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How do!

Fresh from yet another wibbling rant about the state of Chaos, I bring you this thread. And it’s dedicated to enabling a more background accurate representation of Chaos. But, and here’s the important bit, without changing the existing Codexes one bit. And it’s drawing on an old WHFB list selection method.

See, once upon a time, probably my favourite period of WHFB, Chaos broke the mould when it came to army selection. Rather than representing a formal army, this was intended to reflect a given Chaos force being comprised of smaller warbands, temporarily allied in pursuit of a common goal.

What you did was first pick, arm and pay for a Chaos Champion. Then, you had to purchase units of at least equal value. That was their bondsmen/warband. Then rinse and repeat until you’ve spent all your points.

So…why not allow a 40K Soup List on the same lines? Pick a Codex. Pick and pay for a Champion type, then spend at least that many points, from the same Codex, to provide them with Their Dudes. Then do it again and again, picking and choosing from the various Codexes on offer, until all your points are spent.

Oh there’s nothing stopping you picking from a single Codex with its usual restrictions. And Chaos Knights can be Dreadbladed in exactly as is.

Then? Points not withstanding of course, you can have a wild assortment of Chaos forces marching under a single banner.

Perhaps require that 25% be spent on your High Heedyin And Hims Dudes, to represent the chap currently wielding the most influence.

But let Chaos be Chaotic.

I fully agree and it's a great way to make a really striking chaos force. It's how I think of my chaos armies - this is the nurgle warband, here's their temporary word bearer allies and their cultists, and then here's the daemons they've summoned lead by daemon champions.

I fear the problem (as ever) with that style of army building is that a bunch of Even Sadder Young and Old Gits on the internet will crunch the numbers and figure out "the best" configuration for warbands and then it'll get published on the internet and that's all you'll ever see, along with posts where people say "Is X warband VIABLE?!?"

But perhaps I'm too cynical, and if GW really want to promote narrative play, I can't think of a better way than with more narrative force building.

Not daft at all, rather like it!

Do you think it might need some Character restriction, to stop Big Lord Spam/Daemon Prince Spam?

Perhaps simply a Keyword of “Primacy” or similar, with only one such Character being permitted in such a soup list?

As for people number crunching? They do that anyway. All that changes is what boring looks like. I’ve long maintained that Boring People Making Boring Lists shouldn’t mean interesting lists should be prevented.

ok but where does the actual chaos come into it? like the mutations and gifts and daemons and things? what you've described is just picking a bunch of heroes and units from other armies and smooshing them together, kind of like the old Imperial Soup armies, or Crusade forces

I like a system akin to the 2nd edition Chaos codex: You take your core army from the Chaos Codex, and you CAN take units from other armies but you pay a premium for them (In 2nd edition it was specifically the Ultramarines codex and you paid +25% to represent "post-heresy equipment" but I don't see why it couldn't apply to other armies)

I would mix in some of the 3rd edition daemonhunters Adversaries rules

So a slight points bump + chaos options is how I'd do it, with some exceptions (No Chaos Custodes or Grey Knights, for example), possibly with a mandatory character + Battleline unit before you get to pick anything else from that codex (So no Chaos Hammerheads on their own alongside an Iron Warriors army)

This way a chaos force isn't just a carbon copy of the base force (if you choose to have your whole force from another codex), but you can do both a soup army and a pure force.

So for example you could have:
- Normal Chaos army, all units from the Chaos Codex, no corrupted units
- Partially corrupted force: Warlord and most units from the Chaos Codex, but you can have a small contingent of Chaos Orks with a Mek, Boyz and a Battlewagon.
- Soup army: a whole bunch of different forces together in service of the Dark Gods
- Fully corrupted force: whole army taken from another codex, but costs more and has some Chaos upgrades to represent their corrupted nature

It comes from the wide range of possible combinations. Showing that even at the best of times? Chaos forces are still Cults of Personality, with a Champion gathering followers under their unique banner. That even the Legions don’t necessarily fight as a single entity with pre-agreed goals.

