[OSSR] Realm of Chaos - the Lost and the Damned

[DrPraetor]

The first thing you'll notice is that the book has a giant picture of Papa Nergal on the cover who - fun fact! - is now President of these United States.


Shown here, a MAGA rally

Set the wayback machine to 1990, true believers! This ought to be a fairly quick review, because although coming it a respectable 295+ pages, this has a lot of highly repetitive army lists.

There will be a lot of Warhammer history - I expect the peanut gallery to chime in as needed, since my Warhammer-ology is spotty and probably someone on this board has read the novels - and plenty of unflattering comparisons to President Trump. Dune will come up! Maybe more than you would've expected!

There will be many - largely unfavorable - comparisons to the companion book, Slaves to Darkness, which has already been reviewed by http://tgdmb.com/viewtopic.php?t=55529 Chamomile.

I'll be reviewing the book more or less in reverse, because the WH40K armies are at the end.

[Ancient History]

Oh, that's a fun one.

[DrPraetor]

So, Lost and the Damned - what do you get?

Divided roughly into sections:
[***]
You get ~40 pages of Nurgle and Tzeentch material, including a bit of crunch. You saw Nurgle, but no-one cares what Tzeentch looks like.

That's Magnus the Red, who has more cache than his generic sorcerer God.

So as has been pointed out, Slaanesh and Khorne are enemies because they are Sex and Violence and came out in the first book. Also Khorne hates magicians - but he doesn't hate Tzeentch, in spite of Tzeentch being the magician God, and all of Khorne's units having hate against wizards. This actually doesn't bother me?

Tzeentch and Nurgle hate each other because they represent amibition and despair respectively. I like it. It sells me on the thesis that the Chaos Gods represent pathological extremes of normal inclinations. YMMV.

[***]
You get ~50 pages of proto-necromunda rules, mixed in with some more setting/fluff.

These are worth unpacking in some detail, but they're pretty bonkers.

I know people used to actually run WFB and 40K campaigns in my then-local gaming store, but I never saw the appeal.

[***]
You get the obligatory ~20 pages of pictures of people's painted miniatures.

They're about as good as a random sampling of stuff from that same store when I was a kid.

[***]
You get ~40 pages on various warbands which can participate in the aforementioned proto-necromunda campaigns.


[***]
You get ~30 pages of WH40K chaos fluff. How does this differ from the fluff in the other chaos book? I suppose I'll compare.


[***]
You get ~50 pages of WHFB army lists, of the type not used in campaigns. For which version of WHFB? I have no idea! The authors may not know either!

Pretty sure not that one.


[***]
You get ~40 pages of WH40K army lists. I'm going to start with this section, in particular comparing it with the army lists in the other Realm of Chaos book.


[***]
Finally, you get ~20 pages of "summary" - I think this is mostly repeating tables from inside the book but it has a few references to the previous book in it?

The thing is, unless you play all these different games, the book likely only has at-most 60 pages of material (counting generously, including art - but art can be value for a miniatures game) that you'd consider using?

The book looks nice? Every page has that baroque warhammer chaos art crawling up and down the margins, but the text is mostly black on white with only occasional weird fonts and stuff. The art is good - the production values are somewhat better than those on the previous volume.

[Username17]

You get ~50 pages of WHFB army lists, of the type not used in campaigns. For which version of WHFB? I have no idea! The authors may not know either!

This is... basically accurate. Nominally the Realms of Chaos books were made for 3rd edition. But 3rd edition wasn't an edition so much as a state of mind.

3rd edition is a hardback book, but it was originally intended to be compatible with the army lists in Ravening Hordes, which was the 2nd edition Ravening Hordes and not the 6th edition Ravening Hordes. Those army lists were deprecated by the creation of a new army list book called Warhammer Armies.

Realms of Chaos was probably made for 2.5th edition, 3rd edition, and 3.5th edition agnostically.

-Username17

[DrPraetor]

The other thing to remember is that 40K was a fork from second edition, but the people writing this book seem to think you can re-use rules between 40K and 3rd edition?

I want to start our comparison here:
The Lost and the Damned, pp. 252, Chaos Renegades
but we'll also be comparing vs.
Slaves to Darkness, pp. 231, Chaos Renegades

These two sections are weirdly redundant and inconsistent given that they seem to have been written by the same people?
StD is by https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bryan_Ansell, Mike Brunton and Simon Forrest with additional material by Matt Connell, Graeme Davis and Rick Priestly.
L&D is by https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bryan_Ansell and Rick Priestly

Because http://tgdmb.com/viewtopic.php?t=55491 - I think AH maybe knows who the hell these people are?

So I don't have a good explanation for the oddly specific ways these two sections are different.

They both start with generic explanations of how chaos marauders work

a bunch of chaos dudes jump on a shoddily maintained faster than light vessel and go find someone to mess with at random.

