Additional author: Robert “TheChirurgeon” Jones

Fans of teen angst rejoice! Fresh out of the local Hot Topic and bursting into your room through an open window wearing their finest Thursday t-shirts, the Raven Guard have arrived! In the second wave of Supplements to the new Codex: Space Marines, we’ve got Raven Guard and Iron Hands getting new books of their own, packed with new stratagems, psychic powers, warlord traits, relics, and a new unit. Raven Guard players might have felt a bit of a sting when their Chapter Tactic was downgraded from the 2017 version, but the new rules have them screaming back into the fold with a fresh set of sneaky tricks. So dust off and load up your MCR The Black Parade CD, sit back, and join us on a journey through the newest supplement.

Special thanks to Dan “TheSexCannon” Boyd for furnishing us with many, many pictures of his Raven Guard.

Army Rules

In addition to the faction rules laid out in Codex: Space Marines, Raven Guard get some additional rules of their own. But before we dive into those, let’s cover what you need to do to get access to them. We’ve covered this before in our Ultramarines and White Scars reviews, so if you already know this part, feel free to skip ahead.

Accessing These Rules

For most of 8th edition, you’ve only technically gotten access to the full suite of subfaction (i.e. “Raven Guard”) specific rules if your army has literally used the RAVEN GUARD keyword. Homebrew chapters could choose a trait, but wouldn’t get stratagem, trait or relic access (meaning that in tournaments people just used the main keywords).

That’s changed, and you can now get access to 95% of what’s in this book if you are a Raven Guard successor chapter. We broke those rules down in part 1 of our main book review, and importantly “successor chapters” in this case includes those using the “build your own” traits. If you’re going down-the-line Raven Guard, this is the tactic you get:

The Raven Guard were the only Chapter that saw a nerf to its Chapter Tactic in the new book, in part because an army-wide -1 to be hit applying to vehicles has been thoroughly proven to be a horrible mistake. The new trait gives units more than 12″ away the benefit of cover instead (something that makes traits like the Imperial Fists’ and Iron Warriors’ more useful), and gives them -1 to be hit if they are not a Vehicle and already in cover and more than 12″ away. Overall, though it’s technically a weaker ability than what they had (it certainly no longer feels like the definite “best” trait), it’s also one where extending it to vehicles (even just the cover bit) is extremely powerful. This is still definitely a strong one and at a minimum it’ll save you 2 CP for Prepared Positions in half your games. In general, this tactic favours putting lots of Primaris bodies on the board, as it massively increases their already considerable durability, making it hard to sweep you off the field. Do also take note that the requirement to get the -1 to hit isn’t “be in cover”, it’s just be on a terrain feature, so things like hills and Munitorum containers that explicitly don’t give cover still work to give you the -1. A big pile of Primaris Raven Guard standing very sneakily on a large, flat hill lots of crates is a difficult formation to shift.

Note: As Reddit user dode47 points out, hills not only have no cover rules, they explicitly don’t count as terrain features, so while Munitorum containers work for this, hills don’t!

If you want to instead pick your own trait we’ll go through what we think the best successor combos are a bit later on. For now, we just need to establish that Successor chapters can get most (or in fact with CP expenditure, all) of what’s here, and keep that in mind until we cover them in detail. The breakdown of how to get these abilities is as follows. N.B. This is exactly the same as in our other Codex Supplement reviews, so if you’ve already read that you can skip past.