[OSSR]White Dwarf Presents: Chaos Dwarfs

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[OSSR]White Dwarf Presents: Chaos Dwarfs

Post by Ancient History »

Before we begin, I would like to point out that to get to this book, I had to dig for it. Turns out it was in the box underneath the giant skull in my closet.
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Photographic evidence.
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This review was inspired by Koumei & Frank's OSSR of Warhammer 40K, 3rd edition, and is something of a spiritual sequel to my long-ago Dwarfs vs. Dwarfs vs. Dwarfs[/url OSSR

I'm gonna start out with saying that I have more than a soft spot for Chaos Dwarfs. They are the red-headed bastard children of the Warhammer Armies, and that endeared me to them when I was young and didn't know any better. I actually spent quite a bit of time working on the [url=http://www.chaos-dwarfs.com/wiki/]Chaos Dwarfs Wiki
in college when I had copious spare time, and wrote a series of fan-articles called "Earthshaking Canon" for their fanzine, The Word of Hashut. I played seldom, lost constantly, and superglued my fingers together so often I lost count, but I had fun.

Before we get into the thick of it, however, let's run up some preliminary background.

In the Beginning...
There were no Chaos Dwarfs. Not as such. At the tail end of 2nd edition (1986/1987), in Ravening Hordes the Chaos Army list had a line for Chaos Dwarfs - these were dwarfs that had fallen to Chaos, as mutants and really short Chaos Warriors and suchlike. This was expanded upon in Warhammer 3rd Edition which introduced these Chaos Dwarf mutants as an "Ally contingent," as well as introducing a new type of gobbo, the Hobgoblin. The whole Dwarf-mutants-fallen-to-Chaos thing was solidified in the infamous Realms of Chaos books (1989/1990) as Chaos Dwarf Renegades and...well, they were just part of the vast set of mutants and weird shit that Chaos could field.

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And yes, this means there were even potentially Chaos Squats.

Then came 4th edition 1992 - the infamous Herohammer edition, where battlefields tended to be dominated by expensive, overpowered characters. While terrible in terms of balance, this was really the edition that set a lot of the future Warhammer Fantasy product identity, such as rune magic for Dwarfs, the look and feel of Greenskins (and elimination of Half-Orcs, gnomes, etc.) - and it also involved a complete overhaul and re-skin of the entire Chaos Dwarf concept.

The way they did this was...unique. Basically, the army book was introduced as a series of articles in the wholly-owned company magazine White Dwarf, which like Games Workshop itself had started life as basically Britain's homegrown equivalent to Dragon Magazine, with articles on D&D, Runequest, Call of Cthulhu, etc., and morphed into basically being a Games Workshop-only magazine, full of scenarios, beautifully painted units, rules for experimental units, etc. Rick Priestley was pumped out a series of articles in WD161, WD162, WD163, WD164, WD165, and WD170, and was accompanied by a model range - all white metal, no plastic yet - and so two years into the new edition (1994 for those keeping count), Warhammer Fantasy had a new army.

Well, sortof.

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As Frank would put it, this review is going to be 30% big hats by volume.

Where the 2nd & 3rd edition Chaos Dwarfs had been random bands of mutants and stout Chaos Warriors, the new Chaos Dwarfs boasted an Assyrian/Sumerian theme, with big hats, long oiled beards, and an overall Near Eastern look that was fairly exotic. They maintained many attributes of the Dwarfs (in fact, their statlines for the average trooper were basically identical), but they were inverted on some things - where Dwarfs had rune magic and eschewed sorcery, Chaos Dwarfs had no rune magic and were led by powerful sorcerers; where Dwarfs hated Greenskins, Chaos Dwarfs enslaved them, and used ranks of Orcs, Goblins, and Hobgoblins to fill out their armies. Where Dwarfs used pistols and guns, Chaos Dwarfs used blunderbusses. Both were generally slow-moving, and loved big war machines, but Chaos Dwarfs also had cavalry in the form of the mutant Bull Centaurs and Hobgoblin Wolfriders. In places of the Dwarf Ancestor Gods, the Chaos Dwarfs revered the minor Chaos God Hashut.

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And the new Chaos Dwarf look was so successful, it made it into the official canon, such World of Warhammer, the official encyclopedia; and in various spin-off games like Blood Bowl.

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These were some of the last models officially available.

But...Chaos Dwarfs remained very much a minor-league team in Warhammer Fantasy in 4th and 5th edition. The problem was, in part, one that Games Workshop would often struggle with: how do we get players excited enough to buy a new army? Producing fluff and rules was easy and cheap, actually modelling an army, getting in produced and in shops, and then having people buy enough to field in a game was a lot more of an investment. By introducing Chaos Dwarfs in White Dwarf, GW cut the investment a smidgen (since presumably hardcore fans were already subscribers), and by using troops from Orcs & Goblin armies to fill out the ranks, they made it easier for at least O&G players to dabble in Chaos Dwarfs...but it was still a hefty investment, and CD just never quite caught on with the general hoi polloi...and small wonder. Shops aren't going to stock armies that don't sell, and if the shops don't stock them there are no impulse purchases, especially if you have to order from GW direct.