The two descriptions aren't contradictory so much as different in emphasis and tone? It really reads like different people describing the same underlying ideas.


For those who don't know, the end of the classic Elric saga has the great army of Chaos show up with a bevy of chaos champions who have lost their humanity and powered up their mutations with human sacrifice. Xiombarg's flunkies in the middle Corum novels have basically the same schtick, complete with randomly having gotten horse heads and suchnot.
In Warhammer, you play guys aspiring to be Jagreen Lern, and in 40K you play the same guys in space!

Anyway both StD and L&D introduce the concept fine but you certainly don't need both intros.

Then things start to diverge, and hard.

Each book includes a similar but divergent cookbook description of how to generate the corresponding rewards, units, and etc.
L&D almost entirely uses WH40K-specific charts.
StD almost entirely references you back to the WFB charts, occasionally remembering to tell you that dwarves are squats, elves are dark eldar, etc.

L&D and StD both have a series of charts and point costs for either generating a chaos renegade warband from scratch (or taking a warband you've been using in a campaign and slotting it into your army.)
The base cost is:
StD: 60, +30/reward, +10/follower, +10/follower-reward, +cost of equipment
L&D: 200 for D4 rewards*, +200/4 rewards, seemingly inclusive of retinue and equipment.
* I assume that the first 2 rewards aren't counted as rewards, but they don't actually say this.

The StD gets followers every other reward (but might get two rolls), while the L&D gets followers every roll.
StD followers show up with rolls on various equipment charts, while L&D followers show up with a D6 worth of equipment points, plus standard equiment for their squad.
but, L&D followers are bullshit losers showing up in groups of 1D3 while StD followers show up in groups of 2D6 if their grunts, can be squats or zoats or entire squads of space marines.

I think that a StD retinue with 6 rewards is going to come out significantly stronger but also costing more points? Also it will be way more random because in L&D you might get an assassin or psyker-lord for 10 points, or you might get some gretchen for 10 points each; and then you'll be rolling on equipment tables for them while in StD you get 1D6 points to spend on equipment, which is still random (frankly not as good).

Relevant to Frank's point, in L&D it thinks you will default to rolling on the fantasy army followers list, while in StD it think you will do this occasionally in order to give your chaos warband additional flavor. L&D has a very-slightly-rejiggered fantasy follower table. This is of course an issue because WH40K is not based on the same engine! Occasionally, L&D reminds you to ignore the +X values after mental statistics that WFB 3rd edition stat blocks sometimes remember to have (and sometimes don't.) StD has a similar problem but it's not as severe - as a minor example, you might get a rod of command which refers to various manouevre rules that I don't think 40K had because they were specific to WFB 3rd and not WFB2nd on which 40K was based? I'm not 100% sure on that one.

What's really weird is that the references all go forward in time. StD is constantly telling you to look stuff up in the (as yet unpublished) L&D, but L&D hardly ever does the reverse (the major exception being the actual descriptions of the chaos attributes.) So for example, if you wanted to make a Thousand Sons chaos marauder, StD tells you to look up the Tzeentch stuff in L&D and work from there. L&D never bothers to tell you that Slaanesh marines are in the previous book because they don't seem to entertain the possibility that you'd use these warband rules for Slaanesh champions!

My big complaint - and it is significant - is that having both books and wanting to have a Slaanesh warband and a Nergal warband duke it out, I have no idea where to start.

I'll begin with a fairly simple issue. The follower chart in StD specifies that you might get a Thousand Sons devastator squad - ka-ching! - and to look that up in L&D. The Tzeentch Renegades army list in L&D only has Thousand Sons tactical squads in it. These are pre-rubric Thousand Sons who give bonus magic points to adjacent units instead of being dust fused in armor.

So, on that topic, we then get Death Guard and Thousand Sons army lists except we don't. Instead, we get Chaos Marauder army lists that only get champions instead of any usual traitor legion personalities! Furthermore, there seem to be no rules for summoned demons or possessed in these armies, which I'll return to in another post.

The heavy equipment in these armies is limited by number of champions rather than by number of techmarines, no-one gets rolls on equipment tables, points costs are moved around in strange and random ways, and for some reason both armies get ork freebooters. Pages 264 and 276 are exactly the same.
This picture shows up twice, once at the bottom of each:


Likewise, pp. 265 and 277 differ only in having swapped art for the predator tank in the corner.

But the big difference between L&D and StD is that the L&D armies have totally different units in them, including just a couple of space marine options - terminators and generic chaos marines, and either thousand sons or death guard depending - a few minor demons like nurglings, and the 40K beastmen, who I'm pretty sure are broken.

I know that the relative value of T, wounds and armor saves and such swung wildly prior to 40K 3rd edition, but for 15 points you can get a beastman (of either Tzeentch or Nurgle) with T5, 2 wounds, and a plasma pistol. In StD, the beastmen get explosive collars and need to be handled by tech marines. Either version has lousy morale, so you'll want to buy some independent champions at 100 points each because I think in this version they could give their leadership to squads? They're hella random, though.

