by Ed Fortune
When the lovely folk at Games Workshop sent us copies of the Arks of Omen series for review, we only had an inkling as to how epic this campaign series would be. This five-book campaign for the Warhammer 40,000 miniatures game has undoubtedly let the galaxy burn, introducing us to the renewed Demon Primarch Angron (who has a temper), and powerful warp entity Vashtorr and now, with Arks of Omen: The Lion, the Dark Angel’s founder, Lion El’Jonson, aka The Lion.
The main appeal of these books is the story arc; Warhammer 40,000 has a slowly evolving storyline in which only one thing is guaranteed; there is only war.
In the previous book, we saw the forces of Chaos coming very close to winning. The monsters from the warp and their allies are trying to sweep up specific artefacts from across the galaxy to take control of some super-weapon. Arks of Omen: The Lion reveals what that is and how doomed the rest of the galaxy would be should Chaos get its way.
This time the focus of the action is on the secretive order of Space Marines known as the Dark Angels, and the entire storyline takes a bit of a wild detour as we head into some pretty heavy Warhammer 40,000 lore. The Dark Angels are all about secrets, and quite a few get revealed here (though Dark Angels fans will likely know the broad strokes already). It’s not a spoiler to say that the ‘long thought dead’ leader and Primarch Lion El’Jonson, aka The Lion, returns when his people need him most. And, of course, this storyline leaves a few threads dangling at the end for future books.
It’s nicely written, and the art is superb; if you’re into this hobby, this is a good source of inspiration.
Rules-wise, we get stats for the Lion, Commander Dante, and a variety of Imperial Navy/Voidsmen units. Essentially models that came out recently are tied to the release of this book. These are all available on the official Warhammer 40,000 website, but it’s nice to have them in the back of a book, and yes, The Lion is very good at killing things. He’s not great at soaking up damage, though, so you’re going to have to give him some buddies. The new rules for Dante are similarly unexciting; nothing terribly new here.
As this is an Arks of Omen book, we get more rules for the Boarding Actions sub-game. This time covering the Leagues of Votann (Space Dwarves), The Thousand Sons, the Adeptus Custodes and other Agents of the Imperium. Oh, and a lot of missions. These are really well done and bring the entire Boarding Actions game into focus; it really does elevate all the rules printed so far.
A strong ending to a fun series.
