codex crimson slaughter.... yup, GW really hates us.

[FENRISÚLFUR]

Until there is a model for Chaos drop pod, don't expect to see Chaos drop pod in rules. Also don't expect more than some new pieces of artifacts, warlord table and MAYBE some new pieces of wargear. If we are lucky, we might even see some rules tweak here and there, but thats it. There is no precedence for big rule changes and/or adding new units without models for them.

I agree that they wouldn't put in any new units without models, ala the Thunderwolf and spore pod fiasco. To this extent I suggest that they add the chaos vehicle sprue to the drop pod box, jack up the price and call it a day ;)

 

All kidding aside, I would be happy to use the current drop pod kit for my chaos armies. Heck, I'd even paint them blue to represent the @$$ whooping that ole Abby put on those boys in blue to take them!

[Wade Garrett]

Besides, as A D-B (among others) has mentioned at least a few times, the Legions of old are dead.

You do mean Aaron Dembski Bowden, not some other guy with those initials, right?

 

Because when Aaron wrote a Chaos Marine trilogy set in 40k, it was about the VIII Legion Night Lords, scions of the Haunter, scouring your worlds with darkness and terror since M30, not "Generic spiky Astartes who are all exactly like each other because the old traditions of the Legions are all deader than Ferrus Manus".

[Kol Saresk]

 

 

Besides, as A D-B (among others) has mentioned at least a few times, the Legions of old are dead.

You do mean Aaron Dembski Bowden, not some other guy with those initials, right?

 

Because when Aaron wrote a Chaos Marine trilogy set in 40k, it was about the VIII Legion Night Lords, scions of the Haunter, scouring your worlds with darkness and terror since M30, not "Generic spiky Astartes who are all exactly like each other because the old traditions of the Legions are all deader than Ferrus Manus".

 

 

No, it was about a warband of Traitor Marines who call themselves Night Lords and aren't even a representation of the whole Legion, but are merely one warband in a galaxy dull of warbands. Although it is ironic to try and use this series to say "Legionz!" when that series showed the VIII Legion to broken, scattered, shattered, and definitely not a Legion.

[Scribe]

Broken up you mean? Like Chapters almost?

 

Even in the Heresy we see that Night Lords are essentially fractured, so this is new how?

 

The point is the bloodline, the traits, the theme. You dont have to be of the Haunters bloodline to be a Night Lord, but there is still something that is 'Night Lord' as the books show us.

[Kol Saresk]

Broken up you mean? Like Chapters almost?

 

Even in the Heresy we see that Night Lords are essentially fractured, so this is new how?

 

The point is the bloodline, the traits, the theme. You dont have to be of the Haunters bloodline to be a Night Lord, but there is still something that is 'Night Lord' as the books show us.

You do realize that the Chapters are not Legions right? Are you sure you want to use that comparison because it sort of invalidates the point.

 

Yeah, an ideology. Not a Legion. A method. Not a command hierarchy. The VIII Legion is dead. The only "Night Lords" are those who cling to the past and are unwilling to move forward alongside those they drag with them.

 

And actually, in the Heresy they were cohesive. They acted as a Legion. For the most part there was a command hierarchy. After the death of Curze and the Shattering at Tsalgualsa, all pretense of an overall command were, well they were Shattered along with the rest of the Legion. It is dead. Not dying, not an animal in pain that needs to be put out of its misery, but dead.

[Scribe]

The fact that even successors, no matter how far removed from the 'source' share traits with their legion founder...well they may as well be Legions for the intents of the conversation.

 

Nobody cares about Legions as a cohesive whole. If the Legions still existed, they would have won already. I get that, and its not remotely the point.

 

Call it whatever you want, but when CSM players are talking about Legions, they are talking about Traits. They want World Eater's to be better than mooks with the Mark of Khorne at being crazy choppy guys.

 

They want Thousand Sons to ACTUALLY be good at playing sorcerers.

 

They want Night Lords to a man, to work on the principle of fear, and terror, and retribution.

