The second was a boxed set, called Battle for Macragge , which included a compact softcover version of the rules, scenery, dice, templates, and Space Marines and Tyranid miniatures.

The third was a limited Collector's Edition. Battle for Macragge was a "game in a box," targeted primarily at beginners. An expansion to this was released called The Battle Rages On! The 5th Edition of Warhammer 40, was released in the summer of While there are some differences between the 4th and 5th Editions, the general rule set shares numerous similarities.

Codex books designed prior to the 5th Edition are still compatible, with only some changes to how those armies function. The replacement for the previous edition's Battle for Macragge starter set was called Assault on Black Reach , which featured a pocket-sized rulebook containing the full ruleset but omitting the background and hobby sections of the full-sized rulebook , and starter Ork and Space Marine armies. The following Codices were released for the 5th Edition:.

The 6th Edition of Warhammer 40, was released in June The replacement for the previous edition's Assault on Black Reach starter set was called Dark Vengeance. Warhammer 40k Wiki Explore. Imperium of Man. Expansions for Warhammer 40, provide alternative ways to play the game. With the release of 8th Edition, all 7th Edition codexes and expansions were rendered obsolete. Four of the most popular expansions were rereleased in the main rulebook upon launch.

Imperial Armour is a series of official rules supplements to Warhammer 40, codexes produced by Forge World, a subsidiary company of Games Workshop. Current, valid books:. Individual Index books became obsolete when all the relevant codexes were published. However, some datasheets for older models can still be used. On 22 April Games Workshop announced via their Warhammer Community Website that when 8th Edition was released, all Army codexes would be obsolete. Codex Supplements have their parent faction noted in brackets.

All codexes were rendered obsolete by 3rd edition Warhammer 40, Battlezone codexes were rules supplements that dealt with a specialised combat environment, instead of an army.

There was only ever one produced. However, material in Codex: Catachans provides rules for jungle warfare. The concept of a Battlezone codex was replaced by Games Workshop's Expansions.

The two event codexes were released in association with the and Worldwide Campaigns. While Drukhari raids are launched with such speed and voraciousness that many defenders are slain before they even know they are under attack. Without question, those who die ignorant of the fiends that have come for them are the most fortunate.

Commorragh appears within the webway as a composite entity of impossible scale, a shimmering, contradictory realm that plucks at the sanity of those who approach it. Thousands of ships dock each day within its out-flung spines, for the Drukhari are far more numerous than even their craftworld kin suspect.

Violent civil skirmishes are omnipresent, yet descent into complete anarchy is prevented by the ruthless hand of the Supreme Overlord of Commorragh, Asdrubael Vect. In this way the political statuses of these bitter rivals are in constant flux, the ebbing and flowing of their power driven ever by Vect.

Yet the architects of this catastrophe were spared the worst of its wrath, as they were hidden deep within the bounds of the webway. They lurk there still, a race of unrepentant monsters damned to suffer an eternal thirst for the pain of others. The ancient empire of the Aeldari was the greatest civilisation since that of the Old Ones, the various cultures that exist in the 41st Millennium mere reflections of its glory.

Yet the Aeldari fell from grace in the most profound of ways. The origins of those who now call themselves the Drukhari can be found hidden amidst the atrocity and mayhem of that terrible time. The ancient Aeldari had perfected their sciences to such an extent that they could travel vast distances in a heartbeat, reforge planets to their liking and quench stars at a whim. With the galaxy prostrate at their feet and arduous labour but a distant memory, the Aeldari were gradually overcome by an arrogant sense of entitlement.

Free to indulge their every curiosity, they spent ever more time engaged in esoteric pursuits, desperate to escape the ennui that set in over the course of their centuries-long lives. The Aeldari psyche is a thing of extremes and intense complexity; it can experience zeniths of bliss and nadirs of horror far more keenly than that of other races. It is just as capable of falling into corruption as it is of transcending to the sublime. With so much power at their beck and call, the core of the Aeldari realm — once a masterpiece of civilisation — became centred around self-gratification and the pursuit of individual fulfilment.

Slowly, the proud empire began to rot from within. Amongst the pleasure-seekers and the interminably curious were those whose pursuit of excess became increasingly extreme. These included a great proportion of the aristocracy of ancient Aeldari society; those with the wealth and the time to truly explore every aspect of decadence. One by one, the leaders of the cults of excess that were growing within Aeldari society became obsessed with their own power.

