In 2018, Syama Pedersen started uploading Astartes, a five-part Warhammer 40,000 fan film that was so good Games Workshop hired him to work on their own animations. Not only that, they made the Retributor chapter of space marines he'd invented part of the official canon. Since then Pedersen's name has shown up in places like the credits of the 40K episode of Amazon's Secret Level, but what we've really been waiting for is a sequel to Astartes.
And here it is. The trailer for Astartes 2 is 80 seconds of hardcore marine-on-alien action, and it rules. Like the original Astartes, it makes the marines seem weighty without looking awkward or cumbersome, agile enough to cross a barricade like a 1970s TV cop sliding across the hood of a car, or hurtle down a tunnel with a jetpack at full speed.
As explained in an accompanying Warhammer Community post, this teaser is a kind of prequel to introduce the five marines who'll be the protagonists of Astartes 2. We see each one's helmet up close interspersed with scenes of their chapters doing ultraviolence on aliens and heretics, and interestingly they're all members of secondary "successor" chapters rather than the popular ones. Where most official animations and videogames are about chapters like the Ultramarines and Blood Angels, here we see what I'm pretty sure are Retributors, Angels Vermillion, Sons of Medusa, Mortifactors, and Scythes of the Emperor (they're the ones with the amazing capes).
At the end, the final helmet belongs to a terminator marine and bears an Inquisition seal, suggesting that the five marines will have joined the Deathwatch, just like Titus at the start of Space Marine 2, and be working together to fight xenos. "Suffer not the alien to live," as the teaser's final quote has it, before a release date of "2026". We'll be waiting a while then, though there's other Warhammer shows to tide us over. I just watched the three episodes of The Tithes, an anthology about the price the Imperium asks of its citizens, and that's thoroughly decent too.