In your minds eye, the concept of such an army may be Reavers, United for this attack and this attack alone, with the promise of greater spoils as a result. Or it’s a snapshot of a wider warzone, with representatives from larger forces converging and competing. And indeed a bunch of other things.

It is chaos in its rawest, least organised form. And importantly? By no means replaces selecting from a single Codex if that’s your bag.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
To help avoid people just fielding Special Characters? Have a Prime Detachment or whatever, where a single character with the Unique Keyword is allowed. And that’s it.

So you could have say, Kharn the Betrayer leading the main force. But couldn’t then support him with Lucius or Typhus or Ahriman etc.

I mean, I wouldn’t mind fighting such an army once in a while (think of the bragging rights!), but such a restriction would prevent overly boring spam.

It’s about giving Chaos Players greater agency to play the faction their way.

At the risk of being a party pooper, I don't think I'd like this.

My first thought is the issue brought up by Da Boss: it would be very easy/tempting for people to just treat this as a way to field the most points efficient units in the game together again. Basically bringing back whatever the modern equivalent of riptides backed up by scatbikes is. We can say, "boring people make boring lists," but I think this is the sort of thing that would happen on a spectrum. If you give someone the option to cherry pick their favorite units from across the game, it's going to be tempting to do so, at least a little.

Kind of impossible to balance.

But even setting balance aside, I'm not sure I'd like what this would do for the fluff/theming/playstyle of armies. It wouldn't read as "chaotic" to me so much as it would read as a "themeless hodgepodge" of whatever armies the player happens to have access to.

Tau, orks, and chaos marines in the same army doesn't really read as an assemblage of chaos warbands and/or their mercenaries, or whatever. It reads as a bunch of random armies thrown in a blender.

Part of this might just be that 40k battles aren't actually big enough to convey the idea that you're going for? Like, if I saw 5k points of chaos marines with 1k of kroot on the left flank and 1k of drukhari on the right flank, *that* would kind of read as a chaos army with some xenos mercs getting in on the action. But a 1k chaos marine army with 500 points of kroot and 500 points of drukhari doesn't read the same way to me. At that point, it just kind of feels like chaos marines have access to xenos units.

The armies involved also wouldn't feel particularly chaos-corrupted to me. Like, tau units continuing to be all about supporting eachother and staying out of melee and using clean and shiny tech is just going to feel like normal tau; not chaos tau. And if someone actually wanted something like a chaos ork or chaos tau army, I'd think they'd prefer an approach that actually gives them rules and options for showing what that would look like.

One of my own WIP armies is a chaos cult army. It uses mostly chaos models but GSC rules. So my neophytes are cultists, my genestealers are daemonettes/bloodletters, etc. The GSC rules happen to hit the notes I wanted from a (usually Alpha Legion) chaos cult, using trickery and a few horrific melee monsters to overcome a more conventionally powerful enemy.

But if I wanted more official support for a chaos cult army from GW, I wouldn't just want them to let me cherry pick a few GSC units; I'd want something closer to the brood brother rules or day of ascension rules where I get strats and enhancements and so forth that tell a story through how the disparate elements of the army interact. Assuming that a proper codex or supplement or whatever isn't on the table.

Well boy do I have news for you, after I get done with the 3e battle bible, I have a really cool chaos codex idea I am going to make for 40k 3e that includes chaos space marines, chaos deamons, chaos beastmen, chaos/renegade guard, lost and damned, minotaurs, dragon ogres, zombies/skeletons, chaos squats, chaos eldar, chaos androids, chaos orks.

I'm taking heavy influence from the RT era "realms of chaos" books, the 2e chaos codex, the 3e chaos codex's, and the chaos daemons codex.

A literal chaos tapas as that one youtuber says.

 Da Boss wrote:
I fully agree and it's a great way to make a really striking chaos force. It's how I think of my chaos armies - this is the nurgle warband, here's their temporary word bearer allies and their cultists, and then here's the daemons they've summoned lead by daemon champions.

I fear the problem (as ever) with that style of army building is that a bunch of Even Sadder Young and Old Gits on the internet will crunch the numbers and figure out "the best" configuration for warbands and then it'll get published on the internet and that's all you'll ever see, along with posts where people say "Is X warband VIABLE?!?"

