Like Zhargon the Great, I have spent what seems like years sequestered in my inner sanctum, labouring with every spare hour on my life's work. The Book of Hashut? Maybe the Second Book of Hashut would be a good subtitle for it...

As advertised in the old thread, a new edition means a new version of my book, and so going into this renewed project, I had a few objectives in mind:

• To create a usable version of my Chaos Dwarf army list in 8th Edition. Originally, I simply assumed I would compile a list of problems and incorporate changes in the original text, but it quickly became apparent that I wanted to do a lot more than this - 8th Edition is packed with new ideas, and almost every unit cried out to be changed in some subtle way. I knew I would have to virtually start from scratch with the rules.
  
• To create a modern Armies book. I regard my original book as a good first attempt for an amateur. I think it looks pretty good, and most people seemed impressed by how much like a real Armies book it looked. But this wasn't enough for me. I wanted it to be almost totally indistinguishable from something produced by the Games Workshop studio. The whole book would need reformatting to match the most recent Armies books.
  
• To eliminate as much licensed content as possible. CDO is packed with original artwork and models - there is no good reason except availability to use anything drawn or painted by GW in a fan-created list. We have reached the point in this community where the quality and quantity of fan content is enough to fill an entire Armies book. This new version would be a love-letter to CDO; a showcase of the work of others alongside my own.
  

With all these objectives swimming in my head, I knew that I had to go back to the drawing board. Much of the raw text could be reused, and I would of course use many of the same pieces of artwork and miniature photos for the colour section, but I essentially had to start a brand new document and treat nothing as sacred.

This is what I have created:


I hope it goes without saying that this has been a labour of love. When I get involved in a project like this it can become something of an obsession - particularly if it seems like it may be one I can actually finish! So, while I welcome criticism and people pointing out blatant mistakes and typos, I would rather we didn't get any questioning of some of the very basic assumptions that this book makes. There really is not much point in objecting to everyone getting Chaos armour, or customisable Daemonic Engines or the fact that I don't go into detail about exactly what Hashut is (because guess what: it doesn't actually matter). It should be clear from the unusually complete nature of this document that certain decisions were taken long ago, and they ain't changing now. I'm not above making alterations, but let's keep it to minor tweaks, okay? If there's some fundamental stuff you dislike, it's possible this just isn't the book for you.

There will be a downloadable PDF forthcoming, by the way.

Thanks for reading!