500 Worlds Titus is the first chapter in a new continuing narrative that leads its way into the 11th edition of Warhammer 40,000. Pitting the Ultramarines under the command of Captain Titus against the Necron Destroyer horrors of Nekrosor Ammentar’s Cursed Legion, we see the crazed Necron’s plan to try and regather the shards of an ancient star god. Along with this narrative we get a whole host of gaming content and some amazing new models.

In this full review we’ll be digging into 500 Worlds Titus and checking out just what is contained within the books, while also checking out the new models that have been released alongside this wave.

Massive thanks to Games Workshop for sending us this over a little early to check out on the site. If you would like to support the site then why not pick up your copy through our affiliate Element Games and save yourself some money too?

We’ve also filmed full unboxings and reviews of both Titus, Nekrosor and the Nightbringer which you can see just below or over on YouTube

So without further ado, let’s jump into 500 Worlds Titus!

500 Worlds Titus Review

So here we are, another massive end of edition campaign! If you’ve not come across one of these before, then basically at the end of every edition of Warhammer 40,000, Games Workshop tend to put out a series of books that advance the overarching narrative of the game as well as introducing a host of new models, normally for characters. Last time we had the Arks of Omen series, which was a great set of books that brought us new models for characters such as Angron, Farsight, Vashtorr and The Lion himself!

This time, it seems like Games Workshop are doing things a little differently – rather than a single overarching campaign, it looks like we are instead having glimpses of various events happening across the galaxy. This is cool as it means we can have a lot more factions involved without having to shoehorn them in then they might not otherwise fit, and it also means we get a lot more variety in background and focus too.

The first book is 500 Worlds Titus, but really this is a set of 3 books plus a handout of detachments. In the past Games Workshop have included the rules for the new units introduced in these books, but for this one the rules for the new models (and detachments) are all available on Warhammer Community to download rather than being included in the campaign books. This means that if you want to use the new characters then you dont need to pick this up – though as someone who likes physical media I do kinda wish they included the profiles in the book too.

So what do we actually get here then? Inside the slipcase are 3 softback books and a booklet filled with gaming content – One book covers the lore, another a full map based campaign system (with a map and stickers!) and the last book reprints the rules for boarding actions and brings 12 new maps alongside for it. The final booklet in the set contains new detachments for the Space Marines and Necrons, and there’s some really fun stuff in here for that!

500 Worlds Titus – The Lore

The first book “Titus” covers things from a lore point of view. At 80 pages this is the biggest of the volumes and is dedicated to the Ultramarine campaign to reunite the “500 Worlds” of Ultramar and being them back into the Imperium fold. I’m not going to jump into spoilers too much here as i know people will want to read this for themselves, but here’s the rough outline of what is going on.

While the various conflicts have been playing out over the last few editions, things are not so rosy in the Ultramar Segmentum. Guilliman is busy out on the Indomitus Crusade, and Marneus Calgar is facing the multitude of threats to the Imperium in the wider galaxy. So it has fallen on newly promoted Captain Titus (of the Space Marine video games) to command the second company in their task of compliance across the 500 Worlds. he’s not alone, as a number of successor chapters have also been given this task. There’s a lot of ground to cover, and not all records are completely up to date on the standing of various planets. More worryingly, there are meant Xenos threats undetected within the 500 Worlds too.

In 500 Worlds Titus we learn that a number of planets within the Segmentum are actually home to Necron Tomb worlds that are starting to wake for unknown reasons, and with the vastness of space and the unpredictability of travel and communications it is often too late when the Space Marines hear of the telltale signs of an incursion.

While this is going on, we learn about Nekrosor Ammentar – he is the original Destroyer, and his presence is spreading the Destroyer curse to other Necrons who then reconstruct their bodies into objects of murder. Vicious, deadly and as mad as a bag of hammers, Ammentar is on a quest to destroy all living life in the universe. And what better way to get rid of life than to resurrect the personification of Death itself? And so Ammentar is travelling across the galaxy trying to try and obtain every shard of the Nightbringer, in order to try and recombine him into his true all powerful Star God form…

I won’t spoil the story itself, but we see how those two forces interact with some really cool moments that hopefully have some pay off later down in the campaign or into the new edition.

There’s as much background and information here as you would get in a Codex, and it’s always really nice when we get huge lore dumps such as this, with some very interesting things about the Nightbringer himself detailed within the book. If you’re a fan of the Ultramarines or Necrons and you’re a lover of lore then you’re going to want to pick up the set for this alone. There’s not much representation of other factions in the narrative other that the Mechanicum – but hopefully with the approach of the various books focusing on different combat areas we’ll get most factions covered this time around.

War on the Vespator Front

The second volume in 500 Worlds Titus is “War on the Vespator Front” – this is a full 56 page campaign book allowing players to take part in a full 6 month long map based campaign. We’ve had a few campaign books in the past, but this is probably the most interesting one yet, because rather than be “Crusade” this is something different. It’s more a self contained system rather than an expansion of Crusade, and this book is probably better for it. There’s nothing to stop you kitbashing Crusade into it, but this campaign works really well as a self contained package that doesnt need any external material.

