Warhammer 40K: Kill Team – Blood and Zeal brings the universe’s most insidious agents to the forefront of the game. How a false religion corrupts the far future.
Every once in a while Games Workshop, the multi-billion-dollar monolith dubbed by at least one competitor as “the most disruptive of all tabletop companies,” does something surprisingly introspective. Sometimes it’s a comic book partnership that exposes the intrinsic frailty of its main characters. Other times it’s a surprisingly clear and firm stance against racism. This past weekend it was about putting characters on the table that should have been there from the beginning. For its troubles the British company was rewarded with a sell-out set online.
The set in question is Warhammer 40,000: Kill Team – Blood and Zeal, a collection of 19 new miniatures and some reprinted terrain. Designed for the skirmish miniatures game Kill Team, it’s an expansion set for existing players. But it’s also the rare instance of Games Workshop pulling back the curtain on its own universe and filling in some blanks.
Human society in the world of 40K isn’t just the product of a hyper-militarized totalitarian state, and that means it’s not all Space Marines and Martian cyborgs. It’s also home to a powerful theocracy that venerates the Emperor of Mankind as a literal god. That means about half of the plastic folks inside the Blood and Zeal box are furious zealots, utterly corrupted by their belief in a false god, and who carry on their shoulders the fate and well-being of huge swathes of the civilian population in the 41st millennia.
