Chaos Dwarf Army List
We're dwarfs!
Manly dwarfs!
We're dwarfs in haaats...
This month we present the Chaos Dwarf army list. Of course, there's still a bit more work to do on it, testing out new weapons and finalising details, so if you'd like to write in with your comments it isn't too late! Next month we hope to publish the Chaos Dwarf magic cards which are curently under development, and the rules for Chaos Dwarf Blunderbusses (no room in this issue sorry!). The Blunderbusses will have special rules you can use the standard hand gun rules for now.
They left this in the book. Just like it was cut straight from the magazine. Typos and all. Honestly guys, white space would have been better.
Before you get to the army list proper, you get some friendly advice from your local model distributor:
There is no upper limit to the size of a Warhammer army, but one thousand points is probably the smallest size that will enable you to field a battleworthy force. Two thousand points is sufficient to give you a battle that will last an entire evening, while three thousand points is enough to fight a battle that will last the best part of a day.
In Herohammer terms, 1,000 points is bullshit small because you are allowed to spend up to 50% of your points on characters - which you sort of have to do.
Keep in mind that your bog-standard Chaos Dwarf is
14 points per model - most standard Dwarf unites are 11-13 points per model. So without getting into the fiddly bits of command units and equipment, if you decided to buy 1,000 points of Chaos Dwarfs, you're looking at 70 models. Remember that set-piece battle they did a while back in the book? That was twice as many points and ~60 models, some of which were cheap Hobgoblins. The rest of the points went into expensive war machines, generals, sorcerer lords, mounts, and magic items. The question is, was it worth it? Well, when you consider that the blinged-out characters are the ones that did most of the damage in that battle...
It is a good idea to collect armies in blocks of a thousand or five hundred points, starting with, say, a one thousand point core force then adding blocks of five hundred points at a time. This allows you time to paint the models and try them out on the tabletop before deciding what to use next. Chaos Dwarfs can use Chaos or Orc and Goblin Allies, and can also use some of the Orc and Goblin troops directly in the form of subjugated tribes. If you already have these armies you can build up a usable force of Chaos Dwarfs quite quickly, and then decide whether to expand the army with more Chaos Dwarfs later.
There was no easy way to collect a 500 or 1,000 point block. They didn't sell boxed sets with 50 Chaos Dwarf warriors with champion, musician, and standard bearers; they usually sold those models in boxes of 8 or 10, and sometimes the blister packs would only hold 1-3 models. So yeah, you can maybe buy 150 points at a time, more if you're getting a character or a monstrous mount, but even that has to be measured against the
other army creation requirements as far as minimum units you have to have - you can't spend more than 25% of your points on war machines, for example, no more than 25% on monsters (which is separate from your character budget, unless the characters are mounted on the monsters), and at least 25% has to be spent on troops.
Also, note the "Ally" bit - this was GW acknowledging early on that they needed to encourage people to be able to play with what they had rather than save up to buy and paint 1,000 points before they could "play." So they introduced allies, where up to 25% of the troops could be from an "allied" army (for Chaos Dwarfs, this was Chaos on one side and Orcs & Goblins on the other; later editions had elaborate charts on who could ally with whom). In later editions this led to weird situations where you had Chaos Dwarfs that weren't part of the normal Chaos Dwarf armylist but could be included in Chaos Dwarf armies as allies.
The Hellcannon is fun, but where are their hats?
We still haven't got to the army list proper when they give us an equipment list - these cover the fine details of equipping your unit with spears instead of axes, or handguns, that sort of thing. There are a few occasions when you might be inclined to do this - Hobgoblins with spears have certain advantages when bunched into ranks - but generally this is more expensive (especially to model) than beneficial on the tabletop, and a lot of the options are just marked as "unavailable" for Chaos Dwarfs, Bull Centaurs, or Hobgoblins, which just seems excessive.
Now onto the army list proper...