 

Its not even a difficult concept. They can do it in Apoc, they can do it in FW HH books, they can do it in the fluff (aforementioned NL Trilogy) and they can do it with Space Marines in 2 pages, in one book.

 

Thats what people are talking about when they say Legions. They want Legion, fluff driven, traits, regardless of the fact the LEGIONS are broken up, to argue there not 100 marines (Hi there 3rd Company of the Imperial Fists) who have stuck to what made them unique as a military force is simply refusing to see sense.

 

I simply want some parity with the quality of effort thrown in the direction of CSM, and Legion (or whatever the hell you guys want to call it since Legion obviously means something else to you) traits, which can be easily done.

[Kol Saresk]

Post was archived so link is provided for viewing. LINKY

A D-B

 

Chaos has changed.

 

That seems an obvious thing to say, given that Chaos is change, let alone the semi-recent release of the latest Codex: Chaos Space Marines, which shook things up a lot. I'll put it politely when I say that opinion is divided, but the response I've seen online across the various forums - which may or may not hold true to the majority of players - is that this edition's C:CSM is a solid book regarding most mechanics (don't mention dreadnoughts...) and offers some competitive, variable army lists. In regards to the setting and the established lore, it takes a much harder beating.

 

Most of that beating is delivered, one way or another, to Gav Thorpe. He designed the latest codex, so the buck stops with him. People seem to dislike the changes because they were largely for the worse, or because any changes happened at all.

 

I'm not about to pass judgement on any of that. It's just context, and it's neither about defending the writer or accusing him, nor is it about disagreeing with people's opinions one way or the other. I'm not pro- or anti- the new codex.

 

And that's kind of my point. It's there, and I want to get everything I can out of it. I don't want to keep my head filled with army lists that rocked in some semi-mythical golden age, and I don't want to use Counts-As as a kind of holy grail to avoid playing with what's on offer. I have a Codex: Chaos Space Marines, and I want to get into it, to see what I can make rock and roll.

 

I was a Chaos Marine player a couple of editions back, and I really loved what the Index Astartes articles brought to the game. But I never felt like they represented the setting particularly well. They represented gamers' armies very well, yeah. But not the setting. Let me explain that thought a little better.

 

Maybe this is just my perception, but I thought I'd throw it into the mix and see what came out.

 

 

-- The Warband --

 

Chaos Marine armies are not organised by company, by Chapter, or by Legion. Space Marines have companies and Chapters. Space Marines and Chaos Marines both used to have organised Legions. Not anymore.

 

In the 10,000 years since the Horus Heresy, the Traitor Legions have almost entirely dissolved. While the Black Legion - led by the chosen one of the Chaos Gods - has grown immensely powerful, even they spent centuries (perhaps even longer) getting slaughtered by the other Legions. In the Eye of Terror, it's not an empire of peace and mutual respect. Chaos Marines are killing each other, when they're not out killing the people of the Imperium. The World Eaters are the other obvious example of a Legion that was reduced to scattered warbands, by the actions of Khârn the Betrayer. But in 10,000 years, the reason the Black Legion is so powerful is because they are the largest, by far. The other Legions have disintegrated, breaking down through millennia of civil war, battles with the Imperium, wars with other Chaos Marines, and internal rivalries.

 

See, that makes sense to me. I read all of this in various sources, and it makes perfect sense.

 

And this is what was such a change from previous editions. Before, you had Legion-specific rules for playing Chaos Marines as if they were Space Marines, as if the entire army had a unifying theme that immediately defined it on the tabletop. Same colours, same rules - a very easy and appealing theme for a painter and a gamer. But, I'd argue, not really all that accurate to the lore. While warbands made entirely of Traitor Legion Astartes definitely exist in huge numbers, they're still the minority. The Chaos Marines of Warhammer 40,000 are not unified by Legion, or even company. They're barely unified at all, until a powerful champion or warmaster inspires them to rise up together - and even then, they're hardly going to best friends with rival warbands.

