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as the title says, I'm working on a custom codex (for 10th edition). is there anything I should be keeping in mind for a project like this? any tips for how to put a book like this together?

oh and I guess I should say what the codex is (an update of the 8th/9th ed Codex Fallen Sororitas, updated and expanded for 10th edition)

This sounds like a great idea! I don't have any of the minis myself but I'm a big fan of the sisters and saw the original custom codex so looking forward to more updates. If you're planning on continuing the thread when you've made some progress I'll check it out

As for advice, I've not done anything like this before so apologies if its a bit generic but keeping track of any hobby project needs good note-taking and a place where you can easily write down new ideas (such as new unit types etc.) as they come to you. I use OneNote for all my hobby notes and it's good for organising what you've written page-by-page into a notebook.

I'm not much into the gaming side, but I imagine something like this needs lots of playtesting to make sure the army feels fun to play with/against. You could buy some cheap MDF bases and use card cutouts as proxies until you have test models for everything.

Hope this was useful!

 laeranshade wrote:
This sounds like a great idea! I don't have any of the minis myself but I'm a big fan of the sisters and saw the original custom codex so looking forward to more updates. If you're planning on continuing the thread when you've made some progress I'll check it out

As for advice, I've not done anything like this before so apologies if its a bit generic but keeping track of any hobby project needs good note-taking and a place where you can easily write down new ideas (such as new unit types etc.) as they come to you. I use OneNote for all my hobby notes and it's good for organising what you've written page-by-page into a notebook.

I'm not much into the gaming side, but I imagine something like this needs lots of playtesting to make sure the army feels fun to play with/against. You could buy some cheap MDF bases and use card cutouts as proxies until you have test models for everything.

Hope this was useful!

I haven't been taking notes yet (mostly because all the thoughts are already on the page as the codex entries) but once I start playtesting, I'm planning to write a lot down. as for the factor of playtesting, my idea is to use TTS (since most of my friends who play 40k don't live nearby)

as for showing off progress... currently the army is in its v.01 stage, aka what I consider to be the early alpha version. a lot of it is very rough at the moment, because I wanted to get a finished list of most things before I began iterating, but I still have some stuff to show off

here's the army rule, which works similarly to ksons, except pushing for a more aggressive play style (the specific abilities are placeholders unless they impress me later


as for an idea of what characters are looking like, here's the headlining character of the army, Miriael Sabathiel

Basic Advice:

* Constantly ask yourself whether a given rule/unit is fun to play against. Your goal should be to design an army that people enjoy both playing with and against. This is a good rule of thumb for avoiding mechanics that are enjoyable for the person fielding the army but rancid for their opponent. This is extra important with a homebrew codex because you need your opponent's buy-in (moreso than usual) to field it at all.

* KISS (keep it simple, stupid). It's easy to cram tons of flavorful rules in only to realize that you've ended up with an inelegant mess that's impossible to convey to opponents.

* Try to make sure that every unit has a niche. And to follow-up on that, make every unit useful regardless of what detachment the player is fielding. If unit X is only good in detachment Y, then unit X probably needs a second pass.

* Focus on the core stuff, then expand after that. Figure out how to make your basic battle line units, characters, and "iconic" units balanced and fun to use. Then give yourself permission to focus on the more oddball units/"stretch goals" after that.

* Ask yourself, "What makes this army different from every other army? Why is this its own codex instead of a reskin of an existing faction?"

Comments on the Rules You Shared:

It's hard to tell without having the rest of the codex for context. However, your Rites mechanic seems a little underwhelming. Corruption tokens seem slightly difficult to acquire, especially early in your turn. The fact that tokens don't carry over between rounds makes them difficult to accumulate. Additionally, the fact that earning Corruption tokens depends on certain phases combined with Rites only being useful in certain phases means that it's really difficult to accumulate the needed tokens in time to actually use some of the Rites. Additionally, letting tokens accumulate throughout the battle round but expire in a specific player's command phase means that it's probably a lot stronger or weaker based on whether you get first or second turn.

