Warlords of Erehwon by Rick Priestley
I have seen some lovely write ups of various fantasy games which your chaos dwarf miniatures can be used in. Since the dawning of the age of Sigmar, the once very united community have been separated into various camps be they AOS, 8th ed, 9th age, or KOW. The one of coolest things about CDO is that we embrace and celebrate one another’s hobby and do not fall into the infighting and bickering that other areas of fandom have about “the best system”, “the best edition” or “the best way to play”.
Chaos dwarfs has always been the army that refused to die. This forum has always been the forum that refused to die! It takes more than blowing up a planet to separate this community from their evil stunties. And personally I believe the more games I can play with my army - the better!
Anyway, with that preamble out of the way, I am here to introduce you all to my current favourite fantasy battle system - a system which has been fully embraced by my gaming group and has replaced all others. I can’t make subjective statements like this the “best system” or the “best way to play” - but what I can say, hand on heart, is that this system is the most fun I have ever had mass battle fantasy wargaming.
Warlords of Erehwon is created by Rick Priestley (yes that Rick Priestly who designed a little known game called warhammer 40,000 and countless other systems)
Warlords of Erehwon is a fantasy based game designed for 28mm tabletop warfare. The gameplay is built around the D10 system developed for the science-fiction game Beyond the Gates of Antares and also using the praised order dice mechanic first used in the Bolt Action WW2 rules.
Warlords does not use an i go, you go system. Instead it used an alternating action mechanic. A mechanic that I am now so used to, I go you go feels somewhat clunky by comparison! This means that there is no waiting around in your enemy’s turn and that many of the tactical decisions are dependent on what unit activates and when. You cannot rest in this game, the landscape of the battlefield shifting during each turn and your decisions having to react to this.
(A rogue cave troll wanders the battlefield in a a “kill the beast” scenario)
The game utilises a d10 system with a 1 tending to be an instant pass and a 10(or 0) being an instant fail. Unit stats are values which one must equal or score lower than in order to pass a check. Therefore there is no need for tables of any kind.
A d10 system also allows for subtle differences in units that d6 systems cannot do. The difference between a 5+ and a 4+ is massive. Each score higher represents nearly 17 percent increase or reduction in difficulty. On a d10 system this represents 10%. It also allows stats to be read as a simple percentage on face value.
(Brave Landsknechts defend their keep)
For example a model with strength 6 has a 60% chance of doing some damage. A model with agility 5 has a 50% chance of passing an ag test.
The rulebook is a self contained game with rules, scenarios and army lists for dwarfs, humans, elves, gnolls, goblins, orcs, undead, knights, halflings, ancient Greeks,barbarians and a whole section dedicated to monsters.
(Psychotic slayers take on a fell undead beast)
New army lists on Ricks website are released for free intermittently. (Www.thisgaminglife.uk) he has, at the time of writing, added lizardmen, snakemen, romans, ratmen, pig faces orcs and samurai. More are added all of the time.
A chaos dwarf army can be easily made using the dwarf, orc and goblin lists however he has also released a points calculator for creating your own army lists. A friend of mine has used this to make a chaos dwarf army list fully point calculated and game legal. Linked here: Warlords of Erehwon - Chaos Dwarf fan army book
(Imperial Roman Auxillia prepare to fight back a unit of savage centaurs)
The game is miniature agnostic and designed for creating armies limited only by ones own imagination. You can can mix and match lists or create your own. If you wish to play as Romans riding dragons or a halfling and snake man alliance you absolutely can.
The scale of the game is individually based 28mm. The system is designed for warband level gaming (smaller that army but larger than skirmish) although my group has found that the game scales really well for very large epic battles.
(Chaos warriors are ineffectually peppered by goblin arrows)
Basing is very relaxed. Circles, squares or hexes are all cool. Base size just needs to be “sensible” in order for the game to flow nicely. I’ve had many games where 32mm bases minis have fought 20mm based models and it has had no negative effect.
At this time there is no official campaign supplement, however I have written a narrative focused one of my own. (It took months!) This uses the old mighty empire tiles and plenty of d100 tables for random nonsense to occur. Here is a link to my supplement:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1R-y3Vp5MPDcV68L3BpOD7xTlc9UFBMlX/view?usp=drivesdk
In the appendix of this document is also a set of rules for playing siege battles created by a friend and of mine.
Warlords of Erehwon is not a competitive tournament game. It is the ultimate beer and pretzels, dust of your old collection and tell a fun story game. My gaming group, being narratively focused, have embraced it fully.
Within days of a new AOS release there is now a rush on to adapt the warscrolls into a Statline using the calculator to get whatever beast or warrior has caught our eye onto the battlefield.
If you wish to have more detail or information about this system, send me a message and I can send over my numerous resources and homebrew rules for this game.
