Characters / Total War: Warhammer - The Daemons of Chaos

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"Chaos consumes all!"

"They come to claim us for their dark masters, choke the world in decadence, drown it in disease and blood. What hope can there be for the mortal world? It is assailed by nightmares and its most dangerous dreams, each given murderous form by the power of ancient and terrible gods."

The Daemons of Chaos, known also as the Legions of Chaos, the Arch-Enemy, the Great Beast, or simply just Daemons, are malevolent, otherwordly entities born from the deepest and darkest emotions of all mortal creatures. From their fortresses and palaces within this Realm of Chaos, these entities watch with envious eyes towards the mortal kingdoms, waiting with unblinking patience for their chance to wreak destruction and dismay upon the world and to feed upon the misery that they have wrought.

Of the many forces which permeate the world, both emotional and natural otherwise, there are but only Four which holds supreme power within this plane of unnatural existence. Power/Anger, Lust/Pleasure, Death/Despair and Change/Hope are the four greatest forces which have enthralled the world in its grip, for in a world engulfed in such amounts of war, corruption and disease, their dark presence and their malign influence is all but inevitable, for these dark emotions and thoughts fuel the main four Gods of Chaos, Khorne the Blood God, Slaanesh the Dark Prince, Nurgle the Plaguefather and Tzeentch the Changer of Ways.

These malevolent entities are the darkness and nightmares of the mortal races given form. They are the product of the misery and pain which engulfs the lands and so long as the evils of mortal races continue its self-destructive nature, from the dark wound within reality that lies at the uppermost north, these entities shall continue to plague the world for all eternity. When the time finally arises, these daemonic entities seize upon the opportunity to break free from their plane of existence, greedily spilling forth to rampage and slaughter in the name of the Chaos Gods. From the Realm of Chaos they come to conquer and destroy, creatures of magic in service to the darkest of gods. Armies flee before them. Devastation lies behind them, for destruction is the gift they bring to warriors of all races, causes and creeds. They are the Daemons of Chaos, the servants of insane and blasphemous gods, and they will not rest until the world shares their madness, until all that is clean, orderly and natural is smothered into the stuff that is raw Chaos.

Introduced in Total War: Warhammer III, The Daemons of Chaos are playable in custom games, Warhammer III's campaign, and the planned combined campaign mode. They are split into four distinct factions with their own army list and mechanics; Daemons of Khorne, Daemons of Tzeentch, Daemons of Nurgle, and Daemons of Slaanesh, while a fifth faction, Chaos Undivided, takes cues from all of them at once.

NOTE ON SPELLING: much like the Dwarfs vs Dwarves, it's spelled daemons, not demons (though it is still pronounced as the latter).

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In general

Legion of Chaos

• Above Good and Evil: On their good days (which are few and far between) they may dip into this. When all is said and done, the Chaos Gods couldn't care less about mortal notions of good and evil, and describing them as such often results in them just laughing. They simply view notions of morality as so far beneath them, that they don't bother, and do whatever they deem necessary to advance their position and power. It's just the nature of the world often makes "evil" a lot more effective than "good".
• Achilles' Heel:
  • Magical attacks make quick work of most daemons, as it bypasses their resistance to physical damage.
  • The daemons' easy access to fear and terror can be countered with units that are "immune to psychology".
  • Daemonic factions also notably lack anti-large units in their roster, and Nurgle has zero anti-large units of any kind. As a result factions with readily available monsters and cavalry can potentially cause them problems.
• Ambiguously Human: The Flavor Text of the descriptions for the various mortal warriors of Chaos question if they are completely human anymore due to the exposure to Chaos corruption.
• Animalistic Abomination: Daemons don't just come in humanoid varieties, but also in the form of feral creatures deployed as attack animals or mounts. They usually (but not always) fit their master's Animal Motifs, such as Khorne's Flesh Hounds and Nurgle's Rot Flies.
• Animal Motifs: Among the Norscans, savage Khorne is depicted as a wolf, cunning Tzeentch as an eagle, death-loving Nurgle as a crow and wily Slaanesh as a serpent. Beyond that, Nurgle draws heavily on stereotypically filthy creatures like flies, toads and Messy Maggots; daemons of Tzeentch usually have some kind of bird motif; Khorne likes bulls; and most daemons of Slaanesh possess attributes of scorpions (usually in the form of Power Pincers and the occasional stinger tail).
• Always Chaotic Evil: The Daemons, being shards of their malevolent masters, have no concept of right or good, just an overriding imperative that they must obey their masters. They do this by ripping off mortal skulls, killing mortals with plagues, toying with their existence or tempting mortals into damnation, and they do enjoy it greatly. Daemons can provide examples of abstract positive emotions (A Bloodthirster may show honor to a foe who impresses them as an example), but it's always overshadowed by their malevolence.
• Arch-Enemy: While many factions can contend as this, the most notable being the Lizardmen and High Elves (who are the ones responsible for stopping their last invasion of the material plane), the Chaos Gods ultimately have the most hate towards each other.
• Badass Army: There are few things that can stand up to Legions of Chaos fully deployed on the mortal plane, and even individual Chaos armies are truly frightening to fight. Blistering hordes of Daemons charge spearlines without hestitation, Daemonic beasts rip apart screaming archers, and Greater Daemons can fight entire companies of soldiers on their lonesome. As Chaos Undivided, they are a world-ending threat that can only be stopped by the numerous forces of Order banding with one another to stop them. Everyone fears their martial prowess, whether it be the Ax-Crazy berserkers of Khorne, daemonic sorcerers of Tzeench, maggot-legions of Nurgle, or the Servants of the Dark Prince.
• Bald Mystic: Concept art and gameplay trailers have shown that Chaos Cultist heroes tend to shave their heads, this being especially pronounced with Khorne due to the fact he's otherwise covered in facial hair. For the mystic part, well, they're Chaos Cultists that serve the Dark Gods, resulting in them acquiring supernatural powers.
• Big Bad: Collectively for Warhammer III, serving as the main opponents to the forces of Order, and the ones who seek to drown the Warhammer world in never-ending darkness.
• Black Magic: The Daemons wield their own malevolent winds, some of the darkest and straight up evil magic in the setting. Each God has their own dedicated lore, barring Khorne of course. Generally speaking, they are some of the most offensive focused spell lists in the game, and are all about causing pain to your enemies.
• Blessed with Suck: The so called "Gifts" of Chaos are very much this, giving you power but at a horrible price (it is commonly said Chaos will mark one's soul no matter how much you benefit from the power they grant), and these side-effects are only applicable if you don't mutate into a Chaos Spawn first:
  • The Gifts of Khorne will make you among the most powerful warriors in the world, but you'll be in constant pain the longer you go between slaughters, eventually driving you to madness.
  • The Gifts of Tzeentch will give you psychic powers and arcane knowledge that can allow you to walk unchallenged against your opponents, but the knowledge is of things you cannot know, eventually driving you to madness.
  • The Gifts of Nurgle will give you the ability to overcome death itself, but you will be a walking corpse plagued with disease, eventually driving you to madness.
  • The Gifts of Slaanesh will make you faster than ever, and pain will not be a detriment any longer, but you will develop a need for sensation that becomes all consuming, eventually driving you to madness.
• Bright Is Not Good: Daemons of Slaanesh and Tzeentch (as well as their worshippers) tend to be very brightly colored, but by no means does that make them any more sympathetic.
• Close-Range Combatant: In general, the Daemons of Chaos, like most Chaos-aligned factions, have very limited options for ranged combat: Khorne has Skull Cannons and his Soul Grinders, Nurgle has Exalted Plaguebearers with the Death's Head and Plague Drones with the same attack, and Slaanesh has zero ranged units whatsoever. They make up for this by having overwhelming power in melee fights; Khorne has the best balance between durability, speed and strength with overwhelmingly dangerous charging bloodthirsty daemons and Chaos warriors, Nurgle can outlast practically everyone with insane durability and powerful healing spells bolstered by an army that heavily debuffs foes just by being around its units, and Slaanesh has blisteringly fast units that close the distance, deal sickening damage that goes through any armor value, and overwhelm foes with sheer damage. Only Tzeentch averts this, having several decent but not exceptional melee units back up by a variety of daemons that spew Technicolor Fire and other ranged attacks.
• Color Motifs: Khorne is red, Tzeentch is blue, Nurgle is green and Slaanesh is purple/pink. Best demonstrated in the cinematic announcement trailer for Total War: Warhammer 3, where glimpses of Greater Daemons are shown against a backdrop of each color. This extends even to their respective domains in the Realm of Chaos, the landscape being nearly monochromatic in each color.
• A Commander Is You: The Daemons of Chaos are a Generalist/Unconventional/Elitist faction. The Daemons of Chaos faction combines the daemon units of all four Chaos Gods above into one army led by a Daemon Prince, allowing for a mix and match of different units from the different factions to cover all bases. However, they have only access to daemon units, and not some of the cheaper generic mortal units available to each individual faction. On the campaign map, the Daemons of Chaos focus on devoting captured settlements to the four Chaos Gods or Chaos Undivided, and customizing their legendary lord, The God-slayer, to fit each situation. They do however lose out on the unique and powerful campaign abilities of the individual Chaos God focused factions in place of adaptability.
• Complete Immortality: Actually killing a daemon is basically impossible. It's possible even the Chaos Gods can't do it, as Be'lakor's continued existence would seem to suggest. Their physical forms can be destroyed but they reform in the Realm of Chaos. That said being so destroyed does hurt and seems to weaken them, at least for a while (and for a daemon "a while" could be centuries or longer) and the Chaos Gods have also found creative ways to make out-of-favour daemons wish they could die.
• Composite Character: Rather than a single army list as they had in Warhammer Fantasy Battle proper, the Daemons of Chaos are instead split into four separate races of mixed daemons and mortal chaos warriors devoted exclusively to each Ruinous Power, as they appear in Warhammer: Age of Sigmar. By extension, the Daemons have inherited many units that were originally part of the Warriors of Chaos roster, such as Skullcrusher Knights for Khorne and Helstrider cavalry for Slaanesh. The aesthetics are also mash-up of the two time periods, with the daemons using their elaborate post-Age of Sigmar designs, while mortal units wear outfits closer to Fantasy Battle.
• The Corrupter: Countless noble individuals have fallen to the temptations of Chaos; mostly normal people who had noble goals in mind, and either were lied to or fell past the Despair Event Horizon from being stuck in the Crapsack World that is Warhammer. The Chaos Gods and their servants serve as this par excellence in their ability to tempt people into thralldom of the Ruinous Powers.
• Crippling Overspecialization: A problem for Chaos as a whole. The exact details vary per god (and are discussed in detail under their respective folders), but as a generalized example, most daemon KC forces are sorely lacking in ranged units and will be absolutely shredded if you have ranged fire that is tailored to their explicit weaknesses (for example, magic damage for Nurgle).
• Crutch Character: The Heralds are powerful support commanders skilled in combat, magic and area buffs via the Locus system. In the early game, when access to Heroes is scarce, they are thus invaluable for the first several turns. But once the player has multiple well-developed provinces, the Heralds' presence is not as lucrative since you can just recruit Bloodreapers, Irridescent Horrors, Plagueridden and Alluresses to join your armies. Fortunately, a successful and well-levelled Herald can be swapped out for an Exalted Greater Daemon at the player's discretion, bringing a powerful new commander to the field in exchange for keeping only half the levels of the original Lord.
• Cult: A central part of the dedicated Daemon subraces' mechanics involves Chaos Cults, devoted to their respective deities. These cults tend to be equal parts Apocalypse Cult and Religion of Evil. These cults crop up in a number of forms in each subrace's building tree and unit roster:
  • On a straightforward level, cults appear in the names of certain buildings, such as a tier 3-5 building that allows recruitment of Cultists of Tzeentch and Lords of Change.
  • On another, trade resource buildings for Daemons take the form of Cultist Camps, Outposts or Enclaves that grant factionwide or provincial bonuses depending on the resource attached to them.
  • Cults can also crop up in settlements owned by other factions if the associated Corruption of the parent Daemon faction is quite high. This grants visibility over the owning faction's territory and can have support buildings built to help the player's efforts.
  • On a unit level, each Monogod faction has a "Cultist of [...]" Hero Unit who plays an important role in their playstyle. In both campaign and skirmish modes they can summon a unit of Lesser Daemons each; in campaign mode they can not only increase the number of times they can do this but eventually summon a Greater Daemon as well.
    • The Cultist of Khorne is a fairly heavily-armoured frontline warrior with an axe in one hand and a large shield in the other. Unlike the lightly-armoured Anti-Armor Hero Killer unit that is the Bloodreaper, the Cultist of Khorne is more useful as a crowd fighter boosting the Leadership of holding units.
    • The Cultist of Tzeentch is a Squishy Wizard in a faction full of them. His unique benefit is that he wields the Lore of Fire, something the Daemons can't do, and synergises well with Lore of Tzeentch casters since his Lore Attribute Kindleflame and the Warpflame effect of offensive Tzeentch spells both increase a target unit's vulnerability to fire attacks. This allows them to focus fire large single entities or bombard entire units at a time with combined magical damage.
    • The Cultist of Nurgle has a pretty good Melee Attack of 50 and the Armour Sundering contact effect that reduces enemy Armour by 30. he also has a Healing Factor to compensate for his minimal Armour and fairly low Melee Defense, as well as a special ability that reduces the speed, Weapon Strength and Missile Damage of enemies in an area around him, with the effect's intensity increasing over time.
    • The Cultist of Slaanesh is the only female and non-human of the four Cultists (she's a Dark Elf). A lightly-armoured crowd fighter, she's nimble even on foot and has the Devastating Flanker passive ability that lets her do more damage when attacking an enemy from behind. Like the rest of her roster, she's quite good at closing to melee and slipping away once she loses the advantage.
• Cyborg: Crippled daemons who make a pact with the Soulforge are converted into cybernetic monstrosities called Soul Grinders. Total War: Warhammer III makes the first time they have appeared in a Warhammer video game, even though they are normally associated with Warhammer 40,000. The exact roles they fill vary depending on their patron - Khornate and Slanneshi Soul Grinders are straightforward melee monsters, while Tzeentchian and Nurglite Soul Grinders have long-ranged secondary weapons.
• Deal with the Devil: Many people seek the patronage of the Chaos Gods willingly, as the Gods are known to empower their followers. Khorne gives you immense strength and insurmountable martial prowess, Tzeentch gives you sorcery and heightened intellect, Slaanesh can make your charisma and senses better, and Nurgle can improve your lifespan and make you much tougher. Most usually, the person making the deal with the deity is the one who gets screwed over: Khorne's followers become mindless killers; Tzeentch's followers become power-mad, paranoid, and trapped in their own scheming, or they are betrayed by their own patron as part of His own Gambit Roulette, or they get too many mutations; Nurgle's followers often become either mindless zombies or festering, putrid husks of men; Slaanesh's followers usually become addicted to sensation, and frequently descend into rape, torture and self-mutilation. Rarely though, someone can benefit greatly from these deals, but being Gods of Chaos, they are incredibly fickle; they are just as likely to notice and reward a bored nobleman dabbling in the worship secretly as they are to reward a mighty and reputable warrior who has spent decades fighting in their patron's name.
• Demon Lords and Archdevils: Greater Daemons are colossal avatars of the Dark Gods, and "Exalted" Greater Daemons are the most favored of them, charged with commanding the armies of their masters. Below them are Heralds, lesser, human-scale daemons who have clawed their way up to positions of similar authority and prominence. While "regular" variants of Greater Daemons can be simply recruited, to access Exalted Lords, one must level up a Herald and "ascend" them. The Greater Daemons are as follows:
  • Khorne: Bloodthirsters are massive Big Red Devils brandishing massive axes as their weapons. Avatars of carnage and slaughter, they fly over the battlefield on vast batlike wings before swooping down and grinding anything beneath them into paste. Exalted Bloodthirsters also wield a whip in their offhands, and focus on fighting in crowds alongside their frontlines while common Bloodthirsters excel at fighting other giant monsters and cavalry.
  • Tzeentch: Lords of Change are giant blue-feathered Bird People, reflecting Tzeentch's association with Clever Crows. Combining grand strength with a deep intellect, they are masters of magic who manipulate mortals at length for their amusement while also burning them to cinders with their Black Magic. Generic Lords of Change use bound spell versions of the Lore of Tzeentch (normally just Blue and Pink Fire of Tzeentch but in Campaign they can also gain the other four spells) while Exalted Lords of Change are true spellcasters and can also use the Lore of Metal.
  • Nurgle: Great Unclean Ones are jolly, gross green giants as broad as they are tall. Massive balls of lard and muscle, they are tough enough to take many cannonballs to the chest and keep fighting. Generic Great Unclean Ones fight with massive rusty cleavers and spread the "gifts" of their god with the Lore of Nurgle, while Exalted Great Unclean Ones also carry bells and can deliver the "gift" of fatality with the Lore of Death.
  • Slaanesh: Keepers of Secrets are tall, sensuous Hot as Hell Daemons with four arms and long legs ending in cloven hooves and clad in fleshy stockings. They move with astonishing speed for creatures of their size, closing to melee and annihilating those who stand in their way, though their lack of protective clothing makes them vulnerable to ranged attacks. Generic Keepers of Secrets are ranged crowd fighters, best suited to cracking through infantry with their claws and swords while exposing them to the razor edge of sensation with the Lore of Slaanesh. Exalted Keepers of Secrets are more suited to fighting monsters and cavalry with their long spears and can also choose to obscure their coming approach with the Lore of Shadows.
• Demon of Human Origin: The ultimate reward for a servant of Chaos is to be uplifted as a "daemon prince", to serve at their god's side for eternity. Their appearance varies wildly compared to other daemons, but they're usually colossal Winged Humanoids. Big Bad Be'lakor is the first daemon prince, but there have since been many others, including the playable Daemon Prince who leads the Legion of Chaos. NPC daemon princes also serve as Boss Battles in the Realm of Chaos campaign, where their souls — explicitly because of their once-human nature — are necessary to perform a ritual that will lead to the Forge of Souls. Marked Chaos Lords and Sorcerer Lords, which were made available to Daemons with the Champions of Chaos DLC for Warriors of Chaos, can be ascended after enough levels and successful battles to the status of Daemon Prince, though they only keep half of the levels they previously commanded.
• The Dreaded: The Chaos Gods and their daemons are justifiably some of the most terrifying beings in an already brutal universe. So feared are they that in order to avoid accidentally attracting their attention, they are seldom referred to by name and often referred to by epithets or descriptions like The Changer of Ways. Appropriately, every daemon unit in the game inflicts either Fear or Terror in close combat.
• Eldritch Abomination: The Dark Gods are primordial, unbelievably powerful beings from beyond reality. Some sources describe them in human terms (Slaanesh resembling a beautiful man and woman who have been split vertically and then merged into one intersex being, for example), while others depict them as swirling masses of magic and raw emotions that pull at the fabric of reality, and still others depict them as even more up-scaled versions of their Greater Daemons; all are equally valid and equally false at the same time. You can actually see glimpses of the Gods themselves during their final Survival battles, and they are depicted as giant towering entities looming over the battlefield.
• Elite Mooks: "Exalted" daemons are stronger, more expensive variants of each faction's lesser daemon Mooks, such as Exalted Bloodletters of Khorne and Exalted Pink Horrors of Tzeentch, all with roughly the same roles their parent unit has. Exalted variants of greater daemons are also available, but they serve as army commanders rather than standard units. With the addition of Champions of Chaos, daemon factions can also recruit variants of Chosen, the elite mooks of the Warriors of Chaos.
• Emotion Eater: Every angry thought, ambition, sorrow or pleasure feeds the Dark Gods. Daemons usually mock their mortal foes by pointing out their defiance towards them indirectly still feeds them power.
• Enemy Civil War: They are NOT on the same side most of the time. Khorne's hatred for magic puts his followers at odds with Tzeentch's, and Nurgle and Slaanesh in their reveal trailer are fighting over who's gonna recruit the wandering exile. It's known as "The Great Game" and has culminated in countless millennia of infighting that has resulted in the safety of the Mortal World from their undivided attention. It's also unwinnable, because when one becomes stronger, the other three gang up on the stronger to bring him back down to a manageable level. And if one were to succeed, Chaos would ultimately stop being, well, Chaos.
• Evil Is One Big, Happy Family: NO. Daemons will just as happily slaughter eachother as they will mortals. In fact, each Chaos God has a bitter rivalry with at least one other, and this hatred extends to their followers. Indeed, the primary reason Chaos hasn't banded together to destroy the Old World is because they're too busy killing each other.
• Evil Minion: The Chaos-worshipping Northmen and Beastmen fulfill this role for them and their numbers often serve as their front line of disposable units, and getting these factions as vassals if encountered on the campaign map.
• Fantasy Pantheon: The Ruinous Powers are worshipped as empowering gods by the Beastmen, the Fimir, the human tribes of the north, and countless secret cults across the world. While the Dark Gods are jealous, competitive deities who prefer exclusive worship, there are many who worship them all together as a pantheon called "Chaos Undivided".
  • There also exist "lesser" Chaos Gods with their own agendas, though thankfully most of them have only limited influence. The most well-known and powerful of these lesser gods are the Horned Rat, god of the Skaven, and Hashut, god of the Chaos Dwarfs.
• God of Chaos: In case it wasn't obvious enough. The Chaos God's thrive off causing this to the mortal plane, feeding off disorder whenever their mortal followers inflict it.
• God of Evil: Strictly speaking; they are by far the most powerful beings in the setting and they are very bad news. While they can represent some positive emotions, desires and concepts, they prefer to encourage the worst possible aspects of humanity in their worshippers.
• God Needs Prayer Badly: Chaos feeds off the emotions of sentient races, but otherwise doesn't need it directed at them specifically. It simply helps to focus the energy they receive.
• Greater-Scope Villain: In the first two games, where the armies of Chaos are represented almost exclusively by their mortal servants (the Warriors of Chaos, Beastmen and Norscans), while the daemons themselves are only ever mentioned or shown as individual characters.
• Grim Up North: The Chaos Wastes are an Eldritch Location that surrounds the shattered warp-gate of the Old Ones, located exactly at the planet's north pole. It is from here that magic pours into the world from the Realm of Chaos, twisting the landscape and allowing daemons to sustain their manifestations indefinitely. The Warriors of Chaos also gather here, competing in warbands for the favor of the Dark Gods until a champion wrangles them together for a march on the south. The southern pole also houses a broken warp-gate, forming the remote landmass of the Southern Chaos Wastes.
• Hard-Coded Hostility: During Total War: Warhammer III's launch, Daemon factions were completely unable to engage in diplomacy with all races except Warriors of Chaos, Beastmen, Norsca and Skaven. They would automatically declare war on every non-Chaos faction they came across as soon as they were encountered, with the sole exception being the Daemons of Slaanesh, who had the ability of engaging with all races normally as part of their mechanics. With the release of Immortal Empires, this limitation was removed, though predictably Daemon factions are subject to such a high diplomatic aversion penalty with non-evil races that it barely matters.
• The Heartless: The Chaos Gods collectively embody everything negative about the human psyche, and demons emulate the traits most preferred by their masters in as extreme a manner as possible. Notably, the flavor text of lesser demons explain that they're born from the repurposed soul-stuff of mortals who die in a manner that resonates with each god.
• Heavily Armored Mook: With the Champions of Chaos DLC, daemon factions gain the ability to recruit their respective aligned variants of Chaos Warriors and Chosen, who serve as this in each roster compared to daemons (who rely more on physical resistance and other gimmicks to survive combat). Slaanesh and Tzeentch, especially, benefit greatly from the presence of a durable frontline that can tie up enemies and soak damage while their Fragile Speedsters and Squishy Wizards get into position.
• Horns of Villainy: While it's most pronounced with Khorne and Nurgle, the majority of daemon types have horns or horn-like growths, and their mortal auxiliaries usually wear horned helmets in imitation of their masters. As for the villainy part, they're The Legions of Hell.
• King Mook: Heralds are powerful and accomplished lesser daemons, favored by their patron and granted authority over the rest of their kind. In-game, Heralds are available as generic lords for each daemonic race.
• Large and in Charge: Exalted Greater Daemons and Daemon Princes, who serve as lords and generals among The Legions of Hell, are massive monsters that tower over their lesser bretheren.
• The Legions of Hell: Armies of daemons and daemon-worshipping human warriors subservient to the Dark Gods and bent on destroying the mortal world.
• Mad God: All four fit the gold standard, but Tzeentch is especially... inexplicably illogical.
• Magikarp Power: Exalted greater daemons cannot be directly recruited in a campaign. Instead, once it has leveled up enough, a herald has the option of being converted into an exalted greater daemon to gain new powers and abilities.
• Monstrous Scenery: The backgrounds of the final battle maps within the Realm of Chaos are dominated by the shapes of the Chaos Gods as they look down on the clashes between their followers and invading challengers. Most take the form of immense humanoid forms half-seen within the gloom, while Tzeentch appears as hundreds of eyes staring down from the sky.
• Mook Carryover: The release of the Champions of Chaos DLC gave the Daemons of Chaos access to the aligned variant units from the Warriors of Chaos list, effectively doubling their rosters in one update.
• No Body Left Behind: Daemon units' morale and health is a measure of their stability on the mortal plane. When daemons "die", they vanish in a burst of magical energy, and when their morale is low they begin to fade back to the Realm of Chaos (i.e. crumbling like undead).
• Non-Indicative Name: While the majority of their armies are made up of Daemons, the Daemons of Chaos can also recruit mortal worshippers to bolster their numbers.
• Numerological Motif: Each god is associated with a particular sacred number, as well as any multiples of that number — Slaanesh's is six, Nurgle's is seven, Khorne's is eight, and Tzeentch's is nine. This usually factors into special abilities, such as the "Hellblade" buff for Khornate daemons activating after a given unit achieves eighty kills. Chaos as a pantheon is also associated with the number eight, after the eight-pointed star used as a neutral symbol.
• The Omnipotent: Within their own planes of existence. Their influence in the real world, while still extremely palpable, is thankfully limited by comparison.
• Our Demons Are Different: All daemons are a fragment of the god they serve, such that no one faction looks like the other.
  • The Daemons of Khorne look the most like classic demons of any of the Chaos Daemons, with red skin, Scary Teeth, horns, bat wings, and plenty of fire motifs to go around.
  • The Daemons of Nurgle draw heavily from plague and swamp imagery, resembling rotting corpses, mutant flies, gigantic slugs, bloated toads, and other nasty creatures of filth and decay.
  • The more powerful Daemons of Tzeentch are largely birdlike, but their lesser daemons go for some very bizarre shapes like amalgamations of fire-breathing mouths or fanged stingrays with dozens of eyes.
  • The Daemons of Slaanesh (the humanoid ones anyway) usually take the form of scantily clad women with crab-like pincer claws; though given Slaanesh's Otherworldly and Sexually Ambiguous nature, they freely mix and match male and female aspects to better suit their targets. The non-humanoid ones aren't as weird as Tzeentch's daemons, but they're generally bizarre enough to be unsettling, resembling unholy combinations of snakes and scorpions (all of which also have Multiboobage, generally up to six).
• Our Gods Are Greater: Incomprehensibly vast and unfathomably powerful, the Four Gods of Chaos are probably the most powerful entities in the entirety of the Warhammer world. Each one lords over a different aspect/emotion (Rage, Desire, Despair, and Hope are the primary ones) and feasts on the collective actions of all the mortal races, and unlike the other gods of the setting (save perhaps Sotek and the Horned Rat) they can do far more than just empowering mortals to do their bidding, sending out The Legions of Hell to bring about a localized Hell on Earth wherever they see fit.
• Our Imps Are Different: Furies are lesser daemons that resemble bestial winged humanoids. Not aligned to any one god, Furies are scavengers of the Realm of Chaos that commonly follow daemonic armies. In-game they fill a similar niche to Harpies or Fell Bats, as largely-disposable flanking units that can swoop down on unprotected archers and artillery. There are five distinct Fury variants (a neutral/undivided variant as the default, and four aligned variants), each with slightly different stats and their patron's signature trait: Furies of Tzeentch have Barrier, Furies of Nurgle have Cloud of Flies, Furies of Khorne have Frenzy, and Furies of Slaanesh have Devastating Flanker.
• Orcus on His Throne: Despite their near limitless power, the Chaos Gods very rarely take direct action. To them, that's the duty of minions, not omnipotent masters. During his battle, however, Khorne can be seen gazing upon the slaugher of his survival battle leering on his throne, and Slaanesh will directly attempt to whisper seductions and promises to the player when they march through his/her territory.
• Pet the Dog: Even Chaos' Legendary Lords will reward the Advisor for his service with a drop of Ursun's blood at the end of their campaigns, as they agreed to during each of their campaign intros.
• Phantasy Spelling: As noted above it's spelt "Daemon" rather than "Demon", but the word is still pronounced "Dee-Mon" rather than "Day-Mon."
• Precursor Killers: While the exact fate of the Old Ones is ambiguous, what is known is that the Old Ones disappeared completely during the Great Catastrophe, when the Gods of Chaos breached their Portal Network at the planet's poles. Not for nothing do the lizardmen refer to the Ruinous Powers as "the Great Adversary". One Slaanesh-related magical item is a crystal that contains the soul of an Old One, preserved at the most agonizing moment of its death.
• Pure Is Not Good: Subverted actually, the gods are neither good nor evil, but simply elemental.
• Red Baron: The True Gods, the Gods of the North, the Northern Powers, the Aesgardr, the Hungry Gods of the Dark, etc. This is just what the Norscans and other followers of Chaos call them. More broadly, they're typically called the Ruinous Powers.
• Secret Circle of Secrets: Daemonic factions have the unique ability to create Chaos Cults dedicated to their master, in a manner similar to Skaven undercities and Vampire Coast pirate coves, but can be upgraded on a linear track to perform other functions. Hidden within a larger settlement, cults aid in spreading corruption and provide factional resources for their respective faction and can sacrifice themselves for a larger, momentary benefit unique to each race (teleporting an army to the former cult's location for Khorne, and boosting winds of magic for Tzeentch).
• Sigil Spam: Chaos as a pantheon is known for plastering eight-pointed chaos stars everywhere, but each of the Dark Gods also has a personal sigil used by their daemons and most devout followers. The mark of Khorne is a heavily stylized skull face, the mark of Nurgle uses an arrangement of three circles that resembles a biohazard symbol or a stylized fly seen from above, the mark of Tzeentch is a stylized flaming eye, and the mark of Slaanesh is a merging of the Venus and Mars symbols.
• Teeth-Clenched Teamwork: Once in a while, the Chaos Gods will stop their infighting and work together. Fortunately, it never lasts long. In special circumstances, they are able to coordinate the crowning of true Undivided champions, like Archaon and the Daemon Prince, but they quickly fall back into infighting afterwords.
• Top God: The Chaos Gods are constantly competing against one-another to become the strongest member of the pantheon. Every ten turns or so, based on the global balance of corruption, one of the Gods will make a play in the Great Game and achieve ascendancy, providing his daemons with upgraded Unholy Manifestations until the next shift.
• Truce Zone: The Court of the Covenant is described as the only recognized neutral zone in the domains of Chaos, "where truces are composed and hostilities between the Dark Gods annulled." Courts of the Covenant are present as tier-V landmarks in a few important Chaos cities, where they provide a +25 bonus to relations with all daemonic factions, and a 25% bonus to all allegiance point gains for the player's military alliances.
• Unseen No More: The Daemons of Chaos may have had individual members visible in the prior two games, but Total War: Warhammer III sees them and their minions finally take to the stage.
• Was Once a Man: All daemon forces can recruit Chaos Spawn, failed champions who displeased their masters and were sentenced to a Fate Worse than Death (or simply acquired too many "gifts" and devolved into this form), devolving into hulking, mindless abominations that are herded into battle by their former subordinates. Tzeentch and Nurgle (Slaanesh and Khorne gain theirs with DLC) can also recruit Forsaken, which are effectively a type of lesser Spawn — They are warriors whose bodies remain mostly human (being regular infantry as opposed to monstrous infantry), but suffer from hideous mutations that have driven them to feral madness all the same.
• Weapon-Based Characterization: Each Chaos God has a weapon that is associated with their ethos, and can be seen in the arsenal of either their daemons or mortal followers.
  • Blunt and brutal Khorne favors the simple axe.
  • Inexorable Nurgle favors the slow but highly damaging great sword.
  • Manipulative and deceitful Tzeentch favors the versatile halberd.
  • Alluring Slaanesh favors the dominating whip.
• We ARE Struggling Together: Chaos has the general idea of unleashing Hell on Earth, but the Four hate each other so much they spend most of their time infighting rather than banding together to conquer the world.

