Far to the North the chaos incursion spews the stuff of magic into the old world. Norsca, land of harsh snow, is inundated with the power and progeny of the warp. Ever more demon spawn decend into the lands of man, of elf and dwarf. Of the lands that we puny wretches call civilised and noble. Brave armies are sent by emperors snd kings, sent north to fight agaisnt chaos. Some few return, battle scarred, defeated and changed. Broken. Yet what of those who do not ruturn? Not all are dead. The lure of chaos is power, of change, strength and immortality. Far above the northern snows fight those seduced by the promises. For they are not lies! Magic is real, and is bent by the will of those who can wield it. The gods manifest, and reward those who follow them. The land there is beyond the fields we know, into the realm of magic. Snow may be there, but so might jungle. Yet is it snow of water? Nay it is magic made tangible! Are the forests those trees we recognise? Nay, they are things no longer of the plant kingdom, but of the magical realm. Deserts where each rock bears the face of a demon. Ruins of cities that never were. Seas of fluid that do not drown, that instead nourish! Landscapes of the imagination, of the derranged mind, the Realm of Chaos. Step with me into the world, and fight. The rewards are to live as the gods! I shall be your guide, and master of this game we play, for we are but pieces toyed with by the gods themselves. Cast aside notions of parity, of fairness, for our fates are decided by whim and will seem nothing more than the random rolling of the dice of death....
OVERVIEW In a Realm of Chaos capaign, each player brings a Chaos Champion and their warband. These are dedicated to a Chaos, either a specific god or chaos undivided. As we play games, players earn victory points. Each 10 points is spent to roll on the Chaos Rewards table, page 285 in the Lost and the Damned. The results 0 to 40 give the champion a chaos attribute, which is a mutation. 41 and above grant the champion a chaos gift. The top 10% roll is a special reward, called the Eye of the Gods. If the champion rolls this and has 5 or less attributes and 5 or less gifts, then they are seen as lucky and chosen of their patron, but continue to fight on. If they have 6 or more chaos gifts, then their god elevates them to immortality and they become Demon Princes. This is how to win the game! If they have 6 or more chaos atributes, then they will become chaos spawn! You may then elevate another member of your warband to become its champion.
THE GM It is a good idea to nominate one player as the overall GM of your campign. Whilst a GM in not really neccesary, it is a good idea to have somone guiding whats going on generally in the campaign. Sometimes things need to be decided.
RULES REFERENCE I have written a handy reference guide and simplified version of the rules for Warhammer 3rd Edition. You can download the four page A4 pdf by clicking this link. It assumes you have played warhammer before and understand the profile and how the game generally works.
CHAMPION AND WARBAND There is a fun random process for generating your champion and warband. It can be crazily unfair, so please submit it to the GM for balancing. The warbands generated in this campaign are reasonably strong, so under-powered ones will be buffed up a bit. The best place to look is the reference at the back of the Lost and the Damned (LatD). Its updated from the tables in Slaves to Darkness(StD). Page number references will use those initialisms. 1. Generate your champions starting profile. If you roll level 5 then bump up to level 10. Pg 280 LatD 2. Choose your chaos patron, and apply their starting gift, Marks of the Chaos Powers. This is usually a random chaos attribute and a fun buff. Pg 281 LatD CHAOS ATTRIBUTES, MUTATIONS Players must track how many chaos attributes they gain. All champions start with at least one. Attributes can grant Fear Points (fp) so keep a running total of these. The really fun D1000 table starts on page 113 of StD. Use Personal Chaos Attributes for all rolls. There is ANOTHER table, Dominant Chaos Atributes, but those are for assigning to units in big battle games, so dont get confused! FEAR POINTS Some Chaos attributes award Fear Points, so keep track of how many your mutant has. They can give the character the ability to cause fear. Fear Points are explained in StD, page 111. The rules are in the main rulebook, page 71. 3. In this campaign, players start with 2 rolls for followers, on the Retinue table. Pg 290 LatD. You may be called on to roll Chaos Attributes for your followers. You can roll these individually, or have the same for the whole unit. Either method is acceptable. Pg 114l3 StD Either roll may be swapped for a single roll on the Universal creatures table (my favorite table in all warhammer). You only get 1 model from this roll. It will probably be a gnome, human or something like that, but might be a dragon! Pg 294 LatD 4. Check with the Games Master. If you did not get any large creatures then you may pick an ogre, a troll, a minotaur or roll on the chaos Creatures of Chaos sub section of the Universal Creatures table. Pg 295 Latd 5. The actual rules as written let players absolutely ignore any roll and pick results from any of the tables or charts. This is obviously a crazy power to grant but the whole process is liable to the most insane luck rols anyway! So if you find yourself unhappy with a roll, just pick what you want. You wanted a hunan champion but ended up with a gnome? Justvswap it, no big deal. You have a cool centaur unit but rolled up 2 D6 beastmen? Just swap it. I " free pick" is allowed per player. 6. Players are also free to make a single re-roll. Got a mutation that is lame and boring? Got 2 beastemen because you rolled snakes eyes? No problem, use your reroll. 7. Buy equipment. The champion gets D6+X points to spend on the Warhammer Fantasy Battle table on page 296 LatD. All equipment in the warband (including the free hand weapon everyone gets) can be sold using the prices on this table, and the points spent and distributed as the player chooses. Horses are a good thing to buy if you have low movement on any models!
