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Hi,

I'm fairly new to both WH40k and Warhammer Fantasy.. I have been collecting models to build a Black Templars wh40k army but have recently been leaning more towards building a Warriors of Chaos Warhammer Fantasy army.

I just bought and built a set of Chaos Knights. I noticed a lot of talk about Khorne, Tzeench, Nurgle, and Slaanesh as I was looking at color schemes. I understand that in a battle having a certain mark of a specific god has certain benefits, etc..

I really want to take my 5 Chaos Knights and do a 4 Horsemen of the apocalypse theme.. Using the 4 color schemes plus a generic dark colored Chaos theme.

My question is this. If I go ahead and do this, is this breaking any sort of unwritten code in the world of Warhammer gaming? Can I just say, ok, for this game they will have the mark of Nurgle even though there will be 5 differently painted Chaos Knights? Or is this a sin in the community?

I look forward to your comments.

It really depends on your opponent, some people might get really butthurt about it whilst others will think it's pretty cool. As far as I'm aware there's no explicit rule against it so go ahead if that's what you want to go.

There is not, to my knowledge, a specific bit that denotes marks like there is for physical wargear, such as equipping a bow or a spear. In that case, you needn't worry about WYSIWYG requirements, as you surmise. Painting a unit in the colors of the appropriate Chaos god when they're marked is common practice, but not a hard and fast rule. It's not as if all of the gods even have a clearly defined scheme - sure, green evokes Nurgle, but one can just as easily focus on red and purple rawness, brown filth and decay, etc. and still get the point across.

Perhaps more importantly, I think a completely mixed unit is going to be less confusing that putting the Mark of Khorne on a unit that is painted entirely in sickly green - you're giving no visual information, which is better than misleading cues. It's a cool idea, so as long as you make it clear to your opponents what the unit actually is/has (again, the lack of uniform cues will make questions/reminders more likely), many (if not most) will be fine with it. It really does come down to individual players, of course, but I say go for it.

A suggestion that was made to me and what I plan on doing is having interchangeable banners to signify the mark. I'm still trying to figure out how I want to paint my knights given that I probably will try out different marks on them, so I'm going to go for a generic black and leave the mark info on the banner, which I'm going to magnetize and replace depending on what I'm running. Might be a good solution for what you're doing if you're worried about mixed information, but if I were playing against it, I'd think it was cool.

Someone here posted an entire Demons army that was painted in a single color scheme that looked amazing to me. as long as the models themselves have the right equipment, no one should complain about the paint scheme you choose.

red horse for khorne, pale horse for nurgle, black horse for slaanesh, and white horse for tzeench would possibly be the combo. I think this idea is really cool, and people that get it will probably think it is awesome and be fine with it.

the only WYSIWYG painting i can think of is ork's Red Paint Job for 1" extra, unpenalized inch of movement. But thats why most orks slap a red strip on their vehicles anyway.

Even that people usually dont care because its kinda a given that the upgrade is there since its an ork standard.

Glyphs on the other hand make a difference WYSIWYG-wise. I found out i have a BA shoulder pad on my Space Marine i sacrificed for a wicked Ghazgkhull-Thraka bosspole and hes still painted blue. I play against a BA occationally, thats how i found out, and i initially wanted to paint him red just to tick this guy off and pull his neckbeard, but Ghaz is already clad in red so i went with blue. Since that model means nothing to the game im not going to change it, but you could argue it anyway if you were a big enough dick.