Daemons of Khorne

General Tropes

"BLOOD FOR THE BLOOD GOD! SKULLS FOR THE SKULL THRONE!"

"Slay without pity; triumph without remorse. You are the legions of Khorne, His favourite warriors. You shall bring defeat and death to His enemies. You shall crush their world under your heel. To battle! Let blood flow in His name!"

Khorne, also known as Kharneth, the Blood God, The Hound, the Lord of Murder and the Hunter of Souls, is the Chaos God of war, honour, courage, rage, strength and hate. His domain of power encompasses the most basic and brutal of sentient emotion and every act of killing is said to empower him, the more vicious and bloodthirsty the better. He is said to smile upon feats of valour, strength and blood-drenched warrior skill, and is the patron of proud warriors who set themselves against the odds and emerge triumphant through strength and skill. Khorne is said to exalt the brave of both sides of the battle, while at the same time laying his terrible vengeance upon the cowardly and craven.

The Daemons of Khorne are their god in microcosm - unrelenting embodiments of fury and bloodthirsty martial honour. They are the most physically powerful and single-mindedly vicious of all daemonic creatures. Despite being creatures fundamentally of arcane origin, as all daemons are, the creatures of Khorne utilise no sorcery, keeping in with the Blood God's teachings of martial honour. Most, if not all of them, also possess an impressive resistance to assaults of arcane nature. They are beyond any bargaining, and are possessed of the keen martial intellects to rival those of great generals and cunning huntsmen, and bear colossal martial prides that do not easily suffer wounding.

