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The book Traitor's Hate has been out for a while so I wanted to discuss the formation "Veterans of the Legions" which simply is 1-4 of the "cult" troops of CSM (Bezerkers, Noise/Plague Marines, Thousand Sons) without any sort of additional rules for it. To me it seems a waste of potential since there could be some interesting special rules applied to this formation. I have two basic ideas and feel free to critique or expand on them.

1. If you take four of the same unit type you will receive the corresponding special rule if a unit is within 12" of another unit in this formation:

Khorne Bezerkers - Blood Toll
The smell of butchery on a mass scale pushes the Bezerkers to fight ever harder to gain the attention of Khorne
+1 Attack for all models

Plague Marines - Foul Miasma
When the favored on Nurgle gather in droves, the unholy fumes can create a pestilent smoke screen
All models gain Stealth

Thousand Sons - Empyric Wards
Tzeentch ensures his mortal subjects live to fulfill their role in the great game
All models re-roll invulnerable saves of 1

Noise Marines - Galvanizing Harmonics
The cacophony generated by several Noise Marines playing simultaneously throws them into a fervor
All models gain Fleet

2. If you take one of each of the four unit options you will gain the following rule for all four units:

The Pantheon Watches
With warriors from each of the Dark Gods on the field of battle the gods dote upon their chosen scions to prove their superiority. The champion however does not always survive such direct attention
Each unit champion MUST roll on the Chaos Boon Table every turn with the exception that any results of Unworthy Offering is treated as a Spawnhood result instead.

The requirements should imitate the veterans formation in the vanilla codex: 3-5 unit requirement.

Plague marines could probably get away with shrouded instead. If you look at the nurgle daemons, that's what they all get, and it's not like plague marines are super duper amazing for the 24 points they cost.

You could probably throw in the additional d3 run distance for the noise marines, as per daemons of slaneesh. They probably don't need rending, though.

To justify the "strong" rules, the formation should limit the selection to the selection of the same unit 3-5 times.

As such, 2 needs to go entirely.

I'm not sure about the Khorne one.

Could Noisemarines get rules that reflect, support, enhance their sonic weaponry one day? After all, they are NOISE marines. ..

It is kind of untrelated but the only thing that Traitor's hate really lacks is the following rule:

Units that deep strike within 12" of an icon do not scatter.

I could see this rule as part of the cult units, as they are in the warp since 10K years and should have a strong connection to it. And they had it in the previous Codex-versions...
Additionally, that ruling would solve most of the problems Chaos has right now: unreliable Terminators, Mutis, Oblits, Warp Talons, Mayhem Pack, and Icons that noone ever takes...

 Traditio wrote:
The requirements should imitate the veterans formation in the vanilla codex: 3-5 unit requirement.

Plague marines could probably get away with shrouded instead. If you look at the nurgle daemons, that's what they all get, and it's not like plague marines are super duper amazing for the 24 points they cost.

You could probably throw in the additional d3 run distance for the noise marines, as per daemons of slaneesh. They probably don't need rending, though.

To justify the "strong" rules, the formation should limit the selection to the selection of the same unit 3-5 times.

As such, 2 needs to go entirely.

I'm not sure about the Khorne one.

Shrouded seems a bit much on Plague Marines to me. If your tables are like mine, there are a lot of ruins laying around meaning that Stealth basically just ensures you'll have a 3+ cover save if you're denied your 3+ armor save. Shrouded means that your army is now full of T5 guys with 2+ cover saves.

@The OP: I'd change the Thousand Sons rule to allow rerolling all saves of 1 instead of just invuls.

Fleet on Noise Marines makes sense but actually isn't great. Noise Marines suffer from having template weapons and marks that make them want to charge into melee, but their sonic blasters make them want to hold still. The best solution to this would probably be to make sonic blasters assault/heavy instead of salvo, but giving them relentless would do the trick in a simpler fashion. That way, they're relatively mobile (very slaaneshi) and can actually pump out a bunch of shots before charging in.

Giving Berzerkers +1 Attack is fine but slightly boring considering all the different ways that they already get bonus attacks. I'm not sure I'd take this over that new formation that lets you summon the red rain because the red rain effectively gives me even more attacks (albeit only for a turn) and also gives me some control over when a combat ends (I can wait until my own movement phase to use it, thus allowing me to hide in combat and then finish a combat quickly before moving forward and charging other stuff). I'd rather see a rule that lets berzerkers play differently somehow. Perhaps let them treat all transports as assault vehicles so that rhino rush berzerkers is more of an option?

