Help me understand Chaos

[Trout]

I may be dipping my toes into chaos soon, but I don't really understand how everything breaks down faction-wise. I love the look of the large beastmen models and the various monsters of chaos and I love the Marauders and any other musclebound barbarian models. But I don't like horde armies because I don't look forward to painting blocks of 40 identical models.

 

More importantly, I don't really understand how everything breaks down. Slaves to Darkness? Allegiance to a chaos God? Everchosen? What are the options here?

 

Edit: My main goals:

1. I need an excuse to buy a Mumak (using it as a proxy for a Chaos War Mammoth)

2. I need an excuse to paint awesome looking barbarians

3. I need an excuse to buy some of those cool looking large Chaos Beastmen models and/or Monsters of Chaos

 

How do I turn those goals into an army that doesn't suck?

[Arkiham]

Chaos is unlike any other alliance.

So much of chaos is changeable, both rules and models, the kitbashing potential is nigh endless.

Take slaves to darkness, the foundation of chaos.

The chaos Lord, the chaos warshrine the demonic Lord their role and rules change with each mark.

Alot of icons from 40k work well in aos

Mutations work great to modify models, other alliances can be corrupted to chaos.

[Fireymonkeyboy]

 

1.  All chaos models (i.e., models with the CHAOS) keyword can be taken in the same force.

2. Most Chaos models belong to a subfaction.  This can either be a "cult" faction (with one of the chaos gods as keywords, ie., NURGLE, TZEENTCH, KHORNE, or SLAANESH), or a subfaction like BRAYHERDS (the old Beastmen, sans monsters and minotaurs, which get their own keywords now), or SLAVES TO DARKNESS (the old "core" chaos models - warriors, knights, etc.).  You can form an army / force out of models from just one faction.  In some cases (KHORNE, TZEENTCH), these subfactions have had expanded rules, giving them new allegiance abilities, battalions, etc.  In other words, subfactions with expanded rules tend to have something of an advantage to compensate for their more limited selection of models.

3. Some models from subfactions let you take a cult keyword, called a "mark".  This lets them be used in subfaction / cult specific forces.  In my KHORNE army, I take a number of SLAVES TO DARKNESS models, with a KHORNE mark.

4.  Skaven were lumped into Chaos in this edition, but as they were a significantly fleshed out army in the past, basically now constitute a subfaction with subfactions.

There is absolutely nothing stopping you from taking any models you like with the CHAOS keyword, and running them in a force using command traits etc. for CHAOS from the general's handbook.  The only hitch is that most command abilities are at least subfaction specific, and many are even more specific than that.  It means you are likely going to be limited to Inspiring Presence as your ability.  Which is not terrible.

FMB

[Retro]

Sounds like you can run a slaves to darkness allegiance with warherds allies.

it is really going to depend on the allegiance abilities of slaves to darkness, but I imagine it wouldn't suck to have marauders, marauder horsemen, mammoth and some allied beasts.

The only problem I can see is finding a hero that looks sufficiently barbarian that acts as a good support. The only ones I can see are darkoath chieftain and maybe wulfrik, neither of which have command abilities.

how many points are you looking at?