There’s a specific kit in my parents’ loft, wrapped in bubble wrap and tucked behind an unbuilt Rhino, that I’ve been meaning to deal with for about eleven years. It’s a Forge World Death Korps Centaur Light Assault Carrier. Resin. I paid forty quid for it in 2015 when Forge World still had the shop in Nottingham and you could walk in and fondle the casts before committing. The front plate on mine came out warped. One of the tracks had a huge air bubble running down the right side. I tried to fix it with green stuff, gave up after about ninety minutes, put it back in the box, and every time I’ve moved house since then I’ve moved that box. I think about that Centaur more than I ought to.
GW just released a new one. Not a re-release of the old Forge World kit — a completely redesigned plastic Centaur, in mainline 40K, and the hero version is commanded by a brand-new named Commissar with a power fist called Manus Mortis.
Her name is Commissar Graves. Thenia Graves, to be exact.
Commissar Graves, on foot and in a tank
The AdeptiCon 2026 preview gave us Yarrick on a ridge, Wazdakka on a bike, and then this other commissar who barely got a paragraph in the news cycle because everyone was too busy arguing about whether Yarrick is still canonically alive. She’s been hiding in plain sight since. GW dropped her full rules reveal this week and she’s the most interesting Astra Militarum character they’ve put out in years.
She comes in two datasheets. On foot, she’s a duellist with a power fist and a bolt pistol. In a tank, she’s standing half out of a command hatch on her personal Centaur, a modified variant called Vigilance with gold aquilas welded to every flat surface, a regimental flag flying off the back, upgraded guns, and a big armoured ram on the prow. Both versions have the Brutal Disciplinarian ability, which is Commissar-speak for “if one of your Guardsmen fails a morale test near me, I shoot him, and then the squad stops running.” On foot the range matches her bolt pistol. In Vigilance, it matches the range of the vehicle’s gatling cannon, which is rather longer.
That’s a funny bit of rules-fluff synergy. The commissar’s intimidation aura literally has a longer leash when she’s sat in a tank because her gun is bigger. It’s the kind of detail that makes you smile and also, if you’ve been playing this game long enough, makes you picture the poor Guardsmen on the flank who’ve just realised that the tank turning towards them isn’t there to help.
Graves is described in the reveal as uncompromising and feared, a traditionalist who “epitomises the reputation of the Officio Prefectus as brutal and direct in their judgment.” Which is to say: the opposite of Yarrick, who’s a folk hero his men would die for, and the opposite of Ciaphas Cain, who’s a coward his men would die for by accident. Graves is the commissar the other commissars cite in their reports when they want to sound proper.
The female commissar question nobody actually needs to ask
Every time GW puts a female commissar in plastic, there’s a four-day argument on forums about whether this is lore-breaking. It isn’t. It’s never been. The regulations of the Officio Prefectus have never specified a gender. Commissars are recruited from the Schola Progenium orphanages, the same institutions that produce the Sisters of Battle and the Storm Troopers, and selection is based on ideological commitment and capability. If you can fight like a hive-spire duellist and believe in the God-Emperor with the full weight of orphan trauma behind you, you’re in. The wiki entry is extremely clear on this and has been for years.
The reason people argue about it is that the old Commissar miniature, the one everyone knows, is a man. So is Yarrick. So is Cain. So is the commissar in Gaunt’s Ghosts. So was the 2nd edition metal commissar I painted in 1998 with Chaos Black over metallics and Blood Red piping that bled through every wash. The visual shorthand for “commissar” is a lean man in a peaked cap with a bolt pistol, and when GW breaks that shorthand, the argument starts.
The answer to the argument, as it has been for a decade, is Severina Raine. Raine is the commissar from Rachel Harrison’s Honourbound and the companion short stories Execution and A Company of Shadows. She’s attached to the 11th Antari Rifles in the Bale Stars. She’s uncompromising and haunted and specifically built for Harrison’s interrogation of what the job actually does to someone. GW released her as a miniature in 2019 based on the Honourbound cover art, and I’d bet good money that roughly half the people complaining about Graves have never read any of the books Raine is in.
I have, and Honourbound is genuinely one of the better Guard novels of the last ten years. If the Graves reveal pushes people towards it the way the Yarrick reveal pushed people back to Armageddon by McNeill, that’s a win for the lore ecosystem even if the miniature itself is a mixed bag for your list.
