Greetings Terrans. So last post talked about the genesis of my RoW project… this post deals with how I went about generating the warband – I’m going into some detail in case anyone fancies giving it a go themselves.

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First up I wanted to randomise my Chaos power – I’m really not invested in any of the ‘Big Four’ or ‘Chaos Undivided’, so letting fate decide my patron, (or lack thereof), seemed appropriate. The Dice Gods spoke, and I rolled Tzeentch – so plotting, scheming and sorcery it is then!

Next, I generated my Champion using the tables in Slaves to Darkness. I rolled a middling level human hero as my starting point, and then took a single roll on the Chaos Reward table, and a single roll on the Tzeentch table. My first generic Chaos reward was an Attribute, for which I rolled ‘Oversized Hands’ (a further roll determined that they were twice as large). The next roll was for a Gift of Tzeentch, for which I rolled the ‘Gift of Magic’ – super appropriate! I was already starting to form an image of a decent fighter who had thrown in his lot with Tzeentch in exchange for magical powers…

With this in mind, my next step was to look for a suitable Warcry card that represented a middling level Champion with a magic attack. There are a number to choose from, but I settled on the ‘Scinari Loreseeker’ card from the Lumineth range. It’s a nicely balanced card that seemed appropriate – not very tanky but still a decent fighter with a solid magic attach and a tricksy ‘shoot-and-scoot’ special ability.

I then took two rolls on the followers table and ended up with 3 humans and 6 Beastmen. This worked out really nicely for me because my Spire Tyrants gave me plenty of humans to choose from, as well as one of the Beastmen that I needed. I was off to a great start, however, I needed more Beastmen so I used some more Birthday money (thanks again M&D) and picked up the ‘Grashrak’s Despoilers’ Underworlds warband. This gave me five more ‘regular’ Beastmen, plus I had Grashrak himself as a ‘spare’ Shaman for future use. Importantly, all now have Warcry cards thanks to the Tome of Champions, so happy days!

I quickly got to painting & so here they are – the Beastmen that I’ll be using for my starting Warband:

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Plus Grashrak as the ‘spare’ Shaman:

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This effectively locked me in to a points cost for the Champion & Beastmen, but I still had some flexibility in my choice of Human followers. After a bit of numberwang, I settled on adding the Spire Tyrant ‘Headclaimer’, a ‘Pitfighter with Net’ and a ‘Pitfighter with spear’ for a total of 990 points. Here is the warband minus their Champion:

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Properly RoC!!

Anyway, that’s it for another post – catch you all next time when we meet the leader of this savage band.

Greetings Terrans, how goes it? I’m super excited to get this post out there because I’m breaking cover on a new project that has really got my creative juices flowing – a new hobby adventure that I am calling ‘Realm of Warcry’… There will be lovely minis and conversions of course, but also plenty of fluff and fiction – this will be an evolving story, and I don’t know how it will end… Dear reader, let me explain.

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Now, I know that many of you will know what I’m talking about when I talk about the ‘Realm of Chaos’ books, (RoC for short), but for the uninitiated, let’s lay it on the line.

RoC is comprised of two classic Games Workshop books from the late Eighties called ‘Slaves to Darkness’ and ‘The Lost and the Damned’. These tomes dealt with Chaos in Warhammer Fantasy and 40k, and they are gorgeous things packed full of lore, rules, art, army lists, photos of minis, etc. One of the coolest and most inspiring things about RoC is the framework it presents for creating your very own Chaos Champion and Warband, including tables for mutations, attributes, gifts, followers, their gifts, and so on. It is super-detailed. And I’ve always had a soft spot for the idea of creating a Fantasy Chaos Warband in this way, but the game of Fantasy Battle itself was not my cup of tea, and the minis were too expensive for me to ‘do it properly’ back in the day.

Fast forward a few decades and Warcry arrives – this is a nice little skirmish game for Chaos Warbands with a tight rule set, and it very much tries to channel the spirit of RoC. I dabbled a bit with the game when it first came out, and even started up a Daughters of Khaine warband, (Seros the Thrice Cursed is still out there somewhere!), but it didn’t fully click for me – there was something missing…

Fast forward to April this year and my kids bought me a set of Spire Tyrants and the ‘Ogroid Myrmidon’ for my birthday. Here they are:

These are fab minis, really nice to build and paint. I aimed for a range of skin tones across the range, and the Myrmidon got some nice stripes to add some interest. I enjoyed the models so much that I picked up the Warcry Tome of Champions and Agents of Chaos books, and began reading. I suddenly I realised that I could introduce just about any model I liked into the game and so the idea clicked – use the Warcry profiles and rules to run a pick’n’mix warband generated entirely from the RoC books… Hence ‘Realm of Warcry’ (duh)

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So Realm of Warcry was now a thing in my head, but I needed to put a guiding framework around the project to stop it just being a ‘buy all the things’ activity. After a bit of thinking I came up with the following:

1: Everything for the warband must be randomly rolled as described in RoC books and using the RoC tables – 100% honesty, no cheating out of a bad roll!

2: The Champion and Followers must all have a corresponding Warcry card – creative interpretation is allowed – card and model do NOT need to match! (so if I roll up some Dark Elves, I could use any card from any race, along with any base model I like, as long as model and card feel appropriate & makes sense fluff-wise).

3: I will roll to see if I can add followers after every game rather than as determined by victory conditions. The wider warband will be bought, converted as necessary, painted and added to the group. This will form a pool from which I can select fighters up to whatever limit in whatever game.

4: I will ignore any faction rules and so on, instead creating a ‘Warband’ faction that applies to all members, and replaces their original faction. Any special faction-specific Actions also transfer in the same way.

5: I will roll for Chaos Gifts after every game, and I will allow myself to accumulate up to 5 such gifts before I build and paint a new version of my champion to reflect them all in one go. This is intended to avoid having to remodel my Champion too often if I don’t want to. I may also choose to roll gifts for specific warband members if they do something especially cool in any game.

6: I will not change the card that I use for any Warband member (including the Champion) unless I first earn one or more Gifts, and the model is changed accordingly

7: With an opponent’s permission, I will play narrative games specifically designed to add specific models to my warband, and will reciprocate whenever asked.

8: I will create accompanying fluff like camp followers, alters, terrain and so on. These won’t have any combat role, but are intended to add flavour, plot hooks for narrative games, etc.

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So that’s all I’m ready to share on the project right now, I hope this has whet your appetite a little… In fact, I’d be delighted to hear if this has motivated you to do something similar – heck, why not join in! If you have access to the relevant books then just go for it, blog about it, share pics, etc. If you don’t have access to the books then pm me – we can jump on a Zoom call, grab a set of D&D dice and get rolling. I’d love to see a few more Realm of Warcry projects out there, and if we get a few of us then I might start a WhatsApp group. Who knows, maybe we can even get together to scrap it out for the glory of Chaos!!

Anyway, that’s all for now – I am hugely grateful to my kids for choosing them and for inspiring such a cool project, and I hope you are excited to see what’s next :-)