There’s a Beastmen kill team coming to Warhammer 40k in the upcoming Kill Team Gallowfall box. This Fellgor Ravager squad is pitted against a Votann Hearthkyn Salvager team, in what will be the final box for the Gallowdark season – which made kill teams tussle upon a space hulk. The doomed ship’s about to hit a planet, and so three of the six missions in this set involve scrambling for the escape pods.
The Leagues of Votann in the Gallowfall box, revealed at Adepticon, are pretty standard models for the army, though we do see one with a jump pack for the very first time, and there’s also a dude with brass knuckles. But what’s most intriguing here is the inclusion of a Beastmen kill team.
Starting life in Warhammer’s fantasy setting, Beastmen’s presence in Warhammer 40k has been sporadic at best. At first they appeared as abhumans, fighting alongside the Imperium of Man rather than a Warhammer 40k chaos faction. Then they vanished for a long while, finally showing up again as Chaos Beastmen in 2018’s Blackstone Fortress – though we have had Tzaangors among the Thousand Sons faction for a while. Necromunda also has a lone beastman bounty hunter, Gor Half Horn.
Now the beastie boys are back, with a grand total of ten horned hunters to enjoy. There’s all sorts of Beastmen within: three-armed Beastmen, shaman Beastmen, the “bionic Gnarlscar”, and the “chem-tossing Toxhorn”.
What’s perhaps a tad surprising about these incarnations of the Beastmen is just how primitive they look. Sure, some are kitted out with gas masks, chain swords, and such. But squint just a little and you could easily mistake these for Warhammer Fantasy beastmen or troops from the Warhammer Age of Sigmar armies of the Beasts of Chaos.
According to the Warhammer Community article introducing the team, that’s because they’re “practically natives” to the space hulk they reside in, living their a long time, and scavenging all their equipment.
The Gallowfall Kill Team was revealed at 2023 Adepticon on March 22, alongside Warhammer 40k 10th edition, and the return of Primarch Lion El Johnson. Check out our full guide to all the Warhammer 40k factions, if you’re interested in diving deep into the lore.