Goatboy’s Warhammer 40K Hot Mess: Chaos Daemons
While I like the 40K Chaos Daemon army ,it feels like there is a layer missing. It isn’t nearly as interesting as it should be, so let’s figure out how we would “shift the warp up” a bit.
What makes Chaos Daemons a bad army you say? It feels like a very basic Monster Mash faction that doesn’t have the heart to really do anything but putter around in the cesspool that is reality. It just doesn’t have a whole lot of identity I think at the basic level. It just feels like Be’lakor’s random buddies who want to kinda hang out and don’t help each other. I like the whole Shadow of Chaos aspect and think we could push that more as an incursion of the warp instead of just “Be’lakor’s” spooky shadow puppetry.
Chaos Daemons Step One – Bring in the Weird
I think the initial step in all of this is to take the Shadow Aspect but amp it up into the different Chaos god directions. This way you could say – your Shadow is of the Khorne aspect and all your Khorne stuff does things. Heck you could set it up to be almost like a Doctrine system where you can pick different “Gods” to be activated within the Shadow as you move thru the game or just one is active with a specific set of rules. Just like if the Warp starts to bleed into reality a bit long it changes stuff.
For example, say you are all about Khorne and decide to let the Aspects of Khorne rage for a few turns. Turn 1 you would let your Khorne guys get a +1 to their Invulnerable saves as while it isn’t so Khorne like to be protected. Thus allowing your guys to survive damage a bit more does make sense as the war machines get into combat. From there you would do things like add additional charge inches, advance/charge, and explosive combat hits.
Heck you could set it up where you pick a god aspect for that turn and if you double it up you get more stuff etc. This way you could have a whole army of different Daemons and you control how the game shifts per turn. You could say go Khorne for the first two turns and then Tzeentch the last few to help amp up those guys as the clean up crew.
This whole aspect would shift the army and help create true all one god theme lists or set up a whole control system of how the Daemon Warlord wants to plane their turn. You would also try to push a bit more outside of the whole “Be’lakor” or bust aspects that could be annoying. I
Chaos Daemons Step Two – Create More God-themed Detachments
The latest Tyranid codex was neat but how would that really show up in a Chaos Daemon book where the nature of armies should be more chaotic and random? Do we just do God Specific detachments, or do we set up things in how they can shift reality? Things like more static style armies that shift and control the board being more powerful. Or how about crazy assault stuff that just wants to get in and cause as much damage as they can?
What do we do detachment-wise to make Chaos Daemons neat and fun beyond just crazy monsters from the warp? Do we give them some actual thought in how you build a list and let the general control their game play interaction? Or are we just going to get Dirty Bel’akor and his boys on the tabletop the entire time?
Drop Points on all Chaos Daemons Troops
Man the troops are just way too expensive to be even useful. They don’t have enough bodies, don’t do enough damage, and just – are not worth the points you spend. Why wouldn’t you spend points on a Flamer unit that has almost as many wounds and then almost costs half less than some of the troop choices? Or Flesh Hounds of Khorne cost 70 points for 10 wounds worth of objective holding.
I know the worry is a horde of Daemons might be too much but… I don’t think it would ever be. The inability to make units of 20 just means that their cost per wounds is not worth it. I don’t think they should be 20 man units and instead would rather see them cost cheaper than they are now – just to allow them to be useful again.
Chaos Incursion Anti Reality Auras
A daemon incursion should cause so much mental damage it should be some kind of Aura. It also shouldn’t be some kind of Battleshock test or based off of the Battleshock failure. It could be things like adding AP to the Daemons weapons as they rend reality. It could just cause some other weird stuff like letting all daemons get +1 to wound when a target is within range of their aura. It just needs to be something beyond leadership tests and needing to fail leadership. Think about how GW has tried to make C’Tan powers reflect the altering of physics and reality. Stuff like that please.
I always liked daemons as they look cool and play weird. I just want them to play weirder again and be an army an opponent has to think about and worry something odd is going to happen. They need to be aggressive too since we are dealing with monsters that don’t really die.
How would you fix up Chaos Daemons?