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Exiles of Khorne

• Abnormal Ammo: Skull Cannons are motorized daemon-engines equipped with a swivel-gun that fires flaming skulls as ammunition. It acquires these skulls by running down enemy combatants and eating them, enabling the Skull Cannon to replenish ammunition while engaged in melee.
• Achilles' Heel:
  • Ranged troops and elite troops with small unit numbers. As Khorne hates most forms of ranged combat, his armies field even less ranged options than the regular Warriors of Chaos and even less shielded units. They are also quite reliant on collecting skulls and spilling blood of their foes to get stronger, meaning that if the enemy brings a smaller but more elite bunch of soldiers to fight, they will have less buffs to enjoy during the battle. This is very likley to compensate for the fact that next to no one can best Khorne in close quarters (only Norsca and the Warriors of Chaos at this stage can match the quality of their infantry). Skarbrand in partiuclar is a powerful melee fighter, but lacks a good counter to ranged units save just rushing them. Also, Khorne does not welcome nor tolerate feeble weaklings as they are inherently offensive to the virtues of physical strength and martial prowess that he embodies, leaving his armies with no Tier 1 infantry to use as cheap and expendable cannon fodder. Khorne also abhors magic and his faction has absolutly no wizard lords or other spellcaster to speak of.
  • While Khorne excels in actual battles, his focus exclusively on it naturally translates into Crippling Overspecialization outside of it. On the campaign map most Khornite factions will get wiped out early on because of their Hates Everyone Equally nature, meaning they'll have little to no defensive alliances and end up at war with everyone around them. Even the Exiles of Khorne, who have Skarbrand to make up for it and usually stick around most of the game, rarely becomes a major threat under A.I. control because while Skarbrand is easily capable of stomping any other NPC armies in his way, they also have no other factions backing them up and lose territory as soon as one of their major armies isn't around to protect it. Even other Chaos factions can reliably create alliances with each other and the Skaven, but Khorne will just as easily declare war on everyone and wind up worse off in the long run for it.
• Adaptational Modesty: The Khornate bloodletters in-game are shown to wear loincloths. In the tabletop, they do not wear any clothing/armor at all (they are called the naked slayers for that reason, though they have Barbie Doll Anatomy) and those that do are considered bloodletters of higher rank.
• Animal Motifs: Khorne is associated with Savage Wolves and hounds. He is referred to by his followers with epithets such as the Bloodwolf or the Hound, and his daemons include the savage, doglike Flesh Hounds.
• Arch-Enemy: Khorne's straightforward ways of killing are fundamentally opposed to those of vain Slaanesh. Khornate characters can take the "Hates Slaanesh" skill to gain combat bonuses, and Khorne's tech tree includes "Little Brother's War" which provides leadership and weapon strength bonuses against Slaaneshi armies.
  Fluttering and flouncing into battle is the way of the weak and self-indulgent. War should be waged Kharneth's way — with pure, unbridled savagery.
• Asskicking Leads to Leadership: This is a deeply held Khornate tenant. Their lords are some of the strongest fighters in the game.
• Atop a Mountain of Corpses: SKULLS FOR THE SKULL THRONE!. The Skull Throne itself can be glimpsed in the Khorne Survival battle.
• Ax-Crazy: Khorne is the living embodiment of hate and rage — words simply don't exist to describe just how furious he is at any given moment of the day. His daemons are likewise madly uncontrollable blood-drinkers.
• Badass Army: Khorne actually embodies this as a concept. From legions of bloodthirsty, but still discplined mortal Khorne Warriors of Chaos, to the hordes of daemons, ranging from endless Bloodletters, to the thick-armored hide of massive daemonic war-engines of destruction, to the cohorts of massive bat-winged Bloodthirsters, if any daemonic army can be called this, it's Khorne's.
• Beard of Barbarism: Cultists of Khorne have them, huge bristling blond beards bound with bones. Skarbrand, perhaps the most powerful single-entity unit in the game, too seems to favor a huge, plaited beard.
• Barbarian Tribe: Out of all of the Daemons of Chaos armies, Khorne has the most overt and significant mortal component of this, being the only one with multiple Chaos Warrior units. Chaos Warriors, despite their heavily armoured appearance, are indeed savage barbarians from Norsca and can be heard chanting the name of their homeland in battle alongside the supplications of their god.
• Battle Cry: It is borderline impossible to find any Warhammer media featuring followers of Khorne without one of them eventually yelling "BLOOD FOR THE BLOOD GOD! SKULLS FOR THE SKULL THRONE!" at some point. Notably, while all three games had a "BLOOD FOR THE BLOOD GOD!" DLC to add blood and gore into the game, the cry is explicitly uttered by Skarbrand at the end of third game's trailer for said DLC.
• Berserk Button: Khorne may be very easy to anger, but he is especially angered by the following:
  • Cowards. If one of the followers of Khorne displays cowardice, let's say he won't live long. Even if someone from the other side shows cowardice, Khorne will unleash the hounds.
  • Presenting him with the skulls of unworthy foes.
  • Weakness of either mind, body or soul.
  • Magic, specifically combat magic; Khorne will give a pass for enchanted or daemonically empowered weapons and armor, but start using spells against your foes and Khorne will be displeased, as magic is a coward's weapon used by schemers and backstabbers rather than honorable warriors.
  • He greatly dislikes all of his brother gods for different reasons, but he especially despises Slaanesh. His units and tech tree have multiple bonuses when fighting Slaaneshi armies.
• The Berserker: More or less the berserker faction. As daemons of bloodlust, Khorne's warriors all charge forward with reckless disregard for their lives complete with blood-curdling warcries; Bloodthirsters rend entire formations with their hell-axes, cleaving units with jubilant joy, Bloodletters rip apart with their jagged greatswords, and the no less blood-crazy Warriors rush into battle with no hesitation. Hell, their special rule encourages the player to use an aggressive playstyle, alongside the fact Khorne units are all geared for massive damaging charges and dominating melee brawls.
• Black Knight: Khorne's mortal Warriors of Chaos are his most loyal and devoted of his mortal followers, being primarily Norscan berserkers who have received his mark for their insane bloodlust. Clad in thick, red-plate and wielding red-hot weapons forged in Khorne's hellforges, they adorn themselves with bronze marks, heretical runes, and of course, skulls. Tons of skulls. Stat-wise, they are offensively focused Chaos Warriors, but with increases to their melee stats, as well as a bunch of Khorne's special rules. They come in Axe-and-Board, duel-axes, and halberd variants.
• Blood Knight: Being the minions of the god of rage and warfare, they are the most warlike of the daemons, and literally hunger for the blood of foes. This is also represented by the "Bloodletting" mechanic. Khorne followers gain increasingly powerful buffs in the form of a meter that raises after successful battles and other actions. Since they're bloodthirsty, but like winning, defeats will lower the bar, and inaction will further decrease till it starts stacking debuffs on the army.
• Blue-and-Orange Morality: Can a being of such power truly be judged by mortal ethics? Khorne is the embodiment of rage, to judge him harshly for killing and destroying is like judging a forest fire evil for burning.
  • In particular, it would be a fatal mistake to think that he has something against slaughtering civilians en masse because of some ethic: It's simply that he prizes more fights against a Worthy Opponent.
• Boring, but Practical: Compared to the elaborate spells, complex artillery contractions and ranged technology of other, flashier factions including the other daemonic ones, Khorne excels at raw melee power above all else. As a result most Khornate armies will simply charge in and smash the enemy frontline, but they'll do a damn good job of it. Even Khorne's "basic" infantry including Bloodletters and Chaos Warriors of Khorne are among the strongest infantry units in the game. Whatever disadvantages Khorne has, in most straight up melee brawls his units will win almost every time.
• Brutal Honesty: Khorne looks down on deception and trickery as weak. As such, his daemons are one of the few daemons whose claims cannot be taken for granted (or with less salt than other daemons), for they are brutally honest when speaking, with extra emphasis on the "brutal" part.
• Big Red Devil: Khornate Daemons generally resemble classical depictions of red-skinned, horned and cloven-hoofed demons, with the towering and bat-winged Bloodthirsters most closely embodying this trope. To be specific:
  • The Bloodletters are the most common; known as "The Horned Ones" they act as Khorne's most loyal footsoldiers. Being almost skeletal, hunched-backed, and fiery-eyed, they are said to embody the spirit of soldiers in war, albeit bloodthirsty to an insane degree. They have excellent melee abilities, being able to charge hard and fast, butcher anything standing in their way, and deal massive amounts of raw damage with their fiery weapons. Despite having low armor and melee defense, they get a powerful ward-save that makes them surprisingly tanky. They come in two variants; regular Bloodletters and Exalted Bloodletters- Khorne's most favored daemonic soldiers, clad in blazing marks, they can take any other infantry unit and win. Above even the Exalted Bloodletters are Bloodreapers, which act as battle sergeants for the forces of Khorne. The most elite among the Bloodletters become Heralds of Khorne, and command his armies in battle.
  • Then there are the aforementioned Bloodthirsters, perhaps the most feared daemons in existence; colossal monstrous embodiments of Khorne's fury, they are said to represent his undying rage and lust for battle. They take to the skies with their bat-like wings, crimson fur, and hateful battle-cries filling anyone mortal who sees them with dread and terror. Despite being living embodiment of destruction, they are fiendishly intelligent, being some of the most terrifying Four Star Badasses amongst daemon-kind. As they are Strong and Skilled, they have very powerful stat-lines, being able to reliably fight anything sent against them, alongside a large variety of powerful augments. They come as monsters, and then there's the Exalted variant; especially favored champions of Khorne who are some of the most powerful non-Legendary Lords in melee.
• Breath Weapon: Bloodthirsters appear to be able to breath fire as a ranged attack.
• Brutish Character, Brutish Weapon: Axes are Khorne's favorite weapons. Bloodthirsters wield enormous two-handed battleaxes in combat, and Exalted Bloodthirsters pair a slightly smaller axe with an appropriately gigantic whip. Warriors of Khorne also use one-handed axes, with their two variants carrying either a tower shield or a second axe in their off-hand.
• Civilization Destroyer: Khorne cares not for civilized existence, preferring to destroy everything around him, and his followers follow suit. In-game, while Khornate forces can colonize settlements, they must expend skulls to do so.
• Close-Range Combatant: Khorne is a War God who abhors cowardice and hesitation, so his minions eschew most forms of ranged weaponry as well as magic. The notable exception is the Skull Cannon, a light-artillery chariot that fires the flaming skulls of its own victims. Text for Khornate Soul Grinders indicates that they also have a ranged attack.
• Cool Bike: Somewhat weirdly, it appears that Blood Thrones and Skull Cannons are daemonic motorcycles.
• Cool Helmet: The helmets of the chaos warriors in Khorne's service eschew traditional Horns of Villainy in favor of rectangular ornamentation designed to resemble Bloodletter horns or the skull-faced sigil of Khorne himself.
• A Commander Is You: An Elitist/Brute faction. The Khornate roster focuses on powerful, heavily armored troops that charge into the heat of combat and slowly get even more powerful the more casualties they inflict. They have access to powerhouse units such as Skullcrushers, Bloodthirsters, and Khornebulls that excel at breaking the enemy lines with their charge. As a trade-off, Khorne is the only faction in the game without access to magic and has limited ranged options such as Skull Cannons.
• Decapitation Presentation: A common end result of his followers winning fights, as they collect the skulls of the worthy and put them on spikes and wargear. The worthiest are offered to Khorne, and those join the pile of the Skull Throne. Most of his mechanics revolve around gathering skulls.
• Does Not Like Magic: In a nutshell, it's for cowards. On the other hand, Khorne has no qualms with bequeathing enchanted weapons and armors to his followers to further increase their already incredible killing power. Daemon summoning is also okay. In essence, Khorne permits sorcery so long as you're not using it to win your battles for you, expecting you to use this equipment personally or joining the daemons in the fight. Pointing out that this might be hypocrisy will see you die a death more violent than any can imagine. Khornate units are one of the few Chaos units innately blessed with some form of magic dampener and Khorne does not possess his own lore of spells (he's the only god whose mark prevents its bearer from becoming a spellcaster).
• Do Wrong, Right: Khorne doesn't have anything against slaughtering defenseless civilians or people who can't fight back for any moral reasons. He just sees them as unworthy kills and does not like being offered skulls from dishonourable kills.
• Elemental Motifs: Khorne's armies have a consistent association with fire, specifically Hellfire. Warriors of Khorne sport Flaming Swords and Volcanic Veins, many units spit gouts of flame during attack or idle animations, and the Skull Cannon chariot fires Flaming Skulls as ammunition.
• Elite Army: Khorne is very heavy focused in army compositions, their units are better than other factions at high tiers, and they have access to an abundance of elite soldiers. To give a good illustration of this, their first infantry unit they can train are Chaos Warriors of Khorne, a unit that can outfight many other factions' early elites by default. As a negative, most of their options are on the expensive side, and the only thing coming close to affordable "trash" are their warhounds and Chaos Spawn.
• Emotion Eater: Any expression of anger, no matter how small or for whatever reason will make Khorne more powerful. And any instance of killing will serve him, whether it is done by his followers or by those who think they oppose him.
• Enemy Civil War: Once Khorne has enough corruption on the map, the player has access to an Unholy Manifestation called Eternal War, which spawns a hostile Khorne army right by the player. It seems counter-intuitive, till you realize Khorne must sustain his armies through constant battle or they take debuffs, Skulls can be gathered, and the Manifestation can be timed to allow Khorne armies to chain settlement razings (whose action refills Khorne armies movement points, which can be further increased with an Eternal War army).
• Even Evil Has Standards: Khorne detests cowards. This includes people who offer him unworthy kills. His followers are similarly honorable and detest the craven worshippers of the other Chaos Gods.
• Evil Is Burning Hot: Khorne and his daemons are frequently depicted as wielding flaming weapons and occasionally being on fire, going with the whole Hellfire motif.
• Expy: Bryan Ansel (essentially co-creator of Games Workshop), has stated that Khorne was the based on the Conan the Barbarian version of the Celtic deity Crom.
• Fire and Brimstone Hell: Khorne's domain in the Realm of Chaos is a pretty straightforward example. Rocky geography, lakes of lava, forbidding architecture festooned in spikes, and of course hordes of Big Red Devils trying to kill you.
• Flaming Sword: A very common motif, most of Khorne's units have these. Bloodletters wield two-handed swords wreathed in fire, and Khorne Warriors wield inferno-tipped axes.
• Four-Star Badass: Khorne himself, being a God of War, is probably the originator for every tactic and stratagem of war ever created. Khornate Chaos Lords are also often this in ADDITION to being unstoppable berzerkers. Just look at Taurox and Ghoritch.
• Gameplay and Story Integration: Khornate factions must destroy in order to expand. In order to colonize or occupy new land you need to sacrifice skulls, meaning a Khorne faction that wants to expand needs to raze five settlements for every two they claim. They make up for this by being able to automatically settle ruins in the same province as one of their settlements assuming nobody else claims them first, which further encourages a Khorne faction to wipe out everyone around them so those ruins don't get stolen.
• Gameplay and Story Segregation: Despite Khorne making it a point that you need to offer him skulls you personally gathered (hence his hatred of magic users, viewed as cowardly for letting magic do the job for them), Khorne factions can find skull piles to offer him at the sites of battles they did not take part in.
• Genius Bruiser: Supremely powerful and possesses knowledge of everything that's related to fighting and killing.
• Giant Flyer: Both variants of Bloodthirsters can freely fly.
• Gladiator Games: Khorne has a respect for these (or at least the ones that fight in them). His option to destroy a Cult is to convert it into a Fighting Pit (essentially a Gladiator Arena), which also teleports his army to the former Cult’s location (implied to be the result of a mass sacrifice as the gladiators slaughter each-other). Additionally, many of the battlefields around the Brass Citadel are massive arenas centered around a building-sized blood fountain, all the better for Khorne and his followers to watch would-be champions prove themselves.
• Hair-Trigger Temper: Eeyup. He has the most sensitive hair trigger temper, his daemons are lesser reflections of his unending rage, and he causes this trait in his mortal followers.
• Hates Everyone Equally: As the embodiment of hate. Khorne factions receive a hefty aversion penalty to diplomacy with most other races.
• Heavily Armored Mook: Khorne's faction, ranging from the blood-soaked Warriors of Khorne, too the armor-plated Juggernauts, are one of the very few Daemon factions that have access to heavy armor for most of their units; even their non-armored Bloodletters, thanks to their scaly skin, are comparatively tankier than the other daemons of the other Chaos Gods. Combined this with their ward-save, Khorne's units are very tanky.
• Hellfire: Most of Khorne's units have this in the form of flaming weapons are being covered in thick layers of flames. His realm is also this to an extreme-degree. It even takes the form of his special rule, Hellblade; all Khorne units get an additional 20 percent in regular and armor-piercing damage after they make eighty kills.
• Hellhound: Flesh Hounds are daemons resembling a cross between large canines and reptiles, with lizard frills and spiked brass collars. Khorne sends them out to hunt those who displease him, and occasionally gifts them to his champions to serve as a Right-Hand Attack Dog.
• Hell Is War: Khorne's domain is filled with various armies, be it his personal minions or mortals that found themselves there by accident (or on purpose), all roaming around and attacking anyone and anything that crosses their paths. Khorne wouldn't have it any other way.
• Hero Killer: Bloodthirsters combine massive baseline stats with the ability to fly, a flaming attack and anti-large. As a result they excel at targeting and taking out lords and heroes on mounts and even monstrous lords.
• Hot-Blooded: As a living incarnation of rage and hatred, Khorne has very little in the way of emotional control, and tends to immediately act upon his latest impulse.
• Horse of a Different Color: Juggernauts are demonic, biomechanical rhinos used as armored mounts by the forces of Khorne. In the announcement trailer, groups of Bloodcrushers and Skullcrushers (Bloodletters and mortal Khornate warriors, respectively, riding Juggernaughts) are seen charging Kislevite Lancers.
• Horny Vikings: The Norscans are some of the most devoted of Khorne's mortal followers, and their Chaos Warrior bands flock to his crest constantly. More overtly, the Cultist of Khorne is a Norscan warrior who refers to his god in terms roughly reminiscent of actual Old Norse terms of Odin, such as 'Axefather' - 'Allfather', etc. Nevermind also that both Odin and Khorne are gods of battle-madness.
• I Have Many Names: Arkhar, Kharneth, Khorghar, the Blood-Wolf, the Wolf-Father, the Axe-Father, for starters. In addition to his other well deserved titles granted by other mortal races.
• Irony: Khorne is legendary for his disdain for ranged combat. Khornate Daemons are the only Daemon faction with proper artillery. Additionally, Soul Grinders all have ranged attacks except for one... and it's Slaanesh's, not Khorne's.
• Large and in Charge:
• Lightning Bruiser: When compared to the Glass Cannon of Slaanesh, the Mighty Glacier of Nurgle, and the Squishy Wizard of Tzeentch. Khorne units as a whole hit hard, hit fast, and can outlast most opponents in melee.
• Mage Killer: Wizards are despised by Khorne, on the basis that using magic to win battles is a craven, cowardly tactic. The Daemons of Khorne are the only daemonic race to entirely lack spellcasters, but in exchange all Khornate units enjoy 25% magic resistance.
• Magically Inept Fighter: Ironically, despite being wholly magical beings, the daemons of Khorne eschew sorcery of any sort. Meanwhile, Khorne's mortal worshippers are universally warriors and berserkers with no interest in scholarly pursuits or magic. This makes the Daemons of Khorne the only race in the entire trilogy to have no spellcasting options whatsoever, which even the Dwarfs can boast through their Runic Magic.
• Mechanical Monster: Juggernauts, Skull Cannons, Blood Shrines and Blood Thrones are grotesque amalgamations of daemonic flesh and mechanical parts, and are just as sapient and evil as the bloodletters crewing them.
• Metallic Motifs: Khorne is heavily associated with brass, which is the primary metal used in his daemons' weapons and armor.
• Might Makes Right: General Khornate philosophy is that strength is the only virtue; compassion, generosity, mercy and similar emotions are foolishness and weakness.
• Names to Run Away from Really Fast: Khorne himself, his daemons and his followers tend to take on names that very directly describe their taste for violence and murder and their considerable skill in these things.
• Noble Demon: Subverted. While he may have a code of honor, he IS endless violence and fury incarnate.
• Nothing but Skulls: The Skull Throne of Khorne is said to be set atop an absolutely massive pile of skulls, all from brave warriors slain by the minions of the Blood God. In-game, Khornate factions use skulls as a secondary currency, which can be expended for various actions, including occupying settlements.
• Odd Job Gods: Khorne's portfolio includes battle, strength, excellence-at-arms, death, rage, bloodthirst, anger, hatred, vengeance, oaths, and hunting. At least amongst Norscans and other Northmen, as their view of the gods tends to be more nuanced, for obvious reasons.
• Our Minotaurs Are Different: Minotaurs are part of Khorne's mortal forces, functioning similarly to their vanilla counterparts in the Beastmen roster — they're hulking berserkers driven to a frenzy by the scent and taste of blood. Marked Minotaurs are called Khorneataurs, are even more bloodthirsty than other Minotaurs. They wield either dual axes or two-handed greataxes. The main difference between Beastmen Minotaurs is that Khorne's have even more armor and melee defense, making them far tankier than their unmarked kin.
• The Power of Hate: Khorne is characterized as literally the sapient embodiment of hate itself, colaesced into a lifeform that possesses Reality Warper abilities, if not Physical Godhood. To the point that it's inappropriate to imply Khorne even possess the concept of liking anything; the things he encourages and approves of are better understood to not be things he likes but things that act as richer fuel for his hate.
• Proud Warrior Race Guy: Khorne is the most popular god in the North as he relates to the Norscan way of life more directly than the other gods. Life in the North is so violent and bloodthirsty that not taking Khorne as a patron would be suicidality idiotic, so there's not much of a choice.
  • Even compared to other servants of Chaos, Khorne's minions are totally preoccupied with martial endeavors and the pursuit of a twisted notion of honor. Clandestine cults dedicated to Khorne usually take the form of illicit fighting rings and military fraternities.
• Quality over Quantity: Khorne in a nutshell. Khornate forces eschew massive hordes of weaker infantry you would see in an faction like the skaven in favor of smaller Elite Army unit compositions full of exceptionally powerful melee infantry. While this means Khorne is unmatched in melee brawls, the disadvantage is that it can be easy to be overwhelmed and surrounded. Although that's probably how Khornate devotees like it.
• Red Baron: The Blood God, the Lord of Skulls, the Lord of Battles, the Father and Inheritor of all Rage, the Brass Lord of Battles, the God of War, etc, etc.
• Red Is Violent: Armor, daemons, weapons, nearly everything associated with Khorne possesses some amount of red in it, and Khorne is by far the most ferocious and aggressive of the Chaos gods.
• Rhino Rampage: Juggernauts are daemonic, bio-mechanical rhinos that serve as the basis of monstrous cavalry, in the form of Skullcrushers (when ridden by mortal knights) and Bloodcrushers (when ridden by bloodletter daemons). Juggernauts are also available as mounts for Bloodreaper heroes and Herald lords.
• Savage Wolves: A motif of Khorne in Norscan mythology, and fittingly his armies include packs of Chaos Warhounds and daemon-beasts known as Flesh Hounds.
• Serrated Blade of Pain: Bloodletters wield large serrated swords called Hellblades, all the better for spilling blood with.
• Skeleton Motif: Khorne is all about skulls, and his sigil is a heavily stylized skull face.
• The Stoic: When not foaming-at-the-mouth furious or hateful, Khorne is this. Khorne exists only to fight and slay, and is indifferent to anything else, which is part of the reason why he hates Slaanesh so much.
• Team Killer: Khorne is infamous for this, which is why, when travelling with other Chaos forces, Khorne's berserkers are kept at arms length. In-game, they have a special stance called "Combat trials", which passively gathers skulls but onsets attrition to your own army, showing that your own army off-screen is killing each other to glorify Khorne.
• The Thunderdome: The flavor text for the "Destroy" option for Khornate cults implies that "destroyed" cults are turned into gladiator arenas where the slain are used to fuel a summoning ritual.
• Tranquil Fury: It usually overlaps with this, considering he is the God of war and murderous, Ax-Crazy rage.
• Unseen No More: Khorne shows up at the end of the "Trial By Fire" trailer, menacingly staring down at the lone Kislevite warrior and her bear that stumbled upon the Brass Citadel. This is notable for being the first time in Warhammer history that one of the Chaos Gods has been physically portrayed, rather than having one of their daemons act as a stand-in.
• Villainous Valor: As Khorne is the god of battlefield valor, his warriors, especially his mortal ones, are similarly brave, and even noble in a bloodthirsty barbaric way. As such amongst the factions of Chaos, his units have some of the highest leadership values. As a result they look down with disgust on schemers like daemons of Tzeentch, or self-indulgent followers of Slaanesh, seeing their actions as lacking honor.
• War God: Khorne is the Chaos God of war, battle and slaughter and of all emotions that come with them, gaining power from rage, hate and bloodthirst. He's very much a battle-oriented war god — he and his worshippers and daemons value strength and might above all else and have nothing but disdain for anything they perceive as cowardly or weak, such as stealth, deceit, magic, mercy, overly complex tactics or really any battle plan that doesn't boil down to rushing your enemy in a furious horde and hacking them to pieces in vicious close combat. Unsurprisingly, as he gains power from hate and violence and given the kind of universe Warhammer takes place in, he's generally depicted as the mightiest of the Gods of Chaos. Khorne's domains are warfare, martial prowess and berserker rage, and all of his worshippers are vicious and proud warriors. Fittingly, Khorne's arch-rival and foil in the pantheon of Chaos is Slaanesh, a deeply twisted example of a Love Goddess.
• Warrior Heaven: Khorne's realm is one for the men who worship him, being great halls where they fight for all eternity. Warriors who died in their beds are cursed and shamed by the Blood God, and punished by being chained to forges and made to create weapons for his legions.
• We Have Reserves: Not their units, which act as an Elite Army, but on the campaign map, their Bloodhost mechanic allows them to this. Razing a settlement grants Khorne the option to spawn a Bloodhost. A Bloodhost is a player controlled army (with a selection of random units) that has no upkeep, no ability to replenish, and no ability to recruit units, but is otherwise fully capable of doing anything a normal army can. This gives the player ability to swamp the map with endless legions of expendable Bloodhosts that can be used as suicided armies to gather skulls and weaken enemies, before their actual armies come in to finish the job. Bloodhosts can be further enhanced to include better units, more numbers, and more spawnings of Bloodhosts with technology and skills.
• World's Best Warrior: When it comes to melee focused factions, Khorne is the best all-rounder by far, combining all the best stats you need to win a melee and transforming the faction as a whole into a venerable Lightning Bruiser. While Slaanesh and the Beastmen may be more deadly on the charge, Khorne does heavy charge damage, and handily outfights them in battles of attrition. While Nurgle's rot-infested Legions are masters at holding the line, Khorne's units are very durable in extended brawls, even if he doesn't quite have the passive debuffs Grandfather Nurgle has. And while the Warriors of Chaos might be equal in their ability to fight, Khorne's roster is much more mobile. Khorne's Warriors work to be Strong and Skilled and it shows in their battle doctrine.

Skarbrand

Skarbrand the Exiled One

"One skull for the throne, the rest are mine to collect."

"I will rip the bones from your body and leave your skin to rot! But your skull I will give to the skull-god, and it will be one among the multitude."

Once the mightiest of all Khorne's Bloodthirsters, the marshal of the Blood God's war-hosts and his strong right hand, favored over all others, Skarbrand fell to the machinations of Tzeentch and allowed his pride to cloud his judgement. He betrayed Khorne, allowing his rage to overwhelm him to the point of striking at Khorne himself when his back was turned. Although this was only enough to cut a tiny chink into Khorne's armor, the Blood God's fury was boundless; he throttled Skarbrand's very soul, squeezing him dry of every aspect of personality beyond rage, before hurling him across the Realm of Chaos, banished forever from Khorne's sight. Now a mindless engine of destruction, his wings ruined, Skarbrand rages endlessly across the Realm of Chaos and the mortal world alike, taking mountains of skulls and spilling oceans of gore, but never to find redemption in the eyes of his former master.

Skarbrand leads the sub-faction "Exiles of Khorne". In Immortal Empires he begins his campaign in the Barrier Idols in the southern Badlands, where he has no shortage of enemies to choose from.

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• Adaptational Intelligence: Downplayed; most lore describes Skarbrand as something akin to a rabid beast, unable to communicate with others and merely killing anything in front of him in a berserk rage. In this game, while he remains perpetually furious as expected, he's lucid enough to converse with the Advisor, command armies and engage in diplomacy with other followers of Chaos, which is closer to his depiction in Thanquol's Doom.
• All for Nothing: When Skarbrand offers Ursun's skull to Khorne, the Blood God can be heard laughing, though the epilogue text states he is "far from" moved to forgiveness, and that Skarbrand is fated to be exiled forever, meaning the Bloodthirster's campaign was ultimately pointless.
• Ax-Crazy: Even by the low standards of Khorne's followers, Skarbrand is a mountain of uncontained rage. A lot of this has to do with the physical and metaphysical trauma he suffered at Khorne's hands, combined with simple despair at his circumstances. He can barely restrain himself from killing the Advisor, and lives to inflict slaughter and carnage. His special animations have him constantly jerk around like a crazed animal and his combat ones have him rend apart his foes with extreme glee and eagerness.
• Battle Aura: Skarbrand is always covered in smouldering ashes and wisps of black shadows.
• Beard of Barbarism: Of the braided variety. Skarbrand has a chin beard woven into a single, massive braid almost as long as his torso.
• Broke Your Arm Punching Out Cthulhu: His power is so vast that he managed to make a tiny chink in the armor of Khorne himself. His body and soul were both pulverized by Khorne in retribution, leaving him a mindless mountain of rage.
• Brought Down to Badass: His attack that made a chink in Khorne's armor was described as so powerful it would have destroyed an entire army. Since then he has been reduced from Khorne's champion and favorite Bloodthirster to a mindless, rampaging beast — and he's still likely the strongest melee Legendary Lord in the entire game!
• Butt-Monkey: Skarbrand was tricked by Tzeentch into betraying Khorne, physically and mentally pulverized in retribution for it, crippled by the loss of his wings and went from Khorne's champion to a universally hated and despised outcast aided only by other similarly disfavoured daemons of Khorne. He wanders the realms in a perpetual state of rage and despair, fruitlessly spilling oceans of blood for a master who will never forgive him. He's the only one who doesn't get what he wants in his campaign finale, as Khorne accepts the skull of Ursun but declines to forgive Skarbrand.
• Dented Iron: He has lasting scars from Khorne's forcible banishment of him. Two of his horns are broken off, his face is scarred on one side and both his wings are burned up to the point he can't fly. And that's without touching on the mental scars he bears...
• Does Not Like Magic: Like all khornate daemons, he despises magic. He almost attacks the Advisor because he smells magic in him, and only decides to cooperate with him because the latter promises him Ursun's skull.
• Dual Wielding: Wields the twin battle axes Slaughter and Carnage. They become more powerful in battle the more entities he kills, giving him more and more weapon's strength and melee attack the longer he's in combat.
• The Exile: Also known as the Exiled One, Skarbrand was cast from Khorne's sight and now labors to regain the Blood God's favor. His sub-faction is known as the "Exiles of Khorne", suggesting that the bulk of Skarbrand's followers are similarly shamed, and they suffer from a diplomacy penalty when interacting with other Khornate factions.
• Fallen Angel: A suitably dark example of this; he was Khorne's greatest champion and for his defiance and blasphemy he had his wings wrecked and thrown to the earth.
• Feral Villain: Downplayed compared to the tabletop. He's lucid enough enough to converse with the Advisor and even partake in diplomacy but still spends most of his time as a rabid, uncontrollable beast whose very presence drives others to madness and rage.
• Four-Star Badass: He's a supreme battlefield leader and is by far the most dangerous Daemon inside his band of other bloodthirsty killers.
• Hated by All: On top of Khornate forces in general having extremely slim diplomacy options, Skarband's warband, the "Exiles of Khorne", suffers from diplomacy penalties even with other Khornate warbands due to his betrayal.
• Hate Plague: Even the most disciplined warriors, friend or foe, will lose all sense of order and fly into a ravenous frenzy just by standing in his presence. Skarbrand has the active ability "Rage Embodied", an area-of-effect hex that causes all nearby enemy units to suffer from rampage for a short time.
• Hero Killer: He excels at butchering enemy leaders foolish enough to get near him, even dedicated Lord duelists.
• How the Mighty Have Fallen: Downplayed. He's been reduced to an Ax-Crazy volcano of rage - and by Khornate standards that's saying something - condemned to spend eternity butchering armies in service to a master that will never forgive him. That doesn't change the fact that he was and possibly still is the most powerful of all Khorne's Bloodthirsters. In game this is represented as him being virtually unmatched in melee combat. In the lore Order factions and even most daemons give him a wide berth.
• Lightning Bruiser: Do not be fooled by his size, Skarbrand is terrifyingly fast, hard-hitting, and will rend anything that gets into his melee range. With a speed of 85 Skarbrand can outpace most units barring dedicated light cavalry and skirmisher-hunters.
• Mage Killer: If any Wizard makes the mistake of using a spell in the vicinity around Skarbrand, it has a heavy chance of exploding in his face.
• Make Me Wanna Shout: He bellows so loudly that his Battle Cry becomes mired with Hellfire and he can launch it as a super-sonic scream at units in the form of a fiery missile!
• Must Make Amends: Skarbrand fights endlessly and fruitlessly to regain Khorne's favor, reaping a tremendous tally of skulls in the hope that his former master will deign to notice him. The Advisor is able to gain Skarbrand's assistance in his quest by promising him the skull of the god Ursun, which would make for a truly worthy offering. Khorne accepts the skull, but Skarbrand's exile is permanent regardless.
• One-Man Army: Skarbrand is a melee powerhouse that can butcher elite units like nobody’s business.
• Self-Fulfilling Prophecy: Due to his personality being reduced to near-mindless rage he's incapable of realizing that in his constant butchery to regain Khorne's favor he's acting as an even more dedicated servant to the Blood God, meaning there's no pragmatic reason for Khorne to forgive him. His campaign ending reflects this, where Khorne accepts the Skull of Ursun but simply laughs and doesn't forgive Skarbrand.
• The Starscream: Skarbrand was once Khorne's Number Two until Tzeentch tricked him into thinking he was strong enough to usurp the Blood God. It ended poorly.
• Two-Faced: Due to his injuries, the right side of Skarbrand's face is shredded down to the bone, and the horns on that side of his head have been snapped in half as well.
• Villainous BSoD: Has been in this state for a pretty long time, as his rage is fuelled by a knowledge of everything he lost following his treachery. All Skarbrand's acts of roaming the Realm of Chaos and the Mortal Realms slaughtering everything in his path are conducted in the vain hope that Khorne might be impressed and welcome him back to his side.
• Wings Do Nothing: Justified. Skarbrand's wings were destroyed in the crash landing he suffered after Khorne cast him from the Skull Throne; since the damage lingers untreated, Skarbrand can no longer fly. This doesn't stop him from jumping into the air and his wings trying and failing to carry him aloft, seemingly out of muscle memory.
• World's Best Warrior: Do not get into melee with Skarbrand. Do not. In terms of sheer power yes, Skarbrand is quite possibly the most dangerous Legendary Lord in close quarters combat, period; he combines an utterly insane stat-line with a series of powerful augments. His starting weapon strength is strong enough to beat most other "duelists", but it can very quickly rapidly rise, through a combination of Slaughter's mechanics, he gains more and more stat bonuses the longer he fights, can double his attack power through a togglable ability "Wrathful Reaper", and if he somehow gets into a losing fight, he gets even more boosts, possibly reaching the thousands without any upgrades. The end result of this combined with his blistering speed, towering leadership, and demonic hellfire, Skarbrand is a terrifying force to be reckoned with and can two shot most enemy Lords and solo entire armies on his lonesome.

