Tuesday, May 21, 2019

Daemons of the Ruinstorm, First Impressions

Daemons of the Ruinstorm is a new army that has been introduced to Warhammer 30,000 with the release of the 8th rulebook: Malevolence.

In a nut-shell then, this is codex: chaos daemons for 30k. Interestingly, it has always been the case that certain armies could take daemons as allies (i.e. Word Bearers). But now, 30k players have a formal army list for chaos daemons, and the traitors have a new list to use as allies. This is, of course, a very welcome development!

As a daemons player myself for a long time in 40k, this new list does appeal. Heck, I was playing daemons before they were cool or powerful, hence this new army list is something that I do want to tinker about with and consider how to optimise, and play flavourful lists out of.

What is most striking about the new daemons is the sheer amount of customisation that the controlling player can exert over the individual units. This is in huge contrast to the 40k army. Ten thousand years ago, the daemons were a bit more mysterious. Warp space aliens to some. Corruptors to others. They really were not as widely known about. The upshot of all this is that the army lets the controlling player use almost anything from their collection that they like. Great Unclean One? Obviously it's in. Be'Lakor? Yes, sure. How about a Dragon Ogre? Why not! If you have the miniatures, you can literally tailor the rules to suit whatever unit you like. It reminds me of tyranids codexes of years gone by.

I will go through their basic rules in another post, but for now, I'd like to state that I'm pleased to see how they play in a generic sense. It brings back memories of older days when they deep-strike on to the battlefield, and sometimes they are stronger (at the beginning of the game in this case) and weaker (later in the game), coupled with a specific type of Perils for falling back. All this is very good and characterful.

More than this, the army can also be dedicated to the four main powers we all know and love (although not named directly as such, oddly -- Aetheric Dominion is the new name), Chaos Undivided (known as Resplendent Terror), and Malal (ahem: Mirror of Hate). The latter is particularly welcome by the old-timer in me and nicely gets around the copyright issues that have prevented Malal from ever being named since the very earliest of days.

As a final passing thought before I conduct some more in-depth reviews on this army, I really do want to (one day) see playable lists for Xenos who were around in the time of the 30k story line. I think specifically here of Eldar and Orks. However, I wonder if something could be created around a "generic" Xenos army list perhaps.

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