Imperium of Man: Founders, The Primarchs, Adeptus Astartes (First Founding Chapters, Other Chapters, Characters, Primaris Marines), Astra Militarum, Adepta Sororitas, Inquisition, Mechanicus, Other factions
Forces of Chaos: Chaos Gods, Chaos Primarchs, Chaos Marines
Xeno Races: Aeldari (Asuryani, Drukhari) | Leagues of Votann | Necrons | Orks (Characters) | T'au Empire | Tyranids (Genestealer Cults)
The void is in our veins.
"We have always been a race of traders. It is natural to us that we should trade the fighting skills of our Brotherhoods. As well as bringing us a profit, it also allows our youngsters to gain experience and honour, and to keep alive the skills which our strongholds may one day need for their own defence."
The Kin of the Leagues of Votann are the most influential and widespread of the abhuman strains, and the only one to be largely self-governing. Their technology is more advanced than the Imperium's, as they survived the Age of Strife in better shape than other human societies. Physically, the Kin differ from baseline Humanity in a number of aspects. Firstly and most notably, they're cloned rather than born — new Kin are generated from the Cloneskeins, ancient databases of genetic data created by the near-mythical First Ancestors.
The Kin's ancient primogenitors also introduced a number of deliberate alterations: Kin are shorter and stockier than other humans, with denser bones and muscles, and have higher red and white blood cell counts than them as well. Their souls were also made dimmer than normal humans, making them more resistant to Warp-borne corruption at the cost of hamstringing their potential as psykers. Individual Cloneskeins also carry distinct traits that impart specific abilities and define a Kin's role in society, such as enhanced reaction times, the ability to see into the infrared spectrum, or resistance to environmental extremes. This often comes with outwardly visible markers, such as unusual body odors, eye colors, or skin growths.
The Leagues have a delicate relationship with the Imperium, which the Kin see as backwards and a poor successor to the ancient human civilization, and primarily keep to their own worlds; a few occasionally find their way into the greater Imperium as mercenaries and emigrants, and are often mockingly referred to as "Squats". The Leagues are also, for all intents, their own sovereign government, and tied to the imperium by treaties rather than fealty, but the Imperium and the Leagues are allies more often than foes — if only because of their many shared enemies. However, the Leagues keep many secrets from their distant relatives: the Kin's genetic alterations, the knowledge that the Votann — the basis of Kin power — are in fact sentient computers dating back to the Age of Technology, and the true, self-willed robots integrated into Kin society as full citizens — all secrets that would cause problems with the AI- and mutation-averse Imperium...
The Leagues have been deeply affected by the formation of the Great Rift, which they refuse to name due to believing that this would give it greater superstitious power. The countless Warp storms that emerged in its wake ravaged the galactic core and swallowed entire systems whole, destroying entire holds and severing interstellar routes. As a result, many Leagues have been driven to relocate and seek out more welcoming homelands, emerging from their isolation in the Core for the first time in millennia.
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General League Tropes
- A.I. Is a Crapshoot: Downplayed. The Votann that the Leagues of Votann worship and venerate as their ancestor-cores are extremely powerful AIs with vast sums of knowledge dating back to the Dark Age of Technology, but time has not been kind to them. Millennia worth of engrammatic degradation and structural damage to their machinery has rendered them far more impotent than they once were, with calculations they could've completed in hours when new now taking decades or centuries.
- Completely averted by the Ironkin, true AI robots who have been serving alongside their fleshy cousins for as long as anyone can remember. They're treated as equal partners in Kin society, no different from Kin of flesh-and-blood. They're programmed by the Votanns to want to be helpful, but are not servants, and sometimes rise to leadership positions (although few desire to).
- Played with the interpretation of some of the Leagues Votanns' requests. Featured most prominently with the Kronus Hegemony's recently (if only by virtue of happening sometime around the start of M41) awakened Fane-turned-Votann has demanded a great amount of knowledge and material, which has led the Hegemony to institute eternal mandatory military service for all Kin that wish to join them and for each Hold to fulfill a quota of world conquests. This in turn has led them to get into conflicts with just about everyone, including other Leagues, who have formed the opinion that the Hegemony just looks for excuses to start a fight, including declaring Grudges to "justify" such extreme actions and expenditures of resources and Kin lives and not honest grievances.
- Ancestor Veneration: Sort of. The Votann literally contain all the stored knowledge and memories of countless past generations of Kin, and in true Dwarf fashion, the Kin treat them with extreme veneration and respect because of that, but they don't go so far as to outright worship them (though the Trans-Hyperian Alliance push the boundary quite a bit more than other Leagues).