The scale feels a lot bigger than stuff we’ve had in the past. For starters, the book comes with a full fold out map. This thing is very cool and consists of multiple systems each with their own theaters of battle, infrastructure, orbital areas and links to other planets. So for example linked systems are quicker to travel between while others might be multiple jumps away resulting in a longer trip. You see, you dont just have your army in this campaign, you also have a fleet and part of the fun is managing your fleet – where do your ships want to go, what systems do you need to take – and movement of the ships is limited by the links between planets, so you could put your fleet together into a brutal battering ram, or perhaps scatter your ships across the the entire map to allow them to react to other threats or scout out new locations. Each planet has boxes keeping track of the power level for each faction there, essentially showing the level of control each team has on a location, and planets will have varying space to build infrastructure – stuff that can help across the wider campaign, but is susceptible to a bombing run.

This is designed to be a campaign that runs for 6 months, and it feels like this is a nice living breathing system that lets your campaign map feel lived in with it’s own narrative and history.

Essentially the way this works is that each team is given a fleet and is able to set the “power” level of their forces across a number of planets – One with power 4 containing their stronghold, 3 planets at level 3, 4 at level 2 and all the others at 1. They also get to pick 3 pieces of infastructre across those planets, plus the locations of their fleets. This is all done in secret at the start of the campaign, with one player (The Warmaster) managing all the admin. Once all info has been given to the Warmaster, the map is updated to show the state of the system. This is really fun as you might end up having 2 strongholds of rival teams both on the same planet from the off, or a powerful rival faction just a short hop away from your weaker planets. We’ve not seen any of this grand strategy stuff for a while, and I’d love to see this maybe develop into a new edition of planetary empires to allow for campaign play for 11th Edition.

We then get onto the campaign phases themselves, and each month of the campaign the players will choose one of 5 different actions to perform – this could be moving their Fleet to another location, building fortifications on their planets, readying themselves for invasion if they think they are going to be attacked, sending Kill Teams to try and influence the power levels of planets, or doing a battle operation and going to war against another planet. If you do decide you want to fight over a location you even get to pick what type of battle operation you want to run – this could be as simple as trying to assault somewhere with overwhelming force, but there’s some more interesting options such as doing a drop assault to try and gain a beachhead on the location, try and steal a piece of infrastructure, perform a daring raid on a shipyard, attempt to perform a boarding action on a rival fleet or even try and virus bomb a location to make it uninhabitable.

This is very cool, and the various options all have missions that go nicely with them. There’s nothing to stop you opting to use a standard mission deck as your assault option too, but I feel the ones in this book have a lot more flavour.

Realistically each player will have 1 or 2 battles a month, which makes it more manageable that some cumbersome campaigns I’ve seen in the past, and I feel this book makes it easier than it’s ever been to do this kind of huge overarching campaign. I really hope we see more of this in the future – where Crusade can sometimes get a little bit silly if not policed, because this has fixed start and end points everyone goes into it with the same power level

To make things interesting there’s a number of random events that can happen during the campaign, normally triggered when a faction is particularly ahead of behind the others, along with some twists that happen in the later stages of a campaign. These go some way towards leveling the playing field – for example a faction that is far ahead of the others may have to declare their actions publicly rather than in secret, to represent how unwieldy and easy to read their empire is, while a faction that is losing may get access to smugglers who can get them more resources to build more infrastructure.

If you’re like me, then you are long bored of L shaped ruins in paint ball arena style maps – thankfully 500 Worlds Titus fully embraces the wide range of environments that might be fought over with 9 different theatres to fight over, each with their own recommended terrain. One game might be on teeming xenoflora jungle with dense woods, while the next might be within ravines and craters, with a few hardened fortifications dug in deep, while your next game might be on a Necron Tomb World. I love this and anything that brings more varied battlefields to games of Warhammer 40k is a positive in my books.

There’s 5 new missions in the book that represent the various actions that you perform during the campaign, but the book encourages you to also mix in other missions from your collection – so there’s deffo room for overlap with Crusade too. I think you could probably mix in a little of both systems, but just watch out that you dont bog things down with too much admin if you do try and do that!

Dread Incursions

Book 3 in 500 Worlds Titus is Dread Incursions, and this book is a great addition for people who didn’t pick up the Arks of Omen series last time round. This is an 80 page book that contains the full Boarding Actions rules, a brand new campaign system of linked missions based around the 500 Worlds narrative and 12 new missions.

Boarding Actions is a great alternate game mode which takes place within the tight confines of a spacecraft or Tomb World using the Kill Team scenery sets. If you’ve played Zone Mortalis games of Horus Heresy then you’ll know what to expect, claustrophobic fighting through tight corridors with small forces of troops. This is all lifted from the previous Boarding Actions rules, so if you’ve played it before you already know what to expect, and its nice they have included the core rules for this for people who have missed out before.

These games use 500 point forces, so make a really nice introduction to the game too. We get two new army lists included here, one for the Ultramarines (A fairly bananas one that can include a heck of a lot of stuff including Guilliman!) and one for the Necrons that allows for a lot of different character units such as Szeras or Orikan.

