All right. So, everyone knows about my Chaos Dwarf book, a project some years in the making that was quite popular with a few people here. Apparently people even use it in their games and it seems to be quite fun and relatively well balanced, I guess.
But, a while ago when we all got to talking about what a mess the Iron Daemon’s rules were, I decided it might be fun to try and rationalise it and give it rules you could use without having a 20 minute conversation with your opponent - I posted them here. After doing that, I got to thinking a bit. Because there’s a lot of stuff in the Legion of Azgorh list which is kind of…wonky. The war machines all have pages of rules that could just be replaced by having “Troop Type: War Machine (Stone Thrower)” below their profile. The K’daai Destroyer is…yeah…not the best executed monster ever. Why do Chaos Dwarfs get a super-fast Greater Daemon as a Rare choice anyway? And why do Fireborn have so few Wounds, and Bull Centaurs so few Attacks and…and…
I wanted to take a crack at the Legion of Azgorh myself, basically, because I think there are some good ideas there, they’re just applied in some really odd ways. I started writing a proper 8th Edition-ised version of the rules, using the format and style of the most recent Armies books at the time (when I started this we were up to High Elves). I also added some stuff here and there, like an Overlord, Immortals, Black Orcs, Hobgoblin Bolt Throwers and so forth. I called it my “Simplified List” because after a while I began to find its stripped-down approach more appealing than my unwieldy, option-overflowingy full Armies book. I decided that, should I ever field my own army in battle, I’d probably just stick with using this as it had all the units my collection included.
When I finally painted my Immortals after reading the new Dwarfs book, I was seized by the desire to start tinkering with rules again. I thought a lot about how I could change my book, but the scale of the changes I imagined was too great - I just couldn’t bear to pick it up again after all this time and thrust another revision on those who used it. So I went back to the Simplified List and used that as a testbed for my ideas. I put in some units from the book - the Altar of Hashut, Acolytes, the Petrified Sorcerer - and had another crack at making their rules work better. I also thought about the presentation aspects, because I wanted this to look good, and I’ve learned stuff since I did the book. I found some steampunky templates on Deviant Art that were free for personal use and I put together some nice little elements. I then purloined some boxes and textures and things from some of the GW eBook Dataslates and Battle Scrolls to properly mimic the look of a GW publication.
So, after all this rambling, what I have here is a short document (18 pages), that consists of a couple of pages of basic fluff, two pages each of special rules and equipment/upgrades and then the army list with spells and magic items at the end. Not a full Armies book, but enough information to field an army with. I have no intention to expand it into a full book, and I’m well aware that I’m actually treading on my own toes with this but, yeah, this is what I’ve been working on and you can read it if you like.
I’ve called it Legions of Zharr both to distinguish it from my Warhammer: Chaos Dwarfs and as a nod to the Legion of Azgorh. Technically you’ll also need the Warriors of Chaos, Orcs & Goblins and Storm of Magic books to use this as it shares units with these publications and I haven’t provided their special rules, just given page references for them.
Looks awesome. Gonna play this in a mates tourney in early April (assuming it has game balance comparable to your previous masterpiece). Thanks very much.
Oops, somewhere during editing I seem to have lost Burning Bright from the Special Rules section! I’ll correct it tonight, but it just works like it does in Tamurkhan anyway.
I don’t want to diss the FW guys, but yeah, there’s some weird stuff in there. They’re sort of like uber-fanboys of the GW product, who make up bizarre rules and concepts. Like all the endless variations of Space Marine shoulder pads and the Heresy stuff that all the guys on Warseer seem to be incredibly excited about, but which leave me totally cold - and I play Space Marines!
And I think your pictures hold up pretty well! The Astragoth one is still my all-time favourite, which is why I stuck it on the cover.
EDIT: I’ve just uploaded the corrected version that restores Burning Bright to the Special Rules section. I had to alter the Sorcerer Caste rules for Acolytes to save space, so they no longer give a bonus to channelling for any Sorcerers in the unit and I swapped around where it tells you that a Slave Ogre negates Slow to Load (it’s in the Slave Ogre upgrade instead).