- Anti-Magic: Downplayed; in their early history with genetic modification to make their Cloneskeins the Leagues also discovered a way to dim their souls, making them more resistant to Chaos corruption and less likely to be targeted by Daemons and other Warp Predators at the cost of stabbing their psychic potential in the foot. However, unlike the other dim-souled race of the setting, the T'au, there are rare Cloneskeins that can produce psykers known as Grimnyrs who form the priest caste of the Leagues and use their powers to communicate with the Votann and relay their directives.
- The Berserker: Chthonian Beserks are augmented workers of the mining guilds, enhanced with cybernetic modifications to make them stronger and chemical stimulants to allow them to work for long periods of time in hostile conditions. In wartimes, these same augmentations allow them to be drafted as berserkers who will furiously tear through their foes using their old mining equipment while ignoring injury and exhaustion.
- The Bus Came Back: The Leagues' introduction marked the full return of the former Squats as a full faction since the days of Epic.
- Clone Degeneration: Averted; unlike Imperial or other xeno cloning technologies that produce weak clones only usable as Cannon Fodder, can result in soulessness or mutation, or are typically only used to create the basic meat for servitors to be built from, the Kin have much more advanced and fine-tuned cloning technology in the form of their Cradles and Cloneskeins. Instead of taking DNA samples from extant beings as the basis for their cloning, the Cloneskeins are raw data that is fed into the computers of a Cradle to mix-and-match the various raw components and substances required to create a Kin, allowing the Kin to monitor and fine-tune every step of development to make sure the resultant Kin is physiologically and anatomically stable and primed for whatever role they are being made for. It speaks to the reliability of this cloning technology that the Kin cannot recall a time when they were not a cloned people, even in the deepest data-tracks of the Votann, and yet their genomic structure has remained intact and free from unintended mutation across the millennia.
- Designer Babies: Due to the Leagues of Votann's use of mass cloning, they managed to genetically modify their race into what they are now. They did this with samples taken from their vast genepool to create clone templates called Cloneskeins, which are specifically engineered to create whatever type of Kin the Leagues of Votann may need at any given opportunity. However, not all of these Cloneskeins are strictly practical, and some are even designed for fashion or cultural indicators; these types of Cloneskeins can manifest in a multitude of ways and can vary from Kin to Kin.
- Expy: Like most factions in 40k, The Kin are based on one race from Warhammer Fantasy, in this case the Dwarfs.
- A recursive example with StarCraft: the Series was originally proposed to GW as a 40k game after the success of Warcraft 2. When GW rejected the partnership, Blizzard turned the Space Marines into Starcraft Marines primarily by replacing their helmets with bubble visored domed heads. Now the Votann in turn are power armored soldiers with bubble visored domed heads that open to reveal their faces underneath. Combined with the Space Western naming theme of some of their units and overall bulky, hard-edged industrial aesthetic, and it's easy to see a similarity between Starcraft's Terrans and the Kin.
- Fantasy Metals: Besides having more advanced technology, League equipment is superior to the Imperium's due to making use of better materials. In addition to adamantium, the Kin found and use unique minerals from the Core systems like Bastium, Transubstanium and Stelanictite.
- Fun with Acronyms:
- While it's not stated what the acronym stands for, the terminals used by Kin engineers to remotely control their holds' foundries are known as A.N-vyl terminals.
- Leagues weapons interface directly with their bearers' neural augmetics using haptic utility nerve transmission recalibrator modules — HunTRs for short.
- Higher-Tech Species: The Leagues retained a greater technological base during the collapse of the old human civilization, and as they don't share the Imperium's ban on innovation they have slowly but steadily worked on improving it since. As a result, the Leagues are flatly more advanced than the Imperium across the board — even equivalent tools are more reliable and effective, and they retain a lot of technologies, such as ion weapons and true AI, long since lost to or suppressed by the Imperium.
- Honor Before Reason: Played With. While Kin are generally extremely pragmatic and practical when it comes to affairs, exploration, battles and the likes, if they are pushed beyond their usual stoïcism, they form a Grudge against their enemy, and will stop at nothing to see it resolved.
- Human Resources: When a Kin is old and the time of their death arrives, they "rejoin the Ancestors". That is to say, they journey to their League's Votann, to have their bodies and mind subsumed by the Ancestor Core. The body will be recycled and analyzed so that the Kin can be improved, while their mind and memories will be absored by the machine, adding to the data contained within the Votann. It is considered a great honour, encouraging Kin to live fulfilling lives.
