Hi All, like every other chaos player I was eagerly awaiting every little rumor coming from the upcoming codex release. As a Night Lords player I wasn’t fooling myself into believing that playing a post-heresy, so no daemons, daemon engines, or marked units would be good. The rumors indicated that GW is still trying to make the Night Lord’s leadership mechanic a thing, which only time will tell. Gating the second part of their ability to, max, affect units with LD 8 or lower is annoying but not the end of the world. Their relics and stratagems (what few we will get to use anyway) look decent and will be quite handy for my infantry-heavy crusade force. The hardest part of this release is the news that Chaos Lords and Sorcerers lost the ability to take jump packs (likely due to a lack of dedicated models).
As a Night Lords player this stings for me more than many other players, but it does highlight a potential problem for chaos players with converted or legacy models. This issue may also creep into other armies as older space marine kits are squeezed out in favor of primaris options and the like. One way to combat this is to turn to narrative gaming. The crusade system is very flexible and open to house-rules for campaigns. The fact that many of these now extinct models have had points costs in the past is helpful in determining how to adapt them in light of new rules releases. I have had to put this into play a bit already for my Dark Eldar Raven flyers and Eldar Firestorm tank.
Moving forward it wouldn’t surprise me to see GW moving in one or two different directions. The first is that they pull older options and do not replace them, or simply replace them with different units. You could call this the “Primaris” option. This might be the fate of the venerable Space Marine HQs on bike or with a jump pack. The other option is the “Autarch Option”. Just because a type of war-gear disappears doesn’t mean it wont’ come back later. When they re-released the new kit they added a ton of flexibility and options and I wouldn’t be surprised if they go this route for the Chaos models and a few other kits. However, it can be dangerous to assume they will revive a kit as there are few examples of this actually happening.
Whichever path GW takes they have, intentionally or otherwise, already created a mechanism to incorporate old units into the game (at least in a non-competitive setting). Narrative gaming is all about wonky combos and powerful units in unique missions, with lots of player communication. The community may benefit from a group collecting the data sheets for discontinued models and updating them (I think the Firestorm needs D2 on its main weapon, but that is my very small personal crusade) but this can also be done on an ad hoc level.
The splitting of narrative rules from matched play rules remains one of the best decisions made by GW in 9th ed. GM’s of crusade campaigns should feel empowered to have their players use any models that fit their army’s theme, while also not disrupting the balance of the armies excessivly. As the years go on I think we will see more and more cases of legacy units or wargear getting pushed out of matched play. However, I think that there will always be a home for them in crusade campaigns.
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