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Well I’ve been meaning to do this for a while, ever since I scored the two Chaos books on ebay and now it’s time!

I remember we had copies of these two when I was in college and we poured through them, never actually played the game but looted these books of ideas.

So…

RETRO REVIEW – REALMS OF CHAOS: SLAVES TO DARKNESS!

By Bryan Ansell, Mike Brunton and Simon Forrest (and others) with art by John Blanche, Ian Miller and Tony Ackland (and others).



Slaves to Darkness is one of the (in)famous Realms of Chaos books from the late 80s. It came out in 1988 and really raised the bar for what a gaming supplement could look like and the subject matter it could include. For GW fans these are the two books that established the big 4 chaos gods, the major and minor daemons, Chaos Space Marines and generated reams of ideas that GW is still mining today. They are second only to Rogue Trader itself in terms of importance to the development of the Warhammer 40k universe.

At the time it retailed for over US$50, today they go for about $200 on ebay.



So what is in it? Is it any… y’know good?

Let’s find out!

Realms of Chaos basically gives the reader 4 things. First it’s brings in a new game, Chaos warbands where you take your character from putz to Daemon Prince, or Spawn, or Corpse. Most likely corpse. Second it’s a supplement for Warhammer Fantasy bringing in two new armies. Third it brings in three new armies for 40k. And finally it’s a fluff and art book without peer. Unfortunately it’s pretty much all of these things at once with little to no organization. If you think they’re bad now… imagine them 20 years ago!

It starts on an ominous note with Inquisitor Thrax investigating things beyond his ken.



Needless to say, it does not end well.



With that introduction out of the way we’re can enter the Realms of Chaos!



A quick word of praise here for the artists. All the art is ‘signed’ by custom runes, in this case the spiky ring is John Blanche. He and Ian Miller deliver some fantastic stuff throughout the book.

Anyway…

So we meet the big 4, Khorne, Slaanesh, Tzeentch and Nurgle. They’d been cited before along with other chaos gods like Malal but after this book came out they were the big 4 and the others just faded away.

We learn that each one had a legion of daemons who serve them. And of course these legions need names. So we meet the first of many (MANY! MANY!) charts. The Daemonic Name Generator.



Warning: Do not use near ley lines!
Caution: Do not call up that which you cannot put down!

To use it you roll 1d6 or 2d6 (your choice) and multiply it by the sacred number of your god.
Thus should I ever become a Daemon Prince of Khorne my name shall be:

IO’RH’FOL’ER’DH’TH’COG’II’FL’KW’ER’HL’G’G’KS
Plus 18 more syllables.

Since that’s a bit of a mouthful so you’ll also be wanting the Daemonic Use Name Chart.



These names are 4 words long so I get:
HEARTDOG SPOORPEST

Truly a name to be feared!

Now that we can name these daemons, let’s see what they look like on the tabletop.



Fists of Khorne!
Drinkers of Blood!
Lords of Skulls!
Eaters of Gore and Flesh!
Deathbringers of Khorne!
Blooded Ones!
Guardians of the Throne!
High-Handed Slayers!



Slayers of Slaanesh!
Feasters of Pain!
Base Ones!
Despoilers of the Flesh!
Great Horned Ones!

The funny thing, any one of those names is better than Blood Crusher or Soul Grinder…

This same section has fluff, rules and nicknames for the rest of the lesser daemons. Amazingly, despite the infinite diversity of chaos, they’re pretty much the same dudes running around today.

Now we can move on to…



THE ROAD TO POWER!



Ah the flowchart, nothing says raw unbridled chaos like a neat flow chart.



This chapter covers the narrative campaign where players take their champions to the glory of Daemon Prince-hood or the ignobility of spawndom. It includes chart after chart of rewards such as daemon weapons, steeds, spells and followers.

Ultimately, your champion is tested by the Eye of the Gods, where we look at the champion’s rewards outweigh his mutations and... either becomes a mindless spawn, following his former friends around like a puppy, OR becomes a god-like daemon prince.

The third option of course is death. But even in death they do not rest.



Slain champs have a 50/50 shot of rising for a year and a day as a skeleton champion.

Come back next time as we explore the wonders of the d1000 mutation table!

Kid_Kyoto wrote:

Fists of Khorne!
Drinkers of Blood!
Lords of Skulls!
Eaters of Gore and Flesh!
Deathbringers of Khorne!
Blooded Ones!
Guardians of the Throne!
High-Handed Slayers!

Ah the flowchart, nothing says raw unbridled chaos like a neat flow chart.

