Kaleb Daark

And for that I truly loved you

I'd agree with that. I'm seeing slaves becoming a faction where the chaos gods might as well the rumbling volcano in the distance that just spews it's displeasure once in a while. they aren't there to serve the gods and their whims per se, rather that chaos is just a factor in their lives, no different to rain, fire and water giving or destroying, and those that do mark are merely identifying with the power that serves them best at a given point. Novels like Wulfric, and some of the warcry literature illustrates this very well, as does Red Feast as it happens. The discussions on the marauder tribes in Liber Chaotica is amazing at explaining this. I really hope we get a reprint of it. Mortals who serve chaos because fo the lands they inhabit and the lives they lead, so are born into it by default rather than chase service to it, and to them why would not the city dwellers of the civilised lands not appear weak, and in Arky we see a figurehead that reflects the ultimate exaltation of their way of life and belief, after all, to the barbarians of the wastes Archaon has made gods kneel before him as he has no master but all want his favour. And I think this is where GW wants the distinction to come vs the god aligned armies who are all about their patron god body and soul, and who in turn shape their followers better to reflect their own image.

yours for a warhammer+ subscription I'd imagine.

With the way it's going I'd actually take a very different approach and roll it back to the themes of the the original Slaves to Darkness : Lost and the damned book. So there was a hierarchy of Thug / marauder / warrior / knight. Essentially there were levels of fighter with better armour than the last. I totally agree that marauders / cultists call them what you will are humans with a standard human statline, and then you just sprinkle the seasoning on them as appropriate (iron golem etc), but keyword wise they're all the same aside that. Using the above thinking we have cultist/ human ; warrior ; knight ; varanguard. - Arky. We're looking at this from the bottom up, and I think we need to relook at this from the top down. Each faction has it's figurehead and everything underneath it fits into that figurehead in some way. So we could for instance have warriors of chaos as nothing more than full plate better versions of the humans who worship chaos but have not devoted to them. In old 3rd, you had to buy your unit chaos armour, otherwise it was just heavy plate. Then we have Chaos warriors - big distinction, where perhaps they take the chosen slot and save us the pain of terrible fine cast. They are swollen with the favour of chaos and they get the true chaos infused armour which warps and twists with their mutations. And then from their ranks, the knights and varanguard come. I might re-read my old book and see if we can AoS-ify it for the narrative crowd thread...

what prices or availability? I think I'm ready to buy a dragon now... a blood god flavoured one I reckons...

thats exactly what I'd do. I did it for my bloodreavers where I just put a marauder shield on their backs and gave them all the great weapons.

khorne dragon is now back in the FW store

Darkoath barbarians and fly face made it for me. i reckon that there’s more nurgle to come as the battletome nears. But yes, we live the new marauders… now, about that war mammoth they obviously ride on…

AoS 3.5 Loving your style!

citadel compendium 3, 1984 so warhammer was in its second edition. A wizard could summon an elemental as a battle magic spell. Citadel was still making generic D&D miniatures as well at that time, and white dwarf was a magazine with scenarios for D&D, call of Cthulhu and other rpg's as back then Dragon magazine wasn't readily available outside of the TSR rep and game shops. Yes, I did buy all four of them and I did have that first and second edition - granted I bought the first edition because the box art was just beyond cool and never bettered. It was quite a pleasant surprise when I realised the game was really good as well

We used to have them back in the day, you used to be able to summon them. Would sir be interested in the bottom row? And don't forget Forgeworld and it's incarnate elemental models it used to do.

In a way you've highlighted why combined stats are so good in AoS. Chaos lord on dragon... perfect example. Had the khorne dragon been released in fantasy era, it would have tanked due to the fact that irrespective of how many wounds the dragon had, the dude on top, as a character riding a monster he could be sniped or singled out. five wounds later and you remove the 24 wound model. Great, thanks for that. This again was sloppy rules writing as it was a throwback to 5th (6th?) I think, where if you had the foot version of model then if the mount was taken down he could still continue to fight, and so the profiles of the two were never combined. Roll it onto 8th and there was no way anyone in their right mind would mount their character on a centrepiece monster category mount. I couldn't agree more with this sentiment. When AoS first dropped there was a big thing to be made about the fact that the warscrolls were all independent and could be updated as needed - after all, you just went online and printed off the latest version. I was very hopeful that the books would just keep pushing the narrative along and growing and evolving the storyline, collectors pieces as you say to be enjoyed irrespective of edition as effectively they would be editionless, with the factions themselves morphing and shifting in the digital background as the game grew.