Excellencent work, as usual. It lacks the depth of your armybook (obviously), but looks like a solid list. Quick question, have you got more pics of the red big hat army shown on the last page? Who’s it from?
This could be worth a try, though I normally only play with GW/FW rules, perhaps with a few house rules when at home.
FW did a decent enough armylist and I’m sure they’ll do something superior to LoA the next time they return to CDs.
However, I’ve become quite adept at explaining many of the more convoluted rules (like K’daai Destroyer) at tournaments, and I guess a simplification is called for!
Quick question, have you got more pics of the red big hat army shown on the last page? Who's it from?
Skink
I spent absolutely ages trawling the net for pictures of Chaos Dwarfs displayed on scenery to match the GW house style in their publications. I didn't have much success until I started searching for non-English language sites! I think I found these guys on a Spanish site - the rest are here.
Okay: an update. I’ve done a bit of work on Warhammer: Legions of Zharr, but it’s just tweaking the odd bit of wording here and there so nothing major. However, I obviously didn’t include special characters in it originally because I felt it was beyond the scope of what I was trying to do. My mind was whirring away though, and I thought it might be fun to do them as a separate supplement, rather like the 5th Edition “Champions of Chaos” book. So, now we have Warhammer: Masters of Zharr, which contains rules for the following:
Ghorth the Cruel
Astragoth Ironhand
Zhatan the Black
Lord Bhaal
Rykarth the Unbreakable
Hothgar Daemonbane
Ghazak Khan
A lot of these are quite similar to the versions in my book, but some are quite different, and Ghazak Khan is of course totally new to any version of my Chaos Dwarf rules! I thought it would just be cool to include him this time around.
The first post has been updated with both the new version of Legions and Masters - which, by the way, has a glossary of all the special rules for each character, so you can just bolt it right onto another list if you really want to.
Possibly coming next: Warhammer: Engines of Zharr a supplement of scrolls of binding for Storm of Magic games that will feature all the weird and wonderful creations of the Hellforges, such as the full Iron Daemon train, the tri-barrelled Doomhammer Cannon, the Death Zeppelin, the Kolossus and the enormous, earth-shaking Shatterbeast.
Thanks, guys! I’m sort of debating with myself what to do next. I wanted to jump straight into Engines of Zharr but I started thinking about doing some rules for Drazhaoth, and maybe an as-yet unnamed Infernal Guard leader and doing a Legions of Azgorh supplement (hard to imagine something more pointless than what I’ve done already, but that probably is…) which gives a variant list so you can only field what’s in Tamurkhan, but also gives access to Infernal Ironsworn and the special characters I just mentioned.
Then, I started thinking about variant lists for the other outposts. So a list that emphasises Daemon-binding from Daemon’s Stump which would have a Lord-level Daemonsmith instead of Sorcerer Lords and a unit called Hellforge Guard, as well as better access to K’daai etc. The Tower of Gorgoroth would be slavers, with an Overseer character type (who existed in earlier drafts of Legion of Zharr but which I eventually took out) and units of Wretched Slaves and Brutes. I’d have to think about Uzkulak because it’s not as well-defined, but possibly an army of morbid torturers?
So I might do Legions of the Dark Lands or something like that.
I don’t think this is any more pointless than GW’s own erratas and thematic army lists, like the Sacred Spawnings one which appeared for Lizardmen in WD back in the day. Keep on doing it, and GW might eventually recruit you.
Then, I started thinking about variant lists for the other outposts. So a list that emphasises Daemon-binding from Daemon’s Stump which would have a Lord-level Daemonsmith instead of Sorcerer Lords and a unit called Hellforge Guard, as well as better access to K’daai etc. The Tower of Gorgoroth would be slavers, with an Overseer character type (who existed in earlier drafts of Legion of Zharr but which I eventually took out) and units of Wretched Slaves and Brutes. I’d have to think about Uzkulak because it’s not as well-defined, but possibly an army of morbid torturers?
So I might do Legions of the Dark Lands or something like that.
What would people rather see?
