In news which will earn ire and celebration alike among the Warhammer 40,000 community, Games Workshop has announced that its two supplements will be updated for the latest Codex: Space Marines.

Reported on by Faeit 212, the books representing the Imperial Fists and Iron Hands chapters are to receive digital upgrades to keep them in use, with the following information supposedly delivered to those enquiring about the codices’ status:

“The supplement books are no longer available and we have not been made aware of them getting reprinted or of any FAQ updates for them. However it does look like the digital copies of these two supplements have been updated. So if you have purchased the digital copies then you can get the updated information there.”

This will be a cause of celebration for some who supported the books mechanically, favouring the certain rules and points which worked to try and better depict certain chapters and the way they fought according to their own ideologies. The Imperial Fists in particular were offered several special characters and unique rules to assist in bolstering armies, while the Iron Hands received several infamous items of wargear and the ability to spam Dreadnoughts. As such, the armies built up around those rules are to still remain viable for the future.

Despite this, large chunks of the codex are set to be made irrelevant. While the book did build upon Space Marine armies with new rules, massive sections of each codex were devoted to having the army play in specialist environments such as Planetstrike and Cities of Death, neither of which are still in use.

To make matters worse for some, their update also means that the lore and backgrounds of each codex are still canon. Codex: Sentinels of Terra had a detrimental effect upon the Black Templars after it all but completely shunned their siege warfare mentality in the lore, instead focusing upon their Second Edition incarnation as eternal crusaders. It has also been accused of being more a campaign book focusing upon the life of Captain Lysander than the millennia old venerated force, and criticised for the sheer number of massacres inflicted upon an already infamously casualty heavy army. Codex: Clan Raukaan meanwhile was near universally rejected by devoted Iron Hands players; primarily thanks to its complete destruction of their chapter’s identity and using any remnants of their prior depiction only as a failing or wrongdoing.

This has proven to be an especially surprising move given Codex: Iyanden’s recent abandonment, and leaves the fate of the few remaining supplements in question. Whether or not Games Workshop will take the time to update those as well remains to be seen.

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