Pleasure seems especially hard to satisfy as a character who is taking wounds is generally on their own and thus unlikely to survive much longer. Additionally, you're *generally* taking damage on your opponent's shooting or fight phase rather than on your own turn. As a result, if you get first turn, Pleasure will basically never be able to generate a token for you to use with Rush of Pleasure.

Passion and Joy are fine, although Passion probably isn't going to have a chance to kick in until a couple turns into the game, and then it's dependent on your opponent's characters being squishy enough for you to finish off *specifically* with a character unit of your own. Change is iffy because Battleshock is unreliable in the first place and because it has timing issues. If you get first turn, your opponent won't have had a chance to fail battle shock at the top of the round, so Change can never generate tokens that can be used on Rush of Pleasure. Unless your codex has a way to force battleshock tests outside of your opponent's command phase.

So getting tokens in the first place is tricky, and then holding onto them isn't allowed. And after you jump through all those hoops, you've got:

Rush of Pleasure: Unless you have a bunch of Assault weapons in the army, you're giving up your shooting and charging to use this. And the possibility always exists that you would roll well on an advance roll without this ability. So if you're going for an objective that you'd need to advance 5" to get on, you'd have a 33% chance of not needing to use this right in the first place.

Illussion: A good buff. However, you basically need to have satisfied 3 Sins (+1 from your free token = 4 tokens) to use it. So if you have first turn, your opponent probably hasn't had a chance to injure a character this battle round or to fail a battleshock test by the time you want to use this. You'd need to stand a character on an objective, kill a character, and take an injury but not die all on your own turn in order to get use out of this. I guess you could potentially only do 2 of those things and then get lucky enough to have a character be injured but not killed earlier in your opponent's shooting phase, but generally you want to be able to pop buffs like this as soon as your opponent starts shooting or else they can simply opt to do most of their damage against your important unit before they risk injuring a character.

Deluge of Destruction: A potentially pretty strong buff depending on the weapons available to the codex. But assuming they're mostly packing Sororitas style weapons, there's probably not a lot of stuff that procs off of critical hits. Regardless of how strong it is, you have to stand on an objective, get hurt but not die, kill a character, and make your opponent fail battleshock all before your own shooting phase to use it.

Bloodthirsty Blitz: See above about all the things you have to do to use it. And for all those hoops you jumped through, it's basically just "be d6 inches closer to the target before you make your charge roll." For comparison, I think there's a dark eldar advance + charge strat that costs 1 CP and requires you disembark from a transport to use it.

Revel in Joy: See above about being hard to use. Being useful until the end of the turn helps, but the benefit on its own is pretty minor. For perspective, FNP6+ means that for every 6 wounds in a unit, your opponent has to make you fail a single extra save to wipe out that unit. Assuming we're not talking about multi-damage attacks going into a unit of 1 wound models, in which case the value of this drops even further.

Again, I don't have the context of the rest of the codex. I'm guessing you probably have a lot of alternative ways to generate corruption tokens in there? If so, it kind of makes me wonder how necessary it is to have 4 sub-rules for generating tokens (the sins). If not, I think this mechanic would be improved a lot by simply not having your tokens reset to 0 in the command phase. That gives you time to build them up over multiple turns AND does a lot to mitigate the weird timing/first VS second turn issues.

And a final nitpick: is this army meant to be exclusively chaos-undivided? While not a hard-and-fast rule (we have plenty of counterexamples), I tend to think that individuals who can tap into a given god's powers are generally tied to that god specifically. Like, if you're buddies with Slaanesh, you're probably not also buddies with Khorne. As written, it seems like a given unit can potentially exhibit supernatural blessings from all four chaos gods over the course of the game. Which isn't a bad thing, but it does strike me as a little weird or at least very specific. Are you going to include rules/detachments for monogod armies, or is that not appropriate for this faction's fluff?

