Codex: Blood Ravens

[embalancer]

Ok this is going to be a bit of wierd post to start with and closer to a stream of consiousness of ideas with the hope that if my ideas aren't completely stupid that they get turned into rules for a homebrew chapter. 

 

I love the concept of the blood ravens. This super psychic studious chapter I do however think they were the wrong chapter for the dawn of war games and should have been introduced more in something like the Babad war instead, but we've got the hand were dealt and have to deal with gaining memes due to idiotic games executives.

 

Now i've only recently gotten into the games and I haven't had a chance to look at the 9th edition rules, but I'd appreciate if older heads could give me their 2 cents on my ideas for them. 

 

Outline

 

Design Space

 

The Blood Ravens are a chapter that are highly methodical with a high number of powerful psykers. In terms of the game I feel that this would be best reflected in a chapter that specializes in using Stratagems and also have the strongest psychic phase of any CODEX space marines chapter (for the purposes of this thread I'm not counting Grey Knights as a space marine army ... you get what I mean.) However their psychic phase will not be as strong at the thousand sons or grey knights i.e. they will still pay the rising smite cost. 

 

how is this reflected?

 

Psychic  

 

To reflect the psychic power of this army we need quality and quantity. Quality will be found firstly in having the knowledge is power chapter rule (rerolling ones for a psychic test). Secondly being allowed to use the chief librarian stratagum more than once might be an idea as in the older lore the blood ravens had a librarian rank of Father-Librarian which I felt was greater than an epsitolery but less than a chief librarian.

 

Secondly maybe allowing librarians to take up elite slots as well.

 

Thirdly having a unique unit called codicier squad which will be a strike squad grey knight with a bolt pistol instead of a storm bolter and functions like a weird wyrdvane psyker/ chaplian hybrid. Each codicier squad has the following -

 

-Smite

-Brotherhood of Psykers 

-Arcane Rites 

 

Arcane Rites are like Chaplain litenies but instead buff psychic power of the libraraian they're attached / near to. But the roll will be decided by how many codiciers there are. So 1 would go off on a 6+ 2 would go off on a 5+ so on and so on. The buffs I've thought of so far are (stolen i know)

 

- Increased Smite range by 6"

- Roll 3 dice per power roll instead of 2 

- Add 1 MW to the smite

- Smite will go off on a WC5 regardless how many more smites have gotten off but will still add one for the smite roll 

- Allow to pick who to smite within 12" rather than the nearest unit 

- Increase range of psychic power

 

The codicier squad will only have one rite they can perfom with a relic that would allow them to know another. And like the Vitrix Guard wouldn't take up a slot in the detachment that had a librarian in it.

 

Strategic 

 

This chapter needs to be the stratagem heavy chapter as such they need to be able to regenerate CP more readily than most armies and possibly have similar stratagum similar to other armies (Like the aint Xenos debuffs from the deathwatch and hundred sword of vaul from the harliquins). But the one to really steal from is the space wolves knowledge of the foe, but make it more wide ranging and instead free CP for each unit destroyed rather than a character.

 

Thats what I've gotten so far. Any thoughts? Are my ideas for rites too OP?