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NL are meant to "work" with Furies on occasion, so you could use them as lesser daemons (though I don't think it's worth bothering).

I would personally use C:SM to get access to decent fast attack and cheap transports - no need to use Shrike, Khan would work well (in fact probably really well), Vulkan and Lysander could probably be squeezed in etc

C:CSM should be viable though, you could either play with a "come get me" attitude by placing a couple of troop squads on your side with 2-3 vindicators or preds and have raptors and terminators ready to ambush; or the standard troop rush with Rhinos (but I find that dull and easily dealt with by IG).

OK, here's my take on Night Lords in 5th ed, using codex: space marines.

Captain on bike= lord with daemon weapon on bike.

This unlocks:

troops on bikes, with tons of melta.

Supported by:

Assault squads with twin-flamers and a CC upgrade.

Maybe support them with a couple of preds, and call it a day.

Something I like about Soul Hunter is that it shows why the Codex: Space Marines and Codex: Blood Angels are inappropriate. Morale has gone to pot, so they're not going to have And They Shall Know No Fear, Combat Tactics, Combat Squads, or the Red Thirst. However, you have to remember that the Night Lords are really spread out and decentralized: what applies to one company might not apply to another. The Exalted, for example, would be better represented as a Chaos Lord with the Mark of Tzeentch if he ever got off his duff and fought.

Uzas wasn't a Khorne Berzerker, though he seemed to be getting there. Also remember that as a stop-loss measure they amalgamated surviving members of short squads, so no ten-man-two-melta-gun configurations.

I second the notion of using Khorne Berzerker model parts, particularly the Skull Champion helmets, intermixed with a variety of other Space Marine and Chaos Space Marine parts, particularly Imperial Space Marine armour with defaced Imperial symbols. They don't have to have batwinged helms, and skull-helms seemed popular in Soul Hunter

Rules-wise, it's Codex: Chaos Space Marines all the way with unmarked troops and no Icons if you want to be true to the Night Haunters vision, or marked troops, lesser daemons, and Icons if you want to portray those further down the path of damnation. Make sure you have Dirge Casters on all your vehicles.

hmmm... I was thinking about all of the space marine morale effects (fear as a weapon) that I know of and the only ones I could think of are in the BA book. They have two Librarian powers, one called Fear of the Darkness that would probably be very appropriate, and another called Shackle Soul that forces a bunch of morale tests.

it jsut goes to show how morale is not a big part of the game anymore.

You can't. A BA codex would be the closest approximation, avoid the chaos marine dex as that is NOT what you are aiming for.

how did we go from night lords to BA?

Nurglitch wrote:Rules-wise, it's Codex: Chaos Space Marines all the way with unmarked troops and no Icons if you want to be true to the Night Haunters vision, or marked troops, lesser daemons, and Icons if you want to portray those further down the path of damnation. Make sure you have Dirge Casters on all your vehicles.

My conclusion about all of this is along your lines but expanded. If you want to play fluffy lists out of C:CSM, you have to accept that there are Chaos warbands in M41 rather than Traitor Legions. That's actually awesome if you like more than one of the legions--as you get to have a lot of schemes in your army. Here's how I've been doing.

willydstyle wrote:OK, here's my take on Night Lords in 5th ed, using codex: space marines.

Captain on bike= lord with daemon weapon on bike.

This unlocks:

troops on bikes, with tons of melta.

Supported by:

Assault squads with twin-flamers and a CC upgrade.

Maybe support them with a couple of preds, and call it a day.

I agree, I think the nightlords were far enough displaced from what we call "chaos" now, that they would be better represented by Traitor basic marines.

I feel the Marine book covers their options better than the chaos book.

Based on what? Night Lords are in fact Chaos Marines. They are spiky, evil, Emperor-hating, daemon collaborators. Nothing in the Nilla Marines books lends itself to that portrayal.

Specifically the lack of special morale rules like And They Shall Know No Fear in Codex: Chaos Space Marines does a better job at representing the loss of morale.

I don't quite see your point, Nurglitch. Could you explain further?

Manchu wrote:It's true that when you imagine them in true scale they are ridiculous. But the same could be said for most Chaos headgear (looking at you 1kSons). You just have to accept that they look cool in the disproportionate world of Citadel miniatures scale.

I believe the Heresy era Night Lords wore essentially Chaplain helmets to terrorize. Chapterhouse makes some.

Manchu:

The standard morale rules represent self-interested individuals and their varying ability to put matters of self-preservation second to matters of unit coherency.