Thommy H
Neat ideas. Uzkulak is the naval base of the Chaos Dwarf empire and its land army should positively reflect this in some way. Morbid torture could be chucked in as well, but it could easily be prevalent for the Tower of Gorgoroth, were the ready supply of slave bodies makes for ample opportunity for brutalities.
I guess some kind of torture altar or stationary/mobile grotesques (see my log for examples thereof) could play a part in whichever stronghold turns out the most heinous torturer keep. These would likely target the enemy’s leadership as a form of psychological warfare on steroids. See Dracula and the Assyrians/Babylonians for historical inspiration sources.
I’d do variant lists for the other outposts, that sounds a lot more fun to me.
Would you envisage the core CD choices being unique for each outpost? Bearing in mind I suppose the weapons that people have in their armies now (represented often by IG models), it would limit a little what people would take as alternate core choices.
So would you be thinking keep it similar to IG in terms of weapon options but change rules/profile/points etc?
They’d mostly keep the same Core, but (for example) Black Fortress armies wouldn’t have access to regular Chaos Dwarf Warriors - just Infernal Guard. Only Legion of Zharr armies would get the “temple” troops (Immortals, Acolytes, Altar of Hashut) and possibly Petrified Sorcerers too, but they’d have their own special characters and units to replace these. Maybe magic items too.
In terms of format, there’ll be mini-bestiary entries like Masters of Zharr, and then box-outs explaining what each variant is allowed to choose in their armies. I don’t want to do more than one or two unique entries for each list though - they’ll only feel a bit different from regular Chaos Dwarfs, rather like the current generation of 40K supplements.
Okay, first post updated with new attachments. I’ve made a couple of small changes to Legions and Masters of Zharr - just sorting out some points costs mostly (basic Warriors were overcosted - I never revised them in light of the new Dwarf book!) but I’ve also made an adjustment to the available Lores - Pyrophants can now use Shadow and Daemonsmiths can use Death. Sorcerer Lords get both. The reason for this becomes a bit clearer if you read the new Legions of the Dark Lands supplement which has a variant that would be a little limited in Lores if it worked the old way. The logic is that Pyrophants are masters of “shadow and flame” and Daemonsmiths have mastery over spirits and so forth, so it kind of makes sense.
Anyway, Legions of the Dark Lands, as promised, is a supplement that allows you to field variant armies from each of the Chaos Dwarfs’ other fortresses. We have Gorgoth (slave colony), Uzkulak (home of Chaos Dwarf pirates), Daemon’s Stump (rogue Daemonsmiths) and the Black Fortress (Tamurkhan’s Legion of Azgorh). You get rules for three new generic character types, five units, a mount and two special characters (one of which might be very familiar…), as well as eight magic items: two for each variant.
So I don’t really know what this is for as you’d not only need to be using my rules, but also be willing to try out variants of those rules but, hey, it might be fun to read I guess!
Okay, first post updated with new attachments. I've made a couple of small changes to Legions and Masters of Zharr - just sorting out some points costs mostly (basic Warriors were overcosted - I never revised them in light of the new Dwarf book!) but I've also made an adjustment to the available Lores - Pyrophants can now use Shadow and Daemonsmiths can use Death. Sorcerer Lords get both. The reason for this becomes a bit clearer if you read the new Legions of the Dark Lands supplement which has a variant that would be a little limited in Lores if it worked the old way. The logic is that Pyrophants are masters of "shadow and flame" and Daemonsmiths have mastery over spirits and so forth, so it kind of makes sense.
Anyway, Legions of the Dark Lands, as promised, is a supplement that allows you to field variant armies from each of the Chaos Dwarfs' other fortresses. We have Gorgoth (slave colony), Uzkulak (home of Chaos Dwarf pirates), Daemon's Stump (rogue Daemonsmiths) and the Black Fortress (Tamurkhan's Legion of Azgorh). You get rules for three new generic character types, five units, a mount and two special characters (one of which might be very familiar...), as well as eight magic items: two for each variant.
So I don't really know what this is for as you'd not only need to be using my rules, but also be willing to try out variants of those rules but, hey, it might be fun to read I guess!
Thommy H
Ill try it out, or at least some of it during the summer! :)