Games Workshop would find similar difficulties in introducing new armies like Tomb Kings, and tried various ways around it - like "allied contingents" for Kislev, or by declaring Ogre Kingdoms "Dogs of War" that could be taken in any army as mercenaries. But this approach didn't really work for Chaos Dwarfs; by 6th edition they were reduced to a rump army, no new models coming out, supported by an aging ruleset and dependent on Orcs & Goblins rules which changed each edition. Eventually they had a bit of a rebirth in 7th edition - where they were re-invisioned once again, albeit without the Big Hats, and as hideously expensive Forge World models, before the whole game setting blew itself to hell.

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Leave the beards on.

But that's far in the future! The year is 1994, and the world is your engine of destruction pulled by a dozen slaves. Sorcery crackles at the skull-tipped curls of your beard, and the bull centaurs stomp impatiently at the wasted earth of the Plain of Desolation. You are the Dawi'zharr...the Chaos Dwarfs!

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Last edited by Ancient History on Thu Jun 01, 2017 1:42 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by Whipstitch »

I always wanted chaos dwarfs and tomb kings. I think I have some kinda of fetish for big hats, pyramids and ziggurats, which is why I came very, very close to buying a Lizardmen army but decided I couldn't tolerate the puns.
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Post by Thaluikhain »

Never had a single chaos dwarf model, but I'm still the sort that misses them once they are gone.

I do like that they are dwarves that aren't scottish Tolkien rip offs.
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Post by Ancient History »

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At the bottom of the TOC, is a box:
This book has been compiled from articles published over several issues of White Dwarf magazine. In it you will find all the features that normally go to make up a Warhammer Armies book, including background history, a bestiary, special rules, a magic spells deck, battle report, 'Eavy Metal pages, and army list. In short, all the information you need as a Chaos Dwarf general! Although there is little newly published material, we have tidied up some of the presentation to make the material more accessible. We hope that this book will provide Chaos Dwarf players with a more satisfying option than buying some half dozen issues of White Dwarf magazine.

The Chaos Dwarf army lists were originally printed without a Special Characters seciton. We've added a few special characters into the limited space available. Players may wish to use existing models to represent these characters, or, as an alternative, models can be converted to produce suitably individual pieces.
Which says a lot, really. One of the reasons for special characters in WFB was so GW could sell you additional models for those special characters, so the lack of those right off the back maybe indicates a lack of absolute confidence in the line - although that would be rectified later. The formatting in the book is quite literally lifted off the page from White Dwarf, so even though this was a 1994 book, it still looks and feels like a paste-up (and could well have been) - which means that Rick Priestley's name is reproduced about six times in this book, because it's exactly as if they cut the articles out of WD and bound them together. The original working title was probably "Rick Priestley's Scrapbook."

Chaos Dwarfs
The first article is all, fluff. This generally follows the format of Orcs & Goblins and Dwarfs for the same edition (which Rick Priestley also helped write), and features a bit of backstory, map, society, info, etc.

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Basically, back before the last incursion of Chaos, some Dwarfs wandered west, found a plain full of coal and oil, and then got caught when the mutating radiation magic came down, and became evil-sorcery-using-slavers. A solid effort was made to work these guys into the already-established setting: for example, the Chaos Dwarfs bred Black Orcs as superslaves, which worked out well until the Black Orc Rebellion, which was only defeated when the Hobgoblins betrayed the Orcs & Goblins - thus explaining both whey Chaos Dwarfs are important and why you never heard of Hobgoblins in the Orcs & Goblins book.

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Although the whole "Chaos Dwarfs bred slave Black Orcs for superior physical characteristics" is not an aspect of their history you want to look too closely at.
Aside: One of the running jokes I started on the Chaos Dwarf forums was pointing out that the dates for the Black Orc Rebellion and the invasion of the Greenskins into the Empire actually line up - so you could make the argument that it was the fleeing remnants of the Rebellion that gave Sigmar the common enemy he needed to forge his disparate human tribes into an Empire, and thus Chaos Dwarfs accidentally founded the Empire. This is of great amusement to Chaos Dwarf fans and everyone else looks at us like we just smoked banana peels.
And that's a grand total of eight pages, ending with a timeline. Because all Warhammer Army books used to have those.

The Chaos Dwarf Blunderbuss
The articles are not presented strictly in the order they appeared in White Dwarf, presumably because they didn't want to interrupt the army list with silly mechanics, so this next section is technically from a couple issues later, but it handles one of the most important Chaos Dwarf innovations: the blunderbuss.

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Some Dwarf and Empire units in 4th edition could be armed with pistols or hand guns; the Skaven had jezzails, and that was largely it for personal gunpowder weaponry.

