Champions of Chaos was supposed to be a regular RPG expansion for Warhammer Age of Sigmar: Soulbound, with new archetypes, new gear tables, and so on, the fourth in a series that has so far contained Champions of Order, Death, and Destruction. But the corrupting influence of Chaos seems to have seeped out of the Mortal Realms and into the design studio at Cubicle 7, because the book they’re actually going to release is a complete standalone TTRPG. Wargamer’s editor Alex Evans tracked down Cubicle 7’s CEO Dominic McDowall-Thomas at GenCon to shed some light on this accursed tome.
“We got started working on Champions of Chaos, and realized this is something different”, McDowall-Thomas says. “It’s such a completely different style of game, all of the options are different… I think we realized that, well, this needs its own thing”. And so the “standalone core game Champions of Chaos was born”.
The core rules engine remains fairly consistent with the basic Warhammer Age of Sigmar: Soulbound. “You’ll be familiar with a lot of the basic setup, the rules and your characteristics and things like that, the powers and the talents”, McDowall-Thomas says.
But there are some fundamental differences necessitated by the change to Chaos protagonists. “Soulfire is an individual resource… just to represent that everybody’s more out for themselves”. In regular Soulbound games Soulfire is an important resource, both within the narrative – it’s a power that arises from the PCs souls being bound together – and mechanically, where it offers a pool of shared points that can be used for amazing effects, but only by group consensus. Which is definitely not how Chaos operates.
In fact it’s pretty much certain that your team is drawn from multiple factions who worship different Warhammer Chaos gods. “My playtest party will give you a good idea of the range”, McDowall-Thomas says, “There was a Skaven engineer, I was the Tzaangor shaman, skating around the place just being mischievous, and we had a Blightlord – that sort of mid level champion”.
These unlikely allies are cooperating (or at least, not killing each other), because of an order by supreme Chaos overlord Archaon or one of his lieutenants. “I think he’s a little bit peeved at the whole Soulbound thing”, McDowall-Thomas says, “But he can see the sense and is thinking We can’t solve everything with armies, so let’s get some groups together that will do my bidding“. A perfect excuse for RPG parties to go off doing RPG party things, really.
If that sounds a bit too cooperative, don’t worry – your character’s desire to earn the Favor of the Gods will ensure they never truly get along. “Depending on which God you fall under – or maybe you’re Undivided – there are behaviors and objectives that please the God. And as you do those in adventures, you get favor that you can use between sessions – it could be mutations, maybe it could be items, basically the full range of boons that the Chaos gods can can provide”. So while you’re all pursuing the same objective, how you pursue it will differ greatly.
Games will start off in the Bloodwind Spoil, the apocalyptic landscape around Archaon’s Varanspire in the Eight Points. The area first appeared as the setting for the original edition of Warcry. “There was just so much really cool stuff that we got a glimpse of that we were really keen to explore”, McDowall-Thomas says. “It’s also a place where the Champions of Chaos build their power base”, from which the players “can launch off on your various schemes, plots, adventures”.
The sidestep from Soulbound to Soulbound Champions of Chaos puts me in mind of the original Warhammer 40k RPGs, which all shared a core rules engine, but had different refinements and tweaks to accommodate themes as diverse as Rogue Trader bridge crew and Inquisitorial acolytes. Giving each game its own core rulebook was bad for shelf-space, and made using content from one setting in another game a faff, but it meant that each core book gave players all and only the tools they needed for the specific story at hand.
Warhammer Age of Sigmar: Soulbound Champions of Chaos is due to release some time in the next two months. If you’ve had a great time playing the followers of ruin in Soulbound or any other Warhammer RPG, let us know in the Wargamer Discord community!
Make sure you check out our other interviews with McDowall-Thomas at GenCon – we’ve learned a lot about the studios plans for both the Old World RPG and the Horus Heresy RPG.