"Allies in 5th edition?" Topic

Recently I have started work on a couple "Retrohammer" armies. I am collecting Dwarfs and Dark Elves from Black Tree Design. The sculpts of their minis are from roughly the same time as the 4th and 5th editions of Warhammer. So the minis look very similar in design to the minis in the army books of the day.

For the most part I understand that when spending up to 25% of your points on allies you can pretty much select what you want from the listed armies. Your not required to have a general, your not required to field certain percentage of regiments, etc. But when I select Undead allies for my Dark Elves, do I need to field a general from the Undead list in the allies portion?

I cannot find a rule on this anywhere saying that you need to have one. But the Undead army pretty much falls apart once the general is removed. Does the Dark Elf general stand in for these Undead special rules? I can see the issue going either way.

A) The Undead allies are just treated as any other allies, so they don't require a special general. But if the Dark Elf general is killed they suffer the Undead special rules related to the general's death.
B) The Undead allies require a allied general from the Undead book to act as "animator". The only special general rules this model would provide would be for the Undead allies portion of the force, other wise the model is just treated as a hero, just as any other allied character is.

I am leaning towards "A", because I can't find anything to contradict the rules as written. But any help from people that play or played 4th/5th edition would be most welcome.

I can't recall how allies were supposed to work.
I do recall thinking they could totally break balance.

I'd definitely go with B – an elven general simply couldn't keep them, err, motivated, they need an undead animator. (That said, I agree that allies were *not* good in general – they allowed too many odd and unbalancing combinations….)

A footnote in Warhammer history, in 1st edition Dark Elf magicians were Necromancers. This gave them access to both battle magic as well as necromancy. So there is precedent for Dark Elves commanding Undead. But of course 1st and 5th are very different games, hence my question.

I first started playing under 4th edition and there was no mention of anything like that – no way I'm wading through old White Dwarfs to find it, but I'm sure it was FAQed somewhere along the lines.

After some hunting and searching I found out there is an article in either WD207 or 208, not sure which. The article, Forging Alliances, is about using allies in 5th edition.
If anyone has this issue and can access it, could you please let me know if this is addressed in this article. I am willing to track down and buy a copy, but I can't really afford to buy it blindly hoping for an answer.

Just dug it out – 207, and no help – it's a "fluff" piece about putting plausible alliances together, which even comments on how broken and abused the allies rules were….

Thanks for checking that for me.

A little off topic, but this reminds me of my attemt at building a 'Chaos Grey-Knights' force for 40K…not 'allies', but some people have no sense of humour… mostly power-gaming Grey-Knights players…

But yes, there really ought to be some decent explantion for 'allies' in WFB (and 40K)… With Dark-Elves, I think the Necromancer idea works well.