Warhammer Community spotlights Horus Heresy lore, pairs it with MKII Tactical Squad

Lord-Captain Morrachi and the 78th Expeditionary Fleet are the hook here, because this Black Books extract shows just how uneven the Horus Heresy really was. The Blood Angels commander and his fleet stayed unaware of the civil war until it had already ended, which makes the story feel less like a single galaxy-wide collapse and more like a patchwork of delayed news, broken commands, and forces fighting their own version of the war in isolation.

The excerpt comes from The Horus Heresy Book Six: Retribution, first released in 2016, and it lands squarely in the period after the atrocities in the Isstvan system. That matters on the painting desk, because the story is packed with the kinds of faction cues that make Age of Darkness armies sing: the Knights Errant, the Shattered Legions, and the Blackshields. Those are not just lore labels. They are invitations to mix heraldry, strip back iconography, and lean into battered, field-improvised forces that look like they have been fighting across the stars instead of parading on a clean display board.

For collectors, the strongest hobby takeaway is how directly this ties narrative to building. Book Six: Retribution is described as a 297-page Forge World volume with rules for Shattered Legion forces, Knights-Errant, and Blackshields, so the background is already wired into army construction. Warhammer Community’s Horus Heresy setting places all of this 10,000 years before Warhammer 40,000, with 18 Space Marine Legions fighting for or against the Emperor, and that scale gives painters room to tell very different visual stories from one force to the next. A Shattered Legion unit can carry clashing colours, damaged trim, and scavenged markings. A Blackshield squad can go stripped-down and severe. A Knights Errant project can stay cleaner and more deliberate, with just enough campaign wear to show they have been in the wrong place at the right time.

The practical pairing is the MKII Tactical Squad, a 20-model plastic infantry kit that later Horus Heresy coverage highlighted as having support for special, heavy, and melee weapons. That makes it the right kind of blank canvas for this download, especially if you want to re-fight the early campaigns without building a whole bespoke force from scratch. Warhammer Community has also been pushing cross-compatible plastic kits across the range, so the same Heresy-era infantry can support more than one battlefield identity without looking out of place.

This is why the Black Books keep working for the hobby. They do not sit on the shelf as static history, they push you back toward the bench, where Morrachi’s blind fleet, the shattered survivors of Isstvan, and a stack of MKII bodies turn into a force with actual scars.