Thousand Sons army rules, detachment abilities, stratagems and lore for Warhammer 40k, with links to the full unit datasheet table.
The Thousand Sons are one of the Traitor Legions of Chaos Space Marines who are sworn solely to the service of Tzeentch, the Chaos God of change, intrigue and sorcery, though they were once the Imperium of Man's XV Legion of Space Marines. The main feature that distinguishes the Thousand Sons from the other Traitor Legions is the sheer number of psyker mutations that have always existed amongst the Space Marines in this Legion.
Every current member of the Legion possesses psychic abilities and they prefer to use Chaos Sorcerers and guile in combat, relying on their psychic powers and sorcerous knowledge to earn them victory.
As a result of an ancient spell known as the Rubric of Ahriman that was cast soon after the Thousand Sons fell from their homeworld of Prospero during the early days of the Horus Heresy, every Thousand Sons Astartes that lacked psychic powers had his soul fused directly into his power armour. The Thousand Sons have become living embodiments of sorcery animated by the power of Chaos and the will of the Lord of Change.
The Thousand Sons are the scions of the Primarch Magnus the Red, the copper-skinned cyclops whose thirst for knowledge in all its forms led ultimately to damnation and an eternity of servitude to Tzeentch, the Chaos God known as the Changer of the Ways. When the primarchs were scattered throughout the galaxy, Magnus found himself coming to rest upon the distant, isolated colony world of Prospero.
It was perhaps fortunate that a being that many other Human societies would have denounced as a mutant came to such a place. Prospero's only inhabitants were a population of outcast scholars and mystics, who had long since fled the galaxy at large to establish a refuge where they could practise the arts of the psyker.
Raised by such scholars, Magnus learned and mastered every one of their arts, soon surpassing them in every regard. The primarch turned from pupil to master, his fearsomely powerful mind able to manipulate the raw power of the Warp in ways no others could.
By the time the Emperor located His long lost son, Magnus was privy to every secret the libraries of Prospero could offer. He yearned to learn more, and in his sire found the only being with more psychic potential than he. Accepting command of the Space Marine Legion created using his own gene-stock, Magnus took his place in the Great Crusade, and utilised his puissant skills for the good of all Mankind.
But all was not well with this state of affairs, for the Imperium of Man had been envisaged as an end to the superstitions that had benighted the isolated worlds of Mankind for so many long millennia. The worship of deities and fallacious spiritual doctrines was denounced by the Emperor's Iterators, who preached a new age of reason fuelled by the potential of Humanity itself and the doctrines of the Imperial Truth. Sorcery had no place in such a society, yet was not the Emperor the greatest of all psykers?
A great debate raged in the upper echelons of the nascent Imperium, driven by the need to explain and harness the phenomenon of psychic power whilst putting an end to sorcery and superstition. While still comparatively rare, the number of Humans being born with latent psychic powers was increasing, though it was nowhere near so prevalent as it is in the late 41st Millennium. The phenomenon proved all but impossible to explain using the empirical reasoning on which the Imperium was being built, and eventually, a great convocation of the highest ranked and wisest counsellors in the Imperium was called.
The Space Marines of the Emperor's Legiones Astartes were genetically engineered, psycho-indoctrinated warriors with superhuman abilities and minds and souls for war. In addition, each individual Legion had its own idiosyncrasies and character -- the product of their gene-seed and unique warrior culture.
The Thousand Sons were a Space Marine Legion bound up with occult lore, mysticism and the otherworldly powers of the psyker. It was these esoteric arts of war that made them one of the most formidable Legions, but also one of the most distrusted, and would eventually see them subjected to the Emperor's judgement against them.
Like all of their predecessors among the Legiones Astartes, the XVth Space Marine Legion was first forged on Terra by the Emperor of Mankind and its original members were recruited from the Terran population. Their gene-seed was first derived from samples of the psychically-gifted DNA of their genetic father Magnus the Red and then implanted into the first Thousand Sons Astartes in the gene-laboratories of Luna during a brief resurgence of Warp Storms within the boundaries of the Sol System.
