The Eye of Terror is a wound in the fabric of reality allowing the denizens of the warp access to the materium. Created during the Fall of the Elder race, the Eye of Terror is now home to many of the Traitor legions and their Daemon Primarchs. Cadia was previously a barricade against these forces, but with Cadia now fallen the forces of the Warmaster now have free reign to enact their plans. In Reign of Iron, up for pre order today, the Daemon Primarch Perturabo leads his Iron Warriors on a Crusade that will ultimately allow Daemons to walk in the real world and take the Imperium by chaotic force.

In this full review we’ll be checking out the Eye of Terror supplement, seeing what it adds to the game from both a narrative and gameplay point of view and seeing what detachments are within to allow you to theme your armies.

Massive thanks to Games Workshop for sending us a copy 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?

That’s not the only 40k content up today though, as we also have unboxings and reviews of all the new kits coming out alongisde the Eye of Terror book – The new Knight Destrier, Defiler, Chaos Space Marines and Adeptus Mechanicus – you can find articles for all of those right here – and we also have videos you can see just below or over on YouTube

So without further ado, let’s see what Perturabo has been up to in the Eye of Terror…

Eye of Terror – Reign of Iron Review

If you’ve been living under a rock for the last few months, we’re getting towards the end of the End of Edition campaign to finish off the story of Warhammer 40,000 10th Edition. We get one of these every time a new edition comes round, and this time we’ve visited a few different locations. We started out with Titus facing off against the Necrons in the 500 Worlds, then next we headed to The Maelstrom to see what the Red Corsairs and the Aeldari Corsairs are up to. We’re soon headed to Armageddon with the return of Yarrick, but before we do the next book in the series, up for pre order today, is all about the Eye of Terror.

Like with the previous books, we get slipcase containing multiple volumes – but this time we have one less book. In here are Reign of Iron (a focus on the narrative of this story arc), a book bringing us new rules for Apocalypse and finally the usual booklet containing new detachments. In the previous books we also got a campaign system, but I feel that we have a larger Apocalypse book in place of that, and thankfully all these books are going to be fully compatible with the new edition in the summer.

So let’s start off with Eye of Terror – Reign of Iron. This is the narrative book in the set and it focuses on the Iron Warriors and the Adeptus Mechanicus. I don’t want to spoil anything that happens in this, so will have a dedicated spoiler section for you to click open if you want to know more detail!

We get a lot of new art in here which is very cool, including our very first look at a modern interpretation of Perturabo. I do wonder if at one point he was going to return for this book with a model, and with the very heavy focus we have on him in this book I do feel that we’re going to see him on the battlefields sooner rather than later, which is a very cool potential!

The first part of the book actually covers a lot of ground, from some history about the Eye of Terror and the Fall of Cadia, and then on to some really interesting lore where we find out about various worlds and what they are used for and the traitor legions that are based there. The Daemon Primarch Lorgar gets mentioned here along with his world along with a little tease of information about what his Dark Apostles are creating by fusing Daemons with Mortals – I feel this is propping the door open for more Word Bearer love in the future…

The Dark Mechanicum also get name checked, and there’s some new artwork showing some ace looking spider walkers that I really hope we see in model form…

So on to spoilers and what this conflict is actually about…

Apocalypse

It feels it’s been a long time coming, but the Eye of Terror book also contains brand new Apocalypse rules!

For those who don’t know, Apoc was a ruleset that allowed for massive battles featuring 10s of thousands of points of models including things such as Titans while also making the game move quick enough that it didnt collapse under it’s own weight. The original release saw the Baneblade and Ork Stompa released, and we got a couple of versions since then. The last version of the rules took a very different approach and used a ruleset closer to Epic that 40k to make managing the many, many units much easier – though I don’t feel this landed with the fans too well and it quietly disapeared.

For this book, Games Workshop have taken things back to basics. This is designed to run huge games (preferably with multiple players per side) using the core 40k rules with some tweaks to make things run faster.