Hand guns had a range of 24" and were a Strength 4 hit, and could fire every-other-round; Dwarfs had a Ballistic Skill of 3. The way they generally worked is to line them up in long rows two ranks deep, and the first rank would fire, then the first rank would advance or fall back so the second rank could fire, thus theoretically keeping up a steady volley. Pistols were the same deal but had a 6" range, but didn't have to reload for hand-to-hand fighting and were mainly used by champions.

The Chaos Dwarf blunderbuss...worked a little different. Anything within 12" of the front rank was in the Fire Zone. You roll a die for each model in that area. Normal cover rules don't apply, so unless the Chaos Dwarf Blunderbusses are facing a hill, everything in front of them is a potential casualty. Chaos Dwarfs have a Ballistic Skill of 3, and Blunderbusses have a Strength of 3+1 for each extra rank (up to two). There's some other details, but you don't care.

So, your absolute range is diminished, but since you're rolling to hit any target in the Fire Zone and not individual shots, you can potentially hit many more targets, and if your blunderbusses are stacked three ranks deep, you can hit harder. This is actually a rather interesting trade-off; it's a range that works well for blasting the shit out of anything unarmored or lightly-armored that attacks from the front - if they weren't as slow as other dwarfs, you'd really want to march them up to the front of the enemy lines, blow them away, and then fire again when they charge you - because unlike Hand Guns, you don't have to reload - but the problem is, their range is much less than most other ranged weapons, and even a S5 hit isn't going to take down a hero that charges into them. And this is Herohammer.

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There's one other advantage we'll get to later, but as a characteristic weapon - and one of defining mechanics - of Chaos Dwarfs, the blunderbuss says a lot about their overall effectiveness. It's a great ranged weapon against units that basically have no ranged weapons; against all but the shittiest ranged weapons, it's at a disadvantage. Dwarf Crossbowmen and Dwarf Thunderers will sit well outside the Chaos Dwarf Blunderbuss range and fill them with bolts and/or bullets; fucking Elves will fill them with arrows from half the goddamned table away.

On the plus side, it is potentially great against lightly-armored mobs. One of the legitimate tactics with Chaos Dwarfs was to engage the enemy with a pile of infantry, then have the Blunderbusses come in from the side and fire into the flank. Unfortunately, most of the lightly-armored mobs were basically Orcs & Goblins, and even those bastards had archers. Against heavily-armoured foes like Knights or Chaos Warriors, your blunderbusses were almost certainly not going to do the job. You needed heavier firepower.
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Earthshaker Cannon
When in doubt, more dakka.

The Earthshaker Cannon had a range of 12-48", which made it on par with Stone Throwers and Cannon, but not Big Stone Throwers or Great Cannon; damage et al. are likewise pretty much what you expect from a Stone Thrower (S7 hit, deals d3 wounds), but there's a special 'Earthshaking' feature where it also slows or halts units within a few inches of where the shell lands. That's useful, but not groundbreaking; especially when you're facing enemies armed with conventional Cannon (which can deliver S10 hits and d4 wounds from bouncing balls); the Earthshaker says it has a -4 save modifier but that might be a typo.

Of course, the Chaos Dwarfs had other weapons...

Death Rocket
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Same basic tactics: range 48", S5, d3 wounds. Slightly more hilarious misfire chart, because this is still 4th edition.

Hobgoblin Bolt Thrower
Identical to regular Bolt Thrower stats throughout Warhammer, aside from the crew being cowardly Hobgoblins.

It's not a bad complement of artillery pieces, but it is all basically close-to-midrange artillery. Anybody with a Great Cannon or Big Stone Thrower can sit comfortably on the other side of the field and lob stones/cannonballs until the Misfire charts tell them to shove it up their arse. Chaos Dwarfs have distinctly more field artillery pieces than, say, Chaos or any of the Elven armies at this stage in the game, but they come up short against Dwarfs (who in addition to big and small Stone Throwers also had Gyrocopters, Bolt Throwers, Flame Cannons, regular Cannons, and Organ Guns). So, more Dwarf-y than most non-Dwarfs, but not as Dwarfish as...Dwarfs.

What it boils down to is that Chaos Dwarfs have good artillery at middle ranges (provided you can guess ranges accurately), but that artillery is suited more toward unarmoured, lightly armored, and moderately armoured units. It's designed more to soften an enemy up and slow them down than it is to blast them into submission.

Now, to be fair you could make the argument that Chaos Dwarfs partially make up for this lack because they have sorcery, and a good Sorcerer is basically a slightly more mobile and slightly more volatile artillery piece...and we'll talk about that next time, in Chaos Dwarf Magic Cards.
Last edited by Ancient History on Thu Jun 01, 2017 10:25 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by Koumei »

Ancient History wrote: Earthshaker Cannon
...
That's useful, but not groundbreaking;
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Post by Judging__Eagle »

The only thing that I can recall about Chaos Dwarves from back in the 1990's was that their minis were really unique compared with the other pseudo-European factions. Also that they (more specifically, their sorcerors) petrified from the feet up, and were placed along special avenues that commemorate these now petrified Chaos Dwarves.