Come back next time as we explore the wonders of the d1000 mutation table!

Thank you tis was fun!!!


All those names are better!
Flowcharts and matrixes are fun!
Can't wait for the mutation table!

The memories this brings back playing against a Slaanesh army. The d1000 chart and abilities like Rapid Regeneration and Teleportation were just plain scary to play against.

Great book as it really laid the foundation for the greatest evil to Mankind.

D1000 is great, take a roll, what's this? Blood mutation, roll again. Ah, electricity of blood. Now my champ has electric blood, a furry tail, the face of a leach and an emaciated left arm.

Unfortunately my copy of this had to go on eBay to see me through some tough times in Uni.

Thanks KK. You're retros are awesome. Keep it up.

Thanks all, I will have more in a night or two.

I did review the d1000 table once before when I reviewed the WD issue it was in.

http://www.dakkadakka.com/dakkaforum/posts/list/207793.page

amazing old books, I liked the vastness of the random tables, the quasi lore book style and the running story at the beginning of each chapter, told by a storyteller in an Empire village, about the two champions, especially a line from the description of the Slaaneshi champion...

"His behaviour would have shamed a Bretonnian..."

But most of all, I liked the rivalry of the Gods, the realisation that Chaos is held back by it's constant infighting, have read these old tomes from end to end over and over again as a young teen, it just looks so wrong whenever I see new chaos all skipping around together, hand in hand, but divided along species lines instead, beastmen, humans and daemons.

I say bring back Armies of the Gods!

Yeah, the best bit is the whole story that interleaves chapter-by-chapter, to the two champions becoming Spawn or Prince. It's awesome.

Also, the army lists are great!

I got these out of the loft last month for the first time in 15 years. Awesome stuff!

It's like finding out mcdonalds was once a gourmet restaurant.

Unfortunately I think my old Adeptus titanicus has rotted :(

Classic stuff. KK, may I make a request for Rogue Trader as your next retro review?

JohnHwangDD wrote:
Also, the army lists are great!

With the exception of the fixed unit sizes. Multiples o 6 or 8 only was really annoying.

That said, with the current lovely plastic kits we have/are getting I'd kill for some proper daemonic battle rules.

Great read, as always Kyoto

The pictures could be a bit bigger though. I can hardly read the flow chart.

Love the review. When I was a kid, I thought that these books were the most evil thing I had ever read! (In a good way)

reds8n wrote:

JohnHwangDD wrote:
Also, the army lists are great!

With the exception of the fixed unit sizes. Multiples o 6 or 8 only was really annoying.

That said, with the current lovely plastic kits we have/are getting I'd kill for some proper daemonic battle rules.

Nothing stops you from using the old ones or writing your own.

And the unit size thing is classic.

And we’re back!

Let’s open up that copy of Slaves to Darkness again!



Whew! Hate it when the bound spirits of those slain by my unholy majiks escape from my dark tome bound in human flesh and inked in human blood. Geeze they stink up the whole room!

Anyway let’s look our next chapter. Now that we can name our demons, we’ll want to arm them. Sure we COULD arm with a generic Daemon Weapon. Yeah. IF WERE IN 2009! But we’re in 1988 when men were men and games had charts.

Lots of them.



Yes, even your weapon gets a d1000 table!

Yeah GW could have said ‘sword +1’ but why when they can say:
“834-846: The blade is made from fused bones and baked sinew, polished to a razor edge and painted with runes of blood. Once in every battle the bearer of the blade may summon the souls of those the sword has slain… A unit of 2d6 skeletons with standard profiles appears within 3” of the blade’s bearer.”

Y’know, even if the sword on whips up a pile of dead bones (isn’t that the ‘standard profile’ for a skeleton?) it would be AWESOME.

Now those are just your average, everyday chaos weapons, daemon weapons… well…



“For seventeen long centuries have I remained in this blade, confined within these metal walls. During all of my imprisonment you the first I have seen who is worth to bear me into battle. Come, take my hilt, and I will serve you in the manner of my kind, drawing blood of your enemies, protecting you in the midst of the fight, bringing you safe hom again. Now draw me from the scabbard and test the fineness of my balance. See how easily I swing, how my keen edge cleaves the air. A good choice, am I not?”

Is it just me or is that sword coming to on to me?

Of course there is a catch…

“Willing you picked me up. Your first mistake. Willing you drew me. Your second mistake. I do not allow my servants to make three mistakes, foolish mortal…”

Darn. That’s what my last girlfriend said too.