Now, of course you could play games of this size with the regular 40k rules, but the sheer volume of units would cause things to take a very long time. To make this easier the book suggests a number of optional rules that can be taken in order to make things Apoc friendly. Players may or may not use them as they wish, but I feel you’re going to have a cleaner battle if you follow them all.

Firstly, the pack suggests that you can keep up to 50% of your army off the board, and instead bring them on at 25% each turn, to represent crashing waves of combatants joining the battlefield. I quite like this as it stops the car park feeling you sometimes got in the original Apoc.

To make things run easier the book also suggests that any rule that allows a unit to do anything out of turn sequence isnt used – so for example if you have a unit that allows you to move in the shooting phase, then to not use this simply to make the game more manageable.

One of the problems we always had in the original Apocalypse is that whoever went second probably doesnt have any models left at the end of the turn. In this edition of Apocalypse they have fixed that with a couple of rules that are only in play for the first turn. Firstly, unless you are Titanic you can only see a maximum of 24″ – anything over that simply cannot be targeted, which stops too much stuff from getting shot in the first turn. Secondly, any units that are killed turn one are marked with a token and are allowed to have their turn one before they are destroyed. This means they will still get to shoot and charge if they want to, then are removed at the end of the Battle Round. I quite like this as again it makes things a little fairer for the player who goes second. From turn 2 everything works as usual, it just limits the damage an Alpha Strike can do in big games of 40k.

To make sure that things can get on a very busy table, reenforcements can come on at any point during the movement phase too – this lets you move units out of the way before bringing new ones in, or if you forget to bring something on you can move it on later in the movement phase. The key here is making things easy enough to allow for the movement of all these units.

There’s also an optional rule to make any small skirmishes between 2 units that are realistically not doing to have an outcome on the wider battle – instead of rolling to hit and wound and save, you can instead choose to do either D3 or D6 mortal wounds (decided by the players based on the units) on the target to represent the damage they have done abstracted. Most of the time you’ll be rolling as normal, this just lets you deal with those units that are just part of the big scrum to have a part to play in the battle without bogging the game down with lots of rolls. Some won’t like this but as someone who has spent entire weekends playing Apoc this is a great suggestion that will speed things up.

There’s also a couple of pages of further optional rules that can be used to build on these core Apocalypse rules – One of those is to build your army around multiple detachments, which gives you the chance to have quite a varied army – perhaps a look ahead into how detachments will work in 11th Edition…

To make things quicker, there’s a suggestion that if a unit has lots of different weapons you simply fire one weapon type – So for example if your unit had 18 lasguns and 2 melta guns, you could choose to fire all the lasguns or all the melta guns – some won’t like this, but again it makes things faster and basically wants you to give each unit a role – is it shooting infantry or vehicles, and simply pick the weapon that will make a difference against that target.

In another move to remove any redundant shooting, a unit that is in range of an enemy unit can instead give up it’s shooting to gain a Resource Point – these can then be spent as a reroll later in the game. Personally, I think rerolls slow down the game – so I’d maybe put a cap on these or limit them to just cinematic fights that really matter.

There’s some really nice advice in the book about actually getting the game to work – from having someone as a Game Master to ensure the game is running on schedule, to a checklist of what you need to get the game running, and example board sizes along with how long the games will last. For example a game with 4500 points on each side will need a 6×6 board and 4 hours to play it, while a game with 10k points each side will need a 6×14 board and 12+ hours to play through. There’s also advice on how much terrain is needed to add some interest to the battlefield while also leaving enough room for units to move around.

The bulk of this book is dedicated to Apocalypse Stratagems – these are much more powerful and allow for some interesting Apoc specific stuff – as such they are limited to once per game per player, and each team can only use the same one once per phase. Due to the sizes of the armies, CP gained on your turn is increased by 1 CP per 3000 points (so a 9k army would get 3 CP in their turn)

We get 12 core ones with some really fun stuff such as making the wreckage of a Titanic unit into a new Objective marker, or for 2CP bringing back 500 points worth of destroyed units. Want to represent a bombing run? Pick 2 points 18″ apart from each other and for 3CP you can do D3+3 mortal wounds to everything between those points!