Of course, now that I recall that I have more concerns about where the breakpoint between "functionally petrified sorceror" and "decorative avenue collonade" is. Obviously it has to happen 'some' time after the legs petrify. However thinking about the details after that raises some unsettling questions and concerns. If they're road statues at the lower intestinal level then they starve before they fully petrify, but if its at the diaphragm they're going to asphyxiate. Unless all Chaos Dwarf Sorcerors who are approaching non-functionality simply spend all their time channelng the warp in order to expedite the process.

[Edit]

Do WHFB Dwarves have offspring? Or are they born out of the earth? or is it both? I can't recall the setting including tales of dragonslaying shedwarves.
Last edited by Judging__Eagle on Fri Jun 02, 2017 4:28 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by Ancient History »

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There are female dwarfs in Warhammer Fantasy, and at least a couple models for them. They have sex and reproduce the normal way. We'll get to the sorcerer-statues in a bit.
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Post by Judging__Eagle »

Ancient History wrote:
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There are female dwarfs in Warhammer Fantasy, and at least a couple models for them. They have sex and reproduce the normal way. We'll get to the sorcerer-statues in a bit.
That makes sense, the older GW miniatures lines had a wide variety of options that no longer exist (e.g. female space marines). WHFB Dwarves seem to be based on Tolkien's interpretation/division of Elf/Dwarves; and in both female dwarves aren't overly visible, while female elves are presented.

I await to see sorcerer-statues mentioned.
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Post by Ancient History »

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Chaos Dwarf Magic Cards

This article was actually written by Grant Williams rather than Priestley; maybe Rick was sick or Grant knew the new magic system better. Like a lot of games, WFB "refined" its magic system about every edition, which sometimes involved changing things entirely. For 4th edition, this involved a small deck of "Magic Cards" which were dealt out according to the level of your Wizard. It made magic...unpredictable. But first, some backstory:
The Chaos Dwarf Sorcerers rule over the Tower of Zharr-Naggrund as the lords and masters of the Chaos Dwarfs and high priest of Hashut. Their lore is deep and ancient, the study of machines and magic combined to produce arcane engines of power and destruction.

It was the Chaos Dwarf Sorcerers who constructed the city in past ages, who carved its shape from obsidian and raised its dark towers and fashioned its massive gateways. They are few in number, probably no more than a few hundred amongst the whole Chaos Dwarf race.

In the Temple of Hashut the Chaos Dwarf Sorcerers meet in a conclave of evil to make their plans of domination. There is no leader nor formal hierarchy amongst them, but the strongest voice belongs to the oldest and most powerful, for Chaos Dwarfs respect age and knowledge just as much as other Dwarfs. Each Chaos Dwarf Sorcerer controls part of the city, with its workshops and forges, slaves and warriors, as part of his personal dominion.

As Chaos Dwarf Sorcerers use magic it gradually seeps into their bodies, evoking changes in them which are both unique and horrific. Starting with his feet, the Chaos Dwarf Sorcerer slowly begins to turn to immobile stone. At first his legs turn grey and solid so that he is unable to move, and his followers are obliged to carry him around or else he has them construct a mechanical engine to move him about. This condition gradually spreads upwards throughout the whole of the Sorcerer's body until he is made up entirely of stone. These Chaos Dwarf Sorcerer stone statues are lined up along the roadways around the tower of Zharr-Naggrund, forming rank upon rank of grey stones watching over the approach to the city.

To use these spell cards in your Warhammer games, first carefully cut out the front and back of each card as a single piece. Fold the card in half along the dotted line and glue the two sides back-to-back. TO make them a little more hard wearing, it's a good idea to insert some thin card between the wo halves before you glue them together.
Arts and crafts aside, the fluff never quite matched the crunch; the whole sorcerer-engineer and magic-powered-war-machine aspect was better filled by the Skaven. That said, at least the Chaos Dwarfs had spells available. One of the hallmarks of 4th edition was that Dwarfs didn't have access to sorcery - just rune magic. Of course "just" means that Dwarfs could load up hero characters with runic armor, weapons, and talismans, which worked out great in Herohammer and gave them an enviable flexibility - but they lacked any of the advantages of magic, and their countermagic was expensive (effective, but expensive).

So Chaos Dwarfs had an advantage there! ...sort of. Magic was notoriously unreliable in 4th edition; it could do nothing, it could be game changing, or it could just cause your expensive Wizard to vaporize. A legitimate tactic during this era was the "Scroll Caddy," the cheapest wizard you could buy that was loaded down with as many Dispel Scrolls as you could put on them, and whose sole job was basically to defeat whatever the opposing enemy wizard was trying to do.

