![Very Cool! Make Your Own Star Wars: Legion Imperial Agent & Officer | Review [7 Days Early Access]](https://images.beastsofwar.com/2025/12/Star-Wars-Imperial-Agent-_-Officer-coverimage-V3-225-127.jpg)
Horus Heresy Plastic Starter Set Coming Soon?
March 10, 2015 by brennon
I wouldn't say that the internet is abuzz with activity about the rumours of a Horus Heresy Plastic Starter Set but there is certainly a murmur. The rumours for this seem to be drifting between blogs and forums like whispers and then occasionally someone forgets themselves and shouts out the latest morsel. With that in mind it's generally good practise to take anything else in this piece with a big pinch of salt.
So, what could we be getting from Games Workshop and Forge World? Now the dust has settled on a few other rumours we seem to have more information on what could well be a big hit this year...
What's In The Box?
Two identical 'Generic Legion' sides within one box each consisting of...
- 20x Tactical Marines (with components to make Sergeants & Specialists)
- 5x Cataphractii Terminators
- 1x Contemptor Dreadnought
- 1x Legio Centurion/Praetor (with additional Consul options)
...in terms of models. Now, that's a LOT of stuff in a box and when doubled you're getting an insane amount of stuff to play around with. Not only is that something playable with HQ choices, Elites and two Troops (to play a standard game of Warhammer 40,000) but if it's all in plastic then you're getting something pretty special. Games Workshop might be many things but they do plastic kits very well and with a high level of detail.
Also in the box...
- Transfer Sheet containing Symbols for three Loyalist & three Traitor Legions
- Supplement summarising the Great Crusade and important events
- Descriptions of the Legions detailed on the Transfer Sheet
- Supplement for the Age of Darkness
- Rules & Detachment information for playing Legio Astartes & Xenos in the Warhammer 30,000
- New Allied Matrix
- Generic Dataslates for the models within the box including the characters
Once again, an insane amount of stuff within one box. In saying that Games Workshop have been known to go crazy in the past but this seems like a more reliable sort of crazy. If they can get people interested in the world of the Horus Heresy on a grander scale and link back to the resin kits that Forge World produce as a next step then they could be on to a winner.
This also relies on Games Workshop not doing something stupid. If they put together this box and then make it a collectors piece of limited edition then surely they're just shooting themselves in the foot. It's a shame that the existing boxes like Deathstorm and Stormclaw had to be limited time offers when they could have stood as a neat range of introductory boxes for Warhammer 40,000 and done away with the traditional army sets.
Where From Here?
All this opens the floodgates for a lot more gaming back in the Horus Heresy and suddenly those books that you've been collecting and reading through become less of a bespoke coffee table read and more of a rule book again. With an avenue into the game you could certainly see more people picking up the plastics to get started and then adding another model or two every month as they check out the Forge World website.
With the new way in which Warhammer World is being structured with its first Black Library and Forge World stores on location it suddenly becomes a lot more accessible too. Maybe we'll even see events start to pop up where you play through the events of the Heresy officially at the new place.
Something else that changes is the "Oh you can't afford that" mentality that comes with some Horus Heresy folks. If someone turns up to your gaming table and say "where did you get that from?" to then be met with a rather insane price wall it's going to turn people away. Instead if you can offer them a cheaper avenue into the game, maybe to be shared with a friend, you start to deal with that problem.
Extra buzzing that has surrounded this particular topic is that this might not even be anything linked to Forge World and that this could be a self contained box with a slimmed down rules set (or maybe even a different rules set) that enables you to play out a fight between Legions and Loyalists without needing anything else. A taster for both Warhammer 40,000 and 30,000 effectively.
2015 really is turning out to be a year of experimentation for Games Workshop and with Warhammer switching to a smaller scale game, the news of this plastic Horus Heresy set, and probably more rumours down the pipeline, it might turn out to be a good year to be a fan of the angry bear of tabletop wargaming.
What are your thoughts on this new avenue into wargaming in the Horus Heresy? You can discuss it in our forums as well right HERE!
Images above are of the current Forge World Miniatures NOT the 'new' plastics!
Let us know below.
"Games Workshop might be many things but they do plastic kits very well and with a high level of detail..."
