10th Edition Chaos Speculation

[Marshal Loss]

15 hours ago, Rain said:

Most long time Chaos players play Iron Warriors, or Night Lords. Not silver Chaos Marines, or dark blue Chaos Marines. There are thousands of pages of novels and lore behind the Legions. Not so for the Kabal of the Obsidian Rose.

 

Functionally, why does it matter if a detachment is called "Night Lords Murder Stab Fest" or "Grimdark Terrorhost"? If it doesn't, and I don't think it does, then there's little to worry about. There will be less legion-specific content, but it's not being removed entirely. It might encourage people to diverge a little from legion stereotypes as well.

 

I appreciate that in the last few editions - Traitor Legions in 7th, Psychic Awakening in 8th/9th, and then the 9th ed Codex - we've had a glut of legion-specific content, which has often been the only saving grace of our treatment. FW's 11 year focus on 30k has reinforced the community's love of the legions. Going from that to an edition where subfactions aren't explicitly labelled is a bit of a stark change.

 

But I also remember the 3.5 codex we've put on a pedestal for decades. The unaligned legions actually received very little content in that book, with only a handful of bonuses and restrictions in place to guide players in theming their forces. There was none of this 6 warlord trait 6 relic 8 stratagem a dedicated legion trait and a dedicated objective nonsense. It didn't stop Word Bearers from feeling like Word Bearers, or Night Lords from feeling like Night Lords. The game is abstract, after all, and a space marine is a space marine. I don't think we need the amount of legion-specific content that we got in the 9th edition book to represent these forces.

 

If the codex rolls around and GW doesn't give enough detachments to denote the paradigms represented by each legion (e.g. daemonkin for Word Bearers, terror tactics for Night Lords, and so on) then they've messed up big time and deserve some ire. But I think the move to subfaction agnostic detachments is actually a great one for flavour and creativity, and won't hamper dedicated fans of the legions from created the same themed forces they've been doing since Index Astartes started dropping over 20 years ago.