Likewise, pretty much every separate army got their own batch of unique spells (the Empire got eight), and the utility on a lot of them was variable. Generally, you could count on sorcerers acting as short-to-mid-range artillery, but they could also buff other units or set up obstacles in the battlefield. The ten Chaos Dwarf Magic spell cards cover this whole range of stuff, and their overall range of effects isn't bad, even if it isn't amazing or stand-outish compared to other armies.

Chaos Dwarf Magic actually got their own entry in the 1995 Arcane Magic supplement, which helps a bit to compare - for one, Chaos Dwarfs don't have any special snowflake magic rules, like Skaven or Orcs & Goblins. That's good. The less fiddly bullshit mechanics, the better. Not a lot of standouts, otherwise - they have some good spells (for example, Magma Pool is cheap teleportation and can be combined with buff spells for assassinating characters), no out-and-out bad spells, and one spell for dealing with anything that the rest of the army can't fuck with:
Eruption
Power 3 Range: 24"

The Sorcerer chants words of power and smashes his staff on the ground. There is a low rumbling then the ground erupts spewing forth molten lava and clouds of hot ash. Place the 3" diameter circular template over the target to represent the area of the eruption. Any models beneath the template must roll equal to or under their initiative to leap aside. Anything which fails to leap aside is instantly vapourised by the molten lava. War machines such as stone throwers and chariots will be automatically consumed (though their crews get to roll to avoid death) and buildings at least half under the card will collapse on the D6 roll of 4, 5 or 6.
They cleaned up the language a little in Arcane Magic, but the upshot is, if you're having trouble with something, drop it in a volcano.

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Good advice generally.

The Power spread on the cards is two (2) at Power 1, four (7) at Power 2, one (1) at Power 3; that means...well, it's complicated, but generally it means you wanted more Level 2 Sorcerers if you wanted to get anything done. The whole fucking 4th edition Magic system requires a drunk OSSR from somebody like Frank to do proper justice to the madness of it.

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A Chaos Dwarf Sorcerer is never naked so long as they have a hat!

The Battle of Anurell's Tomb
4th edition always included a Battle Report, a sort of round-by-round, blow-by-blow replay of a setpiece battle with lots of illustrations of the studio-painted army to show off the models and what the army could do. Theoretically.

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Fun fact: All Games Workshop names sound 100% more metal in German. ChaoszwergenKrieger!

This was a 3,000 point conflict between Robin Dews (High Elves) and Gary Morley (Chaos Dwarfs). 6,000 points is like $400 in 1980s money, and for which princely sum the High Elves fielded about 85 models and the Chaos Dwarfs about 60ish - depending on whether you're counting war machine crews and monstrous mounts. Both sides include tricked-out, maxed-out characters loaded with magic bling. My tl;dr version of events:

High Elf Turn 1: Elves move forward a couple inches, archers fire at the Chaos Dwarf artillery without result, sorcerer casts a spell that prevents critters from flying.

Chaos Dwarf Turn 1: Chaos Dwarfs move forward a couple inches, Chaos Dwarf artillery fires and misses, magic threatens to destroy pretty much all of the war machines on the battlefield and the High Elves end up dispelling their own spell.

High Elf Turn 2: Elves move forward a couple inches, Elven archery still continues to disappoint, the mages throw clouds at each other.

Chaos Dwarf Turn 2: Chaos Dwarfs move forward a couple inches, the Earthshaker Cannon and Death Rocket actually hit something; the Red Bull of Hashut remembers it can fly and zips around flaming elves to death; both the sorcerers fail to dispel each other's shit from last round, but pull something out of their ass and do it anyway.

High Elf Turn 3: Elves move charge into hand-to-hand combat, for which effort they get shot in the face; the eagle-riding Elf Lord/bastard hits the Chaos Dwarf blunderbusses in the rear, forcing them to rout and then cuts them down; the High Elf General on his own flying bullshit takes a stab at the Chaos Dwarf General on his flying bullshit; the High Elf sorcerer says "fuck it" and no magic happens this round.

Chaos Dwarf Turn 3: Because it worked last time, the Red Bull of Hashut flies forward and flames some more elves to death; the Death Rocket kills the Elf chariot; Hobgoblins win against Elves; the High Elf general killed the Sorcerer but still had to deal with the Lammassu; Elf Champion issues challenge to Bull Centaur Champion; remaining magic users start using bound spells and items because this random bullshit isn't working.

High Elf Turn 4: High Elf general kills the Lammassu; High Elves regroup; Bull Centaur champion tears the Elf champion's head off; the Elf Mage Lord on her flying bullshit attacks the Chaos Dwarf general on his flying bullshit, which ends with both lords and their mounts dying; the High Elf generally ignores this and attacks the Death Rocket crew, which is probably the safest option short of actually fleeing and most likely to save some Victory Points, then uses his last bound spell to no avail against the Hobgoblins.