Interestingly, L&D has hardly any psykers. Thrall Wizards are a 40K unit but they use WFB 3rd edition spell casting rules (I think), for example.

The whole 40K section of this book is a letdown, because you don't have enough material compatible with either version of the rules to make comparable armies of all four chaos gods possible. The omission of a full army list for either thousand sons or death guard is particularly irritating, because these chaos renegade army lists are highly repetitious, and they're wasting tremendous amounts of space. The army list entries in StD generally fit four or five squads to a page, while L&D only fits one or two - and several pages are just straightup duplicates between the two army lists.

[Username17]

Warhammer 40k got its first edition that was called that in 1993 (Warhammer 40K: 2nd edition). Before that, Warhammer 40K existed as "Rogue Trader" that was a patch on Warhammer Fantasy Battle. Now, you may notice that between 1987 and 1993 there were three different extremely different editions of Warhammer Fantasy (2nd, 3rd, and Herohammer), and also that there were big hardcover mid-edition rules updates that severely changed major rules or available army lists or both (Ravening Hordes, Warhammer Armies, Realms of Chaos, and so on). So having Rogue Trader spend almost seven years defaulting to WFB rules and units was deeply weird. For a very expensive competitive game, Warhammer spent a lot of its existence as a theater of the mind.

Anyway, 2nd edition W40K is when they finally put enough rules into the main box that it was a truly stand alone game. But that's definitely not the 40K that Slaves to Darkness and Lost and the Damned were written to interact with.

-Username17

[Thaluikhain]

These two sections are weirdly redundant and inconsistent given that they seem to have been written by the same people?
StD is by https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bryan_Ansell, Mike Brunton and Simon Forrest with additional material by Matt Connell, Graeme Davis and Rick Priestly.
L&D is by https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bryan_Ansell and Rick Priestly

Graeme Davis wrote Midnight Rogue for Fighting Fantasy (set in Port Blacksand, the first one since City of Thieves to be set there), and apparently also did some GURPS stuff.

Any discussion of Bryan Ansell requires this image:

Don't know how many people would have spotted it without being told, but if you take the first letters of the descriptions of the Features and Departments, well...

Rick Priestly is a big name in early GW, but you'd probably guess that. He left once they'd gotten too focused on sales rather than the game, so there's that.

Simon Forrest was the editor for White Dwarf for 1989-1991

[DrPraetor]

So did Bryan Ansell have ghost-writers? Was he taking credit for other people's work? Was he just hard to work with?

It doesn't seem like these two books were written by the same person.

Re-reading my review above, it occurs to me that anyone who doesn't know how Chaos Champions work in Warhammer, will be confused.

So Warhammer - in it's various interlocking flavors - has had various campaign rules, in which you get advance points or advances or some combination of the two. These have often been random, but in the case of Champions of Chaos they are super random, including a significant chance of becoming a mindless mutant (a "chaos spawn") or transcending to become a demon prince, which is totally metal but bad for you the player because your highly-experienced champion evaporates. These advances are called rewards:

The odds of becoming a demon prince or a chaos spawn are a bit complicated.
On each reward, you have a 60% chance of getting a Gift and a 40% chance of getting an Attribute (a mutation.) These options are mutually exclusive on the chart above. You have a 10% of getting the Eye of God, which is itself a Gift but which ends your character if you have >=6 of either.

So since you get more Gifts than Attributes, you start out with a somewhat better chance of becoming a Demon Prince, but some of the Gifts turn into attributes instead (yoink!), some of the attributes turn you into a chaos spawn flat-out (such as Mindless), and if you don't roll the Eye of God between getting your 6th Gift and your 6th attribute, you are SOL.

Much of the balance of Lost and the Damned is dedicated to special rules for that flowchart, including special rules for beastmen and centaurs, for example.

[DrPraetor]

Moving backwards through L&D, we next come to:
pp. 238, Daemon Legions of Chaos (in L&D)
which corresponds to:
pp. 176, Daemonic Legions (in StD)
no, actually
pp. 173, Battles in the Chaos Wastes (in StD)

So again, both of these books have an opener that you'll be battling in the Chaos Wastes, although L&D offers that you might be battling in the Eye of Terror instead.



[/i]That's actually the helix nebula but damn it looks cool.[/i]

In the two books, you have parallel renditions of why the Chaos Gods enjoy the sport of playing Warhammer against eachother, along with some funky rules for chaos battlefields. Once again, this really reads like the same specification being filled out by different people (who weren't reading each other's work?)
In StD, the chaos battlefield has random rules (or you can agree to some with your opponent) like super smash brothers - no items, no armour saves, etc. StD promises that L&D will have rules for chaos terrain!

L&D has no rules for chaos terrain.

