzeentch

Beanith: Don’t get me wrong, the Boon mechanic is a fantastic bit of kit and I love getting to use it and getting to watch most of my characters end up with extra tentacles always sparks joy in both mine and my opponent’s hearts when I inevitably roll a duplicate Boon, but it’s a right ball ache to write about /checks notes/ for the 5th time this edition. Here’s hoping they reuse the same Boons again when the Daemon Codex is eventually released so I can cheat and just cut and paste old bits.

The Boons of Tzeentch table has some excellent results, Flesh Sigils is a 5+ Feel No Pain right up until you accidentally turn into a Spawn and it becomes a 4+ Feel No Pain. Aura of Illusion gives the bearer the Stealth ability and the unit it leads gains the Stealth-lite version that does the same minus 1 to hit rolls but only on attacks more than 12” away. My favorite of the bunch is Immaterial Edge which adds Devastating Wounds to the model’s melee weapons.

Crusade Relics

What else can you get the bookish nerds in your life beyond more books, book vouchers and maybe a dustpan and broom for accidental armour breaches? Well you could also check out what’s on offer in the Thousand Sons Relic Vaults.

Of course this being the Thousand Sons, we start out with the Perfidious Tome. This oversized pamphlet assists with Channeling the Warp treating the additional D6 as an unmodified 6 and increasing your Lore points. Seer’s Bane improves Psychic melee weapon’s Strength, Armour Pen and Damage by 1 or by 2 when you’re swinging it in the general direction of another Psyker. Rounding out the Artificer Relics is the Pentakairic Armour, a neat little pocket daemon that turns your boring Save into a 2+/4++. Sounds great until you remember everyone running around with the Character keyword in the Thousand Sons typically at worst has a 3+/5++ already.

Digging deeper into the pile is a fancy hat with an Omni-scrambler duct-taped to it, the Helm of the Dameon’s Eye prevents enemy units coming in from Reserves being setup within 12”. Continuing the theme of copying other people’s homework is the Hourglass of Manat and this cut price Resurrection Orb brings the bearer back to life on a 2+ with 3 wounds remaining. The Prism of Echoes reminds everyone within 6” of that time Leman Russ dropped by Prospero for a spirited debate with Magnus. Once per battle in any phase, friendly Rubricae models add 1 to the Attack characteristics to all of their non-psychic weapons.

Lastly we have the Legendary relic, the Athenaean Scrolls which spends a whole paragraph that boils down to you spending Lore or Arcana points to do more Rituals or reroll Psychic tests because you’re a massive nerd that would rather read scrolls when you could be outside tricking Space Wolves into playing fetch with Vortex Grenades.

Name Generator

Thousand Sons know that having a name can be a weakness and yet they have provided you with a handy name generator to help name your characters. That said, I don’t know, I think my usual method works fine, Ste’ve the Apost’rophe is so much better than Usemph Kharrogrim.

Final Thoughts

Beanith: For those keeping track, I love testing my lucking with Boons and always giggle when I push the envelope too far and end up with yet another Chaos Spawn cluttering up my Crusade Rosters. That’s why I love seeing the Flesh-change Requisition, being able to deliberately build a Lone Operative Chaos Spawn that either sit in my deployment zone preventing troublesome Reserves in important places or running around in the opponent’s deployment zone making a nuisance of themselves however briefly. Also a big fan of the setting, for once it shouldn’t interfere with the Campaign Master’s narrative with very little hand waving unlike the Necron trying to awaken a Tomb world that the Genestealer Cults are trying to take over whilst the Tyranids devour it and the T’su busy with the rest of the system. (For those wondering how to handle this, all of this is happening “over there” and the progress of each faction is represented by how well your forces are doing here in as a splinter fleet, cult-offshot, etc). All in all, not a bad set of rules and one I hope to see on the table soon that isn’t several blobs of unkillable Scarab Terminators.

TheChirurgeon: I like that these rules bring back the old Cults. They have some very cool and thematic rules, and there are some really cool ideas here with the custom rituals you can get for each cult. It makes me wish that the Thousand Sons Detachments came with new rituals but I can live with this just fine.

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