I hope none of that came across as overly harsh. Genuinely trying to provide constructive feedback. Thank you for sharing some of your work so far!

 Wyldhunt wrote:
Basic Advice:

Spoiler:

* Constantly ask yourself whether a given rule/unit is fun to play against. Your goal should be to design an army that people enjoy both playing with and against. This is a good rule of thumb for avoiding mechanics that are enjoyable for the person fielding the army but rancid for their opponent. This is extra important with a homebrew codex because you need your opponent's buy-in (moreso than usual) to field it at all.

* KISS (keep it simple, stupid). It's easy to cram tons of flavorful rules in only to realize that you've ended up with an inelegant mess that's impossible to convey to opponents.

* Try to make sure that every unit has a niche. And to follow-up on that, make every unit useful regardless of what detachment the player is fielding. If unit X is only good in detachment Y, then unit X probably needs a second pass.

* Focus on the core stuff, then expand after that. Figure out how to make your basic battle line units, characters, and "iconic" units balanced and fun to use. Then give yourself permission to focus on the more oddball units/"stretch goals" after that.

* Ask yourself, "What makes this army different from every other army? Why is this its own codex instead of a reskin of an existing faction?"

duly noted! I already more or less have the list of units I want to include, but the focus I'll be giving them in playtesting is definitely going to skew more towards the more common stuff (ie, testing battleline before I test more niche options). all the units are supposed to have their own niches, but again, that's something that will be figured out in playtesting hopefully

I'll chime in on the KISS principle and your proposed Army-Wide Rule. It is a big fail in the KISS regard.

Look at 10th Edition Acts of Faith, Power from Pain, and Cabal of Sorcerers. Your rule is significantly more complex than any of the three and has less payoff in the end. I think you need to distill the rule down significantly to avoid bookkeeping nightmares.

 alextroy wrote:
I'll chime in on the KISS principle and your proposed Army-Wide Rule. It is a big fail in the KISS regard.

Look at 10th Edition Acts of Faith, Power from Pain, and Cabal of Sorcerers. Your rule is significantly more complex than any of the three and has less payoff in the end. I think you need to distill the rule down significantly to avoid bookkeeping nightmares.

that's entirely fair. i'm not sure how i would go about with the core idea here (do things > get tokens > spend them on abilities) in a more concise way, but it'll be something i keep thinking about as i work on this (giving it more payoff is a big part; i already admitted the abilities as it exists aren't great)

Remove the "do things" step. You get a number of tokens, you can get extra wounds for doing some stuff, but you always have a pull to do something to spend on abilities.

Or give units/army a set of rules that are always on, which you can empower by spending tokens. So lets say rule X gives a unit/weapon/etc criticals on +6. But if you spend extra tokens it goes down to +5. Getting it down to +4, requiers you to pay a cumulative point cost of tokens +1 (0+X+(X+1)+1 for tier 3 ability). Some effects can cost 1 token, some can cost more (to limit certain effects or rules stacking). You could also limit the number of tokens generated.
Lets say you get 3-6 tokens per turn every turn. This is enough to do some basic (1 token cost) action 3 to 6 times, or do 2-3 mid or 1 big token spend per turn.

Some action, lets say something like desacrate (a unit from a fallen army is on an objective) gives one token. But killing a unit on an objective gives 2, as does killing a character, while killing a warlord on a desacrated objective gives even more.

This kind of a system gives the fallen player something to do every turn, entices to engaged multiple objectives and their opponents to wrestle objectives from them, because that home objective being desacrated each turn generates extra tokens.

Multiple tokens and their gaining machanic encourages decision making from the fallen player. The relic for the army, besides the usual gun/weapon/armour could be things like items that allow you to store a token from prior turn. There could be units that let you "bleed' themselfs or kill other units to gain tokens . In some limited manner, so there isn't some fallen character siting with 20 cultists bleeding them every turn, while siting on the home objective.