L&D, has no random rules for battlefields; instead, you get an alternative reward chart for chaos champions fighting on the chaos battlefield. This is part of their focus on campaigns, which takes up much of this book. The alternative reward chart is even more random, since it often kills your entire warband or makes you lost in time and space or something.

In both versions, you and your opponent agree to a number of greater daemons that you get without points. Some fiddly details differ - suggested number of points, instability doesn't apply, pp. 176 of StD has... a hot nautilus-human hybrid mutant chick?

That's +15 on the boner confusion chart.

but these rules are basically compatible!

+1 points for gryffindor!

When we look at the actual army lists, things get weird.

First, although I have to scroll forward to the Auxilliaries army lists that StD has and L&D doesn't, there is a reference to "Warhammer Armies", which means that StD was already targeting WFB 3.5?

Anyway, these two army lists are mostly compatible? There are basically four differences:
[*] StD demon armies have legionnaire units of Khorne and Slaanesh, and promise that L&D will have such rules for Nurgle and Tzeentch.

no such rules exist

[*] L&D has rules for banners and musical instruments and... StD doesn't? No, it does, but they're buried in the Auxiliary chapter and they're generic - same as anyone else gets from Warhammer Armies. L&D has custom standards and instruments for N and T.

[*] In L&D, Demon Princes (these are ascended chaos champions, see my previous post) replace greater demons at no points cost. This is almost certainly a bad deal because Greater Demons fucking stomp you, but I suppose if you cheatroll well, a demon prince could be bonkers. In StD, Demon Princes cost a lot of points.

[*] The rules for auxiliaries are completely different. StD takes WFB auxilliaries limited at 1/3 of your points, but can include shit like undead and... there's a whole list of auxilliaries with stuff like hiding spectres in units of skeletons and jabberwocky!
L&D lets you pick from the other demon army lists (including the ones in StD), from the WFB army list for your chaos God... and from the 40K army list for your God! No points limits are given, and if there are any issues using 40K stuff in your WFB game... well, figure this out on your own.

Overall, demons are way overpriced so you'll be scheming to spend points on various mortal auxilliaries - and arguing about whether Plasma Pistols count as magic weapons. I suppose you can just use the auxilliaries rules from one or another book and... probably there was a White Dwarf article with standards and instruments for Khorne and Slaanesh? I bet there was.

Anyway, Legionnaires of Khorne/Slaanesh are moderately elite infantry in chaos armor and weaponry for slightly too many points. The Doom Drum costs 100 points and makes 50% of your opponents unable to fight back in close combat (it doesn't say whether this only applies to the unit with the musician or the whole battlefield or what). For 200 points your unit can be immune to all magic and ranged attacks! For some reason, the banner that shoots insects at people is Tzeentch and not Nurgle?

So Legionnairies you don't want to buy, but some of the standards and instruments are probably bonkers enough to be worth their high point costs. Also the standards and instruments are cooler. This is a rare area where I think L&D is superior to StD, but they really should've back-filled with special instruments and such for the other two chaos powers.

This has been somewhat scattered, but overall, L&D seems a bit lazy compared to StD. L&D stays "on topic" better - unlike StD, it doesn't have an entire page entry on non-corporeal undead (why is that in StD?) But L&D is actually not as well edited, it has a lot of white space, and it's repetitious. The failure to deliver stuff promised in the previous book is obviously irritating. But overall, StD is a bonkers labor of love by people who are clearly into what they're doing. L&D has some cool stuff but much of it is just paint by numbers.

[DrPraetor]

I realize I glossed over an important aspect of that last section - are the demons cool?

Part of the reason I glossed over this is that the demons are actually introduced in more detail (including special rules that they don't bother to repeat here!) earlier in the book. This chapter mostly concerns itself with how many you can have, how much they cost, etc.

Demons tend to be overpriced - a plaguebearer costs 90 points, and it's got a toughness of 3 and 1 wound. It's other attributes are pretty impressive - it has maxed out mental stats and 2 attacks at WS 5 - but they get smeared by their points value in mortal line troops, of the type you'd actually bring to a demonic battlefield.

But let's put aside costs, this book is where N & T got their demons - did they get good demons?

Well, like Khorne, Nergal basically is his own Greater Demon:

and yeah, I like that demon. Nurgle demons have a jovial personality or a philosophical attitude, in a brittle bipolar kind of way.

Plaguebearers are my least-favorite Nurgle demon. They're explicitly described as being uptight about logistics? That's weird - what with being, you know, demons - but as an aspect of despair I admit it has resonance.

this squad is shown with a range of chaos attributes - I know that varies between editions, but I certainly like this paint job.

Nurglings are happy plague-babies that want to play with you. That's solid nightmare material, in my book.

But I don't think the figures of nurglings have ever been that cool.

Did the beast of nurgle get changed between versions? In L&D, they show up on bases like nurglings.

Continuing the theme, beasts of nurgle are happy puppies that want to frolic with you.

So, yes, I like the Nurgle demons.

