by Patrick Nevan and the Craichouse Patreons

That’s it? That’s the chant against evil from the “Book of Souls”¹

List Articles or Listicles. Best friend to the lazy content creator or overworked piece of AI writing software. Can’t think of anything decent to write about? Think of a goofy question, assign some wholly subjective basis to ranking the answers and congratulations, you’ve just flicked another bread crumb into the Black Hole of content creation. Yes indeed, the Listicle has well and truly earned its place in any fair-minded assessment of the “Top 7 Article Ideas for Piss Poor Blog Writers.” 

A while back the Craichouse writing staff refined this wonderfully lazy process by asking the Patreons in our discord for their answers to What is the Worst Artefact in Age of Sigmar? and I wound up writing up the results in an article which was well received² by the dozen or so people who read it.

So what the hell, if it sort of worked ok once you’d be a fool not to do it again, so here we go with the Worst Warscroll abilities in Age of Sigmar as suggested by the Craichouse Patreons and compiled by me, your humble scribe. Let me tell you of the days of high adventure….

Before getting stuck into the article I should acknowledge the good work done by the AOS rules writing team. They really have cleaned up a lot of the more spectacularly useless abilities and warscroll bloat in the transition to 3^rd edition battletomes so credit where it is due. Most of the classics like the Gnoblars’ Trappers got disappeared or turned into something useful, e.g.:

Something very useful for my baby boys, thanks again GW

Excerpts from Wahapedia, bless them

Terrible warscroll abilities tended to attract a lot more partisan rancor than terrible artefacts. While everyone can agree that the Tzeentch Blade of Fate is a waste of the energy expended through the neurons required to process it, most people were convinced that their faction’s shit abilities were worse than anyone else’s. I suspect it’s because warscrolls may be more important to the factions than artefacts. A dud artefact, you take another one. A dud warscroll and an otherwise cool unit sits on the shelf for eternity. People take that shit personally. With that in mind I came up with some arbitrary rules for the contest. 

The Ground Rules

Useless in Context: One man’s trash is another man’s treasure but a crap warscroll ability has to be useless in the context of the army it rolls out in and the unit it is on. As an example. 

Run and charge you say? Pretty good at face value but the cheapest Thundertusk comes in at 260 points, is one of the most useless units in Age of Sigmar and the only reason you take Yhetees is to use their six inch pile in ability anyway. It’s not completely worthless³ but in the context of the army it’s a stinker.

Difficult to Use: All of the truly crap abilities come with some ridiculous caveat that makes them problematic to employ. Either they are hard to activate or have ridiculous requirements. The Swampcalla Shaman has a prime example:

At the start of your hero phase, if this unit is out of combat it can target a unit wholly within 12 inches that is also out of combat but has a model within 3 inches. It’s pretty much the gold standard of unnecessary complication. That said, despite what some of the Destro whiners in the Craichouse think the ability itself is awesome.

Utterly Infuriating: As noted above the truly useless ability triggers a burning anger far in excess of the bad artefact. The worst ability needs to have that “It” factor. “It” being an aneurism bought on by a fit of apoplectic rage. The Eightfold Doom Sigil endless spell is a prime example of this.

So just to be clear once it’s out you have to keep track of the models killed within 12 inches of it, the active player rolls a dice and gives plus one attack to each unit (but not the mounts in a famously mounted army); but if that player takes the next turn the whole thing is erased without ever taking effect, rendering the whole exercise utterly futile unless there was a pre-existing applied at the end of the previous active players turn and you need to keep track of all of it.

“WHAT THE FUCK? DO I NOT HAVE ENOUGH TO DO IN THIS STUPID FUCKING GAME WITHOUT THIS NONSENSE? WHO WRITES THIS SHIT? EVERY OTHER ARMY GETS SOMETHING SIMPLE AND I HAVE TO PUT UP WITH THIS CRAP?”

Like all great art the truly bad ability transcends conscious reason and reaches something deep inside on a sublime level.

Disqualifications

There were a bunch of meritorious suggestions coming from Underworlds warbands bought into AOS as units. I ruled them out because, honestly, who gives a fuck about Underworlds? They get even less development than regular units and they are mostly out of production.

I also could have filled the list with worthy entries from Slaves to Darkness and Ogor Mawtribes. Both armies seem incapable of attracting more than 50% of the effort required for a half decent battletome and wound up with a lot of garbage abilities. I stuck to one from each but I could have gone 3 out of 4 Daemon Prince command abilities.

Third Place – The Gladiator’s Net – Centaurion Marshall

What a peach of an ability: this one is a masterpiece plucked from fairly stiff competition in the STD book. I like this one for the emotional roller coaster ride it sends the long-suffering Slaves players on. 

1. Ok the warscroll for the sweet new Centaurian dude is up, lets have a look. 

2. Ooh makes things fight last, sweet as bro. 

3. Oh crap, you need a 6 plus to make it work, what the fuck? 

4. And it won’t work on Monsters or units that have five or more models 

5. What a crock of shit a goddam Gloomspite netter slaps a debuff on Archaon but this schmuck gets the game balance. 

6. Wait a second, it goes off on a six plus, are there any modifiers? 

7. No. 

8. Then why does it say six plus? SON OF A BITCH! 

I give this one a bonus for coming with a cool model that people would love to put on the table as well, but in fairness the entire warscroll for this guy is a solid contender for worst in the game. 10 wounds to keep him out of Look Out Sir buffs, abilities that only work on unmarked units and garbage in combat. Giving him another bad ability is really sort of unpolishing a turd. 

2nd Place – Swampboss Skumdrekk – Bet Master

This particular gem was a popular choice from the Craicheads. To me the complaints of Orruk Warclans players are similar to traffic noise when you live near a busy road⁴ but this ability is a masterpiece of poor design. 

