The forces of Chaos come to the front today with their free Datasheet Indexes released to the wild over on Warhammer Community

In this post we’re going to be taking a look at the Chaos Daemons and what sneaky tricks they have up their daemonic sleeves!

Massive thanks to Games Workshop for giving us access to the rules a little early, and you can download them right now off WarCom!

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We also have a whole raft of 40k 10th Edition and Leviathan content up, so be sure to check it out here on the site or on YouTube!

Army Rules

Daemons are an unusual force in the 40k universe in that they are not a standing army as such, but are entities created from emotion that can manifest in our reality for a short time – and in the 10th Edition rules for Daemons games Workshop have captured some of that unnatural feeling to them and represent the fact that they do not quite deploy like other armies.

The Shadow of Chaos is their main mechanic, and this has two effects – firstly for your enemy, if they are in the shadow of chaos then they take batleshock at -1, and if they fail they also suffer D3 mortal wounds. Daemons themselves get a bonus while they are in the shadow of getting +1 to the battleshock roll and if passed they regain D3 wounds, or D3 models if they are battleline – This is amazing and will make daemons very nasty to play against.

So how do you get the Shadow of Chaos? Well your deployment zone is always under the shadow, and then by taking control of half of the objectives in no mans land and/or your opponents deployment zone you spread the shadow there – this is calculated at the start of each phase, so this can be dynamic over a turn as units are killed.

You can also opt to take a quarter of your army as Daemons if you are running another Chaos faction, you dont get access to the daemon abilities listed here, but allows you to take daemon units without breaking any of your detachments.

Daemonic Incursion Detachment

Where Daemons get really tasty is with the Daemonic Incursion Detachment – this allows your units to deep strike outside of 6 inches rather than 9, making it very likely your charges will go off without any hitches! Oh, and the entire army has the Deep Strike rule so you can do this with whoever you want! In Matched Play games up to half of your army can deploy off the board (The Matched Play card deck has additional conditions such as this about reserves in addition to those in the core book) with the restriction that it cannot come down turn 1, but in non matched play you do not have these limitations!

This is really cool though, and makes your nasty combat units a lot safer!

Daemonic Incursion Enhancements

We get 4 enhancements, one for each Chaos God – whats cool about these is that they also have an additional bonus based on if you are in the shadow of chaos

Khorne get +1 attacks and strength, bumped to +2 in the shadow

Tzeentch get +1 attacks and +3 range on their ranged attacks, bumped up to +2 and +6″ in the shadow

Nurgle get a 5+ feel no pain, bumped to 4+ in the shadow

And Slaanesh get to regain a wound on a roll of 4+ when a model is destroyed, with the shadow adding 1 to the roll.

Daemonic Incursion Stratagems

Like with the other factions, the Daemons get 6 Stratagems open up in the Daemonic Incursion

Corrupt Realspace is a nice one that let’s you maintain control of an objective if you move off it, and in addition gives it a 6″ shadow bubble – making it easier to both heal your units and force enemy units off it

Draught of Terror increases your AP and also gives you re-rolls to wounds against battleshocked targets

Warp Surge allows you to advance and still charge – a nice one to use on a unit that has deployed on the battlefield rather than use deep strike

Denizens of the Warp allows a unit to deep strike outside of 3″, but they are not able to charge

The Realm of Chaos is very nice too – it allows you to remove up to two units from the battlefield and deploy them again next turn via deep strike. Lots of cool shenanigans with this one!

And finally Daemonic Invulnerability allows you to reroll Inv saves of 1

Key Units

There’s loads of cool units in the list, and you can check them all out right now on Warhammer Community, so I’m just going to shout out some of my favourites

Be’lakor is amazing, really strong in combat with his sword hitting with 6 attacks at S14, AP -4 and D6+1 damage (and lethal hits for a chance of skipping rolling to wound too!). He generates a 6″ aura of Shadow, and also gets to pick out of a list of special abilities in each turn such as forcing any unit bellow starting strength or wounded to roll battleshock (And due to his aura a failure here will result in mortal wounds!

Shalaxi Hellbane is a dedicated Character, monster and vehicle assassin getting to reroll hits, wounds and damage against those targets

Fiends of Slannesh are another nice unit – with 5 attacks and Devastating Wounds they have a very good chance of putting Mortal Wounds on a target

Finally, Skarbrand is as bananas crazy powerful in combat as your would imagine with him having 8 attacks at S16, AP-4 and flat 6 damage each. Stick him in deep strike and watch him obliterate anything with the potential of 48 damage on a poor unsuspecting target

There’s more 40k content coming over the week, so make sure to stay tuned!