 

I'm not saying Renegade Chapters immediately break up, or no Legion remnants remain "true" to what they perceive as their primarch's ideals. But dealing strictly with the Traitor Legions, their primarchs play almost no role in their activities. Abaddon the Despoiler is Warmaster of Chaos, and Lord of the Traitor Legions. The daemon primarchs are locked in their gods' (and their own) perspectives of the Great Game. They're mostly above the petty mortal fighting of armies in the real universe. While they do invade the Imperium from time to time, it's pretty clear their attentions and powers are elsewhere, on an unseen and more vital (to them) level. Some sources contradict this, such as Black Library novels, which have to be based around a specific Legion in order to sell. So you have the Word Bearers (and the upcoming Night Lords) series, both essentially tied to a Legion-specific theme. And the Word Bearers, bless 'em, are one of the few Legions that keeps its individual warbands relatively loyal to one another.

 

Warbands is the key word, here. Chaos Marines - lacking Legions, Chapters, and companies - are divided into armies of warbands, which is anathema to the regulated, traditional Space Marines of the Imperium. Warbands might be temporary or eternal, depending on the theme of unity, as well as the leader's strength and personality. But it's also what makes the Chaos Marines of 5th edition so interesting to me.

 

It's especially clear in the Special Characters. Half of them don't even associate with their Legions, anymore. I mean... that's pretty clear. Space Marine special characters are exemplars of their Chapters. Chaos Marine special characters couldn't usually care less. They're individuals, and they wage war according to their own principles, not only because the Traitor Legions failed, but because they barely exist in the same form anymore.

 

Look at the rules! Look at the sample armies! There's a lot of opportunity for cool armies that might at first seem random on the tabletop, lacking a colour theme - but they're closely bound to the canon. Armies of purely Thousand Sons or Emperor's Children are likely to be rare. Many are dead; others have joined the Black Legion in its powerful expansion; and many others have broken off to their own warbands to serve either a particular god or an inspiring leader. Others will have become leaders themselves, exalting themselves above their brethren to command armies in the name of Chaos Undivided, or their chosen god, or simply in their own name.

 

Chaos armies of 5th edition have inspired me to get back into the game with Chaos Marines, rather than Space Marines, because I feel they finally cling to the lore in the way the setting has always suggested they act. I'm definitely not thrilled about everything: there are plenty of rules I dislike - especially dreadnoughts, and the less-than-inspiring rules for Possessed and Chosen. I'm not big on what happened to daemons, but I see why they did it, and it's not a deal-breaker for me. I don't like that Chaos Marines apparently abandoned every drop pod, Thunderhawk gunship, landspeeder, attack bike, jetbike, etc. when they ran to the Eye of Terror. Jetbikes, especially, would be a cool and thematic difference between Chaos Marines and Space Marines - and they're littered all through the art of Horus Heresy: Collected Visions, so plenty of warbands would still run them.

 

I'm not an apologist for the 5th edition codex. There's plenty I'm disappointed with. I'm sure my disappointments are equal to anyone's. Just because most Chaos Marines are broken into fractured warbands, it doesn't mean there should be no rules for a warband made up entirely of Astartes from the same Legion, still trying to remain together.

 

But there's still potential, and I admit, it's sort of gripped me:

- A struggling Black Legion champion who must turn to other - even weaker Undivided warbands - to unite into a raiding force.

- A powerful Word Bearer daemon prince who draws his forces from the Word Bearers and a coven of Thousand Son sorcerers who ally with him, bringing a small host of Rubric Marines.

- An ambitious Night Lord commander who allies his biker warband with the remnants of an Emperor's Children army they recently defeated, because the Children's commander pledged fealty rather than be destroyed.

- Two Renegade Chapters depleted of strength, joining to survive together and working with several of the Obliterator Cult, who were drawn to the Renegades' updated and recent Imperial wargear.

