The blood-curdling, four-armed genestealer is among Warhammer 40k‘s most fearsome alien creatures – and yet somehow the new, twisted Malstrain Alpha version for narrative variant game Necromunda is another level of weird and scary.
Revealed via GW’s Warhammer Community site on Monday, the Malstrain Alpha is another radiation-warped Tyranid beastie for Necromunda, joining the repellent Malstrain Coalescence we saw unveiled last ‘Necromonday’.
Pitiless xenos body-snatchers who inject you with their DNA to breed their mutant Genestealer Cults on unsuspecting worlds, the ‘stealers have always been among the scariest, gribbliest terrors in all the Warhammer 40k factions – but this spindly, gnarled, and diseased variant twists that horror knob up to 11.
WarCom reveals it has the rules to match, too – its Madness of the Malstrain rule means your gangers will have to pass a Willpower test in order to charge it, and gain the Insane condition if they fail. That’s rather frightening.
The Alpha is reportedly the “apex of the chain” of Malstrain creatures roaming the underhells of Necromunda’s Hive Secundus ruins – a relentless hunter, who stalks and destroys its prey, morphing and contorting its malleable body into unexpected places.
Like its equally nasty siblings, it’s the child of a malevolent ‘Broodmind’ – a mutated genestealer intelligence created by accident when the Adeptus Mechanicus Tech-priest Biologis Hermiatus fired superweapons at the blighted hive intending to wipe out the ‘stealers, but ended up just making them scarier.
We don’t yet know when the Malstrain Alpha model will be released (it’s not included in the upcoming Necromunda: Hive Secundus box set) nor exactly how much it’ll cost – but based on other, similarly sized Necromunda kits, we’d predict a price of around $35-40 (£24-30).
And WarCom confirms there’ll be another new Necromunda miniature (or miniatures) revealed next week – so we’ll have all the news for you then.
There’s been no shortage of Warhammer 40k news recently, as we also got a brand new 40k balance dataslate last week that introduced huge rules changes to the game, as well as buffing the struggling AdMech army.
And, if you’re in the market for a lower cost 40k alternative, Mantic Games has just revealed a brand new Firefight two-player starter set for its own sci-fi tabletop wargame.
For a bit more Warhammer 40k knowledge, try our full guide to Space Marines and our complete Horus Heresy book order. Or, to stay up to date with daily reports, follow Wargamer on Google News.