Warcry – Rules for Underworlds Fighters

Today we’re going to focus on getting Underworld Warbands on to the table for a game or Warcry. This is something that first appeared in the 2021 Tome of Champions, these fighters were referred to as Bladeborn fighters. Somewhat confusingly, GW did actually produce a game called Bladeborn that was a cross between Underworlds and Warcry which presumably grew into this.

Unfortunately a few months later the new edition of the game was released and while all the other fighters got updates, the Underworlds warbands did not. Since then we’ve had a few turn up in White Dwarf but the consensus was the older ones from the Tome of Champions were not legal. That has changed. 

In the most recent FAQ GW confirmed that the Underworlds Warbands in the Tome of Champions are legal to use. Great news!

This adds over 150 new fighter profiles into the game adding a lot of new options.

Now the fighters from the Tome of Champions are still using the old design principles. Pulling out White Dwarf 480 Sam Pearson and Dave Sanders , the games developers, talked a little about the changes they made for the new edition. Heroes now have less wounds, mounted fighers were given a buff, fast fighters were tones down while slow ones were improved. There were a lot of adjustments made, so we’re probably going to see a lot of fighters that are weaker than existing ones, but we might also find a few gems where they should be costed more!

In this video, I’m going to give an overview of how to include Underworlds fighter into your warband, but I’m not going to look at the fighters. That’s because I’ll be doing a separate video for Chaos, Death, Destruction, and Order going through each of the warbands and talking about how they stack up against the current fighters. Rather than repeating this section over and over we’ll do it just the once in this video.

Each of the Underworlds warbands is part of an existing Warcry warband. For example, Khagra’s Ravagers are all part of the Slaves to Darkness warband. This means you can take Khagra as a Leader or hero and you can take Dour Kragan as a normal fighter in a Slaves to Darkness warband and they have access to all the Slaves to Darkness abilities that they have runemarks for. Unlike normal fighters, each of these fighters can only be taken once (unless otherwise specified). Which makes sense, they’re named fighters after all, you can’t have two Khagras.

They also have their own special runemark unique to their warband. On this card, you can see it beside the Slaves to Darkness symbol while on the GW versions they’are added in with the normal fighter runemarks. This them access to some extra abilities. These are essentially added to the Slaves to Darkness ability list, but you need the Khagra’s Ravagers runemark to use them.

As Khagra is a hero, she can be taken by any other warband in the Chaos Grand Alliance. This means I can add her to my Iron Golems list as an ally.

As an extra bonus, if you include a Bladeborn hero, then you can take fighters from their underworld warband as fighters for your warband. So if I take Khagra then I can also take Zarshia, Cragan, and or Razek as fighter options. This is pretty big, it opens up a lot of options for warbands and can add some fighter variants that previously were locked into a warband.

They will still keep access to all their Slaves to Darkness abilities, no matter what warband they end up in.

If you’re playing narrative, the same rules apply. You can take one as a leader, although as we’ll later see that’s a bad idea. You can a recruit bladeborn hero when you complete the Secure a Powerful Ally quest. If they’re in the same warband as yours you can take the fighters as normal fighter, and if they’re outside your warband you can recruit the fighters after you recruit their leader.

• As these are all named fighers they operate a little differently in campaigns.
• They never make injuries rolls, they always walk it off.
• They never make renown rolls and cannot get renown.
• They cannot have artefacts of power although they can have lesser artefacts.
• If you do pick a bladeborn leader as your warbands leader, they can have their one heroic trait, but as they cannot gain renown they’re stuck there. So you’re better off making another hero your leader.

The majority of the underworlds models released do have have rules, but a few were missed. The Nethermaze warbands did not have any Warcry rules released and a number of the easy to build kits for the Stormcast and the Nighthaunts did get Underworlds rules in the smaller starter boxes but did not get Warcry rules. These are pretty generic models though, so they make good models for existing fighter profiles.

And that’s everything you need to know about including these fantastic models in a game of Warcry. It’s a pretty exciting time for Warcry fans looking through all the options to find what fun combos we can find. Hopefully GW will get around to relaesing the rules for the Nethermaze models and updating all the bladeborn fighters to the new design approach.

If you’re planning on pulling out some of your underworld warbands, check out the Warcry Card Creator, it now has a drop down at the bottom with some pre-completed stats, although do check them as they were added by hand.

I’m working hard on getting the videos talking about the individual underworlds warbands up as soon as possible, so there should be one going up along with this video and I’ll break my normal weekly pattern try try get the rest up as soon as possible. So keep an eye out for those. 

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