Supported by (Turn Off)
Supported by (Turn Off)
"...2015 really is turning out to be a year of experimentation for Games Workshop"
Supported by (Turn Off)
oooooooooooooooooohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh
F~#% You GW! We have an agreement, you and I! You just keep churning out the same ridiculous crap and I just keep turning my attention elsewhere… and now you go and release stuff from one of the most thematically interesting of your fictional time periods, with a straight forward, simple army list; with lots of models, in glorious hard plastic…
I’ve made the Ex-girlfriend comparison before
and now, here I am
standing outside your window in the rain
watching you having a dinner party and seeing you smile and laugh and be fun and elegant and smart; all those things I fell in love with you for
and I forget all the emotional torment and abuse and disrespect and how you emptied my wallet beyond rational explanation
and right here, looking at this ‘new you’ all I want is to believe that you’ve changed, to believe that if I step back through your doorways, it’ll all be different this time, that you won’t try to bleed me for every dollar, that you’ll actually listen to what I have to say and respect me as participant in our relationship, not just a vassal to your intellectual property…
And here you are, in the setting that makes you most attractive and compelling and you are offering, if only with appearances, all the promises I’ve always wanted you to make
and here I am, standing in the rain, longingly… I’m not ready to knock on your door, but I just can’t seem to walk away.
I didn’t know you knew my wife!
lol
hahaha, loving it mate!
having a Cusack moment? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-j379JbL-xM
Macaskill wins, totally the image I was writing – I’m just hoping I don’t end up in a situation where I’m shouting the end of the scene! 🙂
isn’t this Forgeworld not GW? sorry im jsut trying to get into the hobby,thought they were different
While I don’t fully understand the exact financial relationship – yes, forge world is a studio division of GW – they share some talent between them – there was, in its founding, an air of experimentation – a place where GW could release limited runs of product, tied to official armies but without making them official cannon. – Certainly flyers and finecast heroes, among other things, started as Forge World developments before being added to the GW lines. Now, however, (and I can be corrected on this) Forge World is a premier studio for GW – it produces it’s own line that can be used by 40k players, but that are unique in design and cost significantly more – it is the expensive upgrade on already expensive models – like lexus is to toyota 🙂 [I’m trying to be nice, I really am]
I hope this isn’t a case of GW taking over the Horus Heresy from FW, but more of a case of GW helping FW out by creating a gateway product.
If it’s the latter @apocryphal then it’s not so much a case of getting back with an ex, more being presented with an opportunity to get it on with your ex’s prettier, younger sister 🙂
Plastics will be nice, but they will have to be bloody good to tempt me away from resin lol
i’m with you there Dave, if anything it’ll be a dare i say ‘budget’ way to bulk out a Horus Heresy army.
after all what is it 20 man tactical squads isn’t cheap
I think what you will find is that this will be a stepping stone not just to get people to buy 30k and get into the hobby, and others bulking out their 30 and 40k forces but also it will lead into the stores giving patrons the opportunity to purchase/order Forgeworld direct in store with zero shipping costs.
I like the idea (and flaw) of heresy SM armours, but I wish these STCs for Cataphractii Terminators and Contemptor Dreadnought have never ever been found..
Why?
Oh, pure personal point of view 🙂 These “creations” (as well as Centurion Armour) look more like a kind of barrels with attached bulky arms/legs – in my eyes they lack functional simplicity of regular Terminator or Dreadnought arnour (and look more grotesque than them).
At the very least, if the miniatures are going to be made from plastic, that will be great!
I’ve been faffing around trying to make add a couple of heresy missile launchers and iron armour parts, heating resin to make the bits fit together, filling in holes with super glue, filling in miscast edging on the arms, and sanding, scraping and reshaping the resin to make it look how it’s meant to be. And that was after phoning them back get replacement parts for pieces that were broken in transit. At least the old miscast plastic body parts from the devastator squad I’m using were easy to clean up by comparison.
So if they start to use plastic for this rumoured Heresy set, then it’s a step in the right direction. All the fine detailing that FW does can be produced as separate parts to maintain the look of a FW resin mini (I think). So no one would loose out. If they do that for titans, and they have with the Imperial Knights, then that’s mean a lot of much lighter super heavy models (for those who can afford them) and reduce the likelihood of them (and even smaller infantry models) snapping apart when bumped or dropped.
That’s what I’m hoping to see. 😀
Well that does seem interesting but I hope that if it does happen GW won’t mess it up. So far HH stuff that we have seen is from FW and they have done great job while we have seen plenty of bad 40k releases from GW.