Fearless represents irrational groups throwing caution to the wind.

And They Shall Know No Fear represents the way that Space Marines are both willing to die for their comrades and the mission, but aware to decide whether doing so best serves the mission.

The Night Lords of Soul Hunter, Vandred's Warband at least, are very much rational and self-interested individuals. They can put the interests of others above themselves, and behave like professional terrorists, which is represented by their high Leadership, but they're also constantly paranoid about each other, worried that their leader is possessed, one of their number may be a psycker, and the former Apothecary may be making a play for power...

Night Lords? Just use the BA codex.

@Nurglitch: I agree with your interpretation of ATSKNF as much as I disagree with it. After all, that special rule is supposed to represent the opposite situation among loyalists (by which I mean, the very highest moral). Plus, I don't agree that they are as different from other Chaos Space Marines as some people (including me) believe A D-B makes them out to be. Almost all the suggestions in this thread have been "use loyalist codex X" and that would be an interesting point to bring up to him, however.

I don't think they are that different from other Chaos Space Marines. leaving my thoughts about representation and whatnot alone for now.

That's the thing about damnation, nobody says; "Rarr, I'm evil!" It's about ending up on the wrong side too many times. It's also why I love the current Codex: Chaos Space Marines so much as it both identifies the turning point in damnation as the inward turn of Dantean poetry and makes it something everyone can do (also kind of Dantean), which makes 40,000 a compelling, if Euro-centric, morality play.

It makes the steps of damnation: Good intention, self-intentions, utter madness, and makes them understandable in terms of the rules. Chaos Sorcerers, being psychic and thus highly aware of the dangers of dealing with daemons, aren't Fearless (for example) except for Ahriman, who is well known for having a pathologically positivist approach to Chaos. They know what happens if they can't outwit powers that to them are pretty much wholly a-rational. But likewise it is the rebellion against the a-rational (for the individual) Imperial strategy of fascist race survival that subverts the individuals to the interests (not necessarily the cause) of Chaos.

The Night Lords, or at least the warband formerly known as the 10th company (or whichever company it is) seem like Chaos Space Marines well along the road to damnation, and gives them a good reason to be fighting a 10,000 year war despite facing a stop-loss problem, morale problems, and good old fashioned logistical problems (none of which are broached by the game). Some of them are further along than others, and that just hastens their headlong descent into Chaos.

I don't think that Kurze fits that model of damnation very well. FWIW, First Heretic is a much better book than the very good but IMO off-key Soul Hunter. And that could be a big part of it.

Manchu wrote:Seriously.

I'm not asking for the sake of winning GTs here. Just looking for a decently competitive list. I would guess it would involve vanilla CSM and termies.

Personally, I'm not sold on the idea of huge units of Raptors, either.

if you mean how would you play it in the sense of what tactics to use..... I would say that any time you have better mobility than your opponent (raptors) you want to use it to concentrate large parts of your army against small parts of your opponent's army. achieve local superiority and wipe out the enemy in that area before moving on to the next. try to break up the larger battle into as many smaller battles as possible, and then use your mobility to make sure you outnumber him in each one of those smaller battles. that way even a 2000 vs 2000 battle is never really a fair fight - you always have superior numbers. Its easy for your opponent to prevent you from doing this by keeping units close enough to support each other but alot of people dont do this, for whatever reason. Even in annihilation missions they deploy in long drawn out formations that dont really make any tactical sense. Maybe its just my area, I dont know, but it seems like no matter how often I do this to people they cant figure it out. anyway in objective missions you can really pwn people with this tactic, since the more objectives there are the more ways they have to split their army to win.

I think that codex: chaos space marines is a very uncompetitive army right now. if you're not going to use raptors than night lords play like any other rhino rush marine-spam chaos list and frankly aren't that good. I would take as many melta guns and combi meltas as I could, keep all my rhinos in a tight formation, and charge down the middle. Which is dumb, but pretty much all that the book permits as its currently written.

As far as what rules set to use, I would say just use the night lords rules from 3.5 and apply them to codex: chaos space marines as best you can. since the decision to homogonize all the legions and take our books of chaos away was never really a popular one, alot of people will let you do it provided that you A) have a dedicated night lords army, appropriately modeled, and B) don't use the fudged rules to beat people over the head too much. Thats been my experience mixing codex: demons and codex: chaos space marines together, in any case. I run a legit mono-god cult and no one cares, because its fluffy.
AF