They relocated into the labyrinth dimension known as the webway, taking over hidden ports and setting up strongholds at key nodal points within to continue their debased pursuits. Almost invariably, these realms were linked via portals to the sprawling and exhilaratingly lawless city of Commorragh. Commorragh was originally the greatest of the webway port-cities, impossibly vast and able to transport a fleet to any of the most vital planets of the Aeldari empire by virtue of its many portals.

Because of the access it granted to the far-flung corners of realspace, this mighty metropolis was reckoned to be the most important location in the entire webway. It was too valuable to the Aeldari as a whole to belong to any single aspect of their empire, so it existed outside the jurisdiction of the great Aeldari councils of that time. Precisely because of its autonomy, the city-port quickly became a magnet for those that wished their deeds to remain hidden from prying eyes.

The realm of Commorragh expanded unstoppably as wealth flowed across its borders. It spread outward into the void, consuming other webway port-cities, private estates and sub-realms with each new expansion.

Commorragh grew ever larger and more impressive as it fed on their plundered resources. The Aeldari are exceptionally psychically gifted as a race, and as they wallowed ever deeper into corruption, echoes of both agony and ecstasy began to ripple through time and space.

In the parallel dimension of the warp, the reflections of these intense experiences began to coalesce, for the shifting tides of the empyrean can take form around raw emotions, feeding on them and growing strong, even sentient.

The constant stream of indulgence and depravity pouring from the Aeldari empire was as unstoppable as a tide. It nourished and empowered that which crystallised at its centre — a nascent god of excess, content at first simply to wait, and to grow.

The first of these were the Exodites, those who perceived their peril clearest of all. They chose to establish a network of colonies far away from the blighted heart of the empire, exiling themselves so that they might survive. Many of them exist there still, their cultures living in a symbiotic relationship with the world-spirits of their planets. Those who escaped later were the forefathers of the Asuryani.

As their parent society became ever more depraved, they recoiled in horror from what their once-noble kin had become. Realising that they stood upon the brink, they turned their considerable resources to the construction of immense craftworlds: graceful space-cities the size of small moons.

The Aeldari of the craftworlds fled into the void, desperate to escape from the punishment that must surely fall upon their race. Some would even succeed.

Those left behind jeered at the craven flight and narrow minds of their departed cousins. Yet the more cunning amongst them watched, and wondered, shoring up the defences of their occluded webway strongholds even as they continued their hedonistic pursuits. As depravity riddled every aspect of Aeldari society, the cults of excess sought ever more violent thrills.

The elegant architecture of their palaces became battlegrounds as the Aeldari preyed upon each other, delighting in the cruellest of crimes. Their insanity and tainted passion poured into the warp until it achieved critical mass. With a thunderous metaphysical roar that tore the heart out of the empire, a new god was born — Slaanesh, the Dark Prince of Excess. Whole star systems fell amid orgies of cannibalism and violence.

In that instant, most of the Aeldari race was destroyed, consumed by a cataclysm of terror and pain. The epicentre of their realspace empire was sucked into the warp, leaving a yawning maelstrom of pure Chaos in its place — a place the Imperium would later call the Eye of Terror.

Slaanesh gorged upon the despair of the Aeldari. Unstoppable in its ascendancy, it consumed the deities of the old Aeldari empire, scattering the few survivors to the corners of the warp. Yet those hidden in the webway remained all but untouched. Great swathes of the labyrinth dimension itself were shattered into ruin, but many of those Aeldari who had built personal empires in and around Commorragh survived the birth of Slaanesh.

In their supreme arrogance they did not cease their quest for excess, even for a moment. Repentance and atonement were alien concepts to a people who acknowledged no limits to their power. The Aeldari sealed within the webway had not escaped the Fall, though this horror would only dawn on them slowly.

The Aeldari fear Slaanesh above all, for the god was given life by their actions, and now waits hungrily on the other side of the veil to claim each and every one of them. Provided they steeped themselves in the most extreme and decadent acts, the Aeldari of the webway found that the curse of Slaanesh could be abated. The agony of others nourished their withered souls and kept them vital and strong, filling their frames with unnatural energies. Assuming they could feed regularly enough, the webway dwellers became physically immune to the passage of time.

So it was that the Drukhari were born, sadistic parasites who subsist upon the anguish of others in order to prevent the slow death of their immortal souls. There truly is no escape. The Drukhari have unwittingly doomed themselves, exchanging a horrific but mercifully swift end for an eternity of ghoulish starvation.

