Chaos Knights army rules, detachment abilities, stratagems and lore for Warhammer 40k, with links to the full unit datasheet table.
The Chaos Knights, also known as Renegade Knights, Daemon Knights, and the Questor Traitoris in High Gothic, are Imperial Knight combat walkers, their Fallen Noble pilots and Knight houses corrupted to the service of Chaos.
Humanoid war engines that tower over their foes, each Chaos Knight carries an army's worth of firepower upon its weaponised limbs and hulking carapace.
At close quarters, their roaring Reaper Chainswords and crushing Thunderstrike Gauntlets destroy what their trampling feet cannot, scattering terrified survivors before their unstoppable advance. The ground shudders beneath the godlike tread of the Renegade Knights.
Even one such looming war engine possesses the firepower to annihilate entire regiments of enemy warriors, pick apart armoured columns, and swat squadrons of aircraft from the skies. Chaos Lords and rebellious demagogues will go to great lengths to secure the services of such a lone warrior, sacrificing whatever they must to ensure that this god of destruction fights at their side.
Deployed in great number, the Questor Traitoris are more fearsome still, and have been known to bring entire worlds to heel, scourging them by blade and flame in the name of the Dark Gods.
Each Chaos Knight is an unhallowed relic of Humanity's ancient past. They are twisted reflections of the Imperial Knights, corrupted in form and spirit by fell sorceries, dark worship and malefic re-engineering. The Knight suits were first created using Standard Template Construct databases during the Age of Technology, and many have survived through the innumerable wars that have characterised the long Terran millennia since.
For generations uncounted, the colossal war machines have been piloted by Nobles -- aristocratic warriors possessed of enough physical, mental and spiritual fortitude to survive the Ritual of Becoming, commune with the Throne Mechanicum at each walker's heart and thus bond with their Knight suit.
In the case of Chaos Knights, such rituals are tainted by Warp entities, malefic sorceries and the perversions of the Nobles themselves. At first, the Knight may appear unchanged, but in its core the irrevocable process of rot has already begun.
Over Terran years or even centuries, Chaos energies seep into the war engine, torturing its Machine Spirit and mutating its mechanical form. Where once the suit and its pilot were a gleaming beacon of Imperial honour, the Chaos Knight and its Fallen Noble comprise a symbiotic beast of unfettered wrath and base hatred.
A Noble is enabled to pilot their war machine by being wired into an arcane contraption that is implanted into their Knight's cockpit -- a Throne Mechanicum in the larger Knights, or a Helm Mechanicum in the smaller classes. Neural jacks and cerebral uplinks connect the pilot's nervous system to the device, allowing them to directly interface with the machinery of their steed.
Actuators and omni-motivators are driven by streams of hateful thoughts, whilst sensory information and multi-spectrum Auspex relays feed back into the Noble's mind with burning clarity. Within each Throne Mechanicum are the spectral neural echoes of its previous pilots, screaming techno-gheists whose suffering increases exponentially as the Knight to which they are bonded grows ever more warped.
Only the most indomitable Fallen Nobles are able to commune with a Throne Mechanicum. Those that do are able to spur their Chaos Knight into action by inimical will alone. Nobles who are wired into a Helm Mechanicum are similarly twisted by Chaos energies that have been absorbed by their war engine. The Helms also yoke these pilots mind and soul to the will of their Knightly overlords.
Since the Horus Heresy, thousands of individual Knights and even whole Knight houses have fallen to Chaos. Each instance of treachery is a monumental blow to the Imperium. The Nobles and their Knight suits are not only crucial cogs in Humanity's war machine, they are considered to be among the most unshakeably loyal servants of the Emperor.
The history of the Chaos Knights stretches back into the dark recesses of Humanity's past. Long before the Emperor arose on Terra and forged the Imperium of Man, the Knights had established their bastions on worlds across the galaxy. Through countless horrors and long millennia they endured -- but even they were not immune to the corruptions of the Warp.
The first Knight houses were established shortly after Humanity began expanding its domain into the stars. Groups of colonists struck out from Terra aboard Long March generation ships, travelling for solar decades or even Terran centuries through the cold void of space to reach their destination worlds.
Countless colonists were lost to empyric disasters and navigational errors, while those who arrived successfully upon their new planets were faced with all manner of extreme hardships.
Some worlds were battered by savage electrical storms or burned with unrelenting volcanic activity. Others were bathed in exotic radiation, covered in carnivorous flora or infested with strange pathogens that decimated the new arrivals.
Many planets played host to sentient indigenous species who violently resisted Human encroachment, leading to bloody wars for supremacy. Yet the hardiest groups of colonists not only endured, but thrived in their new environments.
Using Standard Template Construct technology, the pioneers were able to fabricate the structures and machines they needed to assert their dominance over their new planet. Each STC database could replicate a specific creation, repeatedly and without fail. In this way the colonists built vast habitats to shield them from the ravages of their planet's atmosphere and devices to reconstitute life-giving essentials such as food, water and breathable air.
In many cases, the vessels that had transported the colonists through space were transformed into fortified enclaves that in time formed the basis for mighty fastnesses. This allowed for the creation of heavy mining tools, refineries and processing plants with which the wealth of the new worlds could be rapidly exploited.
STCs were used to create devastating machines capable of annihilating hostile alien races that offered resistance or invaded the burgeoning Human domains. The first Knight suits were both tools of settlement and weapons of war, equally as capable of sawing down towering trees and crossing inimical environments as they were of gunning down hostile xenos.
Only the most skilled and forceful individuals were equal to the task of operating the Knights suits, and it was to these warriors that the other colonists turned to for protection and, eventually, leadership. Long bloodlines of pilots emerged, and they were subtly mentally conditioned by the systems of their Thrones Mechanicum to become ever-more stringent and authoritarian. These were the Nobles of the first Knight houses.
The planets over which they ruled grew insular, rejecting new advancements in technology in favour of the traditions established and enforced by the Nobles. Due to their isolationist cultures, the Knight Worlds diverged from the path taken by the rest of Humanity, and in doing so were saved from the nightmares that followed.
As rapidly as Humanity expanded into the stars, the collapse of its galactic domain was even swifter. Vast distances between settled worlds led to the emergence of divergent cultures, and with these came rapid genetic evolution and mutation.
Individuals emerged with the ability to sense and manipulate the tumultuous Warp that existed parallel to realspace. On some worlds these so-called "psykers" were mercilessly persecuted, being hunted down and slaughtered wherever they were found, but on many they were revered and allowed to rule over their mundane kin.
Lore excerpt from Warhammer 40k Wiki on Fandom, available under CC BY-SA 3.0.
18 Chaos Knights datasheets on the current roster, each with its points, model statistics, keywords and abilities.
19 Chaos Knights datasheets that are no longer part of the current army roster. They are kept for reference and for players whose collections still contain the models.