The Codex Astartes has a clause about bikes that I think almost everyone reads past. Every Assault Marine, every Scout, and the whole of a Chapter’s 6th Company is required to master mounted warfare as part of training. Not encouraged. Required. Which makes the new Space Marine Captain on Bike a lot less of a novelty than it looks, because a Codex-compliant Chapter is sitting on something like a hundred battle-brothers who can ride before you even count the veterans who keep the skill sharp for their own reasons.
There’s a line attributed to Guilliman in the Apocrypha of Skaros that goes with it. Use your bike squads as a blade, striking the enemy and turning aside his counter-blows in equal measure, but beware that speed is nothing without direction. Generic primarch wisdom on the surface. Except he’s naming a specific unit type and handing it a specific job, which is not what he does for most of the things in that book.
And then the great majority of Chapters just quietly don’t. They put their assault elements in Rhinos and Razorbacks and get on with the war. Every codex I’ve owned since 5th has had bikes in it somewhere and I have never, not once, built a list around them.
Games Workshop revealed the new Captain on Bike on the 24th of August, in plastic, arriving alongside Codex: Space Marines in October. Power sword, thunder hammer or plasma pistol for the right hand, with the scabbard supplied either way so the sword has somewhere to live if you go with the pistol. Five heads, three bare and two helmeted. The bike itself builds either driving forward or tilted at rest with the rider’s boot on the ground. He gives his unit Cleave 1 after a charge, and GW pointed him at Outriders in the same breath as announcing him, which tells you roughly where they expect him to end up.
What the Space Marine Captain on Bike Is Actually Riding
It’s a Raider-pattern combat bike. The Raider is Belisarius Cawl’s design, drawn up for the Ultima Founding along with the rest of the Primaris kit. Cawl kept a fair bit from the old Assault Bike, twin-linked weapons on the forward cowling, the double exhausts, the general silhouette. What changed is underneath. Heavier armour on the engine block, and a front suspension setup properly reworked to handle broken ground. There’s a note in the background about the Raider carrying a bellicose machine spirit that the rider has to dominate before the thing is any use. The background material even reproduces the schematic, credited to Cawl personally.
So the Captain climbing back onto the codex pages is riding an Outrider’s bike. The firstborn Captain on Bike, the one with the Assault Bike and the twin bolters, spent the last edition as a Legends datasheet with no kit attached to it, which is where I’d mentally filed him and left him. What arrives in October is a Primaris officer doing the same job on Cawl’s hardware, under the same two words on the datasheet.
I keep going back and forth on whether that’s a distinction worth making. GW has been doing this for years now and mostly nobody minds. Nobody writes a thinkpiece when a Lieutenant gets a new sculpt. The Legends purge that hit the codex a day earlier took sixteen entries out of the book and this is one unit coming the other way, so on the balance sheet it barely registers. And yet a Captain on a bike was one of the places where firstborn and Primaris genuinely did the same job with different hardware, so the swap is more visible here than it was for, say, Intercessors replacing Tacticals.
The Chapters That Kept the Skill
If every Scout and every Assault Marine has to qualify on a bike, and an entire reserve company has to maintain the skill, then the Codex Astartes treats riding as baseline competency. Most Chapters let it atrophy through disuse anyway.
The Dark Angels solved that by putting every single rider in the Chapter into one company and calling it the Ravenwing, which is either elegant organisational design or the world’s most obvious way to keep a hundred men somewhere the Chaplains can watch them. By 6th edition the fluff had reached the point where the 2nd Company had stopped counting how many members it had. The Ravenwing locates, the Deathwing captures, and the ordinary green-armoured battle-brother is never told what any of it is for.
The doctrine predates the Chapters by a long way. Legion Outrider Squads were a standing part of the Great Crusade order of battle, whole companies of them in some Legions, and after Isstvan they got used for exactly the work you’d expect. Traitor Outriders spent weeks running down the loyalists who had crawled out of the virus-bombing on Isstvan III, then did it again to the survivors of the Drop Site Massacre. There’s a piece of Emperor’s Children Outrider art of that hunt I’ve never quite managed to shake.
