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Chaos remains one of GW’s most popular armies. It has spawned three separate armies for Fantasy and two for 40k (should be three darnit but that’s another story!). Although it began as a thinly-veiled homage (or rip-off) of Lovecraft’s Cthulu books and Moorcock’s Eternal Champion series it has certainly grown into something all its own. And that wasn’t always limited to spikes and skulls either.

Realms of the Chaos: The Lost and the Damned is the 1990 follow up to 1988’s Slaves To Darkness and finishes off the rules for Chaos. Yes. People had to wait two years to get a complete set of rules, so stop complaining about that Dark Space Elf book at least you got a full set of rules! It also has expanded information on beastmen, centaurs, independent demons and other chaos creatures. On the 40k side we have the Death Guard, the Thousand Sons and the Sensei.

Words are by Rick Priestly and Bryan Ansell, with fiction by William King and others. Pictures by a host of artists including Adrian Smith, John Blanche and Jes Goodwin. The art in this book is definitely a step up from the darker, scratchier art of Slaves to Darkness. It’s still disturbing and nasty but clearer and easier to follow.

NOTE: As always, if you were not born in 1990 when this book came out you must post and say so. It’s a rule.






While the first book had Slannesh and Khorne this one covers Nurgle and Tzeentch. Interestingly it describes the two as opposites, Nurgle is about the inevitability of decay and striving against it, Tzeentch is about change and renewal and uncertainty.

Fluff-wise the two have not really changed over the years. Nurgle’s kiss is still a kiss, Tzeeentch’s sigh is still a sigh. The fundamental things apply, as time goes by.

Some fantastic art, including two page spreads by Adrian Smith introduce the two.









One neat thing is while all of the chaos mutants are scary, the mutants themselves look pretty miserable in their lot. It’s pretty clear that having spikes grow out of your skin or a crab claw for an arm is not really as much fun as it sounds. This is something I wish the artists today would do more of, their work looks too much like Manowar album covers and loses a lot of character.

As with the last book there are random tables for various chaos rewards and none of them are going to do much to improve your social life.



Keep in mind, these are NOT the random mutations you get as punishment, these are the rewards!

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That is clearly the face of man who is not entirely satisfied with the choices he has made in life.

Another great feature of the art is how each piece has a strong sense of setting and narrative.



Who is the guy? Where are they fighting? What’s in that book? Gosh isn’t the other guy dead yet? I mean do you really need to keep hacking him like that? We don’t know, but I’d like to know. I’d buy a novel with that on the cover. It’s a lot cooler than generic spiky guys walking through smoke.



Who are these two? Is the winged guy good or just a mutant with wings? Where do those stairs go? I’m a lot more interested in knowing than I am about any recent GW art.



There is a campaign system rewarding players for acting in accordance with their patron’s wishes.



There are also charts and charts for determining where the fight is and for subplots that surround it. This is another brilliant idea that’s totally unworkable.

“OK I rolled a 9, so we’re fighting around an abandoned ship.”
“Great! I’ll get out the insulation foam and water glazes!”
“I’ll get the balsa wood and start building the ship!”
“We’ll be ready to play by spring!”

Still though the results of this insane system might just make it all worth it.




What can I add?

Find out tomorrow!

Whooo! Not as cool as the original, but who doesn't like to see a huge, slimy fat dude for the cover boy?

JohnHwangDD wrote:Whooo! Not as cool as the original, but who doesn't like to see a huge, slimy fat dude for the cover boy?

GW knows that sex sells.

more more more!

Not an easy book to find.

Thanks once again for another blast from the past.
Where my copies of these books went I will never know but
this brings back some fond memories!
It is amazing how familiar I am with these pieces of art after all this time!
Keep it coming!

What I really loved about this book was the independant daemon prince family trees, you can create your own greater, lesser, steed and beast daemons to serve your mighty daemon prince, set up a list of rewards for his followers, have a long line of Prince elevating champion to Prince who then elevates champions to Princes etc.

As to the artwork with the guy with wings, if you look closely, he appears in several pictures by that artist in the book and in a couple of others, one picture has him on horseback with a staff with a lord of change's face on it, mutating a khorne warrior with it.

Oh yeah... and the rules for the beast warbands, minotaur daemon prince ftw!