To this day the Drukhari raid the galaxy from the canker that is Commorragh, sowing misery and destruction wherever they emerge and spiriting away countless captives to their lairs for their own horrible ends. They are masters of torture and degradation, for the longer a Drukhari can drag out the punishment of a captive, the greater the nourishment that can be derived from it.

A Drukhari who has recently fed upon the torment of others shines with a cold and startling aura, their physical form restored to perfection even as the spirit within festers. One who is starved of such energies for long enough will become a shadow, desperately hunting for a taste of pain with which to stave off the gnawing pangs in the depths of their soul.

Only by launching massed raids across the galaxy can they feed their insatiable hunger for suffering, and secure the slaves and resources that allow Commorragh to thrive. The webway gates that connect Commorragh to realspace are dotted across planets, moons and empty patches of space from one end of the galaxy to the other.

Since that time they have remained hidden in the folds of reality, and the Drukhari now use them to terrorise and butcher the inhabitants of realspace, emerging unexpectedly to carry out their slaughter before hastening back to the Dark City with their mutilated captives.

Though some of the entrances to the webway have been discovered by the lesser races, most are known only to the Drukhari and their Aeldari cousins. As such, raiding parties will often prey on the same worlds again and again, appearing as if from nowhere before each massacre.

Other times, Commorrite warlords use their spy networks to keep watch through a particular portal, silently observing as a decimated planet rebuilds over decades, centuries or even millennia. When the fruit of their populous is deemed ripe for harvest, another raid will come screaming from the shadows, giving face to the nightmares that have been buried in the collective conscious of the society for generations. The first sign of a Drukhari raid is usually the appearance of the barb-prowed Raiders.

The silhouettes of these gravcraft are feared by many species across the galaxy and are synonymous with doom. From the decks of the Raiders come fusillades of splinter weapon fire that rake the rows of defending infantry, and beams of darklight that rip through armoured vehicles and gun emplacements. Smaller craft carrying Drukhari champions and their elite retinues follow in the wake of this destruction, quickly overtaking the larger Raiders to stab through the rents in the lines of defence.

Such raids are swift and brutal, for the Drukhari avoid attritional warfare unless the potential rewards in suffering are monumentally high. Besides, the defenders are often eradicated before they have had a chance to fortify their position. This is not to say that the Drukhari mindlessly kill all before them — far from it. Many of their foes are merely neutralised and taken as prisoners, though this is in no way a mercy.

The strike forces of the Drukhari, despite consisting of treacherous and scheming murderers, work like well-tuned machines upon the battlefield. Raids are planned in meticulous detail by the Archons, Succubi and Haemonculi that lead them, and hidden routes through the webway are opened to allow passage for their forces before the assault. Only the most capable are recruited for each realspace raid, which is why Drukhari warriors are such determined opponents, and why their bitter rivalries are set aside during battle.

Working in concert ensures that not only is the greatest amount of punishment inflicted upon the denizens of realspace, but also that the maximum number of victims can be taken back to Commorragh. Vendettas are revisited only once the captives are divided, for above all the Dark City requires a steady intake of fresh souls.

Though many raiding forces coalesce around a particular Archon, Succubus or Haemonculus, the Drukhari armies that fall upon realspace are far from uniform in composition. The Wych Cults who entertain Commorrite society with their nightly displays of ultra-violence are powerful military organisations capable of devastating raids. In addition, many Archons will recruit bands of Wyches from the Cult they patronise, for such warrioracrobats make deadly shock troops.

Similarly, the vile Haemonculus Covens that lurk in the bowels of Commorragh have standing armies of their own. These shambling hordes of flesh-twisted nightmares are often purchased to bulk out a raid with frightening and resilient warriors, or else accompany their leering creators as bodyguards and assistants both.

Typical raiding parties have their ranks swelled further by hirelings or opportunists from the many mercenary subcultures that exist within Commorragh. Whooping gangs of Hellions and hurtling Reaver jetbikes perform high-speed fly-by strikes. Jagged supersonic aircraft and flocks of murderous Scourges supply the Kabalites with air cover, while hovering Ravager gunships pick off armoured targets with contemptuous ease. Incubi, Mandrakes, Grotesques and other freakish specialists lend a raiding party strength and versatility, and it is common for a powerful Archon to surround himself with as many of these varied warriors as he can.

Sometimes a powerful Wych Cult will organise its own raid, marshalling whole fleets of Raiders and Venoms to bear its bands of gladiatrixes into battle. Such raids are often executed with a specific acquisition in mind, be it deadly new beasts for the arenas or esoteric living ingredients to render down into the potent cocktails of combat drugs that the Wych Cults favour.