This brief surge of Warp activity generated psychic convergences all across the globe, resulting in spontaneous outbreaks of psychotic violence. This unusual activity likely did not have any additional mutational effect on the Legion's gene-seed. However, upon learning of these ominous events years later after he was given command of the Legion following his discovery by the Emperor on the world of Prospero, the Primarch Magnus considered these portents as boding ill for his Legion.
The initial corps of Thousand Sons Legionaries, the Student-Aspirants, had been chosen from psychically-gifted individuals who had been citizens of the former Achaemenid Empire that had existed on Terra and had been ruled by the Emperor for nearly a standard century. Because they had been under Imperial rule for so long, the Achaemenids had not suffered as greatly as other regions of the planet during the Emperor's Unification Wars to reunite all the various techno-barbarian tribes and nation-states of the Earth under His rule.
The student-aspirants of the XV Legion had been chosen from among those Achaemenid families the Emperor Himself had determined showed potential and were suitable for the gene-seed implantation process. These young men were taken from the territory of the Achaemenid Empire to the Emperor's secret gene-laboratories beneath the Himalazian (Himalayan) Mountains, where He first had begun His experiments in Human enhancement and created the primarchs, to begin the student-aspirants' transformation into Space Marines. One of these first student-aspirants was Ahzek Ahriman and his twin brother, Ohrmuzd Ahriman.
Once it had been raised, the XVth Legion was deployed by the Emperor to gain experience through the suppression of the few remaining pockets of techno-barbarian resistance on Terra to Imperial rule.
Having proved themselves in this first campaign, the XVth was formally named the Thousand Sons by the Emperor and given their own expeditionary fleet so that they might begin to make contributions to the Great Crusade the Emperor had unleashed to reunify all of Humanity within the newborn Imperium of Man.
The world of Prospero was, as records report, originally a place of pure desolation. It was a desolate, dark planet and was chosen by its original inhabitants because of its sheer distance from Terra. Mutants and psykers lived in reclusion and study on the world, safe from the prejudice and hatred of their fellow Humans.
Prospero was chosen by its original settlers for one reason: its remoteness. Isolated from the most common Imperial travel lanes and boasting virtually no independent resources of any value, Prospero had only one redeeming quality: it was a good place to hide. In the end, it was not even that. Today it is a blasted ruin, declared Purgatus by the Inquisition.
Through the millennia of endless raiding since, it has been discerned the City of Light survived its transit through the Immaterium intact. It came to rest within the Eye of Terror, upon a world that has come to be known as the Planet of the Sorcerers. That daemonic place is a seething cauldron of magical power, reflected across its breadth in the form of infernal volcanism and tempestuous skies saturated with magical vapour. Towers jut from craggy fists of rock thrust up from plains of lava, twisted and obscene mockeries of the spires and pyramids of learning which were the hallmarks of the City of Light before its fall. Mightiest of them all is the obsidian monolith that is the Tower of the Cyclops, said to be so massive it can be discerned from space with the naked eye. More obscenely, the Tower of the Cyclops looks back, as the pinnacle of the obelisk is a glowing warp eye, through which Magnus watches the paths of the future. The Silver Towers of the City of Light have been transfigured by the sorcerous might of the Thousand Sons into space-faring fortresses in which psyker lords set out from the Planet of Sorcerers to traverse the cosmos, launching vengeful assaults upon the Imperium of Man.
The organisation of the Thousand Sons before the coming of Magnus the Red is not currently known but it is recorded that they were not considered particularly different from the organisation of a typical Astartes Legion apart from their unusually high number of battle-brothers that possessed psychic abilities which resulted in the Legion possessing the most powerful Librarians during that era. When Magnus took over command of the Thousand Sons, he instituted organisational and hierarchical changes within his Legion.
Line officers included the sergeants who led a squad-analogue unit called a "chantry," and lieutenants (junior centurions) and captains (senior centurions) who served as the sub-commanders and commanders, respectively, of a company-analogue unit called a "circle." Legion officers of higher rank, including consuls and praetors, commanded one of the nine "Fellowships" that togther comprised the entirety of the Legion. The Thousand Sons also utilised a unique and impenetrable chain of command derived from the hermetic teachings of Magnus the Red, wherein officers held multiple ranks in overlapping tiers of seniority and specialisation, including those of Fellowship, order and cult.