 

All these ideas and more are spinning around, and I'm kind of amazed so few Chaos armies represent the new codex like this. The rules are there. The sample armies in the codex show that it can look cool. Yet people still play Chaos Marines like Space Marines: "I play Black Legion", "I play Word Bearers", rather than "My warband is themed around two allied commanders uniting the remnants of the Emperor's Children and the Night Lords." Hell, would these two commanders turn on each other one day? Almost definitely. Chaos Marines always turn on each other. In the Eye of Terror, they're always at war, and alliance shift all the time. But it's a cool story, and a cool army.

 

I know which one sounds cooler to me, anyway.

 

So where am I going with this? I just wanted to put forward how I see the new codex, and the way it seems Chaos Marine armies are designed from that. I was wondering if it's true that everyone is so disappointed with the damn thing, that people really don't play like this at all. Is everyone still clinging to "I play this Legion" and struggling to represent it unsatisfactorily in the rules? Would people feel weird facing a Chapter-themed Space Marine army with a Chaos warband of grudgingly allied Legionnaires and Renegades, as if they were somehow not making an army to a theme, like the painting guides and traditional gamer army-building wisdom says?

 

See, this got me thinking. People talk about wanting Codex: Chaos Legions all the time. And to me, that's sort of missing the point. Those Legions are - mostly - gone in the lore/setting/fluff. People playing Legion-specific armies are playing what, in the lore, is the minority of what Chaos Marines are.

 

For myself, I'm still undecided. I like the structure and theme of Legion-specific armies, but I also like the idea of an army painted up in the colours of 2-3 Legions, all allied together through a cool storyline. I guess what I want to know is why does the former appeal to almost everyone, and why is there such resistance to the latter?

All emphasis is mine. Now, someone is sure to comment "You idiot. You bolded text that supports Legion rules." And that's because I do and don't agree with it. Legion rules are unnecessary. The reality is that if decent mono-Khorne/Nurgle/Slaanesh/Tzeentch army rules were made, boom, there'd go the need for "Legion" rules. If rules were made for FA lists, Infiltrator lists and Heavy Support Lists, rather than "Night Lords", "Alpha Legion" and "Iron Warriors", we could achieve the same end product, just a different way. Chaos is supposed to be about change. And yet somehow we manage to make Nurgle look innovative.

 

So Scribe, you are right. We need Traits, not "Legion" rules. The Legions are broken. We are Chaos Marines. Ours is the way, the truth and the life. We need to move forward and think of new things instead of clinging to old ideas.

[Warsmith Aznable]

All this talk about the Legions being dead and gone...

 

Are they completely irrelevant to 40k now? They've been the CSM since CSM came into being. Forget that the Legions is what many if not most of us long for, but in GW materials the Legions dominate the background as a big part of who and what CSM are. To say the Night Lords trilogy wasn't really about Night Lords is willfully ignoring all the aspects of those books that were related to the Legion. How about Storm of Iron and the further adventures of Honsou? The Bloodborn may have been a ragged menagerie of a warband, but the Uktramarines knew it was the Iron Warriors who were ultimately responsible for their woes on Calth, just like the Space Wolves knew it was the Thousand Sons giving them bother at the Fang. The Legions are absolutely iconic visually, their paintschemes instantly saying so much about the models and implying so much about the context of the picture as soon as you see it.

 

Whatever happened to the image of enemies of myth and legend appearing suddenly from the warp? The shock and awe of stories told in whispers and dread names full of bad luck manifesting as an all too terrible reality? The horror of once loyal warriors who had marched alongside the God Emperor Himself now come to murder worlds and teach the horrific truths that bent them on their evil path?

 

I sometimes wish they had never started writing the Horus Heresy novels, because it seems like everything we know from them devalues the mystery and gravity of the Traitor Legions. And now we've somehow come to a point where they only matter historically. It's strange and disheartening.

[Scribe]

@Kol

 

Sure, I'll buy that.

 

The reason many (myself included) cling to the Legion tag, is because to us, its a link into the wider story. I dont want Fear Marines. I want Night Lords. I dont want Choppy McCrazy, I want World Eaters.