But perhaps I'm too cynical, and if GW really want to promote narrative play, I can't think of a better way than with more narrative force building.

Nah, you're on the money. I don't think this level of fun is something the community can be trusted with. Someone must beat them on the knuckles regularly with a ruler.

Worth noting that while its probably not a great idea from a rules perspective, you can probably get away with it just fine with the proper conversions and paint schemes.

Like the recent Mandalorian army they teased for Legion is a great example of how Chaos could be painted. They've effectively made an army of unique looking models out of like 5 sculpts almost entirely by how they painted them.

The biggest issue I foresee is the unbearable lack of balance this would cause. When you can choose from anything across 5 Codexes, your army won't have any weaknesses.

The Path To Glory rules from the Realms of Chaos books are played more like Necromunda or Warcry, where it's strongly suggested that a Game Master is elected to help balance the armies and scenarios so that one player doesn't steamroll everyone.
That ain't gonna happen for random pick-up games down the local gaming club.

As someone who had a friend make their own "Codex" where they just picked all the units they liked from all the Space Marine factions and merged them, let me tell you it is not a fun experience.

8th edition chaos with the editions detachment system was pretty much just that.

I took a thousand sons / slaanesh alpha legion force out a few times - on the one hand it was as absurdly cherry-picked as you'd expect, on the other hand it would have been somewhat less abusive without 8ths highly permissive mixing of bonuses (that led to things like the loyal 32).


Some versions of oldhammer had active disadvantages for mixing - i'll have to dig out my old epic chaos book as combined forces were a necessity.

 Gert wrote:
The biggest issue I foresee is the unbearable lack of balance this would cause. When you can choose from anything across 5 Codexes, your army won't have any weaknesses.

The Path To Glory rules from the Realms of Chaos books are played more like Necromunda or Warcry, where it's strongly suggested that a Game Master is elected to help balance the armies and scenarios so that one player doesn't steamroll everyone.
That ain't gonna happen for random pick-up games down the local gaming club.

As someone who had a friend make their own "Codex" where they just picked all the units they liked from all the Space Marine factions and merged them, let me tell you it is not a fun experience.

Balance balance balance, the balance is the points cost not the capability/coverage of what your army can do. Each unit has its own individual weaknesses, you don't have units without weakness. Plus since I'm thinking of making a 3e codex, it won't be chalk full of BS that modern 40k has, like everything hitting on 3+ or 2+ with rerolls for everything and all the other crap that makes 40k boring, like too many attack dice, too many wounds, vehicles having wounds, ugh its just so terrible.

Yeah if you were going to go the warband route you'd have to do it in one book. Maybe leave the god specific legions out and make it the Chaos Undivided book, but you'd have to design for it. But even if you did people would seek to abuse it because that's how people are.

BanjoJohn wrote:

 Gert wrote:
The biggest issue I foresee is the unbearable lack of balance this would cause. When you can choose from anything across 5 Codexes, your army won't have any weaknesses.

The Path To Glory rules from the Realms of Chaos books are played more like Necromunda or Warcry, where it's strongly suggested that a Game Master is elected to help balance the armies and scenarios so that one player doesn't steamroll everyone.
That ain't gonna happen for random pick-up games down the local gaming club.

As someone who had a friend make their own "Codex" where they just picked all the units they liked from all the Space Marine factions and merged them, let me tell you it is not a fun experience.

Balance balance balance, the balance is the points cost not the capability/coverage of what your army can do. Each unit has its own individual weaknesses, you don't have units without weakness. Plus since I'm thinking of making a 3e codex, it won't be chalk full of BS that modern 40k has, like everything hitting on 3+ or 2+ with rerolls for everything and all the other crap that makes 40k boring, like too many attack dice, too many wounds, vehicles having wounds, ugh its just so terrible.

Because things being undercosted or overcosted never existed.

I like the idea in theory.. but feel it would be a lot of work to make it "viable" for anything else than Open Play.

