Traitoris Lance: The 11th-Edition Chaos Knights Extra Dread Ability Detachment

At the start of the first battle round, after selecting one or more Dread abilities to be active for your army, you can select one additional Dread ability to be active for your army. This additional Dread ability cannot be randomly selected.

Read it against Harbingers of Dread to see the size of it. The army rule gives you Deathly Terror from the start, then lets you take one chosen or two random Dread abilities at the start of the first, third and fifth battle rounds. Anything selected stays active for the rest of the battle.

So on turn one, without this detachment, you have either two abilities (Deathly Terror plus one chosen) or three (Deathly Terror plus two random, with a chance of a wasted duplicate). With Traitoris Lance you have three or four, and the extra one is guaranteed to be chosen rather than rolled.

Front-loading is the whole value. An ability taken on turn one is active for five battle rounds; the same ability taken on turn five is active for one. This detachment does not give you more abilities in total, it moves one of them forward and removes the randomness from it.

Which one to take with it. That is your call, but two are worth flagging. Dominion adds 3 inches to Aura ranges, and four of the seven Dread abilities are Auras, so taken early it improves every later pick. Despair stacks a second point of Leadership penalty on Deathly Terror inside the same 9 inch bubble, which is the fastest way to start forcing failures.

Storm of Darkness. The pack rewrites both its When and Effect sections, and both are reproduced here because both are first-party.

When: your opponent's Shooting phase or the Fight phase, just after an enemy unit has selected its targets. Effect: your unit has Stealth, and melee attacks that target your unit have minus 1 to hit rolls.

Note the overlap with the army rule: Stealth is also what the amended Darkness Dread ability grants. A Traitoris Lance army can therefore end up with two routes to the same keyword, which is worth checking before you spend a Command Point on a unit that already has it.

Imperious Advance. The pack rewrites its Effect section: until the end of the phase, each time a model in one of your units makes a Normal, Advance, Fall Back or Charge move, it can move through models and terrain features. When doing so it can move within Engagement Range of such models but, unless it made a Charge move, cannot end that move within Engagement Range of them, and any Desperate Escape test is automatically passed.

The amendment carries a parenthetical that is easy to miss and is the whole reason to read it: the Super-heavy Walker ability does NOT apply while using this stratagem. So you are trading one movement rule for another rather than stacking them, and for a model that already has Super-heavy Walker the exchange is not automatically an upgrade. Check what your model already does before spending the point.

Mirror-sourced rules text with costs from the official Munitorum Field Manual v1.3, reprinted as a planning aid and dataslate-volatile.

Veil of Medrengard (35 points). CHAOS KNIGHTS model only. The bearer has a 4+ invulnerable save against ranged attacks and a 5+ invulnerable save against melee attacks. The only invulnerable-save enhancement in the faction that covers melee at all, and the most expensive here.

Malevolent Heraldry (30 points). CHAOS KNIGHTS model only. Each time you roll dice to randomly select which Dread abilities are active for your army, if the bearer is on the battlefield, you can re-roll one or both results. The natural partner to this detachment's own rule: the detachment gives you a guaranteed non-random pick on turn one, and this improves the random picks you still have to make in battle rounds three and five.

Tyrant's Shadow (25 points). CHAOS KNIGHTS model only. At the end of your Command phase, select one objective marker the bearer is within range of and that you control. It remains under your control until your opponent's Level of Control over it is greater than yours at the end of a phase, and until you lose it, that objective marker has the Deathly Terror ability as if it were a CHAOS KNIGHTS model from your army. A genuinely unusual effect: an objective marker that projects a Leadership aura.

Nightmare's Master (20 points). CHAOS KNIGHTS model only. At the start of the Fight phase, each enemy unit within Engagement Range of the bearer must take a Battle-shock test. The cheapest of the four and the most directly synergistic with the faction's central plan.

At 2 Detachment Points this leaves exactly 1 DP at Strike Force, and it carries no Unique Tag.

Plus [Bastions of Tyranny](/40k/armies/chaos-knights/detachments/bastions-of-tyranny) (1 DP, total 3). The cleanest cause-and-effect pair in the faction. Traitoris Lance front-loads an extra chosen Dread ability on turn one, and several Dread abilities either worsen Leadership or force Battle-shock tests; Bastions of Tyranny pays a Knight Tyrant +1 to hit against battle-shocked units. One detachment manufactures the condition the other is rewarded for, and it does so on the turn the game is still in front of you rather than at the end.