The branching campaigns in this book are very cool. You get three different maps showing the missions and the outcomes of what happens if either side wins, essentially each result will lead to a different mission depending on what happens, allowing you to fight through a series of different games to tell a story. I really like this as allows you to play through all the missions in the book but create your own narrative in doing so. One map covers the ship based terrain, one map covers the Tomb World and the final one features both, with 2 sets of two players having simultaneous games that affect each other!

Finally the book contains 12 new missions. These can be used either as part of the campaign, as stand alone games, or even used during the War of the Vespator Front campaign as missions to play through when doing a boarding action on an enemy fleet.

It’s great to see Boarding Actions is still alive, and hopefully come 11th Edition this is something that is baked into the core book too in order to add more ways to play for players.

500 Worlds Titus Detachments

The final book in the set is a 16 page booklet that offers 3 new Space Marine detachments and 3 new Necron ones. Some of these are insanely good – but this is the end of edition ark, so I’d expect all factions to get stuff this good as the series continues.

The Space Marines open up with the Orbital Assault Force – this allows you to give 3 units the Deep Strike ability at the start of the game, and there’s no restrictions here so if you want a deep striking Land Raider then go for it! In addition to it, units that deep strike get to reroll wounds of 1 and any that come out of a drop pod reroll hits of 1 too!

There’s some fun enhancements here such as giving a unit Scout 6″ or even the ability to be picked up from the battlefield by a dedicated gunship.

Bastion Task Force allows units Battleline to shoot and charge after they advance or fall back, which is very good, and in addition each time a unit hits a unit they give other units a reroll of 1s to hit against them. With this being a Battleline based detachment, most of the upgrades and strats favour battleline units – so for example Blades of Valour increases the AP of battleline units, while Hero of the Chapter gives a hero the Battleline keyword while they lead a unit

Reclamation Force is the final detachment and represents the forces used by Titus during the 500 Worlds campaign. This one is all about objectives, giving you +1 ap to melee weapons targeting something within range of an objective, and making you -1 to wound if the strength is higher than your toughness if you are on an objective.

For the Necrons we start with the amazing Pantheon of Woe – this is all about your C’tan and gives them an ability that improves your AP to targets if they are within 6″ of your C’tan – on top of this you can choose to inflict mortal wounds to them in order to increase the range to 9″. This is a cool one as each of your C’tan have to take a specific upgrade which are all pointed – so for example your Nightbringer can advance and charge, while your Deceiver increase the CP cost of enemy strats within 12″

Cursed Legion is an amazing one if you like Destroyers – all your Destroyer Cult units get +2 strength to their weapons, and if a Destroyer Cult unit manages to destory a unit or cause it to be half strength then all your other units also get +2 strength! I really like this one, and feel this will be a scary one to face!

The final detachment is the Cryptek Conclave – this one as you’d imagine improves Cryptek units, giving them the assault ability and the option to give them a number of different abilities each turn such as Anti-Infantry or Heavy, giving you some versatility in how they can be used on the battlefield.

Nightbringer

Now we couldnt close out this review without having a look at the new units being released alongside it! The Nightbringer is the star of the show and an absolutely phenomenal model!

He might only have 30 pieces, but he is a bit of a fiddly build due to the fact that a lot is supported by the energy field at the bottom of the model. My advice would be to make sure each part is properly cut with no nubs or overhangs and dry fit before sticking.

Once built this was just a case of spraying silver then build up the colour with lots of clear paints through an airbrush!

I’m going to have to get the Void Dragon after this, and I really hope we see the other C’tan in plastic now they have new rules too!

Nekrosor Ammentar

The other new Necron kit in this release is the crazed Nekrosor Ammentar!

Like with the Nightbriger, Nekrosor is an amazing kit though a little fiddly to build. I do think out of the two kits this is the easier one to build however, and he was really quick to paint up too using my scheme I used on the Indomitus Necrons.

Captain Titus and the Wardens of Ultramar

The final kit in this wave is Captain Titus himself and the Wardens of Ultramar.

This is a great kit and full of character. I really like the use of the Human element with the Wardens, and I hope that is something they explore in the future with the Space Marine range. It really shows the scale of an Astartes when you have humans next to them, and I think this is much more interesting than variations of different Lieutenants for example.

Each model has it’s own scenic base, so you might want to keep them separate just to make things a little easier, you’ll struggle to get into the capes and robes for example unless you do.

Summary

So what do I think of 500 Worlds Titus? I’m a big fan of end of edition campaign books, and the inclusion of such a cool campaign system makes this one of the better ones for me – Start a campaign with this book when it comes out and it should take you straight through to the new edition of the game in the summer, which is a great choice! Hopefully the other books add little bits to the campaign and build on this as they go.

The lore is interesting with a few twists and turns and a particularity cool thing on the very last page which hopefully plays our during the campaign too.

If you are interested in the narrative side of Warhammer 40k and want to play some different games than standard matched play stuff then I would highly recommend picking this one up!

500 Worlds Titus and the new model releases are up for pre order today and are released Saturday 24th January.

Games Workshop sent Sprues & Brews a free copy for review purposes.

Published by Matt Crowther

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