- I Have Many Names: Due to the sporadic contact that the Kin have had with the wider galaxy up until the opening of the Great Rift, many species have happened upon isolated groups of Kin and assumed they were a new species and named them according to their own languages. Throughout the millennia the Kin have been known as the abhuman "Squats" by the Imperium, the Demiurg by the T'au, the Heliosi Ancients by the Aeldari, as well as the Gnostari, Grome, and Kreg by assorted other species. Justified by the Leagues more or less inflicting a Small, Secluded World on themselves for most of their history; all of the major holdings of the Kin are in the Galactic Core, which as the cradle for stars is also quite resource rich and thus disincentivizes the Kin to establish holdings outside of the relative safety of the Core. Even when they have to venture into the wider galaxy the Kin are very tight-lipped about the extent of their culture and civilization, thus leading many Imperial authorities and other xeno polities to assume that each League or Kindred encountered is the entirety of some relatively minor xeno species or abhuman strain rather than being a single part of a wider whole.
- It's All About Me: Many Cthonian Miner Guild surveyors consider all resources of the galaxy to belong to them, even if said resources have already been extracted, processed and stored by other cultures or species. Even classifying fully functional industrial infrastructure as a very profitable concentration of harvestable resources as if they were ore veins in an abandoned asteroid is normal. In those cases, the Guild will try to trade first but if that fails, they see the use of violence against their legitimate owners as the next logical step.
- A Lighter Shade of Grey: Along with the T'au, the Leagues are by and large the sanest faction in the 40k universe. They have access to very advanced technology, high living standards, adequate protection from the forces of Chaos, progressive civil rights, and, until recently, lived in relative peace where very few xenos bothered them. Their biggest flaw would be their Greed, and even then they try to be merciful about it. At the very least they show that a lot of the Imperium's worst aspects are largely unnecessary for survival, but good luck trying to convince them of that.
- Might Makes Right: The Kin consider that what they claim by conquest is theirs by right.
- Mirroring Factions: With the Tyranids, of all things. The 'Nids are an extragalactic, biological Horde of Alien Locusts driven by hunger that will strip a planet sterile in search of biomass, and are known to recycle their own dead as more biomass. The Kins are located near the galactic core, and are a race of Planet Looters driven by money who will crack a planet in search of mineral wealth, and will recycle their own dead. The 'Nids are controlled by the Hive Mind through synapse creatures, and the Hive Mind can blot out the warp through a phenomenon known as Shadow in the Warp. The Kins revere their Votann supercomputers, massive knowledge repositories that can be accessed by the Grimnyrs and passed on to the Kins, and the Votanns develop enough emanation to be visible in the Warp, like a mini-Astronomican.
- Modified Clone: One of the First Truths of the Leagues of Votann is that their First Ancestors created them through a process of mass cloning. However, since the Cloneskeins contain a very extensive library of templates and are often tweaked to give resulting Kin specific abilities, there may never be a Kin who is exactly the same as another besides minor cultural markers. The Cloneskeins may also explain why the Imperium has had trouble with concretely identifying Kin from different Leagues or Kindreds as being a part of the same species as each other, as these cultural markers or genetic alterations might do enough to physically differentiate them from others of their kind.
- Only in It for the Money: The most common portrayal of the Kin and the Leagues leans towards this; they value good business and trading partners (hence why they maintain good connections with the T'au who buy their ion weaponry from the Leagues), and if something isn't going to imminently turn a profit for them they are far more reticent to commit to it.
- Our Dwarves Are Different: The Leagues are a space-age take on the dwarven archetype — they're a Human Subspecies marked by being stouter overall than baseline humans, with greater strength and resilience as a result of denser bones and musculature, and much more technologically adept and less superstitious than mainline human society.
- Our Souls Are Different: While Kin have the same sorts of souls as other humans and abhumans, the Votann's experimentations with their genetics, their understanding of the soul's ties to the Warp, and a well-earned wariness about Chaos, gave the Votann reason to place a sort of genetic "shroud" over the Kin's souls that makes them far harder for Daemons or Warp predators to detect by diminishing its effective "luminosity" in the Empyrean. This has had the knock-on effect of hampering their psychic potential, but also meant that they didn't suffer nearly as much psychic backlash with the opening of the Great Rift.
- Outgrown Such Silly Superstitions: In comparison to the Imperium and especially the Adeptus Mechanicus, the Leagues of Votann are this.
