In my job, I do a lot of interviews, and in most of them I’m able to keep my squee-ing, nerdy excitement in check, like the seasoned, professional journalist I am. My in-depth, exclusive Gen Con interview with Cubicle 7 CEO Dom McDowall about the new Warhammer The Horus Heresy tabletop RPG was not one of those. I squeed, and I squeed hard.
Folks, this game looks set to bring to life so much of the Horus Heresy’s storytelling, roleplay, and wargaming fantasies, all at once, that I’m flabbergasted at what it’s promising. I was already excited, but the new details McDowall shared with me have me positively overwrought. I need this game – and I suspect you’ll feel similarly in a thousand words’ time.
A bit of background: Dublin, Ireland based studio Cubicle 7 produces, among other things, a range of officially licensed Warhammer Fantasy and Warhammer 40k roleplaying games, including some of the best tabletop RPGs we’ve ever tested. Their latest release is a Warhammer The Old World TTRPG, which launched in digital form just last week and is testing well (watch out for our upcoming review).
I’ve played several of C7’s other games, including Warhammer 40k: Wrath and Glory, and Age of Sigmar: Soulbound, and both of those are excellent. But for my personal taste, as someone who’s read at least 45 of the 65 titles in the Horus Heresy reading order, the prospect of a Horus Heresy TTRPG immediately overshadowed all the Warhammer RPGs that came before.
Cubicle 7 and Games Workshop’s initial Horus Heresy RPG announcement, in February 2025, whet my appetite nicely, confirming that we’ll be playing as a Consul in one of the loyalist Space Marine legions, with a secondary character to play who could be a Tech priest, iterator, or remembrancer. We’ll be leading a small fleet of our own, “harried by traitors”, and making our way in a galaxy that’s rapidly sinking into civil war.
Now, Wargamer can exclusively reveal several bigger gameplay details that show Cubicle 7 is going far harder than we ever thought to recreate the Horus Heresy’s ‘Space Marine war leader’ fantasy in RPG form. The full interview transcript is so massive it’s going to get its own article later, but for now, here’s a quickfire of the hottest nuggets.
Kicking off at the Isstvan V Dropsite massacre, there are multiple prefigured starting points to choose from, covering all possible loyalist Astartes characters. Yes, that does include loyalists within the traitor legions (Saul Tarvitz fans, rise up), as well as members of the ‘shattered legions’ slaughtered in the Isstvan V ambush: Salamanders, Iron Hands, and Raven Guard.
“Shattered Legions, I think, is a really compelling one,” McDowall tells me. “The tragedy baked into that is huge… trying to come to terms with that at the same time as fighting the fight of their lives.”
You can also play as marines from one of the “consular missions” in which units were seconded between legions to learn from each other’s war doctrines and cultures. Cubicle 7’s range of options here leans hard into the complicated mess of different Space Marine factions and allegiances at the outset of the Heresy war, and I love it.
“You can imagine the possibilities there,” he tells me excitedly. The example that comes to his mind: “You’re a loyalist from a traitor Legion surrounded by the Imperial Fists, and you go ‘you know me, I’m cool!'” Yes, this RPG is going to let you pull the Nathaniel Garro maneuver.
Depending on your legion choice and dice rolls, you could have a wildly different starting situation, and fighting strength. As Raven Guard, you might be a ragtag bunch of bruised and bleeding survivors, fleeing in a couple of ravaged ships. As Ultramarines, you might be a fully armed task force, informed of Horus Lupercal‘s betrayal by garbled astropathic messages, and trying to take the fight to the traitors despite being tangled in warp storms.
But in all cases, you’ll receive immediate orders from your legion superiors (interspersed, as McDowall gleefully says, with “loud exploding noises”), and after that, “you’re on your own”.
The roleplaying campaign that follows is not a boilerplate refit of another party based tabletop RPG, with patrons, quest givers, level ups, and gold. This is war, you are a soldier, and the game is built to tell that story. You’re the commander of a larger force of Space Marines intended to invade planets, board voidships under fire, and fight battles at scale – but your player characters are also an elite command squad capable of pinpoint missions. The game lets you play out both – often as part of the same overall engagement.
“On the top level, there’s the strategic engagements that can be voidships, or they can be on the ground, and all of your squads have some have game information that gives them abilities for conducting those operations,” McDowall explains. Playtesting is still ongoing to decide exactly how these pseudo-wargame battles will work, but it’s happening; we’re getting strategy battles.
“And then you’ve got the more traditional RPG scale combat as well, which will be, you know, everybody taking individual shots,” he says. “you could decide that, actually, we need to do this really quickly, so we’re going to drop pod straight into the HQ.”
Those Astartes forces you’ll be sending into battle around you aren’t faceless, either, McDowall tells me; the sergeants commanding your squads will be named NPCs, with some mechanical XP development over time. “Say, on a mission, you’re going to take a particular squad with you just to act as your security and help to achieve your objectives,” he says. “Then you’ll name the sergeant. If they’re not named already, you may name the Marines as well, and from then on, you’re sort of tracking them through their development as well.”
“Now, say, if your character dies, or if you want to generate another character (or even maybe a secondary character that’s also a legionary), then you can take the named character and convert them, bring them into another level of game information, personalizing them and, yeah, making them a character in their own right.”
Just keeping track here: we’ve got playable characters from every possible loyalist legion (including ones embedded in traitor legions); strategic battles in space and on the ground, with the option to trigger RPG party level engagements as part of those battles; and active force organization, with XCOM-like mechanics to name and develop marines from your ranks into important NPCs and even player characters.
Cubicle 7’s Horus Heresy TTRPG is still set for overall release in 2026, but McDowall tells me he “[hopes] to have the pre-orders go live before the end of [2025]”. An “adventure book and a campaign” will be next up after the core rules are out, he adds – along with “expansions looking at the strategic engagements and providing as many examples of those that you can get in as possible”. Oh, mama.
I haven’t been this excited for a new tabletop roleplaying since I first heard about Modiphius’ Discworld RPG – and with that already rolling out as we speak, and Cubicle 7’s Horus Heresy coming very soon, my Christmasses are all coming at once.
You can bet Wargamer will be bringing you all the latest news on this game as it comes out – including the complete monster transcript of my interview with McDowall, which you can expect to see here next week.
What do you want to see in the upcoming Horus Heresy RPG? Let us know in the official Wargamer Discord community!