Daemons of Tzeentch

General Tropes

"Manipulate fate for Tzeentch!"

"I watch you. I see the hatred in your eyes, well hidden behind courtly graces. I listen. I know the terrible darkness that hides behind your well-rehearsed lies. I wait for you at the edge of sanity. I taste the pain in your mind, the yearning to end this charade. I make my home in the darkest pits of your soul. In the shadows, I bide my time. I patiently wait for you to open your eyes and realise that it is by my will alone that you draw breath. For I am Tzeentch and you are my puppet who dances to my tune."

Tzeentch, also known as Tchar, The Wind-lord, The Raven God, The Eagle, Chi'an Chi, the Changer of Ways and the Great Conspirator, is the Chaos God of magic, change, evolution, destiny, lies and trickery. He is flux embodied, a mad daemon-god who alone truly embodies the terrible energies and momentum of Chaos. He bears a strong claim to all who profess to worship the Northern Gods, for without transformation, a warrior cannot ascend to greatness, the gods cannot grant their blessings, and the living cannot die. He is the Great Sorcerer of Chaos and Bringer of Change, for make no mistake — endless, broiling change is the truest nature of Chaos, and Chaos is the source of the eldritch energies that mortals, in their superstition, have named "magic".

The Daemons of Tzeentch are made of insanity and mayhem, the antithesis of order and law. They subvert and mutate the natural order not out of cruelty, but are motivated by a combination of their own easily provoked boredom and the assumption that their victims must similarly be driven to ennui by their static and staid existences — something instantly cured by the mutating gift of change.

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Oracles of Tzeentch

The Deceivers

• Achilles' Heel:
  • Fast melee units. Tzeentch's units rely on staying out of reach and playing hit-and-run to make the most use of their magic, ranged attacks, and barriers. Units capable of getting in their faces quickly and staying in them will quickly tear them to pieces.
  • On the campaign, Tzeentch's casualty replenishment is terrible and unlike every other faction there is no way to boost it as regular Lords don't have a replenishment skill and Tzeentch has no local replenishment building. This makes Tzeentch's armies incredibly vulnerable to both the concept and mechanic of attrition since they have a lot of trouble replenishing any losses they take. Additionally, while Tzeentch's armies are very effective against Nurgle's armies they're weak to Nurgle corruption, as getting Corrupted by Nurgle can render a Tzeentch lord completely useless with its casualty replenishment penalty making this even worse.
  • Ironically enough, archers. Similar to the Vampire Coast, Tzeentch armies don't actually like it when anything shoots back at them since nearly all of Tzeentch's units have lower range than most factions' archers. Only the Soul Grinder of Tzeentch can shoot from further away, but even then it is no match for actual artillery.
• Airborne Mook: Something of a specialty of Tzeentch's armies, boasting an abnormally high number of flying units: in addition to common furies, they can field screamers, Sky Surfing knights and chariots, and feather-winged Lords of Change as both monster units and army lords. The reveal trailer for Grand Cathay shows Tzeentchian daemons travelling in massive flying swarms, leading to a Sky-Consuming Dogfight when they meet the Cathayan air force.
• Animal Motifs: Tzeentch is strongly tied with birds, especially corvids. He is often referred to as the Raven or the Crow, and his daemons include the Lords of Change, who resemble giant humanoid birds, and Pink Horrors, who often sport avian beaks.
• Arch-Enemy: Of Nurgle. Nurgle is the god of cycles, despair, rot and stagnation. Tzeentch is the lord of change, hope, mutation and optimism. The two are fundamentally opposed because they want the opposite thing (endless stagnation into despair and rot vs. constant random evolution). Tzeentchian characters can take the "Hates Nurgle" skill for some combat bonuses, while Tzeentch's tech tree includes "Pestilent Hatred" which provides leadership buffs against Nurglish armies, as well as a slight resistance to plague spreading. Gameplay-wise, they're the only pair of Chaos Gods who have a Mutual Disadvantage (at least in the campaign) — Tzeentch's forces will destroy Nurgle in a straight fight (they inflict lots and lots of ranged magic damage that cuts through Nurgle's durability and hit well before the Daemons of Nurgle can strike back), but Tzzentch's low casualty replenishment means that Nurglite armies can gradually wear down Tzeentchian armies via attrition.
  The fool god Nurgle, with his flat circles of unchanging time. Let there be disruption! Let there be change!
• The Archmage: Tzeentch's forces boast a massive affinity for magic that blows every other faction out of the water — all of Tzeentch's Legendary Lords, Lords, and Heroes have access to a Lore of Magic (for balance reasons, Lords can only wield the Lore of Tzeentch or the Lore of Metal, while Cultists can wield the Lore of Fire). Not even the Vampire Counts can boast this; the Wight King is solely a melee hero. The Daemons of Tzeentch also have numerous options for manipulating the Winds of Magic, either to give their own armies and territories a boost or take magic away from their enemies. All of his heroes, alongside some of his regular units also posses various bound-spells (which can be further enhanced through upgrades on the campaign), resulting in truly terrifying levels of magical power outside your Winds of Magic reserves.
• Art Evolution: Regular Lords of Change retain their TW:W1 model, which is based on this mini◊ from Forge World, first released in 2012. Exalted Lords of Change, meanwhile, are based on this mini◊, released in 2017 (a year after the original Total War: Warhammer).
• Badass Army: What they lack in numbers and martial strength, the forces of Tzeentch are no less impressive than their kin, thanks to their mastery of Black Magic, ability to control and manipulate the battlefield, and abundance of powerful, warp-fire lobbing assets.
• Badass Bookworm: Any follower of Tzeentch is certainly well-read, and very accustomed to reading Tomes of Eldritch Lore and researching the intricacies of Chaos. They are no less powerful and deadly than the other daemon factions.
• Balance Buff: Tzeetch got an enormous one in Shadows of Change, which gave his forces 'much greater ability to hold their own in melee. In addition to adding in dedicated melee lords and heroes in the form of Chaos Lords of Tzeentch and Exalted Heroes of Tzeentch, they also gained two melee monsters in the form of the Mutalitj Vortex Beast and the Cockatrice, additional melee infantry through Tzaangors, and finally monstrous cavalry via Centigors of Tzeentch. Combined with ranged cavalry in the form of Flamebringers, and Tzeentch now has ways to handle threats that would other severely handicap their armies in the past.
• Basilisk and Cockatrice: Shadows of Change adds the Cockatrice, a Chaos-warped avian Giant Flier whose "petrifying gaze" ability passively reduces the melee attack and speed of nearby enemies by 10%. When it dies, the cockatrice's powers turn against itself, as it falls to earth and shrivels into an inert stone statue.
• Batman Gambit: Tzeentch does this as a thought exercise, every moment of every day for all eternity.
• Black Magic: The Lore of Tzeentch is a highly destructive and unstable form of Entropy and Chaos Magic that only the most magically adept (and insane) followers of Chaos can perform with even a small chance of safety. None of these spells will buff or support your own units as they are fully geared towards destroying the foe in ways perfectly suited for the God of Magic.
• Black Knight: Chaos Warriors of Tzeentch are more mystically inclined then most, and are some of his most dreadful mortal followers. They go into battle with hell-crafted armor, forged with blue metal and bear his livery on greatshields. They come as Chaos Knights, mounted on daemon-steeds, or the more elite and dangerous, Doom Knights, his greatest champions who ride upon floating disks and act as a terrifying airborne cavalry
• Bilingual Bonus: Tzeentch is known by the Cathayans as Chi'an Chi. In modern pinyin, this would be most closely equivalent to Jiān Qí (奸奇; the "Qí" is pronounced like "Chi"); Jiān (奸) means "traitorous" or "deceiving", while Qí (奇) means "strange" or "bizarre", thus giving a final name that means something like "treacherous strangeness" or "deceitful strangeness", which describes Tzeentch perfectly.
• Bird People: The Greater Daemons of Tzeentch, the Lords of Change, take the form of towering avian humanoids in the material realm. Heralds of Tzeentch, as observed in both concept art and the "Enter the World of Tzeentch" trailer, also have avian beaks, as do Exalted Flamers.
• Body Horror: Of all the Chaos Gods, Tzeentch is the freest in doling out mutation, simply because constant, perpetual change is his reason for existing and his followers should embrace this in mind, soul and body. All of his units are covered in tentacles, extra heads, extra eyes, extra mouths, extra everything!
• Bright Is Not Good: Sky blue and gold are his favoured colours. He can change into any colour if he wills it.
• Carry a Big Stick: Tzeentch's forces really seem to enjoy using halberds, with everything from his dedicated Chaos Warriors to Chaos Lords of Tzeentch wielding them. This seems to be an extension for his focus on change and adaptability - halberds are incredibly versatile as opposed to Khorne's favoring of axes (which Nurgle seems to share) and Slaanesh's obsession with whips.
• A Commander Is You: A Technical/Ranger faction. The Tzeentchian roster is made up of several weaker troops that rely on ranged attacks, offensive spells (with the Lore of Tzeentch being entirely damage or debuff spells) or hit and run tactics to do damage. Out of all the monogod factions, they have the best ranged capabilities, and they have the potential to be the most magically adept faction in the game as they can upgrade their Lords of Change (both as Lords and single entity monsters) to wield a wide range of spells from different lores of magic, allowing for whole armies of spellcasters without resorting to Hero spam. All Tzeentch units come with Barrier, a damage shield that recovers when a unit is not engaged in combat, emphasizing a hit and run style of play. Their roster has few units with staying power, relying on Forsaken to hold the line. In their place there are several fast flying units, such as Doom Knights, Screamers of Tzeentch, and Burning Chariots, which can perform fast, damaging hit and run, or bombard enemy lines with ranged firepower.
• The Chessmaster: One of Tzeentch's aspects is the Great Conspirator, wielding his powers over fate and prophecy to orchestrate bizarre schemes. Indeed, he doesn't necessarily even have an end goal, as the plans are not a means to an end, but rather the end in of themselves. This is reflected in game with the "Changing of the Ways" mechanic, wherein Tzeentchian factions can pull off stunts like transferring settlements between factions, manipulating and spying on various armies (including giving war-coordination targets to non-allies), instantly inciting rebellions, breaking alliances between factions or outright starting wars out of the blue.
• Chronic Backstabbing Disorder: He really has a problem with this, considering his modus operandi. A significant number of his own daemons would freely desert or double cross him if given the chance, save for the fact he's the only one who knows their true names. The other Gods are wary of him because of it. Ironically, he's also the one who usually forms alliances between the Chaos Gods. This is probably the biggest reason they are wary of him; if the Great Conspirator wants to team up, they already know the offer is loaded in Tzeentch's favor and will fall apart soon.
• Combat Tentacles: The appearance of random tentacles is one of Tzeentch's favorite gifts to his faithful. Sometimes it's one of your two arms transforming, sometimes it's a new limb.
• Consummate Liar: He is called the Liar God for a reason.
• Creepy Crows: While Nurgle may be associated with crows among the Norscans, it's Tzeentch who really has the corvid motif — Tzeentch is explicitly known as the Raven God, and his avian Lords of Change are based more upon ravens rather than eagles, as opposed to what his Norscan Animal Motif would suggest. Saarthorael takes the form of a White Crow for a reason.
• Crystal Landscape: As Tzeentch corruption increases, large growths of blue crystal begin to appear in both the campaign and battle maps.
• Deal with the Devil: Tzeentch loves these, often making promises to mortals or existing followers with terrible results mostly because it amuses him. At the end of the campaign, Be'lakor figures this out the hard way when he is allowed to retain his corporeal body but is forced to serve the player's faction.
• Evil Is Petty: All of the Chaos Gods are this to an extent, but Tzeentch revels in it. He routinely makes pacts with followers with misleading language, liberal usage of exact words, or horrible unintended consequences. That's when he isn't just changing his mind or going back on deals altogether just because he feels like it.
• Evil Makes You Monstrous: Gruesome mutation is common to all servants of Chaos, but it's especially prominent with Tzeentch, under whom transformation of any sort is glorified. On top of Chaos Spawn, Tzeentchian armies can also field the heavily disfigured Forsaken infantry from the Warriors of Chaos roster. Both units are little more than feral berserkers, being failed champions whose minds have shattered under the changes wrought upon their bodies. They're among the very few dedicated melee units in Tzeentch's roster.
• Evil Sorcerer: An entire faction of them. All of Tzeentch's hero units (and some of his regular ones) have the ability to use spells, and are masters of Black Magic.
• Evilutionary Biologist: Tzeentch is fuelled by the same energies that drive evolution, and seeks to force evolution upon others, hence the readiness with which he dispenses physical transformations. The problem is that Tzeentch doesn't comprehend moderation (or doesn't care), and instead causes his worshippers and victims alike to evolve and mutate and change and change and change until they become indescribable horrors or die (or both).
• Extra Eyes: If Tzeentch thinks you need more eyes, you will get more eyes. Screamers have eyes all over their backs, and horrors seem to sprout more eyeballs as they grow in power (just one for blue horrors, and up to four for exalted pink horrors). The Exalted Lord of Change seen in the game's cinematic announcement trailer has three eyes clustered together just on the one side of his face we see.
• Extra-ore-dinary: Tzeentchian lords and heroes (with the exception of the Cultist) can take the transmutation-centric Lore of Metal for spellcasting, harkening back to the Lords of Change in the first game.
• Eye Motifs: Daemons of Tzeentch tend to be peppered in Extra Eyes, and the primary symbol of Tzeentch is a stylized flaming eye. Tzeentch's personal themes cross with plenty of eye motifs, particularly deception and the pursuit of forbidden knowledge.
• Failure Is the Only Option: Taken to its illogical extreme. Due to his nature as the god of change, Tzeentch requires things to constantly be moving, and never to be settled. As such, he will die if any of his myriad plans succeed, thus every one of his plans will fail because he sabotages them, and he has several plans that run completely contrary to each of his other plans by design (though not as the end). This is the real measure of his chessmastery skills, the fact that he has millions of these simultaneously running, most extremely complex and many spanning centuries, and not one of them succeed even by accident because he is that damn good.
• For the Lulz: Tzeentch cannot be foiled, simply because he doesn't actually have a plan to foil. If Tzeentch ever actually "won", then he would probably cease to exist, because that would mean that nothing would ever be able to change any more.
• Feathered Fiend: Lords of Change are avian horrors brought forth by Tzeentch's darkest dream. They usually take the form of giant, vulture-like daemons, clad in splendid robes, and feathered in all kinds of luminous colors. They are some of the most powerful wizards in the setting; as Tzeentch's chosen daemons they are delightfully twisted sorcerers and scholars, but are most of all schemers. Even by daemon standards, Lords of Charge are notoriously unreliable, manipulative, and malicious. They weave complex plans and gambles only they understand, and will betray/discard everyone involved, allies including, for the sheer heck of it. On the battlefield, regular Lords of Change still have access to the Lore of Magic, and take to the skies as form-disrupting Giant Flyers. Exalted Lords of Change act as Lords, and are even more vibrant and beautiful in their splendor, and even more deadly with their spellcasting.
• Flying Seafood Special: Screamers are daemonic animals that resemble airborne stingrays festooned in Spikes of Villainy. They glide along the currents of the Winds of Magic to feed on stray souls, "swimming" in large, eerie schools.
• Glass Cannon: One of Tzeentch's army trademarks. Many of his ranged units can dish out exceptional damage capable of decimating enemy units from a distance. If they're cornered in melee they'll fall apart and they're even vulnerable to retaliation from enemy ranged units.
• Go Mad from the Revelation: Tzeentch is the keeper of all knowledge, and may grant that knowledge to those who supplicate it from him. However, those who do so do not always have minds capable to accepting the horrible truths Tzeentch has to offer, and this is an all too common result.
• Giant Flyer: Lords of Change are among the two types of greater daemon capable of flight, thanks to their massive feathered wings.
• Immortal Genius: Tzeentch and his forces often epitomize this trope. The Chaos God of Change and Magic, he is not only practically omniscient, is possessed of vast swathes of information on almost every conceivable subject, maintaining vast and impossible libraries of forbidden knowledge. His greater daemons, the Lords of Change, are masters of magic and brilliant tacticians. Mortals who serve him well may eventually be awarded with both immortality and inhuman wisdom, perhaps even ascending to become the near-omniscient Daemon Princess of Tzeentch... provided they don't go insane first.
• Jackass Genie: Beware his sick sense of humor and his close attention to the fine print.
• Long-Range Fighter: Compared to the other Chaos Factions, Tzeentch has a limited number of dedicated melee units (including no options for Chaos Warriors or Chosen variants) but makes up for that with a wider selection of units with ranged attacks and universal access to magic for heroes and lords.
• Mad God: He's a god of scheming who can never allow himself to actually win because it would kill him, so he creates plans upon plans upon plans which are all deliberately set up to fail. Even by the standards of the Chaos Gods, Tzeentch is batshit crazy.
• Magical Library: The Hidden Library of Tzeentch. It holds every magical spell, every prophecy, every piece of knowledge one could hope to find. Just two small problems: the books are alive, and they're pure evil. This is also the theme of many of his building slots.
• Magnificent Bastard: invoked Tzeentch is the literal god of Magnificent Bastards. Whatever you do, he will benefit, Just As Planned.
• Malevolent Masked Men: All Cultists of Tzeentch wear masks that give them horned, beaked visages or moon-shaped faces.
• Manipulative Bastard: Good lord. Tzeentch makes the High Elves blush in embarrassment at how lowly their intrigue system looks in comparison. Tzeentch is notorious for his double-deals, sudden betrayals, and just generally being a spiteful Jerkass that treats everyone like a pawn. Daemons of Tzeentch are untrustworthy to the extreme, they will lie, cheat, and mislead, often times just for the sake of being a backstabber. Much of Tzeentch's gameplay revolves around scheming behind the scenes through his "Changer of Ways" mechanics, to have the other factions break alliances, outright start wars between factions that were once great friends, sour their relationships, found rebel groups and have them turn against each other, directly give settlements to any faction of your choosing all while having different Tzeentchian cults pop up in enemy territory in order to make an invasion against his foes much easier.
• Mobile Maze: The Maze of Tzeentch, which shifts and contorts to trap any who enter it, and it is mostly built with Alien Geometries. In-game, the gimmick of transversing Tzeentch's realm is the transversal itself, the place is a labytnithian maze, in which players must interact with glyphs to see if they are being lead to the library itself, and becomes a mind-game in which players need to select the right ones in proper order, though to toy with the player, sometimes they change and you have to think quick on your feet, less you end up surrounded by Tzeentch's Legions.
• Multi-Armed and Dangerous: Horrors, as shown in the picture above, are practically guranteed to have more than two arms — usually three, but given Tzeentch's penchant for mutations, this isn't a definitive number by any means.
• Odd Job Gods: Tzeentch's portfolio covers Hope, Envy, Treachery, Transformation, Change, and Magic/Psionics. Tzeentch is the patron god of anyone who hopes to pull off any kind of plan. However, he's also the patron god of Gambit Pileups, anyone who is a Spanner in the Works or Unwitting Instigator of Doom, and ensuring you Didn't See That Coming.
• Our Monsters Are Weird: Even by the low standards of daemons, Tzeentch's creations stand out for being downright bizarre looking:
  • Flamers are tubular, almost fungoid-looking monsters with fleshy skirts, Too Many Mouths, and Rubber-Hose Limbs that belch Technicolor Fire. With no feet to speak of, they instead jet around on their own exhaust.
  • Horrors are gibbering fleshballs with bright pink or blue skin and an entirely random number of arms, legs, eyes, tentacles and mouths. Horrors chosen to be Heralds of Tzeentch often have a metallic looking beak on one of their mouths. Then there's the Exalted Flamer, which acts as beaked, nightmarish single entity flame-thrower monster, who fires what are described as the most damaging single fire missile in the game.
  • Rather than a Horse of a Different Color, Tzeentch's "mount" daemon is a circular flying platform that allows the rider to engage in Sky Surfing. Larger variants are instead flying chariots pulled by a Flying Seafood Special. Did we mention that those discs are actually a modified form of the aforementioned Flying Seafood Special?
• Playing with Fire: Cultists of Tzeentch wield the Lore of Fire, the Lore of Tzeentch incorporates spells like "Tzeentch's Firestorm", and Tzeentchian units in general make heavy use of Technicolor Fire in their attacks, with pink and blue horrors tossing small warp-fire balls as precursor attacks, while Flamers and their exalted variant unleash entire waves of uncontrollable Hellfire.
• Psycho Pink: A secondary color of Tzeentch is bright pink, seen mostly in the form of Pink Horrors and Technicolor Fire.
• Punny Name: One of the potential names for Iridescent Horror heroes is Liar'lar'panz'oun'fyre.
• Regenerating Shields, Static Health: All Tzeentch units come equipped with the Barrier trait, a set of magical Deflector Shields that regenerate outside of combat and effectively work as a second, smaller health bar. This makes Tzeentchian units very effective at hit-and-run tactics (such as cycle charging).
• Sky Surfing: Discs of Tzeentch are daemons bound into the form of a flying platform, which favored servants of the Raven God can ride — Heralds of Tzeentch and Iridescent Horrors use them to gain a stable vantage point above the battle, and an Air Jousting cavalry option is available through Doom Knights of Tzeentch. There's also the Burning Chariot, a much larger disc pulled into battle by screamers, available as a lord/hero mount or as a unit crewed by an exalted flamer.
• Squishy Wizard: What defines Tzeentch's army, which is an army of sorcerers. They have by far the most plentiful and potent of magic power; all of your Heroes have access to spells, even some of your monsters, you have a large selection of bound spells, which cost no winds to use, resulting in the player being able to call a torrential wave of blazing, cheap spells, over and over again like no one else can. Furthermore, a majority of you units have the ability to summon baleful torrents of fire dealing constant, and heavy magic-fire damage from afar, and, helping out with the "squishy part", your units all posses magical barriers that protect them from actual damage...but once that goes down, you'll find Tzeentch is by far the least durable of the Chaos Daemons, and what decent melee units you do have, barring Doom Knights, are in the "only decent" selection.
• Technicolor Fire: Fire in vivid blues and pinks is a widespread projectile attack among Tzeentch's minions, and is best displayed by the Flamers — daemons that serve as living flamethrowers and spew gouts of bright blue fire.
• Tome of Eldritch Lore: Daemons of Tzeentch use these as a secondary resource — Tzeentch settlements can produce Tomes, which may then be expended to use the "Changing of the Ways" mechanic. And his cults also create Tomes. They are mostly used in relation to Tzeentch's many schemes.
• Too Many Mouths: Flamers of Tzeentch are covered in mouths, with a toothy maw at the end of each arm and several covering the entirety of their upper torsos.
• Trickster God: The Trickster of the Chaos Gods, given his favor of deception and deceit. Although what he considers a practical joke, only he would consider funny..
• Troll: It's Tzeentch, he is the embodiment of the word and all it stands for. His followers often get killed because Tzeentch sends them incorrect visions of the future, just to get them killed.
• Übermensch: Tzeentch is the patron god of these: He constantly seeks to change, evolve, and discard old laws and restrictions in favour of making your own way based purely on your own will and vision. Nurgle, who wants to decay in the existing world, serves as the Last Man.
• Xanatos Gambit: When the plot itself is the payoff, any of Tzeentch's schemes become this by default. The question is only which one of his pawns reaps their payoff.
• Xanatos Speed Chess: Tzeentch is pulling this constantly against everyone else in the world. Simultaneously. Tzeentch is also pulling this constantly against himself.

