Not-40K Friday - The Old Chaos Army for Old World

 

I've had the 3D printer running this week to finish out the movement tray expanders for Old World. Something bit me and I got fired up to get the trays I needed done and I also decided to go back through and check figure-by-figure what kind of shape they were in after a decade of disuse.

Somewhat to my surprise they were in really good shape. I haven't used my chaos warriors "in anger" since the first few months of Age of Sigmar and I think the last time I talked about them here was right after the move. I played a lot of chaos armies back in 4th-5th-6th with 7th trailing off into not much by 8th. In the earlier days a chaos army was truly "Chaos" as it mixed warriors, daemons, and beastmen all together and as they were gradually separated in the rules I found myself without enough of any one part to make a real army. I decided to focus on the warrior branch of things and had a pretty solid army there painted up during 5th. That continued into 6th with many battles against my friends' Empire and Dwarf armies and people playing my High Elves.

The silver chaos warriors here are that first multi-part Warhammer regiments set they did in the 90's promising us that troop costs would be a lot more reasonable ... uh, yeah. I liked the rough metal look and so did most of the army this way, discovering that drybrushing silver over a black base coat went pretty quickly and looked pretty good. The banners in this army are paper, drawn up in Visio which was fairly new at the time, enahanced by some interesting fonts - an Ultima font among them - and then printed out, painted, and with some decals added on I thought they worked pretty well. They are still holding together 25+ years later so I can't really complain.

Old Two-Blades over there on the left has seen many hours on the table in both Warhammer and as a D&D character, maybe a GURPS character, and maybe even a Fantasy Hero character so he is well-loved here.

There are a couple of converted chaos wizards in the back and then a unit of marauder horsemen after I mostly got over my "I don't need puny skirmishers" phase. At the very least they are good for soaking up those goblin fanatics before they hit my real units. 

Here in the center is the real heart of the army. The red-armored warriors were my Chosen of Khorne - yes kids there was a time when "chosen" were a paint job, not a special model. The kits at the time only had weapon & shield, then later they added a halberd option - in metal. But in the rules we had an option for two weapons and with Khorne's frenzy rules you can bet I wanted that two weapon option. So, I hand-drilled all of those left hands and added in weapons from various other kits, including 40K Ork melee weapons from Gorka-Morka I believe. The unit leader has a pair of spiked maces and a big cape and he has served as an RPG character more than once too.

On the left middle is my first converted mounted hero - he's one of the metal champions of Khorne (he has a bloodletter-y head) that I cut in half at the waist and mounted up I think using a rough rider of Attila lower half. He usually ended up with a magic sword and then for a long time my favorite thing to put on him was the Chaos Runeshield. Unfortunately his shield has gone missing but I remember what it looked like and I am going to have to recreate it and get him back on the table.

On the right in the middle is my usual warlord for my later games, the metal mounted chaos lord that came out a little later than the rest. He has a huge axe, a decent-looking shield, and is on a nicely sculpted horse. Smaller fights were led by the bloodletter-head guy above but any bigger fight from probably 6th edition on was led by the Horned King there. 

Then in the back we have my beloved chaos knights - no. no one really needs a block of ten chaos knights but it is the hammer of all hammers if you do use the full unit. Shoot them, fireball them, drop a cannonball on them - they can lose half the unit and still blow almost anything off of the board with a charge. They were usually led by the Horned King or Bloodletter-Head which just made them nastier. Granted, for many fights I just took 5 or 6 of them and I'm sure I broke them into two units a few times but the back rank is mostly fill-in guys (including some plastic Battlemasters chaos knights) so I didn't really like fielding them separately.

Almost every force selection started with these two units and one or both of these leaders.

The righthand section of the army has another big block of chaos warriors and these are the earlier chunky monopose versions that I think originally came out with Heroquest but were later sold as a straight-up Warhammer unit. I ended up with a bunch of them through trades and such and decided to make another regiment. I liked the irony of a unit of "chaos" warriors made up of identical models. I used the metal 4th edition era command trio for them, did the same drybrush look as the other unit, and painted up their shields to add some nice contrast. They've been used as guards and evil fighters in many RPGs as well.