- In contrast to the Imperium, they are not nearly as religious and hidebound in their ways of thinking and governing themselves, behaving much more like the human empires from the Dark Age of Technology that they descended from. They maintain stable relations with a few xeno polities like the T'au, don't have blanket bans on certain topics and subjects, and are aware enough of the corruptive power of Chaos to actively guard against it while simultaneously not feeding it with their emotions by dimming their own souls and generally leading the kind of lifestyles that Chaos can't get a good hook into.
- In contrast to the Adeptus Mechanicus, the Leagues of Votann are just flat-out more advanced technologically than the Martian priesthood because they actually innovate and modify their technology rather than endlessly copying it without retaining any knowledge on how its underlying machinery or technologies function. They also have no proscriptions on using AI to aid in their everyday lives, from the humble Ironkin who are treated as normal members of their society to the Votann themselves, nigh-godlike AI cores that are the focal point of their society and responsible for the Kin being what they are in the 42nd millennium. Any number of technologies and methodologies the Kin use would be decried as heresy by the Adeptus Mechanicus, which is why the Kin have rather cold relations with the priests of Mars because they are well aware of what would happen should Mars catch a whiff of what they're up to.
- Planet Looters: Not to the omnicidal degree of the Tyranids, but the Leagues ultimately view any resources found throughout the galactic core and elsewhere that they could make use of as being theirs by right of strength and willingness to take, for as the First Truth goes; "Luck Has. Need Keeps. Toil Earns." For the most part, the Kin aren't monsters about this habit unlike the Tyranids or Chaos, and will sometimes even offer to evacuate people off of the world to be strip-mined, but should the current planetary occupants put up too much resistance then they'll simply bring some of the heavy equipment from the Cthonian Mining Guilds to bear, tearing the planet apart from orbit and sifting through the wreckage for the resources they want. In their fluff, the Squats are noted as being one of the few races with the absolute stones to launch calculated raids against the Tyranids in order to steal their biomass goo for the Leagues' own use.
- Pragmatic Villainy: At their worst the Leagues can be considered this; while they maintain decent enough relations with the Imperium and a few xeno polities like the T'au, the Kin are ultimately focused on their own survival at all costs. If that means refusing to aid one of their erstwhile allies because the cost of Kin blood and treasure will be too high, or even going on the offensive to annihilate a weak force that is sitting on a world or resource the Kin want, then so be it.
- Powered Armor: Unlike the Imperium, power armour seems to be far more ubiquitous in the Leagues of Votann and with more expanded applications than just combat. As the Brôkhyr Thunderkyn have power-rigs designed for heavy lifting and numerous other engineering uses outside of combat. Though the more advanced power is always reserved by the elite Hearthguard who wear suits of Exo-armour, heavy armour comparable to suits of Imperial Terminator Armour.
- Ray Gun: Besides being the foremost users of ion weaponry in the 40K setting, the Leagues have kept their volkite weapon technology and they also have developed las weaponry superior to what the Imperium uses.
- Reports of My Death Were Greatly Exaggerated: The initial reasoning for phasing the old Squat army out of the game and setting were that their homeworlds were in the path of Hive Fleet Leviathan and got eaten down to the last. As it would turn out on the reintroduction of the Kin into the setting, Leviathan only managed to consume a single League, the Emberg-Aegnir Bloc. While it was certainly devastating to the Bloc and resulted in their Votann being driven insane from trying to reabsorb all of the dead Kin to deny their biomass to the Tyranids, Imperial astrographers were quite off the mark when they assumed the Emberg-Aegnir Bloc constituted the whole of the Kin race.
- Space Pirates: At least the Kronus Hegemony has no issue with its members being ones openly, even assaulting Space Marines ships if they consider it convenient. An Imperial Fist strike cruiser followed a distress beacon to a remote system just to find that, despite having been activated recently, it belonged to a long-abandoned derelict towed to that location by others. Then an entire Kin fleet from the Kronus Hegemony inmediately bursts from the Warp in a formation perfect for an ambush and claiming that the imperial vessel had invaded their territory, so attacking it was a clear act of self-defence... but then they "thank" the Space Marines for "aiding them in meeting their current conquest quota."
Notable Leagues
Greater Thurian League
A Hearthkyn Warrior of the Greater Thurian League
The largest of the Leagues of Votann, with over 200 allied Kindreds under their banner, the Greater Thurian League is the largest power bloc of the Kin race and consider themselves the epitome of what it means to be Kin.
