The release of Codex: Emperor’s Children gives us our first real look at a brand-new set of Crusade rules for tenth edition and not just an updated version of rules we saw in ninth edition. The Emperor’s Children have a set of rules that model the legions’ quest for perfection and the most insane drugs they can find, to the point that most of your Crusade time will be spent going planet to planet, enslaving local populations, then grinding them into a fine powder that you can snort for a sick high in battle.

Before we dive in, we’d like to thank Games Workshop for providing us with a preview copy of this book for review purposes.

Also, note that this is a review solely of the book’s Crusade rules. For a detailed analysis of the new rules and detachments, head on over to our full Codex review.

Legions of Excess

It’s worth noting that while there are Daemons of Slaanesh in Codex: Emperor’s Children, these units are Daemon friends with no benefits – they won’t gain any XP or battle honours while on your Crusade roster, but they’ll also never fail out-of-action tests. If you want to play with Daemons that level up, you’ll have to do an army of index datasheets.

Combat Elixirs

You could suspend your disbelief in the idea that the Emperor’s Childrens take the time between battles to forage for freshly harvested flora, fauna and other rare and exotic ingredients. Or that when they then take those items and then craft them into various special elixirs that when used at the right time confer powerful bonuses and abilities. Or you could just jettison entirely that paper-thin guise and just name your Chaos Lord Reith Kichard or Ozzy Spawndoom, round up the rest of the band (can you really have too many guitarists?), fire up the bus, and go on tour in an attempt to do all the space drugs you can find.

Space Drugs in this case means Combat Elixirs. And there are two types of Combat Elixirs: Army Elixirs, which affect all of your Emperor’s Children and Personal Elixirs, meant for your characters and their meatshields (i.e. the bearer’s Unit). Using your Combat Elixirs in-game is pretty straight forward: Once per battle at the start of the battle round you can use all of your equipped Combat Elixirs. (Beanith: It is completely optional to scream out “Oh Yeah” at this point at the top of your lungs at your opponent whilst furiously rubbing your nose. Consider rewarding yourself a bonus point if even the Ork players thinks you’re getting a little too carried away there, pal.)

From that point, until the start of the next battle round, the effects of the equipped Combat Elixirs are active. At the end of the battle, all of the equipped Combat Elixirs are lost and removed from your Roster’s stash as the Emperor’s Children take any leftovers with them as they continue onto the afterparty.

There are of course restrictions in place to stop things getting too out of hand and limit the number of servitors thrown into hotel pools. You can only have so many Ingredient types in your stash 

• Common are capped at six.
• Rare are capped at four.
• Exotics are capped at two of each.

The Combat Elixirs themselves are also capped out at a max of three each sitting in your stash but you also can’t keep using the same Combat Elixirs in consecutive battles because the Emperor’s Children are the ultimate hedonists and crave fresh experiences. 

Lastly and fairly amusing to us, if you don’t have any Combat Elixirs equipped, then at the start of the first battle round, all of your Emperor’s Children are Battle-shocked until the end of that battle round. Thankfully the Emperor’s Children won’t start their first battle going cold turkey as they start with the Anfrak Silk army elixir. 

Crafting Combat Elixirs

Gathering ingredients for your Combat Elixirs is nice and simple for the most part. For Common and Rare ingredients, after every battle you will roll a die for each category, add a bonus to those rolls if you won and toss everything into your Combat Elixirs Stash. The Exotic ingredients are a little more tricky and can only be found by completing Agendas, cheating with Requisition or various Battle Honours.

Then between games, you take those ingredients and smoosh them together using the recipes to create Army and Personal elixirs to store in your Combat Elixir Stash. The Army ones tend to be the easier ones to make typically requiring one common and one rare or a specific exotic ingredient to make. The personal elixirs are much more powerful and thus are much more expensive to make so you may not see them in every game.

Army Elixirs

• Anfrak Silk adds 2” to all Emperor’s Children Move characteristics.
• Shivversplint adds 1 to all Emperor’s Children Toughness characteristics.
• Skorflense improves the Ballistic and Weapon skill characteristics by 1.
• Xylocil adds 1 to the Strength characteristic of melee weapons.
• Heliotrophos adds 1 to the Attack characteristic of melee weapons.
• Quail is just a small duck, fight me Dan – Beanith.

