Faction Files: Sons of Behemat — Lore of the Godbeast's Children

Every army in the Mortal Realms turns up with a plan. Deployment zones, screens, a drilled sequence of moves that turns a decent list into a win. The Sons of Behemat have something rather better than a plan: they have reach. A gargant does not go round a building, it goes through it, and while your opponent is still explaining the flanking manoeuvre there is a foot the size of a hay cart coming down on the left objective. This is the only army where the entire force fits in a shoebox and the silhouette will not fit in the photograph.

Faction Files is our lore series — who a faction is, where they came from, and why anyone would want to collect them. Dossier No. 035 goes to the biggest thing on the board: the orphaned children of a dead god, currently enjoying the largest range refresh they have ever had. The models themselves live in our Sons of Behemat collection.

FILE 01 // Origins: the fall of the World Titan

Behemat was a Godbeast — one of the vast, semi-divine creatures that walked the Mortal Realms when the realms were young. He stood with Sigmar. Then came the Age of Chaos, and Behemat was brought down under the weight of numbers that even a god the size of a mountain range could not out-stamp. Where he fell, the land changed shape. Rivers rerouted. Hills appeared. That is the sort of death a World Titan gets.

His children survived him, and did rather less with the inheritance. Gargants scattered across the realms and spent the following centuries doing what an unsupervised giant does: drinking anything liquid, eating anything slower than itself, and picking fights it could not remember the cause of. They dwindled from a race of titans into a nuisance. Most of the Mortal Realms filed them under weather — occasionally destructive, not really a faction.

Then Ghur began to stir, and so did the gargants. Something roused them from the stupor, and the sons of Behemat remembered, dimly but very firmly, that their father had been the largest thing in creation and somebody had killed him. A grudge held by a creature that size is not a grievance. It is a geological event.

FILE 02 // Bigness: the only law that matters

Gargant society, such as it is, runs on one principle: bigger is better, and biggest is king. There is no council, no code, no succession. A gargant's status is measured in height, appetite, and how much tribute it can extract from the little folk without having to bend down.

And they genuinely see it as tribute. This is the detail that makes the faction sing. A gargant that levels a village does not consider itself a raider — it considers itself a monarch collecting what it is owed, from subjects who were regrettably slow with the paperwork. They wear their takings: nets full of stolen livestock, a church bell as a codpiece, somebody's front door strapped on as a shield, an entire fishing boat worn as a hat. Every gargant is a walking museum of places that used to exist.

King Brodd sits at the top of that heap, and he is the closest the faction gets to a genuine leader — a priest-king who remembers Behemat properly and has bent an astonishing number of gargants to a single purpose. Given that the usual limit of gargant co-operation is two of them agreeing not to eat each other before lunch, that is no small achievement. You can see the model in all its ridiculous glory in our King Brodd kit.

FILE 03 // Takers, Stompers and Breakers

The Mega-Gargants come in three flavours, and each one is a personality rather than a battlefield role. It is the best bit of design in the faction.

• Kraken-eaters — coastal gargants with sticky fingers and an eye for anything not nailed down. They wade the shallows, drag nets full of ships and sea-beasts, and take things. Constantly. Their tribes are the Takers, and their idea of diplomacy is arriving with an empty net.
• Warstompers — the ones who actually want a fight, ideally with something that might put up a decent one. Stomper tribes go looking for armies rather than villages, on the reasonable grounds that villages are not sport.
• Gatebreakers — obsessed with walls, gates and anything that dares to be a fortification. A Gatebreaker sees a castle the way you see a stuck jam jar lid: as a personal affront that will be resolved shortly.

Below them come the Mancrusher Gargants, the rank and file — smaller, dimmer, and still tall enough to look into an upstairs window. They follow the big ones around in the hope of scraps, status and the occasional chance to flatten something themselves.

FILE 04 // The new blood: Ma Maegran and the Boss-stompers

The 2026 wave is the biggest thing to happen to this army since it launched, and it adds two ideas the faction has never had.

The first is Ma Maegran, the Chooser of the Mighty — a gargant witch who bestows the blessing of almighty bigness on whichever gargant has pleased her, and strips it from whoever has not. That is a wonderful bit of lore for a faction whose entire social order is measured in size: Maegran does not just support the army, she decides the pecking order. She travels with a pair of Ancient Ghyrochs, ornery megafauna that gore anything that gets close, which rather undercuts the usual plan of sniping the support character.

The second is the Boss-stompers — gargants who take fighting seriously by the standards of a people who mostly swing trees. They sit between a Mancrusher and a Mega-Gargant, which is a genuinely new size tier for the range, and the same box builds them as Rock-hurlers if you would rather throw the masonry than wear it. Alongside them come the Stomper Tribe box, a new Battletome, warscroll cards, dice, and Brawlers of Behemat, a standalone boxed game about two Mega-Gargants settling their differences the traditional way.

FILE 05 // Why collectors love them

Here is the honest pitch. Most armies ask you to paint sixty models before the thing looks like an army. This one asks for about five, and every single one of them is a display piece.

That trade is the whole appeal, and it cuts both ways. You will never face the grim slog of the twentieth identical infantryman — but you also cannot hide a rushed job. When your army is four models, each one gets looked at properly. The good news is that gargants are forgiving to paint: vast slabs of skin and hide that drink up a wash and a drybrush, plus a mountain of loot, rope, rusted iron and stolen tat to have fun with. The kits are also famously characterful to build, with enough optional bits that no two gargants in the realms need look alike.

Where to start if you fancy it:

• One Mega-Gargant first. Buy one, build it, paint it. If you enjoy that, the rest of the army is simply more of it. If you do not, you have lost one kit rather than a term's wages.
• The Spearhead. The cleanest entry point the faction has ever had, and a real game at the end of it.
• Stomper Tribe. A Mega-Gargant plus three Mancrushers is, near enough, a legal army in one box.

New to the brushes entirely? Our beginner painting guide will get that hide and iron looking right, and the wider Age of Sigmar range is worth a browse before you commit. Still choosing a system? Our 40k versus Age of Sigmar comparison is the honest version of that conversation.

Threat assessment

There is no strategy here to counter, no ideology to subvert and no leadership structure to decapitate, because the leadership structure is simply whoever is tallest that morning. The Sons of Behemat cannot be reasoned with, bought off for long, or meaningfully lied to. What they can be is delayed — and that is the whole defence. Every army that has survived a gargant tribe has done it by making the walk expensive, not by winning the fight at the end of it. Everyone else has learned the hard way that a wall is only a wall until something decides otherwise.

Final thought: the Sons of Behemat are what happens when a god dies and nobody explains it to his children. No plan, no politics, no long game — just a very old grudge, an inherited sense of entitlement, and several hundred tonnes of muscle wearing your village as jewellery.

Further reading: crunch the numbers with our Sons of Behemat: Army Analysis, or meet the rest of Destruction in Faction Files: Ogor Mawtribes and Orruk Warclans: Army Analysis.