- A Commander Is You: Generalist, as far as the Leagues are concerned. The GTL is the League most amenable to new players of the army as their special rules don't necessitate that they take specific units or field them in specific ways to get the most out of them, with most of their rules relating to holding objectives and capitalizing on the faction's Judgement Tokens mechanic.
- Blue Is Heroic: Well, blue-green for teal, but the Greater Thurian League is the largest and most noble of the various Leagues, serving as the template by which other Leagues model themselves.
Urani-Surtr Regulates
A Hearthkyn Warrior of the Urani-Surtr Regulates
The dogged defenders of the Leagues of Votann, the Urani-Surtr Regulates are the League that braves the most inhospitable reaches of the galactic core in search of treasure and resources.
- A Commander Is You: Turtle, as their special rules give every unit in the army an extra point of toughness to make it all the harder for the enemy to harm them in any capacity. This especially benefits their heavier units like Brokhyr Thunderkyn, Einhyr Hearthguard, and Hekaton Land Fortresses that already have substantial toughness and make them all the tougher to crack.
- Arch-Enemy: The Orks, Tyranids, and Necrons whom they share borders with. The Urani-Surtr Regulates have been fighting on-again-off-again conflicts with all of these forces for centuries, determined to fight to the last man jack of them rather than give up ground to these hated foes.
- Defiant to the End: Their unique ability allows a fatally wounded unit to attack one more time before dying.
- Honor Before Reason: They maintain holdings under siege by countless Xeno threats, to the point where all Leagues other than them would’ve packed up and moved on to greener pastures.
Trans-Hyperian Alliance
A Hearthkyn Warrior of the Trans-Hyperian Alliance
A nomadic League of survivalists spread out beyond the galactic core, the Trans-Hyperian Alliance is the most puritanical in their veneration of the Ancestors and dedicated to the enrichment of their Votanns above all other concerns.
- A Commander Is You: Guerilla/Technical, as they gain benefits to their armor penetration on good wound rolls as well as to their Grimnyr psykers and Hernkyn Pioneer biker units, requiring a good balance of shooting, movement, and psychic might to get the most of their rules.
- The Fundamentalist: The Trans-Hyperian Alliance is this among the Leagues, venerating the Ancestors and the Votanns more fervently than other Leagues do. This has given the Grimnyrs of the Alliance a great deal of sway in their society, as they are the sole means of communion with the Ancestor-Cores.
- Space Nomads: Unlike the other Leagues, who hold stable territories centered around settled planets or space stations, the Trans-Hyperian Alliance lives in a number of nomadic space fleets — even its three Votann are carried around inside highly fortified vessels.
Kronus Hegemony
A Hearthkyn Warrior of the Kronus Hegemony
A relatively new and very martial League, the Kronus Hegemony fights with brutality and efficiency to stake their claim in a hostile galaxy and earn the respect of the other Leagues despite their youth.
- A Commander Is You: Brute, being the solely melee focused League of the named sub-factions. As such they demand taking melee focused units such as Einhyr Hearthguard and Cthonian Beserks to make the most out of their rules and ensure success.
- The Baby of the Bunch: The Kronus Hegemony is startlingly young, having only properly formed a millennium ago when one of their Fanes gained full-blown sentience and turned into a Votann. This Votann demands that they acquire resources at all times, leading to the Hegemony's war-like nature.
- The Friend No One Likes: They’re considered aggressive to the point where even other leagues think they just start wars and declare Grudges for no good reason.
- Space Pirates: The 10th Space Marines codex shows one of their Kindred ambushing an Imperial Fists vessel and even "thanking" the Space Marines for "aiding them in meeting their current conquest quota."
Ymyr Conglomerate
A Hearthkyn Warrior of the Ymyr Conglomerate
An ancient and extremely wealthy League, the Ymyr Conglomerate owns some of the finest artifice and technology among the Leagues and as such lead relatively comfortable lives even in the brutality of the galactic core.
- A Commander Is You: Ranger/Turtle, as their rules give all of their guns a little bit of extra range, a bonus to armor penetration when shooting at close enemies, and an invulnerable saving throw for every unit in the army that no other League gets, ensuring that your units will stick around for longer and hit harder with their ranged weaponry.
- Screw the Rules, I Have Money!: The Ymyr Conglomerate is fabulously wealthy even by the standards of the Kin (which are markedly better than Imperial Standards), and as such they get better equipment and weaponry than the rest of the Leagues to give them a leg up in battle and commerce.