 

Mark of Khorne simply doesnt go far enough, for me.

 

@Max

 

I fully agree.

[King Jackal]

@rapator - I reckon it's more likely they'll justify calling it a "codex" by giving a rule set for Kranon, the helbrute, maybe the chosen, but most importantly maybe the artifact. There will either be rules for it or it is the ultimate objective of the rumoured campaign. If there are rules, will we see some kind of added benefit to taking daemons of khorne as battle brothers? In my opinion, the Crimson Slaughter is the direction GW want to push chaos. Wouldn't be surprised to see some kind of new mechanic for the boon table.

 

@FENRIS - how simple would it be to make 4-6 sprue chaos vehicle conversion boxes. If handled correctly, they could pretty much do away with releasing a chaos alternative to rhinos, land raiders and drop pods.

[Lay]

"Legions are dead" isn't an argument, it's pure semantics. Acting as a unified force has never, ever been a requisite for Legion rules. Or did Index Astartes or the 3.5 Codex claim that the World Eaters are one big, coherent force?

 

Seriously, people need to stop making excuses for GW.

 

Just last year we were given the "Legionnaire Warband" and "Sons of the Primarch" rules in the Apocalypse rulebook. Before that we were given Apocalypse rules for an "Emperor's Children Warband". Legion rules have been around since Rogue Trader and have been on life support since the Gavdex. Now that we've got dataslates, supplements and whatnot for regular 40k it shouldn't be too hard to bring them back.

[Hellrender]

I think that legions are gone, a Legion as a whole doesn't exist anymore. Only warbands and chapters.

 

But, most warbands still fight the same way their parent legion used to fight. Night Lord warbands still try to use Fear, and dirty little tricks, they dont, now that they are a warband, suddenly lay in siege to a citadel. But, Iron Warrior warbands still do lay siege to stuff. Bombard it into dust. Much like they did as a legion.

 

I'm not entirely sure of total sizes, but i much believe that a warband varies from company strenght to chapter strenght, much like the loyalist legions :) And just like the loyalist first founding chapters, i think that warbands still fight like their parent legion.

[Scribe]

Exactly its all just semantics, the spirit though, the intent, is traits which are linked to a Legion. Which GW has done as mentioned several times, but simply chose not to, while handing it over to Space Marines.

[Kol Saresk]

A warband is literally a collection of Marines/Cultists/Whatever. Anything from a squad to an entire Black Crusade. It can be finite, or infinite. It can literally be anything.

[Scribe]

Yes, it can also be 2000 marines all taken from the same Company, who fought along side their Primarch, and to say that THEY shouldnt get traits (which I dont think you are saying but some do) when 100 Marines sitting on Terra DO get their own book, is mind boggling. 

[arkagl]

If this is codex crison slaughter then maybe it'll be like the inquisitor and LotD but I can have even more Baledrake!!!!!! sarcasm... though I do like me some flying dragons. Notice they haven't given any Dataslates for chaos bc if they gave us a Daemonic Vehicle squadron ppl would hate chaos.

 

Some one needs to build a 100% working Defiler (minus the daemonic possession) and march it over to the GW HQ and stomp them all, let them see how weak Chaos is.

[Kol Saresk]

I ain't saying they shouldn't get traits, but I think I am saying it differently from you. See, from my perspective, most say "Legion" and point to 3.5. But when I look at 3.5, I don't see Legion. I see Khorne, Slaanesh, Nurgle, Tzeentch, Fast Assault, Heavy Support, Infiltrate and Daemon-summoning. That's what I see, if I'm to be perfectly honest. So what I suggest is Khorne, Slaanesh, Nurgle, Tzeentch, Fast Assault, Heavy Support and Infiltrate. Maybe daemon-summoning: it would depend on how it could be done, considering the whole allying with daemons now.