Tzeentch demons are kinda lame. As mentioned way above, I rather approve of the ambition / despair dichotomy, but Tzeentch seldom remembers he is god of ambition and insanely complicated plans, because he's usually busy being the god of chaos magic and lots of mutations. In terms of schtick and aesthetics, that's a lot like being Chaos Undivided. I think the fourth Chaos God was originally intended to be Malal, but there's a whole thing there with comic books and copyright.

Tzeentch is kinda generically Chaos and his demons...

A lord of change. Well, that's a boss paint job, but is that demon extra-magical or extra-mutant? It's a Vrock.

Vrocks are okay, and the Lord of Change is, IMO, the best Tzeentch demon

but only because...

Horrors, frankly, look stupid. Tzeentch, like Slaanesh, looks like one his lesser demons. In the case of Slaanesh, that works well, because Daemonettes are iconic. But Tzeentch looks like a stupid ape dude and no-one has even bothered to post a picture of him on the interweb.

Then we get Tzeentch Flamers, which no-one cares about?

I will say, in defense of Flamers, that at least they look like demons of change. They have a certain dynamism. They're okay.

Discs are fucking stupid

Actually, this second disc I just found looks okay - if discus had been flying manta rays instead of circles with teeth that would've had some juice to it.

So that's cool, but, you know, it's not a disc, right?
I think the Tzeentch = Disc thing came from someone wanting to ride his Floating Disc around in D&D.

In summary: Nurgle's demons are an all around success. If anything, they do too good a job of adhering to theme, and are a bit redundant? But they deliver on the plague carnival, so people like them. Nurgle's minions are also the villains of the favorite campaign / storyline of WFRP, which has helped to build Nurgle's cachet.

Tzeentch, in spite of having some of the coolest stuff in the setting assigned to him (Magnus the Red, for example), is... kinda dispensable? Like if everyone who followed Tzeentch just followed generic Chaos instead you wouldn't even notice, right? His demons run on a spectrum from generic and forgettable, to downright stupid.

[Thaluikhain]

To be fair to Pink and Blue Horrors, claymation blob monsters looked cool (IMHO) back in the day of really crude metal miniatures. And if you kill a Pink one two Blue ones come out (not sure when that was established, though), and they have creepy laughs.

Now that you mention it, I don't care about other Tzeentch demons at all, whereas the other gods have cool stuff.

[OgreBattle]

Magnus the red looks like he could be a khornate demon prince

So were Vrocks based on something existing, Dark Crystal?

[Username17]

So were Vrocks based on something existing, Dark Crystal?

Vrocks were originally called Type I Demons, and are from the 1970s. As far as I recall, they were introduced in the 1977 AD&D Monster Manual, although it would not surprise me in the slightest if they appeared in some of the white box era scribblings. My belief is that they were inspired (directly or indirectly) from a picture in Ars Goetica, an old ass rant about demonology:



-Username17

[deaddmwalking]

That looks like a goose-headed demon, which makes a lot of sense to me. Geese are bad-tempered as fuck, while vultures seem pretty chill. That said, I've not tried to get close to vultures when they're eating (nor have they approached me for a meal). A goose, on the other hand, assaulted me looking for my picnic sandwich.

[Whirlwind]

In summary: Nurgle's demons are an all around success. If anything, they do too good a job of adhering to theme, and are a bit redundant? But they deliver on the plague carnival, so people like them. Nurgle's minions are also the villains of the favorite campaign / storyline of WFRP, which has helped to build Nurgle's cachet.

Tzeentch, in spite of having some of the coolest stuff in the setting assigned to him (Magnus the Red, for example), is... kinda dispensable? Like if everyone who followed Tzeentch just followed generic Chaos instead you wouldn't even notice, right? His demons run on a spectrum from generic and forgettable, to downright stupid.

Which storyline are you thinking of Dr P? Tzeentch's minions are the protagonists of The Enemy Within in WFRP 1, Khorne's minions are the protagonists of the main campaign in WFRP 2, IIRC.

[DrPraetor]

Which storyline are you thinking of Dr P? Tzeentch's minions are the protagonists of The Enemy Within in WFRP 1, Khorne's minions are the protagonists of the main campaign in WFRP 2, IIRC.

Your Warhammerology is superior - for some reason, I thought Nurgle was the main villain in The Enemy Within.

Doesn't the Oldenhaller Contract link to the Enemy Within somehow? That's probably why I was confused.

[Username17]

Yeah, the opening of The Enemy Within is with Nurgle cultists, but then it switches to Tzeentch cultists for the followup adventures without any real explanation.

-Username17

[OgreBattle]

Now the attitude of this era is that your chaos warband is meant to be role playing based with hilarious random rolls, and not a tournament wargame right?

[Whirlwind]

Now the attitude of this era is that your chaos warband is meant to be role playing based with hilarious random rolls, and not a tournament wargame right?

