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hello, disclaimer. not an AOS guy. former fantasy guy.

so i've always had a soft spot for beastmen. when i was younger and wrote stories for my empire army, beastmen were typically the main antagonists.

i never started an army or got the army book or anything but i just liked their look and what not, so many many years later i was disappointed to discover that they were inherently chaos, as i had always assumed they had their own 'culture' with their own gods and the like separate from the chaos gods. almost like a more primitive more beastial version of orcs.

any way i was just watching this video here, and the narrator mentions how the beastmen existed in the new AOS world for quite a while before any other faction of chaos arrived or existed, so maybe GW is moving away from the inherently chaos background.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TNG3X5X5BGQ


is there any other bits of background or lore that might support this? what do you think about the possibility of beastmen becoming something other than a purely chaos faction? (even if there isn't anything else to support this idea.)

I seriously doubt that such a change will ever occur.

Besides, you somehow missed/ignored the official cannon of WHFB & made up your own. Just continue to do so here in the Sigmar era.
GW may say Beastmen are Chaos, but yours don't have to be....

Beastmen are an interesting mix of being as Destructive as the Orks, but were created by the energies of Chaos.

That being said, Chaos is itself quite self-destructive. It wouldn't be that surprising for a Herd to be against the normal Chaos Gods, particularly if they heard of the unspoken one of Malice.

The basic answer to your question; Beasts of Chaos is their faction name nowadays and as that indicates, completely Chaos. Though they (generally) worship Chaos as a primordial force, and disdain if not outright hate god-touched beings as being weak for accepting blessings from another being in exchange for service. Their Battletome does a pretty good job of explaining it out, the WD from a number of months back with their update touches on it too if I recall correctly.

That said it is worth getting into what one considers a "beastman". In AoS that isn't a specific terminology like it was in WHFB; there exist entities like Kragnos or Kurnothi that could certainly be described as 'beastmen' but are not Beasts of Chaos.

It's important to note that Chaos is more than the Gods. The Five main Gods of Chaos are simply the five most powerful entities within the Warp that we are aware of.

Nurgle, Tzeentch, Khorne and Slaanesh are all creatures of the warp born within it and fully of that realm. Their demons are actually part of them, like a body seen as its component parts rather than as a single living thing. So whilst Greater Demons and lesser ones, all fight for power and kill each other even within the same god, they are all part of the same overall being.

The Great Horned Rat is slightly different as he kind of bought his way in at the end of the End Times and operates differently. Skaven don't go to Chaos upon death, they've their own Realm of Ruin within the Realm of Death same as all other living things in the Mortal Realms. The skaven are not part of the Great Horned One either in the same way Deamons are.


So in this you've got the Beastmen who worship Chaos as a concept and the Warp as a place; but don't totally align themselves with any of the Five main gods as a whole. They will fight for one of the core four at times and there are options to take those tainted/blessed by those gods in armies. However in general the race itself has a neutral stance toward the Chaos Gods. This makes them slightly different and it also leaves the door open for the possibility that if their belief were strong enough; if it were focused enough; they could generate the birth of their own Chaos God in much the same way that Slaanesh was birthed.

Already exists--it's Morghur.

In old fantasy, chaos had three books, Demons, Mortal (chaos warriors), and Beastmen. I would be okay if they had a version of beast-type beastmen, kind of thinking like dwarves and chaos dwarves.
Because you have to think of centaurs are part of the Sylvaneth forces (underworld Skaeth's Wild Hunt) and that is kind of close to what they are. Plus beast men have chaos power versions of breeds
also like the Slaangor Fiendbloods, I would be okay with beastmen becoming their own stand-alone faction that somehow straddles the destruction and chaos factions.

ccs wrote:

I seriously doubt that such a change will ever occur.

Besides, you somehow missed/ignored the official cannon of WHFB & made up your own. Just continue to do so here in the Sigmar era.
GW may say Beastmen are Chaos, but yours don't have to be....

if GW say they're chaos, then they're likely to have chaos iconography that i'm not a fan of.


