Welcome to (hopefully) the end of the Righteous War flashpoints. This ones a bit of a doozy as it includes rules for your army falling to chaos. You may be asking yourself “I spent all this time getting Righteous Inspiration, how could I fall to chaos now?” Well thats because all those Righteous boons were to work of the chaos gods all along! Below we’ll outline whats in the book including how your armies can choose to react when finding out they were being guided by chaos all along (for most factions its not pretty) and what you can do if you decide that actually the chaos gods were there for you when the emperor wasn’t and maybe they’re not so bad.
Before we do that however, if you missed the last three articles, you can find them here:
Righteous Inspiration
This is the same as it was in the previous issues but as a basic recap: you keep tallies for each of your units that go up via agendas and stuff. Once you hit 8 points on your tally that unit becomes Puritanical, basically just religious weirdos that make the non religious dudes in your army nervous. There’s a bunch of stuff you can while being righteous but thats all outlined in the above parts and i’m not gonna go through it all again.
Unholy Dedication
Unholy Dedication will, for one Req, increase a unit’s Righteous Tally by one if they have gained a rank or were Marked for Greatness.
Beanith: This is just here for those that Exalt Chaos or Embrace Damnation so they can quickly gain more Puritanical units.
Righteous Aftermaths
Decided to end your Righteous Journey? Well it turns out it was the Chaos Gods all along and they would have gotten away with it, too, if it weren’t for you meddling kids. Here there’s a huge decision tree that basically boils down to:
- If you’re Chaos
- Do you say hell yeah I love being tricked by the chaos gods (Exalt Chaos). Any Daemons need to do this one
- Do you say hell no I hate the chaos gods despite having the chaos keywords (Grave Mistake/No One’s Puppet)
- If you’re Xenos
- You only get one option: admit you made an oopsie and face the consequences. (Grave Mistake)
- If you’re Imperium you get an actually interesting choice:
- Do you immediately recognize the horrific path you went down and try to recover (Grave Mistake/Repent Now). Note Grey Knights and Custodes have to pick this one
- Do you embrace chaos and have your army fall (Embrace Damnation)
Now thats a lot of keywords, lets dig into what it all means.
Exalt Chaos
This result is for the Chaos player that likes to keep things simple, enjoys the Righteous journey and wishes to stay on this path. Each Puritanical unit in your Crusade Roster, gain 1 additional Requisition point which then must be used immediately.
Continue using the Righteous Flashpoint rules whilst praising the Dark Gods. But if you get tired of it, you can always take the No One’s Puppet option.
Grave Mistake
Grave Mistake is the sole result for the Xenos Crusade Rosters. For Imperium and Chaos Crusade Rosters, this is just the starter before your main meal.
This will remove all traces of the Righteous and Puritanical from your Crusade Roster and it won’t be gentle while doing so. Each unit will roll a D6 for each point on their Righteous Inspiration Tally and every 1 will cause that unit to take a Battle Scar or take the cowardly Devastating Blow. You then delete the tally, and remove both the Righteous and Puritanical keywords from the unit. Next is every unit will lose all of it’s Righteous Battle Honours (Beanith: Good) and then replace them with normal Battle Honours. Same again for any Righteous Battle Scars, those get replaced with Battle Scars.
No One’s Puppet
Do you love Chaos Spawn and wish you had more space in your Crusade Roster for them? Well this is the result for you, those tired of the Righteous system, and any other Chaos player that’s pissed off the Campaign Manager.
Each time your Infantry or Bikers gain a Battle Scar when resolving the Grave Mistake rule, unless that unit is a Daemon, roll 2D6 and if the result exceeds the Leadership characteristic of that unit – remove that unit from your Crusade Roster and then replace it with a single Chaos Spawn or add one to an existing unit of Chaos Spawn. The rest of the squad is apparently eaten or something.
Where things get a little bit tricky is dealing with the experience points, if you chose to add the Chaos spawn as a new unit, it keeps the experience points and it gains the appropriate number of Battle Honours for its rank. Whereas if you add it to an existing unit, that experience is just discarded. So if you get unlucky with your Grave Mistake and No One’s Puppet rolls, I hope you really like using the Outrider Detachment. Remember the datasheet limit of 2 or 3 is Match Play nonsense.