DAEMON WEAPONS, CHAOS WEAPONS AND MAGIC ITEMS DAEMON WEAPONS Daemon wepons are a whole thing in this game. Its a weapon with a demon inside it. See StD page 95 for the full details. You need to see what daemon it has in it. This demon has stats. Also these very powerful effects also happen: 1. Dispels any aura (these are spells). 2. Each attack the daemon has gives the bearer +1 to hit in combat( a roll of a 1 to hit always fails) . 3. A wounding hit removes all remaining wounds on the target. 4. A slain target gets its soul sucked out. The bearer gains Strength equal to one third of the targets strenght, and -1 Armour save modier for each point of S gained in this way. 5. The bearer may use the daemon's Will Power stat. CHAOS WEAPONS Chaos weapons are magic swords basically. They usually have a single property and there are loads of different ones listed. There is a cool D1000 table on StD page 81. MAGIC ITEMS Characters can gain magic items. The rules for these are a bit scattered throughout the rule books unfortuntely. If unsure, use the ones from the chaos books, just pick something suitable from the few listed. Khorne and Slaanesh are on StD page 100, Nurgle LatD page 27, Tzeech LatD page42. There is a random magic item table on LatD page 287. Rules for rings and scrolls are in the main WfB 3rd ed pages 184 and 185. The other items listed on the right of the chart (49 to 00) are from Warhammer Armies, pages 13 to 16.
MAKE YOUR MODELS Thats that, now you have your crazy warband! Get it made.
PLAYING GAMES Realm of Chaos is nuts. Its crazy. Some players will have more powerful warbands than others. So it is important to try to balance the games manually. Maybe you have 12 T5 beastmen, and your opponent is only fielding 3 goblins woth the "Shrink" mutation? We all need to be adult about this as its inherently dumb and unbalanced from the get-go! LatD has a really fun set of scenario geneators. Full game scenarios can be rolled on the Detailed Narrative Table, and then there are much looser tables for generating ideas to game with. See page 61 of LatD. Also there is a transcript of parts of the planned but never released third realm of chaos book. This mostly has rules for wierd terrain stuff in it, so worth checking out at this juncture.
VICTORY POINTS TABLE Scenario objectives can award points, but there is also a chart on pg 281 LatD. For this campaign we are IGNORING that table and REPLACING it with the one below. Champion survived the game and won......5 Champion survived the game and lost.......3 Champion caused a wound.....2 per wound Champion slew another champion.....4 Champion spent a whole turn consecrating themselves to their patron........1
POST BATTLE SEQUENCE Roll recovery for any models removed from the game. Pg 292 LatD. Dead champions can become Undead Champions! Pg 159 LatD Level up if your champion has 10 or more Victory Points. JOURNALING The rules as written do insist that you write a journal entry after every game. Vibes! This game was cool.
LEVELLING UP Champions accrue Victory Points during games. When you get 10 points, do these things: 1. Roll on the Chaos Rewards Table. Apply the results. Note down if you gained +1 Chaos Gift or +1 Chaos Attribute, and keep a running total. Pg 285 LatD. 2. Pick an individual follower and roll for them on the followers reward table, pg 286 LatD. Apply the results. 3. Roll on the Retinue Table (or universal creatures table!) to gain new followers. Pg 290 LatD.
SPECIAL CAMPAIGN RULES The GM should make sure that warbands are sort of fair to start out. I will be awarding a fear causing creature to each warband that does not already have something. This will be either a Troll, Minotaur, Ogre or Manticore. Having nothing that can deal with fear in your warnband is a big disadvantage, and some of the warbands are quite scary! NO STUPIDITY Due to the insane power of the warp, creatures with the Stupidity rule are controlled and driven on by the will of their dark masters. Ignore Stupidity during this campaign.