Chaos Dwarf Turn 4: Well, both general and mage are dead, but other than that the Chaos Dwarfs are doing surprisingly well when it comes to just fighting, so they continue to do that. The Earthshaker misses, proving almost singly useless the entire fucking battle; a regiment of Chaos Dwarf warriors that haven't done shit the entire fucking battle occupy critical real estate because special rules in this scenario give them extra VP for doing so; Hobgoblins prove useless against the Elf general (this is Herohammer) and do what they've wanted to do the entire game: flee.

So...what happened?

Well, the Chaos Dwarfs basically almost got their ass handed to them by a punch of pansy-ass elves in a non-optimized expeditionary force. Granted, they were outnumbered and slower-moving and were upstaged in magic at about every turn by the High Elf Sorcerer Lord and their artillery didn't earn it's point cost and...uh...this was supposed to be an advertisement for these guys?

I mean okay, you don't want to blatantly throw the game in favor of the other team; you want a close but fun battle where the side-whose-army-book-this-is comes out on top, but not without a bloodied nose. But...damn. Outnumbered by Elves? The Chaos Dwarf models aren't that expensive, and the whole point of having Greenskins in your army list is so that you have waves of disposable green troops to throw around. My guess is they didn't want to raid the O&G for fear of giving players the wrong impression or something, but as a consequence the CDs were sort of not on their A game against the HEs. I can't help but think a few rolls were fudged for greater dramatic tension.

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That's a lot of hat, a lot of beard, a lot of money, and a lot of sleepless nights high on paint fumes.
Last edited by Ancient History on Sat Jun 03, 2017 1:32 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by Username17 »

Back in the before-time, Orcs and Goblins were not collectively "greenskins" and were instead color-coded. The strongest Orcs were black, Goblins were red, and the Hobgoblins were orange. There's still a citadel color called "Hobgoblin Orange" which is hard to understand now that Orcs and Goblins have been retconned to collectively be "Green Skins."

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In 1983, this comic character debuted, and Warhammer would not let such an obvious thing go un-ripped-off.

Once Hobgoblins became green, I genuinely don't know why they'd continue to exist.

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Post by Koumei »

Nah, they've actually changed the names for the entire range at least once, possibly twice (and have ceased some colours and introduced other new ones). Largely to confuse and annoy people, as far as I can tell. But hobgoblin orange no longer exists.

Also I love the idea that Games fucking Workshop wants to cash in on someone else's IP and rip other works off, given their litigiousness regarding other people.
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Post by Thaluikhain »

Huh, didn't know that. Though, even after they were all green, I seem to recall there was a shade coding, with the hardest orcs being dark green, goblins lighter green and snotlings lighter still. Don't know how official that was.
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Post by Omegonthesane »

Wasn't aware there was a full spectrum of colour-coding, but it is still canon for WHFB that the Black Orcs are a darker green than the smaller orcs as well as being bigger, stronger, and somewhat more disciplined.
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Post by Ancient History »

'Eavy Metal
'Eavy Metal were the porn promo pages where they showed off the studio-painted models. It's a lot of pretty pictures, and we're not going to go through it.
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The chariots were left out of this edition.
For anyone that cares, some nerds get really anal about the iconography on Chaos Dwarf standards and which way around the Rune of Hashut is supposed to be - but you shouldn't care, as everything's made up and the points don't matter.

Chaos Dwarf Bestiary
Okay, so one of the peculiarities of this WFB is that they had a split between the "bestiary" and the "army list" - basically, the bestiary had the fluff, stat lines, and special rules and so forth, and the army list had the requirements for how many of what unit you could take, stat lines, options, and the point costs. If that seems unnecessarily duplicating information...well, yeah, it was.
They wear extremely tall helmets which are as much a symbol of status as they are for protection. Depending on his expertise a Chaos Dwarf's helmet can be a distinctive shape or may be decorated in a specific way. The most important Chaos Dwarfs wear especially large and elaborate helmets.
We're just going to hit the highlights here: Chaos Dwarfs have identical statlines to Dwarfs, and have the same rules about wearing Armour and Pursuit and Flee. Unlike Dwarfs, Chaos Dwarfs do not Hate Orcs and Goblins or carry an Elf Grudge. Ironically, because the Dwarfs Armybook came out before WDP:CD, the Dwarfs don't hate Hobgoblins either.

We haven't talked about the Bull Centaurs much yet. Back in 2nd/3rd edition, a rare type of Dwarf Mutant was the Boar Centaur; in 4th when the Chaos Dwarfs were re-imagined as followers of the bull-god Hashut, they were reimagined as Bull Centaurs.

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Bull Centaurs are actually pretty good cavalry; they're not quite as fast as Elven cavalry but hit harder and have more Wounds and Armour; although less armoured than fully-loaded Empire or Bretonnian Knights, they serve the role of heavy cavalry, and with Chaos Dwarf Leadership stats can take a few casualties without breaking. Where Dwarf armies are mostly known for moving slow, these guys move fast and hit hard.