To start with the requirements are onerous. You have to take at least one 80 point unit of Hobgrots to even have a chance of using this thing. Then you have to nominate one of your own units to be the first to die, then get it killed off. So for a realistic chance to make this ability work you need to go low or one drop, take the first turn in every battle round and have a unit you are committed to destroying. Now you’re not the SBGL so no Fell Bats, realistically the best chance to make this work is a unit of goofy Snarlfang Riders at another 120 points. 

So you take your one drop and your 200 points put it all together and you get a triumph, good for you. Except a triumph is basically useless on a unit of Hobgrots unless you have some dastardly scheme that involves them rerolling charges so it’s going on Skumdrekk. You have to declare it first so the only one you are realisticly taking is Inspired for the plus one to wound. 

After spending your 200 points and altering your entire battleplan to use the ability you get plus one to wound on a unit that you are running to hopefully spike on mortals anyway. I’m honestly curious if anyone has ever pursued this as a strategy? 

Other than having one extra wound, this is also the only ability that distinguishes Skumdrekk at 280 points from the objectively better generic version at 290 points. Someone at GW design was instructed to come up with an ability to distinguish a unique hero from the regular guy and this is what they came up with. The best part is that the narrative behind this one is solid. A bunch of jerk offs gloating over the death and defeat of their colleagues is a very Kruleboy thing to do⁵ but the execution is just terrible.  

The only saving grace for this one is that someday a triumph good enough to go through all this crap for will make its way into the game and Skumdrekk will have his hour. 

1st Place – Maneaters – A Barrel of Meat and the Job’s Done

Ok so full disclosure this one is a bit personal as I’m an Ogor Mawtribes player. Ogors in general are a labor of love but the Gutbuster variety I favor is a labor of the sort of toxic destructive love that used to define people’s coming of age back when they made decent teen romances.⁶ The hard white bit in the middle of the boil of all that toxicity is the love Ogor players feel for Maneaters.  When you kick a Maneater you are putting the boot into us as well.

I don’t care if you’re in finecast I’ll never quit on you

So what do we actually have with this one? On the face of it a command ability to make models count as three on objectives doesn’t seem like a bad idea. Sure it has a few caveats. 

1. It has to be used at the start of your hero phase instead of say, in the battleshock phase when objectives are contested which would make more sense. 

2. It can only be used for that turn so it’s no good for keeping objectives off your opponent across turns. 

3. Only the general can issue it, or technically Kragnos I suppose. Thematic but annoying. 

Still not a bad deal, counting as three models on objectives except for a few small contextual details. 

1. All Ogors, thanks to Might Makes Right count as two models on objectives so going up to three isn’t setting the world on fire. 

2. Maneaters come in a unit size of three so you are going to be looking at a couple of extra bodies on an objective, unless you go all out on Maneater battle line in which cast you get an extra nine for 450 points. 

3. Taking objectives is one of the very few things Ogors don’t need a whole lot of help with. This one is like an Elf getting an ability that lets them stand around like a supercillous jerk. 

It’s garbage. The real kick in the dick with this one is the opportunity cost. Someone at GW said “Hey people love Maneaters, lets tidy up the warscroll and give ’em an ability to represent their mercenary status”. Then that someone probably received word that their employment contract wasn’t being renewed so this is what they came up with as a act of spite.  If this ability was any good you’d see Maneaters in every Ogor list.

Here’s a few possible improvements or alternatives off the top of my head:

1. Command is issued in any battleshock phase so you can use it when the chips are down. 

2. Command is once a game, hero phase to hero phase, but they count as five each.  

3. Command to let you use a different specialist ability on their warscroll.

4. Command to give them an enhanced rally, ie they get back on their feet for more money. 

It’s just so annoying how little went into this ability, but the sublime twist that makes this one so enraging for the Ogor player is that the fruit of lazy game design never falls at our feet. A Slann rolls out of the box able to pump an unlimited number of spells through an Oracle, fine. SBGL summonable units can spawn 3 inches away from the enemy, fantastic. Oh hey, this Underworlds dope make hordes of returnable squigs fight on death, nice work. The Ogor book is as poorly playtested and lazily written as anything and all we got was 170pt Ironblasters for a month. Thanks a bunch you miserable Chud’s. 

And that journey from “this kind of sucks” to “I will burn down GW headquarters” is what makes “A Barrel of Meat and the Job’s Done” the worst ability in the game. Don’t agree? Write your own fucking article, I’m off to Bunnings⁷ to buy some Kerosene.

Note: Editor Pete whose job it is to worry about dumb shit thinks that someone might construe this as an actual threat to burn down Games Workshop. Just to be clear it isn’t an actual threat I’m engaging in exaggerated ranting for comedic purposes. If you don’t think its funny, fine. If you think it’s a serious threat or incitement to whatever look up Hyperbole, it’s in the dictionary somewhere between For Fucks Sake and Pull your Head out of your Ass.

1. From the amazing move Bubba Ho-Tep, if you haven’t seen it do yourself a favor. ↩︎
2. Everything is well received if you only ever listen to positive feedback. ↩︎
3. I know Thundertusk Generals unlock Yhetee battleline and you can charge if someone redeploys out of your 6″ ” pile in, but whatever. ↩︎
4. The noise becomes a constant presence in your life and you only really notice when there’s a major incident. Like when the Destro boys read the Big Pig warscroll. ↩︎
5. Also a very Measured Gaming Club thing to do. Shout out to my brothers, best of luck in all your games. ↩︎
6. I do highly recommend The Spectacular Now if you’re in the mood for smoothing more recent. ↩︎
7. For Non-Australians substitute the big box hardware chain of your choice. ↩︎

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