Champions of Chaos, a New Warhammer: Age of Sigmar TTRPG, Announced

Cubicle 7 has announced that they are releasing a new Warhammer: Age of Sigmar TTRPG based around playing as members of the forces of Chaos. Quietly announced last month, Warhammer Age of Sigmar Soulbound: Champions of Chaos is a new roleplaying game that uses the core Soulbound rules with some new twists to represent playing as Champions of Chaos. While originally intended as an expansion for Warhammer Age of Sigmar Soulbound (Cubicle 7's existing TTRPG set within Warhammer: Age of Sigmar's Mortal Realms), the game was spun off into a standalone book, largely because the game approaches the cooperative elements of the game differently.

In a recent interview with Wargamer (which is how I learned this new game first existed), Cubicle 7 CEO Dominic McDowall-Thomas explained some of the new mechanics. Soulfire, a resource jointly held by the entire party in the original Soulbound game, is now an individual resource and players can also individually pursue the favor of their respective Chaos God to gain various boons over the course of a campaign.

No firm release date was announced for Champions of Chaos, but Wargamer states its due for release sometime in the next two months.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

I kind of like the idea because AoS has done far more cool stuff with Chaos worshippers/champions than Warhammer Fantasy ever did (I genuinely hate to admit it, but it has), but I'll be interested to hear how they make sure campaigns don't just devolve into essentially slaughtering peasants, because pretty much all the Chaos Gods want you to make horrible things happen to normal, helpless, people just in different ways, and situations where multiple Chaos Gods are cooperating tend be particularly bad for that! Also hope they got a hell of a lot of X-card/Veil/etc. table safety suggestions if Slaanesh is included! I haven't yet used an X-card but I feel like a TTRPG with Slaanesh champions/cultists involved would be one I would definitely want to have one available for!

I guess maybe it's a "peasants only count in the event of a tie"-type situation encouraging you to go after "hard targets"? Where you don't get Favour unless you do something "hard" but that's only really the way Khorne thinks in lore typically.

 

[Cergorach]

...table safety suggestions if Slaanesh is included!

Why just Slaanesh? Is it due to potential tentacle porn? What about Tzeench 'The changer of ways', that might also have so horrific consequences! Papa Nurgle isn't exactly family rated either... And the amount of blood and gore Khorne can produce might make some people hurl if you get into the nitty gritty.

There were rules of playing your own small Chaos warband and Champion in the old Realm of Chaos: Slaves to Darkness and Realm of Chaos: The Lost and the Damned, lots of tables for mutations, etc. While that might work in a skirmish game, I wonder how well that would work in a pnp RPG... I'm thinking more of cultists going under somewhere and eventually achieving objectives, getting stronger, more influence, etc. I suspect that this might be interesting, but only for a niche audience, just like the Book of Vile Darkness for D&D or the old 40k Black Crusade RPG... It will make an interesting read an food for thought for GMs, but as a player... They often tend toward the heroic good vs. the psychotic evil...

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Why just Slaanesh? Is it due to potential tentacle porn?

Yeah I mean the whole "sexual assault and general torture-themed god" is like, a lot in a TTRPG (sure he's also associated with excellence/peak skill and all other forms of pleasure/pain but somehow those come up less). The are AoS models where a dude has been turned into a harp where he screams when you pull on the strings and like, I'm not sure I'd want to engage with that, be on the same side as that, and so on in a TTRPG, I'd prefer the distance of a wargame for that. I imagine they'll have considered this.

Papa Nurgle has some... poop stuff... that could be going on (I swear to god if anyone quotes that quote from Total Warhammer III I will temporarily block them lol), but mostly he just wants you to die a surprisingly painless death to many horrible magical diseases, preferably whilst praising his name and after spreading them to a lot of others.

Tzeentch wants change, whether that's you into dead you or you into a chaos beast or your entire nation's governmental structure into a different governmental structure.

Khorne, blessed Khorne, just wants to chop your head off and add it to his living room decor, preferably in a straight fight. He's not really interested in torturing or mutilating you beyond that, let alone the freak stuff the other guys are into.

 

[schneeland]

Ah! So it's a new game. I had previously assumed it's a source book for AoS. But I guess it makes sense since they are starting to experiment with new game lines across their whole Warhammer portfolio.

 

[sevenbastard]

I expect the book to be released as a bunch of loose paper and rules jotted down on cocktail napkins stuffed in a doodled on coffee stained folder.

CHAOS!!!!!

 

[JConstantine]

Ah! So it's a new game. I had previously assumed it's a source book for AoS. But I guess it makes sense since they are starting to experiment with new game lines across their whole Warhammer portfolio.

Seems like it's a "new game" in the way Force & Destiny is a separate game from Edge of the Empire (the same system with a few adjustments to make it more thematically appropriate) rather than the way Old World is separate from WFRP, for example.

 

[Christian Hoffer]

Ah! So it's a new game. I had previously assumed it's a source book for AoS. But I guess it makes sense since they are starting to experiment with new game lines across their whole Warhammer portfolio.

It started off as a sourcebook for Soulbound, but was changed into its own game when they started to dig into mechanics.