Karol wrote:

Spoiler:

Remove the "do things" step. You get a number of tokens, you can get extra wounds for doing some stuff, but you always have a pull to do something to spend on abilities.

Or give units/army a set of rules that are always on, which you can empower by spending tokens. So lets say rule X gives a unit/weapon/etc criticals on +6. But if you spend extra tokens it goes down to +5. Getting it down to +4, requiers you to pay a cumulative point cost of tokens +1 (0+X+(X+1)+1 for tier 3 ability). Some effects can cost 1 token, some can cost more (to limit certain effects or rules stacking). You could also limit the number of tokens generated.
Lets say you get 3-6 tokens per turn every turn. This is enough to do some basic (1 token cost) action 3 to 6 times, or do 2-3 mid or 1 big token spend per turn.

Some action, lets say something like desacrate (a unit from a fallen army is on an objective) gives one token. But killing a unit on an objective gives 2, as does killing a character, while killing a warlord on a desacrated objective gives even more.

This kind of a system gives the fallen player something to do every turn, entices to engaged multiple objectives and their opponents to wrestle objectives from them, because that home objective being desacrated each turn generates extra tokens.

Multiple tokens and their gaining machanic encourages decision making from the fallen player. The relic for the army, besides the usual gun/weapon/armour could be things like items that allow you to store a token from prior turn. There could be units that let you "bleed' themselfs or kill other units to gain tokens . In some limited manner, so there isn't some fallen character siting with 20 cultists bleeding them every turn, while siting on the home objective.

hmm. I'm not a fan of turning this into a passive buff. also, the idea of using the tokens for momentary buffs turns it a little too much into pain tokens, when I'm specifically trying to skew away from that direction

I like the idea that different scale of "do things" grant more tokens, but that's already kinda a thing. as I said, characters will give 1, 2, or 3 tokens based on the strength of their keyword, so having the "do things" options grant more feels like getting things mixed up. this all feels like moving the idea away from the intent of "do things > get tokens > get buffs". as others were saying, I already need to simplify this, so adding even more to this feels like a bit much. thanks for the suggestions, tho. I'm still going to keep this in mind

My suggestion: It's a fallen Sisters army. It gains tokens the same way the Adepta Sororitas gain Miracle Dice. One at the start of each turn and one each time one of its units is destroyed.

Now twist to Chaos by using those tokens to buy effects instead of Dice Rolls. It could be as simple as the Power from Pain where you select a unit during a specific phase and it gets a specific bonus. You just need to balance those bonuses to avoid a single best option that crowds out the others.

 alextroy wrote:
My suggestion: It's a fallen Sisters army. It gains tokens the same way the Adepta Sororitas gain Miracle Dice. One at the start of each turn and one each time one of its units is destroyed.

Now twist to Chaos by using those tokens to buy effects instead of Dice Rolls. It could be as simple as the Power from Pain where you select a unit during a specific phase and it gets a specific bonus. You just need to balance those bonuses to avoid a single best option that crowds out the others.

that's interesting! I like the idea, although if I want that to be how tokens are generated, then I would need to take that into consideration for balance, which I haven't been so far. it would definitely push the army in a different direction, but that might be what works for this, so I'll think on it

did some playtesting and as expected the army rule was never relevant. made some tweaks based on ideas I had and stuff that was suggested here. I don't want to go tearing up the entire idea just yet so I'm making smaller changes, but the most impactful ones are opening the actions for tokens to units other than characters (except Joy, which still feels like it needs to be limited). Pleasure is limited to non-vehicles because otherwise it's too easy (there aren't a ton of non-character units in the army with more than 2 wounds, and only one or two with 3). I also retooled the abilities, and made them cheaper across the board. now 3 is the limit for cost, and Blitz is only one, essentially making it free for one unit, especially on the first turn. this is meant to act as a playstarter and give the army a place to start. not sure if free command rerolls is too good, but I don't expect the changes to token generation are going to be so significant as to be problematic. oh and also corruption tokens don't go away in the command phase.