The World of Fluff with GMort the Cheerful.....

Somewhere in the dungeons below a generic evil fortress.....

" The prisoner is secure?"
" Yes my Lord, though I don't see why you didn't just drop him in some lava or feed him to the Clawbeasts like normal....."
" We may need him later.....and what could be worse torture for him than seeing the fluff filled article were going to write on his behalf using the evil clone?"
" I'm pretty sure being incinerated or eaten alive would be worse.....and besides which if the clone's writing a fluffy article doesn't that make him a good clone and the original evil?"
" Silence!!!!! If you knew anything about being an arch enemy then you wouldn't be in the generic henchman outfit.....though you may have a point about the 'evil' bit..... "
" Fair enough dread overlord......but how did you break into his blogger account "
" His password was 'Fuck'....."
" Oh... "
" and he's DEFINITELY secure? "
" Yes."
" you used one of the cells without a rusty lock, no key hidden behind a false brick, easily activated escape route or gullible guard? "
" Of course "
" That's all right then "
" hang-on.....did you just say without......"

Hello everyone, and an extra special hello to Gav Thorpe for his wonderful work on the Chaos Space Marine Codex and a big thank-you to Matt Ward for his incredibly well thought out background material.....

Kaldor Draigo....what a great guy.

GMort here with another wonderful, in no way arrogant or condescending article without any poorly thought out sweeping statements or personal insults whatsoever in it. As normal I'll be making a real effort not to annoy anybody by telling them they're wrong, screwing up peoples blog rolls by opening with a rude picture and I most definitely wont be using the phrase fuck, fuck, fuckity, fuck, fuck.....

Today I thought I'd write about how much better it is to fill your army with Fluffy and ineffective units, rather than all that messing about with 'optimisation', 'redundancy' and all that other bollocks that other less enlightened players seem to worry about all the time. As I'm such a fan of Gav Thorpes work on Codices I thought I'd concentrate on the Chaos Space Marine codex as a shining example of an incredible piece of work.....

When it comes to making a wonderful army full of great units then you need look no further than the Chaos Space Marine Codex. Unfortunately, even the most carefully crafted of codices can leave itself open to the curse of power-gaming so I'm going to show you how to avoid falling into this trap,

So I'm going to design you an awesomely fluffy army without anything cheesy in it at all.......

First HQ's,

Quake in fear at my glowy head.....

Though it's a great temptation to use Abaddon in your army with his scarily tiny head we need to be realistic about this.....Abaddon leads Black Crusades and as I'm sure these take a great deal of organising before hand he's going to be far to busy to lead twenty Marines and a couple of Obliterators on their mission to die pointlessly to a couple of Grey Knights on some rather familiar green battlefield with it's two generic ruined buildings, three forests and a pointless hill. Kharn is another big no-no as he'd have turned up and killed your whole army for not being angry enough long before the battle actually started. Huron is also probably quite busy managing his own mini version of the Eye of Terror, Lucius is too busy transforming the body of the latest person to kick his ass into.....well......Lucius, etc. So were left with only one choice.....The standard Chaos Lord or possibly a Sorcerer, the former being equipped with a nice easy to maintain Power Weapon as weapons of the Daemon variety are quite rare as well.....

Elites,

Point me at one of my own units so I can smite it mightily..

Chosen Chaos Marines are probably okay as our Lord will have some kind of bodyguard but it's unlikely that any possessed are going to be about and Chaos Terminators are most likely hanging around with more important Chaos Lords who have actual names and written backgrounds. It's also a good idea to take a couple of Chaos Dreadnoughts in your army as nothing says 'Chaos' quite like gunning down your own units for no apparent reason.....

Troops,

Plasma gun and Heavy Bolter.....what an awesome unit configuration.....

Normal Chaos Space Marines are fine as long as they have two different special weapons or one assault weapon and one heavy weapon in order to ensure that the unit is poorly equipped for 50% of the situations that it's in. Equipping a unit with a pair of useful weapons is fine for those power-gaming bastards but is far too cheesy for people like us who are here to have fun at any cost. If your going to let the side down by having 'cult' troops then be sure to always take them in units of the same size as their gods sacred number. Some cheating bastards imply that multiples of that number is fine as well but we all know that is the start of the slippery slope towards 'justifying' your unit choices as 'fluffy' when your actually doing it for an in game advantage.....we're all very disappointed in you......

As for transportation, Chaos players are fortunate that Gav Thorpe had the foresight to leave Razorbacks or any equivalent out of the Chaos Marine Codex thus sparing us the temptation that is known as 'Razorback Spam'. We all know that any army with more than two of  the same unit in it is the height of evil and this grave travesty against the gods of fluff should be avoided at all costs. However, more than a couple of Rhino's is fine and doesn't count as 'spam' at all......

Why?

Well, It's obviously because.....well......that's tricky to explain.....I'll come back to that later.....

Fast Attack,

Behold as I flop random distances towards the enemy and then die.....

This whole section is fine due to the fact that everything in it is rubbish and can therefore be fielded without any complaints from your opponents whatsoever. Chaos Bikers are impressively over-costed, Chaos Raptors have also been carefully pointed slightly more expensive than everybody else's assault units while simultaneously being not as good and Chaos Spawn run off randomly and then die to the first thing that attacks them (though not very quickly as they are slow and purposeful) which is most obviously exactly the thing that they would do and it's therefore fine to field as many of these as you like. In fact Chaos Spawn are such a perfect Chaos unit that you can literally take as many as you like within your points limit as they don't even take up a Force Organisation Chart slot......surely Mr Thorpe has no equal when it comes to unit design.

Heavy Support,

an extremely rare obliterator....

.....and another.....

....and another......

Now we reach the area that those accursed power-gamers have managed to twist to their corrupt and debased needs. Obliterators are incredibly rare from a background point of view. It states quite clearly in the background material that 'whole wars have been waged to provide a cadre of these monstrous warriors with the archeotech they seek', yet those Chaos players who have turned to the dark side of the hobby have no shame in taking up to nine of these.....

I can see that your as shocked as I was......

Our hero and mentor Gav Thorpe can no way be held responsible for this turn of events. I mean it's not his fault that there's no effective ranged anti-tank in other slots and all the other heavy support choices are over costed, poorly armoured or ineffective now is it. I guess that he included Obliterators so if your playing a million point Apocalypse game then you could include a couple (maybe three at the most) of these in your army. How disappointed he must be with you all that you abused his trust so severely.....

I think that'll do for now. Next week I'll be covering how to write a Grey Knight list that actually has Grey Knights in it.

Meanwhile.....

" What do you mean he escaped....."
" Well he found a key to the door behind an extremely poorly concealed rock....."
" Yes?"
" and then after unlocking the door, he told the gullible guard that he was popping out for some fresh air and that he'd lock himself back in again when he got back..... "
" Then what? "
" While casually leaning on a wall he, in a million to one occurrence, leant on the switch that opened a secret tunnel...."
" The tunnel that leads to the snake pit?
" No.....the one that leads to the unguarded garage complex containing a fully fueled escape vehicle...."
" You know what this means don't you? "
" That your going to throw me into the lava?"
" Worse!!! "
" Your going to feed me to the Clawbeasts? "
" Worse even than that!!! "
" Were going to have an article next week on how to break the Necron Codex? "
" Exactly....... "
" Bollocks...... "