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I am starting a small Kill Team of 1K Sons as I enjoy the colour scheme and took a few Egyptology classes as a young'un.

I have a passing knowledge of the legion lore, but if you could clear a few things up I'd be grateful:

In a standard ten-man squad of rubric marines, is the 'aspiring sorcerer' essentially a squad sergeant, and if so is the squad nine suits of dust and one living sergeant?

Is it only bog-standard rubric marines (on the tabletop) that are dust, and no others? What about the terminators and their squad sergeants?

Is there any evidence that any bog-standard rubric marines- at all- are living? Perhaps one single marine with just a spark of psychic ability, enough to pull through?

If sorcerers/ aspiring sorcerers etc., are all living, why do they all wear helmets unlike other chapters/ warbands?

Lastly (and sorry for the barrage), are the 1K Sons a reasonable force in KT? If I expand in to full scale 40K what are their notable weaknesses, and must-have units (for a casual gamer)

Thanks!

If its not a Wizard, its a dust-automaton. That means its only squad leaders and characters who are living beings.

Helmets are an aesthetic choice and you could absolutely model all of your Wizards with bare heads if you wanted to. Helmets just tend to be the best way to show an aesthetic. Khornate Marines have the helmet ears, Tsons have the Egyptian style flare.

As to the armor question, my guess is that GW is continuing the whole thing from WHFB where chaos champions get a set of Chaos Armor that's super tough- but you can never take it off again. (Unless you're Kharn and have one beefy arm that defies vacuum of space.) Just another point that shows how 40k started as "Fantasy Battles in space".

SaltySeaDog wrote:

If sorcerers/ aspiring sorcerers etc., are all living, why do they all wear helmets unlike other chapters/ warbands?

Because, as sorcerers, they're the only marines smart enough to realize that taking your helmet off defeats the purpose of wearing armor when you're fighting people with guns.

A great many bits of Warhammer 40k lore are based on literary references and I'm reasonably confident that the Thousand Sons being "a handful of dust" is a nod to Evelyn Waugh's novel by the same name.