Personal Elixirs

• Allacrine gives the bearer’s unit Fight First.
• Thrynicine is whenever the bearer makes a successful wound roll, you add mortal wounds in addition to any normal damage.
• Sanctus Vi is Norman’s bogey man giving the bearer a 2+ invulnerable save.
• Cerebresec lets you reduce the cost of a stratagem targeting the bearer’s unit by 1.
• Salviqine Tears creates a 12” aura that forces Battle-shock tests.
• Excelsor is what happens when Ozzy bites the head off a Swooping hawk; the bearer’s unit gets to Fire and Fade (move again after firing).

Agendas

Emperor’s Children get the standard array of four Agendas, although the twist is each helps you get Combat Elixir ingredients if you can overperform. Draught of Despair has you kill units that are Battle-Shocked, giving a unit 2XP per kill, and depending on how many failed Battle-Shock tests were failed you get an additional Ingredient per milestone (one for Common, three for Rare, and six, or if an Aeldari unit Battle-Shocked, for Essence of Fear). This is an interesting one because this Agenda would normally be pretty garbage but in Emperor’s Children you have Lords Kakophonist to force Battle-Shock tests and Noise Marines to make the tests harder. With that combo in your back pocket, scoring three Battle-Shock test failures within a game is not out of the question.

Next up is Adorn the Canvas Eclectic which rewards you an XP per battle round if you hold more objectives than your opponent, and if you kill more units than your opponent. You were (hopefully) planning on doing this anyway so it’s a pretty easy one to do if you’re doing well in the game. As a bonus if you score six XP from this Agenda, you get to add three to the roll to find a Rare ingredient. This is a good fall back Agenda if you don’t know what else to take, but none too exciting.

Symphony of Pain and Hate has you get revenge on your opponent’s units that killed yours, giving you 2XP. If one of your units that killed such a unit, kills three or more you gain a Rare ingredient. In addition, if your opponent was an Imperium Space Marine you also get some Distilled Hatred. This is a neat one, although it does require your units to be dead to benefit from which is kinda lame. If you think you’ll have a rough game, this isn’t a bad one to take.

Lastly there’s Feeding the Addiction is your bespoke Ingredient farming Agenda. You get 1XP per melee kill you get and at the end of the battle if you kill any units that aren’t Daemons you get a Rare ingredient or a specific Exotic ingredient depending on their faction. In addition if you manage to kill six units you get D3 extra Common Ingredient as a nice little bonus. I think you’ll take this every game since not only is it easy to pull off, it also gives you a confirmed Exotic Ingredient.

Requisitions

You get the standard faire of Requisitions here. First up is Soul Barter which lets you filter for different ingredient types, good for if you find yourself with a bunch of Ingredients that aren’t quite what you’re looking for. Perfect Ascension is your standard requisition for upgrading a unit to a Daemon Prince, identical to the CSM version. Dark Patronage lets you upgrade a unit from Tormentors or Infractors to Flawless Blades and gives them an extra Battle Trait. Perfection Personified lets you gain an extra Battle Trait after hitting 71XP. Once again they forgot to be specific about where this trait comes from, so house rule should probably be its from this book. Lastly, Excess of Boons lets you get a Chaos Boon instead of a Battle Scar on a 2+ but if you roll a 1 you suffer Spawndom (see the next section for more on that). This one rules and I hope the rest of the cult books have something similar.

Boons of Slaanesh 

Chaos Boons work just like they do in the CSM book. You roll on a D33 table and get a corresponding battle trait, but if you roll a duplicate result you suffer Spawndom turning your beloved character into a lowly Chaos Spawn. The table is pretty large so we won’t go through every entry but there’s some pretty standard stuff like +2 strength in melee, or +1 to Advance and charge, but there are also three that in addition to an upgrade give you an ingredient after reaching a certain criteria which is a neat way to tie it into the army’s main mechanic. 

Crusade Relics

Emperor’s Children get five crusade relics, three Artificer, one Antiquity and one Legendary relic. On the Artificer side of things, we have the Soulsnare Sigil is you standard “Heal a wound per melee kill” upgrade but with a twist. If you kill something with full wounds, you instead get a 5+ Feel No Pain until the next fight phase. This rules and is a great twist on the formula. Next up is Endless Grin which forces a Battle-shock test at -1 for everything within Engagement Range which also gives you one Essence of Fear if someone fails a test in Engagement Range. This one’s neat but nothing to really write home about. Last for the Artificer Relics is Mark of Excess which lets you ignore the downsides of your army rule which is a great little upgrade for any unit.

