Word Bearers fluff question...

[Ubermensch Commander]

One thing to consider on the "only undivided" mark or icon other than A-D-B's well made points:

Chaos Gate had Khorne bits and Tzeentch bits mixed in and I seem to recall bits of fluff mentioning that they worship the Dark Gods as much as a Pantheon as a single faceted entity. It would be quite alright to mix different marks/icons into a Word Bearers army from a fluff standpoint.

Not entirely wrong to do all undivided either, just that it would not be breaking with fluff to include multiple gods favor in one force.

My understanding is the only "mono god" Legions are Emperor's Children, Thousand Sons, World Eaters, and Death Guard.

[the jeske]

Taken from the Warriors of Chaos Armybook, while it might be the "Gifts" section and not the "Marks" section it's still food for thought:

 

"Because most Warriors of Chaos worship the entire pantheon of the Dark Gods, it is not unusual for a warrior to bear the blessing of more than one of his patrons, or even to have taken his power from a defeated foe - for example, a warrior favored by Slaanesh might find his sinews alive with the blessings of Khorne after a particularly vicious slaughter."

 

TDA

which would matter if WFB and w40k woulddnt be separate worlds.

 

My biggest example would be Khalaxis (It was something like that) from the WB books.He and his squad always favored Khorne more than the other gods, but Jarulek allowed it because they were useful in an assault.

there is a difference between being bloodthirsty and being khorn worshiper. technicly even normal loyalist space marines are viewed as brutal killers . SW are blood thirsty like hell , but it doesnt mean they worship khorn . If your khorn marked everything you do , buffs khorn only . some with other gods + if you decide to do something that is against the aspect of your god[khorn dude not killing , nurgle dude doing change etc] you get punished sooner or later. With the WB the problem is that if a marine gets chaos marked , he can no longer worship/do the will of the whole chaos pantheon . He will just do what god X tells him to do [or else his life will be rather short].

 

Ultimately, I know there's a very eager trend to look back at 3.5 and imagine it as a golden age, but let's not forget how limiting it was, too. Were still "enjoying" the Night Lords as "RAPTORS, RAPTORS, RAPTORS" 10 years later, despite it having almost nothing to do with their background, and for every sweet rule we had back then, there was another that artificially limited us in the name of some forced difference between Legions.

so them having a whole grand company of jump troops , inventing the mass use of jump troop units and spreading the use of those around other legions was retconed?

[Lord_Caerolion]

so them having a whole grand company of jump troops , inventing the mass use of jump troop units and spreading the use of those around other legions was retconed?

 

They never had a whole grand company of them that we knew of (their 1st Company wore Terminator Armour like most others), and all that was said was that Sahaal was the first "Raptor". Nothing says they "invented the mass use" of them either. It's just one of those things that the internet has repeated and repeated ad nauseum until people believe that it's true.

While they did spread the idea around, once again I'll use my Black Templar example. The Black Templars invented the Land Raider Crusader, and "spread its use" to other Chapters, yet that doesn't mean that a Black Templar army needs to spam Crusaders to be fluffy.

 

Even though the Night Lords may have had more, they were still damn rare during the Crusade. Even if they had a whole Grand Company, that's still at best 10% of the total Legion strength, and I highly, highly doubt it was that high. If only 2.5% of most Legions were Assault Marines with jump packs, then the Night Lords only having 5% of their total strength is still much higher than before, but still crud-all.

 

The fact remains that the Index Astartes article on the Night Lords doesn't even mention Raptors once. Surely if they were such an integral part of the Legion they'd have been mentioned at least once. As it stands, we only have that Sahaal himself wore a jump-pack, and was the first Raptor, but he only became 1st Company Captain during the Heresy, with Sevetar holding that position before-hand, who fought on foot. Every source we have of 1st Company only shows them in Terminator armour, with neither Lord of the Night, Soul Hunter, Blood Reaver or the Index Astartes article mentioning they were all Raptors.

 

Basically, it was never retconned because it was never the truth, despite what the internet believes.

[Kristoff]

Funny, I thought the Blood Angels developed the Jump Troop.

 

It was the Night Lords that developed the Raptor, taking the Jump Troop and making them a terror weapon.

[thecolorpurple]

One thing I'm surprised hasn't been mentioned is using daemons as appropriate cult troops (or as a variety of other things). The fluff explicitly states the Word Bearers prefer to use lots of daemons and cultists as their backbone and only commit marines to the most important assignments. I'm currently working on a quite fluffy WB army, with kitted out terminators, lots of daemons, and other not-so-great choices, and eventually want to get some traitor guard to ally with them. I also want them to be useable in more competitive games though, so I've put some thought into how to represent more efficient C:CSM choices with the Word Bearers theme. Basically I want my army to be at least 50:50 daemons to marines.

 

Berzerkers as Bloodletters is fairly obvious. You almost never have your zerks actually fire their pistols in game as it is, so the Bloodletters carrying only axes wouldn't really bother anyone I think, and a champion with a suitably impressive axe could easily be a powerfist. I don't really know what to use for a Bloodletter "Rhino" though. I might just stick them in a regular daemon-possesed Rhino, as that doesn't seem to out of character for them.

 

Plague Marines as Plaguebearers is another obvious choice, though these guys would be doing lots of shooting and be carrying special weapons so I want them to have guns represented. I'm planning to greenstuff some simple, fleshy cannons onto the pbs, and represent plasma canon guys by greenstuffing them to be hugely bloated with big guns coming out of them, like they could explode at any moment. A cool but iffy idea for their rhino was to use the forgeworld Nurgle DP as a daemon-possesed Rhino with a havoc launcher. This would be a really fun and appropriate choice, IMHO, but might cause some contention due to having such a different profile for los purposes.

 

For deepstriking termicide squads I'm going to run with flamers of Tzeentch, possibly with some new meltaish weapons greenstuffed on. This makes a lot more since to me than throwing our best warriors in the best armor out in suicide missions. I could then use some actual terminators kitbashed and greenstuffed with some possesed bits as obliterators. Fluffwise they would be ancient, elite, and heavily mutated shooty terminators rather than obliterator cultists.

 

A lash Prince could easily be represented as a Slaanesh herald or even a KoS, without breaking the theme at all. If you want a Nurgle or Tzeentch dp for some reason you could do the same for them, and I don't see how anyone could complain. (Especially if you still include a Lord as your Dark Apostle.)

 

If you wanted to use TS, horrors out of the box would make perfect sense for them, and daemonettes with some conversions could easily be noise marines, replacing sonic weaponry with siren-songesque daemonic powers. Alot of the other units in our codex are downright bad, but to continue the theme, furies or screamers would do well as raptors, bloodcrushers, seekers, or screamers could be bikes, and any of the greater daemons could be represented with a defiler. Hell, the defiler is arguably a better representation of the marked GDs than the actual summoned profile is. I'd obviously run a bloodthirster as cc weapons only, or maybe a flamer and cc. Any sort of daemonic beast, with an appropriate cannonesque conversion, could be a vindicator.

 

I've also got a fluff question of my own, do Word Bearers led by Daemon Princes make sense? I mean I can certainly imagine some of the Dark Apostles or other leaders being elevated, but would they continue as Apostles leading Word Bearers or go their own way?