Warhammer 40K: New Imperial Knight Defender Introduced
There’s a brand new Questoris-pattern Knight stalking onto the tabletop very soon. Meet the new Knight Defender for Warhammer 40,000!
The Imperial Knights are on deck to get a brand new codex, and that means rules updates ahead. But that’s not all they are getting because the new Knight Defender is geared up with old-school tech to take the fight to the enemy.
“The Knight Defender is a walking reliquary of ancient technology, boasting arcane energy relays strong enough to handle the immense strain of its rare and powerful weapons – a blazing plasma executor and the extraordinarily lethal conversion beam obliterator. Most distinctive of all is the bulbous void shield generator mounted on the top of its chassis, providing even greater protection than the usual ion shields in a flickering dome that can envelop other nearby allies.”
Imperial Knight Defender
Yup. You are indeed reading that correctly. The Knight Defender comes with a pair of powerful weapons, but also has some upgraded void shields. Apparently, this will allow the Knight Defender to create a dome of protection for allies on the tabletop. That makes sense from a lore perspective, too.
I’m curious to see how those rules will be implemented in the new codex. I’m also curious about the range of this void shield. Coming off that large of a base, even a 3″ range is a very large footprint!
Aside from the impressive sounding defenses, this new Imperial Knight is packing some serious firepower. The Plasma Executor is a pretty well known weapon of destruction. But a new variant of a Conversion Beam? That’s something to get a little worried about. The old school versions would actually get more powerful the farther they shot. If this works the same way, then I can understand why the Knight Defender is viewed as a “mobile bunker” on the battlefield.
The new Defender will appear in the upcoming Imperial Knights codex. Furthermore, because of these new weapon options, Games Workshop is splitting up the Questoris Knight kit into two versions.
“Both boxes will have all the parts necessary to build the Knights Paladin, Errant, Warden, Gallant and Crusader, while one will contain a new, additional sprue with which to build the Knight Defender, where the other can be assembled as a Knight Preceptor or the mighty Canis Rex.”
I’m looking forward to seeing what else GW has in store for the Imperial Knights (and their chaos counterparts, too).
Knight Time!
