If you have a Warhammer 40k Eldar Harlequins army, but feel that the default Aeldari Battle Host Detachment doesn’t really represent your malicious space clowns, good news! Redditor Remote_Barnacle9143 has published a homebrew Detachment that lets you run a Harlequins-only army.
40k fans who’ve been playing since 2015 will remember when the Harlequins were a standalone Warhammer 40k faction, separate from the main Eldar army list. In 40k 10th edition, this kind of army-within-an-army is represented by a 40k Detachment that gives buffs to subfaction units; but these Detachments only show up in 40k Codex books, and the Eldar’s Codex hasn’t been released yet.
The ‘Defenders of the Black Library’ Detachment – which you can find on Reddit – requires that every model in the army is a Harlequin, just like the seventh edition army list from 2015. This strips away a huge array of Eldar tricks and tools – but the abilities it grants are very powerful.
Whether it’s balanced or not we can’t say, but it’s thematically fitting for the Harlequins, which have always been depicted as one of the smallest and most powerful fighting forces in the 40k universe.
The Detachment grants a simple army-wide boon, ‘Luck of the Laughing God’, which grants a single reroll to hit and to wound each time a Harlequin unit shoots or fights. As a Harlequins army is typically composed of multiple small units with powerful weapons, that will stack up into a lot of rerolls.
The 40k Stratagems for the Detachment emphasise the hyper-fast dance moves of the Harlequins, from Prismatic Blur, which grants a unit a 3+ invulnerable save as it boogies out of the way of enemy attacks, to Twilit Encore, which lets a unit move 6” during the opponent’s movement phase.
The Detachment system for 40k 10th edition is proving to be a flexible and elegant tool, which makes it easy for designers and fans to extend the game with new army-wide rules. Check out the new Drukhari Detachment that Games Workshop released alongside the most recent balance dataslate, or these Chaos Space Marine Detachments that one enterprising fan created for each of the traitor legions.
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