You'd need some way to counter then inevitable wombo combos one could come up with. Like, say that each "Warband" had its bespoke morale, and would suffer catastrophically if their Champion was slain for whatever reason.. Also, not only "battleshocked" but also losing your champion might make the rest of the warband turn on the other warbands? That sort of stuff.. Ultimate chaos leads to ultimate unstability, this would need to be factored in somehow..

Would really need its own codex/rulebook at the bare minimum just to cover how one could soup, and what drawbacks that souping would introduce.. Not something you'd just whip up for a casual matched play

BanjoJohn wrote:

Balance balance balance, the balance is the points cost not the capability/coverage of what your army can do. Each unit has its own individual weaknesses, you don't have units without weakness. Plus since I'm thinking of making a 3e codex, it won't be chalk full of BS that modern 40k has, like everything hitting on 3+ or 2+ with rerolls for everything and all the other crap that makes 40k boring, like too many attack dice, too many wounds, vehicles having wounds, ugh its just so terrible.

Ah yes because an equal points level made all those Superfriends Deathstar lists completely fair.
I must have imagined Invisibility buffed Lorgar with 10 Gal Vorbak single handedly wiping out nearly every unit in my 3k point Heresy army on a regular basis as well.
Points aren't the only factor in balancing and never have been. If you play Khorne you suffer on shooting and no wizard powers. Being able to take whatever you want from 5 Codexes eliminates any of the playstyle weaknesses those armies have.

Just to be clear, I love the idea of a true crazy band of maniacs all under one warlords banner. But given that we're no longer in the age of an army being like 10-12 dudes, it's not something I see as viable in the current day.

 Gert wrote:

BanjoJohn wrote:

Balance balance balance, the balance is the points cost not the capability/coverage of what your army can do. Each unit has its own individual weaknesses, you don't have units without weakness. Plus since I'm thinking of making a 3e codex, it won't be chalk full of BS that modern 40k has, like everything hitting on 3+ or 2+ with rerolls for everything and all the other crap that makes 40k boring, like too many attack dice, too many wounds, vehicles having wounds, ugh its just so terrible.

Ah yes because an equal points level made all those Superfriends Deathstar lists completely fair.
I must have imagined Invisibility buffed Lorgar with 10 Gal Vorbak single handedly wiping out nearly every unit in my 3k point Heresy army on a regular basis as well.
Points aren't the only factor in balancing and never have been. If you play Khorne you suffer on shooting and no wizard powers. Being able to take whatever you want from 5 Codexes eliminates any of the playstyle weaknesses those armies have.

Just to be clear, I love the idea of a true crazy band of maniacs all under one warlords banner. But given that we're no longer in the age of an army being like 10-12 dudes, it's not something I see as viable in the current day.

Except that... I'm making it for 3e so it is based off those points values where like.. 2k points armies back then were half the size of 2k armies now, and none of that heresy/armageddon crap. Have some faith my fellow 40k enjoyer, when I share the codex in a year or two I think you'll love it.

You aren't the only person in this thread dude, my initial post wasn't aimed at you at all.

Isn't this just going back to the soup-armies approach a few editions ago? When the FOC was in its last legs, but where the game had opened up to let you take multiple Force Organisation Charts in a single army so long as you fielded at least the minimum required units for each FOC.

The edition that almost made it that painting choices became mandatory stats influencing elements because people would take the best close-combat Marine version for their close combat marines; the best ranged etc.... So you'd have 3 or 4 different chapters on the table all painted in the same colours - very confusing.


Honestly what you propose is not a bad idea, but its not an idea that works with a game build like Warhammer. Because the potential to min-max becomes extreme. This doesn't just result in super powerful combos that wipe the table and are abused; but can also result in extremely weak combos which are then traps for players to fall into. The result is a bigger separation on the mathematical balance of opposing armies and that can result in increased negative play experiences.

MTG does this a lot, but gets away with it because the cards are collected not build and painted up (you just buy them); and because games are typically pretty fast.
Wargames fail with this approach because when you've a vast mathematical divide people who end up on the weaker end burn out fast when their hours upon hours of building and painting has very little chance of winning.