I was there but too young to understand it...I was hoping someone would explain it to me. Rogue Trader in the rulebook seems quite RPG/narrative focused (no points system, random rolls for equipment and so on), but a couple of years afterwards the WH40K compendium came out, which was a proper set of army lists, so something must have been changing in the background.

[DrPraetor]

Now the attitude of this era is that your chaos warband is meant to be role playing based with hilarious random rolls, and not a tournament wargame right?

I was there but too young to understand it...I was hoping someone would explain it to me. Rogue Trader in the rulebook seems quite RPG/narrative focused (no points system, random rolls for equipment and so on), but a couple of years afterwards the WH40K compendium came out, which was a proper set of army lists, so something must have been changing in the background.

The attitude of this era is: like, whatever, man.

There are occasional comments that stuff is "inappropriate for competitive play", which isn't even the most bonkers stuff. So, for some reason, possessed space marines are inappropriate (that's actually from StD), but a vortex missile that wipes out an enemy force but you can't use in another battle isn't?

There's a common assumption that your chaos army will include the chaos champion and warband that you've been using in a more or less necromunda-like campaign. On the one hand, obviously you would want to do that. On the other hand, this is a huge challenge for a game designer and these GW people are completely not up to it.

In some ways - I'm paraphrasing something Frank posted in another Warhammer thread - Warhammer made a big mistake by abandoning this model. In the warband becomes part of your army model that Warhammer originally supported, you start by collecting a small warband of guys - and, like, a purple dragon that's totally sweet, right? - and then, only once you have an established collection do you add pike squares and shit.

Since people get into the hobby by finding seven or eight figures and painting them probably not to any coherent theme, this makes it much easier for people to enter than if an entry level army is supposed to include 30 dudes with identical regimental colors.

[shlominus]

Doesn't the Oldenhaller Contract link to the Enemy Within somehow? That's probably why I was confused.

tew is mentioned at the end of the oldenhaller contract, but it's just a plug. the adventure is not actually part of the campaign, though many did link them. tew features followers of most of the major chaos gods, not just tzeentch, and even some minor ones (that were created for the campaign, i think). several different tzeentch cults appear, but they are not "the main villain". there is none. the big bad fought at the end of the campaign has no connection to any of the cults, if i remember correctly.

Now the attitude of this era is that your chaos warband is meant to be role playing based with hilarious random rolls, and not a tournament wargame right?

indeed. we rolled up a lot of warbands and champions, but we rarely actually played campaigns (and if we did, they never lasted long). the system was almost completely unsustainable. we were young and stupid, the idea of simply breaking those terrible rules didn't occur to us.

[Whirlwind]

tew is mentioned at the end of the oldenhaller contract, but it's just a plug. the adventure is not actually part of the campaign, though many did link them. tew features followers of most of the major chaos gods, not just tzeentch, and even some minor ones (that were created for the campaign, i think). several different tzeentch cults appear, but they are not "the main villain". there is none. the big bad fought at the end of the campaign has no connection to any of the cults, if i remember correctly.

Your memory misleads you...the baddie at the end is a Daemon of Tzeentch. As you say, there are other cults that appear, but Tzeentchian minions appear most often and are the main baddies in Shadows Over Bogenhafen, Power Behind the Throne & Empire in Flames. They are involved in Death on the Reik and not involved in Something Rotten in Kislev at all.

I don't normally know this much about Warhammer, but I have just been running these for my kids...

[shlominus]

*sigh*

ok.

[DrPraetor]

We're at L&D page pp. 193 - 234 - the Armies of Chaos; Chaos Army of Nurgle; Chaos Army of Tzeentch
this compares to StD pp. 194 - 208 - Armies of Chaos; Armies of Khorne; Armies of Slaanesh

Now the attitude of this era is that your chaos warband is meant to be role playing based with hilarious random rolls, and not a tournament wargame right?

I don't think the authors see any difference.

Once again, these don't even read like they're for the same edition of the game, but they clearly do because both reference Warhammer armies!

Okay, in L&D, your army consists of:
[*] Warbands (Champions + Followers), which you can generate using the full rules or bring from your campaign.
[*] Rank and File Units, which are bought from the army list.
[*] Independent Champions, who are generated to totally different specifications than the champions with warbands!
[*] Chaos Creatures, who are rolled from a random table

There are a couple of pages on creating and retaining the army. All of these chaos champions (and warbands, and such), are supposed to be gathering rewards and followers and such-fucking-not as you play.

You're also supposed to keep track of casualties and mostly when a model dies, your army does not get the points back with certain carve-outs and exceptions?


Then we get rules for war altars - which provide bonuses to leadership and combat resolution, whatever. These rules differ in exactly two minor respects from the rules in StD.