Next to them is one of my favorite character models for chaos that I used as a wizard. he has a staff, and has a helmet with no face, but his raised hand has what could be an eye in the middle of it - very strong on the creepy to weird chaos scale.

Then in the back we have a unit of chaos knights from about 3rd edition, with weirder poses, proportions, and looks than the later ones. It's good to mix in some older units into your army when you can - especially a chaos army.

Yeah, these guys. I like mine better but they definitely have a look.

So there is the army that's intact after 25+ years and getting ready to get back on the table. I do have some additional units of similar vintage that I either never quite finished or took a beating in a move at some point, or that my kids got a hold of when they were toddlers - never leave your army out on the table overnight if you have toddlers! -  so I have some additions to make and I am really looking forward to working on them again. 

Old World-wise my next-most-finished army is my High Elves so they will be getting some attention this weekend, then I have a huge pile of orcs & goblins to go through, some Undead to assemble, the Beastmen I finally caved and converted over to Sigmar bases two years ago only to see them eliminated and returned to the Old World line ... sigh ... and then that shiny box of Bretonians guilting me from the shelf. 

More to come for sure.

Age of Sigmar: Return of the Chaos Warriors

 

After the move comes the unpacking and as a part of that process I got to spend time with things I had not really  touched in a long time. One of those was my old school Chaos Warrior army that I built from about 3rd edition WHFB through 7th edition. It was one of the few armies that I could say was "finished" back then - though they're never really finished, right - in that I had a decent sized force that was fully painted and didn't really lack anything. 

Since the end of WHFB it's been sitting in a wall-mounted display case in the game room providing occasional armored guards for D&D games and not much else. Putting it back up in the new hobby room gave me a chance to look back through it and beyond realizing how many arms and horse tails I need to re-glue it reminded me how much I liked the whole Chaos Warrior thing and that I've missed not having an active force of big armored elite soldiers to stomp things with on demand.

So ... let's see where things are in Age of Sigmar ... oh look there's a big new army set coming out for Slaves to Darkness - the more dramatic name we have now for the old Chaos Warriors army. I had picked up some of the newer style knights and warriors a few years back but never did anything with them. With the prospect of some new releases, at least one possible player, and an interest in building something completely new, well, it all came together.

So now there is a pile of plastic in one corner of the hobby room and I have built my first unit in the new place. It's just one ten-man unit of chaos warriors but a) I am finally back in business after months of zero building or painting and b) it's an elite army so it will only take a few units to make it playable. Heck, there may only 20-30 of these guys in the army anyway, along with some knights and characters. So it's technically a new army but it's very manageable in terms of avoiding a big backlog.

Meanwhile, the old veterans await the return of The Old World ...

Age of Sigmar - First Game Report

So Warhammer Fantasy Battle has been replaced by Warhammer Age of Sigmar in the last few weeks. This is a whole new system with a shiny new boxed set and a new core book that is only tangentially related to what has come before - more on that later.

So did we go buy the big new box? Oh no - In a stunning move, GW has released the rules for AoS on their website for free, along with (even more shocking) army lists for all of the current armies in the game! I was shocked, surprised, and very happy to see this as it's been a  long time since Games Workshop has taken this approach to any of their games, and they've never done it for one of their "main" games. Maybe someone there finally gets it!

Given the rules and army lists and given that we already have several fantasy armies floating around the house we decided to give the new game a try. Apprentice Red brought out his Wood Elves while I dusted off my Chaos Warriors. After re-skimming the rules again and choosing our actual units we got started.

This won't be a long report.

On the right I took a mounted chaos lord, a chaos sorcerer on foot, two units of chaos warriors, and a unit of chaos knights.