Repent Now
So funny story, remember the watery tart that threw a sword at you and promised you the ability to wield supreme power in His Name? Turns out it wasn’t a vision sent by the Emperor and now your Imperium lads need to seek atonement.
Repenting follows roughly the same line as No One’s Puppet, but this will affect all units that gain a Battle Scar when resolving the Grave Mistake rule. Roll 2D6 and if the result exceeds the Leadership characteristic of that unit, it suffers Repentant Shame which reduces the unit’s Leadership characteristic by 1 and gains the Mark of Shame (unit can’t benefit from Auras) Battle Scar from the Core Rule Book.
The Mark of Shame can only be removed from a unit once they have destroyed a Chaos unit and only after you’ve managed to remove all the Marks of Shame from your Crusade Roster, will you be allowed to field Agents of the Imperium.
There is good news however for Grey Knights and Custodes though – they may have been Righteous and Puritanical burks prior to realising their Grave Mistake, but they get to ignore Repent Now as they knew all along… really?
Embrace Damnation
Embrace Damnation is created for that moment in late 2025 when the Chaos Space Marine Codex is finally released and the Imperium player is keen to dip their army in glue and then liberally sprinkle it with spikey bits. This is where you choose to, with your Imperium army, go full Chaos and RP the fall.
Basically, you create a new Crusade Roster with the Chaos keyword and start removing units from your old roster. Next you add a roughly equivalent Chaos unit to your new roster with the same level of experience and appropriate number of Battle Honours. The new unit must keep the same Battle Honours, Battle Scars, and Warlord Traits (if any) as the unit it replaces where possible. You also get to keep any Righteous Battle Honours or Righteous Battle Scars, the Righteous and Puritanical keywords along with any Righteous Inspiration Tally points.
For each Chaos Puritanical unit on your new Crusade Roster, gain 1 Requisition point that must be spent immediately.
Lastly take any remaining Imperium units on your original roster and then run them through the Repent Now section. These units will harbour a burning hatred for any new units added to your Chaos Crusade Roster and will gain an additional 2 experience points for destroying that Chaos unit.
Final Thoughts
Beanith: I love the narrative theme and the story it tells… I just can’t see myself wanting to use it because you’re pretty much driving a stake through your Crusade Roster with this hopefully final part to the Righteous Ruleset
TheChirurgeon: It’s a neat idea but I can’t imagine there was a large group of people who played with these rules and got all the way to the end and were like “WHOAAAAA” at this result. It’s a very cool concept, though.
Norman: While I respect what they were going for here, I really don’t think they stuck the landing here. The ruleset reads like they both want you to engage with this purely detrimental system for most factions voluntarily or have a GM that wasn’t mentioned until now reveal the twist to the play group and have them face the ramifications of their actions. That said for most players it kinda feels like a dirty trick so I don’t know that you’re gonna win any brownie points with them when you tell them to ruin their crusade rosters. This would probably exist better as a combined ruleset with a caveat at the beginning that this system isn’t like other crusade supplements.
TheChirurgeon: The big thing this highlights is how woefully inadequate the rules are for doing this conversion – how the hell do I model Primaris CSM as a unit? My traitor legionnaires don’t even have 2 wounds yet. This seems like something that’ll be more interesting after the new CSM Codex releases, but it seems like we’re still at least a month away from that.
Beanith: This time for sure, this hopefully wraps up our look at The Righteous War Flashpoints, but as always, if you have any questions or feedback, drop us a note in the comments below or email us at contact@goonhammer.com. And if you’re interested in running with these rules in your own Crusade, why not check out Administratum, our tool for tracking Crusade rosters? We’re currently in open beta and we’ve got a ton of great features to help make all of the book keeping for your rosters and campaigns easy.
Have any questions or feedback? Drop us a note in the comments below or email us at contact@goonhammer.com.