When the above is killed, you have to make rout tests.
1) In StD, only units within 12" can rout. In L&D, the rout test is army wide.
2) In StD, the altar can be killed by "desecrating" it (the attendants are dead, enemy troops are in BtB contact.) In L&D, it has to be reduced to 0 wounds (which I think would happen pretty fast if it were assaulted.)

Did Bryan feel that the penalty for losing your War Altar needed to bigger? There's no acknowledgement that these rules are different, let alone a sense as to why.
I believe that this rule was changed completely unintentionally, but again it looks strongly like the same high level description of how war altars work, written by two groups of people who didn't see each-others notes.

Also:
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You may opt to have no attributes at all, or a set number up to the maximum allowed for the creature concerned (see the Beastiary in The Lost and the Damned).

In the previous posts, spoilers are meant to be read in the Arrested Development narrator voice. There is no beastiary in LtD. There Chaos Creatures tables will produce creatures with attributes (mutations), but there's no indication that those are maximums.

This is part of a broad pattern, in which StD promises all sorts of awesome stuff will be in L&D - fucking mutant chaos dragons - and then L&D fails to deliver. That might sum up the review - L&D has some cool stuff, but it's a big disappointment given what was promised in the previous volume.

The aptly-named "Sir Not Appearing in this Film."

Okay, so StD armies have a different price for champions (generally higher, but the equipment system is... different) and warbands (generally lower, but fewer follower rolls I think). I covered this somewhat in the 40K army lists above, but the different entries in StD aren't the same either.

The big difference is that StD armies get a much wider selection of allies and can include Hosts (sundry monsters, some of which do get attributes! So you can buy a wyvern with a D4 chaos attributes in this book but not in the next one!), and Slaanesh can hire mercenaries. There's a table explaining how many of your points can go to these different piles. L&D has none of this stuff (there are allies in the army lists.)

The very small difference is that StD has rules for your baggage train (which I don't think costs points, but it's mandatory if you want to use mercenaries?)

One more overall difference emerges on careful reading. StD has two tables to generate attributes/mutations; one for champions ("personal") and one for squads ("dominant"). The squad-based mutations can't be shit like "magic-user". Neither the 40K army lists in StD, nor any of the army lists in L&D, use the squad-based mutations at all.
My best guess is that L&D is trying to be a standalone book as much as possible, and so they decided to omit the squad-level attributes in order not to repeat the tables or something? But they're not explicitly rejected that I can see - they're just gone. Maybe Bryan just forgot about them?

Then, on to the actual army lists. One thing that L&D has that StD doesn't is more special units for each army.
So I'll go Army of Khorne vs. Army of Nurgle:
Khorne can't hire wizards, can get "hosts" (misc. monsters) if they're not bound+ethereal (these two rules are not in the same place), has the option of giving WH40K weapons to 8 random characters for 240 points total.
Nurgle gets special standards and instruments that are different from the standards and instruments for the Demon Army of Nurgle above. The 100 point banner seems insane, but is available only in limited numbers. Nurgle's army also gets a cloud of flies that has a (6-Strength)/6 chance of paralyzing a nominated unit each turn.
So the Plague Banner costs 100+80 points (a vanilla chaos warrior costs 75) and unless the target saves at -4, the target takes D6 auto-wounds and another D6 auto-wounds every turn. That's obviously worth it, right?
But this version of warhammer has a hidden limit on how many 100 point magic banners you can have.


Both armies get Chaos Knights, Chaos Warriors, Chaos Thugs, generic Beastmen, Trolls and War Altars.

There are a lot of fiddly differences even for the shared units. In L&D, you have to buy a standard (which varies in price between units), then buy it a power? In StD, units just have magic standards and instruments at a fixed price with no explanation of what powers (if any) they're supposed to have? I will say L&D is better because at least it's explicit.

The Khorne War Altar costs 70 and includes 2 cultists (+50 for a wagon), the Nurgle war altar includes "any number of non-combatatant attendants" and costs 120 (the wagon is mandatory.)

Khorne Chaos Knights cost 650/8 and have +1S; Plague Knights cost 520/7 and have +1T, but I think you have to pay +40/7 to give them warhorses? Both these units have the hidden ability to buy 100 pt magic standards. The +1S for Khorne and +1T for Nurgle pattern is true for most of their team-specific units.
There are also generic Chaos Knights in L&D who cost 560/7, come with warhorses, and can only buy 50 pt magic standards.
Units in L&D have slightly more attributes (mutations), but this might be because minions of N&T are supposed to be more mutated? The more elite units have many more mutations on average. So this change might've been deliberate?

Title is "Plague knight on juggernaut", which is awesome but not allowed (Jugs are Khorne).

Then, Khorne also gets Chaos Marauders (intermediate between warriors/knights and thugs) who can be mounted, mounted Chaos Thugs, Chaos Dwarves and Dwarf Berserkers, various Chaos Dwarf artillery, Chaos Centaurs (this last difference is clearly deliberate because Tzeentch gets Centaurs), Minotaurs and Beastmasters (with a pack of either hounds or chaos spawn).