The CD bestiary includes two more advanced mutations, being giant flying monsters that generals and sorcerer lords usually take as mounts: the Great Taurus (or Red Bull of Hashut), and the Lammasu.

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The Great Taurus flies, breathes fire, inspired Terror (which causes weak-leadership units like Goblins to flee), and is armoured; it's not quite equivalent to a dragon as far as flying mounts go, but it'll eat a gyrocopter or pegasus - statwise, they're almost directly between a Manticore and a Hippogriff. So if the High Elves or Dark Elves decide to bring a dragon to the table, that's a bad day - but this is true whether or not you have a Great Taurus.

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The lammasu is a Great Taurus with the head of a Chaos Dwarf. Stat line is almost identical to the Great Taurus, they fly and inspire Terror, but instead of fire they breathe a "Sorcerous Exhalation" which gives it an auto-Dispel check against spells cast against itself or its rider, and protects slightly against magic weapons - even autohit/autokill magic weapons, which is rare. That basically makes a lammasu a Sorcerer-mount for issuing challenges to champions and other characters and going all Herohammer on them.

Hobgoblins are sort of the best and wort of both worlds when it comes to Greenskins in this edition: they suffer Animosity (the lol-mechanic where you roll to see if each unit does anything this turn). On the bright side, having Hobgoblins in your army means all the other Greenskins - Orcs and Goblins - automatically pass their Animosity tests, as none of them trust the Hobgoblins enough to bicker among themselves. And if you have the Hobgoblins themselves sorted out in terms of Leadership, you can actually proceed fairly as normal with your mobs of disposable green troops. Unfortunately, hobgoblins are still prone to breaking and fleeing, and their stats are just average - like, Empire human average. So in a fair fight, their one and probably only advantage is numerical superiority...at first.

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"Stick 'em wiv arrers'. Stick 'em with knives, 'an swords, and spears. Stick 'em quick and stick 'em where it 'urts. But most of all, stick 'em when they's looking the other way."

Gorduz Backstabber, Hobgoblin Chieftain
...which is why Hobgoblins avoid a fair fight, particularly the Sneaky Gits, which are Hobgoblins that have special rules for using two weapons, poison, and "lapping around" formations in hand-to-hand combat, so as to hit units on the flank or rear. This basically means that hobgoblins can tear apart small units just by weight of bonuses and sufficient number of attack rolls, provided they can get in close enough.

Raiding the Orcs & Goblins army list, the Chaos Dwarfs can field units of Black Orcs, Orcs, and Goblins to fill out their ranks. These are bog-standard Greenskins, and prove the old adage that "Quantity has a quality all its own" - that is to say, that O&G fill out an army list and can be used to have more total models on your board than your opponent, which sounds cool. However, you have to remember that this is Herohammer, and the quality of individual Greenskin units is pretty bad (except for Black Orcs), so as a tactic outnumbering your opponent with surprisingly obedient Greenskins by itself is not a guarantee of winning. A 200 point dragon will rout and kill 200 points worth of Goblins, easy.

Noticeably absent in this Bestiary are the "specialist" units that you see in the other contemporary Armybooks; Chaos Dwarfs didn't have individual listings for Blunderbusses, Wolf Riders, 'Arrer Boyz, etc. They saved that for the Army List proper, and so shall we...next time.
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Post by Thaluikhain »

I've sometimes wondered how bull-centaurs fit into Chaos Dwarf society, are they just dwarves with more legs? Likewise, is the lammasu intelligent like a Chaos Dwarf, or is it just someone's ride?
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Post by Ancient History »

Chaos Dwarf Army List
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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.
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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.

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Post by Username17 »

AH wrote:There was no easy way to collect a 500 or 1,000 point block.
There sure fucking wasn't! As you mentioned, Allies were limited to 25% of your points, and Heroes were limited to 50% of your points. But Heroes and squads cost weird jank-ass numbers of points to begin with. 368 points for a dude on a flying magic cow and shit, before you deck them out with swag.

So on 1000 points, your leader could be up to 500 points, which isn't enough to fully kit out a flying badass sorcerer lord, but is enough for a less impressive warrior champion. But on 2000 points you had 1000 points for characters, plenty for your sorcerer lord and some fiddly role players and shit. Problem being: if you were shelling out for the Sorcerer Lord, you didn't want the lesser Champion.

It wasn't just that the more expensive army had more models, it's that it had different models. Modularity in the game was attrociously bad.

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Post by Ancient History »

The Chaos Dwarfs also lacked any unique magic items in this book - forcing them to rely on the generic magic items. Some of which, in the fullness of time and new editions, became unique Chaos Dwarf magic items.
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Post by Judging__Eagle »

Ancient History wrote:
Special Characters
These were the heroes of Herohammer - the important/legendary characters that people could field if they're feeling beardy.


