“Get Used to Disappointment”

~ The Man in Black, the Princess Bride

by Pat Nevan

TLDR: It Still Sucks Donkey Balls

AOS 3 is well and truly into its Lame Duck era and heading towards the the shores of 4th edition in much the same manor as the crewless, rudderless ships that bring Dracula to a new country after he has slaughtered everybody aboard.¹ Here at the Craichouse we have taken our foot off the pedal while GW continues its Soft Dom JOE slow build approach to the eventual 4th Ed release.² The Craichouse Patreons seem happy enough to contribute to our ongoing existence as sterling examples of gentlemanly poise and conduct that the entire community can benefit from. Still, it doesn’t hurt to produce the occasional article for the look of the thing.

Last week my fellow writers turned out a few heartfelt articles on the recent model purge by GW and with the coppery stench of fresh blood hanging heavy in the air, my thoughts naturally turned towards my beloved Khorne.

It’s been about a year since my first ever article for the Craichouse, a review of the new Khorne battletome, so I figured I’d do a bit of a retrospective on the book and the state of my beloved faction. It’s not a particularly urgent bit of business but it’s something close to my heart. We lost Scylla and Valkia in the purge but Games Workshop kindly cushioned the blow by never giving either model a playable set of rules at any point in Age of Sigmar, so I really don’t have any fond memories of them. Thanks for writing such shit warscrolls I guess?

“Goodbye, Goodbye you were bigger than the whole ….. eh. tbh I think I used you in a practice game once. I’m thinking STD Daemon Prince proxy, it’s still a cool model, whatever.”

image credit Games Workshop

Looking Back

For anyone who quite sensibly can’t be bothered reading the Old Review, the gist of it was that while it represented an all around glow-up from the previous garbage Battletomes, it was horribly lacking in what I would come to describe as Verisimilitude.³ Meaning being true to its source material. The new Khorne Battletome, with its focus on board control, out of phase movement. and attrition over melee output was a long way from where the followers of the Blood God should be. Extra complaints about the paucity of the Mortal side, the lack of character, variety, monstrous rampages or heroic actions or pretty much anything to put it in the top ten of combat armies abounded.

A year later I can comfortably state I was correct about all my initial criticisms of the book. Correct and then some, but more on that later. What I was straight up, flat out wrong about was the success level of the book. I figured it would do ok but from its inception to the present day, Mighty Khorne has had its best run ever at the top of the meta, defying Battlescroll nerfs and GHB changes to be one of the consistently top-performing books.

What can I say? When you’re wrong, you’re wrong

Happily for me I have the sort of friends and acquaintance that point out my errors with the same sort of frequency and wild sense of joy as masturbating Rhesus Monkeys.⁴ It just never gets old for them and I get to hear a bunch of ill-informed yahoos screeching at me about how wrong I was every time Khorne does something good.

Well it’s the end of the edition and I’m all out of fucks to give, so I’ll type this sentence out in Big Bold Letters in the hope that it sinks in:

Past a certain point of basic competence, the overall quality of a Book has nothing to do with how well it performs in the game.

Seriously, the rules are completely arbitrary. If “Wins Games” is your standard of what defines a good book, Games Workshop could release a Battletome with a single model that automatically destroyed every opposing model at deployment, and it would be the best Battletome ever written. A Battletome that is too feeble to win a game is no use to anybody, and what makes a book good is open to debate and a good subject for another article – but it isn’t win rate.

Take the KO as an example of an equally strong but far superior book. In terms of Verisimilitude they work exactly as advertised. A gang of fruity-looking steampunk cosplayers drop out of the sky and start blasting away in true Danny Devito meme fashion. You might hate to play against them, but they’re an alpha shooting army, and it’s Danny that is supposed to be enjoying himself.

Found this meme looking for the other one, winning!

In terms of game design the book is much-improved, giving them distinct roles for the different boats and the legitimate melee option they’ve been craving since launch. Was it perfect? No. The pricing was demented on release and the battle tactics are set at a sub-Rhesus Monkey level, but the KO player base seem to love the book and you do see a fair amount of variety in their lists in the two turns before they blow you off the table.

What does Khorne look like 12 months on?

Your basic competitive Khorne list? Tarpit, Tarpit, Whipthirster, Priest, Priest, maybe a Skarbrand, maybe another Tarpit. Possible Bloodsecrator. Maybe a unit of those Unmade to help pin people. Maybe a B’e’l’a’k’o’r to help with board control. Couple of units of Bloodreavers. That’s about 90% of competitive Khorne lists right there. Most of the tarpits are 20-man units of Bloodletters, but you get the odd unit of Mighty Skullcrushers or Bloodcrushers from the free thinkers, and that’s pretty much it.