The White Scars made it the entire Chapter. Every company, reserve companies included, is built around bikes and airborne units. During the Siege of Terra that’s what kept traitor formations off the Palace walls for as long as it lasted, and after the walls came down it’s how the Scars took the Lion’s Gate Starport and choked off the reinforcements coming through it. When the Traitor Legions ran for the Eye, White Scars bike squads harried them world to world the whole way. Chogoris had made the Khan a horse-lord centuries before anyone turned up with a rulebook, and the V Legion’s doctrine grew straight out of that.
I built an Imperial Fists Captain on a bike in about 2019. Bought the Chaplain on Bike clampack off the shelf at my local store, entirely because it was the only Space Marine character on a bike GW sold at the time, and set about removing the skulls. There are so many skulls. I got maybe two thirds of the way through with a scalpel and some green stuff before I realised I’d shaved a flat spot into the fuel tank that no amount of filler was going to fix, and the whole thing has sat in a drawer since, primed Chaos Black, missing the arm I never finished. The kitbash was bad. Pete finished two full Salamanders squads in the time I spent not fixing that fuel tank, which is roughly the ratio our hobby output has run at for the eleven years I’ve known him, about the same span I’ve been at my current job. The new kit means I never have to go back to it. It’s still in the drawer.
Master of the Hunt
Kor’sarro Khan is Captain of the White Scars 3rd Company and the fifty-first Master of the Hunt since the Chapter’s founding. The office works like this. Every twenty-five years, at the height of the Rites of Howling, he’s sent out to find someone who has survived a fight with the White Scars through skill or luck, and he takes a handful of battle-brothers from his own company with him. The hunt can run months or years, other duties delay it constantly, and the sources are clear it’s never abandoned once sworn.
When he gets back to Chogoris with the head there’s a celebration, and then he hands the head to the High Chaplain, who takes a brand out of the fire and burns the eyes out of the skull while the hymn of vengeance is sung. The name comes off the roster of the hunt. The skull gets masked in silver and mounted on a lance. Every step of the road up to the White Scars’ fortress-monastery is lined with them.
He’s done nearly twenty of these. Kernax Voldorius, a daemon prince, is on the list. So is the Eldar pirate Varaliel. He spent two years hunting the Kabal of the Bloodied Talon after Great Khan Kyublai went missing and came back with the Archon’s head plus a thousand more. He has repeatedly failed to catch Shadowsun, which I find genuinely funny given everything else on that record, and he keeps swearing new oaths about it.
There’s one entry on his record I like more than any of the head-taking. In 813.M41 he went to punish the T’au world of Cano’var and turned up to find Necrons already holding it under Overlord Zahndrekh. His Thunderhawk got shot down, he was taken prisoner, and he broke out alongside an Eldar Ranger called Illic Nightspear. The escape went badly. Obyron caught them, killed everyone else in the breakout, and beat the pair of them in a straight fight. Zahndrekh had been watching the whole thing on a monitor, decided he was impressed, and let both of them walk. Neither of them knew at the time that’s why they’d got out.
So yeah. Bikes. My honest read is the doctrine’s fine and the Chapters that ignore it are probably right to, because a Rhino carries ten and a bike carries one, and ten is more than one. Then again the White Scars built a whole functioning cultural practice on top of what is, on paper, a training requirement. An office, a calendar, a liturgy, a road full of silver skulls. None of that exists if Chogoris is a hive world. I was going to draw some conclusion out of that and I’ve now typed and deleted it three times…
Kor’sarro crossed the Rubicon after the War for Chogoris, and Jubal Khan gave him a psyber-berkut called Anzuq, possibly as a gift and possibly to keep an eye on him. His current miniature has the bird on his arm, a severed head hanging off his belt, and both boots on the ground.