Kairos Fateweaver

Kairos Fateweaver, the Oracle of Tzeentch

"It is foreseen! / Change was inevitable!"

"We see that which was and thus we know your secrets. We see that which shall be and thus we know your fate. The now is trivial to us - we know the day we perish is not this day."

Even Tzeentch dares not enter the Well of Eternity, the vast receptacle of knowledge at the heart of the Impossible Fortress. The Great Sorcerer, mighty though he is, cannot be sure of survival within the inky currents of infinity. Still, the Well of Eternity holds great sway over Tzeentch's mind, for it is the one puzzle he cannot solve, and the one mystery he cannot know — a challenge almost painful in its intensity. It was in the cause of understanding that Tzeentch hurled Kairos, a Lord of Change known as the Fateweaver to mortals, into the foreboding depths of the Well. While the Great Sorcerer was not prepared to risk his own being in such a venture, he had no such misgivings at risking one of his servants in such a fashion.

Ever since he clawed his way back from the Well of Eternity after years uncounted within its depths, Kairos can see things that are hidden even to Tzeentch. His right head sees possible futures as clear as day. No scheme is hidden from its sight and the infinite possibilities of tomorrow crystallize into irrefutable fact. Kairos' left head sees the past without the petty colourations of perspective and bias. Past and future pulse through a body shriveled and twisted by its passage through the Well.

Kairos now sits at Tzeentch's right hand, stirring the stygian depths of the Well as he whispers aloud the secrets that only he can see. In the arena of magic, Kairos is unstoppable. He knows every spell in existence, every sigil, sign and quirk of mystical power; though even he cannot marshal them all without a modicum of preparation. Such ability makes him Tzeentch's favoured agent. On the occasions Fateweaver leaves the Impossible Fortress, it is always in the service of a dire task, be it the recovery of a magical artefact, the predestined crushing of an army, or some other ineffable purpose.

Kairos Fateweaver leads the subfaction "Oracles of Tzeentch". In Immortal Empires he begins his campaign in The Southern Wastes below Dawn's Landing, for reasons only he knows.

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• Adaptation Personality Change: In the original lore, Kairos is a single consciousness, and his two heads have a Knights and Knaves deal going: one head will speak the truth, the other will immediately follow up with an equally believable lie. In this game, Kairos instead acts more like a pair of Conjoined Twins; his heads will debate with each other, finish each-other's sentences, refer each-other as "brother" and themselves in the plural.
• The Archmage: Even within the setting, Kairos stands out as the most powerful of the Lords of Change, and this carries over to the game — Kairos knows information on all of the Lores of Magic and can use this to modify his spell list between battles, giving him a vast magic arsenal that can be tailored to his opponent. Besides this he has several abilities that further increase his spellcasting, alongside the rare Greater Arcane Conduit that further increases his power. He also has access to a selection of bound spells that he doesn't even have to use Winds to use, also with his staff which gives him the ability to reverse the cooldown timers on all his spells and abilities, making him a magical powerhouse.
• Badass Boast: Doubling as a Blasphemous Boast, one of his idle quotes has him bragging about having more knowledge than Tzeentch. The best part? Given that he was thrown into Well of Eternity, he's right.
  Kairos: We know more than even he.
• Bird People: He's a Lord of Change, a daemon resembling an immense, blue humanoid bird.
• Blind Seer: An odd variant. Kairos' heads can see the future and the past, but not the present. This is depicted as an inability to solve immediate, short-term problems — When introduced, Kairos has been stranded in the mortal world by the arcane maelstrom whipped up by Ursun's roar, and is fruitlessly combing through his library to find a spell capable of traversing the storm. Naturally, his motive for hunting Ursun is to claim the bear-god's eyes and cure himself of this blind-spot, which would make him functionally omniscient.
• Death Glare: His "Gaze of Tzeentch" special rule allows him to do this to encroaching units, freezing them in place for half a minute due to the sheer malevolence and cunning in his glare.
• Deflector Shields: Kairos can cast "Oracle of Eternity", a spell that can increase the resistances of a targeted unit.
• Discard and Draw: His ability to shuffle his spell list works by equipping "fragments" of each of the eight core lores (unlocked through his skill tree), which each replace two spells from the Lore of Tzeentch with two pre-packaged spells from that lore.
• Evil Genius: A formidable sorcerer and also a supreme seer for having been plunged into the Well of Eternity.
• Evil Sorcerer: He's the most evil and powerful in an entire faction of them.
• Eyes Do Not Belong There: His left hand has an eyeball in its palm, and his right head has a tongue that splits into a pair of waving eyestalks. If he is the one to reach Ursun, Kairos places the Bear God's eyes on his left head's tongue.
• Genius Cripple: A formidably powerful sorcerer, but shriveled and feeble thanks to his experience of being thrown into the Well of Eternity aging him rapidly. He's also blind to the present (although one of his two heads can see the past and the other the future), which means he is virtually incapable of fighting in close combat.
• Glass Cannon: Naturally, being a Squishy Wizard. Kairos boasts some of the strongest magic in the entire game but he'll fall apart in minutes if he's cornered in a melee brawl, even against non-duelist Legendary Lords.
• Mad Oracle: A variation of it combined with With Great Power Comes Great Insanity. Kairos gained the ability to not only see the future but also everything that happened in the past (but not the present) after he managed to survive being in the Well of Eternity, as well as a permanent boost to his own magical powers. This also left him permanently insane, and his heads will bicker and argue about what is really going to happen and what isn't.
• Magic Staff: His Staff of Tomorrow. Given to him by Tzeentch himself, it allows him to reset the cooldowns of all his abilities, including his spell-list.
• Mirror Match: The quest battle for his Staff of Tomorrow brings him into conflict with his past and future selves, both of whom he has to defeat in battle to make it work.
• Multiple Head Case: His trip to the Well gave Kairos two heads — one that sees the future, and one that sees the past. The two of them refer to each other as "brother" and regularly interact with each other, mostly with hostility.
• The Omniscient: He's almost this, and his drive to become this in full is his motivation in his campaign. His current state allows him to see the past and future, but makes him blind to the present; he wants Ursun's eyes to correct this and have full knowledge of everything.
• Red Oni, Blue Oni: His two heads function as this. The green-eyed left head, which sees the past, is impulsive and reckless, while the amber-eyed right head, which sees the future, is more restrained and pragmatic. Their campaign intro in Realm of Chaos drives this point home.
  Right Head: The Tome of Fates holds the answer! The spell we search for.
  Left Head: Kill him, brother. Take it.
  Advisor: Only I can use it! The Tome is bound to my soul!
  Left Head: We can unpick it.
  Right Head: No, let him serve us, for one drop of god-blood. I have foreseen it.
• Removed Achilles' Heel: In the Realm of Chaos campaign, he is motivated to hunt down Ursun to take his eyes and finally remove his blindness to the present.
• Seers: He can see the myriad possibilities of the future with one head, and the unfiltered past with the other. Ironically, each head is incapable of perceiving the world any other way, making Kairos blind to the present. In-game, the Oracles of Tzeentch can perfectly predict how long it will take enemy reinforcements to arrive and ensure their own reinforcements arrive 50% faster, while Kairos' personal army enjoys a +50% resistance to hostile hero actions and ambushes.
• Shoot the Messenger: He almost does this to the Advisor when the latter tries to bribe the Daemon with a pass through the Maelstrom, only stopped by the potential gift of Ursun's eyes and the other head being curious to see how this plays out. There is also the fact that he is likley aware of the Advisor's fate to become a puppet of Tzeentch regardless of how things turn out, meaning that his god wins either way.
• Squishy Wizard: Even compared to other Lords of Change, who can be decent, if unexceptional, melee monsters, Kairos is notoriously frail, and should be kept away from battle at all costs, allowing him to use his overwhelmingly powerful magic.
• Villains Never Lie: Despite being notorious for spouting both truths and lies and serving the god of betrayal and manipulation, Kairos keeps his end of the bargain if he wins the Realm of Chaos campaign and gives the Advisor a drop of Ursun's blood to free him from his pact with Tzeentch. Though it is entirely possible at this point that he saw how his master would get back at the Advisor for this.

The Changeling

The Changeling, Tzeentch's Trickster

"What is mortal life, without a bit of Chaos?"

The Changeling is a Herald of Tzeentch who personifies the part of the Changer of Ways' psyche that is the meddler and the deceiver. Not only can the Changeling mirror the form of another, he can adopt mannerisms and personalities in so flawless a fashion that even the Dark Gods can be deceived. None, save perhaps Tzeentch himself, know the Changeling’s true form, for he goes cowled and cloaked when in his own shape — perhaps even the Changeling himself has forgotten it.

Though Tzeentch loves to take credit for the Changeling's schemes, only a handful of the daemon's adventures are carried out at his divine patron's directions. The Great Schemer is content to let the Changeling roam wild through eternity, causing havoc where he may. Each meddling opens up more possibilities in the Great Game, and Tzeentch watches with amusement as the Changeling weaves his uneven tapestry of disruption.

That so many of his pranks have caused terrible wars is of no concern to the Changeling. He loves the discord of conflict, for it breeds opportunity to deceive and dismay like nothing else. His enjoyment begins even before armies clash: impersonating messengers and generals to disrupt strategy wherever possible. When battle begins, the Changeling is wont to adopt the shape and skill of the most powerful foe, pounding the enemy to pieces with malicious enthusiasm and borrowed muscle.

Introduced in the Shadows of Change DLC for Total War: Warhammer III, the Changeling leads the subfaction "The Decievers".

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• Adaptational Badass: The Changeling was a Hero character in the tabletop game, but in Total War: Warhammer III he's upgraded into a Legendary Lord.
• Collector of Forms: One of the Changeling's battlefield gimmicks is the ability to adopt the form and statistics of any legendary character he's defeated in battle or formed an alliance with. By the end of an average campaign, he'll have an extensive library of faces to choose from.
• Eldritch Abomination: Inasmuch as he has a true form - when violently forced out of whatever he's currently impersonating - he is a flying nightmare accretion of random and rapidly metamorphosing flesh.
• Enemy Exchange Program: His campaign skill "I Come In Peace! No, Really..." cheapens allied recruitment and slightly buffs non-Tzeentchian units acquired this way.
  "...And that's why you should loan me your best regiments. Your personal guard, perhaps?"
• The Faceless: There is nothing underneath his hood other than a dark, formless void.
• False Flag Operation: In the Shadows of Change trailer, the Changeling assumes the form of a Gospodar ice witch and torches a grove sacred to the Ungol hag witches. The Changeling then flees to a nearby Gospodar town, which the vengeful Ungols attack and raze to the ground while he slips away.
• In the Hood: His Shapeshifter Default Form has his face and most of his body hidden under a swirling, hooded cloak, the darkness of which is impenetrable. It's rumored that the Changeling takes this form because he can't actually remember what he's supposed to look like, so he settles on something deliberately vague.
• Laughably Evil: Much of the Changeling's antics are played for dark humor. His skill descriptions include goofy quotes from the poor people he's duped, and a few outright meme references. The event artwork for the completion of a scheme depicts the Changeling running from an angry mob, arms laiden down with stolen treasure.
• Loss of Identity: He's said to have spent so long impersonating other people that he's forgotten his own identity.
• Master of Disguise: The Changeling can not only shapeshift into any person or creature he pleases, he can mimic their mannerisms and personalities almost perfectly, and he uses this skill to carry out his schemes.
• Mechanically Unusual Class: The Decievers, while technically not a nomadic horde, cannot hold settlements — Instead, when they conquer a place, they can install superior Tzeentchian cult undercities that can support military recruitment infrastructure, as well as secondary buildings that either parasitize the settlement or symbiotically co-exist with it.
• Ditto Fighter: Of the non-random type. By toggling "Formless Horror" during battle, the Changeling can assume the form and statistics of any single Legendary Lord or Legendary Hero he's defeated in battle or formed an alliance with, chosen beforehand through a menu on the campaign map (or during army setup for skirmish matches). Campaign skills eventually allow him to copy special abilities as well.
• The Prankster: The Changeling is responsible for "pranks" that claim thousands of lives at a time. He's known for stealing valuable artifacts, misleading generals and heads of state, and starting wars with False Flag Operations. The Changeling's campaign is centered around a variety of schemes to be carried out against the nations of the world, but the true goal is to eventually perform what he calls the "ultimate scheme": a prank to be played upon Tzeentch himself.
• Pet the Dog: His schemes in the Darklands and Naggarond involve creating mass (potentially empire-destroying) slave uprisings in those regions for the Chaos Dwarfs and Dark Elves, because it's a delightful and Tzeenchian prank to turn the masters into the ones being whipped.
• Shapeshifter Guilt Trip: The basis of the skill "Armor of Lies", which increases his physical resistance while transformed.
  "Would you really strike an old friend?"
• Shapeshifter Weapon: His campaign skill "Skip The Boring Part" suggests that he can use his shapeshifting to produce ammunition for bows and guns (increasing his ammunition capacity and reload speed while transformed). Meanwhile "I'm You, Just Better" claims that he isn't afraid to do things like add Combat Tentacles to his disguises to get an edge in melee (increasing his melee attack, melee defence and weapon strength while transformed).
• Shapeshifting Trickster: A Master of Disguise who plays deadly pranks on the nations of the mortal world.
• Spotting the Thread: The Changeling is not just capable of shapeshifting into anyone or anything, he's also an extremely gifted impersonator... but he's not perfect at it, and so he's not invincible. Yuan Bo is able to see through his Miao Ying disguise because his grasp of Cathayan etiquette just isn't good enough.

Daemons of Nurgle

General Tropes

"Share the gifts of Nurgle!"

"Rejoice, children! Your Father brings you hope in your darkest hour. Let those who would accept his gifts come forth and receive the blessings of the Lord of Decay. Cast away your crutches and doubts. Put aside belief in false masters who fill your hearts with lies, sorrow, and regret. Embrace instead the glorious gifts of rot and decay. Revel in the beauty of putrescence and be reborn a living symbol of perseverance."

Nurgle, also known as the Plague Lord, the Lord of Pestilence, The Crow, the Fly Lord, and the Ur-Father, is the Chaos God of disease, decay, destruction, and death by rebirth. He is the eldest of the four Chaos Gods and is the most directly involved with the plight of mortals, particularly humans who suffer so acutely from a fear of death. Indeed, Nurgle is undoubtedly the oldest of the Chaos Gods, for the process of death and decay is as old as life itself.

The Daemons of Nurgle are the embodiment of entropy and decay. They are truly putrid in their appearance and are sickening to look upon, their flesh pulsing with the feverheat of corruption, their innards pushing through lesions in their putrid skin and their bodies oozing with sticky slime. Yet in contrast to their hideous appearance, Nurgle's daemons are cheerful, energetic beings that show a disturbingly friendly demeanor. They are jovial in their work and show great pride in their accomplishments, interpreting the groans of the afflicted as expressions of gratitude.