I hope so much for this to be true. I cannot wait. Dark vengeance minis are superb, as are island of blood jobbies, GW would no doubt nail this too, and forgeworld would indeed be receive a buttload of my cash to pad out these plastics.
I pretty much sold all my 40k stuff and avoid games workshop in general these days (except their excellent base paints) in part because of the attitude of the company, in part because of the ever rising prices, direction the styles been going and importantly no one wanted to play 40k enough to invest in it when we have so many other games going on.
This however may sucker me in with a nostalgic cast back to my early teens playing the horus heresy in epic space marine. Its always been the best part of the 40k world to me but until now luckily for my wallet it was the domain of forge world and as much as I looked and drooled over the shiny stuff I never indulged. If they start doing plastic in their normal quality I could be doomed or at least my wallet and marriage might be.
This is potentially bad news for my wallet again………..as Mr Scott would say, “she can not take much more captain!”.
Also, what a great post from @apocryphal…….you couldn’t be more right!
HH Interex, and xenos would be awesome too! mega-arachnids, those blue and pink mind slave jello things that the luna wolves and blood angels fought, and Laer! omigosh omigosh omigosh!
Yes please, at least 2 sets
dammit. I want this and I don’t even play 40K. ugh.
GW reaching out to their old customer base ? If anything will them back this will, 30K has got to be the biggest untapped IP that Games Workshop possess.
I know a lot of my friends will be happy. Hopefully for them it won’t be a limited release,
i wouldn’t say its ‘untapped’ Forgeworld have been raking it in for a while now purely from 30k. Can’t blame them for halting Fantasy production with the turbulent position of that in favour of the cash cow that is the Horus Heresy stuff.
ok but apart from the books it’s not really mainstream. There’s a lot of mileage to be had especially amongst those who have been around a while.
So are the rocks that a 30K marine strikes an heroic pose on a different rock to that of 40K or is it the same rock but younger?
different rocks, most of the planets that those rocks lived on get destroyed…
unless those fragments made there way over to other planets and didn’t burn up on re-entry.
Different rocks. All the rocks that were used in 30K poses were all put into the museums that were subsequently blown up as the 40K marines were striking their poses. 😉
Very much depend on how it is done, if author and direction remains with forgeworld it could potentially provide a nice entry to HH for people. If it move to the accounts whipping boys aka design studio then I don’t think it can be seen as positive. That is assuming the price is marked lower than FW, and that is not a safe assumption with recent prices.
In addition I feel it smells of a short term money grab, ultimately producing more marines isn’t going to draw in new players and current customer don’t have infinite pockets.
@huscarle most of the ex-GW staff and customers I know are playing other systems or GW old rules with old models, a re-skin of an existing game I don’t think will do it. Besides the whole company direct seems to be a move away from games and going to mini production, and ignore the rules. Forgetting the games where developed to sell minis.
For what it’s worth guys I hear that they maybe HH style miniatures in the set but it’s not based on or in the HH saga that we all know, I was told there’s a difference between HH and 30k and not to ask anything else 🙁 , not so sure what this means just passing on the info fellas :).
Actually that sounds very promising. Perhaps this is meant as a launch product for a story arc in the Great Crusade. So legions jetting off into the galaxy fighting all kinds of weird and wonderful Xenos and heretic worlds.
Also would leave room for FW to do their Horus Heresy Stuff.
lends itself more to my suspicions that it could well be a ‘Great Crusade’ 2 player set that is its own contained game (A bit like the old 5th ed starter box was). That’d make the most sense as it’d be a great platform to then sell to people you can either follow it on to the HH or skip ahead to 40k as an in there.
Now I am going to throw it out there… Ullanor
i’ll just let fester for a little while.
I’ll be keeping my eye out for this one. As it is, I already own all the miniatures from FW HH Character series, but that’s just for modelling purposes. This might push me over the edge to actually start playing (since I immediately get an extra army to lend out to a friend).
It would be nice to have Heresy models that were an easy and cheaper gateway into the game. Especially since the Forge world stuff is insanely expensive for those of us across the Atlantic. I think the Heresy could also make a great 15 mm scale game along the lines of Flames of War.
Warren talked about everyone doing skirmish. Maybe GW should go epic again (but larger than old Epic). Massive scale battles that are part of 40k universe, but ruleset that plays faster than 40k and has a price point that allows for bigger scale. Same thing could work for fantasy if they wanted an outlet for massive battles.
And everyone said GW had lost the plot. Welcome back old friend.