I'm not sure how I feel about The Pantheon Watches. I'm not a huge fan of the boon table in the first place, so I'll refrain from commenting further for now.

Shrouded seems a bit much on Plague Marines to me.

That's what daemons of nurgle confers. I assume that what the OP essentially is getting at is this: "If the units are within x number of inches of each other, they get the daemons of [insert chaos god here]." Perhaps a somewhat stripped down version, but yeah.

This is why I don't like the Khorne one. +1 attack isn't what daemons of khorne confers. The problem is, the major stuff that daemons of khorne confers, Khorne berserkers already get.

Perhaps this would be better: "If a unit of khorne berserkers is within 12 inches of at least one other unit of khorne berserkers from this formation, the rage and furious charge special rules do not expire after the first round of close combat. Because ALWAYS ANGRY ALL THE TIME."

If your tables are like mine, there are a lot of ruins laying around meaning that Stealth basically just ensures you'll have a 3+ cover save if you're denied your 3+ armor save. Shrouded means that your army is now full of T5 guys with 2+ cover saves.

Again, daemons of nurgle already get 2+ covers in ruins. Do you think that plague marines would be OP if they got 2+ cover saves in ruins?

@The OP: I'd change the Thousand Sons rule to allow rerolling all saves of 1 instead of just invuls.

Absolutely not. This is right up there with ravenwing OP cheesery. You've just made it so that thousand sons have practically a 2+, 3++. That makes them more durable than terminators for nowhere near the cost.

Rerolling 1s on invulns is fine. It's what daemons of tzeentch confers, and it makes T-sons roughly as durable as legions of the damned.

Fleet on Noise Marines makes sense but actually isn't great.

It's what daemons of slaanesh confers. That's why I'm recommending the additional 1d3 when running.

I love a good rules rewrite and homebrew discussion but it's kind of hard of touch chaos with these revisions without rewriting both the codex itself, as well as the demons codex that should be synching alongside it (two halves of a whole instead of two separate distinct codexes).

Adding a rule to this formation is merely plastering over the glaring holes in how cult troops as a whole work. For example, it's logical to say that cult troops in a formation should receive some of (or perhaps all of) the benefits of a demon of the same alignment. Except you can't because some of the abilities are then duplicated, undervaluing that alignment choice.

To correct this the whole approach to cult troops and demons would need to be worked on, with them rewritten from the ground up to be complimentary to each other as well as additive to each other where benefits are combined.

Marks should confer some base advantage (a single stat increase, some minor USR's and/or some other small bonus). The cult troops should add further by specialising the unit in ways outside of the marks (adding different stat increases, different USR's, unique wargear etc). Demons of X should have an entirely different set of advantages to the marks. Some of the demon types might have both Mark of X and Demon of X distinguishing them as particularly potent demons of that god. The Demon of X ability can then be transferred to chaos marine units additively through a variety of other special rules. In this case such a formation as the Veterans of the Legion could easily be boosted by the addition of Demon of X rules. Instead if you tried to do that with the current rules then half the advantages would need to be rewritten for them to work. It's really really messy. The two sides of chaos should be plug-and-play and allow for easy crossover to represent the fact that many chaos forces on the battlefield would be a good mix of both demonic and marine units.

A case in point of how this doesn't work currently is the Demonic Possession rule. Possessed Marines (and Warp Talons) have set the precedent that possessed units count as demons, why do demonically possessed vehicles not count as demons also? They really should. And why wouldn't these possessed units be treated as Demons of X? The Imperial Armour books allow for vehicles to be dedicated to the gods, conferring distinct bonuses to them. The whole Mark of X, Demon of X, Dedicated to X and Covenant of X thing is a mess. It's 4 different systems working alongside each other (but often at odds with each other), where one unified system divided into 4 different tiers/categories would work much much better.

I've said it a few times but 40k is a mess of rules just thrown together ad hoc, only evolving when forced to do so or when the next great paradigm shift comes on down from GW HQ. Any attempt to correct the ruleset, including the release of formations and detachments for obviously broken codexes is just plastering over the massive cracks and glaring holes that exist int he ruleset.

