Kakapo Approved
Posted: Thu May 25, 2023 2:13 am
Welcome to this brand new series covering new gaming content for 2004hammer, as well as 3rd and 4th edition Warhammer 40,000. To start things off with a bang, we're introducing a new set of rules for armies of Chaos Daemons in your games of Warhammer 40,000. Kakapo42 sheds some more light on how this diabolical new addition to the 41st Millennium came to be.
Daemonic Incursions - Chaos Daemon Armies in Warhammer 40,000
Kakapo: For a long time now I have been creating exciting new content for Warhammer 40,000, ranging from sci-fi crossovers to new vehicle inventions to, most recently, entire new army lists. Recently I had been meaning to set up a theoretically semi-regular series showcasing them and sharing them for wider use in a revival of Andy Chambers' Chapter Approved feature in White Dwarf, but quickly found myself confronted with decision paralysis on which new content to start with.
The catalyst came with my recent attempts to introduce 2004hammer to my local 40k groups. This experiment has quickly surpassed my wildest expectations, to the point where it has even begun to spread to other 40k groups I've never encountered and is fast taking on a life of its own. An interesting side-effect of this however was that it drew the attention of a number of players interested in trying out 2004hammer and 3rd edition Warhammer 40,000, but whose model collections were mainly comprised of Chaos Daemons. This made getting them started complicated, as normally Chaos Daemons are used as very high caliber support units for other Chaos armies like Lost And The Damned. Not wanting them to be left out, I took on the challenge of working out a means to translate as much of their figure collections as possible into a usable army.
The Foundation
The core of the army was simple enough to put together. Over the years Chaos Space Marines have received not one but two excellent codex books for this version of Warhammer 40,000, and between them they effectively contained all of the basic building blocks for a serviceable set of Daemon army rules. Taking the Lesser Daemons, Daemonic Beasts and Greater Daemons in the 2002 Chaos Space Marine codex provided a good skeleton of basic units, while the Daemonic Gifts featured in the same book made for an excellent ready-made Wargear list. Thus the bulk of the workload simply comprised of transcribing these elements over into an independent list.
From this starting point there were a few extra tweaks made. Perhaps the first thing that long time Chaos players will notice is that Furies have been split off from the Daemonic Beast packs and fleshed out into another unit of Lesser Daemons. This serves two purposes. Thematically, I wanted to reinforce Chaos Undivided as a fully fledged Chaos power in its own right, the equal to any of the individual Chaos Gods, and leaving Furies as just another Daemonic Beast - and a lower end one at that - felt like a great disservice to a unit with such a prestigious and evocative name (tying all the way back to the Furies of Ancient Greek legend), so the creation of an independent Daemon army was a good chance to restore them to their rightful place at the side of the other Lesser Daemons.
Mechanically, this also provides the army with a Chaos Undivided Troops choice that could fit seamlessly alongside God-specific Lesser Daemons in the army, giving Chaos Daemon players at least a binary choice in every Force Organisation category without resorting to bringing in Daemons from different Chaos Gods.
Daemon Princes were another conundrum. Under the 2002 Chaos Space Marine codex, Daemon Princes are an extension of Chaos Lords rather than a separate unit, which provides a lot of scope for customisation but also means that there's no baseline profile for porting over into an independent list. I ended up going with the simplest solution of taking the Chaos Lord profile, adding on the Daemonic Stature upgrade, and using that as the benchmark, which conveniently looks reasonably similar to the Daemon Prince stat profile in the 1999 Chaos Space Marine codex. On top of this I also borrowed a rule from Codex: Space Wolves and allowed Daemon Princes to be taken as either an Elites choice under a Daemon warlord or an HQ choice in their own right, which provides Chaos Daemon players with a choice of Elites units as well as HQ commanders.
Speaking of, these rules offer Chaos Daemon armies a choice of 3 different HQ options - a Greater Daemon, a Daemonic Herald (essentially an enhanced Lesser Daemon with access to Wargear upgrades) and the aforementioned Daemon Prince. I've tried to make choosing between them an open question by restricting Daemonic Gift upgrades to Daemonic Heralds and Daemon Princes only, while leaving the Greater Daemons with their formidable stat profile and a small bonus to nearby Daemon units, as well as locking Greater Daemons to God-specific armies only. This makes choosing a Greater Daemon a trade-off between raw power and tactical flexibility.
I also took the liberty of patching a few other units as Heavy Support options. Defilers were a natural fit here, being already closely associated with both Chaos armies in general and Daemons in particular, as well as a great use for the soul grinder models in many Chaos model collections. To this I added some simple mechanics for importing Chaos Space Marine tanks as Daemon Engines, both as a way of reflecting some of the other Daemon Engines that no doubt exist in the realm of Daemons, but also as a way of getting in some ranged firepower for an army that is otherwise very limited on shooting options, especially at long range.