Each army in the game (including Daemons) also gets between 3 and 6 unique Stratagems too – again these are a lot stronger than regular starts and it’s great that every army is represented here!

We get an entire suite of different missions in the book, which is great and these are supported by a small campaign pack too. This works like a tug of war with each side trying to win 3 battles in sequence in order to win the campaign. All of the missions in the book are covered here, which is a nice way of making sure you play through them all – but we also get rules in the book for designing your own Apoc missions. This is more a framework of advice, but it’s nice to have that insight into the best way of creating missions, and I hope we see more stuff like this in the future.

Finally the book contains a small section that addresses any rules complexities for having multiple players a side. A lot of this is pretty self explanatory, but it’s great that they have addressed it non the less!

Eye of Terror Detachments

Like with the other volumes, Eye of Terror contains a small 1 page booklet with some new detachments in it – represented are the Chaos Space Marines, Space Marines, Chaos Knights, Imperial Knights and Adeptus Mechanicus.

Warpstrike Champions is an interesting one for CSM – you get to pick 2 units out of Terminators, Obliterators or Mutilators and pop them into Strategic Reserves at the end of each of your Opponents turns! They have some cool enhancements such as being able to Rapid Ingress for free, or reroll charges when they deep strike

Cult of the Arkifane is a nice Vashtorr themed one – all of your vehicles get the Daemon keyword, and Vashtorr, Vehicles and Lord Discordant get the Soul Forge keyword (which keys off a few abilities in the detachment) and gain a 5+ inv save!

There’s also an Enhancement that can give a unit the Soul Forge keyword, which is a handy way of popping that save on more units too!

Strats here key off the Soul Forge keyword with says to return lost wounds, allow them to run and charge or even gain toughness.

Ceramite Sentinels is a nice Astartes Siege army, with units getting the Entrenched Keyword if they are in a terrian feature, have not just been set up and there’s no enemy within 3 – on top of this, if they are within terrain they reroll hits and wounds of 1!

Hellhunt Lance is a really good one for your big Chaos Knights – If a Knight gives an aura to two or more War Dogs then the Knight gets the benefit of that aura too!

Freeblade Company is the Loyalist Knight one, and this is very good too – your entire army gets Feel No Pain 6+ and every Knight regains a wound in the command phase – really like this one!

Finally we get the Eradication Cohort for the Mechanicus. This is very Skitarii geared as it allows them to reroll hits of 1 in Protector Imperative and wounds of 1 in Conqueror Imperative. There’s some very good enhancements here such as extending the range of weapons in the unit by 6 and increasing the strength of those weapons by 1!

All of the new models in this wave also have their rules over on Warhammer Community – we’ll be taking a look at them in the separate articles for those units!

Summary

So that is book 3 and I have to say I really enjoyed the lore in this one more than the other books so far. Out of all of them so far I feel this is doing a lot of foreshadowing for stuff that is coming in the future, and that’s pretty exciting. I do think that maybe something was lost not having a narrative thread weaving through all these books, but I do like that they have been able to cover more ground by giving us different slices of action around the galaxy – and hopefully we start to see some of these plot threads start to converge together in the Armageddon book.

I love all the Apocalypse stuff in here too – Especially since Games Workshop have shared that this will be compatible with 11th Edition too, which is especially important as we are just a few months out from that now!

While I am sad we have not got a full campaign book in this one, the first two did this so well I feel they might have just been treading water if they tried to shoehorn another one into this set.

Again this is well worth picking up and I’m looking forward to seeing how this all plays out in the final volume!

Eye of Terror Reign of Terror is up for pre order now and is released Saturday 18th April!

Don’t forget to check out our unboxings of all the amazing new miniatures out today too!

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