40k just needs a proper rewrite from the ground up, with codexes (or whatever replaces them) being written with a unified vision in mind and a solid understanding of what each faction is going to do in the new edition. I mean why do we have a Demon codex if the intent was to release superior Demonkin codexes to replace it? It makes no sense to have a Demon codex if there are to be Demonkin codexes. The idea of an army fielding demons of all 4 gods is a stretch outside of some legion armies (Word Bearers, Black Legion) calling it into existence (and that should be represented by Legion rules with demons brought in as standard force org choices). Demon armies would almost certainly be mono-god, thus Demonkin books should be invalidating vanilla demons. It's a mess. They had one idea one day (to split marines and demons into separate armies) and then changed tack halfway through the journey to invalidate the demon book with Demonkin. But then they changed their mind again and couldn't be bothered to complete the course and release the other 3 kin books.

The thing is if you're gonna go to the effort to houserule rules that are missing (such as the lack of bonus in the Veterans of the Legion formation) then you may as well just throw out the baby with the bathwater and write a proper homebrew codex that makes chaos what they should be. If you're going to cross the threshold of adding your own rules to a game then you may as well just go for a full conversion mod. Otherwise you're still playing a broken faction with broken systems.

Chaos players would be better off trying to show GW how their faction doesn't work, encourage them to fix it properly on their behalf.

 Traditio wrote:

Shrouded seems a bit much on Plague Marines to me.

That's what daemons of nurgle confers. I assume that what the OP essentially is getting at is this: "If the units are within x number of inches of each other, they get the daemons of [insert chaos god here]." Perhaps a somewhat stripped down version, but yeah.

This is why I don't like the Khorne one. +1 attack isn't what daemons of khorne confers. The problem is, the major stuff that daemons of khorne confers, Khorne berserkers already get.

Perhaps this would be better: "If a unit of khorne berserkers is within 12 inches of at least one other unit of khorne berserkers from this formation, the rage and furious charge special rules do not expire after the first round of close combat. Because ALWAYS ANGRY ALL THE TIME."

If your tables are like mine, there are a lot of ruins laying around meaning that Stealth basically just ensures you'll have a 3+ cover save if you're denied your 3+ armor save. Shrouded means that your army is now full of T5 guys with 2+ cover saves.

Again, daemons of nurgle already get 2+ covers in ruins. Do you think that plague marines would be OP if they got 2+ cover saves in ruins?

@The OP: I'd change the Thousand Sons rule to allow rerolling all saves of 1 instead of just invuls.

Absolutely not. This is right up there with ravenwing OP cheesery. You've just made it so that thousand sons have practically a 2+, 3++. That makes them more durable than terminators for nowhere near the cost.

Rerolling 1s on invulns is fine. It's what daemons of tzeentch confers, and it makes T-sons roughly as durable as legions of the damned.

Fleet on Noise Marines makes sense but actually isn't great.

It's what daemons of slaanesh confers. That's why I'm recommending the additional 1d3 when running.

Plague Marines: Nurgle daemon troops are toughness 3 and 4 with no armor save meaning they're easier to wound in general and that their (often 2+) cover saves can be reduced to 5+ invul saves by assaulting them or applying ignores cover weaponry to them. Plague marines, who are admittedly much pricier on a guy-by-guy basis, would still have 3+ armor and FNP against many of the things that normally counter nurgle daemon troops. It probably wouldn't make them "overpowered" in the sense that they'd be instant game winners. I think that upping their toughness to such a degree would make them highly annoying and uninteractive. Sort of like necron troops. It's not that necrons are sweeping tournaments around here, but games against them tend to be frustrating and boring because you most armies struggle to meaningfully counter or engage with them.

Berzerkers: I see what you're going for there. I'm still not a huge fan of Khorne rules that boil down to "punch things more/harder." They already have a lot of punch more/harder rules, and they already have access to formations that let them punch more/harder. Therefor, I prefer the idea of giving them an option that meaningfully changes their play style (a horizontal shift) rather than purely boosting their melee power (a vertical change). This is largely personal bias.