…when the ship is sinking you will clutch at anything to stop going under!
i do like the new model’s.
This could drag me back to WH30k
Ok so what is everything shown above already available from FW site?
*bink*
what was that noise?
The sound of the C&D letter hitting the mailbox. 😉
Ill have two thank you verry much.
Funny enough, it’s the least interesting part of GW for me. I like the cheesy, fun and over the top miniatures they put out.
I’m just not into the market for the more stuck-up, taking-themselves-far-too-serious game-lines, be it Forge World’s Heresy, DZC, Infinity or whatever else is out there trying far too hard to not be fun toys.
Some other people have been commenting scale I can’t help but think GW have missed a trick if these are the same scale as 40k. If they had gone for 10mm or 15mm they would have had a good alternative to epic, a replacement for Lotr, and at 10mm they could have made some incredible kits for Reaver and Warlord Titans that would have made us forget the epic days…..
I expect to see an internal organ internet sales increase upon release.
Reading the comments, it sounds like I’m in a minority here but I feel its a bad move (hobby-wise not business-wise). Whilst it creates a great entry point by lowering the cost, it brings in what I class as the modern-40k gamer. The “modern 40k gamer” in my area is by far a majority of Win-at-all-costs players whose only interest is making the most powerful list possible and smearing their opponent across the table, making for a very one-sided game that is no fun at all.
What brought me to 30k was the abundance of fluff-based armies you can build, and the entry level was pretty much restricted to adults due to the costs, making for a more mature-thinking playerbase. Whilst there are still WAAC players in the 30k community, my experience has been they are very few. This potential move now brings 30k to the shop floor and with it the said-WAAC teenage gamer (GW’s target market of course).
Then there is the question of will FW retain control of 30k? If it moves to GW-central, then I think I’m out. FW are far more open and approachable than the GW studio, showing you the WIP’s and teasing you with what’s coming in the future, rather than these internet whispers followed by a leaked shot of a White Dwarf cover a week before release.
If GW are looking for ways to replace the HIobbit/LotR ranges, then leave 30k alone with FW and I have 2 words for them – Specialist Games
@olliep: Are you really saying that you think they will ruin your game by letting in the riff-raff?
And I would expect this move to be the start of the long-rumoured “merging” of FW into GW proper,
@maledrakh – not quite the point I was trying to make so if it came across that way it’s not intended. The whole approach to/mentality of 40k seems to be different to 30k.
Look at this way – go onto a 40k FB page/forum and they tend to be full of hate and whiners, e.g.
– “this unit’s OP”
– “that unit’s crap”
– “What list should I take to wipe out army X?”
– “GW updated my codex and its now crap”
– etc etc
Then go visit a 30k FB page and you’ll find a totally different atmosphere. Mature (as mature as we can get that is 😉 ) conversations, open friendly dialogue – it’s a different world.
That is more the point I was trying to get across.
From the GW-control point of view, just look at how the GW studio interacts with BoW!
I’ve been to the last 2 HH Weekenders, and the FW Open Day for the last few years – the FW guys are more than happy to discuss WIPs, future projects etc. That is the side I’m afraid of losing – I don’t want the GW “this is what we’re releasing now, you must buy it and we won’t tell you about the future” approach and clamping down of the shutters.
And everyone said GW had lost the plot. Welcome back old friend – O.M.G this is not going to go down well with my 2nd 1/2 🙁 looks like me going to stat back up with GW
They look pretty nice. Just a pity they never put as much effort in when it comes to the rules
…bullseye!
Meh.
Actually I kind of stopped caring about WH40K when I looked through the fluff.
Just wait, Hasbro 40gay to follow………..D.x
If the plastic look anywhere near the resin, this might actually draw me back, but only for the hobby aspect. I wonder which HH legions are picked for the Loyals and the Betrayers.
Oh gods please no…
Alright I’m okay with 30k, I know people love their Space Marines, I just hope it wont be like the Forgeworld 30k books which is, “it is impossible to beat a Marine Legion with Xeno races”, I know this, tried with my Dark Eldar and failed horribly because the Legion rules are overpowered bullshit (Sergeants with Artificer armour for example) had I know this I wouldn’t of played the game with my 30k Opponent but of course he neglected to tell me HOW powerful 30k is.
I’m just worried GW is trying to make their games from 50% of the armies are Space Marines into 100% of the Armies are Space Marines, screw yo Space Marines, I don’t want them.