Why you should be playing House Hawkshroud

The Houses are broken down into having a Household Tradition, Strategem, Warlord trait, and a heirloom. House Hawkshroud really is the defensive house out of all the Imperial knight choices. Their Household Tradition is Oathkeeper, you double the amount of wounds you have for determining your characteristics on the damage table. This is an amazing tradition for your Imperial Knights, which will give them a longer lifespan than your typical knights. For example, if you were running a House Raven Crusadar and that model suffers 12 wounds, it will start to degrade. The model will lose BS, WS, and movement. House Hawkshroud will not have these negative effects until they are at 6 wounds remaining. And will not drop any further until they are at 3 wounds. This can be game changing when having to deal with flyers, and other abilities that will lower your to hit roll. No one wants to be hitting on 5s with a model that you are paying a premium for.

Next we have the Stratagem,Staunch Allies. House Hawkshroud knights have your back like a chiropractor. Any unit that is going to charge your forces with 12 is going be in for a hurting. This stragem is great because it fits lore and gameplay mechanics. More than likely if you are running knights you will be running allies like guard. The guard will screen your knights from targets you don’t want to be charged by and when they get harassed big brother can jump in with heroic intervention and lay the smack down without being touched. This will force your opponents to make bad decisions.  The best model for this is going to be a Valiant with the relic flamer. Your opponent is going to have to eat 10 on average str 7 shots that reroll to wound before they charge in, along with all the other armaments. Then you get a free move and get to stomped whats left to bits.

Duty of the Forsworn is the Warlord Trait. It lets you pick one of your opponent's units and your warlord gets +1 to hit. You can never go wrong with this warlord trait. Choose something that you need to die and let your warlord loose on it. Hitting on 2’s in combat and shooting benefits you in two phases and i'm all about abilities that give you more for less.

The one unique Hawkshroud bonus that I would say is meh is their item Angel’s Grace, the heirloom. It is situational but you can get a considerable use out of it depending on who you are playing. Chaos loves to hand out moral wounds like they are on an episode of Opra. The item lets you ignore a mortal wound from a physic attack on a roll of 4. Another defensive ability to word the defensive aspects of House Hawkshroud.

I would love to see more House Hawkshroud on the tables, partically because yellow looks so good and because I think they are overlooked. If you want to start a House Hawkshroud army, you can pick up what I have painted the in the link below

And as always, the Emperor protects. - Kuyo