Warbands of the Chaos Space Marines are more often than not motley assortments of Heretic Astartes, grisly mutants, their cultist thralls. The pitiless masters callously spend the lives of the mortal warriors to buy time for the more valuable Heretic Astartes while simultaneously offering those very same Chaos Space Marines to host the Daemons of the warp.
The Chaos Space Marines have been fighting a war of vengeance for ten thousand years, sallying forth from the Eye of Terror to wreak havoc on the Imperium that spurned them. This nightmare realm of warp-tainted space corrupts them in body and mind, but also grants them power. Combined with thousands of years of combat experience, they are some of the most deadly veterans of any fighting force.
Many Chaos Space Marines contingents favour aggressive, highly mobile tactics, rushing headlong to get to grips with the foe as quickly as possible. Their skill, armour, deadly weapons, genetic enhancements, and mobs of disposable cultists make these reckless charges highly effective.
Chaos Space Marines are genetically augmented transhumans who seek only to conquer, slaughter, and despoil. Clad in baroque power armour bedecked in macabre trophies and infernal iconography, Chaos Space Marines do battle alongside growling battle tanks, monstrous Daemon Engines, and thronging masses of cultist thralls. Some are possessed by daemonic allies, others bear Chaos-tainted artefacts or wield warp sorcery. No matter what form they take, they pursue their Long War with pitiless brutality, slaughtering any who stand in their path in an ever-escalating campaign of vengeance, conquest and apocalyptic violence.
The Chaos Space Marines go to war armed with corrupted versions of the already-potent weapons and wargear they used as loyal warriors of the Imperium. They're accompanied by foul daemons, twisted war engines, and hordes of cultist thralls.
Chaos Space Marines are genetically augmented transhumans who seek only to conquer, slaughter, and despoil. They pursue their Long War with pitiless brutality, slaughtering any who stand in their path in an ever-escalating campaign of vengeance, conquest and apocalyptic violence.
Vashtorr is the Soul Forge King, a daemonic demigod of unrestrained invention and abominable artifice. When the Arkifane takes physical form, it is as a horror of pallid flesh stretched over infernal mechanisms, soaring to battle amidst a cloud of lightning and smog. Vashtorr deals destruction with every whirring step, unleashing techno gheist curses upon his foes even as he fashions enhancements for his indentured daemon engines from the raw stuff of realspace.
Chaos Cultists are the mortal devotees of the Dark Gods, ordinary men and women fallen to promises of temporal power who take to battle in huge numbers. Bearing a motley collection of improvised, stolen and makeshift weapons, they can overwhelm even determined enemies with sheer weight of numbers.
Haarken Worldclaimer takes a heinous joy in his role as the mouthpiece of Abaddon, for it is he who proclaims the death of worlds. He does so not with some quotidian threat or hollow boast, but by driving his weapon, the Daemon-touched Helspear deep into the heart of citizen and soldier alike. He is a dark omen given form, and the otherworldly destruction he heralds is the coming of the Warmaster himself.
Accursed Cultists have diverse and terrifying origins – whether born of dark ritual, empyric experimentation, or the predation of malign entities, these abberations are herded into battle as lurching shock troops, their tainted flesh reknitting grievous wounds with unnatural vigour. Once they reach close quarters, Mutants flail and lash at the enemy with claws or tendrils, while the horribly-warped Torments pounce with bestial hunger.
A Lord Discordant is a machine-obsessed heretic who scuttles across the battlefield atop a Helstalker mount, all the while exuding a palpable aura of anarchy. His mere presence short-circuits machinery not already riddled with daemonic entities – actuators and servos whir erratically, and targeting augurs simply cease to function. The Lord Discordant siphons off the pained spirit of dying vehicles, using the harvested energy to reinvigorate other Daemon Engines or releasing it as a screaming beam to infect the systems of other enemy vehicles. The most famous among the Lords Discordant, Vex Machinator, brought anarchy to the hivesprawls of Vigilus during the War of Nightmares.
Reliable, resilient and easily repaired, the Rhino APC has been the mainstay transport of the Adeptus Astartes since time immemorial. The Rhinos maintained by the Chaos Space Marines are grotesque shadows of these loyal troop carriers, daubed with terrifying symbols, smeared with the blood of the slain and covered in spikes – all the better to impale and intimidate the enemies of Chaos.