As for tactics? A solid percentage of Khorne players seem to do the “Make the Whipthirster a Priest, move him into range, prayer-yank something forward and try to gank it”. Other than that, tactics consist of getting your forward elements into combat, locking your opponent down and denying their battle tactics with 1-point Blood Tithe moves and fighting in the hero phase. Move the Whipthirster up behind the tarpit blobs to make them harder to kill with the debuff aura. Rinse and Repeat while saving up to summon on 20 Bloodletters, and only ever 20 Bloodletters, nothing else is points efficient.

Yes, I know not everyone does it that way and a few people off in the wilds of America won events with Mortals and the Skullfiend Tribe at CousinCon 23 or whatever. Apparently it was enough to get a points rise on Skullreapers, don’t ask he how. Still, I can almost guarantee that whatever they took, they wound up falling back on the exact same “Lock down and deny” braindead board control, because that’s what the book of the Rage Murder God is designed to do. Lock it down and grind it out. The KO have more tactical variety when they decide between shooting it off from a distance or shooting it off then charging it.

That to me is the unforgiveable sin of the accursed Battletome. They made Khorne an exercise in paint by numbers tedium, attractive to the sort of gamers who would normally be happier talking to themselves through half an hour of Seraphon hero phase. Even when the old books were at their weakest and we were reduced to praying for unmodified sixes on Boomthirsters, or scouring our allied options in the hopes of finding something that might win a game, it was a gambler’s army. I may be romanticizing the good old days but on the Mortal side in particular, there was an artistry in striving to get it all to work. Outside of the odd broken Murderhost/Boomthirster excess period, Khorne was one of the rare AOS armies, like Ogors, that was typically fun to play with or against. People were glad to be matched up with you at a tournament. Now people draw a Khorne match up, roll their eyes, mutter something about “Fucking Whipthirsters” and prepare for a shit time.⁵

Khorne went from an army for white knuckle gamblers and artists to an army you reserve for the dullest player in your AOS Worlds team, and it’s all thanks to one wretched Battletome. A year later and I still can’t wrap my around exactly what the fuck the devs were thinking when they wrote this book. It’s not bad per se. It would be a great set of rules for something like the OBR. The tedious, unimaginative nature of the gameplay and the complete lack of character or individuality in the book suits a race of mechanistic constructs to the ground.

Don’t believe me? Have a quick read of the Khul short story from Dawnbringers. Khul and the gang stumble across a battle and slaughter everyone in classic hammer porn fashion, getting a bunch of blessings as they go. There’s nothing that resembles that in the gameplay produced by this book. Was that so hard to replicate with rules? Ironjawz, FEC, DOK, were they just sick of writing combat armies?

A reasoned rebuttal to criticism of my article

Naturally not everyone is going to agree with my view of the Khorne book. Some people think it’s well written. Some people are proud of what they have accomplished with it. Good for them. The five or so people who have made it this far into the article might think there is a strong element of sour grapes in all this whining. “Have a listen to this guy whinge because they took his toys away and won’t do things the way he likes. Go touch some grass you greasy neckbeard!” Well, in my defense, those fuckers took away my favorite toys and they aren’t doing things the way I like. Of course I’m pissed about it.

Classic Homer

I don’t typically engage with a lot of online criticism but I’ve been having these arguments on repeat for the last year and so I may as well address a few of the common points that get made in defense of the Khorne book in classic, unanswerable Straw Man fashion.

Yes, But…

Rebuttal of the many criticisms of the Khorne books tend to fall into the “Yes, but…” format which evades giving an answer to most of my criticisms.

Yes its stupid that the army is outside the top ten for combat damage, but …

Yes any Mortal hero that isn’t a Priest is a waste of ink, but …

Yes there should be heroic actions, but …

Yes there should be monstrous rampages, but …

Yes it doesn’t really play like a Khorne army, but …

Yes it’s not really fun to play, but …

Typically the but tends to be “but it wins games”, which is fine. As I pointed out, winning games isn’t my metric of a book’s quality or fundamental success, and I will add that Lord Kroak wins a lot of games. Make of that what you will. The other but is, :but the models are still so cool”, and this one really is fair enough. The Khorne pages are still full of people having an absolute blast painting and converting their awesome toys and good luck to them. The aesthetic still rules.

