Thursday 2 June 2016

Not just nutters, but psychopaths too

Nearly all my Chaos Warriors worship Gshtaad The Abomination. If you can't be bothered to read my post about him, he's basically a kind of halfway house between Khorne, the Blood God and Nurgle, the Lord of Decay, theoretically giving me the freedom to collect miniatures from both ranges, and integrate them into a single, coherent force.

But the boundary line between Khorne and Nurgle isn't the only one I've conveniently ignored for the sake of my Chaos Warrior force.

At various points in Games Workshop's history there have been Chaos Thugs, Chaos Marauders and Chaos Warriors - not to mention the uber warriors known as the Chosen. I always imagined these units, taken in sequence, formed a kind of career path for nasty bad guys. I thought a Chaos follower would start as a young nutter, in a pack of Thugs with little armour and equipment, getting bigger and better at fighting until he's collected enough kills, experience and gear to graduate to full-blown, armoured psychopath.

I therefore liked the idea that the demarkation line between Thugs, Marauders, Warriors and Chosen might not be so straightforward. It could be more blurred than the commercial miniature ranges have been able to portray. So some Warriors might not be in full armour, and some Marauders might not be bare-chested. I figured that the occasional hard-as-nails Warrior might even prefer to lead younger, less experienced goons into the fight, probably as an expression of his narcissism, but perhaps even as some kind of twisted, daemon-worshipper's take on civic duty.

Equally, some Marauders might be so blessed by their chosen God that they're way more muscular than the veterans who have spent a lifetime training and building themselves up. Hulking great youths, rapidly rising through the ranks, forgoing skill and experience in favour of sheer, mindless strength.

And you might also find troops who aren't super tough, dangerous-looking fighters. Instead they are skinny little dudes, press-ganged into the lower ranks, given ill-fitting armour and scrappy weapons, essentially just cannon fodder, desperate to unearth some hidden power before Darwin's selection process brutally removes them from the tribe for good.






So what I'm trying to say is that I actively endeavour to make my Chaos Warrior army as diverse as I can. To compose it from as widely dissimilar parts as possible. To achieve variance. Random variance. You might even want to call it Chaos.


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