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Faction: Imperial Agents
Detachment: Veiled Blade Elimination Force (Grotmas)

Essentially you have 580 points tied up in 4 Assassins, who are Lone Operatives with really expensive mandatory upgrades.

You still need a Warlord and some Infantry.

Would you run an Inquisitor and a bunch of Arbites?

Deathwatch, Grey Knights and Sisters feel like watered down versions of themselves in the Imperial Agents list.

There has to be a way to make this work.

I doubt that this is viable. Imperial Agents armies are inherently bad since they don't get the benefit of an army rule, and lists with all four assassins are inherently bad since at least one of them is likely to be redundant against any given army. Adding even more cost in exchange for some fairly niche abilities does not fix any of that.

If I had to run this I think I would want a couple of Corvus Blackstars since those are pretty much the only option for heavier firepower. Grey knights can hold the line on forward objectives and a cheap henchman squad can stand at the back. I'm not sure that the HQ even matters in this weird list so just try to save points. Stick a navigator with your henchman? Or if you are already paying for a kill team and stick Artemis in it? Apologies that I can't offer much more but none of your options seem good.

You can make something, but it won't do much. I really think they were just trying to make something flavourful rather than something that would be remotely competitive.

For my part, I'd be looking at the narrative to drive EVERYTHING.

The Assassins are the stars, so I figure that there is a mission that THEY are expected to achieve, while the rest of the Force is the delivery system for the assassins.

Such a mission, given the asset value of Assassins, I would say is likely to come from the Inquisition, meaning that the delivery system for the Assassins is likely to made up of forces drawn from that Ordo's chamber.

So I would use this force to destroy an Extremis level threat- ie. an enemy selected using the Imperial Agent Crusade rules. These rules create two phases of dealing with a randomly determined threat: the investigation, and the elimination.

So during the investigation's early stages, I'm likely allying a non-Ordo Inquisitor and Henchmen to guard. Once the threat is identified, an Inquisitor of the Ordo best suited to defeating that threat is assigned, along with a support detachment of that Ordo.

Then, once the threat is on the verge of being Eliminated, we send in the Assassins for the Boss fight- so the forces I'd be using would be the forces included in the previous detachment + the Assassins with mandatory enhancements. Whether that means figuring out what to trim from the Ordo detachment in Ordo to accommodate the Assassins in a 2k point force, or simply bumping to Onslaught and adding the assassins to the existing detachment in its entirety.

The kicker is that in order for this to work, you have to do something that GW overlooked: you have to have the option of adding an <Ordo> keyword to a generic Inquisitor.

So what I would be likely to do is take the generic non-Ordo Inquisitor and add an <Ordo> keyword once they complete the investigation, and the Ordo they get is based on the threat they reveal.

So if you think of it as a 7-10 game story, this detachment would really be used in one or two of those games as a culminating event. Heck, it may even suit the narrative to bring in the named Inquisitor from the <Ordo> for that battle, even though named in Crusade do not earn XP.

I feel like they missed the opportunity to go Assassins on this and remove the Epic Hero keyword from them.

Would it have been good? Probably not, but it would have been a lot of fun. I ran oops all Assassins in 9th and while it wasn't terribly strong, it was always a lot of fun.

 Tawnis wrote:
I feel like they missed the opportunity to go Assassins on this and remove the Epic Hero keyword from them.

Would it have been good? Probably not, but it would have been a lot of fun. I ran oops all Assassins in 9th and while it wasn't terribly strong, it was always a lot of fun.

I was hoping this would be the same deal, or that the mandatory upgrades wouldn't be so high...

It would work as a 4 person Combat Patrol (500 points).