The Centaur, back from the dead
The more interesting story, if you’re a Forge World obsessive like me, is the vehicle.
The Centaur first appeared in Imperial Armour Volume Five: The Siege of Vraks — Part One, in 2007. It was a Forge World resin kit for the Death Korps of Krieg, a tiny open-topped armoured utility vehicle designed for one specific job: hauling autocannons, heavy weapons and small squads across trench networks during a prolonged siege. Two crew, five passengers, absolute minimum roof. If you’ve read the Siege of Vraks books, you’ve seen the line art of a Centaur towing a field mortar through the mud while a Krieg commissar shouts at a platoon to dig faster.
The Death Korps used thousands of them at Vraks. Thousands. It was never glamorous, and that’s the whole appeal. The Centaur is the Imperial Guard’s Bren Carrier. It’s the thing that brings the ammunition forward and the wounded back. Forge World also released an Elysian Drop Troops variant, the Centaur Light Assault Carrier, and Elysian players have been paying secondary-market prices for those resin kits since Forge World shut down production years ago.
So when I saw the silhouette of the new plastic Centaur on the AdeptiCon slide, I had a moment. Not of hype. Of genuine, slightly embarrassed, emotional recognition. The kit in my loft — the one that’s been waiting for me to grow up and learn how to work with resin properly — is about to be superseded by a plastic version that will fit together out of the box, will be about a third of the price, and will come with options for the Hippogriff armoured fighting vehicle variant on the same sprue. My reaction was not “finally.” My reaction was “oh, no.”
Actually, let me be fair. Some of it was “finally.” Mostly “finally.” I’d been refusing to pay £160 on eBay for a secondhand Elysian squad, and now I don’t have to.
What they’ve done with the new kit
The new Centaur RSV (Rapid Strike Vehicle) carries ten Guardsmen plus two Characters, has a Firing Deck 12 rule so passengers can shoot out of it, and has a rule called Rapid Strike Vehicle that gives it additional objective control when fully loaded. That last part is the interesting game design. GW is trying to make the Guard play like a Guard army again, with mass infantry in transports charging objectives, rather than a gunline parked across the back edge.
The Hippogriff AFV looks like the same base chassis with a weapons module on top instead of a troop compartment. It comes with a choice between a heavy lascannon, a vigilator cannon, a melta cannon, or a chiron gatling cannon. It has a rule called Convoy Escort Vehicle that lets it reposition after shooting, and it can be fielded in pairs. That’s a reconnaissance/flanking unit, which is something the Guard have been short on since the Forge World Tauros and Salamander units got pulled.
Vigilance, Graves’s personal tank, is the command variant. The Aquiline Prow rule deals mortal wounds on impact — a ram attack that softens a target before the Commissar climbs down and finishes the job with her power fist. There’s a separate rule, Mechanised Spearhead, that gives free Orders to Guard units disembarking from nearby transports. That’s the interesting bit. Graves-in-Vigilance is a force multiplier for any Centaur-heavy list, not just a character unit. She makes the entire platoon run better. Which is, if you squint, exactly what a commissar is supposed to do in the lore.
What I want from the book
The rules reveal is thin on lore. I still don’t know where Graves is from, which regiment she’s attached to, whether she and Yarrick have ever been in the same room, or how she feels about the Steel Legion. The Officio Prefectus has a whole internal political landscape — traditionalists, reformers, the ones who quietly think Yarrick is a soft touch — and “uncompromising traditionalist” is a strong hint at where Graves sits on that map. I want a codex entry that confirms it. I want a Black Library novella. I want a scene where she and Yarrick argue about the correct protocol for executing a platoon sergeant who broke formation to save wounded men, and I want the scene to be ambiguous about who’s right.
I also want the Centaur to get its own lore section. Proper paragraphs about Vraks. An account of the Orphean War. A mention of the Elysian pattern. The vehicle has a longer on-page history than half the named characters in the current Codex, and GW shouldn’t just reintroduce it as a generic plastic transport.
Whether we get any of that is up to the writers, and Black Library has been patchy on the Guard lately. What I’ll probably get is three sprues, a datasheet, a painting guide, and a White Dwarf battle report where Vigilance rams a Trukk. I’ll take it. Forty-one years in, I know what this hobby actually delivers, and I know what my loft looks like.
The old resin one is still in the box. I might build it next to the new plastic one, just to see them side by side. Or I might leave it wrapped and let the next move be the one where I finally deal with it.
