Last of the 4 Bladeborn warbands from the November White Dwarf we have the Gorechosen of Dromm. This warband has three fighters that are part of the Blades of Khorne: Bloodbound. So they join the Blood Warriors, Bloodreavers, and fun heroes like the Slaughterpriest. There are already 2 Bladeborn warbands for this faction, Magore’s Fiends and Garrek’s Reavers. Remember that while you do need to take the leader, Dromm in this case, as an ally to get access the fighters in chaos warband, you don’t have to worry about that for their main warband. So in this case the Bloodbound can take the Gorehulk as a normal fighter without taking Dromm if they wish to.
We have three fighters, we can see from the plot that they’re all pretty expensive. Points are between 150 and 225 and these are all doing damage of 5 or better. That’s not near the top of the curve for their points cost, but it’s still a lot of damage. When it comes to wounds though, these fighters are all super chunky. That’s probably 24 for Herax all the way up to 36 for the Ghorehulk. So it’s going to take a lot of killing to take these fighters down.
There are two abilities from the Bloodborn that all of these fighters can use.
The warbands reaction is Khorne’s Due which you trigger before dice are rolled for a melee attack against this warrior. Misses do two damage to the attacker but crits do an extra point of damage. So this is going to be better on tough warriors. It is similar to the universal reaction Counter, but does more damage at the risk of taking a little more. You’re unlikely to use this ability as it does cost an action these chunky boys will get more work done with their actual attack but if you think they’re going down you can get some revenge damage in.
The second ability is a double, Blood for the Blood God. One of my favourite abilities. If you kill someone, you can use this double to get a free move or attack action. You’re already trying to kill things, and this warband should be pretty good at it, so it’s basically a bonus action for a double although not always when you want it. The white dwarf magazine did also list the Bloodbind and Bloodboil abilities, but it messed up the runemarks and left out the hero runemark. So if you do have the magazine, please do keep this in mind.
The leader of this warband is Dromm, Wounder of Worlds. He’s under-costed for his wounds but over-costed for his weapon. His average damage is 5 but you’d like it to push closer to 8 for 200 points. He does have reach on that weapon which is always great to see.
His special ability is a quad and as quads are unreliable you could almost reading at that point. This one is a bit of a complicated one, you pick two visible board corners or two visible objectives, unfortunately it doesn’t look like you can mix. You then draw a 1mm line between those two points and do damage equal to the ability to anything touching that line, friend or foe.
Unfortunately that’s pretty unreliable. In theory if you get a quad 6 turn one and can see the corners of your opponents deployment you could do 6 damage to all their fighters on the deployment line. Chances of all that lining up though are pretty slim. Luckily, Dromm also has a list of other abilities that come from the main warband abilities.
The first is bloodbind, this is the classic double of the slaughterpriests. You pick an enemy within 8 inches and force them to make a bonus move directly towards you a number of inches equal to the ability. This is kind of like making a bonus move as you can use the double and then attack your target, but it’s also a little more flexible. You can pull a target off an objective which is big and if you have another friendly near you they will also benefit from the target now being in melee range. That this is a double lets you get a little creative as you often will have the options in dice and the right value will pull the target into Dromm’s reach but outside of their melee.
Bloodboil is a straight damage triple. Pick a target within 8 inches, roll dice equal to the ability and for each 4+ you do D3 damage. You could cap out at the dream 18 damage but you could just as easily to 0 damage. To quantify that, each dice will on average do .75 damage. I feel that’s pretty decent.
Last we have the Triple Lord of Skulls. Again we have the requirement of getting a kill in and this ability adds 1 to the attacks of friendly fighters within 6 inches of Dromm. This will work best with fighters who have big damage and low number of attacks or where you have a ton of fighters who can benefit from it.
So overall some good abilities, great wounds and decent damage. Unfortunately, all the Dromm specific abilities are underwhelming and for 10 points less you can go for the Slaughtpriest with Bloodbathed Axe who does slightly more damage and still has that reach.
The big guy in the group is the Gorehulk. In this case he’s actually a little under-costed based on raw stats. The 36 wounds would expect 300 points while the weapon profile is about 220. For this warband this is comparable to the Khorgorath who has less wounds and one less toughness at 20 points cheaper. The Gorehulk is coming in with 8.6 damage which is pretty stunning, but the Khorgorath comes out ahead with 10 average damage.
So lets look at the abilities. The Khorgorath has a double that might do some damage at 6 inches. The Gorehulk gets the double Overhead Smash. You need to fall at least 3 inches to trigger this ability, that means your opponent gets to pick a position within 2 inches of the falling point and there’s a chance of taking some impact damage. The benefit is you get to roll dice equal to the ability and each 4+ does 3 damage to someone within 1 inch, so on average 1.5 damage per dice. So it’s going to be tricky to use but could do some decent damage. Mostly it feels like you’re jumping from the top rope in a wrestling match, which is awesome.
Last in the crew we have Skullgrinder Herax. At 155 points he’s the cheapest of the lot. Average damage is 5 which is still a little low for the points, but the 24 wounds are well above it. You can of course get more damage for less so we’re hinging this on the ability. In this case it’s Chains of Blood a triple that will add half the ability to the range characteristic. It doesn’t actually round the value which in this case is fine as you can measure half an inch. So this is going to push the melee range from 1.5 to 4 inches, which isn’t massive but is something. It will last for the full activation so you can get two attacks out of it. It’s nice, but I’m not impressed. We could instead go for the Wrathmonger which is doing the same average damage and already has the reach of 2 range. That’s 1 less toughness and 4 less wounds, but 15 points cheaper and you’re not wasting a triple.
And that’s the warband, just the three fighters. The models are awesome and are a nice twist on the usual style while still keeping it pretty Khorne. Dromm has some Aztec vibes, the Gorehulk maybe has some mexican wrestler thing going on, and Herax…. Well I don’t know whats going on with Herax but it’s provocative.
We could run a Slaughterpriest, Khorgorath, and Wrathmonger for a chunk cheaper and end up with something similar. I do like the Gorehulk he makes a decent replacement to the Khorgorath. You do get more wounds and toughness and notably the Gorehulk has more damage at toughness 5. I don’t think I’m going to rush out to pick this warband up, but if you already have them or if you’re a fan of the Blades of Khorne they’re a nice option to have.
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