Throne of Chaos

[cyanhawk]

I received my copy of the Throne of Chaos Tamurkhan forge world expansion book and I would like to do a quick review. I don't want to do anything too in depth as I have read through most of the book but have only had it for one day and haven't read it in depth.

First off the book itself is beautiful. It is over 200 pages long. The cover is a sturdy fake leather feeling material about 1/4 inch thick. The pages are matte finished but the paper used is pretty thick. It definitely is a sturdy book. The drawings inside are wonderful. Each page is decorated. This actually has a downside as the decoration takes up the whole page and then the words are printed on top of that. This makes some words hard to read. Its not entire paragraphs but a couple words a page. More annoying than anything else.

The first 100 pages of the book are back story. Phenomenal. I've only read about 20 pages in and the story is pretty good so far. It is set in the future and tells about the rising of Tamurkhan the champion of nurgle.

After the story there is a section on running a campaign based on the book. It pits the 3 forces of chaos books against all comers basically. Looks like fun I am looking forward to getting my gaming group to go through it.

An addendum to the campaign is a section on how to use parts from all 3 chaos books in one army. Its very thematic and actually has a built in sort of animosity. Lots of special rules in there that help to keep the armies balanced. You can't just pick the cream of the crop and go with it. If you have a daemon as the general then the minimum core has to be from chaos daemons book and other things like that.

Next is the Chaos army units. The toad dragon is an awesome model and his rules are pretty crazy. It seems pretty much the same as the experimental rules on forge worlds website. The real winner out of the chaos section for me was the chaos war mammoth. The mammoth can now replace his howdah with a war shrine. It runs around 650 points but it is an absolute beast and will probably earn its points back easily. It has an attack that does d6 str 10 hits for each rank the unit its engaged with has. Smush goes the huge skaven blocks.

After chaos comes the empire section. The empire feels very lackluster. The special characters are good but the landship is pretty meh (other than the fact that it can fire its cannon into a close combat it is in) and the other basic troops listed are also pretty bland.

After empire comes the one reason to buy the book even if you dont care about the new chaos and empire units. CHAOS DWARF army list. The chaos dwarves are back and have a complete army again. They have 3 or so lord choices, 5 hero choices, only 2 or 3 core choices but a ton of special and rare options. In addition they have their own lore of magic call the lore of hashut, and a items list with around 8 items in it. Very very cool over all.

The last page is acknowledgments.

Overall I give the book an 8/10 on my quick glance through. The story in the beginning sets it up quite well for at least 3 more books. One for each of the other chaos gods. This book was the Nurgle book. I definitely recommend it for anyone who is a fan of the fluff. The new chaos and empire units are cool and they can be included in normal empire, WoC and DoC armies. The chaos dwarf section is the real winner in this book. They seem to have been thought out pretty well upon my quick read last night. I can already see a few OP abilities they have but overall they seem pretty good.

Feel free to ask me any questions about it and I will do my best to answer.

 

[n810]

Oh do you own enough minitures to make any of the armies in the book yet?
and What do you think of forgeworlds rules for Warhammer?

Personaly I cant wait for the Lizardmen vs Tzeentch book.

 

[cyanhawk]

I have enough Minis to proxy all the armies. I don't have anything on scale of the toad dragon or war mammoth though. Both have bases bigger than the arachnarok spider from what I can tell. I haven't picked up any of the warhammer forge models either.

I will probably proxy my dwarf models into chaos dwarves in the near future and test them out.

I think forgewold did a good job. Some stuff is crazy but nothing is so ridiculously op that you wouldnt be able to deal with it. Things are costed very well from what I can tell. I will know better once I can actually use some of the stuff on the table. They dont have anything in this book that is super unkilllable like archaon. Tamurkhan is the hardest thing to kill and thats just because he has a special rule that gives him a chance to keep switching host bodies over and over again. The unit with the best ward save in the book is an empire guy with a 3+ ward. Downside is if he fails it he loses it and then gets some crazy negatives to his stats.

I forgot to mention that while most of the book is for Chaos/empire there is one new unit for O&G. Colossal Cave Squig. Same base size as the arachnarok, counts a a rare. I dont have the book in front of me so I cant give you anything more than that right now.

 

[totzro]

I would love to collect a chaos dwarf army! Is the rules in the book official? I know forgeworld is a part of GW, but it's always seem a little bit uncertain to me. I guess you could just convert a regular dwarf army but still...

 

[cyanhawk]

Forgeworld productions are official. Whether a tournament allows them or not is up to the tourney. There are multiple references in the book to units being allowed to be taken as a choice in specific armies. The stuff in the book from what I can tell is more balance on a points per power level basis than the regular army books are.

At the moment the only way ill be playing chaos dwarves is with proxy models. Forgeworld is the only GW company that is going to produce official models. The ones up already are pretty darn tight, just a little outside my price range.


Oh and i just noticed today that mine is signed by the author. Guess I ordered it early enough.

 

[strewart]

Cool, sounds like a good book!

For those interested in Chaos Dwarfs, consider looking at the Mantic range called Abyssal Dwarfs. They are hybrid kits with their good Dwarfs, so a mixture of plastic, metal and resin and thus a little more expensive than other Mantic armies, but still cheaper than GW and far cheaper than FW.
Link.