"What is Chaotic About GW Chaos?" Topic

I was looking back through my older chaos warriors and beastmen. I mix newer models in with them, but realized how standardized they looked ranked up without the older characters. Did GW sculpt the chaos out of Chaos?

I agree. I really enjoyed the shear variety of chaos figures they produced in the 80's.

Yes!

(On both counts)

If you look at the Tzeentch Daemon stuff it is pretty chaotic. I just assembled a burning chariot yesterday.

I have some of the original beastmen and they I include a half man half wasp, one with two heads and a fella with a really long neck. I think I'm right in saying the current lot were originally based on Runequest Broo all a bit uniform…Then there's the whole, you can't have this or that in your chaos army oh but they can be mutants…

The newer/current models are more uniform and yes lack the character that earlier figures had. However, the current figure have gone the farthest to looking like the illustrations of the books. Its Chaos so it is a contradiction. I did give up on the army books after they split the force into Deamons only, Beastmen only and Mortal only. Yes, I know there are some Chaos Ogres and Dragon Ogres for the Mortal force but it not like the old days at all. At one time you could field a truly chaotic force of mortals, demons, beastmen, spawn, Chaos Goblins (remember those), Chaos Dwarves, Dark Elves, and chaos hounds.

Looks like Reaper or someone would collect on where GW is missing out. Maybe we are a minority I guess.

But EE definitely put the word "chaos" into there pricing. Sorry not worth playing nowadays, geez, it was so much more fun back in the 80s, and yes the plastics are great today but hey! who wants to play a skirmish game with 3 monsters and a couple of cruddy core units, that's no raving horde of chaos at all.

GW used Moorcock's symbolism. THAT is what makes it Chaos

Its "Chaos" because using EVIL as a marketing term would be a bad thing You can substitute the word dark as in Eldar for the same result

Using a variety of miniatures from different companies keeps a good bit of energy in the lineup. That's one of the fun things about building a Chaos army… just about anything can find a place in it.

You have to convert one Beastman with an Umbrella. You have to. Trying to find the box with those oldies.

That is chaos. I think of it as wired tentacles and horns with the off the wall item. has to be super crazy.

They are a dark, commercial parody of Moorcock's imagination?

Early editions of Runequest, which GW used to publish in Europe under license, had a chaos mutations table for Broo and other things. The early Realms of Chaos books also had chaos mutations tables, and they looked suspiciously like the ones from RQ.

There is really no more fluff in 40K.

No more Goffs, or Blood Axes or Bad Moons or Snakebites, nope today it is just Orks.

It is the same for Chaos.

The chaos warriors themselves are what bother me so much, so uniform and… Orderly looking, a horn or two doesn't make them "chaotic"

They used to have extra arms and or tentacles too.

Unfortunately if it was truely chaotic then it wouldn't seem as threatening as much as 'random'. GW has had to rationalise them as time has gone on.

I see the same thing with Lovecraft stories. When Lovecraft himself wrote them, everything was delightfully vague. It was when the creatures started getting covered by other people, and moved more into the mainstream, that things got more prescriptive and, imho, less interesting.

Leigh

Well you could always do forsaken as core which are truly mutated warriors. It's still possible. The theme now seems to be more worshipers of chaos with the select few actually being 'gifted' such as forsaken, daemon princes, spawn, sorcerers etc.

A

The other issue is one of being able to actually rank them up on the table. Too much wild uniqueness tends to blow out those 25mm bases pretty quickly, especially as the models have gotten larger and larger over the years. The current rand and file Chaos Warriors are so calm and uniform because that's the only way they rank up consistently.