But the big difference between what I seem to suggest and what others suggest, is I don't care about calling them "Legion tactics" since it won't just be Legions using these tactics. IIRC, there's like a Death Shadows warband which made its name attacking from the shadows. I ain't going to call them Night Lords or a "Night Lords count as"(as Jeske keeps wanting to put it) just because it makes me feel nostalgiac. I'd rather call them a Raptor Cult, Biker Club or Speed-gang. Maybe a terrorist cell, since they are terrorists. "Lords of Terror". Maybe that's the way it could be done. But none of this "Night Lords" crap. The Night Lords are Night Lords. Just because there's a Chapter called the Night Reapers who have similar methods, does not mean they should be "Night Lords". I think Excessus put it somewhere "No one wants all the Berzerkers to be World Eaters."

But hey, seems like GW is instead taking my idea and slapping different, lesser known warbands on it in an attempt to expand our horizons, to help us look at other parts of the fluff we normally wouldn't look at. And yet, from what I see, the reaction is ":Cuss you GW! How ing dare you try and show us Chaos Space Marines beyond the Legions and the Red Corsairs! What the !"

That's what I'm seeing, not necessarily what is meant to be said.

[Excessus]

You are right Kol, it's not 3.5 anymore. That era is long gone and so are the philosophies they employed. As I have said elsewhere, a trait system like the loyalist has wouldn't work for CSM, because even though our warbands can consist of the same legion, it can also consist of several different ones. But there are alternatives, suggested frequently for many years.

 

Think about how things would have been if our already purchaseable flags in the codex did not have the mark limitation as an example. You could put fear on your entire warband, you could have MoN FnP units in all slots...and so on. With the addition of the "missing" special characters from the rest of the legions they could have easily made them work like legion warbands...

 

There is also the "saga" way from  the SW codex. The lord is the central character in any warband, and his "path" would affect the rest of the warband's tactics.

 

 

But there is no real point in me talking about this. GW won't make any more legion supplements, why would they? You can build a legion warband out of the codex. Sure it doesn't really work like one and it will probably be slaughtered on the field of battle, but that's not their concern really. They have already showed us together with FW that ruleswise, chaos in 40k are worse than loyalists!

[Scribe]

Hey, I dont even want to see Red Corsairs. At all. :D

 

If it was up to me, it would be the story of the Legions first, and their shattered remnants as the ultimate horrors of the galaxy 10000 year after living, fighting, and being reborn in 'hell'.

 

So yeah, perhaps we are simply on separate sides of the fence on this one.

 

I want White Scars to be all about fast attacks, mobility, and bikes. I dont want codex: bikers.

[Scribe]

By the way Mods, open up the rant thread. You've got another 3 years till a new CSM book...

[Trevak Dal]

All this talk about the Legions being dead and gone...

 

Are they completely irrelevant to 40k now? They've been the CSM since CSM came into being. Forget that the Legions is what many if not most of us long for, but in GW materials the Legions dominate the background as a big part of who and what CSM are. To say the Night Lords trilogy wasn't really about Night Lords is willfully ignoring all the aspects of those books that were related to the Legion. How about Storm of Iron and the further adventures of Honsou? The Bloodborn may have been a ragged menagerie of a warband, but the Uktramarines knew it was the Iron Warriors who were ultimately responsible for their woes on Calth, just like the Space Wolves knew it was the Thousand Sons giving them bother at the Fang. The Legions are absolutely iconic visually, their paintschemes instantly saying so much about the models and implying so much about the context of the picture as soon as you see it.

 

Whatever happened to the image of enemies of myth and legend appearing suddenly from the warp? The shock and awe of stories told in whispers and dread names full of bad luck manifesting as an all too terrible reality? The horror of once loyal warriors who had marched alongside the God Emperor Himself now come to murder worlds and teach the horrific truths that bent them on their evil path?

 

I sometimes wish they had never started writing the Horus Heresy novels, because it seems like everything we know from them devalues the mystery and gravity of the Traitor Legions. And now we've somehow come to a point where they only matter historically. It's strange and disheartening.