A raiding force of Wyches prefers close assault over all other forms of warfare, and will often be supported by Beastmasters, Reavers and other such warriors of the arenas. Some Wych Cults, most notably the Pain Eternal, are as active in raiding realspace as the most warlike of the Kabals, channelling their fearsome resources into proving their skills in battle against the varied foes of the galaxy at large.

Whole sections were cut off entirely, reduced to isolated islands that were abandoned by their former inhabitants. Many rune-gates were ruptured completely or subsumed by the hungering Chaos dimension, their passages emptying into howling rents in reality. However, the calamity that befell those outside the webway was even greater, for the Dathedian had cleaved the galaxy in two. Countless human worlds that were once part of the wider Imperium floundered in darkness, unable to communicate or travel as they once had, alone amidst the menacing darkness of a hostile galaxy.

The Drukhari have plunged headlong into this shrouded hunting ground, sending their raiding parties to harvest worlds once thought to be impregnable fortresses of Humanity. From these worlds they have taken slaves in greater numbers than ever before. Every day the Imperium sends more forces in a desperate attempt to salvage this section of their realm, and every day more and more captives are taken to die in the arenas of Commorragh. Though the Dathedian wrought great ruination upon the webway, those Drukhari who endured its birth spasms are now free to savour the torment it has created across reality.

Similarly the Covens of the Haemonculi will sometimes launch raids of their own volition. Though usually content to squat like bloated spiders amid their webs of shadow and pain, the Haemonculi need a steady flow of victims as much as any other part of Commorrite society.

A Coven at war is a terrifying sight — a rampaging tide of warped bone and bulging, veined muscle that glitters with a myriad of blades and needles. Grotesques thunder into the enemy ranks alongside buzzing, clicking Engines of Pain, while the gruesome weapons of the Haemonculi torment, rupture and liquefy the foe in spectacular fashion.

On occasion, a Drukhari raiding party will join forces with other factions of Aeldari when the desires of each lend them a shared purpose. The Masques of the Harlequins, the Reborn warhosts of the Ynnari, even the Asuryani of the craftworlds — all find reason to fight alongside their Commorrite cousins against the younger races and ancient enemies that pervade the galaxy.

Though they are but the flickering embers of a dying empire, together the disparate Aeldari peoples can bring whole systems to their knees. Commorragh is the eternal hub in which the Drukhari plot and implement their atrocities. The reaches of space around the city are stitched with seemingly endless trails of scintillating light as vessels pass to and fro between the Dark City and the portals that surround it.

Some of these gateways into realspace are small and dim, but the arterial portals above the largest city-states blaze with ethereal luminescence. Each can accommodate a pirate fleet with ease. To focus on the city that these portals serve is near impossible.

Each distant peak of spires and starscrapers is larger than the last, each border below almost fractal in its complexity. A profusion of thorned dock-spars jut from every archipelago and tower, and ornate spacecraft, held fast in crackling beams of electromagnetic force, occupy every berth.

The Dark City seethes with a constant flow of corruption, as it draws evil to itself only to breathe it back out into the void. Commorragh today is an endless nest of architectural contradictions and spatial anomalies. Each of its estates has been overdeveloped to such an extent that their growth has been forced into the vertical plane, the rival regions sprouting upwards like a tangle of needle-plants fighting for a scrap of sunlight. Each of the spires and towers is linked to its fellows by hundreds of curved arches and strands, and crested with complex silver structures that glow with stolen energies.

Its towering eyries and palaces reach both upward and downward, spiralling into the depths of captive space. With every passing year, the parasitic city seeks to devour ever more of the hidden dimension that acts as its host. Yet it is navigable, for the Dark City has many recognisable districts within its shifting bounds, though their number is almost beyond counting.

Some are well-known and well-travelled, densely inhabited regions of tangled spires and bone-paved streets carved into fiercely defended territories by warring Kabals. Others are death to enter unbidden, the personal realms of powerful Archons or cadaverous Haemonculi who do not take kindly to unsolicited intrusions. Yet most dangerous are those regions that have fallen into disuse, due to either structural or dimensional collapse.

These may take the form of monster-haunted wastelands of vitreous wreckage and ossified remains, or lakes of seething poisons and screaming shadows. The latter will often have suffered dimensional breaches due to the partial or total collapse of the webway around Commorragh is less a city and more a conglomeration of nightmares, brought into existence by the most twisted Drukhari minds.

