Hey everybody! Adam, from TFG Radio, here to talk about the dark days that were the Chaos Space Marine codex before the legendary 3.5 edition.
The new 9th edition Chaos Space Marine codex is out and everyone is abuzz about it. People are talking about all the different way to play the army and it is a joy to see. It has been a long time that people have had a lot of different ways to compete, especially in a tournament. Now we still need to see how the codex will do in the wild these next few weeks but I am pretty confident the army will be well represented in the larger tournaments. Even with this, many people still lament over the old 3.5 edition of the game. In all honesty I am not sure how many of those people actually played the 3.5 book, let alone if they were old enough to even play 40K at that time. What many people never realize was the struggle of playing Chaos Space Marines with the original codex for 3rd edition. This week I will talk about some of the “issues” Chaos players had to deal with when we played with the original 3rd edition codex.
Couldn’t use our Toys
Many of the special characters you see today was also available to us back in 3rd edition. In fact, the armless Abaddon that I own, before I got the newer version, I had bought an painted back when he was introduced in 2nd edition. Unfortunately, tournament players were not allowed to use the named characters in tournaments, and this included tournaments run by Games Workshop. The restriction was that they were only allowed at 2,000 points or more games and most tournament games at the time were between 1500-1750 points. Even if you happen to be playing a 2000 point game, you still needed your opponent’s permission to use the model in your game. This left a lot of these characters sitting on the shelves until you happen to be playing an Apocalypse game or someone actually allowed you to use it, which rarely happened.
Very Generic Daemons
Although the current daemon book is not as strong as it was in the past, in the 3rd edition book, there were some issues. The unit entry was a generic daemon pack that was given a small bonus depending on what type of daemon pack it was. It was a small boost to the unit but not enough to make them very effective or even unique because all four gods used the same unit stat line. So a no flavor unit that did do anything very well and as a result saw very little action on the tabletop. The revised edition greatly boosted the daemons of the dark gods, so much so that I included them all in my Black Legion army by summoning them in as I assaulted my opponent. Even though daemons did not see a lot of use, they did have something that was missing for the entire army…
No Invulnerable Saves
You read that right. Unless you were a daemon or special character, no one in the army had an invulnerable save. So imagine you have your all powerful Chaos Lord, with all his tricks and special weapons, and he basically only has a 3+ save, maybe a 2+ if you give him terminator armour. What’s that you say? Terminator armour has always had a 5+ invulnerable save? Not so fast, my friend. Terminator armour actually DID NOT have an invulnerable save, just the normal 2+ save. Games Workshop finally rectified this in a later Chapter Approved but it was a few months before that happened so we had to make do with just regular armour saves. Still, adversity builds character, right?
That’s all for this week. Hope you enjoyed the article. Let me know what you think, and what issues with the original 3rd edition codex you had, in the comments section below. Don’t forget to visit our Facebook, Twitch, and Patreon pages to stay up to date on what we’re up to and when episodes drop!
And remember boys and girls, Frontline Gaming sells gaming products at a discount, every day in their webcart
