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So, as I mentioned in my introduction thread, I recently returned to 40k with the release of 8th edition, but little plastic men have gotten way more expensive than I remembered, so if I'm going to field a decent army I am needing to get creative. I lucked upon an Age of Sigmar starter box for dirt cheap, and scored a bucket of cultists & a chimera for even less, so I've been looking at building a combined Chaos army - towards that end I also picked up the Start Collecting Khorne Daemons boxed set.

I had the notion of using the Reavers from the AoS box as really powerful melee-oriented cultists, but then I read the Heretics & Renegades list and discovered Renegade Marauders, the scum & villainy-ish mercenaries of the 40k universe. Every squad of 5 allows the inclusion of 2 Brutes, who are tougher and much better at melee than their regular cultist buddies, so now I'm thinking I could use the chaos cultists as the regular marauders, and use the Reavers as brutes. All they would arguably need to fit into 40k would be a pistol-swap out for one of their melee weapons.

I'm going to have quite a few regular cultists left over after using up all the Reavers though, and the Marauders to have a potentially problematic morale rule (roll 1d6, entire squad quits the field on a 1) so I thought I could use the remainder as regular cultists to offset and shield them somewhat, as long as I made sure I used like models with like & didn't mix them between the two different unit types.

The AoS Gorechosen are dead ringers for Khorne Berserkers, and again would probably only need weapon swaps, and if I were being a real stickler about it, the addition of Space Marine pauldrons.

I know that "counts as" models are a mighty grey area as far as gaming is concerned though, so I would appreciate feedback on my proposed conversions and your opinions on whether I'm even crafting a legal army here.

Thanks lots,
Simone

Go for it! Sounds like a cool army idea, but if you plan to play competitively model on the options you choose to run.

Rule of Cool and WYSIWYG.
If these apply to your models, do it.
Use similar bases and model sizes to the official models and you shouldn't have much trouble with "counts-as".
It isn't as though a lot of the units listed in the indexes and codexes have official models anyway. IG veterans, and so on.

Thanks for the feedback guys. I will post updates to the thread to get your opinions on how closely I am adhering to Rule of Cool & WYSIWYG.