Characters
Your army general can be a Chaos Dwarf Lord (160 points, and can have up to three magic items), or a Chaos Dwarf Sorcerer Lord (
328 points and can have up to four magic items). That's not counting mounts or sundry equipment choices. Other characters include a Battle Standard Bearer, a Bull Centaur Lord (
368 points, but t'be fair statwise those will outfight most generic heroes in most armies), and from there down the line you can take sundry heroes, champions, and mages. Pointwise, the costs for a Chaos Dwarf Lord and Chaos Dwarf Sorcerer Lord are exactly in line with costs for other armies like Dwarfs and High Elves.
Hobgoblin Heroes, it must be mentioned, are relatively cheap (59 points, +4 if mounted on a Giant Wolf), and while their stats aren't exactly heroic (Leadership 7), are good value for the points if you're investing heavily in wolves as light infantry.
Units
Your sole real requirement is that you have to include at least one unit of Chaos Dwarf Warriors. Mechanically, these are identical to Dwarf Warriors (11 points per model) armed with double-handed axes (+2 points/model) and heavy armour (+1 points/model). Chaos Dwarf Blunderbusses also cost 14 points/model, which is equivalent to Dwarf Thunderers (13 points/model) with heavy armour (+1 points/model).
That's...the core of your army, really. And it is a bit vanilla when you consider that Dwarfs also had as options Long Beards, Hammerers, Iron Breakers, Crossbowmen, Miners, and Slayers. But then, the Chaos Dwarfs do have a few other options.
Bull Centaurs are, as I mentioned, the heavy cavalry of the Chaos Dwarf army; and they're 41 points/model. As heavy cavalry, they stack up fairly well against other armies, except that they can't be equipped with lances - in hand-to-hand combat, not a big deal, but it means they don't hit quite as hard on the charge and they're more expensive than, say, the general High Elf cavalry, the Silver Helms.
Hobgoblin Warriors are cheap: 5 points/model. They're midcost compared to other Greenskins, and so relatively cheap because they have average stat lines, unexceptionable leadership (LD 6), usual Greenskin animosity/panic issues, and start out unarmored.
"Arrgh," cried Tarka as Gorduz' curved dagger buried itself between his shoulders. The wounded Hobgoblin howled like a beaten cur, and staggered backward out through the door into the night. Fortunately for Tarka the shoulder blades of Hobgoblin-kind had long since evolved into a bony hump. Whether this was fortuitous or a result of natural selection was hard to say. Such wounds rarely proved fatal. In fact, this being the way amongst them, most Hobgoblins bore deep scars between their shoulders.
Other Hobgoblin units include Hobgoblin Archers (5 1/2 points per model, fractional point cost was an occasional thing in this edition of Warhammer), Hobgoblin Sneaky Gits (6 points/model), and Hobgoblin Wolf Riders (14 points/model) - who are able to use the
skirmish rules and can be armed with short bows (+1 point/model) if you want to fill out your mounted archer warfare fantasies.
Hobgoblins in Warhammer Fantasy often veered between traditional Tolkienian wolf riders and a kind of Mongol theme. With wolves instead of horses.
Hobgoblin Wolf Riders make effective light cavalry, but are more expensive than Goblin Wolf Riders (9 points/model) from the O&G list
Speaking of which, included in the Chaos Dwarf lists are the general units
stolen borrowed shared with the Orcs & Goblins army list: Black Orcs (9 points/model), Orcs (5 1/2 points/model), and Goblins (2 1/2 points/model). These borrowings give the Chaos Dwarf army a way to "fill out the ranks" in a way that the Dwarf armies can't and the High Elf armies generally won't (cheapest High Elf unit is Elf Archers at 10 points/model).
It's arguable whether the numbers of "Green Tide" troops you can field is worth the lower overall quality; this was actually firmed up a little in the
Ravening Hordes booklet for 6th edition which basically let Chaos Dwarfs ignore a lot of panicking, fleeing Greenskins, but it means that unless you're careful instead of getting the best of both worlds (Dwarf solidity and Greenskin superior numbers) you might end up with the worst (Dwarf numbers and Greenskin shaky leadership).
It's also worth mentioning that with the borrowings, Chaos Dwarfs have almost every flavor of basic troops in a range of prices to suit your needs, but no
specialists troops, except maybe the Bull Centaurs. It would be nice, for example, to be able to equip wolf riders with handguns, which would turn a decent choice into an excellent one, but you have to work with what you've got. So while there is versatility in the CD army list, it's more in a scale of quality vs. price of troops rather than in the
capabilities of its troops.
