Multi-codex armies

[Heru]

The Rulebook is a bit of a pain to read through in ebook format so I thought I'd bring my question here to those who have better knowledge.

 

The fluff behind my Chaos faction has them not being exactly Chaos and they have a connection through their shadow god to the Shadow realm inhabited by the Mandrakes. So I was wondering is it possible somehow to include Dark Eldar Mandrakes in a Chaos Space Marine army, obviously not the same detachment but in the overall force. I know last edition there was a "do whatever you want" mechanic but I want a way that is less harmful to the overall way the force works (ie battle-forged was better than free-for-all). So ideas or a rundown on how army selection / allies etc work in this edition?

[Ciler]

In both open and narrative play, armies are gathered from "models from your collection", so you could have chaos space marines and mandrakes in the same army (in fact you could even have them in the same detachment, however you'd lose all detachment benefits).

 

In matched play, the rules explicitly state on page 214 that all units must have a common faction keyword or the keyword unaligned. So you need to check them keywords and see if you an make this work or not.

[Arkhanist]

Open play is basically do what you want - the idea being that you can use the rules as a framework to play with, but don't feel bound by any particular restrictions. Clearly this requires the most work with the other player to come up with a fun idea for a game, but encourages you basically to run riot with a 'what if' with no restrictions on unit choice. It's intended for beginners with a disparate collection, or a vet with a limited size new army, or just when you want to try something different.

 

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Narrative play is somewhat more structured. You can still take whatever force composition you like, but it's advisable that you have roughly equal power level; you can also use points if you prefer. Being battle forged is optional, but it does give you access to command points and able to use stratagems, including mission-specific ones. You still need to talk to your opponent beforehand to setup a fun game of course, picking the mission etc - perhaps with a particular type of game in mind.

 

'Battle-forged' is covered in detail at the start of the advanced rules section; basically, each unit must fit into a detachment slot, and every unit in a given detachment must share a single faction keyword. This does give you quite a bit of flexibility; a CHAOS detachment could have demons, multiple different legions of chaos space marines, etc, anything with the chaos keyword. You could thus also easily have another detachment using the AELDARI or DRUKHARI keyword and mix in whatever eldar and/or dark eldar units you want that fit in that detachment.

 

As each codex comes out, they have benefits for more specific keyword detachments; for example, a detachment made up solely of a single chaos marine legion gets a number of extra rules, stratagems, relics and warlord traits. Given neither eldar codex is out yet, there's no particularly strong benefits to be had there, bar the general one of character auras being more useful when there are more units that qualify for their particular keyword requirements.

 

Assuming you're using the chaos space marines book, you'd could have <legion> be SHADOW KINGS, and any CSM unit with <legion> could use that as their faction keyword. If every unit in a detachment was SHADOW KINGS, you'd then get the benefits of the 'Dark Raiders' trait plus the other abilities etc for that detachment.

 

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Matched play is the most restrictive. In addition to balancing points, and being battle forged, your entire army needs to share a common faction keyword, which mandrakes and chaos marines don't. Matched play is intended to be a more balanced style of gaming by reducing 'deathstar' combos common in 7th edition, but of course there's nothing stopping you and your opponent deciding to waive the army-wide faction keyword requirement if you want to yet keeping the rest of the matched play rules and restrictions.

Edited September 22, 2017 by Arkhanist