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i tried using some of their models to create a 40k 'counts as' ork army, but i didn't have any ork bits so it didn't work out too well...


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for anyone curious here's how i would kinda like to see beastmen portrayed

give them semi-permanent settlements. mostly just camps, but they get some form of rudimentary fortifications.

they don't mine or anything like that, they can't process any ore or anything the find in predug mines or anything, but they can reforge metals they salvage.

maybe shamans whittle crude 'art' and the amount of effort they put into it imbues it with some level of enchantment.

etc.

johnpjones1775 wrote:

ccs wrote:

I seriously doubt that such a change will ever occur.

Besides, you somehow missed/ignored the official cannon of WHFB & made up your own. Just continue to do so here in the Sigmar era.
GW may say Beastmen are Chaos, but yours don't have to be....

if GW say they're chaos, then they're likely to have chaos iconography that i'm not a fan of.

Well, as the owner of about 4k pts worth of this army, I can tell you that very few of the current plastics actually have Chaos iconography. There's a few chaos stars on belts & shields, a couple on pendants, and a few etched on axes. The most noticeable would be the shields of course.
Absolutely nothing a few moments with a hobby knife &/or some greenstuff can't easily fix.
Or, in the case of the marked shields? Just don't put those on. A random beastguy here or there in a unit missing a shield won't make any difference. And then you just pull them as casualties 1st.... (serves them right for going into battle without a shield. )

If you'd care to see for yourself what I'm talking about just go to GWs site & look at the pics of the sprues for each unit.

Do not let a few easily changed modeling details deter you from making the army you dream of.

johnpjones1775 wrote:
hello, disclaimer. not an AOS guy. former fantasy guy.

so i've always had a soft spot for beastmen. when i was younger and wrote stories for my empire army, beastmen were typically the main antagonists.

i never started an army or got the army book or anything but i just liked their look and what not, so many many years later i was disappointed to discover that they were inherently chaos, as i had always assumed they had their own 'culture' with their own gods and the like separate from the chaos gods. almost like a more primitive more beastial version of orcs.

any way i was just watching this video here, and the narrator mentions how the beastmen existed in the new AOS world for quite a while before any other faction of chaos arrived or existed, so maybe GW is moving away from the inherently chaos background.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TNG3X5X5BGQ


is there any other bits of background or lore that might support this? what do you think about the possibility of beastmen becoming something other than a purely chaos faction? (even if there isn't anything else to support this idea.)

They are literally the children of chaos, they have marked beasts, and they want everything to fall to chaos and have no order to it, yes they are chaos. This thread is as silly.

Its not mentioned but the primary Chaos god they worhiped weather directly or not, was nugal.
He was viewed as the great devourer which is why they basically ran around well...devouring everything.

The Warhammer Fantasy Beastmen will pretty much always be tied to chaos. There really is no way around that. They have a very... explicitly chaos origin story.

It's only in 40k where they occupy a more morally grey area as just abhumans.


That said, they're not mindless monsters that spill out of the chaos wastes with daemons and such. They are still living sentient beings. They make settlements, have a society, etc... They are kind of a very on-the-nose Feral Savage people. Evil chaos worshipping people as a rule, but still people. In theory you might have individuals who turn away from chaos and maybe try to live counter to their nature, but that would be very rare.

They're kinda like Orcs in LoTR. Inherently evil, but not irredeemably so.

They do kinda live like you want them to. They are semi-nomadic, so they'll sometimes make/take over a permanent structure. They definitely make art, to their own tastes, in the vein of savage tribal stuff. They have families too. Beastmen reproduce like humans do, and can breed with normal humans as well. Sometimes humans can randomly birth beastmen as well, such is chaos's corruption.

One of the old FFG Warhammer RPG adventures involved investigating tales of murder and finding a family of hillbillys feeding people to a local beastmen herd that contained some of their own children who had been born beasts.

They're not mindless beasts, they are savage and feral, but still have the minds of men and are capable(though not inclined) of rational conversation.