I think that all of those dwarves and such can be taken in addition to orc/goblin/chaos allies?

Nurgle, OTH, gets Chaos Undivided Chaos Knights and Warriors (who are just like the Nurgle versions but don't get the bonus T?), Diseased Flagellants - who all have 100 point magic standards (!), Pestigors (who are +1T Beastmen), Chaos Spawn and Chaos Hounds who mysteriously show up without handlers in this army list, you are invited to include a "cavalcade" which is basically the same as the baggage train from the previous book but explicitly non-combatants, a Plague Cart which provides bonuses against instability tests that I don't think your units have to take, Nurglings (see above), Plague Skeletons and Plague Zombies.
Then, Nurgle gets a special shortcut table for making Nurgle champions that is for some reason totally different than the engine used to make champions who have retinues. Solo champions will end up better equipped. This section looks like it was written by someone who didn't think the chaos army would have warbands at all? There are *200* base profiles provided, which vary from "1W loser with 2 bear heads" to Wizard-3 with acid spit. Your champion with *second highest leadership* (that is, not your general, don't ask), can have another 100 point magic standard, and you roll on a bunch of other tables that end up giving you pretty good equipment. You can spend a bunch of points on better equipment, or take death heads and staves of nurgle which you get instead of blood stones (see Khorne notes above).


Finally, for 200 points you can roll on this random creature table. In L&D you get this instead of the Hosts from StD - maybe you get 1D6 rats, maybe you get a dragon. Aha! Some of these are subject to instability, they'd benefit from the plague cart.

Then you get some Nurgle emblems.

More or less those.

OKAY. This is kind of exhausting to read, but now I'm comitted.

Army of Slaanesh vs. Army of Tzeentch:
Slaanesh can have mercenaries and isn't forbidden ethereal hosts. Slaanesh can get Dark Elves as allies instead of Orcs and Goblins.

Tzeentch has thrall wizards which have godawful complicated rules but the point is they spam 1st level spells. An advanced thrall wizard champion might spam higher level spells? That would be totally nuts but I think the only way to get that is to advance the thrall wizard champion in play, you have to buy them at their base level if you spend points. Like Nurgle, Tzeentch gets standards and musical instruments. The 100 point banner has a 2/3 chance of doing something randomly bad to each enemy model within 12", so it's worth the points. Then we get Tzeentch emblems, which I don't see replicated on the internet.

Again there are fiddly differences about how much lances cost and which troops can get chaos armour. Units of Slaanesh get +1Cl and +1WP - these are stats that units in WH used to get before it was all subsumed into leadership. Units of Tzeentch get more and mandatory chaos attributes (mutations). The quality of the editing in L&D is not good - so Knights of Tzeentch have stats for a Chaos Steed in their block, but no points cost is given for swapping them out. 9 Knights of Tzeentch cost 720 points while 6 Knights of Slaanesh cost 490; the Knights of Tzeentch are probably better on average since chaos attributes can be baller, although I'm not sure what you're supposed to do if your entire squad of knights turn into Chaos Spawn?

Anyway, the overlapping troops are about the same as the previous comparison, except that both Slaanesh and Tzeentch get centaurs. Instead of the goblins and dwarves and dwarf artillery that Khorne gets, Slaanesh gets dark elves who may be mounted or ride on lizards. Tzeentch gets the forementioned Thrall Wizards, gets Centaurs, Chaos Hounds/Spawn, Chaos undivided units who don't get the extra attributes/mutations, Tzeentch beastmen do get more mutations like his dedicated troops, you get chariots again.

You get a different random table of 200 champions than does Nurgle (but basically the same followup tables, and only slightly more magic); for 200 points you can roll on a slightly different table of random creatures (it's not very different - it doesn't have, like, more wizards or anything like that.)

The thrall wizards take up a lot of space and you get to cast every 1st level spell in the game probably in each battle, but they're not compelling.

So... the L&D armies get more stuff in their list, but they doubled down on the table rolling. StD promised a lot of cool stuff that L&D doesn't have, and it's frustrating given the low information density. These chapters in L&D are 41 pages instead of StD's 14 and have way more charts but not really more stuff.

Comparing the two books, StD is also better edited in spite of being substantially more ambitious. Again, L&D gives me the impression that it was written by someone who had only second-hand reports on what was in StD (rather than, you know, having the same primary author.) Most of the differences are just odd, and from a first glance it wouldn't occur to me that these were even supposed to be for the same edition of the game!

[Username17]

Camp followers and baggage trains are really important in many historical battles but don't make much of an appearance in most epic fantasy literature. As such, when Warhammer was young and more heavily influenced by historical wargaming, they tried to make camp followers and baggage trains be an important thing. As Warhammer became more self referential, that was gradually dropped.

So it's not really surprising to see more references in the earlier book. The whole concept was in the process of being gradually deprecated and ignored.

-Username17