Thanks for clarifying my inaccuracies.

yea kind of. It was actually a little side project for forgworld to promote a whole different line of minis and model variants. The Black narrative books were written to work alongside the existing 40k rules as was as campaigns in their own right, think of it as AoS suddenly releasing a side order of stuff set in the age of myth at the beginning of the AoS lore so that it didn't interplay with current AoS lore or characters apart form the major players. The black books were a story of a historic event timeline and in the back was the rules and battleplans you needed to play that thing at the time - actually the best equivalent is the Belakor book with the legion of the first prince army list in the back, story narrative, battleplans, army or faction composition. The black books were only ever concerned with the factions within their own narrative. Warhammer Forge did the same with Tamurkhan, which was the fantasy equivalent of a black book, and was set several hundred years before the then current fantasy battle setting. To play heresy you had to be minted, hence the "40k for adults" rep it got, as you were talking armies which started at 3k points and rising. When GW released the Betrayal at calth and Burning of Prospero boxes they sold in their droves because to a 30k player that was over 500 quid of miniatures equivalent in there, and all he'd have to do is buy shoulder pads and accessories if needs be. When 8th edition 40k came along the community kicked off and in truth rightly so as it would write their gaming off overnight - Alan bligh had passed on, and there was no way they were re-writing the black books just to accomodate new rules format. So FW just took on the old 7th rules and tweaked them for 30k. That's when the red books started coming out in their own right, and the various lists and entries in the previous black books got compiled into one book such as Mechanicum and Solar Auxilia and Marine Legions. 30K players are fewer than 40k players but as a good friend of mine is a case in point will think nothing of dropping two or three large in one hit for a couple of titans, they spend, and when they do, they spend big, and as I've said before in the TOW thread, they are fiercly loyal. they're alright with nothing coming out for months if not years providing you don't take anything away or start messing around with established rules. A 30k player is in every respect locked in their own time bubble, and that's how they like it. That's why they'll launch 800 quid straight off the bat on all the FW knights without fear that there's going to be a nerf in three months. Probably no different to any FW customer really, after all, when I look at my chaos dwarfs, my two war mammoths and the ettin and think how much I spent on a boutique army, I was the fantasy battle equivalent, and we would have spent so much more had we been allowed them in normal gw events. Seeing an empire landship on the table was a thing of beauty I have to say.

Ahh yes, much like the frenzy rule in old fantasy that meant you had to charge the nearest enemy unit. Cue much angst as my slab of 30 warriors of chaos chased after a bat or rat swarm for the whole game - because you know, until you kill those three bats and turn them to pulp why are you going to fight the main enemy force? Wow... fantasy really is creeping back into AoS! 😮

I'd actually argue the same but from a different angle insofar that all the new model releases in the latter days of 8th / end times were done with an AoS aesthetic, even to the point of base sizes changing if you remember. When wrathmongers and blight kings came out they got 40mm bases, which were monstrous infantry bases and everyone was crying foul because as regular infantry troop type they were going to get trounced due to model frontage and base size, 3 wounds or not. I'd say that if 9th was practically finished when 8th was released and ready to drop bar some play testing , then the mother ship decided that financially that the old world had run its course, whatever and pulled out the game that had been developed in parallel. I'm not saying it was of course, but I can see the mechanic of AoS being a system (independent of genre) developed for something and just waiting for the right moment or product to spring it on. Perhaps financially they decided that this was the direction sword and board would take, and so they took a whole new track with minimal effort on their part due to the game engine skeleton already being developed robustly enough to just stitch the game world and meat onto it's bones. And with it a whole new avenue opened up with aesthetic possibilities.? All conjecture at this point anyway.

I'm glad I'm not the only one to see this, especially in 3rd ed AoS.. we see the return of many pseudo wfb mechanics like the ward save, look out sir! etc. Maybe in the next rules edition you'll see challenges coming back as well!

