40K Deep Thought: How to do Justice to Chaos Marines?
So I don’t think its a huge surprise that a LOT of folks are wishing for a lot more of something – anything when they flip through the CSM codex. But in the big picture what exactly do we want?
Lets take a step back and look first at what we have. We have in our grubby little hands a fairly generic book that while still costed somewhat well (its starting to get a little long in the tooth) definitely took all the excitement out of the world of Chaos Marines. The book basically tried to take on too much in trying to both streamline and simplify the crazy 1040CSM tax form of the previous edition codex while expanding it to cover everything from the original Traitor Legions to the common garden variety rogue Astartes chapter.
The big problem is how to address it?
1 Codex: Certainly we could simply re-do it with a wider selection of wargear and units, and try to just add more flavor and variety to our current codex.
2 Codices: A second option is the twin codex split – one for generic rebels and the unaligned CSM Legions such as the Night Lords and Iron Warriors, and a second “Cult Legion” codex with the Emperor’s Children, World Eaters, Death Guard, and the Thousand Sons. This could give the players the variety they crave, but is still a halfway house to the grand dream of giving the CSMs the full Loyalist treatment of:
5 Full Codices: The first would be the initial one described above, but with each of the Cult Legions given its own standalone book. The arguments are easy – if a chapter as minor as the Black Templars gets its own book, why not one for any of the massive forces with the power and longevity of any of the 4 cult legions?
Now of course each of these options comes with an ever escalating cost in development time, and opportunity cost of the loss of future non-meq armies, as well as each one making the game even more of a 3+ marine slapfight?
While I personally would love 5 books, I think 2 would do the job. So what do you want—really, my dear traitors?