Thousand Sons: You raise a fair point. I was mostly suggesting it because it's awkward to take a formation that requires you take 4 units of something just to get a special rule that you'll only enjoy when someone is ignoring your armor save. Also, boosting their invul and only their invul doesn't address several key problems they have. Thousand Sons are described as being all but immune to small arms fire but susceptible to powerful anti-tank weaponry. Which is contradicted by their mechanics as they're just as susceptible to small arms fire as normal marines but actually stand up to anti-tank weapons quite well compared to the average bear. Boosting their invul supports this fluff-crunch disparity without addressing the issue that they're quite expensive for a unit just as susceptible to small arms fire as tactical marines while also being significantly more expensive.

My Thousand Sons wishlist is rather long. A few things I'd kind of like to see them get include:
* An extra wound on rubric marines.
* Sorcerers not being forced to take crummy, unfluffy Tzeentch powers (boon of mutation is counter to Thousand Sons fluff)
* More special ammo types instead of just inferno bolts, sort of like a chaos sternguard. Represents different spells worked into their bolts.
* Something akin to a ghost helm (ignore wounds from perils at the cost of warp charges) so that you can actually toss lots of dice at psychic powers without worrying about killing your aspiring sorcerers.

Perhaps one of those options would be within the scope of this project?

Noise Marines: Fleet is part of what daemon of Slaanesh confers, but it doesn't fix their main issues. Noise marines have to pay for marks of Slaanesh, so they want to get up close and use their higher initiative to punch things in the face. The doom siren and assault profile on the blast master also make them want to punch things in the face. However, the majority of the unit is stuck taking rapid fire and salvo weapons (sonic blasters being one of the staples of the unit), and such weapons disallow charging after use while also encouraging the unit to hold still to get their full number of shots from the sonic blasters. So their mandatory upgrades make them want to assault, but their iconic weaponry makes them want to hold still and not assault.

You can build them with assault in mind, forego sonic blasters entirely, and only shoot pistols, doom sirens, and blast masters. But at that point, you're basically just running slaanesh-marked CSM troops with a doom siren. It invalidates the "noise" part of the noise marines except on the champion and 1 out of 10 normal guys. And there's really no reason for this. Sonic blasters used to be assault/heavy instead of salvo, and they're far from overpowered with such a profile.

So if you want to give them rules that let them stick to their theme, I suggest either making sonic blasters assault/heavy or else making them relentless. This allows them to be mobile fighters that advance across the battlefield engaging in both shooting and assault using their noise weapons. Alternatively, if you really want to focus on the assault aspect of them and not fix sonic blasters in the name of giving them daemon rules, why not give them rending instead? Or even the bonus to movement when running? Rending reflects the martial perfection aspect of Slaaneshi marines by representing perfectly-placed strikes and ups their melee prowess considerably while also differentiating them from troop marines. Increasing their run distance by 3" allows blob squads to cross the table faster as they strive to get into melee and also increases their average run distance more than fleet does.

On noise marines, fleet basically just helps them make charge rolls once they happen to be in assault range (assuming they want to assault at all; see: sonic blasters). It's arguably the least useful aspect of the Daemon of Slaanesh rule for noise marines, and it doesn't address the problems facing noise marines.

EDIT: Adding d3" to a run roll would be nice, but it's also an extra die roll to do, and you'd either have to pause to clarify which die you're rolling is a d3 for the run move or else you'd have to roll them separately. It would be fine, but I still don't like it as much as putting the noise back in noise marines. I feel like movement boosts would be more fitting for a formation focused on generic Slaaneshi marines rather than noise marines specifically.

I wrote something up awhile ago, for making "Veterans of the Legions" its own formation. I'm copypasting what I drafted up.

Formation: Veterans of the Legion.
Formation composition: Select 2-4 units from the following: Chosen, Berserkers, Noise Marines, Plague Marines, or Thousand Sons. All units in the formation must share the same Mark.

Benefit: "Veterans of the Long War:" For each unit in the formation beyond the first, you get one bonus that applies to the entire formation. Select the formations at army creation.

Forbidden Lore: Units in this formation gain Brotherhood of Sorcerers (note: may not be taken if the formation includes any models with the Mark of Khorne); if the unit already had a Psyker, the unit has ML 2 as long as that Psyker was alive. Unmarked units may only generate powers from Sinistrum/Electromancy/Geomortis/Heretech. Marked units may only generate powers from their God's discipline.