Yeah Boy!

image credit Games Workshop

The other great response, possibly my favorite thing ever in the history of online discourse, goes a little something like this:

“Oh yeah, you don’t get it. It’s a tactical, thinking man’s army now. I suppose you just want to run up and hit things with an Axe.”

My response is threefold.

1: Yes I do want to run up and hit things with an axe. It’s what I bought a Khorne army for. They’re all about people with legs and axes. When I want to grind people into dust with board control and attrition I have a Nurgle army. Papa’s boys love that sort of thing.

2. Running across aboard and hitting people isn’t nearly as simple as people seem to think it is.

3. Success with the modern Khorne battletome does not make you a tactical genius. 80-90% of the gameplay styles people are using that I outlined above don’t need the Duke of Wellington⁶ to come back from the dead to execute them. Don’t get me wrong, Khorne isn’t old fashioned 80% win rate DOK. AOS is a well-balanced game at the moment, and you have to be on your toes for the 4-1’s and the 5-0’s, but it’s a Basic Bitch army to run and write lists for.⁷

In Conclusion

What can I say? Haters gonna hate, but the book actually turned out worse than I thought it would. On the bright side, like a lot of Khorne diehards I’m psyched that the 4th Ed hard reset is going to give us a chance at a do-over well ahead of a normal schedule. With a little bit of luck, the all-new all-different rules team will have worked on the new Khorne stuff and someone who has an idea of how the faction should work will be in charge.

I’m actually fairly optimistic. There is a little snippet in the article on how to build your army that mentions the Mighty Lord lets you take additional Khorne heroes with him. I’m pretty sure this means we will finally be able to field 8 Bloodbound heroes in a proper Gorechosen and have a reason to run a Mighty Lord after only 9 years. Has to be better than taking the Reality Splitting Axe off him like they did in the last Battletome.

Peter Atkinson writes…

Just want to give Pat one final kicking add to Pat’s thoughts about how embarrassingly wrong he got the Khorne book’s power level. Sorry, I mean how he was “right all along” about the rest of it. I will say fair play to him for owning the power level aspect, although it would be pretty hard to deny, and I can confirm we’ve reminded him of it at every opportunity.

Anyway. First thing I want to say is that I can’t really speak for the Khorne players out there, not least because I tend to look down my nose at them. They always strike me as teenage virgins trying to act hard by pretending to be devil worshippers. The kinds of people who got revenge on the world by drawing pictures of terrible things in their High School notebooks. Fuck knows what those kids do to express their rage now that they never learn how to use a pen – mostly through posting on Warhammer Facebook groups, as far as I can gather.

Secondly, and more importantly (if anything is truly more important that taking the piss out of your fellow gamers): theme matters. Long-term readers will know that we are quite sparing with our Battletome reviews here – we go to town on the armies we love, but we’re not in the business of pumping out “Thanks to GW for the free stuff” propaganda, or just regurgitating slightly-paraphrased rules for every book they dump into the world. As the team has grown, we do like a lot of armies between us these days, so a lot of books will get a fair crack of the whip; but this whole project is very much a labour of love. If you care about this shit way too much, you’re in good company here.

Where am I going with this? Well I think we need to have a think about how we score Battletomes in future. Of course we’ll keep sticking out our necks and making a call on where the new book sits in terms of power level; we’ll keep picking out specific combos; and we’ll keep grading new units on the Powerful vs Interesting matrix, all of which I think adds a lot of value. But I do think verisimilitude matters too, and it’s got to be worth at least a paragraph to address how the playstyle matches up to the theme of the army. It’s something I’d like to build into future reviews quite explicitly, because it matters.

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1. I think, I’m not looking up the actual book or anything. ↩︎
2. Lots of well meaning encouragement with occasional stern correction. When you reach a certain age, you’ll get it. ↩︎
3. I did lift the term from VInce Venturella, but who’s counting? ↩︎
4. A cage full of all-male, lab-raised Rhesus Monkeys who have never been in the presence of a female to be specific. ↩︎
5. Astute readers will note I mentioned I couldn’t care less about the KO NPE. That’s shooting; it’s meant to suck. An all-melee slugfest is meant to be fun. ↩︎
6. Pick your own favorite general if you like. ↩︎
7. Not that there’s anything wrong with taking strong lists to win games. Basic Bitchery is what makes the top-performing armies top performers ↩︎

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