On the left Red took two units of glade guard, a unit of waywatchers, a unit of dryads, and a wizard.

The one mistake we made was using the special terrain rules as written. That meant that every piece of terrain on the table had some kind of extra effect (tracked via the red die in each one) - out to radius of 3"! We quickly dropped the radius effect and just applied the effect to units inside the terrain. Even that meant that two of Red's units and one of mine were paralyzed for half the game because of bad rolls. Also, with the terrain effect being random (and with some of them being random every time a unit touches them!) it's difficult to plan around them or use them in any way.  This is not a desirable situation and we will be altering it the next time we play.

On my right the elf guards and the wizard moved up but were out of bow range on their turn. This would be very bad for them as it meant that on my turn (Red went first) they were within charge range of my chaos knights.

So ... yes - Chaos Knights work pretty much the same way they did in prior editions of Warhammer.

The knights and dryads locked up for two turns after this, mainly because they were too close for me to charge and backing off to set up another charge just does not seem like the chaos knight way of doing things.

Over on my left the infantry advanced with some protection from the chaos wizard, but he could not stop the Khorne warriors (the red ones) from being ensorcelled by the !#@$@#$% hills for two turns. Fortunately the elves were having some similar problems and only got two turns of shooting off during my advance. It hurt because wood elves have some nifty shooting abilities but Chaos Warriors are  2-wound troopers so it didn't hurt as much as it could have. I lost 3-4 men out of each unit.

Once they close in of course, it's a pretty short fight. Chaos warriors also still work about like you would expect them to based on prior editions of Warhammer.

So, what do I think of the new game after one session?

Good:

• It plays fast - we ran through first time setup, selection, and 4 turns each in about 2 hours and I would expect that to be faster if we played again
• There are not a lot of "fiddly bits" - the rules are 4 pages long so there's not much need to look stuff up so the focus does stay on the table and not in the "book"
• Free rules and free army lists is a great choice - multiple thumbs up for this!

Bad:

• Terrain rules are overdone and too variable. There are some good ideas here but it could be a lot better.
• There are not a lot of the nitty-gritty tactical decisions left from prior editions of Warhammer. From how to size up your unit, to formations, to maneuver, most of that is gone. It does speed up the game, but it removes a lot of the "weight" of the game too
• Most of the unit customization from prior versions of Warhammer is gone too. There are a few choices on some units, but tooling up a chaos lord is nothing like it was before.

My biggest positive impression is that it's much easier to grab some sheets, set up some units, and start (and finish!) a game now that it used to be. That's a strong feature and in my experience it's the way a lot of games are going nowadays. Simpler & faster is beating out detailed, tactically rich, simulation type games. Presumably because most players are willing to make that choice. and prefer it. It works for me for now, and I have the older versions of Warhammer (and a bunch of other fantasy rules) to use if I want to get more crunchy again.

Short version: this is the DBA version of Warhammer and I predict it will spark a revolution and a new following much like DBA did years ago in the ancients world.

My biggest negative impression is that when you take away all the unit customization, character customization, magic items, and consistent terrain rules, you take away a lot of both the pre-game and in-game strategy and tactics and turn it into a card game where it's mainly my unit stats vs your unit stats. No more angling for a flank charge, no more setting up to use a one-off magic item, no more screening one unit with another, and no more chance for an otherwise intact unit to flee with a failed leadership roll  means that unit stats (and the die rolls) determine most of the outcome of the game. 

The Big Controversy:

The internet has been aflame with the lack of point values and how it ruins the game. I don't think it does. Again, card games work just fine without point values and that's kind of what it feels like. I think there may be some kind of structure needed for a formal tournament and we are already seeing limits on the number of wounds etc but I wonder if a simple limit on spamming things wouldn't solve the problem. Something like "no more than three of any single unit" should do it, combined with designating certain special types as "unique" so we don't get three "Galrauch the two-headed dragon of chaos" units showing up in one fight. I think that would be enough of a limit to keep the game interesting for everyone.