New Additions
As well as tying all the existing Daemon units together, I also threw in a couple of new additions. The first is Exalted Daemon Packs. These are a notch above Lesser Daemons, with a harder stat profile and the option for a single Daemonic Gift similar to Possessed Chaos Space Marines, and provide Damon armies with an Elites troop.
There are also two new Daemonic Cavalry types. I had originally wanted to simply maintain a single general-purpose Daemonic Cavalry unit like in the 1999 Chaos Space Marine codex, but the 2002 Chaos Space Marine book already let the cat out of the bag with rules for Mounted Daemonettes, and the 1999 codex already spun off Juggernauts as a separate cavalry unit, so I decided to flesh out some equivalents for Nurgle and Tzeentch too. The concept of giant daemonic plague fleas as a mount for Nurgle forces had been living in my head rent-free for some time now, so I took the liberty of including some ridden by Plaguebearers as a cavalry option for Nurgle. For Tzeentch, I took inspiration from the Chaos Spawn in 6th edition Warhammer and combined it with a little dash of HP Lovecraft to create a unit of daemonic creatures that felt suitably weird and wonderful for the Architect of Fate.
Finally, I added in a new monstrous creature - the Abyssal Terror. This is a catch-all term for all the various daemonic grobblies that live in the Warp and are too big and scary to be treated as Daemonic Beasts. I've tried to include lots of scope for players to create their own bizarre monstrosities, and it provides the army with its own unique Heavy Support option that feels suitably, truly daemonic.
No Icons? No Problem!
With all the units in place, the next trick was to address the army rules as a whole. Normally, Daemons are summoned onto the table with icons carried by Mutants, Cultists or Chaos Space Marines, or in the case of Greater Daemons possess another character model. Obviously neither of these methods would work for an army comprised entirely of Chaos Daemons. As an alternative, I looked at some of the rules for Chaos Daemons in other 40k games, and worked off the concept that the Daemon army would be invading from warp rifts on the planet's surface to create a simple system for deep-striking elements of the army en masse. I also added a few restrictions about where they can drop in to ensure that the non-Daemon player has some room to breathe without getting immediately overrun.
In Conclusion
So there you have it! I've stored the army rules as a PDF and given a link to it below, as a lot of the rules are taken straight from other published codexes - naturally all credit goes to the original authors who wrote those sections.
These rules are considered experimental - I've included them here as an advance preview for a select audience to iron out any glaringly obvious oversights before releasing them to the wider public for playtesting, so all constructive feedback is welcome.
In the mean time, let the galaxy burn!
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/ ... sp=sharing
Daemonic Incursions - Chaos Daemon Armies in Warhammer 40,000
Kakapo: For a long time now I have been creating exciting new content for Warhammer 40,000, ranging from sci-fi crossovers to new vehicle inventions to, most recently, entire new army lists. Recently I had been meaning to set up a theoretically semi-regular series showcasing them and sharing them for wider use in a revival of Andy Chambers' Chapter Approved feature in White Dwarf, but quickly found myself confronted with decision paralysis on which new content to start with.
The catalyst came with my recent attempts to introduce 2004hammer to my local 40k groups. This experiment has quickly surpassed my wildest expectations, to the point where it has even begun to spread to other 40k groups I've never encountered and is fast taking on a life of its own. An interesting side-effect of this however was that it drew the attention of a number of players interested in trying out 2004hammer and 3rd edition Warhammer 40,000, but whose model collections were mainly comprised of Chaos Daemons. This made getting them started complicated, as normally Chaos Daemons are used as very high caliber support units for other Chaos armies like Lost And The Damned. Not wanting them to be left out, I took on the challenge of working out a means to translate as much of their figure collections as possible into a usable army.
The Foundation
The core of the army was simple enough to put together. Over the years Chaos Space Marines have received not one but two excellent codex books for this version of Warhammer 40,000, and between them they effectively contained all of the basic building blocks for a serviceable set of Daemon army rules. Taking the Lesser Daemons, Daemonic Beasts and Greater Daemons in the 2002 Chaos Space Marine codex provided a good skeleton of basic units, while the Daemonic Gifts featured in the same book made for an excellent ready-made Wargear list. Thus the bulk of the workload simply comprised of transcribing these elements over into an independent list.
From this starting point there were a few extra tweaks made. Perhaps the first thing that long time Chaos players will notice is that Furies have been split off from the Daemonic Beast packs and fleshed out into another unit of Lesser Daemons. This serves two purposes. Thematically, I wanted to reinforce Chaos Undivided as a fully fledged Chaos power in its own right, the equal to any of the individual Chaos Gods, and leaving Furies as just another Daemonic Beast - and a lower end one at that - felt like a great disservice to a unit with such a prestigious and evocative name (tying all the way back to the Furies of Ancient Greek legend), so the creation of an independent Daemon army was a good chance to restore them to their rightful place at the side of the other Lesser Daemons.