Guerilla Experts: Infiltrate and Move Through Cover.

Martial Prowess: +1 WS/BS

Siege Specialists: Tank Hunters. Squads may take an extra "Special/Heavy" beyond their normal allowed squad size. (For example, a squad of 5 Noise Marines may take 2 Blastmasters)

Slayers: Precision Shots & Precision Strikes

Spoils of the Long War: 5-point cost reduction on wargear upgrades.

The idea is to allow a certain degree of "customization" in army-builds. The only real snafu I'm thinking of is Tzeentch. While BS 5 Infiltrating Thousand Sons could be cute, you're still paying a premium for them, and the Mark of Tzeentch is a terrible upgrade for vanilla Chosen. Regardless, this would allow for "Alpha Legion" or "Iron Warriors" style armies as well. Plus you can do silly stuff like running Thousand Sons as snipers, or using Plague Marines as a Warp Charge Battery.

That's the main issue with the Cult Marines as a whole though. I have fixes I've been playing around with for them.

I have an issue with Forbidden Lore. The God Tables suck pretty hard.

If Traitor's Hate had, like Curse of the Wulfen, made improved Psychic Tables for the CSM, then I could get behind it.

I wouldn't even know how to begin fixing those tables!

 JNAProductions wrote:
I have an issue with Forbidden Lore. The God Tables suck pretty hard.

If Traitor's Hate had, like Curse of the Wulfen, made improved Psychic Tables for the CSM, then I could get behind it.

Free Warp Charge is free Warp Charge, no matter how you slice it. It may be worth removing the "Unmarked" version of it (or make it Sinistrum-only), just because playing around with Traitor's Hate as shown me that Ectomancy is a really useful discipline to have, and the thought of having 4 independent sources of Ghost-Storm or Geomortis or Scrapcode Curse is just insane.

As for the god-specific powers, I actually kind of like the Slaanesh discipline. It's fairly non-random, you get a good mix of controller buffs, and the Primaris gives an easy source of Blind. :

For Thousand Sons, a unit of 10 Horrors gives 1 Warp Charge for 90 points, but doesn't do anything else. Getting 2 Warp Charge for 150 points isn't as tough to swallow when it's on a unit that's basically a toned-down Dark Reaper, and when that unit now has a 66% chance of getting Doombolt (the "good" power of the formation). I imagine such a formation would be more versatile/deadly for Tzeentch if it also allowed Terminators instead of Chosen. The only problem with this is that Chosen would end up being regulated to basically being a "Non-Havoc" source of Heavy Weapons. Which admittedly could be useful if you're running Lost and the Damned as your core instead of the Warband.

Really, the only one that would have issues would be Nurgle, though given that the game favors "weight of fire" rather than "minimum high-strength hits", there is something to be said for getting multiple sources of Weapon Virus.

Given that the Cult Units are overcosted, my rationale at the time was "If you're going to take multiples of an overcosted unit, you might as well keep scaling the bonuses they get upwards accordingly."

 Slaanesh-Devotee wrote:
Could Noisemarines get rules that reflect, support, enhance their sonic weaponry one day? After all, they are NOISE marines. ..

Simple really give them the Relentless USR. Then maybe something like... "Destructive Resonance": in the shooting phase a unit equipped with sonic weapons may boost power gaining the Rending and Get's Hot USR's.

Zerkers need a Run+Assault mechanic and/or keep the benefits of their special rules( Furious Charge, rage, etc) even when they make a disordered charge, because lets face it, be it disordered or not, they just don't fuckin care...

Maybe give Bezerkers an ability that allows them to assault out of any vehicle they disembark from (abiding other rules, such as unable to assault from reserve etc,.). However if it's not an assault vehicle, they count as a disordered charge.

Trying to make rhinos viable as transports for zerkers.

I think the whole Chaos SM codex needs an overhaul and serious rethinking on how they are supposed to feel and be played.

Other than that, I really get the feeling that formation is just a tool to allow you to put some cult units into your "Chaos Decurion". In regular Space Marines you have the option to put formations composed of Dreadnoughts without any benefit and the ironhands have one that consists of a Dread and a Tact squad, again with no benefit.

I would rather see 3 new core formations focusing on the non khorne cults.