I have to say that the armies in fantasy were polarised for the better in my mind. Chaos for instance had literally no range whatsoever, so it's natural anathema was an army with heavy range, but when you got in close, a slab of chaos warriors was hard hitting a tough to break, and unless you were facing a vampire lord (I'm not even going there with elves) or a minotaur, there was very little a chaos lord was scared of being challenged by as they were utter wrecking balls in their own right. Undead armies had lots of troops and powerful characters, but lose the character and the whole army crumbled - hell, in 2nd and third ed I'd literally be making the tea for the other players as my undead army was wiped out to be considered anything meaningful by turn 3 due to instability. In the advent of AoS with models being removed due to battleshock, well, that was a 1st to 3rd ed undead army without even having to fight. it wasn't uncommon for whole units to just disappear - BUT - you had fear and terror, which proportionally were very powerful, as they reduced attacks, strength, and all sorts of shenanigans. Yes, empire did, but at the same time the average human statline was the weakness of the army, but common with every fantasy trope, the humans had a bit of everything and were the most versatile army. ..and elves, well , lets just not go there in 8th ed, yes toughness 3, but try denting the allarielle whitelion deathstar with anything, anything at all. Many new to AoS players never really got the elf hatred amongst longbeards but trust me when I say they were always a vile faction to play against as there was nothing they couldn't do bigger better faster more. Which would be fine if they were points costed to high heaven but they weren't in respect to what they could pump out. What I'm really trying to say is that I'm not adverse to armies having obvious big holes and weaknesses in their arsenal, but compensate with another greater strength to make up for it, and as much as it's a nice to have, I don't see why every faction should have it all and cover every base, I think it diminishes the very flavour of the faction when we start talking like the 40k base about MEQ, TEQ etc. how about a faction with no EQ's to another faction's thing?

Yes it was, back in the 80's it was very much tongue in cheek humour and satire at film, politics and genres. You have to remeber as well that back then it was very much a UK thing, they still hadn't had the big global reach that they have now.

I think that like brets, they've hit a creative roadblock with them. Beasts for many editions and years have been nothing more than chaos cannon fodder, and this was since 8th edition. If souping them means they survive then I'd rather that than lose them altogether, and I bet when that happens there will be a lot of god armies with bestigors as the rank and file. As a faction they just need some real love, not just model wise, but also narrative wise, and where their place is over and above "and then a thousand beastmen charged into the oncoming army and were destroyed after inflicting heavy casualties for no real reason other than you know.. beastmen". I believe that like some of the destruction factions, beasts are in an infinity loop where their models need a massive over haul, after all, they're what 12 years old now, and like everything old world were designed around rank and flank so quite two dimensional in order to rank up. AoS has teased some dynamic offerings in the form of warcry warbands and the like, as it did with chaos warriors - fluff them up a bit and give them a polish and people go wow once again. Surely there's someone in that studio, both writer and artist who has a lot of love for beasts with some vision for them. In fairness, beasts could become chaos' chaos. In the very old fluff they always were the true children of chaos, not boosted by worship of gods or praying for favour. They were the very first children of chaos created, the very first mutations of chaos seeping into the world, and worshipped the raw essence that was chaos rather than the divinity of the chaos gods themselves. It wasn't until Realm of Chaos : slaves to darkness in third ed whfb that we see them throwing their lot in as champions and followers of a given god, and picking up marks. Ultimately one could say that they hate even archaon and the chaos pantheon as to them it's not the true essence of chaos in its purest mutable unadulterated form - as has been said before using the D&D alignment analogy, Beastmen are truly chaotic evil, but the gods of chaos and civilisations worshipping chaos are perhaps seen by the beasts as lawful evil, so still something to be torn down and destroyed. But whichever way they go, a redesign and a proper rethink is necessary, or if the mothership can't be bothered, then I'd rather see them thrown in with chaos factions as pickable troop choices than lose them outright to squatting.

did someone say Chaos Dwarfs? I know, I know.. tenuous... I'll get my coat.

I'd have to agree about the AoS lore insofar that it's all a bit 30 minute cartoon slot. However, that said we didn't really see much develop in the old world until 3rd edition, as before then you really only got the odd snippets of story with the regiments of renown and some white dwarfs bits, oh of course and the scenario packs like Terror of the Lichmaster, MacDeath, Bloodbath at Orcs drift et. al. It was only in 3rd ed when the wfrp started to come out that we started getting really beautifully fleshed out bits of writing detailing the world, and so in many ways cementing the germanic dark feel that we were to get used to. I'd welcome some source books, don't worry about new models to support them etc, just give me meaty well written source material to inspire me and invite me to forge my own narrative. It would be interesting to see where the lore of AoS is after 30 years, after all, like all good settings it has grown over time and been added to and built on till it's something much much larger than itself. I really wish Rick Priestley and the late Alan Bligh were still around to give some serious longbeard mood and feel guidance.

problem is that she's still an elf. And elf is as elf does as Forest Gaempunkin says.

looks like it. Dark mechanicum?

That' won't happen unless wagner and grant have given up the IP. Trust me none more than I would love to see that happen... you know his greatest champion and all that.