——

Poxmakers of Nurgle

• Achilles' Heel:
  • Artillery. Nurgle's units can recover from a lot but they have no long-ranged options outside Ku'gath himself and they can't replace lost models. Artillery hits deal enough damage to kill models outright, meaning they can't be healed or regenerate.
  • Magical ranged attacks. Nurgle's forces have the lowest movement speeds among the daemons, giving ranged units more time to shoot them, their physical resistance doesn't help at all vs. magical attacks, and none of their units have shields to mitigate small-arms fire on the approach. This makes units like Pink Horrors (who have flaming attacks that deal extra damage to Regenerating creatures) and Ice Guard (who slow them even more) extremely effective against them.
• Affably Evil: Much like Grandfather Nurgle himself, most daemons and followers of Nurgle are jovial and easygoing, despite wanting to drown the world in unending pestilence. Daemons of Nurgle all have animations in which they treat each other as friends, some even playing with each other. One of the earliest techs available to a Nurgle faction even gives them a diplomacy buff when interacting with other daemons (with the exception of Daemons of Tzeentch), on the grounds that Nurgle doesn't worry quite as much about the competition of the Great Game. However, the Daemons of Nurgle still have Hard-Coded Hostility against the majority of non-chaos races.
• All Animals Are Dogs: Beasts of Nurgle are great masses of fat, disease, pus and tentacles that act like giant, hyperactive puppies. These disgusting daemons want nothing more than to play with everyone they see, pouncing on and lovingly licking any mortal they come across. Beasts become very despondent when their new playmate stops moving, having succumbed to the diseases and sheer bulk of the daemon, but they soon forget them as they see more potential friends to play with.
• Amphibian at Large: Plague Toads are one of Nurgle's many foul beasts, ogre-sized toads that lope into battle either in packs of ferals or as mounts for Plaguebearers, where they are called Pox Riders. They actually have a decent charge bonus compared to the rest of the roster, which combined with their large mass gives them a particular niche as line-breakers after the lesser daemons are committed to melee.
• And Call Him "George": Beasts of Nurgle are described as having the temperament of friendly, excitable puppies, which naturally leads to complications when a massive, plague-ridden slug monster tries to interact with fragile humans. Eventually, Beasts of Nurgle become frustrated with how mortals quickly ragdoll and refuse to play with them, and this growing resentment leads to their metamorphosis into malevolent Rot Flies.
• Animal Motifs: Nurgle is typically associated with insects, especially ones attracted to carrion and disease, and especially flies and maggots. Swarming clouds of droning insects almost always accompany his followers, and his more bestial daemons resembles immense flies and their giant, bloated larvae.
• Arch-Enemy: Of Tzeentch, to the point where Nurgle is happy to make alliances with Slaanesh and Khorne just to spite the Changer (as an early diplomacy tech explains). All Nurglish characters can take the skill "Hates Tzeentch" for some circumstantial combat bonuses, while Nurgle's tech tree includes "Despicable Rival" which grants faction-wide leadership and missile resistance bonuses against Tzeentchian armies.
  The Fly Lord and his devotees despise Tzeentch, for his obsession with schemes and trickery are the polar opposite of Nurgle's delight in slow, musty stagnation.
• Badass Army: Nurgle's Rot Legion is an ever-marching, ever-growing, calamity of pox and death, that can outfight every opponent... that is, the ones who manage to last against his weaponized plagues that armies must content with to reach them, before hitting a mucus-infested wall of zombie-like Plaguebearers, towering Daemons like the Unclean Ones, and terrifying Daemon-Beasts like the Rot Flies.
• Benevolent Boss: The main difference between Nurgle and the other Chaos Gods is that Grandfather Nurgle actually cares about his followers. He genuinely adores them, and looks out for their welfare the most out of all of the other Gods. Sure, he shows that love by infecting them with ungodly plagues and ever-burning poxes, but Nurgle's followers consider that a blessing! And those who are converted from former foes are especially doted upon!
• Beneficial Disease: Nurgle's followers regard every disease as being a blessing from their lord. This is often the form that Nurgle's boons take when granted to his favored children. And yes, they provide a large amount of buffs to the player's faction when deployed in their own territory, but not without their own downsides.
• Berserk Button: Do not harm the Nurglings, especially around the grandfatherly Great Unclean Ones. Being basically Daemonic children in their mannerisms and attitude, Nurgle's followers are especially protective of them.
• Beware the Nice Ones: Nurgle and many of his followers may sincerely care about everyone and is something of an extremely dark example of a Nice Guy (compared to the other Daemons anyway), but said "care" involves infecting untold masses with magical plagues that often kill millions, and during battles hug their opponents to death. Despite their jovial and friendly attitudes, they are as dangerous and deadly as all the other Daemons.
• BFS: Practically Nurgle's preferred weapons; Plaguebearers carry large broken blades, while Great Unclean Ones wield giant broadbladed swords.
• Black Magic: The Lore of Nurgle is all about forcing your foes to suffer from one Mystical Plague after the other, rotting them apart while your own bloated troops will find themselves invigorated and motivated by those very same diseases that they keep on spreading through the battlefield.
• Blue-and-Orange Morality: Maybe. He claims his horrific plagues to be gifts, and that the despair they cause you are your way of saying thanks to him.
• Big Creepy-Crawlies: Nurgle is heavily themed around disgusting insects, and there are a few examples of them present in his army.
  • Nurgle's Siege Towers are actually giant, monstrous snails grafted to a wooden tower frame, constantly swaying and twitching.
  • Rot Flies are sullen and vicious insectoid daemons, spawned from Beasts of Nurgle that lose their friendly temperament in the face of repeated "rejection" by mortals. High-ranking Plaguebearers, known as Plague Drones, can ride rot flies into battle as airborne cavalry. They are one of the very few Nurgle units that actually have a good amount of mobility and are peerless at protecting the skies above the Rot Legion. With a buzzing drone, they buzz around the carnage of the battlefield, attacking flanks, and contesting airspace of any battlefield.
  • On the campaign map, Nurgle's corruption causes towering insectoid tentacles, festers, and other hive-like objects to begin littering the surface.
• Body Horror:
  • Aesthetically, the Daemons of Nurgle greatly resemble rotting corpses, with green flesh and pus-filled sores all over their bodies. Their bodies are bloated and sweat-encrusted, their eyes are fish-like and slitted, they weave drunkenly and cough vomit and mucus regularly (which is strong enough to melt flesh away if you get any of it on you), and to top it off, they have giant gaping holes in their stomachs covered in serrated teeth and bile. Their animations all have them heaving up bile and vomit, waltzing around like shambling corpses, and sometimes shitting unholy feces out.
  • The Lore of Nurgle's flavor text is Body Horror as a spell list, with the mildest description simply causing victims to void their bowels and suffer violent seizures (Miasma of Pestilence). The others include a breath attack in which the caster hacks up a stream of filth and pus from their lungs (Stream of Corruption); an Attack Reflector that causes victims to contract leprosy and fall apart (Curse of the Leper); a curse that afflicts the target with a necrosis that causes "their skin to blacken and their internal organs to mulch" (Rancid Visitations); an explosion spell that summons a gigantic, fleshy boil that bursts to shower surrounding units in fluids (Blight Boil); and a healing spell that causes allies to physically out-grow damage in a manner reminiscent of tumors, with "wobbling mounds of fat sealing wounds as soon as they are formed" (Fleshy Abundance).
• Body of Bodies: In one of the nurglings' moving animations, the members of one of the distinct swarms that make up a single unit will stack themselves on each other's shoulders and grab each other's limbs to form a facsimile of a humanoid body and then run forwards in this arrangement. In melee, the swarm will retain integrity and attacks by punching enemies.
• A Commander Is You: A Brute/Technical/Unconventional faction. The Nurglish roster relies on slow-moving but extremely resilient units that whittle down their enemies through spreading diseases, from units such as Pox Riders, Beasts of Nurgle, and Great Unclean Ones. On the campaign map, Nurgle plays less like a traditional faction and more like a gradually spreading infestation. Their buildings are not manually upgraded but instead evolve over time into higher tiers of infrastructure (before decaying back into the base building, only to grow again), and they do not summon their forces at full strength but instead have them grow to their full strength over time after being summoned. They also have access to the Plague Cauldron which allows them to concoct different sorts of Mystical Plagues that ravage their enemies while growing their own forces.
• Cyclops: One of the typical physical characteristics of a Plaguebearers of Nurgle is a single, cyclopean eye set in the centre of their faces. These eyes often weep with pus and mucus. This extends to other Nurglite Daemons as well — Plague Toads also have only one eye at the center of their faces.
• Deadly Ringer: Exalted Great Unclean Ones use the 'handbell hammer' variation, except a 'handbell' for a Great Unclean One is the size of a church bell.
• Dead Weight: While not a type of undead, Nurgle's followers, daemonic or otherwise, tend to be extremely bloated from the various diseases that infest them.
• Defeat Means Friendship: Twisted in a way only Nurgle can. No matter how hard you resist him, he will "love" you all the more, so that when you finally give in, you really have his attention. In particular, mortals who resist the devastating effects Nurgle's Rot longer than most are given the privilage of their souls being used to create Heralds of Nurgle and Plagueridden rather than common Mooks.
• Despair Event Horizon: The god of this. When you have passed it and fully given up on everything, you are Nurgle's.
• Dung Fu: Alarmingly, Great Unclean Ones have an attack animation where they bend over and defecate over enemy units, unleashing a tide of awful green filth with little Nurglings riding the wave like a waterpark slide.
• Evil Is Visceral: Nurgle loves life, although this translates in him dispensing random growths of organs, organic ichor, or miscellaneous lifeforms inside his followers and victims. As such, his Daemons often expose unpleasant organs, and are covered in tumorous growths and bloated lesions.
• Fat Bastard: While they have a genuinely jovial demeanor, Daemons of Nurgle still spread terrible plagues just because, and they tend to be on the corpulent side.
• Feel No Pain: The boon of Nurgle is that he will comfort all pain. Follow him, and you never have to worry about getting hurt again, Papa Nurgle will kiss it and make it "better" with a gruesome but beneficial disease. This ties into their regeneration and massive staying power.
• Flies Equals Evil: Nurgle's special rule is "Cloud of Flies" which has large, black flies travel around in massive swarms around Nurgle armies, and provide an mounting buff to melee defense the longer the Daemon stays in combat.
• For Doom the Bell Tolls: Exalted Great Unclean Ones carry hideous, bronze bells in their off-hand.
• Friend to All Living Things/Enemy to All Living Things: Nurgle has the attitude of the former coupled with the function of the later. The juxtaposition of the two is one of the things that makes Nurgle as creepy as he is.
• Garden of Evil:
  • The Garden of Nurgle is a thick weald of rotting trees, dripping with disease, and inhabited by daemons and miscellaneous beasts. Traversing it is an utter nightmare in gameplay; the entire area gives everyone massive attrition damage, and this can only temporarily be solved by stacking special healing effects from very rare oases scattered around the map.
  • Nurgle settlements, unlike those of the other daemonic races, are described as gardens centered around forests of fleshy plague-trees. Every building is a type of plant or related fixture (with names like "plagueflesh poppies" or "rancid aloe") that gestates over time, growing in potency and adding increasingly powerful units to the recruitment pool, until it withers and starts the cycle anew.
• Graceful Loser: Nurgle's followers view death as a natural part of the cycle that will nurture rot and decay, and thus view their own defeats as inevitable.
• Green Is Gross: Nurgle the Plaguemaster, with hideous minions rich in rot and swamp imagery, is associated with the color green.
• Kevlard: Many of Nurgle's daemons are either morbidly obese or pot-bellied, due to the putrid diseases causing their bodies to mutate and bloat. However, this only adds to their Mighty Glacier role.
• Lack of Empathy: The only one of the Daemons to subvert this, as Nurgle is the only Chaos God that seems to care more about his followers than himself. That being said, you really don't want his help.
• Mechanically Unusual Class: Nurgle is quite possibly the most unusual playable faction in Total War history, given the way their buildings and recruitment work. Nurglite buildings are not built, they are grown. You pay once to put the building in place, and every certain amount of turns they automatically upgrade for free, going rank by rank until they are fully upgraded, at that point, they downgrade themselves to level 1 and the cycle begins again, thus the strength of a Nurglite empire waxes and wanes with the cycle of life and death of their buildings. Secondly is the way recruitment works. All units are recruited globally, all of them are recruited right away as if they were regiments of renown, but start at 50% HP and must replenish back to full HP, and lastly, how many units can you recruit depends on how many cycles its respective building has done. Every time a building goes to the next stage of their cycle, they add their respective unit to the recruitment pool, and this pool is accessible by every Nurglite lord globally.
• Messy Maggots: In the announcement trailer, a Great Unclean One has maggots crawling inside his mouth. It serves as an indicator of just how repulsive these daemons are.
• Mighty Glacier: One of Nurgle's dominant playstyles, but what takes the cake is Nurgle's Greater Daemon; the Great Unclean One. A giant, green, hideously obese Daemon that towers over walls, but like their liege lord themselves, are Affably Evil; they act like a kind grandfather obsessed with doting on his grandchildren, and will carry around the mischievous Nurglings. They'll also gleefully infect entire populations with nightmarish poxes and blights, kill millions, all while retaining that genuinely jovial attitude. On the battlefield they lug around their weight and are ridiculously slow, but also having some of the highest HP pools in the game, a staggering amount of melee defense, a powerful ward-save as well as slow, but very heavy strikes, augmented with access to the Lore of Magic.
• Mystical Plague: The many "gifts" of Nurgle, including his signature Nurgle's Rot, all of which he handcrafts in his own realm in the Realm of Chaos. Each new disease in the mortal realm is because of Nurgle and his disgusting cauldron. There's also the Lore of Nurgle, in which every spell regardless of purpose takes the form of horrid plague symptoms.
• The Needs of the Many: Many of his followers follow a rather messed up version of this mentality. Sure, Nurgle loves all life, but if killing someone will result in billions more bacteria, maggots and fungi, then why not?
• Non-Malicious Monster: Beasts of Nurgle are in truth jovial and friendly creatures that just want to play with everyone they meet. However, since they're are also massive beasts full of virulent diseases, and their idea of playing is to jump onto people and slobber corrosive acid on them, they end up as weapons.
• Odd Job Gods: Nurgle's portfolio covers Disease, Decay, Poison, Fear, Despair, Entropy, Endurance, Willpower, and Healing.
• The Patriarch: Nurgle views himself as a loving, generous, playful parental figure to his followers and they adore him for it, lovingly referring to him as "Grandfather", "Grandpa", "Papa", "Father" or "Uncle" Nurgle.
• Plaguemaster: Nurgle's chief domain; he is said to personally craft every contagion that blights the mortal world. His minions are infested with awful diseases, but only grow stronger from suffering them. The Lore of Nurgle is similarly themed on plagues, with the flavor text of spells such as "Miasma of Pestilence," "Curse of the Leper" and "Rancid Visitations" debilitating targets with the resulting Body Horror symptoms.
  • In the campaign, Daemons of Nurgle have access to the Plague Cauldron mechanic, where they can engineer custom plagues by mixing and matching symptoms, each providing various buffs to Nurglite units and penalties to other races. These plagues also spread Nurgle Corruption, allowing the Daemons of Nurgle to spread their influence without dedicating valuable heroes, armies or building slots to the task.
• The Pig-Pen: Why clean up? You will just get dirty again. Besides, Nurgle loves you just the way you are, no matter how filthy you get, so why not let yourself get filthy and have a bunch of friendly bacteria and maggots on your body to keep you company?
• Pragmatic Adaptation: Probably to fit the game into the age rating. In art and model-wise, Nurgle daemons rarely have a Belly Mouth and instead a crushing majority have visible hanging guts (especially visible in case of the Great Unclean Ones). In the game all Nurgle daemons that were presented and should have guts dangling from their bellies have belly mouths.
• Red Baron: The Plague Lord, the Fly Lord, the Plague Father, the Lord of Decay.
• Stepford Smiler: His followers are functionally this. They maintain a happy demeanor while having their bodies decaying, but joining Nurgle's happy family in the first place requires that you have a moment of absolute despair and give up on life entirely. Behind every rotting smile and burbling laugh is a soul that has given up on life.
• Straw Nihilist: Nurgle and his followers are all about this, even if they're all very cheerful about it. Their only purpose is to spread disease and misery further, and having abandoned all hope and ambition they have nothing explicitly to live for other than to die and feed the cycle of rot. On the flip side, they also have the endurance and willpower to not just lay down and die, which makes them all the more dangerous. Put another way, Nurgle is Tzeentch's Last Man.
• Stone Wall: Nurgle's playstyle. Nurglite units are extremely tanky, with high health and melee defense, as well as widespread access to healing powers and poison debuffs to weaken their foes. On the other hand, they have sluggish mobility and middling charge bonuses, discouraging aggressive tactics. Nurgle's armylist is built to be a wall, a maggot infested, shit-stained, bile encrusted wall; an impossible to breach line of ever-resilient Daemons, that all provide a myriad of debuffs like poison as well as special abilities that make enemy units far less potent, and have above-normal regeneration options that allow them to further outlast their opponents.
• Strong Family Resemblance: The Great Unclean Ones are stated to be made in the very image of Nurgle himself, with very little deviating them from their god and father. Even the small Nurglings, spawned from Great Unclean Ones, look almost exactly like tiny Great Unclean Ones.
• The Swarm: Nurglings are the smallest of Nurgle's daemons, who spend most of their time capering around the feet of the larger daemons. When they go to war, though, they bunch up in large swarms of Nurglings, some banding together to form large whips or man-sized effigies of their fellows to hit enemies.
• Synchronized Swarming: Nurglings are modeled so that each "individual" model is textured so as to appear as a group of several nurglings, which still move and attack as if they were a single entity. This is exploited in their attack and moving animations, where the group's component members grab onto each other and move in complex maneuvers such as grouping into a sphere to roll forward, building a humanoid body, or turning themselves into a whip to lash into enemies.
• Uncleanliness Is Next to Ungodliness: The daemons of Nurgle are staggeringly filthy and repulsive to look at, weaponizing plague symptoms and bodily functions as they march in The Legions of Hell.
• Was Once a Man: New Plaguebearers are forged from the soul-stuff of mortals who succumb to Nurgle's Rot, a Mystical Plague that induces freakish and ultimately fatal mutations. The longer the victim can survive as their body warps and twists, the more powerful the resulting Plaguebearer becomes. Plagueridden and Heralds of Nurgle, spawned from the most robust of victims, are especially favored as symbols of the futility of fighting Nurgle.
• Walking Wasteland: Disease, decay, rot, and corrosion are all Nurgle's domain, and his daemons and followers will spread them where ever they go to further honor Papa Nurgle.
• Wins by Doing Absolutely Nothing: Drawing another contrast with Tzeentch, for whom Failure Is the Only Option. As the god of entropy and decay, Nurgle wins by not doing anything because everything slides towards entropy over time.

Ku'gath Plaguefather

Ku'gath Plaguefather, the Rotting Poxmaker

"Ohhh, how delightfulll..."

"The flesh legion marches! A pestilent parade! Gaze upon the dominion of life and decay! A fertile universe pregnant with plagues! The time for virulent rebirth is upon you! Rejoice in proliferation! Share the gifts of Nurgle!"

Whilst other Great Unclean Ones work to spread the plagues already extant, Ku'gath is fascinated by the breeding of new and virulent life. Ku'gath aims to one day breed a contagion that can infect the gods themselves. The Plaguefather rides upon a massive palanquin bedecked with alchemical paraphernalia: vials full of seething powder, flasks of indescribable liquid and hessian sacks stuffed to bursting with Nurglings. This great bulk is held aloft by a carpet of straining Nurglings, and Ku’gath is attended on by countless others, all bred from the Plaguefather's pox vats.

Of all Nurgle's Daemons, Ku'gath is the most willing to personally enter the physical realm - his quest for more efficacious plague-reagents knows no boundaries. So absorbed is he in his search for the perfect plague, Ku'gath remains relatively untroubled by the shifting balance of power within the Realm of Chaos, yet this is not to say that the Plaguefather does not play his part in the Great Game. Ku'gath's experiments are nothing without practical results, and he is ever eager to test fresh creations on the battlefield.

Ku'gath Plaguefather leads the subfaction "Poxmakers of Nurgle". In Immortal Empires he begins his campaign on the Dragon Isles, where a blend of tropical heat and Chaos Dwarf pollution provides him ample opportunity to brew some new concoctions.

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• Action Bomb: Can unlock the active ability "Nurgling Tide", which makes Ku'gath spit out a special unit of Infested Nurglings capable of self-destructing on command.
• Adaptational Badass: Ku'gath is a level 1 wizard in the tabletop; here he has lord-level access to the Lore of Nurgle. Downplayed in that unlike most legendary wizard lords Ku'gath has no unique skills that buff his casting, and as such he's no better as an army wizard than a generic Exalted Great Unclean One or a hero caster (and since his nurgling-throwing is a unique asset, his skill points are usually better spent on buffing his ranged attacks).
• Adaptation Personality Change: Downplayed. Like all the legendary daemon lords, Ku'gath exists in both the Warhammer and Warhammer 40,000 continuities. In the latter, Ku'gath is noted to be very dour and grim, in contrast to the other, more jovial Great Unclean Ones, due to his guilt over having accidentally ruined Nurgle's greatest pox when he was still a Nurgling (by falling into the plague cauldron and drinking it all). As this backstory is missing in his Warhammer Fantasy biography, Ku'gath is portrayed as jolly and affable like all other Great Unclean Ones.
• Affably Evil: As is fitting for a Daemon of Nurgle, Ku'gath can be quite pleasant and jovial even while brewing up continent-ravaging plagues. In the "A Covenant with Chaos" trailer, he can be seen giving a big, hearty laugh as his forces plunge into battle with Slaanesh, and in the introduction cinematic to his own campaign he is very polite towards the Advisor.
• Ascended Extra: Ku'gath had rules for being playable in the eighth edition of the tabletop wargame, but never had a model made before the game was discontinued. Here, he has a full model and is the first playable Legendary Lord for Nurgle.
• Belly Mouth: His swollen gut is split horizontally by a large, fanged maw wider than his own head.
• Cozy Catastrophe: Whereas the other elite demons of Chaos throw themselves against and seethe at the Maelstrom for restricting their movements, Ku'gath is content to wait out the fallout from Ursun's roar, continuing his experiments at a comfortable pace and harvesting corpses from skirmishes among the various factions for raw materials.
• Death from Above: He acts more like an artillery-piece than a dedicated Monster, though he's still very dangerous in close-quarters combat.
• Evil Minions: He makes heavy use of Nurglings, and gives them plenty of buffs when on the campaign.
• Evil Sorcerer: Uses the Lore of Nurgle, though his incredibly slow movement and role as an artillery piece often limits his ability to cast effectively.
• Fantastic Racism: He hates Dwarfs because of their natural resistance to disease, and also because they have a pesky tendency to out-stubborn and ultimately defeat them, including a time during the Time of Woe where his failure to conquer Zufbar got Ku'gath banished to the Forge of Souls. This is shown in-game via a "Hates Dwarfs" skill which increases his combat effectiveness against Dwarfs, which comes already pre-taken at level 1.
  "Dwarfs? What are they good for? And always so bad-tempered. The terrible beauty of disease is not for their sullen eyes. Why can't they just die in agony, as other mortals?"
• Fastball Special: Ku'gath hurls explosive Nurglings into the ranks of the enemy army as if they were cannon balls. His quest item, Necrotic Missiles, is an upgrade that lets him toss groups of nurglings as cluster-projectiles.
• Fin Gore: His left index finger is missing, with the implication being that the many diseases inside of him caused it to rot off.
• From Nobody to Nightmare: Ku'gath was originally just another Nurgling sitting on Nurgle's shoulder, when one day he slipped and fell into a cauldron Nurgle was using to cook up his greatest plague. Ku'gath drank the whole thing and was reborn as the most powerful of Grandfather Nurgle's servants.
• The Heretic: Some other Great Unclean Ones view Ku'gath as heretical because they see his creation of entirely new diseases as blasphemous to Nurgle (as they believe only Nurgle has the right to do that). Nurgle himself doesn't seem to mind, however.
• Mad Artist/Mad Scientist: Of the Plaguemaster variety, of course. Ku'gath views creating new disease variants as a mixture of art and science, and is always on the lookout for new ingredients to work on. The unholy grail of his research is a plague capable of infecting gods, and Ku'gath hopes to use the dying body of Ursun as a testbed. In the campaign, using Ku'gath's personal army as the starting point of a new disease from the Plague Cauldron is 50% cheaper, and all plagues created by his faction have a 15% greater chance at spreading to new targets.
• Magic Knight: Like all non-Khornate greater daemons, Ku'gath is a spellcaster as well as a giant monster.
• Mighty Glacier: Due to his throne, Ku'gath moves even slower (28 speed) than most of Nurgle's already sluggish units, and is one of the slowest playble characters in the trilogy. Luckily, he has very powerful ranged attacks with his explosive Nurglings, access to the Lore of Nurgle for a variety of magic, and has the same overwhelming durability of the other Daemons of Nurgle.
• More Teeth than the Osmond Family: Has two sets of teeth, one on his regular mouth, and an extra bigger set on his belly.
• Overly-Long Tongue: Judging by his intro movie, Ku'gath's tongue looks to be at least three feet long.
• Rhymes on a Dime: Some of Ku'gath's dialogue on the campaign map and during his quest battle is spoken in whimsical (albeit morbid) rhyme:
  "Slops-a-gravy, beggar's crumb. Finger-more and skip the thumb! I crave what a crave and that is Dwarfen scum! I will have their heads and hands in my vice... so best to infect them all with foetid beard-lice!"
• Shoot the Messenger: Averted. Ku'gath is one of the only playable characters in the Realm of Chaos campaign to be completely non-threatening towards the Advisor, entertaining his offer and politely haggling on a price. Of course, the Advisor is keenly aware that simply being in Ku'gath's presence puts him at risk of being exposed to one of the daemon lord's experimental diseases.
• Too Important to Walk: Manages this despite being a colossal and very fat Greater Daemon — Ku'gath rides on a filth-encrusted palanquin hefted around by a swarm of diminutive Nurglings.
• You Have Failed Me: Downplayed. For failing to conquer Zhufbar during a daemonic invasion, Ku'gath was imprisoned by Nurgle in the Forge of Souls for centuries. He was let out eventually, however, as Nurgle ultimately holds Ku'gath in high favour due to his passion for experimentation.
• Walking the Earth: He's noted to be the one of Nurgle's servants most eager to enter the material realm in order to gather new ingredients for his Cauldron from across the world. He is known by a dozen different names by many cultures for this reason, as he is liable to appear anywhere for a new and exotic plague component.
• Walking Wasteland: In single player, Ku'gath's final yellow line skill deals direct damage to anyone directly adjacent to him, so potent is the plaguefather's diseases. On the campaign map whatever army he leads leaves a gigantic trail of slime for the turn, resembling the passing of a giant slug.
• Weaponized Offspring: Nurglings are effectively the offspring of the Great Unclean Ones, and Ku'gath's own progeny are made especially volatile through experimentation, enabling him to use them as explosive ammunition and suicide troops. Ku'gath's faction also enjoys cheaper recruitment for nurgling units, and new nurglings are recruited with more initial health than other units.

Tamurkhan

Tamurkhan, the Maggot Lord

"Gaze upon my dead flesh! Witness your fate!"

The Kurgans speak of a legendary warlord, the Great Kurgan, who long ago sired four sons that would later become the most favored champions of the Chaos Gods. Each of these sons would one day return to the Kurgans, each suffused with the power of his chosen patron, and then lead the tribes out of the steppes to bring unspeakable death and ruin to the whole world. Many such champions of Chaos have come and gone throughout the centuries, but the one known as Tamurkhan the Maggot Lord is perhaps the only champion truly mighty enough to claim to be of the Great Kurgan's lineage. Thoroughly blessed is he by Nurgle, Tamurkhan no longer bears the shape of a mortal man, but that of a putrid and mutated giant maggot, one that hungrily gorges into the flesh of his enemies to consume their innards and then wear their corpse as his own body.

Riding the great Toad Dragon Bubebolos, Tamurkhan currently resides within the decaying shell of Karaka Breakmountain. This Ogre Tyrant destroyed his previous host during a battle in the Mountains of Mourn, not knowing what the Maggot Lord is truly capable of, and has now become his latest meat puppet. Unlike the flimsy, rotting flesh of previous hosts, the Ogre's body gives Tamurkhan tremendous martial strength and power, one which he hopes will be enough to help him realize his ambitions of glory in Nurgle's name. To do that, however, he must first gather other warlords to his banner and galvanize them into a truly terrifying horde of Chaos. Only then can Tamurkhan lead his followers into the heart of the Old World and tear it asunder as a majestic offering to Nurgle, thus achieving what the Great Kurgan of yore could not: true daemonhood.

Introduced in the Thrones of Decay DLC for Total War: Warhammer III, Tamurkhan leads the subfaction "The Maggot Host".

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• Body Horror: Tamurkhan has been warped by Nurgle's blessing into something that resembles a disgusting maggot the size of a baby. It doesn't matter to him, though, because he retains his full intelligence and Father Nurgle has blessed him with abilities that compensate for this body's lackluster physical prowess. Meanwhile his current host, an Ogre Tyrant's corpse, has much of Nurgle's signature rot and decay plus a missing lower jaw and a puss-filled wound on its chest cavity, which is where Tamurkhan has lodged his maggot-body into.
• Brutish Character, Brutish Weapon: Tamurkhan wields the Black Cleaver, a two-handed axe scaled appropriately for his massive ogre host. It was forged for Tamurkhan by the Chaos Dwarfs as token of the pact formed with them during his conquests. In-game, the Black Cleaver gives Tamurkhan magical attacks and improved armor-piercing damage, while also improving the weapon damage of nearby allies.
• Dead Weight: Tamurkhan the parasite currently inhabits the rotting corpse of an ogre tyrant, making him especially fat and grotesque even by the standards of Nurgle's mortal followers.
• Dragon Rider: Rides into battle atop a toad dragon named Bubebolos.
• Four-Star Badass: His greatest trait isn't his ogre strength, diseased toughness, Bubebolos or his ability to burrow into new bodies in case his old one ever gets killed. It's his ability to unify and command vast hordes of not only Nurglite minions, but also other Chaos affiliated worshippers that are not specifically followers of Nurgle. In fact, it is comparable to the skill that Everchosen of the past has displayed, wich is why he is considered one of, if not the greatest Champion of Nurgle that has ever lived.
• Grand Theft Me: A unique blessing from Nurgle allows Tamurkhan to burrow into the bodies of other beings and hijack the rotting carcasses to use for himself.
• Heroic Second Wind: Inverted with his signature tabletop ability Feast of the Maggot Lord, which is depicted differently in Total War: Warhammer III. Once Tamurkhan's health is depleted in battle, his body will release a disgusting shower of filth that damages his would-be killer while giving him another sliver of health to resume fighting.
• Marionette Motion: Tamurkhan is a Puppeteer Parasite controlling the corpse of an ogre, and some of his idle animations allude to this by showing Tamurkhan occasionally struggle to manipulate his limbs properly, such as an arm dangling limply at the elbow until jerked back into place.
• Messy Maggots: Known as the Maggot Lord, this champion of the plague god Nurgle is a man transformed into an oversized writhing maggot, with the grotesque ability to burrow into fresh corpses and wear them like a second skin.
• Not Hyperbole: Unlike others characters' titles, which are slightly more metaphorical or indirect, Tamurkhan's epitet of "Maggot Lord" is entirely literral, as he actually is a giant maggot.
• Puppeteer Parasite: The true form of Tamurkhan is a maggot-like mutant parasite that burrows into dead bodies and takes control. Tamurkhan's current host is an ogre tyrant, giving him prodigious size and strength.
• Villain: Exit, Stage Left: His death animation has Tamurkhan's maggot body bursting out of Karaka's mouth and burrowing into the ground.
• You Kill It, You Bought It: Tamurkhan possessed the ogre tyrant Karaka Breakmountain, and the remnants of the Red Fist tribe — between loyalty to their old master and fear of what had happened — bent the knee and joined Tamurkhan's hordes. The chaos lord quickly made a point of introducing them to the ways of Nurgle, turning them into the mutated Plague Ogres.