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.
Chaos dwarves (sorcerers or not) cyborgs having one representative unit/model seems like a missed opportunity for uncommon science-fantasy/Heavy Metal ideas for WHFB on the part of Games Workshop. On the other hand CD's pseudo-Mesopotamian aesthetics and designs are fairly original in a game filled with (clearly) Eurocentric and (clear, but not obvious to most) Tolkienesque aesthetics; and their overall traction was likely never that high. I can't recall any CD players in any of the LFGS or GWS I've been to in the Burlington to Missisauga area since the 1990's, and my own exposure with CD minis in all of that time was thanks to GW Annual mail order magazine or White Dwarf.
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This is just too weird to not be a little bit interesting. An army of models like this might have even been more popular than normal CDs were.
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Post by OgreBattle »

Half petrified dwarfs in cyber-centaur bodies would be cool
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Post by Ancient History »

Again, it's the problem that Chaos Dwarfs as an army lack really interesting units. They don't have heavy infantry a la Chaos Warriors, they don't have long-range or versatile artillery a la Dwarfs, they don't have Steam Tanks or Pistoliers a la the Empire, they don't have weird sorcerous weapons or weapon teams a la Skaven - and you could really argue that the Skaven do the sorcerous engineering + mobs anti-dwarf concept a lot better.

(Aside: Warhammer 4th/5th had a lot of stupid weird quasi-cyborgs. The Dwarfs had one, the Skaven had at least one, and there were some Orcs with wooden "bioniks" based on 40K.)
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Post by maglag »

My favorite version of "evil dwarves" is probably the one from Warlords Battlecry where dark dwarves focused on spamming constructs like the firebomb, stone golems, iron golems and even golem commanders, their ultimate unit is a giant robot plus pyromaniac artillery like the flame cannonand with a touch of destructive industrial revolution, with mottos like "Burn the forests!" and "In the name of progress!"

Golems/robots of any kind appear to be surprisingly absent from Warhammer troops, so an army focused on them would count as something new for the game.

And considering the Chaos Dwarves fluff, I wold say it would be pretty cool something along the lines of "chaos sorcerors slowly turn to stone but don't stop moving, instead becoming golems with different degrees of mindless". Heck, have it happen to all chaos dwarves, but stronger dwarves become stronger golems.
Last edited by maglag on Tue Jun 06, 2017 6:10 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by shlominus »

the earthshaker was arguably the best artillery weapon around for a time. the earthshaking effect meant that melee troops on foot simply could not reach you unless you missfired and even faster troops were severly hindered. and the best part: enemy shooting was greatly reduced and possibly even completely shut down! in tournaments with an army choice system they were usually heavily restricted.

the blunderbusses also were unique, while some choices like the death rocket or the sneaky gits had their own special rules.

they might not have the model range of some other factiosn, but that was to be expected for a secondary army. calling an army with several unique units "lacking any really interesting units" seems baffling to me. they might have produced fewer truly iconic units like some other armies (it's kind of mean to compare them to skaven on that count, cause skaven have more than most), but they certainly had a few. if you compare them to dwarves, who, apart from a selection of unique war machines, had very few unique troops, things look much better. at the time, dwarves had 20 overall selections in their army list, while chaos dwarves had 19. not so shabby.

the fact that they had every different kind of unit available (apart form monstrous infantry) made them very versatile. very few other armies could do that and it was one of the many reasons why they were quite popular.

it was a bit sad that they removed the old weapon teams or the boar-centaur war engines, but there was still plenty of uniqueness in any chaos dwarf army.

ps: not quite sure about the timing, but bloodbowl had star players very early on, starting in 2nd editon (1989, maybe even earlier). were they common at that time in warhammer? i don't think so. it might have been the other way around. ;)
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Post by Whipstitch »

I would think there'd certainly be room for a faction of sneaky miners and engineers armed with explosives, golem servitors and industrial machinery. I mean, that's pretty much the whole MO of the Dark Iron dwarves in Warcraft and people didn't even blink at such a characterization. After all, it's basically just a bunch of dwarfy behavior as practiced by a bunch of assholes.
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Re: [OSSR]White Dwarf Presents: Chaos Dwarfs

Post by GâtFromKI »

Ancient History wrote:Eventually they had a bit of a rebirth in 7th edition - where they were re-invisioned once again, albeit without the Big Hats, and as hideously expensive Forge World models, before the whole game setting blew itself to hell.

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Leave the beards on.
What is this thing ???

OK, some people don't revere the Big Hats god. But everyone agrees: Big Hat dwarfs have something special, some unique graphical personality. They aren't just Yet Another Dwarf.

The image is just that: Yet Another Dwarf. With a big gun, like so many dwarfs, and mining materials, like every dwarfs ever. I have no difficulty imagining them in any regular dwarf army. Why do they pretend they're chaos dwarfs? Why don't they simply include them in regular dwarfs armies, where they belong?
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