CDO Forums

Project Name: Warhammer Armies: Chaos Dwarfs
Project Leaders: Minty, The Flying Beaver, Crimson Prophet, Uzkul Werit
Project Goal: The aim of this project is to create a NEW list, fair and balanced, but also a fun to use army list that the whole forum worked on

This project will require the following: Rules development, Background writing, artwork, and playtesting. These will be divided into departments each with their own head responsible for maintaining progress. (I will be taking the rules development, but the other three departments will need volunteers. Interested?) Obviously, anyone can be involved with as many departments as they wish.

Rules Development
Department Head: The Flying Beaver

This department is responsible for creating a balanced Chaos Dwarf army list that is agreeable to the majority of players. The head's responsibility is to start discussions by proposing his/her own rules and allowing others to criticize them and add to, integrate with or replace them with their own ideas.

Background Writing
Department Head: Crimson Prophet

This department is responsible for developing an interesting and complete background of the Chaos Dwarfs as a race, and also the various units in the army. Individual fluff pieces can also add to the races character. The head's responsibility is to ensure that all units created by Rules Development have an accompanying fluff description if it does not already. He/she must allocate tasks among volunteers and ensure that this is done in a timely fashion.

Artwork
Department Head: Available

This department, obviously, is responsible for creating artwork to accompany the fluff and rules. An army book cover is mandatory. A balance between old style hats and the newer daemonic/mask style must be met in the art as to satisfy as many people as possible.

Playtesting
Department Head: Uzkul Werit

This department is for ensuring that rules made by Rules Development are balanced and fun to play with. The head's job is to play as many games as he/she can with trial rules, gathering opinions from his/her opponents, and also encouraging other members to do the same.

I volunteer to add fluff to Background Writing.

Cheers.

Oh, I'll do some playtesting. Sounds fairly easy.

Id be willing to work on some fluff, dont know exactly how much, but i definitley contribute!

I could work on some fluff or artwork, I already have some cd sketches with hats/masks

Care to share them Gilgaramesh?

Just a question. Are you going to try and balance the already existing list, or do that and add new units? IMO you shouldn´t add too many new units (Hellcannon, Immortals and maybe 2 more would be more then enough in my eyes).

Edited for you

Quickly mention as well that you only want 'project members' to be allowed votes on certain issues (like the armylist content).  So make this 100% clear who is a project member so you know how to decide things without polls.

Polls may be good for getting the overall picture of CDO, but I'm sure a few who vote won't be discussing why they think this way, or presenting 'complete' alternative solutions.  So its best to decide things without open polls IMO.

That was what I found on my project group.  People were happy to say 'NO', but were not willing to put forward viable alternatives.  At the end of the day you are interested in solutions, not problems.

On a side note, from my experience you should be deciding the fluff for the army first.  This drives the armylist content, the nature of gameplay, and ultimately the rules.

So a few things to get you started:

Why do they go to war? (the most important issue IMO)
How do they fight (defensive/ offensive/ shooty/ elite/ capable of anything etc)?
Overall themes (highly industrial? slaves? Eastern/ babylonian?)?
Built in weakness(s)?  Have to have something.
Access to mercenaries (greenskins, multiple slave options, or nothing)?
If hobgoblins are in the list (you need to think long on this one), are they slaves or mercenaries?

I have pm minty I think it was to say that I will do a front cover ONLY.  No concept art.  I left instructions with him.

you make some good points grimstonefire

as far as hobgoblins are concerned they are slaves, but are an upper class of slaves, being used more like mercenaries than your general pit mining slaves.

the egyptians used a lot of black african slaves this way, treating them rather well, feeding, giving them rights etc, and in return they fought of their own (sort of) free will. that is how i see hobgoblins.

we also know chaos dwarfs, unless marching for chaos, go to war to capture slaves. they dont go to war for moral issues. because they are their for capturing they have to be pretty offensive, although that is just my opinion as i dont really know how an army captures slaves.

i can say for sure that although they have an assyrian/persian/babylonian look to them, army composition wise chaos dwarfs are nothing like them. those middle eastern states relied on chariot and horse archery, as well as slingers and other lighter infantry, with the only heavy infantry being a hoplite type, of which their was a real regiment called the immortals.

Looking at the way I wrote it above it made it look like I was saying 'take a long time to think if they are slaves or mercenaries'.

I think this wasn't written clearly looking at it.  What I meant was that you all need to think long and hard on whether hobgoblins should be in the list at all.

If they are in the list, then look at whether they are slaves or mercenaries.

If you are really going for a NEW book, stick to the bare essentials on fluff and work your way up from there.  Virtually all the fluff and armylist can be built up from this, in the way you all decide.  That would be a very good starting point actually, as it gives you all a framework to work within.

IMO we shouldn't be constrained by what has come before, and should really try to come up with novel ideas (balanced of course ).

I'm willing to play test.

It looks really good

i dont get why, your making an ultimatly pointless book, why dont you try what i tried and failed, using all the same rules in the pdf but clarify them, for example we have enough unit selection why dont you just make the pdf spread out and get rid of all questions harboring chaos dwarf's,

for example we have loads of units:

lord's
Chaos Dwarf Lord
sorcerer Lord
Bull Centaur lord

Heroes
Chaos Dwarf hero
Sorcerer
Bull Centaur Hero
Hobgoblin Hero

Core
Chaos Dwarf Warriors
Blunderbusses
Hobgoblins
Hobgoblin Wolf Boys

Special
Bolt thrower
Death Rocket
Black Orcs
Orcs
Orc Archers
Goblins
Sneaky Gitz