Honestly what you propose would work IF the game were build like Battle Valor - where you have a pool of unit types shared between all armies with some limited variation on choices that allow for small stat alterations
Thus meaning that the big difference between one army and another is almost entirely visually driven.


Otherwise you could get away with it if the game had one set of stats that were endlessly tweaked and adjusted; but that could take decades to achieve good balance.

It's also worth remembering back when this was a thing in WHFB Chaos characters could get very expensive even compared to their units. Even a basic Khorne Lord on horse was around 200 points, IIRC and putting them on a chariot or monster made them cost more than any regular units. It was a neat idea but only really worked because of the unique characteristics of Chaos back then.

 Gert wrote:
The biggest issue I foresee is the unbearable lack of balance this would cause. When you can choose from anything across 5 Codexes, your army won't have any weaknesses.

FWIW I don't think "lacking weaknesses" is the right way to think about it. GW have mostly (rightly) ditched the idea that "since we don't want this factions to be shooty focused - we'll just make sure all their shooty units suck and therefore you shouldn't play them".

There may be an issue of broken synergies - but even that's not as immediately obvious due to the greater restrictions. I.E. you now typically need to attach characters to give a unit a buff, so if you can't, you can't. I guess people might like far looser attachment rules - but I'd assume they stay in place.

A CSM army of say Mutilators, Possessed and Terminators, shouldn't intrinsically be weaker (or indeed stronger) than a "mixed" army of say Mutilators, DG Blightlord Terminators and EC Flawless Blades.
But I guess that's a bit optimistic - as balance is never perfect.

Moreover as you say, abilities matter. Say for example you are playing World Eaters. You may want to bring some Forgefiends as your shooting option. The danger is that if you have free soup, its possible that Noise Marines do that job better. So "every" competitive WE army ends up slotting in 2-3 units of EC Noise Marines. Which to my mind doesn't feel fluffy or really do anything. It just dilutes both factions.

I mean this was the issue in 8th edition. From the year that ran from getting their codex through to Marines breaking everything I thought Dark Eldar were very good. (I know some DE players really disagree - and I may be biased as a hangover from 7th where DE mostly sucked.)
But you know what was better than Dark Eldar? Regular Eldar. Mono DE was pretty much always worse than soup. I'd also argue Eldar pretty much always gained from taking an Archon+3 Ravagers too.
Which I think sucks.

I mean I have time for some soup. I think for example mixing Guardsmen and Marines would be "better" than having mono of both - because the different stats juxtapose each other. I feel a lot of Marine players don't think their guys are "tough" - because they only play those guys. If they had units that died to a stiff breeze they start to realise the value of the extra toughness, wounds an armour.
But equally I wouldn't want the rules to encourage this as the only way to play an "Imperial" force.

Warbands style isn't bad, if you just balance it so that you can go wide on multiple different factions or deep on one or two.

I think it really depends on how big the game is and how many points the core of a warband is, though. If you can only feasibly take 3 or 4 champions and their personal band in a standard game that's not unreasonably finicky for an opponent to keep a grasp on. It also depends on how many special rules and synergy/buff rules the game system uses. Keeping track of passive bonuses for 10 bands would be annoying.

Possibly a warbands system works best for something like the Rampant games family, which is very abstract in how precisely you model a unit so you're free to have personalised bands.



I guess you could have specific Allies Lists that provide a smaller amount of units with less intricate wargear options than the full codex. Space marines could then take a couple of Allied Guardsmen that are just 10-man squads without the full command structure or commissars or the like, while the inverse would let a Guard player take a squad or two of regular tactical marines or bikers.

Rosebuddy wrote:

I guess you could have specific Allies Lists that provide a smaller amount of units with less intricate wargear options than the full codex. Space marines could then take a couple of Allied Guardsmen that are just 10-man squads without the full command structure or commissars or the like, while the inverse would let a Guard player take a squad or two of regular tactical marines or bikers.

The problem here is increasing complexity. Now each model has to be balanced into the game twice- once for regular and once for their allied stat. So you've just doubled the balancing workload of the game and not actually added a single new army nor model to the game itself.