That's sort of always been my point about the Primarchs (and the Emperor in some respects). In 40k, they only matter historically. The rules certainly portray rabble warbands barely surviving, scraping with the barest minimum of resources, with leaders desperate to garner the attention of gods that don't really care in hopes that maybe-maybe they can survive another battle.

 

Point is, we don't really know just yet what's in store with this new thing.

 

It's either a complete repackaging of the CSM codex to go along with the repacked boxes (and that :cuss would be Nurgle Dirty) or it could be a Ground Up Variation on how to run Chaos Space Marines.

 

I hope it's Khorne centric, interesting, fairly priced and most of all fun. It could be the "Ebon Chihuahuas" codex for all I'd care-if it allowed me to get closer faster, to meet my enemies face to face and break their backs and push them off the cliff then I'd run Ebon Chihuahuas and say World Eaters can go die in the fire with their failure of a father.

[Excessus]

 

Make sure you check out our website this weekend, we have another exciting new title on the way.

 

http://www.blacklibrary.com/Images/Games-Workshop-Digital/2014/march/4th-march-blog/preview.png

 

http://www.blacklibrary.com/new-at-bl/Codex-Imperial-Knights.html

[totgeboren]

That link, I must say it's a bit annoying that they say that the Knights were introduced as a concept (as a quick sketch) in '94, when they have this pic from '89! Also, saying that they were sort of forgotten when they even got new plastic models and were included in the starter for Titan Legions (in '94) is just strange. Off topic, but I just had to get that off my chest.

[Trevak Dal]

I do love those Mandalorian Helmets :D

[Tenebris]

Unfortunately nowadays the only fluff that "matters" is the one that justifies three helldrakes, nine obliterators and a juggylord.

 

On the topic of legions, I dare say that all the above is right and ad the same time wrong. We still speak of Emperor's Children characters, of Thousand Sons sorcerers, of Death Guard marines, we still know that they are there, maybe they have one shoulder pad painted in black, maybe they run errands for some renegade chapter but at their very core, in their very bones those marines are still legion, they know who their father is, they know how the gates of Terra looked and how tough to kill were the loyalist legionnaires of old... they have been there and they have done all that, they spilled blood and murdered their truest brothers.

 

I think that while we mostly focus on Chaos Legion as chapter tactics, traits or veteran skills, I have always considered that to be Legion is a thing of soul, of blood of kinship. You might be thrice the rengeade or a paragon of the ancient virtues but in the end you are legion from boots to ears and you are a tough bastard with countless years of experience to call upon.

All in all what we hope for is perhaps the basest and vile thing a fan can aspire, we hope for vengeance. We want to gut those motherless loyalist runts as the true marines, the sons of the Crusade, as the killers of the Heresy, as the murderers of the Imperium. We want to wear colors of allegiance and blood, and we want on tabletop to enact that most beautiful of sins, vengeance.

 

So why we cry for legion specifics, it is because we still see the renegade, the warband, as scum and dregs of thrice turncoats, as traitors to a father, traitors to their brothers and traitors to the legion. Horus Heresy novels did much to cement us in this view, we gloat on every iota of loyalist blood spilled and we simply want to spill more in M41. 

 

I agree wholly, Chaos is exactly that, chaos, no structure, no creed, no certainty, no order, but it is also individuality, talent, faith, devotion, so the explanation on warbands is straight on centre. Yet ask yourslef the following, what convinced you to play Chaos?

 

While cool models is rather redundant in this edition of dinobots and hellchickens, as for game style again little arguments can be found, I think that the majority of us is part of team Chaos due to a single reason, one or more of the traitor legions. 

 

From here it should be a logical process, the players want legion themed rules, the players should get legion themed rules... alas it is not, hence we will get Crimson Slaughter... 

 

... and I was thinking that someone had some sense in GW... especially in the marketing department...

 

 

The result of all this diatribe... in a Thousand Sons army I cannot afford to play more than two MSU squads of Thousand Sons lest I cripple the whole army and consign myself to a series of defeats... to not even mention that any chance for competitive play is long past its due...