Rare
Bull Centaurs
Earthshaker

and just add a few DOW to fatten it out

ogre's and lead belchers in rare for fluff's sake

keep the rules the same but make a nice fat book for the new players, in the end this will Benefit more people and ultimatly attract more players. right now we have more units than half of the armies that are currently out, lets keep it that way,

use diagrams from 4th edition book for example blunderbuss, and earth shaker etc, get the rules from 7th ed orc and goblin book and ogre kingdoms, use the fluff that has been created by you guys, have a 10 page masterclass and show the best on this site and a guide to convert bfsp, no point making a half assed book, lets go for it and make hashut proud by sticking to the rules.
i would help for that book because everyone will be able to use it and ultimatly gain more players and if it sticks to the pdf there would be a chance this may be picked up by gw, trust me.

and to keep everyone happy dedicate a few pages at a back for custom units such as hell cannon immortals etc and maybe chaos dwarf magic but only apon opponents agreement

Hobgoblins most certainly rise to such power...
Just not within Chaos Dwarf armies.

But.. Mogglah Khan is just a random rebel from the Hobgoblin hordes and he is a Hobgoblin Lord. The actual Hobgobala Khan and his generals are certain to be even stronger.

Vaguely off topic, but it would be nice at some point for us to collate together all the 'completed' fanlists in once place that we can find.  Asking permission of course, or providing links to where they are if the people have long since gone.

We could load them up somewhere here I'm sure.

From my own experience of working on CD fanlists, some good advice:

First and foremost decide whether this will simply be a faithful update of the RH list, OR something completely new.  We all have our opinions, but I firmly believe the two will never meet again (old and new), RH is a thing of the past.  So establish this first, and make it clear to everyone.  It will determine a lot of things later on.

Second (as Willmark said) you need to be VERY motivated to get things done.  Unless you can collaborate with people who've already done a lot of work you will be looking at 6-8 months of work minimum.  Being motivated isn't enough in itself though, you need to listen to the advice of others, but be able to push through decisions when people don't agree.

Thirdly do things in this order; Fluff first, then rules, then conversions/ concept art.  Sort out the fundamental fluff questions behind your list first (e.g. 'why do the CD go to war, what do they need to help them in this?', 'how does the whole DZ society function?', 'what are the overall story arcs driving them forwards as a race (past, present and future)?).  

Be prepared to scrap or add units after playtesting, but make sure you keep to your fluff foundations all the time.  It will make a stronger list at the end.  Give everything a purpose for being in the list fluffwise, not just because you happen to need it (probably excluding the core units), it adds a huge amount of character.

Fourthly decide on the provisional list of entries in your fan list before asking people to help complete it.  Trying to get a consensus on which unit entries to include will kill the project from the start.  Do just enough rules to be able get advice on whether the list of entries is balanced in principle before doing any serious work.

Fifth keep up the pace on making decisions.  If your project takes longer than 8 months it will most likely never be finished (with group help anyway).

I could do loads more pointers, but those are the main ones.

Sounds a great idea to do in this manner and although i am not able to devote much time i can playtest with mates and give feedback .My hobby time windows have to be devoted to painting as i am nearing completion of lots of units at once

It will definately need a driving force behind it *whipcracks* and a team of devoted followers *slaves* us?

Just to clarify willmark, what you are proposing is more of an updated 'tome of information', rather than 1 single list?

I.e.
Section 1:  Bringing RH into 7th ed (unchanged in terms of unit composition).
Section 2:  Bringing all old units/ warmachines into 7th ed.  
Section 3:  Choosing a varied selection of new things and including rules.

However, together all 3 parts do not make a balanced list.   This would be made totally clear from the start.  It would be more of a book of rules people can use rather than a single balanced list?

I think that would achieve a LOT overall compared to us all trying to agree on a single balanced list.  So it could work as aside from section 3 (which things to include), there's not that much that can be disagreed on!

The fluff issue wouldn't have to be a problem, we could just not use any!!  Seriously, this part would be a controversial element, so to make it easier and quicker we could just have rules.

Incidently, I'd like to update the 3 current special characters (zhatan, gorduz, astrogoth), and bring in 3 more.  These would be evenly split into lord and hero level, to match the new style of armybook entries.

From mid june onwards I'd be happy to be involved in this.

So for the moment we stick to 'Volume 1' (the RH update), and all work on that?  That would mean the most number of people working on one thing, rather than a couple of people working on everything.

Agreed on keeping it strict to RH, just updating rather than creating, we save that for volumes 2 and 3.

I thought it was time to revamp this section completely.  We seem to have several people interested in a major re-write, but all of them seem to want to do it alone.  If we group everyone together there will hopefully be a lot more motivation overall!  Dark harlequin would probably be interested if you pm him.

@Minty
You have to make it totally clear exactly what your intentions are for this project (see the thread I created on your forum).  The nature of what you are trying to do will probably determine the level of interest.

If you feel you want to be project leader on this please start a new thread in the Warhammer Armies:  Chaos Dwarfs sub-section of the Project area.

That way we can compile the list of people who are still here and still willing to help.  Several of the people early on in this thread are either inactive or unregistered now.

If you decide to take the lead on this I will sticky the thread and make a permenant redirect of people interested in re-writing the list over to your forum.  That way you can open up hundreds of threads on your forum if you wish and they won't appear on CDO as new threads (makes it easier for people like me to keep track of new threads).  I'll then lock this thread.

IMO it's best to recruit people here, but do this project on another forum.

Don’t expect a consensus on CDO (or HoH) on what to include, you won’t get it.  If you are happy listening to just the ideas of the project members registered on your forum then there’s no problems.

So be it.

This thread will be locked, as for the moment it makes no sense to have a single recruiting thread for a project that is not 100% clear in what it sets out and where many people have left already.

If anyone is in doubt as to how this section of the forum will work I'm going to make a new sticky.