Or if you only balance once for the core stats and then just strip the model down for an ally, they run the risk of being near useless statistically speaking so now its a feature that most people won't use. Or they'll just go "hey instead of allies rules lets just allow two armies per player so you can use the full stats of both"

 Overread wrote:
The problem here is increasing complexity. Now each model has to be balanced into the game twice- once for regular and once for their allied stat. So you've just doubled the balancing workload of the game and not actually added a single new army nor model to the game itself.

Fun fact, GW does exactly this with Imperial Agents. They are cheaper if taken in their own force instead of as allies.

Or pretend to, anyway. They don't actually attempt to balance Agents beyond nerfing any given model that becomes too popular to ally into other armies. The codex mainly exists to paywall said allies.

Doesn't the vanilla CSM codex more or less permit this already? You can take chaos marines with any marks, and cultists, and allied titans, and some allied cult marines.

Access to elite cult-troops like Eightbound is deliberately restricted to reward players for going pure World Eaters, but that's kind of the whole point. Otherwise they would just be regular Possessed, which are already available in CSM.

What I think chaos really needs is expanded "Lost and the Damned" units, like traitor guard tanks and more mutants. But for chaos marines themselves they give you pretty much everything you could ask for.

Completely agree Chaos needs a proper Lost & The Damned. Or hey, even multiple books covering things like Daemon Worlds, Renegade Guard, Mutants & Cultists.

But I still ask Why Not Both? If you go quite bitty (so trying not to spend more than equal points on followers), yes yo probably could get some sick combos. But you’re also going to be lacking true force cohesion, as each element should be failing to buff the next.

It’s definitely more a thematic thing for me, and sure we don’t need GW’s consent to do what we want.

But I’d love to have L&D as part of it.

Daemon Worlds would be fantasy type things. Beastmen, Trolls, Minotaurs etc.

Renegade Guard self explanatory.

Lost and the Damned would cover pretty much everything else. From ill equipped and largely untrained Cultists, to very well equipped Pirates etc.

Orkeosaurus wrote:Doesn't the vanilla CSM codex more or less permit this already? You can take chaos marines with any marks, and cultists, and allied titans, and some allied cult marines.

Yes it does.

What I think chaos really needs is expanded "Lost and the Damned" units, like traitor guard tanks and more mutants. But for chaos marines themselves they give you pretty much everything you could ask for.

Also yes.

Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
But I still ask Why Not Both? If you go quite bitty (so trying not to spend more than equal points on followers), yes yo probably could get some sick combos. But you’re also going to be lacking true force cohesion, as each element should be failing to buff the next.

There's a world where this works and doesn't break anything. The problem is you really only need a single cost-efficient standalone unit for this to just warp all chaos list creation into taking the mandatory hyper-efficient unit in every list. Triptides weren't necessarily "synergizing" with eldar back in the day, but they were durable and killy enough to be a common feature in many lists anyway. See also: your loyal 32 from 8th edition (there for CP generation rather than lethalitly, but you see the point) or the lone imperial knight often taken alongside them.

If it turns out that a brick of flamer rubrics just splashes really well into pretty much every chaos list, suddenly they just become that unit that you "have to" take to avoid feeling like you're playing at a disadvantage. And maybe it's just my inner hipster, but the hodgepodge thing loses a lot of charm when it becomes the competitive meta pick instead of just a way to do something quirky.

This is why I said there should be big drawbacks and risks for souping an army together like that. If taken as is, with all current buffs and all, its just never going to result in anything else than broken lists all the way down

Indeed.

I mean, Loyal 32 stuff was dealt with by restricting how you picked your army, and I think eliminating CP Farming?

Here, the main obvious balance is to limit models with the Unique keyword, and that buffs wouldn’t (maybe already don’t?) apply to units with a different Legion keyword.

So each element is largely fighting on its own.

I think there’s also some merit in linking possible Warband choices to the Character. Main example in my head is to take Daemon Engines (Defiler, Dinobots etc), then you first need a Warpsmith. Not only to try to avoid minging combos, but to further reinforce the whole concept of what the mixing is meant to represent.