For your Antiquity Relic, we have the Shriekwave which forces a Battle-shock test on something within 12” in the shooting phase and if they fail it they take three mortal wounds. Kinda lame since you have to use it at the start of the shooting phase before you can get debuffs going with Noise Marines. Lastly, for your Legendary Relic, we have Blissgiver which improves a melee weapon on the Character by giving it +1 Attacks, AP, and Damage in addition to [PRECISION] and [DEVASTATING WOUNDS]. If you ever damage a Character and they don’t die they have to take a Leadership test and if they fail they take three mortal wounds. In addition if you kill an Imperium unit with this, you get one Dilution of False Hope. This is a pretty strong relic, but not as flashy as some other Legendary options. 

Battle Traits

There are some very interesting options available to the Emperor’s Children, there’s a couple of broken combos and the odd pointless one of course but thankfully you’re all good people who roll for their Traits…

Kicking things off is the table for Infantry and oddly enough Monsters which means your Daemon Princes can get a little bit too spicy very quickly.

• Faultless Duellists improves the Armour Penetration on melee weapons by 1.
• Flawless Perfection re-rolls Hit rolls when you’re coked up affected by Combat Elixirs.
• Hallucinogenic Haze gives the unit the Smoke and Grenade keywords. If they already have Grenades, then they get to use the Smokescreen or Grenade Stratagem for free once per battle.
• Fuelled by Sensation is a Feel No Pain 6+ against 1 Damage attacks. This increases to a 5+ FNP when the unit is Below Half-strength.
• Enhanced Stim Injectors or BFN for short lets your unit be affected by Combat Elixirs for an additional battle round. Anyone else worried about a Daemon Prince hopped up on Sanctus Vi poppers enjoying a 2+ Invun save for two battle rounds?
• Favoured of Slaanesh is the ultimate participation ribbon you’ll want to give out to as many units as you can. If the unit destroys one or more units, they are also Marked for Greatness in addition to any other unit. If those units were Aeldari or Daemon, you can also rifle through their pockets and add a Concentrate of Tormented Souls (exotic ingredient) to your stash.

Vehicle models get a decent selection to try and tempt you away from the Weapons Modification charts.

• Spirit of Excess adds Sustained Hits 1 to the model’s weapons.
• Dirge Caster is a 6” Aura to reduces the enemy’s Leadership by 1 and causes a mortal wound to units that fail a Battle-shock test.
• Six-fold Blessing is your bog stand 6+ Feel No Pain.

What’s that? A table just for Noise Marines and the Lord Kakophonists? How unexpected… Beanith: I’m going to assume it has a mirror finish, looks a little dusty, and at some point a speaker or drummer will be hurled through it. 

• Vile Precision gives the ranged weapons Lethal Hits.
• Destructive Encore lets you hit on 5+ when using the Overwatch Stratagem.
• Lethal Reverb lets you select an enemy unit hit in your Shooting phase and until the start of your next turn, that unit is suppressed and subtracts 1 from all Hit rolls.

Rounding them out is a small 3 option table for Characters with two winners and a winner with terms and conditions.

• Unbound Hubris adds a frisson of excitement to every Fight phase where you and your opponent secretly choose a number from 1 to 3 and then reveal at the same time. Should those numbers match then all’s right with the world and life goes on. If they don’t match, then whatever number you choose is added to your melee weapons Attack characteristic and someone’s life may very well not go on. There’s also a bonus for destroying Adeptus Astartes units in melee, giving you Distillate of Hatred (exotic ingredient) for your Combat Elixir Stash.
• Master of Elixirs are masters of sniffing and snorting out extra ingredients for your Combat Elixir Stash with the survivor rolling a d6 and finding a Common ingredient on a 3-5 and a Rare ingredient on a 6.
• Covetous Paragon is the technical winner where you can have an extra Emperor’s Children agenda but only if they are the Warlord for that battle. I expect to see a few ‘Warlord in name only’ running around on the table so your other units can gain an extra bit of XP.

Final Thoughts

Norman: Overall this is a pretty nifty set of rules. I really like how the Combat Elixirs are woven throughout the ruleset. The elixirs themselves are also really strong, some maybe too strong. Looking at you Sanctus Vi and Skorflense. The downsides on them are just not enough to offset a daemon prince coming at you with a 2+ Invulnerable save.

Beanith: I quite enjoyed these Crusade rules as well. I found the idea of your entire army going cold turkey for a battle means starting the game Battle-shocked is hilarious to me. I’m also not as worried as Norman is by the Personal Elixirs being too powerful as various ingredients are hard to come by and the really powerful recipes require 3-5 ingredients to make. I’m not too interested in running this myself but I do hope my opponent will really lean into the Rocker vibe when I come up against them.

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