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Let's say a chaos lord of Slaanesh decides to organize a big gladiatorial game / reality tv show in which he decides to pit a bunch of his mortal followers and slaves, his fellow Space Marines warriors, summoned daemons and, for the grand finale, Lucius the Eternal himself against a team of basically one representative of every faction in 40K that isn't Chaos aligned. Who would you put in the dream team? Note that Space Marines can take two picks because there is so many armies of them, but we don't want half the team being composed of Space Marines either. Custodes/Sisters of Silence, Imperial Knights and Grey Knights are excluded because they are too damn powerful and difficult to capture and no Tyranids because they are not very good at playing with others (though there might be some Tyranids in the traps and beast faced by the dream team. There is a limit of a single non-Primarch epic heroes in the entire team.

Now, to help a little bit with the selection, the chaos lord wants to make it look like a show and put the "dream team" through a variety of challenges like trap rooms, navigation puzzles like the floor is lava, ambushes, escaping a rampaging hellbrute all the while being filmed and recorded so the crowd can laugh at the problems of the group in addition to good old fashion fights in various circumstances against the chaos lord's forces.

Here would be my personal pick:

Space Marines: A blood Angel assault intercessor with jump-pack who is a hair away from falling to the black rage, an Ultramarine successor Chapter (let's say the Marine Errand Chapter) lieutenant (the regular one with bolt pistol and power sword) with a lot of experience as a unit leader.

Imperial Guard: A particularly stupid, but particularly strong Ogryn (regular Ogryn not Bullgryn) he also come with a free guardsman conscript with no weapon (he's the extra)

Adeptus Mechanicus: A Serberys Raider stuck in Conqueror Imperative following a wound suffered in the capture.

Adepta Sororitas: An aging Retributor Sister of Battle of the Ebon Chalice Order armed with a heavy flamer.

Aeldari: A Spiritseer from Iyanden craftworld who has lost literally every single person she loved or knew well to war.

Drukhari: A Succubus of a minor cult who is particularly attractive even by the standards of Succubus

Orks: A Deffskull Ork Big Mek equipped with a kustom mega-blasta and a drilla and a suspiciously large bag of loot and bits

Genestealer Cult: A Kelemorph with a cool hat and a serape.

League of Votann: Einhyr Champion with a Mass hammer and the temper that goes with the Mass hammer.

Necron: A particularly talkative Psychomancer who works for Trazynn

Tau: A newly trained and inexperienced breacher team fire warrior


In that team, I feel you have a bit of everything and in different style and if they can actually work together, they can probably survive up until they face Lucius the Eternal, but that's a very big IF.

So what would be your pick?

Angron.

“Everything Go Squish Now” aside? Well…adjacent.

It’s his forte. Always has been. He’s a Gladiator with superhuman and now demonically enhanced powers.

You can’t poison him. You can’t cripple him. You can’t stop him. Nothing can. You can only delay and temporarily inconvenience him.

A dreadnought-sized solid block of metal

They're facing Lucius the Eternal, even if they win, they lose, because they become Lucius

So the block of metal sits there. Lucius can't defeat it, it can't defeat him, stalemate

You know, now that you mention it, I'm pretty surprised this hasn't been done already. 40k lends itself pretty well to the Hunger Games esque last man standing / trial format. I mean, yeah we have duel type stories like with the Feast of Blades, or the Hammer of Daemons, and there are the Blood Games too, but there often portrayed as one character's journey. Seeing a large group of people that can barely work together slowly being picked apart by traps and enemies is a great idea.

 Tawnis wrote:
You know, now that you mention it, I'm pretty surprised this hasn't been done already. 40k lends itself pretty well to the Hunger Games esque last man standing / trial format. I mean, yeah we have duel type stories like with the Feast of Blades, or the Hammer of Daemons, and there are the Blood Games too, but there often portrayed as one character's journey. Seeing a large group of people that can barely work together slowly being picked apart by traps and enemies is a great idea.

In general, I don't think there is enough books and story where members of various factions work or operate together or even stories told equally from various view points and yeah, I do think my silly scenario would make for a very interesting book.