Chaos Dwarfs Through the Ages

[Karak Norn Clansman]

Welcome, ladies and gentlemen, to the first ever compilation of official Chaos Dwarf miniature developments through the ages!


This overview of Games Workshop and Forgeworld's various iterations of Chaos Dwarfs will take you from the very beginnings up to the present day (April 2019), and showcase the evolution of the weird and wondrous concepts embedded in our Chaos Dwarfs.


This thread deals with Chaos Dwarf concepts in official miniatures. For compilation attempts at community homebrew work on Chaos Dwarfs, see Carven Images (CDO 2007-2017) and the Chaos Dwarf Culture Project.


Enjoy!

[Jivaro]

May Hashut bless you!

[WhiffOfGrapeshot]

Nice thread! You can probably tell that we've had a lot of thought and deliberation put into the Chaos Dwarf representation. The current build is clearly a mix of the 4th+ and 6th/8th styles, a mix of "Big Hats" and Tamurkhan/Legion of Azgorh. Really, they're two separate and somewhat mutually exclusive armylists.
Big Hat Chaos Dwarfs are the ones that utilize lots of Greenskin slaves including Black Orcs, Death Rockets, Earthshaker Cannons, Chaos Dwarf Warriors with Great Weapons or Blunderbusses, and most importantly, their big hats.
Legion of Azgorh Chaos Dwarfs are the ones that utilize Infernal Guard, Deathshrieker Rockets, Dreadquake Mortars, Magma Cannons, K'daai Fireborn and K'daai Destroyers, and Daemonsmiths.

Current BOTET has a mish mash of both rosters, without the completely redundant units, like Death Rockets and Deathshrieker Rockets at the same time. The problem is they have fairly different playstyles. Big Hats love to throw their Greenskin slaves into combat and shoot in with their artillery and extremely limited supply of actual Chaos Dwarfs, while Legion of Azgorh loves to send their heavily armored suicidal Infernal Guard with Fireglaives (Think Slayers in Ironbreaker armor with flaming Thunderer guns that have great weapon bayonets attached!) into combat while their CHOO CHOO TRAINS OF DEATH drive up behind and unleash hellfire.

Really, ideally, there'd be two rosters, Big Hats in Zharr Naggrund, and Legion of Azgorh in Black Fortress, but unfortunately we're heavily limited in faction slots, and even when cutting, merging, and opening up new ones, splitting Chaos Dwarfs up hasn't been close to the top of the list. I'd love to see it, though.

[Maltacus]

Nice read!

A limited way to split chaos dwarfs and other rosters up could be to have more than one building tree, that are mutually exclusive (like in the kingdoms baltic campaign with the lithuanian temples). With chaos dwarfs you choose to dedicate a province to either big hats slavers with trade and greenskin lackeys, or elitist infernal guard and sorcerers and so on. Sylvania may have to focus on either their human army and better economy from humane politics, or more dead and thereby undead options.