Epidemius

Epidemius, Tallyman of Nurgle

Epidemius is Nurgle's chosen Tallyman, the Herald tasked with recording and assessing the effectiveness of his many, many maladies. Unlike most of his brothers, Epidemius often finds himself in whatever plane of existence Nurgle's gifts are unleashed to their fullest. From his palanquin, which is carried by a litter of Nurglings, the dour and single-minded Herald will then observe the diseases that take root on the field and scribble away, properly cataloging every pox and contagion, the speed of their infection, the number of deaths and souls offered to Nurgle, and so on. This task requires his utmost concentration, however, and Epidemius is known to mercilessly kill any Nurgling that belches or giggles too loud, as well as any poor fool who ventures too close while he writes.

Despite his temper, Epidemius's work is crucial in ensuring Nurgle's next brews of filth and decay are stronger than the last. Wherever pestilence is strongest, one can always expect the Tallyman to be there to drone away with his parchment and ink. The plague armies that count him among their number are thus treated with Nurgle's greater blessings, for Epidemius's writings always attract their god's benevolent and putrescent gaze.

A free legendary lord available through Total War Access, Epidemius leads the subfaction "Tallymen of Nurgle" and is only playable in the Immortal Empires campaign of Total War: Warhammer III.

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• Adaptational Badass: A special hero unit in the tabletop wargame, but an army commander and faction leader in Total War.
• Badass Bureaucrat: Epidemius is essentially a daemonic pen-pusher, constantly writing on parchment with a quill as he tallies the plagues at work around him, but he's fully capable of riding his palanquin into the thick of it to take swings with a sword.
• Beleaguered Bureaucrat: Given the endless task of recording data on the performance of Nurgle's countless plagues, Epidemius is rather surly and antisocial for a plaguebearer, acting as a Mean Boss to his nurgling attendants.
• Body Horror: This is to be expected of all of Nurgle's daemons, but Epidemius is a bit special because his hands and feet are absolutely rotted with gangrene.
• Mean Boss: His campaign voicelines have him constantly verbally abuse his Nurgling helpers, which is in stark contrast to how other Nurgle characters treat theirs. In the lore, Epidemius' nurglings are said to be unusually quiet and withdrawn, so as to avoid incurring their master's ire.
  "Steady Nurglings! Or you'll go overboard!"
• Plaguemaster: Like all Daemons of Nurgle. In Epidemius' case, his faction gains number of scaling bonuses based on how many plagues are currently afflicting non-Nurgle factions around the world. Epidemius himself gains regeneration and extra melee attack points when his army attacks a plague-stricken target.
• Too Important to Walk: As a high-ranking Herald of Nurgle, Epidemius rides on a ramshakle throne hauled around by a swarm of nurglings, similar to Ku'gath. Unlike a regular Herald, though, Epidemius is permenantly mounted on his palanquin.

Daemons of Slaanesh

General Tropes

"Submit to Slaanesh!"

"Raise buildings and sing songs in My glory. In My name, pursue your arts and enshrine all beauty. Let all people follow their every desire, sate their every hunger, and deny themselves no adventure. For it is in these things that you will find the greatest pleasure, and it is through these things, and through each other, that you shall rise yourselves higher, even unto the steps of My throne. You will take pleasure in all that is, though your bodies will break and your souls be forfeit. For I am Slaanesh, most jealous of Gods, and most demanding of lovers, and My thirst for you shall never be sated..."

Slaanesh, also known as the Dark Prince, the Prince of Pleasure, The Serpent, the Lord of Excess, the Perfect Prince and even the Prince of Chaos, is the Chaos God of pleasure, passion, excess and decadence. Slaanesh is the Dark God dedicated to the pursuit of earthly gratification and the overthrow of all decent behaviour, as well as hedonism and amoral pleasure for its own sake. He is the God of Obsession, the Master of Excess in All Things, from gluttony to lust to megalomania. Out of all the pantheon, Slaanesh is the youngest of the Chaos Gods, for the complex emotions of erotic desire and decadence can only exist within the minds of intelligent races.

The daemons of Slaanesh possess some elements of the perverse and unnatural beauty of their master, a beauty that provokes loathing and desire in equal measure. Their very presence evokes a tide of sensuality strong enough to drown a living soul, while their seductive promises can enslave even the stoutest heart. Their physical forms are both beguiling and monstrous, fairness and foulness intermingling to blast the soul of the viewer with their monstrous dichotomy.

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Seducers of Slaanesh

• The Ace: One could make the case. Slaanesh is the God of Pleasure, so anything that one derives pleasure from falls under its domain, and it encourages you to find pleasure in absolutely anything, and in turn Slaanesh itself enjoys cultivating new skills and experiences. This includes losing. It's actually noted that many Slaaneshi cultists turned to Slaanesh's worship to cultivate their skills to new heights. The desire to be the greatest duelist, painter, singer, sculptor, etc is just as welcome to Slaanesh as sheer hedonism.
• Achilles' Heel: Sustained combat and Charge Defense. Slaanesh is an entire faction of Glass Cannon units that rely on high mobility and cycle charges to rack up kills. Without their charge bonuses though they're not any better than other units and their lower health and lack of armor will see even lower-tier units completely destroy them if they can't get out of a fight after charging in.
• Added Alliterative Appeal: Slaanesh's slaves certainly seem so, especially sibilant, sensual, serpentine "S" sounds such as Sigvald suggested...
  Daemonettes: Supple servants of Slaanesh!
• Ambiguous Gender: Slaanesh themselves is often referred to as both a man and a woman in the same sentence, and the Dark Prince's daemons are similarly gender-confused, having traits of both sexes present on their higher ranking daemons.
• Arch-Enemy: Of Khorne, whose mindless barbarism contains no thought of the self. All Slaaneshi characters can take the "Hates Khorne" skill for some combat bonuses, and Slaanesh's tech tree includes "Blood God's Disgust", which damages relations with Khornate factions in return for a bonus to leadership and melee defence against their armies.
  This obsession with murder is just cheap, mindless bloodlust of the basest kind. To the servants of Slaanesh, there is so much more to life... and death too, of course.
• Armor-Piercing Attack: Slaanesh is the premier example of this in the trilogy; most of their units, from lowly marauder to godly Keeper of Secrets has this damage type in their repertoire, and combined with their speed and charge bonuses, will shred heavy armor like wet-tissue paper.
• Back Stab: Their army special rule "Devastating Flanker" especially encourages this amongst Slaanesh's many Fragile Speedster units. Any unit attacked in the rear or flanks by Slaanesh's will take double Slaanesh's already insane charge damage values, which can result in many units evaporating in a bloody mist in the first few seconds of combat.
• Badass Army: Slaanesh's legions, while not as war focused as Khorne's, are still very martial; inflicting death is just another pleasure, after all. Slaanesh's army is the fastest in the game, and uses its blistering speed to be a very effective fighting army.
• Beauty Is Bad: Slaanesh and her Daemons are perhaps the cruelest, most callous and most self-centered of all the Dark Gods.
• Beware My Stinger Tail: Fiends of Slaanesh have long, whip-like tails tipped with a scorpion's sting. In the "A Covenant With Chaos" trailer, one Fiend is shown mauling a Nurgle soldier with its tail before finishing the victim off with its pincers.
• Black Magic: The Lore of Slaanesh is quite the fitting collection of spells for an army where you will have a hard time finding anyone who isn't a Combat Sadomasochist. The spellcasters ensure that both sides feel as much pain and pleasure as possible through a myriad of twisted spells, driving the deranged mortals and daemons further into macabre acts of violence wile the enemy is too distracted by euphoria or suffering to properly fight back.
• Blade Below the Shoulder: Marauders of Slaanesh and Hellstrider cavalry wield these in tandem with a shield, their dominant hands mutated into blades of bone that project outwards at the same angle as a held sword. Those equipped with "spears" simply have larger and longer versions of the same mutation.
• Body Horror: Besides the surreal otherworldliness of their masters, Marauders of Slaanesh are covered in very painful mutations, like giant blades jutting out of their hands, horns protruding from the middle of their heads, and visible Tainted Veins.
• Bondage Is Bad: Sadomasochism themes play a heavy role in the faction, with daemons dressed up like otherworldly Dominatrixes that wield barbed whips and scream with pleasure as they inflict pain on their enemies.
• Charm Person: Those who gaze upon Slaanesh can do nothing but fall down and worship its inhuman beauty. This extends to its daemons, though a powerful mind can resist their presence. With Slaanesh itself, however, it doesn't matter how powerful your mind is — unless you are a god or something equally powerful, you will falter and fall before it. On the campaign map, you can use seduction and your charms to turn enemy units to your side before battles.
• Circles of Hell: Slaanesh's castle in the Realm of Chaos is surrounded by six circular regions devoted to the six forms of desire: Avidity, Gluttony, Carnality, Paramountcy, Vainglory, and Indolency. If these regions sound familiar, they are based on the Seven Deadly Sins. This actually forms the basis of Slaanesh's realm Gimmick: the player's Legendary Lord will be assailed by the whispers of Slaanesh themselves, offering them temptation after temptation; orgies with both men and women, massive feasts of the most delicious food, and other perversions of the senses. Mechanically, these temptations take the form of powerful campaign boons (like a 500 percent increase to growth for 15 turns), but if the player accepts they get booted from the Realm of Slaanesh for fifty turns and cannot enter another Realm until the next cycle of rifts happen.
• A Commander Is You: A Guerrilla/Technical/Espionage faction. The Slaaneshi roster emphasizes speed, armour piercing and poison attacks, and relies on chariots, cavalry and generally fast moving units such as Hellstriders, Hellflayers, and Fiends of Slaanesh, some of which gain significant bonus damage from flanking attacks due to having the Devastating Flanker attribute. However, their Crippling Overspecialization leaves their roster without strong staying power, and they have almost no way to deal with flying units as none of their units have ranged attacks outside of spells and they have no flying units outside of Furies, which are merely Cannon Fodder. Slaanesh also relies on debuffing spells and abilities to weaken their enemies, and gain bonuses and abilities from killing routing units. On the campaign map Slaanesh focuses on creating vassals, debuffing opposing factions through Hero actions, as well as seducing enemy units into switching sides for the duration of battles, making them a faction focused on undermining other factions.
• The Corrupter: Whilst the other Ruinous Powers enjoy this, the Dark Prince feeds off and lives for breaking once stalwart individuals into complete degeneracy and turning them into sadomaschostic Sense Freaks. They are very good at it too; the temptations of Slaanesh are quite possibly the hardest to resist, due to how much they appeal to people's most base instincts. Once you belong to Slaanesh in body and soul, there's no turning back. Most of his/her faction mechanics are centered around being this; seducing enemy units to your side with offers of pleasures of the flesh, drawing Order factions to your side and enslaving them as vassals on the campaign, and tempting Heroes and Lords with powerful boons that in actuality hinder and weaken them, and their faction, in the long run.
• Dark Action Girl: Has by far the most "female" (though Slaanesh's daemons are more Ambiguous Gender) units tied to a single faction, making up roughly half the roster. And yes, they are incredibly sinister and evil group of ladies.
• Deal with the Devil: The gist behind their "Gifts of Slaanesh" mechanic; if a player defeats a Lord or Hero, Legendary or otherwise, they can deign to "gift" them a boon of Slaanesh. This has a marginal good effect, but it's layered with a lot of bad ones, that grow in size the longer the gift is active. This boon is not only permanent, it can be given through an agent-action if one does not want to engage them in combat.
• Deathless and Debauched: As the god of pleasure, Slaanesh and his demons are all devoted to hedonism in some way or another. The best of his champions can achieve a measure of immortality in the material realm, most of which is spent on either violence or decadence; the best of them become Daemon Princes devoted to an eternity of ever-worsening hedonism.
• Demon of Human Origin: Mortal "vessels of desire" are collectively reborn into a Daemon of Slaanesh upon a "climax" atop a Slaaneshi Altar.
• Depraved Bisexual: Slaanesh draws many of these to her/his faction, with promises of sex with both men and women if you pledge themselves to them. The orgy featured in the Six Circles of his realm that Slaanesh tries to offer to your Legendary Lord is described as having both beautiful women and men to enjoy, which the player is free to accept or refuse. Though Slaanesh and his/her Daemons are more of a Extreme Omnisexual: Race doesn't matter to these daemons. From Beastmen Minotaurs to human maidens, Slaanesh followers embrace everyone’s unique "beauty".
• Dominatrix: Most of Slaanesh's daemons come across as this, being scantily clad, feminine daemon-women armed with whips, that love to dominate and inflict pain on mortals (though not necessarily always sexual).
• Enemy Exchange Program: Through their seduction mechanic, Slaanesh can convert a two or three enemy units to your own faction just before a battle begins. This includes their higher tier units, although you need to spend quite a bit of favour to do so and there's a strict cap.
• Evil Feels Good: Or, rather, "if it feels good, then it's not evil". Slaanesh encourages his followers to ignore all morality, sanity and any other impediments to feeling pleasure. Alternatively, if you gain pleasure by recognizing something as evil and perverse and doing it anyway, or even doing it because it is evil and that's how you get your jollies, come join in the fun.
• Fan Disservice: Yeah, it's a bunch of scantily-clad, seductive daemons, but it's not really a turn on when they have six breasts, huge Uncanny Valley-infused beauty, otherworldly traits like giant crab claws and scorpion-tails, and the fact they’re literally pulling out the guts of your mates and using them to play skip-rope!
• Faux Affably Evil: Slaanesh, and his/her underlings, more than any other daemon will act superficially charming and sympathetic to mortals to gain their trust and loyalty... but beneath it all, they are some of the most depraved monsters in the setting, and their facades will vanish as soon as they get what they want.
• The Fighting Narcissist: Something of a hat, Slaaneshi warriors tend towards inhumanly fast reflexes with all the arrogance it entails, especially as they're opposed to the brutal berserkers of Khorne.
• Fragile Speedster: Without contest, the Daemons of Slaanesh are the fastest faction in the game, putting the likes of the Wood Elves and Beastmen to shame with their sheer speed. Daemonette infantry can already outpace slower forms of cavalry, while actual Slaaneshi cavalry and chariots can enjoy a blistering 100 speed or more. With their large charge bonus, bonus to charge damage when flanking, and high armor-piercing across the board, the Daemons of Slaanesh can dish out a ton of damage in a short time. They are also one of the squishier factions, however, and if anything sneezes past their physical resistance or pins them down, they’re in for a world of hurt.
• Gender Bender: Slaanesh can freely switch between male, female, hermaphrodite, and any other blending of gender features one can imagine. Some of its followers acquire this as a "gift" as well.
• Glass Cannon: Slaanesh's army list can deal a frightening amount of damage just as quickly as they can take a frightening amount of damage.
• The Hedonist: Slaanesh is the embodiment of all desires and exists only to sate those desires.
• Hermaphrodite: Slaaneshi Daemons very often have the sexual organs of both sexes; Keeper of Secrets, for example, have interactable male and female breasts.
• Hero Killer: Keepers of Secrets are incredibly fast damage-dealing units that can quickly chase down and duel enemy heroes.
• Hot as Hell: Being aspects of the Chaos God of Lust and Pleasure, Slaaneshi daemons are fond of using sensuality to weaken and ensnare their victims. Humanoid daemons of Slaanesh usually assume the form of scantily-clad men and women to help achieve this goal. This is best displayed in the "A Covenant with Chaos" trailer, where the mysterious ruins are filled with statues depicting warriors seduced by beautiful, elvish-seeming women, who then reveal their monstrous true forms and rend them limb from limb. Furthermore, Slaaneshi animations are especially graceful, with extremely suggestive gestures, poses, and even run-cycles that have been compared to fashion show displays.
  • The most common of these are the Daemonettes. They take the form of gorgeous, if alien, women and live to spread misery and death wherever they go. They use hypnotic gazes to tempt mortal men (and women) into giving up their morals and defiling themselves. With whips and giant crab arms, they are fast and deadly, being some of the most nightmarish light infantry one can go up against, though due to the fact they don't wear anything, they go down pretty easily to concentrated fire and units that can survive their charge. There are also the Exalted Daemonettes who are given bits of chitinous armor (meaning they can actually take some hits), made even faster and more hard-hitting, and have the "Soul Scent" special rule, which grants them increased melee and armor-piercing when near low-leadership units.
  • And then there are the Keepers of Secrets, Slaanesh’s own Greater Daemons. Described as inhumanly beautiful, so much they have been worshipped as minor fertility Gods in ages past, they are just as terrifying as the other Greater Daemons, being predators of the highest order; malicious, deceitful, and bloodthirsty, they take glee in causing destruction and mayhem, using their charm and inhuman beauty to destroy entire civilizations. Made by Slaanesh themselves, they take the form of towering, four-armed vaguely goat-like creatures that wear splendid robes of purple and wield gleaming shields and spears of silver. As monsters, they are Glass Cannons to the extreme, having sickening amounts of Armor-Piercing that lets them rend apart heavy armor, mind-boggling speed, and devastating charges as character-duelists, but they fall to battles of attrition with the Blood God's Bloodthirsters, for they are just slightly more hardy than a Lord of Change. Even better, Exalted Keepers can use spells from the Lore of Shadows and Slaanesh, and even the unit variant has access to a handful of spells.
• Horny Vikings: Emphasis on horny. The most common and able of Slaanesh's human followers are the Marauders of Slaanesh, Norscan Marauders who have pledged themselves to the cause of the Dark Prince, and as a result, have been mutated. Despite the stereotypes surrounding Slaanesh, Marauders of Slaanesh remain Blood Knights, but ones who are interested in the pleasures of the flesh and inflicting pain and misery on their enemies. They are no less war-like than their Khorne-kin, but take it in a different direction. Shielded, and with an immunity to psychology, Marauders of Slaanesh are far more durable (despite the fact that they wear way less armor) than regular marauders, and even faster (though less so than their daemonic sisters), and are Slaanesh's cheapest infantry option. Hellstriders, the most favored of these Norscans, are given Mounts of Slaanesh, and become extremely fast and hard-hitting light cavalry.
• Horse of a Different Color: The Steeds of Slaanesh are very strange creatures that graze in herds in the Realm of the Dark Prince, though they are beautiful in their own way. Best-described as a featherless Ostriches with the tongues of anteaters, Steeds are given to Mortal Champions as gifts, and are some of fastest mounts in the entire game.
• Humanoid Abomination: Despite being the most human looking of the Chaos Gods, they are arguably the most unsettling and off-putting due to their alien nature and the fact that they have ''just'' enough differences and weirdness to them to look just plain wrong.
• Interplay of Sex and Violence: Slaaneshi daemons pretty much live here. Most of the time they struggle to understand that there even is a difference between pleasure and pain.
• It Amused Me: That they might receive pleasure from the act is the only reason followers of Slaanesh need to do anything.
• It's All About Me: It really is the crux of Slaanesh's message. The other Dark Gods have some message of serving a great cause (kill everything for glory, change the world, spread "love" to everyone). Slaanesh stresses that only you matter, and everything that gets in the way of your pleasure deserves to be killed or tortured.
• Love Goddess: In a "rape is love" kind of way, and it very technically counts as one due to the Dark Prince's portfolio including Love.
• Multi-Armed and Dangerous: Keepers of Secrets have two regular arms and two ending in blades or pincers.
• Multipurpose Tongue: Steeds of Slannesh have a long whip-like tongue several meters long that is coated by a paralyzing poison. The Steeds use these tongues to attack their enemies, immobilizing the opponent so that they are helpless against their rider's tender mercies.
• Odd Job Gods: Slaanesh's portfolio covers Excess, Depravity, Pain, Perversion, Pleasure, Love, Lust, Desire, Mastery and Beauty.
• Otherworldly and Sexually Ambiguous: Slaaneshi demons usually have hermaphroditic appearances, just like their patron, with many appearing to have one half that is masculine and another that is feminine. Even the symbol of Slaanesh resembles a twisted merger of the Venus and Mars signs.
• Our Elves Are Different: The Slaanesh Cultist Hero Unit is a Dark Elf, restoring Slaanesh worship amongst the Druchii that was mentioned in the older editions of Warhammer. They are just as darkly enchanting as the Daemonettes and go into battle with tight armored corsets and duel-blades.
• Our Monsters Are Weird: The Fiends of Slaanesh. Large, towering nightmares from born from the depths of Slaanesh's realm, they look vaguely like scorpions crossed with an anteater. Scuttling across the floor, they desire to inflict suffering like any other Daemon of Slaanesh, and have dangerous venom from their blade tails, which allows them to inflict poison. On the battlefield, they act as hit and run monsters, having very high speed, charge, and melee attack at the cost of durability. They have the special rule, "sophoric musk", which causes them to lower the melee defense and attack of units just by being around them.
  • The Steeds of Slaanesh look like the bastard offspring of an ostrich and a snake, being armless bipedal beasts with long tongues and sharp scales. They roam Slaanesh's realm in large herds, with high-ranking daemonettes and champions using them as mounts while others use them to pull Seeker Chariots.
• Out with a Bang: Slaanesh has a disturbingly high amount of ways to do this, not all of which are sex as we know it. Slaanesh is also said to grant his/her/its foes one moment of ultimate ecstasy before snuffing their life out. That this is also a gift offered to Slaanesh's own followers is one of the things that makes them willing to die for their patron when their creed otherwise emphasizes self-serving behavior instead of self-sacrifice.
• The Perfectionist: Slaanesh encourages that you take your talents to the absolute peak of skill in all arenas, be it on the battlefield or not. As a consequence, its followers are often very precise fighters that rarely miss their strikes.
• Pink Is Erotic: Slaanesh, the Prince of Pleasure, is heavily associated with this color, and their daemons and servants often display it prominently in their armor and physical coloring.
• Pink Means Feminine: Shades of pink, purple and lilac are the dominant colors of Slaanesh, the Chaos God known for being Other Worldly And Sexually Ambiguous.
• Pleasure Planet: The Palace of Slaanesh. Where every possible depraved act thinkable (and some that are unthinkable) are performed. The player is given the opportunity to join in on the "fun".
• Power Pincers: Claws resembling those of crustaceans or scorpions are a common feature of Slaaneshi daemons, used in combat in place of conventional weapons.
• Power Perversion Potential: Slaanesh is arguably an inversion. The powers he grants to his followers are totally intended to be used for perverse purposes, but in a pinch can be repurposed to serve more pragmatic needs. Perfumes that cause bliss to inhale can incapacitate and fog the minds of foes, extra long tongues for tasting and stimulating can be used to ensnare, etc.
• Pragmatic Villainy: Unlike the other Chaos Gods, Slaanesh does not want the world to be destroyed. Because then there would be no one to corrupt and sway, and things would get boring.
• Psycho Pink: Slaaneshi daemons, despite being prominently pink in coloration, are no less violent and bloodthirsty than the rest of their kind — more often than not, the eroticism and femininity is little more than a honey trap to lure mortals to a gruesome demise, as seen in the "A Covenant with Chaos" trailer.
• Rape, Pillage, and Burn: It's often considered a Fate Worse than Death for your village or town to fall in the hands of a Slaanesh Warband... sometimes they'll do those three things out of order.
• Red Baron: The Dark Prince, the Serpent, She Who Thirsts.
• Sadist: Slaanesh is just as much about sex as taking pleasure in peeling the skin off your victims and slowly torturing them to death. Slaanesh daemons live to inflict pain, on their enemies, as well as each other.
• Safe, Sane, and Consensual: Completely averted and rejected. The followers of Slaanesh consider safety, sanity, and consent to be blasphemous concepts for getting between them and what they want.
• Scary Scorpions: A widespread Animal Motif. Slanneshi daemons almost always have one or more Power Pincers to use as natural weapons, and the multi-legged Fiend of Slaanesh has both a stinger tail and a running animation where it stoops down and scuttles, claws forward, like a scorpion.
• Sense Freak: Long time, hyper-desensitized followers will immolate themselves, just to feel something new.
• Sex Is Evil: An incarnation of this is the simplest way of viewing Slaanesh.
• Sex Is Violence: Slaanesh honestly seems to be unaware of the difference.
• The Smurfette Principle: Slaaneshi daemons are the only ones who have undeniably feminine traits, as well as the only ones who are identified with female pronouns (even if they are Otherworldly and Sexually Ambiguous). Several speak with feminine voices in the "A Covenant With Chaos" trailer.
• So Beautiful, It's a Curse: Literally. Slaanesh is described as so beautiful that merely glancing at it can make you fall in love with it, to the extent you will sell your soul to Slaanesh right then and there without hesitation. Slaanesh does not view this as a curse.
• The Sociopath: The logical end result of the Dark Prince's ethos are followers who no longer care about other people, and only view their fellow man as objects or means to get their own thrills.
• The Social Expert: Slaanesh is the Chaos god with the most charisma and ability to gather mortal followers. Whilst Tzeentch excels at manipulation, his results always ends in betraying the other party, while Slaanesh wants subjects and thralls enslaved to his/her will. As such, he is the only Chaos God who can interact in diplomacy with other Non-Chaos factions, and has an emphasis in the campaign to gather mortal vassals to his/her side.
• Spiked Wheels: Seeker Chariots of all kinds come with bladed wheels, which mow down their targets like grass when their drivers send them crashing into enemy ranks.
• Spin Attack: One of the Keepers of Secrets' attack animations has them hold out their sword and pincer arms and spin rapidly into the enemy.
• Stealth Pun: Slaanesh's forces specialize in Armor Piercing Attacks and ambushing enemies from their blind spots. In other words, they focus on penetrating their enemies and taking them from behind.
• Tamer and Chaster: The tabletop models for Daemonettes and Keepers of Secrets have gone from having their feminine halves go bare-chested to having some covering and back several times. Since going barebreasted here would bump up the rating, all Slaaneshi daemons have coverings for their breasts. That being said, they are still very sexual in their mannerisms.
• Uncanny Valley: An Invoked trope. The artists at Creative Assembly wanted units that looked superficially beautiful from a casual glance, but upon closer inspection would become increasingly wrong and alien the closer you get to them.
• Unmentionables: Exalted Keeper of Secrets wear leggings that take the form of slithery pantyhose and wear what looks like fancy thongs, but instead of looking sexy, it just screams Fan Disservice considering it's a towering goat Daemon with Uncanny Valley beauty.
• Wicked Cultured: Slaanesh is not only about physical sensations such as sex and torture, but also enjoying such things as art and music. Generally, though, Slaanesh and his/her followers gradually move more towards the "wicked" part than the "cultured" part as time goes on.
• Whip of Dominance: Whips are particularly associated with Slaanesh due to their theme of hedonism, sadism, and pleasure, some of Slaaneshi units are armed with them in combat.
  • The Lash of Slaanesh is a Slaaneshi spell that creates a gigantic whip that lashes at an enemy formation.
  • The Steeds of Slaanesh are designed to resemble whips, with one of their names actually being Whips of Slaanesh. Their tails and tongue are also whip-like.
  • Devoted Marauders and Chosen of Slaanesh wield demonically empowered whips and are actually able to fight with them effectively in battle despite being mortals.