Mechanically, this also provides the army with a Chaos Undivided Troops choice that could fit seamlessly alongside God-specific Lesser Daemons in the army, giving Chaos Daemon players at least a binary choice in every Force Organisation category without resorting to bringing in Daemons from different Chaos Gods.
Daemon Princes were another conundrum. Under the 2002 Chaos Space Marine codex, Daemon Princes are an extension of Chaos Lords rather than a separate unit, which provides a lot of scope for customisation but also means that there's no baseline profile for porting over into an independent list. I ended up going with the simplest solution of taking the Chaos Lord profile, adding on the Daemonic Stature upgrade, and using that as the benchmark, which conveniently looks reasonably similar to the Daemon Prince stat profile in the 1999 Chaos Space Marine codex. On top of this I also borrowed a rule from Codex: Space Wolves and allowed Daemon Princes to be taken as either an Elites choice under a Daemon warlord or an HQ choice in their own right, which provides Chaos Daemon players with a choice of Elites units as well as HQ commanders.
Speaking of, these rules offer Chaos Daemon armies a choice of 3 different HQ options - a Greater Daemon, a Daemonic Herald (essentially an enhanced Lesser Daemon with access to Wargear upgrades) and the aforementioned Daemon Prince. I've tried to make choosing between them an open question by restricting Daemonic Gift upgrades to Daemonic Heralds and Daemon Princes only, while leaving the Greater Daemons with their formidable stat profile and a small bonus to nearby Daemon units, as well as locking Greater Daemons to God-specific armies only. This makes choosing a Greater Daemon a trade-off between raw power and tactical flexibility.
I also took the liberty of patching a few other units as Heavy Support options. Defilers were a natural fit here, being already closely associated with both Chaos armies in general and Daemons in particular, as well as a great use for the soul grinder models in many Chaos model collections. To this I added some simple mechanics for importing Chaos Space Marine tanks as Daemon Engines, both as a way of reflecting some of the other Daemon Engines that no doubt exist in the realm of Daemons, but also as a way of getting in some ranged firepower for an army that is otherwise very limited on shooting options, especially at long range.
New Additions
As well as tying all the existing Daemon units together, I also threw in a couple of new additions. The first is Exalted Daemon Packs. These are a notch above Lesser Daemons, with a harder stat profile and the option for a single Daemonic Gift similar to Possessed Chaos Space Marines, and provide Damon armies with an Elites troop.
There are also two new Daemonic Cavalry types. I had originally wanted to simply maintain a single general-purpose Daemonic Cavalry unit like in the 1999 Chaos Space Marine codex, but the 2002 Chaos Space Marine book already let the cat out of the bag with rules for Mounted Daemonettes, and the 1999 codex already spun off Juggernauts as a separate cavalry unit, so I decided to flesh out some equivalents for Nurgle and Tzeentch too. The concept of giant daemonic plague fleas as a mount for Nurgle forces had been living in my head rent-free for some time now, so I took the liberty of including some ridden by Plaguebearers as a cavalry option for Nurgle. For Tzeentch, I took inspiration from the Chaos Spawn in 6th edition Warhammer and combined it with a little dash of HP Lovecraft to create a unit of daemonic creatures that felt suitably weird and wonderful for the Architect of Fate.
Finally, I added in a new monstrous creature - the Abyssal Terror. This is a catch-all term for all the various daemonic grobblies that live in the Warp and are too big and scary to be treated as Daemonic Beasts. I've tried to include lots of scope for players to create their own bizarre monstrosities, and it provides the army with its own unique Heavy Support option that feels suitably, truly daemonic.
No Icons? No Problem!
With all the units in place, the next trick was to address the army rules as a whole. Normally, Daemons are summoned onto the table with icons carried by Mutants, Cultists or Chaos Space Marines, or in the case of Greater Daemons possess another character model. Obviously neither of these methods would work for an army comprised entirely of Chaos Daemons. As an alternative, I looked at some of the rules for Chaos Daemons in other 40k games, and worked off the concept that the Daemon army would be invading from warp rifts on the planet's surface to create a simple system for deep-striking elements of the army en masse. I also added a few restrictions about where they can drop in to ensure that the non-Daemon player has some room to breathe without getting immediately overrun.
In Conclusion
So there you have it! I've stored the army rules as a PDF and given a link to it below, as a lot of the rules are taken straight from other published codexes - naturally all credit goes to the original authors who wrote those sections.
These rules are considered experimental - I've included them here as an advance preview for a select audience to iron out any glaringly obvious oversights before releasing them to the wider public for playtesting, so all constructive feedback is welcome.
In the mean time, let the galaxy burn!
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/ ... sp=sharing