War Machines
Hobgoblin Bolt Thrower (42 points)
Death Rocket (75 points)
Earthshaker Cannon (140 points)
As mentioned, the list is...less deep than you're like; costs are about commensurate compared to equivalent weapons - for example, in the Dwarf list a Bolt Thrower is 54 points, a Small Stone Thrower is 74 points, and a Cannon is 110 points. The lack of really long range (60") artillery has to be balanced against the difficulty of guessing at those ranges. No chariots or anything like that, but then you don't really need them; no tanks, natch.
War machines in Warhammer Fantasy is a bit of a mixed bag, to me. You have to think about it like Money Ball: to win the engagement, I need to earn a certain amount of Victory Points, which means I need to kill a certain amount of models, which means I need to deal a certain number of wounds. Can the warmachines make up for their cost? I mean, one Earthshaker Cannon is equivalent to ten Chaos Dwarf Blunderbusses...and if you look at the battle report, I can't say with certainty which was less effective.
Monsters
4th edition had this thing where you could field monsters. It was stupid, but it gave Games Workshop the excuse to sell honking big minis of dragons, wyverns, manticores, swarms of rats and frogs and shit. No one cares. You don't plan a battle around "I feel like having a Giant Scorpion on the field today."
Unless you're Tomb Kings, maybe.
Special Characters
These were the heroes of Herohammer - the important/legendary characters that people could field if they're feeling beardy.
This concept was extended to "Star Players" in Blood Bowl.
We have:
Zhatan the Black (Chaos Dwarf lord, 172 points, can carry up to 4 magic items, Hates
everybody)
Gorduz Backstabber (Hobgoblin lord, 93 points, gets an extra save whenever he's about to lose his last wound)
Astragoth, High Priest of Hashut (Chaos Dwarf sorcerer lord, 358 points, mecha)
I feel that last one requires some flavor text:
Astragoth is the oldest living Chaos Dwarf Sorcerer. When he was at the height of his powers he was the most potent sorcerer to walk the Plain of Zharr in a thousand years. Now his powers have begun to wane. His body is slowly succumbing to petrification. A decade ago he constructed a mechanical device by which he is transported from place to place. His legs have long ceased to work and even his hands have not turned to stone. To an extent these have been replaced by the machinery grafted to his body. The engine was constructed by his slaves to pans created by Astragoth himself, and combines the undoubted skills of the Chaos Dwarf race with twisted dark science.
After that is about a dozen pages of models and banners and...that's the book.
There are a lot of things about the Chaos Dwarf
concept that are cool, but as I think you can see, there's also a lot lacking - CD-only units, real "killer apps," etc. While it's nice to get some extra use out of your O&G models, if you just take dwarfs, subtract most everything that makes them special, and add in some Greenskins what you get is...kind of a mess? They don't really fill in a capability gap; they're neat and don't have any outright sucky/joke units, but they're also not balls-to-the-walls awesome in anything. Even the Empire has steam tanks, and the Skaven - who got the better end of the magical-engineering stick - have warpfire throwers and the Doomwheel and whatnot.
And, ultimately, maybe that's what doomed them.
Chaos Dwarfs featured prominent in 4th and 5th edition, but in 6th edition didn't get a new armybook - just a listing in
Ravening Hordes. They were already being phased out of everything except Blood Bowl (where they were surprisingly competitive) and the fluff, where they continued to thrive in odd places. Certainly they weren't alone - Bretonnians featured the same fate, and GW's subsequent efforts at "new armies" like Tomb Kings and Ogre Kingdoms presented mixed results, since collecting, assembling, and painting new armies from scratch is no joke.
A final effort was made to revive them - with Forge World providing new, expensive-as-hell resin minis and the kind of mechanical support they could have used a decade and a half prior...but you run into the situation where Games Workshop was marketing hideously overpriced models for a niche army. Which is about when I graduated, and stepped away from this hobby for a bit.