N'Kari

N'Kari, the Arch-tempter

"All pleasure has a price."

"Arrogant mortal, I let you live once so I might experience the sensation of defeat. Now I am gorged on ten thousand souls and I am invincible. Be honoured! Your soul will learn agony and ecstasy under the lash of the Dark Prince of Pleasure once I send it to meet him."

N'Kari is an infamous Keeper of Secrets, a powerful Greater Daemon of Slaanesh, that can trace his origins to the Great Chaos Incursion that occurred during the time of the Old Ones long ago. During that great struggle, the first Phoenix King Aenarion destroyed N'Kari’s mortal form, banishing him back to the Realm of Chaos. However, he has continuously reappeared throughout the millennia, wreaking havoc in the name of the Prince of Pleasure wherever he goes.

N'Kari leads the subfaction "Seducers of Slaanesh". In Immortal Empires he begins his campaign in Chrace, ready to attempt consuming Ulthuan once again. Third time's the charm!

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• Advertised Extra: An extremely odd example, considering he's also an Ascended Extra compared to the tabletop as mentioned below, and is a full playable character in-game with his own faction, but he's arguably this in regards to his status as a Sequel Hook in II. N'Kari was built up heavily in the endings of both the Lizardmen and Arkhan the Black, which both hinted that he was a Greater-Scope Villain for the Vortex Campaign as a whole and was manipulating the conflict for his own interests. This tied into III's focus on the Daemons of Chaos and implied he would have a major role in its story, but when III actually released, N'Kari is just another Daemon Lord trying to exploit the capture of Ursun, something that was entirely Be'lakor's plan. And III's status as a Stealth Prequel means that the Realms of Chaos Campaign isn't what was being built up in II, making it unclear what exactly his implied manipulations in the Vortex Campaign were actually leading to.
• As You Know: When the Advisor tells N'Kari about Ursun, he is unamused; as a Keeper of Secrets, he already kept that secret.
• Arch-Enemy: N'Kari has been a persistent threat to Aenarion and his descendants; Teclis and Tyrion have fought him numerous times, and their victory in Mortal Empires ends on an ominous note hinting that N'Kari is returning for revenge. This is demonstrated in III with N'Kari having an "Elven Grudge" trait by default which increases his combat effectiveness against all Elves, and his epilogue for the Realm of Chaos campaign has N'Kari continue to contemplate his grudge against Ulthuan. In the Immortal Empires combined campaign, N'kari makes good on the foreshadowing by launching an invasion of the elvish homeland, beginning the game with a beachhead in the northeastern province of Chrace.
  "Foolish hypocrites! The arrogant pride of these elves brings them far closer to Slaanesh than their egos would have them believe."
• Armor-Piercing Attack: Like other Keepers of Secrets, heavy armor might as well be bare flesh to N'Kari, for most of his 520 weapon strength, which is normally respectable otherwise, is almost all armor piercing. The Witstealer Sword further massively increases his base damage, as well as making his armor-piercing even greater.
• Ascended Extra: N'Kari never had a model or even rules on the tabletop, but is fully modeled and playable here.
• Bowdlerize: N'Kari's ultimate prize for winning the campaign is Ursun's Sorrow, a magical sphere containing the Bear-God's anguish which the Arch-tempter can use to derive enjoyment from his suffering for all eternity.^note If N'Kari had been portrayed in a lore-faithful manner, which is to "use" Ursun's body in accordance to Slaanesh's virtues, the game would've been given a Mature rating.
• Breaking the Fourth Wall: N'Kari will sometimes say "Don't think you're safe up there!" while ideling on the map.
• Butter Face: Downplayed. While N'kari's body has a kind of strange beauty to it (if one can ignore the clawed arms), his face is absolutely repulsive.
• Composite Character: Visually. N'Kari's design is a blend of this artwork from the High Elves tabletop rulebook (depicting his famous battle with Aenarion) and the post-Age of Sigmar Keeper of Secrets model.
• Cool Sword: The Witstealer Sword, which was made in the molten heat of desire, cooled in a vat of Slaanesh's blood, and given to N'Kari directly by Slaanesh to be his champion in a duel against Skarbrand.
• Demon Lords and Archdevils: N'Kari is a Keeper of Secrets, and one of Slaanesh's favorite minions to boot.
• The Dreaded: Even compared to most Greater Daemons, just mentioning N'Kari's name is considered taboo. At the end of the Lizardmen campaign in The Eye of the Vortex, everyone has an Oh, Crap! moment when Yukcannadoozat's master reveals N'Kari's on the way.
• Early-Bird Cameo: N'Kari was first mentioned in Total War: Warhammer II, in the post-victory epilogues of the Lizardmen Eye of the Vortex campaign and Arkhan the Black's Tomb Kings campaign (as The Voice, in the latter case).
• Everybody Wants the Hermaphrodite: Slaanesh in general embodies this trope and N'kari, with a body and voice that are arrestingly both male and female, is one of the god's greater personifications.
• Evil Is Petty: The other Legendary Lords vying for Ursun have at least something significant to their overall goals riding on it. N'Kari basically just wants a new toy to play with.
• Evil Smells Bad: His presence is marked by a sickeningly sweet smell emanating in the air.
• Evil Sorcerer: He's very adept with the Lore of Slaanesh, and one is of the most evil Wizards period.
• Evil Sounds Deep: N'Kari, speaking with the voice of a man and woman, is incredibly deep.
• Extra Digits: N'Kari has a total of six fingers on each hand.
• Faux Affably Evil: Like any Daemon of Slaanesh, he is quite cordial, and mockingly polite to Arkhan (even referring to him by his proper title of Mortarch) when speaking to him, but it's clear to anyone who's familiar with the lore the implications behind him saying "it's time for me to play"...
• Fragile Speedster: At an insane 100 in speed and campaign skills to boost it even further, N'Kari is one of the fastest Lords and giant monsters in the trilogy, and he can zoom across the battlefield and hit a line before anyone can blink, keeping pace with Slaanesh's cavalry and chariot options (themselves among the fastest units of their kind). With a weapon strength of 520 (nearly all armor-piercing), access to the Lore of Slaanesh, and a base charge bonus of 40 plus the Devastating Flanker trait to double it, he hits and runs like a freight truck. But with a pitiful 5 in armor, N'Kari is vulnerable to any kind of damage and will fall quickly if bogged down in a tar-pit melee or targeted by mass missile fire.
• The Ghost: In the second game's Eye of the Vortex campaign, where he's mentioned by name in a couple of epilogue texts. He manifests himself briefly in Arkhan's epilogue, but only as a disembodied voice.
• Glass Cannon: N'Kari is very strong on the charge, and is a terrifyingly skilled duelist, but like Snikch he can't take much in return.
• Greater-Scope Villain: His only actions until his debut in III were in the shadows. He's apparently behind the resurgence of dark magic coming from Nagash's black pyramid, and, in doing so, for the mobilization of the Tomb Kings. He also seems to have been involved with the Vortex race, though it's unknown what hand he had in it.
• Hero Killer: N'Kari's stats are built around dueling and assassinating other Lords, and at the cost of being slightly worse in infantry brawls, is extremely good at his role.
• Leaning on the Fourth Wall: His dialogue in Arkhan's epilogue, while brief, is tinged with cheeky double-meaning.
  "Play your game, build your petty empire, but know that I am now in your world, and will soon be ready to play."
• Life Drain: His special passive ability “Harvester of Souls" heals him if a unit, fleeing or not, friendly or hostile, is completely wiped out within his vicinity, as he draws in their life essence to give himself a burst of healing. It can even be stacked, and can do much to counter the damage he takes due to his Glass Cannon nature.
• Magic Knight: He's a powerful Glass Cannon in melee, as well as a master of the Lore of Slaanesh.
• Manipulative Bastard: Though an enemy of Tzeentch and his minions, N'Kari is still very adept at this, and is heavily implied to have manipulated Arkhan into activating the Black Pyramid for some unknown reason. It goes without saying that his intentions are really bad. He gets a large bonus to diplomatic relations with all factions to reflect his skill at this.
• Multi-Armed and Dangerous: Like most Keepers of Secrets, N'Kari has four arms: two tipped with Power Pincers, one free, and another holding a sword.
• Sense Freak: Like all Slaaneshi daemons, N'Kari is driven by a quest to discover the ultimate sensation, whatever that may be. He joins the race to find Ursun not to harvest a part of his body like the other daemonic lords, but to vicariously experience the sorrow of a dying god.
• The Social Expert: As the Arch-tempter, N'Kari enjoys a +20 diplomatic bonus to all factions.
• Troll: He seems to revel in the discomfort he causes Arkhan in their brief meeting.
• Unseen No More: After having spent the second game as The Ghost, he makes his full appearance in the third one.
• Your Soul Is Mine!: He threatens the Advisor that, should the old man fail him, his soul will be forfeit to the daemon.

Daemons of Chaos Undivided

The Daemon Prince

"Ursun's power will be mine!"

"I was mortal once. A prince then, a prince now... The gods themselves called me to bear their mark. I have time... to revel in this coming slaughter! I am a puppet no longer! I am the god-slayer!"

Long ago, a prince of the Ungols journeyed to the far north to save Ursun, the bear-god of the Kislevite faith. However, the Ruinous Powers corrupted the prince and turned Ursun's would-be savior into his executioner. With a single shot, he mortally injured Ursun, and with this act he was rewarded by the Gods of Chaos with ascension to immortal daemonhood.

However, Ursun still lives; wounded but alive, kept imprisoned by Be'lakor. Now the Daemon Prince embarks on a vicious campaign to enter the Forge of Souls in the Realm of Chaos to finish what he started: To slay Ursun and take his power for himself.

He leads the subfaction "Legion of Chaos".

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• Achilles' Heel: On the campaign his faction gets a pathetic amount of recruitment slots (just two) and he has no way to get more, forcing him to rely on lower-tier units and global recruitment and giving him the worst army-mustering capabilities of any faction in the entire series. This is only somewhat mitigated if he stays true to Chaos Undivided, which doesn't give him any extra recruitment slots but reduces his regular and global recruitment time for all units.
• Airborne Mooks: The Daemon Prince's skill tree offers quite a lot of scattered bonuses for furies once you get up to the second tier, and taking the Undivided dedication grants his entire faction a version of Summoned From Beyond that spawns fury swarms up to ten times per battle.
• A Lighter Shade of Black: To Be'lakor. While Be'lakor wants to destroy Kislev to spite Ursun, the Daemon Prince simply wants to rule over it as a new god.
• All Your Powers Combined: The Legion of Chaos is a composite of all four daemonic races, harkening back to their original, unified army list on the tabletop. The Daemon Prince can also freely use body parts and weapons acquired from each of the Dark Gods, mixing and matching their blessings.
• Amazing Technicolor Population: His skin color is determined by the ratio of parts he is equipped with — A majority of "undivided" parts will keep him his default ashen grey, while the aligned parts will shift him towards the Dark Gods' respective Color Motifs.
• The Berserker: A Khorne aligned Daemon Prince is a whirling, red blur of death on the battlefield, wielding great weapons and equipped with an unmatched bloodlust.
• Blade Below the Shoulder: Sacrfices to Slaanesh will grant the Daemon Prince massive, bony blades that replace his hands, equipping him with deadly armor-piercing damage.
• Blasphemous Boast: Murdering Ursun understandably makes for some impressive villain cred, and the Daemon Prince is quick to brag about it until the Advisor reveals that he wasn't actually successful. Even afterwords, the Prince has an outspoken god complex.
  Daemon Prince: Those few who survive will say that they met God, and that He is great and terrible!
• BFS: Massive, flame-drenched Daemon-blades, mostly assoicated with Nurgle and Khorne, are available to use, generally being the best great-weapons with high split armor-piercing and regular damage. Even his "regular" swords are massive compared to mortals.
• Bling of War: While all of his end-game sets are ornate, Tzeentch's is the stand-out example, being heavily encrusted in gold and adorned with jewels.
• Bright Is Not Good: Tzeentch's and Slaanesh's Daemon Prince goes into battle with heavenly colors, bright blues and bright pinks, with similarly splendid gold-covered armor. They are just as sick and twisted as their masters.
• Canon Foreigner: He's a character created specifically for Total War: Warhammer III.
• Can't Kill You, Still Need You: He initially attempts to kill the Advisor, but spares his life when the former promises to bring him to the Forge of Souls where Ursun is kept imprisoned so that the Daemon Prince can finish what he started.
• Character Customization: Uniquely, the Daemon Prince's appearance can be completely customized by swapping out his head, chest, arms, legs, wings, tail and weaponry. Each of these modifies his statistics and can grant special abilities, and more options are unlocked by gaining the favor of each deity. The Daemon Prince's reveal trailer has him switch between gear sets every time the camera moves away from him.
• Chest Insignia: His Iconic Starter Equipment has a glowing orange star of Chaos branded onto his chest, which also serves as his faction emblem.
• Cutting Off the Branches: Whilst he can choose to dedicate himself to any of the four Chaos Gods, his ending implies that he ultimately remains an Undivided Daemon Prince.
• Dark Is Evil: The Undivided color-scheme is shadowy gray. He's also one of the greatest examples of The Starscream in the setting after his betrayal of Ursun.
• Deity of Human Origin: His ultimate goal is to ascend as a new deity. In his Reign of Chaos campaign ending, he succeeds.
• Demon of Human Origin: A daemon prince is a mortal servant of the Chaos Gods uplifted to immortal daemonhood as the greatest possible reward for service. Specifically, the Ungol Prince betrayed the god Ursun and (nearly) killed him. He is notably the first new Daemon Prince of Chaos Undivided to exist in the setting since Be'lakor himself.
• Did You Just Punch Out Cthulhu?: Shot a literal bear god as a mortal, and wounded him so badly that everyone thought he successfully killed said god and even now Ursun is barely holding on.
• Double Meaning: He's identified by the game as "The Daemon Prince". A daemon prince is a Demon of Human Origin in the Warhammer universe, but this particular daemon was literally a prince of the Ungol people in his mortal life.
• Evil Sorcerer: The Prince can gain a number of bound spells through special parts, but he can only become a dedicated spellcaster through the worship of Tzeentch, which grants him full access to the Lore of Tzeentch and powerful arcane abilities.
• Evil Sounds Deep: His voice is suitably deep and menacing for such a dreaded figure.
• Face–Heel Turn: He was once a human Kislevite prince working to save his god Ursun, but Chaos corrupted him and made him into Ursun’s would-be killer.
• Fallen Hero: Set out to the north on a quest to rescue Ursun, but now returns at the head of a daemonic host. One of his campaign barks is "Kislev's fallen champion!"
• Fat Bastard: Nurgle's chest pieces give the Daemon Prince a disgusting, bloated gut, along with a nightmarish appearance of Dead Weight with decaying green flesh and a maggot riddled, sore covered belly.
• Feathered Fiend: The worship of Tzeentch gives the Daemon Prince avian features, such as bird-like wings, a beak, and fully crow-like head.
• Flight: His wings aren't just for show, and give him much mobility.
• Godhood Seeker: At the urging of Be'lakor, he attempted to kill Ursun in the belief that it would allow him to take his place as Kislev's Top God. Even after this proved to be a deception, the Daemon Prince still fixates on usurping Ursun, and joins the race to the Forge of Souls to finish off the dying god-bear and absorb his power. In his Realm of Chaos ending, he is successful, and Kislev's enslaved populace begins tearing down temples of Ursun to erect massive statues of the Daemon Prince in their place.
• Good Wings, Evil Wings: The Daemon Prince is carried into battle by a pair of the latter, which are fully customizable. Undivided's are shadowy bat-like, Khorne's are dragon-like, Nurgle's are filthy, decayed, puss-weeping things, Slaanesh’s are bright and vibrant, and Tzeentch's are feathered.
• Greater-Scope Villain: Downplayed, as he is playable and Be'lakor is a rival of his, but his wounding of Ursun indirectly sets the events of the campaign into motion. Now everyone is motivated to try and find the Forge of Souls so they can rescue/interrogate/finish off the bear god.
• Hello, [Insert Name Here]: His name can be customized before starting his campaign. Depending on player choice, this may lead to… humorous results. if the player doesn't play him (or chose to not give him a specific name), his name will be randomly generated.
• Husky Russkie: Even after abandoning his humanity, the Ungol Prince still retains his Kislevite accent. The Husky part comes from being Large and in Charge, same with most Daemonic leaders.
• I Hate Past Me: On the campaign map, the Daemon Prince sometimes expresses shame over the fact he was mortal once, further showing he's Beyond Redemption.
• Iconic Starter Equipment: While the Daemon Prince's gimmick is the ability to customize him, his basic starting appearance is the one that shows up in all promotional material. The Chest Insignia that only exists on his basic chest piece is also used as the emblem of the Legion of Chaos. Even in his Realm of Chaos campaign ending, where he becomes the new Top God of Kislev, he's depicted with his default appearance no matter which Chaos God you dedicated to.
• Irony: The Daemon Prince is of Chaos Undivided, effectively evil incarnate and a Fallen Hero. In Immortal Empires, his Long Campaign Victory condition requires the destruction of almost every other Chaos faction, including the Legendary Lords of the four individual Chaos Gods, something that none of the order factions have as a requirement, which mean his campaign will be the one most focused on taking down Chaos as a whole. For further irony, the one Warriors of Chaos faction he doesn't have to destroy? Be'lakor's Shadow Legion.
• It's Personal: His secondary goal is taking revenge on Be'lakor for his betrayal. When he was mortal, Be'lakor told him that if he slew Ursun, he would take the Bear-God's power. Instead, his first attempt to slay Ursun backfired and would have resulted in his death had the Gods of Chaos not ascended him.
• Kill the God: He almost achieved this with Ursun while still a mortal. Now he is out to finish what he started.
• Never My Fault: The Prince blames everyone else, his brother, Be'lakor, Ursun, Kislev in general, for everything he has done, never accepting that, even with Be'lakor's corruption, he made his own choices.
• No Canon for the Wicked: Due to the game's nature as a prequel, his ending is the one ending that is definitely not canon as Kislev is still Order-aligned by the time of WH1 rather than a theocracy ruled by him.
• Original Generation: He, and his story, is something entirely new to the larger franchise.
• Set Bonus: Several body parts belong to sets that confer additional bonuses if worn as a group.
• Tin Tyrant: The "Armored Prince of Chaos" gear set for the dedicated Undivided path is a suit of thick plate armor, with a Set Bonus that also increases the armor of all units in the Prince's army.
• That Man Is Dead: The Prologue establishes that the Prince's human identity was Yuri Barkov, but that name has been left behind upon ascension to daemonhood, and the player is allowed to chose the Prince's new daemonic moniker. However, there's nothing from stopping the player from giving him the same name again.
• Tom the Dark Lord: Since he can be named by the player, Creative Assembly likes to refer to him as "Daniel" in promotional materials. Even the Advisor gets in on it during the Immortal Empires map reveal trailer, claiming the Daemon Prince sometimes hears the name as a mocking voice carried by the wind.
• Villain Protagonist: If players choose his campaign. Word of God states he's intended to be the player's avatar, making him this especially so.
• Winged Humanoid: The Daemon Prince is borne aloft by gigantic wings, which can be swapped out for different variants. The high end of the Undivided path, however, grants the option to go without wings in return for an increase in physical stats like unit mass.

Legendary Heroes

Kayzk the Befouled

Kayzk the Befouled, Champion of Nurgle

Kayzk the Befouled, so named because of his body's extreme decay in the service of Nurgle, is one of the most terrifying Chaos Champions the Old World has ever seen. He was once a Kurgan horseman whose devotion to the Plaguefather led him and his warband to journey to the Chaos Wastes, eventually becoming the first-ever Rot Knights as a reward for their faith.

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