Units known as "chapters" in some of the other Legions which contained approximately 1,000 Astartes were now referred to as "Fellowships" within the Thousand Sons. The highest number of Fellowships the Thousand Sons were able to field when they rebuilt the Legion following the return of the primarch was ten. However, at the conclusion of the particularly bloody Kamenka Troika Campaign where the Thousand Sons had lost nearly nine hundred Astartes, this effectively wiped out an entire Fellowship. Rather than rebuild the decimated Fellowship, Magnus decided to reorganise and maintain the Legion with only nine Fellowships. This organisation was referred to as the Pesedjet. The Legion's command structure was adapted in accordance with Prosperine philosophy and were now known as the "Rehati" (or the coven of Magnus), a secondary command-track in which the Legion's senior officers were ranked according to psychic ability and influence.
As part of their training, all captains of a Fellowship undertook a secondment to another Space Marine Legion to learn its ways and further the Thousand Sons' understanding of the galaxy in their pursuit of knowledge. Khalophis had served with the Iron Warriors, a Legion he admired and ranked second only to the Thousand Sons. Phosis T'kar fought alongside the Luna Wolves, and never tired of regaling his brothers with tales of meeting Horus Lupercal, or boasting of his close friendship with Hastur Sejanus and Ezekyle Abaddon, the first primarch's closest lieutenants.
Hathor Maat's secondment had seen him serving with the Emperor's Children in their earliest days as they fought alongside the Luna Wolves. As Hathor Maat told of his experience to his fellow captains, he had caught the Phoenician's eye with his perfectly moulded features, and had fought within his sight on many an occasion. Maat's proudest possession was an Oath of Moment carved by Fulgrim, and fixed to his breastplate as he took his leave to return to Prospero.
Uthizzar's secondment had been amongst the shortest ever served, lasting a little less than a Terran year with the Space Wolves. Ahriman had spent five standard years with the Word Bearers, learning much of their Legion and methods of war.
Magnus placed great faith in his subordinates, believing he had taught them well, that their powerful sorceries gave them the necessary tools to function independently of him. Before the Horus Heresy, individual Thousand Sons squads were not led by Veteran sergeants but by those who showed the most psychic promise.
The Thousand Sons were known to dislike close combat, instead relying on strategy and their psychic abilities. Deceit and guile were their hallmarks, and the legion was commonly criticized for its ways, particularly by Leman Russ, who thought that any battle won by means other than strength and courage was dishonourable. Magnus was confident that he had taught his officers well enough for them to act independently and indeed the legion could function very efficiently without the presence of their Primarch. Following the casting of the Rubric of Ahriman, the Thousand Sons' tactics have changed somewhat to compensate for the effects of the spell, and as a result they now make extensive use of Sorcerers and Aspiring Sorcerers leading squads of slow yet unrelenting Rubric Marines into battle.
For the Primarch Magnus, knowledge was power. He believed there was no discipline his intellect could not master, no secret he could not unlock and make serve his purpose. For the Thousand Sons, knowledge was salvation, the means to controlling the psychic legacy of their Primarch's gene. Every book was sacred, every writing worthy of study, every document a resource to be drained. The ultimate knowledge was sorcery, the way to final enlightenment, the key to the universe. Before the Heresy, the Thousand Sons were publicly dogmatic, swearing oaths of loyalty and singing the Imperial hymns. They fought for the expansion of the Emperor's realm with diligence, but as their oath-breaking illustrated, their final loyalty rested not with the Emperor, but with their Primarch. When Magnus's reach for intellectual mastery exceeded his grasp, Tzeentch was waiting for him, and the Space Marines who believed as he did could do nothing but fall with him.
Lore excerpt from Warhammer 40k Wiki on Fandom, available under CC BY-SA 3.0.
34 Thousand Sons datasheets on the current roster, each with its points, model statistics, keywords and abilities.
26 Thousand Sons 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.