Ah, more retro genius from Kyoto. The first WD I ever read (no. 120 odd?) contained an article about modelling a Tzeentch chaos warband that had been generated using those crazy tables. It looked amazing (the chaos spawn had old horror hands for legs and a minotaur head) and though I was utterly confused by all this talk of rolling a D100 and being rewarded with a scorpion tail, I was utterly hooked too.

GW these days? bland, bland, bland by comparrison.

Love the way the winged Tzeentch guy kept popping up in he artwork. Though as overs have said, Slaves to Darkness is the cooler of the pair.

Uh, born after 1990.

But crud, this stuff is cool. I'm looking forward to seeing what else is put up.

Too bad Chaos isn't that cool nowadays...

Kid_Kyoto wrote:

JohnHwangDD wrote:Whooo! Not as cool as the original, but who doesn't like to see a huge, slimy fat dude for the cover boy?

GW knows that sex sells.

Unless you're a pre-pubescient teenage boy, at which point gross and sick sells..... and guess what's on the cover? Who says that GW has dumbed down the game, or started targeting kiddies? Wake up peeps! This has ALWAYS been their target audience. Luckily for them, no man every truly grows out of this stage, he just learns to ape the civilized manners of his peers at little bit.

FWIW, this book was also a ton of fun, definitely much more of an art book like the last one, and a bit of a come down from Slaves to Darkness, but Slaves to Darkness is a true master piece. The sad truth is that Chaos has been in a long slow decline from this lofty pinnacle in '88.

Oh, and I've touched a copy of this book, in 1990.

So, if you've like touched this book in 1990, you need to make a post indicating this. It's a rule.

This was my main introduction into campaign style war gaming.
Roll up a random minor chaos god, roll up demons for said god.
Roll up a warband to fight for said minor god.

It makes me want to adapt it for the Mordheim rule set.
Warband clashes in the great north for loot and prestige.

(I was flipping through my original copy the other night, lousy binding on the bugger.)

chaplaingrabthar wrote:Slaves to Darkness is the cooler of the pair.

And yet the Lost and the Damned sells for 50% more!?

I loved the old chaos fluff. Old and New chaos, it's like the difference between alien, and AvP requim.

And we're back with the next part of the award seeking Retro Review series!

After the excitement of chaos rewards and random battlefields, what can GW do to top that?

How about spelling?

There are several pages of chaos runes, y’know in case you’d like to pass notes in class using the blasphemous tongue of the dark gods.



But then things pick up with a table for making up independent chaos gods, since the writers knew that something as vast as Chaos would have more than 4 flavors.



Again, good, good stuff. Any of the rolls on that chart would give a Dungeon Master a disturbing and original villain for a campaign.

And there’s a table for creating the lesser daemons that serve the independent daemon.



Now if only the two daemon codexes were anywhere near as clever.

Despite my frequent protests that these rules are UNPLAYABLE with WYSIWYG models GW sets out to prove me wrong with several color pages or conversions.







The next section details some of the creatures of Chaos; centaurs, dragon ogres and beastmen.



I always knew he’d get a-head in the world. Get it? Ahead? Oh I kill me…
Anyway they get about 10 pages of background to flesh out their origins and culture.



I really wish GW had kept with centaurs instead of the Beastigores or whatever they threw out to replace them. Centaurs have class.



Dragon ogres on the other hand… they still look someone’s sloppy kitbash and never impressed me.



Skeleton Champions (Chaos champs reanimated to serve for a year and a day) make another appearance. Now that I look at them I really miss the concept. It sort of hammers home the whole ‘worshipping demons is not just fun and games” concept.

Later in the book there are army lists for Nurgle and Tzeentch.





The units are more or less the same now with some that have disappeared over the years. Nurgle has lost his flagellants and plague zombies but things are more or less the same.



And that rounds out the Fantasy section.

Come back next time for the 40k portion!

Awesome. Love the daemonic lobster kettle!

The best thing about these older chaos books was that, as a young boy, when you looked through them, you almost felt like it really was forbidden knowledge. There was that air of "oh wow, this is really something I shouldn't be seeing... like my uncle's Hustler magazines", but in a different, creepier, sort of way. I look at that art and I remember thinking that some of this stuff almost was scary.

Well, that's what 12 year old me thought anyway.