And so at last we come to…

THE D1000 MUTATION TABLE!



Yes my friends, 20 pages of mutations, most with subtables to add to the madness!

Because Atrophy alone is not good enough we have



And swapping limbs is a complex procedure best not attempted without consulting your subtable!



Sure spikes are cool and stuff but even silly mutations have their place



But even they need subtables!



And finally I want to put an old internet rumor to rest. GW does not have the best record on racial sensitivity. For years every bit of artwork, every painted model showed pale skin and European features. In Fantasy non-Europeans were represented by lizards, pigmies, skeletons, goblins and other creatures. So when you see a mutation called ‘black skin’ well people get upset.



Well as you can see they don’t mean dark skin, they mean pitch black.

Now if they could just explain why the Salamanders are suddenly black skinned rather than dark skinned…

Now the problem here is this makes the game IMPOSSIBLE TO PLAY. Just impossible. While having a half crab/half elf chaos champion who spits flame and has one horse leg is cool, who want to model it? And who wants to remodel it when he grows fur too? And who will believe you show up for a game and claim to have ‘randomly’ rolled god like powers with no disadvantages?

This I think would be great for an RPG campaign where the players are aspiring chaos champs or, even better, a video game but for a table top game? Not so much.

That being said GW did try to cover a lot of mutations in their early chaos sculpts. I have a few of these and they still look great today!








Join us next time when we look at Chaos in the 41st Millennium!

God! Chaos had SUCH CHARACTER! It's like the chaos we have now is a boring, limpid, uninspired version of the shear dripping, pulsing, writhing, uninhibited evil that was the chaos of yesteryear....... Even the models look like something, I don't know, CHAOTIC, happened to them, instead of the current "Geez, we dislike the emperor, and we've got spikes" of the current line.

GW's definitely gone corporate, and sold their souls a LONG time ago.

At least the game's a lot more fun to play! The old 40K was a lot more fun to talk about, 5th edition is definitely a better game, game.

While LatD certainly didn't provide rules to anything near this kind of depth, it at least provided a way to field old-school mishmash armies and was an outlet for modeling crazy stuff.

I think GW generally does a good job on the creative end, but IMO their current treatment of Chaos in 40K (and maybe WFB too) leaves a lot to be desired. It's just soulless compared to what it used to be.

BigToof wrote:God! Chaos had SUCH CHARACTER! It's like the chaos we have now is a boring, limpid, uninspired version of the shear dripping, pulsing, writhing, uninhibited evil that was the chaos of yesteryear....... Even the models look like something, I don't know, CHAOTIC, happened to them, instead of the current "Geez, we dislike the emperor, and we've got spikes" of the current line.

GW's definitely gone corporate, and sold their souls a LONG time ago.

At least the game's a lot more fun to play! The old 40K was a lot more fun to talk about, 5th edition is definitely a better game, game.

gorgon wrote:While LatD certainly didn't provide rules to anything near this kind of depth, it at least provided a way to field old-school mishmash armies and was an outlet for modeling crazy stuff.

I think GW generally does a good job on the creative end, but IMO their current treatment of Chaos in 40K (and maybe WFB too) leaves a lot to be desired. It's just soulless compared to what it used to be.

You should read Free Booterz and Ere we Go!! compared to the lobotomized garbage they call Orks now.


I remember playing WHFRP way back when both books came out (STD and LATD) I ended up with a champion that could kill about anything except he got a mutation called one leg and another called "Silly Walk" so he could move 1/2 and inch and could not ride anything.

Dice Monkey wrote:
You should read Free Booterz and Ere we Go!! compared to the lobotomized garbage they call Orks now.

I've got a copy of Waaaggh! Da Orks from way back, and I remember the old Ork lists. Really with the latest 'dex I feel like the orks have gotten a lot of their own back. They were never an incredibly chaotic race, and you can still model them up anyway you want (and a lot of people do), and the rest was fluff. Sure some of the fluff is missing from that latest 'dex, and you're nolonger rolling for your custom combi-weapons, but it's good other than that. The rest has always been sort of up to you anyway.

With chaos on the other hand, I've seen a LOT of people do some incredible conversions, but never anything to the level of the original chaos marines. Most modern chaos still retains a great deal of it's humanity, and still has the basic 2 arms, 2 legs, nose, mouth look. Old skool chaos completely set a LOT of that on it's ear.

BTW, I believe that the first appearance of the mutation's chart was in the original RT. IIRC, the chart was only a D100, so they REALLY expanded upon the idea, but it had been there from the first.