Its fang-like spires and plunging abysses house the most depraved devices of agony imaginable, and from its slave pits and torture chambers come the endless screams of countless wretched slaves. Once-proud fortress complexes and barter-ports spread out in all directions, and the black and angular spires of lesser Kabals riddle their extremities with opportunistic growth.

Many areas are haunted by packs of Ur-Ghuls and Khymerae, and are twisted beyond recognition by the tremendous upheavals of the Fall and the Great Rift.

Their pitch-dark catacombs are prowled by far larger and uglier things than the Drukhari, for in Low Commorragh the lost and the feral thrive like carrion in a graveyard. A vast swathe of these war-torn ruins form a region known as the Sprawls. Through their bleak streets wander the Parched — cadaverous Drukhari who have fallen far from grace. Along this river race Hellions and Reavers, who compete in blisteringly fast aerial duels.

The losers are sent spinning to their deaths, their dissolving corpses adding to the potency of the caustic sludge that swills around them. Further coreward can be found the mercenary district Sec Maegra, more popularly known as Null City — a nationsized shanty town permanently riven by internecine conflict on a scale akin to civil war among the lesser races. A thick mist of poisonous smoke hangs over its roofs, and with every passing minute fresh screams pierce the silence.

At night, the scorched streets resound to solid-shot gunfire and the crack-spit of splinter rifles as negotiations turn sour and rivals are assassinated. Alien mercenaries can be found here in profusion, vying fiercely for the lucrative murder-contracts offered by many of the Kabals. Here can be found the oldest noble houses, which have ruled their demesnes with irresistible force for millennia. Their sweeping wings and towering mansions are crested by citadels full of aristocratic Trueborn warriors, each of whom descend from one of the original orchestrators of the Fall.

In Aelindrach, shadows thicken and writhe as living things, flowing into one another and crawling up the legs of those that trespass amongst them. Here amongst the velvet domes the dreaded Mandrakes make their lairs, bathing in the darkness. The outskirts of Aelindrach give way to the Bone Middens of the Wych Cults, where the skeletal remains of every sentient species in existence can be found, positioned in grim tableaux and mock battles by the Wyches who slew them.

In this way, the daemonic incursion is kept from ever reaching the heart of the Dark City, but every day dozens more pocket realities must be added to the Chasm before the surging forces of Chaos overflow and devour Commorragh from within. Inside these inverted spires lie the labyrinthine lairs of the Haemonculus Covens. Each Coven occupies a sprawling territory of cells and laboratories in which they practise their heinous crafts — spiral-edged torture pits, darklight-warded oubliettes, and galleries through which the screaming choirs of the damned endlessly echo.

In many places the superstructure of these nightmare chambers contain remnants of past subjects to whom the Haemonculi have denied death through their dark science. Helical stairwells are lit by lamps sewn into the eye sockets of incautious visitors, and the bodies of countless alien species flensed in successive degrees line the walls as living relief sculptures.

The Haemonculus Covens are invaluable to the denizens of Commorragh, dealing in body modification, drug distillation and — most importantly — resurrection of dead flesh.

The wards once protecting them from the energies of the Realm of Chaos were left broken beyond repair by the Fall; when tensions grow to boiling point within Commorragh, the collective empathic signal of the Drukhari bleeds outward, drawing the denizens of the immaterium to the Dark City like predators to the scent of an open wound.

These daemonic incursions are known as dysjunctions, and are disasters without compare in the material galaxy. Fiendish warp creatures pour through cracks in the webway to gorge themselves on the souls of whomever they find, and from the high spires to the slums, all of Commorragh becomes a battleground in a desperate war for survival. Even the most minor Kabals consist of hundreds of Drukhari, though their territories may be confined to hidden locations and scattered hideouts.

The largest Kabals comprise millions of skilled warriors. The baleful influence of these monstrous coalitions stretches from one side of the galaxy to the other, plaguing lesser civilizations and inferior races with slave raids and acts of blood-soaked piracy.

Vect named the ranks of warriors that he gathered to his cause the Kabal of the Black Heart. The scions of these aristocratic institutions plumbed the depths of hedonism that led to the Fall. The Commorrite nobility jealously guarded their positions, seeking out and killing any who threatened them or questioned their primacy. The central mass of Commorragh — a mind-boggling metropolis of palatial spires, skyscrapers, arch-shrines and pleasure temples — was the province of the noble houses alone.

Hoping to break back into my Dark Eldar soon. Warhammer 40K Codex Pack. Be careful of what you download or face the consequences. This is a fan-made Codex representing the forces of the Eldar Exodites in battle, for use in the 6th Edition Warhammer 40, game.