I'm sort of sad, but mostly happy to see the charts go. With the marine army list it was possible to pay X points and roll on a chart that could give you something incredible, or something really lame. Same thing with most of the lists. In fact that was one of THE sources of cheating under the old system, since most people didn't want to watch their opponent make several dozen die rolls to see what his boyz were armed with. So usually people just fudged that a bit. And it was impossible to say that the rolls were even close to correctly costed, since it was SO random. I'd much rather just pay the points, and buy what I want, you know? Much fairer all around.

My favourite rolls on that table are... (in no Numeric/Alphabetical order)
176-180 Beweaponed Extremities (fun to say)
181-185 Big Ears
201-210 Blood Substituion (WTF?)
221-225 Bulging Eyes ( ,- Just like that)
281-285 Cowardice (the booby prize)
291-305 Crossbreed (So.. many.. jokes..)
321-325 Dimensional Instability (also fun to say)
331-335 Elastic Limbs (Mr Fantastic, anybody?)
336-340 Enormously fat
341-345 Enormous Noise (see above)
346-355 Evil Eye (MWAHAHAHA!)
366-370 Extremely thin (I must have rolled this result)
396-400 Fear of Blood (for a chaos lord? WTF)
411-415 Fits (Wonderfully generic name)
416-420 Flaming Skull Face (Aww Yeah!)
441-450 Growth (What?)
451-455 Headless (I want to model this NOW)
476-480 Horrible Stench (My dad must have rolled this)
481-485 Huge Head
571-575 Long Nose (What?)
606-610 Mane of Hair (FEAR MY PERM OF DOOM!!! FEAR IT!!!)
616-620 Massive Intellect (ME)
646-655 Moronic (Most of my 'peers' rolled this)
666-675 Multiple Heads (the devils result)
686-700 Overgrown body part (you all know what body part you REALLY want to be overgrown )
701-705 Pin Head
716-720 Pointed Head (What?)
731-735 Prehensile Tail (fun to say)
736-745 Pseudo-Daemonhood (when real Daemonhood is too hard)
746-750 Puny (how would you feel if this guy challenged you?)
766-770 Rearranged Face (My personal favourite)
806-810 Short Legs
811-820 Shrink (I INVOKE MY MIGHTY DAEMONIC POWER!!! *squeaky voice* )
821-825 Siamese twin (what do they call them in the Old World, where there is no Siam?)
826-830 Silly Voice
831-835 Silly Walk (Skalkrak Bloodfists Flying Circus?)
866-880 Technology (What?)
926-930 Uncanny resemblance (OMG Alastair McGowan is trying to decapitate me!)
931-940 Uncontrollable Flatulance (Blood *Pfrt* for *Pfrt* the *Pfrt* Blood *Pfrt* God! *Pfrt**Pfrt**Pfrt*)
946-950 Vividly Coloured Skin (Is it coz I iz orange?)
951-955 Walking head (As soon as my body gets here I'll totally kick your ass!)
986-000 Invent your own (EPIC LAZINESS)

On a side note, how does one roll a d1000?

You roll three different colored d10's - one for units, tens, and hundreds.

CSM - where only the lousy possessed are random anymore.

Great work, man.
I had to wipe a tear from eye while reading this.

Start to work on the better of the two original chaos books, Lost and the Damned, soon!

TR

I love those old bloodletters. I think that I'll convert some plastic ones to have those curved spines.

Hmm, I got

Growth
Fear of Blood
Long Legs

Which is a little worrying as my army worships Khorne. I knew that I should've stayed in accounting.

The 2nd time, I got

Mace Tail (suh-weet!)
Mane of Hair
Furry

Eh...what? I'm like hairy dude with a mace tail. Nice.

I don't think that the gods like me.

Just wondering, and please don't scream sacrilege, Is Is awailable to download, you know, somewhere?

Paul Atreides wrote:Just wondering, and please don't scream sacrilege, Is Is awailable to download, you know, somewhere?

Yes

I got:

Irrational Fear
Bestial Face
Headless?

So apparently, though I have a bestial face, it is non-existant. How am I supposed to see or hear anything to be afraid of it?

The most worthless Chaos entity ever.

Also, notice the extremely low chance you have of creating an actual halfway cool Daemonic Name. The fact that your Daemon can actually receive the name 'Taintlick Manfondle' is just wrong on so many levels. Unless of course, he's a follower of slaanesh.

Very awesome review, KK.

It just means your face is on your chest, back or butt.

"Sit on my face, and tell me that you love me!"